We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act. Agnes Callemard, Director General, Amnesty International In a recent indie podcast covering the news of Amnesty International’s diagnosis of the State…

Whoopi Goldberg has made the mistake of daring to talk about The Holocaust as a “human issue”, as “man’s inhumanity against man” and has been forced to apologise for “trivialising the suffering” of Jews. She is, in her own words, Jewish. Her mistake? Upsetting the Holocaust Industry (to use Norman…

It has been nearly six months since I wrote Soft Covid. This appalling hiatus is mainly due to writing effort being concentrated on a larger project (no further comment just now), completing a remarkably complicated property sale in a foreign country during Covid, and lately to Covid itself — not…

In the beginning, when news of the outbreak raced ahead of the outbreak itself, we heard about all sorts of diverse symptoms, from chills and aches to strange bunions and unusual lesions. Before it’s canonisation of symptoms into the tell-tale tickly cough, chest pain and loss of smell, Covid-19 presented…

This is the dueño (dwarf, guardian spirit, normally of a plant) of Covid-19, colloquially known in Peru as Dr Covid. It is interesting that it appears alongside the dueños of traditional Amazonian medicinal plants like Toē (brugmansia suaveolens) and Sangre de Drago (croton lechleri). The dueño is a telluric spirit…

The abrupt collapse of the American effort to create a democracy in its own image in Afghanistan can be seen as the inevitable outcome of an expensive mistake, costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and/or as a cynical strategic move. The Taliban, newly equipped with abandoned military bases…

Google Man in the Middle and you will find millions of articles about a kind of cyber attack. Google Woman in the Middle and you will find news of the Women’s Olympic middleweight boxing final, in which Lauren Price of Great Britain beat Li Qian of China, and the eponymous…

For the first time since lockdown, they said, the fountain was running, flinging sunlight across the plaza and spritzing the thin, dry air. People came and went, sitting for a while on the L-shaped benches. Lovers, families, a boy chasing pigeons, a girl frowning at a phone. In front of…

As the world grapples with the latest ‘Code Red’ report from the International Panel on Climate Change, summarised by dramatic images of Greece on fire, some grapple with the idea that climate change is the supporting conspiracy behind Covid-19. It seems that, the more consensus there is around human-caused global…