McLaren CEO Zak Brown has defended the F1 team’s partnership with new sponsor British American Tobacco, insisting it has no relationship with the tobacco industry. BAT’s presence in Formula 1 loomed large between 1999 and 2006, when the company co-owned the BAR outfit and promoted its Lucky Strike brand. Thereafter, it fell under the general…
Read moreIs This War World III?
There are 60 million refugees in the world, the same number as were refugees at the end of WW II. On October 31 in an unprecedented joint warning, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Peter Maurer, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross called for “states to stop conflicts, respect international…
Read moreAfter 13 Years Without Charge, Shaker Aamer to be Freed From Guantanamo
Shaker Aamer, the last remaining UK prisoner in Guantánamo Bay prison, will be released and allowed to return home, a British government spokesperson announced Friday. Aamer, 46, a Saudi citizen and UK resident, has been held at the U.S. military base in Cuba for 13 years without charge and has twice been cleared to go…
Read moreAntibiotics Expert Warns It's 'Almost Too Late' to Stop Global Superbug
Following the discovery in the UK of bacteria that resist the most common antibiotic of last resort, a leading British expert is warning it is “almost too late” to stop a global superbug crisis. “The routine preventative use in farming of colistin, and all antibiotics important in human medicine, needs to be banned immediately.”—Cóilín Nunan,…
Read moreCorbyn Victory Energizes the Alienated and Alienates the Establishment
“I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the Queen told Alice in Through the Looking-Glass. By lunchtime on Saturday that number would have been fast approaching double figures. The leftwing stalwart Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership election. His first act as leader would be to address a huge rally welcoming refugees….
Read moreAfter the Iran Nuclear Agreement: Will the Nuclear Powers also Play by the Rules?
When all is said and done, what the recently-approved Iran nuclear agreement is all about is ensuring that Iran honors its commitment under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) not to develop nuclear weapons. But the NPT—which was ratified in 1968 and which went into force in 1970—has two kinds of provisions. The first is that…
Read moreSeizing Wells and Going on Strike, Peruvian Protesters Stand Up to Big Oil
Demanding reparations for industrial pollution and adequate compensation for use of native lands, Indigenous activists in Peru shut down 11 wells in an Amazonian oil block on Tuesday. According to the Spanish EFE news agency, native protesters led by the Federation of the Achuar and Urarina Indigenous Peoples of the Corrientes River (FECONACO) occupied 11…
Read moreTime to Stop Worshipping Economic Growth
There are physical limits to growth on a finite planet. In 1972, the Club of Rome issued their groundbreaking report—Limits to Growth (twelve million copies in thirty-seven languages). The authors predicted that by about 2030, our planet would feel a serious squeeze on natural resources, and they were right on target. In 2009, the Stockholm Resilience Center introduced the…
Read moreLessons we can learn from the fall of the Berlin Wall have never been more topical
Most history books and articles increasingly tell a standard story about the fall of the Berlin Wall: the Soviet Union could no longer economically and militarily handle competition with the West, and brand-new Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to initiate a policy of glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (restructuring) in the mid-1980s. Together with…
Read moreNovember 17: youth uprisings in Greece then and now
In November 1973, thousands of Greek students occupied one of the largest universities of Athens, the National Polytechnic, demanding the end of the military dictatorship which had started in 1967. The voice of the young students, “the free, fighting Greeks” as the DIY radio station of the occupation repeatedly called them, a voice that is…
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