The cost of being a whistle-blower is going up. When Daniel Ellberg stole and published the ‘Pentagon Papers’ in 1971, revealing the monstrous lies that the US government was telling the American public about the Vietnam war, he was arrested and tried, but the court set him free. When Edward Snowden released a vast trove …
Egypt’s first and last democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, died on Monday, lying on the floor of the courtroom where they were trying him on yet more charges. (He was already serving several life sentences.) It was probably a heart attack, but according to witnesses they left him lying there for twenty minutes before medical …
The best way to deal with Donald Trump, especially if you are a foreign government negotiating trade issues, is to give him a little win. It doesn’t have to be big and important; he’s mainly interested in declaring a triumph, and he’ll supply the hot air to inflate your little concession into an allegedly major …
The Black Death killed about 30% of the European population in a few years in the middle of the 14th century. A century and a half later the native people of the Americas were hit by half a dozen plagues as bad as the Black Death, one after another, and 95% of them died. The …
Five of the world’s largest democracies now have populist governments, claimed The Guardian last week, and proceeded to name four: The United States, India, Brazil and the Philippines. Which is the fifth? At various points it name-checks Turkey, Italy and the United Kingdom, but it never becomes clear which. (And by the way, India’s prime …
Barack Obama said of the US mid-term elections that “the character of our country is on the ballot,” and the outcome proved him right. The United States is a psychological basket case, more deeply and angrily divided than at any time since the Vietnam War. It’s not evenly divided, of course. The popular vote saw …
If Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), really did sent a hit team to Turkey to murder dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul ten days ago, what will happen next? Perhaps history can help us here. A little over two centuries ago, in 1804, the …
When all is lost, entire communities sometimes engage in suicidal gestures. It happened as recently as 1906 in Bali, when the local royal family and thousands of their followers, knowing they could not defeat the Dutch conquerors, dressed in their best finery and walked straight into the Dutch gunfire. Thousands were killed. It has been …
“Karl Marx was right: socialism works. It is just that he had the wrong species,” wrote sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, the world’s leading authority on ants. But it’s really a little more complicated than that, and now is a good time to discuss it, because last weekend was the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth. Marx died …
Rex Tillerson did not suffer fools gladly. He called Donald Trump a “moron” in a private conversation after one meeting at the Pentagon, and did not take the opportunity to deny it when a journalist asked him in public. In meetings with the president, he would “roll his eyes and slouch” whenever Trump said something …