27 January 2021 They were planning to put on a play written by an artificial intelligence programme in Prague this month, to mark the invention of robots (or at least the idea of robots) in the same city exactly one hundred years ago. Covid-19 got in the way of that, and it will now only …
Assange: (Almost) Free at Last! On Monday morning, a British judge finally rejected the US attempt to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and jail him forever (or at least for 175 years in a high-security ‘supermax’ prison) on the grounds that he is, as Joe Biden once called him, a “high-tech terrorist”. The vindictiveness of …
15 November 2020 One Hong Kong lawmaker, Claudia Mo, said it was “the death-knell of Hong Kong’s democracy fight.” But she was part of it: one of the fifteen remaining pro-democracy members of the Legislative Council (Legco) who resigned on Thursday in protest at the expulsion of four other democratically elected members of the pseudo-parliament. …
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 …
In an emergency, the good thing about a dictatorship is that it can respond very fast. The bad thing is that it won’t respond at all until the dictator-in-chief says that it should. All the little dictators who flourish in this sort of system won’t risk their positions by passing bad news up the line …
Salisbury is a nice old English town with a fine cathedral, only an hour and a half from London by train, but it doesn’t see many Russian tourists in wintertime. It’s not as cold as Moscow, but Russians tend to prefer Mediterranean destinations for holiday breaks in early March – unless, of course, they are …
“Look, we have no other choice,” Pakistan’s former prime minister Nawaz Sharif said last May. “These games have gone on too long. Something has to change.” Then he left to be with his wife Kulsoom, who is on life support while receiving treatment for cancer in England. But last week he and his daughter Maryam …
“The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common ‘platform’ is, to our minds, faintly ridiculous,” said one of the judges on the employment tribunal. So the tribunal ruled that Uber’s 30,000 drivers in London were actually employees, and therefore entitled to be paid the minimum wage, …
Belgium may be a boring country, but it still seems extreme for a Belgian politician to say that the country is now living through its darkest days since the end of the Second World War. Can any country really be so lucky that the worst thing that has happened to it in the past seventy …
10 March 2014 A Scottish Neverendum? The referendum on Scotland’s independence is only six months away, and suddenly the cautious sparring between the Conservative-led coalition government in London and First Minister Alex Salmond’s pro-independence government in Edinburgh has turned into open war. London won the first battles, and the “No” side will probably win the …