Martin Amis’s Observer Review essay (10 Sept 06) on Islamicist terrorism and its roots in religious faith should be required reading for anyone interested in this key phenomenon of our age and its implications for all religious faith [More >>>]
The White House has published an up-to-date version of its National Strategy for Combating Terrorism document, containing some useful insights even though Europeans would express some of it differently [More >>>]
The Defence Secretary has emerged from obscurity to pardon WWI soldiers executed for cowardice. This suggests a need to identify other figures from the past who suffered punishments now regarded as unjust and who should similarly be pardoned now [More >>>]
As Owen has pointed out, the real objection to the US-UK extradition agreement is not that the US hasn’t ratified it or that it’s easier for the US to extradite from the UK than vice versa: it’s the agreement’s denial of basic rights and due process to those whom the US wants to extradite [More >>>]
Things are moving fast and becoming increasingly interesting in the affair of the book by Craig Murray, former ambassador in Uzbekistan, the passages deleted from or rewritten in it at the behest of the...
In a recent item in Ephems , I reported as a recent news item from the asylum that — A man called Steve Jago has been arrested in Whitehall for carrying a banner bearing...
Commercial interests in the US are posing a genuine threat to the freedom of the internet by seeking control over all Web content. Act now in at least one of several suggested ways to avert the danger [More >>>]
Tony Blair’s long letter of 1982 to Michael Foot and his Guardian article of June 2004 constitute an ironical counterpoint, but the shallowness of both and lack of understanding of basic Labour values in either are consistent with the disasters and defects of his premiership [More >>>]
A post in Owen’s blog (http://www.owen.org/blog/528) demonstrates the falsity of the commonly held opinion that the period in a pregnancy in which abortion should be permitted depends on the point at which the foetus becomes independently viable. Opponents of all abortion at any time hypocritically exploit this fallacy. [More >>>]
The news increasingly reads like self-parody or April Fool’s Day spoofs. Some of the following examples make you want to cry, others to make you laugh. Mostly cry [More >>>]