News

A collection of 649 posts

Capitol insurrection

Two days of infamy

President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared December 7, 1941 to be “a day of infamy.” That was two weeks before my fifth birthday. January 6, 2021 was also a day of infamy. That was shortly after my 84th birthday, almost 80 years after the earlier one, which has long been known

Coronavirus

Call it what it is: corruption

When other governments are involved in nefarious acts of nepotism that line the pockets of their administration or those of their cronies and friends, we call them out for being corrupt. South America, Africa, Asia: corrupt governments! But when this happens in broad daylight, under our noses, in our own

census

Christians now a minority in England and Wales

Over the past few months, as the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) has analyzed the data from Census 2021, they have gradually released interesting nuggets to the British public. Today, the ONS released data showing the continued decline of Christianity, the dominant religion in the UK. This census has

News Brief

Belarus Foreign Minister suddenly dies

Belarus has been inextricably linked to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And although Putin has used the country and its land as a springboard to conduct offensives against its neighbor, extracting a huge proportion of its physical hardware in terms of tanks and military vehicles, the Belarusian armed forces

editor's pick

Erdoğan uses smoke and mirrors in deadly strikes against Kurds

Although Turkey is a historically secular country, President Recep Erdoğan is an authoritarian leader who, not unlike Vladimir Putin, has curtailed freedom of speech and press to solidify his continued rule. And much like Putin (whom he still calls “dear friend”), he has unduly influenced the judici

News Brief

Oh by the way, Trump is running in 2024

Donald Trump is quickly becoming passé. In case you hadn't seen page 6 of your local newspaper, the former president announced the other day that he is running for POTUS in 2024. This should be huge news, but it turned out to be something of a damp squib.

GOP

The Red Ripple won't affect US support for Ukraine

The Red Wave never happened, and left-leaning seculars are generally very happy about this considering what might have happened. But for some, this is not just from a political standpoint concerning hot potatoes like Roe v Wade and women's autonomy, but from the point of view of the

Christian nationalism

Church-shopping for Christian Nationalism

A Washington Post opinion piece titled "America’s religious divide isn’t really about religion" looks at the intersection of politics and religion—much of what we concern ourselves with here at OnlySky—and how, given how "religious" and evangelical politics has become, it's

Boris Johnson

How did Truss happen? A UK observer explains

For those looking at British politics from the outside, the short but chaotic leadership of now-former PM Liz Truss must be baffling. A brief in-country explainer may help. The previously-resigned Prime Minister Boris Johnson was ousted by his own party for successive scandals and pathological lying. This should not have

Liz Truss

After shortest term in history, Truss resigns as UK Prime Minister

It seems only weeks ago that we reported the resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. That's because it was only weeks ago—six, to be exact. Less than two months into her leadership, Liz Truss has now resigned. After a number of very embarrassing U-turns, a mini-budget that

News Brief

Supreme Court declines fetal personhood case

Personhood is a notoriously tricky philosophical term to define, let alone argue about in court. Indeed, the argument that a fertilized human egg has personhood is an incredibly difficult claim to establish. Nonetheless, it is an argument that anti-choicers have been desperate to see debated within the hallowed confines of

Joe Biden

Biden: We are facing the 'prospect of Armageddon'

The world has been perilously close to an apocalypse on a number of occasions. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is one of the most famous. It actually involved several examples, with the closest being when the Soviet submarine B-59 surfaced after a US warship had been dropping practice depth

Disinformation

Can Putin, locked in a bubble of bad intel, spin his way out of disaster?

Colonel General Gennady Zhidko is being reappointed to command Russia's Eastern Military District. One pro-Russian Telegram user has claimed that the general and others have created "a wall of lies...a sea of blood and a swamp of corpses." That wall of lies has for many

News Brief

Russia to illegally annex four more areas in Ukraine

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and essentially occupied parts of two regions (oblasts) in Ukraine, incurring the impotent "wrath" of much of the rest of the world. The lack of meaningful pushback from the West at that time was part of what emboldened Putin to invade the sovereign

Italy

Far-right coalition takes power in Italy

The most right-wing government since Mussolini is forming a government in Italy after a general election this past weekend. This comes as no surprise and accords with polling that preceded the election, causing further alarm for those who are worried about Europe, and the wider world, lurching to the right.

News Brief

Putin escalates Ukraine conflict with mobilization of reserves, nuclear blackmail

In a highly-anticipated yet repeatedly delayed speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Wednesday morning (Sept 21) that the country is to embark on a large-scale mobilization of military reserves. This is in response to successive failures in the ongoing war in Ukraine, most recently resulting in a lightning-quick counteroffensive in

China

Are China and Taiwan the next Russia and Ukraine?

As if Russia and Ukraine hasn't been a challenging enough conflict to manage, the bubbling political cauldron of Taiwan that China is threatening to knock over. This thorn in China's side has been a long time in the sharpening. So why now? Is Taiwan pushing the

crime

A summary of Trump's crimes. Well, his recent ones

The past has finally caught up with Donald Trump. This has been a long and torturous story to show that eventually, and even when we thought it wouldn't, bad people doing bad things will end up in trouble. But what exactly has the former president done wrong? The

Conservatives

Truss is UK's new PM: Echoes of Trump?

Liz Truss has just become the new UK Prime Minister after Boris Johnson was forced to resign following strings of allegations of lying and the Partygate scandal. It now seems a long time since the highest government politicians and accomplices were attending boozy parties while the rest of the country

editor's pick

Ukraine war fatigue: Keep your eyes open

Six months have passed since Russia invaded Ukraine, and Putin still can't really win, no matter what his endgame might be. The campaign has been catastrophic from the very start. Even Russians are feeling the fatigue as they are turning their televisions off, bored of the non-stop propaganda.

Trump

Thou shalt not steal: Theft and the Presidential Records Act

For understandable reasons, much of the recent public discussion about Team Trump’s mishandling of official documents has focused on the situation’s more dramatic and controversial elements. The FBI’s unprecedented execution of a search warrant at an ex-President’s estate. The potential national security implications of some of

News Brief

UK children becoming embroiled in far-right extremism online

Younger children are increasingly being drawn into a "far-right ecosystem" that a Guardian investigation shows is becoming more pervasive online. Among the recent cases was a 13-year-old boy arrested for terrorism offenses in the UK. Though the real numbers are small, the figures are growing and showing an

News Brief

Sunak moves to the right with a war on 'woke'

Two candidates for UK Prime Minister remain and, with Liz Truss representing the more extreme right of the party, Rishi Sunak (the former Chancellor of the Exchequer) was always going to shift to the right to combat here. This is now happening and is exactly what I predicted. This clockwork

Christianity

The stark similarity between Trump support and God belief

The January 6th hearings have been eye-opening and should leave no one in two minds about the hugely questionable moral behavior of Trump. Christian theologians and apologists have one job: to maintain the primacy—the moral perfection—of both God and the Bible. Everything they do is to maintain both

News Brief

Civil unrest predicted in light of UK energy bills

Martin Lewis is a very well-respected money advice expert who has his own website and has hosted many TV shows, as well as being a ubiquitous voice on the news and on radio. Recently, he has predicted that there will be civil unrest in the UK if energy bills continue