News

A collection of 649 posts

News Brief

No environmental agenda: UK PM race heats up like a London fire

In a week where the UK has experienced a record-breaking heatwave and unprecedented resultant wildfires in and around London and in the rest of the country, the race for who will be the next Prime Minister has also heated up. The UK public are left with the prospect of two

Conservatives

Who will be the next UK Prime Minister?

Sometimes I think living in the Conservative Party-led UK is like living in the U.S., but without the guns. Over the last decade, unhealthily assisted by the divisive Brexit debacle, the UK has slipped into popularist polarization. We used to fight over the center ground, but that seems to

Bert Bigelow

We are living in a judicial dictatorship

Decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, just in the past few weeks, have profoundly changed life in our nation. These changes involve abortion, gun control, government funding of religion, and most recently, climate change regulation. All of these rulings were made with a 6-3 or 5-4 conservative majority. In

Conservatives

Boris Johnson resigns: the rat sinks as the ship flees

Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, has resigned. He has presided over the 7th shortest Prime Ministerial reign, a time that has been rocked by scandal after scandal. How did we get here? Left with hardly any fingernails left as he gripped tenuously to power, this morning's fresh

News

If you wanna play, you gotta pray

The deluge continues. Not only have we had the elimination of a woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion, but we have also had two attacks on church/state separation. After deciding that states must fund religious schools, the Supreme Court has now upheld a coach who defied his

Democratic Party

Trump won politics. But can he win again?

You can say anything you like about Trump, but he has won politics. And he's probably going to try again, to most likely avoid jail, because let's be honest: he certainly doesn't need it to achieve anything political. He will never ever top this

COVID crisis

Women are livestock

The Supreme Court has now made it clear. Women have the same rights as farm animals. If a cow is impregnated by a bull, does she have a right to say whether she should carry the fetus to term? Of course not! The farmer who owns her, and has invested

Bert Bigelow

Supreme Court forces taxpayers to fund religious education

“What a difference five years makes. In 2017, I feared that the Court was ‘lead[ing] us ... to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment. Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a

Putin

Lithuania and Russia: De-escalation is not the answer

Russia—and more pertinently Putin—is threatening Lithuania with non-diplomatic retaliation in reply to the Baltic state's sanctioning of goods from Russia to its exclave Kaliningrad. As if things weren't precarious enough to Europe's east, the situation is on the brink of some frightening

GOP

The GOP's Russian church connection

The Republican Party has a long history of opposition to Russia. They were the leaders in Cold War rhetoric, deploring both the communism and atheism of the Soviet regime. In the early 1950s, The Red Scare, promoted by right-wing Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, warned the American people that communism was

gun control

Pro-gun lobby: If guns aren't 100% the issue, then they're 0% the issue

The gun debate is raging. Again. And all I need to really say about this scenario is encapsulated by this meme: This torturous loop continues because of the inaction of U.S. lawmakers, paid to do nothing by their lobbyists. But in these arguments, certain methods of argumentation stick out

Disinformation

The poisoned church: When pastors use their pulpits to spread disinformation

As we see the world becoming victim to the effects of misinformation and disinformation of authoritarian political agents, it is worth remembering that this is also happening closer to home in our local churches. I was reading an article in Atlantic magazine last night about an Evangelical church in Brighton,

Joe Biden

A sad goodbye: Jen Psaki's final briefing

After the four years of Trump's tenure in the White House, and a series of infamous press secretaries who became the butt of many liberal comedy shows, we finally found stability in the position that is the face of the US government. This stability hasn't just

Disinformation

Musk will bring Trump back to Twitter, calls the ban 'foolish in the extreme'

Organisms generally need oxygen to survive and flourish. Certain organisms require more oxygen to reach their peak. In the social media ecosystem, whose habitats include the undrained swamps of the American elite, one apex predator once reigned supreme. And in the misinformation mudslinging and disinformation data-dumping, Trump's famed

Brexit

Heads I win, tails you lose: Attacking the EU with double standards

Every day, I listen to "Ukraine: The Latest," a Daily Telegraph podcast about the conflict in Ukraine. If you're not familiar, the Daily Telegraph is a UK right-wing broadsheet newspaper, and not in line with my personal political persuasion. However, generally, it is excellent, especially when

COVID crisis

Could a SCOTUS Roe v. Wade reversal really help the Democrats?

Last night, a Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) draft opinion was leaked, showing they have voted to overturn the 50-year legal precedent of Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that established the right to abortion. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a draft, which was circulated in February, and was

Bert Bigelow

SCOTUS and the city of Boston's forced flag attack

The Supreme Court just ruled that the city of Boston must allow religious flags to be flown on flagpoles at city government buildings. The ruling is based on the premise that the city had created a “limited public forum” by allowing the flags of other nations or private organizations to

Disinformation

Elon Musk buys Twitter. What could possibly go wrong?

Everyone has their line. Even 4chan, a supposedly "anything-goes platform" that many think is the worst manifestation of the internet, had a line. It was an animated depiction of child pornography, as well as concerted attacks on female journalists and others associated with Gamergate. The result? 8chan was

Putin

Does Putin have Parkinson's disease?

There is definitely something going on with the health of Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin. This was, it seems, particularly evident in a stage-managed appearance with his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu put on for the cameras yesterday in the Kremlin. Watch the video below to see for yourself. Putin&

ukraine

How tone-deaf can you possibly get?

We are in the midst of a world-defining moment in terms of geopolitics. Ukraine has unified the West, solidified NATO and its support, and strengthened the EU. Putin and Russia are looking increasingly isolated as China tries to navigate a fine line. And who sums up this scenario the most

Catholic Church

UK Catholic priest: teachers are 'devils' teaching an 'abomination'

Controversy has visited a town in the south of England over this last week with a taste of American-style preaching very rare in the chapels, cloisters, and vestibules of traditional English holy buildings. Gosport is a town in Hampshire on the south coast of England that enjoys very little news

Putin

There's no nice and neat moral solution to the Ukraine conflict

Although people will be approaching the present war from different angles, looking to load their evaluations with differing amounts of blame for the various players—Putin, NATO, the EU, Ukraine, the West, the IMF etc.—we all desire a nice and neat moral solution. It doesn't matter who

Russia

Cyberwar: When should it go military?

As we see burning buildings containing the charred and broken bodies of Ukrainian citizens, as we take in images of muddy fields and boggy tracks doing more to halt Russian hardware than NATO troops, and when we are glued to social media pictures of Ukrainian underdogs overcoming and requisitioning Russian

earthquake of perspective

Putin meant to destroy Ukraine's identity. Instead, he's massively enhanced it

Though it's hard to know all of Vladimir Putin's intentions in the invasion of Ukraine, one thing is for sure: he intended to destroy Ukraine's independent identity as he subsumed the sovereign nation into a rose-tinted reformulation of the Soviet Union. But of the

Foreign Affairs

The Ukraine-Russia conflict: Let's talk about Putin's endgame

Beyond exclamations of shock and horror, what we need to be talking about as Russia invades Ukraine this morning is Putin's endgame. Putin claims that he is de-Nazifying Ukraine, and that it is not, despite what the West says, a sovereign nation. I listened to one of his