A new documentary on Winne Mandela – called simply Winnie – is fascinating both for what it reveals about the hidden history of South Africa’s transition away from apartheid and for its relevance to other, current struggles. I highly recommend that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn gets his hands on a copy as soon as possible. [...]

Here’s how a free press, one owned by a handful of corporations, uses its freedom. It simply tells you what it is good for its business interests, or more generally for the political and business environment it operates in. It’s not interested in truth or airing all sides, or even necessarily basic facts. The only [...]

It seems that many who supported the weekend’s air strikes on Syria are overlooking the significance of Robert Fisk’s report this morning from Douma, the site of a supposed chemical weapons attack last week. Fisk is the first western journalist to reach the area and speak to people there. One is a senior doctor at [...]

1. The United States, the UK and France launched air strikes on Syria this morning just as inspectors from the UN chemical weapons agency, the OPCW, had arrived to investigate whether a chemical weapons attack – the official justfication for the strikes – had taken place in Douma last week and, if so, who was [...]

Here is a good example of pure, unadulterated western propaganda from the Guardian, written by one of their most senior journalists, Julian Borger. This could be straight out of of the old Soviet mouth-piece Pravda. According to the Guardian: China and Russia are leading a stealthy and increasingly successful effort at the United Nations to [...]

The supposed “anti-semitism crisis” in Britain’s Labour party is revealing an interesting paradox at the heart of modern discussions of anti-semitism. Undoubtedly there are those who intentionally exploit anti-semitism for political gain. That should be obvious if we pause to consider how much attention leftwing “anti-semitism” (criticism of Israel) – formerly promoted as the “New [...]

After a short reprieve following Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected success in Britain’s general election last year, when he only narrowly lost the popular vote, most of the Labour parliamentary party are back, determined to bring him down. And once again, they are being joined by the corporate media in full battle cry. Last week, Corbyn was [...]

Updated below Something quite extraordinary has been happening on Twitter. Corporate journalists have gone into meltdown after two British media analysts – known as Media Lens – tweeted some friendly advice to idealistic youngsters contemplating a career in journalism. Twitter is a social media forum much loved by corporate journalists – probably because media training [...]

The latest research on the prevalence of anti-semitism on Twitter means Labour MP Ruth Smeeth has some very serious questions indeed to answer, as Alan Maddison observes on the Jewish Voice for Labour website. Smeeth has been one of the key figures in Labour arguing that under Jeremy Corbyn the party has faced a supposed [...]

I am loath to draw more attention to the kind of idiocy that passes for informed comment nowadays from academics and mainstream journalists. Recently I lambasted Prof Richard Carver for his arguments against BDS that should have gained him an F for logic in any high school exam. Now we have to endure Brian Whitaker, [...]

It now emerges that the last four years of Julian Assange’s effective imprisonment in the Ecuadorean embassy in London have been entirely unnecessary. In fact, they depended on a legal charade. Behind the scenes, Sweden wanted to drop the extradition case against Assange back in 2013. Why was this not made public? Because Britain persuaded [...]

This is truly disturbing. The Guardian has published a shocking report that not only has Russia’s Vladimir Putin been using social media to disrupt elections in the world’s finest democracy, the United States of America, but he has now found a way to worm his black propaganda into the minds of Hollywood’s unsuspecting glitterati. If [...]

Time to ‘fess up: I don’t understand economics. I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that I’m not supposed to understand it either. As with some weird cult, maybe economic “laws” are only revealed to initiates. Or maybe no one really understands economics; it’s just some are better at pretending they do. Either way, today’s mystifying [...]

How is that highly schooled people, those who have risen to positions of authority and influence within the west’s higher education systems, so often behave as if the bit of their brain governing rational thought has turned to mush whenever the issue of Israel is raised? Let’s take the case of Richard Carver, a senior [...]

Here is an article on food whose political implications are really worth considering. We already know that people in western societies, particularly the US and UK, are eating far too much junk food, and that this leads to an epidemic of obesity, heart disease and cancer. But the latest research not only reveals the extent [...]

Below is a fascinating 9-minute segment of Al Jazeera’s programme The Listening Post on why climate scepticism persists only in what it terms the Anglosphere media – those in the United States, UK, Australia and Canada. Paradoxically, the media in other big polluters, such as China and India, offer climate change deniers no houseroom at [...]