The routinely dishonest BoJo claimed categorically that his Brexit deal would not put a border in the Irish Sea. He insisted that businesses in Northern Ireland would have unencumbered access to markets in England, Scotland and Wales, saying with typical bombast that the Irish Sea trade border would exist “over my dead body”. However, BoJo, in his haste to show he could “get Brexit done”, signed an agreement with the EU, binding in international law, which required the Irish Sea border to be there. More

I expect the war will go on for awhile until the generals and politicians get tired of it. An international antiwar movement with significant numbers could hasten that moment. One doesn’t not demand peace because there’s a war on. Indeed, that’s why one demands peace. The movement against the Vietnam war was organized and expanded while the war escalated, not before or afterwards. More

On the principle that historical analysis requires an attempt to understand the motives of all sides in a war, the Russian argument deserves a fair hearing. Roy Medvedev, one of Russia’s most distinguished historians and long a supporter of Vladimir Putin, gave an interview on March 2, 2022, to the Corriere della Sera. The ninety-six-year-old Medvedev succinctly expressed the Kremlin view of the Ukraine crisis as a clash involving far more than Putin’s concern about NATO expansion to his country’s borders. More

It has dominated news cycles, debates and policies since 2020, but COVID-19 continues to exercise the interest of number crunchers and talliers.  While the ghoulish daily press announcements about infections and deaths across many a country have diminished and, in some cases, disappeared altogether, publications abound about how many were taken in the pandemic. The More