Politics

By Elsa Buchanan The United States’ choice to take a more passive role in the Gaza conflict and delegate the responsibility of leading a ceasefire to Egypt is a blunder from the Obama administration, a leading academic has warned. But the US Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to express a growing frustration over the number of Palestinian civilians killed in Israel's offensive in Gaza, which reached 500 on Monday evening. Unfortunately for the Obama administration, Kerry’s comments made for...

By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor The threat of a real war with Russia still hangs in the air, but one academic believes a cyber-attack is a more likely scenario. A silent, but digitally destructive scenario, which could cause chaos across the globe, adversely affecting the UK. Cyberwarfare is politically motivated hacking to conduct sabotage and espionage. It is a form of information warfare sometimes seen as analogous to conventional warfare. Professor Mike Jackson – computer security expert at Birmingham City...

By David Binder The issue of economic inequality has once again been thrust into the spotlight by French economist Thomas Picketty’s new book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First century.’ Whilst his research has been discussed at great length elsewhere (the Washington Centre for Equitable Growth has produced a useful summary of some reviews) it is worthwhile to step back and consider the virtues of pursuing policies aiming to reduce economic inequality. In other words, is economic inequality in itself always a...

  By Gregory Taylor So the Prime Minister seems to have had a “Night of the Long Knives" part 2, as any political geek will know that Harold Macmillan famously sacked seven members of his cabinet in one night. Although the PM has not sacked seven members of the cabinet he seems to have sacked most of the moderate Tories from the pre 2010 election, and he seems to have brought in a lot of the ‘class of 2010’ intake....

  By Marcus Hunt There are potentially many reasons why an individual might be pro- or anti-immigration. Beliefs about immigration’s concrete effect on the economy, crime, or public services like health and education can be important. However, most people who take a strong view on immigration – and here I include myself – are not well educated about its actual empirical effects. Even if they tried to educate themselves, they would find a whirl of contradictory socio-economic evidence emanating from...

By Guy Dorrell @GuyDorrellEsq This week’s reshuffle gained a huge amount of media and airtime, as it was surely meant to, and coincidentally prevented much coverage of the on-going investigation of paedophilia among the establishment and also prevented proper scrutiny of the DRIP intelligence intercepts legislation. It was cast as a triumph for women in the Cabinet, though in reality there was an increase of a sole post going to a woman over that which we had back in 2010....

  By J T Coombes @GMagnaCarta There was a time, not many decades ago, when warfare was defined by the combatants wearing uniforms to identify who they were and also to separate them from the civilian population and other non-combatants. Within this arena there were also codes of practice on how the actual war was conducted, including an ‘etiquette’ for dealing with the wounded and captured prisoners. We have moved a long way from these ‘Marquis of Queensbury rules’ as...

By Pallav Patankar  Many LGBT people in India grow up without understanding their sexuality and feeling dirty about it because they’re surrounded by homophobia.  Most delay addressing their sexuality which causes problems later.  Once you’re in your mid-twenties you have to get married.  In Indian society your social status is determined by your marital status.  You have to be married with children in order to be accepted. If you’re coming out to your parents, sometimes those issues aren’t very well...

By J T Coombes www.globalmagnacarta.com @GMagnaCarta Looking at the television screens I, like millions of others, struggled to understand the latest horror to come out of this troubled land and the resultant five hour ceasefire. But almost immediately afterwards I thought, “Why five hours?” What is the mind-set of the people responsible that they come up with such a figure? What was the instruction that came from the command post? "Oh Fuck!!! Some more kids got killed. Better have a...