Politics (Page 105)

The arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro, one of Sicily’s most infamous mafia bosses, has reminded many Italians of the extreme violence he was associated with when operating as a leading figure of Cosa Nostra. Denaro appears to belong to another time – when the mafia brutally killed at will. And it is indeed true that the period of extreme violence with which he is associated has been confined to the past. But that does not in any way mean Italy’s organised crime groups have disappeared in the 30 years Denaro has been in hiding – they’ve just had a rethink about how they operate. The Italian mafia has drastically reduced the number of homicides it carries out. Violence is nowContinue Reading

When the US Department of Justice revealed on January 21 that its investigators had found classified materials in Joe Biden’s Delaware home, there was outrage – or, to be more accurate in most cases faux outrage – in Republican party circles. They wasted no time in demanding further investigation into what appeared to be a mishandling of classified documents. Republicans see a double opportunity in the US president’s sloppy handling of what is reported to be a small number of papers from his days as vice-president. It was a God-given opportunity to embarrass a sitting president gearing up to launch his re-election bid. But many in the GOP hoped it would also take the heat off an outwardly similar investigationContinue Reading

Harshit Srivastava S3/Shutterstock Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi remains, even 75 years after his assassination, a useful symbol for many in India. For secularists, the leader of the country’s independence movement represents an imagined India of the past. For the current government, he is a means by which it can soften its international image. In his 2002 essay, academic Ashis Nandy, mentioned four versions of Gandhi, who led India’s move from British colony to independent nation. The first is the Gandhi of the Indian state and of official Indian nationalism. The second is a puritanical and sombre figure, apolitical and dependent on state funding, the subject of university seminars debating: “What would Gandhi do?” The third is the “Gandhi of theContinue Reading

The decision to provide heavy tanks to Ukraine in significant numbers constitutes a step change in western military support for Ukraine. For the first time, western countries are providing substantial offensive capabilities to support a major campaign to regain lost territory. The decision has been long in coming. But for some months, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz resisted the decision to send German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. Even the Nato meeting held at the Ramstein US air base in Germany on January 20 to discuss the issue ended without a decision, much to the frustration of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and some of Kyiv’s other western allies. In addition to a general fear of escalation, there was much publicContinue Reading

praszkiewicz In ancient Rome, the saeculum, or “the age”, was the span of living memory, the telling of an event passed down from the oldest to the youngest. Recognising this profound idea, some have worried that the memory of the Holocaust will fade as the generation of those who survived it near the end of their lives. Survivors are the core witnesses, the human link to the past. Many work tirelessly in Holocaust education and all rightly deserve our praise and support. Members of their families have sometimes followed suit, sharing publicly the stories of their parents or grandparents. This provides a sense of the emotional force of the Holocaust. But we are not ancient Romans. While stories passed downContinue Reading

For the past several days the focus of war news has been squarely on Germany’s Olaf Scholz. The chancellor has been battling with his conscience over whether to accede to Volodymyr Zelensky’s plea to supply Ukraine with his country’s fearsome Leopard 2 tanks. The Ukrainian president has been hammering the message that with much of the fighting in the east of the country bogged down in a bloody and attritional battle around the city of Bakhmut in the eastern Donbas region while Russia is reportedly conscripting and training up hundreds of thousands more troops for a spring offensive, his country is desperate for the sort of increased firepower these tanks can provide. Zelensky has been putting similar pressure on JoeContinue Reading

TDs have raised concerns that child and adolescent mental health services have to “compete” for basic funding, in the wake of a “damning” report published by the Mental Health Commission. There have been calls for action since a report into Ireland’s child mental health services found it to be disjointed, difficult to access and lacking in monitoring and follow-up care in some cases. Acceptance rates of referrals to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (Camhs) varied regionally between 38 per cent and 81 per cent, according to the Mental Health Commission’s interim report published on Monday. It also found that some teams were not monitoring children on antipsychotic medication, that most services had no IT system to manage appointments,Continue Reading

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the British author LP Hartley once wrote, hinting at the mystique of history – the idea that people in the past were somehow different to us in the 21st century. As many historians will tell you, it’s not particularly useful to project modern values onto the past, or to judge historical figures by contemporary ideals. But the idea that the past far away in space and time, is also flawed. It encourages people to overlook the fact that those involved in seismic past events were real human beings, just like ourselves. Nowhere is reconciling that distance between past and present more important than in the case of the Holocaust,Continue Reading

Nowik Sylwia | Shutterstock Andrew Tate is a man who has made a living out of controversy. The extensive media coverage garnered since his arrest in Romania on suspicion of rape, human trafficking and organised crime has largely called him out for his misogynistic views. This matters, because he is a literal influencer. Tate has known a lightning rise to global fame and the kind of viral reach that most of his peers only dream of, despite having been banned by many platforms. By his own account, his strategy has been to get his followers to extend his reach by reposting his content. It is what one criminologist has termed “incendiary content sharing”. Andrew Tate on the Anything Goes WithContinue Reading