UNITED KINGDOM

Activists carry signs in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement which targets Israeli apartheid.
A network of campaigners has warned of a chilling effect posed by a definition of anti-Semitism recently adopted by the British government.

If you thought the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline was over...

Even the most powerful systems of propaganda inadvertently allow uncomfortable truths to slip out into the public domain. Consider a recent BBC News interview following the death of Cuba’s former leader Fidel Castro.

Frustrated and outraged at how reality has turned out, the ruling class denizens of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential tent are lashing out at truth-tellers. “Fake news” is whatever contradicts their lies, and Russia is their all-purpose boogeyman. “Google and Facebook have joined theri corporate media compatriots in an attempt to limit the public’s access to alternative news analysis and independent […]

In of itself, technological development is benign.  But behind every use is a human agent, and behind that agent is a motive, an inspiration, an agenda. Monitoring one’s employees has become the great mainstay of what companies claim is a productive exercise. The watched employee will have incentives to behave, to prosper, and to fulfil the ethos of the company.

Most of the civilians that have been able to flee those areas are being looked after in Centres run by the Syrian Government and Syrian Red Crescent and with aid which the Russians are providing. They all tell of the ‘rebels’ shooting at those trying to leave. (Few know anything about the ‘White Helmets’ and those that do, have little good to say about them because they are working with the terrorists.)

In the wake of Brexit and Trump, ‘mainstream’ media have done the formerly unthinkable by focusing on media bias. The intensity of focus has been such that the Oxford Dictionaries have announced that ‘post-truth’ is their ‘Word of the Year 2016’. ‘Post-truth’ refers to ‘circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion […]

Former Israeli President Shimon Peres watches as British Prime Minister David Cameron signs a visitors book in Jerusalem Wednesday, March 12, 2014. Cameron was visiting Israel to vow support in rejecting boycott attempts against the Jewish state. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)
Britain has announced plans to adopt a controversial new definition of anti-Semitism, which includes criticism of Israel, in a bid to counter the rise in hate crime against Jewish people.

The use of foreign-born to precede the name of a person by some newspapers when discussing Brexit, insinuating that their views are suspect, is troubling and divisive. The debate by the leave campaigners is being increasingly framed in terms of patriotism and nationalism, and being foreign-born, presumably, one is not considered patriotic enough. Language and words matter.

Did child labor help make the food on your table?