By Jonathan Power Januar 7, 2020 In the Chinese government’s eyes it has three rebellious parts of China on its plate – Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In Tibet, protestors from time to time have clashed with police and soldiers. In Hong Kong, the reform and freedom demonstrations are now in their eighth month. In […]
By Jonathan Power Januar 2, 2020 In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, Sherlock Holmes lectures Watson on the unlikely subject of free trade. Holmes: “Capital article this on free trade. Permit me to read you an extract from The Times: ‘You may be cajoled into imagining that your own special trade […]
By Jonathan Power December 18, 2019 Israeli politics gets messier and messier. Now there is to be yet another election, hard on the heels of the last one which, in turn, was hard on the heels of the one before. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have two major aims in life. The first is […]
By Jonathan Power December 11, 2019 The Europeans have not done well in countering President Donald Trump’s onslaught on Iran. When Trump unilaterally decided that the US should withdraw from the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, which committed Iran to winding down its nuclear research in return for the West, Russia and China (the latter two […]
By Jonathan Power December 6, 2019 It goes back to the French revolution of 1789. At the Revolutionary Convention, the most radical of the insurgents decided to seat themselves on the left side. “Why not on the other side, the right side, the place of rectitude, where law and the higher rights resided, when man’s best […]
By Tim Hayward, TFF Associate November 29, 2019 Following revelations of grave flaws in its Syria reporting, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) must allow whistleblowers’ evidence to be heard at the coming OPCW Conference of States Parties. That’s the message from the following public figures who have signed an Open Letter […]
By Tim Hayward, TFF Associate November 29, 2019 As representatives of almost every state in the world gather in The Hague, all eyes should be on them. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – whose conference they are attending – was mandated by the people of the world to play a vital […]
By Jonathan Power November 27, 2019 It’s unbelievable that 102 years have passed since the Balfour Declaration when the British colonial government decided to give the Jews their own homeland- but also promised that “it be done without infringing on the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish population”. Now, this month, the Trump […]
Austere “shock therapy” after the Cold War only shocked the East into reaction. In the West, the corporate political center ultimately did the same. By John Feffer November 18, 2019 The Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago. It was one of the few unambiguously joyous moments in modern history. This popular, nonviolent explosion of dissent […]
By Jonathan Power November 20, 2019 Of all the present foes of America it is Iran which has consistently been over time the number one. Since its Islamic Revolution in 1979 that overthrew the secular-minded Shah and supplanted him with a militant, sometimes warlike, Islamic theocracy, it has been America’s Great Satan. (But for Europe […]