Reading

“Red touch yellow, legless fellow. Red touch black, legs they lack.”
Remembering that neither coral snakes nor scarlet kingsnakes have legs.

“Uplifting. Star-spangled. Anthem.”
Remembering the letters in “USA.”

“A caT has two. A dOg has one.”
How many horns common household pets would have if those household pets had horns, and also if cats had two of them while dogs only had one.

“Red touch yellow, kill a fellow. The largest nation, Russian Federation.”
Distinguishing between a coral snake and the country of Russia.

“An airplane takes you up to a different plane. A submarine goes in the water.”
Determining whether a vehicle is an airplane or a submarine.

“ER = Eating Rounds. ING = Inside, Normally Garments.”
Remembering whether plates go in a dishwashER or a washING machine.

“Red sky in the morn, a day is born. Red sky at night, a day takes flight.”
Distinguishing between sunrise and sunset.

This week’s local elections will be the last significant electoral test for the main political parties before the next general election. Polls indicate that the Conservatives are certain to receive a drubbing, signalling that the end of the road is near for a government that is exhausted and all out of ideas and ambition. Labour […]

- by Adam Frank

Read at Aeon

- by Shayla Love

Read at Psyche

Gaza solidarity encampments have spread to university campuses across the country, inspired by the movement in the US.

The post Uni encampments for Gaza demand end to ties with Israel first appeared on Solidarity Online.

Students in America and increasingly across the world are demonstrating against the Gaza genocide. They’re right to do so, opposing a genocide is never the wrong thing to do.

During the past decade, it has become obvious that economic interconnectedness did not bring forth frictionless international relations as many liberal theorists had predicted. To the contrary, the fact that economic integration has been profoundly uneven has enabled the weaponisation of asymmetrical economic relations for the achievement of geopolitical and/or economic goals (Whyte 2022; Farrell 2023). The weaponisation of the unique international role of the US dollar is one of the most consequential examples of this trend. For instance, in the period since 2001, US sanctions designations have expanded by an extraordinary 933%. In the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, dollar hegemony made it possible to freeze Russia’s foreign reserves and expel the country from the SWIFT payments system and US correspondent banking.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Sitting on the banks of the River Trent, the market town of Rugeley in Staffordshire has a rich industrial history. In 1777, it benefited from the construction of the Trent and Mersey Canal, which enabled the smooth transportation of fragile pottery and created a thriving industry. Cooling water from the river later made it an […]

I wish to honour the miners and pay tribute to the families who, in 1984–5, fought the greatest workers’ fight seen in this country since the Chartists, the Diggers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and the Suffragettes in the battle to save pits, jobs, and communities. I especially want to pay tribute to the young miners, who […]

A possible week in London in 1984: first thing on Monday morning on your way to work, you are greeted at your local tube station by a group of miners collecting donations for the coalfields. When you arrive in the office, your union rep is doing the rounds signing people up for a regular levy […]

In the battle of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) against Margaret Thatcher’s campaign to break the back of the British labour movement, international solidarity with the NUM remains, forty years on, one of the most inspiring dimensions of that titanic twelve-month dispute. As Seumas Milne, interviewed elsewhere in this issue, has written: ‘The 1984–85 […]

On a busy corner in Barnsley, opposite the local college and a dentist’s office, sits the headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Built in 1874, the grade II listed building nestled among rows of Victorian townhouses is easy to miss. Once you pass through the wooden doors and climb the stairs, though, it’s […]