“In these new times, in spite of the dangers, the most brutal force, the most fearful night, we are engaged in the fight to survive.” No Novo Tempo-Ivan Lins, Vitor Martins
David Cameron’s decision to take the UK out of Europe will take Scotland out of the UK. The Prime Minister’s use of the veto against the EU treaty on budgetary reform looks like the game-changer that the SNP leader Alex Salmond has been waiting for. Attachment to the Union in Scotland is likely to evaporate as Scots realise that they have become an appendage to an essentially isolationist England with a sceptic media saturated with an ugly chauvinism. The hostility shown towards European nations is like a bad version of the hostility that old school Scottish nationalists used to show towards England. Only they grew out of it.
To use the language of the US State Department Britain could well be characterised as “a state of concern”. Concerns that we are making too many enemies, that we have rashly antagonised our European partners, that our machinations in the Middle East are leading nowhere but we push ahead regardless, that we are banking all on an Atlantic alliance just when Obama has dropped his “Asia first’ policy bombshell, that we are hanging out with types like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain who don’t share our declared values, that we are over-reliant on security organisations like NATO which have long since passed their sell-by date etc.,etc.
On August 1, 1914, as dreadful war was breaking out in Europe, the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky paid a visit to Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. Dr Rudolf Steiner commented as follows upon this meeting – in a 1916 lecture which he gave in Switzerland:
‘A single sentence and the war in the West would not have taken place.’
At that meeting, he averred that, with just one sentence, ‘this war could have been averted.’1
Professor Domenico Losurdo pinpoints several inconsistencies in the Western rhetoric against Syria. They reveal that the problem is not where we think it is and that the discourse aims to justify a war, not to report the facts.
A 21st-century grassroots movement faces many pitfalls. This was as true back in 1968 as it is today. It could be infiltrated by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, or co-opted by a major party. As the state continues to creep further into our lives, activists can expect that it will use all its resources – not just the violent reaction seen in New York overnight, but also its agents, informants and surveillance packages – in its effort to monitor both sides of any serious social debate. Even bleaker, however, is the possibility that the movement was actually planned and launched by the very establishment activists thought they were waging a battle against in the first place. The larger the movement, the more interested a major party becomes in absorbing it into either the left or the right side of the current two-party paradigm.
AHMEDABAD: Until now it was believed that using a mobile phone for more than 30 minutes daily (over 8 to 10 years) would put the user at an increased risk of cancer. However, a group of experts from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has interpreted the international Interphone study report and claimed that in Indian context, using mobile phones for more than four minutes daily or two hours per month (over 10 years of use) increases risk of cancer and other health hazards.
The Tight Five: From the moment the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour on Sunday, 7 December 1941, the five Anglo-Saxon powers – the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – have, like a closed fist, constituted a whole considerably greater than the sum of its parts. Guarded by its own supra-national priesthood of spies, soldiers, businesspeople and journalists, the Anglo-Saxon imperium brooks no challengers.
