12 Palestinians have been killed and dozens wounded as 30,000 gather on the Gaza-Israel Border for peaceful demonstrations for the ‘March of Return’ running for six weeks. May marks the 70th anniversary of the founding Israel and what the Palestinians call ‘Nakba Day’ – the day of catastrophe, when three quarters of a … Read more
Actor and activist Sean Penn has been getting excruciatingly bad reviews for his novel Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, a dystopian thriller about a hitman, featuring a Trumpian President. The NY Times described it as “a riddle wrapped in an enigma and cloaked in crazy.” And the Guardian said – ‘repellent on … Read more
Roseanne has re-launched, the sit com about a working class white family from suburban Illinois, which catapulted Roseanne Barr and John Goodman to fame in the late 1980s/1990s. To add to the family’s dysfunction this time round is a political divide with Roseanne a Trump supporter (as Barr is in real life) … Read more
The hawkish John Bolton – for bombing Iran and North Korea – has been announced as HR McMaster’s replacement for National Security Adviser, a post which requires no Senate confirmation. He was for the Iraq attack on Saddam Hussein and still thinks it was a good idea. He is a frequent Fox News … Read more
Facebook’s stock fell roughly 5 per cent ($25 billion) when markets opened because of the huge “data breach” scandal that the Guardian broke over the weekend. It’s a complicated story (see URL) involving Cambridge Analytica acquiring and using Facebook data on users personal interests to target voters in the 2016 US election. … Read more
Round and round the mulberry bush and so the tension mounts. Will Trump fire Mueller now that he is daring to go where no man has before, into the Trump business finances; or fire Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, to insert a more pliable yes-man to do the dirty for him? … Read more
The rolling musical chairs continues. Mike Pompeo of the CIA is expected to be nominated as the new US Secretary of State as Rex Tillerson, long seen as an irritant to the President, is summoned back from Africa. Pompeo, 30 December 1963, is more hawkish than Tillerson on Iran which appears to … Read more
The Skripal attempted assassinations have brought the Sergei Magnitsky affair back into the headlines, as well as Deutsche Bank scandal, money-laundering suspect Russian funds into the New York property market, which may impact on the Mueller Investigation. Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer, imprisoned after reporting officials for major fraud and died as … Read more
There’s a welter of claims, counter-claims and hot denials flying over the Stormy Daniels affaire. She’s a porn star who allegedly had a one night stand with Donald Trump four months after his youngest son Barron was born; and was paid off by his lawyer in a confidentiality agreement just before the … Read more
The Eurosceptics have swung the Italian election, where immigration and the economy were the two key issues in addition to political corruption. The two parties garnering most votes campaigned on a radical overhaul of the EU’s legally binding restrictions on public spending and low taxes. The result is being compared with Brexit … Read more