Populists always claim they will clean up politics--'drain the swamp', as Trump put it. Yet because their self-aggrandisement as popular tribunes stems from narcissistic self-regard, they can't resist putting their noses, and those of their cronies, in the trough: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Labour's leaders shy away out of pusillanimity from political-economy realities: undoing the disastrous effects of 'Brexit' means rejoining the single market & customs union, & being a rule-maker rather than -taker means rejoining the EU. Its supporters get this. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Expansion of renewable-energy generation since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has left Europe, and especially Spain, much better placed to deal with the gas price shock occasioned by Trump's war on Iran: euobserver.com/211486/less-... #renewables

Labour's ministers, with their folie de grandeur about Britain's 'national interest' and devotion to an obsolete US 'special relationship', can't see that only European collaboration can address today's global challenges, leaving no substitute for renewed EU membership: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Very useful article on how the #menopause has to be recognised as an occupational-health issue for women workers: theconversation.com/over-80-of-w...

Investment in #renewables by Spain's socialist government has left it best placed in Europe to cope with the Trump energy price shock, with wholesale electricity prices about a quarter of those in conservative Ireland: www.irishtimes.com/world/europe...

Figures are now in on the disastrous numbing of compassion in the US, UK and others: official development assistance fell between 2024 and 2025 by almost a quarter in real terms, to just a quarter of a per cent of gross national income (the UN target is 0.7%): www.ituc-csi.org/Record-fall-... #ODA

As a flailing Trump's power visibly erodes, while he disdains his former devotees--Meloni now added to the list, having distanced herself on Iran and the pope--those he has treated as adversaries are emboldened to challenge him: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

The Banality of Evil in its umpteenth iteration: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Collapse of the AMOC current in the Atlantic--and it is already weakening--would not only be irreversible but could trigger sea level rises of dozens of metres (via collapse of the east Antarctic ice sheet), rendering a great deal of Earth uninhabitable: www.newscientist.com/article/2522... #climate

Trump always lived in a childlike, narcissistic (and misogynistic) world of his own imagination. But now he's lost all contact with the real one: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/u...

Thoughtful from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: “The defeat of ‘Orbánism’ is an opportunity to repudiate its iterations existing in other western democracies and to charter a more constructive, less polarised trajectory for pluralistic societies.” www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

However welcome be the latest populist domino to fall in Budapest, worth recallng how Europe's conservatives have legitimised far-right #xenophobia against undocumented migrants, the regulation on detection & deportation threatening human rights at huge public expense: euobserver.com/210554/europ...

Like all politicians who think their own particular god gives them a divine right to rule unconstrained by the rule of law, Erdogan is cynically using the courts to put his secular, social-democratic opponents behind bars on trumped-up charges: balkaninsight.com/2026/04/13/t...

The 'take back control' advocates of UK departure from the EU were so blinded by post-imperial ideology that they could not see the outcome would in reality be a ceding of power, dropping from the status of rule-maker to rule-taker, in Britain's largest market: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... #Brexit

The Californian 'social media' corporates defend 'free speech' for their users as if they were students at Berkeley protesting against the Vietnam war. In reality, they give free rein to totalitarian states to flood the online public sphere with #misinformation: www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...

What more would it take Israel's far-right government to do, in terms of authorising war crimes and flagrant breaches of international humanitarian law in the region, before the EU would take action rather than merely mouth words? euobserver.com/210469/eu-sa...

Defying US adhesion to the Geneva convention and 1967 protocol and the Statue of Liberty welcoming those 'huddled masses yearning to breathe free', Trump has effectively closed the door on all #refugees ... except white South Africans: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Sanchez has been right on Trump and Iran--and now Europe's conservatives, even its far right, are distancing themselves from the megalomaniac in the White House they had thought they could appease, says @nathalietocci.bsky.social: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Beyond the tens of thousands of civilians killed by the IDF in Gaza are many many more permanently disabled and traumatised: www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

'If we reach 2C above preindustrial levels – which on current form could be in less than two decades – the economic impact of #climate breakdown will be the equivalent of having a new oil war every single year.' www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Providing affordable, sustainable #housing isn't rocket science: it just requires that housing be treated not as a commodity but as a public good: theconversation.com/europe-needs...

Clearest evidence yet that the #AMOC current is weakening--its collapse would mean temperatures would plunge in Europe: www.newscientist.com/article/2522...

It looks worse and worse for the Republicans in the #midterms. Trump has pummelled his base with a foreign war, more inflation and zero decorum, all in one go. The only way to get this albatross from around GOP necks is resort to article 25 of the US constitution: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/u...

Excellent essay by a Russian journalist validating the link academics have made between 'repressed shame' and support for far-right authoritarians. US market-fundamentalist 'shock therapists' ensured post-Soviet Russia would be a terrifying world of social insecurity: euobserver.com/206954/long-...

Poll in Spain finds Trump is perceived as even more of a threat to the world than Putin (whom of course Trump, in his idiocy, presents as no threat at all): elpais.com/espana/2026-...

While projecting his 'derangement' on to others, the narcissist in the White House sees the approval he craves continue to fall through the floor. How much more lawlessness can the GOP take before it loses middle America in the #midterms? www.natesilver.net/p/trump-appr...

A decade on, 63 per cent of Britons would vote to rejoin the EU in a new referendum. So please put those endless Union flags away, Keir Starmer, and catch up with reality: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... #Brexit

Expert blog by Dan Smith on Trump's bull-in-a-china-shop war: www.linkedin.com/safety/go/

Trump does not accept that his idiosyncratic autocracy should be constrained by the rule of law. Nor did Hitler: euobserver.com/209601/europ...

As ever, Trump's narcissistic self-regard leads him to project on to scapegoated others all his failure as his world turns sour: www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

Former EU envoy to the Palestinian territories: 'How can it serve Europe to be seen as a sidekick of an erratic, unreliable and apparently megalomaniac US president, or of a warmongering, annexationist Israeli prime minister?' Quite. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

Trump's ignorant buffoonery, withdrawing from the deal in his first term and launching the war aborting the recent negotiations, has actually enhanced the Iran nuclear threat, experts say: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

The devastation by Israel's far-right administration in Lebanon is not yet comparable to that in Gaza but it is appalling--and of course illegal--nonetheless: euobserver.com/209156/the-o...

Trump's net approval rating is going south of -20%, as petrol prices hit $4 a gallon and the Iran war shows he is living in a make-believe world where reality never intrudes. Expect more talk of mail-in ballots and threats to stop Democrats 'stealing' the midterms: www.economist.com/interactive/...

It is well established that the Mediterranean diet is the best for low mortality and morbidity--and now scientific evidence is mounting as to why extra-virgin olive oil is at the heart of that effect: www.newscientist.com/article/2521...

The deranged king in the White House is acting like a bull in a planetary china shop: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Why does the UK have the lowest output per head in northern-and-western Europe? Long cosseted by imperial markets, it has sustained a classist focus on driving down the cost of labour power rather than increasing the labour value of goods and services: www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2026/03/27/b...

After Orban loses the election in Hungary this month, the EU must put the Israel association agreement into cold storage, ending the Israeli far right's insouciance towards Europe. All EU member states are members of the Council of Europe, which bans the death penalty: euobserver.com/209169/no-mo...

More excellent investigative reporting on how Hungary and Slovak under authoritarian rule are acting as fifth columnists for the Kremlin in the EU: euobserver.com/209226/leake...

The computer-illiterate dictator in the Kremlin thinks the internet is just something else to suppress, along with political opponents and NGOs. Not sure how much longer Russian citizens will accept that in a globalised world: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/w...

Spain's socialist government is alone in Europe in recognising the 'diversity advantage' stemming from well-managed diversity, including through the regularisation of undocumented migrants, as reflected for example in its well-above-average economic performance: www.migpolgroup.com/index.php/20...

The EU has talked itself into a moral panic, akin to the 2015-16 'refugee crisis', stigmatising the very free movement of people within its borders upheld as a right for its (implicitly white) citizens and devoting vast resources to detention and forced returns: www.migpolgroup.com/index.php/20...

The Hungarian election shows why a united, cosmopolitan Europe is critical to defeating far-right reaction in the Kremlin and White House: Putin and Trump know Orban is their ideal disrupter but he looks dead in the water--as, increasingly, may be his sponsors: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Turkiye's far-right Islamist autocrat continues to jail his elected secular-left @chpresmi.bsky.social rivals. The @coe.int must speak out against this member state flagrantly trashing the universal norms of democracy, human rights and the rule of law it promotes: balkaninsight.com/2026/03/31/t...

This BBC feature is totally unaware that Keynes showed decades ago unemployment is involuntary--so reducing unemployment benefit below subsistence has not stopped the number of claimants rising--& that the UK once had a social-insurance welfare state Beveridge designed: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Even smart English football journalists who don't echo the trophy-anticipating hype fail to see that the reason England's men never win senior tournaments is so few of them have the well-travelled experience of most of their high-level opponents, such as France: www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Don't forget: the horror in #Gaza continues unabated. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

One of the reasons global heating is accelerating is that the oceans have been acting as a huge heat sink--and their capacity to do so is exhausting: euobserver.com/207996/count...