Excellent from @nathalietocci.bsky.social on the dilemma facing liberal-progressive Europe, confronting a neo-Stalinist Russia and neo-Maoist China, when the liberal-progressive America it needs is substituted by know-nothing populist idiocy: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Though on the losing side in the Champions League and European Championship finals, @aitanabonmati.bsky.social is the deserved third-in-a-row @ballondor.bsky.social winner. Assertive against the patriarchal powers that were in Spain, she has a #football brain like no other elpais.com/deportes/fut...

Why have the Big Tech oligarchs paid court to King Trump? Because of the 'technofascism' which legitimises likewise their disdain for the public and the public sphere: www.lemonde.fr/idees/articl...

Extraordinary that the US, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and others plan still more fossil-fuel extraction, even as the planet burns. But then when even the 'burn, baby, burn' US president can't understand the greenhouse-gas effect, it's tragically no surprise: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The world cannot just accept that a generation of girls is being denied any education (as against rote-learning the Quran) in Afghanistan by the misogynist men who wrested control of the state again four years ago: www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Were a Jewish progressive like Hannah Arendt alive today she might recall her 'banality of evil'--Netanyahu's genocidal war, to keep himself in power and so out of jail, has turned Israel into a pariah state: www.irishtimes.com/world/middle...

Ireland's judge on the European Court of Human Rights has defended it against those Council of Europe member states which have sought politically to corral it because they don't like the fact that all European's denizens, including asylum-seekers, can appeal to it: www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/co...

Ted Cruz compares threats to ABC by FCC chair to those of mob boss www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... Trump believes absolutely in free speech, as long as it praises him. If not, it's illegal. Not an easy position to defend.

MI6 head: '[Putin] thought he was going to win an easy victory. But he and many others underestimated the Ukrainians.' With the toll mounting and the economy squeezed, his rule hinges on Russia prevailing, meaning he must keep cranking up threats to 'the west': www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

There seem to be no limits to how far Trump is prepared to trample on the rule of law in pursuit of his obsessive personal retribution against his perceived enemies. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/u... His supporters would doubtless mostly wish he focused on employment and inflation.

We need to stop using fossil fuels. Gas, coal, and oil are the past. Renewables are the future! Sign now! #StopFossilGas act.gp/4kIAmNx

Ths is a wonderful success story of how #asylum can be a 'win-win' for #refugees and welcoming host communities (and football a vehicle for integration)--but also of how the denial of safe, legal routes to Europe puts refugees through serial, life-threatening horrors: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The economically illiterate Trump may rail as much as he likes, but the Fed is in a vice on interest rates between his roller-coaster volatility hitting investment & so jobs & his huge tariffs raising the prices of imports--stagflation, or the #TrumpSlump, looms: www.theguardian.com/business/202...

How did Britain lose its 1st-mover industrial-revolution advantage to become the poorest performing economy in the northern Europe / north America region? It never had a 'bourgeois' political revolution which would have allowed all citizens' talents to be drawn on www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

There are all kinds of ways governments can avoid their convention-based #asylum responsibilities--eg by scapegoating the agents #refugees must rely on to arrive, in the absence of safe legal routes, or by doing deals with autocrats abroad--but none is defensible: www.irishtimes.com/ireland/soci...

No one can now doubt the anti-social effect of the absence of regulation of corporate 'social' media, profiting from rage, or the need to develop a digital public space, led by public broadcasters and responsible media entities, to promote information as a public good: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Marx famously wrote that human consciousness demarcated the worst of architects from the best of bees. Today he might say that evidence-based human deliberation must always prevail over artificial intelligence, with its inbuilt biases and unknown errors: www.newscientist.com/article/2496... #AI

The European Commission has got itself tied up in knots by the double standards it applies to Russia under far-right rule & Israel under far-right rule. It is perfectly legitimate in both cases to deny a platform to any figure who does not denounce the regime's crimes euobserver.com/EU%20&%20the...

Erdogan continues to arrest his social-democratic rivals in Istanbul on trumped-up corruption charges. As Gramsci would have put it, retreating into mere domination after loss of hegemony is not a winning strategy: balkaninsight.com/2025/09/17/t... @chpresmi.bsky.social

Far from espousing any left-wing values, the suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk comes from a Republican family and appears to have been immersed in the narcissistic, anything-goes world of online venting Trump and his acolytes fanatically support: www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

The BBC can't just present xenophobic comments alongside those from asylum lawyers as if that were 'balance'. It has to challenge the xenophobes: disowning the European Convention on Human Rights would place the UK with Russia and Belarus outside the Council of Europe: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The UK government has yet to explain how individuals from countries such as Eritrea or Sudan are meant to claim #asylum in Britain, as safe, legal routes are lacking (visas are needed to fly in). Meanwhile, it legitimises the right's 'stop the boats' xenophobia: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Important piece from Benjamin Ward of @hrw.org on the mendacious attacks on the European Court of Human Rights: euobserver.com/EU%20&%20the... @echr.coe.int

Whether to pursue 'growth' (as UK Labour fancies) is no longer a debate: extreme weather events this summer in Europe have knocked €43 billion off GDP; the toll is estimated at €126bn by 2029: www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/e.... Focusing on wellbeing--while saving the planet--is the only option now

Excellent by @gabrielagreilinger.bsky.social on how social democrats must not accommodate the far right: www.socialeurope.eu/the-far-righ.... Progressives need to defend universal norms and use the Council of Europe work on #intercultural integration, based upon them (edoc.coe.int/en/living-to...).

"Every day of inaction costs lives and erodes the credibility of the international community. All States are under a legal obligation to use all means that are reasonably available to them to stop the #genocide in Gaza”--commission chair. www.irishtimes.com/world/middle...

I just signed Budapest's petition with All Out that could really change things for LGBT+ people. Add your name and join me in the fight for LGBT+ rights! a.allout.org/s/P29lG/

Europe's former colonial powers need to regulate people movement, recognising the net benefits #migration brings to host countries--not waste vast resources securitising it at the cost of human lives: www.lighthousereports.com/investigatio...

Amid the horrors of Gaza and Ukraine, the global spotlight has to be turned on to the even greater humanitarian crisis caused by the civil war in #Sudan, including the use of rape as a weapon of war: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/w...

A new law could give millions better rights at work, but corporate lobbyists & politicians are trying to gut it. Tell the UK Government: protect workers, not profits! you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/uk...

'Scientists for Global Responsibility report is the most comprehensive assessment so far of the impact of increasing military spending on greenhouse gas #emissions, as the planet hurtles towards #climate catastrophe and governments fail to take meaningful action': www.theguardian.com/environment/...

In a Europe where the far right, conservatives and some private & 'social' media have enabled a moral panic about refugees--including their conscience-salving redefinition as 'illegal migrants'--important that key institutions stand up for hospitality www.coe.int/en/web/migra... @unhcr.org @coe.int

Not a good week for the 'strongman' image of the unreconstructed, 1950s, macho (though draft dodger) in the White House--disdained by Putin with his drone escalation in Poland and Netanyahu with his assassinations of the Qatar negotiators: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

It's a really simple point but anyone who has a clue about Northern Ireland Protestants knows that the path to a united Ireland is through reconciliation, not Catholic political pressure for a border poll (last held in 1973 to appease Protestant paramilitaries): www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

Leader of #Belarus trade union movement among 50+ prisoners released by the dictatorship. International pressure on Lukashenka must be sustained: www.ituc-csi.org/belarus-trad... @ituc.bsky.social

For all the gee-whiz Big Tech presentation of #AI, it of course depends on an army of exploited and invisible human labour, exposed to profit-seeking stress and shortcuts--just like 'social media' content moderation always was: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

‪ The @wfp.org has enough containers held up by Israel at just one port to feed everyone in Gaza for three weeks. Netanyahu must be forced to end the blockade of UN humanitarian aid: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Football is about respect and fairness. Not sports-washing genocide. Italy is set to host Israel for the World Cup qualifiers while people in Gaza starve and die. Sign now to demand FIFA and UEFA ban Israel from international football! #banisrael action.wemove.eu/sign/2025-09...

This will send a shudder through the boardrooms of Big Oil and Gas--scientists attribute responsibility to individual corporations, based on their #emissions, for intensified #heatwaves, a key step towards rendering them liable before an international court: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The far-right government in Jerusalem has only itself to blame for Israel's newfound pariah status. With sympathetic critics of its many war crimes in the region tarred with the same 'anti-Semitic' and 'Hamas-supporting' brush as the hostile, support has melted away: euobserver.com/EU%20&%20the...

Trump's US looks ever more like a fossil-fuels-addicted beached whale as China powers ahead on #renewables: the cost of a #solar module has fallen by >70% in three years. euobserver.com/Green%20Econ...

Before the Bono concert bringing Trimble and Hume together, arms aloft, the image in the mind of most Protestants was of IRA prisoners, naively released by Mo Mowlam to attend a Sinn Fein conference on the Belfast agreement, fists in the air in a victory salute: www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

Not only is solar more than capable of supplying all the world’s energy, in the long term it’s the only power source that won’t fry the planet.

The irony about the European Commission's 'simplification' (ie corporate-focused #deregulation) agenda under @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu II is that it flies in the face of the evidence that the green transition is 'good for business', if driven by public policy: euobserver.com/*/ar1d8e03ac

Important call for more Europe--much more--from three major liberal and left figures, to address a world in turmoil: www.socialeurope.eu/federation-o... @josepborrell.bsky.social @guyverhofstadt.bsky.social

All the 'social' in 'social media' means is that these media corporations have used their political power to enclose the internet commons while ensuring they face no responsibility, unlike the professional & public-service media, for publishing defamatory material: www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/20...

Micro-particulate #pollution (as from diesel fumes) shown to promote #dementia: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Misogynistic Taliban regime left women in earthquake rubble because of antediluvian religious dogma: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/w...

Because, ironically, of partitionist attitudes in the south of Ireland, the consequences for the republic of legitimising paramilitarism and sectarian intolerance in the north via the 1990s 'peace process' were never imagined. Now that genie is out of the bottle: www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

#AI at work: it's all about humans in control--and so workplace democracy: euobserver.com/Digital/arc0...