Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
EVERY year arms firm Raytheon holds a Burns Night supper in the House of Lords, so the missile-maker should be serving haggis again on January 25, when this column appears.
Raytheon is a US arms firm which makes billions selling bombs to the Saudis. The Saudis use Raytheon’s weapons to blow up men, women and children in the Yemen war.
Its arms sales are so important that President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, overruled advice from his officials to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the Yemen war to preserve a $2 billion Raytheon deal.
The global left must be unwavering in it is support for Venezuela as Washington increases its aggression, and clear-eyed about the West’s cynical motives for targeting it, says CLAUDIA WEBBE
Kenny MacAskill remembers a ‘Sovietologist’ and voice for peace and reconciliation at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
Trump’s Gaza deal is a transient, self-aggrandising spectacle that barely distracts from the West’s outright complicity in the massacre in Gaza and our slide into warmongering, writes MATT KERR
Warming up for his Durham gig, the bard pays attention to the niceties of language


