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
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Ukraine wrapped ever tighter in the fog of war
Putin's disastrous propaganda performance in the West is inversely mirrored by its widespread success at home — this gap is testament also to the power of our own uncritically pro-Nato media. NICK WRIGHT attempts to chart a course
A Ukrainian soldier walks on a destroyed Russian fighting vehicle in Bucha, Ukraine
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
THE FIRST principle in war reporting is never to believe an official source. I became even more convinced of this when, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a provincial governor I was interviewing insisted that poppy production had been suppressed but that it was bad weather that made our flight out of his parish impossible.
As I looked along the valley glowing red with poppies, set against a perfect azure sky, I thought that the evident proximity of mojahedin with their newly CIA-supplied Stinger missiles might be a more compelling reason for our delay. And unless a new tulip-growing enterprise had seized the imagination of his Afghan villagers, that the governor was colour blind.
It is impossible to judge how the Ukraine war is going from even the closest reading of our mass media.
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Washington plays innocent bystander while pouring weapons and intelligence into Ukraine, just as it enables the Gaza genocide — but every US escalation leaves Ukraine weaker than the neutrality deal rejected in 2022, argue MEDEA BENJAMIN and NICOLAS JS DAVIES
