The Mafia hires good accountants (permalink) High-profile leaks like the Pandora Papers and financial collapses like Carillion have shone a spotlight on the role that “the professions” play in enabling international finance crimes, which include both money-laundering and the underlying (ghastly, violent) crimes that produce the money to be laundered. For example, the Sackler… Read More Cory Doctorow: The Mafia hires good accountants
NB: The debate on the Holocaust unleashed by Whoopi Goldberg‘s comments about race could be about her ignorance; but it could also arise from a linguistic misunderstanding around the concept of race. An issue related to this one is the origin of Nazi race legislation, the study of which may be found in this book… Read More Racism, the Nazis and American media
The IITs have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. This time it is not about the fat pay packets their students have got in the institute placements, but about ghosts and steppe people invading, or rather not invading, Bharatvarsh. First, the ghosts. The director of an IIT posted a video on… Read More Shobhit Mahajan: Peddling of anti-scientific beliefs by academia must worry us
A chill is blowing through Chinese civil society as activists, journalists and academics report receiving police warnings and censorship of their social media platforms in recent weeks as Beijing prepares to host the Winter Olympics beginning on Friday. In mid-January, the Beijing-based human rights activist Hu Jia said in a tweet that China’s state security… Read More ‘Nobody can say anything’: China cracks down on dissent ahead of Olympics
The noise of the exploding artillery shell startled me awake in the middle of a July night. Dazed, I stumbled out of bed and tried to check on the other journalists with whom I share a dormitory. As we ran outside, another shell flew overhead. It was five months after the military takeover in Myanmar and three… Read More ‘We’ll keep reporting, whatever the risk from the junta,’ say Myanmar’s journalists
Johnson is no grotesque interloper: his behaviour and attitudes are emblematic of the British establishment. If our ruling institutions have a shared culture, it’s entitlement and shamelessness, a conviction that wrongdoing should meet consequences only if you are poor and powerless. When Johnson solemnly lectured the nation to abide by the rules while presiding over… Read More Owen Jones: Johnson’s hypocrisy and lies are emblematic of the British establishment
Streets were deserted and shops abandoned across many of Myanmar’s towns and cities on Monday, as the public defied threats by the military junta and stayed at home in a “silent strike” on the first anniversary of the country’s coup. Images posted on social media showed usually congested roads with no traffic and stores shuttered.… Read More Silent strike empties streets in Myanmar on anniversary of coup
The Kurdish people have sacrificed 13,000 lives in the fight against ISIS. Progressives should support their effort to build a secure base for direct democracy, feminism, and pluralism. In the night of Thursday, January 20, ISIS mounted a fierce attack to free its prisoners, several thousand of whom were being held in Sina’a prison in Hasaka,… Read More Meredith Tax: Turkey Helps ISIS Attack Rojava
TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized… Bill Gates wheels a… Read More OSCAR SCHWARTZ: What Was the TED Talk?
It’s been 27 years since geologist David Roberts identified some of the oldest footprints of our species ever discovered. The trackway of three footprints was found on the surface of a cemented sand dune (called an aeolianite) near Langebaan on South Africa’s west coast. The tracks were later dated to 117,000 years and were attributed to Homo… Read More Charles Helm – Ancient human tracks on South Africa’s west coast: 3 reasons they are an exciting find
After the truth-shower 