|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Jennifer Baumgardner
By Julian Fellowes $16.49
$13
|
|
|
|
 AP/Peter Morrison
|
That’s spelling potential trouble for the BBC, which is being pressured by Britain’s conservative, pro-Thatcher newspapers not to play the iconic song from “The Wizard of Oz” on this Sunday’s BBC Radio 1 weekly chart-topping-singles show.
Posted on Apr 12, 2013
READ MORE
|
 Danny Birchall (CC-BY)
|
By Joe Conason — Amid all the suffocating claptrap celebrating Margaret Thatcher in the media, only the British themselves seem able to provide a refreshing hit of brisk reality.
Posted on Apr 11, 2013
READ MORE
|
 dutourdumonde / Shutterstock.com
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Two important conservatives departed this life within days of each other. One was a world-historical figure with extravagant political gifts, the other’s misgivings about politics led him to counsel Christians to undertake a political “fast.”
Posted on Apr 10, 2013
READ MORE
|
 AP/File
|
The conservative Thatcher vastly reshaped Britain with her economic policies, pulling the country back from 35 years of socialism and ushering in a new era of privatization.
Posted on Apr 8, 2013
READ MORE
|
 eflon (CC BY 2.0)
|
By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt —
Confiscating customer deposits in Cyprus banks was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England, dated Dec. 10, 2012, shows these plans have been long in the making.
Posted on Mar 28, 2013
READ MORE
|
 Screenshot
|
Tests by the British Food Standards Agency revealed that the European food company’s product contained up to 100 percent horse meat.
Posted on Feb 8, 2013
READ MORE
|
 U.S. Navy/MC1 Eileen Kelly Fors
|
By William Pfaff — The utopian and missionary qualities of American political belief began in the Puritans’ Calvinist theology of “the Elect,” the chosen people.
Posted on Jan 15, 2013
READ MORE
|
 Associated Press
|
By Bill Boyarsky — The recent Leveson Report on the British hacking scandal shows the danger of the media baron adding to his already vast American holdings.
Posted on Dec 5, 2012
READ MORE
|
.jpg) AP/Robert F. Bukaty
|
The pregnancy was announced Monday after the Duchess of Cambridge was admitted to a London-area hospital for treatment of acute morning sickness.
Posted on Dec 3, 2012
READ MORE
|
 OperationPaperStorm (CC BY 2.0)
|
Professional jealousy; dogmatic institutionalism; craven loyalty to power. Glenn Greenwald fires a devastating salvo at the British and American press for their dogged campaign of “disgusting slander” against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Posted on Aug 23, 2012
READ MORE
|
 heipei (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
Amid a $31-billion budget crisis, thousands of British doctors and nurses will lose their jobs unless they agree to accept lower salaries, longer working hours and other conditions, according to a leaked document obtained by The Sunday Times.
Posted on Jul 18, 2012
READ MORE
|
 Boris SV (CC BY-ND 2.0)
|
Newly released top-secret files reveal that Britain’s Ministry of Defense took seriously the possibility of alien contact and assigned “UFO desk officers” the task of monitoring potential threats from outer space.
Posted on Jul 12, 2012
READ MORE
|
 Photo by motiqua (CC-BY)
|
By William Pfaff — Nearly every step in the federalist direction has produced unnecessary complication and strain in the EU. Portugal is not Iowa. Italy cannot become California.
Posted on Jul 11, 2012
READ MORE
|
 AP/Tim Hales
|
Few people have so fully devoted their lives to exposing abuses of power as WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange.
Posted on Jun 22, 2012
READ MORE
|
 Photo by (CC-BY)
|
The verdict in Britain’s Supreme Court did not go well Wednesday for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges. Assange has been granted two weeks to consider his next move, which may be a petition for a retrial.
Posted on May 30, 2012
READ MORE
|
|
By David Sirota — Here’s a newspaper headline that might induce a disbelieving double take: “Christians ‘More Likely to Be Leftwing’ And Have Liberal Views on Immigration and Equality.”
|
 Silvio Tanaka (CC-BY)
|
The British government’s plan to turn the Internet into a national intelligence cache that stores data on every U.K. Web surfer was frustrated Tuesday when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, condemned such a move as a “destruction of human rights.”
|
 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
|
By Adam Hochschild, TomDispatch —
For all the spectacle of thundering cavalry charges, muddy trenches and wartime love and loss, the current popular storytellers of the First World War skip over the conflict’s greatest moral drama by leaving out part of its cast of characters.
|
 Bogdan Migulski (CC-BY)
|
It seems some tweets about plans to “destroy” America, British slang for drinking and drugging too much, and a repeat of a “Family Guy” joke, convinced U.S. officials that a pair of visiting tourists were actually terrorists who flew to L.A. in order to exhume Marilyn Monroe.
|

|
It takes master documentarian Adam Curtis only five minutes to explain what Rupert Murdoch’s war on elitism (and taste) has to do with Google.
|

|
The violent police assaults in response to the Occupy movement are proof that Occupy has hit a political nerve; Britain is preparing for the demise of the euro; meanwhile, the student wing of Occupy tries to encourage higher education. These discoveries and more after the jump.
|
 Alpha (CC-BY-SA)
|
British Prime Minister David Cameron and four of the country’s Internet service providers are bending over backwards to accommodate parents concerned with the allegedly corrosive influence of titillating adverts and porn sites on youth, because teenagers never thought about sex before billboards were invented. (more)
|
 Flickr / Images_of_Money
|
In the discussion over how to solve Europe’s financial crisis, opponents of the euro argue “that it is a monetary straitjacket and that the best reform now would be its breakup.” Not so, says Will Hutton, author, columnist and former editor-in-chief of The Observer. (more)
Posted on Sep 21, 2011
READ MORE
|
 AP / Elizabeth Dalziel
|
The Guardian put together a database of court cases of those detained during and after the unrest that swept London in early August after Metropolitan Police shot 29-year-old Mark Duggan in the city’s Tottenham neighborhood. (more)
|
 Flickr / Dana Spiegel
|
Days after two British men were sentenced to four years in prison for using Facebook to incite disorder that never materialized, Glenn Greenwald writes fluently and concisely about the efforts of governments to maintain power and order by controlling the flow of information and communication online.
|
 AP / Nick Ut
|
By Bill Boyarsky — The unrest tearing apart Britain greatly resembles that of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and conditions across the U.S. could set off a new explosion of violence.
|

|
A student activist living in the middle of London’s riots shares her view from the ground on this week’s Truthdig Radio in collaboration with KPFK. Also on the show: William Cohan and Robert Scheer on Wall Street’s plunge; Robin Wright on Syria, and David Inocencio on juvie journalism.
|
 Karl-Ludwig Poggemann (CC-BY)
|
In this age of terrorism and anxiety, we sometimes let loose a little too freely with loaded words like “attack.” Take the case of LulzSec, the humorous hacker collective that brought down the CIA’s World Factbook, penetrated PBS and resurrected Tupac. (more)
|
 Flickr / Fresh Conservative
|
This Fourth of July, during a transatlantic Age of Austerity, roughly 2,000 people paid to attend a private celebration near the American Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square, where a statue of Ronald Reagan was unveiled. (more)
|
 Vintage Collective (CC-BY)
|
Researchers in the U.K. have found a way to make the hearts of mice repair themselves—a feat that the British Heart Foundation calls the “holy grail” (when applied to humans, we’re guessing). (more)
Posted on Jun 8, 2011
READ MORE
|
|
By David Sirota — In the name of curtailing deficits, politicians across the country are hacking away at programs that aim to make children healthier.
|
 Flickr / Al-Jazeera English
|
Just days after the British government pledged $181 million in grants and loans to foster economically viable democratic transitions in Egypt and Tunisia, a Freedom of Information Act report confirmed that British military personnel are training the same Saudi security forces that were used to crush recent popular uprisings in Bahrain. (more)
|

|
By William Pfaff — The European intervention in Libya has provided a needed practical demonstration of the European states’ ability to influence world affairs, while at the same time discrediting the expectation that the European Union itself can or will conduct a united foreign and security policy.
|

|
Speaking at a historic dinner in the castle that once headquartered Ireland’s British overseers, Queen Elizabeth II expressed regret over the two islands’ violent history: “To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past, I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy.”
|
 Nina Stössinger (CC-BY-SA)
|
The queen has landed in Ireland, where she laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance to honor those who fought against British tyranny. And if you think that’s a nice gesture, you should see the emerald green outfit her majesty wore for her arrival.
|
 NASA / Bill Ingalls
|
The queen of England is headed to Ireland despite a bomb threat and other security concerns. She’ll be the first British monarch to visit the republic in 100 years, the first since the Irish—most of them, anyway—cast off British rule.
|
|
Parliamentary official John Hemming has drawn attention to a new type of court order forbidding members of Britain’s fourth estate to cover cases deemed too sensitive for public consideration. The order, known as a super-injunction ... (more)
|
 Ben Chau (CC-BY-ND)
|
The once-mighty British television empire has fallen to the blitzkrieg of inane American tele-teens. At least that’s the conclusion we’re drawing from this Guardian report, which says shows such as “90210” and “Glee” are responsible for a 500 percent explosion in prom bookings at just one hotel chain.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The always-implausible notion that the European Union could have a common foreign policy has been exploded.
|
 Wikimedia Commons / Bernd Untiedt, Germany Some rights reserved
|
On the same day that Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhadi told the people of rebel Benghazi he would show “no mercy,” the U.N. Security Council approved a resolution brought by the U.K., France and Lebanon to allow “all necessary measures” except invasion to protect Libya’s civilian population.
|
 DigitalGlobe
|
With U.S. nuclear and energy officials offering dire assessments of Japan’s nuclear disaster, the State Department expanded the evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant to 50 miles, four times that ordered by the Japanese government. France, Britain, Australia and Turkey have all ordered evacuations of Tokyo or warned against travel to the region.
|
 Wikimedia Commons / World Economic Forum
|
Thailand’s prime minister may be in some hot water. Abhisit Vejjajiva acknowledged that he holds British citizenship, an admission that may make him vulnerable to prosecution for the deaths of around 90 people in anti-government demonstrations back in 2008.
|
 The Laird of Oldham (CC-BY)
|
The British treasury suspects that Col. Moammar Gadhafi and his government have more than $30 billion stashed in the U.K., and British authorities are prepared to seize those assets in an effort to force the dictator to step down.
Posted on Feb 24, 2011
READ MORE
|
 AP / Jose Luis Magana
|
The U.S. and the U.K. have maintained a diplomatically symbiotic relationship, to all appearances, for decades, but yet another WikiLeaks cable cropped up to harsh that friendly mellow late this week. Let the official backpedaling commence.
|
 Flickr / World Economic Forum
|
With regret over the loss of life throughout and after the 2003 Iraq war, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has changed his tune of condolence, saying his historically unapologetic statements defending the war were misinterpreted.
|
 Flickr / Andrew Mason (CC-BY)
|
Scientists at University College London went poking around the noggins of a couple of MPs and 90 students and were surprised to discover that the brains of right-wing subjects were more prone to fear and anxiety and less so to courage and optimism when compared with their counterparts on the left.
|
 Flickr / Espen Moe (CC-BY)
|
The WikiLeaks founder has been denied bail on the grounds that his ties to the community are weak and he has the means to flee the U.K. Assange, who was arrested Monday by appointment in London, is wanted for questioning in Sweden related to sexual assault allegations that he categorically denies. (See correction inside: Assange has not yet been formally charged.)
|
|
By Ruth Marcus — Judging by England’s biggest engagement, relationships have come a long way in the royal family.
|
 Courtesy of Apple
|
In an effort to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, British doctors and computer engineers are developing small electronic devices that act as tiny STD testing kits, pluggable into a smart phone or computer that then allows users to learn in minutes which, if any, STDs they have.
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|