There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
The pick ’n’ mix politics of Christmas
Marxist theologian PROFESSOR JAMES CROSSLEY looks at how the story of the birth of Jesus was created from multiple sources and how the political class use and abuse it today
Boris Johnson addresses soldiers after serving Christmas lunch to British troops stationed in Estonia, December 2019
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
THE story of the birth of Jesus is found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
While they are both relatively light on the familiar Christmas details, both tell stories of the virgin Mary, Bethlehem and angels (though admittedly angels were understood as militaristic supernatural figures, rather than twee figures of more recent imaginations).
From Matthew’s Gospel we get the unnamed and unnumbered wise men from the east, the gifts (frankincense, gold and myrrh), the star over Bethlehem, Herod’s massacre of the infants and Mary and Joseph’s flight to Egypt with their baby.
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JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
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The peasants’ leader has inspired centures of reformers and revolutionaries since his execution in the Middle Ages following the failed revolt with his vision of an England freed from the Church and aristocracy, writes JAMES CROSSLEY
The sight of Lib Dem politicians engaging in a patronising gesture to Muslim voters by jumping on the Ramadan fast really hollows out the meaning and content of the term ‘solidarity', observes JAMES CROSSLEY
