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 Players of Games
The links between interventionist wars and game theory
[Gaz/cc] 
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
IN Iain M Banks’s sci-fi novel The Player of Games, one of the best game players in the galaxy, Gurgeh, is sent to play a fiendishly complex game called “Azad” on an alien planet.
Azad is played on a vast three-dimensional board with a dizzying array of cards, pieces, and strategies. The alien civilisation venerate it so highly that they are known as the Empire of Azad, and they hold a regular tournament where the overall winner is crowned emperor.
Gurgeh has been sent by his civilisation in an attempt to destabilise the aliens. He has only a few years to learn how to play, using his knowledge of all other known games in co-ordination with mind-enhancing drugs. The novel hinges on his growing addiction to the game of Azad, to the extent that he overlooks the wider games in which he is just a small part.
The novel is Banks at his satirical best. Gurgeh is from The Culture, a future “post-scarcity” civilisation run by benevolent AIs called “Minds.” The Culture don’t officially intervene in other alien worlds, but in this novel they unofficially they send Gurgeh to undermine.
In contrast, the Empire of Azad is not dissimilar to our present society: a strict hierarchy with vast suffering and cruelty. Banks manages to make the reader sympathise with Azad, understanding its citizens’ outrage as “superior” beings with unfair advantages condescend to play games with their civilisation at no risk to themselves. Banks allows for ambiguity in Gurgeh’s motives: is he doing it for the love of the game or to prevent the suffering of others?
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While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
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