The High Court in London will soon decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as “crazy”. Sweden’s chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no [...]

For the last decade, I have been haunted by voices from the other side of death. In this way, back in 2003 I transcribed the words of Pablo Picasso after a tapestry version of his famed painting Guernica at the entrance to the Security Council was covered over at the U.N. just before then-Secretary of [...]

Racism isn’t responsible for the president’s drop in popularity. His right-wing policies are A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay that got me a much larger truckload of hate mail than usual. The piece concerned the persistent problem of denialism in parts of White America when it comes to race. I lamented how, despite media [...]

Lo que recordará el futuro de la decadencia y la caída de EE.UU. 1, Torres Gemelas Dentro de dos años la plantilla de Vanity Fair y del New Yorker se mudará al edificio más atormentado del mundo. Allí, la élite de los fotógrafos de celebridades, cronistas de sociedad y periodistas de revistas podrían encontrar algunas nuevas musas [...]

Carta de un Premio Nobel de la Paz a otro Estimado Barack Obama, más que una carta, la intención es tratar de darte una mano desde América Latina frente a la crisis económica, política y de valores que afecta a EEUU, Europa, Grecia y otros países del mal llamado “primer mundo”. Siempre afirmé que somos un [...]

President Obama has abandoned evidence-based economics to return the US to growth in favour of the politics of deficit-cutting A front page story in Sunday’s New York Times gave the country the bad news. President Obama is no longer paying attention to economists and economics in designing economic policy. Instead, he will do what his campaign [...]

Lo que vivimos en estos días es un trance histórico. Si hace diez, o cinco años, hubiésemos afirmado que el dólar es una moneda en decadencia, que el déficit de Estados Unidos está al nivel de las economías tercermundistas de las últimas décadas del siglo pasado o que la gran potencia imperial de los últimos [...]

Politicians and the media are obsessing on debt, deficit and cuts, but the real story is a stalled economy and rising unemployment President Obama and the Republicans in Congress have finally worked out a deal over the debt ceiling. It appears as though the Republicans got most of what they wanted: big cuts to domestic spending [...]

La coerción es el arma política preferida en Washington. Frente a la necesidad legal de incrementar el techo del endeudamiento del gobierno federal, el partido republicano y todas las fuerzas de la derecha conservadora han amenazado al titular del ejecutivo: o se encara realmente el problema del déficit con fuertes recortes en el gasto público, [...]

Barack Obama is salivating at the prospect of concluding his Big Deal with the Republicans, the one that will move the center robustly – even transformatively – to the Right, where this president really lives. The debt-limit deadline is Obama’s big chance to panic a significant part of the Democratic Party into joining in the [...]