54 h. ago Why Trump’s brutal crackdown on free speech is unprecedented in the US

Experts says rounding up protesters and taking control from universities goes beyond McCarthy’s witch-huntsDonald Trump campaigned on the promise that he would crack down against pro-Palestinian student protesters.Over the past few weeks, he has forcefully followed through. Continue reading...

Politics

54 h. ago ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’ Joe McCarthy and the road to Trump

Red Scare author Clay Risen sees parallels between 1950s witch-hunts and the right’s assault on government todayOn 9 June 1954, in a Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, Joseph Nye Welch made American history. With one question, the lawyer prompted the downfall of Joe McCarthy, the Republican Wisconsin senator who for years had run amok, his persecution of supposed communist subversives ruining countless lives.“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch said, as millions watched on TV, as he defended Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in McCarthy’s sights. Continue reading...

Politics

59 h. ago Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets | Kenan Malik

Arrests, blacklists and deportations are chilling reminders of the red scare that transformed America‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have appeared on screen at the beginning of the film. It didn’t, on orders from the studio, Warner Bros. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor’,” John Huston later reflected. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.”It was a relatively insignificant moment in the drama of America’s postwar red scare. McCarthyism proper had still to take flight. Yet, so deep ran the fear already that a single, everyday word could create consternation in Hollywood. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago Protest at Scots Tesla Centre as anger over Elon Musk sparks boycott calls

Activists joined picketers from across the globe in targeting Elon Musk's Tesla Centres.

Events

4 d. ago Human rights groups rebuke Kristi Noem’s visit to El Salvador prison: ‘political theatre’

Homeland security chief went to infamous prison holding deported Venezuelans as White House targets immigrantsUS politics live – latest updatesHuman rights organizations on Thursday denounced the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem’s, visit to the notorious prison in El Salvador that is holding hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the US earlier this month without a hearing, calling her actions “political theatre”.Critics condemned Noem’s visit as just the latest example of the Trump administration’s aim to spread fear among immigrant communities, as the cabinet member stood in a baseball hat in front of a line of caged men bare from the waist up. Continue reading...

Events

4 d. ago Human rights groups rebuke Kristi Noem’s visit to El Salvador prison: ‘political theater’

Homeland security chief went to infamous prison holding deported Venezuelans as White House targets immigrantsUS politics live – latest updatesHuman rights organizations on Thursday denounced the visit by the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to the notorious prison in El Salvador that is holding hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the US earlier this month without a hearing, calling her actions “political theater”.Critics condemned Noem’s visit as just the latest example of the Trump administration’s aim to spread fear among immigrant communities, as the cabinet member stood in a baseball hat in front of a line of caged men bare from the waist up. Continue reading...

Events

9 d. ago Why decolonise Shakespeare when all the world’s a stage for his ideas on injustice? | Kenan Malik

The trend for cultural reappraisal could risk upholding the very ideas it aims to dismantle‘My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression”.Then, he “began to see the matter in quite another way”: “Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.”Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Jordan Pickford sets ambitious new England target ahead of bringing up new landmark

Jordan Pickford is now targeting 100 England caps with the Everton goalkeeper set to move ahead of Gordon Banks when the Three Lions take on Albania on Friday night

Events

2 w. ago Up to 1.2m people could lose between £4,200 and £6,300 per year from changes to Pip, Resolution Foundation says

Work and pensions secretary says Benefits crackdown will save £5bn by 2030 but disability charities say cuts are ‘immoral’Q: Why have you changed your mind on this?Badenoch says she has not changed her mind. As a member of the government, she abided by collective responsibility. She says in government she regularly questioned the case for net zero.The person who’s been consistent in all this is me.I’m not going to pretend that I won’t have critics This is politics. Being a politician is about being criticised.What I’m asking people to do is listen to what I’m saying. I am not doing what all the other parties are doing. We are changing the way we do things.That’s not how it works. You can’t just pull [a date] out of the air. And what we did was pick a target and then start thinking of how to get there.We need to start thinking about it in a different way. How does this impact families? How is business going to help us deliver? And that’s what the policy commissions are going to do. C...

Economics

2 w. ago Benefits crackdown ‘to save £5bn by 2030’, claims Liz Kendall as disability charities say cuts are ‘immoral’ – UK politics live

Work and pensions secretary says one in 10 people of working age are claiming sickness or disability benefitQ: Why have you changed your mind on this?Badenoch says she has not changed her mind. As a member of the government, she abided by collective responsibility. She says in government she regularly questioned the case for net zero.The person who’s been consistent in all this is me.I’m not going to pretend that I won’t have critics This is politics. Being a politician is about being criticised.What I’m asking people to do is listen to what I’m saying. I am not doing what all the other parties are doing. We are changing the way we do things.That’s not how it works. You can’t just pull [a date] out of the air. And what we did was pick a target and then start thinking of how to get there.We need to start thinking about it in a different way. How does this impact families? How is business going to help us deliver? And that’s what the policy commissions are going to do. Continue readin...

Politics

2 w. ago Liz Kendall says benefits system ‘holding our country back’ and claims plan to crack down on it will save £5bn by 2030 – UK politics live

Work and pensions secretary says one in 10 people of working age are claiming sickness or disability benefitQ: Why have you changed your mind on this?Badenoch says she has not changed her mind. As a member of the government, she abided by collective responsibility. She says in government she regularly questioned the case for net zero.The person who’s been consistent in all this is me.I’m not going to pretend that I won’t have critics This is politics. Being a politician is about being criticised.What I’m asking people to do is listen to what I’m saying. I am not doing what all the other parties are doing. We are changing the way we do things.That’s not how it works. You can’t just pull [a date] out of the air. And what we did was pick a target and then start thinking of how to get there.We need to start thinking about it in a different way. How does this impact families? How is business going to help us deliver? And that’s what the policy commissions are going to do. Continue readin...

Politics

2 w. ago Trump environmental rollbacks would boost pollution and endanger lives, former EPA heads say

Three former Environmental Protection Agency leaders say rollbacks proposed by the Trump administration endanger the lives of millions of Americans and abandon the agency’s mission to protect the environment and human health

Politics

2 w. ago Man Utd target Viktor Gyokeres 'picks' three Premier League teams he wants to join

Manchester United have constantly been linked with a move for Sporting Lisbon striker Viktor Gyokeres but Ruben Amorim might lose out on a reunion with his former star

Politics

3 w. ago The bloodthirsty terror tactics of Mexico's cartels: How ruthless drug gangs punish their enemies and spread fear from mass beheadings to CANNIBALISM

The gruesome discovery of nine bodies and a bag filled with their severed hands on a Mexican highway last week had cartel violence written all over it.

Events

3 w. ago Inside bloodthirsty terror tactics of Mexico's cartels: How ruthless drug gangs punish their enemies and spread fear from mass beheadings to CANNIBALISM

The gruesome discovery of nine bodies and a bag filled with their severed hands on a Mexican highway last week had cartel violence written all over it.

Events

last month For a stagnating left mired in pessimism, Milton’s radical vision is poetry in motion | Kenan Malik

The poet-prophet shows us how to sustain hope and redemption in the wake of political defeat‘Is this pessimism?”, TJ Clark asks in his 2012 essay For a Left with No Future. “Well, yes.” How else, he wonders, “are we meant to understand the arrival of real ruin in the order of global finance and the almost complete failure of left responses to it to resonate beyond the ranks of the faithful?”Published originally in the New Left Review, the essay is part of Those Passions, a new collection of Clark’s work. Clark is not a political theorist but a historian of art. A Marxist, much of his work explores the interface of art and politics with considerable nuance and depth, illuminating artists from Bosch to Pollock, Rembrandt to Lowry. Continue reading...

Politics