Opinion

Filmmaker, writer and activist Ukrainian Oleg Sentsov is 94 days into a hunger strike after being sentenced to 20 years of hard labour on charges of plotting terrorist attacks in Crimea after the Russian Federation annexed it in March 2015.  He has allegedly been beaten and threatened with rape in order to extract a confession. He has been stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship and will be on trial as a Russian Citizen now Russia occupies Crimea. After being initially in...

They're not just whispering it any more. Boris Johnson's supporters are openly talking about him as the next prime minister. Everything is going exactly as Johnson planned. His article in the Daily Telegraph caused precisely the controversy he wanted. Boris' tasteless jokes about Muslim women's attire were carefully chosen to create the maximum outrage in the right places. Demands for an apology were always going to lead to a loud defence from his allies in the media and the Tory...

The Conservatives have pledged £100 million to "end rough sleeping on England's streets by 2027" after the number of people left homeless due to austerity cuts has soared.  Last year, around 4,800 people were estimated to be sleeping rough in England. This is 15 per cent higher than in 2016, and more than double the estimate of 1,800 for 2010 The pledge comes as communities secretary James Brokenshire acknowledged that efforts to tackle homelessness had "not been good enough", adding that...

In the early hours of Thursday, August 9th, Argentina’s Senate narrowly voted down a bill to legalise elective abortion. Senators debated for more than 15 hours before voting 38 to 31, with two abstentions and one absentee, not to allow abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. Women’s rights activists had been optimistic that the passing of the bill in the lower Congress in June was a sign that times were changing in the majority Catholic county. So this...

Something strange happened this morning – I found myself agreeing with Richard Keyes. Yes, he of ‘did you smash it?’ fame. He of ‘it was only banter’ fame. He of the having an affair with his daughter’s friend when his wife had cancer fame. He of the ‘I’ve never seen any human rights offences in Qatar’ fame. He of that video for BeIn Sports showing a presenter around his house (if you haven’t watched it, you really, really should). He’s...

By Stewie Zhu, Founder and CEO of Distributed Credit Chain On this day in 2007 when the credit crunch started, BNP Paribas became the first major bank to freeze three of its funds. In the words of Adam Applegarth, who was then chief executive of Northern Rock – one of the banks at the centre of the crisis – this was ‘the day the world changed’. But a decade later, and we’ve still not fully learnt the lessons of the...

Boris Johnson has come under fire this week following his comments that women wearing burkas "look like letter boxes" and "bank robbers".  The former Foreign Secretary launched the bizarre tirade in his Daily Telegraph column and has since refused to apologise for his "liberal" views. As Lord Pickles rightly pointed out shortly after, "if he is wanting to open up and defend liberal values, then the sensible thing is not to use illiberal language".  But if we are going to tell people what to...

It's funny that the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is called the 'Irish' border. Yes, it's on the island of Ireland, but it certainly wasn't an Irish idea. At least, the vast majority of the island's citizens didn't want the country to be cut in two in the 1920s, and many have campaigned, both peacefully and violently, to put it back together. But not even Irish people in the far south of the island, where the...

"Once we understand the extremity of our plight, once we no longer deny it, then we just might have the will to try drastically to change course", Rupert Read wrote in The London Economic shortly after the winter cold snap brought a record-breaking chill to British shores. As the continent basks in heat the latest study from an international team of climate researchers shows we are heading for a Hothouse Earth scenario which could turn some of the Earth's natural forces that currently protect us...