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Prisons and prisoners
That Julia Navalnaya is furious is, of course, only as it should be. That the late prisoner’s mother is distraught, likewise. That those who care for Navalny are deeply upset is, to say the least, more than natural. For my part, I am, however, more concerned about the conditions endured by other prisoners in Russia.…
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Rape of a nation: Russia
I’m getting off the US’s back now. I’m hoping that after having agonised, day in and day out for four interminable years, over “how we got into this mess”, even the Democratic Party finally understands that Trump wasn’t its cause, only its regrettable result. So I’ll cross over to another superpower: Russia. Not that Russia…
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Dead Rat
There is a dead rat somewhere. The question is: Where? For one thing, there is this business of the expulsion of Russian diplomats from western countries. Journalists everywhere keep clamouring for evidence of the Russian government’s involvement in the Salisbury incident, and Boris Johnson is quoted as replying that Russia’s complicity is “rather like the…
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Gabriel
I can’t get Gabriel out of my head. He disappeared on 27 February. I saw it on the news and since then, for some reason, the little boy has haunted me. The whole business has seemed so utterly improbable in every way. He left his grandparents’ house to go and visit his cousins, just a…
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Yippee
I knew, of course, that this is done, and I knew, roughly, how; how some of the rich and powerful, as opposed to most of us, manage to pay little or no taxes. (Hear for instance BBC’s “file on 4”, “Dirty Money UK” of 11 October 2015). The problem is that more often than not,…