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In Liverpool, shocking new data shows that there has been an unprecedented rise in infant mortality in recent years, with academics attributing at least a third of those deaths to rising child poverty.

we now have clear evidence of how the government's agenda over the past 10 years has directly and negatively affected people's lives

This week, Professor Sir Michael Marmot's review into Health Equity in England was published, 10 years after he first warned that growing inequalities in the country would lead to worse health outcomes for people.

almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable

Tests were in such short supply, and the criteria for getting them were so laughably stringent, that by the end of February, tens of thousands of Americans had likely been infected but only hundreds had been tested.

Chronic underfunding of public health

it’s clear that few leaders have the power to impose an unwanted technology on its population without risking disgruntled voters or – at best – low uptake, which can render these tools irrelevant. That’s why what’s known as “data cultures” has become so important.

Japan’s acceptance of the new Apple-Google contact-tracing app marks a significant departure from a tradition of being fiercely protective of its citizens’ privacy – a national trait left over from a betrayal during the country’s experience of the second world war.In Brazil, a country where the data debate still feels new, a lawyer grapples with a fast-moving, data-hungry governor to force a slower, more conscientious approach while the wider public looks on, largely uninterested. And in South Africa, the idea of a data culture is only relevant to half the country’s population because of intense digital inequality, leaving governments with a cool attitude towards developers trying to promote their products.

just 53% of the South African population is connected – pointing to an issue of digital inequality. The lack of smartphones and digital literacy, both of which are related with poverty, are the main barriers to bringing people online. Smartphones remain unaffordable for many people. RIA found 36% of people claimed the cost of smart devices are the main reason they were not online, 15% said the Internet was too expensive, and 47% mentioned the cost of data as one of the reasons they limit their use. 

“I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …” This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.

The American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished.

American liberals and leftists tend to over-valorize the Western European model, but there is no doubt that the wealthy countries at the core of the EU have far more successfully mitigated the most extreme social inequalities and built systems for health and transportation that far outstrip anything in the U.S. Even in their poor urban suburbs or, say, the disinvested industrial north of France, you will find nothing like the squalor that we still permit—that we accept as ordinary—in the USA. Meanwhile, in our ever-declining adversary-of-convenience, the Moscow subway runs on time.

The pride and pomp of the British in the heyday of empire did not last long. Two world wars impoverished the country and destroyed its empire. (Our 'special relationship' with the USA consisted in getting desperately needed aid during the Second World War in return for a promise to dismantle the empire. Even if the UK could have maintained the empire, which it could not, as proved by Suez, it in effect traded the empire for survival in the 1940s.)

Entry to the EEC/EU saved the country's economy and saw it flourish, and offered a new and significant role as one of the big three states in one of the big three blocs in the emerging new post-Cold War world, alongside the USA and China

British self-congratulation in the first decade of the 21st century had given a group of people in our political order - a fifth column from the past - the feeling that now was the time to reassert what they mythologised as the spirit of Britain in Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee

The SWAPO party received more than 56 percent of the votes for the national assembly, significantly less than during the last elections when the party, which has been in power since independence in 1990, won 80 percent of the vote

Independent candidate Itula Panduleni Filemon Bango finished second, with just more than 29 percent of the vote. Disaffection, especially among Namibia's jobless youth, drove support for former Swapo member and dentist Itula, 62, who ran as an independent candidate.

Geingob's win comes days after allegations of corruption and money laundering in the Namibian fishing industry led to the resignation and arrest of two government ministers in the wake of a joint investigation by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit, the Icelandic State Broadcaster RUV, and the Icelandic magazine Stundin.

hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined

hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.

the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”

between 2015 and 2017 support for Britain’s main parties became much more predicated on issues of culture and identity, reflecting a radical change in how parties attract voters. This shift may lead to a restructuring of the UK party system and the end of traditional party allegiances

Is the country once again experiencing the kind of left-right schism that we saw during the first 25 years after World War II with a choice for voters between a left-wing Labour Party and a right-wing Conservative Party and very little else?

political competition in Britain is defined by two underlying dimensions: one economic dimension, which corresponds to the economic notion of left versus right, and one cultural dimension. This cultural dimension incorporates a range of social issues such as equal opportunities for minorities and the desirability (or not) of the death penalty, as well as a number of issues closely related to globalisation, such as immigration, foreign aid and European integration. This dimension, sometimes referred to as “open” versus “closed”, pits patriotic, Eurosceptic social conservatives against cosmopolitan liberals and by 2017 seemed to be stronger and more coherent in terms of ordering voters’ political orientations than the economic dimension. This suggests that the economic conflict between capital and labour that defined political competition in the 20th century is giving way to a new sort of conflict based on culture and identity.

Imagine an empire with a massive security sector, one barely accountable to the democratic will. This coercive system, though appearing self-perpetuating, represents an elite echelon’s efforts to protect and consolidate power. It employs so many people that its maintenance and funding is necessary, not because of the dictates of national security, but simply to keep all its workers from becoming “superfluous.” With a repressive apparatus notorious for its abuses, this security sector fosters the very domestic opposition it is designed to combat.

this description actually comes from George Kennan’s foundational article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, under the byline X, in 1947. Kennan, perhaps more than anyone else, shaped the rhetoric of the Cold War in a way that made it seem preordained, inevitable. He is most often remembered for calling out the supposedly innate qualities of Russian culture—spiritual deprivation, cynicism, and conformity—upon which communist ideology had been grafted. This combination, he argued, was destined to conflict with the innate qualities of Americanism—its freedom of worship, its emphasis on individuality, and its support of business. But the dominance of the security sector was another persistent motif in Kennan’s work; he dedicated five paragraphs of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to the “organs of suppression.” Secret police lurked everywhere, the narrative went, and prisons were the Soviet Union’s primary feature. By 1953, under Joseph Stalin, 2.6 million people were locked up in the gulag and over 3 million more were forcibly resettled— a total of around 3 percent of the population kept under state control. Kennan’s point, like those of other foundational Cold War tracts, was clear: unlike the United States, the Soviet Union was brutally repressive.

The pathway toward the permanent war economy of NSC 68’s vision was not direct. It was contested in Congress and in public opinion. Critics rightly feared the emergence of a “garrison state,” a term that has been largely lost today.

design’s English-language lives do orbit around certain ideas: intention, planning, aesthetics, method, vocation. These ideas together form a social system that generates meaning, defining the boundaries of knowledge and the locations of cultural and economic value. Design and the ideas that travel with it, in other words, make up a discourse.

Early in the 20th century, design came to refer to the visual styling of existing products. And then, as modernist ideas circulated in Europe before World War II and as Americans adopted the idea of “industrial design,” design began to refer not just to styling products but also to conceiving and planning their function. That was when design came to mean, as Steve Jobs put it much later, “not just what it looks like and feels like” but “how it works.”

Sometime around World War II, it came to mean making things that “solve problems.” With the influence of mid-century global social movements and the rise of digital technology, it began to mean making things that are “human-centered.” And as of recently, design doesn’t have to involve making things at all. It can just mean a way of thinking.

international activists, groups and institutions are increasingly focusing on the United States as a villain, not a hero, on the subject of human rights. While the U.S. has never fully escaped such scrutiny — consider the post-9/11 fury over torture, Guantanamo Bay and drone strikes — former officials and activists say that, under President Donald Trump, American domestic strife is raising an unusual level of alarm alongside U.S. actions on the global stage. Some groups also flag what they say is an erosion of democracy in a country that has long styled itself as a beacon of freedom.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has created a commission tasked with rethinking the U.S. approach to human rights. Pompeo argues there’s been a questionable proliferation of what counts as human rights. Critics fear the commission, whose report is due this summer, will undercut the rights of women, LGBTQ people and others

“The Trump factor is huge, if not the determinative factor” in the battered U.S. reputation, said David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of State for human rights in the George W. Bush administration. “People advocating and fighting for democracy, human rights and freedom around the world are disillusioned by the U.S. government and don’t view the current administration as a true partner.”

Britain is a primary enabler of the autocrats she is so worried about; we are butler to the world’s worst people. Our shell companies hide their money, our private schools educate their children, our lawyers defend their reputations, our financial markets fund their companies, and our banks launder their money. It’s absurd to talk about the threat that dictators pose to our democracy without acknowledging how without our assistance they wouldn’t be a threat at all. It’s like condemning a war without mentioning you supplied the weapons, or criticising a party that took place in your own house.

She boasted of Britain’s place in Nato, of its development aid, of its “cyber-security partnerships”, yet all of the problems that these interventions are supposed to solve are worsened by the unregulated financial system centred on the City. The Russian kleptocrats whom Nato is opposing keep most of their wealth offshore, with houses in London their favourite assets and City lawyers their tireless defenders. The aid payments that go to help the crises in Nigeria, South Sudan or Libya are just sticking plasters over wounds worsened by entrenched corruption, again enabled through the UK. Hackers who defraud people of billions of pounds a year launder their money through our poorly regulated economy.

“Corrupt actors hide their money in the United States all the time. We can no longer provide them a shadow under which to operate,” wrote the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, and the USAID administrator Samantha Power in an article announcing the strategy. “Combating corruption abroad, therefore, begins at home, and our first step must be to expose the owners of shell companies and other illicit funds.”In contrast to that, Truss failed to satisfactorily answer a question from the audience on the British role in laundering money after her speech at Chatham House, choosing instead to talk about how we shouldn’t talk about the empire. If she’d only hung around until after lunch, however, she would have realised quite how colossal her omission was, since on Wednesday Chatham House also hosted the launch of a major report by a group of academics that forensically dissected Britain’s role in enabling corruption, and came to conclusions that were all the more alarming for the sober language they were described in.