“The mimetic principle,” most developed by René Girard, today captures the attention of psychologists, literary critics, war-and-peace makers, and experts in many disciplines. It builds on the desires and behaviour of humans who see something they and their rivals both want. As they follow up, the price exacted by both keeps going up. “Keeping up […]

I know from personal involvement that the devastating invasion of Gaza by Israel could easily have been avoided. After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act […]

The US has learnt none of the lessons of Vietnam. The US and NATO presence conveys a sense of being occupied, the destruction of property and homes and the deaths of innocents, translates into recruits prepared to fight for a war lord, the Taliban or whoever else will arm and feed them. The Russians found […]

We’ve got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don’t care any more – providing we don’t offend the Israelis. It’s not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what […]

Violent interventionism is never justified. But there are non-violent alternatives, and they work…Whilst the failures of violent interventionism have mounted, the last few decades have simultaneously shown the caricatures of nonviolence (as “appeasement”, “naive” or “unworkable”) to be manifestly false… http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/12/religion-christianity1

It’s likely that the next US president will decide the fate of cases against five Guantanamo Bay detainees. The five had their charges dropped last week following an ‘act of conscience’ on the part of prosecutor Lieut-Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, who had resigned after accusing the military of suppressing evidence that could have helped clear them…What […]

Wednesday, 7 January 2009, Independent.co.uk Web So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night’s work in Gaza by the army that believes in “purity of arms”. But why should we be surprised? […]

A new thoughtprovking intro to human trafficking on utube.

At a time when the United Nations is seeking increased financial assistance from rich nations to help developing countries meet the faltering Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including a 50-percent reduction on extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, the current U.S. economic crisis and its predictably negative fallout overseas is expected to be a major setback. […]

It’s extraordinary to me that the United States can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can’t find $25 billion dollars to saved 25,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases. – Bono, rock star and anti-poverty activist.

The news this week has been full of some very big numbers. Some of the biggest and most prestigious banks in the world are in major trouble. Hundreds of billions of dollars have already been loaned or guaranteed by governments to “rescue” these institutions that have made their fortunes loaning money and packaging securities when […]

Good intentions wither fast, especially when it comes to helping the world’s poor. At the turn of the millennium, world leaders committed to cutting extreme global poverty in half and to achieving deep reductions in malnutrition and child mortality rates. They followed that up in 2005 with a pledge to increase development assistance to $130 […]