In August 2014, the police who faced protesters in Ferguson, Missouri looked more like soldiers than officers of the peace. Citizens squared off with a camouflage-clad police force armed with tear gas…
Communities everywhere are feeling more vulnerable and the planet is suffering stresses too.
Shutterstock/Nejron Photo
We appear to have reached one of those extraordinary moments in history when people everywhere, communities and even entire nations, feel increasingly stressed and vulnerable. The same may be said of the…
Garry Kasparov’s unsuccessful campaign for the presidency of chess’ governing body, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), has once again seen chess became an arena for political and ideological…
Overdue for reform: UN Security Council.
EPA/Jason Szenes
The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Syria are symptomatic of deeper problems in the international system. If the Security Council were to fulfil its role under the UN Charter, tackling many of these tragic…
Urgent business: the UN Security Council discusses Gaza and the downing of flight MH17.
EPA/Jason Szenes
On Thursday July 17, 298 people lost their lives when Flight MH17 was downed in eastern Ukraine. Almost immediately accusations were made that the aircraft had been shot down by pro-Russian separatists…
A heroes welcome staged at the Brandenburg Gate.
Michael Kappeler/EPA
The German football team returned from its victorious World Cup campaign in Brazil to a rapturous welcome. Hundreds of thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin to celebrate the first World Cup win for a…
Kerry and Lavrov keep talking.
EPA/Martial Trezzini
Talks between US secretary of state John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Paris, followed after a week of high-level diplomacy, including a phone call between presidents Obama and Putin…
On message: a pro-Russian newspaper in Simferopol, Crimea.
EPA/Yuri Kochetkov
Facebook can be a confusing place. For the follower of Ukrainian and Russian politics the messages could not be more different. At the same time that “Euromaidan PR” is posting pictures of “Putler” and…
Academy Award nominations rarely enter into the domain of politics, and certainly have not delved into Indonesian politics in the past. This year, however, is different. US-British director Joshua Oppenheimer’s…
Sendai, Japan after the 2011 tsunami: imagine nature’s destruction at the push of a button.
US Navy
The words “environmentalism” and “military” are not typically found in the same sentence. Yet ideas about our vulnerability to environmental change are directly linked to military plans for a third world…
A United States Air Force RF-101 Voodoo aircraft pilot photographs a Russian ship loaded with missiles while the aircraft itself casts a shadow in Port Casilda, Cuba, Nov. 6, 1962.
EPA/Defense Imagery
Fifty years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. Since then, the Cuban Missile Crisis has been recognised as one of the most definitive…