Beltoon was told that the index finger of his right hand was the Shahadat, the digit of Allah, and that he must use this finger on the suicide vest to be sure of his place in paradise.
On 4 July, the day after the army overthrew Mohamed Morsi and suspended the constitution, I got an email from a friend in Cairo. A photograph of the 30 June demonstrations in Tahrir Square was...
How you punish a thief, in Plato, depends on the nature of the theft – and always on the status of the thief. The thing that’s stolen is also an issue. In the Laws a slave who steals...
Has Obama’s switch from a policy of detain and interrogate to a policy of kill on sight really followed an anti-liberal script written by Bush-era hawks?
Between 1975 and 1983, Luther Blissett made 246 appearances as a striker for Watford FC and scored 95 goals. When he joined the club they were in the Fourth Division. When he signed for AC Milan...
This piece was first published, with a different heading, on the LRB blog. You can read it here.
In their current condition our banks are an existential threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal.
When the revolt succeeds in its initial goal, we come to realise that what is really bothering us (our lack of freedom, our humiliation, corruption, poor prospects) persists in a new guise, so that we...
Snowden’s profile differed from that of the spy or defector in one conspicuous way: he did not think in secret.
If there hadn’t been so much other lurid wrongdoing in the world of finance, and if mis-sold payment protection insurance had a sexier name, PPI would stand out as the biggest scandal in the history...
A few years ago the garment factories in Bangladesh were mostly small and concentrated in Dhaka itself, where they fought each other for small contracts from obscure European discounters. But then...
The Predator drone began its career as a spy. Its first mission was to fly over the Balkans during the late 1990s and feed live video back to the US. In 2001, it was kitted out with Hellfire...
Not long before last month’s elections, dozens of workers (the youngest was 12) were burned to death in factory fires in Karachi and Lahore. Pakistan’s rulers were unmoved: there were...
On 1 January 2009, around two in the morning, 19 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black man, was shot in the back by a white transit officer in...
In the spring of 2011, a group of oil workers in Western Kazakhstan went on strike. They were working in one of the richest countries in the former Soviet Union, in dangerous conditions, in a...
David Goodhart argues that the major problems with British society are primarily caused by immigration, but his conclusions far outrun the facts.
Murdoch seems driven by insatiable ambition. He is never satisfied. Nothing appears complete, and the old man shows no sign of abandoning the struggle – especially as his heirs (his children) now publicly...
The German public are pissed off with Angela Merkel’s governing coalition, but reluctant to let go of Mutti’s hand.