Mangled metal bars jut out onto the pavement, as if a wild animal had ripped open its cage. The creature responsible, however, is a mechanical beast. 

This is the view of guardrails I encounter on one of my regular cycling routes through the borough of Brent. 

I witness the evolution of them as they appear more twisted and destroyed, then are removed, and replaced entirely, only for the new rails to be disfigured again a few days later. 

As the moonlight shines through these bars, their distorted transformation is mesmerising, making my …

Polarisation in America: Neighbours in suburbia with opposed political views.

U.S. journalist, Danielle Maisano, who has been living in London for 11 years, shares her views on the build-up that led to the fallout of Trump winning his second term.

The last time I voted in a U.S. presidential election on U.S. soil was in 2008. It was also the last time I felt truly inspired by a Democratic nominee. I came politically of age during the George W. Bush period. After years of watching war criminals, Bush and his VP, Dick …

Post truth Trump who is vying to get a second term as president of America in 2025.

“Cat-eating Haitians” – the most recent buzzworthy but baseless claim amplified by the Trump campaign, sparked hyper-salivation amongst MAGA fans, and disbelief in the rest of us. While researching this latest xenophobic rumour, a Springfield, Ohio police report revealed how easily Trump’s post-truth world can be debunked.

In 2016, the same year Trump successfully campaigned to become the 45th POTUS, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year was “post-truth” and is defined as: “relating to or …

“Not a pretty picture: A Tory legacy of divide and rule” The Illegal Migration Bill highlights a party that has a history of xenophobic policies.

The UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s controversial Illegal Migration Bill has caused a lot of concern with protests and open letters condemning its harshness, even exposing division within the Tory Party itself. If the Bill is to become a law, in its current state, it contravenes European and international human rights laws. Yet this policy is part of a tradition of xenophobia in Tory party politics …

“He sits at his table long as a fable planning a banquet of death too sharp are his claws too aglow are his eyes Putin of the great war cry dragging his carcass of history.”

The war in Ukraine has brought together a unified international stance that is saying no to conflict, no to imperialism and no to Putin! This was never more apparent than when poets took a stand in London on 27 March at the JW3 centre, to raise funds for Ukraine in a Poem-a-Thon. Sponsored poets read in relay …

Disturbed by the number of masks of varying types that I have seen since the pandemic when walking around London I decided to do a small experiment.
I wanted to see just how many I could find within 15 minutes. Without barely even looking I found six. This is a disturbing number of them to come across if you think of how short that time period is.
This is of course just a microcosm of a bigger issue and a report released this year by Greenpeace states that “Since masks became compulsory, it’s estimated …

The effect of the pandemic must be combatted not just through medicinal but monetary means.
Benjamin Maslow who created his hierarchy of needs stated in his book The farther reaches of human nature that “The need for ‘dignity, for example, can be seen as a fundamental human right in the same sense that it is a human right to have enough calcium or enough vitamins to be healthy.”
These words written in 1971 have a very poignant meaning in today’s society during a pandemic which has exposed not just a broken …

A rare sighting of the hallowed sky octopus, the harbinger of spring.

The March budget presented free ports as the remedy to economic uncertainty in the face of Brexit and COVID, but are they a good solution?
The Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak’s budget speech hailed free ports, where imported goods are exempt from tariffs, as a silver bullet to fix the economic uncertainty caused by both Brexit and COVID. Finding viable economic solutions is imperative during this time for the UK government which has been criticised for letting down fishermen in the Brexit deal, as well as being criticised for not acting …

One year ago today, I received a work email saying that someone had tested positive for COVID, and that they would be decontaminating the whole building that weekend, but no need to worry, we should be able to return to work next week.
Now, up until this point in 2020, I had been so overwhelmed with work projects, the virus was just a distant murmur – nothing really to concern myself with. But as soon as it had penetrated my immediate circle, my brain switched on. How ashamedly reactive of me.
I …

The new year continues with the pandemic being used by some authoritarian African leaders as a way to cling to power. 
Saturday saw Yoweri Musevini win his sixth term in office after the election was postponed in 2020 due to the risk of Covid, with Mr Musevini telling Ugandan NBS Television that “To have elections when the virus is still there… It will be madness.” However, after much deliberation it was decided that the election would actually go ahead in 2021 despite the virus persisting into the new year with Uganda’s …

Mickey vs Donald.

The first time that the Tory Party finally mentioned the housing crisis, since the snap election, was during  Hammond’s November budget. However unlike these elitists, who clearly only care about their influential wealthy friends, most of us deal with the problem of affordable housing in this city and country on an every day basis. And some of us, like the artist known as EnterHUMAN, highlight the issue in their work.
Guardians: the school we lived in, was her insightful documentary photography exhibition, that took place at the BSMT Gallery space from 19 to 23 May. It highlighted the …

For over 20 years activists within the intersex community have been calling for changes to how operations are performed on those born with the condition and last year a United Nations convention condemned the practice that it describes as “Intersex Genital Mutilation” within 15 countries including the UK.

No sooner had China put a ban on ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings, than the following week the FCA issued a statement on their website about how to use them. Should UK companies who use this fundraising system be worried?
Initial Coin Offerings are a means for cryptocurrency companies and Blockchain industries to crowdfund. ICOs release crypto tokens, which are commonly exchanged for Bitcoin, Ether, other crypto currencies and even fiat money as well. The end result sees the company receiving their capital and the participants their crypto token shares, which they …

Donald Trump’s policy towards Europe is like a glaring white avalanche careering down a hill. The US is on a path to an isolationist freeze, set in motion by Trump’s nationalist rhetoric in which the president is considering changing long-standing foreign policy and this is starting to have a powerful impact on the political landscape of Europe.

The room that I currently write this in will probably no longer be here in a few weeks. The building is going to be torn down. I am a property guardian in a school in central Hackney. What was meant to be six months of accommodation turned out to last just over a year.
I was lucky on that point and on the location, Hackney my eternal home, and also the fact that I live with eight other individuals who are great.
They, like myself, will be out of a home but …

Even though some Eurosceptic parties in Europe have seen an ebb within support from voters recently, the changing political landscape could mean that their political presence and influence within the union might be irreversible.
The 2008 recession formed a catalyst for Eurosceptic parties across the political spectrum on the continent. Support rose due to a number of factors such as the conditions of imposed austerity and dissatisfaction with the establishment ruling parties and their policies.
Yet currently some eurosceptic parties’ support is on the decline. Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, Front National …

 
Putting personal political perspectives aside, I hate to say that I was right in my prediction that Ed Milliband would not win the last election. But his influence certainly left his mark on the party with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters, yet I still feel that it is not enough to resurrect Old Labour policies. The electoral map of 2015, pictured to the left, proves the point that we do live with rose-tinted glasses in our leftist island of London engulfed by a sea of blue.
Jeremy Corbyn is a …

I laughed myself silly on this Telegraph piece on how people have resorted to make money or to prove the existence of a supernatural being. Try photoshop, vinegar art, and just plain coincidence.
So I tried an experiment and found my own faces without trick photography or fabrication, problem was I only got skulls, demons, monsters and no messiahs!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

It was a cold Tuesday and high above the hustle and bustle of Mare Street people reclined in couches in the Hackney Picture House Cinema to watch the young and the old showcase their films at the LSFF. The festival, which this year ran from 9 to18 January, had been going all week with many categories. That night I saw the screenings of the New Shorts Lo-budget mayhem category. The LSFF’s website had this to say about the category: “ […] a selection of 26 out-there gems from bad taste …

It was while reading the salmon coloured pages of the Financial Times that I came across an excellent piece by Tony Barber in the Global Insight section entitled:“Baltic states fear Kremlin concern for their ethnic Russians”.
This FT piece sparked a memory of a point that I had raised to a Goldsmith’s lecturer, when I attended a guest class in leadership this year. I spoke about the fact that Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Crimea 2014 were the age old dictatorial excuse of defending ones own indigenous population in other corners of the …

Brett Bailey’s planned Barbican installation, Exhibit B has come under fire from criticisms that it is racist as it shows black models in poses as slaves.
Yet to see is one thing and to understand is quite another. Bailey has been known for his other work that confronts racism and colonialism.
I personally support the exhibition, just because we live in an age of PC does not mean that prejudices in all their forms do not exist. PC has become a blanket, a way to cover up the evils of the past …

 
It all started with a brown trench coat, a tuft of ginger hair and a white dog. Yep it was while growing up reading Tintin annuals that I became enthralled with the concept of reporting and the world of journalism. Here was a character who did not just travel the world but he righted wrongs, fought against injustice and had some bloody interesting friends.
As I got older I started to get more involved with researching society and politics and to analyse the world that we live in and why it works …

 
Journalist James Foley’s death highlights a bigger problem for freelancers out there desperate to put themselves in harms way to make a living for what they love! 
Read the Guardian piece by Martin Chulov, it illustrates the lack of care and of training by news organisations as they quite happily take the stories of those on the frontline and pay them peanuts in return.
Who is the real cannon fodder in these conflicts? Many of us just sit back and gobble up information easily provided to us and never realise what someone went through for …

 
Press, smut peddlers have their whole operation opened and dissected by Rich Peppiatt, former tabloid reporter, in a new documentary called One Rogue Reporter. Shown as part of the films of the East End Film Festival at the Rio Cinema in Dalston last weekend.
Peppiatt worked for the Daily Star  tabloid until a road to Damascus moment that made him see the error of his ways. In his former job he was forced to be a hater inventing negative sensationalist stories on Muslims. He stood up, said enough, had his resignation letter …

 
 
Daniel Ginns expresses his artistic versatility through continuous line drawings and Mark Rothko wall photos. Recent work was for the Tate Britain as part of a project created by Scottish artist Alan Johnston called Tactile Geometry.
Ginns and I went for a cup of tea to talk about nature over nurture, chance, and what the future holds for an art graduate. The 24-year-old graduated last year with a BA in Illustration, from the Camberwell College of Art. His distinct look is a colourful bandana tied around his forehead to keep his wild …

One of London’s last independent cinemas, the Rio in Dalston, hosted shorts by two visionary women filmmakers at a private screening on Sunday 21 July.
The two directors portrayed gang life in the city through different approaches. Dionne Edwards, 27, from Bristol, who moved to London when she was 18, took the fiction route. Eva-Marie Elg, 30, who came to London in 2003 from just outside the industrial town of Borlänge in Sweden, took the documentary route.
Edward’s film Got Got, shot in colour with a running time of just under 13 minutes, was …

 
In Israel, everyone goes to the military service at the age of 18. But living in military bases before reaching 18 might be quite odd for some people. Nitzan Regev-Sanders, 25, an International Politics and Sociology student at City University, London talks about her extraordinary experience of growing up in army bases in Israel.
Nitzan was born and raised in Israeli army bases as her father was an Air Navigator on different fighter aircrafts. “In a sense I was drafted to the Israeli Army the day I was born,” she said.
Growing …

Our adventures in Amsterdam documented in this video as well as an interview with Slavko Martinov director of the documenatry Propaganda which you can also read about in this review.
Video: Christian Jensen, Text: Mark A. Silberstein, Edit: Jenya Vyaltseva
 
 

 
It has been two years since the start of the uprising in Bahrain.  Back then in 2011, thousands of Bahraini went into the streets of the small island kingdom demanding political reforms and civil rights following similar protests in other Arab countries like Tunisia and Egypt.
Since then, demonstrations in Bahrain continued as  the level of violence increased. Dozens of Bahrainis have been killed since 2011 by the security forces and hundreds were injured. Thousands were arrested and many are still detained according to international human rights organisations.
Amidst this crisis, Bahraini …

Dr Benedetta Brevini, responsible for communication in the Media Reform Coalition (MRC), a coalition consisting of 20 different organisations from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to the Hacked Off group headed by actor Hugh Grant, says the outcome of a Royal Charter  as the new press regulatory body wasn’t quite what  they had envisioned.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in a noisy café in North London, Dr Brevini sipped her coffee and with a serious look on her face said: “This Royal Charter is an ancient constitutional way of regulating. From a …

Dr Benedetta Brevini is coauthor of a book on Wikileaks and its aftermath and is writing a new one on Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) online and media regulation. She worked as a journalist in Milan, London and New York and contributes to The Guardian‘s Comment is Free. She is also a lecturer in Media Policy and Journalism at City University in London and a member of The Media Reform Coalition.
Dr Brevini is not shy. She is one of those people who likes answering questions. She doesn’t circle them; she expands
on them. She doesn’t limit herself …

Taught by volunteers and inclusive to all, squat schools provide an alternative to Cameron’s Big Society free schools, without cost to the taxpayer.
Talia Rose, 28, who has been an English Foreign Language (EFL) teacher for the last nine years, volunteered as a facilitator in free schools in squats. She passionately exclaimed how she became “part of a collective that did an arts free school in the building behind the Bank of Ideas.”
In 2011, the Occupy movement devised the Bank of Ideas, a free school held at the disused UBS office …

Flat Earth believers have been around since biblical times and even photos of Earth taken from space have not deterred them.
Michael N Wilmore, 27, was born in London and moved to Ireland in his teens. He is the vice president of the Flat Earth Society, which he joined in 2006. Wilmore first went into the society as a devil’s advocate, but after about four or five months he was a convert. He said: “I believed in a round Earth theory, I went to school and learnt the same things as …

London smog.

In 1952 an estimated 4,000 people died as a result of severe air pollution in London. Today the same number are estimated to die early each year because of poor air quality in the Capital.
Dr Benjamin Barratt, of the Environmental Research Group at King’s College London, measures air quality across the city. He says in some respects London is quite clean, but in others the city could be considered the worst in Europe.

A skeleton leans sideways on a park bench,  the essence of where life once was now  just bare bones remain. As you look up a spectacular chandelier made of 3000 plaster cast bones by British artist Jodie Carey hangs eerily from the high exhibition ceiling and strikes you as you enter into this death obsession.

What is death? It is one of the only few things in life that is certain and can be at any time. Richard Harris’ exhibition cleverly explores both the gruesome and creepy side of death along …

The UK is one of the richest countries in the world, but there are still massive issues of food waste and poverty. According to FoodCycle an estimated four million people are affected by food poverty in the UK.
Inspired by an American campus kitchen project, Foodcycle is a charity tackles food waste, and food poverty in the UK.This is done through using spare kitchen space, and volunteers. They create meals reclaiming surplus foods donated by food retailers. Those that volunteer are provided with opportunities to learn new skills, when working at FoodCycle’s …

Illegal street art has been plastered on the walls of London’s East End for many years. The formerly known working class district is slowly transforming into a street art Mecca.
You only have to take a turn into a side street along Old Street to find a piece from the movement. That’s where Alternative London Founder Gary Means has set up shop. Or stop.
His white graffiti covered Alternative London double-decker bus is parked in a lock on Rivington Street, EC2.
Alternative London provides street art tours, bike tours and workshops led by …

Two Americans have launched a project that uses public art to share recipes, which are painted across walls in South East London.
Gourmandizing London is an artwork and community project that aims to celebrate the diversity of people, through a series of recipes collected for residents living in the nearby communities.
Jason Page, one of the founders explained Gourmandizing, he said: “Gourmandizing London is a series of murals that are visual and artistic representations of recipes that we collect from people, kitchens and restaurants of the neighbourhoods of South East London. We …

Out of great hardship comes great art. From the heart of a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, a defiant voice is crying for freedom and justice.
In the narrow alleyways of Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, a Palestinian Hip Hop band was born in 2007. Three young rappers who were born and raised in a refugee camp felt fed up with being voiceless and quiet. They decided to sing about their life, their struggle and about the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Their lyrics are strong and often aggressive in describing …

Mary Stevens, 21, from North Carolina studies at City University and  speaks about the recently passed changes to marijuana laws.
I personally think that it can be useful for medical reasons and is less dangerous than cigarette smoking; it can be fun as well. I believe that the US have taken a step in the right direction when it comes to legalising this drug, there are bigger issues to tackle like gun laws and harder drugs, it’s good to see that this has been noticed and progress is being made.
With people …

Dave Ryan doesn’t just deliver mail around one of London’s toughest neighbourhoods he has spent most of his life and spare time trying to improve it.
Having been a community volunteer and local postman for over 42 years he has put blood, sweat and tears into his local boxing club where he aims to improve quality of living for younger people and trying to decrease street crime in the heart of Islington.
Most people think that tougher policing or community service is needed to tackle crime but the boxing club proves it is …

It’s a year since Occupy London left the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, but many of the group are still campaigning for change.
George Barda was one of the most recognisable faces of Occupy London. With his long dark hair and wiry beard he often appeared as a spokesperson for the group.
“We just don’t get as much media coverage now that we are not outside St Paul’s,” saide Barda.
One of the groups most recent campaigns did capture the attention of the media: the occupation of Friern Barnet Library.
“Quite a lot of …

Cycle hire scheme in London “Boris Bikes”.

Cycling is a great way to exercise and a form of travel environmentalists will always favour. To them, the more who choose to cycle rather than travel using vehicles that emit harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the better.

Last week Green party member Jenny Jones, presented a motion to the London assembly asking them to allocate an extra £41 million to the cycling budget.
This extra £41 million would be used to give cyclists more facilities, increasing Transport for London’s (TfL) spending 2 percent for …

Catrine Gangstø leading a Peacepainting workshop.

Peacepainting is an organisation that exists to remind the adult world what it means to think like a child. Using the same format, same frames and same canvas’s children across the world are taking part in painting workshops to express themselves.

“Children think what they say from their heart may be able help someone. Children and youth want to give to others,” said Peacepainting’s founder Catrine Gangstø.
Paintings from the project have been exhibited all across the world in schools, airport, underground, shops and places where political …

Seeing the world through Stjepan Sedlar’s eyes requires a lot of patience and having no fear of the dark. His parents are from Croatia and this Hamburg born photographer, who lives in Berlin, would stray into parks at night taking colour photos without lighting.
It is late afternoon on a cold Sunday in Berlin in the area of Prenzlauerberg. Sedlar, 29, has medium length dark hair and stubble. He rolls a cigarette from his tobacco pouch and proceeds to light it as the last rays of sun begin to fade out of view.
“The …

In the last two decades, the dive tourism industry has exploded into a global giant and has become a welcome source of income in less economically developed countries.
According to The Professional Association of Diving Instructors statistics, its membership numbers have increased by almost 70 per cent since 1993. Experts believe the main reason for the increase in dive tourism has been the influx of technology in recent years, bringing with it competitive flight prices and internet images of far flung shores waiting to be discovered. But recreational dive tourism is …

Bulgarian newspapers.

Bulgaria has the lowest level of press freedom of any European country according to this year’s Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index.

This widely accepted measure of how free the world’s media are, described the small Balkan state as a country “whose promise of reform came to nothing and where the internet ceased to be a safe place for freelance journalists.”
Earlier this month, the then Bulgarian Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov reacted to the publication of leaked files about his business activities during the 1990s with a warning to journalists.
“What they have …

When Burkina Faso’s Paralympic team arrived in London with nowhere to stay, nowhere to train and not enough money to salvage the situation in a strange country, 24 year old Liam Conlon decided to take matters into his own hands.
The Cambridge graduate put some of the athletes up in his Essex home, made them food before and after training and found them somewhere to train.
“Their government funding was late, I found out there was a problem with their accommodation and training arrangements a few weeks prior to their arrival, however …

Investments in Islamic finance are increasing at a rapid rate globally. According to Ernst and Young global Islamic banking assets held by commercial banks are set to reach almost two trillion this year, up from the US$1.3 trillion of assets held in 2011. The sector has seen a 150% increase in the past five years.
There are over 300 Shariah compliant financial institutions worldwide. UK Islamic Finance Secretariat (UKIFS) said Islamic markets have developed in Malaysia, Iran and the Gulf and have potential in developing in Australia, Nigeria and Russia.
A Shariah …

As immigration and tourism soars in Bali, locals are clamping down more than ever to preserve their unique Hindu culture and island beauty.
Made Dedik, Balinese local and owner of Double D Surf School at Seminyak Beach is no exception, and vehemently believes in protecting the island he grew up on.  Double D stands for Damai Damai which translates as “great peace”.
He runs a locally- owned, locally- operated school just a few kilometres down the beach from notorious tourist hotspot, Kuta, and has seen the area change immeasurably over the past …

In 2010 plans for a third runway at Heathrow airport was dropped by the new coalition government. Now, in response to other European countries’ growing aviation capacity, the issue has resurfaced.
The Howard Davies aviation commission will spend 2013 determining the future need for expansions and deliver their report to the government in 2015. Many of the main stakeholders in the situation such as the former BAA have put pressure on the government to speed up this review.
But no matter the decision, activist groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth …

Co-authored with Christian Jensen.
A new campaign will try and make squatting completely illegal. In September 2012, squatting in a residential location, the act of living in a building without paying rent, was made illegal. But now the government is considering extending this to all squatting.
Mike Weatherly, Conservative MP, is one of the strongest proponents of the new campaign: “Some squatters have got nothing to do with homelessness. They are basically anarchists who want rent-free accommodation. I don’t mind people having alternative views on life and living the way they want …

 
Voina, a Russian artivist collective specalising in provocative street art against state control, has released a documentary which recently screened at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA).
The film, Tomorrow, chronicles the history of the group from their early beginnings as shoplifting squatters to their biggest and most controversial piece, painting of a gigantic penis on a drawbridge in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service in St Petersburg.
While the group has more than sixty members since its creation in 2006 the movie focuses on the core of …

 
Ben Goldacre, medical doctor and Guardian journalist is the father of Bad Science a collection of books, hundreds of articles and videos with one goal: challenging myths, rumours and shady businesses in the medical world.
Goldacre’s work is rife with aggression and challenges against other “experts”, with his book Bad Science getting new chapters both in print and online as lawsuits against him finish, something his newest book Bad Pharma will undoubtedly also feature.
The cases he debunks and attacks generally fall into two categories. People who prey on the ignorance, spirituality …

 
Propaganda is a documentary purported to have been made in North Korea with images of decadent western lifestyle, capitalist culture and a message of salvation. A couple claiming to be North Korean dissidents approached a translator in Seoul handing her a DVD on condition that she translate and disseminate it.
All the hundreds of images in the documentary are  from TV and archive footage and  revolve around a North Korean scientist, whose identity has been concealed, who explains under different headings what is wrong with the western world.
From reality TV shows to …

 
Ruggero Galtarossa is from a small city in Northern Italy called Padova. He is 22 years old he has been living in London for two and a half years. He is in his third year studying journalism and sociology for a BA joint honours degree.
The Italians have an exceptionally high average life expectancy – above 74 years for men and 80 years for women. We talked about a special village in the North called Stoccareddo whose inhabitants do not suffer from heart disease or diabetes and live into their 90s …

 
Moorfields Eye Hospital shows the world’s only collection of art for the blind. The unique exhibition consists of more than 20 pieces that appeal to the tactile sense and makes a bold statement that sight is not essential for enjoying art.
The artists used different materials but also vivid colours to make the art works appeal to all senses. One painting shows woman in a black gown but upon touching it also reveals the velvet texture of the garment. Another painting appeals with vivid with colour to the sense of sight …

Bahaa Milhem, a 3rd year journalism student at City University, talks about the difference in culture when it comes to sex in Palestine and here in the UK.
First sex in general and particularly for young people; sex outside marriage?
It’s not illegal but it is looked heavily down upon, especially for women. It is something that goes against the ideas of society. But again it depends on what country you are talking about; Lebanon for example is more Liberal and open minded than compared to Saudi-Arabia.
In the west, especially in big …

 
“I was doing my shopping in the beauty aisle in Sainsbury’s,” Liz*, an undergrad student at City University recalls, “and a middle-aged man, maybe 50 or 60, comes up to me and asks me with this disgusting smirk on his face: ‘Do you know where the Vaseline is?’ It completely caught me off guard. How are you supposed to react? There’s a chance that person is a complete maniac so what are you supposed to say?”
Liz’s experience is unfortunately not unique. Whether it’s an unpleasant comment, an insistent stare or …

The Paralympics brought with them a positive change in attitudes towards disabled people, yet there is still a long way to go.
The French company Atos, contracted by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to reasess the situation of 2.6 million people on incapacity benefits by 2014, was one of the sponsors of the Paralympics. The government claimed that over £600m were overspent on benefits each year for people who no longer qualified for them. The company’s treatment of those it deemed “fit for work” resulted in some suicides as …

 
In the 80s the artists group Guerrilla Girls scattered New York with posters claiming that only 5 per cent of artists in the Metropolitan Museum were women but 83% of all nudes were female.
The number of female artists has increased since then but most nudes in modern art are still women. It doesn’t stop at museums: our entire visual culture, be it advertising, paintings or films, is focused if not obsessed with the naked female body.
While the UK didn’t see a major problem in bare female breasts in the best-selling …

Two years after his hard-hitting crime drama A Prophet, Jacques Audiard is back with a moving love story that unites against all odds a recent amputee and an underground street fighter.
It starts off like an American road-movie: Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a hefty Belgian bloke and his five-year-old son are standing by the side of the highway, hitchhiking their way down to the South of France. Broke and homeless, father and son settle at the sister’s modest house in Antibes.
Ali’s boxing skills gets him a job as a bouncer in a …

Most people have some idea of what an addiction is, but sex doesn’t seem to be one that first comes to mind.
When Steve McQueen’s Shame, a film about a sex addict living in New York, hit the cinema earlier this year, it provoked a lot of controversy. It seems that sex addiction is still a taboo subject that most of us have never have been confronted with.
Medical organisations have been debating whether “sex addiction” really is a condition, or whether it is just an excuse for a high sex …

 
A senior Muslim cleric from the UK was threatened with arrest by an extremist in Saudi Arabia last month.
Dr Usama Hasan, a physics lecturer at Middlesex University and Senior Researcher of the Quilliam Foundation, a Muslim counter-extremism group, was on a pilgrimage in Mecca, when a former president of the Muslim Society of London’s City University confronted him.
Hasan said: “I was accosted by one of these extremists after I bumped into him and he tried to call the Saudi police on me. He was a part of some of the …

Amy Hanson, director of the organisation Big Steps talks about her new documentary about the street children in Nicaragua.

Before instruments there was nature, and Ebe Oke is an artist who lets certain elements of this world resound through his music.
It was this unique sound and his voice that caught the attention of Geoff Travis, the founder of Rough Trade Records, who offered the US musician a development deal. Travis introduced Oke to the guitarist Phil Manzenera of Roxy Music, who he then collaborated and recorded music with. Recently, Oke has been picked for the line-up at Brian Eno’s Punkt festival in Kristiansand, Norway in September.
I met Ebe Oke for an …

 
 
A study by Harvard University released this month reveals that China’s Internet Censor’s new focus is on topics that might incite protest in the country.
Citing examples that two of the most censored topics concerned protests in China’s Inner Mongolia region and in Zengcheng. The study showed that in both cases local inhabitants of the area clashed with the authorities. This is an interesting development because The ‘Great Firewall of China’, a censorship and surveillance project which began to operate in November 2003 recently did a u-turn on blocked keywords such …

 
The old tale of Huckleberry Finn will be released as a new film next year but the best-loved story has had a very unpopular past.
The film currently in production, Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, directed by Jo Kastner, combines the stories of the two books by the author Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn was intended as a sequel to Twain’s previous book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Both novels are set in the town of St.Petersburg, Missouri.
Twain first published Huckleberry Finn in England in 1884 and a year later in the United States. …

 
Reporters Without Borders stated that a journalist from Radio Liberté and two journalists from Kisangani News were released from prison in the last few weeks.Their crimes were that they asked too many questions about the government… But at least they are still alive.
According to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) between 1993 to 1998 four journalists were reported killed in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Between 2005 and 2011 that figure was eight. To add to these atrocities, during the 2011 presidential elections a private television station, which favoured the opposition opponent …

Nobody knows what they are. Or where they came from.
I’m feeling strangely calm. I guess people who have just arrived in the trenches feel the same. One day its all routine and the usual pint on Fridays and the next death surrounds you so closely. Your sense of time is destroyed, no more five year plans or even just wondering what shopping you need to do for next week. Every second could be your last and the futility of knowing you have no say in that envelops you, numbs you. …

Occupy Hong Kong has secured itself a most ironic location, inside the Asia headquarters of HSCB. While the bank has stated they are happy for them to be there and support everyone’s right to protest, the camp state it’s just a hypocritical way of avoiding bad publicity.
While protests in Hong Kong have been met with police brutality and pepper sprayings, the camp itself hasn’t experienced any trouble. Since it started in early October the camp has enjoyed its protection from the weather inside the bank building’s open ground floor, setting …

According to Eric Wishart, Agence France-Presse Asia region chief, China is a still a difficult country to work in, but things are looking up.
So how is the current situation in China, do you have any presence there?
We have bureaus in Beijing and Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taiwan. But in China it’s difficult because if you try to cover situations you get taken away if there is trouble. We try to go to these places and have to try to get round the local police. A foreigner would stand out, so we …

What does it mean to be a young woman in Iran? The Omid Foundation explores this question through enabling disadvantaged women in Iran to use photography as a means of therapy. “Voices of the other half” is the product of a workshop with eleven girls led by Shandi Ghadirian, an Iranian photographer working at the Museum of Photography in Tehran.
“Voices of the other half” covers a wide range of women’s identities and issues women are concerned with in their lives in Iran. One of the girls in the project has …

 
Ric O’Barry, known from the documentary “The Cove”, recognises the film has done a lot of good, yet publicity is only a first step in saving marine life.
O’Barry visited Hong Kong Baptist University for a screening of the film and to debate against Allan Zeman, chairman of Ocean Park, a Hong Kong theme park known for its dolphin shows.
The events were organised by the HKBU branch of Aiesec, a global student exchange scheme. Vriko Séraphina Kwok, head organiser of the events said:
“It took six months of hard work, lack of sleep and thousands …

Donnacha De Long is president of the NUJ and last week he chaired a debate on the topical Leveson inquiry for the Benn Lectures. He became President in April 2011 after being a National Union of Journalists (NUJ) member since he was 19. As his role as president is coming to an end, his Irish revolutionary roots seem to be pulling him back to his homeland. He has started to write a book about his family history, focusing on their involvement in the 1916 uprising and the Irish War of …

On Sunday the first of April 2012 Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy will for the first time have a chance to challenge the current military-backed civilian government head-on. But even if she should win every seat it will only be a first small step in solving Burma’s problems says Jack Aung and Sai Aung Thein, Burmese journalism students and editors of Hong Kong Baptist University’s student newspaper.
Sai and Jack are both from minority ethnic groups (Shan and Mon respectively) and emphasise the real issue is not democracy, but …

 
Headless, armless and feetless mannequins, painted in bold colours and adorned with gem stones and colourful paintings inspired by Pop Art – the first impression of Laila Shawa’s exhibition „The other Side of paradise“ is beautiful, indeed. But a closer look reveals chains and belts of munitions and dynamite on the torsos and bombers in the between the cheerful colours. The other side of “paradise” in Gaza is a complex reality of suicide
The artist Laila Shawa was born in Gaza in 1940 and just 8 years old when the State …

March 15 marked the one year anniversary of the Syrian uprising against President Bashar al Assad’s regime, which has shown no signs of slowing its offensive in the cities that have been key hubs of the opposition.
The pro-Assad forces overran most of the northern city of Idlib, while the military launched its biggest raids in months on the southern city of Daraa – the town the rebels call ‘the birth place of our rebellion’.
The uprising against the Assad regime in Syria reveals why such regimes have persisted for so many …

 
An information bill that is being debated in the next few months in South Africa could put democracy to the most extreme test.
Nelson Mandela came out of prison in the 90s at the end of apartheid, which was a state led separation and oppression of non-whites, and assumed power in 1994 with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party. For 27 years he had carried a vision that all citizens would be equal under the law and that a free press would finally be allowed to flourish without hindrance from …

“People’s aspirations has galvanised a yearning for democracy” says CK Lau, lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University and Vice-Chairman of the Journalism Education Foundation.
Yet the upcoming Hong Kong Chief Executive election seems to be anything but. Three candidates, but the media has already written off the only non-Beijing supporter Albert Ho.
C. Y. Leung and Henry Tang, aka “the pig and the wolf” will be battling for the 1200 votes of the Hong Kong election committee. Leung, the wolf, has been described by top Chinese leaders as “very patriotic”, but the public are more …

It was a busy leap year for Mr François Hollande, the frontrunner in the French presidential elections. For someone who incarnates the 35-hour working week in France he was exceptionally busy. For breakfast he appeared on French radio station RTL being interviewed by well-known journalists such as Jean-Michel Apathie, Alain Duhamel and Yves Calvi as well as the average Frenchman calling in and asking questions. Only a few years ago Hollande described himself as the average Frenchman and rightly so, many of his opponents criticised him for not having done …

Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg popped by the renowned Institute of Political Studies (“Sciences Po” for the French-speaking) in Paris last week for a light-hearted “conversation with students about current events”.
Among the few highlights of the conference was Mr. Clegg’s unexpected response to a British student who, as he addressed the deputy prime-minister, said he was a Lib Dem: “Be careful,” the Liberal Democrats’ leader said, “Hope you get out of here alive!”
Mr. Clegg, who in a few hours would be boarding the Eurostar back to London, took a …

 
 
 
In January 2012, a small organisation called Allt åt Alla (Everything for Everyone), organised an event to highlight the issues surrounding inequalities in Sweden. It did this by organising what they called an “upperclass safari” and for 50kr (£4.70) members could go on a bus-ride to a wealthy suburb called Solsidan. It was advertised as a chance to see how the upperclass lived and to meet “some of Sweden’s richest exploiters”. The aim of the bus ride was to “grow your class hate”. They were also told by Anna Svensson, …