California’s gubernatorial election grows in intensity and unpredictability every day. The political landscape in one of the wealthiest and most politically influential states in the US seems to be constantly shifting, and this race has been no exception. In fact, it perfectly reflects California’s distinctively eclectic, trend-bucking politics. It's worth remembering that California's own electoral system contributes to this dynamic. Since 2010, the state has used the Top-T

The recent mainstreaming of wealth taxes as a political tendency in the UK has demonstrated an appetite for solutions to inequality. Although there have been successful debates, won with logic as much as rhetoric, a tangible wealth tax policy is still in its infancy. The Green Party, the main policy vehicle for the Wealth Tax, is seeking between 1% and 2% of tax on assets held over £10 million per annum. Yet who exactly pays, and how they pay, remain unanswered questions. W

In 1916, a twenty-four year-old British soldier arrived at the Battle of the Somme, where over a million men were killed or wounded over just five miles of ground. John Ronald Reuel (J.R.R) Tolkien lost two of his closest friends in the battle, an experience of indiscriminate slaughter that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Echoes of the First World War can be found throughout Tolkien’s later literary work, most famously in The Lord of the Rings - from the corpse-st

The Iran war has reached the European Union’s back yard, with European warships crowding Cyprus’ shores and drone attacks striking RAF Akrotiri last month. While Europe insists this is not a war, the security of this small island member state is the security of the Union. A few hundred kilometres from the Levant, Europe is quietly building a defensive perimeter around Cyprus – whether it admits it or not. The UK has cleared its bases to facilitate US “defensive strikes” on

One of the reasons I became a journalist was to tell the truth. You could say I was under a fog of naivety and idealism, but I think that I truly believed in the best of humanity. Maybe bad things happened for so long because of an ignorant, and simple population, who just didn’t know the truth. Because if people had access to the truth then things would simply change, right? There would be no discrimination, no suffering, no war. Why would we allow it? Surely if people could