Christopher Ballantine

BBC journalists have been banned from describing the kidnapped Venezuelan leader as having been kidnapped.

The BBC News Editor has sent this to BBC journalists.

A reminder that the US killed 80 people in Venezuela, and it would be nice if the US media cared enough to think that the life of a grandmother in Caracas whose building is destroyed by a US bomb matters as much as the life of a person in the US.

Oscar contender The Last Ranger shows that the world still wants to see South African stories South African film is still popular for stories about animals and conflict. The Last Ranger combines both in a slick, well acted short film.

Excellent piece on South African film-making.

Are we living through the fall of civilisation? | The Reith Lectures 2025 YouTube video by BBC Sounds

The Reith Lectures, 2025. youtu.be/fUJ-qEmQGhM?...

Opinion | Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief

Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief
[New York Times, 16 December 2025]

Norman Finkelstein EXPOSES Israel’s DARKEST SECRET YouTube video by Double Down News

A wonderfully succinct and incisive historical account by Norman Finkelstein.

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Why was Nelson Mandela so critical of Israel? Tel Aviv backed apartheid South Africa with weapons and trade and ignored international boycotts to isolate the racist state. He also lambasted Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Former South African politician Andrew Feinstein explains.

University ranking systems are being rejected. African institutions should take note The ranking industry is targeting universities in Africa, which are seen as offering a new market.

The Sorbonne University, a global symbol of education, science and culture, has announced that it will stop submitting data to Times Higher Education rankings. It is joining a growing movement of universities questioning the value and methodology of these controversial league tables.

‘No one is safe from Israel, not even Mecca and Medina’ | Soumaya Ghannoushi YouTube video by Middle East Eye

www.youtube.com/shorts/xjxsy...

British Opera Company Cancels ‘Tosca’ Collaboration in Israel After Criticism

Opera Collaboration in Israel is Cancelled After Criticism

The Royal Opera said it was scrapping scheduled performances of Puccini's TOSCA in Tel Aviv next year, after nearly 200 staff members signed an open letter criticizing its stance on the war in Gaza. The letter refers to the genocide.

Zapiro: 'Daily Maverick', 25 August 2025

The US state department has announced new sanctions on four ICC officials, including two judges and two prosecutors, because of their efforts to prosecute Americans and Israelis. As a result of the sanctions, any assets that the targets hold in US jurisdictions are frozen. — The Guardian 21 Aug 2025

“I don't like the culture of declaring people heroes and honouring them, but Francesca Albanese is without any doubt in my mind an international hero who will be honoured by history. Today's world needs more Francescas @FranceskAlb” — Max du Preez, eminent South African journalist

Israeli author David Grossman says his country is committing genocide in Gaza Writer says for many years he has refused to use word but now must ‘with immense pain and with a broken heart’

“The occupation has corrupted us. Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967… that’s the truth. We’ve become militarily powerful, and we’ve fallen into the temptation born of our absolute power, and the idea that we can do anything.”
— David Grossman

"We are the victimizers. Never in our lifetime — or the lifetimes of our grandparents or great-grandparents — have we witnessed such relentless daily killing and wanton disregard for human life perpetrated by Jews against others. Perhaps never in Jewish history."

– David Myers: Jewish history, UCLA

‘No one should have more than €10m’: the author of Limitarianism on why the super-rich need to level down radically Prof Ingrid Robeyns has spent a decade studying wealth and ethics and says that limits are essential if we want to eradicate poverty and protect social cohesion and the planet

"We all accept that as a societal goal we want to try to eradicate poverty. Good. But actually, let’s also look at the other side. The fact is, we should and must minimise the number of super-rich people: the amount of wealth concentration is setting the world on fire."

Ok so we’ve ripped healthcare from millions of people and condemned the next generation to a fiscal black hole and a climate black hole, but the gestapo will have budget for shiny new boots and Hugo Boss uniforms. Seems ok I think.

Welcome to Britain 2025: where a musician's words cause more outrage than the murder and horror in Gaza | Owen Jones The issue of what happened at Glastonbury is obscuring the outrage about real bombs and actual death, and I think that is deliberate, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones

“How morally lost is a society in which a chant against a genocidal foreign army provokes a political and media firestorm, but the intentionally starved, unarmed human beings being mowed down on the orders of the IDF high command do not?”

Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades – the a...

“The Trump Administration is a huge surge of almost every kind of violence: Trump is an adjudicated rapist who put a man in charge of the military who himself paid a settlement to a woman who charged him, credibly, with rape; Trump has pardoned the ultra-violent Jan. 6th rioters …” (Rebecca Solnit)

Trump appears to be engineering a situation in which he could invoke the Insurrection Act. Democracy (feeble and partial as it is) offends his every instinct, and he will do whatever he can to snuff it out.