Tomorrow I hope thousands of people will take to the streets in Cardiff, following Wednesday’s Senedd vote in favour of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, to support the humanitarian stance taken by Welsh politicians against the genocide caused by Israel in the Palestinian enclave. In Cardiff Bay on Wednesday 24 members of the Senedd voted…
Apparently Suella Braverman is Britain’s home secretary, not something I was totally aware of as I’ve virtually abstained from “politics” decades ago and generally have very little regard for the people who seek public office. If someone emerged on the political scene who genuinely had a sense of justice and a desire to serve the…
Jamaican-born dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson was the first person, in the late 1970s, to make me completely aware as a young undergraduate that Margaret Thatcher’s England was “a bitch”… but there’s still “no escaping it”, Rishi Sunak’s England is an even bigger bitch. How can any decent human being not condemn Jerusalem’s genocidal assault…
A crowd of 53,271 turned up at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium yesterday afternoon for a meaningless rugby match between Wales and the Barbarians that provided a winning send-off for retiring full-back Leigh Halfpenny as Wales romped to a 49-26 win. I say meaningless… but the fixture did commemorate 50 years since the epic match between the…
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has today announced that the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, has fitted US President Joe “Say It Ain’t So” Biden for a brain transplant. Doctors at the Bethesda Naval Hospital received news last week that a suitable brain had been located at the Al-Ahli Baptist…
Just like the “weigh-in” histrionics that traditionally hype up boxing showdowns, there’s nothing quite like a bout between two “technotwats” to get tongues wagging in the world of social media. Certainly much curiosity was generated when Elon Musk snapped up Twitter in 2022… the big question being whether he’d also target Instagram, acquired by Facebook…
Far be it from me to try to fully explain the significance of the number eight, since it’s an extremely complex hypothesis with branches that stretch back into Biblical history, numerological mysticism and the Fibonacci sequence (made up of numbers which form the sum of the two preceding ones). Why the number is perceived as…
When Ignatius of Loyola became the first “Father General” of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1540, he did so in a very different-looking continent than Europe appears today. Pope Paul III, who approved the society’s foundation within the Catholic church, had his home in the Papal States, which existed in the northern half of…
The history books tell us that after their dissolution in 1312 – following a crackdown by Pope Clement V in France when they fell from grace due to accusations by King Philip IV about deviant sexual rituals – the Knights Templar were stripped of the special privileges they had been granted by the Vatican and,…
Rumours of deviant sexual rituals are not exclusive to the Knights Templar, who amassed a vast fortune between their foundation by Frenchman Hugues de Payens, along with a group of eight acquaintances, in about 1118 and their alleged dissolution in 1312, after King Philip IV of France – deeply in debt to the knights –…
