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Johann Hari: The other 9/11 returns to haunt Latin America

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

The ghost of the other, deadlier 9/11 has returned to stalk Latin America. On Sunday morning, a battalion of soldiers rammed their way into the Presidential Palace in Honduras. They surrounded the bed where the democratically elected President, Manuel Zelaya, was sleeping, and jabbed their machine guns to his chest. They ordered him to get up and marched him on to a military plane. They dumped him in his pyjamas on a landing strip in Costa Rica and told him never to return to the country that freely chose him as their head of state.

Johann Hari: A coup Latin America didn't need

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Johann Hari: Almost everywhere is touched by the Stonewall riots now

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

It is now 40 years since the start of a riot for freedom in a small tavern in New York City – and the riot has never stopped. It is spreading slowly across the world, to every continent, to Mumbai and Shanghai and Dubai. Everywhere it goes, it wins, in time. Yet on 28 June 1969, it seemed only like another Sixties ruck in the muck against corrupt cops. The Stonewall Tavern was a Greenwich Village bar where gay people huddled together to find friends and lovers in a hostile country on a hostile planet. It was a hangout for everyone from macho bikers to drag queens making the pilgrimage from Ohio and Iowa and Kansas. One of the regulars said that until he discovered the bar "I felt like I was the only one... I only knew enough to hide". The regulars were harming nobody, they were only enjoying themselves, but the local police force was fond of busting the bar and beating and imprisoning the clientele. They only allowed the bar to stay open at all because they were being bribed by local gay gangsters.

Johann Hari: When divorce is the wiser option

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Another David Cameron policy has been proved to be based on false right-wing myths in the past month – but who has told you about it? Who knows that his set-piece proposal for fixing Britain has just been shown to make things worse?

Johann Hari: A fight for the Amazon that should inspire the world

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed – yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine.

Johann Hari: They were great at first – but then the creativity dries up

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Last year, I had my own brief experiment with smart drugs. I felt burned out after a series of long foreign assignments, and my brain was rustily chug-chugging along at half-speed. That's when I first read about a drug being billed as "Viagra for the brain" – not Ritalin, but Provigil, a brand name for modafinil.

Johann Hari: Widdecombe would win my vote

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

I am about to say something I thought I would never say. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; my stomach somersaults. Okay. Deep breath. Here goes. Vote for Ann Widdecombe.

Johann Hari: Will the looming war between Iran and Israel now be averted?

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Are we witnessing an anti-1979 – a democratic uprising against the Ayatollahs by the grandchildren of the revolution? On the streets of Tehran, many of the massed millions are chanting: "We will die, but count our votes." The religious police are trying to tear-gas and truncheon this cry into submission, with the possibility of a Tehran Tiananmen hanging in the city's smog. But for today, the secret policemen are in panic and the Ayatollahs are in retreat.

Johann Hari: We're covering our planet with a cloud of space junk

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

In 1965, the American astronaut Edward White dropped a glove, and it has been orbiting the earth at 17,000 miles per hour ever since. This sounds like a quirky Trivial Pursuit answer – what is the deadliest garment in history? – but it could be about to give us all a galactic slap in the face.

Johann Hari: The three ticking time-bombs under British politics

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Last Thursday the British public queued at their polling stations to quietly and politely lay three ticking bombs under British politics. If we don't hear the tick-tock and steadily defuse the voters' anger, the eventual blasts will damage Britain for decades to come.

Johann Hari: A referendum is the only way to decide the European issue

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Johann Hari: Could we be the generation that runs out of fish?

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news – where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek – the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.

Johann Hari: Sir Alan, sexism and the workplace

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Hidden away in the crumpled forehead and gruff barks of Sir Alan Sugar, there is a parable about how to drive sexism out of the British workplace. If you want to understand how Harriet Harman's new Equality Bill will work, watch The Apprentice – and see how even the hardest Sugar can melt if it is dropped into hot water.

Johann Hari: We owe it to do right by the Kenyan victims of British brutality

Thu, 28 May 2009 23:00:01 GMT

In a few weeks, a group of quiet, dignified elderly men and women will arrive in London to explain how the forces of the British state crushed their testicles or breasts with pliers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civilian population who we regarded as "baboons", "barbarians" and "terrorists".

Johann Hari: Why are we silent as Cameron preaches voodoo economics?

Tue, 26 May 2009 23:00:01 GMT

The political H-bomb of Expensaggeddon has confirmed the belief that our politicians are a homogeneous class of crooks only interested in themselves. The gaps between the parties look increasingly like a fatuous blur, designed to cover the looting of the tax-payer. And it's true those gaps are way too narrow, clustering the parties well to the right of public opinion, where they are largely accountable to the rich rather than us. But these differences are, in reality, still wide enough to determine whether millions of us will keep our jobs and our homes. And nobody is telling you how. The dry rot is not only running through Margaret Moran's second home. No. It now runs right through our coverage of politics – and especially of the man most likely to be the next Prime Minister.

Johann Hari: Here are the real reasons that people love this country

Sun, 17 May 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Gordon Brown has released yet another book about Britishness to clutter the nation's bookshelves. He proposes an abstract statement of "British values", or maybe an expanded oath of loyalty, to cement us all together under the Union Jack – but all this well-meaning ho-humming misses the point. Most of us love our country simply because it's ours. I love my flat not because it represents "Johannish" values, or because it's objectively the best flat in the world, but because it's where the things I know and love are cluttered together, and I feel a wave of calm when the door shuts behind me. I feel the same when I step off the Eurostar at Waterloo or stagger out into Terminal Five: Ah, I'm home.

Johann Hari: Dear God, stop brainwashing children

Thu, 07 May 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Let us now put our hands together and pray. O God, we gather here today to ask you to free our schoolchildren from being forced to go through this charade every day. As you know, O Lord, because You see all, British law requires every schoolchild to participate in "an act of collective worship" every 24 hours. Irrespective of what the child thinks or believes, they are shepherded into a hall, silenced, and forced to pray – or pretend to.

Johann Hari: Why is the Labour Party still seduced by Thatcher?

Tue, 05 May 2009 23:00:01 GMT

The celebrations of the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's ascent to power have had a surreal quality. The moist panegyrics from David Cameron and Boris Johnson – followed by an army of cheering commentators, and a distant, shameful echo from Gordon Brown – have been filled with statements that are the opposite of the truth. Yet there they stand, unchallenged, as the road-map for our future.

Johann Hari: Life-threatening disease is the price we pay for cheap meat

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:00:01 GMT

A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue that this global pandemic – and all the deaths we are about to see – is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. So is the way we produce our food really making us sick as a pig?

Johann Hari: To be the new FDR Obama must stick to his ideals

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Nobody feels like hanging out tinsel to mark Barack Obama's first one hundred days - least of all the President himself. After the cheering crowds in Grant Park and the choked-up crowds on Inauguration Day went home, he has been left with a depression, a slew of wars, and an unravelling climate. Mario Cuomo, the former mayor of New York, said politicians "campaign in poetry, but govern in prose" - and Obama has had to hit the prose hard. So now George W. Bush has been despatched to torture only the English language, has "change come to America", as Obama promised?

Johann Hari: To be the new FDR he must stick to his ideals

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Johann Hari: Was J.G. Ballard a prophet of doom - or the future?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:00:01 GMT

How thin is the skin of civilisation? How easily does it break and become an open, suppurating wound? These are the questions that sear through every page of the late J G Ballard's novels – and they will be the questions of the 21st century. Ballard believed that human beings are a violent primate species, prone to occasional spasms of civilisation that soon pass as our primitive instincts reassert themselves. In his work, humans are like chimps in bow-ties, conducting a tea-party for the cameras. We might look charming and functional for a moment, but we will soon toss the cups aside and start defecating on the table.

Johann Hari: Was Ballard right to be so gloomy?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Johann Hari: The dark seduction of horror films

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Show me what scares you, and I will show you your subconscious leeching out into the world. Every culture – every person – imagines there are terrors waiting for us in the dark: the shape of the monsters changes from year to year, but the fear remains. Man, it seems, needs dread and circuses.

Johann Hari: The one lesson of this crisis is the need for a more equal society

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:00:01 GMT

In the smoking rubble of market fundamentalism, we are all being forced to rethink the principles that order our societies – and one small, shining idea is rising again from the wreckage. It is the idea of human equality.