Europe

One of the many games pundits and politicians are playing these days is to spell out why and how the European Union (EU) is going to collapse. Anyone who follows the news worldwide knows all the standard explanations.

There are three longer-range challenges where choices must be made, choices made more complex by the attacks: the COP21 meeting, upcoming regional elections in France, and the wider conflicts in the Middle East.

An interview with Tony Phillips, a researcher in the University of Buenos Aires, who specializes in alternative development, sovereign debt issues and ecological economics. Phillips discusses the focus of his new book Europe on the Brink: Debt Crisis and Dissent in the European Periphery.

While at home in the economic sphere his policies are more social-democratic than revolutionary, Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of Britain's Labour Party, stands for a multitude of progressive positions, from Palestinian self-determination, nuclear disarmament and trade union rights to a curtailment of the arms trade.

For the refugees pouring into Europe, their journeys can be just as deadly as the war zones they're fleeing.

It is certain that there are no easy solutions to the problem of mass exodus. There will have to be complex changes in attitudes and values so that we see ourselves as citizens of the world with a joint responsibility to care for and protect the seven billion on the planet.