The new leaders of Greece and Italy have more in common than their job titles – both are members of the secretive Bilderberg Group. Andrew Williams takes a look at the mysterious organisation

Rob Fuller puts forward the case for Britain’s continued membership of the European Unon

It seems that to get away with any large-scale fraud of our benefits system you’d have to be part of some sort of large crime syndicate.

This week judge Justice Edwards-Stuart scored victories for justice, humanity and common sense, as he granted the travellers camped at Dale Farm a week’s reprieve to fight their forced eviction. The injunction protecting the travellers has been seen as an affront to the law by some; or at least this is the line taken by […]

words may actually hurt me, especially if those words lead to someone hurling sticks and or stones at me

What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and misunderstanding.

Andrew Williams looks back at a defining era for Italian politics as the curtain falls on Silvio Berlusconi’s premiership

Hisham Omara leads our coverage of UMSU’s Middle East and North Africa Week with a deeply personal account of the ongoing uprising in Syria

The East African famine is a humanitarian emergency – but who is responding, asks Charlotte Cook

You just can’t help dozing off at university

Innovation in learning methods should always be embraced – cautiously

As reported exclusively in The Mancunion last week, the number of sex attacks is on the rise in student areas of Manchester. What, then, can be said of the number of convictions? Or the sentences these offenders are likely to receive? Earlier this year, new plans for a consultation on sentencing reform came under fire […]

The government plans to slash the legal aid budget by £350m, yet legal aid will remain in almost all criminal cases or cases that involve areas which are protected by law such as domestic violence, forced marriage or child abduction. The current budget for legal aid in the United Kingdom stands at £2bn, which is […]

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke’s proposals for legal aid reform may sound fairly reasonable when written down; it is hard to argue that “unnecessary litigation” could ever be a good thing (Ministerial Foreword: Proposals for the Reform of Legal Aid in England and Wales). However, what he deems to be “unnecessary cases”, which the public should […]

Privatisation works by opening up services to a free market, which drives down prices and leads to innovation and improvements in customer service. These improvements over a nationalised system are born out of competition between different providers. The telecoms industry is an excellent example of where privatisation has worked to effect improvements; numerous providers offer […]

Fahim Sachedina explains how the late Colonel Gaddafi wasted Libya’s oil riches – but looks forward to a brighter future for a neglected people

Thomas Turner takes a look at the race to win the French presidency with less than six months until polling day

In Britain it is accepted wisdom that female circumcision on minors (now widely referred to as female genital mutilation) is in effect child abuse. How else could you describe carrying out an unnecessary, risky, painful surgery to remove parts of a child’s genitalia? But why do our infant males’ genitals not receive the same protection […]

Circumcision is a practice which has been debated for thousands of years, but to forcibly prevent it from happening would be wrong.

Maya Oppenheim rejects government proposals to criminalise squatting in the context of a housing crisis in an era of rampant unemployment