The right-wing media baron Rupert Murdoch turns 90 today. His news empire has been instrumental in reshaping the world in the image cast by conservative elites. The need to build a robust and democratic alternative media has never been more urgent.

How does the health balance sheet look after one year of the pandemic? Well, 119m people (or just 2% of the world’s population) have been reported as infected, although if we include those who had no symptoms and those who did not report being ill, the figure is probably more like 15-20%. There have been 2.6m reported as having died of the disease. So that’s a case fatality ratio (CFR) of 2.2% globally. In some countries the CFR is way higher – Mexico’s CFR is close to 9%; Italy, the UK and South Africa CFRs are close to 3%. The variation is down to the age of those infected, the general health of the population and the resources and efficacy of the health systems in each country.

Quoted by charlatans to provide an air of magic, praised for his ambiguities, more revered than read: David Broder calls for a serious engagement with a political strategy that still has considerable relevance

MATTHEW ALFORD presents here an article he wrote charting US and British military aggression across the globe – and tells the story of what happened to that article once it arrived in the inbox of editors at a respected liberal publication