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A decade after the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China established their formidable alliance in 1950, escalating public disagreements between them broke the international communist movement apart. InThe Sino-Soviet Split, Lorenz Lüthi tells the story of this rupture, which became one of the defining events of the Cold War. Identifying the primary role of disputes over Marxist-Leninist ideology, Lüthi traces their devastating impact in sowing conflict between the two nations in the areas of economic development, party relations, and foreign policy. The source of this estrangement was Mao Zedong's ideological radicalization at a time when Soviet leaders, mainly Nikita Khrushchev, became committed to more pragmatic domestic and foreign policies. Using a wide array of archival and documentary sources from three continents, Lüthi presents a richly detailed account of Sino-Soviet political relations in the 1950s and 1960s. He explores how Sino-Soviet relations were linked to Chinese domestic politics and to Mao's struggles with internal political rivals. Furthermore, Lüthi argues, the Sino-Soviet split had far-reaching consequences for the socialist camp and its connections to the nonaligned movement, the global Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The Sino-Soviet Splitprovides a meticulous and cogent analysis of a major political fallout between two global powers, opening new areas of research for anyone interested in the history of international relations in the socialist world.

PurposeThis paper aims to demonstrate the ways in which the Misuse of Drugs Act (MDA) militates against the interests and situations of people who use drugs. The author reflects on the author’s journey as a drug user, drugs workers and drug user organiser to critique the MDA. The author describes the impact of the MDA on the author’s early experimentation with substances and highlights the limitations of simplistic drugs prevention. The author describes how the MDA maximises drug-related risks and undermines the creation of healthy cultural norms and community learning among people who use drugs. The author talks about the author’s work as a drugs practitioner and mourns the vandalism of the UK’s harm reduction and drug treatment system. This paper describes the opportunity to use drug policy reform as a progressive electoral agenda to begin the journey towards racial and social justice. This paper calls for the rejection of the Big Drugs Lie and the repeal of the failed MDA.Design/methodology/approachPersonal reflection based on experience as drug user, drugs worker and drug user organiser.FindingsSuccessive UK Governments have used the MDA as a tool of social control and racial discrimination. The Big Drugs Lie undermines science-based and rights-compliant drug policy and drug services and criminalises and puts young people at risk. There is the potential to build a progressive political alliance to remove the impediment of the MDA and use drug policy reform as tools for racial and social justice.Practical implicationsThe MDA maximises the harms faced by people who use drugs, stokes stigma and discrimination and has undermined the quality of drug services. The MDA needs to be exposed and challenged as a tool for social control and racial discrimination. Delivering drug policy reform as a progressive electoral strategy could maximise its potential to improve social and racial justice.Originality/valueThis paper represents the view of people who use drugs by a drug user, a view which is seldom expressed in the length and level of argument shown here.

The marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf is best understood as a dialogue of two outsiders about ideas of social and political belonging and exclusion. These ideas infused the written work of both partners and carried over into literary modernism itself, in part through the influence of the Woolfs' groundbreaking publishing company, the Hogarth Press. In this book, the first to focus on Virginia Woolf's writings in conjunction with those of her husband, Natania Rosenfeld illuminates Leonard's sense of ambivalent social identity and its affinities to Virginia's complex ideas of subjectivity. At the time of the Woolfs' marriage, Leonard was a penniless ex-colonial administrator, a fervent anti-imperialist, a committed socialist, a budding novelist, and an assimilated Jew who vacillated between fierce pride in his ethnicity and repudiation of it. Virginia was an \"intellectual aristocrat,\" socially privileged by her class and family background but hobbled through gender. Leonard helped Virginia elucidate her own prejudices and elitism, and his political engagements intensified her identification with outsiders in British society. Rosenfeld discovers an aesthetic of intersubjectivity constantly at work in Virginia Woolf's prose, links this aesthetic to the intermeshed literary lives of the Woolfs, and connects both these sites of dialogue to the larger sociopolitical debates--about imperialism, capitalism, women, sexuality, international relations, and, finally, fascism--of their historical place and time.

Examines dropout rates, standardized test scores, commission reports, university enrollments, per pupil expenditures, special education costs, employment trends, and other indicators to show that U.S. education is not in the sorry condition its critics claim. Rereading \"A Nation at Risk\" (1983) discloses a xenophobic screed having little to do with education. (48 references) (MLH)

Despite unfavorable publicity concerning public education's performance, 42 percent of Gallup Poll respondents give the schools in their community an A or B, and 33 percent assign them a C. Only 5 percent feel that schools are failing. Parents of public school students rate the schools even higher. Half of those surveyed would pay higher taxes to improve education. (MLH)

Indicators such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, secondary school standardized tests, and state assessment programs all ignore the value added by America's postsecondary education system, including community colleges, trade schools, and universities. Spending and participation levels for U.S. higher education are greater than for any other nation. (10 references) (MLH)

Except for their occasional use of \"gidday\" and other Australian colloquialisms, the women residing on the Pirriwee Peninsula near Sydney could just as easily live in Anywhere, U.S.A. In the opening pages, angry shouts are heard coming from Pirriwee Public School, where parents in costumes are attending what should be a carefree fundraising event.

  Those naysayers are in for a surprise when they read journalist [Joe Conason]'s new book, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth. In 212 zippy pages, Conason, co- author of The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, does battle with conservative conventional wisdom with nary an apology. It's a book tailor-made for a group that has grown increasingly angry in recent years and has been lashing out in a variety of ways, including enthusiastic letter-writing campaigns to media outlets and a zesty variety of Weblogs. They're the folks who have decided they hate the reporting of Fox News Channel, conservative talk radio and all other manifestations of \"the vast right-wing conspiracy.\"

Much of the evidence [Joe Conason] provides is derivative, as his endnotes make clear. Many times evidence bearing on a target's stated point of view ought to go beyond a reference to a newspaper or magazine story. To put it another way, Conason should have actually sat down with [Dick Cheney], [Ann Coulter], [Dennis Hastert] et al. to probe their actions and words as reported elsewhere -- if his targets would have been willing to risk serving as sitting ducks. For the most part, however, Conason mounts a persuasive case from the sources he does use. When Conason says that his targets are hypocrites or downright liars, he is often right. When he writes about the \"family values\" crowd who turn out to be adulterers or the military hawks who avoided life-threatening military service, the evidence appears to be irrefutable. Granted, the book's credibility would be heightened if Conason spent more space examining the alleged hypocrisy and lies of, say, Bill Clinton. But polemicists can be excused for a relatively narrow focus; that is, after all, part of a polemic's definition. Conason deserves praise for placing his polemic in an admirable context: \"If only one political perspective is heard clearly, there can be no robust debate and no meaningful democratic choice. At a time when highly partisan and extremely reactionary Republicans control every branch of government, our country needs full, fair and uninhibited debate that encourages participation -- not a loud, monotonous drone that breeds apathetic surrender.\"