Novara Media

To accompany our podcast series, Death in Westminster, hosts Kojo Koram and Dalia Gebrial met with investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan and former private wealth lawyer Stephanie Brobbey at EartH in Hackney last month.

Digging into the dark money that flows through Westminster, Kojo and Dalia find out what made Stephanie quit her job hiding rich people’s assets, why Peter couldn’t find anyone to publish his story about Labour corruption, and what normal people can do to challenge the global system of wealth extraction.

Listen to Death in Westminster, hosted by Dalia and Kojo Koram, in the Novara Media podcast feed. Follow Peter’s work through the Democracy For Sale newsletter.

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In China in the 1990s, the arrival of the internet was swiftly met with the ‘great firewall’: a complex matrix of censorship, surveillance and state control. Since then there have been two internets: the World Wide Web, and the Chinese internet. ​

Aaron Bastani talks to China analyst Yi-Ling Liu about the cultures and innovations that have evolved in this separate digital ecosphere. How have feminist and LGBTQ+ movements manifested through the Chinese internet? How has the Chinese Communist Party negotiated the promise and threat of the internet, and now AI? And why is the West suddenly so obsessed with China?

Yi-Ling Liu’s book is The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet.

After mulling over the problem of boredom in the last Trip episode, the ACFM gang return with a solution: hobbies.

In this episode Nadia, Jem and Keir wonder why hobbies tend to mutate into jobs, which hobbies are appropriate for commoners, whether men and women approach their hobbies differently, and why having a hobby is often framed as uncool.

It’s a weird-left spin on private pastimes with ideas from Engels and Gary Cross and music from Television Personalities and Shonen Knife.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

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For fifty years, Alfred McCoy has exposed covert operations. In 1972 he uncovered the CIA and French intelligence’s complicity with the heroin trade during the Vietnam War – research that the CIA tried to suppress.

He’s the author of many books, most recently Cold War on Five Continents, which gives a comprehensive account of late 20th century geopolitics, decolonisation, and covert operations.

But now he’s warning of a New Cold War. Is it over for the US empire?

He talked to Richard Hames about the strange parallels between the 1956 Suez Crisis – a turning point in global British influence – and the 2026 war on Iran and the new Chinese World Order.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make life possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

Donald Trump has threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants in an expletive-laden Truth Social Post, and the U.S. account of its rescue of two airmen inside Iran raises more questions than it answers.

With Michael Walker, David Wearing and Daniel Levy.