Episode 079

ISIS now controls half of Syria and much of Iraq. Their fighters are murdering sunbathers on Mediterranean beaches, worshippers in Kuwaiti mosques and who knows who, what and where next? If there's anyone able to answer that question, then it's our guest this week. With the imminent decision by the British parliament to begin bombing yet another Arab Muslim country, we are joined by The Independent's Patrick Cockburn, foreign correspondent of the year and author of “The Rise of the Islamic State.”

And in part two, we take a look at the other story dominating the news this week, Greece. Who knew that Greece could be the Achilles heel of the entire European project? The euro or more particularly the compulsion on most member states to join it was fatally flawed as a project subsuming widely disparate economies (and accounting standards) into a single currency with a single central bank and a single set of neoliberal free market dogmas. On the eve of tomorrow's referendum, we discuss the Grexit with Alex Andreou, a regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Statesman.

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