They’re still celebrating the miraculous fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, and the killing has stopped in Syria except for parts of the north, east and south. So ...
Botswana’s elections have always been seen as a model for Africa, but the one last week has a somewhat wider relevance. The way its politicians handled victory and defeat ...
If you believe the British government (which you should never do), a new agreement will bring justice for the people of the Chagos Islands, who have lived in exile for ...
Donald Trump knows that he could lose the US election in two weeks’ time and he thinks that he knows why. “You have one issue, you have the issue of ...
Elon Musk’s ‘Starship’ project did something spectacular this week. The 160-tonne booster landed safely in the arms (or rather, the ‘chopsticks’) of a rocket-catching device that will soon allow ...
Two weeks ago Iran, in response to Israel’s assassinations of the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, its most important allies in the Arab world, fired 181 ballistic missiles at Israel. ...
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has launched his invasion of Lebanon. As usual in the opening stages of Israeli incursions into that fragile country, the signs and portents look ...
A bit behind the curve (it was first posted last April), I have stumbled across ‘The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness’. It is a brave attempt by a coalition ...
Six Jewish hostages were murdered by Hamas last week just before the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) reached them, and a controversy has erupted in Israel about whether Prime Minister Benjamin ...
Fortress America and Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) are just starting to take shape; bare outlines of what they will have grown into ten years from now. But the trend is ...
When you spend four years writing a book on climate change, you get to know most of the leading players. I have never seen them so dismayed.
“By August, if ...
It really doesn’t matter whether Joe Biden is in peak condition intellectually during a second term as president. He did some useful things in his first term, but his ...
“I have heard that people’s zeal and interest is higher than in the first round [of Iran’s presidential election],” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Iranian TV just ...
Nothing else in France looks like the 1930s, so why should fascism? There really is a fascist movement in France, although it avoids torch-lit marches and jackboots. It has even ...
There is one thing almost all populist nationalists agree on: the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the continuing carnage there was the fault of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. ...
Gaza, IDF, Hamas, Netanyahu, famine, terrorism, genocide, and on and on: the loud, incessant clatter of local issues and tactical moves almost drowns out the low, grinding noise as the ...
Scarcely a week passes without some media pundit or attention-seeking historian warning that a Great War is nigh. As always, there are enough signs and portents around to make that ...
It was technology that got us into this global climate crisis, and it will be technology that gets us out of it. Specifically, technology that lets us go on living ...
It has not been a good week for Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, chief decision-maker in the war in the Gaza Strip that has already cost at least 35,000 ...
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,” wrote Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in 1929. “Now is the time of monsters.”
Gramsci’s remark is being ...
Last week a despairing reader asked me if the solution to the ‘Middle East Problem’ might be to throw money at it: just buy the Palestinians out. Offer every Palestinian ...
“Just like this year, last year the heat wave extended from parts of India to Bangladesh and Myanmar, and all the way to Thailand. This year it went further east, ...