America

How many black cops does it take to commit a racist hate crime? The latest correct answer is ‘five’. That’s the number of policemen in Memphis who have been fired and charged with second-degree murder for the killing of Tyre Nichols. Last month Nichols, who was himself black, was pulled over by the officers. They proceeded to kick him, pepper-spray him, hit him and repeatedly baton him. He died in hospital three days later. Of course, if the Memphis officers had been white, American cities would be being burned and smashed to the ground again, as they were three years ago after the death of George Floyd. On that occasion

The video of Tyre Nichols’ arrest makes for unbearable viewing. The 29-year-old father is dragged out of a car before being set upon by five black policemen. Lawyers for his family said the officers acted like a ‘pack of wolves’; after watching the film, it’s hard to dispute that description. As the backlash to the incident in Memphis on 10 January intensifies, there are plenty of unanswered question. But it seems that Black Lives Matter is already jumping to conclusions. Any hope that Nichols’ horrifying death might spark some unity in the United States has been dashed by the release of a demoralising statement from BLM. Rather than using Nichols’

The reaction to the brutal death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old, after he was stopped by police has been strangely muted. Nichols, a father-of-one, died of his injuries on 10 January, three days after a confrontation with five black officers in Memphis, Tennessee. Lawyers for the family said Nichols, an African-American, was beaten ‘like a human piñata’. The heartbreaking footage of Nichols’s mother, Rowvaughn Wells, breaking down in tears has made the headlines. But the coverage marks a sharp contrast to the fallout after the death of another man, George Floyd, at the hands of police. That incident back in 2020 triggered a worldwide outpouring of grief and anger; the

If Britain’s great flaw is the class system, America’s might be its obsession with classifying official information. There’s a reason ‘that’s classified, sir’ is a stock phrase in so many Hollywood films. Americans tend to revere elite secrecy in the same way British snobs worship aristocracy. You can own lots of land in America and still be a hick. If you’ve gotten hold of sensitive state files, however – well, son, you’ve made it. This fetish for high-bureaucratic privilege might explain why Donald Trump took so many classified papers to his billionaire’s lair in Mar-a-Lago, much as a pirate might squirrel away treasure in a trove. Trump’s favourite film is

Joe Biden has become the Typhoid Mary of classified documents, spreading them as he goes. They keep turning up in batch after batch, everywhere but the floor at Starbucks. The President has said almost nothing about the mess, except to reassure us that ‘people know I take classified documents seriously’. That defence has since taken on a slight change of punctuation: ‘People know I take classified documents. Seriously.’ He certainly does. He takes them everywhere. Most recently, classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, a foreign policy thinktank in Washington, DC established by Biden in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. The documents raise additional questions. Why were

Almost all of us can recite the reasons why Donald Trump’s political career should be over. We hear them again and again. He lost the presidency in 2020 after four exhausting years. His angry fans stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a now infamous day in American history. He lost his media clout after being banned from Facebook and (until recently) Twitter. He has clung to his ‘election denial’, as Democrats like to call it, and that makes all his political antics now seem petulant and tired. In the mid-terms in November, a fair number of the candidates he backed lost crucial senate and gubernatorial races which his party

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States. And this year it was most memorable for two events. The first was the unveiling in Boston of a new sculptural tribute to the civil rights hero. Unfortunately, depending on the position from which you view this inept work of public art, it resembles either a man holding his head in despair or some people holding aloft a giant turd. The second incident was Joe Biden doing what he does best. The President was careful not to politicise the day – apart from attacking the Republicans. But during his remarks he also noted that it was the birthday of

Ah, the New York Times. For years now, the world’s worst newspaper has painted a grim picture of Britain as a quasi-dictatorial kingdom. It’s a country drowning in ‘imperial nostalgia’, where locals huddle round bin fires on the streets of the great metropolis, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps. Our late Queen ‘helped obscure a bloody history of decolonisation’; our judicial system is racist for daring to lock up slave masters. So deranged is the newspaper that it even hired a former Russia Today contributor to sneer that Britain is ‘a nation falling apart at the seams.’ Who on earth would ever want to live here? Well, it turns out, er, the

I got shot in the leg last week. I live in Chicago, in the Hyde Park neighbourhood, which traditionally doesn’t see a lot of shootings. Hyde Park surrounds the University of Chicago and the University Police Department is the third-largest armed force in Illinois. Hyde Park is where Barack Obama lived (about six blocks from me) before he had to take a job out of town. Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle lives on my street. She controls about half of the patronage for the Chicago political machine, including jobs with the sheriff’s department. I’ve walked all over Hyde Park at all hours for 30 years, un-shot the entire time.

Mike Tyson is said once to have claimed the best punch he’d ever thrown was one he landed on actress and model Robin Givens, when she was his wife. ‘Man, I’ll never forget that punch’, his biographer quoted him as saying in 1988. ‘She really offended me and I went bam, and she flew backward, hitting every wall in the apartment.’ The late eighties were different to the times we currently inhabit, but it’s worth noting that, when it was published, the biography didn’t seem to do Tyson’s career a great deal of harm. Before retiring in 2005, in fact, and notwithstanding a three-year stretch in prison for rape, Tyson

Amid New Year celebrations, and a tide of high-profile obituaries, you might have missed something small and far away, but nonetheless significant. The opposition in Venezuela has dissolved its government-in-pretence. By 72 votes to 29, the country’s national assembly voted its parallel government out of existence.   Juan Guaidó can no longer say that he is Venezuela’s legitimate president-in-waiting. Venezuela has, for many years, been a basket case. A country with immense natural resources and an energetic population, it has long languished in poverty. Many have starved, millions have fled, disease and distemper have stalked the land – and, as always in dictatorial societies where economic woes translate into popular discontent, savage brutality has been issued

Is there any weather condition which cannot be blamed on anthropogenic global warming (AGW)? No, it seems, judging by the reaction in the US liberal press to the snowstorm which has engulfed much of the US over the past few days. According to Bloomberg it is all down to a loopier-than-normal jet stream, “the kind of event that could become more common as climate change accelerates”. A similar claim was made by Eric Mack, a correspondent on Forbes, who wrote this week that the poles are warming disproportionately and that, “studies [he didn’t say which ones] have shown that all this unusual and rapid warming in the north affects the jet stream