World

‘This city is not going to stop burning itself down until they [the protestors] know that this officer has been fired.’ Thus spoke Whitney Cabal, a leader of the Kenosha chapter of Black Lives Matter, in response to the latest police shooting in Wisconsin. The use of the passive in that sentence is revealing. As Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out (see ‘The knife went in’) it is common for people to assign motive to inanimate objects when they are loth to admit to being in the wrong. I suspect that the suitably named Ms Cabal knows that the state of Wisconsin did not auto-combust this week, as Krook does at

What’s the bottom line so far? The Democrats think they will win by making the race a referendum on Donald Trump (more the person than the policies, though they hate both). They are effectively trying to run Joe Biden as a generic Democrat. The Republicans think the path to victory is to make the race a choice, Trump versus Biden, to say the Democratic Party is dominated by the far left and that Biden is unable or unwilling to stop that oppressive movement. Drawing a sharp contrast between the two parties was the whole point of Vice President Mike Pence’s speech to conclude the convention’s third night. For the most

In news that should surprise nobody, the German government says there is a ‘certain likelihood’ Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition figure who fell ill while on a domestic flight last week and was evacuated to Germany on the weekend, was poisoned. According to doctors treating him, Navalny was poisoned by an unknown substance from ‘within the group of cholinesterase inhibitors’, indicating he is likely the victim of a nerve agent attack. For many (perhaps too many), this already has Vladimir Putin’s finger prints all over it. Yet over the last two decades of being in power, Putin has blurred the boundaries between state, quasi-state, and non-state to the point where

Days after the UAE and Israel announced a deal, Israelis were already talking about trips to Dubai and all the great five star hotels the Gulf offers. At the same time, the country has been speculating about which states will be next in line to make peace. This sense of a coming era of peacemaking is palpable. However, the reality in the region is that while many countries have been considering closer ties with Israel because of shared threats and interests they are also moving cautiously. Oman is a good example of this paradox. Oman welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a surprise visit in 2018 and it appeared to

Last summer, a bare-chested Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing League and interior minister at the time, roamed the trendiest beaches on the Adriatic coast drinking Mojitos and dancing to DJ sets. But twelve months on, the partying has stopped and Salvini has lost his magic touch: the League has been ousted from the government and support is draining away by the day. ‘Papeete Syndrome’ – named after the tawdry beach club which became the League’s unofficial headquarters last August – is now a synonym of self-defeating hubris in Italy’s political lexicon. And today Italian conservatives worship a new idol: Giorgia Meloni. Salvini’s decline in the polls has largely coincided

On Belarus, the EU has been eager to talk the talk. But it has been slower to walk the walk. Belarus’s sham election – in which the country’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko won 80 per cent of the vote – was condemned by EU leaders as ‘neither free nor fair’. But Brussels stopped short of explicitly demanding a new election, in spite of pleas from the opposition in Belarus as well as from four central European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. In refusing to go further and call for a re-election, the EU is struggling with a dilemma faced by other Western countries: what is the best way