World

It’s Hanukkah next week, and President Donald J Trump has decided to give the state of Israel a big present. He will today recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and it is understood that America will shortly move its embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City.  This is something that Israeli diplomats have long hoped for but did not think possible before President Trump entered the White House this year. His kindness will go down very well with most Israelis and supporters of Israel. However, the Arab world sees it as a deep affront.  Jared Kushner, the president’s 36 year old son-in-law, himself an Orthodox Jew, has been handling Middle

Last week’s white paper on industrial strategy put forward a few useful ideas but ignores the main structural problem we face: the ‘financialisation’ of the economy. At a time when we urgently need to invest to raise productivity, PLCs have been putting over half their profits into buying back their own shares. This practice used to be against the law. Under common law it was treated as a kind of market manipulation. Company law, including the 2006 Companies Act, still has some hallmarks of this assumption but a radical change was made in the Companies Act of 1981. Before that, British companies were not permitted to purchase their own shares. Reliable estimates

For the whole board of the Social Mobility Commission to resign with its chairman, Alan Milburn, condemning the Prime Minister’s commitment to the agenda is pretty damaging. But this attack was inevitable, for reasons that haven’t (so far) been picked up by the newspapers. Ever since Theresa May took office, she has shown almost no interest in the Social Mobility Commission, set up under the coalition years. No10’s approach seems to have been one of strategic neglect. Alan Milburn’s five-year term came up for renewal last July: Justine Greening, the minister responsible, was keen for him to stay. But No10 refused, and asked her to come up with other names.

President Donald J Trump likes nothing better than winning, and he has just had the first major legislative win of his presidency. An enormous $1.4 trillion tax cut has now been passed by the Senate. No Democrat voted for the bill, yet still it passed by 51 to 49 votes. This avoided the anticipated legislative deadlock that would have meant Vice President Mike Pence having to break a 50-50 tie. The bill will now be voted on in the House of Representatives on Monday, where the Republicans have a much larger majority. By getting his tax cut through Congress, Trump answers one of the most stinging critiques of his presidency

As I rode the metro to work this morning, an elderly gentleman holding a sign that read, `Manafort-Flynn. Who’s Next?’ boarded my car at the Judiciary Square stop. It’s a question the Trump administration may be pondering as well. Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has flipped former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty today to lying to the FBI, speculation is rife about whom he target next, with much of it centring on Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of the president. Thus Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports that Kushner is being fingered as the person who ordered Flynn to create a backchannel to Russia. For now the administration

Six months into his presidency, Emmanuel Macron looks untouchable. He has conquered the unions, and his political opponents are a shambles – none more so than the Socialists. Just how divided they are was demonstrated earlier this month when a vicious war of words erupted within the French left. The cause was Islam, an issue that has been agitating Socialists for decades. When the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, François Mitterrand, was elected in 1981, his government was initially a friend of Islam. As the eighties wore on though, some on the left became alarmed at the demands being made of the Republic: prayer rooms in factories and the right to pray

One of the nicest things in life is the discovery that one-time enemies are in fact terrific, brave people who you might have been wrong about and have grown to respect. For instance, when I was growing up I had a rather marked dislike of Germaine Greer. Then, in recent years, I discovered she was one of the only adults left in the room. Likewise Trevor Phillips. When he was head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission we often used to find ourselves at loggerheads. I recall a panel many years ago when, sitting in the green room beforehand, one of the other panellists asked me what I did.

Robert Mugabe’s resignation fascinates because the fall of tyrants is always a family story, decline of the father, writ large. What a strange creature he is. Who else would give a speech of such orotundity that it contained archaic words like ‘pith’, ‘collegiality’, ‘comported’, ‘untrammelled’ and ‘vicissitudes?’ No British politician has used such language since the 1950s but Mugabe, well-educated by Jesuits, has the pomposity of a pedantic poetaster leavened with Marxist-liberationist arcana. As a teenager I had a weakness for freedom fighters. When Mugabe came to London to negotiate independence, I vanished from home to stand outside his hotel. I was very disappointed that he looked like a dorky

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of populism. Last week in Berlin, Christian Lindner, leader of the Free Democrats, walked out of Germany’s coalition talks, plunging the Bundesrepublik into an unprecedented crisis. Meanwhile in Trier, the ancient Rhineland city where Marx was born and raised, locals were busy preparing for next year’s Karl Marx bicentenary. What on earth would Marx have made of Germany – and Europe – today? Sure enough, the proletariat are rising up against the bourgeoisie, but not in the manner he predicted. Marx assumed that nationalism, like the state itself, would wither away. Instead, those pesky proles are embracing nationalism like never before, and

Even for a veteran of the struggle for freedom and democracy in Zimbabwe, the events of the past week continue to shock. When Robert Mugabe refused to step down in his rambling TV address on Sunday, it seemed impeachment would be the only way to remove him from office. Proceedings to do just that started in parliament yesterday. We didn’t get far. The debate had been going for 40 minutes when the speaker interrupted proceedings to announce that he had received a letter from the president. When it came to the part about Mugabe ‘tendering his resignation with immediate effect’, the place exploded. It took several minutes to restore order

Robert Mugabe has resigned as president of Zimbabwe after 37 years in power. The 93-year-old confirmed his intention to step down in a letter to the speaker of the country’s parliament this afternoon. His decision to quit follows widespread protests on the streets of the capital, Harare, in the wake of the coup carried out last week by the country’s military. In a rambling TV address on Sunday, Mugabe resisted calls to quit. But with Zimbabwean MPs debating an impeachment motion to remove Mugabe from power, the leader of the country’s Zanu PF party appears to have changed his mind. The news of Mugabe’s decision to resign was greeted with

Robert Mugabe nearly gave the entire country a heart attack last night. In the late afternoon, a ZTV broadcasting unit was driven into State House, where Mugabe and the military commanders were negotiating his departure from office. After Saturday, when millions of Zimbabweans took to the streets to call for his retirement – and then the Sunday meeting of the Zanu PF Central Committee at which he was summarily dismissed from the leadership of the Party and replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa – we all expected a humble and contrite Mugabe to announce he was stepping down. We waited from 7pm to 9pm for him to come on television live; when

Is the net closing in on Jared Kushner? It is now being reported that Trump’s son-in-law received a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’, which he also reportedly forwarded on. Both Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein are alleging that Kushner did not turn over several important documents to investigators despite numerous requests. If Kushner is engaging in these kind of shenanigans with special counsel Robert Mueller he will be in truly hot water. Kushner’s lawyer has said he was ‘open to responding to any additional requests’. Each day seems to bring a new story about the Trump campaign and Russia, whether it is Kushner or Donald

The liberal media is at the moment engaged in a campaign attacking social media on the grounds that it is ‘destroying democracy’. But is it? The fact is that there is nothing new about social media, the fake news it spreads and the rage it engenders. Ancient Greeks loved the ‘latest news’ as much as anyone today. In his book Characters — it meant ‘behavioural types’ — the Greek academic Theophrastus (d. 287bc) described, among others, the ‘rumour monger’. He was always stopping friends with made-up stories that he claimed to have heard from a reliable source; he assured them that the story was ‘hot’; he quoted unreliable authorities; it