World

Donald Trump has a point when he asks, with respect to the tearing down of Confederate statues: ‘Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?’. The reason he has a point is the rationale being advanced by many advocates for removing such monuments: that the individuals depicted were racist or, in some cases, slaveholders. ‘Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the CUNY hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism,’ New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted. ‘Confederate statues are all about racism,’ declares Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. Karen L. Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina,

Although the House doesn’t return until tomorrow, BBC Parliament has managed to get politicos in the mood for the new term with a re-run of the 1997 General Election – which saw the Conservative party annihilated as Blair won a landslide victory. Particular highlights include the Michael Portillo moment. As Dimbleby puts it: ‘This was his one chance to takeover the leadership of the Conservative party and he’s blown it by losing his own seat.’ Alas not everyone is entertained. ‘It might be more amusing, if we weren’t so close to a repeat performance next time,’ laments Mr S’s CCHQ mole.

After six years of fierce fighting and with hundreds of thousands dead, the Syrian civil war finally appears to be settling down. The country is now divided into various pockets of influence, with Turkish-backed rebels in the north, US-backed Kurdish forces and their allies in the east and the Syrian regime and its Iranian-backed militias in the centre and the capital, Damascus. This now gives Iran, with the influence it already has in Lebanon and Iraq, a sphere of authority stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. The spread of Iranian influence in the region is largely a result of the country’s ability to capitalise on the tumultuous recent history of the Middle East. The

If you haven’t been keeping up, it’s okay to judge a woman on her appearance again. The latest public figure to learn about feminism’s part-time hours is Melania Trump. The First Lady and her husband were photographed on Tuesday as they made their way to the scene of Hurricane Harvey in Texas. But the talking point wasn’t the recovery operation or whether Donald Trump had finally managed to put on a presidential demeanour — it was Melania’s dress sense. For she had flung on a pair of slinky high heels and a bomber jacket for the journey.  The First Lady may as well have directed the floodwaters personally, such was the consternation

George W Bush is, shall we say, not a fan of Donald Trump. He has publicly slammed the 45th President in the most vivid of terms, accusing the magnate of ‘racism’ and ‘name calling’. But as Trump flew into the eye of the storm yesterday — doing so literally, for once — and the First Lady strapped on her four-inch flood busting stilettos, it was Dubya who had done America’s most volatile leader a great favour. Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, marked the beginning of the end for George W Bush. His presidency hobbled on for its full term, but the scandal continued to dog him and his reputation remains tarnished to this

Last week, 116 experts including Tesla’s Elon Musk and DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman called for a ban on autonomous weapons, otherwise known as ‘killer robots’. The experts’ aims are laudable, but they are likely to have about as much effect as King Canute ordering the sea to turn back. Whether we like it or not, autonomous weapons are coming. States like China, Russia and the US are already developing such systems. They will not want to lose the potential military advantage to the other superpowers. From a technological perspective, seeking to ban one application of Artificial Intelligence will become increasingly difficult. More and more, A.I. is multi-purpose. Just think of IBM’s flagship program,

Well, don’t think there’s much milage in the charge against Peter Kosminsky’s drama about IS, The State,  that it glamorises that outfit, do you? It was about as grisly a depiction of the horrors of IS as is commensurate with British viewing standards. So, in this account of four British recruits to IS broadcast this week, we didn’t get the rape of Yazidi women and their nine-year-old daughters but we got the slave market where the jihadists bought and sold them – there’s a secondary market, by the way, in these women in the Middle East. We didn’t get homosexuals tossed off the top of tall buildings, but we did

‘In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any Country.’ So wrote the great Confederate General Robert E. Lee a few years before the outbreak of the American Civil war in a letter to his wife. It is a trite observation that the average American is poorly educated but my suggestion to those in Charlottesville who would remove Lee’s statue is that they study the history of their own nation more carefully. By analogy I can see arguments being made, for example, against the Catholic Church. I would disagree with them, but I