World

The three-month school summer recess began in Turkey just over four weeks ago. But for some teachers they may never see the inside of a school here again. As part of President Erdogan’s post-failed coup cleansing, 21,000 teachers have had their licenses revoked. I’ll say that again, 21,000 teachers have had their licenses revoked. Why? It’s simple, they’ve been accused of having links to a movement which Turkey has proscribed a terrorist organisation. In reality this is McCarthyism playing out in the 21st century. The group they’ve been associated with is an Islamic and social movement led by a cleric called Fethullah Gulen. It funds private schools and universities in more than

There are certain things about political conventions you only notice when you are watching on TV – like Bill Clinton seeming to fall asleep momentarily during his wife’s speech last night. And there are things you only notice when you go along to conventions and spend your afternoons out on the street, under the hot sun, waiting for something to happen. Any of the journalists working in Cleveland and Philadelphia in the past fortnight had a curious thing to relate: lots of things happened on the streets of Philly, and almost nothing happened in Ohio. Before we leave behind the conventions and head into three months of stage-managed swing state rallies, it’s worth asking

At the beginning of his war memoirs, Charles de Gaulle famously wrote, ‘All my life I have had a certain idea of France’ and its ‘eminent and exceptional destiny’. It was not only an abstract concept: the picture in his mind was of ‘the Madonna in mural frescoes’. What is President Hollande’s certain idea of France? Presumably it cannot be the Madonna, since Hollande is the child of French laïcité, which creates an unbridgeable gulf between religion and the republic. But what happens when, in the name of one religion, men in France enter the temple of another and slit the throat of a priest, as happened this week near

You have to admire Bernie Sanders’s chutzpah. For almost the entirety of his over 40-year career in politics, Sanders pointedly abstained from joining the Democratic Party. He is a ‘democratic socialist’, officially registered as an independent, and has never been elected to office as a Democrat, seeing that party as insufficiently collectivist. Sanders only affiliated himself with the Democrats last year, solely for the purpose of trying to capture the party’s presidential nomination. Now that he’s lost that battle, he will return to the Senate as an independent. Given how Sanders has shown absolutely no loyalty to the Democratic Party – indeed, he has run against, and defeated, Democrats at the

Today’s attack was the 7th Islamist terrorist atrocity in France since January 2015. Two hundred and thirty six people have been killed by Islamist terrorism there in the last 18 months. This attack might only have killed one innocent person but it was a particularly brutal event: an 84-year-old priest had his throat slit while celebrating Mass. It was an attack that was designed to shock and to divide, to make it impossible to ignore the religious element of this act of terrorism. Douglas Murray and Haras Rafiq discuss Europe’s summer of terror: The two terrorists were shot dead by police before they could kill their other hostages, two nuns and