World

It’s very fashionable these days to be despondent about the quality of our politicians. They’re all lazy liars who look only to their interests and neglect their duties to their constituents because they’d rather be grunting and snorting around a trough before sticking their snouts in it. And while the expenses scandal, resignations and court cases show that a lot of anti-politics sentiment has been provoked by the politicians themselves, it’s worth remembering that not every accusation levelled at Westminster is fair. Over the past couple of years, a trend for internet memes about politicians has grown. Those graphics tend to juxtapose two images from Parliament, one showing lots of MPs

Here’s something to watch next time you’re visiting Venezuela, if you can avoid getting murdered while you’re there – a ballet based on the life of the glorious late president Hugo Chavez: ‘The piece, From Spider-Seller to Liberator, is roughly based on a series of personal reminiscences culled from the late president’s speeches and his weekly TV show Aló Presidente. A team of Cuban journalists combed through thousands of hours, selecting the folksy childhood anecdotes which he would drop in among state decrees and political announcements. The work begins with a recording of Chávez’s voice saying: “I was like a seed which fell on hard ground,” before a female character

An official end to the Cold War was declared at a summit between President George H. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev on a Soviet cruise ship moored at Malta on 2 December 1989. It is only a matter of time before western governments will have to admit that it has recommenced. While the rhetoric against Islamic State has been at full volume for the past few months, a soft and diminishing response has greeted Vladimir Putin’s escalating aggression. It is as if, Crimea having been ceded, western governments want their citizens to think that the rest of Ukraine is settling down into a mere domestic disagreement. The truth is very different:

If anyone ever wondered what the over-promoted, incapable and incompetent Baroness Sayeeda Warsi was planning to do in retirement, now we know: provoke British Jews on Twitter. Today, after four Jews, one a British citizen, were butchered while praying in Israel, Sayeeda Warsi used the opportunity to taunt British Jews. Not just the Zionist Federation but a former British Jewish communal leader as well. In Sayeeda Warsi’s world you see, Jews who protest that it is wrong only for Muslims to be allowed to pray at a site in Jerusalem holy to both Muslims and Jews are morally equivalent to Palestinian Muslims who use meat cleavers to butcher rabbis while they

The most sobering column you’ll read today is the FT’s Gideon Rachman, no doom monger, warning about the risk of a nuclear war. Rachman is concerned about how quick Vladimir Putin’s Russia now is to rattle the nuclear sabre. Now, as Rachman points out, part of the reason that Russia does this is to make the West think that it might just use these weapons. But the worry is that Putin might miscalculate. For instance, if the Russians did in one of the Nato member Baltic states what it has done in Ukraine, the situation could get out of hand very quickly. What makes this more alarming is the possibility

I fear I may be done for incitement.My friend and expert on all things ISIS, Shiraz Maher, alerts me to the fact that Abu Rumaysah has gone, apparently to fight in Syria. Shiraz and I last encountered him on the BBC programme Sunday Morning Live, alongside nobody’s idea of a push-over Dame Ann Leslie. (You can see the video above).Anyhow, this Anjem Choudary goon spent his portion of the discussion praising ISIS (“I would like to see Britain governed by Sharia,” etc) until provoking Dame Ann, Shiraz and me to ask him why on earth he didn’t just go and join them. All talk and no suitable length trousers etc

From The Spectator, 14 November 1914: The Spectator for the last twenty years has urged that the Russians are the appropriate successors of the Turks at Constantinople. Russia is by far the greatest of the Black Sea Powers, and she ought to be given the key to her own back door— the possession of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles being conditioned, of course, by the guarantee of free access to the Black Sea for the shipping of other Powers, on the lines that govern the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal. We do not doubt for a moment that Russia will be perfectly willing to make such an agreement. That

In simple entertainment terms Citizenfour isn’t as interesting as watching paint dry. It is more like watching someone else watching paint dry. People with opinions on Edward Snowden tend to divide into those who think he’s one of the biggest heroes of all time and those who think he’s at least one of the worst patsies or traitors of all time. Either way it’s hard to imagine why either party would want to watch two hours of footage of him typing on a keyboard. And then typing some more. While the camera focuses on him from the other side of the keyboard. For a very long time. Neither is it

The most remarkable thing about the ceremony at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday is that it just gets more popular. A ceremony that a generation ago might have been confidently predicted to appeal to a smaller and smaller bit of the population has somehow attracted the kind of benign publicity you get for the Children in Need awards. And the enormous crowds at the Tower to see the moatfull of ceramic poppies – one for each British life lost – has taken everyone by surprise. It’s got a good deal to do with the centenary of the First World War, of course, but that itself suggests that in a fractured

If you want to know how serious the situation in Iraq with Islamic State is, just look at what the Americans are doing. President Obama, who made his political name by opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has now asked Congress to approve sending another 1,500 troops there—taking the total number of US forces in the country to roughly 3,000.   Tellingly, the Washington Post reports that, these troops will now not be based mainly in Baghdad and the Kurdish capital of Irbil as they were previously. Instead, they will have a base in Anbar Province, one of the places where the so-called Islamic State has held territory, and north