World

It is not uncommon for new leaders of new nations to flex their muscles. And in spite of its millennia of history as a nation, this is precisely where Egypt now finds itself. It has hosted its first free and fair democratic elections, and, for the first time, has a civilian occupying the Presidency. In this new nation, reborn for the umpteenth time, Mohamed Mursi is busy showing off the Brotherhood’s sinews. He landed in Tehran today, a move the Ahmadinejad government had touted as a diplomatic coup. No Egyptian leader has visited the country in more than three decades, and relations have been little more than frosty at the

‘The last time I spoke at a convention, it turned out I was in the wrong place.’ Artur Davis spoke last night at what he now believes is the right venue for him: the Republican National Convention. It did not take him long to reconcile himself to Republicans angry that they were welcoming a man who had provided the official second in favour of Barack Obama’s candidacy at the Democratic Convention four years ago. Davis has a most unusual personal story. Like most African Americans, he had been a Democrat all his life, and served in the House of Representatives for eight years until 2011. In 2010, he campaigned, unsuccessfully,

I returned from holiday to discover that the silly season has turned into something much more serious. The daily list of horrors from Syria, the Eurozone crisis and the terrifying state of the UK economy: they had all been there when I left (for Greece by the way, where people are genuinely scared about the future — stockpiling food and preparing for civil conflict in some cases). But the Olympic fiesta atmosphere seems to have been replaced by something darker following George Galloway’s moronic comments about the Assange case. There are plenty of men of the Left whose sexual politics don’t bear much scrutiny, but Galloway really is the prize

There was a news report on BBC South East last week expressing outrage that two people had not been arrested and charged for posting allegedly ‘homophobic’ comments on Twitter about the gay fans of the football club Brighton and Hove Albion. The reporter was incensed that charges had not been brought and the miscreants duly banged up. She harangued some poor copper who patiently explained that, under the circumstances, there might have been better ways of dealing with this incident than referral to the courts. I ought to point out that the miscreants were aged 15 and 16 years old; the police simply had a word with the parents. But

When the International Criminal Court (ICC) was set up ten years ago, it was meant to make the world a safer place. The Court and the various UN war crimes tribunals were supposed to pursue and punish war-criminal dictators as a warning to all the others. The idea may have been a noble one but, as Syria now demonstrates, it has proved hideously flawed. Far from deterring brutal dictators, the prospect of ending up like Slobodan Milosevic or Charles Taylor has persuaded some of the worst dictators that they only have one choice: to fight it out to the end. The Assads are only the latest family to prove this

At The American Conservative, Noah Millman argues that Barack Obama’s administration is the kind of small-c conservative leadership Thomas Friedman and other so-called centrists have been asking for: [T]he Obama Administration has been a quintessentially small-”c” conservative one, in that it has tried its best to preserve the status quo in just about every area. Its health care plan aimed to achieve universality with minimal disruption to existing insurance arrangements (which is why it was a good deal for insurance companies). Its response to the financial crisis was centered on securing the financial position of the large banks. Its response to the recession centered on the combination of tax cuts

David Cameron made separate phone calls to President Obama and President Hollande this evening to discuss the situation in Syria. In his conversation with Hollande, the Prime Minister discussed how to ‘build on the non-lethal support recently announced by the UK and agreed that France and the UK would work more closely to identify how they could bolster the opposition and help a potential transitional Syrian government after the inevitable fall of Assad,’ a Downing Street spokesperson said. What will that inevitable fall from power look like? In this week’s Spectator, Douglas Murray argues that the International Criminal Court has changed the way dictators let go of power. In the

I had the pleasure of doing Al Jazeera’s ‘Inside Story’ programme yesterday on Julian Assange’s positively pontifical balcony scene at the Ecuadorian Embassy the other day.  I was at pains to point out that: 1 – Listening to Mr Assange a stranger to the case would never have got the impression that he had skipped bail in order to avoid being questioned on serious sexual assault allegations made by two women in Sweden. 2 – Even if the US government were interested in Wikileaks it would not constitute a ‘witch hunt’ but rather a legitimate investigation into the stealing and publishing of secret government communiques.  Witches do not exist.  Someone who stole

So, two years in prison for the members of Pussy Riot as a consequence of their foul and insulting behaviour inside a church. The western world is outraged and takes the severity of the sentence as evidence that Russia is a totalitarian state where everyone does as Putin wants. Thank God we’re not like that over here, huh? We live in a democracy where one is free to lampoon all religious belief without punitive action descending upon us by the state. Which will be news to Andrew Ryan, among others – he was sentenced to 70 days in jail for setting fire to a copy of the Koran. And the two men who received one

One of the happiest things about writing for the Spectator is that there is no editorial line. Indeed the editor is always pleased by an intra-mural rammy. So there’s this: Dennis Sewell’s argument that Pussy Riot, the only all-girl Russian punk band you’re likely to have heard of, have been asking for trouble and deserve some of the trouble they’re receiving is the lamest sort of counter-intuitive, concern-trolling journalism. It helps pay the bills, mind you, so there’s that too. Having typed the obligatory “Of course Putin is ghastly” paragraph (or, as Sewell puts it, the Russian president is “a nasty, unscrupulous weasel” which, perhaps unwittingly, makes Putin seem a

The British state’s curious relationship with radical Islam appears to have gone full circle. I’ve just found a picture on an internet forum affiliated with al-Qaeda showing Abu Baseer al-Tartusi carrying a rifle in Syria. Al-Tartusi is a little known cleric who was granted political asylum in London and who gave Islamic lectures in Tower Hamlets until relatively recently. Now he is in Syria, leading a group of jihadists in the war against Bashar al-Assad. A pair of British and Dutch journalists were recently kidnapped and then released by jihadists operating near Idlib. Although blindfolded throughout their detention, they reported that some of their captors had British accents. It was