World

Briefly: not content with producing the worst kit in British Olympic history Stella McCartney returns to the well of drivel to tell us that: “I was aware of the fact that it’s [the Union Flag] something that might be overused in the build-up to the Olympics, in taxis, on cushions and mugs, so I wanted to do something different with it – but that was still respectful of its beauty,” McCartney said. “Actually, the colours of the Union Jack are similar to a lot of other flags and the athletes really wanted to feel identifiable as Team GB, so I just used different colours to say the same thing.” Emphasis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajuq5u3IoSQ As leaders from 53 nations gather in Seoul for the second Nuclear Security Summit, President Obama spoke of his ‘vision of a world without nuclear weapons’. It’s a vision he described during his 2008 campaign, and which was later the focus of his 2009 speech in Prague. Today, as then, he talked about the ‘obligation’ he feels to act on this in strikingly personal terms: ‘I say it as a father, who wants my two young daughters to grow up in a world where everything they know and love can’t be instantly wiped out.’ Obama detailed his efforts to reduce America’s arsenal, to get other countries to reduce theirs, and

Presidential candidates are used to having all sorts of derogatory monikers hurled in their direction. But they don’t expect them to come from one of their own senior advisers. And yet that’s exactly what’s happened to Mitt Romney this week. On Wednesday, just after Romney had won the Illinois primary and secured the endorsement of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Eric Fehrnstrom told CNN: ‘Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch — you can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again’ The point he was making isn’t a particularly novel one: candidates

The Olympic games will, despite everything, be rather fun. This is so even though they will be tediously excessive. The absurdly lavish opening ceremony, for instance, will doubtless be an embarrassment that could have been avoided by keeping it simple. Asking the band of the Grenadier Guards to play a few tunes would have sufficed and been pleasingly British, modest and elegant. It would have offered a nice contrast to the totalitarian excess of the Beijing games. Alas, the indignity will not end there. Consider the outfits the poor British athletes will be forced to wear. Unveiled, if that’s the appropriate term, today they appear to be inspired by the

Congratulations to YouTube user Hugh Atkin for this mash-up. Nicely done.

Perhaps I should apologise to Leon Wieseltier? His recent column is not a patch on Jennifer Rubin’s latest screed which may be the most stupid and contemptible thing I’ve yet read today. Ms Rubin peers at Barack Obama’s Syrian policy and does not like what she sees: Not unlike the Green Revolution in 2009, the president nearly three years later is willing to allow an opportunity — to undermine Iran, support democracy, reassert U.S. leadership — slip away. Every now and then the president talks a good game on human rights, but his heart is never in it. In this case, even when coupled with an obvious and compelling national

For years now, Afghanistan policy has been governed by a simple question: Do the unknown costs of leaving Afghanistan trump the known costs of staying in Afghanistan? Until now the answer, at least officially, has always been Yes. But this is not a static question. The known price of remaining in Afghanistan increases all the time; the unknown consequences of withdrawal remain, at best, constant. Indeed, in as much as al-Qaeda’s Afghan capability has been reduced, the costs of withdrawal may in fact be less than once they were. That scarcely means an Afghanistan without NATO troops is going to be a grand place. Nevertheless, it is clear that the

PMQs 7 March