World

The photographs and video footage show North Koreans weeping in their hundreds at the news of Kim Jong-il’s death. But the departed leader, immortalised by Team America as a song-prone loner, remained a mystery to both his people and outsiders alike.   He came to power after his father, North Korea’s founder Kim il Sung, died in 1994. Reliable biographical information about him is scarce. He rarely appeared in public and his voice was seldom broadcast. What’s certain is that he spent lavishly on both luxuries and a nuclear programme, while millions of North Koreans starved. Kim Jong-il’s death comes at an awkward moment. North Korea had just agreed to

Lahore, Pakistan From a distance, the devastating attacks on Shia Muslims in three Afghan cities this week looked like the type of sectarian religious attacks which we got used to in Iraq. The faultline between Sunni and Shia is one of the greatest and most violent in the world, and now and again it divides countries. But in Afghanistan, nothing is ever this simple. For all its woes, it hasn’t seen a sectarian religious attack for ten years. And while the Taleban have had their history persecuting the Shia, it is highly unlikely they were responsible. The more likely ­explanation is less obvious — and even more sinister. These attacks

This is scarcely the most important part of today’s EU shenanigans but, post DSK and all that, one must admire French diplomatic flair when it comes to this sort of thing: The French are very angry – one French diplomat says that Britain is acting “like a man who wants to go to a wife-swapping party without taking his own wife”. Correct or not, this is nicely put. One’s hard-pressed to imagine an FCO or State Department suit expressing his frustration in quite such colourful terms. The temptation to make sweeping nationalist generalisations on the back of an off-the-cuff remark such as this should, naturally, be resisted. [Thanks to LM]

So spake the Taioseach, a Mr Enda Kenny of County Mayo, on Sunday night. Difficult choices are never easy. There is something near-fabulous about the phrase. It has certainly prokoked Fintan O’Toole most severely. He’s in rasping form this week Savour the phrase. Hold it to the light. Swirl it round the glass. Stick your nose in deep and inhale the rich aromas of full-bodied absurdity. Get the pungent whiff of carmelised cliche and curdled smugness. Imagine the work that went into crafting it, the bleary-eyed, caffeine-soaked speechwriters in their lonely eyrie, in the early hours of Sunday morning, running through the variations: hard choices are seldom soft; nasty things

There are many, many, many reasons why Newt Gingrich will not be the 45th President of the United States (assuming, as I do not and actually think pretty unlikely, he wins the GOP nomination) but among them is his habit of saying stuff like this: That’s from 2008. Here’s my transcription of what he says in this clip: Why have we not been hit since 9/11? Good question. My first answer is I honestly don’t know. I would have expected another attack, and I particularly thought, I was very, very worried and I talked to the administration when we had the sniper attacks because the sniper attacks were psychologically so

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of viewing the eurozone crisis: it’s a problem of economics or a problem of politics. Neither explanation quite suffices, of course, since it is both but the emphasis you place on economics vs politics plays a part in how you’ll view the situation and how likely you are to think there’s any kind of solution that can satisfy the politics and the economics of the situation. Which is by way of suggesting that plenty of American commentators seem to think the problem is easy to solve and the main thing lacking in europe is the political will to do something about it. (Exhibit A:

A splendid ad released by Ron Paul’s campaign: Youtube has been great for political ads and while ads alone can’t kill or win a campaign they greatly increase the gaiety of the circus. British politics may not enjoy (or, if you prefer, be afflicted by) TV advertising on the American scale but surely the creatives in the business can start producing quality work like this to be seen online? For entertainment, if nothing else…