World

Mad Men may not be jumping the sharks quite yet, but the latest series is showing signs of collapsing under the weight of its own hype. The carefully built ambiguity of the first few seasons is being lost, replaced by cheesy self-awareness and standard-issue liberal correctness. In this week’s episode, which was broadcast in America last night and will be shown here tomorrow, there was even a little political swipe at Republican candidate Mitt Romney. In the scene above, the character Henry Francis, a political operator for New York mayor John Lindsay, says he doesn’t want his boss to attend an event in Michigan ‘because Romney’s a clown and I

There’s nothing like a crisis to rescue an ailing candidate Yes, he’s back. Just when the French Socialists thought that they were jogging into the Elysée Palace for the first time in 17 years, a discredited president has remounted his favourite war horse, a national security crisis, and with three weeks to go before the first round on 22 April, the left has a fight on its hands. Ten days ago, most commentators agreed that François Hollande merely had to keep his head and events would take their inevitable course. Nicolas Sarkozy, a deeply unpopular president, was about to disappear into the wastepaper basket of history. The election campaign was

Since he has previously been elected in Glasgow and London, I don’t know if it is so astonishing that George Galloway won a by-election in Bradford. Anyway, if you have a couple of hours to spare ou might enjoy this debate between Galloway and Christopher Hitchens. As Christopher put it: “The man’s hunt for a tyrannical fatherland never ends. The Soviet Union let him down, Albania’s gone. Saddam’s been overthrown. But on to the next, in Damascus.” Quite.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Did you see the presidential candidate Rick Santorum lose his cool with a New York Times reporter? If not, you can watch it above. It was a trivial incident, really, but we live in a trivial media age in which politicians think that embarrassing moments are something to boast about. Losing your temper shows that you are human, rather than a politician. Santorum and his spinners have tried to whip up the little row for all it’s worth ahead of his ‘last chance’ primary in Wisconsin. Santorum’s anger, they say, shows he is a ‘real Republican’ — i.e. not like the fake Mitt Romney.

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