World

There’s no need for me to take pro-American lessons from anyone but that doesn’t mean I necessarily or secretly want to be American. That can’t be said of everyone on the British right. Take Douglas Carswell for instance. The MP for Harwich and Clacton is deeply upset by the Scottish government’s decision to free Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds. That’s his right. What’s odder is that he seems to be more upset by the fact that the Americans are upset than by anything else. In one post he suggested that the US ban those responsble for freeing Megrahi from entering the United States. In another, he asks “Is Britain

Well, sort of. If one only paid attention to what Hillary Clinton or (some of) the relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing said, you might gain the false impression that his possible release (or transfer to a Libyan jail) was some kind of admission that he is in fact innocent. It’s important to remember that this is not the case. If – or possibly when – Abdebaset Ali al-Megrahi is released, it will be on the compassionate grounds that he is a dying man whose cancer is inoperable and terminal. It is not an act of clemency* pardon or commutation. Even so, one can see why such a

I’m far from being a zombie aficionado, but isn’t this obvious? If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively. That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada. They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures. My confidence in this research is not, mind you, boosted by this Professor Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake) and colleagues wrote: “We model a zombie attack using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. “We introduce a basic model for zombie

Sure as eggs is eggs, you can count on some folk being terribly exercised each time it is “revealed” that lots of boys named Mohammed, or some variation of the prophet’s name, are being born in europe. This time it’s the revelation [link fixed] that in four Dutch cities Mohammed is the most popular name for boys. Oh no! The Muslims are coming! Never mind that Mohammed is only the 16th most popular boys name in Holland as a whole, better by far to raise the spectre of an Islamic “takeover” of Dutch cities. Never mind that this sort of fear-mongering has become an annual tradition. Did you know, for

I’d never heard of xeroderma pigmentosum until Bronx Banter alerted me to Rick Reilly’s latest ESPN column. I generally consider Reilly an intolerable jackass but this column is very good. Just the thing to leave you feeling a little warmer on a wet Friday afternoon. Even Red Sox fans should tip their hats to the Yankees and, most particularly of course, the kids themselves: The team facing Yankees ace AJ Burnett a few weeks back at Yankee Stadium has to go down as the oddest in baseball history. For one thing, it plays only at night. The players have no choice. Even one minute of sunshine can kill them. They’re

Well, according to Dick Cheney, George W Bush was just as almost as bad as your average America-hating euro-weenie or member of the Democratic Congressional caucus. Barton Gellman – whose sourcing is pretty good – reports that: Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets. “In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled

As the controversy over torture gathers pace, it is ‘open season’ on the intelligence agencies — investigated by the police and challenged by MPs. Scrutiny is fine, says Matthew d’Ancona — but beware of making life impossible for those responsible for our security ‘One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly

There isn’t one. That was a trick headline. The line between a state that tortures and the state that does everything in its power to avoid the physical abuse of individuals in its name is what defined the late twentieth century drive against barbarism. When the French were exposed using specially adapted field radios to pass electric shocks through suspected rebels in Algeria it rightly caused outrage in a world still recovering from the reality of the Holocaust.  We are a little less easy to horrify now. But the revelation that our own intelligence services have been prepared to use the fruits of torture, however unwittingly, still has the ability to digust. The response this