Society

 Kigali, Rwanda To most outsiders, Rwanda is still synonymous with genocide. Nearly a million killed in 100 days; almost three quarters of the Tutsi population dead. The country’s attempts to rebuild have been much commented on, but something else is overlooked: Rwanda has become an astonishing oasis of tolerant Islam and, in many ways, an example to the West. In Rwanda, there is an Islam which stands firm against the petrochemical ‘Gulf Stream’ of Wahhabi finance, despite lacking the huge wealth that Muslims in the Arab world enjoy. It also refuses to yield control to the neo-fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood now backed by Qatar and Turkey. This independence and

One of the issues that should crop up in this Tory leadership contest is local government funding. True, it’s not a particularly enticing matter, but Conservative MPs are generally very worried about the state of their local councils. Today’s BBC story on 11 authorities which could exhaust their reserves within four years underlines this worry. The Beeb used analysis by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance to work out which councils the organisation had listed – anonymously – as being most at risk. The Local Government Association is warning that councils will have to further cut back services and that ‘ongoing funding gaps are simply too big to be plugged

‘You will hear of him at little forgotten fishing ports where the Albanian mountains dip to the Adriatic. If you struck a Mecca pilgrimage the odds are you would meet a dozen of Sandy’s friends in it. In shepherds’ huts in the Caucasus you will find bits of his cast-off clothing, for he has a knack of shedding garments as he goes. In the caravanserais of Bokhara and Samarkand he is known, and there are shikaris in the Pamirs who still speak of him round their fires. If you were going to visit Petrograd or Rome of Cairo it would be no use asking him for directions; if he gave

It was Morten Morland who drew the first comparison between Emmanuel Macron and the story of the emperor’s new clothes. His cartoon is a deadly allegory, and not just for the vanity of Macron. Because the point of the story is not just that the emperor is a vain idiot, but that those who pretend otherwise are idiots, too. The result of the election in France is really a no-brainer. Twenty-one million people voted, 21.9 per cent for Macron. The list backed by the recently thought extinct Marine Le Pen attracted 23.9 per cent. Greens, mainstream conservatives, various leftists and numerous crackpots shared the rest. The vote against Macron: 78.06

For the latest competition, you were asked to dream up an imaginary animal that is a hybrid of two existing ones and write a poem about it. The discovery, some time ago, that the Romans called a giraffe a ‘camelopard’ (and Thomas Hood wrote an ‘Ode to the Cameleopard’) gave me the initial idea for this challenge. I was then reminded of it when reading Spike Milligan’s Book of Milliganimals with my son (remember the Moo-Zebras and the Bald Twit Lion?). Your fantastic beasts included the Octophant, the kangasheep, the corgiraffe and a couple of llamadillos. It was a difficult comp to judge: there were loads of entries of great

The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was a radiant person, smiling and full of light. Devoted to her daughter, successful at work, always good for a laugh at the school gates. No one — save those loved ones who knew her private struggle — saw it coming. For days, waves of confusion and sadness emanated out through our patch of north-west London. This is the way of suicides in social groups. I’ve seen it before. They ripple and reach well beyond where they have any right to. But the peculiar thing about this tragedy was the way

Theresa May isn’t leaving at a time of her choosing, nor has she been able to focus on the domestic policies she listed in her inaugural speech on the steps of Downing Street. But today, as she announced she was resigning, she still tried to set out what she believed was her legacy in tackling the ‘burning injustices’ in Britain.  It wasn’t a long list, and the achievements on that list were in themselves rather small. She said she had committed more funding to mental health in the NHS long-term plan, which is true. This funding increase was greater than those in NHS England had initially hoped for. But there

One of the most irritating defences to meet when playing 1 d4 as White is the Benko Gambit (1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 c5 3 d5 b5). It was foreshadowed by a Ruy Lopez between Nimzowitsch and Capablanca from St Petersburg 1914. In that classic game, White won a queenside pawn in ingenious fashion, only to see the black forces pour down the open lines occasioned by the pawn loss and destroy White’s queen’s flank.   The opening moves of Nimzowitsch-Capablanca, St Petersburg 1914 were as follows: 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Nc3 Nf6 4 Bb5 d6 5 d4 Bd7 6 Bxc6 Bxc6 7 Qd3 exd4 8 Nxd4 g6 9