International politics

Hats-off to Bloomberg’s Max Abelson for this delicious, bone-dry report on how Wall Street’s finest have coped with the impact of Hurricane Sandy. Wall Street turned to Bordeaux, sushi and faxes as Hurricane Sandy wreaked the most havoc in the history of the city’s transit system and closed stock markets on consecutive days for the first time for weather since 1888. “I had to go to the wine cellar and find a good bottle of wine and drink it before it goes bad,” Murry Stegelmann, 50, a founder of investment-management firm Kilimanjaro Advisors LLC, wrote in an e-mail after he lost power at 6 p.m. on Oct. 29 in Darien,

Barack Obama won the second of the three Presidential debates last night but he did not beat Mitt Romney as thoroughly as he had been beaten by the challenger in their first encounter. If you were compiling an aggregate score for the debates so far the President would still be behind. I doubt Republicans will react to this modest reverse for Romney’s fortunes with the kind of panic that liberals embraced two weeks ago. The Democratic meltdown helped turn a setback into a rout. Suddenly momentum – whatever that is – was with Romney and it was easy for Republican raiding parties to mop up Democratic stragglers and put them

Thousands of Iranians took to the streets this week to protest inflation and the collapse of Iranian currency on international markets. Tehran’s historic Grand Bazaar closed for business with many of its merchants leading the demonstrations. This will worry the government because traders there are normally seen as bridging the gap between clerics and Iran’s influential mercantile classes. The atmosphere inside the Bazaar is a useful barometer of Iranian political discontent. During the abortive Green Revolution in 2009 which challenged Ahmadinejad’s re-election, merchants from the Grand Bazaar offered only muted support. In 1979 they swung decisively behind the Islamic Revolution and helped unseat the Shah, having previously secured concessions from

Everyone says that the debates don’t change the dynamics of a presidential race very often. President Barack Obama better hope that remains the case this year. Last night’s debate wasn’t even close. Mitt Romney thumped Obama in Denver. It was, as they say, an old-fashioned ass-kicking. Any Democrat who pretends otherwise is either deluding themselves or trying to kid you. Will it shift the dynamics of the election? Perhaps not. The best Obama’s supporters could say last night is that the President avoided the kind of blunder that might hand Romney an obvious advantage. Maybe so but that kind of defensive mindset seemed somehow to have seeped into Obama last

Some dog-munching old thug from Pyongyang has been addressing the United Nations, warning that his country is the ‘world’s hotspot’ and a spark could trigger a thermonuclear war. It’s quite possible I’m wrong about this, as I am wrong about a lot of things, but North Korea worries me far less than one supposes it should. Partly because it is so far away. And partly because the North Koreans are utterly useless and their fatuous ideology is shared by nobody else in the world (apart from one or two academics in British universities). Even a country as thoroughly grim as China finds Pyongyang ludicrous and insupportable; when push comes to

For years he was the face of radical Islam in Britain – a living caricature of the ‘mad mullah’ — the hook handed, eye patch wearing cleric Abu Hamza. Famous for holding congregational prayers on the streets of Finsbury Park and railing against the West, the era of Abu Hamza is now finally drawing to a close Yesterday, the European Court of Human Rights refused a request by Abu Hamza and four others to have their case referred to its Grand Chamber. This means they have now exhausted all their avenues of appeal through the Strasbourg courts and will soon be extradited to the United States. The Home Office has