On Monday, while IDF troops were clearing the last Hamas terrorists from Israeli communities near the Gaza border, Benjamin Netanyahu promised that ‘we are going to change the Middle East’. Only two Israeli prime ministers have spoken like that before. One was Menachem Begin when he waged war on the PLO in Lebanon in 1982.
The first time a friend told me that Hitler had the right idea about the Jews I was six. Most of my classmates agreed, and quoted their parents in evidence – from which I conclude that anyone who suggests that they don’t understand how the Holocaust happened is either a fool or a liar. It
Early American settlers said that a squirrel could climb up a tree on the coast of Massachusetts, set off westwards and not touch the ground until it reached the Ohio river. The squirrels, like the Native Americans, were pushed out and west. Timber was the settlers’ main resource, and they stripped New England of wood
Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to send troops into Ukraine. He has already achieved his strategic goals — for now. The leading European Union powers, France and Germany, are competing against each other for Putin’s ear, while Britain is competing against them by shipping arms to Ukraine. The United States is exposed as an unreliable protector,
Did Joe Biden fall asleep during the opening speeches of the COP26 climate jamboree in Glasgow? It’s hard to blame him if he did. A conference dedicated to saving the planet is generating nothing but hot air, some of it carboniferously heavy with the exhaust of the armada of private jets that brought the guests.
Kamala Harris’s pandering to anti-Semitism in a photo-op at George Mason University last week confirms that when it comes to the Democrats, the fish now rots from the head. What should a vice president of the United States say when a foreign student ambushes her with boilerplate lies – in this case, lies which fit
The forming of the Australia-UK-US (Aukus) military alliance in the Pacific shows how everything Trump can say, Biden can do. The problem is, Biden isn’t doing it very well. Biden’s administration, like Trump’s, is committed to building its Pacific alliances while sustaining Nato. Yet on Australia as in Afghanistan, the Biden team are doing exactly
Is Donald Trump taking the Democrats’ line on Brexit and the Irish border? We might think so from the Financial Times. On Friday, the FT quoted Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland, saying that the Trump administration, the State Department and the US Congress ‘would all be aligned in the desire to see
Joe Biden is unfit to be President of the United States. It was obvious when he was running for office that he lacks the physical stamina and mental acuity for the job. It has become increasingly obvious since January that the part-time President has either hidden from the media or stumbled through the kind of
The most alarming aspect of living in America is the recurring sensation that no one is in charge. This is much more disconcerting than recognising that the people in charge are incompetent and corrupt: that is merely a sorry fact of everyday life. Three times in two decades the world’s most powerful state has failed
Prince Harry is now chief impact officer for BetterUp, a Californian corporate consultancy whose ‘mission’ is to sell online life coaching with — in his words, — ‘innovation, impact and integrity’. Harry may not realise it, but he is the latest celebrity frontman for the rapidly growing, broadly unregulated and frequently dubious corporate ‘coaching’ industry.
Twitter’s banning of Donald Trump is like bolting the stable door after the QAnon shaman has gone. The damage was done long before the assault on the Capitol was planned on social media. Long before Donald Trump tweeted his way to the White House, social media had reduced American democracy to a lurid freak show.
Betraying the Nobel opens with a detonation from Michael Nobel, Alfred’s great-grandnephew. The vice-chairman and then chairman of the Nobel Family Society for 15 years, Michael believes that the Nobel Peace Institute has betrayed the ‘original conditions of Alfred Nobel’s will and intentions’. Its selection process is ‘very sketchy’ and its committee of Norwegian parliamentarians
Finally, some real evidence of electoral fraud. After weeks of claims and court dismissals, Donald Trump at last has solid evidence that this is a country where elected officials can pick up a phone and try to fix the results, and that, as the mobsters used to say, the fish rots from the head. Unfortunately
Joe Biden talks a lot about restoring America’s standing in the world. But the truth is that if he now has the chance to reshape America’s relationships for a new era, it’s because Donald Trump has already done the awkward stuff. The question is: can Biden and his team swallow their collective pride and build
‘We’re going to be back in the game,’ our presumptive and somewhat previous new president tells us. ‘It’s not America alone.’ But America was never out of the game under Donald Trump and never alone. Look who is also back in the game: Tony Blinken, Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, will be Biden’s secretary
There is, as our presumptive and somewhat presumptuous president Malaprop told us on Sunday, a time to plant and a time for the other thing. There is a time for healing, and a time for massing your advisers in a garden centre and taking your enemies to court for stealing the election. A time for
It’s not over till the senile guy talks gibberish. It might not be over for days. The election may shift to the courts, to be contested like history’s most important parking ticket. Regardless of who wins — and the true professionals of prediction, the bookmakers, now have Donald Trump odds-on — Donald Trump has already
There is nothing to see. In 2014, Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma on a reported salary of $50,000 (£40,000) a month. Hunter knows nothing about the energy business, and he doesn’t seem to speak Ukrainian. ‘I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,’ Joe Biden
Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died in 1983 at 43, ruined by drugs, drink and madness. Though he appeared on plenty of other people’s records and stages — Dr John, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King — Booker recorded only three studio albums
