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Israel’s Putinisation

Adam Shatz: Israel’s Putinisation, 18 February 2016

... preference for military solutions – stands in sharp contrast to the caution and indecision of Barack Obama. Putin is also, in Israeli eyes, refreshingly indifferent to human rights. As relations with the Obama administration have cooled – particularly in the aftermath of the Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu did ...

He wanted a boy

Deborah Friedell: Condoleezza’s Childhood, 20 January 2011

Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family 
by Condoleezza Rice.
Crown, 342 pp., $27, October 2010, 978 0 307 58787 9
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... devout congregation, with no call and response, ‘not even a stray “amen”’. Where for Barack Obama the sound of a gospel choir from the back row of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church was a ‘fleeting glimpse of that thing which I sought’, she’ll have nothing to do with ‘whooping and hollering’. She has never known a crisis of ...

It’s the Oil

Jim Holt: Iraq’s Lucrative Mess, 18 October 2007

... exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term. Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil ...

Babylon with Bananas

Michael Newton: Tarzan's best friend, 29 January 2009

Me Cheeta: The Autobiography 
by Cheeta.
Fourth Estate, 320 pp., £16.99, October 2008, 978 0 00 727863 3
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... and, above all, in the index, which, for instance, suggests discreetly that both John McCain and Barack Obama indulged in adulterous liaisons with Lupe Vélez, the most fiery of Johnny Weissmuller’s five wives. The conceit is that the index was compiled before the lawyers looked at the manuscript, and remains unrevised after their ravages. So although ...

Back to the Graft

Joshua Kurlantzick: Indonesia since Suharto, 3 March 2011

My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist 
by Sadanand Dhume.
Skyhorse, 271 pp., $24.95, April 2009, 978 1 60239 643 2
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Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power 
by Robert Kaplan.
Random House, 384 pp., £21, October 2010, 978 1 4000 6746 6
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Understanding Islam in Indonesia: Politics and Diversity 
by Robert Pringle.
Hawaii, 220 pp., $22, April 2010, 978 0 8248 3415 9
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... realised it had to compete with China for Jakarta’s loyalty. Battle was joined, in November, by Barack Obama, who made a triumphant ‘return’ to Jakarta, reminiscing about growing up there and delivering a speech at the national university that was cheered as though he were a revivalist preacher. The chaos of the late 1990s and early 2000s was ...

Simple Facts and Plain Truths

David A. Bell: Common Sense, 20 October 2011

Common Sense: A Political History 
by Sophia Rosenfeld.
Harvard, 337 pp., £22.95, 0 674 05781 3
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... American radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck use it to deny the legitimacy of Barack Obama. (Beck, as it happens, is the author of Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine.) Is there no way to rescue common sense from the likes of Beck, and restore something of its democratic ...

Past Its Peak

Robert Vitalis: The Oil Curse, 17 December 2009

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil 
by Peter Maass.
Allen Lane, 276 pp., £20, October 2009, 978 1 84614 246 8
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... a company making its tax payment not to an account controlled by the IRS but to … Barack Obama.’ Maass also makes good use of US court records, although in the case of James Giffen, the middleman who helped Chevron win contracts in Kazakhstan and was indicted for kicking back $80 million to President Nazarbayev and other officials, the ...

Short Cuts

Adam Shatz: The Four-Year Assault, 21 January 2021

... a symbol of white supremacy which, since Trump came to power, determined to undo everything that Barack Obama achieved, has become increasingly conspicuous, and not just in the South. For Black Americans, the spectacle of violent Confederate nostalgists in the Capitol building is less likely to recall Japanese fighter planes than the campaign of racist ...

Fortress Conservation

Simone Haysom, 1 December 2022

Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade 
by Rosaleen Duffy.
Yale, 329 pp., £25, June 2022, 978 0 300 23018 5
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... consumers from buying pangolin scale tincture, tiger glue and hornbill bangles.In July 2013, Barack Obama issued an executive order describing wildlife trafficking as an illicit enterprise worth billions of dollars which fuelled instability and undermined security. It transformed the role of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. ‘The State ...

Diary

Deborah Friedell: The Heart and the Fist, 24 May 2018

... the case that the Democrats were less keen on running Eric for higher office, at least right away. Obama spent seven years in the Illinois state senate before going to the US Senate – that’s how it usually works. The Democratic Party was drowning in ambitious Rhodes Scholars who wanted to work for Obama, or to be ...

The Leveller

Ben Ehrenreich: Famine in East Africa, 17 August 2017

... forces – again turned crisis into catastrophe: 258,000 Somalis died in the resulting famine. Barack Obama would soon make Somalia the prototype for a low-visibility and low-risk approach to waging war through drone strikes and targeted raids by Special Operations forces.In his last year in office, Obama began ...

Are you still living?

Kasia Boddy: Counting Americans, 19 October 2023

Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census 
by Dan Bouk.
Picador, 362 pp., $20, August, 978 1 250 87217 3
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... were allowed to self-identify with more than one racial category, many opted simply for Black. Barack Obama was one of them. By publicly completing his form in the Oval Office in 2010, Melissa Harris-Perry argues, Obama ‘embraced Blackness, with all its disprivilege, tumultuous history and disquieting ...

Dialling for Dollars

Deborah Friedell: Corruption in America, 19 March 2015

Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United 
by Zephyr Teachout.
Harvard, 376 pp., £22.95, October 2014, 978 0 674 05040 2
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... be able to fix much else. In 2008, before Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Obama, a conservative group called Citizens United (it describes itself as ‘an organisation dedicated to restoring our government to citizens’ control’) produced Hillary: The Movie, a ninety-minute profile of a psychopath out to destroy America. It’s not ...

Farewell to the Log Cabin

Colin Kidd: America’s Royalist Revolution, 18 December 2014

The Royalist Revolution 
by Eric Nelson.
Harvard, 390 pp., £22.95, October 2014, 978 0 674 73534 7
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... wife, Hillary, a senator for New York, was narrowly defeated for the Democratic nomination by Barack Obama. She went on to serve as Obama’s secretary of state during his first term. The 2016 election looks as if it might see a dynastic collision between Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Jeb Bush for the ...

Text-Inspectors

Andrew O’Hagan: The Good Traitor, 25 September 2014

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State 
by Glenn Greenwald.
Hamish Hamilton, 259 pp., £20, May 2014, 978 0 241 14669 9
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... is the real story behind Greenwald’s tale. ‘We don’t have a domestic spying programme,’ Barack Obama said on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno in August 2013. ‘What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat.’ In truth, as Greenwald reveals, a ...

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