There were 245 detainees at Camp Delta in Guantánamo when President Obama was sworn in this year and there are now about 220. When Guantánamo is mothballed, as he wants, some 80 of...
Eight years, billions of dollars and thousands of dead bodies into the ‘global war on terror’ – sorry, Mr President, the ‘overseas contingency operation’ – and...
The collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers over the weekend of 13-14 September last year was an event of world-historical magnitude. What was so important about it wasn’t the local...
The term ‘honour killing’ entered the British legal system in 2003, when Abdullah Yones pleaded guilty to killing his 16-year-old daughter Heshu. Accounts of the case vary but certain...
Long before he became president, there were signs in Barack Obama of a tendency to promise things easily and compromise often. He broke a campaign vow to filibuster a bill that immunised telecom...
‘The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president,...
The most enthusiastic moment came when David Cameron promised to end poverty and pronounced the Tories the real party of the poor. The Conservatives have, of course, always thought themselves the...
On 25 August, Israel put an end to Gaza’s single most impressive feat of underground engineering. For the three days the tunnel was operational, traders were able to make use of the first...
The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can...
I arrived after dusk at Toussaint Louverture Airport and was relieved to see someone holding a board with my name on it. The State Department and Foreign Office websites had been very...
There’s an episode of The Wire in which the intellectual drug baron Stringer Bell, trying to launder his gang’s profits by legitimate real estate development, finds the project...
Old people still write letters the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a biro, folding up the letter into an envelope, writing the address on the front before adding the stamp. Mostly they...
With both the government and the Labour Party in terminal condition and little time for either to do much about it, our thoughts inevitably turn to the Conservatives, and to what they might do...
It is, of course, now all about oil. Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in...
In May 2001, the French National Assembly passed a law, the Loi Taubira (named after Christiane Taubira, the Socialist deputy who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a...
Officially, no Palestinians live in the ‘Jewish’ city of Upper Nazareth. The city’s elegant website appears only in Hebrew and in Russian. When I was there recently, I called a...
‘Get out of our Queen’s country before our bonfire night and parade day, other than that your building will be blown up.’ The message was sent to Muslim, Polish and Indian...
More than most, Max Weber’s reputation reflects the aspirations of others. His wife, Marianne, did much to establish it in Germany, rapidly turning his articles and drafts into books and...