America

Why did Stormy Daniels testify in court yesterday about her allegedly sexual encounter with Donald Trump? Anybody who has followed the Donald Trump story in recent years will have already heard most of Stormy’s account of her interactions with him. Daniels has a sense of humour. Like many others, she enjoys mocking Trump in public. And in our licentious yet strangely puritanical times, details such as the porn star spanking the 45th president with a rolled-up copy of Forbes magazine are just too much to resist.  The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Nobody seems to care much The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the

Joe Biden just threw a particularly nasty insult the way of Japan, a close ally of the United States, at a campaign event. The president accused the Japanese, along with China, Russia, and India, of being ‘xenophobic’ in their reluctance to admit large numbers of immigrants, and of damaging their economies as a consequence: ‘Why is China stalling so badly economically, why is Japan having trouble, why is Russia, why is India, because they’re xenophobic. They don’t want immigrants. Immigrants are what make us strong,’ he told a Washington fundraiser on Wednesday. The insult is being especially keenly felt over here in Tokyo The insult is being especially keenly felt

For the past few weeks, protests have rocked college campuses across the United States over Israel’s war against Hamas. Last night, police raided Columbia University to remove students occupying one of its buildings, while violence has broken out between protesting groups at UCLA in California. It is only when Israel is defending itself against rapists and murderers that there is this degree of frenzied hysteria across universities The pro-Palestine demonstrators portray themselves as defenders of human rights and social justice – viewing Israel through the warped lens of anti-colonialism and intersectionality. But in reality they have been amplifying the messaging of US-sanctioned terrorist organisations like Hamas. These entities have the blood of Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians on

University campuses across the United States are facing a growing wave of student-led protests over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Campus officials have responded by taking unprecedented measures, including calling in the police, to try to clamp down on the unrest and contain an increasingly chaotic situation. The end result? Some of America’s most prestigious educational institutions look less like places of learning and more like crime scenes. At Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, hundreds of people gathered on campus yesterday, refusing to leave. Police, some in riot gear, arrested nearly 50 protesters. Similar student demonstrations have paralysed campuses at the University of California in Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of

Very rarely do American presidents get policy wins in the Middle East. The region hasn’t been kind to the United States over the last thirty years. The signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty during the Jimmy Carter years and the U.S.-led military campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War are two exceptions to the rule. Everything else has been a failure of degree. Others, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Trump administration’s arbitrary withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018, were self-inflicted wounds that made the region bloodier and more difficult to manage. True to tradition, the Biden administration doesn’t have much

Better late than never. In Washington, the House of Representatives last night voted to approve £49 billion funding in aid for Ukraine by 311 votes to 112. It came after months of wrangling in the Republican party, with the situation in Kyiv continuing to deteriorate. The extent to which the GOP is split was shown in the final voting tally: 101 Republicans voted for the package while 112 voted against. The Speaker, Mike Johnson, who helped marshal the package to passage, said after the vote: ‘We did our work here, and I think history will judge it well.’ Trump’s silence can be a powerful thing But Johnson’s decision to rely

Emmanuel Macron told a communist newspaper earlier this year that he didn’t consider Marine le Pen’s National Rally part of the ‘Republican arc’. By extension, the French president presumably thinks the same of the 13,288,686 million men and women who voted for Le Pen in the second round of the 2022 presidential election. In the event of a war with Russia, or another hostile state, would the president therefore consider Le Pen voters unworthy of serving in the Republic’s military? The average Le Pen supporter has much in common with Britain’s Red Wall voter; they tend not to have gone to university, to have been hit hard by deindustrialisation and

When I was first asked to join the O.J. defence team, I declined, because I had appeared on television and opined that he was probably guilty. Bob Shapiro responded by saying, ‘At this time, everyone thinks he’s guilty, but we have to look at all the evidence.’ He also reminded me that O.J. was facing the death penalty and that I generally don’t decline capital cases. With these considerations in mind, I accepted the role as legal and constitutional consultant to the defence team and designated appellate lawyer in the event he was convicted. O.J. referred to me as his ‘God-forbid lawyer.’ Every defendant is entitled zealous representation, but many

When more than two-thirds of the American electorate doesn’t want to vote for either major party’s nominee, a third party should have a chance. Polls have demonstrated that whichever party chucked its front-runner would win –even if it nominated a cloned sheep. Yet last week, having failed to convince a prominent politician to sign up, No Labels closed shop. Whichever wretched candidate wins, we’ll just have slightly different problems The centrist project was doomed from the start. The formation of a successful ‘unity party’ is inherently unlikely in an era of rabid polarisation. Republicans and Democrats differ substantially on policy issues, and compromise positions on tax, Israel, Ukraine, immigration, and