America

I’ve never cared for the expression ‘affirmative action’, which puts a positive spin on a negative practice: naked, institutionalised racial discrimination – that is, real ‘systemic racism’, which was initiated in the United States long before the expression came into fashion. After all, following the Civil War, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution were expressly added to establish equality under to law for Americans of all races, and a raft of Congressional civil rights legislation has since reinforced this colour-blind principle. Perhaps I risk sounding ungrateful. Still, now the Supreme Court has finally ruled that universities in the US are forbidden from admitting students on the basis of race, my

Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has conceded defeat in his bid to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as secretary-general of Nato. Wallace had been a strong contender for the job, owing to his role in supporting Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. But now it seems the role will go to a character in the mould of the incumbent, a compromise candidate who least offends the countries doing the choosing. The role is simply too big and important to be left to this kind of petty box-ticking and political horse trading. Wallace appeared to suggest, in an interview with the Economist, that he faced opposition to his candidacy from America and France. The next

The five departed souls of the Titan submersible suffered two tragedies. First, the tragedy of dying in a catastrophic implosion deep in the North Atlantic. Then the tragedy of posthumous ridicule. There seems to be a stark and bleak lack of sympathy for the men who perished. Instead a moralistic mob has found them guilty in death of the worst sin of our times: hubris. Much of the discussion about these doomed adventure seekers is making me feel nauseous. The virtual chatter is even worse. The bony finger of judgement is being pointed. ‘Who in their right mind would pay a quarter of a million dollars to gawp at the

On taking office, Joe Biden promised a new approach to foreign policy based on prioritising democratic values and human rights. The US president spoke of ‘the battle between democracy and autocracy’ as the defining struggle of the time, effectively dividing the world into two clear and opposing camps. Now Biden is having to eat his own words by playing host to Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India. It would be a stretch to describe Modi as a standard bearer for human rights or Western democratic values.  Even so, Modi is being given the red carpet treatment in Washington, including the honour of making an address to a joint session

Just as a stopped clock shows the correct time twice a day, so president Joe Biden, amidst the plethora of gaffes that regularly issues from his lips, occasionally utters the plain and unvarnished truth. So it was at a Democratic fundraiser in California yesterday when Biden called China’s president Xi Jinping ‘a dictator’. Explaining why he gave the order to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon that entered US airspace in February, the president said that Xi had been ‘embarrassed’ because the balloon had been blown off course and ‘he didn’t know it was there’. US diplomats, like secretary of state Anthony Blinken (who has just inconclusively met Xi in

When Antony Blinken got on the plane to Beijing two days ago, the US Secretary of State didn’t even know if he’d be meeting with Xi Jinping. Blinken’s visit was originally planned for February before the US withdrew, at the last minute, after a Chinese spy balloon was spotted over Montana. Beijing has always insisted there was nothing untoward about the balloon, seeing the cancellation of Blinken’s visit as an overreaction. US-China relations have been frosty since. Despite this tension, the Secretary of State was granted an audience with the Chinese leader earlier today – but only with a few hours’ notice. The short meeting, which lasted only 30 minutes, is a sign that Beijing, like Washington, wants to

The scene in Miami was somewhat less than promised today. The predicted tens of thousands of protesters were replaced instead by the handful of eccentrics who always seem to find ways to show up at things involving Donald Trump – even historically significant things like the first federal arraignment of a president of the United States on criminal charges. As expected, inside the courthouse Trump pled not guilty to all thirty-seven counts brought against him by the feds, and his mood was reportedly somber.  For Trump, it’s quite possible that this case will drag out well into the 2024 presidential race and potentially beyond. He has claimed that he will

Planes grounded in New York, people told to stay indoors – and an actress forced to leave the stage on Broadway because of the smoke. Canada is ‘on fire’ and New York is choking from the drifting smoke – and it is all the result of man-made climate change. We know this because Justin Trudeau and other have told us so.  ‘We’re seeing more and more of these fires because of climate change,’ tweeted Trudeau this week, ‘We’ll keep working – here at home and with partners around the world – to tackle climate change and address its impacts.’  US vice president Kamala Harris added her ha’porth of wisdom of wisdom by

Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If that’s true, then what the American justice system is doing to Donald Trump is barking mad.  Yes, he’s been indicted, again – on seven federal criminal charges. It’s all unprecedented, again – he’s the first president ever to face, blah, blah, blah. We’re all familiar with the ‘Trump facing…’ news loop by now. America is stuck in Trump legal groundhog day — he’s remorselessly prosecuted, over and over, on so many fronts. He always responds the same way, protesting his INNOCENCE in capital letters on Truth Social, saying he can’t believe this is happening

If you thought American book-banning couldn’t get any more ridiculous, think again. A school district in Utah, one of the most religious states in the country, has banned the Bible.  The Bible – fundamental to the state’s Protestant, Catholic and Mormon churches – is to be removed from elementary and middle school libraries for containing ‘vulgarity or violence’. The authorities for the school district of Davis County, just north of Salt Lake City, upheld a parental complaint that the Bible contained ‘incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide’. The parent, who attached an eight-page list of verses unsuitable for children, wrote: ‘Get this PORN out of our schools.’ The

It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable centre of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomised by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better. In the early days of the tech revolution, some watchers imagined an almost utopian, communitarian society on the horizon. In 1972, the California writer and zeitgeist diagnostician Stewart Brand predicted in Rolling Stone that when computers became widely

It’s no secret that I’m not a personal fan of former president Donald Trump – but through the years I feel I’ve been mostly fair to him, his presidency, his accomplishments and his failures. Something, though, dawned on me during his friendly Fox town hall with Sean Hannity on Thursday night, which wasn’t really a town hall, due to not being live and no audience questions until the last ten minutes of the hour. I’ve been critical of Trump and have praised him, but I’ve rarely ever been bored by him – and that was my impression coming away from his first real sit-down with Iowa voters.  What struck me about this ‘2024-facing’

A few months back I asked a question of Donald Trump: does he know why he’s running to be president again? He made one major speech of which even some of his most ardent followers questioned the enthusiasm. Since then he has occupied the depths of Truth Social and not much more.  After his announcement to seek the presidency for a third time last November (he ran as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, remember), he has held one campaign rally, one town hall on CNN, made one stop in Iowa and another where he canceled a much-hyped rally. He has spent much of his time taking shot after shot

Joseph Robinette Biden, a practising Catholic, has travelled a long way when it comes to gay rights. In 1996, as Senator for Delaware, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which blocked the federal recognition of same-sex unions. Two years earlier he voted to cut funding to schools that taught the acceptance of homosexuality. In the 1970s, when asked about homosexuals in the US military, he replied: ‘My gut reaction is that they are a security risk but I must admit I have not given this much thought… I’ll be darned!’   Saudi Arabia is the world’s second-biggest oil producer and so it gets a pass. Uganda has little to

People imagine that the real world is similar to the dark side of the TV show Succession. For some reason we enjoy thinking that media barons and tech tycoons pull the strings of global power, creating the election-deciding narratives which the bovine public then swallows whole.  But the truth, as Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis showed so spectacularly with their disastrous campaign announcement on Twitter last night, is much more like the funnier bits in Succession. It’s cock-up not conspiracy.  His candidacy makes so much sense in theory. But he’s slipping further and further behind Trump in the polls People mocked Elon Musk last month when his big SpaceX launch

Boris Johnson, Britain’s most sought-after Churchill impersonator, visited Texas on Monday to urge a group of rich right-wing Americans to never, never, never give in to Vladimir Putin. ‘I just urge you all to stick with it,’ Agent Bojo told a private lunch of conservative politicians and donors in Dallas. ‘You are backing the right horse. Ukraine is going to win.’ Johnson wasn’t paid to speak at the lunch, though it’s worth noting that he only stopped over in Texas on the way to the SCALE Fintech conference in Las Vegas, where he is expected to receive a six-figure sum for talking about the future of innovation alongside Saudi Arabia’s