America

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter over the past few years you will almost certainly have met the ‘woke toddler’. This is where progressive parents share the super cute and achingly right-on insights of their tiny charges. Over time, potentially genuine anecdotes have given way to up-front political commentary. A classic of the kind might be the days-old baby who asks granny to name ‘one genuine economic benefit of Brexit’. With more people in on the joke, these tweets slowly died a death. So it was a surprise to see President Biden attempt to revive the genre this week by tweeting his response to ‘Charlotte’. To be fair to

There are few surprises in the Aukus nuclear-powered submarine programmed announced by Rishi Sunak, his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese, and US president Joe Biden overnight. Australia will get its fleet of nuclear submarines. The United States will supply Virginia-class boats to Australia for the 2030s; US Virginias and Royal Navy Astute-class boats will be stationed in Western Australia later this decade. And the three partners, under British leadership, will develop a new ‘Aukus-class’ of nuclear submarines for the 2040s and beyond. It’s a hugely ambitious programme, and geopolitically astute. A risk-averse Sir Humphrey Appleby might have even called it ‘courageous’. Rishi Sunak, however, was right when he told Biden and

Everybody knows that free speech is protected in America under the First Amendment of the nation’s constitution. It’s quite striking, then, to see the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer demanding that a major television network stop its leading anchor from airing footage he doesn’t like.   ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a primetime cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night,’ said Schumer, referring to Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, who this week began showing new security camera images from the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anchor treat the American people and American democracy with

In recent weeks I have been trying out a mental exercise. Perhaps you might join me? Cast your mind back to 1999. We were standing on the dawn of a new millennium. True, there was a strange fear that all the computers might crash because of a bug called Y2K. But aside from that there seemed to be a tremendous optimism. One of the biggest causes for this was the nature of information technology: specifically, the internet. Imagine if someone had said to you then: ‘We are heading into a world where almost anything can be read at the click of a mouse. Almost all the great books will be

Embellishing job applications is a well-honed skill. At the stroke of a pen, two months as an intern becomes four months in a junior position. Being in charge of paper clips is demonstrating leadership. The assistant to the regional manager becomes the assistant regional manager. But no matter how commonplace this exaggeration is, few of us go full Don Draper and make up things about who we actually are. Meet Raquel Evita Saraswati. Saraswati is chief equity, inclusion and culture officer at the Philadelphia-based American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organisation that fights globally for peace and social justice. Her qualifications for the role are impressive. Not only does Saraswati

It’s by now well-established that Fox News, the American media behemoth, is no longer on the Trump Train. Trumpworld’s union with Foxworld was never altogether easy and, ever since that fateful election in November 2020, it has fallen apart. Trumpists despise Fox for, as many see it, helping Joe Biden steal the election. And the top brass at Fox News have sought to distance themselves from the Trump movement and what they regard as its increasingly toxic politics. Rupert Murdoch has had enough of the Orange One, by all accounts. What hasn’t been made entirely clear is the extent of the break-up. One senior Fox figure has let slip, however,

The US government has warned British security officials that the ‘five eyes’ intelligence-sharing agreement may be at risk if the UK imperils the Good Friday Agreement by pulling out of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). I understand that this point has been made recently, and fairly clearly, in talks between the UK and US sides. Rishi Sunak has been holding open the prospect of withdrawing from the ECHR if it frustrates his plans to deport asylum seekers who enter the UK illegally. But this would blow a hole in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which says that citizens of Northern Ireland will receive human rights protections based on

It was only a matter of time before Joe Biden made a ‘surprise’ visit to Kiev. In the year since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the choreographed walkabout with Volodymyr Zelensky has become the must-do photo-op for western global leaders. It’s the 21st century equivalent of an audience with the Pope – a symbolic news happening which shocks no one.  That’s not to say it’s not important. It signals, yet again, that America – the most powerful military and financial player on planet earth – is firmly behind Zelensky and his efforts to repel the Russian invasion. Biden may not, at this moment, be willing to provide the jets that the

At first, it sounded like Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address was going to be another snoozer. Out of the gate came clanging all the usual paeans to bipartisanship: ‘To my Republican friends,’ Biden said, ‘if we could work together in the last Congress, there is no reason we can’t work together in this new Congress!’ Given that just five months ago Biden was pronouncing Trump supporters ‘a threat to this country’, that seemed a bit rich. Sure enough the fake bonhomie didn’t last. What unfolded over the next hour and a quarter was the weirdest, most disorienting State of the Union address I’ve ever seen. The president kept

It was always assumed that the moment Donald Trump walked out of the White House on the morning of Joe Biden’s inauguration, he would begin angling for a second non-consecutive term in 2024. A year ago, he launched his own Twitter imitation platform, Truth Social, and then in November he officially launched his presidential campaign. His speech was met with tepid enthusiasm, even by some of his most ardent supporters. The only apparent reason for another Trump candidacy is because he wants to avenge his 2020 loss like a boxer In the weeks since, Trump has spent his time on Truth Social attacking Republicans and prospective rival candidates and once

A trade war is brewing between the United States and its closest allies. When Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal markets commissioner, pulled out of a summit with US officials just before Christmas, he complained that the agenda ‘no longer gives sufficient space to issues of concern to many European industry ministers and businesses’. A few days before, Emmanuel Macron cornered senator Joe Manchin in Washington DC. ‘You’re hurting my country’, the French president told Manchin. The senator was given a similarly frosty reception at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Germany’s Olaf Scholz and Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel accosted him caustically. The Europeans are upset about Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction

The video of Tyre Nichols’ arrest makes for unbearable viewing. The 29-year-old father is dragged out of a car before being set upon by five black policemen. Lawyers for his family said the officers acted like a ‘pack of wolves’; after watching the film, it’s hard to dispute that description. As the backlash to the incident in Memphis on 10 January intensifies, there are plenty of unanswered question. But it seems that Black Lives Matter is already jumping to conclusions. Any hope that Nichols’ horrifying death might spark some unity in the United States has been dashed by the release of a demoralising statement from BLM. Rather than using Nichols’

The reaction to the brutal death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old, after he was stopped by police has been strangely muted. Nichols, a father-of-one, died of his injuries on 10 January, three days after a confrontation with five black officers in Memphis, Tennessee. Lawyers for the family said Nichols, an African-American, was beaten ‘like a human piñata’. The heartbreaking footage of Nichols’s mother, Rowvaughn Wells, breaking down in tears has made the headlines. But the coverage marks a sharp contrast to the fallout after the death of another man, George Floyd, at the hands of police. That incident back in 2020 triggered a worldwide outpouring of grief and anger; the

If Britain’s great flaw is the class system, America’s might be its obsession with classifying official information. There’s a reason ‘that’s classified, sir’ is a stock phrase in so many Hollywood films. Americans tend to revere elite secrecy in the same way British snobs worship aristocracy. You can own lots of land in America and still be a hick. If you’ve gotten hold of sensitive state files, however – well, son, you’ve made it. This fetish for high-bureaucratic privilege might explain why Donald Trump took so many classified papers to his billionaire’s lair in Mar-a-Lago, much as a pirate might squirrel away treasure in a trove. Trump’s favourite film is

Joe Biden has become the Typhoid Mary of classified documents, spreading them as he goes. They keep turning up in batch after batch, everywhere but the floor at Starbucks. The President has said almost nothing about the mess, except to reassure us that ‘people know I take classified documents seriously’. That defence has since taken on a slight change of punctuation: ‘People know I take classified documents. Seriously.’ He certainly does. He takes them everywhere. Most recently, classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, a foreign policy thinktank in Washington, DC established by Biden in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. The documents raise additional questions. Why were