America

They’re calling it ‘revenge travel’: the desire to make up for the touring opportunities we all lost when we were locked down in our pandemical homes. As a keen professional traveller, I confess I’ve got a fearsome case of this bug: I’ve spent the past 20 months going just about anywhere I can, playing catch up. Here’s a brief list of the cities I have visited since mid-2021: Tbilisi, Seville, Munich, New Orleans, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Bangkok, Yerevan, Rome, Istanbul, Athens, Da Nang, Nashville, Los Angeles, Florence, Phnom Penh, Tucson. I could add a dozen more, but you get the gist. I’ve missed a terrific number of domestic social engagements; but

Three children and three staff have been shot dead at a school in the United States. The pupils who died at the Covenant School in Nashville were all just nine years old. The attacker was Audrey Hale, a 28-year old transgender ex-pupil, who was armed with three guns, including a semi-automatic rifle. Hale was shot dead by police during the incident yesterday morning. America’s tragedy is that such appalling incidents just keep happening. Only last week, a 17 year-old wounded two support staff at a high school in Denver; in February, three students were fatally shot at Michigan State University; in January, two teenagers were killed in a ‘targeted shooting’

Along with death and taxes, life has only one other certainty: the DUP will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Fresh from insulting Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in the annual St Patrick’s Day Washington jamboree as a man who needs to ‘read a history book’, the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has now antagonised Downing Street, the EU, the Irish Government, of course, and President Joe Biden by his rejection of the Windsor Framework. Quite an achievement. The ugly Irish DUP cousins have ruined Biden’s parade with their stone wall refusal to go along with the show In the American polity, Ireland, and St Patrick’s Day, is a positive

Often spoken of in the same breath, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are not in fact all that similar. Both men inspire devotion among their followers. Both men are egotists, born privileged in New York. Both have weaknesses when it comes to the opposite sex. But Johnson is more of an introvert than Trump and less interested in money. Boris is a voracious reader who writes his own books. Donald might, like the satirical horror novelist Garth Marenghi, be one of the few people who has written more books than he’s read.  Still, it is curious how, since the rabble-rousing year of 2016, the lives of Johnson and Trump have

The 45th president of the United States of America — and the leading Republican contender to win back the White House in 2024 — may or may not be arrested today or tomorrow.  According to his former-lawyer-turned-legal-nemesis Michael Cohen, Donald Trump should escape the indignity of handcuffs but could well be ‘fingerprinted, swabbed [and] mugshotted.’ Cohen insists he doesn’t want to see images of Trump doing a ‘perp walk’ because, he says, ‘he respects the institution of the presidency.’  Trump may despise Stormy Daniels, but he would surely respect the hustle   Cohen, a convict himself, is hardly the most credible source. But because he’s a witness against Donald Trump, the media and,

How will it look, for the health of American democracy, if the former President Donald Trump is put in handcuffs next week over charges that he paid ‘hush-hush money’ to the porn star Stormy Daniels?  The man himself seems to be bracing for legal persecution over what he calls ‘The Stormy Horseface Daniels Extortion Plot.’ He says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and blames his ’sleazebag’ former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims Trump paid him £230,000 to pay off Daniels and another woman called Karen McDougal, who was voted America’s second ‘sexiest playmate of the 1990s.’  Trump has always denied the allegations and says the whole Daniels case is

Taiwan has lost another friend. Or at least it soon will, according to the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro. She says her country will formally withdraw its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, in favour of recognising China. If this happens, it will leave only 13 countries (and the Holy See) who recognise Taiwan as independent and sovereign.  Support for Taiwan appears to be dwindling – just as the Chinese Communist Party would wish. But there is a slight wrinkle here. This toing and froing about diplomatic recognition emerges not from ordinary diplomacy, but instead one of the absurder aspects of international politics. Recognising either China or Taiwan is an old problem, one springing from the ‘one China

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