All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
I’m writing this from Washington, DC, where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and think-tankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can
There is an unhappy history of left-wing Britons getting involved in US elections. Back in 2004, the Guardian – the flagship organ of the British left – organized a letter-writing campaign, urging voters in the swing state of Ohio not to re-elect George W. Bush. The good people of Ohio didn’t take kindly to a bunch of
Voters decided to stick with the lesser of two liberal evils
If you think America doesn’t permit assisted suicide, you haven’t been watching the New York mayoral election. The city is deliberately killing itself. The country’s largest city, its financial and media capital, had a choice among three truly dreadful candidates: a deeply-tarnished former governor, a Republican who runs in every election except Homecoming Queen and
William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. New York City is about to be governed by the Columbia University student body. A city that used to think of itself as grown up has just elected
So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offense? She dared to
She campaigned on the basis of what she was not: not Trump, not MAGA
Big government went all in to retain power behind the Sierra Curtain
His presence in Gracie Mansion will send unmistakable messages to police and criminals alike
Both parties clearly saw this election as an indicator for elections to come
Joy Behar said, ‘you’re slamming Republicans too much. You’re taking my job’
Former vice president Dick Cheney died last night aged 84. He arrived in Washington as a congressman for Wyoming, then became secretary for defense under George H.W. Bush and served for eight years as George W. Bush’s vice president. He was considered by many to have pulled the strings behind the Bush administration. What is
The races are being talked of – rightly or not – as an early test for Trump
Instead of vilifying Cheney, MAGA-world should offer him a bouquet of appreciation
It was an ethnic massacre so bad that it could be seen from space. Satellites picked up bloodied patches of soil in North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, after Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) swept into the besieged city. Pools of blood and piles of bodies were identified. Thousands of people are feared to have died in
It’s been almost a year since Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that arguably held more power in Lebanon than the government itself, signed a ceasefire to end a ferocious two-month long war. The deal couldn’t have come at a better time; thousands of Israeli air and artillery strikes had pulverized southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s traditional base
Sheridan has been working at a rate of energy that would kill many lesser men
The President was calm – and even counterintuitive
A deceptive splicing of clips in a documentary made it look like the President had ordered the storming of the Capitol
Maud Maron – who is standing for Manhattan DA – says the city would vote for a moderate Republican mayor
Emmanuel Macron says Europeans should stop relying on social media for their news and turn back to traditional public media. Speaking in Paris on Wednesday, he said people were “completely wrong” to use social networks for information and should instead depend on journalists and established outlets. Social platforms, he argued, are driven by a ‘process
Americans must confront the colonization the British are enduring – or suffer the same fate
They preach environmental sustainability through draconian measures – at the expense of common sense and science
The President says the battleship will return as the centerpiece of his new Golden Fleet
As on the left, there’s a significant number of people on the political right who simply hate the Jews
In this fraught international context, Trump is acting totally sane
Trump’s plan would mean statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico and sweeping firearms restrictions
Christianity is today the most oppressed religion in the world
Forces that mobilized over Gaza have, in the case of atrocities being committed in Sudan, fallen almost entirely silent
Though he received no presents from Xi, Trump clearly enjoyed cavorting abroad and collecting tribute
The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a “law of science” in 1968: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would
Aside from streaming on an iPad, when riding a stationary bike one of the few entertainments on offer is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops
When I joined The Spectator in 2000, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-story Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings
In his youth, Emil Lundin became obsessed with the idea of recording the world’s “most evil album.” The lanky, long-haired Swede formed a black-metal band and set to work. He faced an immediate obstacle. In making history’s most nefarious musical creation, he could hardly use Swedish, with its singsong tones. English was also out of