Washington Post

Cockburn was back in the old country this week, stuffing small brown envelopes with money and slipping them through the letterboxes of wavering Conservative voters before making his personal Brexit back to DC to read the articles of impeachment. As the wheels went up and the gin and tonic went down, he reclined in Club with the newspapers, and also the Washington Post.‘Americans should be jealous of British elections,’ was the headline. Henry Olsen, the Post’s in-house Deplorable, covers ‘populism and American conservative thought’.

Headline-writing can be hard, chaps. Especially when you have to capture the true spirit of a person in the light of their death. But with the demise of Isis founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a truly heinous individual, surely putting his character into black and white is a black-and-white issue. If you're the Washington Post, apparently not, as Spectator contributor Kelly Jane Torrance was one of the first to point out. https://twitter.com/KJTorrance/status/1188467380491640833 'Austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State dies at 48', the paper crowed, dolefully commemorating the life of the man who inspired hundreds of deaths. Obviously, the headline of his obituary has since been changed.

If you do ever find yourself in Moscow with a spare morning or afternoon to discharge, might I recommend a visit to the Museum of Cosmonautics? Roosting below the grandly named ‘Monument to the Conquerors of Space’, the frigid, rather shabby rooms of this museum contain exhibits that are as moving as anything that’s ever been placed in a glass box for tourists to gawp at. When you consider that Soviet Cosmonauts ‘touched the face of God’ using crude, dangerous technology that contained less processing power than the average contemporary fridge – when you consider the sheer bravery of men like Gagarin, Belyayev and Komarov – the major response is (and ought to be) pride. Pride on a human level, that is to say, a species-level pride.

When Trump declared the border situation a national emergency, you couldn’t move for breathless headlines questioning the constitutionality of his order. But has the mainstream media always held this deep commitment to reporting on the limits of power of the nation’s chief executive? Trump is hardly the first president to make use of an executive order in order to circumvent Congress. Back in February, 2011, President Obama began contemplating strikes against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Article I, Section 8, of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war.

Enquiring minds want to know what fallout the National Enquirer story about Jeff Bezos, the proprietor of the Washington Post, will have on the Trump presidency. The Post, to the ire of Trump, has relentlessly pursued Trump, focusing on his illicit business activities.