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Barak Obama just delivered the most important speech of the 2008 campaign so far. Having stepped to Hillary’s left on the issue of meeting with Castro, Ahamdinejad, Chavez et al, he is now going to her right by pledging himself to military strikes on al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan if Musharraf won’t deal with
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If you have read all seven of the JK Rowling books and still haven’t sated your appetite for knowledge of Potter and friends, then read this QandA between the author and some of her most dedicated readers. (Don’t click on the link if you haven’t yet finished Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows and want
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The BBC are reporting that Ed Davey, Ming’s chief of staff, is floating the idea of his officemate Lembit Opik running for mayor of London. This strikes me as a rather desperate attempt by the Lib Dems to get someone with Boris or Ken level name recognition on the ballot. But there’s no denying that
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Over at Comment Central, Daniel Finkelstein is asking folks what impolite behaviour really gets under their skin in an attempt to draw up a definitive list. He starts us off with David Aaronvitch’s ten suggestions in The Times this morning and adds in a few of his own: people who bellow on their mobiles, make
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The Spice Girls have set up a website allowing fans to vote for one more city to be included on their world tour. But I fear they might be in for a surprise. You can enter any city you want and, oh so predictably, the internet campaign to send them to Baghdad is already under
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One of the fascinating things about Brown’s trip to the United States is how while he has kept his relationship with President Bush workmanlike he has been effusive about America in general. Last night on NBC news he told the anchor Brian Williams: I love your country. I mean I’m, I’m a great supporter of everything
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Christopher Martin -Jenkins, The Times’s cricket correspondent and Test Match Special commentator, has an op-ed that is well worth reading on the excessively heated atmosphere during the Trent Bridge Test in this morning’s paper. The game was definitely not played within the spirit of the game. England’s scattering of jelly beans at the crease, apparently
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A new swathe of Russians has hit town – dancing ones this time. The Bolshoi Ballet opened in swaggering style last night at the Coliseum with the full three-act version of Le Corsaire. Even paid-up balletomanes have often only seen the bravura duet from Act One. The whole thing was gloriously, unabashedly old-fashioned. The plot
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Tony Blair will not take a bow for this one, and you can bet Gordon Brown won’t give him credit. But it looks like his plan for a peacekeeping operation in Darfur is finally going ahead – pretty much as the draft whose details were released on the day he stood down envisaged. It was
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I simply disagree with those who criticised Gordon Brown’s Camp David performance in this morning’s press. He struck me as assured, and eloquent. But he has just let himself down in New York, banging on about his last-century approach to poverty reduction. He wants to give Africa the remedy he prescribes for Britain – borrowing
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“We’ll have as much spine as we possibly can, under the circumstances.” This response by Hillary Clinton to an activist calling on her to show some spine by endorsing federal funding for a needle exchange programmes is incredibly revealing of the Clinton campaign mindset. The Clintons’s electoral success has been based on this approach of
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Rachel Sylvester has a typically astute piece in today’s Telegraph on how Brown differs from both Blair and Bush. Here’s the key section: “Mr Brown is different – not just from Mr Bush but also from Mr Blair. While Mr Bush and Mr Blair see the world in black and white, Mr Brown observes more
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Criticism from Ali Miraj, a Tory activist who was an early supporter of David Cameron and sits on two of the party’s policy review groups, of the Tory party’s lack of substance is getting some ink this morning. But in a combative interview on the Today Programme, David Cameron revealed that just yesterday Miraj asked the
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Gordon Brown will be pleased by how his first press conference with George W. Bush went. There were no disasters even if Bush’s ragging of the press and boast that Brown is a ‘humorous Scot’ will rather grate on British ears. While on the plus side, Bush affirmed that Britain is America’s most important bilateral relationship.
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Ken Pollack and Mike O’Hanlon—neither of whom could be called a neo-conservative, a Bush supporter, or a Republican—have a must read op-ed in the New York Times this morning on Iraq. Their view is that: “We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the
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The death of Ingmar Bergman coincides with the re-release of his greatest film, The Seventh Seal (1957), a meditation upon death and the fear of godlessness set in the middle ages but inspired by the nuclear terrors of the Cold War. The bleakness of Bergman’s oeuvre is undeniable, but his films were not cold: there
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Gordon Brown’s op-ed in the Washington Post this morning shows how fluent he is in the language of the special relationship. (Although, Brown speaks it with a less emotional and more intellectual accent than Blair). His piece hits all the right notes and by approvingly quoting Ronald Reagan he shows Washington’s Republican elite that he
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Gordon Brown’s first Prime Ministerial visit to the United States is working well so far. He has kept his personal distance by wearing a suit and not bringing along his wife but balanced this with a statement expressing admiration for the United States and invoking the usual Churchillian rhetoric. He is not playing to the
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Perhaps the best outcome of these torrid last few weeks is that the Cameron project has been brought down to earth. After winning the party leadership against all the odds, some of the Cameroons had the idea they could walk on water, and rewrite the normal laws of politics. They thought if they said the
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David Davis’s warning to his party to show discipline and stick to the centre ground in today’s Sunday Telegraph is the best news for the other David in a while. Davis is scarcely a woolly liberal, a Soho brand manager or a tree hugger. His voice reaches parts of the party Cameron cannot reach. Well-read