8 June 2021 The Silly Season has come early this year. Normally it happens in August, when wicked people all over the northern hemisphere temporarily stop doing evil things to take their children to the beach and enjoy the last of the summer. With no bad news to report, desperate journalists will run any story, …
31 May 2021 “I see a huge and growing gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, two weeks ago, but he despaired a bit too soon. Last Wednesday a Dutch court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s biggest oil companies, must cut its …
10 March 2021 In an letter to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani last weekend, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken insisted that Ghani agree to share power with the Taliban insurgents in a transitional government, to be followed at some point by some sort of election. Understandably, the Afghan leader views this as a shotgun marriage …
7 February 2021 If the Republican Party splits, what name should the breakaway part use? The White People’s Insurrectionary Libertarian True-Blood Republican Party (WPILTBRP), or just the Trump Party? Or maybe the hijacker-in-chief gets to keep the name of the party he stole, in which case the rump has to come up with something completely …
25 January 2021 Most news agencies reported on Sunday that China sent large groups of fighters and bombers into the Taiwanese airspace two days in a row. Much fluttering in the dovecote: the Chinese are testing the resolve of newly installed US President Joe Biden. Considerably fewer agencies also reported that an American aircraft carrier …
18 January 2021 Joe Biden is thrice-blessed. Not only did he win the Democratic nomination and then the presidential election, but as a result of the events of 6 January he takes office when the Republican opposition is in utter disarray and likely to stay that way for a long time. None of that was …
Assange: (Almost) Free at Last! On Monday morning, a British judge finally rejected the US attempt to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and jail him forever (or at least for 175 years in a high-security ‘supermax’ prison) on the grounds that he is, as Joe Biden once called him, a “high-tech terrorist”. The vindictiveness of …
18 November 2020 All the usual caveats apply: don’t go out and celebrate, don’t let your guard down, it’s still going to be a long haul. This winter will be “hard”, warned Uğur Şahin, co-founder and CEO of BioNTech, the German company that announced the first effective Covid-19 vaccine only a week ago. It can’t …
As countries in Europe and North America emerge from lock-down and start trying to rebuild their devastated economies, the great concern is jobs. Unemployment in the US and Canada is over 13%, a post-Second World War high. If it weren’t for subsidies that keep up to a fifth of the working population in paid ‘furloughs’ …
It was completely predictable that Donald Trump would try to blame China for the fact that at least 30 million Americans are unemployed and that 70,000 Americans have already died of Covid-19. His polling numbers are down and the election is only seven months away. What else was he going to do? Blame himself? That’s …