15 February 2021 The self-esteem of two-year-olds and nation-states is too fragile for them to admit they were wrong, which makes it hard for them to move on from blunders. That’s why the toys don’t get picked up and the broken treaties don’t get fixed, and why there may be a tantrum (in the case …
30 December 2020 The recent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan made sense, in an old-fashioned way. The dispute was about territory – borders that were drawn almost a century ago by a Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin – and Azerbaijan had lost the last war and a lot of land. So the Azerbaijanis spent a lot …
3 November 2020 By the time you read this you may know more than I do as I write it, but some conclusions about the US election are already certain. First, this has been essentially a re-run of the 2016 presidential election. The final Electoral College tally and therefore the presidency may still be in …
7 October 2020 Now is when it gets interesting. The announcement last Friday that US President Donald Trump had fallen ill with Covid-19 hardly came as a surprise. His political strategy of playing down Covid-19 required him to be reckless about his own health, and other Republicans were already dropping like flies. Fourteen Republican Senators …
16 September 2020 President Donald Trump declared “the dawn of a new Middle East” in Washington on Tuesday as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrein signed public agreements with Israel for the first time. Not “peace agreements”, as Trump claimed, since neither country has ever been at war with Israel. Just documents involving an exchange …
8 September 2020 Nine of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have just promised not to apply for regulatory approval for any new Covid-19 vaccine before it has gone through all three phases of clinical study. Why would they do such a thing? You’d be surprised if brain surgeons got together and promised not to operate …
Few people outside of Poland care about the outcome of last Sunday’s presidential election there, but maybe they should. Andrzej Duda is practically a Polish clone of Donald Trump, who will also be seeking re-election less than four months from now – and Duda squeaked out a victory. Duda only got 51.2% of the vote …
As British newspaper magnate Viscount Northcliffe said: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” Men don’t bite dogs every day, however, and the news media need ‘content’ every day just to hold the ads apart. So often …
There is movement towards peace in Afghanistan – or at least towards an end to the American military ordeal there, which has lasted for almost eighteen years. US officials and representatives of the Taliban insurgents have held seven rounds of direct talks in the tiny Gulf state of Qatar since last October, and they are …
Every once in a while a photograph of a migrant’s tragic death (usually that of a child) catches the public’s imagination. The image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, fleeing from the Syrian civil war, dead face down in the surf on a Turkish beach in 2015, triggered a wave of sympathy that ended with Germany opening …