McChrystal’s defenders at the Pentagon were making the case Tuesday that the president and his men—(the McChrystal snipers spared Hillary)—must put aside their hurt feelings about being painted as weak sisters. Obama should not fire...

The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is...

New Labour leader Ed Miliband announces plan to ‘make this party slightly less unelectable by 2015’. He added: ‘I am Ed, the Almighty One.’Defeated brother David Miliband overheard muttering: ‘Now I know how Wayne Christ...

Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they’ve never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.

The socioeconomic impact of such a minor outburst is due to our technological development (air travel)—a century ago, such an eruption would have passed unnoticed. Technological development makes us more independent from nature. At the...

So this is where all the vapid talk about the ‘soul’ of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the...

When first asked if he would grant an interview with TIME, Greene responded by asking a question of his own: ‘Does the candidate get paid?

[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of...

The prince’s official job description as king will be ‘defender of the faith,’ which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to...

When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don’t have clean water, when you don’t have a sewer system, when you don’t have electricity, and on top of that you live under one...

There wasn’t even enough meat to make proper fun of [….] I keep waiting for somebody else to come on TV, maybe a cabinet member, to read the real speech, the one that tells us...

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns...

If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor even as an idealist. It will...

Well we’ve left behind the 200X’s, and we move onto the 20XX’s. Maybe that will finally make us feel like we’re living in the future, rather than a media controlled slave state where an iPhone...

The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one...

Indian cricket, and the youngsters themselves, are dealing with issues inconceivable a few summers ago. Riches and all the attendant temptations are thrown at them before they have started shaving regularly. It’s not their fault....

It’s my birthday, by the way, and as of 2:05 this morning (the time of my birth in the middle of a snow storm on the Fort Dix army base in New Jersey) I’m 52...

It’s almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns ‘privately with the administration.’ That’s just a small sliver of...

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the...

The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence of sincere attempts at deficit-reduction the evidence is baffling. The Republicans showed before Christmas that they...

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician’s spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in...

There is no way that the new WikiLeaks leaks don’t leave Hillary Clinton holding the smoking gun. The time for her departure may come next week or next month, but sooner or later, the weakened...

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.

These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.Wait—Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered?...

Here was a temporary solution. Parole would get Mofokeng and Mokoena out of jail as quickly as possible. Other details could be sorted out later. I accompanied Nyambi to Kroonstad jail at the end of...

I thought I was getting away from politics for a while. But I now realise that the vuvuzela is to these World Cup blogs what Julius Malema is to my politics columns: a noisy, but...

For the hundreds of thousands of Californians in gay and lesbian households who are managing their day-to-day lives, this decision affirms the full legal protections and safeguards I believe everyone deserves.

[W]hat possible purpose does this lashing-out serve? Will activists be shamed into recovering their previous enthusiasm? Will Republicans stop their vicious attacks because Obama is lashing out to his left? It was pure self-indulgence; even...

This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, ‘When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.’ But the serious critique of Zuma is...

When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening’s...

My feeling is this whole country is founded on the principle of ‘if you are not hurting anyone, and you’re not fucking with someone else’s shit, and you are paying your taxes, you should be...

And that’s just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will...