While Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) frantically tries to scrub Jamal Khashoggi’s blood off his hands like a Middle Eastern Lady Macbeth – “Here’s the smell of blood still. Not all the sweet perfumes of Arabia will sweeten this hand.” – could we have a word about his war in Yemen too?
The last time I wrote about the treaty banning ‘intermediate-range’ nuclear missiles was 31 years ago, and I really thought I’d never have to visit that tedious subject again. More fool me.
A man who makes Donald Trump look like a bleeding-heart liberal will almost certainly be Brazil’s next president. Jair Bolsonaro won 46 percent of the vote in Sunday’s first round of the Brazilian presidential election, with twelve other candidates running. Fernando Haddad, who will face him alone in the run-off in three weeks’ time, got only 29 percent.
Fifteen years after George W. Bush invaded Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s imaginary ‘weapons of mass destruction’, what have the Iraqis got to show for it? There was a great deal of death and destruction (around half a million Iraqis have died violently since 2003), but they do now have a democratically elected government. Sort of.
There was bound to be a backlash to the ‘Me Too’ movement, and the struggle over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court is clearly part of that culture war. ‘Me Too’ is going to lose this battle unless there is some new and horrendous revelation of Kavanaugh’s past behaviour in the next few days, and lots of people in the US and elsewhere see this as evidence that the war itself is being lost.
The men who carried out Sept. 22 attack on the parade in Ahvaz, in Iran’s southwestern province of Khuzestan, were well trained: four of them killed 25 people and wounded 70 others before they were shot dead. The question is whether they were trained by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or by the backers of the low-profile Ahvaz National Resistance, which also claimed credit for the attack.
Ten years ago this month the financial services firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, triggering the 2008 Crash and the subsequent Great Recession from which the world’s economies have still not fully recovered. Will we look back on this month as the turning point when Donald Trump’s trade war with China unleashed the Second Great Recession?
Salisbury is a nice old English town with a fine cathedral, only an hour and a half from London by train, but it doesn’t see many Russian tourists in wintertime. It’s not as cold as Moscow, but Russians tend to prefer Mediterranean destinations for holiday breaks in early March – unless, of course, they are planning to kill somebody.
I was one of five children, so I am in an invidious position when I write about population growth. That was quite normal at the time where I grew up, but I and my brothers and sisters have had a total of only ten children, so we’re down to replacement level in this generation. This is not happening in Tanzania.
