World

Sunday

Jonathan Owen

How California could be heading for its own version of Brexit

On the face of it, Brits and Californians don’t have much in common: one prefers a spot of Earl Grey, the other misguidedly quaffs health-faddish Kombucha. Yet Californians and Englishmen may agree on one thing: self-government. Many golden state separatists see the successful Brexit campaign as an inspiration. In fact, on the official ‘Yes California Independence‘ website, the president of the movement – Louis J Marinelli – mentions Brexit and what it could mean for his fellow Calexiteers: In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the international community with their ‘Brexit’ vote. Our ‘Calexit’ referendum is about California joining the international community. You have a big decision to make. Supporters of

Friday

Simon Barnes

Russia killed Olympic amateurism. Now it might kill anti-doping

The row about Russia’s state-sponsored doping programme will continue for years. The fact is that Russia has a long tradition of Olympic cheating. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the big issue in Olympic sport was amateurism, the Soviet Union and satellites sent unabashed and obvious full-time professional athletes, while the International Olympic Committee, under the mad Avery Brundage, pretended not to notice. Politics first, ethics second. The end result was that amateurism, a dubious proposition at best and in practice an element of the class war, has now gone for ever. Question: will undoped sport go the same way? Russia promotes, the IOC condones, and ethics comes second

Thursday

Christopher Buckley

When the Donald met the Vlad

SpeccieLeaks presents: Transcript of private meeting between President Trump and President Putin, 14 February 2017, Andreyevsky Hall, Grand Kremlin Palace   PUTIN: So how are you liking Russia? TRUMP: Fabulous. Amazing. And this room — incredible. You have beautiful taste, my friend. Beautiful. PUTIN: You like gold? TRUMP: Very much. We used a tremendous amount of gold in the Trump Tower. PUTIN: Yes, it’s something. Truly. I have seen it on television. TRUMP: Those chandeliers there. How much were those? PUTIN: Well, I don’t know. But I will have this information provided to you. TRUMP: That would be great. We just opened a new hotel in DC, right next to

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why I’m telling my son about the sky fairy

After we were married, my husband and I went on honeymoon to Mexico. We drove across country east to west, then north to Mexico City, to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe where I prayed for a baby. My husband, the least judgmental of atheists, sat happy in the babble of ladies all talking loudly, conversationally, to God. In April this year, with a vomity newborn on my shoulder, I made a nightlight out of a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe and some fairy lights. Now, eight months later, as we begin each evening’s slow, hopeful descent towards bed, I take the stout and opinionated baby to say

Wednesday

Charlotte Gill

The fashion world had no moral compass – until Melania Trump came along

Will someone please dress Melania Trump? She looks like something out of The Only Way is Essex in those tight-fitting, mono-coloured dresses, matched with the plastic smile. But the fashion industry will not intervene, for its members have discovered a moral conscience. Designers including Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford and Derek Lam have made known their extreme reluctance to deal with America’s future First Lady. ‘I’d rather put my energy into helping out those who will be hurt by Trump and his supporters,’ said Jacobs. Separately, Lam stated that he would ‘rather concentrate [his] energies on efforts towards a more just, honourable and a mutually respectful world.’ Who knew these fashion leaders

Monday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Forget diplomacy. Donald Trump wants to talk tough to China

It might be better for everyone if, in the spirit of Yuletide Fake News, we all pretended that Donald Trump’s Twitter account was a spoof, or at least an alter of the man’s many egos. The President-elect, for one, doesn’t take his pronouncements on Twitter too seriously. Or does he? It’s safe to say that there is a growing disconnection between the Donald J. Trump who is putting together a reasonably normal cabinet (‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, aside, perhaps) ahead of his first 100 days, and the Twitter Trump who seems to be threatening China, undermining the democratic process that just got him elected, and generally still trolling humanity. The best explanation I’ve heard as to why Trump

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Renzi concedes defeat in Italian referendum and resigns as PM; the Eurozone is heading for a fresh crisis

Matteo Renzi has conceded defeat in the referendum he called on his constitutional reforms and announced that he is resigning as Prime Minister. NO are on course for an overwhelming victory, they are ahead by a close to 60-40 lead in the count at the moment. Needless to say, this referendum result has profound implications for the Eurozone. The market was supposed to have priced in a defeat for Renzi, but the euro has fallen to  $1.05 earlier this evening – down 1pc from Friday’s close. Defeat will lead to calls for early elections, next year and there is a chance that these elections could lead to the Eurozone’s first anti-single currency government.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Supreme Court judges want it both ways

The Article 50 case has at last woken people up to the power of the Supreme Court. On Monday, at Policy Exchange, I appeared on a panel which included the former Supreme Court judge Lord Hope. He seems a dear and distinguished man, so I felt for him when he complained that current ‘vicious’ press attacks on the judges had gone ‘far too far’. When judges gave lectures these days, their words were ‘picked over’, their sentences ‘taken out of context’. Although he is right that judges should be treated courteously, I was stunned by Lord Hope’s failure to realise that the rudeness they have recently encountered is the inevitable

Saturday

Steven Poole

The great intellectual bromance of the last century — between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky

It’s the intellectual bromance of the last century. Two psychologists — Danny, a Holocaust kid and adviser to the Israel Defence Forces, and Amos, a former child prodigy and paratrooper — meet at the end of the 1960s, and sparks immediately begin to fly. They spend countless hours locked in rooms together at Hebrew University and elsewhere, and eventually co-write a series of papers that will revolutionise the field, and lead to the surviving partner being awarded the Nobel prize in economics. Not, however, before this extraordinary partnership has itself fallen apart, like a love affair, in regret and mutual recrimination. Our heroes are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, celebrated

Ed West Ed West

Is democracy in danger?

Is democracy in danger? This is the belief of a Harvard lecturer called Yascha Mounk whose thesis was profiled in an interesting New York Times piece this week. Mounk began studying the subject after writing a memoir about growing up Jewish in Germany which ‘became a broader investigation of how contemporary European nations were struggling to construct new, multicultural national identities’. As the article points out: He concluded that the effort was not going very well. A populist backlash was rising. But was that just a new kind of politics, or a symptom of something deeper? To answer that question, Mr. Mounk teamed up with Roberto Stefan Foa, a political

Charles Moore Charles Moore

François Fillon’s Thatcherism is both respectable and brave

It seems perplexing that François Fillon, now the Republican candidate for the French presidency, should be a declared admirer of Margaret Thatcher. Although she certainly has her fans in France, it is an absolutely standard political line — even on the right — that her ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic liberalism is un-French. Yet M. Fillon, dismissed by Nicholas Sarkozy, whose prime minister he was, as no more than ‘my collaborator’, has invoked her and won through, while Sarko is gone. In this time of populism, M. Fillon has moved the opposite way to other politicians. He says his failures under Sarkozy taught him that France needs the Iron Lady economic reforms which it

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Lawlessness and disorder: Francois Hollande’s presidency has been a disaster

Forgive me if I sound a touch complacent at the news that Francois Hollande has fallen on his sword. In announcing on Thursday night that he won’t be seeking re-election in the spring, Holland has become the first president in the 58-year history of the Fifth Republic to make such a decision. It was the right one. The wrong one was made by all those millions of French men and women four and a half years ago who gave Hollande their vote. I remember well the evening of 6 May. I went out for supper with a friend and on the metro home I passed through Solferino, the station closest

Douglas Murray

How was a gay Islamist porn star able to penetrate Germany’s intelligence agency?

Anybody who has observed Germany in recent years may have noticed that the country’s politicians have gone a bit nuts.  For instance, it isn’t just Chancellor Merkel but a broad swathe of the German political class, who believe it wise to invite an additional 1-2 percent of the population into the country in a year and only wonder afterwards whether this was a good idea. Happily there is a reassuring factor: this is that the German police and domestic intelligence agency (the BfV) generally appear to be on top of the resulting challenges.  Listen to any of their representatives and you will be assured that the agency is fit to

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: BBC presenter blasts ‘imperialist lies’ over Fidel Castro

This week, it’s not gone unnoticed that the BBC have given Fidel Castro’s death a lot of air time and a lot of tributes. As Andrew Roberts noted over the weekend, BBC News described him as ‘one of the world’s longest-serving and most iconic leaders’ only mentioning in the fourth paragraph that ‘Critics saw him as a dictator’. So, Mr S was unsurprised to hear that a BBC presenter had hit out at the ‘imperialist lies’ being spread about the late Cuban dictator. However, on closer inspection it turned out to be a rather refreshing analysis of Castro’s legacy. On This Week, Andrew Neil attempted to set a few things straight about

Thursday

Barnaby Martin

Italy’s own populist revolution may be about to begin

Golden boy, Luigi Di Maio, is the 30-year-old, slickly dressed leader of the Parliamentary Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), Italy’s insurgent political party that is polling ahead of the incumbent Democrats with a smorgasbord of National Socialist-style policies, plucked from the manifestos of the left and right. And just like everyone else in M5S, Di Maio doesn’t like journalists.   This dislike of journalists is not merely the perfectly reasonable loathing that one develops towards the mainstream media (MSM) if one is a vegan, who doesn’t believe in vaccinations, but who does believe that airplane contrails are evidence of government-funded chemical spraying of the population (M5S member beliefs at one

Steerpike Steerpike

Bob Geldof: I led the booing of Mike Pence at Hamilton

Last month, the president-elect declared war on Hamilton — the broadway musical — after his vice-president elect Mike Pence was booed and jeered at during a performance. At the end of the show — which tells the story of Alexander Hamilton — the cast addressed Pence and warned that they were ‘the diverse Americans anxious you will not protect us’. Since then Trump has taken to Twitter to declare that the theatre must be ‘a safe and special place’ and claimed the cast and audience were ‘very rude’ to a ‘very good man’. Given that he is now in the market for an apology, Mr S was intrigued to learn that another high profile figure had

Helen Nugent

British Gas, house prices, savings and petrol

British Gas is freezing its standard tariffs for millions of people over winter. Britain’s biggest energy supplier says the decision – which applies to gas and electricity – will provide peace of mind for more than six million customers, the BBC reports. The move follows similar action from SSE which has said it will cap standard household energy tariffs until April 2017. House prices The BBC reports that annual house price growth has slowed to its lowest rate since January. Nationwide, the UK’s biggest building society and second largest mortgage lender, said that prices in November were 4.4 per cent higher than a year earlier, compared with a 4.6 per cent

Paul Wood

The Brits behind Trump

It’s the Brits wot won it. That is, the US presidential election was won for Donald Trump with the help of a bunch of British nerds — data scientists from a company called Cambridge Analytica. This was the claim, at least, made by the company in a press release a couple of days after the election. ‘No one saw it coming. The public polls, the experts, and the pundits: just about every-body got it wrong. They were wrong-footed because they didn’t understand who was going to turn out and vote. Except for Cambridge Analytica…’ Frank Luntz, a famous pollster and one of those so embarrassingly mistaken, said: ‘They figured out

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The sexy new face of cigarette packaging

Something for which to thank the government, at last. It is much, much more fun buying cigarettes these days. It was quite good fun when they stopped having the fags on display and you had to play a kind of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game with the woman behind the counter. A bit like that section in Play School where you had to guess if it was behind the round window or the square window or the other window, a sort of arched regency type of thing. The woman scurrying hither and thither, pulling back shutters and scouring the shelves, not allowed to open all compartments at one time in case everybody suddenly

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Syria debate has become dangerously partisan

The collective hysteria about the impending fall of eastern Aleppo to government forces strikes me as understandable and laudable only up to a point. If the advance of Assad’s forces on the rebel-held part of Aleppo means, as the French government suggested, the biggest massacre of civilians since the Second World War, then obviously it would be a very bad thing. But the spectacle of MPs and the BBC presenting the conflict as Assad and Putin’s lot trying to kill or starve little girls (there’s an eight-year-old whose tweets from Aleppo are widely circulated) and their mums without mentioning the overall nature of the conflict, strikes me as partial at