World

To an older generation a school trip was something to be endured as much as enjoyed. It meant an expedition to peer at frogspawn in Epping Forest or, for the recklessly profligate, maybe a coach to Skegness. Over recent decades, however, as top schools have raised their fees in line with the international oligarchy’s ability to pay them, school trips have come to resemble the work of chichi travel agents. Designed to build character, they now build air miles. The trend was already well under way when I was at school in the austere early noughties. Twice a year we went on ‘expeditions’. Some were to the traditional sodden youth

Yesterday Jeremy Clarkson was suspended from Top Gear by the BBC following a ‘fracas’ with a member of staff. Today, the Telegraph reports that the incident occurred on set in Newcastle after the Top Gear presenter grew angry about the lack of catering arrangements for the crew, allegedly leading him to punch a show producer. While sources close to Clarkson deny any punch-up occurred, the BBC are still pushing ahead with plans to drop the remaining Top Gear episodes from their broadcasting schedule. This has not gone down well with Clarkson, who appeared to let his feelings known when he retweeted an upset fan on Twitter: @JeremyClarkson how can @BBC not show the remaining episodes of

Fifty years since the first civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, America still has huge problems with race. Only this week a federal investigation into the killing of an unarmed black man in Ferguson last year concluded that the police there were racist. They’ve been making millions of dollars by targeting black people and issuing tickets for minor traffic infractions. Across America, black people are still poorer, less educated and more likely to go to gaol than white people. In 1962 The Spectator’s New York correspondent Murray Kempton wrote: In the best of cases, to be a Negro in America is to have a station below your capacities… The

  Eastern Ukraine For a moment, the sound of shelling is drowned out by a thumping beat coming from a camouflaged van. ‘Separatysty [Separatists]!’ says the rousing chorus: ‘The day of your death is here!’ We are with a Ukrainian nationalist militia in a village outside Donetsk airport, which is in the hands of pro-Russian rebels, usually referred to by the Ukrainians as terorysty or bandyty. But despite their bravado, the war is not going well for the Ukrainian side. There have been a series of disastrous setbacks, towns and territory lost, whole units put to panicky flight. The shattered village, Piesky, reminds me of Chechnya or Bosnia, the houses’

The Iraqi military’s attempt to retake Tikrit from Islamic State tells us several things about the current politics of the region. First, the Iraqi state is heavily reliant on the Iranians for military assistance. The Iranian Fars News Agency has reported that this assault is being backed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard including the commander of its elite Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Reuters says that Soleimani can be seen directing operations from a hill and that his presence is crucial in terms of controlling the Iraqi Shi’ite militias, many of whom are Iranian trained. Second, there is a danger that Islamic State might succeed in precipitating the sectarian

The murder of Boris Nemtsov, even more than previous assassinations of journalists and other figures deemed unhelpful to Vladimir Putin’s regime, feels like a moment of grim significance. It represents a watershed, dividing Putin’s past from his future. It is true, for sure, that Putin has rarely bothered to conceal his darker side. True, too, that too many people are prone to forgetting his actions – or rather the actions of people close to and supportive of Putin – in the Moscow apartment bombings which eased his path to power. Nevertheless, for a long time now, many people have preferred to turn away from the reality of Putin’s Russia. Reality

The historian Tom Holland tweeted this morning: ‘What ‪#ISIS are doing to the people & culture of ‪#Assyria is worthy of the Nazis. None of us can say we didn’t know.’ What #ISIS are doing to the people & culture of #Assyria is worthy of the Nazis. None of us can say we didn’t know: http://t.co/Ndi02TeueK — Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 27, 2015 He linked to a Washington Post article about how the Islamist group had kidnapped at least 200 Assyrian Christians from their homes in north-east Syria, and may well be preparing to murder them. In another tweet he showed a video by Assyriology professor Simo Parpola on the

How could they? How could girls brought up in the wealthy West abandon their families and their own bright futures to join Isis, a gang of vicious thugs? It’s not just our girls, either, they’re sneaking off to Syria from across Europe and America too, teenagers, bright ones typically, set on becoming sex slaves in a war zone. London’s latest runaways — Shamima, Amira, Kadiza — were pupils at Bethnal Green Academy and the headmaster there, a Mr Keary, echoed most people’s reaction when he shook his head and said: ‘I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make sense.’ But Mr Keary’s wrong, most people are wrong. It does make sense.

A report in today’s Times suggests that French Jews are ready to discard their long-standing distrust for the Far Right and vote for the Front National. In January, Rachel Halliburton described how Marine Le Pen’s public condemnation of anti-Semitism had won her votes, as had her insistence that the party was the only one that defends secularity and democracy against Islamisation. A key part of her strategy has been to use the threat of radical Islam to court the sort of people that the far right has traditionally persecuted, including the gay community and the Jewish community.   That gay men now feel comfortable with the Front National is the result of a deliberate effort

I’m with Rod on the wannabe jihadi brides going to Syria.  The whole official approach demonstrated by the BBC et al is just the same as the government-sponsored videos that crop up on YouTube urging people not to join Isis: a sort of ‘please don’t go, we’re better together’ pleading. But if we really do want to stop young people going out, why not put a bit more grit into it?  A bit more stick as well as carrot?  Why waste this massive amount of airtime just to say that these poor girls didn’t know what they were doing, are nice girls really etc. Why not use it to actually

We are alarmingly close to the most serious confrontation between Russia and the United States since the end of the Cold War. A proxy war between Moscow and Washington on Europe’s Eastern border now seems more likely than not. The Americans were always sceptical of the Franco-German attempt to broker a ceasefire in Ukraine. Events in the last few days have reinforced that scepticism and I understand from senior British government figures that if pro-Russian forces take the town of Mariupol, Washington will begin to arm the Ukrainian military directly. This will lead to a major escalation in the conflict. Obama is more reluctant to arm the Kiev government than

The more you read about the deal between Greece and the Eurozone, the clearer it becomes how temporary a deal it is. First, the Syrzia-led government has to submit on Monday a list of the reforms that it intends to implement over the next four months before the bailout is extended. Then, negotiations will have to start on a third Greek bailout for when this one runs out in the summer. These negotiations will be particularly fraught because of the lack of goodwill on all sides. Last night, Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, declared ‘The Greeks certainly will have a difficult time to explain the deal to their voters.’ Now,

If you haven’t already seen it, I recommend reading this fantastic essay by the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood on What Isis Really Wants. He takes the time to look into the theology of the ‘so-called Islamic State’, as the BBC insists on calling them (I can’t remember ‘so called Irish Republican Army’), and there is no doubting the theological link. To single out just one passage: ‘Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who

Germany wants nothing less than an unconditional surrender from the new Greek government. It is hard to draw any other conclusion from Berlin’s decision to reject Greece’s proposal for a six month extension of the current bailout, which counted as an almost total climb-down by the Syriza-led government. But it seems that the Germans—with an eye on the Spanish elections later this year —want to show that voting for radical, anti-austerity parties gets you absolutely nothing. However, the Germans may well have miscalculated. The Greek Finance Minister wants Greece to leave the euro but, because the vast majority of Greeks wants to stay in the single currency, he has had