Us politics

The Democratic nomination process for 2020 is a race and Bernie Sanders should be the overwhelming favourite. He’s just announced his candidacy, and he’s the form horse, having come a close second in 2016. He won 46 per cent of elected delegates and 23 states. He smashed all sorts of fundraising records. He has a huge movement behind him, something which none of the other announced Democratic candidates have. Somehow, by hook and crook, the Clinton machine scuppered his candidacy last time. But the Clinton machine is nearly destroyed. Who can stop him now? Bernie has consistently polled as the most popular politician in America. He’s a social-media phenomenon who

It is tempting to view the blow-up between Amazon’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos and David Pecker, publisher of the tabloid National Enquirer, with the peculiar glee some journalists experience when they cover a natural disaster: it can be exciting, fun even, to sit back and observe the flames. As political earthquakes go, the Bezos-Pecker face-off is spectacular, since Pecker is a long-time ally of Donald Trump and Trump is the sworn enemy of Bezos and the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post. Trump calls him ‘Jeff Bozo’, presumably because the Post has been so aggressive in its coverage of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia and seems determined to bring down

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the left’s rising political star. The 29-year-old is the youngest women ever to serve in the US Congress and her fan base is growing quickly online, so it’s no surprise that Jeremy Corbyn wants to team up. But the Labour leader’s cosy phone call with the Democrat has somewhat backfired. Corbyn said yesterday that it was ‘great to speak’ to Ocasio-Cortez, who returned the favour by tweeting that it ‘was an honour to share such a lovely and wide-reaching conversation with you’. This seemed to be the start of great things, until a follower of Ocasio-Cortez pointed out Labour’s ongoing troubles with anti-Semitism: Oh dear. It was good while it

If you thought the last two years of transatlantic relations were bad, things are about to get even worse. Donald Trump and his hard-charging secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have scheduled a Middle East security conference for February 13th and 14th. Poland, perhaps the only country in Europe that looks fondly upon Trump as a world leader, will be hosting the two-day affair. Normally, this is the kind of multilateral event European heads-of-state are more than happy to participate in. Not so this one. Trump plan to elevate Iran’s destabilising actions in the region as a principle – perhaps the principle – topic during the conference is giving senior European officials cold feet

For Angela Merkel, the chief guardian of Europe’s centrist politics, 2018 was a year of tribulation – and she admits it. In her New Year’s speech, the German chancellor acknowledged the hardship of the last twelve months while begging her countrymen to unite in the year ahead. “We will only master the challenges of our times if we stick together and collaborate with others across borders,” Merkel told the German people in what can only viewed as a call for the country to come together. Merkel’s words, however, don’t only apply to Germany. Europe as a whole is entering 2019 with many people agnostic about the European Union, exhausted with the familiar

For Silicon Valley, 2018 was defined by one impossible question: should there be limits to free speech on the internet? The first amendment is hardwired into the (American) CEOs of the big three social media sites: Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Each platform grew its user-base with a “words can never hurt me” attitude. Back in 2012, Twitter defined itself as the “free speech wing of the free speech party”; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended his users’ right to be wrong – even for Holocaust deniers. For years, social media platforms allowed posts that could arguably inspire real-life violence in the US, Germany and in Myanmar. But now things are

The past few months have been testing for the so-called special relationship. President Trump’s visit to the UK ended in disaster for Theresa May when the US President gave an interview to the Sun in which he declared that her proposed Brexit deal would kill any chance of a UK/US trade deal. However, not all Cabinet ministers had a wholly bad experience. On Tuesday night, Mr S headed along to Jeremy Hunt’s Foreign Office Christmas reception at Lancaster House – also known as the ‘Foreign Secretary’s leadership launch,’ according to a fellow Cabinet minister. In his speech, Hunt told guests how his own relationship with Trump had flourished on that

The US secretary of state Mike Pompeo strutted into Brussels yesterday like a man on a mission. His task was almost impossible from the start: to convince America’s friends and allies in Europe that the United States under Donald Trump is still the leader of the liberal world order European politicians care so deeply about. It’s difficult to believe Pompeo convinced anyone. America’s top diplomat could have done what many of his predecessors have chosen to do: tell the European foreign policy community to relax and take a deep breath, America won’t be throwing you to the wolves. Instead, Pompeo was far more confrontational, channeling the fire and brimstone of his

Twenty years ago almost no one in the West had heard of Female Genital Mutilation. Then in the 2000s, thanks to a few brave and vocal campaigners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, knowledge of this barbaric practice began to spread. Originally there was some queasiness about taking up the subject at all. Lawmakers and opinion formers took a while to work out their line. There was an early question mark over whether FGM wasn’t just the same as male circumcision. Most people swiftly learned that the difference was, gynaecologically speaking, almost everything. There were some hold-outs among people who thought that since FGM was practiced among Muslims there might be something