Usa

October 18 is ‘anti human-trafficking’ day by 2007 Act of European Parliament; along with ‘anti-slavery day’ by 2010 Act of UK Parliament. So there’s that, for the 29.8 million people worldwide estimated to live in forced servitude. Over at SlaveryFootprint.org, your correspondent learns that I personally make use of 37 slaves in my London routine, mostly through my consumer electronics and my larger-than-average appetite. The survey, laden with factoids about the coerced labour behind shrimp cocktail and mascara, is macro-analysis at its mushiest – and a far more worthwhile use of 15 minutes online than all the ‘carbon-footprint’ calculators put together. The UK’s draft Modern Slavery Bill, due to be in force by next summer, goes past mere symbolism. Though you

From The Spectator, 10 October 1914: American visitors have been surprised at the apparent absence of emotion in England at such a crisis as the present. They can see, they say, no signs that we realize the tremendous nature of the points at issue. The English people, they think, are not taking things seriously. Yet all the time there are signs, if they knew where to look for them, that we are moved as we have never been moved before. “If we let anybody, even our nearest and dearest, know what we feel, we may be unmanned. We must keep a tight hold, and especially on ourselves, or we may lose control.”

This is an extract from Hugo Rifkind’s column in this week’s Spectator, out on Thursday Poor Julian Assange. Call me a contrarian but I’m genuinely starting to feel sorry for the guy. He’s just made such a mess of his life, hasn’t he? And with such promise. Only a few short years ago he was the world’s most prominent anti-everything activist, with hair like an indie guitarist, feted and worshipped wherever you might find hot Scandinavian revolutionaries, smug old men who work for ‘theguardian’ and Jemima Khan. Now he’s a hermit with hair like Noel Edmonds who lives in a cupboard. It’s a hell of a fall. Most crushingly, he’s

This is a preview from this week’s Spectator, available tomorrow: Peering down from the Olympian heights of the New York Times, the columnist David Brooks writes that “We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq.”  There, in the Land of the Two Rivers,  he continues, a succession of American presidents has confronted the “core problem” of our era:  “the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam.” To Brooks and other hawkish right wingers, but also to considerable number of militant liberals, the antidote to this problem is clear:  the application of military power to defeat the jihadists and lay the foundation for a

There was a time when having almost two hundred of your citizens blown out of the sky was a big deal for a western democracy. But when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine last month, killing 193 Dutch citizens and a couple of dozen other Europeans, the response was conspicuous public mourning, some mild objections, a soupçon more sanctions, but otherwise nothing. Everyone knew which government might have handed powerful surface-to-air missiles to eastern Ukraine’s rebels. But nobody seemed willing or able to do anything much about it. There was also a time when whole swaths of the map being overrun by Islamic groups who make al-Qa’eda

The Daily Dot, founded less than two years ago, is best read while sipping the flattest of flat white coffees. I love it, even though it’s not pitched at me: most of its 11 million monthly unique visitors are ‘millennials’. No UK site integrates tech news into the broader culture so expertly. This is what you can find on the Daily Dot home page right now: ‘A guide to Silicon Valley’s top political donors’; ‘How the paleo diet developed into a cult of nonsense’; ‘Anonymous goes to war with Israel’; ‘Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler freaked out by giant reporter’. Those headlines were brewed by some of the world’s best