World

The scene of an al-Qaeda bomb blast in Baghdad (Photo: Reuters)

Nine years after the tragic events of 9/11, al-Qaeda has lost much of its top leadership, commands just a few hundred fighters and is strapped for cash. Paradoxically enough, it also probably exercises more power than at any point the past.

From the north-western Himalayas to the deserts that surrounds Timbuktu, al-Qaeda’s message has been taken up by a new generation of jihadist leaders I call ‘Baby bin Ladens’. In the main, the new al-Qaeda subsidiaries are led by Islamists who participated in the anti-Soviet Union jihad in Afghanistan,… Read More

Kindles are Amazon's best-selling product so far (Photo: AP)

Books, like newspapers in the words of the old riddle, are black and white and read all over. But are they green too? And aren’t the new e-readers – like the Kindle, which has just flown past Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to become Amazon’s best-selling product ever – kinder to the planet?

Read more here.

Chicago buddy: President Obama walking into the Oval Office with Valerie Jarrett in July 2010 (Photo: AFP/GETTY)

I wondered yesterday whether Robert Gibbs jumped or was pushed and noted that President Barack Obama’s words indicated that it was “not an entirely voluntary departure”.

It’s being reported by John King on CNN right now that Gibbs wanted to be a presidential counsellor – something he’s been putting about for quite a while – but William Daley, the new chief of staff, nixed this because he believed that too many cooks would spoil… Read More

Moral blight? US troops in Afghanistan (Photo: AP)

In times of war you will invariably find public figures who are more interested in trashing their country and undermining the war effort than supporting their own troops, who are laying down their lives on the battlefield. In so doing, they willingly run the risk of being used as propaganda fodder by the enemy, and serving as proverbial “useful idiots”, as Lenin would have described them. That is exactly what ten-term California Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey is doing with her distasteful and woefully ignorant remarks on the floor of the House of Representatives today, when she condemned the war in… Read More

John Boehner wields the speaker's gavel (Photo: Reuters)

The convening of a new Congress is traditionally an occasion when the White House allows the denizens of Capitol Hill their day if not in the sun, then at least on the cable news channels.

That was not the case on Wednesday when John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House, accepted an outsize gavel from Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco liberal who became the first woman to occupy the post four years ago. Just over a mile away, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, President Barack Obama was intent on making his own news. He wanted… Read More

Watching Nancy Pelosi’s startlingly inappropriate farewell as House Speaker, in which she turned what should have been a gracious constitutional ceremony into a blatantly partisan defiance of the electorate’s judgement, I wondered whether her fingers were actually going to have to be peeled off the Speaker’s gavel. She really is a piece of work: unrepentant and self-congatulatory to the end, even in the face of overwhelming repudiation by the voters. It was left to John Boehner, the new Republican speaker, to make the generous, bipartisan speech that was fitting for the occasion. How long that bipartisanship can last in a Congress so bitterly divided remains to be seen – but at least he behaved well at the outset. 

And nothing can change… Read More

So did he jump or was he pushed?

Robert Gibbs, the face and mouthpiece of President Barack Obama throughout the campaign and the first two years of his administration, is leaving to become an “outside adviser”. Although the White House is trying to present this as a natural move, it’s a dramatic change, not because Robert Gibbs will no longer be the man at the podium but because he’ll be out of the White House altogether.

It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of Gibbs in ObamaWorld. He’s been with Obama since April 2004, when the now 44th President was just a state senator running for the US Senate. On the campaign trail, he was part of the towel-snapping, sport-loving, male-dominated inner… Read More

Sunrise at the White House (Photo: AP)

Fox News and the BBC are reporting that Robert Gibbs is about to step down as White House Press Secretary, and become “an outside presidential adviser”. His departure comes just two months after the Obama presidency’s “shellacking” in the midterm elections, when the Democrats suffered an historic defeat at the hands of US voters. He follows in the footsteps of former White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel and former National Security Adviser Jim Jones who left in October, and will join senior Obama adviser David Axelrod and Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, who… Read More

Pakistani police guards carry the coffin of late Punjab governor earlier today (Photo: AFP)

The murder of Salman Taseer, the feisty governor of Punjab province, marks yet another grim new year for Pakistan and a depressing reminder of its limited tolerance. He was shot dead by one of his own personal police bodyguards, apparently, because he had called for the country’s much-abused blasphemy laws to be scrapped after a Christian woman was sentenced to death. Members of the country’s minorities are vulnerable to blasphemy accusations in neighbourhood and business disputes with members of the Muslim majority.

Although he… Read More

The ridership of Amtrak amounts to 29 million people (Photo: Getty)

This time last year, President Obama promised a brave new world for America’s train spotters, committing $8 billion to fund 13 high-speed rail projects around the US.

But 12 months later, where has all the money gone?

The comically inept projects range from Ohio’s (now abandoned) plan for a $400 million “high speed” train averaging just 39 mph, to Florida’s 84 mile, $2.7 billion plan to link two cities that are only 90 minutes apart by road. Not to be outdone, Iowa managed to receive $1 billion for a line to… Read More