Overnight, Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, which had long enjoyed by far the highest level of approval in Brazil, became the most unpopular party in the country. How had it come to this?
It’s time for the bitcoin to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. It could have an impact as great as the new kind of banking introduced in Renaissance Italy.
Flanked by his ministers of defence and foreign affairs, Vladimir Putin looked characteristically stern as he went on television on 14 March to announce a significant reduction in...
A master politician like Merkel will never let a good crisis go to waste. By opening the German border, Merkel could hope to recapture the moral high ground.
This election year will be remembered as the one in which two candidates rallied the indignation of millions against the establishment. Both Trump and Sanders actually call it that. The...
Baraa Halabieh could recall almost every detail of the long journey from his family home in the Syrian city of Hama: every bus and taxi fare, where he slept or failed to sleep each night, how...
Angolans sustained immense losses in the fight to end apartheid. It was certainly heroic, but it was ruinous too.
On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war. Although oral hearings finished in early 2011, it won’t report until the middle of this year...
The UK state – its economy, its culture, its fractured identities and party system – is in a much deeper crisis than many want to accept. Its governors, at least in public, remain...
On 4 October 1954 Pakistan’s army chief General Ayub Khan passed the hours of a sleepless night at the Dorchester Hotel in London writing ‘A Short Appreciation of Present and...
I arrived at Al-Modireyet Amn al-Giza, the Giza Directorate of Security, late in the morning of Monday, 8 February. ‘But where’s the entrance?’ I asked the taxi driver...
The war in Syria and Iraq has produced two new de facto states in the last five years and enabled a third quasi-state greatly to expand its territory and power.
The state of emergency that François Hollande declared on 14 November, the day after 130 people were killed and more than 300 wounded by the attackers in Paris, is still in force....
The Whitestone Bridge crosses the East River, connecting Queens to the south-eastern tip of the Bronx. To the west are the ten jails of Rikers Island and to the east are the 18 holes of the...
Is it a condition on the acceptability of warfare that those who kill should put their lives on the line?
The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the Robin Hood myth to their advantage.
The reasons for China’s economic boom remain disputed. Chinese economic policy has changed repeatedly while high growth rates have continued. Commentators are clearer on what...
Ahmad Tibi, a long-standing Arab member of the Knesset, once remarked that ‘Israel is democratic towards Jews, and Jewish towards Arabs.’