Less than a month since Barack Obama went to the American public with his strategy for defeating the Islamic State (IS), expectations of a successful outcome are already being significantly lowered. This…
After one massive by-election win and another near miss, UKIP has been handed another leg-up into mainstream politics: an invitation to participate in one of the three party leaders’ debates scheduled…
Tempers have flared again at the site of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, with masked men attempting to dismantle the protesters’ barricades. After a tense fortnight, the eyes of the world are…
Turkish police use tear gas on Kurdish protesters.
EPA/Sedat Suna
In recent weeks, the Kurdish town of Kobanê on the Turkey-Syria border has become centre stage in the struggle against IS (Islamic State). The latest round of attacks on the town and its surrounding areas…
By the skin of their teeth: Ed Miliband and Liz McInnes.
Lynne Cameron/PA Wire
“Something big is happening here.” Those were the words of Nigel Farage following the news that Douglas Carswell had become UKIP’s first member of parliament by attracting 21,113 votes in the Clacton by-election…
Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.
Jonathan Brady/PA Wire
In a celebration of the rights of children, the 2014 Nobel Prize for Peace has been awarded to Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban for going to school in Pakistan, and Kailash Satyarthi, who has been…
The results of the by-elections that have just taken place in Clacton and Heywood and Middleton are virtually impossible to spin for either the Conservatives or Labour. Predictably, each side of Britain’s…
Language is an important issue for chairwomen and male chairwomen alike.
Shutterstock chairs
With the arrival of the first woman to head the BBC Trust, a perennially tricky question is once again causing awkwardness. Rona Fairhead took the helm of the trust on October 9, but is she be a chairwoman…
Speaking to you from an undisclosed location.
Chris Goldberg via Flickr
In the last few years, the list of sensitive government information made public as a result of unauthorised disclosures has increased exponentially. But who really benefits from these leaks? While they…
Doug and Clementine, Clacton’s newest power couple.
Chris Radburn/PA Wire
UKIP has a seat in the House of Commons, after Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative MP who defected to UKIP, won back his Clacton seat in an expected, but still convincing by-election victory for…
“We’re supposed to negotiate with them?” Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint.
EPA/Ali Mohammed
The Islamic State (IS) now occupies significant swaths of Iraq and Syria, has pushed as far as the border with Turkey, and has succeeded in dragging “the West” into two civil wars in the Middle East. The…
Reports of child abuse related to accusations of witchcraft are on the rise in London, with 27 allegations made to the Metropolitan Police in the past year and 148 cases since 2004. Yet the people charged…
Uhuru Kenyatta, incumbent president of Kenya, has finally appeared before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. He is charged with murder, forcible transfer, rape, persecution, and other…
Evo Morales appears poised to win a third term as president of Bolivia in an election on October 12 at the helm of his “Movement Towards Socialism” (MAS) party. Yet he remains a controversial figure both…
A US appeals court is currently hearing the case of a chimpanzee named Tommy and is to decide if he has the right to bodily integrity and liberty, just like a person. The case, brought by the Nonhuman…
Fixating on the voting age won’t fix the system.
Shutterstock polling station
The case for lowering the voting age to 16 in the UK would appear to have been strengthened by the resonance of young people in the Scottish referendum. But excitement over this issue masks a deeper problem…
Nick Clegg faced a dual challenge in his closing address to the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow. He had to energise his own activists in preparation for a general election seven months away and…
Complaints about the supposed political apathy of todays’ students are not uncommon among middle-aged professors. Historian [Mark Lilla](http://www.zeit.de/2014/37/ideologie-freiheit-westen](http://www.zeit.de/2014/37/ideologie-freiheit-westen…
How can it be that after plummeting to 6% in the polls, their lowest for two decades, the Liberal Democrats appeared to be in such good spirits at their autumn conference in Glasgow? You might even call…
Western strategists are routinely taught to remember a number of maxims, one of the most popular being that “the enemy has a vote”. This fundamental truth of strategy has so far gone apparently unheeded…
Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenko grasps Moldova’s Nicolae Timofti on a recent state visit.
EPA
Belarus and Moldova are two former-Soviet states which have moved in very different directions since the end of the Cold War. Moldova has looked firmly west, but struggled to escape Russia’s influence…
Smoke rises after an apparent air strike outside Kobanê.
EPA/Sedat Suna
Kobanê, a small Kurdish town on the Syrian-Turkish border, has now become the ultimate test of Turkey’s ambivalence on how to engage the so-called Islamic State (IS) in the rapidly worsening situation…
Martin McGuinness believes it’s time for a border poll.
Sinn Fein
In the wake of the Scottish referendum, Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, renewed his party Sinn Féin’s call for a “border poll” to decide if Northern Ireland should leave…
“Just as long as we don’t have to call it The Nicola and David Show.”
Andrew Milligan/PA
After the 2010 UK election, some individuals urged Labour to try to form a rainbow-style coalition with the smaller parties in the House of Commons. According to the maths, several potential groupings…
Dark days ahead for journalism and justice?
Clara Molden/PA
Police “hacking” of journalists’ phone records to identify their sources is a scandal and human rights issue that dwarfs the tabloid phone-hacking affair that led to the Leveson Inquiry. The UK’s trade…