When US Defence Secretary Mark Esper was asked this week to confirm President Donald Trump’s assertion that Islamic State group (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died “whimpering and crying” as he ran into a tunnel, he said he couldn’t: “I don’t have those details.” As someone who has never seen action in his life, and watched this…
Let us stipulate at the outset that Donald Trump is a vulgar and dishonest fraud without a principled bone in his corpulent frame. Yet history is nothing if not a tale overflowing with irony. Despite his massive shortcomings, President Trump appears intent on recalibrating America’s role in the world. Initiating a long-overdue process of aligning…
US Government regulators have approved a genetically modified cotton variety as a “potential solution to human hunger.” The radical decision is to permit consumption by humans, in addition to animals, of seeds of a GMO cotton developed at Texas A&M University, with no independent long-term testing. It opens grave new concerns about the safety of…
What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee. The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian National Dialogue Congress. The 150-strong committee…
Over the past century, the United Kingdom and then the United States have successively courted all states and faith groups in the Middle East. They have fuelled confessional conflicts in such a way as to make themselves indispensable, according to the old principle of “Divide and conquer”. President Trump was elected three years ago with…
Usually, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But in the heavenly White House this weekend, it worked the other way round. Lord Trump took the life of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and then gave life back to ISIS by telling us all that he’d promised to send its surviving murderers to the borders of…
