Funeral designed to elevate Thatcher above politics
LONDON: If it’s true that Margaret Thatcher’s name will be remembered long into the future, these will be among the pictures that will recall her memory. A coffin draped in the union flag, borne slowly by gun

Obama must go to Israel with a message
LONDON: This should be a rare moment of hope. On Friday night, Israel got a new government and in a few days it will be treated to a US presidential visit, the first of Barack Obama’s second term. You’d think that, like

Israel in danger of shift to far right after polls
LONDON: In a week when the dead number 60,000 in Syria — a figure considered an underestimate by the UN body that produced it — it can seem like displacement activity to speak of any other topic in the region. It is Syria, surely, that matters most, a slaughter whose scale shames a world that does so little to stop it.

US constitution: a hurdle in the way of gun reform
LONDON: We watch their movies, we eat their fast food. Their culture has become global culture. So it always comes as a shock to realise how different Americans are from everyone else. The massacre in Newtown horrified even those who thought themselves inured to horror — I know many who could hardly bear to look at those smiling family photographs of the

Republicans face five stages of political grief
WASHINGTON: My election night was spent among the grieving. Most didn’t know they were going to a wake when they headed to the grand ballroom of the Boston Convention Centre on Tuesday night. On the contrary,

Real Romney relaxed among the filthy rich
LONDON: If only the politicians would tell us what they really think, we say. If only they’d drop the soundbites and the focus-group-tested messaging and give it to us straight. Two politicians did just that this

Games reveal another kind of Britain
THE finish line is in sight. After two weeks of exertion, of triumph and dejection, of glittering victory and head-down defeat that have been the focus not just of British attention but of the gaze of the entire world, the London Olympics of 2012 will soon be over — and the reflection will begin.

A battle for the entire Middle East
IT looks a lot like the end. Just as viewers of a movie franchise know the formula so well, they can tell when the final reel is under way, so we’re getting used to the way Arab revolutions unfold — and sense that the signs

As crisis deepens, politicians shrink
IT used to be so simple. Voting was like driving: turn the wheel left and the car would move left, nudge it right and it would shift right. All that it took to effect a national change in direction was a majority of