On March 29, presidential elections were held in Uzbekistan. As expected, the current president, Islam Karimov, was reelected. The 77-year old has been in power for over a quarter of a century, and just began his fourth consecutive term, despite the fact that Uzbek constitution limits presidents to two. (More…)
Sometimes, you can’t tell how much a book has moved you until many years after you first encounter it. This past October, I took a trip Flagstaff, a town I’d somehow managed not to visit in fourteen years of living in Arizona. After a mostly sleepless night of coughing, I forced myself to drive north towards the Grand Canyon. That’s when I remembered Tony Hillerman. (More…)
The last ‘debate’ was somewhat uneventful. Except for one instance, Ed Miliband said he would not have a Labour government if it meant cutting a deal with the SNP. The statement has shocked progressives, but it has been welcomed by Blairites like Martin Kettle. Finally, the Labour leader had emitted yelping noises at the right pitch and sufficiently demonstrated his subservience. (More…)
The pale, yellow light of the waning day streamed through the dusty window panes of the little cigar shop, and across the bench where old Hans Fritzsche worked and hummed the melody of Der Freiheit the while. (More…)
The Etonian scribbler James Delingpole likes to describe the Greens as watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. Today’s Green Party is well to the Left of the trilateral consensus, and its policies have shocked many minds ensnared by conventional wisdom. But it wasn’t always the case. All parties are coalitions, and coalitions mutate over time. (More…)
Booming guitars accentuated by a crushing low-end bass reverberate from the speakers. The drums hammer down with monotonous intensity, making every riff take on the form of an unrelenting earthquake. (More…)
When my family moved to Maryland in the summer of 1979, I was only eleven years old. Yet I already knew enough American history to be intrigued by the prospect of living south of the Mason-Dixon Line. I had absorbed enough from family vacations to have a pretty clear sense of what that would have meant in a state like Georgia or South Carolina. Maryland, though, confused me. (More…)
As the media has inflated UKIP’s popularity, all analyses should come with a series of clarifications. The party is the fourth in the country in terms of council seats won, but it lags far behind in terms of parliamentary seats. The main gains have been in the European Parliament thanks to low turnout and a proportional electoral system. (More…)
If you drive towards the eastern part of Georgia, to the Chechen border, in Akhmeta, you’ll find a group of picturesque villages, home to the Kists, an ethnic group that traces its origins back to the Chechens of the northern Caucasus. (More…)
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies. But in battalions,” Shakespeare once wrote. And so it has been in Britain this week, as massacres in Malaya and Malawi, and dark deeds during Northern Ireland’s Troubles appeared to be catching up with the establishment. (More…)
Earlier this month, American magazine Allure released a nude photoshoot featuring Orange is the New Black star Laverne Cox. Bloggers like Meghan Murphy of Feminist Frequency shot back, criticizing the alleged “empowerment” of the shoot. (More…)
The Green Party has long been a focal point for left-of-centre opinion in Britain. Against the affectations of Blairism, with its claim on the progressive centre-ground running empty after the invasion of Iraq, the Greens looked like the kind of party Labour ought to be. Yet it’s only recently that the Greens have moved onto the mainstream stage. (More…)