Conrad Black

It pains me to be a killjoy, but I cannot join the gush of enthusiasm that Facebook constitutes any reassurance about the innate and imperishable American genius for wealth creation.

Mark Zuckerberg deserves great credit, of course, for a genius idea and the tenacity and ingenuity to...

The United States' official toleration of Iran's march to nuclear capability -- though the latest sanctions have clearly inflicted some inconvenience -- has been so disappointing and clumsy, it has tended to leave the more shameful, if less dangerous, fiasco of policy toward Syria relatively under-exposed. The United States had...

We seem to be in an era when countries and economies are voting in elections or choosing in decisive policy formulations, to opt either for strong medicine and an early cure from economic and fiscal afflictions, or to dive into palliatives and homeopathic displacements, to defer the inevitable. The stern...

The Arab spring is emerging, ever more clearly in the principal Arab country, Egypt, as a goal-line stand by the military and intelligence communities against radical Islam, the Western-emulators lionized by the Western media as the democratic inheritors of millennia of Arab misrule, and colonial outrages becoming only a shrinking...

The fact that Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Robert Redford are collaborating 40 years on to make a documentary about Watergate, enflames, even prospectively, the raw sore of that terrible wound. There are, broadly, two versions of the Watergate saga. The first and still principal one is that...

The Trayvon Martin case is a painful episode at every level; the violent death of any American teenager is a tragedy. And in this case it is compounded by the antics of the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and other pseudo-clerical charlatans trying...

The conventional wisdom as Europe continues to struggle with its debt crisis, albeit with less frenzied pyrotechnics than in most of the last 18 months, is that the old continent is laboring to retain any momentum for the grand European unitary ideal, launched and nourished with such euphoria just 20...

The report by Henry Schuelke III on the fraudulent prosecution of the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens admirably exposed the problem of lawless prosecutors, which to some extent or another afflicts almost every jurisdiction in the U.S. It also exposes the deeper part of the same problem in...

It is with trepidation and regret that I demur in any degree from the widespread praise accorded political scientist James Q. Wilson, who died a couple of weeks ago from leukemia, aged 80. He was a brilliant and a delightful man, and one of the greatest and most...

The feebleness of the Republicans and obtuseness of much of the media has, as was widely predicted and feared, transformed the proposed requirement that Catholic institutions be obliged to pay for insuring their employees for the costs of contraception, including abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization, into a ludicrous and degrading farce.

The memoir of Mimi Alford, in which she details her affair as a White House intern with President John F. Kennedy, reopens an intriguing question about that president. I am one who thinks he was a talented president who would probably not have made the errors his successor...

It is outrageous that some commentators have compared President Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt (not to mention the president's own immodest favourable comparison of himself to FDR and Lyndon Johnson and, for good measure, Abraham Lincoln). FDR came to office on March 4, 1933, with machine gun emplacements at the...

For most of its history of nearly 90 years, Time magazine has been a staple for the smug, clichéd, only-in-America, lumpen bourgeoisie; the Mencken-roasted, Lucian masses always ready to believe that if it's American it must be the best, and if it's happening in America, it must be good.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has come in for some criticism for telling an Egyptian television network that as Egypt devises a new constitution, it should not look to the Constitution of the United States to provide whatever protection for human rights it is seeking. (The existing Egyptian constitution...

Some people have been more vociferous in their lamentations about the state of the world than I, and many have been more disconsolate, but few have been more consistent. It seems timely to reflect on some objectively good developments.

The progress of democracy and of economic prosperity...

American policy in the Near East is bedeviled by both an enforced ambiguity, the product of decades of runaway oil imports and chronic deficits, and a tactical ambivalence. The deficits have placed huge quantities of U.S. Treasury bonds in not necessarily friendly hands.

U.S. and allied efforts...

One of the benefits of blogging here and elsewhere is the volume of well-informed and enlightening messages that pour in. And one of the (less numerous) benefits of having been wrongly convicted and sent to a federal prison, where I now reside (for a few more months), contemplating the blessings...

The burning question after last week's Iowa caucuses was whether the anti-non-Mitt assassination squads would open up on Rick Santorum after he came within eight votes of defeating Mitt. These serried ranks are led in predictability, volume of small arms fire, and giggly abandon -- if not in...

I know it's not very original, but I think the biggest news story of 2011 has been the currency crisis in Europe. For those who remember all the promise and fanfare around the idea of one government for all Europe, of which the new currency was the cornerstone, and the...

Up until the mid-1960s, when I was young, the television news and airwaves at this time of year were full of references to the "Holy Land." There were endless melodious carols and much sacred music portraying cities such as Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and many other geographic names such as the...