Don´t Rely on Your Partner to "Take Care Of" Contraception   more »

As the credits rolled, I fell into a depression. The mawkish introduction by Clinton, the plastic grin of Hillary, the audience pimped with gorgeous young blondes who would not otherwise be caught dead at a show.

I know the Stones were "over" long ago - a point rammed home here by juxtaposing the concert with archival interviews from the band's heyday - but their recordings have stayed with me across time and format: LP, cassette, CD, MP3.

Their lyrics are the band's last tenuous connection with rebellion: lose them, and there is nothing.

It was the old interviews, spliced between images, in living colour, of time's fiendish way with flesh, that pinned my heart to the floor.   more »

Obama seems to have seen, early in his career, the utility of joining a prominent church that would help him establish political roots in the community in which he lives.

Now he sees the utility of distancing himself from that church. Obama’s behavior in dealing with Wright is consistent with that of a politician who often voted “present” in the Illinois State Legislature for the sake of his future political viability.

The more you learn about him, the more Obama seems to be a conventionally opportunistic politician, impressively smart and disciplined, who has put together a good political career and a terrific presidential campaign.

But there’s not much audacity of hope there. There’s the calculation of ambition, and the construction of artifice, mixed in with a dash of deceit — all covered over with the great conceit that this campaign, and this candidate, are different.   more »

The challenge for the next US administration is to create a new Middle East strategy that rejects the juvenile Bush vision of Iraq as a playing field against al-Qaida; which reaches out to moderate Iranians; and which accepts that until there is justice for the Palestinians, American mood music can never play right anywhere in the Muslim world.

The Iraq experience has laid bare the limits of raw military power. It would be naive to suggest that an abrupt American departure would now promise the country a happy future.

But there seems no purpose in a continued US military presence, save within the context of new regional policies vastly different from those that prevail today.   more »

Bear Stearns marks the moment when the global financial crisis went critical. Up until last Friday, it had been possible - just about - to believe that the worst was over and that things were about to get better.

That pretence was stripped away when JP Morgan, at the behest of the Federal Reserve, stepped in when the hedge funds pulled the plug on the fifth-biggest US investment bank.

It is now clear that no end is in sight to the turmoil, and the reason for that is that the Fed and the US treasury are no closer to solving the underlying problem than they were eight months ago.

The crisis will only end when house prices stop falling and banks stop racking up huge losses on their loa   more »