Free Republic

You thought it couldn’t get worse? It certainly can. Britain now faces the very real prospect of Boris Johnson moving into N0 10 (with or without his current girlfriend). He would do so as the country faces its gravest crisis since the Second World War – a crisis of which he was a principal architect – and without having won a general election. He would have been chosen, quite preposterously, by fewer than 120,000 ageing, reactionary Tory party members. Rules are rules: the party with the most MPs selects the prime minister. But the Conservatives have no overwhelming popular mandate....

NABLUS, West Bank – It is hard for me to describe Ahmed Sanakreh as a terrorist, although I know it's true. Hard, because I got to know him and his family quite well, and when you understand people, it's hard to hate them: Twenty-year-old Ahmed, baby-faced with black hair sticking up in gelled spikes, and a passion for his Nokia 90 cell phone; and his elder brother, Alaa, the intense, hollow-cheeked leader of the Palestinian al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus. They are the hard core of the hard core. Although Alaa was the leader, Ahmed...

Half of America and the upper echelons of the US military may be cheering Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation from the post of Defence Secretary, but there was no rejoicing yesterday among those most directly affected by his decisions: the frontline soldiers in Iraq.Troops expressed little pleasure at the departure of the man responsible for their protracted deployment to a hostile country where at least 2,800 of their comrades have died. Indeed some members of the 101st Airborne Division and other troops approached by The Times as they prepared to fly home from Baghdad airport yesterday expressed concern that Robert Gates, Mr...