Pictures of Daniel Ezzedine show him to be a fresh-faced 17-year-old with a warm cheerful smile. His parents are Lebanese but he was brought up in Germany where he had just left school. His teachers brought him to celebrate his graduation on a trip to Canterbury, where he was assaulted and beaten half to death by a gang of youths in what local people are convinced was a racist attack. More

While a healthy number of extreme outdoorists still pride themselves on packing as little gear as possible to escape from civilization, most Americans prefer to bring as many comforts of home as possible (including phones, satellite TV, and internet) when they park their overstuffed vehicles and bodies at campsites. It’s yet another depressing symptom of how utterly well-wrapped we are in our thickening technological cocoons. Even atop Mt. Everest, it’s quite impossible to get away from it all. More

Trump opens negotiations with a threat. That costs nothing, and you never know (or at least, he never knows) whether he can get a freebee. His threat is that the U.S. can hurt its adversary unless that country agrees to abide by America’s wish-list. But in this case the list is so unrealistic that the media are embarrassed to talk about it. The US is making impossible demands for economic surrender – that no country could accept. What appears on the surface to be only a trade war is really a full-fledged Cold War 2.0. More