Obama is a coward.  He is very careful to launch dirty attacks without getting any on his hands. The insults are anonymously sourced. The retaliation comes out of the bowels of the bureaucracy. And he only finds out about it from the media. That allows him to retain what he cares about most: his popularity.

After Trump won, Obama put on his best imitation of decency while his people went on preparing to undermine Trump at every turn by smearing him, wiretapping him and doing everything possible, legally and illegally, to bring him down.

It was the same phony act that he had pulled for eight years, bemoaning the lack of bipartisanship while ruling unilaterally as a dictator, destroying the Constitution while hectoring us about our values, denouncing racism while organizing race riots, complaining about the echo chamber while constructing one and lecturing us on civility while smearing anyone who disagreed.

Trump’s killer instinct lies in understanding that hypocrisy conceals weakness. That is what powered him through the primaries and then through an election. His instinct is to grapple directly with a target. That is also the source of his popularity.

We risk gradually having an offence of blasphemy imposed on the west

"It is wrong to describe this as Islamic terrorism. It is Islamist terrorism. It is a perversion of a great faith.”

This is what the prime minister said in parliament after the attack on Westminster Bridge that killed three tourists and a policeman. While I completely accept that the sins of extremists should never be visited on the vast majority of moderate believers, I am increasingly uneasy about how we handle the connection between religion and extremism. The ideology to which Khalid Masood was converted in prison may indeed be a perversion of Islam, but it is a version of it. We should not shy away from saying so.

After Nice, Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation wrote that saying such terrorism has nothing to do with Islam (as some do) is as dangerous as stating that it has everything to do with Islam.

On March 25, 1957, six European countries signed the Treaty of Rome, which eventually became the European Union.

As people celebrate the Treaty’s 60th anniversary and the longest period in European history without a major war, there is no doubt that it has been hugely successful in that particular objective.

Yet, the celebrations have been subdued to say the least, as Great Britain has now officially asked to leave the Union and doubts as to its very survival abound. What happened?

The original ideas of the founders of the European idea, people like Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi and Robert Shumann, who believed in individual freedom and competition, were gradually replaced by an administrative state run by the unelected bureaucrats of the European Commission that is progressively less democratic.

This is what has caused a popular revulsion about the European project among its citizens and not populists like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Victor Orban.

Here are just some of the problems that must be urgently solved if the EU is to have a life-span much beyond age 60.

Tawang Monastery, Arnunachal Pradesh, India

His Holiness Dalai Lama’s visit today (4/06) to  Tawang, in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, has created great consternation in China. In a veiled threat, the Chinese foreign ministry has warned India not to facilitate the Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit to Tawang, saying the visit may severely impact India-China relations.

Tawang is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the world – for although the Potala in Tibet is larger, it is no longer a monastery having been converted into a tourist attraction by the Chinese Communists.  Tawang is also the monastery to which the Dalai Lama fled in his escape route from Chinese Occupied Tibet in 1959:

Ever since His Holiness and his tens of thousands of disciples escaped Chinese oppression by fleeing to India in 1959, China has been closely monitoring his movements in India and abroad.

China views him as a “splittist” (or separatist) who has consistently refused to accept Chinese control over Tibet. In reality, the Dalai Lama has accepted Tibet is a part of China, but has only demanded autonomy for Tibet, a predominately Buddhist region with a distinct language, ethnic group, and culture.

So why are the Beijing Communists coming unglued now over his visit to this almost inaccessible monastery?