The Democrats have finally chosen their woman. The stand-in for Sarah Palin who will tussle with Joe Biden in closed-door rehearsals for the vice-presidential debate on 2 October will be 49-year-old Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan - a brilliant Democrat who would undoubtedly be a presidential contender herself, had she not been born in Canada and thus constitutionally ineligible to occupy the White House. She will undoubtedly give Biden a [...]

Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna may have brought hell to the people of America's Gulf Coast, but they came like manna from heaven for Senator John McCain, his brand-new running mate Sarah Palin, and the Republicans. First, McCain was quicker off the mark than Barack Obama by taking the decision to abandon political rallies, and he toured the affected areas instead - getting priceless footage on to the nation's television screens [...]

So it’s now official, and 80,000 packed into the Denver Broncos’ football stadium in Denver on Thursday were there to see it: Barack Obama is now indisputably the Democratic candidate for the 2008 presidential election campaign, and the first bi-racial man in American history to win the nomination of a major party. The unlikely campaign that began 19 months ago in the freezing winter of Springfield, Illinois had reached and [...]

We have now reached the end of day two of the eight days of the 2008 Democratic and Republican conventions as I write - the Democrats reserved the Pepsi Centre in Denver for the first four and the Republicans the Xcel Energy Centre in St Paul, Minnesota, for the remaining four that begin on 1 September - and so far the roof has not fallen in over either party. Hillary [...]

The text message that came at 3:04:25 on Saturday morning - on my phone, at least - was just the beginning of what is certain to be one of the most enthralling weeks in American politics for decades. “Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our vice-presidential candidate,” read the message from Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign team. Twelve hours later, in front of 35,000 supporters in sweltering heat [...]

I do wish Barack Obama would stop following me around. I fly into London, and next day he follows me there. A few days later, I find myself in Hawaii. And who should fly in there the following day? You've guessed it: the 47-year-old, not-yet-one-term senator due to be crowned as the official Democratic presidential candidate of 2008 at the party convention, which begins in Denver on Monday 25 August. [...]

Back in 1950, J Edgar Hoover began the FBI's legendary practice of issuing a "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives" list. Posters of dangerous criminals such as serial murderers, rapists and drug warlords were distributed to post offices, and television shows such as America's Most Wanted shot to the top of the ratings. Americans loved playing detective, but only 150 of the most wanted have ever been arrested as a result of [...]

I fear that Ed Balls - or whichever buffoon it was who decided to outsource the £156m contract to mark the Sats of British schoolchildren to a New Jersey-based company called Educational Testing Service (ETS) - does not read the NS. If he (or whoever was responsible) did, they would know that the whole system of Sats that Britain copied from the US in 1991 is an increasingly discredited shambles [...]

How times change. Remember the days when Senator Barack Obama was the great ray of hope for the 2008 US presidential elections? The progressive voice of change, an idealistic outsider who would cast aside the murky Clintonian politics of triangulation and fudging inside the Democratic Party for ever? Whose youthful optimism and promises of change would then propel him to the White House this November, ready to start sweeping clean [...]

This week, I vowed, I would do something unprecedented in modern times: I would not write a single word about the shenanigans of B****k or Mc***n or H*****y, or even about this year's presidential election at all. I intend to keep my word, too, with just one proviso: to say that the subject I have chosen to write about, notwithstanding its tragicomic aspects, should be exercising the mind of the [...]