Anne Penketh is a freelance journalist and columnist based in Paris. She was posted to Moscow, Paris and New York for AFP news agency before joining The Independent, where she was Diplomatic Editor until 2009. She worked in Washington for the non-profit British American Security Information Council before returning to journalism in September 2012.
After the celebrations in Ramallah have died down, and the congratulatory telegrams filed away, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will find himself in exactly the same position as he was yesterday, before the UN General Assembly vote on upgrading Palestine’s status to that of a “non-member observer state”.
What happened yesterday was that after the Israeli-Gaza conflict, [...]
By Anne Penketh | | Friday, 30 November 2012 at 1:02 pm
For the past two weeks, as a Brit living in Washington, DC, I’ve been living in a bubble called #nbcfail.
By Anne Penketh | Olympics, The Foreign Desk | Sunday, 12 August 2012 at 4:15 pm
When you are the most powerful leader in the world, you want to be seen to be manipulating events, not the other way round.
Unfortunately for President Barack Obama, he’s in trouble on the foreign policy front, seven months from a presidential election. At best the situation is unpredictable, at worst, it’s a disaster.
The [...]
By Anne Penketh | The Foreign Desk | Sunday, 15 April 2012 at 5:37 pm
You might complain about how well-informed the Kony 2012 video is, or criticise it for being condescending. You might ask, as the Indy’s Archie Bland does, whether collective outrage is the best way to call for change. You might focus, as Fox News has, on how the charity that produced the video about the notorious leader of [...]
By Anne Penketh | The Foreign Desk | Saturday, 10 March 2012 at 1:18 am
If President Barack Obama thought he had managed to restrain Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from ordering preemptive military strikes on Iran to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon, he might have to try again.
Judging from the prime minister’s speech to the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC in Washington, an Israeli attack is coming sooner rather than later. Noting [...]
By Anne Penketh | The Foreign Desk | Tuesday, 6 March 2012 at 4:32 am
America’s top general has been talking to Egypt’s top military leader about the future of US military aid, or “choices and consequences,” as a Pentagon spokesman put it delicately.
By Anne Penketh | The Foreign Desk | Sunday, 12 February 2012 at 8:51 pm
Mitt Romney had to win big last night in the New Hampshire primary, to solidify his status as the putative frontrunner in the Republican presidential race.
He did, coming in with 40 percent of the vote, after scraping through in the Iowa caucuses with only eight votes more than his nearest rival. The result may [...]
By Anne Penketh | The Foreign Desk | Wednesday, 11 January 2012 at 1:38 pm
It’s hard to keep abreast of events in Europe, even earth-shattering ones such as the Brussels summit, from across the Atlantic. Then again, this might help you put things in perspective: the Washington Post put its account of the summit on page 19 today. The divorce of the UK from the rest of Europe does not merit a TV headline. The America media are far more interested in Mitt Romney’s $10,000 gaffe in the Republican presidential contenders’ debate last night than in how the country’s economy might be affected by the decisions in Brussels.
By Anne Penketh | The Foreign Desk | Sunday, 11 December 2011 at 8:00 pm
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