At last the American dream - that "in America, all things are possible" - was being shared by the one group whose brutal exclusion from it has marred the image and good name of the country since its inception. The White House was built by slave labour, in full view of a slave market. By every measure of deprivation African Americans are still the losers, the underprivileged of American society, with poorer housing and schooling, poorer jobs, higher infant mortality and greater malnutrition.

But that is only one of the two revolutions signified this week. The other was the new kind of politics that Mr Obama used to win power, based on the energy of a vast army of grass-roots supporters in every community. He caught the zeitgeist, understanding the extent to which Americans were aching for their country to be worthy of the love they longed to give it. As he said after the inauguration, "What happened today is not about me, it is about the American people." They have willed into existence a reborn nation - closer to their own likeness, their own idea of themselves. That energy was manifest on the streets despite the bitter cold, and despite the even chillier winds of an economic recession that is biting into the very bones of the American ...

Israel's ferocious military assault on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza has brought international condemnation, despite its insistence that it is only targeting militants and terrorists. Hundreds have been killed and hundreds more injured, including a large number of innocent civilians. Israeli tactics appear to be not so much the elimination of Hamas by killing its personnel one by one as the punishment of the ...