World

Stories about Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, are blowing up on social media. He died in 2002, so why the interest in him now? The weird fact is that Xi Zhongxun is being talked about in the West because he is not being talked about in China. Omission is the perverse way that one learns about what is really going on in the opaque world of Chinese Communist party (CCP) politics. China-watchers live on scraps. Xi Zhongxun was a big cheese in his own right. Born in the north-west’s Shaanxi province, he was an early member of the youth league of the CCP. After meeting Mao Zedong at the conclusion

Home Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, was the last minister to agree funding in the government spending review. Once the NHS and defence were settled there wasn’t enough to go round. The police wanted more. Everyone over the state pension age in England and Wales with an income of £35,000 or less will receive the winter fuel payment after all, at a cost of £1.25 billion, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced. Capital spending included £39 billion on social housing over the next ten years. The government also committed £14.2 billion for the new Sizewell C nuclear power station, but did not say where the money was coming

If Keir Starmer meets Bangladesh’s interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, as planned at Downing Street this week, their agenda will likely include the country’s transition to democratic elections, scheduled for April next year, as well as how the Labour government might assist in recovering stolen Bangladeshi assets. Siddiq wrote to Yunus inviting him for “lunch or afternoon tea” at the Houses of Parliament But the unspoken tension in the room will be Labour MP and former minister Tulip Siddiq – niece of deposed Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina. Hasina fled the country on 5 August 2024 following a violent state crackdown on student-led protests, in which over 800 people have been

It seems conventional wisdom by now that the public can only be convinced by hyperbole. As Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte implies that Britain faces a choice between the NHS and Russian conquest, it is worth asking how much this actually damages democracy – and helps Vladimir Putin? The real threat Russia poses is less of direct military action but through its ‘hybrid war’ instruments of subversion and division Rutte is on tour in a bid to sell the new orthodoxy that Nato member states – many of whom barely, if at all, hit the previous target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence – must commit to spending