World

Tuesday

Limor Simhony Philpott

Israel’s supreme court verdict spells trouble for Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel’s supreme court has overturned a law passed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government last year that would have limited the power of the Israeli courts. This legislation, known as ‘the reasonableness bill’ was meant to put a stop to the courts’ ability to cancel decisions made by the government if they were deemed to be ‘extremely unreasonable’. Yesterday, judges threw out the law, claiming that the government lacked the authority to implement it. The law was part of a package of judicial reforms initiated by Netanyahu’s far-right government; many in Israel argued that the reforms would weaken the courts and undermine Israeli democratic institutions. From the moment it was introduced, the

Edward Howell

Kim Jong-un is in no mood to calm down

South Korean voters will be among the more than four billion people going to the polls this year. With a huge potential range of outcomes, North Korea will be watching closely. The annual new year fireworks and pop concert in Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung Square concluded five days of high-level meetings of Kim Jong-un’s Workers’ Party of Korea. The leader’s message was severe. Kim made clear how dialogue with Washington and Pyongyang was off the table, and the North would seek to ‘crush’ what it has long-termed the ‘hostile power’ of the United States. Firmly in line with his pledge in January 2021, Kim underscored how the North would accelerate its

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Japan’s earthquake has brought back painful memories

The year 2024 began in the worst possible way for Japan. At least 30 people were killed by a powerful earthquake which struck the Ishikawa prefecture on the west coast of the country in mid-afternoon on New Year’s day. The death toll is expected to rise considerably. The quake registered 7.6 on the Richter scale, making it one of the most powerful in recent history. To give you some idea of the magnitude, it is a level that will knock you off your feet – I was unnerved enough by the swaying I felt in a Tokyo department store 180 miles away to hold on to a rail. Japan’s geospatial

Monday

James Lewisohn

How Queen Margrethe made the Danish monarchy popular

Danish New Year’s Eves are to be savoured partly for their predictability. First, on the main Danish State TV channel, the vintage British TV comedy Dinner for One, with Freddie Frinton and May Warden, is broadcast. Then there is the countdown to midnight on the face of Copenhagen’s city hall clock, followed by desultory fireworks let off by individuals in the square below (on a shoestring budget compared to the millions of pounds Sadiq Khan spends annually to promote himself in London). Cut to exultant choirs singing in the new year at a Danish Lutheran church. And, of course, earlier in the evening, the monarch’s address, given since 1972 by our

Terry Barnes

Aussie republicans are fawning over Denmark’s new queen

According to opinion polls, more Australians want to ditch the country’s ties with the British monarchy than retain it. The Labor government of prime minister Anthony Albanese includes an assistant minister for the republic. King Charles is being dropped from Australian banknotes. Most major Australian media outlets, including News Corp’s flagship newspaper the Australian, and especially the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, are no supporters of the King. The ABC last year notoriously used its coronation coverage to debate the future of the monarchy and to assert its direct responsibility for the greatest stain on Australia’s history: the suffering and maltreatment of Aborigines in the colonial period. For Australian

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Putin didn’t mention the war in his New Year’s address

With ‘don’t mention the war!’ the order of the day, it felt as if Vladimir Putin’s message to his people this year was haunted by the ghost of Basil Fawlty. The New Year’s message is a Soviet and then Russian tradition dating back to the 1970s. It is watched widely across the country, sometimes with reverence, often with irony, but nonetheless something of a ritual observed almost regardless of class, location or political orientation. Aired just before midnight in each of the country’s 11 time zones, before the chimes of the Kremlin belltower and the national anthem, in the past it was an opportunity for Putin to try and present

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why Europe’s centrists are terrified of 2024

New Year’s Eve passed off peacefully in France give or take the odd incident. There were 211 arrests in total, announced Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, but overall the country saw in 2024 with good cheer.   In the days leading up to the last day of 2023, there were ominous warnings from the government about the possibility of a terrorist attack. Nearly 100,000 police, gendarmes and soldiers were deployed the length and breadth of France to counter such a threat but nothing materialised.  For a decade ‘populist’ has been the insult of choice for European centrists to describe anyone who dares deviate from their progressive dogma Emmanuel Macron is praying

Nicholas Farrell

The ancient roots of Italy’s Festa della Befana

In Italy if you are not careful, you are condemned to measure out your life in religious festivals. There are so many of them. Perhaps that’s why I find La Befana a bit of a pain coming as it does so hard on the heels of so many others. Or maybe it’s because it is essentially a pagan festival and our civilisation has lost all contact with that world. But then again, maybe it’s just that I have become a miserable old git. The Festa della Befana takes place throughout Italy, but especially in the north, on 5 January, the night before Epiphany. It contains elements that are also found

Natasha Voase

Paris doesn’t want the 2024 Olympics

As hundreds of boats float elegantly down the Seine at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics this summer, one well-known and loved landmark will be absent. The bouquinistes, antique booksellers who have lined the banks for centuries, will have decamped for the duration of the games. For many Parisians who face the prospect of their city being swamped by almost a million incomers, this is the final nail in the coffin. Though much of the French population support the Games or are indifferent, Parisians have been quick to complain about the Games’ arrival. Nearly 44 per cent of Parisians thought the Olympics were a ‘bad thing’, according to one survey,

Andrew Tettenborn

The trouble with the United Nations’s fringe organisations

A new year is a good time for nations, like families, to review the institutions they support. For 2024 I have a suggestion for the UK: it could do worse than standing back and considering hard how it should deal in future with the United Nations and its offshoots. We’re not talking here about leaving the UN as a whole. Except for the lunatic Republican fringe in the United States, there is no serious call for any country to do this. Indeed, there are legal doubts about whether this is even possible, the charter being silent on the matter. (Indonesia purported to quit in the 1960s, but it soon changed

Sunday

Damien Phillips

Is Opec’s power finally failing?

Since 1973, much of global politics has been conducted in the long shadow of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) cartel. That was the year Opec first set its stamp on global affairs by engineering an oil crisis in response to Western governments’ support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Prices quadrupled and exports to western Europe, the United States, and Japan were banned altogether. The result was a deep recession and spiralling inflation, the effects of which endured long after the oil embargo was lifted in 1974. In the years since, the steady flow of petrodollars has propped up authoritarian regimes from Latin America to the Arabian

John Keiger John Keiger

Is Airbus a metaphor for Britain’s relationship with the EU?

A French member of the board of Airbus – the giant European aircraft and aerospace group – once told me that the French thought of it as their company while the Germans thought it theirs. In reality, both countries own it: the French state owns 11 per cent of Airbus capital, Germany 10.9 per cent and Spain 4.17 per cent, with the remaining shares quoted on Euronext. Assembly of Airbus planes from across Europe takes place in Toulouse, where the company’s operational headquarters are located, but the company’s official registered headquarters are in Leiden, Netherlands. For Brussels, Airbus is a model of European integration and EU strategic autonomy. But the invisible

Saturday

Robin Ashenden

Why New Year trumps Christmas in Russia

What a difference a decade makes. Exactly ten years ago, Russians celebrated New Year by watching Goluboi Ogoniek (‘Little Blue Light’) the traditional TV programme – full of glitz, music, Moët and laughter – which ushers in 1 January. Three men dominated Goluboi Ogoniek that particular year. On YouTube, anchorman Vladimir Soloviev can be seen smiling like a pussycat over the merrymaking. Co-presenter is Maxim Galkin, the Soviet-born Israeli comedian married to singing legend Alla Pugacheva. But the biggest surprise is the third of the trio – a compact, intense little man with black hair and a gravelly voice, singing, capering and cracking up the Russian audience with his one-liners.

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Can things get any worse for Olaf Scholz?

A ‘smurf’, a ‘plumber’, a ‘know-it-all’: Olaf Scholz has been called many things. But so far Germany’s chancellor has brushed off the criticism. ‘I like the smurf thing,’ he told German media, ‘they are small, cunning and they always win.’ Being associated with the ‘honourable craft of plumbing’ made him ‘proud’. And of all the epithets to acquire, ‘know-it-all’ may not have been the worst; unless, that is, you run out of answers. Scholz has had a tricky year in 2023. With crisis after crisis engulfing his administration, few Germans now trust him to offer viable solutions. A survey earlier this month suggested that only a fifth of voters are

Friday

Nigel Biggar

The British Museum is the best home for the Elgin Marbles

Should the Elgin Marbles be returned? Greece’s argument, put forward recently by the country’s foreign minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is well rehearsed: the Marbles, he claimed, were ‘essentially stolen’ from their rightful owners by Lord Elgin at the turn of the 19th century – and they belong in the Acropolis, not the British Museum. Only when the looted sculptures are reunited with their siblings in Athens, we’re told, can the ensemble reveal its authentic meaning. The reality is rather more complex. The case for the British Museum returning the Marbles to Athens – albeit by the legal fiction of a ‘loan’ – is weak.  The facts are these. The Acropolis, on which the Parthenon stands,

Geoff Hill

What’s the truth about South Africa’s ‘genocide’ of white farmers?

Is a crime against humanity at risk of unfolding in South Africa? Elon Musk, the Pretoria-born billionaire who owns X (Twitter) and Tesla, fears that there might be. Earlier this year, he wrote that he’d heard of calls for ‘a genocide of white people’ in his former homeland. Musk isn’t alone in his concerns. Steve Hofmeyr, a South African singer with a cult following, thinks that the ‘g-word’ is an appropriate way to describe what is unfolding: ‘If you think that the slaughter of South African farmers is not genocide enough, ask them about their land, language, religion, education, universities, heritage, monuments, safety, dignity and the race-based regulations imposed upon them and their

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

Why 2024 will be tough on Joe Biden

In the United States, presidential elections are rarely won or lost on foreign policy. Domestic matters like the economy, crime, and the overall state of the country are far more relevant to candidates. Even so, incumbents can’t allow the world to degenerate in front of them. Just ask Jimmy Carter, whose 1980 campaign against challenger Ronald Reagan shrivelled away in part to the lingering Iranian hostage crisis. As Joe Biden looks to 2024, his administration is juggling a cornucopia of conflicts, challenges and crises. Whether events outside America’s borders will help or hurt him at the polls next November is anyone’s guess. But there is a sense that the next

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Does Putin use body doubles?

It has become something of a fad to try to identify and quantify the body doubles of Vladimir Putin. There are even outlandish claims that the man himself is dead and has been replaced by one. But why the fascination? It is hardly unusual for autocrats to have doubles – as a shield against assassination or simply as handy proxies to take on the more tedious and less important duties. Stalin had at least a couple; Panamanian strongman Manual Noriega apparently had no fewer than four. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was once photographed chatting with two of his identically-dressed doubles. The likelihood is that those uncharacteristic public events were, indeed,

Wednesday

George Llewelyn

Mad dogs and Putin’s shells: A dispatch from Kherson

Browsing the shelves at Tsum, a supermarket in the centre of Kherson in Ukraine, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Whole Foods in Kensington. The deli and the grocery are as well stocked and diverse as any in London and, in the patisserie, the smell of freshly baked brioche permeates the air. Every day, people walk the aisles, gathering not only essentials but exotic fruits, kombucha and even Christmas decorations. In many ways, Tsum is emblematic of this city’s resilience in the midst of war. On the upper floors, its windows are either smashed or missing altogether; at street level, its doors are appended with large protective

Tuesday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Ukraine’s attack on the Novocherkassk warship matters

It was not quite in time for Christmas (which Ukraine now celebrates on 25 December, after switching this year from the Russian Orthodox Julian calendar), but Kyiv will still be celebrating today’s apparently successful Storm Shadow missile attack on a landing ship in a Crimean port. There are no seasonal ceasefires on either side in this increasingly bitter conflict. The Ropucha-class landing ship Novocherkassk (BDK-46) had already had a rather unhappy war. In March 2022, it was damaged by Ukrainian shelling when docked in Berdyansk in occupied southern Ukraine. Later in the year the Novocherkassk, along with its sister ship, the Tsezar Kunikov, were reportedly immobilised by a lack of