World

Tuesday

Charles Lipson

Joe Biden’s terrible Easter

Among the many political advantages of the presidency, surely one is the ability to extend warm wishes to Christians, Jews and Muslims on their holidays. It’s a golden opportunity to invite a few for pictures at the White House and explain how much the holiday has always meant to you. Easy-peasy. For a Catholic president such as Joe Biden, expressing solidarity with co-religionists on Easter ought to be a well-practiced routine.  Which voter group does the White House think its exclusionary message appeals to?  It took genuine incompetence and obtuseness for the Biden White House to muck up the chance to reach out to fellow Christians on the holiest day

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Anti-Israel virtue signallers should leave Eurovision alone

The 2024 Eurovision Song Contest – the final of which will be held in Malmö on 11 May – is the latest peculiar target of pompous virtue signallers. The hosts of the UK’s largest Eurovision screening have announced their decision to scrap the event. The reason? Israel, of course. ‘We have collectively decided not to screen the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest this year while Israel remains in the competition,’ the independent Rio cinema in Dalston, east London, said in a statement. Reminder: they are talking here, not about the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the Good Friday Agreement, but The Eurovision Song Contest – which generates

Zoe Strimpel

Britain should follow Germany’s lead in weeding out anti-Semites

On the surface of it, Germany’s new pathway to citizenship sounds like a rare dose of sense from the one country in the Western world whose modern history means it still understands why Israel has a right to exist. One surefire short-hand for establishing who means us ill is by singling out those who mean our Jews ill The shake-up makes it easier to get German citizenship, allowing people to apply five rather than eight years after they arrive in the country – and just three years for those with good language skills. But for die-hard anti-Semites, the process will get harder, with questions that may involve naming the date of Israel’s founding

Daniel Thorpe

Is this the beginning of the end for Erdogan?

President Erdogan’s political star rose when he won the local elections in Istanbul exactly 30 years ago. ‘The one who wins Istanbul wins the whole of Turkey,’ he once said. His famous sentence is now back to haunt him. People already talk about ‘the beginning of the end’ for Erdogan In Istanbul yesterday, tens of thousands of people gathered to celebrate not Erdogan but Ekrem Imamoglu, the opposition’s incumbent mayor, in municipal elections. Despite the fatigue from last year’s general elections, over 78 per cent of Turkey’s 61 million-strong electorate turned up to cast their votes yesterday. Their backing for Imamoglu was resounding: his Republican People’s Party (CHP) performed spectacularly, securing 37.7

Limor Simhony Philpott

How will Iran respond to Israel’s assassination in Damascus?

Last night, six missiles fired from an Israeli F-35 combat aircraft hit and destroyed a building belonging to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria. At the time, a meeting between high-ranking members of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad were taking place. The attack resulted in the death of two IRGC generals: Mohammad Reza Zahedi who was leader of the Quds force – the IRGC force in Syria and Lebanon – and his deputy, Sardar Haji Rahimi. It is reported that at least five other IRGC officers were killed in what is one of Israel’s most successful assassinations of senior Iranian commanders.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The alarming rise of the middle-aged terrorist

Police in Paris last week arrested a man suspected of planning an attack against a church. That in itself was not unusual. According to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, since 2017 the police and intelligence services have thwarted 45 Islamist attacks. Is this some twisted form of mid-life crisis? What was different about the man detained in Paris was his age: he was 62. This is an alarming development in Europe’s ceaseless fight against Islamic extremism. In the bloody years of 2015 to 2017, when hundreds of people were slaughtered in attacks across Europe, the perpetrators were young men. The exception was Khalid Masood. On March 22, 2017, the Briton killed five people in an Islamist

Saturday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Japan is no country for young men

Another week, another fun fact about Japan’s declining birthrate and ageing population to startle and amuse us. Japan has now recorded a full decade where sales of adult nappies outstripped those of baby nappies. Thanks to the surfeit of geriatric incontinents, one well-known manufacturer, Oji Holdings, has made headlines by giving up on tots entirely and announcing it will shift its production to nappies for seniors instead. It is a reasonable business decision by the company. There just aren’t enough babies. Indeed, children under the age of 15 made up less than 12 per cent percent of the country’s population in 2022, while those aged 65 and over constituted almost

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

What’s happening in the Darien Gap?

40 min listen

Freddy is joined by evolutionary biologist and host of The DarkHorse Podcast Bret Weinstein. They discuss the Darien Gap, an area of Panama which has become a focal point for America’s migrant crisis. Bret has spent some time investigating the area, what’s going on? 

Mahmoud Saikal

How to stop illegal immigration from Afghanistan

Spring is here. For Afghanistan that means more violence by the Taliban and other terrorists – and more refugees leaving our country on small boats for the United Kingdom and elsewhere.   As a proud patriot it gives me nothing but shame to see the name Afghanistan ever more prominent in British Home Office data sets on illegal immigration. The latest published figures show that in 2023 Afghanistan was the source of more immigrants reaching Britain across the Channel on ‘small boats’ than any other nation: 5,545 out of 29,437 – roughly one in five. The Taliban are a powerful pump for the illegal immigrants roiling British politics A year

Thursday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What Chinese hackers want

27 min listen

Over the last week the UK has been rocked by allegations that China was responsible for two cyber attacks in recent years – one on the Electoral Commission, where hackers successfully accessed the open register, which has the details of 40 million voters; and a set of attempts to access the emails of a number of China critics within parliament. So what do we know about China’s cyber capabilities? What are its goals? And now that the UK knows about these attacks, what should we be doing? Joining me on the podcast today is Nigel Inkster, senior advisor for cyber security and China at the think tank IISS, formerly director

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Germany’s Holocaust dilemma

‘In 2024, Jewish money is once again being confiscated by a German bank’. This is a headline that makes for uncomfortable reading in Berlin. It is part of a story currently making the rounds on social media and being described as a ‘worrying echo of history.’ But there is more to this story than meets the eye. And it goes right to the heart of Germany’s Holocaust dilemma. The country responsible for arguably the biggest crime in history does not want to be seen as suppressing Jewish voices The headline was thought up by the activist organisation Jewish Voice for Peace which says its account with a Berlin bank has been frozen

Ian Williams Ian Williams

US businesses are falling out of love with Xi’s Chinese dream

A US diplomat in Beijing once told me a story of an American businessman hospitalised in the city of Ningbo after being hit at the airport by an electric buggy that was ferrying a group of Chinese VIPs who were late for their flight. The authorities confiscated his passport, demanding he pay for the damage to the buggy before he could leave. The diplomat was outraged, but when he got to Ningbo to provide help, the businessman told him to go home, explaining that he wanted to pay the fine since he was on the cusp of a big deal and didn’t want to upset the authorities. To the diplomat

Daniel Rey

Have NeverTrumpers found a way to hit Donald where it hurts?

With Donald Trump confirmed as the Republican nominee, a group of NeverTrump conservatives have tried to hit the former president somewhere vulnerable: the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Lincoln Project, an organisation led by old-school Republicans, has released a video parodying one of the tunes most associated with Trump’s rallies – the theme song from The Phantom of the Opera. Trump has a profound love of musical theatre, particularly the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Since 2015, songs like ‘The Music of the Night’, ‘All I Ask of You’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ have been part of his pre-speech soundtrack. He revealed in Think Like a Billionaire that he saw

Tuesday

Candida Crewe

The utter horror of UHT milk

On a trip to Italy via Paris last month, my travelling companion and I went to the Gare de Lyon at sparrows to catch a train to Rome. We badly wanted coffee. I came to coffee late in life and am infantile and uncool in my love of frothy buckets of what is effectively a hot coffee milkshake. It is almost all about the milk, preferably whole and organic but, at the very least, fresh. So it was that Starbucks – which uses conventional milk in the UK – twinklingand open in the middle of the freezing station, made the heart lift. I recognised in my childhood that the French did

Yascha Mounk

Why the British think differently from Americans

When I first started teaching undergraduates at Harvard, the grading system the university employed struck me as very odd. Even ambitious students at top colleges in the United States see it as their job to answer any essay question in the most thorough and reasonable way. They regurgitate the dominant view in scholarly literature in a competent manner. If they pull this off without making major errors, they fully expect to get an A. And with grade inflation rampant in the Ivy League, they usually do. This attitude has had a significant influence on American public life. If you read an opinion piece in the New York Times or the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Europe must tighten its borders to combat the Islamist threat

Europe is on a state of high alert after Friday’s Islamist attack in Moscow that left 137 concertgoers dead. France has raised its security alert to the highest level, and more soldiers will be deployed to patrol the streets and stand guard outside ‘sensitive sites’ including churches, synagogues and schools. President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement on Sunday that the group that carried out the Moscow attack, Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS-K), an Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State, had attempted to commit ‘several’ atrocities on French soil in recent months, including an attack in the city of Strasbourg. Will border controls be tightened? It would be futile. The Islamist threat

Nigel Jones

Was Russia right to torture the Moscow attackers?

The court appearance of the four men accused by Russia of carrying out the Moscow massacre of 137 innocent concert goers at the Crocus City Hall venue told its own grim story. All the suspects bore marks of torture: one was wearing a bandage on his ear, following reports that it may have been at least partially severed and forcibly fed to him during his interrogation; another was semi-conscious and appeared to be missing an eye. Meanwhile, a video did the rounds seemingly showing one of the men’s genitals hooked up to an electricity generator.  The footage of the battered men was shocking to tender western eyes, but hardly surprising:

Owen Matthews

The Moscow terror attack is Putin’s 9/11

The Crocus City Hall attack blindsided Putin’s vast security state. Employing nearly a million policemen, 340,000 national guards and over 100,000 spies, that apparatus has proved ruthlessly efficient at terrorising babushkas bringing flowers to Aleksei Navalny’s grave, tracking down lone bloggers and persecuting homosexuals. But as the Crocus attack demonstrated, the Kremlin’s securocrats are utterly incompetent at doing their actual job, which is to protect the lives of Russian citizens. Rather than keep a relentless watch for emerging threats from all over the region, Putin’s security chiefs have instead focused on only two tasks – repressing internal dissent, and stealing money.  Putin is locked into his own lies about Ukraine

Monday

Limor Simhony Philpott

The UN’s ceasefire call will only strengthen Hamas

The UN has passed a draft resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza to last until the end of Ramadan in two weeks’ time, possibly leading to a permanent ceasefire. The resolution was backed by Russia, China and by the 22-nation Arab Group. This is the first time that the security council managed to pass a ceasefire resolution, after all the others were vetoed. The UN resolution is highly unlikely to result in the release of hostages by Hamas The non-binding resolution calls for the ceasefire ‘to be respected by all parties’ and demands ‘the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.’ It does not call for Hamas to

Duncan Gardham

Why Islamic State is fixated with Russia

Islamic State (IS) has released a graphic video showing gunmen storming the Crocus concert hall near Moscow in an attack that killed at least 137 people. The footage corroborates the terrorist organisation’s claim of responsibility. The most likely culprit is the organisation’s offshoot based in Afghanistan. For years, IS-Khorasan Province (IS-K) – a branch of IS based in Afghanistan – has been fixated with Russia. It holds Moscow responsible for destroying its power base in Syria by backing president Assad, and accuses the Kremlin of having Muslim blood on its hands. President Putin is a regular target in its propaganda. President Putin is a regular target in IS’s propaganda IS said