World

Tuesday

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Why has Xi Jinping purged his senior commanders?

The Chinese Communist party will no doubt throw a militarised tantrum should Saturday’s election in Taiwan be won by Lai Ching-te, the more independence-minded of the candidates. Yet behind these histrionics lies an army in turmoil, with a purge of top generals raising serious doubts as to whether it is up to the task of fighting a war.  The CCP has spent billions of dollars expanding and modernising its armed forces at a pace rarely seen in peacetime, with the aim of creating a cutting edge force. But the money thrown at the generals and their hunger to acquire shiny new kit has fuelled increasingly deep-seated corruption in its rapacious

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Can Macron’s ‘Brutus’ PM stop Le Pen?

Emmanuel Macron has begun the new year by replacing one Socialist prime minister with another. Out goes Elisabeth Borne and in comes Gabriel Attal, who at 34 is almost half as young as his 62-year-old predecessor. Macron hopes that Attal will provide his ailing presidency with some youthful vigour after the disastrous 20 months of Borne’s premiership. The arch technocrat wasn’t Macron’s first pick for the choice of PM in May 2022, but the left-wing members of his party made it known that his first choice, Catherine Vautrin, was unacceptable on account of her conservatism. So Borne got the job, but proved inadequate and uninspiring.   As Le Figaro put it, her government

Terry Barnes

Australia sees sense on its plan to ditch the monarchy

Australia’s government has been determined to ‘do a Barbados’ and ditch the British monarchy for an Australian republic with an Australian president. But now, it seems, prime minister Anthony Albanese has lost his nerve. In the week that the first Australian coins of Charles III’s reign entered general circulation, and it was confirmed the King and Queen will visit Australia later this year, Albanese and his government scuttled away from his party’s proclaimed republican intentions with a speed that makes even Rishi Sunak look decisive and in control. After campaigning for office with a commitment to put the future of the monarchy to a constitutional referendum in Labor’s second term

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Trump mocks Macron’s accent

Emmanuel Macron is facing something of a crisis at home: his prime minister has resigned and his party is trailing that of his fierce rival Marine Le Pen by up to ten points in the run-up to crunch European elections. But Macron’s troubles don’t stop there: his ‘friend’ Donald Trump has been busy on the campaign trail in the United States, mocking his old ally and imitating the French leader’s accent. During a rally in Iowa, Trump told the crowd what happened when he threatened to slap tariffs on French wine and champagne if France imposed duties on US tech giants: Trump told the crowd: ‘I said, ‘Emmanuel, how are

Monday

Ben Lazarus Ben Lazarus

Is a new front about to open up in Israel’s war?

Two days after the Israel Defence Forces announced that it had dismantled Hamas’s ‘military framework’ in the northern Gaza Strip, a new front in the war could now begin after the IDF took out a senior Hezbollah commander. Wissam al-Tawil, the deputy head of a unit within the group’s elite Radwan force, was killed this morning in an Israeli air strike on his car in southern Lebanon. ‘This is a very painful strike,’ one unnamed security source told Reuters. ‘Things will flare up now,’ another security source added. Since 7 October, more than 130 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in skirmishes between the group and Israel (another 19 died in Syria). Some

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The unbearably smug spectacle of the Golden Globes

Does anybody actually watch televised Hollywood award shows anymore unless, like me, they’re being paid to? Until ‘The Incident’ at the 2022 Oscars between Will Smith and Chris Rock, the answer was clear; between 2014 and 2020, even the Academy Awards lost almost half their audience, which fell to 23 million. But in 2023, figures were up by a whopping 18 million as eager punters tuned in, perhaps hoping to see a spot of ‘bitch-slapping’ between Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh. The Golden Globes, lacking the iconic oomph of the Oscars, has fared even worse, despite being a broader church in that they cover the year’s top televisual as well

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

What lies at the root of the India-China rivalry?

45 min listen

India is the fifth largest economy in the world, and now has a population larger than China’s. It’s no surprise, then, that officials in Washington often see India as a powerful non-western bulwark to growing Chinese power. On this podcast, I look at where China and India’s rivalry comes from. How much have long-lasting skirmishes on the China-Indian border damaged relations? How have demographics, economic competition and recent international conflicts affected the relationship between the two countries? And are the domestic politics of China and India in fact more similar than most westerners like to admit? I speak to Avinash Paliwal, an international relations expert at the School of Oriental

Jawad Iqbal

What’s the truth about the US defence secretary’s mystery illness?

Questions are growing over who knew what, and when, about the hospitalisation of the American Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, the most senior official in the chain of command between the president and the military. Austin was taken to hospital on New Year’s Day but the news was kept secret. Astonishingly, even president Joe Biden does not appear to have been told that Austin was unwell until last Thursday, four days after his admission to the Walter Reed National Medical Center in Maryland. Key figures in the Pentagon and members of Congress were also kept in the dark, and only informed on Friday. There have even been claims that senior members of his

Sunday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Russia’s egg shortage is panicking Putin

The fall of the house of the Romanovs in 1917 may have been a long time coming, but arguably it was finally triggered by bread prices. It would be ironic if another Russian autocrat fell to food, which may help explain why the Kremlin has been moving so decisively to address Russia’s egg crisis, after prices rose by over 40 percent last year. On Friday, the Investigatory Committee – loosely analogous to an FBI on steroids – ordered an enquiry into potential price fixing, following on the heels of Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov’s decision to launch his own probe. Rather more directly, the much-feared Federal Security Service (FSB) has been

Sasha Lensky

Why hasn’t Russia collapsed?

Following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the calamitous, early missteps of the Russian army, many Western experts fairly crowed over the possibility of Russia disintegrating. ‘It’s high time to prepare for Russia’s collapse,’ ran a typical headline on the Foreign Policy website, while a survey of 167 foreign-policy experts by the Atlantic Council think tank last January found that 40 per cent of them expected Russia to break up internally within ten years due to ‘revolution, civil war, political disintegration’ and so on. Meanwhile, an article from the Hudson Institute was more prescriptive, issuing a list of points to consider when ‘Preparing for the Final Collapse

Jawad Iqbal

The dark side of Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina

Politics in Bangladesh is very much a one-woman show, starring prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who has ruled the country for the last 15 years. When voters go to the polls in elections today, they face little choice but to re-elect her and the ruling Awami League party. The main opposition – the Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) – is boycotting the vote, citing government interference. Many leading opposition figures are under house arrest, behind bars or in exile. An array of independent candidates and a few smaller opposition parties standing for election is meant to convey the impression of an electoral contest of sorts but this shouldn’t fool anyone. Hasina’s long and

Saturday

John Lloyd

George Floyd was no martyr

To write that George Floyd died is to take a position. The received belief is that he was murdered – a murder bigger, in its consequences, than any other crime for decades. Unlike the relatively muted protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the streets of the world hosted men and women passionate in their denunciation of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, whose detention in May 2020 of Floyd by, apparently, kneeling on his neck for around ten minutes, had killed him.  Chauvin became a synecdoche for the perceived repressions of the state – any state, from South Africa to Germany, no matter how strongly committed to democratic governance and civil rights. In Melbourne, in

Mark Hollingsworth

Russia is still very much a security threat inside the UK

At 1.30 p.m. on 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident and BBC journalist, approached a bus stop at the south end of Waterloo bridge. As he gazed absent-mindedly across the Thames, office workers jostled him as they streamed past. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain on the back of his right thigh. Turning quickly, he saw a man stoop to pick up an umbrella. ‘I am sorry’, the man mumbled in a gruff foreign accent. Seconds later, a taxi pulled up, the man jumped inside and disappeared.  The pain was excruciating, and Markov was taken to St James’ hospital, Balham. As he lay in bed, the Soviet bloc defector mentioned

Friday

Julie Bindel

Oscar Pistorius should still be in prison

The murderer Oscar Pistorius was released from prison on parole today, more than a decade after shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. He killed her in an horrific act of femicide: the murder of females by males because they are female. Because such crimes are so normalised and common, criminal justice systems around the world tend to excuse these particular men for committing the most serious crimes against women. In the UK, for example, one woman dies every three days at the hands of a current or former male partner. Some men even come in for preferential treatment: those that are famous, wealthy and conventionally attractive are often treated less harshly than

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Biden’s bogus memorialisation of 6 January

It’s fright month in Joe Biden’s America, folks. Today, 5 January, the US President will travel to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to mark the third anniversary of the riot on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on 6 January 2021. He would have done it on the day but the event had to be rescheduled due to an incoming storm. Biden also likes to rest on the weekends.  Still, near the spot where George Washington and his continental army survived the brutal Revolutionary War winter of 1777-78, the increasingly ethereal 46th president will endeavour to summon the tough ghosts of America’s founding. He will deliver yet another warning about the petrifying threat which

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Harvard’s Claudine Gay isn’t a victim of racism

A month ago, Claudine Gay of Harvard University was obsessed with putting things into context. Asked at that now infamous Congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism whether calling for a genocide of the Jews is a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct, Gay said it would depend on the context. Her remarks raised eyebrows worldwide. The idea that there are some contexts in which it might not be a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct to say ‘Kill all Jews’ made many wonder what the hell is going on at that university. Fast forward four weeks and now Gay seems content to do away with context completely. Consider her resignation letter

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukrainians can’t trust Putin’s hollow promises

Ukraine’s parliament will soon vote on much-needed conscription regulations which would draft an extra half a million recruits into the army. The categories of eligible men will be expanded, the draft age will be lowered from 27 to 25, and any man caught attempting to evade it will face harsh sanctions or imprisonment. Volodymyr Zelensky has stopped talking about victory coming any time soon. His New Year’s message was grim: everyone must either fight or help through work. Ukrainians are braced for another year of war. But talk of ‘peace’ or ‘compromise’ is still seen as code for a surrender which would reward rather than punish Vladimir Putin’s atrocities, cede

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Britain must commit to Ukraine – or admit we don’t care enough

I have never been one of those late-middle-aged right-wing men who, at night, hunkers down over the computer to pleasure himself while staring at photographs of Vladimir Putin. He doesn’t do it for me – not even that picture of him riding a horse semi-naked through a river with a very resolute expression on his stern Asiatic face. This may put me in a minority among people of my age and gender, for I understand that Vlad has legions of admirers among my peers. It is an admiration which tends to speak its name only after a few drinks have been taken and stems largely from Putin’s commendable detestation of

Owen Matthews

Putin’s ‘peace’ is a partitioned Ukraine

Is Vladimir Putin trying to end his war in Ukraine? According to recent reports, the Kremlin has launched a new ‘back-channel diplomacy’ to reach out to senior officials in the Joe Biden administration. Putin’s message: to signal that he could accept a ceasefire that freezes the fighting along current lines. Reactions to the story have been furious. Some Ukrainians, sheltering from Russia’s biggest-ever missile and drone assaults of the war over Christmas, saw it as evidence of a nefarious Washington insider plot to sell Kyiv down the river. President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed Putin’s initiative as disingenuous, saying that he saw ‘no sign’ Russia genuinely wanted to negotiate. ‘We just see

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Algeria has proved a revelation

‘Please accept coffee without payment. You are visitors.’ So said the manager of the retro-chic little Café Auber in downtown Algiers, where we’d paused on a stroll down to the harbour after Christmas. We’d considered the city just a stop on our way into the Sahara. Instead it proved a revelation. Were you to arrive at Algiers on one of the regular overnight ferries from Marseille, you would be greeted by a waterfront of magnificent, ornate, turn-of-the-19th-centurymansion blocks: Parisian-style, cream and white, embroidered with palm trees. Built in the grand French style, the old city rising up the hillside behind remains astonishingly true to its history, though it’s more than