World

Friday

Ben Domenech

Why Democrats shouldn’t celebrate the charges against Donald Trump

The indictment of former president Donald Trump as part of an investigation into hush money paid in 2016 to an ex porn star is striking for a number of reasons. There is its historic nature, unprecedented and indicative of the weaponisation of government entities by partisans who head them. Trump is accused of having an affair with Stormy Daniels and paying her to keep quiet. The allegations – which Trump has denied and says amount to a ‘political persecution’ – are questionable. No serious legal scholar believes they could pass muster. And then there is the total bifurcation of reaction: for Democrats, they are approaching this conclusion with less joy than solemnity,

Thursday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Evan Gershkovich and Russia’s descent into thugocracy

It’s a crude but inescapable fact of history that many states had their origins in better-organised bandit gangs. It’s a depressing feature of the present that some states seem determined to slide back into bandit status. While Putin’s Russia retains the institutions of modern statehood, he and his clique of cronies and yes-men have no problem adopting the tactics of the thug – including kidnapping. The arrest of American journalist Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges appears to be the most recent example. The Kremlin is tiptoeing closer to a kind of ‘North Koreanisation’ Gershkovich, part of the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau, was on assignment in Ekaterinburg when he was

Ian Silvera

Amsterdam’s lazy campaign against British tourists

Amsterdam has launched a campaign telling rowdy Brits to stay away. Men between the age of 18 and 35 are being targeted with videos showing what happens to those who overindulge. Brits who search online for terms like ‘stag do’, ‘cheap Amsterdam accommodation’ and ‘pub crawl Amsterdam’ will be served with the warning adverts featuring tourists being locked up or hospitalised. To put it in wrestling terms, we’ve well and truly become the ‘heels’ of Europe. Brexit, it seems, has catalysed the unfair ‘bad boy Brit’ persona of a sometimes sluggish, mostly uncultured and drunken nation which urinates and swears its way across the continent while ordering beige grub in

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Putin’s crackdown on Russia’s school children

In Russia, nowhere – and no one – is safe from the insidious reach of Putin’s war in Ukraine. In April 2022, during a school art class, twelve-year-old Masha Moskaleva drew a picture of a Russian and Ukrainian flag with missiles flying at a mother and child. Inside the flags, she had written ‘Glory to Ukraine’ and ‘No to War’.  Masha’s art teacher saw her drawing and called in the head teacher who then called the police. Officers interrogated her and her classmates, but Masha managed to slip away after giving them a false name. The following day, as her father, Alexei, was picking her up from school, the two were apprehended by police and taken for

Wednesday

Constantin Eckner

Why Germans are going wild for King Charles

King Charles III is going down a storm in Berlin. Hundreds of wellwishers have turned out to greet the King during a reception at the Brandenburg Gate – and the monarch, who is on his first trip abroad since taking the throne, seems relaxed. But amidst the selfies and Burger King hats (which many of those who turned out to see the King have opted to wear), there is serious business to be done – and German politicians are optimistic that Charles’s visit can repair some of the damage caused by Brexit. While Charles’s mother Elizabeth was seen as apolitical, the King’s past commitments to social and ecological causes have

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron’s last adventure: the President vs the public

Montpellier Every generation or so, French politics is decided on the streets. The May 1968 unrest in Paris spread worldwide; Jacques Chirac’s welfare reform agenda was ended with the 1995 disturbances. The spirit of revolt is so alive in French society that a special police force exists for such occasions, specialising in crowd control. Now President Emmanuel Macron is facing another sustained revolt. Eight weeks into the battle over his pension reforms, it’s far from clear who – if anyone – is winning. Police cars and buildings have been set alight in Strasbourg, Lille, Saint-Étienne and Bordeaux. In Paris, bin men have just ended a three-week strike: some 10,000 tonnes

Posie Parker Posie Parker

Fear and loathing in New Zealand

The mob lunged towards me, screeching and grabbing, and I knew that if I fell I would never get up. I’ve stopped expecting mercy from anyone whose motto is ‘Be kind’ but the event last week was terrifying. I was sure in that moment, on the New Zealand leg of my ‘Let Women Speak’ tour, that the trans activists who surrounded me would trample me to death if they could. They gather in menacing groups to intimidate us and hurt us if they can, just to prevent us speaking a simple truth: that women don’t have penises, men don’t have vaginas, there is no such thing as non-binary and transitioning

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

David Kezerashvili: ‘Georgia is a proxy of the Russian state’

David Kezerashvili knows better than most what standing up to Russia entails. He helped to overthrow the Kremlin-aligned Georgian government during the 2003 Rose Revolution. Then he served as Georgia’s defence minister for two years including when Russia invaded in 2008. He eventually fled to London in 2012 when the Kremlin-backed Georgian Dream government accused him of embezzling $5.2 million in state funds. Seven criminal charges were levelled against him, including extortion and money laundering. None was upheld in court, until two years ago when the country’s Supreme Court overturned the embezzlement acquittal, sentencing him in absentia to ten years in prison. ‘Without calling my defence, in a few hours

Sean Thomas

The decline and fall of urban America

They’re calling it ‘revenge travel’: the desire to make up for the touring opportunities we all lost when we were locked down in our pandemical homes. As a keen professional traveller, I confess I’ve got a fearsome case of this bug: I’ve spent the past 20 months going just about anywhere I can, playing catch up. Here’s a brief list of the cities I have visited since mid-2021: Tbilisi, Seville, Munich, New Orleans, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Bangkok, Yerevan, Rome, Istanbul, Athens, Da Nang, Nashville, Los Angeles, Florence, Phnom Penh, Tucson. I could add a dozen more, but you get the gist. I’ve missed a terrific number of domestic social engagements; but

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is Macron heading for his Margaret Thatcher moment?

There was a sense of foreboding in France at the start of this week. After the anarchy of last Thursday and the extraordinary violence in western France on Saturday, where radical environmentalists fought a pitched battle with police, what would the next seven days bring?  Much of the media speculated that the 10th day of action organised by unions in protest at the government’s pension reform bill would result in the sort of scenes witnessed across France five days earlier, with city halls torched, shops sacked and police stations attacked. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the left-wing La France Insoumise, was accused by the government on Monday of tacitly encouraging the

Robin Ashenden

Who is torching Russia’s military recruitment centres?

The last twelve months or so in the post-Soviet sphere have been, among other things, the year of the Molotov Cocktail. Who can forget those clips, amidst the outbreak of war last February, of Ukrainian women calmly packaging up bottles with petrol, rags and grated polystyrene, as though at a local sewing bee? Or of the boxes of Molotov cocktails loaded up for different areas, as if they were cases of Beaujolais Nouveau? In the recent protests in Tbilisi, Molotov cocktails also featured prominently, in battles between protesters and police. But less well known is the resurgence Molotov’s DIY incendiary bomb has enjoyed in Russia of late. They have been

Tuesday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Nikolai Patrushev, the man dripping poison into Putin’s ear

If I were to have to pick the figure in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle who scares me the most, it would have to be Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council and the closest thing there is in the Russian system to a national security adviser. Patrushev’s profile has grown steadily as both cause and symptom of the system’s drift towards nationalist imperialism, and he best channels the worst impulses within the id of Putin’s clique. Whenever he speaks, it is sadly worth listening. After all, he does not just channel but shape those worst impulses. The Security Council itself is not the Soviet Politburo 2.0 that some assume.

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Why has the former Taiwanese president been cosying up to Beijing?

‘We must peacefully strive to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. This is an unshirkable duty for Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, one that we must work to achieve’. These aren’t the words of a Chinese Communist Party politician – but rather those of the former president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, who is on a ten-day trip to the People’s Republic. Ma’s first stop was Nanjing, where he called for friendlier relations between Beijing and Taipei, appealing to their shared Chinese ancestry.  Ma’s visit just happens to coincide with the incumbent Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen’s own visit to the US later this week, where she’ll meet the new

Debbie Hayton

The tragedy of the Nashville school shooting

Three children and three staff have been shot dead at a school in the United States. The pupils who died at the Covenant School in Nashville were all just nine years old. The attacker was Audrey Hale, a 28-year old transgender ex-pupil, who was armed with three guns, including a semi-automatic rifle. Hale was shot dead by police during the incident yesterday morning. America’s tragedy is that such appalling incidents just keep happening. Only last week, a 17 year-old wounded two support staff at a high school in Denver; in February, three students were fatally shot at Michigan State University; in January, two teenagers were killed in a ‘targeted shooting’

David Cohen

New Zealand has much to learn from the treatment of Posie Parker

A promotional clip for New Zealand uploaded to social media the other day looked like the usual decorous fare churned out by the country’s tourism agency: all deep-blue skies, golden sands and soaring mountains. The words were another matter. There was no come-hither voice enjoining visitors to experience ‘pure New Zealand’. Rather there was the miserable sound of Auckland this past weekend as the women who gathered to hear the biological sex campaigner Posie Parker were confronted by a much burlier mob determined to ‘turf the Terfs’, as one of their placards had it.  New Zealand’s record tallies with Parker’s view of it being ‘the worst place for women’ she had

Jawad Iqbal

Humza Yousaf and the myth about Britain’s diversity problem

Humza Yousaf, the new First Minister of Scotland after his victory in the SNP leadership election, deserves his moment in the sun. Yousaf is Scotland’s first ethnic minority leader and the first Muslim leader of the governing party. Legitimate questions about whether he is up to the job must wait while credit is given for the scale of his achievement in reaching the top of Scottish politics at the tender age of 37. Yousaf’s triumph heralds another significant milestone in the rapidly changing political complexion of the United Kingdom: the barriers to progress for those from non-white backgrounds are disappearing, a remarkable development that would have been implausible just a

Monday

James Snell

Netanyahu’s war on lawyers has thrown Israel into turmoil

Chaos reigns in Israel, a country in the throes of an ad hoc general strike called by trade unions, university students, numerous industries across the country, and many military and civil defence reservists. Demonstrators are storming buildings and fighting the police. Some council leaders say they are beginning a hunger strike. If you wanted to fly into Ben Gurion airport today, as tens of thousands of people usually do of a weekday, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. It’s closed.  Why is all of this happening? In the immediate term, because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sacked his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. Gallant is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and is a loyalist. He said that Netanyahu should

Nicholas Sheppard

The Posie Parker mob has embarassed New Zealand

New Zealand has, until recently, dwelt in splendid isolation during the culture wars. Kiwis have typically been reluctant to discuss social issues, the raising of which usually causes a kind of social static and brings down the mood. The antipathy, tribalism and performative outrage of identity politics hasn’t been much of a problem Down Under. But, in the last few years, things have changed. During the first Covid lockdown, when the country’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern was, in the eyes of the global media, an almost ethereal entity visited benevolently upon these shores, the country was united and sincerely committed to leading the way in the response. By the second

Sunday

Zareer Masani

What the conviction of Rahul Gandhi means for India

The conviction of Rahul Gandhi – an opposition politician and dynastic heir to three of India’s past prime ministers – has raised questions in India about both a colonial-era defamation law and Gandhi’s own political judgement. Rahul is currently an MP in the Indian parliament, but has taken on the role of crown-prince-in-waiting for the Congress party as a potential rival to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  His conviction, by a court in Modi’s BJP-ruled Gujarat state, is for a public comment Rahul made some years ago, asking rhetorically why so many thieves had Modi as their surname. This was a jibe at the PM, Rahul’s bête noire. What might have

Jack Watling

Sending uranium ammo to Ukraine isn’t an escalation

It didn’t take long for the Kremlin to exploit the news that Britain will be supplying depleted uranium armour-piercing anti-tank ammo to Ukraine. On Tuesday, Putin said that ‘Russia will have to respond accordingly, given that the West collectively is already beginning to use weapons with a nuclear component.’ While on Wednesday, Russia’s Ambassador to the US said that the West had ‘irrevocably decided to bring humanity to a dangerous line, beyond which a nuclear Armageddon is looming ever more distinctly.’  Both remarks are part of a long-standing Russian attempt to suggest that the Ukraine conflict might lead to nuclear escalation. The aim is to disrupt international support for Ukraine.