World

The world’s biggest tech firms have lined up to lambast the latest incarnation of the Online Safety Bill and Investigatory Powers Act. Many, including Apple and Meta, are threatening to withdraw products and services from the UK if the proposed rules become law. The Home Office could become the ‘de facto global arbiter of what level of data security and encryption are permissible’, Apple says. They have a point. The government wants to force companies to scan the content of its users’ encrypted messages for harmful content, as well as getting advanced notice to approve any future software updates that are security related. The aim – a noble one – is to ensure

The number of students studying modern languages is plummeting, The Sunday Times says today. ‘The number of pupils studying German has fallen below 2,200 with French also on a downward trend — amid fears students are becoming little Englanders.’ It shows a graph suggesting, rather absurdly, that Brexit is linked to the drop. Really? Little Englanders because they don’t want to learn German? My hunch is that today’s young are more globally-minded than any generation that came before, and this is reflective of a Britain that voted in 2016 not to move away from Europe but to strengthen ties with the wider world. When I was at school, we were

Few political assassinations will have been as predictable as Fernando Villavicencio’s, the Ecuadorian presidential candidate and anti-corruption firebrand gunned down in Quito this week.  The brutal murder took place in a country that in recent decades has been largely free of serious political violence, notwithstanding the ferocious inter-party struggles that have seen both coups and the persecution and exile of opponents.  Yet Villavicencio, a 59-year-old former investigative journalist, did not just anticipate his demise – he repeatedly cited the death threats he was receiving from the drug traffickers he vowed to crack down on. And at times, he almost appeared to welcome the danger.  Just last week, he namechecked the

Move over Nicola Sturgeon, there’s a new sheriff in town. The former SNP leader has faced criticism this week, after it emerged that her government splurged just under £10,000 on VIP airport services for her and her staff – despite foreign affairs being a reserved power. When it comes to taking the mickey out of taxpayers though, it’s clear that the Germans really are doing it better. According to Freedom of Information requests submitted by the Tagesspiegel newspaper, German taxpayers have had to fork out €55,000 on former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hair and make-up since she left office in 2021. In this year alone, Merkel has already managed to rack up

The hacking of the Electoral Commission’s databases highlights the way that in the interconnected modern world, ‘warfare’ can be as much about undermining faith in a country’s institutions and disrupting its political processes as anything else. The Electoral Commission has admitted that ‘hostile actors’ penetrated their systems in August 2021, in a ‘complex cyberattack’ that was only detected in October 2022. In those 14 months, the hackers accessed the details (most, admittedly, openly available) of up to 40 million voters, as well as the commission’s email system. One former Russian spook from the SVR once admitted to me that ‘MI6, CIA and the rest are the opposition: it’s the FSB