World

Sunday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

What does Japan make of Oppenheimer?

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster epic Oppenheimer is wowing critics and selling out cinemas across the world. It’s already threatening to eclipse the disappointing Indiana Jones remake and even Tom Cruise’s raved about latest instalment of the Mission Impossible series. But it’s a worldwide hit with one notable exception: the film hasn’t been released in Japan yet, and no word has been given of when it will be. Some are speculating that there may be no Japanese release at all. That would be highly unusual. Japan, unlike some of its neighbours, very rarely bans films and has accepted WW2 offerings, such as Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers and Michael Bay’s Pearl

Geoff Hill

The joy of rescuing snakes

Snake rescuers like me always get asked the same question: have you ever been bitten? I’ve dealt with mambas, giant pythons, cobras – some of the world’s deadliest snakes – and, thankfully, the answer is no. But why do people always assume the worst about these wonderful creatures? People love to hate snakes. They are the Biblical baddy, the reptile that represents evil. Having nursed a sick cobra back to health, gently holding his head up during a daily bath, I know this depiction is deeply unfair. I’ve long been fascinated by these animals. My father’s family landed at the Cape in 1795 but I was the first to develop

Saturday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The French police have lost faith in the judiciary

Emmanuel Macron broke his silence about the recent riots in France at the start of this week. In a speech in New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific, the president of the Republic declared that the country required a ‘return to authority at every level’.  He added: ‘The lesson I draw from this is order, order, order.’ There was a certain irony to the president’s proclamation. He spoke as a crisis erupted in France, at the heart of which is a power struggle between the police and the justice system.  Resentment has been festering for a number of years within the police – among senior officers as well as the rank and

Friday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The US economy is bouncing back – unlike Europe’s

Every country that imposed a lockdown during the pandemic accepted that there would be an economic price to pay. But governments hoped that, on this measure, their own nation would fare better than others. The objective here was simple: don’t be the ugliest country of the bunch. Now, with some distance between those lockdowns and life today, we’re returning to a more established form of economic competition. Rather than focusing on whose economy looks particularly bad, the emphasis has returned to who is looking good. And on this metric, the United States is putting Europe – and Britain – to shame. The US government reports that its economy grew by

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Why was a Ukrainian fencer punished for not shaking a Russian’s hand?

Must politics stay separate from sport? Ukrainian fencer Olha Kharlan has been disqualified from the World Fencing Championships in Milan after declining to shake hands with her Russian opponent having won the match yesterday. As it concluded, both athletes removed their masks and Anna Smirnova (who competed under a neutral flag) extended her hand. Kharlan responded by presenting her sword as if suggesting they touch sabres instead. Smirnova did not react.  Kharlan left the stage. Smirnova stood there for almost an hour, waiting for a handshake. Afterwards, Smirnova filed a complaint for lack of ‘show of respect’. The Ukrainian fencer was disqualified from the competition and suspended for 60 days from all

Jawad Iqbal

Iran’s morality police can’t save the mullahs forever

Iran’s so-called morality police, loathed and feared in equal measure, are back patrolling the streets of the country. They temporarily disappeared from view in the wake of the widespread public protests over the death last September of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman. She was arrested and beaten, and subsequently died in police custody. Her crime? Not wearing the hijab ‘properly’. She had a few strands of hair showing, enough to be deemed a violation of the strict dress code for women. She paid for this with her life.  Iran’s leaders were rattled by the furious public reaction to her death. Thousands marched in protest, demanding rights and protections for

Thursday

Terry Barnes

John Howard is right about British colonialism in Australia

Almost sixteen years after he lost office and his own parliamentary seat, former Australian Liberal prime minister John Howard is still an influential political figure. Idolised by the right and demonised by the left, when Howard speaks, Australians still take notice. When Howard spoke to the Australian newspaper to mark his 84th birthday this week, he told home truths as he sees them, in his trademark plain language style. The focus of Howard’s interview was the Australian Labor government’s drive to change the nation’s constitution to give Aborigines a race-based ‘Voice to parliament’. It is becoming clear that the Voice referendum will be lost or won only narrowly This would

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Netanyahu’s judicial reforms are not the end of Israeli democracy

Watching Israel tear itself apart this week has been like seeing your best friend embarrass himself at a party. The world has looked on while the Netanyahu government, in hock to a small cabal of religious chauvinists, pushed through the first stage of its judicial reform agenda, sparking the biggest street protests the country has ever seen. Whatever happened to the start-up nation? Last night and this morning was the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and the subsequent exile from Israel. To mark it, firebrand minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the Western Wall to the sound of messianic songs before provocatively

Wednesday

Edward Howell

What has North Korea done with Travis King?

Silence is not a common feature in the North Korean regime’s playbook, and this year is no exception. Only this past week, North Korea’s flurry of ballistic missile launches has been complemented by a cornucopia of threats from senior officials – including Kim Yo-jong, the sharp-tongued sister of Kim Jong-un – who have upped the ante in their anti-US rhetoric. The ruling regime repeated that dialogue with the United States is off the table. Not only that, the North Korean defence minister also warned that the deployment of a US ballistic missile submarine – the USS Kentucky – to South Korea could ‘fall under the conditions’ for the isolated state

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Where has Xi Jinping’s foreign minister gone?

This is the week that James Cleverly planned to be in Beijing to ‘engage, robustly and also constructively’ with China’s communist leaders. But the Foreign Secretary put his trip on hold because the man he planned to engage went missing. Since 25 June foreign minister Qin Gang has vanished without trace, leaving Cleverly twiddling his thumbs and the world wondering what on earth is going on at the top of the Chinese Communist party. The whole bizarre spectacle underlines the challenges of engaging with a system that is so deeply opaque. The mystery deepened on Tuesday when state media reported that Qin was being replaced by his predecessor Wang Yi

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Inside Ukraine’s drone army

Kyiv ‘We will end this war with drones,’ says Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister of Ukraine. We meet at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, which he runs in Kyiv. It has become crucial to the counter-offensive. To reclaim occupied land, Ukrainian troops need to remove miles of landmines, and can do so only if kept safe by swarms of drones that fly ahead, searching for the enemy. Russia has drones too – many more of them – and is adept at jamming and downing Ukraine’s fleet. A drone arms race is under way. Soon after his election, President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the then 28-year-old Fedorov to run a new ministry

Douglas Murray

Was I right about Iraq?

Back in March there was a glut of pieces about the 2003 Iraq war. The 20th anniversary seemed to much of the political and pundit class to be the perfect time to return to this scorched landscape. A number of people asked me to throw in my views and I failed, for two reasons. Firstly because, as some readers will know, I hate anniversaries and the lazy hook they provide to the news cycle. Secondly, because each time I sat down to try to write about those days I found myself unusually conflicted. Those of us who defended the war have spent 20 years filled with ‘if onlys’ The reason

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

What the French media can learn from the Farage banking scandal

Geoffroy Lejeune knows how Nigel Farage feels. Like the former Ukip leader turned TV host, Lejeune’s ‘values’ have made him persona non grata among France’s progressive elite. The 34-year-old journalist was last month appointed editor-in-chief of Journal du Dimanche (JDD), France’s only dedicated Sunday newspaper with a circulation of 140,000.  Newspaper staff were outraged. They downed tools, and have been striking now for five weeks. The papers’ journalists remain ‘more determined than ever’, they say, to continue their industrial action.  The real danger to democracy aren’t the likes of Lejeune or Farage, whatever their opinions may be The problem is Lejeune’s politics. He is described as ‘far right’, and counts

Jawad Iqbal

India’s sinister attempt to censor Oppenheimer

Anurag Thakur, India’s information and broadcasting minister, is hopping mad about a sex scene in Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster film Oppenheimer. The offending segment shows Cillian Murphy, who plays the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, reciting a famous line from the sacred Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita while making love. ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds,’ he declares, the same words he reportedly used after the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945. The angry minister, turned film critic, wants the scene cut from the movie because he deems it disrespectful to Hindus and their faith. The Gita is revered among Hindus and its teachings are passed down through the generations, largely

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Did some good come from the Qing’s dying century?

37 min listen

In the 1800s, Qing China’s final century, European powers were expanding eastwards. The industrialised West, with its gunboats and muskets, and the soft power of Christianity, pushed around the dynasty’s last rulers. But was this period more than just a time of national suffering and humiliation for China? The British Museum’s ongoing exhibit, China’s hidden century, tells the story of Qing China’s final decades. The more than 300 exhibits tell a story not only of decline, but of a complicated exchange between China and the West about culture, fashion, politics and ideas. I reviewed China’s hidden century in The Spectator last month, and hosted a live Chinese Whispers recording about the exhibition in the British Museum a

Mark Nayler

The unlikely new kingmakers in Spanish politics

Depending on how you look at the result of yesterday’s general election in Spain, either everyone won or no one won. It had been called five months early by outgoing Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who hoped to block a resurgent Spanish right after its emphatic victories in regional elections on 28 May. The vote drew 70.4 per cent of the population to the polls, 4.2 per cent more than in 2019. This was a surprisingly high turnout for the middle of summer, when a lot of Spaniards are either on holiday or sheltering from the intense heat.   Prolonged political freezes, sleep-walking governments and prop-up arrangements have become the norm

Jim Lawley

When will Spain’s political paralysis end?

Sunday’s general election in Spain was supposed to answer the question: will Spain be governed for the next four years by a right-wing coalition or by a left-wing coalition? If the question was easy to understand, the answer certainly isn’t. Like the four previous general elections, this one was inconclusive – only even more so.  The right-wing Partido Popular won 136 seats and Vox, even further to the right, won 33, giving a Partido Popular/Vox coalition a total of 169 seats – fewer than most polls had predicted. Unfortunately for the just over 11 million Spaniards who voted for these two parties, this leaves them seven seats short: in a

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Drones strike Moscow in fifth attack since May

For the fifth time in three months, Moscow has once again been targeted by drones. In what is fast becoming a regular occurrence, the Russian ministry of defence reported that two drones attacked the city in the early hours of this morning. Despite the ministry’s claims to have intercepted and jammed the drones, they were still able to inflict damage on two buildings in the south west of the city. According to the government news agency TASS, one of the drones hit a non-residential building on Komsomolsky Prospekt, a mere two miles from the Kremlin and just over the river from Moscow’s famous Gorky Park. This isn’t the largest drone

Sunday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Targeting Odesa marks a new turn in the war

The world is waking up to pictures of fresh destruction in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, which has been under constant Russian fire since the grain export deal collapsed last week. At least one person has been killed and 19 more injured following missile strikes overnight. The roof of the recently-rebuilt Transfiguration Cathedral has partially collapsed, and there have been films of local residents trying to rescue icons and other sacred artefacts. The footage is striking – but a tiny part of what’s now at stake. Back in July 2022, Russia agreed not to destroy Ukraine’s grain-exporting infrastructure given how important the foodstuff is to Africa and world food

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Could Ulez lead to Sadiq Khan’s downfall?

Emmanuel Macron has spoken of his fear of France’s ‘fragmentation’ and of the nation’s ‘division’ following the riots that reduced parts of the Republic to rubble earlier this month. The truth, as the president well knows, is that France is already deeply divided, and the fractures are numerous. As well as the topical one, that of the chasm separating many of the Banlieues from the rest of the Republic, there is also the growing gulf between those who prostrate themselves at the altar of Net Zero and those who are sceptical or downright resistant. And the French, being French, have never been shy in demonstrating forcefully their opposition to the Green zealots.