World

Tuesday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Did Belarusian rebels blow up one of Putin’s planes?

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has some awkward explaining to do to Vladimir Putin after a Russian military plane, being stored in Belarus, was reportedly blown up last weekend by Belarusian rebels.  According to reports, one of the nine working Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs) owned by the Russian military was attacked at the Machiulishchy airfield, just under eight miles from the capital Minsk, where it had been kept since early January this year. The aircraft, said to be worth £274 million, was capable of detecting and targeting air defence systems and formed a key part of Russia’s battlefield strategy. A day after what sounded like two

Richard Ekins

Will Rishi Sunak’s Channel migrant crackdown work?

The government’s inability to control our maritime border is a public scandal. Bold action is needed to make crossing the Channel pointless and put the people smugglers out of business. This will be impossible without major legal reform. So it is good news that the government is about to introduce new legislation to Parliament.  The government’s Rwanda plan was well-intentioned. However, it not supported by a legislative mandate and was, predictably, challenged in the courts. In June last year, an attempt to implement the plan was blocked by a last-minute intervention by the European Court of Human Rights. The legal challenge in our courts continues and even if the government in the end prevails,

John Keiger John Keiger

Macron’s France is a tinderbox

On 22 March 1968 the slow burn that would eventually flare into France’s ‘May ‘68’ began. The radical student movement known as ‘22 March’, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Dany le Rouge) at its heart, was unaware its actions on this day would lead to riots and the eventual paralysis of the French state after workers joined them. History does not repeat itself, it echoes. Even then, echoes from the past do not necessarily produce the same effects, no matter how many revolutions France has known. Nevertheless, 55 years later on this 7 March, France will be paralysed by widespread rolling strikes and demonstrations against President Macron’s proposed legislation to extend the retirement age from

Monday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Why are Russian soldiers videoing their war crimes?

One of the strange aspects of the conflict is that Russian troops not just commit war crimes but film themselves doing so. Another one was released today: a captured soldier surrounded by his soon-to-be executioners. He is standing over a hole he appears to have dug himself. He looks at his Russian captors with contempt, smoking a cigarette and then says ‘Glory to Ukraine’. He is then shot dead. Where and when the video was shot is not yet known. To publish such videos, the Russian soldiers have to be sure that they won’t be punished for it by their own command This is not the first time Russians have publicly

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Spy planes and infiltrators: a history of the CIA in China

47 min listen

The Chinese Communist Party likes to blame its domestic political problems on foreign interference, and it has done so since the days of Chairman Mao. But sometimes, does this paranoia, this narrative, have a point? Or at least during the depths of the Cold War, when the United States, via the CIA, was countering communism across the world through so-called ‘covert operations’. My guest today is Professor John Delury, a historian at the Yonsei University in Seoul, and author of a new book looking at the history of the CIA in China. It’s called Agents of Subversion, and I’d highly recommend it because some of the incredible exploits detailed in there

James Snell

Why has the West allowed Tunisia to slip into dictatorship?

Tunisia has become a police state. This has not happened overnight. But it is still a shocking reversal in democratic development.  This is the country whose former dictator was overthrown in a few days in 2011. His was the first scalp claimed by the Arab revolutions of that year. But where the tyrant Zine El Abidine Ben Ali once went (apart from running away in disgrace), his latest successor, Kais Saied, longs to follow.  A few stories converged over the past week in Tunisia, resulting in major protests over the weekend. Protesting without presidential approval is formally banned in the country, and most of the country’s opposition leaders are now in jail. So to

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Failing to stop the Channel crisis will cost Rishi Sunak his job

Finding an effective solution to Europe’s migrant crisis has eluded the continent’s leaders for a decade. Presidents, prime ministers and chancellors have tried, and failed, to tackle the issue. Above all, governments have been scared to stand up to the powerful pro-migrant lobby which has controlled the narrative since the crisis began in 2011. Is this about to finally change?  Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is determined to make good on his vow to stop the small boats crossing the Channel. This week, Home Secretary Suella Braverman will explain how this will be done. Under a new bill, anyone arriving in the UK on a small boat will be prevented from

Sunday

Jane Stannus

Did China influence the Canadian elections for Trudeau?

It’s been a sticky couple of weeks for Canada’s natural governing party, as the Liberals like to call themselves. Anonymous sources from CSIS, Canada’s intelligence agency, leaked information to two major Canadian media outlets, The Globe and Mail and Global News. The reports say China interfered in Canada’s two most recent federal elections, and that CSIS alerted the government, but that despite warnings the Liberals – who won both elections with a minority government – did nothing.  It’s simultaneously a crisis for the Liberals and a bit of a yawn. Canadians already knew Justin Trudeau was soft on China’s ‘basic dictatorship’. If there was to be foreign interference from one of the most

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

What happens when a state fails

Beirut, Lebanon ‘You can still smell it in the wind,’ says Maria. She points out from the neon-lit bar along Beirut’s shorefront to the dark port area just across the road, where tangled metal and broken concrete jut out into the sky. Maria had been working from home on August 4, 2020, when 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate left to rot in a warehouse on the harbour suddenly detonated, killing more than 200 people and levelling much of the Lebanese capital. Her usual daily drive back from her job as a reporter on a local newspaper – since shuttered due to lack of funding – took her along the seafront.

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Should Hungary be punished for its stance on Ukraine?

After months of delay, the Hungarian parliament finally started the process of approving Finland and Sweden’s Nato membership this week. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party announced that it would back the two countries’ membership bids, but with Hungary the only country besides Turkey to have dragged its heels on the issue, he is again being accused of being the black sheep of the EU.  If western powers have an enemy in Orbán, it is arguably one they created themselves Orbán claims that despite his personal endorsement of Finnish and Swedish Nato membership, his ‘MPs aren’t very enthusiastic.’ ‘Serious discussions’ are needed to persuade his disgruntled party members, he says, even though his MPs

Kit Wilson

Who’s afraid of organoid intelligence?

For fans of bioethical nightmares, it’s been a real stonker of a month. First, we had the suggestion that we use comatose women’s wombs to house surrogate pregnancies. Now, it appears we might have a snazzy idea for what to do with their brains, too: to turn them into hyper-efficient biological computers. Lately, you see, techies have been worrying about the natural, physical limits of conventional, silicon-based computing. Recent developments in ‘machine learning’, in particular, have required exponentially greater amounts of energy – and corporations are concerned that further technological progress will soon become environmentally unsustainable. Thankfully, in a paper published this week, a team of American scientists pointed out something rather nifty: that

Saturday

John Keiger John Keiger

Is Macron really saying the France-Afrique is finished?

On 2 March in Gabon, West Africa, President Macron declared that ‘the days of France-Afrique are over’.  Since the early nineteenth century the African continent has emblazoned France’s aspiration to international power status. Like any empire it provided natural resources. It also provided manpower. Unlike other imperial powers with surplus domestic populations to deploy, France’s demography was stagnant at 40 million from the 1840s until the 1940s. Africa provided troops for her armies (tirailleurs sénégalais) to compete with Germany’s demography and growing forces. Even after the troubled decolonisation in the 1960s Africa continued to provide cheap labour to a thriving French domestic industry. France’s Francophone African empire – combined with its south-east Asian colonies

Mark Hollingsworth

Our Russian sanctions are only helping Vladimir Putin

‘I don’t see a single beneficiary of this crazy war’, wrote the self-made Russian billionaire Oleg Tinkov on his Instagram page on 19 April 2022, less than two months after Russia invaded Ukraine. ‘Innocent people and soldiers are dying every day. This is unacceptable’. His 634,000 followers were stunned to read his anti-war declaration: ‘The generals are waking up with a hangover and realise they have a shit army. Of course, there are morons who draw “Z” but 10 per cent of any country are morons. 90 per cent of Russians are against this war… Stop this massacre.’  The next day Putin’s officials contacted the outspoken tycoon’s executives and threatened

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Will Ukraine retreat from Bakhmut?

‘Is Putin winning?’ asks the cover of this week’s Spectator. Until recently the overall narrative around the war focused on how much land Ukraine was liberating from Russian occupation – but the Kremlin’s strategy of throwing soldiers into the meat-grinder is paying off, with significant progress on their way to the encirclement of the city of Bakhmut. For over six months Bakhmut has been the hottest spot on the Donbas front, with Ukrainian soldiers holding steady against the Russian regular army and Wagner Group mercenaries. But the loss of the salt town of Soledar in January and overwhelming Russian artillery and man density has allowed Russian forces to cut off

Theo Zenou

The spy movie that set Putin on the path to the KGB

Leningrad, summer 1968. Volodya is 15-year-old. With his mates, he goes to the cinema to catch The Shield and the Sword, the new movie everyone in the USSR is buzzing about. It’s a big-budget production about a Soviet spy who infiltrates the Nazis during World War II. Volodya is blown away. ‘I am going to be a spy,’ he decides right there and then. He’s so determined he pays a visit to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad, a bleak office building known to everyone in town as the Big House. He walks up to an officer on duty and says, ‘I want to get a job with you.’ ‘That’s terrific,

Sean Thomas

How we forgot about Pol Pot

When I was a small boy, I had a favourite book: The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton. Given that my own family life not was not untroubled, the story of how a bunch of regular kids travel, via this wonderful tree, to a sequence of fantastical places, where they meet lovable characters like the Saucepan Man, Moon-Face, and Silky the Fairy, seemed to embody a childish version of heaven. An escape, and a Utopia. Yesterday, many decades after reading Enid Blyton under the bedcovers, I encountered the opposite of the Magic Faraway Tree. A tree that is still faraway in time and conception (and growing evermore so), but a tree

Friday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

What Belarus gets out of its friendship with China

What has Alexander Lukashenko been up to in China? The purpose of the Belarusian President’s three-day visit, according to state media outlet BelTA, was to continue ‘the long-term course of building friendship and mutually beneficial cooperation’ between the two countries. But the truth is somewhat murkier. Lukashenko is Vladimir Putin’s closest ally. He allowed Russian troops to launch the northern flank of the invasion from Belarus back in February last year. Since then, he has given Russia free rein to consistently transport troops, weapons and supplies through the country. So, could he have travelled to China as a de facto Russian emissary? Lukashenko was full of praise for Xi Jinping’s leadership, congratulating him

Rupert Darwall

The green movement faces a painful confrontation with reality

Environmentalism is the ruling ideology of our times. Forget neoliberalism. That peaked around 2000 and was definitively dethroned by the financial crisis in 2008, the same year Parliament passed the Climate Change Act which paved the way for Net Zero. Since then, environmentalism has won victory after victory, so it might appear paradoxical that one of the founders of the British green movement struck a defeatist note. Speaking at an event to celebrate the Green Party’s 50th anniversary, Michael Benfield suggested that the ‘battle for the world’s environmental survival is, at this moment, lost.’ The Greens had succeeded in raising consciousness, Benfield said, ‘but we have failed in dealing with the battle

David Abulafia

Captain Cook’s Aboriginal spears belong in Cambridge, not Australia

On the eve of the First World War, Trinity College, Cambridge deposited four spears collected by Captain Cook during his first encounter with native Australians in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge University. There they could be seen and studied by any visitor to Cambridge, rather than being hidden away in a cabinet of curiosities in the Wren Library at Trinity. Now, more than 250 years after Cook’s visit to Australia, they are to be returned to Sydney and to members of the tribe that originally made them. After they arrived in what became known as Botany Bay, Cook’s men confiscated about 40 of these rods from members

Kevin Toolis

Stormont isn’t worth saving

It is a question all good cardiologists must ask themselves every day: when do you stop trying to resuscitate the patient on the operating table? The same question could be asked of Stormont, Northern Ireland’s ever crisis ridden legislature: when do we stop bothering? In the latest round of life-saving treatment, His Majesty the King, Rishi Sunak and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen assembled at Windsor to proclaim a new dawn and the remaking of the Northern Ireland Protocol. And, hopefully, another end to the latest Stormont boycott. The deal unveiled this week will, we’re told, ensure the uninterrupted flow of Scottish seed potatoes and Asda sausages to