World

Tuesday

Yuan Yi Zhu

Donald Trump was Mark Carney’s greatest asset

This election could have been a lot worse for Canada’s Conservatives. As I write, they have taken 41.7 per cent of the popular vote, their highest share since 1988, and are on track to pick up two dozen seats. They have also managed to make inroads with young people and unionised workers – groups that are famously hard for right-wing parties to win over. Yet the victor of the night was Mark Carney, who will have a thin but real minority to work with as prime minister of Canada, and now the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is expected to lose his seat. Ill-informed pundits will say that the Tories threw away

Jim Lawley

What caused Spain’s blackout?

By six o’clock this morning, electricity had been restored to 99 per cent of Spain. Restoring people’s sense of security and a full return to normality, however, will take much longer. Portugal has been similarly affected as, briefly, were parts of southern France. The sudden outage occurred at 12.33 p.m. yesterday, leaving Madrid without electricity for hours. Where I am in Ávila, seventy miles from the capital, the lights didn’t come on again until 1.30 in the morning. Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez said that an investigation was being carried out into the ‘sudden’ loss of electricity generation. ‘It has never happened before,’ he said yesterday evening. ‘All state resources have

Jane Stannus

Mark Carney won’t change Canada for the better

Apparently Canada hasn’t taken enough punishment yet. After a close, hard-fought race that extended into the wee hours of the morning, Mark Carney and the Liberals came away with enough seats to form a minority government. They will form Canada’s fourth consecutive Liberal government since 2015. The Liberals maintained their edge, in part, thanks to the collapse of the New Democratic party, whose leader Jagmeet Singh resigned. An election day message from Donald Trump on Truth Social, calling for Canadians to join the US, may also have pushed undecided voters towards Carney, whose entire campaign was founded on the idea that he was the best candidate to protect Canada from Trump.  

Monday

James Snell

The Vancouver car attack is all too familiar

A man named Kai-Ji Adam Lo, 30, has been charged with eight counts of second-degree murder after 11 people were killed and many more were injured in a car ramming in Vancouver, Canada. He allegedly drove his SUV into a crowd gathered for a festival celebrating Filipino culture. The police say the suspect has no connections to international terror groups such as Isis or al-Qaeda. The suspect’s motive is so far unknown. More dangerous these days, it seems, is the lone attacker Ramming attacks are common because most adults have a car parked outside their home. The 22 March 2017 terror attack on Westminster involved a van striking a crowd

Edward Howell

What has Putin given North Korea for its help in Ukraine?

We knew it was happening all along, but it was only a matter of time before both Russia and North Korea confirmed to the world the inevitable fact that their relationship is more than rhetoric. Six months after the first North Korean soldiers were deployed to the Kursk region, the Kim regime has finally admitted that the country’s armed forces have ‘participated in the operations for liberating’ the area, in what marked ‘a new chapter of history’ in relation to the ‘firm militant friendship between the two countries of the DPRK and Russia’. Only days earlier, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, Valery Gerasimov, lauded

Matthew Lynn

Has Rachel Reeves blown her shot at a US trade deal?

The pictures of a triumphant Rachel Reeves holding aloft a US trade deal as she boards a plane home from Washington should have been all over the front pages this morning. After spending the weekend in Washington, and with a personal meeting with the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the advance briefings were that a deal with the US was very close. Instead, there are now warnings from Pat McFadden that it may take longer than expected. Has Labour blown the chance to sign the first trade accord with the Trump White House? A chance like this is unlikely to come again.  A trade deal with America was never completely

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron has let an epidemic of violence grip France

These have been terrible days in France. On Thursday, a 15-year-old girl was stabbed to death and several of her classmates wounded at a private school in Nantes. It was an attack of singular ferocity. The victim, who was stabbed 57 times, was killed by a fellow pupil, a boy her own age. According to police, he had no ‘clear motive’ for his crime. On Friday a 20-year-old, named by police as Olivier H, walked into a mosque in southern France and told Aboubakar, a 24-year-old of Malian origin, that he would like to pray. Aboubakar, who performed odd jobs in the mosque, led Olivier into the prayer room and

Sunday

Jane Stannus

Canadians need saving from Mark Carney, not Donald Trump

Tomorrow’s election will be one of the most important in Canadian history. The results hang on one crucial question: what’s the biggest threat to Canada right now? The Liberals, under the guidance of Mark Carney, have used every tool at their disposal to frighten, persuade, and cajole voters into believing the biggest threat to Canada is American tariffs and America’s president. But while relations with America are indeed something Canadians should care about, let’s hope that they’re not quite gullible enough to fall for that one. Let’s hope they recognise what Liberals have spent ten years proving over and over: the greatest threat to Canada as we know it isn’t

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

What can we expect from the papal conclave?

54 min listen

Earlier this year Dr Kurt Martens, Professor of Canon Law at the Catholic University of America, joined Damian Thompson on Holy Smoke to unpack what happens during a papal conclave. There was heightened interest in the process due to the film Conclave, which swept the awards season, but also because Pope Francis was hospitalised at the time.  Despite showing some signs of recovery – including being able to meet world leaders such as King Charles III and J.D. Vance – Pope Francis died on Easter Monday. Here we reissue the episode with Dr Martens, looking at what happens when a pope dies, with a new introduction from Damian. Writing the cover article for

Michael Jackson

Jacinda Ardern and the empty politics of ‘kindness’

Just over two years on from stepping down as Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern is awaiting the imminent release of her memoir titled Jacinda Ardern, A Different Kind of Power. The launch will be supported by a 9-night US and UK book tour. The marketing around both employs the ‘kind and empathic’ messaging now firmly cemented as her international brand. Eventbrite, for example, asks us to imagine ‘what if kindness came first?’. Today, if you ask Meta AI or ChatGPT ‘what one word best describes Jacinda Ardern’s leadership style’ they will both respond with ‘empathetic.’ These words do not, however, encapsulate her brand in New Zealand – despite

Charles Parton

Why the new pope won’t be welcome in China

Choosing a new pope has more in common than you might expect with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress’s system for picking a new general secretary. Both processes are autocratic, secret, and rigid; they focus on the leader’s infallibility, and involve a lack of succession planning. And women don’t get a look in. China’s president Xi Jinping commands over 1.3 billion souls; so, too, will the new pope. He will also own the allegiance of an estimated 12 million Chinese. But how will he exercise his pastoral care and oversight? Pope Francis, who was laid to rest yesterday following his death on Monday, had a ‘thing’ about China. He was

Sam Meadows

Bolivia’s fuel crisis could cause a populist turn

‘Some of them will have been waiting for two days.’ My taxi driver was pointing at a queue of lorries, vans and cars stretching essentially the entire length of Villazon, a small town on Bolivia’s border with Argentina. At the front of the queue? A petrol station. Bolivia is in the grip of a severe fuel crisis. Bolivia has traditionally been heavily reliant on natural gas exports, but a collapse in production after years of government neglect has sparked shortages, causing the long queues at petrol stations. The country, the only landlocked nation in South America, and also one of the poorest, is currently importing substantial amounts of fuel. The

Saturday

Francis Pike

What is more worrying than war between India and Pakistan?

This week, jihadist gunmen killed 26 tourists. For some reason Islamist diehards, supported by their stooges in British universities, did not pour onto London’s streets with their heads wrapped in kaffiyeh. I wonder why? Perhaps it was because the tourists killed were Indians not Jews or Caucasians, and the place was Pahalgam, a picturesque village in Indian controlled Kashmir, not southern Israel – so nothing to celebrate then. India has firmly laid blame for the atrocity at Pakistan’s door. Police say the suspects are members of the radical Sunni jihadist group, The Resistance Front, an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) – ‘the Army of the Righteous’. It appears some of the perpetrators

Kristina Murkett

How Trump could reverse America’s baby bust

Over the past few weeks, the White House has been considering a range of ideas to boost America’s falling birth rate: a $5,000 (£3,756) ‘baby bonus’ to new mothers, programmes to educate women on their menstrual cycles, a ‘National Medal of Motherhood’ for women with six children or more. Trump has pledged to be the ‘fertilisation president’, whilst J.D. Vance has said, ‘to put it simply, I want more babies in America’. Across the world, countries are trialling increasingly creative and dramatic policies to try to reverse the fertility decline. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s self-proclaimed mission is ‘procreation, not immigration’, mothers with two or more children are

Michael Evans

Can Pete Hegseth remain at the Pentagon?

The moment the Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s nomination for defence secretary, the Pentagon community knew it was in trouble. One horrified defence official said at the time: ‘He may have been educated at Princeton and Harvard, but does he know anything about running a huge organisation like the Pentagon? No, he doesn’t.’ As both Trump and Hegseth have said in recent days, the Pentagon establishment was against this controversial appointment from the beginning and have claimed this is why the defence department is going through its current turmoil, with summary sackings, accusations of intimidation and unauthorised leaks to sympathetic, ‘establishment’ newspapers. There is a degree of truth in

Linda Jaivin

How Mao haunts China

Imagine a time traveller from Mao Zedong’s China – say a Red Guard  – landing in a Chinese city today, nearly half a century since Mao’s death in 1976 brought the Cultural Revolution to an end. Picture her in baggy unisex khaki and blunt bob, gaping at women her age prancing past in heels and short skirts. See her take in the soaring buildings, bustling shopping centres and pumping night clubs. She looks at a newspaper. Some things make sense: ‘America’s democracy is in decline,’ one headline declares. There are familiar reports on model workers and the same sort of photos of leaders visiting factories and welcoming foreign presidents. But

Friday

Sam Meadows

Milei freed the peso. Argentina’s economy survived

It was Argentina’s ‘liberation day’, Javier Milei proclaimed last week after meeting US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in the Pink House, Argentina’s presidential palace. On Friday, he had shocked the country by lifting the cepo – ‘clamp’ in Spanish – which has restricted currency trades in South America’s second-largest economy for so long. ‘After 15 years of capital controls, we have cast off the anvil to which we were chained,’ Milei said. Lifting the cepo was a key part of Milei’s policy agenda. Nevertheless, few expected him to do anything before mid-term elections in October. But doing so was a key requirement of the disbursement of $20bn from the International Monetary Fund, also announced on

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Is the US getting closer to a Ukraine deal?

US special envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Russia this morning to meet with Vladimir Putin, as Donald Trump ploughs ahead with his plan to secure a peace deal in Ukraine by hook or by crook. This is the pair’s fourth meeting in nearly as many months. Putin and Witkoff are expected to discuss Trump’s final proposal for a ceasefire in the conflict, which is believed to include American recognition of Russian control over Crimea, along with all territories occupied by Moscow since February 2022, a ban on Ukraine joining Nato and the lifting of all sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated earlier this week that

Jim Lawley

Spain’s defence spending boost pleases nobody

Just a week after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Spain to spend more on defence, the country’s socialist prime minister, has unveiled a massive defence development initiative costing over ten billion euros (£8.5 billion). This new plan raises Spain’s defence budget from a mere 1.4 per cent of its GDP, the lowest amongst Nato’s 32 members, to Nato’s current target of two per cent. When announcing the measure, prime minister Pedro Sánchez notably refrained from mentioning Bessent’s directive or US president Donald Trump’s pointed observation that ‘Spain is very low’ in defence spending. He did, however, frame the decision as a necessary response to new global realities: ‘We are

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

What Pope Francis got wrong about illegal migration

Migrants have been pouring into the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa this month. Over 100 on Monday and 344 on Wednesday; the previous week 269 landed, and at the start of April more than 1,000 arrived in a 48-hour period. They are Eritreans, Ethiopians, Sudanese, Guineans, Moroccans, Syrians, Malaysians, Somalis and Senegalese but the three nationalities most heavily represented are Bangladeshis, Egyptians and Pakistanis. Most told their rescuers that they set out from Libya. So much for Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to persuade Libya to work with her to stem the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean. Last year the Italian PM, supported by the EU, signed deals with Libya and Tunisia;