World

Saturday

Robin Ashenden

The Kakhovka dam and the cheapness of western rhetoric

Following the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, politicians in the West have followed the familiar dance of condemnation. ‘If it’s intentional,’ said PM Rishi Sunak, it would be ‘the largest attack on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine since the start of the war’ and represent ‘new lows’ in Russian aggression. France’s President Macron described it as ‘an atrocious act, which is endangering populations.’ Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany, talked about the importance of continuing to ‘support Ukraine for as long as necessary’, while the EU spluttered that ‘attacks on critical civilian infrastructure may amount to war crimes.’ If it’s proved beyond doubt that Russia is culpable for the

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The betrayal of Annecy

The Green mayor of Annecy, François Astorg, declared a fortnight ago that his town in the south-east of France was ‘a land of resistance against fascism, a land of solidarity, a refugee town for those fleeing war, misery and the unhappiness in the world’.   On Thursday, Astorg, expressed his ‘immense sadness’ and his ‘anger’ hours after a Syrian refugee ran amok in a park in Annecy, stabbing six people including four toddlers. ‘It’s the first time this has happened in Annecy,’ declared Astorg. ‘It’s unacceptable’.   The mayor has said that there will be a rally to bring the town together; the cynic is entitled to ask ‘what is the point?’ No

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

America is trapped in Trump legal groundhog day

Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If that’s true, then what the American justice system is doing to Donald Trump is barking mad.  Yes, he’s been indicted, again – on seven federal criminal charges. It’s all unprecedented, again – he’s the first president ever to face, blah, blah, blah. We’re all familiar with the ‘Trump facing…’ news loop by now. America is stuck in Trump legal groundhog day — he’s remorselessly prosecuted, over and over, on so many fronts. He always responds the same way, protesting his INNOCENCE in capital letters on Truth Social, saying he can’t believe this is happening

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s indictment shows his luck is running out

Donald Trump has chalked up a lot of firsts. First president to be a chum of Russian president Vladimir Putin. First president to threaten withdrawal from Nato. Now add a new one: first former president to be indicted on seven federal counts, which is a polite way of saying that a serial prevaricator has been busted for hoarding top government secrets. Now Trump faces protracted litigation that holds the threat of a prison sentence Not surprisingly, Trump is fundraising off the indictment and trumpeting a fresh hoax. ‘I have been indicated, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax,’ Trump declared on his social media site Truth Social. ‘I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!’

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France comes under attack again

What kind of man walks into a park on a summer’s day and randomly stabs and slashes at toddlers? That is the question France is asking itself today after the latest in a long line of bloody atrocities. The scene of this morning’s attack was in Annecy in south-eastern France, a popular holiday resort. An eye-witness said that a man ‘started shouting and went straight to the pushchairs and stabbed the children repeatedly.’ At least three children were stabbed, along with a young woman believed to be a mother. The numbers of victims would have been higher had the police not arrived in just four minutes. As they entered the park, recalled another

Jawad Iqbal

India’s war on Charles Darwin is a step too far

What is it that India’s rulers find so objectionable about Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory that they’ve banned his work from some school classrooms? Firstly, Darwin is not a Hindu and in India’s ruling circles that appears sufficient to cast doubt on his merits as a scientist. Secondly, his cause is not helped by the fact that he is an English scientist. This makes him part of a wider western scientific conspiracy that belittles what the Indian authorities see as the historic scientific triumphs of ancient India. These paranoid fantasies are the reason why Indian children under 16 will no longer be taught about evolution or even who Darwin

Wednesday

Nicholas Sheppard

Kiwis are tiring of New Zealand’s blundering prime minister

It’s all going wrong for New Zealand’s prime minister Chris Hipkins. Hipkins’s laidback, convivial persona and managerial skills were seen as a welcome contrast after the loftier ambition but patchy results of his predecessor, Jacinda Ardern. But a series of political scandals and blunders means Kiwis are rapidly tiring of their leader. The latest trouble involves transport minister Michael Wood, who has been ‘stood down’ after he failed to declare shares in Auckland airport when he became an MP. Hipkins described Wood’s ownership of the stock while he was regulating the aviation industry as ‘not acceptable.’ ‘I’m not sure that Michael himself even has a really good explanation for that,’

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam

When I first heard that the Russians had blown up the Kakhovka dam, I assumed that this was an effective tactic to frustrate the Ukrainian counteroffensive. It will surely slow it. But a Ukrainian friend raises an additional possibility – that these are the scorched-earth tactics the Germans used in much the same places 80 years ago. Writing from Kyiv, she quotes a letter from Himmler to the SS commander in Ukraine in September 1943: ‘It is necessary to make sure that when retreating from Ukraine, not a single person, not a single animal, not a single gram of grain, not a single metre of railway track is there, so

Andrew Roberts

My hope for Ukraine

Kyiv When Winston Churchill visited bomb sites during the Blitz, the most common sentiment he heard was, ‘We can take it!’, followed closely by ‘Give it ’em back!’. That emotion is very evident in Kyiv, where Ukrainians are understandably nonplussed at opposition in some British newspapers like the Times to their drone attacks on Moscow. They point out that they are attacking military targets there, unlike Russia’s terror attacks on civilians. I was in Kyiv as part of General David Petraeus’s delegation to a conference organised by the Cipher Brief, a national security-focused media organisation. He and I are publishing a book entitled Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945

Christopher Snowdon

Is it time for Britain to leave the WHO?

Since declaring Covid-19 to be ‘over as a global health emergency’ early last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has made it very clear that it has no intention of reforming. At its World Health Assembly two weeks ago, North Korea was among ten nations elected to sit on the WHO’s Executive Board, thereby giving Kim Jong-un’s totalitarian state the power to appoint WHO regional directors and potentially vote for the next director-general. The World Health Assembly did not censure North Korea for its countless human rights abuses, which include starving its own people. Instead it singled out Israel for criticism. One of Tedros’s first acts as director-general was to

Michela Wrong

Is anywhere safe for Paul Kagame’s critics?

After weeks of travelling – first Paris, then Kinshasa – I was looking forward to my evening at L’Horloge du Sud in Brussels. Known for its poisson liboké (fish wrapped in banana leaf) and other African specialities, the restaurant is popular with the city’s African diaspora. I’d been invited by a Pan-African thinktank to discuss my book on Rwanda. It was not to be. The day before, I got a call from the Benin journalist due to chair the event. He sounded rattled. The restaurant owner, he said, had been receiving complaints from pro-government Rwandan groups in Brussels, along with threatening emails and anonymous calls from Rwanda itself. His organisation

Tuesday

Edward Howell

Kim Yo-jong is fast becoming North Korea’s propaganda puppeteer

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Such is the axiom underpinning North Korea’s (DPRK) approach towards its nuclear and missile development. The hermit kingdom’s acceleration in its nuclear and missile capabilities demonstrates how Kim Jong-un is working down his wish list of expanding his country’s conventional and unconventional weapons, which he declared in January 2021. Since then, the world has witnessed launches of solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), combat drones, and, most recently, military reconnaissance satellites. Last Wednesday’s launch of a Chollima-1 rocket was nothing to celebrate. It failed to ignite before hurtling into the Yellow Sea, which separates the Korean Peninsula from mainland China. For North

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Key Ukrainian dam destroyed as counter-offensive begins

Hours after the Ukrainian army finally launched its long-awaited counter-offensive, the Nova Kakhovka dam has been blown up – which Zelensky blamed on ‘Russian terrorists’. It belongs to the fifth largest hydroelectric plant in Ukraine, in the occupied part of the Kherson region, which was completely destroyed in the explosion. The flooding has been immediate: more than 80 settlements are in danger (with 16,000 people at risk) including Kherson itself. Kyiv has started the evacuation of the villages and towns located downstream of the Dnipro river. Whether Moscow will do the same for the people it now claims as Russian citizens remains to be seen.  As expected, Russia has denied

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

What’s the point of tilting the statue of Vienna’s antisemitic mayor?

Tilting a statue. That’s the solution now. At least, that’s what a jury appointed by Vienna city council has recommended as the best way to deal with a controversial likeness of Karl Lueger, the early 20th-century mayor who shaped the modern city, but also happened to be an antisemite. Dr Lueger was a social reformer, changing the face of Vienna with new hospitals, schools and state-owned abattoirs, as well as better water, gas and electricity infrastructure, transport systems, a green belt and a distinctive architectural aesthetic. But he was also an ultra-conservative Catholic populist, who regularly indulged in Jew-baiting.  He can be judged by his fans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler

Daniel Rey

Book banning has come back to bite US conservatives

If you thought American book-banning couldn’t get any more ridiculous, think again. A school district in Utah, one of the most religious states in the country, has banned the Bible.  The Bible – fundamental to the state’s Protestant, Catholic and Mormon churches – is to be removed from elementary and middle school libraries for containing ‘vulgarity or violence’. The authorities for the school district of Davis County, just north of Salt Lake City, upheld a parental complaint that the Bible contained ‘incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide’. The parent, who attached an eight-page list of verses unsuitable for children, wrote: ‘Get this PORN out of our schools.’ The

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Why China won’t invade Taiwan

41 min listen

In much of the conversation surrounding China and Taiwan, the question of invasion seems to be a ‘when’ not an ‘if’. But is an invasion really so inevitable? No one knows for sure, of course, but there are good reasons to think that speculations of a war have been overblown. For one, the economic links between Taiwan and China mean that their respective interests are not so zero sum. For another, China may well be causing serious damage to itself through an invasion. Former diplomat Charles Parton has written for the Council on Geostrategy on why Xi Jinping would not take the risk of invading, and he joins the podcast.

Robin Ashenden

The haunting words of Russia’s jailed Putin opponents

How many memorable quotes has the Russia-Ukraine war produced so far? Along with Snake Island’s defiant ‘F*** you Russian warship’, we’ve had president Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv at the beginning of the war with the words: ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’ We also have his ‘Bravery takes you through the most unimaginable hardships to lead you to victory’ and his ‘No one’s going to break us. We are strong. We are Ukrainians’, though these are perhaps less interesting; the first a bit like something from a Disney poster (two kittens find their way home across the desert), the second awkwardly conjuring up memories of the Rocky films. Better,

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Russia flounders as Kyiv gears up for its counter-offensive

According to Moscow, Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive has begun, and has begun badly for Kyiv. Of course, we need to treat the Russian account with all necessary scepticism, but the evidence is that the droney, phony war stage of this campaign season is ending and the real fighting is beginning. The unverified Russian claim is that Kyiv launched a ‘large-scale offensive in five sectors of the front in the South Donetsk direction’, which was beaten back at the cost of some 250 Ukrainian casualties and the loss of a full 16 tanks and 24 other armoured vehicles. Even by the Russian account, this attack comprised just six mechanised and two tank

Sunday

Anna Arutunyan

Who is running Russia while Putin plays war? 

As the war in Ukraine spilled into Russian territory, with shelling in the Russian city of Belgorod, President Vladimir Putin was busy explaining that he ‘sleeps like a normal person’ during an online meeting with families to honour Children’s day. That Putin mentioned his healthy sleeping pattern, without discussing the ongoing Ukrainian incursion into Belgorod – where civilians, including children, were being evacuated – left some observers wondering who is actually running the country while he plays war.   The Russian regime is far from monolithic, and there are other forces in power besides Putin and the turbo-patriots Putin has a penchant for disengaging and struggling to make decisions, especially when there

Joel Kotkin

The end of the Silicon Valley dream

It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable centre of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomised by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better. In the early days of the tech revolution, some watchers imagined an almost utopian, communitarian society on the horizon. In 1972, the California writer and zeitgeist diagnostician Stewart Brand predicted in Rolling Stone that when computers became widely