World Archives

Wednesday

16 Nov 2022

The troubling rise of the Israeli far-right

Something troubling has happened in Israel. The previous government, before it collapsed earlier this month, had been remarkable for its glorious diversity, both political and ethnic. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid shared a rotating prime ministership, presiding over a coalition of parties spanning the entire political spectrum. It was the first administration to include Arab parties; when I met him last year, Issawi Frej, the country’s first Arab minister, told me that he firmly rejected Amnesty’s ‘apartheid Israel’ slur, and envisioned a role for himself in building on the Abraham Accords. Now here was a country that it felt good to defend. The Jewish diaspora loved all this, hailing Israel

Tuesday

15 Nov 2022

Svitlana Morenets

The missile strike on Poland will be a test for Nato

Since the start of the war, there has been a risk of Ukraine’s neighbours being caught in crossfire – especially when Russia turned to a missile-based strategy. This now seems to have happened, with two rockets hitting the Polish village of Przewodów, nearly six miles from Ukraine’s border, killing two farm workers. The stakes are obviously high: if Russian missiles struck a Nato member for the first time, that has implications. US president Joe Biden has said it is ‘unlikely’ that the missile was fired from Russia while Turkey said it must ‘respect’ Moscow’s fervent denial that Russia (which had just fired 100 missiles at Ukraine in a third wave of attacks) had anything

Svitlana Morenets

Third wave of Russian shelling blitz begins in Ukraine

A third wave of Russian missile attacks consisting of approximately 100 shells was launched against Ukraine today. Kyiv has taken a direct hit, with three blocks of flats on fire in the district of Pechersk in the city centre. Other explosions have also been confirmed in Lviv, Kharkiv, Vinnytsia, Khmelnytsky, Zhytomyr, Kryvyi Rih and Rivne, and some cities have been cut off from electricity. Critical infrastructure and power plants appear once again to be Russia’s main target. The Ukrainian government has already declared that emergency power cuts must be implemented across the whole country. Most of the missile hits have been reported in central Ukraine and the north of the

Lisa Haseldine

Russia receives the cold shoulder at Bali’s G20 summit

In the warmth of the Balinese sunshine, Russia has received an unsurprisingly frosty reception at the G20 summit. We are barely a few hours into the summit and the tension is already acute. The source of this tension, of course, is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is the first G20 held since the beginning of the Ukraine war earlier this year. Ahead of the summit, some member states were already questioning whether Russia should still be allowed to retain its membership of the group. Meanwhile, in light of the war, Ukraine was invited to participate in this year’s summit as a guest. Perhaps in anticipation of this, it was announced

Freddy Gray

Will Trump run?

‘I don’t think anyone knows,’ someone close to Donald Trump told me at the end of last week. ‘My guess is he does but that’s just a guess.’ My question, of course, was ‘Is Donald Trump still going to announce?’ — despite the mid-term disappointments for his movement and the increasing certainty among Republican analysts that the party cannot win with him as its public face? He’s expected to announce at 9 pm Eastern Standard Time – 2 am tomorrow, BST – after he declared yesterday on his Truth Social media platform that ‘Hopefully, tomorrow will turn out to be one of the most important days in the history of

James Snell

Iran’s protests are coming to a head

Iran’s protest movement appears to be coming to a head. It’s been going on for two months, since the country’s ‘morality police’ beat Mahsa Amini, a young woman visiting Tehran, into a coma from which she never recovered earlier this year. The reason these thugs gave for dragging her into their van was that she was wearing her mandatory hijab incorrectly. Ever since, Iranians of all ages, across the country, have been on the streets, protesting for ‘women, life, freedom’. Now the violence of that initial act is radiating outwards. From the ominous steps being taken by the Iranian state, and the extra-legal killers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,

Monday

14 Nov 2022

James Forsyth

Has the next cold war been put on hold?

The Biden-Xi meeting at the G20 seems to have been relatively productive, and has at least improved the lines of communication between the two superpowers. The Chinese readout has them declaring that the relationship is ‘not what the international community expects from us’. The first in-person meeting between Biden and Xi since Biden became president does seem to have moved US-China relations on from the depths they fell to after Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. In a sign of the relative détente, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to visit China in the New Year. But the aggressive Chinese language about the status of the island is

Cindy Yu

Second class citizens: the lives of China’s internal migrants

40 min listen

When the city of Zhengzhou, home to the world’s largest iPhone factory, locked down recently, some of its factory workers had nowhere to go. Hoping to escape Covid restrictions, many of them walked miles along motorways to their hometowns, their journey captured by video and shared on social media in China and out. This episode is all about China’s migrant working class – poorly paid and often poorly educated people from the countryside who go to cities like Zhengzhou for better lives. There are hundreds of millions of these so-called ‘internal migrants’, making their story an important part to understand if you want to understand modern China. Even now, ‘on

Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine’s huge victory in Kherson

Less than two months ago, Putin declared four occupied regions of Ukraine as part of Russia. Some speculated that Moscow would view any attempt to liberate those territories as equivalent to an attack on Russian soil. Yet today Volodymyr Zelensky visited the recently liberated Kherson, awarded Ukrainian soldiers and watched them raise the country’s flag. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to comment on Zelensky’s visit to Kherson and reiterated that it was ‘Russian territory’. Zelensky did what Putin couldn’t manage to do in eight months of Russian control over the city – he faced its residents. Asked where Ukrainian forces might advance next, Zelensky said: ‘Not Moscow… We’re not interested

Gabriel Gavin

The Istanbul bombing will deepen Turkey’s rift with the West

Istiklal Avenue is a picture of chaos at the best of times. Istanbul’s answer to Oxford Street, the bustling pedestrian area is lined with upmarket shops, cafes and overpriced kebab stands. Groups of men sit out till late at night on benches drinking tea and playing chess, while families pushing buggies jostle with tourists for ice cream and pastries. On Sunday, though, that chaos gave way to outright panic when an explosion ripped through the heart of the city, Europe’s largest and home to more than 15 million people. One shopper captured the moment the fireball erupted in the packed crowd, sending women and children scrambling to escape. Meanwhile, pictures

Gavin Mortimer

Only the EU can solve the Channel migrants crisis

Rishi Sunak’s remarks about curbing illegal Channel immigration are certainly bullish, but whether he translates words into action will make or break his political career. How many other busted PMs have over-promised on this issue? Sunak told the travelling press corps on a flight to Indonesia, where the G20 summit is being held, that tackling the Channel small boats crisis is his ‘absolute priority’. Other than the Autumn statement, Sunak added, nothing has occupied him more in recent weeks than what he described as ‘illegal migration’ between France and Britain. Admitting that there are no short-term solutions, the PM nonetheless struck a positive note speaking to journalists. ‘There’s a range

Patrick O’Flynn

Braverman’s Channel migrants scheme won’t work

One tries to find grounds for optimism about the resolve and capacity of Her Majesty’s Government in these testing times but there is none to be found in today’s deal with France on Channel migrants. In fact, the wearily familiar outline of the agreement – yet more UK taxpayers’ money going to the French in return for more beach police patrols, better information-sharing, embedded UK officers working alongside them, blah blah blah – fits very neatly into the failed approach of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel. Clearly having what Home Secretary Suella Braverman heralded as a ’40 per cent uplift in the number of French gendarmes patrolling the French beaches’ has

David Marcus

Dumping Trump could backfire for the Republicans

The walls are closing in on Donald Trump. Again. But this time it’s different. Again. In the wake of the Republicans’ performance in the midterms, which ranges from lacklustre to biblically awful depending on how many drinks the GOP consultant you’re asking has had, Trump is taking all the blame. There are two problems with this. First, it’s not really true that it’s all Trump’s fault. And second, it is very likely to backfire and empower an otherwise somewhat floundering Donald. As to the issue of blame, yes, Trump promoted some primary stinkers. Dr. Oz and Don Bolduc in the Pennsylvania and New Hampshire Senate races respectively performed particularly odiously.

Friday

11 Nov 2022

Anna Arutunyan

The best way to stop Russian trolls is to ignore them

Almost from the moment the polls closed in the 2016 US presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, accusations emerged of Russian interference in the election. Now it appears to have been confirmed from the horse’s mouth: Russian trolls recruited by the Putin-linked businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin have meddled in multiple US elections. Prigozhin, known for supplying catering contracts to the Kremlin, openly admitted as much. ‘Gentlemen, we interfered, we are interfering and we will interfere,’ he boasted on the eve of Wednesday’s US midterm elections. He had been asked to confirm findings published by US social media analysis firm Graphica that showed Russian operatives had posted racist cartoons and

Svitlana Morenets

The last hours of the Russian occupation of Kherson

The only large Ukrainian city Russia has been able to capture since February’s invasion – Kherson – has now been liberated. But something else extraordinary happened: Russian reports emerged of thousands of troops being left on the right bank of the Dnipro river after the occupiers blew up the mile-long Antonivsky bridge. Moscow flatly denies this, saying: ‘Not a single unit of soldiers, military equipment and weapons was left on the right bank of the Dnipro.’ But pro-Kremlin military blogs are full of reports to the contrary, some saying that thousands of Russians have been left on the wrong side of the river. If even some are captured, they could be exchanged

Thursday

10 Nov 2022

Svitlana Morenets

How Russia is surrendering Kherson

The Russian evacuation of Kherson is now well underway, leaving an expected trail of destruction in its wake. Russian soldiers are publishing bitter videos as they retreat, with one saying that ‘defending the city with these supplies would be complete madness’ and another adding ‘I hope we will return’. Local reports say fleeing Russians are destroying infrastructure in the area – the region’s energy supplier and TV centre were reportedly blown up today. Russian troops are also placing mines on roads and settlements, in preparation for the Ukrainian army. Meanwhile the Ukrainian advance continues, with dozens of settlements west and north of Kherson liberated today. The Ukrainian flag has been raised

Brendan O’Neill

Trumpism is dead, long live populism!

Donald Trump is done for. Trumpism too. That’s the main takeaway of the Midterms. Many of the candidates Trump backed performed badly and Trump’s own incessant meddling in the Republican campaign seems to have turned voters off. That curious, manic, sometimes amusing little epoch in modern Western politics – the Trump era – is over. But anyone who thinks this means populism is over is kidding themselves. Those folk of a more technocratic bent who are currently clinking their glasses of champagne at the prospect that populism is heading for the graveyard of bad ideas are in for a rude awakening. For there’s another takeaway from these Midterms – Trumpism

James Snell

Assad and Putin stoop to a new low in Syria

Focus on Syria has dwindled since the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But over a decade after the country’s bloody civil war first started, the conflict rumbles on. Armed groups continue to jockey for position. The death toll, caused by Russia’s air force, Iran’s militias, and Bashar al-Assad’s forces, continues to rise. To keep the enclave in the country’s north on its toes, perhaps, the Syrian regime likes to lob artillery into villages and call in Russian aerial attacks. This happens often. Civilians frequently die when the missiles and bombs land in marketplaces. This week saw an intensification of this low-level war on non-combatants. On 6 November, the regime and, most

Nigel Jones

Biden vs Trump is a contest in which we all lose

Overnight President Biden announced that he intends to run again for the White House in 2024 and beat Donald Trump in a rematch of their 2020 contest. This would be funny if it wasn’t a tragedy for both the US and the wider world. We thus have the prospect of a man who will be 82 in two years’ time, and is already, in the words of historian Niall Ferguson ‘manifestly senile’, facing off against a 78-year-old Trump if, as widely expected, the orange man announces another presidential run next week. The absurd spectacle of two vain old men fighting for a future neither will live to see is enough

Justin Marozzi

My 6,000-mile adventure of a lifetime

‘Oh, you’ll hate it, Julia. It’s men talking about cars all the time. Really, really boring. You drive all day, it gets incredibly hot, you’ve got no air-conditioning and then – if and when you make it to your hotel – the men start talking about cars again. It’s awful. Never again.’ This is not the kind of pep talk I’m hoping for on the eve of our 6,000-mile expedition to the Syrian border with my wife in Frieda, our 1956 Bristol 405. Our friend, the novelist Raffaella Barker, knows what she’s talking about. Her husband, who sells classic cars for a living, comes to my rescue. ‘Zip it!’ he