World

The symbolism could hardly have been clearer when Pedro Castillo was sworn in yesterday as Peru’s new President on the country’s 200th anniversary of independence. For arguably the first time in its history, Peru has a head-of-state who personifies the national majority — a campesino hailing from a particularly impoverished region of the northern Andes — rather than a member, real or honorary, of the largely white Lima elite. Given Peru’s persistent, stark inequality, drastically exacerbated by the pandemic, perhaps the biggest surprise is that the electorate has waited until now to vote in such a radical left-populist. Although the rabblerousing rural school teacher currently appears to be tacking towards the centre, he had originally promised

An opinion columnist should have some self-awareness in life. When your job is to sit behind a laptop droning on about politics, for example, one should be very careful before casting aspersions on the mental and physical performance of one of the most decorated Olympians of all time. Simone Biles, who transcended poverty and abuse to become in all likelihood the greatest gymnast ever, with 19 gold medals in World Championships, clearly has nothing to prove when it comes to mental toughness and physical excellence. You can’t hurl yourself head over heels, through the stratosphere, in front of millions of viewers, without both — never mind doing it better than

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is hardly known for its free and fair elections. But a purge of the field ahead of this September’s parliamentary vote has led to protests even from politicians who benefit from his system. And it has brought the woman on whom the whole democratic façade relies close to a breakdown. Ella Pamfilova, the head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, had just wrapped up a meeting in which her officials disbarred the popular Communist party candidate Pavel Grudinin when she was approached by Nikolai Bondarenko, Grudinin’s ally and a popular YouTuber. ‘This is a disgrace to the whole country. You’re trampling democracy,’ he told Pamfilova in a video he

In the 50-kilometre walk at the 1948 Olympics, the gold and silver medallists were aged 28 and 33 respectively. The man who took bronze, Britain’s ‘Tebbs’ Lloyd-Johnson, was 48 years old. Still the oldest person ever to win an Olympic track and field medal, Tebbs is now more famous than the men who finished ahead of him. Another British bronze at those 1948 London Olympics was also worth more than most gold medals. Just three years previously when released from forced labour in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, weightlifter Jim Halliday had weighed a skeletal six stone (38 kg). Restoring his strength by eating eggs (including the shells which,

Which Middle Eastern country offers the best life for Arabs? The answer, as they say, might surprise you. Take any measure you like – democratic representation, women’s rights, lack of corruption, freedom of speech, the protection of sexual minorities – and it is clear that Israel comes out on top. I remember covering an Isis gun attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul in 2017. An Arab-Israeli woman, 19-year-old Lian Zaher Nasser, was one of 39 people who lost their lives in the atrocity. The attentiveness of the Israeli diplomatic service to her family was striking, and equal to anything I’ve seen elsewhere. Years later, a senior Israeli intelligence source

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, over a billion copies of Mao’s Little Red Book were distributed across the People’s Republic. This small pocket-sized collection of quotations provided the scaffolding for an era of communist purges. Utopians need theory. And while the Maoist orthodoxies of the last century have faded, China’s need for a solid intellectual foundation is as strong as ever. Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era is that new theory. But it is written not by the General Secretary himself but by an unassuming 65-year-old: his supreme theoretician. Wang Huning has quietly shaped China over the last three decades, despite the