World

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The fightback against facial recognition

40 min listen

China has run wild with facial recognition. From using it to ration tissues in public toilets, to identifying highest paying customers in stores and criminals from a crowd, what is a budding technology in the West has furthered state surveillance and corporate snooping in China. But there is a civil fightback happening in the courts, on social media and in public opinion at large. On this episode, I speak to Jeffrey Ding, a DPhil researcher of China’s development of AI at the University of Oxford, and Jeremy Daum, Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School, who also runs the blog China Law Translate. We discuss who is driving

Arabella Byrne

The rapid rise of Pascal Blanchard, Macron’s favourite diversity tsar

In October last year Emmanuel Macron had a long list of around 300 to 500 names drawn up. These were no ordinary figures but rather a number of renowned French immigrants who were being lined up as candidates for new street names and statues. Among their number was Martinican philosopher and activist Frantz Fanon, Moroccan war veteran Hammou Moussik, and the Egyptian French singer Dalida. And yet the man behind the scheme, Pascal Blanchard, is arguably more interesting than any of the names on the list. The so-called Rasputin of Macron’s inner-circle, Blanchard is thought to be the driving force behind President Macron’s postcolonial initiative, whispering into his ear during private

Mary Dejevsky

Liz Cheney has lost her fight against Trump but might win the war

When Liz Cheney, the single US House Representative for the state of Wyoming, was sacked as chair of the Republican party conference, there were broadly two views of what that signified, for her and for the Republican party. The more popular view by far was that her dismissal from the third most important post in the party had confirmed and strengthened Donald Trump as crucial to the future of the Republican cause and that her political career was pretty much over. The other view was that being down at this particular juncture did not mean she was out. And the huge coverage – and speculation – her dismissal has attracted

Sunday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Hamas’s rockets are killing Palestinians too

Israel’s military action in Gaza is widely reported daily across the world. Images of hundreds of rockets lighting up the skies over Israeli cities and of the rubble of destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip are once again part of the daily cycle of print and broadcast news. But most reports are thin on details of Israel’s military activities. What exactly are their aims? How are they pursuing them? And how much success are they having? Often Israel’s military activities seem baffling to the wider world. The country’s reluctance to give a detailed, running-commentary on every strike frustrates journalists and citizens, who then assume the worst of motives for these

Saturday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Study: AstraZeneca vaccine highly effective in India

Does the Indian variant of Sars-CoV-2, B1.617.2, have the capacity to escape vaccines? Is it really more transmissible than the Kent variant, and by how much? Those are the urgent questions which government scientific advisers are going to have to try to answer over the next week or two – and the answers will have profound consequences for life in Britain over the next few months. If the reopening of society and the economy is to be stalled, or even reversed – as some doctors, including the BMA seem to want – it will suppress an economic recovery, and depress an extremely large number of people who had been led

Anshel Pfeffer

Netanyahu’s toxic legacy

A week ago Israel was about to have a new government supported by right-wing, left-wing, centrist and Arab parties which was to concentrate on a ‘civilian agenda’ and ‘reconciliation’. Five days of internecine violence shattered that illusion. It’s still Netanyahu’s Israel. I’ve yet to see real evidence Netanyahu somehow engineered these dual crises in Gaza and between Jews and Arabs in Israel but it’s a direct result of his policies. He inherited in 2009 the previous government policies of blockading Gaza but in 12 years did nothing to change it. In regard to Jewish-Arab relations, Netanyahu did everything to exacerbate generations-old hatreds between communities, not because he’s a racist, but

Arieh Kovler

Inside Israel’s Iron Dome

A dramatic photo from the Gaza strip taken in the early hours of Friday morning looks like something out of a Marvel film. On the right, rockets fly from Gaza. The gentle trajectory of their parabolic curves shouldn’t fool anyone: these are unguided explosives travelling at hundreds of miles an hour towards an Israeli town. On the left, each one snaking a unique, winding path, interceptors from Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system shoot up to meet the missiles. In 2001, when Hamas started firing rockets from Gaza into Israel (and, at that time, the still-extant Israeli settlements in Gaza), the terrorist organisation introduced a new weapon that would change the strategic picture

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Can Democrats criticise Israel?

12 min listen

Apart from former nominee-candidate Andrew Yang, the Democratic Party has remained relatively quiet about the latest escalations in Israel and Gaza. Why won’t the Party comment? Freddy Gray talks to Dominic Green.

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Don’t compare Israel to Hamas

No, not this time, Boris. The Prime Minister’s ‘both sides’ response to the terrorist attacks on Israel underscores how Western political elites — left, right and centre — lose all critical reasoning when it comes to one tiny strip of land in the Middle East. Israel is under assault from Hamas, the Islamist mafia that runs Gaza like 19th-century Sicily. This follows tensions over the policing of holy sites during Ramadan; a spate of violent street incidents between Israelis and Palestinians; marching and incitement by the Israeli far-right; Palestinian rioting in Jerusalem; and Arab-Israeli rioting outside the capital. There has also been unrest ahead of a court ruling on property

Thursday

Limor Simhony Philpott

The battle the Israeli Defense Force can’t win

The hostilities between Israel and Gaza caught Netanyahu’s government by surprise. What started as a local demonstration by Palestinians against ongoing efforts to evict them quickly escalated into violent clashes with a heavy-handed Israeli police. Hamas then demanded Israel remove its forces from the area, including the nearby Al-Aqsa mosque, or face reprisals. When they didn’t, the terror group retaliated by firing rockets into Jerusalem. This was on Monday. By Wednesday there had been fierce exchanges of fire between both sides. Hamas fired over 1,500 rockets towards Israeli cities and towns. Despite Israel’s impressive Iron Dome anti-missile system and widely available shelters, over 200 Israelis have been injured and seven

Matthew Lynn

Why the EU keeps losing against big tech

They shift revenues around. They create endless shadowy shell companies. And they undermine the social model by dodging taxes. To the European Union, the American tech giants, when they aren’t busy destroying democracy and hollowing out local economies, are paying far too little to the state, and it is the only organisation with the muscle to start forcing them to contribute their fair share. There is one flaw in that analysis, however. Whenever the matter is put before Europe’s own courts, it keeps losing – and the Commission itself looks like an increasingly rogue organisation. Yesterday, the European General Court decided that a £215 million fine handed to Amazon in

Wednesday

Arieh Kovler

Israel’s worrying descent into violence

I didn’t hear the boom on Monday night. I didn’t hear the siren either, due to some loud renovations. Sitting at my desk in the bomb shelter in my flat that doubles as a home office, I found out we were under rocket attack by reading about it on Twitter. With the blast door and inch-thick steel window plate closed, I waited for the all-clear. A few minutes later, minor damage was reported to a house just outside Jerusalem, hit by shrapnel from a rocket that flew 40 miles from Gaza. Others were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-rocket system. A dramatic end to Jerusalem Day, when Israel celebrates the

Mary Dejevsky

The UK’s very American political realignment

The speed and scale with which voters, mainly but not exclusively in the north of England, have switched their allegiance from traditional Labour to Conservative has been described as unprecedented. Professor Tony Travers of the LSE called it ‘amazing’ and spoke of ‘a massive shift of tectonic plates’. Nor can the results of last week’s elections be dismissed as a one-off. The breaches in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ began well before the Conservative landslide in the 2019 General Election and what happened last Thursday is unlikely to be the end. Labour voters, it appears, were released from their life-long loyalty to the party by the Brexit referendum, and then transferred

John Keiger John Keiger

France needs Britain more than ever

‘What is grave about this situation, Messieurs, is that it is not serious’, was how General de Gaulle addressed his cabinet following the attempted putsch des généraux in April 1961. That could equally apply to recent Franco-British ructions over fishing rights in the Channel Islands. It is mere gesture politics, for all the French retaliatory threats to cut off the electricity supply to Jersey, the British dispatch of two Royal Navy vessels and the French countering with two patrol boats. Behind the facade France and Britain are serious military and diplomatic allies bound by important and wide-ranging security treaties that go beyond just Nato. But it is the French who have

Tuesday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Boring Barnier won’t be the next French president

Let me go out on a limb here and predict that Michel Barnier, who is trying to rekindle his modest and largely forgotten political career on the back of his notoriety as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, is not going to be the next president of France. Barnier is currently famous (but only, I suspect, for 15 minutes) for demanding a three to five year suspension of immigration into France. Bad news for Swedes seeking a retirement chateaux in the Dordogne. But seriously, this is all he’s got? The nightly riots and attacks on police in France, provoking excited talk of civil war, seem to originate with people who are

Arabella Byrne

Was Francois Mitterrand a hero or villain?

François Mitterrand remains something of an enigma in French politics. Mitterrand was the original champagne socialist and he remains a poster-boy of the French left. But France’s former president – an adulterer, member of the French Resistance with a Vichy secret, secularist and sometime Catholic – doesn’t easily fit into any one box.  This week marks forty years since Mitterrand became president. As with commemorating the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death, the occasion marks something of a challenge for France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron. For others, he is the Judas of the Left Macron, having uncancelled Napoleon last week by marking the bicentenary of his death at Les Invalides, is leaving the Mitterrand mania to the

Monday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why French soldiers are moving against Macron

Emmanuel Macron was in Strasbourg on Sunday where he addressed the Conference on the Future of Europe. This is where the President of France is happiest, describing the utopia that he still believes can be achieved by the EU. He feels important and powerful and he is among like-minded people, such as David Sassoli, president of the European parliament, who declared: ‘This conference is for ordinary citizens. Europe is not just for the elites, nor does it belong to them.’ There’s a touch of the Tony Blair in Macron’s canine devotion to the EU, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if the President accomplishes what eluded the former British prime

Friday

Matthew Lynn

Merkel is right to reject Biden’s vaccine patent plan

She handed the vaccine procurement process over to the European Union. She didn’t invest much in new production. And she allowed an American multinational to take control of a brilliant discovery by a small German biotech company. Angela Merkel, the out-going German Chancellor, has not had much success battling the Covid-19 crisis, and her handling of vaccines has been a catastrophe from start to finish. But she has finally got one thing right: she is defending the patents that protect the pharmaceutical industry. In the last week, president Biden has signalled that the United States is ready to back suspending patents on Covid vaccines. The president of the EU commission, Ursula

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: von der Leyen’s vaccine amnesia

How well has the EU dealt with the pandemic? According to Ursula von der Leyen, the bloc’s performance has been world beating. In an address yesterday, the Commission president lauded her own performance while claiming that the EU had proven its detractors wrong. During her so-called ‘state of the union’, she said: We all heard the nagging questions, especially in the first months of this pandemic: aren’t nation states better equipped to fight this crisis? Isn’t our union of 27 too slow to react? And our processes too cumbersome and our stakeholders too diverse? Today I am here to say: Europe has proven these claims wrong…Most importantly we decided to procure vaccines

Thursday

Paige Aarhus

Macron is playing politics in the Channel

The stand-off between France and Britain has escalated into something altogether more serious. Yesterday, the French maritime minister called for Jersey’s electricity supply to be cut off in response to a dispute over fishing rights. Egged on by French officials, around 80 boats began blockading the port of St Helier this morning in a move that is reminiscent of Ursula von der Leyen’s aborted plans for a hard Irish border to stop the flow of vaccines into the UK. Now there are scenes of British Navy vessels approaching the fishing boats as French ships chart a course for the Channel island. Some on the Continent are claiming that the stand-off