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In the last days of the negotiations, the pressure is ramping up as reports began to surface on Thursday evening that the talks were not going as well as hoped. This morning, allies of Emmanuel Macron have warned that France could unilaterally veto a Brexit deal. What will the next days bring and could Macron really pull the plug? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.
David Ogilvy once said that ‘a good advertisement is one that sells the product without drawing attention to itself’. If so, the new Nike ad currently running in Japan is about as big a failure as you can get. It has certainly drawn plenty of attention to itself, producing more angry denunciations than sales. The ad snappily titled ‘The Future isn’t Waiting’ features scenes of bullying and discrimination directed at mixed-raced athletes in Japanese schools. They then fight back and triumph through the power of sport — and the power of Nike sportswear. Boycotters have claimed that the ad massively overstates a real, but far from endemic or Japan-specific problem, and is
After the past few years, it is hard to take Brexit deadlines seriously; they have a tendency to always slide to the right. But Sunday night/Monday morning really is the final deadline, as I say in the Times this morning. There are two reasons for this. First, the Internal Market Bill and the Finance Bill are in the Commons on Monday and Tuesday respectively. Both of these bills override parts of the withdrawal agreement, and in particular the Northern Ireland protocol. The EU would fiercely object, complaining the UK was breaking its obligations under international law and pointing to how the government had itself admitted it was a ‘specific and
Never one to let a bandwagon pass by, Vladimir Putin launched his own national vaccine programme the moment Britain said it was starting its roll-out. Given how badly Russia has been hit, you would expect it to be a popular move. But Russians themselves seem cautious, not least because they mistrust the Kremlin. On Thursday, Russian health officials announced a new record of more than 28,000 coronavirus cases reported in a single day, bringing the total caseload to almost 2.4 million. Russia has the world’s fourth-worst case numbers, behind only the USA, India and Brazil, with over 41,000 deaths to date. Or at least 41,000 according to official statistics —
With Britain leaving the EU, Brussels is adopting a new assertiveness – but Poland and Hungary are fighting back. The two countries are plotting a strategy of vetoing the EU’s latest budget because of a mechanism attached to it allowing the bloc to withhold money if a country falls short of its standards. Poland and Hungary fear that this measure could leave them vulnerable if Brussels doesn’t like their domestic legislation. But this drama is about more than just money – it also shows the direction Euroscepticism is heading in after Brexit. Without Britain’s influence, Euroscepticism is now beginning to take on a new form – more cultural, and less economic. Poland and
Last year, in the cigar bar of an opulent London hotel much favoured by visiting Arabs, an interesting conversation took place. My friend was rich enough to have two private jets and claimed to be doing private shuttle diplomacy between Israel and one of the Gulf states. Smoke curled around our heads and a young Qatari in Gucci trainers passed by with a woman my friend assured me was a Russian prostitute. My friend’s phone was out now and he was on a video call with a man he said was a senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He asked him about a drone strike on Saudi Arabia’s two
It is time we started to talk about reparations. I am not of course referring to the demands made by certain communities to be given vast cash payouts for things that happened before they were born, to people they never knew, by people they never met. I am talking about the need of the citizens of the world to be given reparations by China for what it did to us all this year. Before proceeding further, perhaps it is worth putting a few things in perspective. Delivering his spending review before the House of Commons last week, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak cited figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility explaining
For four years, president Donald Trump radicalised international relations. There was a shift towards the nation state and unilateralism, beginning with the United States. He viewed intergovernmental organisations like the WHO or the World Trade Organization with acute scepticism thanks to what he saw as their bureaucratic sloth and partisanship. His perception of the European Union and Nato was little better; the first he perceived as an unfair competitor; the second a free-loading bureaucracy. So it came as no surprise that the EU could barely contain its joy at Joe Biden’s election, even if certain eastern member states were reticent. However, the EU will be disappointed if it believes president-elect Biden’s foreign policy will
In the last days of November, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was released from Tehran’s Evin prison and flown back to a welcome in Australia. A dual Australian-UK national, she had served two years of a ten-year sentence for espionage — pronounced after a secret trial. She had been in Iran for a conference and was detained as she was about to leave. She had strongly protested her innocence. So why, many Britons might ask, is the Australian-British academic suddenly free after two years in which the Iranian security services tried in vain to ‘turn’ her — while the UK-Iranian dual national, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, remains under house arrest in Tehran, with the
What did Joe Biden make of the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh? The president-elect has yet to make his feelings known, but it is hard to imagine Biden will be pleased with a killing that has the potential to escalate tensions in the Middle East and obstruct his policy towards Iran. Although Israel has not admitted to the attack, it carries all the known trademarks of sophisticated Mossad assassinations. Add to that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s implicit threat against Fakhrizadeh in 2018, and it becomes hard to escape the conclusion that Israel was responsible. So why would Israel risk retaliation by Iran, as well as antagonising Biden and
When U.S. presidents leave office they usually take a step back to work on pet projects or write their memoirs. Jimmy Carter, one of the most active former presidents in U.S. history, began the widely-acclaimed Carter Center to monitor elections around the world. He also continued to serve as an unofficial U.S. government representative. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama began foundations of their own, with both remaining involved in hot-button political topics. George W. Bush decided to go back to his ranch in Texas and take up painting. But Donald Trump may be spending his first few months in retirement fending off criminal investigations against his business. And therein lies the
Belgium has had some of the toughest coronavirus restrictions in Europe during the second wave of the pandemic, with hospitality venues closed and socialising severely restricted. So Mr Steerpike was surprised to note this interesting story in the Belgian press today, which suggested that some may not be following the rules as closely as expected. According to La Dernière Heure, 25 men were arrested this weekend after their lockdown festivities were interrupted by the police. The paper writes: ‘Twenty-five men in their birthday suits were interrupted in the middle of a gang bang on Friday evening in Brussels, close to the central police station of the capital’. Even more intriguingly,
History is accelerating in the Middle East once more. Nuclear scientists are dying in Iran; and again, in Egypt, the regime is cracking down on anyone who dares to criticise it. Kareem Ennarah, the director of the criminal justice and policing unit at human rights organisation, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), was arrested on 18 November and accused of joining a terrorist group and spreading false information. Ennarah worked to shine a light on Egyptian torture, police brutality, arbitrary detention and execution; no wonder he and his colleagues had become unpopular with the authorities. But in recent months, things started to become a lot worse. In February, his colleague Patrick
Yesterday afternoon someone assassinated yet another scientist working on Iran’s nuclear programme. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh headed up the ministry of defence’s research and innovation organisation, and he was ambushed and killed in his car just east of Tehran, by gunmen who opened fire on him and his bodyguards. I’ve been writing about Iranian nuclear scientists getting whacked for almost a decade now, with my book on Iran’s nuclear programme published in an updated edition this month. It appears that another cycle of nuclear violence is starting once again – and Fakhrizadeh is the most important hit yet. He genuinely was at the heart of the Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Indeed, in 2018
The bad boys of Europe are at it again. The EU has been attempting to tie budget funds to members states’ adherence to the rule of law. This has been rejected by Poland and Hungary, leading to the latest in a long line of conflicts between Brussels and the conservative Central European countries. But looking at the issue in a wider regional context, it becomes clear that this is not just another diplomatic spat, but part of a wider trend. The liberalism of the EU is now facing a serious ideological opposition from the entire ‘Visegrád Four’ bloc of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The latest dispute over
The news that Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen ‘father of the bomb’ Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, met his end in a hail of bullets near Tehran today comes as no surprise. As with so many things these past four years, this is all about Trump. Whoever carried out the hit, it is all but certain that Trump gave it the nod. Once again, he is trying to put a stamp on the Middle East that Biden will find difficult to scrub out. His actions would hardly be without precedent; Obama, Clinton and Reagan all made last-gasp moves in the region to shape it in their image. But none of these Presidents were anywhere
There is still some debate about who came up with the adage that ‘if you owe the bank $100 that is your problem. If you owe the bank $1 million dollars that is their problem’. It is usually attributed to the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, which may help explain how he became the richest man of his era. Occasionally, and in a slightly modified form, it is attributed to John Maynard Keynes in his advice to the British cabinet after world war two. And yet in truth, it should probably have been coined by an Italian. Why? Because the country now owes so much money to the rest of
Can an entire country sue for libel? If so, France would have a strong suit against swathes of the American left. The US progressive movement, including the New York Times and Washington Post, has turned on la Republique over its citizens’ habit of getting themselves murdered by Islamists. Most recently, this has included Samuel Paty, a teacher beheaded in the street for showing his students cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, and three people murdered in a church in Nice. In response, French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed stricter regulations for mosque-financing and an end to home-schooling. And in response to this, much of the American left has lost its mind.
Germans, just like Britons, will have to cope with restrictions during this year’s Christmas holidays. Yesterday, Angela Merkel and the heads of Germany’s federal states agreed on an updated catalogue of regulations that will allow ten adults to meet for a Christmas party. After three weeks of what is widely called a ‘lockdown light’, the infection rates in German cities and regions continue to remain above the threshold that has been set by medical experts. The vast majority of Landkreise (regional districts) have recorded an incidence proportion of higher than 50 cases per 1,000 inhabitants within the last week. Chancellor Merkel said yesterday that the ‘lockdown light’ has prevented the
Donald Trump is out of the White House in less than two months. But he has scores to settle before he vacates his chair to Joe Biden, the man who defeated him at the ballot box earlier this month. First, it was the firing of multiple officials at the Pentagon who were deemed by Trump to be insufficiently loyal to his agenda. Next came the replacement of those officials with ultra-loyalists who would implement his orders without question or reservation. And now, Trump is levying his exclusive right to pardon people of federal crimes – a power unique to the presidency. On November 25, when most in Washington, DC were