World

Of course most people don’t read the New York Times. But the paper retains a certain cachet in America, and undoubtedly directs a lot of public thinking in that country, if not further afield. Which is why the paper’s anti-British animus (which has been noted here before) is worth highlighting. The trend has been going on since 2016, when the NYT seemed to have decided that the Brexit vote led the way for the election of Donald Trump. Since then the paper’s desire to attack Britain has appeared insatiable. A fact that leads the paper’s readers to be woefully ill-informed about this country. I for one have been fairly regularly

If there is a God, He’s not French. Last night I was on the balcony of my apartment in Paris enjoying a celebratory ‘deconfinement’ bottle of wine; this morning on my first day of (partial) liberty there is heavy rain and high wind. So much for getting out and about on day one of post-lockdown life in France. Not that it will be that easy even when the weather does stop misbehaving. Paris is in the ‘red zone’, one of four regions of France that still has many restrictions in place, affecting 27 million people. In the ‘green’ zone, effectively the west and south of the country, parks are open,

May 10, 1940 is known in Britain as the day when Winston Churchill became prime minister. In my home country of Iceland that same day, 80 years ago, is remembered for a very different reason. On the day Churchill took control of defending the United Kingdom against invasion, Iceland was invaded: by the United Kingdom. When the invading force arrived in Reykjavík in the early hours of the morning they were met by a policeman on a bicycle. What followed turned out to be a quintessentially British – and simultaneously Icelandic – affair. Since gaining independence in 1918, Iceland had stuck to a policy of neutrality. Britain had already offered

You know those stories about how the EU is banning busty barmaids or Bombay mix that turn out to have an estranged relationship with the truth? This isn’t one of them. On its face, the headline ‘Palestinian terrorists can legally take part in EU-funded activities’ seems so absurd as to be obviously false. Yet the Jerusalem Post’s Lahav Harkov has obtained a letter from Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, head of the EU’s Palestinian delegation, which appears to advise on loopholes to Brussels’ terrorist blacklist. The missive, addressed to Palestinian NGOs, is said to clarify the terms of CFSP 2019/1341, the EU’s listing of individuals and groups to be forbidden financial

In a dramatic move even by his own mercurial standards, Donald Trump has authorised the withdrawal of two Patriot missile systems guarding Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, accompanied by hundreds of American military troops operating them. They were deployed last September after a massive cruise missile and drone attack on the Saudi oil infrastructure – blamed on the Iranians but claimed by their allies the Houthi rebels in Yemen – that knocked about half of the kingdom’s production capacity offline. Now Saudi Arabia has just two Patriot batteries, located at Prince Sultan Air Base in the middle of the Saudi desert. They are not there to protect the royal family and

If coronavirus has taught us anything it’s that if you really want to understand something of a state’s essential character, look at how it battles a pandemic. This crisis has divided humanity up variously, but most markedly along national, if not occasionally stereotypical, lines.  Germany reacted with organisation and efficiency; it has made, on balance, a good fist of it. The UK wavered; it twisted and turned and did stuff on the hoof. Things could be a lot better, but they could also be a lot worse. Some countries have defied expectation. Greece, for example, locked down quickly and comprehensively: it kept mass death at bay. But in a sense,

Sweden has been the world’s Covid-19 outlier, pursuing social distancing but rejecting mandatory lockdown. Schools, bars and restaurants are open – albeit with strong voluntary social distancing compliance and streets that often look almost as empty as Britain’s. Has this been enough? Sweden’s public health agency has now published a study of its R number, a metric which the UK is using to judge the success of the lockdown. The UK objective is to push R below one, by which it means it wants the number of new cases to fall. Last week, the UK’s R number was estimated at 0.8 (± 0.2 points), a figure described as an achievement of