World

A decade after the Arab Spring, good news anywhere is hard to find. In contrast to Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty has increased in the Arab region. Both internal economic growth and direct foreign investment have declined. Unemployment, especially among the young, has grown. Education standards are falling. There is less press freedom, less freedom of association. A BBC survey last year found that more than half of Arabs want to emigrate. In the countries where autocratic leaders were overthrown — Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen — there is nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary era. This week in Egypt, now the most brutally repressive Arab country since Saddam

An extraordinary row between Russia and Poland over the second world war is refusing to die down and threatens to overshadow commemorations for the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has suggested Poland is partly to blame for the war’s outbreak. Poland’s president Andrzej Duda has hit back, accusing Putin of an ‘historical lie’. ‘The words of Vladimir Putin are a complete distortion of historical truth,’ he added. This war of words has hit a nerve in two countries shaped by what happened in the second world war. For Russians and Poles, the war is of immense cultural significance. Russians are proud that they defeated the Nazi

The Japanese are fond of poeticising the fleeting beauty of the cherry blossom season, which no sooner reaches its full glory than is gone, leaving behind nothing but bare branches, scattered petals, and a sense of wistful regret and nostalgic yearning. It’s the theme of countless haikus and mournful folk ballads. But if the cherry blossoms themselves soon vanish, the cherry blossom party scandal, currently vexing prime minister Shinzo Abe, is proving as worryingly hard to remove as Japanese knotweed. It’s in danger of turning into a Japanese version of Watergate. The annual prime minster’s cherry blossom viewing party is a tradition going back to 1952. Public funds are used

Have you noticed how chaotic and wasteful eucalypts are? They have branches that grow in all directions and lengths and they seem to be forever dropping dead bits off them. Why hasn’t natural selection tidied them up so their branches are all economically organised to maximise access to light like beautifully ordered pines or symmetrical oaks? A eucalyptus tree actually looks like a whole lot of trees fighting with each other for access to the light. In fact, a trick to painting a eucalypt is to simply place a lot of grey-green blobs near each other and then connect them with stalks to a central trunk, and voilà, you have

Putin does like to spring a surprise. The first hour or so of his state of the nation address yesterday was the usual fare: Russia standing tall again, measures to address poverty, encouraging larger families. So far, so cut and paste. Then suddenly he dropped a series of constitutional bombshells: tougher presidential term limits, more powers for both parliament and the prime minister. Within three hours, prime minister Dmitry Medvedev was clearing his desk, and we had a sense of the shape of Russia after Putin’s presidency. Which is not, by any means, Russia after Putin. His current term ends in 2024, and although no one doubted he could stay

Kamala Harris began her campaign with an impressive display of political might: a gigantic late-January rally in her hometown of Oakland, California, where 22,000 people turned up for her first major speech as a presidential candidate. “We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation,” the senator from California bellowed into the microphone. “We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before. And we are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question: Who are we?”  On 4 December, it all came crashing down. Staff infighting, financial pains, and a

Donald Trump was given a hard deadline from judiciary committee chairman Jerrold Nadler: if you want to defend yourself against impeachment, you must do so by 6 December. It didn’t take Trump long to respond: over my dead body. But while Trump’s bravado is not a surprise, his impeachment strategy is not without its risks.  White House counsel Pat Cipollone delivered a five-page letter to the senior Democratic lawmaker excoriating the process and taking issue with the entire inquiry. “Again, your letter provided no information whatsoever as to the dates these [impeachment] hearings will occur, what witnesses will be called, what the schedule will be, what the procedures will be, or what rights,