World

Bellingcat is an independent group of exceptionally gifted Leicester-based internet researchers who use information gleaned from open sources to dig up facts that no other team of journalists has been able to discover. Or, Bellingcat is a sophisticated front used by western intelligence agencies to disseminate stories that would be considered tainted if they came from an official source. Which is it? The answer matters, not just because Bellingcat’s investigators — a tiny outfit with just 11 staffers and around 60 volunteers around the world — have apparently identified Sergei Skripal’s would-be assassins, pinned the blame for chemical weapons attacks in Syria squarely on the Assad regime and the responsibility

As chalices go, few are as poisoned as the one Emmanuel Macron has just handed Christophe Castaner. Minister of the interior is one of the most challenging posts in government. The former Socialist MP has cultivated an image over the years of a political tough guy, in contrast to his predecessor, the diminutive Gérard Collomb. But what passes for tough in the National Assembly won’t intimidate the tough guys in France’s inner cities. During his eighteen months in the post, Collomb was a diligent minister, but in the end the 71-year-old was worn down by the enormity of his task. He parted with a message that should cause his successor

If politics were a science, the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union would be the automatic and overwhelming victor in every regional election. Bavaria is doing quite well: it’s the richest region of the richest country in Europe with the lowest unemployment (2.8 per cent) and crime rates. Bavaria, in fact, is so wealthy that it serves as the prime donor to Germany’s poorer states. Last year, Bavaria coughed up €5.89 billion to the cash-strapped regions of the former East Germany. Unfortunately for the CSU, politics is more art than science. You can brag about being the elected administrators of the wealthiest and most physically beautiful part of Germany but still get

‘Final call to halt “climate catastrophe”’, said the BBC’s website, covering the ‘special report’ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change after its meeting in South Korea. It won’t be the final call, though. Every IPCC conference is the ‘last chance to save the planet’, according to its promoters. What is more interesting is the way news organisations are gradually downgrading this story as the years pass. Even the BBC website did not put it top, at least by the time I looked early on Monday evening. Going to the Derby for the first time as a boy, I noticed a gloomy man in a bowler hat walking slowly through

Today marks the marriage of Princess Eugenie to Jack Brooksbank. Although the BBC didn’t jump at the chance to air the royal nuptials, ITV happily took up the offer. The broadcaster was rewarded with a star celebrity turnout – from Kate Moss to Robbie Williams. However, the part that caught Mr S’s attention relates to the readings. The young royal selected an extract from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for her sister Princess Beatrice to read. In it, the book’s narrator Nick describes the protagonist Jay Gatsby’s smile. Eugenie selected it on the grounds that it ‘immediately reminded’ her of her now-husband Jack: But Mr S can’t help but wonder

On 31st August, in a move celebrated by Benjamin Netanyahu as a ‘blessed change’, the Trump administration announced it would cut all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It was a decision with far-reaching and catastrophic implications: the US has long been the largest individual donor to the UNRWA, which serves millions of Palestinian refugees and their dependents in the Middle East. Despite putting at risk the schooling, healthcare and social services on which these refugees rely, Jared Kushner was dismissive and unapologetic. ‘This agency,’ he said, ‘is corrupt, inefficient, and doesn’t help peace.’ That isn’t the case. The move is a clumsy sweeping aside of

I imagine that Daniel and Amy McArthur, owners of Ashers bakery in Northern Ireland, may well want to celebrate their victory in the Supreme Court with a spot of baking today. If so, I suggest this slogan should be written in icing: the equality industry stinks. It has taken Ashers four years and a sequence of court hearings, costing them £200,000 in legal fees, to establish what should have been obvious from the beginning: that no, they didn’t discriminate against a gay couple when they refused to bake a cake bearing the words ‘Support Gay Marriage’ in 2014. Why on Earth did it take so long, and why did the

Suddenly Russian spies seem funny rather than fearsome. ‘More Johnny English than James Bond’ as Security Minister Ben Wallace put it, as if the Salisbury pair had not killed on British soil. It’s certainly true that we have seen some big blunders on the part of the GRU, Russian military intelligence: Sergei Skripal’s would-be assassins presenting themselves as innocent sports nutritionists with a taste for thirteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture. Hackers caught in the Netherlands with laptops that had not been sanitised between operations. The names of 305 GRU officers made public because they registered their cars at their base, presumably in order to avoid paying car tax. The unmasking today of

The European Union finds itself in a bind. Donald Trump’s reintroduction of sanctions against Iran has left European diplomats desperately scrambling to salvage twelve years of nuclear diplomacy. On Friday, Jean-Claude Juncker underlined the EU’s commitment to keeping the deal alive, saying that ‘Europeans must keep their word and not give in to a change of mood, just because others are doing so’. The EU has its work cut out, but is using every tool in its arsenal to prevent Trump from undoing its efforts. A blocking statute previously levied in the 1990s has been updated and re-initiated, allowing European companies doing business with Iran to recover damages in court. Last month, Brussels

The debate over rights for transgender people rumbles on in the wake of proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. Is there a so-called ‘trans orthodoxy’ shutting down debate on this issue? Meanwhile, across the channel, French socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon is aiming to unseat an increasing unpopular Emmanuel Macron. Does Mélenchon have a chance of becoming president? In this week’s cover piece, James Kirkup argues that there is no room for dissent within what he calls the trans orthodoxy, that concerns over changes to the Gender Recognition Act are too quickly labelled ‘transphobic’. Madeleine Kearns adds – teachers are now at the frontline of the transgender politics, being given new

The inquisition that has been launched by woke physicists against a physics professor for expressing some heretical ideas at Cern about why women are under-represented in the field is truly shocking. You would think physicists, of all people, would be wary of inquisitions. Following his presentation, Professor Strumia has now been suspended by Cern, where he’s regularly employed, and is under investigation by the university of Pisa, where he holds a chair in physics, for ethics violations. I wouldn’t be surprised if he loses both positions. In the BBC report, his headline sin is reported to be claiming that ‘physics was invented and built by men’. That’s not 100 per