World

 Kiev Before he was Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort worked for the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych started out as a petty thief in the bleak Soviet city of Donetsk. He stole fur hats from men using its outside toilets. He would reach over the door as they squatted, defenceless, and flee while their trousers were still around their ankles. Even among the criminals of Donetsk, this was thought low behaviour. ‘It’s hard to imagine now that we had such a character as a president of the country,’ said Alex Kovzhun, a Ukrainian political consultant. Kovzhun joyfully put this story on thousands of mock newspaper front pages during

Oh dear. Earlier this month there was a furore when it was revealed that a tights advert featuring a picture of a dancer’s bare back had been banned from the Tube. As part of Sadiq Khan’s promise to ban adverts on TfL which could cause body confidence issues, the firm were told by TfL’s contractor to add a bandeau bra to the image of the model. So, Mr S was intrigued see some of the adverts that TfL appear to be perfectly relaxed about. While a bare back may be deemed too much for the daily commute, a ‘propaganda machine’ advert for Russia Today – the Kremlin-backed news outlet – is a-ok: Workers

Barcelona I was roaring through central Barcelona on the back of a motorcycle, in the midst of a pack of unionist riders adorned with Spanish flags, all sounding their horns with reckless abandon, when it hit me: this was the voice of the silent majority. Catalonia does not want independence from Spain. But let me begin at the beginning. Yesterday afternoon, the word was put out on Twitter that a group of unionists were intending to parade through Barcelona on two wheels before riding out to the port, where a battalion of national police were barracked in a ship. There they planned to serenade officers and shower them with flowers

The Catalan Parliament has voted for a unilateral declaration of independence from Spain. President Carles Puigdemont had toyed with taking the decision but in the end left it up to the legislature. It is now not a question of Madrid deposing him; it will have to shut down the whole operation. Direct rule is all but inevitable. Madrid held out this nuclear option in the hope of dissuading the nationalists from taking the leap but the bluff has been called. After the scenes that greeted the October 1st referendum on independence, only an optimist would expect the Spanish imposition to be a bloodless affair. Most Catalans did not want to

The Vietnam War BBC4 The BBC should be praised for showing all ten episodes of this unique, informative and shattering American series on the Vietnamese war, despite screening eight fewer hours than in the original. Before each episode the BBC warned that ‘some viewers may find some scenes upsetting’. Which ones? A frog jumping in a pool of blood from the head of a dead Vietcong (NLF) fighter? The Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner in the head? The American colonel offering a case of whiskey to the first man to bring him the severed head of an enemy soldier? Which he gets. The eager US soldier on his first day in Vietnam noticing strings of

Let us give thanks for the straight-talking Rory Stewart. After last week’s alarming comments from Max Hill, a QC who appears to believe British Isis fighters just need some TLC, Stewart, a Foreign Office minister, has given a more incisive assessment of the approach that should be taken towards the British jihadists still at large in Syria and Iraq. ‘They are absolutely dedicated, as members of the Islamic State, towards the creation of a caliphate,’ the Conservative MP told the BBC’s John Piennar. ‘They believe in an extremely hateful doctrine which involves killing themselves, killing others and trying to use violence and brutality to create an eighth century, or seventh

Scotland is fast becoming the most strident, unforgiving nanny state in the West. A world leader in the policing of people’s beliefs and lifestyles. It has in recent years passed laws telling football fans what they’re allowed to sing and chant. It has banned smoking in cars and parks and said it wants to make Scotland ‘smokefree’ by 2034. It has introduced the Named Person scheme whereby every bairn will have a state official keeping an eye on them from birth to the age of 18. (George Orwell called — he wants his storyline back.) And now this little republic of rulemaking plans to ban parents from smacking their kids. Yes, parental slapping, the thing that so

Driving out of Barcelona, into the rural hinterland of Catalonia, you soon lose count of all the Catalan flags flying from lamp posts along the highway. This isn’t the state-sanctioned Catalan flag, La Senyera, but the banned rebel flag, L’Estelada – red and yellow stripes, like the official flag, but with a rebel star upon it, like the flags of Cuba and Puerto Rica (two other nations that threw off the Spanish yoke, with variable results). Yet when you arrive in Lleida, Catalonia’s only landlocked province, and get talking to a few locals, it soon becomes clear that the Catalan independence story is actually a lot more nuanced. I’d returned

‘Persecuted and Forgotten?’ is the name of the latest report by Aid to the Church in Need. Unfortunately, there is no need for that question mark in the title. Both the persecution and the oblivion are facts. Christians have been victims of the genocide in Isis-controlled parts of Iraq and Syria. In 2011, there were 150,000 Christians in Aleppo and now there are 35,000. Persecution rises in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Sudan and Iran. In Nigeria, 1.8 million people have been displaced by Boko Haram. In India, there is much more harassment of Christians since Narendra Modi came to power in 2015. In China, there are now thought

PMQs began with an announcement. The life president of the John Bercow fan-club rose from the Speaker’s chair to welcome a distinguished Dutch parliamentarian sitting up in the gallery. No one recognised the name of this blow-in from the land of windmills. But he is no doubt as important in his own domestic circle as Mr Bercow is in his. Taxpayers will be thrilled to know that the Speaker makes pals on his overseas junkets. And how apt that a man of such humble stature has befriended a parliamentarian from the Low Countries. Mr Bercow spent most of the session demonstrating his mastery of events by interrupting MPs with his slim

Why are all the women involved in the Harvey Weinstein allegations only speaking out now? That question has been asked repeatedly – including on this blog – since the accusations against the film mogul first emerged. Why now? Ross Clark suggested on Coffee House yesterday that women who had achieved what some of the actresses and UN goodwill ambassadors had managed should be brave enough to speak out about someone who appears to have been a serial predator over many years – but that they failed to do so because their allegations date back to when they were ‘on the make’. It’s a fair point, isn’t it? But isn’t it