World

Edinburgh is a peach of a city, is it not? Last week, I walked up to the castle on a crisp and sunny morning. Crossing high above the railway line, I watched the trains slink out of Waverley station and snake along the valley floor, a giant Hornby set beneath my feet. The path to the castle is tarmacked and rough, but still slippery with morning frost, so I tread carefully as I follow the zigzag to stand under the castle walls at the top. A young man next to me breathes: ‘Awesome, man.’ Absolutely. And the more so when you think the volcanic plug on which the castle stands

Last month I spent an afternoon in the company of a 91-year-old German called Karl-Heinz. He was a teenage paratrooper in 1944, whose war ended when he was shot in the face by an American sniper the day after D-Day. Karl-Heinz hated the Nazis, but they for their part respected the martial prowess of the parachute regiment. On several occasions, he told me, he was approached by the SS while about town in his uniform, but their attempts to recruit Karl-Heinz into their ranks failed. He didn’t fall for their guff about true Germans only serving in the SS. ISIS is to Islam what the SS was to Germany and

In the historic heart of Riga, Latvia’s bustling capital, there’s a boulevard that doubles as a timeline of this proud country’s turbulent past. When Latvia was part of Tsarist Russia, it was called Alexander Street. In 1918, when Latvia won its independence, it was renamed Freedom Street. In 1940, when the Red Army invaded, its name was changed to Lenin Street. In 1941, when the Wehrmacht marched in, it became Adolf Hitler Street. When Latvia was swallowed up by the Soviet Union, it became Lenin Street once more, and in 1991, when Latvia regained its independence, it became Freedom Street again. 2018 marks the hundredth anniversary of Latvian independence. There

Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga of Honduras, one of the most influential figures in the Catholic Church, has been accused of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Catholic university in his ceremonial role as its chancellor – and of investing more than $1.2 million in London financial companies, some of which has now allegedly vanished. These claims form part of a set of spectacularly damaging but unproven allegations by the widely read Italian media outlet L’Espresso. You can read the report here; it also speculates about a ‘close and unseemly relationship’ between a bishop close to Maradiaga and a mysterious man apparently posing as a priest. The accusations are a disaster

Outvoted on a resolution on Israel, on the wrong side of international opinion, the United States ambassador responded with an intemperate address to the UN General Assembly. America’s diplomat told the countries assembled: ‘The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act… A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of anti-Semitism… has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty — and more — to the murderers of the six million European Jews.

At last, at last, President Donald J Trump has a big win. After the humiliating failure of his attempt to re-re-reform American healthcare, he has now passed his enormous $1.5 trillion tax overhaul through Congress. It is his first significant legislative accomplishment and it is, as he would say, yuge. The Republican splits that emerged over the Obamacare repeal bill threatened to stop his tax plans too. In the end they didn’t. Trump, keen to stress his own generosity, has called it a ‘an incredible Christmas gift for hard-working Americans’ — he’s even posted a little Christmas Tax Cuts video gif on Twitter — and no doubt, with the flush

Matt Hancock, a government minister, has felt obliged to declare formally, ‘Objective reality exists.’ To his credit, he confessed to a certain shamefacedness about this but he added that he believes he had a duty to reassure us. I find it hard to understand what Mr Hancock’s statement means. By ‘objective reality’ does he mean truth? If so, then the proposition ‘There is such a thing as truth’ is self-evident – a necessary proposition – because if someone attempts to refute it and says, ‘There is no such thing as truth,’ then either that proposition is true or the one who states it is wrong. In either case, there is something that is true. Actually, Mr

This week’s Books Podcast — the last before the Christmas break — sees the Spectator’s office flooded with elves. The QI Elves, to be precise. Four of these adorable, trivia-mining creatures — hosts of the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast — join me to look back over some of the more arcane details to emerge from 2017, and to discuss their boldly titled new production The Book of the Year. From tropical weevils to the difficulty of performing mouth-to-mouth on an aardvark, via the number of floors to be found on a Trump tower, their findings will offer essential resources to the Christmas conversationalist. You can listen to our

It’s starting to look as though the historic mission of Donald Trump, who was a registered member of the Democratic party as late as 2009, is to revive American liberalism. On Tuesday night, Trump, who earlier in the day had tweeted ‘Roy Moore will always vote with us’, accomplished his most improbable feat since winning the presidency. He helped hand over a Senate seat in Alabama, sweet home Alabama, the reddest of red states, to the Democratic candidate Doug Jones, a supporter of abortion rights and stricter gun controls. And so there was no sweetness for Trump last night. Instead, he had to eat bitterness, as the Chinese saying has it. A

The last Isis-held town in Iraq, Rawa, has fallen; across the border in Syria, the Russians declared a ‘total rout of the terrorists’. But this tough fight, which has taken three-and-half years, could all be in vain: the coalition which has driven Isis out now faces the gloomy prospect of winning the war and losing the peace. While Isis has been defeated, the next big challenge – how to address the Iranian drive for dominance in the Middle East – goes unanswered.  By ignoring this issue, the West is failing to learn one of the key lessons of the last three years: don’t treat each country as a vacuum. Isis’s ability to spread

At first sight, the evidence presented in David Anderson’s report into the four terror attacks committed between March and June sounds damning. The security service, MI5, had had three of the six attackers on its radar. The Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, who murdered 22 people, had come to the attention of MI5 in 2014. As recently as the beginning of this year, he had been implicated in criminal activity, which MI5 officers now admit might have led to his attack being thwarted had it been investigated. Khuram Butt, one of the attackers at London Bridge, had been under investigation for two years, yet still he and his two accomplices were

Here we go again. Donald Trump decertified the Iran nuclear deal in October. Now, in another audacious foray into Middle East diplomacy, Trump is waving goodbye to the waiver about moving the American embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It appears that the former real estate mogul will embark upon one last construction project. If he couldn’t build in Moscow, why not give Jerusalem a go? Overnight, an international Nimby crowd has formed to decry the move. The Palestinians are announcing that it’s the ‘kiss of death’ to any negotiations about a two-state solution. The Saudis have voiced their firm opposition. Theresa May thinks that ‘The status of Jerusalem should