World

Wednesday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

The arrest of South Korea’s president won’t end this saga

South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol has been arrested after police officers scaled fences and cut through barbed wire to detain him in his luxury Seoul residence. Suk-yeol, the first ever sitting South Korean leader to be taken into custody, was held in connection with his failed attempt to impose martial law last month. But while South Korean authorities have finally got their man, this is far from the end of the saga. Yoon’s talk of ‘bloodshed’ was probably hyperbolic A motorcade believed to be carrying the president was seen leaving his compound and he appears to be being held at the CIO (Corruption Investigation Office) headquarters in the nearby city

Tuesday

Francis Pike

Why Tulip Siddiq had to go

In 1996, I flew to Dhaka to meet Sheikh Hasina, the newly elected prime minister of Bangladesh, to discuss her economic strategy. It was not a pleasant experience. Hasina was humourless, arrogant and bitter – by a long stretch, the most unlikeable politician I’ve met in the sub-continent. By contrast her diminutive niece, Tulip Siddiq, Labour’s anti-corruption minister who has just resigned over her ties to her aunt, is a charmer.  It just stretches credulity that Siddiq and the Labour party did not know that aunty Hasina was a rotten apple To be fair to Hasina, she had excuses for her unattractive demeanour. There was a singular focus on her political raison d’etre – to avenge the brutal assassination of her father,

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Putin is engineering a humanitarian crisis in Transnistria

Sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, the tiny republic of Moldova has been easy prey for Russia in the past. Its 2.5 million people are among the poorest in Europe and the Kremlin has been able to exploit the country’s dependence on cheap Russian gas to keep it as an ally. Putin has decided to let the people of Transnistria freeze so he can pin the blame on Moldova’s pro-EU government But Moldovans, like Ukrainians, have begun to choose another path. In 2022, they applied to join the European Union to be part of the democratic world, and then elected a pro-western president last year. Vladimir Putin’s response has been to engineer

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Can Trump claim the credit for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire?

Donald Trump has made a long list of promises for what will be done on ‘day one’ of his second term in the White House. Peace in the Middle East was not one of them. Yet it looks increasingly likely that the President-elect will be sworn in having just helped to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, to (at least temporarily) end the war in Gaza.  Trump has made his feelings clear about the war for some time: in line with his broader views about foreign conflict, he wanted the war brought to an end. While positioning himself as a strong ally of Israel, the President-elect was also calling

Jonathan Sacerdoti

What price will Israel pay for a ceasefire with Hamas?

As reports swirl of an imminent ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, Israel stands at a crossroads, grappling with the profound dilemmas that such a deal entails. While the full details of the agreement remain unknown until officially announced, the fragments emerging suggest a complex and controversial arrangement that raises difficult questions: How much is Israel willing to concede for the return of hostages? And what price, in lives and security, will the nation pay in the future? Within Israel’s government, opposition to the deal is mounting According to reports, the deal is expected to include the release of 33 hostages defined as “humanitarian cases,” a 42-day ceasefire, and the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The plot to ban X in France

Clara Chappaz is the minister delegate for Artificial Intelligence and the digital economy in the government of Emmanuel Macron. At the weekend she appeared on a television discussion entitled ‘Trump-Musk: Are we ready?’ Chappaz, 35, is very much a Macronist, an entrepreneur who did her MBA at Harvard Business School before launching a successful start-up. French progressives are flexible in their approach to free speech. They’re all for it, as long as they agree with it She expressed her growing concern about the direction certain social media platforms were headed, and the consequences for millions of French people who use them. ‘We have to make sure that wrong opinions are

Matthew Lynn

Spain will regret its 100 per cent expat property tax

They drive up prices. Rents go through the roof. And the locals can no longer afford a home. The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is so fed up with wealthy expats inflating the property market he is planning a 100 per cent tax on anyone from outside the EU buying a home in Spain. Of course, that might prove popular in the short term – but Spain will pay a high price for slamming the door shut on well-off foreigners.  To pretend driving expats out will make any difference to the average Spaniard is just ridiculous Any who dreamt of buying a small place on the Costa del Sol or

Nigel Jones

Will the AfD’s deportation pledge win over German voters?

Next month’s German federal election on 23 February revolves around the disputed meaning of a single toxic word: ‘remigration’. Until the current fiercely fought campaign began, the word was an unmentionable taboo in German politics for obvious historical reasons, since, according to left-wing linguists, it suggested comparison between the deadly forced deportation of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust with the way that unwelcome immigrants are treated in today’s Germany. But at the weekend that taboo was shattered by Alice Weidel, co-leader of the hard right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, when she used the ‘verboten’ word while launching the insurgent party’s election campaign in its East German heartland. Weidel

Daniel Thorpe

Will foreign fighters in Syria export their jihad? 

By the gates of the great 8th-century Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, a group of Central Asian-looking gunmen stand in the uniform of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). It is unclear whether they are visiting or guarding. When I approach, they say they are from ‘East Turkistan’, referring to the Uyghur part of China. Their Arabic is hardly comprehensible, but when I ask in Turkish they speak more fluently. ‘We have been waging jihad in the north in Idlib for ten years,’ the eldest says in a low voice. He looks ten years younger than the age he gives. ‘With the permission of God, we prevailed over the Assad regime. They say we’ll get Syrian citizenship.

James Lewisohn

Here’s what Greenland should do about Donald Trump

Greenland’s prime minister Múte Egede has responded to Donald Trump’s overtures to buy the island by saying it is time to shake off ‘the shackles of colonialism’ and hold an independence referendum. As Egede works out how to proceed on the path to independence from Denmark, and how to respond to Trump as he prepares to take office, he would be advised to do a little background reading. For Donald Trump’s policies are increasingly informed by his key lieutenant, Elon Musk; Musk’s friend and fellow PayPal co-founder Ken Howery will be the next US Ambassador to Denmark; and Musk’s key philosophical text is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which reminds us: ‘Space

Robert Service

Why Trump bullies Nato

President-elect Donald Trump has in recent years talked about ‘buying’ Greenland. Until recently his comments attracted little attention but recently he shocked the world by threatening the use of economic coercion or military force to fulfil his wish. Male gorillas in the forests of west Africa engage in chest-beating to see off their rivals but Nato, to which the Kingdom of Denmark has belonged since its foundation in 1949, is meant to be a zoo park in which all the wardens sign up for a working partnership. What is behind this public breach in diplomatic etiquette? Americans can point to earlier times when they expanded their territory by purchase, not

Monday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Spain is stoking Europe’s migrant crisis

The new year in Spain began much as the old one ended, with a huge influx of illegal immigrants arriving on its shores. Nearly 800 people from North and Sub-Saharan Africa landed on the Canary Islands between 6 and 8 January. That fleet of ten boats are an ominous sign of what Europe can expect in 2025. Spain has become the people smugglers’ route of choice: last year they ferried 63,970 migrants into Spanish territory, an increase of 12.5 per cent on 2023. Of that number, more than 43,000 men, women and children landed in the Canaries. Spain is seen by the people smugglers as the softest of touches The

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Labour’s kowtowing to China will cost Britain

When the security services accessed the mobile phone of Yang Tengbo, the alleged Chinese spy who became a confidant and business partner of the Duke of York, they found a document in which Yang said of the duke, ‘He is in a desperate situation and will grab onto anything’. We can only assume there are memos circulating in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) this week describing the visit by Rachel Reeves in similar terms. Starmer and his ministers appear to be competing to see who can kowtow the lowest before Xi The hapless duke’s entanglement with Yang, whose exclusion from Britain was confirmed shortly before Christmas, was held up as

Terry Barnes

Djokovic must forgive and forget his shoddy Covid experience in Australia

Another Australian Open tennis tournament, another Novak Djokovic media sensation. As play gets under way at Melbourne Park, Djokovic the showman has been working the Australian media, as well as doing a glossy spread for the upmarket US magazine, GQ. The common thread of his media commentary is his experience coming to the 2022 Australian Open when, as the Covid-19 pandemic still raged, the unvaccinated Djokovic was detained and deported after seeking to enter Melbourne, the city oppressed by arguably the most draconian lockdown and vaccination mandates in the world, let alone Australia. The Serbian star’s 2022 experience clearly gnaws at him Having initially been given an exemption to enter

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Was Rachel Reeves’s China trip worth it?

Rachel Reeves is on her way back to the UK after a brief visit to China over the weekend. The Chancellor faced calls to cancel the trip, not over alleged human rights abuses by her hosts, but instead because of the state of the UK bond market. However, those around Reeves did not seriously consider cancelling her visit to China, taking the view that to call it off would have added to a sense of panic. After borrowing costs soared in the days before she departed, Reeves abruptly cancelling the trip would have likely drawn comparisons with 1976, when chancellor Denis Healey turned back at Heathrow, aborting a planned trip

Jay Mens

Trump’s presidency could spell the end of Iran’s regime

Donald J. Trump returns to the Oval Office for the second time as the least interventionist American president since 1941. As the Islamic Republic of Iran – which recently tried to kill him – is at its lowest point in forty years, could the end be near? And what does that all mean for the UK? The death of the Islamic Republic has been predicted many times before, always prematurely. But today, with the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, economic collapse at home, and an incoming Trump administration, the moment feels different. The Iranian rial is trading at 820,000 to the dollar; it was 59,000 back in 2017. It has

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Eva Dou on ‘The House of Huawei’

49 min listen

Chinese Whispers is nominated in the Political Podcast Awards 2025. Vote for it to win the People’s Choice category here. Among the casualties of Donald Trump’s trade war with China in his first presidency was the telecoms giant Huawei. Founded by former military engineer Ren Zhengfei, the company is a world-leading manufacturer of everything from telecoms equipment to smartphones. But it fell foul of the Trump administration as it tried to become integral to the world’s rollout of 5G, leading to a backlash in the West and even the house arrest of Ren’s daughter. At the centre of the row is a suspicion that Huawei is essentially a state-owned company, working

Sunday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Keir Starmer wants to redefine crime and punishment

How far should a government go to stamp out people smuggling? This month, the Home Office is set to introduce powers that will allow courts to place expansive restrictions on those suspected of people smuggling and other serious crimes. Penalties are set to include social media bans, restrictions on banking and even curfews, imposed pre-arrest. Infringement of these court orders would be a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in jail. Some have welcomed this as tough action from the Labour government; finally, you may think, they’re doing something about illegal immigration. But tough policies aren’t always good policies. The mooted powers would allow the police to shut down a

Anatol Lieven

Give Trump’s realism a chance

In one place at least, the reaction to Donald Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal has been one of unequivocal joy. That is Russia – and for obvious reasons. Most Russians have long seen US language about the ‘rules-based order’ as a mere mask for US empire and US national interests. In their view, Trump has now removed the mask. Even more importantly, for the Russian establishment Trump’s words are a confirmation that he and Vladimir Putin see international affairs in very much the same way: as a matter of spheres of influence, transactionalism, and the ruthless defence of national interests. During the Ukrainian revolution and

Saturday

Patrick West

What Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg owe to the mainstream media

Censorship and the silencing of dissenting voices has been a defining feature of the 21st century. It’s curious, because it wasn’t meant to be like this. This epoch, as the tech libertarian utopians of the 1990s so eagerly pronounced, was going to be one of unprecedented and untrammelled freedom. The internet, which burst into public consciousness back then, promised as much. Social media, which erupted a decade later, promised even more. And then it all went wrong. I was cancelled by Facebook for writing about why men are funnier than women We shouldn’t have been surprised. Ideologies based on utopian fantasies, underpinned by the illusion that mankind can be perfected, inevitably