World Archives

Friday

18 Oct 2024

Is North Korea joining the war in Ukraine?

In Russia’s far east, North Korean soldiers are reportedly being trained to fight in the war against Ukraine. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian intelligence, has said that more than 10,000 North Korean troops will not only assist and train Russian forces, but also fight alongside them – starting next month. At least 2,600 of these troops could be deployed in Russia’s Kursk region, to free up Russian soldiers to join Vladimir Putin’s offensive in the Donbas. Zelensky said this means North Korea has ‘effectively joined’ the war South Korea’s spy agency reports that North Korea is sending 12,000 men from four brigades, including elite special forces, to join the war in

Damian Thompson

The Pope announces 21 new cardinals. Is he trying to pack the conclave?

26 min listen

This month Pope Francis announced that he’s creating 21 cardinals, and once again his list includes unexpected names that will baffle commentators who assume that he’s determined to stack the next conclave with liberals. For example, Australia now finally has a cardinal – but he’s a 44-year-old bishop from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic diaspora rather than the actual head of the Ukrainian Church in Kiev. There’s also a new English cardinal who isn’t even a bishop, the Dominican theologian Timothy Radcliffe. He’s nearly 80, so will soon have to step down as an elector – but, believe it or not, one of the new cardinals is 99 and therefore old

Seth J. Frantzman

Israel must finish Hamas off

The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a clash with Israeli troops could help transform Israel’s war efforts against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. It has been a difficult year for Israel fighting this long war. Both groups have been aided by the Iranian regime, which has supplied them with weapons and backing. Iran has also been helping other terrorist groups and militias in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, its goal being to surround Israel with threats, and chip away at Israel’s defences. Drones have attacked from Iraq, ballistic missiles have been fired from Yemen, terrorists have crossed into Israel from Jordan. Today two terrorists tried to infiltrate

Cindy Yu

Labour’s attitude to China looks just as confused as the Tories’

David Lammy is in China on a mission to reset relations with Beijing. But the Foreign Secretary has also pledged to raise some difficult subjects with his hosts. For a politician who heavily criticised the Conservatives’ approach to China, it’s not clear that Lammy is coming up with anything new now he’s in office. Lammy has talked up the difficult issues he will raise with Beijing When Lammy was shadow foreign secretary, he was brave on China. Only last year, he agreed that China’s actions in Xinjiang were genocide and pledged to ‘act multilaterally with our partners’ to pursue a legal reckoning for Beijing. A few months later, he lambasted

Jason M. Brodsky

How Iran will respond to Sinwar’s death

The death of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar on Thursday is an incredible achievement for Israel. It is also a blow to Iran and its axis of terror across the Middle East. Since July, Israel has decapitated the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah – with the killings of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, and now Sinwar himself. There has also been the killing of two commanders of the IRGC Quds Force’s Lebanon Corps – Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Abbas Nilforoushan – in this year alone. While the Islamic Republic has suffered from eliminations of its regional henchmen for years, the breadth and depth of Israel’s recent operations is

Nicholas Hopton

The Iranian diplomat trying to stop Armageddon

‘The embassy is being invaded. The ambassador has had to lock himself in his office upstairs, and there are people on our balcony. Your government is responsible for the safety of our diplomats and embassy. We will hold you accountable…’ The voice at the other end of the line was calm, though there was no mistaking the underlying aggression. ‘The Vienna Convention is very clear about the responsibility of host countries for diplomatic missions.’ I received that call in the autumn of 2017, when I was coming to the end of my second year as Britain’s ambassador to Iran. A large group of demonstrators had been campaigning loudly outside the

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen has a new, right-wing rival

It was only a few months ago that the bogeyman of the Paris elite was Jordan Bardella. Now it’s Bruno Retailleau. The 63-year-old practising Catholic may not be able to match the 29-year-old President of the National Rally when it comes to charisma and style, but nonetheless Retailleau has become the darling of the right since he was appointed the minister of the interior last month. Bardella is troubled by the rise of Retailleau, as is Le Pen and everyone within the National Rally. The party spokeswoman, Laure Lavalette, tried to make a joke of it earlier this month, quipping that Retailleau could do her job such is their alignment on

Arash Azizi

Who will lead Hamas now?

It took more than a year of waging war, but Israel has finally succeeded in killing its top target in Gaza: Yahya Sinwar. Alongside Mohammad Deif, who is thought to have been killed by an Israeli strike in July, Sinwar was the man most responsible for organising the horrific attacks of 7 October. At the time of those attacks, Sinwar was the head of Hamas’s Gaza branch, but since August he had been promoted to the group’s overall leader, replacing the Qatar-based Ismayil Haniyah who was assassinated on 31 July while on a trip to Tehran. The group must now pick a new leader. Having led Hamas’s Gaza branch since

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Benjamin Netanyahu has been vindicated

The death of Yahya Sinwar, the top military commander of Hamas, is an important and symbolic moment in Israel’s ongoing war against the terror group. His elimination was finally made official by an evening statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, following hours of rumours fuelled by the circulation of unmistakable pictures of his corpse. Yet not one rocket was fired into Israel by Hamas in response. This is what progress looks like. The man who threatened to ‘take down the border with Israel and tear out their hearts from their bodies’ is now dead, marking a critical juncture in the conflict that reverberates beyond the battlefield and carries profound implications

Thursday

17 Oct 2024

Limor Simhony Philpott

Yahya Sinwar’s killing is an immense victory for Israel

Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and Israel’s top target in Gaza, has been killed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The Israeli Foreign Minister has confirmed that the Hamas chief was one of three terrorists killed in the Gaza Strip today. Early reports indicate that this wasn’t a targeted hit, but that Israeli forces came across Sinwar’s body by chance, after an IDF tank fired at a building in Rafah where ‘suspicious movement’ had been detected on an upper floor. A body resembling Sinwar was then spotted by IDF troops in the rubble. Sinwar clearly made a critical error The impact of his death cannot be underestimated. Sinwar has been the leader

Mark Galeotti

Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’ is unlikely to impress Europe

After confidentially briefing it around various Western capitals, President Zelelsnky has unveiled – to a degree – his much-trailed ‘victory plan’ to the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. His statement on the plan came ahead of today’s meeting with the European Council. Along with three additional secret codicils shared only with certain partners, the plan has five main points. In and of themselves, none of them are implausible, and all would certainly strengthen Ukraine’s security. However, they also embody certain assumptions that likely make them unworkable, simply because they are asking from Nato, the EU and the West in general a great deal more than they seem willing to offer. One

David Cohen

The strange timing of Jacinda Ardern’s damehood

Jacinda Ardern has been made a dame for her services to politics during the five turbulent years she spent as prime minister of New Zealand. An ‘incredibly honoured and very humbled’ Ardern was officially recognised by the Prince of Wales at Windsor Castle. This week’s investiture came more than a year after she was first appointed a Dame Grand Companion in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours. That was four or so months after she abruptly stepped down from the position she had held since taking office in 2017 at the still-tender age of 37, later winning plaudits around the world for her leadership during Covid. Ardern’s departure was anything but

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Weight loss jabs and England’s German manager

Home Neither Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, nor Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, ruled out a rise in employers’ contributions to national insurance in the Budget on 30 October. The annual rate of inflation fell from 2.2 to 1.7 per cent. Starmer backed an idea by Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, to give fat unemployed people injections of weight-loss drugs in a scheme involving a £280 million investment from Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company that makes the diabetes medication Mounjaro. At the International Investment summit, the Chancellor announced that the UK Infrastructure Bank will become the National Wealth Fund. But the government came up with only £5.8

Wednesday

16 Oct 2024

Freddy Gray

Could the Catholic vote decide the election?

27 min listen

Trump won the Catholic vote in 2016 and Biden won it in 2020. Polling suggests that Trump is on course to win it back this year. With issues such as immigration and abortion high on the agenda for voters, where will the Catholic vote land? Ryan Girdursky, the Catholic founder of the 1776 Project PAC and the National Populist substack joins Freddy Gray to discuss. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Limor Simhony Philpott

Can the US force Israel to bow to its demands on Gaza?

The White House wants Israel to allow more aid into Gaza and implement humanitarian ceasefires within 30 days. If they don’t, the US has threatened to withhold military aid to the country. That’s according to a leaked letter sent over the weekend by secretary of state Anthony Blinken and defence secretary Lloyd Austin in which they set out a short but punchy list of demands. The letter’s unusually harsh tone seems to be motivated by domestic pre-election pressure on the Democratic party. President Joe Biden’s fractured relationship with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has also played a part – which is why the letter was addressed to defence minister Yoav Gallant

Eliot Wilson

Britain shouldn’t take part in joint EU defence missions

Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to ‘reset’ the United Kingdom’s relations with the European Union. But at what cost? The EU has reportedly set out part of the price the UK might have to pay to be allowed back into its good books: Brussels wants Britain to contribute to the EU’s defence missions. Foreign Secretary David Lammy travelled to Luxembourg this week to a meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council to address the issue of security – an important element of Starmer’s intended ‘reset’. In Monday’s meeting, the EU reportedly pressed the Foreign Secretary for UK participation in its peacekeeping and conflict prevention missions, of which there are currently

Nicholas Farrell

Meloni’s migration strategy is working – and the rest of Europe is watching

Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female Prime Minister, has this week achieved what the Tories failed so fatally to do with their doomed Rwanda scheme. Thanks to her determination and charm, Italy has become the first European nation to successfully offshore illegal migrants to a non-EU country. However bogus the claims of migrants, once they’re in the EU it’s virtually impossible to deport them Under Meloni’s scheme, migrants picked up by Italian naval and coastguard vessels from small boats in the Sicilian Channel will be ferried directly to Albania, 750 miles away. They will not set foot in Italy. It is potentially a game-changer, particularly as voter fury across Europe forces

Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s Nato fantasy

Ukraine’s President Zelensky was in Downing Street last week – as well as Paris, Rome, Berlin and Dubrovnik – asking for Nato membership. In every city, he heard the same ‘not yet’ as he’d received in Washington last month. Some of Kyiv’s western allies believe membership is the only way to guarantee Ukraine’s independence. Russia has never attacked a Nato country, because of the Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one is an attack against all. Therefore, Ukraine will never be safe from Russia unless it joins. The US government wants to avoid the war that Ukrainian membership would oblige it to fight But there’s a fundamental flaw to

Brendan O’Neill

No, Israel isn’t deliberately killing children in Gaza

In every war, children perish. It’s the worst thing about conflict, this dragging of innocents into the swirling maelstrom of tensions they don’t even understand. In Iraq, almost 10,000 kids were maimed or killed between 2008 and 2023. In the war in Syria, a child was injured or killed every eight hours for ten infernal years. So unimaginable was the suffering of kids in the Congo wars of recent years that that benighted nation came to be called ‘the epicentre of child suffering’. The echoes of past libels against Jews are deafening now And so it is in the clash between Israel and Hamas. Children in Gaza are dying in

Matthew Lynn

Does Kamala Harris think black men can’t be trusted with crypto?

There have been plenty of accusations made against crypto currencies such as Bitcoin over the years. It is too flimsy, you can’t buy anything with it, and it is wildly volatile. All fair enough. But is it racist? That appears to be the view of Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for US president. The US vice president has unveiled a set of policies designed to help black men, an important group of voters who have been showing worrying signs of drifting towards her rival Donald Trump. It included pledges to improve healthcare, education, and to legalise marijuana, presumably on the grounds they think that black guys smoke a lot of