Politics

In an exhilarating, often exhausting and unprecedented moment in American history, thousands of mourners gathered in an Arizona football stadium on Sunday afternoon to honour slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Attendees included dozens of members of Congress, half the cabinet, President Donald Trump, Vice-President J.D. Vance and the former shadow president, Elon Musk. They remembered Kirk as a husband, a father, a friend, a devotee of freedom of speech, a lover of classical Greek and Roman philosophy, and, perhaps most significantly, a warrior for the Christian God – belief in whom animated Kirk’s every utterance and action. Kirk’s memorial – or, as many speakers called it, ‘revival’ – was perhaps

Britain has formally recognised a Palestinian state for the first time. The Prime Minister Keir Starmer said his announcement yesterday keeps ‘alive the possibility of peace’. Given Britain’s history in the region the move is deeply symbolic, even if it is unlikely to change the reality on the ground. Britain will recognise a country with whose past it is deeply enmeshed and correct a historical injustice. But Starmer would do well to learn from Britain’s involvement with Palestine a century ago: promises and words are cheap, a viable two-state solution will require more. Seventy-seven years after the last High Commissioner left Palestine, his vision of two states for two peoples

It comes without warning. A black shape shearing out of the sky, a clap of wings like a sail breaking. The foal has no time to startle. Talons hit, the ground shakes, and in the next breath it is gone, dragged upward into the light. Rewilding is the countryside’s answer to cosplay This summer on South Uist, a Scottish island in the Outer Hebrides, crofter Donald John Cameron says he lost five Shetland pony foals from his hillside farm, each one vanishing between May and July. He believes they were carried off by white-tailed eagles, reintroduced to Scotland in the 1970s after the species had been hunted to extinction. The foals,

Mahsa Amini was killed by Iran’s morality police on 16 September 2022. Her only ‘crime’ was wearing ‘improper hijab’. The 22-year-old Kurdish woman’s death galvanised the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests that shook the Iranian regime. Three years on, the anger behind the protests remains. On the anniversary of Amini’s death, residents of Tehran chanted ‘Death to the dictator’ (referring to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei) from rooftops and windows, and shopkeepers in Mahsa’s hometown of Saghez, in Kurdistan province, went on strike.  This week, I’ve been speaking to Iranian exiles in Britain. For Ellie Borhan, a 43-year-old Iranian exile and activist, Mahsa’s death marked a turning point. ‘Something switched on

Sir Keir Starmer will recognise Palestine as a country despite objections from both the US and Israel. Yet when it came to independence for Scotland, the three main parties at Westminster were against the idea at the 2014 referendum, and none have called for a similar vote in Wales. How, then, to decide which ‘two-state solutions’ deserve our support? In 1974, the government of Cyprus was overthrown in a coup, and plans to merge the island with Greece followed. That might have worked, given Greek Cypriots made up 80 per cent of the population, but the Turkish minority, already marginalised, feared expulsion. Just five days after the coup, Turkey invaded