World

Saturday

Alexander Kolyandr

What Putin’s Victory Day says about war-time Russia

For the first time in 18 years, Russia’s Victory Day parade will have no tanks. There will be no missile carriers and no armored columns on Red Square. Several regions have canceled their parades altogether. Muscovites had been told to expect no mobile internet on the day itself or this evening. The Ministry of Defense has declared a unilateral ceasefire for May 8 and 9 and warned, in the same breath, that any Ukrainian attack will be answered by "a massive retaliatory missile strike on the center of Kyiv." The Russian Foreign Ministry has helpfully advised foreign embassies in the Ukrainian capital to consider evacuating their staff. The official explanation for the missing weaponry is the threat from Ukrainian FPV drones.

Friday

Freddy Gray

All roads lead to Rome for Rubio

"What to get someone who has everything, I thought," said Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday, as he handed Pope Leo a funny little crystal-football present. "Wow, OK," replied Leo, stiffly. It was a useful reminder that Rubio is not always a smooth operator. For all the articles suggesting he has now overtaken Vice President J.D. Vance as favorite to be the 2028 Republican nominee, for all the media gushing over the "Secretary of Everything" in the White House briefing room, Lil’ Marco can still be something of a robotic plonker on the big stage. Lil’ Marco can still be something of a robotic plonker on the big stage It was Rubio, after all, who was the first cabinet official to suggest in public that Israel had strong-armed America into attacking Iran.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Russians no longer believe Putin’s war propaganda

A year ago, Russia marked the May 9 Victory Day celebration with a spectacular display of fireworks that lit up the Moscow sky. This year the fireworks have again been spectacular – but this time they have been caused by long-range Ukrainian attack drones slamming into refineries, pumping stations and factories deep inside Russia. In the Black Sea port of Tuapse, fireballs of burning gasoline 15 stories high erupted over the local oil refinery, while rivers of burning fuel ran down the city’s streets. Firefighters took three days to extinguish the inferno, which created a plume of smoke so high it was filmed by skiers from the slopes of the Caucasus mountains more than 60 miles away.

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hantavirus
Matt Ridley

How dangerous is the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak?

Here we go again, or maybe not. The World Health Organization is reassuring us that the public health risk from hantavirus is low, after the outbreak on a cruise ship. Hantaviruses are a classic zoonosis: caught from animals. You have to inhale dust containing infected rodent droppings or – in the case of this Andean variant, which has shown limited human-to-human transmission before – to have close and prolonged contact with somebody who has already caught the virus. That means being coughed on, not just sharing the same air in a room. Zoonotic agents are often very good at killing people – Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, Hendra, SARS and Hanta have high fatality rates – but are not so good at infecting people Trouble is, of course, WHO said the same about Covid.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump is clinging to a mirage in the Middle East

Well, well, well. For all the head-scratching that it initially occasioned, President Trump’s hasty abandonment of "Project Freedom" – his grandly titled plan to open the Strait of Hormuz – turns out not to be so mysterious after all. Trump’s reversal, NBC News revealed late yesterday, came at the behest of America’s Gulf allies, foremost among them Riyadh which told Washington that it would suspend the US military’s right to use its airspace. Now Trump, who has described his current exchanges with Iran as "very good," is breathing optimism about a one-page peace memorandum that he claims will be completed by the end of the week. Iran, by contrast, merely says that Trump’s proposal is “under review.

Wednesday

Nicholas Farrell

Meloni is being haunted by the ghost of Berlusconi

The late Silvio Berlusconi has come back from the dead –  momentarily, it is hoped – to torment Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in the guise of the old rogue’s "bunga bunga" woman-in-chief. As a result, Meloni’s opponents and their many friends in the media are baying for the blood of her justice minister Carlo Nordio in a bid to cause her fatal damage. Normal people cannot help but wonder why on earth an Italian president is granting a pardon to someone like her, who has not spent even one single day in prison Italy’s 69 governments since the foundation of the Republic of Italy in 1946 have lasted on average little more than a year.

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Joanna Williams

The slow death of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

For the past few years, woke has been on life support. Back in 2020, police officers knelt for Black Lives Matter, children were taught that boys could become girls, and the trans-inclusive Pride flag seemed to fly from every building in the country. Since then, there has been something of a retreat. The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) industry still has a pulse and is more than capable of reinvention, but it is less confident and more defensive. Human Resource officers were able to rule the roost Why the change? Donald Trump’s second term in office is one reason for the vibe shift. The President punctured all manner of sacred convictions as he signed executive orders to keep DEI out of education and men out of women’s sports.

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Lisa Haseldine

Trump’s missile cut has left Germany exposed

It has been a choppy 12 months for transatlantic relations since Friedrich Merz was sworn in as chancellor of Germany a year ago today. Fittingly, he is marking one year in office by dealing with the fallout of a spat with Donald Trump which has resulted in very real consequences for German – and potentially European – defense. On Friday, the Pentagon announced that 5,000 American troops would be withdrawn from German soil over the coming six to 12 months. Additionally, contrary to an agreement struck between Merz’s predecessor Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden, no new intermediate-range missiles would be stationed in Germany in the immediate future.

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Andrew Cockburn

What today’s Iran headlines don’t reveal about ‘Project Freedom’

"Operation Epic Fury is concluded," declared Marco Rubio, holding his first White House press conference yesterday. The Secretary of State explained that the new mission – reopening the Strait of Hormuz – would essentially be a humanitarian operation, resulting in military exchanges only if US ships came under fire while clearing the passage of mines and other obstacles. Later, President Trump went further, saying that "Project Freedom" (the Hormuz operation) had been paused "to see whether or not" a "Complete and Final Agreement can be finalized and signed." “Project Freedom” is unworkable because the Navy cannot complete the de-mining operation Today, the markets have rebounded on news that US and Iranian officials are discussing "a memorandum of understanding.

Tuesday

Jawad Iqbal

Is the Iran ceasefire crumbling?

Is the fragile Iran war ceasefire over? It would appear so, with American and Iranian forces exchanging fire in the Strait of Hormuz. The renewed clashes follow President Trump’s launch of "Project Freedom," which aims to use the US military to escort stranded ships out of the critical waterway. Trump said American forces had hit seven Iranian small boats, with the US military claiming to have intercepted cruise missiles and drones launched by Tehran. Trump earlier warned that Iranian forces would be "blown off the face of the Earth" if they targeted US ships in the strait or the Persian Gulf. Tehran says it fired "warning shots" at US warships, and said it would attack any foreign force that tried to enter the strait.

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polanski
Rod Liddle

Voters get the politicians they deserve – so Britain should get ready for PM Polanski

It is a truism that in a democracy the voters get the government they deserve – and so we should probably not complain too much if our next prime minister is a snaggle-toothed halfwit who presents to voters an infantile diorama drawn from fairy tales in which dancing is more important than manufacturing, people can be whatever they want to be, the military should be abolished and everyone will be happy except for the Jews, who are to be hounded and vilified and attacked. Zack Polanski’s Greens are the embodiment of what the American writer Rob K. Henderson called “luxury beliefs,” which are beliefs in the main based upon fictions – and they are soaring in the polls.

Monday

Alexander Kolyandr

Russia is running out of workers

Vladimir Putin likes good statistics. At a government meeting on April 15, even as he acknowledged that growth was slowing, he pointed proudly to Russia's unemployment rate: 2.1 percent, a record low. Proof, he suggested, that the economy remains fundamentally sound despite everything the West has thrown at it. The Russian President would do better to worry. A record low unemployment rate is not, in normal circumstances, cause for alarm. In Russia's case it signals something closer to a slow-motion emergency. For the first time in its post-Soviet history, Russia has run out of workers.

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Niko Vorobyov

Venezuela has become another American puppet state

Venezuela’s deposed president, Nicolás Maduro, never enjoyed the charisma or genuine popularity of his predecessor, "El Comandante" Hugo Chávez. So all the murals, billboards and installations dotted around Caracas urging the release of the 63-year-old statesman – along with his wife Cilia Flores – from American captivity, don’t exactly feel like a grassroots effort. "Bring them home!" reads one mural, evoking the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas. Meanwhile, a stopwatch installed in Caracas’s Bolivar Square counts how long it has been since the presidential couple were abducted by the US army in early January.

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Simon Diggins

Britain is facing an Islamist insurgency

The recent horrific attack in Golders Green has generated much anger and despair at this latest in a series of concerted, violent assaults currently aimed primarily at the Jewish community, but with a clear lineage to earlier Islamist outrages such as the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby and the London Bridge attacks of 2017 and 2019. The UK terrorism threat level was raised to "severe" following the attack on Thursday. But terrorism, "an action or threat designed to influence the government or intimidate the public," is an inadequate descriptor of what we face in Britain. Instead, I believe we face a different problem: a full-blown insurgency.

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Mark Galeotti

No, Russia is not on the verge of a coup

However much Western leaders inveigh against Russian disinformation (which, yes, is a real issue), we should never pretend this is not a two-way street. The sudden spate of news stories reporting that a conveniently anonymous "European intelligence agency" claims that the Kremlin fears a coup looks suspiciously more like a psy-op meant to generate paranoia in the Russian elite than a serious assessment. The claim is that Putin’s personal security has been dramatically stepped up, not simply to protect him from increasingly frequent and far-ranging Ukrainian drone strikes but, in particular, because since the beginning of March, the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin himself have been concerned about the risk of a plot or coup attempt targeting the Russian President.

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Friday

Andrew Gilligan

March of the Greenshirts: Polanski’s party are Britain’s real racists

“Back us to stop the far right,” say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right? Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate in next week’s elections for Streatham St. Leonard’s, Lambeth, posts on her Instagram account a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin. She thinks that the British government includes too many “Zionists Jews,” and that Donald Trump is “owned by Jews.” Not even the Z-word, that last one. Not even Israel. Just… Jews. Ali also posts a picture of an armed man in what looks like a Hamas headband, captioning it: “Long live the Resistance.” If it is a Hamas headband, this may actually be a criminal offense.

polanski greenshirts

Thursday

Jawad Iqbal

Why does Zohran Mamdani want Charles III to return the Koh-i-Noor?

Even those who don’t think much of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s politics might grudgingly concede he has a knack for jumping on causes that resonate with his achingly progressive voter base. The idea of righting the wrongs of imperial history – anywhere, even thousands of miles away – is high on the tick list. Hence Mamdani’s call for King Charles to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond, one of the world’s largest and most controversial jewels, to India. The 105-carat diamond, part of the Crown Jewels, is the subject of a fierce historical dispute, with India claiming that it was stolen during British colonial rule. Leaving aside Mamdani’s political opportunism, what is it about the fate of the Koh-i-Noor diamond that seems to agitate so many Indians?

koh-i-noor
Douglas Murray

My night under fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Last Saturday evening, the American media class descended for its annual jamboree of back-slapping at the Washington Hilton. Protesters outside waved signs reading "Death to tyrants" and "Death to all of them." The atmosphere inside was more jovial. Donald Trump was attending the dinner for the first time since becoming President, along with most of his cabinet and senior officials. We were expecting him to give the assembled media a good roasting – and some of us were looking forward to it. Attendees had to show invitations to get into the hotel, but there were few ID checks and no screening as we went to the pre-parties thrown by the major news organizations. Only when we walked into the main dinner hall did we pass through metal detectors.

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

The Golders Green atrocity is the final straw

It is undeniable now: war has been declared on British Jews. A fascistic crusade is being waged against our Jewish compatriots. The anti-Semitic atrocity in Golders Green today is further brutish proof of this unsettling fact. We’ve had fire bombings at synagogues, the murder of Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and now this frenzied knifing of Jews in London. There can be no more equivocating – this is a moral emergency. The most sickening thing about today’s knife pogrom is that it was entirely predictable The scenes from Golders Green are truly grim. Video clips show the suspect wielding his knife with demented fury at two visibly Jewish men.

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