World

Myanmar's junta has stooped to a new low

Myanmar’s junta has once again shown its true self: calculated, despicable, and violently unrestrained. Last night, warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs onto a crowded hospital in Rakhine State. The blast tore through the building with surgical cruelty, sending glass and metal through wards where patients slept. Dozens were killed instantly; others bled out in the darkness as the hospital collapsed around them. Many of the victims were children and infants. This wasn’t a tragic misfire Many of the victims were children and infants. This wasn’t a tragic misfire, nor a reaction to combat nearby. It was a targeted strike: planned, ordered, and executed in the dead of night. The generals

Don't listen to those who tell you America is over

What has gone wrong for Americans? To listen to an increasing number of politicians and pundits on both sides, from Tucker Carlson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from Nick Fuentes to Zohran Mamdani, the answer seems to be: everything. Americans are unable to get a job; to afford the necessities of life; to get married or have children; to find religious meaning or form friendships. And all of this can be laid at the feet of corrupt institutions and a corrupt system. This conspiracy-tinged vitriolic take on the American system is a lie. Yet it contains a grain of truth. Our institutions have been led self-servingly by a coterie who disdain American

LA lacks London’s Christmas spirit

‘Never again!’ I sigh every 6 January, as I pack away the abundance of Christmas decorations and baubles lovingly collected over the decades. ‘It’s too much!’ I moan to Percy. ‘Let’s go to a hot island next year and get away from it all…’ But I never do, because I just love Christmas. Every year in early November I eagerly unpack multiple boxes tenderly packed two years earlier, and the reason is because we like to spend Christmas in London one year and in LA the next, as we love both cities. I have quite a lot of extended family in each, so we know that celebrating in either one

The scientific case for the existence of intelligent alien life

The foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise. When comet experts argued that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS must be a familiar water-rich comet as soon as it was discovered in July, they behaved like artificial intelligence systems: only able to reflect the data sets they were trained on. For decades, the data set that established comet expertise largely comprised icy rocks in the solar system. My counterpoint is simple: humanity launched technological objects into space, so we must conclude that alien life forms could do the same. This possibility must be added to the training data set of comet experts when studying

How an Iran-Egypt Pride match threw the World Cup into disarray

Fifa looks set to face its first major scandal of the 2026 World Cup – if you don’t count the exorbitant cost of the tickets, that is. The Egyptian FA has made a formal request for the cancellation of an LGBTQ+ celebration planned to take place at their Group G game against Iran on 26 June in Seattle. The game roughly coincides with the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The Seattle Pride match committee are planning to combine celebrations of the anniversary with the game.   The game between Iran and Egypt will be the first Pride match in World Cup history A Pride match or Pride night

Keir Starmer's call for ECHR reform is a risky gamble

Ahead of a Council of Europe summit in Strasbourg today to discuss the future scope of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), Keir Starmer has called for ‘practical action’ to fix the asylum system and deal with irregular migration. In a joint letter with the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, Starmer argued that ‘modernisation’ of the ECHR is essential and that the Convention system needs to ‘evolve to reflect the challenges of the 21st century’. The two leaders acknowledged that responsible progressive governments need to ‘control our borders’ in order to ‘protect our democracies’. This is a tacit admission that Labour is concerned that Conservative and Reform UK proposals

Will Australia's social media ban work?

It’s all too easy to get hooked by the online world, to fall headlong into it, to spend hour upon hour immersed in it. Cyberspace has its good, but also much bad. Staying in control of their social media lives is difficult enough for many adults, but for children it can be an especially dangerous world in which to dwell. Too often children are glued to their phones and devices, staring, scrolling, disengaged from the world around them. Too many children are exposed to online harm, including bullying, grooming and shaming. Appallingly, too many children are emotionally and psychologically damaged from social media exposure. Terribly, and tragically, some have taken

Bardella and Le Pen are closer to power than ever before

The 20 days that Nicolas Sarkozy recently spent behind bars have been turned into a book published today. The 70-year-old former president of France was convicted of criminal conspiracy after a long-running investigation into charges his aides approached Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi for campaign funds. ‘Sarko’ was jailed for five years but he was released after 20 days while his appeal is heard. Diary of a prisoner is Sarkozy’s account of his incarceration, written in his cell where ‘grey dominated everything, devoured everything’. But it is what the former president has written about the future of France that has made the headlines. Sarkozy, a centre-right Republican, describes a telephone conversation

Europe’s kind words and bear hugs can't save Zelensky

If bear hugs were army divisions and brave words cash euros, Volodymyr Zelensky would have ended his tour of European capitals this week the best-armed and best-funded leader in the world. Zelensky faces the danger that giving too much to Putin would make Ukraine ungovernable ‘We stand with Ukraine,’ vowed Sir Keir Starmer after hosting a summit for President Zelensky and top European allies at Downing Street on Monday. ‘We support you in the conflict and support you in the negotiations to make sure that this is a just and lasting settlement.’ Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared that ‘nobody should doubt our support for Ukraine’ and that ‘the destiny of

Piers Morgan fell into Nick Fuentes’s trap

When Michael Gove introduced me to Piers Morgan last week at the Spectator Christmas reception, Morgan seized my hand and beamed, ‘I know Jonathan. We’re old friends.’ This was generous of him, not least because it isn’t true. We’d met once before, briefly. But some months earlier I had written a critique of his YouTube show for The Spectator which, to judge by his response, he did not enjoy. He called me a ‘disingenuous twerp’ on X and blocked me there. He then wrote a piece in the magazine entitled, ‘In defence of Piers Morgan, by Piers Morgan’. I mention this not to litigate any grievance, but in the interest of full

Does Trump’s National Security Strategy make sense?

30 min listen

Former senior adviser to US defence secretary Pete Hegseth Dan Caldwell joins Americano to dissect the Trump administration’s sweeping new National Security Strategy — from pulling back in Europe and refocusing on the Western Hemisphere, to managing tensions with China and the fallout from recent strikes on Iran. What’s behind the new reforms?

How Europe can turn the tide on Russia's underwater warfare

Europe is right now fighting an enemy it cannot see and protecting a vulnerability it has not mapped. Undersea drones are taking the conflict between Russia and the West below water. But these sea drones are not looking for soldiers or civilian targets: they are patrolling infrastructure thousands of metres below sea level, aiming to prevent vital communications cables from being severed. In a silent, deep-sea war, Europe and its allies are already counting the cost of Russian damage to its vital undersea cables In a silent, deep-sea war, Europe and its allies are already counting the cost of Russian damage to its vital undersea cables – the spinal cords that

Aussies are enjoying England's Ashes meltdown

What a letdown for lovers of Test cricket in both England and Australia. After just six playing days, the Ashes series between the two old enemies is all but decided. England needs to win all three remaining Tests to regain the Ashes, a feat that only one side has ever achieved: the 1936 Australians, who had a young batsman named Don Bradman. The Australian media has relished the unexpected chance to put the boot into the beleaguered England side Having lost the first Test in Perth in record time, and in the second in Brisbane showed little of the patience and ball-by-ball judgment vital to Test success, the England team

The BBC's anti-Semitism training is an offensive parody

The BBC has unveiled its compulsory training course for all staff on how not to be racist to Jews. I completed the online module and found it laughable, feeble and entirely beside the point. This isn’t education. It’s parody. A cartoonish exercise in HR-driven pseudo-virtue, dressed up as moral instruction. I have written before that if one were writing a sitcom about the modern BBC, and wanted to script a scene satirising its institutional absurdities, one might invent a plotline in which a woke producer commissions a documentary about the children of Gaza and secretly casts the 13-year-old son of a Hamas minister as its narrator. As we know, that’s

What are Ukrainian children doing in North Korea?

The regime of North Korea has continued to exploit the war in Ukraine to spread its propaganda. This week we learnt that Ukrainian children, abducted by Russia, are being sent to an infamous North Korean summer camp. The children have reportedly been taught to ‘destroy Japanese imperialists’ and heard from North Korean soldiers who destroyed the USS Pueblo, a spy ship captured and sank by North Korea in 1968.  This Ukrainian children have been at the Songdowon International Children’s Camp, located near the port city of Wonsan on the country’s east coast. Well known as a popular tourist hotspot for North Korean elites, Wonsan has recently gained infamy for the newly-opened

Trump has made D.C. safe again

In August, the President of the United States declared a crime ‘emergency’ in my home town of Washington D.C. Donald Trump rules by declaring ‘emergencies’ where they don’t exist, but this was a new one. An emergency compared to what? The year I bought my condo, 1992, saw 443 homicides ina city of around half a million people; last year, there were only 190 out of almost 700,000. I say ‘only’ because we’ve become so used to a murder rate 20 times that of London that we somehow managed to ignore it. That, of course, was an option only for white residents – unless you were dumb enough (as I

Paris is a city afraid

The New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs Élysées has been cancelled for security reasons. Paris was supposed to host its usual spectacle. A free open-air concert at the Arc de Triomphe, video projections on the monument and the midnight festivities that once drew close to a million people. Instead, the concert has been scrapped. It will be replaced on national television with a prerecorded concert filmed weeks ago with a handpicked crowd to mimic a celebration Paris no longer believes it can safely host. A capital once famed for its public life now performs it under studio conditions. It marks the collapse of what used to be one of

Will anyone miss the Boomers?

31 min listen

Christopher Caldwell joins Freddy Gray to discuss why the ‘Boomer generation’ – those born between 1946 and 1964 – became one of the most hated generations in recent history. Chris argues that the Boomers uniquely benefited from the resources of other generations, and were able to enjoy the benefits of leftist politics alongside the political and economic freedoms associated with the right; the apex of their power perhaps being the Clinton/Bush era. To what extent are the Boomers responsible for the decline of America? And what merits are there in judging society through age? Plus, do the digital-millennial generation – those born at the late 1980s and early 1990s –