World

Saturday

Druin Burch

How terror triumphed at the Christmas market

Mulled wine and Heckler & Koch assault rifles don’t belong together, except in Christmas films like Die Hard. Festive visitors to Christmas markets in Berlin, London or Strasbourg this year will notice the pairing all the same. Concrete blocks surround fairy lights, and the scent of cloves and cinnamon wafts over armed police carrying submachine guns. Concrete blocks surround fairy lights, and the scent of cloves and cinnamon wafts over armed police carrying submachine guns Since an Islamist drove a lorry into the Breitscheidplatz market in Berlin in December 2016, killing twelve and injuring dozens, we deck the halls with blast protection. There are still tacky wooden chalets selling sausages, but

Friday

Henry Donovan

When will Europe's leaders wake up to the Russian threat?

Europe’s leaders flocked to London this week, determined to show the world a united front. Like school boys at a bus stop, Ukraine’s president Zelensky stood beside Keir Starmer, German chancellor Friedrich Merz and French leader Emmanuel Macron in a carefully staged tableau of Western resolve. It was designed to send a message to Moscow: Europe is ready. Yet the spectacle only highlighted the uncomfortable truth: Europe talks like a military power, but behaves like a political debating society. The continent insists it has woken up to the new reality, yet it still refuses to build the armies required to confront it. Europe talks like a military power, but behaves

Thursday

A.S.H. Smyth

The charming side of elections in the Falklands

It’s election time in the Falklands, where every four years we choose eight members of the Islands’ legislative assembly. They say you don’t want to know how laws or sausages are made. But the way such a far-flung and tiny parliament is put together is actually pretty interesting. In the Falklands there are only two constituencies. Stanley has five seats, with 15 candidates this year and 1,590 registered voters. ‘Camp’ (the rest of the Falklands, including any ‘outer’ islands big enough to have human inhabitants) has three seats and only four candidates, with 239 registered voters. Camp voting is achieved by the rather charming solution of the polling booth coming

Caleb Quinley

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

The Spectator

Portrait of the year: Trump's tariffs, the definition of biological sex and the fall of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

January Downing Street said Rachel Reeves would remain in her role as Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘for the whole of this parliament’. She made a speech standing behind a placard saying: ‘Kickstart economic growth.’ Axel Rudakubana, 18, was sentenced to at least 52 years in prison for the murder of three girls in a knife attack at Southport. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, announced a ‘rapid audit’ of grooming gangs by Baroness Casey of Blackstock. Wildfires raged around Los Angeles. Luke Littler, 17, became world darts champion. The aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton fires in California (Mario Tama/Getty Images) February President Donald Trump of the United States and the

Ben Shapiro

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

Joan Collins

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

Avi Loeb

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

Wednesday

Philip Patrick

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

Patrick West

Pantone’s 'colour of the year' isn't racist

For those of you dreaming of a white Christmas, here’s some advice: keep your thoughts to yourselves. Or at least select carefully who you share such sentiments with. That’s because there are some people today who even find the concept ‘white’ offensive and unacceptable. For those of you dreaming of a white Christmas, here’s some advice: keep your thoughts to yourselves Pantone has nominated a shade of white – ‘Cloud Dancer’ – as its 2026 ‘Colour of the Year’, describing it as ‘a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society’. That alone would seem unremarkable, seeming to be just one of those harmless and inane corporate publicity ruses that

Alexander Horne

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

Terry Barnes

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

Gavin Mortimer

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

Owen Matthews

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

Tuesday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

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

Freddy Gray

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?

Monday

Andy Jones

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

Terry Barnes

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

Jonathan Sacerdoti

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