World

Tuesday

Mark Galeotti

Has America been hacking the phones of Kremlin officials?

In 2014, Vladimir Putin notoriously described the internet as originally a "special project of the CIA" that "is still developing as such." He is also averse to mobile phones, not using or owning one himself and banning them from his offices. These two concerns have come together in today’s announcement by the Federal Security Service (FSB) that it had uncovered a massive "multi-level operation" to hack the smartphones of Russian officials. The FSB’s official announcement states that: Using the technical capabilities of large international IT corporations and mobile communications, representatives of foreign intelligence agencies carried out the covert, unauthorized collection of various types of information from the devices of cyberattack targets.

komagata maru
Jane Stannus

Canada is misremembering the Komagata Maru incident

Another day, another act of national self-abasement from the Canadian government. On May 23, it was all about the Komagata Maru incident, "a moment where Canada failed to uphold our values, with horrific consequences," according to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Pierre Poilievre chimed in, calling it "a dark and shameful chapter in our history and a painful injustice." The official version is as follows: on May 23, 1914, 376 passengers of the SS Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver, hoping for a better life. But because of racist Canadian immigration policy, most were denied entry. They waited for two months in the harbor with limited access to food, water and medical care, but were eventually forced to leave.

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Joshua S. Treviño

How the US is taking on Mexico’s narco-politicians

Soberanía is non-negotiable. That’s what Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum repeats time and again, at her mañaneras, at speeches, at rallies, on television and in person. She says it, her government says it, her political party says it, her apparatus says it. The agents of the United States of America must never, ever set foot on Mexican soil in any operational capacity. The sovereignty of the nation comes first – even before the security of the nation, even before the nation’s own capacity to police itself, even before the safety and lives of its own citizens. As Sheinbaum herself has noted, the first American intervención in Mexico cost the country half its territory.

Monday

Arnout Nuijt

Belgium has a free speech problem

The conviction by a Belgian court of far-right activist Dries Van Langenhove has alarmed both the country’s right and left. Van Langenhove – let there be no doubt – belongs to some of Belgium’s darker far-right movements. He has previously been convicted of racism and Holocaust denial. Yet he has now been fined €4,000, for what the judge described as  "apparently having the intention' to incite hatred and violence, rather than for a crime he was clearly proven to have committed. Bart Eeckhout, chief commentator of Belgium’s left-leaning daily De Morgen – certainly no friend of Van Langenhove – unexpectedly described the conviction for incitement to hatred, violence and racism as an injustice.

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europe
Michael Evans

Should Europe mediate Russia-Ukraine talks?

The worst job in the world is to try negotiating with President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine to everyone’s satisfaction. Yet European leaders want to do just that. Frustrated by the failure of the Trump administration to negotiate anything of value with Putin, Europe is scurrying around looking for the ideal candidate to confront the Russian leader across the table and bash out a peace deal. It’s a fantasy world, of course. If Putin obstructed Trump, his old sparring partner, and never remotely got close to a deal with the Americans, why would he consider sitting down with some European leader, or ex-leader, to bring the four-year war to an end?

Sunday

Michael Day

Don’t forget the evil of the Iranian regime

America’s war on Iran was supposed to give Iranians their freedom. But even in February, at the start of the conflict, the prospects for regime change seemed doubtful. Now hardline IRGC generals appear to be calling the shots. They’ve used the war as a pretext to go after opponents and increase the Islamic Republic’s repression to horrific new levels. More than 6,000 people, including protesters, journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders, dissidents and members of ethnic and religious minorities have been detained under the guise of national security. Many are executed after being dragged through kangaroo courts.

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Friday

Rod Liddle

The secret shame of being ‘Reform-curious’

As a sucker for any melody which relies heavily upon fourth and eighth notes hammered out on a piano, I was always going to fall for Billy Joel’s 1978 hit single "My Life." The lyrics were, as ever with Joel, awful, mixing his cringeworthy ordinary guy New York vernacular shtick with what I dare say he thought were original and profound psychological insights. He is such a hack singer-songwriter. He makes Neil Diamond resemble Wittgenstein. But the tune made me swoon, even its two predictable cod-Beatles middle eights. What to do? Obviously, I couldn’t buy it. There were four record shops in Middlesbrough back then and I was known in all of them.

William Cook

My annual pilgrimage along the route of the Berlin Wall

Each time I return to Berlin – that wonderful, awful city where I whiled away the best days of my misspent youth – I take a walk along the cobbled path that marks the route of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime since it came tumbling down, there isn’t much left to see. A few stretches have been preserved as memorials, but it’s mainly an absence not a presence – a ghostly gap between the backs of buildings, a fissure between past and present, between the hard truths of the last century and the uneasy ambiguities of today. Why do I persist with this melancholy Wanderung, year after year? Because a walk along the Mauerweg (as Berliners call that zigzag footpath) is the best way to take the temperature of this Faustian metropolis.

Berlin Wall
Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith

The rise of the cartel cults

“And this,” I was told, five minutes after arriving in Mexico, “is where they murdered the Archbishop.” I was at the entrance to the car park at Guadalajara airport. The archbishop was Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who died in a hail of bullets on May 24, 1993, along with six other people. He was murdered for daring to criticize the cartels, at least according to the official narrative. There are other theories: he may have been caught in crossfire between rival cartels, or it may have been a case of mistaken identity, and Posadas was assumed to be a cartel head, many of whom, presumably, look like archbishops; or else it was the work of the government itself, which feared Posadas knew too much about its collusion with the cartels.

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Daniel DePetris

Are Trump and Netanyahu heading for a showdown?

Depending on which day it is, the ongoing peace talks between the United States and Iran are either a few days away from being finalized or close to hitting another roadblock. The status of the negotiations fluctuates about as much as Donald Trump’s mood swings. For those on the outside looking in, the whole storyline can be discombobulating. It doesn’t help that US and Iran are still taking pop-shots at each other. Early on Thursday morning, Tehran attacked a US base in response to a fresh round of US strikes on an Iranian base in Bandar Abbas.  Fortunately, the shooting is not killing the diplomacy – at least not yet. There does appear to be a general framework on the table.

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Thursday

Ed West

What is ‘Q Manivannan’ doing in British politics?

In an age full of nepobaby second-generation politicians posing as "outsiders," new Green Party MSP "Q Manivannan" is the real thing. Indeed, the St. Andrew’s postgraduate is so much of an outsider that he doesn’t even hold British citizenship or permanent residency, and is unable to take up paid employment as a condition of his student visa. "Q" was allowed to stand for office last month because the Scottish government – the Wuhan Lab of terrible ideas in UK politics – recently changed the rules allowing foreigners with only limited leave to remain to compete in elections. Although Manivannan faced a probe into his visa, the powers-that-be ruled that being a politician wasn’t a real job.

Michael Murphy

Ireland is desperate for its own George Floyd moment

Ireland is in the midst of its own "George Floyd moment." At least, that’s how a string of international headlines have portrayed the death of Yves Sakila, a Congolese shoplifter who was pronounced dead in hospital after being restrained by security guards, one of whom appeared to kneel on his head or neck. The circumstances of the 35-year-old’s death are being investigated, but, as yet, there is no evidence it resulted from racism or excessive force. Court records show Sakila had a history of theft, and a post-mortem reportedly found no signs of foul play or visible injuries on his body. That has not stopped activists and parts of the establishment from co-opting a personal tragedy to fuel a campaign of racial grievance.

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

France’s migration crisis will outlast Emmanuel Macron

France has maxed out on migrants. It’s a message that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has been pushing for years, but it’s one now endorsed by the government’s Justice Minister. In an interview with a newspaper at the weekend, Gérald Darmanin declared that the Republic has "reached the limits of our capacities for integration and assimilation." Darmanin believes that a three-year suspension of legal immigration is the answer, and in particular he wants a crackdown on the policy of family reunification. Introduced in 1976, the policy allowed migrants – mainly from North Africa – who came to France to work to also bring their family. "We must put an end to immigration as it exists today," said Darmanin.

france
Andrew Tate
Margaret Mitchell

The rise of the Orienfluencers

The term “Orientalism” has always implied some kind of caricature of the eastern world. It was originally coined as a way of describing how the West imagines the East as its negative to shore up self-confidence and justify conquest: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal,’” Edward Said wrote in Orientalism. Now, reverse “the Oriental” and “the European” and you have an idea of the new Orientalism, where the enlightened East becomes the foil to a decadent, violent, barbaric West. The new Orientalists aren’t academics, policymakers or Wall Street Journal opinion columnists.

Tuesday

Fredrik Karrholm

Why Greta is so angry about Swedish immigration

Greta Thunberg is 23 years old. Six years have passed since her emotional address to the UN Climate Action Summit about the end of the world. She has since shifted her attention from climate activism to one fashionable left-wing cause after another, but her tone is as shrill as ever. The other day, she denounced Sweden’s migration policy as inhumane. Her conclusions, as usual, wrong. But she is at least right about one thing: Sweden has adopted an entirely new migration policy. In Sweden, the system has until now often penalized the honest and rewarded the dishonest For years, Sweden took more asylum seekers per capita than any other country in Europe. Now asylum numbers have fallen to their lowest level since 1985, even as pressure across the rest of the continent remains immense.

Philip Patrick

Japan isn’t as safe as you think

I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world.   What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone.

Sunday

Freddy Gray

Why are Trump’s would-be assassins so forgettable?

Another weekend, another failed and frankly pathetic attempt to kill the President of the United States. On February 22, a Sunday, Secret Service shot dead an armed 21-year-old male called Austin Tucker Martin, who had entered the Mar-a-Lago complex, although Donald Trump wasn’t there at the time.  America is in a strange condition when a shoot-out at the White House will be soon forgotten On the Saturday night of April 25, the 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen tried and failed to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Hilton hotel in Washington DC. And we all saw what happened there.  Earlier this month, in an incident the news cycle quickly moved past, Secret Service shot an armed individual at the National Mall.

Saturday

Ian Evans

Welcome to Transnistria: the country that’s not a country

I’ve been on holiday to a country that doesn’t officially exist. It has its own border, passport, flag, currency and army but no one recognizes it – not even its main sponsor, Vladimir Putin. Transnistria is sandwiched between its proper motherland Moldova – which is itself really Romania – and Ukraine, which Putin thinks is part of his motherland. Confused? It doesn’t get any easier.  In 1992 there was a short war between the newly created state of Moldova and separatist, ethnic Russians which resulted in nearly 1,000 deaths and the breakaway "country" (via a peace accord) policed by Russian "peacekeepers.

Transnistria
Matthew Palmer

Inside the Ukrainian army’s art division

The Ukrainian Cultural Forces’ headquarters is situated above a non-descript shopping center not far outside downtown Kyiv. The walls are covered in artwork and photographs, sculptures are dotted about; the initial impression is of a university arts department, though with more security and military figures. Officially part of the Ukrainian Army, though independently set up and run, the Cultural Forces employs artists, musicians, publishers and data analysts. They are something between an artistic collective, an information operations unit and a wartime parallel to the UK’s British Council. Their remit is broad and continually expanding.

Thursday

Geoff Hill

Why the Pentagon has Nigeria in its sights

For the Pentagon, Nigeria is firmly on the list of countries where terror has run amok. In 2025 and again in January and May this year, the US Air Force bombed rebel camps in the north in an effort to halt a spree of murders and abductions that has left thousands dead or missing. US bombings earlier this week killed Islamic State’s second in command, Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, but the insurgency shows no sign of slowing; 17 trainees died recently in an attack on the army’s special forces academy and the conflict has spread to nearby Mali. In Nigeria, keeping the peace is a challenge. Since independence from Britain in 1960, there have been six coups and a civil war.

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