World

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

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

Sunday

Edward Howell

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

Saturday

Andrew Sullivan

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

James Tidmarsh

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

Friday

Freddy Gray

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 –

Angela Epstein

Boycotting Israel could kill Eurovision

What exactly is the point of Eurovision? It can’t be about the music. Britain, the nation that gifted the world the Beatles, David Bowie and the Spice Girls, has been scraping the bottom of the scoreboard for years – thanks to a string of forgettable, frankly embarrassing entries that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a boozy holiday camp open-mic night. The UK hasn’t been alone in putting forward dire entries, but perhaps that then has always been the point. Much to the delight of the millions who watch and feast on Eurovision’s glorious banquet of kitsch and camp – a ding-a-dong smorgasbord where spectacle is compulsory and, for many countries,

Patrick Gibbons

Brexit's back – and so is Truss

16 min listen

There has been a flurry of UK-European activity across Britain this week, with the German state visit in London, the Norwegian Prime Minister signing a defence agreement in Scotland and the British-Irish council meeting in Wales today. Perhaps then it’s inevitable that speculation over closer ties between the UK and the EU has re-emerged. Could Labour seek to rejoin the Customs Union? Would this help or hinder Reform? And would the EU even stomach it? Plus – Liz Truss launches a new show today. Will she say anything new? James Heale and Charles Grant from the Centre for European Reform join Patrick Gibbons to discuss. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Mark Brolin

There’s nothing equal about Russia’s relationship with India

Vladimir Putin lands in Delhi, steps off the plane and instantly gets what he came for: the pictures. The handshake with Narendra Modi, the red carpet, the talk of a ‘special and privileged strategic partnership’. For the Kremlin, this week’s summit in India is mainly a PR exercise: proof to Russians that their country is still received as a great power, while the West tries isolation. But don’t be deceived if it appears that two equal giants are meeting. They are not. India, the land of the future, has surged to become the world’s fifth-largest economy and is on course to overtake Germany and Japan. Russia, the land of the

Gavin Mortimer

David Lammy is wrong about Brexit and the EU

David Lammy believes Britain should rejoin the EU customs union to boost economic growth. In an interview on Thursday, the Deputy Prime Minister argued that leaving the EU had ‘badly damaged’ Britain’s economy. A reversal of Brexit would be good for business he suggested. It was ‘self-evident’ that other countries had ‘seen growth’ after joining the customs union, Lammy told the News Agents podcast. The deputy PM avoided the question of whether Britain should rejoin the euro, as did Health Secretary Wes Streeting earlier in the week. Having declared that Britain was worse off out of the EU, Streeting was asked if the government was planning to take Britain back

Anastasia Piliavsky

Ukraine's war on the Russian language is a mistake

Kyiv has stripped the Russian language of its protection under Europe’s Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Culture warriors at home and abroad have hailed this as a victory; in truth, the move strikes out at millions of Russophone Ukrainians, divides the country and confirms some of Putin’s claims about Ukraine. In a war of survival, splitting Ukraine and feeding Putin’s propaganda is not a cultural sideshow. It is suicide. With his slight frame and warm, modest face, Pavel Viktor looks more like a parish priest than a political firebrand. In reality he is a physics teacher in Odessa, known to millions of Ukrainian schoolchildren for his experimental YouTube lessons. He remains in Odessa under bombardment and at 71 is

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump is running out of tricks to prop up the American economy

President Donald Trump dozed off during his cabinet meeting on Tuesday. Who could blame him? Listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio drone on about Russia would prompt souls less hardy than Trump to catch some shuteye. What should be keeping Trump awake, or at least uneasy, is the shaky state of the American economy. The federal government may not be releasing much data, but the payroll processing company ADP is reporting that private employers cut 32,000 jobs last month. The losses were heavily concentrated among small employers who have been slammed by Trump’s capricious tariff policy. The only positive sign has been in the data centre industry, where investments