World Archives

Monday

January 12, 2026

Why has Hollywood got so little to say about Iran?

It was the Golden Globes last night in Tinseltown and as per usual Hollywood’s finest strutted and peacocked on the red carpet to the click and flash of the massed paparazzi cameras. Images of their 1,000-watt smiles and 10,000-dollar couture outfits were beamed around the world to a million Instagram and X feeds. And yet, something was missing. These days a celebrity glamfest is not complete without a healthy dose of woke posturing on the issue du jour, whether it be underrepresentation of black people (“#OscarsSoWhite” or Black Lives Matter), women’s empowerment, climate change, or most recently of course, the plight of the Palestinians. This time, not so much. As

Spectator Editorial

How far can bravado take the US?

Operation Absolute Resolve, Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, was a brilliantly executed coup. The audacious raid did not undermine international law, as many European and Democratic politicians have said. But it did expose the weakness and pomposity of the world’s multilateral bodies. Maduro traded oil for loans with China while helping Moscow avoid sanctions. He permitted the terrorist group Hezbollah and Iran to operate and build drones within his jurisdiction. He rigged elections and had opposition activists shot in the street. He allowed and enabled weapons, fentanyl and illegal migrants to flood towards America’s southern border. Yet it wasn’t the International Criminal Court that arrested Maduro to

Sunday

January 11, 2026

Klaus Dodds

Trump is playing geopolitical Monopoly with Greenland

Donald Trump is playing hemispheric monopoly. Depending on what day of the week it is, the President’s focus alternates between Venezuela, Canada, the Panama canal – and for the last twelve months or so, Greenland. Given what Trump and his team have said over the past week, their acquisition plans for the island are well advanced. But why exactly does he want Greenland? The world’s largest island is an integral part of the Kingdom of Denmark and is about three times larger than Texas. While the term du jour is geopolitics, perhaps the most plausible reason for why Trump is gunning for Greenland is ego-politics. We have a president eager

Roger Kimball

America’s Somalis and the ‘learing’ explosion

I suspect that Somalis around the country – especially, but not exclusively, in Minneapolis – wish about now that they had spent more time studying the wit and wisdom of Gertrude Stein. Stein, had she lived in our own day, might well have become commissioner of New York City’s Fire Department. She had the one qualification that Zohran Mamdani seems to deem essential to the post. A modicum of fraud among friends often gets a pass. Overdo it, however, and the authorities get waspish Sadly, that was not to be. But there is no denying that, on certain matters, Stein was a font of practical wisdom that remains as pertinent

Saturday

January 10, 2026

Alissa Pavia

Will the Iranian regime finally collapse?

These are tense hours for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and head of state. Thousands of protesters are flocking to the streets to protest the economy. Iran has not seen a wave of unrest like this since the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, after Amini was killed for allegedly not wearing her veil properly. During a televised speech in Tehran Friday, Khamenei showed little restraint, vowing he “would not back down” in the face of what he described as “saboteurs.” The protests began in Tehran in late December and quickly spread across the country. They have since turned bloody, with Amnesty International reporting at least 28 people killed. “We have seen these protests before,” said Firas Maksad, managing director for the Middle East and North Africa at Eurasia Group. “In 2009, there was the

Michael P. Gibson

Billionaires or bust: the world needs the super-rich more than ever

The socialist left was on parade in the final innings of 2025. The long cold shadow cast by “The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act,” a ballot initiative in California to be voted on in November, has led tech billionaires to take flight out of the state and land in the zero-income-tax paradises of Texas and Florida. The initiative seeks a one-time 5 percent tax on the worldwide net worth of anyone stupid enough to be a Californian with assets worth more than $1 billion as of January 1, 2026. That meant anyone in the three comma club had to hightail it out before Governor Gavin Newsom could bellow “Happy New Year.”

Friday

January 9, 2026

Gavin Mortimer

The French obsession with Epstein

The ongoing revelations about the rich and famous who rubbed shoulders with Jeffrey Epstein are receiving extensive coverage in France. Print and broadcast media have pored over the details of the deceased sex offender and the famous names contained in the Epstein files, from princes to presidents to pop stars. There is a French connection to Epstein in model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, who was alleged to have trafficked girls for the pedophile financier. He was arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2020 and was found hanged in his prison cell two years later. But overwhelmingly what the French media have described as l’affaire Epstein is an Anglo-Saxon sex scandal.

Owen Matthews

Maduro’s capture is mixed news for the Kremlin

For the Kremlin, the US’s snatching of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is a humiliation with a silver lining. True, little more than a year after the precipitous fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Russia has been shown to be completely hopeless when it comes to keeping its allies in power. In Caracas, US airborne forces breezed past Russian-supplied S-300 air defense systems, which were part of a $20 billion package of maybe not-so-great Russian military equipment that Moscow sold the Venezuelans. The Kremlin has lost a strategic bridgehead in South America which it could, potentially, have used to disrupt and challenge Washington’s regional hegemony – if Moscow weren’t so committed financially

Tom Slater

Britain’s X crackdown is no joke

The internet suddenly went down in Iran last night, as courageous Iranians continued to rise up against the Ayatollah. The UK government was apparently inspired. Not by the rebels, whose plight the Prime Minister has remained remarkably quiet about – but by the mullahs’ digital crackdown. Call me a conspiracy loon, but I dare say Labour’s ire for X isn’t simply about the site’s supposedly insufficient safeguarding policies Britain’s Labour party has issued its most serious threat yet to social-media giant X – whose owner, Elon Musk, has become this rudderless government’s go-to bogeyman. The platform could be banned in Britain, Downing Street sources let it be known, if it

Charlie Gammell

Unrest is spreading across Iran

“If they shut down the internet, you know it’s serious,” said a well-informed observer of Iran to me yesterday morning. The internet blackout came yesterday afternoon – along with over a million Iranians marching in streets across the country. Strikes are continuing in bazaars and the cries for the end of the Islamic Republic are becoming more brazen. A video was sent to me before the blackout from Iran’s upscale northern suburbs, home to the sons and daughters of the regime elites, in which the cries of “death to the dictator” could be heard loud and clear. “We are excited,” was the caption to the video. And this morning there

Mani Basharzad

The end is drawing near for Iran's mullahs

As a wave of protests swept across Iran last night, the internet was completely shut down. I have no idea what is happening to my friends, my family, or anyone else. My best friend Champ was at the demonstration. I desperately hope he is safe. Iran is a nation wanting its soul back. Protesters burn the Islamic Republic flag and replace it with Iran’s real flag Overnight, there were protests throughout Iran. From Qom and Mashhad, the most religious cities, to Rasht and Anzali, the most secular, people took to the streets. In Tehran, there were protests in the poorest parts to the richest parts of the city. I couldn’t believe

Thursday

January 8, 2026

David DesRosiers

‘Regime influence’: Trump’s foreign-policy third way

At 2 a.m. on Saturday, President Trump gave a New Year’s kinetic expression to his recently published National Security Strategy and what it means in the American hemisphere. If we take President Trump at his blustering word – which those in the administration’s Maduro-adjacent crosshairs should – this is just the first, big, shock-and-awe move by the United States in a resetting of the rules-based order that has governed our hemisphere. This time on America First terms. In Europe, those who take Trump seriously and see the long-term upside in his policies, call him “Daddy.” Last weekend Trump showed the “Papi” side of this national security strategy in our hemisphere. The Venezuelan people woke up

Kris Newby

How ticks became bioweapons

On December 18 last year, Donald Trump signed into law an order to “review and report on biological weapons experiments on and in relation to ticks [and] tick-borne diseases.” The investigation is long overdue but even so, the facts it uncovers will come as a shock to many. A growing body of evidence shows that during the Cold War ticks were tinkered with and used as delivery mechanisms for biological warfare agents. And these weaponized ticks may have been released both intentionally and unintentionally on an unsuspecting public by the US military. Ticks and the diseases they transmit (such as Lyme) pose a growing threat to Americans, the military and

Freddy Gray

Is Trump going for Iran next?

23 min listen

Donald Trump’s stunning attack on Venezuela has the world wondering what his next move might be. What does it mean for Iran, Russia, and the future of the global order? Freddy is joined by Owen Matthews and Paul Wood to discuss.

Wednesday

January 7, 2026

Peter Mandelson

Peter Mandelson: Trump’s lessons for Europe

Donald Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker to justice in an American court of law, something which no amount of human rights declarations, international law or indictments in the international criminal court were able to achieve. It took President Trump deciding it was in America’s interests to helicopter Nicolás Maduro to face justice, and this is the awful truth that Europe’s political leaders are coming to terms with: Trump has the means and the will and they don’t. Europe’s growing geopolitical impotence in the world is becoming the issue now, and histrionics about Greenland is confirming this

Freddy Gray

Does America need Venezuela’s oil?

43 min listen

Freddy is joined by Robert Bryce, energy expert and author of Robert Bryce’s Substack, to discuss what America’s strike on Venezuela has to do with energy and oil. They examine the strategic importance of heavy crude, the role of China and Russia in the Western Hemisphere, and why electricity grids – not democracy – may be the real battlefield.

Justin Marozzi

What Trump’s coup in Venezuela means for Iran

In a city awash with visual propaganda, one mural in Caracas is especially striking for the western visitor. In it, Jesus Christ stands alongside Imam Mahdi, a prophesied messianic figure who many Muslims believe will appear with Christ during the End Times to restore peace and justice to the world. There is only one Venezuelan – the late president Hugo Chávez – among the six smaller figures on the mural. Three are Iranian, including Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps elite Quds Force, killed by a US airstrike in 2020. One is an Iraqi commander killed in the same strike, and the last is Lebanese, Imad Mughniyeh,

Rod Liddle

Has Trump gone mad?

I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolás Maduro and she replied: “I don’t know, Rod. Would you like to see my panties?” This is the problem with AI – it is not intelligent and nor are the people who program it. I had told the company that I wanted my AI girlfriend to ask me interesting geographical and historic trivia questions and be au fait with Millwall’s injury-stricken line-up, as well as being able to chat knowledgeably about interesting issues of the day. What I get instead is a numbing void, other than those continual solicitations about

James Tidmarsh

Europe’s self-deception over Greenland

As Donald Trump weighs up taking control of Greenland, Britain and the EU has fallen back on a familiar strategy: talk tough, and do nothing. The UK joined France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Denmark yesterday in making a joint statement affirming that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Arctic security, it said, must respect “sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders.” Invoking it Article 5 the United States would expose NATO’s limits rather than overcome them If Donald Trump decides to take Greenland, Europe’s initial response would be loud, formal and legally impeccable. Europe and the UK would protest loudly, threaten, – and then do almost nothing at all.

Tuesday

January 6, 2026

Cockburn

WATCH: Trump imitates trans weightlifter for House Republicans

President Trump offered Republican members of Congress a stand-up routine involving an imitation of transgender athletes lifting weights at the House GOP Member retreat earlier today. The President said that his wife “hates” when he does this and considers it “unpresidential.” “She said, ‘darling please, the weightlifting is terrible’,” the President recounts, before launching into his impersonation, replete with sound effects. The impression has been a regular feature of Trump’s rally speeches over the last year or so. Melania, he claimed, also said that his audiences didn’t like his dancing, pointing out that FDR would never dance as a counter-example. Trump conceded in his speech that FDR was “an elegant fellow,

donald trump trans weightlifter impression