World

Tuesday

Ian Williams Ian Williams

China’s hacking frenzy has reached the US Treasury

When Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves visits Beijing in January on a mission to improve ‘economic and financial cooperation’ she could well find her hosts surprisingly well informed about the global financial system and Donald Trump’s plans for it – thanks to China’s hyperactive and increasingly aggressive army of hackers. Chinese hackers are becoming far more Russian in that they are looking increasingly at undermining their adversaries and not just stealing from them The US Treasury on Monday revealed that it had become the victim of what it called a ‘major cybersecurity incident’, which it blamed on state-sponsored Chinese hackers who accessed workstations and viewed documents. The Treasury said

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

How abuse scandals shattered the Church of England but were hidden by the Vatican

13 min listen

In this end-of-year episode of Holy Smoke, Damian Thompson discusses the abuse scandals that have forced the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to resign his post, his predecessor Lord Carey to resign his ministry as a priest, and now threaten the survival of the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cotterill.  These developments are an unprecedented disaster for the Church of England – but how many Roman Catholics realise that Pope Francis would also be facing demands for his resignation if the details of various horrifying scandals were not being allegedly concealed by the Vatican and its media allies? 

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why is Israel being blamed for the battle of Kamal Adwan Hospital?

Every good reporter knows you never bury the lede. You never smother the key point of a story with fluff and verbiage. And yet that’s exactly what much of the media is doing in its coverage of the Battle of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza. They’re burying, if not outright hiding, the most vital, most unsettling part of this tale – namely, that a neo-fascist militia is using a hospital as a base from which to plot the murder of Israel’s soldiers and citizens. When I watch news coverage of the clashes in and around Kamal Adawn, I feel like I’m losing my marbles. This is very clearly a fight

Robin Ashenden

Vodka and the Beatles on a New Year’s Eve in Narva

Narva, the northern Estonian city right on the border with Russia, has been much in the news of late. Not only is it where the Estonians expect any Russian invasion to take place – most of the rest of the frontier passes straight through the middle of Lake Peipus – but it has also become the scene of constant provocations from the Kremlin. There have been border-demarcation symbols snatched by night, local sat-nav jamming, and a host of psychological wind-ups. In the past month reports have come of a clunky Russian surveillance-zeppelin flying over Narva, sporting the letter ‘Z’. This city – in which an estimated 96 per cent of

Monday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Reform’s rising membership, peerages and an 11lb puffball

Home Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, said that the party now had more members than the Conservatives. On Christmas Day, 451 migrants crossed the Channel; another 1,000 arrived in the next three days but three died off Sangatte. Lord Mandelson, having failed to be elected Chancellor of Oxford University, was appointed ambassador to the United States. Sue Gray, the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff, was made a peer with 29 other Labour nominations; among the six Conservative nominations were Nigel Biggar, a retired Oxford professor who has identified some good aspects of the British Empire, and Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union and an associate

James MacMillan

I’m not the only football-obsessed composer

I was in Sweden a few weeks ago, where my music was presented in Stockholm in the most recent International Composer Festival. One of the orchestral works performed was my football-themed ‘Eleven’ (11 players, melodies of 11 notes, chords of 11 pitches and various football chants woven into the fabric of the score). I’m not the first composer obsessed with the beautiful game. Bohuslav Martinu’s ‘Half-time’, written in 1924, was inspired by the supporters of his team, Sparta Prague. And more recently there have been bold examples by English composers Mark-Anthony Turnage (who worked chants for his beloved Arsenal into his orchestral piece ‘Momentum’) and Benedict Mason, in whose opera

John Connolly John Connolly

‘They don’t want me to rise again’: China’s gene-editing scientist on why he’s back in the lab

Before he agrees to be interviewed, He Jiankui has one request: that he is introduced as a ‘gene editing pioneer’. This may come across as grandiose, but it is also indisputable. No one else in history, after all, can say they have created genetically edited human beings. In 2018, He dropped the mother of all scientific bombs when he announced that he had used Crispr, a gene-editing technique, to alter the DNA of two babies. In a YouTube video, He explained that the twins, ‘two beautiful Chinese girls’, codenamed Lulu and Nana, had been born safely just a few weeks before in Shenzhen. Both had had their embryos edited to

Daniel DePetris

Jimmy Carter was a master of conflict resolution

On 29 December, former US president Jimmy Carter died peacefully at his ranch house in Plains, Georgia, at the age of 100. Over the last few years, most people knew him as the old head of state in the rocking chair, surrounded by family and friends, whose sense of morality and numerous good works were the stuff of legends. Whether it was building houses for the poor or establishing an institution that monitored elections around the world, nobody could accuse Carter of living an unproductive life after the presidency. The former peanut farmer from Georgia, however, was also given a bad wrap. He is frequently remembered as the bumbler whose one-term

James Heale James Heale

Jimmy Carter offered dignity in failure

He was the peanut farmer from Georgia who rose to become the leader of the free world. Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, served as president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. While his term in office was not a success, his post-presidency – the longest in American history – was unparalleled in its public service. Uniquely among America’s modern leaders, he will be remembered more for what he did after the White House than what he did in it. Carter’s long life was characterised by service: service to country as a decorated lieutenant in the US navy just after world war two, service

Edward Howell

The Jeju Air crash ends a terrible year for South Korea

This year will go down in history as an annus horribilis for South Korea. December alone has seen a series of crises. The month started with the then-President Yoon Suk Yeol’s invocation of martial law. Just over two weeks and two (acting) presidents later, the month has ended in tragedy. The fatal crash of a Jeju Air flight from Bangkok at Muan International Airport (in the south of the country), killing 179 out of 181 passengers, will go down as one of the deadliest aviation incidents in South Korean history.  The Jeju Air plane crash is a massive shock for a country with such a strong aviation safety record. Before this week,

Sunday

Nigel Jones

Elon Musk’s AfD article has rocked German politics

Fresh from explosively disrupting the politics of the US and Britain, Elon Musk has now turned his attention to Germany. The world’s richest man has written an op-ed in the newspaper Die Welt, endorsing the hard-right populist AfD party, which he has called ‘Germany’s last faint hope’. By doing so, Musk has smashed the carefully constructed firewall which Germany’s old ruling centre-right and centre-left parties had erected against the rapidly rising AfD. The older parties have effectively refused to cooperate with it or join the AfD in local government coalitions. Germany’s establishment will not stem the rise of the right by banning the AfD or branding them as neo-Nazis With Germany

Francis Pike

We should support Donald Trump’s attempt to buy Greenland

Over Christmas, president-elect Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social site that: ‘For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.’ Trump’s overture, while highly unwelcome to the Danes, is not a new idea. He made the proposal first in 2019. When Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen described the idea as ‘absurd’ and said, ‘Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over. Let’s leave it there’, Trump promptly cancelled his visit to Copenhagen. Frederiksen has been equally dismissive this time round. But the main response has come from

Julius Strauss

Can Ukraine survive the coming of Donald Trump?

On the eastern marches of Europe, after nearly three years of slugging it out with its larger, more powerful neighbour for control of a string of unlovely mining towns, Ukraine is approaching exhaustion. Kyiv, which has led a fierce and unexpectedly successful defence of its realm, is contending with a waning supply of weapons, ammunition and money. Worse still, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s war effort is beginning to run out of fighting men. All men aged 25 and over – with the exception of those deemed critical to the war effort, or who have fled, gone into hiding or bribed their way out of the draft – have been dispatched east

Saturday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Putin’s Azerbaijan apology will have bruised his ego

Has Vladimir Putin been forced to eat humble pie? Earlier today, the Russian president felt compelled to issue an apology – of sorts – after an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan on 25 December, killing 38 of the 67 passengers on board. The plane had been travelling from the Azeri capital Baku to Grozny, in the Russian region of Chechnya, when it was hit by air defence systems, forcing it to crash-land hundreds of miles off course in neighbouring Kazakhstan. Speaking on the phone to the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, Putin called the crash a ‘tragic incident’ and expressed his condolences to the injured and families of the victims.

Francis Pike

How the Black Death helped bring prosperity to Europe

As the media alarms us about an approaching ‘quad-demic’ of diseases this winter (Covid-19, Flu, RSV, Norovirus) it is a timely moment to think about the travails of our mediaeval forebears. Their common scourges were typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, anthrax, scabies and syphilis – all untreatable at the time. And then there was the plague. The plague tore up the foundations of society and paved the way for dramatic economic, political and social change Arriving at the ports of Venice, Pisa and Marseilles in 1347, shipboard rats carrying the Yersinia Pestis bacterium disbursed the bubonic plague in Europe. Originally it is thought that plague was brought by Genoese ships from their

Vazha Tavberidze

Who is Mikheil Kavelashvili?

‘They say the human body, given time, builds a resistance to pain. But after being tear-gassed six times in 21 nights, I can’t say I’ve started to tolerate it, let alone appreciate it,’ says a colleague who hasn’t missed a single night of the pro-European protests on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue since 28 November. She counts herself lucky; so far, she has avoided the brutal beatings meted out by the masked riot police, nicknamed ‘robocops’. These enforcers have become the Georgian government’s ruthless arm for crushing dissent, their mission seemingly to maim and mangle those who find the prospect of embracing the Kremlin’s Russkiy mir less than appealing and aren’t afraid to say

Friday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Russians are feeling the pinch as Putin’s war rumbles on

The Russian Orthodox Church or state calendar doesn’t recognise 25 December as a special day: their Christmas is 7 January by their old calendar and, in any case, it is New Year’s Eve that is the real blow out. As households prepare the usual staples of Salad Olivier, Herring under a Fur Coat (smothered in mayonnaise), tangerines and champagne, it will be impossible for them to ignore a basic fact: everything is getting more expensive. Indeed, while the headline inflation rate is just under 10 per cent, the price of many basic foods have increased dramatically more. One Russian newspaper estimated that the price of a typical New Year’s Eve

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The problem with rugby union

Rugby union has always attracted a certain type, the ‘play hard, party hard’ sort. I remember a former teammate – a prop, perhaps not surprisingly – who could drink a pint of his urine in under ten seconds. An England prop, Colin Smart, once downed a bottle of after shave after a Five Nations match and spent the evening having his stomach pumped in a Paris hospital. That was in the 1980s, the same decade when England’s Dean Richards and Scotland’s John Jeffrey took the Calcutta Cup for a tour of Edinburgh pubs after a match. As one of them later quipped – probably before he was presented with the

Wednesday

Janine di Giovanni

The plight facing Gaza’s Christians

On a steamy August morning in 2019, I went to Sunday mass in Gaza city’s Church of the Holy Family. It’s a simple stone building, built in 1974, and shares a compound with a school attended by 500 children, not all of them Catholic. Today, in war time, it is a refuge for hundreds of displaced Gazans whose homes have been destroyed since the Hamas-Israel war began.  As a Catholic who wrote a book about the Christians of the Middle East, and the danger they face of being eradicated, the mass was emotional for me. I have always been struck by the devotion Middle Eastern Christians, the most ancient of people,

Tuesday

Geoff Hill

South Africa dreams of a black Christmas

It’s 38C outside and I’m in a Johannesburg hypermarket owned by the Pick n Pay chain, one of the biggest in South Africa. Despite the heat, their music system has a woman singing ‘Let it snow!’ and songs themed around winter and chestnuts roasting on the fire. In rural areas, the scotch cart is common, a topless buggy pulled by cattle or donkeys, but few here can describe what ‘a one-horse open sleigh’ might look like. Across Pick n Pay and its major competitor known as Checkers, all the Santa props have a light complexion. Not even a black elf. Real holly would wilt in the sun, though it’s grown