World

The next 48 hours could well spell the end of Justin Trudeau. The Canadian Prime Minister – the last major western leader of the pre-Trump era – is reportedly considering resignation, ahead of a key national caucus meeting on Wednesday. Over Christmas, a growing chorus of Liberal MPs from across the country have been issuing calls for Trudeau to quit. The Globe and Mail newspaper quotes sources suggesting that he will make an announcement before the Wednesday meeting to avoid the appearance that he was forced out by Liberal opponents. Still, no one should be in any doubt: after almost ten years in office, Justin Trudeau’s luck may have finally run out.

Some people went mad when Ahmed al-Sharaa (you might know him as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the now de facto leader of Syria) refrained from shaking the hand of Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister of Germany, when she visited Damascus this week. Not shaking hands with a woman! Al-Sharaa is the same jihadist he always was! Another story which fixates westerners: the bars in Damascus – the centrepieces of the Assad regime’s propaganda tours, where journalists and vloggers were made pleasantly drunk within earshot of concentration camps – do they still serve their favourite poison? If they don’t, my oh my, it’s a terrible

The Isis caliphate in Syria and Iraq was defeated at a cost of billions of dollars and the loss of thousands of lives. And yet the ideology of violence and hatred espoused by the Islamic State lives on and has spread into cities in the West like a poison with no antidote. The black flag attached to the pick-up truck which ploughed through crowds of people in New Orleans celebrating the new year was both a symbol of the Islamic State and a message from the terrorist jihadists that they have ‘sleepers’ ready and willing to carry out atrocities. For western governments this poses a never-ending challenge. Judging by what

A social media post on 30 December: photographs of admittedly-splendid new year decorations in Moscow, archly captioned ‘back to 2021.’ The poster is alluding to the fact that obscene and extravagant references to Putin’s war in Ukraine – notably the letter Z, which has come to symbolise it – were notably absent from city decorations this new year. Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, has never seemed especially enthused about the war. He has done what the Kremlin required – diverted resources to help raise ‘volunteer regiments’; wallpapered the city with recruitment adverts; renamed Europe Square Eurasia Square – but he has avoiding too close an identification with the war, unlike so

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