World

Saturday

Charlie Gammell

The winds of change are blowing in Iran

The mood music from Tehran regarding Donald Trump’s election victory was a mixture of ‘don’t care,’ and ‘very much do care.’ Regime insiders remember only too well the toll Trump’s last four years took on their state; Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Qassem Soleimani killed; economy shattered; regionally isolated due to Israeli-Arab normalisation. Trump is not a popular figure in the Khamenei household. But others reacted with a shrug; we’ve dealt with him before and survived. Why not now? Many ordinary Iranians welcomed the pressure he’d bring to bear on the regime, hoping it may prove decisive. Trump is well known for being an admirer of pre-revolutionary Iran, miniskirts,

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris, Joanna Bell, Peter Frankopan, Mary Wakefield and Flora Watkins

38 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: pondering AI, Matthew Parris wonders if he is alone in thinking (1:10); Joanna Bell meets the leader of the Independent Ireland party, Michael Collins, ahead of the Irish general election later this month (8:41); Professor Peter Frankopan argues that the world is facing a new race to rule the seas (17:31); Mary Wakefield reviews Rod Dreher’s new book Living in wonder: finding mystery and meaning in a secular age (28:47); and, Flora Watkins looks at the Christmas comeback of Babycham (34:10).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Ian Williams Ian Williams

The paper mills helping China commit scientific fraud

Few people embody the ideal of scientific excellence as much as Albert Einstein. Each year a Berlin-based foundation bearing his name hands out awards for the sort of research that might have made him proud. This week, the individual prize went to Elisabeth Bik, not a conventional boffin, but a sleuth – a dogged Dutch researcher who abandoned a career at a biomedical start-up for one exposing scientific fraud. That the Einstein Foundation chose to award Bik is testament not only to the impact of her detective work, but also to the way an epidemic of fake science is shaking the scientific establishment. ‘I have a very strong sense that

Lee Cohen

Starmer needs the royal family to help him woo Trump

Donald Trump’s historic re-election must be a particularly bitter pill for Keir Starmer to swallow. Leaders from Javier Milei to Giorgia Meloni are scrambling to curry favour, and Trump’s pal Reform MP Nigel Farage is a regular on the post-election Mar-a-Lago scene. But that’s not the style of Sir Keir and his merry band of net zero Never Trumpers: they could end up singing a different tune that would literally leave Britain out in the cold in the new ‘Drill Baby Drill’ Trump era. Yet an unexpected ally could prevent the bi-lateral relationship between Britain and the United States from unraveling further: the British Royal Family. The monarchy has long been

Friday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The International Criminal Court must fall

The arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant should be the last the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues. The ICC accuses the men, whose nation is embroiled in a multi-front war against enemies sworn to its destruction, of using ‘starvation as a method of warfare’, ‘murder, persecution and other inhumane acts’, and ‘intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population’. Merely to say the charges out loud is to expose their absurdity. Not only is there no evidence that Israel is denying the Palestinians food as a military tactic, there is copious evidence to the contrary: 1.1 million tonnes, to be precise. That

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is Keir Starmer really going to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu?

Benjamin Netanyahu faces arrest if he enters Britain. That is the welcome the Israeli leader will receive should he fancy another trip to the UK any time soon. It comes after the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, along with former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant and Mohammed Deif of Hamas, who is thought to be already dead. Justifying the decision to issue warrants for the two Israeli politicians, the court said they shared criminal responsibility for ‘the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.’ Downing Street has confirmed

Fabian Hoffmann

The missile Putin actually used to hit Ukraine

This week, Russia launched a missile attack on Dnipro, Ukraine, reportedly using a new medium-range ballistic missile named ‘Oreshnik’, as confirmed yesterday by President Putin. Putin stated that the missile attack was a response to Ukraine’s use of western-built missile systems inside Russia, including US-supplied ATACMS ballistic missiles and British Storm Shadow cruise missiles. Before this confirmation, speculation arose that Russia might have launched an intercontinental-range ballistic missile. This claim was initially reported by President Zelensky the morning after the attack, who noted that the missile’s flight path characteristics matched those of an intercontinental-range ballistic missile. While Putin unveiled the Oreshnik as a novel addition to Russia’s arsenal, it is likely

Yuan Yi Zhu

The ICC has destroyed its own credibility 

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity (a third warrant was issued against a Hamas commander, believed to be dead). In so doing, the ICC has undermined – perhaps fatally – its own credibility, as well as prospects for a peace settlement in Gaza. The process which led to the warrants was compromised from the very beginning, when the ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Ahmad Khan KC, who is currently being investigated for alleged sexual misconduct (he denies the allegations), convened a ‘Panel of Experts in International Law’ to provide support

Thursday

Limor Simhony Philpott

The ICC’s vendetta against Israel has gone too far

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant. An ICC warrant was also issued for Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, who was killed by Israel in July. The judges decided that there are ‘reasonable grounds’ that the trio are responsible for war crimes. The ICC must end its vendetta against Israel The court’s decision marks a new low in international efforts to portray Israel as a uniquely evil country. Placing leaders of a law-abiding democracy alongside murderous terrorists risks equating Hamas’s pursuit of a genocidal aim with Israel’s need to defend itself following the 7 October

Ben Domenech

Why Matt Gaetz backed out of the race to become Trump’s attorney general

In Washington, you don’t name anyone disruptive or potentially transformative to your administration without dealing with flack from the Senate. They like things straightforward, predictable, vetted, established and preplanned — and Donald Trump’s cabinet of outsiders is anything but. The Brett Kavanaugh nomination was widely considered to be dead even among his most emphatic supporters (reportedly even the president himself) before his stunning performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee righted the ship. Now, several members of the incoming Trump 47 team faces a certain onslaught from Democrats and potentially wavering support from some Republicans. So getting the cabinet the president wants will require the expenditure of political capital, as it always does with

Michael Evans

Here’s what Putin wants from Ukraine

Donald Trump is still two months away from becoming the 47th president of the United States, and yet his return to the Oval Office in January has already provoked a flurry of policy U-turns by the White House and rising expectation, even in Moscow, of a deal to end the war in Ukraine. Elements of a potential settlement reportedly agreeable to President Putin emerged on Reuters today based on kite-flying suggestions by Russian officials. While there is nothing particularly new in the broad outline of Moscow thinking, the fact that Russian officials are pushing it out in some detail reflects an awareness in the Kremlin that with Trump in power, the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The ‘experts’ who enabled RFK Jr’s rise

22 min listen

The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be secretary of health and human services in the second Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, hates big business, rails against the ultra-processed food that Donald Trump likes to eat and wants climate sceptics jailed.  But in the magazine this week Matt Ridley explains how the experts who now bash him have contributed in putting him where is, and that official Covid misinformation has contributed to his rise. So what could he do in office? Will he release these Covid files? Matt joins Freddy to discuss. 

Matthew Lynn

The Trump Bitcoin bonanza has only just begun

One of the main trading platforms collapsed, and its founder ended up being sent to jail. Two years ago, in the wake of the failure of the FTX, it looked as if Bitcoin had finally been exposed as a flimsy bubble, with the price plunging to just $16,000 in the middle of November 2022. And yet, it turns out that the critics of the digital currency, as so often, had celebrated its demise too soon. This week, Bitcoin hit $97,000 per unit, a fresh all time high. And in reality it will go higher still – because the Trump Bitcoin trade has only just started.  Trump is nothing if not a

Eliot Wilson

Russia’s rumoured ICBM launch is raising the stakes in Ukraine

A Russian attack on the city of Dnipro earlier today included the use of an intercontinental ballistic missile, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. The RS-26 Rubezh was reportedly launched from Astrakhan Oblast on the Caspian Sea, although some analysts remain sceptical. Russia has made no official comment, but it would be the first use of an ICBM in the conflict in Ukraine, representing a deliberate raising of the stakes and a clear signal to Kyiv’s allies. Using an intercontinental ballistic missile to strike Ukraine is performative overkill On Tuesday, which marked the 1,000th day of the war, Ukrainian forces launched American-supplied MGM-140 ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles at an ammunition depot near Karachev

David Cohen

Why the Maori are protesting against equal rights in New Zealand 

Around 35,000 thousand demonstrators descended on the capital of New Zealand this week, many of them adorned in traditional native dress amid a fluttering sea of red, white and black ‘Maori sovereignty’ flags. They were there to decry a bill looking to redefine New Zealand’s founding treaty.  The Treaty Principles Bill, introduced earlier this month by one of the National party-led government’s junior coalition partners, has virtually no chance of becoming law. But the bill’s sponsor, the libertarian ACT party leader David Seymour, insists it offers a ‘certainty and clarity’ long missing in New Zealand. He also wants the country’s constitutional arrangement to have an explicitly democratic basis in law. His

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

How will Putin respond to Ukraine’s Storm Shadow attack?

The air raid sirens sounded yesterday, the American embassy in Kyiv closed, as did the Italian and Greek. The British and French embassy warned nationals to take care and encouraged staff to work remotely. The Ukrainian air force warned residents of the city to seek shelter from an incoming massive air attack. And then nothing happened. It’s not clear which is more embarrassing. That the Russians seem to have been able to perpetrate a nerve-jangling hoax, not least by circulating messages on social media and messaging apps seeming to come from HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence. These claimed that a ‘particularly massive’ airstrike was on the way involving more than 300

Peter Frankopan

Will China soon rule the waves?

On Sunday morning, a communications cable between Sweden and Lithuania was damaged, almost certainly deliberately. Just hours later, the C-Lion cable, the only data link between Finland and central Europe, was severed by what authorities have diplomatically called an ‘external impact’. Most would call it sabotage. In a week where the Biden administration finally gave Kyiv authorisation to use longer-range missiles against targets in Russia, few should think it is a coincidence. Sir Walter Raleigh said that ‘whoever commands the sea commands the trade’ and that ‘whoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world – and consequently the world itself’. To understand how the English

Matt Ridley

The ‘experts’ who enabled RFK Jr’s rise

The nomination of husky-voiced, musclebound Robert F. Kennedy Jr – who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park – to be secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’, according to the BBC. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, hates big business, rails against the ultra-processed food that Donald Trump likes to eat and wants climate sceptics jailed, RFK Jr sounds like a BBC hero and hardly a natural member of the MAGA tribe. But his criticism of Covid vaccines catapulted him into the arms of Trump. The experts who now bash him should reflect on their

Owen Matthews

Biden’s missiles will do Ukraine no favours

With just over 60 days left in office, Joe Biden’s White House has significantly escalated the Ukraine war it had tried so hard to contain by authorising the use of US-supplied medium-range ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) and antipersonnel mines against targets inside Russia. Biden’s U-turn breaks a long-standing convention on US presidential transitions that lame-duck presidents aren’t supposed to make major foreign policy changes – especially not ones that severely constrain the stated policies of their elected successor. The immediate result has been a direct Russian threat to the US embassy in Kyiv and what German defence minister Boris Pistorius has called ‘sabotage’ of undersea internet cables in the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Labour’s Chinese takeaway

I was thrilled to learn that our government intends to enjoy an ‘open’ relationship with China – one of my favourite countries, as I am sure it is yours. Sir Keir Starmer announced this intention when he bumped into Xi Jinping at the G20 beano in Rio de Janeiro. He also said: ‘We want our relations to be consistent, durable, respectful, as we have agreed, avoid surprises where possible. The UK will be a predictable, consistent, sovereign actor committed to the rule of law.’ Those agreeable adjectives are all Keir’s – I didn’t slip any in, surreptitiously, Not even ‘predictable’, which I assume was there to reinforce the earlier commitment