World

Friday

Michael Evans

Trump will find Putin harder to deal with than Hamas

There is no question that bombast sometimes works. President-elect Donald Trump warned hell would be unleashed if Hamas did not release its hostages and the war in Gaza did not end by 20 January, his inauguration day. He never explained what he had in mind to end the war, but he didn’t need to. The threat was enough. President Joe Biden and his national security team had done all the hard negotiating work for a deal but Trump’s stamp on it was conclusive. Trump’s room for manoeuvre is limited. Bombast won’t do it, not this time Can he now do the same with the war in Ukraine? Trump’s main obstacle

Terry Barnes

Sydney’s G-string swimwear row is nothing but hot air

As the hot Australia summer rolls on, so too do the summer silly season stories. The latest is a Sydney council imposing bans on G-string bathing costumes at its public swimming pools.  When it comes to swimwear, Australia has had a long tradition of community standards conflicting with personal freedom. In the early years of the 20th century, anything not neck-to-knee got you ejected from Sydney beaches. In the fifties, as bikinis became popular, patrolling beach inspectors actually measured women’s bikini tops and bottoms to ensure they retained the requisite degree of modesty. Whatever happened to good taste and decorum? This summer, Blue Mountains City Council, in the eponymous hills

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Empire of Trump, the creep of child-free influencers & is fact-checking a fiction?

43 min listen

This week: President Trump’s plan to Make America Greater In the cover piece for the magazine, our deputy editor and host of the Americano podcast, Freddy Gray, delves into Trump’s plans. He speaks to insiders, including Steve Bannon, about the President’s ambitions for empire-building. Could he really take over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal? And if not, what is he really hoping to achieve? Academic and long-time friend of J.D. Vance, James Orr, also writes in the magazine this week about how the vice president-elect could be an even more effective standard-bearer for the MAGA movement. Freddy and James joined the podcast, just before Freddy heads off to cover

Steerpike Steerpike

Blue Labour founder jets off to Trump inauguration

Well, well, well. President-elect Donald Trump may have snubbed Sir Keir Starmer and missed off the new US ambassador Peter Mandelson when he was sending out his inauguration invites but there is one Labour figure who has been deemed privileged enough to make the cut. Steerpike can reveal that Lord Maurice Glasman is currently making his way to DC after being personally invited to the ceremony by the Trump team. How very interesting… The Labour peer and author of Blue Labour is, Mr S understands, heading out to the presidential inauguration – and appears to be the only Labour figure to have been expressly invited by the president’s top team,

Marcus Solarz Hendriks

The questions that need answering on the Chagos Islands deal

The art of policymaking is to chart a course through evolving circumstances. In the face of resistance, there are three options: resist and persevere in kind, adjust, or fold and abandon ship. The best policymakers make the correct decision at the right time. The British government is in such a moment with its attempt to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. For months, it has elected the first option – even as the new Mauritian government rejected the terms of the original deal, and Donald Trump’s election victory promises to usher in an administration with dim views of the agreement. As the Chagossians condemned their exclusion from the negotiations, and Maldivian opposition

Eliot Wilson

Starmer’s support for Ukraine has become half-hearted at best

Sir Keir Starmer arrived in Kyiv this morning. He came by train, crossing the border from Poland, since air travel into the Ukrainian capital is now unacceptably hazardous. Perhaps he regards this visit as a respite after the week’s event so far at Westminster. The Prime Minister arrived to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky bearing gifts. The centrepiece is an extensive 100-year partnership agreement between the United Kingdom and Ukraine, covering nine ‘pillars’ from culture and education through science, technology and healthcare to security and military assistance. This is intended to be a significant and enduring relationship. Since the general election, however, the support has seemed to some to have wavered

Arieh Kovler

How Trump shaped the Hamas-Israel ceasefire deal

After days of increasing optimism, Qatari prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani summoned the press last night to announce that Israel and Hamas had agreed on a ceasefire and hostage deal. In the hours since, Israel has accused Hamas of backtracking on the agreement and dozens of people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza. A planned cabinet vote on the deal in Israel has been pushed back, yet Hamas insists it is still committed to the agreement, which is due to come into effect on Sunday. The deal is complicated, delicate and full of moving parts. Phase one will see Hamas release 33 hostages, both living and dead:

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why has Trump invited Zemmour – and not Le Pen – to his inauguration?

There will be two politicians from France in Washington next week to see Donald Trump sworn in as president – and Emmanuel Macron isn’t one of them. The president didn’t get an invite (unlike his European rival, Giorgia Meloni) and nor for that matter did Marine Le Pen. It says much about how Reconquest is viewed by Team Trump that a party with no seats in the National Assembly is invited to his inauguration The two French politicians invited to witness arguably the greatest political resurrection in American political history are Eric Zemmour and Sarah Knafo. The latter was until a few months ago best known as Zemmour’s partner – professionally and

Paul Wood

The Donald’s plans for the Middle East

The former US president Jimmy Carterdied, at the age of 100, just before news of an imminent deal to free the last of Israel’s hostages in Gaza. Carter’s presidency was crippled by his own hostage crisis, American diplomats held captive in Tehran. Freeing them became his administration’s highest priority, and he worked on it for every single one of the 444 days the crisis lasted, often to the exclusion of anything else. By contrast, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, resisted massive domestic pressure to do a deal for his hostages in order to pursue the war aim of destroying Hamas. You could call this statesmanship, or something else, but

Douglas Murray

The day DEI went up in smoke

What’s in a word? ‘Equality’. ‘Equity’. It’s the sort of thing that Channel 4 newsreaders find impossible to understand. Surely they’re the same thing, aren’t they? And even if they aren’t then what kind of pedant would keep trying to point it out? What difference does it make anyway? Well, quite a lot. Potentially the difference between your home burning down and it not burning down. It’s important that people who come to your burning home look like you.This is meant to be empowering  In the past couple of weeks residents of some of the most ‘progressive’ neighbourhoods in America have had, in real time, an unfortunate crash course on

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Empire of Trump: the President’s plan to make America greater

‘The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation,’ said William McKinley, America’s 25th commander-in-chief, who happens to be one of Donald Trump’s favourite presidents. Trump, who barely dodged a bullet in 2024, shares a number of traits with McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901: Scottish blood, ferocious work ethic, an affinity with the super-rich that somehow appeals to the working classes, a faith in tariffs as a means of safeguarding industry, and a willingness to expand America’s empire to boost future prosperity. ‘I keep speaking to Europeans and British embassy people and telling them he really means this stuff’ ‘I’m talking about protecting the freeworld,’ said Trump

James Orr

J. D. Vance is the future of MAGA

The vice-presidency of the United States has always been the butt of jokes. ‘I don’t plan to be buried until I’ve died,’ quipped Daniel Webster when he declined William Henry Harrison’s offer of the role. John Nance Garner, who served as FDR’s vice-president, dismissed it as ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss’. Even John Adams, the first to hold the office, was equivocal: ‘I am Vice-President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.’ He may prove to be a more effective standard bearer for Trumpism than Trump himself That ‘everything’ has proven elusive. Fewer than a third of vice-presidents have gone on to occupy the Oval

Wednesday

Edward Howell

President Yoon’s arrest brings more turmoil to South Korea

This year has commenced in an historic fashion for South Korea – albeit for all the wrong reasons. Earlier today, South Korean authorities arrested the suspended – but still sitting – president, Yoon Suk Yeol, on charges of corruption and inciting insurrection, after several weeks of the embattled leader evading this outcome. Today marks the first time in history that a sitting South Korean president had been arrested, plunging South Korea once again into unchartered waters. Domestic politics in Asia’s fourth-largest economy looks like it will only get messier. It has been a tempestuous month in South Korean politics. For all the personal scandals, skulduggery, and schisms within his party

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

The arrest of South Korea’s president won’t end this saga

South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol has been arrested after police officers scaled fences and cut through barbed wire to detain him in his luxury Seoul residence. Suk-yeol, the first ever sitting South Korean leader to be taken into custody, was held in connection with his failed attempt to impose martial law last month. But while South Korean authorities have finally got their man, this is far from the end of the saga. Yoon’s talk of ‘bloodshed’ was probably hyperbolic A motorcade believed to be carrying the president was seen leaving his compound and he appears to be being held at the CIO (Corruption Investigation Office) headquarters in the nearby city

Tuesday

Francis Pike

Why Tulip Siddiq had to go

In 1996, I flew to Dhaka to meet Sheikh Hasina, the newly elected prime minister of Bangladesh, to discuss her economic strategy. It was not a pleasant experience. Hasina was humourless, arrogant and bitter – by a long stretch, the most unlikeable politician I’ve met in the sub-continent. By contrast her diminutive niece, Tulip Siddiq, Labour’s anti-corruption minister who has just resigned over her ties to her aunt, is a charmer.  It just stretches credulity that Siddiq and the Labour party did not know that aunty Hasina was a rotten apple To be fair to Hasina, she had excuses for her unattractive demeanour. There was a singular focus on her political raison d’etre – to avenge the brutal assassination of her father,

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Putin is engineering a humanitarian crisis in Transnistria

Sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, the tiny republic of Moldova has been easy prey for Russia in the past. Its 2.5 million people are among the poorest in Europe and the Kremlin has been able to exploit the country’s dependence on cheap Russian gas to keep it as an ally. Putin has decided to let the people of Transnistria freeze so he can pin the blame on Moldova’s pro-EU government But Moldovans, like Ukrainians, have begun to choose another path. In 2022, they applied to join the European Union to be part of the democratic world, and then elected a pro-western president last year. Vladimir Putin’s response has been to engineer

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Can Trump claim the credit for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire?

Donald Trump has made a long list of promises for what will be done on ‘day one’ of his second term in the White House. Peace in the Middle East was not one of them. Yet it looks increasingly likely that the President-elect will be sworn in having just helped to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, to (at least temporarily) end the war in Gaza.  Trump has made his feelings clear about the war for some time: in line with his broader views about foreign conflict, he wanted the war brought to an end. While positioning himself as a strong ally of Israel, the President-elect was also calling

Jonathan Sacerdoti

What price will Israel pay for a ceasefire with Hamas?

As reports swirl of an imminent ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, Israel stands at a crossroads, grappling with the profound dilemmas that such a deal entails. While the full details of the agreement remain unknown until officially announced, the fragments emerging suggest a complex and controversial arrangement that raises difficult questions: How much is Israel willing to concede for the return of hostages? And what price, in lives and security, will the nation pay in the future? Within Israel’s government, opposition to the deal is mounting According to reports, the deal is expected to include the release of 33 hostages defined as “humanitarian cases,” a 42-day ceasefire, and the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The plot to ban X in France

Clara Chappaz is the minister delegate for Artificial Intelligence and the digital economy in the government of Emmanuel Macron. At the weekend she appeared on a television discussion entitled ‘Trump-Musk: Are we ready?’ Chappaz, 35, is very much a Macronist, an entrepreneur who did her MBA at Harvard Business School before launching a successful start-up. French progressives are flexible in their approach to free speech. They’re all for it, as long as they agree with it She expressed her growing concern about the direction certain social media platforms were headed, and the consequences for millions of French people who use them. ‘We have to make sure that wrong opinions are

Matthew Lynn

Spain will regret its 100 per cent expat property tax

They drive up prices. Rents go through the roof. And the locals can no longer afford a home. The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is so fed up with wealthy expats inflating the property market he is planning a 100 per cent tax on anyone from outside the EU buying a home in Spain. Of course, that might prove popular in the short term – but Spain will pay a high price for slamming the door shut on well-off foreigners.  To pretend driving expats out will make any difference to the average Spaniard is just ridiculous Any who dreamt of buying a small place on the Costa del Sol or