World

Sunday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

How France’s Jimmy Savile also got away with his evil

This week nine more charges of sexual abuse were levelled against Abbé Pierre, the late French Roman Catholic priest who for decades was regarded as a modern-day saint. This brings to 33 the number of charges, ranging from sexual assault to the rape of a boy, all alleged to have been committed between the 1960s and shortly before the priest’s death in 2007 at the age of 94. Among the latest complainants are a woman now 58, who detailed how she was assaulted by Abbé Pierre exactly fifty years ago. ‘Several times I’ve wanted to shout to the world that this man isn’t who he says he is,’ the woman said in an

Saturday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trump’s plan for day one

Washington, DC On your marks, get set, executive orders.  Donald Trump will be sworn back into office on Monday, from inside the Capitol Rotunda, as Ronald Reagan was in 1985. Cold weather is the official reason for moving the ceremony from outside to in, and it seems true – the 78-year-old president-elect may wish to avoid the fate of his predecessor William Henry Harrison – although there’s plenty of speculation that security is the real factor. The Donald, in benevolent king mode, also didn’t want the poor horses to freeze to death on his big day. It’s funny what goes on in that very famous orange head.  Trump will then make

Jim Lawley

Spain’s expat tax won’t last long

‘There are only two families in the world, as a grandmother of mine used to say: the haves and the have-nots.’ Sancho Panza’s line in Cervantes’ famous novel was echoed by socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Monday when he worried that Spanish society was rapidly dividing into two classes: ‘Those who inherit properties from their parents and those who have to spend their lives working to pay the rent.’ Spain certainly has a severe housing crisis. Although the fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain population, mass immigration means that every year the country needs to find homes for over half

Friday

Yossi Melman

Why Netanyahu won’t let the Gaza hostage deal fall through

President-elect Donald Trump is poised to claim his first major foreign policy achievement just days before his inauguration on Monday. If no last-minute obstacles arise, a long-anticipated hostage deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza could take effect as soon as this Sunday. But while Trump will emerge victorious from this situation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, will find himself humiliated and defeated. For nearly a year, fearing the collapse of his right-wing coalition, Netanyahu has worked hard to prevent the deal from concluding, using all sorts of excuses and hoping that Hamas would eventually derail it and be blamed for it. This has not happened.

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

RedNote is breaking down the Great Firewall of China

I turned to Xiaohongshu during the pandemic. At a time when I couldn’t visit China, the Chinese social media app (also known as ‘RedNote’) was a little slice of the motherland when I was bored with Instagram or Twitter. I was hooked immediately: like Instagram, the app is good for beautiful pictures and well-produced reels. It also has cute animals and an excellent sample of the dry wit of Chinese millennials. I’ve probably swiped through hours, maybe days, of short videos of beautiful street scenes from Chinese cities, vlogs from people who have swapped mega-cities for rural villages, cooking videos from all corners of the country, Mandarin comedy skits and

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

AfD on track to turn a third of Germany blue

With less than six weeks to go until voters head to the polls, the snap federal election campaign in Germany is finally heating up. The AfD is set to turn a third of Germany blue and clinch five of the country’s 16 states in the party list vote: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Saxony. This should award the party approximately 19.7 per cent of the vote – translating to 146 seats in the Bundestag. These projected results banish any notion that Germany has moved on from its bisected past Just in time for the weekend, the pollsters YouGov have released their first MRP survey, revealing the likely voting intention of

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Why Hamas keeps on celebrating

As plans for a ceasefire were announced on Wednesday night, videos of Gazans celebrating with glee made their way onto international news broadcasts. The celebrations were distinctive in style, and looked nothing like those of a people experiencing the end of a genocide. Many an anchor and analyst overlooked the detail, but we would all do well to pay attention to what the revellers were actually showing and telling us.  No ceasefire can fully address the conflict as long as Hamas remains committed to its ultimate goal: the destruction of Israel and the eradication of Jews in the region This is not the first time Gaza’s civilians have seemed quick to celebrate. No

Fredrik Karrholm

Why Sweden is cracking down on citizenship

The Swedish government is proposing a constitutional amendment that would make it possible to revoke the citizenship of certain individuals. Those who obtained their citizenship through fraudulent means, or who pose a threat to the state, could now face being stripped of their passport. This is one of many measures which are defining Sweden’s pragmatic shift away from radical idealism. In contrast to Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and Britain, there has – until now – been no circumstance that would allow someone’s Swedish citizenship to be cancelled. Not even the worst terrorists involved in appalling crimes at the Islamic State’s zenith could lose their passports. Citizenship is not merely a

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

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