World

It is 00.40 pm, 26 September 1983. Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the duty commander in charge of monitoring the Soviet Union’s early warning satellites designed to identify American missile attacks, is carefully checking his panels. Suddenly, the alarms roar into loud action. The word ‘Launch’ flashes onto his screen in large red letters. For the next 15 seconds, one of the satellites reports that five American Minuteman missiles have been launched and are heading towards the Soviet Union. Based in a secret bunker hidden deep beneath the woods just outside Moscow, Petrov is transfixed and stares at the screen in disbelief and shock. The automatic order to launch in retaliation is also sent to Soviet

The late Henry Kissinger said of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s that it was a shame that both sides couldn’t lose. Much the same is true of the current situation in Syria, where the long established regime of the brutal but secular Assad dynasty looks increasingly likely to fall to a sudden Islamist rebel offensive. Syria has been convulsed by a vicious and multi-sided conflict since 2012 when riots against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad turned into a full-scale civil war. Assad, a London trained ophthalmologist, had reluctantly become the heir apparent to his iron-fisted father Hafez al-Assad (the surname means ‘the lion’) after the death of his more

Emmanuel Macron addressed the French people on Thursday night and once again ruled out the possibility he will resign before his mandate expires in 2027. As for appointing a new Prime Minister – his fourth this year – Macron said he would nominate Michel Barnier’s successor in ‘the coming days’. The big decisions concerning France are no longer made in Paris, but in Brussels Also on television on Thursday evening were the ‘extremists’ who Macron blames for bringing down Barnier’s government. Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon gave lengthy interviews in which they justified their actions and, in the case of the latter, called on Macron to resign. Would it

Provincial capitals falling before an unexpected advance. Military units allegedly defecting, deserting or switching sides. Talk of a coup in Damascus. The Syria of 2012 is the Syria of 2024. For years this was a so-called ‘frozen conflict’. The front lines did not move, no matter how many artillery and aerial attacks there were on civilians in the country’s north. The maps did not change, though dozens of people at a minimum were killed in fighting every week. But now Syria’s civil conflict has reignited. From their portion of Idlib province, a broad coalition of armed groups led by the Islamists Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have taken over a significant