World

Wednesday

Alexander Horne

Israel needs to get out of the Gaza war

As the war in Gaza drags on into its eleventh month, and the conflict risks expanding into a regional war involving both Iran and its Lebanese proxies, it is surely time to question what would be a successful outcome for Israel. Militarily, the IDF has inflicted enormous damage on Hamas. Yet around 115 hostages continue to languish in Gaza and, in public relations terms, Israel is clearly losing the propaganda war.  One of Israel’s problems is that it has simply lost control of the narrative The Jewish state is increasingly accused of war crimes and its allies are more likely to call for a ceasefire than issue a stalwart defence

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

No EU migrant deal will stop the small boats

The sea lanes of Europe were busy last weekend. On Sunday, more than 700 migrants crossed the Channel from France to England, taking the total number this year to 18,342 – a 13 per cent increase on 2023. On the same day, 421 migrants in twelve boats disembarked on the Italian island of Lampedusa, and more have arrived since, swelling the numbers to over 500. The diversity of the nationalities of arrivals in Lampedusa is a fascinating and alarming snapshot of the crisis confronting Europe. The people stepping ashore hailed from Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ghana, Gambia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Liberia and Syria.  There are now too many gangs operating in Asia, the Middle East

Mark Nayler

Catalonia can’t escape the curse of independence 

In a low-key ceremony in the Catalan parliament on Saturday, Spain’s former health minister Salvador Illa was sworn in as the new president of Catalonia. Despite coming first in the regional elections on 12 May, Illa’s Socialists failed to secure a majority and have spent the last three months in cross-party negotiations. They finally struck a deal with the pro-independence ERC, which came third in the May election after losing 13 of its 33 seats.  Illa is the first unionist politician to become president of Catalonia since 2010, so there has been a lot of talk in Spanish media of a ‘nueva etapa’, or new era – a chance for Catalans

Terry Barnes

The city finally cracking down on the e-scooter menace

E-scooters are the bane of modern civilisation. They are the stealth bombers of our pavements. They are a silent danger to those who ride them, and a threat to life and limb for pedestrians and cyclists forced to share paths and roadways with them. They give accident and emergency departments unwanted business, thus imposing a significant social and financial cost on the wider community. There is nothing worse than being out for a walk with your young children in a park or on a shared pathway, only to be nearly mowed down by a speeding e-scooter rider you never heard coming, who sounded no warning, and who obviously doesn’t care

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Is the West finally seeing through Hamas’s lies?

On Saturday, when Israel attacked the al-Taba’een Hamas command centre in Gaza City, jihadi propagandists swung into action straight away. The group had placed the military facility inside a school compound for precisely this reason. Now it was time to cash in. At first, things seemed to be going according to plan. ‘Nearly 100 killed in Israeli strike on school, Gaza officials say,’ blared the Washington Post, a typical example. In the story, Mahmoud Bassal, a ‘Gaza civil defence spokesman’, was given space to hype up the attack without any indication that the Gaza civil defence is controlled by Hamas.  Hamas sat back and waited for the international outrage to place

Tuesday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Putin is panicking about Kursk

As Ukrainian forces continue to gain ground in the Russian region of Kursk, the humiliation for Vladimir Putin is growing. Faced with a mounting crisis, the Kremlin is responding in the only way it knows how: deflection and disinformation. A briefing by Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) published this morning argued that ‘Zelensky is taking crazy steps that threaten to escalate far beyond Ukraine.’ The SVR claimed that there is growing unhappiness in the US with the Ukrainian president over the incursion and that they are looking to replace him with a more malleable candidate – supposedly one who will better represent the West’s interests at future peace negotiations. The intelligence

Jawad Iqbal

Hong Kong’s justice system is an insult to democracy

Lord David Neuberger of Abbotsbury, the British lawyer who sits on Hong Kong’s highest court, needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. The territory’s court of final appeal has upheld verdicts and prison sentences against some of Hong Kong’s leading pro-democracy activists for taking part in a peaceful protest in 2019. The court ruling has been decried as ‘unjust’ by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong before the territory was returned to Chinese rule in 1997. The court unanimously agreed to uphold the convictions of seven activists who participated in the the unauthorised 2019 protests, during which 1.7 million people took to the streets

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s Olympic truce is well and truly over

Emmanuel Macron believes that the Paris Olympics have shown the world the ‘true face of France’. The Games were indeed a success, recovering from the disastrous first day, when saboteurs disabled the rail network and torrential rain turned the opening ceremony into a very damp squib. Macron must have feared the worst but the weather improved and crowds flocked to the iconic Parisian venues to watch two weeks of glorious sport. The tragedy for France is that Macron has empowered this rancorous left ‘We don’t want life to get back to normal,’ remarked Macron on Monday as he hosted an Olympic reception at the Elysée. He and millions of French

Charles Lipson

What caused the glitchy interview between Trump and Musk?

The lengthy interview between Donald Trump and Elon Musk on X last night began 40 minutes late, a technical glitch much of the media celebrated with unrestrained joy. They hate, hate, hate Elon Musk (despite his electric vehicles) – and they hate a media rival. They hate his transformation of Twitter, now X, into an open forum with very little censorship.  And, of course, they hate Musk’s foray into politics since he has taken the wrong side. Until now, Musk has largely avoided politics. He still describes himself as centrist who supported Obama; he said so in the talk with Trump. But Musk has committed what many pundits consider a mortal sin.

Monday

Jim Lawley

How does Spain solve a problem like Carles Puigdemont?

Last week saw dramatic events in Catalonia as Carles Puigdemont, wanted for almost seven years by Spanish justice for spearheading the region’s illegal declaration of independence in 2017, reappeared in the centre of Barcelona and delivered a rousing speech to some 3,500 of his adoring supporters. Then, just as suddenly, he disappeared – to the massive embarrassment of the several hundred policemen who were standing close by waiting to arrest him (though two of them, it seems, may have connived in the escape).    Puigdemont says that he’s now back in Waterloo, south of Brussels, where he’s made his home since 2017: the Belgian authorities refuse to extradite him to Spain. In

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine’s Kursk attack shows no signs of slowing down

It has been seven days since Ukraine began its attack on the Russian region of Kursk – with Ukrainian soldiers launching the first successful cross-border invasion of Russia since the second world war.  Still, Ukraine is showing no signs yet of slowing down. This morning, local authorities in the neighbouring Russian region of Belgorod announced that the evacuation of civilians from the area had begun. This is the second Russian region to evacuate since Kyiv’s invasion began last Tuesday. It is not just Russian resources that are being spread more thinly Addressing the escalating situation in a video on his social media channels, Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote: ‘This morning is an

Sunday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

France’s view on the British riots is stunningly hypocritical

As the Olympics draw to a close tonight, two things have delighted the French. The first is that the Games turned out to be fairly successful, overlooking the weird opening ceremony. The other is the general amusement here that Britain managed to beat France at its own national summer sport: rioting. If Froggie-bashing has for years been a favourite pastime of the British, the scenes on the streets of Britain have given the French a chance to retaliate with relish. News channels gleefully interrupted their coverage of French Olympic triumphs for live feeds of the clashes on British streets. Pundits were ripped from enjoying the beach volleyball to launch a flotilla of op-eds and

Andrew Tettenborn

Why Britain must say no – again – to China’s ‘super embassy’ in London

The previous Tory government may not have been very successful in containing the global ambitions of China, but at least it tried. Whether David Lammy’s Foreign Office has the same ambition to stand up to Beijing’s bullying is unfortunately becoming more doubtful. A straw in the wind is the announcement by China this week that it has revived plans to build a spanking new ‘super embassy’ – ten times the size of Beijing’s current outpost – on land it owns in the heart of the capital, a stone’s throw from the Tower of London.  This isn’t any old exercise in replacement of one piece of real estate with another. What

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is the Great Barrier Reef really dying?

The Great Barrier Reef is, of course, dying – a victim of humans’ hubris and callousness towards the natural world. We know this because we keep being told this is the case. This week, the New York Times carried the headline: ‘Heat Raises Fears of Demise for Great Barrier Reef Within a Generation’. This story, echoed elsewhere, was based on a paper in Nature claiming that the seas around the reef, off the eastern coast of Queensland, are at their warmest in at least 400 years. ‘Highest ocean heat in four centuries places Great Barrier Reef in danger,’ asserted the authors of the study, led by the University of Wollongong

Caleb Quinley

Thailand’s democracy is a sham

Democracy is dying in Thailand, or perhaps it’s already dead. Thailand’s constitutional court this week ordered the dissolution of the country’s most dynamic and popular political party. This ruling is a decisive blow to an already wounded Thai democracy. The Move Forward party’s (MFP) ‘crime’, according to the court, was to call for the country’s strict ‘lèse-majesté’ laws to be reformed. The judges imposed ten-year political bans on all of its leading party members, including former leader Pita Limjaroenrat. Thailand has always been able to present the illusion that it is a democratic country Human rights groups and huge swathes of the voting population view the allegations as politically motivated

Sam Meadows

Javier Milei wants AI to predict crime

In the sci-fi movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise plays a police officer investigating ‘pre-crimes’ – those which are yet to happen, but are predicted by super-intelligent psychic beings. Real-life Argentina might not be relying on psychics, but President Javier Milei has unveiled plans to use AI to ‘predict future crimes’ in a move which has alarmed civil rights activists. As any software engineer will tell you, a predictive algorithm is only as good as the data you put into it The creation of the catchily-named ‘Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit’ is an attempt to integrate AI into modern law enforcement practices in South America’s second-largest economy. It will use ‘machine-learning algorithms’ on past data to predict the future,

Saturday

Limor Simhony Philpott

Israel’s school strike has triggered an information war

An Israeli airstrike on a school in Gaza in the early hours of this morning has once again triggered an information battle in the narrative of the war. Shortly after the strike, the Hamas-controlled government and media-affiliated service reported that there were 100 dead, including women and children. According to Israeli sources, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) took measures to minimise civilian casualties, including using precision weapons to strike the building, which had been used as a shelter. The IDF says that according to evidence obtained from the scene, both the number of casualties and the scale of destruction had been exaggerated. Today’s targets were Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic

Michael Evans

American diplomacy might not stop a Middle East war

On the face of it, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July was a brilliant, opportunistic strike by one of the world’s most dedicated and fearless intelligence services. The presumed targeting by Mossad, however, has disrupted negotiations to bring a ceasefire to Gaza and the release of more Israeli hostages, has provoked a sharp telephone call between President Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, and has inflamed the Middle East to such a dangerous level that a full-scale war cannot be ruled out. It’s a deja vu crisis Much is being made of the urgent diplomatic efforts underway to try and persuade Iran, now with a new

Terry Barnes

Does Australia have a crocodile problem?

During the cold months of July and August, many southern Australians head north to warmer climes. A favourite destination is north Queensland, with its jungles, rainforests, mangrove swamps and rivers. And saltwater crocodiles. David Hogbin, a 40-year-old father-of-three and GP from New South Wales, was one such sun-seeking tourists. He travelled north with his family on holiday, but will never return home. After falling into a river when a path he was walking on gave way, he was eaten by a crocodile. Crocodile attacks in Australia are big news because they’re so rare Hogbin’s death is tragic, not least because he leaves behind a young family, but because this incident

Friday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Nagasaki shouldn’t have snubbed Israel from its A-bomb ceremony

Nagasaki’s Peace Park held a ceremony today to mark the 79th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city (which killed 74,000 people). It was a sombre and moving occasion, as it always is, and one usually attended by high level representatives of all nations. This year was different though: the ambassadors of the UK, US and Israel were elsewhere, holding their own memorial at a Buddhist temple in Tokyo, 750 miles away. Nothing spooks the Japanese as much as disorder The reason is an unseemly row over the withdrawal of an invitation to Israel, by the mayor of Nagasaki Shiro Suzuki, apparently over fears of potential