World

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Did the Louvre robbers want to get caught?

It is more than a month since thieves stole the crown jewels from the Louvre and the chances of recovering the loot, worth an estimated €88 million, diminish with every passing day. The robbery was initially dubbed the “heist of the century,” a brazen theft in broad daylight as visitors strolled through the world’s most famous museum. There were up and down the ladder and in out of the museum in seven minutes, giving the impression that this was the work of villains well-versed in daring robberies. But soon details emerged that suggested the gang of four weren’t quite of the caliber of the thieves immortalized in the Hollywood movie Ocean’s

Friday

Patrick Gibbons

Is South Korea bracing for a third Trump-Kim summit?

Donald Trump’s meeting with President Xi was the standout moment of this month’s Asia-Pacific leaders’ summit in South Korea. Yet almost as much attention focused on the rumors that Trump’s gaze had turned once again to North Korea. Addressing suggestions he would meet Kim, the President told reporters, “I’d be open 100 percent. I get along very well with Kim Jong-un.” A meeting never materialized, but speculation – and tension – has only grown since.  Days after Trump’s departure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrived as part of his own tour of Asia. In Seoul, he became the first defence secretary in nearly eight years to visit Panmunjeom, the border village

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

How much did Trump really know about Epstein?

The main thing that has made the Epstein files seem politically (as opposed to morally) significant is that Donald Trump remains obsessed with preventing them from seeing the light of day. He thus devoted much of Wednesday to importuning Republicans such as Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert not to back their release. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican,” Trump declared, “would fall into that trap.” But senior Republicans, as Politico reported, are expecting mass vote defections in the coming week as legislators prepare to vote for a disclosure bill sponsored by Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene says that releasing the files is “not only

Freddy Gray

The bonfire of the New Right’s vanities

The American right has a problem: it can’t stop talking about itself. Commentators, academics and journalists of what used to be called a “conservative” persuasion all tend to think that their ideas are tremendously interesting. And, in the way a difficult child becomes argumentative when he or she isn’t getting attention, they fight. They fear irrelevance and so they fall out with each other and take sides in order to prove to themselves that they have something worth saying. Things become messy and nasty and everybody gets carried away – usually in the hope of grabbing their own slice of an all-too easily distracted online audience. (Why else am I

new right
Gavin Mortimer

A decade after Bataclan, France is more divided than ever

Ten years ago on Thursday, Islamist terrorists massacred 130 people in a coordinated attack across Paris. It was the heaviest loss of life on French soil since World War Two, and those who perished – as well as the 350 who were wounded – were remembered yesterday in a series of commemorations. Emmanuel Macron visited the six sites where the terrorists struck, among them the Stade de France and the Bataclan concert hall, and the President inaugurated a memorial garden at Place Saint-Gervais, opposite Paris City Hall. According to the Élysée Palace ahead of proceedings, the day would be an opportunity for the nation “to honor the memory of those

bataclan
Matt Ridley

Among the lords of tech

“What’s missing?” the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at Los Angeles, laid out in the haze below us. “Cranes!” he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital “bits” instead of physical “atoms” because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing. Traveling with the upbeat co-founders of the Rational Optimist Society, Stephen

tech

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Trump becoming a lame duck?

No sooner did Democrats in the Senate reach a deal to end the federal government shutdown than a frenzy of liberal pearl clutching ensued. The Democrats should have held out longer, they argued. Healthcare subsidies could have been rescued. Donald Trump’s approval ratings were plunging. Golly, maybe the Democrats could even have driven the dreaded Trump from office? Jonathan Chait’s verdict in the Atlantic was not untypical: “Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake.” Don’t believe a word of it. The surprising thing isn’t that Democrats folded. It’s that they held out as long as they did. In the end, the moderate Democratic Senators, ranging from Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman to Nevada’s Catherine

Monday

Theo Padnos

The jihadist I knew: my life as al-Sharaa’s prisoner

As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al-Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus. Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al-Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria. Whatever else might be said about the old regime of Bashar al-Assad, no one was ever in doubt as to who was in charge. There were

Sunday

Michael Evans

Why is Trump sending an aircraft carrier to Venezuela?

Venezuela has been on tenterhooks for weeks, waiting as the United States gathers an armada of warships. The world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, looks likely to arrive in the Caribbean from the Mediterranean early next week to join the assortment of destroyers, frigates, amphibious assault vessels and a nuclear-powered submarine.  No one seems to know exactly what this magnificent display of American naval firepower is all about. Has it been sent to destroy the cocaine smuggling networks in Venezuela, or topple President Nicolás Maduro, the egregious leader of that poor country? Or is its purpose to remind the Latin American region that the US under Donald Trump

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Why is it only left-wing leaders who are allowed to be young?

There was a time when the French left turned its nose up at all things American. Too low-brow for them. Not now. The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral race has caused much joie de vivre in left-circles. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Gallic Bernie Saunders and the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise, described Mamdani’s win as “very good news.” The general secretary of the center-left Socialist party, Olivier Faure, posted a smiley face on X above a headline in Le Monde, hailing Mamdani as “the youngest mayor in New York history.” Mamdani referenced his age during his victory speech in Brooklyn. “The conventional wisdom would tell you

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Pelosi
Jacob Heilbrunn

Who will replace Pelosi in Republican demonology?

Nancy Pelosi’s career is ending as it began. She entered Congress in 1986 during the Reagan administration and is ending it under the most influential Republican president since the Gipper. On Thursday she released a six-minute video announcing her retirement in 2027 from Congress, the latest octogenarian to depart it. No sooner did this contagonist announce that she would not seek reelection, than Donald Trump crowed that he had outlasted her. Old age, it seems, is no barrier to a slanging match. A few days ago the 85-year old Pelosi called him an “evil creature.” Now Trump, on the verge of becoming an octogenarian himself, returned the favor. She was

Thursday

Lisa Haseldine

Is Germany ready for military service?

It’s finally crunch time for Boris Pistorius’s plan to reintroduce military service in Germany. Following a delay of several months thanks to the country’s snap federal election campaign at the start of the year, the defense minister’s new “Modernization of Military Service” draft law is currently being debated in Berlin. Under Pistorius’s proposals, all 18-year-olds will be asked to complete a questionnaire that will gauge their willingness and ability to carry out military service. For men, the quiz will be compulsory; for “other genders” – including women – it will be optional. Those who declare themselves willing to serve will be invited for a formal assessment for recruitment into the

military
ian williams china rare earths
Ian Williams

China is holding the West to ransom over rare earths

China’s naked weaponization of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s “four pests” campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm. Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisors reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to

Tim Shipman

What the UK can learn from Trump’s second term

When John Swinney, the Scottish National Party leader, and former ambassador Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. “If you’re going to do it,” Scotland’s First Minister suggested, “you might as well go big.” This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term. When Trump visited Chequers,

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

New York is not the city that Mamdani pretends it is

There is an unhappy history of left-wing Britons getting involved in US elections. Back in 2004, the Guardian – the flagship organ of the British left – organized a letter-writing campaign, urging voters in the swing state of Ohio not to re-elect George W. Bush. The good people of Ohio didn’t take kindly to a bunch of North Londoners telling them how to vote, and although the Guardian’s campaign probably can’t be given all the credit, the voters of Ohio duly went to the polls and swung firmly behind Bush. One wishes that London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s intervention in this week’s election in New York might have had a similar result. Interviewed shortly

New York
Charles Lipson

Far left is the new face of the Democratic party

If you think America doesn’t permit assisted suicide, you haven’t been watching the New York mayoral election. The city is deliberately killing itself. The country’s largest city, its financial and media capital, had a choice among three truly dreadful candidates: a deeply-tarnished former governor, a Republican who runs in every election except Homecoming Queen and had no chance of winning this one (but refused to withdraw), and a young socialist with a winning smile, dreamy programs, Islamist allies, and zero administrative experience. Predictably, New York voters chose the absolute worst. Zohran Mamdani won handily. Now, they’ll have to live with Mamdani’s socialist programs, which fail everywhere and break the bank

Mamdani
Heather Mac Donald

The cost of Zohran

William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. New York City is about to be governed by the Columbia University student body. A city that used to think of itself as grown up has just elected a mayor who seems the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled and self-important, enjoying a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilization about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn. American college students regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience

trans lesbians
Brendan O’Neill

Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians’?

So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offense? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room. Ms. Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered a man who identifies as a woman in the changing area of