World

Sunday

Ian Williams Ian Williams

What’s behind China’s overseas policing drive?

So China wants to make the world more ‘safe, reasonable and efficient’ by training thousands of police officers from across the globe to ‘help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities’. The offer came this week from Wang Xiaohong, China’s minister for public security, at a police forum attended by officials from 122 countries in the eastern city of Lianyungang. There were few details, but then few are needed. Authoritarian countries will see China’s frequently brutal approach to law and order, coupled with its zero tolerance for dissent, as rather appealing – and many will already have invested in the technical side of China’s surveillance state. However, even

Saturday

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Are Hong Kong trade offices just Chinese propaganda machines?

China has reacted with anger at American threats to close Hong Kong’s trade offices in the United States, pledging to ‘take practical and effective measures to resolutely counteract it’, while the territory’s Commerce Secretary accused Washington of ‘slander’. In reality, Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices (HKETOs), which were set up to oversee the territory’s external commercial relations and have some diplomatic privileges, are an anachronism. Now that Hong Kong has been stripped of its autonomy, they appear to have little purpose other than to parrot Beijing. There are three such offices in the US – in Washington DC, New York and San Francisco – and on Tuesday the US

Michael Evans

Biden inches towards authorising Storm Shadows in Russia

Storm Shadow, Britain’s highly-prized, air-launched cruise missile, is not going to win the war for Kyiv against the Russian invaders. However, this particular weapon, along with the American ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) are literally waiting in the wings for Kyiv to launch a new-style, more deadly and more provocative strike on air bases and missile sites deep inside Russia. They could transform the near-31-month war into the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. President Putin has warned that if authority is given for these weapons to be used against targets inside Russia, it would mean war between Russia and Nato. Storm

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Moscow wants to ruin your weekend

When is slower internet better than none at all? When are travel delays more serious a political challenge than threats of nuclear war? These questions acquired particular significance with the news that Stockholm’s Arlanda airport was temporarily closed this week when several drones intruded into its airspace. Investigations are still in progress, but the police are suggesting this was deliberate sabotage and suspicion is already falling on Moscow. It has highlighted what is likely to be a central element of Russia’s emerging political warfare against the West: a strategy of inconveniences. What is the strategic value in such seemingly petty and spiteful acts? The FBI has been accusing Moscow of

Rev'd Dr Helen Hall

Witch hunting is no longer a thing of the past

Witch hunting didn’t end in the Middle Ages. Along Kenya’s Kilifi coast, elderly people are being accused of witchcraft, attacked and killed. At least one person a week is targeted and left unable to return to their own land. One man who did survive recently, 74-year-old Tambala Jefwa, lost an eye and is now covered in scars. Something terrifying seems to have escaped the pages of the history books and is stalking the present. Belief in witchcraft remains common in parts of Africa and, indeed, around the world. Recent events in Kenya are by no means isolated: in the early 2020s, the Democratic Republic of Congo saw an alarming surge

Friday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why is Putin expelling more British diplomats?

Another six bite the dust. The British Embassy in Moscow, already pared to the bone, is being reduced by another six diplomats. Their accreditation has been withdrawn because they were ‘threatening the security of the Russian Federation’ by ‘conducting intelligence and subversive work.’ It is bad news for international stability as diplomatic links become more and more attenuated, but perhaps something of a tribute to Britain. The expulsions reflect a sense that Britain is both a tempting and a legitimate target The Russian media today has been running two strikingly similar stories, one built around a statement from the Public Relations Centre of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the other

Thursday

Jonathan Spyer

Israel is turning its sights on Hezbollah

As its Gaza campaign cools, Israel’s attention is returning northwards. Approximately 60,000 Israelis from northern communities are still refugees. A reckoning between Israel and the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah appears to be only a matter of time. Two significant strikes this week suggest that Israel is preparing for a potentially imminent major confrontation, and broadening the scope of its operations on the northern front. In the first attack, according to reports in Syrian state media, Israeli aircraft hit targets in the Hama area in western Syria on the night of 7-8 September. 18 people were reported killed, and over 43 wounded. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), an opposition-linked website

Paul Stott

The decline and fall of Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and a well-known figure in the Islamic world, has been convicted of the rape and sexual coercion of a woman in a Geneva hotel, after a court overturned an earlier acquittal. Professor Ramadan has been jailed for three years, two suspended, over the 2008 incident. Ramadan was a poster boy for those in authority The verdict marks a remarkable fall from grace for Ramadan, who was raised in exile in Switzerland, and skilfully navigated the Francophone, English and Arabic speaking worlds as an academic, campaigner and theologian. His father, Said Ramadan, was central to the Muslim Brotherhood’s development in Europe.  While Ramadan

Nicholas Farrell

My teenage Interrailing adventures

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna In my life I have nearly killed myself mainly with cigarettes and alcohol and dangerous journeys into the night. I have experienced what awaits you in those places but it is not the sort of thing you can easily talk about or even put into words. It is perhaps too secret. I am also usually skint, so all in all I do not exactly fit the bill as a solid and reliable father figure who commands respect. Yet I have six children, aged nine to 21, who live with me and their Italian mother, Carla, and I try to do my best. We have been talking about

The Spectator

How to manage migration like the Swedish

In the end, the German state of Thuringia did not fall into the hands of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The party won the most votes in the recent election but was unable to form a coalition, meaning that Björn Höcke will not be the state’s minister-president. This is ideal for him: he can cry foul, claim to represent the true voice of Germany and point to a conspiracy to keep him out of power. His incendiary strain of politics proved more popular than the more moderate version of the AfD in Saxony, which held elections the same day. These will all be lessons taken into consideration ahead of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: State pension to rise, prisoners released early and a new owner for The Spectator

Home The government won by 348 to 228 a Commons vote on limiting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners to those who qualified by poverty: 52 Labour MPs didn’t vote, one voted with the opposition; five MPs suspended from the Labour party also voted with the opposition. Three million people who began receiving the ‘new’ state pension after 2016 will be given £460 a year more from April 2025, in line with wage growth of 4 per cent. A bill was published to exclude the 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Mel Stride was knocked out of the contest for the leadership of the Conservative party; Robert Jenrick, with

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

There’s still everything to play for in America’s election

The first presidential debate of 2024 changed history by killing off Joe Biden’s career. The second presidential debate was nowhere near as dramatic, for the simple reason that it did not feature the President. Instead, Kamala Harris, Biden’s Vice President and now the Democratic party’s nominee, stood on stage at the National Constitution Center in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night and presented herself as a sort of change candidate for continuity, or perhaps a continuity candidate for change. This audacious move ought to be highly implausible, yet so far she seems to have got away with it. Certainly, by any fair measure, she won the debate and was duly rewarded with

Austin Williams

Why are Chinese students giving up on architecture?

I recently convened an urban studies summer school in a top university in Shanghai and asked the assembled class of architectural master’s students: ‘Who wants to be an architect?’ Not one hand was raised. This was not the typical reticence of Chinese youngsters; this was a class of architectural students who have given up on architecture. They are all hoping to escape architectural education, so that they might progress to classes in AI, digital transformation or some other hi-tech sector where they believe jobs exist. For them, architecture is a dead end. As my Chinese students are discovering, there are too few jobs in the sector, the pay is low

Wednesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

What did we learn from the Harris Trump debate?

24 min listen

Millions of viewers tuned in to watch the first debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last night. Was there really any big winner from the evening? Freddy Gray is joined by Sarah Elliott, spokeswoman for Republicans Overseas UK, to assess the highlights and discuss where the race might go following their first interaction.

Eliot Wilson

Ukraine should be able to use its long-range weapons as it pleases

President Joe Biden has hinted that the United States may shortly lift the restrictions it has placed on Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons. Until now, the US has forbidden the Ukrainian armed forces from using ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles to strike targets far beyond the border with Russia; this policy has been mirrored by the United Kingdom, which limits how the Storm Shadow cruise missiles it has supplied can be used. This change in policy, if it does materialise, is overdue, but welcome. ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles give Ukraine the ability to hit targets hundreds of miles away: the former has a range of around 190 miles, the latter

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Scholz loses his temper as Germany’s migration debate rages

Ding ding! It’s not just in Westminster that the debate over illegal migration has got politicians tearing chunks out of each other. Over in Berlin, an emotional Olaf Scholz got up in front of the Bundestag to give his opponents a piece of his mind. The Chancellor’s speech was meant to be about the budget, but soon veered off track onto migration. In front of a room of rowdy, heckling parliamentarians, the Chancellor attacked the CDU leader of the opposition, Friedrich Merz: ‘You are the type of politician who believes that he has solved the migration issue simply with an interview in Bild am Sonntag. That’s not how it works in reality!’

Terry Barnes

Australia’s social media ban for children won’t work

I was born in the final years of the baby boom. To my generation of children, a social network was our mothers gossiping over the back fence or at the shops. Parents cannot contract out their responsibilities to government But, thanks to a miracle of nature and science, I’m also a father later in life, blessed with a five-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, who is happy, intelligent, and learning fast and precociously about the world around her. She is also, however, happy to be glued to a screen, and can find her way around an iPad and YouTube on my phone. Whether I want her to or not, it won’t be all

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The EU is disintegrating before our eyes

Germany’s decision to reintroduce border controls in an attempt to halt mass immigration is awkward for Keir Starmer. A fortnight ago the British Prime Minister, a friend of European free movement, visited Berlin and among the issues he discussed with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were trade, defence and immigration. Things are so bad that Draghi admitted to having ‘nightmares’ about Europe’s future if nothing is done to halt the ‘slow agony’ of economic decline A few days before Starmer’s visit, three people were killed at a diversity festival by a suspected Syrian refugee. Germany’s decision to tighten its borders (initially for six months but this could be extended) is partly a

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: the key moments in the Trump-Harris debate

On Tuesday night the former President Donald Trump and the current Vice President Kamala Harris faced off in Philadelphia for the first presidential debate since Joe Biden’s disastrous fall from grace earlier this year.  The debate, moderated by ABC, took place over 90 minutes, and saw the candidates clash on immigration, Trump’s rallies, and Afghanistan. A snap CNN poll commissioned after the debate saw 63 per cent say Harris had won, compared to 37 per cent for Trump.  Here are the key moments from the debate: Kamala Harris goads Trump over his rallies As the section of the debate on immigration began – arguably one of Kamala Harris’s weakest areas – the

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Donald Trump was his own worst enemy in this debate

‘So I think you’ve heard tonight two very different visions for our country,’ Vice President Kamala Harris insisted in her closing remarks at last night’s presidential debate. Viewers, I suspect, may disagree. This was not a debate where we learned anything new. There was no great ‘vision’ put forward by Harris or Donald Trump. Public policy was barely touched upon. If what the candidates discussed in terms of specific plans is really their great vision for the United States – distorting the housing market, jacking up prices on consumers – then Americans should be very worried indeed. For a country facing a myriad of economic and existential problems, nothing mentioned