World

Friday

Eliot Wilson

Will Republican leaders apologise over ‘Stakeknife’?

‘Stakeknife’, a double agent who was an informant for the British Army while working within the innermost counsels of the Provisional IRA, probably cost more lives than he saved. That is the damning verdict of Operation Kenova, which has spent seven years – and £40 million – probing whether Stakeknife was effectively permitted to kill while the security forces watched on. Stakeknife’s identity has never been officially confirmed but it is accepted he was a Belfast man called Freddie Scappaticci, who died last year. Interned in 1971 along with figures like Gerry Adams and Alex Maskey, he was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) by 1974 and

Mark Nayler

Spanish soldiers have exposed the flaw in gender self-ID

Dozens of male Spanish soldiers have legally changed their gender, allegedly to claim benefits intended for women. In doing so, the soldiers have exposed the vacuity of Spain’s so-called ‘trans law’, passed last year by its Socialist-led government. Under Spain’s self-ID law, approved in February 2023 despite objections from the conservative opposition, feminist groups and elements of Spain’s ruling leftist coalition, anyone over the age of 16 can change their legal gender without psychiatric or medical evaluation. According to the Daily Telegraph, which reported the story, soldiers in Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta are already taking advantage of its loopholes: 41 men have switched their legal gender to female, and four of have also changed their names. The majority of these

Daniel Thorpe

Will Erdogan ever get to grips with Turkey’s sky-high inflation?

Inflation and the cost-of-living crisis dominates the agenda in Turkey, ahead of local elections at the end of March. Year-on-year inflation reached 67 per cent in February, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute, breaking a 15-month record and puncturing hopes that high interest rates would put a lid on rapidly increasing prices. For years, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a bitter opponent of high interest rates. ‘Interest rates are the reasons, inflation is the result,’ he roared regularly at political rallies, defying traditional economists. He cites Islamic traditions whereby high interest rates amount to usury, to justify his unorthodox monetary policies. Erdogan was a bitter opponent of high interest rates

Kasra Aarabi and Jason M. Brodsky

Iran is making a mockery of the US

Three sailors have been killed and four seriously wounded after the Houthis attacked the True Confidence merchant ship in the Gulf of Aden this week. According to US forces in the region, the 183-metre long ship was hit by a missile launched from Houthi-controlled Yemen. It’s clear already that the fingerprints of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – the Iranian regime’s paramilitary force – are all over this attack. For starters, the Islamic Republic of Iran had a clear motive. Until a few days ago, the True Confidence was owned by Oaktree Capital Management, a US based asset-management firm – and also the previous owner of the Suez Rajan tanker, which was seized by the US last year after being caught carrying Iranian oil. This latest

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s war-mongering talk is unnerving Europe

Relations between German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron have always been strained but they’re now positively hostile. Media on both sides of the Rhine have laid bare the differences that exist between the two men. Der Spiegel calls it a ‘battle of egos’, while Bild recently ran an article headlined ‘The Dangerous Ice Age’.   Analysing the reason for the glacial relationship that exists between Macron and Scholz, Bild highlighted their different natures: Scholz was ‘stiff, often hesitant, but in the end mostly true to his word’, and a leader who had more faith in the Americans and the British than his EU partners. Macron, on the

Christopher Bedford

Biden’s angry State of the Union address

President Joe Biden compared himself to presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, and his Republican opponents to Hitler, Nazis and the Confederacy during Thursday night’s State of the Union – and that was just in the first ninety seconds. Before two minutes had gone by, he’d lumped the Grand Old Party in with Russian president Vladimir Putin for good measure. Having cracked a decent joke and demagogued his opponents, the President was off to the races. By the third minute, he’d reached his next most important goal: more money for war in Ukraine. By minute four, he’d mentioned former president Donald Trump, though not by name. His ‘predecessor’, as he

Meghan Murphy

Justin Trudeau, am I guilty of pre-crime?

Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the internet, intended it to be a place for everyone. But now the web is being used to undermine democracy and free speech. It has become a tool for the powerful to suppress dissent. ‘That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost,’ Berners-Lee told Vanity Fair in 2018. Today, not only do corporations like Google and Meta dictate what we see online, but, in places like Canada, the government is quickly making itself the gatekeeper. Last year, prime minister Justin Trudeau presented his Online Streaming Act as a means to purportedly support the development of online Canadian content. In fact, the

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Putin may seem confident – but Russia’s future is bleak

How old will you be when Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term ends in 2030? Which of today’s world leaders will still be in office? By that time Putin will have been in power for 29 years, and just under half the population of the Earth at that time will have been born during his reign. On current form, Putin is set to see in at least two more US presidents – or more, if he chooses to stay in power until 2036. Putin has made a fetish of defending a Russian national sovereignty that no one had attempted to destroy When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 many

Douglas Murray

The war in the Middle East has barely begun

The few enquiring minds still left occasionally ask me what the most underreported stories of the current Israel-Hamas conflict are. I tend to reply that there are two. The first is the issue of Israeli refugees. They are not called that inside Israel, where the authorities prefer to refer to them as ‘internally displaced people’. But while the world rightly concerns itself with the internally displaced people inside Gaza, the lack of notice paid to this other story is strange. What we have seen in Gaza is merely an opening skirmish. The real showdown will be with Tehran For the past five months, tens of thousands of Israeli families have

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Who fact checks the BBC’s fact-checkers?

Idon’t suppose it will surprise many Jewish people that BBC Verify – as staffed by people with ‘forensic investigative skills’ – used a rabid pro-Palestinian with links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps when adjudicating on an alleged Israeli attack against a Palestinian aid convoy in Gaza. Verify – a new unit which is, of course, pristine and even-handed – turned to a ‘journalist’ called Mahmoud Awadeyah for an unbiased description of exactly what happened to the convoy, unbothered by the fact that this is a man who danced a jig of joy when Israelis were killed in a rocket attack and warned them that there was more of the

Tom Switzer

Why Republicans are sceptical about funding Ukraine

When US policy-makers supported Nato expansion in the 1990s, it was widely believed that America, as the sole remaining superpower, could impose its will and leadership across the globe. ‘An American century’, ‘indispensable nation’, ‘the unipolar moment’, ‘benign hegemony’ – these became the new buzz-words of Washington’s political class. The rhetoric turned bellicose after 9/11, when outrage over the terrorist attacks, together with the mental habits of global supremacy and American exceptionalism, gave US leaders a clear, overriding sense of mission and purpose. Hillary Clinton reflected this notion of the country’s omni-potence as secretary of state in 2010 when she declared that ‘it is in our DNA’ to believe ‘there

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trump II: Back with a Vengeance

In his under-recognised 2007 book Think Big and Kick Ass: In Business and Life, Donald Trump dedicated a chapter to ‘Revenge’. He wrote: ‘My motto is: always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.’ Vengeance is a lifelong theme in the Donald J. Trump story, narrated as it is by Donald J. Trump. In 1992, he told the interviewer Charlie Rose: ‘I love getting even with people.’ He’s fond of quoting Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Revenge is sweet and not fattening.’ In January this year, after his primary victory in New Hampshire, he reiterated: ‘I don’t get too angry – I get even.’ Trump knows that the presidential

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Never Trumpers were never going to win

‘We fight for every inch,’ declared Nikki Haley after she won her first primary in the District of Columbia last week. Her fight didn’t last long. The former governor of South Carolina managed to win one state primary on Super Tuesday, handing the presidential nomination to Donald Trump. Haley’s campaign is over – and with it went the hopes of the Never Trump movement. Why did the attempt to reclaim the Republican party from Trump fail so badly? There are 340 million people in the US: all the Never Trump campaign needed to do was find one who’d make a more convincing Republican candidate. Not only did no candidate emerge, no

Wednesday

Charles Lipson

The race for the White House is about to get much dirtier

Super Tuesday is over and so is the primary season. Although some states have not voted yet and a few others have not finished counting, the parties’ nominees are now locked in. They were really locked in several weeks ago. Biden had no serious competition and Trump vanquished his two main rivals in the early voting.  Trump’s chief competitors were Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s UN ambassador. The former president effectively clinched the nomination when he beat both decisively on their most favourable terrain: DeSantis in Iowa and Haley in New Hampshire and her home state. Haley stayed in the race

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will Macron sell out to the Saudis?

Britain and its government has a well deserved reputation for kow-towing to foreign investors. But even they (one hopes) would draw a line at allowing a Middle East state to set up shop in the Royal Hospital Chelsea. In France, however, Emmanuel Macron’s government is studying a request from Saudi Arabia to erect its Olympic village in the Invalides during the Paris Olympics this summer.   The site is sacred for the French military. As well as housing the country’s national army museum, it is the site of the Institution Nationale des Invalides, the equivalent of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and is also home to a necropolis containing the tomb of

Tuesday

Amy Wilentz

Gangs are on the verge of taking over Haiti

Haiti seems to be on the verge of complete collapse. In the past few days, the country’s gangs – which already controlled 80 per cent of the capital city of Port-au-Prince – have waged a serious assault against the government while the de facto prime minister Ariel Henry is in Kenya. On Saturday there was a mass prison break, with around 5,000 former prisoners on the loose, some of them notorious gang leaders. Just in the past few days, there have been attacks against police stations, the port, the police academy, border force officials and the international airport. Threats have been made against the state hospital, which was forced to close, and the national palace. US based airlines have

Jane Stannus

Canada’s Orwellian online harms Bill

There’s a way of getting children to eat something they dislike – medicine, for example – where you bury the goods in a spoonful of jam. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are trying this method with their Online Harms Bill C-63. But it may not go down as well as they hoped. The stated intent of the Bill is something every decent person supports: protecting children from online victimisation. Yet behind this noble aim lurks the thought police. This is no exaggeration. This legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime. It’s right there in the text: if a judge believes there are reasonable grounds to ‘fear’

Carson Becker

How can Poland’s Law and Justice party revive its fortunes?

After narrowly losing power in October’s parliamentary elections, Poland’s conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) has spent the last four months battling the reforms of Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who co-founded PiS in 2001 and has served as its chairman since 2003, must now adapt to his role in opposition. On Saturday, Kaczynski said that he would seek another term as the leader of PiS, but this won’t be an easy task. After the excitement of the last few weeks, which has included showdowns with the government over its takeover of public media and the arrests (and subsequent presidential pardon) of two opposition figures, some members of PiS’s

Monday

Roger Kimball

The people should decide on Donald Trump, not the courts

In a big victory for democracy, but a big blow to the partisans of ‘Our Democracy™’, the Supreme Court of the United States just reversed the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court, which had determined that Donald Trump could not appear on the ballot for president in that state.  A coven of anti-Trump activists, desperate to stop the juggernaut that is the Trump train, argued that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment authorised them to remove Trump from the ballot because he had engaged in ‘insurrection’ on 6 January 2021.  Let’s leave aside the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment, designed to apply to rebels who had joined the Confederacy during the Civil

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Does France hold the key to cracking down on Islamist extremism?

Are we being ‘poisoned’ by extremism? The Prime Minister seems to think so. His speech on the steps of Downing Street following the Rochdale by-election described a country where values of tolerance and civility were being deliberately undermined by Islamists and the far right. ‘Islamist extremists and the far right feed off and embolden each other,’ he warned. But in conflating those two threats, the Prime Minister made the same mistake as his predecessors. Jews, with no connection to what is happening in Gaza, are terrified by the uptick in hatred against them Sunak followed the script, endorsed by too many institutions in Britain, that the big threat to our way