World

Wednesday

Natasha Hausdorff

Israel is not conducting a genocide in Gaza

Since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, the Jewish State’s most vociferous critics have been busy. Their most egregious claim is that Israel is committing a genocide. As is so often the case with Israel, the crimes it is accused of are rooted in an inversion of the truth. Israel’s critics must stop politicising and weaponising international law to spread blood libels Genocide has been committed during this conflict: by Hamas terrorists who rampaged through southern Israel and massacred over 1,000 innocents, targeting Jews. They executed their barbaric atrocities in the hope this would inspire simultaneous attacks on Israel’s other borders. On that day, Yahya Sinwar’s terror

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

Putin has no interest in peace

It was Groundhog Day in Istanbul’s Ciragan Palace. On one side of the grand conference room sat a long row of slab-faced young Russian apparatchiks, their faces unknown to all but the most dedicated Kremlinologists. On the other, a rather more high-powered and macho group of Ukrainians, many in Nato-regulation military fatigues, filed in to waste another day of their time. During Monday’s hour-long session no substantial issues were discussed, no talking points were even touched upon, no path to peace was opened.  From the Kremlin’s point of view, the talks in Istanbul are not for seeking a peaceful compromise, but rather, as former President Dmitry Medvedev bluntly put it,

James Heale James Heale

Is the public ready for difficult decisions on defence?

16 min listen

Former Commander of Joint Forces Command – and one of the authors of the Strategic Defence Review – General Sir Richard Barrons joins Lucy Dunn and James Heale to talk through the main conclusions of the review, and the questions it raises. Labour have talked up the fact that this is the first government in a generation to not reduce the size of the armed forces. But, as Sir Richard explains, difficult choices await politicians and the public if the UK wants to be more prepared, and faster, for potential threats. Produced by Patrick Gibbons. 

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France’s border patrol is playing a losing game

In a 24-hour period at the weekend, 184 migrants were rescued in the English Channel by the French coastguard. The most southerly group that got into trouble was picked up off Fort-Mahon in the Somme Department, and the most northerly were off Dunkirk, more than 80 miles up the coast. The coastguard was also called to incidents in Wimereux and Grand-Fort-Philippe. In other words, it is not just England that is being invaded. So is France, its rugged coastline saturated by thousands of predominantly young men all intent on crossing the Channel. I’ve written before of their violent desperation: the mob who last year attacked a group of hunters who

Jonathan Spyer

Why Hamas won’t accept Witkoff’s Gaza ceasefire offer

US Envoy Steve Witkoff finally received an answer to his latest proposal for a ceasefire and hostage exchange in Gaza over the weekend from Hamas: a no in all but name. This apparent rejection by the terror group confirms the essential issue under dispute in the conflict. The Gaza Islamist movement is determined to secure a situation in which Israeli forces withdraw from the territory and in which Hamas can begin the process of replenishing and reorganising its own forces and capacities. Any agreement which threatens to reduce the main asset Hamas holds to prevent Israel from executing a full push towards its destruction – namely, the remaining Israeli hostages

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Jews in America are under attack

In Boulder, Colorado, eight elderly Jews were torched alive in a park. They wore red T-shirts bearing the names of hostages seized by Palestinian terrorists over 600 days earlier. Some carried Israeli flags. Walking peacefully in memory and solidarity, they were attacked with fire as a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails created flames as high as a tree. An 88-year-old Holocaust survivor was among the injured. The attacker, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, is reported to be an Egyptian national in the country illegally. He has been charged with 16 counts of attempted murder. Even as Jews in America are being attacked with increasing regularity, we have not seen the birth of a

Monday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The rush to blame Israel is bad for journalism

If the war in Gaza has taught the world anything, it is this: truth in war is rarely immediate. In the fog of conflict, facts take time, evidence can be manipulated and early narratives are often weaponised. Yet time and again, much of the international media – and too many public officials – refuse to learn this lesson. Faced with shocking claims, particularly when they implicate Israel, they rush to publish, to condemn, to headline. Rarely do they wait for verification. Even more rarely do they correct with the same urgency when the facts unravel. In the fog of conflict, facts take time, evidence can be manipulated and early narratives are often

Bartek Staniszewski

What Karol Nawrocki’s triumph means for Poland

Karol Nawrocki – the Law and Justice candidate – is the winner of Poland’s 2025 presidential election following a dramatic turn of events. Despite the final exit poll declaring Civic Platform’s Rafał Trzaskowski to be the winner by a margin of 0.6 percentage points, as the votes started coming in over the night, it was Nawrocki who ended up ahead with 51 per cent of the vote. The Law and Justice candidate managed to overcome the odds to become President, but the result will likely be a political standstill that will leave both sides unhappy. The two parties have been at each other’s throats History does not repeat itself, but

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The real cause of French football hooliganism

Soon after Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) thrashed Inter Milan five-nil to win the Champions League, Ousmane Dembélé urged fans not to go wild. ‘Let’s celebrate but without breaking everything in Paris,’ said the PSG striker. His plea fell on deaf ears. Two have died, shops were looted, bus stops vandalised, cars torched and police attacked as Paris succumbed to an orgy of violence. The worst of the rioting was on the Champs-Élysées, where police came under fire from projectiles, including fireworks, and dozens of arrests were made. In total, 563 people were detained and the Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau labelled them ‘barbarians… who had come to commit crimes and provoke the

Dalibor Rohac

The Polish right is radicalising

In some ways, Poland’s presidential election on Sunday seems a simple continuation of the country’s long-standing status quo. Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s ‘populist’ new president, is expected to extend the existing gridlock between the president’s office and the cabinet, controlled respectively by Law and Justice (PiS) and Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO). The close result in the run-off, moreover, appears to be in line with the deep polarisation of Polish public opinion between two camps that increasingly see each other as enemies, not just as political opponents. Poland’s right is radicalising and blurring its traditionally sharp foreign policy thinking Yet, this short-term continuity should not blind us to signs of looming

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Ireland has been consumed by hatred of Israel

A new religion blights the Republic of Ireland. Catholicism has been supplanted by a far more cultish creed. Its doctrines are declared with great fervour, its icons scar every town and village. You will struggle to find one person who has not converted to this strange and all-consuming faith. Its name? Israelophobia. I knew Ireland was hostile to Israel but I had no idea how bad things had got. It’s suffocating. Wherever you go, whether city or bog, you’ll see it and hear it – that swirling animus for the Jewish State. The political class speaks of little else. The media are feverishly obsessed. From every political party, every TV

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine has dealt a stunning blow to Russia

During their spat in the Oval Office in February, Donald Trump infamously told his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, ‘You don’t have the cards’ to play against Russia. It now appears that Trump could not have been more wrong if he tried. Yesterday, Ukraine inflicted a stunningly unexpected act of sabotage on Russia, directing a flotilla of explosive-laden drones at a number of airbases right across the country. Ukraine worked across three time zones to launch 117 drones, successfully blowing up 41 nuclear-capable bomber jets at four air bases across Russia Dubbed ‘Operation Spider’s Web’, Ukraine worked across three time zones to launch 117 drones, successfully blowing up 41 aircraft, including nuclear-capable

Saturday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Where have all the Japanese tourists gone?

Is the Japanese tourist, for so long in good numbers a welcome and reliable fixture at our most famous tourist spots, now in serious decline? The number of Japanese travelling abroad is still well down on pre-Covid times and with government data just released revealing that fewer and fewer Japanese even hold a passport, the slump could be prolonged, which would be disastrous for the UK tourism and hospitality industry. According to the Japanese government, only around 17 per cent of Japanese adults currently hold a passport, a significantly lower rate than the US and UK (50 and 85 per cent respectively). It seems the Japanese are less and less inclined

Matthew Gould

Israel is going too far

I have kept my silence on the Middle East for ten years. I left Israel in 2015, after five years as British ambassador, as the first Jew in the role. Since then, I have turned down every request to be a talking head. Neither the world nor my successors needed another ex-ambassador pundit. But I now feel obliged to break my silence, just once, to say that the Israeli government’s treatment of the Gazan population is both wrong and self-defeating. And that it is not anti-Israel or pro-Hamas to say that withholding humanitarian aid is not the answer. The situation is the opposite of straightforward. It is not just that

Friday

James Tidmarsh

How can France ban outdoor smoking?

Faced with a cost-of-living crisis, rising delinquency, failing public services, and riots in the suburbs, the French government has finally sprung into action  –  it’s banning smoking outdoors. Not entirely, of course, just in places where children might be. The new rules, coming into force in July, prohibit lighting up in any space ‘frequented by children’, which is as vague and self-important as it sounds. We’re told this includes parks, beaches, bus stops and pavements near schools. Where else? No one knows. What is clear is that the state is now more concerned with puffing parents, than with knife crime or collapsing hospitals. This isn’t really about second-hand smoke. It’s

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Has Serbia really fallen foul of Moscow?

Is it getting harder for Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić to maintain his balancing act between Moscow and the West? Why else, after all, would Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) suddenly revive a year-old story about covert arms supplies to Ukraine? Back in June of last year, the Financial Times splashed the story that Serbia had exported around €800 million (£673 million) worth of ammunition to third parties that then ended up being transferred to Ukraine. At the time, Vučić did not try to deny this, but said that it had nothing to do with Serbia. ‘We have had many contracts with Americans, Spaniards, Czechs, others,’ he said. ‘What they do

Andrew Tettenborn

Britain’s Gulf trade deal is not the place for virtue signalling

Rachel Reeves announced that a trade deal with the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) – in other words, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states – was imminent last week. It was then leaked that, even though the deal was with unashamed petrostates with no time for net zero and, in some cases, a distinctly doubtful record on rights, the text imposed no legal duties in respect of human rights, modern slavery or the environment. The trade unions and human rights groups are unhappy. The TUC wants any deal to be conditional on workers’ rights protection; the Trade Justice Movement and other earnest humanitarian activists are demanding binding commitments on human rights

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why the Japanese don’t believe Fukushima is safe

Soil samples from Fukushima, the prefecture where Japan’s Dai-Ichi Nuclear reactor exploded in 2011 sending plumes of radioactive material into the sky, will be transported to the garden of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba to serve as flower beds. Far from horticultural, the real purpose is to reassure the Japanese people that Fukushima is now safe and to allow the government to get on with the colossal task of moving the mountains of top soil now stocked in the prefecture around Japan to be used for agriculture and as building materials. The Fukushima nuclear ‘disaster’ would perhaps be better named the ‘almost disaster’ The government are resorting to this stunt –

Laurie Wastell

America is coming for Britain’s social media censors

In 2021, after the barbaric Islamist murder of Sir David Amess MP, the response of Britain’s political class was as baffling as it was shameful: it decided to ramp up censorship of the internet. Somehow, MPs’ vital personal safety came to be equated with the nebulous concept of ‘safety’ online, along with the protection of ‘democracy’ from hurty words and unapproved opinions. The Online Safety Act (OSA) was born, handing vast new powers to Ofcom to ‘regulate’ what could be said online. If Washington is now looking to apply the thumbscrews to senior British officials pushing social media censorship, it has plenty to choose from Well, that was then, and

Thursday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

America’s white guilt hangover

36 min listen

From the decline of meritocracy to the rise of anti-Western ideology, author Heather Mac Donald joins Freddy Gray to discuss race, merit, and victim hierarchy. Why is the West so desperate to self-cancel? And is now a moment of reckoning considering we’re five years on from the BLM protests?