World

Thursday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Could Dean Phillips be President?

New Hampshire Joe Biden likes to say that ‘democracy is on the ballot’ in 2024. Yet Joe Biden was not on the ballot on Tuesday in New Hampshire. In his absence, a 55-year-old former congressman called Dean Phillips, who started his campaign just ten weeks ago, won 20 per cent of the vote. Biden still won easily as more than 65 per cent of Democratic voters wrote his name in. But the President’s ducking of New Hampshire, and Phillips’s sudden emergence, says a lot about the sorry state of Democratic politics and the gnawing fear that Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump in November. Dean Phillips’s hair is

Wednesday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Who shot down the plane carrying Ukrainian PoWs?

It will prove to be a terrible and tragic irony if it turns out that Kyiv shot down a Russian transport aircraft today that was transporting Ukrainian prisoners of war ready to be exchanged. Around 11 a.m. local time this morning an Il-76 transport aircraft crashed in a fireball near the Russian village of Yablonova in the Belgorod Region, some 35 miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border. Everyone on board was killed. It appears that, perhaps alongside a military cargo, the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoWs – if the claims of the Russian defence ministry are to be believed. As is always the case in this war, multiple and contradictory explanations

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France’s new PM Gabriel Attal is already fighting fires

Gabriel Attal has only been in his job for two weeks but the youngest prime minister in the history of the Fifth Republic is already facing a series of crises. The most pressing issue for the 34-year-old premier is the farmers’ protest, which began last Friday when a blockade was erected on the A64 motorway west of Toulouse.   Early yesterday morning a car drove into the blockade, killing a farmer and her 12-year-old daughter. Details of the crash emerged throughout the day: it was not a deliberate act, the driver and the occupants were foreign and were confused by the protest. Then it was revealed that the three people in

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Donald Trump swallows New Hampshire

Donald Trump has, like a boa constrictor, squeezed the life out of the Republican primary cycle. Last night, he swallowed New Hampshire and possibly Nikki Haley too.  Haley did better than many of the late polls suggested. But that’s not saying much. She won 44 per cent of the vote, finishing 12 points behind Trump. She now has the momentum to move on to South Carolina, where she is thirty points behind in polls. But if she couldn’t win here in New Hampshire, where independents can vote in the Republican primary, it seems unlikely she can win anywhere. Or, as one Trump campaign official at his campaign’s election night watch party in Nashua put

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

It’s not Palestinian blood that is cheap, Humza Yousaf

Sometimes a politician says something that makes you wonder if they’re living on a different planet. This week it was Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf. He said there is a dearth of political concern for the poor people of Gaza. It feels like ‘Palestinian blood is very cheap’, he said. It seems to me that it isn’t concern for Muslim life that motors the protesting classes – it’s contempt for Israel I’m sorry, what? There have been more public displays of sorrow for the people of Gaza than for any other people caught up in a war as far back as I can remember. Solidarity with Gazans is virtually mandatory

Mark Nayler

What Pedro Sanchez should really be apologising for

Spain has approved a pointless amendment to its constitution, replacing the word ‘handicapped’ with the phrase ‘persons with a disability’. Not only did Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who never says sorry for genuine oversights, apologise for the delay in making this happen, but he also announced that he regards himself as having thereby paid a ‘moral debt’ to the country. The notion that this semantic tweak represents major constitutional change, let alone some kind of moral progress, is risible. Is this what is really wrong with Spain at the moment? Is this – finally! – the apology from Sanchez that’s been so long coming? Is this the constitutional issue at the centre

Limor Simhony Philpott

Israel suffers its deadliest day in Gaza

It’s only Tuesday, and already Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had one of the worst weeks since the war against Hamas started last October. Israelis are losing patience with him and his band of self-serving extremist ministers. Netanyahu, whose approval rates were low before the war and have only got lower since it started, is feeling the squeeze. Last night, in the single most deadly incident since the start of the war, 21 Israeli soldiers were killed when buildings collapsed on them following an RPG grenade attack by Hamas in the city of Khan Yunis, southern Gaza. Three soldiers were also killed in a separate earlier incident in the

Jawad Iqbal

How Modi is tearing up India’s secular state

The religious and political symbolism was unmistakable, as the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi led the consecration of a controversial new Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh state, built on the ruins of a 16th century mosque. The Babri Masjid was torn down by Hindu nationalist mobs in 1992, sparking riots across the country that killed about 2,000 people, most of them Muslim. In 2019, India’s Supreme Court ruled that a temple could be built on the site, a decision that was roundly criticised by India’s Muslim minority. Modi spoke of India being at ‘the beginning of a new era’ The festering wounds from this long-running dispute reverberate to this day. The

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Was China’s economic boom ‘made in America’?

53 min listen

Today, the US and China are at loggerheads. There’s renewed talk of a Cold War as Washington finds various ways to cut China out of key supply chains and to block China’s economic development in areas like semiconductors and renewables. There’s trade, of course, but the imbalance in that (some $370 billion in 2022) tilts in China’s favour and only serves as another source of ammunition for America’s Sinosceptics. China, on the other hand, is also decoupling in its own way, moving fast to cut its reliance on imported technology and energy. At this moment, it seems like US-China tensions are inevitable – but look into the not so ancient

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why is Zelensky echoing Putin’s rhetoric?

Today is Ukraine’s Day of Unity which necessarily had to be marked with an expression of national pride. However, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to issue a decree ‘On the Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’ represented not simply that, but an open political challenge to Moscow, and one which strangely echoed Putin’s rhetoric. The decree begins castigating Russia for oppressing Ukrainians ‘in the lands historically inhabited by them,’ which is defined as the ‘modern Krasnodar, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk and Rostov regions’ – a large swathe of south-western Russia. From this, it demands the creation not just of ‘an action plan for preserving the national identity of

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Will Nikki Haley pull out on Wednesday? 

New Hampshire votes tomorrow and today Nikki Haley has just two planned events. She has a morning meet-and-greet in the city of Franklin and a ‘get out the vote rally’ in Salem this evening.  Nobody could accuse Haley of not working hard. She’s famously an industrious woman. But given the make-or-break nature of tomorrow’s vote, her campaign seems strangely lacking in urgency. Yes, she’s spending a fortune on campaign ads. Yes, she’s engaging in slanging matches with Donald Trump, which is a useful fodder for an increasingly desperate media. She’s accused him of being ‘clearly insecure’ and having ‘temper tantrums’ after he mocked her unusual name.  But her campaign just

Nicholas Farrell

Bologna is rebelling against the 30 kph speed limit

Ravenna You’re not supposed to mock the afflicted, I know, but I laughed when I read the news that the left-wing citadel of Bologna has introduced a 30 kph (19 mph) speed limit. Forcing the Italians – a nation of famously crazy drivers who make fabulous sports cars – to drive no faster than cyclists is to deprive them of an essential element of what it means to be Italian. Poor Italians. Is nothing sacred? Not even speed? Probably, thank God, not even globalisation can change the Italian psyche I’ve lived for so many years cheek by jowl with the Italians and their ins and outs that I must confess I

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France’s protesting farmers have spooked Emmanuel Macron

The farmers of France are mobilising. Their anger will be an early test for Gabriel Attal; the countryside is unknown territory for the new prime minister, a young man raised in the affluent suburbs of Paris, like the majority of Emmanuel Macron’s government.  The first dissent was on Friday in the south-west of France, in and around Toulouse. On the motorway linking the city to the Atlantic coast, the farmers erected a barricade with bales of hay that is still in place three days later. Their largest union, the FNSEA, has warned this is likely to be the first of many such actions. Their president, Arnaud Rousseau told the government: ‘What

Sunday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Ron DeSantis’s cursed campaign

Ron DeSantis’ political action committee is called ‘Never Back Down.’ Well, he just did. A week ago, he said of Trump: ‘You can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring he’ll say you’re wonderful.’ Well, he just endorsed Trump for the presidency in 2024. This morning, DeSantis campaign staff batted away speculation that he would imminently quit, saying ‘with 100 per cent certainty’ that DeSantis would fight on to the South Carolina primary next month and beyond. Hours later, Ron proved them wrong. ‘While this campaign has ended, the mission continues,’ he said in a video. Bowing to the seemingly inevitable, he endorsed Donald Trump

Sean Rayment

Israel can’t win in Gaza anymore

The first and most important principle of war for any military campaign is the selection and maintenance of ‘the aim’. The aim must be clear and unambiguous, so that everyone, from the most senior general to the private soldier, understands what is trying to be achieved. Unfortunately for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) the aim of the war in Gaza – the annihilation of Hamas – is neither clear, unambiguous nor achievable. Now the IDF – or more accurately, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is facing the very real risk of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. When Joe Biden, the US president, spoke to Israelis during a brief

Hans-Joachim Voth and Sascha Becker

Did ‘shallow Christianity’ help the Nazis rise to power?

‘Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison,’ C.S. Lewis famously said. In western countries, organised religion has been declining for the last two centuries; Friedrich Nietzsche even declared that ‘God is dead’. Does the decline and fall of religion have political consequences? Can totalitarian ideology grow in the void left by religion? To find the answer, it’s worth looking to 1930s Germany. Did shallow Christianity – a lack of deep-rooted Christian beliefs – make Germans more susceptible to the Nazi party’s message during the years of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power? In the less-than-fertile Christian soils of Germany, there was room

Saturday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Despite three years in prison, Navalny still scares Putin

The March presidential elections in Russia will, of course, be a stage-managed farce, but that doesn’t mean that real politics has been entirely extinguished. It offers a narrow window of opportunity for the opposition to try and connect with the Russian people – so the Kremlin is doing its best to muzzle them. On the third anniversary of his return to Russia on Wednesday, opposition leader Alexei Navalny issued a statement on X (via his lawyers, his only connection with the outside world) intended to bolster his supporters’ morale. He returned from Germany in 2021 following a poisoning attempt that saw government agents lace his underwear with Novichok. Answering the

Terry Barnes

How Australia became obsessed with land acknowledgments

If you attend almost any public meeting or event in Australia these days, you’ll be greeted – some would say confronted – by a mandatory statement before it starts. Even the nation’s parliament now starts the day with this statement, ahead of the centuries-old ritual of reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Known as the Acknowledgment of Country, it is a now all-pervasive ritual of Australian life. Generally, it uses these words: A whole industry has sprung up around Aborigines being hired by event organisers to stage Welcomes to Country We meet here today on the lands of the traditional owners, the (Aboriginal tribe) people, and acknowledge their elders past and present.

Zoe Strimpel

How Israel is failed by its war of words

Sitting in a room at the Israel Defence Forces’ Hakirya base in Tel Aviv, I listened – along with a room full of delegates, mostly European MPs and members of the House of Lords – to a briefing from an IDF spokesman. He was a British-born reservist recruited back to the front lines of Israel’s communications war, and he did not inspire. He repeated basics about what happened on 7 October, and the horror of those events – something that everyone in that room, all there as pretty major fans of Israel, desirous to see it triumph in its hour of adversity, already appreciated. We wanted new information: dispassionately and