Saudi arabia

In this week’s issue, Owen Matthews discusses Vladimir Putin’s endgame in Syria. He says Russia’s bombing of Aleppo this week was intended to send a clear message: that the Russian President is in charge. But Owen says Putin’s strategy is his riskiest yet. What does it mean for the hopes of peace in war-ravaged Syria? And could it be a good thing after all if Putin’s intervention does bring an end to the conflict? On this week’s podcast, Isabel Hardman is joined by Owen Matthews in Istanbul and Robert Service, Emeritus Professor of Russian history at St Antony’s College, Oxford. The Spectator’s Political Editor James Forsyth says Conservatives used to think

Our most-read piece this week was Fraser Nelson’s article about the Swedish government’s refusal to be honest about the crime and immigration. He said: ‘News of an attack brings grief and outrage, but the sense that the authorities are not telling the whole truth brings a new level of anger and suspicion. All of this further undermines public support for immigration.’ Read the article by clicking here The second most-read article was Melanie Phillips’ cover piece on gender. She said that it was dangerous and wrong to tell children they’re gender fluid. In her piece, Melanie added: ‘In short, the political class is obsessed by gender issues. I trust you

The news that the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has issued a fatwa against the game of chess should come as no surprise. There has always been a chequered history of relations between Islamic clerics and practitioners of the world’s most popular board game. Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh is the most powerful Sunni religious figure in Saudi Arabia and issued the fatwa while answering viewers’ questions during his weekly television broadcast ‘With his Eminence the Mufti’. The show was first broadcast in 2014, ‎but the Grand Mufti’s censorious condemnation of chess, during which he compared it to the pre-Islamic Arab game of Maisir, has only this week achieved prominence. According to the Mufti,

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, decided to allow ministers to campaign for either side in the referendum on membership of the European Union, once his negotiations had been concluded on Britain’s relationship with the EU. The government said it was commissioning 13,000 houses to be built by small builders on public land made available with planning permission. Junior doctors decided to go on strike after all, starting with a day next week, after talks between the government and the British Medical Association broke down. In an extraordinarily drawn-out reshuffle, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, replaced Michael Dugher as shadow culture secretary with Maria Eagle, who was

In January 2014, Douglas Murray explained in The Spectator how relations in the Middle East were becoming increasingly tense. With Saudi Arabia having now cut diplomatic relations with Iran, Douglas’s insight seems prescient. Syria has fallen apart. Major cities in Iraq have fallen to al-Qa’eda. Egypt may have stabilised slightly after a counter-coup. But Lebanon is starting once again to fragment. Beneath all these facts — beneath all the explosions, exhortations and blood — certain themes are emerging. Some years ago, before the Arab ‘Spring’ ever sprung, I remember asking one top security official about the region. What, I wondered, was their single biggest fear? The answer was striking and precise: ‘That the region

This is going to be one hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year the greatest Greek writer since Homer turns 80 (but we’ll keep quiet about that for the moment). Our world is so stuck in reverse that a woman who was stabbed in Miami during the Art Basel shindig, and was bleeding and begging for help, was mistaken for an artwork and ignored. The woman survived but will art? Conceptual art must be the biggest con since Bernie Madoff and then some. And speaking of con artists, I’ve never had any respect for Mark Zuckerberg, someone who is reputed to have copied

What does one do, attend or refuse a party after a tragic event such as the recent Paris outrage? My son happens to live next to Place de la République, where the massacre of innocents by those nice Islamists showing off their manhood took place. He was having dinner with his two little children when the shooting started. Luckily, they’re all OK, but I spent a terrible couple of hours trying to get through after the news came over the TV screens. The next evening in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Costume Institute was celebrating The Art of Style with a black-tie dinner honouring Jacqueline de