World Archives

Tuesday

April 28, 2026

Why has Trump turned on India?

President Donald Trump, not someone to let a good insult go to waste, has caused outrage in India after sharing a social media post describing the country as a “hellhole.” Trump did not make the disparaging remarks himself, merely reposting the statement (without comment) on his Truth Social account. The words actually came from the conservative podcast host Michael Savage, as part of an attack on birthright citizenship. “A baby born here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet,” the Savage said. He accused Indian immigrants in the tech industry of not hiring white native-born Americans,

Monday

April 27, 2026

Freddy Gray

The rise of left-wing violence and why we’re all numb to it

The alleged gunman from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has been named as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen. He was arrested at the scene armed with a shotgun, handgun and multiple knives. It later emerged the suspect sent a note to family members before the shooting, apologizing to parents, colleagues and bystanders for what he was about to do. He wrote: “I apologize to everyone… who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.” He added that he may have given “a lot of people a surprise today” and, although he did not name President Trump directly in

SAS: how Starmer broke the special forces alliance with America

Freddy Gray

SAS: how Keir Starmer broke the special forces alliance with America

The Pentagon has become concerned with the British government’s attitudes toward its special forces. Freddy speaks to Richard Williams and David Davis MP about the historical significance of the special forces relationship and how America is now considering withdrawing the invitation to participate in and benefit from this combined military machine.

Jawad Iqbal

The targeting of Trump tells its own tale

“I can’t imagine that there’s any profession that is more dangerous,” Donald Trump told reporters just hours after the shooting incident at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, DC. This is true enough. Violence against US presidents is, unfortunately, nothing new. Everyone knows this long and bloody history all too well. It includes the killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963; the two assassination attempts within days of each other on President Gerald Ford in 1975; and the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life, when he was shot and seriously wounded at the Washington Hilton hotel – the same venue at which Saturday’s attempted shooting took place – in 1981. Even so,

Saturday

April 25, 2026

John Foreman

Ukraine won’t give up at the behest of Donald Trump

Four years after President Putin bragged that he would “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine, it still stands free. Talking to locals, expats, journalists and diplomats recently in Kyiv, I found a profound sense of realism and a confidence. Ukraine’s military strength is burgeoning. Its people are determined to see things through. They are cautiously optimistic. Although life is looking up after an exceptionally difficult winter, one astute insider noted that the country faces the same strategic challenges: a larger, implacable, and cunning enemy; economic fragility; $500 billion damage to infrastructure; US hostility; and steady civilian and military deaths. The faces of the fallen were everywhere. Two days before my arrival, Russia had launched almost 1,000

Friday

April 24, 2026

Daniel DePetris

The contempt Trump feels for his NATO allies is mutual

The war in Iran has revealed plenty about America’s ability to inflict damage on its enemies, Tehran’s capacity to resist pressure and Washington’s broader tendency to get itself stuck in the Middle East – a region several US presidents planned to extricate from. The conflict has been paused since April 7 due to a ceasefire that Trump extended earlier in the week. But it is nonetheless revealing a gradual systemic shift in the so-called international order that has been bubbling beneath the surface for years. The movable object is none other than the transatlantic alliance which, through NATO, has bound the United States and most of Europe into a single

Eliot Wilson

Why Trump is threatening the Falklands

There are still those who argue that President Trump’s aggressive, impulsive and inconsistent foreign policy is radical and disruptive, and because of this delivers results. The jury remains out on that. But there is one aspect of international affairs in which Trump is at a marked disadvantage. This is an expression of anger, not a policy The President is often governed by impulse, satisfying his instinct of the moment. That has been underlined by a leaked email from the Department of Defense, setting out a list of potential punishments for countries which so far have failed to support Trump’s military action against Iran, Operation Epic Fury. The lack of cooperation

Thursday

April 23, 2026

Alexander Larman

Russell Brand is everything that is wrong with the world

There are few stranger public careers than that of Russell Brand, the former “comedian” turned MAGA cheerleader-in-chief. He has given an interview to Tucker Carlson, another figure who has been on his own peculiar journey, and has announced his intention of running for Mayor of London in 2028, on a vaguely defined but somehow sinister platform that includes “pragmatic” democracy for “people who live in London, who love London.” He is the strutting, peacocking representation of all that is wrong in contemporary society Brand has railed against most of Sadiq Khan’s innovations, asking: “Do you want ULEZ cameras? Do you want congestion charges? Do you want this type of policing

Gavin Mortimer

France isn’t ready for its first openly gay president

France is ready to elect its first openly gay president. That is the belief of Gabriel Attal, who discusses his homosexuality in the memoir that was published yesterday. Attal became the first gay prime minister of the Republic when he was nominated by Emmanuel Macron in January 2024. At 34, he was also the youngest, a man described as a “mini Macron.” Attal is busily promoting his oeuvre – En Homme Libre (As a Free Man) – with media interviews and book-signing appearances. He told one radio station yesterday that being gay was “not at all” a barrier to becoming president. “Our country is more open and tolerant than it

Wednesday

April 22, 2026

Jawad Iqbal

Who is really leading Iran?

In declaring an extension to the ceasefire in the Iran war, President Trump signaled clearly enough that he would prefer to strike a peace deal with Tehran. J.D. Vance, the Vice President, has been kicking his heels, waiting to return to the Pakistani capital Islamabad for another go at achieving a breakthrough. The Iranians keep blowing hot and cold on whether they are ready to play their part. Trump suggested in a social media post earlier this week that he believes this is because Iran’s government is “seriously fractured.” His ceasefire extension is aimed at allowing the regime time to deliver a new proposal. Trump may want to hammer everything

Alexander Kolyandr

Is Russia’s economy really on its last legs?

The head of Swedish military intelligence has dropped what he clearly regards as a bombshell. Thomas Nilsson told the Financial Times this week that Russia’s economy is far weaker than it appears, that the Kremlin systematically manipulates its statistics to fool Ukraine’s Western allies, and that the central bank is understating inflation, which he believes is closer to 15 percent than the official 5.86 percent. For good measure, he endorsed the German intelligence service BND’s earlier estimate that Russia’s budget deficit is understated by $30 billion. One need not be a Kremlin agent to find this less than convincing. That Russia’s economy is struggling is not in dispute. It lives on a mortgaged future

Tuesday

April 21, 2026

Charlie Gammell

Why Iran doesn’t want peace

Perhaps we should be used to be this by now. Yet again, there have been a flurry of promises to rapidly achieve peace in Iran. Yet again, the American administration has threatened to destroy the nation’s infrastructure. J.D. Vance is again flying to Pakistan for more talks. And yet the conflict shows no sign of ending. We don’t know whether the Iranians will actually turn up. A foreign ministry spokesman said yesterday that Iran will not be joining the talks. The speaker of the parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has also made clear that the regime won’t negotiate under threat of civilizational destruction. Why would they resist peace talks? There is

Anna Paulina Luna

Congress needs an ethics overhaul: Anna Paulina Luna

Washington’s problems are not hidden. Many of them simply go unaddressed. On Capitol Hill, “open secrets” persist because Congress has chosen to look the other way. Ask almost any staffer on Capitol Hill, and they can tell you which offices to avoid, which members have a reputation and which situations are quietly tolerated because confronting them would be politically inconvenient. Rumors are not just whispered behind closed doors; they are broadcast to virtually anyone dialed in to the right frequency. Leadership hears them. Colleagues hear them. The press often hears them too. And still nothing happens. Awareness is not the problem. The blatant absence of accountability is. When misconduct is tolerated

Ian Williams

The Iran war is giving Xi the upper hand with Trump

China’s largest trade show is now under way in the southern city of Guangzhou. The Canton Fair is a colossal month-long affair with around 32,000 exhibitors and is often described as a shop window for Chinese manufacturers – a barometer of the China trade – where just about anything and everything can be bought. This year the mood is subdued. “The specter of the Iran war hung heavy like the banners inside the gigantic exhibition halls,” as Bloomberg described it. Exhibitors reportedly complained of soaring costs and falling orders, most notably from the Middle East. China’s economy is highly dependent on exports, and the show’s opening coincided with President Xi

Freddy Gray

Why Trump hasn’t stuck the knife into Starmer

As public messages of support go, it scored pretty low on the conviction-o-meter. “Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom acknowledged that he ‘exercised wrong judgment’ when he chose his Ambassador to Washington,” said President Donald Trump on Truth Social last night. “I agree, he was a really bad pick. Plenty of time to recover, however! President DJT.” Uh oh. None of the trademark capitalization, which suggests Donald’s heart isn’t really in it. Some aide must have just spoken to him about Keir Starmer’s Peter Mandelson crisis, or perhaps a news story came to his attention. You know a British prime minister is in trouble when an American president

Charles Cornish-Dale

Iran is winning the meme war

The opening strikes on Iran forced the country’s military to operate without a centralized command structure. Despite this enormous setback, something like a unified approach has emerged, and nowhere is that more evident than on social media. Iran’s embassies have become meme factories, centers of information warfare churning out images and videos designed to do just one thing: mock the US and Israel and, in particular, Donald Trump. Courtesy of Iran’s overseas missions, we’ve now seen Donald Trump as a minion from Despicable Me; a Lego man fleeing a Lego Jeffrey Epstein; and a Pirate of the Caribbean trying, and failing, to hijack the Strait of Hormuz. My personal favorite came when Trump

Monday

April 20, 2026

Klaus Dodds

Trump’s costly armchair geography

In the 19th century, the geographer and explorer David Livingstone was scathing of what he described as “easy-chair geographers” – authors and mapmakers who produced maps and treatises about the non-European world without ever leaving their learned society or personal office. Donald Trump is a latter-day armchair geographer. Or judging by photographs repeatedly released by the White House, a president comfortable convening meetings in the Oval Office with large maps displayed by his desk. But whether it is a case of acquiring Greenland or blockading the Strait of Hormuz, maps can be poor substitutes for in-field knowledge and understanding. Blockading seven Iranian ports stretching over several hundred miles of coastline

James Heale

Starmer squirms on Mandelson debacle

Keir Starmer is enduring perhaps his most uncomfortable afternoon in the House Commons since being elected Britain’s Prime Minister. He promised in his opening remarks that he would set out the full timeline of Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador, which ended in Olly Robbins’s dismissal last Thursday. Carefully worded and legally precise, his statement contained another revelation: Chris Wormald, the ex-cabinet secretary, was not told Mandelson had failed the UK Security Vetting interview (UKSV), despite leading an official review. Starmer’s tone was one of scorned hurt and anger. He remarked repeatedly how various facts of the case were “staggering.” “I do not accept,” he said, “that I could not

Matthew Fraser

What happened to Provence?

The best time to visit Provence, I always advise when asked, is in the spring before the scorching heat and summer crowds. I have been spending time in the south of France since the early 1990s. Provence was fashionable in those days. Peter Mayle’s massively successful book, A Year in Provence, inspired thousands to pull up stakes and move to southern France to emulate his idyllic life in the Luberon hills. Some settled farther west in the Dordogne, famously called “Dordogneshire” for its concentration of British expats. Mayle became a one-man publishing industry, following up with sequels including Toujours Provence and Encore Provence. Thirty years ago, I stayed with friends who owned a renovated farmhouse

Blake Neff

Populism curve: what is the supply side of Britain and Europe’s decline?

In his new book Why Populists Are Winning: and How to Beat Them, British MP Liam Byrne argues that it’s time to go after the “supply side” of populism – time, that is, to curb freedom of the press and the right of individuals to spend money on causes they believe in. For a decade, you see, the European and British establishments have focused on quashing the demand side of populism. They have employed police, prison, censorship and shame to stop people from voicing anti-establishment opinions, demanding populist policies or voting for populist parties. They have formed preposterously broad coalitions to exclude populist parties from power. They have had law