World

Jawad Iqbal

Why does Zohran Mamdani want Charles III to return the Koh-i-Noor?

Even those who don’t think much of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s politics might grudgingly concede he has a knack for jumping on causes that resonate with his achingly progressive voter base. The idea of righting the wrongs of imperial history – anywhere, even thousands of miles away – is high on the tick list. Hence Mamdani’s call for King Charles to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond, one of the world’s largest and most controversial jewels, to India. The 105-carat diamond, part of the Crown Jewels, is the subject of a fierce historical dispute, with India claiming that it was stolen during British colonial rule. Leaving aside Mamdani’s political opportunism, what is it

koh-i-noor
Douglas Murray

My night under fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Last Saturday evening, the American media class descended for its annual jamboree of back-slapping at the Washington Hilton. Protesters outside waved signs reading “Death to tyrants” and “Death to all of them.” The atmosphere inside was more jovial. Donald Trump was attending the dinner for the first time since becoming President, along with most of his cabinet and senior officials. We were expecting him to give the assembled media a good roasting – and some of us were looking forward to it. Attendees had to show invitations to get into the hotel, but there were few ID checks and no screening as we went to the pre-parties thrown by the

Brendan O’Neill

The Golders Green atrocity is the final straw

It is undeniable now: war has been declared on British Jews. A fascistic crusade is being waged against our Jewish compatriots. The anti-Semitic atrocity in Golders Green today is further brutish proof of this unsettling fact. We’ve had fire bombings at synagogues, the murder of Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and now this frenzied knifing of Jews in London. There can be no more equivocating – this is a moral emergency. The most sickening thing about today’s knife pogrom is that it was entirely predictable The scenes from Golders Green are truly grim. Video clips show the suspect wielding his knife with demented fury at two visibly Jewish men.

golders green
Peter Wood

Mamdani vs monarchy

Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York has faced what others might consider awkward moments in office, as when two Islamists, inspired by ISIS, tried to immolate anti-Muslim protesters outside Gracie Mansion. He passed it off with aplomb by saying the two bomb-carrying individuals were “suspected of coming here to commit an act of terrorism.” In a later statement he acknowledged that the two men had proclaimed “their allegiance to ISIS.”  That counts for boldness on Mamdani’s part. He is considerably more comfortable denouncing Israel, defending the “globalize the intifada” slogan and lamenting anti-Muslim bigotry, than he is in acknowledging New York’s history of terror attacks by Islamists.  It’s therefore possible that when he meets with Charles III and Queen Camilla to lay a wreath at the ceremony for victims of the 9/11 atrocity, the Mayor might spare a

zohran mamdani

Ukraine

Alexander Kolyandr

Why Ukraine’s Russian oil strikes are backfiring

Every drone Ukraine fires at a Russian oil terminal is meant to defund Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Right now, each one may be doing the opposite. Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil export infrastructure are intended to starve Moscow of the budget revenues that fund its war machine. The logic is straightforward: disrupt exports, reduce revenues, constrain the war effort. Kyiv has been explicit about this: Ukrainian officials consistently frame attacks on oil terminals as direct hits on Russia’s war chest, treating every barrel that cannot be shipped as a ruble that cannot be spent on missiles or mobilization. Reuters puts the scale of that disruption in stark terms – at least

ukraine oil drone
Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s allies are falling away

As Ukraine emerges battered but unbowed from the third and most terrible winter of the war against Russia, its people have proved that they can survive and fight on even as Vladimir Putin’s troops destroy swaths of their country’s heating, transport and electricity infrastructure. But one thing that Ukraine cannot survive without is money – and that, the European Union seems critically unable to provide.  On Thursday, a Council of Europe summit once again failed to remove a veto by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, on a €90 billion ($104 billion) tranche of funding for Ukraine. That cash, in the form of a controversial loan raised collectively by the EU,

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Maria Botcharova

Wartime love is not for the faint-hearted in Kyiv

People say love develops more quickly in war – because in a world where anything can happen, what is there to lose? Single and in Kyiv for a while, I decide to swallow my distaste for dating apps and start swiping. The first thing I notice is how many men are from Turkey and based a thousand miles away. How would this work? I decide to focus on the local ones and start chatting to a couple of guys. One seems reasonable if a little forward. He suggests meeting pretty quickly, then calls to chat. I don’t really know Ukrainian norms but frankly, hearing someone’s voice gives me faith that

ukraine love

Israel

Melanie McDonagh

It’s little surprise that an Israeli soldier was caught desecrating a crucifix

There’s something apposite, I suppose, about the desecration of a crucifix. In this case, it was an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon who took a sledgehammer to one on private property and smashed the Jesus figure on the cross. The original crucifixion, as anyone who heard the gospels over Easter will recall, was marked by the humiliation of Jesus; this attack on the figure of one who took on suffering willingly was another humiliation, through the image. Mind you, if the charmer with the sledgehammer had reflected that the Christ-figure is, in Christian belief, not just God-made-man but God-made-Jew, he might have eased off a bit. It looks like the

Jonathan Spyer

Israel won’t stop in Lebanon until Hezbollah is crushed

Direct US-brokered talks between Israeli and Lebanese representatives are set to take place in Washington this week. The Israeli delegation will be headed by Yehiel Leiter, Jerusalem’s ambassador to the US. Lebanon will be represented by Nada Hamadeh, the Lebanese ambassador to Washington. The State Department will host the negotiations. In his statement on Thursday announcing the talks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed their purpose as “disarming Hezbollah and establishing peaceful ‌relations between ⁠Israel and ⁠Lebanon.” Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, for his part, expressed his hope that Beirut should become a “demilitarized city.” Even as the talks were announced, Lebanese Hezbollah’s attacks on Israeli population centers and Israel’s

lebanon
Jonathan Spyer

Will Iran give Benjamin Netanyahu a wartime boost?

Israel’s current war on two fronts shows few signs of wrapping up soon. In Lebanon, the indications are that the IDF is looking to establish an expanded buffer zone north of the border, with the intention of holding it for as long as the government in Beirut fails to fulfill its pledge to disarm Hezbollah. In Iran, Israeli air attacks continue daily, even as Tehran’s missiles and drones target Israel’s centers of civilian population. This year is an election year in Israel, with polls required by law to take place by October. So what impact, if any, are the conflicts having on the political debate inside Israel? Are they likely

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America

Europe

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

NATO
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

russell brand
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

Today

Andrew Gilligan

March of the Greenshirts: Polanski’s party are Britain’s real racists

“Back us to stop the far right,” say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right? Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate in next week’s elections for Streatham St. Leonard’s, Lambeth, posts on her Instagram account a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin. She thinks that the British government includes too many “Zionists Jews,” and that Donald Trump is “owned by Jews.” Not even the Z-word, that last one. Not even Israel. Just… Jews. Ali also posts a picture of an armed man in what looks like a Hamas headband, captioning it: “Long live the

polanski greenshirts

Tuesday

Owen Matthews

How the Ukraine war could end in revolt

Ukraine and Russia are exhausted. Neither side is close to defeat and yet discontent is growing on both sides. In Russia, open criticism of the regime is spreading. Social media influencers have, bizarrely, led the charge. In Ukraine, fury is directed at press gangs who hunt down young men and force them, often violently, into the army. Today, the chances of some kind of political crisis in either Kyiv or Moscow seem more likely than a great breakthrough on the battlefield.  In Russia, there was a rare example of the Kremlin responding to criticism earlier this month when influencer Viktoria Bonya posted an Instagram video addressing Vladimir Putin. “The people

Ukraine
India
Jawad Iqbal

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

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,

disunited states

Saturday

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

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

Wednesday

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

iran
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

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

iran peace
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

anna paulina luna
china
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

starmer
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

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

armchair geographer
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

keir starmer
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

decline britain british

Saturday

Mark Galeotti

Russia’s nationalists are falling out of love with Putin

Moscow’s Manezh exhibition hall is playing host to a celebration of the life and politics of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the outspoken, unfiltered and unrepentantly toxic founder of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), who died in 2022. What is meant to memorialize Zhirinovsky’s career, though, also highlights the degree to which the Kremlin is losing control of the nationalist right. The neatly-choreographed simulation of party politics that has worked for so long is getting harder to sustain The LDPR – which was neither liberal nor democratic – was established in 1992 and from the first was a populist force that was more a vehicle for the bombastic Zhirinovsky than

Friday

Charles Moore

The only ‘civilization’ Trump will destroy is his own

If, as Donald Trump had threatened, “a whole civilization” had died earlier this month, the whole civilization concerned would have been that of the United States, not of Iran. If an American president had deliberately ordered the death of a civilization – whether or not such a thing is achievable – America’s claim to world leadership would have collapsed. Like, I suspect, many, however, I did not go to bed that night thinking that Trump would carry out his threat. I remember my parents telling me that, during the Cuban missile crisis, people truly believed there might be nuclear conflagration at any moment. It did not feel like that this

civilization
Starmer Mandelson
Freddy Gray

Will Keir Starmer be a casualty of the Epstein fallout?

In America, important men don’t seem to suffer too much over their links to the late Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick and Paolo Zampolli, among others, might regret their past friendships with the world’s most famous sex criminal. Certainly, they resent having to face pesky questions about it. But the story just rumbles on, darkly, a source of endless intrigue and gossip and conspiracy theories – sustained as it is by the occasional publicity jolt, such as last week when First Lady Melania Trump, apparently without the knowledge of her husband, decided to give a big public statement denying that she, er, something something Jeffrey