Francis Pike

If you thought Donald Trump was rude to journalists, hang on to your hats. Miffed by a journalist’s temerity in asking about his health, president Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines exploded: ‘How is your wife’s vagina? Is it smelly? Or not smelly? Give me a report.’ Duterte, a 75-year-old provincial politician who revels in the sobriquet ‘Duterte Harry’ after Clint Eastwood’s cop, arrived in national politics in June 2016 with all the media hullabaloo of other internationally reviled populist leaders such as Viktor Orbán and Recep Erdogan. The foul-mouthed Duterte, clearly a coprolaliac, is just as brutal with his political opponents.

It may be time for Father Christmas to look for a new home, before the Russians kick him out. ‘This is our Arctic,’ declared the Russian explorer Artur Chilingarov when he went to the North Pole in 2003. Four years later, another Russian expedition, again led by Chilingarov, planted a titanium flag on the seabed 2.5 miles below the Pole. It was a symbolic gesture of a geopolitical ambition. The jingoistic Chilingarov proclaimed: ‘Our task is to remind the world that Russia is a great Arctic and scientific power.’ Since 2013, Russia has invested heavily in seven military/naval bases along its Arctic coast to strengthen the country’s power and influence.

Although China's economy remains smaller than the United States’s in terms of nominal GDP (albeit ahead of the US in terms of GDP on a purchasing power parity basis) has it already surpassed it in another sense? Since 2008, China's energy and momentum has arguably led to it overtaking its rival. A hundred years from now, historians are likely to look back at the financial crash as the turning point in the balance of power between the West and China. The sub-prime mortgage crisis of that year, followed by president Obama’s high-tax, over-regulated economic management, saw America cast into a prolonged recession and an anaemic recovery.

This month the global media marked the 75th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities’ destructions were momentous indeed, but the coverage has squeezed out other memories of the Pacific War. Who remembers Japan’s genocidal campaign in China that killed more than 20 million people — thousands of them by poison gas and canisters containing plague and typhus? Or the murder of 35 per cent of the 200,000 soldiers and civilians held in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps that meted out unspeakable cruelties? Certainly not the BBC, which failed to put Hiroshima and Nagasaki into any kind of historic context.