The cables are already being mauled in peacetime, usually by a ship that claims it was careless. In a war the same trick is available on purpose, and the West cannot put a guard on every mile of glass on the seabed. Elisabeth Braw's essay in the 26 September issue of The Spectator is the civilian version of that problem. A Chinese icebreaker, the J...
From the anthrax letter attacks in 2001 to aerosolized Ebola in 2015 to the development of SARS-CoV-2 in years 2014-2019, the culprit was never a dangerous foreigner, but the US "biosecurity state." In the 2020 HBO psychological thriller miniseries The Undoing, Hugh Grant plays Dr. Jonathan Fraser, a pediatric oncologist who seems to have it ...
Europe's housing crisis is usually discussed as though houses have somehow acquired a life of their own. Rents rise, vacancy rates collapse, young people remain with their parents, families crowd into inadequate accommodation and governments announce another package of subsidies, planning reforms or rent controls. What often receives less attention...
The Daily Wire version is the paywalled reprint. The original, Eli Steele's "The White Guilt Cage," is the argument: fear of the racism charge built a racial order, and the West now buys its moral standing by treating white guilt as the price of being allowed to speak. Steele opens on a December 2025 killing in Southampton, because he thinks ...
The elites are not arguing with a memory. They are confiscating it, then diagnosing the people who still have it. At a fringe meeting of the Labour conference in Liverpool, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the minister for nature and rural affairs, and the MP for Suffolk Coastal, said she lies awake fearing what the "far-Right" will do with the countryside...
Ceuta is the case in which the arrivals did not become a workforce, a cuisine, or a growth story. They became a fifth of the city, sleeping in tunnels, and the government that called this humanitarian is now trying to send them back. Jim Lawley's 30 September piece in The Spectator starts nine weeks after the crossing. Tens of thousands came ...
Washington has already put the warning in writing. If Labor keeps going, the next steps are the ones it has used on Europe: name the law as censorship, treat the fines as a trade barrier, and squeeze the parts of the relationship that are not submarines. William Nye's 30 September column in The Spectator Australia reads the latest American st...
The Government is keeping a blacklist of people who question its policies, with social media posts criticising the Government being monitored and investigated by officials. The Metro has the story. Negative X and Reddit posts from unsuspecting Brits attacking the UK's anti-terror programme Prevent were added to a database of critical online c...
Christa Pike is alive after Tennessee tried to execute her on 30 September 2026. The death sentence is still in force. A second attempt is legally possible. Hanging and a firing squad are not, unless the law changes. Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at the Knoxville Job C...
There are statements by political leaders that are intended for domestic consumption, statements intended to frighten an adversary, and statements intended to draw a line that the adversary is being told not to cross. Vladimir Putin's latest warning concerning Kaliningrad belongs principally in the third category. It would be foolish either t...
When petrol prices rise, motorists notice immediately. The numbers glow accusingly from the service-station sign and another small piece disappears from the household budget. But there is another fuel price that may matter even more to the economy, including to people who do not own a diesel vehicle. Diesel is the fuel that gets into almost everyth...
Indigenous activist Robbie Thorpe wants to prosecute King Charles III for genocide. Having failed in the Victorian courts, he reportedly intends to take his case to the High Court of Australia. There is one rather large constitutional problem with this project. Thorpe wants a court created by the Australian Constitution, exercising the judicial pow...
There is something absurd about proposing a Digital Duty of Care to make the internet safer and then giving the internet-safety regulator statutory authority to operate sock-puppet accounts. No, that is not satire. The Albanese government's proposed changes to Australia's online-safety regime contemplate allowing the eSafety Commissioner to use wha...
His performance as a senior politician aside, I've no personal dislike of Rishi Sunak, a decent, bright man. In 2025 he told Nick Robinson: "I mean, of course I'm English. Born here, brought up here, yeah, of course I'm English". I think he and I could reasonably discuss that. His claim is imprecise. He can say he's English by birth and address, a ...
The BBC has found a new frontier in the war on ordinary life: fingernails that look like fingernails. Late last week the corporation published a piece on the "bare nails" trend, the quiet-luxury habit of wearing short, natural-looking nails instead of a jewel box glued to each fingertip. A London salon owner said clients were asking for it. Fair en...
On Sunday morning, 27 September 2026, a Cotswolds village woke up to armed police, bomb-disposal robots, and an evacuation. Three white vans had been found near RAF Fairford, the Gloucestershire airbase used by the United States Air Force to fly missions against Iran. A farmer called 999 after seeing hooded, masked men and vehicles blocking the roa...
If a mid-sized European country were accused of murdering prisoners of conscience so their hearts, livers and kidneys could be sold on a timetable, the protests would not wait for a UN resolution. Campuses would empty. Newspapers would run the phrase "crimes against humanity" before breakfast. That is not what happened when the same charge was laid...
Trust is becoming one of the scarcest resources in public life. People question global institutions, governments, bureaucracies, medical authorities and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. We are often told that this is a problem with the public: that people have become too suspicious, too difficult, too unwilling to listen. I think institution...
Britons could be jailed or fined for attaching St George flags to publicly owned lamp-posts and railings under new council proposals. Bristol City Council, which has already spent roughly £50,000 stripping flags from infrastructure across the city, is now exploring whether to seek a High Court injunction. The idea is modelled on Oxfordshire County ...
Wealthy Chinese couples are implanting their embryos into American women so their children can be born as US citizens, The Post has learned. The service is provided by a surrogacy agency, Patriot Conceptions, which operates between China and the US and has been accused of hiding details of who the biological parents are from surrogates. Women who c...
