Growing up in Germany, we were taught to believe we had done better. Better than our grandparents’ generation, who swept their complicity under a thick rug of silence. Better even than our parents, whose revolts in the late 1960s rarely led to any serious reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust. Born in the late … Read more
The next time a breathless news anchor talks about the prospect of a war-ending “deal”, with Ukraine “ceding land for peace”, I want to sit them down with Adeline. In Lviv last week, Adeline showed me on her phone map her lost home in Russian-occupied Nova Kakhovka, just across the Dnipro River from the Ukrainian-liberated … Read more
Severe thunderstorms have battered parts of the US this week as the storm season reaches its climatological peak. The outbreak began last Friday, with Kentucky and Missouri worst affected. Powerful tornadoes associated with supercell thunderstorms whipped across swaths of the midwest, resulting in 25 deaths. One tornado tore through St Louis, killing seven people. Further … Read more
The UK government is reportedly considering selling a post-Brexit border check facility in Kent that could fall out of use as a result of this week’s trade pact with the EU. The site, based in Sevington, Ashford, was erected in 2021 with capacity for 1,300 lorries that were expected to face extra checks on plants … Read more
For the Tories to attack Keir Starmer’s first step towards a Brexit reset is monumental hypocrisy. Their Brexit led to £4.7bn being spent on implementing post-EU border arrangements, according to the National Audit Office, including a vastly expensive “take back control” border post at Sevington in Kent. No other country in the world can have … Read more
“Courage is seeking the truth and speaking it,” Jean Jaurès, the French philosopher and Socialist party leader, told a group of high school students in 1903. “It is not yielding to the law of the triumphant lie as it passes, and not echoing, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, mindless applause and fanatical … Read more
Donald Trump’s pledge to end the war in Ukraine on the first day of his second term as US president was a sign of his unsuitability as a peace broker. A clearer sign was his apparent sympathy with Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump’s tone regarding the Russian president has cooled somewhat on the discovery that the … Read more
A £25m post-Brexit border control post in Portsmouth may have to be demolished if the UK government’s deal with the EU removes the need for health and veterinary checks on food imports, according to the port’s director. Mike Sellers had already spoken out last year about how more than half of the site would never … Read more
European leaders – who have promised to impose “massive” new sanctions on Russia following Vladimir Putin’s rejection of a ceasefire in Ukraine – face the prospect of having to introduce their planned expansion of economic restrictions on the Russian war economy without the United States. European hopes that Donald Trump might increase the pressure on … Read more
The UK’s trade deal with the European Union is expected to smooth trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but for some businesses in the latter it no longer matters, as they have ditched British suppliers. “Overall the deal is welcome but we’re indifferent,” said Peter Bradley, a director of the Mid-Ulster Garden Centre. “We … Read more