Liberal democracies view Putin’s Russia as a bully – and Trump’s US as an angry drunk with a bazooka. The response is pure venom
There are people who argue that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is not motivated by fears or imperial ambitions, but by other countries’ disrespect. Russia once commanded authority as one of the world’s two superpowers, but it has since forfeited that status. It knows it has lost the respect of other countries (Barack Obama famously dismissed Russia as just a “regional power”), and the Ukraine war is its way of winning it back.
What is perhaps surprising is that Donald Trump’s turn against Europe has similar motivations. Putin knows his aggressive revanchism won’t win Russia any love among countries whose respect he craves. But if he can’t be loved, he hopes at least to be feared. If you are in a social order that regards you as inferior, you have every incentive to turn spoiler.
Henry Farrell is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Sergey Radchenko is Wilson E Schmidt distinguished professor at the Henry A Kissinger Center, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
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Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist?
Decision comes amid growing public support for Guan Heng – who secretly filmed detention facilities in China – after he illegally entered US by boat
The Department of Homeland Security has dropped its plan to deport a Chinese national who entered the country illegally, two rights activists have said, after his plight raised public concerns that if deported the man would be punished by Beijing for helping expose human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region.
Rayhan Asat, a human rights lawyer who assisted in the case, said Guan Heng’s lawyer received a letter from the department stating its decision to withdraw its request to send Guan to Uganda. Asat said she now expected Guan’s asylum case to “proceed smoothly and favourably”.
Trump again called for Venezuela’s president to leave power and said the US would keep or sell the oil it had seized
China and Russia have expressed support for Venezuela as it confronts a US blockade of sanctioned oil tankers, while Donald Trump continues to ramp up his pressure campaign on the South American country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
Amid reports of slowing activity at Venezuelan ports, the US president again called for Maduro to leave power, and reiterated that the US would keep or sell the oil it had seized off the coast of Venezuela in recent weeks.
In his first comments since the release, the president expressed sympathy for high-profiles figures, including Bill Clinton, who have come under scrutiny
Donald Trump has broken his silence on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, complaining that people who “innocently met” the convicted paedophile could have their reputations destroyed.
In his first comments since the justice department began releasing the materials on Friday, the US president on Monday expressed sympathy for prominent Democrats who have come under renewed scrutiny over their associations with Epstein.
Emergency crews at work after port facilities and ship damaged, governor says, while Donald Trump says peace talks going ‘OK’. What we know on day 1,399
Russian forces struck Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa late on Monday and damaged port facilities and a ship, the regional governor said, in the second attack on the region in less than 24 hours. Oleh Kiper said on Telegram that emergency crews were tackling the aftermath of the latest attack and that no casualties had been reported but provided no further details. An earlier overnight attack hit port and energy infrastructure in the Odesa region, causing a fire at a major port and disrupting electricity supplies to tens of thousands of people. “Russia is attempting to disrupt maritime logistics by launching systematic attacks on port and energy infrastructure,” deputy prime minister Oleksiy Kuleba said on Telegram.
A Russian general was killed after an explosive device detonated beneath his car in what Moscow described as a likely assassination carried out by Ukrainian intelligence services, reports Pjotr Sauer. Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov, head of the operational training directorate of the Russian armed forces’ general staff, died of his injuries, a spokesperson for Russia’s investigative committee said. “Investigators are pursuing numerous lines of inquiry regarding the murder.” Russian Telegram channels with links to the security services reported that Sarvarov’s car exploded while driving along a Moscow street about 7am on Monday. Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack.
Donald Trump has said talks to end the Ukraine war are going “OK”, a day after his envoy Steve Witkoff characterised US discussions with Ukrainian and European representatives in Florida as “productive and constructive”. “The talks are going along,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday. “We are talking. It’s going OK.” Asked if he planned to speak to Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Vladimir Putin, Trump didn’t say, offering only of the fighting: “I’d like to see it stopped.”
Zelenskyy said initial drafts of US proposals for a peace deal met many of Kyiv’s demands but suggested neither side in the war was likely to get everything it wanted in talks on a settlement. “Overall, it looks quite solid at this stage,” the Ukrainian president said on Monday of the latest talks with US officials. “There are some things we are probably not ready for, and I’m sure there are things the Russians are not ready for either.” Trump has been pushing for a peace deal for months but has run into sharply conflicting demands from Moscow and Kyiv.
Moscow said parallel talks between Russia and the US in Miami at the weekend should not be seen as a breakthrough. “This is a working process,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said when asked whether the talks could be seen as a turning point. The Izvestia news outlet cited him as saying in remarks published on Tuesday that discussions were expected to continue in a “meticulous” format and that Russia’s priority was to obtain from the US details of Washington’s work with Europeans and Ukrainians on a possible settlement. He said Moscow would then judge how far those ideas matched what he called the “spirit of Anchorage”, after the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska in August.
Zelenskyy has said residents of a border village taken into Russia by Moscow’s troops had interacted with their neighbours for years without incident. The Ukrainian president on Monday confirmed media reports that residents of Hrabovske village – on the Sumy region’s border and home to 52 people – were taken away by Russian troops. “I think they simply didn’t expect Russian troops to simply walk in and take them away as prisoners,” Zelenskyy said. “But that’s what happened.” The Kremlin has not commented on the situation. The Ukrainian army has said it is battling an attempted Russian breakthrough in the north-eastern Ukrainian region, where Russian forces have recently seized several villages near the border.
Food and Drug Administration’s approval hands drugmaker Novo Nordisk an edge in the race to market an obesity pill
US regulators on Monday gave the green light to a pill version of the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, the first daily oral medication to treat obesity.
The US Food and Drug Administration’s approval handed drugmaker Novo Nordisk an edge over rival Eli Lilly in the race to market an obesity pill. Lilly’s oral drug, orforglipron, is still under review.
Church leaders and members detained as government tightens controls on underground Christian gatherings
The knocks came at 2am. Hiding out at a friend’s house in a Beijing suburb, Gao Yingjia and his wife, Geng Pengpeng, rushed downstairs to meet the group of plain-clothed men who said they were police officers. Their son, nearly six, was sleeping upstairs, and Gao and Geng wanted to minimise the ruckus. They knew their time was up.
Two months later, Gao is in a detention centre in Guangxi province, southern China, charged with “illegal use of information networks”. His arrest was part of the biggest crackdown on Christians in China since 2018. It has prompted alarm from the US government and human rights groups, with some analysts describing it as the death knell for unofficial churches in China.
Move comes as union representing US diplomats said it was ‘deeply concerned’ by the process, which could ‘politicise’ foreign service
The Trump administration has quietly recalled nearly 30 ambassadors and other senior overseas diplomats as the Trump administration plans to promote appointees loyal to the new administration to higher levels of the state department, according to diplomatic sources.
The recall of the ambassadors or heads of mission, which were confirmed by several current and former senior diplomats, was unusual for targeting career foreign service officers heading embassies overseas who are generally left in place after a change in administration because they strive to be apolitical.
President says the ships will be bigger, faster and a hundred times more powerful than any previous US-built warship
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Donald Trump has announced plans for the US navy to build a new generation of warships – known as “Trump-class”.
The ships will be bigger, faster and a hundred times more powerful than any previous US-built warship, the president said on Monday. The project will begin with construction of two such battleships and eventually be expanded to 20 to 25 new vessels.
Move to bring back customary marine rights is celebrated, but concerns remain about potential effect on tourism and lack of clarity about how it might work
In Fiji, babies know a connection to the sea from birth; their umbilical cords, or vicovico, are sometimes implanted in the reefs that frame the coastal Pacific nation, embedded among the coral. It’s an age-old practice among iTaukei, the Indigenous Fijian people – creating a lifeline to the ocean, a reminder of their roles as traditional custodians.
Yet for decades, controversy over the rights to the Fijian seabed has cast a long cloud over the island nation, which sees a million tourists flock to its shores each year, many to surf the perfect, barrelling reef breaks. It has led to heartache and, at times, violence.
After the awful attack at Bondi, Australia is facing several reckonings. There’s a long-overdue national focus on antisemitism, something that the Jewish community has been worried about as long as I have been alive. There’s the ongoing concern about national security, and questions about how something like this could have happened. But to me, as a public health expert and Jewish Australian, perhaps the most important conversation we are finally having is the one about guns.
Public health experts have been warning about guns for at least a decade. In the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, Australians came together and implemented a suite of measures to curb gun violence across the country. And it worked. Prior to 1996, we saw about one mass shooting a year. In the decades since, we have seen vanishingly few major events, and none with a death toll anywhere close to the shootings of the 80s and 90s.
The league said Metcalf’s actions violate league policy, which specifies that “players may not enter the stands or otherwise confront fans at any time on game day and … if a player makes unnecessary physical contact with a fan in any way that constitutes unsportsmanlike conduct or presents crowd-control issues and/or risk of injury, he will be held accountable.”
Egypt 2 (Marmoush 64, Salah 90+1) Zimabwe 1 (Dube 20)
Record Afcon winners recover to win in Agadir
There were no apologies from Mohamed Salah to his teammates in red on Monday night, with Egypt’s players grateful to Liverpool’s troubled superstar for conjuring a stoppage-time winner.
After failing to capitalise on a dominant start, the seven-times Afcon winners required a stunning equaliser from Manchester City’s Omar Marmoush and Salah’s late winner to spare their blushes against the aptly named Warriors from Zimbabwe, who have never progressed beyond the group stages.
The one moment of true quality came when Raúl Jiménez stood 12 yards from goal and looked at John Victor. It was a battle of wits but there was only going to be one winner. Jiménez stuttered, moved towards the ball at a leisurely pace, waited for Nottingham Forest’s goalkeeper to move left and then set Fulham on the path to a vital victory by sending a clinical penalty into the opposite corner.
This was Jiménez in his element. The Mexican is not the quickest striker around but the 34-year-old is still one of the game’s sharpest thinkers. Few, after all, can match Jiménez for accuracy from the spot. He is calmness personified in those situations and, remarkably, is now joint top with Yaya Touré when it comes to players with a 100% conversion rate from penalty kicks in the history of the Premier League.
She’s such a great interviewer that this chat with Kenneth Branagh feels like it deserves an entire series. It’s relentlessly charming – and hugely moving when they talk about Dame Judi’s late husband
Cast your mind back to Christmas 2017, and you might remember a slightly wacky BBC documentary called Dame Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees. On the surface, it seemed like one of those god-awful shows put together by tombola; matching a celebrity with a random subject and hoping it would pass muster.
However, this was not the case. Dame Judi Dench, it turned out, really did have a passion for trees. An obsessive passion, one that manifested itself in a small woodland where she named trees after friends of hers who had died. The result was unexpectedly tender and gorgeous, and the show ended up being the best thing on TV that Christmas.
The Kansas City Chiefs announced Monday they will leave their longtime home at Arrowhead Stadium for a new, domed stadium that will be built across the Kansas-Missouri state line and be ready for the start of the 2031 season.
The announcement came shortly after a council of Kansas lawmakers voted unanimously inside a packed room at the state Capitol to allow for STAR bonds to be issued to cover up to 70% of the cost of the stadium and accompanying mixed-use district.
Game developer, who was also involved in Medal of Honor and Titanfall, was killed in a car crash
Vince Zampella, the co-creator of the Call of Duty video game series, has died aged 55.
The head of the video game developer Respawn Entertainment and the co-founder of Infinity Ward was killed in a car crash in California, NBC Los Angeles reported.
Liverpool’s record signing, Alexander Isak, is facing several months on the sidelines after undergoing surgery on an ankle injury that included a fractured fibula.
Isak sustained the injury as a result of a heavy challenge from Micky van de Ven while in the process of scoring in Liverpool’s 2-1 win against Tottenham on Saturday. The 26-year-old was helped off in considerable pain and MRI scans confirmed Liverpool’s initial fears of a serious problem.
Coach couldn’t free up his players so they found another way of removing pressure – by losing the series in rapid time
Finally, in the last two days of the third Test with the series already basically lost, England stood up. They have been on a hell of a journey over 11 days of Test cricket, and now – too late – they are getting somewhere.
They have reminded me of some of the students who have passed through the school where I teach: they get into the upper sixths and they’re first-team cricketers, the big boys, very confident, dominating the team, playing good cricket, think they’ve cracked the code. Then they have a gap year and go travelling, and suddenly they realise there’s a whole world out there, that life can be tough and things can be done differently. Out of their comfort zone they can mature rapidly as young men and as people. I look at England’s performance in the third Test and think that after some tough experiences, and having been forced to confront the fact that they are not what they thought they were, they have maybe turned a corner in terms of their maturity.
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Fulham manager Marco Silva talks to Sky Sports. “The team reacted well [against Newcastle in the Carabao Cup] … a tough place to go … we were very competitive again … we fought until the last minutes … a better first half than the second … it was tough to take the result … but there were positives … our identity … some good individual performances … we just want to be more consistent throughout the game.”
A win tonight would be huge for both teams. Neither Fulham nor Forest are in trouble at the moment … but they’re trouble-adjacent, and three points would make their Christmas morning eggnog taste that much sweeter. Victory tonight springs Fulham feasibly as high as 11th, though they’d need to give Forest a four-goal battering to get there. But any victory would take them above Spurs, while a two-goal win sees them leapfrog Brentford as well, and that would surely be more than satisfactory in warming their capital cockles. Meanwhile Forest can only get as high as 15th with a win, but that’d put them ahead of Fulham, and more importantly eight points clear of the relegation zone.
An atmospheric river is forecast to drive storms across the state this week, bringing rain, high winds and risk of floods
One person has died in California amid heavy flooding, as residents across the state brace for a week of brutal storms that are predicted to bring extensive rainfall throughout the Christmas weekend.
Authorities in Redding, a city in northern California, reported that a motorist died on Sunday after becoming stranded in their vehicle.
The Danish postal service has announced it will cease deliveries from 30 December after 400 years. Eventually, other countries may go down a similar route
Predictions of the demise of letter writing are not new. The invention of the telegraph and the rise of the postcard were both seen as potential threats to a more leisurely, reflective form of communication. Yet by the close of the 20th century, more letters were being sent than ever, as social correspondence began to be supplemented by a boom in business mail.
From Europe’s most tech-savvy society, however, comes ominous news. As of next week, Denmark’s state-run postal service will end all letter deliveries after doing the rounds for 400 years. Around 1,500 jobs are being cut, and the country’s beloved red letterboxes are being sold off. It will still be possible for Danes to send a card or a love letter to someone far away next Christmas, but only via the shops of a smaller private company or a costly home collection.
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