China's universities are wooing Western scientists
Charles lieber had few options. On April 28th the renowned former Harvard chemist took up a new post at Tsinghua University's Shenzhen campus. Mr Lieber had been looking for a perch after he was convicted in America in 2021 for hiding ties to Chinese research funding. He is one of a handful of senior Western scholars who have recently taken up posts in China. Others have done so more from a position of choice.
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Daily Mirror
14 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Moment woman throws 'toddler tantrum' at airport after staff weigh her luggage
Stunned travellers at Milan Malpensa Airport watched as the middle-aged woman rolled on the ground, stamped her feet and pounded her fists on the floor while wailing and yelling A video clip shows the embarrassing moment a fully grown adult has a tantrum at the boarding gate of a busy airport. The woman was filmed rolling around on the ground after staff at the bustling airport told her that her hand luggage was too heavy to go onto her flight. Travellers at Milan Malpensa Airport in Italy stood stunned as the woman rolled on the ground, stamped her feet and pounded her fists on the floor. The Chinese tourist reached the boarding gate to take her flight on June 8 but when staff checked her carry-on suitcase they found it was too heavy. She was told that she would need to pay extra or throw away some of the contents, sparking the meltdown in front of dozens of astonished onlookers. In the clip the middle-aged traveller falls to the floor wailing and shouting as she thrashes on the ground in front of the bemused gate staff. Local media reports that the authorities arrived on the scene and tried to calm the situation, but the woman remained uncontrollable. The woman was eventually removed from the flight following her tantrum. She was able to book another ticket once she had calmed down. The shocking scene has been shared widely on social media, with commenters branding it 'embarrassing and childish'. 'Has she forgotten that she's a grown up?' said one viewer. 'This is shameless and disgraceful behaviour,' said another 'I'm speechless. This is so embarrassing,' quipped a third. In other baffling airport behaviour, a man was spotted sprinting between moving planes on the tarmac at Heathrow earlier this week. The man, whose identity is unknown, was seen running on the tarmac by Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport with at least four people trying to catch him before he was finally detained. The man was filmed with something around his waist as he ran away from several men at the airport around planes, which were arriving and leaving. He appeared to be running away from people who appeared to be airport staff. The person behind the camera was heard saying: "What's going on here? Why would there be people running across the [tarmac]? What's this all about? That is not right.
New Statesman
17 hours ago
- New Statesman
How Russia became a franchise of the Wagner Group
For several years, during a season of boredom in the West, the Wagner Group, Russia's private military company, became a pet obsession for the media. This was a story of Vladimir Putin's shadowy 'army of cut-throats', plundering Africa of its gold and diamonds while upending Europe's influence in its former colonies. Western audiences were hooked. In 2022, Wagner became a key tool in Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its previously hidden founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former St Petersburg restaurateur, finally emerged from the shadows. The narrative became even riper: Prigozhin led a short-lived mutiny against the Russian regime in June 2023. But it ended abruptly when his private jet exploded not far from Putin's dacha on Lake Valdai two months later. The story is far from over. The group continues to wage vicious campaigns in the Sahel region, now rebranded as the 'Africa Corps'. In Mali, it helps the regime fight Tuareg and Islamist insurgencies, and was accused of executing civilians. Two recent books shed light on Wagner's role in ushering in a new era of modern warfare: Death Is Our Business by the American journalist John Lechner and Our Business Is Death by the Russian reporters Ilya Barabanov and Denis Korotkov. If Wagner's business was death, then it meant a good deal of its own mercenaries dying, too. This was true even back in the 2010s when Wagner was still viewed as an elite and secretive force, the most prominent case in point being the infamous Battle of Khasham in February 2018. In an episode that became the closest, if indirect, US-Russia clash of the 21st century, Wagnerites tried to capture an oil field in north-eastern Syria controlled by American-backed Kurdish fighters. The Kurds fought back, supported by the US from the air, and the mercenaries were mowed down. Some 80 Russians were killed in just a few hours. All the previous Wagner losses, however, were overshadowed by the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the transformation of the mercenary group into a vehicle to recruit convicts. Lifted out of prisons and put through short and superficial training, some 50,000 of them, by Prigozhin's own estimate, were sent to storm the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut. Barabanov and Korotkov's book presents accounts of convicts forced to fight under the fear of execution. Those refusing to take part in the 'meat storms' were reportedly shot as deserters. Some 20,000 Wagner fighters died in Bakhmut alone, according to Prigozhin's count. Shocking as it was, this practice was not new. Penal battalions were introduced in the Soviet army during the Second World War, guarded by anti-retreat detachments with orders to shoot deserters. Allowing for huge losses to advance on a battlefield was another tradition from Soviet times that was resurrected in Putin's Ukrainian 'special military operation'. 'The special military operation was, in many respects, one giant World War II re-enactment, and everyone got to don a costume and play a character,' Lechner observes. All of this, however, came later. Before 2022, Wagner was less of a cosplay enterprise and more of a private military company with operations in Syria, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya and Africa's Sahel region. Nobody was forced or encouraged to fight for it – but thousands volunteered to. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe What made so many Russian men risk their lives in faraway countries? Barabanov and Korotkov grapple with this question, drawing from personnel files included in a vast archive of Prigozhin's corporate empire that was leaked to them, as well as their interviews with mercenaries. The fact that Wagner offered the kind of salaries these men would never get anywhere else loomed large. In 2017, the Wagner salary of Rbs250,000 a month was worth around $4,300 – six times the national average wage in Russia at the time. Even by Moscow standards, such salaries were very high indeed; outside of Moscow, unheard of. The dramatic culmination of Prigozhin's story, too, is a testament to a broader trend. His rebellion against the system was triggered by bureaucratic pressure. The Russian state wanted to control all those fighting against Ukraine, forcing private military companies and volunteer units to sign contracts with Russia's Ministry of Defence (MoD). Moscow did not need the plausible deniability of Wagner, Cossacks and ragtag nationalist militias any more. It was now openly and brazenly invading Ukraine under the pretext of 'denazification' and wanted to have full military control. When Prigozhin pushed back against the MoD takeover, the palace intrigue ran out of control. He questioned the Kremlin's justification for the invasion, criticised the rampant corruption of Russian elites and even suggested that a certain 'grandpa' in charge of Russia could be 'a dickhead'. Grandpa was the opposition's nickname for Putin, popularised by Alexei Navalny. A showdown was imminent, and Prigozhin blinked first, launching his mutiny before abruptly aborting it. Shortly afterwards, he was dead. [See also: Death of a warlord] But having dispensed with Prigozhin, the Putin regime appears transformed by its former enforcer. Practices he pioneered have been adopted and taken to another level. Recruitment of convicts is now run at such a scale that entire prisons have been hollowed out. And bribes to entice Russian men to fight keep growing. Recently, regional governments started offering new recruits 'staggering sums' with sign-up bonuses of up to $40,000, a BBC investigation revealed. Moreover, the mercenary group changed the very way Russia executes its war. Wagner's tactics at Bakhmut 'led to the systematic adoption of assault groupings, and expendable convict-staffed formations across the Russian military', wrote Michael Kofman, a leading expert on the Russian military. He called the process the 'Wagnerisation of the Russian army'. With up to a million Russians having signed contracts to fight in Ukraine, it may be time to consider the Wagnerisation of Russia. Being paid to kill Ukrainians is today among the highest paying jobs in the country. But for its owner, Wagner was never a golden goose the way, for example, his food catering services in Russia were. Instead, Lechner places the private military company in the broader context of Prigozhin's attempts to ingratiate himself with Putin, the case of the troll factory meddling in the US elections being another prominent example. It was about status, the restaurateur-turned-warlord being 'hell-bent on joining the elite', the author suggests. In the process, he helped bring about the new age of private warfare. Private military companies 'helped usher us into the 17th century with 21st-century technology – onto a battlefield in which the distinction between soldier and mercenary is close to immaterial', Lechner writes, drawing parallels between the likes of Blackwater founder Erik Prince and Prigozhin and the condottieri of Italian city states. In the new era of conflicts between global and regional powers, the mercenaries have returned. There was initial hesitation: Western leaders' thinking was shaped by the post-Cold War 'peace dividend', with Russia humbled by its defeat in Afghanistan and the Cold War in general, while America was still haunted by the spectre of Vietnam. In the era of liberal interventionism and the war on terror that followed, policymakers offered elaborate justifications and set tight rules for use of force. Their justifications later proved bogus, and all rules were trespassed. But disillusionment with war has not sparked a pacifist revival. All around the world, not just in Moscow, there is less hesitation about using military force – and less need to hide behind private contractors. The US support for Israel's war in Gaza is an open-ended commitment, as is Nato's intelligence-sharing, weapons supplies and training of Ukraine's armed forces. Israel and Iran, for the first time in their history, have exchanged direct blows. Reasons for going to war are framed in terms of 'existential threats' and therefore require no further explanation. Mercenaries are still in high demand, but their role is changing. What started as a bespoke service provided by highly skilled, well-paid ex-soldiers has turned into mass recruitment of cannon fodder from poor and conflict-torn regions and countries. These include thousands of Colombians fighting in Ukraine, Yemen and Sudan; hundreds of Nepalese serving as the first line of attack for Russian troops; and Syrians being recruited to kill and die in Azerbaijan, Libya and Niger. For this new age of private warfare, the transformation of Wagner is a useful case study. Founded as an elite group providing security, military training and guarding installations – a business model based on the American example of Blackwater – it grew into dispensable shock troops managed directly by the Russian state. If the US's overseas campaigns made the modern mercenary industry a lucrative career path for army veterans and well-connected hustlers, Putin's wars helped transform it into a global form of human trafficking for men from poor regions of Russia. That in 2025 Russian men are as keen as Colombians and Syrians to fight for money in distant lands is perhaps the best indicator of the desperation, hopelessness and nihilism in Russian provinces after a quarter century of Putin's rule, despite all the talk of Moscow's economic resilience. Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare John Lechner Bloomsbury USA, 288pp, £23 Our Business is Death: The Complete History of the Wagner Group Ilya Barabanov and Denis Korotkov StraightForwardFoundation, 291pp, $9.99 [See also: Trump's nuclear test] Related
New Statesman
17 hours ago
- New Statesman
Laughing at the populist right is not a political strategy
Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images Across north London, in the citadels of the liberal elite, it has been hard to hear yourself think. The roars, whoops and whistles of merry laughter; the stamping of feet on floorboards; the wheezing, the rasping coughs and the slapping of thighs… yes, Donald and Elon, not to mention Nigel and Zia, have brought a lot of innocent cheer. This is not simply about great egos falling out: a voyeuristic thrill as the world's most powerful man and the world's richest man traded insults. It also poses a more important question about whether the revolutionary surge by the populist right, which began in America, is starting to collapse, weighed down by contradictions. After all, in taking aim at President Trump's 'big beautiful bill' in the cause of fiscal sanity, Musk put his finger on the glaring ideological fissure inside today's new right – the gap between traditional fiscal conservatives who believe growth comes from low taxes balanced by tightly controlled government spending; and the performative hucksters, happy to offer whatever the voter base wants, affordable or not. I'm well aware that this flatters Elon Musk, who has been happy to have his company suck greedily at the teat of federal spending, and who only seems to have seen the light when he realised how much the withdrawal of electric vehicle subsidies in the bill would have hit Tesla. Further, Musk's threats to cancel the Dragon rocket programme on which the International Space Station depends – threats he then reversed – and his accusation about Trump's involvement with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – an accusation he then deleted – suggests a man on the edge. Some have pointed to Musk's disclosures about his ketamine use. Trump simply taunted him by saying he is 'losing his mind'. Either way, Musk doesn't look or sound much like a traditional Republican. The tech-titan lobby he speaks for is desperate for lavish US government support and subsidy – and, indeed, in its fight with Chinese rivals, has a strong case for long-term federal backing. If Musk is genuinely gone for good from Trumpland, and it's hard to see a way back, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman will have their thumbs competing for the West Wing doorbell soon. Meanwhile, Musk's Doge, strongly backed in Silicon Valley, so far seems like a damp squib – the tree has defeated the chainsaw. But let's try to put all that to one side. There is still a fundamental difference between the pork-barrel, 'spend big, promise bigger' instincts of Trump himself, using borrowed money to fling tax cuts to his hugely rich friends, and the genuine anxiety of Elon Musk about a swollen federal budget and debt. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Does this divide expose the very nature of the Maga movement? It's powered by poorer, excluded Americans who may have deep hatred of 'woke' culture, but who are interested in their own economic position – blue-collar Americans who want factories brought back home, but also want to keep their benefits, and have a deep suspicion of the political elite. The Trump bill, slashing taxes for the richest while cutting Medicare and other programmes for the poorest, shows whose side he is on; if Musk's campaign to stop the bill by encouraging a platoon of rebel Republicans to block it in the Senate were to succeed, he would be doing a favour not just to the increasingly worried bond markets but also to the Maga base. Let's turn nearer to home, where the gone, gone-back-again Zia Yusuf, the pinging Reform UK chairman who had floated a British version of Doge, offers a parallel. Reform faces two substantial policy challenges. One is 'respectability' – how far to go in an anti-migrant, race-inflected direction in order to energise its coalition? The second is economic. Like Maga, Reform has a blue-collar, working-class base and is offering not just huge tax cuts of nearly £90bn a year but also spending increases of £50bn a year on things those voters want more of, such as the NHS. It says it can pay for this with cuts of £150bn a year. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the numbers don't add up: 'Spending reductions would save less than stated, and the tax cuts would cost more than stated, by a margin of tens of billions of pounds per year.' This suggests, as with the Trump bill, that poorer Farage supporters would find their benefits under threat, while middle-class ones wouldn't get the tax cuts they wanted. Unsurprisingly, and after seeing off Reform in the Hamilton Scottish parliamentary by-election, Keir Starmer has jumped on this, comparing the Farage package to Liz Truss and accusing him of making the same bet – 'that you can spend tens of billions on tax cuts without a proper way of paying for it'. And so we come to this week and the Spending Review. Fundamentally, the fight ahead is about credibility and timing. Populists insist there are quick, almost painless short-term fixes to the long problem of low productivity and growth. They suggest you can slash taxes and simultaneously improve working-class living standards. Reeves' version of social democracy has an answer to this – the big investments announced this week in everything from nuclear power to transport connections. Invest, long-term and patiently, and the growth will return. It's not a quick fix. Voters must wait. Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's former chief economist, urges Labour to have an understandable 'people strategy' and more power for the regions and nations to give voters hope while the investment arrives. Because we are not a patient lot, and that is what Reform preys on. Haldane told the Guardian: 'Nigel Farage is as close to what the country has to a tribune for the working classes. I don't think there's any politician that comes even remotely close to speaking to, and for, blue-collar, working-class Britain. I think that is just a statement of fact…' Well, if so, isn't it an extraordinary one? Farage, an ex-City trader from the suburban south, is more of a tribune than Rayner, Phillipson, Streeting or Reed, who grew up in council housing and on benefits? Able to speak to working people in a way that the government, 92 per cent of whose ministers attended comprehensive schools, can't? This points to a familiar but catastrophic problem – the strange inability of this Labour government to communicate its cause vividly. By investing wisely, it can bring growth and therefore better times, but meanwhile it needs the fire of a Kinnock, the moral weight of a Brown, the birds-from-trees persuasiveness of a Blair. Yet too often, all we hear are wooden tongues. The lessons of the past fortnight are twofold. First, the right-wing populist insurgency, both in America and here, is fragile, not omnipotent. As the Musk episode reminds us, there is a difference between radical protest and traditional conservative thinking, particularly on the role of the state. Any coalition big enough to overwhelm social democracy can come apart quickly when personalities go to war. Although they sometimes run in parallel, American politics and British politics, Brobdingnag and Lilliput, remain different in structure, electoral make-up and rhythm. One must be cautious about those equal signs: the quick peace deal between Yusuf and Farage showed a sense lacking in Washington. Still, the mocking liberal laughter wasn't all ridiculous. But the second lesson is that, even with a plausible growth strategy, social democracy needs brilliant storytellers to keep a tired and sceptical electorate onside. This is a long fight. Starmer and Reeves are in it for years to come. But they have to become far better communicators. Nigel Farage, after all, is a man used to having the last, loud laugh. [See more: Reform needs Zia Yusuf] Related
