A new political chapter has opened in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow, where he has been granted asylum. And the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu-Mohammed al-Jolani, the nom de guerre of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, has captured Damascus, barely ten days after launching its offensive on 27 November.   Brace for numerous theories about why Assad’s regime fell suddenly, with little more than a whimper, and even claims that its downfall was inevitable. In truth, no one predicted HTS’s lightning advance from its redoubts in the north-western province of Idlib, adjacent to Turkey – not Assad, not Iran and Russia, his principal patrons, perhaps not even al-Jolani himself. The House of Assad was built in ...

Assassinations are the perfect fuel for conspiracy theories. So you might think Wednesday’s (4 December) fatal shooting in New York of Brian Thompson, CEO of the huge US firm UnitedHealthcare, would prompt exactly that reaction. And sure enough, dark mutterings soon appeared about whether it was a professional “hit”, and who was behind it. Did it relate to allegations that Thompson had been involved in insider trading? Or was he about to reveal something about vaccines? But on social media in the hours after the story broke, the overwhelming response was not convoluted theories, but something simpler: rage. On X and BlueSky, the immediate assumption was that the murder was revenge for the suffering of a relative denied adequate healthcare. The ...

In the early days of Covid, people lost it. Not a few people; most people. I remember an anarchist friend telling me we should do what the Spanish were doing, and send tanks on to the street to police our house arrest. Within a few months, he was breaking the law to attend illegal raves. A few years on, and almost nobody is willing to own up to the authoritarian spasm that seized us in those first febrile weeks. I believe support for recent governments’ immigration policy was another such spasm. Sensible people are quickly forgetting that they ever thought the arrival of nearly a million people (as the recently released net migration figures show occurred last year) was anything other ...

This was a speech about definition. As the Prime Minister took to the podium at the iconic Pinewood Studios just outside London, the stakes felt more like those of a government two thirds into its term rather than close to the start. Five months after Labour won a historic election victory with a one-word slogan of “change”, there remains confusion and disappointment about what exactly the government stands for. There have been several attempts by Keir Starmer to set a clearer message – his gloomy speech in the Downing Street garden in August, his more hopeful, passionate address at Labour Party conference in Liverpool in September – but the slumping polls suggest these have been insufficient. The government has struggled to ...

Following the 1963 attempt on his life that would later be depicted in the film The Day of the Jackal, Charles de Gaulle was considering his own future, and that of his political project. He put a referendum to the French people asking them to approve a reform that would mean the president was elected directly via universal suffrage rather than by an electoral college system. A vote of no confidence was put forward by the representatives in the Assembly who felt snubbed by the demand to bypass them. Georges Pompidou’s government fell, so De Gaulle dissolved parliament, won the legislative elections and his referendum passed. No such options are available to Emmanuel Macron whose government, led by Michel Barnier, was ...

The collection of staff gathered outside the Guardian’s head office near London’s Kings Cross today (4 December) could have been gathered to celebrate the 233rd birthday of the Observer. Instead they were there, they said, to fight for the survival of Britain’s oldest Sunday paper – and for their own jobs. Journalists from the Guardian and the Observer began a 48-hour strike this morning in protest at the Guardian Media Group’s (GMG) plan to sell the Observer to the digital start-up Tortoise. It is the first strike at the Guardian since 1971. Staff hope to persuade the Scott Trust – which controls the GMG – to pause the deal. Scott Trust chair Ole Jacob Sunde has offered assurances over future of ...

In the end, South Korea's return to martial law lasted only a matter of hours. The country's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, announced that he was invoking the emergency measure in an extraordinary late-night address to the nation on 3 December, citing vague, ill-defined threats that included “North Korean communist forces” and the "anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people”. The martial law decree that went into effect shortly afterwards supposedly banned "all political activities" and placed all news organisations under the control of “the Martial Law Command”, but it was widely ignored. Protesters rallied in large numbers outside the National Assembly, the country's parliament, facing down heavily armed soldiers, while lawmakers rushed to the chamber ...

It is crunch time in France. Yesterday, the Rassemblement National agreed to vote with the left alliance on their no-confidence motion against the government. This came after the prime minister Michel Barnier triggered Article 49.3 to force through the budget. If Barnier’s government is toppled this week, the pressure will be on President Macron to find a new government and a way to pass a budget as fast as possible. Never before in the Fifth Republic has the year ended with no budget and no government. We could be in a legal no-man’s land. To save the budget and his government, Barnier offered many concessions to Marine Le Pen. But each time Le Pen had the same answer: not enough. Barnier ...