Global update
Tokyo: crawling with spies. Getty
The “spy paradise” that’s helping Moscow
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, says Jane Bradley on The Daily, it was an “old school war” involving trenches and mothballed Cold War-era tanks. But Ukraine swiftly turned it into a modern one, with the development of lethal high-tech drones and the use of ballistic missiles. For Moscow, which faces sanctions designed to keep “exactly this type of technology” out of its hands, this should have been game over. Yet Russia has continued to pummel Ukraine, using increasingly high-tech equipment, with “devastating consequences”. When Ukrainians started digging through the rubble after major attacks to analyse fragments of the Russian weaponry, they realised a lot of the most high-tech components were coming from one place: Japan.
Tokyo is a vocal supporter of Kyiv – Japan sanctioned Russia the very day Putin’s men invaded Ukraine – but owing to its lack of a foreign intelligence service, it’s also a “spy paradise”. Russia’s GRU has a specialist spy unit dedicated to evading Western sanctions, and since 2024, one of its top spooks, Maksim Filchenkov, has been living in Tokyo disguised as an executive of the Russian airline Aeroflot. Filchenkov has developed relationships with a network of mid-sized logistics companies that “don’t attract that much attention”, and which tend to have a Russian executive in a senior position. His job is to persuade these firms to supply him with illicit technology, then arrange for the kit be flown to third countries such as Sri Lanka or Vietnam. Aeroflot, which is banned from flying directly from Japan to Russia, then charters one of its planes to collect the goods and get them to Moscow. It’s worked with a ruthless efficiency: Ukraine estimates that as much as 90% of Russian weapons, drones and missiles contain Japanese components, making it a “critical supplier” of the Kremlin’s war machine.
Property
THE TINY COTTAGE This two-bedroom house is located in Dorset’s Blackmore Vale, known for its 19th-century rubble-stone cottages, says The Guardian. On the ground floor is a sitting room with a large inglenook fireplace and an original bread oven, as well as a stylish kitchen with solid oak worktops and a ceramic sink, and a bathroom. Upstairs are the principal bedroom and a versatile space that could function as a second bedroom, a study or a dressing room. The garden is predominantly lawn, landscaped with beds of cow parsley, black elder and foxgloves. Shaftesbury is a 10-minute drive. £285,000. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
Heroes
Two travellers on a Canadian flight that was grounded by wildfires. When they found out that a fellow passenger would now be unable to reach her family to celebrate her 90th birthday, Quinn Sedmak and Tanner Salewich rented a car and drove Patricia Robinson the 600 kilometres from Calgary to British Columbia, where her family were waiting. The three strangers passed the seven-hour journey by swapping stories. “I’d like to think what happened wasn’t extraordinary,” Sedmak tells the Washington Post. “It was simply people being people.”
Villains
Fare dodgers, says Michael Deacon in The Telegraph, who swagger on to Britain’s transport network and merely snigger when challenged, knowing they will face no penalty. Take Charles Brohiri, who in February walked free from court despite pleading guilty to no fewer than 112 offences. I suggest we erect a set of stocks outside every train station and offer law abiding commuters the pleasure of pelting dodgers with veg. Say, £5 for a tomato, £10 to lob the whole tin.
Villains
A group of alpine mountaineers who got stuck on Mont Blanc earlier this month, who were denounced by the local mayor, Jean-Marc Peillex, as “opportunists and dangerous people”. Peillex, mayor of Saint-Gervais, at the foot of the mountain, told the group of 32 they should never have attempted the ascent in the first place after multiple warnings about dangerous rockfalls, and ordered a local helicopter firm to get them down – and send them the bill.
Hero
Mark Waters, a resident of Houston, who saw mothers and young children walking to a bus stop along a busy road overgrown with grass that he described as “taller than the kids”. Instead of assuming it was someone else’s problem, Waters grabbed his lawn mower and cleared the area himself, and is now offering to do the same anywhere safety is an issue. “Our job is to protect the women and the children,” he says, “and that’s what I’m going to do.”
Comment
Roger Moore and Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
From Plenty O’Toole to Madeleine Swann
As the rumour mill grinds on about who might play the next 007, I can’t help worrying, says Madeline Grant in The Spectator: “is the modern world even capable of making a good Bond?” The Daniel Craig era evidently saw itself as more “enlightened” than its predecessors. Bond’s recurring love interest Madeleine Swann is the sort of “high end totty” you’d meet at Davos, not a Plenty O’Toole type. Even her name involves two Proust references. You can just imagine the writers slapping each other on the back. “We’d never name someone Onatopp or Dr Goodhead. We’re ‘cerebral Bond!’”
It was Craig himself who argued the series needed a “darker” turn, because Austin Powers had rendered all the old gags impossible to use. Ironically, Craig’s films are full of ludicrous nonsense – flesh-eating nanobots, gaping plot holes – but without the accompanying fun of Roger Moore’s safari suit. One of the most enjoyable features of the older Bonds was that almost every onscreen woman makes plain her desire for 007, which becomes “funnier and more endearing” when the object of their lust isn’t the “prowling thirtysomething sex machine” Sean Connery but the ageing Moore, who in later outings looks more like the face of a walk-in bath company than an international sex symbol. By the end of the Craig era, Bond’s legendary philandering was comprehensively abandoned – his attentions “repulsed” by a female agent. And gone are the days when 007 joined up with the British armed forces to take on a menacing foreign power. Today’s villains are all “generic freaks of ambiguous motive”, presumably to avoid offending the Chinese or the Russians or radical Islamists. It’s a sad thought, but Britain may simply no longer be a country in which you can set a Bond film.
The Knowledge Crossword
What to watch
Minnow Productions
“The most controversial TV show of the year”
The Great ADHD Myth? will almost certainly be the “most controversial show of the year”, says Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. It follows NHS psychiatrist Max Pemberton (pictured) as he explores the recent explosion in ADHD diagnoses. Pemberton makes no claim to impartiality – a deep scepticism is clear from the outset, which will “incense and offend many”. But he makes a powerful case, and as the show goes on, it’s hard not to be convinced. “It’s certainly not a medical condition as far as I’m concerned,” says the former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners. “The industry around ADHD is about making money at the cost of the misery of others,” says a former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
The range of symptoms associated with ADHD is now so broad, according to one cognitive neuroscientist, that “if you want the diagnosis, you’ll get it”. When Pemberton himself undergoes a private assessment, he does indeed come away with a diagnosis and a powerful prescription. He also follows a 10-year-old boy called Mason as he comes off his meds (“they take my fun-ness away”), and replaces them with a programme of yoga, outdoor activities, no screens and less processed food and sugar. He quickly returns to his “funnier, happier” self. He’s a little harder to contain in the classroom, says his teacher, but that’s a price easily worth paying to see the return of the “true, honest” Mason. We live in a time when questioning any prevailing orthodoxy is met with an “emotional outpouring”. But Pemberton’s prescription is neither radical nor uncompassionate. In fact, if a doctor’s first duty is to do no harm, it’s “quite the opposite”.
Weather
Quoted
“If you wish to be popular in society, consent to be taught many things you already know.”
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
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