All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Is the Japanese economy about to crash? This once unthinkable prospect is now very much thinkable as concerns grow, and the cost of borrowing rises, in response to the bold but, to many, bewildering economic plans of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. It is a question of huge import, for if the Japanese economy collapses the consequences around the globe could be grave.
Europe has come up with a way to hit back at Donald Trump. What began last week as a suggestion that the continent’s soccer nations should boycott this summer’s World Cup has grown into a popular campaign. As the New York Times reported earlier this week, the man who first floated the idea was Oke Göttlich, a senior member of the German Football Association’s executive committee and one of its 11 vice presidents. "What were the justifications for the boycotts of the Olympic Games in the 1980s?" said Göttlich, referring to the US-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the USSR's retaliation four years later. "By my reckoning, the potential threat is greater now than it was then. We need to have this discussion.
As the Potomac ices over for the first time in decades, Washington is in a deep freeze. Democrats are about to send it into an even deeper one. Intent on icing out ICE, they’re threatening to shutter the federal government over a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security and to impeach Kristi Noem. “Donald Trump must fire Kristi Noem immediately,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote Tuesday in a post on social media. “Or Democrats will initiate impeachment proceedings against her in the House. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”Ever since the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the Trump administration has been scrambling to recover its footing – and inadvertently helping the Democrats to get their groove back.
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Freddy is joined by Spectator US online editor Ben Clerkin to discuss the situation in Minnesota, where for a second time an ICE officer shot dead a protester. Freddy and Ben discuss how Trump’s team are divided on the issue, why this time Trump has not been quick to defend the ICE officers and the significance of the freezing cold weather in keeping protesters at bay.
"If it bleeds, it leads." Skim through the headlines of today’s papers and you’ll struggle to find much that’s positive. Coverage of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday might make you think the United States is on the brink of widespread civil disorder, but the truth is that America is set to have its safest year since 1900. Last week, a report by the Council on Criminal Justice examining 40 cities across the US found that homicides in the fell by an astounding 21 percent in 2025. The Trump administration, of course, was quick to take credit. "Deporting criminal illegal alien murderers reduces murders," tweeted Immigration and Customs Enforcement, next to a chart from the study.
According to unconfirmed reports, General Zhang Youxia, China’s vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), sent a company of troops (over a hundred or more) to the government’s Yingxi Hotel in western Beijing on January 18. Their mission was to arrest Xi Jinping. A few hours before, the Chinese president – alerted by an informant – set in motion countermeasures. Troops under the command of Cao Qi, head of Xi’s Central Guards Bureau, ambushed Zhang’s soldiers. In the ensuing gunfight at Yangxi Hotel, nine guards were reportedly killed along with dozens of Zhang Youxia’s soldiers. Throughout China, military movements have been banned and troops and officers have been confined to barracks.
A basic question all Americans should ask themselves before they draw any other conclusions about events in Minneapolis is this: when is it right to interfere with law enforcement? The consequences of doing so are, obviously, potentially grave, even fatal. Obstructing or harassing officers of the law could put their lives in danger as well as yours, and bystanders’ as well. Law enforcement, of necessity, involves risks and the potential for violence, which officers are authorized to use and criminals – or third parties – are not. One side in the Minneapolis turmoil does not accept these premises, or at least doesn’t accept they apply when the laws to be upheld are laws that leftists don’t like.
The fights in Minnesota aren’t just between the protesters and ICE, they also seem to be between President Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Behind the scenes, Trump officials have been lukewarm, at best, over Noem’s performance. And polling shows her department its deep underwater. Significantly, they sent border czar Tom Homan, not Noem, to Minnesota on Monday to signal their high-level commitment to its operations there. Those tea leaves do not portend a long and happy future in Washington for Secretary Noem. In another development Monday, the administration may have signaled its willingness to work with Minnesota Governor Walz to calm down the dangerous street confrontations in Minneapolis.
As America stayed inside at the weekend, terrified and frozen, the White House hosted its own movie night: the first-ever screening of Melania, an insider-access documentary about the First Lady, directed by the disgraced Brett Ratner. This film that old-school Hollywood wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole is coming to theaters everywhere on Friday, whether you see it or not. The Hollywood Reporter, which met the devil at a crossroads in exchange for access, posted exclusive photos of the event, which included “black-tied VIPs, monogrammed popcorn tubs and a military band playing movie tunes”, as well as bespoke black-and-white cookies bearing Melania’s name. The band actually played “Melania’s Waltz,” a special composition for the film.
To walk out of a public performance before the end – be it the theater, a concert or a lecture – is not the done thing. It’s considered an antisocial act that disrupts the performance and thus other people’s pleasure. To walk out provokes tuts of disapproval and scowls of indignation. And yet while it’s something we all disapprove of (at least in theory) it’s also something we all secretly long to do. Who hasn’t sat and squirmed in their seat at some tedious piece of theater and wondered: how much more of this must I suffer? And who hasn’t been subjected to one of those long, sycophantic interviews with some self-adoring author flogging their latest book and not prayed for the courage to make a run for it?
Last week was one of realpolitik, Trump-style. Greenland was sorted, the "New Gaza" unveiled, and all that was left was Ukraine and Russia. Donald Trump went from Davos back to the US but ordered his special envoys to Abu Dhabi, armed with the president’s formula for ending the war in Europe, to get a deal to stop the killing and destruction. As the envoys from the US, Russia and Ukraine opened the talks on Friday in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, none of the pre-signaling indicated that a breakthrough was in the offing. Two days were allotted for the meetings, in the expectation that it wouldn’t just be a rehash of the same, familiar arguments.
A patient, an old woman with white hair, stripped of speech by dementia, followed us each shift, staying an inch behind, wanting nothing more than human presence. We let her into the staff room, where she hovered behind whoever was nearest, her tattooed number visible on her forearm. They found a young girl, Doris, who could speak some English. Malnutrition had left her mouth and face gangrenous I am aware of only one other patient, these past 30 years, who had survived the Nazi death camps. Normally sane and sensible, dusk brought confusion, dragging him backwards in time. Each sundown he began screaming and we could not console him; he took us for guards. I drugged him.
Did a Border Patrol officer kill Alex Pretti in self-defense after being alerted that he was carrying a gun in a chaotic scramble to arrest him? Or did he execute the anti-ICE protester in cold blood after he was disarmed? The truth is that it is difficult to know. Facts, unlike opinions, are hard to come by in Minnesota. Endless replays, as in the case of Renee Good who was shot dead in the city by an ICE officer she drove towards, aren't helping to draw a consensus Endless replays, as in the case of Renee Good who was shot dead in the city by an ICE officer she drove towards, aren't helping to draw a consensus. Trump opponents post freeze-frames and selective snippets of the horrible video to hammer home their assertion of out-of-control ICE death squads.
If you live in Minnesota, as I do, don’t turn on your TV. Don’t log on to social media. Don’t turn on the radio, pick up a newspaper or drive under an overpass. We are approaching a zombie apocalypse in Gotham City level of breakdown. And all indications point to more of the same – or worse.Rioters are rushing to make this the Winter of Despair, modeled after 2020’s BLM Summer of Love. There wasn’t much in terms of consequences for those responsible for Minneapolis’s devastation by fire and looting, so this winter, the activists have reconvened for an epic reunion of riff-raff hell-bent on destroying whatever respectability (and infrastructure) remains in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
The misadventures and "mummy issues" of Brooklyn Beckham – articulated in a verbose Instagram post about how much he hates his parents and why – has stirred feelings, even in those least likely to care about anything to do with the Beckhams, senior or junior. The reason why is simple: the 26-year-old man child of Lord and Lady Beckham is the perfect emblem of his spoiled generation. Brooklyn Beckham is a very rich young man, and everything he has and has done has been thanks to the immense privilege he was born into Along with their totalizing hostility towards things deemed racist or imperialist or anti-trans, they are also the first generation to celebrate cutting off your family if they fall short of your expectations.
FBI Director Kash Patel popped up in several news stories on Friday. He does this periodically, like a skin or glandular disorder – a Kash Rash, as it were. Looking as though he’d spent last night consuming the contents of the FBI’s seized-drug storeroom, Patel announced at an airport presser that the FBI had seized former Canadian snowboarder Ryan Wedding, a “modern-day El Chapo” or Pablo Escobar who was running a multinational drug ring out of Mexico City. That seemed like good news, as did the fact that Patel said that there had been a 210 percent increase in gang takedowns and a reduction in FBI operational expenses in his first year.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has tonight been forced to stall the Bill which would hand the Chagos Islands over to Mauritius. The legislation enabling the deal was expected to be debated in the House of Lords on Monday. But this evening, it was revealed that the votes have been delayed amid parliamentary ping-pong and a backlash from the Americans. Both the Conservatives and Reform UK are keen to take credit for the pause in the bill, under which Britain would give up the archipelago and lease back the Diego Garcia base. The Conservative case for credit is on the legislative front. Peers like Lord Hannan argue that the flip-flop occurred only after the Tories had put out a rare three-line Whip for Monday, with ministers concluding that their Bill would fall.
Braving biting January winds, 120 New Yorkers attended the much-anticipated launch of Nicolas Niarchos’s The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth, at The Spectator’s (still) unfinished, unfurnished penthouse digs. Niarchos is a journalist whose reporting has appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation and the New York Times. He has testified on the effects of Congolese battery metal mining on Capitol Hill and his investigations into mining in Indonesia were shortlisted for a 2024 Livingston Award.
Can Donald Trump veto the UK’s cession of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius? And if he can, does he want to? On Tuesday, he termed it an act of "great stupidity," which certainly seems to imply opposition. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, followed up to say that the UK was "letting down" the US by handing over the Islands to Mauritius. But Sir Keir Starmer was unmoved during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, claiming that in denouncing the Chagos deal Trump was simply trying to put pressure on the UK to abandon Denmark and Greenland, which Starmer of course rightly refused to do.
Trump Derangement Syndrome has become horribly over-diagnosed. Now, anyone who expresses doubts about his wondrous abilities – or just fails to repeat the White House’s preferred talking points – risks being branded a "TDS" sufferer. It’s boring. Still, there remains a large faction of elite journalists, social-media influencers and political actors who loathe Donald Trump with a pathological intensity and who feel their mission in life must be to undermine him by whatever means necessary. They have spent the last decade condemning Trump and his supporters as conspiracy loons even as they leap from one dark theory to the next – Trump is a Russian asset! A closet Nazi! An Al Capone-style mobster! A serial rapist and possibly even a pedophile!
Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi. The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian.
The "nothing ever happens" people seem to be, sadly, correct about Iran thus far, although one hopes that the brutal Islamic Republic might still be overthrown. It’s hard to know what to think, and at times like this we all turn to the experts to give their analysis of what might happen and what might follow. Foreign policy expertise is hard work, because it requires both a specific knowledge of the national culture and the relative strength of personalities. Because there are so many factors involved, analysts frequently get things completely wrong, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles being the notorious examples.
Who among us hasn’t accidentally liked an Instagram comment calling for America to be “free from the Jews?” YouTube children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel fell into that trap this week, issuing a pathetic and quite possibly insincere apology online after one of her subscribers caught her in the act of upvoting Jew-hate. “I’m sure that’s an accident so wanted to let you know,” the fan said. Was it really, though? “Deleted,” Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Accurso, responded. “How horrible. Oh wait. Let me check. Yah, I did delete one like that.” She added, “I hate anti-Semitism.” That didn’t defuse the situation. Ms. Rachel, clearly the victim here, posted a video to Instagram hours later. She wasn’t wearing makeup or her trademark overalls.
Kat Abughazaleh is one of those influencers who – unnervingly – seem to pop out of nowhere fully formed. There was a stint at Media Matters – which in many ways pioneered the modern industry in “disinformation”-watchdogging, political fact-checking and “studying the far right" – where she made short-form videos taking the fight to people like Tucker Carlson. After the 2024 election Abughazaleh, now 26, was one of several youthful activists who called for the destruction of the “gerontocracy” in the Democratic party. She is now a candidate for Illinois's 9th congressional district, after first issuing a primary challenge to 81-year-old Representative Jan Schakowsky. “I just couldn’t watch it anymore. I thought, fuck it, I’m going to run,” she told WIRED.
Rarely has the ideologically divided US Supreme Court seemed so much on the same wavelength. And that is not good news for President Trump.In arguments Wednesday in a case that centers on President Trump’s authority to fire members of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, both Republican and Democratic appointees suggested giving the president unfettered control would harm financial markets and damage public confidence.“Your position – no judicial review, very low bar (for dismissal) and that the president alone makes the determination – would weaken if not shatter the independence of the Federal Reserve,” said Justice Brett Kavanaugh in an exchange with US Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the Trump administration.
There has always been a section of the establishment which thinks that the solution to populism lies in a great straightening-out of the populace. Populism is happening because people are bored, they say, so conscript them, get them off their phones, give them things to do – especially the young. It is only through collective struggle and sacrifice, it’s thought, that liberal democracy may find coherence and purpose again after 30 years of supposed ennui. This part of the liberal center is happy enough to wave the flag. Indeed its main tactic is to accuse its opponents of national treason. It affects to agree with the populists that a new age of expediency has now opened, and that the establishment must now meet it with a ruthlessness of its own.
Pop star Meghan Trainor posted a photograph this week skin-to-skin with her newborn daughter, "Mikey Moon," who was still slick with fluids from the birth canal. The image was tender and maternal. What changed the dynamic was the caption. Trainor revealed she had not actually delivered her daughter, but had her gestated by another woman via a surrogacy arrangement. The online reaction was deeply uneasy and critical. This would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Surrogacy used to be framed as glamorous, progressive, even beautiful. Magazine spreads showed radiant celebrities cradling babies "made possible" by another woman’s womb. The story was celebratory: science plus money equals miracles. Everyone wins. But in 2026, nobody seems convinced anymore.
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Freddy Gray speaks to investigative journalist and policy fellow at American Experiment Bill Glahn about the situation in Minneapolis. They discuss how Minnesota – a state once occupied by Scandinavian peace loving people – became the heart of political eruptions; the multibillion dollar fraud of state social benefits which led to the immigration crackdown and the effect of the cripplingly cold weather in calming the chaos.
The latest media palpitation about Donald Trump concerns his just-announced “Board of Peace.” Unveiled as an initiative to manage the introduction of tranquillity and physical reconstruction of that pile of rubble formerly known as Gaza, the Board of Peace seems to be filling all the empty space in the parking lot reserved for international relations. Think Big! The BoP now seems to take as its mandate international conflict more generally. Reporting on the fledgling enterprise, a story on ABC News mournfully told the world that “Critics and government leaders are decrying the board, saying it undermines the United Nations.” Is that a promise?
When Prince Harry left the witness box at the UK High Court this afternoon, it was observed that he was "visibly emotional." The Duke of Sussex was there to give evidence in his group legal action against the Daily Mail publishers Associated Newspapers a day earlier than expected. There is inevitably a certain amount of personal toil involved in any high-profile legal case – where the stakes for whichever side wins are considerable, both financially and reputationally. But the Duke of Sussex’s emotive, even angry appearance in court today made it quite clear to any onlooker that his motives were deeply personal. It appears that victory for him would represent a spectacular vindication of a quest that he has been on for years.
Michelle Obama is the latest guest on the Call Her Daddy podcast – the raunchy girlfest “Howard Stern for women” – and the conversation is about as relatable as you might imagine. Obama and host Alex Cooper spend a couple of minutes up top talking about skiing. The former first lady is particularly fond of Aspen. “There are a bunch of mothers and daughters. We’ve all raised our kids together, and we take the long weekend, go to Aspen and ski,” joined, she says, by a man named Vance, her personal instructor and “ski husband”. Michelle Obama, “one of the most influential and powerful women in the world” according to Cooper, is promoting her new book The Look, about fashion, style and self-expression. Sometimes, she says, it’s hard to be a woman.
During his lengthy interview with the New York Times, President Trump was asked if there was anything that could check his power on the world stage. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind.” What are we to make of Trump’s morality? That’s between him and God, I suppose, and perhaps only the all-knowing could parse his mind. But it’s fair to wonder where morality factors into Trump’s foreign policy, and whether America’s moral justification of force has only ever been a convenient pretext for acting in our own interest. At the World Economic Forum in Davos today, Trump said he “won’t use force” to take Greenland.
The headline from Trump’s Davos speech is clear: I won’t use military force to take Greenland. That’s what the President told the world’s leading politicians and business executives at the World Economic Forum. That declaration was very good news for all of them and for US investors, who immediately started buying stocks, erasing about half the losses suffered Tuesday, when the threat of force seemed possible. They all knew that carrying out that military threat would shatter the institutional foundation of Western security: NATO and US-European relations. Instead of military threats, Trump emphasized America’s disproportionate contributions to European defense since World War Two. It was finally time for them to bear a fair share of the burden.
There has always been a touch of the actor about Emmanuel Macron, and the President of France was at his theatrical best at Davos on Tuesday. Sporting a pair of aviator sunglasses to conceal a broken blood vessel in his eye, Macron played the part of a man unjustly treated. Not just him, but all of Europe. "We do prefer respect to bullies," concluded Macron in his address to the World Economic Forum. "We do prefer science to plotism, and we do prefer rule of law to brutality. You are welcome in Europe and you are more than welcome to France." Macron didn’t mention Donald Trump by name but the audience understood that he was the big bad bully the French President had in mind.