All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It may sound like a rather arcane development, but a change in the command structure of the Rosgvardiya, Russia’s National Guard, offers some clues about both the state of the country and the Ukraine war – and the Kremlin’s fears for the future. Zolotov has been lobbying for some time for the Rosgvardiya to have
Irresponsible Trump, responsible China: that is the message the BBC’s climate editor seemed to be sending us by juxtaposing the news that the President had repealed Barack Obama’s “endangerment finding” and that China’s carbon emissions fell slightly last year. Trump’s critics like to portray him as a rogue figure in a world which is otherwise committed
In December 2018, to the shock of pretty much everybody in the US national security establishment at the time, President Donald Trump publicly ordered the withdrawal of all US troops from Syria. The announcement caused a panic within the Defense Department, State Department and National Security Council, whose officials teamed up to dissuade Trump from
In announcing an end to the ICE surge in Minnesota, Tom Homan has become for Democrats an unlikely good cop to Kristi Noem’s bad. But the double-act might not last long – the person Homan truly wishes to bring to book is Noem. The White House Border Czar said this morning that the Trump administration
Yesterday, El Paso, Texas, was placed under severe restrictions from the Federal Aviation Administration. For unspecified reasons of national security, no aircraft would be allowed in or out for ten days. Washington sources soon confirmed what many suspected: the cause was hostile drone activity from Mexico. Then there was an about turn. Within a few
Donald Trump spent much of the second half of last year boasting about the total and utter success of his military strikes on Iran. “As you know,” he said in August, “we took out the nuclear capability of Iran, and to use the term that people try to dispute without any knowledge, it was obliterated.” Iran’s
A horrible and incredibly sad tragedy unfolded on February 10 in the small town of Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia, Canada. An 18-year-old, Jesse Van Rootselaar, also known as Jesse Strang, turned a gun first on his mother and stepbrother, then on young students and a teacher at his former high school, and finally on himself – with
Horrible injuries are commonplace in boxing but none, surely, has been quite so devastating as that sustained by the heavyweight Jarrell Miller. In the moment it took for an uppercut to land, the Brooklyn boxer’s life changed forever. Miller went from professional athlete to, well, “the man who got his wig punched off.” I have
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted that he went on vacation, with his family, to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012. How very White Lotus! Suddenly, every ear in Washington cocked Lutnick’s way, like he was starring in an old E.F. Hutton commercial. “My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple with,
Years ago, Peter Mandelson, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington, shared a key lesson with his protégé Morgan McSweeney – until last week the prime minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Reminiscing about his involvement in the Labour party’s 1987 general election campaign, he called it the “spray-paint election.” The manifesto was a “beautiful technicolor” document
The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferable to
Misuse of myself ‘should be a capital offence’, suggests Oliver Duff, the editor of the i Paper. ‘As reflexive pronouns, myself and yourself require a prior subject (I, you),’ he says. I applaud the prospect of a general massacre of abusers of the English language, but by Mr Duff’s criterion, Shakespeare and Richardson, Ruskin and
If you rent a cheap Airbnb house in Las Vegas, you might not be altogether surprised to find dead crickets in the garage. But a thousand vials of medical samples in several freezers – and a centrifuge? After the cleaner and one guest fell ill at a property in the city’s Sunrise Manor neighborhood last week, federal agents raided it
Every couple of years a columnist-cum-novelist will inevitably stoop to shameless self-promotion. In my defence, at least the novel released this month is germane to the political moment. Lest its simple title, A Better Life, come across as lame, I asked the designers of my British and American hardback covers to use imagery that conveys
On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by
Kharkiv, Ukraine In a bunker on the outskirts of Kharkiv, a group of rookie Ukrainian soldiers are learning the basics of combat medicine. The temperature outside is -4°F, and clouds of breath hang in the air – as does the gravity of what they are letting themselves in for. The dummies used for training have
Nothing has been as damaging for the British royal family as the unfortunate meeting of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Jeffrey Epstein. Republican Thomas Massie and the Democrat Ro Khanna know this. In a press conference yesterday, they said they had been shown documents that have been otherwise redacted and withheld from the Epstein files. These documents
During the pandemic, Florida became a haven for those looking to escape lockdowns. Miami was a “Zoom town,” a place where rich mobile professionals moved to enjoy the beaches and freedom, while continuing their remote jobs. Some $36 billion in extra income tax registered with the IRS in 2022. That great influx of people has now come
As a general rule, once a city erects turnstiles to tourist attractions which were once free to visit, it is time to go elsewhere. Never more so than in the case of Rome. Last week the Italian capital introduced a €2 charge to visit the Trevi Fountain. Tight-fisted tourists like me will still be able to
The real problem with US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attending the Grammys wasn’t that it revealed her true colors as a liberal, but that it showed the slow and steady erosion of the court’s institutional reserve. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican, demanded that Chief Justice John Roberts launch an investigation into Jackson
The decision to sentence Jimmy Lai to 20 years in jail in Hong Kong is no surprise, but it is no less shocking or heartbreaking. For his family, especially his courageous wife Teresa, son Sebastien and daughter Claire, who have advocated so tirelessly for their father over the past five years, one can only imagine
It is not just in Washington that the Epstein files continue to dominate. In Westminster, the political reverberations of the Department of Justice’s investigation are threatening to bring down the British government. At the center of the drama is Peter Mandelson: a former Tony Blair aide who served, until recently, as Our Man in DC.
Nothing excuses the manner of Peter Mandelson’s communications with Jeffrey Epstein both before and after the latter’s conviction for sex offenses. Nor are the lies which Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor told about breaking off relations with Epstein defensible. Nevertheless, there is something disturbing about what looks like being the inevitable fallout of the Epstein scandal: that no
What does Jeff Bezos’s gutting of the Washington Post say about America’s sense of itself and of its place in the world? Bezos has scrapped much of the paper’s foreign coverage, as well as the books and sports sections. Over three hundred reporters and editors have been fired – including publisher Will Lewis. The Ukraine
The more salacious aspects of the Epstein files are well known – but what of the banal side of being a billionaire sex pest? It’s no secret Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn were close friends with Epstein, as the trove of emails show. One food-obsessed friend of Cockburn alerted us to the non-stop
Many teenagers today find Christianity off-putting because Jesus seems too fond of “mansplaining.” He appears to have a “God complex,” while the Almighty is alienating on account of being “really violent and aggressive.” These are the findings in the report Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape’s “Translating God” project, based on a recent survey of British 14-
There used to be a political designation in the South of “Yellow Dog Democrats,” meaning voters who’d vote for a yellow dog if the Democrats put them up for election. But in Texas, the yellow dogs have been Republican for a generation. Texas last had a Democratic senator in 1993, and last occupied the Governor’s Mansion in 1995, when Ann Richards
Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a hospital visit to comfort the victim of a knife attack on a police officer, who was forced to fire his weapon to defend himself. Of course, the bed Mamdani visited was that of the schizophrenic man, Jabez Chakraborty, who charged at police and was shot as a result. It almost
Kamala Harris is destined to be the Democratic nominee in 2028 because the American left is now conservative. Democratic politics is now based on two suppositions: The existence of a “silent majority” and the reflexive defense of even the most unlovely institutions. The conservative left glorifies the intelligence agencies and praises generals as the defenders of the republic, while insisting
Political candidates aren’t people these days so much as brand logos for the business of politics. Their stock – the ticker tape of their approval – goes up or down, but after any politician has reached a certain level of mass recognition, their name and face hold value. It doesn’t matter, necessarily, if most voters
35 min listen
The midterm elections in November is shaping up to be one of the most expensive elections yet. Freddy and Ryan Girdusky, author of the National Populist Substack discuss how inflation, crime and immigration are shaping voter patterns, whether the Trump coalition remains as strong as he claims, and what impact President Trump’s recent focus on
Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is proposing a ban on under-16s using social media, following the example set by Australia last year. Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai earlier this week, Sánchez said: “Today our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone… We will protect [them]
23 min listen
Freddy is joined by historian Andrew Lownie, to react to the latest release of Epstein emails – and how they are bringing down a global network of elites. They discuss whether Epstein was a Soviet spy, the renewed pressure on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and if politicians will hide behind “national security” to prevent the release of
Until very recently it was hard to find more stalwart allies of America in Europe than the Poles. Poland was an early supporter of Washington’s policy to expand Nato and actively pushed for a stronger US role in central and eastern Europe. The Poles also stood up as an enthusiastic member of every US-led military