People who want to grab a once-trendy pair of shoes in person will have to go somewhere else: Allbirds announced it has closed all of its stores and struck a deal to sell its assets. The sell-off marks a massive fall from grace for the shoe company, which began as a direct-to-consumer fashion brand before opening brick-and-mortar locations. Allbirds is merely the latest DTC company to find itself drowning, and experts say its shuttering may point to larger problems with the business model.

From $4 billion to $39 million

Allbirds once represented the pinnacle of tech-bro fashion and became known as the “eco-friendly shoe company that won over Silicon Valley,” said the Los Angeles Times. The brand is best recognized for its high-end wool shoes that were “initially embraced by celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, who invested in the company in 2018.” Following a slew of successes with the DTC model, Allbirds “peaked at a $4 billion valuation when it went public in 2021.”

But the company’s remaining assets were sold in March for $39 million, representing only “1% of its peak market capitalization,” said Fortune. The 99% plunge in value was due to “major strategic missteps in trying to sustain its once meteoric growth.” A trend “doesn’t always translate to enduring brand value,” and in Allbirds’ case, the company “believed its growth would last forever, not quite understanding that its distinctive shoes were in fact a fad.”

However, the Allbirds C-suite is seemingly confident that things will turn around. Allbirds “has evolved into a lifestyle footwear brand known for modern design, innovative materials and unparalleled comfort,” Joe Vernachio, the company’s CEO, said in a statement. The sale “builds on the foundational work already completed and sets up the brand to thrive in the years ahead.”

Hit a ceiling

The collapse of Allbirds now has some people asking larger questions about the viability of DTC. Many of these companies “sought to build their customer bases through physical retail and banked on opening stores to boost balance sheets,” said CNBC. As “rents rise, physical retail loses its shine and being digitally native becomes more important, Allbirds and other DTC companies have begun to shift their focus” to a more online strategy.

Many of these early-2010s DTC brands are “suffering from slow sales,” said Marketplace. DTC wasn’t a completely new idea when it arrived, as the business model largely replaced mail-order catalogs. But the “internet refreshed the strategy,” as “anyone with an idea was relatively easily able to present it,” Mark Cohen, the former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, told Marketplace. There is also a “dichotomy between coming up with a brilliant idea and then managing it brilliantly after it’s been noticed by consumers.”

Most brands “do need physical retail to grow their customer base,” Kevin Mullaney, the CEO of retail consultancy The Grayson Company, said to Marketplace. Yet many of these brands, including companies like mattress seller Casper and skincare brand Glossier, were caught “trying to do everything, everywhere, all at once. Meanwhile, the direct-to-consumer space was getting more competitive.” DTC is a “great concept, but it hit a ceiling,” Jessica Ramirez, a co-founder of the advisory firm The Consumer Collective, told Marketplace. Companies “can only go so far with concepts like that.”

Almost from the moment she was elected in 2022, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, has seemed “in complete control”, said Hannah Roberts on Politico. The working-class girl who grew up in a down-at-heel Roman suburb, and shot to power as leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, had – until last week – been shrouded in “an aura of political invincibility”.

Her centre-right coalition – dominated by her own party in alliance with Matteo Salvini’s populist party, Lega, and the late Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – has proved the most stable government Italy has had in years. But that invincible aura has now been shattered by her decision to call a referendum on her proposed judicial reforms, a flagship policy she claimed was needed to end supposed political interference by the courts.

The decision backfired spectacularly: in a vote last week that many considered a plebiscite on her leadership, some 54% of Italians opposed the constitutional amendment, which, among other things, would have separated the career paths of judges and public prosecutors, and reconstituted the bodies that oversaw them.

To Meloni’s critics, this proposal was a threat to judicial independence, and Italy’s three largest cities – Rome, Milan and Naples – all convincingly rejected it. In Naples, where the “No” vote received 71% support, dozens of lawyers and judges revelled in her resounding defeat: at the headquarters of the National Magistrates’ Association they sung the famous anti-fascist song “Bella Ciao” as they quaffed champagne. Her defeat has also given the opposition reason to be cheerful: Italy’s “torpid politics suddenly look competitive again”.

‘Spirit of vengeance’

The PM’s big mistake was to politicise the reforms, said Mario Orfeo in La Repubblica (Rome). Italy’s judicial system is in desperate need of overhaul, not least on account of its routine staff shortages and excessively long trials.

Rather than attempting to make it more efficient, however, Meloni was driven by “the spirit of vengeance”. For decades, the Italian Right has raged about the court’s perceived left-wing bias, a rage stoked by the “Mani pulite” (“Clean Hands”) investigations of the 1990s, in which hundreds of politicians were accused of corruption and had to stand down. The outrage grew under the premiership of media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who had to face dozens of lawsuits over his business dealings, and who damned the judicial system as “a cancer of democracy”.

It’s in that spirit that Meloni and her allies – enraged by judicial rulings that have blocked plans to send asylum seekers to Albania and to build a $13.5 billion bridge to Sicily – approached this referendum. A “parallel Mafia”, is how the justice minister, Carlo Nordio, depicted prosecutors. Italy will be flooded with illegal immigrants and rapists, warned Meloni, if the “Yes” vote loses.

‘Surprisingly clumsy’

Meloni, who has immense political talents, has prospered by being pragmatic and forming viable alliances, said Luzi Bernet in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zürich). But on this occasion she was “surprisingly clumsy”, foolishly assuming that her parliamentary majority would guarantee a simple victory.

But it wasn’t just hubris that led to her defeat, said Christian Rocca on Linkiesta. That “heavy blow” should also be put down to her close relationship with the “radioactive” Donald Trump: in Italy, where fears of rising petrol and electricity prices are rife, Trump’s Iran war is deeply unpopular.

This defeat marks a “major political turning point”, said Le Monde (Paris). Meloni is now weakened: the opposition Democratic Party, the Five Star Movement and the Italian Socialist Party, all smell blood. They are hamstrung, though, by a “glaring lack of leadership”. But a defeat like this will expose the PM to internal attacks and “sow doubt in the ranks”, said Federico Capurso in La Stampa (Turin). So ahead of the 2027 general election, Meloni will have to spend a year “in the trenches”. She may claim nothing has changed: the reality is that “everything has already changed”.

“If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward,” said Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in 2008, a year after he introduced the first iPhone and changed the world forever.

Apple may indeed be “allergic to nostalgia”, said Steven Levy in Wired, but the company is still “begrudgingly engaging in a series of concerts and commemorations, and we’re being blitzed by books, articles and oral histories” to mark its 50th anniversary.

From an inauspicious start in Jobs’ California garage, the company he founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976 went on to pioneer the personal computer, transform the music market, and revolutionise how people use technology in the internet age. Apple is now valued at more than $3.6 trillion (£2.7 trillion), generating $400 billion (£301 billion) a year in revenue, with iPhone sales alone expected to bring in $1 million (£750 million) every 90 seconds. Across the world, 27% of the population – roughly 2.2 billion people – use one or more of its products.

Tariffs, trade wars and anti-trust trials

“No country has been more central to Apple’s rise – or more fraught for its future – than China,” said France 24. CEO Tim Cook, who took over from Jobs after he died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, made China the primary manufacturing base for Apple devices. It is also one of Apple’s largest consumer markets but the company “faces mounting pressure” from “trade tensions and tariffs” accelerating efforts to diversify manufacturing elsewhere in Asia, while “competition from domestic rivals such as Huawei has eaten into Apple’s Chinese market share”.

To put it bluntly, “the world in which Apple once thrived no longer exists,” said former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber in The New Statesman. A “25-year-long process of hyper-globalisation in which money, technologies and ideas have flowed freely” is “now fading amid economic nationalism driven, in part, by a technological arms race between the US and China, and a global tariff offensive led by Donald Trump”.

Apple is also facing a threat to its dominance closer to home, in the form of a series of anti-trust cases against it. “In an industry full of sprawling multipronged tech empires”, the basic argument against Apple is “comparatively simple”, said Adi Robertson on The Verge: “it’s become the ultimate gatekeeper to billions of people’s primary computing hardware, and it keeps competitors locked out while levying a heavy toll on the developers it lets through”.

Regulators and courts have ordered changes, particularly around the App Store, “but those changes have been slow to arrive, in part because for a half-decade or more, Apple has dragged its feet at every turn”.

Artificial intelligence

Apple may have “absolutely owned” the internet and mobile era, said Wired, but “now the future belongs to AI” – a category where Apple seems to have been lacking.

Apple’s Siri lags behind the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, let alone China’s DeepSeek.

This is, in part, because Apple is “limited by its ecosystem”, said Acuity Trading. AI systems “require vast amounts of data, public testing and continuous version launches” and so “cannot be perfected in a closed ecosystem, which is what Apple has built its reputation on”. But perhaps the “most limiting factor is that Apple takes its commitment to user privacy very seriously”, which “has hindered AI development by limiting the amount of data it can use for training AI models”.

This “obsession with user privacy and its premium hardware could position it to drive widespread adoption of personalised AI – and make it profitable, a goal that has proved elusive for much of the AI industry”, said France 24.

Succession planning

The demise of Apple has been predicted many times before; in the mid-1980s after Jobs was forced out and again in 2011 when he passed away. Having revived the company and driven the release of the iMac, iPod and iPhone, Jobs was “widely thought of as irreplaceable”, said Barber. But Cook has not only steadied the ship but also taken the company to new heights, in terms of revenue generation if not technological innovation.

While the 65-year-old has given no indication of an imminent transition, the most likely candidate to take over when he does decide to go is John Ternus, senior vice president for hardware engineering, who oversees development of the devices that generate roughly 80% of Apple’s revenue. “Known for his steadiness and political acumen”, Ternus, like Cook, is “risk averse” and would be a continuity hire rather than “someone more willing to shake things up”, said Bloomberg.

This matters because, while its products “helped define the past 50 years of consumer technology, thriving for another 50 will inevitably require the company to transform in ways that aren’t entirely clear today”.

Even though relations between China and America remain tense, many young Americans’ perspectives seem to be shifting as they adopt Chinese cultural habits. The online trend, dubbed Chinamaxxing, has non-Chinese content creators singing the praises of their newfound Chinese identity. At the same time, the meme’s prevalence has prompted some members of the Chinese diaspora to push back.

‘China’s growing soft power’

For social media users, Chinamaxxing translates to acting increasingly more Chinese. The trend can include “drinking hot water instead of iced lattes, wearing house slippers indoors or embracing traditional Chinese skin care routines,” said NPR. TikTok and Instagram users have taken to saying they are entering a “very Chinese time” in their lives.

The trend has been “amplified by Chinese diaspora influencers” such as Sherry Zhu, who shares “herbal skin care recipes and advice on becoming a Chinese ‘baddie,’” said NPR. Though it began as “niche lifestyle content,” the trend has since “spilled into celebrity PR stunts by the likes of Timothée Chalamet playing ping-pong in Chengdu and mainstream cultural debates.”

It’s probably not an accident that Chinamaxxing has been popularized on TikTok, said Shaoyu Yuan, a scholar who studies Chinese soft power, to NPR. Soft power is the ability to influence international relations through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion. The social media app has an impact on multiple levels. One content stream weakens “American narrative authority by highlighting content that highlights U.S. dysfunction,” while another “makes China look more attractive.”

The meme is not “bound by nationality or ethnicity; anyone can be Chinese if they wish,” said The New York Times. “And right now, many do.” As Labubus and other “Chinese cultural exports” win over global audiences, experts say that the spread of “being Chinese” memes may “signal China’s growing soft power abroad.” For some American content creators, the memes are also a “wry expression of disillusionment with politics at home.”

It’s “partly meme logic,” but it’s also a “sign of growing cultural cachet,” said Yuan to the Times. The memes reflect a “broader shift, in which online audiences are developing a new level of familiarity with China as they engage with it through lifestyle trends and aesthetics” rather than as the “geopolitical rival and security threat it’s often portrayed as" in the U.S.

‘Orientalism by any other name’

The trend has sparked mixed reactions from the Chinese diaspora, with some “worried about the potential for cultural appropriation,” said The Guardian. Even Zhu is concerned about non-Chinese creators reducing traditional medicine to a wellness fad. “I don’t want people to forget the benefits that my culture is providing,” she said to NPR. It comes from China. It’s not “coming from somewhere else.”

Chinamaxxing seemed to reach its peak during Lunar New Year in February. Related advice from non-Chinese creators felt like a direct challenge to the identity of those within the diaspora, said Jenny Lau, the author of “An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included),” to The Guardian. Chinamaxxing is “Orientalism by any other name.”

In 2026, it’s “apparently cool to be Chinese,” said Cherie Wong, a Hong Kong Canadian activist, in an Instagram video. But before “white people claim they are drinking hot water” and in a “very Chinese time, I’mma need you to stop.” A very Chinese time in “my ancestry was my grandparents seeing all their schoolteachers get executed for being intellectuals.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is struggling. The agency tasked with protecting the health of U.S. citizens has lost a quarter of its staffers over the last year, morale is lousy for those who remain and for the moment the organization has no leader: Its last Senate-confirmed director was ousted in August and no replacement has been chosen.

Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised to restore trust in the CDC following the Covid-19 pandemic. But can his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement survive the turmoil?

Why MAHA might be stalled

Kennedy’s MAHA agenda “appears to be stalled,” said The Guardian. The CDC lacks a director, and Trump’s nomination of Casey Means to be U.S. surgeon general is “stuck in limbo” in the Senate. But the administration “isn’t ready to nominate a new CDC director” despite a deadline of last week to do so, said CNN. Administration officials are still “evaluating candidates” who can shift the CDC “to its original mission of fighting infectious disease,” said HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon.

The CDC nomination delay comes as MAHA and Kennedy “appear to be on the ropes,” Tom Bartlett said at The Atlantic. MAHA supporters are “angry” that Trump is shielding herbicide makers from legal liability. The Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine chief just left the agency, a federal judge put a hold on Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda and the Kennedy-allied vice chair of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel resigned last week. Those events, taken together, suggest the secretary’s hold on power is “waning.” A December poll “seems to have scared the White House off Kennedy’s vaccine agenda.” The result: Kenedy is “losing his grip on the CDC.”

The agency is meanwhile in “turmoil,” said The New York Times. Insiders say it is being “remade into a vehicle for ideologues” who share Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda. The shift prompted a staff exodus that leaves public health advocates concerned that Americans will be “increasingly exposed to a wide range of health threats” amid surges of measles, whooping cough and flu infections.

White House avoids controversy

Federal law says that acting agency directors “may not serve in the role for more than 210 days,” said The Hill. That deadline passed last week. National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, who had been serving as acting director, has been “delegated to provide continuity in day-to-day CDC processes” until a permanent replacement is confirmed, said a White House spokesperson.

Getting Senate confirmation is a “potentially tall order,” said Axios. Kennedy and other Trump health appointees have “antagonized some of the chamber’s Republican centrists.” The White House is especially “eager to avoid further controversial health moves” ahead of November’s midterm elections. So Trump’s eventual CDC pick “may need both MAHA and science chops,” said Roll Call. Key GOP senators “want a moderate public servant” who can last in the job. The administration, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), does not have a “very encouraging track record thus far.”

West Texas is not the first place you would expect to find a French aristocrat suspected of murdering his family and going on the run for 15 years.

But last week the Sheriff’s Office of Brewster County posted a request for information about Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès on its Facebook page, following a tip-off from an investigative news team that he had been seen in the south of the county in 2020, accompanied by a black Labrador. Ligonnès “had previously travelled to Brewster County and reportedly claimed it was one of his favourite places”, the sheriff said he’d been told.

The post, which included the most recent known images of Ligonnès, was “enough to stir a frenzy” among French “amateur sleuths and crime fans”, said The Times. Their “favourite mystery, involving multiple supposed sightings over the years, is equivalent to” the enduring controversy around the UK’s “elusive Lord Lucan”.

‘Fantasy life’

Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès was 50 when the bodies of his wife, Agnès, and his children – Arthur, 20, Thomas, 18, Anne, 16, and Benoît, 13 – were discovered under the patio at their home in Nantes in April 2011. They had all been shot, wrapped in sheets, covered in quicklime and buried, along with the two family dogs. The last confirmed sighting of Ligonnès was at a motel near Saint-Tropez two weeks after the bodies were discovered. His car was later found abandoned in the car park.

Initial investigations revealed that, in the days before the killings, Ligonnès had bought cement, digging tools and four bags of lime in various locations in the Nantes area. He also owned a .22 rifle similar to the one used in the killings, had recently bought ammunition and gone to practise at a local shooting club.

Ligonnès, who had an aristocratic lineage, was a “failed businessman”, said The Times. He “lived a fantasy life in which he claimed he was, among other things, a US intelligence agent”. By the time of the murders, he had accrued significant debts and was struggling to maintain his family’s outwardly comfortable lifestyle.

Following his disappearance, reports emerged that Ligonnès had written to friends up to a year before the killings warning that, crippled with debts, he was contemplating “suicide, alone or collective” and “shooting up the house while everyone is sleeping”.

Red herrings and false leads

In the months and years following the murders, hundreds of sightings of Ligonnès were reported to police, “all proving to be false leads”, said France 24.

Then in July 2015, a photo of two of Ligonnès’ sons was sent to an Agence France-Presse journalist, with the words “I am still alive” scrawled on the back, along with his name. Handwriting analysis failed to ascertain if it was genuine.

In 2018, police raided a monastery in Roquebrune-sur-Argens (the Provençal town near Saint-Tropez where his car was abandoned) after a witness reported seeing a man who resembled Ligonnès, but this again proved to be a dead end. A year later, a man was arrested at Glasgow airport and held in custody before tests confirmed it was another case of mistaken identity.

The case then went cold for years, until a new book published earlier this year by Gilles Galloux, a former police investigator on the case. He claimed Ligonnès “boarded a flight from Nice airport using fake ID documents” and has been hiding out in the US, “a place he had long admired”, said The Connexion. It was this lead that drew attention to Brewster County, which Ligonnès visited in the 1990s.

Ligonnès’ sister, Christine, maintains her brother’s innocence, believing the murders “were staged by a foreign intelligence agency, and that the family is living in witness protection in the US”, said The Times. Prosecutors in Nantes remain “sceptical” of such theories. Their somewhat more pedestrian hypothesis is that Ligonnès “probably killed himself in the rocky hinterland of Provence”.

Tech enthusiasts and industry analysts are sounding the alarm about RAMageddon, a shortage of random access memory chips crucial for running many consumer electronics. Though the future implications of the mass integration of generative AI have had much of the industry worried, the immediate impact of AI’s excessive memory needs is being felt worldwide.

Insatiable high-margin demand

The memory chip shortage is “beginning to hammer profits, derail corporate plans and inflate price tags” on everything from “laptops and smartphones to automobiles and data centers,” said Bloomberg. Major technology companies have hinted that going forward, the shortage of DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, the “fundamental building block of almost all technology,” will constrain production.

The global RAM market is “experiencing a severe price crisis,” with the cost of memory chips “surging by as much as 80-90% in recent months,” said CNN. RAMageddon has been driven by the “insatiable, high-margin demand for AI data center infrastructure,” leading manufacturers to shift “production capacity away from consumer products.” This has led to the shortage “expected to last well into 2026 and potentially up to 2028,” analysts said to the outlet.

RAMageddon is “only getting worse,” and there is “no immediate end in sight,” said The Verge. Everything that has a computer inside depends on RAM, and “almost everything has a computer in it now: farm tractors, hospital equipment, your TV set-top box.” Most of the global supply of RAM comes from just “three companies that are happily prioritizing the AI gold rush over everything else.”

Outside of consumer products, the shortage is also “causing problems for resource-constrained laboratories that already faced barriers to accessing powerful computing tools,” said Nature. The shortage is “pushing researchers to develop more efficient algorithms and hardware, to reduce the amount of memory needed.” Scientific research “increasingly relies on large-scale computing infrastructure,” Matteo Rinaldi, the director of the Institute for NanoSystems Innovation at Northeastern University, said to Nature. Many of these workloads “require substantial memory capacity.”

‘Bigger than anything we have faced before’

The tech industry may be reeling because of the shortage, but an easy fix is not imminent. ​​“There’s no relief until 2028,” said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in early February, after speaking to two of the big three memory companies. Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung, which control about 95% of the global DRAM supply, are “making enough money to increase memory production.” Still, it will take time to build the new memory fabrication plants they promised, The Verge said. The companies also see it “as more profitable and less risky to build out slowly” instead of “rushing to meet demand.”

Micron’s memory-fabricating facility in Idaho won’t open until mid-2027, and “you’re not really gonna see real output” until 2028, the company’s vice president of marketing, mobile and client business unit, Christopher Moore, said to Wccftech. SK Hynix predicted the shortage would last through late 2027.

We stand at the “cusp of something that is bigger than anything we’ve faced before,” Tim Archer, the chief executive officer of chip equipment supplier Lam Research Corp., said at a conference in South Korea, per Bloomberg. What lies ahead “between now and the end of this decade” will “overwhelm all other sources of demand.”

With RAMageddon, it is “wiser to hold off doing business today,” as prices are “almost certain to be higher tomorrow,” Suh Young-hwan, who runs three DIY PC shops in Seoul, said to Bloomberg. “Unless Steve Jobs rises from the dead to declare that AI is nothing but a bubble, this trend is likely to persist for some time.”

The ongoing memory crisis is making it “hard for tech enthusiasts and the general population not to feel more than a little deflated,” said Tom’s Guide (a sister site of The Week). We are “marching towards lining the pockets of a small few” while “giving up environmental and financial stability.” It is “easy to feel jaded,” but this kind of crisis “feels a little unprecedented.”

Given the current uncertainty, the Bank of England’s decision to hold interest rates at 3.75% last week was “the only one possible”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. “Policymakers are as clueless on the length of the war, and the cost of energy six weeks or six months from now, as stock market investors.” So why did the London bond market throw such a wobbly?

UK borrowing costs soared to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis on the day after the Bank’s meeting, with the yield on benchmark 10-year gilts surging to 5%, “deepening a three-week long rout”, said the Financial Times. Two-year gilts – the part of the market most sensitive to interest-rate moves – were also pummelled.

Britain has been hit hardest in the global bond sell-off since the outbreak of war, because our dependency on imported energy means spiking oil and gas prices “quickly feed through to broader inflation”. When combined with flatlining growth and rising household borrowing costs, the risk of recession is plain.

‘The spectre of stagnation’

Perhaps last week’s turmoil was “a weird overreaction” to the Bank’s hawkish new tone, said Katie Martin in the same paper – rather than interest rate cuts this year, we are now contemplating hikes. But “the spectre of stagnation stalks the land”. The market has stabilised, but “in aggregate, more than £100 billion has been erased from the market value of UK government bonds in a matter of weeks”, said Stuart Fieldhouse on The Armchair Trader.

“UK rate expectations have been on a remarkable journey in barely a month,” said Chris Beauchamp at IG. “A full 100 basis points rise in rates is now expected for this year.” The bad news for consumers and business is compounded by the implications for the Government of “a fiscal squeeze”. If there’s further escalation in the Middle East, “this may be just the beginning of the crisis”.

The ‘Maradona Effect’

As data on demand weakness becomes evident, the Bank of England won’t want “to compound the damage with higher interest rates”, said Karen Ward of J.P. Morgan in the Financial Times. I suspect it is deploying the “Maradona Effect”, named after the footballing legend whose greatest skill was feinting. Conveying a very hawkish signal about the outlook for rates may obviate the need to actually raise them.

The Bank “faces an acute dilemma”, said Roger Bootle in The Telegraph. As we learnt in 2022, the issue at stake is what happens to inflation after the initial, oil-induced spike. The case for higher rates is to ward off “second-round effects” and stop inflation becoming embedded. “The art of central banking lies partly in not overreacting, but also in not taking action too late.”

Nick Adams is a self-proclaimed alpha male influencer whose social media posts have proclaimed his love of big steaks and the Hooters restaurant chain. He is also President Donald Trump’s new special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism and values, a gig that came Adams’ way only after his nomination to be the U.S. ambassador to Malaysia did not land.

Adams’ appointment is the latest example of Trump’s penchant for out-of-the-box personnel decisions. Critics call him a trolling “dudebro” surviving in the president’s orbit despite an inability to muster support for Senate confirmation.

Provocative, like Trump

Adams surged to MAGA prominence as one of the leading lights of the online “manosphere,” said The New York Times. He posted frequently “about stereotypical symbols of masculinity,” advised men to dominate their relationships with women and lamented Hooters’ 2025 bankruptcy filing by volunteering to lead a “presidential task force” to save the chain. He did not backtrack after Trump nominated him for the Malaysia ambassadorship last year. “I am an alpha male. Yes, I eat rare steaks. Yes, I visit Hooters frequently,” he said in a social media post after the nomination. But Adams said he would “not be apologizing” for his posts.

Adams began a career in his native Australia as a “staunch nationalist” who regularly gave speeches about the “dangers of multiculturalism,” said The Washington Post. He was controversial even among allies: The country’s right-of-center party once “threatened to suspend him for six months” for swearing at a reporter. He resigned from Australian politics in 2012 and decided it was “time to try somewhere else.” Adams gained American citizenship in 2021 and moved quickly into Trump’s circle. Both men “come up with provocative ways to communicate something or highlight a subject area,” Adams told the Post.

The provocations provoke. Adams’ “shtick” targets insecure young men with the “false promise that embracing aggressive misogyny is the key to achieving your dreams,” Amanda Marcotte said at Salon. Adams and other manosphere denizens play the pose as a joke, but it is “pretty much inarguable that Adams’ followers are sincerely misogynistic.”

Malaysia: Failed nomination

Trump appointed Adams to the tourism position after the ambassadorial nomination “came under fire in Malaysia” because Adams had a history of pro-Israel and anti-Islam posts that did not sit well in the largely Islamic nation, said The Diplomat. Young members of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s party marched to the U.S. embassy in Kuala Lumpur to protest the appointment. Adams is a “right-wing agitator and partisan provocateur,” said former law minister Zaid Ibrahim to the outlet. Malaysians cheered when he was quietly withdrawn from consideration, said The South China Morning Post.

The newly created tourism position is a “much better fit for Adams” because it does not involve a “grueling Senate confirmation process,” said The Bulwark. The job’s duties include involvement with the forthcoming World Cup and 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Adams plans to “thrust forward in this role,” he said on X, and “never relent in spreading the message of the greatness of America!”

With oil markets in flux, suspending an early-20th century law might help stabilize energy prices. President Donald Trump certainly hopes so: Last week he signed a 60-day waiver from employing the Jones Act, a law that requires U.S.-flagged vessels be used to carry goods and passengers if they’re traveling between American ports. The law was created to protect the domestic shipping industry, but detractors say it hobbles trade and creates more problems than it solves.

Fewer ships, higher prices

The Jones Act was passed after World War I to “rebuild U.S. shipping after German U-boats decimated America’s merchant fleet” during the war, said The Associated Press. Advocates say the law protects national security and homegrown jobs, but those in opposition say sidelining foreign competition has “driven up the cost of carrying cargo domestically.” Presidents can waive the law during crises, and Trump is using that power for one reason: U.S.-flagged ships are “generally more expensive to operate,” and those added costs fall heavily on places like Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico that rely on overseas shipping.

Trump’s pause will allow foreign tankers to transport oil and gas between ports in the United States. That should “lead to lower transportation costs and increased supply” and eventually lower gasoline prices by 10 cents per gallon, Christopher Niezrecki said at The Conversation. It could be “months, not days or weeks,” before drivers notice the benefits at the pump, however, and that is likely only if Trump extends the waiver’s duration. “Fuel prices would fall more steeply” if the law is fully repealed.

American shipbuilding “has shrunk” despite the law’s best efforts, said Marketplace. The U.S. now has only 55 tankers legally qualified to carry oil and gas between domestic ports. Trump’s interruption of the Jones Act will “dramatically expand the universe of ships available” to do that work, said Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow to the outlet. Places like California, Florida and the Northeast will benefit most from the waiver, said Marketplace, “because those areas rely on ships instead of pipelines.”

Significant costs

The law does have defenders among American shipbuilders and vessel operators. There is “nothing more America First than the Jones Act,” Jennifer Carpenter, the CEO of the American Waterways Operators, said at DC Journal. Repealing it would allow foreign companies to “undercut American companies on labor costs” and hollow out the domestic industry, which raises national security concerns. Without the law, America’s “most sensitive cargo” would be transported between U.S. ports “by foreign mariners, including Chinese shipmen who ultimately answer to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Those against the law hope Trump’s waiver is “the beginning of the end of the Jones Act,” The Washington Post said in an editorial. A South Korean-built tanker costs $170 million less than one made in the United States, and “it costs millions more to operate every year thereafter.” The law has failed to save American shipbuilding but has imposed “significant costs.” Those are “much longer-running issues than anything having to do with the war in Iran.”

Sarah Ferguson was involved in talks to clone the late Queen Elizabeth’s beloved corgis for a reality TV show, The Mail on Sunday has claimed.

The “cash-strapped” former Duchess of York “met executives from Halcyon Studios in Los Angeles for a series of lunches and dinners” in May 2023, eight months after the Queen’s death.

A show synopsis sets out how, after Ferguson “is bequeathed two of the Queen’s beloved corgis, she decides to embark on a bold and controversial business venture – cloning the royal pups”. However, “as she navigates the complex world of genetics and royal protocol, Sarah must also grapple with her own personal demons and strained relationship with the royal family”.

Pet cloning is “highly contentious”, said the paper, “with experts warning it can produce horrible abnormalities”. But it is also highly “lucrative”, with pet lovers in the US, including celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Barbara Streisand and NFL star Tom Brady, paying “up to £75,000” to replicate their favourite animal.

‘Not an exact match’

Science has “come a long way” since Dolly the sheep was cloned three decades ago, said National Geographic. Pet cloning is “becoming more commonplace” with “thousands of grieving pet owners“ turning to the procedure in an attempt to “bring back their lost loves”.

But while a clone “will likely resemble the original pet more than a random member of the same species, both in appearance and behaviour”, their personalities “probably won’t be an exact match”.

Cloning “involves extracting viable eggs from the fallopian tubes” of the female animal, fertilising the egg with sperm from the male animal, then injecting a surrogate with hormones and implanting the embryo, said James Serpell, from the University of Pennsylvania. But it is not cheap – the average procedure costs around $50,000 (£37,000) – or easy. A 2022 study showed a maximum success rate of just 16% as many of the embryos failed to implant successfully, leading to miscarriages and animals born malformed.

Some companies are “trying to market what they do as recreating the original pet, and they’re not succeeding there”, said Serpell. So much happens after conception that, like twins, the two animals will not be “truly identical”.

‘Essence of the hereditary principle’

A spokesperson for Ferguson said she “never progressed any discussions with Halcyon Studios, which were engineered by others, and withdrew from them of her own accord”. But to even “consider cloning the late Queen’s beloved dogs for financial gain is unbelievably grotesque and utterly bizarre”, royal author Richard Fitzwilliams told The Mail on Sunday.

The opportunity to “own an exact replica of a corgi once owned by the Queen of England” would certainly “give immense joy to a certain type of person”, said Sam Leith in The Spectator.

On “a slightly more philosophical plane”, isn’t genetics “the very essence of the hereditary principle?” If she had gone ahead with the proposal, perhaps Ferguson – “in her whimsical but clumsy way” – would “have been putting her manicured finger on the heart of something both important and a little absurd about our monarchy?”

It is generally accepted “as a matter of course that the descent of the crown through the generations is accompanied by a slight but perceptible deterioration of the genetic stock”.

The fallout from The New York Times’ allegations of sexual assault against Cesar Chavez was swift and wide-ranging. Now, some in the industry are hoping the revelations about the late farm labor leader open doors for systemic changes, including reforms aimed at advancing the rights of women farmworkers.

‘It creates an opportunity for those without scruples’

The sexual abuse claims, largely made by Chavez’s co-labor leader, Dolores Huerta, represent a massive fall from grace for a beloved figure in the Latino community, one so cherished that former President Joe Biden even placed a bronze bust of Chavez in the Oval Office in 2021. The allegations “raise a difficult question: How do you reckon with the man without losing the movement?” said KCRA-TV Stockton.

Some are concerned that the focus on Chavez could “leave today’s farmworkers more vulnerable,” farmworker advocate Luis Magaña said to KCRA, since people will be paying less attention to the bigger picture and more on the specifics of Chavez's allegations. The current system, which Magaña says can elicit violence against these workers, “creates an opportunity for those without scruples” to “freely commit some type of abuse, such as not paying them.” Magaña worked alongside Chavez in the early days of the movement but believes the cause must “continue beyond the man.” The time to have a conversation about this issue of sexual abuse among farmworkers documented in the Times exposé is “overdue.”

The farm labor movement itself was “always about the people — the thousands who marched, organized and fought for fair wages and dignity,” Magaña said to KCRA. Many are now trying to reconcile the revelations about Chavez with modern changes. Union organizers, for example, are “trying to push forward the farmworker movement and continue the work that many women, not just Chavez, spearheaded,” said The 19th. This includes “investing resources and support to improve the culture that has protected perpetrators in organizing spaces over victims.”

‘Engage and support our community’

Huerta, now 95, insists that her allegations against Chavez should not downplay the victories made by labor unions. Farmworker labor movements have “always been bigger and far more important than any one individual,” she said in a statement. Chavez’s actions “do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people. We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”

And many say that the current advocacy for women’s rights in the fields, regardless of Chavez, doesn’t go far enough. Do women “feel safe at work? It’s not just the labor movement,” said Olga Miranda, the president of SEIU Local 87, a union for San Francisco service workers, to The San Francisco Standard. There are “assholes everywhere.” The floodgates will open because of the allegations, as there are women who will “stand up and speak out and say, ‘I’m not gonna take your shit.’ Watch out for that force.”

The discourse should shift from “one man to the conditions farmworkers still face today, including a reality many say has long gone unheard: sexual violence against women in the fields,” said KCRA. Many women in these environments, Magaña said to KCRA, “stay silent, not for a cause but out of the need to survive.”

Although he's still only 35, Balendra Shah has already lived many different lives, said Hannah Beech et al. in The New York Times. He has been an engineer, a rapper and – until he stepped down this January – mayor of Nepal's capital city, Kathmandu. But Balen (to give him the name by which he's popularly known) now faces his biggest test yet, as Nepal's youngest-ever prime minister.

The “pugnacious” millennial – who has made a habit of ranting against his critics on social media and coming up with startling political observations (he has even praised “the managerial acumen of dictators like Hitler”) – hasn't formally been declared the next leader of the Himalayan nation, but following the sweeping victory on 5 March of his centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), the party he joined in December, he's all but a shoo-in.

Defying the odds

Balen's success didn't come out of the blue. As Kathmandu's mayor, he cultivated the image of a no-nonsense politician keen to slash red tape. But his appeal skyrocketed after he voiced support for the violent youth demonstrations – the so-called Gen Z protests – that toppled the communist-led government of K.P Sharma Oli last September. People between the ages of 16 and 40 make up about 40% of the population – and younger voters turned out en masse for the RSP.

Balen's spectacular victory has “fundamentally changed” Nepali politics, said Biswas Baral in The Diplomat (Washington DC). Defying an electoral system that typically produces coalition governments, he achieved the “almost impossible” by helping the RSP, a party only founded in 2022, to win 182 out of 275 seats. The old political guard suffered a drubbing so severe that the country's two main parties – the centre-left Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) – were left with just 38 and 25 seats respectively. They paid the price for endemic corruption, chronic political instability and high youth unemployment – issues Balen has promised to address.

If anyone is to blame for the scale of their defeat, it's Oli, said Jiba Raj Pokharel in The Himalayan Times (Kathmandu). It was the 74-year-old communist PM who imposed the social media ban that triggered the Gen Z demonstrations last September, a ban that morphed into a broader movement against state corruption. The security forces opened fire on the crowd and, in the ensuing violence, 76 people died; parliament, the supreme court and other historic buildings were torched. By refusing to take “moral responsibility” for the killings, Oli guaranteed his own “political demise”. Balen stood against him in his seat in Jhapa and, unsurprisingly, beat him by some 50,000 votes.

‘Delicate balance’

This election should be seen as a “youthquake”, said The Kathmandu Post. For decades, Nepalese politics has been dominated by sexagenarians and septuagenarians, in a country where the median age is now just 26. But things are changing fast. In 2022, just 6% of Nepal's politicians were aged under 40. Now 43% of the 165 directly elected MPs are (the rest are selected by parties in a PR list system). Although their election is, of course, a welcome development, this inexperienced new cohort must “transcend the lure of social media populism in favour of substantive, research-driven legislative reform”.

The RSP victory and the trouncing of the old guard is a boon to India and a blow to China, said the Tibetan Review (New Delhi). Nepal is strategically situated between Asia's two largest powers, both of which compete for influence there. India is by far Nepal's biggest trade partner, but under the premiership of Oli, an “unabashedly pro-China figure”, Beijing gained the upper hand. The precarious path Balen will now have to tread is maintaining “a delicate balance” between these regional super powers, said Sanjay Upadhya in the Nepali Times (Kathmandu). “The challenge is to protect Nepal's sovereignty while gaining the economic aid needed for growth.” It will be no easy task.

Artificial intelligence has swept through the tech industry, video games included. While many industry heads are declaring AI the wave of the future, so far, integrating AI into gaming has had a rough start. And its presence is getting pushback from both developers and gaming enthusiasts.

‘RAMaggedon,’ job loss and stunted creativity

The video game industry reached unprecedented heights during the pandemic, but then “artificial intelligence crept up behind it,” said Wired. The industry proliferation of AI is “already accelerating job loss and cheapening the work of developers at studios.”

One of the largest problems gaming faces is the global shortage of random-access memory, a dearth referred to as “RAMaggedon.” The data centers’ need to run AI have “siphoned RAM from the industry,” said Wired. The costs of hardware required for consoles are augmented, leading to higher prices for existing systems and stalled releases of new ones. At-home PC-building, “once a rite of passage for entry-level gamers,” has become a luxury. Analysts warn that the shortage is “expected to last well into 2026 and potentially up to 2028,” said CNN.

Gaming is the “only mass media entertainment where the creative ceiling is limited by consumer hardware,” Washington Post game critic Gene Park said to Wired. If consumers can’t afford or access tech like sufficient RAM, “the innovation will slow down.” Developers could be forced to compromise stories, art, non-player characters, battles and world-building, “all of which are already at risk of being automated by new AI tools,” Wired said.

There is a fear among the staff of major gaming companies that “CEOs will continue to fall for the potential of AI rather than the reality and thus gut workplaces.” About 45,000 gaming employees were fired from 2022 to the end of 2025, with up to 10,000 layoffs forecasted for 2026. Layoffs and fewer job postings have disproportionately impacted junior staffers, and now “everyone is just having seniors do the work,” a veteran game developer at Xbox said to Wired. The work they do is often supplemented with AI.

Mixed feelings

Some gaming executives are pro-AI integration. It is shocking and “sad” that the industry, famous for pushing new technology forward, hasn’t embraced generative AI, said Moritz Baier-Lentz, the head of gaming at Lightspeed Venture Partners, during the recent Game Developers Conference, per PC Gamer. Anti-AI game developers are “demonizing” a “marvelous new technology.” The technology is “ultimately there to empower human creators to create stuff more efficiently,” not replace them, Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Fortnite developer Epic Games, said to IGN. “I think that’s a good thing.”

Developers, unlike some executives, do not seem as sure about AI, though many of them are already using it. Overall, 36% of the game developers surveyed for the 2026 State of the Game Industry Report used generative AI, with business professionals and upper management more likely to use it than rank-and-file developers. 52% of developers think generative AI is having a negative impact on the game industry, up from 30% last year. Only 7% said it had a positive impact.

As more studios have released games with AI-generated art, characters and dialogue, a “growing number have later backtracked or sworn to limit their use of the technology,” said The Washington Post. The reversals have come after “aggressive pushback from gamers online.” Gamers are overwhelmingly worried that the technology will “reduce the work needed from artists and voice actors” or lead to low-quality games filled with AI-generated slop that “lacks a creative touch,” said the Post. How the video game industry navigates this issue could influence companies in other sectors, said Nicole Greene, an AI industry analyst to the Post. Gamers are a “passionate consumer group. They don’t want to go in and see cheap AI backgrounds because a company wanted to cut costs.”

The war in Iran has caused airlines “their biggest test since the Covid-19 pandemic”, said The New York Times.

Air traffic has been “paralysed” and more than 52,000 flights to and from the Middle East have been cancelled since the war began – that is “more than half of all flights planned in the region”.

“Costs are adding up” and tourism in the region has “effectively ground to a halt”. For Emirates and the other Gulf airlines, who “have the highest profit margins in the industry”, continued disruption could take a “substantial” financial and reputational toll.

‘Scrambling’ for alternatives

Since the first missiles were launched, air traffic controllers have been “shepherding passenger jets through safer but congested airspace on the edge of the war”, said the BBC. On a normal day, each individual controller would be responsible for around six aircraft “in their area at a time”. But in times of war it can easily be “double that”.

Shifts would normally be around “45-60 minutes long with 20-30 minutes off” but during times of conflict “they will likely only do a 20-minute stint and then break for the same length of time”. In times such as these, more controllers are brought in to manage the volume and “rotated more frequently to ensure they don’t become overwhelmed”.

Airlines “have been scrambling to find alternatives” to normal routes through Iranian airspace, and the effects are “rippling across the region”, said The New York Times. “Tens of thousands of flights” have been cancelled since war broke out, and the total numbers in the Gulf remain “well below normal levels”.

Airspace restrictions have become an “increasingly common challenge for airlines navigating a world shaped by geopolitical conflict”. The Russian invasion of Ukraine had a similar effect: the “Siberian corridor” over Russia used to be a “relatively direct connection” between Europe and Asia but is has become a “patchwork of workarounds”. Likewise, the airspace over Iran, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and Qatar is now “largely devoid of commercial planes”. The war in the Middle East is “further fragmenting a once efficient and finely tuned global aviation network”.

As “established east-west routes are narrowing, the skies over Central Asia matter more than they did before”, said The Times of Central Asia. Countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are “not immune to the crisis” and cannot match the “far larger networks” and “deeper fleets” of other Gulf hubs.

But they can provide “overflight planning, air traffic management, and route resilience rather than headline passenger numbers”. Their “aviation systems clearly now carry far greater strategic and economic importance than they did only a few years ago”. Governments in the region have acknowledged the “strategic value of their territory for rail, road, and trade corridors”, but the disruption caused by the war in Iran has “added aviation to that argument”.

‘Ballooning cost’

The war in Iran has “exposed the fragility of modern travel”, said Bloomberg. As flight paths become “increasingly narrow”, airlines’ “long-term growth plans” have been thrown into “disarray”.

Diversions add many hours to flights so planes must carry more fuel, which is “an expensive burden in light of the spike in energy costs”. With shipping channels through the Strait of Hormuz “effectively shut”, the markets have been “driving up prices of crude and products like diesel and jet fuel”.

This will inevitably affect consumers. Carriers may “hike fares” and add “fuel surcharges to cover the ballooning cost”. Equally, airlines and other large energy consumers could begin to “panic buy oil derivatives contracts” to “shield them from wild price swings”.

In the longer term, continued instability could also change flight culture, with safety concerns “likely to remain front of mind for many travellers” for the foreseeable future. Higher inflation around the world could mean demand to fly is “reshaped”, even “spurring passengers to rethink long-haul trips” and “favour cheaper holidays closer to home”.

Even though it has long been known that Russia engages in censorship of its citizens, recent experiments in Moscow are raising fears that the Russian government is augmenting its information blockade. This new era of censorship, which involves blacking out internet communications other than approved websites, has raised concerns in Russia and among outside observers.

‘Severely limit what people can see’

Throughout March, people in Moscow have “found themselves without connectivity on their phones” due to internet outages created by the Kremlin, said NBC News. These blackouts have “disrupted the daily lives of millions of residents and hit businesses that rely on mobile internet,” though the Russian government has repeatedly said this is being done in the name of security due to threats from the war in Ukraine.

Certain “websites and apps, including government portals and banking services, may remain accessible through ‘whitelists,’” said Business Insider, as the Kremlin may allow “certain services to keep operating even while broader internet access is restricted.” Beyond government portals, some of the sites on these Russian whitelists may also include “state media outlets and Russian homegrown apps such as Max, a messaging platform controlled by the government,” said The Wall Street Journal.

This effort to control internet access is not new: Russia has been “honing and testing similar infrastructure for the past year,” said the Journal. Many officials believe these rolling blackouts will “likely be in place until the end of the war.” This comes as Russians are already “contending with rising inflation and economic strain more than four years into the war in Ukraine.”

‘Massive headache’

As the Kremlin continues to clamp down harder, many Russians, particularly those in the workforce, say they are having trouble going about their lives. The outages are a “massive headache,” Dmitry, a consultant in Moscow, said to The Guardian. “I’m having trouble ordering a taxi, sending work emails or even just messaging my family.” The blackouts are also “slamming businesses that rely on cellphone internet,” said The Associated Press.

Muscovites who run “cafes, restaurants and shops that rely on mobile internet have suffered massive losses as customers have been unable to pay for the services,” said the AP. Many of the city’s ATMs and parking meters that “rely on cellphone internet stopped working,” further complicating Moscow life. Businesses in the city “lost between 3 and 5 billion rubles [$38 million to $63 million] in five days of shutdowns.” However, businesses with “broadband access and residents with broadband at home have not been affected.”

Many are turning to more low-tech options, with Russians buying old-school technology like walkie-talkies and pagers. Sales of walkie-talkies “increased by 27%, sales of pagers for communication with clients and staff by 73%, and landline telephones by about a quarter,” said Russian news outlet RBC. Muscovites are also looking for less high-tech ways to navigate the area. “Sales of road maps increased by 170% in physical units, foldable maps by 70% and Moscow maps by 20%.”

Dubai is known for being one of the world’s most opulent cities, as well as a bastion of safety in a region under the perpetual threat of violence. But the recent start of the Iran war has shattered the image of peace in the United Arab Emirates’ largest city. Iranian drone attacks and missile launches against the Persian Gulf have turned Dubai into a place where its residents must walk cautiously.

‘Built itself this image’

The war in Iran has “punctured the notion that towering skyscrapers, financial clout and the embrace of luxury and diversity in the Persian Gulf can act as impenetrable shields against the region’s turmoil,” said The Wall Street Journal. Since the war broke out, Iran has launched over 1,900 missiles and drones toward the UAE, according to the country’s defense ministry, with Dubai bearing the brunt of these. Iran is largely attacking the city in an effort to disrupt global trade routes.

Iran’s attacks have been “shutting down the airport, striking the iconic Burj Al Arab hotel and Dubai’s deep-water port, and killing several people across the UAE,” said the Journal. This marks a significant change for Dubai, as its wealth and status as a financial hub have largely made it “impervious to conflict — a haven of stability untouched by the wars, corruption and upheaval around it.”

Dubai has “built itself this image that people aspire to,” Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political science professor from the UAE, told The Washington Post. And publicly, leaders in the region say Dubai is still safe and have “projected confidence in their defense capabilities,” said the Post. The UAE’s anti-missile system has had a “94% overall intercept success,” the Emirati embassy in Washington, D.C., said on X. This system has “largely kept” the “country safe from Iranian attacks.”

‘The shine has definitely been taken off’

Despite the public confidence in Dubai’s safety, many residents seem to feel differently, especially in a city where “more than 90% of its roughly 4 million residents are foreigners,” said the Post. There are “tens of thousands of residents and tourists that have fled Dubai” since the shelling began, said The Guardian, though the city’s “large population of migrant workers largely don’t have that privilege.”

“The shine has definitely been taken off,” John Trudinger, a British teacher and resident of Dubai for 16 years, said to The Guardian. Many of his colleagues in the city are “deeply traumatized and really struggling to cope.” Zain Anwar, a taxi driver from Pakistan, had a similar story. “I don’t want to be in Dubai anymore, there is no business, we are earning nothing since this war and I don’t see the tourism coming back,” he told The Guardian.

Life is going on in certain ways for those who do remain. The situation in the city is “functioning but tense,” Nick Rowles-Davies, a lawyer who moved to Dubai in 2022, said to CNBC. There is “visible vigilance in some areas, particularly at night when interceptions have been audible.” Those living in Dubai are not in a “panic, but there is a clear recognition that this is no longer distant geopolitics.”

The country has adopted a sweeping new law that orders government agencies, private enterprises and parents to foster a “stronger sense of community among all ethnic groups” in the nation, said Lou Qinjian, a delegate to the National People’s Congress, at multiple outlets. The new “ethnic unity” mandate may sound benign, but critics say it could erase and diminish the cultural identities of Uyghurs, Mongolians and other minority groups in favor of the country’s dominant Han Chinese culture.

Binding minorities to the majority

Beijing wants China’s ethnic minorities to “blend in,” said The New York Times. Xi Jinping has “worked aggressively” during his decade in power to pressure minorities in Tibet and elsewhere to “identify first and foremost as patriotic citizens.” The new law furthers that mission with provisions that “touch on education, housing policy, entertainment and other areas” to create a “single national identity” forged by the Chinese Communist Party.

It orders that the Mandarin Chinese language be used in school instruction and other official business and that different ethnicities should live in mixed communities. The goal is to “bind China’s minorities” to the majority Han Chinese population, said the Times. The law tells non-Han Chinese to “integrate themselves with the Han majority and above all else be loyal to Beijing,” said Allen Carlson, of Cornell University, to Bloomberg.

There are 56 officially recognized ethnic groups in China, and “55 are getting squashed” by the new law, said The Economist. The edict is “born of fear” that minority groups are “proving too hard to control.” Early Communist governments allowed minority groups a “range of privileges” to follow their own religions and educate children in their native languages. But “outbursts of violence” over decades in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia persuaded leaders that “even relative autonomy had failed.” The question now is whether the mandate might provoke resentments that may “eventually erupt.”

Cracking down

China started its Sinicization of minority groups in the late 2000s, said BBC News. Monks have been arrested in Tibet, Uyghur Muslims have been sent to reeducation camps, and Mongolians have battled authorities to preserve the right to teach children their language. The law is the latest attempt to “cement Xi’s push toward assimilation” of minority groups.

Beijing’s apparent view is that “minority languages and cultures are backward and impediments to advancement,” said Ian Chong, of the National University of Singapore, to the BBC. Xi is trying to build a “great and strong Chinese nation with a northern Han core.”

Chinese officials say the law was drafted after consultation with “representatives from ethnic minority communities,” said Reuters. The rules emphasize the “protection of cultural traditions and lifestyles of all ethnic groups,” said an editorial in China Daily, the state newspaper. Minority groups like the Tibetans, Mongols, Hui, Manchus and Uyghurs comprise less than 10% of China’s population, said Reuters, but they live mostly in “regions that together cover roughly half of the country’s land area, much of it rich in natural resources.”

Max Dowman made football history on Saturday. Running from his own half, he fired into an empty net to secure Arsenal a 2-0 win over Everton and become the youngest goalscorer in the Premier League.

But afterwards, in the “ecstatic dressing room, the man of the match wasn’t there”, said Miguel Delaney in The Independent. That’s because Dowman “isn’t actually the man of the match”, but a child. The midfielder, aged 16 years and 75 days, isn’t allowed in the same dressing room as the adults, and gets changed in his own space near the referees’ room.

‘Never left alone’

Dowman “probably cannot even remember a time when he was not skipping past opponents with a ball at his feet”, said Sam Dean in The Telegraph. There has been “a buzz” around his name for years. He was scouted when he was just four; at 13, he became the youngest player to represent Arsenal’s under-18s; at 14, he was the youngest to play for their under-21s. He also played for the England under-17s at 14, and started training with Arsenal’s first team. Earlier this year, he became the youngest player in Champions League history and the youngest starter for Arsenal.

There are “clear rules in place” for minors playing adult football, said BBC Sport. Dowman has to change in a separate room from his teammates, before going into the main changing room for pep talks. The teenager, who is due to sit his GCSEs this summer, divides his non-playing time between a private tutor and school. One member of Arsenal’s security team is “assigned to stay close to Dowman at all times”.

“In the eyes of the law, he is still a child,” said former Leeds United welfare officer Lucy Ward. “He looks and behaves like an adult, he’s in an adult environment and scores goals for Arsenal, but the law says that he is treated as a child until he is 18.” Dowman is “never left alone with anyone” who hasn’t been cleared by a DBS check. His parents must give consent when he travels for an away match, and he has to have a chaperone. “He doesn’t want to stand out – he just wants to fit in – but these safeguarding measures are in place for young players.”

‘Right temperament to deliver’

Last season, Dowman was “so far ahead of his opponents and teammates that he was almost playing a different sport”, said Dean in The Telegraph. It was obvious he had “outgrown youth football”. If Premier League rules hadn’t prevented him from playing for the senior team last year, “he might have broken through even earlier”.

In January, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta likened the teenager to a young Lionel Messi. That was after Dowman signed a pre-contract agreement with the north London club (his father handled the negotiations). A professional deal will follow when he turns 17 in December.

“For all the skill, though, you need to have the right temperament to deliver” at that age, said Sky Sports. For every wunderkind who went on to a glittering senior career, there are “players who fell through the trapdoor of promise”.

“He doesn’t seem to be fazed by the occasion or the moment or the context or the opponent,” Arteta said on Saturday. “I’ve seen a lot of players with talent but at 16, very few that can cope with that level of demand.”

Dowman’s goal will “go down in Arsenal folklore”, said Sky Sports. The “touch of the head” to gain control of the ball, the “physicality” required to get past Everton left-back Vitalii Mykolenko, and the touch that sent midfielder Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall “to the shops”. It took Arsenal closer to their first Premier League title in two decades, but it looked like Dowman “had been doing that for years”.

“I just felt it was a magical moment for Max Dowman, a magical moment for Arsenal and absolutely it stopped me in my tracks,” said football pundit Gary Neville. “This kid does look different.”

When José Antonio Kast was elected as Chile’s next president in late 2025, it was “one more alarming case of a worldwide trend toward nativist authoritarianism,” said the Chilean American author Ariel Dorfman at The New York Times. It was also a sign of the “rehabilitation” of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, one of the continent’s “most infamous autocrats.”

Kast, as a vocal supporter of the notoriously brutal Chilean strongman, was elected in part for his hard-right bona fides, only to take office in a very different world than the one in which he campaigned. With war raging in the Middle East and a White House demonstrating an eagerness for regime change across the hemisphere, what does Kast’s unapologetically right-wing ascent mean for one of South America’s most robust economies?

‘Nostalgia’ for dictatorships past? Or ‘frustration with the status quo’?

President Kast “built his career” in government by “railing against liberal values from the fringes of Chilean politics,” said National Public Radio. But during this recent election, he “avoided all mention of the hard-line moral agenda” that has been “synonymous” with his decades-long career in public office.

The son of a Nazi party member who fled to South America following the Holocaust, Kast has shown admiration for Pinochet that has left political analysts questioning whether the new president is showing “nostalgia for Latin America’s past dictatorships” or expressing signs of “frustration with the status quo,” said Al Jazeera.

Regardless of Kast’s personal motivations, the global right-wing excitement over his victory transformed the “routine transfer of power” at last week’s inauguration into a “celebration of a movement that is gaining momentum across the hemisphere,” The New York Times said. Kast is now part of a “growing roster of leaders” in South and Central America “aligned” with the Trump regime as the White House leans on “ideological allies” to address narco cartels and “purge Chinese influence from the region.”

Kast has “avoided” commenting on “controversial issues” both domestic and international, but he has nevertheless “made overtures to the Trump administration,” The Associated Press said. Indications of those types of overtures “intensified recently” with his cancellation of a planned submarine cable between Chile and China that had garnered “intense criticism” from — and deepened diplomatic tensions with — the United States.

For his supporters, Kast’s electoral victory and now presidency come as part of his promise to take a “harder line” on migration, crime and poverty — issues Chileans claim have “eroded the country’s sense of order,” said Zeteo. Critics counter that Kast’s “strongman rhetoric, Trump-style political playbook and backing from hard-right coalitions” revives acute “fears of authoritarianism.”

Grappling with an ‘increasingly challenging’ geopolitical landscape

Kast now assumes the Chilean presidency, a position whose relationship with the U.S. has “deteriorated significantly under the second Trump administration,” the AP said. Kast’s predecessor was a “vocal critic” of Trump, at one point labeling Trump’s leadership “as that of a ‘new emperor.’”

Although Kast seems interested in renewed rapprochement with the U.S., he enters office in an “increasingly challenging international geopolitical landscape,” said Guillermo Holzmann, a political analyst from the University of Valparaíso, to Reuters, including “economic risks from the Iran war, the U.S.’ security strategy in the region and China’s influence in Latin America.” Chinese sway, in particular, poses an acute risk to Chile, the “world’s ​largest copper producer,” given that ⁠China is the “biggest purchaser of the metal.”

While the Trump regime “looks on enthusiastically at this trend” of arch-nationalist conservatives taking office across Latin America, said the Times, it “remains unclear” whether Kast’s Chile and others will “work with the United States on security” and move away from China, their “dominant trading partner.”

Long-standing claims of verbal and physical abuse at world-renowned Copenhagen restaurant Noma have finally “come back to haunt” its founding chef, René Redzepi, said The Times.

The “culinary god” has stepped down after shocking details of his “toxic” kitchen culture were revealed by a damning new investigation. “An apology is not enough,” Redzepi said in a statement on Instagram. “I take responsibility for my own actions.”

Empire built on ‘pain’

Redzepi has been “rewriting the rules of fine dining” since Noma opened in 2003, crafting “jewel-like plates” from sustainable and foraged local ingredients, said The New York Times. His innovative approach scooped him three Michelin stars, and Noma has topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list on five occasions. He became a revered figure in the culinary world: in 2013, Anthony Bourdain proclaimed he was “without a doubt, the most influential, provocative, and important chef in the world”.

In 2024, Noma transitioned from restaurant to “full-time food laboratory”, developing new dishes and running fine-dining pop-ups in different locations around the world. But an upcoming residency in Los Angeles, with a tasting menu priced at $1,500 (£1,300) a head, “sparked a public conversation” about Redzepi’s treatment of his staff, some of whom came forward to claim his “empire” was built on their “pain”.

Thirty-five former staffers, employed between 2009 and 2017, gave accounts of serious abuse, alleging that Redzepi “punched employees in the face” and “slammed them against walls”. Several claimed he would “crouch under the counters” and “jab them in the legs with his fingers or a nearby utensil, like a barbecue fork”. They also described verbal threats, including to have staff members “blacklisted” from other restaurants or to “have their families deported”. Until 2002, Noma had over 30 unpaid interns, working 16-hour days and covering their own living costs. The restaurant’s “one-woman human resources department” also “happened to be Redzepi’s mother-in-law”.

‘Signs’ were all there

This will come as no surprise to “anyone who has followed modern restaurant culture”, said former restaurateur Richard Crampton-Platt in UnHerd. I visited Noma a decade ago and found it “suffocatingly self-regarding”. It developed a reputation as an “enlightened kitchen” and the “progressive future of fine dining” but the “signs of what was really going on” were all there. Redzepi was filmed “screaming at chefs” in the 2008 documentary “Noma at Boiling Point” and, in 2015, he wrote an article in a food magazine admitting that “I have been a bully for a large part of my career”.

“The backlash was inevitable,” said US chef Andrew Gruel in the New York Post. But it’s “ironic” that a lot of the “outrage is coming from the same elite food world that helped build a culture of abuse”. For years, fine-dining kitchens have been “run like military brigades”, with long hours, unpaid or poorly paid workers and a culture of harassment. The tacit “bargain” aspiring young chefs accept is to “endure the brutality, work the hours, and maybe one day earn your place in the hierarchy”. The price of the excellence that food critics and “elite diners” demand is professional kitchens marred by exploitation, burnout and alcohol and drug abuse.

“It’s dehumanising” and it’s been going on for too long, French food journalist Nora Bouazzouni, author of “Violence in the Kitchen”, told CNN. Her work “exposing the extent of physical, emotional and psychological abuse” in professional kitchens across France “has helped spark a national reckoning” that’s “reached the ears of the country’s lawmakers”. Last year, a motion to create a commission of inquiry into violence in professional kitchens was tabled in the French National Assembly.

Undoing this entrenched “French system” that kitchens around the world have “replicated” won’t be easy. But a 2021 paper which drew on 47 interviews with elite chefs, and was published in the Journal of Management Studies, offers one “compelling, but simple solution: create more open kitchens”. A shift away from the “isolated, closed, hidden spaces” where “regular rules don’t apply” could help to establish a healthier work environment.

Before Redzepi’s resignation, tickets for Noma’s LA pop-up had sold out. This only demonstrates, said The Times, that there are “plenty who can happily separate the art from the artist” as long as “the kitchen is thoroughly soundproofed”.

Since 1959, Cuba’s so-called “white coat army” has been one of the Caribbean island nation’s most distinctive exports. “From Latin America to Africa and beyond”, thousands of highly trained medical professionals have worked to fill gaps in overstretched health systems around the world, generating valuable income for Havana in the process, said Al Jazeera.

But the long-standing scheme is now under strain, as the United States seeks to “starve Cuba of much-needed revenue” by putting pressure on its allies to stop importing Cuban medics to prop up their strained health services.

‘Coercive labour’

“For decades” the Cuban government has sent healthcare professionals to work overseas in diplomatic arrangements in which host nations pay Havana directly for the services of its medics, said The New York Times. Doctors are dispatched to “work in remote villages and cities in dozens of countries” where local healthcare systems have difficulty filling posts, but the medics themselves only receive a “small fraction” of what is paid for their services. It is “unclear” exactly how much Cuba has received from such arrangements, but research estimates a revenue of around $4 billion (£2.9 billion) a year from the export of skilled workers, including healthcare workers and teachers.

US officials argue that the programmes amount to a “coercive labour export scheme”, said the Financial Times. The US has expanded visa restrictions on those involved in medical missions, including officials in host countries, whom it accuses of participating in “forced-labour practices”. Last year, it imposed travel restrictions on several officials from Brazil, “once a top destination” for Cuban doctors but where numbers have now rapidly fallen amid increasing pressure from the US.

‘Close to collapse’

“After nearly 50 years”, arrangements will draw to a close in Guyana, said the Associated Press, while “several other Caribbean countries” including St Lucia, Antigua and Dominica are also reviewing their programmes. Medical missions have also ended in staunch Cuban ally Venezuela, as well as Guatemala.

Cuba framed the end of the medical mission in Jamaica as the nation “yielding to US pressure”, said Cuba’s 14ymedio. But Jamaica’s “version is different”, alleging that Cuba “did not even respond” to a proposal to pay doctors directly for their work.

The impact is being felt well beyond the Americas. In Calabria, one of the poorest regions in Italy, the arrival in recent years of 400 Cuban doctors has been “essential to keeping local hospitals running”, said Reuters. But, under duress from Washington, Calabria has now “scrapped plans” to hire 600 further doctors, and is now scrambling in a “global search for medical staff” expected to cost the region €8 million (£6.9 million), said Euractiv.

Giuseppe Ranuccio, vice-president of the Calabrian regional council, told the outlet that the health system was already “close to collapse”. The Cuban doctors “were supposed to buy time for structural reforms”, he said. “But those reforms never arrived.”

Why is America at war with Iran? When will the conflict end? Two weeks after the launch of the joint US-Israel campaign, the answers to these questions remain no clearer, said Lee Siegel in The New Statesman.

Donald Trump's declared goals change all the time: it's to liberate Iranians; to eliminate an imminent nuclear threat; to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles; to avenge the US. As for how long the war could last, Trump declared last Friday that the US wouldn't stop until it secured Iran's “unconditional surrender”.

But in response to rising fuel prices and market turmoil, he softened his language on Monday, saying the war was “very complete, pretty much” and would end soon. His words helped calm markets: the price of a barrel of oil, which had soared to nearly $120, dipped back below $90. However, Trump later reverted to tough rhetoric, insisting that the US was set to press on as “we haven't won enough”.

‘Scorched-earth treatment’

Tehran, for its part, shows no sign of capitulating, said Arash Reisinezhad and Arsham Reisinezhad in Foreign Policy. While the tempo of its missile and drone attacks on neighbouring countries has declined since the opening days of the conflict, the strikes haven't stopped. The regime is aiming to prolong and widen the conflict – Azerbaijan and Turkey are the latest countries to be targeted with Iranian drones – to “generate pressure across multiple domains: energy markets, maritime logistics, regional alliances and domestic politics within the US and its partners”.

Wars between asymmetrical adversaries are rarely decided by the opening exchange of blows. More often, they become “contests of endurance”. Iran is now getting the “scorched-earth treatment”, said Patrick Cockburn in The i Paper. More than 1,000 civilians are thought to have been killed in the bombing so far. But air power alone is unlikely to defeat the Iranian regime. Just look at Gaza, where Hamas remained in control even after cities were razed to the ground.

Iran's ace card is its control over the Strait of Hormuz, said David Patrikarakos in the Daily Mail. About a fifth of the global oil supply normally passes through this narrow stretch of water, which is also a vital conduit for commodities such as nitrogen fertiliser and helium.

Tehran has effectively blockaded the strait by threatening to attack passing vessels, and several commercial ships have already been targeted. While Iran's regular navy has been largely put out of action, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is responsible for the strait, has access to many small, fast-moving craft and remote-control suicide drone boats. It also has missile launchers and drone systems deployed all along the coast.

If the strait remains closed for an extended period, the impact will be catastrophic: Qatar's energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, has warned that it could “bring down the economies of the world”. Trump has talked of providing naval escorts for vessels in the strait, said James Rothwell in The Daily Telegraph, but that would commit American forces to a complex and expensive logistical operation – one with the potential to become “a kind of maritime Vietnam”.

‘Escalation dominance’

Trump is in a trap of his own making, said Edward Luce in the FT. Two “very risky gambles” are available to him. One would be to launch a commando raid to seize what remains of Iran's 400kg stockpile of enriched uranium. “Success would offer Trump a spectacular off-ramp.” The other gambit would be to seize Kharg Island, the outcrop 15 miles off Iran's coast that serves as the nation's principal crude oil export hub. But that would require more boots on the ground, and there's little tolerance in America for more US casualties.

Trump's best option is to call it quits after degrading Iran's military capabilities, said The Economist. Critics will claim that he has left the job half done, and Iran may seek to rebuild its nuclear programme, obliging the US to launch future strikes. But “better for America to declare victory early than limp out of an unpopular war because of exhaustion”.

The markets are expecting Trump to do just that, before “he is overwhelmed by a supply-chain shock to match Covid”, said Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. However, the defiance of Iran's regime will make it harder for him. “It is we who will determine the end of the war,” the IRGC declared on Tuesday. Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran would fight on even after a US declaration of victory. The question now is which aspect of Trump's thinking will prevail: “his fear of losing the US midterm elections? Or his injured vanity and his psychological need to command ‘escalation dominance', always and everywhere?”

With the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran now two weeks old, Iranians are coming to terms with the new normal of daily conflict. But the war has not only affected those living in the country currently under attack, as Iranians living overseas also find themselves caught in the middle of a geopolitical storm. While the Trump administration views the war as a net positive for the world, many of the Iranian diaspora say their feelings are more complicated.

‘Attacking each other on social media’

With the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the installation of his son as his successor, media outlets have “rightly focused on trying to understand how the conflict came about, where bombs have fallen and how many have died,” said The Guardian. But what can “easily get lost are the voices of the people directly affected,” including Iranians living abroad, whose views are “far from uniform.”

In the United States, various factions of Iranian emigrants are “attacking each other on social media, bullying shopkeepers and restaurant owners to promote their political agenda,” Kowsar Gowhari, an Iranian-born attorney living in Maryland, said to The Christian Science Monitor. Despite the new Iranian supreme leader coming to power, there are “some who believe this government is done, finished,” but others “don’t want [President Donald Trump] to destroy the place and to put in place a puppet government.”

Iran has always been a “melting pot with diverse views,” Mohamad Machine-Chian, an author and researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who is a native of Iran, told the Monitor. When the first ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini, took over Iran in 1979, Iranians “thought that the Islamic revolution was the way to go. Forty years later, they can see the disaster that has been created.”

The cultural divide has been especially prominent in California, where “half of all Iranian-Americans live,” said The Economist. And many of the “American-born children of Iranians who left after the revolution are now in their 30s and 40s.” Their memories of Iranian politics are “not of the regime but of America’s forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Many fear that the current situation in Iran could “bring continued conflict rather than liberation.”

Other countries

It is not just the U.S. where Iranians have mixed feelings about the war. Since the conflict began, Iranians abroad feel like they are “living in a parallel universe,” Hosnieh Djafari-Marbini, a council member in Oxford, England, who previously lived in Iran, told The Guardian. This parallel world is one where “life carries on normally — looking after patients, talking to colleagues — while at the same time you open your phone and see the destruction of places that mean so much to you.”

But it isn’t just the emotional toll of the war that could have an impact; Iranians living overseas have been threatened with the seizure of their property and could “face other legal penalties if they express ​support for the United States and Israel,” said Reuters. Those who do “will be met with the confiscation of all their properties,” Iran’s prosecutor general said in a statement.

This hasn’t stopped Iranian emigrants from speaking out. No “Iranian outside, ​in the diaspora, is really and truly worried about themselves and their properties and equity ‌and belongings ⁠when people inside Iran, they go out, barehanded, without anything, they will stand in front of live ammunition, and they actually get killed," Meyam Aghakhani, an Iranian living in London, told Reuters. “So my war and my fight continues without any hesitation.”

Transgender people have been the focus of an aggressive legislative push to mitigate their access to health care in recent years, and now trans prisoners are facing a new offensive. President Donald Trump has instated a policy for the federal incarceration system, one that mirrors an outdated, controversial practice.

‘Culture war targeting transgender civil rights’

The Trump administration released its new policy outlining how transgender people in Bureau of Prisons (BOP) custody will be treated. Approximately 2,200 trans people held in federal prisons will be denied access to gender-affirming health care, be “subjected to constant misgendering by staff” and have items like binders, bras and makeup confiscated, said the Transitics Substack.

The policy will impose treatment targeting “psychological distress/dysphoria” through talk therapy and “psychotropic medication” like antidepressants until the gender dysphoria diagnosis is considered “resolved,” said the Transitics Substack. The new policy designates gender dysphoria as a mental illness that requires “routine mental health care.” Under the new rules, federal prisons “won’t just medically and socially detransition trans people en masse,” they will “actively try to ‘cure’ them of their gender dysphoria.” The policy has been compared to conversion therapy, a dangerous practice recognized by the United Nations as a form of torture.

The changes align with an executive order Trump signed almost immediately after taking office, called “​​Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” The order said that the federal prison system would ensure that no federal funds would be used for any “medical procedure, treatment or drug” for the purpose of “conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” In a lawsuit challenging the order, a federal judge ordered that the prison would continue providing hormones and accommodations. However, in court papers and interviews, transgender people have “described their access to hormone treatments and social transition supports as inconsistent,” said The Marshall Project.

The new policy is the “latest move amid a culture war targeting transgender civil rights nationwide,” with hundreds of anti-trans bills passed at the state-level over the last several years, said the Marshall Project. Last year, the Supreme Court upheld gender-affirming care bans for young people, which have been passed in 20 states. The decision “made it pretty clear” that a ban with “any conceivable rational basis” must be allowed, Jared Littman, a government attorney, said at the hearing announcing the prison bans. In addition to the federal policy, prison systems in Georgia, Kentucky, Utah and Florida have banned access to gender-affirming care.

‘Not just cruel but reckless’

Even before the latest policy, gender-affirming care was inconsistent for trans inmates. Denying hormones to “people in distress” and withdrawing them from “people who are stable undermines safe facility operations,” Alix McLearen, who authored earlier versions of the Bureau of Prisons’ transgender policy manuals, said to the Marshall Project. “From a corrections management perspective, this is not just cruel but reckless.”

Prisoners in Georgia are suing state officials over the state’s policy, which is similar to the federal one. If the new federal prison policy is implemented, and “it’s not enjoined, people will die,” Chinyere Ezie, an attorney representing the plaintiffs in the Georgia suit, said to the Marshall Project. People will die from suicide or will “die or be severely hurt from castration attempts.” Those who don’t lose their lives will “experience the very extreme physiological symptoms of hormone therapy withdrawal,” in addition to “psychological symptoms, including depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation.”

Rebecca-James Meskill, a transwoman incarcerated in Alabama, told Uncloseted Media she was taken off hormones following the original executive order. She did not receive them again until six months after the judge issued the injunction. During that time, she frequently broke out in hives, and the dysphoria about her body hair caused her to scratch her arms until they became scarred. Being off hormone therapy has “left me feeling diminished in every aspect of life,” Meskill said. Her body “started re-masculinizing,” and her body hair is “growing thicker and faster.” The lack of gender-affirming care makes her feel “hopeless and like I need to avoid people.”

On Sunday night, firefighters battled with the flames engulfing Forsyth House – a Victorian building next to Glasgow Central station, home to dozens of small businesses.

“By morning, the dome of the 175-year-old landmark had collapsed,” said The National. “For Glaswegians, it all feels painfully familiar.”

A troubling pattern

The “acrid smell of smoke” lingering in the air on Monday morning recalled the “devastating” fires that tore through the Glasgow School of Art first in 2014, and then four years later in the midst of its restoration, said The Guardian. Today, the building remains a “burnt-out shell”.

Next to the art school, the O2 ABC venue was severely damaged in the same fire; parts of the facade have been demolished and the rest of the decaying site is still awaiting regeneration. A separate major fire that year ripped through a block on Sauchiehall Street in the city centre, destroying several shops and Victoria’s nightclub. And in 2024, a large blaze broke out at the derelict Carlton Terrace, a “once elegant Georgian terrace” on the south bank of the River Clyde.

The destruction of Glasgow’s historic buildings is becoming a “semi-regular occurrence". Declining footfall on the high street and soaring construction costs have hollowed out the city centre, leaving it as a “mess of gap sites and stalled renovations”. Many of its crumbling listed buildings and shops now lie empty. Sunday’s blaze might appear like a “tragic accident but it highlights a brutal reality”, architectural writer and critic Rory Olcayto told the publication. The city’s old buildings are “extremely vulnerable” and until Glasgow starts to treat them “as part of its social fabric, these crises will keep happening”.

Alan Dunlop, the architect who led the 1990s restoration of Glasgow Central station, told The Herald the fire at Forsyth House would “leave a major hole” in the busy street. “I think at times we ignore or take for granted our splendid Victorian heritage and these buildings have to be protected.” A spokesperson for Glasgow City Council said it was “absolutely committed” to protecting the city’s historic buildings and that it had spent more than £280 million since 2013 on heritage projects.

Failing standards

The blaze at Forsyth House – which also destroyed several businesses and shut down the railway station – is “not that unusual”, Billy Hare, a professor of construction management at Glasgow Caledonian University, told The National. Buildings dating back to the 1850s often contain more structural timber which increases the “fire loading”: the total amount of combustible material present.

Victorian buildings also “rarely feature the fire protections of modern buildings, which must conform to national standards”. And improving safety isn’t easy, as alterations to listed buildings – of which Glasgow has hundreds – must be “sympathetically balanced with the internal and external appearance”, which inevitably leads to “conflict between regulatory compliance and heritage conservation”.

Another critical issue is “compartmentation”, fire safety expert Henry Landis told the publication. This prevention strategy involves sub-dividing big buildings into different sections using fire-resistant walls to limit the spread of fire. But problems are common in multi-occupancy buildings, as it can be unclear who has responsibility for the overall “fire strategy”.

While the cause of the fire at Forsyth House has not yet been confirmed, early reports suggest it may have been started by lithium-ion batteries exploding in a vape shop. This could indicate a “massive blind spot in our regulation”, Paul Sweeney, a Scottish Labour MSP for the city, told The Guardian, calling for stricter safety protocols. “Why on earth are we permitting these highly risky retail activities to take place in extremely vulnerable buildings adjacent to critical infrastructure?”

A dating term trending on TikTok has daters concerned about a horrifying practice that some experts say is a form of abuse. Fear of abandonment is fairly common. But when weaponized as a tool for ending a relationship in the middle of the wilderness, it is compounded by a potential for dangerous outcomes.

Fears swirl online

Social media is buzzing about the term “alpine divorce.” It happens when a couple explores nature during a hike or camping trip, and “one abandons the other in the wilderness to fend for themselves,” said USA Today. The concept appears to have originated in a late-1800s short story called “An Alpine Divorce” by Robert Barr. The story involves a man who “attempts to murder his wife while the two are out hiking on a mountain.”

Thanks to a viral TikTok video, the phrase has newfound attention. The video, which has more than 19 million views, features the caption: “POV: You go on a hike with him in the mountains, and he leaves you alone by yourself and you realize he never liked you to begin with.” Stories of alpine divorces littered the comment section, as other women shared their experiences of being left alone in the wilderness.

The renewed interest has also been linked to the recent case of an Austrian mountain climber who was found guilty of gross negligent manslaughter after leaving his girlfriend behind during a hike. Thomas Plamberger abandoned his girlfriend about 164 feet from the summit of the 12,461-foot Grossglockner peak in “high winds without an emergency blanket before she died of hypothermia,” said Outside. His conviction resulted in a “€9,600 (roughly $11,300) fine and a five-month suspended prison sentence.” The incident “sparked intense debates” about alpine divorces and whether the “more skilled climber should be held liable for mountain tragedies or if responsibility rests with the individual climber.”

Future implications

The trend, for many, confirms their “worst fear” of being in an environment where they “don’t have control over what’s going on” and could be “abandoned somewhere,” Stephanie Sarkis, a psychotherapist specializing in narcissistic abuse, said to USA Today. Being in an area you do not know, “where there’s wildlife, where you could easily get lost, especially if it’s unmarked,” is a “real fear for people.”

Alpine divorce’s sudden popularity reflects “broader anxieties about trust, safety and power dynamics in relationships,” particularly in remote or high‑risk settings, said Newsweek. Outdoor safety experts have “long emphasized that hiking and climbing partners share responsibility for each other’s wellbeing,” especially when “experience levels differ.”

Some experts believe there are instances where the practice is excusable. For example, alpine divorce could be warranted if you feel unsafe, Karsten Delap, a professional climber, guide and rescuer, said to Outside. The Austrian courts’ verdict for Plamberger could set a precedent for future cases. The legal decision has “implications for all climbers.” The verdict affirms “if you’re more experienced than your partner, you’re responsible whether you’re a guide or not.”

It's hard to assess the significance of events in real time, said Peter Frankopan in The Independent, but on rare occasions, their historical import is immediately evident. I count three such events in my lifetime: the fall of the Berlin Wall; the 9/11 attacks; and now, the decision by the US and Israel to launch all-out war on Iran.

Escalating conflict

Operation Epic Fury began on Saturday morning with a barrage of air strikes that eliminated the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with many other senior members of the regime. The killings were the product of a sophisticated intelligence campaign, said Mehul Srivastava in the Financial Times. Israel hacked nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran years ago, and had been closely tracking the comings and goings of the bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials. It also had agents on the ground. The Israeli premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, was reportedly shown a photo of Khamenei's body before Iran had even admitted he'd been killed.

The US and Israel have dropped thousands more bombs on Iran over the days since, destroying military sites and sinking at least 20 naval vessels, one of which was torpedoed by a submarine in the Indian Ocean.

Iran “has not held back” in its response, said The Economist. It has unleashed salvoes of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel and nearby states, including UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain. The targets have not just been US military installations (and a UK base in Cyprus), but luxury hotels, airports and energy infrastructure too. Iran has also stemmed the flow of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, by threatening to attack any passing vessels. Although most of Iran's attacks have been fended off, they've triggered a surge in gas and oil prices. And Tehran may escalate its tactics. Strikes on Arab desalination plants, which many states rely on for drinking water, could have “devastating consequences”.

Slim odds

Trump didn't start this, said The Wall Street Journal. He's fighting back against a regime that “has been waging war against the US, Israel and the West for decades”. This carries risks, of course, but it has “the potential to reshape the Middle East for the better and lead to a safer world”.

We should all hope for the fall of Tehran's “despicable” regime, which has just murdered as many as 30,000 people protesting against its rule, said William Hague in The Times. Whether Trump's great gamble will pay off, though, is unclear. The West's recent interventions in the Middle East have all been “followed by chaos, rather than an orderly transition to democracy”.

The odds of success look slim, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. It's easy enough to destroy Iran's military assets, but as the US learnt in Iraq and elsewhere, nothing permanent is achieved by “bouncing rubble and piling up bodies”. Trump called on the regime to surrender its weapons “to the people”. How would that work?

Shifting objectives

The problem with Trump's intervention, said Abigail Hauslohner in the FT, is that there's no clear plan behind it. His rationales and aims change constantly. One minute, he's suggesting the mission will last a few days, the next, he's saying it will go on for five weeks; one minute, he calls on Iranians to “seize control of your destiny”, the next, he says he has no interest in nation-building. On Sunday, he said he had picked three “very good choices” among Iran's officials to take over the country. The next day, he told ABC that US-Israel strikes had been “so successful” that the candidates were “all dead”.

Trump needs to work out exactly what it is he's trying to achieve in Iran, agreed David Blair in The Daily Telegraph. By espousing one objective or another “according to his whims”, he's crippling his chances of achieving any of them. It’s not Trump’s style to be consistent, said Andrew Cockburn in The Spectator. But while he can play fast and loose with facts and arguments, he can’t dodge the real-world consequences of this conflict. The ferocity of Iran’s attacks on America’s Gulf allies, and the regime’s determination to keep fighting, have already come as a nasty surprise to him.

The sheer cost of this conflict will also have to be confronted, said Shashank Joshi in The Economist. The economics are “brutal”. Experts estimate that Iran’s missile barrage against UAE will have cost between $177 million and $360 million. In contrast, the UAE will have had to spend between $1.45 billion and $2.28 billion defending against it. Weapon stocks will be an issue for all parties in this conflict, said Joe Barnes in The Daily Telegraph. The Iranian regime will seek to eke it out and wear America down. But the “biggest limiting factor” on Trump’s ambitions may prove to be a domestic political backlash.

As counter-terrorism police arrest four people today on suspicion of spying for Iran on London’s Jewish community, political focus is intensifying on the spread of Tehran’s tentacles of power across the Western world.

A group of Labour MPs have already written to the government asking for a clampdown on charities that could be operating an Iranian “influence network” in the UK. They warned that a web of such organisations appears “to be actively promoting the Iranian regime’s ideology and interests”.

Iran’s nerve centre in the UK

One of the charities cited by the MPs is the Islamic Centre of England. “Based in the affluent north-west London suburb of Maida Vale”, it has been “accused of being an outpost of the Iranian regime” and has been under investigation by the Charity Commission since 2022, said The Telegraph.

At the centre this week, mourners lit candles in front of photographs of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the former Supreme Leader of Iran who was killed in US-Israeli air strikes on Tehran last weekend. Chants of “We will obey you, Khamenei” were heard, said The Times.

“These are vigils for a man who had British blood on his hands, who ordered terror plots on British soil,” said Kasra Aarabi, of United Against Nuclear Iran, who has been monitoring the activity. “That is deeply concerning.”

The Times revealed last year that the Islamic Centre of England was broadcasting daily religious messages from Khamenei during Ramadan. The paper called it “Iran’s nerve centre” and it was described by the think tank Policy Exchange in 2024 as “sitting at the heart of a network of institutions that project influence”.

The centre has said it does not endorse extremism or unlawful activity and was focused solely on religious, educational and community services. A spokesperson added: “The centre does not represent, promote, or advocate for the political views or agendas of any state, figure or regime. Its religious guidance is confined to matters of faith, ethics, and spirituality. The centre promotes religious peace, and harmony between different faiths.”

‘Seeds of suspicion’

The Tehran regime’s intelligence services “have long targeted Jewish and Israeli people, along with dissidents living in Britain, frequently using criminal proxies as part of their operations”, said The Telegraph.

More than 20 “potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” were identified by MI5 in the year to October 2025, said the intelligence service’s director general Ken McCallum last year.

Research published last June by the National Union for Democracy in Iran, a US-based think tank, found Britain had become a “flashpoint” for Iranian influence. It warned that education was at the “front line” of the Islamic regime’s efforts and it has been “ushering in a generation of radicalised, ideological based zealots”.

The think tank said the regime “has effectively created a life-long, Islamic Republic-centric curriculum for children of all backgrounds in the United Kingdom” and claimed it was “planting seeds of suspicion (against their own British government), and establishing historical falsehoods as reality”.

The Tokyo High Court has upheld a decision to dissolve the Unification Church, a controversial religious organisation linked with the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. Tetsuya Yamagami, the convicted murderer who was sentenced to life in prison, cited Abe’s affiliation to the church as his primary motivation for the killing.

The church used “coercive tactics to solicit large donations” from its members, said The Japan Times. A lower court ruled last year it had “committed acts in violation of laws and regulations”, which were “significantly harming the public welfare”.

Forced compensation

There has been “intense societal focus on the rulings” due to the “scope of harm” the organisation has caused across the country. Under the Religious Corporations Act, the church will be forced to compensate those affected – around 1,500 people – with “damage fees totalling approximately ¥20.4 billion” (£97 million).

The church will also lose its title as a religious organisation, so it can continue only as a “voluntary organisation” and as such will lose tax benefits. Even if the church appeals the decision to the Supreme Court, the liquidation process can proceed immediately.

The Unification Church is a South Korean movement that has “exerted significant influence in Japan since the 1960s”, said The New Yorker. It was founded by Sun Myung Moon and followers are referred to as Moonies. They promote a “theological mix of Christian Messianism, Cold War anti-Communism, pro-natalism, and self-adulation”. Around the same time, Moon “befriended” Shinzo Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, “a war criminal who later served as prime minister” and head of the Liberal Democrats, Abe’s future party.

The church “boasted of having millions of members around the world”, ranging from “Brazil to Nigeria”; however, “this number was likely inflated”. By the 1990s, there were about 600,000 Unificationists in Japan, “twice as many as in Korea”, and today the organisation still has around 60,000 followers in Japan. As recently as 2017, the church’s annual fundraising goal in Japan was an “astounding” $200 million, according to a former official, though the church denies this.

‘Exploiting fears’

It was the “shock assassination” of Abe in 2022 that put the Unification Church under global scrutiny, said the BBC. Yamagami, who has appealed his sentence, “had held a grudge against the prime minister” because of his closeness to the organisation, “which had bankrupted his family”.

Investigators found that the church “coerced” followers into “buying expensive items” by “exploiting fears about their spiritual well-being”, and also revealed “close ties with many conservative lawmakers”.

Abe had appeared in a 2021 video expressing his “respect” for the church’s leader and wife of Moon, Han Hak-ja, said Nippon.com. The following year Abe was killed by Yamagami, who harboured a “deep-seated resentment” of the religious organisation, stemming from the “financial duress his family suffered” at its hands.

The “political connections” the church had “are just the tip of the iceberg” as many other issues “remain unresolved three and a half years after” Abe’s murder. “So much suffering could have been avoided had those in power in both Japan and South Korea not waited to act against the UC.”

To combat the “universal threat” of “cults” like the Unification Church, Japan should “draw on foreign legal frameworks like France’s anti-cult laws”. This is an “ongoing human rights crisis that can no longer be ignored”.

The Trump administration has long trumpeted its goal to automate its operational capacity through artificial intelligence models provided by companies like OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. But as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth moves to offload certain human operations into the realm of the algorithm, one tech firm has emerged as a counterbalance to the White House’s vision for an artificially intelligent military: Anthropic, which “cannot in good conscience” allow Hegseth’s Pentagon to use its AI models without limitations, said CEO Dario Amodei. As the Defense Department weighs consequences, other AI firms are starting to take note — and weigh in.

Taking a ‘bold stand on ethical grounds’

Despite believing in the “existential importance” of using AI to protect the United States and “defeat our autocratic adversaries,” Anthropic has identified a “narrow set of cases” including mass domestic surveillance and “fully autonomous weapons” wherein AI can “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values,” Amodei said in a company statement. Moreover, Hegseth’s allegedly retaliatory move to blacklist Anthropic as a supply chain risk is "inherently contradictory” for labeling the company a security risk and simultaneously “essential to national security.” Hegseth's “heaviest-handed way you can regulate a business” marks a “landmark moment” for how the Pentagon “interacts with our cutting-edge technology developed on U.S. soil” in general, said Katie Sweeten, a former Justice Department official who coordinated the relationship between DOJ and the Pentagon, to Politico.

While Amodei's Anthropic faces a government ban, his “main rival,” OpenAI's Sam Altman, "struck his own deal” to fill Anthropic's Defense Department role, said CBS News. Reached just hours before the U.S. and Israel launched a joint assault on Iran, the OpenAI partnership did not prevent the military from using Anthropic's “very same tools” that it had just banned, said The Wall Street Journal. It will likely take “months” to fully replace Anthropic’s Claude AI model with other platforms.

By “refusing to bow” to a White House intent on “bullying private companies into submission,” Amodei is “taking a bold stand on ethical grounds,” said The Atlantic. While the company’s competitors “jockey for dominance” in the field, Anthropic has “distinguished itself by emphasizing safety.” Refusing White House pressure means Anthropic “may have just averted another crisis” in the form of a “major public backlash” from those who could see the company as a “more principled player in the AI wars.” After Altman's OpenAI replaced Anthropic at the Pentagon, the latter's Claude app has been "rocketing to the top of the App Store,” with some users saying they were “defecting” from ChatGPT to Anthropic after feeling “uneasy about OpenAI's ambitions," said Business Insider.

Contract negotiation vs. congressional regulation

Anthropic is “rightly concerned” that its products could be used for “unsafe or malicious” ends, said former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at The New York Times. But the company is wrong for trying to use “contractual terms” to either “prevent the misuse of its products,” or at least to “deflect responsibility.” But Anthropic also has the “option” to not sell to the government at all. The government, meanwhile, “cannot be expected to negotiate provisions” like Anthropic is asking for with all its partners, which would be a “nightmare to administer and unenforceable.” What, then, could be “appropriate” to address this debate? “Regulation by Congress.”

While it’s no secret that artificial intelligence can be used for nefarious purposes, China is working with AI on an unprecedented scale and using it to target its enemies, according to a report from OpenAI. This is just one way that China is employing AI behind the scenes to disrupt global operations.

‘Sprawling Chinese influence operation’

The report claims that China is using OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, as a “diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression,” said CNN. A “sprawling Chinese influence operation” is being employed largely for “intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating U.S. immigration officials.” Though the exact number of users is unknown, the operation “appeared to involve hundreds of Chinese operators and thousands of fake online accounts on various social media platforms.”

OpenAI’s report “offers one of the most vivid examples yet of how authoritarian regimes can use AI tools to document their censorship efforts,” said CNN. In the case of China impersonating U.S. officials, this was done to “warn a U.S.-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law.” ChatGPT “served as a journal for the Chinese operative to keep track” of their own covert operations.

China is also geopolitically implementing ChatGPT, according to the report; several Chinese accounts “generated English-language emails to state-level U.S. officials or policy analysts working in business and finance, inviting targets to participate in paid consultations,” said Reuters. China’s use of AI also involves more targeted, nonpolitical scams: One group of ChatGPT accounts “used the chatbot to run a dating scam targeting Indonesian men and likely defrauded hundreds of victims a month.”

ChatGPT fights back

China’s AI use is heavy-handed, but there are signs that some of ChatGPT’s built-in safeguards are working. In October 2025, the chatbot “refused to assist an individual associated with Chinese law enforcement in planning an online campaign to discredit” Japanese politician Sanae Takaichi, said Bloomberg. The user allegedly asked ChatGPT to create a “plan that would amplify negative comments” about Takaichi, who became Japan’s prime minister later that month.

But ChatGPT “refused to provide advice on this plan,” said OpenAI’s report, and the user was forced to abandon their efforts. There is evidence, however, that the smear campaign against Takaichi “went ahead, likely using locally hosted Chinese AI models,” said Axios. And many of the other influence-peddling operations described in the report “reflect the same old tools and tactics that influence operators typically use in online campaigns — just supercharged with AI.”

OpenAI’s report “clearly demonstrates the way that China is actively employing AI tools to enhance information operations,” Michael Horowitz, a former Pentagon official and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said to CNN. The AI competition between China and the United States is “continuing to intensify,” and this is “not just taking place at the frontier but in how China’s government is planning and implementing the day-to-day of their surveillance and information apparatus.”

Russia’s plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space could be “catastrophic”, a Canadian military leader has warned on Ukrinform.

Moscow’s reported ambitions “appear quite alarming”, said Brigadier General Christopher Horner, commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Frying electronics 

Satellite warfare has been a threat for some years and the latest “devastating” development is the “possibility of Russia detonating a nuclear weapon in space”, said the Daily Mail.

In 2024 the US believed the Kremlin was developing an “anti-satellite missile tipped with a nuclear warhead for a potential surprise attack in low orbit”. Simulated blast tests by nuclear experts at the Pentagon have suggested that such an attack would destroy thousands of Western satellites.

Satellite networks are “critical to everything from banks synchronising their transactions to navigation tasks that ranged from guiding planes and ships to ensuring a pizza delivery driver finds the right address”.

An anti-satellite nuke would “combine a physical attack that would ripple outwards, destroying more satellites”, with the nuclear component being “used to fry their electronics”, said The Associated Press.

It could “render low-Earth orbit unusable for satellites for as long as a year”, said Republican member of Congress Mike Turner, and the effects would be “devastating”. The US and its allies could be “vulnerable to economic upheaval” and “even a nuclear attack”. The scenario is “the Cuban Missile crisis in space”, said Turner.

Satellite killers

If Russia were to deploy such a “satellite-killing weapon”, it would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, The New York Times said in 2024. This kind of space weaponisation from Russia and China is “one of the primary reasons” the US Space Force was established, said AP.

Now countries are “scrambling to create their own rocket and space programmes to exploit commercial prospects and ensure they aren’t dependent on foreign satellites”, said Fortune.

The US Space Force was launched in 2019 to protect US interests in space and to defend its satellites from attacks by enemies. It’s “far smaller” than the US Army, Navy or Air Force, but it’s “growing”.

Meanwhile, Horner warned that Canada doesn’t have the “capability” to disable a potential Russian nuclear bomb in space. So “my only advice as a military officer is to put pressure” on Moscow so that they don’t follow through with the plan, because that would be an “incredibly terrible thing”.

French politics is starting to give off a “whiff of near civil war”, said Renaud Dély on France Info (Paris). On 12 February in Lyon, a far-right activist and devout Catholic called Quentin Deranque was “lynched in the street for his political beliefs by thugs from the far-left”. He died in hospital from head injuries two days later.

Left has ‘offered a martyr’

The 23-year-old data scientist was a member of Audace Lyon, a neo-fascist group that organises “white self-defence” training sessions, and which had offered to provide security to a group of self-proclaimed “feminist nationalists” protesting against the appearance of radical-left MEP Rima Hassan at a university conference. Hassan, well known for her fiercely pro-Palestinian views, is a leading light of France Unbowed (LFI), the party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate who finished third in the 2022 presidential election.

Most of the 11 people arrested over Deranque’s death had been members of the banned group Young Guard, which has been aligned with LFI, and at least three of whom had reportedly worked for one of its MPs, Raphaël Arnault. Mélenchon insists his party abhors violence, but it now looks as if it will not fare well in next month’s municipal elections. Lyon itself is known as a bastion of the far-right, and a far-right demonstration swept through the city on Saturday.

Deranque’s killing did not come as a surprise, said Paul Sugy in Le Figaro (Paris). Despite its claims to the contrary, the Left’s “anti-fascist” movement has long endorsed physical violence. For evidence of that you just have to look at the Young Guard, which Arnault co-founded in Lyon in 2018, said Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator. It was ordered to disband last summer by the Council of State for inciting violence, and for offering recruits street-fighting lessons. Given its close ties to this proscribed organisation, Mélenchon’s LFI, already languishing at 10% in the polls before the scandal, is unlikely to recover its reputation. What happened in Lyon last week buries for ever the Left’s constant claim of moral superiority.

The killers of Deranque “did not simply commit murder”, said Le Monde (Paris). In mimicking the methods of the “fascists” whom they say they are fighting, “they have sullied progressive and humanist struggles and offered a martyr to their adversaries”. Nevertheless, justified horror at their scandalous violence should not blind us to the unsavoury nature of many of those in the far-right National Rally (RN), now leading in the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election. Some of its supporters wantonly promote violence, and are “implacable enemies of democracy and the Republic”.

‘irresponsible political opportunism’

The Right and far-right are “shamefully exploiting” this tragedy, said Anthony Cortes in L’Humanité (Paris). By demonising the entire Left, figures such as RN president Jordan Bardella hope the electorate will overlook far-right brutality, such as last month’s savage beating near Lyon of a 17-year-old student of Syrian origin. Just as French parties, Mélenchon’s included, have tried to ostracise the RN, so Bardella is now asking other parties to form a united front against LFI. Such “irresponsible political opportunism” in the wake of Deranque’s death may well have fuelled last week’s bomb threat against LFI’s Paris HQ, and attacks against the party’s offices across the country.

Politicians and citizens must together do all they can to ensure the situation doesn’t escalate further, said Fabienne Lemahieu in La Croix (Paris). Things may be bad, but they’re still a far cry “from the meticulously planned clashes of the 1970s and 1980s between skinheads and antifascists”. Let’s keep things that way by maintaining calm.

To that end, LFI must urgently carry out a “genuine internal reassessment”, said Loup Besmond de Senneville in the same paper. It must stop lowering the public discourse by turning everything into a face-off. “The far-right must be fought at the ballot box and through ideas, not by shouting or becoming complicit with those who kill.”

In February 2010, Prince Andrew celebrated his 50th birthday with a glittering reception at St James’s Palace. Jeffrey Epstein, recently released from jail for soliciting sex with a 14-year-old girl, declined an invitation. But hundreds attended, including the model Naomi Campbell and the banker Evelyn de Rothschild, said Alexi Mostrous in The Observer.

Sixteen years on, the man now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor marked his 66th birthday in radically altered circumstances. At around 8am last Thursday, a fleet of unmarked police cars arrived at the former duke’s temporary residence on the Sandringham Estate, and arrested him on suspicion of misconduct in public office. While Andrew was detained in custody, officers searched his homes. Eleven hours later, as he was driven away from Aylsham police station, a photographer snapped him sitting slumped, ashen-faced, in the back of a Range Rover. The next morning, this image was splashed on front pages across the world; two days after that, anti-super-rich activists hung a copy in the Louvre in Paris, above a card reading: “He’s sweating now”.

Ruined man

Even before his arrest, Andrew – who denies any wrongdoing – was a “ruined man”, said Adam Boulton in The i Paper, stripped of his titles, and his Windsor mansion, as the Epstein files confirmed that much of what he’d told Emily Maitlis in his “Newsnight” interview in 2019 had been untrue. The files suggest that he had met Virginia Giuffre – the Epstein survivor who accused him of having sex with her when she was 17 – though he said he had no memory of her; and that, far from cutting ties with Epstein in late 2010, he was in close touch with the paedophile for years afterwards (with their discussions about complex business deals often conducted via an intermediary, Andrew’s adviser David Stern).

Andrew’s arrest was prompted by evidence that, both before and after that date, he’d passed Epstein confidential information he had gleaned as a UK trade envoy. The offence of which he’s suspected carries a possible life term; and the bad news for Andrew is that his brother seems prepared to let them throw the book at him. As the King put it coldly last week, the “law must run its course”.

The King had reportedly objected to Andrew ever being appointed a trade envoy, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. When the idea was mooted in around 2000, he argued that his brother was not suited to the job; but the Queen overruled him – with the support of Peter Mandelson, the former trade secretary.

Red flags ignored

I suppose it seemed a good idea at the time, said Hilary Rose in The Times. Having just left the Navy after 22 years, Andrew had no discernible income, and needed something to do. Why not send him abroad, to drum up business for Britain? And yet, nothing in the personality of this most spoiled and entitled of men made him fit for it.

Four years ago, a former maid at his home reported that he would shout at her if she failed to arrange his 72 teddies as he liked them. But even as a toddler, Andrew had a reputation for being “difficult”, prone to kicking dogs and taunting staff. In his teens, he behaved so badly a footman is said to have punched him – and been kept on, because the Queen felt Andrew had deserved it. He had a brief golden period, after his service in the Falklands War, but it didn’t last. On a trip to the US in 1984, he sprayed a press pack with paint – a “prank” that overshadowed the tour. Visiting Lockerbie after the Pan Am disaster of 1988, he shocked grieving residents by telling them that the Americans had had it “much worse”.

During his decade as a trade envoy, ambassadors fed back that he was a liability – rude and visibly bored at engagements, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. According to his biographer, Andrew Lownie, his staff often asked for attractive women to be invited to events. He insisted on travelling with a large entourage of valets and equerries, who were put up in luxury hotels; he even reportedly put massages on the taxpayers’ tab. Yet these red flags were ignored; and nor were other warning signs heeded – though there were clear questions to be asked about how Andrew and his immediate family were funding their famously extravagant lifestyle. Both he and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson regularly claimed to be broke – but it never dented their lavish spending.

Given all we know about the man, it is hard to muster sympathy for Andrew, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. He is “the author of his own misfortunes”, and the police may still dig up more damning evidence against him. And yet, however deserved, his “descent into disgrace must be hard to bear”, and his future must seem very bleak. We “can vilify him all we like”; but his brother, and the authorities, owe Andrew “the moral duty of care” that he seems to have “failed to show to others”.

While the U.S. and Iran have been ratcheting up threats against each other, a simmering conflict in two neighboring countries just boiled over: Afghanistan and Pakistan devolved into armed conflict on Friday, with the latter declaring the countries in a state of “open war.” Tensions between the two sides have been increasing for months, and experts fear the fighting could represent a breaking point for the broader region.

Taliban began the conflict

The fighting started when the Taliban, the ruling government of Afghanistan, launched “what it called retaliatory attacks on military installations in northwest Pakistan,” said NBC News. As residents were forced to flee their homes, Pakistan hit back, announcing it had “struck military targets in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, as well as Kandahar and Paktia provinces.” A death toll has not been confirmed, but Pakistan said at least 70 people were killed while Afghan officials reported that “dozens of civilians were killed, including women and children.”

In all, Pakistan bombed more than 20 locations in Afghanistan. Following the initial combat, Pakistan “showed no willingness to stop the most expansive fighting in years,” said The New York Times. Pakistan “made every effort to keep the situation normal, directly and through friendly countries,” said Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif in a translated post on X. “Our cup of patience has overflowed. Now it is open war between us and you.”

This “marks one of the biggest escalations in outright hostilities between Pakistan and Afghanistan since 2021 and could be the start of more violence,” said Time. The two countries had a shaky ceasefire deal since October 2025 and were historical allies. But tensions emerged over a border dispute; the Taliban does not consider the Durand Line, a boundary established by the colonial British, to be the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but Pakistani officials do. Relations also devolved because the Taliban is getting “closer to India, with which Pakistan has fought over the disputed region of Kashmir.”

‘Further escalation could compound instability’

When Pakistan and Afghanistan have fought before, other countries often enter via diplomacy, with “mediation by foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar,” said CNN. But while the fighting has typically only lasted several days, many fear that “further escalation could compound instability.” This comes as tensions in nearby Iran are also increasing.

Experts believe the war this time could be worse. Any “retaliation by the Afghans will be in Pakistan’s urban centers,” said Abdul Basit, a senior associate fellow from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, to CNN. “This is a recipe for chaos and chaos is what terrorist networks seek to flourish.” But the Taliban has warfighting methods Pakistan may be unprepared for. “The Afghan Taliban have drones, they have suicide bombers, they are innovative.”

Afghanistan’s retaliation could also “come in the way of raids on border posts and more cross-border guerrilla attacks to target security forces,” said Reuters. But there is also a “wide mismatch between the military capabilities” of the two sides. The Taliban’s reported fighting force of 172,000 is “less than a third of Pakistan's personnel,” and Pakistan is also known to possess nuclear weapons. The United Nations is urging both sides to “continue to seek to resolve any differences through diplomacy,” the organization said.

On the night that Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, Jesse Jackson, who has died aged 84, was there among the vast crowds that gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park, tears streaming down his face, said The Times. Growing up in the segregated Deep South, Jackson “could never have dreamt that he would one day see a Black American winning the highest office in the land”. But he, as much as anyone else, “had blazed the trail for Obama’s victory”.

A civil rights leader in the 1960s, Jackson became the most influential African-American leader in the decades after Martin Luther King Jr’s death; he ran for president twice in the 1980s, and though unsuccessful on each occasion, he won millions of votes and went “further than anyone at that time believed a Black man could”. But “Jackson’s strengths were also his weaknesses. He was driven, ambitious, a powerful orator and brilliant at garnering publicity, but he was also impulsive, attention-grabbing and endlessly controversial.”

Struggle and self-belief

Jesse Louis Burns was born in the small town of Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941. Nothing about his life was simple, said The New York Times, starting with his upbringing. His mother, Helen, was a 16-year-old schoolgirl; his father, Noah, was a 33-year-old former boxer who lived next door, married to another woman, and was not involved in his upbringing. In 1943, his mother married another man, Charles Jackson, who only adopted Jesse 14 years later. Before that, Jesse was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Matilda, in a shack.

“Rejected by his father and not fully embraced by his stepfather, he was taunted by other children, all while learning the racial caste system of the segregated South”: years later, he recalled the two water fountains at the bakery, and the first time his mother led him to the back of the bus. But his grandmother, an illiterate domestic servant, encouraged his growing sense of self-belief.

Jackson stood out at school – “he could talk a hole through a billy goat”, remembered a friend – and excelled as an athlete. In 1959, he won a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, but was shocked to find that, as a Black student, he would not be able to play as a quarterback. While home from college, he joined a sit-in at Greenville’s segregated library and was arrested. He then transferred to the historically Black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where he was elected student body president. There he met Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, a fellow student, whom he married in 1962. The pair would go on to have five children.

In 1964, Jackson enrolled at the Chicago Theological Seminary but, horrified by the beatings of Black demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, he left his studies to join the protesters (he was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968). He met Martin Luther King Jr and, “transformed”, offered his services to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Jackson was appointed head of the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket, which boycotted businesses that did not hire Black people. He made an impact; but his drive, ego and desire for self-promotion “led to clashes, even with Dr King”.

Household name

In April 1968, King was shot dead on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson claimed to have raced to King’s side, cradling his head as he died. He appeared on TV shows the next day wearing the same sweater – now stained with blood – he had worn the day before. “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr King’s head,” he declared. There had been a crucifixion, he said. “I was there. And I’ll be there for the resurrection.”

His claims were disputed by others present, said The Daily Telegraph: they “unanimously agreed” that Jackson had remained in the parking lot; he was accused of using King’s death for his own advancement. Whatever the truth, “the image of Jackson and his bloody shirt brought the horror of the assassination home to the American public” – and he became a “civil rights celebrity”. But he quarrelled with SCLC leaders and, in 1971, Jackson left to form his own group, People United to Save Humanity (Push).

Criss-crossing America, “speaking out against racism, militarism and class divisions”, Jackson became a household name, leading campaigns against truancy and drug use, and inspiring audiences with his slogan: “I am somebody.” In 1979, he travelled to South Africa to denounce apartheid, before visiting the Middle East, where he publicly embraced Yasser Arafat, calling for Palestinian emancipation.

In October 1983, he entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Jackson was, in fact, the second Black American to do so – Shirley Chisholm had run in 1972. His platform was partly “classic left liberalism: taxing the rich, cutting defence and using the savings for social programmes”, said The Economist. But he also had a “glorious vision”, rendered in his rousing Southern Baptist oratory: he told the Democratic National Convention that he would champion “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised”. He came third in the primaries, having run into trouble when he reportedly called Jews “Hymies”, and New York “Hymietown”. Jackson ran again in 1988, emerging from the contest in second place, with seven million votes; Michael Dukakis, who won the nomination, overlooked him as a running mate.

“The rest of his life was spent trying, unsuccessfully, to find a role that would match the excitement of the civil rights years and the presidential runs,” said The Guardian. His international profile remained high; he flew to Baghdad ahead of the first Gulf War to negotiate the release of hundreds of Americans, and to Yugoslavia in 1999 to seek the release of three downed pilots. President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and made him his spiritual adviser during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Jackson was no stranger to scandal himself, admitting in 2001 to a four-year affair with a member of his staff, who had become pregnant in 1998. He did not leave his wife, but supported his daughter financially.

He supported Obama’s run for the presidency, but not uncritically: he accused him of talking down to African Americans. Obama was brilliant, he conceded, but “I would say he ran the last lap of a 60-year race”, Jackson remarked in 2010. On the night of Obama’s victory, he said, his tears had been for King, his mentor and father figure. In 2017, Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and later with progressive supranuclear palsy. He is survived by Jackie and their five children, Santita, Jesse Jr, Jonathan, Yusef and Jacqueline, and by his daughter, Ashley.

Doomscrolling could itself be doomed if European Union regulators have their way.

The European Commission is taking a historic stand against social media, ordering TikTok to disable infinite scrolling, where the page continues to load content as the user scrolls down, allowing them to keep viewing endless content.

Compulsive behaviour 

In the preliminary findings of an ongoing investigation into the social media app, the commission has declared that TikTok’s compulsive design may put it in breach of the Digital Services Act.

Taking aim at the app’s “addictive” features, it said that “by constantly ‘rewarding’ users with more content, certain design features of TikTok fuel the urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain of users into ‘autopilot mode’”. This “may lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users’ self-control”.

If the findings are confirmed, TikTok could face a fine of up to 6% of its global annual turnover, which would be more than $1 billion based on its 2023 revenue of $23 billion. It could also be required to “change the basic design of its service” to comply with the law. TikTok “now has the chance to defend itself and its design before the investigation is concluded”, said The Verge.

Ruining your life

Researchers at the University of Sussex found that doomscrolling is bad for us but it’s the activity we spend most time on. “In other breaking news, water is wet and the Pope is Catholic”, said Big Issue.

Social media is “designed to keep our eyes on it – in order to make us look at advertisements”, said Professor Robin Banerjee, who led the research. This means “we’ve got this very, very clear pattern” of us “spending a lot of time doing stuff that doesn’t particularly bring us joy”.

The “infinite scroll” feature is “ruining your life”, said The Carolinian, because of a “phenomenon” known as the “scrolling paradox”. This is when a “user’s brain” expects a “strong dopamine surge when scrolling endlessly through social media”, which compels them to keep their phones in their hand. But they “simultaneously report feeling increasingly stressed and anxious” by their “literal inability to stop scrolling”.

But is infinite scrolling a bad thing for everyone? For the “socially anxious”, it “may be a blessing in disguise”, said Aparna Nancherla in The New York Times, because it’s “no longer considered rude to avert your gaze and stare down mutely at a glowing screen in public”.

President Donald Trump’s long association with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is a well-documented matter of public record. Less publicly acknowledged, however, are uncorroborated allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor while in Epstein’s orbit, particularly after “more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations,” with a woman who accused Trump of assault “decades ago when she was a minor” were found missing from the Justice Department’s legally mandated Epstein files release, said NPR. As lawmakers work to identify what was redacted and why, the furor over Trump’s Epstein associations seems unlikely to die down anytime soon.

‘Covering up direct evidence’

At the center of the growing scandal are allegations from an unidentified woman who claimed she was forced into a sexual encounter with Trump by Epstein “around 1983, when she was around 13 years old,” said NPR. Congressional investigators determined the tranche of missing documents by “matching public files with case files listed in the evidence manifest” made available to Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team, said Politico.

The focus on the missing documents is “misleading the public,” said the Justice Department on X. Democrats are merely “manufacturing outrage” culled from their “radical anti-Trump base,” even though “NOTHING has been deleted.” Just one day later, however, the DOJ said on X that “as with all documents that have been flagged by the public,” it is “currently reviewing files” alleged to have been withheld, and items deemed improperly redacted “will of course” be published.

While it’s “unclear” why the materials were missing in the first place, their absence “deepens questions” about how the Justice Department has “handled” the legally mandated Epstein file releases, said The New York Times. The law directing the publication of Epstein documents allows redactions to protect victims, as well as for depictions of physical and sexual violence, and in instances where it could affect active investigations, but “expressly prohibited” officials from blocking publication “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity to public figures.”

Democrats plan to “open a parallel investigation” into the allegations against Trump and any DOJ redactions thereof, said House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) in a statement. The Justice Department appears to be “covering up direct evidence of a potential assault by the president of the United States.”

Garcia’s Republican counterpart, Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), signaled openness to pursue the matter further. “We know what the administration says,” said Comer to reporters on Thursday. “We are still looking to get a definitive answer on that.”

‘Gaslighting the entire country’

“So far,” Trump has personally “evaded the crosshairs of credible allegations in the Epstein files” in part thanks to “false statements, misdirection, public confusion and excessive redactions from his own DOJ,” said journalist Roger Sollenberger, one of the first reporters to identify the missing material, on Substack. But the allegations allegedly described in the absent documents “contradict the narrative” that Trump has “not been credibly accused of wrongdoing in the Epstein saga.”

While “many documents” have been removed and then re-added to the DOJ’s Epstein trove since their initial release, some Epstein victims say they’ve “scoured the DOJ’s website” for their own interview documents, “only to come up empty-handed,” said CNN. Given the heavy redactions and missing documentation from the government, the implication, said Epstein victim Jess Michaels to the network, is that “this Department of Justice is actually gaslighting the entire country.”

In recent weeks, Instagram and TikTok feeds have seemingly turned into time machines as people openly yearn for a simpler, more colorful era of the internet. The social media trend has people reminiscing about ten years ago, when everyone was obsessed with Snapchat filters, VSCO girls ruled, and the internet was generally less toxic.

‘The golden age of memes’

This year kicked off with 2016 “making a comeback” as celebrities and regular users “flood Instagram with throwback posts reminiscing about what they viewed as an iconic year for popular culture and the internet,” said NBC News. Nostalgic posts trotted out the memories, with people unearthing “hyper-filtered photos of themselves a decade ago.” The trend has resurfaced “grainy images of açai bowls and sunsets,” along with skinny jeans, choker necklaces and “Snapchat filters that put flower crowns and dog noses on our faces,” said The New York Times. It was the era of the “short-form video app Vine, Pokémon Go and Kylie Jenner lip kits.”

The “2026 is the new 2016” trend can be traced back to an “ironic Gen-Z joke that turned into a sincere movement” known as the Great Meme Reset, in which TikTokers “pined for the good old days, before the web became infested with AI-generated brainrot,” said Forbes. The Meme Reset proposed that social media users “reset” the internet by “posting classic memes to drown out low-effort engagement bait” and spark a “comeback for forgotten trends.” 2016 was chosen as the “golden age of memes, right before the perceived decline.”

Pining for yesteryear

The internet’s “gaze backward to the not-so-distant past” is the latest example of the “acceleration of nostalgia online,” where trends can “burn bright and die fast, making the landscape of just a few years ago feel like a foreign country,” said the Times. The pining for 2016 also “plays into a recent cultural obsession with so-called millennial optimism,” the mindset of those who came of age in the 2010s. This attitude is “potent among millennials themselves,” but also older members of Gen Z who “recall little of the era or arrived on the tail end of it” — and whom “some older generations accuse of taking too rosy an outlook.”

On the surface, the trend “seems like a celebration of fashion and music,” but it really has more to do with 2016 “sitting at the intersection of nostalgia and structural change that we didn’t know was happening on the internet,” said Kate Kennedy, the author of “One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls and Fitting In,” to the Times. While some people are “simply nostalgic for their younger years,” much of the trend is about the “perceived innocence of 2016 compared to the internet today,” said Forbes. The internet wasn’t as “bright and cheerful as it’s being remembered,” but it wasn’t “quite as gamified and monetized as it is today” either, and had more casual users “posting selfies and sharing random thoughts with their followers, just for the sake of it.”

Still, as this trend got popular, some people posted videos “denouncing the idea of making 2026 the new 2016,” said Know Your Meme. Users quickly began “pointing out bad things that happened in 2016.”

All this “Coachella-flower-crowned nostalgia elides” that 2016 was “chock-full of horrors, too,” said Andrea González-Ramírez at The Cut. The year had a bevy of low points and heated controversies, including Brexit, the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub, the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and a Zika outbreak. Even if the “VSCO filters were cute,” the “vibes in 2016 were pretty rancid.”

It was also the year that President Donald Trump was elected over Hillary Clinton, signaling a major shift in the political atmosphere. The world has become a “scarier, more challenging, and more divided place over the past decade,” said González-Ramírez. But in many ways, including the fact that “Trump is back in office pursuing his agenda more aggressively than in his first term” and “high-profile law-enforcement shootings are dominating headlines, we never left 2016.”

When Barack Obama teased Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, the man who helped write the withering speech enjoyed “seeing how angry” Trump got, but did not imagine the businessman would one day become president, said The Telegraph.

The disclosure is part of a new oral history of the Obama years that shows that although the Democrat “took on recession, healthcare and Iraq”, what “he didn’t see coming was Trump”, said The New York Times.

Chuckles and anger

For eight years, Obama’s aides “marvelled” that “no amount of mockery, dismissal or scandal could make Donald Trump go away”, said The Associated Press. Their “bewilderment” is “threaded through hundreds of interviews” with officials released in the “far-reaching history of the Obama presidency”, which is the most extensive set of interviews to emerge so far from those years.

The testimonies, released for “the perusal of historians, researchers and the merely curious”, said The New York Times, don’t include interviews with the Obamas or Joe Biden, but do include significant figures like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Oprah Winfrey.

At the fateful 2011 dinner, speechwriter Jon Favreau was “revelling in the effect of his words”, said The Telegraph. The decision to mock Trump “stemmed from aggravation” over the “continuing lies” about Obama’s birthplace, said The New York Times. “I thought what he was doing was racist,” recalled Favreau, but “not even a brief moment” did he believe Trump would become a political force.

However, David Axelrod, another member of Obama’s team, walked by Trump’s table that evening and overheard the businessman saying he was toying with running for president. Axelrod, in his own words, “chuckled at it and went to my seat”.

‘Demagogic bloviating’

The Obama administration “failed to spot the threat of Trump”, said The New York Times, because they thought him “a thorn in the side with his birther lies and demagogic bloviating”. To them, he was just a “con man”, a “clown” and a “laughing stock”.

But they “missed the shifting mood of the country”. It’s “striking” how “inconceivable” it seemed to Obama and his team that “populist disenchantment with the establishment, globalisation and demographic changes would elevate a figure they scorned”.

The “picture that emerges from the interviews” is a “collapsing popular belief in a system that simply could not, seemingly for its own psychological reasons, grasp what was truly going on”, said The Telegraph. There was a “failure to come to terms with the realities of the moment”.

“It was hard” not to take Trump’s 2016 election victory “personally”, said former White House press secretary Josh Earnest, because the “essence” of Trump’s being, and “everything that he stood for” were “anathema to everything” that the “Obama era” had “been about”.

Obama “started out, like so many”, viewing Trump as “little more than a comical, if malevolent, real-estate hawker”, said The New Yorker. But as well as failing to “anticipate Trump’s victory”, he “failed to comprehend the degree” to which the Republican would, “particularly in his second term, set out to demolish the principles and the institutions” that Obama held dear.

While it is legal to bet using online prediction markets in the United States, pushback has begun against a practice that many states say is harmful to their residents. Officials have initiated numerous lawsuits against major betting platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, but they may face an uphill battle as these prediction markets continue to grow more popular.

At least 20 lawsuits nationwide

Many states have alleged that the online prediction community is essentially a front for gambling. At least 20 federal lawsuits have been filed nationwide, “disputing whether companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket should be treated as federally regulated financial exchanges, as they maintain,” said The Guardian. But the lawsuits claim these companies are “gambling operations that should be regulated like state-licensed sportsbooks.” Polymarket was previously banned in the U.S. but was largely reinstated in 2025.

These lawsuits say the industry is harmful because companies “let users trade on the outcome of virtually anything, ranging from sports and elections to award shows, speeches and even what someone might wear,” said The Guardian. The users essentially bet against each other while platforms collect transaction fees, differing from casinos where players bet “against an established ‘house.’” These companies fall under “federal commodities law and are currently overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission rather than under state gaming regulators,” making the platforms available in all 50 states.

One of the most notable lawsuits is in Nevada, where the state’s “effort to block the prediction market platform Kalshi is moving through multiple courts,” said NBC News. Officials in Nevada allege that Kalshi, “through its prediction market contracts, is offering people a way to illegally bet on sports,” though Kalshi maintains it is just a financial exchange platform. But many of these lawsuits are also facing their own headwinds. In “Massachusetts alone, Robinhood and Polymarket have sued to block” legal maneuvers by the attorney general, said Bloomberg Law.

‘A full-blown war’

As the lawsuits continue, there are also political aspects to the rift between lawmakers and prediction markets. This has “escalated into a full-blown war, and battle lines aren’t being neatly drawn along party lines,” said Wired. Liberals and conservatives often find themselves defending the same cause. One side “argues that the platforms are breaking the law by operating as shadow casinos. The other insists they are just giving people access to legitimate financial markets already subject to adequate government oversight.”

Prediction markets have also become “entrenched in mainstream culture, a transformation that has brought vast sums of money into play,” said Wired. But in court, challenges to “sports prediction markets have won early victories,” said The New York Times, which could be “devastating for prediction markets” as a whole. Kalshi’s “own data shows that $12.5 billion of its total trading volume comes from sports-related contracts.” All of its other categories combined generate just $4.7 billion.

The 2028 election could also have implications for the market, particularly if Democrats win back the White House and go after such brands. “These sportsbook companies want to be fast, they want to be active, they want to get a good return on what they’re spending right now,” Chad Beynon, a senior analyst at Macquarie Group, told the Times, “knowing that this could go away in 2028.”

Perhaps the second-biggest question ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday (behind “what will he actually say?”) is what, if anything, will Democrats do to mark the president’s first SOTU of his uniquely authoritarian second term? In the recent past, State of the Union addresses have contended with disruptive outbursts, coordinated shows of respectful disapproval and a growing cottage industry of high-profile rebuttals, some officially party-sanctioned, others largely self-promotional. But with tensions running high and Washington decorum to consider, Democrats now find themselves torn between calls for calm and calls for more visible forms of resistance.

Call for 'silent defiance'

Democratic Party leaders are “encouraging their troops to protest” the president’s State of the Union speech Tuesday evening, but “how it’s done” remains a “sensitive topic,” said The Hill. After party members “churned headlines” last year with a “series of in-your-face demonstrations” at the president’s joint address to Congress, leaders are eager to “avoid a repeat of those theatrics.” Democrats should attend in “silent defiance” or skip the speech entirely, said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). Those skipping will have an opportunity to participate in a “variety of different alternate programming.”

Debate among Democrats over whether to disrupt, skip, or sit quietly through the State of the Union reflects “broader, ongoing divisions in party strategy,” said MS NOW. With an eye toward the upcoming midterm elections, party leaders are aware that “symbolic decisions” on interrupting or avoiding the speech “could resonate with voters back home.” For many, it’s “simply a dilemma” whether to “even attend,” said Axios. And for those who do attend, “don’t expect anything on the scale of last year” when disruptions repeatedly peppered Trump’s address. There will be “no organized choreography as far as I know,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) to the outlet.

“Central” to the Democrats’ intended “show of force” in standing up to the administration will be “victims of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,” said Roll Call. The effort “starts from leadership on down” with multiple lawmakers, including party heads Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), expected to bring Epstein survivors as their guests. Lawmakers participating in an advocacy group-sponsored “People’s State of the Union” alternative event on the National Mall will also be “sharing letters on behalf of Epstein survivors.”

Risking a diluted impact

Attendees of the “People’s State of the Union” include many lawmakers who eschewed major Trump events, like his inaugurations in the past, “underscoring a small but consistent block of Democrats” who continue to “opt out of the president’s most high-profile events,” said Politico. But after many who skipped the president’s first inauguration ultimately attended his second, the shrinking number of those avoiding his appearances signals a “faded resistance from the first Trump era.”

Barred by party leadership from interrupting Trump’s speech, Democrats are instead “planning individualized responses” to “show opposition to his agenda,” said Axios. But by trying to mobilize “every faction of their coalition before the midterms,” the party risks the fact that a “range of messages could dilute their impact.” Still, while it may complicate efforts to present a “fully unified front,” it has nevertheless become “common for factions within both parties to deliver separate rebuttals aimed at different constituencies.”

The “dangerous fanatics” of Palestine Action have been given a “free pass” to continue promoting hatred and committing acts of violent disorder, said The Sun. Last Friday, the High Court ruled that the government’s decision to proscribe the group as a terrorist organisation had been unlawful.

Palestine Action had, the three judges accepted, carried out some acts of terrorism, said Alistair Gray in the Financial Times. But they ruled that the challenge to the ban – which was put in place last July, after activists broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged two planes – was successful on two main legal grounds. The first was that the decision to outlaw the group amounted to “unjustified interference” with the right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. The second was that the decision, taken by then-home secretary Yvette Cooper, was “disproportionate”, because Palestine Action’s activities had not yet reached “the level, scale and persistence” to fall within the legal definition of terrorism.

‘Good intentions’

This ruling is “disturbing”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. Between August 2024 and June 2025 the group was responsible for 158 “direct action events”, 28 of which caused damage to property exceeding £50,000, or required a significant police presence. In 2024, an activist allegedly attacked a police officer with a sledgehammer, fracturing her spine. Are ministers just supposed to wait around “until more people are injured, or someone even gets killed by these activities”, before they’re allowed to ban the group?

“There were clearly good intentions behind the proscription, but the problems with such a blanket measure became apparent as soon as the police began putting it into practice,” said The Daily Telegraph. Among the more than 2,700 people arrested, were many who would generally never be considered terrorists, from priests to pensioners. To class these people, however “ignorant or misguided” they were, as terrorists, in the same league as militants from al-Qa’eda or Islamic State, threatened to “make the ban look ridiculous”, and those locked up look like martyrs.

‘Fundamentally unsound’

“One does not have to endorse the vandalism perpetrated by Palestine Action supporters” to understand that the proscription of the group was “fundamentally unsound”, said David Littlefair on UnHerd. It’s notable that “the same people who might become apoplectic at citizens being disciplined over social media posts have been remarkably sanguine in response to thousands of pensioners facing prison time for poorly defined crimes”. Many seem now to feel “that the value of free speech as a concept is contingent on how annoying they find the speaker”.

The ban will remain in place while the government prepares to appeal, said Haroon Siddique in The Guardian. But the debacle has already been a “humiliation” for Keir Starmer’s beleaguered government – and “has transformed Palestine Action from a little-known protest group to one that is on the front page of newspapers”.

The beating death of ultraconservative activist Quentin Deranque in the French city of Lyon last week has pushed both the country’s far right and left flanks toward bellicosity, as both ends of the political spectrum blame the other for his death and the threat of further violence. That two of the people detained for the killing, which occurred during a street brawl between far-left and right activists, were aides in a far-left lawmaker’s office has only inflamed already fraught tensions ahead of upcoming local elections and a national election next year to replace outgoing President Emmanuel Macron. As French politicos jockey for influence in the wake of Deranque’s death, has Europe reached its own Charlie Kirk-esque inflection point?

‘Lawless party, unfit to govern’

Deranque’s killing has “spiraled into a bitter war of words” and “intense political jockeying” that offer a “preview of the tensions that could erupt” ahead of France’s national elections next year, said The New York Times. The arrest of suspects associated with the far-left France Unbowed party has led to “thunderous condemnations” from the nation’s far-right, including the National Rally Party, which has “spent years trying to shake off a legacy of xenophobia and antisemitism.” Under party leader Jordan Bardella, National Rally now has an “opportunity” to frame its leftist nemesis as a “lawless party, unfit to govern France.”

Despite France Unbowed’s efforts to “distance the party from Deranque’s violent death,” it has nevertheless “come under attack from rivals across the political spectrum,” said the BBC. Even “more moderate figures on the left,” including ex-President François Hollande, have accused France Unbowed of broadly “being responsible for lowering the tone of politics in France.” The “backlash” against France’s left is, in ways, “reminiscent of the American right’s offensive against ‘antifa’ movements” following the shooting death of far-right wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, said Jacobin.

Conversely, Deranque’s death is “proving to be a turning point for the French far right,” despite the movement being “riddled with deep divisions,” said Le Monde. A planned march of far-right factions this weekend could “provide an opportunity” for ultraconservatives to “rally around a common cause: the figure of Deranque,” who has been “elevated to the status of political martyr” for some. For many on France’s far right, his killing and the reaction could ultimately “strengthen the unity” of a political movement that has “always valued aesthetics and ritual more than doctrine,” said historian Nicolas Lebourg to the outlet.

Shift for France’s ‘cordon sanitaire’

Deranque’s death and the furor surrounding it are “reshaping” France’s domestic politics to the “benefit of the populist National Rally,” said The Times. It has cast the nationalist right wing as “victim” while pushing the left, which traditionally claims the moral high ground, into “disarray.” Now, France’s “partisan landscape” seems to be “reshaping itself around an unprecedented paradox,” said Euro News: The “cordon sanitaire” — a method by which political parties are isolated and excluded from governing coalitions — which has “long applied to the far right” is now being used against France Unbowed.

The National Rally has “turned a corner,” said political communications professor Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet to Euro News. Rather than pushing back against demonization efforts, the party is in the “process of normalization” by framing itself as a “French political force that is here to stay, with a significant presence that is part of the landscape.”

As a boy, James Van Der Beek was sports mad and dreamed of playing in the Superbowl, said The Times. But aged 13, he suffered a “severe concussion” during a football match, and was advised by a doctor to quit for a year.

To the surprise of the other jocks at his high school, he swapped the locker room for the glee club. He took the lead role in a school production of “Grease”, and at 16 he appeared off Broadway in a play by Edward Albee. Four years after that, Van Der Beek, who has died aged 48, won the role that made him famous, in the 1990s coming-of-age TV drama “Dawson’s Creek”.

With his background, he was perfect for the part of the show’s titular protagonist, Dawson Leery, who was tall and muscular, but also sensitive, introspective, and given to implausibly sophisticated musings. “It’s not about the kiss – it’s about the journey and creating a sustaining magic,” Dawson reflects in one episode, while watching “From Here to Eternity”.

James Van Der Beek was born in 1977 and brought up in Connecticut. His father was a telecoms executive, his mother a dancer. When he told her that he wanted to be an actor, aged 15, she drove him to New York to find an agent. Although he got good notices for his role in the Albee play, he spent much of the next few years, he said, “failing auditions for commercials”. He was 20, and at college, by the time he was cast as Dawson – a 15-year-old film buff living in a coastal town in Massachusetts, who is nursing a crush on his tomboy neighbour Joey (Katie Holmes).

“With a quartet of smart, articulate 15-year-olds completed by Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson, the show was an instant hit,” said The Daily Telegraph. Over six seasons, broadcast in dozens of countries, it tracked its characters and their intertwined love lives as they navigated the journey towards adulthood, while exploring serious themes such as mental health, divorce, consent and addiction.

Success, Van Der Beek would reflect, had not come overnight – but his life changed overnight. In 1998, the year that the series launched, he was voted one of People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People; in public, he was mobbed by young fans. He said that for years, he had walked around “in fear of teenage girls”, and that people seemed no longer to regard him as a human being, so much as a “novelty item”. Still, the show’s success also opened doors. While “Dawson’s Creek” was still running, he starred in the box-office hit “Varsity Blues”; in 2002, he had a lead role in the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s “The Rules of Attraction”.

But though he continued to act in films and on TV, he found it harder to move on from “Dawson’s Creek” than its other young stars, and some of his later parts were send-ups of the show. Asked in 2023 what advice he’d give to his younger self, he said: “Don’t be surprised if six years of work gets reduced to a three-second GIF of you crying.” He was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2023. Last year, he had to auction off his TV memorabilia to pay his medical bills. Married twice, he is survived by his second wife, Kimberly, and their six children.

Stephen Colbert will not lead late night without a fight. The CBS host is clashing with his network bosses, saying they refused to air his interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico. At the heart of the conflict is the Federal Communications Commission’s “equal time” rule.

The FCC has long required radio and TV broadcast networks like CBS to “give equal time to political candidates” seeking the same office, said The Associated Press. Talarico is running for U.S. Senate, so that rule would seem to suggest that his Democratic primary opponents would get airtime if he had been featured on Colbert’s show. (The rule does not apply to streaming services, which is why the Talarico interview is featured on Colbert’s YouTube channel.) But the mandate “hasn’t traditionally been applied to talk shows.” Colbert’s staff “can’t find one example of this rule being enforced for any talk show interview” going back to the 1960s, the host said Tuesday night.

Changing standards

The law originated in the 1920s amid concerns that the then-brand-new medium of radio “could influence the outcome of elections by spotlighting a preferred candidate on the airwaves,” said Deadline. Networks and affiliates have taken notable steps to comply: Some stations refused to air Ronald Reagan movies during the 1980 election campaign “out of concerns that they would be on the hook to provide time to other candidates.” And NBC in 2024 gave Donald Trump free airtime during the presidential campaign after Kamala Harris appeared on “Saturday Night Live.”

Congress “created four exemptions in 1959,” said Axios, due to concerns that a strict requirement “would make it impossible for news programs to report on candidates.” One of those exemptions included “bona fide news interviews” and was long understood to include interviews on “late night programming.”

FCC Chair Brendan Carr issued new guidance in January, saying late night and other talk shows would no longer be covered by the exemption, said Politico. The shows are often “motivated by purely partisan political purposes,” Carr said, and going forward must “provide all candidates with equal opportunities.” But critics saw a partisan play on the part of Carr, a Republican. His announcement did not include equal time enforcement for “talk radio, which conservatives dominate,” said David A. Graham at The Atlantic.

Future enforcement

The FCC’s “enforcement powers are limited,” said CNN. Trump has made “repeated calls for station licenses to be revoked” but that is “exceedingly unlikely” and would probably trigger lawsuits. The picture may soon become clearer, though, as the FCC has reportedly opened an investigation into ABC’s “The View” after Talarico was featured as a guest.

Congressional Democrats are offering “sharp condemnation” of Carr and vowing an investigation, said Mediaite. The FCC chairman is “blocking Democratic candidates” from public forums, said Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.) on X. Colbert’s run as the host of “The Late Show,” meanwhile, ends in May.

While Europe’s appetite for fast fashion shows no sign of waning, governments are going straight to the source: tackling the e-commerce giants themselves.

Last year, France tried to ban fast-fashion giant Shein in the country, after authorities found weapons and “childlike” sex dolls for sale on its e-commerce platform. A Paris court rejected the request but referred the matter to the European Commission.

Today, the bloc launched an investigation into the Chinese-founded company under its Digital Services Act (DSA). It will assess whether Shein’s safeguards are curbing the sale of illegal items, including content that constitutes “child sexual abuse material”. “In the EU, illegal products are prohibited – whether they are on a store shelf or on an online marketplace,” said EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen in a statement.

The Commission is also concerned about the “gamification” of the Singapore-based platform and its “addictive” design, a spokesperson told the BBC.

The ‘line in the sand’

Shein and e-commerce rivals such as Temu have made rapid inroads in Europe, but concern is growing over the environmental impact of fast fashion. In the EU, five million tonnes of clothing are “dumped” every year, said the European Parliament: 12kg per person.

Last year, the EU introduced “sweeping new rules” on textile waste, said the Financial Times. It passed on the cost of collecting, sorting and recycling textiles to companies. In a “direct swipe at the fast-fashion industry”, negotiators agreed that online retailers – including those based outside the EU but selling into the bloc – would be subject to the “same obligations” as bricks-and-mortar businesses.

The bloc is also using taxation to combat the economic threat. Until 2021, imports valued under €22 “arrived in Europe without paying VAT”, giving companies like Shein and Temu an “unfair advantage over local businesses”, said tax and finance law professor Albert Navarro García on The Conversation. Now, all non-EU imports are subject to VAT. The effects are “already being felt”, forcing international platforms to “modify their pricing”. Last year, France also became the first European country to “approve a tax on fast fashion”. Brands have to pay an extra €5 per item, which will increase to €10 in 2030.

France “continued its war on fast fashion” with amendments to a climate bill that would impose environmental penalties on retail giants, said Forbes. The bold move was both a “practical and symbolic line in the sand”. Fashion is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions. France, one of the world’s fashion capitals, showed it was “willing to legislate its worst excesses”.

A cultural and economic ‘affront’

France has been “going after” Shein for years, said Nicole Lipman in The Guardian. Authorities have investigated the company for human rights and environmental violations and fined it for “misleading discounts”. “The French fear Shein’s impact on the economy and labour markets, but also what the brand stands for: dirt-cheap clothing, at the expense of ethics.” Shein represents a cultural as well as economic “affront”.

However, in France Shein has become the fifth-largest clothing retailer by volume, according to the Institut Français de la Mode. In November, it opened its first bricks-and-mortar store in Paris, in the iconic department store BHV Marais. More than 100,000 citizens signed a petition opposing its presence, and many protested on opening day. Hours later, Shein was reported to French authorities for “sex dolls with a childlike appearance” listed on its third-party marketplace. The government suspended all Shein deliveries and moved to block the company.

Following “the uproar”, Shein said it “immediately removed the products and banned sex dolls from its site globally, regardless of appearance”, said Le Monde. But now, if the Commission reaches a so-called “non-compliance decision”, Shein may be forced to “alter its actions” further, said The Associated Press. Companies can also be fined up to 6% of their annual global revenue for DSA violations. That puts Shein “at risk of $2.2 billion [£1.6 billion] in penalties”, said The Verge.

“Protecting minors and reducing the risk of harmful content and behaviours are central to how we develop and operate our platform,” Shein said in a statement. “Following the issues identified last year, in addition to enhancement of detection tools, we also accelerated the rollout of additional safeguards around age-restricted products.”

While several notable conspiracy theorists work in the Trump administration, one who has flown under the radar is beginning to gain traction: Kurt Olsen. The attorney was hired by the White House last year to oversee election security and has recently ramped up his efforts to investigate the 2020 election. With the midterms on the horizon, Olsen’s role within President Donald Trump’s administration may be growing.

Olsen’s beginnings and election denial

Olsen, 63, graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served as a Navy SEAL. He later worked as a lawyer and co-founded a law firm. But his national profile began to climb following Trump’s loss to now-former President Joe Biden in 2020. Over the last six years, Olsen has built a “long history of fighting the 2020 election results,” said USA Today.

He notably “joined the Texas attorney general’s attempt to get the Supreme Court to stop four swing states from certifying Biden's 2020 victory over Trump,” said USA Today. The lawyer grew closer to Trump after the election and had “multiple phone calls” with him during the Jan. 6 insurrection, Politico reported in 2022.

Director of election security

The White House hired Olsen in October 2025 as the president’s head of election security, and gave him the “power to refer criminal investigations” into “things that have been thoroughly debunked,” said The New York Times. Olsen is one of several prominent election deniers working for the administration who is “using the power of the state to keep Trump’s denialism alive.” But even in a “constellation of conspiracists, Olsen stands out.”

One crucial moment on the national stage for Olsen came in January 2026, when the FBI used a search warrant to seize ballots and records related to the 2020 race from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. The FBI’s investigation “originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen,” an affidavit for the search warrant said. The FBI was allegedly looking for irregularities in Georgia’s elections at Olsen’s behest.

This is not the only situation in which Olsen has seemingly had significant power in the White House. Trump has “directed top U.S. spy agencies to share sensitive intelligence about the 2020 election” with Olsen, according to Politico. This led him to review “some sensitive compartmented intelligence programs, which are among the most highly classified material stored by U.S. spy agencies.” This move is unusual given that Olsen has “no known experience working with the U.S. spy community.”

The CIA later confirmed that the agency is working with Olsen. “The president has asked Olsen to look at intelligence related to the 2020 election and the agency is ensuring that he has the access necessary to do his work,” a CIA spokesperson told Politico. This all comes as many are sounding the alarm about his involvement. Olsen has a “history of abusing his law license to spread lies about our elections,” Christine P. Sun, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, told the Times. “Now, he’s using his role in the administration and the power of the federal government to take actions fueled by those same lies.”

“Sporting matching signet rings” engraved with “poetics about their twinned souls”, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are the latest on-screen lovers hinting at off-screen romance, said The Times. As publicity for the much-awaited new film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” reaches “fever pitch”, its leads have been leaning into the fantasy with a series of “entwined” interviews and touchy-feely red carpet moments.

“This is not a case of life imitating art” – Robbie has been married to producer Tom Ackerley since 2016, and they had their first child in 2024 – but a particularly shameless “showmance”, “a relationship cultivated by two stars to catapult a film into the zeitgeist”.

‘Planet Vomit’

Even before the film hit UK cinemas, the “Byronic showmance” between its stars was “moving at warp speed to Planet Vomit”, said The Telegraph. During the promotional campaign, Elordi and Robbie have been “wrapped around each other like poison ivy, waxing lyrical about their ‘mutual obsession’”.

They have “tried really, really hard to make everyone think they are besotted lovers”, rather than “professional colleagues with a product to sell”, said The Guardian. Is this how stupid the film industry thinks we become? Something’s “badly wrong” if we all have to watch them “go moony-eyed over each other, knowing full well they’ll drop the artifice like a stone when they each get something new to promote”.

Even platonic friendship isn’t safe from this Hollywood hysteria. While promoting “Wicked” and its sequel, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were “clinging to each other” and “sobbing like they’d just watched their childhood houses burn down”. Did we not once understand that “an actor’s performance began with the opening credits and ended when the lights went up”?

‘Fabricated pairings’

Hollywood has actually been here before – when “the old school studios ordered a young starlet to marry her co-star to promote a new release or a pair of teen sensations were asked to prolong a spent relationship”, said Tatler.

In the Golden Age, big studios like MGM and Universal “locked in” stars with “golden-handcuff contracts”, said The Times. They made them sign morality clauses to control their off-screen love life, and forced them to participate in “fabricated romantic pairings” to promote movies – or even sometimes to “deflect rumours”. In 1955, Universal arranged for closeted gay heartthrob Rock Hudson to be married off to his agent’s secretary amid swirling speculation about his sexuality.

Today’s showmances are less formally planned, Hollywood marketing agent Stacy Jones told the paper. The idea is to generate speculation without explicitly confirming a romance: “never lie, but don’t rush to clarify either”. It’s all “about amplifying chemistry that already feels believable”.

But toying with audiences like this can backfire. Many people “seemed genuinely moved” when Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson appeared to have fallen for one another while making “The Naked Gun”, said Slate – only for the whole affair to be revealed as a “sloppily executed” showmance the moment the promotional tour was over. “If you’re going to fake a relationship, celebs, could you just be prepared to stick it out at least until the movie goes to streaming?”