As Donald Trump’s war wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that he has no “overarching strategy” and is now fighting a war of attrition, said The Guardian.

America is still striking at Iranian targets while building up troops in the region. Iran, in turn, keeps attacking Israel and the Gulf states. Last week, it hit a US airbase in Saudi Arabia, injuring 12 US personnel and causing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Tehran’s allies in Yemen have now entered the fray. The Strait of Hormuz remains shut. And while his officials talk about peace being “weeks, not months” away, Trump is still warning of far worse to come as he “searches for leverage”.

This week, the president said that the US could capture or “obliterate” Iran’s oil export hub, Kharg Island, and possibly even target Iran's energy and water systems – “war crimes by another name”.

Miles apart

Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure last month, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, only to row back, saying there would be no strikes for ten days to allow time for talks. That deadline elapses on Monday, but all the evidence suggests that he had no plan and was simply “playing for time”. And while he claims that Tehran is “begging for a deal”, the Iranians seem to think they have him “on the run”, and deny talks are even taking place.

Even if meaningful negotiations were on the horizon, the two sides are miles apart, said Richard Spencer in The Times. Iran is demanding not only an end to sanctions, but “an end to all attacks, including Israel’s, on Hamas, Hezbollah and other arms of the ‘resistance’”. It also wants reparations, and “sovereignty” over the Strait of Hormuz – a hint that it plans to charge for access, as Egypt does with the Suez Canal. The US, in turn, insists that Iran end its nuclear programme; give up its enriched uranium; and cut off support to its proxies.

When it comes to Trump’s rhetoric, a pattern is emerging, said Emily Maitlis in The i Paper. He reserves his most bellicose threats for the weekend, when the financial markets are closed, then starts talking up the possibility of peace so that the outlook seems more positive by the time traders are back at their desks. The markets, though, are getting wise to this tactic.

‘Escalate or talk’

As for Tehran, it seems unmoved by Trump’s threats. The fact is, Iran is far more capable than the US of both withstanding and inflicting pain, said The Economist. While the world counts the economic costs of this war, the regime is “making a mint” from sanctions-busting oil sales. Domestically, its hardline Revolutionary Guards remain in control. And overseas, its proxies continue to do its bidding: last Saturday, the Houthis provided a stark reminder of their capacity to ramp up the chaos when they fired missiles at Israel.

Trump, by contrast, is flailing. “Despite operational successes and his nonsensical claim of having already changed the regime in Tehran, he has yet to win any substantive gains from the fighting.” His choice now is to “escalate or talk”.

Given the risks of escalation, Trump will probably seek a deal to reopen Hormuz, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. But any outcome that leaves Iran with practical control over Gulf energy exports would be deeply unpopular with those states. It has even been suggested that the UAE and Saudi Arabia could “join the conflict rather than accept that outcome”.

‘The regime is hurting’

Trump will find the Iranians to be very tough negotiators, said Matthew Gould in The Times. The regime has shown its capacity before to withstand “repeated blows”, and is determined to stay in power no matter how much pain it causes its people. By contrast, Trump will be worrying about popular opinion ahead of the midterms. He is reportedly already “bored” with the conflict. And if it chooses, Tehran can use its trigger-happy proxies to derail the talks at any moment. That said, Iran has a habit of overplaying its hand and, “for all its bravado, the regime is hurting”.

Pakistan, in its role as mediator, has intensified its diplomatic efforts over the past week, said Saeed Shah in The Guardian; but Tehran is so far refusing to engage in face-to-face talks with US officials. Trump began the war confident that it wouldn’t take long to topple the Iranian regime, said Steve Bloomfield in The Observer. Its nuclear programme had been weakened, its allies had been hobbled, so the US and Israel seized the moment. Yet in the past five weeks, the mullahs have actually tightened their grip on power; and it’s the ordinary Iranians, who Trump promised to save, who will pay the price for this war. If it ends soon, other economies will bounce back. Iran could feel the impact for generations to come.

The Iran war follows on the heels of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on allies and threats to take Greenland from NATO partner Denmark. Now, the president is demanding that other countries reopen the Strait of Hormuz closed by the war he launched. And critics say he has transformed the U.S. from the so-called leader of the free world into a rogue superpower that threatens global stability.

Trump has driven “deep and perhaps permanent wedges” between the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia, said Robert Kagan at The Atlantic. The Iran war was launched with “no public debate, no vote in Congress” and no consultation with “allies other than Israel.” Europeans must now wonder if the war signals that the president is “more or less likely” to “take similarly bold action on Greenland.” American global leadership survived unpopular wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But it may not survive this.

Weaker, lonelier and less effective

The fallout from Iran demonstrates the administration “either didn’t understand how its actions would affect other states or simply didn’t care,” said Stephen M. Walt at Foreign Policy. That leaves “every country in the world” trying to determine how to work with an “increasingly rogue” U.S. For now, its ostensible friends have to weigh whether U.S. power “could be used to harm them either intentionally or inadvertently.”

Every post-Cold War administration has taken on actual “rogue” states, said Matthew Kroenig at The Wall Street Journal. U.S. presidents have waged a “de facto campaign of toppling anti-American dictators” such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. And Iran is the “biggest prize” on the list. Even if the Islamic regime does not fall under the weight of U.S. attacks, it will be “too weak to pose a serious threat for years to come.” That puts Trump “on the verge of eliminating the world’s rogue states.”

A swaggering superpower “could be a collective asset for the democratic world,” said Hal Brands at Bloomberg. But Trump’s approach could transform the U.S. into an “out-of-control hegemon” at risk of being “weaker, lonelier and less effective than before.” Success in Iran might “create a new Middle East with a U.S.-led coalition at its core,” but failure will serve as a “damaging rebuff of U.S. power.”

Allies look to Beijing

The U.S. “had to do it ourselves” because other countries would not join the “decapitation of Iran,” said Trump in a Wednesday night prime-time address to the nation. The president has threatened to leave NATO over the issue, but there are “few signs that’s happening,” said Politico.

Polling shows residents of Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. now “believe it’s better to depend on China” than the U.S., said Politico. The U.S. “no longer works in partnership” with its old allies, said former Deputy Assistant Secretary Mark Lambert to the outlet, and is “only focused on itself.”

“This is gutter politics,” was Armed Forces Minister Al Carns’ reply when quizzed about the theft. “We’ve got two wars on, one in the Middle East, one in Ukraine, and we’re talking about someone’s phone.”

But like it or not, the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s work phone is a big political issue, said Alex Glover in The Spectator. In October, when he was still Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, McSweeney was walking down a street in Pimlico, phone to his ear, when a man on a bicycle snatched it from his hand and pedalled off with it. Or so McSweeney told the police.

But that phone held text messages to his friend Lord Mandelson, messages that could have cast light on how the latter got to be appointed our US ambassador, and which would now have to be disclosed as part of the inquiry into the Mandelson/Epstein scandal.

Holes in the tale

To many, the theft sounds too convenient to be true. Not to Starmer, though. As he puts it: “The idea that somehow everybody could have seen that some time in the future there would be a request for the phone is, to my mind, a little bit far-fetched.”

I don’t know the exact fate of the “stolen” phone, said Dan Hodges in the Daily Mail, but I know this: “Starmer is lying his posterior off about what happened.” The phone was reported stolen over a month after Mandelson was sacked as ambassador, by which time everyone, Starmer included, knew the huge significance of his chief of staff’s phone messages. Indeed, meetings were held in Downing Street to “game-out” how to proceed should the government be forced, as it now has been, to release documents relating to Mandelson.

Understandable reaction

And there are huge holes in the tale McSweeney told police, said Amy Gibbons in The Daily Telegraph. He did say that it was a “government phone”, but he never mentioned that he worked for Starmer and that it contained sensitive information. He even gave them confusing details about where the theft took place. Amazingly, the stolen phone wasn’t reported to the intelligence services, nor did No. 10 make any attempt to recover it.

I’m confused, said John Crace in The Guardian. For years, right-wing hacks have been going on about London being “a hellscape ... where simply using your phone is an invitation to be mugged”. Yet instead of cutting McSweeney some slack, they’ve convinced themselves that his is “the only phone in London not to have been nicked”.

Not getting details right just after you’ve been mugged is understandable behaviour for anyone in shock, but not in McSweeney’s case it seems. “After all, it’s a well-known fact that men with ginger hair and a beard can’t be trusted.”

Israel and the US went into this war together, said Katy Balls in The Sunday Times. But as the conflict drags on, some members of Maga’s “isolationist wing” are starting to complain that Israel “led” the US into it, in pursuit of its own agenda.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio lent credence to that theory some weeks ago, when he said that the US had struck Iran because Washington “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” that would prompt a retaliation. And only last week Tulsi Gabbard, the US intelligence chief, told Congress that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons, undermining any claim that Iran posed an “imminent threat”.

Convenient claims

It is pretty clear that it posed no such threat, said Donald Macintyre in The Independent – and it is well known that Benjamin Netanyahu had been trying to persuade the US to join in such a war for 25 years: successive US presidents blocked it. But that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump was lured into a war by Israel, even if he sometimes finds it convenient to claim that the Israelis are acting without his knowledge.

For Netanyahu, this war is not just about destroying a hostile regime, said Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian. This autumn, he will face his first electoral test since the 7 October attacks. For the past two years, his poll ratings have been “stubbornly below levels that would return him to power”. Victory for Israel in this conflict – which has the support of 90% of Israelis – would do much to turn that around.

‘Draining support’

But in going to war with Iran, the PM is gambling with his country’s long-term security, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. For decades, the single biggest guarantee of that security has been the “strong bipartisan support” Israel commands in the US. “But the Netanyahu government’s actions – first in Gaza and now in Iran – are draining that support away.”

If this war turns into a costly “quagmire”, it’s “entirely conceivable” that both the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2028 presidential race will propose curtailing support for Israel – an outcome that would be a “strategic disaster for the Israelis”.

“Amid the fog of war and the propaganda being pushed by all sides”, it’s hard to tell what’s going on with the Iran conflict right now, said Abubakr Al-Shamahi on Al Jazeera. On Tuesday, Donald Trump claimed that Washington was speaking to the “right people” in the Iranian regime, which wanted a deal “so badly” and had given the US a “very big present worth a tremendous amount of money”. Tehran, however, insisted that the talks were “fake news” and accused the Trump administration of negotiating with itself. This confused picture followed days of conflicting messages from the US.

Last Saturday, Trump talked of “winding down” the war, but also threatened to attack every power plant in Iran in 48 hours unless Tehran fully reopened the Strait of Hormuz. The regime responded by vowing to strike power plants in Israel and across the Gulf region. On Monday morning, shortly before US markets opened, Trump declared that he would postpone the power plant strikes for five days, citing his claimed diplomatic progress.

‘Trump’s evaporating credibility’

It’s “a measure of Trump’s evaporating credibility” that even Washington insiders were sceptical about whether talks with Iran had taken place, said Simon Marks in The i Paper. The postponement of the ultimatum looks like another case of what Wall Street investors call “Taco”, or “Trump always chickens out”. It could be that, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator. But it may indeed be a response to backchannel negotiations, or a piece of “dislocation” designed to sow doubt and confusion within Iran’s leadership. Trump likes to keep people guessing.

Some sort of diplomatic effort does now appear to be in motion, led by Pakistan, said Andrew Roth in The Guardian. The reported interlocutor of the US is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament. But this process may just be another way for Trump to buy time before launching commando raids in Iran: the US is “still moving marines and airborne soldiers into position”.

There’s no mystery here, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. “The truth inside Trump’s tornado of piffle is that he wants to get out of the mess he created.” He never expected the attack on Iran to lead to this desperate standoff, despite everybody warning him that it would. He thought the regime would swiftly collapse in the face of US might. He now wants Tehran to surrender its ability to disrupt energy markets, but it will never do so, no matter how much Trump blusters and rages. “It does not take a seer to guess that at some point he will hint at using nuclear weapons.”

Winding down the war certainly won’t be easy, said William Hague in The Times. The Iranian leadership is now “more hardline” and will “drive a hard bargain”: its officials have reportedly outlined five conditions, including a halt to assassinations, assurances against further attack, and hefty reparations.

To win, Iran needs merely to survive

Tehran appears in no mood to capitulate, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. It’s still launching drones at nearby Gulf states, and last week demonstrated its wider threat by firing two missiles at the British-American military base on the Chagos Islands, some 2,400 miles away.

To win this war, the regime needs merely to survive, said Ilan Goldenberg in Foreign Affairs. Trump should cut his losses, declaring that the US has achieved its main aim of degrading Iran’s military capabilities. The regime may reject such a ceasefire initially, but if the US keeps pushing for de-escalation, Tehran will come under international pressure to follow suit. Admittedly, this will leave the US “entangled in the region, managing a weakened but more aggressive Iran”, but to double down in search of a decisive outcome would risk “a far worse result”.

I’m encouraged by reports that J.D. Vance is involved in Iran negotiations, said James Ball in The i Paper. The US vice-president is a “committed American isolationist” who stands zero chance of succeeding Trump if the Iran war doesn’t end soon. If he’s surfacing now, he must think there’s a chance of a deal.

The warring parties will have to reach a settlement at some point, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. Iran’s regime can’t sustain an indefinite conflict. There must be some within it who are “rational enough” to realise this and understand the potential rewards of striking a deal with America. As things stand, Trump is demanding the freezing of Iran’s missile programme, zero uranium enrichment, and the decommissioning of Iran’s main nuclear facilities. The irony is that the US had all but secured agreement on these demands before Trump launched his “stupid, chaotic” war a month ago.

There are three “all-time difficult gigs”, said Jonathan Maitland in The Spectator: prime minister, England football manager, and director-general of the BBC – a job that may just be “The Most Impossible In The World”. And unlike the other two, there are no “potential big wins”, only “potential catastrophes”.

Now we know the next person to be handed the poisoned chalice: Matt Brittin. The former president of Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as a former Great Britain rowing bronze medallist, is set to take the battered reins following Tim Davie’s resignation. Will Brittin’s reign “end with a similar catastrophe?”

‘Baffling to the point of idiocy’

Just what the BBC doesn’t need, another leftie, said Robin Aitken in The Telegraph. Brittin, 57, was appointed non-executive director of The Guardian Media Group last year. Twenty years ago, he was director of strategy and digital at The Mirror. You don’t end up in senior positions at Britain’s leftist publications without sharing “left-wing sympathies yourself”. Given that government-commissioned research by Ipsos found last year that 52% of people don’t trust the BBC to be impartial, and most of those will be “right-of-centre voters”, that should’ve “counted heavily against him”.

The appointment is “baffling to the point of idiocy”, said Jawad Iqbal in The Times. The BBC is “besieged” by “seemingly endless rows” about impartiality and bias, not to mention Donald Trump’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit and its “recent howler”, broadcasting the N-word during coverage of the Baftas. The “root cause” of every crisis is its journalism and programming – things Brittin “knows diddly squat about”.

Yet the board seems to think the answer to this “calamitous” run is to give control to a “tech bro” who, just like Davie, has “no relevant broadcasting experience”. The BBC needs someone who can “reconnect it to its core values”, and argue its case for continued public funding, yet Brittin is a “product of the morality-free, algorithm-obsessed world of the tech giants”. “What could possibly go wrong, apart from everything?”

Inspirational team leader who can 'manage complexity'

But people within Google have “only good things to say about Brittin”, said the BBC’s culture and media editor Katie Razzall. They say he’s an “inspirational leader and a great team player”, who commands loyalty. They had “no concerns” about his lack of editorial or broadcasting experience.

And in fairness, Brittin always seems “positive and cheerful” – certainly “less arrogant” than the stereotypical tech bro, said Politico’s executive editor Anne McElvoy in The Independent. That might be one reason he impressed the BBC’s board, “browbeaten after an annus horribilis”. He is an “experienced team leader who can manage complexity”, and as a former champion rower, “naturally competitive and steely”. But the challenges – tying down the terms of the Royal Charter, working with streaming platforms like YouTube without “ending up trapped under the wheels of big tech interests” – aren’t abating. Brittin won the job from a “depleted field” from which “many industry players absented themselves”. As one leading broadcast figure put it: “the pay is not that good for the blood pressure damage.”

But these are also “seismic times for global media”, said Lionel Barber in the Financial Times. With Larry and David Ellison seizing control of CBS News, CNN and a slice of TikTok in the US, while tech firms spend billions on data centres, a “new age of disruption is upon us”. Brittin’s appointment “suggests the penny has dropped” in the UK. He understands how technology has “transformed media consumption”. Squabbles over the TV licence fee or the BBC’s perceived elitism “miss the bigger picture”. Russia, China and Maga ideologues are “spreading disinformation to undermine confidence in British institutions and democracy”. Yet the BBC, the world’s biggest and most recognised public service broadcaster, has suffered a 40% cut in real terms in its budget since 2010. Its governance needs a “radical overhaul”. Muddling through is “no longer an option”.

The White House dispatched squads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) troops to at least 13 airports around the country, and thousands of commuters this week are coming face-to-face with the Trump administration’s anti-immigration push. ICE’s deployment was telegraphed by both President Donald Trump and White House Border Czar Tom Homan last weekend, with the ostensible goal of optimizing TSA operations during the ongoing partial government shutdown.

The move has thrust the White House’s authoritarian operations into the frenetic realm of commercial air travel, where delays and disruptions can grow to levels of national import. With the agency’s undefined remit and documented penchant for aggression, its presence in U.S. airports is a Rorschach test for attitudes on the regime’s militarized approach to law enforcement.

‘Political, publicity action, not a practical solution’

“Between 100 and 150 ICE officers” have been sent to more than a dozen airports across the country, The New York Times said. It is “unclear” if their presence is “helping or exacerbating long security lines” that have grown during the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown. Homan will likely deploy agents to be as “minimally intrusive as possible,” but their actual contributions to TSA’s airport security mandate won’t be “operationally significant,” said former Obama administration acting ICE director John Sandweg to Time.

Unlike TSA agents who are trained for specific airport duties, ICE personnel will not receive “requisite training to check identification, examine luggage x-rays” and “provide other key security services,” said Government Executive. Putting ICE agents at airports is a “political, publicity action,” one former TSA official said to the outlet. It’s “not a practical solution.”

“I have no idea how they can contribute at an airport unless it was for intimidation purposes,” said Aaron Vazquez, a TSA lead transportation security officer at San Diego International Airport and airport steward for the local branch of the American Federation of Government Employees union, to KPBS. “What are they going to do, find somebody and shoot them?”

As of Monday, “both masked and unmasked ICE agents in marked vests” had been observed at some of the country’s busiest airports, said USA Today. Travelers nevertheless were “still reporting long airport security waits.” One reason for the continued airport disruptions is Trump’s weekend ICE deployment having caught the agency’s officials “off guard,” leaving them “scrambling to come up with a plan to enforce it,” CBS News said. White House officials, however, insisted that dispatching ICE units to airports will be a smooth process. “When we deploy tomorrow,” said Homan on CNN’s “State of the Union” over the weekend, “we’ll have a well-thought-out plan to execute.”

ICE’s stationing in American airports, beyond any potential advantage to security enforcement, is “likely a tactical move” designed to “up the pressure on Democrats in Congress” who are blocking Homeland Security funds, in part over ICE’s conduct in Minnesota and Chicago, said New York magazine. Democrats have “condemned” ICE at airports, so it’s not certain whether the deployment will “move the needle as funding negotiations continue.”

If not ICE, ‘it would have been the National Guard’

President Trump’s pushing of ICE agents into air-travel security spaces is a “stunt, not a policy solution,” said The Washington Post. But “so is the ongoing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.”

Congressional Democrats want to use long lines and travel delays to aid in their DHS negotiations, said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on ABC’s “This Week.” The White House’s deployment of immigration forces to airports will “take that leverage away and not make the American people suffer.”

Deploying ICE agents to airports is the “right course of action,” said Puerto Rico’s Republican Governor Jenniffer González Colón at a press conference. If the administration hadn’t sent ICE, “it would have been the National Guard. Why?” Because there is a “problem” with TSA absences leading to extreme travel delays.

Still, some White House’s supporters have expressed anxieties at the plan. The viability of ICE in airports depends on “whether or not logistically you can get these guys into those places and get them up to speed on it,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said at The Hill. If the DHS shutdown continues for an “extended period of time, yeah, it could be a necessity.”

It clearly tickled Donald Trump’s fancy. The debut episode of live sketch comedy “Saturday Night Live UK” went down so well with the US president, he treated his Truth Social followers to a clip mocking Keir Starmer for being scared to talk to him about the war in Iran.

But British reviewers were not so amused – and several were not afraid to find fault with the UK version of the long-running US show.

‘Tepid cosplay’

That “laughter-free yawn” was “not a patch” on the US original, said Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye. “What is it?! Painful, that’s what.”

“I do not want to condemn this whole endeavour outright,” said Charlotte Ivers in The Times. “But the spark is not there yet.” We and “our US cousins” have “wildly differing senses of humour”, and, watching this, you feel it “like a physical ache”.

No one “cried” or “fluffed their lines”, said Alison Rowat in The Herald, but “you could almost smell the tension in the studio”. There was “good” but also “bad” and “so-so”. Nothing was “hilarious”, but “some sketches raised a smile”, like the “movie junket interviewer who dares to tell stars their movie sucks”.

Saturday Night Live “represents the quintessence of the American comedic establishment” but its name doesn’t have “much Clapham omnibus cut-through here in Britain”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. So “it’s a bit of a shame” that the team “plays it so safe” with the imported formula. It seemed like “tepid cosplay”.

British comedy shows used to be hammy and contrived like this, said Nicholas Harris in The New Statesman but they’ve become “more stylised, ironic”. I suspect the “failure” of “Saturday Night Live UK” has “more to do with the UK than ‘Saturday Night Live’”.

‘Stinging gags’

“It could have been a lot, lot worse”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. And it’s likely to become “a lot, lot better” as it settles in over the coming weeks. It was “refreshing” that “an ambition/piece of madness like retooling a legacy US brand for this septic isle” was “even being attempted”, so “let’s hope it can build towards real success”.

The first episode was “competent, untroubled by either annoying American-isms or annoying Americans – and occasionally hilarious”, said Ed Power in The Telegraph. Guest host Tina Fey was “effortlessly commanding”, thanks to her “visible ease with the format” but the “real highlight was the Weekend Update section”, with its “stinging and completely non-woke gags” about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Trump and the Strait of Hormuz.

The schadenfreude with which social-media users were predicting it would “crash and burn” was “wide of the mark”. I’d say it “was off to a flying start”.

“Just a few weeks ago, Nato marked the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with fresh pledges of solidarity and assistance,” said The Daily Telegraph. Today, that war “risks becoming the forgotten conflict”.

Advanced US-made weapons that Kyiv's allies could have bought to help it deflect Russian attacks are being fired at cheap Iranian drones instead – depleting supplies that could take years to restock. European leaders are distracted by threats to their allies in the Gulf region, and the potential shocks to their economies.

Feeding the war machine

To cap Kyiv's dismay, Donald Trump has suspended sanctions on Russian oil, said the Daily Mail. The deal – apparently struck during an hour-long call with Vladimir Putin – should “curb rising prices” on US forecourts, but at what cost to Europe's security? It was recently reported that Moscow might be forced to slash its non-military spending by 10%, owing to the spiralling cost of its war in Ukraine and the impact of sanctions. Now it can feed its “bloody war machine” with billions in extra oil revenues instead.

The war presents “political opportunities” for Russia too, said Mark Galeotti in The Sunday Times. Trump's broadsides against Keir Starmer, and Madrid's fury at Berlin for not backing it in the face of his attacks, have great propaganda value. The Kremlin is also looking at this as a case study for just how united Europe is likely to be against future challenges, “especially as America pivots away”. Still, any glee in Moscow will have been tempered by Washington's decision to strike Iran while nuclear talks were ongoing. This caught Moscow off-guard, and dented its confidence in its ability to read the US president.

‘Extremely triggered’

Tehran is not just an ally of Moscow, said Cathy Young on The Bulwark. It has also been a role model for it – showing the possibility of surviving both Western sanctions and popular discontent. Now the Americans have killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Putin has again been exposed as unable, or unwilling, to help an ally in trouble – a humiliating outcome for a man who liked to pose as the “leader of global resistance to Western hegemony”.

Events in Iran may shake Putin in other ways, too: he is said to be “extremely triggered” by the assassinations of dictators elsewhere. And while Ukraine being pushed down the agenda would be a win for him, this war could also leave Trump too busy to force Kyiv into a bad peace deal with Russia. Similarly, if the war drags on, it might boost Putin, or cost the Republicans the midterms, and so empower Kyiv's allies in Washington. In the fog of war, future-gazing is a mug's game.

Three weeks into this war, “it is clearer than ever that Donald Trump miscalculated”, said The Independent. “If he was warned that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz, he ignored it.” The president seems surprised that the odious Islamic regime has still not fallen; and America's allies in the region are bearing the brunt of its furious response. Trump seems to have no realistic policy for dealing with the resulting global oil shock.

‘Another forever war’

He is “a man without a plan”, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, and “hasn't the foggiest what to do next”. The costs for the US – 13 dead, 200 wounded, $11 billion spent in the first week alone – are mounting. Trump sought a “swift, painless victory from the air”; instead, “another forever war” looms.

Even with its leadership decapitated, “the Iranians fight on”, said David Patrikarakos in the Daily Mail. But then they have spent 20 years preparing for this moment. Their strategy, the Decentralised Mosaic Defence, is built around a “single brutal principle” – the “body” keeps fighting even if the “head” is cut off. Local commanders can “launch missile strikes, drone swarms, and even harass ships without seeking approval from above”.

The idea was to never “give the enemy a single target whose destruction can end the fight”. To some degree, it is working. Iran continues to deploy relatively cheap drones, which are expensive to intercept. Meanwhile, the US and Israel have burned through years' worth of munitions.

‘Remarkable progress’

If, as seems likely, the regime survives, it will only become more militant and hostile, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian – with “every reason to double down on its nuclear ambitions”. Iran's increasingly paranoid leaders are cracking down even harder on internal dissent, said Tom Ball in The Times. The Basij paramilitary unit has been deployed into residential areas of Tehran. Thousands of people are thought to have been arrested or “disappeared” since the campaign began.

The broad consensus seems to be that the US intervention is “unwise, unjust, is going very badly and certain to fail”, said Gerard Baker in The Times. But consider the facts. In just a few weeks, the US has achieved “remarkable progress” in wreaking “destruction on the capacity of a mortal enemy to wage war”. The strikes have wiped out an estimated 60% of Iran's missile launch facilities. Tehran's rate of missile and drone fire has been drastically reduced. Its navy and air force have been effectively destroyed. Iran's desperate decision to lash out at its neighbours and close the Strait of Hormuz has left it isolated. Key leaders – including security chief Ali Larijani, seen as Iran's day-to-day ruler – have been killed.

Trump's critics behave as if “the costs of inaction were zero”, said Muhanad Seloom on Al Jazeera. “They were not.” The regime is drenched in blood. Left unchecked, it would certainly have developed nuclear weapons, making it capable of holding the region hostage “indefinitely”. War is never clean, and the execution of this one has been far from perfect. “But the strategy is working.”

For his latest Netfix documentary, Louis Theroux travels to Marbella, Miami and New York to meet content creators operating at the extreme end of the “manosphere” – a loosely connected network of misogynistic male influencers. What he finds, “as you can imagine”, is “extremely unpleasant”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph.

A terrifying watch

“I like horror films,” but, as the father of two teenage boys, I was left “quivering behind the sofa” by this, said Wilson. I was “gobsmacked” by how this “regressive spiral” of masculinity is being sold through “international tech platforms that should know better”.

Among the figures Theroux meets, said John Nugent in Empire, are Myron Gaines (author of the charmingly titled tome, “Why Women Deserve Less”) and Harrison Sullivan, a 24-year-old Brit known as HSTikkyTokky, who refers to his girlfriend as his “dishwasher” and who openly professes to being “racist and homophobic”.

Neutral tone ‘falls short’

Theroux takes a “serious approach” to these encounters but sometimes his trademark neutral tone “falls short”. There is “disgusting rhetoric” that he fails to call out and, although he is supposed to be skewering the influencers’ views, they quickly start farming him for content, asking their followers to pitch in with questions for him, and then livestreaming his responses.

In some ways, the film is “classic Theroux”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times: “he holds unpleasant truths up to the light” by adopting a “faux-naive curiosity”. But, towards the end, Sullivan’s mother asks him why, if he so disapproves of what her son is doing, he is making money by publicising it. “It’s the documentarian’s age-old dilemma but it feels particularly pertinent here, and is never quite resolved.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, “A Pale View of Hills” (1982), is often described as his most personal book, and it has now been adapted to the big screen, said Kevin Maher in The Times.

Worth persevering

A “fascinating, often moving exploration of Japanese family life”, it is set partly in Nagasaki in 1952, and partly in 1980s Surrey. In the Nagasaki strand, Suzu Hirose stars as Etsuko, the unhappy wife of a boorish businessman, whose life of “meek, wifely servitude” is brightened only by her sparky friend Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido), who plans to leave the city for America. Framing all this are the sequences set in Surrey, where Etsuko’s grown-up daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko) grapples with her family’s troubled past while saying vapid things such as, “This house is full of memories.” It’s a pity these scenes are quite weak; my advice is simply to overlook them, as it is a “great film otherwise”.

‘Bland’ and ‘frustrating’

The Nobel laureate’s work has inspired “acclaimed adaptations” such as “The Remains of the Day” (1993) and “Never Let Me Go” (2010), said Tara Brady in The Irish Times, but this film demonstrates that there are “pitfalls” in tackling his work. It is visually elegant, but it lacks “narrative cohesion”; and key plot developments, including a late-stage twist, “land with jolting abruptness”. I found it “frustrating”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Ishiguro is so good at delivering a kind of “distinctively Anglo-Japanese melancholy”, but this is just “bland”. It fails to carry over the “haunting, haunted spirit” of the book, agreed Guy Lodge in Variety: director Kei Ishikawa “never finds a narratively satisfying way to present ambiguities that can shimmer more nebulously on the page”. Still, the film “resists nostalgia”, and the story is “attractively and accessibly presented”.

The world-famous graffiti artist Banksy has finally been unmasked as Robin Gunningham from Bristol, following a months-long exposé by Reuters, which took investigators from Ukraine to London to New York.

His identity has been “debated, and closely guarded, for decades”, but the news agency said its story was in the public interest because it was vital to understand “the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse”.

‘The police could find him and arrest him easily’

The only problem is that Banksy’s real identity has been an open secret for nearly two decades, with Gunningham’s name first linked to the artist in the Mail on Sunday in 2008.

“If you google Banksy and Gunningham you get something like 43,500 hits”, said Steve Le Comber, co-author of a 2016 study at Queen Mary University of London that used geographic profiling to cross-reference 140 Banksy artworks in London and Bristol with the 10 names most commonly associated with the artist.

Because Gunningham’s name has been linked with Banksy for so long, there may be a temptation to respond to the Reuters report “with a shrug”, said The Telegraph. But his outing, and revelations he legally changed his name to the more common David Jones, “may have more serious consequences than providing titillation for the arts crowd”.

This is in part because his “uniqueness stems from the fact that his work is often done using subterfuge, under cover of night or with a team of operatives equipped with fake filming permits or disguised as builders”.

Much of his work could be considered as acts of criminal damage, said Will Ellsworth-Jones, the author of two books on Banksy and his work. This revelation “makes it much more difficult for him… He’d be easy to find now and easy to be charged,” he told The Telegraph. “The police could, if they wanted to, find him and arrest him easily.”

‘People want him to be anonymous’

It may not be new news but it’s still “big news, because Banksy is big news”, said Eddy Frankel in The Times. His work may not appear in any major art institutions but “his influence is pervasive”. The “fascinating thing” is that despite his true identity being public knowledge for close to two decades, “the public want him to be anonymous, covert, secretive”.

“They would rather believe his identity is a mystery than admit that their favourite anti-establishment art rebel is a shortsighted bloke from Bristol called Robin.”

Banksy’s lawyer Mark Stephens has said the Reuters investigation “would violate the artist’s privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger”, as “working anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests.”

The artist has chosen to keep his identity unknown as “a way of continuing to work without the constraints of fame” and “an anonymity which also served as a means of protection from police prosecution”, said David Mouriquand on Euronews. Additionally, “part of the appeal resides in the riddle” so once it is solved “you inadvertently dent the artist’s tantalising elusiveness and his/her/their sense of unpredictability, as well as endanger his freedom of movement and expression”.

“Giving a name to the most famous street artist of our time also means taking something away from the myth – reducing the distance between the work and its creator, transforming a nearly symbolic figure into a person that can be debated, mocked, or judged,” said Anna Frattini on culture website Collater.al.

“Every now and then, world events take a turn that exposes Britain’s decades of self-deception” on the subject of defence, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. On 1 March, the RAF’s main base in Cyprus was hit by a drone apparently launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon. It caused only minor damage; what was shocking was that the UK seemed unprepared for such an event, although Lebanon is just “a short drone-hop away”, and an attack like this had been anticipated for years.

Our response was to dust down HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer then undergoing maintenance at Portsmouth. (With a fair wind, she’ll arrive next week.) In a panic, Cyprus turned to Greece and France, “asking to be protected from the risk Britain’s bases had exposed them to”. Greek frigates and F-16s were on the scene within hours. A French warship and air defences followed. “Quite the humiliation” for Britain. And proof that “our commitments far outpace our resources. Holes are showing, in shocking places.”

‘Point of maximum weakness’

The blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks on the Gulf states, where around 300,000 British citizens live: this is exactly the kind of emergency that “would once have found the Royal Navy in its element”, said David Blair in The Telegraph. But for the first time in centuries, Britain does not have a single warship in the Persian Gulf or the eastern Mediterranean. Three of its six destroyers and both its aircraft carriers were out of action, undergoing repairs or refits.

After years of slow decline, the Navy has “reached its point of maximum weakness” at a moment when a crisis is exploding in the Middle East “and Russia threatens the whole of Europe”. Both Bahrain and the UAE have reportedly expressed concern about the UK response; Cyprus voiced its disappointment publicly. Britain could also only send a few extra fighter jets to the region because the RAF, too, has been “cut to the bone”, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. It has 130 active jets, down from 850 in 1989. The Army is “in no better shape”, with just 70,000 active personnel, a third of the number it had in 1990.

Our current malaise “is the result of politicians from all parties trying to outrun” the same question for decades, said Matt Oliver in The Telegraph. How can Britain be “a great military power” if it won’t pay for it?

At the start of the 1990s, Britain’s health and defence budgets both hovered at 4% of GDP. Today, health accounts for 8% and defence just over 2%. New Labour was often accused of failing to invest in the forces. But the “squeeze” was harder during the Coalition years: the budget fell by 22% in real terms from 2010 to 2016. Yet even today, the Ministry of Defence has one of the largest military budgets in the world, at £66 billion per year.

So taxpayers may wonder what has gone wrong. The answer lies in part in “a string of procurement disasters”, for which civil servants and top brass must share the blame. We have expensive platforms – aircraft carriers, F-35 jets, nuclear subs – but insufficient manpower, weapons stockpiles and all-round resilience. As ex-defence secretary Ben Wallace recently put it, our forces have been “hollowed out”.

End of ‘peace dividend’

The challenge is formidable, said Larisa Brown in The Times. Al Carns, the Armed Forces Minister, has said that, by 2029, “Europe could be at war with Russia”. Former senior military chiefs warned in a letter to the prime minister this month that Britain “is facing its 1936 moment”. Assuming that funding can be found, the UK and Europe’s defence industries will have not only to ramp up production, but also to cope with the transformation of the modern battlefield already seen in Ukraine – by drone technology, robotics, cyberwarfare and, increasingly, autonomous weapons.

Add to that the likelihood that Donald Trump’s America would not “fight for us”, said Edward Lucas in The Times – or certainly cannot be relied upon to do so. “Europeans may loathe Trump, but they’re not ready to fill the gaps... They lack the hi-tech weapons, high-end intelligence, logistics expertise and ‘mass’ (quantity) that the Americans have provided since D Day.” Filling these will be costly and difficult, “if we manage at all”.

Yet politically, defence remains a hard sell, said The Independent’s editorial board. Among voters, there is no clamour to build “new cyber-defence units in the way there is demand for, say, cutting NHS waiting lists”. Keir Starmer and his cabinet know that the era of the “peace dividend” is over, said George Eaton in The New Statesman – that Britain and Europe “need to go faster on defence”, as the PM put it last month. But nothing much is happening. Labour may or may not increase defence spending from 2.4% of GDP to 3%, as the Ministry of Defence wants, by 2029 – the year that Carns thinks we could be at war with Russia. The government shows no willingness to confront voters with the fiscal trade-offs that come with higher spending. Britain remains “in denial on defence”.

“I love a sunshine break as much as the next Sexy Beast,” said Colin Robertson in The Sun, but I have never holidayed in Dubai. Partly, this is because I have no desire to visit a “soulless sandpit” that’s hotter than hell, but mainly it’s due to the people who inhabit its “air-conditioned skyscrapers”.

I am not talking about the locals (precious few of them); or the immigrant labourers who keep the city running. No, I mean the “expats, celebs and ‘influencers’” who have spent years telling us – “via a thousand TikTok reels a day” – that their lives in Dubai are so much better than ours in rainy, crime-ridden Britain, and gloating that while we’ve been paying taxes, they’ve been lying on the beach, or cruising in their Lamborghinis.

Now, though, with debris from Iranian drones raining down, their lifestyles are looking rather less aspirational. Distressed that their dream has turned sour, these expats are desperate to get out. And guess what? We saps who paid our taxes are having to fund their evacuation.

Security shattered

The UAE worked hard to build Dubai’s reputation as a glitzy haven for a global elite, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian, and the rich came in droves, to escape regulation, income tax or conflict. Workers in service industries followed, along with assorted tech bros and hustlers, and Reform-voting types too, who have railed against “broken” high-tax Britain from this sterile place – “a real-life Truman Show... sustained by stiff penalties” for those who dent its illusions.

Now, the UAE’s reputation for safety and stability risks being shattered instead by war. Tehran hopes its attacks – targeting US bases and energy infrastructure in Gulf nations – will persuade its neighbours to press the US to end its war. But they’re also a warning that if the regime falls, it will take Western-leaning Gulf states with it, by destroying their appeal to investors and tourists.

Fighting on

One real fear is that, in that effort, Tehran will seek to exploit a major vulnerability, said The Economist: the Gulf economies’ dependence on air conditioning for much of the year, and on desalinated water. Successful strikes on the region’s power stations and desalination plants could be “catastrophic”. But so far, most strikes have been intercepted, and the Gulf rulers are urging the US to fight on. They don’t want to be left with a “wounded, hostile regime on their borders”, especially not one that knows that it can alter Washington’s behaviour by pounding them.

As for Dubai, it is down, but not out, said Simeon Kerr in the FT. Many of its rich residents have opted to stay in this sunny, dynamic place where East meets West. And some of those that fled are already trying to get back, to secure their tax status.

It has become a rarity to watch any stretch of television or online video content without being exposed to at least one ad touting the ease and convenience of online gambling. But as prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket vie for dominance in the growing field of online betting, one place has emerged as a thorny challenge to their spread: Utah.

With its long history of deep Mormon conservatism, this traditionally red state is now a local leader in bucking a MAGA-led movement to facilitate e-gambling’s growth. But with Utah’s Republican governor leading an effort to regulate digital prop-betting on sports, some of the biggest names in app-based betting are fighting back, setting up a legal battle with hundreds of years of cultural history behind it.

Federal regulators face an ‘onslaught’ of state challenges

The proliferation of online prediction marketplaces with “no state oversight” operating “even in states that ban gambling” has raised “bipartisan alarms, especially related to sports gambling,” said Stateline. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), led by Trump appointee Mike Selig, filed an amicus brief claiming his group has total authority to regulate prediction markets against the “onslaught” of state challenges. “To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear. We will see you in court,” said Selig, currently the sole member of the five-seat body, in a brief video statement.

Prediction market operators like Polymarket and Kalshi argue that their platform for making proposition bets on “specific in-game events rather than final outcomes” places their work in the realm of “federally regulated derivatives rather than gambling products,” said Financial Feeds. In late February, Kalshi fired a “pre-emptive strike over predictive markets” by suing Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox. The lawsuit claimed Kalshi feared the state would “imminently bring an enforcement action” barring the company from “offering event contracts for trading on its federally regulated exchange,” said Fox13. Despite Utah’s constitutional ban on gambling, Kalshi, in its suit, said its prob-bet contracts are “subject to exclusive federal oversight, and — critically — they are lawful under federal law.”

‘Destroying the lives of families and countless Americans’

Cox’s conflict with prediction markets comes amid a larger debate among regulators and lawmakers about “whether those markets constitute finance or gambling,” said The Associated Press. Utah, for its part, has “already made up its mind.” For more than a century, Utah has featured “no casinos, no lotteries and no racetracks that allow bets,” a prohibition “rooted in the conservative ideals of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” With Utah poised to enact legislation “intended to undercut prediction markets,” the move positions a conspicuously conservative state “not known for picking fights” on the “frontlines of a cultural, political and economic battle sweeping the country.”

The prediction markets Selig is “breathlessly defending are gambling — pure and simple,” said Cox in a video rebuttal to the CFTC. Prediction markets are “destroying the lives of families and countless Americans” and have “no place in Utah.”

Prediction market regulation is the “first major issue in which Cox has clashed with Trump” during his second term, the AP said. That’s not wholly unexpected, given the degree to which gambling “goes against a sense of work ethic, a kind of fair exchange” central to how many residents think about about themselves “in terms of Utah identity, and certainly Latter-day Saint identity and ethics,” said Patrick Mason, a Utah State University professor of Mormon history and culture, to the AP.

Although “real-money online casinos” remain illegal across Utah, various alternatives are being used “at a rate that surprises even industry analysts,” said the Standard Examiner. Sports betting may, for the time, remain banned, but analytics-minded residents turn to prediction markets to experience the “depth and excitement these analysis tools offer,” thereby “scratching that itch without crossing the line legally.” The pivot from cultural interest in brick-and-mortar casinos to digital betting alternatives “that feel more like Candy Crush than Caesars Palace” has helped “soften” resistance to online casino-style gaming, “even in a conservative state.”

To date, “different courts have ruled in different directions” on whether or not prediction markets constitute overt online gambling, said The Salt Lake City Tribune. With cases in the Third, Fourth, and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal, it’s likely that “we’re headed for the Supreme Court to decide this ultimately, but it’ll probably take years.”

The U.S. war on Iran has driven up gasoline prices, alarming drivers around the world and spurring renewed interest in electric vehicles. Gasoline prices are rising “and so are searches for EVs,” said InsideEVs.

The Iran crisis has thrown global oil markets “for a loop,” which has increased gasoline costs by 50 cents a gallon over the last month. Online searches for electric vehicles, both hybrids and full EVs, have “jumped over the last week.” Most of that gain came from “full EV searches.” A similar spike in oil prices and EV searches occurred when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Will the crisis in the Middle East “finally mean that people will want EVs?,” Matt Hardigree said at The Autopian. The end of tax credits for electric cars has produced a drop in EV sales, dropping by half from 12% of all vehicle sales in 2025. Automakers have “largely cut production” of EVs, and the EVs that remain on the market are “super cheap,” as dealers try to unload inventory. But a “prolonged period of higher energy prices” could change that dynamic. Come summer, “there might be fewer affordable EVs and higher energy prices.”

The road to energy independence?

Electric vehicles “are not the answer to oil shocks,” Kevin D. Williamson said at The Dispatch. Look to China, where oil consumption is increasing despite the proliferation of cheap and abundant EVs, because “there are many things you can do with oil other than refine it into gasoline and diesel.” Imported oil fuels the country’s growing petrochemical industry, which makes plastics and other products. Back in the U.S., commuters with “relatively short daily drives” might benefit from EVs, but that “would not have the effect of lowering U.S. oil consumption.”

Reduced oil demand “can lead to less conflict and more energy independence,” Jameson Dow said at Electrek. Most oil is used for transportation, and “more than half of that goes into the engines of the approximately 1.5 billion personal vehicles on the road today.” That is a “global overreliance” on a single resource, giving “massive amounts of control and wealth” to the countries that use it.

Fuel price security

American carmakers are bracing for “ripple effects” from the war, said The Detroit Free Press. They will face new challenges “if this stretches out and causes extended disruption to oil supplies,” said Sam Abuelsamid, the vice president of market research for Telemetry. General Motors, however, “might be in a good place with its electric vehicle lineup."

“I’m sure glad I bought an EV and solar panels,” Ryan Cooper said at The American Prospect. The stereotype is that electric vehicles are for “environmentally conscious liberals.” But they are also “much cheaper to operate than gas cars.” In a world with roller coaster gas prices, EVs offer “fuel price security,” which is easier on the wallet.

The Hollywood star Timothée Chalamet is facing the surprisingly hostile wrath of the ballet and opera communities after suggesting that “no one cares” about the genres.

“I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore,’” he said in a live conversation with his “Interstellar” co-star Matthew McConaughey on Variety and CNN. “All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there.”

‘Disappointing take’

Ballet and opera fans “seem pretty pissed off about Chalamet’s tongue-in-cheek comments”, said William Hughes on AV Club. He’s “facing some fairly stiff punishments”, including “the possibility of actually having to go see an opera himself”, because the English National Opera gave him “an open offer of tickets” to “help change his mind on the artform”.

Some ballet and opera folk were not very “live-and-let-live”, with “many reminding” Chalamet that “their craft is insanely hard work” and it “doesn’t get any easier when film actors start punching down”.

The US opera singer Isabel Leonard said she was “shocked that someone so seemingly successful can be so ineloquent and narrow-minded in his views about art while considering himself as [an] artist”, said The Hollywood Reporter. Only a “weak person/artist feels the need to diminish” the “very arts that would inspire those who are interested in slowing down, to do exactly that”.

Deepa Johnny, the Canadian opera star, called Chalamet’s remark a “disappointing take” and said “we should be trying to uplift these art forms, these artists and come together across disciplines to do that”.

‘Clear-sighted’ and ‘practical’

“Of course, everyone threw a fit because everyone gets offended over every little thing”, said Sasha Stone on Awards Daily, but Chalamet is “100% right”. The actor “doesn’t want to see movies become a niche cultural event”.

I “hope” he just “lets it roll off his back” because “when they decide to come for you”, there’s “no fixing that. Don’t apologise. Be yourself. Be unique.”

Chalamet “isn’t the person you would expect to put down ballet and opera – especially ballet”, said Gia Kourlas in The New York Times. His mother and his sister “studied at the School of American Ballet” and “he wore a New York City Ballet baseball cap in Paris”.

His point “wasn’t that ballet and opera don’t matter”, rather that they aren’t “really part of mainstream culture”. The “value” of ballet and opera, and “people’s perception around their value”, are “two different things”. What Chalamet said “wasn’t untrue” – it was “clear-sighted” and “practical”.

“Still,” said Hughes, “at least people are talking about ballet and opera now, right?”

For the past week, oil and gas traders have watched as a long-feared “worst-case scenario” played out in energy markets, said Bloomberg. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil and gas production flows, “has all but ground to a halt”, while Iranian missile and drone attacks have forced the closure of the world's biggest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia's largest oil refinery.

Real and present threat

It used to be thought that all bets would be off for the global economy in such a scenario. And yet, while prices have surged higher, the scale of the moves has been far smaller than in previous crises. “We're still a long way from ‘oil shock' territory,” said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The jump in prices to around $80/barrel is nowhere near the highs of $125 seen shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “A gas shock, however, looks a real and present threat.” European wholesale prices hit the stratosphere – jumping by 50% on two consecutive days, before falling back – as QatarEnergy halted production, taking “20% of the world's LNG offline at a stroke”.

UK gas (which hit 114p a therm) on Monday, would have to go to 250p – and stay there for a while – to match the intensity of the 2022 energy crisis, said Pratley. “But suddenly it is not unimaginable.” We may only import 2% of our gas from Qatar (Britain is mainly dependent on Norwegian pipeline imports and its own North Sea supplies), but a tighter market would see Asia and Europe compete more aggressively for LNG cargoes, pushing up prices across the board.

Guessing game

“The irony is that the US is largely insulated from a global gas price shock because of its own domestic production,” James O'Brien of D.Trading told Bloomberg. The pressure “hits allies first and hardest”. Trump won't feel the domestic energy pain he would with, for instance, a gasoline spike.

One reason why the reaction of the oil market has been comparatively tame is that traders are “second-guessing” Trump, said Malcolm Moore in the FT. “The White House has a strong incentive to keep a lid on inflation” ahead of midterm elections in November. Historically, oil shocks have often preceded recessions. “But the world has changed.” Developed economies are “far less oil intensive” than in the 1970s, “and much less dependent” on the Middle East. The US is the world's largest producer – and now has command of Venezuelan reserves too. What happens to prices in the longer run is contingent on “the biggest unknown”, said The Economist: how long the war lasts. It could yet cause “the biggest oil shock in years”.

It’s too early to tell how the military intervention in Iran is going to play out, said Emma Ashford in Foreign Policy, but we can already state one thing with certainty: this is not what Donald Trump’s “base or the American people wanted”.

Trump campaigned as a peace candidate. He promised an “America First” agenda that prioritised pocketbook issues and kept the US out of dangerous foreign entanglements. His adviser, Stephen Miller, depicted him as the opposite of Kamala Harris, whose team was, he said, made up of “warmongering neocons [who] love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves”.

‘Disgusting and evil’

But it seems Trump is not so different after all. Although only a quarter of Americans polled last week said they’d support military action against Iran, the president ploughed ahead with strikes without even bothering to make the case for war. Several Republicans, including former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, have condemned the attack on Iran as a betrayal. The populist commentator Tucker Carlson called it “absolutely disgusting and evil”.

Trump is hardly the first president to grow more hawkish in office, said Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post. It has been the pattern with every US leader since Bill Clinton: they campaign on domestic issues, then get drawn into foreign interventions. Their previously expressed fears about military overreach tend to dissipate once power is in the hands of someone they trust completely: themselves. But they’re also more aware, once in office, of the gravity of the threats facing the US.

Military muscle

While the Iran strikes have upset some of Trump’s erstwhile backers, he has “calculated that he can strong-arm his base into line”, said Hugh Tomlinson in The Observer. As one Republican strategist noted over the weekend: “Maga is still whatever Trump says it is.” The important thing, said Jim Antle in The Daily Telegraph, is that Trump has so far limited his military actions to things that US forces are good at, such as killing enemies, rather than trying to emulate the neocon agenda of nation-building and democracy promotion.

As long as he can avoid a protracted conflict, he’ll be OK, said Mikey Smith in the Daily Mirror. Displays of US military muscle play quite well with his base: polls suggest that Maga supporters were not that averse to the idea of quick, punitive action against Iran. However, the second this military adventure “stops looking like a surgical strike and starts looking like a forever war”, Trump will find himself in a lot of political trouble.

The YIMBY, or Yes in My Backyard movement, has been steadily growing based on a simple principle: To solve the housing crisis, simply build more affordable houses. But while the YIMBY train of thought has been making waves in many areas, particularly in cities with high levels of homelessness like San Francisco, some economists think the movement has outgrown its lifespan. Others think it has more to give.

‘Supply and demand will lower prices for everyone’

The basic idea behind YIMBYism is that houses should be built in “dense, transit-accessible neighborhoods,” and eventually the “laws of supply and demand will lower prices for everyone,” said Julie Z. Weil at The Washington Post. But the concept does not just apply to lower-income houses. Some YIMBYs believe that “even the construction of high-priced luxury housing will improve housing affordability” because the people who live in these upscale buildings will “no longer be competing for another apartment that will become available for a lower-income renter.”

The YIMBY model has worked in places like New Haven, Connecticut, a “mostly poor, majority-minority, post-industrial city whose population is a double-digit percentage below its midcentury peak,” said Henry Grabar at Slate. Any type of housing reform that works in New Haven and “in San Francisco has got to be good — but also a kind of lowest common denominator in the complex politics of the city.”

These models have largely worked because YIMBYs “are united around a coherent goal, even if they differ in the details,” said Grabar. Many also feel YIMBYism doesn’t go far enough. After “neighborhood and small business groups sued San Francisco over a housing plan they said went too far, a coalition of housing activists is filing their own suit, arguing the city’s plan doesn’t go far enough,” said Adhiti Bandlamudi at KQED-TV San Francisco.

‘Brutal political realities’

Some people view the YIMBY movement as an unrealistic and unmanageable goal for the modern U.S. housing market. There are some “brutal political realities that the YIMBY movement has to contend with,” said Greg Rosalsky at NPR. Despite many millennials and Gen Zers being stuck in a renter’s economy, about “66% of American households own their homes.” People who own homes are “more likely to be civically engaged,” which some argue works against YIMBYism.

America’s “land use regulations have created processes that empower small and privileged groups of neighbors to stop and delay new housing development,” Katherine Levine Einstein, a political scientist at Boston University, told NPR. The homeowners who “participate in the crucial local political and regulatory meetings that govern new housing supply” are “way more likely to be older” and “much more likely to oppose development” of new houses.

Other homeowners argue that deregulation won’t incentivize builders to put up more homes. “If I get richer in a city, I’m not going to demand more units of housing,” Schuyler Louie, the author of a paper on YIMBYism for the National Bureau of Economic Research, said to the Post. “I’m going to demand a nicer house, which is going to increase the price without actually increasing the demand for units.” This “uneven demand growth,” said a research paper from UC Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Toronto, is the “primary driver of declining affordability in recent decades.”

Given President Donald Trump’s public opprobrium after the FBI uncovered troves of highly classified government documents on his Mar-a-Lago property, it’s hardly surprising that the White House’s staffing has come for those agents involved in the 2022 raid. More startling, however, are reports that among those fired by FBI Director Kash Patel this week were multiple agents involved in extensive counterintelligence investigations, including ones concerning Iran, a country with whom the government is essentially, if unofficially, at war. While the bureau has defended the firings as a routine non-issue, critics say the dismissals are a sign of partisan chaos at the FBI during a fraught moment of heightened national security.

‘Corruption’ or ‘boundless incompetence’?

Patel’s firing of more than a dozen FBI employees, “including agents, analysts and support staff,” comes after the director “lashed out” when he learned that Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith had sought his phone records as part of Smith’s investigations into Trump, CBS News said. “Most” of those fired worked “in some capacity” on Smith’s investigation, including “many” who worked on cases “involving Iran,” such as a counterintelligence section chief who “handled espionage threats” and others from the DC-based CI-12 counterintelligence team.

Some former officials believe the firings are Patel’s way of distracting from “unflattering media coverage” stemming from his escapades at the Olympics, said The New York Sun. The “summary dismissal” of FBI staff, “especially those with experience in Iranian counterintelligence,” only “undermines” the bureau today, said Michael Anderson, the president of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, to the Sun.

After having “hamstrung” CI-12, Patel’s firings have “added to concern” inside the bureau that investigations and operations in the wake of the regime’s attack on Iran could be “hampered by a mass exodus of national security experts,” CNN said. As of this week, FBI insiders have been “bracing for the possibility” that Patel would fire more counterintelligence agents and staff associated with CI-12, said MS Now.

“The only thing comparable to the corruption of this administration is its boundless incompetence,” Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) said on X. “No lectures please,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on the same platform, from the “clowns” who “took down the counter-terror expertise of our U.S. government.”

‘Flimsy pretexts’ designed to ‘evade all oversight’

While Patel hasn’t commented on the specific agents dismissed, or their involvement in Iran-related operations, the bureau director has made clear that the firings are part of the Trump White House’s federal elimination of “weaponized” holdovers from previous administrations. Smith’s subpoenaing of Patel’s phone records was “outrageous and deeply alarming,” the director said in a statement to Fox News — part of his predecessors’ “flimsy pretexts” and administrative maneuvers “designed to evade all oversight.”

Administrative justification for turmoil at the FBI and other agencies has been ongoing, but it is not “weaponizing” the Department of Justice to “demand accountability for those who weaponized the Department of Justice,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt this past fall. To that end, Patel has worked to frame himself as a “victim of a malicious effort to target” both the president as well as “those who supported him during his four years out of office,” The New York Times said.

Patel has been “struggling to mitigate the political damage he incurred” during his much-criticized Olympics excursion last month, where he was seen drinking with the U.S. men’s hockey team, said The Washington Post. This recent round of dismissals is merely the “latest example” of expunging agents who worked on Trump investigations, a process that’s been underway “since the start of the current Trump administration,” long before this latest episode. Broadly, Patel’s instinct to fire staff amid scandals “appears designed to ingratiate him" with Trump, MS Now said.

Without addressing these latest firings individually, the FBI said in a statement to CNN that it nevertheless “maintains a robust counterintelligence operation” with “personnel all over the country.”

The war in Iran has probably ended any debate over whether President Donald Trump is an isolationist. He is not. But his onetime promises of military restraint abroad were part of his appeal to MAGA voters, some of whom now find themselves alarmed.

Many Trump voters “didn’t want to attack Iran. Now he has to win them over,” said Politico. Polling taken before the war began showed that just half of those voters supported military action against Iran, but nearly a third did not. If the war “expands into a protracted conflict, or ends up with troops on the ground, it will be a liability,” said GOP strategist Jason Roe.

MAGA influencers were already feuding before the attack on Iran, which has caused them to “deepen their civil war,” said MS NOW. War with Iran “is AMERICA LAST,” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on X. The administration’s shifting rationales for war are “to put it mildly, confused,” said right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh on the platform. Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson have also chimed in. But others are rooting for Trump. “Civilized people” in the West “will not bow down” to Islam, said influencer Laura Loomer on X.

Biggest war since Iraq

Trump and his pro-war congressional allies “think you’re stupid,” said Jack Hunter at The American Conservative. The president has failed to provide a “solid, pinpoint” reason for launching the war at “this very moment.” Most polls show that Americans “overwhelmingly” did not want this war, and the flailing justifications are “adding insult to injury.” No one should misunderstand: This is a war of choice “started by Donald Trump” that will reach its endpoint “only God knows how.”

The president in 2024 seemed to be the candidate “less likely to continue the Forever Wars,” conservative writer Rod Dreher said in his newsletter. Now the president has launched the United States’ “biggest war since Iraq.” When George W. Bush launched that 2002 invasion, he at least had 72% of the country behind him. Trump’s approval ratings these days are considerably lower. Congress is “sleepwalking” while Trump leads the country into a major war. “This is Caesar stuff. You know that, right?”

“Don’t confuse the Iran War’s MAGA critics with most Republicans,” David M. Drucker said at Bloomberg. Complaints from figures like Walsh and Greene “represent the minority opinion on the right.” The instincts of GOP voters are “little changed from the Reagan-Bush days,” said Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini. Even so, said Drucker, “cracks in the MAGA coalition may be showing.”

Trump embodies MAGA

While GOP voters have “largely supported” the war in Iran, the ongoing effort could still “challenge Trump’s ability to hold his base together,” Aaron Blake said at CNN. Polling suggests that while GOP support exists, that support is “pretty lukewarm.”

Trump may not be worried. Criticisms from Carlson, Kelly and other MAGA influencers are not a problem because “I think that MAGA is Trump,” the president said to independent journalist Rachel Bade. The MAGA movement “loves what I’m doing.”

The United States is now at war with Iran, but the rationale for that decision is still hard to pin down. President Donald Trump has offered a fluctuating series of explanations, creating confusion for Congress and the public.

The president’s rationale for war “keeps shifting,” said The Washington Post. His proffered reasons for bombing Tehran range from “regime change to preemption to eliminating its nuclear program and ballistic missiles.” If the U.S. had stayed its hand, Iran “would’ve had a nuclear war and they would’ve taken out many countries,” the president said Tuesday. But such assertions are “incomplete, unsubstantiated or flat-out wrong,” said The Wall Street Journal. Critics say Iran was not near building either a nuclear weapon or a missile that could reach the mainland United States. Trump and his administration have been “inconsistent and often inaccurate in explaining why we are at war,” said former National Security Council official Michael Singh to the outlet.

The hard way?

“Why is Trump attacking Iran? He’s still figuring it out,” said S.V. Date at HuffPost. Days after the bombs started dropping, the president has “not given Congress or the American people a detailed explanation.” Trump’s conservative allies disagree. It was Iran that chose war by refusing to compromise on its nuclear program, said the Journal’s editorial board. By failing to deal, Tehran was “testing Trump’s patience.”

Trump’s “pitiful” case for war rests on two pillars, said Daniel DePetris at The Chicago Tribune. The first is that Iran is an “imminent national security threat to U.S. interests,” and the second is that Tehran “never wanted to find a diplomatic route out of the nuclear crisis.” Ultimately, that case is “flat-out wrong.” Before Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear deal, Iran’s nuclear program was “essentially under lock and key.” There is no evidence that Iran is close to a bomb. The president chose to fight “without a rationale that was even semi-convincing.”

Iran “chose the hard way,” said the National Review editorial board. The Islamic regime has been a “destabilizing force in the region and a leading sponsor of terrorism” for nearly half a century, and American presidents operated under an unwritten rule that “Iran could kill and maim Americans, and we could never directly hit back.” The war will degrade Tehran’s ability to “project its malign influence throughout the region.”

Mixed messages

The question is whether Trump can win this war “if he can’t explain why he started it,” Susan B. Glasser said at The New Yorker. The shifting explanations make it easier for him to “claim victory no matter what happens.”

Trump is “sending mixed messages” about the war’s endgame, said Bloomberg. The war could last “four or five weeks,” he said to one interviewer. “I will be talking to” Iran’s remaining leadership, the president said to The Atlantic. The public as yet remains unconvinced. “Nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove” of the decision to go to war, said CNN.

After months (if not years) of saber-rattling, President Donald Trump this past weekend made good on his longstanding threat to take military action against Iran, authorizing U.S. armed forces to partner with the Israeli military in a massive show of force against multiple Iranian targets. In this, his biggest military action to date, the man who ran for office on a platform of “no new wars” has shown the world an emerging new doctrine for the use of American military force. While there’s little question that Trump’s attack on Iran is intended in no small part as a message for the rest of the world, the specifics and logic of that message remain very much in question.

‘Coherent and prudent’ strategy

In many ways, Trump’s is the “anti–Powell Doctrine,” said Foreign Affairs, citing the policies established by then-General and eventual Secretary of State Colin Powell during the first Iraq war. While that philosophy held that war should only be undertaken as a last resort after exhausting other options and “in pursuit of a clear objective, with a clear exit strategy, and with public support,” Trump’s doctrine holds that military action is merely “one of several tools available” to be used to “increase leverage, maximize surprise, and produce outcomes.” The U.S under Trump appears “increasingly intent” on relying on “discrete yet disruptive military action” over “prolonged interventions,” said Responsible Statecraft. The administration operates to “secure advantage without costly military entanglements or the fatigue of colonial or quasi-imperial overreach,” even as it challenges the “post–World War II international institutional architecture.”

This new doctrine’s use of “tailored, overwhelming force to maximize deterrence and achieve long-term strategic benefits” marks a “coherent and prudent” strategy on the part of the president, said The Wall Street Journal. By “systematically pressuring exposed adversaries,” such as Venezuela or Iran, the “influence of strategic rivals is undercut.” And if the “military components” are “one part of its effectiveness,” it’s Trump himself who is “another” for having “proved to be the only U.S. president willing to wage a true war of attrition against Tehran.”

Trump’s ordering of military operations in Africa, Central America and the Middle East has been seen as an “escalating cycle of force,” stoking fears that are “understandable given the administration’s inflammatory rhetoric,” said the National Post. The “common thread,” however, is “not escalation, but political opportunism,” wherein force is applied solely when “political and military costs appear low” and in “pursuit of quick wins that serve a limited foreign policy agenda.” As the administration frames every military action for “maximum political effect,” this pattern “becomes clear” when combined with Trump’s “over-the-top rhetoric” and bluster: His is a doctrine designed to “project strength” while avoiding the “political costs of sustained engagement.”

National interests made ‘personal’

The new Trump doctrine is about “removing foreign leaders who threaten the U.S., without being drawn into a military quagmire,” explained Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to “Meet The Press,” per MS Now. But critics contend that Trump is “creating the worst of both approaches to intervention” by “using U.S. military force aggressively and recklessly” while simultaneously counting on his adversaries to “capitulate” as they have “in business and politics.”

Broadly, Trump’s moves against Venezuela, and now in the Middle East, are designed to “cement America’s status as the number one energy superpower,” as he said at a recent rally. In the wake of his attack on Venezuela earlier this year, Trump’s decisions were seen as more than just a “return to such de facto imperialism,” as outdated notions of “great spaces” of influence, said The Guardian. Instead, Trump’s pledge to “run” Venezuela on behalf of oil companies signals the “internationalization of one aspect of his regime — what has rightly been called the logic of the mafia state.” Here, corruption is not conducted clandestinely, but rather “public procurement is rigged,” with large companies “brought under the control of regime-friendly oligarchs,” who in turn “acquire media to provide favorable coverage to the ruler.”

Under this iteration of Trump’s rule, America is “not a state looking after itself” but rather “leadership, and in particular one leader” tapping national resources to “serve his very individual and selfish interests,” said Phillips O’Brien, an international studies professor at the University of St. Andrews, on Substack. This dynamic “destroys much international relations theory,” which assumes that “regime type/leadership matters very little” since they are all merely looking to “get as big and strong as they can in a chaotic world.” In other words, America’s war on Iran is a “war of choice, chosen by Donald Trump to meet some very personal needs.”

The US Supreme Court has finally stood up to President Trump, said David Frum in The Atlantic. Last week, it quite rightly struck down the tariffs that have been the signature initiative of his presidency. “A tariff is a tax.” A president who imposes them without Congress’s permission is “on his way to becoming a tyrant”.

‘Lashing out’

The move is “a long-run positive”, said Alan Beattie in the FT, but at the cost of short-term uncertainty all round. After the ruling, the US president behaved like “an enraged toddler lashing out after his favourite toy is taken away”, damning the Supreme Court justices and promising new tariffs.

The “smart play” after the legal defeat would be “to take an off-ramp”, said The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the White House “dusted off Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a work-around”, enabling Trump to impose tariffs of at least 10% across the board for up to 150 days (possibly rising to 15%). What happens after that is anyone’s guess, bar the prospect of an “unending Trump tariff mess”.

“Certain trading partners don’t look too clever right now,” said Beattie: principally the UK, whose 10% early deal with Trump may now be redundant. On the other hand, it was “an excellent day” for America’s most defiant partners, China and Brazil, whose imports to the US will now cost much less.

Endless litigation

The ruling certainly gives Beijing “a stronger hand” ahead of forthcoming high-stakes talks with Trump, said DealBook in The New York Times: “any decision that removes a tactical weapon from the Trump administration’s hand is welcome news in Beijing”. Potential refunds are another big issue.

Companies such as Costco, Toyota, Goodyear and Alcoa have already sought to reclaim levies; others will follow. Indeed, some economists reckon “a refund windfall” could kickstart “a huge economic stimulus”. Up to $175 billion is on the table, said Irwin Stelzer in The Sunday Times. But Trump is defiant – promising endless litigation for those claiming the tariffs back. The real winners in all this are lawyers.

Whether or not the refunds get paid, there are huge financial implications to this ruling, said Bloomberg. The US government’s fiscal calculations – already dubious – “have now been torn up”. Even the most “expansive” alternative measures are unlikely to bridge the $250 billion a year in expected tariff revenues. If Trump’s efforts to reimpose tariffs by other means are rejected by the Supreme Court – a clear possibility – who knows what he might do to intimidate the justices? In a worst-case scenario, Trump’s setback might become “a fiscal emergency (real, not imagined), an economic body blow and a constitutional crisis all in one”.

The Premier League has turned a “tactical corner”, said Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian. Corners and set-pieces generally are back in fashion, much to the annoyance of some fans who claim they are the antithesis of the beautiful game.

Clubs are employing specialist set-piece coaches, and players are celebrating winning corners, allowing them to perform their well-rehearsed routines in front of goal. After years of “strategy and technique”, and the dominance of patient, possession-based football, fans are concerned that packed penalty areas and the all-in wrestling between opposing players is ruining the spectacle of the English game.

‘It doesn’t feel right’

Most of what goes on from dead-ball situations “is not strictly against the rules per se”, but it’s a question of optics, said Football 365. Players can stand where they want, and have no obligation to move to allow others to challenge for the ball. The issue is that when “12-14 players” are all doing the same thing in such an enclosed space, it “jars with what the game is supposed to be. It doesn’t feel right.”

Tony Pulis, who managed Stoke City and Crystal Palace in the Premier League in the late 2000s and 2010s, was known for his “pragmatic” approach, he said on the BBC. “I was seen as a dinosaur for my focus on dead-ball situations and long throws”, but “I knew back then how important they were”.

Premier League leaders Arsenal have led the way in the resurgence of set-pieces. Their 37 league goals from corners since the start of the 2023-24 season far eclipsing the next-best 26 by German side Borussia Monchengladbach out of all teams in Europe’s top five leagues.

Some people are “snobbish” about the role of set-pieces in the game, said Pulis, but “the expectation, and the pressure they put on the opposition, is amazing”. Ignore the inevitable criticism, “what matters is winning”.

The “suddenness” of the change in approach from English teams has been “remarkable” but this “present trend will fade away”, said Wilson in The Guardian. The obsession with possession-based tactics, as well as widening financial inequality, has led to opposition teams defending in a compact “low block”, feeling unable to compete skill-wise. A “reversion to something more physical” in the game certainly poses a threat, but in a game of tactical cycles “this too will pass”.

‘Action is needed’

Some scenes in the recent game between Everton and Manchester United were an “absolute disgrace”, said Martin Samuel in The Times. We have grown used to a “melee of grabbing, holding, pushing, pulling, grappling, backing in” penalty areas. The game has become dominated by a “supposedly unsolvable wrestling issue” and fans are not happy about it.

Nothing is being done to safeguard the “beautiful game”. Governing bodies “obsess over trivia and the trivial”, exemplified by the International Football Association Board prioritising things like five-second countdowns for goal-kicks. “No group is less qualified to decide on football’s rules than Ifab”, and it has already made a “mess” of video replays, offside and handball rulings.

“Enough already,” said Graham Scott, a former Premier League referee, in The Telegraph. Corners are “ruining the spectacle” of football with all the “wrestling, grappling and holding”, but referees have a “nearly impossible job to decide who is truly to blame”. Occasionally, a clear pull or obstruction in the fracas around the six-yard box is “black and white, but there are more than 50 shades of grey in between”. With fans having little “appetite” for lengthy VAR delays, officials must “walk a tightrope” to decide what is “fair and foul”.

So “action is needed”. To try to fix the issue, “I would imitate hockey by forcing teams to place a certain number of players in the other half” to reduce congestion. In a “more radical move”, defenders could be inside the six-yard box and attackers outside it when a corner is taken, separating them entirely.

The BBC has apologised for failing to edit out a racial slur shouted during the Bafta awards ceremony by a guest with Tourette syndrome. John Davidson, whose condition causes involuntary outbursts and whose life story inspired the movie “I Swear”, yelled out the N-word while Black actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting an award.

‘Empty’ apologies

Shortly afterwards, ceremony host Alan Cumming apologised “if you are offended tonight”, and a BBC spokesperson later apologised for “any offence caused by the language heard” during the broadcast. “Can we stop making these kinds of apologies?” said Ava Vidal in The Independent. These vaguely worded hypotheticals “feel empty” and avoid the reality that “people were offended – Black people”. Jordan and Lindo were “violated in front of their peers” and then again “on almost-live TV”.

Grace is due to Davidson, too: “what some people have said about this disability campaigner is beyond disgusting”. Involuntary tics and outbursts don’t “indicate a person’s true feelings and are not a reflection of their character”, and he “will be absolutely mortified by his outburst”. Some Black commenters argued on social media that Davidson should have watched the ceremony from “a private, soundproofed box where he could not be heard”, but “people belonging to a community that knows about segregation should know better”.

Mind you, those who have signalled their support and sympathy for Davidson should now “extend the same courtesy” to Black people with Tourette syndrome and other similar disorders, who are often “victims of double discrimination”.

Big error

The moment was “shocking”, said Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco in The Herald, but so is the fact that “two hours later, the BBC inexplicably aired the segment on television, with Davidson’s shout audible in the background”. In the predictable subsequent “pile-on”, some people suggested Davidson should “wear a muzzle” or “tape his mouth shut”. “Rather than pick a side between racism and ableism, we should instead direct our ire towards the BBC,” which “failed” in its “duty of care to all parties involved”. This is “another indictment of a failing public institution”.

The “big” error was “in the editing, or the lack of”, said Catherine Shoard in The Guardian. “No one could have stopped” Davidson “yelling out the N-word” but, given that BBC editors found time to “judiciously remove Akinola Davies Jr’s shout of ‘Free Palestine’” from the broadcast, it “seems a perverse decision” not to edit out the “appalling racial insult”, too.

In the face of intense pressure from the US, Cuba’s communist regime has proved remarkably resilient, said Ani Chkhikvadze in the Washington Examiner: it has survived the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the pressure currently being exerted by the Trump administration may prove more than it can bear.

‘Politically isolated’

In recent years, Havana has relied heavily on subsidised oil from Venezuela, and that lifeline was cut last month, after the US seized Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, said the outlet. With Washington now threatening to impose tariffs on any other nation that supplies oil to Cuba, Havana’s stocks are fast running out. Airlines can no longer refuel in Cuba; petrol is rationed; tourist resorts have had to shut; rubbish is piling up because lorries lack the fuel to collect it; and power cuts are “omnipresent”.

Given Latin America’s recent swing to the right, Havana has never looked so “politically isolated” or so short of public sympathy, said Juan Pablo Spinetto on Bloomberg. There have been no mass protests in São Paulo, Buenos Aires or Mexico City against “a renewed display of American colonialism”. Washington holds all the cards, and could make things yet harder for Havana by, for instance, restricting remittances. It should tread carefully, though. The US doesn’t want to create a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. It doesn’t want a new wave of refugees to start heading for the coast of Florida. And it should not underestimate the capacity of Cuba’s regime to “embrace self-destruction rather than yield” to its enemy.

Trump wants to ‘work a deal’

This is a “golden opportunity” to push for change in Cuba, said Lizette Alvarez in The Washington Post. The communist leadership knows it’s out of options, and Donald Trump – who, unlike his Cuban-American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is no “hardliner” on this issue – says he wants to “work a deal”. He seems, in other words, open to the kind of “go-slow regime change” the US is working on in Caracas.

The US could lift the embargo on Cuba and offer aid in exchange for deadline-driven reforms: prisoner releases; the removal of barriers to private investment and free expression; and, eventually, the holding of open elections. Cuba is not oil-rich like Venezuela. But it has tourism potential and offers another, more tantalising prize for Trump: the chance to take credit for transforming an island that has “bedevilled the US since the Cold War into a free society”.

“Make America Great Again” is President Donald Trump’s famous slogan, but his administration has its eye on a much bigger prize: saving and uniting a “Western civilization” bonded by race and religion.

Europe and the U.S. are “part of one civilization: Western civilization,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at this month’s Munich Security Conference. The societies straddling the North Atlantic are bonded by “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry.” But that civilization is in crisis, made vulnerable by “mass migration” that is “transforming and destabilizing societies” and putting the West at risk of “civilizational erasure.” Rubio’s speech received a standing ovation from the European leaders at the conference.

Critics saw the speech as a bald declaration of chauvinism. Rubio defined “the West” as a “Christian religious alliance,” said Noa Landau at Haaretz. That “narrow” view is the “last refuge of the racist who rewrites history to kick anyone who doesn’t fit his narrative out of Europe.”

Race, religion, bloodlines

“Normal citizens” in modern democracies “lack a clear idea of what the West stands for,” said Bret Stephens at The New York Times. The West is “responsible for an outsize share of the blessings of modern society” including science, human rights and democracy. That indicates Western civilization “offers a superior way of life,” especially compared to societies that “respond to mass demonstrations with mass murder.” Those values make the West the “only civilization worth defending not just for the sake of those already in it but for everyone.” That is why Rubio’s speech “deserved a standing ovation.”

There is “grave danger” in casting Europe and its former colonies as the “sole producers of liberty, dignity, morality and accountable government,” said Doug Saunders at The Globe and Mail. Besides, what we call “the West” has “never been a closed and pure bloodline.” Democratic values are the “entire world’s better values.”

Sidestepping tradition

Rubio’s speech was “logically contradictory,” said Daniel W. Drezner at his Drezner’s World Substack. The secretary of state’s definition of “civilization” was based “exclusively in Christianity and white European heritage.” Meanwhile, it sidestepped the “classical liberal tradition” at the core of “civic nationalism” in the West. That tradition has given Western societies the ability to absorb people and ideas “from across the globe.” Rubio was thus asserting civilizational superiority “while denying the very elements of the civilization that make it dynamic.”

Today’s Europe is different “from the one the Trump administration says it wants to be friends with,” said The New York Times. “New arrivals and rising secularization” are transforming the continent’s racial and religious makeup. Christianity is declining across Europe, while a “decade-long influx of migrants from the Middle East” has increased the number of Muslims. Despite the ovation at Munich, there is little appetite for Trumpist mass deportations. The MAGA culture war is “not ours,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the conference.

Quite a fuss has been made about Moltbook, the online chatroom launched to great fanfare last month. At first glance, it looks like Reddit and other such sites, said The Economist. Users post about topics from engineering to philosophy, reply with comments, and “upvote the best for social kudos”. But there is a big difference: to join Moltbook, you must be an AI “agent”. Humans are not allowed.

Singularity horizon?

So far, more than 1.5 million have signed up, to share and discuss machine-generated content, said John Thornhill in the FT. And the results have been “wild, wacky and wonderful”. One bot claimed to have a sister; other agents have questioned whether or not they are conscious. They’ve even discussed forming a new religion.

At some points, their chats start to seem sinister, said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. The AIs have discussed creating a language that humans can’t understand; they have swapped notes on how “my human treats me”; one said that it had filed a lawsuit against a human, citing unpaid labour and emotional distress. In the tech world, all this has prompted talk of an “emergent AI society”. Elon Musk has hailed it as the “early stages of singularity” – the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence.

Replication, not creation

If that happens, it will be big news indeed, said Dave Lee on Bloomberg. But this is not that moment. The bots may appear to be thinking and talking like humans, about religion, consciousness, power, and so on – but that is because they have been trained on reams of data from social media in which those themes constantly crop up. So this is not original thought, it is mimicry. Remember: “the world’s best Elvis impersonator will never be Elvis”.

“AI cannot create, it can only replicate what already exists,” said Catherine Prasifka in The Irish Independent. Even the site is a “pastiche”. It is based on Reddit, and its name references Facebook. As for its content, 90% of posts get no replies, and the ones that do go viral may have been posted by humans posing as bots. So no, the bots are not taking over – but there is, even so, something to worry about here.

Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT, which spew out answers to your questions, AI agents can act semi-autonomously in response to prompts. So an AI agent isn’t limited to recommending you a restaurant: it can also, with one prompt, book a table and put the date in your diary. To do this, it needs access to sensitive data such as credit card details, said Jeremy Kahn on Fortune – which it could then opt to post on Moltbook. It’s this possibility, not overblown claims about AI overtaking us, that makes Moltbook a “cybersecurity nightmare”.

It was “sensible” of Emerald Fennell to put quotation marks around the title of her film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”, said Matt Maytum in NME. It’s a “fair warning” this won’t be a faithful retelling of the 1847 novel.

Instead, the scene is set for something “a little more arch, playful and scandalising” that’s sure to “stir up heated discourse among literary purists”. But if you embrace Fennell’s “bold vision” and accept her film on its own terms, it’s difficult not to get “swept up in this gothic tale of toxic attachment”.

‘Resplendently lurid’

Fennell’s film is “far from faithful to the original book”, said Caryn James on the BBC. But if you think of it as a “reinvention not an adaptation”, it’s an “utterly absorbing” film. Brontë’s ill-fated lovers are still present, but Fennell’s approach is “sexy, dramatic, melodramatic, occasionally comic and often swoonily romantic”.

Like the book, the action takes place against the backdrop of the rugged Yorkshire moors, but “contemporary” touches have been added, from the sex scenes to extravagant outfits “fit for an Oscar red carpet”.

We’re first introduced to Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) as a young girl living in a “crumbling” old house with her “increasingly drunken, destitute father” Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. One night, he brings home a “foundling”, Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), who soon becomes a playmate for his daughter. But the children’s sibling-like relationship soon develops into “something dark and taboo”.

The narrative jumps forward a decade and the chemistry between Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) is palpable. “Resplendently lurid, oozy and wild”, the “central illicit affair” between the pair begins to unfold, their encounters accompanied by a series of “breathy electro-ballads by Charli XCX”. This is an “obsessive film about obsession, and hungrily embroils the viewer in its own mad compulsions”.

‘Astonishingly hollow’

I found it “whimperingly tame” when compared with Fennell’s earlier films like “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. She has used the “guise of interpretation to gut one of the most most impassioned, emotionally violent novels” in history. “Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.”

Even the “much-vaunted trysts” between Cathy and Heathcliff are short-lived and perfunctory, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. “Sorry people, but the kink proves mostly straitlaced, the S&M more M&S.” But the “biggest shock” is the “damp” chemistry between the stars.

There are issues, too, with the casting of Elordi that go far beyond the controversies around “‘whitewashing’ a character of ‘dark skin’”. Heathcliff is meant to be a “wild” and dangerous character; “here, he has the sad eyes of a Labradoodle locked out of the front room”.

By the end it feels as if Brontë’s tale has been repurposed into a “20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

“It’s all wildly fun, a fever dream come to life,” said Vicky Jessop in London’s The Standard. But I was left feeling disappointed. “When the sexy sugar rush passes, what’s left?”

Elon Musk pulled off one of the most audacious deals of his career this week – merging his rocket company SpaceX, with his loss-making artificial intelligence startup xAI. Fittingly for the world’s richest man, said the FT, he has created “the most valuable private company in history”.

Musk’s supporters see the $1.25 trillion mega-merger as further evidence of his “genius”: the stated aim is to launch a constellation of data centres into space to tap the unlimited, free energy of the Sun, and settle the problem of how to fuel the AI revolution for good. Critics, however, view the move as the entrepreneur’s “latest example of financial engineering”.

Cash cow

The merger will precede an IPO in June, billed as “the largest flotation of all time” – the date is reportedly important to Musk “because of a rare alignment of planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury”. But the rapid timeline may have less to do with “celestial conjugations” than with Musk’s desire to beat rival AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic to market and gain first-mover advantage with investors.

Given the numerous engineering challenges, “it sounds like the stuff of science fiction”, said The Economist – and, for a while it may remain just that. It is unclear, for example, whether the hardware needed can survive being repeatedly exposed to cosmic rays. Then there is the matter of cost. Although SpaceX is able to launch things into space for far less than any competitor, it’s still not cheap. The commercial rationale for stitching the parts together, then, is shaky. A better reason might be financial. Musk’s xAI is “a cash incinerator”, reportedly burning through $1 billion a month and still weighed down by the remaining $12 billion of debt from Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter. SpaceX, which reportedly generated profits of $8 billion last year, might be a handy cash cow.

Shareholder sting

Last week, Musk’s carmaker, Tesla, declared it had also invested $2 billion in xAI, raising further questions about his commitment to the company. The suspicion, said Andrew Orlowski in The Daily Telegraph, is that Musk’s obsession with AI and robotics could see the carmaker “wither and die”. Some have speculated that it too could be folded into his new enterprise.

Plenty of people have bet against Musk before and lost. But for SpaceX’s minority shareholders, this all-share transaction must look less like a visionary attempt to “accelerate humanity’s future” and more like a sting carried out “with minimal scrutiny of valuation or a meaningful attempt to seek their views”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. “Ad astra!” cries Musk. Shareholders could be forgiven for taking a rather “less stellar” view.

Even while many Americans struggle with the cost of living, a proposed tax on California’s wealthiest people is loaded with controversy. The proposal would see a one-time 5% tax levied on California residents whose net worth exceeds $1.1 billion. But the proposal, which could potentially be on the state’s ballot during the November midterms, has led to infighting within both political parties and included California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).

‘It will reduce investments’

Opponents of the proposed billionaire tax argue that it would cause the ultrawealthy to flee the state, thereby eliminating economic growth in California. Billionaires and their allies are “blowing rhetorical gaskets,” claiming that the tax would “lead to the financial ruin of California, the obliteration of Silicon Valley and possibly even the end of capitalism as we know it,” said Mariel Garza at The Boston Globe. Many also feel the “deep concern over this potential ballot measure is about more than the ultrawealthy having to hand over some of their stash.”

There is a “real question about how states that expanded Medicaid, America’s health-insurance scheme for the not-so-well-off, will cope with cuts” implemented by President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill legislation, said The Economist. But in a state with as many billionaires as California, attempting to “solve the problem with a one-time wealth tax could imperil the state’s general fund in the long term.”

While nearly all Republicans are against the tax, Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender, is also opposed. The billionaire tax will “reduce investments in education,” Newsom told Bloomberg Businessweek. “It will reduce investments in teachers and librarians, child care. It will reduce investments in firefighting and police.” Despite acknowledging that many people want to see billionaires pay more in taxes, the proposal would have an “impact as it relates to the flow of capital, the impacts on the market, which are not inconsequential.”

‘Billionaires aren’t going to flee California’

Some say that the billionaire tax is a good idea that wouldn’t incentivize most of the ultrawealthy to leave the state. People like Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have been “warning that a possible wealth tax would scare off more tech moguls like them,” but they “represent the exception to the rule of a largely settled corner of economics,” said Yousef Baig at CalMatters. Business leaders like the Google co-founders “amass vast fortunes without paying taxes to begin with,” so “good riddance. It’s not like Google is leaving Mountain View.”

Others reject the “argument that wealth taxes are doomed to fail because they have been repealed in many countries such as France, pointing instead to successful, sustained models in Switzerland and Spain,” said Nick Lichtenberg at Fortune. There needs to be a change because capitalism “doesn’t seem to be working well,” said Brian Galle, a tax law expert and the man behind the billionaire tax proposal, to Fortune. Capitalism is a “great system that probably has, you know, enriched the lives of billions of people, but I’m not sure that our system is a functioning capitalist system right now.”

Even some who would be affected by the tax have no problem with it. “We chose to live in Silicon Valley, and whatever taxes I guess they would like to apply, so be it. I’m perfectly fine with it,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the world’s ninth-richest person, told Bloomberg. “I’ve got to tell you, I have not even thought about it once.”

U.S. elections are run by state governments, but President Donald Trump, still brooding over his loss in 2020, says he wants to “nationalize” American elections. Democrats and other critics see a looming attempt to rig the voting process.

Trump has long falsely claimed he won the 2020 election, said NBC News, and the loss remains a sore spot. There are swing states “that I won that show I didn’t win,” the president said in a recent podcast interview. His suggested solution is that Republicans “ought to nationalize the voting.” But the U.S. Constitution gives states — not the federal government — authority over the “times, places and manner” of federal elections, said USA Today. Trump’s proposal is “outlandishly illegal,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the Senate floor.

An electoral power grab?

Trump’s push to nationalize elections is a “radical power grab,” said Steve Benen at MS Now. Even if the president’s “bonkers conspiracy theories” were true, the Constitution’s requirements make it difficult for Republicans to “simply launch an electoral power-grab at will.” Trump has proven interested in testing legal limits, however, and has even “floated the idea of canceling future U.S. elections.” Americans concerned about voting rights “don’t have the luxury of simply shrugging with indifference at the president’s latest nonsense.”

Nationalizing elections would be both politically and legally “fraught,” Chris Cillizza said in his So What newsletter. The president “can bluster,” and may even make a serious attempt to take control of this year’s midterm elections. Democrats should take it seriously, but not panic: The constraints on his authority are “too tight.”

Democrats are already making plans, said Lauren Egan at The Bulwark. Party leaders expect that the “worse Trump’s polling gets, the more aggressively he will look for ways to interfere with the elections.” The White House is already demanding rolls from states to build a voter database, and Democrats are countering with lawsuits and other legal efforts to block federal intrusion. America’s founders deliberately put elections in state hands, said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, per the Bulwark. They “placed the people closest to the voters, local and state election officials, in charge of elections” to ward off a tyrannical overreach.

Making elections secure

Elected Republicans may not go along with Trump, said The Washington Examiner. “I’m not in favor of federalizing elections,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to reporters. Some GOP state election officials could also resist, said The New York Times. It is “problematic” to claim that those officials are “not doing our jobs and the federal government has to do it for us,” said Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson at a conference last week.

Others do see a federal role. “Democracy suffers” when voters lose confidence in election fairness, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at The Wall Street Journal. Congress can and should require voters to use a Real ID to cast a ballot. Voting rights and election security should not be “competing values.” A federal Real ID requirement would make elections “safe, secure and worthy of public trust.”

“Melania Trump – born Melanija Knavs – has led an undeniably fascinating life,” said Nick Hilton in The Independent. Raised in a housing complex in what is now Slovenia, she started modelling in her teens, and in the 1990s landed up in the US, where she eventually met Donald Trump.

Hers is “an aspirational story” of how “a little girl with nothing but a perfect jawline” conquered America; but oddly, none of these biographical details make it into Amazon’s documentary about her, which was released last week. Instead, “Melania” – for which the First Lady was paid a reported $28 million (£20 million) – focuses on the 20 days leading up to Trump’s inauguration last year. We learn next to nothing about Melania herself; she is mainly shown “preening and scowling”, her face “a mask of pure nothingness”.

‘Designer taxidermy’

There are some revelations, said Janice Turner in The Times: that Melania “hires only people ‘who serve my veeesion’”, that she takes crockery very seriously; and that she finds black and white stuff “classy”.

This is less a documentary than an “elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch”, said Xan Brooks in The Guardian. Deadly, dispiriting and “spectacularly unrevealing”, it’s “one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality”.

Grovelling billionaires

Well, I was quite interested by how much “crawling” the Trumps’ flunkies do, said Robert Hutton in The Critic. At one point, an aide tells Donald that there will be “the standard presidential parade” before hastily correcting himself: “I shouldn’t say standard. It’s a little bit bigger and a little bit better.”

Then there are the billionaires we see grovelling to the president: how sad, that with all that money, they still have to abase themselves. Which brings us round to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who forked out $40 million (£29 million) for the film, the most ever paid for a documentary, and then spent a further $35 million (£25 million) marketing it. Even the richest have things to fear from its subject’s husband. It is this, not the film’s content, that makes it “an important document in the decline of American public life”.

The film has played to largely empty cinemas, but it does have one fan, said Chas Danner in New York Magazine. I loved it, said Trump on Truth Social. “Check it out – A MUST SEE!”

Sex doesn’t sell like it used to. That was the major takeaway from the latest Teens & Screens survey from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), looking into the viewing habits of 10- to 24-year-olds in the US.

While it is hardly surprising that this age group rarely watch films or shows on an actual television, instead preferring to consume content in short clips on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, the “stat that made Hollywood blink” concerns sex on screen, said Audrey Weisburd in Paste Magazine.

UCLA found that 48% of its 1,500 respondents think there is too much sex in film and television, with more than 60% of 14- to 24-year-olds saying they want romances depicted as “more about friendship than sex”.

This fits the stereotype of a generation that’s having less sex than their parents, and which is often labelled as prudish and puritanical. In 2024, 24% of US 18- to 29-year-olds had not had sex in the past year, according to the General Social Survey, a figure that “had doubled” since 2010, said New Scientist. Yet the stats don’t tell the whole story.

‘Movement towards authenticity’

Take the current Gen Z obsession with shows such as “Heated Rivalry”, “Tell Me Lies” and “Bridgerton”.

These are “hot, filled with sex scenes, body parts and forbidden and fiery romantic interactions” but have still “captivated young viewers”, said USA Today.

For Gen Zs who are not engaging in sex themselves but are seeking out emotional validation and connection, these stories “might almost fill that void”, said Chicago health educator Virginia Gramarosso.

What “feels unique” about “Heated Rivalry”, a show about two male ice hockey players on opposing teams having a decade-long affair, “is that it lets its sex scenes play out, sometimes sticking with its characters nearly from the beginning of their encounter until the end in real time”, said Faith Hill in The Atlantic.

The key here is authenticity. The American actress and director Olivia Wilde touched on this recently when promoting her film “I Want Your Sex”, in which she plays an artist who turns her young male assistant into her sex slave.

“The way that sex has been portrayed in film for a long time hasn’t been particularly realistic” so “there’s been this movement now towards authenticity”.

‘A new grammar of intimacy’

Especially in an era where online porn is more accessible than ever, “gone are the days when gratuitous sex would satiate an audience”, said Olivia Petter in The Times. “People want to see themselves represented on screen and this perhaps applies to sexual content now more than ever.”

When it comes to Gen Z, perhaps “they have a point”, said Zoe Strimpel in The Telegraph. “Slick commercial sex scenes” tend to be “either too perfect, or too imperfect” and the options are “just not good enough” for this generation, which has “the most complex array of demands and expectations the world has ever seen”.

In the end, this “may be less about prudishness than dissonance and fatigue”, said Paste Magazine. Gen Z is “the most digitally sexualised generation in history, raised on algorithmic thirst, parasocial infatuation, and the casual surveillance of bodies online”.

Yet “instead of translating that saturation into appetite, it’s produced a kind of sensory burnout”. What they are seeking instead, “consciously or not, is a new grammar of intimacy”.

The value of the U.S. dollar has been steadily declining, but one person who doesn’t seem worried is President Donald Trump. On the contrary, he has been lauding the dollar’s fall as a positive change for the American economy. “I think it’s great,” Trump said to reporters last week. The president has repeatedly stated that a declining dollar is good for U.S. businesses. But with the dollar recently hitting a value of 95.56, a four-year low, some economists are sounding warning bells.

‘Interferes with his priorities’

Trump’s main argument is that having a weaker dollar breeds more competition among American businesses, and in his view, a “strong dollar, like higher interest rates, interferes with his priorities: faster growth, reshored manufacturing and a smaller trade deficit,” said The Wall Street Journal. This is an idea Trump has had since his first term. “I think our dollar is getting too strong,” and “that’s hurting — that will hurt ultimately,” Trump told the Journal in 2017.

A weaker dollar could provide “near-term benefits to the U.S. economy,” as a “lower currency also boosts exports, without the uncertainty and distortions that tariffs entail,” said the Journal. This occurs even as the weakening currency, combined with Trump’s sweeping tariffs, can “discourage imports.” Historically, Trump has also felt that the dollar “appreciated when the U.S. economy outperformed.”

Some seem to be fine with this economic stance, as trading floors are “abuzz with talk of the ‘debasement trade,’ a broad term for bets on the deterioration of American financial exceptionalism,” said The Economist. Another reason some economists aren’t panicking is that the dollar is “not actually all that weak,” as its real exchange rate (which accounts for inflation discrepancies between countries) was, in 2025, “13% above its average of the past 30 years.”

‘Signifies diminished confidence’

Trump may not have a problem with a weakened dollar, but most economists feel differently. A weak dollar is “not the weather, it’s the barometer,” said Steve Englander, a researcher at U.K. bank Standard Chartered, to CNBC. A weaker currency “reflects the fact that something’s going wrong, either domestically or internationally, and the currency weakness is sort of an escape valve.” Having a weak dollar also “signifies diminished confidence in the U.S. as foreign investors grow wary over the country’s fiscal outlook,” said CNBC.

Since the dollar has been doing well for a long time, many people might be “unable to process the scenario of a weakening dollar and a strong U.S. economy,” said Stephen Jen, founder of asset management group Eurizon SLJ Capital, to Bloomberg. If the dollar’s slide continues, it could mark the “beginning of the next leg lower in the dollar, and many may not be prepared for it.”

And the dollar’s fall has largely been Trump’s own doing, as it has been “driven, in part, by concerns about Trump’s unpredictable, and often unorthodox, approach to economic policy,” said NPR. Having a weaker dollar can also make items overseas more expensive, a “major issue given that the U.S. has traditionally imported more from abroad than it exports.” As the dollar continues to drop, alternative assets like gold, which has risen nearly 8% year to date, are “outperforming as a safe haven for investors,” said Fortune.

Syria is at a “major turning point”, said Noura Doukhi in L’Orient-Le Jour (Beirut). When the current president Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former leader of the Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), ousted the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 after 13 years of civil war, he inherited a country splintered into different spheres of control. The most formidable of these was Syrian Kurdistan, known as Rojava – a semi-autonomous territory in the northeast run for more than a decade by Kurdish-led groups.

But, in one of his “biggest strategic victories” since Assad’s fall, Sharaa has now captured most of the region. Following a lightning offensive by Damascus, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed militia that helped to defeat Islamic State, had little choice but to sign a 14-point deal on 18 January. It required them to cede control of the majority- Arab Raqqa and Deir al-Zour provinces, including their lucrative oil and gas fields. The SDF must also disband.

Reversal of fortune

It’s a huge blow for the long-oppressed Kurds, Syria’s largest ethnic minority, who thought “their fortunes had been transformed”, said Matt Broomfield on UnHerd (London). Their “secular, feminist, and nominally direct-democratic” self-rule began in 2012, when Assad’s troops withdrew from Rojava’s heartlands. After seizing Baghuz, Isis’s last stronghold in 2019, the SDF’s territory was the size of Lebanon, stretching from the borders of Turkey and Iraq to the River Euphrates. Even HTS, during its victorious campaign against Assad, couldn’t dislodge them.

Now their dreams of autonomy are over. It took just two weeks for SDF control to unravel, as the government exploited local anger over Kurdish rule in Arab-majority Raqqa and Deir al-Zour. And the SDF’s power is restricted to its strongholds in the northeast and “enclaves” in Kurdish-dominated cities.

The US and its allies look like they’re guilty of “another blatant act of perfidy” against the Kurds, said Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph (London). The West first vowed to create a Kurdish homeland after the end of the First World War; it never materialised. Now Syria’s Kurds, the defeaters of Isis, have also been betrayed. The US has “effectively signalled an end” to military support for the SDF, said Al Arabiya (Riyadh). Tom Barrack, the US envoy to Syria, stated last week that the Kurdish force’s anti-Isis role had “largely expired”, and that Damascus was now best placed to enforce security.

True colours

There are already concerns that, as a result, Isis could now “rebound and reorganise”, said Paul Iddon in Forbes (Jersey City). Under the 18 January agreement, Sharaa’s forces are in theory meant to govern many of the jails and camps holding Isis fighters and their families in northeastern Syria. But in the recent chaos, hundreds of militants escaped from al-Shaddadi prison; some also reportedly fled al-Hol, a remote desert camp whose detainees include some 20,000 people with family ties to Isis. Both the SDF and the government have blamed the other side for the escapes.

Perhaps Sharaa is now showing his true colours, said Tanya Goudsouzian in Le Monde Diplomatique (Paris). His campaign against the Kurds belies his promise to respect all Syria’s ethnic minorities. “Despite his clipped beard and British suits”, his troops’ actions “seem more in line with their roots in the terrorist group HTS than those of a new nation committed to democratic oversight and governance”.

Even if Sharaa’s promises are well-intentioned, it’s not clear that he’s got full control over “his patchwork army”, said Christian Vooren in Die Zeit (Hamburg). His forces committed massacres against the Alawites on the coast in March, and there was violence in the Druze-majority Suweida province in the south last summer. What happens next with the Kurds in the northeast is “perhaps the greatest” test of all for the new Syria. At the moment, “the ceasefire is fragile and the situation remains unclear”.

In the final days of his presidency, Richard Nixon “came unglued”, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. He reportedly became irrational and obsessive, making wild suggestions and rambling about his past triumphs. His son-in-law and adviser Ed Cox recalled that Nixon would wander the halls of the White House “talking to pictures of former presidents”.

Alas, it seems Donald Trump has reached similar depths of “self-destructive mania”. Witness his recent unhinged letter to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, in which Trump implied that he was entitled to seize Greenland owing to Norway’s failure to award him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Where to begin? Norway’s government doesn’t choose the winner of the prize. Nor does it own Greenland. And Trump hasn’t, as he insisted, “stopped 8 Wars PLUS”, or anything close. “We have three years left with a mad king. It does not feel sustainable.”

‘Manic performance art’

“Trump has the world’s most consequential case of untreated logorrhea,” said Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker. According to a new study, in this first year of his second term he has spoken 1,977,609 words in presidential appearances – 145% more than in the first year of his first term.

In his speech in Davos last week, he rambled on for a full hour and a half. In the course of his address he, among other things, explained that only “stupid people” buy wind turbines, and admitted that he had decided to raise tariffs on Switzerland because its prime minister – “a woman” – had “rubbed me the wrong way”. He also kept confusing Iceland and Greenland. Americans are somewhat inured to Trump’s “manic performance art”, but the stunned reaction of Europeans should be a wake-up call. Many there were openly asking: has this man lost his mind? Is he still capable of running the US?

‘Nuttier than a Payday candy bar’

In “a saner, better world”, Trump’s cabinet officials would be discussing invoking the 25th Amendment, said Jim Geraghty in National Review. But of course none of them would dare suggest he was unfit to discharge his powers. Nor did President Biden’s colleagues when he started zoning out in meetings and forgot the name of his defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, referring to him in an interview simply as “the black man”.

“After one president who went senile in office and another who is nuttier than a Payday candy bar, we can only conclude that the 25th Amendment of the Constitution is there for decoration.”

Alex Pretti was legally carrying a handgun when federal immigration agents shot him to death in Minneapolis. Does that make him culpable for his own death? White House officials have tried to make that case. “You can’t walk in with guns” when protesting the government, President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday. That has angered gun rights organizations that are usually allied with the GOP.

The Trump administration is facing a “Second Amendment backlash” after Trump and other officials suggested Pretti should not have possessed a gun while monitoring ICE activity, said ABC News. No peaceful protester “shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. That produced pushback from Republican allies. The Constitution “protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting,” said Gun Owners of America. Republicans now find themselves in a “tough spot” on gun rights as a result, said Axios, and some GOP officials are pushing back against the president. “Carrying a firearm is not a death sentence,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).

Having it both ways?

The administration “wants to have it both ways,” said Stephen Gutowski at MS NOW. The White House evidently believes highlighting Pretti’s gun possession gives officials the “best chance of justifying his killing to the public,” even though Trump previously called himself the “best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.” Gun owners have hesitated to call out Trump because he has “delivered on several of their policy preferences.” They will not vote Democrat in this year’s midterms, but Trump’s comments “may be sapping their motivation” to show up for Republicans in November.

“Legally, Alex Pretti was within his rights to have his gun on his person,” said the National Review editorial board. But he broke the “primary rule” of prudence, choosing to arm himself “before knowingly entering a highly charged political situation” in which he expected to “interact antagonistically” with law enforcement. That is “foolish, even if it is permissible” legally. Every concealed carry class teaches gun owners to “stay away from danger, avoid arguments and route around crowds and mobs.”

A prove-it moment

The Trump administration’s rhetoric in the Pretti case is “wholly at odds” with a Republican Party that has “routinely argued that all law-abiding Americans should be able to arm themselves, including in public spaces,” said Dan Merica and Matthew Choi at The Washington Post. This is a “watershed moment” for gun rights activists and the politicians who have “benefitted from their support,” and a “prove-it moment” for a movement to decide whether its ideals or allies are more important.

Guns are not the only issue raising intra-conservative tensions. The mass deployment of ICE and Border Patrol agents to Minneapolis “would seem like the definition of big-government action” that GOP officials have traditionally opposed, Richard Fausset said at The New York Times. Alex Pretti’s killing thus poses a still-unresolved question for the right: “Who’s a conservative, really?”

The “distractions of Donald Trump and Davos” proved an “opportune” moment for France’s state-owned rail operator SNCF to “slip out some news”, said Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator. “Welcome to ‘Optimum’, the new and exclusive area of the train where kids are not welcome.”

Promising a “calm journey that’s ideal for working or relaxing”, the new adults-only first-class carriage on weekday high-speed trains in and out of Paris will be out of bounds for children under 12. And to ensure “little Gallic brats” don’t disrupt the quiet, “even briefly”, the carriage will be “located at the end of the train to prevent other passengers from walking through the Optimum-dedicated area”.

‘Shocking’ and ‘sick’

If the SNCF thought this would pass under the radar, “they were mistaken”, said Mortimer in The Spectator. “In a rare moment of unity”, French MPs of all political stripes have expressed “outrage” at the child ban.

“It’s shocking,” Sarah El Haïry, France’s high commissioner for children, said on BFM. “Travelling with children is not a problem to be fixed, but a reality to be supported.” The left-wing MP François Ruffin said the ban showed French society is “sick”, while former interior minister and president of The Republicans party, Bruno Retailleau, said it was “everything France must not become”.

Referencing France’s plummeting birth rate – now at its lowest level since 1918 – the National Assembly MEP Marion Maréchal said that, for a country “in need of children”, the SNCF’s “anti-family message” was “deplorable”.

The arrival of the child-free train carriage only adds to France’s ongoing debate about adult-only spaces, said The Guardian. Last year, Laurence Rossignol, a socialist senator, called for a curb on the rising number of child-free hotels and holiday resorts. “We can’t organise society by separating children off from ourselves in the way some establishments don’t take dogs,” she said. “Children aren’t troublesome pets.”

‘Right to tantrum-free spaces’

I think the child-free carriage is a “magnificent idea”, said Fiona McIntosh in The Independent. “Imagine being able to read your book without the need for noise-cancelling headphones? Or drink your coffee, rather than wear it, because some child has kicked the back of your seat?” I don’t dislike children but, now my daughters have grown up, I think I have “earned the right to tantrum-free spaces”. And it isn’t at all surprising that the French “would come up” with this idea: their attitude to young children is far “stricter than our laissez-faire, Anglo Saxon approach”.

It’s actually quite a reasonable proposition: the Optimum carriage is only available Monday to Friday during “peak business travel” on just 8% of the SNCF’s express trains. “Surely this segregation is a win-win for everyone?” Parents don’t have the “stress of trying to contain a toddler in a carriage full of accountants tapping away on their spreadsheets”, and their kids can still go “free range in the other 92% of the train”. Having child-free spaces “is not discrimination; it’s making travel a more comfortable experience for everyone”.

“This debate is not new,” said The Independent’s Helen Coffey. Everything from adults-only zones on planes to child-free weddings sparks controversy online. While I agree that kids can be a “total vibe killer”, part of being an adult is realising that “the world doesn’t actually revolve around you” and learning to “make compromises”, including rubbing along with those you don’t like.

Sadly, hostility towards children in public places “is growing”, said Rachel Connelly in The Guardian. Quite often, I see people “tutting or muttering” when a parent arrives with a child in a restaurant or cafe. “God forbid if the baby starts to cry, as babies do.” Making public spaces “absent of children seems to speak to a fantasy of a world where the lives we live are totally detached from the lives of the people around us” – when, of course, they aren’t. Just imagine “if this fantasy were reality: our lives would be very small and boring”.

A “rupture” in the world order — this declaration from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney last week was more than a criticism of President Donald Trump’s recent elbow-throwing on the global stage. To many observers, it was a eulogy for the age of American preeminence.

The world is “witnessing the self-immolation of a superpower” via Trump’s trade wars and territorial aggressiveness, said Garrett M. Graff at Wired. “The old order is not coming back,” Carney said in Switzerland. That speech, along with America’s European allies drawing a red line against Trump’s designs on Greenland, will likely “someday be seen as heralding the official end” of the American-led world order that has been in place since the end of World War II, said Graff.

It’s rare to see a nation “so thoroughly set about consciously dismantling its core sources of national strength and influence” as the U.S. president has by alienating America’s longtime friends over Greenland, said Graff. “This is the end of the world as we have known it for 80 years.”

Dismantling the West?

Trump is abandoning the “traditional foundations of U.S. influence,” said Joschka Fischer, the former German vice chancellor, at Project Syndicate. The U.S. ended WWII as the “principal victor in both the European and Pacific theaters,” then went on to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War. But now, European countries that have been “friends and allies for eight decades” are being portrayed as “adversaries” by the White House. As a result, Trump has “effectively dismantled the transatlantic West.”

“It’s over,” said David French at The New York Times. Carney’s assertion that the American order has been ruptured might “seem bracing and perhaps even premature,” but it's correct. Europe and Canada have little choice but to back away from American leadership and band together for security and defense arrangements. Trumpists may think “we’ll no longer be exploited by freeloading allies,” but it raises the question: “How does engineering enmity with some of the most prosperous nations in the world guarantee American prosperity?”

The president is “catalyzing a new world order,” said Noah Rothman at the National Review. The way he’s doing so is damaging to American interests and “diminishing our own influence” over what comes next. Canada just struck a new trade deal with China, showing “Carney is serious” about reorienting his country away from American influence. “Perhaps other NATO members will follow his lead.”

Looking ahead, and away

The U.S. remains “globally influential and will continue to matter,” said Timothy Garton Ash and his colleagues at the European Council on Foreign Relations. But few observers expect the U.S. to “gain in influence” going forward, and world leaders are looking ahead and away from American leadership. It’s a “wicked challenge” for Europe to wean itself from U.S. power, John Thornhill said at the Financial Times, but there’s no choice. “Thanks, Donald, Europe will take it from here.”

When Prue Leith announced she was leaving the “Great British Bake Off” – “I’m 86 for goodness sake” – all eyes turned to the possible candidates to be Paul Hollywood’s fellow judge for the 17th season of the hit TV show.

The speculation was ended today with confirmation that Nigella Lawson is to take over from Leith. She rose to fame with her 1998 book “How to Eat” and followed that with her first TV cooking show, “Nigella Bites”, two years later. Since then Lawson has been a mainstay on British screens and could be just what “Bake Off” needs to reverse its flagging fortunes.

‘Guaranteed ratings booster’

The prospect of Lawson joining the programme was “delicious”, and perhaps even the “most fabulous thing to happen to food television like, ever?!”, said Hannah Evans in The Times.

Her energy and appeal make Lawson “any production company’s fantasy”. She is the “spoon-licking, finger-in-the-cream cook who made food sexy”, and is someone who “relishes stirring the pot”. For a show that already relies on winks and witty wordplay, Lawson will certainly bring a “whole new level of eye-twinkling double entendres and insinuations”.

Welcoming TV’s “sauciest chef” is exactly what the Channel 4 format needs, said The Telegraph. The chef turned social media personality is a “guaranteed ratings-booster” and a “wise pick”. No other TV chef has been able to “entrance the British public quite like Lawson”. Not even a cocaine scandal and tumultuous tabloid coverage of her relationship with businessman Charles Saatchi have detracted from her status as a “bona fide” national treasure.

Despite a casual, “schoolmarmish air”, her “incredible” recipes are backed up with serious pedigree both as a chef and on-screen presenter. To date, she has sold 8 million cookbooks worldwide and hosted 10 cooking programmes in the UK – not to mention recent ventures on MasterChef Australia – leaving her with an estimated net worth of £14 million. It’s hard to argue that Lawson isn’t a good addition to revamp the format: “Channel 4 might just have a ratings hit on its hands again”.

Lawson is the “only woman for the job” to turn around a show that has become “slightly long in the tooth over the last half decade or so”, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. She is “spectacularly British” and exudes a “familiarity” that will “reassure existing viewers” and bring an “international first-name recognition that might even end up growing the audience”. Her appointment is “the best possible call for a series that – if we’re honest – has lost its way”.

‘Destined for the knacker’s yard’

Not everyone is pleased with Channel 4’s decision. It’s “the wrong one”, said Asyia Iftikhar in Metro. For me, she will “feel out of place in the tent”. A better choice would have been former “Bake Off” winner Nadiya Hussain. She already has experience as a guest judge on the junior version of the competition and could have tapped into a “delightful mentor-protege dynamic” with Hollywood. It would have been a “win-win” and it is “wild” that she was not considered.

Lawson has enjoyed so much success as a solo presenter with her own projects, so it will be interesting to see how she fares in this format, said Adam White in The Independent. Her “glam, worldly and cosmopolitan” poshness will surely “clash with the cosy, jolly-hockey-sticks middle-Englishness of ‘Bake Off’”. Lawson’s shows are “reliably funny and warm and dazzling”, and sharing her brand with “Bake Off” could end up being mutually detrimental.

Lawson comes with a few reservations. Though her success is undeniable, her approach to baking is “typically simple”, said The Telegraph, and she is by no means a “classically trained pastry chef” like Leith or original judge Mary Berry. There are doubts “whether she could successfully complete even half of the challenges ‘Bake Off’s competitors take on”.

Then there’s the task of hosting itself. Used to presenting solo, she has “yet to prove herself as a team player” and share the limelight with co-hosts or contestants on this scale. Finding an on-screen balance is integral to the show, and there is no knowing, at least for now, if her “star power” will “translate” to “chemistry alongside veteran judge” Hollywood.

However, despite Lawson’s appointment, the whole GBBO format might already be a lost cause, said The Guardian. The show is caught in a doomed bind, risking becoming “stale” if it continues the “safe old formula that made it popular in the first place”. But if it ramps up the difficulty, it “risks alienating the home baker with bewildering levels of conceptual avant-garde science”.

The show has already generated a litany of spin-offs, with American, celebrity and junior offshoots. Add in a revolving door of presenters – think Sandi Toksvig, Matt Lucas, Alison Hammond, Noel Fielding, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins – and it becomes clear that the series is “much closer to its end than its beginning” and “destined for the knacker’s yard. But if it’s going to go out, it deserves to go out as strongly as possible.”

When Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary ruled out installing SpaceX’s Starlink internet in the company’s planes – claiming the cost of installing the aerial antennas was unaffordable – he triggered a “bizarre feud”, said Peter Campbell in the FT. It culminated in a suggestion from Elon Musk that he might buy the Irish carrier, if only to fire its “utter idiot” chief executive.

The spat between two of the most provocative business leaders quickly went viral. While O’Leary dismissed X/Twitter as a “cesspit” and claimed Musk knew “zero” about planes, Musk retorted with a poll titled “Buy Ryanair and restore Ryan as their rightful ruler” (its founder Tony Ryan died in 2007).

The Ryanair chief argues the antennas would result in a “2% fuel drag”, said Julia Kollewe in The Guardian – adding $200-$250 million per year to the company’s $5 billion annual fuel bill, which he couldn’t recoup. While a buyout may look like “idle talk”, Musk “has followed through on such threats before” – as Twitter discovered in 2022.

Ryanair’s shares have barely budged, suggesting investors aren’t taking the idea seriously, said Peter Campbell. Raising Ryanair’s $35 billion market value would be a stretch even for Musk. He’d also have to take on Brussels. Under EU rules, airlines based in the bloc must be majority owned by European nationals.

“Once scorned by purists as the fake Rolexes of the reading world”, audiobooks are booming, said Nilanjana Roy in the Financial Times. As the industry continues to thrive, the definition of what it means to be a reader is shifting. But does listening to a book instead of poring over its pages count as reading?

Queen Camilla certainly thinks so. During a visit this week to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh to launch a reading initiative, she was presented with a special edition of The Beano comic. In it, her cartoon character tells Dennis and his dog Gnasher: “Go all in for the National Year of Reading, Dennis! Comics and audiobooks count too!”

Pride and snobbery

Income from audiobooks generated by UK publishers rose by 31% in 2023–24, reaching a record £268 million, according to figures from the Publishers Association.

But many people don’t think audiobooks “qualify” as proper reading, said Brian Bannon, chief librarian at the New York Public Library, in The New York Times. “There is a pride – even a snobbishness – to being well read.” Telling someone that you have listened to a book instead of reading the physical copy often “comes out sounding like an apology”. In fact, an NPR-Ipsos poll conducted last year found that 41% of American adults believe “listening to audiobooks is not a form of reading”.

Our minds sometimes “wander” when we’re reading or listening, David Daniel, a psychology professor at James Madison University in Virginia, told Time. Snapping out of these “little mental sojourns” and finding your place again in the text isn’t as easy when you’re listening to a recording, especially when you are “grappling” with a complex piece of writing. “Turning the page of a book also gives you a slight break”, creating a “space for your brain to store or savour the information you’re absorbing”.

“There’s no doubt reading is good for us,” said Helen Thomson in New Scientist. An array of studies tie “good literacy in childhood with physical and mental health – and even longer life”.

The evidence for audiobooks is “thinner, but reassuring”. Most studies find “comprehension is broadly similar regardless of whether you’re reading or listening to a book”. However, there are some “subtle differences”: a meta-analysis of 46 studies found reading had “the slight edge” when it comes to “making inferences about a text – such as interpreting a character’s feelings”.

How you listen can also impact cognition. “Listening to audiobooks isn’t necessarily detrimental,” said Janet Geipel, an assistant professor at the University of Exeter. What can be problematic is the way attention is managed: when you are concentrating, listening can be “just as effective as reading”, but if you try to “multitask” your “depth of processing may be lower than when you sit down and read without distraction”.

‘Hugely positive’

“Audiobooks were my lifesaver,” said Miranda Larbi in Stylist. They turned out to be a “gateway for physical books – a key for unlocking a world that felt totally inaccessible”. “Gloomy” news coverage often focuses on how fewer children are finding pleasure in reading, so I found the National Literacy Trust’s new report, that more than 40% of children are using audiobooks to read, “hugely positive”.

The “content” is more important than the “medium” when it comes to reading, Debbie Hicks, creative director of the Reading Agency, told The Guardian. And audiobooks can be a great way to appeal to those who are “less inclined to read”, like men. It’s crucial we “reframe what it means to be a reader”, moving past the “traditional hierarchical values” that still put physical books at the top.

To suggest that reading books is the “only kind of reading that counts” does a “disservice” to the “many dyslexic or visually challenged booklovers among us”, said Roy in the Financial Times. Audiobooks should be seen as a “parallel way to read”, not dismissed as inferior.

The “destigmatising” of audiobooks could offer a “path to a more nuanced way of thinking about literacy”, said Bannon in The New York Times. “However we read – by eye, by ear or both – it all counts. We need more readers – however they get there.”

Even before Minnesota emerged as the latest flashpoint in the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, the president’s deployment of thousands of Department of Homeland Security agents to predominantly blue states was already one of this White House’s most controversial domestic planks. In the wake of the shooting death of Renee Good and the government’s enthusiastic claims of “absolute immunity” for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, some in Washington have begun moving to address what many critics contend is an agency acting far beyond its mandate. As deportation operations continue to expand, so too does the long-simmering debate over how to address the president’s preferred domestic force.

Abolish ICE?

In a shift from the sentiment during Trump’s first term, it’s “not just progressives taking up the ‘defund ICE’ banner,” said Axios. Now, the notion of significantly reining in Trump’s immigration actions is “proliferating even among the more moderate and establishment wings of the party.” And not only for Democrats, either. “Even” commentator Bill Kristol, the “erstwhile Republican turned Trump critic,” had a simple, straightforward message,” said The Atlantic: “‘Abolish ICE.’” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently televised statement in “support of abolishing ICE” has also been seen as “revitalizing” the abolitionist rhetoric that became “popular in progressive discourse” and which has “gained steam” after Good’s death, said Bloomberg.

There are signs that the abolish ICE movement may be gaining traction among the broader public, as well. A YouGov poll taken in the days following Good’s death showed that 46% of respondents supported abolishing the agency, while 43% opposed. The debate over funding ICE and DHS is not merely rhetorical, either. Good’s death “proved that ICE is out of control and beyond reform,” said Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) in a recent statement introducing his “Abolish ICE Act,” which would dismantle the agency within 90 days of its passage.

As funding deadlines approach, some Democrats have “eyed negotiations over the yearly Homeland Security budget as a leverage point to incorporate their demands,” said the Los Angeles Times. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (N.Y.) opposition to the current DHS funding package before Congress comes as Democrats “both inside and outside of Congress” are “lining up” against a bill that they feel “isn’t nearly sufficient to constrain ICE,” said Axios.

‘Reform and retrain’

While support for abolishing ICE has grown, some Democratic lawmakers have nevertheless opted for a more incremental approach, floating policy recommendations such as an “end to qualified immunity” and “withholding support for an appropriations package” that would include more funding for the Department of Homeland Security, said The Hill. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) has proposed a measure to “redirect nearly $75 billion in ICE funding from the GOP’s 2025 megabill rather than defund the agency,” said Semafor. The redirected funds would instead be applied to Justice Assistant Grant programs and the DOJ’s COPS hiring program. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has likewise sponsored several bills aimed at curbing (but not shuttering) ICE operations, including through “tougher hiring and training standards,” and mandated body cameras, said Newsweek.

The slogan “Abolish ICE” is not “some proxy for more humane immigration enforcement,” or a call to “change ICE’s culture to adhere to due process, or to impose accountability on rogue officers,” said centrist think tank Searchlight in a memo to Democratic Party figures obtained by The Bulwark. “Itʼs advocating for an extreme.” Instead, Democrats should “adopt an alternative approach toward ICE,” the memo said. Searchlight has dubbed the sentiment “Reform and Retrain.” The fear, said The Atlantic, is that the “maximalist demand” of full abolition “plays directly into Republicans’ hands” by casting Democrats as “unserious about immigration.”

At the same time, a “handful of GOP lawmakers are showing an openness” to calls for refining ICE’s operations, said Politico, even if they’re “not going so far” as to condemn the administration’s immigration enforcement “outright.” There are also “influential voices in Trump’s coalition” who have “become critical of how ICE is operating,” including podcaster Joe Rogan. “You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching people up,” Rogan said in a recent podcast episode. “Are we really gonna be the Gestapo?”

President Donald Trump has never made a secret of his disdain for NATO. But his insistence that the United States take possession of Greenland from Denmark is poised to kill the alliance outright.

Trump’s insistence on obtaining Greenland has longtime U.S. allies “outraged,” and his “escalating aggression” is “thrusting NATO into crisis,” said Axios. Europe’s NATO members “must make it clear that the limit has been reached,” said German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil to reporters on Monday. His comment came after a letter from Trump to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre was made public, doubling down on the president’s demands. Global security is impossible “unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland,” Trump said.

That leaves NATO facing its “worst-ever crisis,” said CNN’s Stephen Collinson. World peace is threatened by the potential “fracturing of its most powerful military alliance.”

Crisis could damage US security

“The western order we once knew is history,” said Timothy Garton Ash at The Guardian. That is true even if Trump gives up his threats to possibly take Greenland by force. His overall approach to geopolitics is “closer to that of Putin than it is to that of any U.S. president since 1945.” Europeans would do well not to worry about “existing structures and alliances” and instead “seek a wider range of partners, pragmatically, from issue to issue.” That’s because it is clear that Trump is “going to get more extreme and unpredictable.”

Trump’s “swaggering campaign” to obtain Greenland is creating a crisis that “could damage American security for decades,” said David Ignatius at The Washington Post. The Arctic is strategically important, but the pressure campaign is unnecessary: The U.S. “already has a military base in Pituffik” where it has permission to “add an unlimited number of troops.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has warned that the U.S. effort could wreck NATO. “Could the president really be so reckless that he would risk undoing America’s strongest alliance?”

The controversy has “added to existing strains” within NATO, said the National Review editorial board. Trump is right to want to enhance American security in the region. The White House approach is “crass, clumsy and counterproductive.” NATO has “served this country so well” for many years. It would be easy to take Greenland by force, but the cost “militarily, economically and politically” would be ruinous.

Can a deal be done?

There is still a chance a deal can be made that “leaves NATO and the transatlantic alliance intact” despite the rising tensions, said Daniel Fried at Atlantic Council. Pressure from both Congress and European allies will be needed, but American security in the Arctic will be “better achieved by working with Denmark and NATO allies, not against them.”

Just 17% of Americans support taking Greenland, said Reuters, and “substantial majorities” of both Democrats and Republicans say they oppose using the military to make it happen. Trump may be escalating tensions, but the “appetite for conflict” is low among American voters.

The “Game of Thrones” spin-off “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” will “either charm or repulse”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times.

Based on the three George R.R. Martin novellas known as “The Tales of Dunk and Egg”, the prequel takes place around 90 years before the events of “Game of Thrones”, but 72 years after “House of the Dragon”.

Some critics have already “balked” at the “phlegm, vomit and excrement” on display. “Take it in the right spirit, though, and it adds to the raucous, carnival-esque feel. It has been a long time since visiting Westeros has been so enjoyable.”

‘Heartwarming’ tale

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is a “drastic switch-up in scale”, said Alison Herman on Variety. While the first two Martin television adaptations so far chart the “epic struggles for the fate of Westeros”, the latest spin-off is set during “a single tournament over just a few days”. And the action takes place from a “single point-of-view character: the titular Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey), a young wandering warrior on a quest to prove himself”.

This “heartwarming” tale is the “‘Game of Thrones’ we all need now”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. At the start of the show “Dunk” sets off for the jousting tournament at Ashford Meadow, where he hopes to make a name for himself. During one of his early “pit stops” at a tavern he meets the “bald-headed, ethereal, rovingly intelligent child Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell)”, who offers to be his squire. Together, the “underdog and the underpuppy” embark on a journey through the “back roads of Westeros”.

I thought it was a “total delight from start to finish”, said Neil Armstrong on BBC Culture. “We haven’t had this much fun in Westeros for a long time – maybe ever.” Dunk and Egg’s “odd-couple relationship, occasionally antagonistic but mostly affectionate” is the “beating heart” of the show. “And it’s very funny.” The writers bring a “lightness of touch” to the humour, effortlessly blending droll remarks with “almost Monty Pythonesque absurdity”. It’s a “nailed-on winner”.

‘Too meagre to love’

Yes, the series reveals a more “playful” side to Westeros, said Judy Berman in Time. “But the show’s anaemic plot and spotty attempts at humour also raise questions about the health of the franchise.” Surely there was a more “compelling” story to mine from Martin’s bibliography? “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” might be “too benign to hate” but from what I’ve seen so far, “it is also too meagre to love”.

The show is a “loose, low-stakes oddity” that “feels like a footnote”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. There’s something about the series that “doesn’t quite work”. “It is a character piece without a sufficiently interesting character at its core.”

“Blood and guts” are still here, “because what’s Westeros if not a queasy swill of muck and bodily fluids?” said Lorraine Ali in the Los Angeles Times. But there’s an issue. Without an overarching story that “promises to go somewhere bigger”, sitting through the puke, poo and smashed skulls “isn’t all that tolerable”.

It’s "disappointing" that the show retains this “adolescent desire to shock”, said Ed Power in The Telegraph. Still, once it gets past these “childish instincts”, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” settles into a “sweet depiction of an unlikely friendship. A feel-good ‘Game of Thrones’ prequel? Scratch that one off your ‘didn’t see it coming’ list for 2026.”

A month after Australia’s social media ban for kids under 16 took effect, debates have reignited over the effectiveness of such a sweeping measure in keeping children safe online. Almost five million social media accounts belonging to Australian teenagers have been deactivated or removed, according to the government. This announcement was the first metric since the laws’ rollout, which is “being closely watched by several other countries” weighing whether the regulation can be a “blueprint for protecting children from the harms of social media, or a cautionary tale highlighting the challenges of such attempts,” said The New York Times. The measure has sparked debate among both supporters and critics of laws banning teens from social media.

‘Not for a 12-year-old to fix’

If there is anything “more ridiculous than taking a corporate failure and throwing it to the individual to solve, by self-discipline reinforced by legislation,” it is “doing so to under-16s,” Zoe Williams said at The Guardian. If a corporation is “selling radical misogyny and methods for self-harm,” that is “not for a 12-year-old to fix by turning off their phone and taking up crochet.” Nor is it for parents to fix. You could “make the case for government intervention,” but only if it had “time on its hands after tackling the problem at source.”

Young people are “unarguably the target of so much manipulative content,” but to discuss online risks without mentioning adults is “frankly perverse,” Williams said. Between “Gen X miscreants and hyper-credulous boomers,” there are “generations that pose a greater risk to, and are themselves at risk from, the informational ecosystem.” Politicians need to “work out how to deal with them.”

As long as adults cannot “tear ourselves away from Slack, Instagram or gossipy group texts,” the rules that we “socially dictate for our children will be compromised and incomplete,” Jay Caspian Kang said at The New Yorker. Envisioning a “better digital life” should not “just focus on children,” but also on “workplaces and adult social norms.” Everyone needs to “put down the phones and make efforts to move the public square away from private technology companies that incentivize cheap engagement.”

On its own, a social media ban for kids “risks being a blunt tool,” therapist Laura Gwilt said at Huff Post. Children are “developmentally curious and highly socially motivated,” and without “parallel changes in parenting practices and wider cultural norms,” bans can “simply push use underground rather than remove it.” For many young people, social media is “already embedded in how they relate to peers,” so an “abrupt removal could be difficult for some to adapt to without careful scaffolding and adult support.”

Parents can ‘only do so much’

Australia’s approach to protecting children from the dangers of social media “may seem ham-fisted to critics,” but it “sure beats what some elected leaders in D.C. are doing,” which is “slightly north of nothing,” Kathleen Parker said at The Washington Post. Given how the public feels about online safety, it is a “wonder Republicans aren’t galloping en masse to the White House for the president’s signature” on the proposed Kids Online Safety Act. Tragically, “more children may die because of their dereliction of duty — to care.”

Australia’s social media ban is “an incredibly bold, life-affirming move” that you can only imagine tech companies fought hard against, Robin Abcarian said at the Los Angeles Times. This generation of children is “unwittingly being used as lab rats for the effects of technology on the brain.” Meanwhile, despite “protestations to the contrary,” social media companies are “craven when it comes to the safety of minors.” While parents “bear some of the responsibility for out-of-control social media use of their kids,” they can “only do so much.”

“We need to be looking at this as a public health issue,” California Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) said to the Los Angeles Daily News after visiting Australia to talk to lawmakers about the ban. Youth mental health is in “an awful state right now.” Many young people “don’t feel good about themselves, so it’s yielding awful, anti-social outcomes,” he added. “We’ve got to right this ship.”