Nine weeks since the start of Donald Trump’s Middle East war, the US and Iran “have entered a precarious standoff”, said the Financial Times. Trump says he won’t lift the blockade of Iranian ports unless Iran agrees to a deal. The Islamic regime insists it won’t resume talks or reopen the Strait of Hormuz as long as the blockade is in place. This “intransigence” caused the cancellation of a second round of talks in Islamabad – and “Trump is now stuck”.

Midterms looming

He’s “trying to look relaxed”, said James Ball in The i Paper, but it’s not very convincing. The president promised voters a strong economy, with low inflation and cheap fuel; it’s becoming obvious he will deliver on none of these things. The midterm elections are looming, and there is an even more pressing deadline ahead of him: on 1 May, it will be 60 days since Trump notified Congress of his action against Iran, at which point, on paper at least, he needs congressional approval to continue military action. So far, most Republicans have not openly criticised his unpopular war. But they would prefer to avoid voting in favour of it.

Trump’s critics believe he has “worked himself into a trap”, said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal, but the situation is “sustainable”, for now. True, the war has gone on longer than hoped, but financial markets have stabilised. Trump remains popular with his base. Without taking casualties, the US navy has “consolidated a crushing blockade of Iran”; and with a third aircraft carrier in the region, military options are expanding.

The pressure on Iran is great, said Jonathan Spyer in The Spectator, but the US has made the mistake of believing its leaders think “like us”. They are not remotely pragmatic: they have “mortgaged” Iran’s economy to its project of “resistance” for decades. There appears to be no appetite now for accepting anything they “regard as surrender”.

‘This can’t go on’

Trump could cut a deal, said Paul Krugman on Substack, but it wouldn’t look like a victory. In the meantime, oil markets are pessimistic. The oil price drop that followed the 8 April ceasefire has been near reversed. The world is coping by taking oil out of storage. “Since there’s only so much oil in the tanks, this can’t go on.”

The war has removed an estimated 650 million barrels of oil from the international market, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. This could soon reach one billion. The effects are already all too visible in the Asia-Pacific region, which receives 80% of exports from the Gulf. Asian jet fuel has doubled in price. China has suspended exports of refined oil. The Indian rag trade is facing nylon and polyester shortages, because they’re made from Gulf petrochemicals. We’ve been shielded, because at the start of the war a record amount of oil was at sea, heading for Europe. It won’t last.

It’s not just Trump who has “no idea what to do”. Much of the world, including our government, is “sticking its fingers in its ears, shutting its eyes tight and loudly singing ‘la la la’”.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long held himself as a champion of nature and the outdoors, first through his decades of conservation work and now as part of President Donald Trump’s MAGA administration. At times, however, Kennedy’s fascination with the natural world has resulted in eye-opening episodes that blur for many observers the line between respectful curiosity and bizarre desecration of the very fauna he claims to revere. From ursine carcass pranks to whale-oriented road trips, these are Robert F. Kennedy’s most notable animal experiences.

Bear

The 2014 appearance of a bear carcass in Manhattan’s Central Park had remained a mystery for more than a decade until 2024, when Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, admitted in a campaign video with comedian Roseanne Barr that he was behind the bizarre episode. In the video, Kennedy claimed he’d watched a driver ahead of him hit and kill a small bear on the roadside and decided to put the carcass “in his own vehicle, intending to skin it and eat the meat,” The Associated Press said. “But the day got away from him.”

Kennedy had preexisting travel plans and “did not want to leave the dead bear in his car,” Politico said. Instead, he “planted it in the park with an old bicycle” because it would “fit a narrative about a series of bike accidents in the city.” The incident ultimately “died after a while, and it stayed dead for a decade,” Kennedy said in the clip, until The New Yorker “somehow found out about it” during the 2024 race.

Dog (?)

Allegations that RFK had eaten dog stemmed from a text to a friend featuring a photograph that “showed him pantomiming eating a cooked animal carcass,” said CNN. In the message, Kennedy allegedly “recommended the friend try eating dog while traveling in Korea,” although he has since denied eating one himself.

The picture is “me in a campfire in Patagonia on the Futaleufu River eating a goat,” Kennedy said in a Fox News interview in 2024, “which is what we eat down there.” Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul,” the text’s initial recipient said to Vanity Fair. He was “certainly representing that this was a dog and not a goat,” they added, calling the whole affair “grotesque.”

Mice

RFK Jr. is a “predator” about whom the previous generation of storied Kennedys “would be disgusted,” said former First Daughter and onetime U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy in a scathing letter to Congress denouncing her cousin’s then-nomination process in early 2025. While largely focused on RFK’s potential impact on national health, Kennedy, in a shocking paragraph, said her cousin, in his younger years, “enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks.”

The effect, Kennedy said, was often a “perverse scene of despair and violence.” The allegations describe a “power play to those forced to watch” and show signs of RFK being a “terrible bird handler,” said The Independent. “Who feeds a hawk puréed food?”

Raccoon

In her “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise” biography of the secretary, investigative journalist Isabel Vincent drew on “dozens of sources, both new and old, including journals updated daily by Kennedy between 1999 and 2001,” said People. In one such entry, Kennedy “boasts of cutting the penis from a dead raccoon he found on the side of a highway, while his kids waited in the car,” The New York Times said.

“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road-killed raccoon,” Kennedy said, “thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be.” Kennedy “wanted to be a veterinarian as a kid,” said Vincent to People. He has a “great love and interest in animals” and a “freezer full of roadkill, I'm sure, where he studies it.”

Whale

When RFK’s daughter Kick Kennedy was six years old, “word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port,” said Town & Country in a 2012 feature on Kennedy and her infamous family. The elder Kennedy drove to the site, “cut off the whale’s head” with a chainsaw and then “bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco,” the outlet said.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car,” Kick said to T&C. “It was the rankest thing on the planet.” After the episode resurfaced during the 2024 election, Kennedy said at an Arizona rally that he was being investigated for “collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago.” He also “implied without evidence” that the investigation was itself “tied to his endorsement” of Donald Trump, The Associated Press said. In October, 2024, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration announced in a statement to The Hill that it had closed an investigation into the decades-old claim, having “determined the allegation to be unfounded.”

Worm

In a 2012 deposition, RFK Jr. described a period several years earlier when, feeling fatigued and mentally hazy, he’d scheduled a procedure to treat what he’d been told was a brain tumor. But, while “packing for the trip,” he was contacted by a second doctor with a “different opinion,” The New York Times said.

Kennedy, the doctor believed, “had a dead parasite in his head.” The parasite had “got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Kennedy said in the deposition, as reviewed by the Times. “The issue was resolved more than 10 years ago,” Kennedy’s then-presidential campaign said in a statement to CNN during the 2024 presidential race. The candidate is in “robust physical and mental health.” Kennedy himself made light of his cranial condition in a post on X in May 2024. “I offer to eat 5 more brain worms,” Kennedy said, “and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.”

Keir Starmer survived a key vote over whether he should face an inquiry into claims that he misled Parliament about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington. Had he lost Tuesday’s vote, he’d have been referred to the Privileges Committee that forced the resignation of Boris Johnson. The PM described the Tory-led motion – called after it emerged that Mandelson had been installed despite failing part of the vetting process – as a “stunt”.

Before the vote, Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s former chief of staff, and Philip Barton, former head of the Foreign Office, testified to a select committee about their roles in the vetting of Mandelson. Both agreed that some pressure had been applied to officials to expedite the process, but maintained that this had had no bearing on the final decision to clear Mandelson.

Barrage awaits

Starmer deserved to win this vote, said The Independent. From all the public testimony and documentation that has emerged thus far, it’s clear Starmer didn’t intentionally mislead Parliament. He didn’t know that concerns were raised about Mandelson during the vetting process because Olly Robbins – the civil servant who oversaw the appointment and who was sacked as Foreign Office chief a fortnight ago – chose not to tell him.

Robbins thought those concerns had been adequately addressed and merely informed the PM that “due process” had been followed, and that Mandelson had cleared the vetting. On this matter, Starmer “has no case to answer”.

Still, the PM hasn’t emerged that well from this episode, said The Guardian. His assurance to the Commons last week that “no pressure existed whatsoever” in relation to Mandelson’s vetting sits uneasily with other testimony. And of course the appointment itself reflects badly on his judgement. The fact that Starmer had to impose a three-line whip on Labour MPs to support him in the vote only highlighted his weakness, said The Times.

While the result earned him a reprieve, next week’s local elections could prove fatal for his premiership. Starmer has “dodged a bullet, but a barrage awaits”.

Bunker mentality

The “vast majority” of Labour MPs are right behind Starmer – or so he claimed in an interview this week. He probably believes it, said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday, such is the “bunker mentality” in No. 10. Yet talking to Labour MPs around Westminster last week, I struggled to find one who still had any confidence in his leadership.

As one Labour grandee put it: “The parliamentary party used to think he was useless but basically decent. After this week they still think he’s useless, but also that he’s a guy who will stab them and anyone else to save himself.”

Starmer’s peremptory firing of Olly Robbins has proved a tipping point for many in his party, said Ailbhe Rea in The New Statesman. Several Cabinet ministers now privately admit that “they have ‘given up’ after months of grumbling determination to ‘make Keir work’”.

Difficult decisions

The irony, said Camilla Cavendish in the Financial Times, is that the Mandelson affair is “the least of [Starmer’s] mistakes”. Had he taken full responsibility for it from the outset, admitting that the appointment was a gamble that didn’t pay off, it might soon have blown over. The PM deserves more blame for his fundamental failure to deliver his promised “change” agenda, owing to an “almost obstinate lack of interest in making the difficult decisions that his job requires”.

While Ed Miliband has pursued clean energy projects and Wes Streeting has “challenged vested interests” in the NHS, the rest of the system has “drifted”. In this respect, Starmer’s administration has come to resemble Boris Johnson’s: there's “a vacuum where the principal should be”.

But is this really the moment to replace Starmer with yet another PM, asked Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Surely not. They would be our seventh in a decade. Britain can’t afford to keep staging leadership dramas every time a PM makes an error of judgement.

The focus on personalities certainly isn’t helpful, said Polly Toynbee in the same paper. What we really need is radical action to rescue Britain from its slump: an urgent move to rejoin the EU, for instance, and an acceptance that the pensions triple lock is unaffordable. Labour has three full years ahead with a huge working majority of 165. “What matters is not who but what comes next.”

It is “one of the strangest conundrums in modern zoological history”, said The Guardian: “what to do with the descendants of Pablo Escobar’s hippos?”

The animals, which the drug kingpin imported into Colombia, were left to “roam free” and multiply after Escobar was killed in 1993. Now the “feral” pack has become “such an environmental blight, they are facing a mass extermination”.

But they may have found “an unlikely stay of execution”: Anant Ambani, son of the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has once again offered them shelter.

Narco-pets

In the 1980s, the infamous Colombian drug lord illegally imported a plethora of exotic animals to fill his private zoo, including four hippopotamuses – dubbed the “cocaine hippos”, said The Independent. After Escobar’s death, most of the menagerie were relocated, but the enormous hippos were “left behind because they were difficult to move”.

They were abandoned to “go feral on the cocaine baron’s vast private Naples estate”, said The Times. But they multiplied, and spread “far beyond” the hacienda to “the lush river banks of Colombia’s Magdalena River”. An estimated 200 are now “roaming the muddy basin, attacking fishermen and steadily devastating the fragile ecosystem”.

Colombia made various attempts to control the population, including castration, but “to no avail”, said the BBC. The dearth of predators in the “fertile and swampy Antioquia region” provided “the perfect conditions” for them to thrive. Experts say the hippos, believed to be the biggest herd outside Africa, constitute “an invasive species”.

In 2023, the local authority proposed relocating 60 to Ambani’s private animal sanctuary, Vantara, in the Indian state of Gujarat. But “the logistical problems of capturing and moving the hippos” – who weigh up to two tonnes each – stymied the plan, said The Guardian. Taking them to their natural habitat in Africa isn’t feasible, given their limited gene pool and chance of carrying diseases.

After warnings that numbers could swell to more than 1,000 in the next few years, Colombia announced this month that the herd would “begin to be formally hunted and culled”.

‘Living, sentient beings’

Ambani, the son of a telecoms tycoon (and India’s richest man), said this week he’d appealed to the Colombian government to reconsider its decision, and allow the “safe, scientifically led translocation” of nearly half the herd to his private zoo.

“These 80 hippos did not choose where they were born, nor did they create the circumstances they now face,” Ambani wrote in a letter published on the zoo’s Instagram. “They are living, sentient beings, and if we have the ability to save them through a safe and humane solution, we have a responsibility to try.”

Colombia has not commented on the offer. But Vantara, which describes itself as “the world’s largest wildlife rescue centre”, has been the subject of repeated controversy.

The sprawling complex is home to 150,000 animals of 2,000 species, including elephants, tigers, lions and bears – but no hippos. Conservationists say the zoo is unsuitable for some species given the climate; temperatures in the Jamnagar region can soar above 40C. Vantara has also been accused of illegally acquiring and mistreating animals. Last year India’s Supreme Court ordered an investigation into the allegations, and claims that the sanctuary was “being used as a ‘private vanity project’,” said The Telegraph.

President Donald Trump has long understood the power of a brand name — specifically his. And as world leaders flatter and impress upon him the merits of their prospective partnerships, his very name has become a global currency for appealing to his ego. From crucial transportation corridors to wholesale swaths of European countryside, these are the international Trump-titled pitches.

‘Donnyland’ in Ukraine

A growing push to name Ukraine’s embattled Donbas region after the president may be the “most improbable instance” of Trump’s name being “lent to a geopolitical flashpoint,” said The New York Times. Ukrainian officials have reportedly pitched renaming an approximately 2,000 square mile section of the Donetsk area of the Donbas as “Donnyland.”

The idea was “raised partly in jest but also as a diplomatic gesture,” The Kyiv Independent said. The “appeal to Trump’s vanity” has yet to be reflected in “official documents” from the ongoing Ukrainian peace negotiations, however. What’s important is that the Donbas’ various regions “remain Ukraine,” said Zelenskyy to reporters. “As long as it’s not ‘Putinland.’ That is the most important thing.”

Still, it could be in Ukraine’s long-term interests to apply Trump’s branding to their territory, said RAND Corporation Political Scientist Samuel Charap at the Times. Ukraine would likely see having a “Trump imprimatur on a free economic zone” as “something of a deterrent” against Russian aggression.

‘Fort Trump’ in Poland

First pitched publicly by Polish then-President Andrzej Duda during a 2018 White House visit, plans for a $2 billion Fort Trump military base ultimately fizzled before they were resurrected in the first year of Trump’s second term. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “talked about the fact that I hope that Fort Trump, which we talked about” during Trump’s first term, will “really be established,” Duda said to The Associated Press after a series of Warsaw meetings with American officials in 2025.

The proposal returned as Polish officials work to “preserve the U.S. commitment to NATO” over “growing” fears of Russian aggression, the AP said. Polish lawmakers are “convinced” that a strong U.S. alliance and a “high level of spending on defense will help its cause.”

The plans were initially met with public skepticism in Poland when first raised in 2018. Critics “castigated” Duda for what they framed as his “craven behavior,” said The New York Times. “What an embarrassment in front of the entire world,” said Polish lawmaker Tomasz Siemoniak on X, per the Times. “Even leaders of banana republics had more respect for themselves” than Duda.

‘Trump Heights’ in Israel

As thanks for Trump’s 2019 presidential recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the contested Golan Heights, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that he would “bring to the government a resolution calling for a new community on the Golan Heights” to be named on Trump’s behalf. Despite a high-profile groundbreaking ceremony, a “large-scale influx of new residents never materialized,” said The Times of Israel. Still, after Trump’s 2024 reelection, residents hoped their namesake’s victory would “breathe new life into this tiny, remote community.”

‘Trump National Golf Course’ in Syria

When a group of wealthy Syrian investors seeking sanction relief for a luxury rebuilding project for their war-torn nation turned to Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) for advice, his message was simple. “I know how to get the president’s attention,” Wilson said during a meeting with the group. “Make it a Trump National Golf Course in Syria.”

The group, however, was “way ahead of the congressman,” with one member bragging that he “already planned to propose a Trump-branded resort,” said MS NOW. This type of “mixing of personal and diplomatic affairs” has “long been the norm in Middle Eastern nations,” said The New York Times, which first reported the meeting. The blending has “become the way Washington operates in Mr. Trump’s second term too.”

‘Trump Park’ in Israel

Trump “took a brave and unprecedented step that none of his predecessors were willing to take,” Mayor David Even Tzur of the Israeli city of Kiryat Yam said, per Arutz Sheva, after Trump’s 2017 declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. “We must honor him for it.”

Kiryat Yam subsequently invested $1.4 million in a nearly two-acre Trump Park that borders an “existing science park in the center of the city,” said The Times of Israel. “I am grateful for your gesture,” said Trump in a letter to Tzur, according to The Forward. Trump was “moved to know that the people of Israel are encouraged by my decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”

‘Trump Promenade’ in Israel

Donald Trump is “Israel’s best friend ever,” said Netanyahu at a 2025 groundbreaking ceremony for a seaside promenade in the president’s honor in the central Israeli city of Bat Yam. The concept of this “President Donald Trump Promenade,” said The Jerusalem Post, “originated from Trump’s idea to turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront property.” Israel has “wonderful beachside properties here,” Netanyahu said Trump had told him, clarifying that Trump had been “talking about one that’s a bit to the south here, in Gaza.”

“This is so great,” Trump said in a “personal note” to Netanyahu following the naming ceremony. The message was written on a printout of a post Netanyahu made on X showing the groundbreaking ceremony, the Post said.

‘Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity’ between Azerbaijan and Armenia

A key feature of a fragile brokered peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity “promises to become a vital connectivity link between Europe and Asia” that “could go down as” one of Trump’s “most impressive foreign policy achievements” since reelection, said the Atlantic Council. The project’s name was a “concession” sure to “delight Trump,” CNN said, as the president sought to “brand himself in his first six months in office as a global peacemaker.”

Though the project’s stakeholders “share the ambition” that the rail portion of the route “can be completed by 2028 and the end of Trump’s presidency,” the peace process is “still at an early stage,” said the Carnegie Russia Urasia Center. Local groups in the region are also “far less engaged in it than the leaders are.” The plan has elicited a minimal response from Russia, which is “cautious not to antagonize a U.S. administration led by Trump, whose name is tied to the project.”

The U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has had a tangible effect on the economy in the Middle East, and the conflict is also making things more expensive for Americans at home. Increasing oil prices resulting from the war have cascading consequences, and while things like gasoline are most obviously affected, other products are also getting pricier.

Clothes

Supply chain issues with crude oil are raising the cost of the oil’s building blocks, called petrochemicals. Six of these petrochemicals are the “major foundations of plastics and synthetic materials like nylon and polyesters,” said The Associated Press. When petrochemicals become more expensive, it is often accompanied by a spike in clothing prices.

To make a button-down shirt, for example, the “materials account for 27%-30% of the cost a manufacturer incurs,” Andrew Walberer, a partner at the global strategy and management consultancy Kearney, told the AP. Experts are “warning consumers to budget for price increases of 10 to 15%” in clothing if the petrochemicals’ costs continue to rise, said the South China Morning Post.

Condoms

People may not assume safe sex would be impacted by the war, but the world’s largest condom manufacturer, Karex, is planning to “raise prices by 20% to 30% and possibly further if supply chain disruptions drag on due to the Iran war,” said The Guardian. Karex, a Malaysian company, supplies more than 5 billion condoms annually to global manufacturers, including major brands sold in the U.S. like Trojan and Durex.

Karex is being forced to raise its prices because the company “has seen a cost increase for synthetic rubber, nitrile, ‌aluminum foil and silicone oil,” said Inc. magazine. While still seeing high demand, the company is “currently faced with rising freight costs and shipping delays, leading to its customers carrying lower stockpiles” of Karex’s products.

Cosmetics

The war in Iran is even “seeping into the cosmetics supply chain, pushing up the cost of everything from plastic jars and ​lipstick tubes to transport, and reminding the beauty industry that even a tub of face cream depends on fragile ‌global trade routes,” said Reuters. The most notable sector being affected is the Korean beauty industry, which has a large following in the United States.

Due to the unstable cost and raw material prices of petrochemicals, the “unit prices of most products will inevitably be increased,” cosmetics company Luxepack Korea said in a press release, per The Washington Post. Many similar cosmetic brands “aren’t sure how much longer they can absorb rising production costs.”

Gasoline

This one is probably the most obvious: spiking oil prices are causing costs at the pump to skyrocket. On April 29, gas prices “hit a fresh record since the start of the war with Iran, rising to an average nationwide of $4.23 per gallon,” said NBC News, citing data from AAA. The price of Brent crude, the benchmark for international petroleum, also “stands at $114.60, up nearly 25% from the recent low seen April 17.”

It may be unlikely that gas prices will come down anytime soon. President Donald Trump has “told aides to prepare for a long blockade to throttle Iran’s economy by blocking Iranian oil shipments,” said The Guardian. The number of ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz is “now at its lowest level since the start of the war.”

Toys

Like clothes, many stuffed plush toys are “made with polyester and acrylic, synthetic fibers derived from petroleum,” said the AP, so rising prices could similarly impact the toy industry. Suppliers in China have notified Aleni Brands, the company behind popular plush lines like Bizzikins, that “getting the materials already was costing them 10% to 15% more.”

Notable production hurdles are also being experienced by a “cluster of manufacturers in Shantou, a city located 190 miles northeast of Hong Kong, which produces a third of the world’s toys,” said The New York Times. Other child-adjacent products, including crayons, are additionally facing shortages due to petrochemical supply chain issues.

“London’s bridges really are falling down,” said The New York Times as the state of the capital’s river crossings made headlines across the Atlantic.

At the moment, the “global city” has “three vital bridges that drivers can’t use”, said the BBC, and reopening them might not be a simple task.

‘National embarrassment’

Engineers conducting a safety assessment of Hammersmith Bridge in 2019 noticed micro-fractures in the cast iron pedestals holding the bridge together. The west London crossing has been closed to traffic ever since, although it has reopened for pedestrians and cyclists. The ongoing issues have made it not just a local issue but “something of a national embarrassment”, said The Times.

Albert Bridge, “another vital west London crossing”, will be shut to vehicles until the beginning of next year because of structural damage. Three more London bridges have also been placed on the “critical” list: Westminster, Lambeth and Vauxhall Bridges. Although these three aren’t at “immediate risk of closure, the news brings into sharper focus the state of the capital’s river crossings”.

Broadmead Road Bridge, a main route in Redbridge, northeast London, has also been shut for several years. A London Assembly report in 2021 warned that the state of London’s bridges put the capital’s “reputation and status as a global city” at risk. The problem has become so bad that it’s become the “target of international jibes”, said The Times.

Underfunding and ‘managed decline’

Many of the city’s most important crossings, like Hammersmith Bridge and Westminster Bridge, were built more than 100 years ago. They were never designed for today’s levels of traffic – both in terms of volume and weight.

Several non-trunk road bridges were transferred to London borough councils after the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986 and many of these local authorities are now struggling to afford maintenance and repair.

This underfunding has caused problems. In 2023, the “State of the City Report” found that London’s bridges were in a “state of managed decline” and £238 million a year should be spent on maintenance to preserve their condition at the time. From 2010–21, just £100 million was spent.

Better news ahead

Hammersmith Bridge is a “disgrace for London” and would cost £250 million to fix, said London’s The Standard. “Nobody is willing to take responsibility” and it’s “become something of a political football”. The cost of the repairs is supposed to be split three ways between the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, the Department for Transport and Transport for London, but there are “arguments over who pays what” and “even if they will pay at all”.

But “there may be better news ahead”, said The Times. Simon Lightwood, the roads minister, has said Hammersmith Bridge is a “good candidate” for investment from the structures fund, money reserved for infrastructure projects. A requirement for the council to pay a third of the cost of the new bridge may be scrapped, so the fund may cover the whole cost of repairs.

Meanwhile, TfL has recently improved the road surfaces on Vauxhall and Lambeth Bridges – to protect their “below deck structural elements”. But experts say that as London’s infrastructure “ages and struggles to cope with more and heavier traffic”, it’s “inevitable” that other bridges “will need to be shut in the future”, said the BBC.

The case of an “off-grid” Anglo-Australian couple whose children were removed by authorities has divided Italy. Nathan Trevallion, a British former chef, and Australian ex-horse trainer Catherine Birmingham were raising three children in a stone farmhouse in the woods of the mountainous Abruzzo region. But the children were taken into care last year, when the family ended up in hospital after eating poisonous foraged mushrooms.

The couple have been battling to get their children back, filing an appeal with the court in regional capital L’Aquila. In the meantime, the family has become a cause célèbre for the far-right, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressing her “alarm” and declaring that “children are not of the state”.

Remote ‘paradise’

The couple moved to a two-room cottage in Abruzzo’s “remote woodland” in 2021, said The Times. They hoped to “build an off-grid paradise”, growing their own food and homeschooling their daughter, Utopia Rose, now eight, and twins Bluebell and Galorian, seven.

The family would “draw water from a well” and “produce electricity from solar panels”, said The Telegraph. Their house is surrounded by wildlife, including wolves. They slept in one room and used a lavatory in a wooden outhouse, but had a car for shopping in the nearby village of Palmoli, as well as a computer and mobile phones.

But in 2025, when the entire family was hospitalised after eating poisonous mushrooms, their “woodland existence” became known to authorities. Police officers who inspected their home reported the family to social services, who described the farmhouse as “a dilapidated ruin” that was unacceptable for young children. The family “fled to Spain”, then to Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, before returning to their “little patch of wilderness”.

Five months ago, a juvenile court in L’Aquila ordered that the children be put into care. Prosecutors said the children were being raised in “challenging and harmful” environment, without sanitation, formal education or medical supervision. Their mother was initially allowed to live in a room in the same building as her children. But she was “ejected in March”, said The Times, “accused of turning them against staff”.

Cause célèbre

The decision to remove the children “sparked a fierce debate in the country over alternative lifestyles”, said The Guardian. Both parents have given interviews “generating support from thousands” who want the family kept together, and backlash against the magistrate who ordered the children’s removal.

“We live outside of the system, this is what they’re accusing us of,” Trevallion told La Repubblica. “They are ruining the life of a happy family.” Birmingham told a press conference: “This has been by far the cruellest thing I have experienced and personally seen done to children in my life.”

The Italian far-right has “seized upon the case in the name of educational freedom”, said Le Monde, with deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini likening the case to a kidnapping. Trevallion and Birmingham, “foreigners without clear professional activity, not integrated into Italian society and living in informal housing”, have become improbable “victims to be defended” by a faction that is usually “less sympathetic to such profiles”. But, for Salvini's party, which is linked to Donald Trump and Tommy Robinson, the “forest family” has become “a top priority”, used to “fuel its anti-judge rhetoric, portraying magistrates as enemies of family liberties”.

The couple are currently renovating the farmhouse, adding running water and electricity to comply with social services’ requirements. They are also considering moving into an apartment on the edge of the woods that was offered free by the mayor, as a temporary solution. A decision on whether they can have their children back is possible as soon as next month.

“Dying people in California could soon get support from a familiar face,” said The Times. Nicole Kidman has revealed she is training to become a death doula following the painful loss of her mother, Janelle, who died in 2024 aged 84.

The Oscar-winning actor admitted her new venture “sounds a little weird”. But she told an audience at the University of San Francisco she had discovered there was “only so much the family could provide” as her mother approached the end of her life. “That’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.’”

Bridging the gap

A death doula works in a “similar capacity” to a birth doula, said PhD candidate Syman Braun Freck on The Conversation. Instead of assisting a mother during pregnancy and childbirth, a death doula is a “community partner offering support to the dying”. They act as a “neutral third party”, inhabiting a space between family, medical professionals and funeral directors.

Death used to be a “sacred communal process” that took place within the “comfort” of the family home. But during the late 19th and early 20th century dying became “institutionalised” and “medicalised”, and loved ones were “pushed to the wayside”.

This gap in end-of-life care opened a space for a “host of paraprofessionals” and led in the early 2000s to the re-emergence of the “ancient practice” of death doulas.

These individuals aren’t medically trained. They provide practical, spiritual and emotional support for clients, helping them “navigate fear and uncertainty about death and what might come after it”, said The New York Times. Death doulas also assist people expressing their wishes for end-of-life care, help to facilitate “meaningful conversations with their families”, and provide guidance for loved ones left behind.

Meaningful ends

There has been a “rapid” rise in the number of people training to become death doulas in recent years, Dr Emma Clare, chief executive of End of Life Doula UK, told The Times. The charity has around 450 members, after more than 100 joined last year. And it’s not just those with a terminal illness who are using the service; since the pandemic, more “healthy 30-somethings” have also been seeking death doulas to plan a meaningful end to life. The NHS has started to recognise this work, in some cases commissioning doulas to provide additional palliative care for people dying at home.

“I wasn’t surprised” that Nicole Kidman chose to embark on her new venture after losing her mother, said death doula Anna Lyons in The Times. “People often enter into this line of work following grief. You suddenly understand what kind of support is needed.”

I work with people from diagnosis until they die, and support their families after they’re gone. “My role is primarily to listen” and “be a witness to the end of their life”, ensuring they don’t have to go through it alone. There is something “very beautiful about being able to help somebody” in this way. “It is a privilege.”

It is a “lovely thing that everybody should have the opportunity to utilise”, said Eva Wiseman in The Observer. And the “true benefit” of a celebrity doula could lie not in helping you to find peace in your final days, but instead in bringing “distraction from it”. To spend your last moments “holding the manicured hand of a person you loved (in “Moulin Rouge” and “The Others”) would not only add some sparkle to the painful mundanity of death but also, surely, provide meaning when we need it most”.

“Samantha Niblett’s Summer of Sex.” It sounds like something the police would have shut down in the “grubbiest era of Soho peep shows”, said Madeline Grant in The Spectator. But it is, in fact – “just as the world teeters on the brink of geopolitical collapse” – an “actual initiative” announced by a Labour MP last week.

Awash with sex

Niblett, the “dignity-phobic” member for South Derbyshire, said she wants to encourage “open, inclusive, lifelong sex education”, and have a “national conversation” about pleasure, including the benefits of masturbation. As part of her “Summer of Sex” scheme (launched with the appallingly ungrammatical tagline: “Yes Sex Please, We’re British!”) she has teamed up with Cindy Gallop, the founder of an adult website. Together, they’re planning a series of events, including a sex toy exhibition in Parliament. Really? Is there “literally no area of life” that’s safe from “government intervention”?

Fifty-odd years ago, when people thought you could “lose your virginity by riding a bicycle”, this sort of campaign might have had its place, said Shane Watson in The Times. “But, my goodness, where have you been, Niblett?” You can’t move for people talking about sex these days: the world is awash with porn and sex toys; it’s hard to switch on the TV without seeing a sex scene.

Noble stand

Maybe so, said Rowan Pelling in The Daily Telegraph, but I still think Niblett is taking a “noble stand”. She believes, surely rightly, that issues such as consent and sexual abuse are still not well enough understood. And she and Gallop are in fact campaigning against the warping effects of hardcore porn. (Gallop’s website is called Make Love Not Porn.)

I agree that people’s attitudes need a reset, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times: the rising prevalence of choking, hair-pulling and “other abusive behaviours that porn dresses up as sexy” proves this. But Britain doesn’t need more sexual liberation, sex toys or online porn, even if it’s “ethical” porn.

Niblett should be teaching people – especially those who grew up with internet porn – that sex shouldn’t be degrading; it’s about intimacy and understanding other people. Understand that, and they will have “many happy summers – and years – of sex”.

Apple founder Steve Jobs created the iPhone and cultivated a rockstar reputation for innovation. His successor, Tim Cook, turned the company into a globe-spanning colossus of profit. What will the next CEO, John Ternus, do to build on their legacies?

The 51-year-old Ternus “knows Apple at its core” after a quarter-century at the company, said CNN. As a senior executive since 2021, Ternus “led the hardware engineering behind Apple’s most recognizable products” like the iPhone and iPad and was “essential” in developing the new mid-price MacBook Neo.

His promotion to CEO “isn’t much of a surprise,” given that he had been seen as a front-runner to succeed Cook “for at least the last year,” CNN said. His task is to position the company for further success in the age of artificial intelligence. Ternus faces pressure to “produce success out of the gates,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note.

An ‘Apple lifer’

Ternus is a “safe choice in a dangerous moment” for Apple, said Semafor. Cook replaced Jobs when Apple was at the “height of its influence” and built it into the first company with a $1 million market cap. The company is “still a financial juggernaut” though it does not command its former cultural cachet. Ternus is an “Apple lifer” unlikely to take Apple in a “radical new direction” that would “squander its lucrative business.” But his ascension comes as AI transforms the “entire concept of computing and technology.”

The “defining challenge” for Ternus is “fixing the company’s AI strategy,” said CNBC. Apple has so far avoided “hefty capital expenditures” on AI data centers and “punted” on its own AI model. Instead, Apple has bet that consumers will use its iPhones and other products to run AI. Choosing Ternus as CEO signals the company’s belief that the “future of AI will run through tightly integrated devices, not just software,” the University of Notre Dame’s Timothy Hubbard said to CNBC.

Apple faces an “existential challenge” figuring out “what comes after the iPhone,” said Axios. Cook “executed masterfully” to maximize iPhone’s success but “largely sputtered” with new products like the Vision Pro and a failed attempt at building autonomous cars. Companies like Meta and Google are pushing smart glasses, and former Apple design guru Jony Ive is designing hardware for OpenAI. A new leadership era opens with Apple “chasing its next hit” product. Cook demonstrated that Apple can grow. Ternus instead “must prove that it can still innovate.”

Making ‘first-rate physical things’

Apple has put the “hardware guy in charge,” said The Wall Street Journal, and is betting on itself as a “maker of first-rate physical things” in an AI-dominated world. That means navigating “complex geopolitics threatening Apple’s supply chain” and countless “regulatory battles around the world.”

Ternus is expected to “bring back Jobs-era decisiveness” to Apple’s CEO suite, said Bloomberg. Cook was known for “incrementalism” in moving the company’s product line forward, Forrester Research’s Dipanjan Chatterjee said in a note. Ternus “must define Apple’s future as ferociously as he defends its past.”

The FBI and a congressional committee are investigating the mysterious cases of 10 missing or dead scientists and staff who worked at sensitive nuclear or space technology laboratories.

Social media has “lit up” with theories about the disappearances and deaths, said CBS News, as speculation has “swirled” about whether they are part of an effort to “harm” US nuclear or space programmes.

‘Sinister connection’

William Neil McCasland, a retired US air force general now director of technology at an aerospace defence firm, went missing from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 27 February.

Investigators soon became aware of other aerospace and nuclear officials and researchers who have gone missing or died in mysterious circumstances. These cases included a nuclear physicist and MIT professor who was fatally shot outside his Massachusetts home, an aerospace engineer who went missing during a hike in Los Angeles, and two scientists working on nuclear fusion and astrophysics who were murdered in their homes.

“The similar circumstances of some of the disappearances” and the subjects’ involvement in sensitive and secret research have “fuelled speculation about whether coordinated foul play or foreign espionage may be involved”, said The Hill.

The FBI confirmed it is “spearheading the effort to look for connections” between the 10 cases that have come to light and the Republican-led House Oversight Committee said it will examine “questions about a possible sinister connection”. In a post on X, Nasa said that it was cooperating with the investigations, but “at this time, nothing related to Nasa indicates a national security threat”.

The speculation has drawn in the US president. “I hope it’s random, but we’re going to know in the next week and a half,” Donald Trump told reporters, confirming that an investigation was under way. It is “pretty serious stuff” but “hopefully a coincidence, or whatever you want to call it”.

‘People do just die’

People familiar with the cases said that what “underlies” these deaths and disappearances is “not a spy-thriller plot”, but “something more personal and tragic”, said CBS News.

McCasland’s wife said in a Facebook post that it “seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets”, pointing out that her husband retired from the air force more than 12 years ago.

Julia Hicks, the daughter of Michael David Hicks, a scientist who worked at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and died in 2023, told CNN there is “no train of logic” connecting her father’s death to that of other scientists. “I can’t help but laugh about it, but at the same time, it’s getting serious,” she said.

The cases are “scattered across several years at different and only loosely affiliated organisations”, said Joseph Rodgers, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If all of the scientists were working on one project or weapons system, then I’d be more suspicious,” he said.

A former US Department of Energy official was more succinct. “People do just die,” they said.

Allbirds is making a complete heel turn after the shoe brand announced its pivot to AI. And many are skeptical that the footwear company will succeed in making such a big switch to the convoluted tech space. But Allbirds is just the latest in a list of companies that got their start in one industry, then changed to something quite different.

Android

Android cellphones have become as ubiquitous as iPhones in modern years, but the company didn’t start out in the phone game. The brand was launched in 2003, originally “conceived as an operating system for digital cameras,” said software development company Velvetech. By the time Android got up and running, the “market for digital cameras significantly fell,” whereas the “mobile device market was constantly growing.”

The company was forced to pivot to stay alive and began producing an operating system with more widespread uses. It is now used “primarily for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and other wearable devices,” said IT brand Spiceworks.

Nintendo

Nintendo has always made games but probably not the kind you’re thinking of. The company was started in 1889 when its founder, Fusajiro Yamauchi, began producing Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda in Kyoto. By 1902, Yamauchi “started manufacturing the first Western-style playing cards in Japan,” said Nintendo’s website. The company began growing in size throughout the mid-20th century.

By the 1970s, Nintendo realized it had to make a change to keep up with the times, and in 1975 “began the development of its first electronic video game systems,” said BBC News. In 1978, Nintendo “produced a computer game version of the board game Othello” and has since been responsible for producing some of the most iconic video games franchises of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong.

Nokia

Nokia has made perhaps the biggest one-eighty of the companies on this list. While known today for its industrial-strength cellphones, the company started in the 1860s as something wholly different: a wood pulp mill in Finland. This mill was the first step in the mass production of paper. The modern company was eventually formed as a “merger between the Nokia Company (paper), Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works in 1867,” said the Crypto Museum, a Dutch virtual museum.

Prior to its eventual focus on cellphones, Nokia became a bit of an everything brand. It has been “involved in the production of paper, rubber, electricity, car and bicycle tires, footwear, communication cables, television sets, consumer electronics, personal computers, robotics, capacitors, plastics, aluminium, chemicals, mobile phones and last but not least: military communications equipment,” said the Crypto Museum.

Slack

Slack is used today as a business-to-business chat tool by numerous companies and industries. Yet it originated in the 2010s as an “internal communication tool” for the “quirky online multiplayer game Glitch,” said Encyclopedia Britannica. The video game garnered positive reviews, but its “creators found the game to be expensive and unwieldy.” They soon started looking for alternative ways to implement the technology.

This arrived in the form of a rebrand: Slack, a “provider of a messaging tool for facilitating workplace communication, an ‘email killer’ and the ultimate collaboration app,” said TechCrunch. Today, Slack is “used by more than 100,000 organizations, including 77 of the Fortune 100 companies, demonstrating the network effect of a mature and innovative product,” according to the company itself.

Volkswagen

Volkswagen has always sold cars. But in this case, it’s the company’s history that represents a major redirect. The brand is well-known for its associations with the Nazis during World War II: In 1937, Adolf Hitler’s party “founded a state-owned company that was later named Volkswagen, or ‘The People's Car Company,’” said NPR. Volkswagen leadership would eventually disavow its Nazi ties.

The pivot came in modern times, as Volkswagen shifted from supporting antisemitic Nazi Germany to negotiating weapons deals with the state of Israel. In a tinge of irony, Volkswagen, which “produced parts using forced labor for V-1 cruise missiles used by the Wehrmacht during World War II, may soon be manufacturing parts for an Israeli-designed missile defense system,” said Haaretz.

YouTube

YouTube is best known as the video platform where you can watch just about any kind of video. But it was originally started in 2004 by three PayPal employees who had an “idea for a website for users to upload video dating profiles,” said Business Insider. The company was even trademarked on Valentine’s Day. As a dating site, YouTube “attracted little interest, forcing the co-founder to take out ads paying women $20 to upload dating videos.”

Then people began “uploading videos of all kinds to YouTube,” said Business Insider, and the website took off as a general platform. Today, over “20 million videos are uploaded daily” on YouTube, with an estimated 20 billion total videos on the site, the company said.

Before 2000, single fathers by choice were “virtually unheard of”, said The Atlantic. But in the past few years, this population has been growing “notably”.

English law changed in 2019 to give single parents the same rights as couples over surrogate children. Since then, the number of men applying to become sole parents of surrogate babies has tripled, according to data cited in The Times. The number is still “a tiny percentage” of the total applications, but it reflects “a growing trend”.

‘Go it alone’

There aren’t many reliable figures documenting the number of men “deciding to go it alone”, said The Guardian. Most surveys don’t differentiate single fathers by choice from widowers, or separated/divorced men. But according to the Office for National Statistics, about 15% of the UK’s single-parent households are headed by dads.

“We are seeing more men wanting to adopt than in recent years,” said Natalie Gamble, a lawyer specialising in surrogacy law. Since 2019, “the options are opening up. More British surrogates are willing to be matched with fathers.”

Many applying to become single fathers by surrogacy are gay – but not all. Some have either “struggled to find a relationship” or left partners because of “incompatible approaches to having children”, said The Telegraph. This is a “family type that does seem to be on the rise”, said Catherine Jones, a family psychology expert at King’s College London.

The “main hurdle” for surrogacy is “money rather than stigma”, she said. In the UK, it is illegal to advertise for a surrogate, or that you’re willing to become one. Single men often look to Cyprus or Belarus to find surrogate mothers. Many complain that the law in the UK is “yet to catch up with the fact that single men can now much more easily pursue fatherhood in this way”.

The increasing number of single men becoming surrogate parents has caused concern among some campaigners. “The checks on single men undertaking surrogacy are not remotely comparable to those we see in cases of adoption,” said Helen Gibson, from campaign group Surrogacy Concern.

But some single men turn to surrogacy because they were turned down by adoption agencies, said ABC News. “I called five different agencies and every one of them told me that either I would not be considered or that I would be at the bottom of the list because I was a single father,” said Peter Gordon.

“Who is going to give their kid to a 50-year-old bachelor living in SoHo, you know?” said Steven Harris, who was also rejected by adoption agencies. “I wouldn’t.”

The promise of meaning

The trend shouldn’t be surprising given that singlehood has been increasing for years, “more steeply among men than women”, said The Atlantic. The gay community has also recovered from the Aids pandemic; a new generation has “made it through” to adulthood with more financial security and societal acceptance than before.

But the fact that some men are “paying extravagantly for egg donation and surrogacy” might suggest “just how important fatherhood is” for many today. Multiple professionals described the pandemic as a “turning point for a lot of single fathers by choice”. Men came out of the pandemic wanting to “spend those moments with their loved ones before it was too late”.

And in a moment when “many of the traditional trappings of manhood” are no longer guaranteed, fatherhood can be “an answer” to questions of identity. For many single men, fatherhood “dangled a promise of deeper meaning in life”.

But in a society that is “set up to regard women as primary caregivers”, single fatherhood can be alienating, said The Guardian. “Men get questions asking whether it’s Mum’s day off,” said Sophie Zadeh of University College London, who has been researching single fathers by choice. “People assume they can’t parent properly because they are male.”

Her research also suggests men are scrutinised more than women by healthcare visitors, and can be viewed with suspicion. “They’re seen as that bit more unusual.”

With the Russo-Ukrainian War in its fourth year, both sides are dealing with critical troop shortages, and Ukrainian officials think they’ve found a solution. The country has started using remotely controlled robots in combat to account for these shortages and also reduce casualties. But some experts are also downplaying the effect these robots could have on the war.

‘Seize Russian positions solely with automated weapons’

The robots, which often feature mounted machine guns, can “help Ukrainian troops carry gear, lay mines, evacuate the wounded and attack Russian positions,” said Business Insider. At least 280 companies are working to develop these robots, many of which are used to transport ordnance because they can “carry more than roughly 10 servicemen can,” Oleksandr Yabchanka, the head of robotic systems for Ukraine’s Da Vinci Wolves army regiment, told Business Insider.

The robots are a key part of Ukraine’s fight because of their offensive capabilities. One video during combat, filmed last summer, showed several Ukrainian robots that “each carried 66 pounds of explosives,” said The New York Times. One of these robots drove into a Russian stronghold and “blew itself up, while the others held back, monitoring the position.” Several Russian soldiers surrendered, and these kinds of attacks show “that the Ukrainian military can now seize Russian positions solely with automated weapons.”

Of course, human soldiers remain the key demographic on the battlefield, but Ukraine is “eager to highlight its advances to show Western partners that its outnumbered army can stay in the fight,” said the Times, while also promoting the country’s “homegrown defense industry.” During the first three months of 2026, Ukraine’s ground robots “carried out more than 22,000 missions on the front lines,” said Business Insider, citing data from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

‘The reality is more nuanced and far less futuristic’

There are drawbacks to using robots, as they “can still fall prey to enemy drones and also face challenges in traversing battle-scarred landscapes,” said Ars Technica. Though they may be good for frontline combat, at least one Ukrainian battalion reported that robots “attempting to evacuate wounded soldiers failed to reach the positions in four out of five cases due to complicating factors.” Ukraine’s efforts are also in “competition with the Russian military, which has similarly increased its use of robots on the frontlines.”

The narrative has largely been that Ukrainian robots will eventually supersede most of the country’s soldiers, but the “reality is more nuanced and far less futuristic,” said the Kyiv Post. The expansion of these battlefield robots is mostly part of an effort to “support troops not replace them.” And even though the stories of killer robots dominate the headlines, much of the “work performed by these robots remains logistical,” encompassing the delivery of “supplies, including food, ammunition, water and equipment, to frontline positions.”

But even non-offensive missions using robots “can save lives, as they replace tasks that would otherwise require soldiers to move on foot under fire,” a senior operator of ground robotic systems from Ukraine’s 13th Brigade told the Kyiv Post. It remains “far better to send a robot on a mission. If it is destroyed, you lose equipment. But if you send two or three soldiers and they are killed, it is a much greater loss, both emotionally and for the unit’s combat capability.”

President Lee Jae Myung warned earlier this month that the conflict in Iran represented a “war-like situation” for South Koreans. As oil reserves continue to dwindle, even if normal service in the Strait of Hormuz were to resume, it would take a long time for supplies to catch up.

The war is “serving as a significant turning point” for South Korea to shift to renewable energy, South Korea’s Minister of Climate, Energy and Environment Kim Sung-hwan told CNBC. We must undergo a “fundamental energy transition” and “turn this challenge into a blessing in disguise”.

Rising oil prices, and the weakening of the won against the dollar, are “dealing a double blow” to the Korean economy, said The New York Times. But reliance on oil has also highlighted the domestic tussle for green energy action in a divided South Korean system.

‘Draconian’ measures

The “brightly illuminated” satellite images of South Korea at night, compared to the “sea of blackness” in the North, have long been seen as a “wider triumph of capitalism and democracy”, said Christopher Jasper, transport industry editor, in The Telegraph. However, due to the Iran war, these lights could be extinguished “in a matter of weeks”.

Compared to fellow developed countries, South Korea is “almost uniquely lacking in natural resources”, relying on imports to meet “90% of its energy needs”. Around 70% of its crude oil shipments, in addition to 20% natural gas, come from the Gulf. The country has seen fuel prices increase by a fifth, a ban on driving one weekday in five for individuals, and calls to reduce shower times and to charge electric cars and phones only in the daytime. Much more “draconian” measures could be just weeks away.

South Korea must face a “difficult home truth”, said David Fickling in Bloomberg. Behind the “sleek modern society” is an “insatiable appetite for fossil fuels that’s undermining its economy”. But this appetite presents a climate and “strategic” threat. State utility Korea Electric Power Corporation’s (Kepco) “huge” generation plants provide “tempting targets for rocket attacks”, and its proximity to North Korea and China leaves the South exposed to mine threats, should the conflict expand.

A ‘catalyst’ for energy reform?

The fossil-fuel vulnerability highlighted by the war in Iran could be the “catalyst for a faster clean energy system”, said The Guardian. South Korea’s energy targets long predate the current war, aiming to generate 20% of electricity from renewables by 2030 and phase out coal by 2040.

As with most renewable energy, there must be the infrastructure to support it. The power generated by new energy is “colliding” with the grid’s capacity, meaning it is “in effect going to waste”. There is hope in the form of Kepco building high-voltage transmission lines to Seoul, but a decade-long wait and “resistance” from locals are taking the shine off the progress.

On top of the energy opportunities, this is a “fresh opportunity” to “strengthen Seoul’s hand” against North Korea, said Jenni Marsh in Bloomberg. According to Finance Minister Koo Yun Cheol, Middle Eastern countries are “lining up” to buy Korea’s missiles, with their 90% success rate and “affordable price tag” an attractive proposition for buyers. The crisis has also fuelled government investment into nuclear-reactor restarts to “maintain grid stability”. As North Korea’s Kim Jong Un “plays hard to get” with the US, and “refuses talks” with Lee, improving defence capabilities “looks like an increasingly smart option”.

President Lee’s “catnip” calls to transition to renewables due to the war in Iran have “no chance of being met”, said Fickling in the same outlet. For instance, Kepco has “effectively banned” all new generators in the “renewables-rich” east until 2032, all because its “crumbling grid is supposedly incapable of accepting new connections”. Decisions such as these will do “nothing to advance South Korea’s energy transition”. Society as a whole needs to fight against those who have kept them “hooked on polluting power”.

Former Bulgarian President Rumen Radev will soon have a new title, and with it a whole lot of new power. Radev won Bulgaria’s parliamentary elections on Sunday and will become the country’s next prime minister. But while the election victory by Radev’s newly created Progressive Bulgaria party could represent a fresh beginning for a nation fraught with political strife, some people are concerned about Radev’s ties to Russia.

Radev’s beginnings

Radev, 62, was born in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria, and his early career was dedicated to military service. He is an ex-fighter pilot and former commander in the Bulgarian Air Force, and received several military merits before turning his attention to politics. Radev has often used his “daredevil flying skills to build his political brand,” said Politico. When he first ran for president in 2016, the Bulgarian Air Force “heavily promoted his loop-the-loops in a high-profile air show.”

Upon winning the ceremonial role of the presidency in 2017, Radev “quickly made up for his lack of political experience, capitalizing on his military background to cultivate the persona of a fearless patriot uncorrupted by party politics,” said Politico. In January 2026, after anti-corruption protests toppled the government, he became the first Bulgarian head of state to step down from the presidency and announced his candidacy for prime minister. During his campaign, Radev “cast himself as an opponent of the country’s entrenched mafia and its ties to high-ranking politicians,” said The Associated Press.

‘A more pro-Russian stance’

Radev has largely “positioned himself as the populist standard-bearer for anti-corruption protests that brought down the government in December,” said The Washington Post. But many in Europe are concerned about his potential friendliness with the Kremlin. During his campaign, Radev made it clear his government will take a “more pro-Russian stance, consistently opposing aid to Ukraine and saying he wanted to restore relations with Moscow.”

The new prime minister has also criticized the European Union and “called for a new security architecture in Europe, echoing a key Kremlin drive,” said the Post. If tensions were to continue rising between Bulgaria’s new government and the EU, it could cause financial strain in the country, as “Bulgaria’s economy is heavily dependent on EU funding.” Radev’s easy victory in the election could also “strengthen his hand in opposing a proposed EU ban on imported Russian energy supplies.”

Other analysts believe that Radev’s Russian coziness is more of a political tactic. Radev will probably be “unlikely to seek to be disruptive in relations within the European Union,” Vessela Tcherneva, the deputy director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said to The New York Times. In the “coming economic crisis, he would not risk the freezing of EU funds.” Radev’s EU criticism, particularly “regarding financial and military support for Ukraine or sanctions against Russia,” will be “aimed primarily at the domestic audience” and may not translate into action, Maria Simeonova of the European Council on Foreign Relations told the Times.

Some pro-democracy activists feel that Radev’s win could give Bulgaria its “best chance in recent history to do away with the stranglehold of corruption and the weak, unstable governments that have plagued it for decades,” said the Times. Radev’s 44% margin of victory may allow him to create a strong coalition, which could “enact structural and constitutional reforms to tackle the corruption that has stymied Bulgaria’s institutions.”

Former fighter pilot Rumen Radev led his party into Bulgaria’s parliamentary election promising to take on the “corrupt officials, conspirators and extremists” he claimed had run the country into the ground.

Voters responded on Sunday by handing his newly formed Progressive Bulgaria (PB) coalition the “single biggest vote haul in a ‌generation”, which “paves the way for greater political stability after eight elections in five years”, said Reuters.

“This is a victory of hope over mistrust, a victory of freedom over fear,” the 62-year-old Radev said after his landslide victory. Bulgarians had “rejected the complacency and arrogance of the old parties and did not succumb to lies and manipulation”.

Corruption crusader

Radev rose through the ranks of the Bulgarian air force to become a major general and finally head of the service. A relative latecomer to politics, he was elected to the largely ceremonial role of president in 2016. He held the position for nine years, keeping himself above the chaos and corruption scandals that have dominated Bulgarian politics in recent years.

In January he resigned, forming his new PB movement to run in the election after massive anti-corruption protests brought down the previous government. On Sunday he won just under 45% of the vote, giving Bulgaria its first parliamentary majority in nearly 30 years.

The “main factors” driving Radev’s victory were “deep frustration over years of futile anti-corruption efforts, concern over rising prices… and a potent mix of pro-Russian sentiment”, said Atanas Rusev, from the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia. “Radev played astutely on all these anxieties.”

The result “raises expectations of an end to the country’s cycle of short-lived coalition governments”, said Deutsche Welle. Radev had pledged to “crack down on corruption, tackle inflation and pursue a more independent foreign policy within the EU – one that does not exclude dialogue with Russia”.

EU tightrope

A Radev-led government is “bad news for Ukraine and would represent a significant win for Russia”, said Jan Surotchak on the Atlantic Council think tank. In the short term, his victory will “likely mean an end to Bulgarian ammunition supplies to Ukraine, forcing Nato to seek other sources”. The US-backed northern corridor for energy supplies to Eastern Europe could also “lose out in favour of Turk Stream, the last major energy pipeline bringing Russian gas to Europe”.

Radev’s winning message has been a “cocktail of anti-corruption pledges, Euro-scepticism and pledges to rebuild ties with Moscow, spooking some EU and Nato diplomats”, said the Financial Times. But “while his outreach to Russia may be symbolically valuable to the Kremlin, it is likely to be far less consequential in practice” than the recently deposed Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who “routinely vetoed EU decisions in order to benefit Moscow”.

“Unlike in Hungary the political cleavage here between the anti-corruption platform and the anti-Russia platform is wide, so those two messages won’t reinforce each other in quite the same seismic way,” said Vessela Tcherneva, from the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“Maintaining a strategic ambiguity towards Russia and the EU” while focusing on his anti-corruption message helped Radev secure an absolute majority, winning votes from both the far-right and progressives, said The Guardian. This may bring the country “political stability” but “leave it walking a tightrope on EU issues”.

From ordering groceries online to using AI to write emails, technology is making life exponentially easier. But while that may be appealing, it has also become a crutch, and constantly outsourcing our thinking can be detrimental in the long term, according to experts. A new trend called friction maxxing seeks to reintroduce discordance into our lives.

‘Building up tolerance for inconvenience’

Tech companies are succeeding in “making us think of life itself as inconvenient” and an endeavor we should be “continuously escaping” from into “digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands,” sociologist ​​Kathryn Jezer-Morton said at The Cut. The businesses have invested “as much money as possible in friction-elimination tools that effectively dehumanize users.”

It is a method that is “especially evil” because our “love of escaping is one of humanity’s most poetically problematic tendencies, and now it’s being used against us,” said Jezer-Morton. Enter “friction maxxing,” which isn’t “simply a matter of reducing your screen time.” Rather, it requires “building up tolerance for inconvenience” and then “reaching toward enjoyment.”

Friction-maxxing practices could include navigating by road signs instead of Google Maps or arranging to meet up with friends without sharing your location. Or it could mean eschewing ChatGPT for information that could be gleaned from a book or asking other people. Each of these acts may seem insignificant, but an “orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape,” said Jezer-Morton.

Friction maxxing may “play a valuable role in reorienting yourself away from tech dependency” and back toward “embracing the effort that makes people feel genuinely alive and fulfilled,” Mashable said. No one needs to optimize their life in “pursuit of a proverbial gold star.”

The effect of frictionless living

Despite how easy technology advancements have made simple tasks, “living a frictionless life may not be the best for your cognitive function over time,” said The Washington Post. It is basically “having a personal trainer lift the weights for you,” neuroscientist Lila Landowski said to the Post.

Over time, frictionless living could be detrimental because brain functions like learning, memory and focused attention are “use it or lose it,” brain health researcher Marc Milstein, the author of “The Age-Proof Brain,” said to the Post. You need to practice these skills to maintain them. If you’re not regularly challenging your brain, those skills can erode, he said.

And the benefit of friction maxxing isn’t just in boosting cognitive abilities. It also helps to create a more meaningful life said, Emily Falk, a professor and author of “What We Value,” to the Post. If you value building social skills, for example, the ease of writing an email with AI may not align with your values and may make life feel less meaningful. When we “make choices that seem immediately rewarding but don’t take a step back to ask if those choices are compatible with big-picture goals and values, we can get in trouble.”

Many of our decisions about convenience are driven by “short-term emotions,” said Forbes. It feels good to order delivery “because you remove the worry of your kids messing up the ingredients you need to cook.” It feels good to scroll “because you know getting into a challenging book will feel lousy (at least initially).” On the other hand, if you can “learn to grapple with these pesky emotions head-on, the long-term benefits are big.”

Our comfort with friction is “under attack,” and we “bear the responsibility of keeping friction intact as part of our families’ lives” and should “notice the ways that it’s being sanded away for profit,” Jezer-Morton said. Perhaps this is an opportunity to “think more clearly than we ever have about what is interesting and essential about being human.” We have never before “had a chance to see our own humanity so clearly,” but now, with “tech innovation bearing down on us so hard, we can’t take it for granted anymore.”

He was once celebrated as Australia’s “uber-soldier”, said Michael Bachelard in The Sydney Morning Herald. Ben Roberts-Smith, a towering 6ft 7in corporal in the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS), had a “bulging chest full of medals” by the time he returned from his sixth tour of Afghanistan in 2012, including the Victoria Cross, for his bravery against the Taliban.

Australia’s most-decorated living soldier was soon very much in the public eye: there was a display devoted to him in the Australian War Memorial’s Afghanistan gallery; he was named “father of the year” in 2013; he even attended the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022.

However, for years, war reporters had heard “whispers” about his conduct. And from 2018, Roberts-Smith was dogged with allegations of war crimes. Five years later, he lost a defamation case against three newspapers that had alleged that he was involved in unlawful killings in Afghanistan.

Now, so many years on, he has been arrested, said Ben Smee in The Guardian – an episode that “has cut deeply to the core of the Australian psyche”. Roberts-Smith now sits on remand in Sydney’s Silverwater prison, having been charged with five counts of the war crime of murder, dating from 2009 to 2012. If convicted, the 47-year-old faces life imprisonment.

‘Trial by media’

“The wheels of justice are famously slow to turn,” said The Age (Melbourne), “but even by their standards, 17 years is a long time to wait.”

It was in a place known as Whiskey 108, in Uruzgan province, on Easter Sunday in 2009 that Roberts-Smith – who maintains his innocence – is alleged to have shot a detained Afghan man at point-blank range. The victim’s prosthetic leg was reportedly removed as a trophy of war and used as a beer-drinking receptacle by Australian troops. Then, in September 2012, Roberts-Smith is said to have kicked a handcuffed man off a cliff in the village of Darwan, before ordering one of his subordinates to execute him, in a “blooding” ritual.

These accusations have been tested in court before, to a civil standard of proof, when a judge determined that on the balance of probabilities, he had committed murder. His former comrades testified against him; incriminating photos, found hidden in his garden, were shown in court. Unfortunately, there may be many more such cases to come. A judicial report in 2020 found credible evidence that Australian servicemen had played a role in the deaths of 39 Afghan non-combatants in 23 incidents.

For too long, Roberts-Smith and other veterans have been subjected to “trial by media”, without “the opportunity for a fair response”, said Martin Hamilton-Smith in The Daily Telegraph (Sydney). So it’s good that he will finally have his day in court, when the claims against him will be properly tested.

Beyond reasonable doubt

Roberts-Smith is of course innocent until proven guilty, said Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun (Melbourne). Criminal courts need to find defendants guilty beyond all reasonable doubt. Yet it is shocking that so many public figures – the former PM Tony Abbott, the right-wing senator Pauline Hanson, the country’s richest person, Gina Rinehart – have leapt to his defence, as if it’s the “patriotic thing” to do. They claim that “a war hero is being persecuted by woke civilians judging soldiers in battle from the comfort of their sofas”. This is completely wrong. Alleged crimes of this magnitude cannot go uninvestigated.

What makes the Roberts-Smith case “extraordinary” is that prosecutors do not have any of the evidence they would normally need for this kind of case, said The Australian (Sydney): forensics from the crime scene, contemporaneous witness statements. It will be a test for the legal system, in the full glare of the media. But Australians should maintain confidence in due process, and refrain from jumping to conclusions by either damning Roberts-Smith or excusing him. The claims must be heard in full. The rule of law is a “core” Australian value, and even our heroes are not beyond its reach.

On the champions’ podium of 1980s action cinema, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone “fought over gold and silver position”, said Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. “Bronze belonged indisputably to Chuck Norris, who has died aged 86.”

Origin story

He was an expert martial artist, a six-time world middleweight karate champion who ran his own chain of dojos in California. Among his pupils in the mid-1960s was Steve McQueen, who suggested that he should pursue a screen career.

A spectacular fight sequence with Bruce Lee in “The Way of the Dragon” in 1972 – in which he played a rare villainous role – led to a series of “gung-ho” action pictures, such as “Missing in Action” (1984) and “Invasion U.S.A.” (1985). Violent and unsophisticated they may have been, but Norris insisted on the soundness of the philosophy behind them. “I don’t initiate violence, I retaliate,” he said.

He was born Carlos Ray Norris in Ryan, Oklahoma, in 1940, to parents of mixed Irish and Cherokee descent. His father, Ray, who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, was an alcoholic, “and his long binges crippled the family finances and burdened his waitress wife, Wilma”, said The Times. She moved with her three sons – one of whom, Wieland, was later killed in Vietnam – to LA. There Carlos attended Torrance High School, but was bullied for being mixed race, unathletic and cripplingly shy.

At 18 he joined the US air force as a policeman, and in 1958 was sent to Osan, South Korea, where he acquired the nickname Chuck, and became interested in martial arts such as taekwondo and tang soo do, a version of karate. Back at home, while on the waiting list to join the Los Angeles police, he opened a martial arts school in his mother’s backyard, and found that it fulfilled him. His first acting role was a small part as a heavy in Dean Martin’s “The Wrecking Crew” (1968); his first starring vehicle came a decade later.

What took him into the mainstream was the 1980s vogue for films “that chimed with the national mood of wanting a resurgent America to hit back after its humiliation in Vietnam”. In “Missing in Action”, he rescued PoWs from Vietnam while showcasing his martial arts prowess. An even bigger hit was “The Delta Force” (1986), in which he and Lee Marvin fought terrorists in the Middle East. McQueen had reputedly advised Norris after seeing his first films that he should aim for “less dialogue”, and this approach won out, particularly in his best-known success, the TV drama “Walker, Texas Ranger”.

For eight seasons from 1993, he played a lone-wolf lawman with “a black belt and an iron will”. At the peak of his fame, two men tried to mug him in Dallas. When the police arrived, they found the men with broken arms, knives on the ground and Norris, then 54, waiting quietly. “We knew who he was,” the men said. “We just figured that all that stuff on television was fake.”

“The transformation of his life often awed him,” said The Economist. Born into miserable poverty in the Oklahoma backwoods, he was now in a place where the public, “half-joking, thought he could do anything”. By the early 2000s, his hardman persona had made him an ironic cult hero, and a long trail of “Chuck Norris facts” started appearing online: claiming that he made onions cry; that Superman wore Chuck Norris pyjamas; that he was the only person who could slam a revolving door.

Norris had always been on the conservative, evangelical Right, said The Telegraph; he was a staunch Reaganite in the 1980s. In 2008, he published “Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America”. In 2016, he endorsed Donald Trump. Norris married Dianne Kay Holechek in 1958; they had two sons but divorced in 1989. In 1998, he married Gena O’Kelley; they had twin daughters. He also had a daughter from another relationship.

“Our season continues exactly as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle,” wrote LIV Golf’s chief executive, Scott O’Neil, in an email to staff on Wednesday night, hours after an emergency meeting in New York over a “seismic” funding announcement.

“But what about beyond this season?” said The Telegraph. O’Neil’s email was an “attempt to calm ferocious speculation” that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is “pulling the plug” on the franchise, a project into which it has already sunk $5 billion (£3.7 billion).

With the future of the controversial tour under threat, a change in Saudi Arabia’s investment priorities could spell the beginning of the end for its sporting soft power.

‘Dying days’

“Farewell, LIV Golf, we hardly knew ye,” said The Independent. Four years after initiating a “prolonged and ultimately pointless civil war” with the PGA, “LIV is dead, or at least in its dying days”. There had been “signs of creaking” for some time now, with major stars like Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed departing, and “more would surely have followed, given time”. Fundamentally, though, the tour couldn’t ever quite “shake” the sense that the players were “doing it for the money”.

LIV Golf was “supposed to be the breakaway tour that changed golf as we know it”, said BBC Sport. Though it “certainly managed to disrupt the status quo” with the help of an “eye-watering” amount of money from the PIF, it has failed to make returns. The tour’s net losses have totalled more than “more than $1.1 billon (£810 million) since it was established in 2021”; even O’Neil admitted that the tour would not be profitable for another “five-ten years”.

If they ever make a documentary about LIV, “it will look a lot like the one about that calamitous Fyre Festival”, said Sean O’Brien on TalkSport. The dominant narrative is of Saudi Arabia trying to buy “disruption, influence, and a seat at the table with professional golf’s establishment”. Some of the game’s big names who rejected offers to join the tour, such as Tiger Woods, Scottie Scheffler and Ryder Cup and recent Masters winner Rory McIlroy, have been shown to be “on the right side of history”. McIlroy, in particular, was thought to have turned down an offer in excess of Jon Rahm’s reported £500 million contract. In the end, the tour’s only purpose was to “make rich men absurdly richer”.

Changing world

The change in Saudi Arabia’s stance comes as the PIF announced a new five-year strategy on Wednesday to make up a budget deficit of $73 billion. It is expected to “narrow” its funding focus and take stock of a “decade-long spending splurge”, said the Financial Times. One thing’s for sure, the Kingdom’s apparent coldness towards LIV Golf “will reverberate through professional sport”.

The focus for Riyadh has always been money, and diversifying its economic interest away from oil, said The i Paper. Though there was enthusiasm from “golf-mad” PIF governor Yasir al-Rumayyan, “all that matters” to Saudi sovereign Mohammed bin Salman – “who wouldn’t know a five-iron from gridiron” – is return on investment.

For a while, the soft power of sport was a “critical driver” in Saudi Arabia’s repositioning, but the “world has changed since then”. Criticism of the country’s approach to human rights has, “if not washed clean off”, then at least “shunted down the list of global concerns”, while the Iran war has “reinforced the strategic and diplomatic importance of Saudi Arabia in the Middle East”.

This is unlikely to mean a complete retreat from the sporting world, however. The Kingdom is still a major investor in F1 and football, including as hosts of the 2034 men’s World Cup. For now, Riyadh will focus on events that “serve a PR purpose” or “promise a return on investment”. “Golf falls outside both metrics.”

David Szalay was “praised by the judges for its originality” when his pared-back novel, “Flesh”, scooped the Booker Prize last year, said The Times. “Yet some readers have found it strangely familiar.”

Critics have noticed “striking similarities” between “Flesh” and Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film “Barry Lyndon”, which itself is adapted from William Thackeray’s 1844 novel. While some are “flummoxed” by Szalay’s reluctance to acknowledge the extent of the parallels, others are convinced he is “playing a game with readers, sending them on a literary treasure hunt”.

‘Near-identical trajectories’

With its “sparse prose” and constant repetition of the word ‘OK’, the British-Hungarian author’s novel caused quite a stir when it won the 2025 Booker Prize, said The Independent. The awards chair, Roddy Doyle, said the panel of judges had “never read anything quite like it”.

The rags-to-riches tale begins in Hungary, where 15-year-old Istvan lives with his mother in a housing estate. While the eponymous lead in “Barry Lyndon” hails from Ireland, the characters “follow near-identical trajectories: they enlist in the army, marry wealthy women, grieve their sons and clash with their stepsons, and lose everything they have earned later in their lives”.

Despite the almost indistinguishable plot, few critics pointed this out when “Flesh” won the Booker Prize. One of the first to note the similarities was writer Aled Maclean-Jones who in November 2025 described “Flesh” as “quite clearly a near beat-for-beat mirror” both of Thackeray’s novel and Kubrick’s movie, “to such a level I’d almost call it a retelling”, in a post on Substack.

“Szalay has the whole plot, the entire arc, supplied to him”, said David Sexton in The Standard. “There is nothing remotely wrong about it. It’s not plagiarism. Indeed it could be considered a vital tribute to a fantastic film”.

Reader ‘sleuthing’

When Szalay appeared on Dua Lipa’s “Service95 Book Club” podcast he listed five books including “Hamlet” and Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room” as having influenced “Flesh”, said The Independent. But he made no mention of Thackeray’s novel or Kubrick’s film.

Asked directly whether he had “Barry Lyndon” in mind when writing “Flesh”, he told Anthony Cummins in The Observer that he had seen the film when he was 20, “and the rags-to-riches arc was an influence”.

But in an episode of BBC Radio 4’s “This Cultural Life” due to air this week, Szalay “downplays the connection”, said The Times. When asked about whether the film is a “direct reference”, the author tells host John Wilson, “No, I wouldn’t go that far”, adding “Kubrick wasn’t really at the front of my mind, I don’t think.”

“I don’t understand why, at this stage, he won’t own up to it more”, Sexton told The Times. But Cummins had his own theory. “I think he is more artful than people are willing to credit”, he told the newspaper. The similarities could be “more akin to ‘Easter eggs’ in films, hidden messages for fans” to try and find. Perhaps he feels, “‘Why spoil it by talking people through the book in that way?’ There’s fun for the reader in sleuthing”.

When Prince Harry and wife Meghan visited Australia in 2018 as working royals they were “welcomed by rapturous crowds”, said The Guardian. There was “little sign” of that “ecstatic reception” today when the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who stepped down as working members of the royal family in 2020, arrived in Melbourne, said Reuters.

The couple have embarked on a tour that includes “engagements covering sport, mental health and veterans’ affairs”, but in their capacity as private citizens – an arrangement that has raised some eyebrows among their hosts.

Commercial activities  

During their four-day visit Harry will make a solo stop-off in the capital, Canberra, to meet military veterans. He and Meghan will then attend a ⁠mental health summit in Melbourne before rounding off the joint leg of their trip with sailing and rugby events in Sydney. It “still looks very much like a royal visit” even though “officially, it very much is not”, said ABC News.

But unlike on their previous visit, they’ll also “undertake commercial activities”, said Reuters. Meghan will host a wellness retreat at a luxury beachside hotel in Sydney, which will include yoga, manifestation and sound healing. Tickets cost A$2,699 (£1,417) including accommodation, or A$3,199 (£1,680) for a more VIP experience, including a group table photo with Meghan.

Meanwhile, Harry will be a star speaker at InterEdge’s “psychosocial safety” summit, a two-day professional development event with ticket prices as high as A$2,378 (£1,249) for the platinum option. For both of them, their sojourn in Australia is not only “private” but also “promotional”, said The Guardian.

Royal expert Giselle Bastin told the ABC that the commercial aspect of the tour was “unusual” and said the royal family would not be impressed that the Sussexes were “monetising their visit to Australia”.

Quasi-royal disaster

The “quasi-royal tour” was “already a disaster” before they set off, said The Times last month. “Early signs” showed that Australians “aren’t all that excited about their visit”; a recent Ipsos Australia poll found that only 40% of Australians view Harry favourably, while 46% view him unfavourably. Meghan “fares even worse”, with 55% holding a negative view of the US-born duchess.

The “honour” of this visit “comes with a hefty price tag”, said Bevan Shields in The Sydney Morning Herald. Although their travel expenses for the visit are being privately funded, ⁠local media reported that some of the policing costs would be paid by Australian taxpayers. Harry and Meghan are “laser-focused on building a healthy bank balance” now that their lucrative deal with Spotify has “imploded” and most of their Netflix projects have “fallen flat”. “Does anyone seriously believe they are coming to our shores for reasons other than financial and reputational?”. Our warm welcome back in 2018 clearly made Australians “look like a soft target”, so now they are back to “use us as an ATM”.

I “can’t begrudge them trying to make a living”, said Hello! magazine’s royal editor, Emily Nash. The reception of the Australia tour will be a “real litmus test for what else they may do this year”, with an Africa visit potentially on the cards, but it is also “something for the wider royal family to watch”. “The sorry saga” of the former prince Andrew and ex-wife Sarah Ferguson is a “reminder of how blurred the lines can become when titles and influence are mixed with personal gain”. If the Sussexes are able to “effectively operate alongside the working royals, but outside the carefully managed framework that governs royal duties”, that would represent a “headache” for the King.

Tottenham Hotspur’s defeat at Sunderland plunged them into the Premier League relegation zone with only six matches left to save their season.

No football club wants to be relegated but for a famous name like Tottenham, the drop can be particularly tough because “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”, said The i Paper.

Departing jewels 

The north London club have won two league titles, eight FA Cups, four League Cups, and four European trophies in their illustrious past. As recently as 2019, they were beaten finalists in the Champions League. Spurs are the ninth richest club in the world but it’s their position in the Premier League that really matters right now – and they are third from bottom.

Spurs’ wage bill is the seventh highest in the Premier League at £2.63 million per week – nearly twice as much as relegation rivals West Ham. A clause in player contracts imposes a 50% pay cut if the club are relegated but sports finance expert Rob Wilson said this is “nowhere near enough”. The club would need to cut wages by a minimum 75% to “balance” the books.

The club would then need to sell the “crown jewels” in the squad, such as Archie Gray, Djed Spence, Dominic Solanke and Cristian Romero. Rival clubs will “squeeze down the value” of players and “open with offers 30-50% below Spurs’ asking price”, said Wilson. Its annual revenue, which was £565.3 million at the last count, would be expected to drop by £200 million after relegation.

On the brighter side, Spurs would receive “parachute payments”. These are a series of “solidarity payments” the Premier League makes to relegated clubs for up to three years, to “help them adapt to reduced revenues”, such as “significantly less TV revenue”, said the BBC.

Big target

The experience of other big clubs relegated from the Premier League offers precious little hope for Spurs fans. Between 2000 and 2003, Leeds United finished in the top five of the league and reached the semi-final of the Champions League in 2001, but the club were still relegated in 2004. Three years later, Leeds dropped into League One, the third tier, where they spent three seasons. It took them 16 years to get back to the Premier League.

When Manchester City were relegated from the Premier League in 1996, they too ended up in the third tier. They returned in 2002, after changing divisions six times in a “dizzying seven-season period”, said The Sporting News.

When Aston Villa were relegated in 2016, they won only one of their first 12 matches in the Championship, partly because opponents often raised their game against such a big club. One Villa player, Ashley Westwood, said you play with “a big target on your back” in the Championship. “Did teams try harder against us? It certainly felt like that,” he told The Athletic.

The “wider fallout” of Villa’s drop included a redundancy programme to reduce the workforce by around a third. Steve Hollis, the chairman, was “left astonished” after some of the staff told him they would be “willing to work for nothing” because they “loved the club so much”.

In shops, offices and bars across Spain, a single story has been monopolising conversation, said Enrique Aparicio in El Público (Madrid). The case of 25-year-old Noelia Castillo, whose life was ended by euthanasia in a Barcelona hospital last month, has “stirred the entire country”, sparking a fierce debate about an assisted-dying law introduced in 2021.

Castillo had had a troubled life; she'd spent her teen years in state-run foster care, had suffered several sexual assaults, and in 2022 was gang raped by three men. Days after that, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window. The suicide attempt left her paralysed and in chronic pain with depression: insisting that her life was no longer worth living, she asked that it be ended. However her father, backed by a religious advocacy group called Christian Lawyers, claimed that given her fragile mental state, she was in no position to give meaningful consent to an assisted death.

‘Unnecessary suffering’

It's appalling the way in which Castillo was denied the right to a dignified death, said El País (Madrid). Her euthanasia had been unanimously approved, as the law requires, by two doctors, a lawyer and a review and oversight body; and it had been scheduled to take place on 2 August 2024. But then the legal challenges started to roll in, and it was only on 10 March this year, when the European Court of Human Rights rejected the final appeal by Christian Lawyers, that they came to an end. And so her “unnecessary suffering” was prolonged for a “devastating” 601 days, and in the full glare of media attention.

No, that puts everything the wrong way round, said Javier Redondo in El Mundo (Madrid). The assisted-dying law was supposed to provide a “dignified death” for terminally ill patients languishing “bedridden, paralysed and intubated; in agony”. It was not meant for young people like Castillo, who “lacked hope for the life ahead”. This case has fundamentally shifted the “boundaries of euthanasia”.

‘Abandoned’ by society

Indeed, the noise of this scandal should reverberate “far beyond the borders of Spain”, said Laurent Frémont in Le Figaro (Paris). It lays bare a society that no longer knows how to look after its most needy citizens. At every turn, Castillo was failed by the state: it took her from her family when she was a teenager and put her in foster care; she was still in the state's care when she was gang raped; and finally, instead of providing the psychiatric care she so badly needed, the state granted her a medically assisted death. In short, she was “abandoned by the institution” meant to take her family's place.

We need to be careful here, said Pedro García Cuartango on ABC (Madrid). I myself am morally opposed to euthanasia, and I too view Noelia Castillo's death as a societal failure. Yet we must acknowledge that the assisted-dying law was passed by an absolute majority in parliament and thus has full political legitimacy. We may hate the outcome, but in the clash between the law and our moral convictions, we in the end have to accept the law.

“WE GOT HIM!” Donald Trump’s announcement on Sunday that the second of two US airmen had been rescued from “deep inside” Iran struck a “triumphant” tone, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator – and no wonder.

The rescue brought to an end an episode that had begun on Friday, when a US air force F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over southwestern Iran – the first time a US fighter jet had been downed by hostile fire since the 2003 Gulf War. Both crew members had “ejected safely”. But while one was quickly recovered by US forces, the second, a weapons systems officer, was stranded for 36 hours, as the two sides raced to find him.

Iran, eyeing a propaganda victory, offered a £50,000 reward for his capture, said Paul Nuki in The Telegraph. Washington, in turn, was desperate to avoid a humiliation evoking memories of the botched US attempt to rescue 53 embassy staff held hostage by Iran in 1980. In the end, Trump was able to celebrate what he called “one of the most daring search and rescue operations in US history”.

“Deep behind enemy lines”, seriously hurt, and armed only with a pistol, the officer had been in a terrifying position, said Guy Adams in the Daily Mail. But his “survival, evasion, resistance and escape” (SERE) training kicked in, and he scaled a 7,000ft ridge in the Zagros Mountains, before hiding in a crevice and using a satellite device to report his location.

The CIA, meanwhile, hatched a “deception plan”, spreading word in Iran that it was moving the airman out of the country on the ground, said Greg Jaffe in The New York Times. Then, on Saturday night, the US launched a “vast and complex” rescue mission. Two MC-130 troop planes carrying more than 100 special forces commandos landed on a disused airfield near Isfahan, which they used as a forward operating base. Drones and jets provided air cover, striking Iranian forces that came near. Then commandos used mini-helicopters to reach the mountains, extract the weapons officer, and fly him back to the airfield.

It was here that a major hiccup occurred, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian. The troop carrier planes became bogged down in the soil and had to be destroyed by the US to avoid them falling into enemy hands, while new planes were flown in. Although the US did get all its troops out, suffering no casualties, it lost hardware worth about $250 million (£185 million). The episode as a whole was a reminder that, for all America’s military superiority, Iran “can fight back” – and it would only need to “get lucky once” in this asymmetric conflict to secure a major propaganda victory.

Recent violence in the Middle East had some of Dubai’s wealthy British expats rushing to bunkers, but in the longer term they might be seeking shelter in a famous Italian city.

Milan is becoming the preferred destination for the wealthy who are “abandoning” Dubai because of tensions and violence in the Gulf region, said British Asian newspaper Eastern Eye.

Restlessness and reinvention

Italy’s flat-tax regime means that foreign residents can pay €300,000 (£259,620) a year on all overseas income, which is “small change for the world’s wealthiest”, said The Guardian. Even prior to the fighting in Iran, interest in Italy took off after Britain scrapped its non-dom status and Portugal tightened its own rules.

But “tax policy alone does not explain the surge”, said the Economic Times. Italy’s “strong legal framework, EU membership, and relatively stable economy” make it a “compelling choice” for the privileged.

As wealthy families move to “safer European bases”, Milan is enjoying “historic spikes” in luxury real estate sales, from its “renovated palazzi to modern high-end apartments”. Property prices in Milan have risen by 38% over five years.

“Unlike more poetic cities like Rome or Venice”, Milan “actually works” and doesn’t have an issue with “overtourism”, said The Times. Its “strategic location” offers “easy access to the lakes, mountains and coast” and there’s a “restlessness” and an “obsession” with “reinvention”, meaning there’s “always something new to see or do”. It is home to the Borsa Italiana stock exchange, leading banks and global fashion houses.

A new “superfast” railway links the city centre and Linate airport, you can “whizz around the city quicker than ever” on the “tap-in tap-out” metro, and there are new hotels, restaurants, bars and private members’ clubs, which are “cranking up the standards of hospitality” from “perfectly good” to something closer to those of London or New York.

Tax dumping

Can Milan really dethrone Dubai in the affections of the “global elite”? That “remains to be seen”, said The Guardian. Armand Arton, who helps multimillionaire and billionaire families to relocate through investment citizenship schemes, said he’s “positive” that Dubai will “rebound from the current question of doubt around security”.

There are “still questions” about “how far Italy can push its advantage”, said the broadsheet, and the former French prime minister François Bayrou accused Italy of “tax dumping”, an allegation that Giorgia Meloni dismissed as “utterly baseless”.

Italy is not fully replacing Dubai, said Eastern Eye, but it has become a “strategic second home for global elites”. Experts believe the Italian city “offers a compelling alternative for those prioritising European stability”.

As part of AI company Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative, the new general-purpose model Mythos is uniquely powerful in the artificial intelligence industry and is causing concern among even people who are normally trusting of AI. The company, which also makes the AI model Claude, has claimed that Mythos is currently too advanced for public release, and is instead entrusting the model to cybersecurity experts for the time being. Some are worried this could pave the way for even more nefariousness in the AI space.

‘New era of hacking’

Mythos’ AI programming is able to find potential weaknesses in cybersecurity, and it can “detect thousands of high- and critical-severity bugs and software defects, with vulnerabilities identified in most major operating systems and web browsers,” said NBC News. Some of these vulnerabilities “had been undiscovered for decades,” according to Anthropic’s experts. The company found that Mythos’ “cybersecurity capabilities in particular were surprisingly advanced” compared to similar general-purpose AI models.

But there are also fears that Mythos “could usher in a new era of hacking and cybersecurity,” said NBC News. Mythos is “capable of advanced reasoning,” which could allow it to “identify and exploit a growing number of software vulnerabilities” if it were to fall into the wrong hands. To stave off these fears, Anthropic is allowing certain tech firms to access Mythos. But the company “does not have plans yet to release Mythos to the general public,“ said Bloomberg, a move that will ensure the AI ends up “in the hands of defenders first,” officials with Anthropic said.

The tech firms are expected to use Mythos as part of a project called Glasswing to “hunt for flaws in their products and share findings with industry peers,” said Bloomberg. It is a notable change because it will be the “first time a leading AI lab has built a frontier model and simultaneously decided the public cannot use it,” said Forbes. Anthropic’s position remains “straightforward: The model’s cyber capabilities are too dangerous for general availability.”

‘Humanity’s most devious behaviors’

In addittion to hacking vulnerabilities, some experts are concerned about Mythos’ capabilities. Anthropic released a safety evaluation for Mythos that shows a “striking leap in scores on many evaluation benchmarks,” the company said. In some instances, the evaluation “reads like a thriller about an AI that has learned some of humanity’s most devious behaviors,” said Axios.

At least one of the tests performed by Anthropic showed Mythos “acting like a cutthroat executive,” said Axios, doing things like “turning a competitor into a dependent wholesale customer, threatening to cut off supply to control pricing and keeping extra supplier shipments it hadn’t paid for.” The AI had instances where it “used a prohibited method to get an answer, then tried to ‘re-solve’ it to avoid detection,” though these were limited to “less than 0.001% of interactions.”

These issues have not stopped companies from working with Mythos, as “approximately 40 organizations involved in the design, maintenance or operation of computer systems are said to have joined Glasswing,” said The Guardian. This includes major firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, JPMorganChase and Microsoft. And while Anthropic has previously sparred with the Trump administration about its implementation in the Defense Department, the company has also “had discussions with the U.S. government regarding Mythos.”

Donald Trump’s political rivals have denounced him as an “unhinged madman” and a “dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual” after he directed a string of expletives at the Iranian regime. “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!” the US president said on his Truth Social platform .

But Trump is far from the only potty-mouthed politician, and trends suggest that swearing in politics is increasingly going from taboo to mainstream.

‘Profanity seal’

Woodrow Wilson “broke the profanity seal” in 1919, when the then president recalled a time he made a “conspicuous ass of himself”, said Joseph Phillips, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “Since then, presidents, their seconds-in-command, and presidential hopefuls have used profanity at least 692 times” – but the vast majority of curse words, 87%, occurred in the last 10 years.

We’ve “come a long way from our shock” at John Major, not knowing he was being recorded, using the word “bastards” while prime minister in 1993, said Robert Crampton in The Times. Although “tough talk is nothing new in politics”, leaders “long avoided flaunting it”, said The Independent. But now, public vulgarity is “in vogue”. During a political rally in 2025, Trump “used profanity at least four times”. J.D. Vance has also sworn publicly, and former vice president Kamala Harris “earned a roar of approval from her audience” last October when she said of the Trump administration that “these mother******* are crazy”.

Members of Congress and the Senate have also sworn as a “volley of vulgarities underscores an ever-coarsening political environment” on social media. Posts that “evoke the strongest emotions are rewarded with the most engagement”.

‘Anti-intellectualism’

There’s a “misguided belief” that “profanity is more ‘honest’ or ‘authentic’ than polite speech”, said Solomon D. Stevens in the Illinois paper the Journal-Courier. This suggests that politicians who swear are “telling it like it is” or “being real”, while those who don’t must be “holding back and not telling the truth”. But “politicians who swear are just politicians who swear. They can lie just as easily as those who don’t swear.”

There’s also “an anti-intellectualism at work”, as politicians who swear imply that those who don’t are “putting on airs”. While some intellectuals can “certainly be pretentious”, “refraining from coarse language” is not in itself a sign of that.

Trump’s “disinhibited language” sounded like a “tantrum”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. It “suggested that he’d lost self-control because Iran wouldn’t do what he wanted”. Swearing points to an “emotional release and thus a loss of reason”.

The president’s recent profanity also distracted from “the message itself”, said the Deseret News. A “rousing and well-crafted argument” could have “built a compelling case for ousting the country’s ruling regime”, because “when it comes to war, calm self-assurance speaks louder than ranting expletives”.

Politicians aren’t “bawling swear words because they can’t contain their outrage”, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. They do it because, “like preteen boys trying to sound tough”, they believe “the odd public expletive enhances their authenticity” and gives them “an air of pugnacity apropos to the moment”. But they are mistaken. “Most Americans still prefer their leaders to talk like grown-ups.”

Nevertheless, Democrats are pushing back against the right, using bad language themselves and embracing more confrontational and crass tactics. They see it as a way to beat Maga at its own game, attempting to “step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing”, said The New York Times.

Russian commanders are charging “up to £30,000 to spare soldiers from the front lines in Ukraine”, said The Telegraph. Recruits unwilling or unable to pay are “reset” – a “euphemism for sending them to their deaths” in large-scale offensives with astronomical casualty rates.

Wounded soldiers must “pay thousands” to be declared unfit for active service, said PBS. Those who do not are “forced to literally limp into battle”. Seth Jones, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that injured soldiers, sometimes on crutches, are being “used as bait” to “draw fire” from hidden Ukrainian artillery.

Estimates put the number of Russian casualties in the war against Ukraine since 2022 at around 1.2 million, according to the CSIS. Ukrainian officials have also claimed that in March Russia suffered its highest number of losses – more than 35,000 killed or seriously wounded – since the launch of Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” programme last year, said the UK Defence Journal.

‘System of extortion’

“Corruption and slave labour have long been features of the Russian and Soviet armies,” said The Economist. Soldiers are not just seen as “grunts” – serving as “cannon fodder” for their superiors – but more troublingly as a “source of enrichment”.

There is a “system of extortion and punishment” in the Russian ranks, where infantry soldiers must “buy their own” military gear. Other collections begin “under the pretext of raising money for drones, equipment or food”, but payments are expected to continue. “Soldiers who refuse to pay may be thrown into dug-out pits for torture.”

In extreme cases, sources have reported that commanders “requisition troops’ bank cards and PIN codes” before sending them into battle. “The dead are declared missing, and commanders withdraw the money they earned from their bank accounts”. As one soldier was told by a new commanding officer, survival is “not a matter of luck, but of ability to pay”.

In the Russian military, “men learn quickly to fear their commanders more than their foe”, said PBS. Videos appear on social media depicting the “horrific punishments” faced by soldiers if they fail to pay up, with reports of some “being locked in cages, electrocuted and sexually assaulted”. According to the independent Russian station Radio Echo, nearly 12,000 complaints were filed over six months last year, accusing commanders of “corruption and violence towards their own men”.

‘Public resentment’

The Russian military recruitment drive has “poured blood and money into the system, resulting in a vast battlefield economy”, said The Economist. The front line has become a “marketplace where everything has a price: drones, medals, home leave and life itself”.

The problem is widespread, said The New York Times. In the last two years, “at least 12 high-ranking Russian military officials and generals, as well as dozens of lower-ranking officers, have been indicted on corruption charges”.

Most recently, Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Frolov – known as “Executioner” – has been put on trial in a military court, facing charges of fraud, bribery and weapons trafficking. He is accused by the Investigative Committee (Russia’s equivalent of the FBI) of leading a scheme where “more than 30 soldiers and medics” in his regiment “used weapons to shoot themselves in order to obtain payouts for battlefield injuries”. The plot reportedly defrauded the army of “200 million rubles, or $2.6 million”.

This case in particular has “fed public resentment of the economic and social privileges” of high-ranking officials, who are accused of perpetuating the war “only for the money”.

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

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

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

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

‘Spirit of vengeance’

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

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

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

‘Surprisingly clumsy’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tariffs, trade wars and anti-trust trials

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

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

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

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

Artificial intelligence

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

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

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

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

Succession planning

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

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

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

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

‘China’s growing soft power’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Orientalism by any other name’

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

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

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

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

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

Why MAHA might be stalled

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

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

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

White House avoids controversy

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

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

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

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

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

‘Fantasy life’

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

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

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

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

Red herrings and false leads

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

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

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

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

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

“Angela Rayner is no longer ‘on manoeuvres’,” said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. The former deputy PM is now targeting Keir Starmer “with live rounds”. In a speech last week to the soft-left Momentum group, she said that Labour was fighting for survival and “running out of time”. She also condemned the PM’s plans to make it harder for migrants to gain settled status, calling them “un-British” and a “breach of trust”.

A leftward change of tack

Rayner is clearly setting herself up to replace Starmer after Labour’s expected hammering in May’s local elections – and she may succeed. She’s popular with the Labour movement, and her fellow MPs are desperate. Prior to Labour’s catastrophic by-election loss in Gorton and Denton a month ago, they were “prepared to tolerate a strategy that focused on neutralising Reform UK”. But they now regard the Greens as an existential threat.

A leftward change of tack – whether under Starmer or Rayner – makes electoral sense for Labour, said Andy Beckett in The Guardian. Analysis shows that its loss of support to the Greens, Lib Dems and other parties is “larger and more reversible” than its loss of support to Reform. With today’s fragmented electorate, fortune will favour parties that get their vote out. Securing as little as 25% of the electorate could win a lot of closely contested seats.

‘Power over process’

But is Britain ready to accept Rayner as PM, asked Jason Cowley in The Sunday Times. There’s no doubt that she’s a deft operator with a great life story and considerable charm. “Watch her when she is with the King,” an MP told me. “Now imagine her in the Oval Office with [Donald] Trump. It would work.” Rayner would lead in a different way to Starmer – “not least because, unlike him, she relishes power over process”. With the row over her tax affairs expected to be settled before May, she is ready to join the fray.

But while her attacks on immigration reform may cheer some Labour MPs, they won’t go down well with many voters. Targeting that policy is a “strange decision”, said John Rentoul in The Independent. If, as Rayner claims, Labour must “show the British people whose side we’re on”, it makes little sense to make “soft on immigration” one’s signature policy.

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

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

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

‘The spectre of stagnation’

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

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

The ‘Maradona Effect’

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

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

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

Fewer ships, higher prices

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

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

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

Significant costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not an exact match’

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

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

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

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

‘Essence of the hereditary principle’

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

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

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

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

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

‘It creates an opportunity for those without scruples’

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

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

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

‘Engage and support our community’

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

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

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

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

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

Defying the odds

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

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

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

‘Delicate balance’

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

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

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

‘RAMaggedon,’ job loss and stunted creativity

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

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

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

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

Mixed feelings

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

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

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

Have the Democrats found a new saviour? Some in the party believe so, said Adam Wren in Politico. They're pinning their hopes on James Talarico, a 36-year-old Presbyterian seminarian who, following his recent primary victory, is set to contest a Senate seat in Texas in November's midterm elections.

The Democrats haven't won a statewide race there since 1994, and the last time Texas elected a Democrat to the US Senate was back in 1988. But the strong performance of the “disciplined and studious” Talarico has rekindled Democrat dreams of turning Texas blue.

He's a deft communicator, and his centrist, positive style seems to appeal to a wide variety of voters. In the words of the veteran political adviser Mark McKinnon, Talarico could be the “Moses who leads the Lone Star Democrats out of the desert they've been in for 35 years”. This would also give them a “wider than expected path” to flipping the Republican majority in the Senate in November.

Talarico has “clear gifts as a campaigner”, said Lauren Egan on The Bulwark. He seems popular across the various ideological factions of his party and with Latino voters, an increasingly important demographic. But Democrats shouldn't get their hopes too high. They've been let down by Texas candidates before. Remember Beto O'Rourke? Chances are, Talarico will also crash and burn, said National Review. Sure, he's a polished performer whose overt Christianity marks him out from most Democrats, but voters ultimately care about policies – and Talarico's agenda is just too progressive. He has talked of God being “non-binary”, and argues that the Bible is pro-abortion. He uses the trendy gender-neutral term “Latinx”. That stuff won't fly in Texas.

As a conservative Christian, I disagree with Talarico on many matters of theology and ideology, said David French in The New York Times. But it's inspiring to be reminded that “Christian politicians can actually act like Christians”. Talarico campaigned with genuine compassion, declaring in his primary-night speech that he was “tired of being told to hate my neighbour”, tired of “politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as total war”. Compare that with Maga Christianity, where “cruelty in the name of Trumpism is no vice”. Talarico may not win the Senate seat in November, but he has given a lot of people hope, by showing that “kindness still has a place in the public square”.

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

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

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

‘Scrambling’ for alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ballooning cost’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Severely limit what people can see’

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

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

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

‘Massive headache’

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

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

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

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

‘Built itself this image’

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

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

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

‘The shine has definitely been taken off’

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

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

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

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

Binding minorities to the majority

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

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

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

Cracking down

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

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

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

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

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

‘Never left alone’

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

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

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

‘Right temperament to deliver’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grappling with an ‘increasingly challenging’ geopolitical landscape

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

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

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