All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Perhaps the biggest talent of humanity is our gift to adapt to challenging circumstances with creativity and ingenuity. It may also be our biggest fault. Just two days after I stood in the central Gaza Strip, touring the area and seeing the Yellow Line for myself, the IDF yesterday announced another serious breach of the
When leading Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny died two years ago, the only real question was not whodunnit, but howdunnit? His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, quickly blamed poison and said that his partisans had taken tissue samples from his corpse for examination. Yesterday, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands announced that a combined intelligence operation had demonstrated that he was
As Marco Rubio boarded his flight for Munich on Thursday night, he sought to reassure nervous Europeans that they weren’t about to be berated by America. ‘We’ll be good,’ he said. It appears the US Secretary of State kept his word when he addressed the Munich security conference this morning. Rubio kicked off his speech
The government is consulting on the merits of banning children under the age of 16 from social media and looks poised to do so. As with many such digital abstinence movements, politicians who advocate for this change are influenced by The Anxious Generation, a book of pop psychology written by Jonathan Haidt, which claims that social
While all eyes and ears at the Munich security conference will be on US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday, it was America’s Democrats who were able to enjoy their moment in the spotlight on Friday. The party was out in force: Californian governor Gavin Newsom, member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan governor
Remember the old quip about economists? “That’s all very in practice,” they say, “but how does it work out in theory?” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman of the New York Times is a splendid example of that sort of folly. On the evening of November 9, 2016, Krugman skirled that the election of Donald Trump would
You’re not fired! One of the defining aspects of the second Trump administration so far has been the unwillingness of the Commander-in-Chief to oust senior officials who generate unwanted headlines. “Never bend, never break” is the mantra, and that means always refusing to dance to the media’s tune. War Secretary Pete Hegseth, as Americano readers will know,
Over the past few days there has been a flurry of stories and official statements about Irish national Seamus Culleton, now detained by ICE for overstaying a visa for almost 20 years while on the run from multiple drugs warrants in Ireland. The clip of him saying his holding area is a “concentration camp” has been heard
Donald Trump may or may not bomb Iran in the next few days. His cheerleaders will cite the Tehran regime’s brutal executions of Iranian protesters as justification. But if the President is in the mood for humanitarian interventions and stopping barbarism, he might also want to make good on his pledge to annex Canada. Once
23 min listen
Freddy speaks to Spectator writer Katherine Dee about the online obsession with cryptids and what it reveals about the modern internet. They discuss how folklore-style storytelling is thriving on platforms like TikTok, why conspiracy culture now resembles collaborative “alternate reality games” and how AI-generated images are blurring the line between what is real, fake and
It may sound like a rather arcane development, but a change in the command structure of the Rosgvardiya, Russia’s National Guard, offers some clues about both the state of the country and the Ukraine war – and the Kremlin’s fears for the future. Zolotov has been lobbying for some time for the Rosgvardiya to have
Irresponsible Trump, responsible China: that is the message the BBC’s climate editor seemed to be sending us by juxtaposing the news that the President had repealed Barack Obama’s “endangerment finding” and that China’s carbon emissions fell slightly last year. Trump’s critics like to portray him as a rogue figure in a world which is otherwise committed
In December 2018, to the shock of pretty much everybody in the US national security establishment at the time, President Donald Trump publicly ordered the withdrawal of all US troops from Syria. The announcement caused a panic within the Defense Department, State Department and National Security Council, whose officials teamed up to dissuade Trump from
In announcing an end to the ICE surge in Minnesota, Tom Homan has become for Democrats an unlikely good cop to Kristi Noem’s bad. But the double-act might not last long – the person Homan truly wishes to bring to book is Noem. The White House Border Czar said this morning that the Trump administration
Yesterday, El Paso, Texas, was placed under severe restrictions from the Federal Aviation Administration. For unspecified reasons of national security, no aircraft would be allowed in or out for ten days. Washington sources soon confirmed what many suspected: the cause was hostile drone activity from Mexico. Then there was an about turn. Within a few
Donald Trump spent much of the second half of last year boasting about the total and utter success of his military strikes on Iran. “As you know,” he said in August, “we took out the nuclear capability of Iran, and to use the term that people try to dispute without any knowledge, it was obliterated.” Iran’s
A horrible and incredibly sad tragedy unfolded on February 10 in the small town of Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia, Canada. An 18-year-old, Jesse Van Rootselaar, also known as Jesse Strang, turned a gun first on his mother and stepbrother, then on young students and a teacher at his former high school, and finally on himself – with
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted that he went on vacation, with his family, to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012. How very White Lotus! Suddenly, every ear in Washington cocked Lutnick’s way, like he was starring in an old E.F. Hutton commercial. “My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple with,
Years ago, Peter Mandelson, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington, shared a key lesson with his protégé Morgan McSweeney – until last week the prime minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Reminiscing about his involvement in the Labour party’s 1987 general election campaign, he called it the “spray-paint election.” The manifesto was a “beautiful technicolor” document
The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferable to
If you rent a cheap Airbnb house in Las Vegas, you might not be altogether surprised to find dead crickets in the garage. But a thousand vials of medical samples in several freezers – and a centrifuge? After the cleaner and one guest fell ill at a property in the city’s Sunrise Manor neighborhood last week, federal agents raided it
Kharkiv, Ukraine In a bunker on the outskirts of Kharkiv, a group of rookie Ukrainian soldiers are learning the basics of combat medicine. The temperature outside is -4°F, and clouds of breath hang in the air – as does the gravity of what they are letting themselves in for. The dummies used for training have
Nothing has been as damaging for the British royal family as the unfortunate meeting of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Jeffrey Epstein. Republican Thomas Massie and the Democrat Ro Khanna know this. In a press conference yesterday, they said they had been shown documents that have been otherwise redacted and withheld from the Epstein files. These documents
During the pandemic, Florida became a haven for those looking to escape lockdowns. Miami was a “Zoom town,” a place where rich mobile professionals moved to enjoy the beaches and freedom, while continuing their remote jobs. Some $36 billion in extra income tax registered with the IRS in 2022. That great influx of people has now come
As a general rule, once a city erects turnstiles to tourist attractions which were once free to visit, it is time to go elsewhere. Never more so than in the case of Rome. Last week the Italian capital introduced a €2 charge to visit the Trevi Fountain. Tight-fisted tourists like me will still be able to
The real problem with US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attending the Grammys wasn’t that it revealed her true colors as a liberal, but that it showed the slow and steady erosion of the court’s institutional reserve. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican, demanded that Chief Justice John Roberts launch an investigation into Jackson
The decision to sentence Jimmy Lai to 20 years in jail in Hong Kong is no surprise, but it is no less shocking or heartbreaking. For his family, especially his courageous wife Teresa, son Sebastien and daughter Claire, who have advocated so tirelessly for their father over the past five years, one can only imagine
It is not just in Washington that the Epstein files continue to dominate. In Westminster, the political reverberations of the Department of Justice’s investigation are threatening to bring down the British government. At the center of the drama is Peter Mandelson: a former Tony Blair aide who served, until recently, as Our Man in DC.
Nothing excuses the manner of Peter Mandelson’s communications with Jeffrey Epstein both before and after the latter’s conviction for sex offenses. Nor are the lies which Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor told about breaking off relations with Epstein defensible. Nevertheless, there is something disturbing about what looks like being the inevitable fallout of the Epstein scandal: that no
What does Jeff Bezos’s gutting of the Washington Post say about America’s sense of itself and of its place in the world? Bezos has scrapped much of the paper’s foreign coverage, as well as the books and sports sections. Over three hundred reporters and editors have been fired – including publisher Will Lewis. The Ukraine
The more salacious aspects of the Epstein files are well known – but what of the banal side of being a billionaire sex pest? It’s no secret Woody Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn were close friends with Epstein, as the trove of emails show. One food-obsessed friend of Cockburn alerted us to the non-stop
Many teenagers today find Christianity off-putting because Jesus seems too fond of “mansplaining.” He appears to have a “God complex,” while the Almighty is alienating on account of being “really violent and aggressive.” These are the findings in the report Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape’s “Translating God” project, based on a recent survey of British 14-
There used to be a political designation in the South of “Yellow Dog Democrats,” meaning voters who’d vote for a yellow dog if the Democrats put them up for election. But in Texas, the yellow dogs have been Republican for a generation. Texas last had a Democratic senator in 1993, and last occupied the Governor’s Mansion in 1995, when Ann Richards
Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a hospital visit to comfort the victim of a knife attack on a police officer, who was forced to fire his weapon to defend himself. Of course, the bed Mamdani visited was that of the schizophrenic man, Jabez Chakraborty, who charged at police and was shot as a result. It almost
