All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
An important turning point has been reached in Russia’s war on Ukraine. But unfortunately for Kyiv, it’s not the “tide is turning” in Ukraine’s favor narrative that Volodymyr Zelensky has been pushing ever since his long-range drone attacks began smashing oil refineries and logistics warehouses deep inside Russia and sinking dozens of ships in the
With Spain still reeling from the extraordinary scenes in Ceuta, the country's Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has decamped to La Mareta, the government’s palatial retreat on Lanzarote. Before beginning his holiday, he made a brief visit to the exclave, where, according to Madrid, some 72,000 migrants crossed from Morocco and the local authorities say 88 bodies were recovered. Nearly a week later, Ceuta’s government says 3,000 to 5,000 migrants remain; Madrid puts the figure at 2,500. Around 400 are still living on El Trampolín beach, sheltering under blankets and makeshift structures. Food and water are now being distributed, but provision has been patchy: some say they went up to five days without food. Sanitation remains rudimentary.
“Quiet luxury” is all the rage these days, the social media algorithms tell me. On Instagram and TikTok, Americans inform their followers that clothing with no visible branding is a true status signifier, before extolling the virtues of Barbour jackets and Loro Piana shoes. Aspirational people shouldn’t drive flashy new cars, they argue; instead, they should drive a 30-year-old Range Rover – as if the inevitable engine rebuild wouldn’t cost more than most people would spend on a car. When decorating, millennial gray is wrong, garish and uninteresting; everything must be sage green with brass accents. There is nothing more quiet and luxurious than the B&Q color-matching desk.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on freezing rents for rent-stabilized tenants. Since taking office earlier this year, he has done just that. How? By appointing two-thirds of the supposedly independent Rent Guidelines Board. Last month, the board voted to freeze rents on one and two year leases, affecting a million properties. It’s the biggest NYC rent freeze in living memory. Right-wing populists have long been accused of attacking independent institutions and undermining their credibility. Their left-wing counterparts appear to have developed a subtler, more insidious approach. Instead of attacking institutions, they capture them. In doing so, they predetermine outcomes and present the result as an independent judgment.
Just over a week ago, Britain's new prime minister Andy Burnham came under attack over the impending early releases from prison. His critics included the widow of Andrew Harper, a policeman killed on duty in 2019 by being dragged behind a car for a mile. Andrew’s widow, Lissie, described the possible early release of two of his killers as “deplorable.” Burnham insisted that “keeping the public safe will be my top priority” and said of the early release policy that he would “look at in detail before we go further forward.” Clearly Burnham wanted to do anything to avoid being the PM who released rapists early.
The left-wing insurgent Abdul El-Sayed is slightly ahead of the establishment-backed congresswoman, Haley Stevens, with more than 90 percent of the votes counted in the Michigan primaries. Freddy speaks to Alex Castellanos who has written a piece for The Spectator explaining why the DSA's success could be a triumph for Trump, how they reflect a similar political outcome to Trump's populist split in the Republican party and what today's result could mean for the primaries ahead. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Just a few hours before Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, he told me that he was going to “beat the shit” out of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in the November general election. His tactic, he explained in a Detroit farmers’ market yesterday, would be to “staple his [Rogers’s] sins to his forehead.” What those sins were, El-Sayed wouldn’t say. He has in the past criticized Rogers as a "corporate shill" who prioritized pharmaceutical and corporate interests over Michiganders while in Congress. November looks likely to be a fight between capitalism and communism In truth, although he did scrape to victory last night, it was El-Sayed who almost had the shit beaten out of him by Haley Stevens, a mainstream Democrat.
Get to the chopper... but not yet. More construction is underway at the White House, as President Trump has directed contractors to redo their work on the new helipad, a project that started at the beginning of July. Photos taken show crews taking apart their hard work. According to the Washington Post, Trump is "frustrated with its appearance”, and is questioning its placement on the sloped lawn of the White House. Two anonymous sources say he’s debating whether “the slope of the White House lawn needs to be changed.” You cannot question an artist's process. Construction began on the helipad even before it was announced publicly, with the goal of completing the project before President Xi Jinping visits in late September.
Gus Carter is joined by Peachy Keenan to talk about the end of Hollywood as we know it. They discuss how the traditional Hollywood business model is faltering, overtaken by the rise of streaming giants. They also highlight how these platforms, initially seen as the new frontier for film, are now grappling with their own economic challenges. Gus and Peachy also talk about how these challenging times are offering opportunity to new upstarts and directors looking to make their mark on the film industry. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano Produced by Henry Lloyd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The Jason Arday affair has been a great revealer. On the one hand, it is a glorious romp that has brought much-needed mirth to Britain. On the other, the exposure of Professor Arday isn’t really about the guileless Arday himself, but the establishment that elevated him. It has served up a moment of unavoidable clarity in which the nonsense of progressivism stands exposed like the imperial scrotum. Arday himself can hardly be blamed for this scandal. Like Puff the magic dragon, he is notable only for the effect he had on others It is a perfect storm. We have a fantasist in an environment where, for political and social status reasons, everyone takes his claims at face value, or pretends that they do because to express doubt would be to invite unwanted attention.
For up to $100,000 a month, investment banks, hedge funds and algorithmic trading firms can now buy access to President Trump's Truth Social posts milliseconds before they are made public. The premise is that Trump’s posts move markets so much that getting access to these posts mere milliseconds earlier is enough to gain an edge in the market – the elusive alpha that hedge funds are so obsessed with. Critics are labeling it a blatant violation of insider information laws. Without going into the legality of the offering, I want to challenge Trump's claim about the actual value of early access to his posts. We found no evidence of any systematic trading strategy that could deliver a profit Given Trump’s continuous impact on markets, I decided to run an experiment.
Somewhere in a Republican advertising agency, a young man is enjoying a cigar, ordering pizza and assembling the following TV ad. It begins with a Democratic congressman from a competitive district looking reasonable in a manly lumberjack shirt. “The Democratic party is a Big Tent,” he says. The screen goes dark. The announcer says, “A Big Tent? Big enough for what?
Alarmed western observers are warning that the wars in Ukraine and Iran could merge into a single region-wide conflict. Ukrainian drones struck an Iranian oil platform, a Russian missile boat, and sanctioned cargo ships in the Caspian Sea late last month. But in truth, Kyiv has regarded Iran as a combatant in the Ukraine war since the summer of 2022, when the first Shahed drones arrived in Russian-occupied Crimea and Kherson. These drones were accompanied by instructors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who trained Russian operators in their use. Moreover, this was not even Ukraine’s first strike on an Iranian target in the Caspian.
Rod Liddle got me into journalism. We always had The Spectator lying around the house when I was young. I soon learned to turn to him first, as most good readers of the magazine do. My father and I would often read his columns aloud to each other and laugh ourselves into fits. That was Rod’s sublime talent: he made people LOL, long before the internet did. My first job was at the Catholic Herald, and my then-boss Damian Thompson advised me to improve my writing by copying out the articles of my favorite columnist. I chose Rod, obviously, though of course I could never dream of imitating his style or imaginative wit. I particularly enjoyed his fascination with "the nematode worm which stabs itself to death with its own penis.
Rod Liddle, associate editor of The Spectator, has died aged 66. This is the first column he wrote for the magazine on March 9, 2002. It's always a life-affirming moment – for me, at least. The aeroplane has groaned and wheezed its way up, up, above the city and – improbably, to my mind – established a sort of equilibrium with the ethereal new world around it. The engines begin to sound more at ease. Perhaps I won't die this time, after all. And then, the seatbelt signs flick off, and from somewhere far down the aisle, towards first class, there comes the chinkety-chink-chink of the trolley. So, I am not going to die – and, better still, I'm going to be given a nice drink.
Rod Liddle, The Spectator’s associate editor, has died at the age of 66. Rod, who was also a columnist for the Sunday Times of London and Sun, died at the James Cook University hospital in Middlesbrough yesterday evening, following a short illness. His children, Wilder, Tyler and Emmy said in a statement: “We’re all very saddened and shocked at the sudden passing of our wonderful father. He raised us much as you might imagine, to be inquisitive, brave and always humorous. Even in hospital in the last few weeks, he consistently held the room and never let the awful situation show. He has left a legacy that we are all incredibly proud of, he will always be our guide on how to live an extraordinary life.
In an extremely rare bilateral move, the US and Japan have intervened to shore up the Japanese yen, which has been steadily losing value and sliding towards a 40-year low. The news was confirmed by the Japanese Finance Ministry this morning. President Trump preceded the announcement by explaining that the US was “always there to help Japan.” In truth, there wouldn’t have been much point in denying it – a Reuters photo showed a memo on US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Beasant's desk with the simple instruction “To Do – Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) 5-10 billion.” The dollar fell to 157 yen after the announcement, well down from the 164 (considered by Morgan Stanley the highest tolerable point for the Japanese government) of the previous week. This is an extraordinary move.
Gus Carter is joined by Geoffrey Cain to speak about the ongoing developments in Chinese AI, and how it stacks up to its American rivals. Gus and Geoffrey talk about the emergence of Kimi K3, and how Chinese models will become inherently more competitive to global audiences, not just those the United States. They also discuss the OpenAI model that went rogue, and how other US models refused to undertake research to prevent the same from happening again. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano Produced by Henry Lloyd https://www.youtube.com/watch?
European Union interior ministers will hold an emergency video conference on Tuesday to discuss last week’s events in Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta. More than 60,000 Moroccans surged across the border, and although the majority have returned the invasion has traumatized many member states. Italy and Denmark initiated the meeting and soon had the support of twenty other EU countries. In a letter to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the 22 leaders declared: “We have a duty to effectively deter and relentlessly combat illegal migration, by coordinating our action, strengthening our external borders and addressing all policies that can serve as pull factors.
One of my friends has never made her own playlist. “I just get on Spotify and use what the algorithm has made for me,” she says. “If I’m in a good mood, I ask for a ‘happy playlist’.” Then again, I also have friends who are going out of their way to make life less easy. Three of them recently purchased flip phones with no internet connection. Others have bought digital cameras to lug along to every event. CDs are popping up in the center consoles of some of their cars. Even ‘purchasing’ a movie or TV show on a streaming platform doesn’t guarantee your ownership Is this just an extreme extension of the Y2K aesthetic that has overtaken Instagram feeds?
The scenes at Ceuta are eerily reminiscent of aspects of the infamous anti-immigration French novel, The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail – in which Western countries are overrun by mass immigration from India. They also illustrate Europe’s recent asylum crisis in a nutshell. A “luxury belief” ruling by liberal Spanish judges making it harder to deport people, a surge of people from a poor or middle-income country that the authorities in the receiving country are unwilling to resist with force, while the authorities in the sending country are either indifferent or happy to cause their neighbor political discomfort. It has echoes of the Syrian surge in 2015 and the explosion of small boat Channel crossings after 2018.
In 1899 Jack London, beginning his career as a writer, sold a story to Atlantic Monthly for $120. Drawing on his experiences during the Klondike gold rush and on the Yukon River, it was a tale of an Aleutian native wandering the Arctic for years on end in search of his wife, who had been stolen by a powerful Nordic sea captain. London titled his saga, “An Odyssey of the North.
Spain was invaded yesterday. There is no other way to put it. Close to 50,000 foreigners, mostly men, swarmed into Spanish territory and laughed and jeered as they went. Every generation before ours would have called that an invasion, and we should too. The era of euphemism is over. The left’s house of lies has fallen. We can all now see with our own eyes that our nations are being overwhelmed by cocky, often hostile men from afar. It isn’t only Spain’s sovereign integrity that lies in tatters following the storming of Ceuta – so does the tyranny of euphemism we’ve all been forced to labor under these past few years The footage from Ceuta is extraordinary – throngs of foreigners, mostly men from Morocco, gatecrashed an enclave of the Spanish kingdom.
Dr. Fauci won’t see you now. The man who served as America’s top medical adviser during Covid had to be subpoenaed to appear before the Senate this week. Wanted to hear his expert opinion? Too bad. Almost every question received the same response. "On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution." Anthony Fauci’s silence is the perfect coda to the madness of the Covid era. We were told, again and again, to "trust the science." But the science establishment didn’t trust us. Information was withheld, facts were twisted and opinions suppressed. Fauci was given a sweeping presidential pardon by Joe Biden. Yet even now, years later and immune from consequences, Dr. Fauci doesn’t want to talk.
No one imagined that Hamas would voluntarily hand over its weapons and turn to politics and peace in the Gaza Strip. Even when President Trump announced his Board of Peace and 20-point plan toward a settlement to end the war with Israel, the sticking point, every analyst insisted, would be the disarmament of an organization designated a terrorist group by the United States, Britain, the European Union, Australia and many other nations. It’s unlikely that Hamas will cooperate unless Israeli troops withdraw as per the agreement Now, after months of negotiations – involving Trump’s two Middle East envoys, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey – and without any fanfare, the seemingly impossible has been achieved.
When asked on The Root whether he'd support cash reparations for black New Yorkers, Mayor Mamdani said he wouldn't rule it out: "Here in New York City, we were very complicit." The mayor promised an answer once the city's Commission on Racial Equity reports back in 2027. Slightly inflammatory and highly performative, his answer hit his sweet spot perfectly. He is teasing his supporters with a radical, racialized policy that has no price tag and no implementation plan, just outrage. Zohran Mamdani is a better content creator than mayor. He knows exactly which topics will generate clicks, articles and outrage. That's a valuable skill for an influencer or a campaigner – earned media is the best priced media, but less so for a mayor who actually has to govern a major American city.
The US Senate narrowly defeated a measure yesterday intended to crimp, if not terminate, President Trump’s ability to conduct hostilities against Iran. The 50-49 vote on a war powers resolution testified to the mounting hostility toward the military campaign among American voters, two-thirds of whom regard the conflict as a futile endeavor. The result is that Trump’s own popularity rating has plummeted to 32 percent, edging out Joe Biden’s 33 percent shortly before he declared that he was exiting the presidential race in July 2024. Presumably, this is one personal record that Trump will not be inclined to tout at his MAGA rallies. What is to be done? Two diametrically opposed camps have emerged on the right to advise Trump on Iran.
Summertime, and the living isn’t as easy as it used to be. The dying, though, is getting easier, especially if you’re in France, Canada or New York. New York’s MAID law will come into effect August 5: supposedly only for those whose deaths are expected within six months, supposedly through self-administered doses only. But the details don't matter. The important part is this: in New York, the state can now authorize the taking of innocent human life. In early July, the French Senate rejected euthanasia for the fourth time in a row. But the government invoked Article 45 of the French constitution and forced the legislation through, "creating a right" to assisted suicide (as if the state were the divine origin of rights, and could create them at the snap of a finger).
As Gianni Infantino pursues a new future for FIFA, Matt McDonald is joined by Vanity Fair senior editor Jack Holmes to discuss whether the FIFA President is turning into Donald Trump. Just weeks after the end of a highly controversial World Cup, Infantino plans to shake up the foundations of global football (or soccer, if you prefer). But will his bold strategy come to fruition, or might it suffer the same fate as the once mooted European Super League? And what hand will the President of the United States have in all of this? Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano Produced by Henry Lloyd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
I’ve never met Professor Jason Arday. I don’t know whether he has genuinely run 600 miles in six days. I also genuinely don’t know the truth about the remarkable similarities between parts of his doctoral thesis at Liverpool John Moores, which helped propel him rocket-like up the academic greasy pole to a chair at Cambridge, and passages in a dissertation written six years earlier by someone at Brunel. From the parts of Arday’s output I have seen, I have found some fairly thin gruel It is undoubtedly possible that this is nothing more than an honest, if rather careless, omission to acknowledge earlier work: academics are, after all, proverbially absent-minded, and writing theses is stressful.
Air Force One may not use commercial airports, but Donald Trump has nonetheless taken the initiative to plan a major overhaul of Dulles International Airport, the government-owned DC area international airport. Alongside Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Trump revealed the plans of the $22.5 billion renovation in the Oval Office this afternoon. The President emphasized the "bipartisan" nature of this project, which is included alongside the administration’s other efforts to “Make Washington DC Safe and Beautiful Again.” “Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you don’t want to go and be subjected to this airport. Because this airport – it’s a terrible place to be,” Trump said.
Portland’s downtown area, though not without a certain residual hippy charm, increasingly resembles the Dunkirk of May 1940. Standing on top of the city’s Moda Tower at night is to survey the aftermath of a battle, with legions of homeless residents hunched together around braziers or lying on cots displayed in rows on the sidewalk. It appears as if the police in Portland can’t be bothered to enforce the few remaining laws involving public drug use or fouling the streets. But the truth is there simply aren't enough cops to enforce the laws after the city council became one of the first Democratic strongholds to defund the police in the wake of the George Floyd riots in 2020. Now the results of that ideological experiment are in.
This is a fraught moment, perhaps the most dangerous since the end of the Cold War. Two major wars are being fought, one threatening European security, the other the world’s energy supply. In East Asia, China continues to threaten Taiwan, and North Korea is reportedly upgrading its military technology with Russian help. Put simply, the bad guys are on the march, fighting for their regimes’ survival, their malign domestic projects, and as much regional domination as they can achieve. Although the wars in Ukraine and Iran have remained largely separate, there have been several intersections recently and a gnawing fear they could merge into a global conflict. That grim possibility is still a longshot, but there is real danger because the coalitions fighting the two wars overlap.
In his final hours in office, President Joe Biden issued a preemptive, blanket legal pardon for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most visible US health official during the Covid pandemic, for any and all actions he took from 2014 on, the same kind of pardon he granted his son Hunter Biden. Fauci, like Hunter Biden, thus literally rose above the law. That’s what made today’s decision by Fauci to take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee so shocking. After Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth, chairman Rand Paul told Fauci he would face “repercussions” for refusing to answer questions based on a valid congressional subpoena.
