All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
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.
It will bring in outside investors, open the doors to global money, enrich a handful of inside executives and, perhaps most outrageously of all, might even involve the Trump family. The plans by FIFA, the governing body that controls the World Cup, to sell a stake in the competition, have drawn predictably condemnation, not least from the British Prime Minister Andy Burnham. But hold on. This is getting ridiculous. Soccer has become the preeminent global sport precisely because it has been so successfully commercialized – and it is too late to change that now. Soccer is about the most commercialized activity on the planet. A few outside investors will hardly change that The plans to sell a stake in FIFA are more complex than the offside rule as reviewed by VAR.
Washington keeps asking why it is losing Africa to China. I commissioned a survey of nearly 5,000 young Africans to find out what they don’t like about America, and the answer is uncomfortable. America has not been losing because young Africans prefer Beijing. It is losing because previously it would not stop lecturing a continent that has outgrown the lesson. Last week the Pew Research Center reported that, for the first time, China is viewed more favorably than America across much of the world. Our numbers say the same about Africa. But they also say something Pew did not capture: the race is far from over – and President Trump, of all people, is the reason why they could still win it. Young Africans want to deal with Trump for the same reason they will deal with Xi.
With the death of Lindsey Graham and the disappearance of Mitch McConnell, a link to the past seems to have broken. The United States senators had been the symbols of a conservatism that Trump destroyed in 2015. They were the bitter-enders of a dying Republican tradition, we were told. Through McConnell and Graham’s influence, Trump was persuaded to arm Ukraine, delay the withdrawal from Afghanistan, reform and rename NAFTA rather than scrap it, and attack Iran. Graham and McConnell had given this Republicanism a strange posthumous existence throughout Trump's two administrations by various acts of bartering and maneuver. But their battle was always supposed to be a losing one. By the end of 2015, Trumpian nationalism had already conquered the Republican base.
From my home in Ávila I usually have a splendid view of the ancient town’s medieval walls. But yesterday morning the wind changed direction and they were largely obscured by a pall of wildfire smoke. The town hall issued health advice and recommended closing windows. But I’m among the fortunate. Everyone in Burgohondo, 25 miles south of Ávila, has been evacuated. It is the village my wife’s family comes from, and where the fire started. Across the region, tens of thousands have already been forced to leave their homes. And the forecast is ominous. Last year I suggested that Spain’s summer fires are made so frequent and destructive by long, hot, dry summers and by rural depopulation, with the resulting abandonment of farming and grazing.
Diplomatic relations between France and the USA are more strained than ever following a row at the United Nations. The fallout began on Friday when the US was one of ten countries to vote against the renewal of Voker Turk as UN High Commissioner of Human Rights. They were in the minority. Turk, an Austrian, was reappointed by the General Assembly with 144 votes for and 13 abstentions. In response to the vote, the French mission to the UN in Geneva posted a message on social media devoid of any diplomatic nuance. “The United States was once a beacon of human rights,” it began. “That is no longer the case. Today, they find themselves isolated alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali and Russia. And the world is no longer listening to them.” It added a hashtag: “America Alone.
On Monday, an unusually camera-shy Benjamin Netanyahu hopped on a flight to Washington. It wasn’t totally clear he would. Officially, Netanyahu was travelling to attend the funeral of the late senator Lindsey Graham, last of the neocons, his supporter and friend. Unofficially, he wanted to get another face-to-face meeting with President Donald Trump. But some “sources” around Trump hinted that the President would be too busy to squeeze the Israeli PM into his diary. A Trump snub would be embarrassing for Bibi, and suddenly he, too, was very busy and might not be able to make the funeral after all.
Speaking at The Hill’s Nation Summit last week, Florida Republican Kat Cammack claimed that the Chinese government was deploying “digital twins” of every member of Congress. These twins, digital replicas of individual lawmakers, are reportedly built from publicly available data and used to manipulate American politics. Cammack offered no evidence for this allegation, while the broader media largely ignored it. American academics had already published a proof of concept Yet, Cammack’s statement is more interesting than critics might recognize. China may or may not have built 535 virtual legislators. But it easily could. More importantly, somebody almost certainly will.
On the eve of his final debate with Michigan Democratic Senate rival Haley Stevens, Abdul el-Sayed was busted by Politico for declaring at a recent donor meeting: “Ideally you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different.” A round of tut-tutting ensued as various Democrats denounced Sayed for uttering violent threats. By the time of the debate, which took place last night at the Fox 2 studio in Southfield, Michigan, Sayed was emphasizing that it was Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, not Stevens, that he was talking about.“Thank you for clarifying that you didn’t call me an ogre,” Stevens quipped.
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin stepped into his role in early 2025. He said last year it’s the “political equivalent of being a fire hydrant. You get pissed on by everyone.” That might be partially his own fault. The committee, under his leadership, is $2 million in debt. Their physical headquarters have been put up for collateral in a last-ditch attempt to obtain a line of credit. And Martin threw his phone at a junior aide in a fit of frustration at the beginning of the month, resulting in an HR investigation. Tensions heightened at the DNC in May, when the long-awaited autopsy of the 2024 election loss was released – a typo-filled report with no solid thesis and notable absences of relevant details.
Picture the scene. You have bravely battled onto the set of MasterChef Australia, hoping that your strawberry pavlova or similar hero dish is going to be the one that sends the judges into gasps of culinary ecstasy. Then the producers and host smile conspiratorially at you and reveal that the stakes (as opposed to steaks) have been raised. There will be a guest judge, they tell you, a figure who is “a global icon, a philanthropist, a humanitarian, a woman known around the world for her heart, her voice and her deep love for home cooking”. You draw a deep breath. Who on earth is this multi-faceted hyphenate, you wonder, an all-in-one combination of saint, queen and legend?
Of all the platitudes trotted out after an Islamist attack, the maddest has to be: “Don’t politicize this tragedy.” The bodies of our fellow citizens are barely cold before we’re being pre-emptively told off for “exploiting” their deaths for “political ends.” But it’s already political. When a religious hysteric takes up arms against innocents, that’s a political attack. ‘Don’t be divisive’ is a demand for self-censorship masquerading as a plea for social peace The “no politics” rule was swiftly enforced following the atrocity at Berlin Pride. The minute it was announced that the suspect was an ISIS fanboy known for mingling with other Islamists, the cry went out: “Don’t politicize this. Don’t let it divide us.
Freddy Gray is joined by Ben Judah, a former Labour Special Advisor to discuss the new government's outlook on foreign affairs. Freddy and Ben examine how Andy Burnham's appointment of Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary will shape the way Britain builds on its special relationship with the United States and the Trump White House. They also discuss the implications of Miliband's past positions on net zero and fresh drilling for oil and gas, and how that might come to affect his personal relationship with Marco Rubio and Donald Trump. Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/Americano Produced by Natasha Feroze and Henry Lloyd https://www.youtube.com/watch?
For a brief moment I thought that the death this week in Bologna, Italy of a Moroccan, face-down on the tarmac, after being restrained by not just one but two police officers sitting on top of him, might provoke a similar explosion of outrage as the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The next night there was a riot in Bologna during which the rioters brandished placards claiming that the death of Abderrahim Fakir, 42, was an “omicidio di stato” (state murder), chanted “assassini” at the police and attacked them. The police retaliated with tear gas and water cannons as the rioters torched cars and smashed shop windows. Sixty-four police officers were injured.
The words goy and goyim are thrown around by Jews and non-Jews to mean very different things and to convey very, very different impressions. Some antisemites try to weaponize these terms to accuse Jews of being exclusionary or discriminatory against goyim (the correct Hebrew pluralization of goy, rather than the anglicized “goys”). Some Jews have also weaponized the term against their enemies: Ben Shapiro has accused, Tucker Carlson, of “goyslop” for falsely claiming that Jews want “goyim” to die defending Israel. The original meaning of the word goy is neutral. It simply means “nation.” The Bible describes the Jewish people as “goy Kadosh” – a holy nation. In post-biblical eras goy has come to mean “gentile” – any person or nation that is not Jewish.
Hats off to President Trump! At the conclusion of his speech to the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump donned a red cap with 2028 emblazoned upon it and declared that he had hit upon a scheme to “save” the ratings of the new media. “I am pleased to announce my intention to run for a fourth term as President of the United States,” he said. Trump evoked a few titters from the assembled press corps at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but that was about the extent of the hijinks. In one sense, it’s no laughing matter. What will the press do without Trump? He’s correct in viewing himself as its savior. Without the 24/7 entertainment provided by the Donald, views would dwindle.
As one who’s always been keen on putting their hand up and admitting to their faults (a perverse form of boasting, I suspect) I was always suspicious of the medicalization of character flaws which apparently render us helpless in the clammy hands of Fortuna. It was bad enough when friends who’d generally always seemed highly capable jumped on the ADHD bus in later life, suddenly flinching at loud noises when they’d spent a good deal of their lives dancing to ear-splitting techno.
I was about 19 years old and threatening to kill myself with a Bic disposable razor (not easy: I was bluffing) when I realized that Women Love Bastards. The revelation arrived like this. I was a heartbroken student, having been dumped by, ah, let's call her Emilia. For months I mooned about, bereft, wondering why Emilia had chucked me when I was so NICE – attentive, gift-giving, loyal. Then a good female friend – bless her wicked heart – took me aside and said: "Sean, girls don't like nice. They like a guy with swagger. Stubble. Slightly mean." She sighed. "I think we prefer bastards, if I'm honest." Putting down the razor, I picked up her advice, and I have used it ever since. I’m happy to say it works.
It is my solemn duty to report that, as ever in Trumpworld, the news zone has flooded and we are paddling through a reality-bending time loop. Last night, the government reapplied tariffs on more than 80 countries, on this occasion using dubious concerns about "forced labour" to justify the charges on Britain, the EU, Australia and elsewhere. Tonight, the President will attend the rearranged White House Correspondents’ Dinner, three months after the last one was canceled following another assassination attempt. The dinner will be held at the Waldorf Astoria, DC, which used to be the Trump International Hotel. The guest list and security will be tighter this time, and Donald should have a chance to make some good jokes.
Freddy Gray is joined by David Weigel to discuss the Democratic primary battle taking place in Michigan between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens. Freddy and David examine how the contest has become a proxy for the wider battle over the Democratic Party's future, pitting the Obama-era moderates against the ascendant progressive left. They discuss how Israel has emerged as one of the campaign's defining fault lines, how the issue of affordability has been used for different political ends, and what the result could mean for the party as it looks ahead to the 2028 presidential election. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Will he or won’t he? Senator John Fetterman is causing heart palpitations among Democrats with his recent threat to cross the political aisle should they “officially become the anti-Israel party.” Ever since he announced that he would form a joint campaign fundraising committee with his fellow Pennsylvania Republican senator David McCormick, Fetterman has captured the spotlight, which is how he likes it. New York magazine reports that in 2026, Fetterman has already popped up on Fox News 56 times. It’s quite a remarkable turnaround for Fetterman who originally campaigned for the Senate from the Left, defeating his more mainstream Democratic rival Conor Lamb in the 2022 primary.
The Prime Ministerial tenure of Andy Burnham was not 24 hours old before the report came that he would allow American use of United Kingdom bases – most crucially in Diego Garcia – for “defensive” strikes on Iran. The qualifier is so expansive as to be meaningless except in the realm of legal technicality: the United States’s war against the Islamic Republic rests in no small part upon British goodwill. It is not, of course, the first time that Britain has lent its capabilities to war in the Middle East in which the Americans are involved. The Royal Air Force was active in downing Iranian drones sent against Israel and Qatar, at the least, at various points in 2024, 2025, and 2026. The RAF joined the United States Navy in strikes on Yemeni positions in spring 2025.