Sunday 21 December 2025 The saga of Jeffrey Epstein occupies a peculiar and unsettling place in modern American political history. It is not merely the story of a wealthy criminal, nor even of elite corruption. Rather it is an episode that unfolded over several decades, crossing administrations, parties and institutions, and exposing structural weaknesses in the United States’ legal, political and media systems. Few scandals have combined such extremes of wealth, secrecy, pol

Sunday 21 December 2025 Power in Moscow has rarely been simple, and in the contemporary Russian state it is deliberately complex. Authority is centralised yet diffused, personal yet institutional, formal yet dependent upon informal bargains. To understand how decisions are made in Russia’s capital one must look beyond constitutional charts and examine the relationships between individuals, security organs, economic assets and the rituals through which loyalty is signalled and

By Angela Stoop , Special Correspondent for the Lviv Herald When the first images of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine reached my village in the Netherlands, I was struck by the sheer scale of the devastation. The instinct to help overcame every hesitation. I was trained as a veterinary medic, not as a soldier, diplomat, or aid official. Yet within weeks, I was volunteering in convoys that brought food and medical supplies into a country under relentless attack. That was the

Saturday 20 December 2025 Distinguishing a nation’s ruled from its rulers is one of the most important acts of moral and political clarity in international affairs. It is also one of the most frequently neglected. When states act violently, repressively or unlawfully, there is a strong human temptation to transfer blame from those who make decisions to the population over whom those decisions are imposed. History shows that this conflation is not merely an intellectual error.