Monday 11 May 2026 The expansion of digital surveillance has long outpaced the capacity of legal systems to regulate it. Amongst the most contentious innovations now confronting courts is the practice of geofence identification—an investigative method that turns the logic of traditional policing on its head. Rather than identifying a suspect and then seeking evidence, law enforcement agencies define a geographical area and a time window, and then compel technology companies t

Monday 11 May 2026 The proposition that Germany has overtaken the United States in the production of conventional ammunition would, had it been made a decade ago, have seemed improbable to the point of absurdity. The United States, after all, has long been the arsenal not merely of democracy but of a global security architecture in which industrial scale, logistical reach and technological sophistication were assumed to be unrivalled. Germany by contrast spent much of the pos

Monday 11 May 2026 For more than four years the full-scale war in Ukraine has been accompanied by periodic declarations from the Kremlin that peace is near, negotiations are possible, or military objectives are close to fulfilment. Each time Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that the conflict may soon end, diplomats, military analysts and ordinary Ukrainians alike have been left asking the same question: does he mean it? The answer depends not merely upon militar

Sunday 10 May 2026 The image of a metallic humanoid in a police uniform patrolling a Chinese city street might once have belonged exclusively to science fiction. Yet recent demonstrations in the People’s Republic of China of robotic police units capable of autonomous movement, speech interaction and public order functions suggest that a concept once confined to the dystopian imagination is beginning to enter reality. While the technology remains primitive by the standards of

Sunday 10 May 2026 The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the five republics of Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — in a peculiar geopolitical condition. Independent in law, they nevertheless remained deeply integrated into Russian systems of transport, military organisation, finance, language and political culture. Moscow inherited not merely influence but infrastructure: pipelines ran north, military academies remained Rus