Monday 2 February 2026 The recent proposed settlement of a class action lawsuit concerning Google Assistant, reported at USD 68 million, is less about a single lurid allegation than about the slow erosion of a boundary that many people still assume exists: the wall between what is spoken in the home and what may be converted into commercial insight. The claim was not that Google set out to run an always-on wiretap. It was that, in practice, her voice assistant could be trigge

Monday 2 February 2026 War has a peculiar relationship with memory. It compresses time, sharpens recollection and forces societies to decide what they are and what they are not. In Ukraine the full-scale Russian invasion has transformed cultural memory from a largely academic or commemorative concern into an active, lived instrument of national survival. Culture, in its broadest sense, has become both shield and weapon: a means of endurance under bombardment and a language th

Monday 2 February 2026 Periodic calls within Germany to repatriate her gold reserves from the United States are not new. They surface most often during moments of political uncertainty, transatlantic strain or heightened concern about the stability of the international financial system. Recently such proposals have again attracted attention, prompting questions not only about their plausibility but also about what such a move would signify for Germany’s position in the global

Monday 2 February 2026 The question of whether it should be taboo to discuss the mental health of politicians sits uneasily at the intersection of medicine, ethics, journalism and democratic accountability. It is a subject that repeatedly resurfaces during moments of political stress, when leaders appear erratic, impulsive or unusually detached from institutional constraints. The controversy surrounding Donald Trump's behaviour, often seen as erratic in foreign capitals, has

Monday 2 February 2026 The three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – have agreed to establish what they describe as a common military mobility area, a decision that is bureaucratic in form but strategic in substance. It reflects not only their own assessment of the military risks they face, but also a wider recalibration across northern Europe of how war might actually be fought, supplied and sustained on NATO’s eastern flank. At its most basic level, military mob

Monday 2 February 2026 When Viktor Orbán declares that he will not consent to Ukraine joining the European Union in 2027, he is not merely picking a date. He is choosing a battleground. In Brussels 2027 is a budgetary cliff-edge. In Budapest it is a campaign prop in the run-up to the April 2026 election, designed to turn a complex question of accession law and institutional sequencing into a simple, emotive claim: that the money will be taken from Hungarians and handed to Ukr