Friday 20 February 2026 In February 2026 the Middle East once again finds itself suspended between diplomacy and detonation. Following a sharp ultimatum issued by US President Donald Trump — a ten-day deadline for Iran to reach a comprehensive agreement on her nuclear and regional activities — Washington has reinforced her naval posture in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Carrier strike groups, guided missile destroyers and long-range bomber deployments now frame a theatre o

Friday 20 February 2026 In the fevered atmosphere of the contemporary artificial intelligence boom, an entire sub-industry has arisen dedicated to a curious ambition: to extract human expertise from living minds and transmute it into training data for large language models. Professors, lawyers, physicians, military analysts and financiers are invited to compose prompts and to score outputs according to elaborate rubrics. Their knowledge, it is said, can thus be formalised, sc

Friday 20 February 2026 In a speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026 the United States Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, sought to reassure his European audience that beneath the friction of recent years there remains a deep civilisational unity between Europe and the United States. That unity, he argued, rests upon shared Christian values, a common intellectual inheritance and a transatlantic history of mutual defence and democratic aspiration. The

Thursday 19 February 2026 The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is one of those moments when the British state’s unwritten rules become suddenly visible. The police do not, in the ordinary course of affairs, arrest members of the Royal Family. The courts do not, in the ordinary course of affairs, contemplate evidence about royal conduct that might be said to touch the integrity of government. Yet here we are. A man who once stood at the centre of Britain’s ceremonial life

Thursday 19 January 2026 Institutions exist to outlast the passions of the moment. They are designed to absorb shocks, channel conflict into rules, and create continuity across generations. When they function well, they are largely invisible. When they fail, they dominate public life. Over the past decade, there has been a growing sense across much of the world that institutional integrity has weakened — that courts, legislatures, international organisations, regulatory bodie

Thursday 19 February 2026 Europe is no longer an abstraction in Ukraine. She is not a distant constellation of blue flags and twelve stars glimpsed on television screens in Lviv cafés or Kyiv ministries. She is a negotiating partner, a legislative template, a reconstruction banker, a military backstop, and increasingly a horizon against which Ukraine measures her own future. The question is no longer whether Ukraine wishes to join the European Union. The question is whether U