Sunday 8 February 2026 Japan’s snap election of Sunday 8 February 2026 looks set to deliver what Sanae Takaichi asked the electorate for when she dissolved the Diet only months into her premiership: a clear mandate, a disciplined parliamentary machine and political time—enough time to turn Japan’s strategic anxieties into state policy. Exit polls and early projections point to a decisive Liberal Democratic Party victory, with the LDP comfortably over the threshold for a lower

Sunday 8 February 2026 Kharkiv has long been one of Ukraine’s great university cities. Before the full scale invasion, her reputation rested not only on the number of institutions she hosted but on what those institutions made possible: a dense civic life, a skilled labour market, a research culture, and a rhythm of ordinary days shaped by timetables, libraries, laboratories, student cafés and the steady migration of young people from smaller towns into a city that could wide

Sunday 8 February 2026 By February the cold in Lviv is no longer a visitor; she has taken the spare room and unpacked. The apartment block in which I live holds its breath when the power goes, as if the walls themselves are listening for the thud of the next transformer surrendering somewhere beyond the ring road. The blackout arrives without ceremony. A click, a soft mechanical sigh, and the city is returned to an older century. The flat cools with a patience that feels deli

Sunday 8 February 2026 For much of recorded history, gold and silver have occupied a privileged place in the human imagination and in financial systems. They have been currencies, religious symbols and repositories of value in times of war, inflation and institutional collapse. When confidence in paper promises falters, these metals have traditionally been where capital seeks refuge. Yet in recent months both gold and silver prices have fallen sharply, unsettling investors wh

Sunday 8 February 2026 Cannabis has travelled an unusually short distance from counterculture symbol to mass consumer product. In North America and parts of Europe it is marketed as a sleep aid, a pain reliever and, increasingly, a companion to ageing. Yet the scientific literature still shows an awkward mismatch between public confidence and clinical certainty. The most recent wave of studies does not so much settle the argument as sharpen it: cannabis and cannabinoid medici