The possibility of escalating attacks on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure raises one of the most serious economic threats facing the world. Saudi Arabia is not simply another oil-producing country. It is one of the central pillars of the international petroleum system, possessing enormous reserves, substantial production capacity and the abil...

(Allusion to the John Lennon song of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3_0GqPvr4U ) Pete Hegseth is the first US Secretary of Defense/War in a generation who treats the job as warfighting rather than stakeholder management. That is the whole of it. Every complaint against him reduces to the fact that he refuses to perform the bureaucratic li...

Mental health is increasingly recognized as a cornerstone of overall population health, yet its connection to our modern food environments has historically remained underexplored. Recent estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) reveal the staggering scale of the global mental health crisis: in 2023, an estimated 1.2 billion people were li...

Science has an uncomfortable habit of discovering that what it thought it understood was merely a small fraction of a much larger reality. This is particularly evident in two seemingly unrelated fields: nutritional science and astrophysics. Both have developed the concept of "dark matter" to describe important aspects of the world that remain outsi...

Donald Trump may be approaching the most dangerous political confrontation of his extraordinary career. With the American midterm elections scheduled for November 3, 2026, the Republican Party faces the possibility of losing control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Should that happen, the remaining two years of Trump's presidenc...

Throughout human history, authoritarian governments have attempted to control what people say, write, publish and believe. Political dissenters have been imprisoned, religious minorities persecuted, books prohibited and private conversations monitored by the agents of the state. Yet even the most ruthless dictatorships have confronted one fundament...

 Mark Bullen spent eleven years as a police officer with Hertfordshire Constabulary. He was the force's only fluent Russian speaker, wrote its training material on Russian organised crime and prison tattoos (later published as Thief in Law), took part in an International Police Association exchange in St Petersburg in 2010, and organised profe...

We are constantly told that exercise is good for us, and there is overwhelming scientific evidence that this is true. Regular physical activity reduces the risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity and premature death. But does it follow that the more exercise we undertake, the healthier we become? Not necessarily. Research suggests that there may b...

 Sweden spent two decades becoming the world's poster child for a cashless future. Coin slots disappeared from parking meters and newspaper boxes. Card readers and the bank-backed mobile app Swish became the default even for a single coffee. Cash in circulation as a share of GDP fell to among the lowest levels anywhere. Convenience and moderni...

The Wall Street Journal's report on the quiet donor class bankrolling the Democratic Party's Leftward lurch is a useful reminder that the people who spent a decade denouncing "dark money," "oligarchs," and "foreign influence" have simply built their own version. According to the piece and related filings, a cohort of previously obscure donors, many...

 Harry Houdini died on Halloween, 31 October 1926, which was the sort of theatrical ending a publicity agent might have invented had the calendar not supplied it. He was just 52 years old. The name on his birth record was Erik Weisz, born in Budapest on 24 March 1874, the son of a Jewish rabbi. The name that became famous throughout the world ...

The recent surge in support for One Nation has prompted familiar diagnoses: a populist backlash against elite-driven multiculturalism, mass migration, and the technocratic consensus that treated cultural difference as an unqualified good. A more precise account, however, locates the roots of the project not solely in the cosmopolitan preferences of...

Hollywood actors are generally presented to the public as creatures of extraordinary privilege, inhabiting a world of wealth, fame, glamorous relationships and seemingly unlimited opportunity. We see the finished product, the international celebrity whose face appears on cinema screens across the world, but rarely appreciate the personal struggles ...

The allegations surrounding the so-called Cornell 7, seven male students accused in a civil lawsuit of drugging and sexually assaulting a female student at a Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024, have drawn national attention not only for the details of the claims but for the institutional response that followed. Two students were later expelle...

The modern industrial world rests upon an assumption so fundamental that most people never give it a second thought: when we flick a switch, electricity will be there. Hospitals, supermarkets, banking systems, telecommunications, water supplies, transport networks and almost every aspect of contemporary economic life depend upon a continuous supply...

Western analysts have been predicting China's decline for years, and the latest contribution to this increasingly crowded field comes from Carl Minzner in Foreign Affairs, October 5, 2026, under the ominous title, "China's Long Twilight: Demographic Decline, Political Paralysis, and the Fate of Great Powers." Minzner argues that China's ageing popu...

Most people think of heart attacks and strokes as problems caused by unhealthy living. Smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are familiar risk factors. But there is another danger that receives much less attention. Common viral infections, including influenza and COVID-19, may substantially increase the risk...

PARIS — French leaders came up empty-handed on Thursday after spending several days searching for someone in the rioting mob to surrender to. Eyewitnesses reported that residents had spent the last three days attempting to signal unconditional defeat to anyone who would respond inside the rampaging crowd. However, the unruly mob ignored the pleas a...

First, Trump did help resolve conflicts involving Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand, India and Pakistan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Kosovo and Serbia. Some of these diplomatic achievements deserve recognition. Trump has demonstrated a willingness to intervene personally in international disp...

President Trump's recent declaration that anyone still using the term "artificial intelligence" rather than his preferred "super intelligence" is "THE ENEMY" of the White House is not merely eccentric branding. It is a small but revealing piece of nonsense that exceeds even the uncritical boosterism of Operation Warp Speed. Where Warp Speed at leas...