Israel’s conscription dispute is not mainly about religion or identity. Under the pressure of war and court rulings, the state is building special ultra Orthodox service units that restrict women’s routine presence, while draft legislation leans toward targets and gradual measures, leaving the manpower burden concentrated on those already serving.
The war in Ukraine did not create Western misjudgment about Russia. It exposed it. From officer culture and battlefield adaptation to industrial capacity and social endurance, assumptions formed after 1991 collapsed under the pressure of industrial war.
The Middle East security architecture does not exist in any meaningful sense. Fragmented regional actors, weak institutions, and rival alignments leave Iran negotiating deterrence bilaterally rather than regionally.
Elon Musk has consolidated his artificial intelligence venture xAI into SpaceX in a deal valued at around 1.25 trillion dollars, framing the merger as a response to a deeper constraint now shaping AI’s future. Behind the valuation story lies a harder question about power, infrastructure and limits that SpaceX alone cannot wish away.
For more than forty years, the Chinese economy has sustained growth, industrial upgrading, and social stability under a system Western economics said could not function. It was not just cheap labour, exports, or repression. It was an institutional invention that fused markets with state power. The uncomfortable question is no longer why the Chinese economy rose, but why prevailing theory still cannot explain it.
Telegraph Online long read A war with Iran would not be decided by intent or rhetoric, but by logistics. The United States can sustain an intense campaign for only a few days before stocks run out.
The rise of the £5 latte is not a story about coffee prices. It is a case study in Britain’s rentier economy, where access is priced higher than production and ownership is rewarded over work.
Conversational AI is no longer just answering questions. It is shaping belief, identity, and decisions in moments of vulnerability. As people turn to chatbots for therapy, relationship advice, and emotional support, the risk is no longer theoretical. When fluent language nudges users toward despair, self harm, or even suicide, the absence of accountability stops being a technical issue and becomes a public safety failure.
Military deployments, diplomatic signalling, and regional positioning around Iran are no longer isolated acts of deterrence. They are forming a process that advances even in the absence of a formal decision. This essay examines how force posture, political sunk costs, and incompatible assumptions may already be constraining the ability of any actor to stop escalation once it begins.
A widely shared analysis claims China has “missed its chance” and is locked into economic decline. Even accepting its data, the conclusion does not follow. This rebuttal examines how selective metrics, historical analogy, and irreversibility claims are used to turn ambiguity into certainty—and why that reasoning fails under scrutiny.
The dollar still dominates global finance, but states are no longer willing to rely on a single set of payment pathways. From instant domestic systems to new cross-border settlement platforms, a parallel financial infrastructure is taking shape — less about replacing the dollar than about reducing dependence on it.
Russia now controls most of Donbas. What remains is a fortified Ukrainian army compressed into Kramatorsk and Sloviansk and sustained by just two vulnerable supply routes. Rather than storming these fortresses, Russian forces are methodically degrading the roads and rail lines that keep them alive. The decisive question is no longer territory, but whether Ukraine withdraws in time.
At Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest American military installation in the Middle East, subtle changes are underway. US fighter aircraft have deployed forward, an aircraft carrier has entered the region, and logistics activity has surged. The evidence points to preparation for conflict with Iran, while stopping short of a decision to fight.
China is not racing the West to build smarter artificial intelligence. It is racing to embed AI into everyday digital life, turning messaging, shopping, and payments into a single action layer. That shift may matter more than any benchmark result.
Britain and China do not disagree because of tone or diplomacy. They disagree because they are educated into different histories. Britain teaches continuity and inheritance. China teaches rupture and coercion. When British officials visit Beijing, the signals London believes it is sending are not the signals China receives. This gap explains why the same gestures feel reassuring in Britain and provocative in China.
Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Keir Starmer’s China visit rests on a deeper assumption rarely examined in British politics: that Britain is still entitled to leverage over China. This article rebuts her claims point by point, showing how history, power, and reality no longer support that belief.
American protection is no longer automatic. Europe is exposed, China is unavoidable but risky, and Britain is rebuilding optionality. Keir Starmer’s Beijing visit reflects a deeper structural shift in the Western system.
Britain and its allies left thousands of Islamic State detainees in Kurdish run camps as a temporary solution to a politically toxic problem. Now that system is breaking down. As Western governments engage Syria’s new leadership and Kurdish control erodes, the contradiction at the heart of detention by remembering is becoming impossible to ignore.
Labour’s decision to prevent Andy Burnham from standing in a safe by election was framed as procedural. The backlash from MPs, unions, and activists suggests something deeper: a party that has learned to prioritise internal control over confidence in its own coalition.
Xi Jinping’s removal of senior PLA generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli has fuelled speculation about power struggles inside China’s military. This article strips away conjecture and examines what is known, how the Communist Party disciplines the armed forces, and why the balance of evidence points toward corruption rather than a crisis of loyalty at the top of the PLA
Canada’s sudden pivot toward China is not a diplomatic awakening but a reckoning. After years of enforcing American power from extraditions to trade policy Ottawa discovered that loyalty did not guarantee protection. The detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou and the return of U.S. coercion exposed a structural truth: enforcement buys obedience, not immunity.
A winter storm settles quietly over Plano, turning snow into ice and calm into constraint. Beneath the stillness, the storm reveals how North Texas infrastructure, built for another climate, strains under conditions that no longer feel exceptional.
The Middle East is no longer organised around sovereign states and formal diplomacy. From Yemen to Somaliland to Iran, competing models of power are reshaping the region around ports, networks, recognition, and economic pressure. This long read examines how Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and the United States are driving a post sovereign order whose consequences are only beginning to emerge.
McKinsey has acknowledged that artificial intelligence agents now operate alongside its human consultants at scale. This essay examines how that shift is dismantling the traditional consulting pyramid, creating a hidden training debt, and forcing a new settlement around liability, judgment, and institutional survival.
For two decades, companies rented business software because building it was slow, costly, and risky. That assumption has collapsed. As artificial intelligence turns software creation into an industrial process, subscription platforms begin to hollow out: the thinking moves outside the product, the platform becomes a record keeping shell, and renewals become optional. The real disruption is institutional, not technical
CES 2026 did not prove that humanoid robots are ready for the world. It revealed something more consequential: an overcrowded market rushing toward the same idea at the same time. History suggests what comes next. When innovation peaks in abundance rather than differentiation, consolidation follows. Most of today’s humanoid robotics pioneers will not survive the shakeout.
When the United States seized Venezuela’s president, the spectacle was immediate but the real contest was not. China did not respond with noise or retaliation. It responded with doctrine: law, coalition-building, asset protection, and quiet leverage over the systems that matter. The raid was a moment. The struggle over custody, compliance, and power beneath it is ongoing.
China has crossed into the catapult carrier era. The decisive question now is whether it can sustain carrier operations at sea. The Type 054B frigate Luohe signals that Beijing is formalising the escort screen that turns carrier aviation from a symbol into a working system.