Sunday 14 June 2026 Every generation believes that the one following it has somehow gone wrong. The complaint is almost as old as civilisation itself. Ancient Greek writers lamented the decline of youth. Victorian commentators worried that industrialisation was producing a generation without moral fibre. The so-called “Baby Boomers” criticised Generation X for cynicism and apathy, while Millennials were accused of entitlement and self-absorption. Today much of the same critic

Sunday 14 June 2026 The post-Cold War period was marked by an assumption that security could be enjoyed as a dividend of prosperity. Defence budgets across much of Europe declined, military industries consolidated and governments increasingly treated war as a remote contingency rather than a present reality. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shattered that illusion. The subsequent years have revealed a fundamental truth that policymakers had long preferred to ig

Sunday 14 June 2026 The story of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) of Saint Petersburg is one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of modern information warfare. Emerging from relative obscurity in the early 2010s, the organisation evolved from a domestic propaganda enterprise into a global symbol of state-sponsored online influence operations. Its rise reflected not merely technological innovation but a deeper transformation in the way political power is exercised

Sunday 14 June 2026 For much of the early twenty-first century, a particular cultural archetype came to dominate the public imagination: the technology entrepreneur. Usually male, often dressed casually, frequently irreverent and almost always immensely wealthy, the so-called “Tech Bro” became a symbol of modern success. Figures such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and countless lesser-known founders came to be portrayed as intellectual titans whose brilliance tran

Sunday 14 June 2026 As Ukraine is now well into the fifth year of full-scale war, the arithmetic of national survival has become increasingly unforgiving. Weapons can be manufactured, imported or financed by allies. Ammunition can be stockpiled. Drones can be designed in garages and assembled in factories. But armies ultimately depend upon people, and people are becoming Ukraine’s scarcest strategic resource. Against this backdrop, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to

Saturday 13 June 2026 A small fortune changes a life. A large fortune changes a family. A billion dollars can change a city. But a trillion dollars belongs to a different category altogether. It is not merely wealth; it is a quantity so vast that the human mind struggles to comprehend it. If recent reports surrounding the latest ventures of Elon Musk were ever to place him among the world’s first trillionaires, the question naturally arises: how would one spend a trillion dol