Sunday 22 February 2026 In the American imagination the border is often depicted as a line on a map — a place where the state’s power is sharpest, and where certainty is supposed to prevail. Yet for the ordinary foreign visitor the United States is not first encountered at the Rio Grande. She is encountered at an airport desk, a secondary inspection room, a holding cell, a phone call that does not go through. It is in these liminal spaces that immigration policy becomes lived

Sunday 22 February 2026 In February 2022, as Russian armour crossed Ukraine’s borders and Europe rediscovered the vocabulary of trench warfare, something else crossed an invisible threshold. Climate change — the defining, slow-burning crisis of the early twenty-first century — was abruptly displaced from the centre of political discourse by the return of hard geopolitics. Defence budgets swelled. Energy security trumped decarbonisation. Coal plants were reopened in the name o

Sunday 22 February 2026 Equatorial Guinea is small, oil-rich, Spanish-speaking and unusually exposed to the politics of personal rule. She is also geographically awkward: her capital, Malabo, sits on Bioko Island while much of her population and most of her landmass lie on the mainland around Bata. That split matters in security terms. A regime that fears coups does not merely worry about the army as an institution. It worries about who controls the airport at Malabo, the roa

Sunday 22 February 2026 The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act is not merely a gesture towards technological caution. It is a dense and highly structured regulatory instrument, drafted in the idiom of internal market law yet animated by a constitutional philosophy. If the General Data Protection Regulation sought to discipline the exploitation of personal data, the AI Act seeks to discipline the deployment of systems that increasingly mediate human judgment itself.

Sunday 22 February 2026 The question of elections in wartime Ukraine hovers over the country’s political discourse like a constitutional thundercloud. Since the full-scale invasion by the Russian Federation in February 2022 Ukraine has lived under martial law, extended at regular intervals by the Verkhovna Rada. The ordinary rhythms of democratic life — electoral campaigns, party congresses, the testing of incumbents at the ballot box — have been suspended in favour of nation

Sunday 22 February 2026 The idea that a foreign man might come to Ukraine to find a perfect wife is a persistent trope, sustained by fragments of truth, generous misunderstanding and a great deal of projection. It has survived revolutions, war and the collapse of empires, adapting itself to each era’s anxieties and fantasies. In wartime Ukraine, when the country is both profoundly vulnerable and fiercely self-aware, the notion deserves careful, unsentimental examination. Ukra