Saturday 21 February 2026 China’s DeepSeek large language model arrived as a technical statement and a geopolitical event — a reminder that the race for machine intelligence is not merely about clever algorithms, but about power, trust and the governance of information. DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based research lab backed by the hedge fund High-Flyer, became globally prominent with models such as DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, paired with a widely used chatbot application. DeepSeek-R

Saturday 21 February 2026 J.D. Vance has emerged upon the world stage as a figure at once familiar and disconcerting to America’s allies. To some he appears as the articulate tribune of a wounded republic; to others as the polished herald of a new American nationalism impatient with the orthodoxies of the late twentieth century. In either case, as Vice President of the United States, he stands not merely as an adjunct to presidential authority but as an ideological signpost —

Saturday 21 February 2026 In the theatre of post-war diplomacy — where money is pledged faster than rubble is cleared — United States President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace has set itself a task at once grand and perilous: the reconstruction of Gaza. According to statements associated with the initiative, approximately USD 7 billion has been raised — a striking figure in a world fatigued by conflict and wary of Middle Eastern entanglements. The premise is simple en

Saturday 21 February 2026 In times of geopolitical strain and economic anxiety, few ideas are so persistently misunderstood as the theory of comparative advantage. It is invoked in trade negotiations, condemned in election campaigns and blamed for industrial decline. Yet it remains one of the most elegant and empirically robust propositions in the history of economic thought. At its core lies a simple insight: prosperity arises not from national self-sufficiency but from spec

Friday 20 February 2026 On 20 February 2026 the United States Supreme Court struck down the centrepiece of President Trump’s sweeping tariffs programme — not because tariffs are alien to American statecraft, but because this particular set of tariffs was imposed on a claim of emergency authority so broad that it would, in practice, let the President tax the world at will.  For readers outside the United States the significance is immediate. Tariffs are not merely a line-item

Friday 20 February 2026 In the early months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, soldiers on both sides feared artillery above all else. The thunder of incoming shells, the distant whistle and then the concussive shock, defined the tempo of the battlefield. Four years on, artillery remains lethal — but it is no longer the most intimate terror. That distinction now belongs to the drone. Small, cheap and omnipresent, first-person-view unmanned aerial vehicles — known uni