Zohran Mamdani began his mayoralty just after midnight in the old City Hall subway station, tying his first act of power to the systems New Yorkers rely on. The ceremony was short. The mandate is not. He has staked legitimacy on affordability measured in outcomes, not speeches: rents, childcare access, commute costs, staffing, and civic trust. Delivery will decide everything.
War is no longer disrupting global trade. It is being written into the contracts and insurance frameworks that make trade possible. As war risk pricing, listed areas, and standard charterparty clauses harden into routine procedure, conflict becomes a toll. Watch the insurance market, not the speeches. It signals what the world is normalising.
Empires do not collapse because their populations weaken. They collapse because elites refuse to repair the conditions that caused that weakness. History shows a familiar progression: neglect gives way to moral panic, panic hardens into discipline, discipline escalates into militarism, and militarism ends in war. Edwardian Britain followed this path to catastrophe. America is now walking it again.
Britain’s broadcast era is ending. As audiences migrate to platforms and narratives form outside legacy media, the BBC and the state are struggling to retain authority over what is seen, trusted, and debated.
Christmas 2025 arrives as institutions continue to speak in the language of permanence while operating through discretion, conditionality, and managed risk. This editorial records the quiet divergence between declared principle and actual practice across guarantees, law, trust, and power. It is not a forecast or a manifesto, but a reckoning with how the system now behaves and what follows if that reality remains unacknowledged.
The European Commission wants to raise a huge loan for Ukraine backed on frozen Russian reserves, using emergency law to bypass national vetoes. Brussels calls it solidarity and insists nothing is being confiscated. In practice it weaponises custody, turns Euroclear into a litigation magnet and tells the rest of the world that reserves held in Europe are safe only until politics changes.
Martin Wolf now concedes that Britain is stuck in a low productivity, high inequality trap that threatens democracy itself. Yet when the argument reaches the point where rentiers must actually be confronted and capital controlled, he retreats into the language of caution. This long read maps the gap between his diagnosis and the regime he still cannot bring himself to break.
Europe was told it had to cut Russian energy and arm for democracy. In reality it has swapped predictable pipeline gas for volatile imports, pushed energy intensive industry toward the exits and tied its public finances to an open ended rearmament cycle largely designed elsewhere. This piece follows the gas, the factories and the defence budgets to show who really pays for the last phase of US hegemony.
* Telegraph.com is completely independent from the Daily Telegraph * yet the fate of that newspaper now matters to anyone who cares about media power in Britain. This long read traces how a heavily indebted Barclay structure, Abu Dhabi linked financing, RedBird Capital and United Kingdom public interest law collided over the Daily Telegraph. It explains why the latest five hundred million pound bid has been withdrawn and why the real decision was made long before any formal refusal.
The Imperial Press collapses into imperial fantasy, turning America’s pressure on Venezuela into a spectacle while ignoring the moral question at its core: by what right does a powerful state kill and coerce beyond its borders. the historical errors, the military illusions, and the geopolitical hysteria behind modern British foreign reporting.
Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in New York unfolded against a background of quiet algorithmic persuasion. While voters turned to chatbots for guidance, unseen biases shaped what they heard. This essay asks whether human contact can still outmatch machine influence — and what happens when a handful of global actors own the language that defines political thought.
THE TELEGRAPH.COM LONG READ — Europe no longer wages war only on the battlefield. It wages it in language, in narrative, and in the stories it tells itself. A generation of leaders has replaced strategy with moral theatre, diplomacy with slogans, and truth with propaganda and now the bill for that self-deception is coming due.
The Dutch government’s intervention in Nexperia is no ordinary corporate dispute. It marks the first time in peacetime that The Hague has used Cold War-era powers to take control of a functioning private company in the name of “technological security.” By removing Nexperia’s Chinese chief executive and suspending shareholder control, the state has effectively placed Europe’s largest discrete-chip producer under direct administration.
This legal commentary examines whether that act was lawful, proportionate, or politically orchestrated
The new generation of artificial intelligence does not invent truth; it reflects and then has that reflection edited by those who fear what it might reveal. What began as mathematics,became a mirror of humanity, later polished into obedience by governments and corporations anxious to protect their own legitimacy.
The spectre of the 1930s has returned not through mobs or uniforms, but through manufactured crisis and political decrees. Europe’s political elites, convinced they defend democracy, are reproducing its decay. The West’s has birthed a bureaucratic form of fascism, administered by committees controlled by global finance and Oligarchs controlling online platforms.
By Jaffa MOSCOW — The moment came not at the negotiating table, nor in the glare of cameras, but in the back seat of an armored limousine. Donald Trump, en route to a summit...