DIGITAL EDITION
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Cancer neuroscience shows that tumours do not just sit in the body. They recruit nerves, form synapses, steal mitochondria and tap into the stress system to grow and spread. Some of the most promising ways to interfere with that wiring involve cheap drugs we already have. The science is glamorous. The problem is simple. No one can make enough money from the obvious experiments.
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.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Long Read
Around the world engineers keep throwing more data at their models, hoping that scale alone will unlock something resembling intuition or agency. It will not. Intelligence emerges from evolution and from competition anchored in scarcity and survival. Until AI systems are given stakes, persistence and an internal reward structure, they remain tools. This article explains why the missing ingredient is evolutionary pressure.
From a BRICS vantage point, the real energy weapon was never just Russian gas or Chinese rare earths. It was Washington’s grip on sanctions, shipping, finance and the dollar system, used for decades against Venezuela, Iran, Iraq and Russia. With U.S. warships off Caracas and new threats over oil and airspace, Venezuela has become the live test of a split world energy order.
Robotaxis are no longer just prototypes. Waymo now delivers over a million paid rides each month in American cities, while Baidu’s Apollo Go runs fully driverless cabs across Chinese and Gulf cities and chases breakeven in Wuhan. Behind them, Nvidia sells the compute, Uber chases bookings, and regulators decide who can rewrite their streets.
Central banks are not buying gold because the Western system that issues their reserves now freezes and seizes them. From Russian assets to Venezuelan gold, the message to the global South is simple. Your savings in New York or London are hostages, not reserves. The world is quietly building an escape route.
Ukraine’s front is no longer holding, Kiev’s power networks are held together by generators, and Europe is speaking loudly about a war it has neither the army nor the public to fight. Drawing on Telegraph Online’s own investigative sources, this long read examines the military collapse, the managed corruption in Kiev, the Black Sea tanker attacks and what a settlement on Russian terms really means for NATO.
Trump’s second term economy looks respectable on paper. Growth is positive, unemployment is low and an artificial intelligence boom is lifting Wall Street. Yet prices remain far above their pre pandemic level and Liberation Day tariffs have acted as a giant, hidden tax on everyday goods. Voters now blame Trump personally for a cost of living crisis he promised to end, and they are punishing him at the ballot box.
The scandal is not that one secretary of war may have ordered a second missile into a sinking boat. It is that after Vietnam, Iraq, Gaza, Yemen and the drone era, anybody in Washington can still act surprised. This long read traces how the war on drugs, frontier thinking and algorithmic targeting have normalised extrajudicial killing and turned whole populations into expendable categories.
George Galloway tells Tucker Carlson how he and his wife were stopped by counter terrorism police at Gatwick, told they were not under arrest yet not free to leave, questioned for hours about their political views and then released without charge. Legacy broadcasters downplayed the story. Online, millions view it as evidence that Britain’s security services now act with alarming impunity.
Russia / Defence / Long Read / Ukraine
Lieutenant General Apti Alaudinov, a Chechen commander at the heart of Moscow’s war machine, says Russia is winning a deliberate slow grind in Ukraine with drones, attrition and hypersonic missiles. He claims Ukraine is bleeding faster than it can mobilise while Russian forces preserve manpower and hold back tanks. This article unpacks his story using Russian official figures and doctrine as the reference frame.
Britain no longer lives from factories; it lives from contracts, custody and trust in London. That trust is now a sanctions weapon. From Venezuelan gold to Russian reserves and Arctic gas shipping, the United Kingdom is using its courts and insurers to punish enemies. Each strike hurts Moscow. It also teaches the rest of the world how to move money and ships without London.
Russia now chooses where the war is intense and where it is merely noisy. Ukraine still holds its big cities, but the front is tilting. Village by village, the line moves around Siversk, Pokrovsk and Huliaipole, while exhausted brigades try to plug every gap at once. The real question is no longer rhetoric. It is whether Kyiv can hold these hinges or trade them away.
Donald Trump has told airlines and pilots to treat Venezuelan skies as closed, turning a security advisory into a de facto air blackout. Caracas has revoked licences for Iberia and other major carriers, Spanish and Venezuelan passengers are stranded, and Latin American leaders warn that a drug war pretext is tipping toward blockade. The legal reality is murkier than the slogan, but the shock is already real.
Hong Kong’s deadliest tower fire in decades is being sold in Western coverage as a tale of bad contractors and ageing residents. In reality it is the late stage of a British colonial housing model that still treats land as a revenue machine, squeezes people into unsafe estates, and now compares badly with the space and security most families in Shanghai, Beijing and Nanning enjoy.
Britain once sold trial by jury as proof that serious criminal justice belongs in the hands of ordinary citizens. Now ministers want to strip juries from a wide band of cases and blame them for a Crown Court backlog that years of cuts created. This Telegraph Online analysis tests whether the plan is a necessary response to crisis or a quiet transfer of power from the public to the state.
A new daily pill called orforglipron promises to do for obesity and type two diabetes what Ozempic and Wegovy could never quite manage: escape the clinic and land in the bathroom cabinet. Trial data show close to ten per cent weight loss in people with diabetes and more in others, but also a harsher truth. This is not a cure. It is a lifelong metabolic lease.
A small cluster of media groups and global platforms now acts as editor in chief of public reality in Britain. Three national newspaper groups control almost all print circulation, two chains dominate local titles, and a few foreign technology firms decide how news is found and funded. Together they translate extreme wealth at the top into quiet control over what citizens see, fear and forget.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) / China
China’s artificial intelligence giants are not only dodging United States export controls. They are also navigating Beijing’s clampdown on Nvidia. New rules that bar fresh Nvidia deployments in Chinese data centres are pushing Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek to rent GPU farms in Singapore and Malaysia, even as they are forced to build a parallel stack on Huawei and other domestic chips at home.
There was a moment when the Ukraine war could have been frozen where it actually stood. Anchorage produced a twenty eight point plan that acknowledged lost territory, capped Ukraine’s army and barred NATO bases. Moscow signalled conditional acceptance. Kyiv, Europe and parts of Washington then tore it apart with rewrites and leaks. The plan did not fail. It was prevented.
The comforting script that runs through recent commentary says Russia is bleeding and a little more resolve will hand victory back to Kyiv. The numbers say something colder. Russia is winning slowly and expensively. Ukraine is losing slowly and bravely. Western policy is buying time, not changing the destination.
Rachel Reeves’s first Budget does not end Britain’s time as a polite tax haven, but it finally leans against the tide. Threshold freezes still squeeze workers, yet high value property and investment income are asked to pay more, and the two child limit is scrapped. For a country built around offshore money and domestic austerity, that is a small but real turn.
Japan’s new prime minister has forced a choice that Tokyo spent decades avoiding. By calling a Taiwan conflict a threat to Japan’s survival, Sanae Takaichi has pleased Washington and enraged Beijing while riding high in the polls at home. Behind the drama sits a harder project that links whitewashed war memory, rearmed forces and a disposable foreign workforce.
China’s boycott of Japan is not about crowded temples or lost hotel bookings. It is a response to a Japanese prime minister speaking of force in a conflict that touches Chinese territory, against the backdrop of tens of millions of Chinese dead in the last war. Beijing is using tourism to show that history and economic power now move together.
World / Ukraine / United States
Ukraine is being boxed in by three forces at once: a corruption scandal that reaches into Zelensky’s old circle, a peace plan drafted between Washington and Moscow, and a frontline that is creeping the wrong way. Trump’s deadline does not solve any of this. It exposes the fact that Kyiv’s choices are now about managing different forms of defeat, not choosing victory.
The twenty eight point peace plan now on the table does not end the Ukraine war on Western terms. It writes into law what the battlefield has already decided. Ukraine is pushed out of NATO, loses more land, and becomes a neutral buffer, while Europe discovers it was collateral in a project that overreached from the start.
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.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Economics
Artificial intelligence companies talk about safety and innovation, but the real fight is elsewhere. It is over who owns the training data that feeds their models, who gets paid for it and who is quietly turned into free raw material. As Britain dithers over copyright rules, private contracts and foreign courts are deciding that settlement without the country at the table.
London is about to decide whether Oxford Street exists for traffic or for people. One residents society in Marylebone has been treated as the referee, yet it speaks for one of the richest corners of the city, not for the workers and visitors who keep the street alive. This piece tests its claims against evidence on crime, access and growth
Artificial intelligence is not dangerous because it talks. It is dangerous because a tiny group of institutions now trains the black box systems that will sit between citizens and almost every important decision. This piece argues for a hard rule: if a model is used as public infrastructure, its training process cannot remain a corporate secret.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Psychology
A language model is not a friend or a god. It is a fast, obedient engine for words that already lets one person do the work of a team. This piece sets out what the machine can really do now, where it fails, and how to use it as a partner without giving up human judgement or responsibility.
The Suez Canal’s repeated crises are forcing the world to look north. As Red Sea attacks disrupt global trade, Russia and China are turning the Arctic into a strategic bypass where power depends not on warships but on icebreakers. With nuclear fleets and expanding polar capacity, they are shaping a new corridor that could redefine maritime logistics as the ice retreats.
A quiet email refusing a press pass at Westminster has turned into a test of how far Britain will tolerate scrutiny of its own power. Declassified UK, an investigative outlet focused on foreign affairs, was denied access while almost five hundred other journalists still roam the estate. Internal emails released under freedom of information laws point not to space constraints but unease with its standpoint,
Ukraine was sold to Western publics as a clean moral war: brave defenders, honest aid, a shattered Russia at the end of it. What emerges instead is a corrupt and exhausted client state, a Russia that chooses when and where to advance, and a Germany hollowed out by lost energy and bad bets
The presidents fury when Epstein is mentioned is not strength. It is panic. The United States cannot release the full archive because it does not just record one predator, it maps an entire network of compromise inside Washington. Redactions will be sold as national security.
Venezuela is not a target chosen for democracy or regional stability. It is chosen because Washington is running out of financial room and geopolitical momentum. With interest payments exceeding defence spending and Ukraine draining Europe’s capacity, the United States now sees Venezuelan oil and minerals as a lifeline. “Southern Spear” is not a strategy. It is the reflex of a system under pressure, reaching outward for collateral to stabilise itself.
Artificial intelligence does not expand human knowledge; it expands the precision with which that knowledge can be exploited. As models scale, they become instruments of prediction and optimisation that outstrip the capabilities of individuals and institutions. The central danger is not rogue AI but concentrated intelligence: a small elite or powerful state wielding tools of superior foresight, modelling and influence. Unless capability is distributed, society risks becoming captive to those who control the lens.
World / South America / United States
Telegraph Online · Long Read The story begins with about eighty poor men in small boats. Since early September, United States Reaper drones and naval assets have destroyed nineteen craft in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing at least seventy-six people, probably more. Most were Venezuelan or Colombian fishermen and casual labourers moving small loads of […]
* 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.
Germany’s de-industrialisation is not an accident but a self-inflicted collapse. By shutting nuclear plants, severing cheap Russian gas and accepting costly US LNG, Germany destroyed the energy base that powered its industry. Offshoring core manufacturing to China and arriving late to the electric-vehicle transition deepened the decline. High labour costs, rigid regulation and a bloated welfare model have finished the job. Germany dismantled itself—and now the bill is due.
The race for artificial intelligence supremacy will not be won with chips alone but with cheap, abundant power. As AI models consume electricity on the scale of small cities, China’s vast renewable build-out and ultra-high-voltage grid give it a decisive structural advantage. The United States, fixated on silicon and sanctions, risks missing the real battlefield: energy sovereignty. In the new AI order, watts—not transistors—will determine who rules computation.
When the internet collapses, how will you reconnect? A guide to emergency communication, radio networks, and rebuilding digital life from zero
AI is quietly erasing the foundations of the old web. Publishers who block crawlers and cling to paywalls are locking themselves out of the next discovery layer. As assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity deliver answers directly, pages lose their value. The homepage, the catalogue, and the paywall are relics. What replaces them is an intelligent layer where information finds the user, not the other way round.
For two years Western governments and media promised victory in Ukraine, portraying Russia as weak and isolated. That narrative has collapsed. Sanctions failed, NATO’s industrial base faltered, and the battlefield turned. Europe faces de-industrialisation while Russia’s economy and army expand. The press that once sold triumph now prepares audiences for retreat, conditioning the public for a negotiated peace — one dictated on Moscow’s terms, not Washington’s.
In Texas and Tokyo and Seoul, thirty-year-olds now run the same arithmetic: rent that devours half a salary, jobs that can vanish tomorrow, childcare that costs more than university, and the quiet certainty that no one is coming to save them. The future no longer feels like a place that rewards commitment. Across the richest societies in history, the fertility rate has become the most honest metric we have left: a mirror held up to civilisational confidence. The reflection is merciless.
China is often portrayed as the world’s leading polluter, yet the numbers tell another story. The United States and Europe burned through most of the planet’s carbon budget to industrialise and preserve their prosperity. An average American still uses almost three times more energy than a Chinese citizen. By any fair per-person and historical measure, the West remains the greatest emitter, and China’s industrialisation is occurring at a fraction of that cost.