Dentro de la casa estaban Roberto, Amelia y sus hijes pequeñes. El expediente reconstruye un ataque sostenido durante horas. Exconscriptos relataron que se utilizaron fusiles FAL y otras armas, como una ametralladora antiaérea montada sobre trípode, que disparó directamente contra la vivienda, y una bazuca para destruir parte de la estructura.

La justicia no pudo probar un involucramiento de funcionarios del gobierno radical como ideólogos o instigadores del operativo pero la sospecha al respecto fue generalizada, fundada además en los lazos personales entre varios miembros del MTP y funcionarios del gobierno; sin mencionar que en los años 60 y 70 las filas del PRT se nutrieron en parte de jóvenes de origen radical.

Víctor Basterra. Por si faltaban datos para confirmar que Massera seguía en relación estrecha con Licio Gelli, Basterra declaró en la megacausa ESMA haber confeccionado cuatro documentos con nombres diferentes y fotos del jefe de la P2.

El testimonio de Claudio Uriarte resulta importante, porque escribía en el diario Convicción, creado y manejado por Massera y que sostenía las posiciones del almirante y de la Armada en las internas de la cúpula militar. Ya avanzada la democracia, Uriarte estuvo a cargo de la sección Internacionales del diario Página 12, por lo cual ha tenido la oportunidad de obtener información de ambos lados del espectro ideológico.

El almirante Anaya confió la planificación de la operación y el armado del grupo comando al Contralmirante Girling y este -en un pase de manos- a Luis D¨ Imperio, quien designó al mando al capitán de corbeta e infante de marina y buzo táctico Héctor Rosales, junto a los exmontoneros Máximo Nicoletti, Antonio Nelson Latorre alias “el Pelado Diego” y un tercer integrante conocido como “El Marciano”, cuya identidad se desconoce, aunque hay versiones (incluso literarias) que indican que fue un conscripto. D’Imperio, fue el sucesor de Jorge “El Tigre” Acosta en el Grupo de Tareas 3.3.2. de la Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA); el mismo grupo de tareas que había “chupado” a Nicoletti.

Pero su historia no termina allí. Según parece, los jefes de la Armada estaban muy interesados en sus destrezas. Es por ello qué en el año 1978, durante el conflicto que la Argentina mantuvo con Chile por el canal de Beagle, aquella le pidió que preparase un operativo similar al que llevó a cabo en Rio Santiago, esta vez en Valparaíso y contra buques trasandinos. La mediación papal impidió que el asunto llegara a otros estadíos y el plan fue desestimado.

Nabiullina was much praised by the Western technocratic elite and given invitations to Jackson Hole, Basel and the IMF. There, she was fêted for her efforts to defend liberal economic orthodoxy in Russia’s challenging environment as an emerging economy; Christine Lagarde, then managing director of the IMF, said she made ‘central banking sing’.

So, for the world’s producers of commodities and manufactures, what happens in China is a big determinant of the prices of goods, while what happens in the US is a big determinant of the costs of borrowing and servicing debt. And when these two forces are out of phase with each other, many countries around the world (and particularly commodity exporters in the global south) face booms, busts, or both in succession.

`remoralize the ruling classes’,

its recent taste for extremism’ (examples of which are ‘legalization of drugs regardless of the logic of addiction’ and ‘the rights of biological men who identified as women to enter women’s changing rooms and women’s prisons’)

The book seems, prima facie, to be proposing an interesting thesis – that is, one which, even if not completely true, is at least contentful enough to be enlighteningly false.

At the RBA’s press conference on Tuesday announcing the – Monetary Policy Decision – the Governor said that: … when governments are spending a lot of money and we’re running up against capacity constraints, then they do need to think about whether or not there’s ways they can help the inflation problem by looking for ways to constrain demand. Next week, the Treasurer will deliver his annual fiscal statement outlining spending and tax initiatives for 2026-27.

When Louis-Philippe became king in 1830, his regime embraced laissez-faire policies, increased the money supply, and expanded credit and investment. He also extended the franchise to wealthy bankers, financiers, industrialists and some other property owners. Financialisation was rampant, money appeared to determine social status, and French society itself began to be understood as a market

In the view of one judge, brokerage merely shifted unions from love and affection to the ‘still honest domain of self-interested transactions’.

The ardent masses who joined the Communards in battle were seldom industrial workers (Paris in the 1870s had relatively few factories), but more often small shopkeepers, café proprietors, shoemakers, students and self-employed craftsmen of every trade. In other words the petty bourgeoisie, which together with industrial workers constituted the People, the fabled dragon which had carried French revolutions since 1789.

El apoyo argentino en Centroamérica anticipaba ‘tolerancia’ por parte de los EE.UU.; el subsecretario de EE.UU. (Enders) le dijo a Costa Méndez ‘ese problema (Malvinas) es para nosotros un tema de hands off’. Creyó que siempre era más importante para EE.UU. su frontera libre de amenaza ideológica. EE.UU. dependía del apoyo argentino en Centroamérica.

Sassoon and Graves and Owen were obviously far better poets, but it is important to remember that they were not the only, or even the dominant, voices in the air. Disillusion and horror were counterbalanced by pride in what, it continued to be argued, was a necessary sacrifice. In this connection, it is worth mentioning Hugh Cecil’s Flower of Battle (1996), which covers a dozen novelists of the time, many of them bestselling, who tried to make sense of the war with more sorrow than bitterness.

Gen. Arturo A. Corbetta the new federal police chief named after the assassination by a terrorist bomb of Gen. Cesareo Cardozo last week, said in a televised speech Friday night that the subversion required “a high concentration of centralized violence” the state in reply.But he added that this repressive violence must be “official, public and controlled, exercised with decision, but also with the ??? of men who know their duties.”This is the position of General Videla and a majority of the leaders of the armed forces. In the context of the strong emotions aroused among the military by guerrilla violence against retired officers, isolated policemen and the families of serving officers, the idea of “controlled violence” is considered moderate here.

El 2 de julio otro atentado montonero, esta vez a la Superintendencia de Seguridad Federal produjo 23 muertos. Ante semejante desafío, Corbetta no cambió su proceder. Es más, un grupo de policías quiso ir a la cárcel de Villa Devoto, donde había presos políticos para sacarlos y, probablemente, matar algunos. El propio Corbetta, acompañado de un puñado de oficiales de Ejército se interpuso ante los policías en la sede de la jefatura policial y evitó que salieran.

-Eso (Borges en el Colegio Militar) pudo haber sido en 1974 –dice Balza- porque mi suegro, el general Antonio Serrano, era director del Colegio Militar cuando Corbetta era subdirector. Serrano siempre me habló bien de Corbetta. Entre otras cosas, porque a mediados de ese 1974, Serrano renunció al Colegio Militar y pidió el pase a retiro por una pelea con Guillermo Suárez Mason, que era director de Institutos Militares por entonces.

-Yo lo tuve de subdirector del Colegio Militar a Corbetta –dice Giacosa- y una vez lo llevó nada menos que a Jorge Luis Borges a darnos una charla. En otra oportunidad, nos dijo algo así como que "todos los militares deberíamos leer a Borges".

Me preguntó cómo estaba. Le dije que encerrado todo el día, que recién desde hacía poco nos dejaban leer algún diario, pero que no teníamos libros, que los recreos eran esporádicos… en fin, le conté la verdad. Lo que recuerdo es que me dijo: "La única manera legítima de combatir a la subversión es con la Constitución en la mano"

Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker in 1997, objected to the obituarist for the Economist asking: ‘Was there not always, at the very back of her mind, just a nagging feeling that she was being laughed at, even scorned?’ It was ‘an attack in the guise of an obituary’, while the Times had called her a ‘colourful courtesan’, making ‘it plain that, as far as Pamela Harriman was concerned, the age of chivalry was over’. Gopnik suggests, like Purnell, that Pamela was misunderstood: ‘Had this life been played out in the 18th century, she would undoubtedly be the subject of an admiring biography or two by a feminist professor.’

In 1980, while living in penury in Tasmania, Wright became ensnared in the ploys of Victor Rothschild, who used his money, energetic talent and Whitehall prestige to indulge in lofty and irregular wire-pulling in security matters. Rothschild put Wright in touch with the journalist Chapman Pincher, the egregious former defence editor of the Daily Express. In return for promises of money, but also to vent his raging accusations, Wright supplied Pincher with official secrets centring on Hollis’s supposed treachery. Curiously, Thatcher’s cabinet secretary, Robert Armstrong, had devised a similar scheme to leak the Hollis allegations to Pincher in order to pre-empt stories from more left-wing journalists. Hollis’s fictive treason was the sensational selling point of Pincher’s Their Trade Is Treachery (1981).

The increase in Yuan currency options is also another signal of China moving up Shin’s ladder2 of requirements for a reserve currency.

The increase in Yuan currency options is also another signal of China moving up Shin’s ladder2 of requirements for a reserve currency.

Los métodos de Coordinación Federal fueron acuñados por el comisario Alberto Villar, creador dentro de la policía del cuerpo de Guardia de Infantería. Un grupo encabezado por el propio Villar había estado, en 1969, durante la represión de obreros y dirigentes gremiales que participaron del Cordobazo, en mayo de ese año.

Middlemas’ book is particularly valuable for the light it throws on the way in which British re-armament—for the sake of which Chamberlain was supposed to have ‘gained valuable time’ at Munich—was bedevilled and strangled by the Government’s insistence that nothing must be done to produce more than a minimal disturbance of the profitable operations of private enterprise in industry and commerce

he believed, too, that I was of east European Jewish origin, ‘Cockburn’ being a clumsily deceptive translation of my real name, Hannbrand.

WIRED first learned about the campaign after this article’s author was invited by SM4 to participate. The details were later confirmed by several other content creators who received similar outreach.

In an Instagram video posted on April 1, lifestyle influencer Melissa Strahle poses outdoors before an American flag as soft instrumental music plays. “AI lets me focus on what matters most,” she tells her 1.4 million followers. “We need to invest in American-made AI to ensure America leads the way in innovation and job creation.”

Una vez que Ana María González terminó de colocar la bomba se fue del departamento de María Graciela con una nimia excusa –”me siento mal”— luego de completar unos dibujos. Tras la explosión la onda expansiva irritó a los mandos castrenses y llegó al mundo político. La responsable, Ana María González, era la novia de Sergio Leonardo Gass, nombre de guerra “Gabriel”, hijo del dirigente radical y ex diputado nacional Adolfo Gass. Los dos jóvenes eran los más buscados a partir de ese momento.

Another of Bartel’s vignettes shows that austerity was as much a dissolver of the Iron Curtain as mimetic desire. Hungary, which by 1988 had embarked on the Polish route of liberalization, made a headlong effort to reduce expenditure to placate the imf. This included a decision to postpone the overdue modernization of the border wall with Austria. In effect, the de facto dismantling of the Wall was undertaken in the service of cost-cutting.

not only had the basic structure of the neoliberalization process already been laid out by Chilean economists in El Ladrillo, but its key features and overall framework were already under way by the appointment of Chicago Boy par excellence Sergio de Castro as senior adviser for the Ministry of Economics in September 14, 1973 (8). Leaving aside the instability generated by the military’s repressive violence and a dual state interregnum, the neoliberal ascension was also delayed, as noted, by conflicts within a junta split between a protectionist/corporatist and a neoliberal political economy.

Driven by both personal interest and political affiliation, Kast joined forces with other businessmen of the area and provided practical assistance to the military coup and its abducting/killing machine. As later trials would reveal, not only did Michael Kast provide local police and military units with trucks and drivers for arresting and disappearing left militants and radical workers and farmers, but he made sure to add workers from his own factory to the lists handed over. Moreover, as the unlikely survivor of a mass execution, Alejandro Bustos, would testify years later, Kast’s son (Christian Kast, sixteen at the time) was present during interrogations, torture, and executions.

As the US diplomats well understood, the military’s real war was not against the chimera of a communist threat, but against liberalism. It was a poisonous hatred not unlike that imported by the Nazis who had found safe refuge in Argentina. When I first began researching the Nazi escape to Argentina, I was looking for ways in which their presence could have directly inspired the crimes of the dictatorship. As it turned out, I found no physical point of contact and no evidence of direct ties: there were no aging SS officers torturing young prisoners in Argentina’s dungeons during the 1970s. Each country produces its own type of murderous totalitarians.

Norma Berta Radice has consistently denied wrongdoing. The court, however, concluded that she was fully aware of both the criminal origin of the assets she helped manage and the nature of her brother’s activities. The case was formally elevated to trial on March 13, 2023. In 2025, Santiago Viola, who is currently President Milei’s representative before the state body that elects federal judges and the legal representative of ruling party La Libertad Avanza, was appointed as Norma Berta Radice’s lawyer.

by the 1980s Sklar himself had dramatically transvalued his account of corporate liberalism, which he now celebrated as not only benign but even a kind of unconscious, half-recognized American socialism. In Sklar’s hallucinatory prose, corporate capitalism and its Progressive handmaidens achieved a social movement on a par with ‘the Civil War and its aftermath’, to be celebrated because it ‘pacified agrarian populism, transcended proprietary capitalism and, in the inclusive as well as the exclusive sense, contained socialism’. When Sklar died in 2014, he still called himself a leftist but counted John Yoo as a personal friend; he had cut off contact with Judis, but the latter still offered an obituary of more than 10,000 words in The New Republic.

ROGOFF: I hope so. I think he’s the best chance that Argentina’s had in a long time, which is, fair to say, a very low bar. The thing that he’s done that I have not seen before is balancing the budget. If you’re a big borrower and you keep defaulting, a starting point is figuring out how not to have to borrow money, and he’s managed to do that. I don’t know that all his libertarian visions necessarily will come to pass, but he’s provided some stability, bringing inflation down.

Pocos días después una escuadra especial a las órdenes del Buró Político detuvo a Ranier y a otro integrante del ERP, Coco. Esta segunda detención era parte de una estratagema para quebrar la resistencia del Oso.“Lo detuvimos con otro que era inocente –cuenta Mattini-. Agarramos a Coco, al que le teníamos muchísima confianza, y le dijimos: ‘Tenemos una misión rejodida. Te vamos a detener como si fueras un sospechoso y te vamos a maltratar’, para hacerle creer al otro que también lo íbamos a maltratar”.Los llevaron a una misma casa operativa, donde los interrogatorios estarían a cargo de Juan Mangini, el capitán Pepe, jefe de Inteligencia del PRT-ERP, y de Nélida Augier, Pola, encargada de Contrainteligencia.

973 fue un año completo, con dictadura, elecciones, interregno entre ambos, asunción de Cámpora, retorno de Perón, Ezeiza, renuncia presidencial, elecciones, asesinato de Rucci. Resulta difícil encontrar en el pasado una intensidad parecida. Pocas vidas abarcan tantos hechos trascendentes como ese año.

Josh Ryan Collins wrote about the Bank of Canada in “Is Monetary Financing Inflationary? A Case Study of the Canadian Economy, 1935-75” (Spoiler alert: it’s not.)

It is also notable that Poberezhnuk wrote that these soldiers serving in the 14th brigade were ‘attached’ to the 30th brigade. This practice has been much criticized over the past two years, since it means that the ‘attached’ unit is often ‘used up’ at the frontlines by the unit it is attached to. Units that have the privilege to ‘attach’ other units to themselves care little about preserving the lives of troops in these attached units, because they can always just attach another unit. All the while, they can claim to suffer reasonable losses in their own unit.

He also wrote that “I am not persuaded that MMT is the best way to challenge the orthodox theory of sound finance” and echoed the mainstream claims that democracy would collapse if governments didn’t accept a financial constraint: To say that there is no theoretical reason why sovereigns need to “apply to the people” for money is correct, but it fails to consider why the rules of “sound finance” were invented in the first place. The rules were put in place precisely to prevent governments from spending money at will. That governments should apply to parliaments (ultimately, “the people”) for “supply” is part of the theory of the limited state.

Second, fiscal deficits are inflationary and he quoted James Callaghan who as British Labour PM told the 1976 Annual Labour Conference in Blackpool that: We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending … I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists, and insofar as it ever did exist it only worked by … injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy.

I also thought the work of Polish Marxist economist – Michał Kalecki – who was a contemporary of Keynes and was blocked by the latter in his quest for an academic position in Britain, was a far better ‘modern’ extension of Marx than anything Keynes had to offer.

The economic successes of Italy and Germany through strong Keynesian style macroeconomic policies in the early 1930s

“Payment-In-Kind” is a euphemism for “not paying the debt at all,” adding the payment you’d make onto the overall loan balance, accruing interest until the day you supposedly pay it. Put another way, instead of marking a loan as “in default” because the borrower can’t pay it, the fund simply makes the loan larger (and in some cases raises the interest rate).

"Once, a soldier noticed that I wasn't comfortable with it and said, 'What's with you? They aren't coming back here anyway; their story is done.' I didn't reply; I just nodded."

Perhaps it was that he had no access to his phone, no more money and his ChatGPT subscription had expired

“Every society in the modern world,” Goldsmith writes, “is confronting serious problems which have no simple, universal solution.” They do, however, have a simple cause: at root (Goldsmith here sounding more like a bearded polytechnic lecturer than a man who made billions stripping corporations for profit) these ills are the product of the “inversion of values” that is central to modern economies, in which growth comes at the expense of stability. “The economy is a tool to serve us,” he writes. “It is not a demigod to be served by society.”

Entre el 1° de abril, fecha del secuestro de Aleman, y el 25 de mayo, día de la asunción de Cámpora, sólo las tapas de los diarios dieron cuenta de 15 secuestros extorsivos. Entre ellos, el de un gerente de Kodak; un banquero de Rosario; un chacarero, al que asesinaron al no obtener el rescate; el director de una tabacalera; el de un fuerte industrial del ramo textil; el hijo del cantante Roberto Yanés; el jefe de la Gendarmería de Córdoba, Jacobo Nasif; el hijo de un fuerte industrial, por el que pidieron mil millones de pesos; el de un estanciero de Monte; los hijos de dos ejecutivos y un médico; el de un comerciante, por el que pidieron mil millones; y el de un gerente de Coca Cola.

Ningún vínculo familiar, ningún privilegio de clase, nos desviará de nuestra lucha junto al pueblo que ahora, desde la clandestinidad, continuaremos sirviendo, desarrollando la lucha por el camino que marcara nuestro Comandante Guevara: hacia una Argentina libre, justa y socialista.

No single piece of information he passed on was of the highest grade, but betrayal is usually a matter of small increments

his brain a well-oiled Leica.

A shorter version of the report — stripped of the personal claims about Pogrund but with a section on “The Sunday Times article” — was shared with the National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, which declined to launch a full investigation. AdvertisementLabour Together, however, used the fact of the GCHQ referral to create suspicion about the story and its sources, with cabinet ministers and special advisers among those who quietly alleged the report was linked to the Russian state.

Frayn in 1963. Even then – in the very year of That Was the Week That Was – Frayn was using the same analogy, and could see, just as clearly, how anti-establishment comedy was letting its audience off the hook: ‘To go on mocking the Establishment,’ he wrote, ‘has more and more meant making the audience laugh not at themselves at all, but at a standard target which is rapidly becoming as well-established as mothers-in-law. To do this is not to undermine but to confirm the audience’s prejudices, and has less in common with satire than with community hymn-singing – agreeable and heartwarming as that may be.

I’ve watched this up close — and I’ve had to sit through it. Organizations hired Chief Diversity Officers but didn’t shift budget authority. They added “equity” to mission statements but didn’t change who controlled strategy. They created advisory councils of frontline leaders, extracted their knowledge through unpaid “consultation,” then made the same decisions they would have made anyway. They launched listening tours that went nowhere. They renamed programs. They revised style guides. They had people sign oaths — actual oaths — as if the problem were insufficient personal commitment rather than institutional structure.

Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that?’ ‘I’m always in the club drinking martinis,’ he told an interviewer when asked to recall his younger self. ‘What did I know from politics?’ (Richardson doesn’t find in Matthiessen’s letters and journals a coherent politics, but some leftist tendencies emerge in a remark on ‘the startling parallel between communist doctrine and the teachings of Jesus Christ’ and in his sympathy for blacklisted celebrities like Paul Robeson, who ‘got a shitty deal’.) If it were merely a matter of Matthiessen’s reputation as a writer, such explanations might have sufficed, but soon after his arrival in France, he made some new friends, and they started the Paris Review. Since Matthiessen’s employment by the CIA was first reported by the New York Times in 1977, the magazine has had the taint of the association. Given the tendency of its founders, their children and their editorial heirs to memorialise the magazine’s beginnings incessantly, often in the pursuit of fundraising, the issue keeps raising its still un-declassified head, to the extent that many young writers have the impression that since the end of the Second World War American literature has been one big government psyop. That’s why they’re not getting published.

re and more​ in his fiction, Matthiessen made a fetish of the Faulknerian device of multiple, conflicting and elliptical points of view. The tendency is tamed in At Play in the Fields of the Lord. For all the hyperbolic reactions to it, Far Tortuga is a fine if difficult novel that teaches you how to read it as the narrative advances through foul weather. Shadow Country in its final form is a heap of jumbled repetitions about the life of Edgar Watson, a real-life sugar planter on the south-west coast of Florida accused of various crimes, including multiple murders, who died at the hands of a mob of his neighbours in 1910. The first volume is told by a rotation of dozens of neighbours and relatives, speaking in various forms of swamp hillbilly dialect. The next book, told in the third person, follows Watson’s descendants, who try to piece together the truth of his legend. The final volume is narrated by Watson himself in a higher register. It’s hard to defy the blurb from Don DeLillo that appears on the cover of the current edition – ‘His writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes’ – but just as hard to call Watson a hero or villain deserving of this epic treatment.

he story got him the attention of the publisher John Farrar, who passed it to Edward Weeks at the Atlantic. Matthiessen was taken on as a client by ‘the toughest agent in town’. Bernice Baumgarten also represented John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay and Raymond Chandler, who sacked her for calling the Philip Marlowe of The Long Goodbye ‘too Christ-like and sentimental’. She would be hard on Matthiessen’s fiction as well. On receiving 35 pages of a novel in progress, Baumgarten wrote to him: ‘Dear Peter, James Fenimore Cooper wrote this 150 years ago, only he wrote it better. Yrs, Bernice.’

Most of Preston’s subjects tried to whitewash their pasts after World War II, perhaps none more successfully than Pemán, who reinvented himself as a liberal monarchist. In 1981, two months before Pemán’s death, King Juan Carlos awarded the ailing poet the Order of the Golden Fleece, one of the highest honors for Catholic nobles. Aguilera had a more notorious end. One afternoon in 1964 his son Agustín began massaging his father’s sore feet. Suddenly Aguilera pulled out an old revolver from his African service and shot Agustín in the chest. Aguilera’s elder son, Gonzalo, burst into the room, and Aguilera shot him in the chest, too, killing him instantly. Aguilera then went looking for Agustín, who had stumbled out, and found him lying dead in a pool of blood. His wife hid until the Guardia Civil arrived. “Kill him, he’s a savage,” she implored them. Aguilera died in a psychiatric hospital nine months later. He was never charged for the murders.

The night before, the campus had hosted a dinner and conversation between the prominent conservative historian Niall Ferguson and Larry Summers, the former Harvard University president and Treasury secretary. Later, that evening, the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel would deliver the first of a series of lectures on the Antichrist. People at UATX had grown accustomed to fast-paced action.

‘New Updike,’ he might think, with a little uptick of a tricky heart, as he came across a trifling piece in the New Yorker, a meatier story in Playboy, a new novel every few years, all backgrounded by the same infusions of radio and television and newsprint, the same social glosses in Life and Time. I am not such a man. And so, nearly deranged by the time I had commando-crawled my way to the 1980s, I started making notes like ‘drink cold cum in hell’ and ‘i’m glad that god killed you.’ I read on and on, waiting for him to become as good as he had been as a boy.

Based on a range of open source data, he estimated ~59,000-69,000 Russian KIA, ~55,000 Ukrainian KIA, ~30,000 Russian deserters, and ~109,000 Ukrainian deserters. This means ~89,000-99,000 irreversible Russian losses in 2025 and ~164,000 irreversible Ukrainian losses in 2025.

In September 2025, Chirisa Technology Parks' data center caught fire for the second time in two months, and according to Data Center Dynamics, two of the three planned data centers are still in progress.

Yet, at the same time, Israel’s economy has also displayed signs of resilience. The shekel has appreciated nearly 20 percent against the U.S. dollar since the start of the war, and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has reached record highs, buoyed in part by wartime spending and central-bank intervention.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought these problems to the fore. While other countries resorted to debt and fiscal stimulus to deal with the crisis, the Mexican government insisted on maintaining strict budgetary balance. There were no massive bailouts, no universal direct aid, and no increase in public investment to mitigate the economic blow. The IMF rewarded the government for its pandemic response with Special Drawing Rights. As a result, austerity remained the guiding principle even in these exceptional circumstances: protecting the macroeconomic balance while sacrificing the income of millions of families.

Even more concerning for Kyiv is the fact that Europe, despite its collective annual GDP of €17.9tn, has chosen to turn to the bond markets rather than reach into its own pockets.

Disguise structural and sentence-level faults as intentional strategies. In this light, Infinite Jest is no longer poorly-plotted and inconclusive, but ‘fractally structured like a Sierpiński gasket.’3 The hundreds of pages of solecistic flummery in his story collections are not really a grating catalogue of cliches, but an incisive parody of corporate-speak and other modern argots (George Saunders, another basically talentless writer, employs this strategy constantly, besides much else from the Wallace playbook). When it comes time to swoon into obvious sentimentality and Hallmark-style kitsch, just point out you’re aware that’s what it is and are doing it intentionally too. This will let the reader think they’re in on a complicated post-ironic work with real feeling behind it, rather than simply reading bad writing.

Chile’s “black-sheep status” had “already made trouble for its economic recovery” due to overseas boycotts and countries refusing to trade with Santiago.

While the CIA installed all Condor’s constituent governments via military coups

The archives of the Securitate, opened after being vetted by SRI in the mid-2000s, have become a national fixation. Rather than providing transparency, the opening of the archive created what I call a “cult for the occult” – a passion for revealing that which has been hidden about others; searching through files for evidence of collaboration; using the archive as a weapon in political and personal disputes; and trading secrets from the archive for money. More troublesome, the contents of the archive are unreliable.

On the international stage, the crusade led by Jacques Chirac against the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq now looks like the last gasp of a dying creed. In 2009 Nicolas Sarkozy rescinded the Gaullian withdrawal of France from Nato command.

The secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was ‘conscientious’ but ‘hampered ... by his summary understanding of what was not American’.

the liberties he took with historical reality were inspired by political considerations rather than personal vanity.

TF: I know, I saw that. That’s who was advising him. One of the really interesting things about Franklin Roosevelt is that by the time Roosevelt became president, all the orthodox economists were discredited. So Roosevelt couldn’t go to the orthodox economists. They were all flat on their backs. They’d made fools of themselves, and so he had to turn to people with unorthodox ideas. Obama didn’t do that. Obama went right to the guys who had been running things.

What does Meta fraud look like? One example cited by Reuters is the company's discovery of a "six-figure network of accounts" that impersonated US military personnel, who attempted to trick other Meta users sending them money. Reuters also describes "a torrent of fake accounts pretending to be celebrities or represent major consumer brands" in order to steal Meta users' money.

Can AI democratise knowledge—putting a tutor, doctor or adviser in every pocket? Early studies hint at the promise. In Nairobi, OpenAI and Penda Health, a chain of primary-care clinics, tested a tool that advised doctors during consultations. In a randomised trial covering nearly 40,000 patient visits across 15 clinics, doctors with the assistant cut diagnostic errors by 16% and treatment errors by 13%. In Nigeria, a six-week after-school scheme using Microsoft Copilot—in which pupils interacted with the chatbot twice a week—boosted English scores by the equivalent of nearly two years’ extra schooling.

A key aspect of improvement in the Brazilian external accounts has been the process of “de-dollarization” of its external liabilities. This means that now a large share of Brazilian external liabilities (such as public bonds and shares held by non-residents) are denominated in Brazil´s own currency, making creditors bear the exchange rate risk and making the economy less vulnerable to large exchange-rate movements

Despite massive underemployment and informality, the low unemployment rate and growth of real wages are understood as inflationary problems to be solved by constraining demand.

On 31 January, for instance, the New York Times told its readers that Hitler was likely to be stymied by the opposition ‘if he sought to translate the wild and whirling words of his campaign speeches into political action’.

Como se instrumentarán a través del FMI vía swap, piensan en ambos costados de las orillas donde se diseñó el plan, no se requerirá ni una ley en Argentina ni una autorización del Congreso de los Estados Unidos

But in the process, the peso has become so strong, once inflation is factored in, that it’s making it incredibly cheap for middle- and upper-class Argentines to binge on those imported goods. And because Chile has such lower tariffs than Argentina — almost 30 percentage points less, for instance, on clothes — thousands of people are making the trek over the border every day to make those purchases. It’s turned into such big business for stores in Santiago that some of them have exempted Argentines from a rule requiring customers enter a Chilean ID number when making on-line purchases.

The choice of Santander to become Treasury’s conduit to the peso came down to two crucial factors. One, the Spanish lender is part of a small group of so-called primary dealers in U.S. treasuries, which means it has a long-standing relationship with the Federal Reserve. The other is that it has large markets teams in both New York and Buenos Aires.

The opaqueness of First Brands’ operations was amped up by its growing use of a number of short-term borrowing techniques, known broadly as trade finance, that allowed it to take out what amounted to corporate payday loans, often tied to expected shipments or inventory.

Even its much-reviled Washington consensus—while some of its commandments were taken to an extreme length and other ignored—is fundamentally sound and has much to recommend itself.

De acuerdo con la explicación oficial, lo que se busca es desincentivar la compra de esos billetes para luego realizar operaciones especulativas. En modo indirecto, además, esto reduce también la motivación a la compra de dólares, ya que la estimación es que muchos se inclinaban hacia la divisa debido a la ganancia extra que podían obtener.

A fines de septiembre, y mediante la comunicación A 8336 del Banco Central, se estableció que quienes compren dólares oficiales no podrán venderlos luego en el segmento financiero por 90 días.

‘Comprá, campeón”, subraya, en referencia a la frase con la que intentó semanas atrás alejar los rumores de que se avecinaba una devaluación del peso.

Entre los hitos más recordados de su gestión macrista está el bono a 100 años que colocó por 2.700 millones de dólares, pero también sus maniobras a partir de 2018, cuando los fondos frescos comenzaron a escasear. Ese mayo logró vender 3.000 millones de dólares en bonos del Tesoro en pesos a los fondos Templeton y BlackRock con el objetivo de mostrar que el Gobierno todavía tenía acceso a los mercados. Le propuso entonces a Macri pedir un rescate al Fondo Monetario Internacional que resulto el más grande en la historia de la institución (57.000 millones de dólares).

El entonces secretario se ganó con rapidez el aprecio del presidente gracias al acuerdo alcanzado con los fondos buitre que habían llevado a Argentina a los tribunales en 2010 y que bloqueaba el acceso del país sudamericano a los mercados financieros. Desde ese momento, el crédito privado internacional comenzó a fluir a raudales y Caputo fue ascendido a ministro de Finanzas a principios de 2017. Argentina había regresado al mundo y el entonces jefe de Gabinete, Marcos Peña, lo bautizó como “el Messi de las finanzas”.

The German chemicals powerhouse BASF has already temporarily shuttered 80 plans worldwide and is slowing production at another 100 as it plans further output cuts depending on what happens to gas prices.

Over half of Europe’s aluminium smelters have already been affected by the power crises. The EU has temporarily lost 650,000 tonnes of primary aluminium capacity, or about 30% of its total, Eurometaux said. Some of Europe’s biggest steel and chemical plants have also been taken offline and there is no clear idea of when they can start up again. And Europe's fertiliser industry association says more than 70% of the continent's fertiliser production has been either shut or slowed due to sky-high gas prices.

“Sky-high gas prices and aggressive monetary policy tightening have pushed the global economy to the brink of a late 2022/early 2023 recession – defined as two quarters of falling per capita GDP. We expect a global recession to be avoided, but a sustained and substantial improvement in growth also seems unlikely,” Oxford Economics said in a note.

"They will not get there," Guntram Wolff, senior fellow of the Bruegel think-tank, said of the 5% goal. "If you are a highly indebted country, you can't issue more debt, it means very difficult budgetary choices," he said of the hefty tax hikes or spending cuts that it would require.

The European powers have three options to come up with the money they need to fund both their own expanded defence budgets and Ukraine: cut domestic spending, borrow more, or confiscate the $200bn of Russian money that is frozen in Euroclear. They are considering all three but are making little progress.

Not only does Europe not have this money, Europe is slipping into recession and crises. Germany says it can no longer afford to pay for its social services and France and the UK are on the verge of asking for International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout loans. Almost all of Europe is suffering from anaemic growth, cost-of-living crises, elevated energy costs, and high budget deficits. With external debt of over 100% of GDP in several countries, they can’t even afford to borrow their way out of their deepening holes.

hiking VAT to 22% to create more money

This morning UBN reported that the IMF has just persuaded Ukraine’s government to significantly increase its projections for additional funding up from that $37.5bn to $65bn for 2026.

The Trump administration is offering a bailout of hedge funds and banks that bought dollar-denominated Argentinian bonds because of their faith in right-wing President Javier Milei. Milei took over the country a few years ago, which suffered from a lack of dollars and an inability to engage in foreign trade because left-wing governments defaulted on International Monetary Fund and hedge fund obligations. Milei then secured IMF funding due to his pledges to cut pensions and the welfare state.A week and a half ago, voters rebuked Milei in a local election, which led to concerns that the country doesn’t have enough dollars to service its debts should Milei find himself out of power. Argentina quickly went into a financial crisis, a sort of bank run on the country. Those hedge funds are on the hook for defaulted bonds.

Mehta refused to put into his remedy an anti-retaliation provision, which means Google can take revenge on those who testified at trial.

This is, in many ways, the dynamic that defines reactionary centrism: the right must be understood, but never blamed. The left can be blamed, but need not be understood.

Wilson counts “75 rare interviews”.

a spitting comet

she had her own ideas, and particularly for the house magazine, the Poetry Review. She wanted to raise standards by paying contributors rather than charging them. In her debut editorial, she asked: “Cannot we cease railing at the Moderns?” The answer was a predictable no.

In Electric Spark, her capacious and penetrating study of Spark’s life, work and psyche, Frances Wilson favours “Muriel”, though, “When I discuss her writing, I call her Spark”. Where Stannard stepped back, Wilson opens her third eye: “[Spark] is no longer here to score through my sentences, but that does not mean I have not felt, on every page of this book, her control of my hand”.

German scholarship had dominated Roman republican history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But after the Second World War the approach of Ronald Syme, Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford from 1949 to 1970, won primacy among most anglophone scholars; over time and in other hands it tended to devolve into dry-as-dust analyses of rival political groupings, largely stripped of “real” political issues. At the same time groundbreaking German work such as Christian Meier’s sociologically inflected Res publica amissa, published in 1966 but never translated into English, drew little notice.

n idea not conceived in English is probably not worth thinking at all.” Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, perhaps the leading proponent of the historical approach highlighted by this volume, attributes this dictum to an unnamed member of the “Classics faculty, Cambridge, c.1987”.

How much debt do you ask? Well…“Private credit funding of artificial intelligence is running at around $50 billion a quarter, at the low end, for the past three quarters. Even without factoring in the mega deals from Meta and Vantage, they are already providing two to three times what the public markets are providing,” said Matthew Mish, head of credit strategy at UBS.And many new computing hubs are being funded through commercial mortgage-backed securities, tied not to a corporate entity, but to the payments generated by the complexes. The amount of CMBS backed by AI infrastructure is already up 30%, to $15.6 billion, from the full year total in 2024, JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimated this month.

If we move away from regulations and textbooks, we will actually discover another major source of financing the budget deficit - balances in treasury accounts. In fact, this is a kind of "intra-treasury" liquidity reserve, which theoretically should be minimized (if we focus on ideas about the efficiency of the treasury), but in real Russian conditions after 2022 it has been increasing for a long time, allowing it to be used as an additional reserve to cover unforeseen expenses. Balances in treasury accounts first decrease every month as the treasury finances budget expenditures, and then, from the beginning of the tax period, they grow. From the point of view of their direct purpose, their size should not greatly exceed the difference between the minimum and maximum monthly values ​​(in relation to the Russian situation in recent years, this is 2.5-3 trillion rubles), but in practice a much larger amount has formedlarge  balances (up to 9-10 trillion during 2024 and more than 11 trillion rubles in December 2024).

The SEALs reached shore thinking they were alone, and started to remove their diving gear. The target was only a few hundred yards away.

For instance, the Fed crew pushed aggressively for intertwining cryptocurrencies into the banking system. It was “hand-to-hand combat” for 18 months among regulators, with the Fed and officials Nellie Liang and Janet Yellen at Treasury pushing a bill, along with the most bank-friendly Senator, Pat Toomey, that would have given access to Fed facilities to stablecoin issuers. Fortunately, they lost after Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX blew up spectacularly, and the Fed finally flipped its position by issuing a statement opposing crypto coming into regulated banking. (Of course, the embarrassment never ends, some dingbat regulator at the Fed, supported by SF Fed President Mary Daly who also screwed up on SVB, had allowed FTX to buy a bank charter, and get access to the payments system and a Fed backstop.)

Not enough has perhaps been made, in assessing Durrell’s radical animus against England, “Pudding Island”, as he called it, of the wrench from India, where he was born and spent his first schooldays. Opportunistic romancing about these early years came easily to him. Haag disposes of his various later claims to being Irish simply because a great-grandmother, born in Delhi, carried the surname O’Brien. Neither was it true, as he liked to tell his French admirers, that childhood inspirations came from being able to glimpse Mount Everest from the dormitory windows as a pupil at St Joseph’s College in Darjeeling.

In military management, there is a long-standing, hopeless chaos with layers of colonels, who should not only have stopped increasing long ago but should have been separated into a distinct brigade, isolated from decision-making, and who still shuffle papers full of lies.

And what does the Ukrainian industry look like in terms of cooperation with Western arms manufacturers? There have been numerous announcements that Ukraine is collaborating with various companies. This largely remains in the realm of media announcements. If Ukraine doesn't receive significant funding in the form of subsidies for the purchase of Western equipment, even from factories supposedly being built in Ukraine, it won't buy this equipment. We spoke with a representative of one of the ministries responsible for international cooperation. She said that if Ukrainians had a choice, for example, between purchasing one Lynx vehicle for €10 million and three or four Ukrainian-made BTR-4 vehicles for the same price, they would choose the Ukrainian ones. The fact that Western vehicles would be 20-30 percent better doesn't make much difference from their perspective.

Using more than 1,000 radar satellite passes, the FT tracked changes at sites associated with ammunition and missile production, two bottlenecks in the west’s support for Ukraine.

For example, France supplies 90% of its barrel production to Ukraine. Moreover, Ukrainian long-range artillery, particularly Western-supplied systems, is often superior in quality to its Russian counterparts, which is another crucial factor.

). Of course, our national debt remains a politicized issue; people embed their ideological aims in their urgent warnings about Treasuries and interest rates. The Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff told me that “progressives have had their head in the sand about the deficit,” partly because they’re bad at admitting there are trade-offs; he published a paper in the August 2024 issue of the American Economic Review showing that long-term real rates tend to move back to a historical equilibrium. “It was like saying climate change might have partly natural causes,” he said. He watched his thesis get mangled as it moved through the ideology machine. “People think, Well, you’re in favor of ‘austerity’ because you think there’s a trade-off.”

. The stand-in force remains the most important part of the future Marine Corps, not the Marine expeditionary unit.

A divorced father of three boys, he would tell ChatGPT what was in his fridge and ask for recipes his sons might like. When his seven-pound Papillon dog ate a healthy serving of shepherd’s pie, he asked ChatGPT if it would kill him. (Probably not.) During his contentious divorce, he vented to ChatGPT and asked for life advice.“I always felt like it was right,” Mr. Brooks said. “The trust level I had with it grew.”

In a relatively short space of time, one company, Valnet, has acquired a dizzying number of titles, including three publications I once freelanced for — Android Police, How-To Geek, and MakeUseOf.Valnet — a Canadian company whose two founders made their name, and their fortune, in adult media — also owns ScreenRant, The Gamer, XDA Developers, and Polygon, to name but a few sites from its fast-growing portfolio.

The formerly USAID-funded Bihus, which specializes on uncovering corruption, released a new investigation on May 20. It found that the greater part of 40 billion hryvnia (1 billion USD) allocated to the building of frontline fortifications hadn’t found its way to the war-torn Donetsk steppes.

Shyrshyn has been defending Ukraine since the first days of the full-scale invasion, having enlisted in the 80th Air Assault Brigade, where he became a platoon commander. Later, he became a company commander in the 47th Mechanized Brigade. He proved himself a true leader during the offensive operation in the Zaporizhzhia direction in 2023. His company was one of the first to break through to Robotyne after months of frontal assaults on well-prepared enemy defenses — because the commander was always with his soldiers, personally participating in the assaults and fighting on the front lines. His company can be seen in Oleg Sentsov’s film "Real."

The division of the latest 155 mm Caesar self-propelled howitzers (SPHs), as well as the rest of the brigade's artillery and mortar crews, did not have the opportunity to complete a comprehensive firing course and are learning to shoot during combat missions. All 120 mm mortar shells supplied to the brigade, manufactured by the Ministry of Strategic Industries, turned out to be faulty. On December 4, during test firings, not a single one of the 10 shells detonated. The mortars could not provide fire support, and there was no suitable ammunition available to train the mortar crews. Furthermore, the Ministry of Defense neither oversees the quality control of mortar supplies to the troops nor removes faulty ammunition from service.

95% of the brigade's commanders had not fought in the war and needed extensive training and selection before they could be trusted with command. 100% of the brigade's technical specialists had to be trained from scratch—for drones, equipment, and management—and there was no time to shape them into proper specialists.

Nevertheless, most of the soldiers who were sent to France did not desert but were preparing. Neither did more than 4,000 people recruited without selection from the TCR (Territorial Centres of Recruitment), who came to replenish the brigade in September-November, who, in the absence of the brigade command and the home station, lived on the territory of the OC "West" training center and were somehow trained by the instructors sent there by the OC.

In other words, they took away almost all of the fully fit soldiers who had just been appointed by the brigade commander and battalion commanders, actually resetting the previous four months of work, in March-June, so that this brigade was organized in August, and then... they issued an order for everyone who remained to prepare for the trip to France at the end of September.

MP (AWOL) March 46 (3) April 123 (6) May 217 (31) June 1978 (185) July 3882 (310) August 2748 (217) September 3253 (187) October 3211 (339) November 5832 (448).

n early June, it emerged that Russia was actually reducing its payment levels for contract fighters. This would indicate that they are having no issues with finding a sufficient number of fighters. In 2025, payments were reduced in several regions. In particular, in the Samara Region, the amount dropped from 3.6 million rubles (approximately $40,000) to 2.1 million rubles ($23,000); in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (YNAO), from 3.1 million rubles ($34,400) to 1.9 million rubles ($21,100); and in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, where earlier reports mentioned payments of 3 million rubles ($33,300), they have now been reduced to 1.5 million rubles ($16,700). In Bashkortostan, it was decided to cut the one-time payments from 1.6 million rubles ($17,800) to 1 million rubles ($11,100).

Another user wrote that zombie units are widespread:Without exception (well, maybe 154 to some extent), these 150 ‘organisms’ are just ticking boxes—nothing more. For management, they dumped every possible reject from other brigades here. A small example: The deputy battalion commander for armaments DOESN’T KNOW how to properly document and transport weapons in a rail convoy. The brigade’s own leadership is clueless about most regulatory documents—even electronic workflows had to be set up by a sergeant transferred from another brigade. Need I mention that this ‘divinely blessed’ formation’s transport service, in 1.5 years of existence, hasn’t processed a SINGLE vehicle registration?

Contrary to the popular belief that the U.S. job market is extremely tight right now, most jobs still get lots of applicants.

internal recruiters whose function, in part, is to push back on hiring managers’ wish lists. (“That job doesn’t require 10 years of experience,” or “No one with all those qualifications will be willing to accept the salary you’re proposing to pay.”)

His letter ended with a threat – ‘“In addition, we understand that the bill requires the Cabinet of Ministers to ensure that the same level of localization is introduced in future procurement related to projects financed by international financial institutions such as the European Investment Bank. In this regard, we would like to emphasize that these requirements could have a serious negative impact on the future of such institutions in Ukraine and the corresponding support of the EU."

Its financing predominantly runs through two channels: Guarantees provided to mortgage lenders and, via the Sakani Program, interest subsidies and down payment supports provided to home buyers

University of Texas finance professor John M. Griffin and his doctoral student Amin Shams detailed Tether’s activities in a 2018 paper. For the period of March 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018, Griffin and Shams found plausible evidence to conclude that a few actors printed tethers without real dollar backing to artificially rescue Bitcoin (BTC) when its price fell and stimulate its overall growth. The trading activity was concentrated on Bitfinex with trading patterns not seen on other exchanges. Griffin and Shams also noted the dubious nature of Tether’s reserves and demonstrated unbacked issuance. So long as no one could tell the difference between a tether token and a real dollar, these unbacked tokens could be traded as if they were real dollars. Think of it as a cheat code in a video game for unlimited gold when every other player must grind quests to get them.

Two weeks ago, French semiconductor manufacturer Sequans Communications raised $384 million from more than 40 institutional investors to buy bitcoin. The company’s stock jumped 215% that week and peaked at $5.83 a share—but it’s since fallen back down to $1.98.

The challenge of securing enough gas turbines is one of the clearest examples of how booming investment in artificial intelligence is reshaping the electric power industry, overwhelming suppliers and upending longstanding notions of what makes sense financially.

The agency is split primarily into two branches: Enforcement and Removal Operations, which has about 5,500 immigration-enforcement officers, and Homeland Security Investigations, whose roughly 7,000 agents investigate drug smuggling, human trafficking, counterfeit goods, and a range of other cross-border criminal activities.

Some ICE attorneys “are only waiting until their student loans are forgiven, and then they’re leaving,” he said.

Less than four months later, on April 25, 2019, the rumblings of the government’s first financial crisis began. J.P. Morgan decided to shed US$800 million worth of Lebac, a short-term bond from the Central Bank, and buy dollars. One of the largest financial institutions in the world, J.P. Morgan had voluntarily taken on US$2.3 billion in debt and had a good relationship with the Macri administration — several representatives had worked in its offices. Hence the bewilderment at the Central Bank.

December 17, 2015, Sturzenegger felt confident. Macri had taken office as president a week earlier, and as head of the Central Bank, Sturzenegger had fulfilled one of PRO’s main campaign promises: lifting currency controls, the cepo. He raised the purchase limit to US$2 million per month and removed all restrictions. The dollar rose to AR$13.93. Sturzenegger celebrated the measure at a lunch with the Central Bank’s board of directors. But one of the guests pointed out that the devaluation would immediately translate into higher prices, a phenomenon known as pass-through. “Pass-through is a myth,” he answered.

His bachelor pad was a set location for the Juan José Campanella film, La Hija de la Novia (The Daughter of the Bride).

In one of his books, he defines himself as an “incorrigible optimist.” Those words are not so different from descriptors offered by interviewees: workaholic, Swiss discipline, fundamentalist, hard-headed, and naïve. “In a sense, he is pretty dogmatic, with a dose of messianism,” said an economist who knows him pretty well. “He says: ‘I have the solution for Argentina’s crisis, I have it all thought out, I have the correct theoretical model’. As president of the Central Bank, he became the most incarnate version of that.”

On Tuesday, Starmer circled the wagons to defend McSweeney, telling cabinet: ‘We will learn from our mistakes, but we will not turn on our staff – including our chief of staff, without whom none of us would be sitting around this cabinet table.’

. He claimed that at the time he had been discombobulated by a fire-bomb attack on his home (an incident which credible figures in government have linked to the Russians, who will be delighted to know it put the PM off his game

his biographer Tom Baldwin (whom some on the left would like to replace McSweeney),

McSweeney is exercised by the fact that the civil service has 7,000 communications officers, 4,500 of whom work for arm’s-length bodies and quangos and frequently attack what the government is trying to do. Like Dominic Cummings, he is enthused by the possibilities of technology to speed change, such as AI in the NHS or gamers being hired by the Ministry of Defence to fly drones. He is now experimenting with ‘synthetic voters’ – essentially fake focus groups of AI voters who can tell ministers more quickly and cheaply what the public thinks of policies. In the last week he has been reading The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp, co-founder of the tech firm Palantir, which argues that the West’s technical dominance over the past century has been down to collaboration between governments and tech firms.

‘Rachel is a study in Shakespearean tragedy,’ a cabinet colleague of hers remarks. ‘She played a big part in getting our economic credibility back. But in opposition she essentially said no to things, and the problem is that the first thing she said yes to in government was the winter fuel cut.’ Starmer and Reeves both began with a miserablist message that ‘things will get worse before they get better’. This resulted from a major misunderstanding. ‘We tried to do what Cameron and Osborne did in 2010 and blame the last government,’ the cabinet minister says. ‘And while things were significantly worse than we expected, that didn’t resonate with the public.’ A Labour strategist adds: ‘We assumed it was 2010 because the public finances were a mess, but the public appetite was for 1997. They wanted the hopey-changey thing. We told them how it would get worse. We still haven’t really explained how it will get better. It’s almost like what we liked about George Osborne’s “pain for a purpose” was the pain part.’

“This kid is full of beautiful ideas, my kids love him, but he’s just not serious,” said a top corporate lawyer who donated to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. “Everything he’s proposing would require an increase in taxes and that’s just not going to happen.”

Executives and directors from around the world have called me to say that they can't fund any projects if they don't pretend there is AI in them. Non-profits have asked me if we could pretend to do AI because it's the only way to fund infrastructure in the developing world. Readers keep emailing me to say that their contracts are getting cancelled because someone smooth-talked their CEO into believing that they don't need developers. I was miraculously allowed onto some mandated “Professional Development For Board Members On AI” panel hosted by the Financial Times5, alongside people like Yahoo's former CDO, and the preparation consisted of being informed repeatedly that the audience has no idea what AI does but is scared they'll be fired or sued if they don't buy it.

“Opinion” also remains important for retaining and attracting new readership. Its top stories regularly bring in 750,000 to 1.2 million page views. The median number of page views for “Opinion” in 2024 was just below 200,000 per story, and that figure rose in early 2025. Still, a source familiar with the paper’s overall traffic said that “Opinion” is a solid, but not outsize, contributor to it.

In response to concerns from the agribusiness sector, Finance Minister Luis Caputo suggested producers engage in carry trade strategies to increase returns. Rural associations, in turn, replied: The productive sector we represent has received statements from national officials that are troubling. First, we were advised to engage in financial speculation—an activity entirely unrelated to our core mission. Our work is to generate real, exportable wealth, which over the years has allowed successive governments to confiscate a total of $200 billion.

Yes, China halted exports of all rare earths to Japan for two months in 2010 during a territorial dispute, scaring Japanese manufacturers, which nearly ran out of supplies. Sumitomo, a Japanese trading group, and the Japanese government subsequently helped Lynas, an Australian company, build more mining capacity in Australia and processing capacity in Malaysia, so that Japan would have an alternative to China.

The Houthis were also able to down more than a dozen U.S. Reaper drones, each worth around $30 million.

But there are two ways in which Hayek can be used to argue something different. In his own understanding of human evolution, we have continued to rely on forms of ‘tacit’ knowledge that lie beyond the reach of computers. It was the innate human ability to navigate uncertainty that enabled us to interact with one another in the marketplace. As a result we are able to use the hidden power of the market to build computers, but they shouldn’t be able to use it to build us. Of course, Hayek had no idea what might become possible in the age of AI, when computers are increasingly adept at mimicking all the forms of knowledge – tacit, unspoken, unconscious even – that human beings possess. He was thinking of cack-handed earlier attempts to use computer technology to run the economy, such as the doomed Project Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile, which promised to manage prices and goods in real time and never got further than resembling a set for a bad sci-fi movie. It may be that the latest AI technology will soon be able to ‘do’ freedom as Hayek understood it. Perhaps liberation isn’t only for humans after all. But there are grounds for Hayekians to be nervous of Silicon Valley’s ambitions in this area – let alone what is being attempted by its Chinese rivals. The point of the market was to allow us to fulfil our potential. If there are non-human entities who do better under market conditions than we do, might that not be a good reason to shut the market down?

Today, American intellectual property is locked into dominant firms, who spend large amounts of money making sure no one else can use it. Apple for instance spends $1 billion a year on its legal division, and Disney is right now suing people online for using Baby Yoda memes. China, however, has a way around our IP laws; it just hacks our corporations or legally forces technology transfer, and then moves this knowledge throughout its technology sector. Thus American know-how floods into China, while Americans are locked out of the wisdom we developed and paid for.

American strategy for 50 years has been designed to create financial assets, which we then traded to China and foreign countries for physical goods

Clarivate’s recent decision to shift from perpetual access ebook sales to a subscription-only model

And then there's the further point where they’re in the process of claiming that they can take money out of anyone's bank account or freeze anyone's bank account. It's actually mind-bending trying to keep up with these stories of all the different ways that they're going after bank accounts. I mean, they froze a New York state government bank account related to EPA grants that were already handed out that were being administered by Citibank. And I want to dig into that more and write about it more. But that's just one of, I would say, four or five different payment stories that are calamitous.

biofictions

In the end, this was a pyramid scheme resting on the investments of thousands, then millions, of Americans.

since Macintyre’s book has no footnotes

The Iraqi connection is usually the most neglected part of accounts of the siege, since it complicates an otherwise straightforward tale. Yet the operation was wholly planned and organised by Saddam’s intelligence service, right up to the moment the gunmen burst into the embassy. Macintyre recognises that ‘war between Iran and Iraq was looming, and the opening battle was being fought inside 16 Princes Gate.’ In fact, it wasn’t the opening battle: the embassy seizure was one of a rapidly escalating series of violent incidents staged by Iraq in the first half of 1980, leading up to its full-scale invasion of Iran on 22 September. Some years later, I read a declassified message from an agent in Baghdad working for the Defence Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, sent on 8 April, three weeks before the Iranian embassy takeover. ‘There is a 50 per cent chance that Iraq will attack Iran,’ the agent wrote (his name is blacked out but he was evidently well connected with the Iraqi elite). ‘Iraq has moved large numbers of military personnel and equipment in anticipation of such an invasion.’ Skirmishes had already begun: two days earlier, an Iraqi commando unit had fired rockets at an Iranian oilfield. The agent finished by saying that Iraq’s leaders believed that ‘the Iranian military is now weak and can be easily defeated.’

With hindsight, Trump 1.0 is perhaps best described as a lite form of positive-sum populism. He won the election in 2016 against the backdrop of talk of “secular stagnation” (Summers) and a mini-recession in manufacturing. From 2017, Trump’s extraordinarily expansive fiscal policy accelerated growth, helping to restore something close to full employment. Tellingly, this generated tension with the inflation-guardians of the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, tax cuts handed huge benefits to the highest earners and deregulation favored business. Trump’s wilder plans were either not fully fledged, or, he was restrained by “the adults in the room”. We don’t know what a second Trump term might have looked like. The chaos of 2020 blurs any clear analysis. But the escalation of tension with China was ominous, as was the radicalization on the right-wing.