Liberal democracies view Putin’s Russia as a bully – and Trump’s US as an angry drunk with a bazooka. The response is pure venom
There are people who argue that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is not motivated by fears or imperial ambitions, but by other countries’ disrespect. Russia once commanded authority as one of the world’s two superpowers, but it has since forfeited that status. It knows it has lost the respect of other countries (Barack Obama famously dismissed Russia as just a “regional power”), and the Ukraine war is its way of winning it back.
What is perhaps surprising is that Donald Trump’s turn against Europe has similar motivations. Putin knows his aggressive revanchism won’t win Russia any love among countries whose respect he craves. But if he can’t be loved, he hopes at least to be feared. If you are in a social order that regards you as inferior, you have every incentive to turn spoiler.
Henry Farrell is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Sergey Radchenko is Wilson E Schmidt distinguished professor at the Henry A Kissinger Center, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
They went mega-viral as the couple who were caught canoodling on a live screen. Cue plot twists and months of public intrigue
On 16 July 2025, Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot went to a Coldplay concert in Boston. You know this, I know this, my pop-culture-averse neighbour Norma knows this. Millions of people around the world are intimately acquainted with what happened that fateful day: the co-workers were caught cuddling and then jumping apart in horror on Coldplay’s kiss cam. Attention spans are short and fresh memes are minted daily. Unfortunately for Byron and Cabot, this wasn’t just another meme; the video of their shocked reaction contained all the ingredients of a viral moment with unusual staying power.
First, there was the format: the clip – uploaded on social media by a fellow concert-goer – was only a few seconds long and easy to recreate. Then there were the protagonists: Byron was the married CEO of software company Astronomer and Cabot was the head of HR. Inequality is at record levels and eat-the-rich narratives are everywhere; everyone loves the chance to hate on wealthy tech types.
Our 20 favourite pieces of in-depth reporting, essays and profiles from the year
Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist?
Ireland’s 2015 Gender Recognition Act was born in an era of optimism and consensus, but as gender-critical activism grows so does debate whether it can hold
Soon after Ireland passed its Gender Recognition Act in 2015, Kevin Humphreys, a Labour politician, visited a residential home for senior citizens – where an older woman thanked him for the new law.
It was Humphreys who, as the minister of state for social protection 10 years ago, guided through the legislation that has meant transgender people in Ireland can apply to have their lived gender legally recognised by the state through a simple self-certification process.
Her decibel level was almost operatic. But the sound of my first granddaughter wailing like an ambulance was the most beautiful I had ever heard
Just days before Christmas in 2018, I took a flight from New York City to visit my family in southern Italy. My wife, Elvira, and daughter Caroline had moved to a small town in the countryside a few years earlier, and I planned in due course to join the festivities permanently.
I’d made the trip before, once or twice a year since they moved, mainly to get the lay of the land. But this time was different. Caroline had recently had her first child and our first grandchild. And now, after making do with photos and videos, I was finally going to meet Lucia Antonia, all of 11 weeks old. Rarely in my life had I felt more giddy about an encounter in the offing.
Decision comes amid growing public support for Guan Heng – who secretly filmed detention facilities in China – after he illegally entered US by boat
The Department of Homeland Security has dropped its plan to deport a Chinese national who entered the country illegally, two rights activists have said, after his plight raised public concerns that if deported the man would be punished by Beijing for helping expose human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region.
Rayhan Asat, a human rights lawyer who assisted in the case, said Guan Heng’s lawyer received a letter from the department stating its decision to withdraw its request to send Guan to Uganda. Asat said she now expected Guan’s asylum case to “proceed smoothly and favourably”.
Trump again called for Venezuela’s president to leave power and said the US would keep or sell the oil it had seized
China and Russia have expressed support for Venezuela as it confronts a US blockade of sanctioned oil tankers, while Donald Trump continues to ramp up his pressure campaign on the South American country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
Amid reports of slowing activity at Venezuelan ports, the US president again called for Maduro to leave power, and reiterated that the US would keep or sell the oil it had seized off the coast of Venezuela in recent weeks.
In his first comments since the release, the president expressed sympathy for high-profiles figures, including Bill Clinton, who have come under scrutiny
Donald Trump has broken his silence on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, complaining that people who “innocently met” the convicted paedophile could have their reputations destroyed.
In his first comments since the justice department began releasing the materials on Friday, the US president on Monday expressed sympathy for prominent Democrats who have come under renewed scrutiny over their associations with Epstein.
Emergency crews at work after port facilities and ship damaged, governor says, while Donald Trump says peace talks going ‘OK’. What we know on day 1,399
Russian forces struck Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa late on Monday and damaged port facilities and a ship, the regional governor said, in the second attack on the region in less than 24 hours. Oleh Kiper said on Telegram that emergency crews were tackling the aftermath of the latest attack and that no casualties had been reported but provided no further details. An earlier overnight attack hit port and energy infrastructure in the Odesa region, causing a fire at a major port and disrupting electricity supplies to tens of thousands of people. “Russia is attempting to disrupt maritime logistics by launching systematic attacks on port and energy infrastructure,” deputy prime minister Oleksiy Kuleba said on Telegram.
A Russian general was killed after an explosive device detonated beneath his car in what Moscow described as a likely assassination carried out by Ukrainian intelligence services, reports Pjotr Sauer. Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov, head of the operational training directorate of the Russian armed forces’ general staff, died of his injuries, a spokesperson for Russia’s investigative committee said. “Investigators are pursuing numerous lines of inquiry regarding the murder.” Russian Telegram channels with links to the security services reported that Sarvarov’s car exploded while driving along a Moscow street about 7am on Monday. Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack.
Donald Trump has said talks to end the Ukraine war are going “OK”, a day after his envoy Steve Witkoff characterised US discussions with Ukrainian and European representatives in Florida as “productive and constructive”. “The talks are going along,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday. “We are talking. It’s going OK.” Asked if he planned to speak to Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Vladimir Putin, Trump didn’t say, offering only of the fighting: “I’d like to see it stopped.”
Zelenskyy said initial drafts of US proposals for a peace deal met many of Kyiv’s demands but suggested neither side in the war was likely to get everything it wanted in talks on a settlement. “Overall, it looks quite solid at this stage,” the Ukrainian president said on Monday of the latest talks with US officials. “There are some things we are probably not ready for, and I’m sure there are things the Russians are not ready for either.” Trump has been pushing for a peace deal for months but has run into sharply conflicting demands from Moscow and Kyiv.
Moscow said parallel talks between Russia and the US in Miami at the weekend should not be seen as a breakthrough. “This is a working process,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said when asked whether the talks could be seen as a turning point. The Izvestia news outlet cited him as saying in remarks published on Tuesday that discussions were expected to continue in a “meticulous” format and that Russia’s priority was to obtain from the US details of Washington’s work with Europeans and Ukrainians on a possible settlement. He said Moscow would then judge how far those ideas matched what he called the “spirit of Anchorage”, after the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska in August.
Zelenskyy has said residents of a border village taken into Russia by Moscow’s troops had interacted with their neighbours for years without incident. The Ukrainian president on Monday confirmed media reports that residents of Hrabovske village – on the Sumy region’s border and home to 52 people – were taken away by Russian troops. “I think they simply didn’t expect Russian troops to simply walk in and take them away as prisoners,” Zelenskyy said. “But that’s what happened.” The Kremlin has not commented on the situation. The Ukrainian army has said it is battling an attempted Russian breakthrough in the north-eastern Ukrainian region, where Russian forces have recently seized several villages near the border.
President says the ships will be bigger, faster and a hundred times more powerful than any previous US-built warship
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Donald Trump has announced plans for the US navy to build a new generation of warships – known as “Trump-class”.
The ships will be bigger, faster and a hundred times more powerful than any previous US-built warship, the president said on Monday. The project will begin with construction of two such battleships and eventually be expanded to 20 to 25 new vessels.
Food and Drug Administration’s approval hands drugmaker Novo Nordisk an edge in the race to market an obesity pill
US regulators on Monday gave the green light to a pill version of the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, the first daily oral medication to treat obesity.
The US Food and Drug Administration’s approval handed drugmaker Novo Nordisk an edge over rival Eli Lilly in the race to market an obesity pill. Lilly’s oral drug, orforglipron, is still under review.
Church leaders and members detained as government tightens controls on underground Christian gatherings
The knocks came at 2am. Hiding out at a friend’s house in a Beijing suburb, Gao Yingjia and his wife, Geng Pengpeng, rushed downstairs to meet the group of plain-clothed men who said they were police officers. Their son, nearly six, was sleeping upstairs, and Gao and Geng wanted to minimise the ruckus. They knew their time was up.
Two months later, Gao is in a detention centre in Guangxi province, southern China, charged with “illegal use of information networks”. His arrest was part of the biggest crackdown on Christians in China since 2018. It has prompted alarm from the US government and human rights groups, with some analysts describing it as the death knell for unofficial churches in China.
Move comes as union representing US diplomats said it was ‘deeply concerned’ by the process, which could ‘politicise’ foreign service
The Trump administration has quietly recalled nearly 30 ambassadors and other senior overseas diplomats as the Trump administration plans to promote appointees loyal to the new administration to higher levels of the state department, according to diplomatic sources.
The recall of the ambassadors or heads of mission, which were confirmed by several current and former senior diplomats, was unusual for targeting career foreign service officers heading embassies overseas who are generally left in place after a change in administration because they strive to be apolitical.
Move to bring back customary marine rights is celebrated, but concerns remain about potential effect on tourism and lack of clarity about how it might work
In Fiji, babies know a connection to the sea from birth; their umbilical cords, or vicovico, are sometimes implanted in the reefs that frame the coastal Pacific nation, embedded among the coral. It’s an age-old practice among iTaukei, the Indigenous Fijian people – creating a lifeline to the ocean, a reminder of their roles as traditional custodians.
Yet for decades, controversy over the rights to the Fijian seabed has cast a long cloud over the island nation, which sees a million tourists flock to its shores each year, many to surf the perfect, barrelling reef breaks. It has led to heartache and, at times, violence.
After the awful attack at Bondi, Australia is facing several reckonings. There’s a long-overdue national focus on antisemitism, something that the Jewish community has been worried about as long as I have been alive. There’s the ongoing concern about national security, and questions about how something like this could have happened. But to me, as a public health expert and Jewish Australian, perhaps the most important conversation we are finally having is the one about guns.
Public health experts have been warning about guns for at least a decade. In the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, Australians came together and implemented a suite of measures to curb gun violence across the country. And it worked. Prior to 1996, we saw about one mass shooting a year. In the decades since, we have seen vanishingly few major events, and none with a death toll anywhere close to the shootings of the 80s and 90s.
The league said Metcalf’s actions violate league policy, which specifies that “players may not enter the stands or otherwise confront fans at any time on game day and … if a player makes unnecessary physical contact with a fan in any way that constitutes unsportsmanlike conduct or presents crowd-control issues and/or risk of injury, he will be held accountable.”
Egypt 2 (Marmoush 64, Salah 90+1) Zimabwe 1 (Dube 20)
Record Afcon winners recover to win in Agadir
There were no apologies from Mohamed Salah to his teammates in red on Monday night, with Egypt’s players grateful to Liverpool’s troubled superstar for conjuring a stoppage-time winner.
After failing to capitalise on a dominant start, the seven-times Afcon winners required a stunning equaliser from Manchester City’s Omar Marmoush and Salah’s late winner to spare their blushes against the aptly named Warriors from Zimbabwe, who have never progressed beyond the group stages.
The one moment of true quality came when Raúl Jiménez stood 12 yards from goal and looked at John Victor. It was a battle of wits but there was only going to be one winner. Jiménez stuttered, moved towards the ball at a leisurely pace, waited for Nottingham Forest’s goalkeeper to move left and then set Fulham on the path to a vital victory by sending a clinical penalty into the opposite corner.
This was Jiménez in his element. The Mexican is not the quickest striker around but the 34-year-old is still one of the game’s sharpest thinkers. Few, after all, can match Jiménez for accuracy from the spot. He is calmness personified in those situations and, remarkably, is now joint top with Yaya Touré when it comes to players with a 100% conversion rate from penalty kicks in the history of the Premier League.
She’s such a great interviewer that this chat with Kenneth Branagh feels like it deserves an entire series. It’s relentlessly charming – and hugely moving when they talk about Dame Judi’s late husband
Cast your mind back to Christmas 2017, and you might remember a slightly wacky BBC documentary called Dame Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees. On the surface, it seemed like one of those god-awful shows put together by tombola; matching a celebrity with a random subject and hoping it would pass muster.
However, this was not the case. Dame Judi Dench, it turned out, really did have a passion for trees. An obsessive passion, one that manifested itself in a small woodland where she named trees after friends of hers who had died. The result was unexpectedly tender and gorgeous, and the show ended up being the best thing on TV that Christmas.
The Kansas City Chiefs announced Monday they will leave their longtime home at Arrowhead Stadium for a new, domed stadium that will be built across the Kansas-Missouri state line and be ready for the start of the 2031 season.
The announcement came shortly after a council of Kansas lawmakers voted unanimously inside a packed room at the state Capitol to allow for STAR bonds to be issued to cover up to 70% of the cost of the stadium and accompanying mixed-use district.
Liverpool’s record signing, Alexander Isak, is facing several months on the sidelines after undergoing surgery on an ankle injury that included a fractured fibula.
Isak sustained the injury as a result of a heavy challenge from Micky van de Ven while in the process of scoring in Liverpool’s 2-1 win against Tottenham on Saturday. The 26-year-old was helped off in considerable pain and MRI scans confirmed Liverpool’s initial fears of a serious problem.
Coach couldn’t free up his players so they found another way of removing pressure – by losing the series in rapid time
Finally, in the last two days of the third Test with the series already basically lost, England stood up. They have been on a hell of a journey over 11 days of Test cricket, and now – too late – they are getting somewhere.
They have reminded me of some of the students who have passed through the school where I teach: they get into the upper sixths and they’re first-team cricketers, the big boys, very confident, dominating the team, playing good cricket, think they’ve cracked the code. Then they have a gap year and go travelling, and suddenly they realise there’s a whole world out there, that life can be tough and things can be done differently. Out of their comfort zone they can mature rapidly as young men and as people. I look at England’s performance in the third Test and think that after some tough experiences, and having been forced to confront the fact that they are not what they thought they were, they have maybe turned a corner in terms of their maturity.
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