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A Paris official has said she holds the US partially responsible for the record-breaking heatwave in France. The comments were made as part of a scathing rebuke to American tourists, immigrants and expats who have been criticising France for its lack of air conditioning across the country. Over the past week, the transatlantic discourse online has also been heating up, with some Americans – many living in desert and tropical climes in the southern US – mocking the French and Western Europeans for not being able to withstand temperatures to which they are accustomed to every year. “Dear American journalists...

The world’s largest encyclopedia was overrun by bias and censorship—and pushed me out when I tried to fix it. Twenty-five years ago, I co-founded Wikipedia, arguably the most important encyclopedia in human history. On Monday, I was indefinitely banned from the site. The story of what happened to me is, in many ways, the story of our censorious times, in which independent thinking is seen as a threat rather than a virtue, and punished as such. Let me back up. In early 2000, the internet was a very different place than it is today. It was much freer—tools of censorship...

Wealthy nations with the highest rate of immigration over the past 35 years reaped a large economic benefit and many could still absorb more ​workers, according to research to be presented at a top European Central Bank conference next week. Political tensions ‌over immigration have been on the rise in recent years as far-right, anti-immigrant parties have helped drive the issue to near the top of the political agenda while making headway in countries including the U.S., Germany and Britain. The study, which looked at data in dozens of rich ​countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, said...

Given its oft-proclaimed calling as a peace project, the European Union can sound oddly bellicose when it sets about crafting policy. There are trade and fiscal “bazookas” to blast away crises, “silver bullet” solutions for every problem, and “nuclear options” to be used as a last resort. Yet in the absence of an EU army or even a police force, the pen-wielding Eurocracy rarely gets its hands on anything that looks like an actual weapon. The only exception—tellingly—is the club’s border-patrol agency. For over a decade after it was founded in 2005, Frontex agents wielded little more than whistles and...

As dawn breaks, hundreds of men gather at a dusty square in Chaghcharan, the capital of Ghor province in Afghanistan. They line the roadside with weary faces, hoping someone will come along offering any work. It will determine whether their families eat that day. The likelihood of success, however, is low. Juma Khan, 45, has found just three days of work in the past six weeks that paid between 150 to 200 Afghani ($2.35-$3.13; £1.76-£2.34) per day. "My children went to bed hungry three nights in a row. My wife was crying, so were my children. So I begged a...

Ask yourself a question: Why are Democrats so opposed to deporting the millions of illegal migrants who flooded into the country during the Biden administration? They know that illegal immigration propelled Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. They saw how, after winning back the White House in 2020, Joe Biden’s catastrophic open border policies paved the way for Trump’s return in 2024. And they surely must see the polls showing that Americans overwhelmingly support securing the border and deporting illegal migrants — particularly those with criminal records — even if they disapprove of the way Trump has carried out...

Civilisational decline happens slowly at first, and then all at once. Britain has not been this weak and irrelevant on the global stage since the early 1500s; France and Germany are facing equally severe existential crises. It took Donald Trump to call our bluff, exposing our impotence and insignificance to a world we once dominated. British and European politicians cannot stop Trump from buying Greenland, or kidnapping Latin American tyrants, or taking out the Mullahs’ evil nuclear programme, or sanctioning Left-wing international judges, or doing whatever else he wants. Eighty-one years after the end of the Second World War, the...

Welcome to the final edition of Foreign Policy’s China Brief for 2025. Compared with what lies further ahead, next year may be relatively quiet for China. The following year, 2027, marks both the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s unprecedented third term and a frequently cited benchmark for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s ability to attack Taiwan. Though Beijing is keeping a lower profile amid global turbulence, there is plenty of trouble bubbling under the surface. What can we expect from China in the year ahead? Below, we offer our four best bets. A Turn on Women’s Rights China is...

THE WORDS “retirement community” summon up images of easy chairs, overcooked food and endless daytime TV. Latitude Margaritaville, a community being built near Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, quickly disabuses these. “There was a toga party this past weekend,” says Lynette, a resident. “There was a live band, and it was a riot.” Barbie, another of the community’s “ambassadors” (residents employed by the developers to help sell it to potential newcomers), compares living there to “starting college all over again”. There are, she says, “drinks on the driveway, cocktails on the concrete”. If Margaritaville’s residents are representative of their...

An explosive Washington Post report, the subject of so much discussion the past two days, says that, in the first missile strike the Trump Defense Department carried out against operatives of a boat suspected of transporting narcotics on the high seas off Venezuela, two survivors were rendered shipwrecked. As they clung to the wreckage, the U.S. commander ordered a second strike, which killed them. If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say “at best” because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug...

President Trump said his proposed 100% additional tariffs on goods from China were "not sustainable."

The Trump administration has abruptly shifted the focus of its mass deportation campaign, telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to largely pause raids and arrests in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants, according to an internal email and three U.S. officials with knowledge of the guidance. The decision suggested that the scale of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign — an issue that is at the heart of his presidency — is hurting industries and constituencies that he does not want to lose. The new guidance comes after protests in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s immigration raids, including at farms...

As they pounded the Iranian nuclear facilities yesterday, the Israelis were finally doing what so many Western leaders had expected they would do for years, if not decades. In fact, let us be honest: the rest of the world has not just been expecting this Israeli action. Secretly or openly, many governments have been hoping for it. In one astonishing operation the Israelis crippled the Natanz enrichment reactor and seriously damaged two others. They took out six of the most important Iranian nuclear scientists, as well as an astonishing array of the country’s top brass. They blew up radars and...

Paywall. Headline speaks for itself. If you can get the text in some circuitous way, please post it.

Administration officials and members of billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service — aided by local and federal law enforcement agencies — seized the institute’s privately owned headquarters in March and summarily removed its leaders.“The President’s efforts here to take over an organization outside of those bounds, contrary to statute established by Congress and by acts of force and threat using local and federal law enforcement officers, represented a gross usurpation of power and a way of conducting government affairs that unnecessarily traumatized the committed leadership and employees of USIP, who deserved better,” Howell wrote in her 102-page opinion.The judge said...

Donald Trump has repeatedly said that his move to impose wide-ranging tariffs is based on the simple concept of reciprocity: The U.S. should put the same conditions on imports from other countries that they impose on our goods through tariffs and other trade barriers. But the tariff scheme he announced isn’t reciprocal and isn’t based on measuring foreign trade barriers. Instead, it simply measures bilateral trade deficits and comes up with tariff numbers from there. Those are two very different things, and could be one reason why global financial markets are reacting so badly. The upshot is that, in the...

Count me in the ranks of those who have quit Tesla.

FOR TEN DAYS, since the shouting-match in the Oval Office, Ukraine has been scorched by Donald Trump’s wrath. Now comes a moment of catharsis—or another round of brutal punishment. On February 11th America and Ukrainian delegations are due to meet in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The American side says the goal is to create “a framework for a peace agreement and an initial ceasefire”. Yet on the Ukrainian side, amid the hope, there are fears the meeting could be a shake-down, a delaying tactic or an attempt by Mr Trump to win concessions that benefit Russia. The summit comes as Russia...

Before the intimate hour-long press conference began at Stansted Airport, a seasoned industry veteran leaned toward me and remarked: “This may be the most important conference you and I will ever attend in our careers.”

Who steals baby formula? A lot of people, apparently; including two alleged thieves that West Sacramento police say stole $5,000 worth of formula from local Target locations a few days ago. Baby formula is a commonly stolen retail item because of its shelf life and essential value to many people. There’s even a black market for it — but the buyers aren’t who you’d guess