Around the world engineers keep throwing more data at their models, hoping that scale alone will unlock something resembling intuition or agency. It will not. Intelligence emerges from evolution and from competition anchored in scarcity and survival. Until AI systems are given stakes, persistence and an internal reward structure, they remain tools. This article explains why the missing ingredient is evolutionary pressure.
From a BRICS vantage point, the real energy weapon was never just Russian gas or Chinese rare earths. It was Washington’s grip on sanctions, shipping, finance and the dollar system, used for decades against Venezuela, Iran, Iraq and Russia. With U.S. warships off Caracas and new threats over oil and airspace, Venezuela has become the live test of a split world energy order.
Robotaxis are no longer just prototypes. Waymo now delivers over a million paid rides each month in American cities, while Baidu’s Apollo Go runs fully driverless cabs across Chinese and Gulf cities and chases breakeven in Wuhan. Behind them, Nvidia sells the compute, Uber chases bookings, and regulators decide who can rewrite their streets.
Central banks are not buying gold because the Western system that issues their reserves now freezes and seizes them. From Russian assets to Venezuelan gold, the message to the global South is simple. Your savings in New York or London are hostages, not reserves. The world is quietly building an escape route.
Ukraine’s front is no longer holding, Kiev’s power networks are held together by generators, and Europe is speaking loudly about a war it has neither the army nor the public to fight. Drawing on Telegraph Online’s own investigative sources, this long read examines the military collapse, the managed corruption in Kiev, the Black Sea tanker attacks and what a settlement on Russian terms really means for NATO.
Trump’s second term economy looks respectable on paper. Growth is positive, unemployment is low and an artificial intelligence boom is lifting Wall Street. Yet prices remain far above their pre pandemic level and Liberation Day tariffs have acted as a giant, hidden tax on everyday goods. Voters now blame Trump personally for a cost of living crisis he promised to end, and they are punishing him at the ballot box.
The scandal is not that one secretary of war may have ordered a second missile into a sinking boat. It is that after Vietnam, Iraq, Gaza, Yemen and the drone era, anybody in Washington can still act surprised. This long read traces how the war on drugs, frontier thinking and algorithmic targeting have normalised extrajudicial killing and turned whole populations into expendable categories.
George Galloway tells Tucker Carlson how he and his wife were stopped by counter terrorism police at Gatwick, told they were not under arrest yet not free to leave, questioned for hours about their political views and then released without charge. Legacy broadcasters downplayed the story. Online, millions view it as evidence that Britain’s security services now act with alarming impunity.
Lieutenant General Apti Alaudinov, a Chechen commander at the heart of Moscow’s war machine, says Russia is winning a deliberate slow grind in Ukraine with drones, attrition and hypersonic missiles. He claims Ukraine is bleeding faster than it can mobilise while Russian forces preserve manpower and hold back tanks. This article unpacks his story using Russian official figures and doctrine as the reference frame.
Britain no longer lives from factories; it lives from contracts, custody and trust in London. That trust is now a sanctions weapon. From Venezuelan gold to Russian reserves and Arctic gas shipping, the United Kingdom is using its courts and insurers to punish enemies. Each strike hurts Moscow. It also teaches the rest of the world how to move money and ships without London.
Russia now chooses where the war is intense and where it is merely noisy. Ukraine still holds its big cities, but the front is tilting. Village by village, the line moves around Siversk, Pokrovsk and Huliaipole, while exhausted brigades try to plug every gap at once. The real question is no longer rhetoric. It is whether Kyiv can hold these hinges or trade them away.
Donald Trump has told airlines and pilots to treat Venezuelan skies as closed, turning a security advisory into a de facto air blackout. Caracas has revoked licences for Iberia and other major carriers, Spanish and Venezuelan passengers are stranded, and Latin American leaders warn that a drug war pretext is tipping toward blockade. The legal reality is murkier than the slogan, but the shock is already real.
Hong Kong’s deadliest tower fire in decades is being sold in Western coverage as a tale of bad contractors and ageing residents. In reality it is the late stage of a British colonial housing model that still treats land as a revenue machine, squeezes people into unsafe estates, and now compares badly with the space and security most families in Shanghai, Beijing and Nanning enjoy.
Britain once sold trial by jury as proof that serious criminal justice belongs in the hands of ordinary citizens. Now ministers want to strip juries from a wide band of cases and blame them for a Crown Court backlog that years of cuts created. This Telegraph Online analysis tests whether the plan is a necessary response to crisis or a quiet transfer of power from the public to the state.
A new daily pill called orforglipron promises to do for obesity and type two diabetes what Ozempic and Wegovy could never quite manage: escape the clinic and land in the bathroom cabinet. Trial data show close to ten per cent weight loss in people with diabetes and more in others, but also a harsher truth. This is not a cure. It is a lifelong metabolic lease.
A small cluster of media groups and global platforms now acts as editor in chief of public reality in Britain. Three national newspaper groups control almost all print circulation, two chains dominate local titles, and a few foreign technology firms decide how news is found and funded. Together they translate extreme wealth at the top into quiet control over what citizens see, fear and forget.
China’s artificial intelligence giants are not only dodging United States export controls. They are also navigating Beijing’s clampdown on Nvidia. New rules that bar fresh Nvidia deployments in Chinese data centres are pushing Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek to rent GPU farms in Singapore and Malaysia, even as they are forced to build a parallel stack on Huawei and other domestic chips at home.
There was a moment when the Ukraine war could have been frozen where it actually stood. Anchorage produced a twenty eight point plan that acknowledged lost territory, capped Ukraine’s army and barred NATO bases. Moscow signalled conditional acceptance. Kyiv, Europe and parts of Washington then tore it apart with rewrites and leaks. The plan did not fail. It was prevented.
The comforting script that runs through recent commentary says Russia is bleeding and a little more resolve will hand victory back to Kyiv. The numbers say something colder. Russia is winning slowly and expensively. Ukraine is losing slowly and bravely. Western policy is buying time, not changing the destination.
Rachel Reeves’s first Budget does not end Britain’s time as a polite tax haven, but it finally leans against the tide. Threshold freezes still squeeze workers, yet high value property and investment income are asked to pay more, and the two child limit is scrapped. For a country built around offshore money and domestic austerity, that is a small but real turn.
Japan’s new prime minister has forced a choice that Tokyo spent decades avoiding. By calling a Taiwan conflict a threat to Japan’s survival, Sanae Takaichi has pleased Washington and enraged Beijing while riding high in the polls at home. Behind the drama sits a harder project that links whitewashed war memory, rearmed forces and a disposable foreign workforce.
China’s boycott of Japan is not about crowded temples or lost hotel bookings. It is a response to a Japanese prime minister speaking of force in a conflict that touches Chinese territory, against the backdrop of tens of millions of Chinese dead in the last war. Beijing is using tourism to show that history and economic power now move together.
Ukraine is being boxed in by three forces at once: a corruption scandal that reaches into Zelensky’s old circle, a peace plan drafted between Washington and Moscow, and a frontline that is creeping the wrong way. Trump’s deadline does not solve any of this. It exposes the fact that Kyiv’s choices are now about managing different forms of defeat, not choosing victory.
The twenty eight point peace plan now on the table does not end the Ukraine war on Western terms. It writes into law what the battlefield has already decided. Ukraine is pushed out of NATO, loses more land, and becomes a neutral buffer, while Europe discovers it was collateral in a project that overreached from the start.
Europe was told it had to cut Russian energy and arm for democracy. In reality it has swapped predictable pipeline gas for volatile imports, pushed energy intensive industry toward the exits and tied its public finances to an open ended rearmament cycle largely designed elsewhere. This piece follows the gas, the factories and the defence budgets to show who really pays for the last phase of US hegemony.
Artificial intelligence companies talk about safety and innovation, but the real fight is elsewhere. It is over who owns the training data that feeds their models, who gets paid for it and who is quietly turned into free raw material. As Britain dithers over copyright rules, private contracts and foreign courts are deciding that settlement without the country at the table.
London is about to decide whether Oxford Street exists for traffic or for people. One residents society in Marylebone has been treated as the referee, yet it speaks for one of the richest corners of the city, not for the workers and visitors who keep the street alive. This piece tests its claims against evidence on crime, access and growth
Artificial intelligence is not dangerous because it talks. It is dangerous because a tiny group of institutions now trains the black box systems that will sit between citizens and almost every important decision. This piece argues for a hard rule: if a model is used as public infrastructure, its training process cannot remain a corporate secret.