For three days in the middle of June, the spa town of Évian-les-Bains was sealed off from the country it belongs to. Sixteen thousand police, gendarmes, soldiers and border guards held a perimeter that ran along the southern shore of Lake Geneva and across the frontier into Switzerland; the rail line was suspended, the lakefront divided into coloured zones, movement rationed by QR code. On the far side of the lake, in Geneva, some sixty thousand people marched under the banner of a “No G7” (…)

Yet another El Niño, after the strong event of 2023–24, has taken hold of the Pacific Ocean – and this time it may emerge as a historically powerful one. Satellite data through the spring tracked a vast pulse of unusually warm water making its way across the Pacific, and on 11 June 2026 the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its El Niño advisory: the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation is officially underway, with conditions expected to (…)

The dismissal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov on 15 July 2026 has triggered the largest wave of street protests Ukraine has seen since the “Cardboard Maidan” anti-corruption mobilisations of July 2025. Mikael Hertoft presents the anatomy of the crisis: the strategic conflict between a technocrat defence minister committed to drone warfare and a Soviet-trained commander-in-chief reluctant to relinquish conventional military doctrine, the political pressures feeding into Zelenskyy's (…)