Mallen Baker: Faultlines

Russia's President Putin is gearing up for the annual grand military parade in Moscow. This year is a big one because it's the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2, and bigger names from the su…

On day one, he declared several emergencies. Later, he backed this up by invoking the Alien Enemies Act. This has been an ongoing and deliberate push by President Trump to extend the powers of the ex…

In some places, such as Canada and maybe this weekend Australia, populist-right politicians, although they clearly show the signs of being influenced by Trump's MAGA movement, have been disavowing th…

So Ukraine has finally signed the Minerals Deal with the Trump Administration. And news commentators are full of speculation about how much this deal now has changed Trump's orientation with the Ukra…

The news arrived today that the US economy has dramatically cratered - shrinking in the first quarter of the year, whereas it had been strongly growing before. It is fairly clear with the breakdown t…

Mark Carney's Liberal Party has won the Canadian election. It was close, but still extraordinary that he was able to turn around the massive deficit the party originally had with Pierre Poilièvre's C…

The big story about the Pope's funeral - bigger than the event itself on some measures - was a 15 minute one-on-one conversation between Presidents Trump and Zelensky - captured in a photo that is al…

We're used to the idea that Trump lies a lot - I mean, even his supporters know this, although they will use euphemisms to make it sound ok. But WHY has Trump suddenly started telling people that Xi …

Musk's time with DOGE is coming to an end - or at least will be massively dialled back. But the fact is that the exercise, which promised so much, seems to have ended up a failure on every measure. I…

It's official. Trump's tariffs on the world, but especially on China, are making the whole world poorer. Trump wants China to make a deal - but he set the terms of the negotiation in such a way as to…

At the start of the day, Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff were on their way to a top-level meeting in London to discuss President Trump's seven-point "peace" plan. But when the details of the plan were …

President Trump came out of the gates quickly in his second term, testing the limits of his power in all directions at once, and assaulting numerous institutions to show them that he could bully them…

Reports are coming into view about complete disarray at the Pentagon under Trump's controversial pick for secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth. He has fired all his senior advisors, he is isolated, unq…

Answering a question from a Patreon supporter - Should Greenland kick the US out of its one remaining Greenland base, since - if Trump were to make good on his threat to take the island by force - it…

We've been witnessing something really strange over the last three weeks. Trump has been ... silent. OK, only about one thing, but even so. He's been wholly quiet on the subject of Canada, and his pr…

The Supreme Court ruled decisively 9-0 that the man incorrectly removed from the USA to one of the most notorious prisons in El Salvador, Abrego Garcia, that he should be returned to be afforded the …

The Trump / China Trade War enters its third week, and the stakes are only getting higher and the measures more intense. While Trump is busy pulling various other countries into the White House to be…

If the Trump administration is taking the United States in the direction of autocracy, there are certain steps that you would commonly expect to see being taken, in common with other countries that h…

Trump reversed course, and the stock market flowered in response, and everything's now OK, right? Well, except that a lot of damage has been done, most of the tariffs actually still remain, and there…

The news is just in - after all the bluster and the boasting, Trump finally noticed that not all was going swimmingly with his tariffs on the entire world, and he has hit the pause button. For everyo…