“The Navy should explore using high-powered water cannons—also known as firefighting monitors—as ship-based counter-UAS (cUAS) weapons.” That is actually quite clever and I must admit I haven’t seen this before, is anyone aware of existing systems? www.usni.org/magazines/pr...

Fascinating! as.ft.com/r/5442aac6-1...

Keir Starmer (2020) dropping some truth bombs, so time for the annual count of PM u-turns. Please put your favourites below.

"Everything at the end of the day is economics. War is economics,”

Today’s must read is a rare glimpse inside Binance

How a failed baseball player and former stockbroker became the go to arms dealer for US proxy wars Top weekend read from @miles-johnson.bsky.social

I have stated before 90s nostalgia basically ignores the first half of the decade when unemployment reached or got close to post-war highs.

Serious measures here

Goals.

Big new Jeffrey Epstein investigation just dropped: How he built his fortune based on scams and lies. New revelations about his ties to Clinton and Trump. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/m...

This is apropos of absolutely nothing but I have been thinking about best-of-quarter-century stuff and I still say that Free Solo, a documentary about climbing, is one of the five or at worst ten best horror movies of these 25 years.

For those who don’t know, I have been trying to get ROGUE TROOPER made for 25 years. 25 YEARS! -And not just “oh, that would be fun…”

Jan Marsalek Klaxon 🚨🚨🚨 @samgadjones.bsky.social is still hot on the Russian Agent of Chaos beat, delving into the Wirecard fraudster’s Libyan cement factories

“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.” Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability and quality of life. Common sense. Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.

There was a swing toward Trump across the whole country, but it was bigger in the states exposed to very little campaign messaging. Harris presidential campaign messages appear to have been more effective than Trump's. She lost b/c of that general swing, likely caused by economic concerns. /2

I think this guess by my colleague is a good one:

The proposed visa requirements for your “visa free” travel to the US.

3/4 As I wrote two years ago, the word "resilience" was going to be used over and over to describe trade as Trump's tariffs shifted trade and trade imbalances around without fundamentally changing them. That's because the only way the US can cause a reduction in its trade...

"there's a new serif in town"

When the Court is the problem

BLOODY AI,a thread:so, I saw a picture online of the Towers of Perugia by a Renaissance artist, Benedetto Bonfigli whose other work I know a little bit. Here is the image 1/n:

“If [economic] growth was actually your priority, you would not be doing this,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor at King’s College London.

Will Arnett was on Conan and told a story about how Conan dealt with the death of his parents by accusing Jason Bateman of killing them. It’s so funny.

Some of the best content on the FT.com is not being produced by FT journalists, but by below-the-line commenter Winter Cruise Allowance. Here's their take on the new taxes on cash held in stocks-and-shares ISAs:

One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them, One ring to bring them all And in the darkness bind them.

Don't get the hump,

High-speed use of the price-sticker gun

A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

Buy the dip

As Justice Kagan begins her dissent by pointing out, what is even the point of trial, of fact-finding, of clear error, of standards of review, when the Supreme Court simply ignores every single part of that and decides everything purely on the papers without any real consideration of the facts?

14. The government artificially restricting court “sitting days” - effectively closing perfectly usable courtrooms and forcing judges to stay at home, to make a tiny saving on court staff. This happened regularly under the last government. The new lot are still doing it.

the need for juries is a minor contributor to that though

Quick, someone sell Trump on the type-26

An excellent breakdown of why the poverty line doesn't work for measuring actual poverty or drivers of inequality & deprivation.

Just leaving this here. www.economist.com/europe/2025/...

“I kind of feel betrayed, to be honest. We do everything that we can to protect and serve our country. And then they betray us by treating us like we’ve never done anything.” www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

'I never thought Drahi would take MY collateral,' sobs bondholder who invested in the Drahi Taking People's Collateral Company. www.ft.com/content/33fb...

Labor unions can recruit working class candidates in red states, run them as independents, fund them with money they now give to Democrats, and use union members as the core of their volunteer base. The numbers are more plausible than you think. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/how-to-win...

Feel like I'm going mad. The Budget's 'headroom' is based on frankly irresponsible and wildly optimistic claims about what Labour will do in the final year of the forecast, and on ignoring a bunch of upward pressures on spending, and the claim is that she was being exaggeratedly *pessimistic*?

As someone who criticised the government back in January for not having a clear growth strategy it is good to see Torsten set out in plain language what the govt’s strategy is and how it hangs together. This is much better and clearer communication.

yes exactly, I wrote about this a while back “Hug a hoodie”, “You’ve never had it so good”, “Crisis, what crisis?” All were written by newspaper sub-editors rather than politicians www.ft.com/content/2c07...

Let me give some insight on this, as a producer in the dub industry who worked with major streamers, who's witnessed first-hand where this push for AI is coming from. tl;dr: Only CEOs want this. Tell them how much you hate it. Be loud, email, call, @, post. You will kill this. 🧵⬇️

NimbAI

the only substack you need ftav.substack.com/?r=4ys07&utm... * it's free, it's funny, it will make you feel fleetingly like you understand finance and economics before you remember that's not your brand. Other reasons may apply YMMV

Did you know there's a 500-million-year-old species that lives in the deep sea called Paleodictyon, but we only know it from trace fossils and marks on the seafloor and have absolutely no idea what the animal is? It could be a sponge or a foram or a xenophyophore or something totally different.

Budget day vibes

Nusantara has a long way to go

Ireland can’t receive messages from other country’s security services because it doesn’t have secure communications.

Must read FT piece today on neutral Ireland, the soft underbelly of European defence By @judewebber.bsky.social and @helenwarrell.bsky.social

BR has dug through the wreckage of Wirecard to show that the fraudulent payments business did appear to move hundreds of millions for the betting billionaire Calvin Ayre. www.tagesschau.de/investigativ...