Mallen Baker: Faultlines

In this news round-up of the week for Friday, March 27th 2026. Trump declares that Iran negotiations, which seem mostly to be conducted between the voices in his head, are going very well - meanwhile Iran is solidifying its control of the Strait of Hormuz. Meta and YouTube were found legally liable by a California jury for deliberately addicting users and causing harm to young people. A finding th...

Even though President Trump declared to the world that peace negotiations with Iran were advanced, and seeing agreement on most points of substance - today the US presented Iran with its starting-position 15 point plan. Iran basically shrugged it off, presented its own demands, and repeated that no negotiations have taken place, and Iran is not interested in a ceasefire. The absurd Trump claims wo...

The election in Hungary is getting closer - and we've been seeing all the things we knew were coming - Trump's endorsement of Viktor Orban, related to CPAC Hungary conference. Other far-right figures from across Europe turning up to give their support. Reams of Russian disinformation on social media. And ... wait, a false flag assassination attempt? Well, evidence has emerged that the idea was flo...

President Donald Trump has form in claiming that he is in active negotiations with other leaders, or with countries, when the other parties deny any such thing is happening, and it turns out that they were right. So it's somewhat surreal to find him making exactly that sort of claim about the Iranian leadership, when there is precisely nothing you would expect could be achieved by doing so. Except...

In the course of 24 hours, President Donald Trump went from saying that he was looking at 'winding down' the Iran war, to issuing threats to escalate the crisis should Iran refuse to completely open up the Strait of Hormuz. Such massive whiplash on positions suggest that he is getting increasingly agitated about his options, and is looking around - and testing out publicly - the course of action t...

In this news round-up for March 20th 2026: Iran's strike on Qatar has triggered what energy analysts are calling an "Armageddon scenario" for global gas markets — and Trump's denial that the US knew about the Israeli attack that provoked it lacks credibility. President Trump invoked Pearl Harbor during the latest Oval Office struggle session, this time with Japan's prime minister Takaichi. Then pr...

According to one of his best allies in the Senate, President Donald Trump is more furiously angry about having none of America's allies agree to join it dealing with the consequences of his illegal war on Iran, than he's ever been seen. How did we reach this moment? From the time when the consensus seemed to be to flatter and appease Trump, to the point where former allies of the United States are...

In the last few days, the administration of President Donald Trump has been going hard after the media - any journals or networks that have reported the slightest bad news about Trump's Iran war have been getting schooled on being more patriotic. That could just be so much business as usual - except that the FCC Chair Brendan Carr has pitched in to suggest that 'fake news' about the war would be r...

President Trump told NATO allies, as well as countries like Japan, South Korea and even main geopolitical rival China, that they must send warships to help open the Strait of Hormuz - or else. This would be bad for NATO. He would delay his planned visit to Beijing to meet with Xi Jinping. And so far, having spent the last year being insulted, threatened, tariffed and bullied - all of those countri...

It's not a secret that Elon Musk's xAI platform, Grok, is not entirely like other AI models. Specifically, he has gone to great lengths to ensure it absorbs his ethos and "anti-woke" mindset, even as he has been promising it would overtake all the other models any day soon. However, it seems not all has been well in xAI - and Musk has been clearing out the old guard, firing people all over, and ta...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday March 13th 2026. Pentagon insiders reveal that Trump's war on Iran has burned through years of critical munitions in two weeks of his illegal war on Iran. And this could seriously weaken the US in dangerous times. As the Pentagon tries to isolate and damage AI company Anthropic for ethical restrictions on what its system will do, Microsoft has stepped o...

The alarm bells across the world are really starting to sound loudly now, as the short-term effects on the cost and availability of energy and fertiliser is hitting the citizens of countries across the world. President Donald Trump's war of choice with Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz. He has proven unable to reopen it, and the future consequences if this remains the case for an extended perio...

Today, the Financial Times reported on a leaked proposal for Russia to engage in a disinformation and influence campaign in support of the re-election of autocrat Viktor Orban. This comes as his opponent in next month's election, Peter Magyar, is significantly ahead in independent polling. But President Vladimir Putin does not want to lose his best ally in Europe. President Donald Trump likewise....

Trump has started talking in terms of the war being complete, and stressing that it was just an 'excursion' - a sign, according to stock markets and commodity traders, that he is looking pretty urgently for an off-ramp from the Iran war. Is Trump, some are asking, about to TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) out of the Iran war? Well, unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. In a war, it doesn't fa...

Even before Iran had announced the selection of its new Supreme Leader, President Trump and Israel had said they were intending to assassinate whoever it was - unless Trump was involved in the selection. It's a breathtaking statement of imperial ambition - and one that has not been revised after the revealing of Mojtaba Khamenei as that leader. It's also a major breach of the last 400 years of sta...

Xi Jinping's China sees itself as the rising primary power in the world, soon to take over from the fading old empire of the United States. But it knows its new, rapidly growing military, is untested, and may remain so up until it gets called into action over Taiwan. So it has been taking a very keen interest in President Donald Trump's war in Iran, and took the unusual step of releasing five of t...

In this news round-up of the week for Friday March 6th 2026. The first of Trump's Cabinet Secretaries to be fired is Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Trump declares that he will only accept Unconditional Surrender from Iran, but don't worry - it's not REALLY a war. We discuss something you may not have noticed, sparked by the appearance of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Offic...

Most of the international community know that President Donald Trump's war on Iran, having been launched without any sort of imminent threat, having been focused on assassinating all the leadership of the regime, is illegal under international law. Hence why they have not been queueing up to take part in the offensive operations. But so far, they have mostly been muted in their criticism. Step for...

President Donald Trump has muttered darkly about the need to take federal control of the mid-term elections. And now, the evidence suggests that his team has a plan for how to do it - how to take control, and you have to presume to seek to get the outcome that he desires. This is the key pivot point for American democracy - because this will either be the moment that shocks America awake to its de...

War is a serious business. You would hope. But since President Donald Trump announced the start of the war against Iran, the US conduct has been typified by constantly changing commentary on why the war was started, and what its objectives are, constant lying about various details, and nothing that suggests that the mortal danger created for American servicemen and Iranian civilians is being creat...

There are seven ways that President Donald Trump has broken, or significantly altered, the US system, and the global political or economic system. Ways that mean that, when he has finally left office, the world will still remain a very different place to how it was when he most recently found it. Let's look at each of those seven ways, along with the two that either are not yet broken, or might ye...

President Trump has declared war - not a special military operation, not an in-and-out abduction. A full-on offensive assault with the stated goal of regime change. The assault has targeted the country's senior leadership, has been accompanied by calls to the people to rise up and depose their government. And the argument has been that this is okay because the regime is genuinely deplorable and de...

In this news round-up for the week of 27 February 2026: If 2025 was about corporate cowardice and capitulation to the Trump revolution, 2026 is seeing more and more standing up to the bullying. So the AI company Anthropic - threatened with massive sanction by the Pete Hegseth's Pentagon - has regardless refused to give it the right to use its models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Ne...

Today saw Hillary Clinton being quizzed in Congress about the man she never met, while President Trump, who is all over the files, faces no such pressure. We have news that certain key files, including testimony about Trump's alleged wrongdoing, is being withheld by the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, across Europe, real people are feeling much more robust repercussions for their own part in one...

Trump promised that the State of the Union address 2026 would be 'long, because there's lots to talk about'. Some of that talk is likely to be peevish, complaining, even angry. After all, having started the year on a high, it's been pretty much a massive slog ever since. And especially with the huge setback on tariffs, that we have to pretend wasn't a setback at all, and the uncomfortable fact tha...