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It is the prevailing idea in both Brussels and Washington: America is soaring, while Europe is falling behind. This refrain even appears in the White House's now-famous National Security Strategy. "Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP – down from 25% in 1990 to 14% today – partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness."

European conservative parties have echoed this argument in order to call for deregulation and lower taxes: an end to the Green Deal, challenges to a corporate due diligence rule and scrapping the minimum tax rate on multinational companies. The US envoy to the European Union spoke with the same tone last week, claiming that even the poorest US states, such as Mississippi or West Virginia, now enjoyed a higher standard of living than Germany.

Yet all of this has rather little basis in fact. The idea of a sclerotic Europe facing a supposed American El Dorado, which serves as the foundation for the deregulatory offensive that currently prevails in Brussels, rests on three myths.

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• More anti-government protests broke out Friday in Iran, in the latest unrest to sweep the country. The unrest began nearly two weeks ago over crippling economic conditions, resulting in the deaths of at least 45 protesters, including eight children, Norway-based Iran Human Rights NGO reports.
• Authorities cut internet access and telephone lines in Tehran and other cities after major protests on Thursday.
• Donald Trump has threatened to attack Iran if security forces kill protesters, but on Friday Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the US president should “focus on the problems of his own country.”
• The latest demonstrations are the biggest since the large-scale protests that were sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the religious police in 2022.

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The Justice Department has backed off a dubious claim about President Nicolás Maduro that the Trump administration promoted last year in laying the groundwork to remove him from power in Venezuela: accusing him of leading a drug cartel called Cartel de los Soles.

That claim traces back to a 2020 grand jury indictment of Mr. Maduro drafted by the Justice Department. In July 2025, copying language from it, the Treasury Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. In November, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and President Trump’s national security adviser, ordered the State Department to do the same.

But experts in Latin American crime and narcotics issues have said it is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money. And on Saturday, after the administration captured Mr. Maduro, the Justice Department released a rewritten indictment that appeared to tacitly concede the point.

If you visited Brazil in the last few years, you will have seen it: “the other red hat.” Now a trendy accessory on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the decidedly anti-MAGA baseball cap represents not the hard right but the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST).

At nearly two million members strong, the MST is now likely the world’s largest social movement, battle-hardened now after four decades, demanding agrarian reform. Even more impressively, the MST has thrived under adverse conditions, namely the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro. The MST’s goal is to make good on the unfulfilled promises of Brazil’s democratic transition and to break up colonial relations that still reign in the countryside.

The last decade, though, saw that historical mission gain new momentum. The growing visibility of the MST was, in fact, part of a canny “rebrand” — retreating to a defensive posture as the Bolsonaro government declared open war on the movement’s land occupations. In response, the movement made overtures to the progressive urban middle class.

Flying the unlikely banner of organic food, the MST successfully repackaged agrarian reform — and its contentious land seizures — as a mission to deliver nutritious, sustainably sourced, and affordable produce to the Brazilian masses. In doing so, public opinion began to see the movement less as a “mere” peasant movement and more like a project of national transformation. Though allied to the left-leaning government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the movement maintains a complicated relationship with the Brazilian state.

For Jacobin, Nicolas Allen spoke to MST national leader João Paulo Rodrigues about the MST’s strategic vision for the future and how the movement plans to fight to put working-class politics on the national agenda.

The United States hit Venezuela with a “large-scale strike” early Saturday and said its president, Nicolás Maduro, had been captured and flown out of the country after months of stepped-up pressure by Washington — an extraordinary nighttime operation announced by President Donald Trump on social media hours after the attack.

Multiple explosions rang out and low-flying aircraft swept through Caracas, the capital, as Maduro’s government immediately accused the United States of attacking civilian and military installations. The Venezuelan government called it an “imperialist attack” and urged citizens to take to the streets.

It was not immediately clear who was running the country, and Maduro’s whereabouts were not immediately known. Trump announced the developments on Truth Social shortly after 4:30 a.m. ET.

Maduro, Trump said, “has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow.” He set a news conference for later Saturday morning.

The explosions in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, early on the third day of 2026 — at least seven blasts — sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report hearing and seeing the explosions. It was not immediately clear if there were casualties. The apparent attack itself lasted less than 30 minutes, but it was unclear if more actions lay ahead, though Trump said in his post that the strikes were carried out “successfully.”

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ban on U.S. commercial flights in Venezuelan airspace because of “ongoing military activity” ahead of the explosions.

The strike came as the Trump administration has escalated pressure on Maduro, who has been charged with narco-terrorism in the United States. The CIA was behind a drone strike last week at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels — the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began strikes in September.

Trump for months had threatened that he could soon order strikes on targets on Venezuelan land following months of attacks on boats accused of carrying drugs. Maduro has decried the U.S. military operations as a thinly veiled effort to oust him from power.

Some streets in Caracas fill up

Armed individuals and uniformed members of a civilian militia took to the streets of a Caracas neighborhood long considered a stronghold of the ruling party. But in other areas of the city, the streets remained empty hours after the attack. Parts of the city remained without power, but vehicles moved freely.

Video obtained from Caracas and an unidentified coastal city showed tracers and smoke clouding the landscape sky as repeated muted explosions illuminated the night sky. Other footage showed an urban landscape with cars passing on a highway as blasts illuminated the hills behind them. Unintelligible conversation could be heard in the background. The videos were verified by The Associated Press.

Smoke could be seen rising from the hangar of a military base in Caracas, while another military installation in the capital was without power.

“The whole ground shook. This is horrible. We heard explosions and planes,” said Carmen Hidalgo, a 21-year-old office worker, her voice trembling. She was walking briskly with two relatives, returning from a birthday party. “We felt like the air was hitting us.”

Trump is at his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, where he has spent the past two weeks for the holiday season. His public schedule showed he was set to receive an intelligence briefing on Friday evening, hours before the reported strikes. He offered no immediate comment on social media.

Venezuela’s government responded to the attack with a call to action. “People to the streets!” it said in a statement. “The Bolivarian Government calls on all social and political forces in the country to activate mobilization plans and repudiate this imperialist attack.”

The statement added that Maduro had “ordered all national defense plans to be implemented” and declared “a state of external disturbance.” That state of emergency gives him the power to suspend people’s rights and expand the role of the armed forces.

The website of the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, a post that has been closed since 2019, issued a warning to American citizens in the country, saying it was “aware of reports of explosions in and around Caracas.”

“U.S. citizens in Venezuela should shelter in place,” the warning said.

Inquiries to the Pentagon and U.S. Southern Command since Trump’s social media post went unanswered. The FAA warned all commercial and private U.S. pilots that the airspace over Venezuela and the small island nation of Curacao, just off the coast of the country to the north, was off limits “due to safety-of-flight risks associated with ongoing military activity.”

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted his potential concerns, reflecting a view from the right flank in the Congress. “I look forward to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force,” Lee said on X.

More in the article.

The bunny-ear designs on the window aside, there is little to indicate that the ferry has arrived on an island teeming with rabbits. Then, moments after the passengers disembark, there is activity in the undergrowth. A single rabbit scampers out, wholly untroubled by its two-legged visitors. And then another.

A short walk along the coast takes visitors deep into rabbit territory on Okunoshima, one of 3,000 islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Half a dozen of the animals chase away another as it attempts to join them in a communal meal of Chinese cabbage. The scene unfolds in front of smiling, camera-toting tourists barely able to believe their proximity to Okunoshima’s fabled – but troubled – furry residents.

The two grey rabbits that greeted the ferry from the mainland return to bushes stripped of their leaves. Shallow bowls of water left by volunteers dot the island in places where its estimated 400-500 rabbits tend to congregate in expectation of pellets of food left by visitors in the absence of their natural diet of fallen leaves, bark, roots and grass.

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This summer Kimberly Prost, a Canadian judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC), arrived at her home in The Hague and, as was her habit, called out “Alexa”.

There was silence. The voice-activated assistant did not respond. “Alexa was dead. She wouldn’t talk to me,” Prost recalled in an interview with The Irish Times.

Prost had been added to the United States’ sanctions list, because in 2020 she ruled to authorise an investigation into possible atrocities in Afghanistan, including by US troops. Amazon, obliged to implement the sanctions as a US company, had cancelled her account.

It was just the start of what Prost describes as a “pervasive, negative effect” of the sanctions across all aspects of her life, which has shut her out from much of the international banking system.

And this is why, if you're going skiing in Switzerland, you stick to the German-speaking parts (or Romansch, but that's not really a well-known language).

It's a live blog, so excerpts would not be useful.