18/02/2025 06:51
The Guardian
In today’s newsletter: As the US and Russia go ahead with talks in Saudi Arabia, Keir Starmer and other European leaders are grappling with their next moveGood morning. Yesterday, European leaders attended an emergency meeting in Paris to discuss how best to respond to the shift in Ukraine policy from the US under Donald Trump. Today, US and Russian officials will meet in Saudi Arabia for preliminary peace talks. And while Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that there can be no “agreements about us without us”, events of the last week have made it clear that the second of these summits is likely to be more consequential than the first.As shocking as interventions from the US vice-president, JD Vance, and the secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, were last week, part of their argument was emanating from Washington even before Trump’s first term: the demand that European nations take more responsibility for their own security as the US seeks to shift its focus towards Asia.Prisons | Successive governments’ overreliance on longer prison sentences and desire to seem “tough on crime” have driven the justice system to the brink of collapse, an official review has found. The prison population in England and Wales was more than 85,000 at the end of last year, having increased by more than 40,000 since 1993.UK news | A woman shot dead at a Kent pub on Valentine’s Day has been named as Lisa Smith. The 43-year-old from Slough was killed in Knockholt near the Three Horseshoes pub shortly after 7pm on Friday, Kent police said.Conservatives | Kemi Badenoch has said “our country and all of western civilisation will be lost” if efforts to renew the Conservative party and drive forward rightwing ideas globally fail. In a speech at a right-wing conference attended by Jordan Peterson and Nigel Farage, Baedenoch said that “pronouns, diversity policies and climate activism” are a “poison”.Canada | A plane carrying 80 people crash landed at Toronto Pearson airport on Monday, flipping upside down and leaving at least 18 people injured. Video from the scene showed a Delta Air Lines plane belly-up on snow-covered tarmac and people walking away.Religion | Pope Francis will remain in hospital for as long as required after tests in recent days showed a “complex clinical picture”, the Vatican has said. The pontiff, 88, was admitted to Gemelli hospital in Rome on Friday with worsening bronchitis and was diagnosed and treated for a respiratory tract infection.If current trends in the decline of European defence capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders – those for whom the cold war was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in Nato worth the cost.” Continue reading...
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