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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has achieved a historic success by having her government become the longest-serving since World War II; however, her survival regime policy and the lack of significant measures could lead to instability as more ambitious competitors emerge in the political arena. (translated)

Congratulations to @GiorgiaMeloni on a historic achievement - leading the longest-serving Government in the history of the Italian Republic. Political stability matters. Leadership matters.  And a strong, confident Italy matters, to Slovenia, to our region and to Europe. As https://t.co/D7LW0q4vAA #Italy #Leadership #PoliticalStability #IT #SI

We believe that the organisation can play a role not only in ensuring peace and stability, but also in establishing uninterrupted and secure transportation corridors, which are vital for the prosperity of our peoples, and in areas such as energy supply security. As Türkiye, we are taking responsibility for resolving conflicts around us through dialogue and diplomacy.

The Fracture That Kills the Family The West’s deepest divide may not be left versus right, but whether young men and women still share a vision of the good life. The nuclear family is society’s foundation, yet households struggle to form when the sexes view each other as opponents. Many women see marriage as patriarchal; many men see women as manipulative or exploitative. Relationships shift from mutual union to zero-sum power struggles. Christianity framed marriage as union—two people becoming one. Nietzsche warned the death of God would remove a shared moral foundation, leaving society vulnerable to nihilism and fragmentation. We are living that fragmentation. Young men often retreat into pornography, gaming, and prolonged adolescence. Young women increasingly frame sexual liberation as empowerment. Both chase proximate pleasures while losing ultimate purposes: family, responsibility, continuity, and creating life. Dating data reflects the fracture: among unmarried Americans aged 22–35, only 26% of women and 36% of men are actively dating. Ideology filters matches too—Gen Z and young millennials cite political compatibility far more than Boomers. Research also finds a mismatch: only 0.6 single liberal men per single liberal woman, and only 0.5 single conservative women per conservative man. Cross-ideological pairing has risen from 6% in the 1970s to 22% today. The consequences extend beyond dating: fertility has fallen below replacement across much of the West, and 42% of American adults were unpartnered in 2023. Policy responses—tax incentives, parental leave, baby bonuses—miss the deeper cultural and spiritual problem: you can debate taxes, but it’s hard to build a family when you disagree on masculinity, whether marriage is oppressive, or whether family is worth sacrificing for. The values gap is the disease. The political divide is the symptom. The household is the casualty—and when it cracks, everything built above it loses stability. The question is whether a civilization can survive when the two people it most needs to unite can no longer agree why they should.

The Psychology Behind Political Violence Political life carries an appetite for violence beneath the surface. A shooter leaves a manifesto; supporters celebrate; online strangers justify killing over insults, misgendering, and fantasies of execution. We’re told these are separate phenomena—different ideologies, grievances, causes—but they’re deeply connected. The murderer, the celebrant, and the online fantasist share one conviction: blood will build a better world. We often assume ideology comes first, violence second—radicalization infecting an otherwise ordinary person. But corrupted people may seek ideologies that rationalize what they already want to believe. Feeling comes first; philosophy follows. Nietzsche called this *ressentiment*: not ordinary anger, but enduring resentment rooted in surrendered agency and perpetual victimhood. Ressentiment is creative: it turns grievance into virtue and revenge into justice. That’s why movements can sound humanitarian while obsessing over enemies. They promise liberation but focus on who must be eliminated; they call violence self-defense while celebrating destruction. Notice the imbalance: energy goes to identifying who deserves punishment, not to explaining how their better society would work. This is the difference between genuine grievance and pathological ressentiment. Genuine grievance seeks repair; ressentiment seeks subtraction. Its “solutions” are fantasies of punishment—heads cut off, privilege liquidated, wrong pronouns punished. These aren’t coherent doctrines of stability; they’re rationalizations for resentment. Ressentiment also despises self-improvement because it requires admitting agency. Its worldview depends on locating suffering outside oneself. The deepest enemy of these movements, then, is not any specific ideology. It is agency itself.

Deeply saddened by the passing of King Harald V of Norway. A monarch who endured wartime exile as a child and stood for 35 years as an enduring symbol of stability and unity. A distinguished figure in European history. My heartfelt condolences to the Royal Family and the people #KingHaraldV #Norway #RoyalFamily #NO

Czech research led by Daniel Elleder and Jiří Nehyba revealed that bird genes, previously considered missing, were actually hidden in difficult-to-read chromosome dots, leading to a new understanding of the evolutionary stability of genomes and a process called sequential stammering, which indicates high variability and instability in certain parts of DNA. (translated)

AI can make finance more efficient, resilient, and inclusive. But as adoption accelerates, we must stay ahead of emerging risks. Strong governance, better data, and international cooperation will be essential to ensure AI supports financial stability: https://t.co/J9p4sUnLCV https://t.co/kZva5Pa0jc #Fintech #AI #FinancialStability #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.

Velká Británie je opravdový spojenec! Nový premiér zahájil svoji první zahraniční cestu na Ukrajinu s neuvěřitelnou pomocí 🙏🇺🇦 Ukrajina bude mít své dalekonosné střely a další schopnosti jim pomůžou přiblížit se k vítězství! 💪🙏 Železný muž 🇺🇦 💙 💛 ♥️ Jsem vděčný premiérovi Andymu Burnhamovi, že jeho první zahraniční cesta vedla právě na Ukrajinu, a to v den výročí obnovení naší nezávislosti. Partnerství s Velkou Británií je pro Ukrajinu mimořádné. Vybudovali jsme bezprecedentně silný a přátelský dialog, na který můžeme být právem hrdí. Bylo mi ctí jménem ukrajinského lidu předat Andymu první nové státní vyznamenání „Vděčnost ukrajinského lidu“, které bylo uděleno lidu Spojeného království. A dnes naši spolupráci dále rozšiřujeme – Ukrajina a Velká Británie budou rozvíjet partnerství v oblasti umělé inteligence. Dnes jsme podepsali příslušnou deklaraci. Během setkání jsme projednali celý rozsah spolupráce: licence na výrobu střel Storm Shadow, pomoc s pojištěním na ukrajinském trhu, zajištění finanční stability Ukrajiny, diplomacii a další otázky. Vážíme si toho, že kurz Velké Británie zůstává neměnný – plná podpora Ukrajiny a její obrany. Děkuji, Andy! Děkuji, Velká Británie! 🇺🇦🇬🇧 #Ukrajina #VelkáBritánie #Podpora

"Above all, we need to lean into our achievements. Europe remains an oasis of security, stability, and the rule of law. We have independent courts, who strive not to be mere mouthpieces of whoever is in power. We keep our word. We respect contracts. Our continent respects and admires science, reads history, cares about culture, and is mindful of the lessons of the past. We should use those things to become a magnet for investment, for innovation, for people with new ideas. Our very predictability is an advantage in a world of unpredictable powers." "We did invent divisive and ugly ideas, and we can retrieve them from the past. But all of the texts that led to the birth of classical liberalism were written here too, if we want to find them, revive them, and reinterpret them for the present." Anne Applebaum, The Speech to Europe 2026 https://www.erstestiftung.org/en/a-speech-to-europe-2026-the-european-moment/

Ethiopia has an economy growing more than 6% a year, and a population of 128 million, two thirds of them under 30. The potential of our cooperation under Global Gateway is clear. Turning it into more investment needs strong rule of law and stability in the region. https://t.co/XlwFwLDKmN #Ethiopia #GlobalGateway #Investment #ET

Cold Beer and Hot Showers - Not Kilowatt-Hours All That Consumers Want The energy sector spends an extraordinary amount of time talking about generation, transmission, storage, flexibility, markets, tariffs, balancing, ancillary services, carbon emissions, batteries, hydrogen, demand response, electrification pathways, system costs, capacity mechanisms, investment signals, market design and regulation. All of these things matter. Some of them matter enormously. But there is a simple question that often disappears somewhere between the conference room, the policy paper and the technical model: What does the customer actually want? The answer is surprisingly simple. Most people do not wake up in the morning thinking about kilowatt-hours. They do not dream about capacity markets. They do not worry about frequency stability. They do not spend their evenings comparing balancing mechanisms. They want cold beer and hot showers. They want a warm home in winter and a cool home in summer. They want the lights to turn on when they press the switch. They want their phone charged, their food refrigerated and their car ready when they need it. In other words, they do not want energy. They want what energy allows them to do. That distinction may sound trivial, but it changes almost everything. For more than a century, the energy industry has been organized around the production, transportation and sale of energy itself. Electricity became measured in kilowatt-hours. Gas became measured in cubic meters. Fuel became measured in litres or tonnes. Markets, regulations and business models were built around those units. The customer, however, never experienced life in kilowatt-hours. The customer experienced comfort. Convenience. Mobility. Reliability. Security. The units used by the industry and the outcomes desired by the customer were never the same thing. For a long time, this mismatch was not particularly important. Energy was relatively scarce, flexibility was limited, and the dominant challenge was supplying enough fuel to satisfy demand. The system could afford to focus on production because production was the central problem. Today the situation is changing. Electrification is transforming energy systems around the world. Renewable generation is increasing rapidly. Batteries are appearing in homes, businesses and vehicles. Buildings are becoming smarter. Heat pumps are replacing boilers. Electric vehicles are becoming mobile storage assets. Customers are increasingly able not only to consume energy but also to store it, shift it, manage it and sometimes even sell it. As this happens, the most valuable question is no longer simply how much energy is produced. The more important question becomes: How well is energy aligned with what people actually need? A family does not care whether its water heater operates at noon or at two in the afternoon if hot water is available when someone steps into the shower. A homeowner does not care whether a battery charges at 1 p.m. or 3 p.m. if electricity costs less and reliability improves. An electric vehicle owner does not care when charging occurs as long as the vehicle is ready when needed. The objective is not the kilowatt-hour. The objective is the service. This is why many of the most important developments in modern energy systems are not really about producing more energy. They are about matching energy to the service required, at the right time, in the right place and in the right form. The technical term for this is often hidden behind complicated language. Experts discuss flexibility, demand management, dynamic pricing, distributed energy resources and system optimization. Consumers experience something much simpler. They experience agency. They experience the ability to save money without sacrificing comfort. They experience the ability to make choices. They experience the ability to benefit from technologies that work for them rather than asking them to work for the technology. This is where many debates become confused. Consumers do not want to be coordinated. They want agency. Good energy systems do not force people to behave differently. They make beneficial behaviour easier, more natural and more rewarding. The best systems do not rely on control. They rely on alignment. When the customer’s interest aligns with the system’s interest, remarkable things become possible. Demand shifts naturally. Storage becomes useful. Flexibility appears. Costs decline. Reliability improves. The customer does not need to understand the complexity underneath. Just as nobody needs to understand how the internet routes packets around the globe in order to send a message, nobody should need to understand wholesale electricity markets in order to enjoy affordable energy services. Success is not measured by how much complexity consumers are asked to absorb. Success is measured by how much complexity the system absorbs on their behalf. The future energy system will undoubtedly involve more digital technology, more electrification, more storage, more automation and more coordination. But none of those are the destination. They are merely tools. The destination remains exactly what it has always been. Cold beer. Hot showers. Comfortable homes. Reliable mobility. Affordable bills. Everything else is infrastructure. And perhaps that is the simplest way to understand the energy transition. People do not want kilowatt-hours. They want the life that kilowatt-hours make possible.

The strengthening of cooperation between Russia and North Korea raises concerns regarding the war in Ukraine, with President Putin expressing a willingness for further development of joint initiatives with leader Kim Jong-un in the area of regional security and stability. (translated)

I CALL ON THE FREE WORLD TO RECOGNIZE SOMALILAND! 🇸🇴➡️🌍 @somalilandmfa The Republic of Somaliland has governed itself separately since 1991, built functioning institutions, maintained relative stability and demonstrated that responsible self-government deserves international #Somaliland #Recognition #SelfGovernance #SO

A Crown Instead of the Barracks: An Idea From Outside the Box Could Egypt’s exiled opposition use constitutional monarchy to dismantle the legitimacy of the 1952 coup? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands To understand what follows, a reader unfamiliar with Egypt needs one basic fact: since 1952, Egypt has never been governed by anyone who did not first wear a military uniform. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and today Abdel Fattah el-Sisi four men, four eras, one common origin. All rose through the armed forces. All inherited a state built by a coup that year, when a group of officers calling themselves the "Free Officers" overthrew King Farouk I and, within a year, abolished the monarchy altogether and declared a republic. For seventy-three years, the underlying equation has not changed: the army rules, power passes from one officer to the next, and legitimacy is drawn from the barrel of a gun rather than the ballot box. Every conceivable form of opposition has been tried legal parties and banned ones, Islamist movements, liberal and leftist coalitions, the 2011 popular uprising, and the 2013 elections whose result was overturned by force within a year. All of them hit the same wall: a military institution that reproduces itself under different names, while the core of the system remains untouched. So what if the problem, all along, has not simply been who rules, but the constitutional framework that makes military rule possible in the first place? And what if the answer lies not in swapping one president for another, but in dismantling the underlying equation itself, through a framework Egyptian opposition movements have never seriously tried: a purely ceremonial constitutional monarchy, on the model of Belgium, the Netherlands, or Spain where the head of state becomes a symbol above the political fray, while the army is permanently expelled from politics and returned to its barracks. This is not a call to revive a particular family, nor nostalgia for a golden age that never quite existed. It is a proposal for a political and strategic tool that has not yet been used in the intellectual arsenal of Egypt’s opposition in exile a tool that deserves serious discussion, regardless of whether it is ever literally realised or simply serves to expand the boundaries of what is politically thinkable. I. Why 1952, Not 2013 or 2011, Is the Root The strategic error made by most Egyptian opposition movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to the April 6 Youth Movement to the various civil opposition parties has been treating each political crisis as an isolated case: Mubarak was corrupt and had to be toppled; Sisi staged a coup that must be condemned; the interim military council was a transitional phase to be endured. This piecemeal approach treats the symptoms while leaving the original illness untouched. That original illness is the very structure of legitimacy established by the coup of 23 July 1952. The Egyptian republican system, from Nasser to today, has never built its legitimacy on a genuine democratic social contract. Instead, it has rested on a fixed trinity: the rhetoric of "revolution against feudalism and colonialism," charismatic individual leadership, and military protection of the regime framed as the guarantor of stability. This trinity has repeated itself from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak to Sisi, with only cosmetic variations. Each new president was never a break from the system he was its continuation. When the opposition says "let us return to the constitutional framework that preceded the coup," it is not criticising a particular policy. It is declaring that the legal foundation of everything that came after 1952 was illegitimate from the start. Here lies the rhetorical power of "returning to the pre-1952 order": it does not merely demand swapping one ruler for another. It withdraws historical legitimacy from the entire republican military system including today’s regime, which draws its own declared legitimacy from that same "1952 legacy." II. Why a "Ceremonial Crown," Not "the Return of a Ruling Family" Here is the most important distinction anyone advocating this idea seriously must grasp: the project does not rest on restoring any particular individual from the Muhammad Ali dynasty, nor on nostalgia for King Farouk or his ancestors. The real power of the idea lies in the constitutional form, not in the person who happens to sit on the throne. Three successful European democracies illustrate the model clearly. Belgium, where King Philippe is a purely constitutional symbol with no real executive power, while the state is run through an elected parliament and a complex coalition government reflecting the country’s linguistic and political diversity. The Netherlands, where King Willem-Alexander formally opens the parliamentary year and signs laws, but where actual decision-making rests with the prime minister and the elected parliament. And Spain, where the king represents symbolic continuity of the state above party politics, while the military and security services answer entirely to civilian authority a transition achieved after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, when King Juan Carlos I voluntarily relinquished the extensive executive powers he had inherited and backed free elections, most dramatically in February 1981, when he personally ordered the armed forces to remain loyal to the constitution during an attempted military coup, causing it to collapse within hours. The common thread across these three models is not "the presence of an ancient royal family." It is the principle of separating symbol from power. The monarch in these countries does not rule; he represents. He issues no political decisions; he provides the continuity and symbolic stability that allows party political competition to revolve beneath him, without every transfer of power becoming an existential crisis of legitimacy. This is precisely what Egypt’s military republican system lacks: a neutral mechanism for guaranteeing state continuity that does not depend on the person of the ruler or his security apparatus. When Egypt’s military-republican president is absent, it is always the army that fills the vacuum, because it is the only institution built to be the "guarantor of stability." Under a ceremonial monarchical model, by contrast, it is the king not the army who represents that symbolic guarantee, genuinely opening the door to removing the military institution from the political equation altogether. III. Egypt’s Standing Under the Monarchy: An Honest Reckoning, Not Blind Nostalgia For a Western reader with little prior knowledge of Egypt’s monarchical period (1922–1952), it helps to know this: Egypt was nominally independent under its own king from 1922, but Britain retained enormous informal control over the country’s foreign policy, military bases, and the Suez Canal throughout the period a reality that shaped everything that follows. Any honest invocation of "Egypt’s standing under the monarchy" must avoid the trap of mythologised nostalgia that many advocates of this idea fall into. Egypt in that era was no lost paradise, and any honest article must say so plainly. The Egyptian pound, for instance, often invoked as a symbol of "national currency strength" in that period, was not strong because of independent Egyptian monetary policy. It was pegged to the British pound sterling as part of Egypt’s complete colonial financial dependency until 1947, with Egypt exercising no independent oversight of its own currency whatsoever. The pound’s strength, in other words, was not a sovereign Egyptian achievement it was a reflection of British imperial power ruling Egypt from behind the throne. But this does not mean Egypt lacked a genuine regional standing worth studying. Cairo, in the 1930s and 1940s, was the undisputed cultural capital of the entire Arab world: the Egyptian film industry produced more than half of all Arabic-language cinema; its theatre scene, led by figures like Youssef Wahbi and Naguib al-Rihani, and its music, with Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab, set the standard across the region; Cairo University was the first modern university in the Arab world; and the Egyptian press was the reference point for Arab public opinion from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Cairo was, quite simply, to the Arab world what Paris was to Francophone Europe: an unrivalled centre of cultural and intellectual gravity. This standing was not necessarily a product of monarchy itself, so much as a product of a relative space of political and press pluralism that allowed Egyptian civil society to flourish, despite all the flaws of the political system and the interference of both palace and occupier. The lesson here is not "bring back the king and the standing will return." It is: when even a limited margin of civic freedom exists, Egypt flourishes culturally and intellectually almost by its own nature. And that margin is precisely what has been entirely absent across the past seven decades of unchallenged military rule. IV. What Reform Would Actually Require Not Repeating the Old Mistakes Any serious advocacy of this model must include, even briefly, a clear vision for avoiding the flaws of the old monarchical system itself otherwise the proposal collapses into simply replacing one form of authoritarianism with another wearing a different crown. First, the armed forces would need to be placed fully under a civilian ministry of defence, with its budget subject to transparent parliamentary oversight the exact opposite of its current status as a state-within-a-state, and equally opposed to its role under the monarchy, when it often served as an instrument of British influence. Second, a judiciary fully independent of both palace and government alike, unlike the old model, which saw direct royal interference in political life as when King Fuad I dismissed the elected government of Prime Minister Saad Zaghloul’s successor, Mustafa al-Nahhas, in 1928, in one of the clearest "constitutional coups" in modern Egyptian history. Third, a parliament that genuinely represents the people rather than landowners and the aristocracy, as was the case before 1952, when membership in the Senate was effectively conditional on the ability to pay land taxes meaning political representation was, by law, restricted to the wealthy. Fourth, genuine economic sovereignty, with a truly independent national currency rather than one pegged to a foreign power’s currency, unlike the historical dependency of the Egyptian pound on sterling. These four principles are enough to clarify that the project on offer is not a literal "return to the past," but a borrowing of the constitutional form (symbolic monarchy) combined with an explicit rejection of its old substance (colonial dependency, palace interference, parliamentary feudalism). V. The Role of Egyptian Movements in Exile: Between Goal and Instrument This raises the most practical question of all: how might Egypt’s opposition abroad actually adopt this idea, and in what capacity? The honest answer is that the power of this proposal does not necessarily lie in its literal fulfilment, but in its dual strategic function. On one hand, it can be advanced as a genuine political goal adopted by broad coalitions of Egyptian movements coalitions that might include Islamists, liberals, leftists, and traditional monarchists, united around a single shared premise: rejecting the legitimacy of the 1952 order and everything that followed from it, even if they later disagree over the precise final shape of the state. On the other hand and this matters more in practice the idea can be deployed as a rhetorical instrument of pressure to widen a Egyptian political debate currently trapped between two false choices: "continued military rule" or "no alternative, chaos awaits." When the opposition puts forward a clearly defined third model a European-style constitutional monarchy it breaks this false binary and opens new intellectual space in Egyptian public discourse, even if the project is never realised in its literal form. This kind of "leverage idea" is common in the history of political movements worldwide: it is not necessarily proposed to be fulfilled immediately in full, but to redraw the boundaries of the politically possible, and to force the existing regime to defend its legitimacy rather than simply assume it. Conclusion: An Invitation to Debate, Not a Ready-Made Prescription This article does not claim that restoring a monarchical form would magically resolve Egypt’s chronic crisis of legitimacy, nor does it ignore the immense difficulties facing any transformative project under a military institution as economically and securitywise entrenched as Egypt’s is today. But it raises a question that deserves serious debate among Egypt’s opposition in exile, rather than automatic dismissal simply for being unfamiliar: Has the Egyptian opposition exhausted every available tool for dismantling the legitimacy of 1952, or has it remained trapped in the same old binary swapping one ruler for another while the framework that makes military rule possible remains untouched? The idea is on the table now, not as a finished solution, but as an overdue invitation to think outside the box.

Kanclerz Merz na wylocie? https://t.co/Rq74yQxIQ8 Germany’s hot topic this summer: A chancellor swap Germany was once seen as Europe’s anchor of stability. Now Friedrich Merz’s own party is discussing whether the chancellor should go after little more than a year in office. #Merz #Germany #ChancellorSwap #DE

Gerald Knaus, co-founder of the think tank European Stability Initiative, warns that Europe is experiencing the most dangerous moment since 1948, and Vladimir Putin has reasons to believe that the crisis in the region serves his interests, which could lead to tragic consequences for Ukraine and the future of EU integration. (translated)