If there is precisely one thing you watch today, make it this. French Senator Claude Malhuret. A microphone. And the most magnificently savage dismantling of the Trump administration ever delivered in a language they almost certainly don’t speak.
He covers Iran. He covers corruption. He covers the kind of staggering, industrial-scale incompetence that would get you fired from managing a car park. And he does it with the calm, unhurried certainty of a man who has read every page of the indictment and found it, if anything, worse than expected.
France has never pretended to like these people. But this is contempt elevated to an art form. The kind of refined, aristocratic disdain that takes centuries of civilization to produce and approximately ninety seconds to deploy.
Malhuret sounds like he is four seconds from the button. Not out of panic. Out of sheer, exhausted disgust.
Honestly? Understandable.
Watch it. Share it. The adults are speaking.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
Aretha Franklin was a surprise guest performer at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Carole King, who co-wrote “Natural Woman.” Aretha noted in a Vogue interview, “Carole didn’t know I was going to be there at all. That’s one reason she was excited.”
This is the 15-minute speech that got Canadian PM Mark Carney a standing ovation.
For those of you who have become inured to the bloviating meanderings of Trump, this is how real leaders talk.
World leadership is relocating.
Hello friends. I am Yanis Varoufakis stealing a few of your moments to tear up, in front of you, the invitation to appear in the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week to present my new book RAISE YOUR SOUL. I was looking forward to returning to Adelaide for what has been for decades a brilliant festival of books, ideas and debate. No longer. The Zionist Lobby destroyed it. By forcing the Board to disinvite fellow author Randa Abdel-Fattah. By identifying even Bob Carr, the former Premier of NSW and Australia’s former foreign minister, an individual “of concern”. By forcing the Director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, my marvellous, Jewish friend Louise Adler, to resign, they left me with no option other than to tear up my coveted invitation in public. As Louise says, friends and colleagues in the arts, beware of the future. They are coming for you.