An economic D-Day is coming for Iran Financial Times Europe25 Aug 2026The writer is the US sec ret ary of the Treas ury Scott Bes sent In 1943, the Allied powers con vened the Tehran Con fer ence to plot the course of anuncharted act. As Roosevelt and Churchill weighed a cam paign that would cul min ate in the Nor -mandy land ings, they asked them selves what could be done “to bring the greatestpres sure to bear on the enemy”. His tory has returned that ques tion to Tehran. And the moment has arrived toanswer it with the full weight of Amer ican resolve. Pres id ent Don ald Trump and the over whelm ing might of our mil it ary have sig ni fic -antly dis mantled Iran’s mil it ary cap ab il it ies and weakened its nuc lear pro gramme.Now we are enter ing the endgame. At dawn begins an eco nomic D-Day — the singlegreatest fin an cial offens ive ever mar shalled against an adversary. For 47 years, the Islamic repub lic of Iran has been a malig nant force in the world.Within Iran, a cor ...
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Iran Is Using Foreign Criminals to Attack Its Critics Overseas Pouria Zeraati, a dissident who was living in London, was stabbed by a group of Romanian thugs. His case is part of a widening campaign by the Iranian regime to silence its detractors. Pouria Zeraati, an Iranian dissident who was living in London, spent nearly two years collecting evidence that the regime in Tehran had dispatched agents to silence him. He received harassing messages almost daily, by phone and e-mail. Masked men staked out his home and stalked his wife on the street. A stranger warned him on Telegram that he had been offered money to harm him. Zeraati reported each threat to the British police, who assured him that he was safe. But he grew worried that his life was in danger. “I felt as though I was my own detective, prophesying my assassination,” he told me. Zeraati, who is thirty-eight, had arrived in England in 2007 to study mechanical engineering. After graduating, he was hired as a reporter for Ma...
The new world order? Every man for himself Financial Times Europe 25 Aug 2026 Alec Russell alec.russell@ft.com Kofi Annan had a favourite put-down for people who tried to argue that an autocrat could be the right answer for a weak or troubled state. “That’s Johnnie Walker talking . . . ” he would say, recalling how he and friends used to respond in Ghana when he was growing up and someone made an outlandish claim. Autocracies were “built on sand”, he believed; the only way to nurture a nation was via good governance; you just had to keep working at it. I heard the late UN secretary-general deliver this gentle “Johnnie Walker” rejoinder on a tour of Tanzania 15 years ago. It was a time when the post-cold war teleology of hope had run its course. And yet an aspirant breeze of democracy was blowing across much of the developing world. How dispirited Annan would be now. Authoritarianism has of course been on the rise in great powers, such as China and Russia, for over a decade, and ...
The growing threats to ‘Swiss Made’ For decades the country’s exporters focused on adding value to their high-end products, but US tariffs, the fragmentation of global trade and the strong franc are now hitting them harder. Financial Times UK 25 Aug 2026 By Mer cedes Ruehl When US Pres id ent Don ald Trump hit Switzer land with tar iffs last year, Nabil Fran cis’s first reac tion was shock. “It was a wake-up call,” says Fran cis, the chief exec ut ive of Felco, a com pany known for its high-qual ity garden tools. “You under stood that the world was chan ging when Switzer land was treated dif fer ently to the EU.” For gen er a tions, Felco has made its sig na ture red-handled secateurs at its base among the green hills of the French-speak ing can ton of Neuchâtel. Around 95 per cent of pro duc tion is expor ted, with the fam ily-owned group count ing King Charles of the UK and US former first lady Michelle Obama among its cus tom ers. Sud denly, it faced a tar iff of 39 per ...
China’s humanoid robots backed by ‘circular’ deals Purchases from Beijing-backed training hubs lead investors to question level of real demand Financial Times UK 25 Aug 2026 WILLIAM LANGLEY China’s humanoid-robot makers are generating much of their revenue from selling machines to government-backed training centres — which then collect and sell training data back to the robot makers, raising concerns about actual demand in an industry that Beijing is keen to promote. The widely adopted model, reminiscent of Nvidia’s “circular financing” of artificial intelligence data centres, has fuelled China’s so-called embodied AI industry. Valuations of start-ups such as AgiBot and Hong Kong-listed UBTech have soared on expectations that humanoids represent the future of AI. Investors are beginning to question, though, whether government-driven purchases can lead to real commercial demand. “There is a broad consensus among early-stage investors that humanoid robotics is approaching the peak...
Trump Unleashes Scott Bessent on Iran The President redoubles the economic pressure on the regime amid signs it’s working. By Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters On Monday Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Operation Economic Outcast against Iran and its enablers, even comparing the action to D-Day. “Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone,” he said. President Trump is working the phones and “every country has a defined timeline to shut down activities we have identified,” Mr. Bessent said. “If they do not take action, we will do so unilaterally.” He declined to lay out the timelines, leaving Mr. Trump room to delay, but he said to expect “a major announcement of a financial institution being sanctioned by the end of this week.” The D-Day analogy may be grandiose, but President Trump has waited nearly six months to take this economic step. Early in the war the U.S. even encou...
Ukraine Is In More Danger Than It Seems August 24, 2026 at 2:00 PM GMT+10 Winter is coming. Photographer: Oleksandr Klymenko / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images Save Translate Subscribe By the end of last week, Russia’s state TV news anchors were cock-a-hoop over Ukraine’s evident plight as it ran out of interceptors for the Patriot missile batteries needed to stop Moscow’s ballistic missiles. Anything Russia targets can now be destroyed, including Kyiv’s air defenses, they gloated: “All Ukraine’s drone industry is being methodically taken down.” Of course, had you been getting your news from Russian TV for the last five years, you’d have known with absolute certainty that President Vladimir Putin would never invade Ukraine, and once he did that the Ukrainians would never fight back because they’re really Russians. Four years after they did fight back you’d have no clue that your own troops are sustaining massive casualties to move forward at a rate slower than ...