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Take carpenters — essential in a country where a great deal of construction uses wood. Their numbers have more than halved since 2020, while more than 43 per cent of those still working are over 65. Many projects, large and small, are being delayed. A shortage of bus drivers has caused operators in Tokyo to cut over 200 services. The military cannot get close to its recruitment targets. The Foreign Ministry revealed earlier this year that it cannot hire enough Japanese chefs for its embassies. In some parts of the countryside, home deliveries of certain goods are undertaken by scooter riders in their mid-80s. There are genuine concerns across industry that companies are going to run into trouble because Japan no longer has enough tax accountants.

Menegroth was a wholly underground city accessed only through a stone bridge over Esgalduin. While the Dwarves did the major work, the Elves also participated in the construction: the pillars imitated beeches with branches and leaves, the halls were lit by golden lanterns and there were silver fountains, and many figurines of animals. It is told that nightingales and other birds lived within the caves. Thus Thingol had the most beautiful palace a king ever had owned east of the Sea.[4]

Foreigners poured a record $290bn into US stocks in the second quarter and now own about 30 per cent of the market — the highest share in post-second world war history. Europeans and Canadians have been boycotting American goods but continue buying US stocks in bulk — especially the tech giants.

In a way, then, America has become one big bet on AI. Outside of the AI plays, even European stock markets have been outperforming the US this decade, and now that gap is starting to spread. So far in 2025, every major sector from utilities and industrials to healthcare and banks has fared better in the rest of the world than in the US.

What that suggests is that AI better deliver for the US, or its economy and markets will lose the one leg they are now standing on.

In May, 404 Media reported that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched a nationwide network of Flock cameras, a powerful AI-enabled license plate surveillance tool, to look for a woman who self-administered an abortion. At the time, the sheriff told us that the search had nothing to do with criminality and that they were concerned solely about the woman’s safety, specifically the idea that she could be bleeding to death from the abortion. Flock itself said “she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”

But newly unearthed court documents about the incident show that when the search was performed, police were conducting a “death investigation” into the death of the fetus, and police discussed whether they could charge the woman with a crime with the District Attorney’s office on the same day that they performed the Flock search.

Using the language that he used and, most importantly, labeling left wing protestors as “insurrectionists,” crossed a clear red line in civil-military relations. It is the Insurrection Act he seems keen to invoke, which would give him dictatorial-like powers like we’ve never seen used before in this country – not even in the civil war. The civil war was a war between states with militaries fighting on battlefields. A Trump-led deployment of federalized Guard and active-duty troops to quell a fabricated insurrection inside American cities, should only be understood as war on the American people.

Likewise, when all the rich guys got behind cryptocurrency, and all the rich cryptocurrency guys got behind Donald Trump, for these people the thing to do was very obvious, even if they had previously regarded crypto as a scam: not just to buy some cryptocurrency—the kind of move any cynic might make—but to adopt the attitudes and positions of a crypto enthusiast. Neither their conscience nor their concept of dignity troubles them in this switcheroo, because they take for granted that this is the precise way everyone forms the stuff they say and appear to think.

Many years later, in 1975, Schmeling said, "Looking back, I'm almost happy I lost that fight. Just imagine if I would have come back to Germany with a victory. I had nothing to do with the Nazis, but they would have given me a medal. After the war I might have been considered a war criminal."[10]

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During the Nazi purge of Jews from Berlin, he personally saved the lives of two Jewish children by hiding them in his Excelsior hotel room in Berlin. He claimed he was sick and permitted no one to enter.[11] It was not the first time that Schmeling defied the Nazi regime's hatred for Jews. As the story goes, Hitler let it be known through the Reich Ministry of Sports that he was very displeased at Schmeling's relationship with Joe Jacobs, his Jewish fight promoter, and wanted it terminated, but Schmeling refused to bow even to Hitler.[12] During the war, Schmeling was drafted, where he served with the Luftwaffe and was trained as a paratrooper.[13] He participated in the Battle of Crete in May 1941, where he was wounded in his right knee by mortar fire shrapnel during the first day of the battle. After recovering, he was dismissed from active service after being deemed medically unfit for duty because of his injury. Nevertheless, in July 1944 a rumor that he had been killed in action made world news.[14] He later visited American POW camps in Germany and occasionally tried to improve conditions for the prisoners.