Tax policy works best when people understand what is being taxed, why it is being taxed and where the money goes. Once that connection disappears, trust in the system quickly disappears as well, writes Tõnu Kolts.

An iconic Setomaa landmark is back after reservists and U.S. allies teamed up during Estonia's Spring Storm exercise to rebuild a giant stone "7" on Seitsmemägi Hill.

Russia is trying to draw Europe into the role of peace mediator to escape new sanctions, Minister of Foreign Affairs Margus Tsahkna (Eesti 200) said after the U.S. stepped back from leading the process.

The Riigikogu opposition does not think the Reform-Eesti 200 coalition will collapse before the election next spring, but believes a minority government is possible if MPs start joining other parties.

An iconic Setomaa landmark is back after reservists and U.S. allies teamed up during Estonia's Spring Storm exercise to rebuild a giant stone "7" on Seitsmemägi Hill.

The Ministry of Justice wants to raise the so-called blank media levy paid on every recording device, while businesses say the move would create an unjustified competitive advantage for foreign online retailers.

2022. aasta 24. veebruaril alustas Venemaa režiimi juht Vladimir Putin sissetungi Ukrainasse. Pärast seda, kui Ukraina lõi tagasi pealetungi Kiievile, on lahingute kese kandunud Ida- ja Lõuna-Ukrainasse. Postimees kajastab 1553. sõjapäeva sündmusi allolevas blogis.2026/ukraina-kalender 

Käesoleva aasta alguses hakkasid Venemaa kodanikud sõjakomissariaate külastades või elektrooniliste kutsete kaudu sagedamini saama nõndanimetatud mobilisatsioonikäske, teatas väljaanne The Moscow Times, mida vahendas esmaspäeval ukrainlaste uudisteagentuur Unian.

It comes after the Ukrainian capital suffered one of the biggest aerial assaults of the war overnight on Saturday.

The pontiff also warned of a "new digital slaveries" in his first encyclical since becoming Pope last year.

Lord Wolfson tells the BBC Next now typically receives double the number of applicants for one role than it did two years ago.

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges says doctors should routinely check on screen time and social media use when seeing younger patients.

PARIS — When it comes to the economy, France’s far-right National Rally party has an identity crisis — and its adversaries see an opportunity to go on the attack. The contradictory messaging over how to handle France Inc. is being starkly exposed through its two potential candidates for next year’s presidential election, which the party is on track to win. If you listen to the slick Jordan Bardella, the far right appears to be appealing to big business, free market liberals and the white-collar vote. But populist Marine Le Pen, in contrast, is playing to a more traditional blue-collar electorate and sticking to her belief in an interventionist big state. While Bardella has enjoyed success courting the titans of industry — especially those executives belonging to CAC40, the index of France’s largest listed companies — Le Pen’s more recent attempts at engagement with business have been rockier. Politicians from rival parties are wasting no time in seeking to score points from the ideological schism at the heart of the nationalist, anti-immigration National Rally. “There’s the new generation National Rally that’s courting CAC40 executives, companies and business leaders … and the old guard that is pro-spending, pro-nanny state,” Édouard Philippe, the conservative main challenger to the far right, said this month. “You can count on me to condemn their posturing and U-turns.” Éric Zemmour, leader of the far-right Reconquest party, accused Bardella of going to “great lengths” to make it look as if the National Rally were right-wing while the party hierarchy — most notably Le Pen — had leftist economic instincts and wanted to hike taxes. Noting the divisions between Bardella and Le Pen, members of the far-left France Unbowed party said their presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon believed the National Rally needed to “settle” on its true economic agenda. It is possible the National Rally will be able to chart a more coherent course on the economy — and key questions such as deficit reduction and pension reform — after a landmark court ruling on July 7 that will determine whether Le Pen or Bardella will be the official presidential candidate in 2027. But the party’s disagreements on economic strategy run deep, and there is no guarantee they can be resolved quickly. A former French government official, who has regular conversations with National Rally party members, said: “There’s a very clear ideological battle in the party.” “The old chieftains take a dim view of Bardella’s rise,” said the former official who was granted anonymity, like others quoted here, because of the sensitivity of the discussions. Marine Le Pen speaks to the press during a ceremony marking the 81st anniversary of Victory in Europe Day in northern France, on May 8, 2026. | François Lo Presti/AFP via Getty Images Even Le Pen herself admits that she and Bardella are not perfectly aligned — with the economy and business seeming to be the prime example. “I’m neither right-wing nor left-wing,” she told the RTL radio station earlier this month. When asked whether Bardella was more right-wing than her, she answered: “Yes, but when you are neither right nor left-wing, you can welcome people from the right and from the left.” A party divided Le Pen and Bardella have long tried to project unity, but in recent weeks that consensus has appeared to fray. This month, the party’s two leading figures appeared at odds on one of the most explosive election topics: the legal age of retirement in France. The National Rally has historically pledged to reverse President Emmanuel Macron’s flagship pensions reform and lower the legal age of retirement to 62. But Bardella sparked controversy when he said the party was “examining” the issue — comments that were swiftly contradicted by Le Pen, who reaffirmed her support for returning the retirement age to 62. The same tensions also surfaced over a proposed windfall tax on energy companies benefiting from higher oil prices linked to the war in the Middle East. Le Pen backed the idea, while Bardella said it was “not a priority.” Party insiders have tried to frame those differences as a division of labor. “They each have their role to be able to appeal more widely,” said a National Rally official. As the party’s presidential candidate, Le Pen “is above party differences,” while Bardella is “more right-wing.” But according to a former National Rally official, the party is racked by “strong tensions” between the old order backing Le Pen, and the more free-market circle that gravitates towards Bardella. Sensing the controversy growing in the public debate, Le Pen on Friday tried to dispel any doubts about her entente with Bardella. “I believe we have the same economic vision, we defended the same political manifesto in 2022 and 2024,” she told BFM TV channel. Courting the business elite The tensions are in full display in the courtship of the business establishment, however. Jordan Bardella taking part in a vote during a plennary session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on May 20, 2026. | Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images That role has largely fallen to Bardella, but Le Pen is now getting in on the act. Last month she attended a much discussed dinner with some of France’s top executives, among them the country’s richest man, Bernard Arnault. But many still need convincing. According to a senior executive from one of the firms represented at the dinner, Le Pen adopted “a pro-business” tone before quickly reverting to her “state-led, interventionist” discourse. Another top business executive briefed on the encounter said her posture had been “dogmatic.” French utility giant Engie’s chief executive, Catherine MacGregor, was another of the dinner’s attendees. She lambasted the far-right National Rally’s energy platform as being “bad for France.” Meanwhile, Amir Reza-Tofighi, head of the employers’ lobby CPME, told POLITICO that the party needed a more concrete agenda. “It’s simple to say we want to embrace pro-business policies, but we want to see what’s written in black and white” in the party’s political manifesto, he said. He added that reversing Macron’s pension reform would “disqualify” the National Rally economically. “It would mean lying to the French about a major issue, on whether we are capable of balancing our public finances.” Le Pen’s dilemma The core question is how far Le Pen can push the transformation of what was once a fringe populist party into an economically credible governing force. The far right needs to increase “its share of older voters” if it wants to win the 2027 election, said OpinionWay pollster Bruno Jeanbart. “Older voters, who generally have a lot of savings, are afraid,” said Jeanbart, adding their fears focused on the far right’s ability to “run the economy” and concern that a National Rally win could “lead to France leaving the eurozone or the EU.” Le Pen, however, is not fully embracing the transformation to fiscal sobriety and does not want to give up the party’s traditional lavish campaign promises. “She’s an obstacle on this topic” said the former French official. “Being strong on social issues is her political heritage and it has proved successful in elections.” According to one veteran National Rally lawmaker, there are “tensions” with Bardella’s new economic advisor François Durvye, a free-market financier seen as driving the party’s rightward economic shift. The former National Rally official quoted above said: “By pushing the party too far to the right, they risk losing their working-class base.” The mixed messaging is likely to persist for a while, as the party tries to broaden its appeal without alienating its traditional base. “It’s a populist party,” said a former top executive, who has regular conversations with National Rally officials. “The aspirations of the people matter.” “They can’t say ‘We’re going to win the election with an economic program that’s the polar opposite of what voters expect.'”  Nicolas Camut and Sofiane Zaizoune contributed reporting.

Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s From Across the Pond column. The U.S. has the most powerful military in human history. It also hasn’t won a war in more than 30 years. Since 1945, the U.S. has fought major wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran. Among them, only the 1991 Gulf War counts as a genuine success — and even that planted the seeds of future disaster. Meanwhile, the outcomes of the rest range from stalemate and defeat to strategic catastrophe, with Iran perhaps being the worst strategic blunder the U.S. has made post-World War II. So, why does the strongest military on earth keep losing the wars it starts? The answer is not firepower — it’s America’s thinking. The great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of politics by other means. The military is a servant of political ends — one tool among many, and always in service of a clearly defined objective. The U.S. has inverted this theory. Washington treats war not as a continuation of policy but as the failure of policy — a last resort that is reached when diplomacy collapses, often with no set political outcome in mind. The results are always the same: force deployed with no clear ends, and no answer to a question that should precede every decision to fight — what does winning actually look like? U.S. President Donald Trump is the most extreme expression of this problem. In Iran, performative diplomacy was conducted by envoys who understood neither diplomacy nor nuclear physics. Then came a massive bombing campaign, premised on the magical belief that destruction produces capitulation — or, as the president put it this past weekend: We will either get a “good” deal or else we’ll “blow them to kingdom come.” But the end result will be neither. We know this because while Trump may be the most radical manifestation of America’s faulty approach, he is hardly alone. The U.S. way of war is built on three structural flaws. First, the ends and means are inverted: Rather than define a political objective and then select the appropriate instrument, Washington does the reverse. It reaches for the military tool and hopes the politics will follow. “Rolling Thunder” in Vietnam, “Shock and Awe” in Iraq, “Epic Fury” in Iran — each time the U.S. deployed overwhelming force in the belief that wholesale destruction will produce the desired outcome. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine speak during a press conference on U.S. military action in Iran. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images It never does. The second flaw is overreach. U.S. wars are framed around the most expansive goals possible: regime change, civilizational transformation, establishing democracy, ending terrorism. But these aren’t objectives, they are fantasies; and military force is a poor instrument for achieving them. The Gulf War succeeded precisely because then-President George H.W. Bush rejected this logic. His objective was narrow and defined: Reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and restore the status quo ante — nothing more. He resisted enormous pressure to march on Baghdad, and that restraint was not a weakness. It produced a genuine coalition, legitimacy and victory. Years later in the Middle East, President George W. Bush — influenced by the very advisers who had pushed his father to go further — chose differently. The result? A decade of war, a strengthened Iran, and a far less stable region than before. Finally, the third and most fundamental flaw is that those making the plans in Washington believe overwhelming force can compensate for asymmetric motivation. It cannot. America may have the force, but the other side has the will. The Vietcong, the Taliban, the Baathists, the Islamic Revolutionaries — they don’t budge. They have nowhere to go and nothing to lose. When the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive in 1968, striking more than 100 cities simultaneously, the U.S. military called it a defeat for the enemy. And while that was tactically correct, strategically it was the other way around. The Tet Offensive broke U.S. public support and turned the course of the war. The Vietcong knew what they were fighting for, whereas Washington had long since lost that thread. Decades later in Afghanistan, U.S. officials marveled at their own ingenuity — special forces on horseback, precision bombs and a regime toppled in mere weeks. Yet it was only days before the bombing started that Bush asked “who will run the country” once the Taliban was toppled — a fair question no one thought to ask before fueling the B-52s. The men on horseback were brilliant, but there was no theory as to what came next. Moreover, al Qaeda’s longtime leader Osama bin Laden remained at large. Then came Iraq, with the war’s architects predicting a cakewalk in which U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. But the occupation disbanded the Iraqi army, sending hundreds of thousands of armed, humiliated men into the streets with no jobs or prospects. The insurgency that followed should have surprised no one, and yet it surprised everyone. The logic collapsed even faster in Iran. The strategy, such as it was, amounted to this: Kill the country’s supreme leader and hope for a more moderate successor. According to the New York Times, the U.S. and Israel pinned their hopes on former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — no moderate himself — filling the vacuum. But they had no plan for how to install him, no plan for what to do in case of failure, and no plan to prevent Tehran from doing what everyone knew it would: close the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping other than its own. The U.S. Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary celebrations. | Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images At this point, America’s repeated failures are too numerous, committed across too many decades by too many different leaders — Republican and Democrat alike — to be dismissed as coincidences. They reflect a deeper flaw in the American way of war. So, what does a better way look like? The starting point must be more humility and less hubris. Yes, the U.S. military is extraordinary — as the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January underscored. No other intelligence service could have found bin Laden, and no other military could have snatched him from deep inside Pakistan without anyone noticing. But these astounding capabilities are not a substitute for clear thinking and sound strategy. Tactical superiority no more guarantees strategic success than tactical weakness guarantees failure. U.S. military leaders understood this long before Washington forgot it. In 1984, then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger — scarred by Vietnam and Lebanon — laid it out clearly in his framework for determining when and how the U.S. should use military force: clear vital interests, defined and achievable objectives, domestic and international support, overwhelming force applied to limited ends, a clear exit strategy, and war only as a last resort. Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who served as a young officer in Vietnam and later as Weinberger’s military assistant, refined and sharpened these tenets a decade later. Both men had seen what happens when the U.S. fights without a strategy and were keen to avoid a repeat. The Weinberger/Powell doctrine is still the right framework today. It isn’t pacifism, it’s strategic logic — logic that was successfully applied in the Gulf War. It’s also precisely what has been absent from every conflict since. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may have invoked Weinberger as the guide for America’s use of force in Iran, but he proceeded to ignore every one of its principles. The U.S. keeps losing not because its military is weak but because it keeps choosing its instruments before defining its objectives. Given that, it’s no surprise the most powerful army in human history can’t win the wars it starts.

High costs in Nigeria are reshaping Eid preparations as families adjust spending and cut back on celebrations.

Muslim pilgrims have begun arriving in Mina, near Mecca, ahead of the start of Arafah Day.

Mercury in Spain also climbs to well above normal with weather event set to continue for several more daysMore than 350 French towns have recorded their highest-ever temperatures for May as France and the UK set national heat records amid an extreme early-summer heat event that could see the mercury rise to 40C in parts of Spain by the end of the week.The UK’s Met Office said the country’s all-time record for May was broken when a temperature of 34.8C was recorded at London’s Kew Gardens. Continue reading...

Scientists say record-breaking heat is a reminder of how climate crisis is affecting livesThe fierce heat sweeping across Europe over the bank holiday weekend has beaten the UK’s all-time temperature record for May, with scorching highs of close to 35C.A temperature of 33.5C was recorded at Heathrow airport on Monday lunchtime, according to provisional data from the Met Office, beating the previous May record that was set in 1922 and reached again in 1944. Later in the afternoon a temperature of 34.8C was recorded at London’s Kew Gardens. Continue reading...

Proximity of people appears to reduce stifling effect of wolves on small predator populations, scientists find

John Healey is latest government figure to be affected by suspected Russian electronic attack