As markets stubbed their toe on Trump’s high-stakes tariff reveal this week, it was almost possible to forget about that pesky April 5 (tomorrow) deadline for TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell up or face a painful US ban. And while Trump extended that deadline on his first day back in office, it now looks […]

There are all kinds of wild metrics to help track international security — take the famous Pentagon Pizza Index, which monitors spikes in Domino’s and Papa John’s orders as a proxy for Pentagon folks pulling late nighters when something is brewing. Well, here are four less tasty but equally intriguing numbers Intriguers should know: That’s […]

Canada’s new PM, Mark Carney, just took office facing economic turmoil, U.S. tariffs, and Trump’s talk of a 51st state. His first move? Looking beyond America. Carney, the highly regarded former central banker for Canada (and England!), secured the ruling Liberal Party’s leadership and formally took the reins from Justin Trudeau on Friday. He now […]

G7 foreign ministers (🇪🇺, 🇯🇵, 🇬🇧, 🇫🇷, 🇨🇦, 🇺🇸, 🇩🇪, 🇮🇹) just gathered in Canada’s beautiful river resort town of La Malbaie and ended up producing a veeeeery intriguing statement. While these kinds of joint documents can be incredibly, remarkably, truly impressively dull, there are often spicy bits lurking within if you know where and how to look. […]

Another year, another Davos Summit, another Intrigue recap.  First, a quick fun fact: there are brands that spend an absolute fortune to be at Davos each year, but not Intrigue — our very own Helen is an invited speaker! Anyway, around 50 world leaders also attended, including the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen and Argentina’s Javier […]

The World Economic Forum (WEF) crams epic wealth and power into the tiny Swiss ski resort of Davos each January, leaving it open to some truly cracking conspiracy theories — personally as Simpsons fans, we love to imagine Davos rigging every Oscars night. But we’ve been to Davos before (and will be back again from Monday), […]

If you imagine New York on any given day, journalists in Midtown are feverishly scribbling the scathing remarks of an ambassador at the UN Security Council. Travel a little farther south to Wall Street and traders are feverishly fixed to their Bloomberg terminals.  But there’s a world in which these two collide: the bond market. While […]

As clickbaity as it sounds, we’re not making the above title up.  On Wednesday, China’s policymakers announced they’ve added all sorts of small electronic appliances — microwaves, rice cookers, water purifiers — to a list of consumer products eligible for a subsidised trade-in. We’re not here to dunk on that idea — the US and others have […]

We’re not a finance newsletter (we don’t own enough Patagucci vests to qualify), but we do enjoy scrolling through stock tickers.  That’s how we noticed some recent movements around Eutelsat, a Franco-British Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite operator that’s in talks with the EU to ramp up its presence in Ukraine.  Over the past four days, the […]

Shrugging off some winter showers, France’s Emmanuel Macron (co-hosting with India’s Narendra Modi) has rolled out the red carpet for heads of state, executives (hi Jamie Dimon), and AI power players at the latest AI Action Summit, which wraps today (Tuesday). And a quick glance at the headlines might suggest that oh, Macron is announcing $110B in […]

As we foreshadowed yesterday, Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have now seized the eastern Congolese trade hub of Goma in a lightning advance. It’s a conflict with ties to Big Tech, world history, and Western unease, so let’s take a look: A quick glance at a map might make you wonder how Rwanda could possibly be a […]

OpenAI dropped the world’s first-ever ‘reasoning’ AI chatbot back in September, called ‘o1’. The Silicon Valley-based pioneer spent vast amounts of cash and time to release this AI bot that can ‘reason’ its way through more complex problems. And notwithstanding OpenAI’s name and founding philosophy, it again kept its coding secret. But last week, China-based […]