Number of the day

12.7% 

That’s how quickly (annualised) Taiwan’s economy grew in Q4 last year, its fastest in decades amid record chip demand and US investment.

The Epstein files

Some 42 days after they were due, the US justice department finally shared the latest Epstein files on Friday, featuring three million pages, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos.

While it all pours more sordid pressure on familiar US figures (Trump, Clinton, Gates, Musk, Summers, Lutnick and beyond), it's also reverberating around the world, starting in…

• 🇸🇰 Slovakia

The NATO ally's national security advisor and former foreign minister, Miroslav Lajčák, has finally now resigned after the latest dump revealed just how tight he was with Epstein — we're talking texts bantering about anything from females to Putin's foreign minister.

Significance: Finally a head rolls, but not just any head: Lajčák was pro-engagement with Russia, and the right-hand-man to Slovakia's famously Putin-friendly leader, Robert Fico.

• 🇳🇴 Norway

This latest Epstein dump is huge news in Norway, where the crown princess (Mette-Marit) gets mentioned a thousand times! Turns out Norway’s future queen was close with Epstein, and even planned trips to his Palm Beach estate.

And as if the princess wasn’t enough, Norway's former prime minister and long-time head of the Council of Europe (Thorbjørn Jagland) also makes multiple appearances, seemingly acting as Epstein's go-between to the Kremlin.

Significance: It's a big embarrassment for one of Europe's most respected monarchies, already facing a shock assault trial of the princess's son. As for Jagland, his Epstein advocacy for Russia will shine new light on his years at the heart of European power, where he long advocated to keep Putin inside European institutions, which brings us to…

• 🇷🇺 Russia

Putin himself gets mentioned 1,055 times, and Russia 5,876 times, whether it’s Epstein's supposed audiences with the Russian autocrat, unverified FBI informant claims that Epstein managed Putin's money, meetings to brief Putin's former UN ambassador (who later died a suspicious death), and even a 2015 Epstein email to an FSB-trained Putin insider (Sergei Belyakov) seeking help with a Russian woman blackmailing New York elites.

Significance: While last year’s Epstein dump fuelled Israel speculation, this latest edition has prompted the head of Estonia's parliamentary committee on foreign affairs to suggest Epstein was running honeytrap operations for Russian intelligence, a theory now also pondered by Poland's foreign minister. Meanwhile…

• 🇨🇳 China

The Middle Kingdom isn’t centre stage, though there are interesting snippets, whether it's former Trump aide Steve Bannon boasting about a) his own role in Trump's China tariffs, or b) getting an Australian billionaire to run anti-China ads in 2019 elections Down Under.

Interestingly, Harvard's student paper has also detailed Epstein's efforts to help Beijing's elite Tsinghua University (President Xi’s alma mater) establish a campus in Boston.

Significance: There's a bit of online schadenfreude in China that maybe the worst you can say about China's own elites here is they should've known better than to go via Epstein. It hints at the way this sordid saga trashes international perceptions of Western power.

• 🇮🇳 India

Delhi's foreign ministry has come out firing after an Epstein email vaguely seemed to claim credit for the success of Modi's historic first visit to Israel in 2017 — Delhi's statement dismisses it all as "trashy ruminations by a convicted criminal".

Significance: Plausibility aside, India's opposition is seizing on it, along with Epstein’s correspondence both with a member of India's richest family (Ambani) and current oil minister (Puri). Meanwhile, the timing is tricky ahead of Modi's next Israel visit this month.

• 🇨🇦 Canada

We recently described Canada as the Ned Flanders of neighbours, and boy did Canada hold up its end here: its only substantive appearance seems to be a letter in which Canada's LA consulate tells Epstein he's banned from visiting. You see? You can just say no.

Anyway, this is just scratching the surface — bravado or something else, there's not enough internet to cover all the angles, whether it's Epstein pondering investments in Somaliland, or texting with Dubai's powerful Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, or implying he could jailbreak someone in Assad's Syria, or the suggestion of tapping ex-MI6 figures to recover Libya’s frozen state assets.

Intrigue’s Take

There are so many takeaways, but let’s look at two:

First, it’s a reminder that while we at Team Intrigue cut our teeth on the more formal side of diplomacy, states often seek to operate via unofficial social brokers — Epstein had no formal job title, but had half the world’s governments on speed dial.

Second, we’ve looked at the ways this scandal ripples across geography, but it’s rippling across time, too: drawing links to any impending US hit on Iran, Serbia’s leader (Vučić) just blamed his country’s 1999 demise at NATO’s hands not on Belgrade’s own disastrous policy of ethnic cleansing, but on Clinton’s attempts to distract attention from Lewinsky. Ie, Epstein is now even playing into ongoing Serbian revisionism.

Anyway, given this predator’s weird ability to collect world leaders like they’re Pokémon, something tells us there’ll be more ripples to come.

Sound even smarter:

• The UK’s former ambassador to the US (Mandelson) is running out of posts to resign, but amid the latest Epstein release he’s just resigned from the UK’s ruling Labour Party too.

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Meanwhile, elsewhere…

Extra Intrigue

🤣 Your weekly roundup of the world’s lighter news…

• An Australian man has edged out the competition to take the title of World’s Ugliest Lawn.

• A toymaker has accidentally created the bestseller for China’s Year of the Horse, mistakenly printing a toy horse’s smile upside down to produce the must-have “crying horse”.

• Someone has turned an ol’ abandoned English cinema into a graveyard for hundreds of expired Dyson vacuum cleaners.

• A British inventor has modified a trashcan to reach speeds of up to 105kph (79mph).

• And US college students are asking AI for help to make it look like they’re not asking AI for help.

Award of the day

France has been ninja-starring awards out these days — Victoria Beckham just got made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters last week, and Pharrell Williams became a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur too.

But have you heard of Ali Akbar Akbar (above)? President Macron just awarded him the National Order of Merit in a shout-out to the half century he’s spent hawking papers on the streets of Paris, including to Macron himself during his student days. The French head of state put it like this: “You are the accent of the sixth arrondissement, the voice of the French press on Sunday mornings. And every other day of the week, for that matter.”

Today’s poll

Last Thursday’s poll: What do you think are the main international implications from recent ICE headlines?

✅ Nothing, they're just headlines (18%)
😶 A temporary hit to US standing (38%)
❌ This is a big deal (42%)
✍️ Other (write us!) (2%)

Your two cents:

• ❌ L.D: “Points to the difficulties of trying to implement immigration control, which is something many countries want to do.”

• ✍️ K.P: “It might be a big deal for popular opinion, but it won't influence the higher level diplomacy too much in the near future.”

• 😶 R.N: “The power of the image of America is strong but it won’t last forever. Course correct now to avoid locking in the damage permanently.”