Putin is in China, shortly after Trump was in China. The two visits are an extraordinary study in contrasts. Whereas the Trump visit was striking because of the absence of substantive agreements, the Putin visit is packed with them.

That does not mean that the Trump visit was unimportant or a non event. If nothing else it gave the Chinese an opportunity to give Trump and the Americans the strongest warning they have ever given on the topic of Taiwan.

Claims that the warning is the same as warnings the Chinese have previously given are wrong. I have read every readout the Chinese Foreign Ministry has published following a meeting between the US President and the Chinese leadership extending back to the days of Barack Obama and Hu Jintao. No previous warning a Chinese leader has given on the topic of Taiwan has come close to the peremptory and threatening language Xi Jinping used in the warning he gave to Trump. The fact Xi did it in a semi public venue - in a plenary meeting where the entire US delegation was present - underlines the point.

We also have the two ongoing wars: Ukraine and Iran.

The US appears stuck in Iran, with both the Pentagon and the Saudis trying to talk Trump out of renewing the war. Meanwhile oil prices continue to rise, the US and now the UK have had to lift sanctions on Russian oil, and there are reports of Iran rapidly rearming.

As for Ukraine, the most important ongoing fact is the battle for Konstantinovka, which Ukraine is clearly losing, but which the Ukrainian and Western media space have resolutely decided not to mention or talk about. The explanation is very simple. Coverage of the battles of Bakhmut, Avdeyevka and Pokrovsk - and especially of Pokrovsk - undermined the narrative of Ukraine success upon which Western support for the war depends, and led to worried talk that Ukraine might be actually losing the war. So despite the fact that Konstantinovka is bigger than all those other places, and is at least as strategically important, the word has gone out that this battle must not be mentioned or alluded to. Instead the media space is being deliberately filled with stories of drones, 'drone walls', 'kill zones', pictures of fires in Russian refineries, fantastic (and untrue) claims of gigantic Russian losses, claims of a crisis in the Russian economy (also untrue) etc. That these are all irrelevant to the actual situation, and often belong more to the world of the imagination than the world of fact, makes no difference.

It is a testament to the West's continued information dominance how effective this information strategy has proved to be.

There is the sad news (for me) of the defeat in the primaries of Tom Massie. Over the last few weeks Congress has shed who I consider to have been its two best people: Marjorie Taylor Green and now Tom Massie. Massie's defeat however underlines the fact that despite everything - tariffs, the cost of living, Iran, Epstein - going wrong, Trump's grip on the Republican party remains as strong as ever, and that is an important fact that must be taken into account.

Lastly, there is the Starmer-Streeting-Burnham-Rayner circus in Britain, together with the far more consequential unravelling in Germany of Merz and the rise and rise of the AfD, now at 29% against 22% for the CDU. Hats off to our good friend Zarael for predicting it. Germany in my opinion is close to a tipping point. If the AfD breaks through above 30%, and if the CDU falls below 20%, both once unimaginable but now becoming believable, then it is the point of no return and Germany becomes a different country from the one we have known.

So much to discuss today....