These yachts are highly popular with the ‘super-bourgeoisie’ – and getting bigger. Can anything be done to stop them destroying our seas?

Who knew? Apparently everyone did, apart from me: you don’t wear shoes on a superyacht. Now, about to step on to my first teak deck at the Monaco Yacht Show, I’ve got to take my trainers off, and I’m having a sock panic. Have they got holes? Do they even match? Do they smell?

To be honest, I’ve come dressed all wrong for Europe’s big annual superyacht trade exhibition. The code for men seems to be crisp and tucked in, blazers and chinos, navy and white, sculpted hair and designer sunnies. (I went colourful, loose, casual). For women, it’s something like Riviera elegance. Everyone – whether they’re Italian, French, English, German, American, exhibitors, buyers, brokers, charterers – seems to know each other. The international superyacht community seems to be a close-knit one, and I’m not part of it. Yet.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that three men will help lead a new Pentagon project on the “future of warfare,” even as he moves to eliminate hundreds of senior armed service leadership position, including many generals and admirals. Hegseth unveiled Project Meridian during his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. The 120-day […]

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J.B. MacKinnon files a remarkable dispatch from among the members of the so-called Ostrich Army, who convened last fall in British Columbia to protest the planned culling of 300 or so birds following an H5N1 outbreak. The plight of the birds and the various claims made in their defense—that their antibodies could yield a cure for bird flu or COVID-19, for instance—are intriguing enough on their own. But it’s MacKinnon’s study of the Ostrich Army itself that helps this story take flight (even if the subjects at its center cannot). As helicopters pass overhead and a suspected kill pen mysteriously catches fire, suspicion mounts among the troops, and interpretations diverge. A genuinely surprising portrait of a loose, wayward movement, delivered with peak dramatic tension.

This was the Ostrich Army way: every event called for interpretation, an attempt to see through to hidden endgames. “One thing with black magic,” one camper would later say to me, “is they tell you what they’re going to do before they do it.” And so, at first light, when firefighters had won the day and the smoke cleared to reveal the ostrich flock still standing, the sight didn’t lead to any reconsideration of the night’s theories of clandestine slaughter. The Army simply moved on, hoping to make better sense of the next move, or the one after that. The birds really could die this day.