Advance warnings of missile attacks were seemingly suspended last week by the White House, but Ukraine’s president says: ‘Now it works’

The US has resumed sharing intelligence with Kyiv about Russian missile strikes, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday after a meeting with the US envoy Steve Witkoff in Norway.

He said Ukraine was again receiving advance warnings of ballistic missile attacks, which were seemingly suspended last week by the White House. “Now it works. It’s great,” he said, adding that the US move would save lives.

Advance warnings of missile attacks were seemingly suspended last week by the White House, but Ukraine’s president says: ‘Now it works’

The US has resumed sharing intelligence with Kyiv about Russian missile strikes, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday after a meeting with the US envoy Steve Witkoff in Norway.

He said Ukraine was again receiving advance warnings of ballistic missile attacks, which were seemingly suspended last week by the White House. “Now it works. It’s great,” he said, adding that the US move would save lives.

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week, we're going to jump right into it with a philosophical question: What is an accessory dwelling unit anyway? 

It's a question that officials in Somerville, Massachusetts, are realizing they didn't know the answer to after learning that a state law allowing ADUs in single-family neighborhoods could also require them to approve three-story backyard mini-apartments. 

As the Boston Globe reported on Sunday, Somerville's "deep ethos in favor of new housing" is being tested by the extent of the state law. Elected officials are describing the potential for three-story ADUs as a "joke," and the area's state lawmakers, including one who voted for the state law, are demanding reforms to stop them. 

The law in question was a statewide accessory dwelling unit (ADU) legalization tucked inside a major housing package of mostly new spending programs that passed in 2024. 

The bill required municipalities to allow ADUs of either 900 square feet or half the size of the primary dwelling (whichever is smaller) anywhere single-family homes are allowed. A subsequent rule issued by state regulators also forbade localities from imposing height and bulk limits on ADUs that are stricter than the limits imposed on primary dwellings. 

That latter rule is what's causing Somerville's freakout. 

Because the town allows triple-decker apartments (a three-story triplex common in New England) in all its single-family zones, the state rule means that it must also allow ADUs to be three stories tall. 

The Globe story notes that the mini-triple-deckers could still only be 900 square feet, meaning each floor of a mini-triple-decker would have to be pretty small. Thus far, no one has proposed building an ADU tower in Somerville. 

Even so, the town is worried that someone will eventually propose one of these "out-of-scale" units that it'll have to approve. Its officials are now agitating for changes to the state law to prevent this. 

On the one hand, one can perhaps understand why Somerville officials feel blindsided. 

The text of the 2024 ADU law allows localities to set "reasonable" height and bulk limits on accessory units. It was state regulators who decided after the law's passage that requiring ADUs to be shorter than the primary unit was "unreasonable." 

On the other hand, allowing a second home on a lot to be as tall as the first house sounds "reasonable" enough. Can one complain about out-of-scale development when the new unit is the same height as an existing home and a little bit smaller?

Somerville is not the first city where people's own colloquial definition of an accessory unit as "a tiny home that doesn't bother anyone" has clashed with official regulatory definitions that allow ADUs to be a fair bit bigger. 

San Diego's ADU Bonus program once allowed a technically unlimited number of ADUs to be built on single-family parcels near transit stops. (Height and bulk regulations imposed practical limits on how many units could fit on a site.) 

That enabled developers to build what were, in effect, ADU apartment complexes on large single-family lots throughout the city. This year, the city imposed new restrictions to stop these "monster" ADU developments, including a per-lot accessory unit cap. 

The latest dust-up in Somerville, like the San Diego controversy before it, provides several lessons about the realities of housing reform. 

The first is that the definition of "accessory dwelling unit" is completely arbitrary. 

In Massachusetts, an ADU is a 900-square-foot home that can be one story or three stories, depending on the town and zoning district it's being built in. 

In Montana, it's a 1,000-square-foot unit. In California, state law can require localities to allow ADUs as large as 1,200 square feet. Under certain conditions, these ADUs can even be sold separately from the main house. 

At a certain point, an accessory dwelling unit is just a dwelling unit. A house is a house. 

The second lesson is that any ADU reform that is actually intended to produce new housing units is going to cause controversy.  

State and local laws allowing ADUs have been one of the more common forms of housing reforms to pass. 

Supply-boosters see them as a way to get a modest number of new units. Supply skeptics don't see much to object to about allowing someone to install a kitchenette and bathroom in their garage.  

If the ADU regulations don't allow much more than the garage conversion, supply-boosters will be disappointed and push for expansions of the law. California passed dozens of ADU laws before they started enabling actual units to be built. 

If an ADU law actually allows more homes, the ADUs will look like homes, and the supply skeptics will be mad. 

No amount of branding or planning will resolve the inherent conflict of some people wanting more development while others oppose it in their neighborhoods. 

Thus far, Massachusetts' ADU law has been modestly productive. The state's ADU survey reports that 2,048 ADU permits have been issued since the state law went into effect in January 2025. About half of those units are attached ADUs (think the garage with the kitchenette). 

That's a little under 10 percent of Massachusetts total housing production during that time, per the Census Bureau's building permit survey.  

At 50 units permitted, Somerville has actually approved the second most ADUs of any jurisdiction in the state. (Boston has only approved 49.) 

But now that it's facing the prospect of allowing ADUs that look like actual homes, it's starting to get cold feet about the new law. 

Quick Links

• Speaking of Massachusetts, the town of Marblehead (of "are we kind of being pricks?" fame) has at last had its rezoning plan, which allows apartments in more districts, accepted by state officials. 
• While Spain is tightening its tenant protections and rent controls in the face of housing protests, Portugal is trying to remove regulations on its rental housing industry. Either way, housing protesters are clashing with police. 
• Single-family homebuilder confidence continues to drop. 
• The Urban Institute has a new white paper on whether data center development is coming at the expense of housing development. 
• A new report on home construction in Chicago finds that the practice of aldermanic privilege (where individual aldermen can veto projects in their district) is strangling development. 

The post ADU Nihilism appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Jackdaw gasfield announcement signals UK’s commitment to North Sea industry but undermines green credentials

• What does the approval of the Jackdaw gasfield mean?

The Jackdaw gasfield will be given the go-ahead on Wednesday, signalling Andy Burnham’s commitment to the North Sea fossil fuel industry and threatening to trigger a row with climate campaigners and Labour MPs.

Miatta Fahnbulleh and John Healey, the energy secretary and chancellor respectively, will make the announcement from Aberdeen on Wednesday morning after more than a year of deliberations over whether doing so would violate the UK’s climate commitments.

• Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, is leaving, Meta confirmed to Business Insider.
• Kaplan, a Republican who once worked for the Bush administration, spent 15 years at Meta.
• Kaplan helped bridge ties between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and President Donald Trump.

A longtime political operative at Meta who played a key role in bridging ties between the company and President Donald Trump's administration is leaving.

Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, will leave after the midterm elections and a transition period, Axios first reported. Meta confirmed the report to Business Insider.

A veteran Marine Corps artillery officer, Kaplan is a Republican who served as an advisor and deputy chief of staff to former president George W. Bush.

Kaplan joined Meta in 2011. At Meta, he oversaw the company's response to policy issues ranging from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the end of its fact-checking program.

Kaplan helped repair a once-fraught relationship between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Trump after Meta temporarily suspended Trump's account following the January 6 riot.

Kaplan posted on X on Tuesday that he plans to spend time with his family and figure out what to do next.

Kaplan didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Kaplan has served as Meta's chief global affairs officer since 2025, succeeding former UK politician Nick Clegg. Other Meta executives will share his responsibilities, Axios reported.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

GOP lawmakers threaten to pull support for president’s agenda after Russia diesel deal and sanctions pause

• US politics live – latest updates

A handful of Republicans have spoken out against Donald Trump’s softening stance on Russia, threatening to pull financial support for his agenda over his “embarrassing” handling of the Ukraine war.

Don Bacon, an outgoing congressman in Nebraska, condemned Trump’s actions – which include a stunning agreement to buy Russian diesel and the pausing of sanctions on Moscow – as “absolutely disgraceful” and accused the US president of cozying up to a “war criminal” in Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart.

GOP lawmakers threaten to pull support for president’s agenda after Russia diesel deal and sanctions pause

• US politics live – latest updates

A handful of Republicans have spoken out against Donald Trump’s softening stance on Russia, threatening to pull financial support for his agenda over his “embarrassing” handling of the Ukraine war.

Don Bacon, an outgoing congressman in Nebraska, condemned Trump’s actions – which include a stunning agreement to buy Russian diesel and the pausing of sanctions on Moscow – as “absolutely disgraceful” and accused the US president of cozying up to a “war criminal” in Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart.

Protests rarely remain confined to the grievances that first bring people into the streets. When the citizens believe their concerns are being ignored, a grievance over a particular policy or administrative decision can evolve into a broader challenge to the political authority. Consequently, what begins as a demand for correction becomes a question of accountability. […]

The post In Delhi or Paris, restoring order cannot replace public trust appeared first on Asia Times.

Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come, by Charles Kupchan, Yale University Press, 328 pages, $32.50

In popular rendering, international politics since 1945 has been shaped by the so-called "liberal order." Led by the United States, a bundle of international institutions, rules, and norms intended to limit interstate competition and facilitate cooperation were widely embraced, contributing (per this narrative) to a peaceful and prosperous world. Today, that system seems to be breaking down, leaving policymakers, pundits, and scholars grappling with what a future order should entail and how this system should be orchestrated.

Rivers of ink have already flowed in service of this foundational question. To the mix we can now add Charles Kupchan's Bringing Order to Anarchy. Kupchan, a professor of government at Georgetown University and a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, is interested in both how the present crisis of order arrived and what should be done about it—as he puts it, "How did we get here?" and "What do we do now?" In his telling, we arrived at this moment because of the diffusion of power abroad, combined with shifts in domestic priorities among key members of the post-1945 order (especially the United States). The post-1945 order, he concludes, is thus irredeemably broken.

Going forward in what he sees as an increasingly multipolar world, Kupchan advocates a "global system of concerts" modeled on the Concert of Europe—the international order established after the Napoleonic wars. His proposed system would prioritize relations among the great powers, creating "informal and flexible steering groups" that would emphasize "building consensus, establishing lateral lines of authority across power centers, and providing top down governance." In practice, influence and authority would devolve to different regions, within which local great powers would play leading roles in shaping regional affairs. Meanwhile, the great powers would meet as part of a global concert, sitting atop regional orders as a kind of deconfliction and organizing body.

The most welcome contribution here is Kupchan's call to accept the end of the post-1945 order and to work within the constraints of a new distribution of power. For all that policymakers and analysts recognize that change is needed, the debate over the future of international order tends to focus on preserving whatever elements of the existing order we can. It also tends to attribute the need for change to shifts in U.S. domestic politics. Kupchan, on the other hand, helpfully reminds us that order depends first and foremost on the distribution of power. States, after all, are the building blocks of any international system, just as relative power affects both what they want and their options for pursuing their interests. The creation and maintenance of an order therefore hinges on whether it broadly reflects the distribution of power, allowing states to get some of what they want, through means most can accept.

It follows that pronounced shifts in the distribution of power require adjustments in the larger system. The greater the shift, the greater the change. And since the power shift underway today is foundational—with China emerging as a peer competitor to the United States, American power in relative decline, and power diffusing away from the West (broadly conceived)—it would be extremely foolhardy to try to preserve an order created at a very different historical moment. With a new distribution of power, Kupchan recognizes, a new system is required. Hard stop.

Still, Kupchan's call for creating a concert to replace the extant order is not entirely convincing. Two problems stand out.

First, the very same power shifts that require change to the current system leave the efficacy of the concert approach open to question. If great powers are to play the leading role in a concert system, it matters both which states constitute the great powers and how their relative power compares to one another. But amid a power shift, these are the very issues that are likely to be intensely contested, if not fundamentally uncertain. It's inauspicious for the envisioned concert, for instance, that scholars of international politics cannot agree whether the world today is unipolar, multipolar, bipolar, or something else altogether. Absent some baseline understanding of the distribution of power, it is difficult to see how a concert would form, gain buy-in, and operate successfully. 

Kupchan's invocation of the Concert of Europe itself alludes to the problem. It is no accident that the Concert formed only after 25 years of warfare clarified the European distribution of power, and waned as power shifted (due heavily to the emergence of Germany). Nevertheless, Kupchan doesn't seriously engage with this core requirement for a concert model when he makes the case for a concert today. The result is a tension between the book's underlying logic and its top-line policy prescription.

Second, and relatedly, it is not completely clear what the concert's remit would actually entail. On one hand, Kupchan argues that the "Global Concert would be a consultative body, not a decision-making one"; it would "tee up decisions that could be taken and implemented" by other ordering bodies. Yet Kupchan also notes that a key virtue of concerts writ large is their ability to "lower the bar to reaching and abiding by agreements"; similarly, he calls for concert diplomacy that would set up "bespoke steering groups to tackle specific challenges," particularly in security affairs. This suggests something grander than a consultative body. "Reaching and abiding by agreements" and setting up ad hoc fora to tackle specific challenges are decisions. Indeed, even "teeing up" ideas and decisions that could be tackled by subordinate international institutions and structures is a kind of decision. 

One gets the sense that Kupchan is not totally comfortable with the implications of his own reasoning. If new great powers are emerging and are poised to dominate international politics, and if these states are to coordinate with one another in small group settings, it seems likely that the concert would be a decision-making body. Alternatively, if the concert is to truly function as a consultative body, it is unclear why new great powers eager to assert influence over the international agenda would sign up and give credence to this exercise.

Beyond the logic of the concert system itself, no review of Bringing Order to Anarchy would be complete without some reflection on the volume's discussion of U.S. politics. The book contains a lengthy list of proposed domestic changes, including calls to encourage civility, forge bipartisan consensus, put the U.S. fiscal house in order, and avoid ideological excesses at home. No doubt many readers would agree with these recommendations. Still, it is not really clear what these proposals do to advance Kupchan's core arguments. Rather than directly affecting the creation or operation of a concert order, the domestic challenges he wants to remedy act as constraints on U.S. power: They impede the translation of U.S. material capabilities into international influence. Accordingly, a concert system could operate even with a domestically dazed and confused United States—the U.S. would simply be a less effective participant. Changing the domestic status quo may be a good thing, but it is not central to the mission of explaining what a future international order entails. The book's domestic discussion ends up being an odd discursion.

Still, this is an important book. In calling for casting the former order aside, Kupchan brings needed clarity to a meandering discussion. By the same token, it is very useful to bring insights from the Concert of Europe into the policy conversation. Whatever gaps there might be in its ideas about the logic and operation of a concert system—or the relationship of domestic politics to a concert—the book raises a new set of options, and that in itself is a valuable contribution to the discussion.

The post After the International 'Liberal Order' appeared first on Reason Magazine.

RAF Typhoon fighters to fly defensive missions over cities and infrastructure in extension of UK support for Riyadh

RAF Typhoon fighters are to be used in efforts to protect Saudi Arabia from attack by Yemen’s Houthis, flying protective missions over the country’s cities and critical infrastructure as western allies increase their intervention in the escalating conflict.

The operation – the most significant military mission signed off by Andy Burnham as prime minister – will involve RAF pilots attempting to shoot down Houthi missiles and drones, which attacked Saudi airports and oil facilities.