Global sales fall by 3% in third consecutive year of decline as distilleries scale back production or expand storage

The Scottish whisky market has slipped into a supply glut as US tariffs and falling demand weigh on the country’s distilleries.

Global scotch sales fell 3% in the first half of 2025, marking the third consecutive year of decline after decades of growth, according to the alcohol data provider IWSR.

Der Whiskey-Hersteller setzt die Produktion an seinem Stammsitz in Kentucky für das gesamte kommende Jahr aus. Medienberichten zufolge sollen eine schwächere Nachfrage und Trumps Zollpolitik das Unternehmen belasten.

Whiskey brand, owned by Japanese drinks group Suntory, to close main distillery amid tariff uncertainty

The maker of Jim Beam bourbon whiskey will halt production at its main site in Kentucky for all of 2026.

The company said in a statement it would close its distillery in Clermont until it took the “opportunity to invest in site enhancements”.

Images, undated and uncaptioned, include Nabokov lines written on woman’s body and show Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky

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• What we know so far about the Epstein files

Democrats on the House oversight committee have released a new batch of photos from the estate of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as the deadline for the justice department to release its files related to Epstein looms.

The images, released on Thursday, are undated and lack captions or context. Among them are photographs of what appear to be lines from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita written on different parts of a woman’s body.