America

In August, the President of the United States declared a crime ‘emergency’ in my home town of Washington D.C. Donald Trump rules by declaring ‘emergencies’ where they don’t exist, but this was a new one. An emergency compared to what? The year I bought my condo, 1992, saw 443 homicides ina city of around half a million people; last year, there were only 190 out of almost 700,000. I say ‘only’ because we’ve become so used to a murder rate 20 times that of London that we somehow managed to ignore it. That, of course, was an option only for white residents – unless you were dumb enough (as I

President Donald Trump dozed off during his cabinet meeting on Tuesday. Who could blame him? Listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio drone on about Russia would prompt souls less hardy than Trump to catch some shuteye. What should be keeping Trump awake, or at least uneasy, is the shaky state of the American economy. The federal government may not be releasing much data, but the payroll processing company ADP is reporting that private employers cut 32,000 jobs last month. The losses were heavily concentrated among small employers who have been slammed by Trump’s capricious tariff policy. The only positive sign has been in the data centre industry, where investments

Doge has been Doge’d. Elon Musk’s once fearsome US Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) has been shut down eight months before its contract officially ends in July 2026. What was supposed to be an organisation that exploded traditional ways of running the federal government has turned into a damp squib. Doge was established by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Headed by Tesla chief Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who resigned early on to run for governor of Ohio), it struck the kind of fear into government bureaucrats that a visit from the Red Guards might instill during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Musk’s minions rampaged

Volodymyr Zelensky is meeting US officials today for the first time since the news of a US-Russia peace plan for Ukraine emerged yesterday. The Ukrainian president, fresh from a trip to Turkey, is due to meet with the American army chiefs Dan Driscoll and General Randy George – the most senior Pentagon representatives to visit Ukraine since Donald Trump’s return to the White House – who are in the country on a ‘fact-finding’ mission. The purpose of the meeting is for Trump’s representatives to discuss ‘efforts to end the war’. While the agenda has not been made public, it is highly likely the trio will discuss the new 28-point peace plan,

With fresh wind in his sails after his success brokering a somewhat fragile peace in Gaza, Donald Trump has once again turned his attention back to Ukraine. According to reports, the US President’s team has secretly been working on drafting a new plan to end the war. Concerningly, though, once again that confidential plan is being hashed out with Russia – without any input from Ukraine or its European allies. Details of the plan are, as yet, scant – although a report by Axios suggests that it will be made up of 28 points falling under four rough headings: peace in Ukraine, security guarantees for the country, security in Europe

This may not be the conclusion Israel imagined when it launched its campaign in Gaza. Not all the hostage bodies are home. Hamas is bruised, but not broken. The region remains volatile. Yet even as combat continues, the United Nations Security Council, backed by an American administration long assumed to be ‘pro-Israel’, yesterday endorsed a resolution that places an armed international force in Gaza, sketches a vague pathway to Palestinian statehood, and outlines a governing arrangement in which neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority is central. For Israel this is a moment of profound uncertainty – a reminder that military operations, however successful, do not automatically dictate the shape of

No sooner did Democrats in the American Senate reach a deal to end the federal government shutdown than a frenzy of liberal pearl clutching ensued. The Democrats should have held out longer, they argued. Healthcare subsidies could have been rescued. Donald Trump’s approval ratings were plunging. Golly, maybe the Democrats could even have driven the dreaded Trump from office? Jonathan Chait’s verdict in the Atlantic was not untypical: ‘Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake.’ Don’t believe a word of it. The surprising thing isn’t that Democrats folded. It’s that they held out as long as they did. In the end, the moderate Democratic Senators, ranging from Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman