America

It was a banner day for Donald Trump. On Thursday, at the US justice department, a long perpendicular banner with his stern visage was unfurled, proclaiming ‘Make America Safe Again’. And just across from the state department, Trump convened his shiny new Board of Peace at the former US institute of peace, which has a dove-shaped white roof. It was seized in 2025 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and renamed after Trump. ‘I had no idea,’ Trump said. But for all his disclaimers, Trump was not shy about expressing his delight at the new name that adorned the building’s entrance. A bevy of strongmen, including Vietnam’s general secretary To

The talks are still alive. Just. Iranian and US diplomats, engaging indirectly through Omani intermediaries, have yet to make any substantive progress towards a framework of understanding that governs further talks – as Kafkaesque as that might sound – but they are talking, and that is the best that the diplomats can hope for right now.  What separates Iran and America is a vast chasm between their respective red lines, and beyond that, the very substance of the talks themselves. The US is not willing to countenance an Iran that enriches uranium, has a ballistic missile programme and arms proxies throughout the region.  Iran, for its part, perhaps unwisely – as

Is the latest round of Russia-Ukraine peace talks, sponsored by the United States and currently under way in Geneva, likely to hasten the war’s end? Donald Trump seems to believe so. On Friday, the US President claimed that ‘Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelensky will have to hurry. Otherwise, he will miss a great opportunity. He needs to act.’ Europe, for its part, remains deeply sceptical and is urging Ukraine to fight on. As the EU’s Foreign Affairs chief Kaja Kallas told the Munich security conference last week, ‘the greatest threat Russia presents right now is that it gains more at the negotiation table than it has achieved

As Marco Rubio boarded his flight for Munich on Thursday night, he sought to reassure nervous Europeans that they weren’t about to be berated by America. ‘We’ll be good,’ he said. It appears the US Secretary of State kept his word when he addressed the Munich security conference this morning. Rubio kicked off his speech by harking back to 1963, the year Munich played host to the first security conference. Back then, he said, ‘the line between communism and freedom ran through the heart of Germany.’ ‘Soviet communism was on the march and thousands of years of western civilisation hung in the balance.’ Triumphing over communism had, however, allowed the

The Munich security conference started with a bang today. Breaking with tradition, German chancellor Friedrich Merz opened the conference with a punchy speech about relations between Europe and America. ‘A rift, a deep chasm, has opened up between Europe and the United States,’ he declared. ‘We need to talk,’ Merz said. ‘This is more urgent than ever.’ Proclaiming that the world had entered an era of ‘big power politics’, he painted a particularly bleak picture of global affairs. ‘The international order, as it was in its heyday, no longer exists,’ he said.  Merz called on the allies of Ukraine to do more to put pressure on Russia to end its

Investigators from the Paris prosecutor’s cyber-crime unit raided the offices of X in the French capital on Tuesday in what Elon Musk described as a ‘political attack’. The raid was part of an inquiry into whether X, which Musk has owned since 2022, has violated French law. In particular, the prosecutor’s office said it was investigating complicity ‘in possession or organised distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature…sexual deepfakes and fraudulent data extraction by an organised group’. X has denied any wrongdoing. Musk and the former chief executive of X, Linda Yaccarino, have been asked to attend hearings in April. Yaccarino, who left the company last year, echoed

Since the latest tranche of the Epstein files was released over the weekend, the people who have been most embarrassingly affected by them include Peter Mandelson, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Bill Gates. Yet inevitably, attention has turned to Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, who is emerging spectacularly poorly from the scandal. This is thanks to a series of revelations that portray her as, variously, greedy, an appalling judge of character and someone seemingly willing to figuratively pimp her children, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, while she sought to obtain the money that she craved from Epstein. Many distasteful details were revealed in the first files released last year. In the

To the question whether the Melania Trump documentary is as bad as the critics are saying, my answer would be: it depends what you’re looking for. My own view is that it’s pretty well what it is billed as: Melania’s take on Melania, with the lady herself in iron control over the direction. So, not a documentary in the normal sense, for better and worse. It’s her account of the 20 days up to and including her husband’s inauguration, with the emphasis exactly where she decides to put it. The benefit of this is that we see what she regards as important, not what other people do. She’s calling the

‘Always knew you were a nonce.’ That text, from a coworker in London, is how I learnt my name had appeared in the latest tranche of the Epstein Files. In the moments prior, I had been sweating profusely – unlike a certain former prince. I can explain. Yesterday afternoon, the US Department of Justice released three million pages of documents relating to the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex trafficker and financier. Among the documents: an email from a certain ‘Duke’ inviting him for dinner at Buckingham Palace; messages to Peter Mandelson’s husband offering to transfer £10,000; mentions of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bill Gates (all of whom