Has President Trump discovered his “off-ramp” from the war in Iran? His administration insists that Iran’s military power has been crushed, that its already broken economy is now all but dead, and that the Islamic Republic is on its last legs, desperate to make a deal. Yet Tehran, or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard deep state
In 2006, when Usha Vance was still a college junior called Usha Chilukuri, she appeared in the “50 most beautiful people list” of the Yale student magazine, Rumpus. “The charming Chilukuri says that she doesn’t have particular preferences as far as the less fair sex is concerned,” said the article, “though she does like a
The recent DC media revelry was thwarted by a blundering assassination attempt, and in my case, a drunken challenge from journalist Jim Acosta, formerly of CNN and now Substack. He asked me to “step outside” so we could settle our differences like real men. I was eager to oblige on the sidewalk in front of
There’s been a change of mood across the country – and not one that is favorable to the GOP. Last November, the prediction markets gave Republicans a 70 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate. Now their odds have deteriorated. It looks likely that the Democrats will win both the chambers – so what’s
The Southern Poverty Law Center may not, we hope, be long for this world. The Trump administration’s new indictment has exposed the organization’s practice of funneling millions of dollars through fake bank accounts to “informants” sitting in senior positions at the very “hate groups” it claimed to monitor. Even if the SPLC survives, the criminal
Even when he’s not visiting the United States, King Charles III might occasionally daydream about what his reign would be like today if things had worked out differently 250 years ago. The King is not, of course, the head of government anywhere nowadays, and were Charles the king of America, he wouldn’t necessarily wield any
Last Saturday evening, the American media class descended for its annual jamboree of back-slapping at the Washington Hilton. Protesters outside waved signs reading “Death to tyrants” and “Death to all of them.” The atmosphere inside was more jovial. Donald Trump was attending the dinner for the first time since becoming President, along with most of
In September last year, shares in Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, plunged when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the results of an investigation into the environmental causes of autism. One of the causes discovered, RFK Jr. said, was Tylenol use by pregnant women. Studies positing a link had already been used in lawsuits
This column is about the relation between rhetoric and reality, with special reference to political violence and security. Everyone reading this knows that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was rudely interrupted by a crazed gunman. The marksman in question was Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old Cal Tech grad from Torrance, California. I say that he
It’s hard not to feel sorry for Christian Turner, the UK’s new ambassador in Washington. He’s only been in post three months, yet he’s already had to handle a string of bilateral crises – none his fault. US-UK relations are under intense strain over Iran, Ukraine and now the Falklands. And the Jeffrey Epstein stench
It’s tempting, even fashionable, to pooh-pooh the hyperbole from our tech overlords. The release in 2022 of ChatGPT, the first mass-market conversational AI system, unleashed a volley of supercilious put-downs. The chatbot was not intelligent. It was merely hallucinating, manipulating statistics, regurgitating phrases from the internet: it was a “stochastic parrot.” Well, over the next
When Apple named its next chief executive last month it did so without ceremony. Tim Cook will become executive chairman on September 1; John Ternus, his senior vice-president of hardware engineering, will succeed him as CEO. The announcement came with a photograph, not a keynote: the two men walking through Apple Park, the circular glass
These nights, sleep won’t take me. Thirty-one weeks pregnant, I’m too big to ever be comfortable. I toss; I turn; I move to the guest room in the vain hope that having a bed to myself might offer some reprieve from the fact my bones can no longer support my weight. Some time around 3 or
The Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle rolled up to a small bunker hidden in a thicket in Kharkiv oblast then stopped. Another remote-controlled vehicle had just detonated its 66lbs of explosives at the Russian bunker’s entrance, which was still smoldering. And before that a kamikaze drone had dived inside and exploded. The operator was about to
It’s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he’d been sacked just for doing his job – for stopping a thief nicking booze – and national outrage over the whole affair is still running high. Sean is on morning TV as I write, donations to pay
“Back us to stop the far right,” say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right? Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate in next week’s elections for Streatham St. Leonard’s, Lambeth, posts on her Instagram account a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David
This session of parliament is due to end between April 29 and May 6. Now the government is desperate for an Order in Council to kill it off by 9 a.m. on the 29th to avoid another painful Prime Minister’s Questions. The parliament that reassembles for the King’s Speech on May 13 could hardly, in
When Morgan McSweeney concluded his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the Peter Mandelson affair, a senior Labour figure remarked: “What really did we learn from all this? That Keir made a bad decision, wants someone else to blame and didn’t really know what was going on in his own government. Fancy that!”
During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society, who is of Palestinian descent. Mitchell says El-Jamal
In the aftermath of Péter Magyar’s victory in Hungary, while I watch people dancing in the streets as they celebrate Viktor Orbán’s dramatic ousting, I think of my Hungarian grandparents. As Holocaust survivors, they were the lucky ones, and they remained proud Hungarians to the end. They would have greeted this election with characteristic realism:
It is a truism that in a democracy the voters get the government they deserve – and so we should probably not complain too much if our next prime minister is a snaggle-toothed halfwit who presents to voters an infantile diorama drawn from fairy tales in which dancing is more important than manufacturing, people can
Many have come to Rome seeking spiritual guidance: Thomas à Becket, Lord Byron, Lionel Richie. I came for a different purpose: to defend a papal cricket trophy. I am not Catholic. And, until last year, I had never played cricket before. It all started, as many great British stories do, with a pub: the Three
It’s a year since the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that gender means biological sex – and not much has changed. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is advising the government on how to apply the judgment to law, has spent a long while drafting guidance. But last week, word arrived that Bridget Phillipson,
