America

Over the past few months, I’ve wished that almost anyone was education secretary instead of Bridget Phillipson, who seems to be on a one-woman mission to destroy thirty years of school reforms. I’ll be honest, though: by ‘anyone’, I didn’t mean Donald Trump. But this week, President Trump showed how much better he would be in the job than Phillipson, signing an executive order instructing her US counterpart, Linda McMahon, to begin dismantling the US Department of Education. If only Keir Starmer had arrived in Downing Street last July and ordered Phillipson to set about the process of doing herself out of a job. Instead, she is proving with every passing

When Donald Trump ordered the declassification of thousands of secret government documents on the assassination of president John F Kennedy, it looked like it would be a red letter day for America’s conspiracy theorists. The reality has been rather different. The JFK files – as well as other documents about the killings of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which were released on Tuesday – look like a very damp squib. These documents lead to more questions than answers Around 2,000 documents were included in the release from the US National Archives and Records Administration. But despite Trump’s insistence that the files should not be redacted, many still have passages

It may be taking him longer than the 24 hours he pledged on the campaign trail, but it appears that US President Donald Trump might be getting somewhere on halting the war between Russia and Ukraine: following a call lasting an hour and a half, he has persuaded Vladimir Putin to agree to a partial ceasefire in the conflict.  According to the statements beginning to emerge from the Kremlin and White House, the call appears to have gone well. This is despite Putin seemingly delaying the call by at leat 50 minutes, after speaking at a conference for business lobbyists in Moscow earlier in the afternoon. A classic power play

To the distress of many, Donald Trump’s senior advisor Kari Lake announced the discontinuation of federal funding for several iconic news outlets administered by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), including Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty (RFE-RL) and Voice of America.  These multi-language broadcasters are not simply remnants of the Cold War, nor are they ‘a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer’, as Lake’s disgraceful announcement puts it. The US-funded news outlets that are being effectively closed down have been key to America’s soft power in the world, especially in unfree countries.  Wait several months and RFE-RL will be effectively dead The Czech foreign minister, Jan Lipavský, whose

Tesla’s share price has halved, sales have slumped, boycotts are being organised and Chinese rivals are ready to steal the market. It has been a rough few weeks for the electric vehicle manufacturer, but Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has been handed a lifeline by Donald Trump: the US president gave his full-backing to the company by buying one of its cars. Heck, he might even have used his own money. There is just one snag: Trump’s high-profile support will make things worse for Tesla, not better. Outside the White House yesterday, Trump chose from five shiny new Teslas. A day earlier, Trump had posted on his Truth Social feed that

Has Vladimir Putin’s bluff just been called? It certainly looks like it. So long as the Ukrainians were refusing to countenance a ceasefire, then Moscow could portray them as being the obstacle to the kind of quick deal Donald Trump appears eager to conclude. Kyiv had previously floated the idea – after another unhelpful intervention from French President Emmanuel Macron – of a limited ceasefire extending just to long-range drone attacks on each others’ cities and critical infrastructure and operations on the Black Sea. But this was a non-starter that was too transparently a trap for Putin, hoping to make him look like the intransigent party if he turned it

Mark Carney has won the Liberal party leadership contest by an enormous margin. He will soon be the prime minister of Canada. It’s a moment of triumph for the former governor of the Bank of England, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, a senior banker at Goldman Sachs based in the United States, Japan and Britain, for a former shapeshifting personage of the United Nations, for a Davos regular: for one of the most ambitious, globally ambitious, guys around. It’s a repudiation of the idea that a citizen of nowhere financier type educated at Harvard and Oxford could never rise to the top in our populist age. Things are

Historically, the richest and poorest men on the planet tend to father a lot more children than the men in the middle. With the former, its because there’s so much for the spawn to inherit, hence all the aristocratic Fitzes; the latter, because so many offspring die in infancy. The men in the middle tend to look disapprovingly – not without reason, as they pay so much of the taxes the other two dodge – at both. It comes as no surprise then that plenty of people have poured scorn on the announcement by Elon Musk’s partner Shivon Zilis that the pair have welcomed the tech billionaire’s fourteenth child. A