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If you follow the courts, you will certainly have come across Olympus Spa v. Armstrong. On March 12, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied rehearing en banc in this case, which began in 2020 when a transgender woman in Washington State alleged that a traditional Korean spa, which requires patrons to be entirely naked, refused her (or is it him?) entry because she (he?) had not yet undergone so-called gender-affirming surgery.
Pam Bondi’s departure as attorney general has prompted the usual Kremlinologist speculation. One theory has it that Donald Trump was furious that she may have warned Democrat Eric Swalwell about a planned FBI release of documents detailing his past relationship with a Chinese spy. Bondi’s replacement, Todd Blanche, dismissed these claims as false. Another theory is that the President had finally had enough of her errors over the handling of the Epstein files, given Bondi was recently subpoenaed in a bipartisan effort by the House. And Trump is widely reported to be frustrated at her failure to indict his archenemies, former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Those who are sympathetic to MAGA will have their own reasons for being unhappy with Bondi.
The hawthorn hedges are white with blossom; the countryside looks set for a wedding. Even in the small garden of my hospital, spring is inescapable. Cherry and magnolia bloom. Viburnum scents the air, young leaves come to the trees. Hospitals are where most lives begin, and where many end. Hospices shepherd only a small minority of deaths, about one in 20, often those of the middle aged whose diseases are more predictable. Frailty is less orderly, and the fitful hazards of age bring many to the general wards where I work. More of us die in hospital than anywhere else. What sort of spring wakes the hedgerows and the weeds, but not my boy? In the Emergency Department I met the woman who became my wife.
President Trump has now told us something very important about the war with Iran. Ponder his address to the nation this week and you discover how he defines victory. Nothing that happens from here on out will change that. As Trump sees it, he is the winner, having achieved all his goals. He has accomplished regime change in Iran by eliminating the men who led the regime when the war started. America has so damaged the country’s military infrastructure that it will not be able to produce or deliver a nuclear weapon for at least a decade, by which time it will be up to a future American president to take the needed action. So, no need to cart away or destroy Iran’s enriched uranium.
The surprising thing isn’t that Donald Trump fired his attorney general Pam Bondi and appointed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche her temporary successor. It’s that he waited as long as he did. After exercising what is for him unusual restraint – his cabinet was in a state of perpetual upheaval during his first term as president – Trump is going on a firing spree. "He’s very angry, and he’s going to be moving people," one top administration official told Politico yesterday. Next on the chopping block could be a host of Trump loyalists – Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Remer, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – whom the President has found wanting.
And there you have it. Britain is a country where a musician who says "Heil Hitler" gets to headline festivals while a musician who plays with a Jew from Israel gets canceled. Threaten to go "death con 3 on Jewish people" and you’ll be grand. Jam with a Jewish person and you’re toast. Selling T-shirts adorned with the swastika? No problem. Doing a duet with someone from the Jewish state? Don’t even think about it. In the eyes of the keffiyeh-smothered windbags of the cultural elite, praising the Nazi monster who exterminated millions of Jews is a more forgivable moral error than hanging out with a Jew from Israel That was my first thought upon reading that Kanye West will headline all three nights of the Wireless festival in London's Finsbury Park in July.
More like Pam Gone-di! President Trump this afternoon confirmed that Attorney General Pam Bondi would be moving on to pastures new. In a Truth Social post announcing her dismissal, Trump called Bondi a “Great American Patriot and a loyal friend” who “did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900.” “We love Pam,” wrote Trump. Deputy AG Todd Blanche, who Trump dubbed, “a very talented and respected Legal Mind,” will serve as Acting Attorney General. Bondi was Trump’s second choice as AG after his attempt to nominate Matt Gaetz failed. She will now “be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector.” Is there no justice in the world?
As the Artemis II mission thundered into the sky last night, a full moon rose above Cape Canaveral. It was no coincidence: the timing of the lift-off was ordained by lighting requirements and the mechanics of the Moon's orbit. The mission set off not in the direction of the Moon, but towards where the Moon will be in five days’ time when the spacecraft swings around it in what is called a "free-return trajectory." The crew of four are the first in almost 54 years to go to the Moon. In a way, things have not changed so much since then.
In his nationwide address on Wednesday, Donald Trump could not have been clearer about the course of the Iran war. It’s not ending any time soon and there will be no deescalation of military force. Instead, channeling his inner General Curtis LeMay, Trump announced, “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong.” No, they don’t. It was a jarring reference to an ancient and proud Persian civilization that has been commandeered by a gang of thugs.
“Ceasefire!” Some people worried that President Trump was taking to the air waves tonight in order to declare a ceasefire with Iran. That, clearly, was what Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran hoped for in his careful, lengthy and mendacious “Letter to the American People” today. Pezeshkian said that “portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present-day observable facts.” Tell that to the hundreds of American victims of Iranian aggression. Tell it to the thousands of victims of Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas. President Trump was having none of it.
For the first time in memory – and perhaps in history – an American president has attended a Supreme Court argument in person. I recall attorney general Robert Kennedy attending an argument back when I was a law clerk in the early 1960s. But I have seen no record of presidential attendance. Not that there is anything wrong with that, even if it was intended to convey the president’s strong belief in his side of the argument. Any fear that President Trump’s presence would influence the justices was immediately belied by the nature of the justices’ questions – which suggested some hostility to the Solicitor General’s argument limiting birthright citizenship.
Donald Trump has yet again raised the prospect of the United States leaving NATO. The President called the alliance a "paper tiger" and said he "was never swayed by NATO." It is tempting to dismiss it as political theater. But this time feels different. Trump’s frustration with European allies has sharpened, particularly over their reluctance to back his approach to Iran, where the absence of a clear political end-state has made support difficult to sustain. That hesitation has deepened transatlantic irritation. Combined with tensions over Greenland and Denmark, this is no longer an abstract complaint about burden-sharing but an accumulation of grievances. What once sounded like brinkmanship now carries the weight of intent.
Prince Harry used to be fun. It is easy to forget this given the Meghan-Montecito-highly litigious incarnation of the Duke of Sussex, but there was a reason why, for many years, he was the most popular and accessible member of “the Firm.” Less stiff than his brother and considerably less cerebral than his father, he conveyed a sense that he was Harry Wales, the royal you’d want to go for a pint with. Or, as we now know, to have “movie snuggles” with journalists, with whom he could complain about being “hungover again for the third day running.
Maybe a tad prematurely for a term that ends only in 2029, the Trump Organization has released a short video on Truth Social revealing, with a dizzying CGI fly-throughs, proposals for the Donald J. Trump presidential library. Any great memorial should be both surprising and inevitable. The Donald J. Trump presidential library is neither, being woefully predictable in its crassness and feeble as a design It’s not about Making America Literate Again: there’s not a book in sight. I could not even see a reference to Trump’s own great contribution to world literature: The Art of the Deal. By contrast, the Ptolemies’ great library in Alexandria had perhaps 700,000 papyrus rolls. But that was there-and-then and POTUS 47 is nothing if not here-and-now.
Donald Trump, who will deliver an address from the Oval Office tonight, isn’t giving up on his aims for his war in the Middle East. This time his target isn’t Iran but NATO. "You don’t even have a navy," he declared about Britain before going on to denounce the North Atlantic alliance. "I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way," Trump told Britain's Daily Telegraph. There hasn’t been such a loony interview since Kaiser Wilhelm II created an international furor in 1908 in the same paper by denouncing the English as "mad, mad, mad as March hares" for their alleged hostility to Germany.
On February 28, I jumped on a fishing charter with some friends and headed out into the Strait of Hormuz. There was barely any wind. The sea shimmered in the heat of the Gulf sunshine. On the very first drop of our lines, something hit my metal jig and went off like a rocket. After a couple more brief runs, a very stout, double-figure grouper rose through the water column, which I guided safely into the waiting net. It was a personal-best hamour (The Arab word for grouper), weighing between 10 and 12 pounds. I went on to catch a few interesting tropical fish, including a snapper, but I didn’t recognize most of them. It was on our journey back to the Abu Dhabi port that things changed.
The longer the war in Iran churns on, the President Trump’s frustration grows. On Tuesday, Trump was lambasting Washington’s European allies on Truth Social for sitting on their hands and refusing to lift a finger to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf chokepoint through which around 20 percent of the world’s crude oil passes. Calling out the United Kingdom specifically, Trump went on to scold the allies much as a parent would tell a lazy 28 year-old to get out of the house. “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” Trump wrote.
Freddy Gray is joined by Jacob Heilbrunn, Americano regular and editor of the National Interest. They discuss the Strait of Hormuz, rising energy prices and whether the US can extricate itself from a conflict it may not be able to win – and whether we're watching the end of Trumpism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
We don’t know what the end of the Chagos affair will be, but it is rapidly spinning into farce. The latest brickbat is an immensely awkward judgment delivered today by Justice Lewis KC, Chief Justice of the British Indian Ocean Territory (as well as the Falklands and the British Antarctic Territory). The judgment finds that a 2004 administrative order passed by Tony Blair's British government to take away the native Chagossians’ right of abode could not do that. It also found that the government’s consistent practice since then of simply denying the Chagossians’ right to land on their own homeland is illegal.
Easter is almost here – and Canada’s Liberal government has chosen this sacred season to display its utter contempt for Christianity. It is currently forcing through the outrageous Bill C-9, which could make it a hate crime to quote from sections of the Bible. The Liberal government has laid the foundations for religious persecutions More than 40 civil and religious groups had asked that for the Bill’s language be clarified and its scope more carefully defined so that religious texts would not be subject to hate crime legislation. But all in vain. After a hot debate in the House of Commons, the Liberals highhandedly ended a Conservative filibuster and fast-tracked the bill.
Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been restricted during the ongoing war with Iran, which has repeatedly targeted built-up civilian areas including Jerusalem. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco Ielpo, Custos of the Holy Land, were prevented from accessing the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, the day when Christians mark Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.
Over the last 24 hours, President Trump has come up with a bewildering series of "solutions" to the global oil crisis triggered by his war with Iran. He might seize all of the country's oil wells. He may send the marines in to capture its main exporting hub, Kharg Island. He has threatened to bomb the country back to the Stone Age if it doesn’t re-open the Straits of Hormuz, while at the same time – apparently – he is very close to a "fantastic deal" that will settle the entire conflict. But will these threats work? Can Trump keep a lid on the unfolding crisis? Crucially, the markets are not listening to him anymore – and the price of oil keeps rising.
As Trump contemplates a ground operation in Iran, he will be reckoning with the ghosts of previous western "excursions" in the region, as he recently labeled this war. History suggests three endgames for his intervention in Iran are plausible. First, a hasty deal on terms that aggrandize and empower Iran, creating an American equivalent to Britain’s Suez Crisis. Second, a protracted struggle which becomes structurally reminiscent of the Iraq War. Third, a dramatic escalation which achieves Iranian surrender quickly and cleanly. The bad news for Trump is that the outcome he seeks, number three, is the one without real precedent. In the first scenario, Trump makes a deal on terms that flatter Iran.
The Secretary of War is the face of America’s campaign against Iran. "War is hell, and always will be," Pete Hegseth said recently. He is relentlessly focused on lethality, and decimating the Iranian military. His critics correctly point out that this isn’t strategic thinking, this is a strategy of tactics. Hegseth’s metrics of success appear to be counting sorties flown, ordnance dropped and missiles destroyed. This criticism has been leveled at American strategy makers throughout modern history. During the Vietnam war, the metric of choice was body count. During the global war on terror it was Taliban commanders killed. The difference this time is that these decisions are being made in a hyperconnected battlefield.
As the Islamist regime in Iran attacks Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bahrain and Kuwait with drones and missiles, some in the west are quietly happy to see the Gulf’s skyscrapers lose their shine. "Dubai has no culture or history," say the armchair critics. When it comes to measures of wealth preservation, attracting millionaires, rule of law, social safety, artificial intelligence adaptation and combating Islamist radicalism, the UAE comes out far ahead of many western countries. But we can’t acknowledge this, so we insinuate our snootiness is about culture, history, risks and future stability. The snobs are wrong. We insinuate our snootiness towards Dubai is about culture, history, risks and future stability.
Denmark is, by almost any measure, an extraordinary success. A nation of six million that has produced Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Vestas and Lego. Its GDP per capita is comfortably ahead of Sweden and Finland. Greater Copenhagen (including Swedish Lund and Malmö) is ranked among Europe's top innovation clusters. Danish film culture – Bier, Vinterberg, the Borgen phenomenon – has convinced the world that Denmark has solved democracy, one subtitled thriller at a time. Copenhagen airport is the undisputed transport hub of the Nordic region. Denmark remains among the very happiest societies on earth, according to the latest World Happiness Report.
Since the launch of Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, Israeli and US strikes have thinned out Tehran’s political, military and security elite with a series of decapitation strikes. As the Trump administration seeks to explore diplomacy with the remnants of the Iranian regime, a core group of hardened men remain. The new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has been injured and hasn’t appeared in public. Surrounding him are a group of influential Islamic Republic loyalists. They include parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf; the new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr; military advisor to the Supreme Leader Mohsen Rezaei, and commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Ahmad Vahidi.
“See you in Valhalla” is how Kash Patel said farewell to Charlie Kirk. Unfortunately, it now seems that Patel’s own sanctum has now been breached. Iran-aligned hackers have broken into the FBI director’s personal email inbox and released the contents online. What did they leak? The un-redacted Epstein files? The truth behind the Kennedy assassination? Not quite. None of the 300 purloined emails were even sent during Patel’s time at the FBI. The hackers, no doubt cackling manically while doing so, instead released according to the Guardian: a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum. Take that!
The Heritage Foundation’s tech policy team has endorsed European-style age verification laws for social media, likening them to alcohol and tobacco age restrictions. This is a comparison worth taking seriously – just not in the way Heritage intends.Walk into a bar, and a bouncer checks your ID. In about 15 seconds, you’re inside. That’s it. Online age verification would be a very different experience, requiring the collection, storage and verification of sensitive personal documents at scale. This is a breach of privacy and free expression for adults. It also puts minors – a population 35 to 51 times more likely than adults to fall victim to identity theft – at risk.
Granted, I was not the most obvious person to appreciate the installation of Sarah Mullally in Canterbury, even though I think her a splendid Christian pastor and indeed, an exemplary Christian. Her kind, homely face radiates charity and good will; the simplicity of her speech speaks of sincerity. But as a bolshie Catholic, it’s not possible to spend long in Canterbury cathedral during this very Anglican celebration without the subversive thought surfacing that this cathedral is, by rights, Catholic, the Reformation being an unfortunate blip in the great scheme of things.
Will America’s ground invasion of Iran begin in the early hours of tomorrow? Everybody knows, by now, that Trump likes to initiate action late on Fridays, after the markets close. And late last night, the so-called Pentagon Pizza Watch channel – which monitors late-night food orders from the Pentagon for evidence that something big is afoot – reported a surge of activity, leading to all sorts of prediction-market bets that a new military operation would start this weekend. Of course, with so much money to be made on war gambling – there’s now a Polymarket "situation room" bar in Washington, DC – the odds of someone trying to dupe the markets are short.
On April 4, NATO will be 77 years old. The chance that America will be counted among the celebrants when the birthday celebrations roll around is somewhere between nil and zero. President Trump had long predicted that if America needed help, NATO would not come to its aid, even though, as he sees it, the United States has spent billions of dollars over decades defending Europe from Russian aggression. And when America did need help in the war against Iran – a few mine sweepers, please, sirs – the answer "no" came back in several languages.
Last month, Ana Kasparian, executive producer of the progressive YouTube channel The Young Turks (6.5 million subs), tweeted out “Hey, bitch, the goyim are waking the fuck up. Deal with it.” Ana, like many other chronically online leftists, has been making increasingly obsessive anti-Israel content since October 7. So obsessive, in fact, that it led Jillian Michaels, a co-host of Ana’s panel show Her Take, to storm off set in the middle of production saying “I don’t know how every show ends up being about ‘how do we bash Israel?’ This is not for me, I am not interested in this.” “MAGA communist” influencer Jackson Hinkle likes to use the same phrase as Kasparian with his millions of followers. Examples include, “Goyim, do not complain.
Donald Trump likes to use the phrase “go big or go home” to describe his political strategy. It looks as though the US President is about to stress test its efficacy as he weighs dispatching another 10,000 troops to the Middle East, a move that would further embroil him in the widely unpopular war in Iran. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 74 percent of Americans are opposed to a ground war against Iran. Small wonder. The prospect of an American Gallipoli is hardly going to inspire support for a war of choice in the Middle East, one that Trump embarked upon without inspiring any backing in the first place. Instead, he sailed into it without congressional approval. Now he’s running aground.