Congress

The missiles and bombs may have stopped, at least for the moment, but the war between the US and Iran continues. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the US sanctions remain in place, and the fundamental issues separating the combatants remain unresolved. The bilateral negotiations have gone nowhere, and the two sides remain far apart. This stalemate has puzzled observers since it’s not hard to see the outlines of a deal. For Iran, the minimum acceptable goal is regime survival. For the US, it is the end of the Iranian nuclear program, which poses an existential threat to America’s regional partners and, eventually, to Europe and South Asia. Since the

President Trump lavished praise upon King Charles from the Oval Office at the outset of his four-day state visit to the United States. He called the monarch “a man of class” and said “it’s great to have a king in here”. A conspicuous absence of “No Kings” protests in the presence of a real king had not gone unnoticed. But it was Charles’s address to a joint session of Congress that was eagerly awaited on both sides of the Atlantic. His most substantial public speech since he acceded the throne in September 2022, there was a good deal riding on its success. His mother had addressed Congress in May 1991.

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.

Is there a plausible legal basis for going to war with Iran? Senate Democrats say no, and late yesterday forced a vote on a war powers resolution to bring the hostilities to a halt. It failed along largely partisan lines, 53-47, but Democrats say they intend to bring it up again, citing widening public disapproval of the war. “We have created a catastrophe in the Middle East,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, who sponsored the resolution. “This is what you get when you put talk show hosts and real estate developers in charge of national security.” The Trump administration has made it plain that providing a legal justification

Mark Twain famously wrote that “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, and similar rumors have proliferated about King Charles’s state visit to the United States not taking place as a direct result of the ongoing conflict in Iran. Dubiously-informed sources have suggested either that Charles himself is so personally offended by the outbreak of war that he has refused to head to America in a month’s time, or alternatively that the British government, smarting from the tongue-lashings that President Trump has handed out to the hapless Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, have suggested that it would be a bad idea for the trip to go ahead at this

We know the terrible details of how congressional staffer Regina Santos-Aviles, 35, died. She poured gasoline on herself and then flicked the flame on a lighter – a mad decision she instantly regretted. “Please send help. It hurts so bad,” she screamed at the 911 dispatcher. “Oh my God, I don’t want to die.” She tried to smother the flames by rolling on the ground of her backyard in Texas and crawling to a faucet to extinguish them with water. But it was too late. A medical examiner found that the only part of her body not scorched by flames were the soles of her feet.  Thanks to a police

America needs Donald Trump, badly. He is the bull in the china shop that every nation needs from time to time. He is testing his country’s constitution to destruction as well as its relations with the outside world. Such tests hasten the necessity of reform. The only question is how long will it take for reform to catch up and overcome him, as it surely will. Constitutional chaos may then break loose after midterms. This is America’s great opportunity In January alone Trump toppled the leader of Venezuela, mooted the conquest of Greenland and a 100 percent tariffs on Canada, insulted the British army and killed Americans protesting his immigration

Kat Abughazaleh is one of those influencers who – unnervingly – seem to pop out of nowhere fully formed. There was a stint at Media Matters – which in many ways pioneered the modern industry in “disinformation”-watchdogging, political fact-checking and “studying the far right” – where she made short-form videos taking the fight to people like Tucker Carlson. After the 2024 election Abughazaleh, now 26, was one of several youthful activists who called for the destruction of the “gerontocracy” in the Democratic party. She is now a candidate for Illinois’s 9th congressional district, after first issuing a primary challenge to 81-year-old Representative Jan Schakowsky. “I just couldn’t watch it anymore. I

Lost in the hysterical media bleating about a new criminal investigation into Jerome Powell is any attempt to report fairly on his alleged transgressions. The singular lens through which the investigation is being reported in many openly and not-so-openly left leaning outlets is that it is Donald Trump’s revenge after Powell refused to do as instructed and lower interest rates But the aperture needs to be widened to see the full picture: the case is about more than the Chair of the Federal Reserve not bending the knee. It is about Powell’s competency as the nation’s chief money man after presiding over the central bank’s vast and scandalous renovation project

The president Trump stood at a White House lectern and angrily listed his accomplishments

The Crown has punished him – it does not need Washington’s intervention

The Delegate from the US Virgin Islands beat a censuring attempt after it was revealed she’d been emailing Epstein during a congressional hearing

Being summoned by the House Oversight Committee is one of many embarrassing details around the ex-prince’s downfall