America

As Hurricane Milton battered Florida last week, Kamala Harris did her best to look and sound presidential. The Vice President hosted a live broadcast with the leadership of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She then called into CNN, live, to reassure Americans that her administration was tackling the crisis. The message was meant to be clear: she’s got this.  Alas, Joe Biden also wanted to show that he’s in charge and that muddled matters. On Friday, the actual Commander-in-Chief gave an emergency press conference about the disaster from the White House briefing room, which rather overshadowed Harris’s big rally that day in the critical swing state of Michigan.  Joe and

Hurricane Milton has left more than two million homes and businesses in Florida without power and threatens to be a mortal threat for those in its path. But for some, the hurricane also appears to a very large stick with which to beat Florida governor Ron DeSantis for scrapping the state’s climate change goals. DeSantis’ detractors have to explain how a plan to achieve 100 per cent green energy by 2050 will keep Florida’s residents safe from hurricanes A bill, which DeSantis signed in May, removed climate change as a priority in state energy policy and cut the word ‘climate’ from several pieces of state legislation. It banned offshore wind turbines and

‘Astronomical’; the ‘strongest storm in a century’; ‘nearing the mathematical limit for a storm’ – the increasingly fraught descriptions of Hurricane Milton are coming through thick and fast even before it has struck Florida. But how strong is Milton really? The hurricane has been recorded as a category five hurricane – the highest classification – with maximum wind speeds of 180 mph. But it is still out to sea. By the time it makes landfall at the end of the week it is forecast to fall to category three. As for the ‘strongest storm in a century’, it may turn out to be the strongest hurricane to hit Tampa Bay

Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast interview with Vice President Kamala Harris was largely a love-in. But when you have been actively avoiding the media for the majority of your presidential campaign, even the most innocuous of questions can accidentally bite. ‘You don’t do too many long-form interviews,’ Cooper put to Vice President Harris at the start of their 45 minute podcast recording. ‘What made you want to do Call Her Daddy today?’  It made complete sense to kick off Harris’s ‘media blitz’ with a long interview One answer is listenership. Republican circles may scoff at the platform Cooper gives to sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, but those topics – and

To manage expectations in the run-up to last night’s debate, Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, let it be known through anonymous sources that he was nervous. He didn’t want to let Kamala Harris down.  Well, he was tense and it showed. The first question was, inevitably, about the big story of the moment, the escalating conflict in the Middle East. Walz, speaking first, fumbled. He said ‘Iran’ when he meant ‘Israel’, twice, which hardly suggested a mastery of international affairs. He then rambled through various points about the ‘fickleness’ of Donald Trump in foreign affairs. The Republican came over as straightforwardly intelligent and perceptive – the Democrat, less

London mayor Sadiq Khan, whose official day job is running the capital, is in New York this week, where he has denounced Donald Trump and urged Americans to vote for Kamala Harris. Trump would set the wrong tone for the rest of the world, Khan declared. ‘What I’d say in a respectful way to Americans is: I don’t think you realise that the rest of the world is watching because we’ve got skin in the game,’ he said. Come again? Trump would set the wrong tone for the rest of the world, Khan declared Americans are choosing a leader for their country. What the world thinks about this – least of

‘Some things are more important than staying in power,’ Joe Biden just told the United Nations, and the General Assembly broke into sustained applause. Biden left the stage clasping his hand to his chest, so touched that he had so touched the crowd.  ‘It’s your people that matter the most,’ said Biden. ‘Never forget we are here to serve the people. Not the other way around.’ It says quite a lot about the state of modern political leadership that such remarks are construed as moving insight.  Let’s try to put aside how bogus Biden’s departing shtick is. The truth, which we all know, is that he spent the best part