World

Donald Trump is dominating the headlines once again after he hit back furiously at reports that Russia had compromising videos of him in a Moscow hotel room. The president-elect denied the claims, branding BuzzFeed, who revealed the dossier detailing the allegations, a ‘failing piece of garbage’. So should the claims have come to light? No, says the Sun, which attacks the website for publishing the unverified allegations and in so doing making a ‘mockery of journalism’. The paper questions why the website – whose editor-in-chief admitted they could not stand up the claims – gave the go-ahead to release the information anyway. Contrasting it with attempts to ‘strangle British newspapers

During the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, American parents found politics to be a painfully embarrassing subject to discuss in front of their children. The TV news stayed off at dinner time. But even before taking office, Donald Trump has surpassed Bill Clinton. The details of what’s said to have taken place in a Moscow hotel room with a group of prostitutes are lurid enough to damage even someone with Trump’s sexual history. Trump himself has described the allegations as “fake news”. Their significance is that, if true, the President-elect of the United States would be vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians. The CIA believes it “credible” that the Kremlin has such kompromat – or compromising material – on

As Donald Trump’s inauguration draws near, the race is on to find musicians to perform at the event. While Barack Obama had a long list of artists lining up to perform at his, Hollywood is yet to take a shine to the president-elect. In fact things have got so bad that Trump’s team have reportedly now asked Charlotte Church to perform: @realDonaldTrump Your staff have asked me to sing at your inauguration, a simple Internet search would show I think you're a tyrant. Bye💩💩💩💩 — Charlotte Church (@charlottechurch) January 10, 2017 The classical-singer-turned-Corbynista-turned-prossecco-socialist has turned down his offer on the grounds that she thinks he is ‘a tyrant’. However, given

It’s approaching D-Day for the government’s public consultation on press regulation and whether to trigger Leveson 2 with just hours to go until the deadline for submissions. Should the government decide to activate section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, any publication not signed up to Impress — the press regulator largely funded by Max Mosley — will have to pay all the costs in a libel case even if it successfully defends a claim. So, what of Mosley? Kelvin Mackenzie has today used his Sun column to cast some light on the man leading the charge to shackle the press. The former Sun editor has dug up a

Last week I took the Eurostar to the Gare du Nord in Paris. We had lunch next to the station at the Terminus Nord brasserie, unchanged since 1925. The art deco clock on the wall has literally stopped, and everything else is frozen in the world of Fred Astaire, from the mosaic floor to the mirrored walls, to murals of dancers in tails and flapper dresses. But my God the Gare du Nord is a dump. It has a fine 1863 iron-and-glass train shed, with a classical facade lined with statues of handsome women, representing destinations from Calais to the heart-stirring battlefields of Arras and Dunkirk. The station is now

When Donald Trump began his run for the White House, he put building a wall with Mexico at the heart of his campaign. ‘I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words’, he cried after gliding down his golden escalator way back in June 2015. Mark his words indeed. For while the wall is still very much the backbone of his plans for government all the indications are that he will use a rather more prosaic form of funding to achieve it, using the standard Congressional appropriations procedures rather than a brazen cross-border raid. House Republicans have

‘My deep concern is that because of changed ways that news is now gathered, collated, packaged, delivered and displayed, the country can often find itself in… the tyrannical grip of the massed media… which could seriously threaten the political health of the United Kingdom as a Parliamentary democracy.’ This is from a letter I have received from Field Marshal Lord Bramall. Lord Bramall has reason to complain, since he was recently, in his nineties, the victim of preposterous child abuse allegations, invented by the fantasist ‘Nick’, fanned by the media, and wild-goose-chased by the Metropolitan Police. His complaint, however, goes much wider, including how the British media misread the Arab