World

Donald Trump’s fighting talk has the world worried. But his promise to bring ‘fire and fury’ to North Korea will only make things harder, says the Guardian. This type of brinkmanship is nothing new – and the paper points out the ‘dire’ warnings that greeted China and others joining the ‘nuclear club’. Trump, however, is ‘not most people’, the Guardian argues – saying that the president’s words were ‘strikingly reminiscent of the bluster of North Korea itself’. Even this comparison, suggests the paper, isn’t quite fair on Pyongyang: the country’s statements ‘are calculated, not cavalier’. Not so with Trump, says the paper, which suggests the President ‘offers ad-libbed soundbites from

So Ruth Davidson, honorary colonel in the signals reserve, is on manoeuvres again. It is past time, the leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party says, for the government to rethink its approach to immigration. Time, instead, for an adult debate on the subject at the end of which, she hopes, the government will rethink its obstinate insistence on treating immigration as nothing more than a numbers game. And since the government keeps missing its targets on immigration, perhaps it would be sensible to revise those targets? At the very least, she says, it is absurd to insist that foreign undergraduates should be counted as immigrants when the public

Having recently hosted Bono and Rihanna and taken centre stage during Donald Trump’s visit to France, Brigitte Macron now has a new role to keep herself busy. The French President’s wife was named last week as the godmother of the first baby panda born in a French zoo. Macron said she was ‘very happy’ to be asked. But, increasingly, France is not feeling her joy and there is growing resentment at her presence in the Élysée Palace. An online petition launched two weeks ago by the artist Thierry Paul Valette opposing the creation of a formal role for Brigitte Macron as First Lady has been signed by nearly 200,000 people. The petition says

For reasons I find hard to fathom the French did not come out in force to riot against the recent visit of President Trump to France. Normally the mildest provocation has them pouring into the streets to do battle with the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the CRS, notorious for their brutal handling of demonstrators. My wife, half-French herself, suggested that the quiescence of the French public reflected respect for Bastille Day, which President Macron had invited Trump to celebrate. I pooh-poohed that on the grounds that the storming of the Bastille in 1789 marked the beginning of the venerable French tradition of public rioting and was if anything a spur

Donald Trump has a yuge problem in special prosecutor Robert Swan Mueller III. The American president’s anger at having this legal thorn in his administration’s side explains much of his recent erratic behaviour, as Daniel McCarthy explained in the magazine this week. Now we learn that Mueller is using a grand jury – a group that meets in secret and has the legal power to compel testimony – and that can only be an aggravation for Trump. He can keep saying it’s a ‘Witch Hunt’  – maybe it is – but a witch hunt could bring down his presidency, or at least make it impossible for his administration to function.

Imagine the gale-force political winds that it takes to make Donald Trump do something he doesn’t want to do. Yet that’s what happened earlier this week when the president grudgingly approved a new suite of sanctions on Russia passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress. That he signed the bill in private signalled his extreme reluctance—this is the man who threw a soiree in the Rose Garden after doomed GOP health care legislation made it through just the House. Trump, the former reality show star, only turns away the klieg lights under the most bitter circumstances, and that’s what this was. A statement Trump released subsequently grumbled that the sanctions legislation

In Spain, the fight over Catalonian independence has just taken a surreal new turn. Catalonian president Carles Puigdemont – a passionate secessionist who has said he is prepared to go to prison for his cause – recently announced that there will be an independence referendum in his region on October 1st. His pledge prompted the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, to declare, in full crusader-for-democracy mode, that “the government of Spain is going to defend the law” and prevent the vote from happening.    Would that be the same government currently implicated in one of the biggest corruption cases in recent Spanish history? Yes, it would. The so-called Gürtel case

How are things in your country? In mine, we’ve spent the last week and a half being governed by a mid-aughts buddy comedy named ‘Donald and The Mooch’. That latter sobriquet belongs to Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s erstwhile PR man who went on a 10-day profanity-laden bender across Washington proper before even the President realised this probably wasn’t a good idea and headed off to Vegas without him. Scaramucci was sacked on Monday. His official start date wasn’t until mid-August, which makes him the shortest-serving White House comms director in history at negative 15 days. Yet he made quite an impression during his non-tenure. The Mooch was given his job

Last week the births, marriages and deaths column of the Times announced an unusual marriage. Lord N.J. Blackmore had married Lord M.T.D. Hiscutt. The ceremony took place in the Palace of Westminster. ‘Marky’ was attended by five women/girls, said the announcement. Nick had two best men. Somebody ‘acted as page boy’. The honeymoon will be spent in Kenya ‘…with Benidorm delayed’. I had not previously known this, but members of the public can be legally married in Parliament — in the Members’ Dining Room, for example (£2,000) — so my original hunch that the notice was a hoax must have been wrong. I wondered, therefore, why the first-ever same-sex marriage of two

Poor Reince Priebus. Or maybe not so poor. A munificent book deal surely looms in which he can chronicle his serial humiliations at the hands of Donald Trump who, as is his wont, made the announcement on Twitter that retired general John Kelly, the director of the Homeland Security, will now become White House chief of staff. Given the leaking that has been taking place in the Trump administration, Kelly may discover that it was easier to track down illegal immigrants than to catch the leakers. Trump himself waited until late Friday until he revealed the latest changes to his personnel, presumably to outwit the press corps. Anthony ‘the Mooch’ Scaramucci

Much to the ire of many a financial institution, I am self-employed. Those two dirty words which mean it is near impossible to get a mortgage, earn a regular income, and save for retirement. On the upside, I have four private pensions accrued by working for various companies over the past 20 years. What is she complaining about? you cry. Not one but four private pensions, which will all pay out a hefty retirement income when I reach the new state retirement age of 68. Wrong. When I started my first proper job with Pearson and I got my first defined contribution (DC) pension at 26 (I sadly just missed final salary