Our cartoonist on the heroes, villains and superstar performances in week two of the tournament
Continue reading...Democratic primary elections to test strength of party’s left flank as old guard faces string of challenges
New Yorkers were voting on Tuesday in a slate of Democratic primaries poised to reveal the strength of the party’s left flank and shape the battle for control of the US House of Representatives in November.
Voters in Maryland and Utah will also nominate congressional candidates on Tuesday, while South Carolina holds a series of runoff elections for candidates who did not receive a majority of the vote earlier this month.
Continue reading...Blame my uncle and his contempt for rules and regulations
My uncle has a mature and beautiful gingko tree, which also goes by the name of memory tree, which is a little ironic because he can’t remember where he put his hearing aid batteries, and yet he can recollect with pin-sharp detail the exact moment this tree’s predecessor was confiscated by a customs official on the way back from the unnamed country he was smuggling it in from.
“Smuggling” was a large and entirely wrong word for a tiny sapling that wasn’t harming anyone, he said, but they took it off him anyway and destroyed it, a decades-old outrage that felt pretty fresh. I’m a little hazy on how the current tree came to arrive in his garden, whether that first one was a decoy and he was packing two trees, but let’s just say that couldn’t possibly have happened because this definitely isn’t the same uncle who brought seven varieties of seed potato back from a family wedding in Germany in 1985, by putting them in my and my siblings’ pockets, because what kind of customs monster would search a child?
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Continue reading...Trump boasted of assassinating Héctor Guerrero Flores but details are scarce and experts doubt it will harm drug trade
At 10am on 9 June, a huge explosion rattled Las Claritas, a ramshackle town on the edge of a vast goldmine carved out of the Venezuelan Amazon.
“The blast was so powerful that my sister’s house shook, and she was 10 kilometres away,” said one miner, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “Imagine the impact.”
Continue reading...The symbolic power of a stagnant pond beneath Lincoln’s statue has proven irresistible for the president’s critics
Narcissus was cursed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Donald Trump is finding that his effort to overhaul the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington has turned into a perverse tourist attraction and 2,028ft national metaphor.
On Monday afternoon a massive algae bloom had turned the pool a green reminiscent of a plane passenger clutching a sick bag. It also stank, but that did not deter a steady flow of curious tourists snapping photos and TV crews doing eyewitness interviews about the folly of Donald Trump’s $14.7m renovation.
Continue reading...Nighy is the Dingle dwelling grandfather of a Sheffield family in strife in sentimental adaptation of Mark Lowery’s novel Charlie and Me
This, sadly, is not a biopic of the Proclaimers, but a family tearjerker adapted from Charlie and Me, Mark Lowery’s novel for older children, an adventure about a teenage boy who runs away from home with his little brother to go to their grandad’s. It’s a sentimental film that requires a cast of fine actors to squelch through some fairly heavy slush. Among them, Bill Nighy as the grandad seems to suffer from some kind of reverse Samson effect with a rugged beard that might be to blame for his charisma dip.
The film switches between time periods. In the present, teenager Finn (Roman Griffin Davis) runs away after overhearing his separating parents (Clare Dunne and Michael Socha) arguing about who gets which child in the split. Finn takes his scampish younger brother Charlie (Dexter Sol Ansell), and off they set on a 500-mile trip from Sheffield to Dingle on the west coast of Ireland where their grandad John (Nighy) lives.
Continue reading...Film-maker talks about her documentary on John Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower who killed himself in 2024
It is widely recognized that for the Kennedys, tragedy has come often and from unexpected quarters. The filmmaker Rory Kennedy, born six months after the assassination of her father Robert Kennedy, has known her share. But in 2024 it was a loss outside the political dynasty that shook her to the core.
John Barnett, a quality inspector turned whistleblower at Boeing, one of the world’s biggest plane manufacturers, was found dead in his truck outside a hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. Affectionately known as “Swampy” because of his roots in Louisiana, Barnett had a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Continue reading...What the US president succeeded in obliterating was any rationale he offered for going to war
Before Donald Trump finally surrendered in his Iran war, he declared victory several dozen times, including on day eight– “We’ve already won!” – day 10 – “The war is very complete”– day 12, proclaiming he had won five times in 13 seconds – “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, we won the bet in the first hour it was over”– and day 39 –“Total and complete victory, 100%. No question about it”– and claimed a deal to end the war was just around the corner 38 times. The first time he raised the prospect of peace, on day 24, he said the two sides had reached “almost all points of agreement”.
Trump boldly affixed his signature with a sharpie to the Memorandum Of Understanding on day 110, 17 June, at the Palace of Versailles, where the ruinous treaty concluding the first world war was signed. He seemed oblivious to the historical symbolism of the place, but bedazzled by its gold. “Versailles is not gold leaf – Versailles is the real deal,” he remarked.
Continue reading...
In Frankrijk geldt in 54 van de 101 departementen van het land dinsdagmiddag code rood vanwege extreme temperaturen.
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The majority of Britons still believe Big Tech should be contributing more to the public purse, new research suggests. Polling by the Fair Tax Foundation, shared with The Register, finds that 67 percent of respondents believe the UK should ensure large technology companies such as Meta, Google, Apple, and Amazon pay more in Digital Services Tax (DST) to increase their overall tax contribution. The same proportion of Brits said the government should aim to become a world leader in regulating cryptocurrencies and other digital assets to help prevent tax avoidance and evasion. The findings arrive as the future of the UK's Digital Services Tax continues to attract scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic. Introduced in 2020, the levy was designed to extract more money from online giants that generate substantial revenues from UK users while often reporting profits elsewhere. Last year alone, the tax raised around £800 million for the Treasury. Not everyone has been thrilled by the arrangement. President Donald Trump threatened in April to impose a "big tariff" on British imports if the government refused to drop the Digital Services Tax, arguing it unfairly targets US tech giants. The British public, however, appear less concerned, and the polling suggests support extends well beyond the digital tax itself. Three-quarters of respondents said they would prefer to work for a company that can demonstrate it pays its fair share of tax, while 74 percent said they would rather spend money with such a business. More than seven in ten backed requiring fair tax practices from companies bidding for public sector contracts, while 82 percent supported similar requirements for firms receiving government bailout funds. The research forms part of the Fair Tax Foundation's annual survey of public attitudes toward corporate tax conduct, released during Fair Tax Week. Paul Monaghan, chief executive of the organization, said the findings showed that tax fairness remains one of the public's biggest concerns regarding corporate behavior and argued that politicians have a clear mandate to push for greater transparency. "The UK public care about many issues, but 'tax justice' is consistently at the top of their concerns when it comes to corporate conduct," he said. "The days of large multinationals such as Amazon refusing to disclose what their income, profit, and corporate taxes are in the UK need to end. As does the almost complete absence of tax transparency we see from the vast majority of micro-enterprises – which is helping to fuel fraud across the country." That may prove easier said than done. Governments have spent years trying to agree on an international framework for taxing multinational corporations, with varying degrees of success and enthusiasm. Until then, the UK's stopgap solution appears to retain something increasingly rare in modern politics: broad public support. For all the complaints from Big Tech and the US government, most Britons seem perfectly content for HMRC to keep rattling the collection tin outside Silicon Valley's front door. ®
