America

For a true idea of the untold tragedy of gun crime in the US, look beyond the mass shootings to the ‘mundane’ murders. ANDREW PURCELL reports In the early hours of last Sunday, a gunman approached a group of teenagers on a street in Philadelphia and fired eight shots, killing 16-year-old Marquez Houston. A little […]

Is the House of cards about to fall? PAUL CONNEW examines a blockbuster week in the White House as the Russian Connection begins to really bite What did the president know and when did he know it? It was the question that dominated the Watergate scandal until the final curtain of disgrace came down on […]

PAUL CONNEW on the US president’s latest imbroglio It was an under siege US president who presided over the scandal which gave the world the over-used suffix, ‘gate’. Now, another under siege one is responsible for its latest, and perhaps most inelegant to date, application… ‘condolencegate’. And Donald Trump’s latest imbroglio might well prove the […]

The comedian, musician and writer on how American Halloween supplanted the ‘British’ Halloween of old Just one of the many exciting side-benefits of my rapidly advancing years, along with the receding hairline and similarly receding eyesight, is a marked acceleration in just how rapidly the aforementioned years appear to be advancing. I don’t know about […]

Neither carries a blackjack or a Tommy gun. But Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein are modern-day thugs, says Pulitzer Prize-winning writer ALBERT SCARDINO Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein were cut from the same roll of toilet paper. Both are pigs, both are thugs, both are American men of a certain age, a certain position of […]

US editor PAUL CONNEW on what the Weinstein revelations could mean for Donald Trump’s beleaguered administration One voice has been deafeningly silent in the global war of words surrounding disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Step forward, Donald Trump. It’s a topic on which the normally hyper-active presidential Twitter fingers have been curiously paralysed. The legitimate […]

As with other such tragedies, the Las Vegas massacre quickly brought out the worst of the internet, says JONATHON READ. As many tried to make sense of what had happened, in those first few hours after the Las Vegas shooting, social media went into overdrive. Caught up in the vortex of information, emotion and reaction […]

Mass Distraction. Mass Diversion. Mass Dissembling. Weapons regularly deployed from Donald Trump’s armoury long before he entered the White House, the launch-timing usually followed an easily-tracked pattern. Whenever The Donald felt the heat as a businessman, he rolled out the return fire using those familiar tactics. And this week, they have been dramatically, dangerously displayed […]

Between them, Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves rescued a South American art form from an ignominious death – dancing first with love, then with hate – says CHRIS SULLIVAN. A new documentary tells the tortured story of the dance’s greatest-ever partnership In the early years of the last century, tango – without doubt, the […]

PAUL CONNEW on the US president The word out of the White House is that Donald Trump considers Boris Johnson has ‘something of the clown’ about him. A viewpoint that their fairly brief encounter at the UN in New York this week did little to dispel apparently. The temptation is to dismiss one flaxen-haired egomaniac […]

Paul Connew on Donald Trump’s re-election masterplan. Irma and Harvey aren’t the only hurricanes to have traumatised America lately. There’s Hurricane Donald, too. A different kind of hurricane that only devastates the minds of Capitol Hill politicians and leaves bemused citizens with a wary eye on the democratic climate and posing the same question as […]