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Severe thunderstorms have battered parts of the US this week as the storm season reaches its climatological peak. The outbreak began last Friday, with Kentucky and Missouri worst affected. Powerful tornadoes associated with supercell thunderstorms whipped across swaths of the midwest, resulting in 25 deaths. One tornado tore through St Louis, killing seven people. Further … Read more

The UK government is reportedly considering selling a post-Brexit border check facility in Kent that could fall out of use as a result of this week’s trade pact with the EU. The site, based in Sevington, Ashford, was erected in 2021 with capacity for 1,300 lorries that were expected to face extra checks on plants … Read more

For the Tories to attack Keir Starmer’s first step towards a Brexit reset is monumental hypocrisy. Their Brexit led to £4.7bn being spent on implementing post-EU border arrangements, according to the National Audit Office, including a vastly expensive “take back control” border post at Sevington in Kent. No other country in the world can have … Read more

“Courage is seeking the truth and speaking it,” Jean Jaurès, the French philosopher and Socialist party leader, told a group of high school students in 1903. “It is not yielding to the law of the triumphant lie as it passes, and not echoing, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, mindless applause and fanatical … Read more

Donald Trump’s pledge to end the war in Ukraine on the first day of his second term as US president was a sign of his unsuitability as a peace broker. A clearer sign was his apparent sympathy with Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump’s tone regarding the Russian president has cooled somewhat on the discovery that the … Read more

A £25m post-Brexit border control post in Portsmouth may have to be demolished if the UK government’s deal with the EU removes the need for health and veterinary checks on food imports, according to the port’s director. Mike Sellers had already spoken out last year about how more than half of the site would never … Read more

European leaders – who have promised to impose “massive” new sanctions on Russia following Vladimir Putin’s rejection of a ceasefire in Ukraine – face the prospect of having to introduce their planned expansion of economic restrictions on the Russian war economy without the United States. European hopes that Donald Trump might increase the pressure on … Read more

The UK’s trade deal with the European Union is expected to smooth trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but for some businesses in the latter it no longer matters, as they have ditched British suppliers. “Overall the deal is welcome but we’re indifferent,” said Peter Bradley, a director of the Mid-Ulster Garden Centre. “We … Read more

‘The boys are alt-right.” This seems to be the new consensus on far-right politics propagated in numerous articles and podcasts. But the media’s obsessive focus on the young men allegedly fuelling the rise of the far right isn’t just empirically flawed – it misses a much more significant shift in public opinion among young people. … Read more

Nigel Farage missed the parliamentary debate on the biggest reset to Brexit since the referendum because he is overseas on holiday, the Reform UK leader has said. Following speculation that he was on holiday in France, Farage, who has not been seen in the Commons this week and did not present his GB News show … Read more