Pete Hegseth Pete Hegseth Photograph: Reuters The appointment of the Fox News host to head the Pentagon was highly controversial. A former Army National Guard officer, Pete Hegseth, 44, has faced allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement and alcohol abuse. His contributions to the group chat include suggesting that because Americans were unfamiliar with the … Read more
In the face of Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and Donald Trump’s destabilisation of the Atlantic alliance, an embryonic European security council is taking shape on the hoof. Whether it will prove strong enough to protect Europe’s liberal democracies and deter Russia without US military support may be tested all too soon. Nato was created … Read more
If Europe wasn’t already on notice, the extraordinary leak of deliberations by JD Vance and other top-level Trump administration officials over a strike against the Houthis in Yemen was another sign that it has a target on its back. The administration officials gave Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic a front-row seat to the planning for … Read more
In six weeks, the Trump administration’s “rapid scheduled disassembly” of American science has been as sharp and deep as its trashing of the US’s alliances and goodwill; Earth science, weather forecasting and early warning systems, medical research (including cancer research), Nasa. Academic grants more broadly have been cut, paused and subject to review for a … Read more
Within the Trump administration’s Defense Department, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketry is being trumpeted as the nifty new way the Pentagon could move military cargo rapidly around the globe. In the Commerce Department, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service will now be fully eligible for the federal government’s $42 billion rural broadband push, after being largely shut … Read more
NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could. Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over. But this month, a robotic lander named Blue … Read more
As attention focused on diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine this week, the UN human rights office published a powerful reminder of its horrors. A new report on children’s lives since the Russian invasion was prefaced with a nursery director’s description of their response to shelling: “Some children fall to their knees – … Read more
Thanks to Donald Trump, a vacancy is opening up in the international jobs market. For decades, if not centuries, and always imperfectly, the US offered itself to the world as the guarantor of democracy and the land of the free. Now that it’s pivoting away from that job description, there’s an opportunity for someone else … Read more
Extreme weather has caused at least 40 fatalities across parts of the US through the past week, with a variety of hazards including tornadoes, dust storms, and wildfires across the midwest and south. More than 300 tornado warnings were issued by the US National Weather Service (NWS) between Friday and Saturday. By Wednesday, the NWS … Read more
Few people outside Berlin’s political bubble will have heard of Lars Klingbeil. They will soon, though, as he is about to become one of the pivotal players in the new German government. The co-leader of the Social Democratic party (SPD) captured the moment in this week’s debate in the Bundestag, one of the most important … Read more