Should we all be Gaullists now? In the language of France’s most important European partner, the answer is “Jein!” (a German word combining ja for yes and nein for no). Yes, Emmanuel Macron has been right to warn us ever since he became France’s president in 2017 that, discerning a long-term trend of US disengagement, … Read more
new video loaded: SpaceX Launches NASA’s Crew-10 Mission transcript Back transcript SpaceX Launches NASA’s Crew-10 Mission The mission would allow Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, two NASA astronauts, to return to Earth. Their brief scheduled visit to the space station last June was unexpectedly stretched to more than nine months. “Ignition and liftoff.” [cheering] “[unclear] … Read more
From Thursday night into Friday morning, the Earth’s shadow gradually overtook the moon’s typically bright white face, which took on a ruddy red hue. It was the first total lunar eclipse, also known as a blood moon, in more than two years. A lunar eclipse occurs when the sun, Earth and moon align, in that … Read more
For once, the US president and European leaders were on the same page. Grasping for a familiar metaphor, a chorus of western heads of state declared this week that “the ball was in Russia’s court” after Ukraine agreed in talks with the US on Tuesday to an immediate 30-day ceasefire. Rather than making a play, … Read more
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/mar/14/martin-rowson-war-ukraine-cartoon-donald-trump-vladimir-putin-volodymyr-zelenskyy
The arrival of Trump 2.0 in the White House has disrupted the foreign and defence policies of all states and shattered existing paradigms of world order. Political leaders across the globe are having to assess how they respond to this more unpredictable and precarious world. For Ireland, the task is all the more difficult because … Read more
An asteroid-chasing spacecraft just swung past Mars on Wednesday. As it zipped by, it took hundreds of shots of the Red Planet, as well as several snaps of Deimos, one of the two small Martian moons. The operators of the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft were bewitched by the sci-fi aesthetics of the pictures. “We … Read more
Four astronauts are hoping that Friday is the day that they’ll get to head to the International Space Station. They were all ready to go on Wednesday after putting on their spacesuits and boarding their SpaceX spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But with less than 45 minutes … Read more
As journalists filtered out of the presidential administration in central Kyiv on Wednesday afternoon after a 30-minute press conference with president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the general consensus was that he had not said anything that would immediately make for a dramatic headline. That, it seems, was the point. Eager to show the White House that Ukraine … Read more
At this stage of the crisis, it is important to be clear-sighted. The US-Ukraine meeting in Jeddah was a damage-control operation. Both parties reset relations that had been damaged, largely by Washington’s impatience. The US reversed its previous decisions in exchange for something Ukraine was ready to provide anyway: privileged access to Ukraine’s natural resource … Read more