The mood in the White House on Monday was strikingly upbeat. Nato’s ever-cheerful secretary general, Mark Rutte, set the tone as he addressed Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the gathered European leaders. “Let’s make the best out of today,” he said with a smile, before repeatedly thanking the US president for his attention to the … Read more
A hungry pigeon given food at frequent but irregular intervals will develop weird rituals – tics, dances, erratic head jerks – in the hope of summoning another morsel. BF Skinner, the psychologist who first demonstrated this effect in 1947, described the birds adopting “a sort of superstition … as if there were a causal relation … Read more
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and her team face growing criticism of the controversial EU-US tariff deal agreed in July. I am hoping for similar calls for accountability over the EU’s complicity in Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza. Such a reckoning is long overdue. I have watched in despair for … Read more
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/aug/18/ben-jennings-on-wildfires-and-summer-holidays-cartoon
Remember the international outrage over a lurid incident involving a female dance critic, a male choreographer and a deposit of his pet dachshund’s excrement? In February 2023 the German choreographer Marco Goecke cornered Wiebke Hüster in the foyer of the Hanover State Opera during the interval of a show. Goecke, who was then artistic director … Read more
Last week’s extraordinary summit meeting in Alaska is being followed today by an even more extraordinary international conference in Washington. None of the participants knew they were going to take part two days ago. In recent decades, diplomacy has been increasingly conducted in ad hoc contact groups – but the group of seven countries (the … Read more
Hours after Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin departed from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska on Friday, Moscow officials reported that two more villages in Ukraine’s east had been seized by Russian forces. It was a grimly apt postscript to a “peace summit” that allowed a pariah leader to posture on the world stage, but signally failed … Read more
Asked behind the scenes at June’s G7 summit if he could explain why Donald Trump seems to like him so much, Keir Starmer admitted he didn’t really know. Whatever the reason, when it comes to Ukraine, the UK prime minister is once again hoping to exploit this somewhat curious relationship. As soon as it was … Read more
Donald Trump portrays himself as a hard-nosed dealmaker. Yet in the run-up to Friday’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, his claim that the Russian leader held him in high regard and was therefore serious about ending the war in Ukraine sounded naive. Putin doesn’t let sentimentality shape his political and military decisions. Nor … Read more
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/aug/15/martin-rowson-donald-trump-vladimir-putin-alaska-cartoon