A Buffoon Walks Into The Oval Office...

Harry Kane won the men’s Ballon d’Or, the most prestigious individual prize in football. England’s captain is the seventh British player to secure the award. It is well deserved: Mr Kane scored 61 times for Bayern Munich last season, more than anyone in Europe’s top five leagues has managed for...

Prosecutors in Britain charged two 24-year-old men over a suspected terror plot targeting RAF Fairford, an American-operated airbase in the south of England, in late September. Police previously said they thought that Iranian state involvement was “highly likely” in the incident, which saw five...

Yields on French government bonds fell from a high of 5.14% last week to 4.90% after Moody’s decided not to downgrade France’s credit rating. The ratings agency said on Friday that it expected the country to adopt a deficit-reducing budget and that social unrest would calm. The spread between...

Officials from Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—whose countries recently signed a defense pact—met Iran’s president and security chief in Tehran. The countries agreed to continue talks to achieve “peace and security” in the region, according to Iranian media. Earlier, Egypt’s parliament voted to...

America’s Justice Department again brought charges against James Comey, accusing him of leaking classified information. It is the third time the administration has tried to prosecute the former FBI director, whom Donald Trump has never forgiven for probing his 2016 presidential campaign’s...

Stock markets in Brazil tumbled after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva unexpectedly won the country’s presidential election. Investors are rightly worried that Lula’s return for a fourth term will worsen the state of public finances. His left-wing government runs a budget deficit of more than 9% of GDP...

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, filed to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange. It would be the first company focused mainly on frontier AI to go public. Its filing showed a net loss of $80.7bn and revenue of $16.3bn in the first half of 2026. Anthropic is reportedly aiming to match or...

Just One More Reason To Impeach The Demented Old Fool In a fiery statement, former President Donald Trump denounced Norway's Nobel Peace Prize selection as a discredit to the award and labelled the country a shithouse. He also criticized US immigration policy, demanding that the United States...

... prioritize migrants from Norway, Sweden and Denmark over nations such as Venezuela. The remarks, posted on social media, sparked debate over the politicization of the Nobel Prize and the role of Scandinavian nations in US foreign relations, highlighting ongoing tensions between American and...

“What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas,” writes Carlos Heredia Zubieta in El Universal, a Mexican newspaper, watching the close races for Senate and governor across the Rio Grande. “Of its 32 million residents, 41 percent are Hispanic, and of these, four out of five are of Mexican origin.

Last week it was discovered that Wedgewood, a pollster, was faking most of its numbers. Why do such a thing? With so much cash coursing through elections in America, the incentives to fake polls are greater than in other democracies and oversight is weaker. America’s wild-west approach has...

Republicans’ chances of winning the Senate rose by two percentage points in The Economist’s prediction model, thanks in part to a slight improvement in Mr Trump’s dire approval rating. The model still favors Democrats, but since October 10th their win probability has fallen from 62% to 56%.

While in Georgia Mr Trump said Audi, a division of Germany’s Volkswagen, would build a car factory near Macon, giving his trade policy the credit: “Without tariffs they would not have been coming in.” Audi’s boss, Gernot Döllner, joined Mr Trump on the stage, saying “we believe in the American...

On Saturday Donald Trump campaigned in Georgia for Rick Jackson, the Republican running for governor, and Mike Collins, running for Senate. On Sunday he went to Michigan, where he repeated his attacks on Mr El-Sayed: “I'm here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a...

Barack Obama took part in his first midterm rallies. In Ohio the former president assailed an attack ad by Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor, that featured the mother of Amy Acton, his opponent: “There’s a decency we should expect.”

Football’s inflated prize The Ballon d’Or, awarded on Monday, aims to recognize the year’s best-performing men’s footballer. The poll is organized by France Football magazine and is voted on by a single journalist from each of 100 footballing countries. For this year’s award, voters will have to...

...the World Cup final but, by moving to America’s Major League Soccer in 2023, now plays on the periphery of club football. Another problem with focusing on World Cup performance is that it excludes players from smaller nations. Take Georgia’s Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. He sparkled in delivering...

Football’s inflated prize The Ballon d’Or, awarded on Monday, aims to recognize the year’s best-performing men’s footballer. The poll is organized by France Football magazine and is voted on by a single journalist from each of 100 footballing countries. For this year’s award, voters will have to...

The Republicans try to pump up voters That J.D. Vance, America’s vice president, feels obliged to gin up Republicans at a rally in Kansas on Monday says a lot about his party’s prospects in the midterms. Kansas has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932. Yet next week Adam Hamilton...

First, Democrats are running higher-quality candidates than the Republicans. Vivek Ramaswamy, their gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, has run an exceptionally ugly campaign; Ken Paxton, the Senate contender in Texas, is plagued by scandal. The incumbent senator in Kansas, Roger Marshall, is an...

The Republicans try to pump up voters That J.D. Vance, America’s vice president, feels obliged to gin up Republicans at a rally in Kansas on Monday says a lot about his party’s prospects in the midterms. Kansas has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932. Yet next week Adam Hamilton...