79 m. ago Trump wants to move on from the Signal security scandal. House Republicans aren’t making it easy

Some GOP members – including experts on national security – are breaking with the White House’s official line on whether leaked attack plan was classified

Politics

5 h. ago Goldberg dismisses Waltz’s Signal leak defense: ‘Numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones’

Atlantic editor says Trump adviser’s defense for accidentally adding him to war plans chat was implausibleAtlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg has dismissed the explanation offered by national security adviser Mike Waltz for how he was included in a Trump administration group text chat about – and in advance of – the recent bombing of Houthi rebels in Yemen.Goldberg said Waltz’s theory that his contact was “sucked in” to his phone via “somebody else’s contact” was implausible. Continue reading...

Events

7 h. ago Ian Wright and Roy Keane slam 'pathetic' decision which marred FA Cup tie

Bournemouth star Milos Kerkez missed the Cherries' FA Cup quarter-final match against Manchester City through suspension, but ITV pundits Ian Wright and Roy Keane felt

Politics

9 h. ago I thought I'd escaped my abusive foster father when he was locked up for raping me, but my world came crashing down when I came face to face with him in the supermarket

Emma Bardney, 54, was 13 years old when she was sexually abused by her foster father Stephen Noy, 67. She was horrified when she saw him again last June, doing her shop in Retford Morrisons.

Events

10 h. ago Furious moment Trump EXPLODED over war text leaker's absurd Fox interview: 'Should I fire him?'

President Donald Trump was left fuming after National Security Advisor Mike Waltz admitted to accidentally adding a journalist to a Signal group chat about military strikes.

Events

10 h. ago 'Don't you have friends to go with?': the stigma and joy of a table for one | Emma Gannon

Solo dining is a sign of unhappiness, a new report claims. I’ll tell you why I think that’s nonsense – but please don’t pull up a chairI once told a colleague that I was going to Amsterdam on a solo trip to wine and dine alone. “Do you not have any friends to go with?” she replied. She was joking, but I think she also meant it. Her comment was tinged with pity. Why would you choose to eat a three-course meal with a good view or order room service in a nice hotel on your own? What’s the point? Wouldn’t you want to share that with someone?Eating alone often gets a bad rap. It’s getting an even worse rap now that the World Happiness Report moved Americans down the ranking in part because they are, apparently, eating alone too much. The picture doesn’t look good: too many people have no one to eat with, they lack community, and are clearly rather isolated and lonely. Community is incredibly important – especially now, when the world feels increasingly unstable and unpredictable. We all ...

Politics

11 h. ago Parents warned as toxic 'incel' social media accounts connivingly change their SECRET LANGUAGE to avoid detection in the wake of Adolescence uproar and TikTok ban

Online advocates of misogynistic incel (involuntarily celibate) culture are rebranding as 'Sub5s' to get past the platform's ban on hateful material.

Events

17 h. ago The Observer view on JD Vance: spurned in Greenland and humiliated at home, the vice

His foolish foreign trip and the response to the Signal chat leak reflect the irresponsibility of White House teamNot for the first time, JD Vance, America’s outspoken vice-president, has made a public fool of himself. He insisted on visiting Greenland despite unequivocal statements by the territory’s leaders and Denmark’s government that he was not invited and not welcome. Vance’s trip was confined to a remote Arctic base, where he briefly spoke to a few Americans. Plans to make a wider tour and speak to Greenlanders were cancelled – because Greenlanders did not want to speak to him.Such hostility is entirely understandable, given the repeated, provocative and disrespectful declarations by Vance’s boss, Donald Trump, that the US plans to annex Greenland and may do so illegally and by force. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. Election results this month showed the vast majority of local people back expanded self-rule or outright independence. The...

Politics

18 h. ago SNL cold open sees hapless Hegseth, Vance and Rubio joining high

Oscar-winning actress Mikey Madison appeared in the skit, later performing the opening monologue

Politics

22 h. ago NHS runs up £80million bill on translators for patients who don't speak English in just five years

The figures come after it emerged last month that the Department for Work and Pensions was spending £8 million annually on translators for 90 different languages.

Economics

23 h. ago ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S NOTEBOOK: OK, I admit it... the high life is now over for me

High heels are not simply a style of shoe. They are a whole identity. But those who, like me, have worn them since the age of 15 will understand my misery.

Politics

24 h. ago Two may be company, but for a rising number of Australians, three (or more) isn’t a crowd

Polls and studies show younger people are showing more interest in polyamory and non-traditional relationships“I didn’t know what polyamory was,” Melissa* says. “I didn’t have the vocabulary. I Googled it a few times to understand.” Melissa was on the “relationship escalator”. She got married, had a child, then the no longer happy couple split.So she started exploring her options. First stop? Singles’ groups.Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Continue reading...

Politics

25 h. ago JD Vance and other officials told Trump to fire Waltz. There was just one reason he didn’t

President was counseled by senior administration officials about dismissing his national security adviser

Politics

29 h. ago Trump has managed to spin Signalgate as a media lapse, not a major security breach | Andrew Roth

The US administration believes it can divide public attention until there is a new scandal. It may be a winning strategyWhen it comes to Trump-era scandals, the shameless responses to “Signalgate”, in which top administration officials discussing details of an impending strike in Yemen in a group chat without noticing the presence of a prominent journalist, should set alarm bells ringing for its brazenness and incompetence.In a particularly jaw-dropping exchange, Tulsi Gabbard, the United States’ director of national intelligence, was forced to backtrack during a house hearing after she had said that there had been no specific information in the Signal chat about an impending military strike. Then, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published the chat in full, contradicting Gabbard’s remarks that no classified data or weapons systems had been mentioned in the chat. Continue reading...

Politics

30 h. ago 'JD Dunce would be a nasty gimp like creepy one from Somerset,' says Gimp Man of Essex

EXCLUSIVE: The rubbery-rebel’s comments come off the back of Trump, Vance and co being snared in the shock exposure of a Signal group chat, which featured a number of high-profile figures in the US government

Politics

30 h. ago B&Q staff are told saying 'blind drunk' is offensive to disabled people

A 30-page inclusive language guide issued by the DIY chain warns against using these phrases or any others that associate 'impairments with negative things'.

Politics

35 h. ago ‘His genius is elusive’: Harry Lawtey and Toby Jones on bringing Richard Burton back to the screen

In new film Mr Burton, the Industry star plays a young Richard Burton, with Jones as the mentor who helped him find his acting chops. The duo discuss trying to understand a cultural icon – and how to nail that voiceSandringham Road lies in the east of Cardiff; a quiet run of Edwardian terrace houses overlooking Roath Mill Gardens. On a late July day, when the air is warm and the park spills out over its railings, Toby Jones and Harry Lawtey sit on the pavement, wearing matching striped pyjamas. The pair are some way into the filming of Mr Burton, an account of the early life of Richard Burton. Lawtey plays the actor in his younger years, when he was known as Richard Jenkins, and Jones is Philip Burton, the teacher who fostered his young student’s talent. So close would their bond grow that Jenkins would become Burton’s legal ward and take his surname. “Without Philip Burton there would never have been a Richard Burton,” Elizabeth Taylor once wrote. “That great rolling voice that cra...

Politics

36 h. ago ‘The physics community has never split like this’: row erupts over plans for new Large Hadron Collider

Ambitious project could soak up funding for subatomic physics for decades, say opponentsScientists are refining plans to build the world’s biggest machine at a site beneath the Swiss-French border. More than $30bn (£23bn) would be spent drilling a 91km circular tunnel in which subatomic particles would be accelerated to near light speeds and smashed into each other. From the resulting nuclear debris, scientists hope they will then find clues that would help them understand the detailed makeup of the universe.It is an extraordinarily ambitious project. However, it is also a controversial one – for many scientists fear the machine, the Future Circular Collider (FCC), could soak up funding for subatomic physics for decades and leave promising new research avenues starved of resources. Continue reading...

Events

37 h. ago The Signal chat exposes the administration’s incompetence – and its pecking order | Sidney Blumenthal

The discussion revealed unserious people who don’t know when to keep quiet, with Stephen Miller as the real bossOn 13 March, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who was the policy director for two secretaries of defense and was a member of the House intelligence committee, sent a message on the commercial Signal app: “Team – establishing a principles group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours.” “The Houthis PC small group” would oversee a US air attack on the Houthis in Yemen.Despite Waltz’s extensive professional background, he misspelled “principals” as “principles” – perhaps an ordinary typo, but symptomatic of the shambles to come. Although the secretaries of defense, state and treasury, the director of national intelligence, the CIA director, the vice-president, and the president’s chief of staff were among the 18 people included, neither the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, who is a statutory member of the principals comm...

Politics

37 h. ago ‘My patient was happy with her partner of 25 years – then started a torrid affair’: a psychotherapist on why people cheat

I heard every last detail. Eventually we uncovered the truth behind the passionProfessor M was a 60-year-old academic in a scientific, technical field. She chose to lie on my couch, rather than sit opposite me, from our second meeting. Thick black glasses framed her strong nose and she wore monochrome, androgynous clothes. She had a stern authority about her that I noticed the very first time I met her. Her hair was uncoloured and cut into a chic crop. She had lived in London since university in her home country on another continent, and English was her third language, which she spoke perfectly. She had never seen a psychotherapist before.In the first weeks of our work together, she talked – without stopping, breathlessly – about a man she had known in her 20s while undertaking doctoral work in America. By chance, they had met again recently at a conference overseas where both were presenting papers. They had sex in a hotel room hours after this meeting. A relationship began, with i...

Science