Partisan splits on display as president accuses Democrats of leaking draft Pentagon report on bombings’ impact
Republican and Democratic senators have offered starkly contrasting interpretations of Donald Trump’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities after a delayed behind-closed-doors intelligence briefing that the White House had earlier postponed amid accusations of leaks.
Thursday’s session with senior national security officials came after the White House moved back its briefing, originally scheduled for Tuesday, fueling Democratic complaints that Trump was stonewalling Congress over military action the president authorized without congressional approval.
Continue reading...Police say suspects broke in through the front window and fled with property while Pitt was on tour for his new film F1
Police are investigating a break-in at a home reportedly owned by Brad Pitt, who has been on a globe-spanning promo tour for his new movie, F1, after three people allegedly “ransacked” the property.
The Los Angeles police department confirmed they responded to a break-in Wednesday night at a house on the 2300 block of North Edgemont Street in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Continue reading...We’re up against industries worth billions, and millennia of raising girls on skincare and diets, advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith writes. When things do feel wobbly, smaller interventions might stop the scrutiny cycle
Read more Leading questions
How can I stop fixating so much on my appearance? I’m a woman in my late 30s and recently a photo taken in a professional context has sent me spiralling about how I appear to others. I find myself poring over photos for evidence that I’m either ugly or beautiful. In reality I know I’m pretty average looking and the way I look hasn’t held me back from finding a loving partner or living a meaningful life – so it shouldn’t matter. And yet when my confidence wobbles or my mood is low, it’s my physical appearance that obsesses me. How can I de-centre the importance of looks?
Eleanor says: Lately I’ve been getting a lot of ads for cosmetic surgeries; I guess the algorithm ghost thinks I’d like some. But I keep having this experience where I look at the proudly presented “before and after” photos and feel a poignant fondness for the woman on the left, now erased. Sometimes she reminds me of the women who raised me. My teachers and my relatives and my friends’ mothers – good, loving, twinkly-eyed women who taught me how to read and make cakes and laugh and aspire. The “before” women kind of recall them, at various points in their middle-to-old age. But if the women I’ve known had lines on their faces or “saggy” necks – it besmirches them to even talk about them like this – it’s only in slightly seeing their echos in these photos, labelled as faults, that it’s ever occurred to me to notice. I’m sure it’s the same for you with the women who played these roles in your life: we just do not evaluate them on grounds of appearance. It would be a stupid misunderstanding of their value to do so. And of course, because of that, we think they’re just beautiful. I miss those echos in the “after”.
Continue reading...President calls for passage of signature tax bill but it’s not yet clear whether Senate Republicans have sufficient votes
Donald Trump convened congressional leaders and cabinet secretaries at the White House on Thursday to make the case for passage of his marquee tax-and-spending bill, but it remains to be seen whether his pep talk will resolve a developing logjam that could threaten its passage through the Senate.
The president’s intervention comes as the Senate majority leader, John Thune, mulls an initial vote on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on Friday, before a 4 July deadline Trump has imposed to have the legislation ready for his signature.
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After her last album embraced switching off, the musician returns to pop’s fray to revel in the mess of late-20s angst with a strikingly unsettled sound
In April, Lorde launched her fourth album with a brief guerrilla gig in New York. A message telling fans to meet her at Washington Square Park – ostensibly for a video shoot – caused chaos, happily of the variety that gets filmed on multiple cameraphones and goes viral on social media. Thousands turned up and the police shut the event down, but those that evaded them were eventually rewarded by Lorde performing to new single What Was That with impressive gusto given that she was standing on a small wooden table at the time.
It was surprising. Lorde’s last release, 2021’s Solar Power, wasn’t the only album of that period on which a female artist who had become famous in her teens strongly suggested that doing so was a living nightmare – Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever and Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts did, too – but it was the only one that sounded like a resignation letter, sent from a beach in Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s native New Zealand: “Won’t take a call if it’s the label or the radio,” she sang at one point. At another: “If you’re looking for a saviour, well that’s not me.” But Solar Power turned out to be merely an out-of-office message. Four years on and Lorde isn’t just back, but apparently back in the sharp-eyed party girl mode of 2017’s Melodrama. What Was That compares falling in love to the sensation of smoking while on MDMA. “It’s a beautiful life, so why play truant?” she shrugs on opener Hammer. “I jerk tears and they pay me to do it.”
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