Who can resist the 241st season of “America”? The dialogue crackles, with new, if outlandish, characters popping in to keep things fizzing. The latest is the president’s communications director Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci, who called a reporter on Wednesday to tell him that one senior White House colleague, the chief of staff, was a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic”, while contrasting himself with another by declaring: “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”

Published by: The Guardian

Might today’s date live on in the history books as the official end of the industrial revolution, which began more than a century and a half ago? That’s probably a stretch, but the UK government’s announcement that all petrol and diesel cars and vans are to be banned by 2040 sounds like the beginning of the end for the internal combustion engine, the invention that changed human life for ever.

Published by: The Guardian

Heather Stewart is joined by Kate Maltby, Steve Richards and Jonathan Freedland to discuss the cabinet infighting threatening to derail the government. Plus we get tips from MPs Keith Simpson and Chris Bryant on summer reading listsAs parliament approa...

Published by: The Guardian

Few Guardian readers will be shedding a sympathetic tear for Philip Hammond. Most will hear of his view that public sector workers are “overpaid”, reportedly shared with cabinet colleagues last Thursday, and they will recoil in outrage. As my colleague Zoe Williams forcefully argues, the chancellor’s observation – which he sought to justify by noting that those in the public sector benefited from fuller pensions than those outside it – betrays a kind of business class myopia towards the lived experience of those getting by on too little.

Published by: The Guardian

The key is timing. The people may well want a rethink once the clock runs out in March 2019 – when the disaster will be clear

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Published by: The Guardian

Perhaps the very last time I gave even the most fleeting thought to beachwear was exactly 10 years ago, during a family summer holiday to France. We weren’t on the beach but in a municipal pool, for an afternoon of splashing around with my two kids, then aged six and three.

Published by: The Guardian

There are few more perilous lines of work than being an ally of Donald Trump. Vouch for him one minute, usually by insisting that the latest accusation against him is bogus, and the next you’ll be left looking like a fool – as he or his family confirm that the very charge you dismissed as fake is, in fact, true.

Published by: The Guardian

In the movie version, they would have talked for a few minutes and then found an excuse to dismiss their foreign ministers and interpreters. At long last, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump would be alone and in private. Putin would look the American up and down, as proud as a father gazing upon his grown son. “We did it,” Putin might say softly, almost to himself. “We actually did it.”

Published by: The Guardian

Dominic Cummings is the most high profile of many former Brexiteers realising that leaving the EU might not work out well for Britain. The tide is turningWhat would it take to make those who voted for Brexit change their minds? That may turn out to be...

Published by: The Guardian