There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES

EXTINCTION Rebellion (XR) has put environment politics in the popular imagination with a partisan spirit and the kind of creativity that inspires admiration.
Its daring tactics have wrong-footed political authority and the bourgeois media as well as giving the public-order police a more entertaining job than normal.
While the exotic behaviour of some XR activists gives Daily Mail editors apoplexy, the more common — and common sense — reaction from most people is to enjoy the anti-authoritarian exuberance in the same spirit that put-upon peasants and inebriated artisans in feudal Britain revelled in subverting authority when a successful armed rebellion seemed impossibly remote.

Holding office in local government is a poisoned chalice for a party that bases its electoral appeal around issues where it has no power whatsoever, argues NICK WRIGHT

From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT

There is no doubt that Trump’s regime is a right-wing one, but the clash between the state apparatus and the national and local government is a good example of what any future left-wing formation will face here in Britain, writes NICK WRIGHT

European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde sees Trump’s many disruptions as an opportunity to challenge the dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ — but greater Euro assertiveness will also mean greater warmongering and militarism, warns NICK WRIGHT