He lasted just 11 days as White House communications director, before being fired from the Trump administration. The financier and broadcaster discusses working for the president – and becoming his biggest critic

‘If somebody walks into your office and says they’re friends with Donald Trump, they’re either exaggerating the relationship, or they don’t understand the relationship,” says Anthony Scaramucci. “Because nobody is friends with Donald. You’re a transaction in this guy’s field of vision.”

Scaramucci should know. He has been non-friends with Trump for more than 30 years, though these days he’s more an outright enemy. Just as the attention-devouring president once stalked Hillary Clinton on the debate stage, Trump looms large in Scaramucci’s story. The two men seem to haunt each other. When we meet in London during a stopover in his hectic schedule, the conversation rarely drifts away from Trump for more than a few minutes. Conversely, the 62-year-old financier and broadcaster has become one of Trump’s most vocal and penetrating critics. “We fight like New Yorkers,” Scaramucci says. “He doesn’t really come back at me, because he knows I’m going to come back at him.” Unlike Trump’s presumptive friends, Scaramucci does understand Trump, he claims. “There’s something called ‘Trump derangement syndrome’; I think I have ‘Trump reality syndrome’. I know what he is, I know what he does, I know what he’s capable of and I know the danger of him.”

I was a newcomer, negotiating all of usual classroom difficulties for the first time. Throwing AI into the mix felt like downing a coffee in the middle of a panic attack

Two years ago, at the age of 39, I began training to be a school teacher. I wanted to teach English – to help young people become stronger readers, writers and thinkers, with a deeper connection to literature. After 15 years of working as a freelance writer and as a novelist, I felt confident that I had something to offer. But the further I progressed in my training, the more uncertain I felt. One particular question taunted me for my lack of an answer. What to do about artificial intelligence?

The immediate dilemma: what does it mean for English instruction that all pupils now have access to free online chatbots that can produce fluid, fairly complex prose on demand? This question sits atop a teetering pile of timeless pedagogical quandaries: What are we actually trying to do in school? How should we go about doing it? How do we know if we’ve succeeded? I was a newcomer, negotiating all of this for the first time. Throwing AI into the mix felt like downing a coffee in the middle of a panic attack.

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Allen isn’t in the first act of her own show, only coming on after 45 minutes of a string ensemble to stiffly deliver her acclaimed album in full

When Lily Allen’s West End Girl was released in October 2025, it was an instant sensation. A raw document of marital betrayal and neglect, it was a new kind of divorce album for the post-tabloid celebrity, inspired by Allen’s own separation from actor David Harbour. It earned Allen rave reviews and a place alongside Miranda July’s All Fours in a contemporary canon of emancipatory, autofictional art for modern (heterosexual) women. The album’s structure as a narrative held rich potential for live staging, and Allen’s choice to play it in full on a tour of theatres – before returning for an arena run later this year – suggested she would make good on its theatrical promise.

Split into two acts, West End Girl Live certainly begins with theatrical flair. A string ensemble – named the Dallas Minor Trio after one of the album’s standout tracks – takes to the stage for a version of Allen’s 2008 hit The Fear. The crowd enthusiastically sings along to karaoke-style lyrics on a screen behind the trio. It works as a prelude: the song’s minor key paranoia translates well to the arrangement and its themes of existential crises are relevant to the album we’re here to see.

I disliked my first encounter with pole, but two years later my experience with the sport has made me appreciate my body and my self-determination

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When my friend Bea took up pole dancing, she enthusiastically tried to convert everyone she knew to it – a common trope, I’d later find out. As a childhood gymnast and dancefloor enthusiast, I was scouted as a potential recruit, so along with my sister in 2023 we joined her for a class.

The class was packed and the studio felt overly commercialised. The friction of the metal pole against my skin was straight-up painful and spinning around made me so dizzy I had to sit down to reorientate myself several times.

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In the past three months, Donald Trump’s White House has reportedly used AI twice to effect regime change – once in its capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and more recently to help plan the strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The most recent strikes coincided with the end of the Pentagon’s relationship with the AI company Anthropic over concerns its AI tool Claude was being used for purposes the company had explicitly prohibited. The government swiftly signed a new contract with Open AI.

To find out what this means for the use of AI in forthcoming conflicts, Madeleine Finlay speaks to technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker. He explains why he thinks this moment represents a dangerous turning point.

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As for Keir Starmer, even when he tries to make a reasonably sound judgment he somehow ends up losing both sides of the argument

Maybe we should have just had done with it back in December. Instead of offering a polite reservation, every western country should have sent a full, state delegation to Norway. Begging, imploring the Nobel Committee to award Donald Trump the peace prize. We could all have chipped in a couple of billion just to make it even more worth winning.

And if that wasn’t enough, we could have twisted the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, to upgrade his “Peaceiest Ever President” award to the “Makes Jesus Look Second Rate” prize. A large solid gold statue of The Donald would have done the trick. There’s more than enough in the Fifa slush funds.

Israeli PM adds that it will not be an ‘endless war’; Israeli military lists dozens of locations in Lebanon that could be targeted – follow the latest news

• US strikes on Iran triggered by Israel’s plan to launch attack, Rubio says

• Anger with Hezbollah boils as war returns to weary Beirut

The Israeli military has just been quoting as saying it it currently attacking Tehran and Beirut simultaneously.

More on this shortly.

Democrats disturbed by rationale that Trump ordered pre-emptive strikes out of concern about Tehran retaliation

• US-Israel war on Iran – live updates

Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that US troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, in a new explanation for Washington’s surprise entry into the conflict.

The rationale drew divided reviews from top members of Congress who on Monday evening received the first briefing by the Trump administration since it ordered the air campaign to begin over the weekend.

Hundreds of thousands of passengers have found themselves stranded in the middle of a conflict between Iran and its Gulf neighbours

• US-Israel war on Iran – live updates

Holidaymakers on the first flights out of Abu Dhabi since Saturday have described their experiences up close as conflict erupted between Iran and its Gulf neighbours.

With thousands of flights cancelled across the Middle East, leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded, the UK has begun forming evacuation plans for some of the estimated 300,000 Britons in the region.

Tens of thousands of Lebanese flee homes in eerily familiar scenes as Israeli strikes leave 52 people dead

• US-Israel war on Iran – live updates

Abu Yehya and his two sons awoke to the sound of bombing in the early hours of Monday morning. A dozen blasts, one just a few hundred metres away, sent them into the streets of Beirut’s southern suburbs.

They walked for four hours, bleary-eyed, until they reached the same spot in downtown Beirut where they had fled during the last conflict, 18 months earlier, and curled up on the asphalt. There, they learned Hezbollah had struck Israel, and Lebanon was once again at war.