Politics - Friday, March 20, 2026

There are several ways the United States could attempt to reopen the waterway, all of which carry substantial risks.

New York City first lady Rama Duwaji is facing backlash amid resurfaced posts that show her praising airplane hijackers and using racial slurs.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent estimated that the move would add about 140 million barrels of crude to the oil market.

Expert Austin Berg warns Chicago's "pay later" debt culture under Mayor Brandon Johnson is alarming markets with a $1 billion budget gap and risky bond deals.

Forces have been stripped back since the cold war but political stasis is dangerous in the face of growing global threats • Middle East crisis – live updates It will have been more than three weeks since the US and Israel first attacked Iran when the first British warship finally arrives off the coast of Cyprus, a belated defensive deployment that has highlighted the lack of military capacity available to the UK. Nominally, HMS Dragon was one of three destroyers available out of six. In reality the warship has had to be hauled out of dry dock, prepared and then, after launch, tested for several days in the Channel. Its arrival date is still unconfirmed. Continue reading...

A spokesman for the Coast Guard did not directly connect the rescue operation to Thursday’s boat strike in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The vessel sent the man to Costa Rica, and recovered two dead bodies.

The FBI warned that Russian intelligence-linked hackers are targeting Signal users, including U.S. officials and journalists, compromising thousands of accounts.

The California State University system joins a short list of universities fighting Trump orders in court. The Education Department has threatened to cut federal funds to San Jose State University.

A string of recent terrorist attacks reportedly by naturalized citizens exposes serious flaws in U.S. immigration law that can be fixed by the SCAM Act, claims House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn.

Too many want to cast acts of violence and antisemitism as blows against Israel’s government. But the fear and terror land on real people, thousands of miles away Let us begin with a brief exchange on GB News, confirmed this week as the TV arm of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK . Following an attack on a synagogue last week in Michigan , in which a gunman drove a car packed with explosives through the entrance to the building before opening fire, a pundit on the channel sought to clarify what the attacker actually meant by his actions. “This was an Israeli temple,” she explained . “It was aligned with Israel.” By way of evidence, she cited the name of the synagogue – Temple Israel – apparently unaware that Jews have referred to themselves as “the people of Israel” for millennia, long before there was a state of that name, and that there are, for that reason, countless synagogues in the US called Temple Israel. No, for her, the Michigan house of worship, with its on-site school where more than a hundred children were in lessons that day, was a de facto embassy of the Israeli state and therefore an understandable, if not legitimate, target. Hold that episode in your mind. Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . Continue reading...