Tag Archives: WorldNews

Trump’s doctor is a warning to all the footsoldiers and loyal colluders | Zoe Williams

“Dr Harold Bornstein has admitted that the president dictated his own health report. But he’s just one case of collateral damage in Trump’s war on truth”

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Dr Harold Bornstein has admitted that the president dictated his own health report. But he’s just one case of collateral damage in Trump’s war on truth

Two years ago, give or take, the US election seemed to hang on the health of the candidates. A video surfaced of Hillary Clinton, seeming to wobble and almost faint as she got into a car. Your head said: this is trivial thing, if it were serious she would have bowed out, it’s probably one of those diseases like labyrinthitis or flu that you don’t believe exists until you get it yourself. Your gut said: this is very bad, voting is primal; no one lines up behind anyone who looks as though they’re about to fall over.

Trump, meanwhile, was in rude health, which was plain from his overall rudeness, and also, a letter from his physician, Dr Harold Bornstein. It was like a note you forge from your mum, in reverse: Donald Trump can go swimming, because he is in the best health ever, his level of wellbeing is unlike any you may have encountered in a swim-eligible child. It turns out there was a reason. “He dictated the whole thing,” Borstein told CNN on Tuesday. “I just made it up as I went along,” he unclarified, but I think we can call this an idiomatic US/UK difference: over there, the phrase clearly means: “I wrote down what that other person was saying.”

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‘I miss the old Kanye’: what has happened to rap’s most complex star?

Self-delusion is inexhaustible, it seems

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His suggestion that black people have been complicit in their own slavery has prompted widespread outrage. What lies behind Kanye West’s recent provocations?

Photograph: Smallz & Raskind/Contour by Getty Image

In a video viewed more than 6m times on Twitter, 21-year-old Chika Oranika summed up the current feelings of many black Americans about Kanye West. She delivered her own lyrics over the beat of the rap star’s Jesus Walks. “How you say you Yeezus but do nothing to restore us? You support the people up in power that abort us,” she raps into the camera. “It don’t matter how much money you got or you lack, when that cheque clear don’t forget that your children are still black.”

Why the opprobrium, which has come from activists, Hollywood stars and fellow musicians, as well as withering online freestyles? West, one of the most significant, complex and celebrated rappers in the US, has used a 350-tweet stream of consciousness over the past fornight to throw his support firmly behind Donald Trump. But yesterday, he went way beyond party politics in an interview with TMZ, saying, in a sloppy bit of rhetoric: “You hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years? That sounds like a choice.”

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Plants ‘talk to’ each other through their roots

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Scientists studying corn seedlings believe that they send signals under the soil, advising each other of the proximity of other plants

Plants use their roots to “listen in” on their neighbours, according to research that adds to evidence that plants have their own unique forms of communication.

The study found that plants in a crowded environment secrete chemicals into the soil that prompt their neighbours to grow more aggressively, presumably to avoid being left in the shade.

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Europeans cast doubt on Israel’s claims about Iran nuclear breaches

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EU governments stand by 2015 deal with Tehran after presentation by Netanyahu

European leaders have pushed back against Israel’s claims that it has new evidence showing that Iran is breaching the nuclear deal with the west which was signed in 2015.

The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, hailed the Israeli claims as significant, as the 12 May deadline approached for the US president, Donald Trump, to decide whether to pull out of the deal. But Pompeo declined to say whether they represented proof that Iran was violating the deal.

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Apple delivers best-ever second quarter despite sales worries

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With revenues of over $61bn, Apple beat its 2015 record in the report released Tuesday – but sales of its most valuable product are slowing

Apple on Tuesday shook off worries that its $1,000 iPhone had failed to live up to the hype – but sales of the world’s most valuable company’s most valuable product are slowing, and Apple has announced a plan to buy its way out of trouble.

Releasing its latest quarterly report, Apple announced it had sold 52.2m iPhones in the quarter ending 31 March, at an average price of $728.54. Sales were up 3% compared to last year and slightly lower than analysts had expected, but numbers beat the gloomiest forecasts and were enough to deliver Apple its best second quarter ever, with revenues of over $61bn. That beat the record of $58bn set in 2015.

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Facebook’s dating app is finally making privacy invasion sexy

Pimping for profit!

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I, for one, can’t wait for Facebook’s new service. Where better to point a powerful surveillance tool than our love lives?

Thank God Facebook is finally offering a dating app. Who better to entrust with the most intimate parts of our lives than Mark Zuckerberg, the king of privacy?

I assume Zuck will be building it off of one of the early projects that established him as a wunderkind: FaceMash. You may remember it – it’s the one where he hacked into campus websites, collecting pictures that allowed Harvard students to rank each other by hotness.

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