Evelyn Reynolds

New Jersey’s first lady Tammy Murphy has announced the suspension of her Senate campaign.In a video message posted to Twitter/X on Sunday, Murphy said: “After many busy, invigorating, and yet challenging months, I am suspending my Senate campaign today. I’ve been genuine and factual throughout. But it is clear to me that continuing in this race will involve waging a very divisive and negative campaign, which I am not willing to do.”Murphy, wife of New Jersey’s Democratic governor Phil Murphy, was running to replace senator Bob Menendez who is currently facing federal corruption and foreign agent allegations involving Egypt and Qatar. On Thursday, Menendez, who has maintained his innocence, announced that he will not run in the Democratic primary. Nevertheless, he said he is hopeful for an exoneration and may run as an “independent Democrat” in the general election.In her video message, Murphy pointed to Donald Trump, saying that with him on the ballot and “with so much at stake for our nation, I will not in good conscience waste resources, tearing down fellow Democrats”.“Right now, our kids are growing up in a world where fire drills are being replaced by active shooter drills, a world where little girls have less rights than their mothers and climate change threatens all of us. That’s what’s at stake in this election. And as we face grave, dangerous threats on the national level, thanks to Donald Trump and far-right extremists, it’s time to unify, not divide,” Murphy added.She went on to pledge her focus towards re-electing Joe Biden and “ensuring Democratic victories up and down the ballot all across New Jersey”.With Murphy dropping out of New Jersey’s Senate race, the state’s Democratic representative Andy Kim – whom Murphy did not endorse in her address – is left as the clear winner for the Democratic nomination in the June primary.Kim, who has led a popular campaign fuelled largely by grassroots support, has focused his campaign largely on tackling corruption following the allegations surrounding Menendez, including the senator’s alleged acceptances of cash, gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, and luxury watches from foreign governments.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEarlier this month, Kim co-introduced a new bipartisan bill to strengthen federal bribery laws.“We live in a time of the greatest distrust in government in modern American history. As public servants we have a duty to be truthful and faithful to our oaths of office and to the people we serve above all else,” Kim said. More

Eric Trump has come out railing against the $454m fraudulent property valuations judgment against his father Donald Trump, saying bonds the size of the half-a-billion dollar one the former president is being required to put up “don’t exist in this country”.As a court-imposed deadline ticks down on the former president’s family and their businesses to come up with almost half-a-billion dollars, the 40-year-old executive vice-president of the Trump Organization told Fox News on Sunday that bond issuers laughed when he approached them for that sum.“No one’s ever seen a bond this size,” Eric Trump said. “Every single person, when I came to them saying, ‘Hey, can I get a half-billion-dollar bond?’ They were laughing. Top executives of large insurance companies had never seen anything of this size.”He told host Maria Bartiromo: “A $10m bond is a large bond. A $15m bond is an enormous bond. A half-a-billion dollar bond?”On Friday, Donald Trump said he has nearly $500m in cash and suggested he could afford bond in the New York case, which resulted in the former president, his company and some of its executives all being found liable for fraudulent business practices. But that contradicted Trump’s lawyers who have said a surety that would protect Trump’s assets from seizure while he appeals the judgement was “impossible” to obtain.As soon as Tuesday morning, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, could begin to seize Trump’s assets, including his bank accounts and property. Eric Trump, who was fined close to $4m by Judge Arthur Engoron in the same case, was asked how he thought the court had arrived at the fine.“You know what it was, it was a crooked number,” Eric Trump said. “They’re trying to put my father out of business or trying to take all his resources that you’d otherwise put into his own campaign for presidency.”And he claimed that voters would see through the effort and return him to the White House at Joe Biden’s expense in November.“It’s going to backfire because he’s going to win this,” Eric Trump said to the Republican-friendly network. “And everybody in this country universally knows exactly what these people are doing.”Business executives, including Shark Tank host and investor Kevin O’Leary, have also questioned the massive judgment and the now-expiring, 30-day deadline to meet it.“Property rights are mentioned 37 times in the Constitution. Due process – very important,” O’Leary told Fox last week. “Why steal someone’s assets in 27 days? Why not give them more time to come up with the cash – forget about Donald Trump, who would want this to happen to them?”O’Leary said his criticism at the decision had nothing to do with Trump, but with the dissolution of the “essence of the American brand”.From the other side of the New York political spectrum, progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said there was a risk if James decided not to move on Trump’s assets.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s ultimately up to her determination, but it is my belief that all people should be treated equally under the law,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN’s State of the Union. “I actually think that there is risk in not seizing these assets and the open window that exists in him trying to secure these funds through other means.“I think that what we are dealing with politically is the much larger and much more grave and serious pressure of having this judgment against Donald Trump, and him being in this degree of debt and the financial pressures that he is under, and what he is subject to do in order to obtain those assets.”She added: “There is a very real risk of political corruption.”Separately, Trump is grappling with more than 80 pending criminal charges across various jurisdictions in connection with efforts to forcibly overturn the result of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden, retaining classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments.He is also facing multimillion-dollar penalties handed to him after losing a lawsuit centering on a rape allegation that was deemed to be substantially true. More

Senior US Democrats on Sunday increased pressure on Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to abandon a planned offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering.Two days after a similar call by US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was rejected by the Israeli leader, vice-president Kamala Harris said that the Joe Biden White House was “ruling out nothing” in terms of consequences if Netanyahu moves ahead with the assault.Harris said that Washington had been “very clear in terms of our perspective on whether or not that should happen”.“Any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris said on ABC’s This Week. “I have studied the maps – there’s nowhere for those folks to go. And we’re looking at about a million and a half people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there.”Harris declined to say if she, like Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, the most senior politician of the Jewish faith in the US, believed that Netanyahu is an obstacle to peace. But she said: “We’ve been very clear that far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.“We have been very clear that Israel and the Israeli people and Palestinians are entitled to an equal amount of security and dignity.”Her remarks came as political figure from progressive elements of the Democratic political established added their voices to the growing opposition to the humanitarian costs of Israel’s five-month military campaign on the Palestinian territory.That air and ground campaign began after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing more than 1,100 and taking hostage. The offensive has killed more than 30,000 people and pushed Gaza to the brink of famine.On Friday, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused the Jewish state of committing “genocide” against the Palestinians and called on the US to suspend military aid to Israel.She went further Sunday, saying that Israel had “crossed the threshold of intent” in blocking humanitarian aid from reaching starving Gazans.“Multiple governments [and other entities] have stated themselves plainly that the Israeli government and leaders in the Israeli government are intentionally denying, blocking and slow-walking this aid and are precipitating a mass famine,” she told ABC News.“It is horrific. What we are seeing here, I think, with a forced famine, is beyond our ability to deny or explain away. There is no targeting of Hamas in precipitating a mass famine of a million people, half of whom are children.”Netanyahu responded to US pressure on Friday by issuing a statement saying that he told Blinken there was no way to defeat Hamas without going into Rafah.“And I told him that I hope we will do it with the support of the US, but if we have to – we will do it alone,” Netanyahu said.Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday dismissed Netanyahu’s position, saying: “The actions of Hamas do not justify forcing thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to eat grass as their bodies consume themselves.“We are talking about collective punishment, which is unjustifiable.”Separately on Sunday, senator Ralph Warnock of Georgia – a key Black Democrat in Biden’s political coalition for re-election – was asked by CBS’s Face the Nation why the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had become a key issue for African American voters amid a broader discussion around US values.“We in the African American community understand human struggle. We know it when we see it,” Warnock said. While the US cannot forget or turn away from the 7 October attack by Hamas, he said, “we cannot turn away from the scenes of awful suffering and human catastrophe in Gaza”.“For Mr Netanyahu to go into Rafah, where some 1.4 million Palestinians are now sheltering, would be morally unjustifiable,” Warnock added. “It would be unconscionable. And I hope that at the end of the day, cooler heads will prevail.”Asked if continuing to transfer military supplies to Israel was a sacrifice of US moral authority, Warnock instead acknowledged that “Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood, and its enemies are more than just Hamas”.“But look, we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Warnock said. “We can be consistent in our support of Israel’s right to defend itself – and at the same time, be true to American values, and engage this catastrophic humanitarian situation that’s on the ground.” More

Months after his disputed one-vote victory in a Louisiana sheriff’s race was tossed by a court, a Democrat was decisively elected over his Republican rival on his second try Saturday.Henry Whitehorn got 53% of the vote in Saturday’s election in north-west Louisiana’s Caddo parish. He’ll be the first Black sheriff in the parish – which is the word Louisiana uses for county – after defeating John Nickelson, who is white.Returns from the Louisiana secretary of state’s office show Whitehorn defeated Nickelson by more than 4,000 votes this time.Turnout was considerably higher in the second race. State figures show 65,239 people voted in Saturday’s sheriff’s race – up from 43,247 in November.A former head of the Louisiana state police and ex-Shreveport police chief, Whitehorn won by a single vote in November. But courts ordered a new election after finding evidence that two people illegally voted twice and four others voted despite being ineligible.Whitehorn had come out of retirement to run for sheriff after longtime Sheriff Steve Prator announced his retirement.“I’m troubled by the violent crime that’s plaguing our community. I had retired and I could have just sat on the sidelines, if I chose to, and watched. But I’ve been called to serve. I couldn’t just sit and watch this community suffer,” Whitehorn told the Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate.Nickelson conceded Saturday night as Whitehorn’s victory became apparent. “I wish him every success because his success will be Caddo parish’s success,” Nickelson said.Whitehorn will be sworn in on 1 July, replacing interim sheriff Jay Long who took over from Prator on 1 March.Saturday’s victory for Whitehorn came while voters in Louisiana also voted in the state’s presidential preference primary.Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump and Joe Biden won the Republican and Democratic primaries, respectively, in dominant fashion. The former president captured 90% of the vote, and the Democratic incumbent took 86%, Associated Press results show. More

Asked what Abraham Lincoln might have to say to Americans in 2024, an election year in a country as divided as at any time since the civil war Lincoln won, the NPR host Steve Inskeep said the 16th president would advise that a big part of “building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong”.“One of the things that drew me to the topic of Lincoln was the present and the dilemmas and difficulties of democracy right now,” Inskeep said on Saturday, appearing in connection with his book Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, at the 27th Annual Abraham Lincoln Institute Symposium, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.“I did feel like Lincoln had something to say,” Inskeep said, “and I’ve tried to express it. And it has to do with dealing with differences in a fractured society. And it has to do with building a political majority, which is a skill that I think some of us perhaps have forgotten, or we’re being told to forget.“And part of building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong. And hopefully you don’t believe they’re wrong on everything. But maybe out of 10 things, you think they’re very wrong about three things and can find some way to agree on some of the other seven and move forward and at least agree fundamentally on the idea that we have a constitution, we have a republic, we have a democracy. We have a system to mediate our differences. We have institutions and we should uphold them.”The 46th president, Joe Biden, has made Donald Trump’s threat to that constitution, republic and democracy a central plank of his re-election campaign.Trump, the 45th president, refused to admit defeat in 2020, inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress in an attempt to stop certification of that election. Despite that – and while facing 88 criminal charges, multimillion-dollar civil penalties and attempts to keep him off the ballot by constitutional means – he stormed to a third successive presidential nomination by the party that still calls itself the party of Lincoln.Three weeks short of the 159th anniversary of Lincoln’s death – he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s on 14 April 1865, Good Friday, and died the following morning – Inskeep and other historians gathered in the very same theatre. James Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, now the basis for an Apple TV drama, was among those in the stalls.The event took place at the end of another tumultuous week in US politics, in which Trump railed against Democrats while struggling to pay a $454m bond in his New York civil fraud case; sought to have federal criminal charges over his election subversion dismissed; was accused by the White House of employing “unhinged antisemitic rhetoric”; called for the jailing of Liz Cheney, a conservative opponent; and stoked huge debate over what he meant when he predicted a “bloodbath” if Biden beat him again.View image in fullscreenAppealing to the better angels of Americans on both sides of the partisan divide, Inskeep said Lincoln’s example, including his magnanimous approach to defeated Confederates after the civil war, might help voters decide not “to simply denounce, isolate or ostracise those we believe to be wrong.“It is an approach to political difference that I think is a little bit out of fashion now, but it is fundamentally what Lincoln did. It is fundamentally the reason we decided the civil war” and thereby ended slavery.Lincoln “understood that the north had the population, they had the economy, they had the advantages that become real in wartime, that eventually come to tell on the battlefield. And Lincoln had to keep enough people unified to have that political majority, and in order to have that majority win.“It’s a central message and matter for our time.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso appearing were Callie Hawkins, chief executive of President Lincoln’s Cottage, a national monument in Washington; Gordon Leidner, author of Abraham Lincoln and the Bible; George Rable, author of Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War; and Michael Zuckert, author of A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty.As moderator, Lucas Morel, professor of politics at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, returned to a persistent theme of audience questions: how can Americans use Lincoln’s example today.Inskeep said: “Lincoln … understood that people would act in their self-interest but tried to harness that into something larger. And part of recognising that people have self-interest lay in trying to work out who that person was, which I feel is another thing we’re discouraged from doing.“We’re encouraged to speak our truth, which is great, because there’s lots of truths, lots of experiences that were suppressed and ignored and less so now. But the next step is to put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to understand where they’re coming from. And an additional step for a politician, of course, is to appeal to them.”Rable, meanwhile, said voters could learn from viewing Lincoln not as some perfect figure from the past, but as a politician and leader with faults like any other.“Here you have a full-bodied human being” Rable said. “He has strengths, he has weaknesses. And I think [we should] look at leaders that way, rather than saying, ‘OK, this leader does this, I’m just going to dismiss him,’ or, ‘I’m going to believe everything that this leader says’.” More

In September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified that Brett Kavanaugh, then an intermediate appellate judge nominated by Donald Trump to the US supreme court, sexually assaulted her 36 years earlier when they were high school students, fixtures of the suburban-DC country club set.“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford, then 51, told the Washington Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”Kavanaugh vehemently denied it. He also professed his penchants for suds.“We drank beer … I liked beer,” the judge memorably told Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, at his Senate hearing. Pressed by Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota over whether he had ever blacked out because of drinking beer, Kavanaugh ratcheted up the heat. On SNL, Matt Damon memorialized the rabid performance. PJ, Squi, Handsy Hank and Gang-Bang Greg: all are now part of TV lore. The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh anyway, 50-48, a party-line vote.Ford now returns to retell her story, in One Way Back: A Memoir. In essence, she dares Kavanaugh to sue her for defamation. Both know truth constitutes an absolute defense.Kavanaugh is not a “consummately honest person”, Ford writes. “The fact is, he was there in the room with me that night in 1982. And I believe he knows what happened. Even if it’s hazy from the alcohol, I believe he must know.”Ensconced on the high court, Kavanaugh holds his peace.Ford is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a faculty member of Stanford medical school. She is an avid surfer. Metallica is her favourite band. She invokes personal circumstance to explain why she delayed coming forward, electing not to bring her story to the attention of law enforcement as Kavanaugh rose in the Washington legal firmament.“Honestly, if it hadn’t been the supreme court – if my attacker had been running for a local office, for example – I probably wouldn’t have said anything,” Ford writes, adding that this is “a sad, scary thing to admit”.From Kavanaugh’s clerkship to Anthony Kennedy, his immediate predecessor on the supreme court, to his time in the White House of George W Bush and on the US court of appeals, Ford stayed silent. Even with her explanation, the reader is left wondering why.Ford also sheds light on her own college days.“I’d tried mushrooms and pot occasionally before, but now also explored MDMA, which helped me get outside of myself,” she writes, adding: “At the time, I just knew that they seemed to call bullshit on everything, including my self-esteem issues … I never got into anything harder, since cocaine didn’t help with my anxiety and heroin never crossed my path until I was out of college, and by that point I’d kind of missed the window of experimentation that heroin would have required.”Should any rightwingers seeking vengeance think of pouncing on such admissions, it should be noted that Trumpworld is littered with tales of drugs and alcohol. Consider the very public cases of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer, and Ronny Jackson, the Trump White House physician turned congressman from Texas. The GOP likes to hound Hunter Biden, who has struggled with addiction. But he never held office.For Ford, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight took a heavy personal toll. There were threats on her person and family. There were wounds to her psyche. One day, she recalls, she stared at a construction site and imagined it to be a Lego set. “That’s so cool,” she thought. “I wish I was a construction worker. Perhaps people were right. Perhaps I was crazy.”Ford writes favorably of meeting Anita Hill, the staffer who in 1991 confronted Clarence Thomas over his alleged sexual harassment, stoking another epically nasty supreme court nomination fight. Like Kavanaugh, Thomas was confirmed. In 2019, in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh fight, Hill told Ford time can help salve wounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFord’s politics shade left. In One Way Back, she records her satisfaction with the “blue wave” of 2018, “progressive wins” and in particular the victory in a New York House race that year of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, praises One Way Back on its jacket. So does Hill.Kavanaugh is a consequential and controversial figure. In 2022, he cast his lot with four other conservatives in Dobbs v Jackson, voting to overturn Roe v Wade. Those five justices eviscerated the concept of a constitutionally protected right to privacy. In a separate concurrence, Kavanaugh said that in doing so the court had not undercut precedents protecting contraception, interracial marriage and same-sex unions. Other justices differed.The tremors of Dobbs reverberate across the political divide. In the 2022 midterms, a much-anticipated red wave failed to materialize, thanks in part to Dobbs. In reliably Republican Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio, voters have conferred legal protections for abortion rights.On Capitol Hill, Pelosi’s successors as House speaker are also subject to the whims of Republican zealots. Kevin McCarthy is no longer even a congressman. Mike Johnson holds the gavel by the narrowest of margins. In February, Democrats flipped the seat previously held by George Santos, the indicted fabulist. Postmortems found that abortion rights played an outsized role in that Republican defeat. The threat of a national abortion ban drove voters to the polls. For the moment, for Democrats, Dobbs is a gift that keeps on giving – thanks to Kavanaugh and co.“I’d like to believe we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in the years to come,” Ford writes.Maybe sooner than that.
One Way Back: A Memoir is published in the US by Macmillan More

Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant will leave on Sunday for talks in the United States, the Israeli government said, amid growing tensions between the allies over the war in Gaza.Gallant will meet with US counterpart Lloyd Austin, US secretary of state Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan “and additional senior officials”, a statement said.“The parties will discuss developments in the war against the Hamas terrorist organisation in Gaza, efforts undertaken to return the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, humanitarian efforts and measures required to ensure regional stability,” it said.The visit comes after Blinken’s latest whistle-stop tour of the region during which he warned that an Israeli offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah would be a “mistake” that “risks further isolating Israel around the world”.Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israel was prepared to move ahead with the Rafah operation “alone”, without US support.There are widespread fears of mass civilian casualties in Rafah, where about 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge during the war which erupted after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October.Gallant’s visit will be his first to Washington since the fighting broke out.US president Joe Biden said Monday he had told Netanyahu to send a team to Washington to discuss how to avoid a full-scale military operation in Rafah.A US defence official said this week that Gallant’s scheduled meeting with Austin was separate from the delegation visit requested by Biden.The Hamas attack on 7 October resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory military campaign to destroy Hamas has killed at least 32,142 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. More

Americans love Britain, and in many ways the British admire Americans, but the benefits of the relationship are becoming increasingly one-way.That’s the argument set out in a book published next month documenting how US companies have made inroads into the UK economy by exploiting a desperate need for investment, weak regulation and a public that seems oblivious to the cost to themselves and, ultimately, the economy.Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden: whichever administration is pulling the levers, presidents pay lip service to a special relationship with the UK. Each one makes sure US companies leverage Washington’s power to gain entry, kill off local competition, secure monopoly control and run off with the profits largely tax-free.But UK companies that try to break into the US face huge legal and regulatory hurdles. It’s true that selling goods to America is a lucrative business. That’s not the same as setting up a US subsidiary in the US and going head-to-head with domestic corporations.Labour leaders fall into the trap of lauding energetic and profitable US companies as much as their cheering Tory counterparts do. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were more ardent Americanophiles than most. And Keir Starmer shows every sign of rushing to Washington should he be elected, even if Trump is in charge – much as Theresa May did in 2017, before a humiliating return visit two years later.The new book is not an anti-American leftist call to arms of the kind published in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s admiration for Ronald Reagan generated tomes about the UK being the 51st state of America. Vassal State by Angus Hanton (Swift Press) examines for the first time the disparate data showing how much US companies have embedded themselves in the UK, capitalising on our willingness to pay them outlandish fees and subscriptions and afford them the hefty tax breaks needed to keep them in the UK.We know about the power and influence of Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Alphabet/Google. Other high-profile names include online sellers eBay, Wayfair and Etsy, and streaming companies Sky, Disney and Apple TV.The internet’s cloud storage is mostly provided by American companies. All our data, bit by bit, is being collected by US firms, whether at the front end as we buy stuff using Amazon or travel using Google Maps, or at the back end, so to speak, as health data is scraped by US spy technology firm Palantir – which is run by Peter Thiel, the co-founder of another US web behemoth, PayPal.Hanton, a London-based entrepreneur who co-founded the Intergenerational Foundation charity, documents their rise, but also that of less well-known firms which have acquired the UK’s financial and physical plumbing.A classic example is WorldPay, a payments system used by tens of thousands of UK businesses to process card transactions. Once owned by NatWest, it was offloaded after the 2008 crash to US private equity firms Advent International and Bain Capital for £2bn.That was a European Commission order that the UK could have ignored but chose to obey. Advent and Bain floated the company on the London stock market for a handsome profit in 2015, but it soon went private again. Another Advent-owned firm, payments processing technology company Vantiv, paid $10.4bn for it in 2018, then Florida-based Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) paid $35bn in cash and shares for WorldPay in 2019.What ties these firms together is that they offer popular services that somehow we accept should be charged for, without any reference to the cost of production or market influence.It doesn’t happen on the continent in nearly the same way – and some would probably argue France, Germany, Spain and Italy are the poorer for it. WorldPay executives would no doubt say US companies are big investors, enhancing and expanding the UK businesses they buy, often with a long-term vision. Except that the vision includes domination and control of the economy, holding the government to ransom with threats of cutting investments if tax subsidies are not generous enough or tax rates low enough.Google’s soon-to-be-opened monster HQ in London’s King’s Cross is emblematic of the way the UK’s red-carpet treatment for investors has profited US companies and offset the threat of an exodus after Brexit. Google has found the UK, unlike the EU, willing to turn a blind eye to its monopolistic practices.That is great news for Brexiters. It’s not so good for the rest, who, wherever they turn, must pay for the services of an ever-expanding array of US mega-companies. More