The global economy has shown “unexpected resilience” in the face of Donald Trump’s tariffs, but the full impact is yet to be felt, and outlook for growth remains “dim”, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned.
As policymakers gather in Washington for its annual meetings, the IMF has upgraded its forecast for global GDP growth this year to 3.2%, from 3% at its last update in July. Next year’s global forecast is unchanged, at 3.1%.
Evacuations ordered in about 115 Los Angeles area homes as heavy rain and wind raise fears of mudslides and flooding
A rare October storm arrived in California on Tuesday and threatened to pummel wildfire-scarred Los Angeles neighborhoods with heavy rain, high winds and possible mudslides. Some homes were ordered to evacuate.
The evacuations covered about 115 homes mostly in Pacific Palisades and Mandeville Canyon, both struck by a massive inferno in January that killed more than 30 people in all and destroyed more than 17,000 homes and buildings in Los Angeles county.
Democracy is under attack – and the watchdog agency has no quorum. It must be restored
Threats to the US electoral process keep accelerating. Donald Trump is issuing increasingly unhinged demands that his political adversaries and those who fund speech that he views as contrary to his political agenda or supports his political opponents be prosecuted. When a prosecutor balked at this political intervention, Trump simply found one who is more compliant.
In what appears to be yet another attempt to concoct support for unproven claims of voter fraud, the Department of Justice has issued exhaustive voting records requests to multiple states. Voting rights lawsuits have been dismissed. A division targeting foreign interference in our elections has been dismembered. Attempts are under way to make voter registration more onerous. Alarmingly, at least one commentator has warned that the extraordinary call-out of the military against US civilians on US soil may be a “dress rehearsal” for taking over the 2026 election from the lawful administrators in the states. Even short of a takeover, one could well imagine this administration developing pretexts for troop deployments in Democratic strongholds during voting. Indeed, Trump has already called for the military to use American cities, at least those run by Democrats, as “training grounds” and ominously talks of a “war from within”.
Breaking both dawn and sanity, Twilight fan Jared Richards heads to the cinema to watch all five films for the 20th anniversary of Stephenie Meyer’s vampiric bestseller
It is about 4am on a Saturday morning and a delirious energy is emerging at Randwick Ritz’s dusk-to-dawn, 12-hour marathon of the Twilight Saga. The cinema has the airs of an airport terminal after significant delays; at this point, people no longer care how they look and are doing anything they can to stay comfortable.
We’ve reached the night’s 30-minute “breakfast break”, which means we are three of five films into the romantic tale of clumsy, quiet teen Bella Swan, who moves to the foggy forest town of Forks, Washington and falls for Edward Cullen, a (permanently) 17-year-old vampire.
The director of Sentimental Value and The Worst Person in the World made his English-language debut with this divisive family drama in 2015. It’s worth watching for Isabelle Huppert alone
Long before Joachim Trier made the Oscar-winning The Worst Person in the World and this year’s festival megahit Sentimental Value, there was 2015’s Louder than Bombs: a far stranger, slipperier film worth watching for Isabelle Huppert’s spectral turn alone. She plays a character also called Isabelle, a renowned war photographer whose secrets haunt her family three years after her sudden death.
Her teenage son Conrad (Devin Druid) still daydreams in class about the car crash that claimed her life, imagining her final, panicked moments. His brother Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and father Gene (Gabriel Byrne) know (and conceal) the truth: that her fateful, split-second swerve was an act of suicide.
"I love reading so much because I feel like it's the most accessible way to get outside yourself," the "Does Anyone Else Feel This Way?" author tells Page Six.
In South Florida, Bal Harbour’s condo market is on fire. A corner skypad at Oceana Bal Harbour just sold for $29 million — plus an additional $1.5 million for a parking space and furniture— for a record-smashing total of $30.5 million.
The two people killed when a small plane crashed on a Massachusetts highway were a married couple who appeared to take off without a flight plan — and without the aircraft’s owners knowing why it was being flown. Thomas Perkins, 68, and his wife, Agatha Perkins, 66, of Middletown, Rhode Island, were found dead in...
After the jubilation in Israel of the return of the last Gaza hostages, stories of their time in captivity, hidden away in tents and tunnels, are emerging.
Some described being tortured and tormented. Others, though, recalled moments of co-existence with their captors under the most extreme of circumstances. One played cards with the men holding him and even cooked for them. Another said the captors would speak Hebrew for ease of communication.
The administration’s sweeping visa cancellations extend to Mexico’s political elite, alarming allies and rivals alike
The US government has revoked the visas of at least 50 politicians and government officials in Mexico amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug cartels and their suspected political allies, according to two Mexican officials.
The move has sent quiet shock waves through Mexico’s political elite, who regularly travel to the US. It also marks a significant broadening of US anti-narcotics action, with the Trump administration targeting active politicians usually seen as too diplomatically sensitive.
The influential billionaire investor has been giving secret lectures warning about Armageddon. Here’s why it matters
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. For the past week, my brain has been marinating in billionaire Peter Thiel’s byzantine musings about the antichrist and Armageddon. At this point, I’m pickled.
Why, you might ask, does it matter what a billionaire thinks about the antichrist? Good question!
Over the past month, Thiel has hosted four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o Orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. It is a remarkable discursion that reveals the preoccupations of one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and the US.
Thiel was on the forefront of conservative politics long before the rest of Silicon Valley took a rightward turn with Donald Trump’s second term as president. He’s had close ties to Trump for nearly a decade, is credited with catapulting JD Vance into the office of vice-president, and is bankrolling Republicans’ 2026 midterm campaigns. Making his early fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, he has personally contributed to Facebook as its first outside investor, as well as to SpaceX, OpenAI and more through his investment firm, Founders Fund. Palantir, which he co-founded, has won government contracts worth billions to create software for the Pentagon, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the NHS in the UK. Now, with more attention and political pull than ever, the billionaire is looking to spread his message about the antichrist, though he is better known for his savvy politics and investments than his contributions to theology.
In these meandering talks, Thiel is clearly aiming for the kind of syncretic thinking he so relished in the books and lectures of the philosopher and professor René Girard, whom he knew at Stanford University and whose work he has long admired. Unfortunately, more often than not, Thiel ends up with something that reads like Dan Brown.
Overall, the picture of Thiel that emerges in these lectures is someone desperately trying to disidentify from their own power. “You realize,” he tells his audience when interpreting a particular Japanese manga, “in my interpretation … who runs the world is something like the antichrist.” Here’s a man who, together with a couple of fellow Silicon Valley freaks, helped return a sundowning caudillo to a presidency he is obviously unsuited for, and who uses the awesome might of the US government to remake society and the world. A man who funds the companies that harness your data and determine who gets doxxed, deported, drone struck. Who funds far-right movements that seek to remake the very face of liberal democracy.
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