Annalisa Merelli

Theresa May, the leader of the UK’s Conservative Party and its embattled prime minister, is only the second woman to hold either roles. On June 8, following a series of campaign missteps and a late surge from Labour Party rival Jeremy Corbyn, her party lost its majority in parliament in the UK’s snap election. May has vowed to stay on as prime minster despite growing pressure to resign.

While watching today’s US Senate testimony by former FBI director James Comey, it was hard not to start playing “Who will play who in the movie.” All The President’s Men is arguably the best thing to have come out of the Watergate scandal, and it’s been a while since US politics has provided material for a similarly captivating plot.

Former FBI director James Comey gave a written statement to the US senate committee on intelligence ahead of his deposition tomorrow (June 8). It reads more like it was written by a crime novelist than by a cop: Detailed, evocative, and with just enough tension, the seven pages are quite the read, likely to captivate even those not especially into official hearings.

Tomorrow, ousted FBI director James Comey will provide his highly anticipated testimony in front of the senate committee on intelligence. Today, Comey’s written testimony was released by the Senate—and it reads like a juicy novella, replete with Godfather-like scenes. Due in part to his habit of keeping copious notes on meetings with Trump, Comey describes in great detail his encounters with the president, in all their awkward, ominous glory.

In his first foreign trip as US president, Donald Trump “united the entire Muslim world in a way that it really hasn’t been in many years,” one of his officials told the press. Well, if so, it didn’t stay united long.

In April, a rumor spread that 600,000 people were evacuated from Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, because they wouldn’t all be able to fit in the city’s network of bomb shelters in case of an attack. That report was later debunked, but rising tensions between North Korea and the US have a lot of people on edge. North Korea’s series of recent missile tests are unlikely to help matters.

US president Donald Trump’s announcement that the US will pull out of the Paris Agreement was met almost exclusively with disagreement and worry.

It’s telling that UN secretary general António Guterres’s address on climate change this week was held at New York University’s school of business, and not its college of arts and sciences. Guterres had a clear message and he wanted to deliver it to an audience more likely to care about a sound financial, rather than ecological, future: Climate change is real—and it’s bad for business.

“Why so tan!” my Chittaranjan Park downstairs neighbor, Patty, who ran a small beauty parlor, asked me the first time she saw me after my skin had been in the sun long enough that it wouldn’t glow in the dark. I took it to be a compliment—I had been to the beach while in Italy, why thank you very much!

President Donald Trump has been out of the US for nearly a week, gracing with his presence Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy, and now Belgium. In just a couple of days, the US president has met with a long list of foreign leaders—from King Salman of Saudi Arabia, to Palestinian authority president Mahmoud Abbas, to Pope Francis, to the leaders of NATO. Since May 19, he’s visited some of the most strategic locations for today’s international affairs.

[Spoiler warning: This article contains a ton of them.]

Today (May 24), during the quick Roman stop of his first trip abroad as president, Donald Trump met with Pope Francis. With him were his wife Melania, his daughter Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner.

About half of pregnancies in the US are unintended.

Expanding the Mexico City Policy; cutting the US’s contribution to the United Nations Population Fund budget; proposing a health care reform plan that would significantly reduce women’s access to coverage—US president Donald Trump has already strung together a series of attacks on women’s health in his first few months in office. The latest missive is a proposal to cut the Medicaid budget $800 billion over 10 years, or nearly 15% annually (based on the 2016 Medicaid budget of $553 billion).

Since the European Union signed an agreement with Turkey to limit the flow of refugees coming into Greece in March of 2016, the number of arrivals has decreased dramatically. In 2015, over a million people crossed into Europe. In 2016, that number was down to about 350,000, almost half of whom crossed before the border agreement.

The US Department of Justice has named Robert Mueller, a former FBI head, as a special counsel to oversee the bureau’s probe into Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election.

Despite several controversies, including the firing of FBI Director James Comey, US president Donald Trump’s approval rating has remained pretty stable at 40% in the past weeks, according to polling released today by Public Policy Polling (pdf, p.3).

With an unanticipated coup de théâtre, Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey yesterday (May 9). Comey learned of his dismissal from cable news reports while at an event on talent acquisition and diversity at the FBI. It was so unexpected that the former FBI director apparently thought it was a joke.

Most women can tell you what fruit they are.

The day after the American Health Care Act (AHCA) was passed in the US House of Representatives, a group of Republican senators are at work on a version they hope will pass in the Senate. The revisions are expected to be so substantial that the senators crafting the legislation are reportedly not even bothering starting with the text approved in the House, and instead will begin by drafting a health care bill from scratch.

Marine Le Pen, France’s far-right presidential candidate, announced on Apr. 24 that she is temporarily relinquishing her responsibilities as leader of the National Front (FN) party to focus on campaigning for the runoff, in which she is facing Emmanuel Macron, the center-left candidate.

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One of my favorite jokes involves asking Americans whether US history classes cover the events of every single day since the colonies were founded. After all, how else could a mere two centuries of history occupy the same amount of class time that an Italian child like me had to study entire millennia?