The London office, the empty boxes and the £1bn tax loophole

US trade representative Jamieson Greer has a level-headed reputation but commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and White House adviser Peter Navarro also have key roles Having reportedly read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in French, during a military tour of duty in Iraq, Jamieson Greer considered himself an unlikely target for accusations of francophobia. But Donald Trump’s US trade representative, hitherto one of the president’s less high-profile cabinet members, found himself in that uncomfortable position amid the acrimonious collapse of bilateral trade talks with Canada that now threatens to degenerate into an all-out trade war between the two close trading partners whose economies are tightly intertwined...

Guidance says states must implement ‘comprehensive measures’ to address legacy of racial discrimination A UN committee has said countries are legally obliged to consider reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and take other ⁠measures to address the enduring ⁠legacy of racial ​discrimination. Guidance published on Monday by the committee on the elimination of racial discrimination (CERD) said the obligations arose from ⁠a legally binding 1965 convention on racial discrimination, not from the legal standards that existed when the slave trade took place...

Public lands belong to all of us. Noone should plunder those lands for profit Do people still say a car was “sold for parts”? Because the US is being sold for parts or just handed over to the oligarchy. It’s a fire sale, a bankruptcy auction, it’s a planned dismantling of everything from its military to its institutions of higher education to its scientific research to its public lands. And while the threat to sell off part of Yosemite National Park is about a quarter-mile parcel on the park’s edge, Yosemite is a crown jewel in the national park system and, arguably, the world’s first national park. Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility..