Alan Cumming has spoken candidly about living in the United States during Donald Trump’s second tenure as president.

The Scottish actor holds dual US and UK citizenship, and currently resides in New York with his husband, the visual artist Grant Shaffer.

Later this week, the Emmy winner is due to make his debut in Tip Toe, a new Russell T Davies drama which takes an unflinching look at modern life in an ever-divided world.

Speaking to Radio Times to promote his new show, Alan claimed: “Of course, there are kind people in America, and I live in New York, which is a different kettle of fish to the rest of America.”

“But the government…” he continued. “It is a fascist country and I’m paying taxes to it. It’s horrible.”

Riffing on Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, Alan remarked: “Make America like the 1950s again, more like. When Black people would serve you, you could do whatever you liked, and anyone who you didn’t like, you would get the boys to duff them up. That’s what they want. That’s what they’re creating.”

“It’s not a new thing for people to be so bigoted and intolerant – it always has been like that. It’s just been suppressed,” he then insisted.

“What’s shocking now is how public and blatant it is and how comfortable people feel agreeing with it.”

Last year, Alan told HuffPost UK: “People are scared. Especially in America – people are terrified to speak out. You should be scared! You could get attacked, you could get deported… it’s just awful, it’s a terrifying time. If you speak up and are a voice of descent, you risk a lot.”

Referring to a speech he made in support of trans rights on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the former Baftas host said: “After Kimmel, my publicist was saying, ‘you’re going to get deported, you’re going to get deported’.”

“There was such a big response to it, and all I was doing was telling the truth and speaking up! I wasn’t being insulting, I was just telling the truth. And then I realised how privileged I am – in that I have another life, I have a life [in the UK],” he claimed.

“I have a home here, I have a passport, I spend more time here, actually, than I do in America right now. And so, I feel, I guess, privileged and a bit protected by that. If I did get deported, if something happened in that way, then I wouldn’t be sent to a Venezuelan prison, I would be sent to Scotland.”

He added: “In a funny way, it made me realise that I have a duty to keep speaking up. And I want to keep doing that.”

Read Alan Cumming’s full interview in Radio Times here.

Tony Blair has called on the UK to maintain its close ties with Donald Trump’s America even when it’s “difficult or unpopular”.

The former Labour prime minister has penned a brutal essay calling for a policy reset within the party.

Deep fractures between the White House and Downing Street have emerged in recent months after Starmer refused Trump’s requests for aide in the Iran war and turned down US pleas to send warships to the Middle East.

The US president has subsequently compared Starmer to Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister who proposed Nazi appeasement before World War 2.

Blair, who went to war in Iraq out of support for US president George W Bush, suggested Starmer needed to hold onto the relationship with America.

He claimed that the UK-US relationship “has always been an unequal partnership”, adding: “America is much more powerful than any single allied country, is the dominant force and therefore is the ‘shot-caller’.

“This has been true at least for the last half-century. Most American presidents have been too polite to say this; but they always thought it and more important, acted on it.

“That is why I don’t believe with the Trump Presidency we’re witnessing a ‘rupture’ [in relations].”

Blair claimed it was more of a “reckoning”, and it was time for the UK to wake up to “some home truths” from the States.

He also defended Trump’s repeated attacks on the Nato defence alliance, saying: “Though American security strategy is couched in very ‘America First’ terms, it identifies the principal threats – in the Arctic from Russia; longer term, globally, from China; and in the Middle East from Iran – no differently from how Europe sees the world.

“President Trump has demanded increases in Nato spending not dissolution of the alliance.”

Blair said the UK’s relationship with the US was now “weaker” after Starmer refused Trump’s request for American access to military bases for preemptive strikes on Iran earlier this year.

This move was widely welcomed by the general voters.

Public First research for Politico found that more than half (53%) of the UK public viewed America as a negative force globally in April, up from 35% in December.

But Blair said: “I understand the reasons for refusal but it’s not the best way to treat our ally.”

He added: “If you want to play you have to be sat at the table. And bring something to the table.”

However, he struck a more sympathetic tone when he added: “I know how hard it is to be an ally of the USA.

“We were its staunchest supporter post 9/11. We went through Afghanistan and Iraq together. But it mattered deeply to America and so it mattered to us also.

“America remains the indispensable core of Britain’s security alliance. But staying with it means even when it is difficult or unpopular.”

He warned: “The cumulative risk for Britain is that we become frighteningly insular: wary of America because of President Trump.”

Blair later adding on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “I’m not saying the Labour Party should love Donald Trump, get close to Donald Trump.

“I’m simply saying the American relationship matters to Britain.”

Blair was announced as a senior executive on Trump’s “Board of Peace” earlier this year, an initiative meant to initially run Gaza following the end of the Israel-Hamas war.

His appointment sparked fury within the Middle East because of Blair’s past involvement in Iraq.

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Ed Miliband has hit out at Donald Trump’s ongoing war in Iran after the energy price cap increased.

Regulator Ofgem has just announced the energy price cap will be going up by 13% between July 1 and September 30.

That means the average gas and electricity bill will increase to £1,862 a year, adding a significant strain to households across the country.

Responding to the concerning update, energy secretary Ed Miliband said: “The rise in the price cap because of a war we did not choose is deeply unwelcome news for households across the country.”

Trump worked with his Israeli allies to launch an attack on Iran at the end of February.

Iranian troops responded by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, a major shipping lane which is responsible for transporting a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies.

Three months later, the effective closure of the waterway continues as negotiation efforts stall – meaning energy prices around the world have gone up.

The US did ask to use British military bases to initiate preemptive strikes on Iran, but Starmer declined, only allowing the sites to be used for defensive action.

The UK, along with European allies, also turned down Trump’s plea to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz to force it to reopen.

The war has opened a chasm in diplomatic relations between the White House and Downing Street, as Starmer insists Britain will not be drawn into a “wider war”.

Miliband said the government would continue trying to help the public amid rising bills, adding: “We know people were under pressure before this crisis, and that’s why easing that burden is our number one priority. ”

He pointed out that chancellor Rachel Reeves froze fuel duty and made bus travel free for children across England in August.

The cabinet minister noted that the government has also taken £150 average costs off energy bills for the years ahead, and extended the Warm Home Discount for around six million families, too.

Miliband said: “We will continue to monitor the situation ahead of the winter and plan for all contingencies.

“In the immediate term it is essential to de-escalate this conflict to bring oil and gas prices down and as Britain faces the second fossil fuel crisis of this decade, we must learn the right lessons.

“The way to get bills down for good and avoid these price spikes is to go further and faster with this government’s drive for clean homegrown power we control. We are upgrading as many homes as possible ahead of winter with the biggest investment in warm homes in British history.”

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, warned that this would be a very troubling update for the elderly.

She said: “Even during this unprecedented hot weather for May, older people on low incomes are already worrying about how they will afford to stay warm next winter.

“We know that today’s price cap increase is the shape of worse to come when the next price cap is announced, because by then the impact of the war in the Middle East will really be feeding through into prices.

“Unfortunately, these elevated energy costs due to the war will hit just at the time when pensioners will need their heating the most, as we head into winter.”

Age UK urged the government to come up with “an effective plan now to help older people on low incomes to get through the coming winter unscathed”.

Abrahams added: “It’s imperative that we avoid a repeat of the 2024/5 winter, when millions of older people were cold in their own homes.”

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Former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips said she threatened to resign over Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador.

The ex-Labour peer was hired in late 2024, even though his ties to prolific paedophile Jeffrey Epstein were well-known.

Mandelson was sacked in September 2025 when new documents showed the extent of his friendship with Epstein.

He quit the Labour Party earlier this year when more revelations came to light, and is currently under investigation by the Metropolitan Police over allegations of misconduct in public office. He denies any accusations of wrongdoing.

The saga has cast a huge shadow over Starmer’s government and his work to prevent violence against women and girls.

Phillips, a vocal advocate for victims, quit government after Labour’s drubbing in the local elections.

She has now revealed to BBC Newsnight that Mandelson’s appointment almost pushed her to resign long before she actually stepped down.

Upon learning that the then-Labour peer had secured the top job, Phillips said she felt “hurt, and upset, and anger.”

“I had to decide whether me shouting my mouth off about that to make myself feel better was the right thing to do or I could use that hurt, anger, to sweat the assets on violence against women and girls, to get half of what is written in the violence against women and girls strategy actually written into it,” Phillips continued.

“Never waste a crisis is always my mantra,” she said. “But privately, I was horrified, like everybody else.”

Asked if she considered quitting, Phillips said: “I didn’t just consider it, I threatened to resign on a number of occasions and made demands to stop me from resigning.”

The MP for Birmingham Yardley said she had “conversations I won’t repeat” with the prime minister over it.

“But I have to say I think I was one of the only people who actually did that,” she added.

When she quit earlier this month, Phillips told Starmer in a letter: “I think you are a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough.”

She added: “I’m not seeing the change I think I, and the country expect, and so cannot continue to serve as a minister under the current leadership.”

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This article contains major spoilers for the latest episode of Euphoria.

Euphoria boss Sam Levinson has shared his thoughts on the most recent episode of the hit US drama, which featured the death of a major character.

As you’re reading this, we’re going to assume you know now that in the latest instalment of the award-winning series, Jacob Elordi’s character Nate was killed off.

However, it wasn’t just Nate’s death that left viewers reeling, but also the way he died, being stung by a venomous rattlesnake while buried alive.

Speaking to Esquire, Euphoria’s creator Sam Levinson shared exactly where the idea for Jacob’s character to die in such a gruesome way came from.

Explaining that it was always his plan for Nate to die in season three, he said that the character’s burial was an homage to The Candy Snatchers.

The rest of it came to him while driving to work with his wife, Ashley Lent, one morning.

“It was one of those gorgeous L.A. days where it was perfect weather,” he recalled.

“We’re listening to Otis Redding. The windows are down and we’re driving to Warner Bros. and I’m looking out the window. I just had this image of a rattlesnake coming toward this pipe. He’s banging and the snake can sense the movement in the ground. And I thought, ‘What if the snake goes into the pipe and then he’s stuck inside the coffin with this rattlesnake?’.”

He noted that it’s “sort of a funny moment where you realise that not all dark scenes come from a dark place”, adding: “I turned to Ash and I said, ‘I think I got it.’ And I explained how Nate dies in this sequence. She goes, ‘That’s what you’ve been thinking about?’.”

Despite being put through the ringer to shoot the scenes practical effects, Jacob has admitted he had a surprisingly good time filming his character’s death.

In a behind-the-scenes video, the Oscar nominee said: “I had to go into this coffin, my shoulders were touching the sides and I couldn’t move my arms. And then they would drill the lid on, and it would get dark. It was really nice, actually, it was quite peaceful in there.”

“[The snake] was super cute. He was, like, real cuddly,” Jacob then insisted. “He kind of just saddled up next to me, and it was nice. But he was real sleepy – sleepy snake. I had to kind of nudge him to get him to come up [to my face].”

Euphoria’s season three finale – widely believed to be the last ever episode of the show – will premiere on Sky and Now in the UK on Monday 1 June.

Perrie Edwards has dismissed the possibility of Little Mix coming together as a four-piece any time soon.

The Think About Us singer first rose to fame as a contestant on The X Factor back in 2011, where she and fellow auditionees Jade Thirlwall, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Jesy Nelson were put together in a girl group by the judges.

In the end, the quartet went on to win the show, and stayed together as Little Mix for almost a decade, until Jesy announced that she was leaving the band in December 2020 on mental health grounds.

After that, Little Mix remained together as a trio, before going on an indefinite hiatus in 2022.

Since then, Jade, Leigh-Anne and Perrie have all been adamant that they’ll reunite one day, which the latter spoke about during a new interview with Attitude magazine.

“I’m ready and raring,” Perrie enthused. “We always message each other and are bantering like, ‘So how long until we do a reunion? Are we going to do one? Where is it?’.”

She added: “I’m like, just give me a ballpark time. Do you know what I mean? Just let me know when.”

However, when pressed on whether it would involve Jesy, Perrie insisted the band would “definitely” be “a three” when they did come together.

Initially, the remaining members of Little Mix maintained that Jesy’s departure from the group was an amicable one, although this appeared not to be the case as time went on.

Reports around the release of Jesy’s debut solo single Boyz suggested that her former bandmates had all unfollowed her on social media, though unverified “leaked” DMs reportedly sent by Leigh-Anne Pinnock to a TikTok user later suggested that Jesy had, in fact, blocked the trio.

These alleged messages were never verified, nor did Leigh-Anne ever comment on them directly. However, they formed a major part of the conversation during an ill-fated Instagram live-stream Jesy took part in with her Boyz collaborator Nicki Minaj, in which the rapper branded Leigh-Anne a “fucking clown” and accused her of being “jealous” of Jesy.

Just over a year ago, Jesy became a mum to twin girls, Ocean Jade and Story Monroe.

She later disclosed that her daughters had been diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a genetic condition characterised by weakness and wasting in the skeletal muscles, which can cause severe issues with movement.

Following this, Leigh-Anne confirmed earlier this year that she and the rest of Little Mix had “all reached out” to Jesy in light of the news, praising her as “really brave”.

President Donald Trump on Monday proposed that the “Atomic Energy Commission” could help oversee the destruction of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile as he looks to negotiate an end to his unpopular war with the country.

But there’s one apparent error with the proposal: the US Atomic Energy Commission was dissolved over half a century ago.

“This is getting utterly surreal!” wrote Erik Townsend, one of several critics on X who flagged the president’s mention of the defunct agency on his Truth Social platform.

Earlier in the day, Trump pitched on social media that the stockpile of what he calls “nuclear dust” — a sticking point in the talks to bring the conflict to a close and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — be “immediately turned over to the United States to be brought home and destroyed.”

He laid out other alternatives, as well: the enriched uranium could also be “destroyed in place” in conjunction and coordination with Iran or it could be destroyed “at another acceptable location, with the Atomic Energy Commission, or its equivalent, being witness to this process and event.”

Townsend noted that both Pakistan and Israel currently have an “Atomic Energy Commission” but neither “make sense” in the context of Trump’s pitch.

The US Atomic Energy Commission, formed in 1946 under President Harry Truman, was tasked with developing and regulating nuclear technology.

After the AEC was dissolved in 1975, its duties were split between two agencies: the Energy Research and Development Administration (which merged with the Federal Energy Administration in 1977 to make the Department of Energy) and the still-active Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Neither the AEC nor its successors, however, have typically been involved in such a mission to disarm a nation of its nuclear material.

Others on X wondered whether Trump was referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a body that would monitor Iran’s compliance with an international agreement to dispose of its stockpile.

The White House did not immediately return a HuffPost request for comment.

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WASHINGTON — Americans hoping that President Donald Trump’s third “annual” physical exam over a span of 13 months on Tuesday might offer insights into his increasingly bizarre and incomprehensible statements and social media posts are likely to be disappointed.

Neither Trump nor his White House is under any legal obligation to reveal observations about his mental health that might be made by the team of physicians who examined him at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist and former professor at Yale School of Medicine, said those doctors do, though, have an ethical responsibility to the American people to do just that.

“Of course, the White House physician has a duty, and so do we. The public is being shortchanged, and endangered, to the maximum,” said Lee, who in 2017 edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, one of the first warnings from mental health professionals about Trump’s behaviour pattern.

“The incoherence is worrisome, possibly dangerous,” said Allen Dyer, a retired psychiatrist and retired George Washington University professor who recommends a full battery of tests. “The evaluation should include a complete mental status exam as well as imaging studies, lab studies, including amyloid studies that might be indicative of Alzheimer’s, which his father was reported to have had, and a battery of cognitive tests.”

Dyer, in 1973, helped craft the so-called “Goldwater rule” that he says has been misinterpreted to mean that mental health professionals should never offer their analyses of political figures.

Last week, Lee and 19 other doctors and mental health professionals wrote to the White House physician, telling him that “Trump’s judgment, decision-making, and relationship to reality are dangerously impaired” and calling on him to take action because Trump is a danger to himself and others.

Trump’s White House said it would provide information in the next day or two about his Walter Reed visit but would not address HuffPost’s queries about his mental health. Trump himself posted on social media Tuesday afternoon: “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.”

Trump has, ever since he entered politics 11 years ago, spoken and written in an over-the-top style. In recent years and especially in recent months, though, his tendency to ramble and answer questions with non-sequiturs appears to have worsened, while his posts on social media have grown ever more unhinged.

He has threatened Iran with civilization-ending genocide and hinted at using nuclear weapons as the war he began on February 28 continues even as Trump tries to declare victory and move on. Early Tuesday, he posted an AI-generated image of him wielding a long gun and standing over a dead rhinoceros, with the statement “NO RINOS!” — a reference to the acronym “Republicans in name only,” which in his view means Republicans who are not sufficiently loyal to him.

While past presidents and presidential candidates have bent over backward to prove they were healthy enough for the job — the late John McCain released more than a thousand pages of medical records when he ran in 2008 — Trump has taken the opposite approach, revealing virtually nothing.

When he first ran in 2016, Trump released no records but did put out a single-page letter under his personal physician’s signature that appeared to have been written by Trump himself. “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Harold Bornstein wrote.

During his first term, the White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, wound up becoming a big Trump supporter — “If he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200,” he told reporters in 2018 — and eventually ran for and won a House seat from Texas with Trump’s backing.

During this current term, the White House has deflected questions about his health and given at times nonsensical answers. The deep bruising on his right hand, for example, was explained away as resulting from shaking so many hands, even though it was on the back of his hand, which is not touched during a handshake. Eventually the bruises showed up on his left hand, as well.

While Trump’s White House doctors and aides almost certainly will not reveal any information about whether his mental condition was examined, it is possible that Trump may himself do so, the same way he let the world know that his doctors had administered to him a screening test for dementia.

The simple, 30-question Montreal Cognitive Assessment is designed to provide doctors early warning signs of loss of mental acuity. Trump, instead, has repeatedly claimed over the several years since it was first administered to him that it proves his genius.

“I’ve taken it and I’ve aced it all three times, I’ll tell you, because it is a positive thing,” he boasted again on Friday at a political rally.

Dyer said Trump’s claims about the MoCA test are further evidence of his issues. “His bragging about ‘acing’ the Montreal screening test, being able to distinguish two animals, is suggestive for poor judgment rather than cognitive sharpness,” he said,

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