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The explosive tell-all about President Trump, Fire and Fury, has been available for purchase for less than a week, but many of its readers are ready to render a verdict on its impact.

For the president’s detractors, the bestseller offers bona fide proof that Trump is unfit for office; for his supporters, it is nothing more than tabloid fiction written by an author with a questionable reputation.

The book’s international popularity mirrored its U.S.-based reception. In Singapore, some bookstores ran out of copies less than 24 hours after it was released.

Donald Trump on Saturday called Michael Wolff, the writer of a bestselling book about his White House, “a mentally deranged author” who “knowingly writes false information”

Wolff has said he conducted more than 200 interviews and stands by all his sourcing and reporting. News outlets have pointed to inconsistencies in Fire and Fury and in past work

He is a New Yorker in Washington, far more consumed with the news media and personalities than policy issues. He elides facts, fudges the specifics and dispenses with professional norms in the service of success and status.

To put it mildly, it can be hard to attain the unalloyed truth from a president who has long boasted of gaming the press, or from competing courtiers who often wield insider anecdotes as sword and shield in their efforts to protect themselves and bloody their rivals. Then there is the sheer outlandishness of the Trump era: When most anything is plausible it is also printable, but that does not necessarily mean you are getting it right

“Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book,” he says. To confront his problem, Wolff notes that there are times he lets “the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them.” Unfortunately for the reader, he throws up his hands when dealing with three of the most pivotal moments of the Trump campaign and presidency.

Boris Johnson can change from bonhomie to a dark fury in seconds. His normally joky demeanour flashes into a sarcastic snarl, his skin reddens and blotches, his eyes dart into an intense narrow glare and on the worst occasions his lips curl back to reveal wisps of spittle.

The all-out favourite to be our next prime minister has the fiercest and most uncontrollable anger I have seen. A terrifying mood change can be triggered instantly by the slightest challenge to his entitlement or self-worth.

he was temperamentally unsuitable to be entrusted with any position of power, let alone the highest office of all, in charge of the United Kingdom and its nuclear codes.

The German parliament has approved a resolution declaring that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One was a "genocide".

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their people died in the atrocities of 1915. Turkey says the toll was much lower and rejects the term "genocide".

"We will do whatever is necessary to resolve this issue,"

humans are not yet beyond saving themselves from the worst ravages of global warming. There’s fight in us yet, even if it’s a bit shapeless.

The problem – and it’s an existential threat both profound and perverse – is that those who lead us and have power over our shared destiny are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence

Worse than that, their policies, language, patronal obligations and acts of bad faith are poisoning us, training citizens to accept the prospect of inexorable loss, unstoppable chaos, certain doom.

On face, however, the splits with Tillerson and Corker both center around the same material question of whether the United States will start a shooting war, most likely with North Korea.

, Corker told the Times that he worried Trump didn’t understand the stakes of his statements on foreign-policy questions, viewing it as a “reality show of some kind.”

“He doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making,” said Corker, who is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and close to Tillerson, and therefore particularly well-placed to analyze Trump’s foreign-policy choices.

Leave to the psychoanalysts the question why Korea seems to provoke President Trump to more reckless comments than any other international problem. What the world must live with are the consequences.

He threatened to rip up the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. “It is unacceptable, it is a horrible deal made by Hillary,” he said. “It’s a horrible deal, and we are going to renegotiate that deal or terminate it.” In that same interview, Trump demanded a billion-dollar payment for a high-altitude missile defense system. That demand reneged on an agreement reached by Trump’s own administration, by which the South Koreans provided the land for the system and the United States provided the weapons. It probably will not surprise you to learn that the free-trade agreement was not, in fact, negotiated by Hillary Clinton.

That interview had the unintended effect of helping to boost the more U.S.-skeptical of the South Korean presidential candidates in the May 9 election. In midsummer, speaking at his New Jersey golf retreat without a single South Korean present, Trump promised to visit “fire and fury like the world has never seen” upon North Korea. In September at the United Nations he warned that he might “totally destroy North Korea,” adding “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and his region.”

“This is confirmation that we live in a narco-state,” said Jan Struijs of the NPB union, which last year warned that the government and politicians were underestimating the scale of organised crime in the country. A report last month for Amsterdam council said the city’s relaxed drugs policies had “given free rein” to “drugs criminals, hustlers, parasites, middlemen and extortionists”, adding: “Drug-related organised crime – the ‘underworld’ – now exerts a significant influence on our city.”

The AD newspaper said the murder marked the beginning of a “new, dark phase” for the country, adding that although in the Netherlands “the prime minister still cycles to work” and lawyers, judges and prosecutors “move unguarded through life … the underworld has just strengthened its hold on the upper world”.

s no control”. The NRC Handelsblad newspaper said the Netherlands was “naive” in its approach to drugs, citing EU policing officials and unnamed sources in the drugs world, particularly Colombia, who allege the country is “the logistical centre for the cocaine trade in western Europe”.

anger that should be directed at billionaires is instead directed by them. Facing inequality and exclusion, poor wages and insecure jobs, people are persuaded by the newspapers billionaires own and the parties they fund to unleash their fury on immigrants, Muslims, the EU and other “alien” forces.

From the White House, his Manhattan tower and his Florida resort, Donald Trump tweets furiously against “elites”. Dominic Cummings hones the same message as he moves between his townhouse in Islington, with its library and tapestry room, and his family estate in Durham. Clearly, they don’t mean political or economic elites. They mean intellectuals: the students, teachers, professors and independent thinkers who oppose their policies. Anti-intellectualism is a resurgent force in politics.

Myths of national greatness and decline abound. Make America Great Again and Take Back Control propose a glorious homecoming to an imagined golden age. Conservatives and Republicans invoke a rich mythology of family life and patriarchal values. Large numbers of people in the United Kingdom regret the loss of empire.

I’ve spent the past few weeks in a controlled fury — and I’m not normally a fury kind of guy. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and others are trying to pass arguably the most consequential legislative package in a generation, and what did I sense in my recent travels across five states? The same thing I sense in my social media feed and on the various media most-viewed lists.Indifference.

here was a time when the phrase “the common man” was a source of pride and a high compliment.

Over the past few decades there has been a redistribution of dignity — upward

while I freely acknowledge that there was more racism on the right than I was willing or able to see before the rise of Trump, there has been a distinct change in young right-wing culture. It is dramatically different from what it was when I was in college, in law school and starting my legal career.

As I survey the right — especially the young, so-called new right — I see a movement in the grip of some rather simple but powerful cultural forces. Hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice, is herding young right-wing men into outright bigotry and prejudice

they’re not strong or tough or courageous. They’re timid sheep in wolves’ clothing, moving exactly where the loudest and most aggressive voices tell them to.

hey are young, apparently unaffiliated with any political or terror group and brimming with fury over Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories

Palestinians participating in the uprising are largely apolitical youths who post videos, photos and commentary “showing the larger picture of occupation, which is a violent experience which all Palestinians believe it is legitimate to resist,”

collective experience

THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform

We’re the real culprits. When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.

I’m talking about how we use social media in particular and the Internet in general — and how we let them use us. They’re not so much agents as accomplices, new tools for ancient impulses, part of “a long sequence of technological innovations that enable us to do what we want

I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.