The Government looks set to unveil an unprecedented income-support scheme in the coming days in which it will pay 75% or 80% of the wages of the thousands of workers who have lost and will lose their jobs amid the Covid-19 crisis.

Leo Varadkar will have to use all his charm and political know-how in Washington over the next two days if he is to ensure ongoing friendly relations with the Trump administration.

President Trump’s trade war with the EU took centre stage in Washington on Wednesday at the first of the week’s St Patrick’s celebrations.

The Taoiseach will travel to Washington DC today for a series of engagements as part of the annual St Patrick’s Day programme.

Leo Varadkar was due to travel to New York on Tuesday to attend a meeting at the United Nations headquarters, but cancelled his plans last minute, allowing him to stay in Ireland to deal with the “evolving situation”

Across the Atlantic, we have witnessed some very odd behaviour by two senior politicians, in the form of petulance in the US House of Congress.

Last Thursday, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was unflinching on Facebook. She described Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth as “accomplices for misleading the American people with money from God knows where”.

Earlier this week President Vladimir Putin announced plans to amend Russia's constitution so he will, when he is obliged to stand down as president in 2024, retain power. Moscow's parliament was informed though not consulted on measures that mean Putin's two decades of autocracy will not end when he resigns.

There must — mustn’t there? — have been someone in the room who asked questions when the US president, Donald Trump, and his advisors met to discuss the proposal to kill Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani.

By adopting narrow grounds for impeaching the president, Pelosi and House members wanted simple charges they could easily explain to constituents, writes Elizabeth Drew

There is nothing even remotely unconstitutional about the house’s decision to impeach Donald Trump, writes Noah Feldman.

That the Madrid climate talks ended with an inconclusive agreement and a decision to ask countries to be more ambitious in cutting greenhouse gas emissions to realise the 2015 Paris accord shows we have, to use David Axelrod’s all-too-apt phrase, passed the swimsuit stage of international negotiations on climate change.

A joke from the old USSR reported an exchange during a Politburo discussion about a ten-year plan that almost all those present thought was progressing satisfactorily. “Yes,” grunts a dissenter steeped in Marxist theology, “it’s very, very successful in practice, but the theory is all wrong.”

All over the world, historians are dusting off a phrase that regularly has a sharp, if fleeting, relevance: Pre-revolutionary conditions.

Waiting for the Brexit finale has been a bit like sitting in a dentist’s surgery for three years — scared of the worst while hoping for the best, yet willing to accept a modicum of discomfort to get it all over with.

I’ve followed and studied politics all my life.

If the US president is impeached, as seems likely, his name will be blackened in history, and the scandal may be as big as Watergate, in 1974, says Elizabeth Drew.

The scandal over a phone call between US president Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky also involves a large cast of secondary players, writes Andy Sullivan.

IN ANOTHER extraordinary week, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson continued to hog the headlines, much as they have done in recent times.

A secret whistleblower complaint at the centre of an impeachment inquiry alleges that President Donald Trump abused the power of his office to “solicit interference from a foreign country” in next year’s US election.

It was alleged that Mr Trump threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine in a phone conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky in July if he didn't launch that investigation.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced the House is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

A senior US politician has warned that lawmakers could block a future US-UK trade deal if the Good Friday Agreement is undermined.

The US has sold itself as the ‘land of opportunity,’ where a hotel bellboy can, by dint of hard graft, become the proprietor of the business.

US vice president Mike Pence will insist that Britain must "uphold the Good Friday agreement" regardless of the Brexit crisis when he visits Ireland on September 6 and 7, the White House has confirmed.

US Vice President Mike Pence will travel to Ireland next month on behalf of President Donald Trump, the White House has confirmed.

Leon Gast’s 1996 When We Were Kings is one of the great sports films, indeed it may be one of the greatest of all films.

Timothy L O’Brien says describing Donald Trump’s racist baiting of four new Democratic congresswomen of different ethnic backgrounds as ‘strategic’ gives him too much credit.

Trump has previously criticised Rapinoe on Twitter.

The mother of a man who drowned alongside his young daughter while trying to reach the US has said she is comforted by how they clung to each other in their final moments.

As the US Congress returns from a 10-day break, the question of whether the House of Representatives (controlled by the Democrats) should formally commence the process of impeaching US president Donald Trump for misdeeds committed during his tenure — and perhaps before — has split the party.

Donald Trump’s own landing on the Normandy beaches to commemorate D-Day will be launched from the links in Doonbeg, Co Clare.

Things have gotten ugly in Washington since the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election — and they’re about to get uglier.

Before the Democrats in the US face into battle with Donald Trump, they must first decide whether Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders has a better chance of winning, writes Bette Browne

On her recent visit to Europe, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, addressed members of the Dail.