Rudy Giuliani, the pugnacious former mayor of New York, has joined Donald Trump’s legal team with a specific task of dealing with the special investigation into Russian election interference that is swirling around the president’s head.

Giuliani’s appointment, announced in an interview with the Washington Post, comes at the end of an awkward period for Trump in which he struggled to find legal firepower to help him face the billowing Russian investigation. His lead lawyer handling the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, John Dowd, resigned last month.

The appointment also brings to an end a fallow period for Giuliani, who has for many years been close to Trump and who pitched openly for a position in the administration. He was hailed as “America’s mayor” after 9/11 but he has a contentious track record, particularly in his stance towards minorities. Giuliani told the Post he saw his new job as lead attorney on the Russia affair as bringing Mueller’s investigation to a swift end.

“I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller,” he said. He added that he would be working alongside the two existing senior lawyers working for Trump, Jay Sekulow and Ty Cobb. In a statement, Sekulow said: “Rudy is great. He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country.”(theguardian)…[+]

Commonwealth leaders have agreed that Prince Charles will become the next head of the organisation after the Queen, it has emerged, in one of the less surprising diplomatic developments of recent months. The role is not hereditary, but the Queen, who turns 92 on Saturday, used the ongoing Commonwealth heads of government (Chogm) gathering in London to say it was her “sincere wish” to be succeeded by her son.

Commonwealth leaders, who were meeting at Windsor Castle on the second and final day of the formal Chogm programme, had agreed to her wish, sources told the Press Association and others. After the Queen made her wishes known there would have been little prospect of the 53 Commonwealth leaders and foreign ministers, who met at Buckingham Palace on Thursday, not endorsing the plan. Addressing what is most likely her last Chogm summit – she no longer flies long distances and it is not due to return to the UK for some years – the monarch said: “It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations, and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949.”(theguardian)…[+]

The niece of the Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, is opening a finishing school to train the future leaders of France’s far right.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, one of the populist party’s two MPs in France’s previous parliament, withdrew from electoral politics following her aunt’s heavy defeat to Emmanuel Macron in last year’s presidential elections.

But the 28-year-old’s new “academy of political sciences” is set to open this September in central Lyon, one of her close allies, the regional councillor Thibaut Monnier, told LyonMag. A key figure of the Front National’s more traditionalist southern current, Maréchal-Le Pen is far more socially conservative than her aunt and close to the party’s founder, her grandfather Jean-Marie. She is seen by some as a future leader.

The “free and independent” institution sets out to to “detect and train the leaders of tomorrow who will have the courage, intelligence, discernment and competence to act effectively … in the service of society,” she wrote in the rightwing weekly Valeurs Actuelles earlier this year. Open to “all the political currents of the right”, the school says it will provide “the intellectual, cultural, legal, technical and media skills to our young people that will allow them to perform as well as possible in both the business and political arena”.(theguardian)…[+]