Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s Iran threats: ‘The most dangerous episode of the Celebrity Apprentice yet’
Late-night hosts reacted to a late-stage ceasefire with Iran, after Donald Trump promised “a whole civilization will die tonight” in an extremely alarming post,Tuesday was just “another crazy day here in the United States of America!” said Jimmy Kimmel, after the president promised, then called off, destructive attacks in Iran by 8pm that evening,“Probably the most dangerous episode of the Celebrity Apprentice yet,Today was D-Day – in this case, the D stands for dementia, but it was D-Day,”“We’re coming to you from Los Angeles for the local time’s just after 5pm, which was Trump’s deadline for Iran to ‘Open the F-ing strait or you’ll be living in hell,’” the host explained.
“He gave a hard cut-off time of right now,And then this morning he wrote, ‘A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,’” in a post on his social media platform Truth Social,“You realize that this is the same man who was just bitching about losing the Nobel peace prize?” Kimmel marveled,“Now he’s threatening a civilization with death,He went from Mahatma Gandhi to General Zod like that.
“So all day today everyone, most notably the people of Iran, were wondering if their civilization was going to die tonight,” he continued,“Well, good news, it didn’t,It was the Taco Tuesday of all Taco Tuesdays,Our president decided not to drop the chalupa for at least another two weeks,“This is how it goes every single time Trump says something insane” he added.
“He says, ‘I’m going to kill everybody tomorrow at 5pm.’ Then we all freak out and then he backs off.He’s like, ‘You know what? Actually, I’ll kill everyone in two weeks.’ Then we relax, and then he forgets he ever said it in the first place.He has the memory and the skin color of a goldfish.
”Perhaps the worst part, Kimmel said, was “how relaxed the congressional Republicans are about it.Now he threatens to annihilate a civilization, they’re like ‘Well, you know how he is.He’s a big talker! He yaps.’”The comedian also observed, through a series of clips, that it’s “always two weeks” with Trump.“He’s like a conscientious employee.
He always gives two weeks’ notice.”But as of Tuesday night, “no one has any idea of what the plan is.This afternoon the White House press secretary said only the president knows where things stand and what he will do.“And I don’t even believe he knows that,” Kimmel concluded.“Trump said he would decimate Iranian power plants in such a way that they will be burning and exploding never to be used again.
Just like the toilets at Mar-a-Lago,And attacking civilian power plants is a war crime under the Geneva accords,I guess he figures he’s done all the other crimes, he might as well do the war ones, too,And on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert avoided getting into the war with Iran by turning first to the space mission Artemis II, now on its way home,“That’s great, glad to hear that everything is working out, but how do I put this, fellas … not a great time to return to Earth,” he joked.
“You might want to take a couple laps around the parking lot, till the explosions stop.”The astronauts have already traveled further from Earth than anyone before, “which means that humanity finally has enough miles to reach diamond medallion status,” the host quipped.“Now, we can all get into the moon’s sapphire reserve lounge.They have three kinds of citrus water and those little wasabi peas.”The spaceship made it 252,756 miles from Earth – or, as the New York Times put it, the length of 728 million dachshunds, put nose-to-tail.
“Man, Americans will do anything to not use the metric system,” Colbert quipped,After several more minutes of space joy diversions, Colbert reluctantly returned to Earth, where Trump “was so frustrated with the war in Iran that in a post on Sunday, he dropped an f-bomb and apparently converted to Islam”, he said, referring to one especially inflammatory Trump post on Truth Social,(The US president posted: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,President DONALD J.
TRUMP.”)And then there was Trump’s ominous Tuesday morning post, in which he claimed that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”.“OK, that is very upsetting by any measure,” said Colbert.“But I also want to point out that he doesn’t say which civilization will die tonight.Because ours has been seen wandering on a highway overpass.
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US inflation soars in March as war on Iran drives economy into uncertainty
US inflation soared in March amid the US-Israel war with Iran, with prices up 0.9% compared with last month and 3.3% over the year, according to new data released on Friday.The spike in the consumer price index (CPI), which measures the price of a basket of goods and services, is the largest in nearly two years and the first official measure of how the conflict has affected US consumer prices, particularly as Iran blocked the strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas would typically pass.The index for energy rose 10
Welcome to Y’all Street: bullish Dallas aims to steal New York’s financial crown
As the warm sun rises over the Dallas skyline, SUVs and pickup trucks whiz past an unassuming construction site that is helping cement the city’s Texas-sized financial ambitions.Nestled between towers claimed by Bank of America and JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs has cordoned off 800,000 sq ft for a new Dallas campus able to host more than 5,000 staff. But the $700m (£530m) project is more than a regional expansion plan by one of America’s largest banks. It is another win for the lobbyists behind Dallas’s “Y’all Street” – the Texan city’s aggressive push to steal New York’s financial crown.The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, once a fly-in, fly-out stopover for bankers, has seen its financial sector workforce boom over the past decade, surging 40% to 386,000 staff
‘Irresponsible failure’: Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft slam EU over child sexual abuse law lapse
The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected.The law, which was a carve-out of the EU Privacy Act, was put in place in 2021 as a temporary measure allowing companies to use automated detection technologies to scan messages for harms, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming and sextortion. However, it expired on 3 April, and the EU parliament decided not to vote to extend it, amid privacy concerns from some lawmakers.The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act. Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft said they would continue to voluntarily scan their platforms for CSAM, in a joint statement posted on a Google blog
Elon Musk’s xAI sues Colorado over new rules for artificial intelligence
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado over a new AI law set to take effect in June.The suit seeks to block the state from enforcing the law, which would impose new requirements on AI systems to protect state residents from “algorithmic discrimination” in sectors such as education, employment, healthcare, housing and financial services.Colorado was the first state to pass a comprehensive bill to regulate AI.The company claims the law infringes on its first amendment free-speech protections and would force xAI to “promote the state’s ideological views on various matters, racial justice in particular”, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the lawsuit. “Its provisions prohibit developers of AI systems from producing speech that the state of Colorado dislikes
Grand National preview: Jagwar to deny Irish battalions in Aintree spectacular
It is more than a decade since a Grand National winner was trained in an English stable, as Lucinda Russell, successful twice since 2017 from her yard in County Kinross, is the only trainer to break the Irish stranglehold since Oliver Sherwood’s success with Many Clouds in 2015. The home side put up a much-improved performance at last month’s Cheltenham festival, however, and Jagwar (4.00), one of two major contenders from Oliver Greenall and Josh Guerriero’s stable 50 miles the track, could extend the English revival in the biggest race of the season on Saturday.Jagwar will head to Aintree with all of the attributes you could want to see in a modern-day National winner. He has youth on his side at seven years of age, and remains open to improvement with just eight starts over fences on his record to date
Two-horse trainer hopes to keep Grand National fairytale tradition alive
Connor King needs a little persuading that his attempt to win Saturday’s Grand National with Oscars Brother has the potential to be one of the most remarkable tales in the 187-year history of the world’s most famous and storied steeplechase. “It’s probably hard [to see] when you’re in the situation,” the trainer said this week. “When you’re looking in from the outside, it might be easier.”The Grand National, it’s true, amplifies everything: triumph, despair, drama. Even by the standards of what has always been a race apart, however, King’s journey to Liverpool from his tiny stable in County Tipperary skirts the border between implausible and absurd
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