
Vance plays golf on Trump's Turnberry course during holiday in Scotland
Mr Vance landed at Prestwick Airport in South Ayrshire on Wednesday evening before travelling to the luxury Carnell Estate near Kilmarnock.
On Thursday morning he was at the Trump Turnberry resort on the Ayrshire coast and spent time playing on the golf course.
It comes after the US president's own visit to Scotland last month, when he split his stay between Turnberry and his golf resort in Aberdeenshire.
Mr Vance was greeted by dozens of pro-Palestine protesters when he arrived at the Carnell Estate on Wednesday.
The demonstrators waved Palestine flags and shouted pro-Palestine chants.
Airspace restrictions are in place around the estate until Sunday.
Mr Vance will reportedly spend five days in Scotland – the same amount of time his boss Mr Trump did during his trip to the country last month.
Police Scotland previously said they have plans in place for a 'significant police operation' during Mr Vance's time in Scotland.
Mr Vance had been holidaying in the Cotswolds but travelled to Foreign Secretary David Lammy's Chevening House retreat in Kent on Friday and joined him for some carp fishing.
On Wednesday, Mr Vance described the UK-US relationship as 'a beautiful alliance' during a speech at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.

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Daily Mail
22 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Death to Order by Simon Ball: Secret's of the assassin
Death To Order: A Modern History Of Assassination by Simon Ball (Yale £25, 464pp) When it comes to the 'exotic, tawdry, and very confusing' subject of assassinations, there have been few lone wolves. Simon Ball's exhaustive study shows that, behind every shot fired, there's usually a complicated conspiracy. Assassinations need a lot of organising – where to obtain the components, the battery packs for remote-controlled devices; how to design a car bomb, which when detonated will concentrate its force into the driver's seat; how to field the necessary denials, lies and dissimulation. Ball confesses he had a hard time examining the historical record, as files have been lost, destroyed or redacted. Assassins are of course 'a staple of popular entertainment', with characters and action heroes such as James Bond and Jason Bourne. Ian Fleming said of Bond, he's 'an efficient and not very attractive blunt instrument in the hands of government', and the assassin's task or motivation has always been to hasten regime change. Even Queen Elizabeth II saw how 'murder was an instrument of policy'. When Colonel Nasser, in 1955, was being a nuisance to the British over the Suez Canal, she said brightly, and no doubt with her tongue in her cheek, 'I'm surprised nobody has found means of putting something in his coffee.' Presidents, monarchs and political dignitaries have long been targets. Ball discusses how the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, in 1914, by Serb nationalists, precipitated the First World War. Everyone was spoiling for a scrap, the Austrians, Russians, Germans, French, British. 'The assassination was the spark, but any spark would have done.' During the previous decades there had been innumerable sparks to persuade the British to leave India. In 1912, the Viceroy was riding on an elephant when a bomb was thrown, killing the umbrella bearer. In Lahore, the assistant superintendent was killed instead of the superintendent, and the commandant of the Calcutta City Police had his car door blown off. The perpetrators were Hindu extremists, who went after policemen, civil officials, intelligence officers, prosecution lawyers and magistrates. A judge was 'shot in the head and died instantly at his own bench in his own courtroom'. Little wonder many working for the Raj, 'not particularly keen on being shot', boarded ships returning to England. Nearer home, in Ireland, by 1920 the IRA had assassinated 15 policemen, using semi-automatic pistols and Webley revolvers. They attacked Londoners who had connections with the Royal Irish Constabulary. A party playing golf in Kent came under fire. A field marshal was shot in Eaton Place in Belgravia. By the 1970s 'Belfast was the assassination capital of Europe', and IRA agents set forth to murder Ross McWhirter, Airey Neave and Lord Mountbatten. 'Any fool can shoot a viceroy or a police inspector,' it was said, and security was generally lax – except for the chieftains. In Russia, where assassination was 'a revolutionary tactic', the Bolsheviks could never stop arresting and purging members of their own side. Stalin was accompanied everywhere by his 'security detail'. Paranoid about potential rivals, he'd have complete innocents tortured until they confessed to invented plots. In 1940, he ordered the liquidation of Trotsky, whose skull was impaled with an ice-pick in Mexico. As for Hitler, in 1934 Daimler-Benz designed an assassination-proof car for the Fuhrer's use, and he was surrounded by 'a cohort of 450 men', even when within fortified residences. He escaped bombs in cellars, bombs in planes. Retribution was swift. After Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, was killed in Prague, the Gestapo used 'the foulest tortures' to find culprits, killing the inhabitants of a village called Lidice, which had sheltered a radio operator. Over in America, though Teddy Roosevelt boasted 'he could wield a pistol to guarantee his own security', in actuality presidents were guarded by 'a cavalcade' of secret servicemen, mounted police and CIA. The 'protective screen' to this day involves thousands of armed personnel. Not that this saved Kennedy – Ball intriguingly suggests Soviet involvement. When it comes to the CIA, and what is euphemistically called their 'Executive Action Capability', it's hard to know what to believe, when in documents they start mentioning the 'neutralisation' of 'priority targets'. Did the agency really collaborate with the Mafia to remove Fidel Castro, who nevertheless lived to 90? Much of Death To Order reads like a Frederick Forsyth fiction, especially the chapter on France and the assassinations surrounding Algerian independence. There were 150 fatalities in southern France alone, a similar statistic in Paris. Death squads kidnapped victims, executed them, and threw the corpses in canals. 'Bodies were regularly pulled from the Seine by the river authorities.' De Gaulle's Citroen was ambushed in 1962, the assassins using a full-bore military machine gun mounted on the back of a van. The general's driver sped away. The leader of the assassination squad was executed in March the following year. All this inspired the classic Forsyth novel, Edward Fox film and Eddie Redmayne series The Day Of The Jackal. Simon Ball has produced a thorough and gripping account of how humans are addicted to picking each other off. He is particularly acute on the political machinations behind the scenes and asks 'uncomfortable questions about violence, appeasement, collaboration and persuasion'. It is a sad fact that, when one mission has been accomplished, a new wave of murders begins. Our Empire over, the leaders of the newly independent nations immediately started assassinating each other. And because of 'wide conspiracy and organisation', Gandhi was killed by Hindus in India, principally because of his friendly talks with the prime minister of Pakistan and the leader of the Muslim League. Indira Gandhi was shot by her own bodyguards in 1984. Her son Rajiv Gandhi was killed in 1991 by 'a young woman wearing a suicide vest'. Israel calls its regular assassination of Palestinian leaders 'mowing the grass', a highly cynical phrase. Vladimir Putin runs 'a state assassination campaign', reliant on poisons, as the population of Salisbury knows. Ball's book made me start seeing threats all around me. It's a wonder any of us remains alive.


Daily Mail
22 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
PETER HITCHENS: You may not like it, but we have lived peaceful lives because of squalid deals like this one
All aboard HMS Humbug for another round of ignorant bloviation, empty moralising and hypocrisy. Putin is Hitler, we are all Winston Churchill, if we don't stand up now there'll be Russian tanks in Bexley before we know what hit us, etc etc. We must grieve that the USA has wearied of financing and arming one of the stupidest, most pointless wars in human history. Let's all disapprove, from a safe distance. Here they all come, retired generals with growly voices, ancient doddering spooks who never came in from the Cold War, bloodthirsty Blairite veterans of Iraq. Beside them march politicians who somehow never learned any real history, but picked up something about Munich during their A-levels, and world affairs commentators who never ventured east of Frinton. They all want war without end in Ukraine. Many of them give off the rich, sickly perfume of high moral purity. They do not know, or have forgotten that this country took part in a bloodstained illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, that it helped violently to rearrange the borders of Yugoslavia, that it crazily bombed Libya in 2011 (so triggering mass migration which has never stopped since). Some of them actually helped to destabilise Syria so that it now has an Al Qaeda government presiding over the blood, graves and rubble created by our 'ethical foreign policy'. Well, I believe the Ukrainian army is now accepting volunteers from almost anywhere, of nearly any age. It needs to. Pictured: a firefighter tries to extinguish a fire at the central market in Sumy, Ukraine, caused by the explosion of a Russian drone on August 15 Well, I believe the Ukrainian army is now accepting volunteers from almost anywhere, of nearly any age. It needs to. Many of that country's own young men flee abroad, or bribe greedy officials for exemptions, or go into hiding lest they are dragged off to the front by snatch squads employed by their martial law state. For them, the claims that Ukraine is a vibrant western democracy sound pretty thin. So my first response to these jingoes is to say: 'If you are so keen, please go and fight in the war you like so much. Perhaps you might free some press-ganged young man to go home and be a husband and father, instead of cannon fodder'. But that would be a bit emotional. Let's try facts and logic instead. There is a very serious argument against this war. All grown-ups in world affairs are well aware of it. It was from the start a rash, cynical adventure. Ukraine has been used. You can only say the truth if you are a keen supporter of the conflict. For instance, the noted American Russia hawk, Robert Kagan, has correctly stated in the elite magazine Foreign Affairs that Russia was provoked into war. He did not say this justified the invasion, for it doesn't. He just stated as a fact that 'although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin's inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading'. Likewise Leon Panetta, former CIA chief and US Defence Secretary, admitted the Ukraine conflict was a proxy war between Russia. Nato and the USA. If I said this, I would be denounced as a 'Putin apologist'. But he can say it, and he did. Before Ukraine suddenly became independent in 1991, the West was not all that keen on its existence. In June 1990, Margaret Thatcher wanted to bolster Moscow in the region and was dismissive and chilly to Ukrainian nationalists. She briskly batted away a question about opening a British embassy in Kiev. This, she explained, was as likely as Britain opening an embassy in California or Quebec. 'I can see you are trying to get me involved in your politics!', she scolded her questioner. Those Tory war enthusiasts who claim to admire her now might ponder this. A year later, in August 1991, President George HW Bush refused even to meet campaigners for Ukrainian independence. He didn't like the look of them and said 'Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred'. He feared an outbreak of ancient tensions in Ukraine, which has a recent history of deep, dangerous ethnic passions, as all informed people know. It might be a bit early to say he was wrong. But the collapse of the USSR, following a failed KGB coup in Moscow, followed within weeks. Suddenly there was an independent Ukraine whether anyone liked it or not, within borders designed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And some high policy-makers in the USA wanted to use this new country as a battering-ram against Russia. In 1997, the former Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that 'Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia'. He argued: 'However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.' This is the origin of the strange belief that ramshackle Russia, with its scrap-metal mercenary army and an economy the size of Italy is poised to march on Berlin, and then push Nato into the sea at Dunkirk. Donald Trump, whom I greatly dislike, at least has the sense to see that this has gone on long enough and is benefiting nobody at all. He wants to end it, partly because he knows his supporters are sick of America's forever wars and partly because he wants a Nobel Peace Prize If, to do so, he has to hold his nose and treat the sinister tyrant Vladimir Putin as an equal, so that he can bring peace, then he will not be the first democratic leader to do such a thing Ukraine, in its peaceful and surprisingly democratic period from 1991 to 2014, was a county increasingly divided between its fervent, nationalist west and its more neutral Moscow-oriented east. Its then government was not all that keen to be used as a proxy by Washington. But in February 2014, the legitimately elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by a violent ultra-nationalist mob. This was made up of the sort of people the British and American elite classes would normally call 'fascists'. The remnants of the country's parliament violated their own constitution to ratify this squalid putsch. Then the USA and Britain endorsed their lawless action. And that, not the invasion of 2022, was the start of the filthy, dismal war we now see. It has not worked out well for anyone, least of all for poor Ukraine. The vast new graveyards can be seen from space, Russian bombardment has mangled its key infrastructure as well as killing many innocents, and its cities are full of widows, orphans and maimed and disfigured men. For whose good? Who will stop this? Donald Trump, whom I greatly dislike, at least has the sense to see that this has gone on long enough and is benefiting nobody at all. He wants to end it, partly because he knows his supporters are sick of America's forever wars and partly because he wants a Nobel Peace Prize. If, to do so, he has to hold his nose and treat the sinister tyrant Vladimir Putin as an equal, so that he can bring peace, then he will not be the first democratic leader to do such a thing. JFK met the dubious Khrushchev, Nixon met the ghastly mass murderer Mao Zedong, Churchill drank brandy, deep into the night, with the unspeakable despot Stalin. You and I may not like this, but millions of us have lived peaceful prosperous lives because of squalid, despicable deals made by men of power.


The Guardian
22 minutes ago
- The Guardian
US state department stops issuing visas for Gaza children to get medical care
The US state department announced on Saturday that it would stop issuing visas to children from Gaza in desperate need of medical care after an online pressure campaign from Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump who has described herself as 'a proud Islamophobe'. 'All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,' the state department said in a message posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Loomer was banned from before it was purchased by Elon Musk. In a pair of posts on the social network on Friday, Loomer had shared video of badly injured Palestinian children and their family members arriving in Houston and San Francisco this month, along with false claims that their shouts of joy were 'jihadi chants' and that they were 'doing the HAMAS terror whistle'. Loomer also falsely claimed that she had 'exclusively obtained' the two video clips she shared. One was copied from a medical aid charity's public Instagram account and the other was from the Houston Chronicle's YouTube channel. After misrepresenting the children, including amputees arriving to get prosthetic legs, as 'Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone', Loomer demanded to know 'who at the US State Department under @marcorubio signed off on the visas for Palestinians from a HAMAS hot zone'. 'Is Rubio even aware of this?' Loomer wrote, in reference to the secretary of state who was at the time in Alaska meeting Vladimir Putin. 'Why would anyone at the State Department give visas to individuals who live in Gaza, which is run by HAMAS?' Loomer wrote, before falsely stating that '95% of GAZANS voted for HAMAS.' In fact, Hamas got 44% of party list votes in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections across Gaza and the West Bank, and lost three of the five districts in Gaza to the secular Fatah party. After the visa program was halted, Loomer declared victory. 'This is fantastic news,' she wrote in response to the state department announcement. 'Hopefully all GAZANS will be added to President Trump's travel ban. There are doctors in other countries. The US is not the world's hospital!' 'If Laura Loomer had been around in 1940, she'd have been trying to prevent Jewish refugees from entering the US,' Paul Graham, co-founder of the Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, wrote on X after the halt on visas for wounded children was announced. 'You know she would. And if Trump had been president then, she'd have succeeded.'