Duke of Sussex quit as patron of Sentebale last week amid boardroom battle
The Charity Commission has said it has opened a case into “concerns raised” about the charity Sentebale, which the Duke of Sussex quit as patron of last week amid a boardroom battle.
Communities in Ruaha national park reject response to alleged assault and evictions of herders during tourism scheme funded by the bank
The World Bank is embarking on a multimillion-dollar programme in response to alleged human rights abuses against Tanzanian herders during a flagship tourism project it funded for seven years.
Allegations made by pastoralist communities living in and around Ruaha national park include violent evictions, sexual assaults, killings, forced disappearances and large-scale cattle seizures from herders committed by rangers working for the Tanzanian national park authority (Tanapa).
Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and Dan Bardell as Liverpool move one step closer to the Premier League title with a 1-0 derby win over Everton
On the podcast today: Liverpool win a slightly nervy Merseyside derby at Anfield to send them 12 points clear of Arsenal in second place. Should the Diogo Jota goal have stood and should James Tarkowski have been on the pitch when it happened? Not the best night for VAR.
Energy Transfer, a top backer of US president, has received requests to power even more energy-guzzling data centers
Oil and gas barons who donated millions of dollars to the Trump campaign are on the cusp of cashing in on the administration’s support for energy-guzzling data centers – and a slew of unprecedented environmental rollbacks.
Energy Transfer, the oil and gas transport company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, has received requests to power 70 new data centers – a 75% rise since Trump took office, according to a new investigation by the advocacy nonprofit Oil Change International (OCI) and the Guardian.
More than 200 health facilities run by the World Health Organization in Afghanistan, providing medical care for 1.84 million people, have closed or ceased operating after the US aid cuts announced by the Trump administration shut off life-saving medical care, including vaccinations, maternal and child health services.
On his first day in office in January, President Donald Trump announced an immediate freeze on all US foreign assistance, including more than $40bn (£32bn) for international projects coming from USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. It was later confirmed that more than 80% of USAID programmes had been cancelled.
Maintaining seed diversity and abundance is essential – and requires constant work. It’s time for Congress to return to the seed business
From 1862 until 1923, US senators and members of Congress provided vast numbers of seeds to constituents. At its peak, the congressional seed distribution program delivered over 60m seed packets directly to farmers and market gardeners every year, helping introduce new varieties of everything from wheat and corn to oats, soybeans, flowers and vegetables. A century later, far fewer Americans till the soil for a living, but seeds remain central to our lives.
To understand the importance of seeds, try to imagine a morning without them. It would begin naked on a bare mattress, with no cozy sheets or pajamas, and there would be no fluffy towel to wrap up in after your shower. All of those things come from the seeds of the cotton plant. Stumbling wet into the kitchen, you would find no coffee, and no toast or bagel to go with it. There would be no eggs, no bacon, no cereal, no milk. All of those staples come from seeds or from livestock raised on seed crops. And if you thought you might console yourself with a chocolate bar, you can forget it. Cocoa powder, and the cocoa butter that makes it melt in your mouth, are both derived from seeds.
On 23 March contact was lost with a team of Palestinian rescue workers and medics in southern Gaza. A week later their bodies were recovered from a mass grave
At 4.20am, a Red Crescent ambulance on its way to collect people injured by an airstrike in Rafah comes under Israeli fire in Hashashin. Two paramedics are killed.
Miller Gardner was on holiday with family in Costa Rica
Fumes may have leaked from adjacent engine room
Carbon monoxide poisoning was the cause of death of the teenage son of former New York Yankees outfielder Brett Gardner, authorities in Costa Rica said on Wednesday night.
Randall Zúñiga, director of the Judicial Investigation Agency, said 14-year-old Miller Gardner was tested for carboxyhemoglobin, a compound generated when carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin in the blood. When carboxyhemoglobin saturation exceeds 50%, it is considered lethal. In Gardner’s case, the test showed a saturation of 64%.
The country’s so-called political centre has licensed a new era of authoritarianism – to the AfD’s delight
A crackdown on political dissent is well under way in Germany. Over the past two years, institutions and authorities have cancelled events, exhibitions and awards over statements about Palestine or Israel. There are many examples: the Frankfurt book fair indefinitely postponing an award ceremony for Adania Shibli; the Heinrich Böll Foundation withdrawing the Hannah Arendt prize from Masha Gessen; the University of Cologne rescinding a professorship for Nancy Fraser; the No Other Land directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham being defamed by German ministers. And, most recently, the philosopher Omri Boehm being disinvited from speaking at this month’s anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald.
In nearly all of these cases, accusations of antisemitism loom large – even though Jews are often among those being targeted. More often than not, it is liberals driving or tacitly accepting these cancellations, while conservatives and the far right lean back and cheer them on. While vigilance against rising antisemitism is no doubt warranted – especially in Germany – that concern is increasingly weaponised as a political tool to silence the left.
Hanno Hauenstein is a Berlin-based journalist and author. He worked as a senior editor in Berliner Zeitung’s culture department, specialising in contemporary art and politics
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The administration has proposed no realistic settlement, leaving a void for Netanyahu. This is foolishness gone wild
When I wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian a few months ago, anticipating Donald Trump’s foreign policy regarding the Middle East, I made a big mistake.
I thought that there would be diplomacy involved, even if it was ill-conceived. Instead, the complete lack of diplomatic rendering in this administration’s foreign policy is already pointing in dangerous directions, especially regarding Israel, the Palestinians, Jordan and Egypt. Saudi Arabia, the sleeping giant that’s in a key position to provide a roadmap to a fair resolution for both Israelis and Palestinians, seems to be sitting on the sidelines now.
The bestselling video game ever has a devoted, vocal, following. Can a faceless corporation make a successful film based on such beloved IP without involving its fanbase?
By any estimation, Minecraft is impossibly successful. The bestselling video game ever, as of last December it had 204 million monthly active players. Since it was first released in 2011, it has generated over $3bn (£2.3bn) in revenue. What’s more, its players have always been eager to demonstrate their fandom outside the boundaries of the game itself. In 2021, YouTube calculated that videos related to the game – tutorials, walk-throughs, homages, parodies – had collectively been viewed 1tn times. In short, it is a phenomenon.
Such is the strength of feeling, almost all of it positive, about Minecraft that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to turn it into a film. After all, you have a historically popular product and a highly engaged fanbase: what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, quite a lot. Last September, the first trailer for the film – titled A Minecraft Movie – was released, and the reaction was instant and violent. “Minecraft fans devastated by ‘awful’ live-action trailer” read one headline the following day. Some called it “a crime against humanity”; others “a soulless neon abomination”. In less than 24 hours, the website GamingBible had called it “a curse on my eyes” and “pure nightmare fuel”. Within three days of its release, the trailer had been downvoted more than 1m times.
England goalkeeper on how she has fine-tuned her game since moving to France and ‘loving the architecture’ in Paris
Many of us might perceive it as a bustling metropolis full of tourist hotspots. To Mary Earps, however, Paris is noise-free. Peaceful. Beautiful. It is very rare for anybody to spot the England goalkeeper in public – unless she is at the airport or waiting to catch the Eurostar from Gare du Nord – and, for a player who shot to fame so quickly that she was the 2023 Sports Personality of the Year, such relative invisibility in the so-called City of Light is a blissful feeling.
“It’s been more refreshing than I thought it would be,” Earps says of her move to Paris Saint-Germain, who she joined last summer. “The last few years have been unbelievable, a massive acceleration I could never have predicted, and what’s come with that is some incredible opportunities but also a lot of noise, and so I really wanted to get into a little focus zone and just totally concentrate on my development as a footballer. Careers are short and I really wanted to maximise mine. I’m trying to squeeze out every last bit of potential that I have in myself and put the blinkers on a little bit – it’s been nice to escape and just be totally all-in with trying to push myself to another level.”
The poet and writer returns to the May Day mountains in a gentle rumination on family and nature
Go these days to any independent bookshop or art gallery or zine fair, and you may find yourself asking: where are the humans? Title after title is devoted to clay and stone, trees and flowers, the riverine and the botanical, gardens and allotments. Some volumes are philosophical, others urgent calls for climate justice. They share a vocabulary: care, tending, grounding, rootedness, nourishment, regeneration. Nature, however battered, is held up as an antidote to morbid modernity, its alienations, its amnesia.
The Possibility of Tenderness is also about nature, its setting Coffee Grove in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. During Jason Allen-Paisant’s early childhood there, it had no electricity or piped water. Neither beach idyll nor Trenchtown ghetto, its personality was shaped in large part by “grung” – the local name for small plots cultivated by peasant farmers. Apples, guava, mangoes: here, for all the sweat and toil, was succulence. And memories of feeling connected – to the ground, to the past, to kinfolk. “In ‘soil’,” Jennifer Kabat has written, “I hear other words: soul and social.”
(Ninja Tune) After losing their frontman, the band’s third studio album shows how resilient and adaptable they are, with luscious melodies, fantastical lyrics and lots of recorders
The last time Black Country, New Road released a studio album, in 2022, it was accompanied by a strange feeling. Their debut the previous year had reached No 4 in the UK charts, and Ants from Up There was an even greater breakthrough, the sound of the UK septet pulling confidently away from the serried ranks of sprechgesang-heavy alt-rock bands who proliferated in the late 2010s. But there was an elegiac feeling around its release: Black Country, New Road’s frontman, Isaac Wood, had announced his departure four days prior. The others had resolved to continue without him, but given how distinctive Wood’s declarative, ruminating vocals were, many thought the band’s future was uncertain at best.
That proved to be an underestimation. Instead of touring Ants from Up There, the remaining members stopped playing any of the Wood-fronted songs that had made them famous and wrote entirely new ones. “Look at what we did together,” ran the chorus of one of them, on a live album recorded at London’s Bush Hall in December 2022 – looking back with pride at the Wood era, and perhaps in disbelief at where they were going next.
Donald Trump’s tariff plan could undermine the Brexit deal between the EU and the UK for trading arrangements in Northern Ireland, a highly sensitive agreement designed to maintain the 1998 peace pact.
As part of the president’s attempt to spur on a “rebirth” of the US, Trump has imposed a two-tier tariff rate on the island of Ireland – with a 20% tax on exports from the republic but a 10% rate on the UK including Northern Ireland.
Archaeologists say ‘catastrophic military event’ took place at site where 129 bodies have been found so far
As construction crews churned up dirt to renovate a football pitch in Vienna last October, they happened upon an unprecedented find: a heap of intertwined skeletal remains in a mass grave dating to the first-century Roman empire, most likely the bodies of warriors killed in a battle involving Germanic tribes.
This week, after archaeological analysis, experts at the Vienna Museum gave a first public presentation of the grave – linked to “a catastrophic event in a military context” and evidence of the first known fighting in that region.
Israeli PM, who is wanted by the court, hails Viktor Orbán’s ‘bold and principled’ decision to leave the ‘corrupt’ body
Hungary will leave the international criminal court because it has become “political”, the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said as he welcomed his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanhayu - the subject of an ICC arrest warrant - to Budapest for an official visit.
Standing beside Netanyahu at the start of the four-day visit, Orbàn said on Thursday that Hungary was convinced the “otherwise very important court” had “diminished into a political forum”. Netanyahu hailed “a bold and principled” decision.
“We are following the ‘invertebrate of the year’ series with bated breath,” began the email that arrived in the Guardian’s inbox last week.
Mark Blaxter leads the Sanger Institute’s Tree of Life programme, a project that sequences species’ DNA to understand the diversity and origins of life on Earth. But far more importantly, Blaxter and his team are superfans of our invertebrate of the year competition and have offered to map the genome sequence of whoever wins this year.
Serpentine, London From the moment we inhale the scent of this remarkable show – in which trees blast open and boulders perch on branches – the Italian artist intoxicates us like a shaman communing with wood sprites
It’s the aroma that lures you in. Deep and difficult to place, it comes from the thousands of laurel leaves that pad the walls of the Serpentine’s high central space. Laurel is the sharp-leaved evergreen tree sacred to the god Apollo and through him associated with victory and the arts. Poets are crowned with it. In Botticelli’s Primavera, a nymph is chased through laurel trees. A marble sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini depicts Daphne transforming into a laurel to escape Apollo’s unwanted lust – a reason this tree is sacred to him.
So much cultural baggage. It can’t be easy to be a modern Italian artist with ancient Rome, the Renaissance and the baroque on your back. One of the captivating things about Giuseppe Penone’s meditative selection of his works is how easily this artist has cast off that weight of tradition ever since he started his life in art in 1968.
We’d like to hear from people about the impact Trump’s tariffs might have on them and their businesses
Donald Trump has unveiled his global tariffs on US trading partners including 10% on UK exports to the US, 20% on the EU and 34% on China. However, the US’s closest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, have been exempt from the latest round of tariffs.
Wherever you are in the world, we’d like to hear how you might be affected by the tariffs. What preparations or changes are you making to your business? Do you have any concerns?
Ron Klain tells author Chris Whipple that Biden opted for Annie Leibovitz shoot at critical moment in campaign
In the aftermath of the disastrous debate against Donald Trump that ultimately ended his political career, Joe Biden skipped a White House meeting with the congressional Progressive caucus in favor of a Camp David photoshoot with the fashion photographer Annie Leibovitz, a new book says.
“You need to cancel that,” Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff and debate prep leader, told the president, as he advocated securing the endorsement of the group of powerful progressive politicians perhaps key to his remaining the Democratic nominee.
Afrofuturism knows that futures are made – and that who gets to make them is a political question
The digital age sings a seductive song of progress, yet a deliberate erasure echoes within its circuits. We stand at a crossroads, where technology, particularly the promise of artificial intelligence, threatens both to illuminate and to obliterate.
Whose perspectives will shape, and whose will be erased from, the future we build? AI, in particular, has become the latest battleground in a culture war that oscillates between unchecked techno-optimism and dystopian fear. We are told, on one hand, that AI will save us – from disease, inefficiency, ignorance – on the other, that it will replace us, dominate us, erase us.
Lonny Avi Brooks is Professor and Chair of Communication at Cal State East Bay, co-founder of the AfroRithm Futures Group, and co-creator of AfroRithms From The Future, a visionary storytelling game that imagines liberated futures through Black, Indigenous, and Queer perspectives
Reynaldo Anderson is Associate Professor of Africology and African American Studies Temple University
Acknowledgements: we wish to acknowledge Ben Hamamoto and Sheree Renée Thomas for their review of this article and their thoughtful suggestions and edits.
A runaway orphan from coastal Kent is the protagonist in this tightly plotted reimagining of Herman Melville’s whaling classic
“‘And now here I was, an accidental whaler, who knew nothing of whales, except the festive spout in the distance and the unreal immensity of a sperm whale’s corpse on a windy shore.”
So thinks the heroine of Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle, from the deck of the whaler Nimrod, where she has enlisted as a sailor. A teenage orphan from coastal Kent, where she grew up swimming with seals and dolphins, she’s escaped a half-starved life as a factory worker by dressing as a boy to go to sea. Now she finds herself in a crew captained by a morose, reclusive, peg-legged man, who is monomaniacally obsessed with finding and killing the great white whale which maimed him. As many readers will already have guessed, the unlucky Ishmaelle has landed herself in a retelling of Moby-Dick.
Questions on general knowledge and topical trivia, plus a few jokes, every Thursday. How will you fare?
With impeccable timing, last week, when there was a very naughty miniature dachshund making the news, the quiz master decided to take the week off, meaning regular quizzers spent hours poring over every detail of Valerie’s exciting story trying to memorise it all in vain.
At least it meant First Dog on the Moon got a free run to do a cartoon about Valerie without cramping the quiz’s style. Back to the usual format this week, with mostly topical questions and a smattering of general and popular culture knowledge in the mix. There are no prizes, but we always enjoy it when you let us know how you got on in the comments…
There I was, lying in bed and worrying I’d lost a basic life skill. Can you blame me for putting it to the test?
When I was in the first year at middle school, in Miss Hale’s class, my parents returned from a parents’ evening looking disappointed. My nine-year-old self picked up on this. It wasn’t my schoolwork: that was OK. It was that the teacher had revealed that in PE I was the only one in the class who couldn’t do a forward roll.
This was true. It wasn’t that I was physically incapable – I was in the school football team and, without wishing to boast, probably the ninth-quickest runner. I just had this mental block. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The idea of the world momentarily going upside down was too much for me. The prospect of such disorientation was unbearable. If only Miss Hale had taken me to one side and said: “Look, you’re overthinking this – and, believe you me, if you let it, overthinking will blight your life.” But she didn’t, because teachers didn’t talk like that then (and probably don’t do so now, either).
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The 71-year-old director of Dear Diary and The Son’s Room underwent surgery in Rome and is said to be in a stable condition
Italian film director Nanni Moretti is in intensive care at a Rome hospital after suffering a heart attack, according to local media reports.
The 71-year-old director, actor and screenwriter – best known outside Italy for 1993’s Caro Diario (Dear Diary) and 2001’s The Son’s Room – was taken to hospital on Wednesday afternoon. He underwent surgery and is in intensive care, with Italian news agency Ansa reporting that he is in a stable condition.
US president Donald Trump yesterday produced a chart of all the new tariffs he was announcing, affecting trade with countries across the world. Here is the list as he displayed it
The president displayed the top of his list from a podium in the White House Rose Garden, and later published a longer version. Note that the “tariffs charged to the USA” in Trump’s formulation include “trade barriers” so don’t necessarily align with the tariffs published by countries concerned.
Action urgently needed to save the conditions under which markets – and civilisation itself – can operate, says senior Allianz figure
The climate crisis is on track to destroy capitalism, a top insurer has warned, with the vast cost of extreme weather impacts leaving the financial sector unable to operate.
The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments.
Yuki Tsunoda replaces Lawson for Sunday’s Japan GP
Lewis Hamilton describes demotion as ‘pretty harsh’
Max Verstappen has intimated he was unhappy with the way his Red Bull team suddenly sacked their driver Liam Lawson after just two races and replaced him with Yuki Tsunoda from sister team Racing Bulls, speaking in the buildup to this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix.
Red Bull dropped Lawson with a shocking speed after he underperformed in his first two races for the team, a bluntly emphatic act even by F1 standards. In the immediate aftermath the former driver Giedo van der Garde described Red Bull’s treatment of the 23-year-old as “closer to bullying or a panic move” and that they “gave Liam two races only to crush his spirit” in a post on Instagram, which was liked by Verstappen.
Keukenhof, near Amsterdam, increasingly catering to growing demand for social media content
Nestled among tulip fields not far from Amsterdam, the world-famous Keukenhof garden has opened for the spring, welcoming camera-wielding visitors to its increasingly selfie-friendly grounds.
On a sunny day, the paths, park benches and cafes are crowded with tourists taking photos and selfies with one of the Netherlands’ most iconic products – the tulip.
Netflix drama Adolescence sharpens debate over toxic masculinity – and in Spain it is mixed with ignorance over dictatorship
Three or four years ago, the Spanish psychologist Jesús Moreno began to notice a difference in the drawings that the young participants in his workshops on masculinity produced when asked to sketch out their idea of what a man looks like.
The figures they drew were no longer merely the muscular and bizarrely well-endowed drug dealers, etched with prison tattoos and surrounded by guns, knives, cars, sex workers and bundles of cash, to which Moreno and his colleagues had long grown accustomed.
ESPN’s biggest name has never been shy about giving his opinion. But now he is part of the drama he so often comments on
Who would win in a fight between LeBron James and Stephen A Smith is a question only Stephen A Smith would think to ask. There has been little avoiding the question since the Los Angeles Lakers superstar confronted ESPN’s No 1 personality during a recent game against the New York Knicks. The player was venting his displeasure at Smith for his pointed comments about James’s eldest son, and Lakers teammate, Bronny – the 55th pick in last year’s NBA draft.
James approached Smith, a courtside spectator for the game, and appeared to tell him to “keep my son out of this shit” – a callback to Smith questioning whether Bronny deserved to be on a league roster. Smith went on TV the next day to make clear that he wasn’t actually picking on Bronny, the player; he was really calling out LeBron as a bad father for setting a high bar for his son’s pro career. Smith would come back to this point often while making the media rounds after signing a $100m ESPN extension. That should have been the end of the argument – but then last week LeBron sat down with Pat McAfee, whose show follows Smith’s on ESPN, and dismissed Smith as an ice cream-bingeing, couch-bound fanboy.
The sandwich chain now has 274 branches in the capital. How did it grow so huge – and can anything stop it getting even bigger?
At 93-95 Victoria Street, Westminster, a blue plaque marks a piece of London history: the first ever branch of Pret a Manger opened on this spot on 22 July 1986. Nearly 40 years later, it is still going strong.
It’s a nice story – but it’s not the whole story. Look closer and the plaque states that the first Pret sandwich shop opened “near here”. In fact, it was down the road, at 75b, now a branch of Toni & Guy. Except … that wasn’t the first shop, either. The original Pret opened two years earlier and five miles to the north, in Hampstead. It went bust after a year and the founder, Jeffrey Hyman, sold the name, branding and logo to Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham, who reopened in Westminster.
Slot welcomes move and says officiating has been ‘OK’
Everton defender booked for challenge on Mac Allister
The referees’ body, Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL), has acknowledged that Everton’s James Tarkowski should have been sent off early on in their defeat at Liverpool. Arne Slot welcomed the move on Thursday after Tarkowski was only cautioned for a reckless challenge on Alexis Mac Allister.
The referee, Sam Barrott, gave Tarkowski a yellow card and David Moyes conceded the defender was fortunate to stay on the pitch. PGMOL believes the video assistant referee, Paul Tierney, should have recommended a review.
A decade after the finale, new fans are flocking to Glee, causing its songs to shoot up the charts. The internet’s ablaze with TikTok dance homages, Reddit threads – and tons of hate watchers
The year is 2009, and Glee has hit like a cultural earthquake. Every week, millions of people around the world tune in to watch a group of American high school misfits belt out musical theatre and pop hits, turning show choir into mainstream entertainment. The cast’s cover of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ becomes an anthem, spending 37 weeks in the UK charts, catapulting its young stars to overnight fame. Glee clubs start in schools across the US and beyond, and Ryan Murphy’s show develops a devoted fanbase – myself included – who proudly call ourselves Gleeks. Online, we dissect every episode on Tumblr, trade theories and wear our fandom, plus the merch we bought to prove it, as a badge of honour.
But by the time Glee came to a close in 2015, all its magic had faded. The Guardian reported that “few will mourn its passing” as the show’s last season premiered. A string of increasingly absurd storylines and poor song choices left a dwindling viewership and even the most diehard fans drifting away. Or so we thought – because 10 years after its finale, the show is back with a vengeance.
The EU will respond in a “legitimate, proportionate and decisive way” to Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, but its strongest weapon is still “a last resort”, the head of the European parliament’s international trade committee has said.
Bernd Lange, a German Social Democrat, said the EU was discussing the use of the anti-coercion instrument, which EU insiders almost inevitably describe as “the big bazooka”.
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