Economists say levies of between 10% and 50% have dramatically added to the risk of a worldwide downturn
Global financial markets have been plunged into turmoil as Donald Trump’s escalating trade war knocked trillions of dollars off the value of the world’s biggest companies and heightened fears of a US recession.
As world leaders reacted to the US president’s “liberation day” tariff policies demolishing the international trading order, about $2.5tn (£1.9tn) was wiped off Wall Street and share prices in other financial centres across the globe.
The US president’s announcement has caused market chaos and threatens a trade war and US recession
Donald Trump’s announcement of a long slate of new tariffs on the US’s trading partners has caused chaos in global markets and threatens a global trade war and US recession.
Long trailed on his election campaign, Trump’s plans were even more sweeping than many had predicted: a baseline 10% tariff on all imports and higher tariffs for key trading partners, including China and the EU.
Defense chief and others discussed US military operations on messaging app that included journalist
The inspector general of the Department of Defense (DOD) is launching an investigation into Pentagon secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information about military operations in Yemen.
The probe, announced on Thursday, follows a bipartisan request from the Senate armed services committee after allegations emerged that highly precise – and most likely classified – intelligence about impending US airstrikes in Yemen, including strike timing and aircraft models, had been shared in a Signal group chat that included a journalist.
The Democrat delivered the longest Senate speech in history. We asked urologists one pressing question about it
On Monday evening, Cory Booker, a Democratic senator for New Jersey, took the floor to denounce the harm he believes Donald Trump and his administration have inflicted on the United States. “Our country is in crisis,” he said, decrying the economic chaos, mass layoffs and tyrannical acts of the administration’s first 71 days. He stopped speaking 25 hours and five minutes later, making it the longest Senate speech in history.
Many praised Booker for the rousing political act. Some were also impressed by a particular physical feat: namely, he seemingly didn’t pee once the whole time. (A rep for Booker confirmed to TMZ that he did not wear a diaper during his speech.)
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee from southern city of Rafah in one of war’s biggest mass displacements
An Israeli bombing of a school turned shelter in Gaza City has killed at least 27 people, rescuers said, and hundreds of thousands in the Rafah area are fleeing in one of the biggest mass displacements of the war amid Israel’s newly announced campaign to “divide up” the Gaza Strip.
Three missiles hit Dar al-Arqam school in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood on Thursday afternoon, the civil defenceagency spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal said, killing several children and wounding 100 people.
Discovery in Altadena months after fires brings deaths in Eaton fire up to 18, while 12 people killed in Palisades fire
Months after wildfires tore through Los Angeles communities, officials announced this week they had discovered another set of human remains, bringing the death toll in the disaster up to 30.
Investigators were dispatched to Altadena on Wednesday to investigate possible human remains in the community, which was hit hard by the Eaton fire in January. The special operations response team confirmed that the remains were human, the Los Angeles county medical examiner’s office said in a statement.
Phrases used to smooth over tense social situations have meanings beyond the sum of their parts, study suggests
Bonobos use a combination of calls to encourage peace with their partner during mating rituals, research suggests.
The discovery is part of a study that suggests our close evolutionary cousins can string together vocalisations to produce phrases with meanings that go beyond the sum of their parts – something often considered unique to human language.
Neeson steps into the role of the bumbling detective made famous by Leslie Nielsen in the TV show and film series created by the Zucker Abrahams Zucker team
The first footage has been released of Paramount’s upcoming reboot of the much-loved Naked Gun series of spoof police movies. The new film stars Liam Neeson has Frank Drebin Jr – revealed to be the son of Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling detective from the original films.
The trailer introduces him a considerably slicker operator to his late father, disabling a baddie in a schoolgirl disguise with a sharpened lollipop. He is then seen tearfully addressing a photograph of Drebin Snr, as offspring of Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) and, more controversially, Officer Nordberg (OJ Simpson) are seen following suit.
Oscar-winner set to take on role as godlike lion usually perceived to be male in upcoming adaption of The Magician’s Nephew
Meryl Streep is in talks to play Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia film, according to reports. According to Nexus Point News, and confirmed by Deadline Streep, 79, is being lined up to star in Netflix’s film, which will be adapted from The Magician’s Nephew – the sixth of CS Lewis Narnia series of novels, but the first in chronological terms.
In the Narnia books, Aslan is a dignified and quasi-omniscient lion, generally seen to be male and usually interpreted as an allegory for Jesus. The Magician’s Nephew centres on two children, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, who discover the magical world through Digory’s uncle Andrew. Daniel Craig is also in talks for the film, with speculation rising that he will play the uncle. Charli XCX is also in line for a role, rumoured to be Jadis, the White Witch.
The US president has expelled his own country from the rules-based global trade system that America itself created
For the world’s already embattled trading system, it is as though an asteroid has crashed into the planet, devastating everyone and everything that previously existed there. But there is this important difference. If an asteroid struck the Earth, the impact would at least have been caused by ungovernable cosmic forces. The assault on world trade, by contrast, is a completely deliberate act of choice, taken by one man and one nation.
Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on every country in the world is a monstrous and momentous act of folly. Unilateral and unjustified, it was expressed on Wednesday in indefensible language in which Mr Trump described US allies as “cheaters” and “scavengers” who “looted”, “raped” and “pillaged” the US. Many of the calculations on which Mr Trump doled out his punishments are perverse, not least the exclusion of Russia from the condemned list. The tariffs mean prices are certain to rise in sector after sector, in the US and elsewhere, fuelling inflation and perhaps recession. Mr Trump will presumably respond as he did when asked about foreign cars becoming more expensive: “I couldn’t care less.”
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Impunity over Palestinian deaths in Gaza will lead to further cases like this massacre of rescue and healthcare workers
After 18 months of slaughter, it is still possible to be shocked by events in Gaza. More than 50,000 people have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities. More are starving because Israel has cut off aid. The offensive is intensifying again – with 100 children killed or maimed each day since Israel resumed heavy strikes last month, the UN reports.
Even so, Israel’s killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers is particularly chilling. Though they died on 23 March, it took days for Israel to grant access to the site, the UN said. Another man was last seen in Israeli custody. Two grounds for seeing this not only as tragic but as a war crime stand out. The first is that the UN says the men were shot “one by one”, and a forensic expert said that preliminary evidence “suggests they were executed, not from a distant range”, given the “specific and intentional” locations of bullet wounds. Two witnesses said some of the bodies had their hands or legs tied. Prisoners are protected by the Geneva conventions. The second is that medics also enjoy specific protections.
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Starmer will try to calm the situation and focus on May’s local elections, but one thing is clear: our ties with Europe are more crucial than ever
Nobody wins a trade war. You can lose it by greater or lesser degrees: you may be one of the luckier casualties. But that’s about as good as it gets. So, while there will have been initial relief in Downing Street on Wednesday night, a feeling even that Keir Starmer’s placating of Donald Trump looks vindicated, what followed was no victory lap.
How could it be, after that grotesquely swaggering show trial the president staged in the White House garden, all the better to jazz up an economic assault on what were once his country’s allies? Come on down, Britain, escaping with just the minimum 10% tariff on its exports to the US and no drive-by insults! Better than Taiwan (32% plus a lecture about how the US used to build all the semiconductors once), Vietnam (“They like me, I like them” but still a brutal 46%), the EU (“very very tough traders” and lucky to get away with 20%) or poor Lesotho, still reeling from the overnight collapse of US aid and now whacked by a 50% tariff. But even lucky Britain still emerged with a 25% duty on cars that the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) estimates could cost 25,000 jobs, plus the grim realisation that this may be just the beginning of a long unravelling. Globalisation is dead, protectionism is back, and all to satisfy one man’s delusions that life was better in the 1800s before income tax was invented.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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Delays caused by negotiations around overseas rights
ECB launches review into crowded domestic schedule
The England and Wales Cricket Board insists that the sale of the eight Hundred franchises will be completed by the end of April, despite the delays to negotiations.
The governing body’s chief executive, Richard Gould, said that the high valuations were not one of the issues behind the delays, but admitted that future broadcasting rights were. “All the discussions are on a very, very sound footing,” Gould said, “we’re just trying to work out how to maximise value from sponsorships, tickets sales and broadcast revenues. They’re investing a lot of money into our game and we want to make sure that pays dividends.”
Rosie Sandri says her ‘hands were tied’ after slew of criticism, including death threats, led to her resignation
A trans teacher at a Texas high school has resigned after becoming the target of conservative backlash and online attacks.
Rosie Sandri came out as a trans woman about seven months ago. Her colleagues at Red Oak high school and the Red Oak independent school district were very supportive, she recalled to NBC News.
Real Madrid’s Bernabéu also offers appeal to federation
Italy expected to be Spain’s closest rival for tournament
The 2035 Rugby World Cup final could be staged at the revamped Camp Nou in Barcelona with the Spanish rugby federation in discussions with La Liga over using celebrated football stadiums as part of its bid to host the tournament.
Delegates from the Spanish federation met with World Rugby executives last weekend to demonstrate their intentions to host the tournament in 2035 and discussions are said to have piqued interest.
Von der Leyen calls tariffs ‘a major blow to world economy’ while calling for last-ditch negotiations
European leaders have condemned Donald Trump’s tariffs as “fundamentally wrong” and creating an “immense difficulty for Europe”, while appealing for last-ditch negotiations to avert an all-out trade war.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Trump’s decision to impose tariffs was “brutal and unfounded” and appeared to call for a suspension of French investment in the US until the tariffs were clarified.
Rainfall near Memphis, Tennessee, is expected to exceed 12in over the next three days
A prolific tornado outbreak will give way to a rare and widespread flooding threat across the midwest and southern US this week, stressing the nation’s short-staffed weather forecasting and disaster response efforts.
Los Angeles children suffered traumatic disruptions to their education and social lives from the wildfires
The Eaton fire that devastated Altadena in early January burned down Juan Carlos Perez’s family home and the school where his younger daughter attended sixth grade.
Losing both anchors at once, Perez said, has been traumatizing for the 12-year-old. As the family moved from hotel to Airbnb, his daughter has become increasingly withdrawn and too anxious to return to school, asking to finish the semester online. The only time she interacted with friends was during soccer practice, Perez said, but that routine was suspended last month when the family moved this month to a friend’s house in Connecticut.
In recent elections overseas more young men than women have shifted to the right, even the far right. But in Australia the gap between generations rather than genders seems much wider
The US president’s tariffs are almost certain to have dire consequences and he is not impervious to market decline or public opinion
So much for the idea that “liberation day” would free financial markets from their fear of the unknown. Publication of precise tariff rates, went a cheerful line of advance thinking, would at least allow investors to assess the probable trade effects on the basis of hard information. True optimists clung to the idea that Donald Trump would not wish to risk a truly severe market reaction.
That narrative was blown apart when the president reached for his pub-style display of wares. This really was a case of going back to the tariffs rates of the 1920s or 1930s. Not even the penguins of Heard Island and the McDonald Islands were spared.
US president had sued over denied allegations he took part in ‘perverted’ sex acts but UK case was thrown out last year
Donald Trump has been ordered by a judge in England to pay more than £620,000 in legal costs after unsuccessfully suing a company over denied allegations he took part in “perverted” sex acts.
The US president brought a data protection claim against Orbis Business Intelligence, a consultancy founded by a former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, in 2022.
Underneath the measured words you could almost smell the panic as the government scrambled to come up with a plan to respond to Trump’s tariffs
With characteristic humility and good grace … Hardly.
Shortly after 9pm UK time on Wednesday, the Sun-Bed King made his way to the White House Rose Garden, looking every bit the dishonest bookie as he held up a board with every country’s separate tariff. He might as well have been signposting the odds on a global recession.
US stock markets tumbled on Thursday as investors parsed the sweeping change in global trading following Donald Trump’s announcement of a barrage of tariffs on the country’s trading partners.
All three major US index funds were down as trading started on Thursday morning. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fund was down 4.5%, while the S&P 500 and the Dow dropped 3.4% and 2.7% at opening, respectively. Apple and Nvidia, two of the US’s largest companies by market value, had lost a combined $470bn in value by midday.
Police say man landed on island in attempt to meet the Sentinelese people – a tribe untouched by the industrial world
Indian police said on Thursday they had arrested a US tourist who sneaked on to a highly restricted island carrying a coconut and a can of Diet Coke to a tribe untouched by the industrial world.
Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, set foot on the restricted territory of North Sentinel – part of India’s Andaman Islands – in an attempt to meet the Sentinelese people, who are believed to number only about 150.
Donald Trump has introduced eye-watering tariffs on countries around the world. Will they ‘make America wealthy again’? Richard Partington reports
Donald Trump is on a mission to ‘make America wealthy again’. Speaking outside the White House, he said for too long the country had been ‘looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike’. Now that would come to an end, he said, as he slapped eye-watering tariffs on countries around the world.
The Guardian’s senior economics correspondent, Richard Partington, explains why Trump has taken such action and how it could affect the global economy. ‘It could come at huge costs to consumers,’ he says, as markets around the world react with confusion. With prices in the US also likely to rise, will voters soon rue what the president has called ‘liberation day’?
Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist and Islamophobic former Republican congressional candidate banned from Uber, Paypal and some social media platforms, has apparently been successful in pushing the White House to fire national security staffers for disloyalty.
The White House reportedly fired at least three national security council senior aides following a presentation from Loomer. Senior director of intelligence Brian Walsh, senior director for legislative affairs Thomas Boodry and a senior director overseeing tech and national security, David Feith, have all been let go post-meeting, CNN reports. But that number could be up to six staffers now, according to the New York Times.
Vice-president makes remark after reports that president told cabinet members billionaire will be stepping back
JD Vance said on Thursday that Elon Musk would remain a “friend and an adviser” to the vice-president and Donald Trump after he leaves his current role with the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).
In recent days, several news outlets, including Politico, reported that Trump had told members of his cabinet that the tech billionaire, who holds the position of “special government employee”, would soon be stepping back from his role in the administration, and would take on a supporting role and return to the private sector.
Karina Longworth, the host of You Must Remember This, on why people patronise Scorsese and Coppola, and her new season of late-career curios by the likes of Minnelli, Wilder and Hitchcock
‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So runs the most famous line from John Ford’s elegiac 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The 44-year-old historian Karina Longworth has other ideas. The former LA Weekly film critic launched her podcast, You Must Remember This, in 2014, setting out to tell “the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century”, as she puts it in the show’s introduction. Its title is lifted from the jazz standard As Time Goes By (“You must remember this / A kiss is still a kiss …”) as featured in Casablanca. Hearing that wistful, timeworn lyric, it is easy to overlook the imperative hiding in plain sight. With each fastidiously researched and gloriously entertaining episode, Longworth seems to be telling us: you must remember this. To not do so, or to allow fact to curdle into legend, would be unconscionable.
“I don’t want to be a schoolmarm scolding people for forgetting,” she says from a sunny upstairs room in the Los Angeles home she shares with her husband, Rian Johnson, director of the Knives Out whodunnits and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “But I think we can only understand where we are at and where we’re going if we look to where we’ve been.”
Tonight, I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.
The latest escalation and attempts to dismantle the Palestinian leadership are utterly at odds with peace negotiations
Sanam Vakil is a senior research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House
Against the pleas and protests of hostage families desperate to secure the release of their loved ones, the Israeli government is moving ahead with the military occupation of the Gaza Strip. On 2 April, the defence minister, Israel Katz, announced plans to seize large areas of Gaza with the aim of eliminating Hamas’s remaining infrastructure and establishing new security zones that will split Gaza in two. This escalation, which began in mid-March with intensified airstrikes, is intended to encourage a mass exodus of the local population, and has led to substantial civilian casualties.
Despite the international outcry over more than 50,000 deaths, 110,000 civilian injuries and significant displacement of Palestinians, the Israeli government rationalises and justifies these moves as necessary for security against an undefeated Hamas. Ultimately, though, Israel’s actions imperil the fragile ceasefire negotiations, its broader credibility and wider hopes for a political process to end the conflict. In reality, this would be the only viable path to stability and security.
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.
Fifa considering one-off expanded tournament in 2030
Ceferin: ‘We didn’t know anything before the Fifa council’
The Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, has hit out at a proposal to expand the 2030 men’s World Cup to 64 teams, calling the concept a “bad idea” and appearing to criticise Fifa for not advising his organisation of the suggestion in advance.
Fifa confirmed last month that it would consider adopting the sprawling new format as a one-off in 2030 to celebrate the tournament’s centenary, after the idea was raised at a meeting of its council by the Uruguayan football association president, Ignacio Alonso.
Former officials question the reason for a Doge engineer’s access to the Unaccompanied Alien Children portal
A member of Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” gained access to a government system that contains the personal data of unaccompanied immigrant children, according to a recent court filing.
The database, called the Unaccompanied Alien Children portal (UAC), contains extremely detailed information about thousands of minors who enter the United States alone, including individual children’s mental health and therapy records, as well as immigration records, photos and addresses of their family members.
A survivor from a massacre of Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers in Gaza has said he saw Israeli troops open fire on a succession of Red Crescent ambulances and rescue vehicles and then use a bulldozer to bury the wreckage in a pit.
Munther Abed, a 27-year-old Red Crescent volunteer, was in the back of the first ambulance to arrive on the scene of an airstrike in the Hashashin district of Rafah before dawn on 23 March, when it came under intense Israeli fire. His two Red Crescent colleagues sitting in the front were killed but he survived by throwing himself to the floor of the vehicle.
The singer answers your questions about her drum skills, friendship with Joni Mitchell and more – and reveals unheard music with both Prince and Sia
Can you remember the precise moment you realised you had a gift as a vocalist? SalfordRed64 I was doing a talent show at the Burning Spear in Chicago. My group, the Crystallettes, graced many a nightclub stage in competitions, and every time either us or [fellow Chicago girl group] the Emotions would win. But I remember singing some Aretha Franklin songs and people in the audience were throwing money on the stage, and they started calling me “little Aretha”. That’s when I connected the dots: “Oh, I see what this is all about.” I realised I didn’t have to become a teacher or a whatever I wanted to be when I grew up back then – I could be a singer!
You have so much confidence and you just knew you and [the band] Rufus were going to make it big. Where does that confidence come from? stifwhiff When I was with Rufus, I knew I loved what we were doing, and I could only hope and pray everyone else loved it like I did. That’s all you can ask for. And that’s still how I am about the music I make. I have confidence in everything I do – all the time. And that is a necessary thing to have if you want success – if you’ve created something and you want everyone to love it, you have to love it first. And that’s applicable to everything in life, not just music.
Miami billionaire couple part with triptych by late abstract expressionist that previously hung in their bedroom
Tate Modern has announced its most significant single donation in more than 50 years, a monumental triptych by the American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell that she named after her German shepherd dog, Iva.
The huge 6-metre work, painted by Mitchell in 1973, was given to Britain’s national art collection by the billionaire Miami real estate magnate Jorge M Pérez and his wife, Darlene.
Star says cast took a ‘gamble’ appearing in Peter Jackson’s hit trilogy and did not earn enough to ‘rest easy’ for life
Elijah Wood has said that his salary for The Lord of the Rings movies was “not massive” and that appearing in the films was “a real gamble”.
According to a report in Business Insider, which carried quotes from the star at the Texas film awards in March, Wood said the fact that the actors had to sign up for all three films at the start meant that their fees were not related to the film’s financial success. “Because we weren’t making one movie and then renegotiating a contract for the next, it wasn’t the sort of lucrative scenario that you could sort of rest easy for the rest of your life.”
Sara Campanella and Ilaria Sula were found within 48 hours of each other, bringing the number of femicides in 2025 to 11
There have been calls in Italy for a “cultural rebellion” amid outrage and protests over the murders of two female students found within 48 hours of each other, bringing the number of femicides in the country since the start of the year to 11.
Sara Campanella, a 22-year-old biomedical student, was stabbed at a bus stop in the Sicilian city of Messina on Monday afternoon and died while being taken to hospital.
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