© Shuji Kajiyama/Associated Press
© Eric Lee/The New York Times
The island of Ireland faces a complex challenge with Trump’s tariffs. But giving up on transatlantic relations is not the answer
Ireland believes in open, free trade and has build a strong, resilient economy by being the most globalised in Europe. We are a trading country. That is why last night’s news on tariffs came as such a disappointment to us.
Imposing tariffs to force companies to locate in the US will fundamentally change how the world sees it. US economic dominance has not been built on scale or purchasing power alone, but on relationships and alliances, something it is now damaging. “Liberation day” risks forcing a realignment of how global trade operates, without the US at its centre, as countries rethink their relationship with the US and seek new, more reliable partners.
Simon Coveney is a former deputy prime minister, foreign minister and enterprise and trade minister of Ireland
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© Photograph: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
The project in Uganda has captured the disastrous effects of the climate crisis on a vital source of water that is central to the lives and sacred beliefs of the local Bakonzo community
• Photographs by Project Pressure
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© Photograph: Project Pressure
© Photograph: Project Pressure
Jon Hamm stars as a gentlemen thief in a very entertaining midlife-crisis satire. Plus: Charlie Brooker’s hit series is back with another sensational cast
Manifesting his signature blend of unshakeable self-confidence and understated self-loathing, Jon Hamm stars in this midlife-crisis satire. Coop (Hamm) is a hedge fund manager who, after years gazing down at the world from an ivory tower, finds his life falling apart. His wife has gone, his kids are expensive, his sister’s mental health problems are getting worse and he’s lost his job. “Your biggest mistake,” his boss tells him, “was thinking any of this was ever yours.” At a barbecue hosted by friends, he has an idea: the people around him are awful and undeservedly rich – so why not rob them? Soon, everything is spiralling out of control in very entertaining fashion.
Apple TV+, from Friday 11 April
© Photograph: Jessica Kourkounis/Apple
© Photograph: Jessica Kourkounis/Apple
Dismissing Haugh, who headed the US Cyber Command, puts the country at risk at a time of ‘unprecedented cyber threats’, congressional Democrats say
Top congressional Democrats on Thursday protested against the reported firing of Gen Tim Haugh as director of the National Security Agency (NSA), with one lawmaker saying the decision “makes all of us less safe”.
The Washington Post reported late Thursday that Haugh and his civilian deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, had been dismissed from their roles. Haugh also headed US Cyber Command, which coordinates the Pentagon’s cybersecurity operations. The Post report cited two current US officials and one former US official who requested anonymity.
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© Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
© Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The UK is among those least hit by the US president’s war on the world economy. Retaliation at this point makes no sense
The tirade was astonishing. On Wednesday afternoon the world watched as the leader of its most powerful nation accused friends and foes alike of having “looted, pillaged, raped, plundered”, and simultaneously waved a bogus list of tariff imbalances. The playground paranoia was cringeworthy. What on earth was going on?
The answer can only be that Donald Trump is America’s elected president for the next four years. He says he wants to end the military conflicts the US has fought or sponsored round the globe for a quarter of a century. We are waiting for that. Meanwhile, he is waging an economic war on world trade, a response that his biographer and ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, blames on his childhood: “a life spent feeling like a victim … any time he does not totally dominate he feels ripped off”.
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© Photograph: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street
© Photograph: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street
Justice committee said the majority of public submissions oppose the legislation, which seeks to reinterpret the country’s founding document
A parliamentary committee has recommended a bill that seeks to radically reinterpret New Zealand’s founding treaty between Māori tribes and the British Crown should not proceed.
The treaty principles bill, which was introduced to parliament by the minor coalition Act party, seeks to abandon a set of well-established principles that guide the relationship between Māori and ruling authorities in favour of its own redefined principles.
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© Photograph: Joe Allison/Getty Images
© Photograph: Joe Allison/Getty Images
Authorities race to complete clean-up operation after devastation from gales and heaviest rainfall in 20 years
People on the Aegean islands, more used in April to the sight and scent of spring’s blossoms, have been left reeling from flash floods spurred by typhoon-strength gales, with authorities calling a state of emergency in some of Greece’s most popular destinations less than three weeks before Easter.
“It’s a total catastrophe and it happened in just two hours,” said Costas Bizas, the mayor of Paros, the island worst hit by weather not seen in decades. “We need all the help we can get.”
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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
The UK indie-rockers won two Grammys for their debut album. Ahead of their second, they explain how they protected one another amid sudden fame – and how queer love and Davina McCall inspired them
Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale looks like a pop star from a different era. She walks into a bar in east London wearing a giant, floor-length pale-pink padded coat. She has bleached eyebrows, dip-dyed hair, drawn-on freckles and jewels stuck to her nails and teeth. For a moment, Top of the Pops could be on primetime TV and a copy of Smash Hits in my bag. But then Wet Leg’s story always did feel anachronistic. In 2021, they managed what indie bands don’t often manage any more and became an overnight success. That June, they released their first single, Chaise Longue, a deadpan, perfectly simple and cheerfully daft megahit; they conquered the US and Japan, toured arenas and topped the album charts with their scathing, self-titled debut, scoring two Brit awards and two Grammys.
They were still touring that album last summer, supporting Foo Fighters in stadiums. But eventually they found time to make a new one. Trailed by the punchy, indie-sleazy Catch These Fists, Moisturizer otherwise largely ditches their trademark death-stare sarcasm in favour of stompy but soppy love songs. Teasdale lives in London and we are meeting in person, but Hester Chambers, the band’s co-founder and lead guitarist, lives on the Isle of Wight, where Wet Leg met and formed. (Having written their debut alone, this time, they co-wrote with drummer Henry Holmes, guitarist Joshua Mobaraki and bassist Ellis Durand.) Tracking Chambers down will prove a trickier task, but more on that later.
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© Photograph: Alice Backham
© Photograph: Alice Backham
With populist leaders on the back foot and EU support at its highest in years, the US trade war could be an opportunity for the union
Donald Trump has unleashed a trade war on the world, and Europe, considered by Washington to be among the “worst offenders”, is a major target. After hitting European steel, aluminium and cars, this week Trump announced sweeping 20% tariffs on almost all EU imports. Europeans have seen this coming for a long time. Well before his re-election, officials in Brussels were drawing up plans on how the EU might respond to Trump 2.0 and a possible transatlantic trade war.
What might the political fallout in Europe be? The good news is that Trump’s trade war puts Trump-friendly far-right forces in Europe in a terribly uncomfortable position. It’s one thing for the European far right to support Trump in principle, or to support the administration’s tyranny over peoples it doesn’t care about, be it Ukrainians, Canadians, Mexicans or Palestinians. It’s quite another to defend Trump and his policies when the victims are countries that these far-right parties supposedly represent.
Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist
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© Photograph: Daniel Torok/White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Daniel Torok/White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
Indore in Madhya Pradesh was once dotted with fetid waste dumps but after a huge campaign is now virtually spotless
This is what happens usually in India: a politician wakes up and launches a cleanliness “drive” with fanfare. They ostentatiously start sweeping a street and speak solemnly about civic duty while the media take photos. The next day it’s over and things go back to how they were before.
But not in Indore in Madhya Pradesh. From 2017, when it won the prize for being the cleanest city in the country, it kept winning for eight straight years, until last year.
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© Photograph: Pallava Bagla/Corbis/Getty Images
© Photograph: Pallava Bagla/Corbis/Getty Images
This tale of a terminal cancer patient’s newfound horniness upends every expectation you have for on-screen sex – as well as the definition of a soulmate. It leaves you longing for more
Sex is for men. This is a lesson we learn from a very early age. Maybe it is a nice lesson to learn if you are a man, though I imagine the pressure to be seen to know all about it from the off could feel a teensy bit much now and again. I’d probably take that over the internalised shame and alienation from your own body – and from one of the main drivers of pleasure that exists – so that we may all enjoy perpetuating the species, though, I think.
(Why yes, this is all about me! And yes I did grow up Catholic, which can’t have helped. You’re such a sweetheart for noticing!)
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© Photograph: Sarah Shatz/FX
© Photograph: Sarah Shatz/FX
From UK tailors to Australian farmers to Irish whiskey distillers, firms reveal the impact of US measures
Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs will upend global trade, adding costs and delays to businesses around the world and threatening a recession.
The Guardian spoke to eight businesses about the impact.
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© Photograph: Anna Groniecka
© Photograph: Anna Groniecka
Legislation was repealed in 2018 but Caribbean country’s supreme court last week recriminalised the act after appeal
The privy council in London will soon be called upon to make the final decision on a court case to remove homophobic laws in Trinidad and Tobago.
The laws were repealed in 2018 in a high court judgment that struck from the statute book the “buggery law” that had criminalised consensual anal sex since an act passed in 1925 under British rule. However, last week Trinidad’s supreme court upheld a government appeal against the ruling and recriminalised the act, dealing a hammer blow to LGBTQ+ rights in the Caribbean country and prompting the UK Foreign Office to update its advice for LGBTQ+ travellers.
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© Photograph: Sean Drakes/LatinContent/Getty Images
© Photograph: Sean Drakes/LatinContent/Getty Images
Winter Garden Theatre, New York
The actor-director brings his 2005 drama to the stage, now playing the lead role, but while it’s timely and nicely staged, it feels stiff
Time has been kind to Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s sincere dramatization of the broadcaster Edward R Murrow’s on-air tangles with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Sleek, slim and reverent, the 2005 film recalled a time of both cultural panic and promise, before American attention splintered and television’s road forked toward cable news. In its own era, the movie played in implicit contrast to mainstream media’s failure to interrogate the Bush administration’s dubious justifications for the Iraq war. In 2025, well … now, as in 1953, the lies run rampant. But in Clooney’s stark black-and-white drama, truth prevails.
Wouldn’t that be nice. The ongoing lurch away from due process casts both a haunting pall and a self-congratulatory glow over New York’s Winter Garden Theatre, where Clooney leads a proficient, if stiff, Broadway adaptation of his directorial debut. The 63-year-old actor, who originally played Murrow’s comparatively warm producing partner Fred Friendly, steps into the shoes of the hardbitten broadcaster for his Broadway debut with a palpable sense of purpose. The show, one of a handful of starry, expensive productions this spring, at least has the argument of pressing relevance for exorbitant prices. The past week’s wave of government deportations and detentions, for “ties” to “terrorist groups” without evidence or trial, uncannily echo the McCarthy hearings that falsely accused government employees of colluding with the Communist party.
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© Photograph: Emilio Madrid
© Photograph: Emilio Madrid
The court said Yoon had ‘committed a grave betrayal of the trust of the people’ over his ill-fated declaration of martial law in December
South Korea’s suspended president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has been removed from office after the country’s constitutional court voted unanimously to uphold parliament’s decision to impeach him over his ill-fated declaration of martial law in December.
After weeks of deliberations and growing concerns about the future of South Korea’s democracy, all eight justices voted to strip Yoon of his presidential powers.
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© Photograph: Kim Soo-hyeon/Reuters
© Photograph: Kim Soo-hyeon/Reuters
Bloc to discuss trade, security and energy with leaders of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan
The EU is being urged to put human rights centre stage as it begins its first summit with the leaders of central Asia.
The president of the European Council, António Costa, and the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, are meeting the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on Friday.
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© Photograph: Uzbek President Press Service/EPA
© Photograph: Uzbek President Press Service/EPA
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