US president says on Truth Social that ‘this is a great time to get rich’ despite China issuing a 34% tariff on all US goods
The Trump administration is taking aim at Brown University with threats to freeze $510m in grants, widening its promise to withhold federal funding from schoolsit accuses of allowing antisemitism on campus, according to multiple media outlets including Reuters and the New York Times.
University officials said they had not yet been formally notified, but the school was among dozens warned last month that enforcement actions could be coming as the administration seeks to crack down on academic institutions .
From mealtime chats with strangers to lifelong friendships forged in hostels, the travel guide’s team say travelling alone can be very far from lonely
Learning to get comfortable being by yourself can be challenging. Here, the Lonely Planet team share their advice for women traveling solo. Covering everything from making friends to personal safety to crying in public, most of these tips work well for anyone who finds themselves adventuring unescorted.
A rich and indulgent layered chocolate dessert, with a crunchy biscuit base and a tangy, salted creme fraiche topping
This is one for the chocolate lovers (myself included). It’s rich and indulgent, which is why I love it. I can be a bit of a brownie purist – no nuts, ever! – but here I make an exception. The biscuit base stays nice and crunchy, while the tangy, salted creme fraiche topping cuts through some of the richness. You can serve this while it’s still warm for something a little more gooey, but it’s much easier to slice if you let it cool completely.
Using the platform was dangerous and wrong – but officials appeared to prioritize shielding themselves from litigation
No senior US government official in the now-infamous “Houthi PC Small Group” Signal chat seemed new to that kind of group, nor surprised by the sensitivity of the subject discussed in that insecure forum, not even when the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, chimed in with details of a coming airstrike. No one objected – not the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was abroad and using her personal cellphone to discuss pending military operations; not even the presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, who was in Moscow at the time. Yet most of these officials enjoy the luxury of access to secure government communications systems 24/7/365.
Reasonable conclusions may be drawn from these facts. First, Trump’s national security cabinet commonly discusses secret information on insecure personal devices. Second, sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China intercept such communications, especially those sent or received in their countries. Third, as a result, hostile intelligence services now probably possess blackmail material regarding these officials’ indiscreet past conversations on similar topics. Fourth, as a first-term Trump administration official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request. And fifth, no one seems to have feared being investigated by the justice department for what appears to be a violation of the Espionage Act’s Section 793(f), which makes gross negligence in mishandling classified information a felony; the FBI director, Kash Patel, and attorney general, Pam Bondi, quickly confirmed that hunch. Remarkably, the CIA director John Ratcliffe wouldn’t even admit to Congress that he and his colleagues had made a mistake.
Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux is a shot-for-shot labour of love made with amateur actors, beanbag dinosaurs and an army of volunteers. Three years later it is finished – and ‘bigger than Ben-Hur’
This morning’s location: a field outside Castlemaine, Victoria. The air is thick with flies, attracted to the cow dung but ignoring the nearby dinosaur poo, sturdily constructed from papier-mache.
“Oh god,” Sam Neill groans – though these words aren’t actually uttered by Neill but local builder Ian Flavell, who has taken on Neill’s role as palaeontologist Alan Grant – and drops to his knees in front of an ailing triceratops.
Sport’s highest court said Friday it will hold fast-track appeals next month as Mexican soccer club León tries to overturn a Fifa decision to expel it from the Club World Cup in the United States.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) said León and its sibling club Pachuca have separately filed appeals against a Fifa ruling last month that barred León from the Club World Cup because the clubs have the same owner.
Whoever becomes president later this year has unenviable task of healing divisions and rebuilding trust in democratic institutions
It had been a long and at times intolerable wait. But the South Korean constitutional court’s decision on Friday to oust Yoon Suk Yeol from office may have restored the public’s faith in their democracy.
For 22 minutes, millions of South Koreans held their breath as the chief justice of the constitutional court, Moon Hyung-bae, began delivering the court’s verdict on Yoon’s impeachment over his chaotic declaration of martial law in December.
Actor and comedian charged with rape, indecent assault, oral rape and two counts of sexual assault, say police
The comedian and actor Russell Brand has been charged with one count each of rape, indecent assault and oral rape as well as two counts of sexual assault.
Brand will appear in court in London on 2 May, according to the Metropolitan police, which began investigating him in September 2023 after a range of allegations.
Around a fifth of the 10,000 jobs cut from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were done in error and will need to be corrected, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has admitted.
Mass layoffs from the health department began this week amid a push by Donald Trump’s administration to shrink the size of the federal government workforce. Union representatives were told around 10,000 people were to lose their jobs ahead of further reductions that could see the department’s 82,000-strong workforce slashed by nearly a quarter.
I’m 16 and have never really had crushes. Along with that, I moved around a lot as a kid and never really had many friends until year 7. I’ve struggled a lot with maintaining friendships and I’ve always felt a bit awkward and isolated from my peers. I guess part of it was Covid; I never really developed social skills and have always relied on others to help me make friends.
Recently, I met this really nice guy at a debate competition. He seemed genuinely interested in me and kept trying to talk to me. I liked talking to him; it felt really comfortable. For the first time, it felt as if I had met someone I “clicked” with. I actively sought out interactions with him and was praying he’d be on my team, which he was. I just thought I liked him as a friend at first, so I didn’t get any sort of contact information and assumed I’d forget about him.
There are major concerns about the potentially ‘catastrophic’ impact US policy will have on vehicle makers
Emerging into the springtime sun from gate 17 at Volkswagen’s main factory in Wolfsburg at the end of his shift, Carsten, 63, pulled heavily on a cigarette and shook his head when asked about Donald Trump’s US tariff policies.
“It’s just another nail in the coffin for the German car industry,” the assembly line worker said on Thursday. He cited managers’ plans to slash jobs and close factories earlier this year, and a decade before that the “dieselgate” scandal –costly financially and reputationally – when Germany’s largest carmaker was found to have falsified CO2 emissions tests.
Trump’s moves have pushed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into a state of insecurity after they were welcomed to a safe haven
Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Danyil packed everything he could in a bag and traveled 15 hours by bus from the Zakarpattia region in western Ukraine to the Czech Republic.
He fled the war at 17, just as the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, forbade men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country. Now aged 20, he watches from the US as the war drags on. In December, Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and another 370,000 have been wounded in the war.
A glass factory in Wigan that produces fibreglass for electric cars and wind turbines faces closure and the loss of 250 jobs unless its Japanese owner can find a new partner or a buyer.
In the latest blow to Britain’s industrial base, Nippon Electric Glass (NEG) announced a “strategic review” of its composites business Electric Glass Fiber UK (EGF), which it expects to last approximately two months, putting about 250 jobs at risk.
California cases over AI trainers’ use of work by writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Chabon transferred to consolidate with New York suits from John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen and more
Twelve US copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft have been consolidated in New York, despite most of the authors and news outlets suing the companies being opposed to centralisation.
A transfer order made by the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation on Thursday said that centralisation will “allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings”.
We’re interested to hear how people’s invested pension savings have been faring amid sharp ups and downs in recent months and years, and how this may affect them
US president Donald Trump’s trade war, political elections and societal shifts ushering in dramatic change and dire public finances in multiple countries, the war in Ukraine and the Covid pandemic have been creating tumultous conditions on international markets for the past few years.
We’d like to hear how people’s invested pension savings have been affected by this series of economic shocks. Has your invested portfolio sustained big losses, or have you enjoyed staggering stockmarket gains? How may you and your plans be affected by it all? Tell us.
In 1985, a star-studded lineup of Black UK musicians, including Aswad, Dennis Brown and Janet Kay, recorded a charity single to raise funds for famine-stricken Ethiopia. Why are their efforts so little known?
The Ethiopian famine of the early 1980s was one of the defining news stories of the decade, an exposure of the stark divide between developed and developing nations, still referred to at the time as the Third World. It is a received wisdom that the general public in Britain learned about the crisis when shocking images of emaciated men, women and children were shown on BBC news reports. This is not entirely true. In fact, plenty of Rastafarians were already aware of the situation.
The east African country was their spiritual home – many in the movement viewed its former emperor Haile Selassie as their messiah – and a place free from the iniquities of the west. “A lot of Rastafarians went to Ethiopia [before they] came to London,” says the musician and campaigner Leon Leiffer. “I knew many of them, and there was a rumour going around that things were really bad because of the drought. We heard it like that before the mainstream media. And I had the idea to do something to help before we saw anything on the BBC.”
The Inside Out studio’s latest, long-awaited project is a neon-drenched star-straddling adventure featuring an orphan, a tardigrade and a wannabe astronaut
Pixar’s film-makers are famously asked to pitch three unique ideas when proposing new projects. In terms of Elio, unique is very much the operative word. Presumably that pitch went somewhere along the lines of: “A lonely kid is mistaken for Earth’s ambassador by a UN-style council of sentient celestial bath bombs dipped in day-glow glitter and floating in a malfunctioning lava lamp.”
If you thought Inside Out, with its candy-coloured Freudian crisis management team, was pushing it, the studio’s latest project may make you suspect Pixar has fully surrendered to the void, and is now making films for children who are made of sherbet and tie-dye, rather than flesh and bones.
In Solihull, where the factory employs 9,000 workers, there are fears for an ailing industry and wider community
From mountainsides to deserts, or even just to get around town, Land Rovers are used the world over. For a time however, many of the sturdy vehicles’ distinctive oval plates were branded with the name of a West Midlands town.
“It’s an icon for Solihull and it was synonymous with Britain,” said Robert Mills, 70. The town is home to the 121-hectare (300-acre) Jaguar Land Rover car plant, which employs more than 9,000 people and is one of the last bastions of the UK’s waning automotive industry.
Nests on Amsterdam canals provide archive of plastic waste and show how the material ‘is really here to stay’
One day in 1996, someone ate a McDonald’s McChicken burger in Amsterdam.
Perhaps it was a quick bite after work? A leisurely stroll down the canals? A family outing? These details are lost to time, but others are hard to erase completely.
Impoverished African country is hit with highest tariff rate, overturning decades of global trade policy
The day after Donald Trump announced sweeping global tariffs, Lesotho’s garment workers feared for their jobs.
Last year, Lesotho sent about 20% of its $1.1bn (£845m) of exports to the US, most of it clothingunder a continent-wide trade agreement meant to help African countries’ development via tariff-free exports, as well as diamonds.
Journalists now effectively banished say Kremlin’s aim is to make them ‘toxic’ to anyone thinking of speaking to media
Russian BBC journalists who have been labelled “foreign agents” by Vladimir Putin’s regime have spoken of being unable to see their children, forced to sell homes and in effect being banished from their home country.
They are now meant to report their finances to the state, down to supermarket receipts, while there have already been practical effects for family members inside Russia. The journalists said the label was designed to make them “toxic” to any Russians thinking about speaking to independent media.
US-based global brands from Nike to Apple have suffered some of the heaviest falls in share price and market value, as investors react to fears of price increases and a potential slowdown in consumer spending. Here, we examine some of the most exposed industries and brands.
Amid claims that a chatbot helped shape the key calculations, the president is now off playing golf. He’ll find the world economy in a bunker
There’s a scene in the very first episode of Yellowstone where the casino-owning Native American chief explains the basic financial logic of all casinos to an uncomfortable politician: “The gamblers’ money is like a river – flowing one way. Our way.” Oh no, hang on, wait … Not all casinos. In fact, it could be that when all is said and done, the historians looking for that one key fact to illustrate the eventual legacy of Donald Trump will not go with his two stunning presidential election wins. Instead, they’ll point out that in the 90s, he literally managed to bankrupt casinos. To repeat: this is a man who somehow contrived to bankrupt multiple casinos. Is he the guy to reshape the entire global economic order of the past century? Let’s find out! Either way, only 45 months of his presidency left to go.
Anyway: tariffs. Rather than using actual tariff data, the United States of America this week appeared to have genuinely used a basic ChatGPT-style model to calculate the tariffs it would immediately impose on friends/foes/arctic wildlife. This was called either “liberation day”, or the “declaration of economic independence” (sadly not abbreviated – yet – to DEI).
While Harlequins forward focuses on Saturday’s Champions Cup test at Leinster, future opportunities are on his mind
There is a colossal game looming in Croke Park on Saturday afternoon and Chandler Cunningham-South’s pre-match routine is now established. First he likes to step into a cold shower to wake himself up properly. Then the big Harlequins and England forward will open the notebook he carries everywhere with him, pick up a pen and write down exactly what he plans to do to Leinster.
The precise wording – “It’s quite personalised to me” – is less important than the confident mindset it encourages. The basic idea is to reinforce one of two key objectives – “It’s just confirming what’s in my head already,” he says – and ensures he goes into battle “with a clear mind”. Unthinkingly following the herd has never been his style.
In unprecedented orders, the president is targeting lawyers simply for filing cases he opposes. And firms are surrendering
If you are systematically engaged in lawbreaking, lawyers can be very annoying. They sue, and their suits may lead courts to declare your actions illegal.
So Donald Trump, who has launched his second term with a blizzard of blatantly illegal actions, many of which have been suspended by the courts, has decided to address the problem at its root. He’s targeting lawyers, punishing them for doing nothing more than filing lawsuits he opposes, or hiring lawyers he does not like. He has issued unprecedented executive orders penalizing five of the nation’s major law firms, and more are likely to come. These tactics, blatantly illegal, are designed with one goal in mind: to chill lawyers’ willingness to challenge his illegal actions. They are a fundamental attack on the foundation of the rule of law. And they are achieving their purpose, not because they are legal – they obviously are not – but because too many law firms are surrendering to Trump’s illegal demands.
David Cole is a professor at Georgetown Law and former legal director of the ACLU. Amrit Singh is a law professor and executive director of the Rule of Law Impact Lab at Stanford Law School
Nicholas Jacobs was immersed in party activities, even working to elect the Musk-favored candidate who lost
Archived social media posts from a student Republican operative, Nicholas Jacobs, who received a $1m check from Elon Musk, show that he was deeply immersed in Republican electioneering over the last year, working not only to elect Donald Trump but other party candidates in the state.
They included failed Wisconsin Republican senate candidate Eric Hovde; first-term congressman Tony Wied; incumbent Milwaukee Republican vice-chair Brett Galaszewski; and Brad Schimel, the state supreme court candidate whom Musk has spent $25m supporting.
Devices similar to those used during pandemic to be deployed to help stamp out trade in threatened fish
Last year, a colleague of Diego Cardeñosa sent the international shark trade researcher a few pieces of shark fin taken from a bowl of soup in New York City. Using a PCR test similar to those used during the Covid-19 pandemic to test for the virus, Cardeñosa was able to identify the species behind the fin as sandbar shark, an endangered species found in tropical and warm-temperate waters.
Now, Cardeñosa and other scientists from Florida International University, alongside law enforcement officials from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), plan to deploy the tests at ports across the country in order to crack down on seafood fraud and fish trafficking.
After years of creating dark, disturbing, thought-provoking TV, Charlie Brooker is changing it up. The creator and star-studded cast of Black Mirror talk about why this season is the most moving and vulnerable yet
Charlie Brooker has been contemplating the passing of time, and he’s not happy about it. We’re on set at Shepperton for USS Callister: Into Infinity, the sequel to the 2017 space opera from his terrifying tech anthology Black Mirror. “The cast don’t seem to have aged at all,” he grumbles, “whereas I am a wizened old gentleman.”
There is a more reflective, almost nostalgic tone to this seventh season. The episode Plaything flashes back to Brooker’s early years as a gaming journalist in a Bandersnatch-adjacent slice of computer-induced madness; Eulogy immerses Paul Giamatti in his memories as he literally enters decades-old photos; gaslighting parable Bête Noire forces Siena Kelly’s chocolatier to reckon with youthful misdemeanours; Hotel Reverie stars Emma Corrin as a 1940s matinee idol falling for Issa Rae’s modern film star, who plays her white, male love interest in an AI remake of a vintage romance.
In this week’s newsletter: Donald Trump’s week of chaos has made me reappraise the unloved Star Wars prequel – was it quite prescient after all?
There are many scary things to come out of Trump’s tariffs. The world economy being thrown into chaos; spiralling prices; furious economic experts showing charts with big down arrows, using phrases like “gilt markets” and “share index undergrowth”, which I definitely understand. But the most terrifying thing – the thing that has made me truly believe that we are living in the End Times – is a panic-inducing realisation: The Phantom Menacejust might have been right all along.
For those who haven’t seen the first Star Wars prequel, GOD I envy you. The dialogue is wooden and the structure inexplicable (sure, let’s just have a pod-race instead of an Act II) – and that’s even before we get onto the Jar Jar Binks of it all (the answer to the question “what if we shaved Paddington and spliced his DNA with the most unlikeable newt in the world?”). But the biggest complaint is the subject matter.
Tournaments in 2031 and 2035 are likely to be great events but will be hosted by those who need them the least
There is an abundance of reasons why staging the 2031 and 2035 Women’s World Cups in the United States and UK respectively offers cause for delight. The countries have well-established and emotionally invested fanbases, a genuine buy-in to the women’s game and huge, modern stadiums to choose from. These two summer parties will surely eclipse anything women’s sport has seen and the countries, having invested in the women’s game more than any others in modern times, have frankly earned this.
Yet the news that the US and UK are bidding unopposed to host these tournaments is also sad for the women’s game from a global perspective. The US’s NWSL and England’s Women’s Super League are the two most-watched women’s leagues in the world with the largest average attendances and the most professional facilities for players. Therefore, while many will argue that means they deserve the Women’s World Cup the most, they are also the countries who need the tournament the least.
‘Vertical dramas’ consisting of minute-long episodes are booming, with market predicted to be worth $14bn by 2027
Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas. The Quarterback Next Door. Revenge of the XXL Wife. My Secret Agent Husband.
These may sound like cringey fantasies, but they’re actually titles of “vertical dramas”, a new form of episodic television that is gripping millions around the world.
We should all be worried that the rightwing organisation Alliance Defending Freedom has been increasing its activities in this country
I couldn’t sleep the other night, because I made the fatal mistake of reading about US politics directly before bed, specifically the executive order calling for the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian museums. If US politics were a film, I’d say we’re somewhere in between having read aloud from the book that summons demons as a joke, and the final bloodbath.
If JD Vance rewriting history isn’t sinister enough, then came the news that the US state department will be “monitoring” a UK woman’s abortion buffer zone case (why does everything they say always sound so creepy?) They are “concerned”, apparently, “about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom”. The case is that of Livia Tossici-Bolt – who held up a sign reading “Here to talk if you want” outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic and was this morning convicted of breaching the buffer zone. Her case was being funded by the UK branch of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a rightwing organisation with links to the White House, which has increased its expenditure and activities in this country of late. It has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the US.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
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Got a niggling houseplant query? Our expert is here to help. This week: how to repot a claustrophobic peace lily
What’s the problem?
My peace lily’s roots are escaping.
Diagnosis
When roots start growing through the drainage holes, it’s a sign the plant may be root-bound, meaning it has outgrown its pot. While some plants, such as succulents, can tolerate being root-bound, others – such as monsteras and peace lilies – can suffer from stunted growth, drooping leaves due to water retention, or even nutrient deficiencies.
Harvard weighs costs of standing up to president as other elite schools, such as Princeton, signal they won’t concede
The day after the Trump administration announced a review of $9bn in federal contracts and grants with Harvard due to what it claimed was the university’s failure to combat antisemitism on campus, the university’s president, Alan Garber, sent an email to the Harvard community titled: Our resolve.
“When we saw the Garber statement’s subject line, everybody thought: ‘Oh, great, Harvard’s going to stand up!” said Jane Sujen Bock, a board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, a group of alumni founded in 2016 amid a legal battle over affirmative action.
Doctors worry about semaglutides being used by people with restrictive eating disorders – but research also shows they could help others struggling with binge eating
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic have, in three short years, changed our attitudes to the body. They’ve revived a cultural fervor for thinness that has been blamed for everything from the closure of wine bars to killing off the body positivity movement. What began as a seeming miracle drug posited to help those most in need of losing weight for health reasons has led to a clamor in which one in eight Americans have tried the drugs and telehealth companies have offered cheaper off-brand versions with very little oversight.
Ozempic (the brand name for semaglutide) and other GLP-1s mimic a natural hormone in the body, stimulating insulin and slowing the rate of stomach emptying after eating, increasing one’s sense of fullness. But the very qualities that make GLP-1s such powerful tools for weight loss also make them potentially dangerous for those who struggle to adequately feed themselves.
His failure in Wisconsin could provide a model for the defeatist Democrats. Instead of fearing him, they should make him a symbol
It’s important to relish the little pleasures in life, like the knowledge that somewhere, Elon Musk is sad. On Tuesday, the world’s richest person faced an unmistakable rebuke from the public when voters in Wisconsin rejected his preferred candidate for a vacant state supreme court seat there: Brad Schimel, the former state attorney general, on whose campaign Musk had spent more than $25m – lost in a landslide to the liberal Susan Crawford. He must have been devastated, a thought which liberal Americans greeted with relish. The Democratic party’s official account on Musk’s X posted a photo of Musk with the caption “loser”. All that money wasted. Maybe he cried.
In addition to his lavish expenditures, Musk had made himself the center of the race in a deliberate and ill-advised fashion. He appeared at a rally in Green Bay wearing a cheese hat – a deliberately silly article donned by fans of sports teams in the dairy-producing state. He paid for in-person canvassers at a rate of $25 an hour, three times the minimum wage. And in an illegal gesture that the Wisconsin supreme court declined to stop, he handed out giant, novelty $1m checks to voters who signed a petition against “activist” judges – a thinly veiled cash-for-votes scheme, something he also did in Pennsylvania ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
It may not reinvent the wheel but the forthcoming racer looks awesome, plays flawlessly, offers more exhilarating carnage than ever before – and even allows some open-world exploration
How do you follow a game as complete and extensive as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe? Nintendo is banking on the answer being: go bigger. Double the number of racers to 24. Increase the number of characters (60 in total). More weapons. And, most eye-catchingly, more exploration.
That’s not a term you’d associate with the closed circuit, three-lap formula that the series has perfected over the last three decades, but in Mario Kart World, the flagship launch title for the forthcoming Switch 2, Nintendo is tearing down the tyre barriers and offering players a Forza Horizon style open world. It’s not exactly a total reinvention of the wheel, but it’s as big a change to the format as any since the series began. Given physical copies of Mario Kart World will retail at £75 though, is it enough?
Great Hall, Cardiff University In a dazzling performance, the jazz saxophonist draws out tracks from his latest album into giddy extemporisations, ceding the floor to a series of awesome soloists
‘I don’t need to be from here to tell you I love you,” Kamasi Washington says, teeing up the velvet soul of Lines in the Sand. From the back of the room comes a voice, propelled as much by the convivial brilliance that has lit up the stage for the past half an hour as it apparently is by a couple of Thursday-night beers: “I love you too, mate!”
The title of the Los Angeles bandleader and tenor saxophonist’s recent album Fearless Movement promised much and largely delivered, but when live, its all-in-it-together spirit grows extra legs. As Washington and his band draw out its tracks into giddy, 15-minute jazz extemporisations coloured by P-funk squelch and rowdy hip-hop, their joy at being able to play together is obvious and wonderful.
(Island EMI) The British star and the US country artist spur each other on in this tuneful, swinging set with poignant moments
In the twilight years of his career, Elton John has been anointing the next generation with a keener ear than most, championing new stars from Chappell Roan to Wet Leg via his Rocket Hour radio show and collaborating with artists as genre-diverse as Britney Spears, Gorillaz and Young Thug. Who Believes in Angels?, however, feels like a genuine meeting of minds. Created alongside American country rock royalty Brandi Carlile, an 11-times Grammy winner, there is the audible sense of two artists pushing each other and raising the other’s game; on the rollicking rock’n’roll romp of Little Richard’s Bible, or the full-blooded country duet Swing for the Fences, 78-year-old John sounds like a man half his age.
Where many of his recent collaborations have seen him enter the sonic palettes of modern pop, Someone to Belong To’s interweaving harmonies, or the rousing piano balladry of the record’s title track, live firmly in the world of classic, melody-driven songwriting, created by two artists supremely gifted at exactly that. The album ends with the remarkably poignant, Elton-led end-of-life reflection When This Old World Is Done With Me. Who Believes In Angels? is a fine reminder that he’s certainly not there yet.
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