Donald Trump says deals ‘end our foolish dependence on foreign sources’, while Japanese PM hails enhanced economic security
Japan has drawn up plans for investments in US oil, gas and critical mineral projects worth about $36bn under the first wave of a deal with Donald Trump.
The US president and Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s prime minister, announced a trio of projects including a power plant in Portsmouth, Ohio, billed by the Trump administration as the largest natural gas-fired generating facility in US history.
Cycads are ancient palm-like plants that appeared 275m years ago, long before flowering plants evolved
Cycads are ancient palm-like plants that appeared 275m years ago, long before flowering plants evolved. They are also the oldest known seed plants pollinated by insects, but despite their ancient roots they have an ingenious knack of advertising themselves to beetles – they heat up for sex, quite possibly the oldest signal in plants to attract pollinating insects.
Cycads have separate male and female plants, with their sex organs held on cones. When the reproductive organs are ready for sex, they can warm up by more than 10C above their surroundings by cranking up their metabolism using a dense array of energy-producing mitochondria.
Citrus brings vibrancy and zing to savoury and sweet dishes alike
Citrus season brings an entirely new dimension of seasoning – a way to add vibrancy, nuance and brightness far beyond the standard squeeze of lemon. For me, citrus isn’t just acidity: it’s a complex alternative to sugar and vinegar, with varieties that offer bitterness, floral tones, sweetness and sharpness in equal measure. With more than a hundred types of lemons, clementines and limes now available, I find it easiest to think of them in two groups: sour citrus and sweet citrus. Once you know which you’re working with, you can explore each variety’s complexity and decide how best to use it.
Labour promised ‘ambitious reforms’, but it was fixing things that were not broken. And the moral: focus on what matters and stop making stupid mistakes
What were they thinking? Labour inherited the worst of everything, including prisons beyond breaking point, court backlogs as bad as NHS waiting lists, children cast into exceptional destitution, the National Grid unable to cope with demand, reservoirs unbuilt while sewage poured into rivers, high debt, no money and deep public distrust in politics. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were honest about what they found.
So what on earth can have seized them, within months of taking over, to decide this was a good time for a gigantic English council re-disorganisation? Angela Rayner, who was in charge of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government at the time, kicked it off in December 2024. But why, when councils are near-bankrupt and crippled by the ballooning costs of social care and provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities?
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Monday 30 April, ahead of the May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much threat Labour faces from both the Green party and Reform, and whether Keir Starmer can survive as party leader
Book tickets here or at guardian.live
A man who threw his support behind neo-Nazis and spouted antisemitic remarks to an Australia Day rally crowd has been reprimanded and jailed for his offensive conduct.
Brandan Koschel attended the anti-immigration March for Australia protest alongside hundreds of others winding their way through Sydney’s city centre.
Hitchin, Hertfordshire: It’s not quick, it’s not graceful, but these early nesters are hard at work in preparation for egg-laying in a few weeks
Is it too early to whisper the S word? If so, I blame the magpies. Every day for the past two weeks, while enjoying my morning cuppa in bed, I’ve been watching a pair nest-building in a Norway maple across the road. But though the arrival of spring advances each year at a faster pace than any other season, the magpies’ calendar is not out of kilter. Like their corvid cousins the rooks and ravens, they usually start nesting in winter, occasionally as early as December.
Now, a fortnight in, they’re shoring up the bowl-shaped platform in a fork between three upper branches. The movement of their swinging tails as they manoeuvre twigs into place looks graceful, even balletic.
Eye-catching martial arts performance at China gala had viewers and experts wondering what else humanoids can do
Dancing humanoid robots took centre stage on Monday during the annual China Media Group’s Spring Festival Gala, China’s most-watched official television broadcast. They lunged and backflipped (landing on their knees), they spun around and jumped. Not one fell over.
The display was impressive, but prompted some to wonder: if robots can now dance and perform martial arts, what else can they do?
‘Shocking’ data shows the climate crisis and invasive mosquitos mean chikungunya could spread in 29 countries
An excruciatingly painful tropical disease called chikungunya can now be transmitted by mosquitoes across most of Europe, a study has found.
Higher temperatures due to the climate crisis mean infections are now possible for more than six months of the year in Spain, Greece and other southern European countries, and for two months a year in south-east England. Continuing global heating means it is only a matter of time before the disease expands further northwards, the scientists said.
Acts such as Article 3 are drawing inspiration from their culture and meeting a big appetite for Indigenous-focused club nights
“We both live in maybe the most impractical place if you want to be a successful DJ,” laughs Alice Marie Jektevik, one half of Article 3, a Sámi female DJ collective. Jektevik, 36, and her collaborator, Petra Laiti, 30, reside in a rural village in the far north-east of Norway.
But living in Sápmi – the region across northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia traditionally lived in by Sámi people – has proven to be central to their success, providing the inspiration for much of their work.
The fledgling ‘coalition of the willing’ assembled for Ukraine could form the basis for an urgent European security response
After a year of Donald Trump’s second term and twoMunich Security Conferences, we now know that Europe will have to defend itself in future with less US support; probably with much less US support; and possibly – gulp – with no US support at all.
European leaders recognise that they need to reduce overdependence on the US. Yet many, including Keir Starmer and to an extent Friedrich Merz, are stillclinging to the wreckage of the transatlantic relationship. They do so in hope, rather than certainty, that the US will come to Europe’s aid if Russia attacks Nato territory. Who truly believes that Trump, who prefers one-day displays of US power, would commit US forces to an open-ended war in Europe – with potential nuclear risks – if Vladimir Putin suddenly grabbed a Russian-speaking border town in Estonia, or the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard?
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
In 1999, Heather Preen contracted E coli on the beach. Two weeks later she died. Now, as a new Channel 4 show dramatises the scandal, her mother, Julie Maughan, explains why she is still looking for someone to take responsibility
When Julie Maughan was invited to help with a factual drama that would focus on the illegal dumping of raw sewage by water companies, she had to think hard. In some ways, it felt 25 years too late. In 1999, Maughan’s eight-year-old daughter, Heather Preen, had contracted the pathogen E coli O157 on a Devon beach and died within a fortnight. Maughan’s marriage hadn’t survived the grief – she separated from Heather’s father, Mark Preen, a builder, who later took his own life. “I’ve always said it was like a bomb had gone off under our family,” says Maughan. “This little girl, just playing, doing her nutty stuff on an English beach. And that was the price.” Yet there had been no outrage, few questions raised and no clear answers. “Why weren’t people looking into this? It felt as if Heather didn’t matter. Over time, it felt as if she’d been forgotten.” All these years later, Maughan wasn’t sure if she could revisit it. “I didn’t know if I could go back into that world,” she says. “But I’m glad I have.”
The result, Dirty Business, a three-part Channel 4 factual drama, is aiming to spark the same anger over pollution that ITV’s Mr Bates Vs the Post Office did for the Horizon scandal. Jumping between timelines, using actors as well as “real people” and with actual footage of scummy rivers and beaches dotted with toilet paper, sanitary towels and dead fish, it shows how raw sewage dumps have become standard policy for England’s water companies. Jason Watkins and David Thewlis play “sewage sleuths” Peter Hammond and Ash Smith, Cotswolds neighbours who, over time, watched their local river turn from clear and teeming with nature to dense grey and devoid of life. Hammond is a retired professor of computational biology, Smith a retired detective, and together, they used hidden cameras, freedom of information requests and AI models to uncover sewage dumps on an industrial scale.
Google, Anthropic and OpenAI bosses to mingle with global south leaders wrestling for control over technology
Silicon Valley tech billionaires will land in Delhi this week for an AI summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, where leaders of the global south will wrestle for control over the fast-developing technology.
During the week-long AI Impact Summit, attended by thousands of tech executives, government officials and AI safety experts, tech companies valued at trillions of dollars will rub along with leaders of countries such as Kenya and Indonesia, where average wages dip well below $1,000 a month.
As Lunar New Year celebrations get under way, attention in some Chinese communities turns to one of the festival’s most symbolic foods – the dumpling. Melbourne dumpling chef Cindy Feng demonstrates how to shape them with care and precision, and explains why technique, as much as speed, matters
He witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Forty years later, he joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Barack Obama’s election victory and had tears streaming down his face.
Jesse Jackson, who died on Tuesday at the age of 84, was hailed by Martin Luther King III and his wife Andrea King as “a living bridge between generations”. He was the most influential African American political voice between King and Obama. His two runs for the Democratic nomination created the imaginative space for a Black president. He was the architect of a “rainbow coalition” that shapes the Democratic party today.
CEO said services have restarted after termination of grants led to criticism that US was ceding ground to China
Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasts to people in China, its chief executive said on Tuesday, after Trump administration cuts last year largely forced the US-funded outlet to cease operations.
For years, RFA and its sister outlets, including Voice of America (VOA), had been financed with funding approved by the US Congress and overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
Football club donation equal to prize money Ukraine pays gold medallists
Heraskevych barred from racing while wearing ‘helmet of memory’
The owner of Ukrainian football club Shakhtar Donetsk has donated more than $200,000 to skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. The athlete was disqualified from the Milano Cortina Winter Games before competing over the use of a helmet depicting Ukrainian athletes killed in the war with Russia, the club said on Tuesday.
Australia’s race discrimination commissioner has called on Pauline Hanson to apologise for inflammatory comments about Australian Muslims, amid backlash to comments denounced by others as “reprehensible”.
Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman said Hanson was targeting Muslims with her increasingly inflammatory comments, joining condemnation from across the political spectrum.
US family who were 100th to be granted residency under investor scheme say they want to give back to ‘amazing’ New Zealand
Wealthy Americans are dominating applications for New Zealand’s “golden visa”, driven by a love for the country’s natural beauty and entrepreneurial spirit, as well a desire to escape Trump’s administration.
New rules for the Active Investor Plus visa came into effect in April 2025, lowering investment thresholds, removing English-language requirements and cutting the amount of time applicants must spend in the country to establish residency from three years to three weeks. Successful applicants can only purchase homes in New Zealand worth more than $5m.
Curlers wear diamond-printed trousers to honour ‘Team Ulsrud’
Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants page has 360,000 followers
Norway’s men’s curling team delighted supporters at the Olympics on Tuesday by reviving the famous red, white and blue-patterned trousers that became a sensation 16 years ago when they were worn by Thomas Ulsrud’s team.
The eye-catching pants, originally part of a sponsorship deal with sportswear company Loudmouth Golf, turned heads and captured hearts at Vancouver 2010, when Ulsrud’s Norwegian rink became the talk of the Winter Games.
Group was skiing in snow-hit Sierra Nevadas, while winter storm brings heavy rain and floods to other parts of state
Six skiers have been found after a group of 16 went missing this morning as heavy snowfall blanketed California, prompting avalanche warnings in the Sierra Nevada mountains, closing coastal roads and causing flooding in Los Angeles.
The 10 remaining skiers are still missing, according to the sheriff’s office in Nevada county, California. The group was in the Castle Peak area, where an avalanche was reported around 11.30am. According to the sheriff’s office, the group consisted of four ski guides and 12 clients.
Ukrainian president says he hopes Trump’s recent remarks are ‘just his tactics and not the decision’ as negotiators meet in Switzerland. What we know on day 1,456
Independent experts appointed by human rights council speak of ‘grave’ nature regarding scale of atrocities against women and girls
Millions of files related to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein suggest the existence of a “global criminal enterprise” that carried out acts meeting the legal threshold of crimes against humanity, a panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations human rights council has said.
The experts said crimes outlined in documents released by the US justice department were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption and extreme misogyny. The crimes, they said, showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls.
Brazilian accuses referee of ‘poorly executed protocol’
Real Madrid eventually play on after 10-minute delay
Vinícius Júnior declared that “racists are above all cowards [who] need to put their shirts in their mouth to demonstrate how weak they are” and attacked the failure of the referee to act after he was allegedly abused by Benfica’s Gianluca Prestianni during Real Madrid’s 1-0 win in Lisbon. The Brazilian was seemingly minded to walk off and the Madrid coach, Álvaro Arbeloa, said that they would have joined him, although they did eventually play on after a 10-minute delay. Kylian Mbappé said afterwards that Prestianni should not be allowed to play in the Champions league again.
Vinícius had run to the referee, François Letexier, when Prestianni said something to him after celebrating the only goal of the night on 50 minutes. Prestianni covered his mouth as he spoke but Mbappé later backed the Brazilian’s accusation that the word used had been “mono” or monkey. The referee performed the gesture that confirmed that he was activating the anti-racism protocol and the game but following conversations between players, managers and officials the two teams did eventually play on.
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