Trump is wielding imperial powers created by a decades-long master plan. The only way to stop his war is to cut off the money

Donald Trump has now ordered military attacks on more countries than any prior president. These assaults do not merely betray his campaign promises. Launched without congressional authorization, Trump’s bombings and incursions also betray the constitution – an inherently anti-monarch document that exclusively vests warmaking powers in the legislative branch in order to prevent such grave decisions from being made by any one person determined to become a king.

Trump clearly perceives himself in such royal terms – he’s said as much. But as we show in the new season of our investigative podcast series Master Plan: The Kingmakers, Trump did not create the kingly authority he is now employing. He is exercising powers concentrated in the executive branch by previous presidents and courts. And if history is any guide, the only weapon that can stop a mad king is Congress’s power of the purse – a power that Democrats once effectively wielded, but today seem hesitant to brandish, even amid a wildly unpopular Iran incursion that some fear is a precursor to the second world war.

José Antonio Kast, who voted against legalising divorce in 2004, has pushed for return to total abortion ban

Women’s rights activists in Chile are bracing as the most conservative president since the Pinochet dictatorship prepares to take office on Wednesday.

José Antonio Kast, a 60-year-old ultra Catholic whose father was a member of the Nazi party, has consistently blocked progressive bids for women’s rights and equality across his three-decade career in politics.

Remember the iPod? How about the Pippin? In the half-century since it launched its first PC, Apple has given us some amazing innovations. We round up its biggest triumphs and flops

Fifty years after Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded the company in Jobs’ parents’ garage in Los Altos, California, Apple has become a behemoth, and billions of us use its products every day. From the first successful home computers with colour screens, to the iPod, to the smartphone that set the template for the modern mobile era, the company has repeatedly reset consumer expectations.

As a result, the firm occupies a central position in the tech world, initiating trends and popularising products. Here are five of its most influential products from the past half-century – alongside some unusually big misses.

‘Resistance is futile’, wrote one AI product manager for the Associated Press in internal messages to colleagues

No one wants a soulless sermon – that defeats the purpose – and Pope Leo XIV has taken steps to ensure that Roman Catholic priests don’t deliver one.

Artificial intelligence, the new pontiff said in a recent meeting with clergy, “will never be able to share faith”, which is what giving a homily is all about. Resist the temptation and write your own words, he urged.

A shocking new Apple series goes behind the yoga camps where women alleged criminal behaviour from a guru wanted for sexual exploitation charges

Practicing yoga has its benefits: the meditative calm, grounded-ness and balance. The devoted pursue transformative spiritual journeys, through poses, chants and breath work. Some followers of tantra yoga take things even further, using sensuality to channel their energy and reach beyond themselves, seeking out of body liberation and enlightenment.

But it’s that very pursuit that has also left hundreds vulnerable to alleged rape and trafficking.

More than 200 applicants fear they will lose places after home secretary suspends study visas from four countries

Sudanese scientists who have been promised research posts at leading UK universities have spoken of their “shock” and “sadness” that their hopes have been dashed after Shabana Mahmood’s decision to end study visas for people from their country.

More than 200 Sudanese postgraduates and undergraduates fear they will no longer be permitted to take up places at 46 universities, including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London, with some claiming that their lives have been torn apart by the home secretary’s “blunt” intervention.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s capering clash between a demented repressive regime and ragtag freedom fighters is both cartoonish and deadly serious – and perfectly tuned to its times

Viva la revolution and don’t forget your password, your pronouns, your plaid gown and your gun. One Battle After Another, from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, is the brawling rebel insider of this year’s Oscar race; a state-of-the-nation Hollywood spectacular that feels as disunited and unstable as the country it depicts. The film hates America and it loves it, too. It’s on the side of the angels even when it’s not quite sure who they are. It lights a candle to curse the darkness, and prays to God it hasn’t picked up a stick of dynamite by mistake.

“We have to stay out of politics,” Wim Wenders advised his fellow directors at last month’s Berlin film festival, and yet One Battle After Another is political to its fingertips, hard-wired to the here and now and perfectly anticipating the tenor of Donald Trump’s second term. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob, the one-time firebrand turned burnt-out stoner, who belatedly hauls himself off the couch when his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is captured. Freely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, the film updates the book’s jaundiced post-60s hangover for the ICE-age 2020s as the plot careens from the migrant detention camp to the sanctuary city to uncover a Christian Nationalist cell within the US federal government. The self-styled “Christmas Adventurers” are on a heaven-sent mission to make America great again. They say, “If you want to save the planet, you always start with immigration.”

Club’s former owner leads the polls in spiky mayoral race but is accused of putting forward ‘nothing of substance’

Karim Benzema doesn’t often involve himself in French politics. At the end of January, though, the striker gave a glowing endorsement of Jean-Michel Aulas, the former Lyon president who is leading the city’s mayoral race.

“He has everything it takes to do well,” Benzema said in a video played on the news channel LCI as Aulas was being interviewed. “He’s someone who people listen to, he knows where he wants to go and he has a lot of experience,” the former Real Madrid player added. The Lyon-born striker was later joined by Bafétimbi Gomis in showing support for their former boss.

Regulator fined the multimillionaire £1.8m and banned him from the financial services industry last year

Crispin Odey, the multimillionaire financier fighting various lawsuits relating to allegations of sexual misconduct, is to launch a case against the financial services regulator over his exile from the City.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) fined Odey £1.8m and banned him from the financial services industry last year.

If anyone can convince politicians and public of the need to pay for a national care service, it’s Louise Casey. With her involved, I now have hope

No government in my lifetime has been dealt a worse hand than Keir Starmer’s. Austerity-broken public services, an empty Treasury, a jittery bond market freaked out by Liz Truss and then stricken by the arrival of Trump 2.0 with his bully-tariffs. Now Britain’s ally is setting the Middle East on fire in a murderous war, exploding oil and gas prices. This needs repeating regularly, lest anyone forgets the obstacles blocking this government’s best intentions for change.

One of those good intentions in the Labour manifesto was the creation of a national care service. Louise Casey, respected troubleshooter, was given a commission to review adult social care and solve its impossible dilemmas. She showed her thinking in a blistering speech last week.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink? On Thursday 30 April, ahead of May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss the threat to Labour from the Greens and Reform – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

It’s been a troubling season at Tottenham and while there is a slim chance it will end in glory, ignominy is looking more likely

How do you solve a problem such as Tottenham Hotspur? They’re the ninth-richest club in the world, who pride themselves on a thrilling style of play – “To dare is to do” – and have been blessed through the years with a pantheon of household names: Blanchflower, Hoddle, Ardíles, Gascoigne, Bale, Kane, Son. Last August they were seconds from beating Paris Saint-Germain to win the Uefa Super Cup, which would have made them – tenuously – the best team in Europe. Seven months later they’ve wilted into a shell-shocked laughing stock careering towards the Championship. They’re the club that launched a thousand memes.

In this most Spursy of seasons, hiring Mr Fixit Igor Tudor as interim manager looks like being the biggest misstep yet. The Croatian hard man has taken a squad who needed an arm round the shoulder and stuck them in a vice-like headlock. He has openly suggested there’s only three things wrong with them: they can’t run, they can’t score and they can’t defend. You could count the number of fans who backed his appointment on the fingers of Captain Hook’s bad hand, and if three crushing defeats are anything to go by, his shock treatment is going down like a cup of cold West Ham lasagne. Is there any way out?

Logical situation of losing to get a better pick has led to big fines but June’s superstar draft created a ‘perfect storm’

Imagine you are the director of football at a crisis-stricken Premier League club in a world where relegation doesn’t exist and the planet’s best teenagers become available for free in a draft every June.

In this alternate universe, you are also aware of something else: the 2026 Premier League draft is one for the ages. Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsí are in it. So are Bayern Munich’s Lennart Karl and Real Madrid’s Franco Mastantuono. Sign one of them and the glory days will suddenly beckon again.

• Protesters try to block bus carrying players at hotel

• Advocates working to inform players of their rights

The Iranian women’s football team left their hotel and arrived at Gold Coast airport on Tuesday afternoon, appearing to have just hours left to take up Australia’s offer of asylum before they depart the country.

Five players, led by captain Zahra Ghanbari, were formally granted protection in Australia by home affairs minister Tony Burke early on Tuesday morning. The group has already been given an offer to train with A-League Women club Brisbane Roar.

After oil prices surged on Monday the US president sought – and failed – to offer a clear vision for when the largest US intervention in the Middle East in years will end

• Middle East crisis – live updates

At one of the most consequential moments of his two terms in office, wartime president Donald Trump on Monday delivered a vague and contradictory forecast for how long the United States will continue to fight in Iran and what the ultimate goal of the US military campaign there will be.

With oil hovering above $100 a barrel for much of Monday and Middle Eastern allies fearing a further tumble into regional conflict, Trump appeared in Doral, Florida with the mission of calming global markets and reassuring skittish allies that he has a clear vision for how to end the largest US intervention in the Middle East since the Iraq war.

Experts argue sensor and satellite data reveal targeted attacks on farming communities by the Rapid Support Forces were intended to prevent villages producing food

There is strong evidence that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed a war crime by depriving the villagers of north Darfur of the means to produce food, legal experts argue in a new analysis published today calling for the Humanitarian Research Lab’s (HRL) revelations to be used in international courts.

The destruction of the villages, farming equipment and infrastructure all provide strong evidence of a “starvation strategy” against a population already struggling with food insecurity because of the war, says Tom Dannenbaum, a professor at Stanford Law School and a leading expert on the use of starvation in war.

An exhibition of rare photographs by the Italian photographer highlights the abstraction and poetry of his lesser-known works

This sappy and ill-conceived tale about a father, his autistic son and a lifesize toy bear suffers from sanctimonious religious messaging and dreadful dialogue

Anyone with autism or close to someone with the condition might feel inclined to be forbearing of this family drama about a father and his autistic son, given its plea for acceptance and love. But yikes – it is so sappy, ill-conceived and bloated with sanctimonious religious messaging, it is a slog to get through. If, however, you feel that watching it is almost an act of charity in itself (apparently some of the proceeds will go toward supporting carers), admire this at least for being one of the few feature films that tries to depict more challenged autistic people who need support (also known by the now-contested label of “low functioning”). Also to its credit, the film opens with a disclaimer that acknowledges that “the autism spectrum is wide and varied” and that “this film reflects the individual experiences of two characters and is not intended to represent every autistic story”.

The main character here is Elijah (played as a child by Reece Turley and then as an adult by Caleb Milby), a young man first met just after a violent meltdown that has ravaged the family’s Christmas decorations. Elijah’s father Ty (John Wells) attempts to comfort the distraught teen, with help from Elijah’s favourite stuffed toy, polar bear Nook. Flashforward seven years, and Elijah is now in some kind of secure hospital, barely distinguishable from a jail, partly because his mother Pam (Layla Cushman), divorced from Ty, just wants to offload him on the state and wash her hands of him while Ty struggles to maintain his career as an architect.

From jazz in Rotterdam and hip-hop in Paris to brass bands on the beach in Blackpool, the Guardian’s music editor chooses the best European festivals that can be reached by rail

Paris has some great festivals, such as Cercle (22-24 May), with dance music stars against the backdrop of planes and rockets in an outdoor aerospace museum, but the most accessible and democratic is Fête de la musique, which began in Paris in 1982 but is now popular across the country. It is a loose event encompassing dozens of free, semi-impromptu outdoor performances all over each host city, including plenty in Lille, which is even cheaper and quicker to get to than Paris on the Eurostar from London.

Both campaigns have been framed differently at different times, with dubious claims of defensive action and a curious reluctance to label it war

Shifting goals, unclear timelines and a flimsy pretext: at times, the US-Israel campaign against Iran carries curious parallels of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The comparison is far from exact. In 2022, Putin sent a massive army across Ukraine’s borders in an unprovoked invasion of a democratic state, a campaign that quickly resulted in heavy losses. The United States has so far largely limited its involvement to airstrikes against Iran’s authoritarian regime.

I can’t get enough of cabbage right now, and it’s the perfect wrap for this warmly spiced picadillo filling

I love stuffed vegetables. When I was young, I came across a recipe for stuffed aubergines in an old book of my mother’s and must have cooked it a score of times. Later, in the early 1990s and to the echoes of nouvelle cuisine, Delia Smith showed us how we could work similar magic with peppers and tomatoes. Then the technique went deeply out of fashion, but I stayed loyal, and continued quietly stuffing tomatoes, pumpkins and courgettes, all no doubt influenced by my travels in Mexico. Thoday’s stuffed cabbage is inspired by the most delicious tongue in a tantalisingly light escabeche that I once had at Nicos in Mexico City, and also because I can’t get enough of cabbage at the moment.

Calls for a popular uprising and empty promises of help are reckless in the extreme – and no answer to my country’s plight

• Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran

I have been watching the news from inside Iran, unable to hold in my sorrow. As an Iranian who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime, I have been pleading with the world’s human rights organisations and media to keep a focus on the country’s plight. But now I see US-Israeli bombs falling on Iran, and some Iranians celebrating this war while innocent people die. My heart is breaking for my country.

Let us be clear: when Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conspired to launch their war, it was not out of a desire to free the Iranian people from the tyranny of the regime. Netanyahu said on the second day of the war: “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He has named this operation “Lion’s Roar”. Meanwhile, Iranian monarchists celebrate the carnage, waving the shah’s version of the country’s flag with its crowned lion and sun.

Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran. Her books include A Prison Memoir: One Woman’s Struggle in Iran, and the novel The Secret Letters from X to A

Trump has blamed Iran for the mass killing at Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school but geolocation, videos and satellite imagery indicate otherwise

The bombing of a primary school in Minab on 28 February killed scores of people, most of them seven- to 12-year-old girls. The strike is the worst mass killing of the US and Israel’s war on Iran so far – and has been described by Unesco as a “grave violation” of international law.

On Saturday, the US president, Donald Trump, declared that Iran was responsible for the school bombing. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran … they’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

About 10,000 writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman join copyright campaign

Thousands of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman have published an “empty” book to protest against AI firms using their work without permission.

About 10,000 writers have contributed to Don’t Steal This Book, in which the only content is a list of their names. Copies of the work are being distributed to attenders at the London book fair on Tuesday, a week before the UK government is due to issue an assessment on the economic cost of proposed changes in copyright law.

To some it was a reckless experiment but scientists hope the dispersal of 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine could ease the climate crisis

For four days last August, a thick slick of maroon bruised the waters of the Gulf of Maine. The scene, not unlike a toxic red tide, was the result of 65,000 litres of an alkaline chemical, tagged with a red dye, that had been deliberately pumped by scientists into the ocean.

Though it sounds perverse, the event was part of a scientific experiment that could advance a technology to combat both global heating and ocean acidification. Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), as the approach is called, acts like natural weathering, but on human – rather than geological – timescales.