Economists say chancellor could be forced to raise taxes or announce deeper spending cuts later this year; investors cheered by hopes of US-China trade deal

• UK annual borrowing exceeds forecasts by almost £15bn

Here’s our full story on the rise in UK government borrowing, which means the chancellor could be forced to raise taxes or announce deeper spending cuts later this year.

Britain entered the economic shock from Donald Trump’s trade wars with government borrowing having overshot official forecasts by almost £15bn in the most recent financial year.

Move follows news that US secretary of state would not attend

The peace talks, scheduled to take place in London today and to have been hosted by British foreign secretary David Lammy, have been downgraded to official talks, and closed to the media.

In a statement, the UK’s Foreign Office said “the Ukraine peace talks meeting with foreign ministers today is being postponed. Official level talks will continue but these are closed to media.”

Francis will lie in state for three days to allow Catholic faithful to pay their final respects

The coffin makes it way through the Vatican towards St Peter’s Basilica, accompanied by the choir’s singing, starting with Psalm 22.

You can follow the ceremony live watching the stream at the top of the blog.

No music, no script, no narration, no editing – slow TV like this is exactly the balm we need these days

Do you reach for your phone first thing in the morning as soon as you wake up? Me too. Only, for the past week, it’s not my WhatsApp, email or social media I’ve been desperate to check, but how many moose have managed to swim across the Ångerman river overnight.

I know. I need more going on in my life, right? How else to explain my fascination with watching dozens of Swedish moose (yes, moose is the plural of moose, sadly not “meese”) undertake their annual spring migration to summer pastures?

Chris Davies’s dominant side have secured League One promotion but the club hope that is just the start

On day one in the job, as Chris Davies surveyed St Andrew’s for the first time last summer, the Birmingham City manager was struck by a damning statistic courtesy of the club historian, Malcolm McHenry: no league side had lost more matches across the previous five seasons. Birmingham were relegated to League One a month earlier after circling the drain for a while. “When you hear something like that, it’s powerful because you think: ‘Wow, there are 92 teams,’” Davies says. “Everyone has suffered so much … I suppose I saw an opportunity to change that and this season we’ve won more games than any other team in the country.”

Talk about a turnaround. Birmingham, runaway champions, have returned to the Championship at the first attempt and it is now 30 league wins and counting. Only Leeds have scored more goals than Birmingham this season across the top four tiers and only Arsenal, Leeds and Burnley have conceded fewer goals. “I walked into a club that was feeling down,” Davies says. “People were depressed and everybody was looking out for themselves. There was a real concern around the place but underlying that there was an optimism that there could be a reset.”

Plus: footballers who put parenting first, title playoffs in Italy, and relegated Golden Boot winners

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“Arne Slot is going to win the Premier League in his first season after taking over from Jürgen Klopp,” writes Hannah Mitchell. “What examples are there of managers who have had instant success after succeeding a legendary manager?”

It’s not unusual for a new Liverpool manager to win the league in their first season. Matt McQueen (1922-23), Joe Fagan (1983-84) and Kenny Dalglish (1985-86) all did so, – but they were established figures at the club, whether in the boardroom, the boot room or the dressing-room. Arne Slot was new to English football, never mind Liverpool, and was succeeding one of the most charismatic figures in the club’s history. In that context, winning the Premier League with (potentially) four or five games remaining is a remarkable achievement.

Spring into action with new season asparagus in a punchy hazelnut dressing, and a quickfire cheesy gratin with white beans and vegetables

Coming as I do from a family with a colourful array of dietary requirements, I can verify that these veg-forward dishes seriously perform on both the texture and flavour fronts, as well as being achievable crowdpleasers. British asparagus swoops in around now, offering bright green relief from winter’s hardier vegetables, while the jarred and frozen veg in the gratin save on prep time and keep everything light.

Philadelphia’s Speling Reform Asoshiashun wasn’t the only group to demand a simpler way of putting things in print

You may be familiar with the ghoti, the shiny animal with fins that lives in the water; perhaps you even have your own ghoti tank. Ghotis evolved long ago, but they didn’t get their name until the 19th century, when jokesters noted that, thanks to the weirdness of English spelling, the word “fish” might be written with a “gh”, as in “rough”, an “o”, as in “women”, and a “ti”, as in “lotion”.

The idea of the ghoti is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it. He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries. From “through” to “though” and “trough”, whether you’re a child or learning English as a second language, getting the spelling right is a nightmare. Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways.

Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s timely documentary tells the story of the courageous women whose cases of sexual assault and rape have gone unheard by the US judicial system

In 2018, a historic lawsuit was brought against the US city of Austin, Travis County, the Austin Police Department, and the Travis County District Attorney’s Office. The plaintiffs were survivors of sexual assault, whose cases had gone unheard by the judicial system. Gripping and timely, Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s riveting documentary follows these courageous women as they fight for justice.

The film lays bare the shocking details concerning how sex crimes were treated in the county. In one year, between July 2016 and June 2017, of more than 220 cases presented for prosecution, only one went to trial – and the victim in this instance was male. Testimony from the survivors reveal the harrowing extent to which officials turned a blind eye; even with scientific evidence such as DNA matches, the majority of criminal filings were dismissed, denying these women due process in front of a jury.

Experts call for redesign of financial services and improved Centrelink processes to protect older Australians from fraud

• Get our afternoon election email, free app or daily news podcast

The fraud began when Ray Baird, then 65, asked his son Peter for help dealing with the bank. In the years that followed, Peter gained access to his dad’s bank accounts, diverted Ray’s aged pension to his own bank account and ran up debts in his father’s name that led to two caveats being put on Ray’s home.

By the time the fraud was uncovered and Ray, then 74, began to untangle the lies his son had spun, Peter had taken more than $230,000 from him, including seven years of pension totalling $152,423.33.

Idyllic scenery is just part of the appeal of a break that is also about sustainability, meeting locals and maintaining paths

Armed with gloves and pruners, my friend and I are near Pythara waterfall above Chora – the capital of the Greek island of Andros – and we are cutting back thorny and overhanging vegetation. We’re helping out the local volunteer association, Andros Routes, which has been restoring a network of ancient mule tracks, from the coast to the interior and its low mountains. The tracks form part of a new walking holiday that allows us to explore the pretty island on foot – and give something back, too.

The eight-day trip with Ramble Worldwide takes you from the south-east to the north-west, from Ormos Korthiou to Gavrio, via Chora on the east coast, with accommodation in low-key hotels and luggage transfer between them. Daily routes are only suggested: guests can choose full-on trekking days or easy circular walks, customising the holiday to suit energy levels and using buses or taxis to skip sections if desired. Along the way you can choose to help with the maintenance of the paths (secateurs and gloves are delivered to your hotel).

The theme of this year’s celebrated photo bonanza is ‘humanity’ – and Kyoto is bursting with images – from family albums with a twist, to naked men in a frenzied battle for fortune

Towering above commuters and passersby at Kyoto station is a monumental mural featuring more than 500 portraits of local residents. This striking installation by acclaimed French photographer JR heralds the opening of Kyotographie 2025, the city’s celebrated month-long international photography festival.

The theme for this year’s event is “humanity”. Last autumn, JR and his team transformed Kyoto into a living studio, setting up mobile portrait stations across the city to capture the rich diversity of Kyōto-jin society. Monks, artisans, politicians, schoolchildren and drag queens – all life is here.

Shooting the Chronicles of Kyoto – each person is photographed against a greenscreen backdrop

‘Chemical fingerprint’ shows 46% of wood samples certified as sustainable did not come from labelled country of origin

Nearly half of birch wood certified by leading sustainability schemes is misidentified and does not come from the labelled country of origin, according to new testing. The analysis raises fears that large quantities of sanctioned wood from Russia and Belarus are still illegally entering Britain.

New research by World Forest ID, a consortium of research organisations that includes Kew Gardens and the World Resources Institute, scrutinised the accuracy of dozens of harvesting-origin claims on birch products, which had almost entirely been approved by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) sustainability schemes.

While women in their 50s are dismissed as hags, bags or crones, men get to be silver foxes. Suddenly I realised why women try so hard to fend off signs of ageing

A grey pube. There was no denying it. If I hadn’t been contorted into what felt like an advanced yoga position trying to do up fiddly press studs on the crotch of the teddy I was wearing to a party, I would never have seen it. The party was for a novel I had written titled How to Kill Your Husband, and the theme was “dress to kill”. I had planned on wearing stockings, a miniskirt, a garter belt with dagger, and the ridiculous teddy undergarment that you clearly needed an engineering degree to operate. But how could I dress to thrill when I knew what was lurking beneath?

I immediately checked in with girlfriends. Had any of them discovered a grey pubic hair? Yes, yes, they had. What’s more, having hit my 50s, there was apparently much more I had to worry about. I would soon need to spend my life savings getting rid of stretchmarks, cellulite, chin sags, eye bags, neck wrinkles, crepey cleavage, pelvic floor lethargy, dry vagina, muffin top and menopausal weight gain; apparently, hormonal changes meant that I would soon resemble one of those giant jellyfish in a Jacques Cousteau documentary, floating about like a flesh balloon.

Residents in the city’s south despair amid swarm of putrid-smelling arthropods that mate inside building

At a visitor centre on the south coast of New Zealand’s capital, the blustery, briny wind is no match for the smell of thousands of decaying millipedes, which reek like decomposing vermin and rotting fish.

Along the streets of Wellington’s Ōwhiro Bay, dead curled up millipedes are piled up on the footpath, as live ones march along the street. One resident says her neighbours collected five rubbish bags worth of the creatures in a week from around their home.

Labour must deliver the green transition voters want, leaving Reform and the Tories on the side of economic decline and dictators

Which former British prime minister described the climate emergency as “a clock ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines … quilting the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO₂”?

The florid style gives it away. You’d guess Boris Johnson even if you’d forgotten that the master of Brexit bombast also had a sideline in net zero evangelism. It wasn’t the most memorable part of his repertoire and it didn’t catch on as a Conservative catechism.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

• City manager turns focus to FA Cup after vital victory
• Guardiola praises stand-in full-backs Nunes and O’Reilly

Pep Guardiola said he was “really happy” after Matheus Nunes’s winner in added time gave Manchester City a crucial win against Aston Villa in the race for Champions League qualification.

Victory lifts the champions to third place on 61 points, four ahead of Chelsea in sixth, with four games left. A top-five finish will secure European Cup football.

• Olmo scores winner early in second half against Mallorca
• PSG held 1-1 by Nantes but retain unbeaten run

Barcelona’s Dani Olmo scored inside the first minute of the second half to earn a hard-fought 1-0 home win against Mallorca, extending their lead in La Liga over Real Madrid at the top of the table to seven points with five games to go.

Barça dominated proceedings despite their coach, Hansi Flick, deciding to rest several key starters ahead of Saturday’s Copa del Rey final against rivals Real, but the Mallorca goalkeeper Leo Román put on a show between the posts to keep them at bay.

World body says ‘sharp repricing of risks’ possible amid growing concern over role of ‘nonbank’ lenders

• IMF warns of ‘major negative shock’ from Trump’s tariffs
• Editorial: Donald Trump could cost the world $1tn

The global financial system is coming under increasing strain as Donald Trump’s trade war rocks markets, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

“Global financial stability risks have increased significantly,” the IMF said in its regular snapshot of the system, urging regulators to be on the alert for potential crises.

He put Carmen in a gorilla suit and had Das Rheingold’s Erda represented by an 82-year-old naked woman. What are the the director’s plans for his edge-of-the-seat Die Walküre?

From the Muppet Show to Kafka, Yiddish theatre to Vivaldi, pop music to Wagner – Barrie Kosky’s enthusiasms ricochet at a speed that leaves you dizzy as well as, in their rampant variety, a touch envious. This 58-year-old Australian theatre and opera director sees all art, all life, as one. His love of clowns, cabaret and musicals is as intense as his passion for theatre and grand opera. “Whether it touches the soul is all that matters,” he says, his loquacious personality expanding into a small side office at the Royal Opera House in London before a rehearsal. His new staging of Die Walküre, the second opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, openson 1 May .

Kosky was born in Melbourne but has been based in Berlin for the past 20 years, where he was artistic director of the Komische Oper and still has an association there. He is funny, clever, outrageous but above all serious. His productions may shock, though that is never his intention. Dressing his Carmen up in a gorilla suit for a production that now has cult status in Frankfurt and Copenhagen – but did not catch light with audiences in London – was part of a studied aesthetic: the heroine living her brief life through a set of extreme roles. In his Das Rheingold, the first part of the Ring which opened in 2023, he caused upset in some quarters by having Erda – mother Earth – represented by a naked 82-year-old woman.

Comedy spacecraft thefts, passive-aggressive in-laws and a planet being fracked to death – the revolution just got playful, comrades!

Comrades! Welcome back to the revolution. Andor is the Star Wars TV show with the sharpest political acumen: yes, like everything in the franchise, it’s about an underdog rebel movement fighting against a totalitarian empire in space, and it has plenty of thrilling battle sequences, but here there are no Jedi mind powers or cute green backwards-talking psychics. Under the hard-nosed stewardship of writer Tony Gilroy, Andor bins the magic and myth and replaces it with the reality of anti-fascist struggle, where the good guys are ready to risk their lives for freedom. It’s the Star Wars spin-off with the strongest claim to being a proper drama – but, in season two’s opening triple bill, it shows it can do sly, wry comedy too.

We’re a year on from where we left off, which is four years before the Death Star blows up at the end of the original movie – the point at which all the work done by our hero, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), pays off. We pick him up in an imperial military facility, where he’s posing as a test pilot for a spacecraft he intends to nick. There’s a classic Andor moment where Cassian meets the rebellion’s woman on the inside, a junior technician who has gathered her courage to make her contribution, and knows the rage of her superiors will be directed at her once Cassian has flown off. “If I die tonight, was it worth it?” she asks him, and gets a rousing speech in response, urgently whispered.

An ashen pallor and an eerie stillness all that remains where there should fluttering fish and vibrant colours in the reefscape, one conservationist says

The world’s coral reefs have been pushed into “uncharted territory” by the worst global bleaching event on record that has now hit more than 80% of the planet’s reefs, scientists have warned.

Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch shows.

Experimental kamikaze FPV drones have been developed that can penetrate spaces previously thought safe

On the battlefields of Ukraine, new sights emerge. Thread-like filaments of wire, extended across open fields. Netting rigged up between trees along key supply roads. Both are responses to a hard-to-detect weapon able to sneak into spaces previously thought safe, hi tech and low tech all at once.

At a secret workshop in Ukraine’s north-east, where about 20 people assemble hundreds of FPV (first person view) drones, there is a new design. Under the frame of the familiar quadcopter is a cylinder, the size of a forearm. Coiled up inside is fibre optic cable, 10km (6 miles) or even 20km long, to create a wired kamikaze drone.

We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2021: As the fighters advanced on Kabul, it was civilians who mobilised to help with the evacuation. In the absence of a plan, the hardest decisions fell on inexperienced volunteers, and the stress began to tell

By Zarlasht Halaimzai. Read by Serena Manteghi

Ocean-inspired artworks created using kelp-based pigment will be sold to raise funds for conservation

Last year in early summer, Alex Glasgow could be seen hauling up a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm, located off the west coast of Scotland near Skye. Growing on the farm was what Glasgow described as “perhaps the quickest-growing biomass on the planet”: seaweed.

The weed from Glasgow’s farm, KelpCrofters, is used in everything from soil fertiliser to artisanal soaps to glass-making and is part of a burgeoning industry – not just in Scotland, but around the world.

My adopted home has been a dark place of late. But in last week’s local elections, voters turned against cruel politics – and raised hopes of a more progressive future

The Finns say “spring comes in swinging” – when winter gives way to spring, and green shoots meet the final flurries of snow, often well into April. In Finnish politics, too, some hope is beginning to emerge after a long, dark winter.

In municipal, regional and mayoral elections held across the country last week, rightwing populist parties were roundly defeated, while parties on the left gained ground. In particular, the far-right Finns party saw its vote share collapse, from 20% in the general election of 2023 to as low as 7.6% now. This leaves the coalition government of which it forms a part severely weakened and the centre-left Social Democratic party (SDP) with the biggest vote share nationwide (23%). When the Finns party leader, Riikka Purra, admitted defeat on results night, she complained that a punainen aalto, a “red wave”, had swept the country.

Professor says text shows Hathaway lived with playwright in London, upending the established idea of an unhappy marriage

It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than happy. He moved to London to pursue his theatrical career, leaving her in Stratford-upon-Avon and stipulating in his will that she would receive his “second best bed”, although still a valued item.

Now a leading Shakespeare expert has analysed a fragment of a 17th-century letter that appears to cast dramatic new light on their relationship, overturning the idea that the couple never lived together in London.

Dozens of miniature horses and their human running mates have taken part in the Great Northern Gallop, an adventure race through dense forests and across rugged beaches in New Zealand’s Far North. Participants run or walk 100km over four days for the event, which raises money for the welfare of miniature horses

A ruling on equality law has caused relief, fear – and confusion. Libby Brooks reports

On paper it does not sound like something that would spark nationwide interest. Last week the UK supreme court gave its judgment on a case brought by a women’s group against the Scottish government over the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018.

But its judgment – that the word “woman” in equality law refers only to biological sex – has upended years of legal interpretation. And the news of the ruling led to celebrations, protest and an outpouring of emotion.

Ex-advertising executive, who hosted a Fox News show and has criticised Kamala Harris, will stand as a Republican

David Cameron’s former top adviser Steve Hilton has joined the 2026 race for California governor, running as a Republican to replace the Democrats’ Gavin Newsom, who is prevented by law from seeking a third term.

Hilton, who hosted a show on Fox News for six years, launched his campaign with the theme “Golden Again: Great Jobs, Great Homes, Great Kids”. His campaign said Hilton would be “reinforcing his commitment to positive, practical solutions instead of today’s ideology and dogma”, and that his brand of “positive populism” would focus on helping working families.

Delegation visits jails where Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk are being held and denounce ‘authoritarian’ Trump

Congressional lawmakers denounced the treatment of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, the students being detained by US immigration authorities for their pro-Palestinian activism, as a “national disgrace” during a visit to the two facilities in Louisiana where each are being held.

“We stand firm with them in support of free speech,” the Louisiana congressman Troy Carter, who led the delegation, said during a press conference after the visits on Tuesday. “They are frightened, they’re concerned, they want to go home.”

Internet Watch Foundation report shows 380% increase in illegal AI-generated imagery in 2024, most of it ‘category A’

Images of child sexual abuse created by artificial intelligence are becoming “significantly more realistic”, according to an online safety watchdog.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said advances in AI are being reflected in illegal content created and consumed by paedophiles, saying: “In 2024, the quality of AI-generated videos improved exponentially, and all types of AI imagery assessed appeared significantly more realistic as the technology developed.”

US president says tariffs on imported goods will come down from 145% rate but insists ‘we’re doing fine with China’

Donald Trump said during a White House news conference that high tariffs on goods from China will “come down substantially, but it won’t be zero”.

Trump’s remarks were in response to earlier comments on Tuesday by treasury secretary Scott Bessent, who said that the high tariffs were unsustainable and that he expects a “de-escalation” in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

CEO to pare back White House work to one to two days weekly as analysts say role has caused branding crisis

The Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, said he will start pulling back from his role at the so-called “department of government efficiency” starting in May. Musk’s remarks came as the company reported a massive dip in both profits and revenues in the first quarter of 2025 amid backlash against his role in the White House.

On an investor call, Musk said the work necessary to get the government’s “financial house in order is mostly done”.

• ‘When players are fit and available, they have to play’
• Liverpool to be league winners if Arsenal lose to Palace

Mikel Arteta will not shy away from selecting key Arsenal personnel to face Crystal Palace on Wednesday in their final game before next week’s Champions League semi-final first leg even though his team are playing for little beyond pride.

The meagre prize on offer is delaying Liverpool’s title celebrations but the manager denied he could wrap members of his squad in cotton wool. “We cannot think in those terms,” Arteta said. “I think when the players are fit and they are available and they want to play, they have to play. They are at their best when they are playing and they have consistency in their performances.”

The comic’s love for his home town leads him on this charming and wacky odyssey to find ‘his people’ across the pond. Brummies of the world unite!

Joe Lycett is on a mission to visit every one of the 17 Birminghams in the US and the one in Canada too. Why? Because he is a native of the UK’s own Birmingham, and he wants to see if there is any shared identifiable vibe and to foster a sense of togetherness among the scattered Brummies. Also, as he says, he has a pressing need to make a travelogue for Sky “and if anyone can do it, it’s Frank Sk– … it’s me”. There is also a Birmingham on the moon (a remnant of an impact crater – save your jokes, please, that’s Joe’s department) and one in Belgium. But “we don’t have a lunar budget and I’m not going to Belgium,” says Lycett, so off he sets round the US in a tour bus suitably decked out in Cat Deeley and Alison Hammond scatter cushions. They both hail from Birmingham in the UK. This is not difficult, people. Do try to keep up.

Joe has a sheaf of “friendship agreements” for the Birmingham mayors to sign – including a promise to stand together in Nato’s stead should it fall – a pen once used by the Queen Mother with which to do so, a collection of commemorative plaques and some Birmingham-centred presents to give to the people he meets along the way. There is Cadbury’s chocolate, of course, originally manufactured by one of the Quaker families whose histories are centred round the city; Bird’s custard (“sugar and asbestos”) invented by Brummie chemist Alfred Bird in 1837; HP Sauce (born of Nottingham but made famous under the aegis of the Midland Vinegar Company); and some of the 723 novels by “the David Walliams of her day”, Dame Barbara Cartland, originally of Edgbaston. Not all of these facts are in the programme, by the way. Joe’s enthusiastic spirit and evident love for his home town inspired me to go digging. He has that effect on you. And indeed on his driver, the North Carolinian Randy who, once he has figured out what little there is to figure out – and, indeed, that there is that little to figure out – relaxes and gets into the swing of things and functions as the perfect foil for his passenger.

• Serie A leaders Inter will now host Roma on Sunday
• Italy v Wales in Women’s Six Nations to be rescheduled

Serie A has postponed its three fixtures on Saturday because of Pope Francis’s funeral being held that day in Rome. Meanwhile, Italy’s Women’s Six Nations match against Wales is also expected to be rescheduled as the country prepares to pay its respects.

Earlier media reports in Italy had suggested that Serie A might make an exception for Inter’s clash with the visitors Roma to allow Simone Inzaghi’s side additional rest time before their midweek Champions League semi-final at Barcelona. However, the league has confirmed that the game at San Siro will now kick off at 2pm (all times BST) on Sunday.

Jury finds newspaper not liable for allegedly defaming former Alaska governor in 2017 editorial about gun control

Sarah Palin on Tuesday lost in the retrial of her defamation case against the New York Times – a second defeat in the efforts by the former Republican vice-presidential candidate.

A federal jury in New York deliberated for two hours then found the newspaper not liable for allegedly defaming Palin in a 2017 editorial about gun control. Palin appeared dejected as she left the courthouse in Manhattan.

Process yielded seven-woman, five-man jury, more females than the group that convicted media mogul five years ago

Opening statements are set for Wednesday in the former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s rape retrial, this time with a majority-female jury deciding the landmark #MeToo case.

After a days-long selection process yielded a seven-woman, five-man jury and five alternate jurors by Monday, prosecutors and Weinstein’s lawyers finished choosing a sixth and final alternate on Tuesday. Alternates step in if a member of the main panel can’t see the trial through.

Ex-congressman writes letter in bid for leniency and says seven-year sentence sought by prosecutors is too harsh

The disgraced former congressman George Santos is defending his recent social media remarks to a federal judge who will sentence him this week on several fraud charges.

In a letter before his Friday court appearance in New York, Santos, 36, said he was “profoundly sorry” for his crimes but believed a seven-year prison sentence was too harsh, AP reported.