As pressure builds over the president’s broken promise to publicly release details about the convicted sex offender, his base has a new target: Trump himself
“I feel so betrayed and so angry. This is not what I voted for.” “This cemented permanent deep state power.” “I’m concerned about being able to trust Donald Trump to keep his word.” “What about justice for these young ladies who were trafficked? What about their justice? Don’t they deserve justice?”
These were just a few of the calls that besieged conservative radio hosts across the US this week. The president’s ardent supporters spent the past decade fulminating over various foes, from Barack Obama and the deep state to undocumented immigrants and transgender children. Now they have a new target: Donald Trump himself.
Gulim in Kazakhstan keeps her very first one as a souvenir while Coco in Thailand breaks the law by having them, and Serena in Italy says they’re essential. But there’s still a stigma when it comes to talking about sex toys. That’s why Gabriele Galimberti’s images are so powerful, writes author and academic Roxane Gay (Warning: explicit content)
Most of us are taught to keep our sexual lives private. We’re taught to hide our desires, and all too often, to be ashamed of them. Cultural instruction about sex tends to be very prescriptive. Sex happens in our bedrooms, behind closed doors, between a man and a woman. Sex is for procreation rather than pleasure. Sex is for marriage. Sex should only happen when you fall in love. If you’re a woman, you should only have one sexual partner for the whole of your life. If you’re a man, the sky’s the limit.
Certainly, some of these mores have shifted over time, relaxed a bit. But mostly, we’re supposed to keep our sex lives to ourselves. And certainly, we aren’t supposed to partake of anything that would strain the strictures of “good taste”, like say, pornography or sex toys.
Starmer’s successful ‘reset’ with Europe highlights an underlying incoherence. The only rational long-term strategy is to rejoin the EU, but our politics is far removed from that
Like a chronic ailment, strategic incoherence gnaws at everything Britain does in the world. Keir Starmer’s real achievement in resetting relations with mainland Europe – witness the recent visits of the French president Emmanuel Macron and the German chancellor Friedrich Merz – does not obscure, and in a way even highlights, this deeper confusion.
After 1945, Winston Churchill envisioned Britain’s global role at the intersection of three circles: the British Commonwealth and (then still) empire; the Europe whose postwar recovery and unification he strongly supported; and the United States. As Commonwealth countries have formed stronger ties elsewhere, the first circle is no longer of strategic significance. Having committed itself in the 1970s to the most developed political and economic form of the second circle, now the European Union, Britain has withdrawn from it. With the revolutionary nationalism of President Donald Trump, the third circle is also fading fast. So here’s an 80-year countdown of Britain’s strategic circles: three … two … one, going on none.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
I spend all afternoon watching the dog. Then an email pings and I turn to read it. When I turn back, the dog is gone and there’s a new hole in the lawn
Shortly after its first birthday, the new dog suddenly starts digging giant holes in the lawn. I don’t know why I imagined a year would be a cut-off point for a dog developing new unwanted behaviours. Why shouldn’t an adult dog find a hobby?
Anyway, these giant holes represent one of the key challenges of canine training: encouragement is easy; discouragement is hard. It’s easy to teach a dog that peeing outside is good. It takes a lot longer to teach it that peeing inside is bad.
These cooled noodles in a salty-sour sweetcorn sauce are the perfect salad stand-in for hot summer days
In 2003, I had my firstsom tam salad in Bangkok’s searing 30-degree heat. It was crunchy and packed to the rafters with flavour, but, more importantly, it was cold. Until then, I’d been eating hot food in hot weather, but ever since I’ve been chasing that perfect cold summer meal. These cold hiyashi ramen come close for me. They’re ludicrously versatile (think salad plus sauce plus noodles), and the only “cooking” to be done is boiling the noodles; the rest is chopping, blending (the sauce) and assembling. It is truly summertime where the living is easy.
Four people have died and two are missing after four days of heavy rain as authorities warn of landslides and flooding
Torrential rains that lashed South Korea for a fourth day on Saturday kept nearly 3,000 people from returning to their homes, as the death toll reached four people.
Rain is forecast to last until Monday in some areas, as officials urged extreme caution against the risk of landslides and flooding, with warnings issued across most of the country.
Withdrawal of USAID funds threatens decades of progress, say experts, with cuts to research and shortage of mosquito nets putting thousands at risk across the country
Zimbabwe’s efforts to control malaria have been dealt a huge blow as experts say the disease has returned “with a vengeance” after US aid cuts, with 115 outbreaks recorded in 2025 compared with only one last year.
The sharp rise in cases comes six months after Donald Trump halted critical funding for US research and national response programmes.
Karam al-Ghussain, 9, and Lulu, 10, were fetching water from a nearby distribution station when an Israeli strike hit it, and them
In Gaza, being a helpful, loving child can be a death sentence. Heba al-Ghussain’s nine-year-old son, Karam, was killed by an Israeli airstrike because he went to fetch water for the family, and her 10-year-old daughter, Lulu, was killed because she went to give Karam a hand.
The siblings were waiting beside a water distribution station, holding jerry cans and buckets, when it was bombed last Sunday, killing six children and four adults and injuring 19 others, mostly children.
Abortion is criminalised and stigmatised – and now the right has found a new female scapegoat in its US-style war on bodily autonomy
Every nation has literary classics that shape its cultural identity. Germans have Faust, Goethe’s play about the successful but dissatisfied scientist Dr Heinrich Faust, who makes a deal with the devil. Faust has been performed, referenced and read in schools for more than two centuries now. Interestingly, the most tragic character in this tragedy is not the protagonist, but his “love interest”, Gretchen – a teenage girl groomed by the old man, impregnated and socially ostracised. Her solution? She drowns her “illegitimate” newborn child, accepts her death penalty and rejects Faust’s offer to save her from prison. In God’s mercy, the Christian girl seeks salvation and off goes Faust with the devil to new adventures in Faust, Part Two.
What would Gretchen do today, I wonder. Her fate is not only a result of sexual abuse and an inherently misogynistic morality, but also nonexistent reproductive rights. In today’s Germany, abortion is still illegal under the criminal code. It is nonpunishable under certain conditions, particularly during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, but nonetheless, in practice a modern-day Gretchen might have difficulty finding a doctor willing to perform a termination, depending on where she lives. Moreover, Gretchen might be intimidated by the stigma, which is not just societal but enshrined in German law.
Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist
EU agrees 18th package of sanctions against Moscow, including a moving price cap on Russian oil 15% below market rates. What we know on day 1,242
One person was killed and at least one apartment building set alight in Odesa after Russian forces staged a mass drone attack on the Ukrainian Black Sea port. The city’s mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, said at least 20 drones had converged on the city. “Civilian infrastructure was damaged as a result of the attack. A residential high-rise building is on fire” and rescuers were pulling people out, he said. The Odesa region’s emergency service said later that five people were rescued from burning apartments but “one rescued woman died”.
The Russian defence ministry said its air defence systems destroyed 87 Ukrainian drones in a five-hour period on Friday evening, including over the Bryansk region bordering northern Ukraine and the Moscow region. Russian aviation authorities were once again forced to suspend flights at Sheremetyevo and Domodedovo airports serving Moscow. The Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said 13 drones were downed or destroyed after midnight, but made no mention of casualties or damage. The acting governor of Rostov region, on Ukraine’s eastern border, said Ukrainian drones triggered fires and knocked down power lines.
The EU on Friday agreed an 18th package of sanctions against Russia, including measures aimed at restricting the Russian oil and energy industry. The EU will set a moving price cap on Russian crude at 15% below its average market price, aiming to improve on a largely ineffective $60 cap that the G7 economies have tried to impose since December 2022. The measures were approved after Slovakia dropped its opposition in exchange for further guarantees on gas imports.
Kaja Kallas said the measures by the EU would be “one of its strongest sanctions packages against Russia to date”. “We will keep raising the costs, so stopping the aggression becomes the only path forward for Moscow,” said the EU foreign policy chief.
The UK announced it would join the price cap, dealing a blow to Moscow’s oil revenues. “The UK and its EU allies are turning the screw on the Kremlin’s war chest by stemming the most valuable funding stream of its illegal war in Ukraine even further,” said the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, at a G20 meeting in South Africa.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, complained to reporters that Russia considered “such unilateral restrictions illegal”. “We oppose them,” he said. “But at the same time, of course, we have already acquired a certain immunity from sanctions. We have adapted to life under sanctions.”
The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said the possibility of Ukraine joining the EU by 2034 was unlikely. “For us, the absolute top priority is, first and foremost, to do everything possible to end this war,” Merz said on Friday. “Then we’ll talk about the reconstruction of Ukraine … but that’s going to take a number of years.” He said it would “probably not even affect the EU’s current medium-term financial outlook”, which runs to 2034. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said in Kyiv in February that Ukraine could join the EU before 2030 if the country continued reforms at the current speed and quality.
Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said on Friday that his forces were “containing intense pressure” from Russia on Pokrovsk, a logistics hub in eastern Donetsk region that has weathered months of Russian attempts to capture it. Syrskyi said he had presented a report to the president describing the challenges facing Ukrainian troops along the 1,000km (620-mile) front. “The enemy is continuing to deploy its tactic of small infantry groups, but has proved powerless on its attempts to seize Pokrovsk. Today, they tried to break through with sabotage groups but were exposed and destroyed,” Syrskyi wrote on Telegram.
The first tranche of Australian tanks has been handed over to the Ukrainian army. Australia had previously pledged to give Ukraine 49 Abrams tanks last October. A majority of the tanks have been delivered and a final tranche will arrive in the coming months, but actual numbers have not been released.
In an era of mistrust in politics, the government now has a duty to bring maximum transparency to a very opaque scandal
One of many extraordinary features of the data breach that put tens of thousands of Afghan lives in jeopardy is the length of time between the original leak and the government taking action. The email containing a highly sensitive dataset was sent from a Ministry of Defence computer in February 2022. Ministers were not aware of the problem until August 2023.
The fact that the MoD’s systems were lax enough for the error to have been made is worrying enough. The delayed response is more alarming still. And then there is the disturbing mechanism by which the whole scandal was kept from the public eye.
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US president, who is pushing for ceasefire deal in Gaza, praises Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff as ‘fantastic’
Ten more hostages will be released from Gaza “very shortly”, Donald Trump said at the White House Friday. The news comes as the president continues to push for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
“We got most of the hostages back. We’re going to have another 10 coming very shortly, and we hope to have that finished quickly,” Trump said during a dinner with Republican senators. He also praised his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff as “fantastic”.
Surveys show party may only secure 10 to 15 of 125 seats up for grabs but is eroding support of prime minister Shigeru Ishiba’s shaky LDP minority government
A disillusioned Japanese electorate feeling the economic pinch goes to the polls on Sunday, as a rightwing party promoting a “Japanese-first” agenda gains popularity, with fears over foreigners becoming a major election issue.
Birthed on YouTube during the Covid-19 pandemic spreading conspiracy theories about vaccinations and a cabal of global elites, the party, Sanseito, has widened its appeal ahead of Sunday’s upper house vote – railing against immigration and dragging rhetoric that was once confined to Japan’s political fringes into the mainstream.
A resounding cheer erupted when on Monday three Palestinian teenagers shuffled on to the stage of a convention centre tucked away behind the golden beaches of Australia’s Sunshine Coast.
All of them from the West Bank, they were only half of a team able to attend the International Mathematics Olympiad, a gathering of the world’s brightest young mathematical minds, where medals can offer tickets to any university in the world and launch brilliant careers.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.
She said Obama and senior officials in his administration had “[laid] the groundwork for … a years-long coup” against Trump after his victory over Hillary Clinton by “manufacturing intelligence” to suggest that Russia had tried to influence the election. That included using a dossier prepared by a British intelligence analyst, Christopher Steele, that they knew to be unreliable, Gabbard claimed.
President follows through on libel threat over report that said he sent Epstein ‘bawdy’ birthday note and sketch
Donald Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.
Trump’s lawsuit on Friday, which also targets Dow Jones and News Corp, was filed in the southern district of Florida federal court in Miami.
Yvette Davids, who took the role in January 2004, will be succeeded by Michael Borgschulte
The first woman to lead the US naval academy is being reassigned, with the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, moving to replace her with a Marine Corps general, defense officials confirmed on Friday.
The decision marks the first time in the nearly 180-year history of the academy that a Marine Corps officer has been nominated to take charge.
Lawmakers note cancellation follows Colbert’s criticism of parent company Paramount for settling Trump suit
Democrats are condemning CBS for its recent decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes just a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump.
Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”
Video at the concert showed Astronomer’s married CEO with his arms around its head of human resources
Astronomer, the company at the center of the Coldplay scandal in which its CEO was caught canoodling with its chief human resources officer, has finally issued a statement on the matter.
More than 24 hours after a Jumbotron camera at a Coldplay concert in Boston, Massachusetts, caught the software company’s married CEO, Andy Byron, with his arms around the company’s HR head, Kristin Cabot, Astronomer has responded to the incident which has taken the internet by storm.
Bergman teamed with wife Marilyn to write lyrics for such hits as The Way We Were and The Windmills of Your Mind
Alan Bergman, the Oscar-winning lyricist who teamed with his wife, Marilyn, for an enduring and loving partnership that produced such old-fashioned hits as How Do You Keep the Music Playing?, It Might Be You and the classic The Way We Were, has died aged 99.
Bergman died late on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles, family spokesperson Ken Sunshine said in a statement on Friday. The statement said Bergman had, in recent months, suffered from respiratory issues “but continued to write songs till the very end”.
“Spain is Spain,” Switzerland’s talismanic captain, Lia Wälti, had warned and, in the quarter-final between the host nation and the world champions, Spain Spained, crushing the resolve of a team that had played in an inspired fashion.
The hosts had more than clung on, they fought, roared on by a crowd that maybe believed, maybe did not, but that did not really matter. It took until the 66th minute for the tournament favourites to find a way through, Athenea del Castillo and Clàudia Pina each striking in a five-minute, second-half spell to crush gentle rumblings of a possible upset.
Scores of Venezuelans deported by US to El Salvador repatriated as Marco Rubio hails return of Americans
Venezuela released 10 jailed Americans on Friday in exchange for getting home scores of migrants deported by the United States to El Salvador months ago under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The resolution represents a diplomatic achievement for the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, helps Donald Trump in his goal of bringing home Americans jailed abroad and lands El Salvador a swap that it had proposed months ago.
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