Goods from country are to face an extra 10% levy from Tuesday alongside additional 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports

Over in the UK, the home secretary Yvette Cooper said that Trump’s tariff plans could have a “really damaging impact” on the global economy and growth.

The Labour cabinet minister said the UK wanted to break down trade barriers, not put them up.

President’s ‘culture war’ crusade targets DEI and LGBTQ+ rights in bid to spread rightwing agenda, experts say

Donald Trump didn’t need to wait for the black box flight recorder. He knew what caused the mid-air collision of a passenger plane and army helicopter that killed 67 people. Or he thought he did.

“They actually came out with a directive – ‘too white’,” the US president told reporters on Thursday, seeking to blame former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for including Black and Latino people in the federal workforce. “We want the people that are competent.”

For the artist and film director acts of protest were as much a part of growing up as playing in the local park. Here he recalls his first encounters with activism

My first encounter with resistance was unbeknownst to me, and I was annoyed by it. At nine years old, I found myself attending Saturday school, missing Football Focus and not being with my friends playing in the local park. First my sister and I went to the Marcus Garvey Saturday school in Hammersmith. Later we went to the Saturday school in Acton, organised by Mr Carter. He was a light-skinned Black man with slightly ginger hair and freckles, bearing a strange resemblance to Jimmy Carter, who was the president of the United States.

The sole purpose of the Saturday school was to help Black children who were underachieving or being failed by the education system. At that time, I didn’t know that these facilities were organised throughout the United Kingdom by Black parents, teachers and academics. In 1971, a London schoolteacher, Bernard Coard, wrote a pamphlet called How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain. Although there had been efforts to support Black children prior to this, this was the launching pad for a nationwide and organised act of self-determination.

But it’s important to not limit our sense of what resistance looks like

All those lists and instructions and editorials on how to resist authoritarianism and stand up for human rights, the rule of law and climate are good, and I both wholly support them and want to veer off from their recommendations here. Yes, everyone with any capacity to do so should join things, call politicians, support the groups and campaigns protecting the above. But it’s important to not limit our sense of what resistance looks like to these versions of doing something. In addition to these formal, structured ways of defending what you believe in, there are ways of doing so woven into everyday life and our conversations and communications.

Each of us needs to stand on principle, loudly, whenever, wherever we can. Used strategically, our voices can do a lot to preserve anti-authoritarian worldviews about facts, science, history, rights, justice and inclusion. In this moment, it matters to just be a person who, wherever the opportunity arises, affirms that the climate crisis is real and climate solutions benefit us all, immigrants are vital to our economy and their rights matter, trans people harm no one by their existence but face terrible harm, diversity strengthens enterprises and communities and our country, women’s rights and equality should be non-negotiable.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

Interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa arrives in Riyadh on trip that appears to signal shift away from Iran alliance

Syria’s interim president has made his first trip abroad, travelling to Saudi Arabia in a move that is likely to be an attempt to signal Damascus’s shift away from Iran as its main regional ally.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was once aligned with al-Qaida, landed in Riyadh alongside his government’s foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani. The two men travelled on a Saudi jet, with a Saudi flag visible on the table behind them.

It’s time to celebrate celery with a soothing soup, and a nice potato pancake to go with it

Most of the soup I make is in an effort to deal with my over-enthusiasm at the shops, a need to tidy up a vegetable rack overflowing with beetroot or leeks. A case of waste not, want not rather than to spotlight a vegetable in season. The results can be good or less so, depending on just how many turnips and swedes I am also trying to get rid of. This week, I made soup simply to celebrate a particularly fine head of celery.

I carried it home with my shopping, the celery’s plume of leaves poking pertly from my bag. The soup was good, using the entire head, or at least those stalks I hadn’t torn away and munched raw the moment I arrived home. The like-it-or-loathe-it vegetable was mellowed and sweetened by sour cream and potato.

• Spurs beat Wolves to signing with £20.9m buy obligation
• Ange Postecoglou still hoping to add an attacking player

Tottenham have completed the signing of the Lens centre-back, Kevin Danso, on an initial loan with an obligation to buy for €25m (£20.9m) in the summer.

The Spurs manager, Ange Postecoglou, had said on Friday that the club might need to strengthen in central defence as they waited for an update on Radu Dragusin. The Romanian centre-back suffered what looked a worrying knee injury against Elfsborg in the Europa League on Thursday night.

Manga and anime brands are now revealed as some of the biggest sellers in the £510m sector

At the Toy Fair in London’s Olympia last month, there were some less familiar faces alongside the Bluey plushies and Minions fart blasters. Hatsune Miku, Tanjiro Kamado and Labubu aren’t household names in the UK, but collectible figurines and merchandise based on manga, anime and video games, are some of the biggest sellers for the British toy industry.

Collectibles – ornamental toys sold with the objective of collecting a definable set – are now a £510m sector in the UK, according to research by the British Toy & Hobby Association and Circana.

It’s time to hand out final grades as the dust settles on one of the busiest free-agency windows in WNBA history

One of the most dynamic periods of the WNBA offseason is coming to an end as free agents are signing contrasts with their teams at the start of February. This year was particularly exciting as a huge crop of the league’s stars – including Breanna Stewart, Kelsey Plum, Jewell Loyd, Brittney Griner and more – were able to test the waters of free agency, some for the first time.

As with any period of growth and upheaval, women’s basketball is in the middle of a truly critical moment. TV ratings are up, attendance is way up; Unrivaled is pulling in impressive viewership each week in Miami, and AU Pro Basketball kicks off its newest season in Nashville this month.

According to a new poll, half of our 13- to 27-year-olds can’t see the point of all those time-wasting elections and parliaments. Why do they not know that authoritarianism is worse?

The phrase “shocking findings” is hugely overused in the media, which is strange because it’s so clumsy. The word endings nearly rhyme, but not quite, and there’s something infantile about the word “finding” for something you’ve found. Is your lunch your eatings? Did you do any pooings this morning? Always go for a weeing before leaving the house – or building.

Most “shocking findings” don’t turn out to be that shocking. The phrase gets deployed to dupe you into reading on and then it’s just some study that’s come out with something predictably depressing. Not this time. Last week, there were some genuinely shocking findings. I’d go so far as simply to call them shockings. Never mind that they were found – that’s not their key characteristic at all. They’re shockings, infuriatings and frankly frightenings.

First women working as fishing guides on Laxá River, featured in new film, call for action after farmed fish escape

For seven generations, Andrea Ósk Hermóðsdóttir’s family have been fishing on the Laxá River in Aðaldalur. Iceland has a reputation as a world leader on feminism, but until recently women have not been able to work as guides to wild salmon fishing for visiting anglers – a job that has traditionally been the preserve of men.

The 21-year-old engineering student, her sister Alexandra Ósk, 16, and their friends Arndís Inga Árnadóttir, 18, and her sister Áslaug Anna, 15, are now the first generation of female guides on their river in northern Iceland, and among the very first female fishing guides in the country.

The Royal Ballet principal on her late career debut, taking her daughters to work, and playing goodies and baddies

Born in Devon in 1984, Lauren Cuthbertson joined the Royal Ballet School aged 11 and the Royal Ballet in 2002, becoming a principal six years later. She has danced leading roles in all the great classical ballets including Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, has performed in works by Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton, and created many new ballets, particularly those by Christopher Wheeldon, who cast her as Alice in his three-act Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and as Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. She has recently become principal guest artist at the Royal Ballet and is taking a teaching diploma. She lives in west London with her boyfriend and their two daughters, aged four and two.

You’re about to make your debut as Tatiana in John Cranko’s Onegin, based on Pushkin’s classic verse-novel. How are you feeling?
It’s a funny sensation making such a significant debut so late in my career: it made me feel quite vulnerable, but also it was very thrilling. It’s been a lovely journey but it’s surprisingly physical. I did my first run through on stage at an 11am rehearsal and when I went to tear up Onegin’s letter at the end [as Tatiana sends him away], I had no strength in my arms. I hadn’t anticipated that. Mind you, an early call is always weird – it’s hard to eat properly. You might have a bit of breakfast, but suddenly you finish the rehearsal, and it’s 2pm. You can’t eat a sandwich in the middle of a three-act ballet.

Suddenly our family life becomes an unfunny sitcom

My daughter is crying. She is holding a tiny red London bus, one of her favourite toys, and the terrible thing that has happened to her is that she has smashed our television with it. The screen is completely destroyed, with a central impact now radiating a small spider web of white lines, within a larger morass of jagged, blocky blues, greens and purples that crowd out the picture on its surface.

I am too stunned to move, the impact having happened so fast that I’ve yet to process it at all. My first thoughts, such as they exist in this zen-like state of paralysis, are of the immediate financial cost of what she’s done. Thus, the denial phase of grief kicks in swiftly. I switch the TV off, perhaps hoping the very clearly annihilated screen is a signal fault. I turn it back on, dismayed to discover that no, this was not an emergency broadcast from Smashed Telly Gold +1; my two-year-old has just managed to do £400’s worth of damage in two-fifths of a second.

With the little homes the passengers build for themselves out of laptops and crisps, it’s microcosmic

Yesterday I was on a train for six hours – three there, three back, through two time zones and three weather conditions, and all of it without my headphones. Around me, passengers built little homes for themselves out of laptops and crisps, a whole universe on a plastic fold-down table. The computer screen acted primarily as a barrier, an emotional-load-bearing wall. Objects and arms were removed from sleeves and erected in delicate piles – illusions of privacy were magicked in the quiet coach. Rooms were fashioned on laps behind seats, or ideas of rooms; walled, breaded concepts – here is a kitchenette formed from Pret a Manger baguettes and precarious coffees, here is the memory-foam neck pillow, a portable bedroom, and here onscreen at 250km an hour is a working office, fizzing with legitimacy and blue light. I looked around with love at this side of us, we silly animals, building homes out of sticks anywhere we sit for longer than 20 minutes.

On smaller screens, my travelling neighbour pecked at a two-hour game of Candy Crush, while across the aisle a young man (blue jumper, skin that appeared to be enamelled) was playing blackjack. I looked over occasionally – through his window I could see the newbuild flats with their enclosed balconies, each one filled with boxes, and duvets and pillows pressed face-like against the glass – but for a long time I couldn’t tell if the man was winning, his face remained terribly still.

A survey found that young people admitted finding democracy dull against the toxic glamour of strongman politics

‘DYOR.” That’s what they say. That’s Do Your Own Research, for those of us not quite meeting the 13- to 28-year-old gen Z age bracket. It’s a common refrain when one of them finds their truth challenged.

So I set out on some DYOR regarding the report last week that most gen Zers were in favour of the UK becoming a dictatorship. The study, commissioned by Channel 4, has been described broadly as “shocking”, “worrying” and “bleak”. Yet for anyone with daily interaction with that generation, it would probably be better described as – “fairly predictable”.

Research into ‘dark personality traits’ has always focused on men. But some experts believe standard testing misses the ways an antisocial personality manifests itself in women

Picture a psychopath. Who do you see in your mind’s eye? Chances are it’s a man. And chances are your answer would be similar if you were asked to picture a narcissist. From Charles Manson and Ted Bundy to Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump, most famous people we consider psychopathic or narcissistic are male. That’s even the case for fiction – think Hannibal Lecter, Patrick Bateman or Norman Bates.

Scientists long assumed that women were simply too wonderful to be significantly psychopathic or narcissistic, and didn’t bother to study the possibility much, according to Ava Green from City St George’s, University of London. But research over the past few decades is increasingly challenging this stereotype, suggesting women can have a dark streak, too. Much like in autism or ADHD, such traits just express themselves slightly differently in women – making them harder to spot with diagnostic tests that were essentially developed for men.

Playing a raging but inwardly terrified housewife, the actor and a fine supporting case are the intense focus of a story that cries out for closure

Anyone who has ever heard the director Mike Leigh interviewed will know that he is not a man who is given to enthusiasm. He doesn’t effuse; rather he growls, a bristly, whiskery warning to the world to keep its distance. Listening to him, you could be forgiven for assuming that, with a career spanning more than half a century, seven Oscar nominations, a Cannes Palme d’Or (for Secrets & Lies) and a Venice Golden Lion (for Vera Drake), Leigh is not much of a fan of anything to do with the film industry. But then you watch one of his films – his latest, Hard Truths, for example – and it becomes clear that there is one passion that remains undimmed over the years, one thing that he cherishes above all others. And that is actors and their craft.

The British director has a distinctive way of working that amplifies and embraces the contribution of his cast. This is not just a case of handing an actor a few inert lines on page and hoping for the best. His films are born out of an extended process of workshopping and rehearsals. Dialogue is chewed over; characters are fully lived in; stories are grown out of the fertile collaboration between director and performers. It’s a way of working that has pros and cons for the final film, but what’s undeniable is that Leigh’s method has helped give birth to some viscerally powerful performances over the years, the latest of which is a quite remarkable Bafta-nominated, British independent film awards-winning turn from Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the central role of housewife Pansy.

Champions show their enduring class in the second half after making a sloppy start to Six Nations defence

In a tournament with no room for a warm-up, where you just hop into the blocks and hope to explode out of them, home games are a mixed blessing. If the getaway isn’t clean then the boost to the away side can be turbo stuff. Which poses a dilemma: how do you catch up without playing catch up?

Ireland’s one word answer might be perseverance. If pushed to expand they might add that when you can sense your opponents losing the plot you have to help them along with that one. Patience is actually better than going bald-headed for the big prize. Nudge the ball in behind them and squeeze some more.

The isolated Pacific nation is trying to build its first football team amid a battle for survival against rising sea levels

The Marshall Islands, an isolated sprawl of atolls covering 750,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean but home to barely 42,000 people, may be the final frontier for the world’s most popular sport. It claims to be the last country on Earth without a football team, and to this day, the islands have never hosted an 11-a-side game.

Until recently, football was an alien concept in a nation occupied by the US since the second world war, with baseball and basketball the traditional sports. As interest has grown in recent years, another barrier has emerged. Land has always been at a premium on these fragile shores, but never more than now with rising sea levels bringing fears of permanent flooding.

A win against Fulham and draw at Villa are early signs of a better fit at West Ham on manager’s return to his old club

Graham Potter’s return to Chelsea coming on deadline day feels symbolic. West Ham’s head coach does not look back fondly at the extravaganza of player trading when he was in charge at Stamford Bridge in January 2023. It was a time of chaos and unreasonable pressure. The new owners were spending like there was no tomorrow and by the time the window closed it was left to Potter to make sense of a squad so bloated there was not enough space for everyone in the first-team dressing room.

Good luck with that. Chelsea had crowed after beating Arsenal to Mykhaylo Mudryk. Negotiations with Benfica led to a British transfer record for Enzo Fernández. Noni Madueke, David Datro Fofana and Benoît Badiashile joined. A deal for Malo Gusto was confirmed for the summer. João Félix arrived on loan. Jorginho took his experience and nous to Arsenal. Hakim Ziyech’s loan to Paris Saint-Germain collapsed because of technical issues. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had to be cut from the squad for the Champions League knockout stages. Potter, who takes West Ham to Stamford Bridge on Monday night, watched it all unfold and knew that expectations were about to go through the roof.

While privacy fears are justified, the main beef Silicon Valley has is that China’s chatbot is democratising the technology

No, it was not a “Sputnik moment”. The launch last month of DeepSeek R1, the Chinese generative AI or chatbot, created mayhem in the tech world, with stocks plummeting and much chatter about the US losing its supremacy in AI technology. Yet, for all the disruption, the Sputnik analogy reveals less about DeepSeek than about American neuroses.

The original Sputnik moment came on 4 October 1957 when the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik 1, the first time humanity had sent a satellite into orbit. It was, to anachronistically borrow a phrase from a later and even more momentous landmark, “one giant leap for mankind”, in Neil Armstrong’s historic words as he took a “small step” on to the surface of the moon.

The Egyptian adds another gear to Manchester City’s shift to more direct play with a short-passing game as backup

Everything is new. Everything is different. Omar Marmoush steps off the plane at Manchester Airport and what greets him is a kind of sensory overload. He peers through blacked-out windows of his chauffeured car at the city he now calls home. “What are the names of the supermarkets?” he asks. “Tesco,” comes the reply. “Asda. Sainsbury’s. Aldi.”

On the pitch, it’s a similar story. “He has something special,” Erling Haaland confirms after a dynamic debut against Chelsea last Saturday night. “He’s going to be a fantastic player for us. It’s about getting to know him as soon as possible, because there are so many important games coming.”

Global collaboration with US researchers likely to be set back by years, including on spread of drug-resistant HIV

A flagship programme to create malaria vaccines has been halted by the Trump administration, in just one example of a rippling disruption to health research around the globe since the new US president took power.

The USAid Malaria Vaccine Development Program (MVDP) – which works to prevent child deaths by creating more effective second-generation vaccines – funds research by teams collaborating across institutes, including the US university Johns Hopkins and the UK’s University of Oxford.