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Trump tariffs of 25% on steel and aluminium come into effect globally as Europe says it will retaliate – business live

European Commission says it will impose counter-tariffs on US goods from April

Unite, the UK’s biggest union, is calling on the government to immediately designate UK-produced steel as critical national infrastructure.

Unite believes there should be strict procurement rules for public sector projects to ensure they always use UK produced steel, and that that all future major infrastructure projects should be required to use UK produced steel.

Our government must act decisively to protect the steel industry and its workers following the announcement of US tariffs.

This is a matter of national security. Steel should be immediately designated as critical national infrastructure to properly protect it.

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© Photograph: Allison Dinner/EPA

© Photograph: Allison Dinner/EPA

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Islanders’ Kyle MacLean won’t make excuses for Year 2 woes

LOS ANGELES — A year ago, Kyle MacLean burst onto the Islanders scene like a supernova, playing with an energy and verve that rejuvenated the fourth line for a late run into the playoffs. Year 2 for the 25-year-old has followed a tougher course. “I’m definitely still learning,” MacLean — who was in the lineup...

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The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan review – do no harm

A doctor’s brilliant study of the dangers of overdiagnosis, from ADHD to long Covid

We swim in oceans of quackery. The media is flooded with misinformation about health and pseudo-diagnoses based on vibes rather than evidence. Books awash with error and supposition swamp our charts, penned by people uniquely unqualified to write them. Our ears are filled with popular podcasts claiming health benefits but really just peddling unregulated dietary supplements. And Robert Kennedy Jr, a man who has spent a lifetime spewing antivaccine jibber-jabber, is now US secretary of health. Vaccination is arguably the most successful health intervention in history (with the possible exception of sanitation), and now more than ever we should be basking in the fact that a global pandemic was brought to a close by safe and effective vaccines.

But here’s the conundrum: medical diagnoses are on the rise across the board, in many cases dramatically, and this is fuel for the medical disinformation industry. The most obvious example is autism, the incidence of which has shot up in a couple of decades, correlated with, but not caused by, an increase in vaccination. Cancer diagnoses are also up. A lot more people seem to have ADHD these days, which was barely around when I was at school. And millions now endure long Covid, a disease with a bucket of symptoms that did not exist at all five years ago.

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© Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer

© Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer

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How not to be deported: India’s nurses seeking work abroad learn how to migrate safely

Kerala is providing lessons on how not to be scammed by employment agencies as US and UK step up immigration raids

On a warm February morning, Devika, 24, sits with more than 60 classmates in the city of Kochi, in Kerala, southern India, learning how to tell a bogus overseas recruitment agency from a genuine one. Organised by the local government, the training session on safe and legal migration is among a handful of interventions in a country making headlines around the world as undocumented Indian migrants are rounded up and sent back home.

The training could not have been more timely.

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© Photograph: Ashish K Vincent/The Migration Story

© Photograph: Ashish K Vincent/The Migration Story

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Spotify is trumpeting big paydays for artists – but only a tiny fraction of them are actually thriving

The company’s latest Loud & Clear report – a relatively transparent look into a closed-off industry – shows just how skewed financial success is in music

Since 2021, Spotify has published its Loud & Clear report, corralling data points to show how much money is being earned by artists on the streaming service. There is much talk of “transparency” – perhaps the most duplicitous word in the music industry’s lexicon – but this year’s report feels very different, coming as it does alongside the publication of author Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine, a studs-up assault on streaming economics in general and Spotify in particular.

Then there is the unfortunate timing of the news, as recently unearthed by Music Business Worldwide, that Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has cashed out close to $700m in shares in the company since 2023 while Martin Lorentzon, the company’s other co-founder, cashed out $556.8m in shares in 2024 alone. Meanwhile artists scream of widening financial inequalities and accuse streaming services of doing better from artists than artists are doing from streaming services.

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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

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Where the art of Edvard Munch comes alive: a city break in Oslo

As a new exhibition celebrating the portraits of Edvard Munch opens at London’s National Portrait Gallery, we take a trip to the artist’s home city in Norway

I reach Ekeberg Park at sunset and walk along the muddy paths to find the viewpoint. The late winter sky is like a watercolour: soft blue and grey clouds layer together, with a sweeping gradient of yellow verging from tobacco stain to pale lemon above the distant, bruise-coloured hills. At the viewpoint, I look out over Oslo and listen for a scream.

In 1892, Edvard Munch took a walk in this same park as the sun was setting. Recording the experience in his diary, he wrote that he heard “a great and infinite scream through nature”. The experience became the basis of his most enduring painting.

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© Photograph: Laura Hall

© Photograph: Laura Hall

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A Touch of Love review – Margaret Drabble’s single-mother drama is a vivid 60s time capsule

This Drabble adaptation about a PhD student who gets pregnant is kitchen-sinky but without humour or even awareness. It’s an interesting curio

Waris Hussein’s earnest 1969 movie, adapted by Margaret Drabble from her own novel The Millstone, is a London-set drama about a young woman who has difficulties with men while researching a PhD in English literature – and as a result we get some tremendously nostalgic shots of the British Museum round reading room, when it was still a working library. American star Sandy Dennis puts on a stage-school English accent to play Rosamund, the graduate student who has well-to-do but insufferable bien pensant liberal parents, the kind of people who, as she explains to someone, “let the charlady sit down to dine with us, that kind of nonsense”.

Rosamund finds herself alone in her parents’ London flat while they are away doing good works in Africa and she exchanges brittle, knowing dialogue with chaps who take her out on dates: Joe (Michael Coles) and Roger (John Standing). However, she is only attracted to an oddly camp television newsreader called George, played with bizarre twinkly eyed condescension by Ian McKellen. (The 60s setting and the air of sexual loucheness put me in mind of McKellen’s performance as John Profumo in Michael Caton-Jones’s Scandal.) Rosamond loses her virginity in a single, unsatisfactory sexual encounter with George; she gets pregnant and resolves to keep the baby despite objections from family, friends and nurses.

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© Photograph: Studiocanal Films Ltd/Alamy

© Photograph: Studiocanal Films Ltd/Alamy

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A moment that changed me: Crohn’s left me in constant pain. An operation restored my appetite for life

Eating with my family was a source of joy and pleasure until illness ravaged my digestive system. After my stoma was fitted, everything tasted amazing again

Growing up, I always loved food. On Sundays, I’d ask for seconds of my roast dinner. My gran would bake cakes every weekend, which I would drown in custard. I can still remember how the chocolate digestive biscuits I’d eat when I got in from school tasted, how satisfying it was to dip them in my tea as I chatted with my dad about my day. Food brought us together as a family and it was something I always relished.

Then I got sick. I was 12 when I first displayed symptoms of Crohn’s disease. I started getting unbearable pain in my stomach and going to the toilet a bit more. Then a lot more. And I stopped feeling hungry. My weight dropped three stone (19kg), my periods stopped and I had no energy, but it was my sudden lack of appetite that I missed the most. Food had always been a source of joy; I’d watch cookery shows and cry, remembering how much pleasure I used to take from eating. Now, my body rejected everything except supplement drinks that pretended to have flavours like lime and orange but always just tasted like bile. I was fading away and it was terrifying.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Carys Green

© Photograph: Courtesy of Carys Green

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Online Influencer Is Killed While Livestreaming in Tokyo

Police in Japan have charged a man with the murder, saying he was a follower who had tracked her location by the buildings behind her as she filmed herself.

© Kyodo News, via Associated Press

Investigators at the scene where an online influencer was stabbed to death in Tokyo on Tuesday. Violent crime is rare in Japan.
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Greenland election: opposition Democrat party wins surprise victory amid spectre of Trump

Centre-right party wins most votes ahead of the Naleraq party, with coalition talks expected to begin

The centre-right Democrat party has won the most votes in Greenland’s parliamentary elections, a surprise result as the territory went to the polls in the shadow of US president Donald Trump’s threat to take control of it “one way or another”.

None of the parties are set to win a majority of the 31 seats in parliament, so negotiations to form a coalition will be held in the coming days.

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© Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

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Chinese Warships Circle Australia and Leave It Feeling ‘Near Naked’

The unusual deployment by three navy ships over the past month has prompted a debate in Australia about its aging fleet and reliance on the United States.

© Australian Defense Force

The Chinese flotilla included a cruiser, top, and supply vessel, shown in a photo released by the Australian military last month. For nearly a month, Australian forces were on alert over the ships’ movement.
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Out of Putin’s war and Trump’s treachery, a new Europe is being born

The EU has its Trojan horses and Nato’s cornerstone has crumbled. But European allies, including the UK, are bound by an urgent shared purpose

Moscow’s immense military mobilisation is clearly not aimed just at Ukraine. Unless Vladimir Putin accepts a ceasefire with meaningful security guarantees there will be no end in sight to the war. If anything, we could see the extension of Russia’s aggression beyond Ukraine. The bleak reality is that Europe still faces an unprecedented threat and notwithstanding signs of progress for Ukraine at talks in Jeddah, we face it alone.

Worse, we now have to confront it with the US working against us. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump appear to share a plan: a Vichy-like regime in Ukraine and a European continent split into spheres of influence, which Russia, the US (and perhaps China) can colonise and prey upon. Most European publics sense this. A critical mass of European leaders gets it too. They are beginning to act.

Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist

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© Photograph: Javad Parsa/Reuters

© Photograph: Javad Parsa/Reuters

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A Trump-Putin pact is emerging – and Europe is its target | Rafael Behr

US betrayal of Ukraine is the rehearsal for a grander bargain with Moscow and an assault on continental solidarity

A prime time current affairs programme; a discussion about Donald Trump’s handling of the war in Ukraine. “He’s doing excellent things,” says a firebrand politician on the panel, before listing White House actions that have belittled Volodymyr Zelenskyy and weakened his battlefield position – military aid suspended; satellite communications obstructed; intelligence withheld. “Do we support this?” It is a rhetorical question.

“We support it all. Absolutely,” the celebrity host responds. “We are thrilled by everything Trump is doing.”

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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© Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

© Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

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Biased laws and poverty driving huge rise in female prisoners – report

First such study finds laws on abortion, debt and dress help increase rate of women being jailed twice as fast as for men

Poverty, abuse and discriminatory laws are driving a huge rise in the number of women in prison globally, according to a new report.

With the rise of the far right and an international backlash against women’s rights, the research said there was a risk that laws would increasingly be used to target women, forcing more behind bars.

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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

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Lip reader reveals what Virginia high school track runner said to opponent before hitting her in head with baton

The Virginia high school sprinter accused of smacking her opponent on the back of the head with a baton shouted at her younger competitor during the alleged attack, according to a report. Alaila Everett was the baton-wielding senior who was running the second leg for I.C. Norcom High School girl’s 4×200 meter relay team where...

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Elina Svitolina upsets Jessica Pegula to reach quarter-finals at rain-affected Indian Wells

  • Ukrainian overcomes weather delay to win 5-7, 6-1,6-2
  • Iga Swiatek wallops Muchova 6-1, 6-1 in last-16 match

Elina Svitolina waited out a three-hour rain delay in the Californian desert to beat fourth-seeded Jessica Pegula 5-7, 6-1, 6-2 and move into the Indian Wells quarter-finals.

After the Ukrainian dropped the first set, she rallied before the weather interrupted proceedings early in the third set.

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© Photograph: Robert Prange/Getty Images

© Photograph: Robert Prange/Getty Images

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MS patients in England to benefit from major roll out of take-at-home pill

Cladribine tablet for those with active multiple sclerosis will reduce hospital visits and free up appointments

Thousands of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) in England are to become the first in Europe to benefit from a major roll out of an immunotherapy pill.

Current treatments involve regular trips to hospital, drug infusions, frequent injections and extensive monitoring, which add to the burden on patients and healthcare systems.

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© Photograph: Charlotte Ball/PA

© Photograph: Charlotte Ball/PA

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‘They add 10 years to my age!’ What happened when a millennial and a gen Zer swapped jeans

Young women wear their jeans low and ultra-baggy, while laughing at the ‘moms’ with their high waists and exposed ankles. It’s time to bring the generations together – if only to try on each other’s trousers

Every day, it feels as if social media finds new ways to let us know how old we are. Just joined TikTok? You’re probably a millennial. Wear your hair in a centre parting? Must be gen Z. Paid off your mortgage – or even have one? OK boomer.

This generational divide is particularly strong, it seems, when it comes to jeans. Look around you and you have probably noticed that younger people prefer to wear them low-rise, long-hemmed and ultra-baggy, while millennials wear them high on the waist and high off the ground – AKA the “mom jean”. TikTok is full of videos of young people mocking their elders for their jeans choices. Now even millennials are coming after their generation’s commitment to the style. “My fellow millennials,” begins a video from TikToker Indigo Tshai Williams-Brunton, “Just completely stop with the mom jeans.”

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© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

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From the archive: The end of Atlanticism: has Trump killed the ideology that won the cold war? – podcast

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 2018: The foreign policy establishment has been lamenting its death for half a century. But Atlanticism has long been a convenient myth

By Madeleine Schwartz. Read by Kelly Burke

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© Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

© Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

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‘I feel utter anger’: From Canada to Europe, a movement to boycott US goods is spreading

Tesla sales are falling and apps and online groups are springing up to help consumers choose non-US items

The renowned German classical violinist Christian Tetzlaff was blunt in explaining why he and his quartet have cancelled a summer tour of the US.

“There seems to be a quietness or denial about what’s going on,” Tetzlaff said, describing his horror at the authoritarian polices of Donald Trump and the response of US elites to the country’s growing democratic crisis.

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© Photograph: Chris Helgren/Reuters

© Photograph: Chris Helgren/Reuters

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Booze and bets in Benidorm: welcome to the Costa del Cheltenham

Standing room only in pubs and bars long before the action begins, thousands of British tourists now enjoy the festival in the Spanish hotspot

A bell rings for half past happy hour on Cheltenham festival eve in a city that has discarded time.

Not entirely, of course. Conventional clocks are required to determine the midday cut off between a cheap full English breakfast – available in a range of sizes, from large through to extra, extra large – and an ever so slightly pricier one. So, too, to distinguish between upcoming performances from Michael Jackson, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Queen, who, extraordinarily, have descended on the same Spanish bar, on the same night. Just as they will again tomorrow; at least, tribute acts of varying quality.

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© Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

© Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

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‘We swept into Moscow in Gorbachev’s limousine’: Neil Tennant’s love affair with Russia – before the ‘cancer of Putin’

They played Red Square, launched MTV Russia and got driven home from a gay club by the police. But the freedoms witnessed by Pet Shop Boys have been crushed. Singer Neil Tennant relives those heady days – and calls for a revolution

The journalist Andrey Sapozhnikov of Novaya Gazeta Europe, the independent Russian newspaper that now operates from Latvia in order to avoid censorship by Putin’s regime, recently asked Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys: “You have been actively commenting on Russian politics since 2013 and the Pussy Riot case, and you are arguably one of the most engaged western artists in relation to the Russian context today. Why do you care so deeply about what is happening specifically in Russia?” Here is his reply, which the Guardian is publishing in English.

I have been interested in Russia since reading a book when I was a young boy about the 1917 revolutions. It fascinated me that the Russian empire was replaced by another empire, the Soviet Union, which unleashed a lot of energy but rapidly became a brutal dictatorship under Stalin, a 20th-century Ivan the Terrible. Since then I have read a lot about Soviet culture, particularly the work and struggles of Shostakovich and Prokofiev and other artists, writers, musicians. This interest fed into the lyrics I wrote. For instance My October Symphony, or indeed our first hit single, West End Girls: “In every city, in every nation / From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station.”

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© Photograph: Donald Christie

© Photograph: Donald Christie

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