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2.00 JACK RICHARDS NOVICE LIMITED HANDICAP CHASE, 2M 4F 127YD

A race that reverts back to handicap status after 10 years as a level-weights contest, including most recently as a Grade One. The switch has definitely had the desired effect on the field size, as 20 are due to go to post after meagre turnouts of eight, four, seven and 11 in the last four years as a Grade One, but the flip-side for punters is that while four of the last five winners were at single-figure odds, there is much more chance of an upset today. Gordon Elliott’s Firefox, who has raced in Grade One company in two of his last three starts, has emerged from the pack as the likely favourite, but he is giving weight to every runner bar Springwell Bay, a winner over course and distance at the New Year’s Day meeting. Caldwell Potter is another interesting runner, not least as a result of his price tag - £632,000 – when he was bought by a syndicate including Sir Alex Ferguson and the late John Hales at a major dispersal sale in Ireland in February 2024. He has been the beaten favourite on his last two starts but makes his handicap debut on what could yet prove to be a decent mark. Elsewhere in the field, Ireland is well represented and Terence O’Brien’s Answer To Kayf is one that caught my eye. He was a very impressive winner of his handicap debut at Naas in January, and while that race was on heavy ground, he has enough form on a sounder surface to suggest that today’s going will not be an issue.

The retired engineer and NHS worker chewed over social housing and strong leaders. Could they find common ground on Covid?

Bob, 67, Newton Abbot, Devon

Occupation Retired businessman, used to run a small tool-making company

US president aims latest trade war salvo at Europe, threatening its alcohol industry after the EU imposed levies on American whiskey on Wednesday

Luxury Italian sports car manufacturer Ferrari says it is ready for countermeasures if US President Donald Trump imposes hefty tariffs on European auto imports.

“We are ready with some countermeasures,” Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna told Cnbc’s Converge Live in Singapore. “We are waiting for the official number to be published,” he added, referring to Trump’s threat of duties “of around 25%” on EU carmakers.

He added:

We will watch what happens over the next month, in the next few weeks. We are in the same boat in terms of tariffs.

The customer is at the centre of our attention.”

Twenty minutes after arriving on holiday in Italian city, Yanis Tereshchenko drew on experience of war to intervene

A Ukrainian soldier who insists on always carrying a first-aid kit – even on holiday – has been praised for saving the life of a stabbing victim during a trip to Venice, Italy.

Yanis Tereshchenko, a 32-year-old teacher who enlisted in the Ukrainian army’s third assault brigade immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, was on his way to his hotel with his wife and his five-year-old son in the Rialto district when he witnessed an altercation between two young men.

Maria Branyas Morera, US-born supercentenarian who died in Spain last August, found to have microbiota of an infant

The US-born woman who was the world’s oldest living person before she died in Spain last August at age 117 once attributed her longevity to “luck and good genetics”. And, evidently, Maria Branyas Morera was right.

A study of Branyas’s microbiome and DNA that scientists began conducting before her death reportedly determined that the genes she inherited allowed her cells to essentially feel and behave as if they were 17 years younger than they actually were. And Branyas’s microbiota – which primarily refers to the bacteria in people’s guts that has a role in keeping them healthy – mirrored that of an infant, according to the research led by University of Barcelona genetics professor Manel Esteller, a leading expert on ageing.

Performers can fight cynicism in age of Trump, says Nicola Benedetti as she announces 2025 programme

Musicians and artists should challenge disinformation and cynicism in global politics by standing up for fundamental truths, the violinist Nicola Benedetti has said.

Benedetti, the director of the Edinburgh international festival, said the arts played an essential role during periods of turmoil by showing the best of human achievement.

Kevin Fagan, who spent decades at the San Francisco Chronicle, argues in a new book that ‘atrociously unforgivable’ US poverty must be addressed

Veteran journalist Kevin Fagan spent decades covering homelessness for the San Francisco Chronicle, reporting on a crisis that persists despite billions poured into housing and services and years of political debate.

The issue is personal for him. Fagan was episodically homeless in his youth, sleeping in his car and camping outside while he attended college and later in doorways abroad as a traveling musician.

(Luaka Bop)
Forty years into their career, this family band deliver their debut – and it’s a life-affirming album full of spontaneity and seemingly telepathic harmonising

The saga of Annie & the Caldwells’ debut album is lengthy and convoluted. The record probably wouldn’t have existed at all had crate-digging record collectors not chanced upon Waiting for the Trumpet to Sound, a 1974 single by gospel group the Staples Jr Singers, released on a Mississippi label so obscure that only one copy has ever been sold on Discogs. It came to the attention of Greg Belson, a British-born, LA-based soul DJ, who has carved out a niche playing recherché dancefloor-friendly gospel (if you want to hear the Lord’s praises being sung amid the sweatily hedonistic environs of Glastonbury’s gay club NYC Downlow, then he’s your go-to guy). He included its B-side on a 2019 compilation, The Time for Peace is Now: Gospel Music About Us.

The song’s author, Annie Caldwell, has recalled receiving “a call from a man, I think his name was David”. It was former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, whose Luaka Bop label released the compilation and then the Staples Jr Singers’ solitary album. Caldwell’s surprise at being contacted about records she had made in her early teens didn’t deter her from suggesting Byrne’s label might also be interested in the band she had been leading for the last 40 years, comprised of her husband, children and goddaughter. They were, and you can see why.

DDT use nearly wiped out the raptor by the 1970s. Now peregrine numbers are collapsing again in many countries and no one is quite sure why

For the past six years, Gordon Propp, who builds sets for British Columbia’s film industry, has kept a close watch over 13 peregrine falcon nests in and around Vancouver, including 10 on the city’s bridges.

A self-described wildlife enthusiast and citizen scientist, Propp has had a lifelong fascination with these raptors. “To see a creature that high up the food chain adapting to an urban environment, to me, that’s quite remarkable,” says Propp.

Hera spacecraft takes photos of red planet’s second moon, Deimos, while en route to asteroids 110m miles away

A European spacecraft has taken photos of Mars’s smaller and more mysterious second moon during its flight past the planet en route to a pair of asteroids more than 110m miles (177m km) away.

The Hera probe activated a suite of instruments to capture images of the red planet and Deimos, a small and lumpy 8-mile-wide moon, which orbits Mars along with the 14-mile-wide Phobos.

Election winner Friedrich Merz also trying to seal €500bn fund to revive economy before new parliament convenes

Germany’s outgoing parliament is meeting on Thursday to debate the creation of a €500bn (£420bn) fund for infrastructure investment and radical changes in the country’s borrowing limits in order to boost defence spending.

Friedrich Merz, whose conservatives won last month’s election and who is on the verge of becoming the new chancellor, wants to seal the funding deal before the new parliament convenes in less than two weeks. An expanded group of far-right and far-left MPs could oppose it in the new Bundestag, a so-called “blocking minority” Merz is keen to avoid.

• Usyk has 30 days to agree heavyweight title defence
• Britain’s Dubois had hoped for rematch with Ukrainian

Oleksandr Usyk has been ordered to start negotiations to defend his WBO heavyweight title against Joseph Parker, potentially scuppering Daniel Dubois’ hopes of a rematch with the Ukrainian.

The WBO has announced Usyk, who also holds the WBC and WBA crowns, has 30 days to “reach terms” for a mandatory title defence against New Zealand’s Parker or the sanctioning body will call for purse bids.

It will take a new movement of responsible readers and benefactors to protect independent media

When Disney announced yet another round of layoffs at ABC News last week, it came on the heels of a year in which almost 15,000 media jobs were lost – and capped off a quarter-century in which we’ve seen thousands of independent publications shut down or merged with larger conglomerates.

The upshot is that Americans now find ourselves trapped in an information environment more tightly controlled than ever by a handful of oligarchs.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she has contributed to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times

London, Manchester, Cardiff, Birmingham – I have favourite early-morning memories from each of them

I’ve had enough of city living. London has been my home on and off since I came to university in 1986. I’m tired of it. But there’s one bit I still love. That’s when I find myself right bang in the middle of town early in the morning. I feel the same way about all the other cities in which I ply my trade: Birmingham, Cardiff and Manchester, mainly. At about 6am, all cities have a similar character.

I write this in a cafe on Old Compton Street in Soho, in central London, at 6.30am. Here more than anywhere, it feels as though you’re in the eye of a storm. There aren’t many people about because the people, millions of them, are all jammed up on the roads and crammed on to public transport, getting in each other’s way, trying to get here. So for another hour or so we have it to ourselves. “We” being the early starters and a few late finishers.

Delis are turning to plant-based egg substitutes as bird flu and inflation push up the cost of the real thing. But how does the faux BEC compare?

Like a yellow taxi or the pizza rat, the bacon, egg and cheese sandwich has become a symbol of New York City. You can find a BEC in just about any bodega, or corner store, where it serves as a cheap, filling breakfast, quick lunch or hangover cure.

But with egg prices soaring across the country due to inflation and the worst avian influenza outbreak in history, delis are struggling to keep the price down. It’s been tough since 2022, when the bird flu began, with reports of farmers having to slaughter millions of birds a month. Francisco Marte, a bodega owner in the Bronx and president of the Bodega and Small Business Association, told NY1 that about 50% of delis had to raise prices on BECs to make a profit.

Tax-exempt special interest groups like lobbyists and non-profits are exercising power with little democratic oversight

The repression that began under the Biden administration has accelerated under Trump. Mahmoud Khalil’s detention by federal agents – reportedly Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers – despite his legal, permanent resident status will probably have its intended effect. People will speak up less; their fear of the irreversible harm meted out by a vengeful state is justified. Now we are all left to contend with the wreckage of the first amendment to the US constitution, which used to guarantee the right to speech in this country.

Responsibility for the erosion of our rights is attributable – in part – to the bipartisan embrace of the non-governmental, non-profit sector. That’s because from the 1940s onward, the federal government has ceded much state authority to philanthropies and non-profits. Those groups, in turn, have acted to craft policy – everything from how to develop equitable housing or the benefits of inoculating children to ensuring that speech targeting Israel is punishable by law.

In reaching the Champions League quarter-finals, Unai Emery’s side have taken a step closer to being immortalised

Glory comes in many forms. Perhaps the best Aston Villa could hope for on Wednesday was a game of little drama. They had in effect won the tie in Belgium last week; the last thing they wanted was to have to win it again. And yet, straightforward as it was, this was glorious, a night that in its outcome, if not the precise details, was epochal, marking Villa’s return to the European elite. Perhaps that will be a long‑term state, perhaps fleeting; either way, it is significant.

There is a tide in the affairs of clubs which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. For Villa this was one of the nights fans yearn for, a night of destiny, a night to be spoken of for a long time to come. Even five years ago it would have seemed absurd that all that they had to do to reach the Champions League quarter-finals was avoid a two-goal defeat against the Belgian champions.

PM says he is ‘bringing management of the NHS back into democratic control by abolishing the arms length body NHS England’

Starmer is now talking about regulatation, and giving examples of where he thinks it has gone too far.

l give you an example. There’s a office conversion in Bingley, which, as you know, is in Yorkshire. That is an office conversion that will create 139 homes.

But now the future of that is uncertain because the regulator was not properly consulted on the power of cricket balls. That’s 139 homes. Now just think of the people, the families, the individuals who want those homes to buy, those homes to make their life and now they’re held up. Why? You’ll decide whether this is a good reason because I’m going to quote this is the reason ‘because the ball strike assessment doesn’t appear to be undertaken by a specialist, qualified consultant’. So that’s what’s holding up these 139 homes.

When we had those terrible riots … what we saw then, in response, was dynamic. It was strong, it was urgent. It was what I call active government, on the pitch, doing what was needed, acting.

But for many of us, I think the feeling is we don’t really have that everywhere all of the time at the moment.

The state employs more people than we’ve employed for decades, and yet look around the country; do you see good value everywhere? Because I don’t.

I actually think it’s weaker than it’s ever been, overstretched, unfocused, trying to do too much, doing it badly, unable to deliver the security that people need.

Key factors will drive the Kremlin’s decision. Can Russia fight on and for what? Or is there more benefit in allying with Donald Trump?

At this stage of the crisis, it is important to be clear-sighted. The US-Ukraine meeting in Jeddah was a damage-control operation. Both parties reset relations that had been damaged, largely by Washington’s impatience. The US reversed its previous decisions in exchange for something Ukraine was ready to provide anyway: privileged access to Ukraine’s natural resource wealth and a willingness to start a peace process.

It is encouraging to see renewed US-Ukraine dialogue to end the war. As Churchill said, the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them. The public mugging in the Oval Office, calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator and the pause in military and intelligence support were hard to fathom. Ukrainians wondered why President Trump was putting the blame and the pressure on the victim, and protecting the aggressor. Trump’s “beautiful” deal involved bullying the weaker and reassuring the stronger. He finds it more natural to put pressure on allies, be it Ukraine or Canada, and relax it on adversaries.

Performing in Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist during A-levels was a lesson in low-art laughs and political anger that unites an audience

It was 1999. I was doing A-levels in Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, the former mining community I depict in my TV series Sherwood. My comprehensive school was one of the biggest in the country, one of a very small number with a working theatre. I wouldn’t be doing what I get to do now without that massive bit of luck.

I started doing loads of acting, and the department decided to do the first A-level drama they’d ever done because there were about a dozen of us who wanted to keep going after GCSEs.

As told to Lindesay Irvine

James Graham’s adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff is on tour until 5 July

In skijoring, competitors ski or snowboard while being pulled by horses at full gallop. It’s dizzying and dangerous – but for these athletes, it’s not their first rodeo

At first, the crowd seems incompatible. It’s as if someone took a wrong turn. Cowboy hats and helmets, saddles and ski boots, belt buckles and snowsuits – those two types of gear aren’t usually cut from the same cloth. But this weekend in the midwest, at this year’s Extreme Skijoring event, they go together like “Minnesota” and “nice”.

The sun is beating down on the snow-covered track at Canterbury Park, 25 minutes from downtown Minneapolis, where fur and fringe fill the stands and old-school country blares from the speakers. It’s noon, but people are already taking shotskis. There’s a bison named Kidd Buffalo off in the distance, and the American flag beats against the wind.

A rider and skier compete at the Extreme Skijoring event at Canterbury Park in Shakopee, Minnesota in February.

How do you choose a design you will love for life? And what can you do to cover up an old flame’s name? Top tattooists, including David Beckham’s artist, reveal all

“My customers generally come to me for my style,” says Aly Sidgwick, a tattoo artist at Take Note in Edinburgh. “I do a lot of woodland creatures, like bats, badgers and birds, and also mythical creatures.” Trawling through designs on social media can be helpful in choosing an artist, if a little overwhelming: “Work out if you want something bold and bright or soft and subtle,” says Sidgwick, “then look online and see what kind of styles there are and who does those designs in your town.” Be prepared to travel for the right artist, Sidgwick adds.

The defense secretary has empowered his lawyer Tim Parlatore to remake the judge advocate general’s corps

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is expected in the coming weeks to start a sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps as part of an effort to make the US military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The changes are poised to have implications across the military, as Hegseth’s office considers changes to the interpretation of the US rules of engagement on the battlefield to the way that charges are brought under the military justice system.

We would like to hear from people aged 18-24 about their childhood experiences with smartphones – positive or negative

We would like to hear from people aged 18-24 about their childhood experiences with smartphones and social media, positive or negative.

What approach would you take with your own children, as a result of lessons learned from your experience? Would you let them have access to a smartphone or social media, and how often? What rules would you put in place?

I’ve always believed the people are powerful. Now we know the world’s richest man does too

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a nightmare of notifications. On Sunday, it got worse. Elon Musk had tweeted and amplified inflammatory lies about me and Tesla Takedown, a growing national grassroots movement peacefully protesting at Tesla showrooms that I’m proudly a part of. Musk tweeted: “Costa is committing crimes.”

As a longtime local activist and organizer in Seattle, I’m accustomed to some conflict with powerful forces. The intention of the Tesla Takedown movement is to make a strong public stand against the tech oligarchy behind the Trump administration’s cruel and illegal actions, and to encourage Americans to sell their Teslas and dump the company’s stock. Protests like these – peaceful, locally organized, and spreading across the world – are at the heart of free speech in a democracy and a cornerstone of US political traditions. So it’s telling that the response from so-called “free speech absolutist” Musk has been to single out individuals – and spread lies about us and our movement. The harassment that has followed his post has been frightening.

A new exhibition in Los Angeles celebrates the life and work of a painter who died at 37 of Aids as he tried to preserve a record of those around him

Taken too early by the Aids pandemic, the artist Larry Stanton created work for an exuberant, prodigious handful of years before dying in 1984 at age 37. Championed by David Hockney, whose work his paintings at time resemble, Stanton excelled in creating portraits of gay men that are at once guileless and penetrating.

Clearing Gallery in Los Angeles is presenting a survey of the artist’s work titled Think of Me When It Thunders, a reference to one of the last things Stanton said to his longtime lover, Arthur Lambert, while on his hospital deathbed. Trying to assuage the pain of watching his confidant and lover deteriorating, Stanton told Lambert to “think of me when it thunders.” The latter later lamented that “it doesn’t thunder every day.”

Wisden Cricket Monthly have selected the 100 hundreds that changed the game. Here’s a taster of the list

107
Duke of Dorset’s XI v Wrotham
The Vine, Sevenoaks
August 1769

Labour targeting sickness and disability benefits that have ballooned amid increasingly ageing and unwell population

Keir Starmer’s government is aiming to cut billions of pounds from welfare spending before the spring statement.

The prime minister has warned that Britain’s benefits system is the “worst of all worlds”, before the government publishes a green paper on sickness and disability benefit changes next week. Starmer is facing the biggest rebellion of his premiership over the plans.

• Briton ‘under no assumptions that it will be easy’
• Hopes high at Melbourne for Hamilton and Ferrari

Lewis Hamilton has insisted he has nothing to prove and feels no pressure going into his first race for Ferrari at the Formula One season opener in Melbourne this weekend, with the seven-time champion simply revelling in what he described as the most exciting period of an already long and storied career.

Hamilton, who made his F1 debut in 2007 and is now entering his 19th season in the sport, will make his debut with Ferrari at Albert Park after six years at McLaren and then 12 at Mercedes.

• British No 1 defeats third seed 7-5, 6-4
• Draper will face Ben Shelton in quarter-finals

Jack Draper booked his place in the quarter-finals of the BNP Paribas Open with a straight-sets victory over third seed Taylor Fritz. Seven successive games from late in the first set turned the match in Draper’s favour before he navigated a late stumble to win 7-5, 6-4.

Serve dominated the first 10 games, the British No 1 seizing his only break opportunity in the 11th game and serving out to win the set. Draper, seeded 13th in Indian Wells, broke twice more as he surged into a 4-0 lead in the second set.

Ryanair runner has a big chance to become only the second winner at the festival from across the Channel since 2005

While the Gold Cup on Friday revolves around the odds-on Galopin Des Champs and his bid for a third consecutive success, the Ryanair Chase over two and a half miles on Thursday is much more open, with live contenders from Britain, Ireland and France, and the prospect of seeing the bold front‑runner Il Est Francais tackling Cheltenham for the first time, with top-class opponents including Fact To File and Protektorat in hot pursuit, is one to savour.

Il Est Francais (3.20) was a clear leader for much of the way in the King George VI Chase at Kempton at Christmas before Banbridge reeled him in on the run to the last, and his devastating front-running success in the Kauto Star Novices Chase at the same meeting in 2023 was one of the best performances by a novice in recent years.

As energy firms race to meet challenges of storing power, critics worry about fluctuations in the depth of the loch

Brian Shaw stood at the edge of Loch Ness and pointed to a band of glistening pebbles and damp sand skirting the shore. It seemed as if the tide had gone out.

Overnight, Foyers, a small pumped-storage power station, had recharged itself, drawing up millions of litres of water into a reservoir high up on a hill behind it, ready for release through its turbines to boost the UK’s electricity supply. That led to the surface of Loch Ness, the largest body of freshwater in the UK, falling by 14cm in a matter of hours.

Talks over ceasefire come as Russian operation to expel Kursk’s Ukrainian forces in final stage, claims Kremlin

• Trump hints at financial repercussions if Russia rejects Ukraine ceasefire

Suspilne, Ukraine's state broadcaster, reports that Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Odesa, and partially occupied Zaporizhzhia were the Ukrainian regions that suffered overnight Russian attacks. Ukraine’s military has claimed it shot down 74 of 117 drones overnight, and that Russia also launched an Iskander-M missile.

Russian media reports that Alexander Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, has arrived in Moscow.

Slyly investigating language and bias in media culture, this follow-up to Assembly confirms Brown as one of the most intelligent voices writing today

Should your social media occasionally present you with publishing-related content, you may have spotted proofs for Natasha Brown’s Universality on your feed last autumn. The excitement with which various “bookfluencers” clutched them was twofold. Brown appeared on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list in 2023, and Universality is the follow-up to her 2021 debut, Assembly, which saw her shortlisted for a Goldsmiths, Orwell, and Folio prize: its critical and commercial popularity has undoubtedly created a sense of anticipation for this next book. But alongside that fact was the feeling that the proof itself provoked as an aesthetic object: striking and slender, with its reflective gold jacket and spectrally engraved lettering. “Oh, it’s a book,” a family member of mine exclaimed on holding it, having been intrigued by what I was carrying around. It wasn’t an absurd response. Those early copies were fashioned to look like bars of gold, in reference to the fact that the first 49 pages are delivered in the style of a magazine feature about a young man who uses one to bludgeon the leader of a group called The Universalists, a faction of political activists (or squatters, depending on who you ask) attempting to form a self-sustaining “microsociety” on a Yorkshire farm during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It’s the sort of story that would set social media alight for days, or rather, as Brown wryly notes in the book’s second chapter, two weeks: “a modern parable [that exposes] the fraying fabric of British society”. Each detail is more eye-popping than the last. Both the farm and the gold belong to a banker named Richard Spencer, a man with “multiple homes, farming land, investments and cars […] a household staff; a pretty wife, plus a much younger girlfriend”. A perfect symbol, in short, of “the excessive fruits of late capitalism”. Jake, the young man doing the bludgeoning, is the son of a reactionary British journalist, Miriam “Lenny” Leonard, whose columns are designed less to provoke thought and more to go viral online. The Universalists themselves share DNA with Extinction Rebellion, and do just as good a job at polarising the great British public. At the centre of it all is that gold ingot, with which, post-bludgeoning, Jake absconds after police raid the farm. Hence the flashy proofs. Except – not really. Engraved on the back of each copy is a quote from the penultimate chapter: “Words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency.” After the first section the conceit of a magazine feature drops, with succeeding chapters told from different characters’ perspectives. We learn to read carefully.

Feasting polar bears, flying octopuses and gadgets galore – these stunning images won in their category at this year’s awards

To celebrate this significant milestone, our writer follows the flow of the artist’s inspiration, taking in sights that would have been familiar to the Old Master

For visitors in search of scenic walking routes, the province of North Holland is perhaps not an obvious choice. The landscape is famously as flat as the local pancakes and picturesque mountains, forests and waterfalls are in short supply.

Head into the countryside south of Amsterdam, however, and you can find lovely walking routes amid a quintessentially Dutch landscape of green fields, windmills and waterways. Walks along the Amstel River, which flows north into Amsterdam, also offer an opportunity to follow in famous footsteps. Rembrandt van Rijn lived for much of his life close to the river, was fond of walking its banks and produced some beautiful pictures here. With Amsterdam about to celebrate its 750th birthday in June, it’s a good moment to see the city from another angle, along the waterway which gave the city its name.

A season of debuts, intimate shows and memorable moments in the French capital

Former Philippines president filmed a video message en route to the Hague, saying ‘I will be responsible for everything’

Former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has said he will accept responsibility for his government’s so-called “war on drugs” in a video message filmed on board a plane shortly before he was taken into the custody of the international criminal court (ICC).

“Whatever happened in the past, I will be the front of our law enforcement and the military. I said this already, that I will protect you, and I will be responsible for everything,” he said.

A ‘dog act’ isn’t simply ruffling someone’s feathers – it’s an act of betrayal. Caitlin Cassidy explains the meaning of the Australian phrase to Julia Hollingsworth.

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Caitlin, this week Australia’s industry minister, Ed Husic, called US president Donald Trump’s tariffs on aluminium and steel a “dog act”. I grew up in New Zealand, a country so close to Australia and yet so free from the phrase “dog act”. Please tell me – what does it mean, and does it have anything to do with dogs?

Your nation has missed out on a truly scathing critique.

The documents would ultimately inform whether Musk has been operating unconstitutionally to the extent Doge’s activities should be halted

Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, have been ordered by a federal judge to turn over a wide array of records that would reveal the identities of staffers and internal records related to efforts to aggressively cut federal government spending and programs.

US district judge Tanya Chutkan’s order forces Musk to produce documents related to Doge’s activities as part of a lawsuit brought by 14 Democratic state attorneys general that alleges Musk violated the constitution by wielding powers that only Senate-confirmed officials should possess.