During the trip, the White House also confirmed that Trump would meet with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander whose forces helped overthrow Bashar al-Assad in 2024. The informal meeting will be the first face-to-face meeting between a US president and a Syrian leader since 2000, when Bill Clinton met with the late leader Hafez al-Assad in Geneva.
League playoffs clash with international assignment
Buttler, Bethell, Jacks could have allegiances tested
England expect most of the five IPL players picked for their one-day international series against West Indies to report for international duty rather than complete the rescheduled tournament.
The IPL’s league phase will now conclude on 27 May, two days before England play their opening game against West Indies at Edgbaston, meaning that Jofra Archer and Jamie Overton, whose teams have already been eliminated from playoff contention, will certainly be free to play for their country.
The White House says it is borrowing from Bernie Sanders and adopts rhetoric once dismissed as dangerous to lift its flagging poll ratings
It’s striking to see Donald Trump, who built his re-election campaign around attacking the “radical left”, now borrowing some of its economic policies. In just months, he has shifted from denouncing “communist” price controls to saying he would implement them, and from defending tax breaks for the wealthy to proposing tax increases on those earning more than $2.5m a year if it benefits poorer Americans. These moves echo longstanding proposals from progressives like Bernie Sanders – despite Mr Trump’s past efforts to portray such ideas as “lunatic”. The irony is hard to miss.
Consider recent policy announcements that mirror a liberal-left agenda. Capping credit card interest rates was a Sanders campaign promise before it was a Trump one. And it may happen – courtesy of an unlikely alliance between Mr Sanders and the Republican senator Josh Hawley. Slashing drug prices by executive fiat? Absolutely, says Robert F Kennedy Jr, Mr Trump’s secretary of health, crediting Mr Sanders for the idea. The Vermont senator shot back, saying the administration’s plan would be “thrown out” by judges – and that meaningful reform required legislation.
In a letter, Milieudefensie says it wants to stop firm developing new oil and gas projects ‘to curb crisis’
Climate campaigners in the Netherlands have promised to take Shell to court for a second time to force the energy company to stop developing new oil and gas projects.
In a letter to Shell, the Dutch climate non-profit Milieudefensie vowed to take legal action because the company has 700 oil and gas projects in development that will continue to drive up carbon emissions despite efforts to slow global heating.
Picnic PostNL rider claims maiden grand tour stage win
Mads Pedersen finishes fourth and retains maglia rosa
Casper van Uden claimed his maiden grand tour victory in a sprint finish on stage four of the Giro d’Italia to top an all-Dutch podium in Lecce. The Picnic PostNL rider Van Uden powered ahead of his compatriot Olav Kooij (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Maikel Zijlaard (Tudor) in a bunch dash for the line. Mads Pedersen finished fourth to retain the maglia rosa.
After the first three stages in Albania and a subsequent rest day, the Giro returned to Italy in Puglia, with a mostly-flat 189-kilometre run from Alberobello to Lecce.
US health secretary went for dip in Rock Creek, which officials report is toxic due to bacteria and pathogens
The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has revealed that he went swimming with his children in a Washington DC creek that authorities have said is toxic due to contamination by an upstream, ageing sewer system.
The “Make America healthy again” crusader attracted attention for the Mother’s Day dip in Dumbarton Oaks Park with his grandchildren Bobcat and Cassius, which he posted about on X. He was also accompanied by relatives Amaryllis, Bobby, Kick and Jackson.
It’s a little bit rich to talk about food insecurity in the US when your last name is Trump. But after stints as a feminist influencer and political adviser, the president’s favourite daughter has found a new path
Ivanka Trump has had her manicured fingers in many pies. She’s designed jewellery and shoes. She’s written a book called Women Who Work, marketed at women who work, full of inspirational quotes and touching anecdotes about how she, a woman, has sometimes worked so hard that she has had to sacrifice massages.
That was Early Influencer Ivanka, anyway. Then came Ivanka’s political era. During Donald Trump’s first term as president, she appointed herself Daddy’s special adviser and did a lot of very special advising. In that capacity she gallivanted around the globe, dropping in on the G20 and hobnobbed with world leaders, all while insisting: “I try to stay out of politics.” And, of course, the president’s eldest daughter, who very nearly became the head of the World Bank, tirelessly advocated for women’s economic empowerment.
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Cuts follow push to slim management ranks, despite headcount still being up year-on-year in March
Microsoft says it is laying off nearly 3% of its entire workforce.
The tech giant didn’t disclose the total amount of lost jobs, but it will amount to about 6,000 people. Microsoft employed 228,000 full-time workers as of last June, the last time it reported its annual headcount. About 55% of those workers were in the US.
The leftwing, pro-Palestine streamer’s interrogation by airport officials on his return to the US shows a chilling escalation of the war on free speech
Where are all the free speech warriors on the right now? Hasan Piker, a popular streamer with 4.5 million followers across YouTube and Twitch, who has been hailed by mainstream publications such as the New Yorker and New York Times as the left’s answer to the deluge of rightwing internet influencers, says he was detained and questioned for hours by border control agents as he re-entered the US (Piker is a US citizen). It is an instructive moment. Countries that behave like this towards political commentators and dissenting voices who are their own citizens are either nakedly authoritarian, or well on the way.
Piker was reportedly interrogated at length not just about Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah, but his views on Donald Trump. The 33-year-old pundit – an unapologetic champion of the Palestinian cause – stuck to a message of opposing “endless bloodshed” and siding with civilians. That the biggest progressive streamer in the US was subjected to this experience is emblematic of a phenomenon that requires an accurate and insistent description: it is the biggest assault on free speech in the west since the height of McCarthyism seven decades ago.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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The wooden statues commemorate the author’s time in the area while recuperating after the first world war and a moment that inspired a tale of star-crossed love in Middle-earth
Wooden carved statues of JRR Tolkien and his wife, Edith, will be unveiled in an East Yorkshire village next month, celebrating the area’s influence on the writer.
Tolkien spent nearly 18 months in Hull and East Yorkshire while recovering from trench fever during the first world war, and the area’s landscape is believed to have inspired his works, including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
Prime minister, who led Liberals to re-election last month, named Anita Anand to foreign affairs portfolio
Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, has announced a major cabinet shakeup, including a new foreign minister, as he shapes a newly re-elected Liberal government.
Carney, who replaced Justin Trudeau earlier this year and won the election last month, named Anita Anand as foreign minister, replacing Mélanie Joly, who becomes the minister of industry. Anand previously served in roles including defense minister.
Big tech companies have exploited human language for AI gain. Now they want us to see their products as trustworthy collaborators
After publishing my third book in early April, I kept encountering headlines that made me feel like the protagonist of some Black Mirrorepisode. “Vauhini Vara consulted ChatGPT to help craft her new book ‘Searches,’” one of them read. “To tell her own story, this acclaimed novelist turned to ChatGPT,” said another. “Vauhini Vara examines selfhood with assistance from ChatGPT,” went a third.
The publications describing Searches this way were reputable and fact-based. But their descriptions of my book – and of ChatGPT’s role in it – didn’t match my own reading. It was true that I had put my ChatGPT conversations in the book, but my goal had been critique, not collaboration. In interviews and public events, I had repeatedly cautioned against using large language models such as the ones behind ChatGPT for help with self-expression. Had these headline writers misunderstood what I’d written? Had I?
The president’s migrant crackdown has fueled an increasingly angry atmosphere – and some border agents are praising ‘Daddy Trump’
Osvaldo Ruiz and a friend were hiking through an isolated stretch of mountains, just a few miles from the sprawling US-Mexico border wall that fringes San Diego, when the federal agent stopped them in their tracks.
It was late March, mid-morning, and Ruiz, who works for a local non-profit called Border Angels, was busy. That day he was scouting a new route where his group could leave life-saving water and food for the sporadic waves of migrants who still cross through these desolate borderlands. Ruiz and his friend, a fellow Border Angels member, already knew they were being watched. A helicopter had been buzzing overhead for the past several hours, tracking them.
With pollen season in full swing, here is what to know about allergy treatments and when to seek medical help
Allergy season is always rough, and it has only been getting worse.
Warming global temperatures and an increasing number of extreme weather events have made the pollen season in North America 20 days longer than it was in 1990, according to one 2021 study.
The jubilantly gory horror franchise returns with a hugely entertaining sixth installment which sets up an entire family tree for the slaughter
Final Destination, the giddy and splatterific franchise where the grim reaper finds increasingly cartoonish and comical ways to get back at those who think they’ve cheated death, has been sitting things out for more than a decade. Maybe that’s telling.
In the time since, we saw the rise of so-called “elevated horror”, a trend that arguably began with 2014’s The Babadook and enjoyed its biggest success with last fall’s Longlegs. Those earnestly artful films tend to shrug off the horror genre’s baser pleasures to instead mine drama, trauma and influences such as Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and Nicolas Roeg. For those feeling a bit trauma-fatigued, I’m happy to say Final Destination is not only back but better than ever.
Eight federal agencies will terminate a further $450m in grants to Harvard University, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday, escalating its antagonization of the elite institution over what officials frame as inadequate responses to antisemitism on campus.
The latest funding cuts come after the administration cancelled $2.2bn in federal funding to the university, bringing the total financial penalty to approximately $2.65bn.
The father of the Norwegian track and field superstar Jakob Ingebrigtsen should go to prison for two and a half years for “a regime of repeated abuse” that spanned a decade, prosecutors have told a court in Norway.
Summing up the state’s case, the prosecutor Angjerd Kvernenes said that Jakob and his sister, Ingrid, had suffered physical and mental abuse at the hands of their father and former coach, Gjert, which began when Jakob was seven years old.
Gyökeres has been heavily linked with a return to England in recent transfer windows. Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United have all been credited with an interest in the Swedish striker, who has scored 38 goals in the Portuguese top flight this season – 20 more than his nearest challenger. Sporting will be reluctant to lose their star but the former Brighton and Coventry player seems perfectly suited to the rigours of Premier League football. This summer might be the one when he leaves Lisbon.
Ukrainian president says if Russian leader does not arrive it will indicate ‘that he does not want to end the war’
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has doubled down on his promise to wait in Turkey on Thursday for face-to-face talks with Vladimir Putin, calling it a test of Russia’s willingness to pursue peace.
Speaking to journalists in Kyiv on Tuesday, Zelenskyy said he planned to wait for Putin in Ankara alongside the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, adding that he would travel to Istanbul if Putin opted to hold the meeting there.
On Monday evening the airport had far fewer than the 14 controllers agreed on between the union and regulators
New Jersey’s Newark Liberty airport, one of three major airports serving New York City, had just three air traffic controllers on duty on Monday, which was well short of the 14 called for and forced air regulators to delay arriving flights for up to seven hours.
The air traffic controller shortfall, first reported by the New York Times, comes amid a growing number of problems for the hub. In a little more than a week, Newark has suffered three communications blackouts, rendering the control tower unable to track or communicate with planes for up to 90 seconds.
Donald Trump is all too comfortable brushing aside criticism from Democrats and the “fake news media”, but when the flak over his decision to accept a $400m luxury jet from the Qatari government comes from his most devoted supporters it might behoove the US president to listen.
Stars of Trump’s Make America great again (Maga) firmament are speaking out in unambiguous terms against the plan for him to be donated a jet described as a “palace in the sky” and convert it into Air Force One. They are damning the idea in Trump’s own language – telling him this is not “draining the swamp” as he promised to do during his first presidency, and nor does it conform to the theme of his second Oval Office term: “America First.”
The US president has the leverage to force through a ceasefire. If he does not, he will implicitly signal approval of what looks like a plan of total destruction
Donald Trump would like a big foreign policy win as he embarks on his tour of the Middle East this week. He could secure one – and save lives – by demanding that Israel agree to a lasting ceasefire in exchange for the release of all hostages held in Gaza. He might prefer to avoid the issue, but no other leader has the leverage to force its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to end this war. If Mr Trump instead backs Israel’s current proposals, he will put the US imprimatur on what looks like a plan of total destruction.
Israel’s attacks have already killed more than 52,000 people in Gaza, according to local health authorities – the vast majority of them civilians, many of them children. Bakeries, hospitals and schools have been obliterated. Aid has been blocked for two months. Gaza faces famine. Last week, Israeli officials briefed that if no deal to free the hostages seized in the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023 is reached, its forces would flatten Gaza, forcing Palestinians to crush into a single “humanitarian area” or flee abroad. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said that Gaza would be “entirely destroyed”, and “totally despairing” Palestinians would realise “there is no hope”. He has said that freeing hostages is “not the most important thing”.
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He is a transfixing screen presence – but he lives for the raw thrill of the stage. As he takes over the Venice theatre biennale, the star lets us know what to expect: cut-up plays and a Pinocchio unlike any other
Sitting in his house in Rome, an overstuffed bookcase and a distressed wooden door behind him, Willem Dafoe scrunches his hair as though kneading the thoughts in his head. The 69-year-old, Wisconsin-born actor could pass today for any genial, bristle-moustached handyman in checked shirt and horn-rimmed specs. (Perhaps he even built the bookcase and distressed the door himself.) But it’s that hand that is the giveaway: it keeps scrunching as he talks until the hair is standing in jagged forks. As a visualisation of what is happening in his brain, it is second to none.
We are speaking in April on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth (and death), which feels apt given that it is Dafoe’s two-year appointment as artistic director of the international theatre festival at the Venice Biennale that has occasioned our video call today. He looks sheepish when I point out the significance of the date, then reverts to his usual wolfish expression. “Ah, Shakespeare doesn’t care,” he says with a wave of the hand. Dafoe has never had much of a relationship with those plays. “There’s a lot of pointing and indicating when people perform them. A lot of leading the audience. Those are things I don’t think are very vital. But it’s such beautiful writing, and I’ve become interested in doing Shakespeare in my dotage.” Could there be a Lear on the horizon? “Why not?” he says with a goofy wobble of the head.
Quebec recount awarded seat to Liberal challenger by one vote, but a missing ballot could throw contest into disarray
Canada’s Liberal party has inched closer to a majority government after a judicial recount found the party had won an electoral district by just a single vote. But a voter has also claimed her ballot wasn’t counted, throwing the result once more into disarray.
Officials at Elections Canada at the weekend finished a recount for the Quebec district of Terrebonne, where the incumbent Bloc Québécois candidate Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné appeared to have beaten her Liberal challenger Tatiana Auguste.
Even his Maga pals are questioning the lavish gift. Don’t they know not to look a wooden gift horse in the mouth?
If you’re familiar with your folklore, you’ll know the story of The Emperor’s New Plane, in which some barely-even-wily out-of-towners turn up with an offer to give a vain and selfish leader a new $400m Boeing 747-8. The merits of accepting this “flying palace” are invisible only to those who are stupid or incompetent, which means the emperor would literally be an idiot not to take it, right?
Right? And so it is that Donald Trump is STUNNED that anyone could be so dumb as to not think he should accept the offer of a state-of-the-art griftliner from the Qatari royal family. This will supposedly become Air Force One, with that other candelabra-free dumpster presumably pensioned off to ferry someone tasteless and irrelevant. (Eric Trump?)
US owners confirm it will become the country’s first major stadium dedicated to a women’s team next season
Goodison Park, one of the UK’s oldest football stadiums, has been saved from demolition and will become the country’s first major stadium dedicated solely to a women’s team next season.
Hailed as a gamechanging move for women’s football, Everton Women will kick off their first season at Goodison in September, 133 years after the men’s team started playing at the ground in Walton, Liverpool.
LA judge to decide whether Erik and Lyle Menendez should get chance at freedom after serving 30 years for murder
Erik and Lyle Menendez returned to court on Tuesday for a long-awaited hearing where a Los Angeles judge will decide whether the brothers should get a chance at freedom after serving nearly three decades in prison for the double murder of their parents in 1989.
The resentencing hearing, which is moving ahead after months of delays, is expected to last two days. If Judge Michael Jesic shortens their sentences, the brothers would still need approval from the state’s parole board to be released.
Should carpet as a medium be as highly regarded as painting with oils and sculpting with marble? Anna Perach, an artist born in Ukraine, talks us through her new show inspired by Hoffman’s love triangle tale The Sandman
‘I’m led by stories,” Anna Perach tells me as we sit in her sun-drenched studio at Gasworks in London. The wall behind me is stacked with a rainbow of yarns, and on her desk sit a collection of texts that point to the key themes of her work: femininity, magic and the uncanny. Perach’s life-size humanoid sculptures made of tufted carpet surround us, their presence equal parts eerie and warming. Their strange humanity seems steeped in narrative, which she draws from folklore and fairytales.
The sculptures cry out to be touched, with their beautifully fluffy, varied and multicoloured surfaces. They are, as she says, “aesthetically overbearing”. Perach’s work is in part about the porous boundaries between bodies and the world. Their intense tactility, meanwhile, brings out a childish desire to sink your fingers deep into a comforting, if slightly spooky, softness. And their hollowness asks the viewer to imagine a body inside them – when exhibiting the works, performers do inhabit them and bring them to life.
Time-lapse footage reveals cardiac cells in a mouse embryo begin to organise themselves during early development
The moment a heart begins to form has been captured in extraordinary time-lapse images for the first time.
The footage reveals cardiac cells in a mouse embryo begin to spontaneously organise themselves into a heart-like shape early in development. Scientists say the technique could provide new insights into congenital heart defects, which affect nearly one in 100 babies.
The greatest trick Carlo Ancelotti ever pulled was raising one eyebrow at 45 degrees. Ancelotti’s left eyebrow has become a symbol of his management style: easy-going, slightly rakish, the Jeffrey Lebowski. It’s in total contrast to the hyperactive supercoaches who dream of chalkboards and third-man runs. Even when he’s facing the sack or when his team are losing 5-1 on aggregate, Ancelotti is doubtlessly dreaming of cigars and opera. But Ol’ Man Carlo must know something because he just keeps rolling on. The next stop is Brazil. Well, OK, Europe because that’s where Brazil play most of their games these days, but you get the point: DON CARLO X SELEÇÃO!
Having read Ken Muir’s idea for Newcastle to use a QR code for a logo (yesterday’s Football Daily letters), it strikes me that this is less than an ideal plan, given that their home shirt is already a barcode. What next, using RFID chips implanted into every shirt?” – Nick Jeffery (and 1,056 others).
At least Dave Challinor’s Stockport crew had the chance to recover from the ridiculous decision in their playoff first leg (yesterday’s News, Bits and Bobs – full email edition). Allow me to present the FAI Cup final from 2003, as Longford Town, leading 1-0, break away following an injury-time corner for St Patrick’s Athletic (about 10 minutes into the linked video). It doesn’t look wrong, but the St Pat’s keeper had gone up for the corner, meaning that the pictured defender is the last man, putting the Longford player a good five yards offside. He went on to score and secure a 2-0 win for Longford. From memory, nobody at all reacted, suggesting that not only the players and staff, but the match officials weren’t fully up on the offside law” – Mike Slattery.
The implication, in Football Daily and elsewhere, that Liverpool fans who booed Trent Alexander Arnold were hypocritical by virtue of the fact they also sing You’ll Never Walk Alone at every opportunity struck me as odd. As far as I recall it’s a song intended to remind someone at their lowest ebb that someone else has their back. I don’t remember the verse that claims this is still the case even if you take advantage of a situation in order to get what you want, while at the same time turning your back on those who nurtured, supported and lavishly rewarded you. Or maybe that’s in Carousel: The Director’s Cut” – Dave Evans.
Re Trent: if you love him, let him go ️️️” – Mark Gillett.
Some will argue the actor’s legacy of landmark film roles should not be tainted by his conviction for sexual assault. But it will
It seems strangely appropriate that 76-year-old French movie star Gérard Depardieu was found guilty of sexual assault and given an 18-month suspended prison sentence on the eve of the 78th edition of the Cannes film festival. Both Cannes and Depardieu, born in the 40s, belong to an old world, but it seems only one of them has managed to adapt to the times we live in, especially since the #MeToo movement.
For anyone who followed the trial closely, it was never in doubt that justice would prevail and that a French monument was about to fall. Once the accusers, two female technicians who worked as set-dresser and assistant director on the film Les Volets Verts in 2021, had pressed charges and the facts been exposed in court, there was little doubt as to the dignity of the victims and the veracity of the sexual assaults. But what was particularly striking was how Depardieu behaved throughout the trial. His attitude was an aggravating factor for the public but also the court. Unrepentant, uncomprehending, lamenting that he didn’t understand this new world, Depardieu pretended to be physically frailer than he was, and lacked gravitas.
Featuring moving interviews from the relatives of victims and chilling new footage of a handcuffed Fred locating the bodies at Cromwell Street, a new Netflix documentary pushes the true crime genre to its limit
Dez Chambers waited 15 years to get the news she didn’t want. All that time, she thought her missing little sister, Alison, might still be out there. Dez would watch documentaries about homelessness to see if perhaps she’d recognise a face, and even attempted the Salvation Army’s family tracing service. “It was hope,” she says from her home in the Netherlands.
Hope faded one day in 1994. Calling her from the UK, Dez’s mother-in-law cried down the phone. There was panic, there was confusion, “so I had to ask her. And then she said it was in the papers that the remains had been identified as Alison.”
Manufacturing and coalmining aren’t the way to make America great again. Here’s what would actually restore good-paying jobs
On Sunday night, the US announced that it was cutting tariffs on Chinese imports from 145% to 30%, for 90 days, and the Chinese are dropping tariffs on US goods from 125% to 10%, also for 90 days.
The stock market soared on the news. (Anyone with inside knowledge of the deal could have made a killing.)
Tory party withdraws whip from Central Suffolk and North Ipswich MP over alleged incidents at Groucho Club in London in 2023
An MP has been charged with sexual assault over alleged incidents at London’s exclusive Groucho Club in 2023, the Crown Prosecution Service has said.
Patrick Spencer, the MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich and son of the former Conservative treasurer Michael Spencer, was charged with two counts of sexual assault against two separate women, said the CPS.
The government’s new policy will take us back to an uglier, more dangerous place – and it’s not even supported by the data
How do you reduce immigration while at the same time boosting growth? Labour’s recent immigration white paper sets out a supposedly clear answer. Since the recent “surge” in immigration was driven by the system shifting away from “higher-skilled migration”, it has “distorted the labour market” and undermined the UK’s productivity and GDP.
This argument, which has been made in increasingly shrill tones by the rightwing press and thinktanks over the past two years, was echoed by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, who tweeted that “the Tories ran an immigration system that relied on cheap foreign labour”. It sounds plausible. There’s just one problem. It doesn’t fit the facts, and the government knows it.
Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant
Trading away Luka Dončić made Nico Harrison a reviled figure among Dallas fans. Now he has an unexpected chance to redeem himself
Dallas is ground zero for one of America’s most historic conspiracy theories. Just half a mile from the grassy knoll where John F Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963, sits the American Airlines Center – the newest site of Dallas conspiracy lore.
While this year’s NBA draft lottery took place in Chicago on Monday night, the heart of the drama haunts Dallas. Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison’s career lives to see another day after his team improbably beat 1.8% odds to land the No 1 pick in this year’s draft – which they will almost certainly use to pick Duke phenom Cooper Flagg, one of the most talented college players in years. The 6ft 9in wing will presumably usher in the first full season of Dallas’s post-Luka Dončić era. Mavs fans almost have to laugh, or maybe raise a very suspicious eyebrow. With the NBA’s four worst teams (Washington Wizards, Charlotte Hornets, Utah Jazz, and New Orleans Pelicans) all taking a nosedive in the lottery, the storyline is tailor-made for a grand conspiracy theory.
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