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.”
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
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.
While all eyes are on the Middle East and Ukraine, brutality still reigns in many other regions suffering many other conflicts
The world is becoming a more dangerous place. It’s an often-heard sentiment these days, but is it really true? Historical comparisons are of limited help.
Last week’s 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis between 1940 and 1945, offered a grim reminder of how indescribably brutal life can be when war reigns unchecked. Could things get any worse?
Rachel Reeves is all for growth; her party and the country needs it. But still we hear nothing about the most obvious solution…
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a satirical book,It Can’t Happen Here, about a lying demagogue, Buzz Windrip, who rises to power and transforms the American scene for the worse within months.
There were fears of parallels with the plot of the book when Trump first became president. This time, the fears are far more serious, as Trump’s barrage of executive orders challenges the constitutional checks and balances designed by the founding fathers to inhibit the autocratic desires of a future wrong’un becoming president.
Economists fear full-on, tit-for-tat trade war as US also imposes tariffs on Mexico and China
Mark Carney, the favourite to replace Justin Trudeau as the Canadian prime minister, has vowed that his country is “going to stand up to a bully” after Donald Trump imposed 25% tariffs on goods coming in from Canada.
There are now 25% tariffs on goods coming into the US from Canada and Mexico, while China is being hit with tariffs of 10% on imported goods, leading some economists to fear the outbreak of a full-on, tit-for-tat trade war.
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, announces tit-for-tat 25% tariffs and warns of impeded access to ‘vital goods critical to US security’
The leaders of Canada and Mexico have hit back after Donald Trump signed an order authorizing drastic tariffs of up to 25% on their exports to the US, while China said it would complain to the World Trade Organization after it was also targeted by the president.
Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, on Saturday night made a televised address announcing concrete measures including a tit-for-tat 25% tariff phased in across C$155bn ($107bn) worth of American products. Trudeau said Trump had put at risk US consumers’ and industries’ access to much-needed Canadian critical minerals and resources including oil, energy and timber. The prime minister promised to work with Canada’s provinces to review dealings with the United States.
Move would threaten life-saving global humanitarian aid programs, from HIV/Aids treatments to clean water access
The website for the US Agency for International Development, or USAid, appeared to be offline on Saturday, as the Trump administration moves to put the free-standing agency, and its current $42.8bn budget for global humanitarian operations, under state department control.
A message stating that the “server IP address could not be found” appeared when attempts were made to access the website on Saturday.
Aviation experts say piloting Black Hawk helicopters is a complex challenge but army defends training operations
In March 2023, two US army Black Hawk helicopters collided and crashed into a Kentucky farmer’s field after a nighttime evacuation training mission, killing nine service members.
That crash was among a dozen fatal crashes during army Black Hawk training missions since 2014 that claimed the lives of 47 service members and in April 2023 helped prompt Pentagon officials to temporarily ground and provide more training to all army aviators not involved in critical missions.
The US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, indicated multiple jihadists were killed and no civilians were harmed
The US military has conducted airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) operatives in Somalia, the first attacks in the country during Donald Trump’s second term as president.
The strikes were carried out against IS-Somalia in the Golis Mountains, in Somalia’s semi-autonomous northern Puntland region. In 2015, IS-Somalia splintered from al-Shabaab, a much larger and more widely known jihadist organisation affiliated with al-Qaida, which controls parts of southern Somalia.
Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor chair to lead party still reeling from extensive losses
Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor party, won the crowded race to become the next chair of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday.
The move provides Martin with a powerful perch to determine the messaging and trajectory of a party that is still reeling from its extensive losses in the November election and confronting four more years of Donald Trump’s leadership.
The blazes killed 29 people and are estimated to have caused more than $250bn in damages
The Palisades and Eaton wildfires, which killed at least 29 people and burned across about 60 sq miles (155 sq km) around Los Angeles, have been fully contained.
California’s department of forestry and fire protection’s announcement on Friday came more than three weeks after the two blazes battered this highly populated area of southern California, laying waste to entire neighborhoods – including Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Containment refers to how much of a perimeter has been established around a fire to prevent it from growing, according to NBC News.
Other swaps due to new ‘rotation’ include NPR for Breitbart, NBC for One America News and Politico for HuffPost
The Trump administration’s program to shake up media representation at official briefings and press calls in Washington is set to affect the Pentagon, with credentialed media being rotated out of assigned workspaces for media newcomers.
The conservative-leaning One America News Network will replace NBC News, Breitbart will be given space held by National Public Radio, the New York Post has been offered the New York Times’ workspace and HuffPost will replace Politico.
Magnificent, irreplaceable 20th-century architecture made with craft and imagination was destroyed in the Palisades wildfires
Pacific Palisades and its surrounding neighbourhoods, which have burned so ferociously over the past three weeks, happen to be the location of some beautiful and magnificent 20th-century architecture. Or were, as the fire has taken a terrible toll.
Houses by the émigré Austrian modernist Richard Neutra have gone, as have most of the Park Planned Homes of 1948, an idealistic experiment in affordable modern living by the architect Gregory Ain. Stone chimney stacks are all that remain of the scaled-up cabin that was Will Rogers’ ranch house. His 30-horse stables, in their centre a rotonda like an equine chapter house, are ashes.
Secretary of defense says mission was for evacuating government officials in the event of a catastrophe or attack
Top US officials have said the military helicopter that collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River on Wednesday was on a training mission for evacuating members of government in the event of a catastrophe or attack.
The US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, told Fox News that the helicopter was performing a “continuity of government” drill designed to help pilots “rehearse in ways that would reflect a real-world scenario”. Hegseth declined to elaborate, saying he didn’t want to get “into anything that’s classified”.
Meant to lend credibility to his nomination to head HHS, the letter is signed by some doctors disciplined for not following Covid guidelines
A letter submitted to the US Senate that states it was sent by physicians in support of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination as secretary of health and human services includes the names of doctors who have had their licenses revoked or suspended, or who have faced other disciplinary actions, the Associated Press has found.
The letter was meant to lend credibility to Kennedy’s nomination, which has faced strenuous opposition from medical experts due to his two decades of anti-vaccine activism. Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a medical doctor who boasts on his official website of an effort he created to vaccinate 36,000 children against hepatitis B, expressed hesitancy about Kennedy’s nomination and is seen as a key vote.
When asked about his plans to visit the crash site, Trump made a joke: ‘The water? You want me to go swimming?’
Every day, the world seems to get stupider and stupider and our leaders seem to get nastier and nastier. Nobody expects empathy or accuracy from Donald Trump but, even by the extremely low standards to which he is held, his reaction to the tragic mid-air collision in Washington DC that killed 67 people on Wednesday night was shocking.
Trump’s pick to lead national intelligence has upset foreign policy hawks by not condemning the NSA whistleblower
A smooth path to the pinnacle of America’s intelligence pyramid was never in the cards for Tulsi Gabbard.
Dogged by a catalogue of eyebrow-raising past statements about Russia, Ukraine and Bashar al-Assad, accusations of parroting Kremlin talking points, and a lack of experience in intelligence (not even having sat on a relevant congressional committee), Gabbard was always a counterintuitive choice to sit atop the 18 US spy agencies and their roughly 70,000 employees.
Only 35% of Punxsutawney Phil’s winter predictions are accurate, while Staten Island Chuck’s forecasts have 85% accuracy
Scientists have cast doubt on the reliability of America’s most celebrated rodent forecaster – whose apparent knack of predicting how long winter will last forms a hallowed tradition in the US.
Punxsutawney Phil, made famous by the 1993 film Groundhog Day, attracts thousands of visitors every 2 February to the Pennsylvania town from which he takes his name.
His second term seems to represent an unassailable victory for conservative white men – but soon he’ll be another incumbent in an anti-incumbent world
Why exactly is Donald Trump’s new presidency so disorienting? So far, explanations have tended to focus on its manic pace, contempt for political conventions and blatant subversion of supposedly one of the world’s most robust democracies.
But all these elements were also present in his first presidency. Meanwhile, other features of both his terms, such as his cult of personality, scapegoating of immigrants and accusation that liberal elites have caused national decline, are standard practice for hard-right strongmen, and have been for at least a century.
Trump’s pretense as king has quickly devolved into his strutting insult routine. He will always exploit tragedy to display his self-regard
Outrages of Donald Trump’s rancid character topple over each other so rapidly and in such volume that they long ago became banal. His vileness is unremarked upon, his rottenness unworthy of further commentary. Trump’s offensiveness is an unspoken assumption. Rules and norms exist for him to break. More, he is rewarded. Meta, after discarding monitoring of hateful content and disinformation on Facebook, is paying him $25m in tribute to settle his lawsuit against it for having banned him after his attempted coup on January 6 and his potential “instances of violence” and threats to “public safety”. All is forgiven, if not forgotten. There are no gates; there are no gatekeepers. Let the bad times roll.
But Trump crashed through a new boundary after an army helicopter collided with an airliner about to land at Washington’s Reagan National airport on 29 January with the loss of 67 lives. While police and firefighters were still recovering bodies from the Potomac River, before any report from the National Transportation Safety Board and evidence was fully gathered, Trump went on TV to spew blame against enemies within and to deflect responsibility.
Connexion
