News (old posts, page 946)

Trump defends tariffs as more trade announcements expected – live updates

President Donald Trump said that there would be more trade-related announcements this morning

Sources in the European Union, which Donald Trump said could expect a letter regarding its tariff deal in the next 48 hours, said they believed a framework agreement would be reached this week. The agreement is expected to include headline tariff arrangements for a limited number of sectors including cars, steel and medical devices.

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, told the Bundestag today: “I am cautiously optimistic that we can succeed in reaching an agreement with the US in the next few days, by the end of the month at the latest.”

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My Dad just died … again! A close inspection of TV’s most shocking plot-holes

A character just got bumped off for the second time in And Just Like That – but it’s far from the first show to mess up in this way. Just look at Friends!

Now in its third season, it’s safe to say that HBO’s Sex and the City revival And Just Like That has struggled to capture the zeitgeist in the same way as its mother series. But that all changes now because, in its most recent episode, shrugged off its tired old premise to become something new. Now it is nothing less than a show about the miracle of human reanimation.

The most recent episode was entitled Silent Mode. In it, Nicole Ari Parker’s character Lisa learned that her 90-year-old father had died. As she prepared to deliver a moving eulogy, sharp-eyed And Just Like That loyalists were all grabbed by the same sudden thought: wait, hadn’t he already died once before?

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Ice is about to become the biggest police force in the US | Judith Levine

Trump’s budget bill is creating a colossus with more resources than many national militaries

On Thursday, congressional Republicans passed Trump’s 1,000-page budget, and the president signed it on Saturday. The rich will get obscenely richer. The poor will be hungrier and sicker, work more precarious, and the planet unrelentingly hotter. The symmetry is elegant: cuts to healthcare and food programs average about $120bn each year over the next decade, while the tax cuts will save households earning more than $500,000 about $120bn a year.

Trump got what he wanted. But enriching himself and his wealthy friends at the expense of everyone else has long been his life purpose. It was not until he became president, with the Heritage Foundation’s wonks, the deportation czar Stephen Miller, and six loyal supreme courtiers behind him, that he could reshape the US in his own amoral, racist, violence-intoxicated image. In fact, the latter goal may be dearer to him than the former.

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Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: So long, sequin kaftan! The holiday wardrobe is all about sleek, muted neutrals

The vacation aesthetic is now altogether more low-key. Take a deep breath and put those fringed palazzo pants down

Does your kaftan have a sequin trim? Adorable! Does your holiday tote bag have a shell bag charm? Cute. Does your maxidress have pom-poms dangling from it? Um, OK, I’m sure it’s lovely, but let’s take a moment here, shall we? Are you completely sure you need to coordinate your beach jellies with your candy-striped shorts and cropped top? Look, I’m going to come out and ask the question here. Have our holiday wardrobes got a bit … overexcited?

I don’t want to be a killjoy. But there is a fine line between a cheerful holiday aesthetic and looking as though you bought the entire contents of your suitcase while on a sangria-fuelled shopping spree at Gatwick. Beguiling though all this stuff is, there is a point where tomato-print sundresses and sandals with ric-rac lacing stop looking delightfully Dolce, and start looking a tiny bit overwrought. Take a deep breath and put those fringed palazzo pants down.

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Has the Trump-Putin bromance finally run its course?

US president appears to have run out of patience with his Russian counterpart – but how that transmits into practical support for Kyiv remains to be seen

“I’m not happy with Putin. I can tell you that much right now,” Trump said, expressing his frustration with the Russian leader over the war in Ukraine. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin … He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

It may not have been Churchillian in oratorical flourish, and with Trump everything is capable of being reversed in hours, but possibly, just possibly, the rupture between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump has happened. If so it is a transformatory moment, and a vindication for both Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he arrives in Rome for the annual Ukraine reconstruction conference and for those others, notably the British and the French governments, that have patiently helped the scales to fall from Trump’s eyes about Putin’s true intentions. At long last and after many false starts, the US president seems to have accepted he is unpersuadable on ending the war.

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