6 h. ago Stunned resignation and foreboding: a week in Trump’s shadow at IMF

Few policymakers mention US president by name, but his tariffs dominate IMF-World Bank meetingBusiness live – latest updatesKristalina Georgieva’s favourite film, the International Monetary Fund boss told the audience at a packed panel event in Washington on Thursday, is Tom Hanks’s cold war romp Bridge of Spies.In one of the stranger digressions in a frequently strange week, Georgieva recalled the moment when Hanks’s character, a US lawyer, tells the Soviet spy he has been appointed to defend that he will probably be executed. “You don’t seem alarmed,” Hanks says to him; to which the spy – played by Mark Rylance – replies, “Would it help?” Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago Francis saw his duty to be 'ad vitam' and not to follow Pope Benedict XVI in resigning

Pope Benedict XVI stunned the world when he announced his resignation in 2013, the first in 600 years

Politics

7 d. ago ‘I don’t want to give money to this America’: tourists’ fears of US travel under Trump

With US visits down 11.6% in March compared with last year, people share their views and experiences on the US borderLast year, while Joe Biden was US president, Jenny and her husband booked a trip to Boston for June 2025.The British couple had been to New York before and wanted to see more of the country. But after Donald Trump’s re-election in November, Jenny said a “shadow” began to fall on their travel plans. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s Congo deal: mineral riches for protection | Editorial

Faced with regional chaos and shrinking options, Kinshasa seeks terms of trade that echo the old extractive order in modern disguise“The vilest scramble for loot that has ever disfigured the history of human conscience” is how Joseph Conrad described colonial-era concessions granted to private companies for Congo’s natural resources in Heart of Darkness. Under Donald Trump, that scramble may be back. If news reports are right, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is offering the US a blunt deal: minerals for military help – a slice of sovereignty traded for a shot at stability.The concern is this isn’t a return, it’s a sequel. For three decades, Washington supported Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a cold war ally and brutal dictator who looted the Congo until his 1997 fall. That history of power politics still casts a long shadow. The Trump administration openly favours muscle over diplomacy. Fadhel Kaboub, an associate professor of economics at Denison University, notes that Biden-era ...

Politics

3 w. ago ‘I would never be able to sing a song that a robot wrote’: Lucy Dacus on her new album’s themes of artistry and intimacy

As the indie singer-songwriter and Boygenius star releases her latest, highly personal solo record, she talks of her weariness of AI and digital art, the pressures of being in a public relationship, and her anger and fears in Trump’s USIn the shadow of a Hogarth painting, accompanied by guitar and violin, Lucy Dacus is singing about disappointment. The painting depicts Thomas Coram, founder of the Foundling Hospital in London’s Bloomsbury district. A shipbuilder by trade, he is portrayed in full baroque garb, a style usually reserved for the aristocracy. But amid the classical architecture and rich fabrics, he is shown as he was: the thread veins on his face, his feet not quite touching the ground. The setting is apt for Dacus’s disquisitions on life and love, and the ways they can exceed, or fall short of, the expectations we place upon them: the moments that feel exalted, idealised, as well as the times when reality intrudes on the fantasy.The Foundling Museum, the setting of toni...

Culture

4 w. ago Australian prime minister calls election amid shadow of Trump and cost

Anthony Albanese’s ruling Labor party faces a challenge by the centre-right Coalition led by Peter Dutton at the 3 May voteFollow all our Australian 2025 election coverageAustralia will go to the polls on 3 May, with Anthony Albanese’s first-term Labor government facing an uphill struggle to retain its narrow majority in parliament.Neither he nor the centre-right opposition leader, Peter Dutton, have sparked enthusiasm in the electorate, and polls suggest neither party may achieve an absolute majority in the 150-seat House of Representatives, meaning one or the other would need to negotiate with independents and minor parties to form government. Continue reading...

Politics

4 w. ago In the shadow of Trump’s tariff threats and claims of a ‘51st state.’ Here’s what to know about Canada’s snap election

President Donald Trump’s tariff aggressions and talk of incorporating the country as a 51st state has flipped Canadian politics upside down in recent months, allowing the once-unpopular Liberals to mount an extraordinary comeback

Politics