Powderhorn

The final piece of the central tower of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia has been laid in place, bringing the church to its maximum final height 144 years after work began.

After several days when it has been too windy to work, the upper section of the 17 metre-high four-sided steel and glass cross was winched into position at 11am on Friday, completing the tower dedicated to Jesus Christ. At 172.5 metres, the Sagrada Familia, to which the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí devoted the later part of his life, is Barcelona’s tallest building and the world’s tallest church.

As the Catalan and Vatican flags were raised, Jordi Faulí, the chief architect for the project, said: “It’s been a joyful day, wonderful for all the people who have made it possible.”

A ceremony to mark the completion of the tower – the tallest of 18 conceived by Gaudí – is due to take place on the centenary of Gaudí’s death in 1926 on 10 June, 16 years after the church was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI.

I think someone needed his diaper changed, if only for this one line:

“I wanted to be a good boy,” Trump said, describing his relative restraint in issuing tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Trump said that tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 will remain “in place and in full force and effect”.

Being a "good boy" for your polycule is your business. At no point should it involve tariffs.

Matthew Ramirez started at Western Governors University as a computer science major in 2025, drawn by the promise of a high-paying, flexible career as a programmer. But as headlines mounted about tech layoffs and AI’s potential to replace entry-level coders, he began to question whether that path would actually lead to a job.

When the 20-year-old interviewed for a datacenter technician role that June and never heard back, his doubts deepened. In December, Ramirez decided on what he thought was a safer bet: turning away from computer science entirely. He dropped his planned major to instead apply to nursing school. He comes from a family of nurses, and sees the field as more stable and harder to automate than coding.

“Even though AI might not be at the point where it will overtake all these entry-level jobs now, by the time I graduate, it likely will,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez is not alone in reshaping his career out of anxiety over AI. As students like him are reconsidering their majors over concerns that AI may disrupt their employment prospects, more established workers – some with decades of experience – are rethinking their trajectories because they’re encountering AI at work and share the same unease. Some workers are eschewing it entirely; others are embracing it.

God, booking a flight is going to be really tedious by the time all airports are named after this asshole. I'd prefer the outcome where all restaurants are Taco Bell.

Democrats in Florida have condemned Republican colleagues in the state legislature who approved the renaming of the airport in West Palm Beach the “President Donald J Trump International Airport”, less than a week after lawyers for Trump sought to trademark the name.

Only the signature of Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, now stands before a renaming ceremony at the airport less than six miles from the US president’s waterfront Mar-a-Lago mansion and private resort club in Palm Beach.

Currently known as Palm Beach International, the airport is frequented by Trump on Air Force One on most weekends during the winter season. The president is then driven to and from his residence along a stretch of road renamed Donald J Trump Boulevard in January in another act of homage by the Florida legislature.

The airport bill passed the Florida house by 81 votes to 30 on Tuesday in a strictly partisan vote after vocal pushback from a number of Democratic state representatives. It was then swiftly ushered through by state senators two days later.

The New York Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security has sent Google, Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and other media corporations subpoenas for the names on accounts that criticize ICE enforcement. The department wants to identify Americans who oppose what it’s doing.

I’ll save them time.

Hello? Kristi Noem?

Robert Reich here. I hear you’re trying to find the names of people who are making negative comments on social media about ICE enforcement.

Look no further. I’ve done it frequently. I’m still doing it. This note to you is another example.

If you want more details, just type “Robert Reich” into an internet browser, followed by YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or X or TikTok or Reddit or Substack or the Guardian.

Then type in your name, or ICE, or the Department of Homeland Security. That will give you plenty of evidence.

If you read what I’ve said, you’ll find it’s very critical. I’ve done some videos that are very critical of you and ICE, too.

Let me not mince words: I really, truly believe you’re doing a shitty job.

No notes.

An hour before dawn, in a nameless rock pile in the world’s largest hot desert, Djimet Guemona clambered up a narrow gully. The route was hemmed by high walls, where uncountable centuries of weathering had cinched the sandstone into a rumpled, reptilian skin. From its base, the outcropping had looked like any one of the numerous rock formations, or hoodoos, in the northwest corner of the Ennedi Natural and Cultural Reserve, in eastern Chad.

But this one, Guemona assured me, contained a special treasure. Though the formation’s interior was labyrinthine, the archaeologist moved swiftly, ignoring the GPS coordinates stored on his phone. He had the location committed to memory.

Rounding a scarp, Guemona stopped in front of a rare expanse of vertical plane where the rock ran smooth. Under torchlight, I could see that hundreds of figures had been carved into its surface. There were ostriches with lollipop heads beside stick-legged giraffes, their necks comically exaggerated. Human forms stood among this crowded bestiary, and beneath them all, in palimpsest, were larger etchings of elephants, older and more deeply inscribed.

“When I found it, I yelled with excitement,” Guemona told me, casting his headlamp left and right so that the shapes appeared to dance across the rock face. These were prehistoric etchings that hadn’t been mentioned in any of the colonial literature he’d studied. Nor had Guemona received any rumor of their existence from the herders whom he often canvassed for information. Whoever carved them inhabited a deeper past, perhaps 10,000 years ago, when the creatures they depict­ed could still be found throughout North Africa. These images were ghosts from a time when the Sahara was green.

Christian Marot never thought he would get a reply to the letter he sent to Sir David Attenborough, at the age of 19, which included a copy of his wildlife filming.

But 10 days later, one came, containing both praise and a considered critique - the original USB stick taped neatly to the personalised stationery bearing the broadcaster's name.

"It was just surreal," says Marot, and "hugely encouraging for a budding wildlife filmmaker".

A decade later, now a professional camera operator, he found himself in a sunny field in Greenford, filming close up shots of Sir David releasing harvest mice on to a grass frond.

It was a real "pinch me moment" for someone who "found words to be difficult" because of his struggles with dyslexia and, on several occasions, was told by teachers he "would not succeed in life".

Police have seized art posters from a Canberra music venue and bar that depict world leaders and others, including Donald Trump and Elon Musk, wearing Nazi uniforms, and are investigating whether new federal hate symbol laws were broken.

David Howe, the owner of Dissent Cafe and Bar in Canberra’s CBD, said his venue was shut down for about two hours on Wednesday night as police investigated a complaint about hate imagery relating to five posters in the window.

“I think it’s ludicrous to be perfectly honest,” he told Guardian Australia, describing the works as an “anti-fascist statement” and noting the shut down had caused the cancellation of an interstate band’s performance.

By Thursday afternoon, less than 24 hours later, the posters were placed back in the windows, with the contents covered with the word “CENSORED” in red. Howe said he hoped patrons appreciated their return, describing them “absolutely” as protest art.

Plug-in hybrid electric cars (PHEVs) use much more fuel on the road than officially stated by their manufacturers, a large-scale analysis of about a million vehicles of this type has shown.

The Fraunhofer Institute carried out what is thought to be the most comprehensive study of its kind to date, using the data transmitted wirelessly by PHEVs from a variety of manufacturers while they were on the road.

The cars involved were all produced between 2021 and 2023. The data transmitted enabled analysts to determine their precise and real-world fuel consumption, as opposed to that stated in the vehicles’ official EU approved certification.

PHEVs, cars which combine a petrol or diesel engine with a battery-powered electric motor that is charged from an external energy point, give drivers the flexibility to be able to switch between the ecologically safer power source, and the more conventional, but environmentally more damaging one, as and when conditions allow. Manufacturers typically market the vehicles as energy efficient. On paper at least, the vehicles are said to use much less fuel, between one and two litres per 100km, than conventional cars. However environmental groups have long since voiced scepticism over the claims.

According to the study, the vehicles require on average six litres per 100km, or about 300%, more fuel to run than previously cited.

Like many of us who are mindful of our plastic consumption, Beth Gardiner would take her own bags to the supermarket and be annoyed whenever she forgot to do so. Out without her refillable bottle, she would avoid buying bottled water. “Here I am, in my own little life, worrying about that and trying to use less plastic,” she says. Then she read an article in this newspaper, just over eight years ago, and discovered that fossil fuel companies had ploughed more than $180bn (£130bn) into plastic plants in the US since 2010. “It was a kick in the teeth,” says Gardiner. “You’re telling me that while I am beating myself up because I forgot to bring my water bottle, all these huge oil companies are pouring billions …” She looks appalled. “It was just such a shock.”

Two months before that piece was published, a photograph of a seahorse clinging to a plastic cotton bud had gone viral; two years before that England followed Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and introduced a charge for carrier bags. “I was one of so many people who were trying to use less plastic – and it just felt like such a moment of revelation: these companies are, on the contrary, increasing production and wanting to push [plastic use] up and up.” Then, says Gardiner, as she started researching her book Plastic Inc: Big Oil, Big Money and the Plan to Trash our Future, “it only becomes more shocking.”

Her research took her to Reserve, Louisiana, in the Lower Mississippi River, where she met Robert Taylor, an activist in his 80s who has spent much of his life living by an enormous plastics plant. “He is surrounded by illness, by all kinds of cancers. He only found out in 2016, as a result of federal action, that the levels of toxic gases had gone through the roof in his area, an overwhelmingly Black neighbourhood. He told me about all the illness in his family – affecting his wife and his daughter, his neighbours and his cousins. It was haunting. When we talk about plastic, we tend to think about the ways we experience it in our own lives, and we’re not as aware of the production and the impact it has on the people who live beside it.”

In April 2025, less than three months after Donald Trump returned to the White House, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out its latest public health alert on so-called “superbugs”, strains of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

These drug-resistant germs, the CDC warned, are responsible for more than 3m infections in the US each year, claiming the lives of up to 48,000 Americans.

Globally, the largely untreatable pathogens contribute annually to almost 5m deaths, and health experts fear that unless urgent steps are taken they could become a leading killer, surpassing even cancer, by 2050.

“We’re in a war against bacteria,” said Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. He is on the frontlines of that war against superbugs; the NIH lab in which he works is driving what he described as “high-risk, high-reward research”.

But over the past year, the battlefield has toughened. Under the Trump administration, Morgan, 33, and thousands of other young American scientists like him have grappled with wave after wave of disruptions.

Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired.

The Trump administration is planning to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza, sprawling more than 350 acres, according to Board of Peace contracting records reviewed by the Guardian.

The site is envisioned as a military operating base for a future International Stabilization Force (ISF), planned as a multinational military force composed of pledged troops. The ISF is part of the newly created Board of Peace which is meant to govern Gaza. The Board of Peace is chaired by Donald Trump and led in part by his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The plans reviewed by the Guardian call for the phased construction of a military outpost that will eventually have a footprint of 1,400 metres by 1,100 metres, ringed by 26 trailer-mounted armored watch towers, a small arms range, bunkers, and a warehouse for military equipment for operations. The entire base will be encircled with barbed wire.

The fortification is planned for an arid stretch of flatlands in southern Gaza strewn with saltbush and white broom shrubs, and littered with twisted metal from years of Israeli bombardment. The Guardian has reviewed video of the area. A source close to the planning tells the Guardian that a small group of bidders – international construction companies with experience in war zones – have already been shown the area in a site visit.