After our startling piece by Canadian actor Jasmine Mooney about her detention at the US border last month, readers around the world were similarly appalled by what happened to Rebecca Burke (pictured above). The British graphic artist spoke to Jenny Kleeman about her chilling experience of being stopped by immigration officials as she tried to leave the US for Canada; interrogated, shackled and branded an illegal alien, she was sent to an ICE centre for 19 days. These stories and others prompted our Today in Focus team to try to answer a previously unimaginable question for wealthy western travellers: is it safe to visit the United States? Meanwhile, across the US and Europe, thousands took to the streets to protest Trump’s heavy-handed actions. This gallery showed the scale and spirit of the protests.
Hugo Lowell’s exclusive revealing exactly how The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the White House Signal group chat was eye opening - and the mistake was months in the making.
Julia Carrie Wong wrote a must-read essay on how the Christian right in the United States is waging war on the most Christian of concepts: empathy. Julia explored how empathy has been recast by the likes of Elon Musk and JD Vance as a parasitic plague. And there was a fascinating feature from Steve Rose on how, thanks to the American right, Christian faith-based TV and cinema is booming.
It has taken five years for Shaun Walker to persuade a former KGB spy, codename the Inheritor, to tell his story. Make sure you read the jaw-dropping long read about the man whose father recruited him as a teenager and set him up with a bewildering double life.
In a joint investigation with non-profit investigative organisation SourceMaterial, we revealed the dramatic impact that big tech’s vast datacentres have on water supplies in some of the world’s driest areas as they use water to cool their servers. Elsewhere, Josh Toussaint-Strauss and the team behind our It’s complicated video explainer series looked at how demand for the raw materials used in the production of green tech is helping to fuel the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Dan Sabbagh had a fascinating interview with Bohdan Krotevych, the former chief of staff of Ukraine’s Azov brigade. Krotevych has called for the head of Ukraine’s military to step aside, accusing him of a lack of strategic imagination and placing Ukrainian soldiers’ lives at risk with “borderline criminal” orders.
Our UK police and crime correspondent Vikram Dodd revealed that UK government officials are developing a “murder prediction” programme that uses data to identify potential killers – a move described as “chilling and dystopian” by campaigners.
Australia’s federal election is in early May and Guardian reporters have been busy. Sarah Basford Canales wrote about a Liberal candidate who said women should not serve in combat roles in the military, which has led to him being dumped by his party. Josh Butler reported on a major U-turn on key coalition policies as Labor pulls ahead in the polls and Rafqa Touma and Ima Caldwell spoke to young Australians about their pre-election concerns regarding money, housing, healthcare and the climate emergency.
In an extract from her new book about life as a disabled woman in modern Britain, Guardian columnist Frances Ryan wrote about how representation has barely improved in decades: “when I grew up as a disabled teenager in the late 1990s, I knew no other disabled women like me. I’d seen barely a handful on television and next to none in films. Women’s mags portrayed perfection, and sickness and disability seemingly had no part in that. In some ways, it doesn’t feel much better now.”
I enjoyed Samantha Ellis’s mouthwatering essay about the frustrations of trying to persuade her young son to swap his flavour-free food favourites for the delicious dishes of her Iraqi-Jewish heritage; Nesrine Malik on why pan-African air travel is so costly and cumbersome; and Simon Hattenstone’s interview with the wonderful Oscar-winning British director Steve McQueen, who talked candidly about his experience of prostate cancer and the disproportionate impact the disease has on black men. And I was intrigued by architecture critic Oliver Wainwright on the radical eco designers making houses out of bark, resin and pine needles, in a practice they call “nose to tail eating – but for trees”.
Finally, great news for fans (like me, but I promise I had no influence) of the noble tardigrade which was this week named the 2025 Guardian invertebrate of the year. Natural history writer Patrick Barkham saluted a “microscopic multisegmented animal that resembles a piglet wrapped in an enormous duvet”. Look at the photo and tell me it’s not lovable.
One more thing …If you thought nothing could be more boring than tax, Dan Neidle’s BBC Radio 4 series Untaxing will prove you wrong – it’s a gripping account of why tax matters, bringing in the Beatles, Jaffa cakes and a £10bn fridge.
