People across the US took to the streets on Saturday to oppose what left-leaning organizations called Donald Trump’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda”.

Organizers were expecting more than 500,000 people to demonstrate in Washington DC, Florida and elsewhere.

At Washington’s national mall, demonstrators from as far afield as New Hampshire and Pennsylvania gathered in the shadow of the George Washington memorial monument, in advance of the anti-Trump rally there.

In overcast conditions, protesters displayed a vast array of placards and, in some cases, Ukrainian flags, expressing opposition to the policies of the administration which has sought cordial relations with Russia amid its invasion of Ukraine.

Some protesters said they hoped the event – the first mass demonstration in Washington DC since Trump took office – would act as an example to inspire others to register opposition. “The aim is get people to rise up,” said Diane Kolifrath, 63, who had travelled from New Hampshire with 100 fellow members of New Hampshire Forward, a civic society organisation.

“Many people are scared to protest against Trump because he has reacted aggressively and violently to those who have stood up,” Kolifrath said. The goal of this protest is to let the rest of Americans who aren’t participating see that we are standing up and hopefully when they see our strength, that will give them the courage to also stand up.”

MoveOn, one of the organizations planning the day of protest they’re calling “Hands Off” along with dozens of labor, environmental and other progressive groups, said that more than 1,000 protests are planned across the US, including at state capitols.

“This is shaping up to be the biggest single-day protest in the last several years of American history,” Ezra Levin, a founder of Indivisible, one of the groups planning the event, said on a recent organizing call.

The largest event was expected to be the one at the National Mall, where members of Congress, including the Democrats Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, are scheduled to speak to crowds.

The scene in Hollywood, Florida, about an hour south of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, was lively as well. Referring to the White House’s billionaire business adviser Elon Musk and the government cuts he has overseen, predominantly white protesters chanted: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Trump and Musk have got to go.

They jeered motorists in Tesla Cybertrucks manufactured by Musk’s electric vehicle maker – and wielded colorful placards that left little doubt as to where they stood with the Trump administration.

“Prosecute and jail the Turd Reich,” read one. Some reserved special ire for the world’s richest person: “I did not elect Elon Musk.” Others emphasized the protesters’ anxieties about the future of democracy in the US. “Hands off democracy,” declared one placard. “Stop being [Vladimir] Putin’s puppet,” enjoined another, referring to Russia’s dictator.

Many motorists driving past the assembled demonstrators honked their horns and flashed thumb’s-up gestures in solidarity. Broward county was one of only six counties in Florida that voted for Kamala Harris in November – she defeated Trump there by 16 percentage points – and it is host to one of the US’s most vibrant LGBTQ+ communities.

“This is an assault on our democracy, on our economy, on our civil rights,” said Jennifer Heit, a 64-year-old editor and resident of Plantation who toted a poster that read: “USA: No to King or Oligarchy.” She added: “Everything is looking so bad that I feel we have to do all we can while we can, and just having all this noise is unsettling to everyone.”

Heit attended a protest outside a Tesla dealership in Fort Lauderdale recently, and she has been outraged by the Trump administration’s frontal assault on the rule of law and the judiciary – including with respect to people who have been deported without due process. “We’re supposed to be a nation of laws and due process,” she said.

Public health researcher Donna Greene, 62, came dressed as France’s beheaded queen Marie Antoinette and carried a placard that said: “Musk and Trump Say Let Them Eat Cake.”

She said she is proud of the 65 missions that her father Sam Ragland flew for the US military during the second world war. But, she said, the country her dad fought for is not the same one she sees emerging under Trump.

“Everything my father fought for and everything we hold dear as a country is being dismantled,” Greene said. “I am beyond incredulous at how quickly our country’s institutions have been dismantled with no pushback from the Republicans who are currently in charge.”

In Ventura, California, Sandy Friedman brought her eight-year-old graddaughter, Harlow Rose Rega, to demonstrate. Friedman said she was worried about her social security, remarking: “I worked my whole life and so did my husband. Now I’m afraid Trump will take it away.”

Harlow held up a sign reading: “Save my future.”

The protest’s website called Saturday “a nationwide mobilization to stop the most brazen power grab in modern history”.

“Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies are orchestrating an all-out assault on our government, our economy, and our basic rights – enabled by Congress every step of the way.

“They want to strip America for parts – shuttering social security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid – all to bankroll their billionaire tax scam. They’re handing over our tax dollars, our public services, and our democracy to the ultra-rich. If we don’t fight now, there won’t be anything left to save.”

The protests come after the stock market plummeted this week following Trump’s 1 April announcement of tariffs. Despite the economic fallout, Trump said on Friday: “My policies will never change.”

Trump’s approval rating this week fell to 43%, his lowest since taking office, according to a Reuters poll.

After Trump was first elected to the White House in 2016, at least 470,000 people – three times the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration – joined the Women’s March protest in Washington DC, and millions more rallied around the country, making it the largest single-day protest in US history.

Barack Obama has called on US citizens, colleges and law firms to resist Donald Trump’s political agenda – and warned Americans to prepare to “possibly sacrifice” in support of democratic values.

“It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say you are a progressive or say you are for social justice or say you’re for free speech and not have to pay a price for it,” Obama said during a speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, on Thursday.

The two-term former Democratic president painted a picture of the Trump White House looking to upend the international order created after the second world war – and a domestic political reconfiguration in which ideological disagreement falling within mutual respect for free speech and the rule of law being eroded.

“It is up to all of us to fix this,” Obama said, including “the citizen, the ordinary person who says: ‘No, that’s not right.’”

Obama said he disagreed with some of the president’s economic policies, including widespread new tariffs. But the former president said he is “more deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech”.

That referred to decisions by the Trump administration to pull federal funding for top universities unless they agreed to abandon student diversity programs and implement guidelines on what it considered to be the line between legitimate protest in support of Palestinians and antisemitism.

Obama also said schools and students should review campus environments around issues of academic freedom and to be prepared to lose government funding in their defense.

“If you are a university, you may have to figure out: ‘Are we, in fact, doing things right?’” he said during the conversation at Hamilton College. “Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?

“If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say: ‘That’s why we got this big endowment.’”

Columbia University, in New York, has become the centerpiece of administration efforts to crack down via federal funding on what it contends were campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war that strayed into antisemitism.

Federal immigration agents have arrested and sought to deport one graduate student whom they claimed violated immigration rules by engaging in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Another student sued after immigration agents tried to arrest and deport her after she also engaged in such demonstrations.

The university agreed to make policy changes, including hiring security officers with arrest powers and banning protests in academic buildings, after the Trump administration stripped it of $400m in federal grants. The administration says it may now reinstate the money.

Harvard, Princeton University and other institutions are also under federal funding review over their policies on the issue.

“Now we’re at one of those moments where, you know what? It’s not enough just to say you’re for something; you may actually have to do something,” Obama said.

The former president went on to question deals between corporate law firms and the administration after they were hit by executive orders over their connection to attorneys involved in prosecution efforts against Trump during Joe Biden’s presidency – or for representing the current administration’s political opponents.

“It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me or a whole bunch of my predecessors,” Obama said, going on to question a decision by the White House to restrict access of the Associated Press to official events over the news agency’s decision to reject Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

People across the US took to the streets on Saturday to oppose what left-leaning organizations called Donald Trump’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda”.

Organizers were expecting more than 500,000 people to demonstrate in Washington DC, Florida and elsewhere.

At Washington’s national mall, demonstrators from as far afield as New Hampshire and Pennsylvania gathered in the shadow of the George Washington memorial monument, in advance of the anti-Trump rally there.

In overcast conditions, protesters displayed a vast array of placards and, in some cases, Ukrainian flags, expressing opposition to the policies of the administration which has sought cordial relations with Russia amid its invasion of Ukraine.

Some protesters said they hoped the event – the first mass demonstration in Washington DC since Trump took office – would act as an example to inspire others to register opposition. “The aim is get people to rise up,” said Diane Kolifrath, 63, who had travelled from New Hampshire with 100 fellow members of New Hampshire Forward, a civic society organisation.

“Many people are scared to protest against Trump because he has reacted aggressively and violently to those who have stood up,” Kolifrath said. The goal of this protest is to let the rest of Americans who aren’t participating see that we are standing up and hopefully when they see our strength, that will give them the courage to also stand up.”

MoveOn, one of the organizations planning the day of protest they’re calling “Hands Off” along with dozens of labor, environmental and other progressive groups, said that more than 1,000 protests are planned across the US, including at state capitols.

“This is shaping up to be the biggest single-day protest in the last several years of American history,” Ezra Levin, a founder of Indivisible, one of the groups planning the event, said on a recent organizing call.

The largest event was expected to be the one at the National Mall, where members of Congress, including the Democrats Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, are scheduled to speak to crowds.

The scene in Hollywood, Florida, about an hour south of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, was lively as well. Referring to the White House’s billionaire business adviser Elon Musk and the government cuts he has overseen, predominantly white protesters chanted: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Trump and Musk have got to go.

They jeered motorists in Tesla Cybertrucks manufactured by Musk’s electric vehicle maker – and wielded colorful placards that left little doubt as to where they stood with the Trump administration.

“Prosecute and jail the Turd Reich,” read one. Some reserved special ire for the world’s richest person: “I did not elect Elon Musk.” Others emphasized the protesters’ anxieties about the future of democracy in the US. “Hands off democracy,” declared one placard. “Stop being [Vladimir] Putin’s puppet,” enjoined another, referring to Russia’s dictator.

Many motorists driving past the assembled demonstrators honked their horns and flashed thumb’s-up gestures in solidarity. Broward county was one of only six counties in Florida that voted for Kamala Harris in November – she defeated Trump there by 16 percentage points – and it is host to one of the US’s most vibrant LGBTQ+ communities.

“This is an assault on our democracy, on our economy, on our civil rights,” said Jennifer Heit, a 64-year-old editor and resident of Plantation who toted a poster that read: “USA: No to King or Oligarchy.” She added: “Everything is looking so bad that I feel we have to do all we can while we can, and just having all this noise is unsettling to everyone.”

Heit attended a protest outside a Tesla dealership in Fort Lauderdale recently, and she has been outraged by the Trump administration’s frontal assault on the rule of law and the judiciary – including with respect to people who have been deported without due process. “We’re supposed to be a nation of laws and due process,” she said.

Public health researcher Donna Greene, 62, came dressed as France’s beheaded queen Marie Antoinette and carried a placard that said: “Musk and Trump Say Let Them Eat Cake.”

She said she is proud of the 65 missions that her father Sam Ragland flew for the US military during the second world war. But, she said, the country her dad fought for is not the same one she sees emerging under Trump.

“Everything my father fought for and everything we hold dear as a country is being dismantled,” Greene said. “I am beyond incredulous at how quickly our country’s institutions have been dismantled with no pushback from the Republicans who are currently in charge.”

In Ventura, California, Sandy Friedman brought her eight-year-old graddaughter, Harlow Rose Rega, to demonstrate. Friedman said she was worried about her social security, remarking: “I worked my whole life and so did my husband. Now I’m afraid Trump will take it away.”

Harlow held up a sign reading: “Save my future.”

The protest’s website called Saturday “a nationwide mobilization to stop the most brazen power grab in modern history”.

“Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies are orchestrating an all-out assault on our government, our economy, and our basic rights – enabled by Congress every step of the way.

“They want to strip America for parts – shuttering social security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid – all to bankroll their billionaire tax scam. They’re handing over our tax dollars, our public services, and our democracy to the ultra-rich. If we don’t fight now, there won’t be anything left to save.”

The protests come after the stock market plummeted this week following Trump’s 1 April announcement of tariffs. Despite the economic fallout, Trump said on Friday: “My policies will never change.”

Trump’s approval rating this week fell to 43%, his lowest since taking office, according to a Reuters poll.

After Trump was first elected to the White House in 2016, at least 470,000 people – three times the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration – joined the Women’s March protest in Washington DC, and millions more rallied around the country, making it the largest single-day protest in US history.

Barack Obama has called on US citizens, colleges and law firms to resist Donald Trump’s political agenda – and warned Americans to prepare to “possibly sacrifice” in support of democratic values.

“It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say you are a progressive or say you are for social justice or say you’re for free speech and not have to pay a price for it,” Obama said during a speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, on Thursday.

The two-term former Democratic president painted a picture of the Trump White House looking to upend the international order created after the second world war – and a domestic political reconfiguration in which ideological disagreement falling within mutual respect for free speech and the rule of law being eroded.

“It is up to all of us to fix this,” Obama said, including “the citizen, the ordinary person who says: ‘No, that’s not right.’”

Obama said he disagreed with some of the president’s economic policies, including widespread new tariffs. But the former president said he is “more deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech”.

That referred to decisions by the Trump administration to pull federal funding for top universities unless they agreed to abandon student diversity programs and implement guidelines on what it considered to be the line between legitimate protest in support of Palestinians and antisemitism.

Obama also said schools and students should review campus environments around issues of academic freedom and to be prepared to lose government funding in their defense.

“If you are a university, you may have to figure out: ‘Are we, in fact, doing things right?’” he said during the conversation at Hamilton College. “Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?

“If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say: ‘That’s why we got this big endowment.’”

Columbia University, in New York, has become the centerpiece of administration efforts to crack down via federal funding on what it contends were campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war that strayed into antisemitism.

Federal immigration agents have arrested and sought to deport one graduate student whom they claimed violated immigration rules by engaging in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Another student sued after immigration agents tried to arrest and deport her after she also engaged in such demonstrations.

The university agreed to make policy changes, including hiring security officers with arrest powers and banning protests in academic buildings, after the Trump administration stripped it of $400m in federal grants. The administration says it may now reinstate the money.

Harvard, Princeton University and other institutions are also under federal funding review over their policies on the issue.

“Now we’re at one of those moments where, you know what? It’s not enough just to say you’re for something; you may actually have to do something,” Obama said.

The former president went on to question deals between corporate law firms and the administration after they were hit by executive orders over their connection to attorneys involved in prosecution efforts against Trump during Joe Biden’s presidency – or for representing the current administration’s political opponents.

“It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me or a whole bunch of my predecessors,” Obama said, going on to question a decision by the White House to restrict access of the Associated Press to official events over the news agency’s decision to reject Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

The world’s biggest youth Christian missionary organisation is facing allegations of spiritual abuse and controlling behaviour from young people who say they were left “traumatised”.

An Observer investigation has revealed evidence of safeguarding failings within Youth With a Mission (YWAM), a global movement that trains young Christians to spread the gospel. A spokesperson for YWAM said the organisation was “heartbroken” by the claims and was “deeply committed to the safety and wellbeing” of everyone in its care.

The allegations span two decades and include claims that young missionaries were publicly shamed, subjected to rituals to “cure” their homosexuality, and told that leaving was against God’s will.

Young British adults who signed up for training schools and overseas mission trips – many during their gap years – described regular confession sessions where they were pressured to admit their “sins” in a group.

These included perceived moral transgressions such as homosexual thoughts, sexual activity, abortions and watching pornography, as well as other “sins” such as disobeying a leader or having “rebellious thoughts”. Those who confessed could be questioned and made to give public apologies, according to former missionaries. They could be prayed for or could face punishment, including being removed from volunteer roles. In some cases, interventions were more extreme. Former YWAM volunteers described the use of rituals similar to exorcisms to banish demons from people who acknowledged having sex outside marriage.

Another former British YWAM worship leader described a “casting out” at a base in Australia, arranged after a man revealed that he had sexual relations with other men. Leaders placed their hands on him before chanting prayers to “banish the spirit of homosexuality”, and he reportedly convulsed. The British man was himself struggling with his sexuality and said he was left feeling as though a “demon” was living inside him.

Others described how people disclosed being victims of assault or sexual abuse, as well as transgressions such as speeding fines.

The “repentance and forgiveness” rituals are alleged to be part of a wider picture of control at some bases, which also included restrictions on romantic relationships, clothing and when missionaries could visit family.

Commands were often communicated by leaders as though they were instructions from God. “They were always changing what other people wanted to do by saying: ‘I reckon, God is saying this.’ It was used to manipulate,” one former missionary said.

YWAM operates in about 180 countries and sends about 25,000 people on short-term missions each year. It was founded in 1960 by the American missionary Loren Cunningham and has key bases in the US, Australia, Switzerland and the UK, where it is a registered charity.

A spokesperson for YWAM England said it was committed to “continuous improvement in safeguarding practices” and that each location was responsible for upholding standards. It said it was “strongly opposed” to forced confessions. “While confession of sin may occur, the person should never be publicly shamed or pressured to apologise.”

Last year, YWAM’s base in Perth, Australia – one of the biggest in the world – faced scrutiny over its handling of alleged historic sexual misconduct, including claims that its leaders told alleged victims to apologise to their alleged attackers for “leading them on”. A YWAM base in the UK was recently closed amid claims of spiritual abuse.

The allegations come as a prayer movement linked to YWAM – which aims to recruit the next generation of Christian missionaries – sweeps through Britain.

The Send UK & Ireland, an initiative by a coalition of Christian groups, which is legally controlled by the YWAM branch in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, launched with a show last July at Ovo Arena Wembley. It has since held pop-ups at churches and concert halls across the UK.

Its aim is to recruit 100,000 young British adults to do missionary work in the UK and abroad and reverse the trend of decline among western missions.

After the Wembley event, hundreds of people signed up via QR code to serve as missionaries through YWAM and the Send’s other partner organisations.

The allegations, made by former missionaries whose experiences span two decades and 18 countries, raise questions about culture and safeguarding within YWAM, which has a decentralised structure that critics say leads to insufficient oversight. The organisation defers power to leaders on bases around the world, who say they take safeguarding seriously.

YWAM has underlying statements of principles and runs discipleship training schools which have a similar structure across all bases, with lectures on topics such as “sin, repentance and restitution”, “spiritual warfare” and “discipling nations”.

The code of conduct for the University of the Nations, YWAM’s unaccredited Christian university, which oversees YWAM training schools, says “any moral violation”, including “sexual immorality”, is grounds for disciplinary action. Other bases list fornication and homosexuality as immoral behaviours alongside incest and bestiality.

In 2020, Lynn Green, one of YWAM’s most senior leaders and the founder of YWAM England, published a blog post urging the human race to “repent for ignoring the laws of God”, blaming abortion and “the homosexual agenda” for “bringing destruction”.

Felicity Davies, 34, a designer from Yorkshire who spent six years in YWAM after joining at the age of 18, said the “purity culture” and alleged controlling behaviour at a base in South Africa left her feeling “suffocated” and “not good enough”.

“I constantly had to do certain things in order for God to love me or to be accepted,” she said. “People should be aware that this isn’t all happy-clappy. A lot of people get traumatised.”

Lena Stary, 26, from Bristol, who joined YWAM aged 18, said her experience in Switzerland left her suffering panic attacks and had taken years to untangle. It had made it “very difficult to trust other people”. She is no longer religious. “I just found it so difficult to believe that God is a loving being if all of what I was being told was true,” she said.

A YWAM spokesperson said: “Although a high number of individuals have had a positive experience in YWAM, we are aware and deeply regret that some have had harmful experiences of spiritual abuse and manipulation.” They said each base was responsible for safeguarding and was held to account by leadership teams overseeing specific regions.

In England, a YWAM spokesperson said leaders had “implemented stricter oversight mechanisms” after claims of spiritual abuse at a base which has since closed. They said YWAM held “traditional Christian views on sexuality and marriage” but was reviewing how it communicated those beliefs to prevent “shame or rejection”, and that it condemned any practice that traumatised people or associated their identity with demonic influence.

“We are deeply grieved to hear reports that spiritual practices intended for healing were instead used in coercive or shaming ways,” they said.

Green stood by his comments on abortion and homosexuality and said he sought to approach the matters “with both grace and faithfulness”, adding that he, “like others in YWAM”, condemned any form of spiritual abuse.

A YWAM Perth spokesperson said any comment that an alleged victim had “led on” their alleged attacker or must apologise to them did not reflect the views of leadership.

One Sunday last summer, 5,000 young people packed into the Wembley Arena for a “mass gathering of gen Z Jesus followers”. They danced to Christian rock, hugged, wept and sang. Between performances, charismatic leaders proclaimed something “huge” was afoot.

“Tonight kicks something off,” said Andy Byrd, a leader of Youth With a Mission (YWAM). He told the crowd they were witnessing the start of a “spiritual awakening”. Soon, the UK would send out “thousands of missionaries” to preach the name of Jesus – and “see every tribe, tongue and nation worshipping before the throne”.

The event, called The Send, was a hit. Hundreds of attenders scanned a QR code committing to devote their lives to Jesus. Some poured into London and preached to passengers on the tube.

The organisers of the event say it heralds a new era for the UK. Since Wembley, pop-ups from St Albans to Sheffield have recruited more people to the cause. “What we’re seeing – [our generation] have never had this. It’s one of those history-making moments,” a Send volunteer said.

For those who are no longer in the fold, its rise rings alarm bells. Daniel* from Bristol signed up with YWAM, the global organisation leading The Send UK, aged 19. He moved to Perth, Australia for a training course, later leading mission trips to countries including India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Mozambique. At first, it was everything he’d hoped for: fun, adventure, a shared sense of purpose. “It was an experience that not many people get to have.”

But behind the scenes, there was a darker side. Back at the base, there were strict rules about morality, purity and sexuality. Daniel, who is using a pseudonym, felt closely watched by the base leaders, who were “treated like royalty” and viewed as messengers for God. There was an expectation of obedience and absolute transparency, with regular confession of “sins”. People publicly repented for perceived moral transgressions, including disobedience, negativity, masturbation and homosexual thoughts. Sometimes, they underwent “healing” to banish demons. “The reaction was ‘This is a deep sin, so we’re going to need to cast this out’,” said Daniel, who was privately questioning his own sexuality.

At one point, he considered leaving. But base leaders said it wasn’t God’s plan and told him to “go away and re-pray”. He stayed for another two years. “I thought, ‘Maybe God really is saying this,’” he said.

For centuries, Christian missionaries have travelled the world preaching the gospel. In the 1800s and 1900s, western missionaries helped spread Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It was “very mixed up with colonialism”, said Rev Canon Mark Oxbrow from the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies.

Today, the flow of western missionaries has slowed. “In Britain and Europe, there’s been a pretty steep decline,” said Brian Stanley, professor emeritus of world Christianity at the University of Edinburgh.

At the same time, YWAM (pronounced why-wam) has thrived. Founded in 1960 by American Loren Cunningham, it has bases across more than 180 countries and trains young people to spread the gospel in “the nations”, often on short-term trips. Key targets include “the Muslim world”, “the Hindu world”, “tribal peoples”, and “the poor and needy”.

The Observer has spoken to 21 current and former YWAMers whose experiences span two decades and 18 countries. For each of them, their first exposure to YWAM was a discipleship training school (DTS).

Costing £5,000 to £10,000, the programmes, which follow a similar structure at all YWAM bases, are a “gateway” to the movement, combining an outreach trip with lectures on topics such as “sin, repentance and restitution”, “spiritual warfare” and “discipling nations”. Afterwards, graduates can stay on as unpaid volunteers in roles ranging from mentoring new students and leading mission trips to cooking and cleaning at a base.

One former missionary, Lena Stary, 26, from Bristol, signed up for a DTS at YWAM’s base in Switzerland after leaving school. She said her A-levels hadn’t gone well and she was wondering “what on earth” she would do. Growing up in a churchgoing family, missionaries had been “revered”, so she began researching YWAM.

Scrolling through the website for the YWAM base in Lausanne, near Lake Geneva, Stary, then 18, was captivated by the “whimsical, Swiss adventure vibes”. She took on two jobs to save £6,000 for the programme, room and board.

At the base, she shared a room with five other young women and had a schedule of lectures and prayer sessions from “when you wake up to when you go to sleep”. Outside the classroom, she recalls rules on general life, including restrictions on dating, expectations about what people would wear, and how often they could leave to visit family.

Early on, there was a message drilled in that “the best thing to do with your life is be a missionary”. She claims that leaders suggested “people who had left had backslidden” and that lectures were “very shame-driven” and “heavily focused on obedience, submitting to God and laying down your rights”. On the third day, students were invited to a “testimony night”, the first of many during Stary’s 18 months there. In a room in the headquarters – a converted hotel – they sat in a circle and confessed their sins. “You’re expected to share all your secrets,” Stary says. “If you were more reserved, it’s like you weren’t really committed to giving your life to Jesus.”

Ex-missionaries from bases around the world describe similar sessions – often lasting late into the night or held over several days at a time. For some, it could feel cathartic. One British woman who did a DTS and trained as an outreach leader in London in 2019 said she spoke about “classic teenage insecurities” and that the sessions could feel like “counselling”.

Other times, it felt punitive. People admitted to kissing outside marriage, homosexual thoughts, masturbating, having abortions, using sex toys, illegally streaming TV programmes and speeding. They could be prayed for, made to apologise, questioned in front of the group – or face punishment. A man in his 20s who admitted to having masturbated said he was asked to step back from a leadership role.

Sources across multiple bases described how people were also put under pressure to confess to sinful thoughts – such as thinking highly of themselves or disagreeing with leaders, which was seen as “having a rebellious spirit”.

Anything related to sex outside marriage was particularly problematic because of the belief that it leads people to form “soul ties”, soaking up each other’s sin. In this context, some people disclosed suffering sexual abuse. One woman who said she had been raped was prayed for by the group.

At a base in Brazil, two British ex-YWAMers described how a man and woman were forced to apologise to the group after they were found to have “hooked up”. The other missionaries then voted on whether they should stay.

Others were subjected to “healing” rituals similar to exorcisms. At a base in South Africa, a British ex-YWAMer described rituals branded as “inner healing”, which were used for people who had sex outside marriage. “We ‘prayed off’ all the demons and sin and asked God to forgive them and make them whole again.”

Daniel recalled a similar ritual in Perth, where a man who admitted sexual relations with other men was subjected to a “casting out”. Leaders laid hands on him, chanting prayers as he convulsed on the floor. “People would say it was the opposite of God in you. I saw it as the spirit of homosexuality which needed to come out.”

These “repentance and forgiveness” rituals are alleged to have been part of a wider picture of control. Former YWAM volunteers described rules ranging from an alcohol ban to restrictions on what music they could play, what clothes they could wear, when they could visit relatives and who they could date.

Sammy*, 24, from Sheffield, joined a DTS during her gap year in 2018 at a now-closed YWAM base in King’s Cross. At first, she loved it. But when she returned for a leadership course, she found it “quite controlling”. At one point, she was put under pressure not to attend her ill grandmother’s birthday because it clashed with a church service. When she started dating a man from a Christian dating app she says she was told it was “ungodly”.

“[The leader] said, ‘It’s your choice. You do what you want to do,’ but also, ‘It’s really bad.’ I got on the train home and cried a lot. There is shame that seeps through, even if you disagree.”

At other bases, women were told not to wear leggings or strappy tops to avoid “tempting men” and opening “a door to the devil”. “There was so much [pressure] on the woman not to ‘let the brothers stumble’. It just makes you feel shit to be a woman,” an ex-YWAMer said.

In South Africa, a woman was reprimanded by base leaders after telling friends she was considering getting dreadlocks. In an email, she was told not to get the hairstyle because it was linked with “rebellion, false worship, mind control, witchcraft … ostracisation from society, destruction and death” and would compromise the “spiritual integrity” of the base. “We thank you in advance for your submission to this boundary,” the email said.

The woman said her time in YWAM had left her feeling “very trapped” and that the email was the “cherry on top”. Since leaving, she has had to unlearn what she had been taught about sex and the way women should behave. “It’s so damaging,” she said. “You are programmed that you have to hide yourself and that sex is wrong.”

Many who shared their stories caveated them by saying it was not black and white. They made friends for life in YWAM, missed the strong sense of community and said the bad experiences were mixed with good ones.

But several described the intense control and insular community as feeling “cult-like”. Though everyone was technically free to leave, they said there were practical and psychological barriers. “You’re not physically restrained, but the level of thought control – and the level of influence other people had over the way that you were living your life – made it hard,” said Stary.

Often, YWAMers were young, thousands of miles from home, and reliant on YWAM for their housing and visas. Many say they were discouraged from taking outside jobs and encouraged to raise donations that were paid to YWAM for living expenses. One fundraising guide advised listing the names of “everyone you know, literally everyone” to ask for support.

Some say they struggled to cover their basic needs, let alone extras like plane tickets. “I’d have to sell my furniture at the end of each month and then buy it all back again,” said one YWAMer.

Eudo Albornoz, 35, a Venezuelan political sciences graduate now living in Bristol, left YWAM in December 2019 after spending seven years in Switzerland, Albania, and the Dominican Republic. He did missionary work in homeless shelters and orphanages and felt like he was “doing a good thing”, but found the experience “alienating”.

“You feel like you are a saint, because you’re a missionary. And you feel like the leaders hear God more directly than your family would,” he said. “You don’t know how to get back to a regular church. You start mistrusting everybody outside YWAM.”

Some say they were directly put under pressure by leaders not to leave. Emily Garcés, 43, a former YWAM staff member who now runs a Facebook group for those who have left, says she was told by base leaders in Argentina in 2005 that she could not leave with their blessing. “We sat in this big circle of leaders and they said, ‘We don’t think you should be doing this. If you go, you will fall into sexual sin.’”

In the mission field, meanwhile, people described having a genuine desire to help the communities they served. YWAM says it aims to address “practical and physical needs” through relief and development initiatives. But looking back, some question the impact of the work. Daniel, the former outreach leader based in Perth, said teams would often work with people in extreme poverty; during one trip to Indonesia, he preached the gospel to sex workers in a Jakarta slum and collected statistics on how many people had been saved. “We would promise them that Jesus would change their life. But then a week later it was, ‘See you later! Bye! Have a nice life!’ And they’re still living in the slums,” he said. “I really look back and think, what was the fruit of our labour?”

Others recall finding themselves in risky situations with little practical training – and being praised by leaders for their devotion. One YWAMer described smuggling bibles into countries where it was banned or strictly controlled. “No one said: ‘Don’t do this.’ It was more, like, encouraged. But if you are caught with them, you can go to prison. It was putting young people in really vulnerable situations,” he said.

In South Africa, a young woman described going into a red light district while posing as the partner of a man hosting a sex party. The idea was to gather data on the sex trade and share the evidence with the police, but “there were a lot of gangs … watching these places and we were going door to door, trying to find the youngest girls”.

Looking back, she says there was a lack of safeguarding, with “red flags left, right and centre”. “There was also this element of, if you’re doing something that’s a bit scary and a bit dramatic, it’s seen as more radical. We were praised for it. But actually, what was radical about it? We were being so stupid.”

In response, YWAM said that while many people had positive experiences, some had suffered “spiritual abuse”, which it “deeply regrets”. It said it had sought to strengthen its policies, encouraged people to speak out and took safeguarding seriously. It has a decentralised structure, which devolves responsibility for bases to local leaders.

In England, a spokesperson said YWAM held “traditional Christian views on sexuality and marriage” but was actively reviewing how it taught those views to ensure it did not cause “shame or rejection”. They said the organisation “strongly opposed” pressured public confessions; that no one should be shamed or made to apologise; and that “healing prayer must be conducted only with informed consent, trauma-awareness and appropriate spiritual and pastoral oversight”. They also condemned any practice that traumatised people or associated them with demonic influence. “We are deeply grieved to hear reports that spiritual practices intended for healing were used in coercive or shaming ways,” they said.

YWAM Perth said the same, adding that while it held “traditional Christian convictions” about marriage and sexuality, it recognised that “in the past, some of our methods of encouraging this have lacked grace or sensitivity”. It was “truly saddened” by any negative impacts and never aimed to “coerce or control” anyone. It said a voluntary audit of its practices by an external agency in 2021 had led to it improving its policies and reporting structures.

YWAM Lausanne denied missionaries were subject to strict rules, saying they could take six weeks of holiday a year, and that “instruction on what to wear” involved advice for their protection, such as when travelling to countries with a malaria risk or playing sports. It denied suggesting people who left had “backslidden”, saying it valued “every form of engagement in society equally”. It said claims that people felt alienated from the outside world did not reflect its beliefs or practices. “We encourage relationships and good communication with family, friends and the local church,” a spokesperson said.

In relation to mission trips, a YWAM England spokesperson said teams were given thorough pre-departure briefings, including training in cultural sensitivities, and dangerous trips were discouraged. Teams also had an orientation on arrival. “We understand that these briefings are consistently practised across YWAM,” they said.

Ex-YWAMers said they wanted the organisation to improve its complaints processes and to strengthen central oversight of bases, to improve the safety of both young missionaries and the communities they serve.

Olivia Jackson, a re­search­er at Durham University who worked as a human rights consultant to mission movements and spent 10 years in YWAM herself, said the current decentralised structure allowed for “plausible deniability about abuse and poor behaviour”. When people did complain, she said concerns were not always escalated. “You’re told: ‘If it’s not on a par with what Jesus suffered for your sake, then you’ve got no right to complain.’”

Sammy from the London base felt her concerns about leadership had not been taken seriously. She said there had been a “clear hierarchy” if another student or volunteer was accused of wrongdoing – but not when it was a base leader. “I remember talking to my [YWAM] mentor and the response was just: ‘Our leaders aren’t perfect,’” she said.

While there is a decentralised structure, YWAM is founded on principles that apply across all bases. The University of the Nations, an unaccredited university that oversees training schools, sets the direction of courses and has codes of conduct that students must follow. These say “any moral violation”, including “sexual immorality”, is grounds for disciplinary action. Individual bases are more explicit about their policies, including a US base which lists fornication and homosexuality as immoral behaviours alongside incest and bestiality, and another which says changing gender “goes against God’s will”.

Leaders have also made their views clear. In 2020, Lynn Green, founder of YWAM England, published a blogpost urging the human race to repent “for ignoring the laws of God”, blaming abortion and “the homosexual agenda” for “bringing destruction”.

For Daniel, who was struggling with his sexuality, knowing YWAM had strict rules on sex outside marriage meant it initially felt like a “safe space”. Any niggles he might be gay became “more and more silenced”. “It felt quite nonexistent. There was nothing going on there,” he said.

Witnessing the treatment of other gay people eventually made it impossible to ignore his own sexuality. He began believing his heart was “not clean” and said he felt that “fundamentally there was something wrong” with him.

He would regularly repent of his thoughts and dreams. “I felt as though this demon was inside of me and I needed to get my heart right,” he said. “It was this constant struggle to be accepted by God.”

At YWAM England’s HQ – a 48-acre campus in Harpenden, Hertfordshire – The Send UK and Ireland’s director, Josh Cutting, distanced the movement from problems of the past.

He emphasised safeguarding, saying The Send was working with an external organisation which had given it a “vision” of how to “help people make good decisions”, prevent spiritual abuse and “avoid the power play” that could arise. And he said The Send was open to all. “Everyone’s in. We go on the journey together of people that are willing to say yes to [Jesus].”

Cutting added that while The Send was closely connected to YWAM, it works in collaboration with 60 other churches and Christian groups, including those supporting people to do missions work at home as well as abroad. “The thing we have in common is we want to follow Jesus and obey his words and share the good news,” he said.

Some ex-YWAMers say that, even so, it makes them “nervous”. With slick TikTok and Instagram marketing, The Send’s website pitches it as a modern movement for those who have shunned the church as a “tradition of the past”. But behind the marketing, there is a strong link to the evangelical right, including groups opposed to same-sex marriage and abortion.

The Send itself was born out of The Call, an American prayer movement whose co-founder, Lou Engle, has caused controversy with his radical views, including speaking at a rally supporting Ugandan anti-gay laws, calling for the criminalisation of abortion and saying Muslim proclamations were fuelling the “demonic realm”.

Asked about The Send UK’s link to Engle, who was pictured on its website until last week, Cutting provided a written comment saying the organisation was aware of “past statements” made by Engle which “do not reflect the culture or tone we want for The Send UK & Ireland”. He said that, while Engle played a role in the movement’s “early days” in the US, its UK team operated independently, adding that it held a “traditional Christian view of marriage” but rejected “any approach that fosters fear, exclusion, or internalised shame”.

When the Observer spoke to Cutting, he said The Send had “an orthodox view on the things Jesus says” and that there was an “alignment” with Engle on issues such as marriage, but that he hoped that, in practice, this would “look slightly different in the UK because of how we would do it”. “It’s less polarising; it’s more nuanced,” he said. “That’s not to take away from what we believe.”

In his written statement, he said The Send did not endorse, condone or facilitate public confession, coercion, shame or forced “healing”, adding that it had clear processes for reporting concerns. He said he was aware of concerns within YWAM and supported efforts to bring the issues to light, adding that The Send UK was committed to “fostering a message of respect, service to others and love”.

For Sarah*, a current volunteer with YWAM and The Send, “submitting to Jesus” has been “the most releasing thing”. The 24-year-old said she had previously been living a “lukewarm lifestyle” with one foot in her religion and one out. So she quit her job at a PR agency in London to do a DTS in Hawaii. She now runs Send events in the UK and said she felt “honoured” to be part of it.

Felicity Davies, a designer from Yorkshire, said she had joined YWAM at 18 because she was passionate about her religion and “really wanted to help people”. But she said her six years at bases in New Zealand and South Africa had left her feeling “suffocated” and “not good enough”. “I constantly had to do certain things in order for God to love me,” she said.

After leaving, she came out as queer. She also began questioning the version of Christianity she had been taught. “I think there’s a lot of solid good bits in the Bible, but the version I’d seen just didn’t sit right,” she said.

Now 34, she said movements such as The Send made her “nervous” for the next generation – and hopes speaking out will help young people make a more informed choice. “I learned so much about generosity and community in YWAM, so it wasn’t all awful. But people should be aware that this isn’t all happy-clappy,” she said. “A lot of people get traumatised. And no one’s held to account.”

*Names have been changed

Donald Trump’s 10% tariff on all imports from many countries, including the UK, has come into force after 48 hours of turmoil.

US customs agents began collecting the unilateral tariff at US seaports, airports and customs warehouses at 12.01am ET (04:01 GMT), with higher levies on goods from 57 larger trading partners due to start next week – including from the EU, which will be hit with a 20% rate.

Keir Starmer was expected to spend the weekend speaking to foreign leaders about the tariffs, after calls with the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the Italian PM, Giorgia Meloni, on Friday in which the leaders agreed that an “all-out trade war would be extremely damaging”.

Starmer was “clear the UK’s response will be guided by the national interest” and officials would “calmly continue with our preparatory work, rather than rush to retaliate”, a No 10 spokesperson said.

Up until now, UK ministers have avoided voicing any criticism of Trump as they sought to secure a trade agreement with the US – hoping for some exemption from the tariffs. However, the UK government has drawn up a list of products that could be hit in retaliation, and was consulting with businesses on how any countermeasures could affect them.

Ralph Goodale, the high commissioner for Canada in the UK, told BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme that the US needed to “feel the pain” and Canada would stand firm.

He said: “The action taken by the US government is completely illogical. It will damage the United States itself. It will raise costs in the United States. It will eliminate jobs in the United States, it will reduce growth in the United States and we have to make it abundantly clear not just that that is going to happen rhetorically, but the US has to feel the pain, because ultimately it will be Americans who will persuade their government to stop this foolishness.”

Trump’s announcement of the tariffs on Wednesday shook global stock markets to their core, wiping out $5tn in stock market value for S&P 500 companies by Friday’s close, a record two-day decline. The prices of oil and commodities plunged, as investors fled to the safety of government bonds.

“This is the single biggest trade action of our lifetime,” said Kelly Ann Shaw, a trade lawyer at Hogan Lovells and former White House trade adviser during Trump’s first term.

While speaking at a Brookings Institution event on Thursday, Shaw said she expected that over time the tariffs would evolve as countries started negotiating lower rates for themselves, but she called the change “huge”.

Shaw said: “This is a pretty seismic and significant shift in the way that we trade with every country on Earth.”

Australia, the UK, Colombia, Argentina, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are among countries initially hit with the 10% tariff.

At 12.01 ET on Wednesday, Trump’s higher “reciprocal” tariff rates of 11% to 50% are due to take effect. EU imports will face a 20% tariff, while Chinese goods will be hit with a 34% tariff, bringing Trump’s total new levies on China to 54%.

Canada and Mexico were exempt from Trump’s latest duties because they are still subject to a 25% tariff related to the US fentanyl crisis for goods that do not comply with the US-Mexico-Canada rules of origin.

Reuters contributed to this report

On Thursday evening, towards the end of a long week at a textiles factory on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyēn Thị Diẹu and her husband were watching the news. More than 8,700 miles away, US president Donald Trump was announcing sweeping, unprecedented tariffs on every country around the world. Nowhere was safe, even the uninhabited Heard Island and McDonald Islands off the western coast of Australia that, for some unexplained reason, were hit with a 10% tariff.

His announcement launched a fierce global trade war and triggered a global market meltdown, including on Trump’s own cherished Wall Street, where hundreds of billions of dollars of stock values evaporated.

And for Diẹu and her husband, it could mean they lose their jobs. They both work for a Taiwanese company making footwear in Vietnam for an American company, that exports them around the world. It is hard to find a better example of modern globalisation – and now, as the US enters a new age of protectionism, a speech in the White House Rose Garden means that Diẹu doesn’t know how her family will survive.

“Nothing is clear,” said Diẹu on Saturday night, as she browsed a roadside market in one of Ho Chi Minh City’s industrial zones, home to tens of thousands of people who work in the city’s factories. “I feel confused and worried that my job may not be stable.”

Officials in Vietnam are concerned. The US is Vietnam’s biggest market, with exports making up 30% of the country’s GDP and fuelling its economic growth. Hours after the announcement, Vietnam’s prime minister ordered the creation of a “rapid response team” and said the deputy prime minister, Ho Duc Phoc, would head to the US for a “working visit”.

Every country around the world has had a similar reaction. In Europe, leaders condemned Trump’s tariffs as “fundamentally wrong” (Olaf Scholz), “brutal and unfounded” (Emmanuel Macron) and “contrary to the interests of millions of people, on both sides of the Atlantic” (Pedro Sánchez).

European media were similarly brutal. “Filled with paranoia, vengeance and coerciveness” was the verdict of Le Monde, while Italy’s Corriere della Sera urged the EU to threaten “counter-tariffs … to bring the US to the table. Clearly, the EU is being put through what amounts to a stress test. It will need to demonstrate unity.”

But while Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission chief, said Europeans felt “let down by their oldest ally” and warned the tariffs were “a major blow to the world economy” with “dire consequences”, the EU did not immediately respond.

Partly, that is because – in the words of Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia group consultancy – the bloc’s “ultimate aim is to prevent a further escalation, bring the US to the table, and explore paths to mutually rolling back transatlantic trade barriers”.

Brussels still hopes that over the coming weeks, “a combination of counter-duties, threats and offers” will bring results, Rahman said, limiting the damage to an EU-US trade relationship that was worth more than €1.6tn (£1.3tn) in 2023.

There is a lot for Europe to lose if it doesn’t. Trump’s “liberation day” tariff of 20% on almost all EU exports to the US came after 25% levies on steel, aluminium, cars and car parts. In total, about 70% – or €380bn – of EU exports to the US will be affected.

EU officials calculate that would raise about €80bn for the US treasury if trade remained unchanged, which it most probably won’t: economists have estimated that in the medium term, EU exports to the US could fall by 50% because of the tariffs.

But if Brussels hopes a staggered approach to retaliation will encourage the US to negotiate, there is another reason it is not rushing to respond: getting 27 member states, each with national interests to defend, to agree on a single strategy is not easy.

The EU’s response to Trump’s steel and aluminium tariffs, which were announced six weeks ago, will probably include levies on emblematic American products such as orange juice, blue jeans, bourbon whiskey and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Due to be unveiled in mid-April, however, its exact details have still not been decided. Still less, the bloc’s retaliatory response to the 25% duties on EU cars and car parts that came into force on 3 April – let alone the latest liberation day tariffs.

Member states are nervous. France, Italy and Ireland, for example, are campaigning hard to have bourbon removed from the list – because Trump has threatened to hit European wines and spirits with a 200% duty if the EU includes it.

Targeting the US whiskey, they argue, would do more economic harm than good: EU countries import barely €500m of bourbon annually, but export €8bn of wine and spirits to the US – and some EU winemakers rely on the US for up to 20% of sales.

“What matters,” said Ignacio García Bercero, a former senior EU trade negotiator, “is that you maximise the political impact [on the US], and limit the economic impact [to the EU]”. It is a delicate balancing act.

The EU does, however, have one strong hand to play in services. Trump is obsessed with the $236bn US trade deficit with the EU in goods, but less well known is that the US runs a trade surplus in services with the EU of €109bn.

If necessary, limiting US companies’ access to EU public procurement tenders or to European markets ranging from banking and other financial services to big tech could prove a powerful riposte. For the time being, though, it has not come to that.

“We are buying the space we need to negotiate, and looking at targeting our response in the most effective way possible,” an EU official said: not just “how we impact the US”, but also “saving our member states and our industry the pain wherever possible”.

As Europe reeled from the shock of the tariffs, the unspoken message from Beijing was: welcome to our world. “There are no winners in trade wars, and there is no way out for protectionism,” the commerce ministry said on Thursday.

For Xi Jinping’s government, there was no Brussels-style hesitancy – they immediately hit back. On Friday, China announced that it would be imposing retaliatory tariffs of 34% on US imports, starting on 10 April. China also added US entities to its export control list, restricting their ability to do business in China.

Chinese companies have been figuring out how to circumnavigate Trump’s tariffs since 2018, when Trump’s first US-China trade war started. Companies have been moving their supply chains to south-east Asia, while the government has been signing trade deals with global south countries with increasing gusto.

Even with countries without a free trade agreement, such as Brazil, Chinese bilateral trade has soared in the past seven years. In 2023, China-Brazil trade reached a record $157.5bn.

Economists noted that the US tariffs on Chinese goods did not change the fact that the US is a net importer of products that China produces, such as fast fashion, electronics and clean energy equipment. “If the US shifts around its importing pattern without changing its net imports, it’s not going to make much of a difference to the world,” said Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University. “You’ll see trade shift around, but the basic imbalances will remain there.”

Trump and his team have tried to tackle this problem by imposing tariffs on the countries that have been used by Chinese companies to reroute their supply chains, such as Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. Those countries are being hit with even higher tariffs than China, at 46%, 36% and 49%, respectively.

Whether or not the tariffs have the desired effect from the US perspective, there is one clear strategic victory – for China. China, once again, can present itself as the stable global partner for third countries, in contrast to the capricious US.

Back in Washington, Trump was claiming on social media that “China played it wrong – they panicked”, insisting that despite the market drops, global political condemnation and even rare criticism from his own Republican party, his tariffs had made it a “great time to get rich”.

But with all eyes nervously on Monday’s markets amid worries that the calamitous drops will continue, recession fears are mounting in America. JP Morgan analysts last week boosted their odds on a global recession to 60% and Americans are bracing for a return of inflation – the thing that above all else probably doomed Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.

On the streets of New York too, there was panic among some. In Washington Square Park, two sisters from Detroit were sitting on a park bench nearby the magnolia trees now in bloom. Kathleen, a primary school teacher, said she worried about whether there was a plan in place before changes are made.

“I want to be optimistic, but I live under an umbrella of worry with this administration,” Kathleen said. “I worry about the leadership, worry about a lack of continuity within the leadership, and so many changes at once without a plan.”

Her sister, Elizabeth, said she’d grown so anxious she’d stepped back from the news. “Our mum definitely had a huge jump in anxiety during this past week over her investments. She worked hard for those and she lives on them … a retired schoolteacher, and the drop in stocks very much affects her day-to-day feeling of security.”

Trump made his move because he dreams of a return of American manufacturing might, convinced that tariffs will force factories home to the US, even though almost all economists think that is highly unlikely.

Yet, for such a momentous decision which has rattled the entire world economy, Trump reportedly only made up his mind at the last minute. According to the Washington Post, Trump didn’t arrive on an exact plan until just three hours before the Rose Garden performance.

The “liberation day” announcement from the White House was a choreographed event, and his speech drew cheers from the audience, largely made up cabinet members and blue-collar workers from manufacturing sectors that have for decades been economically pummelled by foreign competition. He offered up a vision that tariffs would bring back an older American economy, reopening factories and returning prosperity to ordinary workers.

“Taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years,” Trump complained “But it is not going to happen any more.”

Vice-president JD Vance said: “We’ve seen closing factories, we’ve seen rising inflation. We’ve seen the cost of housing so high that most Americans can’t afford to buy a home right now. President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction.”

Most observers would probably agree that the US economy was heading in a “different direction”, but would not be quite as enthusiastic as the vice-president.

On Friday, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, warned that Trump risked stoking even higher inflation and slower growth. “It is now becoming clear that the tariff increases will be significantly larger than expected,” he said. “The same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.”

As the financial markets continued to convulse on Friday, the Washington Post reported that Trump was unbowed by negative headlines, criticism from foreign leaders, and was determined to listen to a single voice to secure what he views as his political legacy. That voice was his own.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck any more,” a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking told the newspaper. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

But even some former Trump economic officials privately expressed doubts that returning the US to an era of manufacturing self-sufficiency was probably impossible.

The author Michael Wolff, who has published four books about Trump in power, says the US president will now be keenly gauging how his interruption to global trade norms is going down, with updates and live-action replays provided by aides. Trump, Wolff says, is probably caught between two opposing instincts.

“It’s great for him – he’s dominating the news once again. Nobody is talking about anything else except tariffs. Suddenly, tariffs, an arcane piece of trade policy, are the most dramatic thing in the world that he’s imbued with reality-show stuff. He’ll be really pleased with that.”

But on the other hand, Wolff predicts, Trump will be watching the financial markets. “He’ll have the business guys calling up saying: what the fuck are you doing? I’m sure he hasn’t come to any conclusion. So on the one hand it’s great – he’s the world’s leading guy again. On the other, it might collapse in on him.”

And that, he adds, is the essence of Trump. “He’s fundamentally self-destructive, but that self-destructive impulse is exactly what keeps him at the forefront of the news.”

Back in Vietnam, Trump’s image as a successful businessman chimed with many in the country, where entrepreneurship is prized. Several of his books have been translated into Vietnamese, including The Art of the Deal. During his first term, many Vietnamese also welcomed his tough stance on China, and polling suggests Vietnam was one of the few countries where most of the population was confident in his leadership.

“I view him all the time on TV,” said Diẹu, who adds that she also likes him. Will her mind change after his tariff announcement? There’s a pause. “It’s hard to say.”

Donald Trump’s vast overhaul of US trade policy this week has called time on an era of globalization, alarming people, governments and investors around the world. No one should have been surprised, the US president said.

The announcement of 10% to 50% tariffs on US trading partners tanked stock markets after Trump unveiled a “declaration of economic independence” so drastic it drew comparison with Britain’s exit from the European Union – Brexit.

But Trump, who won re-election promising that tariffs would make America great again, has advocated for the return of widespread tariffs with “great consistency” for decades. “I’ve been talking about it for 40 years,” he noted in the White House Rose Garden.

Many businesses, economists and politicians believe Trump’s trade plan is wrongheaded, flawed and risky. Some have even suggested it might have been written by ChatGPT. But he is unquestionably right when it comes to the number of decades he has argued for it.

“This is so unusual for Trump. He’s a conventional politician in one way: he doesn’t believe in much deeply,” Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Tariffs are different. “This one thing, he seems to deeply believe in.”

As far back as 1987, when a fame-hungry real estate tycoon took out full-page ads in newspapers, the now president called for such a strategy. Other major economies are the “greatest profit machines ever created”, he argued way back when. “‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America.”

Eight years after the start of his first term and just 10 weeks into his second, he has finally set about seriously delivering that dream – and cast aside warnings it may deteriorate into a nightmare.

On the campaign trail last year, Trump made no secret of his vision: tariffs would unshackle the US economy, he promised, revitalize its industrial heartlands and unlock a gigantic financial windfall for the federal government.

But after pitching this big, beautiful and bold reconstruction of the global economic order, the early actions of the second Trump administration were strikingly smaller, messier and altogether more hesitant than trailed.

The focus, at first, narrowed dramatically from the world to just a handful of nations: China, Canada and Mexico. While China was hit hard, sweeping tariffs on Canada and Mexico were interrupted by a dizzying array of deadlines, delays and dispensations.

Tariffs were increased on steel and aluminum. But Trump’s trade agenda was largely characterized by threats and spats: rhetoric, but not reality.

On Wednesday, dubbed “liberation day” by Trump and his aides, he did his best to draw a sharp line under weeks of wavering, doubt and confusion – and imposed the universal and “reciprocal” tariffs he pledged so many times to introduce while fighting to regain the White House.

Defying the stark forecasts and concerns of mainstream economists and corporations, Trump went with his gut. “That was true of the Brexiteers, was it not? They really believed it deeply from the core of their souls,” said Sabato.

At one point during his address, Trump switched from president to historian. “In 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax,” he said, setting the stage for a sharp reduction in tariffs on foreign goods. “Citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.”

Decades of US prosperity “came to a very abrupt end” with the Great Depression from 1929, Professor Trump opined before his class of aides, cabinet secretaries and supporters. “It would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy,” he claimed. “It would have been a much different story.”

Actual historians took issue with this account. “It’s what we would call a lie. False. Not true,” said Andrew Cohen, professor of history in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. “He’s wrong. No one thinks that. Even conservative economists don’t think that. Even protectionist economists don’t think that.”

Months into the depression, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 – which hiked tariffs on hundreds of imports in a bid to boost the US economy – is widely considered to have prolonged, and even deepened, the crisis. No other president has tried the same tactic again – until now.

The swift rebuttal to Trump’s analysis of the past was surpassed only by the response to his ambitious predictions for the future.

The president has promised a new Golden Age, with millions of new jobs, billions more dollars’ worth of US exports and trillions of dollars in tariff revenues. Outside his administration, skepticism is high.

“The Trump tariffs mark a liberation from the benefits of free trade for American businesses and consumers,” said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University, and a former official at the International Monetary Fund. “Trump has taken the hatchet to trade with practically every major US trading partner, sparing few allies or rivals,” he added, with action that will be “severely disruptive to the US economy, with the effects felt by American consumers and businesses in practically every industry”.

Who pays the price? The rest of the world, according to the president and his aides. But import tariffs are paid by the companies and consumers that import the goods from the rest of the world – in this case, US companies and consumers – rather than the overseas companies exporting them.

Trump’s tariffs will increase the average US household’s costs by $3,800, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

“These tariff increases are likely to be some of the biggest tax increases in US history and will result (if fully implemented) in some of the highest tariff rates the US has ever seen,” wrote Jeremy Horpedahl, adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, who noted that they could exceed the post-Smoot-Hawley levels of 1930.

“Like all tariffs, some large portion of these new levies will be paid by US consumers and businesses in the form of higher prices,” added Horpedahl.

If Trump is right, and his decades-old dream revives the world’s largest economy, enriching its citizens and transforming its industrial base into a manufacturing powerhouse, his administration will be one of the most successful in modern memory.

But if he’s wrong, the very Americans who elected him to rapidly bring down the cost of living are likely to be hit hardest.

“It’s either going to be Trump and his team or it’s going to be a large majority of experienced mainstream economists,” said Sabato. “I know where my bet is.”

Ted Cruz, the US senator from Texas, has warned that his fellow Republicans risk a “bloodbath” in the 2026 midterm elections if Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs cause a recession.

Cruz also warned that the president’s tariffs, if they stay in place for long and are met by global retaliation on American goods, could trigger a full-blown trade war that “would destroy jobs here at home, and do real damage to the US economy”.

“A hundred years ago, the US economy didn’t have the leverage to have the kind of impact we do now. But I worry, there are voices within the administration that want to see these tariffs continue for ever and ever,” he added.

The Texan’s comments, made on his Verdict podcast on Friday, were a further sign that the imposition of global “reciprocal” duties on imported goods is causing unease among Republicans.

The Republican US senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced bipartisan legislation on Thursday to grant Congress more power over placing tariffs on US trading nations. The bill, co-sponsored by the Democratic senator Maria Cantwell, would “reaffirm” the role of Congress in setting and approving trade policy.

The Republican senators Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis have since signed on as co-sponsors. Though the legislation is considered largely symbolic, it telegraphs anxiety over the $5.4tn loss of stock market capitalization over two days and signs of an electoral backlash to Trump administration policies in the form of a defeat at the ballot box by a Wisconsin supreme court race candidate backed by Trump’s billionaire business adviser Elon Musk.

In two Florida congressional races, the Republican winners also underperformed.

On his podcast, Cruz warned that tariffs and trade retaliation over the long term could push the US into “a recession, particularly a bad recession – 2026 in all likelihood politically would be a bloodbath”.

“You would face a Democrat House, and you might even face a Democrat Senate,” Cruz said.

“If we’re in the middle of a recession and people are hurting badly, they punish the party in power,” Cruz warned, adding he did not share the White House’s position that the tariffs would usher in “a booming economy”.

But if “every other country on Earth” hits the US with retaliatory tariffs and Trump’s so-called reciprocal levies remain in place, “that is a terrible outcome” that “would destroy jobs here at home, and do real damage to the US economy”.

Cruz, nonetheless, held out an olive branch to the administration.

“Look, I want this to succeed … but my definition of succeed may be different than the White House’s,” he said, adding that his definition of success “is dramatically lower tariffs abroad and result in dramatically lowering tariffs here”.

“That’s success for the American workers, American businesses, American growth, American prosperity,” he continued. “That’s a great outcome.”

Mobile phone footage of the last moments of some of the 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers killed by Israeli forces in an incident in Gaza last month appears to contradict the version of events put forward by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The almost seven-minute video, which the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Saturday was recovered from the phone of Rifat Radwan, one of the men killed, appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle. It shows a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.

The vehicle stops beside another that has driven off the road. Two men get out to examine the stopped vehicle, and then gunfire erupts before the screen goes black.

The Israeli military has said its soldiers “did not randomly attack” any ambulances, insisting they fired on “terrorists” approaching them in “suspicious vehicles”.

Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, a military spokesperson, said troops opened fire on vehicles that had no prior clearance to enter the area, and were driving with their lights off.

The IDF said on Saturday that the incident was still under investigation and that “all claims, including the documentation circulated about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation”.

Late on Saturday, Reuters cited an anonymous Israeli military official as telling journalists that the initial account of the vehicles not having emergency lights on was mistaken.

Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, including at least one UN employee, were killed in the incident in Rafah on 23 March, in which the UN says Israeli forces shot the men “one by one” and then buried them in a mass grave.

According to the UN humanitarian affairs office (Ocha), the PRCS and civil defence workers were on a mission to rescue colleagues who had been shot at earlier in the day, when their clearly marked vehicles came under heavy Israeli fire in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan district. A Red Crescent official in Gaza said there was evidence of at least one person being detained and killed, as the body of one of the dead had been found with his hands tied.

The shootings happened one day into the renewed Israeli offensive in the area close to the Egyptian border after the breakdown of a two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Another Red Crescent worker on the mission is still reported missing.

Mobile phone footage of the last moments of some of the 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers killed by Israeli forces in an incident in Gaza last month appears to contradict the version of events put forward by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The almost seven-minute video, which the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Saturday was recovered from the phone of Rifat Radwan, one of the men killed, appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle. It shows a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.

The vehicle stops beside another that has driven off the road. Two men get out to examine the stopped vehicle, and then gunfire erupts before the screen goes black.

The Israeli military has said its soldiers “did not randomly attack” any ambulances, insisting they fired on “terrorists” approaching them in “suspicious vehicles”.

Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, a military spokesperson, said troops opened fire on vehicles that had no prior clearance to enter the area, and were driving with their lights off.

The IDF said on Saturday that the incident was still under investigation and that “all claims, including the documentation circulated about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation”.

Late on Saturday, Reuters cited an anonymous Israeli military official as telling journalists that the initial account of the vehicles not having emergency lights on was mistaken.

Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, including at least one UN employee, were killed in the incident in Rafah on 23 March, in which the UN says Israeli forces shot the men “one by one” and then buried them in a mass grave.

According to the UN humanitarian affairs office (Ocha), the PRCS and civil defence workers were on a mission to rescue colleagues who had been shot at earlier in the day, when their clearly marked vehicles came under heavy Israeli fire in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan district. A Red Crescent official in Gaza said there was evidence of at least one person being detained and killed, as the body of one of the dead had been found with his hands tied.

The shootings happened one day into the renewed Israeli offensive in the area close to the Egyptian border after the breakdown of a two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Another Red Crescent worker on the mission is still reported missing.

Gaza is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a civilian now that Israeli forces have resumed their military campaign with even more ferocity, but for the first responders who rush towards the wreckage of bombed buildings, the risks are multiplied many times over.

The 15 paramedics and rescue workers whose bodies were found last weekend in a bulldozed pit outside Rafah knew they were putting their lives in peril to try to save others, but they could not have been prepared for what awaited them in the early hours of 23 March.

Saleh Moamer, a 45-year-old Red Crescent ambulance officer and paramedic, had already come close to death twice, his brother, Bilal, recalled. Earlier in the war Saleh was assigned to transport patients between hospitals when his vehicle came under Israeli army fire. The driver was killed instantly and a bullet lodged in Saleh’s chest near his heart. Administering first aid on himself he slid below his seat and steered the vehicle out of the line of fire by following directions given over the radio by his colleagues.

Saleh spent three months in hospital then returned to work. Not long after, on a rescue mission near Rafah, his ambulance was shot at again and he was wounded in the right shoulder. He and Bilal talked about how he had used up all his luck and the third time would be fatal. It was half-joke, half deadly serious, and turned out to be prophetic.

“He said that whatever was intended for him, would happen,” Bilal said.

Before he went out on his night shift on 22 March, Saleh bought bulk quantities of household goods for his wife, their six children, and his brother’s two children who they had been looking after since their father was killed in the conflict.

“He said it would benefit them in the future. It was as if he had a feeling he would not return,” Bilal said.

Saleh joined the Red Crescent during the 2008-09 Israeli invasion of Gaza. He had studied business administration at Al-Azhar University, but his urge to do something immediate to help people amid the turmoil and bloodshed led him to train as a paramedic.

“What kept him going, despite the dangers, was his drive to save innocent lives,” Bilal said, describing his older brother as cheerful and friendly but profoundly dedicated.

“He was deeply passionate about his work and spent most of his time in the ambulance and emergency department,” he said. “When he finished his work in the ambulance, he would head to the vehicle maintenance department at the Red Crescent, fixing any electrical problems. He even formed a team to visit the homes of the injured to check on them. If he had any medicine or medical supplies, he would seek outpatients in need.”

When the dispatch call came early on Sunday 23 March that people had been injured in an airstrike on the Tel al-Sultan area of Rafah, Saleh took an ambulance to the scene. Seeing the extent of the damage he called for more ambulances, collected the wounded he could find and returned to base, according to his brother.

On arriving back he learned that radio contact had been lost with another ambulance also dispatched to the site. That ambulance, which was being driven by Saleh’s colleague, Mustafa Khafaja, had come under intense Israeli fire and by the time he heard they were missing at about 4.30am, Khafaja and his fellow paramedic Ezz alDin Shatt were already dead, according to the third man in the ambulance, Munther Abed, who had survived but was detained by Israeli soldiers. Abed later described them as special forces.

Before dawn, Saleh drove back to the scene and could only see the empty ambulance in an area of sandy dunes in Tel al-Sultan known as Hashashin, Bilal said. He drove back to the ambulance station in al-Mawasi, a few miles up the coast, and organised a rescue convoy of Red Crescent ambulances, a bright red civil defence fire truck and a UN vehicle. In all, 13 paramedics and rescue workers drove to Hashashin to look for their missing colleagues, and that was the last time they were seen alive.

Bound and made to lie on the ground, Abed, the detained paramedic from the first ambulance, saw one rescue vehicle after another ambushed by waiting Israeli forces. Later he saw a military digger excavate a pit and the vehicles being thrown in before a bulldozer covered it over.

The families of the missing first responders spent a whole week in agony before receiving the call that bodies had been found. Bilal, his surviving brother and his parents rushed to the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, hoping Saleh would not be among the remains, but that hope was quickly smashed.

“When the bodies arrived, they were wrapped in white shrouds with their names written on them. I was the one who uncovered my brother’s face, and I began to wonder if it was really him,” Bilal said. The bodies had been in the ground for a week. They confirmed it was Saleh by the ring on his finger.

“There were marks from restraints on Saleh’s wrists where the Israeli army had bound him. His fingers were also broken,” he said. Two other witnesses have told the Guardian that some of the victims had had their hands or feet bound.

Israel’s military has said its “initial assessment” of the incident found that its troops had opened fire on several vehicles “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals”, and has claimed, so far without evidence, that Hamas fighters and other militants had been using the ambulances for cover.

For Bilal, the Israeli claim that the ambulances were carrying terrorists, was a further insult. “These paramedics were providing humanitarian services. They did not pose any threat or carry weapons. What was their crime for them to be killed like this?” he asked.

Among the other families who dashed to the morgue at Nasser hospital was a 63-year-old father, Sobhi Bahloul, searching for his son, Mohammad, a volunteer Red Crescent paramedic.

Finding his body, Sobhi said he went into shock and could not cry. “Perhaps I wasn’t fully conscious of what was happening,” he said. “[The dead] were still in their uniforms, covered in blood and dirt. I was able to recognise Mohammad’s features with difficulty. I moved closer until my face was right in front of his, and only then was I certain it was him. Then we pulled his ID from his trouser pocket.”

Sobhi said: “The gunshot wounds were clear – shots to the chest and his wrist. It looked like he had raised his hand to shield himself, and the bullets went through his hand into his chest and out of his back. There were more than four bullets, all in the chest and heart area. I believe he died instantly.”

Like Saleh, Mohammad was passionate about his work as a paramedic. He graduated from Al-Azhar University with a degree in nursing, then took a series of intensive courses, obtained an ambulance driving licence, trained as a paramedic, and had continued studies in health administration at Al-Quds Open University. He had been volunteering since 2018 and had hoped it would become a paid job, but the absence of a salary did not dim his commitment.

“We hardly saw him at home,” his father recalled. “He was constantly at the hospital, with the ambulance teams. He was courageous and proactive, never waiting for instructions – always taking the initiative.”

“I raised my children to love goodness and to do good deeds,” Sobhi said. “We had a principle in our home: do good without expecting thanks or praise. Mohammad lived by this principle.

“We never expected this to happen – not even in our worst nightmares,” Sobhi added. “They went to save lives, only to become victims themselves.”

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Spain in the latest protest against housing speculation and to demand access to affordable homes.

Organisers claim that up to 150,000 joined the protest in Madrid while smaller demonstrations were held in about 40 cities across the country. Protesters from Málaga on the Costa del Sol to Vigo in the Atlantic northwest chanted “end the housing racket” and “landlords are guilty, the government is responsible”.

Valeria Racu, a spokesperson for the Madrid tenants’ union, called for rent strikes such as those mounted recently in some Catalan coastal towns.

“This is the beginning of the end of the housing business,” Racu said. “The beginning of a better society, without landlordism and this parasitical system that devours our salaries and our resources.”

The union says 1.4m Spanish households spend more than 30% of their income on housing, 200,000 families more than 10 years ago.

Housing has become the number one social issue in Spain as a combination of property speculation and tourist apartments have driven the cost of rented housing beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy.

Official statistics suggest there are at least 15,000 illegal tourist apartments in Madrid while in Barcelona the city council says it will not renew the existing 10,000 tourist apartment licences when they expire in 2028.

What was initially a problem in areas with a high concentration of tourists, such as the Balearic and Canary Islands, as well as Barcelona, has become an issue across the country, with protests in Seville, Valencia, Santiago de Compostela, Burgos and San Sebastián, among other cities, where protesters rattled sets of keys in what has become a symbol of discontent over the lack of affordable homes.

In the Balearics the average rent for a small apartment has risen by 40% in five years to about €1,400 (£1,190) a month, more than the average monthly salary of those working in the hospitality sector, the region’s main industry.

The young have been hardest hit as housing costs have soared while salaries remain stagnant. A study published by the Spanish youth council showed that a lack of affordable housing meant that last year 85% of young people under 30 were still living with their parents.

In Barcelona, where thousands gathered in the Plaça d’Espanya, protesters demanded a 50% reduction in rents, indefinite leases and an end to property speculation.

According to the Catalan housing agency, rents in Barcelona have increased by 70% in the past 10 years. Salaries rose by 17.5% over the same period.

“The housing game is rigged in favour of anyone with assets while tax incentives encourage them to acquire more and more property,” said Jaime Palomera of the Barcelona Urban Research Institute and the author of El Secuestro de la Vivienda (The Kidnapping of Housing).

“The rich have got richer since the financial crash in 2008 and the Covid crisis and they have used this wealth to buy more and more property, constantly driving up prices and increasing inequality.

“The fact is that property offers a better return than other investments. We have an economic model that encourages investment in assets that don’t create any value but simply use rent as a way of sucking money out of the middle classes.”

The solution, Palomera says, is to tax those who own multiple properties.

He cites the example of Singapore, where the state offers financial support to first-time buyers but imposes an ascending tax regime on second and subsequent homes.

France’s far right is hoping for a massive public show of support tomorrow in a “people’s protest” against Marine Le Pen being barred from standing for president in 2027.

The Rassemblement National (National Rally – RN) party called for a nationwide demonstration under the banner “Save Democracy” after Le Pen was found guilty in a €4m (£3.4m) embezzlement trial.

Leftwing and centrist parties have also called for separate gatherings in and around the capital in support of the law being enforced – as well to back the court, and judges who have been subject to death threats requiring police protection.

The prime minister, François Bayrou, has called for the rival rallies to be held in a spirit of “calm, mutual respect and a spirit of responsibility” to avoid clashes.

The Ouest-France newspaper said the demonstrations would be a “battle of images”. “We might almost believe we’re in the middle of an election campaign,” it wrote.

The RN called for a “peaceful popular mobilisation” after Le Pen was found guilty last Monday of embezzling European Parliament funds through a huge fake jobs scam. A 10-year investigation was followed by a nine-week trial last autumn and the three judges delivered their verdict after a three-month deliberation.

Le Pen and eight other RN European Parliament members, who all denied the charges and have appealed, were judged to have been part of an organised “system” of embezzlement between 2004 and 2016 in which European funds supposed to be used to pay EU parliamentary assistants were used to pay the party’s workers in France. The court found Le Pen to be at “the heart” of this system and guilty of directly organising eight fictitious contracts and instigating a wider fake jobs scheme.

Le Pen and her colleagues are not the only French politicians to have been accused of financial impropriety. In February 2024, eight members of Bayrou’s centrist party MoDem were found guilty of similarly misusing European Parliament funds. They were fined, sentenced to prison terms and banned from public office. Bayrou was cleared of embezzlement.

Rightwing French MP Éric Ciotti, who supports Le Pen, and has suggested overturning the law barring her and others convicted of fraud from public office, is under investigation on allegations of misuse of public funds.

In 2022, former PM and presidential hopeful François Fillon and his Welsh wife, Penelope, were convicted on appeal of embezzling public funds in a fake job scandal.

Le Pen was sentenced to four years in prison, two suspended and two to be served with an electronic tag. She was also fined €100,000 and hit with an immediate ban from public office for five years. Because of the appeal against her conviction, the sentence is postponed until a retrial, but the bar from public office remains in place.

French legal authorities have said they will speed up the process, which can take decades, to ensure the Court of Appeal hears the case and delivers a verdict by the summer of 2026.

To take part in the presidential election she will need to be either cleared, or convicted a second time but with the ban lifted. The second option raises the prospect of a convicted fraudster entering the Elysée wearing an electronic anklet.

While the RN is hoping for a show of strength this weekend, polls suggest Le Pen may not have the public support she is counting on and claims.

An institute cluster poll for Le Point magazine found 61% of French people thought her conviction justified and two out of three of those quizzed said the immediate application of a bar on standing for public office was “fair”; 43% said the condemnation and punishment was “extremely justified”.

Stewart Chau, director of polling at Vérian Group, said France was engaged in a “battle of opinion” and that the polls had to be viewed with caution.

“If 60% of people believe this justice is impartial and think Marine Le Pen is not above the law and should be judged like anyone else, it still means 40% do not agree and think it is a political decision, which is not an insignificant number,” Chau told the Observer.

He said he did not think there would be a massive mobilisation in support of the RN on Sunday.

“The RN is trying to wrap this judgement against it up as a wider issue of an attack on democracy. While the political earthquake caused by last Monday’s judgement is felt by the RN’s inner circle and its supporters, I don’t think the wider dynamic is there,” he added.

The French far-right has repeatedly presented itself as above the corruption and abuse of power scandals that have hit other parties. Le Pen’s father and founder of the Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died in January, adopted the slogan “clean hands and head held high” before the 1993 legislative elections. For decades, his daughter, who took over the party in 2011, has campaigned for stricter laws to tackle corruption in public life; when the ineligibility rule for public office for convicted fraudsters was debated in parliament in 2016 she called for those found guilty to be barred for life.

Commentators say to beware of rallies suggesting there is widespread popular support when most of those attending are already party members or supportersbackers.

“There will no doubt be a large crowd at the RN’s Paris meeting on Sunday. As in 2017 at the meeting called by François Fillon at Place du Trocadéro when he was indicted. But beware of optical illusions: every time, it’s not the ‘people’ who revolt against the judges, it’s just the supporters, the faithful who fly to the aid of their candidate,” wrote FranceInfo.

Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo, has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting his former personal assistant, firing her when she wouldn’t acquiesce to advances and reneging on a settlement that was meant to keep the allegations confidential.

The former assistant, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, sued the filmmaker and his production company on Thursday. She is seeking a judge’s order to enforce the agreement after Schrader said he couldn’t go through with it. The terms, including a monetary payment, were not disclosed.

“This is an open-and-shut settlement enforcement matter,” Doe’s lawyer, Gregory Chiarello, wrote in court papers accompanying the breach-of-contract claim.

Schrader’s lawyer, Philip J Kessler, deemed the lawsuit “desperate, opportunistic and frivolous” – and said many of the allegations in it are false or materially misleading.

“We absolutely deny that there was ever a sexual relationship of any kind between Mr Schrader and his former assistant, and we deny that Mr Schrader ever made an attempt to have a sexual relationship of any kind with his former assistant,” Kessler said.

The lawsuit, filed in a New York court, laid bare allegations that the confidential settlement between Doe, 26, and Schrader, 78, had been intended to keep under wraps.

They include her claim that the filmmaker trapped her in his hotel room, grabbed her arms and kissed her against her will last year while they were promoting his latest film, Oh, Canada, at the Cannes film festival in France.

Two days later, the lawsuit said, Schrader called Doe repeatedly and sent her angry text messages claiming he was “dying” and couldn’t pack his bags. When Doe arrived to help, the lawsuit said, Schrader exposed his genitals to her as he opened his hotel room door wearing nothing but an open bathrobe.

Doe alleges Schrader fired her last September after she again rejected his advances. Soon after, the lawsuit said, he sent her an email expressing fear that he’d become “a Harvey Weinstein” in her mind. Weinstein, the movie mogul turned #MeToo villain, was convicted of rape in Los Angeles in 2022 and is awaiting a 15 April retrial in his New York rape case.

According to the lawsuit, Schrader agreed to the settlement on 5 February but changed his mind after an illness and “soul searching”. Schrader conveyed through his lawyers in March that he “could not live with the settlement”, the lawsuit said. Kessler disputed that.

“The agreement that they’re trying to enforce against Mr Schrader, in plain English, required both parties to sign it before it became legally effective,” Kessler said. “Mr Schrader declined to sign it. It’s frankly as simple as that.”

Doe worked for Schrader from 2021 until 2024, according to the lawsuit. During that time, Kessler said, she posted on social media about how much she loved her job and referred to Schrader as an extraordinary mentor and “my man”.

Schrader rose to fame through his collaborations with the director Martin Scorsese, beginning with Taxi Driver in 1976. Robert De Niro’s iconic line “You talkin’ to me?” is seared into the lexicon and ranked among the American Film Institute’s all-time greatest movie quotes.

Schrader co-wrote Scorsese’s 1980 boxing drama Raging Bull, also starring De Niro, and authored his 1988 religious epic The Last Temptation of Christ and his 1999 paramedic drama Bringing Out the Dead.

He also directed 23 of his own films, including 1980’s American Gigolo, which he also wrote. He received his only Academy Award nomination for writing First Reformed, a 2017 thriller about a small-town minister that he also directed.

Schrader told the Associated Press last year that he made Oh, Canada – the film that Doe said brought them to Cannes – as he reconciled his own mortality after a string of hospitalizations for long Covid.

In 2016, Schrader told the Hollywood Reporter that police visited him after he ranted on Facebook about Donald Trump’s then-looming first presidency. Schrader wrote that Trump’s election was “a call to violence” and said people should be “willing to take arms”.

In 2023, he trashed the Oscars as scrambling “to be woke” with diversity efforts and more international voters. And in 2021, in the wake of #MeToo, he decried so-called “cancel culture”, telling Deadline it was “so infectious, it’s like the Delta virus”.

“If your friend says, ‘They’re saying these terrible things about me that aren’t true,’ you’re afraid to come to their defense, because you might catch that virus, too,” Schrader told the entertainment news outlet.

Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo, has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting his former personal assistant, firing her when she wouldn’t acquiesce to advances and reneging on a settlement that was meant to keep the allegations confidential.

The former assistant, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, sued the filmmaker and his production company on Thursday. She is seeking a judge’s order to enforce the agreement after Schrader said he couldn’t go through with it. The terms, including a monetary payment, were not disclosed.

“This is an open-and-shut settlement enforcement matter,” Doe’s lawyer, Gregory Chiarello, wrote in court papers accompanying the breach-of-contract claim.

Schrader’s lawyer, Philip J Kessler, deemed the lawsuit “desperate, opportunistic and frivolous” – and said many of the allegations in it are false or materially misleading.

“We absolutely deny that there was ever a sexual relationship of any kind between Mr Schrader and his former assistant, and we deny that Mr Schrader ever made an attempt to have a sexual relationship of any kind with his former assistant,” Kessler said.

The lawsuit, filed in a New York court, laid bare allegations that the confidential settlement between Doe, 26, and Schrader, 78, had been intended to keep under wraps.

They include her claim that the filmmaker trapped her in his hotel room, grabbed her arms and kissed her against her will last year while they were promoting his latest film, Oh, Canada, at the Cannes film festival in France.

Two days later, the lawsuit said, Schrader called Doe repeatedly and sent her angry text messages claiming he was “dying” and couldn’t pack his bags. When Doe arrived to help, the lawsuit said, Schrader exposed his genitals to her as he opened his hotel room door wearing nothing but an open bathrobe.

Doe alleges Schrader fired her last September after she again rejected his advances. Soon after, the lawsuit said, he sent her an email expressing fear that he’d become “a Harvey Weinstein” in her mind. Weinstein, the movie mogul turned #MeToo villain, was convicted of rape in Los Angeles in 2022 and is awaiting a 15 April retrial in his New York rape case.

According to the lawsuit, Schrader agreed to the settlement on 5 February but changed his mind after an illness and “soul searching”. Schrader conveyed through his lawyers in March that he “could not live with the settlement”, the lawsuit said. Kessler disputed that.

“The agreement that they’re trying to enforce against Mr Schrader, in plain English, required both parties to sign it before it became legally effective,” Kessler said. “Mr Schrader declined to sign it. It’s frankly as simple as that.”

Doe worked for Schrader from 2021 until 2024, according to the lawsuit. During that time, Kessler said, she posted on social media about how much she loved her job and referred to Schrader as an extraordinary mentor and “my man”.

Schrader rose to fame through his collaborations with the director Martin Scorsese, beginning with Taxi Driver in 1976. Robert De Niro’s iconic line “You talkin’ to me?” is seared into the lexicon and ranked among the American Film Institute’s all-time greatest movie quotes.

Schrader co-wrote Scorsese’s 1980 boxing drama Raging Bull, also starring De Niro, and authored his 1988 religious epic The Last Temptation of Christ and his 1999 paramedic drama Bringing Out the Dead.

He also directed 23 of his own films, including 1980’s American Gigolo, which he also wrote. He received his only Academy Award nomination for writing First Reformed, a 2017 thriller about a small-town minister that he also directed.

Schrader told the Associated Press last year that he made Oh, Canada – the film that Doe said brought them to Cannes – as he reconciled his own mortality after a string of hospitalizations for long Covid.

In 2016, Schrader told the Hollywood Reporter that police visited him after he ranted on Facebook about Donald Trump’s then-looming first presidency. Schrader wrote that Trump’s election was “a call to violence” and said people should be “willing to take arms”.

In 2023, he trashed the Oscars as scrambling “to be woke” with diversity efforts and more international voters. And in 2021, in the wake of #MeToo, he decried so-called “cancel culture”, telling Deadline it was “so infectious, it’s like the Delta virus”.

“If your friend says, ‘They’re saying these terrible things about me that aren’t true,’ you’re afraid to come to their defense, because you might catch that virus, too,” Schrader told the entertainment news outlet.

About 40 Youth Demand protesters were told to move on by the police during a pro-Palestinian rally in central London on Saturday.

The campaigners began gathering at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on Saturday morning and made their way to King’s Cross station.

The action is part of Youth Demand’s plans for demonstrations every Tuesday and Saturday in April. Some protesters held banners which read “Stop arming Israel” while others let off green flares before being moved along by the Metropolitan police.

Youth Demand said its supporters divided into two groups and, at about 12.15pm, a group of 40 people blocked traffic on Euston Road near King’s Cross.

The Met issued the protesters with a warning under section seven of the Public Order Act, Youth Demand said, and the group moved on after 10 minutes. No arrests were made, according to Scotland Yard.

A Met spokesperson previously said: “Youth Demand have stated an intention to ‘shut down’ London over the month of April using tactics including ‘swarming’ and road blocks.

“While we absolutely recognise the importance of the right to protest, we have a responsibility to intervene to prevent activity that crosses the line from protest into serious disruption and other criminality.”

Last Thursday, six people from Youth Demand were arrested at a Quaker House meeting on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. More than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with Tasers, forced their way into the Westminster meeting house.

However, Youth Demand said the publicity surrounding the raid had had the effect of increasing awareness of their activities, and has resulted in a large number of people signing up to join.

King Charles will have to temper his public support for net zero after Kemi Badenoch broke the political consensus over the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Senior royal sources have conceded that the 76-year-old monarch, who has spent more than half a century highlighting environmental challenges, will have to choose his words more carefully now that the Conservatives under Badenoch have said it will be impossible for the UK to hit net zero by 2050.

“The only way that we can regain it [trust] is to tell the unvarnished truth – net zero by 2050 is impossible,” the Conservative leader said last month.

Charles III has spoken publicly about how vital it is to hit net zero by the 2050 target date, set by Theresa May’s government in 2019 and agreed upon by subsequent administrations. Successive prime ministers have used the king’s long track record on campaigning for climate action to help promote Britain’s leadership on combatting the challenges.

In December 2023, for example, the king told the Cop28 UN climate change conference in Dubai that more urgent action was needed to bring the world towards a zero-carbon future. “After all, ladies and gentlemen, in 2050 our grandchildren won’t be asking what we said, they will be living with the consequences of what we did or didn’t do,” he said.

At that point, the main UK political parties were agreed on the issue. Now the monarch runs the risk of becoming embroiled in a party political dispute. In addition to the change in the Conservative view, Reform wants to scrap net zero completely.

Craig Prescott, a constitutional expert at Royal Holloway, University of London, suggested the king must be less specific about his own views on the target. “I think if you take the view that the monarchy has to be ‘two or three steps away’ from party politics then, as party politics changes, the monarchy should change,” he said.

Charles, who flies to Italy tomorrow with Queen Camilla for a state visit that lasts until Thursday, will still put tackling the climate crisis and other environmental challenges at the heart of his monarchy.

The work to create a more sustainable future will be a feature of the trip. In Rome, the king will join a meeting chaired by the foreign secretary, David Lammy, and attended by business leaders to hear how Britain and Italy are working together on the transition to clean energy. In Ravenna he will meet farmers whose land and crops have been severely affected by devastating floods in the region in the past few years.

He and Camilla, who celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary at a state banquet in Rome on Wednesday evening, will visit the Colosseum and celebrate close defence ties between the two countries, in spite of the political differences between Keir Starmer’s Labour party and Italy’s rightwing leader, Giorgia Meloni.

The need to avoid involving the king in party political controversy has been highlighted after documents released on Friday revealed that the monarch secretly met Prince Andrew to discuss his future and was twice briefed about plans for him to be involved in a £2.4bn investment fund run by an alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo. Buckingham Palace insisted Yang, since banned from Britain despite protesting his innocence, was not specifically mentioned.

Prince William is likely to attend the Cop30 UN climate conference in Belém, Brazil, in November and may also be more guarded than before about his views on achieving net zero, although royals may still be expected to reflect on government policy on the international stage.

Any silencing of the monarch and his heir threatens to weaken Britain’s voice abroad, according to some environmental groups. Shaun Spiers, executive director of the environmental thinktank Green Alliance, said Charles might be unable to speak out specifically on the 2050 target but could talk generally about the need for climate action. “The king is a well-respected leader and it would be a shame if he didn’t speak on it, particularly internationally,” he said.

Reshima Sharma, deputy head of politics at Greenpeace UK, pointed to popular support for green policies. “King Charles has long been an important advocate for action to clean up our environment and tackle climate change. While the monarchy must remain politically neutral, thankfully climate action continues to receive the kind of popular support that politicians can only dream of. This is reflected across voters of all stripes,” she said.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

Paul Simon largely avoided mention of the health problems that had kept him off the road for the previous seven years when the storied singer-songwriter kicked off his return – and evident farewell – tour in New Orleans on Friday.

Yet, having strummed and crooned his way through some of his catalogue’s more discreet entries, and having reached a part where he treated the audience to a finishing salvo of three of his mega hits, Simon made apparent reference to those issues by letting some lyrics from The Boxer hang in the air.

“He carries the reminders / of every glove that laid him down / or cut him till he cried out / in his anger and his shame / ‘I am leaving, I am leaving,’” Simon sang, before casting a knowing glance at the audience and intoning, “but the fighter still remains / Yes – he still remains.”

That was the moment the opener of what had been billed A Quiet Celebration Tour stopped being quiet. Crowd members who had audibly joked about struggling to stay awake through some of Simon’s mellower, deeper cuts joined those around them in collectively belting out the concluding “lie-la-lie” refrain and a round of cheers that ultimately rivaled the closing standing ovation later.

Simon’s 19-number turn at New Orleans’ Saenger Theater – designed to resemble one of Italy’s baroque courtyards – marked his return to touring after announcing in 2018 that he would stop, citing in part the rigors of travel and time away from family.

Of course, the 16-time Emmy winner didn’t stop creating music. He has previously explained how a dream telling him to write Seven Psalms later led to the release of a 33-minute album of that name, which he has described as a contemplation of faith, spirituality and the struggle to maintain belief. But he has also said he did consider fully retiring after losing most of the hearing in his left ear while recording Seven Psalms.

Embarking on A Quiet Celebration, with plans for 55 shows across 20 North American cities, demonstrated that the 83-year-old opted for at least one final circuit of curtain calls.

As had been telegraphed ahead of time, Simon played the entire Seven Psalms album in order without commentary, marked largely by his voice and guitar except for a couple of duets with spouse and fellow lyricist Edie Brickell. Then there was an intermission. He traded in the dark business suit with which he started for a baseball cap, velour jacket and jeans.

And things got palpably bluesier and more upbeat as he delivered on a show-opening promise to spend the post-intermission period on rearranged, more familiar selections from his and the Simon & Garfunkel songbooks, including Graceland, Slip Sliding Away, Homeward Bound and – with Brickell – Under African Skies.

Simon intentionally prevented the second part of the show from becoming a “best of” compilation. He announced he would toss in some of the lesser-known work he has produced through a career spanning eight decades, though he joked that he knew them well because “I mean, they’re my songs.” But he coupled them with anecdotes about their inspiration.

He set up St Judy’s Comet – a song he described as one “I very rarely perform” – by recounting how he named it after Robert St Judy, a drummer in the band led by Clifton Chenier, a zydeco musician from Opelousas, Louisiana, about three hours north-west of New Orleans. He played The Late Great Johnny Ace and explained how he got the idea for it having learned of the 1954 accidental, self-inflicted shooting death of the R&B singer of that name.

And, playing Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War, he explained that he came up with it having seen a picture of a surrealist painter with his wife and their pet some time after the second world war. The song title was the caption of the photo.

The final three numbers needed no introduction. Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard and The Boxer elicited sing-alongs that contrasted starkly with the Seven Psalms portion. Then Simon went without his backing ensemble for the solo finale: The Sound of Silence.

Concertgoers left pockets of seats in at least some parts of the venue empty. One likely factor may simply involve New Orleans having the reputation for last-minute, walk-up crowds while also knowing Simon had a second show scheduled at the Saenger on Saturday.

Prices, however, were a talking point in and around the theater among fans. With ticket prices being listed between about $99 and $450, T-shirts inside were $40. Zip-up fleeces were $100. Someone whose water bottle rolled down several rows quipped it was no big deal because it only cost roughly $17.

Meanwhile, at least four people in New Orleans’ central business district – where the Saenger stands – could be overheard on Friday engaging in gallows humor about their 401(k) retirement accounts being drained after tariffs imposed by the Trump administration upended stock markets.

Nonetheless, if that same kind of chatter was any indication, Simon likely hit the right pitch with his mix of selections.

Father and daughter Enrique and Yedithza Nunez said they traveled from Sacramento, California, to both visit New Orleans and see Simon play live for the first time during what they called a bucket-list trip. Echoing others in the theater, they viewed listening to Seven Psalms as sort of part of the admission price to then indulge in the music that vaulted the main attraction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist and member of Simon & Garfunkel.

Married couple Ron and Darlene Moore made the short trip over to the Saenger from their home in New Orleans’ Marigny neighborhood to see Simon in person for a third time. They said they had been most looking forward to seeing him play Seven Psalms live, having already taken in his more commercially successful material.

“I do like the old pieces,” Darlene Moore said. “But I love how he evolves.”

The appearance of the vivid-green powder elicits smiles and appreciative sounds, and anticipation among dozens of tea lovers. Their hand-milled batches now ready for whisking with hot water, they will soon be rewarded for their patience.

The foreign tourists attending a matcha-making experience in Uji, near Kyoto in western Japan, are united in their love of the powdered, bitter form of green tea the Japanese have been drinking for centuries, and which is now at the centre of a global boom.

Made from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant and originally served, in highly stylised fashion, at formal tea ceremonies by masters of sado – the way of tea – matcha is the flavour profile of the times, the must-have ingredient in everything from lattes and chocolates to ice-cream and boiled sweets.

After the lean years of the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses in Uji, a town known for deep historical ties to the matcha trade, are cashing in.

Buoyed up by record levels of tourism to Japan, restaurants take the matcha theme to its culinary extreme: gyoza and takoyaki drizzled in matcha-infused dressing, and bowls of “stamina” ramen topped with the chlorophyll-rich green stuff. Every cafe is packed on an overcast, drizzly afternoon, as are the family-run shops doing a roaring trade in packets of locally produced tea, colourfully decorated containers and matcha-themed confectionery.

At Chazuna, a park and museum devoted to the town’s tea culture, matcha workshops are fully booked for the next fortnight. Of the 60 people a day who come to make, and then drink, their own tea, about 90% are from overseas.

“We opened in 2021 and for the first two years we didn’t have many visitors,” says Chazuna’s director, Naoto Sakayori. “Then everything changed in March last year and, since August, interest has rocketed. It’s all about matcha, matcha. People think that if they come to Kyoto on holiday, then they absolutely have to come here for a matcha experience. And then everyone posts their photos and videos online.”

Stephen Blackburn, a tourist from New York, was among the first to ride the matcha wave. “I have more or less stopped drinking coffee and now just drink matcha,” says Blackburn, a former barista who started drinking the Japanese pick-me-up eight years ago. “I like the taste and the way it makes me feel. It’s not like coffee. It doesn’t leave me agitated … it makes me more focused.”

But some visitors to Uji are still not convinced. “To be honest, we don’t really like matcha,” says Henrik Hantel, who is honeymooning in Japan with his wife, Tessa. “We tried it in Germany several times and disliked it, but we thought Japanese matcha might be different … and it’s everywhere here, so we don’t have much choice but to try it in its traditional home. We’re going to give it one more go and hope we won’t be disappointed again.”

However, the global appetite for all things matcha is a double-edged sword. Reports of a shortage emerged last autumn, prompting tea companies in Kyoto to impose unprecedented purchase limits on the powder, which has been consumed in Japan since the 12th century after it was introduced by Buddhist monks from China.

Soaring demand in Europe, the US and Australia has prompted warnings of further shortages this year. While consumption of leaf green tea and matcha is declining in Japan, the rest of the world can’t get enough, with the global market in matcha alone expected to surge from $2.8bn [£2.2bn] in 2023 to about $5bn by 2028.

According to the agriculture ministry, Japan produced 4,176 tonnes of matcha in 2023, almost three times the quantity in 2010. Keen to exploit the growing commercial potential, Japan’s government is reportedly planning subsidies to encourage growers to move away from traditional leaf tea, or sencha, and produce more tencha – tea for grinding – the type of leaf that produces matcha.

Official campaigns to spread the word about matcha have been wildly successful. The tea promotion account on Instagram, run by the Japan Food Product Overseas Promotion Centre, has almost 50,000 followers.

This year’s tea harvest, which will start this month, will replenish the matcha supply, but relief will be temporary. Overseas consumption “reached a record high last year”, Fumi Ueki, chief of the Leaf Brand Group, a department of Ito En, one of Japan’s largest tea companies, told the Japan Times.

Inevitably, social media has been a driver of interest. Matcha content is hard to avoid on TikTok, with users pointing to evidence of the health benefits of regular consumption of antioxidant-rich green tea, whose caffeine levels are slightly lower than those in coffee.

While he has been taken aback by the levels of interest in matcha – Chazuna will soon host large groups of British visitors – Sakayori appreciates its aesthetic, even spiritual, appeal.

“It’s not like drinking coffee or English tea,” he says. “It’s about more than the taste… drinking matcha is an experience.”

The march of the brilliant-green powder continues, winning unlikely converts along the way, including Henrik and Tessa Hantel. “We decided to try matcha along with a dessert and, to be honest, it was the best experience we’ve had so far,” they wrote in an email after speaking to the Observer. “I still don’t think we’ll order it back in Germany but it was a happy way to end our matcha experience in Japan.”