Donald Trump defends Putin over deadly Sumy attack
US President Donald Trump has defended Russia’s “terrible” missile attack on Sumy as a “mistake”.
“I think it was terrible and I was told they made a mistake, but I think it’s a horrible thing. I think the whole war is a horrible thing,” he told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday evening.
Trump did not specify what he meant by a “mistake” when asked. He said: “They made a mistake… you’re gonna ask them”.
It comes after Volodymyr Zelensky urged Trump to visit Ukraine and see the devastation caused by the war himself. Mr Zelensky demanded a tough international response to the Sumy attack, which came as Mr Trump rapidly pushed to end the conflict.
Two Russian ballistic missiles struck the city of Sumy on Sunday, killing 34 people and wounding 117 in one of the deadliest strikes of the war.
EU foreign ministers were expected to meet in Luxembourg this morning to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine and new sanctions on Russia. A video posted on social media by the Ukrainian president showed bodies strewn in the middle of a city street near a destroyed bus and burnt-out cars.
“Only scoundrels can act like this, taking the lives of ordinary people,” he said, noting the attack had come on Palm Sunday when some people were going to church.
Asking Mr Trump to see the destruction for himself, Mr Zelensky said in an interview with CBS: “Please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead.”
‘Stop Brexit Man’ cleared of flouting police ban over loud music
An activist known as Stop Brexit Man has been cleared of flouting a police ban after playing anti-Conservative and anti-Brexit edits of The Muppet Show and Darth Vader‘s theme outside Parliament.
Steve Bray, 56, was playing music on March 20 last year before then-prime minister Rishi Sunak arrived for Prime Minister’s Questions. Police had approached Mr Bray when he was stood on a traffic island at around 11.20am, and handed him a map to warn him he wasn’t allowed to play the speakers in the controlled area under a by-law, the court heard. He resumed playing the music intermittently and, over an hour later, officers seized the speakers.
The activist is known for playing music in protest around Westminster, famously playing D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better” at the gates of Downing Street when Mr Sunak announced a general election in the pouring rain last May.
Mr Bray was found not guilty of failing without reasonable excuse to comply with a direction given under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 “re prohibited activities in Parliament Square” at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
Mr Bray, of Port Talbot, South Wales, represented himself in court and denied the charge. He told a previous hearing that playing music was part of his “fundamental right to protest” and that they were played “sporadically”, rather than all day.
The court previously heard that Mr Bray had told the police their map, illustrating where he could not use the speakers, was incorrect. Body-worn footage, featuring the activist, saw him telling police repeatedly that they had the wrong map.
He said it was outdated, which the officers would learn if they spoke to someone higher up the chain of command.
Deputy District Judge Anthony Woodcock acknowledged that Mr Bray admitted to being “anti-Tory”, as he said: “He believes his is an important message to disseminate.
“He needs the volume that he uses the get the message across from Parliament Street to the Palace of Westminster.”
Judge Woodcock continued: “He says that his strategy needs pictures of him in the media and he’s spent many hours campaigning and has never been arrested, his relations with police are generally good.”
“His equipment operates on battery-power and is limited,” the judge added, as he said that Mr Bray was entitled to be “fixated” on the issues he protests about.
“How he chooses to express those views is a matter for him,” the judge said. “Lampooning the Government through satire is a long tradition in this country.”
Mr Bray said that he used the Muppets and Darth Vader themes “as the prime minister came in, which is what we always did for Rishi – apparently he’s a Star Wars fan.”
When Mr Bray was told he was not allowed to play there, the court heard he stuck his fingers in his ears and said: “No it’s not, it’s not, not here – it’s not wrong here”.
He then told the officers: “I know what I can’t do” before they suggesting they stick it “where the sun don’t shine.” He then lit a cigarette and looked away.
The defendant apologised as several witnesses described to court the negative impact of the activist’s music, which could be heard as high as the sixth floor in nearby buildings.
Katy Perry to blast off with all-women crew on Blue Origin rocket
Katy Perry and five other women are about to be launched into space on the first all-female mission in more than six decades.
The crew will journey to the edge of space in an autonomous rocket made by Blue Origin, the private space firm owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Perry will be joined by former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and journalist and Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sanchez. In a post with Ms Sanchez, Perry wrote that she would put “the ‘ass’ in astronaut”.
In an Instagram post, the “Roar” singer wrote: “I’ve dreamt of going to space for 15 years and tomorrow that dream becomes a reality.
“The Taking Up Space Crew launches tomorrow morning at 7am CT and I am SO honoured to be alongside 5 other incredible and inspiring women as we become the first ever all-female flight space crew!”
She added: “Alongside the post, she shared a video of the capsule that she has been “training in for the last few days”, and revealed her call name is Feather.
She also said she plans to “sing in space”, and explained where all her other “astronaut girly friends” will sit in the spacecraft.
Perry added: “I do believe this (is happening) because believing your dreams and saying that is actually how you make your dreams come true.”
In another video, the “Dark Horse” singer said she is “always looking for little confirmations from the heavens, from my guides, from my angels, from my higher self”.
“When I’m looking for it, it’s pretty loud,” she added.
The rocket is set for lift-off as part of Blue Origin Flight NS-31 on April 14 at 8.30am local time, or 2.30pm in the UK.
The craft will then fly through space for around four minutes before floating back down to Earth, with the entire journey taking a little over 10 minutes.
SNL apologises to Aimee Lou Wood following ‘mean’ sketch
The White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood has said that Saturday Night Live has sent her a rare apology after making fun of her appearance during a sketch on the latest episode.
During Saturday night’s episode (12 April), SNL cast members reimagined the hit HBO series The White Lotus as The White Potus. The sketch depicted Donald Trump (played by James Austin Johnson) attempting to unwind at an exotic vacation resort with Ivanka Trump (Scarlett Johansson) and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (Jon Gries), while secretly panicking about the future financial state of America due to its tariff policy chaos.
The SNL skit also attempted to recreate the dynamic between Rick (Walton Goggins) and his younger girlfriend Chelsea (Lou Wood), with RFK Jr (Jonn Hamm) rambling about fluoride in water to his confused girlfriend, played by SNL cast member Sarah Sherman, who darts off to kill and eat a monkey.
In the skit, Sherman put on a bizarre British accent (Lou Wood used her own Mancunian accent in The White Lotus) and appeared to be wearing exaggerated prosthetic teeth in an attempt to parody Lou Wood’s appearance.
In a post shared on her Instagram Story on Sunday (13 April), Lou Wood has called the skit “unfunny and mean”.
Lou Wood, 31, has since shared an update with her fans. The Sex Education star wrote in an Instagram story: “I’ve had apologies from SNL.”
She added: “The last thing I’ll say on the matter. I am not thin-skinned. I actually love being taken the p*** out of when it’s clever and in good spirits. But the joke was about fluoride. I have big gap teeth not bad teeth. I don’t mind caricature – I understand that’s what SNL is. But the rest of the skit was punching up and I/Chelsea was the only one punched down on.”
Continuing she said: “Actually one last thing. Not Sarah Sherman’s fault. Not hating on her, hating on the concept.”
She also shared a comment from a fan comparing this skit to “1970s misogyny” saying that “this sums up my view”.
Lou Wood, who rose to prominence for her performance as Aimee Gibbs in Netflix’s award-winning series Sex Education, has been at the centre of a positive conversation surrounding Hollywood beauty standards since she joined The White Lotus.
Her natural teeth have been praised as refreshing amid the perfect-looking veneers that dominate the big and small screens.
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Heiress sues travel company for £1m over cancelled Titanic wreck dive in doomed sub
A British explorer who guided Prince Harry to the North Pole is locked in a £1m court fight with a billionaire heiress over a cancelled expedition to the wreck of The Titanic on the ill-fated Titan submersible.
Henry Cookson, a former safari guide and polar explorer, now runs Cookson’s Adventures, an ultra-luxury adventure travel company specialising in bespoke trips for high net-worth individuals to far flung and otherwise inaccessible spots, often costing millions.
In 2017, his company was paid £680,000 by Karen Lo, the super-rich heiress to a Hong Kong soy milk fortune, to organise a once-in-a-lifetime submarine visit to the Titanic, planned for 2018 aboard the OceanGate Titan craft.
But the 2018 dive was canceled after the vessel was damaged by lightning, with Ms Lo being offered a priority place on a future trip instead.
However she never got her trip after Covid intervened and the Titan vessel then infamously imploded during a dive to the wreck in June 2023, killing all five passengers, including OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, and causing the company’s operations to cease.
Ms Lo is now suing Holland Park-based Henry Cookson Adventures Ltd, claiming the company is responsible for refunding her for the Titanic trip she paid for but never took.
But Mr Cookson’s company is fighting the claim, saying the heiress knew there were no refunds when she put her money down for the Titanic trip, and that she had a chance to go on the expedition later but never did.
Ms Lo is a Hong Kong based heiress with a reported net worth of $1 billion. Her wealth comes from Vitasoy, a soymilk and drinks company founded by her grandfather Dr Lo Kwee-seong, which has a reported global turnover of $1 billion and over 7,000 employees.
She hit the headlines in 2018 when she bought Sting’s New York apartment for $50m and again in 2023 when she sued a gallery owner for £500,000 over alleged non-delivery of a Banksy painting she had bought.
On his company’s website, Mr Cookson describes how he used his experience guiding horseback safaris in Kenya and in polar exploration, including a mission to the Pole with Prince Harry and the Walking With The Wounded charity, to set up ultra high-end adventure travel company Cookson’s Adventures.
“It’s these expeditions that served as inspiration in founding Cookson Adventures, bringing the same standards of ground-breaking excellence to the world of private travel. That’s whether working with remote tribes in Africa or organising Alaska’s most complex charter operations,” the website states.
Papers lodged with London’s High court describe how Mr Cookson had previously been “on friendly personal terms” with Ms Lo, even attending her wedding, and had organised trips worth “tens of millions of US dollars” for her and her guests.
Her barrister Jack Harding states in court papers: “The defendant agreed to organise and supply a two-week expedition for the claimant and 17 others to visit the wreck of the Titanic between 30th June and 14th July 2018.
“The defendant’s supplier for the expedition was OceanGate, a company which, at the material time, specialised in the provision of crewed submersibles for tourism, research and exploration.”
Having paid around £670,000 up front for the trip in May 2018, an email was sent by Cookson Adventure to Ms Lo explaining that the mission had been cancelled because the Titan craft had been struck by lightning and its electronic systems damaged.
The contract “provided ‘clients’ with 100% credit toward 2019 Titanic dives or any other expedition offered by OceanGate” due to the cancellation, but “OceanGate did not carry out any further dives to the Titanic wreck in 2019 or 2020,” he said.
“The claimant, through her agents and legal representatives, subsequently requested repayment of the sums paid under the contract. The defendant has refused to refund any of the claimant’s money.”
Ms Lo is suing under the Package Travel Regulations 1992, arguing it was an express or implied term of the contract that the dive would take place within a “reasonable time.”
“In repudiatory breach of the aforementioned express and/or implied terms, the Titanic Expedition did not take place in 2018 or at all,” he says.
“As a result of the defendant’s breach of contract, the claimant was entitled to and did elect to treat the contract as at an end.
“As a result of the matters set out above, the claimant seeks damages for her wasted expenditure in entering into a contract which was never performed.
“The defendant was enriched, at the expense of the claimant, by the payment and receipt of her money. It is irrelevant that the defendant may have subsequently passed some or all of the money to its own supplier.
“The claimant did not receive any benefit from the money that she paid to the claimant and/or the defendant did not provide any service of benefit to the claimant.”
Ms Lo’s lawyer says she wants her £670,000 back, plus interest at 8% from May 2018, taking the total claimed over £1m.
However in the defence to the action, Henk Soede, for Mr Cookson’s company, denies they owe the heiress a penny.
“She was introduced to Mr Cookson through a personal friend in 2011-12 and has been using the defendant’s services since then, in every case for exclusive unique and tailor-made trips at very high cost,” he says.
“For example, in 2018/19, after the postponed dive voyage to which this claim relates, the defendant arranged and the claimant paid in full for a multi-million dollar trip to the Antarctic on three yachts, including the super-yacht purchased in the name of the claimant the year previously, with twin helicopters and two submersibles, for a total of 13 guests and four nannies.
“The claimant’s annual budget with the defendant ran into tens of missions of US dollars.
“The claimant and Mr Cookson were on friendly personal terms and Mr Cookson had attended her wedding in Rome and accompanied a number of her friends who traveled with the couple to Egypt as part of their honeymoon.
“At no stage did the defendant agree to ‘organise and supply’ an expedition for the claimant and her guests to visit the wreck of The Titanic,” the lawyer states, insisting that Mr Cookson’s company instead had an “affiliate agreement” to be a booking agent for some of the planned trips, with OceanGate remaining the “organiser”.
The contract had also contained a no-refund clause, with the agreement being that a credit towards a future voyage with priority booking rights be provided instead if the mission did not go ahead for technical reasons.
“The defendant disputes this claim because, in outline, the Package Travel Regulations 1992 do not apply because the holiday was neither sold nor offered to be sold in the UK,” he says.
“Alternatively, even if the regulations did apply, the claimant would not be entitled to a refund as the package was not cancelled but only postponed, in accordance with the agreed terms.
“Nor in any event would the defendant be liable to refund monies paid to it, which, as the claimant was well aware, had been passed on to the party providing the voyage, which was also, if the regulations applied, the organiser.
“The claimant did not take up the credit within a reasonable time and thereby waived or lost her entitlement. Further, by notifying the defendant that she did not intend on using the credit in the future, the claimant terminated the contract and/or cancelled the voyage.
“Alternatively, the contract was in any event frustrated as a result of the complete loss of the dive vessel in 2023 and the resulting cessation of the provider’s trading activities.”
The lawyer states that whilst no dives took place in 2019 and Covid restrictions stopped any missions in 2020, dives took place in 2021 and 2022 which Ms Lo could have joined using her credit, prior to the ill-fated final mission in 2023.
“At all material times, OceanGate acknowledged that the defendant was entitled to a credit for un-taken 2018 missions,” he says.
“However, the claimant made clear that she did not want to use her credit in 2019 or at any time in the future.”
Her solicitors had instead demanded a refund in June 2019, he said.
The case, unless settled, will come before a judge in court at a later date.
The Titan submersible was the first privately-owned submersible with a claimed maximum depth of 4,000 metres and the first completed crewed submersible with a hull constructed of titanium and carbon fiber composite materials.
After testing with dives to its maximum intended depth in 2018 and 2019, the original composite hull of Titan developed fatigue damage and was replaced by 2021.
In that year, OceanGate began transporting paying customers to the wreck of the Titanic, completing several dives to the wreck site in 2021 and 2022.
During the submersible’s first 2023 expedition, it imploded during the crew’s descent to the wreckage of Titanic, about 320 nautical miles (590 km) south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland.
The submersible was carrying tourists Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, his son Suleman Dawood, crew member and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and OceanGate founder and the vessel’s pilot, Stockton Rush.
Britain’s aid cuts harm the world – and the UK itself
When the government announced that it was to divert almost half of the annual foreign aid budget to defence spending, the outcry, beyond the aid community and the demonstrative resignation of the development minister, was rather less than might have been expected in response to such a drastic switch.
To be sure, the muted response had its causes, which included the acceptance that Europe was going to have to pay a lot more towards its own defence; the continuing strength of UK public support for Ukraine; and the regrettable reality that foreign aid is rarely a popular destination for taxpayers’ money. If there was also an element of ignorance – or, at the very least, a reluctance to acknowledge the likely consequences of such a major redirection of resources – such excuses are no longer tenable, if ever they were. The scale of the likely damage has now been spelt out in an analysis by the charity Save the Children – and a disastrous picture it presents, too.
As is so often the case, the first to suffer will be the poorest, and chief among those are women and girls, mothers and babies. Programmes designed to widen access to education, family planning, clean water and food are all likely to be cut back or ended, affecting as many as 12 million people. Almost 3 million fewer children could be in education compared with five years ago. Poor sanitation means the spread of disease; curtailing sexual health programmes risks increasing the spread of HIV. By any measure, these add up to a big step in the wrong direction.
Even those dismal figures, however, do not tell the whole story. When the reallocation between the aid and defence budgets was announced, the prime minister insisted that aid to Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan would be protected. Together, however, these commitments amount to nearly £7bn of the £9.2bn that is envisaged to be the aid budget in 2027. To that has also to be added the £3bn or so that currently goes from the foreign aid budget towards the cost of accommodating asylum seekers and irregular migrants in the UK. Save the Children estimates a “black hole” of at least £750,000 that could presage the end of practically every other aid programme, with as many as 55 million people affected around the world.
One very partial remedy might be for the government to reallocate the asylum costs to domestic spending departments. But this looks unlikely. While it was questioned at one time by none other than the foreign secretary, David Lammy, the use of the foreign aid budget to fund accommodation for asylum seekers is clearly designed to fend off criticism and, with the number of small-boat crossings only rising, these costs look unlikely to come down soon, despite the home secretary’s hopes of cutting spending by speeding up procedures. Dan Paskins of Save the Children has it right when he says, “We should not fund our response to one crisis at the expense of others.”
International pressure to keep up foreign aid spending is also diminished. The Trump administration went so far as to disband one of the world’s biggest aid agencies, USAID, with some immediate dire consequences, including for earthquake relief in Myanmar. Rather than being seen as an example of what not to do, however, that one move seemed to give others a green light to downgrade their own foreign aid efforts. The UK was one – and the scale of the cut was savage. At 0.3 per cent of gross national income (GNI), the UK’s aid contribution is now at its lowest for 25 years.
It is a far cry from the 0.7 per cent of GNI that is called for by the UN, was promised by the Blair government, and was finally reached by the UK in 2013. This is where it stayed until 2021, when it was “temporarily” reduced to 0.5 per cent by the Johnson government in the light of Covid spending pressures. Last year’s Labour manifesto included an undertaking to restore the budget to 0.7 per cent. For all the current special circumstances, the government should be held to its pledge.
Summary cuts to vital aid programmes harm the intended recipients above all. But they harm the donor country and its government, too. They damage its reputation and its projection of “soft power”, but they also threaten to increase multiple risks, from the spread of disease to security threats and enforced migration, any or all of which could eventually reach our shores. A supposedly short-term slashing of the foreign aid budget today can all too easily translate into much higher costs for everyone tomorrow.