Aston Villa’s European dream dies as riotous comeback falls just short

Au revoir, Aston Villa. But if there was a way to exit the Champions League, this was it. An epic, extraordinary effort was in vain and yet valiant and magnificent. They will not join the class of 1982 in tasting European glory, but there was a doomed glory to this. They beat the side Unai Emery declared the favourites to win the Champions League on the night. They threatened a comeback to rival the Remontada Luis Enrique’s Barcelona produced to beat Emery’s Paris Saint-Germain in 2017. Two goals behind on the evening, trailing 5-1 on aggregate, Villa scored three times in response.

Like Bayern Munich before them, Paris Saint-Germain were beaten in Birmingham. But if it was only over 90 minutes, there may be a legacy if the frailties Villa highlighted can be exposed by Arsenal or Real Madrid in the semi-final. They took on PSG’s running machines and rattled them with their relentlessness. A team with 17 wins in their previous 18 games ended up buffeted, relieved there were only three minutes of injury time.

For Villa, a first European Cup run in 42 years ended too soon. They departed rueing the injury-time goal Nuno Mendes scored in Paris and the reflexes of the outstanding Gianluigi Donnarumma showed at Villa Park but cherishing memories of a special night. “We can feel happy, we can feel proud,” said Emery. “In our process, tonight was the highest level we achieved.”

There was Marcus Rashford, playing like a man possessed, his revival accelerated as he tore into PSG. There was John McGinn, powering a fightback in idiosyncratic fashion. There was Youri Tielemans, his terrific season garnished with their first goal. There was Ezri Konsa, slotting in his shot to put Villa 3-2 up, giving them half an hour to score the goal that would earn extra time.

It eluded them. Indeed, the closest they came was courtesy of the man they borrowed from the French capital. PSG have conjured some tragicomic ways to go out of the Champions League in the last decade. Had this been powered by a goal from Marco Asensio, a player they own, it would have been among the most galling. But Donnarumma saved his shot. The hero of Anfield was PSG’s rescuer at Villa Park, eliminating an English club again.

It took a combination of an inspired goalkeeper and flying full-backs to finish Villa off. PSG’s goals in the first half-hour showed they were kings of the break. For Achraf Hakimi and Nuno Mendes, counter-attack may have been the best form of defence.

It illustrated the buccaneering brilliance of this PSG team. It is not in their nature to sit on a scoreline. Rather than defending a 3-1 lead, their full-backs ran from deep in their own half to score. The opener may have had a particular popularity on the other side of the English Channel.

Emi Martinez, the bete noire of the French public, was culpable on a day when his bravado backfired. PSG scored with the last attack of the game in Paris and their first of note in Birmingham. Luis Enrique had brought back Bradley Barcola and was vindicated as the winger sped away to cross, Martinez parried it out of Ousmane Dembele’s reach and Hakimi, who had run 80 yards from his own back four, followed up to score.

What one full-back could do, another could emulate. Mendes had struck in the first leg. He scored in the second, too, bending in a shot from the edge of the box, found by Dembele after a lightning break that carried PSG the length of the pitch.

So far, tres bien for PSG. “At 2-0, we nearly had Villa on the canvas,” said Luis Enrique. They did not supply the knockout blow after a superb start. His team combatted rain, wind and cold, with bare-chested Parisian supporters bouncing in inclement conditions. It contributed to a wonderful atmosphere. Villa Park has rarely been louder. They turned the volume up for ‘Hi Ho Aston Villa’. If PSG were not intimidated by the sound of Jeff Beck, the sight of John McGinn induced more worries.

The captain led the response. So did Tielemans. Aggrieved to be denied a penalty a minute earlier, he finished off a fine move that involved McGinn and Rashford, albeit aided by a telling touch off Pacho.

It was not the last one. The defender completed an unwanted double, McGinn’s shot looping up off him and over Donnarumma. A second goal in three minutes followed, Rashford surging the byline to pick out Konsa.

It came amid a fearless, ferocious start to the second half from Villa. Donnarumma, who had denied Pau Torres before the break, had to distinguish himself. Sandwiching McGinn’s goal, Donnarumma made very different but terrific saves from Rashford. The hero of Anfield clawed away a header from Tielemans. He denied Asensio. “Sensational,” said Luis Enrique.

But if the goalkeeper displayed defiance, PSG showed vulnerabilities. Here Villa were, attempting attack after attack, amassing 17 shots, Emery descending into histrionics on the touchline as the fourth goal would not come. “I didn’t think we would be knocked out at any moment,” said Luis Enrique. But an admission followed. “I don’t think this team has been so dominated by another team in this way.”

Villa nevertheless became just the fifth side to beat PSG this season. But like the fourth, Liverpool, they still went out over two legs. But PSG ended up celebrating a defeat, surviving the thriller at Villa, stumbling on where they seemed set to surge.

Joe Biden skewers Trump in first speech since leaving Oval Office

Former president Joe Biden assailed President Donald Trump and Republicans for their attacks on Social Security in his first address since leaving the White House on Tuesday.

The former president spoke to the Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled’s national conference, his first since he left the White House in January after President Donald Trump took office.

“Social Security is more than just a government program,” he said. “It’s a sacred promise.”

In recent months, Biden has mostly stayed away from the public eye. He left office incredibly unpopular having already had to exit the 2024 presidential election early. But many continue to attribute the loss of his former vice president Kamala Harris to Trump on Biden’s radioactive brand.

Nevertheless, Biden’s first post-presidential address since leaving Pennsylvania Avenue focused on a topic close to his heart: preserving Social Security from Republican attacks.

“They want to wreck it, so they can rob it,” he said. Biden also criticized Republicans for trying to cut not just Social Security, but Medicaid. Last week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a budget framework to begin the process to enact massive spending cuts while also extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

The legislation instructs the committee that oversees Medicaid to find $880 billion worth of cuts. On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson opened the door to taking able-bodied workers and young men off of Medicaid, the health care program meant for low-income people, children and people with disabilities.

“What are the two big pots of money out there in raw numbers? Social Security and Medicaid,” Biden said. “These guys are willing to hurt the middle class and the working class in order to deliver significant, greater wealth to the already very wealthy. Who in the hell do they think they are?”

Biden also assailed various members of the Trump administration for their comments on Social Security.

Specifically, he pointed to Elon Musk, who leads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”

“What the hell are they talking about?” Biden said. “People earned these benefits. They paid into that benefit. They rely on that benefit.”

Musk has also said that dead people and people who are as old as 300 years old receive benefits, which has debunked repeatedly. Rather, recipients with incomplete birth dates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.

Biden, 82, used Musk’s claims to make a joke about his age, which became a pressing issue during his 2024 presidential campaign during his one debate with Trump where Biden gave a sometimes hoarse and rambling delivery.

“By the way, those 300-year-old folks on Social Security, I would like to meet them,” he joked. “Hell of thing, man. I’m looking for longevity. Because it is hell when you turn 40 years old.”

In recent weeks, Musk has sought to have DOGE explore his supposed “fraud epidemic” within the government program which provides direct payments to senior citizens. But last month, a court issued a temporary restraining order to prevent DOGE from going on a fraud “fishing expedition.”

The former president also criticized Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who said that if his mother-in-law missed a Social Security payment, she would not complain.

“She’s probably a lovely woman,” he said. “No kidding. Her son-in-law is a billionaire. What about that 94-year old-mother that’s living all by herself?”

Biden’s delivery throughout the address was similar to his performance in his final years as president as he occasionally trailed off and whispered before going louder. That delivery that showed visible signs of his age led many Democrats in 2024 – led by former president Barack Obama, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi – to say that he should step aside.

His address comes as Democrats attempt to recuperate after their brutal loss where Republicans not only regained the White House but also control of the Senate.

In recent months, Democrats have sought to have newer voices, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hitting the road with Sen. Bernie Sanders, an octagenerian himself, to Republican areas. Meanwhile, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, a more moderate Democrat, delivered a marathon 25-hour address to oppose Republican policies and show his own stamina.

Mystery behind felling of 500-year-old London tree solved

A centuries-old oak tree that has “more ecological value than the Sycamore Gap” has been cut down by the owners of a nearby Toby Carvery.

Reports were made to Enfield Council in London earlier this month over the felling of an ancient oak tree in Whitewebbs Wood, a woodland in the north of the capital, with locals having decried the incident as “devastating”.

The tree, which was thought to be in the top 100 of London’s 600,000 oak trees in terms of its size, sat on land owned by the council that was leased to Mitchell and Butlers, the hospitality group that operates the Whitewebbs House Toby Carvery in the park.

A spokesperson for Mitchell and Butlers said the tree was cut down after the company was advised by arboriculture experts that it caused a “serious health and safety risk”.

“This was an essential action to protect our employees and guests, to whom we have a duty of care,” the spokesperson said. “We took every necessary measure to ensure all legal requirements were met,” they said.

“We are grateful to our expert contractors for warning us of this hazard so swiftly, allowing us to act before anyone was harmed.”

Lawrence-Thor Stephen, CEO of London-based tree care company Thor’s Trees, not the company that worked on the tree, said the 3 April felling was a “loss for Enfield” and “a loss for the nation”.

The tree is estimated to be up to 500 years old, and Mr Stephen said that, due to its age, it is more ecologically valuable than the roughly 200-year-old Sycamore Gap tree near Hadrian’s Wall, which was felled in 2023.

“I can’t believe this has happened,” he said. “This is a loss of a national treasure.”

The tree is a pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) with a girth of 6.1m, and it is officially verified on the Woodland Trust’s Ancient Tree Inventory.

Mr Stephen told The Independent that thousands of species of birds, bats and insects rely on the tree to survive.

“When an ancient tree falls, it’s nature that’s wounded – and a community,” he said.

“But from this, we have the chance to build something better: stronger protections, greater awareness, and a renewed commitment to the trees that quietly support all life around us.

“Let’s make sure this story is not just one of loss but a turning point for action.”

The Woodland Trust, which has been advocating for legal protections for the country’s oldest and most important trees, called the incident “devastating”.

The trust cited support for its Living Legends petition that was handed to Downing Street with 100,000 signatures in November and the Heritage Trees Bill, which was introduced in the House of Lords by Baroness Young in 2023.

The legislation proposes the introduction of a list of nationally important heritage trees and a preservation order that could be used to promote the protection of ancient and important trees.

In a statement issued before Mitchell and Butlers revealed it was behind the tree being cut down, Ergin Erbil, leader of Enfield Council, said that while the incident occurred on 3 April, the council wasn’t made aware until last week, prompting it to carry out an immediate inspection of the site.

In that statement, he said the incident had been reported to the police and a tree preservation order was put in place to protect it from further damage. The Metropolitan Police confirmed before Mitchell and Butlers’ admission that it had received a report from Enfield Council.

Both the police and the council have since been contacted for further comment.

The hidden costs of your digital storage – and how to clean it up

Your cloud storage is nearly full.” These six words will strike fear into the heart of any digital hoarder –and might prompt some existential questioning. Didn’t I only just buy a load more storage? Can I even remember what is lurking in this elusive cloud, and why I’m clinging on to it? Will I just be paying for more and more gigabytes and terabytes of digital space as I go through life, dragging them around like some invisible burden?

It feels like a great, banal paradox of modern life: we’re always signing up for more storage, and constantly on the verge of running out. iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox: many of us are fully paid-up customers of them all, for a mixture of personal and professional purposes – and the expense can slowly but surely creep up.

A few quid each month might not seem too extravagant. You can secure 50 GB of storage on Apple’s iCloud for 99p per month, 200 GB for £2.99 and so on. Google’s basic plan is similarly priced, offering 100 GB for £1.59 monthly and 200 GB for £2.49. Dropbox offers a massive 2 TB for £9.99 each month. But if you’re locked into subscriptions for a handful of different platforms – say you use a Mac laptop, and back it up using iCloud, but all your digital photos are archived with Google, for example – it can easily add up to hundreds of pounds over the course of a year.

Recent research from phone network O2 suggested that 42 per cent of British mobile phone users pay for additional storage, with millennials paying around six times as much as their boomer counterparts. Photos, videos and unused apps were highlighted as the main storage-hogging culprits. “We’ve all got used to using cloud storage as a digital dumping ground,” says digital strategist and sustainable business coach Adela Mei. “Digital can often mean out of sight, out of mind,” she adds, “until the storage bill comes in”. So is paying for exponentially increasing amounts of storage just a part of life now?

Most of us use some form of digital cloud every day, but few of us properly understand how it works. “Cloud storage allows you to save files, like photos, documents and videos, on the internet instead of on your phone or computer,” explains Professor Tom Jackson, Loughborough University’s co-lead of digital decarbonisation, a movement based around responsible, more efficient use of data in order to minimise potential carbon emissions. Tech giants such as Google, Apple and Amazon, as well as dedicated cloud companies with less instantly recognisable names, “run huge data centres with thousands of servers that store your files securely”, he adds, and “when you save a file to the cloud, it gets sent over the internet to a remote server”.

Data centres are set up with multiple servers and systems to ensure that if one fails, customers can still access their files. And if your phone breaks down or your laptop goes on the blink, your data is safe. Essentially, Jackson says, “cloud storage makes digital life easier – no more worrying about running out of space or losing important memories”.

But as our lives increasingly play out online, we’re generating more and more data. In 2010, for example, two zettabytes (that’s one billion terabytes, and a terabyte is equivalent to one thousand gigabytes, if you want to try and get an idea of the scope) of data were generated around the world. 10 years later, in 2020, the amount rose to 32 zettabytes. This year, it’s estimated that around 180 zettabytes of data will be created globally, this “equates to more than 6.8 billion years of continuous high quality Netflix streaming”, says Jackson’s colleague and project co-lead, Professor Ian Hodgkinson. And as time goes on, the amount is “set to expand rapidly, so much so that by 2035 global data creation is expected to exceed 2,000 zettabytes”.

These are numbers so big, they’re hard to get your head around. Martin Butler, professor of digital transformation at Vlerick Business School, puts it in more tangible terms: if data storage occupied as much space as a garden shed a decade ago, he says, now it’s more akin to a sprawling Great Wall of China. One of the main drivers for this, he adds, “is the ubiquity of connected devices, with every user and device becoming a constant source of data production”. Every message, document or selfie adds up.

And as technology, including AI, becomes ever more advanced, more data is generated. “One of the biggest drivers is the rise of AI and large language models [systems that can understand and generate plausibly human text],” explains Olivier Subramanian, head of cloud advisory at tech consultancy BJSS, because these “require enormous data sets and computational power” in order to work properly.

As annoying as it might be to keep paying out for our personal data storage, the environmental implications are far, far more alarming. Data centres are now responsible for more emissions than the aviation industry. The powerful processors “require large and constant electrical input”, says Jackson, and every hard drive – and back-up device – must “remain powered and accessible” in case a customer needs access (data never sleeps).

All of this generates serious amounts of heat, and so another hugely energy-intensive part of the process is cooling. In many data centres, cold water is piped around the servers, because using liquid is about 3,000 times more efficient than using an air system. This can “often account for up to half of the centre’s total energy use”, Butler says. More data means more energy required to run and cool down more servers, and therefore more carbon emissions. Vast amounts of water get used up, too: in 2021, the average Google data centre consumed around 450,000 gallons of water every single day, according to stats released by the tech company.

In research published last year, Jackson, Hodgkinson and their colleague Dr Vitor Castro predicted that we are currently on a path towards a “data doomsday”. Based on current projections, global electricity supply from renewable energy sources won’t be able to meet the demand from digital data this year, which “risks increasing reliance on fossil fuels, especially during periods of peak energy demand”, Hodgkinson says. They’ve estimated that “if data consumption continues unabated, electricity demand driven by data could exceed global electricity production by 2033”. That’s only eight years away – terrifying, right?

It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that your photos from that holiday in 2016 aren’t singularly responsible for a potential climate apocalypse. Research estimates that somewhere between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of cloud data storage is used up by individual consumers (rather than businesses), says Butler, and many of us do “have rather poor data hygiene practices, like taking 10 pictures when one will do, or never cleaning personal data”.

But this, he notes, still “pales in comparison to what large enterprises do”. Social media giants and media companies generate and consume vast amounts through targeted advertising, video content and the metadata that comes with it.

Ultimately, Butler adds, “this is business for Big Tech”, so “there is no motivation for Google, Amazon, Microsoft and [Chinese tech company] Alibaba to reduce the amount of data stored for their customers”. After all, they want to sell products, services and subscriptions.

Instead, he says, they “will work on reducing the impact per unit of data stored” and, he concedes, they “have done that rather well”. Last year, Google signed up to use small-scale nuclear reactors to power its data centres; by 2030, the company is aiming for net zero emissions. Microsoft, meanwhile, is constructing data centres using wood to reduce the carbon footprint. Tech innovations should allow us to “store more data in smaller spaces”, too, Butler says.

But just as we can all try to recycle more and cut back on single use plastic, our own digital behaviour is still important. “Individual actions, like clearing out old files or photos, can make a difference, even if they seem small on their own,” says Subramanian. “While your cloud footprint might appear insignificant, when multiplied by billions of users, the impact becomes substantial.” He reckons that we should “think before [we] store: do you really need to keep that email or those 10 nearly identical photos? Is it necessary to create a dozen AI-generated Studio Ghibli images of you and your family?”

But what about sorting through our back catalogues, given that most of us are the not-so-proud owners of at least a decade or so’s cumulative digital ephemera, hoarded across various platforms and devices? It’s not fun, glamorous or even as satisfying as filling up a bin bag, but simply deleting files that you no longer need is a good place to start, says Mei.

Clean-up apps are designed to automate much of this work, but they often charge a subscription fee (and do you really want a third-party app accessing your personal data?) Instead, you can go through manually by looking at the size and last used date of the file, and blitzing the biggest and oldest first. When you’re pondering over what to keep and what to delete, Mei recommends channelling your inner Marie Kondo and asking yourself a series of questions: “Do I need it? Do I use it? Do I enjoy it?”

Repeating the process with your emails can help free up Cloud space too (especially if you’re always dealing with attachment-laden messages).

The key, Mei adds, is to keep doing this regularly, and “getting your files and folders in order” will help you “find things easily and avoid duplications” – consider it a “tidy desk policy, for your digital world”. Oh, and it might sound obvious, but make sure you delete stuff from the trash can on your Cloud as well as on your device.

There are other quick swaps that you can make, too, such as using more storage-friendly formats for your images (avoid space-hogging TIFFs and consider trying Google’s WebP format, which was designed for efficiency), or compressing them if you can cope with the lower resolution. On Apple devices, you can also control which apps actually get backed up to the cloud: social media platforms and streaming services, for example, tend to have their own servers, so backing them up is pretty redundant. And you can, of course, invest in physical storage devices, like portable hard drives, to back up and store files that you don’t use very often.

When you’ve had a smartphone for years, your message history starts to eat up a decent chunk of storage. If you have one friend whose voice notes are starting to become more like fully fledged podcasts, consider targeting that conversation and deleting those files (unless they have loads of sentimental value). You can also change your settings on WhatsApp and opt out of automatically downloading every single file you’re sent; you’ll find that your storage is no longer clogged up with other people’s blurry gig videos and naff memes.

More than anything, though, we need to change the way we think about our data: instead of viewing it as something nebulous and intangible, it’s time to start considering the very real implications, and remembering that the cost is more than just financial. “Just because data is invisible doesn’t mean it’s carbon neutral,” Jackson says. “Every file has a footprint.”

Protesters Tasered as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s town hall disrupted

Protesters disrupted Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s town hall, including two who were tased by police at the event, according to a report.

Two people were tased and at least six people were removed as the Republican Congresswoman spoke at a town hall at Acworth Community Center in her home state of Georgia on Tuesday, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Three individuals were charged in connection over the disruption, including one who was charged with disorderly conduct, police told the outlet.

Footage posted on social media appeared to capture the moment one protester was tased.

One clip showed a man wearing a black hoodie surrounded by five officers in the corner of the room, appearing to resist arrest. The protester can be heard yelling an expletive before he’s seen on camera getting tased.

The crowd can be heard cheering and clapping after the stun gun went off.

Greene then says: “This is a peaceful town hall.”

The Independent has reached out to Acworth Police for more information.

“Are you really doing this?” another protester — a man in a gray hoodie — repeated as two police officers physically forced him out of the room, a separate video shows. The officers kept telling him to “stop” as the protester appeared to try to break free from their grips.

As the chaotic group nears the door to exit the town hall, one of the officers can be seen tumbling to the ground, bringing the gray hoodie-sporting man with him.

In a separate clip, a protester holding up a “Jail 4 inside traders” sign can be seen being escorted from the town hall.

The sign appeared to be alluding to Greene’s decision to heed President Donald Trump’s advice and buy stocks last week as the market tanked due to his sweeping tariff plan. Hours later, he issued a 90-day pause on most of the levies.

The congresswoman bought stock in big brands like Lululemon, Dell Computer, Amazon, and the parent of Restoration Hardware after they dropped by around 40 percent on average late last week, the Associated Press reported.

After the event, Greene praised the protesters’ removal.

“I’m glad they got thrown out,” she said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “That’s exactly what I wanted to see happen.”

Greene’s town hall interruptions mark the latest backlash that Trump-aligned Republicans have faced at town halls in their home states.

Last month, town hall attendees confronted Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz over her stances, including her refusal to call for the resignation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after the so-called Signalgate texts were exposed. The crowd then burst into a chant of “lock him up.”

Weeks earlier, fellow Georgia Rep. Rich McCormick was met with constituents’ boos and angry questions at his town hall. One attendee asked what the Republican Congressman planned to do to “rein in the megalomaniac in the White House?”

Also in February, a 54-year-old veteran was escorted out of a town hall following a shouting match with North Carolina Rep. Chuck Edwards.

“And you wonder why folks don’t want to do town halls anymore?” Edwards quipped during the event.

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Trump has taken his deep grudge against Zelensky further than ever

What could possess Donald Trump to victim-shame Ukraine’s president and endorse the actions of an indicted war criminal by backing Vladimir Putin? Personal hatred of Volodymyr Zelensky? A near-demented obsession with personal sleight? A radical strategic vision that’s upended world affairs? Something worse?

Probably.

Soon after the massacre in Sumy, where two Iskander missiles slammed into the provincial Ukrainian capital killing 35 people, including two children, Trump sloughed off the atrocity by claiming it had been a Russian mistake. Shocking, but not surprising, as Trump has consistently taken the Russian side at every opportunity this year.

Before most of the bodies could be collected from the city morgue, though, he had gone on the offensive by doubling down on his efforts to pin Ukraine’s suffering on its president.

“When you start a war, you got to know you can win,” he said of Ukraine’s leader.

Zelensky was not president when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. He was elected by a landslide in 2019. Russia launched its attempt to kill him, capture Kyiv, and colonise Ukraine in February 2022.

He didn’t start the war with Russia – and wasn’t president when Ukraine enshrined the goal of Nato membership in its 2018 constitution.

Zelensky did, however, earn Trump’s anger by being a disloyal recipient of America’s largesse, mostly financial aid, for failing to open an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business deals in Ukraine in July 2019. Joe Biden was the likely Democrat candidate in the election of 2020.

Back then, Trump was impeached by Congress over his alleged threat to withhold $400m in US military aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky helped with the campaign against Biden and other anti-Democrat operations.

Trump was cleared by the Senate but the damage had been done. He bears a deep grudge against Zelensky.

But Trump was already a Russian strategic partner. His relationship with Moscow goes back to 1987 when he made his first trip to the capital of the Soviet Union to scout for investment opportunities. He didn’t ever do any deals in Russia. But Russian bankers have backed some of his enterprises since.

Trump has always been sloppy with state secrets since his first term in office. His top intelligence staff have risked easy penetration by foreign spies because they’ve been using their personal phones for top-secret communications.

So it is reasonable to assume that America’s adversaries, like Russia, have deep knowledge and understanding of every aspect of the 47th president’s life – and have done so for decades.

He supports Russian G7/8 membership. He refused to put tariffs on Moscow this month. He has adopted every one of Russia’s initial negotiating principles as his own when it comes to Ukraine, and said he thought that the country may anyway “be Russian one day”. He wants to get back into doing business with Russia too.

But he went further into the realms of bully-backing with his statement on Monday that “you don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you missiles”.

Again, Zelensky didn’t start the war. The US, the UK, Russia and Ukraine signed a memorandum in Budapest guaranteeing Kyiv security after Ukraine gave up its nuclear missiles in 1994. France and China backed the Budapest memo with their own document.

Ukraine, a Western democracy with ambitions to join the European Union, is a sovereign nation that Putin has said he wants to bring back into the post-Soviet Russian empire. Putin has also said he has designs on the Baltic states, Moldova, and Romania.

Support for Ukraine is a necessary condition of Europe’s defence. America’s network of allies in Nato and beyond has been the weft of Washington’s tapestry of alliances that has made it a global superpower.

To Trump, though, it’s getting in the way of turning the world into spheres of influence in which the US, Russia, and China carve up the planet. That’s also, by the way, Putin’s vision.

“I believe, sadly, [that] Russian narratives are prevailing in the US,” said Zelensky in an interview with CBS at the weekend.

“How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war? This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia’s information policy on America, on US politics and US politicians.”

That may cost him dearly.

When Trump ranted at Zelensky in March during the Ukrainian president’s official visit to the Oval Office, Trump reiterated how deeply loyal he felt to Putin because the Russian president had been accused of backing his candidacy in 2016.

“Let me tell ya, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me – we went through a phoney witch hunt when they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,” Trump raged, as he got increasingly incoherent during the attack.

“That was a phoney Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And [Putin] had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn‘t end up in a war. And he went through it.”

This gobbledygook makes little sense. It does, however, reveal the depth of his feelings for Putin who, at least since 2016, he has seen as sharing a trench with The Donald in the wider campaign to undermine the American oligarch.

Trump soon suspended military aid and then intelligence sharing with Kyiv after the Oval Office row, which coincided with Putin’s campaign to free the Kursk region captured by Ukraine in Russia last year.

Trump has turned America’s system of alliances with the West upside down and inside out.

His evisceration of America’s security establishment with ideological purges, attacks on the US judiciary, Federal bureaucracy, the education system and the constitution itself have been combined with a wholesale trashing of Washington’s soft power and humanitarian operations.

This all serves the interests of the Kremlin. It’s Making Moscow Great Again.

A former KGB chief, Putin has reinforced his relationship with Trump by stroking his vanity. He’s relentless in his cultivation of the US president.

In his most recent effort, he sent a portrait of the US president painted in Russia to the White House in the care of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s chief Ukraine negotiator.

Witkoff said his boss thought the painting was “beautiful”. The bad news is that Trump’s narcissism is Russia’s greatest strategic asset.

Britain still has free speech – as Steve Bray has shown loud and clear

Steve Bray, known to most as the “Stop Brexit Man” after his years-long noisy campaign against Britain’s departure from the European Union, has won his latest legal case.

He has been cleared of failing to follow a police order, namely to stop being quite so loud in the environs of parliament. Westminster Magistrates’ Court, in quiet deliberation, agreed with Bray’s arguments that he has the right to protest at any given level of decibels.

Deputy District Judge Anthony Woodcock said Bray “admitted that he is ‘anti-Tory’ … He believes his is an important message to disseminate. He needs the volume that he uses to get the message across from Parliament Street to the Palace of Westminster.”

After nearly a decade as a fixture on the streets and public spaces around Whitehall – and too divisive and annoying to be termed a “national treasure” – Bray has at least become a part of Britain’s constitution…

By offering a supposedly inappropriate musical accompaniment to then prime minister Rishi Sunak’s entry into the House of Commons on 20 March 2024. It was not a legal argument, but Bray justified blasting the Darth Vader theme in the general direction of the Palace of Westminster on the grounds that Sunak is a Star Wars fan (a matter of public knowledge and not in doubt). When he followed up with The Muppet Show theme during Prime Minister’s Questions, police confiscated his loudspeakers.

Officers had previously issued Bray a map of permitted areas for his protests, using a Westminster Council by-law. But that was no match for the amateur human rights lawyer. He told them the map was inaccurate and, as an obiter dictum, that the officers could “stick it where the sun don’t shine”.

If authorities now choose to appeal this week’s judgment, the arguments could go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights (which, let’s face it, he’d enjoy … though in his absence, Westminster would be a bit more tranquil.)

It proves that, contrary to what Elon Musk and JD Vance claim, free speech is alive and well in Britain – loud and clear.

By no means. A price of (extremely loud) free speech is disruption to anyone working or living in the area, who must endure a racket which, like a bad busker knocking out Oasis, could be viewed as a form of torture.

In court, Bray apologised to those affected. Lee Anderson, the Tory/Brexit Party/Reform UK MP who sometimes had testy exchanges with Bray, condemned the judgment: “As well as being a public nuisance, Steve Bray is also known as a sponging parasite who relies on dimwitted do-gooders to subsidise his lifestyle. I suspect Bray is probably a person of interest to the HMRC, as are many others who scrounge an existence through political campaigning. It is time for transparency and people like Bray should publish all their donations just like a charity has to. I suspect he has trousered hundreds of thousands of pounds. It’s about time he spent some of it on new clothes and toiletries.”

Anderson provided no evidence for his claims, and his arguments did not address the legal right to say things that Reform UK might not like.

Plenty of D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better” as Labour came closer to power, while Liz Truss had to compete with Kaiser Chiefs’ “I Predict a Riot” during appearances in Downing Street in her brief premiership. Most notably, Yakety Sax – used on The Benny Hill Show – eradicated any vestigial dignity during Boris Johnson’s resignation statement.

Protest and survive. Bray’s case adds to the corpus of legal protections for awkward dissent. Brian Haw, the man who spent about a decade living in a tent on Parliament Square in protest against the Iraq war, similarly survived numerous legal attempts to dislodge him. In 2005, then home secretary David Blunkett drafted an act of parliament apparently specially designed to end Haw’s small and untidy encampment; the attempt failed because someone failed to make the legislation retrospective.

Squares and streets around Westminster have always been the scenes of marches, protests – and the odd riot – and will continue to do so. For Steve Bray, things can hardly get better; he’ll be fine now –unless Lee Anderson ever gets to be home secretary.