After lighting a fuse under global financial markets, Donald Trump stepped back – all the way to a Florida golf course. A week later, having just caved to pressure to ease his trade tariffs, the US president defended the retreat while hosting racing car champions at the White House.

Trump had spent the time in between golfing, dining with donors and making insouciant declarations such as “this is a great time to get rich”, even as the US economy melted down.

It was a jolting juxtaposition that prompted comparisons with the emperor Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned, or insane monarchs who lost touch with reality. It also provided a clear illustration of how Trump governs during his volatile and extreme second presidency: erratically, with little attention to convention, and often on the hoof from one public engagement to another surrounded by courtiers who never disagree with him.

“He’s certainly living up to the caricature of being a mad king,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “When you’re addressing a ballroom in a tuxedo, telling people to take the painful medicine, or on your umpteenth golf vacation while economic chaos is rippling throughout this country and others, at best you’re completely out of touch.

“At worst, you’re a sociopathic narcissist who doesn’t give a crap about anyone suffering. Ultimately there will be a political price to pay for that.”

Trump had swerved past April Fools’ Day to make 2 April his so-called “liberation day”. Against a backdrop of giant US flags in the White House Rose Garden, he announced sweeping tariffs – taxes on foreign imports – on dozens of countries, using a widely discredited formula to upend the decades-old order of global trade.

Trump did not decide on the final plan until less than three hours ahead of his splashy event, according to the Washington Post newspaper, but found Vice-President JD Vance and other staff constantly deferential. The Post quoted a person close to his inner circle as saying: “He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck any more. 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.”

A day later, with markets suffering trillions of dollars in losses, Trump boarded Air Force One bound for Miami, Florida. He arrived at his Doral resort for a Saudi-funded LIV Golf event in a golf cart driven by his son Eric Trump.

Trump woke up on Friday at Mar-a-Lago, his gilded private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and donned a red “Make America great again” cap and white polo shirt. His limousine glided down a street lined with palm streets and cheering fans before arriving at his golf club.

He also spent the morning defending himself on his Truth Social media platform and vowing to stay the course. “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE,” he wrote.

Trump remained in Florida during the dignified transfer of four US soldiers killed during a training exercise in Lithuania, sending Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to Dover air force base in Delaware to represent him. Instead the president attended a candlelit dinner for Maga Inc, an allied political organisation, reportedly charging $1m a plate.

Maggie Haberman, a Trump biographer and New York Times reporter, commented on CNN: “I think long ago he stopped caring about certain optics, and he’s made very clear during this presidency, he’s going to do what he wants … He is not messaging this in a way that suggests that he understands what average people might be going through right now.”

On Saturday, Trump played at another family golf course, in Jupiter, Florida, prompting an official White House announcement: “The president won his second round matchup of the senior club championship today in Jupiter, Fla., and advances to the championship round on Sunday.”

When Sunday came the president played on even as his cabinet members scrambled to political TV shows and offered conflicting signals, with some insisting that his tariffs were set in stone and others suggesting that he remained open to negotiation.

Trump returned to Washington and a growing chorus of dissent from allies, captains of industry and his own Republican loyalty, pleading with him to change course before a potential recession turned into a depression. Yet his first public event was a celebration of baseball’s World Series winners, the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he was presented with a “Trump 47” baseball shirt.

On Tuesday, in bow tie and tuxedo, Trump told a fundraising dinner in Washington: “I know what the hell I’m doing.” He claimed that the tariffs were forcing world leaders to negotiate with him, boasting: “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal.”

But the following day, Trump blinked. He posted on Truth Social that, while escalating tariffs on China, he would pause others for 90 days to allow space for negotiation. His bubble of wealth and power had finally been punctured.

Trump has often proved impervious to the kind of scandals or gaffes that would damage another politician, but his casual attitude even as the markets were on fire suggested a man uniquely detached from the anxieties of ordinary people, including his own voters.

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Let them eat cake: Marie Antoinette kind of fits. He won his own golf tournament at his own club. How about that? Bill Clinton also cheated at golf a lot and people would let him win because he was president. It’s just the way they are. Rules don’t apply.”

This is not the first time that Trump, accused by critics of demanding absolute loyalty from courtiers, pursuing vengeance against perceived enemies and displaying scorn for his subjects, has been likened to a monarch.

Speaking at the Politics and Prose bookshop in Washington last weekend, Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist and author of the book Notorious, compared the president to William Shakespeare’s Richard III.

“Richard III comes up to the edge of the stage and wraps the audience into the bad thing he’s about to do,” Dowd told the Guardian during an question and answer session. “He tells them and he uses humour so that he’s supposed to be the villain, but the humour kind of counters it so you don’t think of him as badly.

“Trump does the same thing … He has this kind of wacky side so then when he does the very authoritarian stuff you get deflected by the crazy side he has. I think the SNL [Saturday Night Live] mimic captures this where he’s sort of being funny, so then when he turns authoritarian, you’re thinking: wait, is he really doing what I think he’s doing?”

Donald Trump insisted his trade war with much of the world was “doing really well” despite mounting fears of recession and as Beijing hit back and again hiked tariffs on US exports to China.

As the US president said his aggressive tariffs strategy was “moving along quickly”, a closely watched economic survey revealed that US consumer expectations for price growth had soared to a four-decade high.

The White House maintains that the US economy is on the verge of a “golden age”, however, and that dozens of countries – now facing a US tariff of 10% after Trump shelved plans to impose higher rates until July – are scrambling to make deals.

“The phones have been ringing off the hook to make deals,” the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Friday.

Beijing raised Chinese tariffs on US products to 125% on Friday – the latest salvo of its escalating trade dispute with Washington – and accused Trump of “unilateral bullying and coercion”.

“Even if the US continues to impose even higher tariffs, it would no longer have any economic significance, and would go down as a joke in the history of world economics,” the Chinese finance ministry said.

Few investors were laughing. US government bonds – typically seen as one of the world’s safest financial assets – continued to be sold off, and were on course for their biggest weekly loss since 2019. The dollar also fell against a basket of currencies, and was down against the euro and the pound.

Leading stock indices paused for breath on Friday after days of torrid trading. The FTSE 100 rose 0.6% in London. The S&P 500 increased 1.8% and the Dow Jones industrial average gained 1.6% in New York.

The S&P 500 finished an extraordinarily volatile week for markets up 5.7%, its biggest weekly gain since November 2023.

“We are doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Very exciting for America, and the World!!! It is moving along quickly. DJT”

Some of Wall Street’s most influential figures were unconvinced. “I think we’re very close, if not in, a recession now,” Larry Fink, CEO of the investment giant BlackRock, told CNBC. Far from providing certainty, the 90-day pause on higher US tariffs on much of the world “means longer, more elevated uncertainty”, he added.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the US’s largest bank, said the world’s largest economy was facing “considerable turbulence” as a key measure of consumer confidence tumbled to its lowest level since the Covid-19 pandemic – and the second-lowest level on record.

US consumer sentiment has dropped 11% to 50.8 this month, ahead the pause announced by Trump earlier this week, according to a regularly survey compiled by the University of Michigan.

Expectations for inflation meanwhile surged, with respondents indicating they are bracing for prices to rise by 6.7% over the coming year – the survey’s highest year-ahead inflation expectation reading since 1981.

“There is great optimism in this economy,” Leavitt claimed at the White House briefing when asked about the survey. “Trust in President Trump. He knows what he’s doing. This is a proven economic formula.”

Trump won back the White House last November by pledging to rapidly bring down prices – something he has claimed, in recent weeks, is already happening. US inflation climbed at an annual rate of 2.4% last month, according to official data.

“Consumers have spiralled from anxious to petrified,” observed Samuel Tombs, chief US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. He added, however, that a bipartisan divide – with Democrats growing more pessimistic, while Republicans become more upbeat – suggests that people are allowing their political views to cloud their economic confidence.

The US’s top markets watchdog is facing demands from senior Democrats to launch an investigation into alleged insider trading and market manipulation after Trump declared on social media that it was “A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” hours before announcing Wednesday’s climbdown on tariffs.

Days of erratic policymaking constructed a rollercoaster week for markets, with the S&P 500 dropping 12% in just four sessions, before surging back almost 10% in a single day after the administration pulled back from imposing higher tariffs on most countries, except China, which is facing a 145% tariff on exports to the US.

In a letter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Senate Democrats including Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer wrote: “It is unconscionable that as American families are concerned about their financial security during this economic crisis entirely manufactured by the President, insiders may have actively profited from the market volatility and potentially perpetrated financial fraud on the American public.”

Tesla meanwhile stopped taking orders in China for two models it previously imported from the US, as companies scramble to adapt to prohibitive tariffs imposed in Trump’s trade war.

The manufacturer, run by Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, removed “order now” buttons on its Chinese website for its Model S saloon and Model X sports utility vehicle.

Tesla did not give any indication of why it had made the changes but it came after the rapid escalation of the trade war between the US and China.

The border taxes make the goods trade between the two countries prohibitively expensive and mean cars imported from the US are now much less attractive in China than those produced locally.

In the UK, economists warned that stronger than expected growth of 0.5% in February is likely to prove short lived as the impact of Trump’s trade war is felt throughout the global economy.

At the beginning of this helter-skelter week, Downing Street was declaring globalisation not only dead but a failure. Now, only five trading days later, the autopsy is still under way but the victim may instead be economic populism, strangled by Wall Street, the citadel of globalisation. Donald Trump’s so-called liberation day may in fact have been the anti-globalist’s entombment day.

In an effort to deny even a tactical retreat, Trump’s aides insist the White House goal all along was not to weaken globalism, or even to protect the US economy with tariffs, but instead to get into a negotiation to lower tariffs around the world and to punish China. As cover stories go, it is hardly credible, partly because the tariffs were repeatedly lauded by Trump as a macroeconomic revenue-raising measure, or a means to bolster US manufacturing.

The reality is that when faced by an attempt to remake the world trading system overnight, or what the former UK Treasury minister Jim O’Neill describes as “a full-on Kamikaze mission”, the markets revolted. But the retreat caused by the sell-off of US Treasury bonds has been only partial, with tariffs set at 10% universally, except for parts of trade with Mexico and Canada.

Washington’s all-out trade spat with China, meanwhile, still leaves the average effective tariff rate at 27%, the highest since 1903, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

Amid the chaos, significant long-term damage has been done not only to Trump’s political credibility but also to the resilience of globalisation as a system.

Trust, agreed rules and a degree of political stability are the underpinnings of globalisation. They are the prerequisite for specialised and highly extended trade supply lines across political borders to function. Globalisation, after all, is not just about the trade in goods or free markets, it is a set of interconnected ideas and institutions underpinning wealth creation that has dominated political thinking since the end of the second world war.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was not alone in arguing that Trump’s liberation day and its aftermath marked the end of an era. In a warning that holds true even after Trump’s retreat, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister and a former governor of the Bank of England, said: “The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States that Canada has relied on since the end of second world war, a system that while not perfect helped deliver prosperity for Canada for decades, is over.

“The 80-year period when the US embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free exchange of goods and services, is over. While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”

In short, this is not a phase, however the trade war with China is resolved. The legacy of liberation day will linger for generations.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, largely agreed that the US was committing an act of abdication. “The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by Roosevelt in 1934 … It was, in fact, one of America’s greatest policy achievements. Donald Trump burned it all down,” he wrote.

When the man elected to lead the country that invented globalisation places the rejection of globalism at his ideological core, even if it means alienating the US’s closest allies, a fundamental reordering is under way.

A key difficulty is that Trump, 78, has shown no sign of wanting to learn from this debacle. As far back as September 1987 he spent $95,000 to publish an “open letter to the American people” in three newspapers. “For years, Japan and other wealthy nations have been taking advantage of the US,” he wrote. “It is time to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay.”

While his target may have shifted from Japan to China, Trump’s sense of resentment and betrayal, coupled with an aversion to trade deficits, has never left him. His election in 2016, alongside Brexit, merely confirmed to him how his message resonated.

In fairness to Trump, analysis showed that US voting districts with industries vulnerable to Chinese imports tended to elect representatives with more polarised stances.

The vote gave him a mandate to end what he described as the US carnage of “rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”. Many in the Davos establishment acknowledged that he had seen something they had not – globalism had left too many behind, not just in poor countries but among a previously middle-class group in western economies.

Trump’s first term would probably have seen a version of this week’s debacle if he had chosen different advisers, and if he had not later been knocked off course by Covid.

For the first two years of his first term, in 2017-18, his instincts were largely kept in check by his economic adviser Gary Cohn, a former chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs, who dampened Trump’s determination to use tariffs to end trade deficits.

Cohn engaged in a two-year running argument, compiling a mass of statistics designed to convince a sceptical Trump that the decline of US manufacturing and its replacement by a service economy was largely benign.

He set out how blanket tariffs rebound on American consumers. He explained the link between consumer uncertainty and the stock market. He challenged Trump to explain why he thought tariffs would not be counterproductive. Trump replied that he did not know, but he just did and it was what he had thought for 30 years. At one point, exasperated, Cohn accused Trump of a dangerous nostalgia, saying: “You have a Norman Rockwell view of America” – the artist remembered for his idealised portrait of American workers.

In the end, Cohn found Trump – who once scrawled “trade is bad” as the summation of his thinking for a keynote speech – so immune to evidence, and so determined to impose steel and aluminium tariffs, that he quit, leaving Peter Navarro, a man Cohn regarded as a tariff flat earther, to take the reins.

Vestiges of opposition to Trump’s tactics remained inside the Republican party. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska senator, tweeted a now familiar criticism in 2018: “About those new tariffs: Europe, Canada & Mexico aren’t China. You don’t treat allies the same way you treat opponents. Blanket protectionism is a big part of why we had a Great Depression. ‘Make America Great Again’ shouldn’t mean ‘Make America 1929 Again’.”

But Trump largely ignored the critics inside his own party. Re-elected in 2024, with Navarro and other tariff supporters reappointed to lead his trade team, Trump was convinced that his key mistake in the first term had been taking any notice of those advising him that globalisation had brought the US unparalleled wealth.

The path was clear for Trump’s headlong assault on tariffs, in part because in the four years out of office the anti-globalist tide had appeared to be heading in his direction. Many on the centre left bought the argument that hyperglobalisation did not suit an era of geopolitical conflict.

The Biden administration, for instance, in the name of reindustrialisation and national security, retained many Trump-era tariffs, especially on China, a decision seen as a mistake by a study published this week by Harvard Kennedy School. In the study, Joe Biden’s economic advisers Adam Posen and Jonas Nahm argued that the protectionism was excessive.

Since the 2007-08 financial crisis, there has been a steady increase in trade-restricting measures – such as tariffs, non-tariff measures, export controls and investment restrictions – contributing to growing trade fragmentation. In 2024 alone, more than 3,000 trade restrictions were implemented globally.

Some arose from legitimate concern about unfair competition, but much was being driven by deepening geopolitical competition. Countries of all politics have resorted to ever-expanding definitions of national security to screen foreign investment and trade. New language has entered the vocabulary such as “friend or near-shoring”, a term to encourage companies to align their supply chains with the geopolitical interests of their countries.

The call for resilient supply chains was given a spur by the vulnerabilities exposed by Covid, including the west’s dependence on a small number of vaccine suppliers.

After the invasion of Ukraine, Russia further exposed the west’s supply chain vulnerability by exploiting Europe’s dependence on its gas pipelines. Interconnectors designed to bring countries closer, such as undersea data cables, have become targets – from the Baltic Sea to the Taiwan Strait. The war also blew apart the myth that trade brought peace.

As a result, investment screening measures were introduced by governments all over the west empowering them to block takeovers and investments by foreign firms, mainly Chinese in strategic industries.

Rachel Reeves endorsed the trend in a speech in Washington as the UK’s shadow chancellor in May 2023. “Globalisation as we know it is dead. Supply chains that prioritise only what is cheapest and fastest struggle when a crisis strikes, be that PPE during Covid or energy following the war in Ukraine.”

In a diagnosis similar to Trump’s, Reeves claimed that a globalised system “can be gamed by countries like China who have undercut and ignored the international trading rules and made it impossible for our own to compete”.

Rajan Raghuram, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and ex-governor of India’s central bank, has argued that friend-shoring is “resurgent protectionism, cloaked and augmented by new geopolitical rivalries”. He also criticised the initiative as “concentrating production within the gated community of advanced communities”.

Even so, trade as a proportion of GDP – the best measure of economic openness – has not as yet collapsed. In its 2023 report titled Re-globalisation, the World Trade Organization (WTO) said there had been a slowdown in world trade after the financial crash and Covid, but the change may as much be to do with the growth of services, as opposed to goods, in the world economy. Countervailing trends such as digital trade have kept globalisation alive.

The issue now is what can be preserved from the wreckage of the past week, and whether a new coalition of the willing – this time of free traders – can be assembled, if necessary. There is talk of a G6 – the G7 minus the US – going to China to see if an agreement can be found to reduce its trade imbalances, and distorting subsidies, a subject of complaint to the WTO not just by the west but by emerging markets.

But this will require the UK’s Labour party to stop briefing that globalisation has failed. In the current context there is no room for nuance, and it risks sounding as if Labour shares Trump’s utterly chaotic prescription. This is the time to declare economic populism, and not free trade, dead.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unit involved in the killings of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers in the Gaza Strip last month was under the command of a brigade led by a notorious Israeli general previously accused by some of his own troops of having “contempt for human life”.

The IDF has confirmed that troops from Golani, one of the army’s five infantry brigades, opened fire on two convoys of ambulances in Rafah on 23 March and dug a mass grave to cover the bodies of those killed until the corpses could be retrieved by a UN team six days later. It has disputed allegations from two witnesses who exhumed the bodies and newly released postmortem results that found several of those killed had close-range gunshot wounds to the head and chest and were discovered with their hands or legs tied.

Field operatives from Unit 504, a military intelligence unit with a reputation for cruelty and reckless behaviour, including torture, were also present during the attack, a senior military intelligence source with knowledge of recent IDF deployments in southern Gaza told the Guardian. The Israeli military declined to comment on whether 504 was involved.

During the Rafah attack, the Golani troops were under the command of the reservist Armoured 14th Brigade. The 14th Brigade is part of a division led by Brig Gen Yehuda Vach, who former officers say designated an unofficial “kill zone” elsewhere in the strip which resulted in the arbitrary killings of Palestinian civilians. Soldiers also alleged Vach’s “lack of operational discipline” endangered soldiers’ lives.

Vach has also told troops “there are no innocents in Gaza”, according to an investigation by the Israeli daily Haaretz.

In a video of Golani troops being briefed before their redeployment to Gaza earlier this month, aired by Israel’s Channel 14, a battalion commander appeared to endorse an open-fire policy, telling the soldiers: “Anyone you encounter there is an enemy. You identify anyone, you eliminate him.”

Golani soldiers have previously been accused of war crimes in the conflict, including killing civilians, degrading treatment of bodies, needless destruction of civilian infrastructure, and incitement to genocide.

A song written by a member of the brigade’s 51st Battalion in the aftermath of the Hamas 7 October 2023 attack on Israel that ignited the war has become an unofficial anthem for many soldiers. The chorus’s lyrics include: “For what you did to the nation of Israel, Golani is coming with gasoline … Gaza will burn.”

The accompanying music video features footage from Golani operations in Gaza in which the brigade’s yellow and green standard can clearly be seen.

Many of the allegations against Golani troops were compiled from social media photo and video footage posted online by the soldiers themselves and cited in legal filings by the Hind Rajab Foundation, a non-profit that aims to hold Israeli military personnel accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israeli officials say the two founders of the Belgium-based organisation have a history of extremist views.

The presence of Unit 504 was also backed up by the account of the sole survivor of the massacre, the Red Crescent volunteer Munther Abed, and official photos and video of recent IDF operations in Rafah.

The unit has conducted thousands of interrogations of captives from Gaza during the war, and differs from other Israeli military intelligence outfits in that the soldiers are combat troops, operating at a battalion level, who speak fluent Arabic.

According to Abed, a 27-year-old ambulance service volunteer, troops he described as looking like “special forces … armed with rifles, green lasers, and night-vision goggles” dragged him out of the emergency vehicle after it was shot at continuously for five minutes, killing the driver and paramedic he was travelling with.

The uniform description could match either Golani commandos or that of Unit 504 field operatives.

Abed said he was then stripped to his underwear, with his hands bound behind his back, and threatened, suffocated and beaten during several hours of interrogation.

Last week, the Israeli military backtracked on its account of the killings of the paramedics after footage emerged which contradicted its claims that the Red Crescent vehicles were not marked as emergency vehicles and were not using headlights or flashing lights when troops opened fire.

The IDF has said that between six and nine of the medics had links to Hamas, without providing evidence. None of those killed – eight Red Crescent staff, six members of the Gaza civil defence agency and one employee of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees – were armed. One Red Crescent employee is still missing.

The Israeli army chief, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, has since ordered a second, more in-depth investigation into the attack.

Over 18 months of war Israeli forces have killed hundreds of medical workers and the staff of aid agencies and UN organisations in Gaza. In April last year, seven members of the charity World Central Kitchen died in a sustained Israeli attack on their clearly marked vehicles.

Human rights organisations have long accused the Israeli military of a culture of impunity, with few soldiers ever facing justice. In 2023, fewer than 1% of complaints made against Israeli troops’ actions in the occupied Palestinian territories ended in a conviction, according to the latest US state department annual human rights report.

Earlier this week, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society called for an international investigation into the incident, which was the deadliest for members of the International Committee of the Red Cross since six workers were shot and killed in 2017 in an Islamic State ambush in Afghanistan.

Prince Harry has said he is “exhausted” by his lengthy legal battle to reinstate his police protection.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Harry believes that his UK security was removed to “force” him “back into Britain and establishment life”.

He was prompted to sue the Home Office but said he had been “overwhelmed” by the legal action, which has lasted more than three years.

The prince told the Telegraph after a two-day hearing at the court of appeal in London this week that the removal of his police protection was “difficult to swallow”, and that of all his legal cases, including his legal battles with the tabloids, “this one always mattered the most”.

Harry reportedly does not feel safe when visiting the UK with his children. Much of this week’s appeal and the original hearing about his security were heard in private because of the “highly confidential” evidence. “People would be shocked by what’s being held back,” he said, adding that his “worst fears have been confirmed by the whole legal disclosure in this case and that’s really sad”.

The prince was not required to give evidence at the hearing, but flew from his home in California to attend what has been described as the “last throw of the dice” to overturn a decision. He “comprehensively lost” his case against the Home Office in February 2024 when Mr Justice Lane ruled that the government’s decision to remove his security was not unfair.

Harry reportedly views the removal of his and Meghan’s security as “a means of trying to force them back into Britain and establishment life, by making visits to the UK as outsiders more difficult and potentially unsafe”.

The prince also believes that his father, King Charles, could have intervened to reinstate his security detail because the king’s private secretary, Sir Clive Alderton, sits on the royal and VIP executive committee, but Buckingham Palace denied it had any decision-making power.

It is understood that Alderton was not on the committee when the decision over Harry’s security was made five years ago after he and Meghan had left their royal duties.

A palace source said: “These are matters of security and government policy and, as usual, it would be inappropriate to comment or intervene on either.”

It is alleged that Harry is still not on speaking terms with his father and brother. Harry saw the king last February after Charles was diagnosed with cancer, but they have not met since.

A result of his appeal will be handed down by a panel of three judges after Easter.

A London antiquities dealer has withdrawn an ancient Greek amphora from sale after evidence arose that links it to a notorious smuggler.

The Kallos Gallery in Mayfair, London, has removed a black-figure amphora – a jar with two handles and a narrow neck made around 550BC – from sale after the Observer contacted it about concerns raised by an expert in the illegal trade of antiquities.

Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, an archaeologist and leading expert in looted antiquities and trafficking networks, found evidence that led him to conclude the amphora probably came from an illicit excavation in Italy.

He spotted the amphora when the gallery offered it last month at Tefaf Maastricht, one of the world’s foremost art and antiques fairs, and matched it to a Polaroid photograph that appears to show the same object in the hands of Giacomo Medici, who was convicted in Italy in 2004 of dealing in stolen artefacts. That photograph was part of an archive seized from him by police and was on the website of the Italian Carabinieri.

The Dutch police have been notified. The object’s value is believed to be about £50,000.

The Kallos Gallery, which specialises in ancient art, was founded in 2014 by Baron Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza, son of the late Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen Bornemisza, the Swiss billionaire who built up what was regarded as the greatest art collection in private hands in the world.

Measuring 23.6cm in height, the amphora is decorated with sphinxes, a ram and a lion. It is attributed to the artist known only as the Phineus Painter, named after a cup he decorated with the myth of Phineus, the blind king plagued by harpies and saved by Jason and the Argonauts.

The collecting history given by the gallery online only dated back to 1986. This raised Tsirogiannis’s suspicions that the jar could have been part of an illicit excavation, he said: “These are immediate red flags.”

He added that the provenance details included a gallery that had belonged to a dealer who was himself convicted for receiving stolen antiquities from Italy in the 1970s.

Tsirogiannis, an affiliated archaeology lecturer at the University of Cambridge, heads illicit antiquities trafficking research for the Unesco chair on threats to cultural heritage at the Ionian University in Corfu. The late Paolo Giorgio Ferri, the Italian public prosecutor who pursued and prosecuted traffickers in looted antiquities, gave Tsirogiannis access to tens of thousands of images and other archival material seized in police raids from traffickers and other individuals involved in the illicit trade.

Over 19 years, Tsirogiannis has identified more than 1,700 looted antiquities, alerting police and playing a role in their repatriation to 15 countries. The finds include an ancient Greek bronze horse that Sotheby’s New York intended to auction in 2018 until Tsirogiannis notified the authorities of its links to the British antiquities dealer Robin Symes. Greece claimed the horse as its national property, and in 2020 Sotheby’s lost its legal challenge, prompting the Greek culture minister to welcome the court’s ruling as a victory for countries seeking to reclaim their antiquities.

Last year, Christie’s withdrew ancient Greek vases from auction after Tsirogiannis discovered their link to another convicted antiquities trafficker. He criticised the auctioneer’s failure to reveal that the objects could be traced to Gianfranco Becchina, who was convicted in 2011 of illegally dealing in antiquities. Christie’s said at the time that it withdrew the works once it was made aware of the connection.

Tsirogiannis has identified many other Medici objects, which have been repatriated to Italy over the years. “Medici was receiving objects looted from tombs in Italy,” he said, adding that he believes the amphora came from Etruscan tombs in Italy.

He has repeatedly argued that auction houses and dealers do not make adequate checks with Greek and Italian authorities, and has criticised their failure to disclose objects’ full collecting history.

Madeleine Perridge, director of the Kallos Gallery, said: “We make every effort to do our due diligence and publish all collection and publication history known to us … The artwork in question has been immediately removed from sale pending advice from the relevant authorities. We have absolutely no interest in handling tainted artworks and welcome an opportunity to find practical and productive solutions to these complex issues.”

Ted Kotcheff, the prolific Canadian director of films including First Blood, Weekend at Bernie’s, Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, has died aged 94. His daughter Kate Kotcheff told the Canadian Press that he had died of heart failure on Thursday in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he lived. His son Thomas said: “He died of old age, peacefully, and surrounded by loved ones.”

In an amazingly varied career, Kotcheff’s work ranged from hardhitting TV plays and low-budget features in the UK, to hit Hollywood comedies and prestige-laden award-winners and cult films. Kate Kotcheff said: “He was an amazing storyteller. He was an incredible, larger than life character [and] he was a director who could turn his hand to anything.”

The son of Bulgarian/Macedonian immigrants to Canada, Kotcheff was born in 1931 in Toronto, and raised in the city’s Cabbagetown district. After earning a degree in English literature from Toronto University, Kotcheff joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in the early 1950s, part of a remarkable generation that included Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller, Sidney J Furie and Alvin Rakoff. Like them, he felt he had to move away to further his career, and Kotcheff came to London in 1957 and began making TV plays for strands including Hour of Mystery, Armchair Theatre and ITV Playhouse. These included an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones in 1958, written by Terry Southern and starring Kenneth Spencer and Harry H Corbett, No Trams to Lime Street in 1959, written by Alun Owen, and – infamously – Underground in 1958, in which actor Gareth Jones collapsed and died during a live transmission.

Kotcheff moved into features in the early 60s, making his debut with the 1962 comedy Tiara Tahiti, starring James Mason and John Mills, following it up with Life at the Top, the sequel to hit kitchen sink drama Room at the Top, in 1965, and the race-issue drama Two Gentlemen Sharing in 1969. In the same period Kotcheff also directed the original production of Lionel Bart’s celebrated musical Maggie May, which premiered in 1964. Kotcheff continued to work in TV, directing Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine in 1967, and achieving perhaps his high point with a contribution to Play for Today in 1971: Edna the Inebriate Woman, starring Patricia Hayes as a homeless alcoholic.

However his career had taken an unexpected detour in the same year with the cult Australian film Wake in Fright, for which he was offered the job to direct despite never having visited the country. Despite being poorly received in its home country due to its uncompromising depiction of a brutally cruel Australian outback, including notorious scenes of a kangaroo hunt, Wake in Fright was selected for the Cannes film festival and went on to become celebrated as a landmark film, both as part of the Australian new wave of the 1970s and as a pioneering entry in the “Ozploitation” subgenre.

In 1974 Kotcheff finally realised his ambition of making a successful Canadian feature film with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; starring Richard Dreyfuss, it was adapted from a novel by his friend (and former housemate in London) Mordecai Richler, with whom he had worked on a string of British productions – including an Armchair Theatre adaptation of Duddy Kravitz in 1961. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival and was a major commercial success in Canada.

As a result, Hollywood took notice and Kotcheff was hired to make satirical comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as a successful married couple who turn to crime after Segal is fired. It was a hit on its release in 1977, and Kotcheff followed it up with another Segal comedy Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? and Nick Nolte American football film North Dallas Forty.

Kotcheff then released arguably his most influential film: the Sylvester Stallone action film First Blood, which had numerous directors and lead actors attached to it before Kotcheff offered the role to Stallone and production got underway in 1981. A depiction of an emotionally embattled Vietnam veteran, First Blood was a sizeable hit and spawned two sequels, including Rambo: First Blood Part II which became a career-defining success for Stallone in 1985. Kotcheff had another big success at the end of the decade: the dead-body comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, starring Andrew McCarthy.

After the failure of the Tom Selleck comedy Folks! in 1992, Kotcheff returned to TV, and in 2000 joined the long running crime show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as executive producer and occasional director, where he remained for 12 seasons.

Kotcheff was married twice, to Sylvia Kay between 1962 and 1972, and to Laifun Chung, who survives him.

Young men and boys fuelled by “strongly misogynistic” online material are hunting for vulnerable women and girls to exploit on websites such as eating disorder and suicide forums, senior officers have said.

The threat from young males wanting to carry out serious harm is so serious that counter-terrorism officers are joining the National Crime Agency (NCA) in the hunt for them, fearing they could go on to attack or kill.

Britain’s head of counter-terrorism, Matt Jukes, told the Guardian that a joint taskforce would be set up between his force and the NCA to tackle those fixated with violence online, in what he called a “decisive moment”.

Jukes, the Metropolitan police force’s assistant commissioner for specialist operations, said the new pairing would look for those consuming online material about killings or sexual abuse. Those who might go on to plot school shootings and other mass attacks, as well as those who encouraged women and girls to harm themselves, would also fall under their remit.

The new taskforce will also tackle so-called com networks (online communities), which counter-terrorism policing (CTP) and the NCA said involved hundreds of boys and young men. They will also hunt for those viewing material inciting sexual abuse.

The decision to pool the efforts of CTP and the NCA is being driven by the fear that it might be impossible to tell whether an obsession with violence and gore could turn into terrorism, a school massacre or other serious attack until it was too late.

Jukes, who is expected to be a candidate for the deputy commissionership of the Met, said: “What we’ve seen over the years is the characteristics of those cases looking increasingly similar.”

Com networks grew sixfold between 2022 and 2024 and are mainly young males joining together online to carry out hacking exercises and hunt for victims to steer into sexual abuse or worse.

James Babbage, the director general of threats for the NCA, said com networks were believed to have hundreds of people in the UK alone.

“We think they’re mostly doing it for kudos, for notoriety … within their peer group online,” he said. “In general, they are looking for victims who are already vulnerable. So they are looking at sort of suicidal ideation sites. They’re looking at eating disorders forums.”

Jukes said: “Young people who might have felt very isolated in some of their ideas and interests might never even have thought of some of the things which they’re now accessing … so people are getting both content and validation.

“We’re going to go after the com networks. We are going to go after those who appear to be administrating and facilitating them.”

The boost to the hunt for potentially violent young males comes after the Guardian revealed that the Southport attacker who murdered three girls at a dance class last July had been referred and rejected three times by the Prevent programme.

Prevent exists to identify those at risk of supporting terrorist violence. The Southport attacker had shown insufficient signs of ideological extremism but did have an interest in violence, including school massacres.

Babbage said: “The violence-fixated individuals that are coming up on the radar for terrorism policing, the tech-enabled violence against women and girls that police are seeing and the com networks that we’re seeing engaged in child sexual abuse and cybercrime – to some degree, this sort of young male community, it’s sort of the same threat.

“People are spinning up and radicalising and getting into more extreme harm, and might spin out and end up presenting as any one of those things.”

The material driving the young males to view horrific material and to potentially offend “has a very significant dose of misogyny in it”, Babbage added.

Jukes said the internet had “turbocharged” material triggering resentment among some young men: “In com networks and in terrorist networks, the idea that the interests of men and boys have been relegated, and the interests of women have been elevated, leads directly to violent misogyny.”

He said there were “technological and engineering” solutions to the crisis, and that big tech could help by stopping the algorithms pushing extreme content to youngpeople who wanted it. They could also aid police in helping to detect young people searching for violent content.

Jukes added: “The scale we’re talking about is beyond human intervention. There are too many users, too much traffic.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organizer, is eligible to be deported from the United States, an immigration judge ruled on Friday during a contentious hearing at a remote court in central Louisiana.

The decision sides with the Trump administration’s claim that a short memo written by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, which stated Khalil’s “current or expected beliefs, statements or associations” were counter to foreign policy interests, is sufficient evidence to remove a lawful permanent resident from the United States. The undated memo, the main piece of evidence submitted by the government, contained no allegations of criminal conduct.

During a tense hearing on Friday afternoon, Khalil’s attorneys made an array of unsuccessful arguments attempting to both delay a ruling on his eligibility for removal and to terminate proceedings entirely. They argued the broad allegations contained in Rubio’s memo gave them a right to directly cross-examine him.

Khalil held prayer beads as three attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security presented arguments for his removal.

Judge Jamee Comans ruled that Rubio’s determination was “presumptive and sufficient evidence” and that she had no power to rule on concerns over free speech.

“There is no indication that Congress contemplated an immigration judge or even the attorney general overruling the secretary of state on matters of foreign policy,” Comans said.

A supporter was in tears sat on the crowded public benches as the ruling was delivered.

Following the ruling, Khalil, who had remained silent throughout proceedings, requested permission to speak before the court.

Addressing the judge directly, he said: “I would like to quote what you said last time, that ‘there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness.’”

He continued: “Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process.

“This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me is afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”

Khalil, 30, helped lead pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia last year. He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers in New York on 8 March and transferred to a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he has been detained for over a month. His case was the first in a string of Ice arrests instigated by the Trump administration targeting pro-Palestinian students and scholars present in the US on visas or green cards.

The ruling means that Khalil’s removal proceedings will continue to move forward in Jena, while a separate case being heard in federal court in New Jersey examines the legality of his detention and questions surrounding the constitutionality of the government’s claims it can deport people for first amendment-protected speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy.

Khalil’s legal team is asking the New Jersey judge to release him on bail so that he can reunite with his wife, who is due to give birth to their first child this month.

His lawyers slammed the decision, which they said appeared to be prewritten. “Today, we saw our worst fears play out: Mahmoud was subject to a charade of due process, a flagrant violation of his right to a fair hearing, and a weaponization of immigration law to suppress dissent. This is not over, and our fight continues,” said Marc van der Hout, Khalil’s immigration lawyer.

“If Mahmoud can be targeted in this way, simply for speaking out for Palestinians and exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech, this can happen to anyone over any issue the Trump administration dislikes. We will continue working tirelessly until Mahmoud is free and rightfully returned home to his family and community.”

Van der Hout told a federal judge that Khalil will file the appeal after the immigration judge who ruled him “removable” issues the final written ruling. Van der Hout added that Khalil’s legal team may also pursue an asylum case.

“So nothing is going to happen quickly in the immigration proceeding even though she’s found him removable on the foreign policy grounds,” he said.

The judge gave lawyers for Khalil until 23 April to seek a waiver.

During a short prayer vigil held outside the detention centre on Friday afternoon, a group of interfaith clergy read messages of support. A short statement from Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, who is due to give birth this month, was also delivered in front of reporters.

“Today’s decision feels like a devastating blow to our family. No person should be deemed ‘removable’ from their home for speaking out against the killing of Palestinian families, doctors, and journalists,” the statement read.

It continued: “In less than a month, Mahmoud and I will welcome our first child. Until we are reunited, I will not stop advocating for my husband’s safe return home.”

The New Jersey judge has ordered the government not to remove Khalil as his case plays out in federal court. A hearing in that case is set for later on Friday.

One perfume smells suspiciously like a £355 bottle of Baccarat Rouge 540 eau de parfum. Another, which has notes of grapefruit, rose and Levantine spice, is reminiscent of a £215 bottle of Penhaligon’s Halfeti. But unlike those luxury brands, these “dupe scents” can cost as little as a fiver.

As many as half of UK consumers are now thought to have succumbed to the social media craze for cheap perfumes “inspired by” well-known luxury fragrances. And lawyers now say perfume brands and beauty companies need greater legal protection from rivals who imitate their products.

Intellectual property lawyers and chartered trademark attorneys told the Observer that the law must catch up to better protect the original creators of perfumes. Some said they had been contacted by companies seeking advice on how to legally dupe a perfume, while others had received enquiries from luxury brands about how to take legal action against dupe scents.

“Everybody wants to smell good and to have an affordable slice of luxury. However, it comes at the expense of proper artists, because perfume creation is an art,” Mireille Dagger, legal director at Broadfield law firm, told the Observer. “These companies are riding on the coattails of artists. It’s very unfair. It’s very hard to create a perfume brand and build it up. It requires expertise, artistic talent, time, energy and investment.”

“There have been no known cases in the UK of any perfume brands being able to trademark their scent – because under UK law, it’s a requirement that a trademark be graphically representable,” Dagger said.

While perfume manufacturers can trademark their brand names, distinctive labels and unique bottle shapes, none of the lawyers the Observer spoke to believed it would be possible, in practice, to trademark the scent of an original fragrance. A company needs to be able to clearly, precisely and objectively describe what they are protecting with a trademark.

“When it comes to scent, you just can’t do that, because scent is subjective. Different people smell different things. It’s very hard to consistently reproduce that scent on paper,” added Dagger. “You’re not able to put it in writing.”

Equally, a scent cannot usually be patented, said Eloise Harding, a partner in Mishcon de Reya’s intellectual property department, because this requires a particular perfume formulation to have an “inventive step” during its creation. “I don’t think any kind of fragrance is likely to have a sufficient level of inventive step,” she said.

A brand owner might not even want to patent its perfume formulation, said Robert Lye, legal director at Gateley. “The quid pro quo for patent protection is that the patented invention is made public, meaning that anyone would be able to copy the formulation once the patent has expired.” The maximum duration of a patent is 20 years, he added.

Some copycat perfume manufacturers are using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCMS) to break down the complex chemical profiles of expensive perfumes so they can emulate these scents – potentially using cheaper, “substandard” ingredients, Dagger said. The cheaper imitations are particularly popular on TikTok, where there are thousands of posts with the hashtag #perfumedupe.

With the once-inaccessible trade secrets about a perfume’s formulation now able to be deduced using GCMS, “there is no way, legally, for perfumers to protect their work,” said Dagger.

She would like to see “dupe brands being forced to pay royalties to the original brands”. As for the law, “something creative needs to happen – protection for the fragrance industry is lagging woefully behind beauty and fashion.”

The UK fragrance market was estimated to be worth £1.74bn in 2024, and is on track to surpass £2bn by 2029, according to market researchers Mintel.

In a recent survey of 1,435 fragrance buyers in the UK, 50% said they had bought a dupe perfume. A third of those surveyed said they would be prepared to buy a dupe fragrance again while 18% of those who had not yet bought one said they would be interested in doing so.

“It is almost a lost cause for perfume brands to defend themselves, if all they are saying is ‘we came up with this fragrance first’, because I don’t think consumers really care about that,” said Dionne Officer, a Mintel research analyst.

Admirers of designer perfume brands no longer think they should have to pay through the nose to have access to luxury scents: “Seeing dupe scents on social media, and knowing influencers are buying them, has made them more acceptable,” she added.

Younger consumers in particular are accustomed to seeing fast-fashion brands duplicating independent designers, and are unlikely to feel it is a taboo to openly wear a dupe scent or even give one as a gift.

“Maybe in older generations, it would have been looked down upon, to copy something,” said Officer. “But younger consumers have grown up in a time of economic instability, where you’re praised if you get a bargain – it’s seen as quite cool, now.”

Bella Thorne has accused fellow US actor Mickey Rourke of bruising her genitals with a metal grinder on the set of a movie that they filmed together during what she described as “one of the all time worst experiences” of her career.

In a story on her Instagram account on Friday, Thorne alleged that the episode was part of a broader campaign to humiliate her while they collaborated on the 2020 thriller Girl. She wrote: “This fucking dude. GROSS” and relayed the account in writing over a copy of a BBC article reporting that Celebrity Big Brother’s producers had reprimanded him for aiming homophobic comments at the singer JoJo Siwa while they competed on the reality show.

A representative of Rourke did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thorne’s allegations.

Thorne’s post recounted how she and the Oscar nominee were sharing a scene in which she was kneeling with her hands zip-tied around her back. “He’s supposed to take a metal grinder to my knee cap and instead he used it on my genitals [through] my jeans,” Thorne wrote. “Hitting them over and over again. I had bruises on my pelvic bone – Working with Mickey was one of the all time worst experiences of my life working as an actress.”

She also shared a screenshot of a post on X in which she alleged that Rourke separately revved an engine and covered her “completely in dirt” for another scene.

“I guess he thought it was funny to humiliate me in front of the entire crew,” Thorne – the 27-year-old former Disney star whose credits also include The Duff and Amityville: The Awakening – said of Rourke, 72.

Thorne then asserted that she had to take it upon herself to “go in his trailer absolutely alone” and talk him into finishing up the movie “as he shouted crazy demands that he wanted” from those helming the project written and directed by Chad Faust.

“He refused to speak to the director or producers – so I had to convince him to show up and complete his job,” Thorne continued. “In fact I had to beg.”

She said it was “uncomfortable”. But she said she endured it because “the movie could not be finished without him [and] everyone’s work would’ve just been lost and completely for nothing”.

Thorne’s comments about her on-set experience with Rourke on Girl capped off a week of unflattering headlines for the actor whose work on 2008’s The Wrestler once won him Golden Globe and Bafta awards.

He earned a formal warning from Celebrity Big Brother UK’s producers after going on the show and boasting to Siwa, who is gay, that he would “make her straight”.

Rourke also invoked a British slang word for cigarette that is also a homophobic slur in the US before directing himself at Siwa and saying: “I’m not talking to you.”

Celebrity Big Brother UK’s producers indicated to Rourke that they would remove him from the show if he kept up with the homophobic language.