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How Giorgia Meloni’s cosy relations with Donald Trump turned sour

Six months ago, Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, stood surrounded by men on a stage in Sharm el-Sheikh, where world leaders had gathered to discuss the Gaza peace deal. In front of her, Donald Trump showered praise and insults on the assembled leaders, before describing Meloni as a “beautiful young woman”. Turning towards her, he added: “You don’t mind being called beautiful, right? Because you are. Thank you very much for coming.” Meloni looked uncomfortable, but accepted the compliment. She had worked hard to establish herself as a solid European ally for Trump, paying a flying visit to his Mar-a-Lago country club in Florida and being the only European leader to attend his inauguration as US president. That relationship, rooted in shared nationalistic rhetoric, is now unravelling as quickly as it formed. In an interview this week, Trump turned on her, telling the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Tuesday that she “lacked courage” for failing to join the US-Israeli war on Iran. The rebuke came after Meloni described Trump’s attack on Pope Leo – who has emerged as a vocal critic of the Iran war – as “unacceptable”. “She is the one who is unacceptable,” Trump snapped, “because she doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon and would blow up Italy in two minutes if it had the chance.” The remarks rounded off a challenging month for Meloni, whose government suffered a bruising setback in a referendum on a judicial overhaul in March and whose cosy relations with Trump have been an increasing political liability in a country with a deeply rooted anti-war culture. Meloni needed a way to help restore her image and recuperate consensus – and analysts say Trump’s feud with Pope Leo provided the ideal opportunity. “When you consider the moment in Sharm-el Sheikh, she wasn’t pleased to receive that compliment – she understood how diminishing it was – but she accepted it,” said Cecilia Sottilotta, an associate politics professor at the University for Foreigners in Perugia. “However, there comes a time when never standing up to your partner becomes a problem. So the Pope Leo row was welcome news for Meloni, because in Italy, people love their popes, and they hate wars … Meloni desperately needed an excuse to distance herself from Trump and this was a good one.” Meloni had started to distance herself from Trump after the strikes in Iran were launched in late February, albeit cautiously. In parliament, she strongly criticised the conflict while at the same time warning that we “cannot afford a regime of ayatollahs in possession of nuclear weapons” that could threaten Italy and Europe. After the referendum defeat, she adopted a stronger approach by denying use of an airbase in Sicily for US military planes carrying weapons for the Iran war. Still, her delicate balancing was visible even with her defence of Pope Leo. Meloni said Trump’s verbal attack against the pontiff – whom he described as “weak” and catering to the “radical left” – was “unacceptable”. But that was only after she came under pressure from the opposition when she omitted to address the remarks in a social media post that praised Leo for his role in “fostering the return of peace” as he departed on a trip to Africa. “Her instinct right up until the very end was to walk the tightrope,” said Sottilotta. “But this is a big crisis and at this point, you cannot afford but to take sides.” The ousting of her far-right ally Viktor Orbán in Hungary in elections on Sunday is also suspected to have played a role in Meloni’s reaction to Trump – especially after the US vice-president, JD Vance, travelled to Budapest in an effort to boost Orbán’s chances. “Vance going to Orbán was like delivering the kiss of death,” said Sottilotta. “So when she saw that, she really understood.” Now beginning to focus on general elections in 2027 – which until the referendum were expected to strongly favour her ruling coalition – Meloni has begun a tactful pivot. In a further sign of distancing herself from the war, this week Italy suspended a defence pact with Israel, previously a staunchly supported ally. Meloni also reiterated her government’s backing of Ukraine during a meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Rome on Wednesday, pledging to help boost the country’s defences against Russian attacks. On Friday, she will join the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who have also been the repeated targets of Trump’s wrath, for talks in Paris on securing the strait of Hormuz. Although Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has lost some support in recent weeks, the party maintains a lead in polls, as does Meloni’s personal popularity rating even if her leadership has lost its shine. Unless the fragmented opposition produces a credible alternative to Meloni, the polls are likely to remain static. Her government is now expected to prioritise plans to pass an electoral law that could give it a comfortable win in the next elections. “I believe coalition remains favoured, in the sense that it has a clear leader,” said Lorenzo Pregliasco, a co-founder of YouTrend, a political analysis firm. “The opposition still needs to define the alternative.” Meloni’s government has enjoyed a stable ride since coming to power in October 2022 mostly due to it being compact rather than achieving anything meaningful to improve the lives of Italians. “She’s dealt with the Trump issue, which in the short term, was a tactful move,” said Mattia Diletti, a politics professor at Sapienza University in Rome. “But unless she makes some spectacular changes [on the domestic front], she will decline. Italians don’t care too much about international politics but they do care about the war in Iran and wider Middle East, because it’s affecting their lives and the cost of living, so the sooner it stops, the better for Meloni.”

Pedro Pascal v Pedro Piscal: actor in legal battle with Chilean spirit brand

The actor Pedro Pascal is waging a legal battle against a Chilean pisco merchant who has chosen a cheeky name for his brand of the country’s national spirit: Pedro Piscal. David Herrera registered the brand name with a Chilean commercial regulator in 2023 and began selling his pisco in off-licences and restaurants. “We tried a few names and Pedro Piscal stuck,” Herrera, 41, said. “Then we were planning a trip up to the Pisco region when suddenly we were getting strongly worded emails from lawyers. Me, a mere mortal, getting emails from a superstar actor? It scared me a bit.” Pascal, who was born in Chile and is a popular figure in his home country, did not attend a court hearing but filed to take control of the brand name on account of its similarity with his own name and brand. Herrera is not the first Chilean entrepreneur to have found themselves facing down a Hollywood A-lister in court over a cheeky pun. A honey business calling itself Miel Gibson – using a still from Braveheart on the label – won the right to keep using the name after the actor sued. In 2020, DC Comics went after a bakery in Santiago that had called itself Superpan for three decades and used images of Clark Kent and his famous “S” symbol. The bakery emerged victorious. And across town, not far from a printing business named Harry Plotter, Matías Jara runs Star Wash, a car wash service that borrows liberally from the Star Wars canon – and even uses its famous font. “Chileans are mischievous, that’s the thing,” Jara said. “We are always messing around and joking. We change the lyrics to songs in English to Chileanise them, and we like wordplay – I love Star Wars and just wanted to stand out with my brand.” Once a month, motorists can get their footwells vacuumed under the watchful gaze of Chewbacca or sit at the wheel while a gaggle of Stormtroopers supervise the polishing of their windshield, as the forecourt has become a popular meetup place for cosplayers. Star Wash won its initial legal battle with Lucasfilm, the rights holder to the Star Wars franchise, to keep using the name but is still waiting for a ruling in another case that could force Jara to change the company’s name. As for Pedro Piscal, Herrera said: “I don’t regret it for a moment.” He said he and his cousins were partial to a piscola – pisco and Coca-Cola poured over ice – and would call it a piscal. He said Pedro came from the pedro ximénez grape variety, from which the spirit is distilled. But the actor’s lawyers saw it differently. Juan Pablo Silva, the managing partner at the firm representing Pascal, said he was unable to comment on an ongoing case. However, he highlighted initial rulings that transferred ownership of two online domains from Herrera to Pascal, as well as the actor successfully trademarking his name, as reasons for the firm’s optimism over a decision that could come before the end of the year. Herrera said: “We don’t use [Pascal’s] face or his likeness anywhere. We’re just selling a good product.”

Europe live: Russia ‘does not deserve’ lifting of sanctions, Zelenskyy says, after deadly overnight strikes in Ukraine

Meanwhile, we are also getting a confirmation that Hungary’s outgoing prime minister Viktor Orbán will skip his final EU summit as he readies to hand over power after losing power in last Sunday’s parliamentary election. Hungary’s EU affairs minister János Bóka confirmed he would not attend the meeting “due to his duties related to the handover of power,” and Hungary will not be politically represented in his absence. The meeting is expected to discuss the crisis in the Middle East and the next EU budget, and the outgoing government said it communicated its views to the president of the European Council ahead of the summit.

Chef José Andrés warns of multi-year world famine from Iran war

The celebrity chef and humanitarian José Andrés has a warning for the suits in Washington and around the world: stop looking at the oil tickers and start looking at the soil. The World Central Kitchen (WCK) founder believes that the world is sleepwalking into a massive, multi-year famine, being slow-walked by the “silent” collapse of the global fertilizer trade as a byproduct of the war with Iran. “I foresee a very big increase in famine across the world by the fall of 2026 and 2027,” Andrés told the Guardian on the sidelines of Semafor’s global economy conference in Washington. In the wake of disruptions around the strait of Hormuz, a global shipping chokepoint central to ceasefire negotiations between the US and Iran, Andrés pointed to nitrogen fertilizer supply chains, which he says have tightened and are pushing up costs for farmers and raising concerns about global food production “It is not only oil that leaves through the strait of Hormuz,” he said. “It is also heavy, heavy fertilizers.” The danger, he explained, was the delay. When fertilizers don’t arrive in time for key planting windows, yields can fall in the following harvest cycle. Disruptions in global trade can ripple into higher prices and lower output, hitting the poorest countries hardest. “In America, you can have a 2% or 3% increase and people will manage,” he said. “But in places like Haiti, they don’t serve you a kilo of rice, they serve you one ounce at a time. Those people are going to be suffering the consequences.” There is one solution he has been pushing that he believes is insultingly simple: a 3% “peace tax” based on the total GDP of every country. “The amount of money we are now increasing in the defense of every single country – if we would only put 3% on the side, there would be plenty of food to make sure we wouldn’t have hunger on planet Earth,” Andrés argued. Under a Donald Trump defense proposal for 2027, spending would rise to $1.5tn, $445bn more than 2026 levels. Global military spending had already hit a record-breaking $2.7tn in 2024, the highest ever recorded and the steepest annual rise since the end of the cold war, according to Sipri, meaning a 3% diversion would generate roughly $81bn a year. Oxfam, which also backs the 3% solution, in a 2022 report estimated that donor governments need to invest around $37bn every year until 2030 to tackle both extreme and chronic hunger. Instead, Andrés said, we choose “mayhem”. “It seems,” he added, “that we are led by people who like to be warriors”. That reality is hitting home for WCK, which relies on donations and has over the years served millions of meals in both Gaza and Ukraine. The non-profit organization is going to have to wind down operations in the region because of those high costs. “We don’t want to scale back, but we have the cash in hand we have,” he said. “The increase in the cost is going to make us make certain decisions … I shouldn’t be in the moment of deciding who eats. Everybody should be fed.” As the US and Europe grapple with the migration question, the political consensus has coalesced around the idea that there should be more barriers. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law last July, authorized $165bn for the Department of Homeland Security, including $46.5bn specifically for the border wall. In the European Union, the sweeping new pact on migration and asylum is set for full adoption this June, which would impose mandatory border screening, speed up asylum and return decisions at the EU’s external frontier, expand detention-like processing, and require member states to share responsibility either by relocating asylum seekers or paying financial contributions. Andrés has a message for those who think the solution is more concrete and blockages. Hunger, he said, is the ultimate border-crosser. “We can build all the walls we want, but if there are hungry mothers that need to feed their children, there is no wall thick or big enough that is going to stop them,” he said.

What mines has Iran laid in the strait of Hormuz and how can the US remove them?

Donald Trump has said he plans to begin anti-mine operations in the strait of Hormuz as part of a wider attempt to reopen the waterway, which has in effect been closed to marine traffic by Iran since the US and Israel launched their war in late February. What do we know about Iran’s minelaying? In the absence of much of its fleet of large naval vessels, which have been destroyed by US and Israeli strikes, Iran has deployed small surface vessels to lay mines in parts of the strait of Hormuz. It is not known how many mines have been laid. Iran has left a path open to ships that are prepared to pay a toll. According to US officials quoted by the New York Times, Iran has indicated that it cannot locate all of the mines that it has laid and lacks the capability to remove them. The mines are just one strand in an array of offensive options available to Iran in the strait, including cheap drones, anti-ship missiles and fast-attack small vessels. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) displayed some of their small vessel and mine capacity in a propaganda video filmed in a naval bunker in January 2025: What mines does Iran have? Tehran is thought to have deployed two main types of mine: the Maham 3 and the Maham 7. Unlike earlier mines that relied on physical contact between a ship’s hull and trigger mechanisms on the mine itself, both are more modern varieties that use magnetic and acoustic sensors to detect when a ship is close before detonating warheads. The Maham 3 is an anchored, 300kg mine that can be used in waters as deep as 100 metres. The Maham 7 is a bottom-resting 220kg mine for use in shallower waters. Its conical shape is designed to evade sonar detection as it sits on the seabed. Analysis suggests that despite heavy attrition to its navy, Iran still retains upward of 80% to 90% of its small boats and mine-layers and could therefore lay more mines if the conflict continues. What are the options for the US to clear mines and what are the risks? Mines are quick and easy to lay, but their clearance is laborious and dangerous. Although the strait is narrow, the mined passage represents a large area and crewed US minesweepers would be easy targets in the event of a resumption of hostilities. The best, and least risky, option for the US would be to use uncrewed marine mine-hunting vehicles. Those include the Knifefish undersea mine hunter, a submersible device, and the MCM anti-mine vessel, which looks like a speed boat. The US could also deploy the AN/ASQ-235 (Archerfish) airborne mine neutralisation system from an MH 60S helicopter. The system, controlled by the helicopter’s crew, uses vehicles with sonar to detect mines and then destroy them. Although uncrewed anti-mine systems remove the danger to personnel from the mines themselves, they require relatively close proximity from US ships and aircraft to launch and control them. So US personnel could still be targeted by missiles or drone-swarms if the ceasefire ends. Two US destroyers – the USS Frank E Petersen and USS Michael Murphy – transited the strait on 11 April in a development that US Central Command described as “setting conditions for clearing mines”. It is unclear what Tehran’s attitude to more sustained operations might be and what impact they would have on the ceasefire. How effective are modern mines? The global economy’s reliance on maritime trade gives countries deploying mines an outsized leverage compared with the relatively low cost of laying the mines. It takes only a small number of mines to close sea lanes, not least because some mines can be set to detonate after a certain number of ships have passed over, creating uncertainty. Is Iran required to map where it has laid mines? There are overlapping international laws and claims covering the strait that are complicated by the fact that neither Iran nor the US is a party to the 1994 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. International law stipulates that mines may not be used to close international straits for innocent passage. However, Iran claims part of the strait as its territorial waters. It is not clear, in any case, whether Iran would be required to provide a detailed mine map to the US, with whom it is still engaged in an armed conflict (albeit suspended by a ceasefire), not least at a time when the US is imposing its own military blockade.

South African politician Julius Malema given five-year jail term for gun offence

The South African leftwing politician Julius Malema has been sentenced to five years in prison for firing a rifle in the air at a political rally in 2018. Lawyers for the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, South Africa’s fourth largest political party, immediately sought leave to appeal. The magistrate is currently considering whether to grant this. Malema was convicted last year on charges including unlawful possession of a firearm and discharging a weapon in a public place, after an incident at the EFF’s fifth anniversary celebrations in KuGompo City, then known as East London. The magistrate, Twanet Oliver, said: “It wasn't … an impulsive act … It wasn’t anger. It was the event of the evening.” Malema’s lawyers had argued the shots were intended just to be celebratory and that no one was harmed. Any prison sentence longer than 12 months would bar Malema from being a member of parliament, although that would not go into effect until all appeals had been exhausted. Dozens of redshirted EFF supporters watched proceedings outside the magistrates court in KuGompo City. Party officials said beforehand that the case was politically motivated and designed to silence Malema, the former leader of the African National Congress’s youth league. State prosecutors had argued for a 15-year jail sentence. “The accused is a political leader with a huge following … young people emulate this kind of behaviour,” the prosecutor Joel Cesar said during the sentencing arguments on Wednesday. “He’s a member of parliament, a lawmaker, but he breaks the law.“ The case was brought by AfriForum, a conservative lobby group that claims to represent the interests of the Afrikaner minority. AfriForum had also criticised Malema for chanting “Kill The Boer” at rallies and brought a separate case accusing him of hate speech. The constitutional court ruled in 2025 that the chant, which originated as an anti-apartheid song, was not hate speech and not meant to be taken literally. Malema, 45, the son of a domestic worker, founded the EFF in 2013 after he was expelled from the ruling ANC for “sowing division”. The EFF is known for its disruptive parliamentary protests and describes itself as anti-imperialist and inspired by Marxism. It secured 9.5% of the vote in national elections in 2024, down from 10.8% in 2019. Reuters contributed to this report

Has Marles bowed to Trump’s wishes on defence spending? The figures are as clear as mud

If there’s anyone who knows just how much pressure Donald Trump is heaping on allies to lift defence spending, it’s Richard Marles. The message was received loud and clear when he met his US counterpart, Pete Hegseth, in Singapore nearly a year ago. Angry at Nato and other countries Trump views as leeching off the US for security, the zero sum president insisted Australia must lift spending to 3.5% of GDP. Instead of admitting they would bring forward decisions and increase budgets, Marles and Anthony Albanese played down the demands from Washington. Spending decisions, they said, would not be based on arbitrary goals, but instead on the basis of need. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email So it was surprising on Thursday when Marles suddenly used the release of Australia’s latest national defence strategy to measure total defence spending in Nato terms, pointing out that by 2033, Australia will be above the 3% of GDP threshold. Earlier, he had announced defence spending would rise to about 2.4% of GDP over the next decade. In an address to the National Press Club, Marles said the government would spend $14bn more over the four-year forward estimates period, and $53bn more over the next decade. By his count, that means that Labor has increased defence spending by about $117bn over 10 years, compared with the former Coalition government. About $5bn in so-called “reprioritisations” would free up cash. The cuts include scrapping 10 Spartan c-27J small transport planes. Marles said that was how you compare “apples with apples”. But, like so much in the defence portfolio, the figures are as clear as mud. Nato rules account for major projects and procurement differently to Australia’s federal budget. As Australian Strategic Policy Institute researcher Linus Cohen has noted, while costs in Australia are spread out over the lifetime of a major asset, like a new warship, members of the 32-country bloc report spending when the ship is built and the bill is paid. Some budget spending that sits outside the defence portfolio would also be included in the 3% total for Australia, including the costs of international intelligence activities and superannuation entitlements for service members. On the Aukus nuclear submarines agreement, Marles says the picture is clear. Asked if the 2023 cost estimate of the controversial $368bn project is still current, he argued the best way to understand the total price tag is to consider it at about 0.15% of GDP over the life of the project. Initially unwilling to give a figure, Marles argues there hasn’t been a significant increase in the cost of nuclear subs. But spending over the next decade on Aukus has increased from the $53bn-to-$63bn range provided in the last defence strategy two years ago, to between $71bn and $96bn over the same period today. The government says that change is related to the progress of related infrastructure, including the Osborne shipyard in South Australia and the Henderson base in Western Australia. Under the Aukus deal, the first Virginia Class submarine from the United States is due to arrive in Australia in 2032, with another arriving every four years, before the bespoke Australian-built model starts coming online in 2042. Perhaps frustrated at criticism from the opposition, the press gallery and defence commentators, Marles was pointed in his speech, insisting that increases in spending did not happen because of thinktanks, retired generals “or washed-up bureaucrats”. On his own test – comparing apples with apples – Thursday’s explanation lacked the transparency Marles says Australian taxpayers expect and deserve. • Tom McIlroy is Guardian Australia’s political editor