As we went to press, Donald Trump was in New York preparing to step inside the Manhattan court where he will be fingerprinted and face the first criminal charges ever brought against a former US president. For our big story, Washington bureau chief David Smith examines how Trump has sought to play this unprecedented event to his best political advantage and ramp up support and funds for his 2024 presidential bid. And we look back at the how adult film star Stormy Daniels’s life entangled itself with Trump, opening up an avenue that gave prosecutor Alvin Bragg a route towards the indictment.
We return to Cotton Capital, the Guardian’s investigation into its founders’ links to the slave trade with Cassandra Gooptar’s research into the businessmen who backed John Edward Taylor to found the paper. She explains how deep dives into archives, online databases and ancestry records produced the “smoking gun” that connected nine of the men to enslavers and enslaved people in plantations in the US and Jamaica. And to bring story into the present, Lanre Bakare is in Manchester to find a city where historical memory has left the Black faces off its story of industrial wealth and political radicalism.
Culture is on the move with a trip to Margate on England’s south coast where art critic Jonathan Jones meets Tracey Emin to find out what led her to set up an art school in her home town and to meet some of the artists who are studying and working in the new space. We then travel up the east coast to Cromer with Berlin correspondent Kate Connolly to discover how a film project about Brexit Britain has made the Norfolk seaside town a hit in Germany and created a tourism buzz. Finally, our culture pages head to Iceland where the island’s unique geography and social history have shaped a genre-blending orchestral tradition.
Guardian Weekly staff can now all agree that spring has arrived outside our office windows, but the return of sunnier days has led feature writer Sam Wollaston to take a critical look at his lawn. For our environment feature this week he wonders whether the muddy patch at the back of his house would be greener if he opted for artificial grass, then does some research with naturalists and garden experts to make his decision.
We hope you enjoy this edition.
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