Salt cod and sweet pears are just the thing to stir happy memories

I have history with salt cod. Some years ago, we were on our way from the south of Italy, where my father is from, to Tuscany, where my parents now live. We had a new baby and a car suspension compromised by a boot packed with wheels of cheese and salami. We took a break on the outskirts of a town not far from Naples, where we planned to order a quick primi and be on our way.

The pastas came and went, and then more cutlery arrived for one member of our party – my father, unable to resist salt cod, sat bashfully awaiting a sneakily ordered secondi for at least another hour.

Even if the supreme court were to resist the president’s onslaught, it has little means to enforce its decisions

When the chief justice of the US supreme court, John Roberts, delivered his bombshell ruling last July granting Donald Trump absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, he laid out his vision of an expansive presidency. The executive, he wrote, should be “vigorous and energetic”, and free to carry out duties “boldly and fearlessly”.

If that sums up Roberts’ ideal occupant of the Oval Office, then he has certainly got what he wants in the 47th president. In his first month back, Trump has vigorously fired tens of thousands of federal workers; energetically ignored congressional statutes; boldly run roughshod over the constitution; and fearlessly unleashed Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in a slash-and-burn campaign against the US government.

Trinidad and Tobago and its neighbors mix music genres in a fast-growing transatlantic artistic exchange

It was the wee hours of carnival on Saturday when the soca legend Machel Montano and Nigerian American Afrobeats superstar Davido took to the stage in Port of Spain. By then, the audience of thousands had already been partying for hours, but when the two launched into their hit song Fling It Up , the crowd erupted.

This year’s Trinidad and Tobago carnival – which included the finals of the country’s steelpan competition and two days of hardcore reveling – highlighted a growing trend of collaboration between artists from Africa and the Caribbean, with musicians exploring the common threads of their cultural heritage at a time when the campaign for reparations has brought about a closer look at historical ties.

Gestures of servility from administration members and world leaders alike are sickeningly common in the mad king’s court

Sycophancy is the coin of the realm. In Donald Trump’s court, flattery is the only spoken language. He does not need an executive order to enforce it. Fear is the other side of the coin. Loyalty must be blind. Obedience is safety. Cronyism secures status. His whim is dogma. Criticism is heresy. Debate is apostasy. Expertise is bias. Objectivity is a hoax. Truth is just your opinion. Lies are defended to the death as articles of faith. New ones are manufactured on an industrial scale by his press office for social influencers to spread. Denying facts proves fealty. The rule of law is partisan. Russia is our trusted ally. Britain and France are “random counties”. Retribution is policy.

The deeper the submission to madness, the greater his supremacy. The subjugation is more thorough if the things people are forced to accept are irrational or, better, the reverse of what they had believed. When previously held beliefs are abandoned to conform to their opposite, like the secretary of state Marco Rubio’s formerly adamant support of Ukraine, which went to his core as the son of refugees from Castro’s Cuba, the more Trump’s dominance is demonstrated. Rubio has gone full circle, from his family fleeing one kind of tyranny to Trump sneering at him as “Little Marco” to ambitious embrace of his tormentor. He finds himself as a supplicant to Trump complaining about Elon Musk’s mindless wreckage of the state department. Formally the ranking constitutional officer of the cabinet, Rubio is below Musk in Trump’s hierarchy.

Gestures of servility from administration members and world leaders alike are sickeningly common in the mad king’s court

Sycophancy is the coin of the realm. In Donald Trump’s court, flattery is the only spoken language. He does not need an executive order to enforce it. Fear is the other side of the coin. Loyalty must be blind. Obedience is safety. Cronyism secures status. His whim is dogma. Criticism is heresy. Debate is apostasy. Expertise is bias. Objectivity is a hoax. Truth is just your opinion. Lies are defended to the death as articles of faith. New ones are manufactured on an industrial scale by his press office for social influencers to spread. Denying facts proves fealty. The rule of law is partisan. Russia is our trusted ally. Britain and France are “random counties”. Retribution is policy.

The deeper the submission to madness, the greater his supremacy. The subjugation is more thorough if the things people are forced to accept are irrational or, better, the reverse of what they had believed. When previously held beliefs are abandoned to conform to their opposite, like the secretary of state Marco Rubio’s formerly adamant support of Ukraine, which went to his core as the son of refugees from Castro’s Cuba, the more Trump’s dominance is demonstrated. Rubio has gone full circle, from his family fleeing one kind of tyranny to Trump sneering at him as “Little Marco” to ambitious embrace of his tormentor. He finds himself as a supplicant to Trump complaining about Elon Musk’s mindless wreckage of the state department. Formally the ranking constitutional officer of the cabinet, Rubio is below Musk in Trump’s hierarchy.

Dealing with PTSD, Merlin Hanbury-Tenison retreated to his family farm in Cornwall. There, working to revive a rare fragment of rainforest, he found a way to heal himself

A straight-backed, well-spoken former management consultant and ex-soldier in a wax jacket might not resemble much of a tree wizard, but the man leading me into a steep Cornish valley of gnarled, mossy oaks is called Merlin. He possesses hidden depths. And surfaces. Within minutes of meeting, as we head towards the Mother Tree – a venerable oak of special significance – Merlin Hanbury-Tenison reveals that he recently had a tattoo of the tree etched on his skin. I’m expecting him to roll up a sleeve to reveal a mini-tree outline, but he whips out his phone and shows me a picture: the 39-year-old’s entire back is covered with a spectacular full-colour painting of the oak. “It took 22 hours. I was quite sore,” he says, a little ruefully. “But I was in London afterwards, feeling quite overcome by the city and I had this moment: I’ve got the rainforest with me. Wherever I go, I feel like I’m carrying the forest and its story with me.”

Merlin is keen to tell the remarkable 5,000-year story of this fragment of Atlantic temperate rainforest – a rare habitat found in wet and mild westerly coastal regions and which is under more threat than tropical rainforests. In fact, he is now the custodian of this special, nature-rich landscape filled with ferns, mosses, lichens and fungi. He is slightly more reticent about his own remarkable life. Both stories are well worth telling.