A US court has ruled that Donald Trump’s trade tariffs are illegal, saying that the president did not have the authority to use the emergency powers legislation he cited when imposing the sweeping global levies last month. The Trump administration says it will appeal the ruling and that it’s “not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency”. Britain will ramp up its offensive cyberattacks against states such as Russia and China, the defence secretary has announced, while unveiling a new £1bn military cyber command which will co-ordinate the attacks. “The keyboard,” says John Healy, “has become a weapon of war.” This spring has been the sunniest on record. Some 630 hours of sunshine were clocked between 1 March and 27 May, beating the previous record of 626 hours set in 2020. The lead will likely increase over the final four days of the season as the weekend is set to be sunny.

A touch of royal magic in Canada

We Canadians are occasionally vulnerable to “lazy republicanism”, says Jen Gerson in The Guardian. But since King Charles and Queen Camilla arrived for their royal tour on Monday, any “latent scepticism” has melted away. In the face of recent politics – Donald Trump using tariffs to undermine the trade relationship that has been the bedrock of our economy for decades and musing about forcing Canada into becoming the “51st state” – the “transcendent benefits of monarchy” are obvious. Mark Carney opening his parliament with a throne speech from the King is not only an “incredible coup”, but also a “remarkably subtle bit of geopolitics”.

King Charles III is a “potent symbol of Canada’s history”, and free of partisan affiliation. Monarchy is something we can all celebrate, regardless of which party we voted for in our recent “rancorous” election: even the Conservatives who hung “Fuck Trudeau” flags in their windows could show up with mini-Canada flags to welcome Charles. And with Trump scrambling our sense of place in the world, the royal presence is a reminder that we have friends beyond our neighbour to the south. Friends who will stand up for us, too. At a time when many elected leaders of Western nations have remained “conspicuously silent” in the face of a belligerent US, the King’s talk of the deep value of “democracy, pluralism, rule of law, self-determination and freedom” reminds us that there is still a “whisper of a Commonwealth” that can at least offer moral support. Perhaps most powerful of all is that, with Trump so obsessed with pageantry and praise, we have on our side the best equipped person on earth to deliver “pomp, ceremony and elaborate trim detail”. If Charles can work his royal magic to soothe the US president’s ego, “I won’t begrudge the King of Canada’s portrait on everything”.

🇨🇦👑 It’s important to note that the throne the King was speaking from is “not the British throne”, says Matthew Parris in The Times. Charles III is King of Canada quite separately from his other realms, including the United Kingdom. When his grandfather, George VI, made a state visit to the US in 1939, he chose to be accompanied in Washington only by the Canadian PM, Mackenzie King, “making the point that the Americans were being visited by the King of Canada”.