Pomp and diplomacy

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King Charles III’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, lived to the ripe old age of 96, giving the UK public a lot of time to consider how her son would perform as monarch.

A common concern, for many years, was that Charles would be too political for the throne. A man of strong opinions, he championed environmental causes and intervened in areas such as architecture.

Yet as king, Charles has become a highly-disciplined monarch adept at speaking only when necessary, a master of subtlety.

Today, as he arrives in Washington to meet with Donald Trump, he’ll require those skills turned up to the max, with UK-US relations at their lowest ebb in decades and the president having just escaped another attempted shooting.

Charles’ four-day visit includes a bilateral meeting with Trump, a White House banquet and a speech to a joint session of Congress. The president is a fan of the king — a “fantastic man” — and has suggested the pomp and ceremony may be a chance to mend relations.

The king is supposed to be strictly apolitical, but is likely to try to nudge his fellow head of state in a more amiable direction.

When Trump visited Britain last year, Charles gave a pretty obvious nod to White House policy when he said that “we and our allies stand together in support of Ukraine” during a set-piece speech to a room full of the US administration’s most senior officials.

Otherwise, Charles will be looking for the visit to go off without any further drama following the weekend shooting.

Then Buckingham Palace will hope its work is done with regard to Trump; After all, two meetings, either side of the Atlantic, goes beyond the call of duty. — Julian Harris

Photographer: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty Images

Global Must Reads

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is visiting Russia today after Washington and Tehran failed to kick off a second round of peace talks at the weekend, delivering a blow to Islamabad’s efforts to broker a settlement. Iran has given the US a new proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war that includes postponing nuclear negotiations, Axios reported.

Mali’s defense minister, Sadio Camara, was killed in a suicide attack on his home during a coordinated assault by an al-Qaeda affiliate across several locations in the West African country. The attacks on military barracks in the capital Bamako and several other towns come as jihadist pressure intensifies, with fuel disruptions and repeated convoy strikes destabilizing the capital in recent months, alongside renewed US diplomatic engagement with Mali.

Source: AFP/Getty Images

Poland’s finance minister is campaigning to unlock new European sources of defense funding to avoid further straining the budget. Andrzej Domanski told us that even after Poland’s fiscal deficit ballooned to an unsustainable 7.3% of economic output last year, defense spending remains Warsaw’s top priority, propelling the government to look for additional funding abroad.

Colombian presidential candidate Iván Cepeda, an ally of current leader Gustavo Petro, consolidated his lead in the most recent poll and would defeat both conservative rivals in a runoff scenario, five weeks ahead of the vote. The Andean nation has faced a surge in violence in recent days after a series of attacks left dozens dead in southern Colombia.

Keir Starmer’s governing Labour Party has strong roots in Wales, but polls project it will record its lowest share of seats there since 1906 in voting next month. What’s more, Labour looks set to lose control of the Welsh Parliament for the first time since its formation in 1999, with the pro-independence Plaid Cymru party vying with Nigel Farage’s Reform in what threatens to be an awful set of UK local election results for the prime minister on May 7.

Photographer: Tom Skipp/Bloomberg

Senator Thom Tillis said he’s dropping his blockade of Kevin Warsh’s nomination to head the US Federal Reserve, saying the Justice Department’s decision to end a criminal probe targeting chairman Jerome Powell removed a threat to the central bank’s independence.

Two US agents who died after an operation to dismantle a suspected Mexican narcotics laboratory had no permission to be carrying out operations of this kind, the cabinet said. 

Venezuela and US officials are in talks to incorporate opposition and independent members to the board of the South American country’s central bank, a key potential step toward power-sharing to help root out corruption.

A US move to sanction one of China’s largest private refiners over ties to Iran will hurt a vast and already embattled petrochemicals sector — but the collateral damage will extend far beyond oil.

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Chart of the Day

Economists have sharply upgraded their forecasts for China’s import growth and now expect it to overtake the pace of expansion in exports for the first time since 2021, keeping the trade balance from ballooning much beyond last year’s record. Faced with pushback abroad as Chinese goods flooded into foreign markets since the pandemic, the government has responded by pledging to open the domestic market to imports.

And Finally

Most evenings, 78-year-old retiree Mohamed Ismail would sit at his local ’ahwa, one of the small, no-frills coffee shops that are the cornerstone of social life in Cairo, smoking shisha and playing chess with friends often until the wee hours. Then came the Iran war and a surge in energy prices, forcing businesses to close earlier to curb electricity use, dimming the lights on Cairo’s nocturnal activity. Authorities have just announced that the month-long measures are easing, and Ismail is among the Cairenes rejoicing that the dark, eerie calm over the largest city in the Middle East and Africa is being lifted.

Photographer: Islam Safwat/Bloomberg

Thanks to everyone who answered Friday’s quiz question, and congratulations to Elaine Milbank, who was first to identify Japan as the country where the government approved legal changes last week that will allow the export of lethal military equipment for the first time since World War II.

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