Anthony Albanese has condemned Donald Trump’s decision to slap tariffs on Australian steel and aluminium as “entirely unjustified” and “not a friendly act”, after the Labor government failed to receive the exemption the US president had dangled in a call last month.
The Australian prime minister said his government would continue pushing for an exemption to the 25% tariffs, calling the trade barriers favoured by Trump “a form of economic self-harm”, in his strongest criticism of the American president since he returned to office.
“This is against the spirit of our two nations’ enduring friendship and fundamentally at odds with the benefit of our economic partnership that has delivered over more than 70 years,” Albanese said in Sydney on Wednesday.
The Trump administration announced it had rejected Australia’s plea for an exemption from US tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, due to come into effect on Wednesday.
Read more about the tariffs – and whether Australia should be worried – in our explainer here.
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In pictures
Are you good at doing nothing? A South Korean artist suffering burnout created a Space-out competition – where participants compete to see who can zone out the most over 90 minutes – and the contest is coming to Melbourne’s Rising festival.
What they said …
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“We stuffed a lot of things up.”
The Sportsbet chief executive, Barni Evans, told an industry conference in Sydney on Wednesday that Australia’s largest online gambling company “forgot to do some grownup things” and “stuffed a lot of things up”, including its involvement in an advertising “arms race”. Evans also said Sportsbet – whose customers gambled $2.7bn with it over three months last year – had initially done “a terrible job” of alerting sporting bodies to betting transactions that may have posed serious integrity threats.
In numbers
The man with heart failure has become the first person in the world to walk out of a hospital with a total artificial heart implant. The Australian researchers and doctors behind the operation announced on Wednesday that the implant had been an “unmitigated clinical success” after the man lived with the device for more than 100 days before receiving a donor heart transplant in early March.
Before bed read
Back in the 1980s, a group of elderly people helped revolutionise how experts think about strength training. They participated in one simple exercise, which proved older adults can build and retain muscle – and caused a paradigm shift in science.
Daily word game
Today’s starter word is: CHIA. You have five goes to get the longest word including the starter word. Play Wordiply.
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