Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
The slump in China’s manufacturing PMI (see opening post) is “a canary in the trade war coal mine,” says Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management.
The poor bird’s feathers have been “scorched by tariffs and global uncertainty”, Innes reports, explaining:
The Caixin Manufacturing PMI’s plunge to 48.3 isn’t just a weak print—it’s a body blow to the backbone of China’s economy: small and mid-sized exporters now caught in a brutal vice grip between faltering global demand and a Washington-led tariff regime that’s more carrot-and-stick diplomacy than ceasefire.
“There is no simple, single change, no matter how radical, that will deliver the fundamental reset that is needed for the water sector.”
“We have heard of deep-rooted, systemic and interlocking failures over the years – failure in Government’s strategy and planning for the future, failure in regulation to protect both the billpayer and the environment and failure by some water companies and their owners to act in the public, as well as their private, interest.
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© Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
© Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
IDF says it fired at ‘individual suspects who advanced towards troops’ during incident at aid point in southern Gaza Strip
Palestinians killed by Israeli fire at aid point, Gaza officials say
Israeli strikes on Gaza schools part of deliberate strategy, say sources
In its statement about troops opening fire on people near an aid distribution point in southern Gaza, Israel’s military has claimed “IDF troops are not preventing the arrival of Gazan civilians to the humanitarian aid distribution sites. The warning shots were fired approximately half a kilometer away from the humanitarian aid distribution site toward several suspects who advanced toward the troops in such a way that posed a threat to them.”
At the weekend Philippe Lazzarini, the Unrwa commissioner-general described the aid distribution system being enforced by Israeli authorities as a “death trap”, adding that “This humiliating system has forced thousands of hungry and desperate people to walk for tens of miles to an area that’s all but pulverized due to heavy bombardment.”
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© Photograph: Hatem Khaled/Reuters
© Photograph: Hatem Khaled/Reuters
A canny biography of the early career of this strange, brilliant novelist
Muriel Spark, born Muriel Sarah Camberg, was nothing if not protean. Her gravestone declares her a poet; posterity knows her as the author of 22 short, indelibly strange and subversive novels. In life, she was by turns an editor, critic, biographer, playwright, Jewish Gentile, Catholic convert, divorcee, abandoning mother, spy. As Frances Wilson observes in this canny biography, she looks in every photograph as if she is played by a different actor, so drastic are the changes in her face and style. From precocious Edinburgh schoolgirl to unhappy Rhodesian wife, spirited London bohemian to poised Roman socialite, Spark made an art of unsettling transformations. She was the queen of narrative control, not least the narrative of her own life.
She was also the enemy of biographers, a pursuer of lawsuits who managed to delay the publication of her own authorised biography by seven years (“a hatchet job; full of insults”, she said, unjustly), and went to war with the former lover who wrote two accounts of her life. And yet she didn’t hide her traces, leaving for researchers not one but two vast archives, of her personal papers and her working process, neatly organised in box files that total the length of an Olympic swimming pool.
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© Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images
© Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images
From brooding, brutalist boxes to Scandi-inspired circular affairs with curved confessional booths, these astonishing churches are often located off the beaten track
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© Photograph: Matthew Dransfield
© Photograph: Matthew Dransfield
The hike offers dramatic views of the Swiss Alps’ ‘murder wall’ – and poignant insights into the climbers who first braved it. For the son of one of those pioneers, it had a special resonance
A few years ago, my dad told me of a mountain where I could easily sense another world. “There is a special air and light,” he had said, vaguely. “You just have to walk close to it to feel and see it. Stand in one place and just look up.”
The mountain on my dad’s mind that day was the Eiger, Switzerland’s 3,970-metre ogre of limestone and ice. Like few others, the peak exerts a gravitational pull on climbers and it remains the chief symbol of the Bernese Oberland; its most notable feature, the 1,800-metre north face, is the largest in the Alps. This gigantic slab looms over the village of Grindelwald, to the south-east of the town of Interlaken, appearing at sunrise as an immense black spectre in a valley of green.
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© Photograph: Mike Maceacheran
© Photograph: Mike Maceacheran
A badass surfer on Australia’s Gold Coast takes on a villainous tour guide who is ferrying unwary sightseers to view the sharks
Sean Byrne’s gonzo horror thriller premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of this year’s Cannes film festival, in the sidebar where Cannes traditionally finds a place in its heart for genre or offbeat fare. Yet despite this stamp of authority – and a lead turn from Jai Courtney that could best be described as “gnarly” – I couldn’t get behind this movie, which has a bargain-basement straight-to-streaming feel to it.
The scene is the Australian Gold Coast where surfers come to catch gigantic waves. Hassie Harrison (from TV’s Yellowstone) plays a badass surfer named Zephyr, who travels around in her van as free as the wind sampling the most outrageous swells. She meets-cute with Moses (Josh Heuston), a nerdy guy who is very sweet and yet also kind of hot. When they part, Zephyr is to come fatefully into contact with the film’s horrible villain, a beefy, bullish guy called Tucker, played by Courtney, who has a business taking attractive twentysomething tourists wearing only swimming costumes out on his boat, promising them an intimate encounter with sharks. But the unspeakable Tucker, a great shark enthusiast himself, has some pretty unusual ideas about the food he wants to offer to bring these creatures up to his boat.
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© Photograph: Vertigo Releasing/PA
© Photograph: Vertigo Releasing/PA
Half of those diagnosed will now survive for 10 years or more after advances in diagnosis and treatment
The proportion of people surviving cancer in the UK has doubled since the 1970s amid a “golden age” of progress in diagnosis and treatment, a report says.
Half of those diagnosed will now survive for 10 years or more, up from 24%, according to the first study of 50 years of data on cancer mortality and cases. The rate of people dying from cancer has fallen by 23% since the 1970s, from 328 in every 100,000 people to 252.
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© Photograph: NHS England/PA
© Photograph: NHS England/PA
This extraordinary adaptation of Paris Lees’ memoir follows wild, witty teen Byron as they go from cottaging for cash aged 15 to finding solace in a raucous gang of trans and queer pals. You’ll never look at a loo brush the same way
The title suggests a generic experience of nascent womanhood, but What It Feels Like for a Girl is miles from your typical female bildungsroman. This adaptation of journalist Paris Lees’ excellent memoir about growing up in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire (or ‘Ucknall, as the book, with its mesmeric phonetic dialect, has it) chronicles the coming-of-age of Byron, who is seen by others as a boy. Initially, our protagonist doesn’t really push back on that; despite some early gender dysphoria – angrily dismissed by their macho father – the prospect of one day openly living as a woman is completely outside their frame of reference. On a visit to a nightclub, Byron (Ellis Howard) encounters future friend Lady Die, who makes a joke about someone being a transexual. “What’s a transexual?” asks Byron – smiling, mystified.
This is the early 00s, you see: pre Nadia’s Big Brother win, although a couple of years post Hayley Cropper’s Corrie debut. Still, in terms of the general public’s comprehension of trans issues, it is the dark ages. (Thanks to the current Y2K fashion renaissance, however, the aesthetics are positively aspirational: dumbphones, chokers, FCUK slogan tees, Kappa tracksuits.) Yet Byron’s eventual gender transition isn’t what makes this an extraordinary and at times deeply disturbing account of a partly misspent youth. The reason 15-year-old Byron is at the aforementioned club in the first place is because they are searching for their erstwhile boyfriend Max (Sweetpea’s Calam Lynch). But Max isn’t just Byron’s first love – he’s also their pimp. A chance encounter in a public toilet introduced Byron to cottaging; they then begin performing sex acts on strangers for money. Byron’s success in the field – and enthusiasm for the job – means they are soon headhunted by Max to meet the demands of wealthier clients.
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© Photograph: Photographer: Enda Bowe/Enda Bowe
© Photograph: Photographer: Enda Bowe/Enda Bowe
Served in a comforting broth and topped with fresh herbs and grated pecorino, this versatile dish is one for all ages
There is something deeply nostalgic about this dish, although it wasn’t something I grew up with. Perhaps it’s the use of small pasta that makes me feel childlike, but either way, it is the kind of recipe that is immensely versatile: it can be an elegant, light spring meal finished with punchy extra-virgin olive oil, an extra sprinkle of pepper and a grating of pecorino, or you could label it kid-friendly and comforting. It’s not exclusively so, but I’d hazard a bet that they’ll enjoy it.
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© Photograph: Ola O Smit/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Kitty Coles. Food styling assistant: Megan Lambert.
© Photograph: Ola O Smit/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Kitty Coles. Food styling assistant: Megan Lambert.
The whole tax and spending ship is an unseaworthy rustbucket. This spending review is a chance to fix it
Who in their right mind would want to be Rachel Reeves right now? Her spending review out next week will feel like austerity all over again. Even if, in reality, it’s not a cut but more spending, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies emphasises. After an uplift in everyday spending at the budget, here comes a much-needed capital slab of £113bn. Yet whatever the numbers say, painful cuts to most things will be the story and the feeling.
If you want to try your hand, the IFS has just put its “Be the Chancellor” gadget up on its site. Strap yourself into Reeves’s fiscal straitjacket and attempt a Houdini-like escape, as you decide on levels of borrowing, taxing, spending and debt. One thing it illuminates is how much even mere slivers of growth improve your position immensely. How far can you go? The febrile market meltdown point is unknowable, but Liz Truss was a useful crash dummy testing squillions on tax cuts without raising revenue. Donald Trump, plunging into an unexplored fiscal wilderness, beat a retreat when his monster tariffs sent the markets charging back out at him. He seems to be having another try.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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© Photograph: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images
Climate minister says greenlighting North West Shelf project until 2070 is not the leadership Pacific countries expect as Australia seeks to host summit
Vanuatu’s climate minister has expressed disappointment over Australia’s decision to extend one of the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas projects and said it raises questions over its bid to co-host the Cop31 summit with Pacific nations.
The UN is expected to announce which country will host the major climate summit in the coming weeks, with Australia pushing for the event to be held in Adelaide as part of a “Pacific Cop”.
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© Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images
Murder accused also tells jury she was never diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had history of ‘consulting Dr Google’
Erin Patterson has told a court she wishes she never told her Facebook friends in a private group chat “this family I swear to fucking god” in relation to her in-laws, saying she felt ashamed but hoped that sharing her frustrations would mean she had a “big cheer squad” for her problems.
Patterson also told the jury in her triple murder trial that she was never diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had a history of “consulting Dr Google”, and hoped to bring her family back together despite a formal separation with her estranged husband, Simon, seven years earlier.
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© Photograph: Anita Lester/AAP
© Photograph: Anita Lester/AAP
Head coach planning mid-season training break in March
Move may exacerbate concerns about player burnout
Thomas Tuchel is planning a warm-weather training break for his England squad next March followed by a pre-World Cup boot camp in Miami in June because of concerns about the effect of high temperatures on the players during the tournament in the US.
The England head coach has altered the Football Association’s usual travel itinerary this week by taking his squad to Barcelona for a six-day training camp to work them hard in the heat before the World Cup qualifier against Andorra on Saturday. Similar trips are on the agenda for next year.
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© Photograph: Adam Davy/PA
© Photograph: Adam Davy/PA
TUI issues advice for tourists in affected region after earthquake about 29km north of Rhodes
© Getty Images
‘It’s over for short men,’ one user claimed
© Getty Images
Actor says interview published by Kurier newspaper last week ‘entirely phony’
© Getty Images for AFI
The couple had been in a ‘committed and promising’ relationship, the man’s lawsuit claims
© CTV News
An encouraging clay-court season for Draper was brought to an abrupt halt by the inspired Alexander Bublik
© PA Wire
Mount Etna, on the east coast of Sicily, between the cities of Messina and Catania, is one of the world’s most active volcanoes
© Reuters
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The Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in Toulouse issued a red aviation warning after Mount Etna’s eruption, but this has subsequently been downgraded to orange
© Robert Graystone for The Independent
Scientists say flavonoid diversity in diet linked to longer life
© University of Barcelona
Mason twice had stint as interim Spurs manager and becomes the youngest boss in the Championship
© PA Archive
Zelensky says Russia and Ukraine agree to exchange 1,000 prisoners each, potentially rising to 1200
© AFP/Getty
© Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
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The quarter-finals begin in Paris as the tournament intensifies
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