March annual rate comes before expected rise because of household bills going up this month
UK inflation dropped to 2.6% in March, increasing the pressure on Bank of England policymakers to cut interest rates next month asDonald Trump’s tariff wars cast an uncertain outlook.
Prices growth was weak ahead of an expected rise in April as households begin to pay higher council tax and utility bills.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Anna Watson/Alamy
© Photograph: Anna Watson/Alamy
Shares plunge as firm says H20 chip, designed for Chinese market to comply with controls, will now need special licence
Nvidia has said it expects a $5.5bn (£4.1bn) hit after Donald Trump’s administration barred the chip designer from selling crucial artificial intelligence chips in China, sending shares in one of the US’s most valuable companies plunging in after-hours trading.
The company said in an official filing late on Tuesday that its H20 AI chip, which was designed specifically for the Chinese market to comply with export controls, would now require a special licence to sell there for the “indefinite future”.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
When even Daniel Day-Lewis is out of retirement, you have to start wondering whether actors just like messing with people
Cate Blanchett is an actor’s actor. Cate Blanchett is the type of actor whose characters – flinty, steely, sly, sophisticated – are hardly distinguishable from the person herself. She speaks with the jarringly refined accent of an alien trained only on stage melodramas. She does not laugh; she titters. She does not walk; she glides. She does not debase herself with the prosaic concerns of you or I.
This is why it is very hard to believe that she is “giving up”. In an interview with the Radio Times on Monday, Blanchett suggested she was no longer an actor. “My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it. I am serious about giving up acting,” she said. “[There are] a lot of things I want to do with my life.”
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Forty-seven teams have gone into second legs trailing by three or more goals. Only four have turned it around
By Opta Analyst
What a night it was for Arsenal. A Champions League quarter-final at home to holders and perennial winners Real Madrid, and a resounding 3-0 victory. Two stunning free-kicks from Declan Rice and another impressive finish from Mikel Merino put them in a commanding position but, crucially, it was only the first leg.
Real Madrid did not wait long before making noises about overturning the deficit at the Santiago Bernabéu. “The possibilities of qualifying are quite low, but we have to try 100%,” said the manager, Carlo Ancelotti. “We have to do all we can. It’s an opportunity to show a response to a poor game. In football, everything can happen. We need to believe. We need to have trust because, sometimes, a lot of times in the Bernabéu, it happened.”
Continue reading...
© Composite: Reuters, Getty, Shutterstock, Tom Jenkins
© Composite: Reuters, Getty, Shutterstock, Tom Jenkins
An actor’s story becomes a thrillingly radical deconstruction of family relationships and the social roles we play
There is an eeriness to great acting. Studied movements take on life; a living other emerges. Bad acting achieves no such uncanniness. Excessively self-conscious, the failing actor never dissolves into their role. We watch them watching themselves act.
Although we rarely see her on stage, the actor narrating Audition, Katie Kitamura’s unnerving, desperately tense fifth novel, never stops watching herself perform. Even passing, offhand phrases seem to fray under the strain of an unsustainable self-awareness. “You might think that people wondered how we did it,” she says, describing the comfortable Manhattan lifestyle she shares with her husband. The perspectives are tortuous, unmanageable. Who is this “you” that might imagine their way into the opinions of unseen others? As the novel progresses, these gazes are experienced as social roles both longed for and resisted. “How many times had I been told how much it meant to some person or another, seeing someone who looked like me on stage or on screen,” she says, one of many moments in the novel in which ethnicity is both present and absent at once: acknowledged, but never explicitly named.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Iuliia Burmistrova/Getty Images
© Photograph: Iuliia Burmistrova/Getty Images
Juliette Pavy’s photographs of eco expeditions bring an element of lyrical storytelling to the global impact of invisible pollutants, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Juliette Pavy
© Photograph: Juliette Pavy
Dutton has taken the Liberal party further to the right, but his strategy of aping the US president could be unravelling as Trump tariffs cause chaos
Peter Dutton, the man who would be prime minister of Australia, is one of the hard men of the country’s politics.
So, with Australia facing a federal election now set for 3 May, it was not a huge step for him to start road-testing some of the language and policies of Donald Trump after his win in the US last November.
Continue reading...
© Composite: Guardian design
© Composite: Guardian design
The Selma star is excellent in a beautiful-looking, zany, 60s-set show about a former criminal. But it is a big pile of random whimsy with very little coherent narrative
In the blurb promoting Government Cheese, Apple TV+ describes it as “surrealist”. It isn’t, but it does have plenty of what is becoming the streamer’s signature style. Is your dramedy quirky, kooky and kind of cartoony? Is it set mid-century in the US, away from the big cities, where humble but smarter-than-average folk arch deadpan eyebrows at unusual events? Yes? You’ve got a full-season commission! Don’t worry about an engaging premise or a coherent narrative – we just want those zany indie vibes.
We are in the San Fernando valley, California, 1969. After a riot breaks out during a flood, a burglar and petty fraudster, Hampton Chambers (David Oyelowo), is released from prison, strolling back into his home town of Chatsworth in his one sharp suit, with the rolling, bouncing gait of a born huckster who has fatally high self-esteem. While incarcerated, he has invented a self-sharpening drill, the proceeds from which he hopes will aid him as he reconnects with his family and goes straight. But his neglected wife and sons are frosty and he needs to earn money faster than his supposed wonder tool can make it, so a return to criminality beckons – bringing with it all the lying and cheating that alienated his loved ones in the first place.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Michael Becker/Courtesy Of Apple
© Photograph: Michael Becker/Courtesy Of Apple
Hannah’s second feature about her husband follows him on tour, but the offstage footage is rather less compelling than the music
Daryl Hannah has made another film (after Paradox in 2018) about her musician husband Neil Young; this one is about his recent 15-date solo tour of outdoor arenas on the US west coast. It works best when the living legend is on stage, cheerfully and unselfconsciously performing just like it’s 1972 and regaling the whooping audience with his comments: “Steve Stills gave me this guitar – I wrote a lot of songs on this sucker!”; “I’m so happy I was here before AI was born!” He really is utterly open and unpretentious.
But the movie itself tests the fanbase loyalty to the limits by being pointlessly and uninterestingly shot in arthouse black-and-white (though it exasperatingly bleeds out into colour over the closing credits) and by including an awful lot of material on the tour bus which is – how to put this? – not very interesting. Neil likes to ride up front with the driver, Jerry Don Borden by name, who becomes almost this film’s star. Bafflingly, Hannah uses a huge amount of tour bus footage from a locked-off camera position, not next to Neil, but at the driver’s seat right by Jerry, whose beaming face and steering wheel loom into the screen almost interminably. At one stage, we hear from him at some length on the subject of Howard Hughes, while Neil nods along, way in the background.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: PR IMAGE
© Photograph: PR IMAGE
My beloved Converse All Stars had always been part of my identity. But when they became painful and impractical, it transformed my relationship with clothes
Style and comfort have always been of equal priority for me. I got my first pair of Converse All Stars at the mall in Indiana in the 1980s. They were teal and yellow – I would fold the lip of the hi-top over to show off the lemony interior. For my wedding, I wore low-top leather Converse with my white dress. I’ve walked across cities from Rome to Mumbai, Chicago to Oslo – all while wearing Converse, or Fly London boots – looking for vintage one-offs and secondhand gems, clothes made to last.
In 2021, aged 41, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a degenerative disease that resulted in symptoms including difficulty moving, especially walking. Dystonia is a common symptom for those of us with young onset Parkinson’s; it involves the involuntary and painful twisting of parts of the body. In my case, dystonia occurs in my back, hands, feet and ankles. When my medications aren’t working, or when I’m tired – and more so as the disease progresses – this drastically curtails my mobility and dexterity. My toes grip the earth, my ankles frequently and painfully roll, sometimes I stumble and nearly or actually fall. It is mentally and physically exhausting, and the pain can take my breath away.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Courtesy of Kimberley Campanello
© Photograph: Courtesy of Kimberley Campanello
Human rights groups say drop is partly due to EU policies that turn blind eye to rights abuses in countries such as Libya and Tunisia
Irregular crossings at Europe’s borders have fallen by 30% in the first quarter of the year compared with the same period last year, in a decrease that rights groups partly attributed to EU policies that have emphasised deterrence while seemingly turning a blind eye to the risk of rights abuses.
The decline was seen across all the major migratory routes into Europe, the EU’s border agency Frontex said in a statement, amounting to nearly 33,600 fewer arrivals in the first three months of the year.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Roberto Salomone/The Guardian
© Photograph: Roberto Salomone/The Guardian
Jimmy Butler had 38 points, seven rebounds and six assists creating opportunities on both ends at every chance, Stephen Curry scored 37, and the Golden State Warriors earned the seventh seed in the Western Conference playoffs by beating the Memphis Grizzlies 121-116 Tuesday night in the play-in Tournament.
Playoff Jimmy in all his brilliance on the big stage took serious pressure off Curry, who knocked down a baseline three-pointer with 1:50 to go and one from the left wing with a minute on the clock.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP
© Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP
Winner bought ticket in San Luis Obispo, getting prize with odds of one in 2,047,423, according to California Lottery
An unhoused man in California won $1m from a lottery ticket that he bought from a liquor store on the state’s central coast.
The winner, who has not been publicly identified, purchased the scratcher ticket from Sandy’s Deli-Liquor in San Luis Obispo, where he has been a customer for years, according to media reports.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Fred Greaves/Reuters
© Photograph: Fred Greaves/Reuters
The disappointment on show after a valiant quarter-final defeat shows just how far Unai Emery’s team have come
It was the 57th minute when Unai Emery made a series of small circles with his hands as the pulses of everyone else in this stadium began to race that little bit quicker. Emery tapped his temples, reminding his Aston Villa players to stay focused, but, really, who was he kidding? Ezri Konsa had just side-footed a shot in off a post to earn Villa the lead on the night and, with the help of a tail wind from the Holte End, this stadium felt liftoff. And not for the first time. The noise was so loud and the atmosphere so fervent that it seemed worth checking on the foundations of this grand old ground.
Villa won the match and, though they lost the tie, this was a night they will always remember. It is also an evening when, once they have fully digested the drama of rousing from 5-1 down on aggregate, they will surely reflect on the strides they have made, particularly under Emery. Villa inadvertently did so with an amusing faux pas in the moments before kick-off: someone presumably pressed the wrong button as the Europa and Conference League walk-on music boomed instead of the operatic Champions League anthem as the players lined up on the pitch.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
A second young child in Texas died from a measles infection
© Getty Images
UK Sport has stressed the importance of sustainability as the climate crisis continues to threaten the future of sport
© Getty Images
‘These unforgettable moments continue to remind us that the Ocean is brimming with mysteries yet to be solved’
© Schmidt Ocean Institute
Mikel Arteta’s side take a three-goal lead to the Spanish capital, an advantage that should be safe yet feels oddly vulnerable
© Arsenal FC via Getty Images
Easing inflation marks steeper drop predicted by economists
© PA
Financial crime agency names Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi in case related to newspaper linked to their Congress party
© AFP via Getty
The Spanish giants have a near impossible task on their hands to overcome a three-goal deficit against Arsenal but their record against Premier League clubs gives them reason to hope
© Getty
The hosts will be without manager Eddie Howe who is recovering from pneumonia
© Getty
Connexion
