The US musician was a major influence on post-punk and alt-rock scenes thanks to his spirited, chaotic style
David Thomas, who fronted the wild and free-thinking American rock band Pere Ubu, has died aged 71.
A statement on Pere Ubu’s Facebook page said that he died “in his home town of Brighton & Hove, with his wife and youngest step-daughter by his side. MC5 were playing on the radio. He will ultimately be returned to his home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn’ … We’ll leave you with his own words, which sums up who he was better than we can: ‘My name is David Fucking Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock and roll band in the world.’”
Children among nine dead and at least 70 wounded by Russian attack, Ukraine says
We understand that while the visit will be cut short after Zelenskyy’s meeting with Ramaphosa, their media activities will still proceed, meaning we should hear from the Ukrainian president in the next few hours.
Rachel and I will keep an eye on this development to see if Zelenskyy takes part in a scheduled press conference in Pretoria in case he wants to say more about the attacks overnight.
More than 50,000 people, queuing for hours, viewed body of late pontiff over 24-hour period, says Vatican
St Peter’s Basilica has reopened for thousands of people to pay their final respects to Pope Francis for a second day, following a brief pause after keeping its doors open all night.
The 16th-century basilica, where Francis’s simple wooden coffin is placed on the main altar, was scheduled to close at midnight but remained open until 5.30am to allow in those who still wished to enter.
Both sides say they have resolved to end conflict through peaceful means after ‘frank’ talks facilitated by Qatar
The Democratic Republic of the Congo and a coalition of militias including the Rwanda-backed M23 have agreed to work towards a truce to end the fighting that has engulfed the eastern part of the country since January.
In similarly worded statements released on Wednesday night, the government and Alliance Fleuve Congo (Congo River Alliance) said their representatives had held talks facilitated by Qatar and resolved to end the conflict through peaceful means.
This outrageous skewering of the modern dating landscape confronts toxic masculinity and the contradictions of female desire
Nearly every page in Sophie Kemp’s debut is smart, jarring and wickedly funny. Set in Brooklyn in 2019, this wild, absurdist take on the millennial novel tracks the adventures of Reality Kahn, a 23-year-old waterslide commercial actor and zine-maker who determines to become “the greatest girlfriend of all time”, after her drug-dealing sex partner, Emil, casually suggests that she gets herself a man. Prior to that point, Reality had just been living her life, no strings attached. “Would having a special guy around really make me happier? Was this the life purpose I was looking for?” A boyfriend, she decides, might “add colour to my life as well as provide intrigue”. And, New York City being “a place where nefarious individuals got ideas”, he could also protect her from “getting raped so much”.
Reality’s quest kicks off with a hunt for “intel”. Where do guys who make good boyfriends usually spend their time? Farcical as it is, her inquiry touches on that most sobering of cliches about true love: that it is darn hard to find. Emil responds with confusion: “Where do they hang out? Girl, I think you’re sexy as fuck and fun, but for serious, you are on some sort of insane-ass trip these days. They’re not a pack of wildebeests in the plains.” Desperate for better advice, Reality turns to Girlfriend Weekly, Kemp’s cheeky homage to the time-honoured world of women’s magazines. It has all the answers she’s looking for, even if they are hilariously fusty and over the top: “Bring a little charm with you everywhere that you go. For example, when you are at the grocer’s, be sure to give a smile and a wink to the dashing gentleman in the porkpie hat. Say: ‘Gee whiz, woo-woo, you are a beautiful specimen and I am a virgin.’”
For half a century, the GOP has embraced tax cuts for the rich. But as Americans turn against the idea, the party is divided
“I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice – I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” the rightwing impresario Bari Weiss told a Federalist Society gathering in 2023. “And that’s OK. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”
The assembled conservatives guffawed at hearing the quiet part out loud: in this case, the admission that tax cuts for the rich have been the glue holding the US conservative movement together.
I need to stop dwelling on everything I get wrong, from sending my ball into the drink to squeezing the wrong bottom
Whether you’re into sport or not, there’s wisdom to be mined from it. Once you’ve picked your way through the platitudes, banalities and cliche there’s gold in there.
Rory McIlroy’s famous victory at the US Masters earlier this month yielded, for me anyway, a particularly good example. McIlroy’s psychologist, Bob Rotella, has been credited with helping his man develop golf’s key mental skill: putting your bad shots behind you and barely giving them a second thought.
Chadema spokesperson says party’s deputy chair and secretary general held on way to protest over treason charges
Tanzania’s main opposition party has said at least two of its officials have been arrested on their way to a rally to support the leading government opponent Tundu Lissu, who is due in court to face a treason charge.
Authorities in the east African country have increasingly cracked down on the opposition Chadema party in the run-up to presidential and parliamentary polls in October.
Our writers take a look at the best prospects coming out of college, and which teams needs to nail their picks over the coming days
Travis Hunter, CB/WR. Any team picking No 1 overall needs a quarterback. And Cam Ward is the top quarterback prospect in the class. But the No 1 pick should be Hunter, the electrifying hybrid corner/receiver. Whether he can play both ways in the league is an open question, but wherever he lines up, Hunter will be a gamechanger at a premium position. OC
A series of distinctive, comb-like grooves found preserved in sediment near Aberdeen in Scotland were left behind by the underside of huge “tabular” icebergs that dragged across the North Sea floor between 18,000 and 20,000 years ago, the researchers said.
She has been called a ‘brave disruptor’ by campaigners and ‘rabid’ by internet critics. But for Charlotte Proudman, only one opinion matters: that of the women and children she defends in the family courts
At lunchtime, when she is working at her barristers’ chambers in central London, Charlotte Proudman, a specialist in family law, faces a confronting choice. Should she nip around the corner to Pret a Manger or join her colleagues at the Middle Temple dining hall? It’s not so much a question of whether she feels like a sandwich or a sit-down meal, but a more existential decision, requiring her to analyse who she is and where she belongs.
It is 15 years since Proudman qualified as a barrister, but she still feels a sense of alienation when she walks into the formal dining halls. “It’s largely a sea of male, pale, stale figures sitting there, all in their suits. They all look identical, and are probably from similar demographic backgrounds. As a woman, you already stand out,” she says when we meet at her deserted offices on Good Friday. “It feels like a pocket of establishment elitism. In Pret you’ll have a mixture of solicitors, some paralegals, maybe some judges popping in and out; it’s more cosmopolitan.”
Newcastle have said Eddie Howe has returned to work after a period in hospital with pneumonia. The manager was admitted to hospital two Fridays ago and missed three matches.
“Newcastle United are delighted to confirm that Eddie Howe has returned to his duties at the club’s training centre,” a club statement read. “Eddie had recently been hospitalised with pneumonia and has now returned to work after a period of recovery. We thank supporters for their warm wishes.”
A journalist’s bracingly honest account of interviews with musicians from Brian May to Shaun Ryder
When the journalist Kate Mossman was a child, she developed an obsession with the rock band Queen. Mossman came of age in the 1990s, but the irony and snark of that decade left her cold. Instead, she lived for the “middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jacket and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before”. Watching Queen’s posthumous single These Are the Days of Our Lives on Top of the Pops in 1991, she “felt something within myself ignite”. Though she was captivated by the strange longing of a monochrome Freddie Mercury, who had died weeks earlier, it was drummer Roger Taylor who became the focus of her obsession. On the mantelpiece of her childhood home sat a holy relic: a beer glass he had drunk from during a solo gig. Twenty years later, while on her way to interview Taylor and Queen guitarist Brian May for a magazine profile, Mossman confesses: “I think I’m going to black out.”
Her sharp yet heartfelt interviews with Taylor and May – which took place separately – appear in Men of a Certain Age, a compendium of Mossman’s work previously published in the Word, the now defunct music magazine, and in political weekly the New Statesman. The book features 19 encounters with ageing male musicians including Shaun Ryder, Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Sting, Dave Gahan, Jon Bon Jovi, Nick Cave and Terence Trent D’Arby. Mossman tops and tails the articles with present-day thoughts, reflecting on her expectations, the preparation, the long journeys to far-flung homes, and the peculiar and sometimes fraught dynamic between interviewer and interviewee.
After the apparent defanging of the once critical talkshow host, can the president get more stars onside? Some nuts will be tougher to crack than others
If President Trump invited you to the White House, would you go? This is the question US hacks and other media personalities have been asking themselves since the inauguration, an American version of that self-flattering British perennial: when Buckingham Palace calls, will you be buying a fascinator to accept the OBE? In both cases, no matter how pluckily anti-establishment an individual may have been to that point, the answer is often a resounding: you bet!
First, the rationalisations. In the US context, respect for the “office of the president”, for which there is no British equivalent that doesn’t prompt sniggering, is taken seriously enough that if the president calls, you don’t turn him down. There’s the standard argument in favour of engagement over boycott as a more constructive path to account-holding. And there is, for hacks, the perfectly reasonable rationale of pursuing the story. Of course, you’re going to say yes if Trump calls. How could you not?
Allegations come days after Japanese authorities increased efforts to deter crimes by US servicemen on island
Two US marines based on the Japanese island of Okinawa are being investigated for alleged rape, days after local authorities stepped up efforts to deter sexual and other crimes by US service personnel.
A marine in his 20s is suspected of raping a Japanese woman in a bathroom at a US military base last month, while a second man, also a marine in his 20s, allegedly raped a woman at a base in January, according to media reports.
Lawsuit rebukes claim that president can arbitrarily impose tariffs based on act intended for emergencies
A dozen states sued the Trump administration in the US court of international trade in New York on Wednesday to stop its tariff policy, saying it is unlawful and has brought chaos to the American economy.
The lawsuit said the policy put in place by Donald Trump has been subject to his “whims rather than the sound exercise of lawful authority”.
We want to hear your tips for how to renew your sense of adventure – whether it’s making spontaneous decisions, trying new things, or actively broadening your horizons
As we get older, many of us feel like we lose our sense of adventure. Busy lives can leave us lacking in energy, while increasing responsibilities can leave little room for more adventurous pursuits.
But maintaining an adventurous perspective can help to keep life exciting. With this in mind, we want to hear your tips for how to renew your sense of adventure – whether it’s making spontaneous decisions, trying new things, or actively broadening your horizons. If you know a surefire way to reignite your adventurous side, tell us about it below.
As the 100-day mark approaches, we’d like to hear from Americans about the second Trump administration so far
On the eve of his inauguration in January, Donald Trump vowed to deliver the “most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history”.
Since taking office, the president has issued a flurry of executive orders that amount to a shock-and-awe campaign, and made a series of policy moves to dramatically reshape the United States.
“For sure, this last week has put a dent in that and, for sure, delayed it,”
“We’re stubborn as mules. We’re not easy to knock down.”
“With fieldwork completed just days after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, it is unsurprising that consumer expectations for the economy plummeted to a record low. The original tariff schedule, since reduced for most countries, was expected to reduce growth in the UK and elsewhere. Yet despite this economic pessimism, expectations of retail spending rose slightly as the prospect of Easter shopping drew closer.
The state of the economy dropped significantly to -48 in April, down from -35 in March.
Their personal financial situation worsened to -16 in April, down from -10 in March.
Their personal spending on retail rose to +3 in April, up from 0 in March.
Their personal spending overall fell slightly to +10 in April, down from +11 in March.
Their personal saving rose slightly to -4 in April, up from -5 in March.
The retail chain that filed for bankruptcy in 2017 believes a film starring mass produced kids’ merch will be a good way to refresh its brand relevance. Let’s all blame Barbie …
Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ show The Studio has a compelling character at the centre; a studio executive who loves cinema but is forced to churn out endless soulless dreck based on increasingly miserable IP. In real life, however, it would be silly to assume that someone would be creatively barren enough to make a film based on Kool-Aid. And this is because in real life people are creatively barren enough to make a film about Toys R Us.
Variety has reported that a live-action Toys R Us movie is in the works, made by Toys R Us Studios which is apparently a real thing that exists in the world. The movie is said to be a live-action film, along the lines of Night at the Museum and Big, which “aims to capture that childhood wonder in a modern, fast-paced adventure that taps into the Toys R Us brand’s relevance across its more than 70 years in the toy industry.” And quite frankly this couldn’t have come soon enough, because if my children have been crying out for anything, it’s a film about the brand relevance of a shop.
For five decades the Japanese photographer has captured the internal lives of a host of unlikely subjects, from dockers to Black GIs. Now a new show celebrates an artist dedicated to documenting the underdog
In 1975, when Mao Ishikawa was in her early 20s, she took a job in a bar frequented by Black American GIs stationed at Camp Hansen, in Okinawa. She had grown up hating the Americans who controlled her home island and, to this day, maintain military bases there. Yet she found kindred spirits among the soldiers and her fellow barmaids, with whom she lived and loved and also photographed. These images became her first major documentary series, Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa, and capture a sense of their youthful freedom and outsider bonhomie, from the group of men and women hanging out in bed to the trio hitting the town for a night out, the women’s hair teased into afros, massive hoop earrings glinting.
Like much of what you can discover in Ishikawa’s first UK survey, spanning her five-decade career – from dockworkers to travelling actors or downtown Philadelphia’s African American community – these are natural, intimate photographs of a hidden world that could only have been taken by an insider. They are an act of political resistance, too.
French clubs are enjoying best continental season in decades but catastrophic crisis could engulf entire league
If it is results that count, tout va bien for Ligue 1. Having so far accrued its second-highest total of Uefa ranking points in a single campaign, the “league of talents” remains on course to register its best season in Europe since the 1990s, when Marseille, Paris Saint-Germain, Monaco and others regularly featured in the latter stages of Uefa competitions.
A transformed, exuberant if still-not-quite-perfect PSG hope to go one better than the Thomas Tuchel side who lost the 2020 Champions League final to Bayern Munich, and Lyon gave Manchester United an almighty scare in the quarter-finals of the Europa League. Brest and Lille defied the odds by qualifying for the knockout stage of the Champions League, beating teams such as PSV, Atlético Madrid and the holders, Real Madrid, on the way. The conveyor belt of young talent shows no sign of slowing, the 17-year-old Ayyoub Bouaddi of Lille and PSG’s Désiré Doué the latest French academy products to break through on the biggest of stages.
The UN has called the detention of Pablo López Alavez ‘arbitrary’, while human rights organisations say his sentence is part of a systematic and alarming pattern of criminalisation of Mexico’s environmental activists
The meeting room in the prison of Villa de Etla, a town in Oaxaca, Mexico, doubles as a classroom with school desks and a small library. The walls feature motivational phrases such as “First things first”, “Live and let live” and “Little by little, you’ll go far”.
Pablo López Alavez, a 56-year-old environmental defender, has had nearly 15 years to contemplate these sentiments – and faces 15 more, after being imprisoned for murders he says he did not commit.
The poet’s debut novel is a transcendent portrait of gay desire that pays homage to the English literary tradition
Seán Hewitt, the author of two acclaimedpoetry collections and an equally acclaimed memoir, now publishes his debut novel Open, Heaven – a tender, skilled and epiphanic work which I suspect will meet the same response. It takes its title from William Blake’s poem Milton, which speaks of wandering through “realms of terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions of varied beauty” – a line that quite nicely describes the reader’s experience of this book.
Its opening recalls – with the sense of a deliberate engagement with literary tradition – TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, or LP Hartley’s The Go-Between: “Time runs faster backwards. The years – long, arduous and uncertain when taken one by one – unspool quickly … the garden sends its snow upwards, into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves, and blooms in reverse.” Our narrator James, a librarian who loved but never desired his husband, is a man arrested in time past. Directed by doctors to rest after the “bewildered weeks” that follow his divorce, he returns endlessly to thoughts of his youth, “hoping to find the answer to something left unfinished”. He searches online for properties in the village of Thornmere, where he was once a solitary teen who loved – with disastrous single-minded loyalty – a boy called Luke. He discovers a farmhouse for sale which is achingly familiar; so he is prompted to return to Thornmere in person, having never really departed it in spirit, and we are plunged into the body of the novel.
This drama about dancers could have been as fun as Fame in tutus. Instead, it is a jarring, cringe-inducing mess. Wait till you see Simon Callow as an evil billionaire!
At first, Étoile looks as if it’s shaping up to be Fame in pointe shoes. One character even knowingly quotes the “This is where you start paying, in sweat” speech. This would be fine – great, even, because who didn’t love the quintessential 80s series about the high-energy kids from New York City’s High School of the Performing Legwarmers? The problem is that, as the new venture from Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino progresses, it doesn’t seem to be sure what it is. Apart from Whimsical with a capital W, an attitude that rarely works out well for anyone.
The setup is simple. Two dance companies – Le Ballet National in Paris and the Metropolitan Ballet Theater in New York City – are struggling after Covid and assorted other modern pressures such as anti-elitist attitudes and everybody’s terrible attention spans. So what if they swapped their top dancers and choreographers and launched a huge publicity campaign about it so everyone abandoned YouTube and became interested in ballet instead?
Mark Cohen’s photographs of his daily walks in New York show the world viewed from the height of a child – revealing fresh threats, thrills and perspectives
The UK’s first national trail was established to help secure a right to roam. To mark its anniversary, our writer takes on a particularly wild section
High on the ridges of the Pennines, somewhere between the waters of Malham Tarn in the Yorkshire Dales and Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders, a 31-year-old woman stands amid a group of mainly male walkers. She’s wearing bell-bottom jeans, a fitted long-sleeve top and an Alice band to keep her hair out of her face in the prevailing westerly wind. Her name is Joyce Neville and the year is 1952. She’s in the middle of a walk along a proposed national trail – the Pennine Way
Joyce had seen an advert for this self-described “Pioneer Walk” in the Sunday newspapers a few months earlier. It was placed by the writer and campaigner Tom Stephenson who was requesting “accomplished walkers, fit and over 18” to take part in a 15-day hike on the “long green trail” he was suggesting be created in Britain (inspired by the US’s 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail). Few women wore jeans back then, according to Joyce’s notes (which were passed on to me by Paddy Dillon, author of Cicerone’s Walking the Pennine Way guidebook), and the whole trip cost just £25.
Booming fintech company gives details of initiative to improve working culture as profits more than double
Revolut has been tracking staff behaviour, granting or docking points on an internal “Karma” system that is feeding into the UK bank’s decisions on bonus payouts.
The practice was detailed in Revolut’s annual report, which showed that profits had more than doubled last year, jumping by 148% to £1bn in 2024. That increase was due to a rise in subscriptions, and revenues from its wealth and crypto trading divisions.
Gilmour, Waters, Wright and Mason are space rock whippets in the burning Italian sun in this outrageously indulgent yet vivid and beguiling music documentary
Here they are: Pink Floyd in 1971, amazingly young, amazingly thin, like four space-rock whippets standing mysteriously on their hind legs in the burning Italian sun. Dave Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason are performing “live at Pompeii” in this mesmerically peculiar and outrageously indulgent music documentary from film-maker Adrian Maben, now on rerelease over half a century later, available on freakily large Imax screens undreamt of in the 70s. The music and the atmosphere are an irresistible fan-madeleine for those who can remember referring to them solemnly as “the Floyd” (ahem).
The band are shown performing live in Pompeii’s ancient Roman amphitheatre in the late afternoon, but not to an audience as you might assume, but weirdly and almost haughtily alone. The banks of amplifiers are pounding out the music just to the ancient stones and pillars and to the film crew facing them (and to the crew filming them from behind), who like most of the band are shown shirtless in the sweating heat. (No one worried about sunscreen in 1971.) Maben’s vision was avowedly inspired by his experience as a young traveller searching frantically for a lost passport in this very amphitheatre, as well as by Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva, much admired by Freud, in which a German archaeologist in Pompeii has a sunstricken hallucinatory glimpse of a woman who lived thousands of years before.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday that peace talks in London had been marked by “emotions” and pledged that Ukraine would abide by its constitution, which he has previously pointed out forbids surrendering territory such as Crimea. “Emotions have run high today. But it is good that five countries met to bring peace closer,” the Ukrainian president posted. “The American side shared its vision. Ukraine and other Europeans presented their inputs. And we hope that it is exactly such joint work that will lead to lasting peace.”
Zelenskyy posted a 2018 Crimea Declaration from Mike Pompeo, secretary of state during Donald Trump’s his first term, which said: “The United States rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.” Trump now appears to be proposing that the US formally recognise Russian control of Crimea – violating the UN Charter and principles that the US has led the way in upholding since the second world war, that borders must not be changed by force.
Zelenskyy’s post came as Trump scolded him for dwelling on Crimea, saying it was harming talks and that “nobody is asking Zelenskyy to recognise Crimea”. Trump told reporters later that he thought the London talks had gone “pretty well … we’ve got to get two people, two strong people, two smart people, to agree. And as soon as they agree, the killing will stop.”
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, cancelled his trip to attend the London talks on Wednesday, leading to the cancellation of a broader meeting with foreign ministers from Ukraine, Britain, France and Germany. Downing Street said there were instead meetings with Washington’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and national security advisers from France and Germany. Donald Trump’s friend, the real estate dealer Steve Witkoff, is expected to meet Vladimir Putin again on Friday.
French president Emmanuel Macron’s office said: “Ukraine’s territorial integrity and European aspirations are very strong requirements for Europeans.” A spokesperson for Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, told reporters “it has to be up to Ukraine to decide its future”. Keith Kellogg said the talks with Andriy Yermak in London were positive. “It’s time to move forward on President Trump’s UKR-RU war directive: stop the killing, achieve peace, and put America First,” Kellogg posted.
At least 21 people were injured in Kyiv early on Thursday after a missile attack onthe capital. “The 21st casualty was already hospitalised,” said Vitali Klitschko, the Kyiv mayor. He said a three-year-old child was taken to hospital. Military authorities said damage had been reported in at least two districts. Kharkiv was also under missile attack early on Thursday, according to its mayor, Ihor Terekhov, who said explosions had been heard in the city. The Ukrainian air force reported Russian bombers taking off and firing missiles.
Ukraine’s military said on Wednesday that it hit a Russian long-range drone production site in Tatarstan, damaging the final assembly line. Russia extensively uses Shahed and other types of drones for strikes across Ukraine. Ukraine’s general staff said the plant could make 300 drones per day. Reuters could not independently verify the statement.
The death toll rose to nine after a Russian drone hit a bus carrying workers in the Ukrainian city of Marhanets – one of 134 large drones that Ukrainian authorities reported had attacked the country over Tuesday night and into Wednesday.
Former cricketer opens up on dark times during recovery
‘I thought my face had come off. I was frightened to death’
Andrew Flintoff has described his return to cricket as a coach over the past 18 months as “the one thing that saved me” as he struggled to come to terms with the mental and physical scars caused in a car accident during filming for the BBC’s Top Gear in December 2022.
Flintoff talks for the first time about the accident and its aftermath in a Disney+ documentary to be released on Friday. “After the accident I didn’t think I had it in me to get through,” he says.
Indian PM makes speech amid increasing tensions with Pakistan after 26 men killed in contested Himalayan region
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has vowed to punish all those responsible for Tuesday’s attack in Kashmir, pursuing them “to the ends of the Earth”.
Twenty-six men were killed in the tourist hotspot of Pahalgam, in the deadliest attack on civilians in the contested Muslim-majority territory since 2000.
Victims include fans rushing to buy tickets at well over face value, data collected by Lloyds Banking Group suggests
Oasis fans have collectively lost more than £2m to scams since tickets for its reunion tour went on sale last year, a major bank has estimated.
Lloyds Banking Group based the calculation on the volume of fraud reports made by its own customers. Oasis fans make up more than half (56%) of all reported concert ticket scams so far this year, according to Lloyds’ data, losing £436 on average.
Expectations that the Fed will cut short-term interest rates and falling consumer confidence could indicate what is ahead
Imagine you are sailing a ship through dense fog, looking out for land. Your lookout spots species of birds typically found offshore. It now seems likely that you are approaching land, but it is impossible to know for sure until you see the coastline. If a US recession is land, the “birds” are already swooping into view. But these sightings offer no guarantees of what lies ahead, only probabilities.
An inverted yield curve, when the long-term interest rate falls to or below the short-term rate, is commonly considered to be a predictor of recession. The 10-year bond ratedidfall below the three-month Treasury rate in March, although the two are now at about the same level. In any case, the yield curve does not actually tell us much. It simply reflects financial market expectations that the US Federal Reserve might cut short-term interest rates in the future, which in turn reflects expectations that economic activity might falter.
Sophie Lloyd, who was expelled in 1991 when her deception was exposed, accepts belated apology from the society
Deception has always been an integral part of magic. So when Sophie Lloyd set about attempting to gain access to the formerly male-only ranks of the Magic Circle, she concocted an elaborate disguise.
To become the magician Raymond Lloyd, she wore a male bodysuit, wig, gloves to disguise her feminine hands – making sleight of hand even more difficult – and wore “plumpers” in her mouth to give herself a square jaw.
At least nine people have been killed and more than 70 injured in Kyiv after Russia carried out one of the most devastating air attacks against Ukraine for months, with Kharkiv and other cities also targeted.
Waves of drones as well as ballistic and guided missiles struck the Ukrainian capital early on Thursday. There were explosions for much of the night, beginning at about 1am local time, and the rattle of anti-aircraft fire as Ukrainian defences tried to shoot the missiles down.
The nation remembers pontiff’s trip to the Philippines, where he met Typhoon Haiyan survivors in a show of sympathy and humility
At Quiapo church in central Manila, the pews are filled with worshippers. Latecomers gather near the entrance, clutching fans to ease the stifling heat.
A prayer is read out in memory of Pope Francis, known affectionately as Lolo Kiko, or Grandpa Francis, whose image stands framed on the alter.
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