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.
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”.
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.”
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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Memphis comeback falls short as Warriors win 121-116
Warriors will face No 2 Rockets in Game 1 on Sunday
Magic claim No 7 seed with 120-95 win over Hawks
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.
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.
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.
China Daily, the ruling Communist party’s English-language mouthpiece, says the US ‘has been living beyond its means for decades’
The US needs to “stop whining” about being a victim after “taking a free ride on the globalisation train”, China’s official state media has said, as the trade war between the two countries continued to spiral.
Last week’s tit-for-tat tariff hikes appear to have paused, but the conflict between the two biggest economies is showing no signs of letting up.
Suspect apprehended within hours of Tuesday violence, says school district, while superintendent says such shootings ‘becoming way too familiar’
A suspect in a shooting at a Dallas high school that wounded four students and drew a heavy police response to the campus has been taken into custody, school district officials have announced.
Three of the students were injured by gunfire and the fourth was injured in their lower body, according to the Dallas fire-rescue department. It said units were dispatched to Wilmer-Hutchins high school just after 1pm and that the four male students were taken to hospitals with injuries ranging from serious to not life-threatening.
By claiming that any regulation is censorship, the White House is bullying Britain to abandon online safety laws and digital taxes
Compared with many countries around the world, the US is still a great democracy, but a much lesser one than it was four months ago. The constitution has not been rewritten. Checks and balances have not been dissolved. The difference is a president who ignores those constraints, and the impotence of the institutions that should enforce them.
Which is the true US, the one enshrined in law or the one that smirks in contempt of law? If the latter, should Britain welcome its embrace as a kindred nation? That is an existential question lurking in the technical folds of a potential transatlantic trade agreement.
I think back to my 20-year-old self and my sister, lost in her imagined worlds, and I feel compassion for us both
When my sister was 21, she was diagnosed with dementia. She had survived a malignant brain tumour diagnosis when she was 10, but her cancer was inoperable and sat directly on her hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory formation.
My sister moved in and out of what I would call “reality”. She spent days talking to people I couldn’t see, laughing at jokes I couldn’t hear. I would cajole her into playing Scrabble with me, and after a couple of hours she might say something “normal”, like, “How are you, Jackie?” She just needed mental stimulation, I would think. If I could play Scrabble with her every day, she would come back to me.
The neurosurgeon saved the boxer’s life in 1991 and since then the pair have become close friends
“This man is my hero,” Michael Watson says simply as he turns to Peter Hamlyn, the neurosurgeon who saved his life and carried out seven operations on the stricken boxer’s brain in the aftermath of his fight against Chris Eubank in September 1991. “We are like family, me and Peter, and we have unusual banter. Peter says I’m a little bit dark to be family.”
Watson chuckles at his friend’s quip but, having interviewed Watson multiple times before and after the fateful bout that pushed him close to death, and having spent the morning with Hamlyn, I sense an essential truth. The brain surgeon and the boxer share a deeply compassionate intent to help each other.
Part-school, part-social network, a Mouride circle on the Spanish island is helping teenage asylum seekers prepare for adulthood and navigate a challenging welfare system
• Photographs by Diana Takacsova
In a three-storey building in a residential neighbourhood in Gran Canaria, about an hour’s drive from the airport, more than a dozen teenage Senegalese boys in colourful, flowing robes sit in a circle, soulfully chanting supplications. Behind them, girls sit with their heads covered, praying. On the top-floor terrace a feast of steaming rice, meat and vegetable gravy is being prepared.
It is a bright Sunday afternoon in February. The young people are mostly asylum seekers from Senegal, who live in detention centres where conditions can be brutal, according to Spanish human rights groups.
Equalities campaigners in the UK are braced for a supreme court ruling that could have a significant impact on the rights of transgender people to use single-sex services.
Five judges on the UK supreme court will rule on Wednesday morning whether or not the definition of woman in the Equality Act 2010 includes transgender women with gender recognition certificates (GRC).
He has been starring in the hit Netflix show You, as the psychopath Joe Goldberg, throughout his 30s. As the actor says goodbye to the role, he reflects on celebrity, controversy and masculinity
Early morning in Penn Badgley’s house has the reassuringly normal noisy chaos that comes with a young family. The actor is in his New York home, preparing to talk about murder and manipulation, while listening out for signs that his wife, who is pregnant with twins, needs help getting their four-year-old son out of the door. She does; he excuses himself, and disappears for a few minutes. If Joe Goldberg, the serial killer Badgley portrays on the hit Netflix series You is controlling, devoid of love and unable to form relationships, Badgley appears to have created a life that looks the opposite.
His time as Goldberg – the role that has been his highest-profile after his big break on another hit series, Gossip Girl – is about to come to an end. The series’ fifth and final season is about to air, and after that, says Badgley with a smile, “I don’t have to speak about Joe Goldberg ever again, if I don’t want to,” before adding: “Of course, I’m sure I will.”
Is this fast paced drama – featuring Holliday Grainger and Ambika Mod - about a kidnapped child enjoyably daft or just nonsense? Luckily, it has enough chutzpah and style to mean you don't ask too many questions
I do love a premise that is sheer simplicity, yet yields potentially infinite terror. I’m in, I say! Have at it! So I settled in for a right good terrify, courtesy of The Stolen Girl (adapted by Catherine Moulton from the 2020 thriller Playdate by Alex Dahl). It begins with a mother letting her child go for a sleepover with a new girl at her school and arriving to pick her up the next day to find only a cleaning lady there – who explains that this is just a holiday let and that the last family there have gone. “Dum-dum-daaaaah,” I hope you are saying, otherwise you are in entirely the wrong mood for this stuff.
Denise Gough stars as Elisa, mother of the missing girl, Lucia (Beatrice Cohen). Then there’s Jim Sturgess as Lucia’s father, Fred, and Holliday Grainger as Rebecca, mother of Lucia’s new friend Josie (Robyn Betteridge) and unexpected flight risk. Let the games begin! Who is Rebecca really and what is her interest in Lucia? Is she a woman/mother with mental health problems, a child trafficker, or someone with a festering grudge against Elisa and keen to hit her where it most hurts? Or is it all something to do with Fred’s work as a criminal barrister? Could Sarah Banks, who recently inveigled Fred into a near-affair, have anything to do with it? Also, Lucia has a birthmark on her back that might as well be in the shape of Chekhov’s gun, so that’s going to have a pivotal role at some point.
‘Gamechanger’ brought in after success of trial offering larger doses of drugs within first two weeks of treatment
People in Britain with heart failure are being given larger doses of drugs at the start of their treatment after a global study found that this led to a huge fall in deaths.
Experts say the new approach could mean those with the potentially fatal condition start receiving their ideal amount of medication within two weeks of diagnosis rather than after many months.
Administration will have to share under oath how it’s trying to get Kilmar Ábrego García back to US, says district judge
A federal judge sharply rebuked the Trump administration and scolded officials on Tuesday for taking no steps to secure the return of a man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, as the US supreme court had ordered in a contentious ruling last week.
The US district judge Paula Xinis said that Donald Trump’s news conference with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, where the leaders joked that Kilmar Ábrego García would not be released, did not count as compliance.
Post office says it ‘definitely’ won’t collect tariffs on Washington’s behalf and Hongkongers should prepare to pay exorbitant fees
Hong Kong Post said on Wednesday it had suspended goods mail services by sea to the US and will suspend its air mail postal service for items containing goods from 27 April due to “bullying” US tariffs.
When sending items to the US, people in Hong Kong “should be prepared to pay exorbitant and unreasonable fees due to the US’s unreasonable and bullying acts”, Hong Kong Post said in a statement.
Kilmar Ábrego García was deported, detained and flown to a notorious prison – before officials admitted they had made an error. Why is he still there? Maanvi Singh reports
Kilmar Ábrego García was 16 when he came to the US, after his family were targeted by criminal gangs in his home of El Salvador. He joined his brother in Maryland and started a new life.
In 2019, he was arrested by immigration officials and accused of being a gang member, but his lawyers argued there was no evidence for this, pointed out he had no criminal convictions and insisted he should not be sent back to a country where he was himself at risk from criminal gangs. A judge agreed and gave him protected status so he could not be deported.
Mark Rutte makes pledge after Donald Trump blames Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting war; three hurt in ‘massive’ Russian drone attack. What we know on day 1,148
In first speech since leaving office, ex-president spoke of ‘destruction’ current administration has wrought
Joe Biden on Tuesday accused Donald Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, Elon Musk, of “taking a hatchet” to the social security administration as they moved at warp-speed to dismantle large swaths of the federal government.
In his first public remarks since leaving office, the former president avoided any explicit mention of Trump – his predecessor and successor – but he was sharply critical of the new administration for threatening social security, which Biden called a “sacred promise” that more than 70 million Americans rely on each month.
All banking in the Pacific nation used to be done in cash but that is about to change on the main island of Funafuti
Tuvalu, one of the world’s most remote nations, has unveiled its first ever ATMs, at the headquarters of the National Bank of Tuvalu in the village of Vaiaku on Funafuti, the country’s main island.
Tuesday’s ceremony marked a historic shift for the island nation of 12,000 people, which has never before had access to electronic banking. Attended by prime minister Feleti Teo, the governor general, traditional leaders, members of parliament and representatives from the diplomatic and business sectors, the event celebrated a long-anticipated move toward financial modernisation.
Testimony that Instagram was ‘better’ seems to bolster allegations Meta used ‘buy or bury’ tactic to snap up rivals
Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram in 2018 in anticipation of a potential antitrust suit, documents unveiled at a trial in Washington showed on Tuesday.
“While most companies resist break-ups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up,” he wrote in an email at the time. He said there was a “there is a non-trivial chance” his company would be forced to spin Instagram and WhatsApp out anyway.
Consumption and production falls in almost every market as industry fears a ‘generational’ change in drinking habits
Worldwide consumption of wine fell in 2024 to its lowest level in more than 60 years, the main trade body has said, raising concerns about new risks from US tariffs.
The International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) said on Tuesday that 2024 sales fell 3.3% from the previous year to 214.2m hectolitres.
Study of 420,000 Britons suggests going at speeds of at least 4mph can lower risks by up to 43%
Walking at a brisker pace could lower the risk of a wide range of heart rhythm problems, according to a study.
The peer-reviewed research, published in BMJ Heart, analysed data from 420,925 participants of the UK Biobank who had provided data on their walking speed. Of these, 81,956 gave more detailed data on the amount of time they spent walking at different paces.
A man who claims to be a “direct descendant of the Kings of France” has lost his legal bid to wrest control of the fleur-de-lis symbol from the New Orleans Saints, after a US appeals court found he had no standing to challenge the team’s decades-old trademark.
Michel J Messier of Rutland, Vermont, argued that his family held intellectual property rights to the fleur-de-lis due to their alleged royal lineage, citing ancestral ties to the monarchs of France, Scotland, Aragon, and Castille. The NFL franchise, which has used the stylized lily symbol since its inception in 1967, registered the trademark in 1974 for use in professional football entertainment.
In Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s brutal and immersive new film, memory informs the events that take place in real time to a unit of soldiers in Iraq
Warfare, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s assiduous new film on a single episode of the American war in Iraq, opens with a title card typical to a war picture: date, location, barebones summary – 11 November 2006, in Ramadi, Iraq. Navy Seal team alpha one is supporting marines in insurgents’ territory. And then one final, unusual detail in place of the standard “based on a true story” – “This film uses only their memories.” The “only” is an ominous indicator: this is a film working against the Hollywood tide to gloss, simplify or narrativize. Warfare, based primarily on Mendoza’s memories of that day as a former Seal, as well as those of fellow soldiers and civilians present, is as much an experiment of translation as a cinematic achievement, a movie defined by both what it shows and what it does not.
Much of the press surrounding Warfare has focused on this exacting verisimilitude, its mission to create the “most accurate war film possible”. If something could not be double-checked by another account, it was not included. The intricate, fully immersive soundscape, designed by Glenn Freemantle, encompasses the vast volume spectrum of conflict – civilian chatter, a hand grazing a windowsill, burps of radio, destabilizing patters of gunfire and the sonic boom of a “show of force” military flyover that had nearly the same fetal-position effect on the theater audience as it did the characters. With the exception of a first scene observing the soldiers raucously dancing to the erotic music video for Eric Prydz’s Call On Me – underscoring just how young they are, how much pressure must be released – the movie proceeds in more or less real time. Ninety-ish minutes at a house the soldiers picked because one said “I like it”, at first tracking and then fighting nameless insurgents, with dialogue primarily in undiluted military jargon.
Merwil Gutiérrez sent from New York to El Salvador prison although family says he has no criminal history or gang ties
A 19-year-old Venezuelan in New York City reportedly was apprehended by Trump administration immigration authorities and deported to El Salvador despite agents’ realizing he was not whom they meant to arrest in a targeted operation.
Merwil Gutiérrez, whose family opened an asylum case after arriving in the US, was deported from the Bronx to the notorious Cecot prison in El Salvador despite his relatives’ insistence that he has no gang ties or criminal history, according to Documented, a newsroom dedicated to telling the stories of immigrants in New York City. The Gutiérrez family says it has been left without information or answers.
Unai Emery will always shudder at mention of La Remontada. It came to define his time as the manager of Paris Saint-Germain, the crazy Champions League defeat to Luis Enrique’s Barcelona in 2017 after his team had held a 4-0 first-leg lead in the last 16. Barcelona would end up needing three goals with 88 minutes of the second leg gone at the Camp Nou. They got them for a 6-5 aggregate win.
On an epic night in the West Midlands, the roles were reversed; Emery the hunter with Aston Villa, Luis Enrique the hunted at PSG. It so nearly produced the ultimate moment of catharsis for Emery. His team were magnificent, absorbing the body blows of two concessions inside the opening half-hour that put PSG 5-1 up on aggregate and refusing to believe that this showpiece Champions League quarter-final was beyond them.
In the end, it was comfortable enough for Barcelona, despite Serhou Guirassy’s hat-trick. They were unable to hold the ball and command through possession as they might have liked but they always had clear water. There were spells, though, when they were distinctly uneasy and, but for an own goal that came at just the right time for them, this might have been a very awkward evening.
“I had a feeling something like that would happen today because I know the stadium well,” said the Barça manager, Hansi Flick, once of Bayern. “Things didn’t go too well for us, but Dortmund played very well. The things we played out weren’t what we normally do.” It was a tie, though, that raised doubts about Barcelona as potential champions. There is much to admire about Flick’s Spanish league leaders but theirs is a high-risk game and more precise opponents than Dortmund might have exposed them.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio also spoke with foreign minister about strengthening countries’ ties
The United States has removed sanctions on a close aide of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the state department said, adding that the punitive measures had been “inconsistent with US foreign policy interests”.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, spoke on Tuesday with his Hungarian counterpart, the foreign minister Péter Szijjártó, and informed him of the move, state department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
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