Bessent calls for big rate cut in September after steady US inflation, sending global stocks rallying

Rolls-Royce’s efforts to power artificial intelligence (AI) datacentres with its nuclear reactors could turn it into the UK’s most valuable company, according to its boss.

The engineering firm recently reported a 50% rise in half-year profits of £1.7bn as strong demand for its jet engines and power generators for AI data centres underpinned its turnaround efforts. This drove its share price to a record high of £11.085, taking the company’s market value above £90bn for the first time. In October 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, its share price fell below 40p.

There is no private company in the world with the nuclear capability we have. If we are not market leader globally, we did something wrong.

It’s not in our plan. I don’t agree with the idea you can only perform in the US. That’s not true and hopefully we have demonstrated that.

Then, the Fed might have difficulty rejecting a call for a cut by 50 basis points in the Fed Funds rate!

• Forward says club paying for lack of clear direction

• He believes United need to ‘make a plan and stick to it’

Marcus Rashford has offered a withering assessment of Manchester United’s predicament, saying a lack of consistent playing principles since Sir Alex Ferguson stood down has left the club in “no man’s land”.

The forward, on loan for the season at Barcelona from United, believes that despite repeated talk of transition no transition has taken place and that the club will not be able to win the Premier League or achieve consistent success unless they make a plan and stick with it.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will join calls with Trump and Vance in last chance to shape US position before Alaska meeting

Ukraine will not cede land that could be Russian springboard for new war

In his latest update before travelling to Berlin, Zelenskyy repeated his key lines about “putting pressure on Russia” to achieve a peace settlement.

But in what feels like a pointed warning about Putin, he added:

We must learn from the experience of Ukraine, our partners, to prevent deception by Russia. There is no sign now that the Russians are preparing to end the war.

In this first adult novel from the acclaimed children’s author, an immortal magician returns to tell the story of a royal court where he cast his spells some 500 years before

The American author Louis Sachar’s most celebrated book, 1998’s YA novel Holes, was a huge word-of-mouth success on both sides of the Atlantic. Its short, punchy chapters tell the story of plump, hapless Stanley Yelnats, sent to a summer camp for wayward boys, where a terrifying Warden has peculiar ideas about character reformation. The 5ft-deep holes the boys are required to dig turn out to have a surprising purpose. Shifts of time, register and perspective render a simple premise mesmerisingly intricate. It has peril, love, crime, wickedness, redemption and friendship in, well, spades.

A quarter of a century later, Sachar has written his first supposedly adult novel, in which many of the same ingredients reappear. A man “dressed like a typical American tourist”, but with an odd habit of storing cake crumbs in the pocket of his hoodie, has arrived at the castle of the title, filled with curiosity to see how much has changed in the past 500 years. He seems to know intimate details about daily life back then in the court of King Sandro, Queen Corinna and the headstrong teenage princess, Tullia. Anatole, the king’s bumbling magician and alchemist, was fast losing prestige due to his abject failure to turn black sand, brought in from Iceland at huge expense, into gold. But the magician evidently achieved one stunning success, for Anatole is our present-day narrator. Grisly legends have built up around the castle, as eagerly related by the tour guide, but are full of errors. Anatole decides to recount the real story.

Shared motel rooms, sleeping on floors and making a net loss are among hurdles facing the globetrotters chasing ranking points

Less than a year after exiting the 2022 Wimbledon quarter-final on the All England Club’s pristine No 1 Court, Cristian Garín found himself 10,000 miles away on a hard court on the Pacific island of Nouméa, New Caledonia.

The Chilean, who had a career-high ranking of world No 17, had signed up for an ATP Challenger event, tennis’s second-tier tour, mostly attracting players outside the top 100, after a wrist injury forced him to miss two ATP Masters 1000 events. By January 2023, Garín sat at a precarious No 82.

For some the only hope is treatment abroad, but not all survive the long, desperate wait for Israel’s approval

Abdel Karim Wahdan no longer has the energy to speak. When visitors arrive, the eight-year-old pretends to be sleeping so that no one looks at him. Between his frequent dialysis sessions, he cries. His bones hurt, he says.

Abdel Karim is dying. His death should be preventable but because he lives in Gaza he cannot access the treatment that would save his life. What started as acute kidney failure is now chronic: his small body has begun to swell and he spends his days between hospital beds and injections that he hates.

New head coach hopes team steal limelight on Wednesday against PSG, who only returned to training last week

For your first trick, please show us Tottenham can trade blows with the best team Europe has produced this decade. If Thomas Frank wanted to make a statement two months after crossing London then defeating Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday night would set this season’s bar for performance somewhere beyond the stratosphere. His new role, or at least the relentless public scrutiny of it, begins in earnest beneath the Friulian foothills and it is an opportunity to form the kind of first impression that leaves a lasting signature.

Hearts have never been won or lost through showings in the Uefa Super Cup, which has traditionally been as much a late-summer beauty parade as a high-octane heave between the previous campaign’s big winners. There is certainly no guarantee that a hot night in the beguiling surroundings of Udine, whose modest solar-powered stadium has been feted for its environmental credentials, provides hard evidence of sustainable progress on the pitch.

Hawizeh’s wetlands once had abundant fishing and wildlife. In a land threatened by drought and desertification, oil drilling is draining the last of the water

At dawn, a veil of mist clings to the canals of Hawizeh, where sky and water seem to blur into a mirror. In the stern of a narrow wooden boat, 23-year-old Mustafa Hashim scans the marshes’ shallows, cutting the motor and switching to a traditional pole to avoid snagging on invasive roots or thickening mud.

It takes him about half an hour to push through the shrinking marshes to reach Um al-Nea’aj, once a vibrant lake teeming with boats and birdsong. Now, the water is about half a metre deep.

• Fast bowler hoping for selection after Windies hat-trick

• Home Ashes series starts with Perth Test on 21 November

Fast bowler Scott Boland says Australia will ignore any on-field aggression brought down under by England this summer, 100 days from the first Ashes Test in a tour that looks set to break records.

England and India completed a thrilling drawn series last week across five Tests marked by tension between the two sides, prompting Indian captain Shubman Gill at one point to describe the hosts’ behaviour as not “what I would think comes in the spirit of the game”.

• Tight end says last two seasons ‘not to my standard’

• Says off-field acting and hosting drew focus from NFL

• KC star motivated to ‘show up’ for Chiefs this season

Kansas City Chiefs star tight end Travis Kelce is the first to admit that his past two seasons haven’t been up to par. His statistics, while still impressive, back that up when considering the standard Kelce set in his previous seven Pro Bowl seasons.

As the world knows, Kelce’s life has been in a brighter spotlight given his highly publicized relationship with Taylor Swift – you’ve likely heard of her – and a slate of off-field ventures. The 35-year-old has hosted Saturday Night Live, landed a role in Ryan Murphy’s Grotesquerie, appeared in Happy Gilmore 2 alongside Adam Sandler, and taken on a hosting gig for Amazon’s Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity? He also keeps busy with the New Heights podcast he co-hosts with his brother, Jason, where Swift this week announced her new album.

• Sprinter arrested after dispute with Christian Coleman

• Olympic champion to pursue ‘a lot of self-reflection’

• Public apology issued to her boyfriend and fans

The Olympic gold medal sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson has said she plans to seek help following her 27 July arrest, which stemmed from a physical confrontation at an airport with her boyfriend, the US sprinter Christian Coleman.

“I’m taking this time to not only see myself but get myself a certain level of help that overall is going to reflect who I truly am in my heart and my spirit and not allowing this moment – but accepting this moment – to be more,” Richardson said in an Instagram post Monday night.

Labor divided on how to respond to the emerging technology as media and arts groups fear ‘rampant theft’ of intellectual property

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AI risks entrenching racism and sexism in Australia, the human rights commissioner has warned, amid internal Labor debate about how to respond to the emerging technology.

Lorraine Finlay says the pursuit of productivity gains from AI should not come at the expense of discrimination if the technology is not properly regulated.

Bluetooth noise cancellers have good sound, physical buttons and buck trend of boring black cans with distinctive transparent aesthetic

London-based Nothing’s latest gadget is a set of over-ear headphones that throws out the dull design norms of noise-cancelling cans for an attention-attracting look that is a cross between a 1980s Walkman and Doctor Who’s Cybermen.

The large, semi-transparent cans are certainly a statement piece on your head, with an outer design covered in details, dot-matrix print and physical buttons, but sadly stopping short of the flashing LEDs of the company’s phones.

Doctor Marianne wonders if her gay colleague Tor’s approach to dating would work for her, in the second film of Dag Johan Haugerud’s absorbing trilogy

Here is the second of Norwegian film-maker and novelist Dag Johan Haugerud’s seductive trilogy about affairs of the heart and mind, set in Oslo. (It comes between Sex and Dreams.) It is a thoroughly grownup and absorbing drama, acted with such sympathy and warmth, a ruminative and exploratory movie of ideas, and one that pays its audience the compliment of treating them as intelligent beings. Love is about a familiar question: can straight people learn from or even absorb the open and polygamous approach to sex that appears to come easier to gay people (and perhaps younger people of all sexualities), perhaps specifically gay men? Or is that idea stereotypical and naive?

Andrea Braein Hovig plays Marianne, a urology consultant whose job it is to give bad news to a succession of men about their prostate cancer. She is single (though her past romantic life remains a mystery); her best friend, Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), tries to set her up with a divorced friend. But Marianne finds herself restive with the whole monolithic idea of dating and relationships and she is fascinated with what her nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) tells her about his own life. After work, she encounters him on their commuter ferry and he candidly tells her he uses Grindr to set up exciting, ephemeral encounters on this very craft.

From hazardous trips through the Kurdish mountains to a queer journey into the heart of Americana, these images all wowed the esteemed prize’s judges

An entrancing biography of Tony Cornell, who displayed a scientist’s commitment to impartiality as he investigated the paranormal

My first and only experience with a Ouija board occurred when I was 11, at a friend’s house. It was good, spooky fun until it wasn’t. I recall movement and the start of a message before we recoiled from the board. Later that evening, I learned that my grandfather had died. While I realise now that a boy with a terminally ill relative and a lurid imagination was not the most reliable witness, I remember wanting to believe that I’d had a brush with the uncanny.

When Times journalist Ben Machell’s dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain’s most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster. His answering machine filled up with pleas to investigate strange happenings around the country: a trawlerman mauled by an invisible hound, a house that bled water, a rural bungalow plagued by fires and expiring pets.

The revival of Nielsen’s 80s classic applies CGI and flashbacks a little too liberally, but there’s the odd glimmer of wit in an otherwise clunky script

Ever since Brigitte Nielsen unlaced her battle corset after shooting ended on pulpy fantasy actioner Red Sonja back in the 1980s, there’s been talk of sequels and/or reboots. Truffle around the internet and you’ll find a saga to rival the finest in Old Norse about deals signed and projects greenlit and then abandoned over the years, with names attached to direct ranging from X-Men’s Bryan Singer to Transparent’s Joey Soloway. What a shame Soloway’s version never got off the ground because that surely would have been a hoot, and probably more interesting than this soggy, CGI-infused, low-budget confection that’s finally arrived.

Little-known actor Matilda Lutz gets the lead role this time around, as well as getting all the hair extensions in the auburn aisle. She presents a Sonja that’s more a pixie-like hippy chick than Nielsen’s Valkyrie heroine, a bit of a loner who mostly kicks around the forest with her beloved horse. Sonja finds herself sucked, at first unenthusiastically, into camaraderie after she is captured by evil emperor Draygan (Robert Sheehan, clearly enjoying himself) and compelled to fight in gladiatorial combats. Sometimes her opponents are the other prisoners, and sometimes they are gargantuan amalgamations of pixels and VFX fairy dust, including a grumpy cyclops roughly the size of a tower block who is controlled by Draygan with what looks like a magic torch. Wallis Day plays another antagonist with bleached eyebrows and agonising visions of all the people she’s ever killed, just to show that baddies have backstories too.

I was looking for liberation from the apps, but quitting them only made my life harder and turned me into a man obsessed

I unlocked my iPhone screen at the precise moment that my weekly screen time notification appeared – accidentally dismissing it before I could take a screenshot – and promptly erupted into a rage. I had spent an excruciating week resolutely not looking at my phone, part of a month-long effort to whittle my daily screen time down from more than four hours a day to less than an hour, with the hope of improving my mental wellbeing (and possibly carving out a career as an inspirational speaker). But my efforts felt futile without being able to post evidence online about how offline I had become. I frantically Googled how to retrieve notifications (you cannot) and – briefly – considered re-creating my screen time report in Photoshop.

Over the past decade or two, my efforts at self-improvement have taken various forms: the year where I read 105 books; the period during which I gave up all forms of sugar including, misguidedly, fruit; and a dalliance with shamanism that, I’m sorry to say, included interpretive dance. Some might suggest I would be better off learning to cook, or drive, or type with more than one finger, but they can’t reach me because I no longer look at my phone.

In Alaska the Russian leader will claim to want peace, but only on his terms – and play on the president’s desperation to ‘make a deal’ quickly

Wars do not have to be won. Total victories loom largest in the popular imagination because those are the stories nations always tell to sustain patriotic feeling. The fuller version of history is written in stalemates.

That is worth remembering when Donald Trump meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. Both leaders have incentives to pretend that Ukraine’s fate can be settled decisively without any Ukrainians at the negotiating table. That doesn’t make it so.

Unprecedented temperatures causing difficulties in south-west France, Croatia, Italy and Spain with wildfire destruction across Europe up 87%

• How dangerous are wildfires and how can we stop them from getting worse?

Extreme heat is breaking temperature records across Europe, early measurements suggest, and driving bigger and stronger wildfires.

In south-west France, records were broken on Monday in Angoulême, Bergerac, Bordeaux, Saint-Émilion and Saint-Girons. Météo France said the “often remarkable, even unprecedented, maximum temperatures” in the region were 12C above the norm for the last few decades.

The conditions for ferocious fires are expected to worsen as the planet heats up, putting more people at risk

With bigger and stronger wildfires becoming more common as Europe swelters in record-breaking heat, people will need to adapt and learn how to stay safe.

Chinese-style sweet-and-sour pork with plums, chicken wings with plum ketchup and a chai creme caramel with tea-poached plums

There’s a windfall of delicious plums to be gathered in gardens and pick-your-own farms up and down the country right now, but they’re often overlooked. Instead, it’s peaches, nectarines and apricots that get all the glory. Well, more for me! Plums that haven’t flown in from far-flung places are best: sweet, tart, fleshy and complex in flavour. It’s a no-brainer to earmark them for comforting cakes and puddings, but they are an equally worthy companion for meat, such as duck, pork or fried chicken, because their natural sharpness cuts through any fatty richness.

Putin has escalated strikes on Donetsk region and is likely to demand Ukraine hands it over in talks with Trump

Nataliya Petrovna pointed to a crater on the edge of a football field. Around it lay bits of twisted metal. From nearby came loud banging as residents fixed plywood to their damaged five-storey apartment block. Many of its windows were broken. “The last few days have been terrible. We could hear the drones buzzing over us. The one that exploded near the school opposite was a Russian Shahed. Maybe some kind of new type,” she said.

Petrovna lives in the eastern garrison city of Kramatorsk, in Donetsk province, about 15 miles from the frontline. The distance is just beyond the range of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, at least for now. But it is easily reachable by other kinds of enemy objects. They include air-dropped glide bombs, Grad rockets and unmanned kamikaze drones – now cruising Ukraine’s skies in overwhelming numbers.

Late-night host says he was eligible thanks to his Italian grandmother and that president’s second term is ‘so much worse’ than he expected

Jimmy Kimmel has revealed he acquired Italian citizenship due to Donald Trump’s presidency, the latest in a wave of celebrities to make contingency plans after his re-election in 2024.

Speaking on The Sarah Silverman Podcast, the US late-night host confirmed the news. Italian news agency Ansa confirmed Kimmel had obtained Italian citizenship earlier this year after proving his ancestral lineage.