It’s week two of budget black-hole gate. When will it all end? Probably after the May elections
Good times for Britain when the chancellor is saved by the Office for Budget Responsibility being slightly more inept than her at a single convenient moment. Following the accidental early publication of the fiscal watchdog’s market-sensitive budget document, chair Richard Hughes has now fallen on his sword. Although it’s possible he meant to fall on his feet but just mistimed it. On Monday we discovered that the OBR’s website is not securely hosted but was built using WordPress. Oh man. That’s definitely budget, but is it responsible? It may as well just have had a Tumblr.
This series of unfortunate events meant the OBR bigwigs were a man down when they appeared before the Treasury select committee this morning, butching out the decision to go to war with Rachel Reeves by releasing their draft economic assessments in the weeks leading up to the budget. Did the chancellor seriously mislead the country about the state of the public finances? That is the £4.2bn question. Are our problems going to turn out to be a whole lot bigger than something that could be addressed with £4.2bn? The answer to that is regrettably too obvious too state.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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© Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/No 10 Downing Street
© Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/No 10 Downing Street
© Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/No 10 Downing Street
© Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Joaquín Guzmán López’s alleged kidnapping was to show cooperation with US leaders, attorney says
Armed men entered through a window to ambush Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the most elusive of the Sinaloa cartel’s leaders, who was then loaded onto a plane, drugged and spirited across the border to the United States, according to details revealed on Monday in the plea hearing of the drug trafficker who abducted him.
Joaquín Guzmán López, the 39-year-old son of former Sinaloa cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, pleaded guilty to two counts of drug trafficking and continuing criminal enterprise in federal court in Chicago after admitting his role in overseeing the transport of tens of thousands of kilograms (pounds) of drugs to the US.
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© Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters
© Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters
© Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters
© Jack Plunkett/Associated Press
Defense secretary shares anecdote in The War on Warriors and rails against ‘rules and regulations’ governing war
Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement.
The anecdote is contained in a book Hegseth wrote last year in which he also repeatedly railed against the constraints placed on “American warfighters” by the laws of war and the Geneva conventions.
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© Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
In the tropical dry forests of northern Colombia, a small team is gradually restoring the degraded habitat of the rare cotton-top tamarin
Luis Enrique Centena spent decades silencing the forest. Now, he listens. Making a whistle, the former logger points up to a flash of white and reddish fur in the canopy. Inquisitive eyes peer back – a cotton-top tamarin, one of the world’s rarest primates.
“I used to cut trees and never took the titís into account,” says Centena, calling the cotton-tops by their local name. “I ignored them. I didn’t know that they were in danger of extinction, I only knew I had to feed my family. But now we have become friends.”
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© Photograph: Charlie Cordero/The Guardian
© Photograph: Charlie Cordero/The Guardian
© Photograph: Charlie Cordero/The Guardian
Documentary about New Zealand’s former leader records a shrewd but likable premier who did without the usual politician’s defences
New Zealand’s former prime minister Jacinda Ardern emerges from this documentary portrait the way she did when she was in power from 2017 to 2023 … as a human being. More than any politician anywhere in the world in my adult lifetime, she looked like an actual member of the human race who was catapulted to office too fast to have acquired the defensive carapace of the professional politician. She was vulnerable and scrutable and likable in ways utterly alien to everyone else.
Obviously this sympathetic film has been edited in such a way as to omit most of the hard business of internal politics and to foreground this humanity, although there is one fascinating moment at the very end when her partner Clarke Gayford gently asks if she might be doing too much; with a tiny flash of temper she asks if he is telling her to “delegate”. Gayford got his Denis Thatcher closeup there. Did we see a subliminal moment of the non-niceness vital for all successful politicians?
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© Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Everett/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Everett/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Everett/Shutterstock
None of the former officers named by the IOPC will face disciplinary proceedings because they have all retired
Twelve police officers would have faced disciplinary cases of gross misconduct for a catalogue of professional failings relating to the Hillsborough disaster if they were still serving, the police watchdog has said.
However, no former officer named by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) will face disciplinary proceedings because they have all retired. Some, including Peter Wright, the chief constable of South Yorkshire police at the time of the 1989 disaster, have died.
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© Photograph: Tony McArdle/Everton FC/Getty Images
© Photograph: Tony McArdle/Everton FC/Getty Images
© Photograph: Tony McArdle/Everton FC/Getty Images
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