Jack Dorsey to cut 4,000 workers at Block amid AI advances – but specters such as weak crypto market haunt company

Jack Dorsey cited AI as the driving force behind cutting 40% of his company’s employees, but other factors such as a weak crypto market, overstaffing and a declining stock price may also have motivated the move.

Last week, the financial technology company Block announced that it would lay off 4,000 of its 10,000 workers. Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders that advances in AI “have changed what it means to build and run a company”.

⚽ World Cup qualifier from Turkey, kick-off at 5pm GMT
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How do we go about even thinking of a World Cup at present? This fixture says plenty on its own: Ukraine are the home side but are playing in Turkey because of the war with Russia. Sarina Wiegman, the England manager, says her side are in close contact with the UK government regarding their safety amid the conflict that rages nearby. A 32-team festival of joy and global co-operation feels hallucinogenic right now.

But here we are, the start of the European qualifiers for next year’s World Cup in Brazil. England find themselves in a group with Ukraine, Iceland and Spain. The team that finishes top qualifies directly; the others will have to enter the playoffs. The main show, undoubtedly, will be the battle between the world champions and Euro winners, but we’ll get to that in April. First up, Antalya, kick-off at 5pm GMT.

At least 169 killed in raid near Sudan border as clashes between government and opposition forces intensify

South Sudan is reeling from an escalating conflict between the government-aligned army and opposition forces and allied groups that observers say risks returning the country to a full-blown civil war.

Violent confrontations in the world’s youngest country between the military, which is loyal to President Salva Kiir, and insurgents believed to be allied to the suspended vice-president, Riek Machar, have increased in recent weeks.

Stockpiles of the most advanced US-made weapons are limited – while few know how large Iran’s arsenal is

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The outcome and duration of the war in the Middle East may be decided by a grim calculus based on the size of Iran’s drone and missile stocks v vital air defence munitions held by the US, Israel and Gulf states, analysts and officials say.

Since Saturday, Iran and its proxies have sought to counter the intensive joint US and Israeli offensive with more than 1,000 strikes against targets across almost a dozen countries spread over 1,200 miles. With its antiquated air force unable to compete with those of Israel and the US, Tehran has relied on its arsenal of missiles and drones.

Northern Irish designer ditches darker undercurrents for seductive vision of Monet’s waterlilies at opening show of Paris fashion week

In a dark news cycle, joy sells. With his second major womenswear show for Dior, the Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson put a pin in the soul-searching of his first season, and plunged gleefully for the springtime-in-Paris jugular. For the opening show of Paris fashion week, Dior offered a seductive vision of Monet’s waterlilies, walks in the Tuileries gardens, and the Eiffel Tower glittering in the sunshine.

Anderson, a keen art collector who moved to Paris for the Dior role last year, has been looking at Seurat’s romantic paintings of ordinary Parisians at leisure, as well as Monet. A promenade across the octagonal pond of the Tuileries was built as a catwalk, and the Sunday sailboats upgraded for the occasion into giant lily pads with vibrant blooms. Dollhouse-sized pairs of classic French green park chairs were sent out as whimsical invitations.

Fear and grief mix in the small town of Beit Shemesh, where missile struck ageing bomb shelter

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With 30 people inside the neighbourhood bomb shelter on Sunday afternoon, and sirens wailing outside, Oren Katz went to close the reinforced door.

It was an act of generosity that was typical of the father of four, and it would cost him his life. As he reached the entrance, the shelter took a direct hit from an Iranian missile.

• Man City manager says side must adapt to set pieces

• Erling Haaland faces fitness test ahead of Forest match

Pep Guardiola has said there is no point in complaining about the rising prevalence of set pieces, with Manchester City’s manager recognising the need to adapt.

While City’s 57 goals in the Premier League is one fewer than Arsenal, the leading scorers, only nine have derived from dead balls, a rate of 15.8%, the division’s lowest.

• ‘I don’t know what game they’re trying to play,’ says Rahm

• Spaniard’s stance has put Ryder Cup place in peril

Jon Rahm’s dispute with the DP World Tour has escalated after the Spaniard accused the organisation of “extorting” golfers over fines for competing on the LIV circuit. Rahm’s Ryder Cup future remains in peril with no resolution to the matter in sight, with insiders at the DP World Tour and Europe’s Ryder Cup fans baffled by his stance.

Rahm incurred fines and suspensions as a DP World, formerly European, Tour member playing on what are regarded as competing Saudi-backed LIV events. Rahm signed for LIV in 2023 in a deal reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Case involved Trump orders targeting major law firms for representing clients or causes the president did not like

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The US justice department has dropped legal proceedings against four law firms that stood up to retaliatory executive actions by Donald Trump for representing clients or causes the president did not like.

A number of other law companies made settlements with Trump’s administration in the months after his second presidency began to avoid consequences, including being stripped of security clearances and having access to government buildings terminated.

• Entirely different back line selected for fixture in Rome

• Only three players in same position as Ireland game

Steve Borthwick has wielded the axe and made 12 changes to his England team to face Italy, picking an entirely different back line as he seeks to salvage his side’s Six Nations campaign with the most radical selection of his tenure.

Borthwick has made nine personnel changes as well as moving Tommy Freeman to outside-centre, Ben Earl back to No 8 and Tom Curry to openside. Fin Smith has also been installed at fly-half and with Henry Pollock dropped after just one start.

Formula One’s newest team liken their effort to the Apollo moon landings and join the grid with the aim of becoming a championship-winning force

When the new Formula One season begins on Sunday in the usual fever of excitement and anticipation, consider amid the maelstrom the Cadillac team. Before the lights go out in Melbourne, F1’s newest entrant will have a deserved chance to take a breath and savour for but a moment, their remarkable achievement of simply having made it to the grid.

The US team backed by General Motors has been built, aside from those involved in the pre-planning, from scratch in what will be a year and a day since its entry was formally approved. As their team principal, Graeme Lowdon, explained, that process had begun in an empty room with a screwdriver and an A4 sheet of paper.

The musician, producer and label head, who has died aged 81, turned his boyhood passion for blues into a hugely impactful career

Mike Vernon, who has died aged 81, was the ultimate schoolboy blues nut. First he published a blues fanzine, next he persuaded Decca Records to hire him to produce British blues bands, then he started his own indie label issuing 45s of African American blues artists, before CBS agreed to finance his Blue Horizon label. From the 1970s on, he would record and perform as a solo artist and band member; he was a producer for David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton and more. His was a life determined by his love for music, and he served his muse generously for more than 60 years.

Vernon’s upbringing in Surrey was typical of many children born in the mid-1940s: he sang in his church choir, listened to the jazz and show tune LPs his parents owned and was bowled over by the arrival of rock’n’roll, responding most strongly to the likes of Little Richard, Fats Domino and Larry Williams. Inquisitive and determined, he sought out records by older African American blues and R&B artists then, while studying at Croydon Art College, started following the fledgling British blues bands led by Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner.

Some may balk at Netherlanders’ ‘nothing to hide’ approach, but there is evidence their curtain customs could come with health benefits

Name: The Dutch method.

Age: Possibly in place since the Reformation, making it about 500 years old.

After five marriages and countless magazine covers, the former Baywatch star makes being makeup-free and unattached look the best of all worlds

Pamela Anderson has been married five times. She has made the kind of romantic decisions – impulsive, reckless, incorrigible – that suggest someone who struggles to be alone. She had known her first husband only a few days; her second marriage lasted four months; she described her most recent, in 2020, as “a disaster”. Now, at 58, she is finally single.

“There’s that great Osho quote – ‘The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love.’ That’s where I’m at right now,” she told AnOther magazine. “I just want to unleash the dragon. I don’t need anybody in my way. I want to get it out. It happens at different times in everybody’s life, and this is my time.”

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If POTUS can really bomb peace, stability and women’s rights into the Middle East, I’ll take my hat off to him. Judging by his role in Gaza, I won’t hold my breath

Donald Trump says Keir Starmer has damaged the special relationship by not helping him more in the US-Israel war on Iran. But you have to remember that when you do help, Trump pretends you didn’t anyway, and also pisses on your war dead. Still, what could be more enticing than the Americans trying to sell you a timeshare on a war in the Middle East?

And so to Iran. “War is the realm of uncertainty,” said Carl von Clausewitz, who – and not to be a bitch – I still think of as a more impressive military theorist than Pete Hegseth. Certainly, Carl had fewer Crusades tattoos than the US defence secretary. Hegseth is 100% certain about all his nailed-down positions, even the ones in apparent conflict with each other. And it feels like a great sign that he, Marco Rubio and JD Vance already seem to have different rationales for why this war was launched. This is an administration that came to power on an explicit “no more wars” ticket – but look, as Pete keeps saying, this isn’t a regime-change war. If that seems confusing, given he first said it about 10 minutes after US-Israeli strikes had just cratered the ayatollah’s compound, Hegseth has since been on hand to scoff that what’s going down in Iran is “no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise”.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Government working to transport stranded nationals in coming days, prioritising most vulnerable

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The UK government will charter a flight from Oman in the coming days, prioritising vulnerable British nationals in the region amid continued strikes by Iran, the foreign secretary has said.

Yvette Cooper said the closure of the airspace and the ongoing threat of strikes from Iran, retaliating for US-Israeli attacks, meant the situation was “fast-moving”.

The lesson here isn’t that one AI company is more ethical than another. It’s that we must renovate our democratic structures

OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential risks posed by a new technology powerful enough that the Pentagon claims it is essential to national security. At issue is Anthropic’s insistence that the US Department of Defense (DoD) could not use its models to facilitate “mass surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons,” provisions the defense secretary Pete Hegseth derided as “woke”.

It all came to a head on Friday evening when Donald Trump issued an order for federal government agencies to discontinue use of Anthropic models. Within hours, OpenAI had swooped in, potentially seizing hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts by striking an agreement with the administration to provide classified government systems with AI.

Consuming algae products won’t make up for a poor diet, despite the benefits claimed by influencers, experts warn

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If you have a weak stomach, I don’t recommend watching one of the many videos on social media of influencers dipping their spoons into a jar of sea moss and putting mounds of the congealed substance – with a texture resembling congealed oil or snot – straight into their mouths.

“People have this assumption that it’s disgusting,” one influencer says, holding a spoonful in her mouth and, while seemingly trying not to swallow, insisting: “It’s really not.” Another dry-retches as soon as it passes her lips.

With a world-class cast that will have you constantly saying ‘hey, it’s that guy!’, this horror drama about a doomed Royal Navy expedition is a grand treatise on colonial folly

There’s an old adage that adventure is extreme discomfort remembered from an armchair. But what if there is no armchair waiting at the end of your journey? What if you never return at all? Well, then you have the first season of AMC anthology series The Terror. Based on the bestselling book of the same name by Dan Simmons, who died last month, it chronicles a doomed Royal Navy expedition dispatched to the Arctic in search of the fabled Northwest Passage.

Under the leadership of Captains Sir John Franklin and Francis Crozier, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, manned with 129 crew, set sail from England in 1845. They became locked in pack ice off King William Island in the winter of 1846. After that, the entire expedition vanished – both ships and all hands lost – a sort of Victorian-era MH370 that has fascinated historians, geographers and artists ever since.

• All-rounder ‘excited for the challenge’ of facing hosts

• ‘Baz and Brooky are keeping the group nice and calm’

England have pledged to go into Thursday’s T20 World Cup semi-final against India with no fear, with Sam Curran describing the fixture as “a dream” and “a brilliant opportunity” about which they are feeling “hugely confident”.

On the face of it the challenge England face is daunting. Though they won all three games in the Super 8 stage to ease into the semi-finals those matches were played in Sri Lanka, where they now have a 100% record in six outings this year. They have since returned to Mumbai, where they were so nearly beaten by Nepal in their tournament opener and then actually beaten by West Indies, and where they can expect nothing but hostility from a sold-out crowd of 33,000.

Artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson found an unusual way to remember those who were killed or died by suicide between 2018 and 2025

Between 2021 and 2025, Black nonbinary artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson visited 91 locations across 15 states – in all of these sites a trans, gender nonconforming, or intersex individual had died, either by murder or suicide. At each site they conducted a ceremony of their own to bear witness to what had happened there.

“It was very challenging in ways that I’m continuing to mend from and rest with,” they said. “It is not ‘inexpensive’ on my body and spirit. That cost I knew would be there.”

Susan Everard says her daughter ‘added to the beauty of the world’

Sarah Everard’s mother said her daughter “added to the beauty of the world” as she paid tribute to her humour and principled nature on the five-year anniversary of her murder.

Writing for British Vogue, alongside a picture of Sarah taken at V festival for an online street style series in 2010, Susan Everard said she “loved clothes and fashion” and had “her whole life ahead of her” when the photo was taken.

US county attorney is ‘confident’ her office will be able to pursue charges in cases which led to criticisms of use-of-force policies

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A Minnesota state prosecutor announced an investigation Monday that may lead to charges against federal officers, including Greg Bovino, for misconduct during an immigration enforcement crackdown.

Hennepin county attorney Mary Moriarty said in a news conference that her office is already looking into 17 cases, including one where Bovino, a border patrol official, threw a smoke canister at protesters on 21 January.

Olivier De Schutter says new economic agenda needed to tackle crises of rising inequality and ecological collapse

The global economy must be reordered to ensure it serves ordinary people around the world rather than the “frivolous and destructive demands of the ultra-rich”, according to a leading UN figure.

Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, says politicians must stop prioritising “socially and ecologically destructive growth” that only increases the profits – and serves the consumption demands – of the world’s richest individuals and corporations.