In a new video series on our It’s Complicated Youtube channel, we’re on a mission to untangle confusing everyday topics by speaking directly with experts
Antibiotics are one of the most powerful tools in modern medicine, used to treat everything from minor infections to life-threatening illnesses. But despite how common they are, there’s still a lot of confusion about how they work, when we should take them, and what risks come with overuse. Antimicrobial resistance has been called one of the greatest public health threats by the World Health Organisation.
In a new video series on our It’s Complicated Youtube channel, we’re on a mission to untangle confusing everyday topics by speaking directly with experts and asking the questions people actually have. In an upcoming episode, we’re turning our attention to antibiotics
While the top and bottom of the Premier League are resolved, European spots are very much up for grabs
Intrigue on the final day of the Premier League season is concentrated solely on who qualifies for Europe, but there is plenty of it. Seven clubs will enter the last round of matches unsure of which European competition they will be playing in next season, or in some cases whether they will be playing in Europe at all, with half of the division potentially competing in Uefa tournaments in 2025-26. Here is what is at stake on Sunday …
President’s eldest son says ‘that calling is there’ while speaking at the Qatar Economic Forum
China is concerned about a US project to build the Golden Dome missile defence shield and urged Washington to abandon its development and deployment, a foreign ministry spokesperson said on Wednesday.
US president Donald Trump said on Tuesday he had selected a design for the project and named a Space Force general to head the ambitious program aimed at blocking threats from China and Russia, Reuters reported.
Right, time to play a searching 40-yard crossfield pass to Will Unwin, who’ll talk you through the rest of the morning. Bye.
Elsewhere, Nick Ames has been in Kyiv reporting on how amputee football is helping Ukraine’s war-wounded.
“It’s about emotional gain, helping them rediscover this will to live. In some cases they’re now doing something they weren’t able to before their injuries. The key thing is that we don’t kick anyone out of a team. If you want to play, come to training and let’s do it. Everyone can try, we’ll always encourage each other.”
Four children and two adults killed in attack on bus en route to army public school in Balochistan province
Pakistan has blamed India for a suspected suicide attack on a school bus in its south-western province of Balochistan on Wednesday morning that killed four children.
The bus was en route to the army public school in the city of Khuzdar. According to local officials, an attacker drove a vehicle into the bus and then detonated explosives.
Cannes film festival Foster plays a psychoanalyst who suspects her client may not have killed herself, and sets out to investigate with ex-husband Daniel Auteuil
Rebecca Zlotowski serves up a genial, preposterous psychological mystery caper: the tale of an American psychoanalyst in Paris, watchably played by Jodie Foster in elegant French, who suspects that a patient who reportedly committed suicide was actually murdered. Zlotowski is perhaps channelling Hitchcock or De Palma, or even late-period Woody Allen – or maybe Zlotowski has, like so many of us, fallen under the comedy spell of Only Murders in the Building on TV and fancied the idea of bringing its vibe to Paris and transforming the mood – slightly – into something more serious.
Foster is classy shrink Lilian Steiner, stunned at the news that her client Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira) has taken her own life. She is also furiously confronted by Paula’s grieving widower Simon (Mathieu Amalric), who believes she bears some responsibility for her death, having prescribed antidepressants which were apparently taken in overdose. But a tense visit from Paula’s daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) leads her to suspect foul play. Soon, she and her tolerant ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil) are putting people under surveillance and generally staking them out; then someone breaks into Lilian’s private office and steals the minidiscs on which she records analysis sessions.
After an attack in Palm Springs, experts say the internet is only helping lone wolves find dangerous fringe theories
Experts say an online ecosystem that allows lone actors to latch on to fringe viewpoints is bolstering violent extremism in the US, following an attack over the weekend on a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California.
Investigators are combing through the writings of a 25-year-old man killed in a large explosion outside the American Reproductive Centers, an IVF facility, that was heavily damaged in what they’ve described as an “intentional act of terrorism”. The suspect in the bombing, Guy Edward Bartkus, left behind writings that appear to hold fringe theories of “antinatalism” and nihilism, ideologies that oppose procreation and have a general sense of the meaninglessness of life.
A Guardian investigation finds insurer quietly paid facilities that helped it gain Medicare enrollees and reduce hospitalizations. Whistleblowers allege harm to residents
UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest healthcare conglomerate, has secretly paid nursing homes thousands in bonuses to help slash hospital transfers for ailing residents – part of a series of cost-cutting tactics that has saved the company millions, but at times risked residents’ health, a Guardian investigation has found.
Those secret bonuses have been paid out as part of a UnitedHealth program that stations the company’s own medical teams in nursing homes and pushes them to cut care expenses for residents covered by the insurance giant.
In the latest twist in the Goop candle saga, the famous creation, which retailed at $75 in 2020, is now on offer at $400 on eBay. Not bad for a product that started out as a joke
I have a foolproof way to make millions. It’s a little tricky to execute, but hear me out, OK? Step one: find a time machine. Step two: travel back to 2020. Step three: quickly, before they all get nabbed, buy the entire stock of the This Smells Like My Vagina candle that Gwyneth Paltrow notoriously sold on Goop for $75 a pop. Then come back to 2025 and sell them on eBay for $400 each. Seriously, that’s what they are going for now. We’re talking a 433% return!
How do I know this? Not, to be clear, because I am spending my evenings searching for vagina-scented candles. No, I know this because the chatter around Paltrow’s candle is impossible to fully extinguish; it keeps popping back up in the news. In 2021, for example, there was a big hoo-hah because a Texas man claimed that the candle exploded on his bedside table. No one was injured but a lawsuit was filed for the Texas man and others who “through no fault of their own, bought defective and dangerous vagina-scented candles”.
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Instead of cutting taxes on the richest Americans – who hold much of the country’s debt – simply raise them
On Friday, the credit rating of the United States was downgraded. Moody’s, the ratings firm, announced that the government’s rising debt levels would grow further if the Trump Republican package of new tax cuts were enacted. This makes lending to the US riskier.
Moody’s is the third of the three major credit-rating agencies to downgrade the credit rating of the United States.
They’ll pay even more interest on the growing debt – to the super-rich.
They’ll pay higher interest rates on all other long-term debt. (As higher rates on treasury bonds waft through the economy, they raise borrowing costs on everything from mortgages to auto loans.)
The debt crisis will give Republicans even more excuse to do what they’re always wanting to do: slash safety nets. So many Americans could lose benefits they rely on, such as Medicaid and food stamps.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
As the league’s newest team targets a bright future, they are also keen to respect the culture and history of the Bay Area they represent
Purple-dyed ponytails and sequin jackets glittering in shades of black and violet. Fans are decked out in sports logos and LGBTQ rainbows while Black Box’s Everybody Everybody – a queer dance club classic – booms from the speakers. Ali Wong is playfully dancing on the Jumbotron. There’s no misinterpreting it: the WNBA has arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Golden State Valkyries – who are owned by Golden State Warriors tech mogul Joe Lacob, and housed with their sibling franchise at Chase Center in San Francisco – were announced in 2023 (their name was confirmed in 2024) as the first WNBA expansion team since 2008. Last Friday, the team made their WNBA debut, against the Los Angeles Sparks, in front of a sellout crowd of 18,064.
Push It hitmakers Sandra Denton and Cheryl James claim Universal is blocking the return of their copyright, but label claims it has repeatedly attempted a resolution
The pop-rap group Salt-N-Pepa have sued Universal Music Group as they try to regain control over their master recordings.
Salt-N-Pepa are known for irrepressible hits across the 1980s and 1990s such as Push It and Let’s Talk About Sex, which both reached No 2 in the UK and the US Top 20.
While the splashy, star-packed season might not have lived up to the hype, there were still enough notably hilarious moments
This was a massive season for Saturday Night Live, which celebrated 50 years on air. Along with two huge specials – a musical celebration and the big primetime anniversary show – it was also an election year. The season was loaded from start to finish with returning cast members and huge guest stars.
You’d think this would translate into a truly memorable run of episodes, but alas, that wasn’t the case with a season that was as choppy as any over the past decade. Which isn’t to say there was nothing good; as with every season, there were any number of sketches that got a lot of attention and laughs. Sometimes more the former than the latter – see the mega-popular Domingosketches starring Marcello Hernández, which, let’s face it, only went viral because each of them co-starred a pop princess with a huge stan army. But others were legitimately hilarious.
Roger Federer saw it as a ‘panic shot’ but the drop shot is back in vogue thanks to a greater understanding of its effectiveness
A little more than two years ago, Daniil Medvedev was working his way through the early rounds of the Miami Open when he noticed a distinct shift in his opponents’ tactics. A few days earlier, he had been convincingly beaten in the Indian Wells final by Carlos Alcaraz, who dismantled him with a relentless stream of drop shots. Suddenly, everyone was hitting drop shots against him.
“A lot of guys maybe saw the final, so they started to do only drop shots against me,” says Medvedev, smiling widely. “It’s not the same. It’s like: ‘OK, continue doing it. I’m there.’ Against [Alcaraz], I’m not there.”
Veterans are using sport as a form of rehabilitation from severe injuries and, as one organiser explains: ‘It’s about emotional gain, helping them rediscover this will to live’
A little more than four months ago, Konstantyn Moskal arrived at a new position close to Ukraine’s frontline. He had been serving in the army for six years and, as a native of the almost entirely occupied Luhansk region, knew the price of war better than most. It was soon to take a horrifying toll from him. Moskal stepped on a landmine shortly after the rotation and life changed irrevocably. The evacuation procedure went smoothly, in the circumstances, but his lower left leg could not be saved. It was hard not to think dark thoughts after two operations; tougher still given a prosthetic was nowhere on the horizon.
Now it is mid-May. Wearing the red, yellow-trimmed shirt of FK Khrestonostsi, Moskal puffs out his cheeks before sitting in the dugout. He props his crutch against the neighbouring seat. The second half of the final is starting and he will take a breather. He smiles at his wife, Alina, who watches from the front row. This time he has remembered to wear his talisman, a metallic cross fastened around his neck, and he tells her it is the reason for his two goals. Soon he will almost certainly win his first football tournament. “Rest up or you won’t be able to lift the trophy,” a teammate advises.
More and more cafes offer you the chance to pet a cat as you sip your cappuccino. Some see themselves as shelters more than businesses. Why do animal protection charities want them closed?
It’s just gone 3pm on a sunny Wednesday in Norwich, and the mid-afternoon, midweek slump is hitting hard at the cafe on Dereham Road. Almost everyone here is asleep – before they’re roused by the rattle of the Dreamies tub, that is. The Cat House, which opened nearly two years ago, is the city’s first cat cafe. From Wednesday to Sunday, for a cover charge of £10, punters can spend 60 minutes (or £13 for 90 minutes) enjoying feline company over a beverage and a snack. There are a few people already here – as well as the 20 resident cats dotted around the spacious converted building. They’re curled up above eye level in cat trees, hunkering in boxes and tunnels, weaving in between the table legs. The visitors hover respectfully in their orbit, hoping to be favoured by their attention. From the hushed voices, sound of the water fountain, and nature scenes playing on the TV, the Cat House resembles a library more than a cafe. There’s no clue to the controversy about whether it should be in operation at all.
Two months ago, the RSPCA and Cats Protection made a joint call for cat cafes to be phased out, saying that it was “almost impossible” for them to guarantee the animals’ welfare. Once a novelty, the concept has become relatively common in the UK, and not just in big cities. According to a freedom of information request lodged by the RSPCA and Cats Protection, there are 32 cat cafes licensed across England (and none in Wales). With 44% of those licences granted in the last financial year, their number may be set to rise further. Not all areas require licences, meaning the charities also suspect more are operating without any oversight. The sudden increase in cat cafes has led both organisations to take a joint stand, calling on local authorities to decline applications for new licences and not renew existing ones.
Thanks to excellent new tints, sticks and sprays, rising temperatures do not have to mean melting makeup
At the time of writing, my life and mood have been shifted dramatically by spring sunshine. And so too would my makeup if I hadn’t spent weeks testing new long-wear products designed to stop one’s face melting in the heat. Those of us with oily skin, an active lifestyle or a hormonal propensity for sweating or flushing, can also struggle to hold on to foundation, eyeshadow and more. But until recently, the term “long-wear” often meant dry, dragging, somewhat joyless textures and shades.
My best new discovery is Milk’s superlative Hydro Grip Gel Tint (£34), available in 15 shades; I wear number five and it’s perfect. Its light and comfortable texture and sheer, natural-looking, summery coverage betray what is extraordinarily dogged staying power. Used in place of foundation or tinted moisturiser, this has remained perfectly intact through tears, 16-hour days and a common cold – its glow never dimming. It has a flexible, stretchy gel texture that prevents cracking or caking as skin tires and dries. Concealer, blush, powders and anything else you care to throw on top layer over happily and smoothly (it has a similar texture to a primer). It’s an unequivocal 10/10 and I already know it’ll be among my best products of 2025. For a smidge more coverage with a comparable lifespan, try Maybelline’s impressive Super Stay 24h Skin Tint (£13.99).
Ernie Els and Retief Goosen reportedly part of delegation as president seeks to reset ties after white ‘genocide’ claims
The South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is expected to take the golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen with him to meet Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday, as the government attempts to reset relations with the US amid Trump’s accusations that it is fomenting a white “genocide”.
Ramaphosa’s appeal to Trump’s love of golf, with the potential inclusion of Els and Goosen reported by South African local media, is part of his efforts to avoid a public dressing down of the kind Trump gave to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in February.
Reuters has spoken to Mahmoud al-Haw at one of the soup kitchens in Gaza. The father-of-four says he has been regularly waiting in crowds for up to six hours to obtain food, and sometimes returns empty-handed.
“I have a sick daughter. I can’t provide her with anything. There is no bread, there is nothing,” the 39-year-old told the news agency.
Kremlin said the Russian president visited the region on Tuesday and met with the interim government
Ukraine will ask the EU next week to consider big new steps to isolate Moscow, including seizing Russian assets and bringing in sanctions for some buyers of Russian oil, as US president Donald Trump has backed off from tightening sanctions, reports Reuters in an exclusive.
A previously unreported Ukrainian white paper to be presented to the EU calls for the 27-member bloc to take a more aggressive and independent position on sanctions as uncertainty hangs over Washington’s future role.
From Marx to Piketty, a sprawling but marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s naysayers
Capitalism has a way of confounding its critics. Like one of those fairground punching bags, it pops right back up every time a crisis knocks it down. Friedrich Engels learned this the hard way. “The American crash is superb,” he enthused in a letter to Karl Marx in 1857: this was communism’s big chance. Well, not quite. The US Treasury stepped in, recapitalising banks with its gold reserves; in Britain the Bank Charter Act was suspended to enable the printing of money. The rulebook was torn up and capitalism saved.
So it has always been. Every time we have teetered close to the precipice, big government has swooped down to save the day. The name of the game is “managed capitalism” and it has been a going concern for more than 200 years. This is the theme of John Cassidy’s new book, a marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s critics, written in good old-fashioned expository prose – if at times a touch workmanlike compared with some of his subjects, such as exhilarating stylists Marx and Carlyle.
Staff at a UN-run clinic in country’s north-east worry about growing funding gaps amid dismantling of USAID
At a UN-run antenatal clinic in a camp for people displaced by Boko Haram, the colours stand out like the bellies of the pregnant women. Abayas in neon green, dark brown and shades of yellow graze against the purple and white uniforms of nurses attending to them in the beige-orange halls of the maternal healthcare facility.
Within the clinic in Maiduguri in north-east Nigeria, midwives and nurses are handing out free emergency home delivery kits, “dignity kits” for sexual abuse survivors and reusable sanitary pads to curb exploitation of young girls who cannot afford them.
Andriy Portnov, an ex-politician in Ukraine, was shot outside a school in a wealthy suburb, according to sources close to the police
Spanish newspaper El País is reporting that the police believe there were “two or three” attackers, with “at least three” gunshot wounds discovered on the body of the dead man.
The newspaper quotes sources close to the investigation claiming that the man was driving a car at the time of the attack.
Petro Pochynok, 34, charged with conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life
A third man has been charged over suspected arson attacks at properties and a car linked to Keir Starmer.
Petro Pochynok, 34, has been charged with conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life and will appear at Westminster magistrates court on Wednesday morning.
“In terms of aggregate league position, will Tottenham v Manchester United be the worst European final ever?” asks Phil Taylor (and dozens of others).
Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United, who meet in Bilbao tonight, put all their eggs in the Europa League basket sometime before the clocks went back. They are 17th and 16th in the Premier League respectively, giving them an aggregate position of 33. It is, to take a couple of unashamedly gratuitous examples, equivalent to Oldham Athletic playing Southampton in the Uefa Cup final of 1992, or Sabadell meeting Racing Santander in the same competition in 1987.
Nick Harkaway sees parallels with postwar period as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold comes to the West End
Russia’s war in Ukraine has reignited “cold war strategies”, according to the son of John le Carré, who announced that an adaptation of his father’s classic novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is coming to the West End for the first time.
Nick Harkaway, who published Karla’s Choice last year, a sequel to the 1963 thriller, said the current geopolitical situation had echoes of the charged postwar period.
They have been quick to brand the new pope an ‘anti-Trump’ ‘total Marxist’. In return, he is already critiquing their worldview
In the outer reaches of the Magasphere, it would be fair to say the advent of the first pope from the US has not been greeted with unbridled enthusiasm. Take Laura Loomer, the thirtysomething influencer and conspiracy theorist, whose verdict on Leo XIV was as instant as it was theologically uninformed: “Anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.” Also doing the rounds on X was a short summary of Leo’s supposed transgressions before ascending to St Peter’s chair: “Trashed Trump, trashed Vance, trashed border enforcement, endorsed DREAMer-style illegal immigration, repeatedly praised and honored George Floyd, and endorsed a Democrat senator’s call for more gun control.”
So far, so tedious. The comic-book casting of the new pope as a globalist villain in the US culture wars is traceable back to his predecessor’s impact on liberal opinion a decade ago. Pope Francis’s sometimes lonely championing of progressive causes, such as the rights of migrants, gave him a kind of liberal celebrity and led Time magazine to name him “person of the year” in 2013. Pope Leo, born in Chicago, has been pre-emptively caricatured by much of the Maga right as a continuity pontiff who will, in effect, front up the religious wing of the Democratic party.
Manager’s emotional intelligence needed for painful therapy process regardless of Europa League final result
“It will change my life; it will not change me,” Ruben Amorim told the BBC not long after becoming Manchester United manager, his underpinning sentiment – that self-worth comes from within – a cornerstone of therapeutic thinking. Sure enough, as the interview continued, he unabashedly raised his own therapy, in the process showing disarming candour, a man supremely comfortable in his own head.
Effective treatment requires going backwards to go forwards and it is easy to chortle that under Amorim, United have done just that. As they prepare for a final we could characterise as two bald men fighting over a wig, there may be a very specific regression taking place: back to good old 1990, when United finished 13th in the league and then beat an even worse team to win a cup, changing everything in the process.
A partnership between the world’s best man-manager and the Seleção will be fun – and potentially glorious
The year is 2026 and Carlo Ancelotti is recreating a famous Real Madrid photo. Once more he finds himself on an open-top bus celebrating a landmark victory in sunglasses while smoking a cigar, accompanied by a smiling Rodrygo, Vinicius Junior and Éder Militão. David Alaba is missing and there are confusing new additions, such as Casemiro and Raphinha.
Pan out and we realise we’re nowhere near the Cibeles Fountain in Madrid but are instead on Avenida Atlântica by Copacabana beach. Yellow and green confetti fills the sky and Neymar is showing off a record-extending sixth World Cup to an adoring crowd. He’s finally won them over for delivering the hexa, something expected of him since he rose to prominence as a spiky-haired Santos prodigy at the turn of the 2010s, and they have fallen in love with the Seleção again.
A rise in employer national insurance contributions and a boost to the national minimum wage also put pressure on companies to raise prices by more than City analysts had forecast.
A rerelease of the documentary about the German film-maker’s operatic adventure in the Peruvian jungle is a compelling portrait of an artist obsessed
In 1982, film-maker Les Blank released this sombre, thoughtful, quietly awestruck documentary account of Werner Herzog’s crazy sisyphean struggle in a remote and dangerous Peruvian jungle location, making his extraordinary drama Fitzcarraldo, which came out the same year. Fitzcarraldo was Herzog’s own bizarre and brilliant story idea, crazily amplifying and exaggerating a case from real life.
Early 20th-century opera enthusiast Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, played with straw-hair and mad blue eyes by Klaus Kinski, goes into the rubber trade to make enough money to realise his dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian port town of Iquito; he works out that the steamship needed to transport materials can only be brought into the required stretch of water by dragging it across land between two tributaries. This is a crazy, magnificent and operatic obsession, more grandiose than anything that could be presented on stage, for which he will need Indigenous peoples as slave labour to haul the ship. By playing these tribes his Caruso records on an old gramophone player, he persuades them he is a white god who must be obeyed.
Alternate political realities are compellingly explored in this sinister vision of a children’s home – but the echoes of Ishiguro are just too strong
In 2016 Catherine Chidgey published her fourth novel, The Wish Child, a child’s-eye view of Nazi Germany. Since then the much-garlanded New Zealander has contrived to be not only conspicuously prolific but also intriguingly unpredictable. Though she returned to wartime Germany in her Women’s prize-longlisted Holocaust novel, Remote Sympathy, her work has ranged from the coming-of-age psychological thriller Pet to The Beat of the Pendulum, a “found” novel that drew on everything from conversations and social media posts to news bulletins and even satnav instructions to create a picture of one woman’s life over a year. The Axeman’s Carnival, published in the UK last year, was partly narrated by a magpie. Like The Wish Child it won the Acorn prize for fiction, making Chidgey the only writer to win New Zealand’s most prestigious prize twice.
The Book of Guilt appears to mark another departure. Chidgey describes her ninth novel as her “first foray into dystopian fiction” and, while the book purports to be set in England in 1979 with a female prime minister newly ensconced in Downing Street, it is not the country we know. In Chidgey’s alternate universe, the second world war ended not in 1945 with allied victory, but in 1943 when the assassination of Hitler by German conspirators led to a swiftly negotiated peace treaty. Subsequent collaboration across Europe has ensured that progress in biological and medical science, already significantly advanced, has accelerated, fuelled by shared research that includes the grotesque experiments carried out on prisoners in Nazi death camps.
Your Facebook or Instagram account can be your link to friends, a profile for your work or a key to other services, so losing access can be very worrying. Here’s what to do if the worst happens.
If you have access to the phone number or email account associated with your Facebook or Instagram account, try to reset your password by clicking on the “Forgot password?” link on the main Facebook or Instagram login screen. Follow the instructions in the email or text message you receive.
If you no longer have access to the email account linked to your Facebook account, use a device with which you have previously logged into Facebook and go to facebook.com/login/identify. Enter any email address or phone number you might have associated with your account, or find your username which is the string of characters after Facebook.com/ on your page. Click on “No longer have access to these?”, “Forgotten account?” or “Recover” and follow the instructions to prove your identity and reset your password.
If your account was hacked, visit facebook.com/hacked or instagram.com/hacked/ on a device you have previously used to log in and follow the instructions. Visit the help with a hacked accountpage for Facebook or Instagram.
Turn on two-step verification in the “password and security” section of the Accounts Centre. Use an authentication app or security key for this, not SMS codes. Save your recovery codes somewhere safe in case you lose access to your two-step authentication method.
Turn on “unrecognised login” alerts in the “password and security” section of the Accounts Centre, which will alert you to any suspicious login activity.
Remove any suspicious “friends” from your account – these could be fake accounts or scammers.
If you are eligible, turn on “advanced protection for Facebook” in the “password and security” section of the Accounts Centre.
I’d spent 10 years trying to be more like my goat-farming neighbours. What if I stressed my ‘Britishness’ instead?
I was standing in the long queue of a rural French boulangerie when it happened. The sun was just coming up and the glorious smell of freshly baked baguette filled the dawn air. I drank it in and shuffled forward, awaiting my turn, aware I was getting “looks” – and it wasn’t difficult to see why. I had driven all night from performing at a comedy gig in London to get to my home in the Loire valley, and I was still in my work clothes. My stage wear included a check tweed Edwardian frock coat with matching weskit, navy blue dress trousers, brogue monk shoes, a smart Oxford-collared shirt and a knitted blue tie, slightly loosened. Under normal circumstances, I would not invade my local boulangerie dressed as a cross between a late 60s dandy and a roaring 20s duellist, but it had been a long drive, and I was too tired to tone it down.
Plus, I had never really fit in locally anyway. We had moved there about 10 years earlier, in 2005 – a catastrophic decision, according to my agent, but a happy one for me, my wife and our then four-year-old son; the pace of life was less frenetic and we felt less hemmed in. And, as I often said only half-jokingly, it was the closest place to London we could afford to buy a house. Things had gone pretty well: my wife, being half-French and fluent, was working locally as a teacher, and my son had picked up the language more quickly than I can change a car tyre. We had two more children and I was … well, I was doing OK.
Comments from Jensen Huang come as Beijing accuses the US of ‘bullying and protectionism’
US chip exports controls have been a “failure”, the head of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, told a tech forum on Wednesday, as the Chinese government separately slammed US warnings to other countries against using Chinese tech.
Successive US administrations have imposed restrictions on the sale of hi-tech AI chips to China, in an effort to curb China’s military advancement and protect US dominance of the AI industry. But Huang told the Computex tech forum in Taipei that the controls had instead spurred on Chinese developers.
The controversial feature, added in 2022, will disappear after the Margaret River Pro. Few surfers on the elite tour are sad to see it go
On Tuesday, as a towering swell groomed by the Roaring Forties across the Indian Ocean reached its explosive final destination on the Western Australian coast, two surfers battled for their careers. Australian-Japanese surfer Connor O’Leary and Queenslander Liam O’Brien took on each other and Margaret River’s pumping conditions to retain a spot on the World Surf League’s Championship Tour.
With O’Leary just above and O’Brien just below the dreaded cut-line, victory would be a major step towards safety; defeat would likely consign the loser to a re-qualification slog on the second-tier Challenger Series.
Researchers say threat from ‘jailbroken’ chatbots trained to churn out illegal information is ‘tangible and concerning’
Hacked AI-powered chatbots threaten to make dangerous knowledge readily available by churning out illicit information the programs absorb during training, researchers say.
The warning comes amid a disturbing trend for chatbots that have been “jailbroken” to circumvent their built-in safety controls. The restrictions are supposed to prevent the programs from providing harmful, biased or inappropriate responses to users’ questions.
Connexion
