Trump adviser Peter Navarro says ‘we have to revise our expectations down’ because of US deportation programme

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.

It’s non-farm payrolls day! The eagerly-awaited US jobs report is out today, and the White House has been trying to moderate expectations.

We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like. When we were letting in 2 million illegal aliens a day we had to produce 200,000 [jobs] a month for steady stay.

Now 50,000 a month is going to be more like what we need. Wall Street, when this stuff comes out, they can’t rain on our parade, they just have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals.

The FTSE 100 is set to open up, after a lacklustre close on Tuesday. On quiet days for earnings reports and economic data points, the index tends to act as a barometer for commodity prices. Gold prices have strengthened slightly and are at close to two-year highs, supported by strengthening sentiment around US rate cuts this year. Copper and oil are also providing a light tailwind today.

US stock futures are erring on the side of optimism ahead of jobs data expected later on. Hopes for a rate cut by the Fed next month have improved slightly after American retail sales unexpectedly flatlined in December, with shares in Costco, Target and Walmart all ending down on Tuesday.

Our US economists see nonfarm payrolls coming in at +75k, with the unemployment rate staying at 4.4%. Remember as well that today’s report will include the annual benchmark revisions to payrolls, which could rewrite some of the trends over recent history.

We already got the preliminary number in September, which said that payrolls were -911k lower as of March 2025. However, that number can be different from the preliminary release, and last year’s preliminary benchmark revision was -818k but the final number was a smaller -589k, so not as negative as first thought.

1.30pm GMT: US non-farm payrolls for January (previous: 50,000; forecast: 70,000)

5.30pm GMT: Bank of England policymaker James Talbot gives speech

The medals stacked up for the Scandinavians and Johannes Høsflot Klæbo basked in his main-character era

Day four of the Milano Cortina Games, and one question is starting to feel a little rhetorical: how do you stop Johannes Høsflot Klæbo? Short answer – you don’t. You just race for second and hope he smiles at you on the way past.

On Tuesday, the Norwegian cross-country phenomenon did what he has been doing all week: made world-class athletes look as if they were chasing a mirage. Technique? Flawless. Tactics? Ruthless. Power, speed and a hill-climbing gear that seems to defy physics? Check, check and check. Klæbo cruised through the sprint classic rounds, detonated the field on the final climb and skied away with his second gold of these Games and his seventh gold overall, putting him just one shy of the all-time Winter Olympic record.

The clamour for change is growing on the south coast and the pressure is growing on the Seagulls’ young head coach

When Paul Barber referenced “growing fan impatience across large parts of the football landscape” in his programme notes before Sunday’s game against their arch rivals Crystal Palace, the Brighton chief executive must have feared what was to come.

The clamour for change on the south coast that began as a murmur last spring after Fabian Hürzeler’s side had collected one point from four Premier League matches and been knocked out of the FA Cup in the sixth round has been steadily building ever since. Despite recovering from a slow start to this season, a second successive December without a victory has been followed by more disappointment in the first few weeks of 2026 to heap pressure on the German head coach’s slender shoulders.

Plus: a perfect hat-trick of assists, more almost-one-club players and Oxford’s penalty drought

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“In their Champions League match against PSV Eindhoven, Bayern Munich made four substitutions in the 62nd minute,” writes Stephan Wijnen. “The four players entering the pitch together had a combined estimated value of €265m (Harry Kane, Michael Olise, Serge Gnabry and Alphonso Davies). Is this the most expensive combined substitution ever?”

Before we go any further – a player’s estimated value is not an objective measure, but using transfer fees doesn’t necessarily work, with some players moving for no fee (Kylian Mbappé, for example). Like Stephan in his question, we are going to use Transfermarkt’s valuations in a bid for consistency, and will focus on the value of players coming on.

Can you do any better? Email us with your answers

What if loving your child is destroying you and all you want to do is escape? That’s the nightmare Byrne faces in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The star and its director reveal why backers were scared

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, for which Rose Byrne just won a Golden Globe, is unmistakably a horror film. And yet how can it be? It’s the story of a mother, Linda, with a very sick child. You never see the child, only the outlines of the anxious medics. You never find out what’s wrong with her, only that it involves a feeding tube. Linda is going steadily crazy, because who wouldn’t? On paper, this is a painful yet heartwarming tale of love and adversity. Instead, it is claustrophobic and vertiginous. It sometimes has the panic-attack surrealism of an anxiety dream, and other times is so real you can barely look directly at it. I’ve never seen the maternal condition drawn as a trip to the abyss. The only film I’ve seen that’s anything like this is Eraserhead.

“I was very influenced by that film,” writer and director Mary Bronstein says, carefully. She’s a fascinating conversationalist, frank and open but watchful. Byrne is more reserved. Both are darkly funny, all the time. They look Hollywood-polished, in this central London hotel, but fair play, they’ve just come out of a photoshoot. “Eraserhead is about a type of parental anxiety that only men can have,” Bronstein says. “And this is a film about a parental anxiety only a woman can have. In Eraserhead, he can leave and that’s his angst. Linda cannot leave. That’s hers.”

England head coach warns against conceding penalties and intensity drop-offs before Six Nations visit to Murrayfield

England’s players normally look forward to a Calcutta Cup examination at Murrayfield with about as much enthusiasm as a trip to the dentist. At best it tends to be uncomfortable, at worst it’s grip-the-chair-and-pray time. And that’s before they are wheeled out into the freezing rain and the hygienist produces a set of bagpipes to enhance the experience even further.

So it was more than a little unnerving to listen to Steve Borthwick talking about his team’s genuine enthusiasm for what lies in store. Never mind all the recurring pain they have endured in Edinburgh in recent years, with three defeats in their past four visits. This time they are heading north in a strikingly different mood, flashing the kind of confident pearly white smile usually reserved for Love Island contestants.

Wildfires that left 23 people dead were made about three times more likely by global heating, researchers say

The climate crisis inflamed deadly wildfires that left 23 people dead in Chile and devastated forests in Argentina that host some of the world’s oldest trees, scientists have found.

The hot, dry and windy conditions that enabled the fires to blaze across huge areas in January were made about three times more likely by global heating, researchers from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium found.

• Qatar still has infrastructure from 2022 World Cup

• Ahmedabad, India likely to be other host candidate

Qatar’s bid to host the 2036 Olympic Games has received a boost with the state-owned broadcaster beIN Sports concluding a media rights deal for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

It is understood that beIN has won the rights to broadcast LA 2028 in the Middle East and north Africa (Mena) region, with the contract signed by the International Olympic Committee president, Kirsty Coventry, and the beIN chair, Nasser al-Khelaifi, over the last few days at the Winter Games in Milan Cortina.

Mal Lanyon says police were ‘required’ to disperse crowd, while Mehreen Faruqi accused them of ‘assaulting Muslims’

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A Muslim group has urged the New South Wales police commissioner to apologise to the entire Muslim community after police disrupted a group of people praying during a protest against the visit by Israel’s president in Sydney on Monday.

Australian National Imams Council (Anic) confirmed it had received an apology from Mal Lanyon about the incident, but two other major Muslim groups Guardian Australia spoke to said they had not.

An immersive account of how the inhabitants of a liberal city – including the author’s father – survived fascism

In December 1941, the Nazi authorities received a letter from a soldier complaining that, on his recent leave in Berlin, he had been thoroughly disgusted by what he saw. While his comrades were dying at the front, plenty of young men appeared to have dodged military duty and were now to be found carousing in Berlin’s packed bars. The women were no better: husbandless but flush with ration coupons purloined from soldiers on leave, they were busy gorging themselves. “If Berlin were Germany,” huffed the complainant, “we would have lost this war years ago.”

Berlin had always been a case apart. The legacy of the wild Weimar years – all that artistic and political radicalism, not to mention louche living – had continued under the Third Reich. The city remained defiantly itself and, despite the efforts of high command, mulish about being told what to do. That, at least, had been the situation in 1941.

Lengthy delays in compensation are ‘emblematic’ of what many relatives of migrant workers go through in the Gulf kingdom, say rights groups

When Mohammad Arshad fell to his death while constructing the first new stadium for the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, one of the main stadium contractors, the Belgian construction multinational Besix, promised it would take immediate steps to ensure all end-of-service and insurance payments were, “handled in a timely and respectful manner”.

Almost a year later, Arshad’s family say they have yet to receive either.

From grown men eating ice cream – gasp! – to Noël Coward sweating in the desert and a baseball team without pants – a new exhibition celebrates images from the era-defining magazine

PM and global climate action advocate looks set to secure another victory despite voter concerns over cost of living and crime

Barbados prime minister and global climate action champion, Mia Amor Mottley, is on course for a third consecutive term in office, forecasts suggest, as voters head to the polls on Wednesday.

Mottley is the country’s first female leader since its independence in 1966, and her strong international advocacy for climate action and support for small and vulnerable nations have made her an influential and popular global and regional leader, experts say.

Nine-year-old Lamia is obliged by her school to bake a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein, and meets a series of vivid characters as she shops for sanctioned ingredients

There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi, a Bake Off-style adventure about a little girl in early-90s Iraq required by her school to make a birthday cake in Saddam Hussein’s honour, despite sanctions and the consequent shortage of every single cake-making ingredient. Hadi is a former Sundance Lab fellow and his film lists Hollywood heavy-hitters Chris Columbus and Eric Roth among its executive producers – who may just have induced Hadi to sprinkle some old-fashioned Tinseltown sugar into the mix. The moment when the little girl gazes at her reflection in the river is surely inspired by The Lion King.

Among the largely nonprofessional cast is the unselfconsciously excellent Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as nine-year-old Lamia, whose greedy teacher gobbles the apple she has brought to school for her lunch. This blowhard announces that the class must draw lots for which of them will bake the Saddam cake; it falls to Lamia. In addition, her pal Saeed (Sajad Mohama Qasem) – who has a crush on Lamia – has to supply the fruit for this party, on which only the teacher will be gorging himself. Lamia sets off into town with her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) on a desperate shopping expedition, carrying her pet cockerel, Hindi, who gives a great animal performance and whose unpredictable crowings clearly forced the actors to improvise lines around him.

Residents of the UK’s most expensive flats have won a court case over defective pipework. If their homes are shoddily built, what hope do the rest of us have?

Even multimillionaires can’t escape Britain’s cowboy builders, it seems. Last week, residents of One Hyde Park, the UK’s most expensive flats, won a £35m court case against the contractor that built their homes. The high court ordered the construction company Laing O’Rourke to fix defective pipework that was discovered to be causing problems in 2014, only three years after the luxury development was completed.

At the other end of the economy, tens of thousands of families are facing damp and mould issues also caused by botched building works. A National Audit Office investigation revealed in October last year that a staggering 98% of external insulation fitted under the previous government’s home-improvement schemes was installed so ineptly that it will have to be repaired or replaced.

Phineas Harper is a writer and curator

I was quite spoiled and he could be a little dour. But on that terrible day, when he was just two blocks away when the South Tower exploded, I realised he was all I wanted

I met Chris in the college bar in 1997. I was part of a group of visiting American students visiting the University of Oxford – we kept ourselves to ourselves in the first few weeks of term – and he leaned over from the next table to talk to me. I saw his one-dimpled smile and the cocky way he tipped his chair back on two legs and I thought: “Uh-oh, here’s trouble.”

Despite the fact that I was only at Oxford for one term, we quickly became a couple – and stayed together. When he finished university and started working in London, I returned to North Carolina to finish my English degree. We visited each other when we could. He made a surprise appearance at my 21st birthday party; we spent a New Year’s Eve in Paris.

The winning run may be over but his Manchester United team showed fight until the end against West Ham

On nights such as these it can feel as though football is choosing to remind you of its true nature. Which is, it turns out, the most gloriously perverse, slow-burn, 400‑miles‑from‑home, 10.15pm on a Tuesday, waving your arms in the air, gripped‑with‑final‑plot‑twist-ecstasy pursuit ever devised.

For Manchester United’s travelling support this game must have felt like a slow-motion strangulation. Your team have had two shots on target all night. They’re 1-0 down against relegation-haunted West Ham – 95 minutes have passed. Narratives are being muddled. Arcs of hope reined in.

• Tottenham manager ‘1,000% sure’ he should carry on

• Fans booed and jeered the Dane once again during defeat

Thomas Frank remains convinced he has the support of the Tottenham board and will continue in his job as manager, arguing that the club’s problems run deeper than him. The Dane watched his team lose 2-1 at home to Newcastle on Monday night; they have won just twice in 17 Premier League games and lag 16th in the table, five points above the relegation zone.

It was another night when the Spurs fans booed and jeered him. At one point, they sang for Mauricio Pochettino, their former manager, who is now in charge of the USA national side, while they also told Frank towards the end of the game that he should be “sacked in the morning”.

Dressed in Sunday school apparel and singing exclusively in Dutch, this unorthodox five-piece embrace clinical chaos

From Kapelle, Holland
Recommended if you like Black Midi, King Crimson, YHWH Nailgun
Up next New single Maalstroom out now

Tight-fitted in scrimpy Sunday school apparel, Grote Geelstaart – Dutch for great yellowtail fish – make music that’s decidedly less orthodox than appearances suggest. Drums skirmish with frighteningly efficient, jackhammer velocity; synths and guitars buzz and ring like fire alarms; the bass rumbles like a jammed freighter engine. Grote Geelstaart’s clinical chaos goes hand in hand with vocalist/guitarist Luuk Bosma’s primal punk dramaturgy, reminiscent of Nick Cave, James Chance and underrated Dutch punk thespians De Kift. This MO translates wonderfully to Grote Geelstaart’s Zeelandic roots, a place where an intricate network of dykes is built and maintained to keep the unforgiving North Sea at bay: human ingenuity v lawless elements.

More than half of the cases presenting to the St Vincent’s emergency department in Sydney had self-reported speeds of more than 25km/h

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“You don’t understand the power of an ebike until you get on one,” Dr Tony Grabs warns.

Grabs, the director of trauma at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, cites a patient who jumped on a rental ebike after a night of drinking with friends – the first time she’d ever been on one.

Emissions have plunged 75% since communist times in the birthplace of big oil – but for some the transition has been brutal

Once the frozen fields outside Bucharest have thawed, workers will assemble the largest solar farm in Europe: one million photovoltaic panels backed by batteries to power homes after sunset. But the 760MW project in southern Romania will not hold the title for long. In the north-west, authorities have approved a bigger plant that will boast a capacity of 1GW.

The sun-lit plots of silicone and glass will join a slew of projects that have rendered the Romanian economy unrecognisable from its polluted state when communism ended. They include an onshore windfarm near the Black Sea that for several years was Europe’s biggest, a nuclear power plant by the Danube whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years, and a fast-spreading patchwork of solar panels topping homes and shops across the country.

In Cardinham, which has had 366mm of rain this year, there’s little need to check the weather forecast: more rain

• Tell us: how have you been affected by the rainy weather in the UK?

“I’m thinking of building an ark,” said Sarah Cowen, an artist and cafe owner. “It’s been horrendous. We’ve never known anything like it. The mud, the silt, the endless rain.” Cowen is one of a hardy, if soggy, bunch who live or work in and around the parish of Cardinham, on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, which has endured 41 consecutive days of rain – and counting.

“This is definitely global warming. You get either baking sun or continuous rain,” Cowen said. The locals don’t have to look at the weather forecast here at the moment. “You know it’s going to be rain,” Cowen said.

The party’s MPs know their leader is failing but with no obvious replacement, getting rid of him now would cause more hurt than healing

Westminster time is counted in scandals, resignations, rebellions, U-turns and leadership crises. All the things that aren’t good government age a regime. Keir Starmer has presided over a lot of woes in 18 months, making a young government look old.

The premature decrepitude is more advanced, and more disturbing to Labour MPs, because it feels like continuity from the turbulent Tory regime that came before. The policies and personnel are different, but to the casual passing voter the sound of screaming and breaking crockery around Downing Street is familiar as a sign of a political problem family in residence.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Monday 30 April, ahead of May elections join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat is Labour from both the Green party and Reform and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the Labour party
Book tickets here

Vast flocks of birds return to Somerset and a rare grebe turns an ordinary walk into something special

After weeks of heavy rain, Cheddar reservoir in Somerset is finally full again – of water, and of birds. Thousands of coots, hundreds of gulls and ducks, and dozens of great crested grebes crowd the surface, some already moulting into their smart breeding plumage, crests and all.

They feed almost constantly, building up energy reserves for the breeding season. Among the throng are some less familiar visitors: a flock of scaup, the males bulkier than the nearby tufted ducks, with pale grey backs that catch the light. Flocks of goosanders dive frequently for food, the colourful males looking like a cormorant in extravagant drag.