Worsening global outlook makes ‘gradual and careful’ approach on interest rates by Bank of England more difficult

• UK inflation falls to 2.6%, increasing pressure on Bank to cut interest rates
• Business live – latest updates

Cooling inflation, resilient wage growth, and an economy outperforming expectations. After the turmoil since Donald Trump’s “liberation day”, there are some signs that Britain entered the crisis in reasonable shape.

The trouble is, the good news is unlikely to last long. The bigger-than-expected decline in inflation to 2.6% in March will come as a welcome reprieve for hard-pressed households. But it is a snapshot from a rear-view mirror, on an increasingly rocky journey.

A deft, documentary-like portrait of 70s and 80s Black British culture outside London

Lanre Bakare’s first book is not just a work of history – it is a necessary and urgent recalibration of the way we think about Black Britain. Too often, mainstream accounts flatten the story, centring it on London, reducing the complexities of life beyond the capital to footnotes. Bakare, a Guardian arts and culture correspondent, challenges this myopia head-on, presenting an expansive, deeply researched work that insists on a broader, richer understanding of Black life. He travels to Bradford, Cardiff, Birmingham and Edinburgh, pulling together art, politics and social movements, with a vision of community life in the 70s and 80s that feels both urgent and long overdue.

Bakare opens with northern soul, an unexpected starting point, since it’s mostly associated with working-class white youth. But in tracing its rise and the spaces where it flourished – clubs, underground venues, dance halls – and giving voice to its Black devotees, he paints a deft portrait of the social tensions of the time.

Coogan does his best, but there’s a tonal mismatch here: the animal-teaches-lonely-human narrative jars with a depiction of lives in totalitarian Argentina

Here is a well-meaning, awkward tonal jumble of a movie, based on the bestselling memoir by former teacher Tom Michell ; it is a quirky true-story heart warmer, in which an adorable penguin is apparently supposed to redeem not merely the human hero’s personal heartbreak but maybe even the agony of Argentina during the 70s junta. It stars Steve Coogan, who has often in the past shown brilliant technique as a straight actor, and in Philomena with Judi Dench proved he is perfectly capable of carrying an un-ironised emotional story. But his performance here is bafflingly underpowered and opaque, as if he is slightly perplexed by the script he’s been given.

Coogan plays Tom, who takes a job in Peronist Argentina in 1976, teaching English at a stuffy private school for the sons of wealthy expatriates, and is wary of the overbearing headteacher, played by Jonathan Pryce. On a holiday to Uruguay, he rescues a penguin from an oil slick on the beach and finds himself responsible for this bedraggled bird. He ends up smuggling it back to Argentina with him where, named Juan Salvador, it becomes the unhappy and lonely man’s feathered friend – actually, his only friend. But all this happens in tandem with Michell’s personal involvement in combating the horror of the Argentinian junta in which innocent people get “disappeared” by the secret police – and this of course blunts the feelgood mood that the film is trying to sell.

She helped bankroll Trump, backs Israel’s war in Gaza and traded away Luka Dončić. Dallas fans are furious – and they’re not alone

In the NBA, villainy rarely looks like chaos. It often arrives in the form of billionaires who believe their power serves a greater good. The NBA’s old guard of terrible owners – Donald Sterling, Glen Taylor and Robert Sarver – have mostly exited the stage, having offloaded their controlling stakes in recent years. Even James Dolan, long regarded as the autocratic overlord of the New York Knicks, has begun to loosen his grip on basketball operations . Yet as the league evolves, the absence of these figures creates a vacuum – one in which a new archetype of villainous owner can emerge. And from where I stand, Miriam Adelson is the No 1 example.

Adelson, the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, is worth around $27bn , making her one of the world’s richest women. Her fortune primarily stems from gambling her majority ownership in the Las Vegas Sands casino and resort company. In late 2023, she purchased majority ownership of the Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban for $3.5bn . In a little over two years in charge, she has alienated large parts of the team’s fanbase by allowing the trade of a generational superstar , Luka Dončić, who took the team to the NBA finals last season.

Wide-ranging interview addresses how Trump presidency has upended certainties over EU-US relations

A group of Serbian students completed their epic 1,300km trip from Novi Sad to Strasbourg , France last night, getting a red carpet welcome as they got there.

The campaign sought to draw the EU’s attention to on-going mass protests in Serbia against alleged corruption after 15 people died and several were seriously injured when the concrete canopy of the newly renovated train station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, collapsed.

The Mayhem tour’s ticketing agencies deny dynamic pricing has been implemented, but fans have complained prices are high and inconsistent

• Election 2025 live updates: Australia federal election campaign
• Get our afternoon election email , free app or daily news podcast

The little monsters are not happy. Lady Gaga fans have swamped social media to complain about exorbitant ticket prices for the pop star’s Australian concerts, with many speculating that dynamic pricing is involved – a claim the official ticketing agency for the Melbourne and Brisbane shows, Ticketmaster, has denied.

Off the back of her chart-topping album Mayhem, Lady Gaga is heading to Australia for the first time in 11 years, with Live Nation bringing the Mayhem Ball to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in December. Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation, is responsible for the ticket sales in Melbourne and Brisbane. Ticketek is separately handling the Sydney show, because of its affiliation with Sydney venue Accor Stadium.

Sign up for the Afternoon Update: Election 2025 email newsletter

Shares plunge as firm says H20 chip, designed for Chinese market to comply with controls, will now need special licence

Nvidia has said it expects a $5.5bn (£4.1bn) hit after Donald Trump’s administration barred the chip designer from selling crucial artificial intelligence chips in China, sending shares in one of the US’s most valuable companies plunging in after-hours trading.

The company said in an official filing late on Tuesday that its H20 AI chip, which was designed specifically for the Chinese market to comply with export controls, would now require a special licence to sell there for the “indefinite future”.

When even Daniel Day-Lewis is out of retirement, you have to start wondering whether actors just like messing with people

Cate Blanchett is an actor’s actor. Cate Blanchett is the type of actor whose characters – flinty, steely, sly, sophisticated – are hardly distinguishable from the person herself. She speaks with the jarringly refined accent of an alien trained only on stage melodramas. She does not laugh; she titters. She does not walk; she glides. She does not debase herself with the prosaic concerns of you or I.

This is why it is very hard to believe that she is “giving up”. In an interview with the Radio Times on Monday, Blanchett suggested she was no longer an actor. “My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it. I am serious about giving up acting,” she said. “[There are] a lot of things I want to do with my life.”

Plus: second yellow cards in one game; Welsh teams in the same division; and the highest scorers against a former club

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“Who was the first player to have a red card rescinded after a game?” asks Masai Graham.

In September 1969, Northampton Town played away to Swansea in the old Division Four, which is an intro nobody expected to be reading in the year 2025. After 66 minutes their forward Frank Large, frustrated after the referee had given a free-kick against him, booted the ball into the crowd and hit a 12-year-old flush in the face. As Large walked over to apologise, Billy Carroll, a former Swansea player, ran on to the field and chinned him. Large threw hands in response and was sent off.