
What’s it like to catch a gig so great it goes down in history? Our writers relive incredible performances by everyone from Amy Winehouse at the North Sea jazz festival to Kanye West at Glastonbury
Talking Heads, the Rock Garden, London, 13 May 1977
Continue reading...From the World Cup fan park in Manchester, supporters cheer through the night as England beat Mexico to advance to the quarter-finals
Manchester is up there with the greatest footballing cities in the world. But even here, the fans had hardly seen a game like it.
In the early hours of Monday morning, at Europe’s biggest World Cup fan park, as the final whistle blew after an agonising 11 minutes of injury time, the crowd cheered with a roar loud enough to wake anyone in Manchester still asleep.
Continue reading...Quite aside from all the convolutions, it’s clear the government is ignorant of the reality for young people like me hoping to get on the property ladder
I need to talk about money. Specifically my finances and trying to buy a house as a young person. I hope you’ll forgive me if I sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about, but that’s because I’m going to try to make sense of the government’s reforms to personal savings accounts, known as Isas.
These products have become significantly overcomplicated in recent years, with the government continually refreshing what were conceived of as simple tax-free savings accounts with new rules, allowances, products and age restrictions. I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. As the deputy money editor of the i newspaper, Callum Mason, put it: “It’s hard enough to understand if you cover money for a living – I don’t know how the general public is supposed to do so.”
Jason Okundaye is a Guardian Opinion assistant editor
Continue reading...The actor spent almost a decade fighting monsters – and making friends – on the hit Netflix show. Then, last year, it all came to an end. How’s he adjusting?
Finn Wolfhard is remembering his first experience of celebrity. It was 2016 and he was 13. The first season of Stranger Things had aired that summer, and he returned to his high school in Vancouver as if nothing had changed. But things had changed. “People didn’t know how to treat me, especially the teachers. Kids that didn’t even look at me before were paying attention to me or wanting to hang out.” He remembers a girl in the year above who really wanted a photo with him. “And I was like: ‘Oh, I can’t really take photos at school.’ And she wasn’t listening to me and pulled me into, like, a side hug. I remember thinking: ‘Shit, man. I have no control over this. This seems crazy.’ So, it was definitely weird at first, and something I still haven’t totally grasped.”
How strange it must be to have spent such a large part of your life playing a character that half the world knows, and has watched grow up on screen, turning from a wide-eyed, gawky, nerdy kid to a sharp-cheekboned (but still quite gawky) action hero. Nobody could have predicted how huge Stranger Things would become or how long it would last, fuelled by popular demand, then stalled by the pandemic. It concluded a decade later, at the end of last year, having reached the point where it was no longer sustainable for twentysomethings like Wolfhard to pass as high schoolers.
Continue reading...Race to develop ‘embodied AI’ focuses on creating dextrous hands to transform humanoid robots from gimmicks into useful products
Human hands – nimble, nerve-filled appendages that are the most flexible part of the human skeleton – are exceptionally complex. Many tasks that most people can do largely without thinking, from tying a pair of shoelaces to buttoning up a shirt, in fact require a complex set of neurological instructions and precise choreography. In thousands of years of human history, no machine has been able to truly replicate human’s greatest tool.
But now, as artificial intelligence (AI) races forwards, some companies think they are close to surpassing this final but most difficult hurdle in robotics. Most of them are in China.
Continue reading...Little-known abroad, Andy Burnham has a chance to define a new era of US-UK relations. Should he seek to charm or bargain with the bully in the White House – or treat him ‘like a poorly informed constituent’?
If, as expected, Andy Burnham becomes the British prime minister later this month, one of his first telephone calls is likely to be with Donald Trump.
Trump’s mother was Scottish and he has a nostalgic fascination with Britain. But managing a relationship with the erratic, transactional and demanding US president has been a diplomatic minefield for Burnham’s predecessors.
Continue reading...File it as England’s finest World Cup knockout phase victory since 1966. There have not been a huge number of them; only nine previously, each a gripping drama in its own right. Yet it was the context of this one that set it apart.
England stepped into the mayhem of the Estadio Azteca, a venue that contains a very particular ghost for them, to face the full force of the Mexican nation. Plus a team that almost never lose here. Javier Aguirre’s men brought flawless form to the showpiece; four wins out of four so far at the tournament; their tournament. It was the cohosts’ grand send-off from their own turf, arguably the biggest game in their history. An unofficial final for them.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Government and developers privately acknowledged Lanarkshire datacentre site had power provision ‘issue’
‘It’s smoke and mirrors’: hope turns to fear in Scottish village chosen for AI datacentre
What are Britain’s AI growth zones and are the plans feasible or ‘complete bunk’?
A landmark AI development billed as delivering jobs and prosperity has misrepresented its plans to channel a nuclear reactor’s worth of power to a site in rural Scotland, a Guardian investigation has found.
When it was announced in January, the government promised that an £8.2bn AI datacentre complex in Lanarkshire – built by the US firm CoreWeave and the Scottish company DataVita – would be powered entirely from on-site renewables and built by 2030.
Continue reading...Reform UK leader claims he is victim of ‘hit job’ as parliamentary standards commissioner investigates £5m donation
UK fighter jets intercepted a Russian maritime patrol aircraft after it “repeatedly approached” the carrier strike group in the Norwegian Sea, the Ministry of Defence has revealed.
An MoD spokesperson said:
While operating in the Norwegian Sea on Operation Firecrest, the UK’s Carrier Strike Group was repeatedly approached by a Russian ‘Bear-F’ maritime patrol aircraft.
The Bear-F passed at low altitude and unnecessarily close to HMS Prince of Wales and dropped a large number of sonobuoys in close proximity to the carrier.
This is the opposite of an establishment hit job. This is so that the public can know that the establishment, in terms of people with lots of money, are not buying their members of parliament.
And over the decades that I was a member of parliament, each time there was a review of the code of conduct, the standards were raised because of the need to keep public trust and confidence.
Continue reading...Dan Jarvis, who wants to stay on as defence secretary, says he is confident PM-in-waiting values national security
The new defence secretary, Dan Jarvis, has called on Andy Burnham to increase defence spending dramatically from 2030 and “evidence the trajectory” towards a Nato target that would mean £25bn a year more for the military by the middle of the next decade.
The former paratrooper said he was confident that the prime minister-in-waiting valued national security, as he openly lobbied him for cash that would probably have to come from cuts elsewhere.
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