Nvidia, OpenAI and Microsoft announce investments as part of multibillion-dollar package alongside Trump visit
Donald Trump’s arrival in the UK on Tuesday night was accompanied by a multibillion-dollar transatlantic tech agreement.
The announcement features some of the biggest names from Silicon Valley: the chipmaker Nvidia; the ChatGPT developer, OpenAI; and Microsoft. Big numbers were involved, with Microsoft hailing its $30bn (£22bn) investment as a major commitment to the UK – and adding, in an apparent swipe at its rivals, that it was not making “empty tech promises”.
Continue reading...The choice for governments around the world is clear: engage, or fall beneath the US president’s wheel. For now, Britain must do the former
Has any visiting leader ever seen so little of Britain or the British as Donald Trump is doing this week? The absurdly unrepresentative version of the country offered up to the US president on his second state visit on Wednesday was a Windsor parody, a Potemkin version of this country, glistening with protocol and polish, amid a lavish reenactment of the British monarchy’s invented traditions. Just about the only thing that was authentic was the rain.
But here’s the unalterable and underlying thing. None of that really matters. What matters is that Trump is the most powerful leader in the world. Despite all the Trumpian shocks, the US and Britain remain allies. Business can and should be done between them. So the opportunity for face-time with Trump, in circumstances designed to soften him up with flattery and engage him over this country’s own priorities, is to be seized. Not to do this would be perverse.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Donald Trump is back on UK soil for his ‘unprecedented’ second state visit. Will the US president’s trip help to distract from Keir Starmer’s challenges at home? Or could it leave the prime minister even more exposed? Kiran Stacey asks the columnist and Politics Weekly America host, Jonathan Freedland
Send your thoughts and questions to politicsweeklyuk@theguardian.com
She had a zest for life that propelled her to the heights of stage and screen – but behind all this lay a shocking story of violence, grooming and abuse. From her bed, flanked by pills and cigarettes, Ireland’s grande dame looks back
Brenda Fricker is sitting up in a bed plumped with pillows, wearing a sapphire blue blouse and a head of grey-golden ringlets. One bedside table has her medication, 25 pills a day. Another has a cup of water, an ashtray and her cigarettes. Above and on either side of her are shelves jammed with an eclectic hoard of books: Salman Rushdie, Edna O’Brien, Brian Aldiss, Alex Ferguson. Meanwhile, gazing out from framed black and white photographs on the walls, are writers, producers and actors from another era, plus a young, luminous Fricker herself.
The current version of Fricker is 80 and not so well, happy to be interviewed but only from the bed of her Dublin home – not exactly a common setup with stars, but then she is no ordinary star. “I’m out of breath just talking,” she says. “I’ve never known tiredness ever in my life. Weary. Will I ever get up again?” She will, but the question is not entirely rhetorical. “I’m having a dreadful death,” she says. “I’m just dying, every day in pain.” This is said in a matter of fact tone, only to be undercut by a rueful prediction: “I’ll probably live to be 100.”
Continue reading...An American football fan called in sick so he could attend a game – and was rumbled after being caught on camera, his face projected up on the stadium’s giant screens
Name: Getting Coldplayed.
Age: The original incident happened on 16 July this year.
Continue reading...Anderson updates Thomas Pynchon for the era of Ice roundups, pitting shaggy revolutionary Leonardo DiCaprio against cartoonish forces of reaction
One of the great creative bromances has flowered again: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon. Having adapted Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for the screen in 2015, Anderson has now taken a freer rein with his 1990 novel Vineland, creating a bizarre action thriller driven by pulpy comic-book energy and transformed political indignation, keeping his pedal at all times welded to the metal.
It’s a riff on the now recognisable Anderson-Pynchonian idea of counterculture and counter-revolution, absorbing the paranoid style of American politics into a screwball farcical resistance, with a jolting, jangling, nerve-shredding score by Jonny Greenwood. It’s partly a freaky-Freudian diagnosis of father-daughter dysfunction – juxtaposed with the separation of migrant children and parents at the US-Mexico border – and a very serious, relevant response to the US’s secretive ruling class and its insidiously normalised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) roundups: the toxic new Vichyite Trump enthusiasm.
Continue reading...Politicians, dignitaries and high profile tech entrepreneurs attend feast as protests mark US president’s second state visit
Lucy Powell has hit out at the “sexist” framing of her deputy Labour leadership campaign, with people claiming she and her rival, Bridget Phillipson, are standing as “proxies” for two men, Aletha Adu reports.
Most of Donald Trump’s policies horrify progressives and leftwingers in Britain, including Labour party members and supporters, but Keir Starmer has said almost nothing critical about the Trump administration because he has taken a view that maintaining good relations with the White House is in the national interest.
I understand the UK government’s position of being pragmatic on the international stage and wanting to maintain a good relationship with the leader of the most powerful country in the world. Faced with a revanchist Russia, Europe’s security feels less certain now than at any time since the second world war. And the threat of even higher US tariffs is ever present.
But it’s also important to ensure our special relationship includes being open and honest with each other. At times, this means being a critical friend and speaking truth to power – and being clear that we reject the politics of fear and division. Showing President Trump why he must back Ukraine, not Putin. Making the case for taking the climate emergency seriously. Urging the president to stop the tariff wars that are tearing global trade apart. And putting pressure on him to do much more to end Israel’s horrific onslaught on Gaza, as only he has the power to bring Israel’s brazen and repeated violations of international law to an end.
Continue reading...Home Office says it will review modern slavery laws to save PM’s ‘one in, one out’ returns deal with France
Shabana Mahmood has accused asylum seekers of making “vexatious, last-minute claims” to avoid removal to France as the Home Office said it would review modern slavery laws to save Keir Starmer’s returns deal.
After an 11th-hour injunction that scuppered Labour’s “one in, one out” scheme, the home secretary said she would stop claimants “suddenly deciding that they are a modern slave on the eve of their removal”, adding that it made a “mockery of our laws and this country’s generosity”.
Continue reading...Video from ‘unite the kingdom’ rally captured man saying ‘someone needs to shoot Keir Starmer’
A man allegedly captured on video at the far-right rally in London on Saturday threatening to kill Keir Starmer has been arrested by police.
An investigation was launched on Sunday in connection with the video, which was filmed at the event organised by the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as Tommy Robinson.
Continue reading...Two army divisions work their way towards centre of Gaza City as further Israeli airstrikes destroy buildings
Israeli troops pressed ahead with a ground offensive into Gaza City on Wednesday, making further efforts to force more people to flee their homes and travel to overcrowded and unsafe areas in the south of the devastated territory.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Wednesday they had carried out 150 air and artillery strikes ahead of the ground operation that began early on Tuesday morning.
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