President says he gave Britain ‘better deal than I had to’ but ally was ‘not there when we needed them’ on Iran

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Donald Trump has threatened to row back on the trade deal the US signed with the UK last year, in his latest salvo against the British government over sharp differences about the US’s approach to the Middle East.

The US president said the economic deal struck with the UK, which cut some of his tariffs on cars, aluminium and steel, was “better than I had to” and that it could “always be changed”.

A man who meant to be a priest is faced with a moral crossroads in this ambitious and affecting first novel

Jon Doyle’s debut novel tells the story of Mack O’Brien, a young man who went to a seminary to study for the priesthood but was asked to leave because he had no real calling, and has therefore returned to his family home in Wales to work out what to do with his life. Cheek by jowl with his ailing, deeply religious mother, and a father struggling to process the grief of his own parents’ recent deaths, he finds himself drawn into participating in a local theatre production – playing a disciple in Owen Sheers’s now-legendary Passion of Port Talbot, an immersive community-led re-enactment of the crucifixion that took place over several days in Port Talbot in 2012, starring Michael Sheen.

Mack is recruited after a steelworker from the plant where he works as a security guard drops out of the show. Material enough for a novel already, one might think, but all this becomes more or less background noise when, on the same night he agrees to be in the play, Mack bumps into Siwan, a young woman he was close to at school. Siwan’s mother was an environmental activist who ended up going to prison for her protests. Siwan had visited him at the seminary on the day he agreed to leave the priesthood and said to him, “forgive me father, for I am about to sin”. The nature of the sin she is intent on committing becomes the focus of the novel.

Researchers identify wrecks at the bottom of the sea from as far back as fifth century BC, from Europe and beyond

Spanish archaeologists exploring the bay that curves between the southern port of Algeciras and the Rock of Gibraltar have documented the wrecks of more than 30 ships that came to grief near the Pillars of Hercules between the fifth century BC and the second world war.

Over the millennia, the bay, which sits at the north end of the strait of Gibraltar that separates Europe from Africa, has swallowed everything from Phoenician and Roman vessels to British, Spanish, Venetian and Dutch ships – as well as the odd aeroplane.

A cross between road movie and sci-fi, this is a subversive and bittersweet story about a 77-year-old who refuses to be shipped off to a ‘colony’

Gabriel Mascaro’s wayward, intriguing feature is a kind of road movie, or maybe river movie – the Amazon, in fact, in Brazil’s remote north-west. It is a film that follows its nose, meandering across land and water, wonderfully shot with fascinating visual compositions. There are occasional weird resemblances to Fitzcarraldo or The African Queen, but filmic allusions are not the point. This is a drama which contrives to transform and liberate its elderly heroine with a series of encounters and vignettes; it is a film about escape and maybe the film itself escapes generic classification, though it’s a problem that disparate ideas and characters are left undeveloped.

On one level, we have a chilling dystopian nightmare about a future society that pretends to value its older citizens by compelling them to leave their homes and live in special “colonies”, a low-cost gerontocidal warehousing of everyone over 75. They are sometimes transported in a special prison vehicle for errant oldsters nicknamed the “wrinkle wagon” – like a dog-catcher’s van – and when they finally have to board the coach taking them to these “colonies” they are issued with humiliating, compulsory adult diapers. But on another level, it is a more realist drama about the way society patronises and erases older people.

Promotion of ‘bitcoin treasury’ firm with Kwasi Kwarteng draws new attention to Reform leader’s relations with industry

A thumping electronic beat provides the soundtrack to the video as Nigel Farage appears in front of a bank of screens.

At first glance, it could be yet another of the Reform UK leader’s “second jobs” – whether promoting gold as a pension fallback or recording Cameo videos. And in a sense, it is: Farage is promoting a £2m cryptocurrency purchase by a company in which he has £215,000 invested, Stack BTC.

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Dramatic weather in Kamikochi, Japan.

(And a bit of a creative edit.)

Kamikochi is a highland valley in the Hida Mountains, the "Northern Alps" of the Japanese Alps, located in Nagano Prefecture. It is preserved within Chubu-Sangaku National Park. The valley floor is at an elevation of around 1,500 m, while surrounding peaks reach up to 3,190 m. The Azusa River flows through the valley. The area is designated as one of Japan's National Cultural Assets, and is on the list of Special Natural Monuments, and Special Places of Scenic Beauty.

Sony A7C / ILCE-7C
Sony FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS
87mm; 1/100 sec; f/8; ISO 200

Researchers who found the flaws scored beer money bounties and warn the problem is probably pervasive

Exclusive  Security researchers hijacked three popular AI agents that integrate with GitHub Actions by using a new type of prompt injection attack to steal API keys and access tokens, and the vendors who run agents didn’t disclose the problem.…

When Grandma entered her chrysalis three years ago, everyone thought she would come out looking completely different. We all got super excited to see what kind of disgusting or beautiful creature Grandma would become, and we assumed this would give us all sorts of interesting things to look at and talk about. Sadly, it turns out that we’ve been left with nothing but a huge letdown, because Grandma just emerged from her chrysalis looking exactly like she did before.

What a huge disappointment. We waited all that time and wound up with the same exact Grandma we started with.

Everyone remembers exactly what they were doing on that fateful day three years ago when Grandma tapped on a glass in the middle of dinner to get everyone’s attention and calmly said, “It’s time for me to transform,” before getting up and walking into the living room. When we finally checked on her a few days later, we discovered that her body had become fully enveloped inside of a shimmering green and gold chrysalis that hung above one of our recliners.

That first moment of realizing Grandma had entered her chrysalis form was filled with so much hope and promise. We all remember how everyone in the family was hugging and cheering at the sight of Grandma’s chrysalis swaying slightly as it hung from the ceiling. We were all so excited about the possibility that Grandma would crawl out of her chrysalis looking completely different.

For the next three years, everyone in the family was speculating wildly about what Grandma might transform into when she finally emerged from her chrysalis. Dad thought she might come out looking like an angel with enormous feathered wings and gigantic biceps who could lift him up over her head and fly him around town while he shouted curse words and flipped people off.

“People would look up in the sky and scream, ‘Stop saying curse words! Stop flipping us off!’” Dad used to say, his eyes glazed over with a faraway look as he imagined Grandma’s helpful new body. “But they wouldn’t be able to do anything because my mother-in-law would be flying like a thousand miles in the sky and carrying me around, so if they wanted me to stop yelling swears at them from above, they would have to use missiles, and those are hard to get if you’re not the army, so there’d be no way to stop me.”

Mom said that she hoped that Grandma would crawl out of her chrysalis looking exactly like Vladimir Lenin so that she could enter Grandma in the county fair’s annual Lenin Lookalike Contest and win the set of golf clubs they offer as the grand prize every year.

Grandpa hoped that she came out looking like “a big swarm of flies” so that he could “see what it was like to be married to a big swarm of flies.” He also sometimes imagined that Grandma would emerge from the chrysalis looking like “a monster who is half donkey, half car, and half monster” so that he could “kiss a weird thing for free all the time.” Everyone in the family agreed this was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said about another person in the history of human civilization.

The rest of the family also had all sorts of amazing dreams for what Grandma might be turning into during her three years in the chrysalis. Some of us thought she was going to come out looking like a big ball of wriggling human fingers, others thought that she was going to become a big spider or a small spider or a normal-sized spider as big as a bus. Cousin Dorothy speculated that Grandma would turn into “a mysterious antlered beast that will only emerge from the forest during lunar festivals.”

The possibilities seemed endless, and yet they all came crashing down just this morning when Grandma clawed her way out of her chrysalis looking exactly the same as she had when she first went in three years ago. She just fell out of the chrysalis onto the living room floor, stood up, looked at the whole family who were staring at her in shocked silence, and said, “I’m new,” before immediately going into the kitchen to start shoving fistfuls of potato chips into her mouth. When we asked her what the deal was, Grandma explained that she “became goo” inside the chrysalis, but then she apparently just reconstituted herself right back into the same exact body she started with.

Dad got so emotional that he punched a hole in the drywall.

Needless to say, this is one of the biggest letdowns our family has ever had. This is the kind of chrysalis-related anticlimax you always imagine happening to other people, but never to you. Now that it has, we’re all still trying to process how she could have spent so much time in there without a single visible transformation. Grandpa even cried a little bit when he realized that he was never, ever going to know what it’s like to be married to a big swarm of flies. Here’s hoping our family is able to pick up the pieces after this and we can find a way to heal in the wake of this catastrophe.