Nieuws wereld

ONS data for three months to February is not expected to alter Bank of England’s decision on interest rates

Unemployment in the UK unexpectedly fell in the three months to February, according to official figures – but the fallout from the conflict in the Middle East is expected to cause a rise in job cuts.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that the rate of unemployment was 4.9% in the three months to February. This compares with 5.2% in the three months to January, a rate that economists had expected to also see in February.

Zayne Jason William McMillan’s lawyer says client’s tirade was antisemitic but claims he ‘does not consider himself racist against Jewish community’

A man seen mimicking the Bondi beach terror attack before making slurs against Jewish people has been jailed.

Zayne Jason William McMillan, 23, was heavily intoxicated when he and a friend went to Bondi beach, six weeks after the shooting, in which 15 people were killed.

What’s it like to lose your partner of more than 40 years? The novelist and essayist reflects on going from ‘we’ to ‘I’

It wasn’t quite Beatlemania, but, at the height of Paul Auster’s fame in the 1980s and 90s, screaming fans clambered on to the hood of a car after a reading in Buenos Aires. Admirers mobbed him at bookshop events in Paris, the city where he had once eked out a living translating French literature. He was offered big money to make ads promoting American beef to Japan. He was hailed as a rock god, a literary superstar, a postmodernist with leading-man looks.

Little of this is of much consequence or consolation to novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt who, before he died of cancer in 2024, had been married to Auster for more than 40 years. As she tells it in Ghost Stories, her memoir of their life together, she was a tall blond PhD student in a jumpsuit when she met him – “a beautiful man in a black leather jacket” – at a poetry reading. He was separated from the mother of his child, living alone in a gloomy Brooklyn apartment, yet to publish anything of substance. Literature bound them: he was just 15 when he decided his future was in writing; she had come to the same insight at an even younger age.

UK’s Rare Breeds Survival Trust says calf numbers of white park cattle last year were less than two-thirds of 2022 level

An ancient breed of cattle whose ancestors are thought to have accompanied the Celts as they were pushed to Britain’s fringes by the Romans has been designated as urgently at risk by a UK conservation charity.

Publishing its 2026 watchlist on Tuesday, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust moved white park cattle to its “priority” category as new calf numbers sank last year to less than two-thirds of their 2022 level.

She left after being held up at gunpoint. Now Silvana Trevale wants to show a different side to the ‘wounded’ country – with a photography project about the resilience of its youth completed last year

No longer does global power rest only on alliances, military might, currency dynamics, and effective control of multilateral institutions. The new geopolitical contest is between competing infrastructure blocs: packages of finance, contractors, standards, and data systems that create long-term dependencies.

As the old world order fractures and a multipolar era takes shape, Africa has an unprecedented opportunity to translate its global position and enviable economic endowments into durable geopolitical and economic leverage. But African leaders will have to play their cards right.

Private credit markets are under growing stress, fueling fears of a financial crisis that could spill over to the real economy. But a closer look at the evidence suggests that the risks are less severe than in previous cycles, and that predictions of a meltdown are running well ahead of the facts.

By closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has handed the Trump administration a practice test. To pass—and preserve deterrence against a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan—the United States must reopen the Strait decisively and visibly with escorts, minesweepers, and strikes on launch sites.

China’s trade surplus is often blamed on its industrial policies. In reality, however, it reflects a persistent gap between savings and investment, driven by demographic pressures and financial constraints that shape household behavior and restrict private firms’ access to credit.