US consumer confidence hits record low as Americans fret about rising prices; jobs report beats forecasts – as it happened

Newsflash: the US economy added more jobs than expected in April.Non-farm payrolls rose by 115,000 last month, the Bureau for Labor Statistics reports, beating forecasts of a 62,000 increase.That’s still a slowdown compared with March, though – where the NFP has been revised up to 185,000 jobs, from 178,000 initially.But February’s data is even worse than previously thought – payrolls that month are now estimated to have fallen by 156,000, down from a previous estimate of a 133,000 decline.Those revisions mean employment in February and March combined is 16,000 lower than previously reported

UK borrowing costs fall and pound rises after Starmer says he will stay as PM

UK government borrowing costs fell and the pound rose on Friday as Keir Starmer vowed to remain as prime minister despite the Labour party losing hundreds of council seats across England.Investors calculated that some of the intense pressure on Starmer’s leadership had eased, as Labour appeared on track for smaller losses than election experts had predicted.The yield – effectively the interest rate – had jumped earlier this week, amid fears that the prime minister could face a leadership challenge if the results from the local elections and the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales were particularly poor.But after Starmer insisted he would not walk away, the yield on benchmark UK 10-year gilts was down 5 basis points, or 0.05 of a percentage point, at 4

‘Being human helps’: despite rise of AI is there still hope for Europe’s translators?

In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.The proposed translation was reassuring, with his job security in mind: L’air de la nuit, vif et vif, était vivifiant (The night air, lively and lively, was enlivening

UK schools should remove pupils’ online photos as AI blackmail threat grows, say experts

UK schools should remove pictures of pupils’ faces from their websites and social media accounts because blackmailers are using them to create sexually explicit images, experts have said.Child safety experts and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) warn that criminals are using AI to manipulate photos of children and then demand cash not to publish them.They are recommending educational institutions remove identifiable pictures of children from their websites and social media accounts – or consider not using them at all.The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said an unnamed UK secondary school had recently been subjected to a blackmail attempt after criminals used the institution’s website or social media accounts to take photos of schoolchildren and then, using AI tools, turned them into child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The blackmailers sent the images to the school and threatened to publish them online if they did not receive money

Tennis slams’ refusal to discuss money is slap in face for players who are right to threaten boycott | Tumaini Carayol

At some point in the quiet buildup to her opening match at the Italian Open, Aryna Sabalenka decided to attack one of the most contentious subjects in her sport with the same force as her forehand. In her press conference, the subject of the top players’ attempts to attain a greater revenue share from the grand slam tournaments prompted the world No 1 to make a drastic prediction: “I think at some point we will boycott it, yeah,” she said. “I feel like that’s going to be the only way to fight for our rights.”It marked an escalation in a pay dispute that, until this point, had played out in a series of polite letters and public statements. Over a year ago, in March 2025, the players sent their first letter to the grand slam tournaments

England aim to match Lionesses and Red Roses as historic summer kicks off

Historic occasions are like buses: you spend ages twiddling your thumbs and then two come along at once. England have waited nine years for another home World Cup, wallowing all the while in memories of their win in 2017, and almost a century for a maiden women’s Test at Lord’s. Now both are being thrust upon them over the space of a single month, from 12 June to 13 July, in a true summer bonanza for women’s cricket.First, though, a T20 World Cup dress rehearsal: three one-day internationals against New Zealand, followed by three Twenty20s against the same opposition, and another three against India. The 50-over series, which begins on Sunday in Durham, feels a little as if it has been plonked thoughtlessly into the calendar