Reeves arrives at IMF with little leeway to prove its UK downgrade wrong

The Iran war is bad news for the global economy. But for some countries, the unfolding conflict is having a bigger impact than for others. The International Monetary Fund’s verdict is that Britain is the G7’s biggest loser.Amid the rising damage from the Middle East war, the Washington-based fund warned UK economic growth rate would be 0.5 percentage points lower this year than it had predicted back in January – the biggest downgrade among the club of wealthy nations

BP’s new boss to overhaul structure after retreat from green strategy

BP’s new boss has set out plans to reinstate the company structure the fossil fuel supermajor ditched six years ago as part of its failed attempt to reorganise the business to pursue a green agenda.Meg O’Neill told staff that the 117-year-old company would return to a “simpler, stronger” two-business arrangement including an upstream oil and gas production unit and a downstream business focused on refining and distributing fuels and retail activities.“In service of becoming a simpler, stronger, more valuable BP, we intend to build an organisation with a clear upstream and downstream,” O’Neill said.The planned overhaul is the latest step in dismantling the legacy of former chief executive Bernard Looney who in 2020 restructured BP to include a gas and low-carbon energy division as part of a wide-ranging mission to “reimagine” BP as a green energy company.The green agenda raised concerns among BP’s investor base, and made the company a target of activist investor Elliott Management, which called for BP to return its focus to fossil fuels and simplify its structure

AI companies make powerful tech – but they’re also savvy marketers

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the Guardian’s US tech editor, writing to you from my happy village in Pokopia.Artificial intelligence companies make powerful products. They also make outlandish claims.Last week, Anthropic released Claude Mythos, an AI model focused on cybersecurity, which has inspired widespread thrill and panic over how capable it is said to be

Don’t make Marshal Foch’s mistake on AI | Letters

Emma Brockes’ article struck a chord (It’s finally happened: I’m now worried about AI. And consulting ChatGPT did nothing to allay my fears, 8 April). I am reading Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, in which the eminent French historian and soon-to-be-executed resistance worker gives a first-hand account of the collapse of the French army in 1940. He attributes the debacle at least in part to a failure of imagination on the part of the French general staff, who were incapable of grasping that technology, and war, had fundamentally changed since 1918.Brockes’ article suggests that we, and our leaders, are suffering from the same inability to understand that a technology which is currently amusingly alarming will develop in less amusing ways – the future Marshal Ferdinand Foch had, according to Bloch, earlier dismissed aircraft as being a toy for hobbyists and not of any military interest

Nicky Henderson on Constitution Hill and the yips: ‘The best jumper you’ll ever see and he lost it’

The venerated trainer could not find a guru in the world to cure one of the greatest hurdlers in history but a surprise switch to the Flat promises a career swansongNicky Henderson is 75 years old and, after almost half a century of training horses, he has seen everything in the strange and compelling world of racing. But the extraordinary and still evolving story of his great old horse Constitution Hill makes even Henderson pause in his study. It’s a sunlit afternoon in Lambourn and we’ve just left the mighty but complex horse in his stable.Standing next to Henderson for a photoshoot, Constitution Hill had been typically calm. He then took a slow walk outside before, having waited patiently for lunch, the horse ambled inside for a good feed

The Breakdown | Will Bath or anyone else stop the Bordeaux Bègles juggernaut in Europe?

Last week Northampton’s director of rugby, Phil Dowson, made an interesting comparison between boxing and rugby. He suggested there was a decent chance his side’s Champions Cup quarter-final against Bath would prove good viewing because of the clubs’ contrasting philosophies around how best to play the game. “Styles make fights” is a familiar ring mantra and the same is increasingly true in top-level rugby.On the one hand you had Northampton, all razor-sharp angles and dextrous hands. On the other was Bath, renowned for their knack of wearing their rivals down and then picking them off in the closing stages