Author: damazah@gmail.com

Moscow says it will have a ‘harsh and painful’ response to Hungarian move to expel 10 diplomatsWe are getting a bit more on that Russian response to Hungary, and it’s clear that Moscow is not happy.The foreign ministry said it would proceed with a “harsh and painful” response, AFP reported.“The response to the Russophobic lobby in Budapest will be harsh and painful,” foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told the TASS state news agency.ShareKey eventsUK summons Serbian chargé d’affaires over Mladić funeralThe UK has joined the growing chorus of countries criticising Serbia for the pomp and the official participation in yesterday’s…

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Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on a range of US goods came into effect on Tuesday, with no sign of a trade deal on the horizon. The counter-tariffs will apply to nearly C$28bn ($20bn; £15bn) worth of American products, from steel to furniture to cotton T-shirts, and will be as high as 50%. Fresh fish and lobster were also on the list, but Canada later omitted them after pushback from its seafood industry – a sign of the tricky balance it has to strike as it retaliates against its largest trading partner.Both US and Canadian officials have said they would like to…

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Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon delivers a keynote speech at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan June 1, 2026. Ann Wang | ReutersQualcomm shares jumped 10% on Tuesday after the company announced a data center infrastructure partnership with Amazon Web Services, a major win as the chipmaker tries to take on Nvidia in the AI market. According to a press release, Qualcomm is working with Amazon “across multiple generations of customized silicon” help build out AWS’ AI infrastructure.”As AI workloads grow exponentially — driving unprecedented demand for compute, storage, networking and memory bandwidth, and energy-efficient infrastructure — the collaboration brings together Amazon’s comprehensive,…

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The boss of one of the UK’s biggest chip companies has claimed AI will be able to find a cure for cancer “in our lifetime”.Rene Haas, chief executive of the chip designer Arm Holdings, said that, while modelling how a DNA marker is affected by cancer was currently “too complex” a problem for either humans or technology, computers were “going to solve it” in the future.Haas told the BBC: “AI is going to … find a cure for cancer that today you and I, other humans [could] not in our lifetimes. I believe in our lifetime, AI will help cure…

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One of the best-known scenes from the TV series The Inbetweeners is the four angst-ridden teenage characters shouting abuse at people queueing at a bus stop. Only losers take the bus, is the point – except they use a much ruder word. There’s also a statement, misattributed to Margaret Thatcher, that any man over the age of 26 using a bus was a loser. This idea is deeply ingrained.But when I was an MP it became obvious that there wasn’t the same stigma attached to jumping on the bus in London as there often was in other big cities. It…

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Two reports have renewed the debate over whether nations should stop prioritizing economic growth.In June, the Global Justice Report, published by a research organization called the World Inequality Lab, called for a rebalancing of income and wealth, and for the richest countries to accept lower growth, to solve planet-wide problems such as environmental degradation and climate change1.In May, a United Nations group of economists, the High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP, published a set of recommendations for moving beyond gross domestic product (GDP)2. The report called on nations to manage their economies around a dashboard of indicators of sustainable well-being,…

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Key eventsAnd now Price, in the same over, caught behind for 29. Glos 45-3.ShareBustling Balderson does it again, bowling Phillips for eight, Gloucestershire 44-2. Ken, watching with keener eyes than me thinks it may have kept down a little, anyhow, it zipped through the gate without any manners.ShareAfter nine neatly-knitted overs here at OT, Anderson is replaced at the JA end by Mitch Stanley.ShareThey restart at Old Trafford in sudden bright sunshine, though I’ve just got to finish something, won’t be too long, but do keep chatting BTL.ShareThey’ve just started at New Road (the inevitable Ben Sanderson dismissing Lategan for…

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By Deborah Oyekale Nigerian Afrobeats star Burna Boy and Colombian singer Shakira have recorded a major milestone with their joint track, “Dai Dai”. The official music video crossed 1 billion views on Shakira’s YouTube channel, making it the first song released in 2026 to reach the mark. “Dai Dai” was released on May 23, 2026, and was named the Official Song of the FIFA World Cup 2026. The video now has over 1,000,951,637 views and 7.8 million likes. The collaboration blends Shakira’s Latin-pop sound with Burna Boy’s Afrobeats, and it gained massive traction during the tournament. The duo also performed…

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Why do recipes often say to deseed tomatoes? Isn’t that where the flavour is, especially since the seeds don’t make much difference to a sauce’s texture?Catriona, by email“It all depends on the variety of tomato,” says the Guardian’s Rachel Roddy, “because some are much seedier than others. Sicilian varieties that require little watering, for example, have loads of little bitter seeds, which do need flicking or sieving out.” If, however, Catriona had some vesuvio tomatoes destined for a salad, Jay Patel, co-owner of Italian restaurant Legare in London, wouldn’t bother: “Those are generally pretty meaty and don’t have many seeds,…

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UK pays highest borrowing rate since 1998 in 30-year bond saleNewsflash: The UK has paid a record high borrowing cost to sell 30-year government debt this morning, as bond market turbulence puts pressure on the public finances.The UK has sold £4.25bn of gilts maturing in 2056 at a yield, or interest rate, of 5.8168%, Reuters reports.This appears to be the highest yield for any gilt sale since the UK’s Debt Management Office was created in 1998.Significantly, it is above the 5.4047% yield which bonds of this type were sold for in May 2025.It’s not a massive surprise, as last week’s…

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