Regulator finds inadequate monitoring by firm could have exposed vulnerable customers ‘to clear risk of harm’ Ovo Energy has agreed to pay more than £10m after the energy regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, found a lack of monitoring of vulnerable customers with prepayment meters (PPMs) could have exposed them to a “clear risk of harm”. Ofgem found that Ovo did not adequately monitor its PPM customers, including those on the priority services register, leading to breaches of the watchdog’s rules designed to protect customers in vulnerable situations. ​​ Continue reading...

Emma-Lee Moss, AKA singer-songwriter Emmy the Great, has written a memoir rooted in her love of Hong Kong’s east-meets-west pop. She picks her favourite tracks Emma-Lee Moss, a singer-songwriter who released four albums as Emmy the Great, was born in Hong Kong to an English father and Hongkonger mother. She lived there until she was 11, when her family moved to England, one of many who left Hong Kong before its transfer of sovereignty from the UK to China in 1997. Even as a child, Moss understood the significance of the handover, which returned Hong Kong to Chinese control after 156 years as a British colony. “Thanks to our British passports, we would avoid the greatest schism our city had ever known – and its consequences, which were unwritten,” Moss writes in her memoir, My Cantopop Nights. Later, as a touring musician, Moss played gigs in Hong Kong, where she reconnected with her childhood love of Cantopop – predominantly Hong Kong music that blended Chinese and western pop sensibilities. In 2017, she moved back there to write her fourth album. That year, which marked 20 years since the handover, saw thousands of pro-democracy protesters on the streets after activists including Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow were imprisoned. Amid the unrest, Moss sought to capture Hong Kong’s sound and spirit through her music. Continue reading...

Set to be this year’s biggest blockbuster, The Odyssey’s cast has been selected to ‘represent the world’. Fair enough – except that one key country seems to have gone completely unrepresented … There are the American accents, gleaming body suits and a muddy Dunkirk palette. And then there is Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, a casting choice that recently drew racist attacks from the usual moaners of the internet, including Elon Musk, who complained it wasn’t authentic. Authenticity matters. He’s just focusing entirely in the wrong place. To many Greeks, what concerns us most about the first look at Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is the whereabouts of Billy Zane. Zane, like other beloved members of the Greek diaspora in Hollywood, has recently appeared on “Alternative Odyssey” lists on the Greek side of social media, as well as over dinner table debates from Patras to Palmers Green. (Theo James, Jennifer Aniston, Hank Azaria, and Dave Bautista are among the other nominees.) Greek and Greek Cypriot media platforms are writing open letters. It’s a symptom of feeling left out by Hollywood, again and with no explanation, from our foundational mythologies and epics, with a cast list that features not even a token –opoulos, –edes, or –iannou. Not a single Greek. Continue reading...

Energy and military sites targeted as guests gather for economic forum where Putin is due to speak on Friday Ukrainian drones hit energy and military sites in St Petersburg early on Wednesday hours before international guests gathered for the city’s flagship economic forum, in a blow to Vladimir Putin. Several long-range drones crashed into oil storage facilities after Russian air defences tried unsuccessfully to shoot them down. There were loud explosions and black smoke rose high above the city from the blazing oil terminal. Continue reading...

‘It has always been more than just a team to me’ Driver currently third in this year’s standings Charles Leclerc has signed a new multi-year deal to remain driving for Ferrari, with the 28-year-old Monegasque extending his relationship with the team which began in 2019. He will continue to drive alongside Lewis Hamilton who also has a long-term contract with the team. Ferrari announced their decision to continue with Leclerc on the eve of his home grand prix at Monaco this weekend. He has been a staunch Ferrari driver for almost all of his career and has competed in 155 races for the Scuderia, a tally second only to Michael Schumacher’s enormously successful tenure with Ferrari between 1996 and 2006. Continue reading...

Johnson tells BBC documentary he played tennis in early 2016 with then prime minister to discuss EU referendum UK politics live – latest updates David Cameron offered Boris Johnson a senior Cabinet position in return for campaigning for the UK to remain in the EU during the 2016 referendum, it has been revealed In the event, and with four months to go before the vote, Johnson transformed the terms of the debate by announcing in February 2016 that “after a huge amount of heartache” he was throwing his weight behind the campaign to take Britain out of the EU. Continue reading...

Updates from Wednesday’s quarter-final matches Email Katy | Zerev sees off Jódar | Kostyuk through For at least a few fleeting moments, it appeared that something significant might be unfolding on Tuesday beneath the Court Philippe-Chatrier roof. Rafael Jódar had started his first grand slam quarter-final desperate to make his mark and he spent the first 40 minutes eviscerating the ball off both sides, lasering groundstrokes that seemingly struck every line. He built a 5-2 lead over Alexander Zverev, a game away from starting with a statement in the biggest match of his career. Normalcy resumed quickly. Jódar’s attempts to serve out the set ended in a break to love for the second seed, who quickly took control and refused to relinquish his position until the end of the match. Continue reading...

The outspoken crime novelist talks his provocative new book, his hatred of technology and why the film adaptation of LA Confidential is a ‘turkey’ James Ellroy does not own a computer, his publicist explains, so will a phone interview be OK? When the self-proclaimed “mad dog of American crime fiction” picks up his landline at the appointed hour, it transpires that he has never owned a mobile phone either. Nor sent an email. Nor figured out how to turn on his ex-wife Helen Knode’s TV set. “Everything is very complex and it’s satanic to me, the dependency that people have on computers,” Ellroy, 78, says cheerfully in a bass baritone drawl from his pad in Denver, Colorado. “I don’t engage in internet chat and I understand there’s all this crazy shit on the internet and people with the most outlandish beliefs on God’s green Earth.” Continue reading...

With rivals racing to market to raise ‘eye-popping sums’, the spotlight is now on the AI sector’s one-time ‘poster child’ A year is a long time in AI. Just 12 months ago, Sam Altman was predicting his company OpenAI would build a super intelligence and fundamentally remake society. Now the boss of the ChatGPT developer is walking back those ideas after failing to make money from ads and erotic chatbots. Meanwhile, rivals are storming ahead with plans to expand and go public on the stock market, in what is widely expected to be a season of record-setting initial public offerings (IPOs). Continue reading...

Chilling comments by Reform figures can’t be dismissed when you consider the overwhelming power of the UK’s centralised state Britain is much closer to tyranny than you think. Consider a recent social post by Zia Yusuf, one of Reform UK’s leading figures. “Recent events demonstrate why I view the Tory and Labour politicians who created the burning injustice of modern Britain as traitors to their country,” he wrote. “A reckoning is coming.” He didn’t define those “recent events”, or what his reckoning would entail, but historically speaking, those deemed “traitors to their country” do not fare well. Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

The neurologist Orlando Swayne doesn’t suggest everyone can recover. But he does argue that early, targeted and intense therapy can sometimes bring about life-changing improvements – and we have a moral obligation to provide it Claire was in bad shape. She had been brought to the ward on a stretcher and hoisted on to a bed where she lay curled up in a ball. She was unable to speak, her eyes flat and face expressionless. While she could move her right arm a little, her left arm and both legs were immobile. Life had changed dramatically for Claire, a mother of three in her late 30s, many months earlier, when she collapsed while on a night out with friends. A weakness in an artery at the base of her brain had ruptured, spilling blood around her frontal lobe. She was taken to hospital, where surgeons removed two side plate-sized pieces of bone from her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. She spent months in intensive care. Continue reading...

Even for nonbelievers like me, the pope has become a reassuring – and all too rare – voice of moral clarity Do you remember the early 2000s, when Silicon Valley buzzed with idealism and tech bros told us they were going to save the world? “Don’t be evil” was Google’s unofficial motto; it’s 2004 IPO prospectus declared that doing “good things for the world” was more important than “short term gains”. Mark Zuckerberg similarly wrote in Facebook’s 2012 IPO letter that the social network was “built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected”. As was obvious to anyone paying attention, this was all performative bullshit. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic about that period of time – which came to a definitive end in 2018, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. By and large, billionaires and CEOs still cared what the hoi polloi thought of them. They were self-aware enough to realize that, even with all their billions, there’s a lot more of us than there are of them. Continue reading...

Think self-tan is too much effort – or too risky? Not any more. The latest products are so simple to use you can just go with the glow I can’t be without a facial self-tan in spring/summer. Keen to offload heavier coverage foundations that can slip, slide and suffocate in the sunshine, I reach for a subtle tanner as a warmer, lighter and, truly, easier base layer for makeup. People wrongly imagine self-tan to be too effortful, fiddly and risky, and understandably wonder where to slot it into their skincare routine, but a new crop of facial self-tanners simplifies both these issues. Continue reading...

Democrats seek to oust Republicans in New Jersey and Iowa, while other major races remain up in the air Voters in Tuesday’s primary elections across the US chose candidates who could flip critical districts in the US House and Senate in November, setting up a series of high-stakes general election contests in a midterm year expected to favor Democrats. Among the most watched races are: a New Jersey Democrat who could oust a Republican incumbent absent with a mystery medical issue for months; several Iowa Democrats hoping to flip their red-leaning state; and California’s redrawn maps that have given Democrats an advantage in the heavily blue state. Continue reading...

Emergency services at scene of incident at Sourton Down, near Okehampton A Royal Navy helicopter has crashed into a field in Devon, police have confirmed. Emergency services are at the scene of the incident at Sourton Down, near Okehampton. Continue reading...

Howells puts in a strong turn as Henry Paget, a Victorian marquess who blows his inheritance on hosting wild parties and staging gender-defying theatrical performances Playing the shy Colin in Russell T Davies’s 2021 TV drama It’s a Sin, Callum Scott Howells had to be the humble caterpillar compared to Olly Alexander’s extravagant butterfly. But now Howells gets an upgrade to full butterfly status in this high-spirited and good-humoured drama from screenwriter Lisa Baker and director Celyn Jones, reclaiming a forgotten chapter in queer Victorian history. With a moustache resembling that of Proust, Howells amusingly plays the flamboyant aristocrat Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, a delicate consumptive and aesthete who, in the late 19th century, blew his vast inheritance on colossal private theatricals, wild parties and jaw-dropping performances in which he would appear in gender-challenging costumes, including a diaphanous veil he wore as a “butterfly dancer”. He caused scandal with his behaviour and apparently unconsummated marriage to first cousin Lily (Ruby Stokes), whose attitude to him here is perhaps more affectionate and tolerant than it was in real life. Continue reading...

The critic’s memoir’s is a portrait in determination to go against the grain and ‘pursue a life in words and ideas’ Brian Dillon lost his parents early, his mother when he was 16, his father at 21. He writes of them in passing here, as he did in his first book, In the Dark Room, but with little overt display of grief. Narrated in the third person, with young Dillon a removed he rather than an emotionally manipulative I, this isn’t a weepy orphanhood memoir. It describes instead his awkward Dublin education, as he struggles to carve out an identity for himself and to accommodate his passion for avant garde music and literature within academe. He grows up surrounded by the books acquired by his father, who left school early and went to university late. He reads them avidly and adds to them with library borrowings and purchases of his own. But, to begin with, his greater attachment is to music magazines and to David Bowie, whose excitingly ambivalent sexuality echoes his own. His father speaks of duty – to homework, weekly mass and getting a decent job. But his commitment is to jouissance, if only he can find it. Continue reading...

Sarah Jones appeals for calm after rioting over the death of Nowak, who was handcuffed while dying from stab wound Yesterday Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, delivered what he called an “emergency address to the nation” on YouTube at around this time. In it, he claimed that the Henry Nowak case was proof that white people were treated unfairly in the UK. He said that George Floyd (whom he described as a “career criminal”) died in policy custody in the US, there was a surge in support for the Black Lives Matter campaign, with Keir Starmer taking the knee. But nothing remotely similar has occurred after the death of Nowak, Farage claimed. Silence, absolute silence, proof, if ever there was any, that we’re living in a two-tier culture in this country where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities. Enough of anti white prejudice a promotion of the idea that white lives matter just as much as black lives. An end to DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and positive discrimination, but a country that treats everybody equally and fairly before the law. This is serious. This is urgent. I fear for where our society would be in a few short years if we don’t grip this and do it very, very quickly. I don’t think the evidence at the moment would suggest that, if you look at the facts and figures about policing. I will always listen to the police in terms of what they’re saying and the home secretary said yesterday [that] we need to talk to the police. We need to talk to the Sikh community. We need to talk to knife crime campaigners. We need to understand what it is we need to do differently and better and we will do that. Continue reading...

With Graham Potter at the helm and Viktor Gyökeres finding form, hopes are high after playoff success This article is part of the Guardian’s 2026 World Cup Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 48 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from three countries each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 11 June. Continue reading...

There are ways to address the lack of faith. And unless Starmer, Burnham or Streeting do that, the issue of who is PM is moot What happens next? Will Andy Burnham win the Makerfield byelection? Will Keir Starmer fight on? Will Wes Streeting run? After that, can Reform win the next general election? Is the Green bounce real? The politics-as-sports predictions rumble on. One newspaper editor texted me the other day asking who would be prime minister come Christmas, apparently because I was on his “clever list”. “Dunno” I said. “You’re off the list,” he replied. My fear is that whoever is prime minister by the end of the year, a lot of attention will have been distracted from the underlying problem. Voters are not just giving up on this government, but on democracy itself. This weary, cold scepticism comes through in the polls, the focus groups, and it’s in the look in the electorate’s eyes. Politicians know it and it’s making the country ungovernable. Polly Curtis is chief executive of Demos. Her latest paper, The New Deal: How to repair the broken relationship between state and citizen, is published today Continue reading...

The EU must enact laws to stop gender apartheid and end impunity – not invite the perpetrators to Brussels. For Afghan women and girls it is a matter of survival The Taliban in Afghanistan recently arrested three of my family members, kept them in captivity, tortured one, and confiscated my house. It was to silence me. I was about to write to European diplomats to seek support for the release of my innocent family when I heard the shocking news that the EU is inviting Taliban officials to Brussels. After nearly five years, what has changed in Afghanistan to make life better for its women and its people? Five years with no official schools for female students beyond sixth grade, while thousands of religious schools have been established across Afghanistan, where girls may attend without restrictions. Five years of bans on women becoming doctors, while maternal and infant mortality have skyrocketed. Five years of exclusion from the job market, leaving women to beg on the streets. Continue reading...

Plus: which teams had the most wins without promotion and can anyone match Jadon Sancho’s hat-trick? “Matvey Safonov did not make a single save in the Champions League final, across normal time, extra time and penalties, and wound up winning it,” notes Philip Cornwall. “I realise records are limited, but has this happened before in a major final?” We’ve found three more Champions League finals in which the winning goalkeeper did not have a save to make, though none of them had the chance to do so during a penalty competition. When José Mourinho’s Porto beat Monaco 3-0 in 2004, Vitor Baía made no saves that were officially recorded, though he did make one great stop when Fernando Morientes was wrongly flagged offside. Continue reading...

OECD forecast sets out economic risks from conflict, pointing to potential shortfalls to key energy products OECD predicts spate of recessions globally if Iran conflict drags into 2027 Rural areas in the UK would be particularly at risk of diesel shortages if the conflict in Iran continues to squeeze supplies, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned. The OECD predicted economic growth of 0.9% in the UK this year – a modest upgrade from the 0.7% it feared in March when it last updated its forecasts. It said government spending will help to support the economy in the short term. Continue reading...

Watchdog says ‘publishers will now have effective tools to prevent content being used to power AI features in search’ Publishers will be able to opt out of their content being used to train Google’s AI models and power its search summaries, the UK competition watchdog has announced as it imposes new conduct requirements on search services. “Publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews,” the Competition and Markets Authority said. Continue reading...

The Cambrian Line hugs the shore, offering easy access to the Wales Coast Path, the Cadfan Way pilgrimage route and glorious Cardigan Bay From the graveyard of St Michael’s in Ynys, Wales, the view was ravishing: the Italianate oddity of Portmeirion sparkled on the opposite shore; the peaks of Eryri (Snowdonia) rippled in the distance; and, within the River Dwyryd’s broad swirl, sat the tidal island of Ynys Gifftan. “No one’s lived there for years,” said a passerby pointing to the isle, “but it’s just been put up for sale – £350,000, if you fancy it.” I rather did, but sadly my modest savings don’t stretch that far. Wales’s “armpit”, geographically speaking – which is how some people refer to that chunk of Gwynedd where estuaries perspire into Cardigan Bay before it curves round the outstretched Llŷn peninsula – looked like a spectacular place to be marooned. Continue reading...