Le Journal

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial newsEuropean luxury stocks are also suffering this morning. The French conglomerate LVMH has dropped 4.45%, wiping billions off its market value. The group owns fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs and Loewe.Hermès International is also falling, down 2.9% this morning. Continue reading...

The Guardian’s picture editors select photos from around the world Continue reading...

US president says he no longer feels the need to think ‘purely of peace’ in letter to Norwegian prime ministerDonald Trump has linked his repeated threats to seize control of Greenland to the fact that he has not been awarded the Nobel peace prize in an extraordinary letter sent to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.The US president said in the letter – the authenticity of which was confirmed by Støre to the Norwegian newspaper VG on Monday – that after failing to win the prize, he no longer felt the need to think “purely of peace”. Continue reading...

His blunt, brash scepticism has made the podcaster and writer something of a cult figure. But as concern over large language models builds, he’s no longer the outsider he once wasIf some time in an entirely possible future they come to make a movie about “how the AI bubble burst”, Ed Zitron will doubtless be a main character. He’s the perfect outsider figure: the eccentric loner who saw all this coming and screamed from the sidelines that the sky was falling, but nobody would listen. Just as Christian Bale portrayed Michael Burry, the investor who predicted the 2008 financial crash, in The Big Short, you can well imagine Robert Pattinson fighting Paul Mescal, say, to portray Zitron, the animated, colourfully obnoxious but doggedly detail-oriented Brit, who’s become one of big tech’s noisiest critics.This is not to say the AI bubble will burst, necessarily, but against a tidal wave of AI boosterism, Zitron’s blunt, brash scepticism has made him something of a cult figure. His tech newsletter, Where’s Your Ed At, now has more than 80,000 subscribers; his weekly podcast, Better Offline, is well within the Top 20 on the tech charts; he’s a regular dissenting voice in the media; and his subreddit has become a safe space for AI sceptics, including those within the tech industry itself – one user describes him as “a lighthouse in a storm of insane hypercapitalist bullshit”. Continue reading...

Fremantle Park, Perth Returning to Australian stages after nine years, the band delivers a fierce, generous set that draws on four decades of musicGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailDragging his hand across the piano keys, Nick Cave leaps into the air and charges towards the crowd like a preacher breaking from the pulpit. “Bring your spirit down!” he cries repeatedly, arms flung wide as the choir roars behind him.It’s barely 10 minutes into their set at Fremantle Park in Perth, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have the audience in the palm of their hands. Touring their 2024 album Wild God in Australia for the first time, they open with the brooding track Frogs and the eponymous Wild God, an explosive crescendo of high-pitched strings, soaring vocals and pounding percussion. Continue reading...