Peter Mullan brings his formidable presence to this quirky dramedy from first-time feature director Sean Robert Dunn: he is angry and weary, disillusioned but kind-hearted, someone who got his feelings hurt a long time ago … but wouldn’t dream of making a fuss about it. It’s Mullan who gives weight and flavour to a film that might otherwise be a bit watery and unsure quite how sharp a sting it wan...
Peter Mullan brings his formidable presence to this quirky dramedy from first-time feature director Sean Robert Dunn: he is angry and weary, disillusioned but kind-hearted, someone who got his feelings hurt a long time ago … but wouldn’t dream of making a fuss about it. It’s Mullan who gives weight and flavour to a film that might otherwise be a bit watery and unsure quite how sharp a sting it wants to deliver. Kenneth (played by Mullan) is a cantankerous local historian and widower in the fictional Scottish town of Aberloch, obsessed with the memory of his obscure ancestor Sir Douglas Weatherford, an unscrupulous 18th-century landowner and amateur surgeon given to vivisectional experiments on the lower orders. Sir Douglas’s writings on the importance of rational self-interest have caused him to be described by his descendant as a lost hero of the Scottish enlightenment: a mix of David Hume, Adam Smith, Dr Livingstone and Walter Scott. Kenneth embarrassingly dresses up in wig and knee breeches as Sir Douglas Weatherford to give excruciating lectures about his hero to uncomprehending tourists. But then a low-rent Game of Thrones-style TV show starts filming in the locality. The tourist centre where Kenneth is employed eagerly throws away all its boring Sir Douglas Weatherford exhibits, repurposes itself as a fan hub and makes Kenneth dress up as one of the show’s silly characters. Kenneth is a powder keg of emotion ready to blow and what makes it worse is that Sir Douglas’s ghost is lurking about the place, full of contempt for his ridiculous and pathetic descendant. I could have done with a lot more of Sir Douglas himself, whose dyspeptic speech at the very beginning is very funny: but that keynote of scabrous satire that he appears to introduce is overtaken by bittersweet sadness as Kenneth takes centre stage. It’s a tender and very sympathetic performance from Mullan.
Walt Disney Co. reported sales and earnings for its fiscal first quarter that exceed analysts’ expectations. Disney’s results for the quarter were boosted by record sales at its theme parks division. However, the company said it expects challenges attracting international tourists to its domestic parks in the current period. Geetha Ranganathan has more on “Bloomberg Open Interest.”
Walt Disney Co. reported sales and earnings for its fiscal first quarter that exceed analysts’ expectations. Disney’s results for the quarter were boosted by record sales at its theme parks division. However, the company said it expects challenges attracting international tourists to its domestic parks in the current period. Geetha Ranganathan has more on “Bloomberg Open Interest.”
Peter Mandelson has resigned his Labour party membership after new details of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein came to light. But why did Labour ever decide to appoint him as US ambassador? Pippa and Kiran chat through what No 10 knew and when Continue reading...
Peter Mandelson has resigned his Labour party membership after new details of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein came to light. But why did Labour ever decide to appoint him as US ambassador? Pippa and Kiran chat through what No 10 knew and when Continue reading...
Shares in Oracle (ORCL) gained after the technology company said it plans to raise up to $50 billion this year to fund its cloud-infrastructure business. Oracle stock was recently up 2.8% at $169.20, reversing course after trading lower in premarket action.
Shares in Oracle (ORCL) gained after the technology company said it plans to raise up to $50 billion this year to fund its cloud-infrastructure business. Oracle stock was recently up 2.8% at $169.20, reversing course after trading lower in premarket action.
Melania, Brett Ratner’s authorised documentary about the current US first lady, has opened at No 29 in the UK box office chart on its first weekend of release. The film, which cost Amazon $40m to buy and $35m to promote, screened in 155 cinemas across the UK and Ireland, taking £32,974 overall, with a site average of £212.80. This result will have the distributors breathing a sigh of relief as – d...
Melania, Brett Ratner’s authorised documentary about the current US first lady, has opened at No 29 in the UK box office chart on its first weekend of release. The film, which cost Amazon $40m to buy and $35m to promote, screened in 155 cinemas across the UK and Ireland, taking £32,974 overall, with a site average of £212.80. This result will have the distributors breathing a sigh of relief as – despite the modest takings – this is far from the disaster many anticipated. The scale of the rollout was unprecedented in the UK documentary sector, where most titles are capped at around 25 locations. Melania’s take is just shy of the £33,000 achieved by Prime Minister – the recent documentary about the former New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern – over its first weekend of release. That film was out on 28 UK screens (18% of Melania’s rollout total) making a site average of £1,178.57 (more than five times greater than Melania). While many screenings of Melania were either empty or very sparsely attended, some were sold out. The early afternoon showing at the Vue Islington in London, for instance, had to turn away prospective punters, who were nearly all journalists. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet topped the UK box office on its fourth weekend of release, making £1,412,612 across 737 locations for a site average of £1,917. This was just a ticket or two above The Housemaid, Paul Feig’s erotic thriller, which took £1,399,262 on its sixth week of release, across 596 locations for a £2,348 site average. The top five was rounded out by two other new releases – Shelter (£946,903) and Iron Lung (£948,731) – and Zootropolis 2, which took £855,208 on its 10th week of release. Further chart information is currently unavailable from tracking and analytics company Comscore, but a representative did add that Melania was the ninth best performing new release of the week. Twelve new titles were out in the UK last Friday, including Bollywood releases Mardaani 3 and Gandhi Talks, which are both out in a ...
Name: Damp January. Age: New. It’s over thankfully, though in the UK we now seem to be into damp February. I read all the rain was driven by an unusual and powerful jet stream. Er, we’re not actually talking about that kind of damp January. What kind are we’re talking about then? Like a not dry January. That’s what I meant! As in, not alcohol free. Oh. And how does damp January go then? Moderation...
Name: Damp January. Age: New. It’s over thankfully, though in the UK we now seem to be into damp February. I read all the rain was driven by an unusual and powerful jet stream. Er, we’re not actually talking about that kind of damp January. What kind are we’re talking about then? Like a not dry January. That’s what I meant! As in, not alcohol free. Oh. And how does damp January go then? Moderation, as opposed to abstinence. To be honest, I normally only get to about 5 January anyway (unless there’s a weekend before then). Do you have any evidence? Where is this coming from? From Waitrose, as it happens. Nice middle-class evidence then. Go on. Waitrose reports a “significant softening” of the dry January trend. How soft are we talking? Alcohol sales in January this year, compared to other months, were down just 25%. That still seems like a significant drop, no? It’s less so when compared with, say, January 2022, when alcohol sales were 42% lower on average. And the 2026 data suggests that of the 58% of the UK public aiming to cut back, a significant proportion (31%) opted for a damp January rather than a totally dry one. I still think it might have something to do with all the rain we’ve had this year. Plus, possibly geopolitics. It’s hard not to give in when it’s so miserable out there. This is not just a UK thing: a survey of 1,869 American adults by consumer research firm Curion in late December found that people are no longer asking: “Can I go 30 days without drinking?” Doesn’t January have 31 days? Hmmm, you could be right. Anyway, people are now asking: “How do I feel when I drink less – and what do I replace it with?” Damp is the new dry? That’s exactly what Pierpaolo Petrassi said. Waitrose’s head of beers, wines and spirits? The very same. And Petrassi went on to say that customers are moving “away from the ‘all-or-nothing’ mentality and instead look towards more mindful ‘damp’ moderation.” Sounds more like a wellness trend than a test of willpower. Exactly....
Modders have already managed to run multi-frame generation on AMD Radeon GPUs, with varying levels of success. While the mode does work, boosting the perceived smoothness of games, it only runs in certain titles and requires some file tinkering. We’re not just talking about new Radeon GPUs either, as the workaround also works on older GPUs. The trick relies on enabling multi-frame generation (MFG)...
Modders have already managed to run multi-frame generation on AMD Radeon GPUs, with varying levels of success. While the mode does work, boosting the perceived smoothness of games, it only runs in certain titles and requires some file tinkering. We’re not just talking about new Radeon GPUs either, as the workaround also works on older GPUs. The trick relies on enabling multi-frame generation (MFG) using DLSS Enabler. This tool simulates DLSS upscaling and DLSS frame generation on DirectX 12-compatible GPUs and DLSS 2/3-ready games. In other words, it can technically inject a form of multi-frame gen into games using any GPU. Like OptiScaler, this mod injects DLSS components through FSR’s pipeline to trick the game engine into generating more frames than AMD Radeon GPUs currently support. As a reminder, MFG is officially only available for Nvidia RTX 50 Series users and some Intel Panther Lake iGPUs, as AMD has yet to release its own in-house MFG tech. YouTuber Ancient Gameplays took it for a spin in Cyberpunk 2077 to test its capabilities, showing that the mod does indeed work, though not without some limitations. The frame rate did multiply as promised, the smoothness improved, and ambient occlusion was noticeably enhanced. However, there were also visible motion artifacts. While this was to be expected, there is another sizable issue with this mod, which is stability. Ancient Gameplays had to launch the game multiple times before it finally booted, as there seems to be some issue during the launch process. The 3x MFG option was also bugged when paired with ray tracing, causing unpleasant stuttering. Likewise, the game’s adaptive frame generation option didn’t work correctly on the Radeon GPU, causing huge variations in performance, jumping between fast motion and a sluggish, stuttery experience. If you manage to remain patient through all of this, you could finally experience MFG ahead of other Radeon owners. Of course, this mod mode is only recommended for hardwar...
BlackJack3D Cryptocurrency investment products reported outflows of $1.7B for the week ending January 30, registering the second consecutive week of outflows, as Bitcoin ( BTC-USD ) and Ethereum ( ETH-USD ) led the outflows. Bitcoin led weekly outflows with $1.32B, according to a CoinShares report. On the other hand, short Bitcoin products saw a year-to-date (YTD) rise in assets under management (...
BlackJack3D Cryptocurrency investment products reported outflows of $1.7B for the week ending January 30, registering the second consecutive week of outflows, as Bitcoin ( BTC-USD ) and Ethereum ( ETH-USD ) led the outflows. Bitcoin led weekly outflows with $1.32B, according to a CoinShares report. On the other hand, short Bitcoin products saw a year-to-date (YTD) rise in assets under management (AuM) of 8.1%. “This has reversed year-to-date inflows, leaving net YTD flows at a global outflow of $1B, signalling a marked deterioration in investor sentiment towards the asset class. We believe this reflects a combination of factors, including the appointment of a more hawkish US Federal Reserve Chair, continued whale selling associated with the four-year cycle, and heightened geopolitical volatility. Since the price highs in October 2025, we have seen total AuM fall by $73B,” said James Butterfill, CoinShares’ Head of Research, said. Ethereum reported outflows of $308M during the last week, while XRP and Solana ( SOL-USD ) saw outflows of $43.7M and $31.7M, respectively, highlighting negative sentiment across major tokens. On the other hand, Hype-related investment products saw inflows of $15.5M, benefitting from recent on-chain sales frenzy in tokenised precious metals. According to the report, outflows were concentrated in the U.S., which saw nearly $1.65B of withdrawals. Sentiment was more mixed across other regions, with Canada and Sweden registering minor outflows of $37.3M and $18.9M, respectively. In contrast, Switzerland and Germany recorded inflows of $11M and $4.3M, respectively. More on Bitcoin USD Bitcoin's Fall: Why Now Is The Time For A Contrarian-Long IBIT Play Whale's Market Outlook 2026: Crypto Majors, Perp DEXs, And Prediction Markets Davos Takeaways - Bitcoin Is Not Here To Replace Banks, And That's A Good Thing Crypto slide intensifies as Bitcoin hits around $75,000 Abu Dhabi royal’s $500M bet on Trump family crypto venture
The mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence has said she felt she had been “taken for a fool” by the publisher of the Daily Mail, after she was told about allegations it had targeted her with unlawful information gathering techniques. Appearing at the high court in London, Doreen Lawrence said she felt angry because of the trust she had placed in the Daily Mail, owing to its coverage of h...
The mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence has said she felt she had been “taken for a fool” by the publisher of the Daily Mail, after she was told about allegations it had targeted her with unlawful information gathering techniques. Appearing at the high court in London, Doreen Lawrence said she felt angry because of the trust she had placed in the Daily Mail, owing to its coverage of her son’s case. Lady Lawrence is one of seven figures bringing legal action against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) over alleged phone hacking, “blagging” and other forms of unlawful information gathering. The other claimants are Prince Harry, Sir Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, the actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost, and the former Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes. Giving evidence, Lawrence said she felt angry about how she had been treated, accusing the publisher of using her and her son’s case “to give them credibility of supporting a black family”. Lawrence’s involvement in the case is of particular significance, given the Daily Mail’s repeated campaigning for justice for her son since his murder in 1993. Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail’s former long-serving editor, has held it up as one of the newspaper’s most important campaigns. ANL denies all the allegations of unlawful information gathering, describing them as “lurid” and “preposterous”. Lawrence is bringing her claims against ANL in relation to five articles published between 1997 and 2007. In a written statement to the court, she accused the publisher of “landline tapping me, blagging me and hacking into my voicemails, monitoring my bank account and phone bills, targeting me with hidden electronic surveillance, and making corrupt payments to serving police officers to steal information about the murder investigations into Stephen’s death whilst pretending to be my friend”. “We had trusted the Mail and worked with the Mail for 25 years,” she said. “I felt like I had been taken for a fool. I still do. I d...
Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) reports Q4 2025 earnings today after market close. Wall Street expects earnings of $0.23 per share on revenue of $1.33 billion, representing 63% year-over-year growth. Shares have fallen 17.5% over the past month, underperforming the technology sector amid broader market volatility. The Numbers That Matter What Wall Street Expects: EPS consensus: ... Everything Yo...
Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) reports Q4 2025 earnings today after market close. Wall Street expects earnings of $0.23 per share on revenue of $1.33 billion, representing 63% year-over-year growth. Shares have fallen 17.5% over the past month, underperforming the technology sector amid broader market volatility. The Numbers That Matter What Wall Street Expects: EPS consensus: ... Everything You Need to Know About Palantir Heading Into Q4 Earnings
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) with CEO Jensen Huang saying the company's check could end up being the biggest investment Nvidia has ever made. Speaking to reporters in Taipei, Huang said Nvidia will absolutely take part, calling OpenAI a great investment, according to Bloomberg. The round is drawing heavy interest from Big Tech as OpenAI looks to raise ...
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) with CEO Jensen Huang saying the company's check could end up being the biggest investment Nvidia has ever made. Speaking to reporters in Taipei, Huang said Nvidia will absolutely take part, calling OpenAI a great investment, according to Bloomberg. The round is drawing heavy interest from Big Tech as OpenAI looks to raise as much as $100 billion, with the company backed by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). The Wall Street Journal has also reported that Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in the Sam Altman-led AI developer. Still, Huang moved quickly to cool speculation around eye-popping numbers, saying Nvidia's investment would be nothing like $100 billion. His comments follow a recent Journal report that earlier plans for Nvidia to commit up to $100 billion as part of a blockbuster deal signed in September have stalled, after some internal concerns emerged.
Investing.com -- Amazon shares are undervalued ahead of a coming acceleration in its cloud business, according to Jefferies analyst Brent Thill, who argued in a note to clients that the stock trades at a level that does not reflect its strengthening fundamentals. Thill wrote that Amazon “trades at 13x NTM EV/EBITDA, 6 turns below [its] 10-yr avg and 8 turns below WMT.” “We think that’s too cheap a...
Investing.com -- Amazon shares are undervalued ahead of a coming acceleration in its cloud business, according to Jefferies analyst Brent Thill, who argued in a note to clients that the stock trades at a level that does not reflect its strengthening fundamentals. Thill wrote that Amazon “trades at 13x NTM EV/EBITDA, 6 turns below [its] 10-yr avg and 8 turns below WMT.” “We think that’s too cheap at [the] early stage of AWS re-acceleration,” he added. Jefferies believes Amazon’s cloud unit is positioned for a clear pickup in growth, describing AWS as “primed for re-acceleration.” Thill pointed to three drivers that could lift backlog growth into “mid-20s or higher” in the fourth quarter, including the “easiest comp of the year,” a strong start to the quarter with October bookings alone, including the $38 billion OpenAI deal, “surpassing all of Q3’s deal volume,” and “bullish expert checks across the board.” The bank added that AWS revenue should “catch up to backlog growth over time.” Jefferies also cited resilient consumer spending and operational improvements within Amazon’s retail operations. Checks reportedly showed “solid ecomm performance, robust cloud strength, and logistics efficiency improvements,” with the firm viewing fourth-quarter EBIT expectations of about $26 billion as “reasonable.” The stock’s valuation remains a key part of Jefferies’ bullish stance. Thill said Amazon trades at a 25% discount to major internet peers and is “well below” its long-term average. Jefferies sees “25% upside” based on its sum-of-the-parts valuation. The firm reiterated its Buy rating and $300 price target on the stock. Related articles Amazon stock is ’too cheap’, Jefferies says HSBC raises silver price forecasts as market tightness persists This sector is 'poised for a big, beautiful year': Truist
EU Faces Hard Choices After LNG 'Wake-Up Call' Authored by Irina Slav, via OilPrice.com, Europe is growing uneasy over its heavy reliance on U.S. LNG, with EU officials warning that energy security risks are shifting rather than disappearing. Diversification options are limited: sanctions on Russian gas and strict EU methane regulations effectively rule out major suppliers like Russia, Qatar, and ...
EU Faces Hard Choices After LNG 'Wake-Up Call' Authored by Irina Slav, via OilPrice.com, Europe is growing uneasy over its heavy reliance on U.S. LNG, with EU officials warning that energy security risks are shifting rather than disappearing. Diversification options are limited: sanctions on Russian gas and strict EU methane regulations effectively rule out major suppliers like Russia, Qatar, and much of U.S. LNG. Gas costs and policy contradictions are rising, as Europe pushes for diversification while remaining locked into record U.S. LNG imports The European Union needs to diversify its natural gas sources, Brussels’ energy commissioner said this week, expressing a growing unease in European capitals that the EU has become too dependent on liquefied natural gas from the United States. Yet succeeding in that diversification drive will be tricky because of the bloc’s emissions-focused energy policies – and the sanctions on Russia. “We are speaking to countries around the world that are able to deliver LNG to us,” Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen told media in Brussels this week, as quoted by Bloomberg. “I definitely hear this when speaking to energy ministers and heads of state from all over Europe that there is a growing concern.” The situation represents an interesting reversal of sentiment from just four years ago. Back in 2022, the European Union declared it would switch from Russian pipeline gas as punishment for the invasion of eastern Ukraine and start buying U.S. liquefied gas instead. EU officials hailed the decision as a big step towards energy independence and praised U.S. LNG producers—and the U.S. federal government—as a reliable business partner and energy supplier. Now, the European Union is the biggest regional buyer of U.S. liquefied gas, which seems to have been the plan all along—but that gas is coming at a steep cost, and with the federal government very different from the one of four years ago, the image of the reliable business partner and en...
00:00 Speaker A Markets and data editor Jared Blikre is joining me now. And first up, we got a deal in the energy space, Devon Energy, Merger Monday here. So Devon buying Coterra in an all stock deal here. It's valued at $21.4 billion. Um, it's always interesting when you've got the backdrop of a big oil deal, oil prices going down, but hey, you know, some sometimes that's the that's the breaks. 0...
00:00 Speaker A Markets and data editor Jared Blikre is joining me now. And first up, we got a deal in the energy space, Devon Energy, Merger Monday here. So Devon buying Coterra in an all stock deal here. It's valued at $21.4 billion. Um, it's always interesting when you've got the backdrop of a big oil deal, oil prices going down, but hey, you know, some sometimes that's the that's the breaks. 00:23 Speaker B Yeah, I mean, both stocks are going down right now. You might expect Devon to go down and maybe the other one up a little bit, but nevertheless, let's uh highlight some of the deal terms here. We got uh all stock merger, $58 billion combined enterprise value and the exchange ratio is going to be 0.7 Devon shares per each Coterra share. and Devon owners are going to end up with 54% of the combined company. 00:54 Speaker B What you're looking there at on the Wi-Fi interactive is a one-year chart of Devon Energy. You can see it's down 2% in the extended morning market, and it's up about 14%. Just recently climbed out of this long trading range. I'll give you a five-year look too, and you can see it's been trending down. A lot of energy stocks, um, are pretty sideways trading, and that's because they pay a lot in dividends and so you don't necessarily see that reflected in the stock price, but they're very energy companies are expected by investors to return cash to them. And that can be through buybacks and also those dividends that I was talking about. Oh, a couple more details, leadership, Devon CEO Clay Gasper is going to run the whole operation, and Tom Jordan, who's a Coterra CEO, is going to become the non-executive chair. Headquarters will be in Houston with a big big presence in Oklahoma City. 01:43 Speaker A Yeah, and part of what's going on here in the shale patch as it were shale patches, I guess around the country is they've gotten really tapped out. And so you need, it's more expensive in some certain cases, you need better technology. So the big bo...