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His diligence is one reason why Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, made Healey his unexpected pick for chancellor on Monday. Allies say others include their shared commitment to re-industrialisation and devolution.

After an occasionally vicious briefing war between allies of other potential candidates, the hardworking Healey is seen as a safe choice who can unite a fractured party while not scaring the markets.

But many who know him say the new chancellor is more ideologically driven than he may seem, and that Burnham will come unstuck if he treats his most senior minister as little more than a factotum.

“This is being billed as equivalent to Gordon Brown appointing Alistair Darling,” said one Labour official, referring to the former prime minister’s choice of chancellor, who was initially seen as someone who would simply do the bidding of No 10.

“But it turned out Darling had views of his own which did not always chime with Brown’s – Andy has to avoid making the same mistake.”

The decision to appoint Healey was arguably the most important Burnham made on his first day in Downing Street. The new chancellor will be tasked with finding money for the prime minister’s various policy promises, including higher defence spending, taking utilities into public control and finding ways to cut voters’ living costs.

Burnham has promised not to raise income tax, VAT or national insurance, and to stick to the last government’s borrowing rules, placing his chancellor in the same straitjacket that hampered his predecessor, Rachel Reeves.

Healey is in an almost unique position to take the tough decisions required while keeping Labour MPs onboard. Since entering parliament in 1997, he has largely avoided becoming attached to one faction or another.

Although he served in the Treasury for five years while Brown was chancellor, he was always respected by the opposing Blairite camp. More recently, he has successfully bridged the widening gap between allies of the former prime minister Keir Starmer and those on the soft left agitating for his removal.

Part of Healey’s ability to appeal to different wings of the party comes from his personal warmth. He will often involve relatively junior members of staff in policy and political discussions and, like his new boss in No 10, has an ability to remember names and details about people’s lives.

David Walker, the bishop of Manchester, was one of the local Labour members who voted for him to be the Labour candidate for the seat of Wentworth in 1997 – over other rising stars such as Yvette Cooper – now health secretary.

“One of the things that impressed us at the time was that John was committed to living in the community and putting down roots here,” said Walker. “He always made sure he turned up to community events and showed his face, even when he was busy with national politics.”

Luke Pollard, his former ministerial colleague at the Ministry of Defence, called Healey “genuinely the finest and most decent man I’ve worked with since being elected”.

As defence secretary, Healey earned a reputation as a strong ally of the armed forces, putting the repair of dilapidated military housing at the top of his list of priorities. To some in government however, this closeness to the military was a weakness.

When he asked the Treasury for an extra £28bn to fund the defence investment plan (Dip), just months after negotiating a multi-year budget, Reeves was infuriated.

Her allies said Healey had been hoodwinked by service chiefs into believing that last year’s strategic defence review was fully funded, only to have to go back and ask for more when it came to thrashing out the detail.

Those close to the chancellor, however, say he needed more money for his budget because of the additional geopolitical commitments Starmer had made in the months after the defence review, including playing peacekeeping roles in Ukraine and the Gulf.

One former government official said the row showed that far from being a fiscal hawk, as some have claimed, Healey would come down on the side of higher spending when presented with a policy dilemma.

“He is definitely not a fiscal hawk or even a firm hand in the tiller as he’s being portrayed by some,” they said. “He is a big spender.”

In the end, Healey resigned in protest just days before the Dip, which some of Starmer’s allies believe was part of a deal with Burnham to become his chancellor.

Wes Streeting, Healey’s replacement as defence secretary, suggested additional money was also likely to be found from cuts elsewhere. “We understand the sacrifices that involves from other government departments,” he told a press conference during his first day in the job.

The chancellor will now have to do the kind of adjudicating between departments that could, for the first time, make him unpopular with large parts of the parliamentary Labour party.

The question is whether, when faced with a minister in sudden need of extra cash, as he himself once was, he loosens the purse strings or sticks to the discipline of his predecessor. %!s()

Fenway Sports Group (FSG), Liverpool’s United States-based owner, confirmed the approach from Bhatia’s group on Tuesday.

“An investment consortium led, managed, and represented by Amit Bhatia has expressed interest in making a strategic minority investment in Liverpool Football Club,” an FSG spokesperson told the AFP news agency.

Bhatia, the son-in-law of Indian steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, is heading a consortium interested in buying into the 20-time English champions.

The Financial Times reported that Bhatia has hired advisers to work on the offer, which the newspaper said could value Liverpool at more than $6bn.

Just hours after Bhatia’s interest in Liverpool emerged, the London-born 46-year-old stepped down from his role as a director and co-owner of English Championship side Queens Park Rangers (QPR).

Bhatia, who spent 18 seasons with the west Londoners, will transfer his ownership of the club to majority owner Ruben Gnanalingam.

“I step back from my formal responsibilities with pride, gratitude and affection. I want to thank the players, managers, staff, the community trust, my fellow board members and, above all, the fans, who have made me and my family feel part of the QPR family for so many years,” Bhatia said.

Bhatia’s discussions with FSG – who bought Liverpool for 300 million British pounds ($400m) in 2010 – are believed to be at an early stage, with no deal struck yet.

Any investment from Bhatia would be made to further position Liverpool for success, following FSG’s move in 2023 to sell a minority stake in the club to global sports investment firm Dynasty.

Reports at the time valued that transaction between $100m and $200m. %!s()

However, art has a funny way of multiplying meanings, often above and beyond what its creators intended, and the Headington Shark is a case in point. The filmmakers behind comedy-drama Learning to Breathe Under Water, which recently premiered in Karlovy Vary (and also played the Galway Film Fleadh very near where the film was shot), jump the shark concept across the Irish Sea to make a different sort of point, perhaps about the absurdity of death.

Learning to Breathe Under Water

The Bottom Line

Swims in circles.

Venue: Karlovy Vary Film Festival
Cast: Rory Kinnear, Maria Bakalova, Ezra Carlisle, Niamh McCann, Margaret McAuliffe, Vanessa Ifediora
Director: Rebekah Fortune
Screenwriter: Richard Brabin

1 hour 35 minutes

This uneven, more-than-a-little-sappy but ultimately well-meaning assemblage posits a bereaved artist (Rory Kinnear) who constructs a metal apex predator on his roof after the death of his wife, right through the bedroom ceiling of his young son Leo (Ezra Carlisle). A Bulgarian au pair played by Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Apprentice) joins this odd domestic menage in order to move the story along toward mild change and finally closure.

There’s something that’s not quite working here, but it isn’t easy to tell if the problem lies in Richard Brabin’s script or Rebekah Fortune’s direction, which feel like they’re pulling in opposite directions. The screenplay, Brabin’s first produced script, contains many amusing lines, often spoken by elementary-school-aged Leo, a serious little boy whose literal approach to the world and tendency to stim by touching his fingers together when stressed suggest an undiagnosed neurodivergent condition. When Bakalova’s Anya asks what he and his father like to eat, for instance, Kinnear’s Peter replies that they’ll eat anything. “But it has to be food,” Leo stipulates usefully.

Young Carlisle’s deadpan delivery really makes moments like this sing. Likewise, small snatches of stop-motion animated business, as if illustrating the weird and wonderful world inside Leo’s head, add a sense of whimsy, recalling the early work of Paddington director Paul King such as his similarly darkly comic Bunny and the Bull.

Unfortunately, the narrative here doesn’t keep up its forward momentum, the flights of fancy start to dry up, and the back half of the film descends into mawkishness, with an entirely manufactured conflict brewed up between Anya and Peter that sees Anya moving out and things falling apart. At this point, it feels like the fault may lay with Fortune’s command of tone, but another pass at the script surely wouldn’t have gone amiss.

What’s less arguable is the quality of Kinnear’s performance, a fine study in comic understatement at first that modulates into a delicately limned portrait of pain barely stifled. A scene in which he plays the piano that belonged to his late wife and silently starts crying is a proper heartbreaker, and a further reminder that Kinnear is criminally underused in both British and Irish cinema. Mind you, he’s consistently employed to play stiff or oddball supporting characters (see, for instance, his British officer in TV’s Say Nothing) or, in the case of horror feature Men, all the stiff and oddball male characters that aren’t Jessie Buckley, but this film proves he can carry a lead role effortlessly.

Given that most of the action happens inside Leo and Peter’s home, special attention is lavished on the production design, overseen by May Davies, which adeptly uses color and set dressing to illustrate where Peter’s head is at in any given scene. The clutter ebbs and flows like the tide, reflecting the chaos of spaces where artists live, often homes just on the cusp between quaint and unbearably chaotic. %!s()

Longer, thinner wings made of light but strong composite materials offer the promise of energy savings but present a problem for manufacturers because they will not fit in airports around the world, many of which are already at or near full capacity.

“The value of being able to fold the wings is huge,” said Sue Partridge, the head of Airbus’s wing of tomorrow programme, speaking at the Farnborough airshow, south-west of London, where the global industry gathers for a major conference every two years.

Folding wingtips offer a solution. Boeing has already installed them on its larger 777X, which has two aisles, but the technology has not been used on any single-aisle planes. Boeing is also looking at new technologies, including using a “truss” to brace longer wings.

Airbus said it will fit extensions of about four or five metres to the wings of one of its A321neo planes to test how different shapes cope in real-world conditions in the second half of next year. The model is part of the A320 family of aircraft, the bestselling model of all time.

The European manufacturer and its bitter US rival Boeing are gearing up to make the next generation of planes after decades of selling their respective A320 and 737 models. Both companies are looking at technologies that they hope will significantly cut down energy usage, including new engines, hybrid electric systems and longer wings.

Airbus is about to start the assembly of the wing extension in its factory in Broughton, north Wales. However, its first phase of tests will only include the bolts that will fix it in place and not yet the hinges that will allow it to fold up.

The company has said it will decide on the shape of its new aircraft by 2030. Partridge said Airbus already knows that the next generation will use relatively heavy engines with a large diameter and that the wings will be bent like a gull’s for extra aerodynamic benefit.

Airbus and Boeing will also have to choose new engines. Airbus is considering whether to go with covered engines that encase the fan blades, or an “open fan” option with the blades exposed.

The British manufacturer Rolls-Royce is hoping to break into the market for higher-selling single-aisle planes, also known as narrowbodies, when Airbus and Boeing make their next generation. The Rolls-Royce chief executive, Tufan Erginbilgiç, on Tuesday told reporters at Farnborough that the company had only two years to persuade the plane manufacturers to choose its engines.

He urged the UK government under its new prime minister, Andy Burnham, to back the company’s investments in its UltraFan engine programme. The new chancellor, John Healey, was previously the defence secretary and so “understands Rolls-Royce and our agenda”, Erginbilgiç added. However, the plea for subsidy from the highly profitable manufacturer will have to be weighed against Burnham’s other spending priorities such as social care and ending rough sleeping.

Rolls-Royce is developing two variants of its UltraFan engine – one for larger, widebody jets and another narrowbody version. Erginbilgiç said it was worth supporting because it was the “single biggest opportunity for the next 50 years” for economic growth for the UK, and that it would “transform advanced manufacturing” in the country.

“We would like to do it in the UK because it is our origin,” Erginbilgiç said. “But we have other options.”

Kevin Craven, the chief executive of ADS Group, a lobby group for the British aerospace and defence industry, said the UK government should “focus on the champions for UK aerospace” in trying to win “probably the most consequential decision in our industry”. %!s()

Just a tub of ice cream and yoghurt cost her about 10 million rials (just over $5), added Leyla, who on Tuesday received 180 million rials ($94) as her monthly pension.

“And that’s the amount I get after a 40 percent increase from the government this year – but it doesn’t even begin to cover the essentials,” she said.

A mix of decades-old economic structural issues, coupled with limitations imposed by local authorities and the compounding damage inflicted by a war launched by the United States and Israel in February, just months after a 12-day conflict with Israel, continues to make life more difficult for Iranians.

Across the sanctions-hit country, people face a mounting list of challenges as they struggle to get by – from collapsing purchasing power and unaffordable food, rent and medicine to lost jobs, unreliable internet, electricity cuts, banking disruptions and destroyed infrastructure.

Masoud, a young resident of the capital, said his landlord agreed after much negotiation to settle for a rent increase of just less than 50 percent this year.

“It’s steep, but I’d either have to pay more for a similar apartment in the same neighbourhood or move further south in the city – not to mention the costs of moving,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that he expected next year to be much worse.

This is while the government has decreed that landlords in Tehran can legally only increase rent by 27 percent, with the cap for other provinces set at 25 percent. But those figures are often used as the floor, not the ceiling, for prices while unhappy tenants have to trudge through chaotic dispute-resolution councils if they protest.

A similar picture has emerged in other sectors and industries, where support from a cash-strapped government is either nonexistent or extremely limited as conditions get tougher by the day.

For instance, the government offers monthly cash subsidies and electronic coupons for the purchase of food items, but they only equal a few dollars. Local media, citing users, have recently reported that some shops refuse to accept the coupons since they have not been compensated for them by the government.

In the meantime, inflation last month was at nearly 90 percent, with food inflation hitting 134 percent, compared with a year earlier. The figures for next month are expected to be worse. Iran’s national currency hit a new all-time low this week and continued to hover around that on Tuesday at more than 1.9 million rials against the US dollar.

Controlled prices for all types of bread sold in Tehran were nearly doubled by the government in an official decree last month. Local media said petrol prices could soon increase again after a bump last year.

Experts say loan allocations to businesses have proven slow or inadequate, individuals and businesses have received little arrears relief despite ongoing banking disruptions resulting from major cyberattacks last month, and unemployment insurance – which has seen a surge of new applications this year – misses most informal and digital workers.

The country is struggling to recover after facing deadly nationwide protests in January, as well as two wars in less than a year, with the ongoing conflict with the US showing no signs of abating.

Both during the protest killings in January and the current war, the Islamic Republic cut off all access to the global internet, with the second shutdown lasting three months to become the longest-ever recorded in any country. Some access was restored in late May, but Iran’s internet landscape remains one of the slowest and most heavily filtered in the world.

The extensive damage from the war has also worsened Iran’s structural problems, whose economy has also been strained by years of Western sanctions and local mismanagement.

During the two wars, the US and Israel systematically bombed a large number of civilian targets, including ports, airports, bridges and roads, as well as oil and gas facilities, petrochemical manufacturers, steel giants, power stations and water facilities.

The damage is already estimated to be running in the hundreds of billions of dollars, with heavy attacks and a naval blockade imposed on Iran’s southern ports being far from over.

Iranian authorities have blamed some of the electricity blackouts, which continue to affect people and businesses while summer temperatures surpass 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in parts of the country, on the bombing. The blackouts have led to water shortages in some provinces, including some of those being bombed by the US to the south, as water pumps stopped working.

Despite the mounting hardships, many Iranians do their best to maintain a semblance of a life, keeping routines, going out and enjoying street music wherever it is not stifled.

But some were left feeling they were facing only more roadblocks after authorities this week temporarily closed down a large number of cafes and shops in central Tehran, where thousands of people had gathered each day to socialise absent other venues.

In the artsy and storied Sanaei and Iranshahr streets, cafe owners were given a range of reasons when they were shut down – from not conforming to “Islamic norms” of mandatory hijab for women to allegedly blocking the pavement. Such closures have happened in waves in the past, too.

“Any trace of vibrancy and being alive are nipped in the bud,” said a young man who witnessed one of the cafes being shut down. “How many more years of youth and life do we have left to wait for this country to become a normal place to live?”

Adel Ferdosipour, Iran’s most renowned football commentator, was left in tears on Monday night after the website and application for his popular Football 360 were erased by authorities for criticising Team Melli and its head coach after a weak performance at the World Cup.

“Why don’t you let people work in this country? How is this possible?” he said, addressing the authorities, in a version of the programme released on social media.

“Your ceiling is so low that you can’t tolerate anything. You have all the media and resources, but you’re so small that you can’t even tolerate a website and an application,” he said in a clip that went viral on Tuesday. %!s()