Tell us: how are your finances looking ahead of the Spring Forecast?

Next Tuesday the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will update the country on the state of the economy when the Spring Forecast is delivered to parliament.The government is not expected to make major announcements on taxes and spending but will include the latest forecasts for growth, details of the UK’s financial position and hint at the changes we might expect in future.We would like to hear from you. How are you feeling about your finances right now and has anything improved or worsened over the past year?You can tell us about your financial situation using this form.Please include as much detail as possible

Rolls-Royce boss pushes for UK taxpayer support for new jet engine

The chief executive of Rolls-Royce has pressed ministers for taxpayer support for a new jet engine, on a day the company also announced record profits and promised to give up to £9bn back to shareholders.The £3bn engine project, designed to power smaller commercial planes, would allow Rolls-Royce to re-enter the lucrative short-haul flights market.Tufan Erginbilgiç said on Thursday: “Not supporting it would be a sort of strange thing to do,” given Labour had named advanced manufacturing as a priority in its industrial strategy, released last summer.Rolls-Royce has already spent more than £1bn on the project, while it has reportedly asked the UK government to initially provide between £100m and £200m to develop and test the UltraFan 30 engine.Erginbilgiç said: “There are all sorts of numbers out there

Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more

A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternativesThere’s not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes – sorry, gifts – and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that’s before we get to the rampant “enshittification”, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them

Keen bosses, strange mistakes and a looming threat: workers on training AI to do their jobs

Workers grappling with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence have said they feel “devalued” by the technology and warned of a downward trajectory in the quality of work.Recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund found AI would affect about 40% of jobs around the world. Its head, Kristalina Georgieva, has said: “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”Workers who have trained AI models to replace some or all of their roles tell the Guardian about their experiences.‘I now earn less while working longer correcting the mistakes of AI editors’Christie* edits papers for academics for whom English is a second language

US hockey star Hilary Knight responds to Trump’s ‘distasteful joke’ about women’s team

Hilary Knight, the captain of the US women’s ice hockey team, has responded to comments made by Donald Trump after the Americans won gold at the Winter Olympics, calling the president’s quip a “distasteful joke”.After the US men’s ice hockey team won gold on Sunday, Trump called into the locker-room celebration and invited the players to be his guests at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.“I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team,” he said. “You do know that. I do believe I probably would be impeached [if the women’s team wasn’t invited]

Saracens’ salary cap penalty under scrutiny over conflict of interest claims

Saracens will consider their position over an alleged undeclared conflict of interest at the centre of the disciplinary process into the 2019 salary cap scandal. The club were fined an unprecedented £5.36m for salary cap breaches over the previous three seasons and were relegated to the Championship, but the punishment has come under fresh scrutiny with these new allegations.Saracens point to an allegation made about the accounting firm Saffery Champness and claims that the level of fine handed down was “largely based upon advice provided to PRL”.According to the Daily Telegraph, Saffery Champness was auditor for Sale Sharks at the same time that it gave “impartial expert advice” about Saracens