Green

PROFESSOR Green has revealed his bowel hernia has returned after nine years with a painful-looking picture.

In snaps shared to Instagram, the rapper’s bowel can be seen “poking out” of his skin underneath a previous surgical scar.

Celebs Go Dating star Green — real name Stephen Manderson — nicknamed the hernia Henry and documented the latest in a long line of health issues, ending with a resigned: “Here we go again.”

The 42-year-old wrote: “Life’s been a lot lately… I’ve learned I’m not totally free from historic patterns, and in almost the same breath learned I catch things well before I ever did previously, and am (on good days) able to observe my thoughts spiralling without spiralling with them.

“This hernia recurrence happened yesterday and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a weight I could do without given everything else health wise that’s going on… out of my control though.”

Green went on to say that it’s up to him to take responsibility of the situation and embrace the latest setback.

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Turning to his music, and his supporting slot on pal Example’s UK tour, as an outlet for frustration, he said: “I’m playing the next single tonight, tomorrow, all through the Example tour and at every show till it drops.”

Following his first hernia removal in 2017, Green had a very rare allergic reaction — only the second person in the world at the time — to the mesh used to fix the issue.

It led to series issues including a a partially collapsed lung, distension and pneumonia.

Just last week Green revealed benign tumours had been found behind his eye and on his spine as part of a condition called schwannomatosis — a rare disorder in which tumours form on nerves around the body.

It followed surgery to remove four more tumours from his head and neck that had been causing him pain.

Among his four new growths is one the size of lemon around his S2 nerve, which is responsible for muscle movement in the lower body.

However, it wasn’t the physical symptoms he found to be the worst thing, rather than the mental torture of not knowing whether or not they were malignant, revealing he suffered trauma fretting over the ‘worst case scenario’.

The star was diagnosed with ADHD and autism when he was 40 and is also a mental health advocate.

Among his other health issues are lifelong struggles with his gut, which required a pyloromyotomy — the cutting away of pyloric muscle to aid the passing of food through the body — at six years old and he later went on to suffer from severe irritable bowel syndrome.

He also has the genetic clotting disorder haemophila B.

Environmentalists had something in their arsenal for Tuesday’s election they never did before: a billionaire benefactor willing to empty his pockets of tens of millions of dollars to bring climate change to the forefront of political debate and elect candidates committed to fighting global warming.

But California hedge fund titan Tom Steyer’s $74-million bet — most of it from his own wallet — yielded little payoff. On Tuesday, voters elected the most hostile Congress environmentalists have faced in years.

The Republicans who won control are already making plans to roll back President Obama’s signature emission reduction efforts, green-light the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that would transport Canadian tar sands oil to the U.S. Gulf Coast, and cancel subsidies for renewable energy.

Steyer says he has no regrets.

“I feel great,” he said by phone from his organization’s San Francisco office. “We set out to put climate on the ballot in a bunch of states, to build an organization and to build a relationship with a bunch of voters.”

He argued that all of that happened, pointing to hundreds of thousands of climate-minded voters newly enlisted in his organization, NextGen Climate, the emergence of global warming in the debate in several races, and the retreat by various GOP candidates from a platform of outright denial of climate science.

He chalked up Tuesday’s results to “that part of the world we don’t control.” Steyer said there was no approach that would have overcome the Republican tide that gave the party control of Congress and defeated several of the candidates NextGen backed.

But the election results raise new questions about the approach deep-pocketed, green-minded donors are taking toward electoral politics. Despite their best efforts, and the huge amount of money invested, they are failing to get voters to set aside other concerns and cast their ballots on environmental issues. This time out, the president’s record and the economy were the forefront issues, with all others receding.

“The take-away here is this was not a successful strategy,” said Josh Freed, vice president for clean energy at Third Way, a group that seeks a middle path between the two warring parties. “Candidate positions on climate do not move the overwhelming majority of voters to pull the lever for or against them. I hope these organizations take a step back and come up with a different approach.”

Steyer’s group saw its candidates victorious in U.S. Senate races in Michigan and New Hampshire, and in state legislative races, including in Oregon. But candidates they backed lost in hotly contested Senate races in Colorado and Iowa. NextGen also failed to unseat the governors of Florida and Maine, targeted by the organization for their outspoken skepticism of climate science.

The unpopular GOP governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, which Steyer’s group campaigned against, lost. But even in that race — won by NextGen’s candidate, Democrat Tom Wolf — global warming hardly was a factor, according to G. Terry Madonna, who directs the Franklin & Marshall College Poll in Lancaster.

Steyer’s impact was “Zero. None. Zero,” he said. Climate change “was not an issue at all. It has literally no salience with voters. It didn’t ever come up.”

University of New Hampshire pollster Andrew Smith said much the same with regard to the Senate race in his state, which Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen won. “I don’t think anybody paid any attention to global warming this election,” he said.

In part that is because much of Steyer’s money was spent airing ads on issues his organization thought were more likely to turn out the Democratic faithful. But that too sometimes backfired.

In Colorado, independent pollster Floyd Ciruli suggested Steyer’s heavy TV advertising, which seized on a Democratic theme emphasizing abortion rights, may have actually hurt Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, who lost to GOP Rep. Cory Gardner.

“It was probably a net negative,” Ciruli said. “It turned out to be one of those things that threw Udall on the defensive. He was being parodied and mocked for it and criticized for it.”

Even Steyer’s strategists acknowledge that climate change is not a top-tier issue now. The question is whether it ever will be. Advocates such as Freed say the push seems to be futile, and well-funded green political groups should shift their strategy to more narrowly focused efforts with bipartisan appeal. They might start, he said, by being more open to such GOP-favored options as nuclear energy.

The green campaign efforts instead focus on getting Congress back to where it was in 2010, when it almost passed a California-style law that would have capped greenhouse gas emissions nationwide.

NextGen officials say they are confident in their strategy — and persistent. “This is a multi-cycle effort,” said Chris Lehane, Steyer’s lead political strategist. “If it was easy, it already would have been done…. Social change like this is not like switching on a light bulb.”

The GOP takeover of the Senate occurs as the science of climate change has grown more definitive and the predictions of widespread effects more detailed and dire. On Sunday, a panel of hundreds of climate scientists convened by the United Nations warned that climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels was already affecting life on every continent and in the oceans and that the window was closing rapidly for governments to avert the worst damage expected later this century.

Yet skepticism of climate science remains Republican orthodoxy. North Carolina Sen.-elect Thom Tillis said in a primary debate that climate change is not “a fact.” Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is expected to take the helm of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and dismissed the U.N. science panel “as a front for the environmental left.”

Obama moved to cut greenhouse gas emissions by issuing new rules for power plants and the nation’s vehicle fleet. The GOP-run Congress will not be able to nix the rules outright. But it could so thoroughly weaken or delay them through riders to key legislation that they’d be rendered ineffective, analysts said. Deeper cuts to the nation’s emissions would probably require congressional action, and the current GOP position on climate change makes such action improbable.

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune acknowledged there was a “copious amount of bad news” in Tuesday’s election. But he says there was “significant good news” as well.

“Candidates who formerly denied climate science are now saying they are not scientists and instead talk about clean energy and associate themselves with it,” he said.

“The money from Tom Steyer made a difference in elevating climate science and pushing all these lawmakers to move off a denial platform,” Brune said.

evan.halper@latimes.com

mark.barabak@latimes.com

Halper reported from New Orleans, Barabak from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Neela Banerjee in Washington contributed to this report.

BRIAN May has been banned from planting daffodils on his village green after the local council said they could pose a safety risk.

The former Queen rocker planned to donate bulbs for his village green in Elstead, Surrey, but the local council have blocked him.

Elstead parish council said the yellow flowers would obstruct the line of sight of nearby traffic.

The authority added that the daffodils would prevent locals crossing the green and disrupt accessibility.

The 78-year-old’s request was therefore rejected as the council said it had “a responsibility to balance community initiatives with safety”.

Speaking to the Farnham Herald, Sir Brian said: “We’re struggling to imagine how 18-inch stalks could [obstruct] anyone’s view, especially when the green is normally surrounded by parked vehicles including a 7ft-high ice cream van.”

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The guitarist hoped the village green would be another success after he previously planted 3,000 bulbs on the green outside St James’s Church.

Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative MP for Godalming and Ash praised “Elstead’s most famous resident Sir Brian May and his brilliant team of planters for supplying and planting the stunning daffodils for Elstead green”.

The council countered that the village green and the church green were “two very different areas”.

It added that the church green was “more amenable to daffodil planting”.

Jenny Littledale, a local resident, said: “How sad that something so lovely has been turned down for such a ridiculous reason.”

Jenny Else, another Elstead resident and former Waverley borough councillor, said the locals wishes hadn’t been considered.

She continued: “Perhaps a vote should have been taken. There has been so much interest in the proposal.”

Ms Else said that when she had seen a sketch of the proposed area for the flowers, she didn’t think sight lines were under threat.

“There is a large area for any community gatherings during the daffodil season and good pedestrian access,” she added.

Sir Brian shared the news on a blog post, he wrote: “I’ve been quite thrilled to get so many happy comments from the village about this year’s display.

“Probably the best part of it all has been the friends I’ve made here in Elstead.

“And of course thanks to our parish council for giving me the permission to donate spring beauty to our community!

“We were all hoping to adorn the main village green for next spring… But sadly the parish council last night rejected my plan.”

A council spokesperson said: “Elstead parish council welcomes and proactively supports community planting and is extremely grateful to the volunteers who put time and care into projects like this.

“The parish council has a duty to balance the practical usage of our green along with the views of our residents.

“The main village green is used in several ways throughout the year. It hosts key community events, is crossed regularly on foot and is valued by some as an open space.

“As a council, we have said that we very much welcome further discussion about these options and thank everyone involved for their enthusiasm and ideas.”

The spokesman told The Telegraph that the issue had been “portrayed in one way when it’s not actually that at all”. The negative response to the ruling got “out of hand” they added.

Australian Hannah Green’s strong start to 2026 continued with victory in the JM Eagle LA Championship – her fourth triumph of the year.

In March, she became the first Australian to win the Women’s Australian Open since 2014, and lifted the LPGA’s Women’s World Championship and the Australian WPGA Championship.

In Los Angeles, Green holed a curling 12-foot birdie putt on the first play-off hole to win this LPGA Tour event for the third time in four years.

It was a stunning victory for Green given she had briefly been six shots adrift of the lead after Kim Sei-young chipped in for an eagle three on the 11th.

Green responded with the first of five birdies in six holes as she reeled in Kim and Im Jin-hee and all three finished on 17 under par.

“I didn’t think I was still in the tournament,” said Green, who won her only major, the Women’s PGA Championship, in 2019.

On her tournament-winning stroke, she added: “I had that putt, similar line in regulation, so I felt somewhat comfortable.”

Kim had already missed a 35-foot birdie attempt while Im – penalised a stroke for slow play during Saturday’s third round – was also unable to get down in three after a wayward tee shot.

The tournament was played at El Caballero for the second year because of course renovations at Wilshire where Green had won this title in 2023 and 2024.

During Saturday’s round, the tournament’s prize money was increased by $1m to $4.75m (£3.5m), lifting the purse to the highest on the tour outside of the major championships and season-ending CME Group Tour Championship.

As a result of that, Green took home $712,500, up from $562,500.

The Chevron Championship, the first women’s major of the year, stars on Thursday in Houston, Texas.

The International Monetary Fund has downgraded its global growth forecast for 2026 from 3.3 to 3.1 percent, citing the impact of the United States-Israeli war on Iran and the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz on the world economy.

The war has damaged energy infrastructure across the Gulf, while critical exports like oil, gas, chemicals and fertiliser remain largely stranded by Iran’s shutdown of the strait and the subsequent US naval blockade of Iranian ports.

In the worst-case scenario of a prolonged war, the IMF said global growth could fall to 2.5 percent in 2026, with low-income and developing economies hit the hardest by soaring commodity and energy prices. The global shipping and logistics industry is facing a separate crisis.

But every economic crisis also has beneficiaries: despite the dire macroeconomic outlook, some corners of the global economy are thriving on the uncertainty.

Here’s a look at five industries that are doing well either despite – or because of – the darkening economic outlook.

Wall Street investment banks

Global investors have been on a rollercoaster since the start of US President Donald Trump’s second term last year. The president’s erratic decision-making, where he often issues an ultimatum one day and then changes it the next, has led traders to coin the term “TACO trade”, where TACO stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out”.

The recent volatility has made some investors anxious, but it’s been a boon to investment banks, which make millions in commissions and revenue from the surging volume of trade, according to Sean Dunlap, a director of equity research at Morningstar Research Services.

“Clients want to reposition, so they trade frequently,” he told Al Jazeera. “Spreads tend to increase, which increases the profitability for trade intermediaries like banks.”

First-quarter results for 2026 – released this week – showed that Morgan Stanley reported a profit of $5.57bn, up 29 percent year on year, while Goldman Sachs reported a profit of $5.63bn, up 19 percent year on year.

JP Morgan Chase also reported major gains, with first-quarter earnings of $16.49bn, up 13 percent year on year. The banks all cited high levels of trading, deal-making, and “robust client engagement” as the reasons behind surging profits.

The boomtime for banks could reverse course, however, if volatility persists for too long, Dunlap warned, because investors may become increasingly cautious and less willing to borrow money to make trades.

Prediction markets

As mainstream Wall Street banks reap profits, the crypto-based prediction platform Polymarket has been earning upwards of $1m a day since the start of the month by letting users make peer-to-peer bets on everything from sports tournaments to elections.

Polymarket has been doing well since the start of the war, but it revised its fee structure on March 30 to cash in even more on its popularity.

Rival platforms like Kalshi, Novig and Robinhood also follow the same business model, but Polymarket has been the standout winner of 2026 because it controversially allows users to bet on the outcome of conflicts like the Iran war.

Polymarket revised its fee structure on March 30 to cash in on its popularity. The change has already netted the platform more than $21m in fees since April 1, up from $11.6m for all of March and $6.23m for all of February, according to DefiLlama, a website that provides data analysis for decentralised finance platforms.

If the current trend continues, Polymarket could make $342m in fees this year alone, according to DefiLlama’s analysis.

Anonymous users have also made millions correctly predicting the dates of major events like the US-Iran ceasefire, but the outcomes for rank-and-file users are typically less impressive.

Researchers found that the top 1 percent of Polymarket users captured 84 percent of all trading gains, according to a new report released this month analysing 70 million trades from 2022 to 2025. The returns are so high that US federal regulators have pledged to crack down on insider trading in prediction markets following suspiciously well-timed bets on Iran war outcomes.

Aerospace and defence

Unsurprisingly, the aerospace and defence industries are booming this year due to major conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, Sudan, Gaza and Lebanon and a surge in global defence spending.

About half of the world’s countries have increased their military budgets over the past five years, according to an April report from the IMF, which means they are also buying everything from drones to missiles — more than ever before. Demand is growing particularly fast in Europe, where NATO countries have committed to raising defence spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035.

The defence industry has, in turn, seen major gains on the stock market. The MSCI World Aerospace and Defence Index – which tracks aerospace and defence stocks across 23 global markets – reported net returns of 32 percent year on year at the end of March.

The defence index outpaced the MSCI World Index, which tracks 1,300 large and mid-cap companies across the same 23 markets. The index, which gives a broader overview of global stock markets, reported net returns of 18.9 percent over the same period.

Artificial intelligence

Last year, the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) office predicted that the AI industry would grow from $189bn in 2023 to $4.8 trillion by 2033, and the Iran war does not seem to have dented the outlook.

“Despite the shocks from the Iran war, we’re still seeing resilience in a lot of sectors like artificial intelligence and renewable energy,” said Nick Marro, lead analyst for global trade at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

One metric for the AI boom has been the high volume of semiconductor chips still being exported out of East Asia, he said. At the top of the chart is chipmaking powerhouse Taiwan, which reported record-breaking merchandise exports of $80.2bn in March, up 61.8 percent year on year, according to EIU analysis.

The surge was led by exports to the US, which grew by 124 percent year on year, the EIU said.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s top chipmaker better known by its acronym “TSMC,” on Thursday posted a net income of 572.8 billion New Taiwan Dollars (NTD) ($18.1bn) for the first three months of 2026 – up 58 percent year on year in NTD.

Another metric, initial public offerings or “IPOs,” also shows that the industry is confident for the moment, with industry leaders Anthropic and OpenAI both planning to go public this year.

Renewable energy

The Iran war has highlighted the need to transition from fossil fuels not only for environmental reasons, but also for reasons of energy security. The war marks the third major energy shock this decade, following the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Iran war has “boosted” renewable energy “given the urgency to switch away from fossil fuels and diversify towards renewable sources,” Marro of the EIU said.

Even before the Iran war began, the International Energy Agency reported that global governments were already taking active measures to invest in renewable energy for geopolitical reasons.

According to an IEA report released this month, “150 countries have active policies to advance renewable and nuclear deployment, 130 have energy efficiency and electrification policies, and 32 have policies to incentivise supply chain resilience and diversification across critical minerals and clean energy technologies.”

The Iran war has triggered another flurry of policymaking in Asia, which typically buys 80 to 90 percent of the oil and gas that transits through the Strait of Hormuz. Since the shutdown, the region has been struggling to find alternative sources of energy, forcing governments to deploy emergency measures like fuel rationing and price caps.

South Korea, Thailand, India, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines have all announced a variety of measures from tax breaks for at-home solar panels to commissioning new renewable energy projects – and even restarting nuclear reactors.

The surge in policymaking has been good for the renewable industry. The S&P Global Clean Energy Transition Index, which tracks 100 companies that produce solar, wind, hydro, biomass and other renewable energy across emerging and developed markets, is up 70.92 percent year on year.