plunge

Before today, all four nations of the UK had recorded their highest temperature of the year so far on Tuesday after very warm air was dragged in from continental Europe.

The addition of the foehn effect – a warming wind on the leeside of a mountain – meant that north-west Wales saw the highest temperatures.

The focus of the highest temperatures on Wednesday will be the Midlands, East Anglia and south-east England, possibly reaching 26C (79F) in some localised spots.

This is around 10C above average for early April.

The last time before this week that 25C or more was recorded in the UK was 19 September 2025, when temperatures peaked at 27.8C at St James’s Park, London.

Around this time in April in 2017 and 2020 25C (77F) was recorded, but last year that temperature was not reached until the last day of the month.

The highest temperature ever recorded in the UK in April was 29.4C (84.9F) measured in London in 1949.

There is some way to go to beat that but spring is the fastest warming season due to climate change.

Scotland and Northern Ireland will not be as warm. The cloud will break to give some sunshine and temperatures could still reach as high as 18C (64F) in eastern Scotland.

April 8 (UPI) — Global oil prices tumbled after the United States, Israel and Iran agreed to a Pakistan-brokered two-week cease-fire deal that included reopening the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.

The Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate benchmarks saw double-digit percentage falls following U.S. President Donald Trump‘s announcement of the breakthrough Tuesday evening, and have since stabilized, changing hands at $95.51 and $96.48 a barrel in early trade on Wednesday.

The market reacted to the prospect that oil tankers trapped in the Persian Gulf would be finally be able to transit the 21-mile-wide body of water between Iran and the UAE and Oman, easing major disruption to global supply caused by Iran’s effective blockade of the strait.

However, oil remained well above its $72 a barrel level on Feb. 27, the day before the United States and Israel unleashed their airborne offensive against Iran, amid uncertainty over the mechanism for the resumption of maritime traffic in the strait and the ongoing impact of war damage to energy infrastructure in Gulf countries.

There was also confusion over whether the cease-fire extended to Israel’s military offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Pakistan said it did, but Israel said it did not and that its operations would continue.

Financial markets in Europe rallied Wednesday morning, following very significant gains in Asia, where the Nikkei 225 in Tokyo ended up 5.42%, Korea’s KOSPI surged almost 7% higher and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index closed up more than 3%.

Out-of-hours futures transactions in the United States suggested equities would also rally very strongly there when stock exchanges open in a few hours.

Jay Woods, chief market strategist at Freedom Capital Markets in New York, expressed skepticism.

“It wasn’t much of a surprise that there was an announced reprieve in the Iranian conflict. The concern now is if this all too familiar ‘two-week’ timeframe is going to lead to a resolution,” said Woods.

A statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council posted on X by the Iranian foreign minister said safe passage of ships through Hormuz Strait would be possible for the duration of the cease-fire, but that it would have to be “via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces.”

In a post on his Truth Social platform in the early hours of Wednesday hailing the cease-fire, Trump pledged U.S. assistance with the logistical problems.

“The United States will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just ‘hangin around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will. Just like we are experiencing in the U.S., this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” Trump wrote.

MST Marquee analyst Saul Kavonic told the BBC that while the number of ships getting through the Hormuz Strait would increase from a trickle, a return to normal levels of energy production in the region was unlikely without a permanent end to the conflict and warning that repairs to damaged infrastructure could take many months.

Published on
30/03/2026 – 11:15 GMT+2

It is an old market saying, but it has never felt more apt: when people are worried about the future, they buy gold — when they are worried about the present, they sell it.

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While the Iran war has raised longer-term concerns over energy security and global stability, the immediate fallout, in the form of surging oil prices and renewed inflation fears, has forced investors to prioritise liquidity and higher-yielding assets over metals.

Gold hit an all-time high of $5,602 (€4,873) at the end of January and looked to be heading higher still in early March, but has since dropped nearly 25% to a low of $4,100 (€3,567), trading around $4,500 (€3,915) at the time of writing.

The decline marks a dramatic pullback from gold’s extraordinary performance last year.

In 2025, the metal delivered one of its best annual gains in decades, rising more than 60% to record levels as central banks accumulated reserves and investors sought protection amid economic uncertainty.

The drop in 2026 has triggered a swift unwinding of leveraged positions in futures and exchange-traded funds which were riding last year’s tremendous rise.

This sharp reversal defies the traditional role of the metal as a refuge during geopolitical turmoil, with a stronger US dollar and rising bond yields proving far more influential.

Macroeconomic forces override safe-haven appeal

Rising US Treasury yields and a firmer US dollar have been the dominant headwinds for precious metals.

Higher oil prices stemming from the Iran war have lifted inflation expectations, prompting markets to price in fewer Federal Reserve rate cuts or even the possibility of tighter policy for longer, including potential hikes that were previously unexpected.

This has increased the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding gold, while the US dollar’s strength has made it more expensive for international buyers.

The result has been a classic “flight to liquidity” rather than the expected flight to quality risk assets, as leveraged traders facing margin calls accelerated the sell-off.

The correction for metals has been one of the sharpest in recent memory.

Silver shares in gold’s downturn

Silver, which often amplifies gold’s moves, followed with an even bigger drop.

The white metal reached an all time high of $121 just one day after gold, on 29 January, but it has since dropped roughly 50% to as low as $61.

At the time of writing, it is trading at around $70.

Silver enjoyed an even more spectacular rally than gold in 2025, surging roughly 145% thanks to robust industrial demand from solar panels, electronics and electric vehicles, combined with investment buying.

In 2026, however, it has also declined sharply amid the same pressures of US dollar strength and higher yields, although its industrial fundamentals continue to offer longer-term support.

“I want to lick your stink … I want to taste your foulness … I want to shower in your rot … I want to feast in your fetid funk.”

Have more romantic sweet nothings ever graced the screen? Scripted by Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie (partners in life and in filmmaking), these words of seduction are music to the ears of a lonely Gravedigger (Glowicki), who has been formulating a perfume to cover up her corpse-like stench. What she discovers is that the right one will love her exactly the way she smells, learning that she’s not so pheromonally challenged after all.

Glowicki’s sophomore feature “Dead Lover,” sometimes presented in “Stink-O-Vision,” is one of those entirely singular freakouts that we can thank Telefilm Canada for subsidizing (see also: the Cronenberg family oeuvre, Matt Johnson’s current “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” and many more).

She co-writes, directs and stars in this highly stylized, wonderfully DIY handmade project, beautifully designed with gruesomely gothic sets by production designer Becca Morrin and art director Ashley Devereux. The blend of intentional artifice paired with deep emotion calls to mind other Canadian auteurs like Guy Maddin and Matthew Rankin (“The Twentieth Century”), but Glowicki’s film also exists within another lineage: the feminist Frankenstein film.

The film opens with a quote from Mary Shelley: “There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.” Her 1818 novel “Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus” has always been a feminist text (despite Guillermo del Toro’s more bro-ey adaptation), grappling with the terrifying power of creating life — and how close that is to death. Feminist filmmakers have drawn out these inherent themes from the book, the most recent and loudest example being Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” But “Dead Lover” hews closer to Laura Moss’ modern medical take, “birth/rebirth,” and even more closely to Zelda Williams’ cute, poppy “Lisa Frankenstein,” in which a young seamstress stitches up a reanimated boyfriend.

Our Gravedigger speaks to us, and to the moon, about her heart’s desire in charming cockney rhyming slang. Her hopes are rather simple and conventional: one true lifelong love and a family. After much rejection, she finally finds her Lover (Petrie) in the cemetery, saving him from a ferocious beast while he mourns his late opera-singer sister (Leah Doz). After the pair consummate their fragrant lust, the Gravedigger is ready to settle down right away.

In order to make her dreams come true, Lover travels to Europe for fertility treatments, where he drowns on a ship, the only thing left of him a finger, delivered to her by fishermen. Our enterprising Gravedigger, a true woman of science, engineers a lizard elixir and regenerates the finger into a long tentacle that eventually demands a body. What better choice than his own sister? But when her wild new Creature (Doz) comes to life, all hell breaks loose, summoning the sister’s jealous, grief-stricken Widower (Lowen Morrow) into an unfortunate love triangle (or square?).

Glowicki is a terrific filmmaker, marshaling her tiny troupe to execute this unique project. Petrie, Doz and Morrow play multiple roles, including a gossipy Greek chorus and the band of merry fisherman (truly an astonishing array of Canadian accent work on display). Her commitment to her singular vision never wavers, but as an actor, Glowicki is truly astonishing. Caked in Halloween makeup and lit with an array of colored gels, Glowicki summons something primal, pure and deeply moving about the lengths one will go to for love, a screech from the depths of her gut.

With a dream-pop soundtrack by U.S. Girls that would be at home in an episode of “Twin Peaks,” “Dead Lover,” in all its stinky, sexy, queer and grotesque glory, is one of the grossest and loveliest films about love I’ve ever seen. This one’s for the horny, hopeless goth inside all of us.

Gold’s reputation over the past year as the go-to refuge in a crisis is taking a battering as war rages and threatens to expand in the Middle East and financial markets buckle.

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Spot gold plunged to a 2026 low near $4,100 in early trading on Monday before recovering sharply to above $4,400 after US President Donald Trump announced he was postponing military strikes against Iranian power plants for five days following “very good and productive conversations” with Tehran — a swing of around $300 in the space of hours.

The metal has still shed more than 20% since hitting a record high of $5,594.82 an ounce on 29 January.

Silver has lost nearly half its value since hitting an all-time high of $121.67 in January, in one of the more violent collapses in the precious metal’s modern history.

Spot silver was down 8.9% at $61.76 — a year-to-date low and almost half of its $117 level on 28 February, when the Iran war began.

The counterintuitive sell-off has rattled investors who piled into precious metals expecting them to hold firm.

The dollar dropped against the euro after Trump’s comments and traded around $1.1572 to the euro on Monday afternoon, while the pound was up at a rate of $1.3341. The yen traded at around ¥159.47 per dollar.

Oil shocks continue to reverberate

The main culprit is the oil shock. As crude surges past $100 a barrel, bond yields are climbing and the US dollar is strengthening, making precious metals far less attractive to investors bracing for higher interest rates.

The dollar has emerged as one of the clearest safe-haven winners, strengthening over 2% so far this month.

For a non-yielding asset like gold, that is a double blow.

The prospect of higher interest rates as a result of the war is also boosting government bonds among investors, at the expense of precious metals.

Yet seasoned observers urge caution before declaring the gold story over.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, points out that gold is in the middle of only its third major bull run since 1971 and that the previous two also caused stomach-churning fluctuations.

“Neither interest rates staying higher for longer nor a stronger dollar may help the investment case for precious metals, but both the 1971-1980 and 2001-2010 bull runs saw several retreats which did not ultimately nullify or prevent major gains,” Mould said.

“So it may be too early to give up on gold just yet,” he continued.

During the first bull run, triggered by Richard Nixon’s decision to decouple the dollar from the gold standard in 1971, gold surged from $35 to a peak of $835 an ounce by January 1980, but not before enduring three mini bear markets and five corrections of 10% or more along the way.

The second run, which began in 2001 amid the wreckage of the dotcom bust and gathered pace through the 2008 financial crisis, was equally volatile, featuring two bear markets and another five double-digit corrections before gold peaked near $1,900 in 2011.

This third advance has been no smoother.

“A swoon of more than 20% caught some bulls off guard in 2022, as the world emerged from lockdowns, and 10%-plus corrections in each of 2016, 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2023 [gold peaks] warned that volatility was never far away,” Mould noted.

The question of dividends

The paradox at the heart of the current sell-off is that the very crisis that might once have sent investors flooding into gold is now working against it.

Rising oil prices fuel inflation fears, inflation fears fuel expectations of higher interest rates and higher rates make gold — which pays no dividend and costs money to hold — less appealing.

“Gold’s status as a haven may now be tarnished in the eyes of some,” Mould said, “as the precious metal is falling in price even as war roils the Middle East and financial markets alike.”

But not everyone is convinced the metal’s moment has passed.

The inflation and stagflation of the 1970s, partly triggered by the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, ultimately made gold the standout portfolio pick of that decade.

A prolonged conflict that stretches government finances — pushing welfare costs up and tax revenues down, on top of surging defence spending — could yet revive that dynamic.

If central banks respond to recession with fresh rate cuts and quantitative easing, the case for gold as a store of value comes roaring back.

“The war in Iran and its effect on oil and gas prices is stoking fears of inflation and how that could force central banks to raise interest rates,” he concluded.

Key indexes in Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong tumble as Iran threatens attacks on energy infrastructure across region.

Stock markets in the Asia Pacific have fallen sharply amid US President Donald Trump’s ultimatum warning Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face the annihilation of its energy infrastructure.

Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 and South Korea’s KOSPI plunged 4 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively, in early trading on Monday.

In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng Index tumbled about 2 percent.

Australia’s ASX 200 dropped about 1.6 percent, while the NZX 50 in New Zealand dipped about 1.3 percent.

Futures on Wall Street, which are traded outside of regular market hours, saw moderate losses, with those tied to the S&P500 and the Nasdaq Composite down about 0.5 percent.

Oil prices remained volatile amid fears of further disruption to global energy supplies.

Futures for Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose more than 1.5 percent to top $114 a barrel, before easing to about $112 as of 02:00 GMT.

Trump on Saturday threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants within 48 hours if Tehran does not end its effective blockade of the strait, through which about one-fifth of global oil and natural gas exports usually transit.

Tehran has pledged to completely close the waterway, which is still being transited by a small number of Chinese, Indian and Pakistani-flagged vessels, and launch retaliatory attacks on energy and water infrastructure across the region if Trump follows through on his threat.

Based on the timing of Trump’s warning on Truth Social, the deadline for his ultimatum is set to expire at 23:44 GMT on Monday.

Trump’s threat has added to fears of a cascading global energy crisis as the US and Israel’s war on Iran approaches the one-month mark with no clear end in sight.

Oil prices have surged more than 50 percent since the start of the war, which began with US-Israeli strikes on February 28.

Analysts have warned that energy prices are likely to rise significantly further if the strait remains effectively closed, with some observers predicting oil to hit $150 or even $200 a barrel.

Trump on Sunday held a phone call with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to discuss the situation in the Middle East, including the effective closure of the strait.

The two leaders agreed that unblocking the strait is “essential to ensure stability in the global energy market”, Starmer’s office said in a statement.

Trump has provided conflicting messages about the goals of the war and how long it might last.

Hours before issuing his ultimatum on Saturday, Trump said that his administration was “very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down” military operations against Iran.

Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani last week told reporters that officials had detailed plans for at least three more weeks of war.