Some lenders are set to cut rates on mortgages after turmoil from US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy raised expectations that UK interest rates could be cut further this year.

TSB Bank said it will reduce some two-year fixed rate mortgages by up to 0.25 percentage points on Wednesday, following MPowered Mortgages which trimmed rates across a number of its deals.

Financial markets and economists are predicting that the Bank of England will cut interest rates by more than expected this year to avoid an economic downturn.

The Bank’s main rate stands at 4.5%. It was forecast to reduce it twice this year but the uncertainty created by US tariffs has changed the expectation to three cuts.

Sarah Coles, head of personal finance at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the Bank of England, and other countries’ central banks, “will be really looking to cut interest rates as much as possible in order to support growth”.

“And of course mortgage companies start to price that in right away and we’ve already seen mortgage rates start to fall and we should see plenty of that in the coming days,” she added.

The average mortgage rates on two-year and five-year fixed deals were unchanged on Tuesday, at 5.32% and 5.17% respectively, according to financial information company Moneyfacts, although it said rates were expected to come down in the coming weeks.

Mortgage brokers told the BBC that if so-called swap rates, which lenders use to price loans, stay as they are then some mortgage rates may fall to as low as 3.79% in the coming weeks.

However, the lowest rate deals will not be available to all borrowers, particularly first-time buyers, and may come with a hefty fee.

And many homeowners coming off fixed deals signed before interest rates started rising in mid-2021 will still find themselves in a higher mortgage rate environment.

According to the Bank of England, around a third of those on households will be looking to renew in the next year or two.

A detailed analysis of a full-sized digital scan of the Titanic has revealed new insight into the doomed liner’s final hours.

The exact 3D replica shows the violence of how the ship ripped in two as it sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912 – 1,500 passengers lost their lives in the disaster.

The scan provides a new view of a boiler room, confirming eye-witness accounts that engineers worked right to the end to keep the ship’s lights on.

And a computer simulation also suggests that punctures in the hull the size of A4 pieces of paper led to the ship’s demise.

“Titanic is the last surviving eyewitness to the disaster, and she still has stories to tell,” said Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst.

The scan has been studied for a new documentary by National Geographic and Atlantic Productions called Titanic: The Digital Resurrection.

The wreck, which lies 3,800m down in the icy waters of the Atlantic, was mapped using underwater robots.

More than 700,000 images, taken from every angle, were used to create the “digital twin”, which was revealed exclusively to the world by BBC News in 2023.

Because the wreck is so large and lies in the gloom of the deep, exploring it with submersibles only shows tantalising snapshots. The scan, however, provides the first full view of the Titanic.

The immense bow lies upright on the seafloor, almost as if the ship were continuing its voyage.

But sitting 600m away, the stern is a heap of mangled metal. The damage was caused as it slammed into the sea floor after the ship broke in half.

The new mapping technology is providing a different way to study the ship.

“It’s like a crime scene: you need to see what the evidence is, in the context of where it is,” said Parks Stephenson.

“And having a comprehensive view of the entirety of the wreck site is key to understanding what happened here.”

The scan shows new close-up details, including a porthole that was most likely smashed by the iceberg. It tallies with the eye-witness reports of survivors that ice came into some people’s cabins during the collision.

Experts have been studying one of the Titanic’s huge boiler rooms – it’s easy to see on the scan because it sits at the rear of the bow section at the point where the ship broke in two.

Passengers said that the lights were still on as the ship plunged beneath the waves.

The digital replica shows that some of the boilers are concave, which suggests they were still operating as they were plunged into the water.

Lying on the deck of the stern, a valve has also been discovered in an open position, indicating that steam was still flowing into the electricity generating system.

This would have been thanks to a team of engineers led by Joseph Bell who stayed behind to shovel coal into the furnaces to keep the lights on.

All died in the disaster but their heroic actions saved many lives, said Parks Stephenson.

“They kept the lights and the power working to the end, to give the crew time to launch the lifeboats safely with some light instead of in absolute darkness,” he told the BBC.

“They held the chaos at bay as long as possible, and all of that was kind of symbolised by this open steam valve just sitting there on the stern.”

A new simulation has also provided further insights into the sinking.

It takes a detailed structural model of the ship, created from Titanic’s blueprints, and also information about its speed, direction and position, to predict the damage that was caused as it hit the iceberg.

“We used advanced numerical algorithms, computational modelling and supercomputing capabilities to reconstruct the Titanic sinking,” said Prof Jeom-Kee Paik, from University College London, who led the research.

The simulation shows that as the ship made only a glancing blow against the iceberg it was left with a series of punctures running in a line along a narrow section of the hull.

Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable, designed to stay afloat even if four of its watertight compartments flooded.

But the simulation calculates the iceberg’s damage was spread across six compartments.

“The difference between Titanic sinking and not sinking are down to the fine margins of holes about the size of a piece of paper,” said Simon Benson, an associate lecturer in naval architecture at the University of Newcastle.

“But the problem is that those small holes are across a long length of the ship, so the flood water comes in slowly but surely into all of those holes, and then eventually the compartments are flooded over the top and the Titanic sinks.”

Unfortunately the damage cannot be seen on the scan as the lower section of the bow is hidden beneath the sediment.

The human tragedy of the Titanic is still very much visible.

Personal possessions from the ship’s passengers are scattered across the sea floor.

The scan is providing new clues about that cold night in 1912, but it will take experts years to fully scrutinise every detail of the 3D replica.

“She’s only giving her stories to us a little bit at a time,” said Parks Stephenson.

“Every time, she leaves us wanting for more.”

It doesn’t take long to make David Hockney laugh.

At nearly 88 years old, he is frail but still very dapper in his beige, red and black houndstooth suit with a white silk handkerchief poking out of the pocket, and trademark round yellow glasses perched on his nose.

Britain’s most popular artist chuckles a lot, his throaty laugh betraying his many years of smoking.

But, he tells me, as a young student from Bradford at the Royal College of Art in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the other students laughed at him.

“People would mock my accent,” he says. But it didn’t faze him. Hockney knew his worth even then. “I’d look at their artworks and I’d think, well, if I drew like that, I’d keep my mouth shut.”

What would the young boy growing up in Bradford think about the life he’d go on to have and the work he’d create?

“He’d have thought it was pretty daft.”

For decades, Hockney has been among the world’s greatest living artists, and he is now opening his biggest ever show.

As we sit together in a vast gallery at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a stunning museum designed in reflective glass on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, I ask him what he thinks of the exhibition.

He says it’s his best ever, and bursts into laughter again.

It’s an expression of pure delight at the 11 rooms filled across four floors with his art – and at being alive to see it. “I’m just laughing, I mean we made it!”

Two years ago, when they started planning the exhibition, “I just thought I probably wouldn’t be here”, he says. “I’m still a smoker, a happy smoker fed up of bossy people telling you what to do… but I didn’t know.”

Hockney is sporting a badge that says “End Bossiness Now” in a gallery dedicated to his love of spring. During the pandemic in 2020, Hockney, who was living in Normandy, used his iPad to paint the trees and flowers blooming as spring arrived.

Those 220 iPad works adorn this gallery, floor to ceiling, the walls bursting with blossom and pure joy, made at a time when the world wasn’t feeling very hopeful.

Visitors to the show are greeted at the entrance by Hockney’s message from that time: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring.”

Hockney has been in poor health. He now has two full-time carers, who have accompanied him to Paris from London, where he now lives. Portraits of both, sitting in their dark blue nurses’ uniforms, are the most recent works in the exhibition, made earlier this year.

A self-portrait of Hockney, painting and smoking a cigarette (his two great loves) is also very new.

He still paints for four to six hours every day, he tells me.

He believes you can’t judge a painter until their last work is done – but looking at his own work gathered together in Paris, “I can see what I was always trying to do, really”.

And he promises that “anybody who has just a little visual sensibility will really enjoy this show”.

His great-nephew Richard Hockney, who has regularly sat for him for 28 years, since he was four years old, including for this exhibition, tells me everyone was determined the artist would make it to Paris.

The night before, Hockney got into a car with his dachshund Tess to be driven across the Channel. And on the morning before they left, they were playing him variations of the jazz classic April in Paris.

Having arrived, “he is glowing”, Richard says. “I think this will keep him going for a long, long time, to be honest.”

And with spring unfolding in the French capital, it’s entirely appropriate that the artist known for chronicling spring would open his exhibition, David Hockney 25, now.

This is a man who would fly back from his home in Los Angeles when he heard the hawthorn had begun to blossom in his native Yorkshire, just so he could paint the dazzling spectacle.

Some of his earliest works, including probably his most famous, A Bigger Splash, are also on show in Paris.

That painting, capturing the moment of a swimmer diving into a Santa Monica pool, is on the wall next to Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the south of France pool painting that broke records when it sold at auction in 2018 for £70m.

Next to those are Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, another of Hockney’s most recognisable works, which depicts his good friend Celia Birtwell and her husband Ossie Clark, with their white cat on his knee. Seeing them brought together in one room is spectacular.

But the show’s main focus is the last 25 years because “it’s 2025”, he says. “People think it’s miserable, but in 1925 they’d had the First World War.”

It’s a visual feast, full of the bright colours and optimism for which Hockney has become known.

“I’ve always had it. I’ve always thought it was an absurd world.”

A world to laugh at, to look at closely, as Hockney does, and to paint vibrantly.

Some of the iPad paintings are huge. He’s “amazed they could be blown up so big” when they were created on something so small.

One room is almost pitch dark to show off paintings he did of the Moon, made possible by advances in iPad technology.

There’s also a floor devoted to his portraits (about 60), including a 2022 painting of singer Harry Styles in a striped cardigan with a set of pearls around his neck.

But the rest are the friends and family Hockney knows well – Birtwell, her children and grandchildren, the show’s curator Sir Norman Rosenthal wearing full regalia, Hockney’s partner JP, sometimes with Tess the dog – and two of Richard.

Even though they’re related, when he’s having a portrait done “it’s very surreal looking at him and then realising you’re being painted by David Hockney”, he tells me. “You know he’s always going to create a masterpiece.”

His great uncle chooses to paint people he loves because “he sees the truer representation of yourself than you do”. In one of the portraits, Richard is grinning, in a green and white striped T-shirt.

Because Hockney likes Richard’s cheeky grin, “he will sit there and grin at me because he knows it’s going to make me grin… after six hours, it aches a bit”.

King Charles went to visit Hockney at home in London before he travelled. “He’s a very nice man, thoughtful, I thought,” the artist says. “He does watercolours himself.”

But he doesn’t fancy painting the King. “The problem there is the majesty, isn’t it really? I would find that a bit difficult, I think.”

He does, though, have a work on the go, a new painting of his great-nephew.

Richard tells me Hockney “says he’s still got a lot of work to do, which is good”, adding: “As long as that’s in his head, then he’ll keep going.”

The artist says he’ll finish his painting of his great nephew and then “I will paint somebody else. And I just carry on.”

David Hockney 25 is at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, from 9 April until 31 August.

A 15-year-old boy and 13-year-old girl have been found guilty of killing an 80-year-old man who was filmed being punched and kicked during a fatal attack at a park.

Leicester Crown Court heard the boy racially abused Bhim Kohli, and slapped him in the face with a slider shoe while he was on his knees during the “intense attack”, while the girl encouraged the violence and filmed it on her phone while laughing.

Mr Kohli died the day after the assault, which occurred yards from his home while he was walking his dog Rocky in Franklin Park, Braunstone Town, Leicestershire, on 1 September.

The boy was charged with murder and manslaughter, but was acquitted of the more serious charge on Tuesday.

Neither defendant can be named because of their ages.

The boy was remanded in custody, while the girl was released on conditional bail.

They will be sentenced on 19 and 20 May.

When the verdicts were read out, the boy leaned forward in the dock while the girl cried, and hugged her mother when she was released.

Addressing the girl, Mr Justice Turner said: “I want to make it absolutely crystal clear that the fact that bail is being granted should not be taken as any indication as to the sentence when the time comes.”

The judge, who will consider a media application to lift reporting restrictions on 19 May, thanked the jury – which deliberated for more than six hours – for their “obvious hard work”.

After the hearing, Mr Kohli’s daughter Susan Kohli recalled the moment she found her dad at the park “screaming out” in pain.

“It was horrendous, we have never seen him like that before. We all thought he would go to hospital to be treated and he would then be fine. We never imagined he wouldn’t return home. My dad passed away before our eyes, surrounded by his family,” she said.

“We feel anger and disgust towards the teenagers who took dad away from us. They humiliated an 80-year-old man, assaulted him, filmed it and laughed at him.

“The boy… used violence so severe that he broke three of dad’s ribs and neck which caused trauma to his spinal column.”

Mrs Kohli told of watching the video of her father being hit by the slider shoe.

“A loud horrible slapping sound is heard when the boy struck dad,” she said. “Hearing the girl laugh at this assault on dad is utterly disgusting. This sound plays over and over in our heads. Also captured on video is dad’s attempt to call for help as he shouted out for his grandson.”

Mrs Kohli said her father was a “devoted life partner to my mum for 55 years”, as well as a retired businessman, a close friend to many and a “very active” man who had three allotment plots where he grew fruit and vegetables.

“He was an amazing man who loved life. He never took himself seriously. He was good fun to be around and very chatty,” she said.

“He was the person who knitted our family together and we miss him every second of every day.

“The area we have loved for so many years and called home feels so different now and we will never feel safe.

“Having happened only a minute’s walk of where we live is something we cannot get away from and it is a constant reminder.

“Every time my mum opens the front door she thinks about what happened to her husband.”

Both defendants were among a group of children who encountered Mr Kohli in the park on the day he was fatally injured, the trial, which lasted more than five weeks, heard.

Opening the prosecution case, Harpreet Sandhu KC said: “[Bhim Kohli] left his home on Bramble Way. Having left his home, he walked a few yards to the entrance of Franklin Park, where he was going to take his dog for a walk.

“However, Mr Kohli would not get the opportunity to walk his dog for long and never would he return home. That is because in Franklin Park, Mr Kohli had the misfortune to encounter these two defendants.”

Mr Sandhu told the court the boy and girl had spent the afternoon together at Braunstone Park before going to the boy’s home, where he changed his clothes and wore black sliders – a loose-fitting type of shoe similar in appearance to flip-flops – which the barrister said were used in the attack.

He said CCTV footage showed Mr Kohli walked with his dog to Franklin Park at about 18:18 BST, followed by the two defendants and three other children a few minutes later.

The footage of the assault was shown to the jury.

Jurors heard Mr Kohli was discovered by two of his children “on the ground and in obvious pain”.

Mr Kohli, the court heard, had told his daughter he had been punched in the face, kicked, and racially abused.

His cause of death was given as a neck injury causing spinal cord damage, and he had a number of other injuries including fractured ribs.

The boy told a friend he would go “on the run” to Hinckley, in Leicestershire, the day after the attack but was arrested by police minutes later while hiding in a bush, the court heard.

In a letter written by the boy, after he had been charged, to a professional who was working with him, he said: “I am so nervous, well scared and worried. I accept I did it and I’m doing time, I’m just scared about how long I have to do.”

He also said in the letter that his girlfriend had broken up with him and he had been “struggling with that”, so he “needed anger etc releasing”.

When the professional told the boy that the contents of his letter would need to be disclosed, the boy said “that’s my manslaughter plea gone”, Mr Sandhu told the jury.

As Birmingham’s bin strikes enter their fifth week, the health secretary has said he is concerned about the impact of the walkout on public health.

Speaking to Times Radio, Wes Streeting said: “I certainly am concerned about the public health situation and the poor conditions we’re seeing for people in Birmingham.

“As the bin bags are piling up, we see rats and other vermin crawling around.”

Birmingham City Council said on Tuesday morning: “All of our waste wagons have been deployed from our three depots citywide this morning.”

Asking residents to leave their bins out as they normally would, the authority said it would collect them “asap” and apologised for what it called “the current situation”.

Natasha, whose 11-week-old son’s immune system is impaired due to being born prematurely, told BBC Radio WM part of her street in Winson Green was “quite literally a waste site”, blocking her route to the bus stop.

“That pathway is basically covered in black bin bags and physical household waste bins that are overflowing,” she said. “You can clearly see where rodents have actually bitten into the bin bags and they’ve been opened up.

“Do I walk past that tip point, where all that rubbish is, where all the rodents are accumulating, and all the pests are?

“Or do I… walk on the road with my son’s pushchair?

“Essentially, I’m having to choose between my son becoming possibly critically ill or being hit by a car.”

Talks between bin workers and the city council ended on Monday without an agreement being reached and are due to resume on Tuesday.

The strike has made headlines around the world, and last week the city council declared a major incident.

With the backlog of waste growing by 1,000 tonnes a week, neighbouring Lichfield District Council is due to start sending crews to help clear it.

The impact of fly-tipping on communities in the West Midlands, due to the strike, is being debated in the Commons on Tuesday.

“I understand industrial disputes happen,” Streeting added. “I understand people have the right to withdraw their labour, that’s part and parcel of industrial relations in our country.

“But what is not acceptable is allowing these sorts of… unsanitary conditions… to occur on people’s streets.”

Bin workers began indefinite strike action on 11 March, although walkouts have been taking place since January.

They are fighting plans to remove some roles and downgrade others.

Birmingham City Council said only a small number of workers would be facing pay cuts, and it desperately needs to save money after effectively declaring itself bankrupt in 2023.

Unite the Union, which is representing the workers, said Monday’s talks had been “productive” despite the lack of resolution.

But it would not go into the details of what had been discussed.

“All I can say is we both want an end to this dispute,” said Unite regional officer Zoe Mayou.

England’s health secretary’s comments reflect the crisis point many in Birmingham feel the situation has reached.

Speaking to the BBC, one resident said he felt like he was “living in a Third World country“, while others have complained of having to take their rubbish to temporary collection sites after coming home from long overnight shifts.

The council is advising people to continue putting out their household waste on collection days, saying workers who are not on strike will do their best to remove it.

A previous bin strike in 2017 went on for seven weeks before an agreement was reached.