Meryl Streep has admitted that she came close to turning down one of her most iconic roles in The Devil Wears Prada.

Appearing on The Today Show to promote the sequel, Meryl recalled how as soon as she read the script for the original film, she knew immediately that it was “going to be a hit”, so seized an opportunity.

“I thought, it’s a great script. And they called me up and made an offer and I said, ‘No, I’m not gonna do it’,” Meryl recalled.

She continued: “I knew it was gonna be a hit, and I wanted to see if I doubled my ask, and they went right away and said, ‘Sure’.”

Meryl went on to share that it took her a long time to “understand that I could do that” and that “you can ask for what you want”.

“I was sure it would be a hit, and they needed me,” she added. “I wanted it, but if they didn’t want to do that, I was OK because I’m old. I was ready to retire.

“But that was a lesson. That was a great way to start, so I was in a good mood when we began.”

Alongside the returning faces from the original Devil Wears Prada film, Meryl is joined in the new follow-up by the likes of Bridgerton’s Simone Ashley, Justin Theroux, Lucy Liu and a wave of celebrity cameos.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 arrives in cinemas on Friday 1 May. Check out HuffPost UK’s review of the film here.

Correction: A previous version of this article erroneously stated that Meryl Streep initially turned down The Devil Wears Prada 2, rather than the first film. This has now been corrected.

Comedians Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse have paid tribute to the canine companion with whom they shared the screen numerous times over the years in their hit series Gone Fishing.

The pair first encountered the Patterdale Terrier mix Ted in season three of Gone Fishing, back in 2020, and he went on to make numerous on-screen appearances alongside the presenters.

On Monday morning, the BBC announced that Ted had died, with both of Gone Fishing’s hosts sharing touching tributes.

“So very, very sad,” Bob lamented, remembering “lovely Ted” as “the best companion and the greatest little chum”.

“Going to miss him so much.,. and away boss,” he added.

Paul agreed: “He wasn’t a dog, he was a species all of his own. He’s gone to the great briefcase emporium in the sky. We will really miss you mate.”

After his first introduction in 2020, Ted became a fan-favourite with Gone Fishing viewers, and in the 2025 Christmas special, he was awarded an honorary Lifetime Achievement Award.

The BBC explained that when Ted was around six months old, he was rescued from a dog’s home and went to live with Gone Fishing’s executive producer Lisa Clark, who was his owner until he died.

In her own statement, the producer: “Ted was a much-loved family pet as well as a treasured companion to Paul and Bob on Gone Fishing. He took fame in his little stride and loved nothing better than messing around on the riverbanks, nicking jammy dodgers from Bob and bait from Paul.

“He will be sorely missed both at home and on screen. We’ll never forget him. He is survived at home by Bo the Briard.”

Ted is due to make one final posthumous appearance in Gone Fishing in its upcoming ninth season, which is expected to air on the BBC later this year.

Beef creator Lee Jung Sin is weighing in about what’s next for the award-winning show.

After Beef’s inaugural series proved to be a huge success with both critics and viewers, Netflix made the decision to turn it into an anthology series, focussing on a different set of characters – and, indeed, a different central feud – each time.

Season two premiered earlier this month, with Lee previously sharing his hopes to conclude after a third run.

However, in a candid new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the three-time Emmy winner made it clear that he’s at peace if Beef were to come to an end without a third iteration.

“I’d be perfectly happy if this were the last season,” he claimed. “I think it’s really emotionally taxing, the making of it and the rollout of it.”

He continued: “I feel like I’ve said it through two seasons of Beef. But I do remain open if the universe shows me something in the future and it feels right for Beef. I’m definitely open.”

The first season of Beef featured Ali Wong and Steven Yeun as a pair of strangers who become engrossed in each other’s lives when a chance road range encounter bubbles over into an all-encompassing vendetta.

In the follow-up, the stakes were raised even higher, with Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny playing two feuding couples on opposing sides of a generational and class divide that leads both pairs to ask big questions about their partners, and themselves.

Back in 2023, while promoting season one, Lee told Rolling Stone that he’d always envisaged Beef telling three separate stories.

“I have one really big general idea that I can’t really say yet, but I have three seasons mapped out in my head currently,” he claimed.

Seasons one and two of Beef are now streaming on Netflix.

Donald Trump has never been bothered about maintaining tradition.

Despite decades of work on both sides of the Atlantic to build and maintain the so-called “special relationship” between the UK and America, the president’s second term has put it under almost unbearable strain.

Prime minister Keir Starmer initially bent over backwards to woo Trump in a bid to secure a trade deal and keep the maverick Republic on side.

But then Trump began threatening to annex Greenland, undermining Nato, withdrawing support for Ukraine, tearing into British military capabilities and U-turning over the Chagos deal.

The scandal around Starmer’s decision to appoint, then sack, Peter Mandelson – a friend of convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – as the UK’s ambassador to Washington, did not help either.

But the final straw came when Trump, together with Israel, bombed Iran.

Starmer rejected the US’s requests for UK support, leading to fresh verbal abuse from the president.

Trump said Starmer was “no Winston Churchill” and compared him to Neville Chamberlain who championed the Nazi appeasement policy before World War 2.

He’s even threatened to withdraw the US recognition of the Falkland Islands as a British overseas territory.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the UK’s ambassador to the US Christian Turner suggested the relationship between the two countries was not that special after all.

In comments dating back to February, leaked to the Financial Times this week, he said while there is a “deep history and affinity” there, the special relationship phrase was “nostalgic, it’s quite backwards-looking, and it has a lot of baggage to it”.

He’s not alone in this thinking. Less than half of Americans (43%) polled by Public First for Channel 4 News agree that the UK is one of their greatest allies.

So why do we still call it a “special relationship”?

The phrase has been bandied around British and American politics for years.

First coined by Winston Churchill in 1944 after America joined the Allies’ efforts to defeat the Nazis during the Second World War, the term has played a pivotal role in trans-Atlantic politics for decades.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were seen as ideological soulmates in the 1980s, while Tony Blair and George W Bush took the “special relationship” to new heights following the 9/11 terror attacks and Iraq war.

Over the decades, the lower rungs of government started working together on intelligence, defence and security too, encouraged by the bond between leaders.

That’s not to say it’s always been plain-sailing. Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson, for example, repeatedly clashed over the Vietnam war.

But Trump’s recent behaviour threatens to take the “special relationship” to new lows.

So Starmer deployed one of the UK’s most powerful diplomatic weapons this week: the royal family.

King Charles III and his wife Queen Camilla headed to the US for a state visit in a bid to try to amend the fraying bond between Downing Street and the White House.

The King definitely won over his American audience with an extraordinary speech to US Congress, and a later one at the State dinner, where he made a series of tacit digs towards Trump.

He stressed the need for “executive power” to be kept in check and subtly reminded Trump that Nato allies jumped to America’s defence after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Charles even gave the president a golden bell from a World War 2 submarine, HMS Trump (the jokes write themselves).

His trip marks a significant moment in the international relationship, especially as no British monarch has addressed Congress since 1991.

Trump, known for his infatuation with the royal family and their grandeur, told Charles this week: “Americans have no closer friends than the British.”

He previously told the BBC that Charles could “absolutely” fix the fraying relationship.

But any hopes that this Trump vs Starmer episode was just a blip seem to be short-lived.

Just after the monarch left Washington, Trump tried to create a fresh diplomatic row with Starmer by claiming the King agrees with him on Iran – though the Palace is yet to confirm or deny that allegation.

Considering the monarch is meant to be completely apolitical representative for Britain, their private conversations are highly confidential.

This revelation was a huge breach of diplomatic protocol.

The move suggests not only does Trump not grasp the nature of British politics, but he is clearly not be willing to “forgive” Starmer for not joining in with the Iran war.

Further tensions could come down the line, too, with so many of their initial grievances yet to be resolved.

The Ukraine war and the conflict in the Middle East rumble on, while the Trump adminstration could renew its ambitions to seize Greenland.

The UK-US trade deal still hangs in the balance too, as does the agreement to hand over the Chagos islands to Mauritius.

Former Nato secretary-general and UK defence secretary, Lord Robertson, told Chatham House pointed out that the States no longer tells Britain about its plans ahead of time.

Trump did not warn Downing Street about his air strikes on Iran, his plan to implement widespread tariffs or his threats to launch military aggression against Greenland.

Robertson said this demonstrated a “growing divergence” between the countries.

“All the while Washington’s diplomatic tone towards the United Kingdom has reached a historic low point,” he added.

While, acknowledging that the Trump administration does not represent the whole of the US, he warned that America is expected to become “more transactional” in its foreign policy – including in its approach to the UK.

British ministers have repeatedly claimed that frictions at the top were not too unusual, and that the lower levels of government would still continue to operate in sync.

But is that cooperation at threat if the leaders are at loggerheads?

Listen to this week’s Commons People as we unpack the origins of the “special relationship”, why it looks more precarious than ever and what that trans-Atlantic bond could look like in the future.

Subscribe to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.

Recently, the Bank of England suggested that UK supermarkets may bring in something called “dynamic” and “personalised” pricing.

It noted some sectors are experimenting with technology “that could enable dynamic pricing in the future, such as electronic shelf labels in supermarkets”.

But when HuffPost UK asked the British Retail Consortium, which represents multiple UK supermarkets, whether this is likely, its director of food and sustainability, Andrew Opie, said: “Supermarkets do not use, and have no plan to use, dynamic or surge pricing in their stores.”

He added that digital pricing displays, which some supermarkets use, allow retailers to update and check thousands of prices “in an effective way, so they can continue to offer great value for customers”.

But what is dynamic and personalised pricing, why do some think it’s coming soon, and why do others call worries of hourly price surges a “fantasy”?

Dynamic pricing involves “frequent, real-time adjustments in response to demand and supply,” the Bank of England said. It’s been used for years in hospitality and air travel.

It’s why hotels have an “off-season”; rooms are usually cheaper when fewer people are on holiday, and can climb rapidly during peak season and large events like the World Cup.

But as tech and algorithms advance, the Bank of England claimed the practice is “spreading and evolving”.

The Times said that, in theory, that could mean an ice cream would cost you more on a sunny day if dynamic pricing were applied to supermarkets.

However, The Grocer called the idea of live, hourly price surges in our supermarkets “pure fantasy”.

Personalised pricing “goes further still and may involve tailoring the price each consumer is offered to their personal circumstances and consumption patterns,” said the Bank of England.

It responds to a data-backed profile that algorithms have built on you, your behaviour, and your spending habits.

In short, it could mean that Peter would pay £150 for a flight Paul is only charged £70 for. That might, again in theory, be because the algorithms know Peter is on a birthday trip (so the date is non-negotiable) and lives in a posher postcode.

The Bank of England said personalised pricing is “widely adopted across all sectors”.

“Largely, these are still simple forms of personalised pricing, for example, using loyalty cards and online customer accounts, and are widespread in recreational services like gym memberships,” it said.

Both dynamic and personalised pricing can lead to either lower or higher than average prices.

Supermarkets are pushing back against the idea. The British Retail Consortium told us supermarkets don’t use, and have no plans to introduce, dynamic or surge prices in the UK.

The Bank of England’s statement mentioned changeable electronic supermarket labels, rather than static paper ones, when discussing dynamic pricing, as well as AI and improved algorithms.

They said: “Digital pricing allows firms to change prices frequently at negligible cost.”

But, as we shared above, the British Retail Consortium’s director of food and sustainability said these are used to “update and check thousands of prices in an effective way, so they can continue to offer great value”.

It’s also worth noting that digital labels have been in place for a while in many UK stores.

The Grocer shared an article in April 2023 which said Aldi, Lidl, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and ASDA were trialling, discussing, or had partly implemented digital labels.

In 2024, an Aldi spokesperson told HuffPost UK: “I can confirm Aldi began introducing electronic labels in 2021 to give colleagues more time on the shop floor to provide great service to our customers”.

Worries about how they may hurt our wallets are relatively old, too.

In 2023, the BBC said that yellow discount stickers may become a thing of the past “because supermarkets are adopting dynamic pricing, controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) software”.

This, they reported, would track food’s sell-by date and update its cost accordingly, meaning there’d be “no need for members of staff to walk around the fresh food aisles with a sticker gun towards the end of the day”.

That has, thankfully, not stopped workers in my local shops from whipping out the machine in 2026, though digital labels can update prices in real time.

Speaking to ITV News, consumer expert Martyn James said “when companies aren’t under scrutiny, sometimes the temptation [of dynamic or surge pricing] can get a little bit too much”, but a bigger threat could come from price hikes and greater food inflation following the US-Iran conflict.

May 2026 kicks off with a full “flower” moon. Because the moon is at its furthest point from the Earth – its apogee – this month’s lunar debut will be a smaller-looking “micromoon”.

But this month will see two full moons, and the second is a rare “blue moon”.

Here’s the date of both and how to catch them, as well as what a “blue moon” means:

We usually get one full moon a month, or 12 a year.

But we get monthly “blue moons”, which is the kind that describes this May’s second moon, for roughly the same reason we get leap years: the maths isn’t exactly even.

There are different types of blue moons: more on that later.

Royal Museums Greenwich explained that the moon takes 29.5 days to complete all of its phases, while most months have 30 or 31 days.

So, while our calendar years have 365 days (except for leap years), 12 cycles of the moon take about 354 days. That’s a decent amount of leftover days.

As a result, every two to three years, we experience a 13th moon. This is called a “blue” moon, because unlike our regular moons, which are all called things like the “flower”, “blood”, and “wolf” moons, they aren’t named.

In 2018, we had two blue moons in a single year, a phenomenon not expected to happen again until 2037.

The last blue moon took place in August 2024, and the next one is set for May 2027.

As if that wasn’t enough information to take in, there are two kinds of blue moon: seasonal and monthly.

This May’s blue moon is a monthly blue moon. That means it’s the second full moon in a single month. Monthly blue moons are a newer phenomenon: the definition came about in 1946.

Monthly moons are technically “astronomically incorrect,” BBC Sky At Night Magazine explained, though this definition is the most common today. They were accidentally invented because James Hugh Pruett misunderstood some dates in a farmer’s almanack.

But 2027′s blue moon will be a seasonal blue moon, which is a much older term.

These relate to the astronomical season, which is marked by solstices and equinoxes; the period between a solstice and an equinox is an astronomical season.

Most of the time, these only get three moons, but sometimes, because the moon cycles aren’t perfectly aligned with these seasons, we get four.

A seasonal blue moon is the third moon in an astronomical season of four moons.

The next monthly blue moon will be on December 31, 2028.

This will rise at 6:23pm in the UK on Friday, May 1.

It’ll be visible in any dark, relatively clear sky throughout the night. And while some cloud cover is predicted, experts think this’ll be “patchy” – meaning catching the “micromoon” could be a waiting game.

It’ll rise on Sunday, May 31.

Like the flower moon, it should be visible in clear, dark skies.