As I write my last regular column for the Guardian, my thoughts turn to the lessons and hope we can take from history

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand, as the old hymn has it, we seem to inhabit a world that is more seriously troubled in more places than many can ever remember. In the UK, national morale feels all but shot. Politics commands little faith. Ditto the media. The idea that, as a country, we still have enough in common to carry us through – the idea embedded in Britain’s once potent Churchillian myth – feels increasingly threadbare.

Welcome, in short, to the Britain of the mid-1980s. That Britain often felt like a broken nation in a broken world, very much as Britain often does in the mid-2020s. The breakages were of course very different. And on one important level, misery is the river of the world. But, for those who can still recall them, the 1980s moods of crisis and uncertainty have things in common with those of today.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

The world’s largest Wetherspoon’s has seal-spotting views, a green leather banquette and a grand central staircase. I would do anything for that pub, so imagine my surprise when I was given my marching orders

In the most prime imaginable bit of Ramsgate beach real estate, right on the sand, stands a handsome, turn-of-the-last-century building that had claimed for the longest amount of time, some years in neon, to be a casino. I’d never been allowed in as a kid. Then in the 90s it was leaning towards defunct, by the 00s it looked a bit haunted, then there was a fire, and wham, 2017, it turned into a Spoons. It had been trailed for a few months ahead, and I’d sworn off it; the living nightmare that was Brexit was only a few months old and Wetherspoon’s Tim Martin was one of its most gracelessly triumphant fuglemen. He could keep his (incredibly cheap) pints and his (superhumanly fast) nuggets.

Sting and his former bandmates go to the high court over a royalties dispute this week – the latest chapter in the song’s remarkably fractious story

This week’s high court hearings between Sting and his former bandmates in the Police, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, are the latest chapter in the life of a song whose negative energy seems to have seeped out into real life.

Every Breath You Take is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Copeland and Summers against Sting, alleging that he owes them royalties linked to their contributions to the hugely popular song, particularly from streaming earnings, estimated at $2m (£1.5m) in total. Sting’s legal team have countered that previous agreements between him and his bandmates regarding their royalties from the song do not include streaming revenue – and argued in pre-trial documents that the pair may have been “substantially overpaid”. In the hearing’s opening day, it was revealed that since the lawsuit was filed, Sting has paid them $870,000 (£647,000) to redress what his lawyer called “certain admitted historic underpayments”. But there are still plenty of future potential earnings up for debate.

Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered

In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.

It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.

In countries such as South Sudan, the great herds have all but disappeared. But further south, conservation success mean increasing human-wildlife conflict

It is late on a January afternoon in the middle of South Sudan’s dry season, and the landscape, pricked with stubby acacias, is hazy with smoke from people burning the grasslands to encourage new growth. Even from the perspective of a single-engine ultralight aircraft, we are warned it will be hard to spot the last elephant in Badingilo national park, a protected area covering nearly 9,000 sq km (3,475 sq miles).

Technology helps – the 20-year-old bull elephant wears a GPS collar that pings coordinates every hour. The animal’s behaviour patterns also help; Badingilo’s last elephant is so lonely that it moves with a herd of giraffes.

From amused texts to awkward introductions, the run-up to the release of awards-tipped Shaker biopic The Testament of Ann Lee has been a strange experience

The messages started over a year ago. “The title cracked me up,” my film-loving friend Matt texted me, along with a tweet announcing a new musical called Ann Lee, starring Amanda Seyfried and directed by Mona Fastvold, about an 18th-century leader of the Shaker movement. Why would such innocuous film news delight him so much? Well, because my name is Ann Lee too.

“Yes! Fame at last!” I replied. I’ve answered in a similar vein to all the messages since then from other friends eager to break the news to me that my name was getting top billing in a prestigious Hollywood film. And I was genuinely amused and excited; for most of my life Ann Lee had seemed the beigest of names. Lee, or Li as it’s also spelled, is one of the most common surnames in the world and shared by more than 100 million people in Asia. I was sure there were many many Ann Lees out there. But when you get a film title dedicated to it? Now that’s when you start to feel your name might be special after all.

US president adopts more measured tone and suggests a pause in decision on threatened US military action in Iran

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Donald Trump has said he has been assured the killing of protesters in Iran has been halted, adding that he would “watch it and see” about threatened US military action, as tensions appeared to ease on Wednesday night.

Trump had repeatedly talked in recent days about coming to the aid of the Iranian people over the crackdown on protests that Iran Human Rights, a group based in Norway, said had now killed at least 3,428 people and led to the arrest of more than 10,000.

ONS says GDP expanded in news that is unlikely to deter Bank of England from making more interest rate cuts

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The UK economy grew by a stronger than expected 0.3% in November despite uncertainty around the chancellor Rachel Reeves’s budget, official figures show.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Thursday showed the improvement, up from a 0.1% fall in October.

Amid global backlash, billionaire had only hours earlier said he was not aware of any ‘naked underage images’

Elon Musk’s xAI has announced it will block the ability of its Grok AI tool to alter images of real people to put them in “revealing clothing such as bikinis”, amid a global backlash over the tool being used to generate explicit imagery.

The move came just hours after the billionaire said he was was not aware of any “naked underage images” made by Grok.

Talks fail to solve ‘fundamental disagreement’ over Arctic island controlled by Copenhagen

Donald Trump reiterated on Wednesday that the US needs Greenland and that Denmark cannot be relied upon to protect the island, even as he said that “something will work out” with respect to the future governance of the Danish overseas territory.

The remarks, which came after a high-stakes meeting between US, Danish and Greenlandic officials, indicate that fundamental differences remain between how Washington, Copenhagen and Nuuk see the political future of the island.

Exclusive: US is less feared by its traditional adversaries, while its allies feel ever more distant, results show

A year after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a global survey suggests much of the world believes his nation-first, “Make America Great Again” approach is instead helping to make China great again.

The 21-country survey for the influential European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) thinktank also found that under Trump, the US is less feared by its traditional adversaries, while its allies – particularly in Europe – feel ever more distant.

Four more who had paused their strikes choose not to continue after government opts against giving contract to Elbit Systems UK

Three Palestine Action-affiliated prisoners have announced the end of their hunger strike after the government decided not to award a £2bn contract to the Israeli arms company subsidiary Elbit Systems UK – with another four who had paused their protest choosing not to continue.

Fears had been growing for the welfare of those taking part. On Wednesday, Heba Muraisi, 31, would have been on day 73 of refusing food, the same number of days as reached by the Irish republican hunger striker Kieran Doherty, who survived the longest of 10 men who died in a 1981 action. The earliest death among the Irish republicans was after 46 days, raising fears about the risk to life of the prisoners in jail awaiting trial for offences relating to protests claimed by Palestine Action.

Four astronauts undock from International Space Station, with the affected crewmember in a stable condition, says space agency

Four crew members have left the International Space Station (ISS) and are heading back to Earth after a medical issue prompted their mission to be cut a month short in Nasa’s first medical evacuation.

A video feed from Nasa showed American astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui undocking from the ISS at 2220 GMT on Wednesday, after five months in space.

Items worth £59.7m allocated to museums, galleries, libraries and archives as part of Arts Council England scheme

Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli’s desk, a painting by Vanessa Bell and a rare artwork by Edgar Degas are among the items of cultural importance saved for the nation this year.

The items, worth a total of £59.7m, will be allocated to museums, galleries, libraries and archives around the UK as part of Art Council England’s cultural gifts and acceptance in lieu schemes.

Ynyshir’s Gareth Ward ‘not embarrassed’ by score and says it was due to concerns about the use of raw ingredients

The chef behind a Welsh restaurant with two Michelin stars says it has “the highest standards in the world”, despite being given a one-star hygiene rating in a recent inspection.

Ynyshir, a restaurant with rooms near Machynlleth on the southern edge of the Eryri national park, has been praised as one of the best in the world.

Prime minister wants cabinet ministers to move on from policies that have tanked with voters

Before the 2015 UK election, the Australian political expert Lynton Crosby devised a strategy for the Tories that became known as “scraping the barnacles off the boat” – shedding unpopular policies that hindered the party’s electoral appeal.

Instead, the party focused on core issues it believed would help win over floating voters: the economy, welfare, the strength of David Cameron (and weakness of Ed Miliband) and immigration. Everything else was deprioritised and the Conservatives stuck to their messages rigidly. It worked.

The bandhgala jacket will no longer be part of the formal uniform for Indian Railways staff, following claims it symbolises a ‘colonial mindset’

It is one India’s most ubiquitous garments, with origins in the grand Mughal courts and Rajasthani kingdoms of times past, and still widely favoured by sharply dressed grooms at wedding receptions.

But this week, the distinctive high-collared bandhgala jacket – known to many as the “princely jacket” in a nod to its royal origins – found itself at the centre of a lively debate after it was denounced by the Indian railways minister as a symbol of a “colonial mindset”.

Dipping in the freezing waters of Scandinavia, Greenland and Finland was life-changing – and full of warmth thanks to saunas, hot springs and like-minded people

Warm lights shine from the houses that dot the wintry slopes of Mount Fløyen and a cold wind blows as I stand in a swimming costume trying to talk myself into joining my friends in Bergen harbour. Stars are already appearing in the inky mid-afternoon sky.

Life-changing moments are easy to spot in retrospect, but at the time they can feel so ordinary. I didn’t know then that my wintry swim would lead to a year of adventures. I was a hair’s breadth from wimping out, but then I was in. The water was so cold it burned. I gasped for breath. The bones in my feet ached with cold as I trod water, legs frantic under the dark surface. It lasted under a minute and then we were out.

This hormone-fuelled tale of the training college for space voyagers is like Grange Hill, with phasers – and it has a female lead unlike any captain before

The original Star Trek TV series debuted in 1966, so trying to get your head round all the sequels, prequels and timeline-splitting spin-offs can often feel like homework. It was only a matter of time before the venerable sci-fi franchise used a school as a setting. But Starfleet Academy, the latest streaming series, is not some random cosmic polytechnic for aliens to study humanities or vice versa. This is the oft-referenced San Francisco space campus sited right next to the Golden Gate Bridge. With James T Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard on the alumni list, it is basically Hogwarts for wannabe starship captains.

Or at least it used to be. As this newest Trek opens we are in the 32nd century: as far into the future as the franchise has ever gone, boldly or otherwise. (The original 1966 five-year mission for Kirk and co took place in the 23rd century.) The universe is still recovering from the Burn, an all-encompassing cataclysm from 2020’s season three of Star Trek: Discovery that put the kibosh on faster-than-light warp travel. After an extended period of intergalactic isolationism, Starfleet Academy is about to receive its first new intake for over a century. Mega-fan Stephen Colbert is already on board as the school’s PA announcer. All it needs is a new chancellor.

A fascinating deep dive into the discovery, use and implications of a revolutionary new treatment

Few aspects of being human have generated more judgment, scorn and condemnation than a person’s size, shape and weight – particularly if you happen to be female. As late as 2022, the Times’s columnist Matthew Parris published a column headlined “Fat shaming is the only way to beat the obesity crisis” in which he attributed Britain’s “losing battle with fat” to society’s failure to goad and stigmatise the overweight into finally, shamefacedly, eating less. The tendency to equate excess weight with poor character (and thinness with grit and self-control) treats obesity as a moral as well as physical failing – less a disease than a lifestyle choice.

One of the great strengths of Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan’s first book is its insistence on framing the discovery of the new weight-loss drugs within the fraught social and cultural context of beauty norms, body image and health. For those who need them, weekly injections of Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro can be revolutionary. Yet for every person with diabetes or obesity taking the drugs to improve their health, others – neither obese nor diabetic – are obtaining them to get “beach-body” ready, fit into smaller dresses, or attain the slender aesthetic social media demands of them. Small wonder some commentators have likened the injections to “an eating disorder in a pen”.

Sustainable fresh scallops are best treated simply, and this herby, garlicky breadcrumb topping ticks all the right boxes

As a kid growing up in West Bay, Dorset, I used to sit on the harbour wall and watch the small trawlers coming in with their catch. My friend Mark’s dad’s boat, along with all the others, would be stacked high with sacks of queenies that they’d dredged up only hours before, and Mark’s mum would pack us off to school with a tub each of queen scallop meat doused in Sarson’s vinegar and white pepper, to eat later as a playground snack. At the time, I thought nothing of it, but, looking back now, I realise quite what a luxurious schoolday treat this was.

These days, however, our local scallop fishermen don’t fish for queenies much any more, because the time it takes to shuck and clean them is more or less the same as that for larger king scallops, so they’re no longer financially viable; also, instead of all those trawlers that Lyme Bay had in the past, it’s now mostly divers who fish more sustainably for king scallops, without demolishing the sea bed in the process. There are two main dive boats that fish out of Lyme Regis nowadays, operated by Jon Shuker and Ali Day, and they’ve pretty much cornered the local market. They recently started experimenting with so-called “disco scallops”, which are caught in pots fitted with flashing lights that lure them in, which is much more efficient, crew-wise, than diving, because a boat with one diver is legally required to have a crew of four, comprising the working diver, a standby diver, a supervisor and a driver. Crazy, eh?

Mathilde Aurier’s 65 Rue d’Aubagne looks at the 2018 house collapse in Marseille and how the city healed itself through ‘love and solidarity’

“It was a turning point for Marseille, and it spotlighted the politics of France’s second city. There’s still a lot of things that have been left unsaid, things that aren’t pretty. But it set things into motion too.”

Playwright and director Mathilde Aurier is talking about what has been referred to as France’s Grenfell moment: the collapse of two dilapidated houses on 5 November 2018 on the Rue d’Aubagne in the Noailles neighbourhood, just a few hundred metres from the magnificent Old Port. Eight people were killed, causing a national outcry about urban inequality and social deprivation.

Inua Ellams’ play takes you to different destinations for intimate conversations about sex, queerness, capitalism, football and much more

I first saw Barber Shop Chronicles on National Theatre at Home. It was during the first lockdown in 2020 and I was trying to find some entertainment while I was furloughed. I was 26 and hadn’t seen a lot of theatre, but had heard good things about it on social media.

For the first five minutes or so the audience are milling around the barber shop set. You’re not really sure who’s an actor and who’s an audience member. But there’s a real sense of camaraderie, jokes and vibes – you really feel part of it. The setting is not exactly domestic, not exactly business. There wasn’t a raised stage so you felt invited, and then kind of zoomed, into the action.

For the first time in the UK, the photographer’s magnum opus is going on display in its entirety – introducing new viewers to New York’s edgy downtown scene and a generation lost to Aids. Here, she looks back at the ‘fearlessness and wildness’ of her life and times

The US I grew up in was built on the rule of law. Now my Indian-born dad is scared ICE will take him from his American care home

As an American of mixed Danish and Indian heritage, who is also a citizen of France and, therefore, of the EU, Donald Trump’s contempt for the rule of law fills me with dread. “I don’t need international law,” he boasted on 7 January in an interview with the New York Times. For Louis XIV, it was “L’état, c’est moi”. For Trump, it’s the “Donroe doctrine”, or “the western hemisphere is mine for whatever profit I and my elite group of loyal courtiers can wring from it”.

At the same time, Trump’s honesty about his intention to use the astonishing military power he wields for unfettered plunder is at least refreshing. No more American pieties to democracy and human rights. The world hasn’t seen this kind of unabashed dedication to amassing wealth since the British East India Company. All hail the new king emperor! Or else.

Mira Kamdar is a Paris-based writer and author of India in the 21st Century. She writes Mixed Borders on Substack

The AI chatbot’s torrent of nonconsensual deepfakes isn’t its first scandal and won’t be its last. Responsible governments should simply ban it

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Billionaire and career Bond-villain cosplayer Elon Musk has been forced by public backlash into a humiliating backdown over use of his AI chatbot, Grok. Watching the world’s richest man eat a shit sandwich on a global stage represents a rare win for sovereign democracy.

Because – unlike his company history of labour and safety abuses … his exploding rockets … his government interventions that deny aid to the starving … disabling Starlink internet systems in war zones … sharing “white solidarity” statements … or growing concern about overvaluations of his company’s share price – the nature of Grok’s latest scandal may finally be inspiring governments towards imposing some Musk-limiting red lines.

A line has been crossed, and it’s vital to understand that. A system that sends paramilitaries on to the streets will observe no limits

A few years ago, towards the end of the second Obama administration, a friend and her wife flew back to New York from a holiday in Mexico, landing for a connecting flight in South Carolina. At immigration, the officer looked from one to the other, asked their relation to one another and on receiving the reply, made a noise of disgust – “ugh”. On the pretext that American citizens can’t go through the same lane as a spouse on a green card (not true), he sent them to the back of the line, causing them to miss their connection. But that’s not the point of the story.

My friend is a white Australian who is generally conflict-averse; her wife is a Japanese-American who can stop traffic with a single, hard stare, and who teaches in the South Bronx, where many of her students have been harassed by law enforcement since the day they were born. As trouble got under way, my friend kicked off like a good’un, swearing and muttering sarcastically in the Australian style, while her wife shot her desperate, angry looks. Shut up. Shut Up. SHUT UP.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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Having lost the faith of his party and the public, the prime minister turns to dad jokes – and he’s even worse at those than running the country

Not another one. On Tuesday evening, the government announced that it wasn’t going to make digital ID cards mandatory after all. Just months after Keir Starmer had made digital ID cards the cornerstone of his plans to stop migrants working illegally.

It’s getting hard to keep up. At Christmas, we had the U-turn on inheritance tax on farms. In the New Year, we had a U-turn on business rates for pubs. All U-turns that were undoubtedly for the better. All U-turns that came with their own numbing predictability. Almost as if the government hadn’t thought things through. Surely not.

Big tech companies cannot be trusted. It is not enough that they remove harm when they find it – the law must make their systems prevent harm

On X, a woman posts a photo in a sari, and within minutes, various users are underneath the post tagging Grok to strip her down to a bikini. It is a shocking violation of privacy, but now a familiar and commonplace practice. Between June 2025 and January 2026, I documented 565 instances of users requesting Grok to create nonconsensual intimate imagery. Of these, 389 were requested in just one day.

Last Friday, after a backlash against the platform’s ability to create such nonconsensual sexual images, X announced that Grok’s AI image generation feature would only be available to subscribers. Reports suggest that the bot now no longer responds to prompts to generate images of women in bikinis (although apparently will still do so for requests about men).

Nana Nwachukwu is an AI governance expert and a PhD researcher at Trinity College Dublin

There was a time when nobody picked up after their dogs – and it would have been considered disgusting to do so. What caused the change in attitude?

A PE teacher from Cardiff called Tony is frozen solid after being caught in an avalanche in 1979. There he remains until global heating sees to his thawing and he pops up in the present day, exactly as he was back then. Comedy ensues. This is make-believe, by the way; it’s the premise of Mike Bubbins’ BBC series Mammoth. In the masterful opening scenes, to the sound of Gerry Rafferty’s Get It Right Next Time, we see Tony being scornful, angry, frightened and disgusted by four things that didn’t happen before his big freeze.

He scoffs at a bloke carrying a baby in a sling, gives a charity chugger very short shrift, and jumps out of his skin when a youth on a hoverboard zips past him. But it was Tony’s disgust at a woman picking up her German shepherd’s poo that got me thinking. When did picking up dog poo become the thing to do? Or, put another way, when did just leaving it there become the thing not to do? When did we start becoming disgusted at those who didn’t pick it up rather than those who did? This is a pretty seismic cultural shift, I’m sure you’ll agree.

It is better to correct policy than persist in error, but Keir Starmer cannot afford to keep signalling his lack of coherent direction

In practical terms there is not a huge difference between proving your identity online with a passport and using a government-issued digital ID. But when possession of the latter is a legal requirement, the distinction has clear political significance. So does the government’s decision this week to abandon proposals to make digital ID mandatory.

People will still have to verify their identities in order to work in Britain. That was declared as the main purpose of the scheme when Sir Keir Starmer announced it last autumn. It would prevent people without the proper entitlement – illegal migrants, in short – having jobs. Now the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, says she is “pretty relaxed” about what kind of ID is used for verification.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Proposals to relaunch Northern Powerhouse Rail are welcome and overdue. But passengers and commuters will believe it when they see it

In areas starved of the kind of investment taken for granted in the south-east, the miserable state of northern England’s railways has long been a source of anger and indignation. One analysis of Treasury figures found that the equivalent of seven Elizabeth lines could have been built in the north, if levels of funding devoted to London’s transport needs had been replicated there. Instead, an estimated £140bn shortfall means that the 35-mile trip from Liverpool to Manchester can take more than twice as long as the 42-mile journey from London to Reading.

Plans to resuscitate the Northern Powerhouse Rail project (NPR), unveiled on Tuesday by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are therefore welcome and overdue. The government has committed to developing a three-stage plan to upgrade rail connections from the west coast to the north-east. No doubt mindful of the political threat posed to Labour by Reform in “red wall” seats, Sir Keir Starmer hailed the moment as a turning point, observing that northerners had “been let down by broken promises” in the past.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Dr Vicky Cleak is frustrated with the lengthy registration process to practice, while Mona Sood and another reader are wary of NHS drug-based interventions

As a UK-trained consultant psychiatrist, fully indemnified, appraised and regulated by the General Medical Council, with specialist expertise in adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) assessment and treatment, I read your article on rising ADHD care costs with concern and frustration (NHS ADHD spending over budget by £164m as unregulated clinics boom, 12 January).

For the past eight months I have been navigating the opaque Care Quality Commission (CQC) registration process to provide high-quality, fully regulated ADHD assessments in an independent setting, alongside two similarly qualified colleagues. Until this process is complete, I am legally prohibited from seeing patients.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, Ray Flynn and another reader respond to the news that the practice is classed as possible child abuse in a draft Crown Prosecution Service document

I would welcome criminalising circumcision if it was performed by an unqualified person – just as would be the case if someone unqualified conducted any other surgical operation (Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document, 10 January). But leaping from that to banning the practice altogether is not justified.

Given that it is a longstanding and important tradition among Jews, Muslims and various other cultures, the best way forward is to only permit circumcision if it is practised by someone specifically qualified for it and who belongs to a nationally accredited scheme. This would involve compulsory training, monitoring all cases and producing annual reports.

Richard Hermer’s comments on Trump and Venezuela show that he seems to have forgotten what it says, writes Mark Seddon

One of my former UN bosses, María Fernanda Espinosa, made a point of sending a copy of the UN charter to the permanent representative of each member state on her election as president of the UN general assembly, by way of reminding them of their binding commitments.

As she now intends to stand for election as the first female secretary general of that much-maligned organisation, perhaps it might be the time to consider doing the same again? Certainly Donald Trump, who has told us that his own personal morality and very big brain take precedence over international law, could do with a copy, as could Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, as the latter pair continue to dodge international arrest warrants.

Judith Condon is disappointed by Call the Midwife’s reductive depiction of the Women’s Liberation Movement

What a pity to see Call the Midwife, still one of Britain’s most popular television series, stumbling into tired stereotypes about the Women’s Liberation Movement of the early 1970s.

The first episode of the new series had the female characters attending a WLM meeting, then assembling to burn their bras over a brazier. The scene may have provided an amusing image of the various styles of bra, but was not worthy of a programme that has previously shone much light on the everyday lives of women in postwar Britain.

It’s damning that Chelsea, despite spending vast sums on their squad, are still reliant on such a skittish goalkeeper

Martín Zubimendi had as much time as he wanted against the team forever building for tomorrow. Taking a flick from Viktor Gyökeres in his stride, the Arsenal midfielder danced into the area, weighed up whether to shoot and thought better of it. Instead there was a sauntering move away from Andrey Santos, a feint to throw Wesley Fofana and then, only when Zubimendi had decided he was ready, was there the calm to beat Robert Sánchez and leave Chelsea with a mountain to climb in this Carabao Cup semi-final.

It was swaggering from Zubimendi. In that moment it was Arsenal demonstrating why they are so far ahead of this occasionally thrilling but often baffling Chelsea side, who have faint hope of a turnaround after battling to a defeat that was 3-2 going on 4-0. Mikel Arteta’s side had, after all, done the dirty stuff. The first goal came from a corner, the second from Sánchez’s error, but the third was different. It was silky from Arsenal, the ball pinging between Mikel Merino and Gyökeres before Zubimendi applied the graceful finishing touch, and a reminder that they are top of the Premier League because they perform both sides of the game.

• Last 16: Albacete 3-2 Real Madrid

• Stoppage-time winner secures huge upset

For 20 minutes of Álvaro Arbeloa’s debut as manager of Real Madrid, the fog came down and no one could see any football. For the other 70, they couldn’t either. Not from his team, at least. From Albacete Balompié, 17th in the second division, they witnessed something magical. An outrageous goal scored with single second to go was the perfect end to the greatest story they ever told, history made. When the final whistle went, Madrid headed straight down the tunnel, defeated again, while the party began in the Carlos Belmonte.

Arbeloa had said he wanted to see Vinícius Júnior dance; instead, it was Albacete’s fans who would, long into the night of their lives. This could not have been any better; at Madrid, things can always get worse, the crisis deepening. Careful what you wish for and all that. “At this club every defeat is a tragedy, so imagine one like this,” Arbeloa said. “Failure is the road to success,” Madrid’s new manager added, insisting he was not afraid, that he had suffered eliminations even worse, but this had hurt.

Some day, perhaps, Mohamed Salah will get the better of Sadio Mané in a major game, but not on Wednesday, not in the Africa Cup of Nations semi-final.

When Senegal beat Egypt in a shootout in the 2021 Afcon final, Mané scored the winning penalty before Salah had the chance to take his. In the shootout in the qualifying playoff for the 2022 World Cup, Salah missed his effort and Mané scored the winning penalty.

• Robertson leaves role two years into four-year contract

• Decision to part ways comes after internal NZR review

Scott Robertson has stepped down as New Zealand coach following an internal review of the All Blacks’ performance.

Speculation over Robertson’s future has mounted since December amid reports of friction between senior players and All Blacks staff.

• Amateur player celebrates winning One Point Slam at Australian Open

• Sydney coach to use million-dollar payday to travel and buy property

Pending tax advice, tennis coach Jordan Smith is Australia’s newest millionaire, thrust into the global spotlight after beating top professionals in the One Point Slam on Wednesday night.

Smith’s improbable run to the $1m prize made him a magnet on Thursday morning at Melbourne Park, amid more than a dozen local and international interviews, selfies, promotions and autographs.

Today’s rumours are air-tight

David Moyes is a keen admirer of massive centre-forwards, so it should not come as a surprise that Everton want to bring in all 6ft 2in of Youssef En-Nesyri from Fenerbahce. An initial loan offer, with a £20m option, is on the table for the Moroccan, leaving a decision to made in Istanbul. There is a chance Callum Wilson could swap West Ham for Merseyside to join up with Moyes, too.

Nottingham Forest are also interested in En-Nesyri but their main striking target is Olympiakos’ veteran forward, Mehdi Taremi. Sean Dyche was hoping for a quiet month but needs must and that could include sending Oleksandr Zinchenko back to Arsenal after a very forgettable loan spell at the City Ground.

• Trump defeats Ding Junhui, Robertson sinks Wakelin

• All eight first-round games ended in same scoreline

The world No 1 Judd Trump made three centuries as he saw off Ding Junhui 6-2 to move into the quarter-finals of the Masters, before Neil Robertson defeated Chris Wakelin by the same score – meaning that all eight first-round matches at London’s Alexandra Palace finished 6-2.

After edging a lengthy first frame, Trump – who was not able to lift any silverware in 2025 – crafted a fine break of 116 which was followed with a break of 69 to open up an early 3-0 lead.

• Indian government yet to issue visas to spinners

• Ahmed and Rashid unlikely to fly to Sri Lanka this week

England have had a setback in their preparations for the T20 World Cup next month with the Indian government yet to issue visas to the spinners Adil Rashid and Rehan Ahmed.

The delay means both players, who have Pakistani heritage, are unlikely to travel with the rest of the squad this weekend for six warm-up games against Sri Lanka, and it is unclear when they will join their teammates.

• Wane: ‘I believe the time is right to step aside’

• Successor likely to be part-time appointment

Shaun Wane has left his position as England head coach with immediate effect, the Guardian can reveal, leaving the national team on the hunt for a replacement for the Rugby League World Cup later this year.

Wane oversaw England’s 3-0 Ashes defeat against Australia last autumn but insisted in the aftermath of that series that he was keen to continue and rebuild going into the World Cup in the southern hemisphere this year.

Mayor urged calm as protesters gathered on the scene, as city continues to reel in aftermath of Renee Nicole Good’s killing

A federal officer has shot a man in the leg during an enforcement operation in north Minneapolis, sparking protests in a city still on edge after the killing of Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent last week.

The shooting occurred about 7pm local time, according to witnesses. Several hundred protesters gathered at the scene on Wednesday night facing off with agents who blocked off the area and used smoke and other crowd control weapons.

Night-time temperatures dip close to -20C; minister outlines major problems with desertion and conscription evasion. What we know on day 1,422

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to declare a state of emergency in Ukraine’s energy sector to tackle disrupted power supplies after heavy Russian attacks. Energy imports would also be increased, the Ukrainian president said. Emergency crews in Ukraine have proceeded with round-the-clock efforts to restore power and heating supplies at a time when night-time temperatures are dipping close to -20C (-4F). Zelenskyy said the state of emergency would allow authorities “more options and flexibility”. He called for the establishment of more centres where residents can stay warm and charge electronic devices, and said nightly curfews could be lifted in areas where the security situation permitted it.

The president said Kyiv – whose mayor he regularly clashes with – had done considerably less than other major centres, notably Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, to prepare for the hardships inflicted by the attacks. “Even in recent days, I do not see sufficient intensity,” he said. “This must be urgently corrected. Decisions must be made.” The Kyiv mayor, Vitali Klitschko, countered that heating had been restored to all but about 400 of 6,000 affected apartment buildings and support centres were operating 24 hours a day. “Such statements, first of all, undermine the dedicated work of thousands of people, professionals,” Klitschko wrote. “They may not have weapons in their hands, but through their tireless efforts they are also fighting for their country.” Zelenskyy said a permanent coordination headquarters would be set up in Kyiv with Denys Shmyhal, the newly appointed first deputy prime minister and energy minister, overseeing the work.

Donald Trump has again claimed Ukraine – not Russia – is holding up a potential peace deal, rhetoric that stands in marked contrast to that of European allies, who have consistently argued Moscow has little interest in ending its war in Ukraine. “I think he’s ready to make a deal,” Trump said of Vladimir Putin, in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday. “I think Ukraine is less ready to make a deal.” Moscow and Kyiv remain at odds over the key issue of territory. There are few signs that Putin is prepared to soften his maximalist demands to end the full-scale invasion.

Zelenskyy urged the military to hold their positions along the 1,200km (775-mile) frontline and diplomats to keep working on securing peace. “From our side, maximum productivity is required,” he said. “We expect the same level of energetic work from the American side. I personally very much expect this.”

Ukraine will be able to buy military equipment from non-European suppliers when it is given access to a €90bn (£78bn) EU loan later this year under a proposal outlined by the EU executive, Jennifer Rankin writes from Brussels. “European preference first, but if not possible then purchase abroad,” said the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who added that Europe should have a return in jobs and research benefits from the “billions and billions that are being invested”. Her proposal represents a softening of the approach pursued by France that favoured a more restrictive “buy European” clause. The commission said an alternative plan based on using Russia’s frozen assets remained on the table.

Desertion by 200,000 troops and another two million people evading conscription are among many challenges facing the military, Ukraine’s new defence minister said on Wednesday. Mykhailo Fedorov told parliament that other problems included excessive bureaucracy, a Soviet-style approach to management, and disruptions in the supply of equipment to troops. “We cannot fight a war with new technologies but an old organisational structure,” Fedorov said.

The defence ministry was facing a shortfall of 300bn hryvnia ($6.9bn) in funding, Fedorov said. On the upside he said some sectors had emerged from scratch, including private missile producers, which now number about 20, and more than 100 companies manufacturing ground-based robotic systems.

The US treasury department has extended until 28 February a licence for companies to talk with Russian energy company Lukoil about buying its foreign assets. The US imposed sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, Russia’s two biggest energy companies, on 22 October as part of an effort to pressure Moscow over its war in Ukraine. Lukoil put its $22bn in global assets up for sale shortly after. It has been hard-hit by the US sanctions, with overseas operations disrupted from Iraq to Finland.

Pressure mounting for use of glyphosate, listed by WHO since 2015 as probable carcinogen, to be heavily restricted

Children are potentially being exposed to the controversial weedkiller glyphosate at playgrounds across the UK, campaigners have said after testing playgrounds in London and the home counties.

The World Health Organization has listed glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen since 2015. However, campaigners say local authorities in the UK are still using thousands of litres of glyphosate-based herbicides in public green spaces.

Royal College of Nursing publishes dossier of evidence including case of elderly patient who choked to death in corridor

Corridor care is “a type of torture” that is leading to patients dying and causing NHS staff to have nightmares, the UK’s nurses union has warned.

In one case, an elderly patient choked to death in a corridor, unseen by staff, according to a new dossier of evidence highlighting the problem published by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).

Survey by education thinktank finds ‘contradictory’ attitudes towards free speech at UK universities

One-third of students think Reform UK politicians should be barred from speaking on university campuses, according to a survey of student attitudes towards free speech that organisers described as “contradictory” and confusing.

While 69% of students told the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) survey that universities should “never limit free speech”, similar numbers also supported speaking bans on specific political parties.

Subsidies awarded to eight new projects help keep UK on track to decarbonise by 2030

• Nils Pratley: Labour faces risks on energy despite ‘record’ wind power auction

• Will Great Britain’s offshore wind subsidy auction mean lower energy bills?

• Ed Miliband: With this record wind power auction, we’ve proved the rightwing doubters wrong

A make-or-break auction for the UK government’s goal to create a clean electricity system by 2030 has awarded subsidy contracts to enough offshore windfarms to power 12m homes.

In Great Britain’s most competitive auction for renewable subsidies to date, energy companies vied for contracts that guarantee the price for each unit of clean electricity they generate.

Energy company also under pressure from worse oil trading performance and weaker oil prices

• Business live – latest updates

BP has said it expects to write down the value of its struggling green energy business by as much as $5bn (£3.7bn), as it refocuses on fossil fuels under its new chair, Albert Manifold.

The oil company said the writedowns were mostly related to its gas and low-carbon energy divisions in its “transition businesses”, but added that wiping between $4bn and $5bn off their value would not affect its underlying profits when it reports its full-year results in February.

Data leads scientists to declare 2015 Paris agreement to keep global heating below 1.5C ‘dead in the water’

Last year was the third hottest on record, scientists have said, with mounting fossil fuel pollution behind “exceptional” temperatures.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said 2025 had continued a three-year streak of “extraordinary global temperatures” during which surface air temperatures averaged 1.48C above preindustrial levels.

For Hannah Thorogood, a first-generation Lincolnshire farmer, grazing her sheep on solar land gave her a leg-up in the industry

On a blustery Lincolnshire morning, Hannah Thorogood paused between two ranks of solar panels. Her sheep nosedived into the grass under their shelter and began to graze.

“When I first started out, 18 acres and 20 sheep was as much as I could afford,” said the first-generation farmer. “Now, because I can graze this land for free, I have 250 acres and over 200 sheep. Solar grazing has given me a massive leg-up.”

Families are concerned about possibility for intelligence services to veto officers giving evidence after disasters

Keir Starmer is facing the prospect of Labour MPs rebelling on his manifesto-promised Hillsborough law after talks broke down with families over how the duty of candour would apply to serving intelligence officers.

Starmer was introduced at last year’s Labour conference by Margaret Aspinall, whose son James, 18, was one of the 97 people killed in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. She praised him for pushing forward with the bill after months of arguments over its future.

Shabana Mahmood has lost confidence in Craig Guildford over his force’s ‘exaggerated and untrue’ intelligence assessments

• Explainer: What did West Midlands police chief get wrong in decision to ban Maccabi fans?

The police chief who used “exaggerated and untrue” intelligence to justify a ban on Israeli football fans was clinging on to his job on Wednesday, despite the home secretary demanding he resign.

Craig Guildford, who leads West Midlands police, is determined to stay in his post for now, the Guardian has learned, despite a war of words that culminated in Shabana Mahmood declaring she had lost confidence in him.

St Michael’s Mount launches major operation to clear up devastation caused by 112mph winds

The tidal island of St Michael’s Mount in the far south-west of Britain is usually a place of peace and quiet.

But it has become a hive of noisy activity as gardeners equipped with chainsaws and wood chippers get to grips with the devastating damage caused by Storm Goretti.

The site was the UK’s first Amazon warehouse and staff will be offered a transfer to a new Northampton site or elsewhere

Amazon is planning to close one of its UK fulfilment centres, offering workers the chance to transfer to another site.

The company announced a consultation on a proposal to close the site in Milton Keynes, which was the first Amazon centre to open in the UK, in 1998.

Campaign beset by violence with supporters of rival candidate Bobi Wine teargassed and detained

Ugandans are preparing to vote in an election that is expected to result in Yoweri Museveni extending his nearly four-decade grip on power in the east African country, after a campaign beset by violence.

Security forces have frequently clamped down on supporters of Museveni’s main opponent, Bobi Wine, by teargassing and shooting bullets at events and detaining people. Authorities have also arrested civil society members and suspended rights groups. On Tuesday, they shut down internet access and limited mobile phone services countrywide.

No details given of committee members who will run territory but they are expected be technocrats, not politicians

The US has announced the start of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, including the creation of a committee of Palestinian technocrats who are supposed to take over the day-to-day running of the territory for a transition period.

The announcement was made on social media by Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, but it lacked any detail or names of potential members of the proposed “national committee for the administration of Gaza”. The committee is not expected to begin work until mandated by a “peace board” chaired by Trump, which has yet to be created.

Judges uphold redrawing to offset Texas gerrymandering as Newsom attacks lawsuit as ‘weak attempt to silence voters’

A federal appeals panel on Wednesday upheld the California ballot initiative that allows temporary changes to congressional district maps designed to benefit Democrats in upcoming elections.

The measure, known as Proposition 50, emerged in response to actions taken in Texas, where Republican leaders sought to adjust congressional districts to increase GOP representation in the US House. As the midterm elections approach, a period when shifts in party control are common, Trump urged Texas officials to redraw their maps to boost Republican seats.

Decoded genome of meat in pup’s stomach helps scientists build picture of what caused extinction of species

Researchers have shed light on the final centuries of the woolly rhinoceros after studying a hairy lump of meat from the stomach of an ancient wolf cub that became mummified in the Siberian permafrost.

The beautifully preserved remains of a two-month-old female wolf cub were discovered in 2011 near the village of Tumat in northeastern Siberia. The animal is thought to have died 14,400 years ago when a landslide collapsed its den, trapping the cub and others inside.

Plan will start with TransPennine upgrade with new line connecting Liverpool and Manchester in second phase

Long-awaited plans for better railways across the north of England have been given government backing with an undertaking to “reverse years of chronic underinvestment” by spending up to £45bn building Northern Powerhouse Rail.

Just over £1bn has been allocated to work up a detailed three-stage plan to connect cities from Liverpool to Newcastle, which could fulfil most of the demands of northern leaders, in a series of long-term projects.

How upgrades will be funded and when they might be completed is still far from clear

Like a long-promised train that finally trundles into view, the green light for Northern Powerhouse Rail was better late than never. It arrived to relief rather than rejoicing from Labour mayors. They were happy, at last, to get moving.

A brief recap: the world’s most expensive and long-delayed rail line, HS2, was originally due to speed passengers from London to Birmingham and north on two separate legs to Manchester and Leeds.

US owner scraps auction after bids from private equity firms fail to meet its £2bn sale expectations, report says

• Business live – latest updates

Coca-Cola has reportedly abandoned plans to sell its Costa Coffee chain after bids from private equity firms failed to meet its expectations.

The US soft drinks company halted discussions with remaining bidders in December, according to the Financial Times, ending a months-long auction process.

US president says Jamie Dimon was wrong to suggest he was undermining independence of central bank

• Business live – latest updates

Donald Trump has hit out at the JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon, saying the Wall Street executive was wrong to suggest he was undermining the independence of the Federal Reserve.

The US president and his administration have come under fire for their attacks on the Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, who is facing a criminal investigation by the US Department of Justice over alleged “abuse of taxpayer dollars” linked to renovations to the central bank’s headquarters in Washington.

Jessie Buckley and Timothée Chalamet might be winning all of the awards but as Oscar voting begins, these actors also deserve inclusion

Every January, if not earlier, awards narratives leading up to the Oscars take shape. While the specifics of the Academy Award nominations are never known in advance, and can always be counted on for some surprises when they’re actually unveiled, critics and pundits and fans all enter into that final stretch with a pretty good idea of who won’t be nominated.

Some of this is because of the endless spitballing. But the “won’t” list is also easy to compile because it ultimately houses almost everyone who acted in a movie over the past year. Twenty performances are selected for the Oscars annually, and given the other high-profile awards bodies with additional preferences, category numbers and a never-complete overlap with the Academy, let’s say about 40 are in the broader competition of real possibilities. But there are so many more great performances every year than that, across all sizes, scopes and genres.

On the anniversary of his death aged 69, stars from Sigourney Weaver to Sharleen Spiteri, Tom Felton to Harriet Walter, remember the wit, charm and endless generosity of one of Britain’s best-loved actors

Ruby Wax

A social media content moderator becomes obsessed with a violent video in this restrained, unsettling workplace thriller starring Lili Reinhart

Here is a workplace drama, of sorts. Like many people, Daisy (Lili Reinhart) works a desk job using a computer. Unlike most people, fainting at work is a rite of passage; she moderates videos on social media that have been reported for violating the terms of service. That means watching everything from horrible porn to horrible politics to horrible accidents and everything in between, a non-stop diet of videos with titles such as “fetus in blender” or “strangulation but she doesn’t die”.

Her boss takes her to task for deleting a graphic video showing a suicide, which supposedly has news value and should have been left up. But the tipping point for Daisy is a really nasty video titled “nailed it”, which shows violence and cruelty that she believes is real and non-consensual. So begins a low-key quest to track down the perpetrator, though she is far from sure what she will do when she finds them. Nor is she altogether sure why it is this particular video, of all the trash and hatred washing over her, day in, day out, that has inspired her obsession. Her colleagues and boss shrug off her concerns: this video is nothing special.

The chirpy travel guide explores fjords and harvests mussels in a new series. Plus, daft sitcom Piglets returns. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
Lorraine Kelly has packed her bikinis and balaclavas to embark on a dreamy three-part voyage across Norway. She’s a chirpy travel guide as she steers the ship herself in Ålesund, the gateway to the fjords, before cracking on with a busy itinerary of floating saunas, kayaking down the River Nid and mussel harvesting. She also explores the concept of friluftsliv: living in and embracing nature. Hollie Richardson

After Guardian writers shared their choices, readers responded with picks from films including Withnail and I, Emily the Criminal and Chopper

The fact that he manages to save a kid’s life while remaining a sweary alcoholic without an ounce of dignity and self-respect … is positively heartwarming. GusCairns

The small screen phenomenon, and its publicized use of intimacy coordinators, has arrived as established Hollywood names have started to criticize the role

If you could pinpoint a moment where things change for Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), the two professional hockey players secretly hooking up in the show Heated Rivalry – a moment when the relationship breaks through into fraught emotional territory, when the hazy, undefined thing has become a thing – it would be midway through episode four.

Ilya’s couch, mid-morning, post-breakfast. (The exponentially growing fandom of this six-episode show from Canadian streamer Crave, which premiered in North America in late November with virtually no promotion and has rapidly become one of the most organic TV phenomena in recent memory, knows exactly what I’m talking about.) Hollander overhears Rozanov’s distressing phone call from home and asks how his father is (he doesn’t know Russian, but agitation needs no language); Rozanov responds by wrapping a sculpted arm around his neck. The two then get intimate, in one of the show’s many near-wordless sex scenes, culminating in them each using the other’s first name for the first time.

The neo-soul superstar – an in-demand musical collaborator, a seasoned actor and a bestselling poet – will take on your questions

In the age of GLP-1s and the deep-plane facelift making dozens of famous women appear perpetually 32 years old, there’s something extra heartening about Pressha, the lead single from three-time Grammy-winner Jill Scott’s sixth album. “I wasn’t the aesthetic / I guess, I guess, I get it / So much pressure to appear just like them / Pretty and cosmetic,” she sings in a coolly unimpressed kiss-off to a former paramour too cowardly to be seen with her in public.

It’s typical of the 53-year-old neo-soul superstar’s direct way with singing about femininity – a quality that’s made her an in-demand collaborator with artists including Dr Dre, Pusha T, Will Smith, Common and Kehlani. As well as having several US No 1 albums to her name, Scott is an artist’s artist: her new record features Tierra Whack, JID and Too $hort; she was originally discovered by Questlove back in her spoken-word days before releasing her platinum-certified debut Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol 1 in 2000.

From 46-minute jams to MTV video hits, here are the freedom-loving Dead guitarist and singer’s finest songs about ‘rainbows of sound’ and ‘enjoying the ride’

• Bob Weir, co-founder of rock group the Grateful Dead, dies at age 78
• Alexis Petridis: ‘Bob Weir was the chief custodian of the Dead’s legacy’
• Aaron Dessner: ‘I’ll never forget playing with him’

The Dead’s love for the road is in evidence on this segment from That’s It for the Other One, the four-part opening track of their second LP, Anthem of the Sun. A rare Bob Weir-penned lyric details the Dead’s youngest member being busted by the cops “for smiling on a cloudy day” – referencing a real-life incident when Weir pelted police with water balloons as they conducted what he took to be illegal searches outside the group’s Haight-Ashbury hangout. It then connects with the band’s spiritual forebears the Merry Pranksters by referencing Neal Cassady, driver of “a bus to never-ever land”. The song later evolved into The Other One, one of the Dead’s most played tunes and a launchpad for their exploratory jams – as in this languid, brilliant version at San Francisco’s Winterland in 1974.

Was British army major Robbie Mills leading a secret double life? Or was his posthumous accuser hoodwinking Mills’ family? A true-crime investigation finds out

A true-crime investigation into the supposed secret double life of British army major Robbie Mills. After Mills died in 1955, apparently from an accident on a submarine, a man called John Cotell turned up at his home claiming to be a friend of his – and a fellow spy. Journalist Eugene Henderson tells the troubling tale of Cottell, who rapidly insinuated his way into the Mills family’s lives. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

Wigmore Hall, London
The vocalist travels the full spectrum of the human voice, from subdued sounds of mouth and breath to an exhilarating remix of her own hyper-exuberant electronic soundscape

First, ambient electronics: quiet twitters and whistles approaching birdsong, as if synthesisers had been recorded in the wild. Then crooning, close to the mic but with all trace of melody excised to leave only the sounds of mouth and breath. Then finally something closer to singing – still intensely inward – that travelled the full spectrum from guttural groans and glitching vocal fry to exquisite bel canto resonance as the electronics bubbled, rippled and thudded.

As openers go, Yvette Janine Jackson’s Waiting was slow-burn, even gnomic. Other items in this remarkable programme of works for voice and electronics had more immediate impact – the no-holds-barred intensity of the word “white”, crescendoing to rawness and then looped, that began Laure M Hiendl’s White Radiance^TM. Or the faux-baroque sampled strings that launched Loré Lixenberg’s powerfully bonkers political manifesto-cum-arioso Cosmic Voice Party. From subdued start to exhilarating finish, however, the entire programme laid bare and revelled in the constituent parts of the human vocal apparatus.

Family trauma shapes a student’s affair with her teacher in this bleak and funny fiction debut from the American memoirist

When it was published in 2022, Jennette McCurdy’s memoir lit a touchpaper to a nascent cultural conversation. I’m Glad My Mom Died introduced her mother Debra’s narcissistic personality disorder into a world eager to discuss adult child and parent estrangement. McCurdy had also suffered sexual abuse, and claimed her mother had contributed to her developing an eating disorder. The memoir was a bestseller, walking readers through the realities of generational trauma; a step change for the former Disney child star who had been “the funny one” on obnoxious Nickelodeon kids’ shows.

In her debut work of fiction, Half His Age, McCurdy continues to shake open a Pandora’s box, shedding light on blurred parent-child boundaries and loss of identity due to over-enmeshment, with solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers’ room.

The death of a friend and the attempted murder of her husband Salman Rushdie loom large in the poet’s moving memoir

The night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was fretting about her best friend. Kamilah Aisha Moon was due to read a poem at the ceremony, but no one had heard from her. Her phone was going straight to voicemail and staff at her hotel said she hadn’t checked in. “We’ll find her. She wouldn’t miss your wedding,” Griffiths’s sister, Melissa, assured her. But the next afternoon, in the middle of her wedding reception, Griffiths learned that Moon had died alone at home in Atlanta of unknown causes. On hearing the news she collapsed, hit her head on a table and blacked out. Paramedics pried open her eyes to shine a torch on them: “A particle of light that is so distant from the world I once knew.”

For Griffiths, 47, the death of her best friend and “chosen sister” was one in a series of upheavals stretching across a decade. It began with the death of her mother, who was her greatest cheerleader and fiercest critic. She had instilled in her daughter the importance of “independence above everything. I was raised not to lose myself in the stories of others, especially men.”

A sociologist talks to the people putting their faith – and their hearts – in the hands of robots

If much of the discussion of AI risk conjures doomsday scenarios of hyper-intelligent bots brandishing nuclear codes, perhaps we should be thinking closer to home. In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them. A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren’t merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead.

To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in “synthetic personas”.

An expert in both disciplines makes a bold attempt to convince sceptics, and partially succeeds

Vladimir Nabokov notoriously dismissed the “vulgar, shabby, and fundamentally medieval world” of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whom he called “the Viennese witch doctor”. His negative judgment has been shared by many in the near 90 years since Freud’s death. A reputational high-water mark in the postwar period was followed by a collapse, at least in scientific circles, but there are signs of newfound respectability for his ideas, including among those who once rejected him outright. Mark Solms’s latest book, a wide-ranging and engrossing defence of Freud as a scientist and a healer, is a striking contribution to the re-evaluation of a thinker whom WH Auden described as “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion”.

It would be difficult to improve on Solms’s credentials for the task he sets himself. He is a neuroscientist, expert in the neuropsychology of dreams, the author of several books on the relationship between brain and consciousness, a practising psychoanalyst and the editor of the 24-volume revised standard edition of Freud’s complete works. He is also a wonderfully witty and lucid writer.

When Hollow Knight: Silksong came out last summer I was in so much pain that I didn’t know if I’d be able to play it. Could a video game teach me anything new about suffering?

Last year I became uncomfortably well acquainted with suffering. In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder – burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but everything was painful; even at rest it was horrible. I couldn’t play my guitar; I couldn’t play video games; I couldn’t sleep. I learned how quickly physical suffering lacerates your mental wellbeing.

I’d had episodes of nagging pain from so-called repetitive strain injuries before, the product of long hours hunched over laptops and game controllers over the course of decades, but nothing like this. A few months later, after the initial unrelenting agony had subsided to a permanent hum of more moderate pain, it was diagnosed as brachial neuritis, inflammation of the nerve path that travels from the base of your neck down to your hand. (Nobody knows what causes it, but it sometimes happens after an infection or an injury.) The good news, I was told by a neurologist, was that it usually gets better in about one to three years, and I hadn’t lost any function in my right hand. The bad news was that there was nothing much to be done about the pain in the meantime.

From the greatest cartoon racing game in history to a remastered version of an Alien-inspired sci-fi shooter, here are the Switch’s must-play games

• The 15 best games to play on the Nintendo Switch in 2025

Although the Nintendo Switch 2 has been out for several months, not everyone has made the leap to the new machine and there is still much to enjoy on the original console in 2026 (and beyond). From timeless Mario adventures to cutesy shooters to chasm-deep role-playing quests, here are 15 games no Switch owner should be without.

PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, Xbox, PC; Square-Enix
This landmark role-playing game remains a revolutionary tour de force

At first glance, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, first released in 1997 and now available in newly remastered guise, does little to separate itself from other boilerplate fantasy fiction. There is a hero, Ramza – an idealistic nobleman with luscious blond hair who cavorts about the medieval-inspired realm of Ivalice in search of high adventure. But quickly, and with narrative elegance, the picture complicates: peasant revolutionaries duke it out with gilded monarchists; machiavellian plots plunge the kingdom into chaos. Ramza must navigate this knotty political matrix, all while experiencing his own ideological awakening.

There is a strong case to be made that Final Fantasy Tactics tells a better story than the landmark Final Fantasy VII (which saw Cloud Strife and a ragtag bunch of eco-terrorist pals taking on the shady megacorporation Shinra). And with our real-world political focus shifting from the looming threat of the climate crisis to the more pressing rise of fascism (though the two are inextricably linked), one can make the argument that Tactics is now also the more timely game.

This now venerable hardware remains an ideal platform for classics such as Minecraft and daring experiments from the brightest new developers

Now surely approaching their twilight years, the Xbox Series S and X machines nevertheless still have plenty to offer both new and veteran owners. We have selected 15 titles that show the range of what’s on offer, from the biggest blockbusters to lesser known indie gems you may have missed. Whether you’re after tense psychological horror or wild escapism, it’s all here and more.

The Place, London
Intriguing works by Seirian Griffiths, Qi Song and Isadora D’Héloïsa explore in-between states in this month-long showcase of the future of dance

Each evening at the Place’s Resolution festival of new choreography showcases fresh green shoots and this particular triple bill of bright, idea-driven dance was united by intriguing concepts. Each piece is a consideration of in-between states, most outlandishly the standout, Interchange, a questing solo by Seirian Griffiths. In a particularly bureaucratic purgatory, the recently deceased Michael is informed, via a brisk yet personable voiceover from Sam Booth, that he has some excess baggage to process. The only way forward is to revisit the loves of his life, from his mother to fleeting relationships.

The setup, with its slightly overdone pastiche of muzak-accompanied admin hell, prompts a dance of not quite exorcism but certainly cleansing as Michael spins through his past. The occasionally galloping pace suggests the near-death notion of events flashing before your eyes, as Griffiths makes graceful yet quicksilver transitions between contained bouts of torment that are strikingly well acted and boosted by his own coiled compositions. The hip-hop stylings are featherlight, too, when he pivots with a headstand or practically levitates, his shadow like a chalked outline below.

Barbican Hall, London
The tension barely let up for two hours as Rattle led the London Symphony Orchestra and a commanding cast through this vital account of Janáček’s opera.

It is only two months since Jakub Hrůša’s rightly acclaimed and idiomatic conducting of Leoš Janáček’s penultimate opera at Covent Garden. Now, like the proverbial London buses, here comes the same piece again (though this time calling itself The Makropulos Affair rather than the Royal Opera’s The Makropulos Case), with Simon Rattle leading two concert performances at the Barbican Hall.

Rattle’s first-night account was simply sensational. He plunged at almost manic speed into Makropulos’s compellingly exciting prelude, and barely let up for the best part of two hours, as the opera played without an interval. The fierce tension may occasionally have come at the expense of some of the lighter touches that beguiled in Hrůša’s approach. Yet Janáček’s extraordinarily deft ear for orchestral detail and harmony – like the bassoon solo announcing the central character’s first appearance – was never sacrificed. The LSO played thrillingly.

Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham
Coming off the back of a rough period, the Scottish band find reconnection, renewal and purpose in their singular mix of pop, rock and metal

‘With a little love, we can conquer all,” Simon Neil croons on Biffy Clyro’s opening song A Little Love, over its huge, infectious arena-rock chorus. It’s a line that feels like a mantra for the Scottish band 30 years and 10 albums in: they’re currently touring 2025’s Futique having come through a rough period. They experienced major burnout, band members fell out for the first time and founding member James Johnston pulled out of this tour due to mental health and addiction issues. But their new songs feel rooted in renewal, reconnection and newfound purpose. Neil pays tribute to his departed bandmate on the urgent and zippy Friendshipping, which is an ode to the importance of maintaining such relationships.

Futique was recorded in Berlin; the band said that the ghosts of Bowie, Iggy and Nick Cave’s the Birthday Party “bled into the songs”. No such art-pop apparitions feel present tonight. Instead there’s a rousing pop sensibility to these new tracks. Goodbye is a slow-burn ballad that explodes into an arms-aloft anthem, while Shot One embodies the band’s knack for merging sugary melodies and meaty riffs – existing in the blurred middle ground between rock, pop and metal that they comfortably own.

From laying eggs on stage to coaching the Clintons in clowning, the LA performer is full of surprises. She talks about bringing back her rollercoaster solo romcom Weer and the new project that terrifies her

She’s the toast of Off-Broadway now but nothing about the early work of LA clown Natalie Palamides screamed mainstream darling. In her debut show Laid, a maternal-anxiety antic that won her best newcomer at the Edinburgh comedy awards, she gave birth to eggs then broke them on stage. In her second, Nate, she cross-dressed as a beer-chugging douchebag to workshop sexual assault and consent with her astonished audience. Who foresaw that this loose cannon would soon be Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s clown coach, in the series Gutsy? Who then saw an extended New York City run beckoning, thronged with celebrity attendees?

“Drew Barrymore came, Kevin Bacon came,” says Palamides, on a video call. “Sabrina Carpenter came: that was nuts. Dua Lipa, Nathan Fielder, Neil Patrick Harris.” The show was Weer, and the run (until shortly before Christmas) was at “the birthplace of Off-Broadway”, the Cherry Lane theatre, recently relaunched by hip movie studio A24. When we speak, Palamides, 36, is laid low with flu, her body’s revenge for that marathon three-month run. “I thought a month would be the longest I’d ever do it,” she croaks. “It takes a lot of physical endurance to make it through the show.”

Sam Levinson’s hit HBO drama series returns in April with Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi returning

The first trailer for the third season of Euphoria promises more sex, drugs and violence, teasing a troubled life after high school for the show’s characters.

Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer and Jacob Elordi are among those returning for episodes four years in the making. The new season will take place five years after the characters were last seen.

He has broken his ankles, endured 365 days in a cell and faced down the 20th century’s worst winter. Yet he says he is not a masochist. We meet the man Marina Abramovich calls ‘the master’

For one year, beginning on 30 September 1978, Tehching Hsieh lived in an 11ft 6in x 9ft wooden cage. He was not permitted to speak, read or consume any media, but every day a friend visited with food and to remove his waste.

The vital context here is that this incarceration was voluntary: Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American artist whose chosen practice is performance art, undertaking durational “actions” for long periods. Marina Abramović has called him the “master” of the form. In 1980, seven months after the end of Cage Piece, Hsieh began another year-long work, Time Clock Piece, which required him to punch a factory-style clock-in machine in his studio, every hour of each day for 365 days.

In 1994 the singer and Brian Eno spent a day with ‘outsider’ artists. Intimate photographs, showing in Australia for the first time, reveal the effect it had

From the Thin White Duke to Ziggy Stardust, the Berlin recluse to the late-career elegist, David Bowie’s oeuvre is defined by reinvention. As an artist he was relentlessly attuned to the conditions that might provoke the next creative rupture. One defining moment, however, has largely slipped from the popular imagination: a day spent inside a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Vienna – one that would prove unexpectedly formative.

In September 1994, Bowie and Brian Eno – who had reunited to develop new music – accepted an invitation from the Austrian artist André Heller to visit the Maria Gugging psychiatric clinic. The site’s Haus der Künstler, established in 1981 as a communal home and studio, is known internationally as a centre for Art Brut – or “Outsider Art” – produced by residents, many living with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

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‘Huge parts of the city were being destroyed. This was part of my attempt to preserve the whole damn thing. The area became a juvenile prison’

I landed in America in 1965 from Chile. I literally arrived on a banana boat. I went to the University of Notre Dame in the midwest and then to Columbia in New York. I had a teacher – also a photographer – who taught foreign students to write and speak better English. I would try to write poetry, which he thought was terrible. I’d never taken a picture before but he encouraged me to try photography and offered to lend me the money for a Pentax Spotmatic he’d seen for sale downtown. After that, I would just walk around New York with it and take photos. It quickly became clear to me how divided the city was. Half was white and the other half was Black and Latino. There was tremendous segregation.

Columbia was very prosperous. The students were well off and many were the sons of extremely rich people. I felt out of place. Also, there’s just a huge sense of loss when you leave your country and you don’t know anybody and are on your own. It made me want to look at what else was going on: to see the other side and the underside of the city. I found it easily because, in the late 60s and early 70s, deindustrialisation was going on. Big companies and car plants were shutting down and there were huge job losses and store closures. That contrast resonated with me. My family had lost a lot of money. The first part of my life was about seeing things disappear and having to make do with less and less. I was interested to see that in the US.

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

It feels as if this really is the start of a new era for the Thursday news quiz. Not only was there last week’s announcement that Willow had retired from her role as the official dog of the Guardian Thursday news quiz, but this week we have a new visual tone, courtesy of a set of lovely, whimsical illustrations by Anaïs Mims. Rest assured, not much else has changed. It is still 15 questions on topical news, pop culture and general knowledge, and it is still packed every week with the same hackneyed old in-jokes. There are no prizes, but tell us how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 230

Bring your ostracised wardrobe items in from the cold by forgetting about whether they go with each other. Instead, let them shine in all their glory

Fashion is a dance between rules and rebellion. Great style requires a bit of both. The rules are essential, because one of the key emotional benefits that a great wardrobe can deliver is a sense of control in a chaotic world. The rules are there to simplify and clarify, lighting our route to a well put-together outfit. That well put-together outfit has the power to help you feel calmer, simply because you look in the mirror and see a competent person and therefore feel like a competent person. Style rules also come in useful for making sense of the world around us. Dress codes, style tribes, the signals we send – whether as blatant as the slogan on a T-shirt, or as subtle as the brand of your rucksack – hold an important social function, making other people legible to us.

But style also needs friction. Fashion dies if it stops moving, because moving with the times is what makes it fashion rather than just pretty clothes. The restless forward energy that moves hemlines and invents new silhouettes is what drives the plot and keeps us interested.

Most resolutions don’t survive past January, so how do you make a change that lasts? Readers share their top tips, from habit stacking to drinking their second coffee outdoors

• Motivation-boosting buys to help you stick to your resolutions

January often starts with a long list of unrealistic resolutions – and ends with them all being abandoned. But some good habits are worth keeping, whether that’s flossing daily, getting exercise or eating more plants.

So how do you build a habit that sticks – and what helped you to do it? We asked for your tips on changes that worked, from drinking your second cup of coffee outdoors to reminders to move (or putting a trampoline in your kitchen).

Are you easing into 2026 by resting and restoring? Or hitting it at 100mph? Either way, we have tips, tech and ideas for you. Plus, low- and no-alcohol drinks and cold weather essentials

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As you open a new calendar and the pressure mounts to become a shinier, fitter, more optimised version of yourself, it’s worth acknowledging a small but liberating truth: January is a really awkward month to reinvent your life.

It’s cold, it’s dark, everyone’s broke and our collective serotonin is running low. Which is why, this year, we’re proposing two equally valid paths – and suggesting we stop pretending we have to choose just one.

The best exercise bikes for home workouts, spin and getting sweaty, tested

‘A sign to change your technique’: how to make your toothbrush last longer – and keep it out of landfill

I tried 75 low- and no-alcohol drinks: here are my favourite beers, wines and spirits

How to dress in cold weather: 10 stylish and cosy updates for winter

The big freeze: 21 winter essentials to get you through the cold snap

‘A classic citric-forward twang and complex flavour’: the best supermarket marmalade, tasted and rated

Also: advice to reduce screen time, how to maximize your toaster oven, the best gloves and at-home fitness staples

• This piece was originally published in the Filter US newsletter on buying fewer, better things. Sign up here to get early access to it

Each week we cut through the noise to bring you smart, practical recommendations on how to live better – from what is worth buying to the tools, habits and ideas that actually last.

At this time last year, I was a full-time student, throwing on the requisite leggings and an oversized sweatshirt for evening classes and late-night library sessions. This year, I’ve joined countless others in office life, zipping in and out of conference rooms and hopping on video calls for interviews and meetings. I love any excuse to shop, but many office-friendly pieces, including pricey blazers and crisp button-downs, are far outside my price range.

The 27 best fashion gifts in the US – curated by our favorite stylists and creators

Eight winter clothing essentials Scandinavians swear by – from heated socks to ‘allværsjakke’

Whether it’s hidden layers or touchscreen gloves, our fashion expert shares her tips for staying snug when the temperature drops

• The best slippers for men and women

Dressing for winter is a balancing act: it’s rare you’ll ever be the perfect temperature. One moment you step outside to see your breath hanging in the air, the next you’re packed into a sweltering, crowded train.

Luckily, a few smart wardrobe hacks can help with this seasonal conundrum. From thermal fabrics that keep you warm without bulk to breathable knitwear, these simple upgrades can transform your winter style while keeping you warm and cosy even on the coldest days.

It’s not just potatoes that you can turn into these moreish fried cakes – just about any root veg will do the trick

Crisp, savoury and satiating latkes are my idea of the perfect brunch and, rather than sticking to potatoes, I often make them with a mixture of root vegetables, using up whatever I have to hand – just 25-50g of any vegetable will make a latke – and adding some ground linseeds or flax, which gives breakfast some nutrition-boosting omega-3s. I usually have them with a poached egg for protein or apple compote and soya yoghurt.

An incredible smoked haddock paste for toast, crackers or crudités, and a moreish and indulgent multi-mushroom-topped pastry

Two key elements at the heart of Portuguese eating culture are couvert and pastry. A couvert, comprising bread, butter, pickled or garlic carrots, cheese and fish paté (often sardine), comes as standard at every Portuguese restaurant and family dinner table alike, as it does at our restaurant Luso, where our fish paste is an ode to this way of dining. The mushroom tart, meanwhile, celebrates the Portuguese love of pastry and is a take on a traditional savoury tart. While such tarts are unlikely to feature solely mushrooms (they’re much more likely to be mixed vegetable tarts), we like to focus on the incredible varietals of this single ingredient.

From one-pot meals to versatile dishes that last all week, our panel of experts serves up ideas for solo chefs

I really struggle with cooking for one, so what can I make in January that’s interesting but easy and, most importantly, warming?
Jane, via email
“There’s an art to the perfect solo meal,” says Bonnie Chung, author of Miso: From Japanese Classics to Everyday Umami, “and that’s balancing decadence with ease.” For Chung, that means good-quality ingredients (“tinned anchovies, jarred beans”), a dish that can be cooked in one pan (“a night alone must be maximised with minimal washing-up”) and eaten with a single piece of cutlery, “preferably in front of the telly and out of a bowl nestling in your lap”. Happily, she says, all of those requirements are met by miso udon carbonara: “It has all the rich and creamy nirvana of a cheesy pasta, but with a delicious, mochi-like chew that is incredibly satisfying.” Not only that, but you can knock it up in less than 10 minutes. “Melt cheese, milk and miso in a pan to make the sauce base, then add frozen udon that have been soaked in hot water.” Coat the noodles in the sauce, then serve with crisp bacon or perhaps a few anchovies for “pops of salty fat”. Crown with a golden egg yolk (preferably duck, but hen “will suffice”), which should then be broken: “Add a crack of black pepper, and your cosy night in has begun.”

“January feels like a time for fresh, bright flavours,” says the Guardian’s own Felicity Cloake, which for her often means pasta con le sarde made with tinned fish, fennel seeds and lots of lemon juice; “or with purple sprouting broccoli and a generous helping of garlic and chilli”. A jar of chickpeas, meanwhile, mixed, perhaps, with harissa, chopped herbs and crumbled feta, brings the possibility of a quick stew, Cloake adds, while it’s always a good shout to braise some beans, because cook-once, eat-all-week recipes are a godsend – so long as they’re versatile, that is.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

A light but filling no-bechamel souffle with a zingy citrus salad to add a sharp burst of flavour and colour

There is a skill in not wasting food and it’s all about good, old-fashioned housekeeping. If you learn how to store ingredients properly (cool, dark places are handy for spuds, for example) and keep tabs on what’s in your fridge/freezer, you can use everything up before it goes off – and make delicious things in the process. This golden, cheese-crusted souffle uses up the celeriac and spuds left after the festive season, plus any odds and ends of cheeses. It is spectacularly good, especially paired with a sparkling citrus salad.

Sex parties allow Conrad and Callum to explore their desires in a safe space – and as couple

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

We keep the connection with subtle signals, glances across the room and an unspoken agreement that we won’t disappear

Counselling should help, but it sounds as if you need to slow down and give yourself time to grieve

I am 37 years old, happily married and have two children, who came along quickly after we got married in my late 20s. I instantly fell in love with them. However, I wasn’t really emotionally or practically ready, and developed postnatal anxiety.

I’ve always cared about the climate crisis, and since after having kids, and knowing it will affect their lives more than mine, I became motivated to make changes. We live a very “green” life.

In Vallejo, California, ‘trad sons’ report feeling trapped by family obligations, slim job prospects and the fear of violence – leaving little room for romance

Are boys becoming men later? In recent decades, the markers of adulthood have shifted for young American men: they are almost twice as likely to be single, less likely to go to college and more likely to be unemployed. Most significantly for their parents, they are also less likely to have fled the nest, with the term “trad son” springing into social media lexicon in recent months. In the 1970s, only 8% of Americans aged 25 to 34 were living with their parents, but by 2023, that figure had jumped to 18%, with men more likely to live at home than women, according to a Pew survey.

But not everywhere in the US has the same rates of adults living in their familial home. The living arrangement is least common in the midwest and most common in the north-east. Topping the list was Vallejo, where 33% of young adults live with their parents. How were they making it work?

Bored, lonely and emerging from lockdown, a less-traditional relationship was just what I was looking for

We were just two midlifers in our 50s who met back in 2020 using a popular dating app. Bored, lonely and emerging from lockdown we jumped at the chance for an outing. We had our first date at a trendy, dimly-lit Japanese restaurant and bar in Sydney’s Surry Hills. By our second lychee martini, we became aware of some mutual connections that we knew and discovered that we had actually grown up in the same place.

There was an immediate feeling of familiarity and a shared sense of humour that clicked without effort. We were in no rush for anything too serious. In fact, it would take another five outings, including antique-trawling for some 70s-inspired crockery, before things would develop into more of a romantic connection.

If you rush it because 31 January is on the horizon you are likely to make mistakes, or not have everything you need

The deadline is 31 January, but don’t put it off – try to set aside enough time over the next few days to complete your tax return for the tax year that ran from 6 April 2024 to 5 April 2025.

This was even though I had revoked my citizenship and now have dual British and German nationality

I want to flag a discriminatory experience I’ve had with the Co-op’s will-writing service.

I asked it to update a will it had drawn up for me in 2020, with my partner and our daughter as the beneficiaries. I received no follow-up for two months.

I have paid two monthly £108 instalments but am now phone-less and out of pocket

I ordered a £544 phone from Amazon. A tracking update later informed me that it “may be lost” and I could request a refund. I pressed the refund option and was directed to customer service, which insisted I wait a week to claim.

A week later I was told I needed to file an incident report from the email address associated with my account. When I complied, the report was rejected as coming from an address that “didn’t meet certain security standards”.

Thousands of people thought they paid the Dart Charge, but only realised when they got a penalty charge notice

You have had a long car journey but, thankfully, remember after you get home that you have to pay the Dart Charge, the toll for driving over the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, part of the busy Dartford Crossing over the Thames linking Essex and Kent. You quickly pay on your phone after searching for the website.

A few weeks later, however, a penalty charge notice (PCN) arrives and you realise you have been duped. The site you thought you had paid the £3.50 toll through was a fraud and the money went to criminals, while you are left with a £70 fine.

For fifteen years I have been devoted to the sport, but can still barely tackle or shoot. I decided to get a coach and give him the challenge of a lifetime

If I told you I have played football for 15 years, you’d probably assume that I’m decent. Unfortunately, I am not. I have three left feet and a not-very-convincing shot on goal. Despite how many years I have put into the sport, these things show little to no improvement.

I play football for the joy of it: the rush of the first whistle; the exhilaration of making a successful tackle or a clever pass; and the feeling of all fears and concerns melting away the moment the game starts. So until recently, the fact that I’m so bad at it occurred to me as, at worst, incidental. I grew up at a time when football was largely considered a men’s sport. In the 90s, there were about 80 girls’ football clubs in England (there are more than 12,000 now); there wasn’t a women’s premier league until 1994; and by the time I was in my 20s, boring jokes about women knowing the offside rule were wheeled out with disappointing regularity. As someone who still remembers the feeling of getting kicked off the pitch by the boys as soon as I entered year 3, I’ve always just felt blessed to play.

I hadn’t fully grasped how the idea of a better future sustained me – now I, like many others, find it difficult to be productive

A new year is upon us. Traditionally, we use this time to look forward, imagine and plan.

But instead, I have noticed that most of my friends have been struggling to think beyond the next few days or weeks. I, too, have been having difficulty conjuring up visions of a better future – either for myself or in general.

Research finds minor changes in physical activity could hugely reduce number of premature deaths

Just five extra minutes of exercise and half an hour less sitting time each day could help millions of people live longer, according to research highlighting the potentially huge population benefits of making even tiny lifestyle changes.

Until now, evidence about reducing the number of premature deaths assumed that everyone must meet specific targets, overlooking the positives of even minor increases in physical activity.

Dr Ezekiel J Emanuel, a former Obamacare adviser, has deceptively simple advice for living a healthy life

Being healthy shouldn’t feel this complicated. Yet every week brings a new wellness fixation, from “fibermaxxing” to “zone 2 training”, creatine and cortisol-hacking.

Between prescriptive plans, complex science and often contradictory advice, it can seem like being healthy is a full-time job – or a hopeless cause.

Looking for something gentle and kind for a sensitive nose? The new gen Z brands have you covered

For someone who makes no secret of her obsession with fragrance, I’m always surprised by how frequently people ask me to recommend one for someone who hates the stuff.

Sometimes wearing more potent fragrances is impossible for those prone to allergies or migraines, but mostly it’s an instinctive aversion to being held captive all day by scent too pervasive for one’s liking. And in these instances, I invariably suggest the layering of two more subtly scented products with compatible aromas, to add depth and interest without the same strength as a power perfume.

The performative male was over at the 2026 Golden Globes, where even risk-takers like Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi and Jeremy Allen White did little to temper the black tie stuffiness

Timothée Chalamet was the final clue. As he arrived in good time on the Golden Globes red carpet, the star of Marty Supreme put pay to speculation as to whether the chromatic marketing of the film’s ping pong balls would have him wearing orange. Instead, he wore a black T-shirt; vest, jacket and Timberland boots with silver buttons by Chrome Hearts, souped up with a five-figure Cartier necklace. Kylie Jenner, his partner and sartorial foil, was nowhere to be seen.

Styled by Taylor McNeill, who was also responsible for Chalamet’s wildly amusing if chaotic red carpet campaign for the film, the look was bad boy Bond. It also set the tone for an evening of subdued tones. If we thought the penguin suit had gone extinct, we were wrong. The performative male is over – welcome to the return of the staid suit.

Claudia Winkleman is among high-profile women again popularising the trouser style once favoured by hippies

In fashion currently, trouser shape firmly sit in two camps – skin-tight, as with the revival of skinny jeans, or ultra oversized and baggy. But, perhaps, there is a third way. Enter – once again – the flare.

The trouser shape, first popularised in the 70s and flirted with briefly five years ago, is back again in 2026. Resale app Depop says there has been a 30% increase in the searches for the style this month alone.

As screen fatigue grows, a new trend is swapping smartphones for crosswords and sketchbooks – turning the humble bag into a tool for offline living

There’s a new “it” bag – but this time it is not about a designer label or splashy logo. Instead, it’s what is inside that counts.

So-called analogue bags, filled with activities such as crosswords, knitting, novels and journals, have become the unexpected accessory of the season.

The multi-day trail between the Cumbria and North Yorkshire coasts is one of Britain’s most popular, and now upgrades, path repairs and trail officers aim to preserve it for future generations

A soft breeze tickled the waters of Innominate Tarn, sending ripples dashing across the pool, bogbean and tussock grass dancing at its fringes. From my rocky perch atop Haystacks, I gazed down on Buttermere and Crummock Water glistening to the north, the round-shouldered hulks of Pillar and Great Gable looming to the south. A pair of ravens cronked indignantly, protesting against the intrusion on their eyrie; otherwise, stillness reigned.

Bless you, Alfred Wainwright, I murmured, picturing the hiking legend whose ashes are scattered around this lonely tarn. And then, surprising myself: you too, Rishi Sunak. In very different ways, both had brought me to this most spectacular of Lakeland crags.

Cut out flying and you shred skiing’s carbon footprint. And opting for a high-altitude resort that needs less artificial snow makes it even greener. Les Arcs in the French Alps ticks both boxes

I’ve always wanted to try skiing, but it’s not a cheap holiday and I have always had a lingering suspicion that some resorts are like Las Vegas in the mountains, with artificial snow, damaging infrastructure, annihilated vegetation and air-freighted fine dining – in short, profoundly unsustainable.

However, if there’s a way to have a green family ski holiday, then sign me – and my husband, Joe, two kids and my mum – up. Here’s how to do it.

Three trains, two buses and a ferry take our writer from Essex to Northern Ireland, to enjoy wild swims, whiskey, sandy beaches and the Giant’s Causeway

Oystercatchers fly off as I step through stalks of storm-racked kelp for an icy dip in the winter-grey sea. Actually, the water feels unexpectedly warm, perhaps in contrast to the freezing wind. But it’s cold enough to do its job: every nerve is singing and I feel euphoric. I’m exploring the Antrim coast, which has some of the UK’s finest beaches, and proves excellent for a sustainable break – even in the stormy depths of winter.

Ballygally Castle is a great place to start and offers a Sea Dips and Hot Sips package that includes dry robes, hot-water bottles and flasks. The affordable castle, celebrating its 400th birthday this year, is perhaps Northern Ireland’s only 17th-century hotel.

Our popular readers’ tips column has been running for 20 years. We’ve selected some highlights from the past 12 months to help you plan your 2026 adventures
• Enter this week’s competition, on life-changing holidays

In 2026, when it feels as though the world is moments away from any number of disasters, there is nothing hotter than watching someone do their job really, really well

Name: Competency porn.

Age: Relatively new.

Professional mermaids risk hypothermia, seasickness and the cling of skin-tight silicone, but the reward is becoming an ‘ocean ambassador’ – and a bit more colour in the world

Propelled by a shimmering silicon tail, Katrin Gray spins underwater, blowing kisses to the audience as her long, copper hair floats around her face. Her seemingly effortless movement is anything but – a professional mermaid’s free diving and performance skills require training, practice and total concentration.

Mermaiding has become a global cottage industry, with pageants, conventions, retreats and meet-ups, where people gather in “pods” to practise their dolphin kicks. Makers create bespoke tail flukes, bejewelled bras, mermaid hair and even prosthetic gills for professional and hobbyist “seasters”. There is even a Netflix reality series called MerPeople, which documents the occasionally perilous journey of several aspiring professional merfolk. “No dead mermaids” is the motto of one business featured.

It is the most essential thing we do - yet many of us arguably breathe badly. The author of Breath explains how that can be changed

In the last stages of writing his book, Breath, James Nestor was stressed. “Which was ironic when writing a book about breathing patterns and mellowing out,” he says. The book was late; he’d spent his advance and was haemorrhaging even more money on extra research that was taking him off in new, potentially interesting, directions – was it really necessary, he wondered, to go to Paris to look at old skulls buried in catacombs beneath the city? (It was.)

Then a couple of months before the book’s May 2020 publication date, the Covid pandemic hit, and Nestor was advised to wait it out. He couldn’t afford to. “One of the main motivations for releasing it at that time was to get that [on-publication] advance,” he says. “But I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to release it. I said: ‘How are you going to promote a book that can’t be sold in stores, that I can’t tour for?’” He expected, he says, “absolutely zero to happen”.

Dying is a process and in a person’s final hours and days, Nickie and her Threshold Choir are there to accompany people on their way and bring comfort. Through specially composed songs, akin to lullabies, the choir cultivates an environment of love and safety around those on their deathbed.  For the volunteer choir members, it is also an opportunity to channel their own experiences of grief and together open up conversations about death.

Full interview with Nickie Aven, available here

He had threatened her, locked her up and absconded with one of their daughters. Palmer knew she and her girls needed to escape – but it would involve huge risk and total reinvention

In the summer of 1989, Karen Palmer bought a used car for cash, filled it with belongings – some clothes, toys, one pot, one pan and a shoebox of photos – and “disappeared” with her new husband and two young daughters. She didn’t tell her mother, her friends or her neighbours where she was going. She gave no notice to her employers and landlord, leaving items out on her apartment balcony as a sign she still lived there.

“I have such a clear memory of the day we left Los Angeles,” says Palmer. “It was this weird combination of fear and exhilaration, heart pounding, driving into the unknown.” Palmer was fleeing her ex-husband, Gil, the man she feared, and the father of her two daughters, Erin and Amy, then seven and three.

Ahead of high-stakes talks, people tell of alarm, thoughts of fleeing and lack of information on what to do if US invades

• Europe live – latest updates

When she was living in Denmark, the seemingly unshakeable safety of Greenland was a comforting source of reassurance for Najannguaq Hegelund. Whenever there was any instability in the world, she would joke with her family: “Well we will just go to Greenland, nothing ever happens in Greenland.”

But in the past two weeks – during which Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened military action on the largely autonomous Arctic territory the US president claims he “needs” for national security purposes, despite it being part of the Danish kingdom – Hegelund, 37, has realised this is suddenly no longer true.

Ras ‘Ein al ‘Auja is a community of about 135 families – and the only one remaining in this part of the Jordan valley

Five decades in the south Jordan valley were ending in a day, and Mahmoud Eshaq struggled to hold back his tears. The 55-year-old had not cried since he was a boy, but as he dismantled the family home and prepared to flee the village where his whole life had played out, he was overwhelmed by grief.

While Eshaq’s children loaded mattresses, a fridge, sacks of flour and suitcases of clothes into a truck, masked soldiers escorted a teenage Israeli shepherd down the main village road, where he posed for photos on his donkey, flashing a V sign.

We’d like to hear from young people, parents and teachers about how Elon Musk’s controversial chatbot is affecting you

Degrading images of real women and children with their clothes digitally removed by Elon Musk’s Grok tool continue to be shared online, despite widespread alarm and a pledge by the platform to suspend users who generate them.

While some safeguards have been introduced, the ease with which the AI tool can be abused has raised urgent questions about consent, online safety and the ability of governments worldwide to regulate fast-moving AI technologies. Meanwhile, the misuse of AI to harass, humiliate and sexually exploit people – particularly women and girls – is rapidly escalating.

We are looking to tell the stories of pairings who developed friendships because a common life experience - either shared at the same time or lived apart - bonded them

Do you have a friend who was the right person at the right time? Did they become a great source of support because you met at a certain moment in your life or a particular shared set of circumstances brought you together?

We are looking to tell the stories of pairings who developed life-affirming friendships because a common life experience - either shared at the same time or lived apart - bonded them. From becoming parents at the same time to losing a relative or dealing with a new diagnosis, we want to hear how you helped each other. Whatever scenario brought you close – whether overcoming adversity or celebrating a new life stage – we’d love to hear about your friendship and how it helped you both.

We’d like to hear from people who are training AI to replace their current roles

Analysis by the International Monetary Fund says Artificial intelligence will affect about 40% of jobs around the world.

We’d like to find out more about the impact of AI on jobs now. With this in mind, we want to hear from people who have been training AI to replace their current roles. What has the experience been like? How do you feel about your future at your company? Do you have concerns?

Whether your question is about exercise, eating, or general wellness, post it below and we’ll put a selection to our panel on the night

There’s no bad time to take a more active interest in your health, but the new year, for lots of us, feels like a fresh start. Maybe you’re planning to sign up for a 10k or finally have a go at bouldering, eat a bit better or learn to swing a kettlebell. Maybe you want to keep up with your grandkids — or just be a little bit more physically prepared for whatever life throws at you.

To help things along, Guardian Live invites you to a special event with public health expert Devi Sridhar, journalist and author Mariella Frostrup, and health and fitness columnist Joel Snape. They’ll be joining the Guardian’s Today in Focus presenter Annie Kelly to discuss simple, actionable ways to stay fit and healthy as you move through the second half of life: whether that means staying strong and mobile or stressing less and sleeping better.

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