It’s not just Tunbridge Wells – a country famous around the world for its rain is in danger of self-imposed drought

You get up and go to the loo, only to find the flush doesn’t work. You try the shower, except nothing comes out. You want a glass of water, but on turning the tap there is not a drop. Your day stumbles on, stripped of its essentials: no washing hands, no cleaning up the baby, neither tea nor coffee, no easy way to do the dishes or the laundry. Dirt accumulates; tempers fray.

The water company texts: we are so sorry; colleagues are working to restore connection; everything should soon be normal. You want to believe them, but the more it’s repeated, the more it becomes a kind of hold music. There’s no supply the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. Each morning brings with it the same chest-tightening question: what will happen today? Buckets and bottles don’t stop you feeling grubby and smelly, or from noticing the taint on your family and friends and neighbours. You’re not quite the people you thought you were and nothing feels normal.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

After Spudulike closed in 2024, the reign of the jacket potato seemed over in the UK. But now the favourite is back, piled with new toppings, sold by new companies and promoted all over social media by potato influencers

They were once a lunch option that inspired little excitement – but the jacket potato’s time has finally come. After decades in epicurean exile, the humble spud has made a roaring comeback in the UK and piqued the interest of foodies across the world. A-listers, tourists and trend-hopping teenagers are queueing for hours to get their hands on them. For Jacob Nelson, who sells loaded spuds that have gone super-viral on social media, this was all part of the plan. “We thought: how can we make the jacket potato sexy again?” he says.

The 30-year-old, who runs SpudBros with his brother Harley and dad Tony, was among the first crop of social-media savvy spud vendors to give the jacket potato a much-needed makeover. After a slow start in lockdown, the brothers spoke to some youngsters in Preston Flag Market, where they had set up shop, to find out why they were shunning spuds. “It was an absolute ghost town,” says Harley. “We spoke to one student walking past us. He said to get on social media.” The pair listened, filming their interactions with customers while showing off their mouthwatering loaded spuds, and subsequently went stratospheric on TikTok in 2023.

This ancient Scottish tavern was a raucous, cross-generational hangout where everyone – young and old, locals and tourists – sang themselves hoarse to Fairytale of New York

This is said to be one of Scotland’s most haunted pubs, but for me it’s haunted with happy memories, the ghosts of hazy nights out, the spectre of my younger self, and of course the cantankerous clergyman who stalks its walls from beyond the grave.

When Stuart Green’s wife, an environmental rights lawyer, was shot dead in a car in front of her children in the Philippines, he found books on grief little help. So he wrote his own

The dreaded school run is a daily battle for most parents. Even once out of the door and at the school gates, feigned smiles and small talk with other haggard parents can be a mass performance. For Stuart Green, who spent years wrestling his young twins out of car seats and into coats, all the while keeping an eye on his eldest daughter, it was the small talk he dreaded.

“Is Mummy at work?” someone might ask. Green’s response would be a half truth: “I’m a single parent.” The full story could not be explained in a 15-second conversation on the street.

Manual for building design aims to encourage low-carbon construction as alternative to steel and concrete

An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it’s time we took it seriously as a building material, too.

This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be “bamboo-ready” as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper alternative to steel and concrete.

She’s got the smarts, the FBI training and the CBeebies wardrobe. Will the bookies’ favourite become the first female Traitor to win a UK series?

Even a stopped castle clock is right twice a day. During last Friday’s jack-in-the-box mission on The Traitors, the remaining contestants were asked which of their fellow players would make the best Traitor. In a rare moment of insight, Weymouth gardener James Baker – he of the clumsy shield-stealing – said: “Rachel. She has those FBI skills and is just so smooth.”

He doesn’t know the half of it. Cut to Rachel saying through gritted teeth: “Shut up, James. Just shush.” She might have been momentarily rattled but the canny operator was soon making a mental note of everyone’s answers to use against them later. Translation: James’s days could be numbered.

Nato chief Mark Rutte says there is ‘a lot of work to be done’, as some Danish MPs voice concern at Greenland apparently being sidelined in US president’s talks

Donald Trump’s announcement of a “framework of a future deal” that would settle the issue of Greenland after weeks of escalating threats has been met with profound scepticism from people in the Arctic territory, even as financial markets rebounded and European leaders welcomed a reprieve from further tariffs.

Just hours after the president used his speech at the World Economic Forum to insist he wanted Greenland, “including right, title and ownership,” but backed away from his more bellicose threats of military intervention – Trump took to social media to announce “the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” and withdrew the threat of tariffs against eight European countries. He later called it “a concept of a deal” when he spoke to business network CNBC soon after Wall Street closed.

Exclusive: Beijing, Delhi, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro among worst affected, with demand close to exceeding supply

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 39 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress”, new analysis and mapping has shown.

Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown.

Trial of Adrian Gonzales in Corpus Christi was the first over the hesitant law enforcement response to the 2022 attack

A former Uvalde schools police officer was acquitted Wednesday of charges that he failed in his duties to confront the gunman at Robb Elementary during the critical first minutes of one of the deadliest school shootings in US history.

Jurors deliberated for more than seven hours before finding Adrian Gonzales, 52, not guilty in the first trial over the hesitant law enforcement response to the 2022 attack, in which a teenage gunman killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers. Had he been convicted, he faced up two years in prison on more than two dozen charges of child abandonment and endangerment.

Record-breaking rains spark landslide at Mount Maunganui campsite, with helicopter teams retrieving families from rooftops and local states of emergency declared

Emergency services in New Zealand are searching for several people, including a child, believed missing after a landslide hit a campsite during storms that have caused widespread damage across the North Island.

Emergency minister Mark Mitchell told RNZ that parts of the east coast looked like “a war zone”, with helicopters deployed to rescue families sheltering on rooftops from flooding, and local states of emergency declared in five regions across Northland and the East Cape due to days of record-breaking torrential rain.

Duke of Sussex says Associated Newspapers has made Meghan’s life ‘an absolute misery’ and alleges it used unlawful means to secure stories

Prince Harry has accused the publisher of the Daily Mail of wanting to drive him “to drugs and drinking” by placing his life under surveillance, as he told the high court that it continued to “come after” him and his wife.

The Duke of Sussex was on the verge of tears as he said Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) had continued to make Meghan’s life “an absolute misery” during his litigation against it.

RNIB research uncovers high anxiety around rail travel with some having fallen into gaps or been trapped in doors

• ‘It was a very lucky escape’: blind man who fell on to tracks calls for rail travel improvements

Four in five blind and partially sighted people in the UK have struggled to cross the gap between trains and station platforms, according to a survey, with some falling and injuring themselves.

Many blind and partially sighted people avoid taking train journeys owing to anxieties around whether they will be properly supported after having had inconsistent experiences, according to research from the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).

Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho, who led Tiananmen Square vigils, accused of inciting subversion

The national security trial of three pro-democracy activists who organised an annual memorial in Hong Kong to mark the Tiananmen Square massacre opened on Thursday, in another landmark case brought under the Beijing-imposed law that has practically crushed protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city.

Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho are charged with inciting subversion under Hong Kong’s national security law. Their trial is one of the most high-profile national security cases to be heard in Hong Kong since Beijing imposed the law in 2020. The defendants face a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment if convicted. The law has a near-100% conviction rate.

Unclear if presidents will have anything to sign; Mark Rutte urges Nato to pour out their air defence stockpiles for Ukraine. What we know on day 1,429

Voldymyr Zelenskyy was reported on Wednesday evening to be bound for Davos after Donald Trump appeared to summon him to the World Economic Forum. The Ukrainian president had said a day earlier that he did not expect to attend the conference in Switzerland as Russian attacks had plunged Ukraine into an energy crisis: “Undoubtedly, I choose Ukraine in this case, rather than the economic forum, but everything can change at any moment.”

Trump’s announcement of the meeting appeared to be at short notice, since he said it would take place on Wednesday, when his Ukrainian counterpart was not even in the same country. After Trump spoke, officials clarified that their meeting would be on Thursday. Zelenskyy previously said: “Meetings with America should always end with concrete results to strengthen Ukraine or to move closer to ending the war. And if the documents are ready, we will meet.” Talks between senior Ukrainian representatives and Trump’s envoys have been continuing since Saturday, including in Davos, but late on Wednesday it was unclear whether there would be any documents to sign.

Top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov said he had met US representatives Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Davos. Umerov repeated the familiar refrain that their talks focused on security guarantees and postwar recovery. Umerov said a Ukrainian delegation also met representatives of the US investment firm Blackrock about rebuilding plans.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, meanwhile said that he would meet on Thursday with Witkoff and Kushner, who were headed from Davos to Moscow. Interestingly, Putin, quoted by Russian news agencies, said he would discuss with the US envoys the possible use of frozen Russian assets. The EU has been wrangling with how to mobilise Belgian-held Russian assets, about €300bn ($350bn) worth, to help Ukraine defend itself and rebuild. Putin appeared to be attempting to head off the European effort, reportedly saying he wanted to use such funding to restore “[territories] damaged during military actions”. He did not say whether those would be Ukrainian, Russian or Russian-held areas.

The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, on Wednesday urged its military chiefs to press their national governments to get desperately needed air defence systems to Ukraine. “Please use your influence to help your political masters to do even more,” Rutte said in a video message to top brass as they met at Nato’s Brussels headquarters. “Look deep into your stockpiles to see what more you can give to Ukraine, particularly air defence interceptors. The time really is now.”

A Ukrainian drone strike set oil terminal tanks on fire at Volna in the southern Krasnodar region on Wednesday, Russian authorities said, claiming that three people were killed and eight injured. There was claim and counterclaim after a fire at residential buildings near the city of Krasnodar in Russia’s south-west. The region’s leader said it was a Ukrainian drone strike and 11 people were injured. The Ukrainian side said it was stray Russian air defence fire. The head of Ukraine’s anti-disinformation centre, Andriy Kovalenko: “A Russian air defence missile struck a residential building in the town of Afipsky [in the Adygea region].”

UK had highest relative increase of five countries in study, with 20-fold rise in proportion of women over 25 using it

The proportion of people in the UK on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medication has tripled in the past decade, with a 20-fold increase among women aged 25 and over, a study shows.

Researchers led by the University of Oxford examined electronic health records from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK to estimate the use of ADHD medication among adults and children aged three and above.

A brief encounter set off a chain of events that culminated in a public rebuff to the US president from Keir Starmer

When Kemi Badenoch met Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, on Monday evening, she pressed him on two issues: the Chagos Islands deal and North Sea oil drilling.

Neither participant was part of their respective executive branch, and neither issue was at the centre of the crisis that has engulfed transatlantic politics. But before long, the meeting had some very real political consequences.

GeoKarst is a new EU-funded project highlighting a unique landscape of caves, gorges and medieval villages near Trieste

Our guide turns out the lights and suddenly there is nothing. Just total darkness, the sound of gentle dripping and a creeping feeling of unease. The switch is flicked back on and the shadowy world that lies deep beneath the Karst returns. I’m in Vilenica, thought to be the first cave in the world ever opened to tourists, with records of visitors dating back to 1633. It’s a magical sight: a grand antechamber sculpted through erosion, filled with soaring stalagmites and plunging stalactites streaked in shades of red, terracotta and orange by iron oxide, and dotted with shimmering crystals.

Vilenica is just one of a network of thousands of caves located in the Karst region of western Slovenia and eastern Italy, which is known for its porous, soluble limestone rock. Above ground, this creates a distinctive landscape, filled with rocks bearing lined striations and pockmarked by hollows known as dolines, where the limestone has collapsed underneath. But below ground is where it’s really special, with enormous caves, sinkholes and subterranean rivers. Later in the day, I visit the region’s other main visitor cave, Škocjan, where I’m amazed to see an underground river thunder through a chamber almost 150 metres high. It’s an almost surreal sensory experience, with the rush of the rapids echoing around the walls.

China isn’t the only country imposing limits on creative expression, argues the provocative artist

‘Chinese culture is the opposite of provocation,” Ai Weiwei once told an interviewer. “It tries to seek harmony in human nature and society.” Harmony has never been his bag. Provocation though? In spades. As a student at the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s, he joined an artist group called Stars that had a slogan: “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom”. In the 1990s, returning to Beijing after a decade in downtown New York, he and a couple of friends published and distributed samizdat-style books devoted to off-piste, often-political art of the kind that government censors tend to fear.

Ai’s own work was bolshie and anathema to custodians of good taste. His Study of Perspective series showed him raising a middle finger at global sites – among them Tiananmen Square, the Eiffel Tower, the White House – that are expected to produce awe, delight, reverence. In the self-explanatory photographic sequence Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), itself the follow-up to Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo (1994), he asked viewers to decide who was the bigger cultural vandal: himself, a mere artist – or a Chinese state for whom iconoclasm was a defining feature of its modernising project. A 2000 exhibition in Shanghai that he helped to stage bore the name Fuck Off. (Its Chinese subtitle was “Ways to Not Cooperate’”.)

Saipan, about Keane’s infamous World Cup row with manager Mick McCarthy, has become a hit film in its native Ireland – as it opens in the UK screenwriter Paul Frasier explains how he aimed to avoid the mistakes of the past

The best bit of football action in Saipan happens on a tennis court. The forthcoming movie about the schism between Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane that led to the latter departing the 2002 World Cup before it started does not attempt to recreate any of the action from the tournament. In fact, it largely takes place in a decrepit hotel. But we do get one exception: Keane, played by Éanna Hardwicke, practising alone in the grounds. At the back of a court, the sullen, spartan athlete stands as a ball is fired up and over the net towards him. He tracks it with his eyes, opens up his right foot, takes the ball on his instep and kills it dead. And with that, his sporting bona fides are confirmed.

Saipan is a movie about masculinity, about men and their egos. It’s also about an era in Irish history; the roaring of the Celtic tiger, where questions of national identity came to the fore. What it’s not, really, is a movie about football. Which might be a canny choice, because while the world’s most popular sport only continues to grow its audience, football’s track record on the big screen is, how shall we say, like Manchester United after Sir Alex.

OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Stripe are rumoured to be among ten of the biggest companies considering IPOs

You’ve probably heard of “unicorns” – technology startups valued at more than $1bn – but 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the “hectocorn”, with several US and European companies potentially floating on stock markets at valuations over $100bn (£75bn).

OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Stripe are among the big names said to be considering an initial public offering (IPO) this year.

Thornton Wilder’s classic American play is transposed for the inaugural production of National Theatre Wales. The result is heartfelt, though its emotional bite can feel uncertain

A revival of Thornton Wilder’s great American play about a provincial town, north of New York, might have carried strong state-of-the-nation resonances at this dark, Trumpian juncture. So it initially seems counterintuitive that this inaugural show for the new National Theatre Wales, which Michael Sheen has heroically championed, transposes the American backwater to Wales.

But Wilder’s play, premiering in the inter-war years, in 1938, is more eternal than political, dramatising a close-knit community navigating life, love and death. And the transposition is convincing here, in spirit, encapsulating the lilt of its Welshness, noisier, more playful and lyrical than the original, especially in its glowing visual imagination and movement design by Jess Williams as well as its emotional lighting by Ryan Joseph Stafford.

This bean and pasta dish has always taken on variations from around Italy – and even Thailand

Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, under the banner of story, art and folklore, the Roman publishing house Newton Compton published a series of 27 books about regional Italian cooking. Some, such as Jeanne Carola Francesconi’s epic 1965 La Cucina Napoletana, were reprints of established books, while others were specially commissioned for the series. There is considerable variation; some of the 20 regions occupy 650 densely filled pages, sometimes spread over two volumes, while other regions have 236 pages with larger fonts, with everything in between. All of which is great, although I can’t help feeling affectionate towards the regions with 14-point font.

In the face of the vast variation of regional culinary habits, knowledge and rituals, I also feel affectionate towards the common traditions; those that are specific to a place, but at the same time that cross local and national borders, as well as for the stories of the ingredients. Take pasta e fagioli, for which beans are boiled in water with fat, maybe fragrant herbs and vegetables, then pasta is added for a dense dish that probably needs a spoon. Almost all regions (and towns and individuals) have a version that is both extremely general, and specific – white beans, potato, no rosemary in Lazio, say; lardo, sage and plenty of rosemary in Piedmont; nutmeg, bread and pasta in Liguria; lardo, marjoram, tomato and chilli in Abruzzo – inviting a sort of pick and mix. And the embracing of new ideas, too, because cooking is a living, evolving thing.

From newbie drag queens to wild voguing performances, a new archival exhibition boasts images from four decades of riotous nightlife

In 1978, Soviet scientists stumbled upon a family living in a remote part of Russia. They hadn’t interacted with outsiders for decades. Almost half a century later, one of them is still there

In the summer of 1978, a team of geologists exploring southern Siberia found something rarer than diamonds. While searching for a helicopter landing site amid the steep hills and forested canyons of the western Sayan mountains, their pilot caught sight of what appeared to be a garden, 150 miles from the nearest settlement. Hovering as low as he could, he saw a house. No people were visible, but someone was clearly tending the garden. He and his geologist passengers were shocked to find a dwelling in an area long considered too remote for human habitation.

When the four geologists set up camp 10 miles away, it was the mysterious homestead that was first in their mind. Who could live here? Were the inhabitants the last Mohicans of the Brezhnev era? The geologists ventured to the settlement bearing gifts – and a pistol, just in case. They were greeted by a disheveled old man dressed in patched-up sacking cloth. This was Karp Osipovich Lykov, the patriarch of the family. Inside a tiny, dark cabin, the geologists found Karp’s two adult daughters, Natalia and Agafia, weeping and praying. Four miles away, by the riverside, lived Karp’s two middle-aged sons, Savin and Dmitry. It soon became apparent that none of the members of this ageing family had interacted with outsiders in decades.

Trump’s tariff retreat should lull nobody into dropping their guard. The EU must join forces with Canada, Japan and other like-minded countries

EU leaders would do well to meditate on the seminal lesson that the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, delivered at this year’s World Economic Forum.

In an incisive analysis of the new age of predatory great powers, where might is increasingly asserted as right, Carney not only accurately defined the coarsening of international relations as “a rupture, not a transition”. He also outlined how liberal democratic “middle powers” such as Canada – but also European countries – must build coalitions to counter coercion and defend as much as possible of the principles of territorial integrity, the rule of law, free trade, climate action and human rights. He spelled out a hedging strategy that Canada is already pursuing, diversifying its trade and supply chains and even opening its market to Chinese electric vehicles to counter Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian-made automobiles.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

Britain’s parents know that this content is harming their children. It’s vital to put young people’s mental health first

• Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Conservative party

• Badenoch tells Starmer to ‘just get on’ with under-16s social media ban

The Conservative party believes in freedom. We believe people should be able to make choices about their own lives. That they, not the state, should decide what they do. But freedom is not a given. It depends on something more fundamental: the ability to make good choices in the first place. And that ability is not fully formed in children.

For too long, Britain has treated childhood as an afterthought. We know that a child’s early years shape the trajectory of their entire life. Yet our political system has too often focused more on repairing damage in adulthood rather than preventing it early on. That is a dereliction of our duty as politicians.

Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Conservative party and MP for North West Essex

The global economic system doesn’t even benefit its US and European creators any more – let alone indebted nations or emerging giants

Donald Trump represents everything that the Davos crowd hates – and it is unlikely they are any more well-disposed towards him after being forced to listen to more than an hour of the president’s rambling speech today. He is a protectionist, not a free trader. He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax and is suspicious of multilateral organisations. He prefers power plays to dialogue and he doesn’t have any time for the “woke” capitalism that Davos has been keen to promote, with its focus on gender equality and ethical investment. The shindig’s organisers, the World Economic Forum (WEF), had to agree to sideline those issues in order to secure Trump’s appearance.

For decades, anti-globalisation protesters have sought to shut down the WEF. Thanks to Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, their prayers may soon be answered. In today’s world, Davos is an irrelevance and it seems fitting that Trump should be on hand this week to deliver the coup de grace to the liberal international rules-based order that the WEF prides itself on upholding.

Tory leader tries to score points by siding with out-of-control president hellbent on destroying Nato and Europe

It had been a relatively quiet night. Apart from Donald Trump giving a long, rambling press conference in which he offered only a few mild insults to his supposed allies and posting mockups of Canada and Greenland covered in the Stars and Stripes. Apart from that. But that barely raises an eyebrow these days.

Still, any respite – even 12 hours – is to be welcomed. Gives Keir Starmer a moment to catch his breath. A morning when the news cycle looks vaguely like it did the night before. Even if that is situation normal: all fucked up. A chance to think. Rather than be bounced into yet another psychotic parallel universe. Shame then that Kemi Badenoch didn’t also use the time to do the same. Thinking has never appeared to be her strong point.

My phone zoom helped me see better. One man was on the footbridge. He was holding a gun. It was pointed towards me

• Warning: This article contains graphic content

Hanukah is called “the festival of light”. It is a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, not biblically prescribed. There are no long synagogue services, no onerous prohibitions or requirements. Just candles, songs and doughnuts. This is probably part of why I always loved it.

There were four or five events in Sydney for the first night of Hanukah. In 2024 we went to an event at Dover Heights, but parking was a nightmare. We decide on Bondi (where parking is also a nightmare). Five of us – my mum, husband, son (3), daughter (one-and-a-half) and I pile into the car.

Given the software company’s size and funding options, British Business Bank’s investment looks like mission creep

The state-owned multi-tentacled British Business Bank has never been a simple organisation to understand, but at least one could vaguely grasp its intended role in life. “Our mission is to drive economic growth by helping smaller businesses get the finance they need to start, scale and stay in the UK,” declares its website.

Jolly good. For decades, complaints have been heard about gaps in the financing ecosystem for startups and for promising young UK companies, particularly those in tech-related and life science fields, or those spinning out of universities. So one can applaud the existence of a large and distinctly British source of capital to “crowd in”, as politicians like to say, private venture funds.

After covering Trump’s immigration policies from Chicago and LA, the Twin Cities operation feels like a marked escalation

The Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial board described the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation in the Twin Cities as “a military occupation”. Local leaders have used words like “siege” and “invasion”. After a week of reporting in Minneapolis and St Paul, I wouldn’t know how else to describe the scene.

I’ve been covering the administration’s immigration policies since Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January last year. I was in Chicago in January last year, when the administration assigned hundreds of federal agents to conduct “enhanced targeted operations” in the city. I was in Los Angeles last summer, when agents began seizing workers at car washes and garment warehouses, grabbing bicyclists and raiding churches.

The prime minister has a duty to be candid with the British public about the scale of the global realignment caused by a volatile US president

One foreign policy achievement that Donald Trump prefers not to boast about is his role in helping Mark Carney win last year’s Canadian general election. The incumbent Liberal party faced crushing defeat before Mr Trump threatened to annex Canada. Mr Carney’s candidacy was buoyed up by a patriotic rally against US bullying.

Perhaps because his country has also been coveted by Mr Trump, Mr Carney has given one of the most clear-sighted responses of any democratic leader to the US president’s designs on Greenland. Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, the Canadian prime minister set out the challenge for countries whose security and prosperity have depended on a global system underwritten by the US.

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.

Questions about the breakup of a venerable education charity, and who has benefited from it, need answers

Whatever emerges from two separate investigations into last year’s privatisation of City & Guilds, the transfer to new owners is a done deal. The qualifications arm of the 148-year-old vocational education charity – with a royal charter granted by Queen Victoria – is now the property of a Greek-owned business, PeopleCert, with plans to cut costs and replace UK jobs with cheaper staff abroad. One of the biggest, best-regarded non-profits in England’s further education (FE) sector has thus been turned into an international brand that shares the name of the charity that sold it – now rebadged as the City & Guilds Foundation.

Ministers appear not to have been paying attention when this momentous decision was taken by trustees (neither City & Guilds nor the other awarding bodies were mentioned by name in last year’s skills white paper). The sell-off was not debated in parliament. But the deal is belatedly under the spotlight after the Guardian revealed that senior City & Guilds staff, including the chief executive, Kirstie Donnelly, and the chief financial officer, Abid Ismail, received huge bonuses (£1.7m and £1.2m) when the deal went through.

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.

Joe Yates, Prof Philip J Landrigan, Prof Jennifer Kirwan and Prof Jamie Davies respond to an article on doubts raised about studies on microplastics in the human body

While it may be a belated Christmas present for the petrochemical industry, your article (‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body, 13 January) was less surprising to the scientific community, where constructive debate around microplastic detection in humans has been ongoing for some time. Such debate is entirely normal – and essential – for scientific inquiry.

New and novel methods must be tried, tested, critiqued, improved and tried again. Science is incremental and gradual – unlike the uncapped production and pollution of plastics, which contain thousands of hazardous chemicals. Decades of robust evidence demonstrates the harms that these inflict on people and planet.

Alderman Gregory Jones KC responds to an article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett about her beloved untrendy cafe and subsequent letters on the subject

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s lament for the untrendy cafe reflects a view held by some that the operators of cafes on Hampstead Heath should never change (I’m sick of avocado toast – I just want to keep my local, untrendy cafe, 12 January). It is a position rooted more in nostalgia than in the practical realities of managing public assets – and it overlooks several inconvenient facts.

The long-standing reliance on short-term arrangements limited the cafes’ ability to invest in buildings, facilities and staff. This had to change. Moving to longer leases is not about change for its own sake, but about providing stability: enabling investment, fair pay and a sustainable future for customers.

Responding to a letter by Kathy Dalwood, Jennifer Gale says women have heard of Stuart Broad and Tracy Zussman commends sporting analogies. Plus a letter from Colin Prower

Kathy Dalwood complains of articles “that make use of male sporting analogies” (Letters, 18 January). I think most female Guardian readers, unlike her, will have heard of Stuart Broad – we tend to be well informed in general, not just about other women. I have been attending men’s cricket matches for at least 40 years; apart from in the rowdy “party” stands, there are usually almost as many women as men in the crowd.
Jennifer Gale
Bideford, Devon

• I am a female Guardian reader who knows who Stuart Broad is and understood the analogy of someone choosing not to walk. Some of us quite like analogies, sporting or otherwise, and don’t consider them to be akin to “blokey, pub-style chat”. I hope this example hasn’t pushed any readers over the edge – or should that be the outside edge?
Tracy Zussman
Hove, East Sussex

Tailed in Moscow | Martin Kettle on music | John Crace has it all covered | Changing duvet covers | Reform UK characters

Dan Sabbagh reports that a former British defence attache to Moscow said he was tailed every time he left the British embassy (Why a Chinese ‘mega embassy’ is not such a worry for British spies. 18 January). A British spy in Moscow in the 1960s told me how, after offering his bus fare one morning, the driver said it had already been paid. As the driver pointed to a fellow passenger, the Briton and the Russian tasked with tailing him exchanged knowing glances.
Richard Norton-Taylor
London

• Following the letters (15 January and 18 January) in praise of Martin Kettle’s excellent political writing, I’d like to add my appreciation for his superb reviews of classical music. He shows great knowledge and insight into both areas – a real renaissance man. I hope that he will still provide the odd music review in his well-earned retirement.
Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick
St Albans

As Brendon McCullum and Rob Key limp on, perhaps it is worth retracing the steps that brought us here

There will be consequences. There must be consequences. Perhaps there have already been consequences. Harry Brook is very sorry for getting punched by a bouncer in New Zealand. Rob Key is very sorry for overseeing an Ashes tour that in retrospect could probably have been an email. Brendon McCullum is not sorry, but has promised to “look at things over the next little while”, which is basically the same as an apology, so fine.

In the meantime, the travelling circus of English cricket rolls on. There is a white-ball series in Sri Lanka starting on Thursday morning, for which – consequences, remember – McCullum remains as coach, Key remains as managing director and Brook remains as captain. In addition Zak Crawley returns to open the batting in the 50-over team, a fitting reward for not playing a single 50-over game in the whole of 2024 or 2025. Nature heals.

• ‘Salah was fit to play 90 after one day’s training’

• Liverpool manager highlights Joe Gomez’s contribution

Arne Slot saluted Mohamed Salah’s professionalism and singled out Joe Gomez for praise after Liverpool climbed to fourth in the Champions League table with a commanding win in Marseille.

Liverpool, who host Qarabag at Anfield next week in their final group game, delivered a fine performance and result against Roberto De ­Zerbi’s team to record a ninth win in 11 ­European away fixtures.

There are many ways to self-destruct on a football pitch but PSV ­Eindhoven chose one of the more obvious methods.

In opting to play out slowly from the back against high-pressing opponents possessing forwards blessed with the speed and skill of Yoane Wissa and Anthony Gordon, Peter Bosz’s team were always likely to come undone.

• Manchester City 0-1 Chelsea (Kaptein 41)

• Chelsea will meet Manchester United in the final

Chelsea reached a seventh successive Women’s League Cup final as they edged past their rivals ­Manchester City to book a meeting with Manchester United – but even the Chelsea head coach, Sonia Bompastor, had to admit her team were a “little bit lucky” as City did everything but equalise.

Wieke Kaptein’s first-half header won the contest for the holders, but Hannah Hampton’s ­acrobatics in goal and a series of spurned opportunities from City were the key difference, leaving home fans baffled as to how they had not reached the final, which will be played at Ashton Gate on 15 March.

• Policy allowed Max Verstappen back into 2025 title race

• Team due to unveil new car in Bahrain on 9 February

The McLaren team is to continue its policy of pursuing a rigorous fairness towards Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri for the 2026 Formula One season. That is despite their doing so last season allowed a late challenge from Red Bull’s Max Verstappen which might have prevented the team securing the drivers’ title, which was ultimately won by Norris.

Last year McLaren enjoyed the most competitive car for most of the season and from the off, the team insisted their drivers would be free to race one another and the team would apply what they referred to as their “papaya rules” to ensure they were scrupulously fair to both in racing situations.

• WRU chair says ‘system was essentially broken’ in Wales

• Fan group insists there is ‘no appetite for a merger’

Richard Collier-Keywood, the embattled chair of the Welsh Rugby Union, has insisted he has the support of fans and players in Wales as the WRU attempts to drive through radical plans to cut one of the four professional sides.

Giving evidence before the House of Commons Welsh affairs select committee, Collier-Keywood – who is facing the threat of a vote of no confidence in his leadership – said he believed “the rugby system was essentially broken” in Wales before he took over and there was widespread acknowledgment that it needed to change.

The brief ripple of applause at full time said it all. This was a deeply unconvincing display from ­Chelsea, who took 78 agonising minutes to find a way past the might of the champions of Cyprus, and it was not a surprise that Stamford Bridge greeted victory with such a muted response.

The mood was one of relief. There was plenty of angst on a night when the home fans continued their protests against Chelsea’s ­owners. The football was too slow, too ­predictable, and it hardly seemed to register that Moisés Caicedo shattering Pafos FC’s defiance ensured that Liam ­Rosenior’s side will have a chance to secure direct qualification into the ­Champions League last 16 when they visit Napoli in their final game next week.

• Reds’ success aided by Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa gigs

• Real Madrid take top spot again with £1.4bn revenue

Liverpool were the English club with the highest revenue last season according to the annual Deloitte Football Money League – but for the first time in the report’s 29-year history no Premier League club made the top four.

Real Madrid again took top spot with €1.61bn (£1.4bn), far ahead of Barcelona, with €974m. Bayern Munich with €860m and Paris Saint-Germain with €837m were third and fourth respectively.

• Ten-time winner beats Italian qualifier 6-3 6-2 6-2 in second round

• Serbian could face Botic van de Zandschulp next at Melbourne Park
  

Djokovic to serve first…

Cries of “Nole!” as the living legend strides out onto a sunbathed Rod Laver Arena. He unpacks his bags in front of a knot of Serbian fans and pulls on a white crocodilian hat. Maestrelli is wearing his baseball cap backwards, like a Steve Buscemi meme.

Australians urged to do a good deed – or mitzvah – as Anthony Albanese says day is ‘opportunity for us as a nation to wrap our arms around the Jewish community’

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Fresh wreaths of flowers have been laid at Bondi beach, children have cooked meals for those in need and Anthony Albanese has welcomed the opportunity to “wrap our arms around” the Jewish community as Australia holds a national day of mourning for the victims of last month’s terror attack.

Under the banner of the New South Wales government’s One Mitzvah for Bondi initiative, all Australians were urged to do a good deed – or mitzvah – on Thursday to mark the day of mourning.

IFG says proposed plans, which will slash the number of jury trials, will produce ‘marginal gains’ of less than 2% time saved

David Lammy’s plans to introduce judge-only criminal trials in England and Wales will save less than 2% of time in crown courts, the Institute for Government (IFG) has said.

In a report that casts doubt on the ability of the changes, which will slash the number of jury trials to achieve their goal of wiping out the courts’ backlog, the thinktank described the gains from judge-only trials as “marginal”.

Reporters had been in car on way to new camp, says media group, as two 13-year-old boys killed in separate incidents

Hospitals in Gaza say Israeli forces killed at least 11 Palestinians on Wednesday, including two 13-year-old boys and three journalists, in the latest violence to undermine a three-month-old ceasefire.

Palestinian health officials said the Israeli airstrike killed three Palestinian journalists who were travelling in a car to film a newly established displacement camp in the Netzarim area of central Gaza.

Development charity’s new co-chairs signal shift from controversial sponsor a child scheme launched in 1972 to long-term grassroots funding

Child sponsorship schemes that allow donors to handpick children to support in poor countries can carry racialised, paternalistic undertones and need to be transformed, the newly appointed co-chief executives of ActionAid UK said as they set out to “decolonise” the organisation’s work.

ActionAid began in 1972 by finding sponsors for schoolchildren in India and Kenya, but Taahra Ghazi and Hannah Bond have launched their co-leadership this month with the goal of shifting narratives around aid from sympathy towards solidarity and partnership with global movements.

The band went on hiatus after outrage over onstage joke in 2024, but Gass confirms the band will return, saying: ‘It was hard. It is like a marriage’

Tenacious D member Kyle Gass has confirmed that he and bandmate Jack Black have reconciled and will reunite, after outrage over an onstage joke about the assassination attempt on the US president, Donald Trump, lead to the band going on hiatus.

While performing in Sydney in July 2024, when Black suggested he make a wish for his birthday while blowing candles on stage, Gass responded, “Don’t miss Trump next time”, referring to the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania earlier that week.

Researchers say event described as ‘major tipping point’ for clean energy in era of destabilised politics

Wind and solar overtook fossil fuels in the European Union’s power generation last year, a report has found, in a “major tipping point” for clean energy.

Turbines spinning in the wind and photovoltaic panels lit up by the sun generated 30% of the EU’s electricity in 2025, according to an annual review. Power plants burning coal, oil and gas generated 29%.

Experts say big flaw is the lack of mandatory requirements, meaning developers could ignore the guidance

Housing where shops, schools, public transport and possibly pubs are close by, with green spaces and access to nature, and where heritage is preserved, should be the norm for all new developments, according to guidelines set out by the government.

King’s Cross in London, for example, where industrial buildings have been converted into shops, restaurants and public spaces, and where schools and care homes mingle with social and private housing near to a cleaned-up canal and nature reserve, could become the model, according to the new vision.

Our passion for these cute-looking salamanders means they are everywhere – except in the wild, where the species is under increasing threat

Axolotls are the new llamas. Which were, of course, the new unicorns. Which triggered a moment for narwhals. If you are an unusual-looking animal, this is your time. Even humans who have never seen an axolotl – a type of salamander – in the smooth and slimy flesh will have met a cartoon or cuddly one. Mexican axolotls have the kind of look that is made for commercial reproduction. The most popular domestic species is pink. Some glow in the dark – and their smile is bigger than Walter’s in the Muppets.

At Argos or Kmart, you can buy axolotls as cuddly toys, featured on socks, hoodies and bedding, or moulded into nightlights. You can crochet an axolotl, stick a rubber one on the end of your pencil or wear them on your underpants. The Economist says they’re a “global megastar”. More than 1,000 axolotl-themed products are listed on Walmart’s website. They grace US Girl Scouts patches, McDonald’s Happy Meals, and the 50-peso bill, a design so popular that, last year, the Bank of Mexico reported that 12.9 million people were hoarding the notes.

Felling of 500-year-old oak has provoked fury from public and Enfield council, which leases land to Mitchells & Butlers

The restaurant chain Toby Carvery is facing eviction from one of its sites after taking a chainsaw to an ancient oak tree without the permission of its council landlord.

The partial felling last April of the 500-year-old oak on the edge of a Toby Carvery car park in Whitewebbs Park, Enfield, provoked widespread public dismay and fury from Enfield council, which leases the land to the restaurant’s owners Mitchells & Butlers Retail (M&B).

Culture secretary says national institutions will receive £600m but they must extend influence outside London

London-based museums need to ensure they reach every part of the country, according to Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, who on Wednesday announced a landmark £1.5bn funding package for the arts meant to restore national pride.

National museums including the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery will be handed a £600m package but the culture secretary has urged them to look outside the capital to extend their sphere of influence.

Commons will now have to consider Tory-led amendment, which is likely to be supported by Labour MPs

• As a parent – and a Conservative – I know that banning social media for under-16s is the right thing to do

The House of Lords has voted decisively for a ban on social media for under-16s in a move that puts pressure on Keir Starmer to bring in Australian-style restrictions.

Peers voted by 261 to 150 in favour of a Tory-led amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill, which was not backed by the government.

Carl Crowther says his feline has heart problem and needs medication, after delivery driver seen making off with it

A concerned pet owner has pleaded for the safe return of his family’s ill cat after an Amazon delivery driver was caught on video picking the animal up and walking away.

Carl Crowther, 53, said that he had been expecting a package on Monday 19 January, but had been forced to leave to go to his job as a maintenance worker about an hour before it arrived, at approximately 2.30pm.

Unnamed woman held against her will since mid-1990s by Amanda Wixon, who beat her and shaved her head

A woman was imprisoned and forced to work for a mother and her 10 children for more than a quarter of a century in an ordeal described at the end of a crown court trial as “Dickensian”.

The woman, who is now in her 40s and cannot be named, lived off scraps, could not leave the house and was forced to wash secretly at night, Gloucester crown court was told.

Reporters Without Borders said the ruling against the 26-year-old journalist showed a ‘blatant disregard for press freedom’ in the Southeast Asian nation

A young Filipino journalist who spent nearly six years in a crowded provincial prison was found guilty of terror financing on Thursday, in a case rights groups and a UN rapporteur labelled a “travesty of justice”.

Community journalist and radio broadcaster Frenchie Cumpio, 26, and former roommate Marielle Domequil broke down in tears and hugged each other as the guilty verdict was read and they were sentenced to 12-18 years in prison by judge Georgina Uy Perez of the Tacloban regional court.

US justice department’s website shows the disgraced former CEO petitioned Donald Trump over fraud conviction

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has asked Donald Trump to commute her sentence after she was convicted of defrauding investors in her now-defunct blood-testing startup that was once valued at $9bn, a notice on the US Department of Justice website showed.

The justice department’s office of the pardon attorney lists the status of her commutation request, which was made last year, as pending.

House committee opens prospect of using one of its most powerful punishments against an ex-president for first time

House Republicans advanced a resolution on Wednesday to hold former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, opening the prospect of the House using one of its most powerful punishments against a former president for the first time.

The Republican-controlled House oversight committee approved the contempt of Congress charges, setting up a potential vote in the House. It was an initial step toward a criminal prosecution by the Department of Justice that, if successful, could send the Clintons to prison in a dispute over compelling them to testify before the House oversight committee.

US military says it has transported ‘IS fighters’ to Iraq after Kurdish-controlled prisons and camps changed hands

Concerned western officials said they were closely monitoring the deteriorating security situation in north-east Syria amid fears that Islamic State militants could re-emerge after the Kurdish defeat at the hands of the Damascus government.

The US military said it had transported “150 IS fighters” from a frontline prison in Hasakah province across the border to Iraq, and said it was willing to move up to 7,000 to prevent what it warned could be a dangerous breakout.

Snap’s chief executive had been due to testify in civil action also involving Meta, TikTok and YouTube

Snapchat’s parent company has settled a civil lawsuit shortly before it was due to start in California, but other large tech companies still face a trial under the case.

Snap’s chief executive, Evan Spiegel, had been due to testify in a tech addiction lawsuit which also involves the Instagram owner, Meta; ByteDance’s TikTok; and Alphabet-owned YouTube – which have not settled.

Jamie Dimon warns of civil unrest but Nvidia’s Jensen Huang argues tech will create rather than destroy jobs

Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, has said artificial intelligence “may go too fast for society” and cause “civil unrest” unless governments and business support displaced workers.

While advances in AI will have huge benefits, from increasing productivity to curing diseases, the technology may need to be phased in to “save society”, he said.

Bigger than forecast rise probably temporary but analysts rule out Bank of England interest rate cut in February

Inflation in the UK rose for the first time in five months to 3.4% in December, pushed up by higher air fares and tobacco prices.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the annual inflation rate increased from 3.2% in November after falling in October and flatlining in the previous three months. The figure overshot City economists’s forecasts of a modest rise to 3.3%.

Carnage, exploding supermodels, Isabella Rossellini … forget the disastrous All’s Fair – Ryan Murphy is back at his best with this tale of a lethal sexually transmitted virus which also makes people beautiful

Ryan Murphy’s last screen offering was the existentially terrible All’s Fair. It was critically panned, as any show that contains the lines: “He owns, like, all of cosmetics”, “You’re the best lawyers in town – maybe the country!” and a fruit basket “lightly brushed with salmonella and faecal matter”, while somehow managing to bypass humour, camp and brio, deserves to be. It got an unprecedented zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a no-stars review here on the grounds that it was so-bad-it-was-bad, and has duly been commissioned for a second series.

By that measure, Murphy’s new show is a triumph. The Beauty has a plot, structure, characters that often act, react and speak as real human beings might, a sense of what it’s doing and where it’s going and – whisper it – even a touch of commentary on the state of society today. It’s almost like old American anthology days, when Murphy threw the likes of The People v OJ Simpson, Feud and The Assassination of Gianni Versace at us one after the other; leasing new lives to Sarah Paulson, Jessica Lange and assorted other glorious figures, and having us believe the good times would roll for ever.

The Gangs of London star returned to the stage alongside Ben Whishaw in a 2024 production of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece. In this diary of the first preview, he describes passing the point of no return

I step into the wings and the state of it all hits me. The hum of a packed, expectant crowd ready for a show. I inch my way down along the short passage and there, standing in the cubbyhole space backstage like a beautiful lost waif, is Ben Whishaw. It hits me how different he looks in full costume. We lock eyes and hug. We hold each other for a few moments, trying to breathe in sync and to connect. We can both feel the adrenaline pumping and rushing through each other. A final squeeze and I turn away and walk back to the edge of the wings where we are to make our entrance.

My breathing is steady, but my heart is pump-pump-pumping. This is as close as I get to full-on nervous. I am not afraid though. It’s excitement; anticipation; a sexy, knowing thrill. I know there will be a split second of sheer terror when the call comes though. The moment you know you’re past the point of no return. That thought-memory passes through with the next inhale-exhale. It’s as if I can feel the giddy heat coming off the crowd even back here in the wings, behind the soon-gone shelter of a curtain, feet away from where Vladimir and Estragon will come to life. It’s new and familiar all at once.

Scott calls on Davina to help find his long-lost sister in the heart-tugging series. Plus, a Dispatches investigation into Palestine Action. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, ITV1
The DNA show never fails to make your eyes leak. Scott was 12 years old when he learned that his mum and dad were actually his grandparents and his older sister was his mum – and now he’s desperate to find his real older sister who was put up for adoption. Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell help with finding her and navigating the emotional rollercoaster that ensues. Hollie Richardson

It is the year 2029 and an LA cop finds himself accused of murdering his wife. He has 90 minutes to clear his name before robo-justice sends him down

Irish writer Marco van Belle delivers an entertaining script for this real time futurist thriller-satire set in LA in 2029, in a world (as they say) where AI is wholly responsible for assessing criminal guilt or innocence. You’ve heard of RoboCop. This is RoboJustice. Veteran Russian-Kazakh film-maker Timur Bekmambetov directs, bringing his usual robust approach to the big action sequences, and Chris Pratt stars as the LAPD cop accused of murder. (Longtime Pratt fans will appreciate a cameo appearance here of Pratt’s fellow cast-member from TV’s Parks and Recreation, Jay Jackson, effectively reprising his performance as sonorous TV newsreader Perd Hapley.)

The film’s ostensible target is the insidious power of AI, though the movie partakes of today’s liberal opinion doublethink, in which we all solemnly concur that AI is very worrying while not having the smallest intention of doing anything about it. Pratt plays Detective Chris Raven, an officer with a drinking problem but nonetheless a poster boy for LA law enforcement in 2029 for having brought in the first conviction under the city’s creepy new hi-tech justice system, ironically entitled Mercy (it doesn’t appear to be an acronym). AI is now the sole arbiter of justice and defendants each have a 90-minute trial to make their case in front of Judge Maddox, an AI-hologram played by Rebecca Ferguson who icily insists on the facts but is capable of weird Max-Headroom-type glitches.

Director Christopher Gans returns to the haunted town franchise but can’t seem to figure out what to do with it

There’s an admirable loyalty, maybe even poetry, in a film-maker returning to an unpromising, barely there movie series 20 years after his first crack became a minor hit. The horror film Silent Hill, based on a video game of the same name, has garnered a cult following in the decades since its 2006 release, but it’s not exactly a genre classic nor beloved franchise, with a single little-seen 2012 sequel to its name – until now. Return to Silent Hill brings back the first film’s director, Christopher Gans, for a new story set in the same ash-strewn ghost town, this one based on the Silent Hill 2 video game. Characters in these movies tend to wander into a place that is obviously haunted or cursed, refusing to leave even after it becomes clear that they should, and only decide to escape after it’s too late. Maybe Gans can relate.

Or maybe he’s the only man for the job because no one else will take it. That could almost describe James (Jeremy Irvine), the hapless protagonist of Return to Silent Hill. After a chance traffic-accident meeting with Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson) that unconvincingly thwarts her attempt to leave home, the two fall in love, and after a time James even moves to Mary’s oddball town; as a painter, he can go anywhere (though if there’s a reason that Mary couldn’t leave, given that she was already ready to hop a bus when they meet, I missed it). Despite the movie skipping over what makes them so instantly compatible, James is all in; someone has to be.

Éanna Hardwick and Steve Coogan star as furious Keane and his luckless manager McCarthy in this retelling of the Man Utd star’s infamous 2002 walkout

Here is a sports drama which is also a true-life psychodrama of the Irish republic. In the run-up to the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan, the nation was convulsed with dismay when mercurial star player Roy Keane stormed out of Ireland’s chaotic training camp on the Pacific island of Saipan and got on the first plane home after a colossal row with manager Mick McCarthy. Could it really be true that Ireland’s key performer was going to let the side down? Was he just a spoilt Man U brat? Or was Keane a true Irish patriot, insisting on high standards of training and management for Irish football which this (English-born) manager wasn’t providing?

It’s a story which is capably, straightforwardly told by film-makers Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa, and well acted by its leads Éanna Hardwicke as Keane and Steve Coogan as McCarthy. It is almost like a theatrical chamber piece, putting us on the spot with the two male egos as they butt heads – but perhaps giving less sense of the angst they were creating back home.

He lit up Europe with bands ranging from Peachfuzz to Kings of Convenience. But it was the Whitest Boy Alive that sent Erlend Øye stratospheric. As they return, the soft-singing, country-hopping sensation looks back

If you were to imagine the recent evolution of music in Europe as a series of scenes from a Where’s Wally?-style puzzle book, one bespectacled, lanky figure would pop up on almost every page. There he is in mid-90s London, handing out flyers for his first band Peachfuzz. Here he is in NME at the dawn of the new millennium, fronting folk duo Kings of Convenience and spearheading the new acoustic movement. There he is strumming his guitar in the vanguard of Norway’s “Bergen wave”. Then he’s off spinning records in Berlin nightclubs during the city’s “poor but sexy” post-millennial years. By the 2010s, he’s driving a renaissance of Italian chamber pop as part of La Comitiva, his bandmates hailing from the southern tip of Sicily.

It’s hard to think of a figure more musically cosmopolitan than Erlend Otre Øye, connecting the dots across a continent where national scenes rarely overlap – and making magic happen. No wonder his debut solo album, with 10 tracks recorded in 10 different cities, was called Unrest. Of all his reincarnations, though, the one that has best endured (if you go by Spotify) is his four-piece, The Whitest Boy Alive. And this spring and summer, they’re reuniting for a tour of Mexico and Europe to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dreams, their debut album.

Alex Jennings’s performance hums with buried rage in Christopher Isherwood’s landmark exploration of grief

At the start of A Single Man, George Falconer wakes up at home in the morning and drags himself despondently to the bathroom. There he stares at himself in the mirror, observing not so much a face as “the expression of a predicament … a dull harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle”.

Set in 1962, Christopher Isherwood’s landmark novel follows a day in the life of a 58-year-old British expat and college professor living in California. George is silently trying to come to terms with the death of his partner, Jim, after a car accident. We accompany him from his morning ablutions – during which he reflects on the judgment of his homophobic neighbour Mrs Strunk – and his drive to work, to a teaching session, a gym workout and a drink with his friend Charley. Throughout we are privy to his internal monologue, which reveals George as a man prone to existential dread and who is isolated in a world that, owing to his sexuality, regards him with suspicion.

Queen tells reading campaign that listening counts too – and the publishing industry increasingly agrees

Queen Camilla has met many disreputable characters in her time as a royal, but her encounter this week with two celebrity reprobates was at least for a good cause. The queen has appeared in the Beano alongside its celebrated bad boy Dennis the Menace and his dog, Gnasher, as part of a campaign to promote reading.

It wasn’t the cartoon Camilla’s waspish waist that captured the headlines (“I wish,” she said of her comic strip avatar), but what she had to say while encouraging the tween menace to “go all in” for reading: “Comics and audiobooks count too!”

Ored Recordings documents chants, laments and displacement songs of the Caucasus threatened by erasure. After the invasion of Ukraine, its ‘punk ethnography’ has never been more urgent

In May 2022, a few weeks after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, musician Bulat Khalilov was attending a demonstration in Nalchik, a southern Russian city in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. As he joined a group congregating around the monument to the Circassian victims of Russo-Circassian war, Khalilov was approached by a policeman and sensed trouble. To his surprise, the officer asked: “Are you from Ored Recordings? I follow you on Instagram. You’re doing great.”

Their gathering still had to be dispersed, but the enthusiasm that Ored Recordings inspires even among enforcers of the law speaks volumes about the power of what Khalilov and his friend and label co-founder Timur Kodzoko call “punk ethnography”: the recording of religious chants, laments and displacement songs at family gatherings, local festivals, in people’s kitchens, to fight against the erasure of Circassian culture.

The Canadian poet, whose winning collection explores environmental and personal loss, discusses making art in existential times

Early on in her latest collection, the Canadian poet Karen Solie apologises: “I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful.” The line appears in a poem, Red Spring, about agribusiness and its sinister human impact: the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate, is “advertised as non-persistent; but tell that to Dewayne Johnson // and his non-Hodgkin lymphoma”. In 2018, a jury ruled that Monsanto’s glyphosate weedkiller, Roundup, caused the former groundskeeper’s cancer.

Solie’s admission – that real horror can’t be prettified – recalls Noor Hindi’s viral 2020 poem, Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying. We can’t “treat poetry like it’s some kind of separate thing” to what’s going on around us, says Solie, speaking to me in Soho, London, the morning after finding out she has won the TS Eliot prize for her collection Wellwater. “We all have to keep our eyes open”, but “that doesn’t mean we can’t say we’re scared, because it’s scary”.

The ghosts of Lincoln in the Bardo return to confront a dying oil man’s destructive legacy – but this time they feel like a gimmick

George Saunders is back in the Bardo – perhaps stuck there. Vigil, his first novel since 2017’s Booker prize‑winning Lincoln in the Bardo, returns to that indeterminate space between life and death, comedy and grief, moral inquiry and narrative hijinks. Once again, the living are largely absent, and the dead are meddlesome and chatty. They have bones to pick.

They converge at the deathbed of an oil man, KJ Boone. He’s a postwar bootstrapper: long-lived, filthy rich and mightily pleased with himself. “A steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through him, regarding all he had managed to see, cause and create.” Boone is calm in his final hours, enviably so. He seems destined to die exactly as he lived, untroubled by self-reflection. But as his body falters, his mind becomes permeable to ghosts, and they have work to do. The tycoon has profited handsomely from climate denial, and there is still time for him to acknowledge his fossil-fuelled sins before the lights go out.

In this larky autofiction, the ups and downs of creative life are cartoonishly dramatised as the writer becomes an action hero

Rob Doyle’s previous novel, Threshold, took the form of a blackly comic travelogue narrated by an Irish writer named Rob. In one episode before Rob becomes an author, we see him as a sexually pent-up teacher abroad, masturbating over an essay he’s marking. That the scene is an echo of one in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (once named by Doyle as the best book from the past 40 years) hardly lessens our discomfort, and it’s hard not to feel that our unease is precisely the point. “Frankly, a lot of my life has been disastrous,” he once told an interviewer – which might not be quite as self-deprecating as it sounds, given that Doyle has also argued that “great literature” is born of “abjection” not “glory”.

The autofictional game-playing continues in his new novel, Cameo, but instead of self-abasing display, we get a perky book-world send-up for the culture war era, cartoonishly dramatising the ups and downs of creative life. It takes the form of a vertiginous hall of mirrors centred on gazillion-selling Dublin novelist Ren Duka, renowned for a long novel cycle drawn on his own life, the summaries of which comprise the bulk of the book we’re reading. Duka’s work isn’t autofiction à la Knausgård: hardly deskbound, still less under the yoke of domesticity, he leads a jet-set life of peril, mixing with drug dealers, terrorists, spies, and eventually serving time for tax evasion before he develops a crack habit, a penchant for threesomes in Paris and – perhaps least likely of all – returns to his long-forsaken Catholicism.

An exploration of what constitutes the literary arts – plus all the ‘troubled hearts’ and demons that accompany it – through the lens of Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Now, Mother, What’s the Matter?

Only the monsters do not have troubled hearts.
Life is for troubled hearts. Art is for troubled
hearts. For my whole life, Hamlet has been
a bridge between. Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother,
what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something
is always the matter, and not just for mothers.
(As I write this, the Angelus rings.) Every
character in Hamlet is troubled, there are
no monsters in it. I render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s — everything is
troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar
is troubled. I render unto God the things
that are God’s and feel — want to feel? Do feel —
that God is troubled. I also render unto art.
But I have no idea what art is. What
Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ is. What
the luminous chaos of The Portrait of
a Lady is. What The Pilgrim’s Progress is.
My feet knew the way before I opened
the book: that just before the gate to heaven
is yet another hole to hell.

After years away​ revisiting my abandoned island uncovers new features, old memories and the quiet reassurance that ​you can go home again

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Nintendo’s pandemic-era hit Animal Crossing: New Horizons got another major update last week, along with a £5 Switch 2 upgrade that makes it look and run better on the new console. Last year, I threw a new year’s party for my children in the game, but apart from that I have barely touched my island since the depths of lockdown, when sunny Alba was my preferred escape from the monotonous misery of the real world. Back then, I spent more than 200 hours on this island. Stepping out of her (now massive) house, my avatar’s hair is all ruffled and her eyes sleepy after a long, long time aslumber.

I half-expected Alba to be practically in ruins, but it’s not that bad. Aside from a few cockroaches in the basement and a bunch of weeds poking up from the snow, everything is as it was. The paths that I had laid out around the island still lead me to the shop, the tailors, the museum; I stop by to visit Blathers the curatorial owl, and he gives me a new mission to find a pigeon called Brewster so that we can open a museum cafe. “It’s been four years and eight months!” exclaims one of my longtime residents, a penguin called Aurora. That can’t be right, can it? Have I really been ignoring her since summer 2021? Thankfully, Animal Crossing characters are very forgiving. I get the impression they’ve been getting along perfectly fine without me.

PC; Inkle
The UK game developer’s latest is a database mystery constructed from an archive of fictional books. Their combined contents threaten to crack the code of reality

Bletchley Park: famed home of the Enigma machine, Colossus computer, and, according to the premise of TR-49, an altogether stranger piece of tech. Two engineers created a machine that feeds on the most esoteric books: treatises on quantum computing, meditations on dark matter, pulp sci-fi novels and more. In the mid-2010s, when the game is set, Britain finds itself again engulfed by war, this time with itself. The arcane tool may hold the key to victory.

You play as budding codebreaker Abbi, a straight-talking northerner who is sifting through the machine now moved to a crypt beneath Manchester Cathedral. She has no idea how it works and neither do you. So you start tinkering. You input a four-digit code – two letters followed by two numbers. What do these correspond to? The initials of people and the year of a particular book’s publication. Input a code correctly and you are whisked away to the corresponding page, as if using a particularly speedy microfiche reader. These pages – say, by famed fictional physicist, Joshua Silverton – are filled with clues and, should you get lucky, further codes and even the titles of particular works. Your primary goal is to match codes with the corresponding book title in a bid to find the most crucial text of all, Endpeace, the key to understanding the erudite ghosts of this machine.

Embark Studios’ multiplayer extraction shooter game has already sold 12m copies in just three months. Will it capture you too?

Released last October Arc Raiders has swiftly become one of the most successful online shooters in the world, shifting 12m copies in barely three months and attracting as many players as established mega hits such as Counter-Strike 2 and Apex Legends. So what is it about this sci-fi blaster that’s captured so many people – and how can you get involved?

So what is Arc Raiders?

The team behind Baby Steps discuss why they made a whiny, unprepared manbaby the protagonist – and how players have grown to love Nate as he struggles up a mountain

“I don’t know why he is in a onesie and has a big ass,” shrugs game developer Gabe Cuzzillo. “Bennett just came in with that at some point.”

“I thought it would be cute,” replies Bennett Foddy, who was formerly Cuzzillo’s professor at New York University’s Game Center and is now his collaborator. “Working on character design and animation brings you over to liking big butts. I could give you an enormous amount of evidence for this.”

Malmaison hotel, London
Theatregoers move from room to room as emotional messiness is laid bare with spirited bridesmaids, painful encounters and ‘call it all off’ nerves

When isn’t there big family drama in the buildup to a wedding? The nerves, the tantrums – sometimes even charges of “inappropriate” first dances. Isn’t it all part and parcel of the apparently perfect day?

That emotional messiness is laid bare in Dante or Die’s utterly gorgeous site-specific show, first performed in 2013, now reprised at a number of Malmaison hotels, including this one in London as part of the Barbican’s Scene Change season.

Arcola theatre, London
Chris Bowers, a former British diplomat in Iraqi Kurdistan, brings authenticity but not enough human drama to his play about the 1991 Kurdish uprising

This historical drama about the 1991 Kurdish uprising in Iraq abounds with diplomats. There is the Whitehall contingent, speaking in clipped tones about Kurds hiding in the mountains, at the mercy of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces. There’s Iraqi diplomat Al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother, and there is also Chris Bowers, the play’s writer and a former British diplomat in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Bowers infuses the debates and wrangles at the heart of this crisis with an authenticity that carries weight, but it does not make for good drama in itself.

At Arcola theatre, London, until 7 February

In All Is But Fantasy, the fates of Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra and more are given a thrilling twist by US writer, director and singer Whitney White. She talks about untimely deaths – and being left speechless by Judi Dench

Whitney White is practically swooning. “I have more respect and love for William Shakespeare than I can honestly communicate,” she says on a video call from Stratford-upon-Avon. When she went to Holy Trinity Church to visit his grave, she says: “I just wept, because the language is so beautiful to me.”

White’s first encounter with Shakespeare’s work was in Chicago at high school, where A Midsummer Night’s Dream unleashed her inner “theatre nerd”, she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Shouldn’t all theatre have music and dance and text and fights and be as full as possible?’ Then you grow up and start doing theatre – and we segment the business into musicals and plays.”

A Giant on the Bridge, performed by a ‘Scottish indie folk supergroup’, draws on dozens of interviews about the confines former prisoners experience on the outside

When we talk about crime and punishment, the notion of homecoming is often absent but decarceration and re-entry are critical aspects of the justice system. These subjects are at the heart of A Giant on the Bridge, the singer-songwriter Jo Mango and the theatre-maker Liam Hurley’s urgent piece of gig-theatre, which premiered in 2024 and heads out on tour across Scotland next month.

It was born from a research project, Distant Voices: Coming Home, that revealed dire statistics for the number of people who come out of prison and then go back in again, says Mango. “Research showed that the process is often less about the individuals and more about societal and structural issues – whether they can get a job when they come out, whether they have any family left who are there to support them.” A Giant on the Bridge emerged as “a kind of way of writing an essay about what we learned”, Mango says, but using songs co-written by people who have lived experience of the prison system.

‘After I took this, police officers bundled me into the back of a car and drove me to the local station where I was questioned for a long time. On the way out, they took turns to punch and kick me’

In 1993, a photograph I’d taken of a bus driver in Luxor, Egypt, won a competition. The prize was some money, a camera and a return ticket to anywhere in the world. I chose Chile. The camera was an all-bells-and-whistles model: I sold it to a taxi driver at 3am. I’ve always preferred working with light 35mm cameras.

After three months in Chile, I caught a train that rose up to the high Bolivian Altiplano plateau, leaving me with a splitting headache only relieved by some coca tea. I had an open-ended commission with the Financial Times to provide photographs from financial areas of the South American cities I went to, so while my main aim was to wander around photographing exciting things I came across, I also made sure to head to the financial district and government quarters in the city of La Paz, which is where this was taken.

Author discusses changes made to Lindsay Gordon novels from 80s and 90s to prepare for their rerelease

The crime writer Val McDermid has revealed she was assigned a “sensitivity reader” to remove language that could cause offence from her earlier works.

The Scottish author has sold more than 19m novels worldwide and is known for the authenticity of the dialogue in her work.

Pop star to be inducted alongside Alanis Morissette, Kenny Loggins and Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons of Kiss

Taylor Swift, 36, will become the second-youngest songwriter ever inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, joining the ranks of Stevie Wonder, who was 33 when he was inducted in 1983, the organization announced on Wednesday.

The honor places the pop superstar, winner of 14 Grammys, among the most celebrated songwriters across generations.

Solid doors are being replaced with sliding ones, or even transparent cubicles. For furious guests, this is a cost-cutting measure too far

Name: Hotel bathroom doors.

Age: Solid doors have existed since ancient Egypt.

I’ve got a feeling this is the year skirts regain their main character energy

I never stopped wearing skirts, I just sort of stopped thinking about them. They were a plus-one, not the main event. For the past few years I have planned my outfits around my obsession with pleated trousers, or my latest experimental jean shape. Or I have worn dresses. Sometimes I have ended up in a skirt, but the skirt was kind of an afterthought. For instance, at one point last year when it was chilly and I needed to look smart as well as cosy, I picked out a sweater and a pair of knee-high boots, and then slotted in a plain midi in satin or wool, just something to sit in between.

Things could be about to change. I’ve got a feeling that 2026 could be the year that skirts get main character energy again. For a start: hemlines are getting shorter again, which makes skirts more attention-grabbing. If you left the house with your eyes open at any point in 2025, you will have noticed this happening: generation Z and Alpha wear very, very short skirts – she says, trying and failing not to sound about 150 years old – but the trend for above-the-knee hemlines crosses all generations. Adult women with their legs out was very much a feature of the pre-Christmas party season. But what is noticeable is that the mini renaissance is much more about a skirt, than it is about a dress. A short skirt feels cooler; more about your style and less about your body than a minidress.

They’re hyped as fixes for everything from anxiety to insomnia, but can lying under seven kilos of fabric really help you unwind? We put weighted blankets to the test

• I tested the most-hyped sleep aids – here’s what worked

Anyone who’s ever nodded off under the weight of a purring cat or snoring dog already knows how weighted blankets work. The warmth, the softness, the hefty pressure that renders you unable to fidget or indeed move. Worries subside, and you have no choice but to slide into slumber.

Studies have demonstrated some success for weighted blankets as sleep aids, but where these hefty quilts seem to excel is in alleviating anxiety – and not just according to TikTok influencers. Scientists, medics and the NHS are trialling them to comfort dementia patients, soothe neurodivergent children and even relieve chronic pain.

Best weighted blanket overall:
Emma Hug

Best budget weighted blanket:
Silentnight Wellbeing

Looking to cut heating bills or warm just one room without firing up the boiler? We cosied up to 12 electric heaters to find the best

• The best hot-water bottles

Are you in need of a stopgap stand-in for your central heating? Or perhaps you’re looking for an efficient appliance to heat a small space. If so, investing in one of the best electric heaters will rid the cold from your home.

Electric heaters range from compact, fast-acting fan-powered models to oil-filled radiators and wall-mounted panels. Some also have smart functionality, so you can ask Alexa to turn up the heat, and other advanced features such as air purification and adaptive heating. But which are best?

Best electric heater overall:
Beldray 2,000W smart ceramic core radiator

Best budget electric heater:
Russell Hobbs oscillating ceramic 2kW heater

Heated airers claim to dry your clothes without costing the earth in energy. We put 17 to the test to reveal the best, from covered options to mini drying racks

• The best electric heaters, tried and tested

Rising energy bills and perma-drizzle are conspiring to keep the nation’s laundry damp, not least by making it such a turn-off to turn on the heating. No wonder heated clothes airers are having a moment. These modish appliances sell out within hours of reaching shops and inspire evangelistic fervour among owners, who call them “life-savers” and “gamechangers”.

Can a hot clothes horse really change your life, let alone dry your soggy washing as fast as a tumble dryer for a fraction of the cost and with none of the noise? Over the past 18 months, I’ve put 17 bestsellers through their paces – including three new models in the past few months – to find out whether they’re the best thing in laundry since the clothes peg, or destined for the loft.

Best heated clothes airer overall:
Lakeland Dry:Soon Deluxe 3-tier heated airer and cover

Best budget heated airer:
Black+Decker heated winged clothes airer

New year pick-me-ups; hand cream to soothe dry, chapped skin; and the best clothes to buy secondhand

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Damp weather, grey skies, days that don’t seem to be getting any longer and the return to normality after the new year motivation boost: it’s no wonder some of us feel a bit flat in January.

To lift our spirits, we asked you for your favourite pick-me-ups, and rounded up some from us at the Filter too. From umbrellas that give you a glow-up to microdosing nature, here are your tried-and-tested ways to beat the January blues.

Hunt, scroll, strike gold: the best clothes and accessories to buy secondhand – and where to find them

The best (non-greasy) hand creams to soften dry and chapped skin, tested

‘Big, firm, crunchy’: the best supermarket granola, tasted and rated

The best wake-up under the sun: Lumie Bodyclock Glow 150 sunrise alarm clock review

We tested 20 hot-water bottles – these are the best for comfort and cosiness

The best Apple Watches in 2026: what’s worth buying and what’s not, according to our expert

The best air fryers, tried and tested for crisp and crunch

This creamy grain-free dish contains flaked almonds for extra crunch and protein – perfect if you’re cutting down on carbs

I’m fasting for three days a week for the whole of this month. It’s not for everyone, I know, and it’s important to talk to your doctor first, but the benefits are well researched and include improved digestion and immune function, and lowered blood pressure. When we fast, the body goes into ketosis, which breaks down fat for energy, and to stay in ketosis afterwards it helps to reduce carbs and increase protein, which is where today’s low-carb, zero-waste recipe comes in.

Coconut bars with matcha, a nutty rubble for soups, sandwiches or toast, and super-simple almond butter flapjacks

I love a Bounty, although I call them paradise bars. I also love matcha (and not only for its health-supporting benefits). Though my partner doesn’t enjoy drinking matcha tea, when I mix it into the sweetness of the coconut filling, even he’s on board. Then, a very munchable and grabbable savoury granola, and flapjacks that you can throw together in minutes for a week’s worth of on-the-go snacks.

Our preserving pundits dive into the bittersweet dilemmas surrounding baking paper circles, wax seals and the judicious application of heat

When my son makes marmalade, he never warms the jars or uses circles of baking paper and cellophane – he just puts the lids on. It never goes mouldy, so am I wasting my time doing it the “proper” way?
Dagna, Berkhamsted, Herts
You can’t get much sweeter than marmalade, and this is most likely the reason for both Dagna and her son’s success, despite their differing strategies. “The chance of mould developing is low because there’s so much sugar to balance the bitterness of the orange peel,” says Camilla Wynne, preserver and author of All That Crumbs Allow. “Mould needs water to do its thing, and sugar binds to water.” She recalls a former student who, like Dagna’s son, simply ladled her marmalade into jars and closed the lids. All was fine until one day the student’s latest batch of marmalade was covered in mould: “She’d been reducing the sugar in her recipe over the years, so her method no longer worked because there was available water for mould to grow.”

But back to the particulars of the family dispute. “He’s more right than she is,” says Pam Corbin, author of Pam the Jam: The Book of Preserves. “Nowadays, we have fantastic food-grade lids, which have a wax seal inside and keep preserves safer than a wax disc and cellophane would.” Some people put a wax disc under the twist-on lid, too, but for Corbin that’s a hard no: “As the marmalade cools, condensation forms on top of the paper, so you’re more likely to get mould.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Jammy leeks, savoury sweet chawanmushi and toasted sesame seeds make this flaky pastry dish feel decadent and special

This savoury custard tart celebrates some of my favourite flavours (and dishes): jammy miso leeks, savoury-sweet chawanmushi (a Japanese steamed custard flavoured with dashi) and toasty sesame seeds, all enveloped in flaky pastry. It feels decadent, so it’s best served with a simple fennel salad, zingy with apple cider vinegar and mustard. It’s excellent eaten while still warm from the oven (be patient!), but even better as leftovers, because I have a soft spot for cold eggy tarts.

Ferment: Simple Ferments and Pickles, and How to Eat Them, by Kenji Morimoto, is published by Pan Macmillan at £22. To order a copy for £19.80, visit the guardianbookshop.com

As a defence lawyer, I rely on witness statements. But one unusual case prompted me to reconsider the role of memory, and a traumatic experience that had affected me for years

I spent nearly 20 years working as a criminal defence lawyer in the remote communities of the Canadian Arctic. Nunavut – roughly the size of western Europe – is home to fewer than 40,000 people, most of whom are Inuit. The brief summers boast endless days, while polar night descends over long winters where temperatures occasionally drop as low as -50C. Despite the lack of urban centres and a small, homogenous population, the territory records one of the highest violent-crime rates per capita in the world.

There are no roads connecting Nunavut’s 26 communities. Aircraft is the only option, except for a brief ice-free window in late summer when supplies and fuel can be delivered by boat. Several times a year, the justice system arrives: a travelling circuit court sets up a temporary courtroom in local gymnasiums or community halls for three to four days.

From naked embraces and sofa snogging to the very final stages of life, a new exhibition proves there is no one way to age

From repurposed engagement rings to parties, tattoos and the wild home renovations of #DivorcedMomCore, relationship splits have entered a surprising new era

Name: Divorce rings.

Age: Relatively new. British Vogue is reporting that they are a thing. And if it’s in Vogue the chances are it’s in vogue.

In China, marriage and birth rates have hit record lows and many people are living in isolation. Is the Are You Dead? app just a practical response to this – or something more troubling?

A few days before Christmas, after a short battle with illness, a woman in Shanghai called Jiang Ting died. For years, the 46-year-old had lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Hongkou, a residential neighbourhood that sits along the Huangpu River. Neighbours described her as quiet. “She rarely chats with people. We only see her when she goes to and from work, and occasionally when she comes out to pick up takeout,” said a local resident interviewed by a Chinese reporter. Her parents long deceased, Jiang had no partner or children to inherit her estate. Her lonely death sparked a debate in Chinese media about how society should handle the increasing number of people dying with no next of kin.

For Xiong Sisi, also a professional in her 40s living alone in Shanghai, the news triggered uncomfortable feelings. “I truly worry that, after I die, no one will collect my body. I don’t care how I’m buried, but if I rot there, it’s bad for the house,” she says.

From understanding jargon such as APRs and 0% transfer offers, to getting perks such as air miles or cashback

When you apply for a credit card or personal loan, the lender will quote interest as the annual percentage rate (APR). This is, essentially, the total cost of borrowing over 12 months, shown as a percentage of the amount you have borrowed. It takes fees into account, as well as interest. The rate should give you an idea of how much you will have to pay back on top of the money you want to borrow.

The cinema chain didn’t warn me clearly when I went to see Avatar: Fire and Ash that I needed to register my number plate

I parked at Cineworld in Chichester to watch the new film Avatar: Fire and Ash.

It is more than three hours long and, when I returned to my car, I’d received a penalty charge notice (PCN) for overstaying. I’d watched the previous two Avatar films there without a problem.

A bereaved young customer was baffled by the wildly fluctuating balances the energy supplier claimed on a family’s account

When my mother died of cancer, my aunt adopted me. She, too, died of cancer in 2024. At 26, I am now alone and struggling to deal with enormous, nonsensical energy bills from E.ON Next.

In 2022, I discovered my aunt had been paying massively inflated bills for the flat I shared with her, so I had the account closed and a new one set up in my name. An E.ON agent took meter readings, a smart meter was installed, and a final bill sent showing the account was more than £6,000 in credit. E.ON wouldn’t let me have it in cash, so the credit was transferred to the new account and used to pay the bills for the next two years.

This is one of three key months when fraudsters ramp up the number of scams to trap travellers into paying for a ‘bargain holiday’ … that doesn’t exist

• Stress-free travel: plan now to avoid holiday scams and pitfalls

You are battling the January blues and see a cheap deal on one of your socials for a two-week break in Spain during August. Better still, the price is £200 cheaper than elsewhere, possibly because the holiday is almost sold out.

When you text to confirm the details after making the payment, you are talked through the booking by a convincing contact.

Mini breaks and micro-stretches could help strengthen your neck and reduce pain and stress, say experts

• Read more summer essentials

If you’re reading this on your device, chin tucked into your chest, or leaning over your desk shaped like a question mark, pause for a moment. How’s your neck feeling?

The way we sit, scroll and work means we often hold static positions for too long, creating tension and stiffness that radiates through the upper body.

Pricey deworming remedies are being touted as cure-alls. Supermodel Heidi Klum gave it a go – experts roll their eyes

Last August, supermodel Heidi Klum revealed that she and her husband, Tom Kaulitz, were planning a worm and parasite cleanse.

“Everything on my Instagram feed at the moment is about worms and parasites,” she told the Wall Street Journal, ominously adding: “I don’t know what the heck is going to come out.”

Spruiked by online influencers as a way of gaining insight into our health, experts say at-home tests oversimplify complex factors and can cause unnecessary distress

• Read more in the Antiviral series

For a few hundred dollars you can put your poo in an envelope and post it off to a laboratory. In return you’ll get a report (sometimes generated by AI) outlining your food sensitivities, metabolic fitness, and what pathogens or fungi you’re harbouring.

These at-home gut microbiome tests or “GI mapping” kits are frequently promoted by influencers as a way to “hack your health” and “take control” through analysing some of the trillions of organisms that live in your digestive tract.

As a boy, Tom Stoltman was diagnosed with autism and bullied at school. When he became depressed in his teens, his older brother, a bodybuilder, suggested a trip to the gym

• ‘I was told I wouldn’t walk again. I proved the doctors wrong’: the bike-obsessed pensioner who broke his neck and started afresh

Tom Stoltman was a skinny kid: 90kg, 6ft 8in, with glasses and sticking‑out teeth. Diagnosed with autism as a young child, he felt he didn’t fit in. “I was really shy,” he says. “I got bullied in school for being different.” Back then, the boy from Invergordon didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. He lived in baggy hoodies. “Hood up. That was my comfort.” He loved football but “I used to look at people on the pitch and think, ‘He’s tinier than me, but he’s pushing me off the ball.’”

By 16 he’d hit a “crashing point”. He went from football-obsessed to playing Xbox all day. He’d skip meals in favour of sweets. “Sometimes it was four or five, six bags.”

Musée Rodin was the venue for the designer’s second men’s show for the house, and he sought to shun normality

He is one of fashion’s greatest ruminators so where better than the Musée Rodin in Paris to stage Jonathan Anderson’s second menswear show for Dior. Guests including the actors Robert Pattinson and Mia Goth, and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton wandered past Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker as they made their way to their seats on Wednesday afternoon.

Speaking backstage before the show, Anderson, dressed in his signature faded Levi’s jeans and a navy cashmere sweater, described the collection as “another character study”, explaining that this time he set out to explore “the idea of a new aristocracy”, questioning “what it means today” and “what can it be?” The-41-year old designer said when it came to the social hierarchy he wanted to “ignore the aspect of money” and instead home in on “their eccentricity”.

There are so many great value bathing creams and gels, you can indulge yourself all winter long

January is cold, frequently depressing and almost everyone is indoors and feeling broke. At the start of the year, the most activity I can manage is to pop on a podcast and haul myself into a bubble bath.

It’s a comfort that has made me an expert in every bath cream, foam and salt on the high street. I am practically incapable of passing a shelf without popping a new one in my trolley. And while I love a posh soak, there is something extra satisfying about using lavish amounts of product and enjoying a luxury-feeling bath without a drop of spender’s remorse.

A look at some of the Italian fashion designer’s greatest moments, after his death at the age of 93

Italian fashion designer who dressed some of the world’s most photographed women in glamorous, show-stopping gowns

After Valentino Garavani retired in 2008 from a fashion world in which the meaning of luxury had changed, his half-century of couture creation was marked with exhibitions.

The one at Somerset House in London in 2012, Valentino: Master of Couture, displayed more than a hundred of his outfits within close peering range, each with a card bearing the name of the woman – royal, diva, star, social leader – for whom it had been created.

With 64% of the city’s residents relying on buses and trains so overloaded that up to 10 passengers die a day, anger is rising over a taxpayer-funded road most will never use

Mumbai is known for its graphic inequality, its gleaming high-rises where the rich live with panoramic views of the Arabian Sea standing next to windowless hovels perched over drains. It is home to 90 of India’s billionaires, but also to more than six million slum dwellers, about 55% of central Mumbai’s population.

Now Mumbai has a new symbol of the gulf between rich and poor: a high-speed, eight-lane motorway on its western coast, which critics say serves only the wealthy despite being built with taxpayers’ money.

The city’s architecture travels through time and continents, incorporating everything from slabs of the Italian Alps to meteorites that hit southern Africa 2bn years ago

In the heart of London’s Square Mile, between the windows of a tapas restaurant, a 150m-year-old ammonite stares mutely at passersby. The fossil is embedded in a limestone wall on Plantation Lane, sitting alongside the remnants of ancient nautiloids and squid-like belemnites. It’s a mineralised aquarium hiding in plain sight, a snapshot of deep time that few even glance at, a transtemporal space where patatas bravas meet prehistoric cephalopods.

How often do you give thought to the stones that make up our towns and cities? To the building blocks, paving slabs and machine-cut masonry that backdrop our lives? If your name’s Dr Ruth Siddall, the answer to that question would be yesterday, today and every day for the foreseeable. Her passion is urban geology, and it turns out that the architecture of central London – in common with many places – is a largely unwitting showcase of Earth science through the ages.

Forget draughty bunk rooms and awkward social encounters, hostels now provide home comforts and a sense of community private rentals will never match

‘Penguins? In Snowdonia?” I asked incredulously. “That’s right!” came the enthusiastic reply from our newest hostel companion. We were standing in the large kitchen of The Rocks hostel in Capel Curig, a village in the north-east of Eryri national park (Snowdonia), chatting amiably while waiting for our teas to brew.

“Head up Moel Siabod to the lake, and that’s where the penguins are. You’ll see a sign warning about feeding them,” he said. “But even if they’re hiding and you don’t see one, it’s one of the best walks in the area.”

Charente-Maritime is a more affordable, less manicured family destination than nearby Île de Ré

Dinner comes with a spectacle in La Tremblade. Before I sit down to a platter of oysters at La Cabane des Bons Vivants, one of the village’s canal-side restaurants, I stand and watch orange flames bellow up from a tangle of long, skinny pine needles inside a large, open oven. They are piled on top of a board of carefully arranged mussels and, by setting fire to the pine needles, the shellfish cook in their own juices.

This is the curious tradition of moules à l’éclade, a novel way of cooking mussels developed by Marennes-Oléron oyster farmers along the River Seudre in the Charente-Maritime, halfway down France’s west coast. The short-lived flaming spectacle is a prelude to sliding apart the charred shells and finding juicy orange molluscs inside – and just one highlight of our evening along La Grève. The avenue that cuts between the oyster beds, lined by colourful, ramshackle huts and rustic pontoons is an alluring venue for a sunset meal by the canal, the atmosphere all the more lively and fascinating for it being in a working oyster-farming village.

When I swapped my iPhone for a Nokia, Walkman, film camera and physical map, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But my life soon started to change

When two balaclava-clad men on a motorbike mounted the pavement to rob me, recently, I remained oblivious. My eyes were pinned to a text message on my phone, and my hands were so clawed around it that they didn’t even bother to grab it. It wasn’t until an elderly woman shrieked and I felt the whoosh of air as the bike launched back on to the road that I looked up at all. They might have been unsuccessful but it did make me think: what else am I missing from the real world around me?

Before I’ve poured my first morning coffee I’ve already watched the lives of strangers unfold on Instagram, checked the headlines, responded to texts, swiped through some matches on a dating app, and refreshed my emails, twice. I check Apple Maps for my quickest route to work. I’ve usually left it too late to get the bus, so I rent a Lime bike using the app. During the day, my brother sends me some memes, I take a picture of a canal boat, and pay for my lunch on Apple Pay. I walk home listening to music on Spotify and a long voice note from a friend, then I watch a nondescript TV drama, while scrolling through Depop and Vinted for clothes.

At first Stephanie Wood felt out of her depth rafting the Franklin, but by the end, a world of new possibilities had opened up

I am old, I am unfit for this project and I am colder than hell frozen over but I am also stuck. A helicopter will not winch me out because my only injuries are the agonies of dodgy hips, screaming arm muscles and deeply wounded pride.

And there are miles and days to go before I sleep again on a mattress with clean sheets and a pillow and luxuriate in a hot shower and can be propelled forward in ways that do not require the use of my arms.

As a study says a pet death can hurt as much as that of a relative, three people describe their emotions

Grief over the death of a pet could be as chronic as that for a human family member, according to research. The study, published in the academic journal PLOS One, suggests grieving pet owners can suffer from prolonged grief disorder (PGD).

PGD is a mental health condition that can last months or even years, and often involves intense longing and despair, and problems socialising and going about daily tasks. Currently, only those grieving the loss of a person can be diagnosed.

The Glory was a haven for outlandish self-expression and the early stomping ground for many of the UK’s most infamous drag queens. It made me ready for life

In a packed pub, revellers chat, sip lager and look at their phones. Suddenly a side door crashes open, and in walks drag sensation John Sizzle, dressed as a hair-raisingly accurate Diana, Princess of Wales. She saunters demurely to a halo, fashioned from tinsel and coat hangers and stuck to the wall, stands under it, and starts lip-syncing to Beyoncé’s Halo. The crowd erupts.

Amateur conservationist and social media influencer Theerasak 'Pop' Saksritawee has a rare bond with Thailand’s critically endangered dugongs. With dugong fatalities increasing, Pop works alongside scientists at Phuket Marine Biological Centre to track the mammals with his drone and restore their disappearing seagrass habitat. Translating complex science for thousands online, Pop raises an urgent alarm about climate change, pollution and habitat loss — before Thailand’s dugongs vanish forever

Scale and speed of president’s moves have stunned observers of authoritarian regimes – is the US in democratic peril?

Three hundred and sixty-five days after Donald Trump swore his oath of office and completed an extraordinary return to power, many historians, scholars and experts say his presidency has pushed American democracy to the brink – or beyond it.

In the first year of Trump’s second term, the democratically elected US president has moved with startling speed to consolidate authority: dismantling federal agencies, purging the civil service, firing independent watchdogs, sidelining Congress, challenging judicial rulings, deploying federal force in blue cities, stifling dissent, persecuting political enemies, targeting immigrants, scapegoating marginalized groups, ordering the capture of a foreign leader, leveraging the presidency for profit, trampling academic freedom and escalating attacks on the news media.

In Oscar-shortlisted documentary short Cashing Out, a little-known industry that saw dying LGBTQ+ people sell their life insurance policies is remembered

During the summer of 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic, the documentary director Matt Nadel was back home in Boca Raton, Florida. He remembers one particular evening walk that he took with his father, Phil, as they weathered out those early months.

As they strode through the neighborhood, Nadel, now 26, said that the prospect of a vaccine was exciting, but the idea of pharmaceutical executives profiting off a devastating virus left him feeling uneasy. Phil grew concerned by the complex ethical predicament that his son laid out, and Nadel could quickly tell that his father was acting strangely.

Driven by a belief in a common humanity, the Platzdarm search team bring the bodies of soldiers back from the frontline – no matter which side they fought on

Alexei clears his throat without showing the slightest expression on his face. Squatting and wearing gloves, he shakes the military uniform that once belonged to a man. The jacket and trousers still hold their shape, but inside there is nothing. Just air.

Alexei pulls out a worn, stained piece of paper from one of the pockets. “Andrei. Moscow,” he reads aloud. “There’s a phone number written here. Good. It helps us trace his origin.” Whoever he was, he was a Russian soldier.

Finding bodies from both sides is common at the front – the remains pile up after a battle

We’d like to hear from people in Jenrick’s Newark constituency about how they feel about him defecting to Reform UK

After months of denials, Robert Jenrick finally defected to Reform UK last week.

Nigel Farage called it the “latest Christmas present I’ve ever had”, while Conservative MPs called him a “coward” and a “traitor”.

We would like to hear from people who have used chatbots for companionship or mental health support

AI Chatbots are now a part of everyday life. ChatGPT surpassed 800 million weekly active users in late 2025.

Some people are forming relationships with these chatbots, using them for companionship, mental health support, and even as therapists.

Has a chatbot helped you get through a difficult period in life? If so, we’d like to hear about it.

If you’re having trouble using the form click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here.

We’d like to hear your questions ahead of the next episode of It’s Complicated

The team from our It’s Complicated Youtube channel are looking at how eating throughout the day has become normal in many Western contexts, what that might be doing to our bodies, and whether this new wave of wellness fasting really does what it claims.

We’d like to know what you want explained. If you could sit down with a leading expert on fasting, what would you ask them? Send us your questions, large or small via the form below. Your questions could help shape our reporting and be featured in the show.

Our clothes can be one of the most powerful non-verbal communicators – tell us yours reflect who you are and what you do?

From uniforms to suits to tracksuits to costumes, clothes keep us warm and covered – but they are also one of the most powerful non-verbal communicators, a second skin which reflects who you are and what you do.

We want to hear from people about why they wear what they wear. Do your clothes help you in the workplace? Are they making a statement? Maybe you’re a waiter and have worn the same work uniform for years, or maybe your job involves wearing very little. Please tell us about yourselves.

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