Exclusive: Analysis of more than 4,000 of Reform UK leader’s paid-for Cameo videos also shows they contain misogynistic remarks and antisemitic conspiracies

Nigel Farage has sold videos in which he endorsed a neo-Nazi event, repeated extremist slogans and supported a man convicted over his involvement in a far-right riot. The videos are among several highly questionable clips identified by the Guardian in an investigation into the Reform UK leader’s use of the personalised video platform Cameo.

They include videos in which he repeats a motto associated with the UK far right, references antisemitic conspiracy theories and makes misogynistic remarks about leftwing politicians – including a comment about the US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s breasts.

Falling costs and government incentives make solar an attractive option for many, reducing need for gas

After prices of liquefied natural gas surged to record highs after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, millions of people in Pakistan were repeatedly left without electricity. An intense heatwave and gas shortages amid record-breaking prices resulted in power cuts across the country.

But people soon started to realise there was an alternative. The falling costs of solar panels and generous government incentives to feed excess power back to the grid made rooftop solar an attractive option.

What is it like to be Michael B Jordan’s twin, Andie MacDowell’s hands or Rachel Weisz’s hair? Some of Hollywood’s best stand-ins reveal all

Most of us are familiar with the idea of stunt doubles in film and television. But there are plenty of other doubles working in the industry, too – for when an actor doesn’t want to do an intimate scene, for example, or doesn’t have the skills required to show their character playing an instrument or driving a car. Here, six body doubles talk about their secret lives on screen.

Due to an ongoing judicial review, Home Office data currently leaves out the thousands of people apprehended at Palestine Action protests. But whichever way you cut it, the number of arrests is outrageous

On the surface, the Home Office’s latest data on terrorism arrests looks relatively stable. There were 255 terrorism-related arrests in 2025, which is only a 2% increase on the previous year’s figure of 250.

Funny thing is, I know three people who were arrested on terrorism-related charges last year. I could even pinpoint the date, because two of their middle-aged children had to leave my middle-aged birthday party to pick them up from a police station. I know, I know, it’s not all about me, even if it was my birthday – but if those numbers are solid, that means more than 50% of the mini-surge came from more or less the same group of people, two of them from the same postcode.

As stories of men leaving their dates in ‘sketchy situations’ go viral, experts say these incidents could stem from big egos and poor communication

MJ calls what happened to her in Zion national park “small ‘T’ trauma”. She knows women have experienced worse from their partners. But she still feels the anger of being left behind on a hike by her now ex. “It brings up stuff in my body that maybe I have not cleared out yet,” she said.

Five years ago, MJ and a new partner – he was not exactly her boyfriend, and the pair were not exclusive – traveled from Los Angeles to Utah for an adventure getaway. MJ, who is 38 and works in PR, was looking forward to exploring Zion’s striking scenery; its vast sandstone canyon and pristine wading trails were on the list. But on the morning of their big hike, MJ was not feeling well. She could not shake the feeling that something was “off”; indeed, MJ would learn on this trip that her partner was seeing other women.

Our photojournalist explores the Cornish landmark on the eve of its anniversary and meets some of its staff, visitors, plants and creatures

“Give me a sleeping bag and I’ll happily sleep here overnight,” says Kim Mackintosh as she wanders amid the vibrant flora of the Mediterranean biome at the Eden Project on the eve of the tourist attraction’s 25th anniversary.

Loupe in hand, the leader of the biome’s horticulture team is marvelling at an array of plants that have recently come into bloom, tenderly examining the yellow furry buds of an Acacia glaucoptera before flogging a Grevillea flower to dispense its rich, honey-flavoured nectar.

Kim Mackintosh inspects the ‘kangaroo paw’ of an Anigozanthos through her loupe. All photographs by Jonny Weeks

Exclusive: Jonathan Powell thought Tehran’s ‘surprising’ offer on its nuclear programme could prevent rush to war, sources say

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Britain’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, attended the final talks between the US and Iran and judged that the offer made by Tehran on its nuclear programme was significant enough to prevent a rush to war, the Guardian can reveal.

Powell thought progress had been made in Geneva and that the deal proposed by Iran was “surprising”, according to sources.

Joe Kent resigned as national counter-terrorism center director, saying Iran posed no imminent threat to the US

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Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a far-right political figure and supporter of Donald Trump, resigned from his position on Tuesday in protest of the war in Iran.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote in a resignation letter posted to X. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

If confirmed, death would make Larijani the most senior Iranian figure to be killed since Ali Khamenei on first day of war

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Israel says it has killed a linchpin of Iranian politics, the national security chief, Ali Larijani, in overnight strikes, a claim that if confirmed would make him the most senior Iranian figure to die in the war since the supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed on its first day.

Iran has yet to comment on either claim. If confirmed, Larijani’s death would remove a pivotal figure at the heart of the regime’s political and security establishment at a moment of acute crisis and represent devastating blow.

Vaccination programme to be launched on Canterbury campus as strain B of disease identified in fatal outbreak

Students in Kent are to be offered a targeted vaccination against meningitis B after two more cases in the deadly outbreak were confirmed and pharmacies ran out of vaccine doses.

Government scientists have said two people who died in the outbreak had bacterial strain B of the disease, for which most people have not been vaccinated.

The prime minister told the Ukrainian president that Russia must not benefit from the war against Iran

Nigel Farage is speaking now at the Reform UK event.

The website promoting the lottery is up. It is called nigelcutmybills.com.

Chancellor seeks ‘genuine break with the past’ in tackling centralised and ‘geographically unequal’ country

• Business live – latest updates

Rachel Reeves has announced that the Treasury will draw up plans to give regional leaders a share of national tax revenues as part of a radical plan to rebalance the English economy.

Setting out her intention to create investment-led growth, the chancellor promised “a genuine break with the past” that would shift spending power away from Westminster.

Pakistani strike on Afghan capital kills 400 people, who burned in their beds or were crushed by collapsing walls

Witnesses and survivors have described the horrific scenes of a Pakistani air raid that hit a drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul, killing more than 400 people, who burned in their beds or were crushed by the collapsing building.

Afghan rescue crews were still digging bodies out of the rubble on Tuesday after the strike, the deadliest single attack so far in a three-week war between the two countries.

Party’s former leader, who is being sued for symbolic damages, says opponents have repeatedly tried to conflate Sinn Féin and IRA

Gerry Adams has told the high court that opponents of Sinn Féin have repeatedly sought to conflate the political party he led with the IRA, as he denied ever being a member of the Irish Republican Army.

Giving evidence in London watched by victims of IRA bombings, the 77-year-old, credited with helping to bring about the peace process that ended the Troubles, also rejected accusations that he had ever led the paramilitary organisation or sat on its army council.

Woman known only as Beth says abuser claimed status made him untouchable, which terrorised her into silence

MI5 has apologised and paid compensation to a woman who alleged the Security Service was to blame for her being attacked with a machete and abused by one of its agents.

The woman, known only as Beth, was in a relationship with a man she says used his status as an MI5 agent to perpetrate abuse and terrorise her into silence.

Exclusive: actor’s Papa Salt gin to get oyster-free version after venues says it is ‘not worth the risk’

Margot Robbie said she “couldn’t wait” to see the artisan gin brand she had created stocked in her London local. But the willingness of the capital’s venues to fulfil her dream has been seriously compromised by three words on the side of the bottle – “warning: contains molluscs”.

The Wuthering Heights star has had to change the recipe of her spirit after top London bars and restaurants rejected it due to allergen concerns, the Guardian can reveal.

British writer brought wit, realism and class consciousness to cold war espionage fiction, reshaping the genre in the 1960s

• Len Deighton obituary

Len Deighton, the British author whose subversive spy novels helped redefine the genre in the 1960s, has died aged 97.

Best known for his debut, The Ipcress File, Deighton went on to write more than 30 books over a career spanning four decades, establishing himself as one of the most distinctive voices in postwar fiction. His work, often compared to that of John le Carré, combined meticulous research with wit and sharp observations about class and bureaucracy.

Variant identified in Kent can cause long-term complications and prove fatal if not caught early with antibiotics

• Tell us: how is the meningitis outbreak in Canterbury being handled?

Health officials have confirmed that meningitis B is the strain identified in some of the cases in Kent, in an outbreak that has killed two young people and left 15 others seriously ill.

It is the first African country to deposit data in the Arctic World Archive, a storage facility designed to preserve records of everything from cultural practices to historical events

A decommissioned coalmine near the north pole is the last place you’d expect to find Indigenous stories from rural Nigeria, but deep below the Arctic permafrost of Svalbard a storage unit contains a cache of cultural and literary records from the West African country.

The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a data storage unit where organisations and individuals can deposit records kept on specialist digitised film called Piql that lasts up to 2,000 years. On 27 February, Nigeria became the first African country to place archives at the facility 300 metres beneath a mountain where the cold, dark, dry conditions are perfect for preservation.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
From poppy seeds and opium pipes to the astonishing truth about tulips, science and obsession collide in this aromatic history of plants and pioneers

Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, died in 1715 having spent her life changing the floral world. She procured plants from Africa, India, China, Japan and South America that had never been seen in Britain before. These were for her vast formal garden – a print featured in this delightful exhibition shows its regular avenues and plantations, all covering a considerable part of Gloucestershire. But if Somerset’s disciplined parkland is pure Age of Reason, a painting she commissioned of one of her sunflowers is a yellow ecstasy: a blazing cosmic eye staring wildly at you.

Science and obsession, this show reveals, have never been far apart in the history of humans and plants. In the 1600s and 1700s, European botany made huge intellectual advances, filling European gardens with new colours and aromas. All this depended on growing commercial, naval and military might that brought the world’s seeds and bulbs to Britain and its neighbours. Yet even as pioneers collected and classified global flora, the sheer beauty and sensuality of flowers threatened to turn analysis into beauty-addled reverie.

Electric toothbrushes promise healthier teeth and gums and can transform your oral hygiene. We put more than 20 models – from Oral-B to Philips to Suri – to the test

• How to make your toothbrush last longer – and keep it out of landfill

If you grew up using a conventional toothbrush – essentially a stick with bristles on the end – you may be surprised to learn just how long the electric toothbrush has been around. The first was designed in the late 1930s, but that model was a long way from the sleek, feature-packed and Bluetooth-enabled beasts you can buy today.

There are now dozens of ultra-advanced versions on the market, but which ones are worth your cash? To help answer that question, my teeth have become figurative guinea pigs. Over the past 18 months, I’ve put more than 20 electric toothbrushes from the likes of Oral-B, Philips, Suri, Ordo, Silk’n and Foreo through their paces to separate the best from the rest. Here are my conclusions.

Best electric toothbrush overall:
Spotlight Sonic Pro

Best value electric toothbrush:
Icy Bear Next-Generation sonic toothbrush

The writer, actor and singer won an award for her role in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. Then everything went silent. As the rising star returns in her very own musical, she hits out at ‘massive’ celebrity casting

This time last year, Maimuna Memon was surfing an almighty career high. The Lancashire-born composer, writer and actor had just won an Olivier award for her performance in the musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, based on a section of War and Peace. But then it all went silent. “I didn’t expect to skyrocket but I did think, ‘OK, what’s next?’” she says. “And it was a rather quiet year, which was tough.”

It turned out to be useful, in terms of “stripping the ego away”. She went to Galway to be with her mother, a nurse and fiddle-player. “I watched her play and saw these incredible musicians playing for the love of it – not for how they will be reviewed, or to win any awards, or any of that.”

Warner Bros might have swept the Oscars with Sinners and One Battle After Another, but the impending merger has those in the industry worried about the future

On Sunday, Warner Bros snared 11 Oscars for One Battle After Another, Sinners and Weapons, equalling the record for most wins for a single film studio. Paramount, by contrast, did not earn a single nomination.

Yet in an apparent case of a minnow swallowing a whale, Paramount is poised to gobble up Warner Bros in a deal worth $111bn. If approved by regulators, the two studios would be consolidated into one, redrawing the Hollywood map and sowing uncertainty for actors, directors and writers as well as millions of viewers.

Alexander Armstrong, Lucy Beaumont, Bradley Walsh … when will commissioners stop sending standups to other nations? It’s not like they have any insight or connection to these places – it has to end

‘You know what we need to inject some life into our dying medium?” says the TV commissioner. Her colleagues all wait for the moment of inspiration, the sparkle of insight that justifies the gargantuan salary. “We need a show where a comedian travels to a location!”

Hmm, they all think, does she mean a location said comedian has a particularly personal connection to?

Britons learn about the country’s involvement ‘almost as a self-congratulatory narrative’, says historian Joseph Mulhern

In 1845 British citizens and companies were already legally prohibited from owning or buying enslaved people overseas, yet that year 385 captives were “transferred” to a British mining company in Brazil named St John d’El Rey.

Despite a global campaign waged by the UK against slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, the move was not technically illegal because the enslaved people were not sold but “rented” – a practice permitted overseas under the 1843 Slave Trade Act.

Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people

In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the “department of government efficiency”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers”.

Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need “God mode”, an overview of the whole.

I spent a week at a London jobcentre. Those I met were smart and eager to work – and now they have a government willing to help them

Labour did it before. Can it do it again, with things being so much harder now? New Labour’s new deal for the young unemployed levered large numbers of people into work, but in 1998 the economy was on the upswing. Now, economic stagnation has resulted in falling vacancies and rising unemployment. And Donald Trump’s war threatens much worse in the future. Today the Department for Work and Pensions secretary, Pat McFadden, promises “life-changing opportunities to young people” to “significantly reverse the increase we inherited in those not in education, employment or training”, now numbering nearly a million.

A major boost will be the greatly extended youth jobs guarantee, offering six-month-long subsidised-wage roles for unemployed 18- to 24-year-olds. And a youth jobs grant will offer employers a £3,000 subsidy to hire young people who are on benefits and have been out of work for six months. It mirrors the Future Jobs Fund that Labour brought in, after the financial crash, in 2009 – one of its most successful programmes, which boosted participants’ chance of employment by 27%, with a net gain per participant of £7,750 in increased wages and tax receipts and reduced benefit payments. (David Cameron scrapped it in 2010 without waiting to see those results.)

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Thursday 30 April, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform UK – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader.
Book tickets here or at guardian.live

The philosopher, who has died aged 96, was often caricatured as a consensus-seeking liberal. But his belief in the need for shared understanding had a radical underpinning

Despite its canonical name, the Frankfurt School is not a school. It is, at least according to my former teacher, the critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi, a constellation. For a century, this scholarly constellation has pursued the intellectual endeavour of critique. Critique here is not the “thumbs down” or “blocking” exercised on social media. It is the wild aspiration to describe reality in a way that transforms it.

Jürgen Habermas, who died on 14 March 2026 at the age of 96, was a fixed star in this constellation. He set the compass for several generations of mostly German and North American thinkers. Habermas was incredibly prolific, with more than 40 books to his name, and very charismatic. There was an intensity, a concentration to Habermas’s thought and dialogue that his writings convey only poorly. The thundering polemics he brought to public debates also seem a far cry from the consensus-oriented discourse ethics he is known for.

Eva von Redecker is a German philosopher and nonfiction writer

With civilians across the Middle East living under attack, it’s vital to resist the forces of hate and insist on dignity and compassion for all

• David Davidi-Brown is chief executive of the New Israel Fund

First, if you are lucky, there is a loud warning alert on your phone. Then the sirens scream from all around you. Within seconds, people move quickly but calmly: to a safe room, to a shelter, sometimes simply to the nearest underground car park. Some families sleep in public shelters, unsure whether they can reach safety from home in time, young children in tow.

In my case, the past few weeks have meant hours in a shared reinforced room with neighbours, time alongside strangers – and their calming dogs – in public shelters, and, fortunately, many nights sleeping in a safe room between sirens.

David Davidi-Brown is chief executive of the New Israel Fund

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.

Starmer’s popular stance on Iran feels like a possible turning point – and could pave the way for a renewed unity within the Labour party

• John McTernan was Tony Blair’s political secretary at No 10

Dear prime minister, a word in your ear. It’s Groundhog Day. Again. Let’s start with the first tranche of Mandelson papers released last week. You should know this will go on and on: the beginning of a relentless media process of picking over the same mistake. And it needn’t have been so. It would, perhaps, have been better to have held all the papers back and to release them in one massive dump. A lot of stories would have been generated in one day – but they would have fought against each other and in some cases cancelled each other out. Still, we have the process we have – in that archetypal bureaucratic phrase “we are where we are”. So what is to be done?

The art of politics, like magic, is misdirection. Normally, media types work hard to fill the airwaves while you work hard on the medium- and long-term challenges. But right now, it’s not like that. At the moment, we have the gift of news events absorbing political discourse wherever you turn. Whether it’s Peter Mandelson, or the May elections, or the new forever war in Iran, we are surrounded by “news sponges” – topics that are discussed and rediscussed, generating all heat and no light. That opens up a space. Let’s use this time productively.

John McTernan is a political strategist. He was Tony Blair’s political secretary at 10 Downing Street

That $11.3bn doesn’t include any estimate of repairing facilities or replacing losses

Generally speaking, when you bomb another country, and that country retaliates, you call it a “war”. Very simple word. Three letters. Even Donald Trump knows how to spell it.

But be careful about calling the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, which have expanded into an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, a “war”. The geniuses in the White House can’t seem to figure out what the hell they’re doing. House speaker Mike Johnson announced on 5 March that “we are not at war” and that the US has “no intention of being at war”. Some lawmakers, such as senator Cynthia Lummis, meanwhile, are arguing that the US has been in “forever war” with Iran for decades.

Be alive to this threat. The wisdom of ordinary people is our bedrock: a sacred principle is being sacrificed to falsely explain systemic failure

How many Labour policy U-turns does it take to form a complete circle? How many Labour policy complete circles does it take to form a black hole? A black hole in which public interest and party loyalty is crushed past the point of no return.

The reversing of fundamental decisions in the blink of an eye has dire consequences for the integrity of both government and democracy. The latest, quite breathtaking example being the staggering decision to allow the United States to use British airbases for an illegal war on Iran.

Michael Mansfield KC is a human rights lawyer, and has represented the Lawrence family since 1993

Sweden’s V-Dem Institute warns that the US is no longer a liberal democracy. And autocracy is creeping across Europe too

The US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey.

“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.

The US has overwhelming military power. Yet the battle has moved to oil routes, alliances and domestic politics – where Tehran is testing western unity

Donald Trump would like you to know that he is winning the war with Iran. So comprehensively, in fact, that he now needs Nato’s help. The western alliance, he warns, will have a “very bad” future if its members refuse. Germany’s defence minister had a brisk reply: this is not our war. Meanwhile, tankers pile up outside the strait of Hormuz as Britain promises, in an understated way, to keep “looking” at its options. Mr Trump has found out that starting a war without a coalition of the willing is easier than finishing one with it.

Along with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the US president started with an illegal attack on Iran in which the country’s supreme leader was assassinated. American forces have established overwhelming military superiority. By hitting military targets but sparing key oil facilities on Kharg Island, Mr Trump is sending a blunt signal: the US can wreck Iran’s economy. It just hasn’t decided to – yet.

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.

Huge vehicles are popular with drivers, but their wider impacts on road safety and the environment must be tackled

No one who walks, cycles or drives around London, or many of the world’s big cities, could fail to notice the vastly increased size of the typical car. A type of vehicle once associated with rural settings and outdoor lifestyles is now ubiquitous. Heavily marketed as sports utility vehicles (SUVs), supersize cars are among the key consumer trends of recent decades. In 2022, they accounted for 46% of global new car sales.

For manufacturers, these vehicles are big earners due to higher profit margins. For those inside them, they offer more space and a higher vantage point. But for those on the outside, SUVs have obvious downsides. The threat that they pose to pedestrians is one. Research shows that children are 77% more likely to die if struck by an SUV compared with other cars, due to their size and structure – particularly their raised bonnets. This finding was highlighted in an announcement from the London mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, that such risks are being scrutinised as part of a wider review into SUVs’ environmental impact. This evidence will provide the basis for policy proposals that are expected to include higher charges for owners.

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.

Readers respond to articles by Zoe Williams and Clive Lewis about the party’s popularity crisis

Zoe Williams’s conjecture that pragmatism might be the solution to Labour’s polling woes is surely a triumph of hope over experience. (There is no denying Labour is in crisis – but in a strange way, Keir Starmer is equipped to save it, 12 March). Disavowal of ideology in favour of pragmatism is the precise cause of the apparent aimlessness and inability to convey Labour’s mission that she describes, compounded by unforced policy errors, U-turns and poor judgment. Labour members may well be discussing whether Keir Starmer should be tacking more to the left, but the underlying question remains whether he is the right person to lead a party that needs, as she says, a complete step change in orientation in the new multiparty environment.

Unlike Andy Burnham, for example, he has shown no interest in either proportional representation or cross-party collaboration to defeat the far right. The future of both the party and country are more important than the fate of any individual leader. With electoral disaster forecast for May, Labour MPs are increasingly likely to be considering that the best medicine for the party’s current malaise might be Starmer replacement therapy.
Dr Anthony Isaacs
London

Melissa Hayhurst says the government should ensure children are getting the support they need instead of attacking the lawyers helping parents

The claim by the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, that lawyers are “exploiting” parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) is not only wrong, it is deeply insulting to the thousands of families who are forced to rely on legal advice simply to secure the support their children are already entitled to under the law (Report, 13 March).

I am one of those parents. My daughter Jessica has complex needs and is unable to speak or communicate. Like many families across the country, we depend on the legal protections within the Send framework to ensure that she receives the education, care and support she requires.

Baby lies | Fuel price fairness | Gut feelings | Fifa fiasco | Human connection | Cooking instructions

When gently asked about a pen scribble in a picture book “Goodness, I wonder who did that?”, 27-month-old Emily confidently retorted “Nancy!” – our miniature dachshund (Little liars: babies younger than one practise deceit, study suggests, 16 March).
Dianne Ball
Nottingham

• The government’s fuel duty is set, but the VAT element is a percentage of the retail price. Reducing VAT, perhaps to zero, could be a way to show an intent for fuel price “fairness” and avoid accusations that the government is profiteering, as it is suggesting that others might be (Watchdog puts UK fuel retailers ‘on notice’ over profiteering from Iran war, 12 March).
Mic Porter
Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear

Sue Morgan of SongBird Survival warns of dangers such as fur left out for nesting birds by well-meaning pet owners

I was pleased to read Stephen Moss’s account of blue tits starting to sing in his garden as they gear up for nesting season (Birdwatch: Blue tits are feisty and fascinating but often taken for granted, 11 March). But while blue tits remain a familiar sight, they, along with many other garden birds, now face a growing number of hidden threats in the very place we imagine them to be safest: our gardens.

Scientific research funded by SongBird Survival has shown how everyday gardening choices can have serious consequences. Around a third of UK gardeners use pesticides, and our studies found that house sparrow numbers, for example, were nearly 40% lower in gardens where the pesticide metaldehyde was used.

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• Smaller clubs at risk of ‘funding their direct rivals in the EFL’

• ‘Other European leagues have a levy on Uefa income’

A number of mid-ranking Premier League clubs are lobbying for a percentage of the biggest teams’ Uefa revenue to be used to help fund a new financial settlement with the English Football League.

Talks over the so-called New Deal for Football have been in stasis since midway through the 2023-24 season, when the Premier League put negotiations on hold after failing to get the support of clubs for a funding deal for the lower divisions that would have been worth £880m over six years. The newly created Independent Football Regulator has been charged by the government with reviving the discussions and has been given backstop powers to impose a settlement if the parties are unable to agree. Divisions within the Premier League over how to pay for it remain.

Our cartoonist on the Gunners’ teenage saviour and a new springtime ritual at Stamford Bridge

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The champions France lead with five players but every side is represented in pick from a tournament to savour

15. Thomas Ramos France
Plays like the lovechild of Mike Brown and Thomas Castaignède with Jonny Wilkinson levels of marksmanship thrown in. There was never any doubt he would nail that decisive final winning penalty in Paris, just as he did against England in Lyon two years ago. The 30-year-old is the first player to be the top points-scorer in four successive championships and now tops France’s all-time list.

14. Kyle Steyn Scotland
When Scotland and Glasgow play well, the influential Steyn is one of the main reasons why. His interception try from Antoine Dupont’s deflected pass against France at Murrayfield, his second score of the game, neatly summed up his game awareness and pace. His ability to beat defenders and compete strongly in the air also set him apart, although the impressive Rob Baloucoune deserves a mention.

• Iran FA president said negotiations being held with Fifa

• Trump said Iran should not play for their ‘life and safety’

Fifa is unwilling to switch Iran’s World Cup matches to Mexico despite the country’s football federation claiming it is in discussions with the world governing body about moving their games outside the United States.

Iran are due to play two fixtures in Los Angeles and one in Seattle but their participation in the tournament has been placed in doubt by the US’s joint airstrikes on the country with Israel.

Former Norwich defender lived for years in an LA motel, cut ties with his family for more than three decades and is now the subject of a documentary

“I hated it,” Tony Powell says on a spring afternoon in Los Angeles of his past as a secretly gay professional footballer for Bournemouth and Norwich in the 1970s. Powell is 78 and now lives in a very different world compared with when he was a husband, the father of two young daughters and Norwich’s player of the season in 1979.

Powell is not a demonstrative man and, having been forced to bury his true self for decades, does not make a fuss about the pain he endured. But there is an ache in his English accent, which remains intact after 45 years in America. “I just wanted to be who I am, but at that time it was not a good idea to come out.”

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It has been rather an underwhelming World Cup cycle for Brazil. They arrived at the Human Rights World Cup as fairly hot favourites but after their exit at the hands of Croatia in the last eight in Al-Rayyan four years ago things have drifted. They went out in the quarter-finals at the 2024 Copa América, then limped through Conmebol qualifying for the Geopolitics World Cup, finishing fifth after six defeats – to Uruguay, Colombia, Argentina (twice), Paraguay and Bolivia – with their lowest points tally since South America switched to an 18-game format for the 2002 tournament. In October they lost 3-2 to Japan in a friendly and in November they were held to a 1-1 draw by Tunisia.

Following on from Ken Muir’s bin-related Spurs joke yesterday, maybe the next candidate for the Tottenham managerial merry-go-round should be the current boss of Dutch side Brabantia?” – Phil Taverner.

Re yesterday’s line about teenager Max Dowman fielding the ‘what did you get up to at the weekend?’ question as he walked through the school gates on Monday morning: surely the more obvious b@nter among those of that age would be ‘so I heard you scored on Saturday night?’ – Justin Kavanagh.

Independent team now called Les Marseillaises want to become an iconic club and have the history-making Corinne Diacre at the helm

“Here in Marseille your blood is not red, it’s blue,” says Les Marseillaises’ manager, Corinne Diacre. “Even today it can be hard for some parents to see their girls wanting to play football, but here they don’t play football: they play for Marseille. It’s seen as completely different.”

Diacre is happy and relaxed. The rebranded and independent Marseille women’s team, still owned by the American businessman Frank McCourt, through the investment arm McCourt Global, after his purchase of the wider Marseille club in 2016, are being given an injection of resource and energy while maintaining strategic ties.

So severe is the vibration problem caused by the car’s Honda engine that the team principal feared his drivers suffering permanent nerve damage

The next round of the Formula One world championship in Japan will be the home race for the Aston Martin team’s engine manufacturer, Honda, at the Suzuka circuit. A celebratory affair, however, is not expected amid painful days for Honda, whose return to F1 has been marked by a failure to make the grade.

Its engine’s shortcomings were exposed for the second successive race at the Chinese Grand Prix on Sunday. Fernando Alonso retired after 32 laps because the vibration from the engine was so severe he was losing feeling in his hands and feet. Hit teammate Lance Stroll had retired after 10 laps with a battery problem, an element of the hybrid engine that has plagued the manufacturer from day one.

• USA and Venezuela play for title on Tuesday night

• Navy Seal gave locker room talk to Americans

• Venezuelans dance and sing before games

The US will play Venezuela in the World Baseball Classic final on Tuesday, a meeting that comes after recent tensions between the two countries.

In January, Donald Trump ordered a military operation that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Since then, the US has launched a war against Iran, during which the American players have paid tribute to their country’s military. Players have saluted each other after victories and the team invited Robert J O’Neill, a former Navy Seal who claims he killed Osama bin Laden, to give a locker room speech. Two of the team’s pitchers, Paul Skenes and Griffin Jax, played at the Air Force Academy and have spoken of the importance of honoring the military.

Exclusive: Fixing a leak can be simple and equivalent to closing a coal power station, making lack of action maddening, say analysts

The world’s worst mega-leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane in 2025 have been revealed by an analysis of satellite data.

The super-polluting plumes from oil and gas facilities have a colossal heating impact on the climate but often result from poor maintenance and can be simple to fix. The assessment found dozens of mega-leaks, each having the same global heating impact as a coal-fired power station.

Nearly 700 deals pulled in two weeks and only a few fixed-rate products below 4% are available, says Moneyfacts

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Britons taking out a new home loan face paying almost £800 a year more on average than before the Iran war as “Trumpflation” pushes up UK mortgage rates, according to Moneyfacts.

Nearly 700 mortgage deals have been pulled by lenders as the economic fallout from the war results in the biggest upheaval since the aftermath of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget in 2022.

Scotland’s busiest station to run reduced trains timetable after estimated 953,000 passenger journeys affected so far

Scotland’s busiest station, Glasgow Central, will partially reopen its main concourse on Wednesday, including for cross-border services, after a fire gutted the Victorian building next to it.

There will be a reduced timetable, including a scaled-down service to London Euston, and passengers are asked to check journeys before travelling.

Étienne Davignon is charged with participation in war crimes in relation to killing of then PM Patrice Lumumba

A former Belgian diplomat, 93, should stand trial over alleged complicity in the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what was then the newly independent Congolese state, a Brussels court has ruled.

Étienne Davignon, the only person still alive among 10 Belgians the Lumumba family accuses of involvement in the killing, is charged with participation in war crimes.

The response follows social media footage of the One Battle After Another actor remonstrating with a member of security during the ceremony

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has responded to the complaint by Oscar nominee Teyana Taylor over the behaviour of a security guard who manhandled her in the closing moments of the ceremony.

In footage that circulated on social media after the telecast on Sunday, Taylor can be heard telling someone off-camera that they are “a man putting your hands on a female. You’re very rude. Very rude.”

Fearing that extreme weather threatened its epic breaks, Oriente Salvaje is piloting the first surf insurance policy to protect livelihoods and ecosystems

In the late 1990s in El Salvador, Rodrigo Barraza went in search of every surfer’s dream: a pristine wave, far from the crowds. Down a rough dirt track hours from any city, he found it: a little-known surf spot on the country’s eastern shores, where long lines of waves form a crisp right-hand break, surrounded by thousands of hectares of tropical forest.

“I fell in love with the place,” says Barraza. In 2004, he opened a small hotel there, and along with some surfing friends, founded a tourism association. They developed sustainable tourism standards and committed to protect the surrounding biodiverse ecosystem of rare dry tropical forest, rivers and mangroves. They called it Oriente Salvaje – the “wild east”.

Oriente Salvaje is known by surfers for its world-class breaks, Las Flores and Punto Mango

Berkeley is adopting the ‘Zone 0’ regulation, which mandates first 5ft around the home in high-risk areas should be clear of combustible material

Michel Thouati went through the five stages of grief before he ripped his beloved fig tree from the earth. There was a persimmon and an elderberry too, nestled close to his hillside home in Berkeley,California, and they all had to go.

The plants thriving on his small property had become overshadowed by the dangers growing with them: an emerging body of research had found landscaping can help fuel the disastrous fires sweeping out of the wildland and into neighborhoods like his. Tucked into the ridges overlooking California’s San Francisco Bay and against an expansive nature area, the house Thouati and his wife have owned for 30-some years sits in one of the highest wildfire-threat areas in the state.

This year, Guardian Live events will host the Guardian Climate Forum 2026, a live gathering focused on discussing solutions, accountability and the shared task of building a greener, fairer future. And we want to shape this landmark event with your help

The climate crisis is one of the defining challenges of our age. But it is also a story of ingenuity, resilience and collective action. Across the world, communities are rethinking energy, food, transport and finance. Campaigners are holding power to account. Scientists are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Change is happening and the conversation about what comes next belongs to all of us.

We’d like to hear from you:

Which climate issues feel the most pressing where you are, and which give you hope?

What solutions, ideas or grassroots initiatives deserve deeper exploration?

Who would you most like to hear from, and whose perspectives are we missing?

What stories about climate progress, innovation or accountability are underreported?

What would make an event on climate feel constructive, inspiring and genuinely useful?

Drosopigi, the Mani, Greece: This rocky region’s abundance of flora takes the breath away – not least a long and winding trail of Chios chamomile

The Greek name for this southernmost tip of the Peloponnese is linked to a Byzantine fort at Cape Tigani (called Megali Maina), but it may well also draw on the region’s desolate, mountainous rocky country that persists throughout the entire peninsula.

The fierce Maniot people were well described by Patrick Leigh Fermor in his book Mani (1958), but the region has been more recently celebrated in Charles Foster’s brilliant The Edges of the World, published in January. In history the Mani was known variously for the relentless and sometimes centuries-long vendettas between its local clans, as a fertile recruiting ground for Mediterranean piracy and as an early outpost for Greek liberation from Ottoman rule.

Forces in England and Wales and journalists pledge to improve relations amid rising distrust

Police and the media have backed a “reset” in relations between officers and journalists, after a prolonged period of distrust since the handling of the Nicola Bulley case in 2023.

Bulley’s disappearance in Lancashire led to significant fallout between the police and the press, with media outlets saying a lack of access and information allowed incorrect assertions and conspiracy theories about the case to gain ground.

After carrying out an audit, the council found some parts of the town were ‘overwhelmed’

A local council has stopped residents from installing any more memorial benches in the town amid concerns that it is becoming “overwhelmed”.

Hartlepool borough council has said it is not currently taking any new applications for benches, after concerns from residents that there are too many.

Only half the road network is in good condition despite 1.9m repairs last year, says industry body

A losing battle with potholes has now seen the backlog of repairs across England and Wales reach a record £18.6bn, according to an annual industry estimate, despite councils filling in about 1.9m holes last year.

The “national disgrace” of dangerously pockmarked local roads has been exacerbated by a notably wet winter, with only half of the network now reported to be in good condition.

Ecotricity ranked top in Citizens Advice survey, followed by Outfox, Octopus and Co-operative

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Approximately 14 million households in the UK are receiving “below average” customer service from their energy supplier, a consumer group has warned.

Citizens Advice said energy suppliers must improve their service, as its survey of 16 companies showed that half of gas and electricity consumers are with suppliers scoring less than three out of five stars for their customer service.

President says he will ‘never (ever) endorse anyone’ who votes against Save America act as Senate prepares to take up debate on controversial bill

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A top counter-terrorism official in the Trump administration has resigned over the ongoing war on Iran.

Joe Kent, who reported to director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, said that he “cannot in good conscience” support the joint conflict with Israel.

You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.

Snappily named Xi-cc-plus, Cern physicists spotted the particle in shower of debris that lit up Large Hadron Collider

Scientists at the Cern nuclear physics laboratory near Geneva have discovered a heavier version of the proton, the subatomic particle that sits at the heart of every known atom in the universe.

They spotted the particle in a shower of debris that lit up a detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located deep beneath the ground at Cern, which smashes protons together at close to the speed of light. The collisions recreate in microcosm conditions that prevailed just after the big bang, with the energy converting to particles that spray in all directions.

The newfound particle, which is four times heavier than the regular proton, should help physicists refine their understanding of the strong nuclear force that glues together the innards of all atomic nuclei. The force is unusual because it behaves like a rubber band, getting stronger as the distance between subatomic particles increases.

Charges follow discovery of body of Masood Masjoody, who was a critic of the Tehran regime and the exiled shah

Two people have been charged with the murder of an Iranian activist in Canada, in a case which has intensified fears over transnational repression of critics of the regime in Tehran.

Masood Masjoody, a former university maths teacher, went missing in early February in the city of Burnaby, British Columbia. He had been critical of Iran’s theocratic regime and the exiled family of the former shah.

More than 100 others injured in bombings targeting post office, market areas and hospital in Maiduguri

At least 23 people have been killed and more than 100 others injured in multiple suspected suicide bombings in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, shattering its reputation as a relative oasis of calm in recent years as a long-running insurgency was pushed to the rural hinterlands.

Authorities said the explosions went off at the post office and market areas, as well as the entrance to the University of Maiduguri teaching hospital, on Monday evening during iftar, the breaking of fast in the month of Ramadan.

Weekly news magazine’s parent company makes third significant ownership shake-up in its 183-year history

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The Canadian billionaire Stephen Smith has bought a stake in the parent company of the Economist, held by Lynn Forester de Rothschild, in only the third significant ownership structure shake-up in its 183-year history.

Smith and his family holding company, Smith Financial Corp, which owns financial businesses, including a co-ownership of the influential proxy advisory group Glass Lewis, has acquired a 26.9% stake in the Economist Group (TEG) for an undisclosed sum.

Carmaker reduces office-based roles and will not fill vacancies ‘to ensure long-term competitiveness of business’

Bentley is to cut 275 jobs in the UK as the carmaker faces a “challenging global market environment”.

The luxury brand, owned by Germany’s Volkswagen, is preparing to launch its first all-electric model but acknowledged it had some work to do to persuade consumers to switch away from internal combustion engine vehicles.

One of the best-paid executives in Hollywood has already made $113m after selling shares in WBD this month

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David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros Discovery, is in line for a $700m (£525m) payday from the $110bn sale of the Hollywood studio to Paramount Skydance.

Zaslav could receive $34.2m in cash severance payments, $115.8m in vested stock and $517.2m in unvested share awards once the deal is complete, according to a filing from Warner Bros Discovery on Monday.

Board members Jørgen Vig Knudstorp and Beth Ford face scrutiny for the coffee chain’s ongoing labor dispute

Starbucks shareholders are pushing to remove two board members at the company who they argue have contributed to stalling the coffee chain’s long-fought-over union drive.

The SOC Investment Group, Trillium Asset Management, Merseyside Pension Fund, the non-profit Shareholder Association for Research and Education (Share), and the New York state and New York City comptrollers wrote a letter to Starbucks shareholders to vote “no” on the re-election of board members Jørgen Vig Knudstorp and Beth Ford at Starbucks’s annual shareholders meeting on 25 March.

Born in Russia and raised in Israel, Ocher rejected the IDF draft for a life in Germany. As she releases an album inspired by the Weimar period, she discusses nationalism, AI and the future of humanity

‘When I moved to Berlin 19 years ago, it felt like some kind of revival of the Weimar period,” says Mary Ocher, referring to the cultural glory days of pre-Nazi Germany. But then she saw “the tail end of this beautiful period. Now in Germany, they try to deport EU citizens who participated in pro-Palestine protests. From where I am, it’s pretty scary.” To Ocher, it was the right time to call her new album Weimar, to draw parallels between the rise of fascism in the 1930s and our own era, tied to her experiences as an immigrant artist in Berlin.

Ocher has never seen making political work as a choice. Born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents, she is an Israeli citizen who grew up in Tel Aviv, where she was exposed to intense nationalism that appalled her. “I hated everything around me,” the 39-year-old says of her teenage years in Israel. “There was no accountability, no possibility to change anything. I could see that people who migrated to Israel wanted to integrate and to become part of that society, which means not criticising it, and actively joining the mainstream that is preaching hate.”

From a pocket of Zen in the Dream House installation, the rapper/producer talks about channelling the city’s perpetual din, whether solo or with Billy Woods as Armand Hammer

Seated opposite me in the Dream House, New York rapper and producer Elucid leans against the wall, crosses his ankles and shuts his eyes. Perfumed by incense, the long-running installation in a Manhattan loft, from composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela, is an otherworldly experience: a fridge-sized speaker cabinet occupies each corner, and pink and purple stage lights illuminate curly mobiles hanging from the ceiling. Violet-tinted film covers the three west-facing windows, making it hard to tell what time it is, or if time is passing at all. Each speaker plays distinct parts of a long drone composition; the emphasis shifts as you tilt your head or move through the space. Eventually, Elucid gets up and slowly walks around, finding a spot to lie down and let it all wash over him.

An hour later, as we sip cocktails in a nearby bar, he tells me that he drifted off a bit. This was his first visit to the Dream House in at least a decade, but his years of frequenting floatation tanks – at least once a season, always after coming home from tour – had him primed for the installation’s meditative properties. “It takes a minute to get into another space, but I definitely got there,” he says. As he settled into the cascading tone, his eyes closed, words like “engine room” and “turbine” came to mind, unconsciously mirroring his songwriting process. “Rappers always be like, ‘The beat tells me what to do,’” he says, and he is no different. “Sound has colour, emotion and force, and everyone who hears the same sound interprets it differently. I’ve developed a sound vocabulary, and oftentimes words pop in. Sometimes it’s a whole sentence.”

Cancelled after two seasons, this 2003 curio following a travelling troupe in the American dust bowl recalls everything from Stephen King to Twin Peaks

Carnivàle premiered on HBO in 2003 and was cancelled after only two seasons. In the immediate aftermath, this decision was protested by the small but dedicated cult following the show had amassed (to the tune of 50,000 emails).

But in the years since, as the television canon has expanded and the taste for mystery-box TV has waned, Carnivàle now seems little more than a minor curio in HBO’s ever-expanding back catalogue. So what is this curio about?

Undemanding retelling of Jesus’s choice miracles, breaking bread at dinner and the subsequent crucifixion and resurrection ticks basic boxes but offers no depth

Another contribution from the fast-growing faith-based film-making industry, this dramatisation of Jesus’s final meal and the events leading up to it is as basic as it gets. That said, it’s perfectly serviceable for what it was no doubt intended to be: something religious families can slap on TV for the teens while the grownups get the holiday banquet ready. As dehydrated theology goes, it contains all the basic New Testament theological nutrients – including the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Jesus’s dispute with Jerusalem’s rabbinate, his invention of the Eucharistic sacrament at the titular supper, the betrayals by Judas and Peter – and then bing-bang-bong, the crucifixion and resurrection are briskly run through by the time the bread rolls are out of the oven.

Naturally, there’s no question here that our man Jesus (played by Jamie Ward) is anything other than the son of God and therefore the Messiah. But viewers living in more secular families or even ones with other faiths might find this not only a useful primer on Christianity but also a respectful reminder of how Jesus was first and foremost a Jew, and that the Last Supper was a celebration of Passover with its own rituals and sacred meanings.

In Ric Rawlins’ West Country vampire film, a student journalist investigates mysteries below the surface of River Avon

What lurks beneath the surface can be dangerous, as any wild swimmer will tell you. There really is something in the water to worry about. But Wild Swimmers is not a documentary campaigning for clean water; the menace here is not E coli but a centuries-old river-dwelling vampire. It’s written and directed by music journalist turned film-maker Ric Rawlins and, like his 2023 debut Rewilding, it is another shoestring outsider horror set in the West Country, amateurishly acted by non-professionals and rickety in way you will either find charming or a chore.

Valerie Kwok is Deji, a journalism student from Hong Kong who is looking into a spate of mysterious deaths in the River Avon. She tracks down a retired police officer who investigated the death of a teenage girl in 2018 that was officially recorded as a drowning. But something felt off, the copper tells Deji: a witness described the girl seemingly pulled under the water, and the postmortem identified snake bites on her neck. The plot only gets sillier as the body count rises, and Deji is joined in her search for the truth by photographer Kim (Caroline Murray).

A Norwegian film-maker takes us through grief in Storyville. Plus: launching a rocket in French Guiana. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Four
A joyous yet tragic introduction to a film by its Norwegian maker and narrator, Gunnar Hall Jensen, as he explains that the little boy in the home video clips we are watching – his son, Jonathan – is now dead. Jensen went on to capture their relationship on camera for more than 20 years, which he candidly reflects on here, until Jonathan started to become withdrawn and distanced from his father before being killed at 21. Hollie Richardson

The stars of the smash hit Birmingham-set series tell all to Edith Bowman. Plus, the shocking 1969 Israeli plan to secretly transfer 60,000 Palestinians to Paraguay

Ahead of the release of the Peaky Blinders film, Edith Bowman and Packy Lee (who played Johnny Dogs) present an in-depth look at the series. Astonishingly, given it’s made by – and viewable on – Netflix, it works well in both audio and video form. From erudite chats with creator Steven Knight about 19th-century masculinity to Cillian Murphy going deep on the research he did to play Tommy Shelby, it’s a nice companion piece for fans. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
Joan Tower’s concerto for alto saxophone was brilliantly delivered by Steven Banks, part of a lively concert

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales is marking the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence in a series of concerts, and the UK premiere of Love Returns, by the 87-year-old American composer Joan Tower, was at the centre of this programme with Finnish conductor Tomas Djupsjöbacka.

Tower is best known for her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman and, in this work, a concerto for alto saxophone, she has realised an uncommonly appealing piece. Its title relates to Tower’s use of a melody from her piano piece, Love Letter, written in memory of her late husband, as the basis for a theme and variations structure, as different from conventional concerto form as can be, evolving and gradually accelerating in tempo over its whole span of six sections. The only departure from this is in the fifth of the six: a solo saxophone cadenza, brilliantly delivered by soloist Steven Banks. His sometimes edgy, sometimes honeyed tone was wonderfully expressive throughout, whirling virtuoso passagework countered by aching lyricism, with Djupsjöbacka ensuring that Tower’s orchestral textures offered the optimal balance to the solo lines.

The singer and actor, formerly of Savages, was shaken up by Le Tigre and gets emotional when hearing Fontaines DC, but which rapper can she no longer bear to listen to?

The first song I fell in love with
I had an incredible piano teacher, who would play me a lot of jazz records that I would learn and sing along to. Chet Baker was charismatic, good looking and stylish. Even though I had a really soft, small voice, I’d give My Funny Valentine my best shot.

The song I inexplicably know every lyric to
Dollar Days by David Bowie, because I had to perform it recently at the British Library for the 10-year anniversary of his final album, Blackstar.

Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
Receiving its UK premiere in a programme with Britten and Walton, Nico Muhly’s trumpet concerto is inspired by the instrument’s biblical – sometimes apocalyptic – associations

Audiences can be fickle. The Hallé’s latest programme featured one of the world’s most celebrated trumpeters, a UK premiere from one of the world’s most high-profile living composers, and one of this country’s most successful young conductors – yet the Bridgewater Hall yawned with empty seats. Whatever the reasons, those who decided against booking missed an exhilarating evening.

It started politely enough, with the rollicking baroquery of Britten’s Courtly Dances from Gloriana. A set of Tudorbethan pastiches, these dances encourage orchestral good behaviour. But conductor Alpesh Chauhan also allowed glimpses of a harsher, modernist world outside in the viciously chirrupping winds and off-kilter repetitions of the central Morris Dance and the gleeful snaps and rattles of the closing Lavolta.

A witty metaphysical satire about what happens when the processes that help souls pass on begin to fail

Jenni Fagan’s satirical fifth novel, The Delusions, opens with an epigraph from the Kurt Vonnegut-inspired science fiction curiosity Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer. “The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” The afterthought leaks back into the original statement, underpinning and undermining everything.

Infinity and eternity are both unavoidably present in The Delusions, which takes place in a vast anteroom to the afterlife, “the largest soul terminus in existence”. It’s the metaphysical equivalent of a big-box store, where they help you sort your false perceptions of yourself from what you actually were, before you’re Processed and sent on to whatever comes next (or, should you fail the Questionnaire, Dissolved on the spot). Though to be honest, no one in Processing is certain what that next thing is.

The former archbishop delves deep into a word that is easy to use on social media, but hard to follow through on

You don’t need to scroll far down a social media feed to find someone expressing “solidarity” for the victims of cruelty or injustice. A show of solidarity feels more emphatic than expressing support or sympathy. As Rowan Williams argues, it can act as “a moral intensifier”, positioning us squarely alongside the victim. It can also be a declaration of innocence, a way of distancing ourselves definitively from the perpetrators and their guilt.

Williams wants to move us beyond this idea of solidarity as unequivocal identification. He has some sharp things to say about “empathy” as a modern solve-all, when it too often serves the needs of “a clamorous self” that “cannot bear the idea of a real stranger”. True solidarity, he argues, is less a virtue to be cultivated than a human condition to be acknowledged. It requires us to accept two stubborn truths: first, that we can never identify completely with someone else, because we are inescapably separate from them in mind and body; and second, that we are innately social beings, linked to each other by invisible threads of obligation and reciprocity.

As Emerald Fennell’s film sparks debate, we celebrate the pioneering brilliance of the siblings’ work

This was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. It was rejected by publishers nine times. Written in the voice of a male narrator, William Crimsworth, it offers a downbeat story of everyday middle-class striving as the protagonist travels to Brussels to establish his career as a teacher. But the last publisher to see it thought it showed promise, despite being too short and insufficiently “striking and exciting”. Had the author anything else to offer? Luckily, Jane Eyre – which amply supplied the earlier book’s deficiencies – was already in train and was soon accepted with alacrity. Although The Professor remained unpublished in Charlotte’s lifetime, she continued to believe that it was “as good as I can write”; its subtly ironised male voice reveals her underlying literary sophistication.

The actor led the starry book deals, while publishers assessed whether US-style bans are spreading to the UK

The annual London book fair wrapped on Thursday, marking the end of three days that saw 33,000 people connected to the book industry – agents, publishers, authors, among others – gather at Olympia to make deals and discuss the state of the publishing world, and its future. Here’s our roundup of the biggest deals, trends and takeaways from the fair.

The starriest book deal of the week was a new thriller series co-authored by Idris Elba, featuring an MI6 field operative who gets deployed to Mauritius to investigate an attempted murder. Elsewhere, rights were scooped for Alex Ferguson’s first autobiography in 13 years, broadcaster Mishal Husain’s debut children’s book, and the story of designer Paul Smith’s life.

Team Artichoke; PC/Mac
Ancient Greek gods, adorable raccoons and hypnotic puzzling from Olympus to the mortal realm and back

There’s been a trend for a while where familiar puzzle game genres are imbued with novel stories to give them depth and meaning beyond simply clearing a screen for points. Occult object sorter Strange Horticulture and historical romance card game Regency Solitaire are lovely examples, and now here’s Mythmatch, a match-three game in the style of Candy Crush or Bejeweled that’s also a warming tale of friendship and community set in a small town in ancient Greece. Interspersed with cerebral challenges are dialogue scenes with villagers and with gods which accentuate each other and give little clues that are picked up later, making this both puzzle game and communal oral drama.

You play as Artemis, the immortal daughter of Zeus, who is tired of getting overlooked for plum jobs in favour of her oafish brother Apollo (brilliantly portrayed as an insufferable proto-tech bro). When the role of God of the Hunt comes up, she applies, but finds she must first earn favour with a council of her elders on Mount Olympus, and they all have puzzle-based jobs for her. Hephaestus wants her to help make arrows and hammers in his foundry, while Apollo needs her to protect his collection of chimp soft toys (a not-so-subtle dig at NFTs). These mini-tasks take the form of match-three puzzles, though cleverly they also bring in elements of other puzzle games such as Plants vs Zombies and Overcooked.

Scientists in the US have uploaded a fruit fly to a computer simulation, while an Australian lab has taught neurons on a glass chip to play a 90s video game. How long before we are all living in a sci-fi movie?

It sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation. In San Francisco, biotechnology company Eon Systems created a virtual insect that knew how to walk, fly, groom and feed in its virtual environment. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, have taught a petri dish containing 200,000 human brain cells to play the iconic 90s shooter Doom. One experiment has pushed a brain into a computer; the other has plugged a computer into brain cells.

Both stories have been hailed as scientific breakthroughs, but have also sparked inevitable fears about the prospects of lab-grown humans and digital clones. Should we be concerned?

From war zones and socially virtuous farming to ever-changing boards and role-playing with 167 dice, here’s our pick of the most absorbing table-based entertainment

Video games have long been heavily inspired by physical games, from chess and Scrabble to Dungeons & Dragons. The deck-building collectible card game, for example, has become immensely popular in digital form, thanks to hits such as Slay the Spire, Marvel Snap and Balatro. Now, an increasing number of games are going in the opposite direction, trading pixels for pieces and screens for spinners. Here are six of our favourites.

Company of Heroes 2nd Edition (Bad Crow Games, £119.70)

Josh Wardle hopes his digital take on the cryptic crossword can be a gradual on-ramp crossing the cultural divide between Britain and the US

In 2021, Josh Wardle became a household name almost overnight. His digital game, Wordle, turned a simple guessing game into a global morning ritual: six guesses, one word, and a grid of coloured squares shared across social media feeds.

It became a cultural phenomenon; bought within months by the New York Times for a seven-figure sum.

Hampstead theatre, London
US businessman-turned-playwright Aaron Loeb combines medical tech concepts with knotty dilemmas and Mamet-esque dialogue

An earnest research scientist turns up at a sleek venture capitalist firm to pitch her idea with a set of old-school index cards. Willa (Letty Thomas) is initially dismissed by young gun May (Millicent Wong) until she realises Willa has found a way to predict cancer in the human body. It’s a sort of medicalised version of the “precrime” technology of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report – except this is not a futuristic landscape but modern-day San Francisco.

May, the ambitious protege of company boss Paul (Lloyd Owen), sees that she has a rare, high-value startup (known as a “unicorn”) in her hands. But the marriage between Willa’s cutting-edge medical technology and Paul’s profit-driven business brings big dilemmas.

At Hampstead theatre, London until 11 April.

The spectacular stage version of Studio Ghibli’s much-loved film has spent a year at the Gillian Lynne theatre in London. To celebrate, photographer Tristram Kenton was granted backstage access

Palais Garnier, Paris
Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple’s Arena spills off the stage while Morau’s equally audacious Étude has balletic body snatchers

What a joy to find Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple given full run of the grandiose Palais Garnier. The sparky duo from London, known as Jess and Morgs, bring their audacious blend of choreography and live camerawork to a gripping new creation, Arena, with video design by Jakub Lech. It peaks with a bravura sequence in which Loup Marcault-Derouard leaves the stage and is seen on a huge screen, racing around the opera house’s imposing halls and staircase. Arena gives the sense of choreographers in a candy store, seizing the real estate newly available to them after their hit, tech-centric reboot of Coppélia for Scottish Ballet in 2022.

The piece opens with understated, percussive coolness and shades of A Chorus Line – an athletic squad limber up with individual and collective confidence. “Next please!” barks the voiceover and a camera operator glides down the queue, capturing beady eyes, beating chests, glistening sweat. In the age of Instagram, dancers are ever-ready for their closeups and here the port de bras frequently results in tightly framed faces – but Arena exposes the perils of chronically online culture and the urge to compete, compare and conform. There is a gladiatorial element to Annemarie Woods’ costumes yet this is a dystopian contest that also feels rooted in the present day.

Whitworth, Manchester
Hokusai’s breathtaking woodblock print may be ubiquitous today but, as this startling show reminds us, it’s also an apocalyptic vision of a world about to change

The printed images made in Japan between the 17th and 20th centuries, known collectively as “pictures of the floating world”, could be bought from a local bookshop for about the price of a bowl of noodles. Collected casually, like posters or magazines, these mass-produced media started out as sexy, charming and dazzling snapshots of Tokyo high-life for the vicarious enjoyment of those who could not afford it. Manufactured by workshops of artists and artisans, they made professional works of art available to ordinary people for the first time. They’re breathtakingly beautiful, and they changed the history of art.

The first and most enduringly popular subjects for these collectible prints were famous actors from the kabuki theatreand beautiful women, typically courtesans from the brothel district of Yoshiwara. By introducing us to the denizens of the floating world, the first half of this dazzling exhibition sheds light on the dreams and desires that drive popular culture. Kunichika’s portrait of an actor in the role of a “heavenly being” is as heart-throbbing and as gender-bending as Rudolph Valentino in a bolero vest. A “fashionable beauty” caught by Eizan in the process of applying her lipstick, a delicately turned ankle visible through the gap in her marvellously rendered gown, is erotic in a way that is unavoidably (and by design) voyeuristic. You could imagine stumbling upon this half-dressed model, glimpsed through an open door, in the pages of Vogue Italia.

In an industry obsessed with ‘perfect’ feet, fallen arches can be seen as a barrier to success. But that’s a damaging myth that has excluded many from the joy of ballet

Picking up my ballet shoes again after six years has been bittersweet. I have felt joy in returning to a childhood hobby yet discomfort, too, knowing that I originally stopped ballet because of my incredibly flat feet. There is no doubt that ballet challenges your feet immensely – the tips of your toes support the entire weight of your body when dancing with pointe shoes. Struggling to go on pointe left me feeling that my body was not built for ballet, which is far from true, as flat-footed ballet professionals are out there and thriving.

However, the industry still has an obsession with “perfect” feet. High arches have traditionally been praised in ballet, and some dancers today use farches (fake arches), which give the illusion that your foot is more bendy than it is.

Ditched washing machines, a woman’s bare leg, the back of Willem Dafoe’s head … the Oscar-nominated director talks us through his new photography show in Athens – made with his darkroom assistant Emma Stone

In the centre of Athens, a brand new temple has popped up. Walk around the tall white columns surrounding it and you’ll eventually find the entrance to its inner sanctum. It might not be quite as old as the nearby Parthenon but it does hold a unique kind of treasure: the personal photographs of director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Taken over the last few years as he wandered his home country, they offer a glimpse of Greece through the auteur’s absurdist eye. We see a coffin resting against a wall next to a mop, and a couple of horses with their heads chopped off by foregrounded trees. A roadside memorial is shown underneath a sign warning of danger ahead – the wiggly road symbol points directly upwards, as if suggesting the route to the next life for the poor victim. This last image is poignant, strange and funny, eliciting the same awkward clash of emotions you get from watching Lanthimos’s films.

In Albany, Western Australia, Finnish artist Kari Kola has thrown beams across the night sky with a spectacle that may even be visible from space

The coastal scrub above Whalers Cove crackles underfoot as Menang man Larry Blight kneels and pushes his hands into the sandy soil. After a moment he lifts a tangled bulb from the earth.

“This is bloodroot. Our people were named after it,” he says proudly.

Sheldonian, Oxford
The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, the Oxford Bach Choir and a fine quartet of soloists made the case for Elgar’s oratorio

It was supposed to be a great choral triptych: the foundation of the Christian church in three musical epics, starting with 1903’s The Apostles and ending with the never-to-be-written The Last Judgement. But Elgar’s inspiration and his Catholic faith both deserted the composer before the sequence could be completed, leaving the story in mid-air with the central panel The Kingdom (1906).

Perhaps that’s why the oratorio has always been treated as the runt of litter – less operatic than everyone’s favourite, The Dream of Gerontius, and less dramatic than The Apostles, which hoovers up both crucifixion and resurrection, leaving The Kingdom with the aftermath. Grassroots Christian evangelism is not obviously the stuff of headlines. Or arias.

They are essentially nachos that don’t require cooking, but is this trend worth your time? There was only one way to find out ...

Ready salted, prawn cocktail, pickled onion and smoky bacon – crisps are undoubtedly the nation’s favourite snack food, subject to a variety of staple and sometimes suspicious flavour varieties. According to one recent report, they were the UK’s snack of choice on 94% of “all consumption occasions”, often enjoyed with a complementary dip, or served in a packet ripped open on a pub table. But now, the humble bag of crisps is having a revamp.

Enter: the loaded crisp bag. It’s a lot like loaded fries or nachos, in that it can be a vehicle for a whole gamut of flavours – as served, for example, at Pablos, a fast food outlet in Nottingham where anything from ground beef to molten cheese is dolloped into an opened bag of crisps.

As a mental health chaplain in New York, I help people leave homelessness. But mental illness, bureaucracy and a fragile system often pull them back

Whether you want buildable or barely there, our beauty writer put 19 formulas through their paces – plus, makeup artists on how to apply it

• The best concealers for camouflaging blemishes and dark circles

As a makeup-loving teenager, I spent countless hours of my precious youth practising how to apply makeup, and spent more money than I dare to count buying products.

My cosmetics drawers quickly filled with fun mascaras, bronzers and eyeshadow palettes, but my choice of foundation was ruining the look of anything I applied on top. Whether it was oxidising and turning my skin orange, or mismatched formulation types causing the whole look to separate on the skin, getting a lasting natural finish seemed impossible. Had I spent a little more time picking out the best foundation for my skin type, I wouldn’t be haunted by so many embarrassing photos from my adolescence.

Best foundation overall:
Charlotte Tilbury Airbrush Flawless Foundation

Best budget foundation:
L’Oréal True Match foundation

Our writer picks her favourite, tried-and-tested products for better sleep – from a bargain eye mask to a sustainable duvet

• The best mattresses – tested
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Just as spring emerges from its long, soggy lie-in, we’re going back to bed.

It may not seem the most obvious time of year for World Sleep Day (which was 13 March), but light evenings, early sunrises and the last cries of the fox mating season mean some of us need all the sleep help we can get.

Which supermarket Spanish omelette seems as if it’s served plump from the pan, and which is a soggy flop?

• The best supermarket free-range eggs

My second ever chef job was at Glastonbury in 1997, which is now famous as the “Year of the Mud”. We sliced hundreds of kilos of potatoes, peeled onions until we cried, and cracked and whisked untold dozens of eggs. Back then, you couldn’t buy tortilla in a shop, only from a tapas restaurant, but these days there’s an incredible selection in many supermarkets. I normally eat shop-bought tortilla straight from the packet, but during this taste test, I discovered just how nice it is when reheated in a pan. I tried all these tortillas hot and cold, and even the lower-scoring ones were quite enjoyable when eaten warm.

I judged them on taste and texture, which varied from a dense, firmly set egg to the soft and squidgy centre I love. All were relatively minimally processed, but all lacked transparency regarding the origin of their ingredients – though, thankfully, many were made with free-range eggs, which scored them an extra star. Some were made in the UK and others in Spain, but that didn’t always equate to a better product. While supermarket tortilla can’t quite replicate the fresh-from-the-pan experience, the best come surprisingly close.

The sport is booming, but which racket will boost your game? Our expert enlisted the help of a padel coach to round up the aces

• The best fitness tech and gadgets

There are ludicrously fast-growing sports – and then there’s padel. According to the Lawn Tennis Association, only 15,000 British players picked up a padel racket in 2019 … but by the end of 2024, that figure was more than 400,000. Of those, about 399,000 are probably mispronouncing it: think pah-dell rather than paddle. But get used to strange looks if you insist on saying it like that.

People love padel because it’s so easy to play. If you can hit a ball with a racket, you can play – and there’s something joyous about whacking any ball over any net. You don’t need to be incredibly fit either: while better players will be constantly on the move, casual players can get away with something akin to walking pace.

Best padel racket overall:
Babolat Counter Origin

It’s not simply a case of dividing the ingredients list by the number of servings, our experts agree, but it is more often than not about common sense

Any tips for downsizing recipes to serve one? Dividing by the number of servings doesn’t always work.
Melanie, by email
“It’s often just common sense,” says Kitty Coles, author of Make More With Less, plus a little maths – though, as Melanie so wisely points out, you can’t always simply divide the ingredients and be done with it.

First, you need to consider your cookware: “It’s really worth investing in smaller pans and a smaller skillet,” says Alexina Anatole, who is behind the Small Wins Substack. A tiny amount of liquid in a large pan, say, will get too much exposure to heat, so it’s very likely you’ll under- or overcook its contents. As Shelina Permalloo, author of What to Cook When Everyone’s Hungry, says, “The absorption method for rice is a nightmare if you’re using a wrong-sized pan.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

A comforting, rustic roast chicken and saffron casserole with a knockout hazelnut mojo verde

Chicken and beans are two of the foods I grew up with, and were often cooked in one pot and designed to be shared. It’s the kind of cooking we do at my restaurant Lolo: generous, relaxed and made to be eaten together. March sits between the seasons, when we still need comfort, but also start to look for freshness, too, and this stew feels just right for the moment. As the days get longer and spring starts to show itself, it is warming without being heavy, while the mojo verde lifts everything and gives the dish energy.

This classic dish needs no deviation from its time-honoured traditions – but mastering it does require some skill

The first time I dared to write a recipe for Irish stew, I was invited on to the national broadcaster, RTÉ, to discuss my choices live on air. And, to my considerable relief, it was eventually decided that I had not dishonoured the memory of my ancestors. It’s tempting for modern cooks to meddle with such resolutely plain classics. Do not! It’s delicious just as it is.

Prep 20 min
Cook 2 hr
Serves 6

The trouble with open kitchens is that the chaos is fully visible to everyone

DakaDaka, a rowdy paean to Georgian cuisine, has arrived on Heddon Street in the West End of London. Heddon Street has always been synonymous with rowdiness, regardless of the fact that the mature, semi-elegant likes of Sabor, Piccolino and Heddon Street Kitchen are quite the opposite. But anyone who ever found themselves staggering out of Strawberry Moons in the 1990s having lost a shoe and with a love bite or from the basement club at Momo will know that this little nook tucked away behind Regent Street is where a good time is meant to be had.

And now there’s DakaDaka, which certainly does not market itself as a nightclub, because, well, virtually nowhere does any more. What DakaDaka does do, though, is play Georgian dance music very loudly and with endless enthusiasm right through your badrijani (grilled aubergines), imeruli (cheese-filled flatbread) and kababi (lamb skewers). Helpfully, the brick walls have been painted pitch-black to give these dark, candle-lit, metal-clad premises a real sense that you’ve somehow stumbled into a 2am lock-in on a back street in Tbilisi, complete with pottery, folklore and blackboards on the walls, though this place also happens to serve grape salads and nakhvatsa (corn crisps). Some potential customers will no doubt read that and think: “Yippee! I love a restaurant where talking to my friends is no longer part of the arduous invisible labour of leaving the house.” Well, those people will adore DakaDaka, and should take up one of the tables in the heart of the melee. Otherwise, there’s also a sit-up counter behind which the open kitchen is in full swing, and where you can sit shoulder to shoulder with a total stranger. If you do, however, please dress in removable layers, because you will be directly next to the open fire used for “live fire cooking”, that hospitality phrase du jour that has caused me so much merriment in recent years because it proves that if you put enough male chefs in one room for long enough, they will literally believe they invented fire.

In a world teeming with social media and smart devices, there are many ways to upset people, whether you’re checking your watch notifications or sending a voice note without a text to explain the subject. Here’s how to navigate it all

In an age of smartphones, social media and instant communication, it has never been easier to connect … or to offend everyone around us. Many of today’s most common etiquette breaches stem not from malice but from convenience: a badly written message, a thoughtless post, a device that demands our attention. Yet good manners still hinge on the same old principle: consideration for others. From eschewing headphones on public transport to ghosting invitations and sharing thoughtlessly online, here are some of the most common modern etiquette mistakes, why they grate, and how they can be avoided.

Two Oxfordshire inhabitants disagreed over the role of the royals, but would they see eye to eye over benefits and immigration?

Matilda, 19, Oxfordshire

Occupation Starts a history degree in September

When they lived in different countries, sex was spontaneous for Rupert and Eva, but now they cohabit they experiment more

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

We’ve been trying the ‘sex first’ rule when you go out on a date, because you don’t really feel like sex after dinner and a glass of wine

Even if he was on a night shift, I’d sneak into his workplace and we’d have sex there

It’s OK to be angry at your husband – the shame isn’t yours to carry

I have been married for 30 years. Until recently, we were the best of friends. Then he began being distant, though he remained kind. I thought this was a passing phase, a midlife crisis of some sort. But one day I found out by chance that he had been engaged in a year-long affair with another woman. Life as I knew it collapsed.

It was not so much that my world was turned upside down, as it lost its cohesion. I was instantly reduced to pieces. No matter how much I try to make sense of it all, I cannot. I am (was?) a super-active person with many interests, and this betrayal has splintered me and narrowed everything down to this single event.

I was suddenly presented with a nearly £2,000 bill backdated to 2020 when it had mistakenly stopped collecting my direct debits

Thames Water has blindsided me with a bill for nearly £2,000, backdated to 2020. It turns out that it mistakenly stopped collecting my direct debits back then and has not sent any bills since.

It admitted its error and promised to write off charges older than 12 months, but now it is trying to recover almost the full amount.

Criminals exploiting Middle East crisis by targeting customers seeking help or refunds from affected carriers

Your flight has been delayed as a result of the Middle East crisis and you want to find out what’s happening, so you go online for an answer. You find a social media account run by the airline you are booked with and post a question, and get a reply offering help.

You’re asked to send a direct message with details, which seems reasonable. A conversation starts and you are told to give your phone number as you may be due compensation. This is where it all starts going wrong: instead of being given money, you have it taken. Although it looked official, the account that replied was a scam.

We were stranded as flights were cancelled, but the travel company didn’t seem aware of our rights

We are holidaymakers stranded in Mauritius by the conflict in the Gulf. Our return flight, booked as part of a Virgin Holidays package, was routed via Dubai and was cancelled.

We were advised by Virgin’s local representative that we should arrange and pay for accommodation ourselves until flights resumed, and reclaim it on our travel insurance. Only after we challenged this position did Virgin agree to cover hotel costs.

Woodall services near Sheffield is now one of the UK’s most expensive pit stops, with petrol at 172.9p a litre

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Opened in 1968, Woodall services on the M1 near Sheffield is Yorkshire’s oldest roadside service station. This weekend, it was also one of the country’s most expensive pit stops, with diesel priced at 185.9p a litre and petrol at 172.9p.

“Do you really want to know what I think? You probably couldn’t print it,” said biker Alan Harrison, who had stopped for a coffee break in the sunshine while heading from Leeds to Bournemouth.

A growing body of evidence suggests the vaccine may also lower risk of stroke and heart attack

One in three people in the US get shingles. Despite this, US vaccination rates remain low – about 35% of adults over 60, consistent with overall vaccination trends.

“We have a vaccine that works really well,” says Dr Andrew Wallach, ambulatory care chief medical officer at NYC Health + Hospitals. “But there is a lot of what I call vaccine fatigue right now.”

While it’s not effective as an antibiotic, some evidence suggests honey can help with wound healing – but good quality research is lacking

• Read more in the Antiviral series

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Humans have been consuming honey for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks used it as a sweetener, but also a treatment for burns. Hippocrates, often referred to as the “father of medicine”, championed the sticky stuff – mistakenly – for purposes as varied as contraception and baldness.

Today, honey is often described as a superfood with a laundry list of promised benefits: a treatment for coughs, an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, a potential solution to combat drug-resistant superbugs. Antiviral has previously debunked claims about hay fever and honey, finding there is little evidence that raw honey can reduce symptoms of allergic rhinitis.

Donna Lu is an assistant editor, climate, environment and science at Guardian Australia

Antiviral is a fortnightly column that interrogates the evidence behind the health headlines and factchecks popular wellness claims

Grey-market injectable peptides – a category of substances with obscure, alphanumeric names such as BPC-157, GHK-Cu, or TB-500 – have developed a devoted following among biohackers and health optimisers. To understand how these unregulated substances have become mainstream and what they could be doing in our bodies, Madeleine Finlay hears from journalist Adrienne Matei and from Dr Anna Barnard, an associate professor at Imperial College London who researches peptides

‘People are turning themselves into lab rats’: the injectable peptides craze sweeping the US

My therapist told me that anxiety is a bully and, like all bullies, it needs to be put in its place. To my relief, she knew exactly how to do it

The second half of 2011 was not a good time for me. Work was very stressful, and what had been gearing up to be the Great Summer Romance had slowly and painfully fizzled out. My mother was unwell, and I was going through a phase of really missing my father, who had died a few years before. It was the perfect, uninvited storm.

Before, when I’d gone through bad patches, I’d been able to dig myself out fairly quickly. Not this time. Suddenly, I was living in a state of high anxiety. I was still getting on with my life – going to work, going out – but anxiety was running the show. Having to make even the smallest decision would send me into a panic.

The first proper show since Valentino’s death is about the late designer, about beauty – and about Michele’s mother

Valentino Garavani wanted to make beautiful clothes for the women who could afford them. The perpetually tanned designer, whose vision of jet set glamour was matched only by his own yacht-and-pug lifestyle, died in January. So there was an obvious logic in taking the first proper catwalk show since his death off the fashion week schedule and back to Rome, where he lived, worked, and died. Milan and Paris may be the capitals of European style, but Rome looks better.

Garavani left his own brand almost 20 years ago. But his singular approach to beauty has not been without its obstacles for his most recent successor, Alessandro Michele, who took over the fashion house in 2024. “It’s a complicated DNA because beauty is always changing,” he said after the show, which took place in the 17th-century Palazzo Barberini. “This collection is about Valentino. It’s about beauty. But it’s [also] about the tension between me and the brand, a beauty I’m trying to translate.”

Online fashion commentator Lyas’s catwalk watch parties have gone from hastily assembled get-togethers to large-scale spectacles. But how easy is it to walk the line between outsider and insider?

It was the latest Paris fashion week, moments before the Tom Ford show was due to start, when fashion commentator Lyas slipped through the backstage entrance of the Théâtre du Châtelet and went upstairs to get mic’d up.

Having failed to get a ticket to the actual show, 27-year-old Lyas – whose real name is Elias Medini and who has almost 500,000 followers on Instagram – was preparing to livestream it on a big screen to 2,000 of his fellow rejects currently sitting in the auditorium. The night before he had shown Saint Laurent. In a few days he would do the same for Chanel. His aim, he says, is to democratise a famously closed-off industry, and open up the spectacle of fashion week to people who have no chance of ever going themselves.

Is the secret to a decent night’s kip a good sleep kit? Silky pyjamas, cosy socks and a dressing gown you won’t mind being seen in when putting the bins out will certainly help

Experts share tips on dressing as the most authentic version of yourself and avoiding the draw of the latest microtrends

How would you define your personal style? Is it cottagecore? Tomato girl? Whimsigoth? Quiet luxury? Maybe you don’t know what these terms mean (congratulations) and maybe you do (my condolences).

Like unwelcome nose hairs, new microtrends seem to sprout from the depths of social media every other week. In some ways, their pervasiveness has made style seem more accessible than ever. They reduce aesthetics to mathematical equations that you can solve by buying up a bunch of fast fashion. By the time these cheap, mass-produced items dissolve into microplastics – which they will, quickly – other aesthetic trends will have replaced them.

Feted for its warm winters and famous lemons, the seaside border town has attracted artists and writers from around the world

‘It’s not France, it’s not Italy, it’s Menton.” The seaside town on the French-Italian border has changed identities many times in its history. It was the only town in France completely annexed by the Italians during the second world war, but has also belonged to the Grimaldis of Monaco, was part of the kingdom of Sardinia, and only became French after a public vote in 1860. Today, ignoring the colours of Il Tricolore and Le Tricolore, almost everything is painted in various shades of yellow, a celebration of the town’s reliance on its beloved lemon.

Mauro Colagreco, the chef at the spectacular Mirazur restaurant, a few steps from the border, takes me up into the hills to visit one of his lemon and citrus fruit suppliers. “You can eat the peel of a Menton lemon; it has a thick, sweet rind. You can eat the whole thing; it’s totally organic and very juicy.” Menton’s microclimate, its warm winters, terraced hills and sandy soil make it perfect for growing citrus fruit. “What’s particular to the Menton lemon is that it has a smile, a small curvy fold at one end,” says Colagreco, who uses them in his restaurant alongside exploring the possibilities of Star Ruby grapefruits, yuzu confit and kumquats.

From the Venetian lagoon to the sparkling Med, these island getaways offer a welcome change of pace just a short hop from the mainland

Connected to the German mainland by a single rail causeway, Sylt is just over three hours from Hamburg by direct train. The largest of the North Frisian islands, it slices through the North Sea and the Wadden Sea, with salt marshes and mudflats to the east and 25 miles of white sands sweeping along the western coast, grassy dunes buffering the bracing winds.

Book an overnight stay in the cosy smuggler’s cottage on Looe Island and you get to enjoy this marine nature reserve after the day trippers have gone home

It is just after dawn and from a viewpoint on Looe Island, Cornwall, I watch two seals on the beach below. The pair entwine in the surf, her freckled, creamy belly against his, flippers wrapped around each other, eyes closed in blissful bonding. I feel like a peeping Tom, watching from behind a bush. It feels too intimate a moment to be spying upon, but the emerald-eyed cormorants guarding the beach seem unbothered.

I had arrived on Looe Island, also known as St George’s Island, off the south coast of Cornwall, the previous morning via the romantically named Night Riviera sleeper train from London, changing early in the morning in Liskeard, then 15 minutes across the waves in a small fishing boat. The island is managed by the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and can only be accessed on organised visits, and while most people come on day trips, I’m staying for a little longer. I have come loaded down with all the food and bedding I will need for my three-night visit, but also with the mental baggage of workaday life. Now, that weight lifts as I watch the male seal court his lady in the shallows.

In addition to near-20% of the beachside suburb’s population claiming Irish ancestry, it also boasts an astounding array of Irish entities, from themed bars to two fully fledged rugby teams

“I remember having my mind blown seeing boys walking down the beach in Irish football jerseys,” says Luke McCaul, a Dublin-born hairdresser and drag queen who moved to the beachside Sydney suburb of Coogee to work 15 years ago.

“Like, ‘what the fuck are they doing?’ Gaelic football jerseys – in Australia!”

Moss poles can end up looking tatty, but a sculptural stake is like a piece of art

The problem
Somewhere along the way, moss poles became mandatory for any climbing plant. In reality, most are plastic tubes wrapped in fibres that shed, go bald and drop bits all over the soil. The “living totem” promise is rarely fulfilled, especially if you aren’t misting it daily.

The hack
Swap the fake tree trunk for a proper plant stake. A simple metal or recycled plastic stake gives your climber something solid to lean on without pretending to be bark. The new sculptural stakes, such as the wavy pieces from Secateur Me Baby (pictured), transform a floppy vine into a line of living green wrapped around a piece of design.

The answers to today’s problems

Earlier today I posed four puzzles from the Hyde Park Math Zine, a maths fanzine from Austin, Texas. Here they are again with solutions.

1. Ring it

They roam the workplace, promoting themselves loudly and incessantly – while undermining everyone else

Name: Office hookworms.

Age: A recent term for a very old complaint.

Why would anyone kick a bird? Penny was delightful company from the moment I rescued her from some bullies in a pub

A few years ago I was sitting in a pub beer garden when a scruffy little pigeon landed on the bench. After a while, the pigeon edged a bit closer to me, and before I knew it she’d hopped on to my lap.

One of the waitresses came over and explained that this pigeon had wandered inside, but sadly some customers kicked her around to get rid of her. She looked quite young. I thought maybe she was a baby. For the next three hours, this pigeon didn’t leave my side. Then I drove home with her on my shoulder.

As big tech continues to dominate the film industry, Video StoreAge is a uniquely crafted company that works with film-makers to sell independent films on USB drives

The streaming-skeptical cinephile faces a dilemma in 2026, especially when it comes to watching movies at home. Increasingly, movies are available via rentals that funnel money to mega-corporations including Amazon or Apple; digital “purchases” from those same companies that can actually be revoked at any moment; or, most enticingly but still somewhat inconveniently, well-curated physical media special editions that treat films with the respect they deserve (sometimes even respect they don’t, depending on the title) while taking up a lot of shelf space and hitting your wallet hard. Plus, as vinyl aficionados know, bespoke physical media can also be severely limited in terms of where you can actually play it. Basically, almost everyone in the home-video space is trying to either be Amazon or the Criterion Collection.

Ash Cook, the former Sundance programmer who founded the new distributor Video StoreAge (pronounced like “storage”), is trying to figure out a third way. He described Video StoreAge’s products – indie movies sold on USB drives – as “like a DVD in the present tense. It’s a way to have a physical copy of a movie, but in this case you can play it on your computer. It has digital utility.” Like almost anything else these days, Video StoreAge is available as a subscription, with quarterly collections of five features and five shorts. The first drop includes Vera Drew’s buzzed-about The People’s Joker, a homemade superhero comedy that reappropriates many elements of the Batman mythos into a trans coming-out story. (Honestly, it’s more fun than those Joaquin Phoenix movies and might understand the Joker character better, too.) But they also sell single films, including Drew’s, or any combinations of available films as a sort of digital indie-movie mix tape on those format-flexible USB drives. (The quarter’s shorts package is included with every movie regardless, an automatic special feature.)

From Gaza to Iran, the pattern is the same: precision weapons, chosen blindness, and dead children. The cost of failing to regulate AI warfare is already too high

There is an Israeli military strategy called the “fog procedure”. First used during the second intifada, it’s an unofficial rule that requires soldiers guarding military posts in conditions of low visibility to shoot bursts of gunfire into the darkness, on the theory that an invisible threat might be lurking.

It’s violence licensed by blindness. Shoot into the darkness and call it deterrence. With the dawn of AI warfare, that same logic of chosen blindness has been refined, systematized, and handed off to a machine.

In 2023, what were thought to be Nazar Daletskyi’s remains were buried in his home village and his mother, Nataliia, visited the grave every week. Three years later, he spoke to her on the phone

Nazar Daletskyi was declared dead in May 2023. The DNA match left no room for doubt, officials told his mother, Nataliia. A Ukrainian soldier who volunteered for the front in the early weeks of the war, Nazar had become one more casualty of Russia’s invasion.

Nazar’s remains were laid to rest in the cemetery of his home village. In the months after the funeral, Nataliia visited the grave at least once a week, at first to cry and later to stand in quiet contemplation, remembering her only son.

Health officials, schools and a university in Kent are working to contain an outbreak. We want to hear from those living in the area

A meningitis outbreak in Kent has been linked to a strain that most young people are not routinely vaccinated against, with two people confirmed to have died and 11 more in hospital. Health officials have offered antibiotics to those at risk, as authorities work to contain the spread.

We want to hear from people living in Canterbury and the surrounding area whether the outbreak is being well managed by the authorities.

Perhaps you are limiting car journeys or reducing the amount of cooking you do. Tell us

The conflict in the Middle East has disrupted global shipping routes and caused a surge in global oil market prices.

The strait of Hormuz, one of the most important waterways in the world, through which about a fifth of international oil supplies usually travel, has been all but closed since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran.

We’d like to hear from people in the UK who have seen the cost of goods or services increase or experienced delays, cancellations or other disruptions

The conflict in the Middle East, disruption to global shipping routes and rising oil prices are beginning to have knock-on effects on supply chains and energy markets around the world.

Petrol prices have begun to rise, while turbulence in financial markets has pushed up mortgage rates. Higher transport and supply costs can also feed through into the price of goods and services.

Tell us about your favourite break in France, whether it was in the town or countryside – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

France is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations but there are still plenty of hidden corners where you can go to escape the crowds. We’d love to hear about your favourite under-the-radar places in France, whether it’s an underrated city break destination, a little-known museum, gallery or cultural attraction, a beautiful village, national park or stretch of coastline.

The best tip of the week, chosen by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet wins a £200 voucher to stay at a Coolstays property – the company has more than 3,000 worldwide. The best tips will appear in the Guardian Travel section and website.

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