Not content with haemorrhaging MPs to Reform, Kemi decides to drive others into the arms of the Lib Dems

A minute’s silence for Kemi Badenoch. Thoughts and prayers welcome. The Tory party leader just can’t help herself. Every time you think that, just maybe, she is beginning to get the hang of the job, she comes up with something so deranged, so batshit that you can only sit back and admire the self-destruction. Almost as if she can’t bear any idea of success. Bewilderingly, sabotaging herself seems to be her default coping mechanism. Someone who can only find satisfaction in annihilating her own party. Sometimes you even wonder if she has ever been a Tory.

Like so much of Kemi’s behaviour, this was all totally avoidable. There was no need for her to do or say anything. With Keir Starmer away in China, this was a week off for her from prime minister’s questions. A slot she would delegate to the even more useless Andrew Griffith. Clearly Badenoch does not welcome any competition so Griffith might get the deputy leader job for good.

A new book and podcast tell the story of a 1 in 12, a venue that used community and artistic passion as bulwarks against poverty and grim politics. Its founders and key acts recall gigs, plays and pranks on the NME

“Things were getting grim,” says Gary Cavanagh, reflecting on Bradford in the early 1980s. “There was a hell of a lot of unemployment, and people were thrown on the scrap heap.”

Cavanagh was working for Bradford’s claimants union in 1981, helping the city’s poor and unemployed get benefits, when a government report stated that one in 12 dole recipients were defrauding the state. So he and some friends reclaimed this statistic – which they thought was ludicrous – as an identity. “We became the 1 in 12 Club,” he says.

If you’re wearing tight clothes and flashing your ankles, you may want to make some bold changes

Is your wardrobe cringe? Does it make you look out-of-touch and cause younger and cooler people to look upon you with pity? Do you really want me to answer that? Never mind, I’m going to anyway, so buckle up. Brutal honesty is very January, so I will give it to you straight. But before we get down to dissecting your wardrobe, two quick questions for you. Do you put full stops in text messages? Were you baffled by Labubus? If the answer to those two questions is yes, then I’m afraid the signs are that your wardrobe is almost certainly cringe.

Being cringe is essentially being old-fashioned, but worse. Being old-fashioned is what happens when you grow older with grace and dignity. Cringe is when you lose your touch while convincing yourself you are still down with the kids.

It’s just not cool to be wasted any more. But for a country shaped by booze, it does pose questions about what comes next

It’s November 2024 and my puritanical American children are attending their first autumn fair at their new English primary school. There’s a laser show and hotdogs and a raffle. There’s also a bar for the parents, which makes my two pull up short. Newcomers to this country experience many cultural differences but perhaps none as striking as this: “Is that alcohol?” says my child, scowling up at me like a tiny member of the Taliban. “At a school thing?” I’m two Baileys hot chocolates in at this point and give her a smile 10% broader than necessary. Yes, my darlings; welcome to Britain.

Or at least, welcome, possibly, to the last vestiges of how Britain once was. For a while now we’ve known anecdotally that people in this country are drinking less than they were. My own generation X is deep into middle age and many of us – save for the odd life-saver at a school event and the biggest occasions – have given it up. Where the anomalies fall more glaringly is in the generations below us, among young people whose behaviour differs from our own at their age. This week, official confirmation came in the form of a survey of 10,000 people commissioned by the NHS that found almost a quarter (24%) of adults in England had not drunk alcohol in 2024, an increase from just under a fifth (19%) in 2022.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Reform UK has announced Matt Goodwin as its candidate for the hotly anticipated Gorton and Denton byelection. John Harris and Kiran Stacey discuss his chances. Plus, John speaks to Esther Ghey about why the government should back a social media ban for under-16s

When it comes to origin stories, comedians have some of the strangest – from performing for a £5 bet to getting back at their boss to making an unlikely pact with a friend

Not all standup comedians wake up one day and decide to be funny for a living. That wasn’t the case for John Bishop, anyway. He took up comedy to avoid paying a bar’s cover charge and to escape his failing marriage – a story that inspired Bradley Cooper’s new film, Is This Thing On? And Bishop is not the only comic with an unusual origin story. From impressing girlfriends to losing their voices, brain tumours to bad bosses – or not wanting to lose a £5 bet – British comics told us the reasons they became standup comedians and the lengths to which they went to get on stage for the first time.

Exclusive: MPs backing bill to use ‘nuclear option’ of 1911 Parliament Act if it continues to be blocked by Lords

Supporters of assisted dying will seek to force through the bill using an archaic parliamentary procedure if it continues to be blocked by the Lords.

The high stakes move – described by some backers as the “nuclear option” – would be the first time the 1911 Parliament Act has been invoked for a private member’s bill.

PM is first UK leader to visit China in eight years and hopes to strengthen bond with superpower amid uncertainty over US alliance

Keir Starmer will meet the Chinese president Xi Jinping on Thursday for historic talks he hopes will deepen economic ties at a time when some inside government fear the US is no longer a reliable partner.

The prime minister – the first UK leader to visit China in eight years – will hold a 40-minute meeting with Xi at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing before a number of cultural and business receptions.

US president says armada heading towards Iran is ‘prepared to fulfil its missions with violence if necessary’

The threat of war between the US and Iran appeared to loom closer after Donald Trump told Tehran time was running out and that a huge US armada was moving quickly towards the country “with great power, enthusiasm and purpose”.

Writing on social media, the US president said on Wednesday that the fleet headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was larger than the one sent to Venezuela before the removal of Nicolás Maduro earlier this month and was “prepared to rapidly fulfil its missions with speed and violence if necessary”.

Industry groups warn that aligning agriculture standards overnight could cost British businesses up to £810m a year

British food sector representatives have urged the government to introduce a transition period if it agrees to realign post-Brexit agriculture rules with the EU.

They warned that aligning regulations overnight would create a “cliff edge” that could cost UK businesses between £500m and £810m a year, because of the divergence in standards since Brexit.

Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas, shares photo of boy who was detained by federal agents on his way home from preschool

• Two agents who shot Minnesota man on leave as Trump says he will ‘de-escalate’

• Lawmakers condemn ‘disgusting’ attack on Ilhan Omar at Minneapolis town hall

Two federal officers fired their guns during the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, according to an initial review by the Department of Homeland Security that was obtained by NBC News.

Three sources told NBC News that the preliminary report, from a Customs and Border Protection internal investigation led by the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was sent to congressional committees yesterday, including the House homeland security and judiciary committees.

Average bills to go up by 5.4% in April, with Ofwat approving record spending plans amid outrage over sewage spills

Water bills in England and Wales will rise by an average of £33 per household in April, in the latest above-inflation increase intended to fix leaking pipes and sewage treatment works.

The increase will push the average annual water bill to £639 in the year from 1 April, up 5.4% on the previous year, according to figures published on Thursday by Water UK, a lobby group for the industry.

Mike Hawes casts doubt on Labour’s plan to double production by 2035, as Starmer visits China with carmaker delegation

A target of building 1.3m cars a year is likely to be missed unless a large new UK factory is built in the coming years, an industry group has said, as Keir Starmer prepares to hold trade talks in China.

Labour aims to have 1.3m vehicles rolling off production lines by 2035, a central ambition of its industrial strategy. That would nearly double the 764,715 cars and vans made in 2025, according to new data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

Assailant, 80, said to have entered victim’s property in Little Hulton on Tuesday and asked for cash and her purse

An 80-year-old man has been arrested after a 95-year-old woman was tied up and threatened during an attempted robbery in Salford after being asked about bin collection day, police said.

It is understood an assailant entered the woman’s property in Little Hulton in Salford on Tuesday, tied her hands together, and asked for cash and her purse.

Richard Hetherington forced to play Prince Calàf in Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot after French tenor Roberto Alagna taken ill

In terms of drama at the opera, it will be difficult to surpass Tuesday’s performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot after a tenor became unwell leading to a surprise substitution.

A Royal Opera House chief, dressed in a jumper, chinos and trainers, deputised in the lead role after French tenor Roberto Alagna, playing Prince Calàf, became ill after the second act.

Newton Aycliffe was meant to be a model town for a fairer postwar Britain. But unaffordable rents on a high street amounting to 0.12% of its property tycoon owner’s holdings have made it a symbol of decline – and a warning for Labour

• How has your local high street changed since 2019? Check your postcode

• Labour risks election wipeout unless it improves Britain’s high streets

Under blue skies and bunting, the whole of County Durham seemed to turn out for the young Queen Elizabeth II. They lined the streets in their thousands, waving flags and marvelling at the grand royal procession weaving past their newly built homes.

It was 27 May 1960 and the recently crowned queen was officially opening the town of Newton Aycliffe on her first provincial tour after the birth of her third child, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, three months earlier. A 16-page commemorative pamphlet, priced at two shillings and sixpence, records the local Light Infantry buglers playing to the giddy crowd.

Starmer’s team is wary of spies but such fears are not new – with Theresa May once warned to get dressed under a duvet

When prime ministers travel to China, heightened security arrangements are a given – as is the quiet game of cat and mouse that takes place behind the scenes as each country tests out each other’s tradecraft and capabilities.

Keir Starmer’s team has been issued with burner phones and fresh sim cards, and is using temporary email addresses, to prevent devices being loaded with spyware or UK government servers being hacked into.

The laws have been criticised by tech startups, which say they go too far, and civil society groups, which say they don’t go far enough

South Korea has embarked on a foray into the regulation of AI, launching what has been billed as the most comprehensive set of laws anywhere in the world, that could prove a model for other countries, but the new legislation has already encountered pushback.

The laws, which will force companies to label AI-generated content, have been criticised by local tech startups, which say they go too far, and civil society groups, which say they don’t go far enough.

Add invisible digital watermarks for clearly artificial outputs such as cartoons or artwork. For realistic deepfakes, visible labels are required.

“High-impact AI”, including systems used for medical diagnosis, hiring and loan approvals, will require operators to conduct risk assessments and document how decisions are made. If a human makes the final decision the system may fall outside the category.

Extremely powerful AI models will require safety reports, but the threshold is set so high that government officials acknowledge no models worldwide currently meet it.

Suit filed by Amplify Legal says laws violate constitutional right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

As Emily Waldorf languished in an Arkansas hospital, she felt like “a ticking time bomb”. It was 2024, and the physical therapist was in the midst of miscarrying a much-wanted pregnancy. But because her fetus still had a heartbeat, hospital officials said Arkansas’s near-total abortion ban blocked them from taking steps to induce labor and end her pregnancy.

Instead, Waldorf had to wait and hope that she didn’t develop a deadly infection.

She was the art world’s hottest ticket after her confrontational goths-and-dobermans show at the Venice Biennale. But did she get too cosy with the worlds of fashion and advertising?

‘I don’t know what you want to know,” says Anne Imhof, three-quarters of the way into our interview. Her cautious smile, between curtains of jet black hair, changes into a sceptical pout. I have just quoted a headline at Imhof, one of Germany’s most important contemporary artists, that described her 2025 New York show as “a bad Balenciaga ad”.

Just a few years ago, Imhof was the hottest ticket on the international art circuit: a Golden Lion winner at the 2017 Venice Biennale, whose transformation of the German pavilion into a sinister, S&M-flavoured “catwalk show from hell” had masses scrambling to join the queue. Imhof was a cultural polymath whose shows combined etchings, paintings, dance, live music and film; a muse to fashion designers whose sporty goth aesthetic – Adidas tracksuit bottoms, chunky trainers, black leather – beseiged the clubs of Berlin and beyond.

Forget brash statement projects – Riba’s prestigious gold medal has gone to a pivotal figure who works above an Aldi and designs billowing bandstands, jewel-like chapels and buildings that change colour

When Níall McLaughlin was shortlisted for the Stirling prize in 2013, for designing an exquisitely jewel-like chapel for a theological college near Oxford, he brought along his client to the prize-giving ceremony. It was the first (and possibly last) time a group of Anglican nuns had ever graced such a spectacle.

Despite clearly having God on his side, he lost out that year, but eventually scooped the Stirling in 2022, for the New Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Founded in 1428, Magdalene’s alumni include Samuel Pepys, Norman Hartnell and Bamber Gascoigne. Oxbridge colleges expect their buildings to endure, and McLaughlin delivered a reassuringly robust and handsomely detailed exemplar, mixing crisp planes of brick that recalled the American modernist Louis Kahn, with top notes of English Arts and Crafts, echoing the gabled forms of the college’s historic courts.

Antiheroine, a new film about the musician’s tumultuous life and career, premiered at the festival with some frank admissions but the star not present

A new documentary about the gen X icon and “queen of grunge” Courtney Love caused a stir at the Sundance film festival – without the legendary Hole frontwoman in attendance.

The musician and actor, now 61, was supposed to attend the premiere of Antiheroine, a new retrospective documentary by Edward Lovelace and James Hall that traces her storied life and career, but did not make it for undisclosed reasons. “We’re really gutted that Courtney couldn’t make it tonight to celebrate this moment with us all,” said Lovelace in his introduction for the film’s premiere in Park City, Utah, calling Love “so unfiltered, so truthful”.

This weekend sees the release of a controversially funded film about the first lady, directed by a disgraced film-maker

It’s not often that a presidential administration faces a direct referendum at the box office. Sure, there was more than a hint of rebuke in Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 unexpectedly becoming the biggest-grossing non-music-or-nature documentary of all time (and highest full stop in North America) while taking re-election-year shots at George W Bush (who went on to squeak out another victory anyway). But that movie was also sold on Moore himself, a recent Oscar winner and fixture in both film and television by that point. Bush was excoriated, but he wasn’t exactly getting top billing. The unambiguous star of this weekend’s Trump-approved documentary is right there in the title: Melania. It’s coming to 1,500 theaters this weekend from Amazon/MGM.

Relatively few documentaries receive a wide release (though Melania is going out in about half as many theaters as last weekend’s Amazon release, the Chris Pratt vehicle Mercy), so comparison points are relatively few. Box office predictions generally place the movie well under Moore’s unlikely high-water mark for the form. Some are guessing the opening weekend will pull in about $1m, which would comfortably keep it off the list of the worst wide openings of all time (the record low for a new release in around 1,500 theaters is about $330,000) but would nonetheless qualify it as a bomb. Others estimate that it will go as high as $5m, putting it in line with rightwing docs like Am I Racist?, the highest-grossing documentary of 2024, which ended its run with $12m. As the Hollywood Reporter points out, technically inching ahead of Am I Racist? and the recent faith-based After Death would boast the biggest non-music launch for a documentary of the past decade.

It requires copious pillows and duvets, and has gone viral on social media. Will this elaborate new sleeping set-up give you a cosy night’s rest – or just exacerbate your back pain?

Name: The potato bed.

Age: About two months.

We’ve had declarations of obsession, we’ve had notification of their matching rings … can someone please throw some cold water over this press tour love-fest?

Even though it isn’t released for another fortnight, you may already have formed strong opinions about Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Perhaps you hold the position that the novel is a text so sacred that any adaptation whatsoever is equivalent to sacrilege. Or maybe you are excited to see what a noted iconoclast such as Fennell will do with something as fusty as a 179-year-old book.

Either way, it is likely that your key takeaway from the Wuthering Heights press tour so far is that it’s getting a bit much. It has now been revealed that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi have matching rings decorated with two hugging skeletons and the phrase “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”.

The former academic’s candidacy in the Gorton and Denton byelection shows the hard right has evolved. To stop it the left must change too

Matt Goodwin has been selected as the Reform UK candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton byelection – a contest he has a very good chance of winning. I suppose I miss the days when watching the toxic right was more of a cod-psychoanalytical pastime: when you could watch the Goodwin of 2024, preaching the superiority of Hungary in openly anti-migrant terms, compare him to the Goodwin of the mid-2010s, when he was an adviser to the coalition government on tackling anti-Muslim hatred, and say, “wow, this guy’s been on a journey”. What were the waypoints of his slide from “just asking the questions”, through dog-whistle racism, to brazen ethno-nationalism? What could have been the trigger events? Which bad crowd has he fallen in with?

The author James Bloodworth, who mapped Goodwin’s journey rigorously last summer, considers him the intellectual mascot of the politics of resentment. He quoted Goodwin thus: “I just spent four days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the west. I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No mass immigration. No broken borders. No self-loathing. No chaos. And now I’ve just landed back in the UK.” These talking points are all commonplace on the hard and far right; migration is situated as a wellspring of social ills, from crime and disunity, through drug use and housing crises, and it is stated with so much confidence, so little evidence or logic, that it’s really more of a muster point than an opinion held in good faith.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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.

Decades after I first befriended one of the town’s sons, I finally got to see the place – or at least its glorious bridge

Is it possible to have a soft spot for a place you’ve never been to and know next to nothing about? I think it is, in my case anyway, for I have developed warm feelings for Runcorn. On reflection, this has been in the making, quietly, in my subconscious, for a long time. In the last century, I was at university with a lad from Runcorn and, as he is the only person I have ever known from Runcorn, he is bound to colour my sense of the place. Big Everton fan. Could occasionally, like most of us in our gang, get a bit boisterous on a night out, but otherwise had a heart of gold. Reconnected with him recently and the boisterousness seems to have dissipated while the heart of gold still beats. I met his dad once, too; he was nice as well. All good for my own personal sense of Brand Runcorn.

Also in the last century, I got talking to the bloke sitting next to me on a train out of Euston. I was squashed up next to him and his suitcases. He had a lot of luggage, so wherever he was going it looked as if he would be staying there a while. He turned out to be American, and a Mormon. I had, not long before, been to Salt Lake City, so we had a nice chat about that. When I asked him where he was heading, he said Runcorn. This led me to ask why. He replied: “Because that’s where the Lord has sent me.” There’s no answer to that, or at least not one I could think of as we rattled our way north. A shroud of mystery now settled over my idea of Runcorn.

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.

With almost one in five firms breaching targets, the watchdog’s new get-tough approach on capital levels seems to be anything but

When half the nation’s retail energy suppliers, including Bulb with 1.7 million customers, failed during the gas crisis of 2021-22, the embarrassed regulator, Ofgem, decided it should probably pay more attention to companies’ balance sheets. Better late than never.

The cost of mopping up the corporate calamities added up to £2.7bn, or £94 on every household’s energy bill, calculated the National Audit Office.

The human impulse to steal has been accelerated by AI, inequality and our political leaders – with profound consequences

Last week I discovered that an article I wrote about the England cricket team has already been copied and repackaged, verbatim and without permission, by an Indian website. What is the appropriate response here? Decry and sue? Shrug and move on? I ponder the question as I stroll through my local supermarket, where the mackerel fillets are wreathed in metal security chains and the dishwasher tabs have to be requested from the storeroom like an illicit little treat.

On the way home, I screenshot and crop a news article and share it to one of my WhatsApp groups. In another group, a family member has posted an AI-generated video (“forwarded many times”) of Donald Trump getting his head shaved by Xi Jinping while Joe Biden laughs in the background. I watch the mindless slop on my phone as I walk along the main road, instinctively gripping my phone a little tighter as I do so.

Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist

The US president bears political responsibility for having greenlighted ICE agents’ regularly lawless conduct

As public outrage grows over the killing of two protesters by Donald Trump’s deportation agents in Minneapolis, the White House is going into damage-control mode. It has its work cut out for it. Trump didn’t pull the triggers that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but he bears political responsibility for having greenlighted the agents’ regularly lawless conduct.

Good and Pretti should not have been killed. As far as can be seen in the ample video evidence that has emerged, neither posed a threat to the agents at the scene or anyone else. Their sole “offense” was to take a stand against the deportation raids. Yet trigger-happy agents needlessly shot them – Good as she was turning her car away from the agents, Pretti while he was restrained by agents on the ground. There was no plausible self-defense to justify these killings.

There are unspoken rules about being in an elevator, people! Unspoken being one of the most important

• Read more petty gripes

Most people don’t relish being locked in a confined space, in close proximity to strangers, travelling at speed. And yet, so many people do nothing to elevate the experience for others.

I am floored at the enthusiasm of people who stand at the crack of elevator doors waiting for them to open, as if it were 9am at the Black Friday sales. When the doors open, they recoil in surprise – presumably they were expecting to be the first passengers on the maiden voyage of this metal tube sliding up and down the building’s shaft.

The worrying rise of Christian nationalism should be top of a crowded in-tray for Sarah Mullally as she takes up her role

Before the St Paul’s Cathedral service that confirmed her on Wednesday as the first female archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally repeated a proverb that has become something of a personal mantra: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” In an Anglican communion that remains bitterly divided, rancorous and unsure of its public role, an invitation to partnership and collaboration hit the right note. The formidable task now for Dame Sarah will be to provide the leadership to make it happen.

As a state-educated former NHS worker who rose to become England’s chief nursing officer, the 106th occupant of St Augustine’s chair is a very different proposition to Justin Welby, her Old Etonian predecessor. But many of the challenges she confronts remain the same. Her immediate priority must be to end the cycle of failure in dealing with historical abuse in the church, which has led to a collapse of trust in parishes and ultimately forced Mr Welby’s resignation.

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.

The prime minister cannot wish away the contradictions between upholding democratic values and pursuing commercial interests with Beijing

It has been clear for many years that China’s status as a second global superpower poses challenges to the world’s democracies. Donald Trump’s marauding behaviour as president of the first-placed superpower makes those challenges more acute. In the past, the UK’s relationship with Beijing has been anchored, and sometimes dictated, by the alliance with Washington. Mr Trump’s contempt for former allies, expressed as sabotage of Nato and a scattergun imposition of tariffs, scrambles the old strategic calculus.

This is an ominous backdrop for Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing. The prime minister is trying to perform a difficult balancing act, looking for commercial opportunity in a growing powerhouse while protecting national security from an authoritarian behemoth.

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 an article on people getting trapped by debt they can never seem to repay

Thanks for your article (Student loans: ‘My debt rose £20,000 to £77,000 even though I’m paying’, 23 January). I began my studies in 1999, part of the New Labour push to widen access to university. Had I known then that I would still be repaying this “loan” for the rest of my working life, I might have thought twice.

The original premise was that student loans were a small, manageable contribution, easily cleared once you entered work. At the time, it was routine for more privileged families to take the low-interest loan even if it wasn’t needed, park it in savings and repay it later in a lump sum. For those of us who relied on the loan simply to live, that option never existed.

Forcing households to buy broadband to access BBC television channels after 2034 would exclude poorer viewers, writes Christy Swords

Tim Davie warns that a move to subscription would mean the BBC is “no longer a universal service” (BBC faces ‘profound jeopardy’ without funding overhaul, Tim Davie says, 26 January). The outgoing director general is right: the threat to BBC universality within the next charter period is very real. But that threat in part is coming from the corporation itself.

The BBC is proposing to switch off digital terrestrial television (DTT, or Freeview) in 2034. This would force all UK homes to take out a high-speed broadband subscription or lose access to BBC services. For the first time, you’d need a subscription to watch “free-to-air” UK TV.

No other large tropical ecosystem has been so well preserved, but Mauritius has plans for fishing and other exploitation, writes Clive Hambler

Ending the pristine state of the Chagos region is arguably a greater loss of biodiversity than the extinction of the dodo, yet is often neglected in discussions of the transfer to Mauritius (What are the Chagos Islands – and why is the UK returning them to Mauritius?, 20 January). No other large tropical ecosystem on Earth has been so well protected, and its value to the science of ecology is correspondingly immense.

It is not species richness or abundance that singles the Chagos out: it is the ecosystem’s near-natural functioning. Mauritian plans for fishing and other exploitation are not compatible with protection of the last great tropical wilderness area – which is currently teaching us how to repair and protect others.

Readers respond to the news that the development charity is rethinking such schemes as they carry racialised, paternalistic undertones

I welcome the news that ActionAid is moving away from child sponsorship schemes, following other global NGOs in recent years (ActionAid to rethink child sponsorship as part of plan to ‘decolonise’ its work, 22 January). These schemes are colonial-like from a global analytical perspective, and local residents have long subverted and refuted their terms because they represent “poverty porn”. They also reify the community in ways that don’t work for those who sign up for them.

Research in Tanzania showed that local staff were uneasy with the core premise. But pressures came from further up the chain, and it was often a pragmatic choice to retain a key source of unrestricted funding (for other fantastic advocacy work that project-based NGOs can’t always do).

Liam Rosenior made a mess, cleaned it up and left Naples praying that Cole Palmer’s injury woes are over. All over the place during a wretched first half, an inspired comeback had Chelsea celebrating at full time. They had looked to Palmer for inspiration and, although the attacker was kept in reserve until the second half, he did enough during his time on the pitch to show why Chelsea have responded to suggestions that their main man is pining for a return to Manchester by branding him untouchable.

It was a cutting cameo from the player whose virtuoso brilliance downed Paris Saint-Germain in the Club World Cup final last summer. Introduced with Chelsea 2-1 down against Napoli and staring at the prospect of a two-leg playoff to reach the last 16 of the Champions League, Palmer was minimalistic but impactful. The 23-year-old’s presence alone was enough to restore order and, even if he is still not in peak condition, his first assists of a season disrupted by an array of niggles were a reminder of what Chelsea have been missing while their best player has been recovering from nagging groin and thigh complaints.

• Anatoliy Trubin scores dramatic goal against Real Madrid

• Barça and Sporting in last 16, Bodø/Glimt make playoffs

Goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin scored a 98th-minute header as Benfica defeated Real Madrid 4-2 to secure a Champions League knockout place on Wednesday and deny their opponents an automatic spot in the last 16.

Benfica were heading out despite leading 3-2 with seconds of stoppage time remaining before Trubin met a free-kick to score the goal they needed to get into the playoff round on goal difference.

Liverpool are having to stomach “a very bad cocktail” in the Premier League of wasted chances and cheap goals conceded, according to Arne Slot. To extend the mixologist’s analogy, his team are enjoying life with a few margaritas in the Champions League.

Slot’s side cruised into the last 16 for the second successive season with a demolition of Qarabag at Anfield. Mohamed Salah was among the goalscorers for the first time since accusing Liverpool of throwing him under the bus, while Alexis Mac Allister, Florian Wirtz, the potent Hugo Ekitiké and substitute Federico Chiesa were also on the scoresheet.

• Arsenal 6-0 AS Far (Blackstenius 8, Maanum 12, Caldentey 21pen, Smith 41, Russo 66 76)

• Arsenal play Corinthians of Brazil in Sunday’s final

A businesslike performance against AS Far earned Arsenal a place in Sunday’s final of the inaugural Fifa Women’s Champions Cup against Corinthians.

Four goals in the first half – from Stina Blackstenius, Frida Maanum, Mariona Caldentey and Olivia Smith – allowed Renée Slegers to rotate players and rest some legs and the substitute Alessia Russo added two after the break to complete the rout.

On a chilly, fun, boisterous night in Paris, with the Champions League mega-table scrolling away in the background, Newcastle produced a fine performance at the home of the European champions that left both teams outside the automatic qualification slots, but Newcastle much the happier of the two.

A 1-1 draw means Eddie Howe’s team finished 12th overall. They will now enter the knockout phase in the last two weeks of February, as had always seemed likely, to face either Qarabag or Monaco. More surprisingly, Paris Saint-Germain will join them there after some late score-ticker malarkey nudged them out of the top eight.

Local officials confirmed that ICE will conduct immigration operations during 8 February game in Santa Clara

US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) agents are expected to conduct immigration enforcement operations during next month’s Super Bowl game in Santa Clara, California.

Local officials confirmed to media that ICE is expected to deploy for the game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations team has long worked the Super Bowl and other major sporting events, largely focused on preventing human trafficking and stopping the sale of counterfeit goods, but immigration operations would be unusual.

• American becomes latest major winner to exit

• 2018 Masters champion will be eligible for PGA Tour

Patrick Reed has delivered the ­latest high-profile blow to LIV Golf by announcing he will leave the circuit before the start of its 2026 season.

The 35-year-old American former Masters champion joins Brooks Koepka by instead focusing on the PGA Tour. Reed will spend his immediate time on the DP World Tour, where he won the Dubai Desert Classic on Sunday. Reed tees up in Bahrain from Thursday.

Nerveless batter is a master of building an innings on spinning wickets and his form suggests he could have prospered in India and Sri Lanka

The final night was Harry Brook’s but Joe Root still took the series, as he usually does in Sri Lanka. It was here that he began his stratospheric run against the red ball, a double hundred at Galle in 2021 the first of 24 Test tons in the next five years. Go back to 2014, his first visit to the country with England, and there’s an unbeaten 50-over century in Pallekele, a trick he repeated on Tuesday in Colombo.

As Root and Brook sat on the Premadasa outfield after England’s 53-run win in the deciding one-day international, it was the former’s shirt that one supporter repeatedly pleaded for from the stands, never mind what the captain had just done. Local admiration is expected when the 35-year-old has never left a tour of Sri Lanka without at least one match winning knock.

Snow athletes have rebounded with a radical overhaul after funding was cut in response to poor results at Beijing Winter Olympics

Just days before the Winter Olympics in Milano-Cortina, the young Team GB members who think nothing of flying 30ft in the air while spinning like gyroscopes have once again proved they have the X Factor. Last Friday, Mia Brookes, 19, soared to X Games gold in the snowboard slopestyle in Aspen. Zoe Atkin, 23, followed suit in the freeski superpipe and before the weekend was through Kirsty Muir, 21, added a third gold in the freeski slopestyle, along with a big air silver.

All told it was a hugely successful time for GB Snowsport, with Charlotte Bankes winning her first World Cup snowboard cross event since breaking her collarbone in April in China the previous week. Little wonder, then, that Atkin is bullish about the British skiers’ and snowboarders’ chances in Italy.

Hakeem Jeffries rebukes Donald Trump for suggesting the Minnesota congresswoman staged what happened

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Lawmakers from both parties have condemned the attack on Ilhan Omar after the Minnesota congresswoman was sprayed with an unknown substance during her town hall on Tuesday night in Minneapolis.

In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, responded to comments from Donald Trump who quipped that “she probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”

Actor says the defence of his peers and fans was ‘really nice’ after Quentin Tarantino’s scathing assessment calling Dano ‘a weak, weak, uninteresting guy’

Paul Dano has responded to Quentin Tarantino’s scathing criticism of his acting abilities, thanking those who came to his defence after Tarantino called him a “weak, uninteresting guy” and “the limpest dick in the world”.

On Wednesday, Dano told Variety that the supportive responses that poured in from his peers and across social media was touching.

Production company asked for full review after broadcaster ‘completely unaware’ of Levi Hodgetts-Hague’s comments

Over 20 seasons, the Apprentice boardroom has not been short on drama – but one recurrent theme is the UK show’s penchant for problematic contestants.

This season, which airs its first episode on Thursday, is no different. Offensive tweets posted by contestant Levi Hodgetts-Hague from a decade ago have been unearthed since filming, prompting the BBC to urge the show’s production company to carry out stricter background checks on contestants.

Esther Ghey has previously said she believes her daughter’s social media addiction made her more vulnerable

Esther Ghey has called on MPs to vote for an age restriction on social media in the coming weeks, as she accused the government of “kicking the can down the road” with its planned consultation.

The mother of the murdered teenager Brianna Ghey told the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast she believed children would be harmed if the government waited for the results of its assessment later this year rather than enacting a ban straight away.

Stranger allegedly threw Thermos of coffee on nine-month-old boy in Brisbane park in 2024

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A Chinese team will visit Australia to help search for a man who allegedly randomly attacked a baby with hot coffee before fleeing the country.

China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, announced on Wednesday that investigators will travel to Queensland to work with police to investigate the 33-year-old accused attacker.

Monarch says he has remained focused despite early criticisms of his beliefs, in new film Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision

King Charles has revealed he “wasn’t going to be diverted” from his environmental campaigning despite criticism in the past in a new documentary showcasing his philosophy of “Harmony”.

In the Amazon Prime Video film, his first project with a streaming platform, Charles recalls past attacks on his outspokenness on the environment, saying: “I just felt this was the approach that I was going to stick to. A course I set and I wasn’t going to be diverted from.”

Judgment in The Hague orders Netherlands to do more to protect Caribbean people in its territory from impacts of climate crisis

The Dutch government discriminated against people in one of its most vulnerable territories by not helping them adapt to climate change, a court has found.

The judgment, announced on Wednesday in The Hague, chastises the Netherlands for treating people on the island of Bonaire, in the Caribbean, differently to inhabitants of the European part of the country and for not doing its fair share to cut national emissions.

Highly contagious virus, which spreads from animals to humans, has a high fatality rate and there is no vaccine

Airports across Asia have been put on high alert after India confirmed two cases of the deadly Nipah virus in the state of West Bengal over the past month.

Thailand, Nepal and Vietnam are among the countries screening airport arrivals over fears of an wider outbreak of the virus, which can spread from animals to humans and has a high fatality rate.

Rest of UK has resisted calls to make builders install bricks that provide nesting for swifts and other endangered birds

Swift bricks will be installed in all new buildings in Scotland after the Scottish parliament voted in favour of a law to help endangered cavity-nesting birds.

The Scottish government and MSPs across the parties backed an amendment by Scottish Green Mark Ruskell to make swift bricks mandatory for all new dwellings “where reasonably practical and appropriate”.

UK technology secretary also announced plans to train up to 10 million Britons in AI skills to help workforce adapt

Increasing deployment of artificial intelligence will cause job losses, the UK technology secretary has warned, saying: “I want to level with the public. Some jobs will go.”

In a speech on government plans to handle the impact of AI on the British economy, Liz Kendall declined to say how many redundancies the technology might cause but said: “We know people are worried about graduate entry jobs in places like law and finance.”

Campaigners demand ‘real consequences’ for peer who claimed expenses for car journeys he did not take

Campaigners have criticised as too lenient the punishment handed to a Conservative hereditary peer found to have broken the House of Lords rules for the second time.

In a report published on Wednesday, the House of Lords concluded that the Earl of Shrewsbury had fiddled his expenses and had done so in an “unacceptably casual” way. The lords’ authorities are intending to suspend him from the upper chamber for two weeks.

Campaigners say government is letting landlords ‘drag their feet’ and ‘denying renters the most basic standards’

Labour’s promise to make private rented homes in England fit for habitation will not be enforced for almost a decade, a decision campaigners have described as “absurd”.

The timeline means landlords will have until 2035 to implement a new decent homes standard (DHS) in their properties, which will include “robust standards” to combat disrepair, damp and energy inefficiency.

BBC’s director of nations will take over Tim Davie’s role while corporation seeks permanent replacement

The BBC has named senior executive Rhodri Talfan Davies as its interim director general, as the corporation continues the search for a permanent replacement for Tim Davie.

Davie, who resigned in November after the row over the BBC’s editing of a Donald Trump speech, will remain in the role until the start of April. Talfan Davies will then take over.

Firm’s fourth-quarter 2025 beat expectations as it lavishes investment on AI infrastructure and CEO faces questioning

As Meta spends billions on artificial intelligence data centers and its CEO prepares to testify in a landmark social media trial, the company is earning a pretty penny.

Meta reported strong financial results on Wednesday, beating Wall Street expectations of $58.59bn with $59.89bn in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025. It reported earnings per share (EPS) of $8.88 – which also surpassed Wall Street expectations of $8.23 in EPS. Meta’s stocks jumped nearly 10% in after-hours trading after the release.

Ali Akbar, 73, honoured by Emmanuel Macron with National Order of Merit for dedication he pours into work

For more than five decades he’s pounded the pavements of Paris, becoming part of the city’s cultural fabric as he strikes up conversations, greets longtime friends and offers parodies of daily news headlines.

On Wednesday, the efforts of the man believed to be France’s last newspaper hawker were recognised, as Ali Akbar, a 73-year-old originally from Pakistan, received one of France’s most prestigious honours.

Gergely Karácsony urged people to take to streets in June in pushback against Orbán government’s attack on rights

Prosecutors in Hungary have filed charges against the progressive mayor of Budapest, seeking to fine him months after hundreds of thousands of people heeded his call to take to the streets in defiance of the government’s ban on Pride.

The June march made headlines around the world after the ruling Fidesz party, led by the rightwing populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, backed legislation that created a legal basis for Pride to be banned, citing a widely criticised need to protect children.

PTI reports Pakistan’s jailed former PM being denied proper medical treatment and visits from family and lawyers

Pakistan’s incarcerated former prime minister Imran Khan is facing severe eye damage and is being denied proper access to medical treatment while in solitary confinement, officials from his political party say.

Khan, 73, considered Pakistan’s most high-profile political prisoner, has been in jail since August 2023. He is serving sentences for corruption and leaking state secrets, which he has claimed are part of a state-sponsored campaign to keep him out of power.

High hopes for Optimus robot help company beat forecasts despite yearly revenue decline and flailing car business

In the clearest sign yet that Tesla is pivoting away from its electric car business, CEO Elon Musk announced on Wednesday’s investor call that the company would discontinue production of its Model X SUV and Model S full-size sedan.

“It’s time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end,” Musk said. “We expect to wind down S and X production next quarter.”

Company reports second-quarter revenues of $81.27bn but posts slowing growth in key cloud computing business

Investor interest in Microsoft shares may have weakened in recent months, but the company posted strong financial results on Wednesday which yet again demonstrated that the AI boom is roaring on.

Microsoft reported earnings for the second quarter of fiscal year that are likely to keep the party going for Wall Street, despite slowing growth in its key cloud computing business.

Fed voted to pause cuts to interest rate, which currently sits between 3.5% and 3.75%, after slashing it three times in fall

The US Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged after its first rate-setting meeting of the year on Wednesday, resisting enormous pressure from the White House to lower rates.

A majority of members in the Fed’s federal open market committee (FOMC) voted to pause interest rate cuts after slashing rates three times in the fall. Rates currently sit at a range of 3.5% to 3.75%.

Founder of the world wide web says commercialisation means the net has been ‘optimised for nastiness’, but collaboration and compassion can prevail

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When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.

Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.

‘Dobrușa once had a population of 200. Grisa now lived there alone with his 120 ducks and other animals. The two other remaining residents were murdered by a farmer from a neighbouring village’

This was taken in a village in rural Moldova that no longer exists. Thirty years ago, Dobrușa had a population of 200, and was typical of settlements found across the country after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. When this man Grisa moved there in 2000 to start a sheep farm, the population had declined to 70. When this was taken, in July 2019, he was the sole resident of the village. He was 65.

A few months before I took it, the only other remaining residents – a couple in their 40s – were murdered by a farmer from a neighbouring village. Their half-naked bodies were found on the ground. They’d been beaten to death. It was a very dark story and, after this terrible incident, Grisa told me he no longer felt safe living alone there. He was thinking about moving to a bigger village.

Sundance film festival: Jay Duplass recruits David Duchovny, Hope Davis and Kaitlyn Dever for a patchy, poignant tale

If anyone can speak to the “end of an era” nostalgia coursing through the legacy-minded 2026 Sundance film festival, its final edition in Park City and its first without founder Robert Redford, it would be Jay Duplass. The film-maker first attended the indie festival along with his brother, Mark, in 2003, with a self-proclaimed “$3 film”, then went on to premiere three projects – The Puffy Chair, Baghead and Cyrus – that epitomized the much-debated, very indie mumblecore movement of yore. For the Duplass brothers, the festival was, as it has been for many a small-budget artist trying to break out, the difference between a career and another $3 film. Without Sundance, he recently joked: “I’d probably be a psychologist right now.”

Psychologist sympathies peek through See You When I See You, Duplass’s feature film return to the festival after 16 years largely focused on acting and directing episodic television, notably for Togetherness, Search Party and the criminally underseen Somebody, Somewhere. An earnest adaptation of comedian Adam Cayton-Holland’s memoir, Tragedy Plus Time, the 102-minute film is both a straightforward tribute to psychotherapy and a tightrope walk of tone, attempting to balance profound grief with breezy comedy for a family reeling from a shocking loss.

See You When I See You is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

A look behind the scenes of the star’s second album turns out to reveal exactly what you’d expect, at arduous length

Paris Hilton here presents us with an unbearable act of docu-self-love, avowedly a behind-the-scenes study of her second studio album, Infinite Icon, and where she’s at as a musician, survivor and mom. But maybe there is, in fact, nothing behind the scenes; judging by this, the scenes are all there is: Insta-exhibitionism, empty phrases and show.

Hilton’s second album no doubt has its admirers and detractors, and her fans are perfectly happy with it. But this film, for which she is executive producer, is an indiscriminate non-curation of narcissism and torpid self-importance that seems to go on and on and on for ever; the longest two hours of anyone’s life, finally signing off with a splodge of uninteresting and unedited concert footage.

Linklater recreates the making of the landmark French New Wave classic with an awestruck tastefulness that smooths over any disruptiveness

Breathless, deathless … and pointless? Here is Richard Linklater’s impeccably submissive, tastefully cinephile period drama about the making of Godard’s debut 1960 classic À Bout de Souffle, that starred Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo as the star-crossed lovers in Paris. Linklater’s homage has credits in French and is beautifully shot in monochrome, as opposed to the boring old colour of real life in which the events were actually happening; he even cutely fabricates cue marks in the corner of the screen, those things that once told projectionists when to changeover the reels. But Linklater smoothly avoids any disruptive jump-cuts.

It’s a good-natured, intelligent effort for which Godard himself, were he still alive, would undoubtedly have ripped Linklater a new one. (When Michel Hazanavicius made Redoubtable in 2017 about Godard’s making of his 1967 film La Chinoise, the man himself called that “a stupid, stupid idea”; Hazanavicius wasn’t even making a film about Godard’s first and biggest hit.)

A silent-era classic has been reframed for the vertical scroll of phone screens. Is this innovation, sacrilege, or just another way to repackage cinema history?

‘Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake,” said Alfred Hitchcock. Who knew that anyone would take the knife to one of his most beloved silent films, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), and turn it into a vertical microdrama?

The Tattle TV app has announced that it will be streaming serial killer drama The Lodger on its phone-friendly vertical platform, telling Deadline that it is “one of the first known instances of a classic feature film being fully reframed for vertical, mobile-first consumption”. So will it set a trend? And if so, how can we stop it?

I’m only joking, of course. There will always be those who see archive cinema as just so much more content to be re-appropriated in new formats. And there will always be old-guard purists – who, me? – who wince at the thought. Still, Tattle TV, you have my attention, so let’s talk about it.

We won’t be getting this mini-Hitch in the UK, or the EU for that matter, due to rights, but lucky US viewers will be able to watch the film that Hitchcock considered “the first time I exercised my style” in a format that largely disregards that style. The Lodger will be presented with its squarish 4:3 image either extended or cut down to fill a vertical phone screen. So there will often be parts of the image missing, which is a problem.

The opening shot of The Lodger is a chilling closeup of a woman screaming, her head tilted so that her entire face fills the frame, lit from behind to emphasise her blond hair. Hitchcock told Truffaut that in The Lodger, he presented “ideas in purely visual terms”. This closeup represents the terror spreading across London as a ripper targets young, golden-haired women. Is the idea intact, even if the image isn’t? Hitchcock, a well-known stickler for carefully composed frames, may well disagree. I would.

The top categories are stacked with quality, from Bad Bunny to Kendrick Lamar, Chappell Roan and K-pop hits – but here are the artists who most deserve to triumph

Bad Bunny – DTMF
Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild
Doechii – Anxiety
Billie Eilish – Wildflower
Kendrick Lamar & SZA – Luther
Lady Gaga – Abracadabra
Chappell Roan – The Subway
Rosé & Bruno Mars – APT.

After his death aged 73, we look back at a selection of the hundreds of tracks the Sly and Robbie drummer had a hand in making

It isn’t Sly Dunbar’s most spectacular performance as a drummer – although his playing is right in the pocket: listen to the lightness of his touch on the cymbals and the tightness of his occasional fills – but as recording debuts go, appearing on an early 70s reggae classic in your teens, a single that furthermore went to No 1 in the UK and sold 300,000 copies despite British radio’s disinclination to play it, is quite the impressive way to open your account.

Folk duo Pound & Stevens have transformed, and added to, Holst’s The Planets Suite and tour the new work this week with Britten Sinfonia. Will Pound explains why playing by ear is his greatest strength

I’m a harmonica and accordion player and one half of folk-classical duo Stevens & Pound. As a multi-instrumentalist I am rooted in a folk tradition that is oral, aural and communal. Music and song are passed down by ear, either through recordings or – more fun – traditional music sessions. Here, players and singers get together to share, swap and play tunes, drawing from a repertoire that is always evolving. While collections of tunes are certainly notated, their scores act as a skeleton – providing the basic architecture of pitch and rhythm but rarely offering explicit guidance on how the music should be played.

Delia Stevens and I are about to head out on tour, performing with the Britten Sinfonia and Robert Macfarlane in a new work called The Silent Planet, a recomposition of Holst’s Planets suite. It’s the culmination of 18 months of rehearsals and revisions, and the score for this 60-minute work, orchestrated by Ian Gardiner, totals 165 pages and includes Earth, an entirely new composition.

The mysterious Cornish electronic music pioneer has gained an extraordinary second life in the TikTok era. Writers and musicians explain why his glitchy slipperiness is so in tune with life today

QKThr, an obscure cut from Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs, sounds like an ambient experiment recorded on a historic pirate ship. Shaky fingers caress the keys of an accordion to create an uncanny tone; clustered chords cry out, subdued but mighty, before scuttling back into dreamy nothingness.

This 88-second elegy has always been overshadowed by another song on Drukqs, the Disklavier instrumental Avril 14th, which alongside Windowlicker is the Cornish producer’s best-known track. But QKThr has become a weird breakaway success, featuring on nearly 8m TikTok posts, adorning everything from cute panda videos to lightly memed US presidential debates, and a fail video trend dubbed “subtle foreshadowing”.

An exhilarating account of Bowie’s spirituality and the quasi-religious nature of his work, from Space Oddity to Blackstar

It has become a tired cliche among fans to say that everything went wrong in the world after Bowie died in 2016. It also misses the point: rather than being one of the last avatars of a liberal order that has crumbled around our ears, Bowie prophesied the mayhem that has replaced it.

In his later years, he thought that we had entered a zone of chaos and fragmentation. This is what allowed him to be so prescient about the internet – not its promise, but its menace. There is no plan and no order. There is just disaster and social collapse. Those looking for reassurance should not listen to Bowie (please listen to something, anything, else). His world, from Space Oddity through to the background violence of The Next Day and Blackstar, was always drowned or destroyed or incinerated: “This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide” as he exclaims at the beginning of Diamond Dogs.

A father and son move to the Patagonian woods – but intensity wanes when a search for home becomes an obsessive quest for revenge

When the protagonist of Daniel Wiles’s debut novel Mercia’s Take, set in a mining community during the industrial revolution, left a bag of gold downstairs unprotected and then went to bed, I actually closed the book, in an attempt to stop the unfolding disaster. After finding this seam of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son will be able to go to school, rather than join the other children who work in the mine, like “blind, bald rodents unearthing themselves in search of scraps of candlelight”. In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask prize, everything closes in on Michael: lungs clog, tunnels collapse, horse-drawn narrowboats are attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It’s a vivid reminder of the cost, in bodily suffering, of resource extraction.

The Puma, Wiles’s second novel, is also a serious and intense historical novel about a father with limited resources who attempts to break a cycle of violence. In the early 1950s Bernardo, a more morally ambiguous figure than Michael, has brought his young son James across the Atlantic from England to the house in the Patagonian woods where he himself grew up. James chatters blithely about becoming a footballer, but Bernardo is distracted. He thinks he sees “shadows of his family walking in and out”, reminding him of a childhood in which “his eyes were wide and hurt by the twilight and he was barefooted and emptyhearted”.

This second novel in a sharp duology offers a powerful interrogation of language in the age of mechanical mass destruction

Never knowingly unknowing, Ali Smith pre-empts the most likely criticism of her latest novel, Glyph, when a character says: “I’m just not sure that books that are novels and fiction and so on should be so close to real life … or so politically blatant.”

Glyph, which follows sisters Petra and Patch as they reflect on childhood attempts to grapple with the finality of death following the loss of their mother, goes further than any of Smith’s recent work in robustly answering this charge. While the Seasonal Quartet playfully anatomised the social fracture of post-Brexit Britain, and immediate predecessor Gliff dealt with the violence of the securitised state, Glyph, in its explicit engagement with the Israeli government’s apartheid and genocide in Palestine, raises the ethical stakes decisively. To engage in a Smithian pun – this is Art in the Age of Mechanical Mass Destruction.

A quietly revolutionary account of cohabiting captured a nation’s heart – but what does it mean for the rest of the world?

When Sunwoo and Hana met on Twitter, they were in their 40s and committed bachelorettes. Both raised by the sea in Busan, they studied in Seoul before entering the city’s famously brutal rat race, Sunwoo as a fashion journalist, Hana as a copywriter. They shared the same taste in music and books, and importantly, both had rejected marriage. No wonder. In South Korea’s stubbornly patriarchal culture, women in dual-income families spend nearly three hours more a day on household chores than men. Instead, Sunwoo and Hana joined the large number of South Koreans living alone. At first, independence felt exhilarating. By middle age however, loneliness was beginning to gnaw, and their boxy studio apartments felt oppressively small.

Two Women Living Together, a 2019 South Korean bestseller that spawned a popular podcast, charts Sunwoo and Hana’s decision to buy a sunlit house together and live not as a romantic couple but as friends. Across 49 warm, chatty essays, they invite us into the life they share with four cats, reflecting on everything from the food they love to their retirement fantasies.

​In the fiercely competitive market ​of the online multiplayer game, Highguard​’s rocky start means it now has a lot to prove

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In the fast-paced, almost psychotically unforgiving video game business, you really do have to stick the landing. Launching a new game is an artform in itself – do you go for months of slowly building hype or a sudden shock reveal, simultaneously announcing and releasing a new project in one fell swoop? The latter worked incredibly well for online shooter Apex Legends, which remains one of the genre’s stalwarts six years after its surprise launch on 4 February 2019. What you don’t do with a new release, is something that falls awkwardly between those two approaches. Enter Highguard.

This new online multiplayer title from newcomer Wildlight Entertainment has an excellent pedigree. The studio was formed by ex-Respawn Entertainment staff, most of whom previously worked on Titanfall, Call of Duty and the aforementioned Apex Legends. They know what they’re doing. But the launch has been … troubled.

From rhino-sized Rhyhorns to worm-like Diglett, visitors to PokéPark Kanto will roam a forest populated by lifelike Pokémon statues when the attraction opens next week

In Japan, February is normally a period of quiet reflection, a month defined by winter festivals in Sapporo’s snowy mountains and staving off the cold in steaming hot springs. Traditionally, international tourists start to arrive with the blossoms in spring – but thanks to the opening of Pokémon’s first ever amusement park on 5 February, this year, they are likely to come earlier.

Unlike the rollercoaster-filled thrills of Tokyo Disney Sea or Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, PokéPark Kanto is essentially a forest populated by models of the creatures from the perennially popular games. Nestled in the quiet Tokyo suburb of Inagi, half an hour from the city centre, the park is a walkable forest with more than 600 Pokémonin it. Where the Mario-themed Super Nintendo World slots neatly into the massive Universal Studios Japan, PokéPark Kanto is hidden in the back of the less glitzy, funfair-esque Japanese theme park Yomiuri Land.

I’ve been a games journalist since 2007, but still there isn’t much video games coverage that feels like it’s specifically for people like me. So I’m creating a home for it: Mothership

Whether you’re reading about the impending AI bubble bursting or about the video game industry’s mass layoffs and cancelled projects, 2026 does not feel like a hopeful time for gaming. What’s more, games journalists – as well as all other kinds of journalists – have been losing their jobs at alarming rates, making it difficult to adequately cover these crises. Donald Trump’s White House, meanwhile, is using video game memes as ICE recruitment tools, and game studios are backing away from diversity and inclusion initiatives in response to the wider world’s slide to the right.

The manosphere is back, and we’ve lost mainstream feminist websites such as Teen Vogue; bigots everywhere are celebrating what they see as the death of “woke”. Put it all together and we have a dismal stew of doom for someone like me, a queer woman and a feminist who’s been a games journalist and critic since 2007.

Quake Brutalist Jam began as a celebration of old-fashioned shooter level design, but its latest version is one step away from being a game in its own right

A lone concrete spire stands in a shallow bowl of rock, sheltering a rusted trapdoor from the elements. Standing on the trapdoor causes it to yawn open like iron jaws, dropping you through a vertical shaft into a subterranean museum. Here, dozens of doors line the walls of three vaulted grey galleries, each leading to a pocket dimension of dizzying virtual architecture and fierce gladiatorial combat.

Welcome to Quake Brutalist Jam, the hottest community event for lovers of id Software’s classic first-person shooter from 1996. First run in 2022, the Jam started out as a celebration of old-school 3D level design, where veteran game developers, aspiring level designers and enthusiast modders gather to construct new maps and missions themed around the austere minimalism of brutalist architecture.

Linbury theatre, London
Full of postcard moments, Taylor’s choreography harks back to a more straightforward, analogue age – and is all the better for that

Paul Taylor is not a choreographer for the cynical. Then again, maybe he is exactly what a cynic needs. At the outset of his 1988 piece Brandenburgs, with the dancers in tight green velour beaming beatifically out at us, the hardened viewer may be thinking: this is a bit twee, a bit dated. Twenty-five minutes later, after a hurricane of leaping and spinning and tightly honed technique, you’re thinking how joyful it is to be alive.

Taylor was one of the most prominent and popular figures in American modern dance, leading his company for more than 60 years until his death in 2018. The company first visited the UK in 1964, but has not been to London in 20-odd years. (In this short run they’re also dancing a second programme, including Taylor’s final work Concertiana, from 2018.)

Limelight, Belfast
At 73, the lodestar of Americana still writes with urgency, as the patient force of her band sends the music grooving skywards

‘Thanks for being receptive to my complaining,” Lucinda Williams says late on, deadpan, after a run of songs circling power and consequence. Outside, Storm Chandra keeps the streets jumpy. Inside Belfast’s Limelight, a sold-out crowd sits on fold-up seats for a show shifted from Mandela Hall at short notice, the room oddly calm for a venue known for sweat and shoving.

Williams is a lodestar in the broad galaxy of music still called Americana, and two days after turning 73, she has the authority of a multiple Grammy winner who writes with urgency. She is living with the after-effects of a stroke, stepping on and off stage with care, yet once she’s behind the mic she radiates resolve. If anything, the voice sounds newly burnished; the phrasing more deliberate, the vibrato catching the light.

She has based ballets on Frida Kahlo, Coco Chanel and Eva Perón. So Annabelle Lopez Ochoa was well placed to take on the passionate, complicated figure of Anne Lister

A couple dance across the studio, their movements formal, the mood resigned. The man pulls his partner towards him but she spins away, landing face to face with another woman. Now the two women dance and everything is different: bright and playful as their eyes meet. It ends in a clinch behind a bookcase. The great love is not between the woman, Mariana, and her husband, but between Mariana and Anne Lister, also known as Gentleman Jack.

I’m watching this play out in a rehearsal room at Northern Ballet in Leeds, where choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa is in the midst of creating a ballet version of Gentleman Jack, as popularised in Sally Wainwright’s hit TV series (Wainwright is a consultant on the ballet). Lister was a 19th-century landowner running her family’s estate in Halifax, but is better known for the diaries that revealed her passionate lesbian love affairs and for boldly living an unconventional life for the times.

ICA, London
Lima made her name with surreal encounters meant to free you from mundane everyday thinking. It’s rather a lot to ask of a key-grabbing hand, a dancing parasol and some melting ice

One of the worst things contemporary art can make you do is think serious thoughts about stupid things. Sure, sometimes a urinal is beautiful, a shed is interesting, and an empty room is a container of countless ideas. But sometimes, it has no deeper meaning worth seeking out. Sometimes it’s just a bit silly.

Brazilian conceptualist Laura Lima would rather call it absurd. Her show at the ICA – her first solo presentation in the UK despite decades of international exhibitions and biennale appearances – is filled with surreal encounters, all of which are meant to jostle you out of your mundane, staid mental rut (“our habitual modes of attention”) and find meaning in the unexpected.

Olivier award-winning West End production will follow US example and be trimmed to make it ‘more accessible than ever before’

For almost a decade it has been the most epic fixture in West End theatre: a two-part play that runs for five hours, including intervals. But later this year Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will only be staged in London as a shortened, single production running 175 minutes.

The new format is in line with the other versions of the hit play presented in the US, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. Its producers announced on Monday that a one-part production would make it more accessible, “allowing even more audiences to experience the story with one ticket and one visit to the theatre”.

Pianist who put her solo career on hold to care for her husband and established the John Ogdon Foundation to preserve his legacy

The pianist Brenda Lucas Ogdon, who has died aged 90, achieved greatest prominence in the duo with her husband John Ogdon, one of the most dazzling performers of his day. It was at the suggestion of the conductor John Minchinton that they started playing as a duo, and in 1962 Lord Harewood invited them to perform Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion at the Edinburgh international festival. It proved to be a notable success, and in the following year’s festival they gave it again.

John’s joint victory at the Tchaikovsky International Competition in 1962, sharing first place with Vladimir Ashkenazy, led to international tours. In Australia in 1964 the couple had separate performing schedules as well as playing as a duo, and Brenda cared for their infant daughter, Annabel. Later tours included several to the US, where on one occasion they performed Mozart’s Concerto for Three Pianos in Houston with the conductor, André Previn, at the third keyboard, and to the Soviet Union.

Asafe Ghalib photographs his friends and fellow artists with one aim – to transform them into their ‘rawest, most beautiful and most empowered’ form

Lover, You Should Have Come Over enters charts at No 97, after becoming popular on social media platform

Jeff Buckley has achieved his first US Hot 100 hit single, 29 years after his death, with Lover, You Should Have Come Over at No 97 this week.

TikTok virality is behind the success, as a new generation of listeners discover Buckley’s spirited, romantic songwriting and pair it with videos on the social media platform. TikTok videos don’t count towards US chart positions, but viral trends drive listeners towards songs on streaming services that do count.

Our perception of a person’s physical beauty is colored by our perception of their behavior – but what if we divorced inner and outer beauty?

Hey Ugly,

They say we end up with the face we deserve. When we think “ugly” (hurtful, spiteful, non-constructive) thoughts, our faces tense and harden. Similarly, when I ignore my needs, my face shows me signs of it.

In 20 years, Danish capital’s fashion week has pushed for greener standards and catapulted homegrown talent to global success

When it comes to fashion weeks, there used to be four key cities: New York, London, Milan and Paris. While they remain titleholders, a host of other cities from Berlin to Seoul and Lagos have been vying for the same recognition to become “the fifth fashion week”. But so far only one real winner has emerged: Copenhagen fashion week.

On Tuesday, the Danish showcase, which has helped catapult homegrown brands including Ganni into the international spotlight while spearheading sustainability initiatives, kicked off the start of its 20th-anniversary celebrations.

This premium assisted machine makes every caffeinated drink under the sun, from flat whites to cold brew, but true baristas may itch for more freedom

• The best espresso machines for your home, tested

In ancient Greece, people in need of advice would seek out their local oracle. The fee for divine guidance would be paid for by animal sacrifice – a goat, or perhaps a sheep for particularly pressing issues. Fast forward to 2026, and inflation has taken its toll. The price of admission to Sage’s Oracle Jet is now closer to that of a cow. For anyone who isn’t a regular at their local livestock markets, that’s about £1,700.

However, the Oracle Jet does exactly what it says on the tin. This is an assisted espresso machine that guides users from coffee bean to espresso cup (hence the “Oracle”), froths milk to silken perfection, and heats up in seconds because of the use of fast-heating ThermoJet technology (yep, “Jet”).

Electric toothbrushes promise healthier teeth and gums and can transform your oral hygiene. We put more than 20 models to the test to reveal the best for every budget

• 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 year, I’ve put a bunch of electric toothbrushes from Oral-B, Philips, Suri, Ordo, Silk’n, Foreo and more 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

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basic they scrimp on? Ben Fogle talks to the Filter about vintage clothing, toothpaste and garden makeovers gone wrong

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Ben Fogle is an adventurer, broadcaster and bestselling author. He has presented TV series from all over the globe: his many extreme exploits include climbing Everest, rowing the Atlantic, crossing the deserts of the Empty Quarter in the Middle East and racing across Antarctica to the south pole.

He has toured the UK with his sell-out shows, and most recently has become co-owner of Sheffield-based outdoor clothing brand Buffalo Systems. His work combines adventure, conservation and storytelling.

From luxury Simba and Otty mattresses to brilliant budget buys, here’s what we recommend – and how to know if you’ve found a good deal

• The best mattresses for back pain
• The best mattress toppers, tested

A good mattress improves your sleep, say mattress makers – and they would, wouldn’t they? But they’re right. The older I get, the more I know it. When I was 20, I could sleep anywhere: a friend’s floor, a filthy sofa – even a phone box one night. These days, I won’t get a single one of 40 winks if I’m not lying on a decent mattress. Comfy but firm, cosy but breathable, and with loads of cool spots for my feet.

Today’s best mattresses promise all this and more. Gone are the days when your biggest decision was between a sprung double and a sprung king-size. Pocket springs are still around, but they face stiff – well, medium-firm – competition from hybrid mattresses that combine springs and memory foam to provide that all-important balance of comfort and support.

Best mattress overall:
Otty Original Hybrid

All those odds and ends of chillies, garlic skins and rind can be used to flavour oil for dunking, dipping and marinating

Today’s recipe began life as a way to use up garlic skins and herby leftovers, all of which contain a surprising amount of flavour, but it has evolved over time. Infused oil has countless uses – drizzle it over carpaccio, pasta or salad, use it to marinate meat, fish and vegetables, or simply as a dip for chunks of sourdough – and some of my favourites include lemon rind, garlic skin and rosemary; star anise, cacao and orange rind; and makrut lime leaf, lemongrass husk and coriander stems, which I found especially delicious drizzled over some noodles and pak choi. Freshly infused oils of this sort aren’t suitable for long storage, however, so use them up within a day to two.

What began as an exciting gen Z food trend has become ubiquitous. Is the bubble about to burst under the weight of ‘fake’ honey and cheap, mass-produced knock-offs?

When hot honey started popping up on restaurant menus about five years ago – drizzled over pizza perhaps, or used as a glaze for meat or halloumi – it seemed novel; something unusual and exciting to try. Word soon got out, particularly among gen Z, about its “swicy” (sweet and spicy) appeal, and the product has “gone a bit crazy over the last couple of years”, according to Laurence Edwards, owner of Black Mountain Honey, which has seen its hot honey sales shoot up.

Like salted caramel, its forebear in the world of food trends, hot honey – generally made by adding or infusing chilli to honey – now seems to be everywhere. Not only can you buy supermarket own-brand versions, but products such as hot honey Jaffa Cakes, hot honey Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut cereal and, most recently, hot honey flavoured Walkers crisps, have now come into existence.

Heaven in a bowl: sweet-and-sour peanut with pasta, Burmese noodle soup with coconut, noodles and myriad garnishes, and an easy and flavourful dumpling soup

One of the best things for lifting deflated spirits is a deep bowl of steaming, restorative soup – perfect for warming the places your old woolly jumper can’t reach. I love the romance and cosiness of creamy European soups drunk straight out of a mug around a fire in November, but in the icy tundra that is January I need something with more heat and intensity, something sustaining, spicy, gutsy and textured, so that I need a fork or chopsticks to eat it, rather than just a spoon. These punchy soups are simply rapture in a bowl, and make for extremely satisfying slurping.

Our panel says they dabble with homemade tortilla chips, hummus and crudites, olives, pastry twists, savoury granola … untold possibilities abound

What savoury snacks do your recipe columnists make when they’re trying to stay away from the biscuit tin?
Jess, by email
The pull of the biscuit tin is all too familiar to Guardian baker Benjamina Ebuehi, who, unsurprisingly, is often found in full “sweet mode”. To counterbalance the intake of cake, she tends to look for “something salty, spiced and crisp”, and, if time is on her side, that usually means homemade tortilla chips. “Chop corn tortillas into triangles, brush with olive oil and seasonings – flaky salt, za’atar, dukkah, garlic granules, or everything bagel seasoning, which is elite.” Bake until nice and crisp, then dunk into hummus. Her fellow Guardian regular Georgina Hayden is also rarely found without a tub of that creamy chickpea dip, whether it’s homemade or shop-bought: “I usually drizzle chilli crisp oil over the top of my hummus, then scoop it up with crudites [celery, carrot, cucumber, say]. That’s so good – and so easy.”

If Hayden’s trying “to be fancy”, however, her attention turns to gildas, – “an olive, a little anchovy and a pickled green chilli on a cocktail stick – or just a lovely, salty, anchovy-stuffed olive”. You could, of course, thread any antipasti you have knocking around on to said stick: “Sun-dried tomato, artichoke heart or one of those gorgeous, marinated onions.” Having a batch of that in the fridge feels “like a treat, but less indulgent”, she adds.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

After the failure of his police career, Jack came to live with us, caring for the whole family indiscriminately. When I was sickest, and felt unlovable, he reminded me I was loved

Jack, the cocker spaniel, was sacked by the police. His career as a detection dog was an utter failure – he was more interested in people than cannabis and made some embarrassing mistakes, including begging for treats from potential offenders rather than alerting officers about drugs.

A colleague told me about a police dog that needed a home and so Jack arrived – via police van – at our house. He was lithe, glossy black and animated. He ricocheted around the house, knocking over children and pot plants. He chased rabbits and pheasants over the fields. He ate off the children’s plates and collected shoes. He loved us all indiscriminately and liked to have us where he could see us. If anyone left the room, he’d sigh deeply and follow, remaining close until the pack was back together.

Can a prison officer turned tram driver and a retired medical tech operations manager agree on incarceration, antisemitism and Trump?

Ian, 60, Manchester

Occupation Retired, used to be an operations manager for medical tech

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects trivial and profound considers a heartfelt matter

• This week’s question: To shred or not to shred: is it OK to recycle sensitive documents?

How can we accept that what feels like overwhelming love for someone is unrequited, and how can we get over it? HH, Suffolk, by email

Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday.

Susan Hayes and Craig got to know each other through an online game. When they finally met in person, it felt like a real-life romance novel

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

When 2023 rolled around, I was ready for a change. I’d spent the Covid years locked down in Victoria, Canada. I had quit my day job at the end of 2019 to write full-time and travel, only for the world to shut down.

During those long, lonely years, I kept myself distracted by playing an online game. Nothing fancy, just a phone game about surviving a zombie apocalypse. It was a bit of fun and a way to connect with people from around the world. One of those people was a fellow named Craig.

Try to focus on the long term, be clear about your priorities, and resist withdrawing money early

All employers must automatically enrol their employees in a workplace pension scheme if they meet the eligibility criteria: the employee must be a UK resident, aged between 22 and state pension age, and earning more than £10,000 a year, £192 a week or £822 a month, in the 2025/26 tax year.

I was stranded in Brussels after a power failure, but the promised refund for hotels, food and transport failed to arrive

Eurostar is refusing to honour expenses claims after a power failure in the tunnel stranded thousands of passengers last month.

Our party of four was stuck at Brussels station when all trains to and from London were cancelled for 24 hours. Eurostar staff told us to find a hotel and handed out leaflets promising that accommodation, food and transport costs would be refunded.

Holding multiple jobs without your employer’s knowledge has boomed in the age of hybrid working. Is it a canny response to job insecurity – or a fast track to getting fired?

Name: Polygamous working.

Age: It’s really a post-pandemic phenomenon.

She had entered end-of-life care and I relied on my car to get to her, but it hadn’t returned the licence

Our daughter, who has cancer, entered end-of-life care on Christmas Eve. I am a carer for her and her two young children.

We both live in rural villages with no public transport options, so I need a car to get to her at short notice, but last summer, out of the blue, the DVLA told me I could not drive until December and revoked my licence.

The ligament that connects your foot bones can cause severe heel pain when inflamed. Here’s how to avoid that

Recently, I decided to go for a jog after not running at all for more than [redacted] years. I did a half-marathon a couple of presidential administrations ago, so surely it would be fine? It was! Until the next morning, when I rolled out of bed, put my feet on the floor and felt a sharp pain in my heel.

Plantar fasciitis, my old nemesis.

Strengthen the muscles of the feet. Silverman suggests doing toe curls (with your feet flat on a towel, grip the towel with your toes and scrunch it towards your body) or marble pickups (using your toes to pick up marbles or similar objects from the floor).

Stretching. Specifically, stretching the calf muscles and the achilles tendon. Regularly stretching and massaging these areas “can help to not only assuage the inflammation, but prevent it from coming back”, says Aiyer.

Increase activity levels gradually. Allow your body to get acclimated to increases in activity levels rather than suddenly ramping up. Basically, don’t do what I did.

Wear the right shoes. Choose a shoe that’s too supportive, and your foot muscles can weaken over time, says Silverman. But choose a shoe that’s not supportive enough, and you may expose your plantar fascia to more direct trauma. Rather than sweating this Goldilocks challenge, Silverman says you should “choose footwear that matches the environment and activity”.

Traditional bodybuilding advice has been to push workouts to the point of failure, and that soreness is an indicator of effectiveness. But recent studies show there’s another way

Until pretty recently, the conventional wisdom about building muscle was that it worked via a system you might think of as “tear and repair” – the idea being that working out causes microtears in the muscle fibres, which trigger the body’s repair processes, encouraging the muscles to come back bigger and stronger.

That’s why many old-school trainers will tell you that there’s no gain without pain, and why a lot of bodybuilding advice includes increasingly byzantine ways of pushing your biceps and triceps to the point where you can’t do another repetition: the more trauma you can cause, the thinking goes, the more “swole” you can become.

While there may be benefits to the treatment, anti-ageing probably isn’t one of them – which is something better left to the professionals

‘Red light therapy, where LED lights are shone on your skin, has been around for a while,” says Afshin Mosahebi, a professor in plastic surgery at University College London. But what was once an expensive treatment you’d go to a professional to receive is now becoming widely available in the form of light-up masks you can wear at home.

“Reasonable reports show that the treatment is good for wound-healing,” says Mosahebi. This is why it is recommended for inflammatory skin conditions such as acne, dermatitis and psoriasis, as it increases circulation, decreases inflammation, and improves cell regeneration.

Used in healing practices for centuries, modern versions of these spiky mats are increasingly popular, and many people find them invaluable. Here’s what the science says

Ever since Keith, 39, from Kansas, was in a car accident in 2023, he has lived with “pretty much constant mid-back and shoulder pain”. Over-the-counter treatments didn’t touch the sides and he didn’t want to resort to opiates. “Having exhausted everything there was solid science for with no satisfaction, I delved into acupressure,” he says. He bought an acupressure mat made of lightly padded fabric, studded all over with tiny plastic spikes, to lay his back on, and was surprised to find that it actually helped.

Acupressure mats, also known as Shakti mats, are inspired by the beds of nails that Indian gurus used for meditation and healing more than 1,000 years ago. While today’s mats have the nonthreatening sheen of a luxury wellbeing product, the spikes are no joke. In fact, the internet serves up a plethora of images of flaming, dented backs after their use – although you’re unlikely to seriously injure yourself using them. While the mats have been widely available for more than a decade, there has been a recent surge in mainstream interest. You may have seen them heavily advertised on your social media feed, the most prominent brand being Shakti Mat, made in India and costing up to £99 for the premium model. But Amazon is full of acupressure mats and pillows – Lidl recently stocked a mat and pillow combo for a tenner. Yet there is still no compelling evidence that they relieve stress, pain and sleep problems, or help with any other unmet health needs.

Makeup textures embrace the flash and clash of formulas that you can ‘smoosh on carelessly’

I’ve always judged the Pantone colour of the year to be way less interesting to readers than to journalists. But the 2026 winner (an unremarkable off-white called Cloud Dancer) struck me as even less relevant when trends are finally looking interesting again.

Around the time of that news, Mac named glam pop queen Chappell Roan as its new global ambassador. The appointment of Roan – all grunge glitters, colourful face jewels and clumpy mascara – celebrates the experimental, edgy and playful Mac aesthetic, and signals what may be the end of what industry figures often describe as the “beige buffet” of post-Covid fashion and beauty.

Designer’s third collection confirms his dream start at the label, as warmth for the women who wear it shines through

It is the biggest job in fashion and Matthieu Blazy is knocking it out of the park. Chanel, the most famous fashion house in the world, with annual sales of almost $20bn (£14.6bn) and a designer lineage that includes Coco Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld, is an intimidating prospect for a 41-year-old Belgian designer who, until his appointment last year, was little known outside the industry. But this haute couture debut, his third collection for the house, confirmed that Blazy is off to a dream start.

The show concluded with a standing ovation from the audience, which included Anna Wintour, Nicole Kidman and Dua Lipa. Backstage, veteran Chanel personnel were high-fiving each other – a remarkable display of giddiness in an industry where cool is all. In the Grand Palais venue, transformed into a willow wood of sugar-pink trees and fairytale giant mushrooms, clients tossed sable coats to the ground and clustered for grinning selfies. By every metric, approval ratings for the new-look Chanel are off the charts.

Designer spins the historic house off on a tangent in Paris, with his reading of its history being that shock value can sell

For billionaires with an eye on best-dressed lists and Oscar nominees with sights set on red carpet domination, Paris haute couture – where a dress can take months to make by hand, and cost as much as a small apartment in the city – is a shopping opportunity. For the rest of the fashion industry, it is a battle for bragging rights between the haughtiest brand names in the world. With ambitious young designers newly installed at Dior and Chanel vying for domination, that battle is feistier than ever.

Haute couture is an arms race like no other. At 10 o’clock on a Monday morning, the Oscar nominee Teyana Taylor was in a diamond tiara in the front row of Schiaparelli, where the house is preparing for a lavish exhibition opening at the V&A Museum this spring. A few hours later in the garden of the Rodin Museum, where a mirrored Dior catwalk reflected a suspended canopy of lush moss studded with silk flowers, Pharrell Williams and the actor Josh O’Connor arrived promptly, but the show was delayed an hour for the arrival of Rihanna in a black satin cocoon coat.

Goodbye, clean girl; hello, blazing icon! Hairstylist Jessie’s mismatched red-and-yellow look has been a joyful shot of warmth on our screens, and makeup artists say they’re here for it

‘It’s Stephen! It’s Stephen. And here they all come to chat a load of bollocks.” So said Jessie Roux all the way back in episode four, spewing truth bombs while wearing sweetcorn-yellow eyeshadow. Yet here we are – as I write this, on the day of the final – with Stephen Libby still masquerading as a Faithful, looking th’innocent flower but being the serpent under’t, as per Lady Macbeth’s advice.

But it hasn’t been for want of Jessie trying – the 28-year-old has been a fan favourite on the latest season of The Traitors for smarts like these, but also for her bright and mismatched makeup. Often yellow and red, like Rupert Bear’s outfit or the Lego logo, the shades are what Little Greene paint company calls exclamatory things such as Trumpet and Heat.

Now a ‘wild river national park’, the Vjosa needs more trees to be planted to preserve its fragile ecosystem. And visitors are being asked to help …

Our induction into tree-planting comes from Pietro, an Italian hydromorphologist charged with overseeing our group of 20 or so volunteers for the week. We’re standing in a makeshift nursery full of spindly willow and poplar saplings just above the Vjosa River, a graceful, meandering waterway that cuts east to west across southern Albania from its source 169 miles away upstream in Greece.

Expertly extricating an infant willow from the clay-rich soil, Pietro holds up the plant for us all to see. Its earthy tendrils look oddly exposed and vulnerable. “The trick is not to accidentally snick the stem or break the roots,” he says. Message registered, we take up our hoes and head off in pairs to follow his instructions.

The volunteering week is the brainchild of EcoAlbania and the Austria-based Riverwatch. Back in 2023, these two conservation charities succeeded in persuading the Albanian government to designate the River Vjosa as Europe’s first “wild river national park”. It was a timely intervention. According to new research co-funded by Riverwatch, Albania has lost 711 miles (1,144km) of “nearly natural” river stretches since 2018 – more, proportionally, than any country in the Balkans. Now, the question facing both organisations is: what next?

On our first evening, Riverwatch’s chief executive, Ulrich (“Uli”) Eichelmann, gives a presentation setting out his answer. But before he does, we have a dinner of lamb and homegrown vegetables to work through. The traditional spread is a speciality of the Lord Byron guesthouse in Tepelenë, a small town in the heart of the Vjosa valley and home to EcoAlbania’s field office – our base for the week.

The distractions of daily life can make writing a book a frustrating task, so I sought boltholes offering creative support and solitude in inspiring landscapes

The idea for my novel came in a rush: as I walked over the Thames on the Golden Jubilee Bridge in central London, the scene at the heart of it leapt out of the deep blue dusk and clung on to me until I committed to writing it into existence.

A few months later, it became depressingly clear that the half-hour snatches of writing at the end of my working day just weren’t going to get me over the finish line.

Change your life – or just kick back and relax – by connecting with nature, trying a creative workshop, or taking a yoga course somewhere beautiful

Playfulness is at the heart of the Art and Play holiday, based on a farm outside the Bay of Kotor. A family-friendly retreat designed to reignite joy and reconnect with the inner child, it’s one for solo travellers and couples as well as parents with kids. There are creative sessions on everything from dance to painting, as well as time to enjoy the farm – feeding the animals, collecting eggs or helping harvest vegetables for farm-fresh meals. Excursions include hikes to hidden beaches, kayaking and trips to Kotor and Budva, but there’s time to chill by the pool too; evenings are for board games, music and campfires. Accommodation ranges from camping and glamping to cabins, a treehouse and restored farmhouse.
Seven days from £695, children 5-12 £350, under-fives free, includes brunch, dinner and snacks, 3 May and 23 August, responsibletravel.com

The process of learning to catch a wave is an all-consuming activity that can prove to be a powerful therapeutic tool

I can’t remember when my terror of waves began in earnest. Maybe it was a singular incident that triggered it, like that monster wave in Biarritz, France, almost 20 years ago that body-slammed me on to the seabed, taking all the skin off my chin.

More likely is that my transition from fearless to frightened had been more of a slow creep, and a perfectly rational one when you consider the danger of riptides, hidden rocks, sharks and concussion. But for me, I feel it goes deeper. Almost inevitably my job will have had something to do with this. Nearly two decades of working as a journalist reporting on the very worst things that human beings can do to other human beings in a wide array of contexts has definitely eroded my sense that I can keep myself – and others – safe from harm in a dangerous world.

Each year, about 80 British people are victims of a homicide overseas, and grieving loved ones have to navigate the aftermath. Eve Henderson describes losing her husband, and her fight to help others

On a Sunday in October 1997, Eve Henderson looked down at her husband, Roderick, as he lay in a hospital bed, unable to make sense of what she saw. She was, she says, “a block of stone”. They were in the neurological ward of a huge hospital on the outskirts of Paris. It had taken Henderson an hour to find, travelling on the Métro with the name scribbled on a scrap of paper,. Roderick looked comfortable when she arrived; he was a good colour, but there was a round red mark in the centre of his forehead and a small tube inside his mouth, attached to something she later learned was breathing for him.

“He looked fairly alive,” says Henderson, “and I just stood there. A doctor came in. She was in tears and I thought: ‘Bloody hell, am I meant to be crying?’ You’ve got no emotion, you’ve got nothing. You don’t know what to say or where you are. That’s what shock does to you.”

Leicester, where I grew up, was a ‘super diverse’ city. But when I went on a short trip with a friend, it gave me a glimpse of another world

When I was 24, I visited Ireland for the first time. It was the autumn after I graduated from university, and a friend who had won an award for her dissertation used her prize money to rent a beach hut on Valentia Island, so that we could spend a week working on our novels.

The stone hut stood very close to the water’s edge on the western tip of Ireland, overlooking the expansive metal-blue of the Atlantic. The island possessed a rugged kind of beauty – cliff edges, a lush rainforest, cold frothing water. It astounded us. As did the tranquillity. It was what we had come in search of.

The Brooklyn townhouse is filled with spectres of her ill-fated marriage to David Harbour. But perhaps the buyer has some creative ideas

How long a minute is depends which side of the bathroom door you’re on. Now it appears that how much a $1m loss matters depends how eager you are for your business to be concluded.

That’s pretty eager apparently – and unsurprisingly – if you’re Lily Allen and David Harbour. The former couple have just accepted $7m for the Brooklyn townhouse they listed for $8m in October.

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.

Toy becomes a popular symbol of workplace fatigue after manufacturing error gave it a frown instead of a smile

On 17 February China will celebrate the start of the year of the horse, the zodiac sign symbolising high energy and hard work. But the runaway success of a defective stuffed toy suggests that many Chinese are not feeling the vibe.

A red horse toy produced by Happy Sister in the city of Yiwu in the west of China was meant to wear a broad grin, but a factory error meant it hit the shops sporting a despairing grimace. Because the smile was placed upside down, the horse’s nostrils could be interpreted as tears.

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

People in south-west mop up after Storm Chandra and prepare for next bout of rain, with major incident declared

In the early hours, the Wade family’s boxer puppy began barking. Thinking it needed to be let out, they traipsed downstairs and opened the back door – to be greeted not by their neat garden but an expanse of water.

“It was like a sea out there,” said James Wade. Over the coming hours the water crept into their home on a modern estate in Taunton, forcing James, his wife, Faye, and their three children, six, 11 and 12, out and into emergency accommodation.

Unable to get near Ukraine’s main port, Moscow is pounding the city from afar with missiles and drones

Outside the Kadorr apartment complex in Ukraine’s Black Sea city of Odesa, about 500 metres from the seafront, residents and rescue workers mill around in freezing temperatures.

Above an office on the 25th floor, a block of wall has been blown out by a Russian drone. Below, rubble and glass have been moved quickly into piles as owners survey cars crushed by the falling masonry.

Finding herself in charge of her sick husband’s clipper, a self-taught working-class teenager overcame storms, icebergs and a disloyal first mate to get her ship to safety

No one knows exactly what Mary Ann Patten said in September 1856 when she convinced a crew on the verge of mutiny to accept her command as captain. What is known is that Patten, who was 19 and pregnant, was a force to be reckoned with.

After taking the helm from her sick husband in the middle of a ferocious storm off the coast of Cape Horn, the notoriously hazardous tip of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago off southern Chile, she successfully put down the mutiny and navigated her way to safety through a sea of icebergs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We would like to hear from people about the impact of the stormy weather conditions in the UK

Flood and weather warnings from both Environment Agency and the Met Office are in place across much of the UK as Storm Chandra brought heavy rain and strong winds to many areas of the UK.

As day broke on Tuesday, there were almost 100 flood warnings in England and nearly 200 alerts – meaning flooding is possible – in place, with heavy rain falling on already saturated ground. There 24 flood alerts in Wales at the time of writing. A red flood warning – meaning danger to life – has been issued for a river in south-west England.

We would like to hear your suggestions for the UK’s first town of culture

With the search for the UK’s first town of culture under way, we would like to hear your suggestions.

Guardian writers’ own nominations include Ramsgate in Kent, Falmouth in Cornwall, Abergavenny in Monmouthshire, and Portobello in Edinburgh. Which town would you nominate, and why?

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