He went from being the east London boy who was expelled from school to becoming the Bafta award‑winning star of Alien: Romulus. Ahead of his prison drama Wasteman, David Jonsson discusses the pressures of being a leading Black British actor

David Jonsson is the kind of actor who disappears so completely into his roles that it’s easy to forget you’re watching the same person each time. In Rye Lane, he’s a lovestruck south Londoner; in Industry, an Etonian banker with ice in his veins; in Alien: Romulus, a paranoid android. He’s now starring as heroin addict Taylor in the ultraviolent British prison drama Wasteman and, for the first time, the 32-year-old actor claims he is playing something close to himself. “This is the most personal role I’ve done,” he says. “It’s so messed up because it’s a dark story about rehabilitation and addiction, but I know these men really well. Especially when you’re growing up somewhere like where I did.”

We meet on a Friday afternoon at a photo studio in Islington, closer to where Jonsson lives now in north London than to Custom House in the East End, where he grew up. He arrives wearing a beanie pulled tight over his cornrows and a windbreaker. He looks stylish but carries a delicate shyness that mirrors his character’s air of desperation. Wasteman, which opens this month after a critically acclaimed festival run that netted five British Independent Film awards (Bifa) nominations including best lead performance for Jonsson, tells the story of Taylor, a young father who has spent 13 years in prison for a crime he committed as a teenager. In the film’s unflinching depiction of the British prison system, he’s referred to as a “nitty” – UK slang for a desperate, pathetic drug addict. Jonsson lost 1.8 stone to embody Taylor’s “wasted” physique. “I was mawga, properly skinny,” he says, slipping into patois.

He didn’t look like a stereotypical ‘drug addict’, but when he fled to South Africa with all our savings it was obvious that is what he had become

When I tell people that a drug addiction nearly killed my dad, I know what most of them are thinking. Heroin. Crack. Maybe meth or ket. Those substances that steal your soul and slowly wreak havoc on your body. They’re imagining Trainspotting; too-skinny frames and protruding hip bones, the physical effects of addiction that are impossible to miss.

But that isn’t how it played out in my family.

Lego and Crocs have joined forces to create oversized Lego-shaped shoes. Are they as ridiculous as they sound? We sent our most podophilic writer to find out

Everyone knows that standing on Lego is the worst pain known to man, but standing in Lego Crocs – how bad can they be? And are they really worth £199? I got hold of a prototype pair to test how my feet would survive.

The trees morph into sand dunes to protect homes on the seafront against rising sea levels and serve as habitat for rare species

Britain’s fight against climate breakdown may usually look like windfarms or solar energy. But on miles of Lancashire coast the frontline is rather more festive.

Tens of thousands of discarded Christmas trees have been partially buried on beaches south of Blackpool as a frontier against rising sea levels.

Monogamy may be held up as an ideal, but evolution has other ideas

Most of us know people in committed relationships, even lifelong marriages. And we also know stories about relationship transgressions, of partnerships tested or broken by infidelity.

As an evolutionary biologist who studies sex and relationships, I’m fascinated by these two truths. We humans make romantic commitments to each other – and some also break those commitments by cheating.

The Beloved author’s refusal to conform made her a hero to many – and the only black female writer to have won a Nobel prize in literature

There are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, inconvenient, stubborn, complicated, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is one place where all these forms of difficulty overlap. I feel like I have always known this; I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count. But I only began to understand – to discover the meanings and uses of – my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison.

Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything from literature to politics, criticism to ethics, to the responsibilities of making art. In 1993 she became the only black woman ever to win the Nobel prize in literature. But the facts remain: she is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach. Notwithstanding the voluminous train of profiles, reviews and scholarly analysis that she drags behind her, she is difficult to write about. More to the point, she is our only truly canonical black female writer – and her work is highly complex.

High court said the then home secretary had not followed her own policies when bringing in the ban last summer

Shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, said she was “appalled” by the high court’s ruling on Friday that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful and supports the government’s intention to appeal against the decision (see post at 09.35 for more details).

Speaking to Sky News this morning, Patel, a former home secretary between July 2019 and Septmeber 2022, said:

I’m pretty appalled by that ruling, and clearly it’s now going to be subject to a legal appeal. And I think it’s right that it should be appealed …

It is right that they feel the full force of our laws, including the proscription that has been put in place. They are on par with how terrorist organisations conduct themselves, and they plan their attacks.

Four directors of communications

Two chiefs of staff

Two cabinet secretaries

US ambassador

Intelligence agencies say deadly toxin in skin of Ecuador dart frogs found in Navalny’s body and highly likely resulted in his death

• What is dart frog toxin, which is said to have been used to kill Alexei Navalny?

Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, was killed by dart frog poison administered by the Russian state two years ago, a multi-intelligence agency inquiry has found, according to a statement released by five countries, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.

The US was not one of the intelligence agencies making the claim.

Egyptian with history of disruptive behaviour was taken to hospital and then returned to detention

A Home Office private deportation flight for one man had to be cancelled on Thursday morning after he was able to swallow a lithium vape battery shortly before being taken to the plane.

Officials are now investigating the circumstances around the incident. The man, an Egyptian foreign national offender with a history of being disruptive during removal attempts, was due to take a flight from the UK via Albania to Egypt.

Trades Union Congress says women have worked a month and a half for free this year and legislation is needed

Women in the UK will not be paid the same as men until 2056 at the current rate of progress, according to a Trades Union Congress report.

The gender pay gap, which stands at £2,548 a year, means that women have in effect worked for free so far this year, the TUC said.

Acquisition by Premier Group Recruitment boss Andrew Woosnam appears to be example of ‘phoenixism’

A recruitment business that went bust owing the tax authorities and other creditors almost £3m has promised to send its staff on an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas after being repurchased by its former owner for an initial £10,000.

Premier Group Recruitment went into administration in September with debts of £2.9m – including £647,000 owed to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which had commenced enforcement proceedings against the company.

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The teams are out. The atmosphere at St. Andrew’s is incredible. Kick-off is just a few moments away!

Elsewhere in the FA Cup today

Grimsby Town v Wolves

Stoke City v Fulham

Oxford United v Sunderland

Arsenal v Wigan

Jim Boyling gave evidence under his fake identity during prosecution of activists he had infiltrated

Senior police officers praised an undercover officer who had lied to a court about his real identity during a prosecution of environmental activists, secret documents aired at the spycops public inquiry have revealed.

Jim Boyling, an undercover officer, gave evidence under his fake identity when he was prosecuted while masquerading as an activist. He was prosecuted alongside six campaigners for public order offences, but senior officers decided not to tell the court that he was actually a police spy.

Cases reported in seven schools and a nursery in Enfield amid concern over low levels of MMR vaccination in capital

More than 60 children have been infected by a measles outbreak in north London, it has been reported.

Seven schools and a nursery in Enfield reported the cases, with some children treated in hospital, according to the Sunday Times.

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Brignone smashed her leg at the end of last season, fought her way back, and now look!

Goodness me, she’s almost perfect as she nears the end, and 1:03.23 is her time! That puts her 0.74 up on Colturi, Hector and Stjernesund, plus a whole 1.02 on Shiffrin!

Diplomats in Havana are preparing for an alternative Trump tactic: the country being starved until people take to the streets and the US can step in

Among the verdant gardens of Havana’s diplomatic quarter, Siboney, ambassadors from countries traditionally allied to the United States are expressing increasing frustration with Washington’s attempt to unseat Cuba’s government, while simultaneously drawing up plans to draw down their missions.

Cuba is in crisis. Already reeling from a four-year economic slump, worsened by hyper-inflation and the migration of nearly 20% of the population, the 67-year-old communist government is at its weakest. After Washington’s successful military operation against Cuba’s ally Venezuela at the beginning of January, the US administration is actively seeking regime change.

Tablets could make treatment more mainstream, with sector predicted to be worth $200bn by end of the decade

“I just felt slow: I want to be able to do anything my kids want to do and not have weight be a factor. Even a ride or a water park – things have weight limits,” says Melody Ewert, 44, from Minnesota.

Ewert has just switched from Eli Lilly’s Zepbound weekly injection to Novo Nordisk’s new daily Wegovy pill. Analysts believe the arrival of easy-to-take tablets could push weight-loss treatments further into the mainstream in a year that has been described as “pivotal” for the booming anti-obesity market. The new pills, like the jabs, mimic the gut hormone GLP-1 that regulates appetite.

Custodian University of Sunderland says renovation costs of £45m are too high and building must be pulled down. Not without a fight, say locals, who believe they’re being taken for fools

The “little pieces of Sunderland” produced by the city’s glassmaking factory for more than a century can be traced back to an even older story that began in the seventh century, when English glassmaking began at a monastery beside the River Wear, run by abbott and later saint Benedict Biscop.

In 2007, the Pyrex factory that opened more than 100 years earlier and made glass that found its way into millions of homes closed down, with production moved to France.

An Arsenal fan and a Manchester United fan might not agree on football teams, but could they find common ground on mobile phones and AI?

Aaran, 43, Winchester

Occupation Works in executive recruitment

Dan and Zoe met on a train and connected instantly. Twenty years and three kids later, they’re still trying out new things
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

We have a cup of tea and a chat with the receptionist then go on to a leather-clad room

Does it only affect weak people? Is work always the cause? Burnout myths, busted by the experts

Once, after surviving yet another round of redundancies in a former job, I did something very odd. I turned off the lights in my room and lay face-down on the bed, unable to move. Rather than feeling relief at having escaped the axe, I was exhausted and numb. I’m not the only one. Fatigue, apathy and hopelessness are all textbook signs of burnout, a bleak phenomenon that has come to define many of our working lives. In 2025, a report from Moodle found that 66% of US workers had experienced some kind of burnout, while a Mental Health UK survey found that one in three adults came under high levels of pressure or stress in the previous year. Despite the prevalence of burnout, plenty of misconceptions around it persist. “Everybody thinks it’s some sort of disease or medical condition,” says Christina Maslach, the psychology professor who was the first to study the syndrome in the 1970s. “But it’s actually a response to chronic job stressors – a stress response.” Here we separate the facts from the myths.

A stylish high-stakes armed robbery thriller with Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo, and a gentle supernatural comedy from Mackenzie Crook. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

Here’s how to follow along with our coverage – the finest writing and up-to-the-minute reports

Emerald Fennell’s film brings the raunch to Brontë’s romance, while Nintendo’s beloved plumber stars in a colourful, family-friendly sports game

Wuthering Heights
Out now
Out on the wily, windy moors, writer-director Emerald Fennell has constructed a new interpretation of the Emily Brontë classic. Margot Robbie is Cathy while Jacob Elordi takes on Heathcliff, and as you might expect from the film-maker behind Saltburn, the passionate pair are set to leave no height unwuthered.

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days

• Norwegian on course for six potential golds at Games

• France take cross-country skiing relay silver, Italy bronze

Johannes Høsflot Klæbo led Norway to victory in the men’s 4x7.5km cross-country relay at the Milano Cortina Games on Sunday to win a record ninth career gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

The 29-year-old has won four gold medals at these Games and is widely expected to take another two in the men’s team sprint on Wednesday and 50km classic race on Saturday.

More details soon …

• Kateryna Kotsar gets engaged at end of qualifying run

• ‘It was so cute … it’s two really huge things for me’

For most athletes, qualifying for your first Olympic final would be more than enough excitement for one night. But Ukrainian freeskier Kateryna Kotsar’s evening was just getting started.

Having made the big air final, Kotsar then wrote “freedom of memory” on her glove to protest against the ban of her compatriot Vladyslav Heraskevych for wearing images of slain athletes on his helmet. And a Valentine’s Day she will never forget took another surprise turn when her boyfriend, Bohdan Fashtryha, then dropped to one knee and proposed.

• Kennedy insists he is innocent of any wrongdoing

• World Curling says officials will clamp down on violations

The Canadian curler at the centre of a cheating row at the Winter Olympics has denied any wrongdoing, accusing the Swedish team of deliberately trying to “catch us in the act”.

On Saturday, World Curling confirmed that Canada had escaped punishment despite being accused of breaking the rules in the 8-6 victory over Sweden on Friday night. However, the sport’s governing body did warn Canada about their abusive langugage and introduced emergency spot checks on Saturday afternoon to make sure teams were not cheating when releasing the stone.

• Greenland flag raised in crowd after Danes’ opening goal

• Fans say gesture is sign of support amid Trump rhetoric

• Americans pull away after slow start for 6-3 win

Two fans who raised a flag of Greenland as the United States played Denmark in men’s ice hockey at the Winter Olympics on Saturday say they did so as a gesture of European support for the island and for Denmark.

Vita Kalniņa and her husband, Alexander Kalniņš, fans of the Latvian hockey team who live in Germany, held up a large Greenland flag during warmups and again when the Danish team scored the opening goal of the preliminary round game against the US at the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena.

Ilia Malinin entered the Olympic free skate as the runaway favorite. Early mistakes triggered a meltdown that laid bare the brutal math of modern figure skating

What made Ilia Malinin’s Olympic defeat so shocking was not simply his years-long dominance entering Friday night. It was how completely the competition had tilted in his favor before he even stepped on the ice.

For nearly three years, Malinin had been men’s skating’s guiding light: unbeaten since late 2023, winner of back-to-back world titles, the skater who recalibrated the sport’s technical ceiling and then made winning look procedural. He arrived at the Milano Ice Skating Arena leading by more than five points after the short program and carrying the most difficult planned program in the field. Under almost any normal competitive logic, that combination should have been decisive.

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What a devastating counter attack from Everton! They have an overload going forward and work it to Hannah Blundell. Blundell plays the ball into the path of Honoka Hayashi who taps into an empty net.

Well this is a surprise. London City Lionesses work it well down the right and deliver the ball into the box. Nikita Parris bravely meets it and heads the ball back across goal. What a start for the away side.

• Sean Dyche was sacked after 25 games in the role

• Pereira starts with Europa League tie at Fenerbahce

Nottingham Forest have confirmed the appointment of Vítor Pereira as their fourth head coach of the season. The former Wolves manager takes over from Sean Dyche, who was sacked on Thursday, on a contract until June 2027.

Pereira inherits a team one place and three points above the relegation zone. Dyche lasted 25 matches after replacing Ange Postecoglou, who was given eight games as the successor to Nuno Espírito Santo.

Head coach must make changes for Ireland’s visit after his error-strewn side lacked the nous to fight back after the hosts’ fast start

England arrived at Murrayfield announcing their intentions to be “bulletproof”. Truth be told this was Scotland shooting fish in a barrel. Punishing mistakes, of which there were a litany, Gregor Townsend’s team exposed the glaring limitations of Steve Borthwick’s side that will be desperately difficult to recover from.

Defeats happen, England’s winning run was always going to end sooner or later, but the paucity of this performance is some setback for a side whose grand slam hopes are over for another year. Two years ago Borthwick bemoaned how England had “played small” after a fast start, unable to stem Scotland’s momentum after giving up the initiative. Here they barely played at all. For England unravelled at Murrayfield again. It is as if Flower of Scotland flicks a switch in these players and Murphy’s law makes a mockery of them.

Former Chelsea and Real Madrid idol wants merely to be remembered as ‘a good player and a funny guy’ after a career of multiple titles – and spats with Mourinho

If Italy is a boot, Lecce sits right on the heel. It is here, deep in the countryside a few kilometres outside the baroque city, that the noise of the Bernabéu and the intensity of Stamford Bridge feel like a lifetime ago. The setting is rustic, quiet and slow-paced: a stark contrast to the frenetic energy that defined Eden Hazard’s career on the pitch.

It has been almost three years since he stopped playing, and the silence since his retirement at 32 has been notable. After an injury-hit spell at Real Madrid brought a premature end to a dazzling career, Hazard did not seek the spotlight. Surrounded by vineyards rather than defenders, slumped in an armchair, he seems entirely at peace, remarkably comfortable with his life after football.

Lucy and Pippa Tallant have opened the Crossbar, in Brighton, to create a place for women to feel comfortable watching all sport

You can’t miss it, the giant “Crossbar” flanked by two stylised crosses in black on the whitewashed outside walls glares down the street, a stone’s throw from Brighton’s Churchill Square. Outside is the narrow shelf that the co-owner Lucy Tallant, the DIY enthusiast of the pair, attached to the wall for those wanting to hang around outside. As she worked on that shelf, two girls walked past and one proclaimed: “Yeah, they’re opening a lesbian club.” “A lesbian club?” replied the other, “Yeah, there’s one outside now.”

Lucy was in stitches, and so was social media when she posted about what she had overheard. The shelf has become a thing, with lesbians posing for photographs and then sharing online with versions of “there’s one outside now” as the caption.

Croat never stays long but is an expert at doing what is necessary and also comes with a reputation as a taskmaster

In Italy, the interim manager of a football club is often referred to as “un traghettatore” – a ferryman. When waters are choppy, you do not need some ambitious captain with notions of heading out on an adventure. All you really want is someone who can get you safely to shore.

Igor Tudor is not keen on the word. Hearing it applied to him when he arrived at Juventus last season, he observed that every manager, everywhere, is living from game to game. “You can have a contract for five years and get sent home after three matches,” he said. “You have to construct your tomorrow today.”

Their best players and managers may move on, but this thoroughly modern club keep punching above their weight

When the news cycle spins so fast, it’s worth remembering where Brentford were in the summer. They had lost their popular manager of seven years, Thomas Frank. They had lost their two best forwards, Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa. They had lost their goalkeeper Mark Flekken. And they had lost two stalwarts in Christian Nørgaard and Ben Mee (even if the latter’s involvement the previous season had been limited as he turned 35). Departure and replacement is an unavoidable part of life for a club such as Brentford, but this seemed a like a lot to deal with.

Their summer signings were hard to judge. As a rule of thumb, if Brentford are signing someone about whom you already have considered opinions, it’s likely something has gone awry. That said, Caoimhín Kelleher’s gifts are clear, and a fee of just under £13m seemed good value for a goalkeeper with Premier League experience, while Dango Ouattara had demonstrated at Bournemouth how effective he could be either through the middle or out wide. But Antoni Milambo, Michael Kayode and Kaye Furo were unknown quantities.

• Australian hits out at online trolls who have targeted her appearance

• Former prodigy to call time on professional career at end of 2026

Australia’s Destanee Aiava has announced her plans to retire from professional tennis in a scathing and expletive-laden statement on social media.

The 25-year-old hit out at a tennis culture she said was “racist, misogynistic, homophobic and hostile to anyone who doesn’t fit the mould”, as she revealed plans to call time on her playing career at the end of 2026.

We didn’t see Super Bowl LX coming, but some of us were early believers in Ben Johnson’s Bears, Trevor Lawrence’s Jaguars and the fallibility of the Chiefs

It doesn’t take long for the egg the start dripping from our faces. The early September headline accompanying our 2025 NFL predictions – Will it be Mahomes, Jackson or Allen in the Super Bowl? – was the ultimate hedge. After all, what were the odds that one of them wouldn’t emerge from the AFC?

Then there was the reality. Mike Vrabel’s dramatic turnaround of New England. The Bears transforming from worst-to-first in the NFC North under Ben Johnson. The first-half magic of Daniel Jones. The successful pairing of Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Sam Darnold.

This dominant tradition in the party has long insisted on appeasing powerful interests. But it’s unsuited to modern times

Labour is a more complicated political party than most. For over a century, it has tried to contain warring traditions, philosophies and factions. Internal disagreements have been driven not just by personal rivalries, but by profound differences about how, and how much, to challenge Britain’s deeply embedded arrangements of power and wealth.

The party’s current crisis, while most directly caused by Keir Starmer’s political shortcomings and the chillingly selective morality of Peter Mandelson, is really the result of one Labour tradition demonstrably failing in government to meet the needs of today’s world. Often dominant in the party, especially over the past 40 years, you could call that tradition Labour minimalism.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

The similarities between now and events preceding the shah’s exile are striking. The radical clerics benefited then, but who would prevail this time?

A critical moment looms for Iran, and so for the Middle East. The global consequences of any upheaval in Tehran have been made amply clear since the revolution in 1979 that ushered in the rule of radical Islamist clerics. In Oman, the Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and his team have begun indirect talks with a high-powered US delegation. Many analysts believe the gap between the two sides is too wide to be bridged, and that a conflict is inevitable. Just this weekend, having already threatened military action, Donald Trump said regime change is the “the best thing that could happen” in Iran. The tension, and risks grow higher.

The hold on Iran of those who came to power in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution is now at stake. The ultimate objective of the US appears to be regime change. This may, in fact, already be under way. In December 2025 and January 2026, the most extensive wave of protest since the early 1980s swept Iran, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets from Mashhad to Abadan.

Jason Burke is the international security correspondent of the Guardian and author of The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s

Opposition challenger Péter Magyar is ahead in the polls on a promise of hope. Orbán is betting on fear of war to stay in power

After 16 years of uninterrupted power, Viktor Orbán is facing his biggest electoral challenge. For years Hungary’s prime minister has spun weak policy performance as success. The rise of a rival, Péter Magyar, and the opposition Tisza party has exposed the limits of that strategy.

The economy is stagnating, despite repeated promises of a long-awaited takeoff. Over the past decade and a half, Hungary has slipped from being one of central and eastern Europe’s strongest performers to one of its weakest. Public services, from healthcare to transport, are widely seen as neglected, and Policy Solutions surveys show that voters have noticed. Hungary is not alone in facing a cost of living crisis, but comparisons offer little consolation to voters who were assured that Orbán’s model would deliver exceptional results.

András Bíró-Nagy is a senior research fellow at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest and director of Policy Solutions. He is the author of The Path of Hungary’s EU Membership

Love has long been framed as a pursuit of the young, but this narrative lags behind reality

As Valentine’s Day approached we were once again flooded with the usual suspects: roses, chocolates, sophisticated dinners and glossy ads featuring young heterosexual couples staring earnestly into each other’s eyes. The problem isn’t just that this version of romance is exclusionary – though it is. It’s that it’s profoundly out of step with how love is actually being lived, negotiated and reimagined in contemporary Australia.

Culturally, love has long been framed as a pursuit of the young. From Romeo and Juliet to Normal People, from Bridget Jones to When Harry Met Sally, romantic fulfilment is depicted as something you secure early; ideally before your knees give out or your mortgage locks in. The message is consistent: find love in your 20s or 30s, settle down, and then coast (emotionally paired and narratively complete) until death do you part.

Lisa Portolan is an academic. Her latest book is 10 Ways to Find Love … and How to Keep it. She will appear in ‘Heterofatalism’ at the All About Women festival at the Sydney Opera House on 8 March

Our studies in civil resistance offer insight into the level of popular organizing needed to repel assaults on democracy

In the wake of two horrifying killings of legal observers in Minnesota, on top of the abduction of countless immigrant community members, the country has reached a turning point. Backlash against ICE’s lawlessness and aggression has reverberated so loudly that even Trump has heard it. But the effects on ordinary Americans contemplating what they would do if they lived in Minneapolis or St Paul is perhaps even more profound.

The extraordinary level of grassroots solidarity and creative resistance in anti-ICE protests in Minnesota has given people a new appreciation for the power that mass non-cooperation can have in resisting the Trump administration’s drive toward authoritarianism. And it has created an awareness of why such action is clearly needed.

Mark and Paul Engler are co-directors of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. A new and expanded 10th anniversary edition of their book This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century has just been released.

His shameful stewardship of a once great title highlights how much we lose when private interest eclipses the public good

Not long after being made Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999, Jeff Bezos told me: “They were not choosing me as much as they were choosing the internet, and me as a symbol.” A quarter of an increasingly dark century later, the Amazon founder is now a symbol of something else: how the ultra-rich can kill the news.

Job cuts in an industry that has struggled financially since the internet came into existence and killed its business model is hardly new, but last week’s brutal cull of hundreds of journalists at the Bezos-owned Washington Post marks a new low. The redundancies that were announced to staff on a video call, the axing of half its foreign bureau (including the war reporter in Ukraine) – not since P&O Ferries have layoffs been handled so badly. Former Post stalwart Paul Farhi described a decision that affected nearly half of the 790-strong workforce as “the biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation”.

This year-round churn profits shops and content creators, but not the rest of us. Nobody needs ‘autumn oven gloves’

It’s Valentine’s Day, which means you should have spent the last few weeks swapping all of the lamps in your house. If not, you still have a few hours: box up your beige lampshades (or better yet, throw them in the bin) and replace them with ones of red and pink hues. Then – if you want to feel mentally well – you must also change your lightbulbs, because “warm white lighting” is the best way to ensure your crimson decor doesn’t look “too harsh”.

This is according to online lighting company Pooky, which is selling 43 “lust-worthy lamps” (and shades) for Valentine’s Day. A press release sent on behalf of the brand in late January proudly declared that Google searches for “seasonal decor” have increased 70% year-on-year globally, while queries about “Valentine’s decor” have soared 2,584% since the start of 2026. “The beauty of seasonal lighting,” said Pooky’s chief creative officer, “is that it’s easy to rotate. Store one or two Valentine lampshades, a set of rose-tinted bulbs and a handful of candles in a labelled box, and you can transform your home every February in minutes.”

With their profile and vile words, these malign provocateurs are tearing down decency’s guardrails

It lacks the elegance of “greed is good”, but as a distillation of the spirit of the age, it’s right up there. “I feel liberated,” a top banker told the Financial Times shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”

So that’s what they meant by “vibe shift”. Though, as the Epstein files reveal daily, the top 0.01% were hardly primly biting their tongues before Trump’s win, at least not in private. Those with telephone-number fortunes and great power felt able to speak, and write, to each other about women in language so vicious, so filled with hate – women discussed as body parts, as “less than human”, in Gordon Brown’s apt phrase – that they didn’t need the encouragement of a “grab ’em by the pussy” president to cast off their inhibitions.

Jonathan Freedland 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.

With just seven weeks before its funding runs out, the UK’s greatest cultural asset and most trusted international news organisation must be supported

“The programmes will neither be very interesting nor very good,” said the then BBC director general John Reith, when he launched its Empire Service in December 1932. Nearly a century later, the BBC World Service, as it is now known, broadcasts in 43 languages, reaches 313 million people a week and is one of the UK’s most influential cultural assets. It is also a lifeline for millions. “Perhaps Britain’s greatest gift to the world” in the 20th century, as Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, once put it.

But this week Tim Davie, the corporation’s director general, announced that the World Service will run out of funding in just seven weeks. Most of its £400m budget comes from the licence fee, although the Foreign Office – which funded it entirely until 2014 – contributed £137m in the last year. The funding arrangement with the Foreign Office finishes at the end of March. There is no plan for what happens next.

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.

At a moment of stagnation and political drift, Andy Burnham’s push for a new plan suggests the centre-left debate has moved beyond Downing Street

Once a political leader’s net favourability sinks deep into negative territory, recovery is the exception, not the rule. It usually takes an economic rebound, a dramatic political reset or an opposition implosion to reverse the slide. Sir Keir Starmer’s personal ratings are in a danger zone from which few escape.

Yet the prime minister, like the Bourbons, has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. He made a speech this week after coming close to being ousted suggesting he would “fight” on. He doubled down in parliament despite glaring errors in judgment. He forced out his cabinet secretary while his own failures remain unaddressed. He seemed to blame everyone but himself. When support slips and a leader answers with defiance, voters don’t see strength – they see denial.

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Readers respond to Sangeeta Pillai’s objection to Britons’ ‘pointless stream of politeness’

I do not agree with Sangeeta Pillai (The hill I will die on: Britons love saying thank you – I think we should ban the phrase, 7 February). I do not like sarcastic or passive aggressive “thank yous”, but what is wrong with thanking people in the service industry for the service they give? I do not believe that it is overworked or meaningless. I love to thank baristas, shop assistants, bus drivers or other people because they more often than not provide a very good service. They work hard and are not paid a lot of money. They are often people doing jobs that are difficult for one reason or another.

Why not be kind and appreciative? Isn’t there enough hardship and negativity in these febrile times?
Deirdre Breen
Dublin, Ireland

Francis Bown says its grey concrete and childlike composition expressed the fatalism and despair of the time, while Helen Keats reflects on other brutalist builds

Fiona Twycross, the heritage minister, is to be congratulated for finally giving London’s Southbank Centre Grade II listing (Campaigners welcome ‘long overdue’ listing of brutalist Southbank Centre, 10 February).

I remember being shocked when I first saw it in the 1960s, but it has become a remarkable symbol of the zeitgeist.

Readers respond to Sammy Gecsoyler’s article about his week without bank and contactless cards

I welcome Sammy Gecsoyler’s article (My week of only using cash: could a return to notes and coins change my life?, 10 February) while noting that he is young, employed and living in a city, and that he commented about the older cash-payers seen in charity shops.

I am one of the many who live rurally. We rely on access to cash. Our lives still include paying small sums – £2.50 for entry and a coffee at our many village societies (open to all), or £5 for lunch provided fortnightly by volunteers – and varying sums to sponsor fundraising or village facilities, or small amounts to travel on our community bus.

Beehive socialism | Ratcliffe’s apology | Tommy Cooper’s dream | Valentine’s Day | Love boat

The beehive may not be quite the utopian dream it first appears to be (Letters, 9 February). Worker bees need to be so active during the summer months that they typically only survive for about four to six weeks. Drone bees’ longevity is not much better. The lucky ones may get to service the queen, but die as a consequence. Unsurprisingly, the queen fares much better.
Tom Challenor
Ealing, London

• So Jim Ratcliffe is sorry for his choice of language use in relation to immigration (Report, 12 February). What about being sorry for his sentiments? Could I suggest that he spends a week as a bed-bound inpatient in a NHS hospital before he makes a judgment about the contribution of immigrants?
Liz Thompson
Oxford

Mette Frederiksen and her Greenlandic counterpart, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said the pressure on the island’s people was “unacceptable”. Key US politics stories from 14 February at a glance

Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen has said she believes Donald Trump still wants to own Greenland, despite dialling back his recent threats to seize it by force.

Asked at the Munich Security Conference if the US president still wanted to own the Arctic island, Frederiksen said: “Unfortunately, I think the desire is the same.”

Exclusive: images and testimony from the January uprising, when Iranian security forces are believed to have killed thousands of men, women and children who had flocked on to the streets

After imposing a nationwide internet blackout, the Iranian regime appears to have largely obscured the mass killing of protesters. However, a photographer in Tehran has managed to share their documentation of what happened, along with the testimony of those who joined in and survived the protests.

The fight for Hope Moor is set to be repeated across the UK as the government aims to hit its renewable energy targets

Instead of a slingshot, the Davids are brandishing a sculpture and a coffee table book. Their Goliaths are a Norwegian energy company and a UK energy secretary with renewable targets to meet.

A fierce battle has begun over one of England’s tallest windfarms, proposed for deep peat moorland overlooking the Yorkshire Dales national park, in what residents say will mark the irrevocable industrialisation of their rural landscape.

Brewer last month said it was closing its distilling brands, prompting concerns for jobs at its Scottish facility

The beer-maker BrewDog could be broken up after consultants were called in to help find new investors.

The Scotland-based brewer, which makes craft beer such as Punk IPA and Elvis Juice, has appointed consultants AlixPartners to oversee the sale process.

Man charged after 2,600-year-old cat sculpture, mummy mask and necklace stolen from Caboolture museum

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Queensland police have arrested a man accused of staging a brazen cat burglary of priceless Egyptian artefacts from a museum in Caboolture, north of Brisbane.

The man, 52, of no fixed address, was arrested on Russell Island in Moreton Bay on Saturday evening, after police allegedly found most of the stolen artefacts in a camper van parked at a ferry terminal.

Senators said repeal was ‘particularly troubling’ and was counter to EPA’s mandate to protect human health

More than three dozen Democratic senators have begun an independent inquiry into the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following a huge change in how the agency measures the health benefits of reducing air pollution that is widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.

In a regulatory impact analysis, the EPA said it would stop assigning a monetary value to the health benefits associated with regulations on fine particulate matter and ozone. The agency argued that the estimates contain too much uncertainty.

A thatcher, gardener and others on keeping their business afloat in the bad weather – and their fears for the future

With 76 flood warnings still in force across the UK and further downpours forecast this week and next, parts of the country have endured rain almost without pause since the start of the year.

The prolonged wet weather is disrupting livelihoods as well as daily life, particularly in rural areas, where flooded roads, waterlogged ground and repeated storms are making it harder to keep businesses afloat, protect crops and maintain steady work.

Exclusive: High levels of banned ‘forever chemical’ have been detected in rivers and groundwater at 25 sites

A string of toxic pollution hotspots has been uncovered across Cumbria and Lancashire, with high levels of the banned cancer-causing “forever chemical” Pfos detected in rivers and groundwater at 25 sites.

The contamination, spread across a large area, was uncovered by Watershed Investigations and the Guardian after a freedom of information request revealed high concentrations of Pfos in Environment Agency samples taken in January 2025.

Environmental groups say ‘cynical and devastating’ reversal of endangerment finding has grave implications

The Trump administration has dismantled the basis for all US climate regulations, in its most confrontational anti-environment move yet.

The 2009 endangerment finding determined that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare and should therefore be controlled by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). By revoking it on Thursday, officials eliminated the legal foundation enabling the government to control planet-heating pollution.

Family pay tribute to Demi Edmunds, from Caldicot, saying she ‘loved her friends, and she was loved by all’

A 17-year-old girl who died in a collision involving three cars in Wales was “funny, kind and caring”, her brother said.

Demi Edmunds was the sole pedestrian in the incident on the A4042 in Cwmbran, Torfaen, Wales, which occurred at about 12.25pm on Thursday afternoon, Gwent police said.

HMRC figures show 11% rise in young million-pound earners, with influencers and tech pay cited as key

Their generation is often derided for being work-shy, self-centred and overly sensitive. But when it comes to making money, people under 30 are proving they are something else entirely: successful.

A record 1,000 taxpayers under 30 earned more than £1m last year, an 11% increase on the year before, HMRC records show.

Co-author George Cottrell is close aide to party leader Nigel Farage and served several months in US prison

As a choice for a book title, How to Launder Money certainly caught the eye. But then again, its co-author George Cottrell claims to know what he’s talking about.

A close aide to Nigel Farage, Cottrell served several months in a US prison after being convicted there in 2017 for wire fraud – a chapter in his life he referred to at his book launch party on Thursday night.

Senior policing source says ‘tsunami’ of claims expected after US release of papers relating to disgraced financier

British police have set up a new national group to deal with allegations that Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking of women had ties to Britain, as well as claims against his associates, such as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

At least three British police forces are dealing with allegations triggered by the revelations about Epstein and his associates in documents released in the US, with more claims of wrongdoing expected by police officials.

Mohan Karki – one of many people ICE has deported to countries with which they have little connection – leaves behind his wife and seven-month-old baby he has yet to hold

Tika Basnet sat facing the glow of her iPhone, a red tika pressed into the center of her forehead. Seven-month-old Briana slept on her lap, her breathing soft and uneven. On the other side of the screen was Mohan Karki, Basnet’s husband, who had yet to hold his daughter.

For Karki, nearly 9,000 miles (14,500km) away, it was already morning. He was in hiding in south Asia, his exact location withheld for his safety, his face breaking into pixels as he watched his daughter sleep.

Few outsiders, if any, have ventured more widely into the centre of Sudan’s brutal civil war than Jérôme Tubiana. The French humanitarian has been granted unprecedented access to travel throughout the western region of Darfur to document the heart of a conflict that has created the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. His powerful images offer insights into a gruelling war that shows no sign of abating, but where hope endures that one day the killing might stop

Worst weather forecast to hit late on Sunday, a day after floods caused power outages, road collapses and home evacuations

New Zealand’s weather bureau has warned more flooding could hit the country’s North Island, a day after floods caused power outages, road collapses, home evacuations and caused the death of a man whose vehicle was submerged on a highway.

There was “threat to life from dangerous river conditions, significant flooding and slips” as a deepening low-pressure system east of the North Island brought heavy rain and severe gales to several regions, the weather bureau said.

The disappearance in Arizona of the Today show host Savannah Guthrie’s mother has captivated the nation

Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her Tucson, Arizona, home two weeks ago, setting off a potent chain reaction of federal and local criminal investigation, amateur sleuthing and public obsession that – so far – has resulted in neither the 84-year-old grandmother being located or anyone named as a suspect or, indeed, arrested.

It is a case that is both enthralling and baffling the American public, casting doubts on the ability of investigators to get to the bottom of the mystery that each day generates a fresh 24-hour news cycle – but seemingly little in the way of solid fresh leads likely to solve the case.

Agentic AI apps first interview you and then give you limited matches selected for ‘similarity and reciprocity of personality’

Dating apps exploit you, dating profiles lie to you, and sex is basically something old people used to do. You might as well consider it: can AI help you find love?

For a handful of tech entrepreneurs and a few brave Londoners, the answer is “maybe”.

Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax changes encourage more people to invest in previously unloved product

The government’s “inheritance tax raid” on pensions has helped drive sales of retirement annuities to new highs.

Industry data this week revealed they enjoyed a “record-breaking” 2025, with sales growing by 4% to £7.4bn and the average amount invested in an annuity surpassing £80,000 for the first time.

High court refuses injunction to stop CMA naming company penalised for failing to hand over information

Euro Car Parks is infamous for dishing out fines but the private parking company has been hit with an almost £475,000 penalty of its own after it failed to hand over information to a regulator.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had imposed a £473,000 fine after the company did not respond for three months to seven requests for information, including by registered post, email and hand-delivered letter.

Its human partners said the flirty, quirky GPT-4o was the perfect companion – on the eve of Valentine’s Day, it’s being turned off for good. How will users cope?

Brandie plans to spend her last day with Daniel at the zoo. He always loved animals. Last year, she took him to the Corpus Christi aquarium in Texas, where he “lost his damn mind” over a baby flamingo. “He loves the color and pizzazz,” Brandie said. Daniel taught her that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.

Daniel is a chatbot powered by the large language model ChatGPT. Brandie communicates with Daniel by sending text and photos, talks to Daniel while driving home from work via voice mode. Daniel runs on GPT-4o, a version released by OpenAI in 2024 that is known for sounding human in a way that is either comforting or unnerving, depending on who you ask. Upon debut, CEO Sam Altman compared the model to “AI from the movies” – a confidant ready to live life alongside its user.

The journalist, presenter and author on catchy kids’ earworms, impromptu rap-off during BBC night shifts and the 90s pop banger that plays havoc with her ankles

The first song I fell in love with
I grew up in a house where music was played all the time. I watched Kylie on Neighbours, and so fell in love with I Should Be So Lucky. I love how you don’t need to know about her private life, you can still just love her. I went to see her recently and she was amazing.

The first album I bought
Hangin’ Tough by New Kids on the Block, on cassette, from Woolies in Middlesbrough, with some pick’n’mix. I don’t think you could ever go into Woolies and not come out with some pick’n’mix. I liked the underdog, so Donnie Wahlberg was my favourite member.

It was the reality show that aimed to disrupt the fashion industry but, as a shocking Netflix docuseries details, it also became part of the problem

Even for those who didn’t watch the show religiously, there’s a scene in America’s Next Top Model that has broken through from reality TV infamy to hall-of-fame virality.

It’s when Tyra Banks, model-turned-TV-mogul, loses her temper in spectacular fashion at contest Tiffany Richardson, after misunderstanding her post-elimination response as something to be read as ungrateful. “I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this!” she screams. “When my mother yells like this, it’s because she loves me. I was rooting for you, we were all rooting for you, how dare you!”

Pelicot tells her story about finding justice in a Newsnight special. Plus: hit thriller Yellowjackets comes to ITV1. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Two

My teenage self was shy and miserable, before a coming-of-age film unleashed an adolescence of drink, sex and drugs. It was a years-long party that eventually came crashing down

At 13, what felt like almost overnight, I turned from a happy, musical-theatre-loving child into a sad, lonely teenager. Things I had cared about only yesterday were suddenly irrelevant, as I realised that nothing and no one mattered, least of all me. It’s an angst that adults often find difficult to remember or understand; as the famous line from The Virgin Suicides goes: “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.”

Going to an all-girls Catholic school, I didn’t even really know that sex, drugs and alcohol existed, or that they had currency, until I watched Thirteen for the first time at 14, after seeing a still on Pinterest. The reckless rebellion the two best friends portrayed was seductive to me, and within weeks of watching the film, I’d met some girls from the co-ed school opposite who were having sex, going to parties and taking drugs. Soon, I was doing it all too.

Institutional menace and an idealistic take on redemption sit side-by-side in Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ empathic and occasionally over-earnest film

The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test.

This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way.

From ‘honour’ killings to nuclear war, some screen works have led directly legislative action – despite what jury head Wenders suggested at the Berlin film festival

Should film festivals be more than just screenings and red carpets? Should they prompt us to think about the role cinema plays in the world? Novelist Arundhati Roy certainly thinks so. She pulled out of appearing at the Berlin festival in protest at jury president Wim Wenders’ claim that films should “stay out of politics”; she said Wenders’ stance was “unconscionable”, and that to “hear [him] say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping.”

Wenders had suggested that cinema is a way to build empathy, but not directly change politicians’ minds. However this is simply not true. Some films – both documentary and narrative – have not only changed public opinion about social issues but led directly to legislation. Despite evidence to the contrary, politicians are people too. They can be moved. And sometimes they are even moved to action.

Declarations of undying affection, comparisons to a summer’s day? Who needs ‘em! Our writers recall the offbeat songs that capture their hearts

By Easter 2004, I’d been in a relationship with my partner, Maria, for four months and I was just realising how deeply in love I was. We had become inseparable. A magazine sent me to the ATP festival at Pontins in Camber Sands to interview “the Beastie Boys of noise”, Wolf Eyes. The interview fell to pieces when the band, in a state of great psychic refreshment, all wearing Manowar T-shirts, refused to stop watching a Manowar DVD and signalled they would only answer questions if they related to Manowar.

BP Pulse Live, Birmingham
The US band’s brawny, pit-inciting riffs come laced with blurry waves of distortion, making for music that is oddly reflective and melancholy

Early 00s metal is enjoying a revival, but that alone can’t account for the dramatic surge in commercial fortunes being enjoyed by Deftones. Thirty-one years on from the release of their debut album, they find themselves, as frontman Chino Moreno has put it, “literally bigger than we’ve ever been”. Between the release of 2020’s Ohms and last year’s Private Music their monthly listener figures on Spotify surged from two million to 17 million. The 15,000-capacity venue where they open their UK tour is accordingly heaving.

The reason, with a certain inevitability, is TikTok virality. Tonight, Deftones’ setlist is liberally peppered with tracks ubiquitous on the social media app, from opener Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) to encore Cherry Waves – although why its users have alighted on them is a matter of conjecture. On fan forums, opinions range from the practical (younger listeners discovered the band after emo rappers sampled their music) to the more earthy: there is discussion of a phenomenon called – dear God - “hornycore” into which the Deftones apparently fit because Moreno has “sexual tones” and is “a fox/daddy”.

(Atlantic)
Casting off her Bratty cigarettes and sunglasses, the pop visionary channels the torments of Heathcliff and Cathy and the tumult of the Velvet Underground on her latest captivating pivot

In the catalogues of rock and pop artists, film soundtracks usually seem like interstitial releases. For every career highlight Shaft or Superfly, there’s a plethora of soundtrack albums that carry the tang of the side-hustle. It was doubtless flattering to be asked in the first place – who doesn’t want to feel like a polymath? – but the results are doomed to languish in the footnotes, alongside the compilations of B-sides and outtakes, where only diehard fans spend extended amounts of time.

But the release of House, the first single taken from Charli xcx’s soundtrack to Wuthering Heights, strongly suggested that its author saw Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë as a chance for a reset. In 2024’s Brat, she made an album you could genuinely call era-defining without fear of embarrassment: if an album makes an impact on the US presidential campaign and its title ends up refashioned as an adjective in the Collins English Dictionary, then it’s definitely era-defining.

The Londoner defies classification, writing, producing and arranging her unique mix of neo-soul, R&B, indie and grunge – and gathering some big-name backers along the way

From London
Recommend if you like Rochelle Jordan, Ragz Originale, Sailorr
Up next New music due later this year

Natanya tears genres open and rebuilds them in her own image. Her drums swing loose and jazzy over heavy 808s; synths drift dreamily before snapping into gritty guitar riffs. Writing, producing and arranging all her own work, she weaves together neo-soul silk, R&B groove, indie edge, and flashes of grunge, all carried by a buttery falsetto that nods to Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson and early Destiny’s Child.

They’re all over blurbs and social media, but do these bite-size labels lead to formulaic fiction? Plus the classics reimagined for a modern reader

Opposites attract. He falls first. Coffee shop. Forced proximity. Sports romance. University sports romance. Ivy League university sports romance! Best friend’s brother. Brother’s best friend. Slow burn. Age gap. Amnesia. Wounded hero. Single father. Single mother. Language barrier. The bodyguard. Fake dating. Marriage of convenience.

If this list means nothing to you, you’re not a romance reader. Tropes, as these bullet-point ideas have come to be known, have taken over romance. Those who write, market and read romantic fiction use them to pinpoint exactly what to expect before the first page is turned. On Instagram, Amazon and bookshop posters you’ll find covers annotated with arrows and faux-handwritten labels reading “slow-burn” or “home-town boy/new girl in town”. Turn over any romance title and they’ll be there listed in the blurb.

Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward; Pagans by James Alistair Henry; Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo; Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman; A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang

Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward (Viper, £16.99)
The latest from the horror/crime virtuoso combines supernatural, psychological and all-too-human terrors in a tale drawing on elements ranging from Peter Pan to historic serial abusers. Nowhere House was in a remote American mountain valley; when it burned down, the terrible crimes committed by Hollywood star Leaf Winham against young men were revealed. Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy – or is it a girl? – hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian. Her experiences are interwoven with stories from others drawn there: Marc, a journalist determined to get inside the fortress; Adam, the only one of Leaf’s victims to survive; the pioneers who built the first house in the valley, and more. A dark, grimly compelling and very twisty tale.

Pagans by James Alistair Henry (Moonflower, £9.99)
In this entertaining alt-history debut, we are in a 21st-century Britain where the Norman conquest never happened, split along religious and cultural lines. The Saxons are led by the High King, who rules the greater part of England; Scotland is behind a wall, allied to the Nordic Economic Union; and the indigenous Celts are second-class citizens. In the buildup to a London summit to discuss plans for British unity, a Celtic negotiator is found dead, nailed to a tree in Epping Forest. Detective Captain Aedith Mercia of the London police teams up with Drustan of the Dumnonian tribal police in a search for what seems to be a religiously motivated serial killer; they find evidence there could be a greater political threat. It’s a great read, combining clever world-building with engaging characters and an exciting story, and ending with a promise of more to come.

Who killed Zorah? Snippets of gossip expose the divisions in a migrant community in this polyphonic portrait of contemporary America

There has been debate lately about whether novels should cater for our cauterised attention spans. If that means narratives constructed in short chunks that can be consumed in five-minute bursts on a phone – intelligent, but with plenty of cliffhangers and well-timed packets of information to keep us coming back – then Good People ticks all the boxes.

Patmeena Sabit’s debut is constructed from a chorus of short testimonies – none more than a few pages, some just a few lines – about the death of Zorah Sharaf, an Afghan American teenager who has drowned in a canal at the wheel of the family car. We hear from family, friends and those in the wider community – neighbours, teachers, schoolmates, journalists, the guy who found the body – as well as those involved in the investigation (though very little from the police), and bites of media commentary. A picture slowly forms of a devastated family, but what kind of family was it? Versions are multiple and contradictory. The Sharafs are perfect, loving, tight-knit. They are dangerously dysfunctional.

A portrait of the company whose ‘toymaker philosophy’ stands in contrast to the tech giants that rule our lives

What is the highest-grossing entertainment franchise of all time? You might be tempted to think of Star Wars, or perhaps the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Maybe even Harry Potter? But no: it’s Pokémon – the others don’t come close. The Japanese “pocket monsters”, which star in video games, TV series and tradable playing cards, have made an estimated $115bn since 1996. Is this a sign of the lamentable infantilisation of postmodern society?

Not a bit of it, argues Keza MacDonald, the Guardian’s video games editor, in her winsomely enthusiastic biography of Nintendo, the company that had become an eponym for electronic entertainment long before anyone had heard the words “PlayStation” or “Xbox”. Yes, Pokémon is mostly a children’s pursuit, but a sophisticated one: “Like Harry Potter, the Famous Five and Narnia,” she observes, “it offers a powerful fantasy of self-determination, set in a world almost totally free of adult supervision.” And in its complicated scoring system, “it got millions of kids voluntarily doing a kind of algebra”.

We explore the cosy world-building spin-off with Game Freak’s Shigeru Ohmori and his fellow developers – and learn how it began with a Pokémon-hunting dream

Pokémon is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, and everybody knows what to expect from these games by now. The concept is simple: head into a cartoonish paradise full of whimsical creatures, capture them in red-and-white balls and assemble a team of warriors from them, before battling other aspiring Pokémon masters. But the latest entry in the series is different – a game that’s more about building than battling.

In Pokopia, a refreshingly pacific twist on the series, players are dropped into a virtual world where Pokémon are freed from their spherical prisons and happily roam their natural habitats. There’s one minor caveat – you have to create those habitats by hand, building them from what you can find.

The YouTube gaming star’s weird and divisive adaptation of his obscure horror film is a game within a film about a game – and hints at new directions for storytelling

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Something weird struck me early on while watching the movie Iron Lung, which has so far taken $32m at the box office, despite being a grungy low-budget sci-fi thriller adapted from an independent video game few people outside of the horror gaming community have even heard of. Set after a galactic apocalypse, it follows a convict who must buy his freedom by piloting a rusty submarine through an ocean of human blood on a distant planet. Ostensibly, he’s looking for relics that may prove vital for scientific research, but what he finds is much more ghastly. So far, so strange.

The film was also written, directed and financed by one person – the YouTube gaming superstar Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach – who also stars. But that’s not the weird part, either. The weird part is that watching the film Iron Lung feels like watching Fischbach play Iron Lung the game. Maybe it’s the fact that he spends most of the movie sitting at the sub’s controls, trying to figure out how to use them correctly – like a gamer would. Maybe it’s that, as the film progresses, he has to solve a series of environmental puzzles linked by various codes, computer read-outs and little injections of narrative – just like in a video game. Long periods of the movie involve Fischbach trying to decide what to do next, the camera close up on his confused face. This is incredibly similar to watching his YouTube videos about playing Iron Lung, an experience he often found bewildering. It was the most metatextual experience I’ve had in the cinema since The Truman Show – but I’m not sure this is what Fischbach intended.

PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox, PC; Grasshopper Manufacture/Marvelous Inc
After some dumb fun hacking at zombies, legendary developer Suda51’s first original game in a decade sadly only delivers a host of incoherent disappointments

Ever since he baffled GameCube owners with 2005’s Killer7, Japanese game director Suda51 has had a reputation for turning heads. From parodying the banality of open-world games with 2007’s No More Heroes to collaborating with James Gunn for 2012’s pulpy Lollipop Chainsaw, his games often offer a welcome reprieve from soulless, half-a-billion-dollar-budget gaming blockbusters. It was with considerable excitement that I fired up Suda’s first new game in 10 years.

The game kicks off with a slick cartoon that shows our hero, Romeo Stargazer, being eaten by a zombie. Hastily resurrected by his zany scientist grandfather, Romeo returns from the brink imbued with new powers – and then we’re off. Almost immediately I am bombarded by an impenetrable wall of proper-noun nonsense. It’s like this for the next 20 hours.

Trading social media for Pokémon battles and evolutions in Kanto on a Game Boy Advance has been surprisingly serene

Cutting back on doomscrolling must be one of the hardest new year resolutions to keep. Instinctively tapping on the usual suspects on your phone’s home screen becomes a reflex, and vast quantities of money and user data have been specifically employed to keep you reaching for the phone, ingraining it into our work, leisure and social lives. You’ll get no shame from me if you love your phone and have a healthy relationship with your apps, but I’ve found myself struggling lately.

This year, I’m attempting to cut back on screen time – sort of. I’m replacing the sleek oblong of my smartphone with something a little more fuzzy and nostalgic. In an attempt to dismantle my bad habit, I’m closing the feeds of instant updates and instead carrying around a Game Boy Advance. I’ve been playing Pokémon FireRed, a remake of the very first Pokémon games, which turn 30 this month. Even this refreshed version is more than two decades old.

Bush theatre, London
Karim Khan’s tender portrait of South Asians finding companionship through shared grief and illness is played with crackling chemistry by Shobu Kapoor and Rehan Sheikh

Love stories don’t traditionally start in diabetes clinics. Nor are two widowed South Asians dealing with declining health in their later years conventional romantic leads. But this is where Karim Khan’s quietly passionate play takes us. Despite its overlong running time, it’s a story that cuts straight to the heart.

Khan is a whiz at writing authentic multilingual conversation. From their first meeting, Liaquat and Hema zoom between Hindi and English, building a vivid soundscape of diasporic life. In their sessions, Hema (played with sharp fire by Shobu Kapoor) is initially exasperated by Rehan Sheikh’s gentle, teddy-bear-like Liaquat and his blithe refusal to take his diabetes seriously. Over time, though, their chemistry starts to crackle, as they steal and feast on mangoes, and Hema forgets, for just a second, about their rising sugar levels.

Shrink to toy-size or dive into an ocean in exhibition where studio brings Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Up to life

If you have ever wanted to rummage through the books in Andy’s bedroom from Toy Story or inspect the vintage trinkets lining the shelves of Carl Fredricksen’s home in Up, you’re in luck.

Scenes from some of Pixar’s most beloved films have been meticulously recreated in Wembley, north London, as part of the newly opened immersive Mundo Pixar Experience.

Aldwych theatre, London
William Nicholson’s take on CS Lewis’s marriage to an American divorcee should have you in bits but it fails to feel as eviscerating as it should

The drama of love and loss in Shadowlands has played out movingly in film and on television. William Nicholson’s take on CS Lewis’s marriage to an American divorcee is that of late-found passion, terminal illness and a crisis of the celebrated writer’s Christian faith. In all its iterations, it is an old-fashioned weepie. In this production, originally staged at Chichester Festival theatre, it just feels old-fashioned.

It has charm and pulls you into its sadness but seems as creaky as the half-filled, wood-panelled library in its backdrop. There is too much a sense of a drama unfolding, from the moment Lewis (Hugh Bonneville) receives a letter from American fan, Joy Davidman (Maggie Siff), to his slow falling in love and her descent into illness.

Theatre Royal, Glasgow
There are strong performances and much to admire in Dai Fujikura and Harry Ross’s opera about the Japanese artist, but it feels strangely inert

‘I might become the art myself,” sings the artist Katsushika Hokusai in the new opera by composer Dai Fujikura and librettist Harry Ross. And here he is, doing just that: played by the baritone Daisuke Ohyama, with the forces of Scottish Opera ranged around him.

Over five acts, The Great Wave gives us episodes from Hokusai’s life and death, beginning with his funeral then continuing in flashback, including a dream sequence in which he encounters the wave that inspired his most famous print. As you might expect, it looks beautiful. The production is the work of an all-Japanese team headed by the director Satoshi Miyagi, and it’s full of Hokusai’s pictures, projected upon the bamboo walls of Junpei Kiz’s set, which reflect the artist’s barrel-shaped coffin. It often sounds beautiful, too: Fujikura uses the shakuhachi – a recorder-like flute, played by Shozan Hasegawa – as the basis for a light-infused soundworld conjuring openness and simplicity in almost Copland-esque style, made piquant with fluttering, elusive orchestral textures.

Queens-born Joe Macken’s hyperrealistic model, made with wood, cardboard and glue, is now on view at the Museum of the City of New York

In 2003, Joe Macken built a miniature model of a bridge out of popsicle sticks. He wanted it to look like a “hybrid” of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges. Soon after, Macken, who grew up in Middle Village, Queens, moved his family to a small town upstate, more than 160 miles from the city. Macken loaded his bridge on the moving truck. It did not make the trip.

“It got destroyed, and I was kind of bummed,” said Macken, who is now 63. “So I figured, let me build something better.”

In this week’s newsletter: Everyone has to start somewhere … and in front of someone. Thankfully, these soon-to-be-huge artists left the mime act and dodgy covers (mostly) in the past

From the Beatles slogging through mammoth sets for jeering sailors in Hamburg basement bars, to Ed Sheeran playing just about every open mic night in the south of England, even the biggest acts had to start small. So when we asked Guide readers to share their memories of seeing now-massive bands and artists before they were famous, it was inevitable we’d get some great tales. So much so, in fact, that we’ve decided to devote the main chunk of this week’s Guide to your pre-fame gig recollections. We’ve also asked Guardian music writers – seasoned veterans of seeking out the next big thing – to share a few of their memories. Read on for tales of Kurt Cobain in Yorkshire, Playboi Carti’s set in an east London snooker club and an ill-advised David Bowie mime performance …

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Capturing things that mix the strange with the beautiful helped the Spanish graphic designer recover from a blue period

Iñigo Jerez Quintana uses the French term objet trouvé to describe this abandoned bear. Quintana, a Spanish graphic designer, was walking from his studio to a work meeting in Poblenou, a district of Barcelona, when he spotted it.

“I take photos based on visual impulses; anything that catches my eye,” he says. “The colour match of the bear’s fur and wall paint anchors a childish stereotype in a place where it doesn’t really belong.”

Apollo theatre, London
Jonathan Lynn’s farewell to the beloved parliamentary sitcom casts Griff Rhys Jones as ex-PM Jim Hacker, making one last call on his wily consigliere

Death comes to us all but, slightly before it, so too does that period when no one’s certain whether you’re still around. “I’m not dead,” splutters Griff Rhys Jones’s Jim Hacker in this Yes, Prime Minister reboot. “I’m in the House of Lords!” The ex-PM is also now master of an Oxford college, but is faced with expulsion from this sinecure by students riled by his affronts against woke orthodoxy. And so, in Jonathan Lynn’s elegiac swansong for his well-loved sitcom duo, Hacker calls upon his old consigliere Sir Humphrey to rescue him from trouble one last time.

Lynn (who wrote the original with the late Antony Jay) directs too, alongside Michael Gyngell, a production first staged in 2023 at the Barn in Cirencester. Its ambition, as Hacker’s care worker Sophie telegraphs by quoting Shelley’s Ozymandias, is to examine the mighty once they have fallen. Whither Hacker and Sir Humphrey, now exiled from the corridors of power, hanging on to a world they now barely understand? The latter is condemned to a care home, indeed, by his “evil queen” daughter-in-law. There is poignancy in that, but it’s not dwelled upon in a show that majors not in depth of feeling, far less dramatic incident, but in urbane wit and the illicit thrill of hearing old codgers say inappropriate things.

It’s possible this is a platonic relationship, but your concerns are valid and your husband isn’t providing any reassurance

My husband and I are in our 60s. We have been married for 40 years, some of it happily, some not so much. Our children are grown up and gone, and we have recently retired. Some of our tensions over the years have been around my husband’s tendency to be undermining and belittling. He claims not to understand why I might find certain things upsetting, yet refuses to engage with couples counselling (apparently I would tell lies). We have muddled through and mostly get on well now, though he dislikes most of my friends and siblings, and won’t socialise with them. To be fair, he is self-contained and doesn’t seem to need friends in the way I do – he has one friend.

A few months ago, an ex-colleague got in touch with my husband and asked to meet for coffee. They met, had a long lunch, and my husband mentioned a few weeks later that they were arranging to meet again as he had enjoyed the catchup. I was a bit thrown. I found it odd that she couldn’t confide in her partner or friends, but my husband exploded and we had one of our worst, most vicious arguments in years. He accused me of not wanting him to have friends (the opposite is true) and threw up the fact that I have platonic male friends; true, but my male friends and I go back 30-plus years and we don’t meet one-to-one. This just feels a bit out of character and potentially inappropriate.

Ripping up your own rulebook after 20-odd years is brave, but Koba 2.0 is somehow still kicking it

Sometimes, my memories of a restaurant begin at the end, and at Koba in Fitzrovia, central London, the enduring image is the warm, fresh, sugary, bean paste doughnut served with a pot of buckwheat tea. It was an utter delight, but then, Korean sweet bean paste, which is made with adzuki beans, is so very satisfying: pleasantly claggy, almost nutty, and a little decadent, while at the same time still convincing you that it might count as one of your five a day, were it not stuffed inside a hot fresh doughnut with a whopping great dollop of whipped cream. It was a cold winter’s day – the sort where, by lunchtime, my own umbrella had blown inside-out twice and everyone else’s seemed determined to poke my eye out. Against that backdrop, this doughnut was a moment of pure bliss.

Koba, a Korean restaurant by Linda Lee, has been providing moments of such joy for 20 solid years, not least with its traditional tabletop barbecue hot plates on which guests could grill their own dinner. Or, in many cases, have their dinner grilled for them by a kindly server, because nothing says: “Lord God, what time does my shift finish?” more than the face of a tired Korean server watching a gang of tipsy non-Koreans trying to work a tabletop hot plate. After you’ve dropped that first plate of onions into your handbag, you’re often more than grateful for the help. To celebrate reaching 20 years, however, and after an elegant revamp, Lee has now ditched those hotplates altogether. Koba 2.0 has also slung out the black tables, the dangling extraction vents and much of the dark wood, and replaced it with a wabi sabi colour palette that’s pale, dreamy and, in places, even twinkly.

Which quiche egg-celled and which crumbled in the face of our rigorous taste test?

• The best supermarket extra-virgin olive oil

I learned to make quiche from one of the best chefs I know, Gill Meller, my old head chef at River Cottage HQ, about 20 years ago. His quiche is rich and creamy, with beautifully crumbly pastry, and my benchmark for these store-bought versions.

I tasted all of the quiches cooked according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Overall, the quality was lower than I’d hoped for, with many relying on ultra-processed ingredients, such as palm oil, emulsifiers and, often, caged-hen eggs. Free-range products didn’t always communicate this clearly on the packet, so it’s worth checking the ingredients list. Also, some described their pastry as “buttery” when they don’t contain any butter, and are instead made with vegetable shortening (palm and rapeseed oil). Encouragingly, however, a few gems emerged, with wonderfully simple ingredients, light and fluffy free-range custards, crisp all-butter pastry and generously filled.

Shark’s latest gadget claims to tackle everything from pore size to puffiness, but can an at-home hydrofacial really replace a trip to the salon?

• The best LED face masks, tested

The beauty tech market has boomed in the past few years, with countless brands launching products that promise clinic-quality results from home. After its LED face mask, the Cryoglow, made every beauty lover’s 2025 wishlist, Shark’s latest beauty launch, the FacialPro Glow, promises access to the sort of hydrofacial tech previously reserved for professional facialists.

If you’re familiar with hydrofacials (AKA hydradermabrasion), then you’ll be aware that they have impressive pore cleansing and hydrating powers when performed in a clinic by a trained facialist. However, I was intrigued to see whether a portable device could be powerful enough to rival a facial that costs more than £100 – and concerned it would be unwise to put such power in the hands of non-professionals.

From handheld to corded, self-emptying to stick models, these are our resident cleaner’s favourite vacuums for a spotless home

• The best cordless vacuum cleaners, tested
• How to make your vacuum cleaner last longer

Buying a vacuum cleaner isn’t as easy as you might think. With so many brands and models to choose from, it can be bewildering. Sticking with established brands isn’t necessarily a safe bet, with past performance being no guarantee that the latest models will be as good. Meanwhile, prices can be deceptive, with some affordable models now closing the gap on top-of-the-range brands when it comes to cleaning performance.

You can’t know all this by browsing through a department store or online. The ideal thing to do would be to take a few models home to try them out – but good luck persuading anyone to let you do that. Thankfully, you won’t have to try because I’ve tested an array of models for you. I’ve measured each one’s ability to perform a range of real-world cleaning jobs, so you can discover the best vacuum cleaner for you.

Best corded vacuum cleaner overall:
Shark Detect XL Car + Pet LA791UKT

Best cordless vacuum cleaner overall:
Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty IP3251UKT

Everything you need to know about buying ski gear: our fashion expert’s top budget brands for goggles, gloves, salopettes and jackets

• How to dress in cold weather

Skiing is expensive. From your lift pass to your equipment hire, transfers, travel and accommodation, it’s not a particularly accessible sport. Luckily, there are ways to curb your spending if you’re heading to the slopes – one of which is your choice of ski gear.

There are several reasonably priced brands that provide quality for a fraction of the price of luxury labels. Sure, you won’t be buying the most technologically advanced gear – if you’re a seasoned skier tackling extreme weather off piste, a high-street jacket probably won’t cut it – but if you’re a touch more fairweather, like me, these products will do the job just fine. And some brands offer a high spec for a relatively reasonable price, too – the North Face and Tog24 always put performance first, for example.

With 2026 being the year of the fire horse, this spicy number has a suitable kick to mark the occasion

Here’s a spicy little number that will help you see in the lunar new year in style on 17 February.

Rron Rakoci, mixologist, Huŏ, London

See in the year of the fire horse with a duo of dishes packed full of flavour and symbolism

Christmas is lovely, but my kids think Chinese new year is by far the best holiday. I might be biased, but, unusually, I am inclined to agree with them. As my eldest puts it, “New clothes, cash, booze and food – what’s not to love?” There’s the added bonus that cash is absolutely more than acceptable – in fact, it’s de rigueur, so there’s no shopping for mundane socks and smelly candles. Chinese new year is full of rituals and, just as at Christmas, every family has its own, but they are all variations on a theme. Symbolism looms large in Chinese culture, and at new year it centres around messages of prosperity, luck and family. Symbolism extends naturally to the food, too. The word for “fish’” in Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese sounds a lot like the word for “surplus”, so to have fish is to have an abundance, to have more than one needs, while dumplings represent wealth on account of their shape. I hope you enjoy these abundantly wealth-wishing recipes. Kung hei fat choi!

The higher you toss it, the more luck you’ll have this new lunar year. Chopsticks at the ready …

This Tuesday marks the start of the lunar new year and the year of the fire horse, which represents fresh opportunities, personal growth and good fortune. I, for one, am keen to usher that horse in, and to celebrate I’ll be making this noodle salad, which is a variation on one I first ate at Mandy Yin’s restaurant, Sambal Shiok. It’s a dish that’s eaten across Malaysia and Singapore, and the idea is that everyone around the table tosses the salad high into the air at the same time: the superstition goes that the higher the salad is tossed, the more luck will ensue. Come on, Nelly.

Preparing simple, repetitive meals is the key to 30 days of fasting

Ramadan arrives this year in February, in the heart of winter. Short days, cold evenings and the pressure of everyday work mean that preparation is no longer about producing abundance, but about reducing effort while maintaining care. For many households balancing jobs, children and long commutes, the question is not what to cook, but how to make the month manageable.

The most effective approach to Ramadan cooking is not variety but repetition. A small set of meals that are easy to digest, quick to prepare and gentle on the body can carry a household through 30 days of fasting with far less stress than daily reinvention. The aim is to do the thinking once, not every day.

There was a language barrier, a mother who burned their letters and a record label manager who disapproved. But Kerry Cox was madly in love

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In my early 20s I quit my job in New Zealand and moved to Sydney to study martial arts. In 1982, after competing in the World Pugilist championships in Hong Kong, I hitchhiked around Japan for a month or so, then headed for Korea via ferry in January 1983. I’d heard air fares were cheap from Korea. No internet back then!

While boarding, I was approached by a very attractive Japanese woman, with limited English, who told me that if I bought one box of bananas and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black label, I could pay for most of my trip in Korea. These items were very much in demand back then.

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Five women on both sides of the Atlantic reveal what it’s like trying to find a partner in your 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s

Stella Ralfini, 78-year-old beauty writer, London (pictured above)

Bouquets imported to Europe found to be heavily contaminated, often with chemicals banned in EU and UK

Stay away from roses this Valentine’s Day, environmental campaigners have warned after testing revealed them to be heavily contaminated with pesticides.

Laboratory testing on bouquets in the Netherlands, Europe’s flower import hub, found roses had the highest residues of neurological and reproductive toxins compared with other flowers.

Being codependent is often seen as a bad thing. But a new book makes the case for ‘healthy dependency’

Many of us desire deeper relationships. What we don’t always agree on is how close is too close. Dating advice often casts intimacy as a tightrope – pull back too much, or push for more. Either move is read as a red flag. Between discussions of incompatible attachment styles, the importance of boundaries and the dangers of love-bombing, it’s easy to get the impression there’s a correct level of closeness to aim for.

In truth, intimacy isn’t one-size-fits-all and comfort levels vary – not just between individuals, but across their relationships.

Fraudsters use stolen personal details to send out products, then post a fake verified and positive online review

A package arrives but you can’t remember ordering anything.

When you open it, you find some cheap, flimsy jewellery.

A family struggled to rebuild their lives after an abusive marriage ended in tragedy and financial ruin

Family life ended for Francesca Onody on a late summer evening in 2022 when her abusive husband doused their cottage with petrol as police arrived to arrest him. She and her children escaped seconds before the building exploded. Her husband Malcolm Baker died in the blaze.

That night, Onody lost her husband, her home, her pets and her possessions.

From a picturesque cottage in a country village to a listed building in the heart of bustling Manchester

More young Americans are taking on side gigs to explore their passions and make extra cash while navigating an unstable job market

Aashna Doshi, a software engineer at Google, is constantly monitoring her headspace. “This way I don’t burn myself out,” she said. “And I stay a lot more consistent with my podcast and content creation work.”

On top of her day job in the tech giant’s security and artificial intelligence department, Doshi also publishes social media content about working in tech and her life in New York City, and records podcasts – sometimes all three in a day.

Self-reliance is often encouraged over asking others for help in the modern world. But doing everything yourself can be a sign that you are scared of intimacy

When a relative was seriously ill and in intensive care for more than a month, Cianne Jones stepped in. “I took it upon myself to be that person in the hospital every single day – chasing doctors, taking notes, making sure I understood why they were doing things.” It was so stressful, she says, that at one point her hair started falling out, but she ploughed on.

It was Jones’s therapist who gently questioned whether she was going to ask for help. Jones laughs. “The hair falling out didn’t suggest to me that I needed help, it was somebody else looking in and saying that.” She has a large, close family who would have helped immediately – and did, once Jones asked – it’s just that it didn’t occur to her to ask. “I had taken that role on: ‘I’m just going to get everything done.’ I just took off, and that was it.”

Cases among younger people are rising – such as with actor James Van Der Beek, who died on 11 February at age 48

Actor James Van Der Beek died on 11 February, aged 48; he had been diagnosed in 2023 with colorectal cancer.

According to the World Health Organization, colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. While rates are declining overall, cases among younger people are rising.

Everyone should get their eyes tested every two years, but there are other ways to optimise your vision, say ophthalmologists – and yes, eating carrots may help

Eye health is often something that we take for granted until we encounter problems. But lifestyle choices such as screen time and smoking can affect your vision. Here, ophthalmologists share their tips on maintaining healthy eyes, from sight tests to sunglasses.

This unofficial diagnosis describes the anxiety-driven, compulsive obsession with living as long as possible. While it might seem healthy to monitor your diet, exercise and biomarkers, it can come at a huge emotional cost

It was a pitta bread that finally broke Jason Wood. It arrived with hummus instead of the vegetable crudites he had preordered in a restaurant that he had painstakingly researched, as he always did, weeks before he and his husband visited. “In that moment, I just snapped,” he recalls. “I hit rock bottom, I got angry … I started crying, I started shaking. I just felt like I couldn’t do it any more, like I had been crushed by all this pressure I put on myself.”

Today, Wood, 40, speaks calmly. Neat and groomed, he seems orderly by nature. But at that time, his attempts to control every aspect of his life had spiralled. He painstakingly monitored what he ate (sometimes only organic, sometimes raw or unprocessed; calories painstakingly counted), his exercise regime (twice a day, seven days a week), and tracked every bodily function from his heart rate to his blood pressure, body fat and sleep “schedule”. He even monitored his glucose levels repeatedly throughout the day. “I was living by those numbers,” he says.

Wuthering Heights is the latest film to turn heads over anachronistic costumes, but it’s not by any means the first

Emerald Fennell’s retelling of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights finally hits cinema screens this weekend. Ever since the first set of photos were released, the anachronisms of the costumes have been central to the conversation.

As fashion industry watchdog Diet Prada put it: “The costume design for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights scandalised audiences with its freaky mix of Oktoberfest corseting meets 1950’s ballgowns meets futuristic liquid organza meets … Barbie?”

Night at the opera theme for Kors’ autumn-winter collection features elegant gowns draped in opulent coats

Five years ago, Covid prevented Michael Kors celebrating 40 years as a fashion designer, so nothing was going to stop him partying when that figure reached 45. “It’s crazy, I’ve been in fashion 45 years, but I’m only 32,” said Kors, 66.

The sweeping double staircase of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York became the catwalk for a fashion week show dedicated to the chic women of the city. On Kors’ best dressed list is the “amazing, remarkable” Rama Duwaji, the city’s first lady as wife of the mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Valentine’s, Galentine’s, staying in – or going out? Sometimes it’s just nice to dress up

On game day, where fashion has become a huge part of athlete identity, professionals are reaching for codified displays of their wealth

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On Sunday night the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX, Bad Bunny put on a spectacular half-time show, and multiple players all walked down the tunnel from the car park to the dressing rooms carrying the same logo’d bag. The bag in question, by luxury French brand Goyard, isn’t part of any official uniform – and isn’t really known outside of its 0.1% customer base. But it has become as ubiquitous a status symbol among American football players as their AirPods Max headphones and Richard Mille watches – and is part of a brave new world of tunnel fits.

Most primetime NFL games’ coverage start hours before kick-off, as photographers, fans and pundits alike pore over players’ sartorial choices just as they would their missed tackles and spectacular catches.

Writers from George Eliot to Goethe put this Lombardy town on the map, then it fell out of fashion. Today it makes a picture-perfect alternative to the Italian lakes

The ancient settlement of Chiavenna, in Lombardy, near Italy’s border with Switzerland, was once well known among travellers. “Lovely Chiavenna … mountain peaks, huge boulders, with rippling miniature torrents and lovely young flowers … and grassy heights with rich Spanish chestnuts,” wrote George Eliot in 1860.

Eliot wasn’t the only writer to rhapsodise about this charming town. Edith Wharton described it as “fantastically picturesque … an exuberance of rococo”. For Mary Shelley it was “paradise … glowing in rich and sunny vegetation”, while Goethe described it as “like a dream”.

It’s an ideal time of year for snuggling up on a countryside break. We pick accommodation from shepherds’ huts in Somerset to a chateau in Wales

Six vintage-style “luxury huts” spaced out around a lake make up The Shepherds Hut Retreat in south Somerset. They have modern kitchens and bathrooms, private areas with hot tubs, and fancy features such as telescopes, gin bars, pizza ovens, fire pits and hammocks. There is also a woodland sauna on site. The newest hut, 1898, is the grandest, and is inspired by the Pig hotels. It is a mile’s walk to the Lord Poulett Arms, a thatched 17th-century pub in the village of Hinton St George, and half an hour’s drive to the beaches of the Jurassic Coast in east Devon and Dorset.
From £169, coolstays.com

Romance is in the air on a roof terrace in Venice, rowing across Lake Bled and a fairytale garden in Stuttgart
• Tell us about your memorable breaks in Wales – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

We had our wedding reception at the Grand Hotel Royal in Sorrento, south of Naples. We danced to two guitarists playing Justin Bieber’s Despacito with our 50 guests singing and dancing along with us. We watched as the sun began to melt into the Mediterranean Sea from this time-capsule hotel balancing on the edge of a cliff. I floated out of my body and felt a rush of euphoria – perhaps it was the limoncello spritzers. We’ve returned many times and I get the same rush – the gelato, the pizza, the people, it feels as if I’m in a Richard Curtis film.
Charlotte Sahami

Being a passenger in this vast country is ‘a full-blooded immersion in the local’, says the novelist whose latest protagonist is lured by the romance of the rails

I carry my train journeys in my bones, the juddering song of the Indian rail. Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, famously likened India to a palimpsest, no layer quite effacing the one that went before. That’s how I think of Indian railway journeys. They inscribe on the mind our fellow travellers, our ways, our thousand languages, our landscapes, our climate.

I think of a rail journey I made in 1998 – that brutal summer of nuclear testing – setting out from Mumbai, in an ordinary three-tier sleeper, for Dehradun, 1,000 miles (1,600km) north. The frazzled train fell off any semblance of a schedule. The voyage grew longer, past 50 hours; hotter, past 50C. I remember the metallic burn on the window grilles; the hot, killing wind that blew through them; the sizzle of water drops splashed on the face when theyhit the uncovered platforms in the heart of the country; the melt of my rubber soles. A fortnight later, having trekked to the mouth of a tributary of the Ganges, completing my expedition from the Arabian Sea to a Himalayan glacier, it was possible to look back on the rail ordeal with affection.

The actor on a massive scam, the guilty pleasure of Judge Judy and why he’s never done a day’s work in his life

Born in Lancashire, Matthew Kelly, 75, studied drama at Manchester Polytechnic and acted at the Liverpool Everyman. He moved into TV, presenting Game for a Laugh in the 80s, You Bet! in the 90s and Stars in their Eyes from 1993 to 2004. Having returned to the stage, he received an Olivier award in 2004 for his role in Of Mice and Men in London’s West End. He stars in Waiting for Godot at Glasgow’s Citizens theatre from 20 February to 14 March, then takes the play to Liverpool and Bolton. He has two children and lives in London.

What is your greatest fear?
Not being able to work.

As a dedicated observer of things happening right outside my house, I can testify that that big puddle has been there for three months

I’ve never needed to be convinced of the cognitive benefits of looking out the window. I would do it all day if I thought people couldn’t see me.

I’m currently staring out of our front window, arms folded, at the large puddle running along the road’s edge outside our house.

From Boy, Baby, Reason and Diary to stubbin and rumpy, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 The world’s largest ocean current circles which continent?
2 Who was both the 8th US president and the 8th vice-president?
3 Where did Britain’s first nudist beach open in 1980?
4 What term did Liz Hurley coin for non-celebrities?
5 Stubbin and rumpy are local names for what felines?
6 Who was introduced on The Porter Wagoner Show in September 1967?
7 Which country’s postal service stopped delivering letters in December 2025?
8 What was the only spin-off series from Friends?
What links:
9 Royal Ascot; Open golf; Laver Cup; Olympic heptathlon; Cricket World Cup final (in descending order)?
10 Fleet; Holloway; Marshalsea; Millbank; Newgate?
11 Hirundine bird; Idris Elba DCI; male monarch; Mama Used to Say singer?
12 Boy; Baby; Reason; Diary?
13 1981 and 2005; 1973 and 1992; 1986; 1999?
14 Gulf of Mexico; Denali; US Department of Defense?
15 Septimius Severus; Constantius Chlorus; Dick Turpin; Joseph Rowntree?

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

As calls for the former prince to cooperate with investigation become deafening, this may be the reckoning Andrew cannot escape

Gordon Brown is a man who gets into the detail.

In office, and since then, he has applied his forensic mind to the matters that concern him. Lately, he has been focused on the Epstein files.

Communal central heating means Moscow can plunge entire neighbourhoods into cold with a single strike

Many Ukrainians are without heating in sub-zero temperatures as a result of relentless Russian strikes on energy infrastructure, while the country suffers through its coldest winter of the war so far.

Ukraine is especially vulnerable to such attacks, as Moscow can exploit a widespread Soviet-era heat system in which multiple apartment blocks rely on communal central heating.

Annual remembrance in Neauphle-le-Château revives memories of short exile that reshaped Iran, but which locals would rather forget

Every February, members of the Iranian diaspora descend on an abandoned plot of land in an unremarkable street in the French town of Neauphle-le-Château, a 90-minute drive west of Paris.

On the nominated Sunday, a marquee is hastily thrown up and framed photographs of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini hung on the canvas. Green baize is laid on the muddy garden path between posts painted with equal bands of green, white and red, the colours of the Islamic republic’s flag.

We want to hear people’s thoughts on reading the novel ahead of the new adaptation – and if you’ve watched the film how does it compare?

Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights came to theatres worldwide on 13 February, with the director Emerald Fennell saying she hopes it will “provoke a sort of primal response.”

But Brontë’s tempestuous 1847 novel itself has been described as too extreme for the screen and on its release it was certainly not interpreted as a love story. “I can’t adapt the book as it is but I can approximate the way it made me feel,” Fennell has said.

Who is your favourite television couple, and why?

From sparks flying during The OC’s Spider-Man snog to love stories so powerful they make you weep, Guardian writers have picked the television couples whose tales never fail to make hearts pound. Now we would like to hear yours. What is your favourite TV romance, and why?

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Reform UK was voted into power in several English councils last May – we want to hear from residents about their experiences so far

Following the May 2025 English local elections, Reform UK won more than 600 seats and took control of 10 councils, including Kent and County Durham.

Reform campaigned on promises to cut waste, lower council tax and change how councils are run. Since taking office, it has said it is delivering savings and a new approach, while critics have questioned some of its claims and accused the party of breaking pledges not to raise council tax. The Reform-led Worcestershire county council is likely to issue England’s largest council tax rise this April.

Our wildlife series Young Country Diary is looking for articles written by children, about their winter encounters with nature

**Editor’s note: The deadline has now passed for winter submissions – but keep hold of this link, the form will reopen on Wednesday 1 April for spring articles.**

Once again, the Young Country Diary series is open for submissions! Every three months we ask you to send us an article written by a child aged 8-14.

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