Yes, many Americans are struggling, but it’s good to know the first family can still afford Earth’s most expensive provisions. Morale is everything, isn’t it?

In the absence of any clearly and consistently stated aims from the US administration, maybe each day of the Iran war just needs a moodboard description. In which case, Sunday was a tale of two nepo babies. In Iran, the high-level executive search for the new ayatollah concluded that the old ayatollah’s son was the best man for the position. It’s not for me to assess his job prospects, but you’d hope his supermarket order doesn’t contain any “ripen at home” pears.

Meanwhile, across the world, in LA, Donald Trump’s eldest granddaughter posted a YouTube video titled “I Brought My Secret Service to Erewhon”. By way of background, Erewhon is Earth’s most pretentiously extravagant hipster food shop, and, as Kai was at pains to brag, “the most expensive grocery store pretty much out there. Everything’s crazy expensive! So we’re going to get my favourite stuff.”

Marina Hyde 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.

The raunchy 80s adaptation of smash hit novel A Woman of Substance drew the highest ratings Channel 4 has ever seen. As the broadcaster goes there again, the cast and creators talk feminism, revenge – and sex caves

Somewhere on the West Yorkshire moors is what the team behind A Woman of Substance nicknamed “the sex cave”. It is here that the heroine, Emma Harte, loses her virginity in the lavish new adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s bonkbuster. “It’s hidden away and beautiful,” says the showrunner, Katherine Jakeways. “The lighting in there almost looks like AI, but it’s real. Weirdly, it’s about a mile from my mother-in-law’s house. I haven’t told her yet that it’s a sex cave!”

This is just one of many unusual sites for sex scenes featured in the show. “Oh my God, I know,” laughs Jessica Reynolds, who plays the young Emma. “Not just the cave, but there’s a little love shack, too. The cave is the most stunning location, with sunlight coming through these arching rocks. I wonder if they used it in Wuthering Heights, too? If they didn’t, they should have.”

Remember the iPod? How about the Pippin? In the half-century since it launched its first PC, Apple has given us some amazing innovations. We round up its biggest triumphs and flops

Fifty years after Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded the company in Jobs’ parents’ garage in Los Altos, California, Apple has become a behemoth, and billions of us use its products every day. From the first successful home computers with colour screens, to the iPod, to the smartphone that set the template for the modern mobile era, the company has repeatedly reset consumer expectations.

As a result, the firm occupies a central position in the tech world, initiating trends and popularising products. Here are five of its most influential products from the past half-century – alongside some unusually big misses.

Oil markets have had some of the steepest price rises ever recorded as conflict in the Middle East escalated over the last week. Although the world is slowly becoming greener, fossil fuels are still the lifeblood of every economy so when oil and gas prices rise, the effect ripples through almost every aspect of our financial lives. Jillian Ambrose, energy correspondent for the Guardian, explains how the conflict may affect global costs.

• Oil prices ‘could breach $100 a barrel within days’ amid supply disruption from Iran war

Psychologist Leanne ten Brinke has spent decades studying toxic personality traits. What are the red flags to look out for among workmates, politicians and potential partners?

Coming face to face with a probable psychopath was enough to make Dr Leanne ten Brinke rethink her career choices. Early in her 20s, while studying forensic psychology in Halifax, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Ten Brinke was volunteering at a parole office, which would hold weekly group meetings for released sex offenders. “Most of the men showed contrition,” says Ten Brinke. “They really seemed to recognise the damage that they had done.” Except for one. The treatment programme seemed “like a game to him”, she says. One week, in a discussion about the impact their crimes had on victims, this rapist stared at Ten Brinke and, smiling slightly, started to say how much his victim looked like her, “and how I was ‘his type’. Clearly he was trying to scare me, and he did.”

It put her off a career working with convicted criminals, but she remained fascinated with “dark personalities” – psychopathy, mainly, but also narcissism, machiavellianism (manipulating and exploiting others) and sadism. From politics to business to the media, it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of people to study. There were selfish, callous, impulsive and manipulative people everywhere, often presenting as gregarious and charming. “It started to occur to me that these traits aren’t just confined to an underworld. These traits appear in all aspects of our lives,” she says.

When Trump granted white South Africans refugee status, he was echoing a falsehood about Black people taking revenge for years of brutality. But no one flourishes in a repressive police state

There’s a little town in the scrub in South Africa – a full day’s drive from the country’s big cities – that has become perhaps the most scrutinised place on earth, given its size. It is 9 sq km (3.5 sq miles) of suburban-style houses harbouring about 3,000 people, with a main drag, a municipal swimming pool, one gas station and some pecan farms. Nothing of consequence ever really happens there, a fact the townspeople take as a point of pride. And yet over the past three decades, dozens of English-language news outlets have made a pilgrimage to it, often more than once. The New York Times alone has run four dedicated profiles. The essays have kept pace year after year, quoting the same people over and over, even as nothing of note occurred. There’s been no war, no disaster.

That changelessness is the point. No people of colour are allowed to live in the town, called Orania. The name is a nod to the river that runs nearby – and to the Orange Free State, the apartheid-era designation for the province in which it lies. Orania’s founders established it in 1991, the year after South Africa’s best-known Black liberation leader (and future president), Nelson Mandela, was freed following 27 years in prison.

The US defence secretary says the military is increasing attacks on the regime

• Pete Hegseth warns of day of ‘most intense’ US strikes on Iran yet

• How have you been affected by the latest Middle East events?

Investor hopes for a swift resolution to the Middle East conflict propelled Australian shares higher today, with the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 finishing the day up 1.1% and recovering about $35bn in value after yesterday’s $90bn plunge.

Oil prices surged to a four-year high early in the week before coming back down below $US90 a barrel after Donald Trump suggested the Iran conflict would end soon, sending global stock markets higher.

The government said a week ago the warship would be deployed but it is still at dock. What is happening?

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• UK politics live – latest updates

The pace at which HMS Dragon has been readied for deployment to defend a British military base in Cyprus from attacks by Iran has prompted claims that Britain’s proud naval history has been shamed.

It has been a week since the government said the Portsmouth-based Type 45 destroyer would be deployed, but it is still at dock and the ship is likely to take another five days or more to reach its destination.

Trump has blamed Iran for the mass killing at Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school but geolocation, videos and satellite imagery indicate otherwise

The bombing of a primary school in Minab on 28 February killed scores of people, most of them seven- to 12-year-old girls. The strike is the worst mass killing of the US and Israel’s war on Iran so far – and has been described by Unesco as a “grave violation” of international law.

On Saturday, the US president, Donald Trump, declared that Iran was responsible for the school bombing. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran … they’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

Only two vessels not linked to Iran or Russia have braved ‘chicken run’ since US president’s promise on Friday

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Only two vessels not linked to Iran or Russia have made the “chicken run” through the strait of Hormuz since Donald Trump said he would “ensure the free flow of energy to the world”, according to maritime records.

One of those that braved the journey since the US president’s announcement of emergency measures on Friday went “dark” by switching off its transponder and a second signalled it was Chinese owned and crewed.

Hong Kong-based airline has business-class return listed at A$39,577, as travellers seek routes avoiding Middle East

• Business live – latest updates

The Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific is selling seats from Sydney to London for more than £20,000 in April, as passengers search for scarce long-haul flights without changing in the Middle East.

The tickets, listed at A$39,577 in business class for returns departing in mid-April, far outstrip the usual fares charged even in the first class cabin.

Exclusive: Safeguarding minister says man accused of breaching restraining order will come to court only in 2028

• UK politics live – latest updates

A man accused of breaching a restraining order related to Jess Phillips will not have his case heard in the crown court until 2028, the Labour minister has revealed, as she urged MPs to back measures to scrap some jury trials.

Phillips said the courts and tribunals bill had her “100%” support, saying personal experience showed the “broken” court system was used to delay trials and exert control by those who were violent against women.

Rising temperatures making it hard even for young, healthy people to safely do normal physical tasks in many regions

Climate breakdown is shrinking the amount of time that people can safely go about their lives, according to a study that shows a third of the world’s population now resides in areas where heat severely limits activity.

Rising temperatures, driven by the continued burning of fossil fuels, are making it difficult even for many young, healthy adults to do basic physical activities, such as housework or walking up stairs during daylight hours at the height of the summer, the report warns.

Chancellor raises prospect of help after prices almost treble since start of conflict

• How will war in the Middle East affect your finances?

Rural households that rely on heating oil to warm their homes and provide hot water are facing a “sudden and frightening” surge in their bills, with prices almost trebling since the start of the Iran war.

The cost of heating oil is not covered by Ofgem’s energy price cap and varies between suppliers. In examples seen by the Guardian, customers who were typically paying 62p a litre before the war are now being quoted about £1.73.

Anthony Russell, 43, will appear in court via video link on Wednesday accused of attack at HMP Frankland

A fellow inmate has been charged with the murder of the child killer Ian Huntley in a maximum security prison, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has said.

Anthony Russell, 43, will appear before magistrates charged with murdering the 52-year-old at HMP Frankland, in County Durham.

Reform leader’s latest comment contrasts with earlier statement that ‘gloves need to come off’

• UK politics live – latest updates

Nigel Farage has been accused of making a U-turn after he said Britain should not get involved in Donald Trump’s war with Iran.

His comments on Tuesday contrasted with his previous assertion that the “gloves need to come off” when dealing with Iran.

Multimillionaire begins case against FCA ban over handling of investigation into sexual misconduct claims

The multimillionaire financier Crispin Odey was described by the head of his hedge fund as a “sex pest” and a sociopath and blamed an incident in which he allegedly groped a female staff member’s breasts on a sedative he had taken, a tribunal has heard.

The Brexit-backing hedge fund chief’s behaviour came under the microscope on the first day of a lawsuit he has brought against the financial services regulator over his exile from the City.

Salem Al-Salem faces landmark trial over alleged role in crackdown on protests in Damascus in 2011

A former Syrian colonel has appeared in a London court to face charges of crimes against humanity in the first prosecution of its kind in England and Wales.

Salem Al-Salem is charged with murder and torture, crimes allegedly committed during the Syrian government’s violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Damascus in 2011.

The 600kg Van Allen probe A will re-enter Tuesday evening, with most of it burning before reaching Earth’s surface

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Parts of a giant Nasa satellite will crash to Earth on Tuesday evening, the US space agency is warning – but the chance of being struck is extremely low.

According to the US military’s Space Force, the roughly 1,323lb (600kg) spacecraft, one of twin probes launched in 2012 to investigate the Van Allen radiation belt, is estimated to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at about 7.45pm EDT.

George Michael: The Faith Tour will receive a global cinema release alongside previously unheard music from his Wham! and solo discographies

A long lost film centered on George Michael’s landmark 1988 Faith tour is set for cinema release later this year, in addition to a new album of previously unheard live performances.

George Michael: The Faith Tour is being lined up for a global big screen rollout, with footage taken from a previously unseen 14 camera shoot of Michael’s performance at Paris’ Bercy Arena in 1988. A press release bills the project as a tour de force in archival film-making, celebrating Michael’s ambition and artistry at its peak.

Experts argue sensor and satellite data reveal targeted attacks on farming communities by the Rapid Support Forces were intended to prevent villages producing food

There is strong evidence that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed a war crime by depriving the villagers of north Darfur of the means to produce food, legal experts argue in a new analysis published today calling for the Humanitarian Research Lab’s (HRL) revelations to be used in international courts.

The destruction of the villages, farming equipment and infrastructure all provide strong evidence of a “starvation strategy” against a population already struggling with food insecurity because of the war, says Tom Dannenbaum, a professor at Stanford Law School and a leading expert on the use of starvation in war.

Family-run farms in El Salvador and Honduras face mounting losses, rising costs – and the need to adapt or be left behind

• Read more of our Coffee crisis series here

On a steep hillside in western El Salvador, Oscar Leiva watches rainfall in December, a month that once marked the start of the dry season. During this harvest cycle, flowering came early and then stalled. A heatwave followed. What remains of the crop is uneven, lower in quality and more expensive to produce than the last.

For Leiva and his family, coffee has never been just a crop. His mother, Marina Marinero, remembers when the rains arrived on schedule and the harvest could be planned months in advance. Today, the calendar no longer holds. Decisions about pruning, fertilising and hiring labour feel like educated guesses. Each mistake carries a cost the family cannot afford.

To some it was a reckless experiment but scientists hope the dispersal of 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine could ease the climate crisis

For four days last August, a thick slick of maroon bruised the waters of the Gulf of Maine. The scene, not unlike a toxic red tide, was the result of 65,000 litres of an alkaline chemical, tagged with a red dye, that had been deliberately pumped by scientists into the ocean.

Though it sounds perverse, the event was part of a scientific experiment that could advance a technology to combat both global heating and ocean acidification. Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), as the approach is called, acts like natural weathering, but on human – rather than geological – timescales.

Both campaigns have been framed differently at different times, with dubious claims of defensive action and a curious reluctance to label it war

Shifting goals, unclear timelines and a flimsy pretext: at times, the US-Israel campaign against Iran carries curious parallels of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The comparison is far from exact. In 2022, Putin sent a massive army across Ukraine’s borders in an unprovoked invasion of a democratic state, a campaign that quickly resulted in heavy losses. The United States has so far largely limited its involvement to airstrikes against Iran’s authoritarian regime.

Fury over Timothée Chalamet’s comments about ballet or Jessie Buckley not liking cats has reached a bizarre fever pitch as the industry wills this Sunday to arrive faster

Around day five of debate over what Timothée Chalamet said and/or meant about opera and ballet, it started to feel like maybe the 2025-2026 Oscar season had actually lasted for the past 17 years.

Voting for the 98th annual Academy awards concluded on 5 March, but that didn’t stop the internet from throwing a bunch of attempted buzzer-beaters; an interview where Chalamet casually referred to ballet and opera as potentially endangered (and perhaps not especially relevant) art forms was actually held some weeks ago in a conversation with fellow actor Matthew McConaughey. But it was that same vote-closing on Thursday when the clip started to circulate virally online and rebuttals poured in. This was swiftly followed by counter-charges that most likely the majority of people excoriating Chalamet, campaigning for best actor in Marty Supreme, had themselves not been the ballet or opera especially recently.

From Peter Sellers dressing like a Nazi, to having to manage her mother Judy Garland’s addiction, jaws will drop at Minnelli’s anecdotes

Tuesday marks the publication of Kids, Wait Til You Hear This!, the enormously entertaining memoir by Liza Minnelli, and that title – gossipy, confiding and with no small measure of Broadway panache – sets the tone from the off.

As well as coming across as kind and politically aware, Minnelli is quite heroically unburdened by tact, and as she sketches her life from gilded Hollywood to scrappy New York and on through addiction, ill health and multiple marriages, everyone – most of all herself – is assessed with bracing honesty.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basic they scrimp on? Andi Oliver talks to the Filter about food processors, chocolate and the perils of sleep shopping

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Andi Oliver rose to fame fronting the band Rip Rig + Panic with Neneh Cherry in 1981 and working in TV in the 90s. She was a judge on Great British Menu for four series, and is now in her sixth season as host. She also regularly appears on BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet and the Food Programme.

Andi acts, has run several restaurants and presented documentaries, including two with her daughter Miquita. She published a cookbook, The Pepperpot Diaries, in 2023.

He’s wrestled until he vomits, posed naked for adult photos and now he’s about to take on the manosphere for Netflix. We look back at the interviewer’s most jaw-dropping shows

It has been almost 30 years since Louis Theroux began making documentaries for the BBC. Few could have predicted that the endearingly dorky figure who made his first series, Weird Weekends – throwing himself, gonzo-style, into strange American subcultures – would become a public figure as famous as many of his celebrity interviewees.

With nearly 100 BBC titles under his belt, Theroux is now moving over to Netflix. Inside the Manosphere, the first programme he has presented for the streamer, dives into the world of the men’s rights movement, and explorations of masculinity, in the extremely online era. Ahead of its release on 11 March, we pick out 20 of Theroux’s finest docs to date.

New designer’s kid-in-a-candy-store enthusiasm is evident in confident colours and loosened silhouettes

A building site, but make it chic: that was the set for Chanel’s Paris fashion week show. Cranes in Meccano-bright colours towered over the catwalk, their reflection shimmering sequin-bright on an opalescent floor that was inspired by Monet, according to the designer Matthieu Blazy. Monet has been a backstage buzzword at Dior and Chanel this week, as the two giants battle for bragging rights over French culture.

Fashion week loves a visual metaphor. Blazy, who arrived at Chanel last year, is rebuilding the designer, and having fun with it. The invitation for the show was a tiny stainless steel tape measure on a pendant. He has immersed himself in house history – Cocology? – and after the show, greeted reporters clutching a folded printout of an interview Coco Chanel gave to Le Figaro in 1955. Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and a grandee of the brand since 1990, remarked that he had never come across this interview before Blazy brought it to him. Blazy’s kid-in-a-candy-store enthusiasm is infectious, and the city’s Chanel boutiques have been packed all week. A simple cotton shirt embroidered with the Chanel name is sold out, at a price of €3,900. New season bags are limited to one per customer – a policy designed, the company says, to limit resale at even higher prices.

Jockey Club says aim is to get more women watching racing and revival is not a response to ‘woke’ jibes

First and foremost, it is a huge sporting event, billed by its fans as the Olympics of jump racing – but it can also act as a social barometer, giving clues as to the state and mood of the nation.

This year’s Cheltenham festival, which began on Tuesday, feels a little like a step back in time with the return of “Ladies Day” after a five-year hiatus and a reduction in the price of a pint.

As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

Lea Pao, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has been experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poems, perform at recitation events, look at art in the real world.

It’s an effort to reconnect them to the bodily experience of learning, she said, and to keep them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. “There’s no AI-proof anything,” Pao said. “Rather than policing it, I hope that their overall experiences in this class will show them that there’s a way out.”

Our cartoonist reflects on the FA Cup fifth round, including Ben Waine’s commitment to the bit

• Buy this cartoon | David’s favourite works of 2025

• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

The Afro-Uruguayan rhythms, born among enslaved Africans and once banned, now draws thousands to public squares and carnival parades

Like the blues in the US, samba in Brazil, rumba in Cuba and plena in Puerto Rico, candombe, Uruguay’s Afro-descendent music, was once reviled, marginalised and even banned – but managed to endure.

But while other such genres have for decades formed part of the cultural mainstream across the Americas, only now is candombe experiencing its peak.

A drone view of the Rueda de Candombe gathering in the streets of Ciudad Vieja in Montevideo, Uruguay.

If anyone can convince politicians and public of the need to pay for a national care service, it’s Louise Casey. With her involved, I now have hope

No government in my lifetime has been dealt a worse hand than Keir Starmer’s. Austerity-broken public services, an empty Treasury, a jittery bond market freaked out by Liz Truss and then stricken by the arrival of Trump 2.0 with his bully-tariffs. Now Britain’s ally is setting the Middle East on fire in a murderous war, exploding oil and gas prices. This needs repeating regularly, lest anyone forgets the obstacles blocking this government’s best intentions for change.

One of those good intentions in the Labour manifesto was the creation of a national care service. Louise Casey, respected troubleshooter, was given a commission to review adult social care and solve its impossible dilemmas. She showed her thinking in a blistering speech last week.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink? On Thursday 30 April, ahead of May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss the threat to Labour from the Greens and Reform – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

From energy to food, all of life’s essentials are about to get even more expensive. But just knowing that won’t pay the bills

As soon as the attacks on Iran started, the warnings commenced: “Get ready for price shocks. Get ready for the oil price to spike. Oh, no need to get ready – it’s already hit $100 a barrel. Get ready for Russia to claw some circuitous but massive advantage from the fact that everything is on fire, get ready for energy bills to go up.” By about day five, experts were explaining how to lock in your current tariff except, whoops, given the global instability, those tariffs were no longer available. If it felt mercenary to worry about your unit price as people were dying, that’s because it was; but considerations of human decency and proportionality aren’t going to arrest the trajectory of life getting more expensive.

Get ready for everything to feed into everything else: rising petrol prices to lead to food inflation, food inflation to lead to stuff inflation. Get ready for wages to be unequal to the cost of living, get ready not to complain about it because you’re lucky to have a wage. Get ready for stock exchanges to crash, get ready to not be entirely sure what scale of economic disaster you’re looking at.

I’ve spent my adult years fighting to pay the bill, drinking insultingly weak cups of tea and making small talk on the bus. But life is too short

Sunday lunch guests often check in the day before, but this text was different. Rather than making sure of the time, or wondering what to bring, it was a bold, direct question. “Is it cold in your house?”

I stared at my phone screen in awe. This was revolutionary. I’ve been freezing in so many homes, but it had never occurred to me to make temperature inquiries in advance so I could wear a thicker jumper or thermals. Even if I’d had the idea, I probably wouldn’t have followed through for fear of appearing rude, preferring instead to slowly lose the feeling in my toes. But here was proof that, for a host, this kind of query is welcome – after all, most people want their guests to be comfortable and have a nice time, unless they’re a dominatrix.

The rarely seen Mojtaba Khamenei is a surprise appointment, but his accession is above all a statement of defiance

When Mojtaba Khamenei was named Iran’s new supreme leader, many observers reacted with surprise. For decades, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been a shadowy figure in Iranian politics, rarely seen in public and almost never heard speaking.

He has never given interviews, has held no elected office and appears publicly only on rare ceremonial occasions. Even among political insiders, knowledge of his views is fragmentary. What little is known about him consists of scattered anecdotes: brief involvement in the Iran-Iraq war as a young man, occasional appearances in political circles and a long association with figures inside Iran’s security establishment.

Calls for a popular uprising and empty promises of help are reckless in the extreme – and no answer to my country’s plight

• Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran

I have been watching the news from inside Iran, unable to hold in my sorrow. As an Iranian who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime, I have been pleading with the world’s human rights organisations and media to keep a focus on the country’s plight. But now I see US-Israeli bombs falling on Iran, and some Iranians celebrating this war while innocent people die. My heart is breaking for my country.

Let us be clear: when Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conspired to launch their war, it was not out of a desire to free the Iranian people from the tyranny of the regime. Netanyahu said on the second day of the war: “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He has named this operation “Lion’s Roar”. Meanwhile, Iranian monarchists celebrate the carnage, waving the shah’s version of the country’s flag with its crowned lion and sun.

Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran. Her books include A Prison Memoir: One Woman’s Struggle in Iran, and the novel The Secret Letters from X to A

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.

‘Resistance is futile’, wrote one AI product manager for the Associated Press in internal messages to colleagues

No one wants a soulless sermon – that defeats the purpose – and Pope Leo XIV has taken steps to ensure that Roman Catholic priests don’t deliver one.

Artificial intelligence, the new pontiff said in a recent meeting with clergy, “will never be able to share faith”, which is what giving a homily is all about. Resist the temptation and write your own words, he urged.

Fewer than 100 days out, host cities haven’t received promised funding, and fears about ICE’s presence are widespread

On Sunday 19 July, the final match of the 2026 Fifa World Cup will be played in East Rutherford, New Jersey. For one day, our community will be the center of the world.

But as that moment approaches, I find myself spending less time thinking about the games at MetLife Stadium, and more time worrying about whether we are ready. Because if Washington doesn’t get its act together, we risk turning a generational opportunity into an international embarrassment.

The war reveals Britain’s exposure to volatile fossil fuel prices. More North Sea drilling will not shield households, building domestic green energy will

What should Britain do when war in the Middle East sends energy prices soaring? If the strait of Hormuz were blocked for the month of fighting that Donald Trump predicts, British households could face another brutal cost of living shock. Goldman Sachs warns of prices at the pump rising to 2022 levels. That would put more than 50p on each litre in the tank. Prolonged disruption to global gas supplies could see energy bills in the UK rise by £900 to £2,500 a year. Such uncertainty strengthens the case for going big on clean energy.

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has grasped this reality. By contrast, the Conservatives and Reform UK are doubling down on domestic fossil fuel extraction. The debate is framed around a simple claim of energy security: drill more at home. But the argument is rhetorical. Britain might export a bit more crude and have a smidgen more gas. But it would still need to import refined fuels and liquefied natural gas (LNG). Households would remain exposed to global energy shocks. Clean electricity, by contrast, cuts gas demand and reduces exposure to volatile markets. The political pressures are jobs, tax revenues and the economies of Scotland and north-east England tied to a declining asset.

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.

Treatments continue to improve. The challenge now facing ministers is hugely unequal outcomes

New analysis from Cancer Research UK, revealing a 29% drop in the rate of people dying from cancer compared with 40 years ago, is a vital counterpoint to grim health headlines about the UK’s outcomes falling behind those of other countries, and the NHS missing its own cancer targets. Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, made a related point in a recent lecture. Stand back from the day to day, he said, and the extraordinary leaps forward enabled by vaccinations and other advances in treatment and public health come into focus.

This longer view is not a cause for complacency or inaction. England’s latest cancer plan, launched last month, highlighted shocking lapses including lengthy waits for treatment and a failure to tackle inequalities in cancer mortality dating back 15 years. Last year, analysis by the Guardian found that about three-quarters of NHS trusts were failing to reach standards relating to diagnosis and treatment.

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.

Desmond Hewitt responds to an article by an Iranian citizen living in Tehran in the midst of the ongoing war

The poignancy of the anonymous author’s article describing life in Tehran is almost too much to bear (‘Don’t die’: the two words that sum up our lives in Tehran now, 7 March). I would like to say to them and their friends who simply want to stay alive that there are many here among us, in the UK at least, who agree with you. In particular, your words on the oxymoronic dictatorial democratic narrative on the justification for yet another confected, misguided and maniacal war in the Middle East.

The Alice Through the Looking Glass prism that the government of the world’s so-called largest democracy uses as its justification for the bombing of your country is sickening. Sickening because that country has stood by while the atrocities they claim to abhor take place elsewhere in the world.

Readers respond to Aditya Chakrabortty’s article about the decline in healthy life expectancy in the UK

How could I fault Aditya Chakrabortty’s account of the failure to prioritise the nation’s health as he cites me as its inspiration (This is a life and death story for the UK – so why is it being brushed under the carpet?, 6 March). However, it is important to emphasise that the government is well aware of the gross health inequities that scar our nation and limit lives as well as economic prosperity, but chooses not to prioritise them. The ministerial response last month to the House of Lords report on ageing contains this shocking statistic: a girl born in Barnsley can expect an average of 53 years of good health, whereas one born in Wokingham can look forward to 71 healthy years – an extra 18 years.

Throughout the country deprivation accelerates ageing, which for many means an unnecessary premature exit from the labour market and premature need for social care. But the main focus of health policy is the manifesto commitment to reduce NHS waiting times, a target that has very little impact on health inequity. Instead, a radical programme is required to prevent the largely social and commercial determinants of ill-health, such as poverty, poor diets, lack of exercise, and air pollution.

David Morgale writes about the sense of accomplishment he felt on the mountains, in response to Emma Loffhagen’s article on skiing being a waste of money. Plus letters from John Carter and Eric J Ascalon

While I accept that Emma Loffhagen may have tried skiing once and hated it, I disagree with most of her conclusions regarding this activity (The hill I will die on: People who ski have more money than sense, 7 March).

In the past it was certainly a sport exclusive to the wealthy, but today it is enjoyed by people at all economic levels. It is possible to rent boots, skis, helmets and clothing that is specially designed for cold weather. Holiday packages and lessons are also available.

The pressures to fix yourself are produced socially, by algorithms, markets, racism-coded aesthetics and status anxiety, says Dr Bruno De Oliveira

Your piece on the rise of impossible male beauty standards (‘There is no shame in being vain’: the relentless rise of impossible male beauty standards, 5 March) captures something bigger than vanity, that of a neoliberal moral economy which turns the body into a private “project” and then invoices the individual for failing it.

Mark Fisher called this magical voluntarism, the doctrine that we can will ourselves into any desired form, and that if we don’t, it’s because we didn’t want it enough. In that frame, a square jaw is “discipline”, hair loss is “laziness” and distress becomes personal inadequacy rather than a predictable response to platformed comparison, commercialised insecurity and precarious lives.

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The Winter Paralympics return to Italy for the second time in 20 years. From the fashion capital of Milan to the dramatic peaks of Cortina d’Ampezzo, Milan Cortina will take place across northern Italy, marking the 50th anniversary of the first Paralympic Winter Games.

The Paralympics open on Friday 6 March in the Arena di Verona and the Games will will showcase around 665 athletes competing in 79 medal events across six sports – para alpine skiing, para biathlon, para cross-country skiing, para ice hockey, para snowboard and wheelchair curling. The results of these events will be searchable on this page.

We take a look at the best images from the Games, including skiing, curling and ice hockey

• Murashkovskyi benefits from artificial intelligence support

• ‘I used it as a psychologist, coach and sometimes as a doctor’

Team Ukraine have hit the ground running at the Winter Paralympics, standing second in the medal table after three days of competition. Their resolve and determination has been inspirational to many, but one athlete has revealed a secret weapon in their search for a competitive edge.

Maksym Murashkovskyi, who won ­silver in the men’s visually impaired biathlon on Sunday and did not miss a shot, has been ­working with ­OpenAI’s large language model. “For the past six months, I have been training with ChatGPT,” he said. “It was not only ­tactics. It was half of my ­training plan, ­motivation, etc. So it was a huge ­volume of all of my training. I used it as a psychologist, coach and, sometimes, as a doctor.”

• Varvara Voronchikhina wins women’s super-G standing

• Russian anthem has not been heard at Games since 2014

The Russian national anthem has been played at the Paralympics for the first time since 2014 as the skier Varvara Voronchikhina claimed gold in the women’s super-G standing.

A tearful Voronchikhina received her medal on Monday afternoon, and the Russian flag was raised, after a dominant performance on the slopes of the Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre. A watching crowd of international fans responded only with polite applause, but Voronchikhina’s success has already been celebrated by Russia’s sports minister.

Follow all the latest news from day one of the festival
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The first handicap at this year’s festival – promoted up the card after the Mares’ Hurdle moved to later in the week – is often the toughest nut to crack all week, as all bar one or two of the juveniles lining up will be making their handicap debut. That means, in turn – to no-one’s great surprise – that their trainers will have been doing all they can to show just enough form to get them into the race, but not so much that end up with too much weight. The mean price of the winners since the first running in 2005 has been 21-1, and while that is slightly skewed by the 80-1 victory of Jeff Kidder in 2021, there have also been two winners at 40-1, three at 33-1 and two at 25-1.

The last eight winners, meanwhile, have all been trained in Ireland, and the last two were saddled by Joseph O’Brien, who fields Glen To Glen and Dignam this time around. Saratoga, meanwhile, is the mount of JP McManus’s (soon-to-be-ex) No.1, Mark Walsh, and has a very similar profile to the same owner’s Brazil, successful in this race in 2022. Manlaga, the winner of the Victor Ludorum at Haydock last time, is another live contender in the same colours, while Ammes, from the burgeoning James Owen stable, is also worth considering carefully as his excellent trainer has kept him away from hurdles since a strong run at Wetherby in October. My eventual pick in an ultra-competitive heat, though, is Faye Bramley’s Winston Junior, who has been put away since finishing behind my fancy for the Triumph Hurdle, Minella Study, in a strong race at Cheltenham in December.

• Chessum wears No 6 jersey as Pepper switches flank

• Borthwick accepts ‘huge challenge’ awaits in Paris

Steve Borthwick has recalled Ollie Chessum to his beleaguered side for their final Six Nations match against France but otherwise stuck by the same underfire players who suffered defeat against Italy.

Chessum comes into the side at blindside flanker to add to England’s lineout options but Borthwick has named an unchanged back line despite last weekend’s humiliating first ever defeat by the Azzurri which extended England’s losing run to three matches. Guy Pepper switches to openside flanker with Sam Underhill – who was a late call-up for the injured Tom Curry against Italy – returning to the bench.

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After eight months and 252 games, Bigger Cup has finally reached the bare-knuckle stage of this bizarrely elongated competition. We get the thrilling spectacle of three repeat fixtures from the league phase, thanks to the suits wanting to make this the most thrilling and profitable product possible. The world demands more Galatasaray v Liverpool, extra Kieran Trippier v Lamine Yamal and plenty of Pep Guardiola against whichever former Anfield stalwart is in the Real Madrid dugout this week. It is very much Groundhog Day for the TikTok generation, with Uefa desperately hoping that short attention spans mean everyone has already forgotten these earlier matchups.

Re: the masked fan in Germany who unplugged the ref’s review monitor in a protest at VAR (yesterday’s News, Bits and Bobs, full email edition). Please tell me it was this guy!” – Antony T.

With respect to Greg Wynn’s missive (yesterday’s Football Daily letters), Oscar Piastri crashed on the reconnaissance lap, which is like a footballer getting knacked while getting off the bus” – Robert Pearce (and others).

This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.

Liam Rosenior has unlocked João Pedro and must do the same with Cole Palmer for Chelsea to reach their potential

João Pedro had been a Chelsea player for less than two weeks when he faced Paris Saint-Germain in the final of the Club World Cup last summer. The settling-in period was intense. The forward had an impactful substitute appearance when he made his debut in the quarter-final win over Palmeiras, struck a clinical double when Fluminense were downed in the semi-finals and then, on a thrilling, sweaty afternoon in New Jersey, delivered the coup de grace when Chelsea became world champions thanks to a stunning demolition of PSG.

It was 3-0 when João Pedro lifted a clever finish over Gianluigi Donnarumma in the 43rd minute, and the manner of the humiliation was hard for PSG to accept. Heads were scrambled as the newly crowned European champions felt their aura of invincibility ebb away at the end of an epic season. João Neves was shown a red card for a tangle with Marc Cucurella – who else? – and the loss of discipline even involved Luis Enrique, the PSG manager, appearing to slap João Pedro in the face when a mass brawl broke out at full-time.

As the new league year gets underway, we take a look at the best and worst moves heading into the 2026 season

Los Angeles Rams

• Russian loses to Katerina Siniakova in three sets

• Teenager throws racket on several occasions

Mirra Andreeva’s Indian Wells title defense met a bad-tempered end on Monday as Katerina Siniakova stunned the Russian teenager 4-6, 7-6, 6-3.

The 18-year-old opened her bid to retain her crown with a dominant 6-0, 6-0 demolition of Solana Sierra. But she was in trouble early and often against Siniakova, the world No 44, in a rollercoaster contest that ended with a shot from the Czech that hit the net cord and dribbled over in one last frustrating moment.

Players and coaches demand more accountability from Caf after latest decision further disrupts preparation schedule

On 13 February, Patrice Motsepe, the president of the Confederation of African Football (Caf), promised that this year’s Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (Wafcon), scheduled to be played in Morocco between 17 March and 4 April, would go ahead as planned. One of the reasons he had to make that statement was the 2024 tournament had been postponed for a remarkable 19 months, until July 2025.

That supposedly solemn presidential promise was broken on 5 March, 12 days before the start of the tournament, with many of the teams – including Nigeria, the defending champions, Cameroon and Ghana – playing friendlies across Africa and Asia to prepare for the showpiece, which also determines which teams get to represent the continent at next year’s World Cup.

This is an extract from our free email about women’s football, Moving the Goalposts. To get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions. Moving the Goalposts is delivered to your inboxes every Tuesday and Thursday.

• Pair reportedly refused to board plane home

• Team’s departure for Malaysia ends Asian Cup saga

Two more members of the Iranian women’s football team have reportedly sought asylum in Australia after refusing to board a flight back to their home country after competing in the Women’s Asian Cup tournament.

A plane left Sydney airport on Tuesday night local time for Malaysia, reports said, with players and staff, ending a dramatic two days when five players were granted asylum after refusing to return home.

Club’s former owner leads the polls in spiky mayoral race but is accused of putting forward ‘nothing of substance’

Karim Benzema doesn’t often involve himself in French politics. At the end of January, though, the striker gave a glowing endorsement of Jean-Michel Aulas, the former Lyon president who is leading the city’s mayoral race.

“He has everything it takes to do well,” Benzema said in a video played on the news channel LCI as Aulas was being interviewed. “He’s someone who people listen to, he knows where he wants to go and he has a lot of experience,” the former Real Madrid player added. The Lyon-born striker was later joined by Bafétimbi Gomis in showing support for their former boss.

Car group reports 54% drop in pre-tax profits as it says Iran war could affect demand for Audi and Porsche brands

• Business live – latest updates

Europe’s largest automaker, Volkswagen, is to shed 50,000 jobs by the end of the decade, as it faces falling sales in China and North America and punitive US tariffs imposed by Donald Trump.

The 10-brand group, whose luxury subsidiaries Porsche and Audi are also under pressure, said the jobs would go in Germany, affecting the entire group, as part of a restructuring drive in light of the darkening global business climate.

Thousands of girls were locked up by Board for the Protection of Women for ‘rehabilitation’

Spain is to formally pardon a group of 53 women who are among thousands who were incarcerated by the Franco regime on the grounds that they were supposedly “fallen or in danger of falling”.

The women were locked up as adolescents by the Board for the Protection of Women, a collection of institutions run by religious orders. The board, which had echoes of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries, was overseen by Carmen Polo, the wife of the dictator Gen Francisco Franco.

The White House aide who revealed that Richard Nixon had secretly recorded his conversations as president has died

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Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertently hastened Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal when he revealed that the president had bugged the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and routinely recorded his conversations, has died. He was 99.

His death was confirmed to the Associated Press by his wife, Kim, and John Dean, who served as White House counsel to Nixon during the Watergate scandal and helped expose the wrongdoing.

The singer joined the band in 2007, touring with them and providing lead vocals on their last album, Life, Love & Hope

Tommy DeCarlo, the frontman of US rock band Boston since 2007, has died of brain cancer, his family have confirmed.

“It is with heavy hearts that we share the passing of our dad, Tommy DeCarlo, on Monday, 9 March 2026,” they wrote in a statement. “After being diagnosed with brain cancer last September, he fought with incredible strength and courage right up until the very end. During this difficult time, we kindly ask that friends and fans respect our family’s privacy as we grieve and support one another.”

The 78-year-old has announced a return to the action hero role that made his name in 1982, promising ‘all kinds of madness’

Arnold Schwarzenegger is to return to the role that launched him as a movie star in a belated third instalment of the Conan the Barbarian franchise. The original film, released in 1982 and adapted from pulpy novels by Robert E Howard, saw the then bodybuilder play the chivalric sword-wielder on a quest for revenge against James Earl Jones’ cult leader Thulsa Doom.

Schwarzenegger, 78, whose acting work has slowed since he returned to the profession after his stint as the governor of California, announced at the Arnold sports festival in Columbus, Ohio over the weekend that director Christopher McQuarrie, best known for his work on the Mission: Impossible franchise, would take the reins on King Conan.

St Albans Cathedral, Hertfordshire: The chapel here is a wonderful curiosity, thanks to its restoration by a green-fingered Victorian sculptor

All’s quiet in the Lady Chapel, sheltered from the bustle of the city by thick limestone walls of Totternhoe clunch, quarried just a few miles north-west in Bedfordshire.

But though I’m aware of being alone in a vast vaulted space, when I look at the stonework, I feel surrounded by the echoes of women who’ve stood here before me and left their legacy on the chapel walls.

Monitors admit they are struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from widening war

Israel’s bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure will have major long-term environmental repercussions, experts have warned, as monitors admitted they were struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from the widening war.

Even as Iranians filled the streets to mark the appointment of a new supreme leader, the Shahran oil depot north-east of Tehran and the Shahr-e fuel depot to its south continued to burn on Monday, two days after they were bombed by Israeli warplanes.

Britain’s toads have begun their spring migration, putting them at even greater risk than usual. Here’s how – and why – we should look after them

There’s a touch of old magic about toads, those shapeshifters of myth, superstition and folklore. Charismatic creatures with the pleasing Latin binomial bufo bufo, common toads have astonishing copper- or gold-coloured eyes and rugged, textured skin. “People say they look warty, which I’ve always thought is a bit unfair,” says Dr Silviu Petrovan, a conservationist and toad population researcher.

More prosaically, toads are great for your garden. “We say toads are a gardener’s best friend, because they eat all the pests,” says Jenny Tse-Leon, the head of conservation and impact at the British amphibian charity Froglife. Their spring migration is a dramatic event, during which hundreds of thousands of animals travel back to their ancestral breeding ponds. “Like the wildebeest of the Serengeti,” says Tse-Leon. “They’re just a lot smaller than wildebeest.” The males “piggyback” on potential partners: “You see them riding on the female’s back to get a lift to the pond.”

Jessika Roswall cites Poland and Finland, which have made border areas near Russia or its allies ‘more hostile’ to cross

Countries should look to rewild their land borders as a deterrence to invasion and build up other geographical defences to attack, Europe’s environment chief has said.

Jessika Roswall, the EU’s commissioner for the environment, water resilience and a competitive circular economy, said nature should be used to improve national security. “Investing in nature and using nature as a natural border control is necessary, and actually increases biodiversity. It’s a win-win,” she said.

Former footballer detained after incident outside Huyton and Prescot golf club on Sunday evening

Joey Barton is due to appear in court charged with attacking a man near a golf club in Liverpool.

The former footballer was arrested after the incident outside Huyton and Prescot golf club at 9pm on Sunday.

Police ombudsman says scale of investigation now clearer after ‘significant amount of digital evidence’ seized

Authorities in Northern Ireland have identified “multiple” potential victims of a former police officer who is accused of rape and other sexual offences.

The office of the police ombudsman said on Tuesday it was allocating all available resources to the case given its “impact, scale and complexity”.

Campaigners say Wes Streeting’s decision to name senior midwife as chair will begin to restore trust

Families who lost babies at two hospitals in Leeds have said they are slowly regaining trust in the health secretary after the midwife Donna Ockenden was appointed to lead a review into the failing service, where 56 babies and two mothers died in five years.

Ockenden, who conducted a similar review into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford hospital NHS trust in 2020, was chosen to lead the investigation into Leeds teaching hospitals NHS trust after a campaign by the families.

More than 200 applicants fear they will lose places after home secretary suspends study visas from four countries

Sudanese scientists who have been promised research posts at leading UK universities have spoken of their “shock” and “sadness” that their hopes have been dashed after Shabana Mahmood’s decision to end study visas for people from their country.

More than 200 Sudanese postgraduates and undergraduates fear they will no longer be permitted to take up places at 46 universities, including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London, with some claiming that their lives have been torn apart by the home secretary’s “blunt” intervention.

Election will be a test of Trump’s sway and may provide a rare opportunity for Democrats in the southern state

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A special election for the successor to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional district in Georgia on Tuesday will be a test of Donald Trump’s sway, and may provide a rare opportunity for Democrats in a deep-red pocket of the southern state.

Republican former prosecutor Clay Fuller is likely to come out of Tuesday’s jungle primary, in which the top two candidates go to a runoff regardless of party, alongside retired army general Shawn Harris, a Democrat. The two would face a run-off election on 7 April.

Travel operators say Chinese and North Koreans can now buy tickets for services leaving this week

Passenger train services between China and North Korea are to resume this week, six years after their suspension because of the Covid-19 pandemic, travel operators have said.

Train journeys between the two countries were halted in 2020 as strict border closures were imposed to prevent the virus spreading.

No injuries were reported after authorities found evidence of a discharged firearm near the consulate in Toronto

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Police in Canada are investigating after shots were fired at the US consulate in Toronto. Officers said evidence was found of a discharged firearm and that no injuries were reported.

Toronto police said in a social media post they responded to the reported shots at 5.29 a.m. (0929 GMT) on Tuesday.

José Antonio Kast, who voted against legalising divorce in 2004, has pushed for return to total abortion ban

Women’s rights activists in Chile are bracing as the most conservative president since the Pinochet dictatorship prepares to take office on Wednesday.

José Antonio Kast, a 60-year-old ultra Catholic whose father was a member of the Nazi party, has consistently blocked progressive bids for women’s rights and equality across his three-decade career in politics.

UK’s GSK is leading the way in research but AstraZeneca is not involved in the area, report finds

• Business live – latest updates

The pipeline of new drugs to fight superbugs remains “worryingly thin” and has shrunk by 35% in the last five years, experts have said, predicting the annual number of deaths linked to drug-resistant infections globally will double to 8 million by 2050.

The number of projects from large pharma companies has shrunk by 35% over the past five years, from 92 to 60 medicines in development, according to a report from the Access to Medicine Foundation (AMF), a Netherlands-based non-profit group, backed by the Wellcome Trust.

Iran is bombing Gulf datacenters to blow up symbols of alliance with the US – bringing the war directly into the lives of millions of people

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US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

Showdown over datacenter politics at heart of North Carolina primary

Indonesia to ban social media for children under 16

Australians will have to verify their age to watch pornography from Monday. Here’s what you need to know

About 10,000 writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman join copyright campaign

Thousands of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman have published an “empty” book to protest against AI firms using their work without permission.

About 10,000 writers have contributed to Don’t Steal This Book, in which the only content is a list of their names. Copies of the work are being distributed to attenders at the London book fair on Tuesday, a week before the UK government is due to issue an assessment on the economic cost of proposed changes in copyright law.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s capering clash between a demented repressive regime and ragtag freedom fighters is both cartoonish and deadly serious – and perfectly tuned to its times

Viva la revolution and don’t forget your password, your pronouns, your plaid gown and your gun. One Battle After Another, from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, is the brawling rebel insider of this year’s Oscar race; a state-of-the-nation Hollywood spectacular that feels as disunited and unstable as the country it depicts. The film hates America and it loves it, too. It’s on the side of the angels even when it’s not quite sure who they are. It lights a candle to curse the darkness, and prays to God it hasn’t picked up a stick of dynamite by mistake.

“We have to stay out of politics,” Wim Wenders advised his fellow directors at last month’s Berlin film festival, and yet One Battle After Another is political to its fingertips, hard-wired to the here and now and perfectly anticipating the tenor of Donald Trump’s second term. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob, the one-time firebrand turned burnt-out stoner, who belatedly hauls himself off the couch when his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is captured. Freely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, the film updates the book’s jaundiced post-60s hangover for the ICE-age 2020s as the plot careens from the migrant detention camp to the sanctuary city to uncover a Christian Nationalist cell within the US federal government. The self-styled “Christmas Adventurers” are on a heaven-sent mission to make America great again. They say, “If you want to save the planet, you always start with immigration.”

Starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode as enemies-to-lovers, this very American portrait of Ireland happens to be charming

In 2010 the Guardian gave the romcom Leap Year a one-star review. The script was “horrendous”, according to the reviewer: “Afterwards, the only ‘leap’ I felt like making was off a motorway gantry into the fast lane of the M25.”

He wasn’t alone. Leap Year has an approval rating of 23% on Rotten Tomatoes; the New York Times called it “so witless, charmless and unimaginative that it can be described as a movie only in the strictly technical sense”.

Tale of a brilliant molecular biologist cast into outer space with only a helpful alien for company is a bit silly, but Gosling’s charisma keeps it watchable

This is a movie, adapted from Andy Weir’s sci-fi bestseller, about a desperate astronaut mission of the future, named by Nasa after the “Hail Mary pass” in American football, launched into space in a last-ditch attempt to save Planet Earth, dying because a string of alien microbes are snuffing out the sun.

Hunky high school science teacher Dr Ryland Grace, played with seductive, unruffled good humour by Ryan Gosling, wakes up from his induced coma on this spacecraft, with wacky long hair, straggly beard and zero memory of why he is aboard. The rest of the crew are dead, and Grace must now figure out how he got there and how to rescue humanity.

When a couple of cops turn up to a domestic violence call, things take a nasty turn as we see the mayhem unfold thanks to their body-worn cameras

At its best, this low-budget found-footage horror recalls the early Paranormal Activity films, with plenty of jump-scares and low-fi atmospheric eeriness. The “found footage” here isn’t black-and-white security videos though, but the bodycams worn by a pair of cops on what they initially believe to be a routine domestic violence call in a neighbourhood noted for its large population of “tweakers” (AKA methamphetamine addicts).

Shot on location in Alberta, Canada, the film makes good use of real derelict locations, giving a plausible griminess to a broadly supernatural tale. The bodycam conceit starts out as an ace up the film’s sleeve before gradually becoming a bit of a liability, though in a way that is different from the usual pitfalls of the genre. In most found-footage films, the nagging question is why and how the filming would plausibly continue – there is usually a point where a character’s self-preservation would take precedence over neatly capturing whatever mayhem is going down. The bodycam conceit handily avoids this issue – the filming is passive and the cameras cannot be turned off.

A shocking new Apple TV series goes behind the yoga camps where women alleged criminal behaviour from a guru wanted for sexual exploitation charges

Practicing yoga has its benefits: the meditative calm, grounded-ness and balance. The devoted pursue transformative spiritual journeys, through poses, chants and breath work. Some followers of tantra yoga take things even further, using sensuality to channel their energy and reach beyond themselves, seeking out of body liberation and enlightenment.

But it’s that very pursuit that has also left hundreds vulnerable to alleged rape and trafficking.

Championed by the BBC’s John Peel and signed to Rough Trade, the band were punk when that meant DIY, psychedelia and prog as well as screaming chords. What’s more, they loved Pink Floyd …

Swell Maps were a punk band, but only because that word meant something different when they started making records in 1977. It didn’t mean bands called Knuckleheadz or Gimp Fist; it meant unfettered freedom, curiosity rather than rage. Theirs was a music that wandered off in unexpected directions, where songs barely hung together before falling apart, punctuated by peculiar sounds made by whatever happened to be around. It was psychedelia and it was prog and it was krautrock, every bit as much as it was punk. Most of all, it was DIY.

So Swell Maps’ descendants weren’t the kind to get sleeve tattoos and don leather. They, like Swell Maps, were nerds. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore described them as “part of my upbringing”. Stephen Malkmus noted that Pavement formed, more or less, as a tribute to Swell Maps and their kindred spirits Desperate Bicycles. Now add all the bands who have tried or still try to sound like Pavement or Sonic Youth, bands who may never have heard of Swell Maps. That’s how you map the scope of their influence.

The Bavarian band known for a love of tinkering embraced a fresh ethos, ditching remote collaboration for a collective recording done in a week

‘It all went so fast,” Markus Acher says. “We’ve never been this fast at making a record.” He is sitting at the far end of a sofa in the Notwist’s Munich studio. On the other end is his brother Micha Acher; next to them, Cico Beck, who joined the band in 2014, balances on a stool. For a group known for meticulous studio craft, speed is an unfamiliar sensation. For most of their career, the Notwist have worked slowly, layering, revising, rethinking, as if wary of committing too soon to anything at all.

Formed in 1989 in the Bavarian town of Weilheim, the Notwist began as a heavy metal trio before evolving, over the next decade, into one of Germany’s most distinctive bands. Their breakthrough album, Neon Golden (2002), married indie songwriting to electronic textures, shaped largely by then-member Martin Gretschmann, also known as Console or Acid Pauli, in a way that felt inward-looking and strangely expansive. Its influence travelled far beyond Germany, securing the band a place in the canon of early-2000s indie experimentalism. Pitchfork named Neon Golden one of the best albums of the 2000s.

Maisie Adam and Scott Bryan talk comically and sensitively to people who found sudden tabloid and early internet fame in the 00s. Plus, Norse myths and history with Iain Glen from Game of Thrones

It’s all too easy to sneer at pop culture’s also-rans. This series from comic Maisie Adam and journalist Scott Bryan does the opposite, embracing people who found sudden fame – mostly in the 90s and 00s – and telling their stories with humour and care. Guests include Liberty X’s Kelli Young, who thinks she and her bandmates were seen as “too R&B” to win ITV’s Popstars – and is surprisingly grateful to the funk band who sued them. Hannah J Davies
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02 Academy, Leeds
The frontman struggled to get through most of the band’s choruses but that left space for Will Sergeant’s glorious psychedelic shapes and a supportive sing along

Ian McCulloch once cheekily described the Bunnymen as “the greatest band in the world, the greatest songs in the history of time and the greatest singer”, although you’d be hard pushed to find evidence of the latter at this show. Things begin promisingly enough with the darkly powerful Going Up and All That Jazz from 1980’s Crocodiles, the first of the terrific four-album run which blended psychedelia, post-punk and classic songwriting to turn the Liverpudlians into one of most hallowed bands of the decade.

However, the singer seems to be suddenly irritated by the bass sound, and grows increasingly tetchy as he jabs a finger towards an amplifier and summons a crew member on stage. After starting the gig standing tall in trademark shades and overcoat, McCulloch then requests a stool and remains perched on it for the rest of the night, sipping and mumbling incoherently between songs. At 66, the singer can’t be expected to hit the notes he did aged 22, but he doesn’t attempt the choruses of Bring on the Dancing Horses, leaving them to the crowd before abruptly leading the band offstage.

Lady Gaga and David Gest are among those who get ferocious dressings-down in this brutally candid memoir

Liza Minnelli’s father, the film director Vincente Minnelli, used to joke that his daughter’s career in show business was preordained. She was certainly familiar with the dark side of the industry from a young age through her mother Judy Garland, who was on the MGM payroll aged 13, before shooting to fame as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Garland was famously depressive and addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol. When her daughter was six, she shut herself in the bathroom and made the first of many suicide attempts. Minnelli soon learned to monitor her mother and hide her pill bottles when she saw darkness descending. By 13, she was “my mother’s caretaker – a nurse, a doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one … Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood, she robbed me of mine.”

In her memoir, Minnelli – who turns 80 this month – recounts how she broke free from her dysfunctional family at 16 and moved to New York to make it as a singer and actor. Little surprise, given her parentage, that her ascent was swift. “I was the original nepo baby,” she observes, gleefully. But if show business was in her DNA, so was addiction. In her 20s she became hooked on Valium, diet pills, cocaine and alcohol. Later, as her career faltered and her private life imploded, her sister Lorna staged an intervention and got her into the first of many rehab programmes.

A teenage girl dreams of escaping her controlling father, in this sparkling coming-of-age romp haunted by trauma

Alex Kadis establishes a jaunty tone from the very first pages of her debut about Connie Costa, a music-loving teenager stuck at home in east London in the mid-1970s, longing to break free from her smothering Greek Cypriot extended family, and in particular her restrictive father. Dubbing him “the fat murderer”, she has dreamed endlessly about killing him ever since the car accident a year before that took the lives of her mother and younger brothers. Lively, opinionated, and slightly chubby in her groovy 70s gear, Connie has two imaginary friends in the form of Marc Bolan and “bloody David Bowie”, with whom she communes via the posters on her bedroom wall. Marc she adores, but Bowie can be a bit snide, as well as having dubious taste in fashion.

She’s starting to develop a keen interest in the male trouser region (Marc’s is placed at eye level). In the case of her father’s friend, Peter Pervy Roy, who wears “trousers so eye-wateringly tight that they squashed his knob and bollocks into a weird flat patty”, actual proximity can be off-putting. Far more appetising is her childhood friend Vas, similarly suffering from growing up while Greek. Vas displays his willy on demand: “It’s definitely getting bigger.” Everyone else assumes he’s gay because he reads poetry.

As the original On the Road scroll heads to auction, a new exhibition uncovers the private life of the Beat legend

Among great literary myths, the one of Jack Kerouac is often reduced to a vibe. The open road, a cigarette, a postwar rebel leaning on a beat-up car – a masculine archetype of rebellion and hedonism. Kerouac’s 1957 book On the Road was the bible of the beat generation and chronicles, in startlingly unfiltered prose, his travels across the US with fellow writers Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, and his lifelong muse, the dashing Neal Cassady. The book shifted the course of US literature and captured the imagination of a rapidly changing world. Kerouac was crowned king of the beats, a moniker he later despised.

This, at least, is what many students of US literature know. But a new exhibition Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac at New York’s Grolier Club aims to rehumanize the myth, with letters from Kerouac that have never been publicly viewed before.

There are sharply observed pleasures to be found in this black comedy of infidelity, revenge and intergenerational tension – but the plot is both implausible and predictable

John Lanchester has distinguished between his nonfiction and his novels as the line between “things happening in the world” and “the things that won’t leave you alone”. Over the last decade and a half that gap appears to have narrowed. His 2012 bestseller, Capital, used the global economic crisis (explained with characteristic verve and lucidity in the nonfiction Whoops!) to lend a sharply moral edge to a sprawling Dickensian story about the London property bubble, told through the class cross-section of a newly affluent south London street. His 2019 follow-up, The Wall, was a dystopian near-future tale in which rising sea levels have exacted a catastrophic toll: a heavily guarded sea wall encircles a Britain determined to fortify its vanishing coastline and keep out the refugees desperately seeking asylum. In 2019, global sea levels reached a record high.

Lanchester’s satirical chops are on full display in his latest, Look What You Made Me Do, but this time his focus is more personal than political. Set in a recognisably professional – for which read excruciatingly smug – north London peopled by architects and agents, Lanchester’s sixth novel is billed by its publishers as a black comedy.

PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5; Tribute Games Inc
A treat for nostalgia fans and completists, but there’s little new in this rehashing of a classic that feels like an add-on rather than a fully fledged adventure

It’s 20XX, and unrepentant slacker Scott Pilgrim and his friends are revelling in the throes of young adulthood. They’re skint, but in a cool way that’s unrecognisable today (not least because nobody can afford to live near downtown Toronto). For many readers, the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels were a cultural touchpoint, a story about emotional immaturity, growing as a person and ultimately defeating youthful arrogance. Having cemented itself as a cult classic with an Edgar Wright movie, a 2010 tie-in game and a Netflix miniseries, it’s now back in the form of a raucous action-adventure game, Scott Pilgrim EX.

This is a homecoming of sorts for developer Tribute Games, which was formed by ex-Ubisoft employees who worked on the 2010 Scott Pilgrim game. Having established themselves as beat ’em up revivalists with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Marvel Cosmic Invasion, the team has stepped up for another crack at this essential coming-of-age tale. Scott Pilgrim EX feels like a passion project, so they have the Powers of Love and Understanding on their side.

Nintendo Switch 2; Game Freak/Omega Force/Nintendo
Work together with a bunch of lovable Pokémon to restore a long-abandoned town in this novel, absorbing game that’s quite unlike others in the series

Bear with me here: Pokémon has always had an environmentalist subtext. As you wander its verdant, creature-filled worlds, collecting species like an acquisitive David Attenborough, you are constantly shown that people and Pokémon should live in harmony. The bad guys in these stories, from Team Rocket to Bill Nighy in the Detective Pikachu film, are always the ones who want to abuse these creatures for personal gain. Otherwise you are shown that people must have respect for Pokémon; both the critters you catch and the ones that exist in the wild. There is a delicate independency between humans and the natural world.

In this new spin-off from the series, we see what happens when there are no humans around. You, a shapeshifting blob of jelly called Ditto, awaken in a half-demolished wasteland that was once, presumably, a lively town. There are some other Pokémon around, confused and lonely, and together you work to restore the place and make it beautiful again. Taking the uncanny humanoid form of your half-remembered former trainer, you learn useful talents from the Pokémon around you: how to water parched grass, dig up weeds and grow flowers, punch rocks until they crumble to clear all the old paths.

Pokémon Pokopia is out 5 March; £59.99

From the ghostly Shutter Story to road trip adventure Outbound and strategy puzzler Titanium Court, here are the titles we enjoyed the most from this year’s Steam Next Fest showcase

These days, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that every new indie game is either a co-op extraction shooter or a roguelike deck-builder – fortunately that’s not quite the case. Each February, the week-long Steam Next Fest is a vast and varied showcase of forthcoming titles, all with downloadable demos, and only a minority of them adhere to those dominant genres. It’s a lovely chance to dig into the sometimes bewildering Steam store and pick out interesting treats – and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Here are five of my favourites.

With the wait for the new Winds and Waves games set to stretch into 2027, Pokemon’s 30th anniversary celebrations have plugged the gap with a deluge of nostalgia bait. Is the franchise in danger of losing its heart?

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It has been almost impossible to escape Pokémon for the past few weeks. To mark the 30th anniversary of the original games, the Pokémon Company has been on an unprecedented promotional nostalgia trip for the entire month: there was a campaign where celebrities gushed about their favourite Pokémon, gifting us the memorable sight of Lady Gaga singing with a Jigglypuff, and Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen (great Game Boy Advance remakes of the original 1996 games) were rereleased on the Nintendo Switch. The Natural History Museum in London has opened a special Pokémon pop-up shop, and a limited-edition greyscale Pikachu plush toy sold out in about three seconds (they will be making more, to the disappointment of scalpers everywhere).

And all that is just the start. We’ve seen the opening of a Pokémon theme park in Tokyo, the announcement of a tiny Game Boy-shaped music player that plays the games’ soundtrack, a collaboration with high-fashion brand JimmyPaul that had its own runway show … it’s been endless. Regular readers will know that I am exactly the target audience for this festival of Pokémon nostalgia: the first generation of Pokémon kids and now hurtling towards 40. And yet I have been unmoved by most of this, even slightly annoyed by it.

An exhibition of rare photographs by the Italian photographer highlights the abstraction and poetry of his lesser-known works

Abbey theatre, Dublin
Director Tom Creed brings this 1926 political classic into the present, with a tremendous cast navigating the tonal switch from comedy into tragedy

Marking the centenary of the premiere of Seán O’Casey’s potent political drama, the Abbey’s latest production opens a door to looser, more experimental ways of staging it. Frequently produced in recent years, the tragi-comic work that caused a riot in 1926 is now embedded in the Irish theatre canon.

It is set among Dublin tenement dwellers in the run-up to the Easter Rising of 1916, and O’Casey’s characters are caught up in events beyond their control. Try as she might, the newly married Nora Clitheroe (Kate Gilmore) can’t persuade her husband Jack (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) to stay home rather than joining an Irish Citizen Army rally. Nor can she keep the outside world at bay, with her neighbours, the absurdly morbid Mrs Gogan (Kate Stanley Brennan) and hard-drinking Unionist Bessie Burgess (Mary Murray) bursting in constantly, with no privacy possible.

At Abbey theatre, Dublin, until 30 April

★★★★★ / ★★★★★
Photographers’ Gallery, London
Gottschalk documents lesbian life in the 60s and 70s, while this year’s Deutsche Börse prize ranges from appalling scenes from women’s prisons to an exploration of invented facts

When Donna Gottschalk came out as gay to her mother, she replied: “You’ve chosen a rough path.” It was New York in the 1960s, homosexuality was illegal and, as the photographer reflects in a video piece included in her new exhibition We Others: “There were no happy gay people.” A photograph of Gottschalk’s mother in the beauty salon she ran in the notoriously crime-ridden Alphabet City appears at the start of the show, in which the images are accompanied by texts by the French writer Hélène Giannecchini, recording the photographer’s memories of the people and events depicted.

Gottschalk picked up a camera at 17, so these pictures also constitute her own awakening, as she accepted her identity and became involved with the Gay Liberation Front. It starts with family. Here is a painfully poignant image of Gottschalk’s sister, Myla, aged 11, the picture of innocence and peace, asleep in bed in the family’s apartment in a tenement building.

They wowed the Edinburgh fringe with whip-smart sketches about Nasa engineers and what their audience were thinking. Now the slacker troupe are back on stage – but a long way from TV screens

When a “New York cult favourite sketch group” (as per the blurb) visits the UK, we may imagine we are getting the next big thing. But by the end of a transatlantic video call to three-quarters of the four-piece Simple Town, I am disabused of such naivety. “We meet sometimes with UK production companies,” says one of their number, Sam Lanier, “who see us and think: ‘These guys could be a great bridge to the American market.’ But what they don’t know is that no one fucks with us in America. All the people who work in development in American comedy already know about us, and they’ve all said ‘no’.”

“We don’t make a living doing Simple Town at all,” he adds. Reader, don’t let the status of Saturday Night Live – or recent Netflix hit I Think You Should Leave – fool you: sketch comedy isn’t a golden ticket in the US either. And Simple Town, such lovable debutants at the Edinburgh fringe last summer, are in the same boat as their UK counterparts: holding down day jobs, making films as well as live sketch, just about keeping their team-comedy show on the road. But “we really believe in it,” says Felipe Di Poi. “We believe the work we’ve done together is the best work any of us has done, that it’s way bigger than anything we could have made by ourselves.” You can deny them TV gigs, you can stymie their professional development, but – by all the collaborative gods! – you can’t keep a good sketch troupe down.

Director rounds on actor, who acted in the cult film, saying he feels disrespected, and claiming cynical reasons behind her recent comments

Quentin Tarantino has responded to Rosanna Arquette’s criticism of his prolific use of the N-word in his films including Pulp Fiction, saying Arquette “show[ed] a decided lack of class”.

In a statement sent to numerous publications including Deadline, Tarantino said: “I hope the publicity you’re getting from 132 different media outlets writing your name and printing your picture was worth disrespecting me and a film I remember quite clearly you were thrilled to be a part of? … After I gave you a job, and you took the money, to trash it for what I suspect is very cynical reasons shows a decided lack of class, no less honour.”

The Milk and Good Will Hunting director’s new film is about ‘a little guy’ taking violent revenge against the system. He talks about the parallels between Dead Man’s Wire and the homicide case currently dividing Gen Z and boomers

In February 1977, a middle-aged Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis took hostage an employee at his local mortgage brokers, who he was convinced had cheated him out of the profits of a piece of real estate. The system was weighted against the little guy, Kiritsis decided, and he was going to be the one to make it pay. He attached one end of a wire to the trigger of a shotgun, the other to the hostage’s head, and demanded $5m and an admission of guilt from the brokers’ boss. The final moments of the standoff, which lasted 63 hours, were broadcast live on TV.

It has already been the subject of a 2018 documentary (Dead Man’s Line) and a 2022 thriller podcast (American Hostage) which starred Jon Hamm as the DJ who broadcast an interview with Kiritsis live from the crime scene. Now Gus Van Sant, whose 40-year-plus career incorporates queer landmarks (My Own Private Idaho, Milk), mainstream crowdpleasers (Good Will Hunting) and arthouse award-winners (the Columbine-inspired Elephant), is dramatising the events in Dead Man’s Wire. This wry thriller cuts between the volatile captor (Bill Skarsgård) and the media circus swirling around him, which includes the DJ, played here by Colman Domingo, and a female TV journalist (Myha’la) fed up with being fobbed off. Al Pacino has a cameo as the boss of the mortgage company, sunning himself in Malibu and unconvinced he has anything much to apologise for.

First he came for Berlin’s film festival. Now it’s books. Wolfram Weimer seems to be on a mission to curb progressive thinking

There is a particular kind of danger that smells like paper and dust. You find it in independent bookshops. Those with uneven wooden floors and handwritten staff recommendations, where someone has shelved Audre Lorde next to Karl Marx and a debut novelist from Neukölln. Places where no algorithm is trying to guess who you are before you have the chance to change your mind.

I walk in for a novel and walk out with a theory of the state, a pamphlet on housing struggles, a Palestinian poet I had never heard of. No “for you” page in an online store would have suggested it. The bookseller did. Independent bookshops are dangerous because they interrupt us. They do not optimise our curiosity. They derail it. Is that the reason why Germany’s culture commissioner, Wolfram Weimer, is now consulting the domestic intelligence agency before approving funds to bookshops?

Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist

The line-up for this year’s festival includes Emma Thompson, Malala Yousafzai, Ian McEwan and other prominent authors and figures

Emma Thompson, Malala Yousafzai, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Gisèle Pelicot are among the headline names appearing at Hay festival 2026, organisers have announced.

The popular UK literary festival has now unveiled its full programme, featuring more than 500 events running from 21 to 31 May in Hay-on-Wye, Powys.

Most people fail with AI because they don’t understand what it actually is – if you treat it as a skill, not a shortcut, you’ll get the best results

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Training teams to use AI at work has given me a front-row seat to a new kind of professional divide.

Some people hand everything over to the machine and stop thinking. Others won’t touch it at all.

Now’s the perfect time to sort your outdoor space, and we’ve got the whole thing covered with our roundup of the best online nurseries. Plus, gardening pros reveal their go-to kit

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With the first signs of spring and that tantalising sense of sap rising, it’s time to venture into the garden. If it’s looking a mess, then don’t despair: these days the received wisdom is to let it stay scruffy over the winter, providing a much-needed habitat for all kinds of wildlife. So the good news is that you’ve been doing your bit, however unwittingly.

Now, though, it’s time to tidy up dead leaves, straggly growth and all those precocious weeds that are trying to get a head start. And if 2026 is the year that you want to up your gardening game – whether that’s planning a new border, or just plugging some gaps – you might be thinking about buying some new plants. We’re here to help.

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Whether you want bulbs or bare roots, perennials or houseplants, we asked experts for the online nurseries they trust for reliable, beautiful greenery

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As winter turns to spring and the days warm and lengthen, we’re so keen to get out in the garden, do some work, and also go shopping for lovely new plants.

It’s great to get acquainted with your local garden centre to see what’s on offer, but nurseries with an online presence can be a horticultural lifeline if you don’t have a good one nearby, or you’re (or want to be) car-free. Online stores often provide a wider range of inspiring plants because they have more growing space or specialise in particular types of plant, such as shade lovers or hellebores, enabling you to track down the perfect plant for your space.

Whether it’s merino socks, martini glasses or sustainable wool blankets, we’ve handpicked 82 thoughtful gift ideas to make the mother figure in your life feel truly special

• The best flower delivery for every budget

Not everyone is lucky enough to have their mum around, or have a good relationship with them, but Mother’s Day can be for any mother figure in your life – from grannies to aunts to mentors to family friends.

But how can you show your appreciation? For Mother’s Day (15 March), a handmade card and a hug are probably top of most people’s lists. If they don’t like physical gifts, a day out together, like a long walk, spa trip or afternoon tea, could be a winner – and we’ve suggested a few options below.

Sleeveless knits, breton stripes and shoe charms … our fashion writers share their secrets to a budget-friendly, new-season refresh

• How to have a guilt-free wardrobe clearout

Think of your spring wardrobe as a dry run for summer. There are the occasional warm days – when you regret leaving the house with a coat – and, of course, no end of showers. There are even the odd times when you can almost get away without wearing tights, which opens you up to all manner of skirts and shoes.

Spring is blouson jacket season, and a good time to wear denim beyond jeans (how about a dress?). Now’s also the time to try a short(ish) skirt with socks and loafers, which is strangely wearable for something with its roots in Prada. How about a corset top that isn’t a corset, or wearing a Lanvin-style headscarf if you’re having a difficult hair day? And why not add a bag charm while you’re there? Think 2026 colours – difficult green, pops of cornflower instead of red, universally wearable lilac. Most of all, it’s about adding to what you already own, or styling it in a new way. Welcome to spring.

My goal: a perfect 10 from Rate My Chives, the ‘number one authority on chives worldwide’. Why is this so hard?

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Chopping chives, I notice my weak wrists for the first time. My knife is connected to my hand which is connected to my wrist, which is flopping about like an overcooked piece of asparagus.

“You’ve got to keep them more sturdy,” says chef Trisha Greentree. “Lock in that line.”

High heat and low moisture are key to avoiding a soggy or stuck-to-the-pan mess

When I fry fish, the skin never goes crisp, and instead either sticks, rips or goes limp. What am I doing wrong?
Emily, by email
“The secret to perfectly crisp fish skin is heat,” says Mitch Tonks, founder of Rockfish in south-west England. Well, heat plus a little bit of prep. Fish are, of course, moist things, and moisture is the enemy in the quest for that golden-brown crust, so the first thing Emily is going to need to do is dry that skin out. “If the fish has any moisture on it, it will create steam while it’s being cooked, which, in turn, will make the skin go soggy and inedible, rather than crisp and delicious,” says British fish guru Nathan Outlaw, whose latest book, On Fish: A Seafood Handbook, is published next month. And the best way to do that, Outlaw says, is to wipe and dab the skin with some kitchen paper or a clean tea towel.

Rick Toogood, head chef and co-founder of Prawn on the Lawn in London and Padstow, Cornwall, and Jack Stein, chef director of Rick Stein Restaurants, are simpatico, but Outlaw then goes that one step farther: “Take a second piece of kitchen paper [or another clean tea towel], wrap up the fish in it and leave for a couple of minutes,” he says. “This allows any remaining moisture to be absorbed.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

I can’t get enough of cabbage right now, and it’s the perfect wrap for this warmly spiced picadillo filling

I love stuffed vegetables. When I was young, I came across a recipe for stuffed aubergines in an old book of my mother’s and must have cooked it a score of times. Later, in the early 1990s and to the echoes of nouvelle cuisine, Delia Smith showed us how we could work similar magic with peppers and tomatoes. Then the technique went deeply out of fashion, but I stayed loyal, and continued quietly stuffing tomatoes, pumpkins and courgettes, all no doubt influenced by my travels in Mexico. Thoday’s stuffed cabbage is inspired by the most delicious tongue in a tantalisingly light escabeche that I once had at Nicos in Mexico City, and also because I can’t get enough of cabbage at the moment.

It’s not the heart, but the stomach that will sometimes define whether a budding romance proves food for the soul, or reaches boiling point …

For Anna Jones, it’s lemons. For Ben Benton, it’s rice. For Gurdeep Loyal, it’s anchovies on pizza and, for me, it’s Yorkshire Tea in the morning. I could – did – date someone who “didn’t drink hot drinks”, but I would never have married a man I couldn’t make tea for when I woke up, or who couldn’t make me tea in turn.

These are what I’ve come to call “meal-breakers” – mouthfuls whose joys we feel our loved one must share, if we’re to share our lives with them. They are foods and drinks we cleave to as much for what they say about us and our values as we do for their smell, texture and taste. For most, it’s not so much the meal as the principle it conveys; not the anchovies on pizza so much as being with “someone who appreciates food as an act of collective joy – that embraces an ethos of all plates being communal,” says Loyal, author of the cookbook Flavour Heroes. The meticulous divvying-up of brown, salty silvers to ensure an even distribution on each pizza slice: that’s the sharing ethos he looks for in a potential soulmate.

Pessimism can be a form of self-protection, so it might be helpful to reflect on where this pattern started

I am a 38-year-old woman with three kids and a husband. I often find myself expecting people to disappoint me, and make appointments anticipating that they will back out at the last minute. I then start to play the role of the victim, the friend who has been let down, and this whole narrative begins in my head.

I may invite a friend to something, but then come up with all the reasons why the thing is stupid and they wouldn’t want to come. I downplay it, saying: “Oh, it’s nothing fun”, and “Don’t worry if you can’t come”, even though I know I would have a great time.

I was leaving behind my friends and family and contending with the loss of my beloved dad. When I boarded, I really fell apart

• Read more in the Kindness of strangers series

A long-haul flight in economy is never an appealing prospect but this one felt especially tough. I was leaving California after the death of my father to return to Australia, where I live. I was exhausted, emotional and prone to bursting into tears. It was always hard leaving my birthplace, friends and family behind, and this time I was also contending with the loss of my beloved dad.

I was desperately hoping I might have a spare seat next to me on the plane so I could get some sleep, or at least a little privacy. There would be no such luck. When I checked in, the desk staff told me the flight was completely full; worse still, I was in the very last row. Mine was the aisle seat, right beside the toilet and the galley – the busiest, most public place on the plane, when what I really needed was peace.

Will’s recovery from prostate surgery led to a new level of intimacy with Lucy and brought them closer together

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

I worried that intimacy would no longer be possible in the same way and questioned what that would mean for my sense of identity and our marriage

Paul Heath knew the rice-cooking David McLean was his sort of guy. Then one humid morning, he reached for the camera to capture a post-shower moment

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We met in 1998, at a health and relationship course run back then by the Gay Men’s Health Centre in Melbourne. I saw David across the crowded room at a drinks session afterwards and slowly made my way around to talking with him. We were both in our mid-30s, and I’ve always gone for those tall skinny guys. We chatted easily and before he left I scribbled down my number.

He rang a few weeks later on a Saturday night, apparently figuring I wouldn’t be home and that he’d just leave a message. When I picked up, I think he was a little thrown. He said something like: “Hi, um, hang on a sec, oh fuck, I’ve gotta turn the rice down!” And I thought, this is my sort of guy – Saturday night at home cooking rice, what’s not to love.

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Airline has refused refund after our flight was diverted because of bad weather and we were left on the plane for six hours

I was on a Ryanair flight from Bristol to Dublin that took off during Storm Amy in October last year. It was unable to land at Dublin after two abortive attempts and was diverted to Manchester, where we sat on the plane for six hours, with no complimentary refreshments, before being unceremoniously ejected at nearly midnight.

We were told Ryanair staff would organise taxis and hotels, but no crew disembarked with us, and the terminal was deserted.

They were far from home but it refused to let them stay without specific ID to prove they were over 18

My disabled 22-year-old daughter and her 20-year-old sister were turned away late at night by Travelodge Cambridge Orchard Park because staff would not accept that they were over 18. Their rail and student cards showing their dates of birth were not accepted.

I called the hotel and offered to scan their passports but this was refused as well. The customer service helpline was similarly unhelpful. By then it was nearly 10pm and they had nowhere else to go. The 22-year-old is autistic and when she goes anywhere we always have to have her itinerary pre-planned and someone to be with her.

It’s a grim time to be in your 20s, no doubt, but don’t blame it all on older people: being chopped up into ever smaller rivalries only serves the market

Intergenerational relations, or lack of them, is a subject I’ve been thinking about, on and off, since the financial crisis. I’ve read up on it, too – things such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ report on intergenerational earnings mobility, which is wonky but full of fascinating information which needs some parsing. (Example: “While the educational attainment of ethnic minorities growing up in families eligible for free school meals is often higher than that of their white majority peers, their earnings outcomes show no such advantage.” Why not?) Another good source of data is the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s (OBR) report on intergenerational fairness – which, interestingly, is about the bluntest statement of fiscal unfairness that you can find. The OBR makes the point that “a current new-born baby would make an average net discounted contribution to the exchequer of £68,400 over its life-time, whilst future generations would have to contribute £159,700”. In plain English, people’s lifetime contribution to the state is going to double. That number is from 2011, and will definitely have got worse. In 2019, the House of Lords published a report on “Tackling intergenerational unfairness”, which doesn’t even bother pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. Mind you, not everyone agrees. A 2023 report from Imperial College Business School argues “there is more solidarity between generations than the ‘Millennials versus Boomers’ narrative would suggest”.

So this is definitely a question you can address through data – though there is a risk that you can use numbers to cherrypick your way to a conclusion you already held in advance. The other way of thinking about it is through lived experience. Not necessarily just your own. I often find myself thinking about the range of experiences and expectations in my own family, going no further than one generation back and one generation forward. I’m on the cusp between boomers and generation X. My children, both in their 20s, are firmly in generation Z. My parents were born in the 20s, in the west of Ireland and in South Africa. Between us, it’s a wildly different set of life stories, and chucking it into the capacious carpet bag labelled “generational differences” seems to me to be a violent oversimplification.

Bank criticised for tone of spending summaries, with one user complaining to ombudsman over ‘humiliating’ use of data

When does lighthearted banter become inappropriate and humiliating?

The digital bank Monzo has been accused of overstepping the mark by using the data it holds to tell one customer with a past eating disorder that she eats a lot of fast food, spends “more than most” on Just Eat takeaways, and had banished her life goals thanks to her spending choices.

Researchers working to unpick whether daily multivitamin results in people staying healthier as they age

Taking a multivitamin every day for two years appears to slow some markers of biological ageing – albeit to a small degree, research suggests.

While chronological age is based on how long a person has lived, biological age reflects the state of the body. Estimates of the latter are often based on changes in patterns of DNA methylation – modifications to DNA that accumulate with age and affect how genes function.

Huge improvements in prevention, diagnosis and treatment have driven the fall, Cancer Research UK says

The rate of people dying from cancer in the UK has fallen by almost a third since the 1980s amid seismic progress in prevention, diagnosis and treatment, a report has found.

About 247 in every 100,000 people die from cancer each year, a 29% drop from the peak in 1989 of about 355 per 100,000, according to an analysis by Cancer Research UK (CRUK).

Doctors share healthful habits for managing urination and debunk misconceptions about trips to the bathroom

Urination is a vital human function and often occurs without much fanfare or thought – but age, sex, medications and a host of other factors can influence how you use the bathroom. Because there can be so much variation, patients must not ignore what seems out of the norm for their bodies, says Dr Vannita Simma-Chiang, a board-certified urologist and associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

“If something seems strange to you, one of the best things you can do is just go in and chat with a medical professional about it,” says Simma-Chiang.

Our current approach to mental health labelling and diagnosis has brought benefits. But as a practising doctor, I am concerned that it may be doing more harm than good

By Gavin Francis. Read by Noof Ousellam

It is estimated that every year more than one million bald people fly to Istanbul. They go for two reasons – hair transplant quality and competitive costs

“I used to look at my father and understand that I was destined to go bald,” says James McElroy. He smiles when he thinks back to his trip to Istanbul a year ago. “I had a few doubts at the beginning, but today I’m happy and satisfied. Yes, I had a hair transplant, I don’t hide it and I’m not ashamed of it. It was a somewhat intense experience, but I’d do it again – especially now that I’m single. I’m happy to talk about it and I’m happy to receive compliments. That wasn’t the goal, but I appreciate them.”

A patient is reading the terms and conditions of his contract before the transplant begins at Sule Hair Clinic.

Influencers are doing their best to recreate Bessette’s deeply individualized style, which ironically was a refusal to follow along with what was popular

While US pop culture has a long-held fascination with the Kennedys, much of the recent fervor around FX’s newest hit show, Love Story, has been aimed at the style of Carolyn Bessette, who worked as a publicist at Calvin Klein before marrying into America’s most storied political family.

Open up TikTok and you’ll see influencers doing their best to recreate her looks and makeup routines. Brands are invoking Bessette to promote their products; hair care brand Schwarzkopf posted about a highlighting technique the brand called “foiled cashmere, inspired by Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy”.

Seán McGirr inspired by modern identity and ‘London girls’ in one of strongest collections to date, as brand cuts jobs and struggles for momentum

Beneath the Paris fashion week hoopla – Chappell Roan resplendent in the front row, champagne flowing backstage – there were dark undercurrents at Alexander McQueen’s Paris fashion week show. The brand has seen a 60% decline in turnover over the past three years. Workforce cuts were made in the London headquarters last year, and a third of the brand’s 180 employees in Italy are thought to be at risk of losing their jobs. Fifteen years after the death of Lee McQueen, the brand is struggling to maintain momentum.

The founder is a hallowed name in the fashion industry, and one of the few modern designers to whose character and story the wider public feel a connection. But the generation who wore McQueen’s original bumsters have aged out of shock-value fashion, and the name has less power over younger consumers.

Transparent specs often associated with hygienist appointments have conquered catwalks and high streets

Despite some people in the UK experiencing 40 consecutive days of rain this year, sales of sunglasses have not been dampened.

Instead, the dark skies have ushered in a new era of eyewear: the non-sun sunglasses.

From jazz in Rotterdam and hip-hop in Paris to brass bands on the beach in Blackpool, the Guardian’s music editor chooses the best European festivals that can be reached by rail

Paris has some great festivals, such as Cercle (22-24 May), with dance music stars against the backdrop of planes and rockets in an outdoor aerospace museum, but the most accessible and democratic is Fête de la musique, which began in Paris in 1982 but is now popular across the country. It is a loose event encompassing dozens of free, semi-impromptu outdoor performances all over each host city, including plenty in Lille, which is even cheaper and quicker to get to than Paris on the Eurostar from London.

From packrafting in Luxembourg to cycling in Slovenia and eclipse-spotting in Spain, here are some great ways to get the kids into the wild

Several companies offer affordable multi-activity trips for families in Greece, but if you’re looking for something less frenetic, and a bit more challenging for teenagers, how about Greek island-hopping by sea kayak? Running on regular dates through the summer months, Trekking Hellas’s three-day, two‑night odysseys in the Ionian Sea start in Nidri, on Lefkada, and paddle on past Skorpios to Meganisi, camping out at Lakka before continuing the next day to Mikros Gialos for a second night under the stars before turning for home. There are stops for swimming, resting and barbecues along the way, and some thrilling cave detours, but with about six hours of paddling a day, the minimum age is 14.
From €352pp including kayaking and camping equipment, guiding and meals (trekking.gr)

On a tight budget, we stayed in a bothy, climbed a mountain, looked for Nessie and – best of all – made memories that money can’t buy

‘There! There – I can see it!” The cries of my four-year-old echoed around the ruins of 13th-century Urquhart Castle, causing a group of US tourists to come running over to the corbelled bartizans (overhanging turrets) where we stood. “It’s Nessie, I saw her,” he insisted, pointing at the ripples spinning out from the back of a sightseeing vessel on Loch Ness.

This was day four of a budget, week-long Scotland adventure for the two of us, and we were spending the day in Drumnadrochit, on the shores of the country’s most famous body of water, looking for the fabled monster.

Mountain hikes, river swims and centuries-old traditions appeal to the whole family on a trip to the Balkans

‘Uno, Uno, Uno No Mercy!” the six-year-old son of our hosts for the day bellows while leading my boys, 10 and 12, into his dimly lit corrugated iron home. I let out a little sigh of relief. The popular card game is a much-needed icebreaker as ominous clouds close in on the remote stan (the Albanian word for a shepherd dwelling). Despite the language barrier, much laughter and consternation soon spill out of the darkness, just as hail hammers down on the tin roof. Dogs bark, chickens cluck and sheep bleat as the thunder grows louder, and we all – our eight hosts, seven guests and one guide – shelter in the tiny kitchen, the living room-cum-bedroom (now Uno parlour), or on the veranda.

It’s day two of a seven-day trip with Undiscovered Balkans, crisscrossing between Albania and Montenegro on foot and by car. Having always wanted to hike the Peaks of the Balkans trail, a 119-mile (192km) hike linking Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania, I jumped at the chance to sample this new guided itinerary. Combining some of the region’s most famous hikes with gentler excursions for kids, such as a day experiencing life as a shepherd, or visits to remote swimming spots, it seemed a novel alternative to our usual “get a map and hope for the best” approach to hiking holidays.

In search of a new adventure, Craig Munns went back to school. Now, at 65, he spends his days examining long-vanished life forms

Craig Munns has a large model of a T rex on his desk. He got it with a magazine subscription two decades ago. One day, a few years ago, he was sitting in his study, which was dense with books and yellow sticky notes and posters charting evolution from single cells upward, and he thought, “What am I going to do next in my life?” And his eyes lit upon the T rex.

Munns had recently taken on a job at the public library in Canberra, but it had always rankled with him that he had not studied for a degree, starting instead as an electronics trainee after he left school in Sydney, Australia. So he decided to enrol as a part-time student. He graduated at 62, with honours in palaeontology from the University of New England in Armidale, NSW.

Researchers have found evidence of what many of us always suspected: ‘hasslers’ shorten your lifespan. And they know by exactly how long

Name: Hasslers.

Age: More like ageing.

He is an Australian shepherd dog who navigates the world with fearless joy. When I had two heart attacks, his unwavering devotion helped save me

Luke, a blind Australian shepherd, came to us seven years ago, after we rescued him from a working horse farm. Even though he can’t see, Luke moves around with a fearlessness that is inspiring.

He compensates with his other senses; Luke can smell and hear at an astonishing level, that’s how he notices things. But he also seems to understand that he’s going to run into things and be confused at times. That does not deter him in the slightest.

If plucking made more hairs grow, it would be the solution to thinning, but sadly it can have the opposite effect

‘I wish that by plucking a single hair you would get more to grow back,” says Desmond Tobin, professor of dermatological science at University College Dublin. “It would be a great solution for people who are thinning and unhappy about it.”

Unfortunately, it’s a myth. Our scalp is covered in follicles – essentially tiny hair factories – and each one produces just a single hair shaft. Plucking a hair won’t cause multiple hairs to grow from the same follicle.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley has endured threats and sexual harassment to report on Jeffrey Epstein’s chief enabler. Maxwell’s conviction was only the start of the quest for justice, she says

On 9 September 2022, Lucia Osborne-Crowley flew from London to Miami and caught a Greyhound bus north to West Palm Beach. The writer and journalist had arranged to meet Carolyn Andriano, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell from the age of 14 until she was 17, starting in 2001. Andriano had been a crucial witness in the trial against Maxwell in 2021.

When the two women met, Andriano said she had just been visited by a private investigator – a man in his 60s, who had heard she was talking to someone about a book. In a restaurant that afternoon, Osborne-Crowley was approached by a man in his 60s. What was she writing, he wanted to know. He offered her drugs, cash and a meeting with one of Epstein’s pilots, then put his hands under her skirt. When the manager asked him to leave, he waited in the car park; Osborne-Crowley had to escape through a staff exit.

As speculation mounts that Kim Jong-un and Trump could meet this month, analysts say Pyongyang will continue to see nuclear weapons as a matter of survival

• Middle East crisis – live updates

North Korea’s launch last week of a missile from a naval destroyer elicited an uncharacteristically prosaic analysis from the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. The launch was proof, he said, that arming ships with nuclear weapons was “making satisfactory progress”.

But the test, and Kim’s mildly upbeat appraisal, were designed to reverberate well beyond the deck of the 5,000-tonne destroyer-class vessel the Choe Hyon – the biggest warship in the North Korean fleet.

Interpol’s DNA unit is helping bring closure to families of murder victims, whose names may be unknown for decades

In the shadow of Antwerp’s main arena, close to the city’s docklands, runs the Groot Schijn River. It was here that the body of Rita Roberts was discovered in June 1992, floating against the grate of a water treatment plant.

She appeared to have been murdered, but Belgian police were unable to identify her. A tattoo of a black rose with green leaves and initials on her left arm was their only clue.

If you’re living or working in the region and have been impacted by the US-Israel conflict with Iran, we would like to hear from you

As the conflict in the Middle East continues to escalate, we would like to hear how people living, working or travelling in the region have been affected.

Whether you are in the region or impacted in other ways, please get in touch.

With shipping routes disrupted and tensions rising across the region we want to hear from maritime workers, sailors and port workers and others working at sea who are affected

The conflict in the Middle East is disrupting shipping across the region, including in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s busiest maritime routes.

Maritime traffic through the strait, the narrow channel linking the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman, has effectively been closed since strikes on Iran began. Some vessels have been diverted or delayed and ports and shipping companies are dealing with heightened security concerns and uncertainty.

We would like to hear your experiences as a practitioner or someone who has tried this procedure

At the end of February, a report by the Women and Equalities Committee recommend that “high harm” procedures such as the liquid Brazilian butt lift (BBL) should be banned.

The government is “not moving quickly enough”, MPs said, stressing the need for a licensing system for non-surgical cosmetic procedures, noting that a “lack of timely action is fostering complacency in self-regulation” within the industry.

The report warned of a wild west in which procedures have reportedly taken place in Airbnbs, hotel rooms, garden sheds and public toilets. Individuals without any formal training can carry out potentially harmful interventions, placing the public at risk, MPs concluded.

Share your experiences as a practitioner or someone who has tried this procedure.

As he turns 80 this year, we’re inviting fans of the author to ask him the questions they’ve always wanted to ask

Michael Rosen’s work has been a stalwart of children’s bookshelves, bedtime stories and classroom read-alongs for decades, with children and adults alike able to quote chunks of his work. The much-loved poet, performer and broadcaster has a knack for writing sing-song rhymes that stick in your mind for years to come, whether it’s his classic picture book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt or his hilarious poem Chocolate Cake.

His first poetry collection, Mind Your Own Business, was published in 1974, and since then Rosen has written more than 140 books of poetry and prose, served as children’s laureate, and even become a TikTok meme for his pronunciation of the word “nice.”

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