As the results livestream was delayed, voters lamented: ‘Is it too much to ask for competence as well as democracy?’

Start as you mean to go on. Your Party has had a fair few ups and downs in its short lifespan. Some might call it chaos. Its two most prominent members, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, seem barely able to stand being in the same room as each other. Allegations of financial misconduct over membership fees and donations. A party conference which Sultana refused to attend on the first day. Accusations of corruption and sexism. A boys’ club.

The briefings and counter-briefings from the two factions never let up. Its hatreds seemed to be what gave Corbyn and Sultana a sense of purpose. A reminder that the left often prefers to pick a fight with other groups on the left rather than the rightwing parties. A misplaced Marxist dialectic or some other thought crime of false consciousness seemingly far worse than threatening to deport hundreds of thousands of foreigners.

Falling volcanic ash has for years been viewed as a nuisance. But a Sicilian project has discovered its agricultural potential and wants to spread the word

In the Sicilian town of Giarre overlooking Mount Etna, Andrea Passanisi, a tropical and citrus fruits producer, uses an unusual fertiliser on his 100-hectare (247-acre) stretch of land: volcano ash.

Like hundreds of farmers and citizens of rural towns perched on the slopes of Europe’s highest and most active volcano, the 41-year-old’s family has had to deal with the nuisance of falling volcanic ash for generations. But it is only in recent years that the quantity of ash has become so excessive that it required an alternative approach.

Treating the underlying acne can help. But stress relief measures like meditation can too – and may depend on the severity

Hi Ugly,

I tend to get pimples, especially around my period. This is fine and normal. What’s not fine is that I cannot stop picking at them, making my skin irritated and red.

Why is this column called ‘Ask Ugly’?

How should I be styling my pubic hair?

How do I deal with imperfection?

My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done

I want to ignore beauty culture. But I’ll never get anywhere if I don’t look a certain way

Daniel Siad, facing allegation of rape in France, appears in more than 1,000 documents in latest declassified files

“In This busyness I feel like fisherman some time I cache quick, some time no fish,” Daniel Siad, a model scout, wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in July 2014, explaining the frustrations of his work scouring the world for future models.

In this exchange, released in the latest batch of US Department of Justice documents, Siad was annoyed with Epstein, who had failed to turn up for a planned meeting.

As the dust settles on the government’s landmark changes to children’s special educational needs and disabilities provision, what will their impact really be on young people, their families and schools? John Harris and Kiran Stacey look at what we know so far. And, a growing backlash from graduates over student loan payments, led by the influential consumer champion Martin Lewis, is causing a headache the government was not anticipating. Why did they overlook this and what changes could be made?

Archive: ITV news, BBC

Ahead of her UK tour and her three nominations at this weekend’s Brit awards, we appraise Allen’s sharp, candid songcraft

The final track of West End Girl is as close as the album’s break-up saga comes to conciliation, which isn’t terribly close (there’s a glancing lyrical reference to fault on both sides). But in its dreamy trip-hoppy backing and the sweetness of its melody lurks something else: a sense of closure.

Turnout in Gorton and Denton byelection over 47%, with 36,903 verified votes cast as Greens, Reform and Labour contest the seat

Reform activists are “hearing Matt Goodwin has all but conceded defeat to the Greens”, the UK poll aggregator Britain Elects has posted on X.

The Greens have predicted a “seismic moment” in UK politics, with a party source telling the Press Association:

Things are feeling positive. Not wanting to get ahead of ourselves, but everything that we thought that was going to be happening looks like it’s happening … Whatever happens, I think it’s fair to say that Greens are here to stay now as a progressive voice in British politics.

Care roles hit particularly hard by UK’s lurch to the right on migration, according to analysis of Home Office data

Hospitals and care homes in the UK face “an impending car crash”, experts have warned, as research shows the number of overseas nurses and carers has collapsed.

Analysis of Home Office quarterly data reveals the number of overseas nurses granted entry to the UK has fallen by 93% over three years. Just 1,777 overseas nurses were granted entry in 2025, compared with 26,100 in 2022.

Escalation of violence between the volatile neighbours makes a Qatar-mediated ceasefire appear increasingly shaky

Pakistan bombed Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul and two other provinces on Friday, hours after a cross-border attack, the latest escalation of violence between the volatile neighbours who signed a Qatar-mediated ceasefire in 2025.

Following months of tit-for-tat clashes, Afghan forces attacked Pakistani border troops on Thursday night in what the Taliban government said was retaliation for earlier deadly air strikes.

Mediators say more talks to be held next week but no clear evidence two sides any closer on uranium enrichment

High-stakes talks between the US and Iran over the future of Tehran’s nuclear programme ended on Thursday without a deal, as the White House weighs a military operation that would mark its largest intervention in the Middle East in decades.

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, claimed “good progress” had been made at the talks and Omani mediators predicted negotiations would reconvene at a technical level next week in Vienna.

Clinton delivers withering rebuke and says hearing is an attempt to deflect attention from Trump’s actions

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Hillary Clinton delivered a withering rebuke to a congressional committee investigating her supposed links to Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, accusing its Republican members of embarking on a “fishing expedition” intended to cover up and deflect attention from the actions of Donald Trump.

In a furious opening statement, the former secretary of state suggested the event was “partisan political theatre” and “an insult to the American people” while repeating her insistence that she had never met Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker who died in 2019.

European Anti-Fraud Office to look into the former US ambassador’s time as trade commissioner in Brussels

Peter Mandelson is facing an inquiry by the EU’s anti-fraud agency after the European Commission requested the body look into his activities during his time as trade commissioner in Brussels.

The commission said it referred the peer, 72, to the European Anti-Fraud Office, known as Olaf, last week after the US Department of Justice released documents allegedly showing he shared sensitive government information with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Study shows lower risk for multiple myeloma as well as pancreatic, prostate, breast and kidney cancers

Vegetarians have a substantially lower risk of five types of cancer, a landmark study on the role of diet has revealed.

The research, using data from more than 1.8 million people who were tracked over many years, found that vegetarians had a 21% lower risk of pancreatic cancer, a 12% lower risk of prostate cancer and a 9% lower risk of breast cancer compared with meat eaters. Combined, these cancers account for around a fifth of cancer deaths in the UK.

Action relates to corruption case over allocation of government land in Dhaka to a private company

A court in Bangladesh has ordered officials to request an Interpol red notice for the British Labour MP Tulip Siddiq over a corruption case linked to the allocation of government land in Dhaka.

Bangladesh’s anti-corruption commission has alleged Siddiq used her relationship with her aunt, the former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, to influence the allocation of a plot of state-owned land in Dhaka’s Gulshan district to a private company. Siddiq has rejected the claim as baseless and politically motivated.

Scientists say DNA evidence indicates male Neanderthals and human females interbred more often than opposite

Tens of thousands of years ago, as modern humans migrated into northerly territories inhabited by our ancient cousins, the Neanderthals, the two species met – and sometimes mated.

Now, genetic evidence has revealed a striking imbalance in these prehistoric trysts, suggesting that interbreeding was mostly between male Neanderthals and female humans.

The former US secretary of state urged Republicans to question Donald Trump ‘directly under oath’ about his ties with the convicted sex offender

Hillary Clinton appeared before a congressional committee investigating her supposed links to Jeffrey Epstein – and accused its Republican members of targeting her in a bid to distract from Donald Trump’s involvement with the convicted sex offender.

The former US secretary of state answered questions for hours during a closed-door session on Thursday, a day before her husband, the former US president Bill Clinton, was also due to appear.

Firm’s automated warehouses are struggling to compete against swift deliveries from stores by bike riders

• Ocado to cut 1,000 jobs in £150m cost-saving drive

Only six years ago, the boss of Ocado Group was writing the obituary for supermarkets as he predicted that a surge in online grocery shopping during the pandemic had brought forward the hi-tech future.

“Not every store will disappear, but there will be a dramatic shift,” Tim Steiner said at the height of the Covid pandemic, when shopping from the sofa became the only option for many.

How has legislation backed by MPs failed to clear the House of Lords? And what will happen now?

• Assisted dying bill not at ‘end of the road’, peer says as time runs short

The attempt to bring in new laws allowing assisted dying for terminally ill people with less than six months to live looks likely to fail. The legislation passed the House of Commons but it has struggled in the House of Lords, and campaigners in favour of the new law have accused peers of “sabotage”. Here is what has happened:

The Star Trek actor answers your questions on Leonard Nimoy, the bathroom facilities on the USS Enterprise and the correct way to eat kangaroo penis

George, you’ve lived long, how’s prospering going? MosesQuest
I’ll be celebrating my 89th birthday in less than two months, I’m enjoying life wonderfully, and here I am talking to the Guardian!

Do you have a beauty regime? Because – let’s be honest – you look great. TooMuchSpareTime
Well, thank you for the compliment. I believe in discipline. I do want to – as we say – live long and prosper. There were so many Sunday mornings I woke up groaning: “I’ll never do that again,” after debauched nights at college spent on the beer bus. I’ve learned that, if you take care of yourself, mother nature will be good to you. I was a marathoner. I started in my 40s, my husband, Brad, trained me, and I’ve done six in total. The last was the London marathon in 1991. London’s one of my favourite cities. You have to run over cobbles, so it was horrible on the ankles. I ended up aching all over, leaning on buildings for support. I recently had surgery on my foot, so I think that is life teaching me not to engage in any more crazy 26.2-mile runs for a while.

A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternatives

There’s not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes – sorry, gifts – and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that’s before we get to the rampant “enshittification”, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them.

We’ve entered into a Faustian pact with these companies: “While it’s brilliant to have access to high-quality products and software, very often for ‘free’, it’s important to remember that there is a trade-off involved – often of our personal data and privacy,” says Lisa Barber, tech editor at Which? We give these companies our attention and our information, which they then turn into big bucks and apparently unassailable monopolies.

When Arlene went missing, suspicion fell on her abusive husband. This documentary is a sober reflection on violence against women, and a gripping whodunnit where some questions remain unanswered

When the police arrived at Arlene Fraser’s house in Elgin, Moray in April 1998, they found a place where time had stopped suddenly, like a needle lifted hastily from a record. Sights that would have been ordinary had she been there were disturbing in her absence: a bicycle on its side in the yard, a vacuum cleaner plugged into a socket in the hall, washing on the line. Having stood in her dressing gown to wave her two children off as they left for school that Tuesday morning, Arlene had since vanished.

Across two episodes that sensitively manage to juggle a sobering reflection on violence against women and a gripping whodunnit where a full answer keeps maddeningly eluding the authorities, Murder Case lays out what is thought to have happened to Arlene, and replays the twists and surprises of the trial – or rather, the trials – where concrete details refused to emerge. It is sad, enraging, frustrating, compelling.

Based on footage made by a devastated father in the aftermath of the school shooting, this heartbreaking documentary speaks to those still dealing with the loss. You wonder how some are still standing

Thirty years on, the Dunblane massacre remains almost unbelievable and the grief of the families unfathomable. In a terrible way, it is almost harder to see them now, three decades on; three decades lived without the children who should now be grown up, with families of their own.

On 13 March 1996, a man called Thomas Hamilton shot dead 15 primary schoolchildren aged between five and six and their teacher Gwen Mayor in their gym as they were beginning a PE lesson. Some of them he shot at point-blank range when they were incapacitated by earlier bullets. A 16th child died on the way to hospital.

(Kong)
Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon band mark 25 years with an album inspired by India and shaped by loss, featuring collaborators living and dead

It is 25 years since Gorillaz released their eponymous debut album. A project you might reasonably have assumed was a jokey one-off on the part of a Britpop star has instead lasted a quarter of a century, long enough for Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s concept of a “virtual group” to seem less like a snarky gag at the expense of manufactured pop than oddly commonplace: their latest release is launched into a world where cartoon K-pop bands Huntr/x and Saja Boys have collectively spent 100 weeks and counting on the UK singles chart, where the anime “vocaloid” Hatsune Miku is playing the O2 Arena and where celebrated producer Timbaland has launched an AI-generated singer called Tata Taktumi. Meanwhile, Gorillaz’s oeuvre has sprawled to nine albums, involving something like 100 guest artists; they are the thread that links Carly Simon to Shaun Ryder, Skepta to Lou Reed and Bad Bunny to Mark E Smith.

Perhaps inevitably, marshalling so many eclectic contributors has proved a challenge, even for someone as undoubtedly talented as Damon Albarn. Gorillaz albums are seldom concise affairs and are of variable quality, thus tricky to navigate. The best ones are those unified by a strong underlying concept, as on Demon Days’ glum survey of “the world in a state of night” post-9/11, or the ecological satire of 2010’s Plastic Beach.

After a nine-year-old girl was kidnapped and taken from Spain to Bolivia, authorities feared the worst. They found her in the rainforest nine months later – but that wasn’t the end of her ordeal

On 27 August 2013, a tall, spirited nine-year-old girl with long, well-brushed hair boarded an overnight coach in Barcelona. Nada Itrab was bright and observant. At school, she regularly came top of her class. Even now, she carried a notebook, eager to record the things she would discover on this trip. She had been given a camera, too – a cheap, lilac-coloured digital model which, since she was unused to luxuries, seemed to her like a treasure.

In eight hours, Nada would be at Barajas airport in the Spanish capital, Madrid. She would take her first flight, heading for Bolivia’s largest city, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. To her, the trip was an adventure, like something from the storybooks that she read at her local library in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a city just south of Barcelona. The daughter of undocumented immigrants from Morocco, Nada had lived there since she was four.

The anger toward John Davidson’s racist Baftas outburst is understandable. But I’ve had to ask what I owe to others with the condition

I cover Canada for the Guardian, a country spanning six time zones and more than 40 million people, whose stories I get to tell for a living.

I’ve had a successful career but at times, I worry that my work suffers because I have Tourette syndrome (TS).

It’s no surprise that so many Kiwis are leaving New Zealand behind for a nation with much larger capacity for embarrassment: Australia

I got the news that Aotearoa’s most (internationally) famous prime minister is moving to Sydney in a way that is only possible in New Zealand. I was at the final Splore festival in Tāpapakanga at the weekend (one of our longest-running and arguably most beautiful festivals) when Clarke Gayford, Jacinda Ardern’s husband, popped up next to me on the dancefloor dressed as a giant toadstool. “Yeah, we’re moving to Sydney,” he said to a man in funereal pirate garb. “Can’t wait!”

Maybe it was the joy of a perfect tracklist at 2am, maybe it was getting this breaking news from the horse’s mouth, but I felt thrilled for our former first couple. Like Splore, NZ has the hungover malaise of a party being cancelled and the lights going out.

Johanna Cosgrove is an award-winning actor/writer/comedian. She will perform her show Sweetie at the Melbourne international comedy festival and is now in NZ filming an exciting top-secret feature film

The UK, like many other countries, has a falling birthrate. But Danny Kruger’s perverse 1970s-style policies offer nothing to mothers-to-be

Babies are beautiful. I always want to smile at them in the street, perhaps because they are a rarer and more precious sight in this ageing country or because they remind me of my grandchildren. There are about 3.5 million children aged four and under, while dogs on the streets are a more plentiful 13.5 million. Is the dog boom compensating for fewer children? As time goes by, there are going to be ever more grandparents and ever fewer children to beam at foolishly.

That is not only a sadness and a loss, but becoming an aged society is a cultural and economic threat. Older people, by and large, are not the innovators or new thinkers. An ageing society risks declining in optimism, creativity and, above all, risk-taking: a top-heavy preponderance of older people makes for a conservative and fearful electorate. We are there already – and it’s getting worse.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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

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 nail-biting Gorton and Denton byelection has shown the cracks in first past the post. I still don’t think proportional representation is the answer

You can’t always get what you want. And as Mick Jagger didn’t add, sometimes the best you can hope for is just to stop other people getting it. At the time of writing, I don’t yet know exactly how that process has panned out for the people of Gorton and Denton in the kind of byelection Labour should normally win at a canter but which instead became a three-way race with Reform UK and the Greens, and a broader metaphor for the collapse of old certainties.

But for anyone chiefly motivated by keeping Reform’s Matt Goodwin out of Manchester, what’s clear is that the baffling process of trying to calculate your vote by second-guessing what everyone else is doing, while worrying that you might accidentally make things worse, did not necessarily feel like democracy at its finest. And unless something big changes, millions of us could be doing something similar at the next general election, in seats across the country where things have changed so much since 2024 that it’s no longer clear who is the “Stop Farage” candidate and who is the wasted vote. Which will lead some to wonder: is this really the best our electoral system can do?

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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

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.

Every country supports its aerospace business, while keeping the production at home is vital. At least with Rolls the UK is backing a winner

Rolls-Royce, the engine-maker and defence firm that is spitting out so much cash it can shove £7bn to £9bn towards buying back shares over the next three years, would like UK taxpayers to find a few quid – reportedly up to £200m as a first slug – to help fund one its big bets. The company would “appreciate” financial support from the government to smooth work on a new engine, says its chief executive, Tufan Erginbilgiç.

Outrageous? Well, corporate welfare for Rolls is obviously absurd in the abstract. If there is a definition of a company that can afford to pay for its own research and development, this is it. One might also say Rolls owes us a favour since it was the recipient of billions of pounds worth of loan guarantees from the UK’s export finance agency when the Covid wolf was at the corporate door in 2020.

It doesn’t fit neatly on a Treasury spreadsheet, but there is huge value in disabled and non-disabled pupils learning together

When I was 11, a woman at the hospital asked me what school I was starting in September. I still remember her surprise when I told her I would be going to the local girls grammar, as the hoist pulled my wet limbs out of the physio pool. I was a child but already familiar with those few seconds: the time between a person seeing my wheelchair and the flash across their face as they tried to recalibrate their expectations.

That was the summer of 1996, five years before the law required schools to make “reasonable provisions” for disabled pupils, and only two or three decades after it was the norm to segregate us in “special schools” with rudimentary curriculums, away from “normal” children.

Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist

Populists blame an ever-expanding list of enemies for social ills – many of which are in fact caused by changes in our habits and social norms

One of the great strengths of populism, in all its rightwing and leftwing varieties, is its readiness to blame people. When democracies are discontented, as most are now, the old early 21st-century politics of relative consensus and moderation is seen by many voters as insincere and inadequate, as many unpopular centrist leaders have discovered. Societies are always divided between clashing interests, especially under the current, ultracompetitive version of capitalism, and populism recognises that. In some ways, it is more honest than conventional politics.

But only in some. Rightwing populism in particular relies on an ever-expanding list of enemies – from urban elites to benefit claimants, immigrants to deep-state bureaucrats, diversity officers to leftwing radicals, net zero “zealots” to mild liberals – yet this list always contains a striking omission. In Britain as in other countries, many of the social trends that rightwing populists and their supporters say they hate, and want to reverse, are partly being driven by populist voters themselves.

The themes of an interim report are painfully familiar. Its authors must explain why previous reforms have failed

Perhaps the most dismaying thing about the interim maternity care report commissioned by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, is how little of it is new: entrenched cultural and leadership failures; staff shortages and crumbling facilities; stark racial and socioeconomic disparities, with black women nearly three times more likely to die than white women; and hospitals still covering up mistakes. These grave and painfully familiar shortcomings apply to England, where health policy is devolved; Scotland is conducting its own maternity review.

So far there is little indication of how Lady Amos, the Labour peer leading the inquiry, believes that this failing system can be sorted out. This is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive document, which draws heavily on the 8,000 consultation responses received so far. But some overlap in her final report – expected in the next few months – with the 748 recommendations already placed before ministers over the past decade is inevitable. The question facing her team, and Mr Streeting, is what they can try that hasn’t been tried before, or how they can do similar things differently.

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.

After a century of Labour dominance, disillusionment with both Westminster and Cardiff has given progressive nationalists a historic opportunity

Speaking last October at his party’s annual conference, Plaid Cymru’s leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, raised the biggest cheer when he laid out the stakes in what may be an era-defining Senedd election: “Let’s be clear,” he told his audience: “We’re not here to act as Labour’s conscience. We are not here to repair Labour. We are here to replace them.”

For most of the 100 years in which the Labour party has been the overwhelmingly dominant force in Wales, such talk would have been for the birds. But as Plaid gathers for a spring summit in Newport this weekend, ahead of May’s poll, it reflects the new political reality. Soon after Mr ap Iorwerth spoke, his party won the Caerphilly byelection from Labour with a 19-point increase in its vote share, depriving Nigel Farage of a post-industrial seat he had expected to win.

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.

Stupid government policy | The best U-turns | Easy crossword | Warming the sheets | Hot bricks

Regarding the new rules on dual nationals (Report, 24 February), given its standing in the polls, surely the government would prefer not to give voters yet another reason to think they are governed by callous, indifferent fools? Permitting dual nationals to enter with an electronic travel authorisation would be a simple fix for a stupid and illiberal policy inflicted on its own citizens.
Bill Robinson
Norwich

• Keir Starmer’s latest change of mind, over local elections (Report, 16 February), reminds me that years ago, my driving instructor told me U-turns should be avoided if possible. But if one was required, it was necessary to move as far to the left as possible before turning.
Stuart Harrington
Burnham on Sea, Somerset

Readers respond to articles by Gaby Hinsliff and Sumaiya Motara on the availability of first jobs, and the hoops applicants are made to jump through

Gaby Hinsliff may be right to link the current lack of starter jobs to recent increases in minimum wage and national insurance costs for employers (Do you remember your first crappy job? Today’s young people would wish for half your luck, 20 February). But there’s more to it.

In the 250-plus years between the invention of the water-powered spinning jenny and artificial intelligence, we have developed technology and technique with the primary aim of reducing the number of people necessary to employ for a given amount of output. On a finite planet, the amount of output must eventually stabilise. We cannot maintain for ever the notion that everyone must have a job in order to be allowed to have a life.
Donald Simpson
Rochdale, Greater Manchester

Readers respond to an interview with Beth Gardiner on how the oil industry is pumping billions more into plastics

Beth Gardiner is right to argue that plastic is not merely a recycling failure (‘They pushed so many lies about recycling’: the fight to stop big oil pumping billions more into plastics, 19 February). It is something far more consequential: an oil growth strategy.

Petrochemicals – of which plastics are the dominant output – now account for roughly 75% of net global oil-demand growth, and are projected to become the largest driver of future oil demand. Plastic production has already doubled in the past two decades. Major oil companies are responding accordingly. Recent consolidation – including a $60bn merger creating one of the world’s largest plastics producers – reflects a deliberate pivot toward petrochemical assets as a long-term demand anchor.

Readers respond to an article by an anonymous 15-year-old girl about hateful comments against women and girls on social media

The disturbing account from a 15‑year‑old girl describing the misogyny she faces online (I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day, 23 February) will come as no surprise to those of us working to safeguard young people’s mental health. The scale of harmful content in online worlds is deeply concerning. The author has been brave in shining a light on her experiences, and many young people today are exposed to misogyny and hatred in ways that are difficult for those who are not digital natives to fully understand.

Yet it is also important to recognise that the online world is not wholly negative, since for many young people it offers connection, solidarity, creativity and meaningful support. Any policy response must protect access to these positive spaces, not cut young people off from them.

Chelsea must keep their heads at Arsenal, Anthony Gordon faces his old club and a key return for Sunderland

Unai Emery has seen most things in this game but he has never won at Wolves. In three and a half years at Villa, he has lost two and drawn one of his three away games at Molineux. Twelve months ago they lost this fixture 2-0 and this week Emery shared his poor record to stress the difficulty of the challenge facing his side, particularly given they have won just one of their past five matches in all competitions. Emery even mentioned his visit to Wolverhampton with Arsenal in 2019, when his team trailed 3-0 at half-time and lost 3-1. For Emery, there is no better time to break his duck, with the schedule dictating that Villa could move nine points clear of fifth-placed Chelsea, who visit Villa on Wednesday, before Liam Rosenior’s side travel to Arsenal on Sunday. Victory would enhance Villa’s chances of returning to the Champions League but also pile pressure on a direct rival. Ben Fisher

Wolves v Aston Villa, Friday 8pm (all kick-offs GMT)

Bournemouth v Sunderland, Saturday 12.30pm

Burnley v Brentford, Saturday 3pm

Liverpool v West Ham, Saturday 3pm

For 67 minutes, Nottingham Forest were at risk of matching an unwanted record. At that point Fenerbahce were 2-0 up and full of belief that they could achieve the miracle their head coach, Domenico Tedesco, had been manifesting since their 3-0 first-leg defeat in Istanbul.

Only one team in the history of European club competitions have lost the first leg of a tie by a three-goal margin at home and advanced in the second. Up in the directors’ box, Evangelos Marinakis, more than an interested party on that occasion, presumably had flashbacks of Olympiakos suffering a 4-1 home defeat by Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Conference League two years ago, only to triumph 6-1 in Serbia in the second leg.

Martin O’Neill delivered a little piece of history in what will surely be his final European fixture as a manager. He created such wonderful memories for Celtic’s support in this domain during his first tenure that departing with a smile felt appropriate. In Stuttgart, Celtic won their first competitive game in Germany. It took them 17 attempts. “The evening is nothing to do with me,” said O’Neill with needless self-deprecation.

Luke McCowan’s goal inside 30 seconds was irrelevant in the broader context of this tie. Stuttgart’s 4-1 canter in Glasgow a week earlier ensured that. Still, a game that had the whiff of irrelevance for Celtic delivered unexpected cheer. The statistics will show Stuttgart spent much of the evening camped in Celtic’s half – the hosts had 24 attempts at goal – but the Scottish champions played with a diligence and discipline that is worthy of huge credit. Sebastian Tounekti should even have delivered a second Celtic goal in the closing minutes. By then, Stuttgart were going through the motions.

It is a peculiarity particular to Crystal Palace that a season of such upheaval and unrest could still end up with Oliver Glasner’s side winning another trophy. Having left the pitch after last week’s first leg with supporters calling for the Austrian manager to be sacked in the morning, Maxence Lacroix and Evann Guessand made it a much more harmonious evening for Glasner and his side.

After being fortunate to escape from last week’s trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina with a 1-1 draw, it could have been very different if Zrinjski Mostar had equalised just before Guessand settled the tie late on. But having been demoted from the Europa League to the Conference League after winning the FA Cup last season, Palace’s first European campaign will continue against either the Cypriot side Larnaca – who they lost to during the group stages – or Mainz from Germany in the last 16.

• RFU due to confirm shake-up of rugby’s top division

• Knighthead Capital Management in early discussions

Birmingham City’s owner, Knighthead Capital Management, is among a number of American investors exploring the purchase of potential new franchises in Prem Rugby before a radical shake-up of the sport due to be ratified by the Rugby Football Union on Friday.

The RFU council will vote at Twickenham on proposals to ringfence the 10-team Prem with no promotion or relegation until 2030, when a staged expansion is planned, beginning with the addition of two more teams.

• Deficit is the highest ever recorded by an English club

• BlueCo partner Strasbourg also lost £69m in same period

Chelsea made a financial loss of £355m in the 2024-25 season, according to new data released by Uefa, the biggest deficit ever recorded by an English football club.

According to Uefa, Chelsea’s losses were more than double the ­second-worst in Europe, the £171m posted by Lyon. The figures are also about £260m worse than those posted by the Blues in 2023-24.

• Batter will play in Friday’s match against New Zealand

• Winner of the game will top the group in Super 8s

England have not committed to fielding their strongest side in Friday’s do-not-necessarily-have-to-win T20 World Cup encounter with New ­Zealand but Jos Buttler will be given the chance to turn around his ­miserable run of form, with the team’s coaching staff convinced that a return to familiar lofty standards is imminent.

After six games at the tournament, Buttler’s top score is 26, against Nepal in England’s opener, and in their past four matches he has contributed three, three, seven and two. It is his worst run in international T20s since he followed 13 in his first ever innings with five successive single-digit scores, between February and September 2012.

• Player is captain of NHL’s Ottawa Senators

• Tkachuk expresses regret over Trump joke

US ice hockey star Brady Tkachuk has said he does not appreciate an AI video released by the White House that shows him insulting Canadians.

Tkachuk played in the Americans’ victory over Canada at the Winter Olympics on Sunday, which secured the US men their first gold medal since 1980. In the wake of that win, the White House’s TikTok account published video of Tkachuk saying: “They booed our national anthem, so I had to come out and teach those maple syrup eating fuckers a lesson.”

How did a small Nordic country dominate the Games? By making sport fun and not something for kids to suffer

Norway’s Olympians stormed the mountains of Milano Cortina and left the rest of the world wondering how a nation of 5.6 million people regularly tops the Winter Olympics medal table, this year winning 18 gold medals and 41 medals overall.

They’re not bad at the Summer Olympics either, despite not playing to their obvious national geographical strengths, winning four gold medals and a total of eight medals in Paris 2024. But all this talk of medals detracts from looking more closely at what the Norwegians do to create one of the best and most sustainable sports systems in the world.

Lead plaintiff, now 20, says use of social media made her relationships with friends and family anxious and strained

The young woman at the heart of the landmark trial about the addictive nature of social media testified for the first time on Thursday, saying she got hooked on YouTube starting at age six and Instagram at nine. By the time she was 10, she said, she had become depressed and was engaging in self-harm.

The woman, who is now 20 and known by her initials KGM, is the lead plaintiff in an expansive lawsuit against YouTube and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook. The crux of the case alleges social media companies intentionally create addictive products, leading to mental health issues in young people.

Former Labour leader says time for ‘real work’ to begin as his candidates take 14 of 24 available places on executive committee

A Jeremy Corbyn-led Your Party will work with the Green party and others to push for a “coordinated left-flank offensive” against Reform and Labour, the Guardian understands.

After winning a comprehensive victory to become the de facto leader of the leftwing startup party on Thursday, Corbyn will seek to rebuild bridges with pro-Gaza communities “alienated” by his rival Zarah Sultana, sources close to Corbyn said.

Inmate understood to be Huntley taken to hospital after being assaulted at HMP Frankland in County Durham

The Soham murderer Ian Huntley has been seriously injured in a prison attack in County Durham.

A prisoner, understood to be Huntley, who was convicted of killing two 10-year-old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, was taken to hospital after being assaulted on Thursday morning at HMP Frankland, Durham constabulary said.

Coroner finds Jeremy Webb’s death in 2022 caused by mammalian meat allergy – one of only two known cases, with other fatality in US in 2024

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On a June night in 2022, 16-year-old Jeremy Webb was camping with friends on the New South Wales Central Coast, north of Sydney, when he vomited after eating beef sausages.

Struggling to breathe, the teenager ran from the campground to knock on the window of a nearby camper van, and asked the occupants to call an ambulance. Then he collapsed.

Experimental therapy of applying stem cells during surgery could be ‘major milestone’ in treatment of birth defects

Giving stem cells to unborn babies diagnosed with spina bifida while they have in utero surgery could be “a major milestone” in the treatment of birth defects, doctors say.

A trial in the US found that applying stem cells from the mother’s placenta to her baby’s spine while it was being repaired was safe and improved the child’s mobility and quality of life.

Supermarket chain says it will point customers to herring and other species to protect threatened Atlantic stocks

Waitrose has become the first UK supermarket to suspend the sale of mackerel because of overfishing and will start pointing customers toward herring and other species.

The Marine Conservation Society warned last year that stocks were at breaking point owing to overfishing, and it downgraded mackerel from a three to a four on its five-point Good Fish Guide sustainability scale.

As fish stocks dwindle, surf tourism may offer a lifeline to traditional caballitos de totora fishers, whose vessels are thought to be among the first ever used to ride waves

Just before dawn, in a scene that has repeated itself over thousands of years on the north coast of Peru, fishers drag boats made of bound reeds to the water’s edge and, kneeling on them, use paddles shaped from split bamboo to row out into the Pacific Ocean to catch their breakfast. A few hours later, these surfer fishers return with netfuls of their catch, riding waves on the final stretch back to the shore. From the main beach in Huanchaco – a seaside town near the city of Trujillo – the fish are taken to sell at the market or to beachfront restaurants preparing meals for tourists.

The four-metre-long reed vessels – known as caballitos de totora in Spanish, or “little reed horses” – are placed upright on their ends by the promenade on El Mogote beach so that the seawater drains away and they are ready to be used the next morning.

Thinktank proposes councils stop using private contractors in attempt to improve quality and spending

Councils should train up their own workers to install insulation in England’s draughty houses, and offer home upgrades street by street, beginning in the most deprived areas, according to proposals for cutting energy bills.

Setting up “home improvement corporations” would allow greater control by councils over low-carbon retrofits for housing, and would be a more efficient way of spending limited public funds for insulation, according to the Common Wealth thinktank, sets out the proposals in a report this week.

Panama joins smaller nations in dropping support for policy aimed at cutting maritime emissions

US “bullying” over a proposed carbon levy on shipping appears to be paying off, experts have said, after Panama reversed its support for the measure.

In a leaked document seen by the Guardian, the key maritime state has co-sponsored a proposal to the International Maritime Organization that would in effect cancel the carbon levy and undermine attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Indhu Rubasingham calls in Jennie Lee lecture for renewed commitment to creative risk and new writing

The National Theatre’s artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, has said conservative theatre-making will kill the industry, even if it helps venues balance the books for now.

Delivering the second-ever Jennie Lee lecture in front of an audience of 200 representatives from the UK arts industry on Thursday, Rubasingham called for a renewed national commitment to backing creative risk and new writing.

The far-right activist’s trip came amid calls for the US to be included in a probe into foreign interference in UK politics

The hosting of Tommy Robinson by the Trump administration has been condemned by British MPs amid calls for the US to be included in a probe into foreign interference in UK politics.

The far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is being feted in the US, where he met figures including a political appointee at the Department of State in Washington DC and a congressman.

Prosecutors allege Stephen McCullagh broadcast six-hour recording to provide alibi for killing Natalie McNally

A man in Northern Ireland confected an alibi for the murder of his pregnant girlfriend by uploading a prerecorded gaming session to YouTube and pretending it was a live stream, a court has been told.

Stephen McCullagh broadcast a six-hour recording of him playing Grand Theft Auto and Robot Wars to create the impression that he was at home, while in fact he was 17 miles away committing murder, prosecutors told Belfast crown court on Thursday.

Sadiq Khan reveals 100 officers will use roaming technology for six months but opponents call its use ‘alarming’

Metropolitan police officers are to start scanning citizens’ faces using automated facial recognition technology to check their identities, in a move backed by the mayor of London but described as “alarming” by opponents.

The pilot was revealed on Thursday when Sadiq Khan said 100 officers would use the roaming technology – commonly deployed on smartphones – for six months. The mayor was responding to questioning from an opposition politician amid rising concern about the rollout of AI-powered policing tools. The Met’s website still states it “does not presently use the so-called operator initiated facial recognition”.

Federal Aviation Administration bars flights around Fort Hancock after reported use of anti-drone military laser

The Federal Aviation Administration barred flights on Thursday in an area around Fort Hancock, Texas, after congressional aides told Reuters a military laser-based anti-drone system was believed to have accidentally shot down a US government drone.

The FAA and Pentagon did not immediately comment but the FAA cited “special security reasons” in its notice about the restrictions on the airspace near the Mexican border posted on its Notam alert system, shorthand for “Notice to Air Missions”.

Law demanding IDs match ‘sex at birth’ also includes bathroom ban provision for trans people in public buildings

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Transgender Kansas residents have begun receiving letters from the state’s department of motor vehicles notifying them that their driver’s licenses will be invalid beginning Thursday, as a new law goes into effect that demands that forms of identification must now reflect the credential holder’s “sex at birth”.

The bill, known as SB 244, also bans transgender people from using bathrooms in public buildings that match their gender identity, and creates a sort of bounty hunter system, in which citizens can sue transgender people they encounter in restrooms for $1,000 in damages.

Largest ever image obtained by specialist telescope in Chile represents scientific and aesthetic breakthrough

Scientists have captured a beautiful image in unprecedented detail of the vast Milky Way galaxy, of which our own solar system is a part.

The stunning image is the largest ever obtained by the specialist telescope in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma) radio telescope, according to the group behind the project.

Fund says loan will resolve Ukrainian balance of payments problem while boosting reconstruction and growth prospects. What we know on day 1,465

The International Monetary Fund said its executive board had approved an $8.1bn, four-year loan for Ukraine, of which $1.5bn would be disbursed immediately. The IMF said on Thursday the new extended fund facility arrangement for Ukraine would help anchor a $136.5bn international support package for the war-torn country, which this week marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion. The IMF managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, said the loan would resolve Ukraine’s balance of payments problem and restore medium-term external viability while boosting prospects for reconstruction and growth after the war ended and helping to facilitate Ukraine’s steps to join the EU.

Ukrainian and US officials met in Geneva on Thursday for talks on postwar reconstruction despite a deadlock in negotiations with Russia, and officials in Kyiv hoped to finalise key details of a settlement at a trilateral meeting early next month. Top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov said the participants at the meeting spoke to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after its conclusion.

Zelenskyy, who spoke to the US president, Donald Trump, on Wednesday, said trilateral talks would probably take place in Abu Dhabi in early March and would aim to prepare the way for a meeting of Ukraine and Russia’s leaders.

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s special envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, also held talks with US officials in Geneva on Thursday, Russia’s state-run RIA news agency reported. Dmitriev declined to comment on the outcome of the meeting, RIA said. Umerov said negotiators were working on economic and security issues to “make the next trilateral meeting involving the US and Russia as substantive as possible”.

Romania scrambled fighter jets on Thursday when a drone breached its national airspace during a Russian attack on Ukrainian infrastructure near the border, the defence ministry said, in the second airspace breach in as many days. The EU and Nato member shares a 650km land border with Ukraine and has had drones breach its airspace and fragments fall on its territory repeatedly since Russia began attacking Kyiv’s ports across the Danube.

Ukrainian missiles struck the Russian town of Belgorod, inflicting serious damage on energy installations and disrupting power, water and heating, the regional governor said early on Friday. The attack on Belgorod, 40km from the Ukrainian border, and the surrounding district was the second in five days to cause serious damage.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday its air defence units had downed 220 Ukrainian drones over a nine-hour period, including 24 headed for Moscow. The latest ministry statement said 53 drones were intercepted and destroyed in a three-hour period ending at 11pm. Many of the drones were intercepted over regions in central Russia. The ministry said 12 had targeted Moscow.

OpenAI-powered assistant will help to ‘understand overall service patterns’, company says, as move sparks backlash

From hospitality workers to retail employees, the exaggerated “customer service voice”, often mocked in internet memes as wildly different from someone’s real voice, has long been a cultural trope. Fast-food giant Burger King is now taking that voice one step further, saying it will detect whether employees are using words like “please” and “thank you” through the assistance of artificial intelligence.

On Thursday, Burger King announced it is rolling out a new AI chatbot connected to employee headsets at hundreds of locations in the US as part of a platform called BK Assistant, powered by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Pete Hegseth has threatened to cancel $200m contract unless it is given unfettered access to Claude model

Anthropic said Thursday it “cannot in good conscience” comply with a demand from the Pentagon to remove safety precautions from its artificial intelligence model and grant the US military unfettered access to its AI capabilities.

The Department of Defense had threatened to cancel a $200m contract and deem Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation with serious financial implications, if the company did not comply with the request by Friday.

Company walks away from planned takeover as co-chiefs say deal ‘no longer financially attractive’

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Netflix has walked away from its planned takeover of Warner Bros Discovery, declining to raise its offer for the media conglomerate’s storied Hollywood studios and streaming business after it determined a sweetened rival offer from Paramount Skydance to be “superior”.

In a statement on Thursday evening, Netflix co-chief executives Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that “at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive”.

Yorkshire plant has been criticised for taking material from some of British Columbia’s most environmentally important forests

The owner of Drax power plant has started reducing the amount of Canadian wood pellets it burns, and will stop burning trees from British Columbia entirely within the next year.

The FTSE 250 company Drax Group said its Canadian wood pellet plants, which once supplied millions of tonnes of biomass to be burnt in its North Yorkshire power plant, had cost the company almost £200m in financial impairments last year.

Citizens theatre, Glasgow
Even the safety curtain has a morbid air in Dominic Hill’s post-apocalyptic staging of Beckett’s classic

Productions of Samuel Beckett’s modernist classic often evoke the world of music hall. The duelling routines of Vladimir and Estragon recall the banter of old-time vaudeville acts. A sequence of hat-swapping could have come straight from Laurel and Hardy.

Echoes of that remain in Dominic Hill’s staging, a co-production with the Liverpool Everyman and Bolton Octagon, but his approach is less end of the pier than end of the road.

At Citizens theatre, Glasgow, until 14 March. Then at Everyman theatre, Liverpool, 17 March-4 April and Octagon theatre, Bolton, 15 April-2 May.

With tech bros investing in vast underground homes to shield them from future horrors, a slew of ‘bunker-buster’ dramas like Paradise and Silo are asking: do they know something we don’t?

Sam Altman’s got one – although Mark Zuckerberg’s is, apparently, bigger. Peter Thiel’s is described as “mega” and located in New Zealand. These days, a doomsday bunker (or, in Elon Musk’s case, an “apocalypse resort”) is de rigueur for any self-respecting billionaire – enough to make you wonder if they know something we don’t.

A slew of recent dramas suggests that we are fascinated by such impressive underground real estate. Most audacious is Paradise on Disney+, in which tech-billionaire Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) funds a staggeringly elaborate building project under the not-so-subtle codename “Versailles”. Unlike Clive Owen’s Andy Ronson in A Murder at the End of the World, saving a few hand-picked individuals isn’t enough for this girl-boss-cum-tech-bro. Instead, Redmond has gone a step further, building “the world’s largest underground city”, an ersatz all-American suburb, accommodating 25,000 people while a climate catastrophe plays out above their heads.

Neve Campbell, Kevin Williamson and Courtney Cox return for another Ghostface whodunnit that is messy but mostly entertaining

Whether you love or hate the Scream franchise, it’s hard at this stage not to at least respect it. Even without the subterranean bar set by other lazy slasher sequels (stalk, stab, repeat, yawn) it’s a series that has now been around for 30 years and tasked itself with extending an ongoing narrative of insanely convoluted soap, finding new ways to comment on the horror genre and appealing to a savvier generation of younger fans (the sixth film managed to be the highest-grossing in the US). If nothing has rivalled the 1996 original, it’s still hard to argue that there’s been an objectively bad Scream movie, even at the franchise’s less effective moments, there’s been a buzz of effort and energy present.

The run continues, albeit with perhaps more notes than usual, with Scream 7, a scrappy, passably entertaining new chapter that limps to the screen with wounds on show. The original plan had been to continue the story of the Carpenter sisters, introduced in 2022’s hit relaunch, but after the shameful firing of star Melissa Barrera who dared to speak out about a genocide, it was back to the drawing board. Said drawing board was then just a headshot of Neve Campbell, the original Scream queen, and a bunch of dollar signs next to it as the actor had rightfully turned down the sixth film over what she said was a lowball offer. Some seven million reasons to rejoin later (according to reports) and she’s back front and centre, along with many amusing “why weren’t you in New York?” references, and with some familiar, and confusing, old friends.

Fans of the hit noughties series will be delighted to see the original cast back at Sacred Heart hospital. But this reboot isn’t afraid to move with the times

Bill Lawrence is on a tear. This is the man who gave us Ted Lasso and Shrinking, and who is days away from launching Rooster, the Steve Carell sitcom that HBO already sees as the anchor to its comedy output. At this stage in his career, Lawrence could blow his nose and the contents of his tissue would become a beloved heartwarming comedy series.

So it’s interesting that, of all his available options, Lawrence has instead decided to revive Scrubs. It’s a show with a big footprint – when Friends ended, you could argue that it became the biggest sitcom on Earth – but it still felt very much of its time. It was a medical comedy that not only derived a lot of its laughs from Family Guy-style cutaway skits, back when they counted as new and exciting, but also had more than one character who specialised in baroque cruelty, which doesn’t seem particularly on-brand for Lawrence any more. Ted Lasso would never.

The ongoing battle over for the iconic film studio is set to have a major impact on what we, the viewers, get to watch

It’s not unusual for a corporate merger to take months and months to actually finalize, but even by those standards, the bidding for ownership of Warner Bros Discovery has been drawn out. Netflix made a deal to buy the Warner Bros side of the company – its studio and streaming businesses – late last year, but Paramount Skydance has been undeterred, aggressively pursuing what it claims to be a better offer for the entire WBD operation. After several failed attempts at a hostile takeover, WBD is considering a final Paramount offer, to which Netflix will have the opportunity to counter. What we have is what learned cinema scholars might refer to as an Alien v Predator situation, in honor of Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox: whoever wins, we lose.

That is to say that for cinema devotees, casual viewers and people working in the film industry, the ideal outcome would be for Warner Bros to continue as its own entity: an entertainment company making movies and TV series. But that’s clearly not going to happen – nor are any number of relatively superior options floated last year, like the idea of Apple, who worked with the studio on the global smash and Best Picture nominee F1, buying Warner instead. They are still a massive corporation, but they have shown a willingness to spend on major (and theatrically released!) projects like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and have such a thriving business in other areas that they could afford to run Warner as a real studio, trying to continue the company’s recent hot streak.

Filmed last summer as the government sought to cut disability benefits, this groundbreaking show about an artist and her best friend is laugh-out-loud funny

As a rule, I don’t chat about the Equality Act when I’m watching TV. But as I sat down to the new series of We Might Regret This – the BBC’s groundbreaking comedy about a disabled artist and her best friend turned personal assistant – I couldn’t help but think about the cultural and political climate that it’s landing in (one in which politicians are genuinely debating whether we should scrap the law that stops employers from being able to sack someone because they’re disabled).

The writers are clearly not naive to this. Filmed last summer as the government sought to cut disability benefits, the first episode opens with Freya (played by co-creator and writer Kyla Harris) in a supermarket filming a public information advert for the Department for Work and Pensions. A prop baby flung over one shoulder and staring up from her wheelchair at nappies on the top shelf, Freya – still half-heartedly doing the disability-themed modelling she started last series – is struggling to get the right expression. Can she use some of her “lived experience”, the director asks. “You saying: ‘Hey, if something is wrong with your body, the government will throw you a fiver.’” Freya offers him another look. “OK, that’s too helpless. That’s Unicef.”

The author’s prize-winning memoir about losing both her sons to suicide is a calm, sensitive account of ‘radical acceptance’

‘There is no good way to say this.” This is the phrase used by police when visiting the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li – twice. On the first occasion, officers advise her and her husband to sit down before telling them their son, Vincent, has died by suicide. The couple hear the same line several years later when James, their other son, dies – also by suicide. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” Li states.

In this memoir, Li describes how Vincent, 16, enjoyed baking, while 19-year-old James was a brilliant linguist and a deep thinker. Shortly before Vincent’s death, Li had written a memoir about her depressive episodes which led to her own suicide attempts. She wonders if this contributed to both her sons’ sense that suicide could be a viable way out of difficulty.

Half a century ago, the famed New York venue run by a former marine and folk singer was ground zero for the punk and new wave scenes. Now the bands who played there are being celebrated on a 101-track box set

Fifty years ago, a dive bar in New York’s East Village started to attract attention as a new hub for rock music. Initially, this was a whisper conveyed in a handful of small-circulation music magazines. Then, celebrated musicians, record label executives, hip journalists and photographers, followed by the influencers of that era, began making a beeline for 315 Bowery, the home of CBGB.

Inside, an array of young, unknown artists were making music that would change rock’s sound and look, attitude and aesthetic. These outsiders created a template for punk, spoken word, powerpop, new wave, no wave, mutant funk, hardcore and so much more besides.

Norwegian Chamber Orchestra/Kuusisto/Amidon
(Platoon)
The Finnish violinist-conductor strips back The Lark Ascending to revelatory effect in an album that moves from searing grief to radiant, folk-infused transcendence with Sam Amidon

‘We aren’t deleting notes,” says Pekka Kuusisto, “but deleting ketchup.” The Finnish conductor and violinist is talking about Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, a work of such innate Britishness that it regularly tops UK classical music popularity polls. Kuusisto’s Lark isn’t RVW-lite, however, but a penetrating, convincingly honest account that strips the music back to its essential roots in the English folk tradition. Opening with a breathless whisper, it flutters and soars before vanishing into a realm of spiritual tranquillity.

The album, entitled Willows and featuring the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, is in part a reflection on grief and loss: Ellen Reid’s Desiderium, a visceral howl for solo violin, is dedicated to Kuusisto’s gifted brother Jaako, who died in 2022. Elsewhere, Caroline Shaw’s Plan & Elevation, an orchestral version of her 2015 string quartet, picks up on the arboreal theme in a work that maps out Washington DC’s Dumbarton Oaks estate. Architecturally conceived, the piece takes Mozart and Ravel as its guides in flickering lines crisscrossing five assorted movements.

Their friendship and musical partnership spans four decades. As the legendary Hungarian composer turns 100, cellist Steven Isserlis celebrates a musician of boundless imagination, humour – and his vivid way with words

I vividly remember my first meeting with György Kurtág. It was 40 or so years ago at the International Musicians Seminar in Prussia Cove, Cornwall. I was sitting in the dining hall there, when a man with grizzled hair and an unusually fervent countenance came up to me and, with barely any introduction, started talking about my pizzicato playing in a performance he’d heard of the Schubert quintet some years earlier, in which I’d taken the second cello part. This man was none other than Kurtág – accompanied then, as almost invariably during those years, by his wife Márta; she hung back somewhat, but didn’t miss a word.

I was immediately struck by his magnetic intensity, his fierce passion for music and his unique way of speaking English – punctuated by frequent utterances of “er-er-er” (Many years later, Kurtág was to tell me: “Stuttering is my natural mode of expression.”) He and Márta simply embodied – he still embodies – music. I had never met anyone to whom each note mattered so much. They both reminded me of what a friend once said about Beethoven: “He didn’t know the meaning of the words ‘it doesn’t matter’.”

We follow one woman across decades of change in this deeply compassionate novel of independence and dreams

Indian Railways has been a source of patriotic pride, controversy, endless cover-ups, labyrinthine bureaucracy and death on an industrial scale since its founding in 1951. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong, his first novel in 15 years since The Sly Company of People Who Care, explores its other major and fiercely contested impact on Indian society, as one of the country’s foremost employers of women and sources of female empowerment, especially in rural areas.

We follow the irrepressible, motherless Charu Chitol, from her childhood in 1960s smalltown Bihar with her rail employee father, a frustrated writer and frustrated socialist, through her dizzying encounters with rapidly modernising big-city Bombay, and on to a railways personnel department job, first office-bound, then as a roving welfare officer, investigating pensions claims, frauds and other abuses. The book ends in the early 1990s, all post-independence goodwill long spent.

Powerful case studies can’t make up for this book’s superficiality when it comes to the broader issues

‘We are today in need of more humility in how we frame geographies of the mind,” says Gavin Francis, a GP and travel writer. In his new book he attempts to combine both disciplines as he treks the uncanny topography of mental illness.

The journey is divided into chapters that explore various genres of human anguish – clinical anxiety, trauma, bipolar disorder, depression and psychosis – as well as autism and ADHD. He attempts to summarise each condition’s history in roughly 20 pages, evaluate past and contemporary theories, and weigh up the efficacy of treatments. To call this ambitious is to break new frontiers in understatement.

In his new memoir, Art Manteris recalls raucous times in Nevada, and explains why the explosion of sports betting in the US presents serious risks

Forty years ago, the New England Patriots played in their first Super Bowl. It ended disastrously for New England, who lost 46-10 to the Chicago Bears. The Bears’ mammoth defensive tackle, William “The Refrigerator” Perry, even got involved in the scoring with a touchdown.

That moment looked like it would cause serious problems for Art Manteris, who at the time ran the sportsbook at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Under Manteris, Caesars had offered odds on whether Perry would score during the game – and, as fans scrambled to back the popular player, the house stood to lose a significant sum if he did. When Perry ran into the end zone, gamblers collected handsomely, to the tune of $250,000. The next day, Manteris was summoned to meet the boss of Caesars, Henry Gluck.

A compelling and fitfully harrowing child’s-eye account of a mother’s unravelling

Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him out of school. It was the early 1990s and the family had recently moved from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas, where Block’s father had started a new job. While Block and his older brother, Aaron, had been wrenched away from their schoolmates, their mother had left behind work, a social life and her best friend, and found herself isolated and rudderless. But then she discovered a new purpose: taking charge of her son’s education.

Homeschooled reveals how Block ended up spending five years deprived of the company of his peers (including Aaron, who continued going to school) and at the mercy of his mother’s unpredictable moods. She had decided school was stifling her younger son’s creativity and that mainstream education wasn’t right for a boy of his sensitivities.

Fear, fights and feverish fanservice collide in this celebration of Resident Evil’s recent and retro legacy
PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch 2; Capcom

There’s often an undercurrent of existential fatigue in games that look back at their legacy. Dark Souls III’s dying kingdom, Metal Gear Solid 4’s decrepit Snake. So when Capcom showed us an ageing Leon Kennedy entering the ruins of the police station that marked the start of his journey from rookie cop to hardened veteran, it felt tinged with ennui as much as nostalgia. That self-reflective swansong for this 30-year series may still happen one day, but Requiem isn’t it. Even at its dourest and most pensive, this is less a song for the dead, more a knees-up in honour of the rocket launchers and typewriters that came before. Leon may be getting on a bit, but this is Capcom as energised, devious and goofy as ever.

Leon’s old scars will have to wait, anyway. Requiem’s new blood is FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft. Equal parts tenacious and nervous, she’s a fitting lens on the horror portion of Requiem’s split focus between disempowered terror and cathartic action. The story opens with Grace – more acquainted with desk work than field ops – tasked to go over a crime scene at a gutted hotel. She knows the place well, since it holds some horrific memories for her. Still, she heads off with little more than a flashlight and a pistol you’ll never find quite enough ammunition for to feel safe.

With ​i​ts longtime figureheads stepping aside, Microsoft’s gaming division faces a pivotal moment​, raising questions about whether ​i​t can still balance creative ambition with corporate strategy​ in the age of AI

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And so it’s all change at Xbox. Last Friday it was announced that the CEO of Microsoft’s gaming division, Phil Spencer, is to retire, while its president Sarah Bond is resigning. In their place, a new partnership: Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is promoted to chief content officer, while the new CEO is Asha Sharma, who moves from her post as president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product.

In a company-wide email, Spencer stated that he would stay on until the summer in an advisory role before, “starting the next chapter of my life”. For her part, Bond issued a statement on her LinkedIn account: “I’ve decided this is the right time for me to take my next step, both personally and professionally.” It was all extremely good natured, but its doubtful these airy missives tell the full tale.

Glowfrog Games; PC
Short but very sweet tale asks the player to compile a scrapbook of mementoes telling the story of a heartfelt bond that frays over time

There are few things sadder than the end of a close friendship. Whether it happens in a sudden moment of betrayal or after years of gradual separation, the feelings of loss can stay with you for a lifetime.

This is the theme of Pieced Together, a quiet, charming narrative game about best pals Connie and Beth, who meet at school in the 1990s and form an immediate, seemingly inseparable bond. Through the ingenious medium of an interactive scrapbook, we play as Connie, glueing in photos, notes and memories of her friend after years of separation. The game begins with several attempts to write Beth a letter, before we cut-out, stick and sort the story of their lives together.

We explore the strange food-obsessed world of a new game whose tech was once called ‘an insult to life itself’ by Hayao Miyazaki, the film-maker behind Spirited Away

A strange piece of software has recently landed on the PC gaming store Steam. And “software” feels like the cleanest way to describe it. Existing somewhere between a full-blown life sim, a science project and a kind of haunted fish tank, Anlife: Motion-learning Life Evolution probably would have disappeared without making much impact if it wasn’t for one unusual factor. Several years ago some of its creators were absolutely roasted on camera by one of the genuine legends of Japanese animation.

Back in 2016, Hayao Miyazaki, the director of movies such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, was shown new technology that used AI in order to animate models. Faced with a zombie that utilised its head to move by knocking its skull against the ground and wriggling its body like a fish, Miyazaki declared what he had seen was “an insult to life itself”. It’s hard not to watch the clip without feeling slightly seared – but now, a decade later, the ashen-faced developers from that room have sufficiently recovered to make their work widely available.

Arts theatre, Cambridge
Marital uncoupling may not be the social taboo it was in the 1920s, but this sumptuous revival delivers timeless pathos with the witty barbs

‘What’s the use of arguing and bickering like this?” a husband asks his wife in Easy Virtue. “It doesn’t lead anywhere.” He’s wrong, of course: it’s this kind of verbal fencing and simmering fury that would lead a 25-year-old Noël Coward to stardom.

Audiences may not know this early work, but in Trevor Nunn’s luxuriant new production they will know exactly where they are. Simon Higlett’s sumptuous drawing-room set comes complete with marble staircase for doleful exits and dramatic entrances and his 1920s outfits are accompanied by some of the best finger waves you’ll see outside Strictly’s Charleston week.

At the Arts theatre, Cambridge, until 7 March

Hever Castle, Kent
Historians have amassed the largest group of portraits of Henry VIII’s second wife, whom he began courting 500 years ago (and beheaded 10 years later). But do we really need a public vote on the best likeness?

Royal portraits are enjoying a spike in attention at present. While art historians are salivating over the recent discovery of the Catherine of Aragon pendant, Hever Castle, the childhood home of her successor as queen, is capitalising on its Tudor connection by mounting Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn. It has assembled the greatest number of portraits believed to be of Boleyn ever attempted (Guinness, take note).

Curators Owen Emmerson and Kate McCaffrey say it is a “fitting [way] to mark the quincentennial anniversary of Henry VIII’s courtship of Anne”. I look forward to the quincentennial exhibition marking her execution too.

Tate Modern, London
Forget the sex and drugs of the 90s. This wildly emotional exhibition shows that Emin’s life’s work has been turning suffering into sculpture, insults into poetry – and agony into art

It feels as if you’re intruding. Walking into Tate Modern’s huge Tracey Emin retrospective is like walking in on her crying, naked, sobbing and snotty, as if you have stumbled into something painfully private.

That’s not an easy thing to pull off in the cavernous spaces of our leading contemporary art institution, but that’s what makes Tracey – it doesn’t feel right calling her Emin, she pulls you so close it’s like you know her, it’s Tracey isn’t it? – such a special, important, era-defining artist.

Donmar Warehouse, London
The 28 Years Later star joins the impressive Anastasia Hille in Anna Ziegler’s two-hander about grief and family

There are many ingenious ideas in Anna Ziegler’s spare, sensitive two-hander, which features a sensational stage debut by screen star Erin Kellyman. She could not be more confident as Delilah, a bolshie, half-American daughter in mourning, who has a spiky relationship with her buttoned-up British stepmother, Jennifer (Anastasia Hille).

Artfully directed by Diyan Zora, the play is both a telling (the women narrate in third person) and an enactment of their developing relationship within a circle on stage, which revolves as the two psychologically orbit each other. We see them meet, clash and misunderstand each other while confessing their inner worlds to us, just outside this dramatic circle.

Eclectic event to bring contemporary art to part of peninsula usually bypassed by tourists and art lovers

Art lovers usually bypass the Cornish town of Bodmin as they head to the more obvious delights of seaside galleries in places such as St Ives and Newlyn.

But an eclectic festival called Flamm – Cornish/Kernewek for flame or spark – is bringing contemporary art to the hinterland of the peninsula this weekend. Highlights range from a clay sculpture of jackdaws, a reference to the local legend of the Bodmin jail inmate Rose Wright, imprisoned after supposedly training birds to steal coins, to a sound installation on a railway platform featuring an eerie conversation between two train workers.

English Garden, painted in 1965, is on display before it goes under the hammer with estimate of £2.5m-£3.5m

David Hockney’s first English landscape, depicting a perfectly manicured Oxfordshire garden, is on show for the first time in three decades before being auctioned.

Sotheby’s said the 1965 painting, English Garden, which was completed in Boulder, Colorado, was pivotal for Hockney as well as holding an important place in wider art history.

The actor, long open about his struggle with sobriety, was also ordered to undergo drug testing and pay $100,000 bond

Shia LaBeouf on Thursday was ordered to enroll in substance abuse treatment, undergo a drug testing program and pay a $100,000 bond as conditions of his release from custody after the actor allegedly battered and hurled homophobic slurs at two men at a New Orleans bar.

The requirements imposed on LaBeouf, 39, by New Orleans judge Simone Levine came after the Transformers film franchise star was initially allowed to leave jail without being required to pay a bond in the hours after his 17 February arrest on two counts of misdemeanor battery.

After the star made a fresh denunciation of the US president at an alternative State of the Union event, Trump returned fire at length on Truth Social, calling De Niro ‘sick and demented’

Donald Trump has responded to a recent podcast appearance by Robert De Niro, in which he called the president “an idiot”.

Speaking on Monday’s episode of The Best People with Nicole Wallace, De Niro, who has long criticised the politics, morals and competence of Trump, said: “He’s an idiot. We gotta get rid of him. He’s gonna ruin the country.”

Are influencers really the biggest problem facing waiting staff? Not compared with the customer who demanded I pick up her dog’s poo ...

Influencers have had a bad time of it at restaurants recently. There they are, just trying to record a quick video and take a few pictures of their lunch, and restaurateur Jeremy King (of the Ivy and the Wolseley in London) goes and writes an article saying they’re ruining the dining experience of “bona fide guests” – something he says staff are “desperately trying to stop”. I’ve read pieces calling TikTok the end of the London restaurant scene. Friends’ parents have even said they would get up and leave if they were sitting next to anyone filming their meal.

This surprises me. I have worked as a waitress in restaurants for more than five years, a job I love, and the joys of which most often come from the customers I serve. Of course, for every 10 great customers, you’re bound to get one that’s not so great – I’ve come across my fair share of those.

Emily wants Ananya to load the machine methodically. Ananya is happy with her more random approach. Whose argument stacks up? You decide

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

There is a correct way to load a dishwasher. Ananya’s haphazard method makes no sense

My method works fine. By dictating how it should be done, Emily is being superior and controlling

Whether you want moisturiser or mascara, serum or nail polish, our expert shares her go-to skincare and makeup. Plus, top tips for buying cruelty-free

• The best refillable beauty products

Thanks to a growing demand for ethically produced products, vegan and cruelty-free beauty has improved dramatically in recent years. An increasing number of brands are now vegan – in particular newer brands, which have prioritised ethical credentials. By the same token, many use recyclable, compostable or refillable reusable packaging, and donate to environmental causes.

Vegan beauty products are ones that avoid commonly used animal-derived ingredients, such as beeswax, lanolin (derived from sheep’s wool), snail mucin, keratin (found in some nail polish and nail treatments) and non-vegan collagen, which is generally derived from the connective tissues, skin, bones and cartilage of cows or fish.

Whether it’s beans or machines, grinders or pods, the Filter’s coffee expert Sasha Muller answered readers’ questions

• The best coffee machines, tested

Want to know how to make a barista-style brew at home or maybe where to buy the best coffee beans – or even which espresso machine is best? The Filter’s coffee expert, Sasha Muller, has been answering your questions.

Sasha has tested coffee machines, cafetieres, espresso machines and more for the Filter. You asked him about pretty much everything – from which decafs actually taste nice to the best grinders to use – and whether it’s possible to be too much of a coffee nerd.

Bean to cup coffee machines with dual hoppers do tend to cost a hefty premium, but one slightly more affordable option is the De’Longhi Rivelia. I do mean slightly, though – the most basic model which uses a manual steam wand is currently £575, and the fully automatic version I’ve tested in recent months is £675. It’s a great machine that justifies the premium over cheaper models – both in terms of its coffee brewing, which is superb, and its design. The masterstroke here is that the Rivelia comes with two plastic swappable bean hoppers which twist and lock into place. You do still end up with some beans left in the mouth of the grinder when you swap them over, but the Rivelia’s touchscreen gives you the option to purge the beans, or brew one last caffeinated (or decaffeinated) cup. And if only two types of beans isn’t enough then you can buy replaceable bean hoppers for £18 a pop.

It really depends what kind of coffee you like – and how you’re brewing it – but sadly I’ve struggled to find any real bargains. I’ve tried a bunch of the cheapest beans from the likes of Aldi and Lidl in recent months in the interests of science (and saving cash), and they’ve mostly been fine – but none of them have really hit the spot. It’s definitely worth looking out for time-limited deals on supermarket own brand beans and ground coffees – they can be surprisingly decent – but you’re partly at the mercy of how long the bags have been sitting on the shelves. With no roast dates on these coffees, they could be months old and past their best. It’s impossible to tell.

One of my guilty penny-pinching options is a big 1kg bag of Lavazza Rossa beans or similar. These occasionally come up on a deal for around £10 to £12, and although they’re by no means a refined pick – the experience is akin to someone smearing burnt toast and intensely bitter chocolate all over your taste buds – they make a mean Italian-style espresso and similarly potent cappuccino.

Keep dry in outerwear that’s been put through its paces in showers indoors and out

• How to choose a waterproof jacket
• The best men’s walking boots for every type of hiking adventure

I didn’t think it was possible for my cat to respect me less. That was until he caught me testing a waterproof jacket in the shower. Him, motionless in the hallway, a textbook look of feline disapproval painted across his face. Me, slowly rotating behind a glass screen like a Gore-Tex doner kebab.

What he doesn’t understand is that modern rain gear makes braving the elements far less miserable. Gone are the clammy rubberised raincoats of old. Today’s lightweight shell jackets incorporate clever fabric technologies that keep the rain sealed out without leaving you steaming inside.

Best waterproof jacket overall:
Montane Torren

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basic they scrimp on? The anti-consumerist guru talks pencils, fancy tea and Niwaki gardening tools with the Filter

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Patrick Grant is an outspoken advocate for radical change in the fashion industry. His campaigning brand Community Clothing supports local clothing and textile manufacturers across the UK.

He is a regular on TV and radio, best known for his role on the hit BBC series The Great British Sewing Bee. His book Less was published by HarperCollins in May 2024 and was an instant Sunday Times bestseller.

From a Sichuan-inspired lasagne and a simple macaroni cheese to pasta al forno with meatballs, here are a few easy, inspired recipes to enjoy hot from the oven

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

The other day, I climbed the communal stairs and opened the front door to the smell of cheese on toast. A welcome aroma made even more welcome when I realised that it was actually the tips of pasta tubes turning golden among grated cheese and creamy bechamel sauce. To add to the pleasant scene, my partner, Vincenzo, was washing up. Because that is the thing about pasta al forno – baked pasta – the time between finishing the construction and the eating is around about 25 minutes. That is, exactly the right amount of time to wash up and wipe up, or delegate those tasks to someone else while you make a salad and open a bottle of wine. There are few things as beautiful, inviting and complete as baked pasta and a clean kitchen.

The baked-pasta galaxy is a big one, with many stars. Ann and Franco Taruschio provide a brilliant recipe for a classic lasagne bolognese, made with fresh pasta, a rich (but not tomato-rich) ragu and parmesan-enriched bechamel. While their recipe is undoubtedly written for fresh pasta – either homemade or bought – it can and should be adapted for dried pasta, too. Just remember to plunge the dried sheets in boiling water for 30 seconds before using them, even if the packet instructions say not to soak them. Also, make the bechamel slightly more liquid by increasing the milk by 100ml. Meanwhile, for a lasagne recipe specifically written for dried pasta and with a juicy, tomato-rich meat sauce, look to Katie Stewart via Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Alternatively, Tamal Ray has a fantastic-sounding Sichuan-inspired lasagne made with pork mince, fermented bean ragu, bechamel and chard (pictured top).

There’s depth, complexity and nuance to this fortified wine that’s worth its own moment in the spotlight

I like to think of vermouth as the Nile Rodgers of drinks, a backbone of good times known more for big hit collaborations than for its solo work. It is a foundation of any self-respecting cocktail cabinet (though it should be kept in the fridge), and also a family of drinks with many individual talents, which are now at long last being more widely recognised – Waitrose’s most recent Food & Drink report even touted vermouth as a 2026 trend, with searches for the stuff up by 26%.

A fortified wine that originated in 19th-century northern Italy, vermouth is most associated with western Europe, but these days it’s produced in or close to many wine-producing regions across the world. It is made by aromatising a base wine with botanicals – traditionally wormwood, from which it takes its name (wermut in German), but also gentian, citrus peel, herbs, spices and others – before that’s bolstered by grape spirit or brandy, generally taking the ABV to between 15% and 18%. This is a gladiator of a wine: it has brawn, but also plenty of complexity.

A comforting and rustic plate inspired by trip to a traditional Roman trattoria

The benefit of soaking and cooking (or, better still, pressure cooking) your own beans are many: less packaging; money saved (a 500g bag of dried beans costing £2.50 will yield 1.5kg cooked beans, while some 400g tins can cost more or less the same); the suspiciously coloured but flavourful and starchy bean cooking water; and some personal satisfaction that you actually remembered to soak the beans in the first place. The benefits – and joy – of tinned beans, however, are almost instantaneous. That is, just a ring-pull away – unless, of course, said ring-pull comes off prematurely, turning the tin into a door without a knob and leaving you two options: searching for the tin opener that is somewhere in the miscellaneous drawer (or among the picnic equipment, which is on top of the wardrobe), or puncturing the tin at exactly the right spot on the seam with a pointy parmesan knife, which is somewhere in the same drawer.

Fortunately, the ring pull didn’t come away prematurely on any of the three tins – two borlotti beans and one plum tomatoes – required for this week’s recipe, which came about thanks to a meal at Dal Cordaro, a hard-working and decent trattoria just behind Porta Portese, a 17th-century city gate (arch) in the Aurelian wall on the right bank of the river Tiber. Everything we ordered – whole braised artichokes, slow-cooked oxtail stew, flash-fried rags of beef (straccetti), pasta and chickpeas – was pleasing and could have made its way into this column. However, my plate of beans in a rich, orange-tinted tomato sauce with poached sausages and greens (escarole) stirred in at some point was the satisfying idea that came home with me.

Maiale al latte pairs tender pork with a creamy, caramelised sauce – and saves old milk from a down-the-sink fate

According to the Sustainable Food Trust, “the milk from 40,000 cows (300,000 tonnes) is tipped down the kitchen sink each year – a real slap in the face for the farmer”. Even though some supermarkets have now swapped use-by for best-before dates on their milk, those dates can still be confusing, so always do the sniff test before binning it: even if it’s a little sour, you can still cook with it.

Forget fear of public speaking. A lot of people now shy away completely from speaking to anyone in public. But if we learn to do this it’s enriching, for ourselves and society

It started with two incidents on the same day. In a fairly empty train carriage, a stranger in her 70s approached me: “Do you mind if I sit here? Or did you want to be alone with your thoughts?” I weighed it up for a split second, conscious that I was, in effect, agreeing to a conversation: “No, of course I don’t mind. Sit down.”

She turned out to be an agreeable, kind woman who had had a difficult day. I didn’t have to say much: “I’m sorry to hear that.” “That’s tough for you.” She occasionally asked me questions about myself, which I dodged politely. I could tell she was only asking so the conversation would not be so one-sided. Some moments are for listening, not sharing. I sensed, without needing to know explicitly, that she was probably returning to an empty house and wanted to process the day out loud. I didn’t feel uncomfortable, as I knew I could duck out at any moment by saying I needed to get back to my phone messages. But instead we talked – or, rather, I listened – for most of the 50-minute journey. I registered that it was an unusual occurrence, this connection, but thought little more of it. A small part of me was glad this kind of thing still happens.

A new relationship in their 50s brought adventure, curiosity and freedom for Alexandra and Laurent

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

I love how committed and loyal Laurent is. For him, I’m at the top of the pyramid

My fellow Brits seem weighed down by endless swiping – I went to the Europeans for a fresh perspective

Last year, I went through a breakup and threw myself into internet dating. I started experimenting with mirror selfies, and spent whole evenings trying to take artful photographs of my own bum. I agonised over my three-line bio. I even put a notebook by my bed with the Hinge prompt “most spontaneous thing I’ve done” written on the first page, so if the answer came to me in a dream, I’d have a pen and paper handy.

I’d spent my early 30s trying to cling on to a failing relationship, which had made me feel stuck in a holding pattern. As if I was fated to have a slightly different version of the same argument every night until I was dead. The thrill of scrolling on Hinge, when I first started dating, was that it felt like shopping for an alternate future. I’d pore over pictures of men cradling small dogs and swinging tennis rackets, and get high on the thought of all the tiny dogs and tennis games we would enjoy together. I started hiding my phone in a cupboard in the kitchen before I went to sleep, because when I kept it in my room, I could feel all my new lives calling to me. Sometimes, when I got up to hide it, I had motion sickness from scrolling so hard and so fast.

From never arguing to knowing exactly what the other thinks, the signs your relationship is in trouble aren’t always obvious. Experts reveal what to watch for – and how to get the spark back

You would think this is a sign of perfect harmony. Not so if you have stopped arguing completely. “Stopping disagreeing isn’t a sign of peace, it points to emotional withdrawal,” explains Simone Bose, a relationship therapist at Relate. It happens, says Bose, because couples are “likely protecting themselves from feeling disappointed or from conflict itself, but are becoming emotionally numb”. Clinical psychologist and Couples Therapy star Dr Orna Guralnik agrees, noting that “some people don’t argue because they’ve come to a state of acceptance of who each other are, but some don’t argue because they’ve given up. It’s a cold, detached form of not arguing – a resignation.” For Oona Metz, a social worker, psychotherapist and the author of Unhitched: The Essential Divorce Guide for Women, “Couples who stop arguing even when they have major disagreements are on a collision course towards either an unhappy marriage or a divorce.” This is because “unresolved issues get swept under the rug and eventually come out in some other way”.

What is behind the growing anger over plan 2 student loans and what could reforms mean for graduates?

Pressure is building on the government to reform the student loans system, with politicians and campaigners piling in, and a minister conceding there are “problems” with the current set-up.

Yesterday the consumer champion Martin Lewis – who last month locked horns with Rachel Reeves – became engaged in a war of words with Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, on live TV.

BNPL can be a fee-free way to manage cashflow for an essential purchase but keep track of the payment schedule

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) is a form of credit that lets you spread payments for everything from clothes, jewellery and white goods to concert tickets, hotel rooms and takeaway meals.

I’ve been without a hob in my new kitchen for three months after an emergency engineer was forced to disconnect it

When Wickes installed my new kitchen, I noticed an odd, worsening smell that I put down to the ongoing works.

It was nearly two months later that I realised it was gas. My supplier dispatched an emergency engineer, who discovered a leak in the newly fitted hob and categorised it as an immediate danger. The gas supply to the hob was disconnected and Wickes sent a replacement, but no one came to install it.

Insurers say cases of scammers manipulating people into staging crashes and filing bogus claims are under-reported

Romance fraud typically evokes images of people being tricked out of their life savings by partners they meet on dating sites, but some scammers use a different tactic: recruiting unsuspecting victims into fake insurance claims.

The scam involves a fraudster convincing their partner, or a person they are dating, either to say they have witnessed a car accident, or to take out an insurance policy and file a bogus claim in order to secure a payout.

Orforglipron led to greater weight loss than semaglutide tablets and could offer more effective oral alternative to jabs

A new daily pill could be a more effective GLP-1 tablet for weight loss, according to a clinical trial that may pave the way for an improved non-injection alternative to Wegovy and Mounjaro.

The drug, called orforglipron and manufactured by Eli Lilly, is prescribed for type 2 diabetes and targets the same GLP-1 receptors as oral semaglutide. Like semaglutide, it lowers blood sugar levels, slows digestion and suppresses appetite. Unlike semaglutide tablets, it does not need to be taken on an empty stomach.

It makes rejection, teasing or criticism feel unbearable, often prompting a strong physical reaction. Sufferers describe life with a condition that is only just starting to be understood

Jenna Turnbull’s chest is tightening. The 36-year-old civil servant, who lives in Cardiff, can picture herself as she speaks: an 11-year-old in her PE kit waiting with the other kids for her lesson to start. “We were outside by the courts waiting to play netball,” she says. “Somebody commented that I had hairy arms, one of the boys.” Her voice wobbles. The incident was clearly juvenile; rationally, she knows that. Yet 25 years on, her embarrassment is still visceral, with the power to cause instant physical discomfort.

She searches for another example of her acute reaction to teasing and recalls a trip to the pub with her friends six years ago. Amid the loud conversation and laughter, a quip was made in the group about her being untidy at home. Or that’s how she perceived it. “About me not keeping on top of the house,” she recalls. The person “was having a laugh. It was just something that was said off the cuff.” Yet while the memory and detail is hazy, the shame she feels about it is not. “That comment still haunts me,” she says. After that pub outing, she started cleaning her house obsessively – to such an extreme that it became one of the symptoms leading to her diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). “I’ve been known to spend four or five hours cleaning my bathroom,” she says.

Disease, which causes people to stop breathing while asleep, linked to increased risk of heart attack and stroke

Obstructive sleep apnoea costs the US and UK economies more than £137bn ($185bn) a year, according to research.

People with the serious health condition repeatedly stop breathing temporarily while asleep; they tend to snore very loudly and can wake up gasping for breath.

Most believe they will struggle to get an appointment, with over a quarter choosing to manage ailment themselves

Almost half the public delay or avoid contacting their GP surgery when they are ill, mainly because they think they will struggle to get an appointment.

Overall 48% of people across the UK did not bother to ask their family doctor for help – either initially or at all – when they got sick over the past year, a survey found.

Faster access to GPs and A&E are the public’s top priorities for the NHS.

Only 32% believe the NHS provides a good service nationally.

42% think the standard of NHS care has worsened over the past year and only 12% think that it has improved.

47% fear NHS care will decline further over the next year and just 15% expect it to get better

It was once reserved for office workers and Rishi Sunak, but now pop stars and supermodels can’t get enough of the preppy look

My favourite kind of fashion moment is not a Met Gala headline-maker or a Paris catwalk extravaganza. Nope. My favourite fashion moment is when one piece of clothing is suddenly everywhere for no obvious reason, which is what is happening right now with the quarter-zip sweater.

The jumper with a chin-to-breastbone zip, which has been around for ever, is the breakout main character of the 2026 wardrobe. At a Chanel catwalk show held in New York recently, a quarter-zip knit was the star of the show, worn with a fancy cocktail-hour skirt and diamond drop earrings. Charli xcx teamed a Saint Laurent one with sunglasses and shorts on her last trip to Paris fashion week. Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta wears stealth-wealth dark merino ones in the dugout, rapper Central Cee wears a cream Ralph Lauren one on TikTok – and the man opposite you on the train right now, taking a Zoom call on his AirPods while eating Pret porridge, is probably wearing one too.

Instead of being obvious like a dark foundation, these tints will make you look as if you’ve had a touch of summer sun

Having one’s foundation match one’s skin tone exactly is a classic case of beauty industry dogma v popular opinion. The truth is that many people seek a little more warmth in their complexion – not only but especially come winter – and are disinclined to use another method such as tanning drops or bronzer to achieve it. And I’m always for whatever someone wants to do with their own face. All that concerns me is recommending the right product for the job.

A full coverage foundation in too dark a colour stands out like a sore thumb. The key to subtly deepening, or “warming up”, any skin tone is in choosing a sheerer base with clear pigment better able to “stretch” across any disparity in tone between skin and makeup.

Designer Daniel Lee’s trenchcoats and bomber jackets fizz with urban energy in collection that embraces bad weather

In a winter of record-breaking rain, Burberry – purveyor of the stalwart British coat – is back in the zeitgeist. A season of downpours has provided an apt backdrop for a return to form, as the brand re-entered the FTSE 100 last autumn after an ignominious year out of the charts.

The classic check scarf was ranked the fourth hottest fashion item in the last quarter of 2025 on the search, sales and social media metrics of the Lyst index, with overall demand for the brand up 239% year on year.

Karoline Vitto, Phoebe English and Sinead Gorey include wide range of body shapes on catwalks

Body diversity has made a comeback at London fashion week despite a wider shift towards ultra-thinness in the fashion industry.

Emerging designers including Karoline Vitto, Phoebe English and Sinead Gorey included a wide range of body shapes on catwalks over the past four days. Sizes have ranged from a UK size 10-16, a category referred to as mid-size in the industry, to plus-size, also known as curve models, which measures from a UK size 18 upwards. Sample size, often referred to as straight models, ranges from a UK 4-8.

This former industrial quartier is now getting noticed for its community-focused art spaces, lively local bars and inexpensive north African food

On a hill that rises up between Belleville’s Chinatown and Père-Lachaise cemetery, Ménilmontant was once a rural hamlet with vines and farms, before becoming more industrial in the 19th century. The quartier boasts a united, colourful community whose working-class Parisian roots have long been integrated with a strong north African diaspora. Bohemian, arty and socially committed, it remains off the tourist trail with no notable museums or monuments; it’s just a genuinely Parisian neighbourhood. The locals were bemused to learn that Time Out made Ménilmontant one of its World’s Coolest Neighbourhoods for 2025, though tourists who do venture here to discover a glimpse of a fast-disappearing Paris are sure of a warm welcome.

It took Ellen Baum about 16 hours to finish clearing one section of hair ties, condoms and tissues woven into the fencing

On a blisteringly cold day earlier this month, Ellen Baum was not in the best mood as she walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to meet some friends in Manhattan.

“I had read particularly horrible news that morning about, you know, the general state of the world,” said Baum, who is 37 and works in tech. And then there was the garbage. Baum stared at the dirty tissues, hair ties, trash bags and socks affixed to the suspension bridge’s frame – sometimes she even sees condoms and tampons woven into the fencing – and had a thought. “I can’t do anything about some of these big problems that the world and the city are facing. But I can do one modicum of something nice.”

This picturesque corner of the East Midlands is a well-kept secret and it’s great for exploring by public transport

Fallow deer are grazing under ruined brick walls in the house where Lady Jane Grey was born. It’s a moody spring day at Bradgate Park in Leicestershire and there are few visitors. Instead, there are fieldfares in the hedges and skylarks singing in the mist. I’m walking, through bracken and craggy outcrops, towards Old John Tower, a folly that looks like a giant beer mug on the hill ahead.

It sometimes feels as though England’s much-photographed beauty spots get more booked up and overpriced every day. But there are scenic corners of the country that still fly under the insta-radar and Charnwood, around Loughborough, is one of these. The largest borough in Leicestershire, Charnwood is the area between Leicester and the Nottinghamshire border. Its gentle wooded hills and well-kept villages offer country walks to gourmet pubs and cafes. It’s like a cheaper, quieter Cotswolds with better transport links.

In the last of the series, the writer returns to three passed-over places where he used to live – Harrow, Clitheroe and Princetown in Devon

• Where tourists seldom tread, parts 1-19

The last in this series of underexplored, overlooked, bypassed towns revisits three places loosely linked to somewhere I’ve lived at different stages of my life. Relocating is grand-scale vacationing, as there are a few months when the new place feels like a holiday destination – fresh, strange, not filtered and tainted by habit or prejudice. Going back years later is part-pilgrimage, part-funeral.

After a decade at the top, the Bake Off winner is reclaiming her career and refusing to soften her edges. She discusses racism, gaslighting – and why comfort food is more important than ever

In a food world where the trend is for protein and weight-loss injections and sugar is the supervillain, Nadiya’s Quick Comforts seems somewhat contrary. There are golden syrup dumplings. There is a chapter devoted to deep frying, with cheese balls and ingenious deep-fried cannelloni.

“If I could write an entire book on deep frying, I absolutely would,” says Hussain with a laugh. “This is how I cook, this is how I eat, this is how I show love to my family. Everything in there is stuff that my kids absolutely love.” It’s about balance, she says – there are also lovely recipes for soothing plant-based dal and delicious noodles – because “I think anything that’s an extreme version of itself is dangerous”.

In 1990, Gary Williamson was 18, backpacking in Europe, when his vision began to fail. It was the start of a perilous journey

The first sign that something was wrong was the blurred text in the book Gary Williamson was reading. The problem with his vision had come on suddenly – the day before, it had been normal. Williamson thought perhaps he was tired, or run down. He was 18 and had arrived in Gibraltar after travelling through Europe for two weeks, sleeping rough and not eating or drinking properly. “I’ll go and get some water and something to eat. I thought: maybe it’s nothing. I’ll see how I am tomorrow. The next day, I woke up and it was bad again.” He remembers cautiously getting out his book to test his eyesight: “It’s actually getting worse. I can’t read it now. The lines were starting to blur.” He had relied on a map to get him that far. “I remember thinking: that’s going to become useless very soon. I need to work out what I’m doing.” He needed to get home.

It was 1990, and Williamson didn’t think to call home to ask for help. With no money left – he had made it to Gibraltar four days earlier with the intention to find work – he decided to hitch a lift, thinking a UK-bound lorry would be his best bet. He made it to the gates where the haulage lorries left the port, threw down his backpack by the side of the road and waited. None of the lorries stopped to pick him up. He was, he says, “panicking a little bit, thinking: what do I do? It was harder than I thought it was going to be.” Around 6pm, he gave up. He went back to where he had been sleeping, on a patch of sandy ground behind a sandwich stall over the Spanish border. Before he went to sleep, he wished that he would get a lift the next day, and that his eyesight wouldn’t be any worse. When he woke up, it was.

When Sammy Azdoufal found he had access to data from robot vacuum cleaners around the world, he told a tech publication. But the implications could be mind-boggling

Name: The accidental hacker.

Age: It doesn’t matter how old Sammy Azdoufal is. What he did is what’s important here, and what he did is very much of the age.

This method can help deter pests and promote growth, but it won’t work for every plant

The problem
Enter any deep plant nerd space such as the Reddit threads, and you’ll find Leca. Hardcore followers cite positives to growing plants in these clay balls, such as fewer pests and watering mistakes, and faster growth. Switching from soil to semi-hydro is tempting, but does it actually make life easier?

The hack
Leca stands for lightweight expanded clay aggregate. Unlike soil, it is inert and doesn’t feed the plant. Its job is to hold moisture and air around the roots, while you provide everything else via a diluted fertiliser solution. Water sits at the bottom of the pot, and the clay wicks it upwards, keeping the root zone evenly damp.

Ukrainian soldiers are sent to The Forest Glade – Ukraine’s first centre for the treatment of psychological trauma – before returning to the frontline. After spending over three years in Russian captivity following the battle for Mariupol, 25-year-old Kyrylo Chuvak spends three weeks at the centre, a brief opportunity for rehabilitation. Hidden in the pines near Kyiv, this modest building offers soldiers psychological therapy as well as tango, archery, guided breathing, medieval games and quiet conversations over tea. After four years of war, and with waning international attention, the battle is not only taking place on the frontline but in the mind

Jeremy Corbyn's allies declared victory after he was voted to be Your Party's parliamentary leader in an election in which his rival Zarah Sultana was also voted on to the party’s leadership committee. The party is hoping to turn the page on bitter in-fighting since its launch last year, but will it succeed? Lucy Hough talks to the Guardian columnist Owen Jones

Centuries-old wells restored to provide drinking water as parts of the country head towards “day zero” when no water will be available

A loud cheer and sounds of clapping reverberated around Bansilalpet, a neighbourhood in Hyderabad, when the first trickle of clean water dribbled out of the ground. After an 18-month effort to clear out 3,000 tonnes of rubbish and restore the stone walls and adjacent area, the 17th-century Bansilalpet stepwell had become a source of clean drinking water for the first time in four decades.

“It was such a joyous moment to see water collecting into the stepwell after clearing 40 years of garbage,” says Hajira Adeeb, a 45-year-old resident of Bansilalpet, who grew up seeing the well become transformed from the community’s water source to a dumping ground. “I visit almost every day. The area is clean and lit up in the evenings. I enjoy sitting there.”

After months of rows between factions with ‘fundamentally differing visions’, results of leadership election are at hand

An increasingly bloody battle for the soul of the leftwing Your Party set up by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana will come to a conclusion on Thursday, when the results of its leadership election will be announced.

After almost eight months of public spats, rows over money, accusations of sexism and rifts over policy and direction, Your Party is hoping to turn a page on the manifold misfortunes that have beset it since its launch last year.

We want to hear how people across the UK are managing their money as Rachel Reeves prepares to set out the latest economic outlook

Next Tuesday the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will update the country on the state of the economy when the spring forecast is delivered to parliament.

The government is not expected to make major announcements on taxes and spending but will include the latest forecasts for growth, details of the UK’s financial position and hint at the changes we might expect in future.

The UK will phase out traditional home phones by 2027, but the switchover has been stressful for some. How do you feel about the change?

UK telecoms companies are retiring traditional landline services and replacing them with internet-based home phone connections.

The industry has set a deadline of January 2027 to complete this switch with roughly 3.2 million homes still to move over. While the digital switchover has been straightforward for most households, for some vulnerable customers, such as those with telecare devices, it has been very stressful.

Many experts and women living with the disease say the name polycystic ovary syndrome is reductive and misleading

More than one in 10 women of reproductive age have a hormonal disorder which can have wide-ranging health effects, including on metabolism, skin, mental health and the reproductive and cardiovascular systems.

Despite these diverse symptoms, the condition is known as polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. It is a name many experts and those living with the disease says is reductive and misleading, prompting a global initiative working to formally rename PCOS to something that more accurately reflects the disease.

As storms intensify and flooding becomes more frequent, many communities say infrastructure is struggling to cope. We want to hear how resilient your community feels to more extreme weather

Persistent rain and repeated flooding are testing the resilience of rural communities across the UK, impacting daily life, work and people’s livelihoods.

In recent years, repeated storms and long periods of rain have overwhelmed drainage systems, cut off villages, damaged roads and disrupted power and broadband services. Scientists warn that heavier winter rainfall is arriving earlier than expected, while councils and the Environment Agency face funding pressures and difficult decisions about where to prioritise protection.

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