A study found small changes to key behaviours can have significant benefits, and I’m all for barely perceptible adjustments

A week into the first lockdown of the pandemic, I vowed I would never set foot in a gym again. This pledge seemed in keeping with the confused fatalism of the moment, but it turned out to be one of the few promises to myself I have ever kept.

Since then I’ve become a fan of evidence suggesting that minimal changes to one’s lifestyle make a big difference to overall health, and this week there was more: a study from the University of Sydney found that even small changes to three key behaviours – sleep, diet, and exercise – can have significant benefits. For those with the least healthy habits, an additional five minutes of sleep, two minutes more exercise and minimal dietary adjustments could add another year of life.

The brutal crackdown in Iran, ICE in Minneapolis, Russian aistrikes in Kyiv and heavy rain in Gaza – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing

US bombs are not the answer, but there’s much the outside world can do – starting with noticing the horror unfolding in Tehran

Did you notice history being made this week? I am not referring to what may have been the most pathetic moment in recorded time – Donald Trump gratefully taking the Nobel peace prize medal from the woman who actually won it – nor the defection of a politician from one British rightwing party to another, but something grimmer. For this week witnessed what could well prove to be a landmark chapter in the blood-soaked history of the Middle East.

Thanks to an information blackout caused by Tehran’s decision to switch off the internet, it is hard to be precise about what just happened on the streets of Iran. But one official has admitted to a death toll of 2,000. CBS News put the number of dead at 12,000, while some warn it could be many thousands more – all of them Iranian civilians, gunned down for daring to protest against their government and to demand a better life.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US? On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

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.

Donald Trump has been gifted the Nobel peace prize medal by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. The gesture comes after Machado was unexpectedly sidelined by Trump when US forces abducted her political rival, Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. Her supporters had hoped Trump would recognise her as Venezuela's new leader, but instead he gave his support to the dictator’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez.

Woman who paired Buckley with Paul Mescal in critics’ favourite is contender in new Academy Award category

If you were to compile a list of the most powerful people in the movie business, you might start with the auteurs, the A-list actors or the execs who bankroll Oscar-winning projects.

But among those better-known powerbrokers is another vital cog in the Hollywood machine: the people with the ability to make and grow stars.

A dry spell doesn’t necessarily mean it’s over, say the experts. They share their advice on how to restore intimacy, from changing venue to writing a ‘menu’ and finding your kink

First up, don’t panic! “Every couple goes through dry spells. It doesn’t mean either of you is broken, and is not an indicator that something is ‘wrong’,” says Dr Tammy Nelson, sex and couples therapist, author of Open Monogamy, and host of The Trouble With Sex podcast. Dr Laurie Mintz, sex therapist and author of Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters – and How to Get It agrees: “The limerence stage, where you can’t keep your hands off each other, lasts six months to two years, then fades, but people think there’s something wrong with them or the relationship.”

Taking drug in pregnancy does not raise chances of autism, ADHD or intellectual disability, ‘gold standard’ review finds

Taking paracetamol in pregnancy does not increase the chance that the child will be autistic, or have ADHD or an intellectual disability, a “gold standard” review of the evidence has found.

The findings debunk Donald Trump’s claims last September that the painkiller causes autism, which were condemned by medical, women’s health and scientific organisations around the world.

Report claims unrestricted online access will be a ‘government privilege’, limited to individuals vetted by regime

Iran is planning to permanently break from the global internet, only allowing individuals vetted by the regime to connect online, according to Iranian digital rights activists.

“A confidential plan is under way to turn international internet access into a ‘governmental privilege’,” according to a report from Filterwatch, an organisation monitoring Iran’s internet censorship, citing a number of sources in Iran.

Laila Cunningham accused of endangering Muslims after saying it ‘has to be assumed’ people hiding their face for a criminal reason

Reform UK’s mayoral candidate for London has been accused of endangering Muslims after she said women wearing the burqa should be subject to stop and search.

Laila Cunningham, who was announced as Reform’s candidate for the 2028 mayoral elections last week, said no one should cover their face “in an open society”, adding: “It has to be assumed that if you’re hiding your face, you’re hiding it for a criminal reason.”

White House says seven-strong board, chaired by Trump, will steer Gaza through next phase of reconstruction

Donald Trump has appointed the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and former British prime minister Tony Blair to a newly created Gaza “board of peace”, a body he claims will steer the next phase of reconstruction and governance in the war-ravaged territory.

The White House said the seven-strong “founding executive board” will also include Trump’s special envoy, the property developer Steve Witkoff; the World Bank president, Ajay Banga; and the president’s son-in-law and long-time adviser Jared Kushner. Trump himself will serve as chair, with further appointments expected in the coming weeks.

Edward Brandt sentenced to 20 weeks in prison after behaviour left former minister ‘in fear of sexual violence’

A former councillor has been jailed for 20 weeks after stalking Penny Mordaunt, which the former cabinet minister said left her fearing “sexual violence”.

Edward Brandt, a professional sailor, had been found guilty of the offence but was acquitted of a more serious charge of stalking involving serious alarm or distress.

President raises pressure on European allies as US envoy says deal to take island ‘should and will be made’

• Fear in Greenland as threat of invasion looms

Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on countries that do not “go along” with his plan to annex Greenland, increasing pressure on European allies who have opposed his effort to take over the Arctic territory.

After a tense week in which Nato allies deployed troops to the largely autonomous territory, which is part of the Danish kingdom, the US president announced he might punish countries that do not support his plans to take over Greenland, using force if necessary.

Parts suppliers ‘put production on hold’ amid mounting confusion as China restricts purchase of the chips and US puts 25% roundabout tariff on their sale

Suppliers of parts for Nvidia’s H200 have paused production after Chinese customs officials blocked shipments of the newly approved artificial intelligence processors from entering China, according to a report.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report, which appeared in the Financial Times citing two people with knowledge of the matter. Nvidia did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment made outside regular business hours.

The light L-159 fighter is likely the plane promised by president of Czech Republic, Petr Pavl, to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. What we know on day 1,424

The Czech Republic is set to provide Ukraine shortly with “medium combat planes which are highly effective in fighting drones”, President Petr Pavel told his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Kyiv on Friday. Pavel has previously said Czech-made subsonic L-159 fighter jets could be transferred to Ukraine. “I believe we will manage to quickly and successfully conclude this issue,” Pavel told a news conference with Zelenskyy.

The Czech army has 24 one- and two-seater L-159 jets, used for training and support for ground forces. They can be armed with missiles and machine-gun pods. Iraq used the jets in the war against Islamic State, and fleets are owned by private companies that loan them to the US and UK air forces for combat training. The Czechs’ main fighter jet is the Swedish Saab JAS-39 Gripen. Pavel said Prague might also supply early-warning systems such as radars.

Zelenskyy meanwhile conceded problems with Ukrainian air defences at a critical moment in the war. Some systems supplied to Ukraine by western allies had run out of ammunition amid a wave of Russian attacks that have devastated his country’s energy infrastructure. “Until this morning we had several systems without missiles. Today I can say this openly because today I have those missiles … We received a substantial package in the morning.” He urged both European allies and the US to increase deliveries.

Ukraine and the US will hold talks in Miami on Saturday to discuss security guarantees and Ukraine’s economic recovery, Kyiv’s ambassador to the US, Olga Stefanishyna, said on Friday. Zelenskyy said he hoped Ukraine would sign security guarantees with the US next week, possibly at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In Miami, Ukraine’s negotiators would be Kyrylo Budanov, head of the presidential office, and Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s defence council secretary, the ambassador said, without naming the US participants. They would discuss security guarantees and postwar reconstruction. “The goal of the visit is to finalise these agreements with our American partners,” said Stefanishyna.

A majority of Ukrainians would strongly oppose withdrawing troops from the remainder of the Donetsk region still controlled by Kyiv in exchange for European and US security guarantees, a poll released on Friday indicated. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) said 54% of Ukrainians categorically rejected the idea; 39% would reluctantly accept. “Those who are ready to agree expect quite significant security guarantees,” said KIIS executive director Anton Hrushetskyi. The survey was conducted in early January among 601 respondents on Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Almost 70% did not believe current negotiations would lead to a lasting peace, with 57% believing Russia would attack again if there was a ceasefire at the current frontlines and security guarantees from allies. Even if security guarantees were given, 40% believed the US would not provide support in the event of renewed Russian invasion, against 39% who thought it would. Russia has publicly shown little interest in scaling down its demands and made few comments regarding the 20-point peace framework that Ukraine and the US have been trying to finalise.

Russia and Ukraine on Friday agreed to a localised ceasefire to allow repairs on the last remaining backup powerline at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, according to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA. Zaporizhzhia is the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe and has been illegally occupied by Russian forces since March 2022. Its six reactors have been shut down since the occupation but it still needs electricity to keep its nuclear fuel safely cooled.

Exclusive: Secret report suggests fats, oils and grease accumulate in ‘inaccessible dead zone’ at Malabar plant, then dislodge when pumping pressure ‘rapidly increases’

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A giant fatberg, potentially the size of four Sydney buses, within Sydney Water’s Malabar deepwater ocean sewer has been identified as the likely source of the debris balls that washed up on Sydney beaches a year ago.

Sydney Water isn’t sure exactly how big the fatberg is because it can’t easily access where it has accumulated.

Grieving, bruised and divided on the wisdom of foreign-backed revolt, how can the Iranian people achieve change?

The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami in his novel 1Q84 may have foreshadowed the great and indelible rift Iranian society is about to experience. “The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

Inside Iran, contrasting memories are already being brought into even sharper relief and made more traumatic by the blanket propaganda from Iran state TV portraying protesters as drug-crazed or pawns of a foreign power attracted to a violent terrorist culture reminiscent of Islamic State.

US president’s increasingly bellicose demands for control of the island may force the EU to draw a line in the snow

• Greenland: new shipping routes, hidden minerals – and a frontline between the US and Russia?

The crisis over Greenland may deliver the moment when Europe must stand up to Donald Trump, as officials have said a US attempt to annex the territory could shatter the Nato transatlantic alliance.

European leaders have entertained Trump’s demands for nearly a year as he has pushed Nato countries to increase their defence spending to 5% of GDP, and threatened to pull US support from Ukraine as part of a peace process that appears to favour Russia. They have also given a muted response to US adventurism abroad including the capture and rendition of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

PM’s visit to Beijing seen as a welcome reset to relations in a ‘new world order’ but critics worry what trade deal could mean for Canadian workers

Mark Carney’s trip to Beijing this week secured what he described as a “preliminary but landmark” trade deal and a recognition – welcomed by Beijing – that countries are operating in a “new world order”.

Carney’s visit is the first time in nearly a decade that a Canadian prime minister has been welcomed in Beijing. It comes after years of a deep freeze in the relationship between Ottawa and Beijing that Carney wants to thaw, in order to reduce his country’s precarious reliance on the United States.

Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie have gone from waiting tables to ‘One Direction-level’ fame in a matter of months, upstaging A-listers at the Golden Globes last week. What’s next?

Tough luck if you prefer your romcoms PG-rated, or ice hockey leaves you cold: there is no escaping Heated Rivalry. The steamy coming-of-age series has been a sensation in North America, making instant stars of its leads as producers rush to make more of it. It’s hard to remember the last TV show to spark such a furore, let alone one from Canada’s “Crave network”. So who are the young men at the centre of the frenzy – and how are they coping with all that thirst?

1. From waiting tables …

She was a star at 14, learned how to act with the whole world watching, then stepped away to discover herself. Now she’s back in the new Tomb Raider – and a Die Hard-style thriller

Sophie Turner has a screwball comedy vibe in real life – elegant trouser suit, arch but friendly expression, perfect hair, she looks ready for some whipsmart repartee and a sundowner. She seems very comfortable in her own skin, which is unusual anyway when you’re not quite 30, but especially incongruous given her various screen personas: first, in Game of Thrones. Thirteen when she was cast as Sansa Stark, 14 when she started filming, she embodied anxious, aristocratic self-possession at an age when a regular human can’t even keep track of their own socks. Six seasons in, arguably at peak GoT impact, she became Jean Grey in X-Men: Apocalypse, a role she reprised in 2019 for Dark Phoenix, action-studded and ram-jammed with superpowers.

Now she’s the lead in Steal, a Prime Video drama about a corporate heist, though that makes it sound quite desk and keyboard-based when, in fact, it is white-knuckle tense and alarmingly paced. The villains move in a malevolent swarm like hornets; hapless middle managers are slain almost immediately; it’s impossible to tell for the longest time whether we’re looking at gangster thugs or hacking geniuses, motivated by avarice or anarchy. It’s a first-time screenplay by novelist Sotiris Nikias (who writes crime under a pseudonym, Ray Celestin), and it feels original, not so much in the action and hyperviolence as in the trade-offs it refuses to make: whatever explosions are going on, however much chasing around a dystopian pension-fund investment office, you still wouldn’t call it an action drama. It has a novelistic feel, like characters from a David Nicholls book woke up in Die Hard, and there’s a constant swirl, as you try to figure out who’s the assailed and who’s the assailant.

Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power plants as severe frost set in have been described as ‘crimes against humanity’

Outside the main pumping station for Bucha, three engineers, bundled up in parkas, are working on the emergency generator keeping the Ukrainian city supplied with water.

One holds a heat gun to the generator’s filter in an effort to unfreeze it, his face reddened by blowing snow and a daytime temperature of -12C (10.4F). Watching attentively is the city’s mayor, Anatolii Fedoruk. The generator in his office is also frozen when the Guardian visits and he apologises for the lack of coffee.

Food critic comes under fire after suggesting health and safety rules ‘don’t really apply’ to elite restaurants

According to a critic who has eaten at every three-star Michelin restaurant in the world, Gareth Ward, the star chef and owner of Ynyshir, on the southern edge of Eryri national park, is a groundbreaking visionary.

“He knows which rules to break and when,” Andy Hayler wrote. “He’s like Picasso; if you look at his early still lifes, they’re unbelievably perfect.”

Consultant psychiatrist who blew the whistle on racist admission policies at London medical schools

In 1986 the psychiatrist Dr Aggrey Burke, along with his colleague Joe Collier, had gathered evidence that their employer, St George’s hospital, and other London medical schools, were discriminating against women and people with “foreign sounding names” in their admission processes. Burke and Collier, both then senior lecturers at St George’s, decided to blow the whistle. They published a paper that led to a Commission for Racial Equality inquiry, and wholesale changes to the admission policies at medical schools across the capital. Burke knew the risk the pair were taking, saying it was “as though one had offended against the whole system; we were blamed, unfairly treated and made to feel that we were outcasts”.

As the first Black consultant psychiatrist in the UK, Burke, who has died aged 82 of prostate cancer, was at the forefront of challenging mental health systems to treat Black people with fairness, and of supporting those caught up in the criminal justice system. The most notable case he worked on was that of the Rastafarian Stephen Thompson who, in 1980, was sectioned in Rampton secure hospital in Nottinghamshire because he violently resisted prison officers cutting off his locks, ignoring the religious significance of his hair. Burke was one of the independent psychiatrists who intervened, and he managed to have Thompson released after what he humbly called a process of “negotiation”.

As Michael Carrick prepares for Saturday’s derby, fans wonder if this is the club’s worst moment – but they are spoilt for choice

Manchester United, without a permanent head coach or European football and knocked out of both domestic cups at the first time of asking, are facing another bleak season. In the almost 13 years since Sir Alex Ferguson left, the club have struggled to find stability, with his shadow stretching down from the directors’ box to the dugout, emphasised by the stand named in his honour staring back.

Manchester City arrive at Old Trafford on Saturday in the opposite position, having had Pep Guardiola in post for a decade, amassing 18 major trophies. Michael Carrick will take charge of United for the first time since being appointed until the end of the season at a club who appear to be without a functioning long-term plan. This will be a campaign of only 40 competitive games for United, their fewest since 1914-15, with some fans thankful for being able to cut down on trudging visits. So is this, in the post-Ferguson era, the lowest of the lows?

The Tokyo Olympic champion has climbed more than 1,200 places back to the world top 10 following the birth of her daughter, Bella

“I definitely think I’m a better player now than I was before my pregnancy,” Belinda Bencic says as she reflects on climbing more than 1,200 places up the world rankings since returning to competitive tennis as a new mother. In October 2024 Bencic had plummeted to a lowly spot as world No 1,213 when she stepped back on to court feeling secure that baby Bella was being looked after by her husband, Martin Hromkovic – who is also her strength and conditioning coach.

On 11 January, 14 months since her comeback began, Bencic played Iga Swiatek in the final of the United Cup in Sydney. The world No 2, and current Wimbledon champion, won the first set but Bencic played supreme tennis as she swept Swiatek aside 6-0, 6-3 in the next two sets to seal her ninth consecutive victory of the week for Switzerland. Her imperious performance also meant that Bencic was back in the world top 10 again.

• Bath 63-10 Edinburgh

• Two tries for Cokanasiga while front-rowers all score

Scotland’s fly-half Finn Russell had spoken about his desire to claim the pre-Six Nations bragging rights at the expense of several good mates in the Edinburgh squad. There was never the slightest doubt his wish would be granted as Bath eased to a comprehensive nine-try victory that guarantees pool winner status plus a home draw in the last 16 and, potentially, beyond.

On this occasion Russell also had the luxury of an armchair ride behind a Bath pack who took an early grip on the contest and never let go. Even if Edinburgh had turned up in north-east Somerset with their best side, as opposed to resting a few senior men, they would have been hard pressed to put too many dents in the black-shirted tanks and electric sprinters parked up opposite.

Manager’s decision is no surprise having fought to keep Marc Guéhi in the summer and amid doubts over futures of a host of Palace’s FA Cup-winning stars

It was the day Crystal Palace supporters had dreaded but feared was inevitable. Oliver Glasner, having confirmed that the captain Marc Guéhi’s move to Manchester City is poised to go ahead, had another bombshell prepared for his press conference to preview Saturday’s trip to Sunderland.

Nearly eight months to the day since the Austrian led the club to their first major trophy by beating Manchester City in the FA Cup final, his announcement that he will leave Selhurst Park at the end of the season came as no surprise. It rounds off one of the worst weeks in the club’s history after the humiliating defeat by non-league Macclesfield that will be for ever an unwanted postscript to their victory.

Manager aware his reign has parallels to the Spurs spell of his counterpart at West Ham, Saturday’s visitors

When Thomas Frank glances along the touchline at Nuno Espírito Santo on Saturday afternoon, he will see more than the ghost of Tottenham managers past. Because during his darkest hours – and there have been a few of those during a fraught first season at the club – he may also see a vision of his own future.

The parallels between the two are clear and they are difficult to ignore as Nuno makes his return to Spurs with West Ham, desperate for a result to help lift the club out of the relegation places. When Nuno went to Spurs in 2021, he did so as a manager who had made his name in English football with Wolves, getting them promoted from the Championship and going on to enjoy success with them in the top division. Ditto Frank with Brentford before his move to Spurs last summer.

News from Friday’s press conferences, including updates on Arsenal, Nottingham Forest and West Ham

Brentford’s record-breaking Brazilian has overcome a torrid childhood, racism and injuries – but is dreaming of Brazil’s No 9 shirt at the World Cup

Igor Thiago had dreams that seemed impossible. His impoverished childhood and the early death of his father forced him to grow up fast while still a teenager. To eat, he had to start working as a child. He was a bricklayer’s assistant, a fruit carrier at the market and a car washer … so many jobs that could have prevented him from becoming the Brazilian to make Premier League history with the most goals in a single season.

Igor Thiago has 16 goals in 21 games for Brentford. There are still 17 more matches to go, the first against Chelsea on Saturday, but he has already surpassed such Brazilian luminaries as Roberto Firmino, Matheus Cunha and Gabriel Martinelli, all of whom scored 15 league goals in their most prolific season. How to describe this turnaround in his life? Igor Thiago has an easy explanation. “I would describe it as a lot of hard work. I think that everything God has planned for my life, has given me this year at Brentford, is something I hadn’t experienced yet in my career,” he says.

The postseason continues with the Broncos and Seahawks entering the fray, but there could be trouble for one of the frontrunners

What the Bills need to do to win: Keep winning short-yardage situations. The tush push on fourth down that propelled Josh Allen 10 yards and helped secure Buffalo’s win over Jacksonville last weekend epitomised how the Bills dominated the game’s crucial moments. The Bills converted four of their five third downs with four yards or to go last Sunday, and they finished fifth in third-down rate in the regular season in the same situations. Denver were eighth this season in third-and-short defensive efficiency (50.6%). Bills offensive coordinator Joe Brady will have to find ways to create leverage for Allen and the Bills in those vital moments to keep the scoreboard moving.

• Relationship between pair had appeared fractious

• New race engineer to be named ‘in due course’

Ferrari have announced they are to replace Riccardo Adami as Lewis Hamilton’s race engineer for the 2026 Formula One season, after the pair endured what appeared to be a fractious and testing relationship during the seven-time world champion’s first season with the Scuderia.

Ferrari issued a statement on Friday stating Adami would be moved to a new role with the team’s driver academy as academy and test previous cars manager, adding that his replacement as Hamilton’s race engineer, the crucial link between team and driver on the pit wall, would be announced in due course.

Marine Le Pen is milking rural fury over the Mercosur pact. France’s politicians, of all stripes, are too cowardly to defend a good deal

Once again, France’s farmers have been blocking motorways with their tractors in protest, this time at an impending EU trade agreement with a group of South American countries in a common market known as Mercosur, which has been 25 years in the making.

The tragedy is that while the EU can finally claim an important victory in its strategy of sealing rules-based free-trade pacts with key regions and countries worldwide to counter aggressive US trade protectionism, in so doing it is helping the Eurosceptic far right to electoral victory in France. Losing the support of France, a founding member, for European integration if the far right wins power, would have a more damaging impact on the long-term stability of the EU than any trade boost with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

By welcoming ‘Honest Bob’ Jenrick into the fold, the Reform seer is embracing the uniparty chaos he claimed to be seeing off

Like a 1970s rust-belt serial killer, Nigel Farage is painstakingly assembling around him the political corpses of Boris Johnson’s final, terrible cabinet. Think about it. You never see Reform’s defectors after the initial unveiling press conference, and I’m beginning to wonder what happens to them. I think Nigel amateurishly embalms them or stuffs them with horsehair and sackcloth, then seats them round a “cabinet” table in his cellar, where they all silently agree with him at all times, and never interrupt him.

But look, I’m prepared to consider more outlandish fan theories too, particularly after the sheer farce of Robert Jenrick’s defection on Thursday. If Nigel’s sloppy-seconding carries on at this rate, the Reform/Conservative party differentiation is going to feel a lot like it did when Bucks Fizz factionalised and split, then mounted rival tours of the UK. Neither music nor the United Kingdom was the beneficiary.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

European countries sending troops to the island is only raising the temperature and generating fear – exactly what the US president wants

Is Greenland Donald Trump’s 25th-amendment moment? Last time around, this was when the Washington “grownups” debated his capacity to be president, notably in the final fortnight of his presidency, after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Under the constitution, a president can be replaced should the vice-president and a cabinet majority decide their leader is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. The trouble today is that there are no grownups.

The US president’s designs on Greenland are clearly mad. He claims Russia and China are scheming to seize the island and that Denmark should be forced urgently to transfer its sovereignty. Denmark had long allowed the US extended military access to Greenland, but Trump seems to want to own it. None of his staff has been able to say why.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and the author of A Short History of America: From Tea Party to Trump

Reform’s latest defector from the Tories is a politician whose eye has only ever been on his own ambition

It’s come down to this. Watch any reality TV show and it won’t be long before you hear the lead presenter talking about how each contestant has been on a journey. It’s as though we can’t survive without a narrative structure. An attempt to give emotional meaning to something fundamentally meaningless.

It feels as if everyone has to be on a journey now. If you’re not, then you’re somehow less interesting. Only half a person. Even our politicians are no longer exempt. In the last 24 hours there have been any number of talking heads lining up to tell us that Robert Jenrick has been on quite the journey. His former Tory colleagues. His new tribe at Reform. Even Honest Bob likes to talk about his journey. Makes him feel special and different. Important.

There are many excuses for failing to tax the ultra-wealthy. The truth is that governments don’t tackle the problem because they don’t want to

There is one political problem from which all others follow. It is the major cause of Donald Trump, of Nigel Farage, of the shocking weakness of their opponents, of the polarisation tearing societies apart, of the devastation of the living world. It is simply stated: the extreme wealth of a small number of people.

It can also be quantified. The World Inequality Report (WIR) 2026 shows that about 56,000 people – 0.001% of the global population – corral three times more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. They afflict almost every country. In the UK, for example, 50 families hold more wealth than 50% of the population combined.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

For the sake of British Jews and British Muslims – and those of us who believe in multiculturalism – lessons must be learned from the Villa Park row

It was an infamous night in football.

More than 5,000 Dutch police officers had to be deployed to contain hundreds of Israeli fans embarking on a post-match rampage, tearing down Palestinian flags, assaulting Muslim taxi drivers and throwing innocent bystanders into a river.

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.

Is there any circumstance on Earth that would make these people, in all their finery, skip this thing entirely?

The truest thing ever said about the Golden Globes was by Tina Fey when she hosted the awards in 2019 and described the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of junket hacks, as operating out of the “back booth of a French McDonalds”. The HFPA was disbanded in 2023 after allegations of racism, but 95 former members retained voting rights and on Monday, the show went on.

The West Midlands police chief finally bowed to government pressure and quit. But we should not sleepwalk into a centralised system

After refusing to walk, in a manner reminiscent of Stuart Broad batting against the Australians in the 2013 Ashes, the West Midlands chief constable Craig Guildford has finally accepted the inevitable and retired with ill-concealed reluctance from his post. He had little alternative.

On Wednesday the Home Office had released a critical report by the chief inspector of constabulary, Sir Andy Cooke, into the way West Midlands police supported banning Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans from attending a fixture in Birmingham against Aston Villa. The same day, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, told the Commons that she no longer had confidence in Mr Guildford. The chief constable tried to face down the criticism. But, on Friday, he quit.

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 US president wants Americans to believe they are facing an emergency. The real danger is from his administration

In Minnesota, armed and masked agents are ripping families apart. They are seizing parents while they wait with their child at a bus stop, going door to door seeking undocumented migrants and breaking car windows to drag people out. Last Wednesday an officer shot dead Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen. Her killing is a tragedy for all who loved her, and most of all for the three children left motherless. It also marks her country’s crossing of a Rubicon.

Where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) once preferred to keep a low profile, it now seeks publicity and confrontation – pumped up on billions of dollars in funding, the aggression and brazenness of the administration and the licensing of bigotry.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Readers respond to Jonathan Liew’s article on rude chants on the football terraces about the prime minister

Jonathan Liew links rude football chants to the unmerited personal abuse which Keir Starmer is currently receiving (When crowds direct offensive chants at Keir Starmer, who’s to blame? I’m afraid he is, 13 January).

Football managers are frequently the target for similar treatment. Like them, Starmer has to set his team’s strategy and tactics and produce results that please supporters.

Guardian readers responds to an article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in which she laments the takeover of four family-owned cafes

I can’t help being disappointed by the current controversy over the Hampstead Heath cafes, as highlighted by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (I’m sick of avocado toast – I just want to keep my local, untrendy cafe, 12 January), as it’s all happened before.

In 2016, as chair of the Hampstead Heath management committee, I voted against the proposal to take the running of the Parliament Hill cafe away from the D’Auria family and hand it to the Benugo chain, but the proposal was initially agreed (albeit by only one vote). There was a predictable outcry against this decision, and I found myself confronted by angry protesters at a meeting chaired by the local MP, Keir Starmer.

Readers respond to Emma John’s article on the difference in attitudes to the game in England and Australia

Emma John’s perceptive analysis of cricket in Australia is spot-on (England ruthlessly privatised cricket – Australia embraces it with constant public displays of affection, 9 January). I have been visiting Australia for many years – our son and his family live in Sydney. The locals, on hearing my accent, mostly respond by saying “Sorry about the cricket, mate.” It’s not in a gloating or superior way, but in a genuine sense of puzzlement at how when we have often promised a real contest we perform like a malfunctioning firework.

As Emma observes, in Australia cricket is a national obsession and accessible to all, either to watch or to play. In England it has become elitist, with free-to-air TV coverage long gone, the cost of going to a game increasingly prohibitive and the county game’s importance as a place to learn having been eroded. In spite of a loyal and well-heeled bunch of supporters, epitomised by the Barmy Army, it has become a minority sport, and the poorer for it.

Publishing pays abysmally, says an anonymous writer, who feels closer to their neighbours on benefits than to their former peers in teaching and academia

Access to the arts might be good for mental health (The Guardian view on living more creatively: a daily dose of art, 9 January), but the conditions in which most artists have to produce their work does nothing to improve their own.

I’m a novelist, and I was paid £1,000 and £500 respectively for my last two books. The latter was shortlisted for an international literary award. That’s £1,500 earned in 10 years. Before turning to writing full-time, I worked in other areas: in local government, and as a teacher and academic.

Company says TB testing carried out as ‘precaution’ after small number of workers contracted lung disease

Amazon is testing workers at its Coventry warehouse for tuberculosis after an outbreak of the lung disease.

A handful of workers from the site were found to have contagious tuberculosis (TB) last year, prompting the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to begin running a screening programme in September.

Governor Tim Walz says ‘weaponizing the justice system is an authoritarian tactic’ as he and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey reportedly will be subpoenaed

The US justice department is investigating Minnesota’s political leaders for allegedly conspiring to obstruct the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown there, according to multiple reports.

The investigation, which CBS News first reported, marks an extraordinary use of federal power to challenge two of the crackdown’s most vocal Democratic critics, including the state’s governor, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey.

Craig Guildford retires after inquiry found ‘greatly exaggerated’ intelligence was used to justify ban

The head of England’s second biggest police force has stepped down after an official inquiry found that “greatly exaggerated” intelligence was used to justify a ban on fans of an Israeli football team attending a match.

Craig Guildford retired with immediate effect as chief constable of West Midlands police on Friday, two days after a damning report led Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, to declare she had lost confidence in him.

Charity hails ‘momentous’ decision to give abiraterone to about 8,000 newly diagnosed men each year

The NHS has expanded access to a prostate cancer drug across England in a move expected to save thousands of lives.

Abiraterone, which starves cancer cells of the hormones they need to grow, will be offered to men who are newly diagnosed and whose disease has not spread beyond the prostate.

Robert Rhodes was cleared previously but convicted after retrial during which child came forward with new evidence

A husband who killed his wife and manipulated his own child in a “wicked” plot to get away with murder has been jailed for life.

Robert Rhodes, 52, was previously cleared of killing his wife, Dawn, on the grounds of self-defence. But in a retrial in December he was found guilty of her murder after their child came forward with new evidence under double jeopardy rules.

Todolí foundation produces varieties from Buddha’s hands to sudachi and hopes to help citrus survive climate change

It was on a trip with a friend to the east coast of Spain that the chef Matthew Slotover came across the “Garden of Eden”, an organic farm growing citrus varieties he had never heard of. The Todolí Citrus Foundation is a nonprofit venture and the largest private collection of citrus in the world with more than 500 varieties, and its owners think the rare fruit could hold the genetic secrets to growing citrus groves that can deal with climate change.

The farm yields far more interesting fruit than oranges and lemons for Slotover’s menu, including kumquat, finger lime, sudachi and bergamot.

The Uru Chipaya, one of South America’s most ancient civilisations, are battling drought, salinity and an exodus of their people as the climate crisis wreaks havoc on their land

In the small town of Chipaya, everything is dry. Only a few people walk along the sandy streets, and many houses look abandoned – some secured with a padlock. The wind is so strong that it forces you to close your eyes.

Chipaya lies on Bolivia’s Altiplano, 35 miles from the Chilean border. The vast plateau, nearly 4,000 metres above sea level, feels almost empty of people and animals, its solitude framed by snow-capped volcanoes. It raises the question: can anybody possibly live here?

Architects and designers have recycled ancient practice of collecting rainwater to make buildings ecologically friendly

When the legendary Taiwanese rock band Mayday were due to perform in Beijing one evening in May 2023, some fans were worried that the rainy weather could affect the show. Mayday were taking to the stage in Beijing’s National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, built for the 2008 Olympics. Like the real-life twig piles that give the building its nickname, the stadium is built with an intricate and highly porous lattice, made of steel.

“Don’t worry too much,” reassured an article published by the official newsletter for China’s ministry of water resources. “The Bird’s Nest also has its ‘secret weapon’!”

Judge finds Durham trust violated nurses’ dignity and created intimidating environment by allowing use of single-sex space

A group of nurses who complained about a trans colleague using single-sex changing rooms at work suffered harassment, an employment tribunal judge has ruled.

The judge found the nurses’ dignity was violated and they encountered “a hostile, intimidating, humiliating and degrading environment” at work.

Portland Communications, founded by Keir Starmer’s communications chief, linked to so-called black hat edits

A high-profile PR company founded by Keir Starmer’s communications chief has been accused of commissioning changes to Wikipedia pages to make them more favourable towards clients.

Portland Communications, founded by Tim Allan, has been linked to the so-called black hat edits, sometimes referred to as “Wikilaundering”. Several changes were made to Wikipedia pages by a network of editors, allegedly controlled by a contractor working on Portland’s behalf.

Latest Labour U-turn follows concerns publicising of details could negatively impact children of offenders

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Ministers have dropped plans to photograph, name and shame offenders ordered to complete unpaid community work in England and Wales in the latest U-turn by Labour.

The plans, first disclosed by the Guardian, would have meant people convicted of minor criminal offences having details of their cases and their community work publicised on government websites and promoted through local media.

Full-time carer Martina Karos and Eleni Edwards, eight, were found dead at home in Salford

A translator who became a full-time carer for her severely disabled eight-year-old daughter killed herself and her child after becoming “overwhelmed” by loneliness, a coroner concluded.

Martina Karos, 40, and Eleni Edwards were found dead at their home in Salford, Greater Manchester, after police were called when the girl did not turn up at school on 23 September 2024.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Bobi Wine flown to unknown location, his party says, hours after security forces allegedly killed 10 of his campaigners

The Ugandan opposition leader Bobi Wine was taken from his house and brought to an unknown location on Friday, his party said as President Yoweri Museveni closed in on a landslide re-election.

Wine’s National Unity Platform party said on Friday evening in a post on X that an army helicopter had landed in his compound in the capital, Kampala, and “forcibly taken him away to an unknown destination”.

Grand jury in Ohio charged Michael David McKee, 39, with aggravated murder and burglary for fatal shootings

An Ohio grand jury has indicted an Illinois surgeon in the double homicide of his ex-wife and her dentist husband, who were killed in their Columbus home in December in a case that initially generated nationwide mystery.

Court records show a Franklin county grand jury charged Michael David McKee on 16 January with aggravated murder and aggravated burglary while using a firearm suppressor.

Actor held without bond in New Mexico on child abuse charges stemming from twin brothers’ complaint

With allegations of prior sexual misconduct against him continuing to mount, Timothy Busfield received an expression of support from his wife and fellow actor, Melissa Gilbert – as he was also ordered held without bond in connection with on-set child abuse charges in New Mexico.

A statement that a representative for Gilbert, known best for her work on Little House on the Prairie, shared with media outlets said she “supports her husband” and was keeping “her focus … on supporting and caring for their … family, as they navigate this moment”.

Experts say central banks are increasingly stuffing their vaults as an insurance policy in a volatile world

Fifteen minutes after takeoff, the call came for Serbia’s central bank governor: millions of dollars’ worth of gold bars, destined for a high-security Belgrade vault, had been left on the runway of a Swiss airport.

In air freight – despite the extraordinary value of bullion – fresh flowers, food and other perishables still take priority. “We learned this the hard way,” Jorgovanka Tabaković told a conference late last year.

Pair will be absent ‘for short period’ from vocational trainer, whose charity is under investigation by Charity Commission

The two most senior executives at City & Guilds have been put on leave shortly after a scandal over millions of pounds of bonuses triggered a Charity Commission investigation into the vocational training body.

The chief executive, Kirstie Donnelly, and the chief financial officer, Abid Ismail, will be “absent from work for a short period”, as its new owner, PeopleCert, commissioned an internal investigation into events before and after its acquisition of City & Guilds’ training and qualifications business.

Kevin Hassett, a top contender to replace Jerome Powell, suggests he believes Powell told truth about Fed renovation

Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, said he expected there was “nothing to see here” as the US Department of Justice pursues its criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair.

The Trump administration has faced a chorus of criticism in recent days after it emerged that the justice department had served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas, in a significant escalation of its extraordinary attack on the US central bank’s independence.

Andrew Bailey says he and heads of other institutions have responsibility to ‘challenge back’ populist narratives

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The governor of the Bank of England has urged the world’s leading global institutions to fight back against the rise of populism, warning that it represents one of the biggest threats to improvements in living standards.

In a thinly veiled response to Donald Trump’s attempts to interfere with the independence of the US Federal Reserve, Andrew Bailey said that he and the heads of other institutions had a duty to “challenge back” populist narratives.

The famous gallery, home to masterpieces from Goya and Velázquez, is exploring how best to preserve, and improve, the visitor experience

Friday morning found Diego Velázquez striking the familiar pose he has held for the past 370 years, staring out, brush in one hand, palette in the other, from the huge canvas of Las Meninas.

The 14 people who stood before the painting to meet the Spanish artist’s haughty gaze – not to mention the heavy eyes of the dozy mastiff in the picture’s foreground – were among the first visitors of the day to Madrid’s Prado Museum.

In its second season, the award-winning medical drama is a scarily reflective show for the many Americans who watch it

If you were stuck in the waiting room at the fictional Pittsburgh trauma medical center (PTMC) – and, as is the case with most real emergency rooms, to be at “the Pitt” almost certainly means waiting for hours (unless you’re imminently dying, but even then …) – you would at least have a lot to read. Paperwork and entry forms, for one. Signs warning that “aggressive behavior will not be tolerated”, a response to the real uptick in violence against healthcare workers. A memorial plaque to the victims of the mass shooting at PittFest, which drenched the back half of the acclaimed HBO Max show’s first season in unbelievably harrowing, bloody, very American trauma. Labels on the many homeopathic remedies carried, in Ziploc bags, by a prospective patient deeply skeptical of western medicine and big pharma. Promotional literature on the larger hospital system, for which The Pitt is its cash-strapped, paint-stripped, constantly beleaguered front door.

And, in its second season, which premiered earlier this month, so-called “patient passports” that supposedly help you understand the procedures and expected wait times at an urban emergency room. The leaflets are the brainchild of Dr Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), the tech-affectionate, norms-challenging attending physician introduced this season as a foil to the more by-the-books Dr Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the series anchor played by recent Golden Globe winner Noah Wyle. Dr Robby, the show’s raison d’être and the core of viewer sentiment, is skeptical of the patient passports, as he seems to be of most change at the Pitt; their introduction is one of many seeds planted in what will surely become a larger thematic battle between tradition and innovation, emotion and rationality, old, haunted attending physician and his upstart replacement.

Films by Joachim Trier, Óliver Laxe, Mascha Schilinski and Jafar Panahi will jostle for recognition at tomorrow’s event – which has repositioned itself as a major tastemaker during awards season

The European Film Awards (EFAs) have long styled themselves as “Europe’s answer to the Oscars”, even if, in terms of boosting commercial successes at the box office, their impact has been negligible. But as American studios increasingly prioritise franchise sequels over serious drama, and European films vie for major trophies outside the “best international feature” silo, the EFAs are feeling emboldened about becoming a major tastemaker for grownup cinema.

This year, the European Film Academy has for the first time moved its annual jamboree from December to the middle of the US awards season, right between the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards.

From Gilmore Girls to Perry Mason, readers reveal the programmes that never fail to bring them joy

I really think Toast of London is Matt Berry’s best work. It’s hilarious. The plots are daft, the cameos are often left-field but work well, and it has loads of great nonsensical gags. It’s a shining example of a sitcom with an unlikable protagonist that you can’t help but root for anyway. I must have watched it from beginning to end at least 15 times. Every friendship and relationship in my life eventually reaches a crossroads: will they like Toast or not? Rhys, 24, Cardiff

Sebastian Stan is being eyed as district attorney Harvey Dent and his supervillain alter ego – can Gotham residents expect an improvement in the city’s patchy justice system?

The arrival in Gotham City of Harvey Dent, AKA Two-Face, is rarely without consequence in Batman sagas. Tommy Lee Jones’ shrieking, neon-splashed Batman Forever iteration turned the character into a dissociative identity slot machine, endlessly pulling its own lever, while Billy Dee Williams’ take in 1989’s Batman was a promise of future ruin. In Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the downfall of Aaron Eckhart’s crusading district attorney signalled the dangers of placing too much faith in the moral resilience of a single individual, especially in a city where the very idea of justice is already under existential strain.

With the news this week cautiously announced in the Hollywood Reporter that Sebastian Stan will be playing Dent in Matt Reeves’ highly anticipated forthcoming sequel to The Batman, it’s quite possible the new episode will be less interested in the masked theatrics of the 20th-century big screen caped crusader, and more in the idea that the very concept of justice is about to slowly disintegrate. In Stan, Reeves has an actor who excels at playing men whose morality erodes like damp plaster, which feeds beautifully into his vision of Gotham. In Reeves’ worldview, it is a city that is rotting politely from the inside, not one ruled by a carnival of freaks desperate for the spotlight. So it is hard to imagine this languid, gloriously doom-drenched Gotham giving birth to a Dent who goes down the rampant route of extreme, scenery-chewing theatricality.

There is even the potential here to move on from the Nolan era, with its focus on symbolism and high-stakes ethical thought experiments. Eckhart’s turn is one of the greatest performances in any comic book movie, but by utilising the madness of grief to transform him into Two-Face, rather than relying on the incremental, constantly self-justifying slide into monstrosity seen in the best comics or the excellent 1990s Batman: The Animated Series TV show, something was lost. When he’s at his best, Dent doesn’t “snap”, so much as reason his way into villainy, seemingly convincing himself step by step that the law no longer works and that only he is strong enough to replace it. This Two-Face isn’t chaos dressed up as madness (like the Joker) but justice stripped of empathy, clinging to the illusion of fairness – the semi-ruined coin he still pretends represents due process. His descent into villainy feels almost inevitable in a town as violently decayed as Gotham, and his arrival on the scene simply confirms how impossible Batman’s job is.

Hamnet and H Is for Hawk fuse themes of loss, birds and elemental female emotion. But whose fault is it if you remain dry-eyed?

‘Is it porn or is it art?” A familiar, even dated question where nudity is involved, and (forgive thumbnail) pretty well-resolved– which is to say: we let the tastemakers decide, and it tips the scale towards “art” if one or both protagonists are not that good-looking.

“Is it grief-porn or is it grief-art?” is a more vexed question. Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true.

(A$AP Rocky Recordings)
Now a father of three and burgeoning actor, Rocky finally comes back to music with his strongest album since his 2013 debut – though there’s plenty of flab

It has been eight years since A$AP Rocky, once and future king of New York rap, released an album. In the world of hip-hop, where even A-list stars such as Rocky’s friend and collaborator Tyler, the Creator are prone to releasing multiple albums a year, this is a lifetime. In the time since Rocky released his third album, 2018’s Testing, Kanye West has rebranded as a born-again Christian, swerved to the right and released five albums. Rocky hasn’t been sitting around: he’s been a press mainstay, thanks to his relationship with pop superstar Rihanna, with whom he now has three children, and last year was acquitted of firing a gun at a former friend, dodging up to 24 years in prison. He has also found acclaim as an actor, starring opposite Rose Byrne in the lauded dark comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest.

Aside from a few one-off singles, such as the Tame Impala collaboration Sundress, Rocky has released music in fits and starts in recent years. (In terms of mainstream stars, perhaps only Rocky’s romantic partner outpaces him when it comes to leaving fans waiting: it has been a decade since Rihanna’s last record.) Testing yielded the Skepta-featuring hit Praise the Lord (Da Shine), but otherwise fell flat with mainstream audiences and critics alike, lacking the dynamism and potent charisma of his breakout albums. That album seemed to leave Rocky at a crossroads. Would it serve him best to continue exploring its slipshod experimentalism, or to make an attempt at retrenchment, and return to the more straightforward music that made him famous?

The woodwind player who taught André 3000 music theory releases his searching debut album next month

From Los Angeles
Recommend if you like Miguel Atwood Ferguson, Shabaka Hutchings’s flute music, the Coltranes
Up next Debut album And So It Is released 13 February

For woodwind players, breath is everything: the lifeforce of artistry, the thing that furnishes sound with personality. But a few years ago, the Los Angeles saxophonist Aaron Shaw realised he was becoming increasingly breathless. In 2023, aged 27, he was diagnosed with bone marrow failure, meaning he wasn’t producing enough oxygen-carrying red blood cells. A change of approach was required.

(Columbia)
Framed as the music Williams wanted to make post-Take That, Britpop surpasses pastiche and swerves unpredictably. Homoerotic paean to Morrissey, anyone?

The arrival of Robbie Williams’s 13th album has been a complicated business. It was announced in May 2025 and was supposed to come out in October, when its title would have chimed with the 90s nostalgia sparked by the Oasis reunion. Williams spent the summer engaging in promotion, unveiling fake Britpop-themed blue plaques around London and staging a press conference at the Groucho Club. There was a launch gig at storied Camden venue Dingwalls, at which he performed not just his new album in full, but his 1997 solo debut Life Thru a Lens.

It was a bold choice, given that Life Thru a Lens initially threatened to derail his solo career: at the time, the now nakedly obvious supernova hits Angels and Let Me Entertain You were overlooked while people criticised Williams’s muddled attempts to fit in with, well, Britpop. On stage at Dingwalls, he made the surprise announcement that the album now wasn’t coming out until mid-February, admitting with winning candour that he didn’t want to compete with Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Now it’s suddenly appeared, without explanation, two weeks into January: presumably because Williams will have fewer competitors in the albums chart this week, giving him a greater chance at breaking the record he currently jointly holds with the Beatles for the most UK No 1 albums ever.

(InFiné)
The composers’ first collaborative album ebbs from epic, cinematic heights to delicate and dreamy lullabies

After years of touring together, Los Angeles-based composers Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have developed what the former refers to as a “musical telepathy”. Tragic Magic, the pair’s first collaborative album, evidences this bond: born out of a short series of improv sessions in Paris, it’s a wonderfully immersive set of new age and ambient tracks, where Barwick’s airy, reverbed vocals and atmospheric synth washes interweave with, and accentuate, Lattimore’s twinkling harp.

The album sessions took place shortly after last year’s California wildfires, which the two musicians experienced as residents. Accordingly, tragedy and hope cut through the dreamlike haze of these unfurling compositions. With its delicate harp loop and hushed whispers, opener Perpetual Adoration is as sweet and dreamy as a lullaby, while the gorgeous, moving Haze With No Haze carries a quiet desperation in the brittle, staccato melody and Barwick’s yearning high register. As always, her lyrics are indiscernible, words blurring into texture and shapeless whispers, but teem with feeling.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some great new paperbacks, from a Renaissance romp to an ode to optimism

The Cut Up by Louise Welsh; The Persian by David McCloskey; The 10:12 by Anna Maloney; Very Slowly All at Once by Lauren Schott; Vivian Dies Again by CE Hulse

The Cut Up by Louise Welsh (Canongate, £20)
This welcome third outing for gay Glaswegian auctioneer Rilke opens with his discovery of a body. Obnoxious jewellery dealer Rodney Manderson has been killed outside the Bowery auction rooms, stabbed through the eye with the Victorian hatpin that his boss, Rose Bowery, has brandished in front of the nation on Bargain Hunt. As she discussed the pin’s virtues as a deadly weapon as well as its millinerial uses, the fiercely loyal Rilke decides – while feeling grateful to have skipped lunch and trying not to think of jelly – to remove it before calling the police. They soon decide they’ve got their man, but Rilke’s not so sure; the roots of the crime may lie in the past – in particular, a notorious reform school. With a central character who feels like an old friend, The Cut Up is as sharply observed, humane and beautifully written as its two superb predecessors.

The Persian by David McCloskey (Swift, £20)
Former CIA analyst McCloskey’s fourth novel centres on Jewish Iranian dentist Kam Esfahani. Dissatisfied with life in Sweden, where his family relocated when driven out of Iran, and wanting the wherewithal to move to California, he accepts an offer from the chief of Mossad’s Caesarea Division. Returning to Tehran, he runs a fake dental practice as cover for assisting in “sowing chaos and mayhem in Iran”. Things go awry when he enlists double agent Roya Shabani, widow of an Iranian scientist killed by the Israelis. The book takes the form of a series of confessions that Kam, now caught and imprisoned, is forced to write by his torturer, and these documents – which may or may not reveal the whole truth – are interspersed with flashbacks. Kam’s cynical tone and mordant humour serve to underline not only the horror, but also the inherent hypocrisy of the endless cycle of violence and retribution: this masterly novel is tragically topical and utterly gripping.

From classmates to co-parents, the changing dynamics of a female friendship are astutely observed in a novel that explores the boundaries between love, lust and companionship

Australian author Madeleine Gray’s award-winning debut novel Green Dot was a smart, funny tale of a doomed office affair. Her new novel, Chosen Family, is a smart, funny tale of a complicated, life-changing relationship between two women.

Nell and Eve meet aged 12 at a girls’ school in Sydney. Gray’s narrative moves smoothly back and forth from the 00s to the present day; as in David Nicholls’s One Day, we learn about our protagonists by meeting them at different moments in their lives, from the pressures of high school to the alcohol-soaked freedoms of university to the frustrations and joys of early parenthood.

The Lincoln in the Bardo author is back with another metaphysical tale. He discusses Buddhism, partisan politics and the terrifying flight that changed his life

Like his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker prize in 2017, George Saunders’s new novel is a ghost story. In Vigil, an oil tycoon who spent a lifetime covering up the scientific evidence for climate change is visited on his deathbed by a host of spirits, who force him to grapple with his legacy. What draws Saunders to ghost stories? “If I had us talking here in a story and I allowed a ghost in from the 1940s, I might be more interested in it. It might be because they are in fact here,” he says, gesturing to the hotel lobby around us. “Or even if it’s not ghosts, we both have memories of people we love who have passed. They are here, in a neurologically very active way.” A ghost story can feel more “truthful”, he adds: “If you were really trying to tell the truth about this moment, would you so confidently narrow it to just today?”

Ghosts also invite us to confront our mortality and, in so doing, force a new perspective on life: what remains once you strip away the meaningless, day-to-day distractions in which we tend to lose ourselves? “Death, to me, has always been a hot topic,” Saunders says. “It’s so unbelievable that it will happen to us, too. And I suppose as you get older it becomes more …” he puts on a goofy voice: “interesting”. He is 67, grizzled and avuncular, surprisingly softly spoken for a writer who talks so loudly – and with such freewheeling, wisecracking energy – on the page. He says death is close to becoming a “preoccupation” for him and he worries that he is not prepared for it.

The team behind Baby Steps discuss why they made a whiny, unprepared manbaby the protagonist – and how players have grown to love Nate as he struggles up a mountain

“I don’t know why he is in a onesie and has a big ass,” shrugs game developer Gabe Cuzzillo. “Bennett just came in with that at some point.”

“I thought it would be cute,” replies Bennett Foddy, who was formerly Cuzzillo’s professor at New York University’s Game Center and is now his collaborator. “Working on character design and animation brings you over to liking big butts. I could give you an enormous amount of evidence for this.”

Showing the value of great design over visual impact, this faithfully resurrected home computer seamlessly integrates modern tech with some wonderful additional touches

The emotional hit was something I didn’t expect, although perhaps I should have. The Commodore 64 Ultimate, a new version of the legendary 8-bit computer, comes in a box designed to resemble the original packaging – a photo of the machine itself on a background of deep blue fading into a series of white stripes. Then when you open it, you find an uncannily accurate replica of what fans lovingly referred to as the breadbox – the chunky, sloped Commodore 64, in hues of brown and beige, the red LED in one corner above the row of fawn-coloured function keys. It’s like 1982 all over again.

My dad bought us a C64 in late 1983. It was our second computer after the ZX81 and it felt like an enormous leap into the future with its detailed colour graphics, advanced sound chip and proper grown-up keyboard. We unpacked it on our dinner table, plugging it into a small portable TV and loading the one game we had, a very basic Donkey Kong clone named Crazy Kong. My life would never be the same again. This contraption was my obsession for the next four years – my friendships and free-time would revolve around games such as Bruce Lee, Paradroid and Hyper Sports. To this day, I treasure the memories of playing golf sim Leaderboard with my dad. The sound effects, speech samples and graphics conjured by that computer have lived rent free in my head for, god, almost 40 years.

When Hollow Knight: Silksong came out last summer I was in so much pain that I didn’t know if I’d be able to play it. Could a video game teach me anything new about suffering?

Last year I became uncomfortably well acquainted with suffering. In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder – burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but everything was painful; even at rest it was horrible. I couldn’t play my guitar; I couldn’t play video games; I couldn’t sleep. I learned how quickly physical suffering lacerates your mental wellbeing.

I’d had episodes of nagging pain from so-called repetitive strain injuries before, the product of long hours hunched over laptops and game controllers over the course of decades, but nothing like this. A few months later, after the initial unrelenting agony had subsided to a permanent hum of more moderate pain, it was diagnosed as brachial neuritis, inflammation of the nerve path that travels from the base of your neck down to your hand. (Nobody knows what causes it, but it sometimes happens after an infection or an injury.) The good news, I was told by a neurologist, was that it usually gets better in about one to three years, and I hadn’t lost any function in my right hand. The bad news was that there was nothing much to be done about the pain in the meantime.

From the greatest cartoon racing game in history to a remastered version of an Alien-inspired sci-fi shooter, here are the Switch’s must-play games

• The 15 best games to play on the Nintendo Switch in 2025

Although the Nintendo Switch 2 has been out for several months, not everyone has made the leap to the new machine and there is still much to enjoy on the original console in 2026 (and beyond). From timeless Mario adventures to cutesy shooters to chasm-deep role-playing quests, here are 15 games no Switch owner should be without.

Aldwych theatre, London
Jamie Eastlake’s play about two football fans mixes together song, dance, comedy and dark family drama, with incohesive results

This tale of two hard-up reprobates in Gateshead, who dream of getting a Newcastle United season ticket by hook or by crook, encapsulates hope in the face of adversity. Adapted from an award-winning book (which also became the film Purely Belter), the play has its own rags-to-riches story, of sorts. Written and directed by Jamie Eastlake, it began life at a 60-seater social club in north Tyneside in 2022. Now, here it is in the West End, full of vivid characters, in-your-face demotic and subtly damning commentary on the political betrayals of this region, drained of resources – and sometimes hope itself.

Jonathan Tulloch’s original novel, The Season Ticket, was published in 2000 but could have been written for our age of austerity, though its tone wavers between comedy and tragedy. The picaresque exploits of young, disenfranchised friends Gerry (Dean Logan) and Sewell (Jack Robertson) – whether scouring the banks of the Tyne for stuff to sell or carrying out burglaries – are spliced with dark family drama involving poverty, domestic violence, alcoholism and sexual abuse.

At Aldwych theatre, London, until 24 January. Then at Newcastle Theatre Royal, 9-13 June

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Dai Fujikura’s elusive trombone concerto was given its UK premiere by Peter Moore, who made its colours and textures sing; a persuasive but perhaps too sunny reading of Mahler’s first symphony followed in the concert’s second half

Trombone concertos don’t come around every day. The last time this Cinderella of the brass section had a major moment in the spotlight was in 2022, when the Proms hosted their first solo trombonist in almost 20 years. Before that, you have to go back to 2008 for headlines – when a dazzling 12-year-old broke records as the youngest ever winner of BBC Young Musician. The trombone player in each case? Peter Moore.

Now with a decade-long stint at the London Symphony Orchestra under his belt, Belfast-born Moore is one of the great champions of his instrument, whose growing concerto repertoire has a lot to do with his persuasive advocacy. He had an intriguing platform in Dai Fujikura’s Vast Ocean II (2023) – a reworking of the composer’s 2005 trombone concerto, given its UK premiere here by Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

King’s Head theatre, London
Levi Kreis embarks on a journey of rediscovery in song, from self-hating adolescence to self-destructive adulthood

The title of this semi-autobiographical musical is also a massive spoiler. Broadway star Levi Kreis plays a version of himself, battling his demons and facing his past, only to conclude that, however flawed he often feels, he is in fact – ah, you’ve guessed.

This Levi stumbles off stage, inked and emotional, having been dumped by text during a matinee. After 11 sober months, he reaches for the crystal meth – but his soft-eyed sponsor Ben (Yiftach “Iffy” Mizrahi) urges him to confront his inner child, ideally in song. Levi is unconvinced – “my inner child is like Chucky, but he’s human, he’s gay and he thinks he’s Elvis” – but sits at the keyboard and yowls through the pain.

Piotr Anderszewski
(Warner Classics)
Darkness hangs over a fluid and distinctively emotional take on a dozen introspective works

Brahms’s late piano music is a pinnacle of 19th-century Romanticism, though its atmosphere of introspection and veiled emotion is a million miles from the more turbulent works of his youth. Piotr Anderszewski sees in it a testament of sorts, but one that keeps as many secrets as it reveals. By selecting a dozen of these intimate miniatures to make up an absorbing 48-minute programme, the Polish pianist opens a markedly individual window on to the composer’s solitary artistic maturity.

He opens with the aching B-minor Intermezzo from the Op 119 set, the tempo measured and laden with melancholy reflection. Phrasing is fluid across concentrated interpretations that exhibit a distinctive emotional core. The moderate pace continues throughout, with Anderszewski preferring to avoid leavening the mood merely for the sake of contrast. The cumulative effect is one of penetrating regret.

Original script from 1954 referring to ‘troubles of this kind’ to be brought to life on stage for LGBT+ History Month

“All the homosexuals I’ve known have been extremely eager, like alcoholics, to spread the disease from which they suffer,” the barrister Lord Hailsham told the BBC in 1954.

Other contributors to the BBC’s first ever programme on male homosexuality largely agreed. A Church of England moralist warned any “invert” who may have been listening in of “transitory attachments, disillusionment and loneliness in his old age”.

Song that topped Swedish Spotify rankings ruled ineligible after elements of song revealed to be partly AI-made

A hit song has been excluded from Sweden’s official chart after it emerged the “artist” behind it was an AI creation.

I Know, You’re Not Mine – or Jag Vet, Du Är Inte Min in Swedish – by a singer called Jacub has been a streaming success in Sweden, topping the Spotify rankings.

In the week that we mourn the death of the Guardian’s long-serving classical music critic, composers, performers, colleagues and others who knew and worked with him pay tribute to a writer whose passing is a huge loss to the music world

I owe Andrew Clements big time. He wrote so positively about my music early in my career and the last article he wrote was singling out my opera Festen for special praise. He did seem to go off me a bit in mid career but he was such a serious and thoughtful critic that I often agreed with him. I got to know him very well in the late 90s as he was the partner of the librettist and translator Amanda Holden. He had such a broad knowledge of music and a great enthusiasm for new music which he wrote and spoke about with such warmth and humour. We spent many evenings in Highbury talking about Stravinsky, politics and Arsenal football club – he cared about the most important things in life. Mark-Anthony Turnage, composer

***

Tracey gathers the melancholy giants, a lost London is remembered and collages celebrate Scots strugglers – all in your weekly dispatch

Crossing into Darkness
Tracey Emin curates an exhibition about thresholds of despair and the power of melancholy featuring Goya, Munch, Bourgeois, Baselitz and other visionary artists.
• Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, opens Sunday

Judy Stokes, a retired GP, shares her experience as a spatial-sequence synaesthete

• Read more stories of synaesthesia in the way I feel series

Did someone with spatial-sequence synaesthesia design the calendar app on mobile phones? Because that’s how time and dates look in my brain. If you say a date to me, that day appears in a grid diagram in my head, and it shows if that box is already imprinted with a holiday, event or someone’s birthday. Public holidays and special events like Christmas and Easter are already imprinted for the year, and the diagram goes backwards to about 100,000BC and then forwards all the way to about the year 2500 before tapering off.

It was only in my 60s that I discovered there was a name for this phenomenon – not just the way time appears in this 3D sort of calendar pattern, but the colours seen when I think of certain words. Two decades previously, I’d mentioned to a friend that Tuesdays were yellow and she’d looked at me in the same strange, befuddled way that family members always had when told about the calendar in my head. Out of embarrassment, it was never discussed further. I was clearly very odd.

I’d love to claim the Hand & Heart in Nottingham taught me something profound – but it was mostly about bankrolling free rounds

When I was a teenager, before Tripadvisor, pubs lived as mental notes rather than star ratings. There was the one where – exactly like that scene in The Inbetweeners – we realised they’d serve us a pint at 16 if we ordered some food (one shared plate of chips). There was the one you might get lucky in on Christmas Eve; the one you’d take a girl to, to impress her with the romantic views; and the one that only served cider in halves because it was so brain cell-poppingly strong – a pub best tackled before a bank holiday Monday, known colloquially as “Super Cider Sunday”, when you still had a few brain cells to spare.

From traditional to microwavable, wearable to extra-fleecy, here are our favourite hot-water bottles for winter

• Winter essentials to get you through the cold snap

Call me old before my time, but I find hot-water bottles particularly comforting. I can’t be alone, either: once the relic of grandparents’ bedrooms, hot-water bottles are having a revival. Maybe it’s the effects of high energy prices, or an increasing desire to achieve cosiness.

But how different can hot-water bottles really be? Fill them, hug them – job done, right? Well, yes and no. Since hot-water bottles have been trending, manufacturers have upped the ante. Yes, there are the traditional hot-water bottles sloshing about with bellies full of hot water, but there are also rechargeable hot-water bottles, which often stay warm for far longer. And, many people prefer the comforting weight and safety of microwavable “hot-water” bottle alternatives, often filled with natural grains, such as wheat.

Best overall:
CosyPanda majestic mustard waffle hot-water bottle

Best budget:
Argos hot-water bottle with chunky knit cover

Cold weather cracking your hands? From cult classics to anti-ageing formulas, these creams will nourish and protect

• The best body moisturisers, tested

The skin on your hands is exposed to all sorts of stressors, from cold weather to cleaning products. Even hand soap can strip skin of its natural oils, causing dryness and irritation. Whether you’re struggling with skin dryness or want something with anti-ageing benefits, there’s probably a hand cream that can help.

The best hand cream for you will depend on the specific problems you’re facing, so I asked dermatologists to identify the best ingredients for each goal. The recommendations here are a result of weeks of thorough testing, based on the expert advice I received.

Best hand cream overall:
L’Occitane shea butter hand cream

Best budget hand cream:
E45 Repairing hand cream

From vintage suede to discount designer heels, these wardrobe staples are often better preloved

• From beeswax to baby wipes: how to make your leather last a lifetime

What’s not to love about secondhand shopping? You get one-off pieces while making an environmentally conscious fashion choice. From party dresses to jeans, some pieces are even better – and much more affordable – vintage. A well-made, brand-new leather jacket could set you back anywhere between £150 and £700, but you could pick up a secondhand one for £50 or less.

But it can be daunting when you first start. Knowing what you’re looking for and where you can find it is key. Consider where to shop: Vinted is good for a high-street steal, while Vestiaire Collective could get you discount designer (and it’s great for shoes; see below). Don’t overlook your local charity shop, either: some of my most satisfying secondhand buys have come from Oxfam or Crisis.

Most resolutions don’t survive past January, so how do you make a change that lasts? Readers share their top tips, from habit stacking to drinking their second coffee outdoors

• Motivation-boosting buys to help you stick to your resolutions

January often starts with a long list of unrealistic resolutions – and ends with them all being abandoned. But some good habits are worth keeping, whether that’s flossing daily, getting exercise or eating more plants.

So how do you build a habit that sticks – and what helped you to do it? We asked for your tips on changes that worked, from drinking your second cup of coffee outdoors to reminders to move (or putting a trampoline in your kitchen).

Pandan leaf brings fragrant southern Asian sweetness to a mix of rice gin, white vermouth and green chartreuse

At Bun House Disco, we’re all about bringing the vibrancy of late-night 1980s Hong Kong to Shoreditch, east London, and paying homage to a time when the island came alive after dark. In that same spirit, our cocktail list nods to the classics, but also features all sorts of Chinese and Asian ingredients and spices.

Serves 1

Linus Leung, Bun House Disco, London E2

Moreish teatime treats that melt in the mouth… go on, you deserve it

If I were to rank my top biscuits of all time, Viennese fingers would sit firmly in my top three. There’s not too much going on: just a good, buttery crumb, melt-in-the-mouth texture and chocolate-dipped ends, which are a must. While they’re pretty straightforward to make, issues often arise when it’s time to pipe the dough, and it can be tricky to strike a balance between a consistency that has enough butter but still holds its shape once baked. I find that the addition of a little milk helps make it more pipeable, as does using a large, open-star nozzle to avoid cramped hands and burst piping bags.

There are some decent wine substitutes out there that are worth trying – but it’s always worth remembering that they aren’t actually ‘wine’

Are you a lover of oaky rioja, or maybe zingy Kiwi sauvignon blanc, and looking to find a non-alcoholic lookalike? To put it bluntly, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Alcohol does much more than make you tipsy; it is the magic ingredient that gives so much of wine’s wondrous complexity, character and charm. Not only does it carry volatile compounds that make up wine’s endlessly fascinating combinations of scents and tastes, along with a sensation of warmth, it also creates that viscous body and texture – what’s rather grossly known in the trade as “mouthfeel” – of the liquid in your mouth, and the overall balance of all these factors in the wine.

When the base wine is dealcoholised, however, all that character goes with it. Compared with beer’s relatively low-alcohol content, wine’s usual 11%-15% ABV means that, when the alcohol has gone, you feel its absence more, which is partly why nolo beers are generally more successful than nolo wine. That said, there are some wine substitutes that are worth trying, but, to avoid disappointment, my advice is to see them as drinks that aren’t wine because, well, they’re simply not.

Whether you’re abstaining or just cutting back, a glass of red, white or rosé can elevate everything from risottos and stews to pasta and puddings

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Hands up, who is dry Januarying? While it’s not something I do explicitly, I do like to cut back a bit at the beginning of the year. The marathon that is Christmas socialising can be fun but relentless, and I imagine there are many others in the same boat. When it comes to wine, at least, the problem with cutting back is what to do with the rest of the bottle. Sure, I’ll have a glass or two if I fancy it one evening, but it’s pretty much a wasted bottle if you don’t finish the rest within a few days. Fear not – I have a plethora of recipes that will ensure you never need to waste a drop – enjoy a glass or two, then use the rest in the dish of your choice. Winner, winner, chicken Marbella dinner (one of my all-time effortless favourites – scroll the link for the recipe).

There are lots of excellent suggestions in this wonderful feature on how to incorporate wine into everything from pasta to pudding. In particular, the braised short ribs from James Ramsden immediately caught my attention, as this is precisely the kind of food I want to be making and eating right now. Preferably with a pan of oozy, buttery polenta on the side. Another dish that is ticking all the cold, winter boxes is Tom Hunt’s meat stew, an all-round great braising method. If you are more of a white wine drinker, then Italian classic chicken cacciatore is equally comforting and would also be perfect with creamy polenta or mash. And let’s not forget about rosé – whoever says you can only drink it in the summer has clearly not read Fiona Beckett’s strong case for this delicate pink drink being enjoyed year-round. While the recipe for these prawns with garlic and chilli calls for white wine, I am confident you could happily switch for rosé.

Margaret says her daughter didn’t pay the airport charge, so it’s on her. Georgie says this cock up is all her mum’s doing. You decide who got them into this fine mess
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

We dropped Georgia off in her own car and she didn’t pay the drop-off fee, so the fine is hers

I didn’t know you had to pay for drop-off. Mum knew and didn’t tell me, so she should help pay

Researcher calls for guidelines for diagnosing prolonged grief disorder to be expanded to cover people who lose pets

Grief over the death of a pet could be as chronic as that for a human family member, research has shown, confirming what many people already know about their bond with their furry friends.

People grieving the loss of a pet can suffer from prolonged grief disorder (PGD), a mental health condition brought about by the death of a loved one, a survey published in the academic journal PLOS One has found.

Sex parties allow Conrad and Callum to explore their desires in a safe space – and as couple

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

We keep the connection with subtle signals, glances across the room and an unspoken agreement that we won’t disappear

Counselling should help, but it sounds as if you need to slow down and give yourself time to grieve

I am 37 years old, happily married and have two children, who came along quickly after we got married in my late 20s. I instantly fell in love with them. However, I wasn’t really emotionally or practically ready, and developed postnatal anxiety.

I’ve always cared about the climate crisis, and since after having kids, and knowing it will affect their lives more than mine, I became motivated to make changes. We live a very “green” life.

If you rush it because 31 January is on the horizon you are likely to make mistakes, or not have everything you need

The deadline is 31 January, but don’t put it off – try to set aside enough time over the next few days to complete your tax return for the tax year that ran from 6 April 2024 to 5 April 2025.

This was even though I had revoked my citizenship and now have dual British and German nationality

I want to flag a discriminatory experience I’ve had with the Co-op’s will-writing service.

I asked it to update a will it had drawn up for me in 2020, with my partner and our daughter as the beneficiaries. I received no follow-up for two months.

I have paid two monthly £108 instalments but am now phone-less and out of pocket

I ordered a £544 phone from Amazon. A tracking update later informed me that it “may be lost” and I could request a refund. I pressed the refund option and was directed to customer service, which insisted I wait a week to claim.

A week later I was told I needed to file an incident report from the email address associated with my account. When I complied, the report was rejected as coming from an address that “didn’t meet certain security standards”.

Thousands of people thought they paid the Dart Charge, but only realised when they got a penalty charge notice

You have had a long car journey but, thankfully, remember after you get home that you have to pay the Dart Charge, the toll for driving over the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, part of the busy Dartford Crossing over the Thames linking Essex and Kent. You quickly pay on your phone after searching for the website.

A few weeks later, however, a penalty charge notice (PCN) arrives and you realise you have been duped. The site you thought you had paid the £3.50 toll through was a fraud and the money went to criminals, while you are left with a £70 fine.

The Gardanas, a pair of mucus-coloured hemp shoes, are a somewhat paradoxical current must-have. But their appeal goes deeper than the topsoil

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There is every chance that 2026 will be the year you see your first pair of Gardana gardening clogs in the wild. In fact, if you spend much time on TikTok, or live in Brooklyn, you’ve probably already been seeing them for months, if not years. I saw my first pair a few weeks ago. I watched a dad dropping his kids off at school in head-to-toe Carhartt, a pair of Gardanas peeping out from below his trousers like a shy frog.

Pliable, but with a sturdy sole, they go for as little as £25. The work of French “environmental poet” André Ravachol, who founded the Plasticana brand behind the clogs in 1998, they’re made from 100% recycled PVC and hemp, which gives them their earthy-caramel or, as Vogue put it, “bird-pooey” hue. They have since been called “maybe the coolest shoes in London” by one TikToker, as he Lime-biked his way through the capital to try to nab a pair.

It’s becoming more common for people to use AI chatbots for personal guidance – but this doesn’t come without risks

• Sign up for our free newsletter course on how to make AI work for you

If you’re like a lot of people, you’ve probably ditched your new year resolutions by now. Setting goals is hard; keeping them is harder – and failure can bring about icky feelings about yourself.

This year, in an effort to game the system and tilt the scales toward success, some people used AI for their 2026 resolutions. It’s the latest step in an ongoing trend: in September 2025, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released findings showing that using the AI chatbot for personal guidance is very common.

My friends were already experienced climbers, while I was starting at zero. My first day brought many hard lessons

• Read more summer essentials

At first, I didn’t notice it. When it became too big to not notice, I ignored it. In my ignorance, I even mocked it. It wasn’t until it had completely subsumed my inner circle that I was forced to accept reality: my friends can climb up walls like mountain goats.

Bouldering is the art of ascending short “climbs” using time-tested techniques. As much a problem-solving exercise as it is a physical one, it pleases parts of the brain left dormant for millennia. What began as a way to train rock climbers has blossomed into its own culture replete with specialised gear, terminology, community and Italian brain rot memes.

For fifteen years I have been devoted to the sport, but can still barely tackle or shoot. I decided to get a coach and give him the challenge of a lifetime

If I told you I have played football for 15 years, you’d probably assume that I’m decent. Unfortunately, I am not. I have three left feet and a not-very-convincing shot on goal. Despite how many years I have put into the sport, these things show little to no improvement.

I play football for the joy of it: the rush of the first whistle; the exhilaration of making a successful tackle or a clever pass; and the feeling of all fears and concerns melting away the moment the game starts. So until recently, the fact that I’m so bad at it occurred to me as, at worst, incidental. I grew up at a time when football was largely considered a men’s sport. In the 90s, there were about 80 girls’ football clubs in England (there are more than 12,000 now); there wasn’t a women’s premier league until 1994; and by the time I was in my 20s, boring jokes about women knowing the offside rule were wheeled out with disappointing regularity. As someone who still remembers the feeling of getting kicked off the pitch by the boys as soon as I entered year 3, I’ve always just felt blessed to play.

The bandhgala jacket will no longer be part of the formal uniform for Indian Railways staff, following claims it symbolises a ‘colonial mindset’

It is one India’s most ubiquitous garments, with origins in the grand Mughal courts and Rajasthani kingdoms of times past, and still widely favoured by sharply dressed grooms at wedding receptions.

But this week, the distinctive high-collared bandhgala jacket – known to many as the “princely jacket” in a nod to its royal origins – found itself at the centre of a lively debate after it was denounced by the Indian railways minister as a symbol of a “colonial mindset”.

Bring your ostracised wardrobe items in from the cold by forgetting about whether they go with each other. Instead, let them shine in all their glory

Fashion is a dance between rules and rebellion. Great style requires a bit of both. The rules are essential, because one of the key emotional benefits that a great wardrobe can deliver is a sense of control in a chaotic world. The rules are there to simplify and clarify, lighting our route to a well put-together outfit. That well put-together outfit has the power to help you feel calmer, simply because you look in the mirror and see a competent person and therefore feel like a competent person. Style rules also come in useful for making sense of the world around us. Dress codes, style tribes, the signals we send – whether as blatant as the slogan on a T-shirt, or as subtle as the brand of your rucksack – hold an important social function, making other people legible to us.

But style also needs friction. Fashion dies if it stops moving, because moving with the times is what makes it fashion rather than just pretty clothes. The restless forward energy that moves hemlines and invents new silhouettes is what drives the plot and keeps us interested.

Looking for something gentle and kind for a sensitive nose? The new gen Z brands have you covered

For someone who makes no secret of her obsession with fragrance, I’m always surprised by how frequently people ask me to recommend one for someone who hates the stuff.

Sometimes wearing more potent fragrances is impossible for those prone to allergies or migraines, but mostly it’s an instinctive aversion to being held captive all day by scent too pervasive for one’s liking. And in these instances, I invariably suggest the layering of two more subtly scented products with compatible aromas, to add depth and interest without the same strength as a power perfume.

The performative male was over at the 2026 Golden Globes, where even risk-takers like Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi and Jeremy Allen White did little to temper the black tie stuffiness

Timothée Chalamet was the final clue. As he arrived in good time on the Golden Globes red carpet, the star of Marty Supreme put pay to speculation as to whether the chromatic marketing of the film’s ping pong balls would have him wearing orange. Instead, he wore a black T-shirt; vest, jacket and Timberland boots with silver buttons by Chrome Hearts, souped up with a five-figure Cartier necklace. Kylie Jenner, his partner and sartorial foil, was nowhere to be seen.

Styled by Taylor McNeill, who was also responsible for Chalamet’s wildly amusing if chaotic red carpet campaign for the film, the look was bad boy Bond. It also set the tone for an evening of subdued tones. If we thought the penguin suit had gone extinct, we were wrong. The performative male is over – welcome to the return of the staid suit.

Our readers bask in the memory of great beach discoveries, from Latvia to Sicily
• Send us a tip on Scandinavia or Finland – the best wins a £200 holiday voucher

Forty miles east of Palermo, the magnificent Sicilian resort town of Cefalù juts out beneath dramatic cliffs. The town has a perfect half-moon beach of golden sands melding into the gorgeous clear turquoise sea. Medieval lanes of stones in a diamond pattern lead up to a lively square offering great Italian food. It’s fronted by a beautiful Norman cathedral with twin towers and Byzantine mosaics inside.
David Innes-Wilkin

Dipping in the freezing waters of Scandinavia, Greenland and Finland was life-changing – and full of warmth thanks to saunas, hot springs and like-minded people

Warm lights shine from the houses that dot the wintry slopes of Mount Fløyen and a cold wind blows as I stand in a swimming costume trying to talk myself into joining my friends in Bergen harbour. Stars are already appearing in the inky mid-afternoon sky.

Life-changing moments are easy to spot in retrospect, but at the time they can feel so ordinary. I didn’t know then that my wintry swim would lead to a year of adventures. I was a hair’s breadth from wimping out, but then I was in. The water was so cold it burned. I gasped for breath. The bones in my feet ached with cold as I trod water, legs frantic under the dark surface. It lasted under a minute and then we were out.

The multi-day trail between the Cumbria and North Yorkshire coasts is one of Britain’s most popular, and now upgrades, path repairs and trail officers aim to preserve it for future generations

A soft breeze tickled the waters of Innominate Tarn, sending ripples dashing across the pool, bogbean and tussock grass dancing at its fringes. From my rocky perch atop Haystacks, I gazed down on Buttermere and Crummock Water glistening to the north, the round-shouldered hulks of Pillar and Great Gable looming to the south. A pair of ravens cronked indignantly, protesting against the intrusion on their eyrie; otherwise, stillness reigned.

Bless you, Alfred Wainwright, I murmured, picturing the hiking legend whose ashes are scattered around this lonely tarn. And then, surprising myself: you too, Rishi Sunak. In very different ways, both had brought me to this most spectacular of Lakeland crags.

Cut out flying and you shred skiing’s carbon footprint. And opting for a high-altitude resort that needs less artificial snow makes it even greener. Les Arcs in the French Alps ticks both boxes

I’ve always wanted to try skiing, but it’s not a cheap holiday and I have always had a lingering suspicion that some resorts are like Las Vegas in the mountains, with artificial snow, damaging infrastructure, annihilated vegetation and air-freighted fine dining – in short, profoundly unsustainable.

However, if there’s a way to have a green family ski holiday, then sign me – and my husband, Joe, two kids and my mum – up. Here’s how to do it.

Trend of mini-me dressing – wearing same clothes as one’s children – has extended to four-legged friends

Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian are some of the many who have long indulged in mini-me dressing – wearing the same clothes as their children – but now the trend is being extended to people’s four-legged companions, too. The dog clothing market is soaring and this winter it is coats that are topping the most in-demand list.

Bestsellers at Pawelier, a London-based luxury pet accessories shop include a £135 four-leg puffer coat complete with a fuzzy hood and toggle detailing, and a £110 reversible down-filled jumpsuit in cornflower blue and cappuccino brown that wouldn’t look out of place on a designer catwalk. The Italian greyhounds and whippets pictured bundled up in them appear to be prepped for an Alpine adventure rather than a lap around the park.

It makes me feel like a proud parent to see them take flight

The International Crane Foundation was set up in 1973, with the aim of safeguarding the world’s 15 crane species – most are endangered or vulnerable due to habitat loss, climate change and hunting. As senior aviculturist at the headquarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin, I’m involved in everything from daily feeding to overseeing chick-rearing.

Whenever possible, chicks are raised by their biological parents or adopted by other adult cranes, but when that isn’t possible, we have to raise them, and teach them how to behave like cranes. Some chicks will later be released into the wild, so it’s important that they learn to stay away from people and other predators.

Reducing the number of rooms while creating more space turned an uninspiring house into a thing of beauty with an exotic garden to match

Already weary from multiple house viewings that didn’t meet their criteria, Purvi Harlalka and Jyothish George were unenthused when details of a large, long-neglected HMO (house of multiple occupancy) in north London dropped into their inbox. First impressions in real life were equally lacklustre, at least for George.

“We arrived for our viewing and he whispered, ‘There’s no way we’re going to buy this dump!’” says Harlalka. “But later, I convinced him of its potential. It had so much light and, importantly, a garden. I knew it was the one.”

These long, hangover-free January weekends offer a great opportunity for some horticultural housekeeping

Lots of pressure at this time of year, isn’t there? All those pink cheeks and sweaty brows puffing their way around the park in dusted-down trainers; all those Botivo mocktails (delicious, for what it’s worth) as we strive to self-improve during one of the most grisly months of the year. I’ve never really been one for resolutions, nor time-measured sobriety (amazing how having small children deflates one’s desire to drink enough to conjure a hangover). I prefer to believe that we should mirror what the outdoor world is doing at this time: namely hibernating in an attempt to store up energy for the warmer months that are to come.

Still, if you really feel you must do something vaguely horticultural at this time of year, can I suggest you get your seeds in order? I still think about a photograph I saw of Monty Don’s seed stash in a colour supplement years ago. It was housed in a pleasingly bashed-up vintage index-card cabinet, tucked against the wall of his potting shed – a building with more natural light and square footage than many flats I’ve lived in. How chic! How clever! How deliciously organised!

Dying is a process and in a person’s final hours and days, Nickie and her Threshold Choir are there to accompany people on their way and bring comfort. Through specially composed songs, akin to lullabies, the choir cultivates an environment of love and safety around those on their deathbed.  For the volunteer choir members, it is also an opportunity to channel their own experiences of grief and together open up conversations about death.

Full interview with Nickie Aven, available here

Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered

In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.

It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.

With a huge audience and serving as an avatar for millions of centrist Americans, Rogan compares ICE raids to Gestapo

Joe Rogan’s comparison of US immigration raids to Gestapo operations, made during a podcast episode earlier this week, has sparked speculation about whether the wildly popular podcaster, who endorsed Donald Trump in 2024, has fully soured on Trump’s presidency – and what that might say of the millions of mainly young men who listen to Rogan’s show.

Rogan’s views, as expressed in the podcast discussion, were more complicated than the Gestapo remark taken alone might make them seem. Yet even his more measured skepticism about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids feels somewhat significant, given Rogan’s cultural status and the evidence that Americans in general are turning against Trump’s hardline anti-immigration efforts.

Key maps show the growing strategic importance of Greenland as Arctic ice melts under global heating

Lying between the US and Russia, Greenland has become a critical frontline as the Arctic opens up because of global heating.

Its importance has been underscored by Donald Trump openly considering the US taking the island from its Nato partner Denmark, either by buying it, or by force.

We would like to hear about what your pet meant to you and your family

Grief over the death of a pet could be as chronic as that for a human family member, according new research published in the academic journal PLOS One.

According to the study, grieving pet owners can suffer from prolonged grief disorder (PGD) – although currently only those grieving the loss of a person can be diagnosed.

We would like to hear about your much-loved locals. What was the pub that changed you – and how?

As part of a new series, writers are telling the stories of the pub that changed them, kicking off with Zoe Williams who was barred from the Spoons she adored most.

Now we would like to hear about your much-loved locals. Was there a bar of your past that left a lasting impression on you? What was the pub that changed you – and how? Let us know and we’ll publish a selection of your responses.

We’d like to hear from young people, parents and teachers about how Elon Musk’s controversial chatbot is affecting you

Degrading images of real women and children with their clothes digitally removed by Elon Musk’s Grok tool continue to be shared online, despite widespread alarm and a pledge by the platform to suspend users who generate them.

While some safeguards have been introduced, the ease with which the AI tool can be abused has raised urgent questions about consent, online safety and the ability of governments worldwide to regulate fast-moving AI technologies. Meanwhile, the misuse of AI to harass, humiliate and sexually exploit people – particularly women and girls – is rapidly escalating.

We are looking to tell the stories of pairings who developed friendships because a common life experience - either shared at the same time or lived apart - bonded them

Do you have a friend who was the right person at the right time? Did they become a great source of support because you met at a certain moment in your life or a particular shared set of circumstances brought you together?

We are looking to tell the stories of pairings who developed life-affirming friendships because a common life experience - either shared at the same time or lived apart - bonded them. From becoming parents at the same time to losing a relative or dealing with a new diagnosis, we want to hear how you helped each other. Whatever scenario brought you close – whether overcoming adversity or celebrating a new life stage – we’d love to hear about your friendship and how it helped you both.

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