Universal credit to rise faster than inflation, benefit hurdles eased, extra help for children and young people … I bet you had no idea

It’s the good this government does that can make you hold your head in your hands and sigh. Ask people what they think of Labour policy on benefits and they will probably talk of seizing the winter fuel allowance from freezing pensioners. Or that £5bn snatched from disabled people, until Labour’s own MPs prevented it. These were the signifiers that set the wrong tone early on. Late, far too late, abolishing the two-child limit has not made the same impression on public perceptions, despite the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) this week reporting it as being behind what could be the greatest ever fall in child poverty in a parliament.

The government fails to herald its progress in reversing the worst the Tories did to benefits. Why? I’m not sure if it is ineptitude or a political decision not to trumpet its many progressive policies.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Retail accounts for 5% of the UK economy – but its visibility gives it an outsize influence on public perception

Up and down Britain there are boarded-up shops. Banks and department stores have been replaced by vape shops, barbers and bookmakers. Shoplifting is at a record high, local services cut, and public frustration is mounting.

Politically, high street decline is perfect campaign fodder for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Under Donald Trump, the White House has filled its social media with memes, wishcasting, nostalgia and deepfakes. Here’s what you need to know to navigate the trolling

It started with an image of Trump as a king mocked up on a fake Time magazine cover. Since then it’s developed into a full-blown phenomenon, one academics are calling “slopaganda” – an unholy alliance of easily available AI tools and political messaging. “Shitposting”, the publishing of deliberately crude, offensive content online to provoke a reaction, has reached the level of “institutional shitposting”, according to Know Your Meme’s editor Don Caldwell. This is trolling as official government communication. And nobody is more skilled at it than the Trump administration – a government that has not only allowed the AI industry all the regulative freedom it desires, but has embraced the technology for its own in-house purposes. Here are 10 of the most significant fake images the White House has put out so far.

Miqdaad Versi, Shaista Aziz, Aamna Mohdin and Nosheen Iqbal on the rise of the far right and growing Islamophobia in the UK

The far right is on the rise and much of its messaging is explicitly Islamophobic. In 2024 anti-Muslim hate crimes in England and Wales doubled. Meanwhile, the government has stated that it cannot even agree on a definition of what Islamophobia is.

How does all this make British Muslims feel? Miqdaad Versi, Shaista Aziz and the Guardian’s community affairs reporter Aamna Mohdin talk to Nosheen Iqbal about what’s changed.

Mothers on social media are advocating a tough, no-nonsense approach to parenting. Does this teach children important lessons – or just make them feel isolated and ashamed?

A couple of weeks ago, a video posted on TikTok by Paige Carter, a mother in Florida, went viral. Carter explained that she had thrown her daughter’s iPad out of the window when she had been misbehaving on the way to school, and she films herself retrieving the tablet, now with a cracked screen. The video has been watched 4.9m times, and Carter was congratulated in the comments, with one person writing “Learning Fafo at an early age: top tier parenting.” Welcome to the parenting trend that doesn’t seem to be disappearing: “Fuck around and find out.”

In another video, when a small child announces he is going to leave home, his mother says “see ya”, shuts the front door behind him, and turns off the outside light – then opens the door to him screaming and pounding to be let back in (it has been liked 1.5m times). He had learned, said his mother, “the meaning of Fafo”.

Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collective effort

Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I’d spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me.

Report into actions of Yaser Jabbar from 2017 to 2022 says 36 of the patients suffered severe harm under his care

Nearly 100 children suffered harm at the hands of a Great Ormond Street orthopaedic surgeon, a report has concluded.

Yaser Jabbar treated hundreds of children from 2017 to 2022 at Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) in London, with independent experts saying in the review that his surgery fell well below the level expected in several areas.

Downing Street gives no date for when the agreement of 30 days of visa-free travel will come into force

For more context on today’s Starmer-Xi meeting, China is the world’s second-biggest economy and Britain’s third-largest trading partner – to which it exports £45bn of goods and services a year – so it is no surprise the UK has turned to Beijing in its search for economic reliability.

As the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar reported earlier today, the UK does not rank among the top 10 of China’s trading partners but the Beijing leadership has spied a political opportunity to improve links with one of Washington’s closest allies at a time of deep uncertainty in the transatlantic alliance.

Vincent Chan, 45, is already facing years behind bars for molesting girls aged three and four at a nursery in London

A paedophile nursery worker has admitted a series of new charges including filming up the skirts of girls as they sat in a classroom.

Vincent Chan, 45, is facing years behind bars for molesting girls aged three and four while working at Bright Horizons nursery in West Hampstead, north London.

Turkey hosts urgent mediation as Trump’s threats mount and Tehran weighs painful compromises to avoid conflict

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, will travel to Ankara for talks aimed at preventing a US attack, as Turkish diplomats seek to convince Tehran it must offer concessions over its nuclear programme if it is to avert a potentially devastating conflict.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, proposed a video conference between Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian – the kind of high-wire diplomacy that may appeal to the US leader, but would be anathema to circumspect Iranian diplomats. No formal direct talks have been held between the two countries for a decade.

Manchester mayor takes aim at House of Commons briefing culture and says he will continue to call out liars

• UK politics live – latest updates

Westminster insiders “do not get a licence to lie”, said Andy Burnham on Thursday, in an angry swipe at the political briefing culture in the House of Commons.

After a week of political antagonism over the Labour party’s national executive committee’s decision to block Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton byelection next month, the Manchester mayor said he would call out liars in Westminster in the aftermath of the dispute.

Leo Ross was stabbed to death by stranger as he walked home from school in January last year

A teenager has pleaded guilty to murdering a 12-year-old Birmingham boy, Leo Ross, by stabbing him in the stomach during a random attack in parkland.

Leo died after being taken to hospital from a riverside path in Shire Country Park, Hall Green, Birmingham, on 21 January last year.

Border czar Tom Homan in Minneapolis says ‘no agency is perfect’ and acknowledges improvements that need to be made to federal immigration enforcement

• ‘Nothing has changed’: Minneapolis on edge despite Trump’s de-escalation vow

“I do not want to hear that “everything that’s been done here has been perfect”, Homan said, without referring specifically to the fatal shooting of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Homan noted that while no “agency is perfect” he did not come to Minneapolis to create “headlines”. The federal immigration enforcement surge is “going to improve because of changes we’re making”, he said.

Latest ruling affects up to 3.6m women born in 1950s who say they have lost out in way UK pension age changed

Millions of “Waspi women” will not receive any compensation, the government has again decided in its latest ruling on the case – but campaigners say they will fight on to secure the justice they say they have been “shamefully denied”.

As many as 3.6 million women born in the 1950s are said to have lost out because of government failings in the way changes to the state pension age were made, prompting the launch in 2015 of the Waspi (Women Against State Pension Inequality) campaign.

Government to lend up to £10,000 to worst-affected new retirees as minister admits there is ‘unacceptable’ backlog

Newly retired civil servants say they are struggling to pay bills and buy food because delays at their pension scheme have left them without an income for months.

Pensioners have reported being forced to borrow money from family to pay for food and heating, with some saying they feared losing their homes because they could not afford their rent or mortgage.

A unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will join a US delegation to the Winter Olympics in Italy, sparking confusion and uproar in the country.

Guardian reporter Jakub Krupa looks at what role the agency, which is embroiled in a violent US immigration crackdown, might have at the Milan-Cortina Games.

ICE said agents would 'vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organisations' but not run enforcement operations.

Milan’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, said the the agents would be unwelcome in the city. 'This is a militia that kills,' he said

The Green party has made gains under its leader – but there is also uncertainty ahead

The Greens talk of a “Polanski effect” – a surge of momentum and visibility since Zack Polanski became leader, as the party gains attention in an increasingly fragmented political landscape.

The polls offer the clearest signal so far of whether that narrative is borne out in public support. But they are not the only thing to consider and experts say the reality is hard to be certain about.

The actor on manifesting the part of Hagrid in Harry Potter, struggling with his looks and his issue with Strictly

You’re big on pies on your Insta. What’s your go-to pastry recipe and, briefly, your favourite filling – savoury and sweet? TopTramp
Well, as much as I can make it, I like to have a little block of shop-bought shortcrust or flaky pastry in the fridge. It’s so much easier to just roll it out and stick it on top. The pies have to be double crust. The one I make the most is slow braised, tiny chunks of steak with minced beef and roasted shallots, like a minced beef and onion pie. The kids love that with chips for Saturday night dinner. I like making chicken and mushroom with leek, although my partner’s a veggie, so she would probably say fish pie, with boiled eggs, which is a real labour of love, so I tend to save that for special occasions. I like a nice apple and cinnamon pie with a Demerara sugar crust, and cherry pie made with that really shit fake filling.

What happened to your live-action remake of Captain Pugwash? keithrickaby
That was nearly 10 years ago. There was quite a good script. I think the money was coming from China, and I’m not sure they’d seen Captain Pugwash before. I think it was one of those things that never quite reached escape velocity. I do remember they just had normal names, and not the double entendres like Seaman Staines or Master Bates that everyone thinks were in the cartoon.

As the superstar K-pop boyband prepare for their first album in three years – after its members completed their military service – we count down the best of their toothsome pop

At the start of their career, BTS were marketed as a cross between a Korean idol band and a blinged-out rap act: “Our life is hip-hop,” offered band member Suga early on. No More Dream is actually far tougher-sounding than you might expect: the vocals growl, the backing blares, the double-bass sample that drives the intro is great.

David Zwirner, London
Though they were created for comic books, the artist’s horny and hilarious drawings of his own neuroses, and of glamazons in thigh-high boots, are unnervingly powerful on gallery walls

It is unnerving to walk into a gallery and see all your deepest fears and anxieties splayed out across the wall, but that is the power of Robert Crumb. For more than half a century, the wiry, weird, difficult and awkwardly horny artist (now in his 80s) has been churning out underground comics that lay bare his deepest neuroses, and reflect yours back in the process.

Now he is being celebrated in an ultra-high-end London gallery, with pages ripped from his notebooks and framed up like the finest of fine art. Except this isn’t fine, it’s filthy and angry and paranoid. It’s classic Crumb: skinny men quivering with worry and fear and hormones in a cruel, uncaring, senseless world – filled with towering women in thigh-high boots, obviously.

From baked beans with a Gujarati twist to billowing Yorkshire pudding with bramley apples, Guardian readers share the dishes that have connected their families across the generations

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

A few years ago, I bought my mother a notebook for her recipes. It was a weighty, leather-bound affair that could act as a vault for all the vivid stews, slow-cooked beans and many other family specialities – the secrets of which existed only in her head. Although the gift has basically been a failure (bar a lengthy WhatsApp message detailing her complex jollof rice methodology, she still has an allergy to writing down cooking techniques or quantities), I think the impulse behind it is sound and highly relatable. Family recipes are a form of time travel. An act of cultural preservation that connects us deeply to people we may not have met and places we may not have visited.

Those realities shine through in this week’s gathered compendium of heirloom recipes submitted by readers. Baked beans given a Gujarati twist. An Atlantic-hopping riff on spinach and feta pie. A billowing yorkshire pudding with sticky bramley apples in its base. All of these preparations, particularly when a recipe for anything is a mere tap away, point to the power of human connection and the ingenuity of domestic chefs. And perhaps the best thing about ancestral culinary approaches is that they can be passed from one clan to another, living on even as they are adapted and evolve.

The disgraced and despised British entertainer’s distinctive look is trending among some film fans on TikTok. Should somebody tell them what he did?

When British people think of Jimmy Savile, it isn’t typically as someone whose style to admire. But at screenings of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the latest film in the 28 Days Later franchise which was released this month, that does seem to be what some US filmgoers are thinking.

In the film, a murderous cult known as “the Jimmies” stalk the ruins of post‑apocalyptic Britain. Led by Sir Jimmy Crystal, played by Jack O’Connell, the sect are instantly recognisable for their cheap tracksuits, bleached blonde wigs and particular mannerisms.

Edwin wants Chloe to join him at all of his large family’s events, but she values her independence. You decide who is playing happy families
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

It’s thoughtless to wheel me out to his family as a formality. I need my own space sometimes

After months of community resistance, the president backed down. Leadership from below succeeded when politics as usual failed

For most politicians and journalists, the answer to nearly every question is to look up. Not at the moon, the stars or even the chimney tops, but at their leaders: the people who sit atop institutions, wield power and set the line that others follow. The top of the totem pole is the sole focal point, and the stories that count usually come from the heights of power.

Bend your neck back far enough and Davos becomes not a talking shop in a Swiss ski resort, but a gathering of world leaders; Keir Starmer flying into Beijing is a summit of great powers; even who should be the MP for Gorton and Denton is really all about the Labour leadership. For this piece, the Guardian’s research librarians counted how many times the words “leader” or “leadership” appeared across the British press. Over the past week alone, the rough total stands at 2,000. A third of those stories concern one man: Donald Trump.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

The actor was promoting her new lingerie line – and in 2026, marketing requires more than a glossy ad

I would hate to have to launch a new product in 2026. Imagine a scenario where you’ve developed some ingenious new widget that costs millions of dollars to design, produce and bring to market. You could have quit numerous times. You probably wanted to, because there’s a new season of The Traitors and you have to catch up. But you never surrendered. You persevered, and your brilliant invention is ready for the world. All you have to do now is convince a society besieged by a nonstop cavalcade of crises to care. If the US government could kindly stop sending paramilitary forces to occupy major cities, that would be great for my brand.

This is the predicament faced by poor Sydney Sweeney, the actor best known for HBO’s Euphoria and the recent film The Housemaid. This week, Sweeney debuted a new lingerie line called “Syrn”. I presume it’s meant to be pronounced “siren”, since that’s a suitably sultry-sounding name. Also, confusing, which might be part of the brilliant marketing plan behind the launch. If you baffle enough people, they’ll be sure to Google you to see what your damn problem is anyway. If I was the marketing lead on this project, I would have suggested “Syren”, since that at least has a real vowel in it, like most actual words. Unfortunately, “Syren” was the name of a Confederate blockade runner during the civil war, which we (and very particularly Sydney Sweeney) would probably want to avoid associating with.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

I’d been catching sight of a billboard displaying what I suspected to be some rogue punctuation every time I drove into Cardiff. This time, I had to stop and capture the evidence

Something’s been bothering me on my commute to Cardiff. I usually take the train, but when I have to drive, just after I’ve passed Cardiff City stadium, I always get a red light just before a railway bridge. It’s not the red light I object to, it’s the giant electronic billboard right there, its brightness of such ferocity that I feel it burning my retina. And, as is the way with these things, the moment you see anything up there you’re interested in, it changes again.

So it was that I kept half-seeing something so astonishing – and not in a good way – that I thought I must be mistaken. And then either the billboard or the traffic lights would change, and I’d be on my way. As time went on, I even started slowing down as I approached this junction to try to catch the offending ad. But even when I got a good look at it, I thought I must be mistaken. Eventually, at 6am one Saturday morning over Christmas, I parked, readied the camera on my phone, and waited. The roads were deathly quiet, neither car nor soul anywhere. Just me, my phone, and this wretched sign. All in the cause of seeking confirmation that I had indeed found the most egregious use of an apostrophe in history.

The star’s urgent and to-the-point protest song is not subtle about its target and right now that’s why it works so well

Bruce Springsteen’s new protest song isn’t open to interpretation.

In Streets of Minneapolis, the Boss condemns “King Trump’s private army from the DHS” that “came to Minneapolis to enforce the law – or so their story goes”. He names Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both killed by federal agents amid protests. He rages against “Miller and Noem’s dirty lies”, referencing the faces of the Trump administration’s onslaught against immigrants.

The ‘mother of all deals’ is as much about the tariff-heavy geopolitics of the Trump era as it is about bilateral trade

The year was 2007. Steve Jobs had announced the launch of the first iPhone, the sub-prime mortgage crisis was bubbling up in the US, the EU had enlarged to include Romania and Bulgaria, and India had for the first time become a trillion-dollar economy. This was when trade talks between Delhi and Brussels were initiated for the first time. But it wouldn’t be until this very week, almost 20 years later, that a deal was signed after a few final months of unusually accelerated negotiations.

On Tuesday, the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Council António Costa and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced the “mother of all deals”, which promises to bring together about 2 billion consumers and a quarter of the world’s GDP. The agreement opens parts of India’s famously protectionist domestic market with a focus on exporting manufacturing and services; in return, middle-class Indian consumers will find it cheaper to buy European cars and wine. The overarching EU-India comprehensive strategic agenda is really much larger in scope, taking in defence and security, commitments to multilateralism, mobility and cooperation in a range of areas.

Ravinder Kaur is professor of Asian studies at the University of Copenhagen and is writing a book about the history of the global south

In the winter of despair, it was a day of the vile and a night of the obscene

It was the worst of times and then even worse; it was the age of lies and then more lies; it was an epoch of preening and cowardice. In the winter of despair, it was a day of the vile and a night of the obscene. It was a tale of two films, one featuring the stark killing of a protester on a cold Minneapolis street and the other starring Melania Trump striking poses in a “documentary” shown at a private screening at the White House.

Throughout the day of Saturday 24 January videos of the killing by ICE agents of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Veterans Administration hospital, on a street in Minneapolis were broadcast endlessly on TV news channels and seen by tens of millions online. The videos clearly showed Pretti with his phone in his hand, holding his hands up as he approached ICE agents who had pepper-sprayed a woman. He was coming to her aid, a Good Samaritan. The ICE agents instantly attacked him. One frame of a video shows one agent with his gun drawn, pointed at Pretti’s back as he fell, hands still in the air. Agents appear to have shot him 10 times in five seconds.

Manners and respect are the norm for kids here. Treating them like a nuisance won’t do anything to help France’s declining birthrate

In French culture, seven is known as “l’âge de raison”, the age at which children know right from wrong and can take some moral responsibility. France’s national rail operator, it seems, puts the age at which a child can be trusted to behave in a non-annoying way onboard a train a bit higher.

In launching its new Optimum plus tariff earlier this month, offering spaces onboard its weekday TGV trains between Paris and Lyon with bigger, more comfortable seats, fancy food and no under-12s, SNCF was trying to appeal to the many business travellers who make that journey. But the move has sparked a backlash and a philosophical debate about the place of children in society, against the backdrop of a worrying decline in French birthrates. “We can’t on one hand say that we are not having enough children and on the other hand try to exclude them from everywhere,” argues Sarah El Haïry, France’s high commissioner for childhood.

Helen Massy-Beresford is a British journalist and editor who lives in Paris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite an estimated outlay of $6bn since 2022, LIV appears to be far away from establishing itself in the the manner of PIF projects in other sports

In one sense, it is difficult to detect anything warm and cuddly in all of this. Elite golfers, who were already obscenely rich, take the bounty on offer from a Saudi Arabian-backed disruption model before shuffling back whence they came – essentially for a trivial penalty – when the novelty wears off. This is hardly sport at its purest. Instead, an admission by Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed that they blundered in believing the fairways were greener on the LIV side. The PGA Tour, desperate to portray themselves as the big boys in the playground, welcome one-time pariahs back with open arms. Other golfers who spurned LIV’s fluttering eyelashes scratch their heads, wondering why they bothered.

There is, however, an underlying and endearing point. All the petroleum pounds in the world are no substitute for legacy. Trying to match the achievements of Arnold Palmer, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy carries significance. LIV golf has no relevance beyond its own domain. Saudi Arabia has made inroads into various sports but, in golf, the kingdom is unquestionably doomed. LIV is on the road towards oblivion, far earlier than most had anticipated. Only those who will gain financially from its continuation can try to spin an alternative story.

• Sabalenka powers into final with brutal 6-2, 6-3 win

• World No 1 penalised for mid-point grunt in first set

Aryna Sabalenka has dared officials to penalise her again for grunting after she rumbled over the top of Ukrainian Elina Svitolina in the Australian Open semi-final on Thursday to reach her fourth straight final at Melbourne Park.

The world No 1 suppressed Svitolina’s mid-match momentum in a 6-2, 6-3 victory in just 77 minutes on Rod Laver Arena thanks to a dominant display of power tennis.

The joy of the game is that big moments are rare – the climax of the UCL group phase felt like too much of a good thing

It’s half an hour after attempting to watch 18 football matches at the same time on the final match day of the Champions League group stage, so it’s still a little early to tell whether I think it was a brilliant night of football or not.

The information overload from a TV, laptop and phone means I may need a couple of weeks to really process it – by which time of course this will all be forgotten and we’ll be wondering whether one point from three Premier League games is enough for Thomas Frank to keep his job.

• Forwards in line to sign from Wolves and Aston Villa

• James Ward-Prowse seals loan move to Burnley

Wolves have agreed to sell Jørgen Strand Larsen to Crystal Palace after receiving a bid totalling £50m for the Norway striker.

The agent Jorge Mendes has been leading negotiations on behalf of Wolves, who have accepted an initial £45m, plus £5m in add-ons. Strand Larsen would represent Palace’s record buy, eclipsing the £35m they paid to take Brennan Johnson from Tottenham this month.

The PWR returns with Gloucester-Hartpury on an epic winning run and a tight battle for the semi-final spots

Gloucester-Hartpury will take to the pitch this weekend when the league returns from a six-week break looking to sustain an enviable record in Premiership Women’s Rugby. The West Country team are unbeaten since a defeat by local rivals Bristol Bears in November 2024 and have since won 18 PWR games on the bounce, including their third successive final.

If Gloucester beat Loughborough at Kingsholm on Sunday they will leapfrog Saracens, who sit top of the table despite losing to the champions this season, and who have a bye this weekend. The top two are 12 points clear of the rest and the clubs who finish in either of those spots host their semi-final.

Tottenham eased into the last 16 and the midfielder trusts their uplift will provide ‘a big jump’ in the Premier League

It was a question most assuredly in keeping with the overall craziness of the situation. Tottenham: 14th in the Premier League, with two wins out of 14 some of their fans beginning to fret about relegation. Also out of both domestic cups. Tottenham: the fourth best team in Europe after the conclusion of the league phase of the Champions League. On a fast-track to the last 16.

So, of course, it was put to João Palhinha as he left the stadium after Spurs’s convincing 2-0 win at Eintracht Frankfurt on Wednesday night. Can Spurs win the Champions League? The midfielder’s response was to chuckle. And then laugh a little more. “I know what you want to hear from me,” he said.

While the desperation to keep Trinity Rodman is understandable, tweaking the salary cap could be a big mistake

Perhaps it was all worth it in the end. As a tearful Trinity Rodman signs the most lucrative contract in the history of women’s football – flanked by the Washington Spirit owner, Michele Kang, and a young fan called Emma in pink braids – the internet is already burning white hot. The podcasters will feast for days. After months of bungling US soccer finally has its money shot and, in more ways than one, the numbers are going to be stratospheric.

But then Rodman has always been an effortless creator of content: a true footballer for the TikTok generation. From the spectacular strikes to the famous Trin Spin, from the vivid streaks in her hair to the viral goal celebrations, Rodman’s ability to convey the joy of the game in snackable morsels is the root of her appeal. Aged 23 she already has an Olympic gold medal and 49 international caps, to which she can now add a £1.5m-a-year deal and her very own rule.

In a tumultuous campaign and three-way Scottish title fight, the 73-year-old manager still has ambitions on the European stage

Martin O’Neill’s involvement in celebrated European moments in Celtic’s history means he is entitled to bridle at the belief that domain is no longer a priority. O’Neill used pre-match media duties for the Europa League visit of Utrecht on Thursday to point towards what has the potential to be an uplifting few days for the Scottish champions.

“We got a result in Feyenoord and fought our guts out in Bologna,” he said. “We don’t now want to just throw it away. We want to try and go for it if we can. We could still lose the game. We might not win the match and we might go out of the competition, but we want to give it a go.

• Davis arrested after US Marshals surveillance operation

• Warrant alleges battery, false imprisonment, kidnapping

• Arrest follows lawsuit and cancelled Jake Paul bout

Gervonta Davis, a three-division world champion and one of boxing’s biggest stars, was taken into custody in Miami on Wednesday, nearly two weeks after police issued an arrest warrant accusing the fighter of battery, false imprisonment and attempted kidnapping in connection with an alleged domestic violence incident last fall.

Miami Gardens police said Davis was apprehended following a multi-day surveillance operation conducted across three counties in coordination with the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force. Authorities said he was arrested without incident in Miami’s Design District and booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center late Wednesday night.

Survey by disability charity finds 45% of parents of children with complex needs ‘worried support will be taken away’

• ‘We’ve fought so hard’: family’s worry as England’s Send overhaul looms

Parents of disabled children fear that the government’s reforms to special needs education in England could mean they lose vital support, according to a new survey that highlights the high stakes facing ministers.

The poll of 1,000 parents of children with multiple complex needs including deaf-blind, autism and physical impairment, carried out for the disability charity Sense, found that half of the parents surveyed “feel nervous” about the upcoming reforms, and 45% said they were “worried my child’s support will be taken away” in any changes.

Judge says claim brought by Sex Matters should be made instead by individual who says they have faced discrimination

A legal challenge brought by a charity over transgender people’s access to single-sex facilities at swimming ponds in Hampstead Heath has failed at the high court.

Sex Matters, a UK-wide gender-critical campaign group, sought to take legal action against the City of London, which manages the bathing ponds in north London, arguing that allowing trans people to use the facilities for the gender with which they identified amounted to sex discrimination.

Killings involving knives or sharp implements dropped by 23% year on year, ONS figures show

The total number of homicides in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level since records began after a dramatic drop in killings involving a knife or sharp implement.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show 499 homicides were recorded by police in the 12 months to September 2025, a drop of 7% year on year from 539. These are the lowest overall homicide figures since records were first recorded in 2003.

Couple killed near Kyiv and apartment block hit while US says territorial issue of Donetsk ‘very difficult’ to resolve. What we know on day 1,436

Russia has hit cities across Ukraine with drones and a missile, killing a couple near the capital of Kyiv one day after five people died in an attack on a passenger train. The attack came ahead of a fresh round of peace talks due at the weekend. Officials said four people, including two children, sought medical attention after the strikes overnight to Wednesday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack on the apartment block, as well as another strike with short-range rockets on what he described as a residential area without military targets in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia. “We will respond fairly to Russia for this and other similar attacks,” he wrote on social media. Russian strikes on other locations across the country included the southern port city of Odesa as well as the central city of Kryvyi Rih.

The territorial issue of Donetsk is “very difficult” to resolve, the US secretary of state has said, saying there is active work under way to reconcile the issue at US-mediated talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. “It’s still a bridge we have to cross,” Marco Rubio said on Wednesday. “It’s still a gap, but at least we’ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one,” he told a US Senate foreign relations committee hearing, referring to the eastern Ukrainian region where Moscow wants Kyiv to surrender land. Rubio said the US may the join the new Russia-Ukraine talks this week but that said US participation would be more junior than last week when Donald Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner joined negotiations in Abu Dhabi that were Ukrainian and Russian officials’ first face-to-face talks on Trump’s plan to end the war.

Life will be particularly tough for Ukrainians over the next three weeks due to plunging temperatures and intense Russian attacks on the energy system that have already deprived millions of light and heat, a senior lawmaker said on Wednesday. “The bad news is that there will indeed be frosts, and it will be difficult,” Andriy Gerus, the head of the parliament’s energy committee, told the national TV channel, Marathon. “The good news is that we need to hold out for three weeks, and then it will get easier,” he added, citing predicted warmer temperatures and increased solar power from longer days.

Russian strikes against Odesa have escalated sharply in recent months as conflict centred on the Black Sea has heated up again after it had settled into stalemate, Peter Beaumont reports from the southern Ukrainian city. The biggest recent strike – on 13 December, in which 160 drones and missiles targeted energy infrastructure – left large parts of the city without water and electricity for days on end, marking the beginning of a period of almost daily attacks.

Ukraine has urged the European Union not to be afraid of taking “physical” action against Russia’s “shadow fleet”, pointing to the example of Venezuela-linked oil tankers seized by the US. Visiting Berlin, the Ukrainian presidency’s special representative for sanctions, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, also said on Wednesday that work was still needed on western components found in Russian weapons, which he said was proof that Moscow was circumventing sanctions. Calling for “robust actions”, he said that only increased pressure on Russia could help with negotiations to bring the war to an end. The volume of oil transported in 2025 by Russia’s “shadow fleet” – a flotilla of old oil tankers that aim to get around international sanctions – was the same as the previous year, Vlasiuk said.

Paul Patterson, who represented firm at Horizon inquiry, will become non-executive chair of UK business

• Business live – latest updates

The European boss of Fujitsu, the company behind the Horizon software at the heart of the Post Office IT scandal, is to step down from his role in March.

Paul Patterson, who is the chief executive of the European division of the company, will become non-executive chair of Fujitsu’s UK business, where he will “continue managing the company’s response” to the inquiry into the scandal.

Projects in development expected to grow global capacity by nearly 50% amid growing concern over impact on planet

The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions, with this record boom driven by the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters to service artificial intelligence, according to a new forecast.

This year is set to shatter the annual record for new gas power additions around the world, with projects in development expected to grow existing global gas capacity by nearly 50%, a report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found.

Pan Europe found several pesticide residues in 85% of apples, with some showing traces of up to seven chemicals

Environmental groups have raised the alarm after finding toxic “pesticide cocktails” in apples sold across Europe.

Pan Europe, a coalition of NGOs campaigning against pesticide use, had about 60 apples bought in 13 European countries – including France, Spain, Italy and Poland – analysed for chemical residues.

Canada has reached a tentative deal for 30 belugas in an amusement park to be shipped to four aquariums in US

• ‘It’s heartbreaking’: how 30 captive beluga whales have become pawns in row over animal cruelty

Before boarding the plane, the travellers will be given a dose of Valium to calm their nerves. For some, it will be the first time they’ve flown. Others have logged thousands of miles over the Pacific Ocean. Like most weary and anxious passengers, they will be offered minimal personal space on board and food isn’t included in their fare.

But for these jet-setters, the tight quarters and minimal refreshments aren’t meant to maximize airline profits: they’re meant to keep them safe.

Light scattering creates the shade we see when we look skyward, and studies show the process varies around the world

On holiday the sky may look a deeper shade of blue than even the clearest summer day at home. Some places, including Cape Town in South Africa and Briançon in France, pride themselves on the blueness of their skies. But is there really any difference?

The blue of the sky is the product of Rayleigh scattering, which affects light more at the blue end of the spectrum. The blue we see is just the blue component of scattered white sunlight.

Of those affected by midlife challenges such as menopause, nine in 10 do not seek help, therapists’ organisation says

Almost two in three women over 50 in the UK struggle with their mental health as they deal with menopause, relationship breakdowns and changes to their appearance, a survey has found.

Brain fog, parents dying, children leaving home and financial pressures can also trigger difficulties such as sleeping problems, feeling anxious or overwhelmed, and a loss of zest for life.

John Eric Spiby is one of four jailed for being part of gang running operation worth up to £288m

A man who won £2.4m on the national lottery helped build a multimillion pound drug empire that involved manufacturing counterfeit tablets on an industrial scale, a court has heard.

John Eric Spiby, 80, was the leader of a drugs operation worth up to £288m that centred on his “quiet, rural” home near Wigan, Bolton crown court was told.

Policy intended to keep more children sanctioned for non-violent bad behaviour in school in ‘internal exclusion’ units

Suspending pupils from school will be reserved for the most serious cases of bad behaviour including violence, according to the latest government guidance to be issued to schools in England.

The Department for Education (DfE) is to announce a consultation on behaviour policy to be included in the forthcoming schools white paper that is intended to keep more children sanctioned for non-violent misbehaviour in schools in units known as “internal exclusion”, rather than sending them home.

Parents, teachers and young people share their views on whether social media restrictions would work in the UK

Pressure is mounting on the UK government to introduce a ban on social media for under-16s, after a decisive vote in House of Lords in favour of Australian-style restrictions.

Peers backed a Tory-led amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill by 261 votes to 150, despite the government opposing the move. Ministers are already considering a ban as part of a consultation due to report by the summer and so the Lords amendment is unlikely to pass in the Commons. Starmer is also understood to want to wait until evidence from Australia’s ban, which came into force in December, has been assessed, though the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has urged him to “just get on with it”.

Analysis finds at least 150 channels on messaging app that are distributing AI-generated images and video

Millions of people around the world are creating and sharing deepfake nudes on the secure messaging app Telegram, a Guardian analysis has shown, as the spread of advanced AI tools industrialises the online abuse of women.

The Guardian has identified at least 150 Telegram channels – large encrypted group chats popular for their secure communication – that appear to have users in many countries, from the UK to Brazil, China to Nigeria, Russia to India. Some of them offer “nudified” photos or videos for a fee: users can upload a photo of any woman, and AI will produce a video of that woman performing sexual acts. Many more offer a feed of images – of celebrities, social media influencers and ordinary women – made nude or made to perform sexual acts by AI. Followers are also using the channels to share tips on available deepfake tools.

Despite no criminal charges being brought against them, four officers have been detained since the MV Dali struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, killing six workers

Several crew members of a ship that collided with a bridge in Baltimore almost two years ago are still being held in the US by federal authorities despite the fact that no criminal charges have been brought against them.

In the early hours of 26 March 2024, the MV Dali departed the port of Baltimore bound for Sri Lanka. While navigating the Fort McHenry channel, the 1,000ft-long Singapore-flagged cargo vessel lost power before striking the bridge. The impact resulted in the deaths of six people who were working on the bridge at the time.

The Earth-size planet HD 137010 b has a ‘50% chance of residing in the habitable zone’ of its sun-like star, scientists say

Astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable new planet about 146 light-years away which is Earth-sized and has conditions similar to Mars.

The candidate planet, named HD 137010 b, orbits a sun-like star and is estimated to be 6% larger than Earth.

Women across Afghanistan describe the traumatic impact of disappearing clinics and contraception

Parwana* no longer recognises her own children. Once known for her beauty in her village in Kandahar province, the 36-year-old sits on the floor of her mother’s home, rocking silently. After nine pregnancies and six miscarriages, many under pressure from her husband and in-laws, Parwana has slipped into a permanent state of confusion.

“She is lost,” says her mother, Sharifa. “They broke her with fear, pregnancies and violence.”

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as metal prices continue to soar

The weak dollar has helped to drive the copper price to a record high today too.

The benchmark three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange jumped almost 8% to a new all-time peak of $14,125 a tonne, before slipping back slightly.

Investors are piling into base metals on the Shanghai Futures Exchange on expectations for stronger US growth and more spending on data centers, robotics and power infrastructure. That’s spurring global prices higher.

Inflation is close to the target of 2 percent.

The Swedish economy is growing at a solid pace. The labour market is weak but showing signs of improvement.

Giving passengers right to additional carry-on baggage would be ‘terrible for the consumer’, warns airline’s CEO

EasyJet said proposals to enforce free additional cabin bags on planes across Europe are a “lunatic idea”, warning of fare rises and flight delays if legislation goes through.

The European parliament last week voted overwhelmingly to give all passengers the right to carry on a small case, as well as the free underseat bags currently permitted.

Shares in Ocado fall almost 10% after revealing Sobeys will close Calgary site that uses UK group’s delivery technology

• Business live – latest updates

Ocado has revealed its Canadian partner is closing a warehouse that uses its robots and automation technology in another blow to the UK online delivery group’s business model. Shares in Ocado dived almost 10% on Thursday after it announced that Sobeys would be shutting the Calgary facility, saying it was “largely due to the Alberta grocery e-commerce market’s size and the rate of expansion being slower than originally anticipated”.

The decision came less than three months after Ocado’s US partner Kroger closed three warehouses, knocking almost a fifth off the UK company’s value.

Closure of one in eight sites puts almost 300 branch-based workers’ jobs at risk

• Business live – latest updates

Santander is closing another 44 of its UK bank branches, putting nearly 300 jobs at risk as it gears up for its £2.6bn takeover of rival TSB.

The Spanish-owned lender said the closures were due to a rise in digital banking after a push to get more customers using mobile and online services across the country.

Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland (28 April)

Boston, Lincolnshire (28 April)

Evesham, Worcestershire (28 April)

Mold, Clwyd (28 April)

Ramsgate, Kent (28 April)

Woking, Surrey (28 April)

Bangor, County Down (29 April)

Bridgwater, Somerset (29 April)

Kirkintilloch, East Dunbartonshire (29 April)

Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire (29 April)

Newbury, Berkshire (29 April)

Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire (29 April)

Tonbridge, Kent (29 April)

Bishop Auckland, County Durham (5 May)

Gosport, Hampshire (5 May)

Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire (5 May)

Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire (5 May)

Pontefract, West Yorkshire (5 May)

Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire (5 May)

Glengormley, County Antrim (6 May)

Leyland, Lancashire (6 May)

Mansfield, Nottinghamshire (6 May)

Merthyr Tydfil, Mid Glamorgan (6 May)

Northallerton, North Yorkshire (6 May)

Ringwood, Hampshire (6 May)

Andover, Hampshire 12 May)

Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan (12 May)

Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (12 May)

Macclesfield, Cheshire (12 May)

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire (12 May)

Cwmbran, Gwent (13 May)

Golders Green, north London (13 May)

Heswall, Merseyside (13 May)

Redditch, Worcestershire (13 May)

Stranraer, Wigtownshire (13 May)

Newton Abbot, Devon (19 May)

Stafford, Staffordshire (19 May)

Banbridge, County Down (19 May)

Liskeard, Cornwall (20 May)

Shirley, West Midlands (20 May)

Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire

Ormskirk, Lancashire

Whitehaven, Cumbria

Wilmslow, Cheshire

Holburne Museum, Bath
The feted photographer’s latest exhibition starts with images of ancient scultures depicting devotion and violence, before moving to war pictures and brooding Somerset landscapes

Few people have seen as much horror as Don McCullin. The feted photographer, now 90, witnessed major conflicts and disasters up close for decades. You can only imagine, through his widely published black and white pictures, how that might have affected him.

McCullin’s latest exhibition, Broken Beauty at the Holburne Museum in Bath, begins with four recent pictures of ruined Roman sculptures. These images – the white ruins photographed against black backgrounds so they float – are reminiscent at first of museum postcards, representations of representations that refer to ancient history and myths of fatal ambition, desire and domination. There’s a crouching Venus, her arms missing and head half-shattered. A hermaphrodite struggles to get away from a lascivious satyr. A headless Amazon and the Roman emperor Commodus, known for his uninhibited cruelty, are fighting on horseback. Their pockmarked surfaces and broken limbs suggest the collapse of the great empires, the fragility of ideals that are obliterated by time, like marble.

He gets bitten by a grumpy moggy, bathes with lions and visits a home for disabled felines. This heartfelt, hilarious three-part homage to kitties is pure comfort viewing

David Baddiel has a mission “to fulfil a lifelong dream of spending as much time as possible with cats”. He wants to put felines in the spotlight and challenge common misconceptions about them being “sneaky, evil and lazy”. Baddiel gets stuck in. He meets famous cat influencers such as Atticus – a stunning ragdoll with 96,700 Instagram followers, who was asked by Paramount to perform a promotional motorbike stunt for the latest Mission: Impossible film. He does kitten yoga, hand-feeds two chatty cheetahs and even bathes with lions. It’s every cat person’s dream!

The show’s premise is that cats are popular on social media. The hashtag #catsofinstagram currently has more than 212m posts on Instagram’s mobile app, and #cat ranked among the top 100 trending hashtags. Yet hardly any TV shows are made about cats and their owners. Instead, cat owners, like myself and Baddiel, are often subjected to cruel stereotyping. A few years ago, cat ownership was even mocked by the current US vice-president, JD Vance, who dismissed his rivals in the Democratic party as “childless cat ladies”. Not any more. Enter David Baddiel: Cat Man.

Channel 4’s baffling documentary consists of a lorryload of content creators flapping their hands while providing no new information or insight. A triumph of noise for noise’s sake

By now, the fallout from Brooklyn Beckham’s Instagram broadside against his parents has reached a point of total saturation. There have been news reports, memes, obsessive TikTok deep dives and newspaper thinkpieces covering the story from every conceivable angle. “Brooklyn Beckham is doing his best” said the New York Times. “It’s time to believe adult children when they speak out against their toxic parents,” said BuzzFeed. “The Beckham family feud is every mother’s worst nightmare,” said the Independent. And on it went.

So you have to respect Channel 4 for gazing out across this exhausting event horizon of a story and identifying a gap in the market. Until now, nobody has managed to turn the Beckham family drama into a shrill 30-minute primetime documentary where a lorryload of content creators flap their hands while providing no new information or insight. Thanks to Beckham: Family at War, that gap has been filled. Congratulations, everyone.

Sundance film festival: comedian Iliza Shlesinger’s nonsensical misfire is a swirl of cliches, unfunny comedy, stock characters and bizarre direction from Josephine Decker

I will give Chasing Summer this: there’s something inherently interesting about its unexpected union of two opposite forces. On one side there’s Josephine Decker, an unusual film-maker whose genre-challenging work spans experimental theater (2019’s Madeline’s Madeline), claustrophobic psychodrama (2020’s perversely thrilling, woefully underseen Shirley) and magical realism (the 2022 YA grief flick The Sky Is Everywhere). On the other, comedian Iliza Shlesinger, whose brand of fast-paced, ribald, sometimes hilarious (and sometimes too gender-essentialist) standup is both subverted and enhanced by her own white, blond conventional attractiveness. I can’t imagine many saw the former choosing to direct Chasing Summer, a Hallmark-esque comedy written by and starring the latter. Theoretically, the collision should generate sparks.

It does, though I can’t imagine in the way the odd couple intended. The 98-minute film, which premiered this week at Sundance, is one of the most bizarre combinations of director and material I’ve ever seen, more curious car crash than collaboration. It is almost worth it to watch a sensitive and surprising director, so attuned to inner turmoil and unreality, wrangle anything substantial out of razor-thin characters and a boilerplate set-up.

Chasing Summer is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

This period drama’s puddingy mix of clunking soap and fairytale wish-fulfilment is hard to resist. It is, however, utterly bananas

‘I am charting a more venturesome course outside this society and in doing so I am being true to myself!” snorts Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson), flaring his philandering nostrils as Lady Violet (Ruth Gemmell) looks on aghast. “But you still have two sisters who must marry and their fate depends on the family reputation,” she snaps, bustle crackling with maternal indignation. “This requires you to be a gentleman and not … a rake!”

At this point, when faced with such period-specific umbrage, it is customary for the casual viewer to insert her monocle and refer to her dog-eared copy of The Crashingly Inevitable Downton Abbey Comparisons Companion. And in many ways Bridgerton, bless its ridiculous socks, continues to invite such comparisons with open arms. There are costumes. There is a house. There are scones (pronounced “scones”, of course, not – heaven forfend – “scones”) and scrunch-faced toffs clearing their throats at news from the shires. There are scullery maids a-titterin’ an’ a-gossipin’ and footmen with calves like bowling balls plotting to relieve dignitaries of their britches. There is a string-heavy score that becomes aroused at times of narrative tension and actively tumescent at the sight of a poorly secured cravat.

Another unbearable set of contestants run around like headless chickens. Plus: tissues at the ready for Long Lost Family. Here’s to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One
It’s impressive how, now in its 20th year, Alan Sugar continues to be presented with contestants even more unbearable than the last lot. To mark the anniversary, he’s brought the first winner, Tim Campbell, on to the panel with Karren Brady. More excitingly, the first task takes place in Hong Kong, where the teams need to locate nine items. Cue the same people who boasted about having brains running around like headless chickens. Hollie Richardson

The author and spoken word artist’s delivery is full of tenderness and humour as she confronts the outdated notions of innocence that surround women

The latest collection by the poet Hollie McNish is dedicated to anyone who has been “blamed, shamed, pressured, tortured, dehumanised, de-mothered over a man-made concept about your own body”. Virgin is a series of poems and prose stories aimed at busting myths and challenging stereotypes about sex and the body.

McNish tackles the persistently weird and outdated notions of innocence and purity around young women: “Do not tell me which touches have mattered the most / This is your obsession not mine.” In Send Nudes she notes how any shame about those who have sent “a snapshot of your body stripped autumn bare” lies with the person who broke trust by sharing or mocking it, and not with the sender.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This tender satire of a dysfunctional American family’s search for moral guidance is precisely what our times need

Making the comic novel succeed is a rich, tricky project in our age of desperate, sometimes weirdly eager apocalypticism. Madeline Cash has spotted that a combination of tenderness and satire may be precisely what our times require. Lost Lambs, her debut novel about the Flynn family, is a witty, quickfire book set in a small American town, punch-drunk on clever, skewering lists and infested typographically by the gnats that plague the local church the family attends (“explagnation”, “extermignation”).

The Flynns are in a mess. It was easy for Catherine and Bud to be passionate when he was a young rock star and she was an aspiring artist. But since then they’ve acquired three daughters and a lot of Tupperware. Catherine succumbs to the advances of Jim, an amateur artist who gives her “the youthful comfort of being understood”. He’s rekindled her artistic ambitions, prompting her to decorate the Flynn house with nude self-portraits and proclaim an open marriage. She doesn’t yet know that Jim has a collection of pottery vaginas in his basement (“each of these pussies has touched my life”).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milton Court, London
Left-field duo Stevens & Pound threaded funky folk stylings with poetry by Robert Macfarlane and virtuoso playing by Britten Sinfonia to create The Silent Planet, a rethinking of Holst’s Planets Suite, with the addition of the newly composed Earth

‘Is it a concert? Is it a gig?” pondered writer Robert Macfarlane, introducing the second half of this quirky classical-meets-folk performance. By the end, melodeon and harmonica player Will Pound had drawn his own conclusions: the encore – an upbeat, gently madcap arrangement of the Sailor’s Hornpipe – would be “a rave”, he joked, to polite giggles from the unequivocally well-behaved audience.

Not that the evening had lacked moments to inspire toe tapping and chin bobbing. Percussionist Delia Stevens saw to that, as she danced between instruments laid out around her like at a jumble sale – among them a set of mixing bowls, one toy piano, a guitar balanced next to a vibraphone as well as numerous drums, shakers and contraptions I’d be pushed to name, mostly played two or three at a time. As a duo, Stevens & Pound bill themselves as a “left-field folk” act. Their mashup of Pound’s folk background and Stevens’s classical training is all about high-energy, rhythmically driven virtuosity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the musical version of the notoriously gory book returns to the stage, its tale of 80s yuppie nihilism feels more relevant than ever in the era of Andrew Tate, Trump and tech bros

I have just witnessed a murder. Spattered against the white walls of the Almeida theatre are several thin streaks of blood. Underneath them a particularly gruesome-looking hand axe rests on a table. And on the other side of the room, a clue to who the perpetrator might be. Discarded next to someone’s laptop is a business card – bone-coloured, raised black lettering – bearing a familiar name: Patrick Bateman.

Him again.

Sybille Fendt’s intimate photographs of terminally ill patients and their carers were inspired by the death of her own husband – a period in which she experienced pain, tenderness and love

As the Cardigans go back on the road, their frontwoman will answer your questions on her remarkably varied career

After more than 30 years of melodious guitar pop, the Cardigans are returning to the stage – and their frontwoman Nina Persson will be joining us to answer your questions.

The Swedish band instantly marked themselves out from the rest of both pop and alternative music when they broke through in 1995 with their album Life: sophisticated lounge-pop informed by bossa nova and disco (including sprightly Black Sabbath cover versions) was the very opposite of boorish Britpop or rave culture, and Persson’s vocals – girlish yet faintly careworn – carried so much drama within them.

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

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

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

Forget flashy St Moritz or Zermatt, the unsung village of Arosa has childlike charm, with animal sanctuaries, cool accommodation and kid-friendly tobogganing

On the approach to Arosa in the Graubünden Alps, the road is lined with mountain chapels, their stark spires soaring heavenwards; a portent, perhaps, of the ominous route ahead. The sheer-sided valley is skirted with rugged farmhouses and the road twists, over ravines and round hairpin curves, to a holiday destination that feels like a well-kept secret.

On the village’s frozen lake, young families ice skate, hand in hand. A little farther along, on the snow-covered main street, children sled rapidly downhill, overtaking cars. The resort’s mascots are a happy gang of brown bears. And there are Narnia lamp-posts, which turn the falling snow almost gold every evening. Switzerland is replete with ski towns but none feel quite this innocent and childlike, like stepping into a fairytale.

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Thanks to Anaïs Mims’s whimsical illustrations, this week’s quiz invites you to consider an important question: are you the moustache of misplaced confidence, or the question mark of honest uncertainty? Fifteen questions on the week’s headlines, pop culture and general knowledge await. There are no prizes, but we enjoy hearing how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 232

Textile bins are overflowing, but donating isn’t always the answer. Experts share the smarter, greener ways to declutter unwanted clothes

• How to look after your knitwear, according to experts

Have you even started the new year if you haven’t thought about having a wardrobe clearout? A recent trip to my local supermarket suggests that residents of my home town have been doing just that in their droves, with textile recycling bins overflowing on to the pavements. And we may think donating our unwanted clothes does us a favour while helping out someone else and potentially the environment, but there’s a chance we could be doing the exact opposite.

“Because our clothing is so overproduced in such large quantities, when you donate to charity, often it’s not getting resold,” says Aja Barber, author of the book Consumed. And she warns that much of our donated clothing won’t end up in the well-intended places we had hoped it would. “[It] will most likely end up in landfill or be exported in the waste colonialism chain, which means our excess volumes end up in countries like Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. It’s a business, but when a lot of the clothing is trash to begin with, sadly it creates a lot of pollution.”

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

• The best espresso machines for your home, tested

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

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

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

• How to make your toothbrush last longer – and keep it out of landfill

If you grew up using a conventional toothbrush – essentially a stick with bristles on the end – you may be surprised to learn just how long the electric toothbrush has been around. The first was designed in the late 1930s, but that model was a long way from the sleek, feature-packed and Bluetooth-enabled beasts you can buy today.

There are now dozens of ultra-advanced versions on the market, but which ones are worth your cash? To help answer that question, my teeth have become figurative guinea pigs. Over the past year, I’ve put a bunch of electric toothbrushes from Oral-B, Philips, Suri, Ordo, Silk’n, Foreo and more through their paces to separate the best from the rest. Here are my conclusions.

Best electric toothbrush overall:
Spotlight Sonic Pro

Best value electric toothbrush:
Icy Bear Next-Generation sonic toothbrush

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

• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

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

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

This crisp and punchy salad is a tribute to the late veg specialist Charlie Hicks and a shared love of the versatile Italian chicory puntarelle

Like many, I remember Charlie Hicks from Veg Talk, a weekly show that ran on Radio 4 from 1998-2005. The show, according to Sheila Dillon, came into being after her interview with Charlie, a fourth-generation fruit and veg supplier at Covent Garden market, for an episode of The Food Programme exploring where chefs bought their produce. Sitting at the kitchen table with her husband the following evening, Sheila recounted her day and Charlie’s enormous knowledge, enthusiasm and ability to communicate both. A few days after that, a similar conversation took place with her colleagues at Radio 4, which resulted in Veg Talk – what’s in and what’s out in the world of fresh produce. As well as Charlie’s market report, each episode included a feature called “vegetable of the week” and the participation of studio guests – Angela Hartnett, Alastair Little, Rose Gray, Darina Allen and Mitch Tonks, to name just a few – and took calls from listeners.

The show had its critics – in a 2005 interview with the Independent, broadcaster Andy Kershaw is quoted as saying, “This show should have been strangled at birth” – but it also had legions of fans (myself included), who tuned in mostly for Charlie’s expertise accumulated over a lifetime of working the markets, cooking with his wife, Anna, talking to growers and reading, so it was both practical and scholarly. Add to this his sharp humour, easy bantering relationships and warm voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian, 60, Manchester

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Name: Polygamous working.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plantar fasciitis, my old nemesis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Name: The potato bed.

Age: About two months.

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

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

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

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

Hey Ugly,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wake up to the top stories and what they mean – free to your inbox every weekday morning at 7am

Scroll less, understand more: sign up to receive our news email each weekday for clarity on the top stories in the UK and across the world.

Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you

Get smart, sustainable shopping advice from the Filter team straight to your inbox, every Sunday

The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.

A weekly email from our star chefs featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideas

Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from our star chefs, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent.

Sign up below to start receiving the best of our culinary journalism in one mouth-watering weekly email.

Upgrade your space today, with eight emails packed with tips to brighten up your home - whatever your budget

Embrace your space: the Guardian’s House to Home newsletter is bursting with tips and tricks to help you boost your bedroom and give your living room some love.

Sign up any time, and get eight emails direct to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world