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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some say the technology is devaluing their work, while others reckon it is not yet – and might never be – good enough to replace them entirely

Workers grappling with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence have said they feel “devalued” by the technology and warned of a downward trajectory in the quality of work.

Recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund found AI would affect about 40% of jobs around the world. Its head, Kristalina Georgieva, has said: “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”

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

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

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

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

• UK politics live – latest updates

Jeremy Corbyn is to become the parliamentary leader of Your Party, after an election in which his rival Zarah Sultana was also voted on to the party’s leadership committee.

Corbyn’s allies declared victory immediately after the vote in which Corbyn-backed candidates took 14 of the 24 available places on the party’s central executive committee (CEC). Sultana-backed candidates took seven of the seats, while three went to independents.

Gibraltar was not included in the post-Brexit trade deal negotiated between the UK and the EU more than five years ago

The number of asylum seekers being housed temporarily in hotels has fallen to the lowest level for 18 months, Home Office figures show. Rajeev Syal has the story.

A minister has confirmed that the government is pressing ahead with the deal to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

Yes. My colleague the foreign secretary Yvette Cooper has been talking to Marco Rubio, her opposite number in the US, about it. Foreign policy is never easy. We will make progress on the Chagos deal.

Number of Neets climbs to 957,000, up 11,000 on previous quarter, ONS says, driven by rise among young women

The number of young people in the UK not working or in education has risen closer to a million, figures show, as a government adviser warned that society’s expectation of each generation doing better than the next was “now being broken”.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the number of people aged 16 to 24 who were not in education, employment or training (Neet) rose to 957,000 in the final three months of last year, equating to 12.8% of this age group.

Damning inquiry into services in England reveals falsification of medical records after ‘negligent’ care

• What is the national maternity and neonatal investigation and why was it launched?

• Cruel comments, racism and cover-ups: key findings from England’s maternity care report

Hospitals that cause harm and injury to women and babies during childbirth often resort to a “cover-up” of their mistakes, falsify medical records and deny bereaved parents answers, a damning report has found.

“Negligent” care has devastating emotional and psychological consequences for families, disputes between maternity staff have a “disastrous” impact on mothers, and ethnic minority and poorer women have worse outcomes because of racism and discrimination, Lady Amos said.

Banning families from being involved in investigations into the mistakes they encountered.

Conducting inquiries into errors which families think are poor quality and do not properly reflect what occurred.

Driving distressed families to instigate legal action as a way of getting at the truth after they were “denied openness and honesty in the aftermath of harm and bereavement”.

Failing to treat families who have lost a baby with compassion.

Assembly members voted on Wednesday in favour of the bill, which will need royal assent before it becomes law

Jersey’s parliament has given final approval to a bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults who live on the island.

Members of the States Assembly voted by 32 to 16 on Thursday in favour of the bill, which will now need royal assent before it becomes law.

Voters head to the polls in south-east Manchester in one of the most unpredictable byelections in recent years

• Analysis: What a win would mean for Reform, Greens and Labour

The polls have opened in the three-way battle for Gorton and Denton in south-east Manchester in one of the most unpredictable byelections in years.

The Green party leader Zack Polanski said his party was “neck and neck” with Reform UK to overturn Labour’s 13,000-vote majority, and that Labour will need to “search their conscience” if Reform UK wins.Keir Starmer’s party has targeted left-leaning voters in the Greater Manchester seat with claims that only Labour can see off Nigel Farage’s Reform, saying that a vote for the Greens was “in effect, a vote for Reform”.

The Oman-mediated discussions take place amid a massive buildup of US warships and aircraft in the Middle East

The nuclear talks today are the third between the US and Iran since June 2025, when the US joined Israel’s war against Iran and bombed its nuclear and military sites. It effectively ended the US-Iran talks that were held in the weeks prior to the conflict aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement.

As before, the negotiations are being mediated by Oman, which has maintained a policy of neutrality and assumed the role of mediator both within the Arabian peninsula and more broadly across the Middle East. The country lies in the centre of tensions between the US and Iran and is directly vulnerable to maritime instability and regional escalation.

If the talks fail, there is uncertainty over what the US may do regarding a possible military attack against Iran, and when it might act. Questions remain over what this could mean for the wider region, with Iran warning it would retaliate and even attack Israel.

The state-run Oman News Agency has posted photos on social media showing the Omani foreign minister Badr Albusaidi sat with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Geneva.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She left the Netherlands for Britain in the 1970s at just 17. Now, after receiving a short suspended sentence, she faces removal to a country she hasn’t lived in for five decades or visited since 1999

Last December, a letter from the Home Office dropped through Maria’s door. When she read it, she screamed. At 68, she lives with her disabled partner, Tom, who she cares for, in a rental home in west London, and has been resident in the UK for almost 50 years. The letter said the home secretary had decided to pursue her deportation. “The secretary of state has deemed your deportation to be conducive to the public good,” it continued, “and accordingly it is in the public interest that you be removed from the UK without delay.”

The only thing that ties Maria to the Netherlands, her birthplace, is, she says, her passport. For most of her five decades in residence in the UK, the country was part of the EU, so there was no need for her to apply for leave to remain. In January 2022, she was given EU Settled Status (EUSS), a form of indefinite leave to remain for EU and other European citizens who had been living in the UK for five years or more on 31 December 2020.

In the second episode of a new series, reporter Matthew Cassel travels across the West Bank to document what daily life looks like under deepening Israeli occupation. In this episode he travels from Bethlehem to Nablus, to ask those living there if a Palestinian state is possible amidst an increasingly entrenched settler network.

Cuba says it thwarted armed exiles on a Florida-registered speedboat who were trying to infiltrate from the US

A deadly exchange of fire between two boats off the coast of Cuba, killing four and wounding six, has raised already high tensions between Washington and Havana.

Cuba’s government said a US-registered boat was carrying 10 people, most of whom it claimed “have a known history of criminal and violent activity”. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the US was gathering its own information but called the open sea shootout “highly unusual”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist

Murderous governments and armed groups always considered reporters like Marie Colvin a nuisance – now they see them as legitimate targets

A friend wrote to me last week to tell me that my name appeared in the Epstein files. “But it’s for a good cause,” he wrote. “Nothing sinister.”

In 2012, shortly after my friend and colleague Marie Colvin was killed in Homs, Syria, I met with the now-disgraced Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen. Rød-Larsen was a renowned fixer who had negotiated the 1993 Oslo accords.

Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza. She is the author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

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.

Some on the right portray this TikTok phenomenon as tantamount to treason. That says more about them than the fans of Chinese culture

As it’s Chinese lunar new year, it would not be surprising if you’ve found yourself scrolling through some China-inspired content. But before you click the heart on a TikTok of paper lanterns or mouthwatering noodles, think twice. As an unsuspecting citizen, you may well be participating in a geopolitical battle where western civilisation itself is on the line.

This isn’t the plot of a mediocre action thriller on Amazon Prime – this is “Chinamaxxing”, an internet trend that has got some commentators worrying that gen Z are about to topple the west from the inside.

Coco Khan is a writer and co-host of the politics podcast Pod Save the UK

While some who have lived their entire lives under democracy seem willing to forsake it, many who have experienced life under autocracy want out

There is plenty to worry about in the global contest between democracy and autocracy. Iran’s violent repression of antigovernment protests in January crushed the latest effort to challenge a ruthless regime. In many European countries, including Britain, Germany and France, far-right parties seem ascendant. And Donald Trump is doing what he can to undermine democracy in the United States.

Yet a closer analysis shows that autocrats are often running scared of their people. And surprisingly, democracy these days seems sometimes to be held in higher esteem in the global south than in the democratic heartland of the west.

To even be talking about this drastic deportation policy is a sign the far right is winning. In Italy, it’s more than just talk

Meeting Tommy Robinson earlier this month, the French anti-immigration politician Éric Zemmour bluntly summed up his mission: “Politics needs to defeat demographics.” Given rising numbers of Muslims, he said, there was perhaps “10 to 20 years” left to save Europe from “disappearing”. Both men placed their hopes in one policy to reverse the “invasion”: remigration.

At root, remigration means using mass deportations in order to curtail minority – especially Muslim – populations. In France’s 2022 presidential election, Zemmour pledged the creation of a “ministry of remigration” meant to remove “1 million” people, targeting undocumented and dual-national criminals. In practice, supporters of the idea often blur distinctions between criminals and non-criminals, longer-standing citizens and recent migrants, the undocumented and those with settled status.

Will US intelligence learn its lessons from the Iraq war, and just how badly their legitimacy has been undermined?

Four years ago, on 24 February 2022, the Russian military began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, having already occupied Crimea since 2014. Tensions between Ukraine’s government and western leaders on one side and the Kremlin on the other had been escalating for years, but war did not seem like a foregone conclusion, at least not to key European politicians and even to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president.

Zelenskyy hadn’t even packed an emergency suitcase, though talk of war was everywhere. All that changed at 4.50am that Thursday morning. Russian missiles rained down on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, and Russian troops invaded the eastern flank of the country on three different fronts. Zelenskyy and his family fled to an undisclosed location amid threats of Russian assassination squads. What has become the largest war on European soil since the second world war, what Putin has blandly called a “special military operation”, had begun.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York

The sex offender could exploit these masters of the universe ​because, despite their privilege, ​they still felt short-changed by life

One of the things that has been frequently puzzled over as the effluent of the Epstein story flows on, is how a college dropout who thought it was cool to do typos managed to persuade the world’s most powerful into his lair. What, precisely, was the nature of his “genius”? Was it blackmail? Was it the social pyramid scheme of using one big name to reel in another? Nothing has come close to explaining it until, with the latest crop of details from the Epstein files, something has become suddenly clear: that it wasn’t the trafficked girls and women who Jeffrey Epstein groomed. The man’s real talent, if we want to call it that, was in the grooming of his cohort of associates.

This isn’t to say, of course, that the men and occasional woman who threw in their lot with a man we must straight-facedly refer to as “the dead paedophile” weren’t culpable. Nonetheless, if you study the huge amount of Epstein-related material, from the New York Times’s deep dive into his finances to the vast cache of correspondence contained in the files, a picture emerges of a man who did the kind of number on his peers that you would more commonly see directed at victims. While multiple survivor testimonies indicate that Epstein regarded the girls and women he trafficked as of such low consequence he didn’t even need to bother to groom them – per Virginia Giuffre’s account, Epstein raped her the first time they met – all of his resources, via a variety of tactics, went into capturing the allegiances of powerful men.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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

The ability to conduct polite debate on social media, without amplifying menaces and lies, is a basic qualification for public office

The impulse to post on social media often overwhelms judgment of what is appropriate to share. Knowing when not to succumb to that urge, exercising due diligence before passing on material that is flatly false or offensive, is an indispensable skill for politicians in the digital age. Or it should be.

It is a test failed by Simon Evans, a Reform UK councillor and deputy leader on Lancashire council. Mr Evans shared a Facebook image of Natalie Fleet, a Labour MP, featuring a fake quote – “I voted against the grooming gang enquiry”. The Bolsover MP has, in reality, campaigned to protect girls from sexual predators. An accompanying comment called for Ms Fleet to be shot. Mr Evans says he did not see the offending remark. He deleted the post and apologised, adding that “this sort of rhetoric has no place in our politics”. Reform UK investigated, concluded that it had been “an honest mistake” and that no further action was required.

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 long-overdue refurbishment could be an ideal opportunity for Britain to spread power to other parts of the UK, and send a powerful message

MPs and peers face a looming choice: stay put or move out to allow billions of pounds of urgent repairs to the crumbling Palace of Westminster. That was the conclusion of a report from MPs, peers and lay members on the restoration and renewal client board this month. The palace, rebuilt after a fire destroyed it in 1834, is falling apart. There have been 36 “fire incidents” since 2016. Water leaks, heating failures and sewerage problems plague the heart of this Unesco world heritage site.

Fixing Westminster would save money in the long run. An upgrade is also a matter of safety and legacy. “The building is just waiting for some disaster,” says the Tory peer Michael Dobbs, who advises visitors that if they see someone running, they should run too. Labour’s Peter Hain is blunter still, calling it “a Notre Dame inferno in the making”. Without action, he warns, the Commons could go up in flames.

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.

Peter Wardley and Tom Moore remind us of historical royal troubles. Plus letters from Agama Cunningham, Chris Edwards, Ian Reader and Derrick Cameron

Simon Jenkins says that, apart from two fines paid by Princess Anne (one for an uncontrolled dog, the other for speeding), researchers into royal quarrels with the law have to go back to Charles I and Mary, Queen of Scots (Stripped of finery, detained by police as an ordinary citizen: now Andrew enters a new era – and Britain too, 19 February).

Leaving aside less serious brushes with law, often over property rights, there are two cases of major legal significance that he fails to note – in neither were the consequences confined within the British Isles.

Prof Robin Simon on the charity’s visionary founder, Fred Hohler

I was pleased to see Art UK’s achievements mentioned in your article, but astonished that it only featured its new chair and not the remarkable man who made it all possible (‘We’ve scratched the surface’: mission to digitise UK public art reaches 1m entries, 23 February). I refer to Fred Hohler, who established the Public Catalogue Foundation, a charity the work of which is now online under its registered trademark – Art UK.

Hohler’s aim was inspired: to record every oil painting in every public collection in the UK. Having achieved that, he is now directing an even larger project with a similar aim, The Watercolour World, which is a charity under the patronage of the king and queen.
Prof Robin Simon
Editor, British Art Journal

Ana Beard says we should all connect more with colour as it is multidisciplinary and you can engage with it at any level

I was with Francesca Newton most of the way (The 60-second rule? Colour theory? Yet more ways we’re supposed to live our lives, 21 February). There is too much noise online, and if Francesca mostly wears black, good. But the truth is multifaceted.

Connecting with colour is a joyful way to resist the pervasive, racist and misogynistic chromophobia that has tainted the west for hundreds of years. I enjoy the Colour Me Beautiful movement, but I’ll still wear pink even if it doesn’t “suit” me.

Prof Roger Bayston extols the virtues of wearing wooden shoes

I was interested to see the article about the decline in clog wearing (Experience: I am the last traditional clog maker in England, 22 February). I had “flat feet” in the 1970s, perhaps due to working in hospitals with underfloor heating.

During a visit to Sweden in 1974, I noticed many people wearing wooden shoes, and decided to try a pair. Instant comfort.

The knockout playoffs are complete after a whirlwind round of action. Bodø/Glimt’s fairytale continues while the holders struggled again

Bodø/Glimt’s 2-1 defeat of Inter at San Siro continued this season’s miracle. The post-match discussion between Inter coach Cristian Chivu and his opposite number, Kjetil Knutsen, was one of admiration, an acknowledgment the Norwegian team had been too good for the runaway Serie A leaders. Even though Inter were without Lautaro Martínez, their standard bearer, a comeback seemed likely as they dominated the early stages. But they found no way through, eventually falling victim to the high-quality, high-speed attacking that had left them with a 3-1 deficit to overcome from the first leg.

The Belgian goalkeeper has quickly won over the club’s faithful but admits adapting to the Premier League’s physicality has been a challenge

Senne Lammens revels in the “war” of being Manchester United’s goalkeeper in the hugely physical Premier League yet remains bemused at being applauded when entering a primary school classroom on a Wednesday afternoon.

Clearly the 23-year-old is still adjusting to a rocketing career trajectory. Following his £18m transfer from Royal Antwerp on 1 September, Lammens made his debut in the 2-0 win over Sunderland on 4 October, and established himself as the first-choice with a faultless start that featured five clean sheets in 21 league games.

• Markram’s unbeaten 82 proves pivotal in emphatic chase

• De Kock and Rickelton also impress in nine-wicket win

South Africa took a giant leap toward the Twenty20 World Cup semi-finals after a dominant nine-wicket win over West Indies on Thursday.

A whirlwind 95-run opening partnership between the captain, Aiden Markram (82 not out), and Quinton de Kock (47) in eight overs made short work of the chase. Ryan Rickelton added an unbeaten 45 and South Africa motored to 177 for one in 16.1 overs and stretched their unbeaten record in the tournament to six games. West Indies reached 176 for eight from 83 for seven.

An exit from Soldier Field could lead the Bears across state lines. But it could help revive a once thriving area and the team would still be in most fans’ orbit

You think you’re locked out of the housing market? The Chicago Bears have been renting since Warren G Harding was president.

They started out in the NFL as tenants at Wrigley Field, sharing the baseball cathedral with the Cubs for 50 seasons before the league insisted all teams play in a stadium with a capacity of at least 50,000. So in 1971, the Bears decamped to Soldier Field, where they’ve been ever since – save for a season-long “road trip” in 2002 to the University of Illinois’ Memorial Stadium during renovations. Soldier Field is prime football real estate: neoclassical, on the downtown lakefront, with sweeping views of one of America’s most sumptuous skylines. But the lease terms are crazy, the city park district (which owns the stadium) is a borderline slumlord, and the Bears – star-crossed to play in the league’s oldest and smallest stadium while representing its third-largest market – have outgrown the place.

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

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

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

• Costs will increase at extended 2026 tournament

• Around 10 federations want Fifa to tackle problems

A number of European football federations fear they will lose money sending their national teams to the World Cup this summer, with an unusual hike in costs and inconsistencies around tax exemptions among the problems Fifa is being urged to rectify.

Although Fifa approved record prize money of £539m for the tournament last December it may not be enough to prevent losses, or reduced profits, for competitors who would usually expect a World Cup to generate vital funds. An investigation by the Guardian and PA Media found particular concerns among football associations about the consequences of missing out on money that would largely be reinvested in local initiatives.

Our cartoonist looks at Wellington Phoenix goalkeeper Josh Oluwayemi’s unfortunate intervention that created global headlines

SheBelieves Cup campaign that starts against Argentina will show coach is now refining rather than experimenting

When the whistle blows to start USA v Argentina on Sunday in Nashville, a new period of the Emma Hayes era will begin in earnest. The team preparing to play La Albiceleste in Tennessee for the 11th SheBelieves Cup, followed by Canada and Colombia, is the first in more than a year to feature no uncapped players.

For a head coach who spent 2025 setting, challenging or matching all-time USWNT records for capping players, that is a notable shift and it marks the next phase of the team’s World Cup preparation.

• No financial details of deal with Saudi-owned club

• Portuguese player already owns share in Al-Nassr

Cristiano Ronaldo announced on Thursday that he had acquired a 25% stake in Saudi-owned Spanish second division club Almería.

“This strategic investment in UD Almería reflects Ronaldo’s long-term commitment to professional football ownership,” read a statement from his new sports holding company, CR7 Sports Investments, which gave no financial details of the deal.

‘It will soon be spring – and the Danes will soon be going to the polls,’ Danish PM tells the parliament in a special statement

Nordic correspondent

Frederiksen is speaking now.

Leaked information obtained by Guardian paints disturbing picture of violence waged by terror group’s Ukrainian cell

The Ukrainian wing of an internationally proscribed terrorist organization with suspected links to Russia is continuing to claim multiple murders in Ukraine, which comes after it was linked to the brazen assassination of an intelligence officer in Kyiv over the summer.

In a Telegram post, the Ukrainian cell of the Base – born in the US, but with a web of cells all over the world – claimed “a successful operation to eliminate an enemy agent in Odesa” in a car bombing, which was later reported on in local Ukrainian media.

Councillors vote to allow couple to stay on plot of land, overruling objections of Wuthering Heights actor

Earlier this month, Martin Clunes was appearing on a red carpet in London alongside his fellow stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi for the UK premiere of Wuthering Heights.

On Thursday, the actor was to be found in the rather less glamorous surroundings of a county hall in the English West Country to hear councillors rule against him in a long-running dispute with a family of new travellers.

Four arrests over Camorra’s alleged infiltration of San Giovanni Bosco to carry out lucrative criminal activity

Italian police on Wednesday arrested four people over an alleged Camorra plot to infiltrate a Naples hospital, stage fake crashes for insurance payouts and spirit corpses away on oxygen-masked stretchers to profit from private ambulance transfers.

The investigation, sparked by the testimony of a state witness, uncovered a web of lucrative criminal activity allegedly carried out by members of the Contini clan of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, inside San Giovanni Bosco hospital. Prosecutors said the “operations were made possible by the organisation’s capacity for intimidation, a force that bent public officials and private citizens alike to its will”.

Hillary Clinton to testify Thursday from their home in Chappaqua, while Bill Clinton will speak to panel friday

Hillary Clinton will testify before congressional lawmakers investigating the ties of Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday in the first of two closed-door hearings that will also include her husband, Bill Clinton.

Both have complained that they are being singled out unfairly to distract public attention from Donald Trump, who had a long friendship with Epstein before breaking with him. They also claim the testimony should occur in public.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man in 20s arrested on Thursday after man in 40s reportedly carrying weapons apprehended at scene on Tuesday

A second suspect has been arrested after a man allegedly entered Manchester Central Mosque with an axe and a knife on Tuesday.

Greater Manchester police announced on Thursday that a man in his 20s had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a section 18 assault in relation to the incident.

Home Office figures also show a rise in asylum refusal rates, as government claims tightening of rules is working

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The number of asylum seekers being housed temporarily in hotels has fallen to the lowest level for 18 months, Home Office figures show.

The statistics, released on Thursday, also show a drop in asylum approvals including claimants from Syria and Afghanistan. The figures have been seized upon by the government as evidence that Labour’s tightening of the asylum system is working, but a refugee charity has expressed concern that the clampdown is turning away people seeking refuge from war and oppressive regimes.

MPs raise cases of honeymooners and other Britons caught out by new passport requirements as minister rejects calls for grace period

• Dual nationals: have you been prevented from travelling to the UK?

The Home Office has dismissed as “absurd” claims that it failed to properly communicate new border rules that left some British dual nationals at risk of being prevented from boarding flights to the UK.

During a heated session in parliament on Wednesday, the Home Office minister Mike Tapp suggested that media coverage in the Guardian and BBC reflected the department’s efforts to publicise the changes.

‘Index of repression’ includes smears, harassment, job losses and arrests, legal advocacy group says

Palestinian solidarity is being “silenced, criminalised and sanctioned”, according to an advocacy group that says it has recorded more than 900 examples of repression across Britain in the last six years.

People had been targeted with smears, disinformation, harassment, doxing (having private or identifying information published online), visa cancellations, financial blacklisting, loss of employment and arrest, according to the European Legal Support Center, which, along with the research group Forensic Architecture, has created the “index of repression”.

Rare clash off island’s coast took place amid US oil embargo and heightened tensions between two countries

Cuban forces killed four exiles and wounded six others who sailed into its waters onboard a Florida-registered speedboat and opened fire on a Cuban patrol, the country’s government said, at a time of heightened tensions with the US.

Cuba’s interior ministry said the group comprised anti-government Cubans, some of whom were previously wanted for plotting attacks. They came from the US dressed in camouflage and armed with assault rifles, handguns, homemade explosives, ballistic vests and telescopic sights, it said.

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

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

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

Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases

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ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation, a study of the AI platform has found, which experts worry could “feasibly lead to unnecessary harm and death”.

OpenAI launched the “Health” feature of ChatGPTto limited audiences in January, which it promotes as a way for users to “securely connect medical records and wellness apps” to generate health advice and responses. More than 40 million people reportedly ask ChatGPT for health-related advice every day.

Police warn Moninder Singh, head of the Sikh Federation of Canada, his family are also at risk

Police in Canada warned a prominent Sikh activist of “credible threat” to his family’s life, days before the prime minister, Mark Carney, visits India in search of new trade deals.

Moninder Singh, who heads the Sikh Federation of Canada, said officers visited his home on Sunday, to warn him that a confidential police informant had passed information suggesting he and his family were at risk.

Retail technology business to reduce about 5% of global workforce, with two-thirds of job losses affecting UK

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Ocado is to cut 1,000 jobs as the retail technology business attempts to slash £150m in costs though a substantial restructuring programme.

The company confirmed that about 5% of its global workforce will be affected, with roughly two-thirds of the job losses affecting its UK operations.

Firm, which has announced record profits and £9bn share buyback, has £3bn project for smaller commercial planes

The chief executive of Rolls-Royce has pressed ministers for taxpayer support for a new jet engine, on a day the company also announced record profits and promised to give up to £9bn back to shareholders.

The £3bn engine project, designed to power smaller commercial planes, would allow Rolls-Royce to re-enter the lucrative short-haul flights market.

Group aims to be ‘simpler, lower-cost, AI-enabled business’ and achieve £500m of annual savings by 2028

The beleaguered UK advertising group WPP has announced a radical restructure to counter the threat posed by the growth of artificial intelligence, including plans to sell assets and job cuts.

Aiming to be “a simpler, lower-cost, AI-enabled business”, the London-based company laid out plans to achieve £500m of annual savings by 2028, at a cost of £400m over two years.

He was at the heart of 1960s counterculture, then paved the way for the libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley. At 87, Brand is still keen to ensure the world is maintained properly – not just today, but for the next 10,000 years

Stewart Brand thinks big and long. He thinks on a planetary scale – as suggested by the title of his celebrated Whole Earth Catalog – and on the longest of timeframes, as with his Long Now Foundation, which looks forward to the next 10,000 years of human civilisation. He has had a lifelong fascination with the future, and anything that could get us there faster, from space travel to psychedelic drugs to computing. In fact, he was arguably the bridge between the San Francisco counterculture of the 60s and present-day Silicon Valley: in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs eulogised the Whole Earth Catalog and Brand’s philosophy, and echoed its farewell mantra: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

You could say that Brand has also lived big and long. He is now 87 years old, in the final chapters of an eventful and adventurous life that has crossed paths with some of the most consequential events and figures of his era. He has been a writer, an editor, a publisher, a soldier, a photojournalist, an LSD evangelist, an events organiser, a future-planning consultant, even a government adviser (to the California governor Jerry Brown in the late 70s). “There was a time when people asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I find things and I found things,’” says Brand, as in he is a founder. He is speaking from a library where he likes to work in Petaluma, California, not far from his houseboat in Sausalito. “I’m always searching for good stuff to recommend, and good people.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ongoing battle over who will own the iconic film studio is set to have a major impact on what we, the viewers, get to watch in the future

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

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

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

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

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

The notoriously private Manchester painter agreed in 1972 to be recorded by a young fan. The results, broadcast here for the first time, are tender, revealing – and desperately moving

In 1972 a young woman pitched up at an artist’s home to meet her idol. Angela Barratt was 27, with no experience in journalism, art criticism or interviewing blunt northern men of a different generation. LS Lowry was 84, a notoriously private painter who lived alone and increasingly at odds with a world changed beyond all recognition from the industrial heartlands he’d spent a lifetime documenting. Over the next four years the unlikely pair struck up a bond. They met at least 15 more times in Lowry’s home. On each occasion, amid his parents’ portraits, paintings propped up on the piano, and the whirr of the reel-to-reel recorder, the artist bared his soul.

It’s an amazing story, and one that could so easily have been lost. Barratt never did get round to writing up her interviews, the last of which took place just one month before the painter’s death. In 2022, after her own death, the tapes were discovered by her son. Now they’re broadcast for the first time in LS Lowry: The Unheard Tapes. This landmark BBC film is a dense collage of dramatised scenes in which the interviews are reconstructed by lip-syncing actors alongside archive material and commentary from a multitude of talking heads: Jeanette Winterson, Stuart Maconie, critics, curators, biographers, even a psychotherapist. In short, there’s a lot going on.

LS Lowry: The Unheard Tapes is on BBC Two / iPlayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbican, London
This celebration of Iceland’s outsize musical talents was a mixed bag, but highlights such as Bára Gísladóttir’s double bass concerto and Daníel Bjarnason’s I Want to Be Alive revealed singular and innovative voices

Despite its modest population of about 400,000 – that’s roughly the size of Bristol – Iceland punches significantly above its weight, artistically. Musicians from Víkingur Ólafsson to Björk, and composers from what has been called the First Icelandic School regularly top the bill in concert halls worldwide. But is there such a thing as an Icelandic sound?

An afternoon programme of chamber and choral music suggested not. Casting its net wide, the 20th-century European mainstream was much in evidence. Hafliði Hallgrímsson’s Seven Epigrams for violin and cello, stylishly performed by Phoebe Rousochatzaki and Kosta Popovic, might have been by Schnittke. A homage to leading Soviet artists, it included a suitably jittery portrait of Shostakovich.

It is an epic piece of music that literally falls apart – and it perfectly captured the end-of-days chaos after the tragedy. Composer William Basinski and musician Anohni recall its febrile birth in New York’s avant-garde scene

‘Do you remember me phoning and saying, ‘Get over here! You won’t believe what’s happened!’” William Basinski is reminiscing with his old friend Anohni about the summer of 2001, when he made a startling discovery. Out of work and at a loose end, the experimental composer had decided to digitise some recordings he’d made in the early 1980s – snippets of orchestral music and muzak he found on shortwave radio stations. He was planning to add his own instrumentation, but as the tapes started playing on a loop he noticed something else was happening: the music was gradually degrading. The recordings were so old that the iron oxide particles were falling off the tape as they played. Soon, there would be nothing left but crackles and then silence.

It was every musician’s worst nightmare. But for Basinski it was like striking gold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creators say they’re offering Africans a ‘hopeful, utopian feeling’ of retrieving objects looted by colonial armies

A new South African video game lets players take back African artefacts held in western museums in a series of heists, amid a growing campaign to repatriate treasures looted by colonial armies.

Players of Relooted become South African sports scientist and parkour expert Nomali, as she leaps and dives through museums to retrieve 70 real objects. They include an Asante gold mask that was taken by the British army when it destroyed the Asante empire’s capital, Kumasi, and is now in the Wallace Collection in London. Another object is the skull of the Tanzanian king Mangi Meli, which was taken to Germany after its colonial regime executed him in 1900.

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

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

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

At the Arts theatre, Cambridge, until 7 March

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Thatcher-years episodes of Peter Flannery’s award-winning TV series to be adapted for Newcastle stage

It is regarded as one of the greatest British television series ever made, exploring the decline of the Labour party, sleaze, social decay, dodgy developers, injustice and how idealism can so easily turn to disillusionment and cynicism.

Our Friends in the North will return this year in a new guise and will be just as relevant, its writer believes, as it was 30 years ago.

Tilda Swinton among those to sign petition supporting Tricia Tuttle, who reportedly faces sack after pro-Palestine speeches at gala

Prominent directors and actors have rallied in support of the American head of the Berlin film festival in response to reports she could be sacked over comments by award-winners criticising the war in Gaza and the German government’s support for Israel.

Germany’s federal government commissioner for culture and media, Wolfram Weimer, convened a crisis meeting on Thursday on the “future direction of the Berlinale”, which is among Europe’s top three cinema showcases with Cannes and Venice.

Spurred on by a vision of the Shakers’ founding leader, Celia Rowlson-Hall masterminded the whirl of movement in Mona Fastvold’s feverish film

‘I’ll tell you something I’ve not told anyone,” says Celia Rowlson-Hall. “This might make me sound a little wild, but I don’t care.” The choreographer is recounting her experience on The Testament of Ann Lee, a fever dream of a film starring Amanda Seyfried as the leader of 18th-century Christian sect the Shakers, whose ecstatic prayer rituals could involve dancing for days. “The night before we started filming, I was sleeping and, literally, the ghost of Ann Lee was over my bed with angels around and she said: ‘Go forth!’” Rowlson-Hall laughs at herself for revealing this. “Was that my imagination allowing myself to go forth? Maybe, probably,” she smiles. “It was so intense that I will never forget it.”

In Mona Fastvold’s film, we see Lee, a blacksmith’s daughter from Manchester, having vivid religious visions that trigger her evangelism. Much like creative visions, I say. Maybe in a different time Lee would have been an artist? “She was an artist, without a doubt,” says Rowlson-Hall. To be an artist, she continues, “you have to believe in more than just what you see in front of you. It’s a concoction of faith and drive, a little delusion and a lot of energy. Like gunpowder.” Lee definitely had those qualities, leading the Shakers to the US, preaching piety, pacifism, celibacy and the confession of sins, and inspiring devotion as well as ire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The best coffee machines, tested

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best waterproof jacket overall:
Montane Torren

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

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

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

Add percussive therapy to your post-workout routine with our expert picks, including mini and deep-tissue models. Plus, a brand new frontrunner now in top spot

• The best running shoes, tested

Massage guns are often pitched at the highly active. They can help you warm up for workouts, accelerate recovery and generally keep things loose and injury-free. However, you don’t have to be training for an Ironman triathlon to benefit from a percussive pummelling. A good session can also alleviate the general soreness, stiffness and pain that comes from desk-bound days and the daily grind – all without having to cough up for a spell on a masseuse’s table or be handled by a stranger.

These personal-care power tools use rapid, repetitive pressure and vibrations to penetrate tired muscles, with a selection of heads, variable speeds and even automated routines to tailor treatments towards tight trouble spots. Dozens of massage guns are available from various brands, and you can spend anything from £50 to £500. But not all muscle massage guns are made equal.

Best massage gun overall:
Therabody Theragun Sense 2

Best budget massage gun:
Renpho Active Thermacool 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A traditional Kashmiri curry and spicy street food bring the best out of this flavourful meat

Mutton rarely gets the attention it deserves. It’s a mature meat, so is naturally sustainable, and it has a depth and richness that younger cuts simply cannot offer. That robustness is exactly what makes it so rewarding to cook with. Mutton’s bold character stands up beautifully to spices, aromatics and slow cooking, so it’s ideal for curries, stews and braises; on the grill, meanwhile, it takes on smoke in a way that enhances its complexity, rather than overwhelming it. You’re unlikely to find mutton in the supermarket, so you’ll need to make a trip to the butcher’s (many halal ones sell it) or order online.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was in New Orleans for work, without travel insurance, when the car crashed into me. In the months I spent recovering, I began to think seriously about how I treated my health

The SUV slammed into me at a crosswalk, where I had right of way. It was 2024 and I was on the first night of a work trip to New Orleans. Time slowed down as I flew 2 metres through the air and crashed on to the road in what felt like slow motion. When I managed to stand up, there were waves of adrenaline juddering through me. My friend, Brandy, and a group of strangers helped me to the side of the road, and it was then that I remembered my annual travel insurance had expired the week before. In a prim, defensive tone, like a dowager who’d just had a fainting spell and resented all the fuss, I insisted that I was perfectly fine and didn’t need an ambulance. Then I blacked out.

The paramedics arrived and, despite my protests, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. On the stretcher, I started calculating how much money I had in my current account, how much I could put on a credit card and how much I could plausibly ask to borrow from my parents. My lack of insurance was entirely due to my own fecklessness, but being forced to run these sums with a head injury, after begging not to receive help that I obviously needed, was an almost comically bleak experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Where tourists seldom tread, parts 1-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Name: The accidental hacker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the past five years, MPs’ attitudes in the House of Commons towards immigration have swung harder to the right than at almost any other time in the last century

Labour and Conservative MPs are speaking in a more hostile way about immigration than at almost any other time in the last century, the Guardian can reveal.

An unprecedented analysis of 100 years of parliamentary speeches has shown a sharp shift to the right on the issue – with the biggest swing from positive to negative attitudes coming in the past five years.

Andrew Lownie spent years investigating the greed and excesses of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson for his book Entitled. Here, the writer reveals the barriers he faced in getting to the truth

The Saturday morning I meet Andrew Lownie, the author of “the most devastating royal biography ever written” (according to the Daily Mail), the front page of every newspaper carries the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Some have aerial shots of the police arriving to search his home, most including the now infamous photograph of his face in the back of his car. He looks hunted, because he literally has been, but his expression is curiously blank, its most legible emotion grievance. One journalist, Lownie says, reported late on the night of Friday’s arrest that: “Andrew still can’t see what the problem is. He thinks he’s been hard done by. He’s obsessed with other details – whether he can take his horses up to Norfolk, who’s going to get the dogs, where he’s going to park his car. It’s a sort of disassociation.”

Lownie’s office, in his home a stone’s throw from parliament, is a monument to the success of his book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York (along with his other books: one on the Mountbattens, one on Guy Burgess, one to come on Prince Philip). One desk is piled high with books about Andrew and Sarah, some of them by Ferguson herself, others warts-and-all, kiss-and-tell accounts from confidants and clairvoyants. Lownie has stacks of rejected freedom of information requests, from UK Trade and Investment; the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office; the Information Commissioner – “They sometimes took so long to respond that they haven’t even downloaded the request before it expires.” He approached 3,000 people from all the way through Mountbatten-Windsor’s life; only a tenth of them would speak to him, which to me feels quite unsurprising, and yet Lownie is indignant. “I wrote to ambassadors, and they said ‘not interested’. This was a matter of public interest. Others, very cheerily when I wrote to them a third time, said ‘nice try’, as if it was some sort of joke. These are the guys I want in the dock, in parliament, on oath. This is the thing that makes me upset. I, perhaps naively, expect standards in public life.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We would like to hear your story of serving a nightmare patron

A diner in a Sydney restaurant has been caught on CCTV sprinkling armpit hair into their food “in attempt to get a free meal”. After confronting the head chef, the man allegedly then left without paying, having ordered the most expensive items on the menu.

With this delightful story in mind, do you have a story of dealing with a rude or generally bad customer while working in hospitality?

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