The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont is reporting on these latest hostage releases.
Three more Israelis – all male civilian hostages – were being released on Saturday to Israel as part of the continuing ceasefire agreement with Hamas in Gaza.
One of the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station since last June explained in a new interview that she is struggling to remember what it feels like to walk and lie down.
New safety regulations have led SMEs to stop sales to bloc and Northern Ireland while they work out how to comply
Small businesses are warning they have had to pause selling their products in the European Union and Northern Ireland since mid-December while they work out how to comply with new EU product safety regulations that caught many of them unawares.
Skye Weavers, a small family business on the Isle of Skye, says it has missed out on sales of its scarves, shawls and blankets to customers in both markets after halting internet orders from those locations because of the rule change.
Experts say use of groups to warn others about dangerous men is indictment on governments’ failure to keep women safe
“Any info on Chris* please? Thanks.” The words in a Facebook post, above three pictures of a man. In the comments, a woman replies: “He was also posted a few days ago by someone.”
Further down, a second woman replies: “I’m shaking, I’m his fiancee.”
From dancers to divas, amputees to activists: what images of the human form throughout the decades tell us about who we are
There is no image more compelling to us than to see another human being naked. Thouusands of years of evolution and desire, of empathy and curiosity, hardwire us to stare. The sight is visceral, electrifying, irresistible. It is familiar and forbidden; innocence and sin. The naked body is there in the bathroom mirror every morning, but to see another always feels like stumbling on a secret. A salt-twist of narcissism heightens our emotions, so that looking at a nude feels very different from admiring a watercolour landscape. Ethics come into it. In the history of portraiture, it is the nudes that are the most honest, or the most exploitative – or sometimes both.
Photographs are part of the fabric of everyday life for all of us, in a way charcoal sketches or oil paintings are not. So when a nude is not a sketch or a painting but a photograph, the intensity ratchets up. The polite distance of the art gallery experience is stripped away, leaving gut reaction and raw emotion. All of which is to say: nothing like a nude photograph to get you by the jugular.
Participants in Channel 4’s new show recreate the journeys made by refugees for entertainment. It’s awkward watching, and feels like a pointless endeavour
Channel 4 is often criticised for not being the bold and ballsy network it once was. That may be true – but where else on British TV would you find a reality docuseries in which participants recreate the treacherous journeys undertaken by asylum seekers? Go Back to Where You Came From (Monday, 9pm) has already been the subject of social media speculation and furious comment pieces, all before a single episode has aired. A refugee charity derided it as “A Place in the Sun meets Benefits Street”, which is a truly horrifying combination, but also – unfortunately – made me want to watch it more. At the other end of the spectrum, people with union jacks in their X bios have decided that it is “lefty propaganda” and a PR effort for those they refer to as “illegals”.
Go Back to Where You Came From is based on an Australian series, which proved equally divisive at first but was eventually praised as “ambitious” and “confronting”. This version is certainly in-your-face: Nathan, who owns a haulage company back in Barnsley, is essentially a human foghorn, and opens the series bellowing about how illegal immigration is akin to rape and murder. A chef called Dave says he wants the Royal Navy to set up landmines to blow up small boats, and offers a memorable, if tasteless, soundbite as he looks across the Dover coast: “it’s like rats – you leave food out and they keep coming”. Soon they will be on the streets of Mogadishu and Raqqa, hollering far worse. Meanwhile, the producers let a Welsh woman called Jess complain that everyone in town calls her a “flap guzzler” because she’s gay, and then – when she remembers she’s here to make a documentary about immigration – film her shaking in fear at the sight of a local asylum hotel. Nathan, Dave and Jess’s views are roughly in line with those of another participant, Chloe, while Bushra and Mathilda are more sympathetic to the plight of those hoping to make a new life in the UK. As Bushra points out, if the shoe was on the other foot, most people rallying against unauthorised border crossings wouldn’t hesitate to find a safe place for their families to live.
Trump’s pretense as king has quickly devolved into his strutting insult routine. He will always exploit tragedy to display his self-regard
Outrages of Donald Trump’s rancid character topple over each other so rapidly and in such volume that they long ago became banal. His vileness is unremarked upon, his rottenness unworthy of further commentary. Trump’s offensiveness is an unspoken assumption. Rules and norms exist for him to break. More, he is rewarded. Meta, after discarding monitoring of hateful content and disinformation on Facebook, is paying him $25m in tribute to settle his lawsuit against it for having banned him after his attempted coup on January 6 and his potential “instances of violence” and threats to “public safety”. All is forgiven, if not forgotten. There are no gates; there are no gatekeepers. Let the bad times roll.
But Trump crashed through a new boundary after an army helicopter collided with an airliner about to land at Washington’s Reagan National airport on 29 January with the loss of 67 lives. While police and firefighters were still recovering bodies from the Potomac River, before any report from the National Transportation Safety Board and evidence was fully gathered, Trump went on TV to spew blame against enemies within and to deflect responsibility.
From brazen bull and the Duke of Exeter’s daughter to the whirligig, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 Which first cousins were executed, respectively, in 1536 and 1542? 2 What fruit has the highest fat content? 3 The desk lamp Luxo Jr is a mascot of which film company? 4 What was first published in October 1851 as The Whale? 5 Which Yorkshire cricketer’s name was graffitied on the Berlin Wall? 6 Under construction in Chile, what is the ELT? 7 What is the offspring of a jack and a jenny? 8 Which West Bank city was first settled about 11,000 years ago? What links:
9 Brown envelope; Spanish trading galleon; 1975 world title fight? 10 Alpha Jet (France); Hawk T1A (UK); F-16 Fighting Falcon (US)? 11 Brazen bull; Duke of Exeter’s daughter; Judas cradle; whirligig? 12 Une pomme; deux poires; trois prunes; quatre fraises; cinq oranges? 13 Jon Bon Jovi; Lauryn Hill; Whitney Houston; Paul Simon; Frank Sinatra; Bruce Springsteen? 14 Battuto; holy trinity; mirepoix; sofrito; Suppengrün? 15 Mozart’s Don Giovanni; Ovid’s Pygmalion; Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman?
She served in the Iraq War and the fight against the Islamic State. Now she is the latest victim of a far-right hoax machine that has repeatedly smeared trans people as killers
The Palisades and Eaton fires, two of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history, reached 100 percent containment more than three weeks after they began.
A view of a hillside in Topanga, Calif., during the Palisades fire last month. It, along with the Eaton fire, destroyed entire neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area.
Yarden Bibas was released Saturday in the latest hostage swap, exacerbating concerns about his wife, Shiri, and the couple's young children, Kfir and Ariel, who were also kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023.
A medical transport jet carrying a child patient, her mother and four others has crashed into a Philadelphia neighborhood about 30 seconds after taking off, erupting in a fireball and engulfing several homes in flames
Three high-profile Israeli hostages are set to be released by Hamas on Saturday, while Palestinian authorities say Israel has agreed to release dozens of prisoners, in the fourth round of exchanges during the Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas
A new BBC drama explores one of the most vexing acts of sabotage in literary history: the decision by Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra to burn nearly all the writer’s letters after her death. Keeley Hawes and the cast, as well as the series director, talk to Katie Rosseinsky about what might have motivated Cassandra, the perils of being unmarried and female in Regency England and the extraordinary love that existed between the two sisters
Think Bordeaux means blowing the budget? Think again – the world’s most famous wine region has plenty of affordable gems, and you don’t need to earn a banker’s salary to enjoy them. Here’s how to sip luxury for less
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