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‘If I go to my grave and know that my son has outdone me, I’m in heaven,’ said Terminator star
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The son of a British-Indian woman who died in the Air India plane crash has revealed he missed her last phone call, made just hours before she boarded the ill-fated flight.
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Chichester Festival theatre
Natalie Dormer is exceptional in the title role with Phillip Breen’s clever production reflecting the full scope of the novel’s ambition
The stampede of actors making their way from screen to stage continues with Natalie Dormer’s return to the boards as the lead, tragic figure in Leo Tolstoy’s story of one aristocratic unhappy family.
She is exceptional in the part of Anna, inhabiting the boldness, insecurity and anger of the discontented wife seeking her freedom through romantic passion. But there is little chemistry in her relationship with Vronsky (Seamus Dillane) – the rakish military man for whom she leaves her loveless marriage, and he is a non-character, left uncoloured.
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© Photograph: Marc Brenner
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It's not the life-and-death situations that make ‘blue-light’ work intolerable, it’s the rogue employees who the forces won’t sack, says former 999 call handler turned police conduct campaigner Issy Vine
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Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport is shut until further notice
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‘I feel so removed from who I am,’ said 30-year-old actor before her treatment
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Follow all the latest transfer news as the rumour mill whirs despite the end of the summer’s first transfer window
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Unlike Keir Starmer and his cabinet, Reform UK’s leader actually understands and exploits the rules of engagement in our digital age
As so often happens, what Nigel Farage said on a recent visit to south Wales deserved endless pejoratives. It was ludicrous, condescending, half-baked, opportunistic and plain stupid. Even he didn’t seem to know exactly what he wanted. At a Reform UK press conference in Port Talbot, he seemed to make the case for reopening the town’s steel-making blast furnaces, before admitting that “it might be easier to build a new one”, though he also acknowledged that it would “cost in the low billions” to do so. But he had even more dizzying visions of reopened Welsh mines. “If you offer people well-paying jobs … many will take them,” said Farage, “even though you have to accept that mining is dangerous.”
The climate crisis, predictably enough, was not worth considering. He also did not offer any opinions about coal-related issues such as slag heaps, land slips, rivers that run black, and unimaginable underground disasters. When he was asked where new pits might be located, he blithely offered the opinion that it “comes down to geology”. That is true, up to a point, but he would surely also have to think about the housing developments and business parks that often sit atop all those disused coal seams.
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© Illustration: R Fresson/The Guardian
© Illustration: R Fresson/The Guardian
Exclusive: The Independent has seen a communique between the TUC and the French and Canadian union umbrella bodies demanding their governments recognise Palestine as a state immediately with Labour on the brink of a civil war over the issue
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Former French president loses country’s highest state award despite Emmanuel Macron’s opposition to move
The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been stripped of his Legion of Honour, the country’s highest distinction, after his conviction for corruption was confirmed last year, according to an official decree published on Sunday.
The conservative one-term president has been beset by legal problems since leaving office in 2012. In December France’s highest court upheld his conviction for influence peddling and corruption, ordering him to wear an electronic ankle tag for 12 months.
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© Photograph: Lafargue Raphael/ABACA/REX/Shutterstock
Healthy scepticism is needed because flaw is that large language models remain prone to casually making things up
From helping consultants diagnose cancer, to aiding teachers in drawing up lesson plans – and flooding social media with derivative slop – generative artificial intelligence is being adopted across the economy at breakneck speed.
Yet a growing number of voices are starting to question how much of an asset the technology can be to the UK’s sluggish economy. Not least because there is no escaping a persistent flaw: large language models (LLMs) remain prone to casually making things up.
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© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
From blackmail to burglary, the events of Spark’s life often uncannily echoed those of her novels – no wonder the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie believed she could predict the future
“There is a supernatural process going on under the surface and within the substance of all things,” says a priest in Muriel Spark’s 1965 novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Spark believed herself wired into this process. The novelist was aware from the start of “a definite ‘something beyond myself’”, an “access to knowledge that I couldn’t possibly have gained through normal channels”.
“Somehow things happened, odd things, when Muriel was around,” recalled her friend Shirley Hazzard. “Everything that happened to Muriel,” according to her American editor Barbara Epler, “had been foreseen”, usually in her books themselves. If Spark wrote about blackmail, she too would be blackmailed; if she wrote about a burglary, she would then be burgled. Thirty years after toying with an idea for The Hothouse by the East River (1973), in which electrocution by lightning takes place down a telephone line, lightning struck Spark’s house in Italy, sending a current of electricity through the external wires and burning her upper lip.
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© Photograph: Dmitri Kasterine/CAMERA PRESS
Foreigners treated as enemies, judges under attack: the signs are everywhere in the US. But there are still reasons to hope
Like so many others, I watched the video of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts University, as she was surrounded by men dressed in black, some wearing masks. They carried guns. One grabbed her by the collar. The men surrounded her, and one handcuffed her. You can hear her short shrieks of fear.
She must have been terrified. I know I was when, as a 19-year-old student, I was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires by members of an irregular taskforce. I know what it feels like and I know what it portends.
Miriam Lewin is a leading Argentine journalist and survivor of the dictatorship. She is the author of six books, including Iosi, the Remorseful Spy forthcoming in English in July 2025 (Seven Stories Press). A seven episode podcast about Miriam Lewin’s experience as a prisoner of the state and her fight for justice is titled The Burden: Avenger
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© Photograph: Anonymous/AP
Budding scholars pursue overseas jobs amid attacks on education and research, prompting fears of an American brain drain
Eric Schuster was over the moon when he landed a lab assistant position in a coral reef biology lab at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO). The 23-year-old had recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nanoengineering from the University of California, San Diego, into a fiercely competitive job market. He felt like he’d struck gold.
But the relentless cuts to scientific research and attacks on higher education by the Trump administration have turned what felt like a promising academic future into unstable ground.
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© Photograph: Nina Paz
© Photograph: Nina Paz
Mark Lynas has spent decades pushing for action on climate emissions but now says nuclear war is even greater threat
Climate breakdown is usually held up as the biggest, most urgent threat humans pose to the future of the planet today.
But what if there was another, greater, human-made threat that could snuff out not only human civilisation, but practically the entire biosphere, in the blink of an eye?
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© Photograph: AP
© Photograph: AP
With oppositional views on net zero and Jeremy Corbyn, could a Greenpeace campaigner and a Tory physicist find any mutual ground?
Becky, 47, Brighton
Occupation Data product owner at a utilities company
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© Photograph: Anna Gordon/The Guardian
© Photograph: Anna Gordon/The Guardian
Desperate dads meet in car parks to exchange packets; exhausted parents slip it into their kids’ drinks; families waiting months for prescriptions buy it ‘off label’. But is it worth the risk?
The first time I gave him a gummy, I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I killed him?’ He just passed out in front of the TV. That never happens.” Jen is remembering giving her son, David, six, melatonin to help him sleep. She got them from a friend, a paediatrician who gave them to her own child. “It was sort of hilarious. She had half a tub of gummies, and her husband met my husband in a car park near a roundabout to hand them over, like some underhand black-market deal.” Her tone is light, but in fact she and her husband were becoming increasingly desperate for sleep. “They were like gold dust.”
By meeting in the car park to exchange the gummies, the husbands weren’t breaking the law, exactly, but they were stepping into a legal grey area. Melatonin is a synthetic version of the sleep hormone that occurs naturally in our bodies, rising at night in response to darkness and helping us get to sleep. It isn’t strictly illegal in the UK, but it is a prescription-only medication, and it can only be prescribed to children by a paediatrician under a specific set of circumstances, usually for children with a diagnosis of autism or ADHD. The rationale for this pathway is so that the paediatric specialist can rule out any potentially physical causes or underlying disease relating to the sleep disorder. Side-effects can include drowsiness the next day, nausea and feeling dizzy.
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© Illustration: Carl Godfrey/The Guardian
© Illustration: Carl Godfrey/The Guardian
Khushboo Rajpurohit, a 21-year-old newlywed, was among 241 passengers killed in Air India crash. Her family travelled over 500km to receive her mortal remains, Namita Singh reports
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Protesters take to streets in a dozen cities to march against an industry they say is wrecking communities
Campaigners in at least a dozen tourist hotspots across southern Europe have taken to the streets to protest against “touristification”.
It is the most widespread joint action to date against what they see as the steady reshaping of their cities to meet the needs of tourists rather than those who live and work there.
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© Photograph: Bruna Casas/Reuters
© Photograph: Bruna Casas/Reuters
Dragging conflict into the Gulf is a strategic mistake, says Iran’s foreign minister after drone strike on coastal facility
Iran’s foreign minister has accused Israel of seeking to expand the war beyond Iran by attacking a major gas facility in Bushehr province on the Gulf coast.
Speaking to diplomats in his first public appearance since the initial Israeli strikes, Abbas Araghchi said: “Dragging the conflict into the Persian Gulf is a strategic mistake and its goal is to drag the war outside Iranian territory. Any military development in this region can affect the entire world.”
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© Photograph: AP
Director Hwang Dong-hyuk said he has dedicated six years of his life to the drama
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Drugs that slow progression of Alzheimer’s don’t provide enough benefit to justify substantial cost for NHS, regulator has said
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Escalating tensions as Israel launches largest bombardment on Iran in decades early on Friday
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