Man United come into this game with an unfamiliar feeling. They can look back on their last performance with great satisfaction.
Against Real Sociedad on Thursday, they weren’t flawless (until the 87th minute, they led only by virtue of some over-zealous refereeing), but by the end they were dominant. And the word “electrified” was even used of them.
Victim, 45, hospitalized and in stable condition as police unable to say if attack was random or targeted
A 45-year-old man was set on fire in the middle of Times Square overnight on Sunday, according to police, three months after a woman was killed on a subway train in an arson attack.
Footage from the scene captured the moments the man, shirtless and severely burned, was rushed by authorities into an ambulance after the flames were extinguished.
Coaches set to miss out for second straight Lions tour
Andy Farrell looks likely to overlook England’s assistants when selecting his British & Irish Lions coaching staff, with Steve Borthwick revealing he has not been approached about members of the backroom team.
After England rounded off their Six Nations campaign with a record win against Wales to ensure a second-placed finish, Borthwick stated that he wanted as many of his players selected for the Lions tour as possible when Farrell names his squad on 8 May.
Strikes began on Saturday with the aim of punishing Iran-backed armed group for attacks on Red Sea shipping
US officials have said airstrikes launched against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis will continue indefinitely, after a first round on Saturday killed at least 31 people and injured up to 100 more.
The strikes, which aim to punish the Houthis for their attacks against Red Sea shipping, are Donald Trump’s first such use of US military might in the region since he took power in January.
Singer, dancer and member of the 1980s pop group Five Star along with his four siblings
Stedman Pearson, who has died aged 60 while undergoing dialysis treatment for diabetes, was the eldest of the five siblings who made up the British pop group Five Star. Frequently compared to the Jackson 5, both for their all-family lineup and the fact that they were managed by a controlling and overbearing father, Five Star emerged from Romford, east London, and became a pop phenomenon in the mid-1980s with a string of hit singles and albums.
The group was a project involving the entire Pearson family. Stedman was in effect Stedman Pearson Jr, since though his father was widely known as Buster Pearson, his actual first name was Stedman.
New evidence of particles damaging crops strengthens the case for an international plastics treaty
New and concerning findings from environmental scientists about the impact of microplastics on crops and marine algae add to a growing body of evidence about the disruption caused to living systems by plastic pollution. The results, from a team led by Prof Huan Zhong at Nanjing University, China, are not definitive and require corroboration. But analysis showing that plastics could limit photosynthesis (the conversion of sunlight into chemical energy) must be taken seriously. If the researchers are correct, and staple crops are being reduced by about 12%, there are huge implications for global agriculture and food supplies. This could inject new urgency into efforts to tackle plastic pollution.
There is no single route by which microplastic particles inhibit plants from growing. The overall effect is attributed to a combination of blocked sunlight and nutrients, and damage to soil and cells. This can lead to reduced levels of chlorophyll – the pigment enabling photosynthesis. When the researchers modelled the crop losses caused by an effect of this size, they found Asia was hardest hit, potentially contributing to food insecurity and worsening hunger.
Trump invoked 1798 law previously used to detain Japanese Americans in second world war to justify deportations
The US deported more than 250 mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador despite a US judge’s ruling to halt the flights on Saturday after Donald Trump controversially invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 had arrived and were in custody as part of a deal under which the US will pay the Central American country to hold them in its 40,000-person capacity “terrorism confinement centre”.
Mikel Arteta had promised that Arsenal would not give up on their title dream easily and, although they remain 12 points behind the champions-elect Liverpool after one of the most comfortable 1-0 win you will see, there remains hope in this part of north London.
Mikel Merino’s first-half goal from a corner – Arsenal’s 11th of the season but first since mid-January – proved enough to see off a toothless Chelsea side who looked badly short of inspiration without their talisman Cole Palmer and secure a first win in four league games.
Some areas forecast to have warmer weather than Ibiza and Corfu on Thursday’s spring equinox
Parts of the UK are expected to be warmer than Ibiza and Corfu this week on the first official day of spring.
This Thursday marks the spring equinox and temperatures could reach 19C (66F) in the south of England. The Met Office meteorologist Becky Mitchell said that was 8C hotter than the average for the time of year.
Exclusive: Doctor Who writer says he feels ‘a wave of anger heading towards us’ and hostility in UK as well as US
Russell T Davies has said gay society is in the “greatest danger I have ever seen”, since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.
Speaking to the Guardian at the Gaydio Pride awards in Manchester on Friday, the Doctor Who screenwriter said the rise in hostility was not limited to the US but “is here [in the UK] now”.
Arsenal secured their first league win in over a month thanks to a first-half Mikel Merino header
Join the discussion: email Daniel with your thoughts
Arteta says this is a big game and the players are focused on that. They’re excited to face Real Madrid and the international break is coming next so they need to play well and hopefully get some players back afterwards.
Where is the game? Arsenal will fancy Declan Rice and Martin Odegaard to run off James and Moises Caicedo, while their left flank of Lewis-Skelly and Leandro Trossard will surely target Jadon Sacnho, unrenowned for his physicality or relentlessness, and Wesley Fofana, a centre-back playing out of position.
Hamza Igamane drove in a glorious late winner as Rangers beat Celtic 3-2 in a thrilling Old Firm match at Parkhead.
Nico Raskin headed the visitors in front from a corner in the fourth minute before Mohamed Diomande added a second in the 37th minute and Barry Ferguson’s side should have been further ahead at the interval.
Steve Witkoff says US discussions with Russian president ‘positive’ and ‘solution-based’ and leaders likely to speak
Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff said on Sunday that he expected the US president to speak with Vladimir Putin this week, saying that the Russian president “accepts the philosophy” of Trump’s ceasefire and peace terms.
Witkoff told CNN that discussions with Putin over several hours last week were “positive” and “solution-based”. He declined to confirm when asked whether Putin’s demands included the surrender of Ukrainian forces in Kursk; international recognition of Ukrainian territory seized by Russia as Russian; limits on Ukraine’s ability to mobilize; a halt to western military aid; and a ban on foreign peacekeepers.
While writing my book, I asked on social media for stories from parents suffering extreme sleep deprivation. It was hilarious – and frightening
Sleep is a feminist issue. Or should I say, lack of sleep is a feminist issue. During a particularly thickly cut bout of tiredness, when my son was a newborn, I became so convinced that my tiny, milk-stained baby had rolled out of my arms and somehow, unfathomably out of the room, into the night outside that I started crawling along the floor of our hallway, in the dark, sobbing. The fact that the boy couldn’t yet roll over, was in his cot, and the door was closed, while my partner snored like a mechanical digger beside him, could not penetrate the exhausted fug of terror that had enveloped me after weeks, months of broken, fluttering, barely snatched rest.
Whether it’s waking up every 45 minutes to feed a screaming baby, making shopping lists while roasting under the duvet in an insomniac hormonal flush, staying up past midnight to clean the house once your children are in bed, or setting the alarm for 4.45am so you can get your elderly mother to the toilet before she has an accident; the night shift of unpaid, unrecognised and uncelebrated domestic labour is still predominantly undertaken by women. While the Office for National Statistics found that in 2022, almost 4.9 million (56%) night-time workers were male and almost 3.9 million (44%) were female, this does not by any means mean that women are getting more sleep. I very much doubt that it was a breastfeeding woman who smugly declared Friday 14 March as World Sleep Day.
With nearly 2,000 investigations into incidents at NSW childcare centres since 2020 and one provider’s response under investigation, parents are grappling with lingering questions
I was 21, living in Sydney, working as a glassie at a local pub and feeling a bit lost. I didn’t know what to do in life – the one thing I had going for me was playing the flute.
I’d saved for two years to buy my flute when I was 16 and earning $2.35 an hour at the supermarket. Every day I would come home and play it. It would help me process my emotions.
Gina Rinehart is Australia’s richest person – and as her wealth continues to rise, so does her power and influence. But what does she want? As the federal election approaches, Guardian Australia’s new seriesexplores the impact Australia’s richest person could have onAustralian politics. Senior correspondent Sarah Martin investigates decades of family history and infighting to make sense of how she became a mining billionaire, legal warrior and Trump admirer – and what she mightdo next.
ASMR videos can mimic the feeling of physical touch, which a study has found is popular with young consumers. But how many intimate gestures of love, care and connection are they missing out on?
You wouldn’t think a deep dive on slime-squishing and head-scratching videos could be haunting, but a recent study on ASMR content left me haunted and also slightly grossed out.
ASMR, for those not particularly online, is a content genre named after the feeling it provokes in some viewers: autonomous sensory meridian response, a pseudoscientific name for a pleasurable tingling accompanied by a sense of calm. If you’re moderately online, you may know it as “those whispering and tapping videos” – there is lots of that, plus scratching, slime and gentle brushing. But there is much more to it, as I discovered reading a report by innovation agency Revealing Reality, including subgenres that mimic physical touch. You can watch ASMR-ists pretend to brush your hair, groom you for nits or wipe your “face” – the camera – with a spit-moistened finger (that is the gross bit).
Former talkshow host takes public her battle to remove her guardian, ordered by a court due to dementia and aphasia
The note dropped from the upper floor window of an assisted living facility in New York on the morning of 10 March contained a simple message: “Help! Wendy!!” it read.
For any patient inside, it would have been tragic. But, astonishingly, the writer of this note was Wendy Williams, a trailblazing television talkshow host and once one of the most recognisble daytime TV faces in America.
Donald Trump keeps saying he inherited a terrible economy from Joe Biden and many Americans believe him, even though that’s not true. During his White House marketing event for Tesla on Tuesday, Trump said the US and its economy “went to hell” under Biden. Last week, in his national address to Congress, Trump said: “We inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.”
But the truth is that by standard economic measures, the US economy was in excellent shape when Biden turned over the White House keys to Trump, even though most Americans, upset about inflation, told pollsters the economy was in poor shape.
From hacking screen time settings to bypassing website restrictions, young people make responsible parenting in the age of tech feel like a game of whack-a-mole. Here’s how to do it successfully
I know I’m not alone as a parent when I admit I have often felt like an exasperated failure in trying to restrict what my children see online. There were the times they hacked their devices’ screen time settings, or managed to stumble into inappropriate content in spite of the controls, not to mention the ever inventive workarounds to access restricted sites. Worst of all is the ill will the rigmarole creates between us all. So when in the first minute of my conversation with digital parenting coach Elizabeth Milovidov, she says, “I think parents need to just kind of give themselves a hug, breathe and start over,” I feel so heard and comforted I could cry.
“Parents are incredibly busy. They’re overwhelmed,” says Milovidov. “And then this whole idea of trying to lock things down is not easy. I remember trying to learn how to programme a VCR, and it was just like: oh my God.” And yet she herself, a parent of teens, seems so chill. She admits having watched far too much TV in the 70s, and she has turned out OK; she has a PhD and is an international consultant on tech and parenting.
The UK’s top creatives have put together a list of makers who put sustainability first. Using everything from reclaimed rattan and bacteria-dyed fabrics to algorithmic design, these trailblazers are making positive steps forward for people and planet
I feel hopeful about the impact of design on the world,” says fashion designer Foday Dumbuya, “It has the power to drive change by addressing social issues, promoting sustainability, and enhancing quality of life.”
In September this year, the UK hosts the World Design Congress (WDC), where the best minds from business, education and research get together to discuss how design can do just this.
British driver won Australian Grand Prix in season opener
Norris wary of complacency: ‘if you relax, you have failed’
Britain’s Lando Norris believes he and his McLaren team are now favourites for the 2025 Formula One world championship after a strong victory at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix – but Ferrari’s team principal, Frédéric Vasseur, admitted his team had to up their game in working with Lewis Hamilton.
After a dramatic and incident packed race in mixed wet and dry conditions, Norris took the flag for his first victory in Australia, the first time he has won the opening race of a season and the perfect start for the 25-year-old’s title ambitions.
Some cells are still alive within the dung, and could be used to boost genetic diversity in certain species
Turning animal poo into offspring sounds like a zoo keeper’s conjuring trick, but it might become a reality if researchers succeed in a new project to help save endangered animals from extinction.
From snow leopards to sea turtles, animals the world over are under threat, with some scientists calling the massive loss of wildlife in recent decades a “biological annihilation”.
In this valuable, brutally honest guide, the broadcaster argues that a supposedly joyful time is often steeped in drudgery and social isolation
“It’s a bloody weird experience, maternity leave, and it’s OK to acknowledge that,” Emma Barnett writes in Maternity Service, her short, no-nonsense guide to surviving this curious – and relatively recent – phenomenon that can feel, in the thick of it, like a temporary exile from the outside world. For many new mothers, the abrupt severance from their professional lives and previous identities can leave them flailing in a strange and destabilising limbo where it seems almost taboo to voice any feelings of dislocation, in case these come across as a lack of maternal devotion.
Barnett proposes that the whole business should be rebranded – rather than “maternity leave”, which suggests a nice relaxing break, it should be styled “maternity service”, with all the latter term’s connotations of a military tour of duty. Words such as “duty” and “service” are unfashionable these days, she says, but it can help to reframe this strange, formless, sleep-deprived time as a finite period in which you are performing a series of tasks in the service of keeping your newborn alive. There are echoes here of Claire Kilroy’s brutally honest novel of early motherhood, Soldier Sailor, in which the narrator is the soldier of the title; Barnett mentions that she and a new mother comrade still greet each oother as “soldier”.
Leaders on left bet on Musk’s bravado to pull party out of political weeds as CEO eyes social security and health cuts
For most of the 17-minute interview, Elon Musk stuck to a script. He was just a tech guy on a mission to “eliminate waste and fraud” from government.
His slash-and-burn cost-cutting crusade was making “good progress actually”, he told the Fox Business commentator Larry Kudlow on Monday, despite sparking a backlash that has reverberated far beyond Washington.
The Black Country, New Road and Jockstrap musician on a YouTube philosopher, the power of Munch and her love of saunas and Japanese onsen
Born in Cornwall in 1997, Georgia Ellery attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. There she met Taylor Skye, with whom she founded the electro-pop duo Jockstrap; their 2022 debut album, I Love You Jennifer B, was nominated for the Mercury prize. In 2019 she starred in the Mark Jenkin film Bait. She is also a member of the Mercury-nominated Black Country, New Road, who have so far released two albums blending post-rock, klezmer and jazz. Their third album, Forever Howlong, is out on 4 April on Ninja Tune; they tour in the autumn. Ellery lives in London.
Researchers use innovative cameras to identify fish species hindering coral reef restoration
Marine scientists in Florida working to help reverse a calamitous decades-long decline in coral reefs caught fishy “porch pirates” in the act with an innovative underwater doorbell-style surveillance camera.
The footage showed that three corallivorous species – redband parrotfish, foureye butterflyfish and stoplight parrotfish – were responsible for eating more than 97% of coral laid as bait by the researchers at an offshore reef near Miami.
Interior minister says blaze at pop concert in eastern town of Kočani probably caused by pyrotechnics
Fifty-nine people have been killed and more than 100 injured in a fire that broke out in a nightclub in North Macedonia early on Sunday.
The blaze in the small eastern town of Kočani is thought to have erupted when special-effect pyrotechnics caused the roof of the Pulse nightclub to go up in flames.
The solid bronze severed head of Melbourne’s decapitated King George V statue appears to have briefly reappeared in public, gracing the stage during a performance by a visiting Northern Irish hip hop group.
The statue in the King’s Domain parklands was beheaded during the King’s Birthday Weekend in June 2024 – one of a series of anti-colonial acts of sabotage targeting British memorials in Melbourne.
3 min: Ooooh, top save from Schmeichel, diving to his right to tip round a stinging strike from Raskin. A corner for Rangers …
2 min: Schlupp is into the action again, heading away the corner for a throw-in. Tavernier sends it long, into the area, with Celtic unable to properly get rid. Rangers have another throw …
Numbers using satellite broadband system has been growing but users are having second thoughts due to Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s administration
Tesla sales have tumbled, X has had an exodus of users, and now it seems cracks are appearing among those who have turned to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system as a means of staying connected in remote areas.
While the number of Starlink users has been growing, some subscribers have been venting their frustrations over Musk’s political machinations, saying they will no longer use the high-speed satellite internet system.
The Kennedy Center and BLM mural have been targeted, the newspaper is in freefall – and the Maga movement is gaining a foothold
It was an audience more accustomed to stifling a cough or resisting the temptation to unwrap a sweet. But when they spotted vice-president JD Vance taking his seat at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on Thursday night, classical music-goers erupted in unrestrained boos, jeers and shouts of “You ruined this place!”
The noisy protest exemplified a culture clash taking place in the nation’s capital. It came in the same week that work began to remove a giant “Black Lives Matter” mural near the White House, a top political columnist quit the Washington Post newspaper and a spending bill passed by the House of Representatives sought to impose drastic budget cuts of $1.1bn on the District of Columbia (DC).
Trump administration accused of ‘quid pro quo’ for fast-tracking controversial fossil fuel proposal in Michigan
Donald Trump’s administration is being accused by activists of a quid pro quo as it attempts to fast-track a controversial fossil fuel pipeline proposal in Michigan that would in part be built by a donor with deep financial ties to the president.
While Canadian oil giant Enbridge owns the Line 5 oil and gas pipeline that it is attempting to replace in the Great Lakes region, the contractor is Tim Barnard, who, along with his wife, gave $1m to Trump’s campaign last year, Federal Election Commission records show.
An unexpected bit of tech opened up a whole new world of possibilities for a frustrated, injured writer
If you had asked me a month or two ago if I had ever had a spatial immersive experience, or what the chances were that at the age of 60, I would become an early adopter of virtual reality goggles, I would have said it was about as likely as a tech giant from Silicon Valley being appointed to “disrupt” the US federal government.
Let me explain the unlikely series of events that led me to the latest in technology.
Interim manager positive despite League Cup final defeat
Teams meet in Women’s Champions League this week
Nick Cushing has said Manchester City’s performance in their League Cup final defeat on Saturday gives him belief that they can beat Chelsea in the Women’s Champions League on Wednesday, as the teams’ run of four consecutive meetings continues.
Manchester City lost 2-1 in Cushing’s first game back in interim charge, five days after the sacking of Gareth Taylor, and Cushing’s team will now host Chelsea in the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final, before a crucial league meeting at the Etihad Stadium on 23 March and then, on 27 March, the reverse leg of their European tie.
The pandemic forced many people in England and Wales to reflect how they might die with dignity, and the numbers of those wanting to die at home is on the rise
When Marlene Viggers was told her newly diagnosed cancer was untreatable, she said she wanted to go home to die. “She was the matriarch of the family, she held everything together, and she wanted to have her family all around her,” said Neil Andrews, her son-in-law.
For the next few weeks, until Marlene died in January 2022 at the age of 73, she was given round-the-clock care by her closest relatives supported by Marie Curie, the end of life charity.
Trump administration’s interpretation of immigration law paves way for high-stakes legal clash after activist’s arrest
The Trump administration is relying on an obscure provision of immigration law to justify deporting Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident,setting up a high-stakes legal battle betweenthe first amendment and what the government claims are its foreign policy powers.
Khalil,a Columbia University graduate who became a leader of pro-Palestinian protests on the campus, was arrested on 8 March by immigration agents. After his arrest, immigration officials said they were seeking to deport him under a provision of federallaw that gives the US secretary of state, currently Marco Rubio, the power to deport someone if their presence in the country is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.
The promotion of Israel’s national narrative remains exempt from Trump’s wholesale attack on DEI
On 7 March, the Trump administration announced that it had cancelled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University, saying the school’s “Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and antisemitic harassment on their campuses” and that “universities must comply with all federal anti-discrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding”.
The “harassment” leveraged by the president and other pro-Israel ideologues was a reference to the paradigm-setting pro-Palestinian activism that energized the campus over the past year. Columbia’s students became national leaders in the anti-genocide movement, and the Gaza solidarity encampment they established garnered international attention – including from the US Congress, which held hearings on so-called “campus antisemitism”.
The best way to explore the country’s fabulous valleys and vistas is with a choose-your-own-adventure rail pass
Switzerland isn’t expensive, it’s just very exclusive,” joked our tour guide as we walked along the paved path by the shore of Lake Lucerne. The Grand Train Tour of Switzerland – or GTToS for aficionados – certainly has the feel of an epic journey, complete with trains and boats offering panoramic views of its mountains, valleys and lakes.
The GTToS takes in 1,280km of sights, many of them Unesco world heritage sites, such as the Swiss Alps of Jungfrau-Aletsch, the Matterhorn and the crystal clear waters of Lake Thun. The route is very flexible – you can hop on and off as you go.
Before the 2024 election, the two authors tried to stop Donald Trump’s plan to gut the US federal government with an investigation that transformed the image of civil servants from bureaucrats to superheroes. Now their worst fears have been realised
In late 2023, as the US presidential election was heaving into view, the author Michael Lewis called up six writers he admired – five Americans and one Briton – and asked if they’d like to contribute to an urgent new series he was putting together for the Washington Post. At the time, Lewis was hearing talk that if Donald Trump got back into power, his administration would unleash a programme of cuts that would rip the federal government to shreds. Lewis decided to launch a pre-emptive strike. The series, entitled Who Is Government?, would appear in the weeks running up to the election. Its purpose, Lewis explains over a Zoom call from his book-lined study in Berkeley, California, “was to inoculate the federal workforce against really mindless attacks”. It would do this by valorising public service and, as he puts it, “jarring the stereotype people had in their heads about civil servants”.
Other writers might shrink away from the notion that they could restrain a US president with a handful of essays, but Lewis has an outsized sway. Author of such mega-bestsellers as Liar’s Poker and Flash Boys, he has a knack for writing about arcane concepts in business, finance and economics in ways that don’t just enlighten the uninitiated but whip along with the pace of an airport thriller. Hollywood loves him: Moneyball, The Blind Side and The Big Short all got turned into hit movies crammed with A-listers. So when Lewis speaks out about the forces shaping our world, even if it concerns something as seemingly unsexy as the federal government, people tend to listen.
A Grade II-listed former storehouse on the edge of the Thames has become a modern home, but its historic character remains at the heart of its redesign
In the late 18th century, London was one of the busiest ports in the world, the docks in the east bustling with clippers, sailors and porters unloading tea, tobacco, rice, fruit, sugar and wine. It meant that industrial warehouses were thrown up along the banks of the Thames for much-needed storage. Almost two centuries later, only a handful of those Victorian storehouses survive, but those that do have been regenerated, inspired by the renovation of New York’s loft apartments in the 1980s.
For South African interior designer Veronique Hopkinson, a historical home – specifically, a warehouse in London – was always on the bucket list. Her riverside apartment in a Grade II-listed warehouse is in Wapping with a balcony that overlooks the Thames. The busy city river traffic includes raucous party cruisers, dredgers and navy patrol boats. When the tide drifts out, revealing the bones of the city below the waterline, hawk-eyed mudlarkers start sifting.
Maximo Napa, 61, says he survived by eating cockroaches, birds and a turtle – and thinking about his mother
A Peruvian fisher was found alive after drifting at sea for 94 days, a navy official said on Saturday, as he was discharged from hospital after his ordeal.
Maximo Napa, 61, was rescued in his small fishing boat on Tuesday after being spotted by an Ecuadorian vessel off the coast of Chimbote in northern Peru.
Spring has finally sprung and it’s time to celebrate with vivid, exciting colours and tastes
As the smell of wild garlic fills the woodlands of Britain, it’s time to leave all thoughts of winter behind us and embrace the new. This is a menu to celebrate March, with its tripping lambs and nodding daffs. Verdant shoots give vibrancy to the landscape, urban and rural, and hope is in the air. These recipes celebrate the arrival of fresh new flavours, while not being overly optimistic, with staples such as carrots and dried green peas acting as the backbone of the dishes such as rhubarb, that blushing harbinger of spring, which gives a decisive nod to better times in the charlotte pudding, along with delicately spiced ice-cream.
Peter Reynolds, who runs a business in Afghanistan, was held along with his wife last month and needs heart pills, says his daughter
The life of a 79-year-old British man imprisoned along with his wife by the Taliban is in serious danger, his family have warned.
Peter Reynolds and his wife, Barbie, 75, who run a training business in Afghanistan, were detained last month when they travelled to their home in Bamiyan province.
Meant as a cautionary leftwing tale, Report from Iron Mountain had a real-world impact that is still playing out
We live in a blizzard of fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories. It’s tempting to blame this on social media – which does indeed exacerbate the problem. And AI deepfakes promise to make the situation even worse. But at root this is not about technology: it’s about how humans think, as an astonishing case that long predates the internet reveals. This is an amazing story – about the perils of amazing stories.
In November 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a strange document was published in New York. Report from Iron Mountain was the work of a top-secret “special study group” recruited by the Kennedy administration to scope out what would happen to the US if permanent global peace broke out. It warned the end of war, and of the fear of war, would wreck America’s economy, even its whole society. To replace the effects, extreme measures would be required – eugenics, fake alien scares, pollution, blood games. Even slavery. The report was so incendiary it had been suppressed, but one of the study group leaked it, determined that the public learn the truth. It caused a furore. The worried memos, demanding someone check if this document was real, went all the way up to President Johnson.
After her mum died, Anna Whitwham was drawn to martial arts, and found an outlet for her grief in the ring
I am standing in the middle of the boxing ring, a stage lit up like a theatre. I’ve hit the woman so hard she staggers back into the ropes. The pause makes me relax. I think I’ve won, but I’m wrong. Rage moves her. Boxing can be like a game of chess, a play on stillness and control. But not now, and not here. I am scrappy and wild. When she comes for me, I launch myself at her. My face can take this pounding – it’s been thickened by temper and that’s enough. Then she hits me and my legs buckle and my head spins. There is the thud of silence as I scramble for sense – but it’s over. My body is done.
I started boxing soon after my mum died. It had been a long and brutal three years of watching the tumour take over, edging closer to her throat. It happened during Covid, so visiting her in the hospice felt clandestine and sneaky – we’d stalk the silent wards in masks, hands raw with sanitiser, scared to touch each other. I nursed and helped her to the end. I witnessed how the mechanisms of her body stopped working. I watched Mum stop eating because her body wouldn’t let her swallow. Bedsores stopped her sleeping. She needed extra blankets to stop the mattress causing her pain.
Higher education institutions continue to function as powerful engines of social mobility. They need more, not less, support
It’s no secret that the Trump administration is not a friend of the country’s higher education system. During a speech he gave at the National Conservatism conference in October 2021, vice-president JD Vance pinpointed American universities as “the enemy” while repeating a litany of increasingly familiar charges about their purported cultural elitism, radical-left ideological agenda, and incapacity to prepare students for the real needs of the labor market.
More recently, Donald Trump has also endorsed plans to tax university endowments and abolish the Department of Education, which oversees both the federal Pell Grant system and most federally subsidized student loan programs, jointly accounting for about 40% of the country’s higher education revenues.
Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti is executive director of the Moynihan Center and full professor of political science at the City College of New York.
Social media is lurching to the right like a tapeworm scenting offal – and X’s algorithms make it hard to find opposing opinion
Wake up grandad and put your opinions in the pedal bin! If you even think you are well informed you are living a lie. What the world believes today depends on who is controlling legacy media’s last feeble news fronts, like the head-bobbing slaphead Jeff Bezos’s supine Washington Post, and on who programs digital social media sluices, such as Ketamine Ken’s Twitter, currently X, essentially an ape with a megaphone standing in a crowded marketplace shouting unsubstantiated rumours at babies, and showing pornographic photographs to children.
But was it ever thus? Did it just take the unalloyed unpleasantness of Elon Musk to make us see ourselves as we always were, toilet paper people fluttering on the whims of wealthy men’s media outlets, 8 billion dogshit golems, Frankingsteins made of farts?
Treatment of Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, who has been suspended from senate, shines light on women’s rights
Last July, Nigeria’s third-most powerful man gave a rare apology on the floor of the senate which he heads.
Godswill Akpabio had chastised his colleague Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan for speaking out of turn, saying: “We are not in a nightclub”. But after receiving what he said was a deluge of insulting text messages from Nigerians, he apologised publicly a few days later.
The post-dinner rant is all of a piece with our fetish for feedback, but isn’t it all a bit morally cheap?
My new duvet cover is upset with me. This is not, I stress, due to offensive activities in the bedroom. My sin is that two months after purchasing this admirably functional, mid-market item of bed linen, I have yet to leave a review on the company website.
Ever since my initial purchase – online, of course – I have been haunted by an increasingly plaintive sequence of requests, demands and, eventually, cajoling whimpers. Recently, these pleas moved firmly into the territory of emotional blackmail. As an “independent, family business”, my bed linen providers rely on positive reviews to keep a roof over their heads, I was told. I’m aware that the duvet cover itself isn’t sentient but, with this level of pressure leveraged in its name, it’s hard to catch sight of it in the laundry and not attribute to it a smidge of cotton-fibred resentment.
National Portrait Gallery, London Strindberg and his psychic double and the fierce sister of Nietzsche are among the stars in this show devoted to the Norwegian painter’s tremendous portraits – yet the omissions are glaring
In the autumn of 1908, Edvard Munch admitted himself to Dr Daniel Jacobson’s private clinic in Copenhagen to be treated for acute alcohol-induced psychosis. Over the next eight months, Jacobson helped him give up nicotine as well as drink. Of the stream of images Munch painted in the clinic – never paralysed by any setback – one is a towering portrait of the doctor that appears about halfway through this new show.
Jacobson stands tall, feet widely planted, hands on hips in his three-piece suit. His face is all sharp-eyed intelligence, equal to any crisis. The sitter thought the picture loopy, perhaps because of all the pulsating energy that radiates around him in swift strokes to rival his vigour. But a photograph of the two men, the painting between them, shows it was an excellent likeness. It is quite surprising, therefore, to read the wall-text assertion that this was Munch’s act of “revenge”.
Tonks spent 18 months documenting the fisherfolk of the south-west, learning about the community’s relationship with the sea, and how the future could be more sustainable for the fishers
Two figures bend over a ship’s gunwale, busy with a net, their bright yellow oilskins in brilliant contrast to the inky night. A flock of gulls, eerily spectral in the camera flash, frenzied by the impending catch, flap and wheel in a void so black that sea and sky are one. With their backs turned, it is unclear exactly what the figures are doing, but their straining forms and the intensity of the scene suggests swift, coordinated action.
Unlike the quiet serenity that characterises many other photographs in this series, made among fishing communities in Cornwall by Birmingham-born photographer Jon Tonks, this image reflects a precarious – and occasionally perilous – livelihood.
Proving that government can be a force for good is essential if Sir Keir Starmer is to see off the populist right
Listening to Sir Keir Starmer’s recent lament that the “flabby” state is failing Britain was to experience deja vu all over again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since another Labour prime minister, one Tony Blair, vented his frustration with the public sector by complaining that trying to reform government had left him with “scars on my back”. In similar vein, David Cameron’s lot used to excuse their struggles to get stuff done by blaming resistance from the amorphous administrative “Blob”. Dominic Cummings told Boris Johnson that the solution was to pack Number 10 with “weirdos”, “misfits” and “wild cards” – a self-description if ever there was one – while purging the senior civil service. He was still working his way through his “shit list” of mandarins when he got the boot himself. You will not recall the Johnson administration as an able and stable outfit dedicated to serving the needs of the public. The grim chaos of that period is a warning to the current government that braggadocio, stunts and wheezes will not make the state smarter.
Most prime ministers become exasperated with the bureaucracy under them at some point. It has taken eight months for Sir Keir to conclude that a “weak”, “overstretched” and “unfocused” state is failing to properly perform its “core purposes”. He’s not wrong. The contract between government and citizenry is in a bad way. “The public has lost faith in the state to deliver,” says one cabinet minister who worries about this a lot. “People find themselves paying more in tax, but do they feel the benefit in the public realm? They don’t.”
The Booker-prize winning novelist reflects on the times in his life when recollection and imagination have intertwined, and wonders whether we can ever rely on our brains to provide us with the truth
It sounds a simple business. “I changed my mind.” Subject, verb, object – a clear, clean action, without correcting or diminishing adjectives or adverbs. “No, I’m not doing that – I changed my mind” is usually an irrefutable statement. It implies the presence of strong arguments which can be provided if necessary. The economist John Maynard Keynes, charged with inconsistency, famously replied, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” So, he – and we – are happily and confidently in charge of this whole operation. The world may sadly incline to inconsistency, but not us.
And yet the phrase covers a great variety of mental activities, some seemingly rational and logical, others elemental and instinctive. There may be a simmering-away beneath the level of consciousness until the bursting realisation comes that, yes, you have changed your mind completely on this subject, that person, this theory, that worldview. The dadaist Francis Picabia once put it like this: “Our heads are round so that our thoughts can change direction.” And I think this feels as close to a true accounting of our mental processes as does Maynard Keynes’s statement.
Kathryn Yusoff sparked a culture war with her latest book, suggesting slavery and white supremacy informed the work of geology’s founding fathers. Here, she and other experts suggest that attitudes have changed little since
It was at the London Library at St James’s Square, surrounded by the shiny offices of geological extraction companies including BP and Rio Tinto, that Kathryn Yusoff discovered a deep link between geology and racism. It was 2017, and the professor of inhuman geography from Queen Mary University of London was doing research for a book about the history of geology. Little did she know that her niche, archival discoveries, which led to a 600-page tome on race and geoscience seven years later, would put her on the very faultline of a culture war.
The academic book, called Geologic Life, was published in 2024. It soon attracted the attention of the conservative higher education publication the College Fix, which said that Yusoff’s writing “suggests even rocks have been corrupted in white supremacists’ schemes”. A minor eruption followed, with articles in many rightwing newspapers including the Daily Mail and Telegraph, featuring quotes such as “geology is no more racist than fish’n’chips”. “The articles were grossly inaccurate and deliberately mischaracterised the book in inflammatory and abusive language,” says Yusoff.
Scotland were almost the party poopers but in the end the flame throwers and fireworks were not in vain for French
For a moment, a brief, flickering moment, you just wondered whether it was all about to come crashing down. Scotland had just scored one of the great tries, off the back of a twisty blistering run from Blair Kinghorn, which had begun well back in his own 22, and went in, out, one way then the other, deep into the French half.
Matt Fagerson carried the ball on and all of a sudden there was Tom Jordan, slipping away from Gaël Fickou like he was shrugging off a wet raincoat, to score. France were a man down, Scotland were two points up, and Finn Russell was staring down the conversion. And then – pop! – the referee, Matt Carley, punctured the bubble and told Russell that actually Kinghorn had just been in touch.
The employers of the estate agent who sued them for unfair constructive dismissal would do well to read Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli had an important piece of advice about office politics: “If an injury has to be done to a man,” he writes in The Prince, “it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” Most of us can relate to that.
It’s likely that whoever accidentally insulted Nicholas Walker, the take-no-prisoners manager of the Rickmansworth branch of Robsons Estate Agents, by giving him a second-rate desk, hadn’t read Machiavelli’s 1532 tract. Because Walker, no doubt thinking of Machiavelli’s subsequent invocation – “it is safer to be feared than loved because … fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails” – immediately dragged his ashen-faced employers to an employment tribunal where he successfully sued them for unfair constructive dismissal. They probably really regret giving him that desk.
Holmes and Moriarty, the new authorised Sherlock Holmes novel by Gareth Rubin, is out now
Verstappen second, Russell third as Piastri finishes ninth
Lewis Hamilton 10th in Melbourne on Ferrari debut
If he is to make a tilt at this season’s Formula One world championship, Lando Norris can consider that he made the case as leading contender definitively at the very opening meeting of 2025. In weathering the storm for his victory at the Australian Grand Prix, Norris demonstrated control, precision and an iron will under pressure. There is an awful long way to go but at the death on a treacherous wet track and harried by a charging Max Verstappen, Norris held his nerve like a champion.
In the build up to the race, it was weather for the ducks on Albert Park Lake as waves of rain sashayed across the circuit, duly playing a significant part in its outcome.
In a searingly honest interview, the star chef talks about the pressure of success, dealing with grief and how being sectioned by his wife changed everything
Heston Blumenthal, one of Britain’s greatest chefs, lives in a small village in Provence. When we meet, on a weekday morning in February, he is in the Hind’s Head in Bray, a stone’s throw from his very famous restaurant, the Fat Duck, which turns 30 this August. Blumenthal is in England to test dishes he hopes to recall to an anniversary menu – a kind of Greatest Hits of the Duck. “But it’s a backbreaker,” he says. “You start off with the old recipes and you realise they’re not up to scratch – we’ve moved on. So we’re tasting, tasting, tasting.” Yesterday, Blumenthal cooked four pieces of turbot, each at a minimally different temperature, to nail the dish. “At this level, those incremental differences make a massive difference,” he goes on, looking briefly bemused. “It’s been hard.”
Much else has been hard for Blumenthal recently. In November 2023, he was sectioned in France following a week-long manic episode and given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He spent 20 days on a psychiatric ward and a further 40 days at a clinic. Blumenthal describes the ward as “a bit like a prison”. For many days prior to hospitalisation he had been unable to sit still and his mind raced. He had begun talking for hours at a time, often through the night, and he would become irritable when his wife, Melanie, whom he married earlier that year, could not find a way to respond. “He locked himself within his own universe,” Melanie told me later. “And to get in? Good luck.” Melanie eventually left for respite at her parents’ home, a two-hour drive away, and Blumenthal remained in Provence alone, experiencing symptoms of psychosis. In a phone message sent after Melanie left, Blumenthal told her he was in possession of a gun, and he began to suggest arrangements for his funeral. Of the gun he says, “It felt real, but there was nothing there, I was hallucinating… And then I started talking about death.”
GPs are increasingly directing vulnerable people to practitioners in a booming industry with no oversight
I was struck by the news last week that GPs are so overwhelmed with mental health patients that they are directing them to the care of unregulated charities. Complex cases are now in the hands of therapists who are not always qualified to treat them.
In one case, an autistic girl with an eating disorder was asked to self-refer to a local charity that offered “one-to-one support” – given by someone untrained in psychotherapy or counselling. Her mother, a former psychiatric nurse, became concerned that the treatment was doing more harm than good and put a stop to the sessions.
This account of working life at Mark Zuckerberg’s tech giant organisation describes a ‘diabolical cult’ able to swing elections and profit at the expense of the world’s vulnerable
Shortly after her waters broke, Sarah Wynn-Williams was lying in hospital with her feet in stirrups, typing a work memo on her laptop between contractions. Facebook’s director of global public policy needed to send talking points from her recent trip to oversee the tech giant’s bid to launch operations in Myanmar to her boss Sheryl Sandberg. Then she would give birth to her first child.
Wynn-Williams’s husband, a journalist called Tom, was livid but, as men tend to be in labour rooms, impotent. The doctor gently closed her laptop. “Please let me push send,” whimpered Sarah. “You should be pushing,” retorted the doctor with improbable timing. “But not ‘send’.”
Russia has pushed Europe into a quasi-Keynesian approach to the defence budget. Only Britain insists on cutting help to the sick to pay for security
As the president of the US provokes trade and economic chaos at home and abroad, an American tells a British friend of mine: “At least your political system removed Truss; we are landed with Trump for four years.”
Unfortunately, when it comes to the worldwide damage being wreaked by Trump and his cronies, the “we” applies to all of us.
Home Office told Manikarnika Dutta to quit Britain for spending too many days abroad for study
A high-achieving academic has been threatened with deportation from the UK because the Home Office says she has spent too many days conducting her research requiring access to historic Indian archives stored in India.
Manikarnika Dutta, 37, a historian, conducted the research as part of her academic commitments to the University of Oxford, which involved studying archives in cities in India and attending a series of international conferences.
That voice in your head telling you that you’re saying the wrong things, or not saying enough, is not telling the truth
The dilemma How can I feel less intimidated when talking to senior or pivotal people who might be good for my career? And feel less shame in the aftermath? I come from a working-class, immigrant background. I have risen through the ranks in my team and now have a lead role where I go to lots of meetings. I frequently suffer with impostor syndrome. I have seen people reach the top of their game just by being good at meetings, while I feel like I lack this skill, and now this job is more challenging.
I long to stay in my comfort zone in which I have lots of quiet time to do work rather than attend meetings. Though if I was to do that, I’d be taking a step down in my career. After talking to people I admire, I end up not sleeping and rerunning the conversation, annoyed at myself for my performance.
Nordic countries were early adopters of digital payments. Now, electronic banking is seen as a potential threat to national security
In 2018 a former deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank predicted that by 2025 the country would probably be cashless.
Seven years on, that prediction has turned out to be pretty much true. Just one in 10 purchases are made with cash, and card is the most common form of payment, followed by the Swedish mobile payment system Swish, launched by six banks in 2012 and now ubiquitous. Other mobile phone payment services are also growing quickly.
The arrival of four astronauts will allow Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to return to Earth after nine months on the International Space Station
There were emotional scenes of smiling astronauts hugging and embracing in zero gravity on the International Space Station on Sunday after a replacement crew docked with the orbital outpost – a step towards the return home of two astronauts who have been stranded for more than nine months.
A SpaceX capsule delivered four astronauts to the ISS in a Nasa crew-swap mission that will allow the pair of stuck astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, to return home after nine months on the orbiting lab.
AI is so good at writing software that one father asked it to organise his kids’ school lunches. But that doesn’t mean it’s taking over
Way back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy, an eminent AI guru, made waves with a striking claim that “the hottest new programming language is English”. This was because the advent of large language models (LLMs) meant that from now on humans would not have to learn arcane programming languages in order to tell computers what to do. Henceforth, they could speak to machines like the Duke of Devonshire spoke to his gardener, and the machines would do their bidding.
Ever since LLMs emerged, programmers have been early adopters, using them as unpaid assistants (or “co-pilots”) and finding them useful up to a point – but always with the proviso that, like interns, they make mistakes, and you need to have real programming expertise to spot those.
Photographer Chantal Pinzi travelled the globe to take shots of female skateboarders who defy cultural norms, including this one of Asha Gond
For the past few years the Italian photographer Chantal Pinzi has been documenting the rebel spirit of female skateboarders, in a project she calls Shred the Patriarchy. Her original focus was on girls who skated in Morocco, in defiance of cultural norms. She continued that project in rural India, where a handful of women have used skateboarding to stake out public spaces for themselves.
One pioneer of this is Asha Gond, who grew up in a farming family in the village of Janwaar in Madhya Pradesh. In 2014 a charitable organisation, the Rural Changemakers, helped to fund a skatepark in the village, built with the help of the community as a way of driving social and cultural development. Gond, one inspiration for the Netflix series Skater Girl, learned her skills at the park and became India’s only female competitor at the world skateboarding championship. The park had two rules: “No school, no skateboarding”, and “Girls first” – both rare sentiments in an area where girls often faced arranged marriages by the time they were of secondary school age.
England lock is finally turning into captain he was tipped to become, and should get ultimate accolade this summer
It was 12 years ago that England came here chasing the grand slam. It was Stuart Lancaster’s second Six Nations in charge and though an unconvincing home victory over Italy had come the week before, hopes were high England could seal a first clean sweep since 2003. They ended up being beaten so emphatically that some of the Wales players were discussing where in town they would celebrate their 30-3 win – which earned them the title, snatched out of England’s grasp – during the second half.
So poor were England that numerous members of the side played their way out of the British & Irish Lions squad to tour Australia. Warren Gatland was on sabbatical from Wales at the time, Rob Howley in temporary charge, but the New Zealander put great stock in how players performed in hostile atmospheres away from home and, based on the evidence of their limp surrender, plenty were suddenly out of contention.
Some interesting developments coming out of Albert Park as the cars get a first look at the sodden circuit – plenty of cars taking the opportunity to practice a standing start as they head out of the pits.
And there’s a bit of a surprise from Ferrari, as Hamilton is being sent out on intermediates, while Leclerc looks to have full wets on.
Bodies of 17 murdered men removed from monument to Francoism and returned to families amid political row over legacy of Spain’s civil war
Juan Chueca Sagarra was buried for the third time late on Wednesday afternoon, his tiny coffin, topped with a single white rose, stowed in a crypt in his home town of Magallón, which sits among vineyards and wind turbines under the huge, low skies of Aragón.
His homecoming was as overdue as his murder was savage, and his afterlife has been peripatetic. The farm worker, trade unionist and father of five was 42 when he and five other men were shot dead by Francoists in the cemetery in the neighbouring town of Borja in August 1936.
Virtually unknown in the west, Ne Zha 2 is the world’s highest-grossing animation at £1.6bn – outdoing Inside Out 2 – just weeks after its release
Just a few years ago, the biggest star of the Chinese box office was a brave army commander. Last year it was a woman who rediscovers herself through boxing. But in 2025 the hero that has caught everyone’s attention – and broken international box office records – is an animated demon child.
Ne Zha 2, a Chinese animation written and directed by Yang Yu, is a whirlwind of a film. The plot, inspired by Chinese mythology, follows the story of Ne Zha, a demon child raised by humans. He is on a quest to obtain a precious elixir to restore the physical state of his friend, the dragon prince Ao Bing, whose body has been destroyed by a lightning strike.
Sprint sensation clocks 20.05 secs in U20 heat at state championships
Australian breaks 20-second barrier in final with wind-assisted 19.98s
Sprint sensation Gout Gout, Australia’s fastest man over 200m, has lit up the track with a world-leading run during the under-20 heats at the Queensland Athletics championships on Sunday.
Gout blitzed the field by more than two seconds to cross the line in 20.05s for the fastest 200m recorded across the globe in all ages in 2025. The 17-year-old smashed the previous best 20.13s clocked by Zimbabwe’s Makanakaishe Charamba in Texas last month.
Federal employees in a little-known office dedicated to tech and consulting services were at work on the afternoon of 3 February when Elon Musk tweeted about their agency for the first time.
Ukrainian president maintains his troops are still fighting in Russia’s Kursk region and warns that Moscow is ‘doing everything’ to prevent a ceasefire. What we know on day 1,117
British No 1 defeats defending champion 6-1, 0-6, 6-4
Draper to face Holger Rune after he beat Daniil Medvedev
Of the four previous times that Jack Draper and Carlos Alcaraz had stood across the net from each other, half had ended with a distraught Briton aborting the match because of injury. While Draper attempted to keep up with the most successful player of his generation, their rivalry underlined the biggest obstacle in his career: his physical frailty.
Physically, mentally and in every other category, however, the British No 1 has dramatically improved over the past year as he has established himself as one of the very best players in the world. Amid a fortnight that has showcased the best tennis of his life, the 23-year-old held his nerve in a turbulent, chaotic tussle to close out a remarkable 6-1, 0-6, 6-4 win over Alcaraz and reach his first Masters 1000 final at Indian Wells.
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