First women working as fishing guides on Laxá River, featured in new film, call for action after farmed fish escape
For seven generations, Andrea Ósk Hermóðsdóttir’s family have been fishing on the Laxá River in Aðaldalur. Iceland has a reputation as a world leader on feminism, but until recently women have not been able to work as guides to wild salmon fishing for visiting anglers – a job that has traditionally been the preserve of men.
The 21-year-old engineering student, her sister Alexandra Ósk, 16, and their friends Arndís Inga Árnadóttir, 18, and her sister Áslaug Anna, 15, are now the first generation of female guides on their river in northern Iceland, and among the very first female fishing guides in the country.
The Royal Ballet principal on her late career debut, taking her daughters to work, and playing goodies and baddies
Born in Devon in 1984, Lauren Cuthbertson joined the Royal Ballet School aged 11 and the Royal Ballet in 2002, becoming a principal six years later. She has danced leading roles in all the great classical ballets including Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, has performed in works by Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton, and created many new ballets, particularly those by Christopher Wheeldon, who cast her as Alice in his three-act Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and as Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. She has recently become principal guest artist at the Royal Ballet and is taking a teaching diploma. She lives in west London with her boyfriend and their two daughters, aged four and two.
You’re about to make your debut as Tatiana in John Cranko’sOnegin, based on Pushkin’s classic verse-novel. How are you feeling? It’s a funny sensation making such a significant debut so late in my career: it made me feel quite vulnerable, but also it was very thrilling. It’s been a lovely journey but it’s surprisingly physical. I did my first run through on stage at an 11am rehearsal and when I went to tear up Onegin’s letter at the end [as Tatiana sends him away], I had no strength in my arms. I hadn’t anticipated that. Mind you, an early call is always weird – it’s hard to eat properly. You might have a bit of breakfast, but suddenly you finish the rehearsal, and it’s 2pm. You can’t eat a sandwich in the middle of a three-act ballet.
Suddenly our family life becomes an unfunny sitcom
My daughter is crying. She is holding a tiny red London bus, one of her favourite toys, and the terrible thing that has happened to her is that she has smashed our television with it. The screen is completely destroyed, with a central impact now radiating a small spider web of white lines, within a larger morass of jagged, blocky blues, greens and purples that crowd out the picture on its surface.
I am too stunned to move, the impact having happened so fast that I’ve yet to process it at all. My first thoughts, such as they exist in this zen-like state of paralysis, are of the immediate financial cost of what she’s done. Thus, the denial phase of grief kicks in swiftly. I switch the TV off, perhaps hoping the very clearly annihilated screen is a signal fault. I turn it back on, dismayed to discover that no, this was not an emergency broadcast from Smashed Telly Gold +1; my two-year-old has just managed to do £400’s worth of damage in two-fifths of a second.
With the little homes the passengers build for themselves out of laptops and crisps, it’s microcosmic
Yesterday I was on a train for six hours – three there, three back, through two time zones and three weather conditions, and all of it without my headphones. Around me, passengers built little homes for themselves out of laptops and crisps, a whole universe on a plastic fold-down table. The computer screen acted primarily as a barrier, an emotional-load-bearing wall. Objects and arms were removed from sleeves and erected in delicate piles – illusions of privacy were magicked in the quiet coach. Rooms were fashioned on laps behind seats, or ideas of rooms; walled, breaded concepts – here is a kitchenette formed from Pret a Manger baguettes and precarious coffees, here is the memory-foam neck pillow, a portable bedroom, and here onscreen at 250km an hour is a working office, fizzing with legitimacy and blue light. I looked around with love at this side of us, we silly animals, building homes out of sticks anywhere we sit for longer than 20 minutes.
On smaller screens, my travelling neighbour pecked at a two-hour game of Candy Crush, while across the aisle a young man (blue jumper, skin that appeared to be enamelled) was playing blackjack. I looked over occasionally – through his window I could see the newbuild flats with their enclosed balconies, each one filled with boxes, and duvets and pillows pressed face-like against the glass – but for a long time I couldn’t tell if the man was winning, his face remained terribly still.
A survey found that young people admitted finding democracy dull against the toxic glamour of strongman politics
‘DYOR.” That’s what they say. That’s Do Your Own Research, for those of us not quite meeting the 13- to 28-year-old gen Z age bracket. It’s a common refrain when one of them finds their truth challenged.
So I set out on some DYOR regarding the report last week that most gen Zers were in favour of the UK becoming a dictatorship. The study, commissioned by Channel 4, has been described broadly as “shocking”, “worrying” and “bleak”. Yet for anyone with daily interaction with that generation, it would probably be better described as – “fairly predictable”.
Research into ‘dark personality traits’ has always focused on men. But some experts believe standard testing misses the ways an antisocial personality manifests itself in women
Picture a psychopath. Who do you see in your mind’s eye? Chances are it’s a man. And chances are your answer would be similar if you were asked to picture a narcissist. From Charles Manson and Ted Bundy to Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump, most famous people we consider psychopathic or narcissistic are male. That’s even the case for fiction – think Hannibal Lecter, Patrick Bateman or Norman Bates.
Scientists long assumed that women were simply too wonderful to be significantly psychopathic or narcissistic, and didn’t bother to study the possibility much, according to Ava Green from City St George’s, University of London. But research over the past few decades is increasingly challenging this stereotype, suggesting women can have a dark streak, too. Much like in autism or ADHD, such traits just express themselves slightly differently in women – making them harder to spot with diagnostic tests that were essentially developed for men.
Playing a raging but inwardly terrified housewife, the actor and a fine supporting case are the intense focus of a story that cries out for closure
Anyone who has ever heard the director Mike Leigh interviewed will know that he is not a man who is given to enthusiasm. He doesn’t effuse; rather he growls, a bristly, whiskery warning to the world to keep its distance. Listening to him, you could be forgiven for assuming that, with a career spanning more than half a century, seven Oscar nominations, a Cannes Palme d’Or (for Secrets & Lies) and a Venice Golden Lion (for Vera Drake), Leigh is not much of a fan of anything to do with the film industry. But then you watch one of his films – his latest, Hard Truths, for example – and it becomes clear that there is one passion that remains undimmed over the years, one thing that he cherishes above all others. And that is actors and their craft.
The British director has a distinctive way of working that amplifies and embraces the contribution of his cast. This is not just a case of handing an actor a few inert lines on page and hoping for the best. His films are born out of an extended process of workshopping and rehearsals. Dialogue is chewed over; characters are fully lived in; stories are grown out of the fertile collaboration between director and performers. It’s a way of working that has pros and cons for the final film, but what’s undeniable is that Leigh’s method has helped give birth to some viscerally powerful performances over the years, the latest of which is a quite remarkable Bafta-nominated, British independent film awards-winning turn from Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the central role of housewife Pansy.
Champions show their enduring class in the second half after making a sloppy start to Six Nations defence
In a tournament with no room for a warm-up, where you just hop into the blocks and hope to explode out of them, home games are a mixed blessing. If the getaway isn’t clean then the boost to the away side can be turbo stuff. Which poses a dilemma: how do you catch up without playing catch up?
Ireland’s one word answer might be perseverance. If pushed to expand they might add that when you can sense your opponents losing the plot you have to help them along with that one. Patience is actually better than going bald-headed for the big prize. Nudge the ball in behind them and squeeze some more.
The isolated Pacific nation is trying to build its first football team amid a battle for survival against rising sea levels
The Marshall Islands, an isolated sprawl of atolls covering 750,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean but home to barely 42,000 people, may be the final frontier for the world’s most popular sport. It claims to be the last country on Earth without a football team, and to this day, the islands have never hosted an 11-a-side game.
Until recently, football was an alien concept in a nation occupied by the US since the second world war, with baseball and basketball the traditional sports. As interest has grown in recent years, another barrier has emerged. Land has always been at a premium on these fragile shores, but never more than now with rising sea levels bringing fears of permanent flooding.
A win against Fulham and draw at Villa are early signs of a better fit at West Ham on manager’s return to his old club
Graham Potter’s return to Chelsea coming on deadline day feels symbolic. West Ham’s head coach does not look back fondly at the extravaganza of player trading when he was in charge at Stamford Bridge in January 2023. It was a time of chaos and unreasonable pressure. The new owners were spending like there was no tomorrow and by the time the window closed it was left to Potter to make sense of a squad so bloated there was not enough space for everyone in the first-team dressing room.
Good luck with that. Chelsea had crowed after beating Arsenal to Mykhaylo Mudryk. Negotiations with Benfica led to a British transfer record for Enzo Fernández. Noni Madueke, David Datro Fofana and Benoît Badiashile joined. A deal for Malo Gusto was confirmed for the summer. João Félix arrived on loan. Jorginho took his experience and nous to Arsenal. Hakim Ziyech’s loan to Paris Saint-Germain collapsed because of technical issues. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had to be cut from the squad for the Champions League knockout stages. Potter, who takes West Ham to Stamford Bridge on Monday night, watched it all unfold and knew that expectations were about to go through the roof.
While privacy fears are justified, the main beef Silicon Valley has is that China’s chatbot is democratising the technology
No, it was not a “Sputnik moment”. The launch last month of DeepSeek R1, the Chinese generative AI or chatbot, created mayhem in the tech world, with stocks plummeting and much chatter about the US losing its supremacy in AI technology. Yet, for all the disruption, the Sputnik analogy reveals less about DeepSeek than about American neuroses.
The original Sputnik moment came on 4 October 1957 when the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik 1, the first time humanity had sent a satellite into orbit. It was, to anachronistically borrow a phrase from a later and even more momentous landmark, “one giant leap for mankind”, in Neil Armstrong’s historic words as he took a “small step” on to the surface of the moon.
The Egyptian adds another gear to Manchester City’s shift to more direct play with a short-passing game as backup
Everything is new. Everything is different. Omar Marmoush steps off the plane at Manchester Airport and what greets him is a kind of sensory overload. He peers through blacked-out windows of his chauffeured car at the city he now calls home. “What are the names of the supermarkets?” he asks. “Tesco,” comes the reply. “Asda. Sainsbury’s. Aldi.”
On the pitch, it’s a similar story. “He has something special,” Erling Haaland confirms after a dynamic debut against Chelsea last Saturday night. “He’s going to be a fantastic player for us. It’s about getting to know him as soon as possible, because there are so many important games coming.”
Global collaboration with US researchers likely to be set back by years, including on spread of drug-resistant HIV
A flagship programme to create malaria vaccines has been halted by the Trump administration, in just one example of a rippling disruption to health research around the globe since the new US president took power.
The USAid Malaria Vaccine Development Program (MVDP) – which works to prevent child deaths by creating more effective second-generation vaccines – funds research by teams collaborating across institutes, including the US university Johns Hopkins and the UK’s University of Oxford.
While all eyes are on the Middle East and Ukraine, brutality still reigns in many other regions suffering many other conflicts
The world is becoming a more dangerous place. It’s an often-heard sentiment these days, but is it really true? Historical comparisons are of limited help.
Last week’s 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis between 1940 and 1945, offered a grim reminder of how indescribably brutal life can be when war reigns unchecked. Could things get any worse?
You might think Dame Sheila Hancock would be taking life a little easy – no chance. She talks about her working-class roots, being lucky in love, the frustration of being passed over for serious roles – and why she’s fed up with feeling anxious
These last few weeks, Sheila Hancock has surrendered. “I’m addicted, really,” she’s confessing. “I just can’t stop myself. I’m at it every night, without fail.” She halts, shakes her head, looks troubled, momentarily. “And everyone is fucking crying all the time. I can’t understand why for the life of me.” She leans forward, blue eyes piercing. Clocking my confusion, she grins wryly. “I’m talking about that television show, darling. What’s it called? No, don’t tell me. I’ll get there.”
Her old pal Gyles Brandreth, Hancock informs me, always makes her find the word she’s searching for when it escapes her. “He won’t chip in. ‘You must remember it yourself,’ he says, ‘because not doing so makes you forget.’ So I do, when forced.”
The first volume of the tech baron turned philanthropist’s memoirs focuses on his parent’s struggles to control him – and a painful early loss
The enduring mystery about William Henry Gates III is this: how did a precocious and sometimes obnoxious kid evolve into a billionaire tech lord and then into an elder statesman and philanthropist? This book gives us only the first part of the story, tracing Gates’s evolution from birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft in 1975. For the next part of the story, we will just have to wait for the sequel.
In a way, the volume’s title describes it well. In the era before machine learning and AI, when computer programs were exclusively written by humans, the term “source code” meant something. It described computer programs that could be read – and understood, if you knew the programming language – enabling you to explain why the machine did what it did.
The Louvre’s proposed two-tier fees are a better way to fund museums than iffy corporate sponsorship deals
Introducing, five years on, another Brexit bonus: the chance to support the renovation of the Louvre. President Emmanuel Macron has proposed paying for the “renaissance” of the Paris museum, in part, by increasing entrance fees for visitors from outside the EU.
After some initial attempts to represent this as a direct insult – “Brits will be forced to pay more than EU residents” (the Mail) – even the rabidly pro-Brexit press appears to have accepted that the scheme applies globally, to all non-EU visitors: an exceptionally cunning way of Brit-targeting, even for the French.
Rachel Reeves is all for growth; her party and the country needs it. But still we hear nothing about the most obvious solution…
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a satirical book,It Can’t Happen Here, about a lying demagogue, Buzz Windrip, who rises to power and transforms the American scene for the worse within months.
There were fears of parallels with the plot of the book when Trump first became president. This time, the fears are far more serious, as Trump’s barrage of executive orders challenges the constitutional checks and balances designed by the founding fathers to inhibit the autocratic desires of a future wrong’un becoming president.
Alexander Gronsky’s photograph of families in the snow hints at something more dubious
The photographer Alexander Gronsky calls the series of pictures he took in Moscow suburbs, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Something Is Going on Here. This image of families in the snow has a kind of dubious innocence. It is juxtaposed in other photos in the collection with military vehicles idling in these same winter landscapes at the edge of the city, and uniformed Russian soldiers mingling with ordinary residents. The contrast gives all of the images a disturbing edge of menace. You find yourself looking hard, for example, at the couple of figures on the right of this picture, in authoritarian black, and wondering how they fit with the people in the primary-coloured jackets. They are part of a landscape in which “normal life” is never quite what it seems.
Gronsky was born in Estonia, and has been based in Russia for most of his career – despite being arrested in the anti-Putin protests of 2015. He has long been drawn to the curious hinterlands at the edge of cities, places half-developed or awaiting development, bulldozers standing by, tower blocks not completed. In a recent interview he explained how he was drawn to these areas because those “edgelands” represented an uncertain kind of escape from the normal rules of cities that require you to walk on the pavement and behave yourself. “Suddenly,” he said, “there’s a gap in the fence, and beyond lies an abandoned construction site. Different rules apply in this space – there are no ethical boundaries; you can use this place as a restroom or smash beer bottles.” That kind of unwritten licence creates what Gronsky documents as a new kind of uneasy “pastoral” where norms become unruly, borders porous, and everywhere is a sort of no man’s land, where – good or bad – “anything can happen”.
For the Beyond Paradise actor, happy Sundays are all about the plot
What’s an average Sunday? I share an allotment with my friend, which is wonderful. We grow turnips, parsnips and tromboncinos, which are in the squash family and a bit phallic. It’s a really peaceful thing to do and it calms me.
Is it hard to get an allotment? You have to go on a waiting list. One of my big regrets is that I didn’t do it with my kids. Now they’re grown up, they look at me as if I’m a mad woman when I say I’m going down to the allotment. But it’s full of young couples with young children, digging.
Is there allotment envy? Yes. There’s always someone better than you. There’s a lady who does French squashes in the most extraordinary shapes, and someone else who has a magical bottomless pit of potatoes. My friend Caroline sorts out our logistics. She’s always getting gets me to build structures and hang nets to stop the birds eating all the cavolo nero.
Have you got a shed? We share a shed. There’s a lot of diplomacy. If a rake slips slightly on to someone else’s side, I become nervous and I push it back. Shed etiquette is very important.
Is it a happy place? Yes. As an actor, you have to use your brain and nerves. It’s wonderful on a Sunday morning to unlock the gate to the secret garden and see the wonder of what’s growing. (Why hasn’t anyone written a sitcom about an allotment? I might one day.) On the way home I like to steal into different churches.
Such as? On Christmas Day I went into the Russian Orthodox Church up the road. It was one of the most magical experiences of my life. I like travelling on the bus on a Sunday, because it’s slow and I can watch people. I might go to a choral evensong, or I might just have my mates round and we’ll get all horrendously drunk. It’s not PC here at all.
Technology has changed how predators operate. Now a raft of new offences will stop those who create heinous content escaping punishment
Technology moves fast. Legislation can be slow. For decades, that has felt like a fundamental fact of public life. But the gap between our laws and the world they are supposed to govern feels wider than ever. While the internet has transformed every element of our society, the state has not kept up.
Most of the laws that prohibit the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse imagery have been in place since the 1990s. Back then, Photoshop was in its infancy. The physical photographs that paedophiles shared were no less vile, but they were easier for the police to seize and destroy.
Peter Kyle is secretary of state for science, innovation and technology
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
‘Mexican Monster’ beats Morrell by unanimous decision
Benavidez improves to 30-0 with one-sided victory
Stephen Fulton wins WBC featherweight belt in co-main
David Benavidez unified the light heavyweight championship by earning a unanimous decision over challenger David Morrell on Saturday night to keep his interim WBC belt and win the WBA title.
Judges Patricia Morse Jarman and Steve Weisfeld both scored the fight 115-111 while Tim Cheatham scored it 118-108.
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