Kemi Badenoch issues rebuke to Priti Patel after former home secretary defends rise in migration since Brexit

The Green party is also calling for the UK to rejoin the customs union. And rejoining would be “the best option” when there is political support for that, it says. But, in a statement issued to mark the fifth anniversary, the party also says the referendum showed the problem with “binary choices” and it calls for the use of citizens’ assemblies to chart a way forward.

Ellie Chowns MP said:

The Green party is very clear that people and planet would benefit from much closer relationships between our country and the European Union.

We will continue to press the Labour government to be braver and bolder in overcoming the negative impacts of Brexit.

We must repair the trading relationship with our neighbours that was so badly ruined under the Conservatives. Their deal has been an utter disaster for our country - for farmers, fishers and small businesses - caught up in red tape.

So far the Labour government has failed to show the urgency and ambition needed to fix our relationship with Europe. Ministers must be in a parallel universe if they think we can grow the economy without boosting trade with our nearest neighbours.

Palestinian militant group says Ofer Calderon, Keith Siegel and Yarden Bibas will be freed as part of ceasefire deal

Israeli gunboats killed a Palestinian fisherman in Gaza’s coastal waters, near the Nuseirat refugee camp, Al Jazeera reports.

The Israeli military has repeatedly shot at Palestinians, including fishermen, in recent weeks despite the ceasefire.

Live, rolling coverage of business, economics and financial markets as US president said he would impose first tariffs of new administration on 1 February

Sticking briefly to the German economy theme, regional data suggests that inflation fell across the country.

That matched a slightly lower than expected reading for French inflation this morning. French consumer prices rose by 1.4% in the year to January, slightly lower than the 1.5% expected by economists.

In Saxony, the inflation rate fell in January to 2.4% from 3.2% in the previous month, in Brandenburg it fell to 2.3% from 2.4%, in Baden-Wuerttemberg it fell to 2.3% from 2.6%, in North Rhine-Westphalia it fell to 2.0% from 2.5% and in Bavaria it fell to 2.5% in January from 3.0% in December.

Bundestag to review Influx Limitation Act, which looks to tighten rules in existing laws on residence as Friedrich Merz grapples with rise of far right

And if you’re thinking, OK, Jakub, but what’s going on with Germany, aren’t they supposed to be starting any moment now?!

Don’t worry, I’m keeping an eye on this.

Discover what Trump, Mette and Mute are talking about.

• Rashford has rejected teams including Tottenham
• Manchester United keen on Mathys Tel as replacement

Marcus Rashford has his heart set on a loan move to Barcelona before Monday’s transfer deadline but a deal will go through only if the Catalan club can offload up to two players.

Rashford has rejected offers from several other clubs including Tottenham because of his determination to join Barcelona. Under La Liga’s squad cost limit rules Barcelona will have to generate funds to be able to spend the money required to sign Rashford from Manchester United. They are prepared in principle to cover most or all of Rashford’s £375,000-a-week salary.

(Recordiadau Smotyn Du)
Singer Owen Shiers combines traditional ballads, musical settings of poems, and originals built on stories collected from rural west Walians, all sung in Welsh

In the tiny kiln rooms of west Walian mills over a century ago, farmers would tell stories, read verse and sing songs through the night as their oats baked around them. This gathering was a shimli, a Welsh word that falls from the tongue with a similar softness to Carmarthenshire folk singer Owen Shiers’s delivery of these 11 quietly political songs.

Recording as Cynefin (a Welsh word for a place where we feel we belong), Shiers’s second album mixes traditional ballads, musical settings of poems and originals built on stories collected from rural west Walians, all sung in Welsh. Their arrangements are pastoral and lyrical, weaving in horns, double bass, piano and strings in a way that tilts towards Robert Kirby’s work with Nick Drake, while also sounding strangely sun-kissed and filmic (imagine Wales by way of a short hop to Iberia).

Katerina gets embarrassed when daughter Anya tops up her tips. Anya says waiters deserve a decent bonus. You decide who should foot the bill
Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I find it offensive when Anya tops up my tip in a restaurant – if I’m paying she should follow my lead

France’s Louis Bielle-Biarre is widely tipped for the scene stealer but there are plenty of other themes to warm to

Who is going to win and why? France are the favourites for me. The form their players have shown in the Champions Cup is extraordinary. There are six French teams in the last 16 and five have home ties. They are peaking at the right time and also have the world’s best player and captain back in Antoine Dupont.

Whether he jumped or was pushed, the former Liverpool captain is once again bequeathing a club at risk of the drop

Perhaps it was the sight of Piers Morgan in Saudi Arabia that prompted Steven Gerrard to leave the country. Or maybe it was the opposite, and the presence of the former broadcaster – in Riyadh to watch his mate Cristiano Ronaldo – provoked pangs of homesickness. Or did the 44-year-old even choose to go at all? Reports in England suggested the Liverpool legend wanted out for personal reasons, while those coming out of Saudi Arabia suggested that Al-Ettifaq, languishing 12th in the Pro League, made the move.

“I want to express my gratitude to the club, the players, the fans, and everyone involved for the opportunity and the support during my time here,” Gerrard said on Thursday as his departure was confirmed. “From the first day I was warmly welcomed and I have enjoyed the chance to work in a new country with a different culture. So overall I have learnt a lot and it’s been a positive experience personally and for my family as well. But football is unpredictable and sometimes things don’t go the way we want.”

Have you been paying attention to the big (and small) stories in football, rugby, cricket, tennis, golf and NFL?

It’s not only the prices that make a trip to the designer outlet worthwhile, it’s the hope of tracking down cherished discontinued items

Millions flock to Bicester Village each year for discounted fashion at designer outlets. Now it has its sights set on beauty. I visited before Christmas and my fear of finding skincare-slightly-on-the-turn and sad-looking eyeshadows in shades of mint and mauve proved unfounded.

Fragrance was well served, with a festive pop-up store by Byredo, selling even its bestselling candles, fragrances and hand care at what seemed a smallish discount. There were also permanent outlets for Creed, Penhaligon’s, Roja and Molton Brown, all with up to 60% off the RRP.

Neom had 30-odd per cent reductions on its luxury candles and I couldn’t work out why, given that they were still full price elsewhere. (Slightly wonky labels? Overstocking? They looked great to me.)

Forget tatty cast-offs – the secondhand marketplace is now the first port of call for the savvy shopper

The rise of secondhand fashion is an enormously cheering thing, and in a world not currently over-blessed with hugely cheering things, it is worth taking a moment to celebrate.

In a short space of time, the pre-loved fashion economy has gone from being niche – vintage stores full of antique silk dresses at the top end, jumble sale tat at the other, not much in the middle – to a viable way to source every part of your wardrobe. The marketplace of new-to-you clothes, rather than new-to-the-world clothes, is now an aspirational, respectable, efficient, affordable place to shop. Not just for the pieces that have always been associated with secondhand (tea dresses for retro dressers, rare jeans for denim nerds) but for straight-down-the-middle mainstream wardrobe stuff. Your cousin’s North Face puffer jacket? £45 from Vinted. Your line manager’s Zara blazer? £18 courtesy of Depop. The Prada handbag your bestie dreams about her friends clubbing together for on her big birthday? £250 on eBay.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

• White does not take disciplinary action against fighter
• Mitchell, 30, said ‘Hitler was a good guy’ on podcast

UFC president and CEO Dana White criticized Bryce Mitchell for making anti-Semitic and homophobic comments on a podcast during which the featherweight also praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust.

But, citing freedom of expression, White said the organization would not take any disciplinary actions against Mitchell.

In contrast to the current crop of swaggering tech bros, the Microsoft founder comes across as wry and self-deprecating in this memoir of starting out

Bill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world: once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate, now grown up into a beloved elder statesman. Former rivals, most notably Apple’s Steve Jobs, have since departed this dimension, while the Gates Foundation, focusing on unsexy but important technologies such as malaria nets, was doing “effective altruism” long before that became a fashionable term among philosophically minded tech bros.

Time, then, to look back. In the first of what the author threatens will be a trilogy of memoirs, Gates recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977.

He grows up in a pleasant suburb of Seattle with a lawyer father and a schoolteacher mother. His intellectual development is keyed to an origin scene in which he is fascinated by his grandmother’s skill at card games around the family dining table. The eight-year-old Gates realises that gin rummy and sevens are systems of dynamic data that the player can learn to manipulate.
As he tells it, Gates was a rather disruptive schoolchild, always playing the smart alec and not wanting to try too hard, until he first learned to use a computer terminal under the guidance of an influential maths teacher named Bill Dougall. (I wanted to learn more about this man than Gates supplies in a still extraordinary thumbnail sketch: “He had been a World War II Navy pilot and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing. Somewhere along the way he earned a degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris on top of graduate degrees in engineering and education.”)

Ah, the computer terminal. It is 1968, so the school terminal communicates with a mainframe elsewhere. Soon enough, the 13-year-old Gates has taught it to play noughts and crosses. He is hooked. He befriends another pupil, Paul Allen – who will later introduce him to alcohol and LSD – and together they pore over programming manuals deep into the night. Gates plans a vast simulation war game, but he and his friends get their first taste of writing actually useful software when they are asked to automate class scheduling after their school merges with another. Success with this leads the children, now calling themselves the Lakeside Programming Group, to write a payroll program for local businesses, and later to create software for traffic engineers.

A review of this year’s Photo Brussels festival, where the theme of artificial intelligence and its impact and potential were examined by the curated work

Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence? Probably all of us are a little – but the artists at the centre of this year’s Photo Brussels festival have embraced the technology to bring us an intriguing and, at times, optimistic exploration of one of the most concerning developments of our time.

The ambitious curation by the photography academic Michel Poivert gathers together 17 projects at Brussels’ Hangar gallery. Together their creations reveal the visual and intellectual potential, along with the current limits, of this wave of “promptography”.

Images in the Cherry Airlines series

A city associated with sausage and herring is now a haven for plant-based foods – and Poland’s rightwing politicians aren’t happy

I want to tell you about a relatively typical neighbourhood in my city. There are two vegan sushi restaurants, three vegan ramen spots. There are a few vegan delis. All the convenience stores have a vegan section. There’s an abundance of vegan bakeries. There’s a place that does vegan peking duck – it’s good, I promise. Many of these vegan places proudly have a rainbow flag on display. I’m not talking about Los Angeles or New York. I’m not even talking about Copenhagen. My neighbourhood is called Śródmieście. The vegan paradise I’m talking about – it’s Warsaw.

If you don’t believe me, well, Warsaw has been ranked among the top vegan cities in the world by HappyCow (a vegan ranking website) for the past six years. In 2022, it was National Geographic’s number one vegan city in the world. Maybe your perception of Poland is all kielbasa (sausage) and conservative politics. Herring and hate. It’s more complicated than that. In the past two decades there has been a quiet vegan revolution in the country.

Karol Adamiak is a chef from Warsaw. Barclay Bram contributed research and writing to this article. They cook together as Bracia

From mindful waking in the Yorkshire Dales to a Buddhist retreat in Japan, our tipsters have found inner peace and rejuvenation all over the world

With Eryri national park (Snowdonia) on the doorstep and guided wild swims available, north Wales’ Tawelu Retreats offers options to explore the outdoors or go full hibernation with the retreat’s yoga classes and meditations, plus a sauna and hot tub. The chef cooked up filling, comforting veggie food and gorgeous chai and hot chocolate. Even getting lost running up the Welsh fells and nearly missing my hot shells massage didn’t trouble my stress levels. It’s women only, four days from £650.
Laura King

From a 16th-century house on the banks for the River Stour in Suffolk to a west London flat above a pizzeria

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual is going viral! All the kids are reading it

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For nearly two decades, ‘General’ Narsamma and her team at Sangham Radio have honed their craft, learning every aspect of broadcasting, including fixing the radio mast and interview techniques

• Words and photographs by Uday Narayanan

As twilight settles over Sangareddy district in the southern Indian state of Telangana, the airwaves crackle to life. It is the voice of Masanagari Narsamma, a 45-year-old Dalit woman, who has spent the last two decades transforming the lives of women, farmers and children in nearby villages.

“This is our weapon,” she says, gripping the microphone at the radio station. “With this, we speak our truth.”

Masanagari Narsamma and Algole Narsamma in front of Sangham Radio. The duo, with no formal training in media or broadcasting, have built the station into a cornerstone of their community

Such a profound social change needs consensus and leadership. Those tasked with seeing this through are offering neither

There is something about the sound of Prof Sir Chris Whitty’s voice that inexorably takes me back. Whenever he speaks it’s hard not to think about R numbers and social distancing, masks and variants. His was the judgment we learned to trust in the days when the only certainty was that thousands were going to die; his the not-quite-inscrutable face we studied for clues that some politician had just said something stupid. For those reasons and more, I would very much like to know what the chief medical officer thinks about assisted dying for terminally ill people. But when he came before the committee scrutinising this most sensitive of issues on Wednesday, he wouldn’t say.

Whitty answered all questions posed about the proposed new law, including how accurately doctors can predict that someone has only six months left. (Not entirely, though he explained that they’re better at predicting that death will come in the foreseeable future – which seems more important here than whether it’s five, six or seven months exactly, though Whitty didn’t say the last part.) He wasn’t asked how well doctors can predict what that death might be like: how much pain or indignity it’s likely to involve, which might be equally hard to say but is what I’d want to know. (Some apply for assisted death without ever using the option, just to know it is there if needed.)

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Using thermogalvanic technology as cooling mechanism may significantly reduce power usage, research says

A novel use of technology could make refrigerators cheaper and more environmentally friendly, according to a report.

Domestic refrigerators and freezers consumed close to 4% of global electricity in 2019, according to one estimate, so an innovation that significantly reduces their power usage would not be insignificant.

Clinical trials find one-time gene therapy exa-cel offers ‘functional cure’ in 96.6% of patients

A “groundbreaking” £1.65m treatment offering a potential cure for people in England living with sickle cell disease has been approved for use on the NHS, the medicines watchdog has announced.

Campaigners welcomed news of the approval of the one-time gene therapy, known as exagamglogene autotemcel, or exa-cel, which edits the faulty gene in a patient’s own stem cells.