What’s Next for the Gaza Truce? Look at the Border With Egypt.
© Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
© Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
The sighting of Evyatar David, who was kidnapped on 7 October 2023, brought joy to his brother Ilay, but his pleas for peace show the human costs of a return to war
When Hamas brought two captive Israelis to watch Saturday’s release of six of their fellow hostages and then beg for their own liberation, it was purposely jabbing at a deeply painful divide in Israeli society.
Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal were 22-year-old best friends when they were kidnapped at the Nova music festival on 7 October 2023. The Hamas video showed them sitting in a minivan watching the propaganda-laden handover ceremony, and then turning to the cameras to plead with Benjamin Netanyahu to agree a second phase in the current ceasefire, which would allow the release of all the remaining 59 hostages (only a minority of whom are thought to be still alive).
Continue reading...© Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian
© Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian
Feeling sadness is essential for feeling happiness, but unlearning the avoidance mechanisms your partner has put in place may take time
• Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a relationship problem sent in by a reader
As a teenager, my partner lost their father to illness. He was their idol, so of course this led to profound grief, which I feel is unresolved.
We recently watched a movie that was hauntingly emotional, and my partner was angry afterwards. This led to an argument, with them saying they never want to watch something that will make them feel sadness again. I encouraged them to sit with sadness; they went to bed.
Continue reading...© Illustration: Alex Mellon/The Guardian
© Illustration: Alex Mellon/The Guardian
The former marine was able to plumb depths of nastiness that set him apart from other ‘hard men’ actors of his generation, such as Robert Duvall and Clint Eastwood
It’s the dog that gets me about Gene Hackman. Decades ago he went off to New Mexico, away from the bright lights of fame. And the dog went with him and his wife. Hackman was a firm man – you might say hard. He had been a marine, and seldom bowed to all the suck-up stuff about being lovable and a movie star. He was 95. Clint Eastwood is 94, Robert Duvall the same. Jack Nicholson is only 87, still the kid.
Dustin Hoffman is 87 too, Robert Redford 88, Warren Beatty 87. Harrison Ford is 82, and he seems older, or worried. We can’t expect these guys to go on for ever, just because they’re geezers, veterans and not forgotten.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy
© Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy
In unequal households – the majority of heterosexual homes – domestic and emotional pressures on women can have a direct effect on libido
Zoe and her husband, Charles, can’t keep their hands off each other. They were like this in the early stages of their relationship, too – “there was something wrong with us” – Zoe jokes about their prolific lovemaking. But this new, “giddy” phase is different.
“It feels like we’ve just started again. But with all this history, and this amazing child, and all this other stuff that binds us together,” she says.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Francesco Carta fotografo/Getty Images
© Photograph: Francesco Carta fotografo/Getty Images
The World Nature Photography awards have announced their winners for 2025. From white-cheeked terns to a blue-tailed damselfly peeking through a daisy, the photographs are a stark reminder of the beauty and chaos of the natural world. The top award went to Maruša Puhek’s image of two deers running through a Slovenian vineyard
Continue reading...© Photograph: Georgina Steytler
© Photograph: Georgina Steytler
Forget about inflation. Now it’s all about cutting ‘waste’ in the form of jobs and our already paltry social safety net
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump never missed an opportunity to harp on inflation, promising that “on day one” he would “end inflation” and lower the costs of groceries, cars, and other common goods.
Well, it’s day 40, and inflation saw its largest increase in over a year. Blink and you might have missed that Trump and his fellow Republicans have largely abandoned their concerns about inflation to focus on government “waste”.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA
© Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA
When Amy Gledhill and Harriet Kemsley both realised the other was newly unattached, the standups decided to create Single Ladies in Your Area, a hit podcast about divorces, dating and unwanted DMs
A few months ago, comedians Amy Gledhill and Harriet Kemsley went speed dating. Tentatively hopeful and giddily anxious, they settled their nerves with a drink before arriving at the venue, a trendy south-east London pizzeria. In the event, any excitement was unwarranted: Kemsley “dissociated” and went quiet, while Gledhill found herself in “corporate team-building mode”, using humour to grease the wheels of other people’s dates while disengaging on a personal level. The men weren’t perfect, either: one avoided all eye contact; another recognised Gledhill – who has become a familiar face since winning last year’s Edinburgh fringe prize – and started doing her own material at her. There was a promising development, though: one attender slid into Gledhill’s DMs later that evening – and she replied.
How do I know all this? Because since October, Kemsley and Gledhill have been routinely spilling the beans about their love lives on their candid and hugely endearing podcast Single Ladies in Your Area. The show sees the 37-year-olds grapple with modern dating, a premise that requires them to share their hopes, fears and deepest vulnerabilities. “We divulge too much,” says Kemsley, sitting in the offices of the podcast’s production company, fresh from another heart-on-sleeve recording. “And then we listen to it and go: ‘That’s fine, put it out!’” laughs Gledhill beside her.
Continue reading...© Composite: Matt Crockett/Linda Blacker
© Composite: Matt Crockett/Linda Blacker
The Englishman Dale Whitnell made two holes-in-one during a once-in-a-lifetime round on day two of the South African Open.
The 36-year-old, whose DP World Tour breakthrough came in the 2023 Scandinavian Mixed, aced the 179-yard 2nd in soft, calm conditions at the Durban Country Club and then repeated the feat at the 149-yard 12th. It is estimated the odds of making two holes-in-one in the same round are 67 million to one.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Warren Little/Getty Images
© Photograph: Warren Little/Getty Images
Sebastian Padrón explains how ice-cream brought his family closer with fellow Argentinian and neighbour
When Sebastian Padrón opened his ice-cream parlour around the corner from Pope Francis’s home in Casa Santa Marta in Vatican City, his wife, Silvia, came up with a clever way of ingratiating her husband with his fellow Argentinian.
“She told me: ‘Go and bring an ice-cream to Pope Francis,’” said Padrón. “I said: ‘Impossible.’”
Continue reading...© Photograph: Victor Sokolowicz/The Guardian
© Photograph: Victor Sokolowicz/The Guardian
The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world
Continue reading...© Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters
© Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters
Patel has signalled he isn’t interested in pursuing insurrectionists amid resurgence of extremist groups
With Kash Patel officially appointed as the new FBI director and Dan Bongino as his number two, experts are warning the fate of federal law enforcement investigations into the far right face a grim future.
Patel taking the reins of the FBI also coincides with a resurgence of the Base, an accelerationist neo-Nazi group with terrorism designations around the world, along with other emboldened extremists connected to the January 6 attacks on the Capitol.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Getty Images
© Photograph: Getty Images
Stephen Graham’s new show about a boy arrested for murder is utterly chilling. Its team talk rage, panic attacks and being bowled over by a 14-year-old
The first few minutes of Netflix’s new drama Adolescence are among the most incredible you will ever see. Two police officers drive to a house, smash its doors in, sweep from room to room and apprehend a teenage boy suspected of murdering a female classmate. They load him into a van, drive to a police station then process him for arrest.
On the surface this sounds like any workaday drama, but the incredible thing about Adolescence is this: the whole sequence is conducted in one take. From car to house to van to station, the camera never leaves the action. Even more incredibly, the entire series follows in kind. There are four episodes, each without a single edit.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Netflix
© Photograph: Netflix
Olympic gold medallist on his strained departure from Ineos Grenadiers, moving to Q36.5 and feeling revitalised
It’s July 2022 and Tom Pidcock is flying down the towering Col du Galibier at 100km an hour, pushing the boundaries of what is achievable on a road bike, his rear wheel sliding through each snaking vertiginous bend, leaving his peers far behind and French TV commentators aghast.
A couple of hours later, he raises his arms at the top of Alpe d’Huez, one of the Tour’s most feared climbs, taking an exhilarating stage win in his debut Tour de France. A new star is born. Few doubt that it’s only a matter of time until he wears the yellow jersey.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Jasper Jacobs/Belga/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Jasper Jacobs/Belga/AFP/Getty Images
Exclusive: International development minister warns it will be ‘impossible’ to retain funding in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine
Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister, has quit her post over Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the international aid budget by almost half to pay for a generational increase in defence spending.
The senior Labour MP, who attended cabinet, predicted that the UK pulling back from development would bolster Russia, which has already been aggressively increasing its presence worldwide, as well as encourage China’s attempts to rewrite global rules.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
As Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to Washington to meet Donald Trump, a number of questions remain unanswered
As Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to Washington to meet Donald Trump, questions remain over the future of Ukraine and the country’s war with Russia. Here are five things we don’t know about a possible deal to end the conflict.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA
© Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA
The reportedly outgoing Lucasfilm president has brought a raft of new movies to the sci-fi franchise but some plans have crashed and the narrative has the look of random splashing
If the reports are true, and Kathleen Kennedy is to step down as president of Lucasfilm, it is possible to look back on her near 13-year reign over the Star Wars movies and wonder how one person managed to oversee an entire industry of sci-fi fantasy dreams, decrees and doomed announcements that always seemed to fall apart as quickly as they were constructed. Like any of the Death Stars that have permeated these films, Kennedy’s apparently well-constructed visions for future episodes always seemed to be blown to smithereens just as they were about to take over the Hollywood nebula. From Josh Trank’s mysteriously vanished Boba Fett film to Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron crash-landing before takeoff, her time at the helm of Lucasfilm will be marked by vast, ambitious projects that promised to be “fully operational” – only for the scrappy reality of budget concerns and creative differences to transform them into little more than unfinished, floating chunks of cinematic debris, drifting aimlessly through the void.
It is fair to say that while her predecessor George Lucas procrastinated, toiled, and employed as much energy as a protocol droid attempting to jog through quicksand, Kennedy, in terms of bringing new Star Wars films to the multiplexes (after the mixed reception to his midichlorian-infested, blue-screen-heavy prequel trilogy), moved like a hyperspace-jumping Millennium Falcon. Initially at least: no sooner had the ink dried on Disney’s galactically ambitious purchase of Lucasfilm for a $4.5bn (£2.5bn) in 2012 than Kennedy was off hunting down JJ Abrams to oversee 2015’s The Force Awakens. It was a movie that – at the time – felt as if fans of the saga had finally been gifted a return to the knockabout space romps of Lucas’s original trilogy – but these days it feels like a gleaming hyperspace lane to nowhere: a void at the heart of everything that is wrong about modern-day Star Wars.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Disney/Lucasfilm/Allstar
© Photograph: Disney/Lucasfilm/Allstar
Thousands of tourists arrived to see lava in recent weeks, but not all were prepared for treks up the Sicilian volcano
A river of fire from the depths of the Earth carves its way through the black rocks of a mountain blanketed white with snow. Above, the setting sun tints the clouds red. Fountains of lava that explode from a crater soar hundreds of metres into the air and Etna’s roar echoes across the Sicilian sky.
Its recent eruptions were a breathtaking spectacle, drawing thousands of tourists and unwary daytrippers – many there for a selfie. For some, the outcome was catastrophic.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Antonio Parrinello/The Guardian
© Photograph: Antonio Parrinello/The Guardian
Nothing I have done is more impactful than a day’s work in this battleground in the south, the graveyard of politicians’ abandoned promises
The tentacles of disinformation have already claimed their first young victim. This week, an unvaccinated child in Texas died of measles – an entirely preventable disease. Right now, the state is seeing its largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years. Yet at a White House briefing, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services, falsely noted “it is not unusual”, and did not offer any plans for containment.
I am a pediatrician in Texas, and I can assure you the situation is so abnormal that most younger physicians have never seen a case of measles, thanks to successful vaccination campaigns.
Seema Jilani is a pediatric physician based in Texas, a first-generation American, and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations
Continue reading...© Photograph: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
© Photograph: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Cats in two states tested positive after eating raw food from Wild Coast Raw, which issued voluntary recall
As the bird flu outbreak continues gaining force in the US, a second company selling raw pet food issued a voluntary recall after cats from two different households in Oregon contracted H5N1 from the tainted meat earlier this month.
Two more cats in different households in Washington state have tested positive for bird flu after eating the same brand of raw pet food nearly two weeks after the recall, officials announced on Wednesday. One cat was euthanized, while the other remains under veterinary care.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Jaromir Chalabala/Alamy
© Photograph: Jaromir Chalabala/Alamy
Barely known to each other before they were abducted by the brutal al-Shabaab militants, a friendship forged in adversity helped them and their children find safety
Ancha*, who was 20, had been kidnapped and held captive in a house in northern Mozambique for two months when 17-year-old Fatima* was brought there. What their captors did not know – even after the young women’s daring escape together – was that they were cousins.
Both had grown up around Mucojo, a small coastal town 130 miles (210km) south of the Tanzanian border, from where they had been abducted in separate raids in 2020 by Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jamaa militants, an Islamic State-affiliated group known locally as al-Shabaab (though it has no links with the Islamist militants of the same name in Somalia).
Continue reading...© Composite: Juan Luis Rod
© Composite: Juan Luis Rod
While last year’s Academy Awards progressed with relative predictability, this year pundits are split and the four big categories are too close to call
The red carpet is being vacuumed, the manicurists are working overtime and, across Hollywood, an unprecedented number of acceptance speeches are getting a polish.
The four big categories at this year’s Oscars – best picture, director, actor and actress – are being deemed too close to call as the remarkable drama of this year’s award season reaches a peak.
Continue reading...© Composite: PR
© Composite: PR
Back with his new film Day of the Fight, the reluctant star recalls anxiety about his looks, a strange dinner with Guillermo del Toro, spats with Trump and Weinstein … and hints at his plan to save the world
Ron Perlman could be mistaken for Will Ferrell’s grumpy older brother. Today, however, he mostly looks trapped. That slab of a face, frosted with a white beard and moustache, seems too formidable to be contained by the narrow vertical frame of his iPad camera. Wearing a stonewashed grey denim jacket over a black shirt, he peers down at me, brow crinkled, as if from a great height. It’s like being on a Zoom call with Goliath.
Though he introduces himself as “Ron from Brooklyn”, the actor, who is a few weeks shy of 75, is sitting at home in Los Angeles. No, the fires didn’t touch him, but the nearest ones were only three miles away, close enough to make him jittery. “Scary times,” he says. His voice rumbles like a freight train. Tom Waits, whom he was once plausibly but falsely rumoured to be playing in a movie, sounds like Charles Hawtrey by comparison.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Chelsea Lauren/HCA/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Chelsea Lauren/HCA/Shutterstock
UK PM hopes charm offensive will yield benefits but Eurosceptics in president’s coterie could scupper plan
Is there enough love left in the US-UK special relationship or has the magic faded?
That is the question that Keir Starmer arrived in Washington to pose at what Sir Peter Westmacott, Britain’s ambassador to Washington from 2012 to 2016, called “one of the most consequential meetings of a British prime minister and president that we have had since the second world war”.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
© Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
The winger has explained his actions
© Getty Images
Hand-delivering a red-sealed note from King Charles was an undeniable masterstroke of British soft power, says Jon Sopel – but in playing his royal Trump card, Keir Starmer must not believe he has done all he must do to win over the US president for good, says Jon Sopel
© Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street
Australian officials, including prime minister Anthony Albanese, downplay Trump’s response
© PA Wire
© Erin Schaff/The New York Times
The former Miami Heat player had a cancerous cyst removed in December 2023
© Getty Images
Pam Bondi’s 8 a.m. deadline for FBI director Kash Patel to hand over the ‘full and complete’ set of Epstein documents has passed
© PA