It stars a roaming shapeshifter – and a cat-faced soldier fighting a zombie in a swamp. We go behind the scenes of The Stimming Pool, the first ever feature film to be made by autistic directors
Do you know how many autistic people there are in the UK? The answer is an estimated 700,000. Yet until now, there has never been a single feature-length film directed by autistic people. Or at least not one that has secured a theatrical release in the UK and slots at festivals worldwide.
The film is The Stimming Pool, an experimental feature shot over just 12 days that puts on screen the interests, passions and perspectives of its five young autistic creators. They worked alongside Steven Eastwood, professor of film practice at London’s Queen Mary University, funded initially by the Wellcome Trust. “We asked why autistic people are always required to explain or illustrate their experience,” says Eastwood. “What about just having neurodivergent authors behind the cameras, doing the creativity?”
Omer Wenkert says he was held mostly in darkness – and his mistreatment was often sparked by events in war
An Israeli hostage freed by Hamas last month has described the distressing conditions and abuse he says he endured during 505 days held in Gaza.
In an interview on Israeli television, Omer Wenkert, 23, said he had hidden in a bomb shelter with a close friend when it became clear the Nova music festival was under attack by Hamas and other militants from Gaza on 7 October 2023.
Former president was surrendered to The Hague amid a row between his family and that of the current president
Few expected things to move so quickly. Supporters of the Philippines’ former president Rodrigo Duterte barely had time to protest before he was jetted off to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity in relation to his country’s so-called “war on drugs”. According to activists, this bloody crackdown has seen as many as 30,000 people killed since 2016.
The charges brought against the former leader are the culmination of years of work by activists, lawyers and victims, who documented abuses committed under his government, often at great personal risk. But Duterte arguably would not have been surrendered to The Hague if it weren’t for his family’s dramatic feud with that of Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the current president.
There is no ‘ideal’ aim for sexual compatibility. If you feel there is something amiss, talk about it
As a sex educator and author, my job – my purpose in life – is teaching women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies. My latest book, Come Together, is all about the science (and art!) of sex in long term relationships.
Since I published the book, one of the biggest topics I’m asked about in email and at events is sexual incompatibility. Here’s what I think people should know.
Remains are of an adult member of an extinct species who lived up to 1.4m years ago, researchers say
Bone fragments unearthed at an ancient cave in Spain belong to the oldest known human face in western Europe, researchers say.
The fossilised remains make up the left cheek and upper jaw of an adult member of an extinct human species who lived and died on the Iberian peninsula between 1.1m and 1.4m years ago.
Austrian’s work with Eagles attracts Bundesliga interest
Jean-Philippe Mateta trains in Marbella after head injury
Crystal Palace have opened talks with Oliver Glasner over extending his contract in an attempt to ward off potential interest from RB Leipzig.
The Austrian celebrated his first anniversary as manager last month and Palace are 11th in the Premier League after Saturday’s win over Ipswich, having recovered from a poor start. They have also reached the last eight of both domestic cup competitions. Palace lost to Arsenal in the Carabao Cup and face Fulham in the FA Cup quarter-finals at the end of this month.
Key figure in pro-Palestinian campus protests arrested by Ice known for kindness and skill for de-escalation
Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate who was detained by Ice on Saturday night, was linked by Donald Trump, without evidence, to “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. But for those who know him, Khalil was a student, a steady negotiator and a leader whose activism placed him at the center of a national movement for Palestinian solidarity.
Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder who is currently in immigration detention in Louisiana, was a lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a role that thrust him into the spotlight during the pro-Palestinian encampment protests last spring – long before his high-profile arrest. He gained a reputation among fellow protesters as a principled and strategic organizer, earning praise for his ability to de-escalate tense situations.
Following last week’s smash-and-grab victory by Liverpool at the Parc des Princes, Football Daily’s expected fun (xF) threshold going into Tuesday night’s second leg at Anfield was extremely high but caveated by several questions. Would Paris Saint-Germain be able to play as well again? Was there any chance Liverpool could be as bad? After Alisson’s heroics in the French capital, would he again be called upon to singlehandedly repel PSG’s attacking hordes? And while it’s OK for PSG fans to finally like Luis Enrique’s exciting team of apparently ego-free young whippersnappers, is it OK for neutrals who disapprove of nation states buying up football clubs in blatant attempts at image-laundering to row in behind them as well? And the answers … Not quite. No, up to a point once it got to penalties. And probably not but they’re so much fun to watch.
We’re going into eight weeks of your life now where you sacrifice everything – you’re not shopping tomorrow, you’re not bowling, your diet’s good … if your wife or girlfriend wants to go shopping, wants to do that, they have to make the sacrifices, it’s a massive sacrifice for us to achieve something because you can’t now go to Bluewater tomorrow walking around high-fiving and going Costa Coffee when you should be resting and all those things, now we have to be at it, now the professional has to be paramount, and everyone’s sacrificing, everyone’s family is sacrificing for the greater good if you like” – Nathan Jones does not appear to have become any less rambling or entertainingly intense since joining Charlton. A 1-0 win at Crawley leaves them fourth in League One.
Re: Stuart Pearce (yesterday’s Quote of the Day). From the man who walked away from a collision with a dustcart (at Newcastle) and tried to run off a broken leg (West Ham), I’m surprised the word ‘pain’ is in his vocabulary” – Paul Griffin.
Re: yesterday’s Football Daily. The proposed New Trafford Enormodome has three pylons, spires, or whatever you call them that are apparently inspired by the devil’s trident on the club badge. Are these the only three points home fans are guaranteed to see?” – Derek McGee.
Since you’re using the wisdom of Sebastian Coe to explain the rationale of Big Sir Jim’s Big Tent, does this mean New Old Trafford will host two games and then lie idle until West Ham move in on a peppercorn rent?” – Declan Hackett.
I know I will definitely not be the first of 1,057 readers to congratulate Ed Taylor on trying again and successfully winning letter of the day yesterday with exactly the same letter as he sent in for publication on Wednesday 5 March that didn’t. The only thing less surprising than a c0ck-up [intentional reader-baiting, no? – Football Daily Ed] with a tea-time email was Alan Shearer still not understanding the new offside law change as evidenced in his commentary on Liverpool v PSG” – Andy Morrison (and 1,056 others).
United manager says criticism of his players is fair
Yoro and Maguire ruled out of Real Sociedad second leg
Ruben Amorim has stated that Sir Jim Ratcliffe was correct to criticise Manchester United players, saying he and they are “underperforming”.
On Monday Ratcliffe claimed that the squad was overpaid and not good enough, referencing Casemiro, Rasmus Højlund, André Onana, Antony and Jadon Sancho when doing so.Amorim was asked about the comments from the club’s co-owner.
Alan Jones somehow straddled the riotous noise of the Sex Pistols, the fetishism of Vivienne Westwood and the hedonism of disco and gay clubs. A new book tells his story
In the mid-70s, Alan Jones was performing a particularly exquisite balancing act. A habitué both of Vivienne Westwood’s London boutique Sex and the gay clubs, he was on the frontline of two seemingly opposed cultures: punk and disco. Each camp might have thought the other completely incomprehensible – tuneless noise or vacuous hedonism – but for him it was quite natural: as he says, “They blended together in my mind. It was all about going out and having a good time; the music was interchangeable. And once Vivienne began her fetish clothing lines, it fitted both arenas.”
Nevertheless, there were pinch points. In April 1976, Jones DJed for the Sex Pistols when they played a Soho strip club, El Paradise. Arriving with his “new best friend” John Paul Getty III – fresh from his kidnapping in Italy – Jones decided on a disco set.
As the new league year gets underway, we take a look at the best and worst moves heading into the 2025 season
The Vikings letting Sam Darnold walk was the headline-grabber, but they had more intel on him than any other franchise and were happy to turn the keys over to JJ McCarthy rather than bring back the former Jets quarterback on what would have been a manageable contract. It’s the team’s work elsewhere that’s most intriguing, though. The Vikings retained starting cornerback Byron Murphy and fortified both sides of the line of scrimmage with tasty, affordable signings. They brought in center Ryan Kelly and guard Will Fries from the Colts. The duo are one of the most switched-on, savvy interior tandems in the league. They never bust a protection and will give McCarthy a semblance of security during his first season as starter.
Harlequin returns at full-back for England in Cardiff
Freeman picked at centre and Roebuck earns debut
Marcus Smith has been recalled to the starting lineup for England’s Super Saturday clash with Wales while Henry Pollock is in line for a debut from the bench with Steve Borthwick rolling the dice as his side seek an unlikely Six Nations title.
Smith returns to the side at full-back with Elliot Daly switching to the left wing while Tommy Freeman is deployed at outside centre and Tom Roebuck earns a first start on the right wing. Ben Curry and Luke Cowan-Dickie also come into the side while on the bench Borthwick has included the 20-year-old Northampton flanker Pollock as well as George Ford, who is in line for a first appearance of this year’s championship and a 99th cap.
The shocking tale of a Mormon family YouTuber who was imprisoned for child abuse distils thousands of hours of footage to genuinely push the story forward. It’s as sensitive as it is out-there
Ruby Franke turned her life into content for years, so there is a bleak irony in her content being repurposed now to reveal the extent of her crimes. As a vlogger, she and her husband, Kevin, made a living from YouTube, posting videos on the popular channel 8 Passengers, now defunct, about Mormon family life and parenting their six children in the picturesque city of Springville, Utah. But in 2023 Franke was arrested and charged with aggravated child abuse and sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. The astonishing three-part documentary Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke tells the story, from the beginning of the family’s internet fame in 2015 all the way to Franke’s imprisonment.
It starts with the now infamous and distressing doorbell-camera footage of one of the Franke children, a 12-year-old boy – the documentary blurs the faces of the four youngest children and does not name them – who turns up on a neighbour’s porch, asking to be taken to the nearest police station. He is evidently injured and emaciated. Later, we see more from that day and witness the neighbour sobbing when he realises the state the child is in. The boy has escaped imprisonment from the house of a woman called Jodi Hildebrandt. It is the spark that lights the inferno.
Daniel Noboa, who is seeking re-election, announced the partnership with Erik Prince, a supporter of Donald Trump
Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, has announced a “strategic alliance” with the Donald Trump-supporting founder of the private military firm Blackwater to supposedly reinforce his controversial “war” on crime.
Noboa, the rightwing heir to a South American banana empire, announced the partnership with Erik Prince on social media on Tuesday night.
Once again, the American economy is under the gun and under a microscope
In 2016, voters in the UK opted to leave the European Union hoping that the day after would deliver something better. Nearly nine years later, Britain’s growth remains anemic, its economy continues to underperform. A parade of prime ministers came and went. Along the way, a head of lettuce outlasted a hapless and clueless Liz Truss.
Blood and soil economics exacts high a price. Fittingly, Nigel Farage, the godfather of Brexit, was on hand for Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. On account of the cold, he was not seated. Still, Farage left his mark. America now endures a Brexit moment of its own.
‘When time is right I’ll have no problem standing aside’
American multi-major winner set to miss rest of season
As Tiger Woods begins his recovery from yet another injury, Rory McIlroy has firmly dismissed any notion of his own career stretching into his 50s.
The 49-year-old Woods ruptured an achilles while training at home on Tuesday morning. McIlroy believes Woods will not feature in any of the 2025 majors. “It sucks,” McIlroy said. “He doesn’t have much luck when it comes to injuries and his body. Obviously he was trying to ramp up to get ready for Augusta and Achilles surgeries aren’t fun.
Preview: 2.40 The Coral Cup Handicap Hurdle, 2m 5f
This is always one of the fiercest betting heats of the week, and also one of the trickiest of all the races to solve, with just two successful favourites this century and winners at 50-1, 33-1 (twice) and 28-1 in the last dozen years alone. Dan Skelton fields the likely favourite in Be Aware as he attempts to complete a three-timer in this race, following victories for Langer Dan in each of the last two runnings, and while the old warrior in not in the field this time around, Henry de Bromhead’s Ballyadam, the three-and-a-half length runner-up 12 months ago, is back for another crack. Be Aware, a hold-up horse who is certain to get a strong pace to aim at, has run well in handicaps at Cheltenham and Ascot on his two previous starts this season, but his run-style means he will need some luck in running and punters are, frankly, spoiled for choice if they are looking for an alternative. JP McManus’s colours will be aboard a couple of very live runners in Impose Toi and Comfort Zone, while Tony Bloom, another owner who likes a punt, will have high hopes of Bunting, seventh home behind Majborough in last year’s Triumph Hurdle. Harry Fry’s Beat The Bat also seems sure to appreciate a return to this trip after an eye-catching run in the William Hill Handicap Hurdle last time and is possibly the pick of the prices at around 12-1.
Mahmoud Khalil was detained by Ice agents on Saturday, part of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus protesters
Mahmoud Khalil’s wife, who is now eight months pregnant, issued a statement on Tuesday night after the Columbia University graduate student and activist was arrested in New York by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke his green card and have him deported.
“I am pleading with the world to continue to speak up against his unjust and horrific detention by the Trump administration,” Khalil’s wife, who is a US citizen, said in her statement, remaining anonymous for fear of harassment.
The $488m Spherex mission aims to explain how galaxies evolved over billions of years
Nasa’s newest space telescope rocketed into orbit on Tuesday to map the entire sky like never before – a sweeping look at hundreds of millions of galaxies and their shared cosmic glow since the beginning of time.
SpaceX launched the Spherex observatory from California, putting it on course to fly over Earth’s poles. Tagging along were four suitcase-size satellites to study the sun. Spherex popped off the rocket’s upper stage first, drifting into the blackness of space with a blue Earth in the background.
Emma Heming Willis, who is primary carer for the actor since his dementia diagnosis in 2023, says there is ‘a broader story’ to tell about their plight
Emma Heming Willis, the primary carer for her husband, the actor Bruce Willis, who is suffering from a rare form of dementia, has issued a statement in the wake of the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa.
An investigation by local authorities in New Mexico concluded last week that Arakawa, 65, died of a rare respiratory disease around seven days before her husband, meaning that it was likely he spent a week by himself, disorientated and increasingly malnourished.
Government says about 130 still held after Balochistan militants blew up a railway line and hijacked train
An operation to rescue hundreds of people taken hostage when a train was hijacked by a separatist militant group in remote south-west Pakistan has continued into its second day, with dozens killed in the onslaught.
On Wednesday, Pakistan’s security services claimed to have rescued about 190 people who were being held captive after militants from the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) blew up a railway line and launched an attack on the Jaffar Express train.
Nottingham Forest’s 1-0 win over Manchester City on Saturday was a statement. Nuno Espírito Santo’s side have claimed some impressive results at the City Ground this season. They beat Aston Villa and Tottenham at home in December; they smashed Brighton 7-0 last month; and they have taken points off Liverpool and Arsenal. Yet victory over the defending champions in a battle for a Champions League finish spoke volumes. It was Forest’s first home win against City since Jason Lee bagged a brace and Steve Stone added a third in a 3-0 victory in September 1995. It was a win a long time in the making.
Importantly, though, the result wasn’t a huge shock. Forest beat the drop by just six points last season, albeit with a four-point deduction, but they are now third in the table and on course to qualify for the Champions League. They are four points clear of fifth-placed City, with sixth-placed Newcastle a further point back. It feels more likely than not that Forest will return to Europe’s elite club competition for the first time in 45 years, particularly with fifth place in the Premier League likely to be enough to guarantee Champions League football. The last time the club played in the European Cup, in 1980, they were the reigning champions.
The director talks about his genre-trampling film Sister Midnight, the hilarious and gory story of a female force of nature stifled in an arranged marriage
One of the most powerful scenes in Sister Midnight is also a quiet and unexpected one. The protagonist, Uma, sits idly with her neighbour Sheetal outside their adjoining homes in Mumbai. To pass the time, the bored housewives pretend to be divorcing one another. Amid the role play, Uma turns to her confidant and says: “I’m tainted goods, I’m a divorcee. But it’s OK. I’ll wear this like a badge and go forth to the hills, form a manless nation and build a monolithic altar to the pussy.”
The statement captures what is so provocative about the film – it turns societal norms on their head and dares to ask: what if we did things differently? At its core, the film feels quite feminist. “That word comes up a lot,” says director Karan Kandhari. “I’m happy people can see the film like that, but I didn’t set out to make something with an agenda. I would say the film is actually punk rock because it questions things that don’t make sense. Just because something is tradition or old doesn’t mean it’s right.”
The Kremlin has declined to commit to an immediate 30-day ceasefire in the war with Ukraine, stating that Vladimir Putin must first be briefed by the US before deciding whether the proposal would be acceptable to Russia.
Results and off-pitch changes contributed to coach going days before a cup final and months after all seemed rosy
On a cold Manchester night last November, as Gareth Taylor watched his team secure a 10th straight victory of the season by beating Hammarby, the idea that he would not be in charge of Manchester City by mid-March seemed fairly far-fetched. City were on a run of 21 wins and one defeat in 23 WSL matches, meaning that across 12 months they had the best league results in the country. Yet four months and four painful league defeats later, Taylor is out.
To some, who were surprised Taylor was given a one-year contract extension in May 2023 despite City finishing fourth, his departure has been on the cards because of a relatively low trophy return – the FA Cup in 2020 and League Cup in 2022 – and City’s eliminations in the qualifying rounds of the Champions League in 2022 and 2023. To others, who see him as the coach who was within a whisker of winning the league last term, his dismissal may seem brutal.
On the podcast today; PSG knock out Liverpool on penalties after two thrilling legs. PSG rarely put a foot wrong in either game including four perfect spot kicks.
Large tax cuts for the rich, import tariffs, and the competing interests of Republican nationalists and the techno-right is a dangerous combination
What connects Donald Trump’s approach to trade, tax and government spending? Is there a Trumpian theory of economics – Maganomics? Trump, like most politicians, would doubtless reject any claim that he was following a particular ideological blueprint, but then, as John Maynard Keynes said: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
It’s certainly difficult to attribute Trump’s policies to the intellectual influence of any one strand in economic thinking. The most obvious frame is the dual one identified by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, who describes it as a combination of economic nationalism and the techno-right. The former, represented by long-term Trump confidantes Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, wants to rebuild America’s traditional industrial strength behind tariff walls while deporting as many immigrants as possible; the latter, represented of course by Elon Musk, to engineer a great leap forward into an AI-enabled libertarian future.
Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant
Captain says no decision has been made on his future
Van Dijk: ‘If anyone says they know, they are lying’
Virgil van Dijk has said he has “no idea” whether he will be a Liverpool player next season. The captain’s contract expires this summer and he is yet to sign a new deal.
Unless Van Dijk extends his stay he will have played his last European game for the club after Liverpool were knocked out of the Champions League by Paris Saint-Germain. His teammates Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold are in the same situation. Talks have been held with all three.
Netflix’s motor-racing extravaganza is one of the most influential shows of the decade. How did it turn such a tedious sport into such gripping television?
Tennis has Break Point. Rugby union has Six Nations: Full Contact. Nascar has Full Speed. Golf has Full Swing. Basketball has Starting 5. Cycling has Tour de France: Unchained. American football has both Quarterback and Receiver. Athletics has Sprint. What do all these documentaries have in common? They have all sprung up in the past five years or so, and are basically all the same show: if they are not full clones of Formula 1: Drive to Survive, they are heavily inspired by it.
Drive to Survive thus has a claim to be one of the most influential TV documentaries of the past decade, having pioneered a simple but effective format. Every 12 months since 2019, it has delivered a new season – last week it released the seventh – that recaps what happened in the previous year’s F1 championship, using behind-the-scenes access, race-day footage and retrospective interviews.
The 11 days of whiplash-inducing talks British and French officials endured to repair shattered relations between Washington and Kyiv, and for the first time put Donald Trump’s trust in Vladimir Putin to the test, could go down as one of the great feats of diplomatic escapology.
The dogged fence-mending may yet unravel as hurdles remain, principally the outstanding question of Ukraine’s security guarantees, but for the first time, in the words of Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, the ball is in Russia’s court. Putin, by instinct cautious, has preferred watching from the sidelines, suppressing his delight as Trump denounced Volodymyr Zelenskyy to his face in the White House and wreaked subsequent vengeance by stopping all military aid and then pulling some US intelligence.
Rohit Sharma’s side are all-time greats but Indian dominance has created imbalance and over-dependence
They can tear you apart with a thousand incisive cuts or systematically grind you down to a fine powder. They have a bottomless well of talent with multiple world class options in every position. Winning is not only expected but demanded, both from within the camp and throughout their legions of loyal supporters that have turned them into a commercial behemoth.
No, not India, who eased past New Zealand to claim the Champions Trophy this weekend. We’re talking about Ricky Ponting’s Australia. Actually, it’s Clive Lloyd’s West Indians. Or should that be Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, Richie McCaw’s All Blacks, or the Americans under Christie Rampone, Carli Lloyd and Megan Rapinoe?
As tech firms battle creative industries over copyright, OpenAI chief Sam Altman says he was ‘really struck’ by product’s output
The company behind ChatGPT has revealed it has developed an artificial intelligence model that is “good at creative writing”, as the tech sector continues its tussle with the creative industries over copyright.
The chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said the unnamed model was the first time he had been “really struck” by the written output of one of the startup’s products.
Ficre Ghebreyesus, who died in 2012, made vertiginous paintings celebrating family, the diaspora and his own turbulent story. His first European solo exhibition charts this remarkable journey
What is home? What does it mean to belong? For Eritrea-born artist, activist and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus, who fled war in his homeland at the age of 16 and landed on US shores in 1981, these were vital questions that played out in his vibrant, often dreamlike canvases. “Painting was the miracle, the final act of defiance through which I exorcised the pain and reclaimed my sense of place, my moral compass, and my love for life,” the artist wrote in 2000, in his application for a masters in fine art at Yale School of Art.
Ghebreyesus, who died suddenly of a heart attack aged 50 in 2012, left behind more than 800 paintings. These were barely exhibited in his lifetime but have garnered acclaim posthumously, presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale and in a handful of US shows. Now Ghebreyesus will have his first solo British exhibition at Modern Art gallery in London, made up of 25 canvases from the 1990s to 2011, many of which have never been displayed publicly.
The US president is making energy deals with Japan and Ukraine, and in Africa has even touted resurrecting coal
Donald Trump’s repeated mantra of “drill, baby, drill” demands that more oil and gas be extracted in the United States, but the president has set his sights on an even broader goal: keeping the world hooked on planet-heating fossil fuels for as long as possible.
In deals being formulated with countries such as Japan and Ukraine, Trump is using US leverage in tariffs and military aid to bolster the flow of oil and gas around the world. In Africa, his administration has even touted the resurrection of coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, to bring energy to the continent.
Radhika Apte is terrific as a woman preparing to settle down with a shiftless husband she barely knows when her world goes awry
British-Indian film-maker Karan Kandhari makes a stylish and offbeat feature debut with a black-comic horror set in Mumbai, elegantly shot by Sverre Sørdal and designed by Shruti Gupte – and if it runs out of road a bit before the end, and can’t quite decide what the point of everything has been … well, we’ve had a lot of laugh-lines, shocks and ingenious sight gags along the way. With its deadpan drollery and rectilinear tableau scenes, Sister Midnight takes something from Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch and also – at its most alarming – something more from Polanski’s Repulsion.
The movie’s satirical theme is the horror of arranged marriage, or maybe the intimate horror of marriage full stop – the feeling of being trapped, of suddenly and mysteriously not knowing who or what your partner is, the delirious fear and hate that can boil up out of nowhere for your spouse and yourself. Radhika Apte plays Uma, a woman who has arrived in Mumbai to start life as a housewife after an arranged marriage, the groom having gone on ahead to where he has already established himself in what is to be their modest marital home. (Apte also played an arranged bride in Michael Winterbottom’s The Wedding Guest) The wedding itself has evidently already taken place, and her husband is Gopal (Ashok Pathak), an unprepossessing guy from her home village with whom she hasn’t really spoken since they were both children, and who now spends his leisure hours at home loafing around, not talking to his wife, watching TV and masturbating. “You used to be so sensitive!” complains Uma. “I was eight,” replies Gopal.
A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s executive order banning trans youth healthcare, but access remains uncertain
Aryn Kavanaugh was sitting in her living room in South Carolina when her 17-year-old daughter came into the room and said: “I’m really scared. I think people are gonna die.” Katherine, who is using her middle name for her protection, told Kavanaugh that she thought transgender youth may be the target of violence due to the hate generated by Donald Trump’s recent action.
On 28 January, Trump issued an executive order to ban access to gender-affirming care for youth under 19 years old. It directed federal agencies to deny funding to institutions that offer gender-affirming medical care including hormones and puberty blockers.
Tesla sales are falling and apps and online groups are springing up to help consumers choose non-US items
The renowned German classical violinist Christian Tetzlaff was blunt in explaining why he and his quartet have cancelled a summer tour of the US.
“There seems to be a quietness or denial about what’s going on,” Tetzlaff said, describing his horror at the authoritarian polices of Donald Trump and the response of US elites to the country’s growing democratic crisis.
As she brings A Shadow Work to the UK, the New York choreographer talks about therapy, ‘pulling up women with me’ and art-led activism
Chanel DaSilva has always been a dancer. “I felt completely free,” she says of her first class. “I felt at home. Like I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. And it’s weird to know that at the age of three.” The New Yorker, 38, is a rising star choreographer in the US, with credits including Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, and is about to make her international debut in London.
DaSilva’s dance style has been described as “technique meets humanity”, in the sense that she draws on the precision and virtuosity of classical and modern dance, but brings in a freedom and naturalism. The piece she has made here for the company Ballet Black, called A Shadow Work, is in part about dealing with grief over the death of her mother when DaSilva was 19. At the time, trying to get through her college education, she couldn’t cope with it. “So I packed up that grief, put it in a little box, and pushed it down deep. And it stayed there for about 10 years until I was finally brave enough to reckon with it.” In hindsight, “I should have mourned,” she says. “But we’re not judging.”
France coach Galthié furious over loss of pivotal captain
Prop says he had ‘no malicious intent’ in incident at ruck
The Ireland prop Andrew Porter insisted “I haven’t done anything wrong” as he hit back at France’s head coach Fabien Galthié amid the fallout over Antoine Dupont’s season-ending knee injury.
Les Bleus’ captain – widely regarded as the world’s best player – faces a lengthy spell on the sidelines after rupturing an anterior cruciate ligament during his country’s 42-27 Six Nations win in Dublin. France were furious with the incident which caused the injury, with Galthié branding it “reprehensible” as he announced his intention to refer Porter and his Ireland teammate Tadhg Beirne to the citing commissioner for possible retrospective punishment.
Canadian foreign minister condemns ‘unjustified’ trade war and condemns ‘Trump’s talks of annexing our country through economic coercion’
Congressional brinkmanship, including repeated near-misses with shutdowns and over the nation’s $36 trillion in debt, has contributed to global ratings agencies’ moves to downgrade the US federal government’s once-pristine credit rating, reports Reuters.
Democrats have long chided Republicans for threatening or voting for government shutdowns, and Republicans were quick to call them out for considering votes that could risk one.
Master of Solong, which was in collision with tanker, was arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter
The arrested master of the Solong, a container ship that crashed into another vessel in the North Sea, is a Russian national, its management company has confirmed.
The 59-year-old was arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter on Tuesday after Monday’s fiery collision about 12 miles off the East Yorkshire coast, which left one man presumed dead.
A bullet grazed the Memphis man’s thigh after his one-year-old pit bull got his paw stuck in a gun’s trigger guard
Dog bites man is hardly news, but in Tennessee, a dog recently shot a man.
In what is only the latest instance of a kind of accidental shooting that intermittently occurs in the US, Jerald Kirkwood reported to police in Memphis that he and a woman were lying in bed with a firearm when his dog jumped up and inadvertently caused the weapon to discharge.
Mangroves are being destroyed and residents displaced to make way for an airport to serve president Nayib Bukele’s vision of a tax-free economic hub
When Nayib Bukele launched his presidential campaign in the eastern department of La Unión in 2018, the new outsider politician stood in a street packed with supporters and promised a new airport. La Unión and the rest of El Salvador’s eastern region have historically been neglected by governments, with few infrastructure projects and widespread poverty.
Just a month later, Bukele travelled to Germany to lobby for his project. “Munich airport is interested in operating our new airport that we will build in La Unión,” he said.
The defiantly anti-commercial British musician had walked away from mainstream success twice by his early 20s. Will his Academy Award convince him to embrace Hollywood, celebrity, the big bucks?
Daniel Blumberg hands me his Oscar, as surprised as he is chuffed. Bloody hell, it’s heavy. Is it real gold? “I wish it was,” says the latest winner of best original score, for The Brutalist. (Apparently, it’s gold-plated bronze.) He puts it back on a shabby wooden shelf alongside his Bafta, also for The Brutalist, and his Ivor Novello award, which he won in 2022 for The World to Come, directed by Mona Fastvold (the partner of Brutalist director Brady Corbet). “Before the Ivor Novello, the only thing I’d ever won was ‘most improved footballer’ when I was six,” he says. “Honestly, I’d never thought about Oscars in my entire life. I’d never even watched the ceremony.”
Blumberg, 35, is the least likely Oscar winner you could imagine. Not because he lacks the talent, but because he has spent his career walking away from mainstream success. The former schoolboy indie pop star has reinvented himself as an atonal improviser of scratchy, screechy weirdness. If that sounds like a tough listen, it’s all combined with sublime minimalist melodies to create music as beautiful as it is challenging.
By turning his back on US allies and global institutions, Trump will help Xi Jinping advance his plan for a China-centric world
Is Donald Trump China’s worst nightmare or a dream come true? He is both, but not in equal measure. In the near-term, his tariff-led approach to trade will cause problems for Beijing. However, in just a few weeks he has done more damage to the liberal international order, the cohesion of the democratic west, and the US’s global standing, than all the combined efforts to undermine them in the entirety of the cold war. This goes beyond the wildest dreams China’s leaders could have had.
The tariffs already levied are serious enough, and Beijing cannot but see them as a harbinger of more to come. Unlike during his first term, this time Trump seems prepared to deliver the threats he makes. With China’s economy already misfiring, an intensified trade war is the last thing Beijing needs, despite the bravado of its diplomats.
Steve Tsang is director of the China Institute at Soas University of London and co-author of The Political Thought of Xi Jinping
French European Affairs minister, Benjamin Haddad, said the European Union could go further in its response to US tariffs, though a trade war was in no-one’s interest, Reuters reported.
“We have the means to go further, if we want,” Haddad told TF1 TV.
Swedish firm unable to ‘secure the necessary financial conditions to continue in its current form’
Northvolt, the Swedish electric vehicle battery startup, has filed for bankruptcy in Sweden, marking the end of a company once seen as Europe’s best hope of challenging the dominant Asian battery industry.
The company said in a statement it had been unable to “secure the necessary financial conditions to continue in its current form” in Sweden.
Broad shoulders and slim skirts reflected designer Anthony Vaccarello’s intention to create a ‘simplicity of silhouette’
Saint Laurent has cross-generational cool. On the last night of Paris fashion week, Kate Moss sat next to Catherine Deneuve, both in black tailoring, sheer blouses and high heels. Pedro Almodóvar and Rossy de Palma smiled for the cameras, while Hailey Bieber and Charli XCX kept their shades on.
Saint Laurent’s daytime silhouette this season is an inverted triangle, with broad shoulders narrowing to slim skirts and sheer tights. For evening, it flipped upside down, with slinky sweaters and grand ball skirts. The colours were of cocktail ring gemstones: emerald, sapphire, ruby and garnet.
For many Israelis, military service is a rite of passage that lasts two to three years. Being such a formative part of the social contract in Israel, it is unusual for eligible young people to refuse their draft orders. Every year some ask for exemptions, but only a handful openly declare themselves as conscientious objectors, commonly known as refuseniks. However, since 7 October and the war in Gaza, refusenik organisations say the number of people refusing the draft has risen, even though during wartime punishments are harsher. The Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, Bethan McKernan, spent time with Itamar Greenberg, an 18-year-old who has been in and out of military prison for almost a year as a result of his refusal to serve
Author of Detransition, Baby found success and pushback she never anticipated and now returns with a provocative collection of stories
Author Torrey Peters’ mind has imagined everything from a future virus that turns everyone trans to a crossdressing fetishist in a poreless silicone suit, but the premise of her new novel, Stag Dance, sounded too bizarre even for her. “If I hadn’t read it in a book I wouldn’t have believed it,” she told me during a lengthy conversation about her life and work. “It’s so over the top. It’s literally an upside down triangle. That’s a little too on the nose.”
The triangle Peters refers to is one that is made out of fabric, and that loggers in the early part of the last century used to affix to their crotches in order to denote that they had changed their sex to female for the purposes of dances held deep in the wilderness. This is a fact that Peters uncovered while reading original texts about logging culture while developing the unique lexicon that she employs to write the titular novel. One of these “stag dances” forms the basis of Peters’ story, a remarkable feat of high modernism that channels the ethos of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian into the story of a lumberjack experiencing a remarkable gender transition.
The tournament will be leveraged for the glorification of a leader to a degree not seen since Benito Mussolini dominated the 1934 World Cup in Italy
Two men held a press event in the Oval Office last week to announce a taskforce that would work to resolve the logistical problems surrounding the 2026 World Cup in North America, which were largely created by one of them.
Both men were in their element. One, Donald Trump, received toady genuflection and a large, golden … thing (actually the Club World Cup trophy). The other, Fifa president Gianni Infantino, occasioned to bask in the proximity to real power, was affectionately referred to as “The king of soccer, I guess, in a certain way” by Trump.
Injecting pollutants into the atmosphere to reflect the sun would be extremely dangerous, but the UK is funding field trials
Some years ago in the pages of the Guardian, we sounded the alarm about the increasing attention being paid to solar geoengineering – a barking mad scheme to cancel global heating by putting pollutants in the atmosphere that dim the sun by reflecting some sunlight back to space.
In one widely touted proposition, fleets of aircraft would continually inject sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere, simulating the effects of a massive array of volcanoes erupting continuously. In essence, we have broken the climate by releasing gigatonnes of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide, and solar geoengineering proposes to “fix” it by breaking a very different part of the climate system.
Raymond T Pierrehumbert FRS is professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford. He is an author of the 2015 US National Academy of Sciences report on climate intervention
Geoffrey Rush’s retired judge is terrorised by Lithgow’s therapy puppet-wielding fellow resident in this claustrophobic tale of elder-on-elder abuse
Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end. It’s a movie about bullying and elder abuse – more specifically, elder-on-elder abuse – and it is always most chilling when it sticks to the realist constraints of what could actually happen.
The locale is an un-luxurious residential care facility where a retired judge is now astonished to find himself; this is Stefan Mortensen, played by Geoffrey Rush, who succumbed to a catastrophic stroke while passing judgment from the bench. He is a cantankerous and high-handed man, furious to be in this demeaning place and who, like many there, assures himself it isn’t for long. Mortensen has to share a room with Tony Garfield (George Henare), a retired rugby star whose career fizzled out. These men are terrorised by long-term patient Dave Crealy, played with true hideousness by John Lithgow, a racist bully who convinces the care staff he is a gentle, harmless soul by exaggerating his mental and physical decay, but tyrannises patients behind officialdom’s back with his therapy hand puppet named Jenny Pen, making the bewildered and terrified patients submit to her “rule”.
Berrada hopes investment in team will not be affected
Plan to build £2bn stadium in five years has this in mind
Omar Berrada has admitted it is a “risk” for Manchester United to try to build a world-class team and venue at the same time. The club announced on Tuesday they planned to construct a 100,000-seat ground on land adjacent to Old Trafford.
Berrada hopes United can move into the £2bn stadium by the start of the 2030-31 season but said the cost of building it could have an impact, acknowledging that Arsenal and Tottenham struggled to juggle building a ground and fighting at the top.
The third season of Mike White’s delicious resort-set comedy drama has teased yet another murder but we don’t yet know the whos or the whys
After a characteristically slow start, we are now halfway through this year’s season of The White Lotus. From what we know of the last two seasons, this means that things are about to get very crazy very quickly. To use season one as a way marker, we are now approximately the runtime of The Brutalist away from watching someone perform the equivalent of a suitcase poop.
More than previous runs, however, a number of mysteries still hang over almost every White Lotus character this year. We know that there’s a shooting. We know that there’s a body. At this point, almost every character could be either one of them. It’s time to theorise wildly.
Nintendo Switch, iPhone/iPad, Mac, PC (version played); Inkle Inkle’s latest game revels in lying, stealing and blackmail as you resort to any means necessary to avoid expulsion from a posh school
As with seemingly everything in the UK, it all comes back to the class system. Verity Amersham, a scholarship student at Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls, is accused of pushing the hockey captain out of a window, and the school’s fearsome headmistress is determined to expel her despite the flimsiest evidence. When Verity protests her innocence, Miss Mulligatawney remains unpersuaded, spelling out her reasoning in plain terms: as a northerner with working-class parents, Verity simply isn’t the “right sort”.
The injustice of it all is a potent driver, ensuring I set about my goal of preventing Verity’s expulsion with determined zeal, much like Matilda defying the hateful Miss Trunchbull. As in developer Inkle’s 2021 game Overboard!, you’re given a time limit to work within and a handful of areas to move between, from the library to the sick room (AKA the “san”, where the school’s grumpy matron lurks). Each area has characters to talk to and objects to find, and each action moves the clock forward. The game follows a rigid school timetable: at 2pm, for example, all of the students will troop up to the library for Latin.
Leaving home at 16 to pursue his dream has paid off for Britain’s youngest F1 driver as he begins his first full season
There is an unmistakeable air of steely determination about Ollie Bearman; an almost disquieting sense of purpose doubtless instrumental in propelling the 19-year-old British driver into Formula One with an eye-catching opening to his career.
Bearman is about to enter his first full season with the Haas team and while tearing most teenagers away from their friends is a torturous task, since he left home in Essex at 16 to pursue the dream of reaching F1, everything has been subsumed to the cause.
“Liverpool’s 1-0 win against Paris Saint-Germain last week was the ultimate smash-and-grab victory. When was the phrase first used in a football context?” poses our very own Niall McVeigh.
Liverpool’s win in Paris was smash-and-grab bingo. They were away from home, like all burglars. They were battered and their keeper had the game of his life, which made it feel like they had stolen a result they didn’t deserve. The match was low-scoring, which meant there was a single, sudden moment of smashing and grabbing. And that moment came late on, in the 87th minute, increasing the dramatic impact to Hitchcockian levels.
SMASH AND GRAB
Audacious thief sentenced
Sentence of 20 months’ hard labour at Clerkenwell today on William Woolley (31), labourer, for breaking the window of one of Messrs Straker’s establishments in the East End.
Prisoner’s practice, it was shown, was to deliberately smash shop windows with a stone, and then bolt with whatever he could grab from the window.
Brussels countermeasures to target €26bn of US goods from April while UK takes ‘pragmatic’ approach; US tariffs cover wide range of household goods such as tin foil
Community Union, Britain’s steelworkers’ union says the tariffs are “hugely damaging” and threaten jobs – and “self-defeating” for the United States.
Alasdair McDiarmid, Community’s assistant general secretary, said:
These US tariffs on UK steel exports are hugely damaging and they threaten jobs. For the US it’s also self-defeating, as the UK is a leading supplier of specialist steel products required by their defence and aerospace sectors.
The UK’s response must include delivering a robust Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the strongest possible trade defence measures to shield our sector from diverted imports.
Our government must act decisively to protect the steel industry and its workers following the announcement of US tariffs.
This is a matter of national security. Steel should be immediately designated as critical national infrastructure to properly protect it.
A doctor’s brilliant study of the dangers of overdiagnosis, from ADHD to long Covid
We swim in oceans of quackery. The media is flooded with misinformation about health and pseudo-diagnoses based on vibes rather than evidence. Books awash with error and supposition swamp our charts, penned by people uniquely unqualified to write them. Our ears are filled with popular podcasts claiming health benefits but really just peddling unregulated dietary supplements. And Robert Kennedy Jr, a man who has spent a lifetime spewing antivaccine jibber-jabber, is now US secretary of health. Vaccination is arguably the most successful health intervention in history (with the possible exception of sanitation), and now more than ever we should be basking in the fact that a global pandemic was brought to a close by safe and effective vaccines.
But here’s the conundrum: medical diagnoses are on the rise across the board, in many cases dramatically, and this is fuel for the medical disinformation industry. The most obvious example is autism, the incidence of which has shot up in a couple of decades, correlated with, but not caused by, an increase in vaccination. Cancer diagnoses are also up. A lot more people seem to have ADHD these days, which was barely around when I was at school. And millions now endure long Covid, a disease with a bucket of symptoms that did not exist at all five years ago.
Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s community in rural Maine is not always welcoming to trans women. She deals with the hostility by capturing the local area’s beauty
Kerala is providing lessons on how not to be scammed by employment agencies as US and UK step up immigration raids
On a warm February morning, Devika, 24, sits with more than 60 classmates in the city of Kochi, in Kerala, southern India, learning how to tell a bogus overseas recruitment agency from a genuine one. Organised by the local government, the training session on safe and legal migration is among a handful of interventions in a country making headlines around the world as undocumented Indian migrants are rounded up and sent back home.
The company’s latest Loud & Clear report – a relatively transparent look into a closed-off industry – shows just how skewed financial success is in music
Since 2021, Spotify has published its Loud & Clear report, corralling data points to show how much money is being earned by artists on the streaming service. There is much talk of “transparency” – perhaps the most duplicitous word in the music industry’s lexicon – but this year’s report feels very different, coming as it does alongside the publication of author Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine, a studs-up assault on streaming economics in general and Spotify in particular.
Then there is the unfortunate timing of the news, as recently unearthed by Music Business Worldwide, that Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has cashed out close to $700m in shares in the company since 2023 while Martin Lorentzon, the company’s other co-founder, cashed out $556.8m in shares in 2024 alone. Meanwhile artists scream of widening financial inequalities and accuse streaming services of doing better from artists than artists are doing from streaming services.
As a new exhibition celebrating the portraits of Edvard Munch opens at London’s National Portrait Gallery, we take a trip to the artist’s home city in Norway
I reach Ekeberg Parkat sunset and walk along the muddy paths to find the viewpoint. The late winter sky is like a watercolour: soft blue and grey clouds layer together, with a sweeping gradient of yellow verging from tobacco stain to pale lemon above the distant, bruise-coloured hills. At the viewpoint, I look out over Oslo and listen for a scream.
In 1892, Edvard Munch took a walk in this same parkas the sun was setting. Recording the experience in his diary, he wrote that he heard “a great and infinite scream through nature”. The experience became the basis of his most enduring painting.
Eating with my family was a source of joy and pleasure until illness ravaged my digestive system. After my stoma was fitted, everything tasted amazing again
Growing up, I always loved food. On Sundays, I’d ask for seconds of my roast dinner. My gran would bake cakes every weekend, which I would drown in custard. I can still remember how the chocolate digestive biscuits I’d eat when I got in from school tasted, how satisfying it was to dip them in my tea as I chatted with my dad about my day. Food brought us together as a family and it was something I always relished.
Then I got sick. I was 12 when I first displayed symptoms of Crohn’s disease. I started getting unbearable pain in my stomach and going to the toilet a bit more. Then a lot more. And I stopped feeling hungry. My weight dropped three stone (19kg), my periods stopped and I had no energy, but it was my sudden lack of appetite that I missed the most. Food had always been a source of joy; I’d watch cookery shows and cry, remembering how much pleasure I used to take from eating. Now, my body rejected everything except supplement drinks that pretended to have flavours like lime and orange but always just tasted like bile. I was fading away and it was terrifying.
Opposition centre-right party gains most votes ahead of Naleraq party, with coalition talks expected to begin
Greenland has voted for a complete overhaul of its government in a shock result in which the centre-right Democrat party more than tripled its seats after a dramatic election campaign fought against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s threats to acquire the Arctic island.
Tuesday’s election, in which the Democrats replaced Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA), the party of the former prime minister Múte B Egede, as the biggest party in the Inatsisartut, the Greenlandic parliament, also led to a doubling of seats for Naleraq – the party most open to US collaboration and which supports a snap vote on independence – making it the second-biggest party.
The EU has its Trojan horses and Nato’s cornerstone has crumbled. But European allies, including the UK, are bound by an urgent shared purpose
Moscow’s immense military mobilisation is clearly not aimed just at Ukraine. Unless Vladimir Putin accepts a ceasefire with meaningful security guarantees there will be no end in sight to the war. If anything, we could see the extension of Russia’s aggression beyond Ukraine. The bleak reality is that Europe still faces an unprecedented threat and notwithstanding signs of progress for Ukraine at talks in Jeddah, we face it alone.
Worse, we now have to confront it with the US working against us. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump appear to share a plan: a Vichy-like regime in Ukraine and a European continent split into spheres of influence, which Russia, the US (and perhaps China) can colonise and prey upon. Most European publics sense this. A critical mass of European leaders gets it too. They are beginning to act.
US betrayal of Ukraine is the rehearsal for a grander bargain with Moscow and an assault on continental solidarity
A prime time current affairs programme; a discussion about Donald Trump’s handling of the war in Ukraine. “He’s doing excellent things,” says a firebrand politician on the panel, before listing White House actions that have belittled Volodymyr Zelenskyy and weakened his battlefield position – military aid suspended; satellite communications obstructed; intelligence withheld. “Do we support this?” It is a rhetorical question.
“We support it all. Absolutely,” the celebrity host responds. “We are thrilled by everything Trump is doing.”
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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First such study finds laws on abortion, debt and dress help increase rate of women being jailed twice as fast as for men
Poverty, abuse and discriminatory laws are driving a huge rise in the number of women in prison globally, according to a new report.
With the rise of the far right and an international backlash against women’s rights, the research said there was a risk that laws would increasingly be used to target women, forcing more behind bars.
Svitolina thanked Americans for their “unwavering support” and “compassion” in a social media post on Sunday after beating Danielle Collins in the third round of Indian Wells.
Cladribine tablet for those with active multiple sclerosis will reduce hospital visits and free up appointments
Thousands of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) in England are to become the first in Europe to benefit from a major roll out of an immunotherapy pill.
Current treatments involve regular trips to hospital, drug infusions, frequent injections and extensive monitoring, which add to the burden on patients and healthcare systems.
Young women wear their jeans low and ultra-baggy, while laughing at the ‘moms’ with their high waists and exposed ankles. It’s time to bring the generations together – if only to try on each other’s trousers
Every day, it feels as if social media finds new ways to let us know how old we are. Just joined TikTok? You’re probably a millennial. Wear your hair in a centre parting? Must be gen Z. Paid off your mortgage – or even have one? OK boomer.
This generational divide is particularly strong, it seems, when it comes to jeans. Look around you and you have probably noticed that younger people prefer to wear them low-rise, long-hemmed and ultra-baggy, while millennials wear them high on the waist and high off the ground – AKA the “mom jean”. TikTok is full of videos of young people mocking their elders for their jeans choices. Now even millennials are coming after their generation’s commitment to the style. “My fellow millennials,” begins a video from TikToker Indigo Tshai Williams-Brunton, “Just completely stop with the mom jeans.”
We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
This week, from 2018: The foreign policy establishment has been lamenting its death for half a century. But Atlanticism has long been a convenient myth
Standing room only in pubs and bars long before the action begins, thousands of British tourists now enjoy the festival in the Spanish hotspot
A bell rings for half past happy hour on Cheltenham festival eve in a city that has discarded time.
Not entirely, of course. Conventional clocks are required to determine the midday cut off between a cheap full English breakfast – available in a range of sizes, from large through to extra, extra large – and an ever so slightly pricier one. So, too, to distinguish between upcoming performances from Michael Jackson, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Queen, who, extraordinarily, have descended on the same Spanish bar, on the same night. Just as they will again tomorrow; at least, tribute acts of varying quality.
They played Red Square, launched MTV Russia and got driven home from a gay club by the police. But the freedoms witnessed by Pet Shop Boys have been crushed. Singer Neil Tennant relives those heady days – and calls for a revolution
The journalist Andrey Sapozhnikov ofNovaya Gazeta Europe, the independent Russian newspaper that now operates from Latvia in order to avoid censorship by Putin’s regime, recently asked Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys: “You have been actively commenting on Russian politics since 2013 and the Pussy Riot case, and you are arguably one of the most engaged western artists in relation to the Russian context today. Why do you care so deeply about what is happening specifically in Russia?” Here is his reply, which the Guardian is publishing in English.
I have been interested in Russia since reading a book when I was a young boy about the 1917 revolutions. It fascinated me that the Russian empire was replaced by another empire, the Soviet Union, which unleashed a lot of energy but rapidly became a brutal dictatorship under Stalin, a 20th-century Ivan the Terrible. Since then I have read a lot about Soviet culture, particularly the work and struggles of Shostakovich and Prokofiev and other artists, writers, musicians. This interest fed into the lyrics I wrote. For instance My October Symphony, or indeed our first hit single, West End Girls: “In every city, in every nation / From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station.”
Daughter accuses government of ‘kidnapping’ ex-president as victims of ‘war on drugs’ express jubilation at arrest
Lawyers for Rodrigo Duterte have demanded that he be returned to Manila in a petition filed to the supreme court, as victims of the former Philippine president’s bloody “war on drugs” expressed jubilation.
Duterte, who was flown to The Hague on Tuesday night to face charges of crimes against humanity in relation to anti-drugs crackdowns, is the first former Asian leader to be served an arrest warrant filed by the ICC. Activists say as many as 30,000 people were killed in the “war on drugs”.
Connexion
