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Xi Jinping begins four-day Russia visit as Ukrainian drones attack Moscow

Chinese leader will attend Victory Day parade and hold talks with Vladimir Putin

Xi Jinping has arrived in Moscow at the start of a four-day visit to attend Russia’s military parade commemorating the anniversary of the end of the second world war, known in Russia as Victory Day.

The Chinese leader’s arrival coincided with Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian capital. Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said Russia’s air defence units destroyed at least 14 Ukrainian drones overnight.

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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

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Starmer tells MPs that criticism of UK-India trade deal is ‘incoherent nonsense’ – UK politics live

PM says deal is a ‘huge win’ for Britons as MPs press him over winter fuel cuts during PMQs

Keir Starmer starts by saying rising tensions between India and Pakistan will be of serious concern for many across Britain. The government is enouraging de-escalation, he says.

He says tomorrow the nation will fall silent to commemorate VE Day. The armed forces protect our freedom, he says.

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© Photograph: Parliament Live

© Photograph: Parliament Live

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Real-world geoengineering experiments revealed by UK agency

Trials will test ways to block sunlight and slow climate crisis that threatens to trigger catastrophic tipping points

Real-world geoengineering experiments spanning the globe from the Arctic to the Great Barrier Reef are being funded by the UK government. They will test sun-reflecting particles in the stratosphere, brightening reflective clouds using sprays of seawater and pumping water on to sea ice to thicken it.

Getting this “critical missing scientific data” is vital with the Earth nearing several catastrophic climate tipping points, said the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), the government agency backing the plan. If demonstrated to be safe, geoengineering could temporarily cool the planet and give more time to tackle the root cause of the climate crisis: the burning of fossil fuels.

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© Photograph: Kazimierz Jurewicz/Alamy

© Photograph: Kazimierz Jurewicz/Alamy

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Minerals, mobile phones and militias: how war unfolded in DRC

How the global wrangle for natural resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is fuelling one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises

Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, after three months of fighting, a peace agreement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is in the works. I spoke to our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, about the conflict, how quickly it escalated and the prospects for peace.

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© Illustration: Joe Plimmer/Guardian pictures/Louis Tato/AFP/Getty/Alamy

© Illustration: Joe Plimmer/Guardian pictures/Louis Tato/AFP/Getty/Alamy

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You are the head coach: Guardian writers choose their own Lions squads

We asked our rugby experts to elbow Andy Farrell aside and install themselves as the man in charge. This is who they picked and why

Build the team around The majority of my spine players come in the pack. In some areas the leading candidate is a cut above the rest and none more so than Dan Sheehan at hooker. He’s nailed on as first choice. I’d put Maro Itoje in that bracket too and, due to lack of alternatives, I would’ve had Caelan Doris before news of his shoulder injury emerged. Perhaps the most important player is the one back I’ve selected in this category, however. Jamison Gibson-Park has been so exceptionally consistent and is someone you can look to build around. You build a team around your players of influence and, for me, they are Sheehan, Itoje and Gibson-Park.

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© Composite: Guardian Picture Desk

© Composite: Guardian Picture Desk

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‘It’ll be solemn, enshrining his ashes’: statue of Lemmy to be unveiled in his home town of Stoke-on-Trent

Cast in bronze by sculptor Andy Edwards and containing the legendary Motörhead frontman’s DNA, the effigy underscores the West Midlands’ rock heritage

“That’s the street where Lemmy lived,” says sculptor Andy Edwards as we drive into the town of Burslem in the north of Stoke-on-Trent, past terrace houses and a ceramics factory. This Friday, a motorcade will travel the same route to Burslem’s Market Place to unveil a statue of the late Motörhead frontman, 10 years since his death – and 50 years since the metal band’s founding.

Phil Campbell, Motörhead’s longest-serving guitarist, will be there, placing a portion of Lemmy Kilmister’s ashes into the plinth. “It’ll be wonderful, finally getting an incredible statue in his home town,” says Campbell. “It’ll be solemn in a way, with enshrining his ashes, but also a celebration of the music and the fantastic character he was. Anything to do with Lem is significant and really special. He’s missed by many. He’s still in my dreams two or three times a week, getting on my case about something.”

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© Photograph: Andy Edwards

© Photograph: Andy Edwards

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‘Maduro did not close our bureau – Trump did’: Voice of America journalists speak out

Workers at the esteemed news service say they’re being silenced by the president – but they’re vowing to fight back

Carolina Valladares Pérez, a Washington-based correspondent for the government-funded international news service Voice of America, has reported from places where press freedom is severely restricted – war zones and autocratic states – in the Middle East and across Latin America. Intimidation and threats from state officials were not unusual – but she always managed to get the story out.

Now for the first time in her career, Valladares Pérez says she has been silenced – not by a faraway regime, but by the government of the United States.

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© Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

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Trump administration to stop US research on space pollution, in boon to Elon Musk

SpaceX and Starlink owner may benefit from Trump cuts to projects that could have led to regulations and costs

The Trump administration is poised to kill federal research into pollution from satellites and rockets, including some caused by Elon Musk’s space companies, raising new conflict-of-interest questions about the billionaire SpaceX and Starlink owner.

The pollution appears to be accumulating in the stratosphere at alarming levels. Some fear it could destroy the ozone layer, potentially expose some people to higher levels of ultraviolet radiation or help further destabilize the earth’s climate during the climate crisis.

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© Photograph: ESA/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: ESA/AFP/Getty Images

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Huma Bhabha review – ‘Giacometti is a foil to her flamboyance. She is today’s Picasso’

Barbican, London
The Pakistani-American sculptor’s traumatised patchwork people more than hold their own against the great Swiss artist’s striding, emaciated statues in this thrilling clash

An artist has to ask big questions and have intense thoughts to get away with exhibiting among the profound masterpieces of Alberto Giacometti. I didn’t give much for Huma Bhabha’s chances. But she takes the Barbican’s new daylit art gallery by storm.

Grey morning light from windows that look across the brutalist ponds at St Giles Cripplegate pours through big holes in her 2019 sculpture Mask of Dimitrios. This roughly assembled human figure has plastic bags for breasts – not inflated but sagging pieces of dirty polythene – a metal chair for a skeleton enhanced by blackened dog bones, plaster arms and legs, a battered tray for a face, all tacked together over an inner emptiness.

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© Photograph: PR

© Photograph: PR

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Fox Chase Boy: standup comedy confronts trauma in a Catholic community

There is surprising nostalgia and humour in Gerad Argeros’s story of healing after child abuse by a Catholic priest. He was an altar boy at St Cecilia Catholic church in north-east Philadelphia when, at age 11, he became one of the victims of paedophile James Brzyski. Decades later, the actor and father developed the one-man stage show Fox Chase Boy. Performing it to his close-knit parish he speaks directly about a crime cloaked in silence, and brings welcome insight into their collective trauma

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© Photograph: Gerad Argeros

© Photograph: Gerad Argeros

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Woman wins £30,000 compensation for being compared to Darth Vader

Croydon employment tribunal rules NHS worker Lorna Rooke suffered workplace ‘detriment’

Comparing someone at work to the Star Wars villain Darth Vader is “insulting” and “upsetting”, an employment tribunal has ruled.

A judge concluded that being told you have the same personality type as the infamous sci-fi baddie is a workplace “detriment” – a legal term meaning harm or negative impact experienced by a person.

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© Photograph: LUCASFILM/Allstar

© Photograph: LUCASFILM/Allstar

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Ocean with David Attenborough review – a passionate case against the ruination of the seas

Released on his 99th birthday and presented in the context of his remarkable career, Sir David’s authority is matched only by nature’s grandeur in this visually stunning film

A visual marvel like all his work, governed by his own matchless authority and striking a steady tonal balance between warning and hope, David Attenborough’s new film about the oceans is absorbing and compelling. He makes a passionate case against the ruin caused by industrial overfishing and the sinister mega-trawlers which roam everywhere, raking the seabed with their vast metal nets, brutally and wastefully hoovering up fish populations of which the majority is often simply thrown away, depleting developing countries and fishing communities of their share. Attenborough says that this is the new colonialism. The film is released in cinemas in anticipation of the UN’s World Oceans Day in June, which is campaigning for 30% of the world’s oceans to be preserved from exploitation – at present, only around 3% is protected in this way.

As he arrives at his 99th birthday, Sir David presents this new documentary in the context of his own remarkable life and career, studying and thinking about the oceans as the last part of the world to be fully understood and also, perhaps, the last part to be exploited – and despoiled. As he says, until relatively recently, the ocean was regarded as a kind of mysterious, undifferentiated Sahara, a wilderness, of interest largely for providing an apparently endless supply of food. But he shows us an amazing vista of diversity and life, an extraordinary undulating landscape, a giant second planet of whose existence humanity has long been unaware but now seems in danger of damaging or even destroying.

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© Photograph: Olly Scholey/Silverback Films and Open Planet Studios

© Photograph: Olly Scholey/Silverback Films and Open Planet Studios

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Does your child identify as a cat? There’s a man in Texas who can help | Arwa Mahdawi

Are schools really providing litter trays for kids whose pronouns are Puss and Purr? Or is state representative Stan Gerdes just stoking the culture war with his proposed FURRIES Act?

Move over, Wagatha Christie: Furlock Holmes is investigating “non-human behaviour” in Texas schools. A Republican state representative called Stan Gerdes recently filed a bill called the Forbidden Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Educational Spaces (FURRIES) Act, which would ban schoolkids from acting like animals. No hissing during history, no meowing during maths, and absolutely no relieving yourself in a litter box during lunch break, according to the FURRIES Act.

Are animal impersonations a serious issue in Texas’s schools? Gerdes insists so, noting in a press release that he had heard reports of a “furry-related incident” in at least one school. When pressed on the issue, however, he was unable to provide any actual evidence of schools providing litter boxes for students who identify as felines.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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© Photograph: Posed by model; real444/Getty Images

© Photograph: Posed by model; real444/Getty Images

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‘It’s like putting a whale in a blender’: the rise of deadly ship collisions in Chile

On average, five fatal whale strikes occur in the country’s waters each year, the highest in the world – and just a fraction of the total number killed, say researchers

  • Photographs by Francis Pérez

The memory of a blue whale gliding past his small boat haunts Patricio Ortiz. A deep wound disfigured the cetacean’s giant body – a big chunk had been ripped from its dorsal fin. Cargo ships are the only adversary capable of inflicting such harm on a blue whale, he says.

“Nothing can be done when they’re up against those floating monsters.”

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© Photograph: Francis Pérez/The Guardian

© Photograph: Francis Pérez/The Guardian

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New reports tell us cattle and sheep farming can be sustainable – don’t believe them, it’s all bull | George Monbiot

Feeding the world sustainably is an incredibly complex challenge, yet some people are trying to sell us a bucolic fairytale

The fire that has just destroyed 500 hectares (1,230 acres) of Dartmoor should have been impossible. It should not be a fire-prone landscape. But sheep, cattle and ponies have made it so. They selectively browse out tree seedlings, preventing the return of temperate rainforest, which is extremely difficult to burn. In dry weather, the moor grass, bracken and heather covering the deforested landscape are tinder.

The plume of carbon dioxide and smoke released this week is one of the many impacts of livestock grazing. But several recent films, alongside celebrities, politicians, billionaires and far-right podcasts, seek to persuade us that cattle and sheep are good for the atmosphere and the living planet. This story, wrapped in romantic cottagecore, is now the most active and seductive frontier of climate-science denial. It is heavily promoted by the meat industry, which is as ruthless and machiavellian as the fossil fuel industry. It sows confusion among people desperately seeking to do the right thing in an age of misinformation.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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© Illustration: Bill Bragg/The Guardian

© Illustration: Bill Bragg/The Guardian

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China to cut interest rates in response to trade war with US

Half-point cut to be made to banks’ reserve requirement ratio and 1tn yuan released into banking system

China will cut interest rates and inject some much-needed liquidity into the domestic economy, as the country steels itself for a bruising trade war with the US.

The People’s Bank of China said on Wednesday it would make a half-point cut to the banks’ reserve requirement ratio, its benchmark interest rate, and release 1tn yuan (£103.6bn) into the banking system.

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© Photograph: Héctor Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Héctor Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

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Norwegian fan trades five kilos of fish for ticket to Bodø/Glimt v Tottenham

  • Supporter with spare ticket took the bait over offer
  • Around 50,000 supporters vying for just 480 seats

A Norwegian bartered five kilos of semi-dried fish for a ticket to Thursday’s semi-final clash between Bodø/Glimt and Tottenham in the Arctic Circle, as the hosts aim to become the first Norwegian club to reach a European final.

Some 50,000 fans were vying for just 480 remaining tickets to the second leg of Bodø/Glimt’s Europa League semi-final.

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© Photograph: Alex Pantling/UEFA/Getty Images

© Photograph: Alex Pantling/UEFA/Getty Images

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The Spin | Phones, sweets and sandpaper: a pocket history of cricketers’ unusual items

The mobile that fell out of Tom Bailey’s trousers when he was batting isn’t the strangest thing players have secreted in their whites

When Tom Bailey’s mobile phone fell out of his pocket on Saturday as he was turning for a quick second during Lancashire’s Championship match with Gloucestershire, it brought some cheap laughs, as well as a sharp letter of warning from the ECB’s anti-corruption officer. It was also another chapter in cricket’s pocket history: from sandpaper to sandwiches. What, as Gollum pondered, has it got in its pocketses?

For Derbyshire left-arm spinner Fred Swarbrook, the answer was a lucky pebble. After developing the yips, a psychologist had advised him to take a stone on to the pitch and rub it before he was about to bowl. Sadly, it didn’t work and the luckless Swarbrook was forced to retire.

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© Photograph: LancsTV

© Photograph: LancsTV

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‘Climate change is real’: devastating wildfire photography – in pictures

Artist and photographer Phil Buehler captured some of the worst-hit properties from this year’s Eaton Fire in Altadena, Los Angeles and assembled them for this year’s Spring/Break art show taking place in New York City until 12 May. The exhibit will include a cyclorama with some of the 9/11 calls during the fires playing softly in the background

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© Photograph: Phil Buehler Pwbuehler@gmail.com/Phil Buehler

© Photograph: Phil Buehler Pwbuehler@gmail.com/Phil Buehler

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‘I missed talking math with people’: why John Urschel left the NFL for MIT

The former Baltimore Ravens guard had a lucrative career in professional football. But he chose to concentrate on his first love in academia

John Urschel lifts the blinds in his second-floor office in the mathematics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Outside is Cambridge in all of its springtime splendor on a mid-April afternoon. Everything about his office says “college professor” – the computer on one side of the desk, the stack of papers on the other, the books on the shelves behind him.

He grins through his beard and his eyes sparkle behind his glasses when he describes his research in linear algebra. When he gestures enthusiastically, you can imagine those huge hands protecting his quarterback from opposing pass rushers – which he once did as a guard for the Baltimore Ravens.

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© Photograph: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize

© Photograph: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize

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Two-thirds of global heating caused by richest 10%, study suggests

Paper in Nature Climate Change journal reveals major role wealthy emitters play in driving climate extremes

The world’s wealthiest 10% are responsible for two-thirds of global heating since 1990, driving droughts and heatwaves in the poorest parts of the world, according to a study.

While researchers have previously shown that higher income groups emit disproportionately large amounts of greenhouse gases, the latest survey is the first to try to pin down how that inequality translates into responsibility for climate breakdown. It offers a powerful argument for climate finance and wealth taxes by attempting to give an evidential basis for how many people in the developed world – including more than 50% of full-time employees in the UK – bear a heightened responsibility for the climate disasters affecting people who can least afford it.

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© Photograph: Hassan Ali Elmi/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Hassan Ali Elmi/AFP/Getty Images

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Biden accuses Trump of ‘modern-day appeasement’ towards Russia

In his first interview since leaving office, former US president told the BBC he fears for US-Europe relations

Joe Biden has accused Donald Trump of “modern-day appeasement” in his approach to Russia and expressed fears that Europe would “lose confidence in the certainty of America” in his first interview since leaving the White House in January.

“He [Vladimir Putin] believes it [Russia] has historical rights to Ukraine,” Biden told the BBC. Anybody who thought the Russian president would stop if Kyiv conceded territory, as recently proposed by Trump, “is just foolish”, he said.

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© Photograph: BBC

© Photograph: BBC

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Looming US-China trade talks lift Asian stock markets; China cuts interest rates – business live

People’s Bank of China says interest rate cut due to global uncertainty and ‘trade tensions’

Denmark’s Novo Nordisk has cut its revenue and profit forecasts for this year following disappointing sales of its weight loss drug Wegovy, as US prescriptions tailed off amid fierce competition.

Booming sales of Wegovy and the diabetes medication Ozempic helped to turn the pharmaceutical firm into Europe’s most valuable listed company, worth $615bn at its peak.

Obesity drug maker Novo Nordisk looked like a lean profit machine but its sales are turning flabbier as main rival Eli Lily gains more muscle in the space.

In the first quarter of 2025, we delivered 18% sales growth and continued to expand the reach of our innovative GLP-1 treatments.

However, we have reduced our full-year outlook due to lower than-planned branded GLP-1 penetration, which is impacted by the rapid expansion of compounding in the US.

Novo Nordisk has lashed out at the controversial US compounding industry in its quarterly update, citing a focus on preventing unlawful formulations of semaglutide, the active ingredient in its weight-loss wonder jab Wegovy. In some cases US compounding pharmacies are allowed to formulate active medical ingredients into non-approved drugs to meet individual requirements or combat shortfalls in supply.

Wegovy sales growth in the US was hardly pedestrian,at 39%, but it was international sales that drove most of the 83% uplift, as new markets open up. None of this was enough to prevent a downgrade to full-year guidance.

There’s a clampdown on compounders, but question marks remain over its enforcement. The end of the shortage also raises questions about the health of US demand. That’s also reflected in Novo’s deal last week with a US healthcare provider to provide Wegovy to patients at a discounted rate of $499.

There’s intense competition too from Eli Lilly, both in injectables and in the race to bring an oral alternative to the market. These challenges have been reflected in a 40% decline in the share price over the last six months. Novo remains a key player in the biggest shift in healthcare treatment of our generation. This could mark an attractive entry point for opportunistic investors, but there’s a real job to do to restore market confidence.

Currently, the obesity market is still dominated by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, but there are numerous clinical trials ongoing with competitors looking to enter the space.

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© Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

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New pope will face ‘complex moment in history’, senior cardinal says, before conclave to select Pope Francis’ successor – live

Cardinals set to meet behind closed doors of Sistine Chapel to decide who will become new pope

If you’d rather get up to date on the pomp and the politics of the conclave, the process to elect Pope Francis’s successor, good news: we’ve got you covered.

It is, as Guardian journalist Harriet Sherwood explains, an election rich in ceremony and ritual. Yet it can get very dirty too: cardinals lobbying in corridors and Vatican gardens; allegations of leaks to the media to discredit rivals; even the emergence of a video of one cardinal – a bookies’ favourite to be the next pope – singing ‘atheist anthem’ Imagine by John Lennon.

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© Photograph: Murad Sezer/Reuters

© Photograph: Murad Sezer/Reuters

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Danish firm shelves huge UK windfarm project over rising costs

Ørsted cancels fourth stage of Hornsea project off Yorkshire coast, which was expected to include 180 giant turbines

One of the UK’s largest planned offshore windfarms has been cancelled by its developer, the Danish wind power company Ørsted, as a result of higher costs and greater risk.

The fourth phase of the huge Hornsea windfarm development, located off the Yorkshire coast, was expected to include 180 giant turbines, capable of generating the equivalent of enough green electricity to power 1m homes.

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© Photograph: Orsted/EPA

© Photograph: Orsted/EPA

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Riefenstahl review – nauseating yet gripping story of Nazi poster woman

The only important woman in the Nazi movement entranced Hitler, directed Triumph of the Will – and spent the rest of her life alternately fearful and defiant

Andres Veiel’s sombre documentary tells the gripping, incrementally nauseating story of Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl, the brilliant and pioneering German film-maker of the 20th century who isn’t getting her name on a Girls on Tops T-shirt any time soon.

Riefenstahl was a dancer and actor in prewar movies by Arnold Fanck and GW Pabst, whose performance in 1932 in The Blue Light, her own Aryan romantic fantasy as director-star, entranced the Führer and secured her two historic directing commissions: Triumph of the Will in 1935, a monumentally euphoric and grandiose account of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, and Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Games, with whose undoubtedly stunning images and choreography Riefenstahl effectively invented the modern-day Olympics with its opening and closing ceremonies and media coverage.

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© Photograph: BetaCinema/Riefenstahl copyright/Landesarchiv/BadenWuerttemberg

© Photograph: BetaCinema/Riefenstahl copyright/Landesarchiv/BadenWuerttemberg

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The Illegals by Shaun Walker review – gripping true stories of spies who lived deep undercover

An eye-opening account of the old Soviet tactic of embedding secret agents where you’d least expect them

One of the best series of the golden age of TV drama, The Americans (2013-2018), centred on a pair of Russian sleeper agents operating in suburban Washington DC during the height of the cold war. By day they seemed to be a boring married American couple; by night they set honey traps, sabotaged facilities, recruited traitors and assassinated enemies.

That story was based in part on the real-life pair of “illegals” – as spies living under deep cover in civil society are called – Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov, who pretended to be Canadians living in Cambridge, Massachussetts, until their arrest and deportation in 2010. In reality, they weren’t so successful: owing to the turning of another Soviet agent, they were closely monitored by the FBI for years and never managed anything nefarious enough to make it worth charging them with espionage.

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© Photograph: Dreamworks/Amblin/Fx/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Dreamworks/Amblin/Fx/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

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Amazon makes ‘fundamental leap forward in robotics’ with device having sense of touch

Vulcan device ‘capable of grabbing three-quarters of items in warehouses’ fuels fears of mass job losses

Amazon said it has made a “fundamental leap forward in robotics” after developing a robot with a sense of touch that will be capable of grabbing about three-quarters of the items in its vast warehouses.

Vulcan – which launches at the US firm’s “Delivering the Future” event in Dortmund, Germany, on Wednesday and is to be deployed around the world in the next few years – is designed to help humans sort items for storage and then prepare them for delivery as the latest in a suite of robots which have an ever-growing role in the online retailer’s extensive operation.

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© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

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Chilavert, choripán and children: a night with Argentina’s champions

Most fans who visit Buenos Aires want to watch Boca or River. I plumped for reigning champions Vélez Sarsfield

By The Football Mine

When imagining a football match in Buenos Aires many fans visualise La Bombonera shuddering to its foundations by the jumping mass of blue and yellow Boca Juniors supporters or the majestic Estadio Monumental bedecked in streams of ticker tape when hosting Argentina’s victory in the World Cup final in 1978. Last Sunday, the Monumental was at full capacity as 85,000 fans watched River Plate beat Boca 2-1 in a tense Superclásico. However, a few weeks ago my experience of going to a football match in Buenos Aires was very different indeed.

As I discovered when planning my trip to Buenos Aires, gaining admission to one of the Argentinian capital’s largest clubs, such as Boca or River Plate, is by no means straightforward. Both clubs have significant numbers of members, with more than 340,000 each (only Real Madrid have more). These socios have priority when it comes to buying tickets so there is limited availability. One of the only ways to buy tickets in advance is through a third party, who charge $150 upwards. Kick-off times are only announced a week or so in advance, which makes life even more complicated.

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© Photograph: Agustín Marcarian/Reuters

© Photograph: Agustín Marcarian/Reuters

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Trajectory, vibe, a sense of progress: why Arsenal can’t afford a Paris mismatch | Barney Ronay

There is a fair chance Mikel Arteta’s team won’t beat Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League. If they must lose, lose right

Is this thing … still on? After last week’s strangely enervated first-leg performance against Paris Saint-Germain at the Emirates Stadium it has been tempting to get a bit ahead of things, to see Arsenal’s season as already a zombie entity, still out there walking around the place, limbs twitching, skinny hands rattling the perimeter fence, not exactly dead, but not too far from undead.

On Monday night, even, Paris police declared Wednesday’s return leg at the Parc des Princes an event “of no particular concern”, as in no great flashpoints, no obvious tension. Just don’t tell Mikel Arteta that. And not just because rumours of the death of Arsenal’s season are widely exaggerated. There is even a nightmare scenario available to the club’s supporters, a product of the deep banter-verse, where Arsenal don’t make the Champions League next season but Tottenham do. All they need to do is keep losing while others win, and while slack, stitched-together Spurs bundle through Bodø/Glimt and a beta Manchester United, thereby banking their £100m jackpot while finishing 16th in the league.

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© Photograph: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC/Getty Images

© Photograph: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC/Getty Images

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Geraint Thomas: ‘It’s been up and down. You remember the good times’

Tour de France winner in 2018 is building for a final assault on the great race before a farewell in Cardiff

“Bike racing is all I have ever known,” says Geraint Thomas of the 19-year professional career that will end this summer with one final Tour de France and a farewell appearance in the Tour of Britain.

While many of his peers are relishing a Tadej Pogacar-free Giro d’Italia that starts on Friday, the 2018 Tour winner has opted against three weeks in Italy, favouring one last ride in July’s French hothouse.

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© Photograph: Dario Belingheri/Getty Images

© Photograph: Dario Belingheri/Getty Images

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Erin Patterson discharged herself five minutes after doctor warned she may have death cap mushroom poisoning, court hears

Doctor tells Victorian triple murder trial he called the police in a bid to have Patterson return to the hospital

A doctor who treated Erin Patterson has told her triple murder trial that he was surprised she discharged herself from hospital five minutes after being told she may have been exposed to potentially fatal mushroom poisoning.

Dr Christopher Webster, who was working at the Leongatha hospital two days after Patterson served beef wellington to her in-laws for lunch, gave evidence on Wednesday at the Latrobe Valley law courts in Morwell.

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© Photograph: James Ross/EPA

© Photograph: James Ross/EPA

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Race for Liberal leadership turns bitter as Peter Dutton vows ‘graceful silence’ on question of his successor

Angus Taylor’s allies have dismissed speculation he is poised to pull out and clear a path for Sussan Ley to lead the party’s rebuild

The race for the Liberal leadership is becoming bitter as Angus Taylor’s allies dismiss speculation he is poised to pull out and clear the path for Sussan Ley to lead the party rebuild after Saturday’s election disaster.

It comes as Peter Dutton made his first brief remarks since his concession speech on Saturday night, saying he intended to make a “graceful exit” from politics.

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© Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

© Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

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By calling a genocide a genocide, Andor just made its most political point yet

Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars show has repeatedly felt like it was ripped from today’s headlines – but Mon Mothma’s radical speech was written two years ago

  • Warning: this contains spoilers for episode nine of Andor season two

Since it started in 2022, the Star Wars spin-off Andor has proved an unexpectedly bolshie addition to the Disney-owned mega-franchise. By portraying worker uprisings, surveillance states, sexual violence and prison industrial complexes, showrunner Tony Gilroy added fresh political nuance and human stakes to George Lucas’s endless galactic civil war.

And since its April premiere, the show’s second and final season has only doubled down. In the first episode, viewers saw smarmy spin doctors from the Empire’s “Ministry of Enlightenment” discuss how to “weaponise” galactic opinion to manufacture public approval for ethnic cleansing on the planet Ghorman. News anchors parrot Imperial talking points, while the military plots a long game: to provoke an uprising from “rebels you can depend on to do the wrong thing” to justify a mass crackdown – all in service of a long-planned land and resources grab.

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© Photograph: Lucasfilm Ltd™

© Photograph: Lucasfilm Ltd™

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The Names by Florence Knapp – the verdict on spring’s hottest debut

In this strikingly assured sliding doors tale, three alternate narratives unfold, showing how the choice of a name influences a life

What’s in a name? More than Shakespeare might have led us to believe, according to research. Ever since 1985, when a study found that people tend to prefer the letters of their own initials over the other letters of the alphabet, research has confirmed the name-letter effect, proving that not only do consumers favour brands matching their initials, they are actually more likely to donate to relief efforts for a natural disaster such as a hurricane if they share an initial with that disaster. How far the name-letter effect influences our bigger life decisions – where we live, our choices of career or life partner – remains contentious, but there are clear indicators that, far from serving simply as identifiers, the names we are given at birth have the power to influence our psychological, social and economic outcomes.

Florence Knapp’s strikingly assured debut novel, The Names, takes this idea and gives it a high-concept twist. It is October 1987 and Cora, trapped in a wretched and abusive marriage, has just had a second baby, a son. As she and her nine-year-old daughter Maia push the pram together through the debris of the Great Storm to register the birth, they talk about names. Cora’s husband Gordon has always insisted that the baby will take his name, a tradition passed down through his family, but Cora shrinks from the prospect. It is not just that she dislikes the name Gordon, “the way it starts with a splintering wound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a downward thud like someone slamming down a sports bag”. She fears that the name will force an unwelcome shape on her baby son, corrupting his innocence, locking him into a chain of violent, domineering men. Cora prefers Julian which, in her book of baby names, means sky father; she nurses the naive hope that, since the name honours Gordon’s paternity, he will find it an acceptable compromise. Meanwhile, Maia suggests Bear because it sounds “all soft and cuddly and kind … but also, brave and strong”.

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© Photograph: Sophie Davidson

© Photograph: Sophie Davidson

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‘Government pays!’: hereditary peer faces questions over expenses claim for business trip

Earl of Shrewsbury offers to reimburse taxpayer over use of first-class ticket and his ‘erroneous’ claims

A Conservative hereditary peer, who was previously punished for breaking the House of Lords rules, is facing fresh questions over whether he breached them again after he admitted he “erroneously” made claims last year for travel expenses he did not incur.

After inquiries by the Guardian, the Earl of Shrewsbury said he has offered to reimburse the taxpayer for the travel expenses he claimed, and any sums that could be due from part of a first-class ticket he used to attend a board meeting of a commercial company.

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© Composite: Guardian Design/AP/UK Parliament

© Composite: Guardian Design/AP/UK Parliament

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I travelled the length and breadth of Luxembourg by bus – and it didn’t cost me a penny

With free public transport for all – including tourists - exploring the vineyards, mysterious canyons and lush forests of the Grand Duchy couldn’t be easier

I am not sure what surprises me most when I get off the train at Luxembourg’s main station – the sheer friendliness of locals who seem to greet everyone as they pass by with a cheery Moien (hello), or the fact that from this point I will not be paying a penny to travel the length and breadth of the Grand Duchy.

Five years ago, Luxembourg became the first country in the world to actively tackle its carbon footprint by making all public transport free for everyone, including tourists. So I have come to see how it works in practice, aiming to travel to the country’s little known vineyards hugging the slopes along the Moselle River and then trek through the mysterious canyons and forests of the Mullerthal region.

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© Photograph: M_K/Alamy

© Photograph: M_K/Alamy

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