A beautiful lake, gorgeous fabric: how could the Myanmar photographer resist?
When Aung Chan Thar was 25, he was selected to represent Myanmar as part of Asean Centre for Biodiversity’s (ACB) Young Asean Storytellers programme. A cohort of 20 young artists and writers visited Asean Heritage Parks in their own countries to tell stories of biodiversity, nature and culture.
Aung first travelled to Inlay Lake Wildlife Sanctuary, known for its floating gardens, in 2022. “The Intha people live around the lake and build floating houses: structures made from bamboo on stilts,” Aung says. “Fishing is a common occupation; they use their feet to paddle their boats. So is the production of colourful cloth.”
To win votes, Trump can afford to face up to corporate power – to deliver his promised 1.5m homes, Starmer can’t
In an incredibly polarised society, there are fewer and fewer things that seem to unite both sides of the aisle in the US political system. Yet it turns out that an objection to Wall Street’s grand heist of single-family homes has done just that.
We might expect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren to rail against the incursion of institutional investors into residential real estate markets, causing rent prices to jump and effectively locking millions of households out of home ownership. However, I admit I was surprised to see JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene striking a similar note. But I was completely dumbfounded to see the real estate tycoon and Wall Street darling Donald Trump sing from the same hymn sheet.
Adam Almeida is a writer and researcher living in London
Thousands of Palestinian cancer patients are living without treatment as they await medical evacuation
When the Gaza war began, Ismail Abu Naji was just 18 months old, his small body covered in swollen, bleeding lesions. Months earlier, doctors had diagnosed him with a rare blood cancer, one that, if untreated, is often a death sentence.
In the weeks before the war, Ismail’s family had arranged for him to be transferred to Al-Makassed hospital in Jerusalem, a charitable institution for Palestinians, for specialised care. But the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack that triggered the conflict meant Ismail could not leave the territory.
The adventurer on his family’s escape vessel, his crush on the Princess of Wales, and a disgusting toenail habit
Born in Northern Ireland, Bear Grylls, 51, served as a soldier in the 21 SAS regiment and went on to star in adventure series, including seven seasons of Discovery Channel’s Man vs Wild. Other shows are Running Wild With Bear Grylls, the Emmy award-winning You vs Wild, and Bafta-winning The Island With Bear Grylls. His new series, Wild Reckoning, starts on BBC One next month. He is married with three sons and lives in London, north Wales and Switzerland.
What is your greatest fear?
Small things make me anxious – like social things – but I have no big fears because I have faith in my heart.
The Philadelphia Union product has added end product to his trademark hustle – can he keep the good form going?
Timing is everything in a World Cup year, and Brenden Aaronson’s has been pretty much perfect.
Scoring a goal and putting in a top performance against your team’s biggest rival is something all players dream of. To do so when your family is watching in the stands and a reporter from your home town newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, is in the press box makes it all the better. Aaronson did all of the above at Elland Road for Leeds United against Manchester United earlier this month.
While the threat of retaliatory measures to stop the annexation of Greenland worked, it remains to be seen if Europe has the unity to follow through
The past couple of weeks have seen the most spectacular crisis escalation in the transatlantic relationship, over the US threat to annex Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark. It risked becoming a major conflict among the members of Nato, the most powerful security alliance in world history – until now.
On Wednesday, after a meeting with Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, the US president, Donald Trump, backtracked on his threats to slap tariffs on countries that got in the way of his annexation project. As European leaders huddled together over dinner for a post-crisis debrief in Brussels on 22 January, they congratulated themselves on their unity and appreciated the intervention of Rutte, or “Daddy diplomacy”. If these really were the conclusions of the latest debacle in transatlantic relations, they are missing important parts of the story.
The native of Thunder Bay, Canada, has been compared to Pablo Escobar and El Chapo – but is he really as big a figure as US prosecutors have claimed?
To compete at the highest levels of snowboarding, racers must master carving, edging and balance at speeds stretching the limits of imagination. They can fluently read the nuances of snow and fine-tune their bodies to cross the finish line faster than anyone else.
The Canadian snowboarder Ryan Wedding had these skills – but also the quality that catapults amateurs to an elite level: a highly competitive instinct to succeed that can at times manifest in a desire to crush fellow competitors.
Better regulation and enforcement urged before launch of oral treatments, which criminals are likely to try to exploit
Experts are warning that fake weight-loss treatments could become more prevalent as tablet forms of the medications, currently available only via injections in the UK, are launched.
They say stronger regulation and enforcement are needed to prevent fraudsters from cashing in on tablets which will be easier to counterfeit.
Osaka cites abdominal injury linked to prior pregnancy
Two-time champion withdraws before Inglis match
Naomi Osaka withdrew from the Australian Open just hours before she was due to take the court against the qualifier Maddison Inglis, citing an abdominal injury linked to body changes from her pregnancy.
The news landed late on a Saturday in Melbourne that had been heavily affected by soaring temperatures that triggered the tournament’s heat protocols, forcing arena roofs closed and suspending play on outside courts.
As a bookish child with a distant father and a disapproving mother, the Curious Incident author retreated into a world of his own. Looking back, he asks what it means to lose parents who never showed you love
When I see washed-out photographs of English life in the 60s and 70s – cardiganed grandmothers eating roadside picnics beside Morris Minors, pale men sunbathing in shoes and socks on stripy deckchairs, Raleigh Choppers and caged budgerigars and faux leather pouffes – I feel a wave of what can’t properly be called nostalgia, because the last thing I’d want is to return to that age and those places where I was often profoundly unhappy and from which I’d have been desperate to escape if escape had been a possibility. Why then this longing, this echo of some remembered comfort?
Is it that, as children, we live inside a bubble of focused attention that gives everything inside a memorable fierceness? The way one could lie, for example, on a lawn and look down into the jungle of the grass to see earwigs and woodlice lumbering between the pale green trunks like brontosauri lumbering between the ferns and gingkos of the Late Jurassic. The way a rucked bedspread could become a mountain range stretched below the wings of a badly painted Airfix Spitfire. Or do objects, in their constancy, provide consolation in a world where adults are unpredictable and distant and unloving?
Really, why wouldn’t you wash yourself after using the toilet? If you won’t listen to me, then listen to Zohran Mamdani – and get your straddle on
The first time I heard a bidet mentioned in the US – or at least what it’s used for – was at the start of an off-Broadway play I saw in 2015 called Threesome. An Egyptian-American couple are in bed waiting for a white man they’ve invited to join them for the tryst of the title. He bounds on to the stage after using the bathroom, and the couple yell at him, “Go back and wash your ass!”
Like that couple, and Threesome’s playwright, Yussef El Guindi, I’m Egyptian. In Egypt, bathrooms in every home, as well as those in public buildings, are fitted with some kind of contraption for washing after using the toilet: a bidet, a standalone low oval basin next to the toilet that one straddles – or, more popularly, a shattaf, a fixture in the toilet itself through which water streams out. Sometimes, the shattaf is a small showerhead attached to the wall next to the toilet. I’ve recently learned that its name in English is a bum gun. It’s my favourite kind of shattaf, because you can control the water pressure.
Health secretary will describe plan to offer tax relief on private healthcare as ‘tax cut for the wealthiest’
Reform UK’s policy of tax relief on private health insurance could cost the country £1.7bn, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, is expected to say on Saturday.
Streeting will make the claim at a conference organised by the Fabian Society, a socialist thinktank aligned to the Labour party, and will describe the Reform proposal as a “tax cut for the wealthiest”.
All the news, discussion and buildup before a busy day of football
In the WSL today, the two most successful women’s teams in England go head-to-head in a London derby as Chelsea host Arsenal at Stamford Bridge. A win today would see the Blues move within three points of league leaders Manchester City, while victory for Arsenal could prove huge in the race for Champions League qualification and potentially – though unlikely at this stage – the title race.
West Ham, who host Sunderland later, have agreed to terminate Guido Rodriguez’s contract by mutual consent. The Argentina midfielder is heading to Valencia. West Ham are also pushing to complete a deal for the Fulham winger Adama Traore.
3rd over: Sri Lanka 7-0 (Nissanka 4, Mishara 1) A decent maiden from Overton who beats a driving Mishara with one that jags away late off the seam. Bright sunshine beating down in Colombo, it looks a scorcher. If England have to chase leather for 50 overs they could be a bit cooked later on.
2nd over: Sri Lanka 7-0 (Nissanka 4, Mishara 1) Sam Curran zips in from t’other end. He starts with a wide outside off and then is too straight, flicked off the hip by Mishara for a single.
Partnership with tech giant speaks to push to engage younger fans but also has wider strategic goals in mind
In this World Cup year, Fifa has come out of the blocks quickly. In the past few weeks any number of initiatives have been announced or activated, from a data partnership with Opta to facilitate more betting, to the Fifa Pass for speeding up visa applications for the US this summer, to the unveiling of the official Lego World Cup trophy. Among the ever-expanding list is an intriguing deal with TikTok, a partnership that will give digital creators front-row seats at the 104-match tournament.
In Fifa language its partnership with the short-form video platform will make “the most inclusive event in football history … even more accessible”. According to TikTok’s global head of content, James Stafford, it will bring fans “closer to the action in ways they can’t get anywhere else”. It plans to do so by granting an unspecified number of online personalities behind-the-scenes access, giving them archive and highlights footage to use in their content and, in return, requesting an avalanche of posts that will make the World Cup inescapable for TikTok users.
Shift in relations and unpredictability of Donald Trump make it ‘risky to store so much gold in the US’, say experts
Germany is facing calls to withdraw its billions of euros’ worth of gold from US vaults, spurred on by the shift in transatlantic relations and the unpredictability of Donald Trump.
Germany holds the world’s second biggest national gold reserves after the US, of which approximately €164bn (£122bn) worth – 1,236 tonnes – is stored in New York.
Manager keen to finish season strongly after accusing chair of abandoning him and the squad by selling Marc Guéhi
Oliver Glasner was about 54 minutes into his latest press conference when he laid out the plan for how his truce with the Crystal Palace chair, Steve Parish, could work after they ate together this week.
“Steve and I left our dinner, and really both with a big smile we said: ‘Hey, we achieved so much all together here in the last 22 months. We don’t want and we don’t accept that this ends like the last three, four, five weeks have been. We don’t accept it.’ So we stick together, we work hard all together to get an ending this season that it deserves.
Sunday’s table-topping clash with Hearts is a fixture that carries huge meaning for both clubs
It is instructive that Thursday evening’s Europa League clash in Bologna could be regarded by Celtic as an inconvenience. Aberdeen hold the Scottish Cup. St Mirren claimed the League Cup in December. Celtic find themselves involved in a title race worthy of the name. In short, domestic dominance is no longer a guarantee.
Much has been said – and screamed – about the flow of poor decision-making that at least has Celtic’s hitherto immovable position in Scotland under threat. There has also been wild exaggeration in respect of the current crop of Celtic and Rangers players being among the worst in living memory. Celtic finished fourth and adrift of Motherwell in successive seasons from 1993. Rangers rattled around unconvincingly in the lower divisions, including a failed attempt to win promotion from the second tier, after their financial meltdown of 2012. The relative weakness of others in Scotland’s top flight is a reasonable point for debate but Old Firm fans have encountered much, much worse than this.
Once dismissed as a basement game, table tennis is enjoying an unlikely US revival as the Oscar-tipped biopic Marty Supreme collides with a wave of new players
For decades in the US, table tennis has lived a double life: one of the most widely played sports in the country, yet still dismissed by many as a basement pursuit. Now, unexpectedly, it is having a cultural moment.
The release of Marty Supreme, a film steeped in obsession and myth, and loosely based on postwar American table tennis champion Marty Reisman, has pushed ping-pong into the pop-culture mainstream – just as US Major League Table Tennis sells out matches, clubs report growing interest, and younger players pick up paddles for the first time.
Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack targeting Ukraine’s two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, early on Saturday, as US, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in the United Arab Emirates for the second day of tripartite peace talks.
“Peace efforts? Trilateral meeting in the UAE? Diplomacy? For Ukrainians, this was another night of Russian terror,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, said after the latest Russian assault on critical infrastructure.
In this week’s newsletter: As his movie Bulk tours indie cinemas, director Ben Wheatley recommends the oddball influences that fuelled his most unconventional work
Few directors currently working merit the title of ‘cult hero’ more than Ben Wheatley. Over a 15-year-plus career, the British film-maker has dabbled in just about every cinematic genre and style imaginable: psychedelic horror (A Field in England, In the Earth), grimy video nasty (Kill List), stylish, gun-toting thrillers (Free Fire), murderous Mike Leigh homages (Down Terrace, Sightseers), literary adaptations (Rebecca, High-Rise), and even a whopping great studio monster movie (Meg 2: The Trench).
Wheatley’s latest film further cements that cult status. Bulk is a defiantly DIY sci-fi-noir-paranoid-thriller hybrid, starring Sam Riley as an investigative journo tasked with rescuing a scientist from his own malfunctioning multi-dimensional creation. With its handwritten title cards, overdubbed dialogue, sticky-back-plastic special effects and general vibe of formal experimentation, Bulk exists a world away from most modern film-making. Even it’s delivery method feels far from the churn of the mainstream: instead of a standard release, the film is in the middle of a tour of independent cinemas across the UK and Ireland – tonight in Liverpool, tomorrow Lewes, with Dublin and Cork on the horizon (you can seek out your nearest screening here).
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