Global collaboration with US researchers likely to be set back by years, including on spread of drug-resistant HIV
A flagship programme to create malaria vaccines has been halted by the Trump administration, in just one example of a rippling disruption to health research around the globe since the new US president took power.
The USAid Malaria Vaccine Development Program (MVDP) – which works to prevent child deaths by creating more effective second-generation vaccines – funds research by teams collaborating across institutes, including the US university Johns Hopkins and the UK’s University of Oxford.
While all eyes are on the Middle East and Ukraine, brutality still reigns in many other regions suffering many other conflicts.
The world is becoming a more dangerous place. It’s an often-heard sentiment these days, but is it really true? Historical comparisons are of limited help.
Last week’s 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis between 1940 and 1945, offered a grim reminder of how indescribably brutal life can be when war reigns unchecked. Could things get any worse?
You might think Dame Sheila Hancock would be taking life a little easy – no chance. She talks about her working-class roots, being lucky in love, the frustration of being passed over for serious roles – and why she’s fed up with feeling anxious
These last few weeks, Sheila Hancock has surrendered. “I’m addicted, really,” she’s confessing. “I just can’t stop myself. I’m at it every night, without fail.” She halts, shakes her head, looks troubled, momentarily. “And everyone is fucking crying all the time. I can’t understand why for the life of me.” She leans forward, blue eyes piercing. Clocking my confusion, she grins wryly. “I’m talking about that television show, darling. What’s it called? No, don’t tell me. I’ll get there.”
Her old pal Gyles Brandreth, Hancock informs me, always makes her find the word she’s searching for when it escapes her. “He won’t chip in. ‘You must remember it yourself,’ he says, ‘because not doing so makes you forget.’ So I do, when forced.”
The first volume of the tech baron turned philanthropist’s memoirs focuses on his parent’s struggles to control him – and a painful early loss
The enduring mystery about William Henry Gates III is this: how did a precocious and sometimes obnoxious kid evolve into a billionaire tech lord and then into an elder statesman and philanthropist? This book gives us only the first part of the story, tracing Gates’s evolution from birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft in 1975. For the next part of the story, we will just have to wait for the sequel.
In a way, the volume’s title describes it well. In the era before machine learning and AI, when computer programs were exclusively written by humans, the term “source code” meant something. It described computer programs that could be read – and understood, if you knew the programming language – enabling you to explain why the machine did what it did.
The Louvre’s proposed two-tier fees are a better way to fund museums than iffy corporate sponsorship deals
Introducing, five years on, another Brexit bonus: the chance to support the renovation of the Louvre. President Emmanuel Macron has proposed paying for the “renaissance” of the Paris museum, in part, by increasing entrance fees for visitors from outside the EU.
After some initial attempts to represent this as a direct insult – “Brits will be forced to pay more than EU residents” (the Mail) – even the rabidly pro-Brexit press appears to have accepted that the scheme applies globally, to all non-EU visitors: an exceptionally cunning way of Brit-targeting, even for the French.
Rachel Reeves is all for growth; her party and the country needs it. But still we hear nothing about the most obvious solution…
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a satirical book,It Can’t Happen Here, about a lying demagogue, Buzz Windrip, who rises to power and transforms the American scene for the worse within months.
There were fears of parallels with the plot of the book when Trump first became president. This time, the fears are far more serious, as Trump’s barrage of executive orders challenges the constitutional checks and balances designed by the founding fathers to inhibit the autocratic desires of a future wrong’un becoming president.
Alexander Gronsky’s photograph of families in the snow hints at something more dubious
The photographer Alexander Gronsky calls the series of pictures he took in Moscow suburbs, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Something Is Going on Here. This image of families in the snow has a kind of dubious innocence. It is juxtaposed in other photos in the collection with military vehicles idling in these same winter landscapes at the edge of the city, and uniformed Russian soldiers mingling with ordinary residents. The contrast gives all of the images a disturbing edge of menace. You find yourself looking hard, for example, at the couple of figures on the right of this picture, in authoritarian black, and wondering how they fit with the people in the primary-coloured jackets. They are part of a landscape in which “normal life” is never quite what it seems.
Gronsky was born in Estonia, and has been based in Russia for most of his career – despite being arrested in the anti-Putin protests of 2015. He has long been drawn to the curious hinterlands at the edge of cities, places half-developed or awaiting development, bulldozers standing by, tower blocks not completed. In a recent interview he explained how he was drawn to these areas because those “edgelands” represented an uncertain kind of escape from the normal rules of cities that require you to walk on the pavement and behave yourself. “Suddenly,” he said, “there’s a gap in the fence, and beyond lies an abandoned construction site. Different rules apply in this space – there are no ethical boundaries; you can use this place as a restroom or smash beer bottles.” That kind of unwritten licence creates what Gronsky documents as a new kind of uneasy “pastoral” where norms become unruly, borders porous, and everywhere is a sort of no man’s land, where – good or bad – “anything can happen”.
For the Beyond Paradise actor, happy Sundays are all about the plot
What’s an average Sunday? I share an allotment with my friend, which is wonderful. We grow turnips, parsnips and tromboncinos, which are in the squash family and a bit phallic. It’s a really peaceful thing to do and it calms me.
Is it hard to get an allotment? You have to go on a waiting list. One of my big regrets is that I didn’t do it with my kids. Now they’re grown up, they look at me as if I’m a mad woman when I say I’m going down to the allotment. But it’s full of young couples with young children, digging.
Is there allotment envy? Yes. There’s always someone better than you. There’s a lady who does French squashes in the most extraordinary shapes, and someone else who has a magical bottomless pit of potatoes. My friend Caroline sorts out our logistics. She’s always getting gets me to build structures and hang nets to stop the birds eating all the cavolo nero.
Have you got a shed? We share a shed. There’s a lot of diplomacy. If a rake slips slightly on to someone else’s side, I become nervous and I push it back. Shed etiquette is very important.
Is it a happy place? Yes. As an actor, you have to use your brain and nerves. It’s wonderful on a Sunday morning to unlock the gate to the secret garden and see the wonder of what’s growing. (Why hasn’t anyone written a sitcom about an allotment? I might one day.) On the way home I like to steal into different churches.
Such as? On Christmas Day I went into the Russian Orthodox Church up the road. It was one of the most magical experiences of my life. I like travelling on the bus on a Sunday, because it’s slow and I can watch people. I might go to a choral evensong, or I might just have my mates round and we’ll get all horrendously drunk. It’s not PC here at all.
Technology has changed how predators operate. Now a raft of new offences will stop those who create heinous content escaping punishment
Technology moves fast. Legislation can be slow. For decades, that has felt like a fundamental fact of public life. But the gap between our laws and the world they are supposed to govern feels wider than ever. While the internet has transformed every element of our society, the state has not kept up.
Most of the laws that prohibit the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse imagery have been in place since the 1990s. Back then, Photoshop was in its infancy. The physical photographs that paedophiles shared were no less vile, but they were easier for the police to seize and destroy.
Peter Kyle is secretary of state for science, innovation and technology
‘Mexican Monster’ beats Morrell by unanimous decision
Benavidez improves to 30-0 with one-sided victory
Stephen Fulton wins WBC featherweight belt in co-main
David Benavidez unified the light heavyweight championship by earning a unanimous decision over challenger David Morrell on Saturday night to keep his interim WBC belt and win the WBA title.
Judges Patricia Morse Jarman and Steve Weisfeld both scored the fight 115-111 while Tim Cheatham scored it 118-108.
Phosphate, key to food production, is choking waterways, but a new sponge-like material returns it to the soil for crops
It is one of the least appreciated substances on the planet and its misuse is now threatening to unleash environmental mayhem. Phosphorus is a key component of fertilisers that have become vital in providing food for the world. But at the same time, the spread of these phosphorus compounds – known as phosphates – into rivers, lakes and streams is spreading algal blooms that are killing fish stocks and marine life on a huge scale.
It is a striking mismatch that is now being tackled by a project of remarkable simplicity. The company Rookwood Operations, based in Wells, Somerset, has launched a product that enables phosphates to be extracted from problem areas and then reused on farmland.
Rachel Reeves’s s bold infrastructure plans for Heathrow, transport, housing and more rely on training a new generation of construction professionals before the shovels go in the ground
Even a nonexistent Heathrow third runway or HS2 northern leg have arguably done their bit for the economy: keeping a small army of planners, lawyers and lobbyists busy over years of tussle between the “builders and the blockers”, as Rachel Reeves has styled them.
Now the blockers are, as the chancellor made clear in laying out her vision for turbocharged infrastructure growth, as welcome as rare bats or newts at a construction site. But are the builders ready to take their turn?
The question I have been married for 18 years to a man I now consider difficult. Over the past few years, I’ve realised he has serious issues, particularly severe OCD that has left him barely functioning. He refuses help, citing concerns it might affect future emigration plans, despite being unable to leave the house. I spent years trying to support and help him recover.
He is stubborn, driven by pride, and a year ago insisted on emigrating, believing it would solve his problems. I resisted, fearing instability with small children and his unresolved issues. His failure to create a concrete plan has left emigration a constant tension in our lives. He accuses me of being risk-averse, while I feel I can’t trust his leadership.
After a troubled start, this family-run Yemeni outpost in York has won a loving following in the local community
Yemen Heaven, 98 Walmgate, York YO1 9TL. Meze £7, large dishes £15-£21.95, desserts £6-£9, wines from £23
Some restaurants are just a nice place to go for dinner. Yemen Heaven in York is obviously that. You will eat well there. The black seeded flatbreads, the breadth of over-sized dinner plates, are soft and crisp. There’s a pleasing creaminess to the spice-dusted, oil-dribbled, tahini-rich hummus that comes topped with a single shiny black olive, the savoury equivalent of a cherry on top. But the restaurant is more than that. Much like Arabic Flavour in Aberystwyth, which I visited last year, it is both the story of exile and an act of memory. It is the product of one woman’s determination to maintain her family’s traditions; to free the country of her birth from a single narrative of war and hardship, however overwhelming that narrative might seem right now.
The performance artist shocked 1980s London with his surreal outfits, outlandish lifestyle and collaborations with Lucian Freud, dancer Michael Clark and others. As a major exhibition opens at Tate Modern, family and friends talk about Bowery’s larger-than-life legacy
In October 1980, 19 year-old Leigh Bowery arrived in London from the small Australian town of Sunshine in suburban Melbourne. He brought with him a single suitcase and a portable sewing machine. A few months later, he spent his first Christmas away from home in a rented bedsit feeling depressed and lonely. On 31 December, he attempted to raise his spirits by writing down his new year resolutions:
1. Get weight down to 12 stone.
2. Learn as much as possible.
3. Become established in the world of art, fashion or literature.
4. Wear makeup every day.
The chancellor’s apparent volte-face in backing a third runway has left many in her party disillusioned and led them to label it as an act of desperation
In 2020, Rachel Reeves, the MP for Leeds West and Pudsey, was clear why she opposed expansion of nearby Leeds Bradford airport. It would, she said, “significantly increase air and noise pollution”, so on environmental grounds, it should not happen.
By the autumn of 2021, as shadow chancellor, Reeves was the senior Labour figure chosen to lead her party’s hugely ambitious plans for a green industrial revolution.
The NSW transport minister, Jo Haylen, has apologised after using her ministerial driver to chauffeur her and some friends to and from a three-hour private lunch on the Australia Day weekend – at a cost of $750.
“I made the wrong decision,” Haylen said on Sunday when apologising and confirming she would repay the money for the 13-hour, 446km trip to the Hunter Valley.
Encouraging kids to play with fire? Hear us out, says party worried by the Netherlands’ increasingly sedentary ways
Ten-year-old Jackie stood with a small pan in the flames of an open fire, chatting merrily, when her popcorn caught alight.
With no sign of panic, her mother put out the flames in a nearby ditch. Then Jackie and her eight-year-old brother, Michael, calmly cooked a second batch.
Olympic champions John Peers and Matt Ebden have reunited to seal an emphatic Davis Cup triumph in Sweden and celebrate their Australian team earning a rare tie back on home soil.
With Lleyton Hewitt’s outfit 2-0 overnight in the first-round qualifying tie after the first-day singles in Stockholm, the golden veterans teamed up on Saturday for the first time since their Paris triumph to win the tie-clinching doubles rubber.
A growing number of older women are taking up the nomadic lifestyle, challenging traditional views of ageing. While grey nomad stereotypes persist, many say it’s the best decision they ever made
Seven years ago, Robyn Drayton stood out the front of her home in Newcastle, north of Sydney, and felt overwhelmed with a desire to get out.
“Something came over me. I just burst into tears,” Drayton, now 63, says. “I’d done a lot of travelling overseas and had a caravan and knew it was time.
Palestine Red Crescent Society crews prepare sick and wounded children to be evacuated from Gaza into Egypt as Israel reopens the critical Rafah crossing after nine months. The reopening is part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, and allows for medical evacuations for patients with urgent care needs. The crossing is a vital conduit into Gaza, and its closure caused outcry, trapping people with medical needs inside the territory.
Border has been closed since May 2024 for even the most urgent medical cases and evacuations are significant first step
The Rafah terminal that marks the crossing between southern Gaza and Egypt straddles a complicated border. On the Egyptian side, a double arch marks the entry to the terminal buildings themselves, and beyond, Gaza.
Television cameras on the Egyptian side caught the moment on Saturday that the crossing, which has been closed since May, was reopened for medical evacuations showing one young girl, whose foot had been amputated, being loaded into an Egyptian ambulance.
On a sleepy road on the outskirts of Sydney sat a caravan that would make international headlines.
Inside, New South Wales police discovered enough explosives to cause a “potential mass causality event”, but no detonator. There was a list of Jewish sites and a note that included the words: “Fuck the Jews.”
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