From pirates and skateboarders in Hastings to legends and locks in Devizes, from dolphins in Scarborough to the ‘artists’ town’ of Kirkcudbright, readers put forward their favourite places

Culture secretary Lisa Nandy has launched a search for the UK’s first “town of culture�, similar to the city of culture programme, which honoured Bradford last year. After the Guardian’s writers nominated theirs – including Ramsgate in Kent, Falmouth in Cornwall, Abergavenny in Monmouthshire and Portobello in Edinburgh – we asked readers which UK towns they would put forward.

There is a look of despair in Starmer’s eyes – and a feeling in the room that the endgame has begun

It’s beginning to feel terminal. Not that there hasn’t been talk of Labour MPs wanting to remove Keir Starmer before. Just that this time there’s the sense of a tipping point being reached. No more second chances. No praying for a miracle that will never come in the May elections. A quantum shift of collective despair.

You can’t escape the irony. Starmer has always prided himself on being Mr Rules. It’s how he got elected. He might be a bit dull and lack charisma, but you can count on him to be reliable. To play by the rules. And now he has been undone by having given the prime Washington job to a man who was the epitome of Mr No Rules. And he had thought he had been so clever by acting out of character to make Peter Mandelson the US ambassador. Many in his cabinet had congratulated him, as had many Tories. A sleazy diplomat for a sleazy president. A match made in heaven.

Bankers and billionaires are flocking to the city where income tax is zero but critics say it ignores money laundering – and pay disparities are huge

• Business live – latest updates

Aidan Doyle was an estate agent in Liverpool before he decamped to Dubai and turned a £30,000 annual income into £500,000 a year and climbing.

Acting as an agent for buyers and sellers, Doyle has seen his commission soar beyond anything he could hope to generate in the UK after just three years in the city, one of seven city-states in the United Arab Emirates.

The Swedish band’s frontwoman answers your questions on ‘sweet and curious’ Tom Jones, being changed by cancer and whether the Cardigans will ever make new music

Are you a fan of actual cardigans? garythenotrashcougar
I can see the genius of them as items of clothing, but I never looked good in a cardigan. Our [former] songwriter and guitar player [Peter Svensson] suggested the name. We were super anglophiles. We loved British music. Our first album is called Emmerdale because the series was shown on Swedish TV every day, titled Home to the Farm. We romanticised something sort of rainy and hazy and woolly … like the cardigan.

I like covers that have a new take on the original, so I really enjoyed your lounge-style version of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. What made you choose that band [Black Sabbath] and song in particular? NotDrivingAMiniMetro
We were big fans – for a heavy band there’s a real pop sentiment in the songwriting – and I think it’s interesting when a cover is a stretch away from your natural sound. As a woman, I thought singing a song done by very manly men gave it a wonderfully creepy aspect. Ozzy [Osbourne] came to see us in Los Angeles and said it was the creepiest thing he’d ever heard, which coming from him is the biggest compliment.

More than eight years after the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people, the companies, materials and rules that made it possible are still shaping how homes are built, in the UK and around the world.

Neelam Tailor looks at how deregulation, industry lobbying and corporate greed allowed a preventable tragedy to happen, and why, even now, some of the companies criticised by the public inquiry continue to receive million-pound public contracts, impacting the safety of our homes

A leaked pitch to reshape Ethereum’s leadership exposed deep divisions over politics, power and ether’s static price

US crypto developer Danny Ryan submitted a proposal in November 2024 to Vitalik Buterin, the founder and symbolic leader of Ethereum, a prominent blockchain powering the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. Ryan, who had worked for seven years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), Ethereum’s de facto governing body, suggested that Ethereum could be on the cusp of an era-defining shift.

Since its founding in 2014, the foundation had prioritized technical upgrades and had avoided centralizing power while its user base was growing, but Ethereum had now grown up, and the cryptocurrency world around it had grown up, too. The EF could now “exercise a stronger voice� without compromising its ethos of decentralization, Ryan said – and he was open to leading that charge if appointed as the foundation’s new executive director.

Amid warnings McSweeney’s survival would leave his position ‘untenable’, PM apologises to Epstein’s victims for appointing Mandelson as US ambassador

Downing Street has defied calls to remove Keir Starmer’s most senior aide, insisting Morgan McSweeney retains the prime minister’s confidence, as frustration grows over a wait for documents on Peter Mandelson, which some fear could last for weeks.

Amid warnings from Labour backbenchers that McSweeney’s survival would leave Starmer’s position “untenable�, Starmer apologised to victims of Jeffrey Epstein for appointing Mandelson, a close friend of the convicted child sex offender, as US ambassador.

Exclusive: Luxury aircraft owned by property tycoon close to US president’s family has twice flown Palestinian men from Arizona to Tel Aviv

On the morning of 21 January, Israeli authorities left eight Palestinian men at a West Bank checkpoint. Disoriented and cold, they were dressed in prison-issued tracksuits and carried their few belongings in plastic bags.

Hours earlier, they had been sitting with their wrists and ankles shackled on the plush leather seats of a private jet owned by the Florida property tycoon Gil Dezer, a longtime business partner of Donald Trump.

Newly unsealed files claim the banker, who has denied any wrongdoing, forced a woman to touch his genitals during a massage before raping her

US prosecutors reviewed allegations of rape and bodily harm against the former Barclays boss and former JP Morgan banker Jes Staley, according to newly unsealed files linked to the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Multiple documents in the Epstein files cite serious allegations of sexual misconduct against Staley, including that he forced a woman to touch his genitals during a massage before raping her, and left “bloody marks� on the arms of a woman he called “tinkerbell�.

Councils call on ministers to write off special educational needs and disability deficits that are predicted to reach £14bn in 2028

Four in five English local authorities will be in effect bankrupted by rising special educational needs spending unless the government introduces significant reforms to the system, council leaders have said.

Councils have called on ministers to write off special educational needs and disability (Send) deficits accumulated by local authorities over the past few years. These are projected to reach £14bn in two years’ time.

Half-term trial will limit ride access passes for those with additional needs and offer calmer spaces to people who find crowds difficult

People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety and autism will be prevented from using fast-lane disability queueing passes at Alton Towers during a trial over the February half-term holidays.

Merlin Entertainments, which runs the theme park in Staffordshire, provides a “ride access pass� to visitors who have difficulty queueing due to a disability or medical condition.

While labels list dozens of possible risks only four are supported by evidence, say researchers

Almost all side-effects listed for statins are not caused by the drugs, according to the world’s most comprehensive review of evidence.

Other than the well-known risks around muscle pain and diabetes, only four of 66 other statin side-effects listed on labels – liver test changes, minor liver abnormalities, urine changes and tissue swelling – are supported by evidence. And the risks are very small, according to the systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Lancet.

Shabana Mahmood insists deportations will rise, as Labour government is accused of promoting ‘harmful stereotypes’ of migrants

Nearly 60,000 unauthorised migrants and convicted criminals have been removed or deported from the UK since Labour took office, the Home Office has said.

The announcement came amid claims that the government was promoting “harmful stereotypes� by equating migration with criminality.

• France 36-14 Ireland

• Bielle-Biarrey scores twice in dazzling display

The Six Nations is under way and already a couple of things are ­crystal clear. It is going to take a seriously good team to beat France in Paris in this year’s championship and ­watching them attack will be an ­absolute treat. Ireland were not so much beaten as outplayed by ­opponents who will be even more dangerous with a dry ball at their disposal.

Never mind the argument about brief in-game adverts during ITV’s coverage. Irish fans would probably have preferred a total 80-minute blackout or, failing that, an entire evening of cookery programming. Instead those back at home had to watch the visitors being repeatedly sliced and diced by seemingly ravenous hosts. Talk about eating your greens.

Authorities scrap Arakurayama Sengen park cherry blossom festival near Mount Fuji because of tourists trespassing, littering and ‘defecating in private yards’

A Japanese cherry blossom festival near Mount Fuji has been cancelled after officials cited a rise in disruptive tourist behaviour.

On Tuesday, officials in the central Japanese city of Fujiyoshida announced they would no longer host the Arakurayama Sengen park cherry blossom festival this year. The weeks-long event has been held for the past decade and attracts about 200,000 tourists annually.

Anger at former US ambassador Peter Mandelson’s relations with the child sex offender threatens to topple the prime minister

It was the one scandal that Donald Trump seemed unable to shake. No matter his best efforts to convince his supporter base that there was nothing to see here, the demands for the administration to release every document it had on the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein only grew.

Yet even after the most shocking revelations in the latest drop about Trump’s inner circle – involving everyone from Elon Musk to the Maga honcho Steve Bannon to the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, not to mention Trump himself – so far, it seems, the administration has escaped largely unscathed. Nobody has resigned, nobody has been fired, and certainly there is no sign that the US president is going anywhere.

While the US president’s many mentions in the Esptein files seem to have no consequences, in the UK Starmer could be the first world leader to fall

All around Europe, the political and business elite are facing an inquest on what blinded so many to think it was permissible to consort with a known child sex offender. As the 3m emails and 1,800 photos released on Friday by the US Department of Justice start to percolate across the continent and through to national media, questions about the moral fibre of this elite are starting to be asked at markedly different levels of intensity.

Squirming businessmen, bankers, politicians, royals, academics, tech bros and partners in law firms have become entangled in Jeffrey Epstein’s interlocking circles of money, power and sex. It seems there was no one in a position of power that Epstein was not in email contact with, and that there was little limit to what this networking elite was prepared to do in return for a gift, a contact or an invite to a sexually charged party. Elon Musk was right when in July 2025 he tweeted – only to quickly delete it – that “so many powerful people want that list suppressed�.

Days after Labour’s 2010 defeat former cabinet minister began dogged pursuit of ‘highly paid’ jobs, emails show

Peter Mandelson began seeking advice from the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on how to land “highly paid� senior roles with companies including BP and Glencore within days of Labour’s 2010 electoral defeat, emails show.

A flurry of messages, sent in the weeks and months following the collapse of the New Labour project, reveal how Epstein mentored Mandelson as the former cabinet minister touted himself for lucrative jobs at global businesses.

Huge release of files provides extraordinary detail on the extent of the disgraced financier’s network

Among the new trove of 3m files relating to Jeffrey Epstein released last week are a vast number of stories shedding light on his relationships with prominent figures in the US, the UK, and around the world. Inclusion in the files does not imply wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s wrongdoing – but a sampling of some of the details they include provides extraordinary detail on the extent of his network.

Keir Starmer’s days as prime minister are numbered, Labour MPs have warned, after a week of fury over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. While several MPs have said the prime minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, should take responsibility and resign, the mood surrounding No 10 has seemed ‘terminal’, said an MP from the 2024 intake. Lucy Hough talks to political correspondent Alexandra Topping

Trump might not embody Christian values yet is the religious right’s chosen instrument to turn the tide against liberal, godless America

• US politics live – latest updates

They had come to say a prayer for the father, the son and the holy ghost.

The father was Donald Trump, who, despite sending federal militias to roam Minneapolis, threatening to invade Greenland and telling lies by the dozen, remains the lord and saviour of the religious right.

Although weakened by airstrikes, sanctions and domestic unrest, Tehran is surprisingly bullish before talks with US

When it comes to Iran and Donald Trump, there is so much bluff, backed by military hardware, that the truth rarely makes an appearance.

It appears that a bullish Iran is going into negotiations with the US on Friday adopting maximalist positions that do not seem greatly different to those it adopted in the five rounds of talks before the negotiations were abruptly halted by the surprise Israeli attack on Iran last June.

Artists from Bernini to Louise Bourgeois are brought together in a new exhibition exploring the uncomfortable erotic parables of the ancient Roman poet

On three massive screens in a darkened room, snakes glide over the face of artist Juul Kraijer – covering her eyes, caressing her lips. She is the silent but terrifying snake-headed Medusa, and one of the surprises in an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam revolving around Greek and Roman myths.

While the show features rarely lent works from masters such as Caravaggio, Bernini, Rodin and Brâncuși, it marries them with modern artists who reinterpret the legends where male gods do all they can to get their wicked way and the powerless are punished. Transgender bodies, bare breasts and even a volcanic vulva appear in artworks inspired by Roman poet Ovid’s masterpiece, Metamorphoses.

A new retrospective celebrates the work of the cat credited with roles in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Comedy of Terrors and Rhubarb

In the midst of Oscar season, it becomes evident just how much work it takes to win an Academy Award, both in on-screen work and off-screen campaigning. Consider, however, that multiple actors have won more than one Oscar. (Emma Stone, one of this year’s best actress nominees, won twice in the past decade.) Only a single cat, meanwhile, has twice won the Patsy – the Picture Animal Top Star of the Year. (The award, given by the American Humane Association, not to be confused with the Humane Society, was discontinued in 1986.) That cat is Orangey, the subject of a small retrospective at New York City’s Metrograph cinema. Plenty of rep houses will play a movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s around Valentine’s Day; the Metrograph is going deeper into the Orangey catalogue for a wider variety of titles and genres.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s does offer Orangey his most famous role: the rather less colorfully named Cat, pet of Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), who calls him a “poor slob without a name�. Orangey features heavily in the film’s climax, when Holly releases her pet into an alley as she prepares to leave town, only to have Paul (George Peppard) rush to retrieve him. It completes a running thread that Cat is a part of Holly’s wildness as well as her potential domestication. What better animal, of course, than one equally prone to draping himself over his makeshift mistress and making yowling leaps around her apartment?

National Museum, Cardiff
In a superb, mystical retrospective, the painter sheds social trappings – and her clothes – as she uses her enormous intelligence to paint purely

This is Gwen John straight, no chaser. Cardiff’s National Museum has put together a superb, daunting retrospective of the woman who is now, perhaps, the most famous Welsh artist. It is not a blow-by-blow biographical story of how she was born in Haverfordwest in 1876, how she and her brother Augustus both loved art as children, how she insisted on going to the Slade School of Fine Art like him then made her life in bohemian France. Instead, the moment you enter the show, you are plunged into her spiritual, austere existence. We meet her in the glory of her solitude, painting cats and the sparse rooms she rented in Paris and women alone in moments of calm thought.

There is a row of variants of a young woman in a blue dress with long dark hair sitting weakly in an armchair, a table at her elbow, all painted in about 1920. In most there’s a cup and teapot on the table, in one it’s a bowl of soup. She looks down as she reads a letter, occasionally a book. Their titles vary too – The Letter, The Seated Woman, The Convalescent.

Though lab-made peptides are touted as a cure-all, they are not FDA-regulated and pose serious risks, experts warn

Here’s a new trend that sounds unwise: buying unregulated substances from dealers in foreign countries and injecting them into your body.

And yet, grey-market injectable peptides – a category of substances with obscure, alphanumeric names like BPC-157, GHK-Cu, or TB-500 – have developed a devoted following among biohackers and health optimizers.

The Australian aerial photographer Andrew Vukosav takes his striking images while flying solo in his Cessna 182 on long journeys into remote terrain. His plane, named Valerie, has a high-resolution camera fixed to its underbelly to capture landscapes that challenge cliches of the outback. Vukosav has touched down in the US to showcase his series Longitude Latitude Solitude, which features photos taken over 10 years while logging 560 hours in the air

In a few isolated communities in central Nigeria, some babies are believed to be bad omens. Olusola and Chinwe Stevens run a thriving home for babies at risk. But what happens when the families want them back?

Esther Stevens’ life nearly ended as soon as it began. She was born in 2007, in a village on the outskirts of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city. Her mother died giving birth to her, and in the eyes of some villagers, that meant the baby was cursed. According to tradition, there was only one way to deal with such a child. The villagers tied the newborn to her mother’s lifeless body and prepared to bury them together.

When word reached a Nigerian missionary living in the community, she rushed to the burial site and pleaded for the baby’s life. After the villagers and relatives refused, she appealed to the traditional priest who had been called on to perform the rite. “Finally, the priest agreed and said, let them give her the evil child and see what the child will become,� Esther said. “The child, that’s me.�

It is not good enough just to criticize Trump. We must offer a positive vision that will improve the lives of Americans

At this difficult moment in American history, it’s imperative that we have the courage to be honest with ourselves.

The United States, once the envy of the world, is now a nation in profound decline. For the sake of our children and future generations, we must reverse that decline and change, in very fundamental ways, the direction of our country.

Politics has recklessly downplayed the significance of the local inn, but the hard right has cottoned on – and its opponents better follow suit

Nigel Farage thinks poor families should be denied benefits and the cash go to their local pub. When he runs the country, he says, he will cut child benefit for those with more than two children and switch the £3bn saved to keep down the price of beer.

The art of populism lies in headlines. It is about the way you tell it. Farage also says he would still give benefits to “British working families�, meaning about 3,700 households with two British-born parents who both work full-time. It seems a gratuitous discrimination. As for cutting VAT on pubs to 10%, it would apply not just to pubs but to the entire hospitality sector. It was for effect that he decided to make the announcement in a pub rather than McDonald’s.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and the author of A Short History of America: From Tea Party to Trump

As fewer people choose to pair up, let alone marry, it could be that our species’ mating patterns are moving closer to the natural order

Monogamy, you may have heard, is in crisis. Fewer people are in relationships, let alone opting to be in one ’til death. And even those who have already exchanged vows seem to be increasingly looking for wiggle room. “Quiet divorce� – mentally checking out of your union, rather than going through the rigmarole of formally dissolving it – is reportedly on the rise, as is “ethical non-monogamy� (ENM) and opening up a relationship to include other partners.

This is borne out by my experience on mainstream dating apps. About one profile in every 10 I come across seems to express a preference for “ENM� or polyamory, or mentions an existing wife or girlfriend. The best you can hope for, if you’re prepared to accept those terms, is that the “primary partner� really is across the arrangement as described.

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist

Allowing fair and peaceful criticism of a foreign head of state, even amid a deeply fraught Middle Eastern crisis, is not antisemitism

Not all protests have a violent intent or target a group as illegitimate. But there are many Jewish people in Australia who feel that they are being attacked and that violence is being fomented against them. They see it every day when they watch the news, they worry about it when they see security guards at their schools or when at their synagogues, and they hear it when they are told that they have no right to cultural safety if they believe in the right of Jewish people to a homeland.

After the terrorist shootings at Bondi, the New South Wales government has empowered the police commissioner to put limits on protests or to ban them. The problem is that in allowing the banning of all protests, our laws go too far. They treat every protest as the same, without regard to intent, conduct, or risk.

Since the 70s, China has turned around its economy – from introducing subsidies to mining untapped talent, these are the lessons Starmer must take note of

Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping were both on a mission when they came to power within months of each other at the tail end of the 1970s. Thatcher wanted to reinvigorate capitalism in Britain, while Deng launched a programme of reform and liberalisation that he called socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Since then, the economies of Britain and China have been transformed, but in different ways. China was essentially a peasant economy when Deng took control, but it has since become an industrial powerhouse, while Britain has ceased to be a major manufacturing player and instead became a country dominated by services.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

In my mind, Nigella Lawson should already be spending her life where random people just prepare delicious things for her to have bites of

Last week, I was sent an exciting news story by a friend. This was a surprise for two reasons: I’m chronically online so I usually see everything first, and also there are no good news stories any more in this life. But it was real, and for many people, including me, this one piece of blessed news was equal to three or four regular pieces of good news.

It is a rat king of good news, a fatberg of good news clogging up my pipes. It had been announced that *trumpets heralding* *doves released* the iconic Nigella Lawson is joining the iconic The Great British Bake Off!!!!!! (I don’t know how many exclamation marks are allowed in the Guardian style guide, I might be pushing it.)

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There’s nothing wrong with a good, hoppy IPA, but perhaps it’s time to reappraise classic styles of beer again

The writer Vladimir Nabokov was extremely particular when it came to language, and rather more basic when it came to sustenance: “My habits are simple, my tastes banal,� he once told an interviewer. “I would not exchange my favourite fare (bacon and eggs, beer) for the most misspelt menu in the world.�

I’ve often thought of this as I’ve perused misspelt beer menus over the years, wondering what Nabokov would make of all the hazy dubble IPAs and triple brown mocha porters, because, over the course of what we might have to label the “craft era�, beer has become anything but simple. You may well have lamented this, too, especially if you’ve ever been cornered by an enthusiast at a party. India pale ale (IPA), for example, which was once a distinctly British style of ale designed for export, has, in the hands of American craft brewers, become a sort of standard-bearer for complicated beer: aggressively hopped, often startlingly bitter and/or sour, and redolent of a bygone era of millennial hipster striving.

The prime minister has said sorry for believing Peter Mandelson’s lies – but the Epstein connection should have been disqualification enough

Accused of terrible misjudgment in appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington, Sir Keir Starmer says that questions were raised but answered with lies. Mandelson “portrayed Jeffrey Epstein as someone he barely knew� and was sacked as soon as it became clear the relationship had been much closer.

Addressing the scale of the deception on Thursday, the prime minister sounded authentically outraged. Mandelson had failed a “basic test of honesty� and “such deceit is incompatible with public service�. Credulity is not a great defence. Focusing on the lies obscures the extent of what was already known to be true when the fateful appointment was made.

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.

The growing rift between two Gulf powers will be felt across the Middle East and the Horn of Africa

In 2017, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates spearheaded a blockade of Qatar, disrupting trade, stability and lives in the region. Their de facto leaders – the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and Abu Dhabi’s then crown prince, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, now president of the UAE – had forged a close alliance. The older man had eagerly promoted the younger Saudi royal in Washington and elsewhere, and was seen as his mentor. Riyadh borrowed aspects of the UAE’s model, and the countries together intervened – at huge cost – against Houthi rebels in Yemen. Together they sought to contain the Arab spring and backed authoritarian rule in Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere.

Yet by 2023 the relationship had soured: the Saudi crown prince reportedly accused the UAE of “stabb[ing] us in the back�. Late last year the disputes became spectacularly public. In Yemen, Southern secessionists backed by the UAE made dramatic advances in oil-rich areas – before being forced out by Saudi-backed forces. Riyadh effectively described the UAE as threatening its national security. Saudi commentators voiced increasing contempt for the kingdom’s former partner. In turn, a senior Emirati official complained of “wickedness� in the media campaign against it.

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.

Readers respond to an article by Marina Hyde on the powerful men who were complicit in Jeffrey Epstein’s exploitation of women and girls

Marina Hyde asks why wealthy, powerful men still associated with Jeffrey Epstein despite knowing about his crimes (Never forget Epstein’s little helpers – the powerful men who knew about his crimes, and helped him out anyway, 3 February). As a church minister who has been involved in dealing with a small number of historical allegations of abuse, may I make the following observations. The Methodist church has a robust safeguarding policy, with mandatory training for everyone who works or volunteers in the church, and there is much work being done to help us hear the voices of those abused.

Despite all this, when an allegation of historical abuse is made, congregations find it almost impossible to believe that the elderly man they have known, loved and respected for decades could be guilty of such a crime. The accuser is often younger, female and had left the church decades before, so is a stranger. I have also observed families of the accused, especially wives, absolutely deny that their loved one could be capable of such things, despite evidence, court cases and convictions.

Readers on the merits of making class a protected characteristic, and improving working-class representation across a range of professions

Re the proposal that class should become a protected characteristic (Editorial, 30 January), my son is 21. He is studying biochemistry and is in the final year of a four-year course. He is job-seeking. In that endeavour, he has had the misfortune to have been born to professional parents.

His mother (me) is a solicitor and his father an accountant. He went to a selective state grammar school – the very type of school designed to create social mobility. He lives in a “good� postcode and never had free school meals. As a result, his job opportunities seem to be limited. The eligibility requirements of many job advertisements in biosciences exclude him because of his selective school. For some applications, he must give his parents’ postcode, their job titles and level of education. It seems designed to exclude him from the first sift.

The government must prioritise research into new drugs, rather than relying on interventions first made available 60 years ago, writes Marjorie Wallace of Sane

It is not only veterans and emergency workers living with post-traumatic stress disorder who could benefit if ministers heed the call from Sir Nick Carter (Ex-British army chief calls on ministers to back MDMA-assisted therapy for veterans, 1 February). Thousands of people who have major mental illness, and those dealing with bereavement and trauma, could be helped too.

The shocking lack of progress in developing transformative psychiatric medicines, and a dearth of innovation has left clinicians with few weapons in their armoury to relieve mental pain. Families and people scarred by long-term distress tell us they are desperate for new treatments and therapies.

Jessica Pandian of Inquest says homicides within prisons are not individual acts but reveal how violence operates at an institutional level

Alex South’s article (Death on the inside: as a prison officer, I saw how the system perpetuates violence, 13 January) limits the scope of prison violence to individual acts by focusing on prisoner-on-prisoner homicides. But violence is part and parcel of how prisons function.

Hundreds of people die in prison each year, the majority by suicide, medical neglect or drugs. Even if we focus on homicides, they reveal how violence operates at an institutional level. Last year, the inquest of Sundeep Ghuman exposed how it was multiple failures by the prison, not just the actions of his cellmate, that led to his unlawful killing. The jury concluded that by forcing Sundeep to share a cell with a known racist, the prison contributed to his death. The inquest also found that placing three men in a nine-square-metre cell designed for two increased tensions.

• Eve Muirhead confident Britain ‘can disrupt the norm’

• Medal chances in snowboarding, skiing and skeleton

Team GB have never made anything more than the occasional ripple at the Winter Olympics. Which makes the prediction of Eve Muirhead, Britain’s chef de mission at the Milano Cortina Games, rather extraordinary.

“I believe that we are taking one of the most potent teams of athletes that we have taken to a Winter Olympic Games,� she says. “We have the capability to disrupt the norm.�

Arsenal need energy from home crowd, Florian Wirtz has found his groove and Liam Rosenior deserves respect

Daniel Farke is understood to have wanted a new goalkeeper during the January transfer window but the Leeds board failed to oblige. Might that decision ultimately cost the club their Premier League status? It will be interesting to see whether Farke recalls the recently dropped former Lyon goalkeeper, Lucas Perri, or keeps faith with Karl Darlow against Nottingham Forest at Elland Road on Friday night. Darlow, formerly second choice at Newcastle, struggled with crosses when Arsenal won 4-0 in West Yorkshire last Saturday and may approach a quintessential relegation six-pointer against Forest with dented confidence. What about Illan Meslier? Previously a star under Marcelo Bielsa, a keeper once hyped as France’s future No 1 has been demoted to third choice and has been discussing a potential move to Besiktas before Friday’s transfer deadline in Turkey. Talks only began after Leeds rejected a bid for Perri from Besiktas last week. Time will tell if that was that the right decision. Louise Taylor

• Club short on defenders before three games in seven days

• Head coach ‘very happy’ with squad despite lack of cover

Arne Slot has said Liverpool have “a hell of a challenge� to prevent injuries affecting their ambitions for the rest of the season after failing to sign Lutsharel Geertruida on deadline day.

Although Liverpool strengthened for next season with the £60m signing of Jérémy Jacquet, who will arrive from Rennes in the summer, their current problems in defence were not covered. The Premier League champions did move for the Netherlands international Geertruida, who is on loan at Sunderland from Leipzig and wanted the transfer, but the deal was called off because Sunderland were unable to secure a replacement.

The actions of Fifa’s fawning president as well as the Olympics leader’s call for ‘neutral ground’ underscores the hollowness of the global bodies’ values

In an ever more complex world, it is always good to have figures who can simplify things for us. A single person, making it crystal clear where they stand and what for, can be the light in the darkness that helps you navigate today’s turbulent waters.

That’s why I’m so grateful for Gianni Infantino. The man is the ultimate guide to geopolitics, and a waypost for anyone confused by the moral labyrinth they find themselves living in. Whichever way he’s pointing, you can feel confident you should be headed in the opposite direction.

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.

• Wing unable to complete training session on Thursday

• Daly the leading alternative if Exeter player ruled out

Immanuel Feyi-Waboso has given England a late injury scare before they start their Six Nations campaign against Wales on Saturday after pulling up in training.

The Exeter wing was unable to complete England’s session at Pennyhill Park due to a leg injury with Steve Borthwick’s medical staff investigating its extent on Thursday night.

Seattle’s Aden Durde will be the first British coach to appear in the Super Bowl. He wants to ensure he’s not the last

Midway through the 2023 NFL season, Dallas Cowboys star edge rusher Micah Parsons was frustrated. Asked about the source – a feeling of being held by opponents all the time – Parsons credited his defensive line coach Aden Durde with keeping him in check.

“[Coach Durde] pulled me aside and said, ‘You gotta remember, you’re Micah fucking Parsons,� he recalled. “‘This shit is going to happen. You just gotta keep going. Fuck all the other stuff.’�

• Test captain has bruised eye and grazes to cheek and lip

• 34-year-old is back in England after dismal Ashes tour

Ben Stokes has sustained a significant facial injury after being struck by a cricket ball.

The England Test captain posted a picture on Instagram showing his right eye heavily swollen and bruised, a graze on his cheek and lip, and a bandage stuffed in his nose. He captioned the picture: “You should see the state of the cricket ball.�

• Leicester breached PSR rules for period ending 2023-24

• Club outside the relegation zone on goal difference

Leicester have been deducted six points after being found in breach of the Premier League’s financial rules. The punishment, determined by an independent disciplinary commission, leaves them outside the Championship relegation zone only on goal difference.

A hearing took place in November after Leicester were alleged to have breached profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) for the three-season period ending with 2023-24. There were also two further charges against the club for failing to cooperate and failing to submit their financial accounts on time.

The FA’s proposals for a shake-up of the competition have met a groundswell of opposition with fans arguing it would bolster the wealthy elite

As so much of the modern game increasingly sucks the joy out of football, there remains something pure and precious about the sight of those famous black and white numbered balls being tipped out of the velvet bag for an FA Cup draw.

Your heart rate intensifies as they clatter when tipped into the bowl. Each side has the same chance of being pitted against any other club and, for those few moments, there is a special feeling. Hope.

• Bild claims acid injections used to alter jumpers’ suits

• ‘If anything was to come to the surface we’d look at it’

During its 26-year history, the World Anti-Doping Agency has faced thousands of questions about athletes using illicit substances. Thursday, however, surely marked the first time it was asked whether ski jumpers were injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid in order to fly further.

The Wada president Witold Banka’s reaction? “Ski jumping is very popular in Poland [Banka’s home country] so I promise you I’m going to look at it,� he said, with a wry smile.

Keep abreast of every event at the Winter Olympics with our day-by-day and sport-by-sport schedules, and follow events live

The Winter Olympics returns to Italy for the first time in two decades. From the fashion capital of Milan to the dramatic peaks of Cortina d’Ampezzo, the Milano Cortina Games – the first to be co-hosted by two cities – will stretch across northern Italy blending world-class winter sport with a strong sense of history and ambition.

Sixteen sports and more than 110 gold medals await, from the raw speed of alpine skiing and bobsleigh to the tactical endurance of biathlon and cross-country. Alpine fans will once again be drawn to Mikaela Shiffrin, still redefining excellence across the technical disciplines.

Stars, new events, iconic Alpine venues and a return to full Olympic atmosphere after the pandemic era. Here’s everything you need to know about Milano Cortina 2026

The Winter Olympics are back – and this time they’re zigzagging across northern Italy. Milano Cortina 2026 will be the most spread-out Winter Games ever staged, jumping from Milan’s arenas to the Dolomites’ classic Alpine slopes. With returning superstars, brand-new events and Italy leaning hard into its Olympic heritage, these Games may feel like they’ve arrived quietly – but there is a lot going on. From how and when to watch, to who matters and why these Olympics could look very different, here are your most pressing questions answered.

• This article was amended on 5 February 2026. In an earlier version, a map misspelled the resort of Livigno as “Livingo�.

Stars could align for USA and Canada in ice hockey, while hosts Italy are getting their downhill hopes up

All eyes are on the, ah, essentials of the Norwegian men’s ski jump team as they try to recover from one of the great botched crotch stitch switch scandals of 2025. Two of their gold medal-winning athletes from Beijing 2022, including the defending Olympic champion on the long hill, were banned for three months after a whistleblower published a video of their coach tampering with the (strictly regulated) crotch stitching on their jumpsuits at the Nordic world championships last year, in an attempt to make them more aerodynamic by adding padding. Groin-gate led to a national debate about ethics in sport and a complete overhaul of the rules. We’re told doctors are now using “3D measurements� to carefully scrutinise all competing athletes before competition.

Shifting explanations of Gabbard’s presence at election center intensifies scrutiny of role she played in operation

Donald Trump on Thursday offered a new and shifting account of why Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present last week at an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia, saying she went at the urging of the attorney general Pam Bondi.

“She took a lot of heat two days ago because she went in at Pam’s insistence,� the US president said at the National Prayer Breakfast, a high-profile event of political and religious leaders. “She went in and she looked at votes that wanted to be checked out from Georgia.�

Home of UK parliament spends £1.5m a week on repairs but critics say restoration proposals lack accountability

Plans to restore the crumbling Palace of Westminster could cost £40bn and take up to 61 years, a report by the body set up to investigate how the project should be handled has found.

Critics labelled the cost as “eye-watering� and said the project lacked accountability.

World’s most prominent cryptocurrency peaked at $126,000 in October 2025, only to see its value slump steeply

Bitcoin’s price sank to $63,000 on Thursday, its lowest level in more than a year, and half its all-time peak of $126,000, reached in October 2025. A months-long dip in cryptocurrency prices has tanked shares of companies that have increasingly invested in bitcoin, exacerbating broader stock market jitters.

Bitcoin rode a high during Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency in 2024 and throughout 2025; its price steadily increased as the president made one industry-friendly move after another. Crypto’s largest currency hit $100,000 for the first time in December 2024 and even rose to a record high of $126,210.50 on 6 October, according to Coinbase. But bitcoin’s valuation has dipped over the last few months, falling especially hard in January and the start of February.

Whitkoff says ‘significant work remains’ as second day of US-led peace talks in Abu Dhabi concludes: What we know on day 1,444

Ukraine and Russia concluded a second round of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi on Thursday aimed at ending Europe’s biggest conflict since the second world war, with the two sides conducting a major prisoner swap and agreeing to resume negotiations soon. But Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy involved in the talks, cautioned that “significant work remains� in the weeks ahead, dampening expectations of any swift move towards peace. The meetings marked the most substantive engagement between senior delegations from Kyiv and Moscow in months, pointing to a tentative, if uncertain, revival of diplomatic efforts nearly four years into the war.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday said more US sanctions against Russia depended on talks aimed at ending the nearly four-year-old Ukraine war. Bessent said he would consider new sanctions against Russia’s shadow fleet – a step Trump has not taken since returning to office in January 2025. His comments come after Ukraine and Russia concluded a second day of US-led talks in Abu Dhabi on Thursday without a breakthrough in ending the conflict. “I will take it under consideration. We will see where the peace talks go,� Bessent said at a Senate Banking Committee hearing. He said the Trump administration’s sanctions against Russian oil majors Rosneft and Lukoil had helped bring Russia to the negotiating table in the peace talks.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the trilateral talks with the US and Russia were “not easy,� but insisted that Ukraine would remainconstructive and seek a fair deal to end to the Russian aggression. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said the trilateral negotiations had been “genuinely constructive�, thanking the US and the United Arab Emirates for their role in mediating the talks. Russia’s representative, Kirill Dmitriev, similarly struck a positive note, saying there had been progress and “forward movement� in discussions on ending the war.

Separately, Russia has signalled its readiness to engage with more European leaders, saying it could “listen to any proposal� if it considered it a serious attempt to reopen diplomatic channels and not “pathetic� posturing.

Western sanctions are having a “significant impact� on the Russian economy, the EU’s sanctions envoy has said, ahead of the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. David O’Sullivan, a veteran Irish official, said sanctions were “not a silver bullet� and would always face circumvention, but insisted that after four years he was confident they were having an effect. “We may be, in the course of 2026, coming to a point where the whole thing becomes unsustainable, because so much of the Russian economy has been distorted so much by the building up of the war economy at the expense of the civil economy,� he told the Guardian in a rare interview. The Russian economy is thought to be under its greatest strain since the early days of the war. Oil revenues are plummeting, inflation is running at about 6% and interest rates at 16%.

Night-time shelling by Ukraine inflicted “serious damage� in the Russian city of Belgorod, near the border, the region’s governor said early on Friday. Vyacheslav Gladkov, in a video posted on Telegram after midnight, said city officials were holding an emergency meeting to devise a plan of action. “The enemy has shelled the civilian city of Belgorod. Everyone knows we have no military targets,� said Gladkov. “There has been serious damage. I have been out to look around.� A post on the unofficial Russian Telegram channel Mash, which has sources in the security services, said missiles had hit the city that lies about 40 km (25 miles) from the Ukrainian border and power had been cut in some districts.

Bezalel Zini accused of role in taking goods into the occupied Palestinian territory during an Israeli blockade

The brother of Israel’s internal security chief has been charged with “assisting the enemy in wartime� for his alleged role in a smuggling network taking cigarettes and other goods into Gaza during an Israeli blockade of the occupied Palestinian territory.

Bezalel Zini was one of more than 10 people charged in relation to the alleged network. His brother, David Zini, is the head of the Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency. He was appointed by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, last May and began the job in October.

When marine biologist Océane Attlan saw the tiny Braun’s wrasse, it was like ‘recognising a familiar face, but you can’t put a name on it’

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The chances of encountering the rare reef fish were so far-fetched, it took marine biologist Océane Attlan a few seconds to clock what she was seeing.

“All of a sudden I saw this fish. You know when you recognise a familiar face, but you can’t put a name on it. That’s the feeling I had,� she said.

While the overall risk of a shark attack remains low, experts say warmer waters, various weather events, shifting prey and busier coastlines can increase the risk

A recent cluster of shark attacks along Australia’s east coast – including a fatal attack on a 12-year-old boy in Sydney – has renewed attention on how people share the ocean with sharks, particularly in a country that sees more than 500 million coastal visits by beachgoers each year.

While the overall risk of a shark attack remains low, experts say warmer waters, various weather events, shifting prey and busier coastlines can increase the likelihood of shark encounters – making when, where and how people enter the water as important as ever.

Exclusive: Campaigners say proposed cut from £11.9bn over past five years to £9bn over next five years will cost lives and livelihoods

The UK plans to slash its aid to poor countries stricken by the climate crisis by more than a fifth, the Guardian has learned, despite promises to increase assistance and warnings from campaigners that the move will cost lives and livelihoods.

Ministers plan to cut climate finance for the developing world from £11.6bn over the past five years to £9bn in the next five. In real terms, accounting for inflation, this would represent a cut of about 40% in spending power since 2021, when the £11.6bn budget was agreed.

Toxicity from farm chemicals increased for most species groups between 2013 and 2019, with insects worst affected

Ecological harm from pesticides is growing globally, a study has found, with bugs, fish, pollinators and land-based plants among six species groups hit hardest.

Insects suffered the greatest increase in harm from synthetic farm chemicals between 2013 and 2019, the study shows, with “applied� toxicity rising by 42.9%, followed by soil organisms, which faced an increase of 30.8%.

US president says deal, which he previously described as act of ‘great stupidity’, was ‘best’ PM could make

Donald Trump has watered down his criticism of the UK’s plan to hand the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius, saying the deal was the “best� Keir Starmer could make.

The US president had described ceding sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory, which includes the Diego Garcia military base, as an “act of great stupidity� only last month. He also claimed the deal was one of many “national security reasons� why the US should acquire Greenland.

Opposition MPs urge Labour to pause public contracts with the US tech firm after attempts to examine deals blocked

Labour should halt public contracts with the US tech company Palantir, opposition politicians have said, amid growing concern at the lack of government transparency over dealings with the company and Peter Mandelson.

Since 2023, Palantir has secured more than £500m in contracts with the NHS and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), while it employed Global Counsel, the lobbying firm founded by Mandelson. Emails released by the US Department of Justice show Mandelson sought help from Jeffrey Epstein to find “rich individuals� as clients.

Furnish says he and his husband felt ‘violated’ by the Daily Mail, which allegedly used information gained unlawfully

David Furnish has said it is “an abomination� that the publisher of the Daily Mail was able to write “narrow-minded� stories about him and his husband, Elton John, using information allegedly secured by unlawful means.

In evidence submitted to the high court, Furnish said he and John had been “violated� by the Mail, after being told that it had worked with private detectives to intercept their phone calls and personal details.

South Crofty site could get $225m funding as US seeks to secure supply of critical metal

Donald Trump has aggressively pursued investment into hi-tech industries in recent months, but the US administration has now set its sights on a more traditional sector: tin mining in Cornwall.

The South Crofty mine, near the village of Pool, could start up again after nearly three decades aided by a potential $225m (£166m) investment from across the Atlantic, creating 300 jobs.

Jon Hallford to be sentenced Friday for abusing nearly 200 corpses; his wife,� Carie Hallford, to be sentenced in April

Derrick Johnson buried his mother’s ashes beneath a golden dewdrop tree with purple blossoms at his home on Maui’s Haleakal� volcano, fulfilling her wish of a final resting place looking over her grandchildren.

Then the FBI called.

Brain activity suggests newborns can detect and predict patterns relating to rhythm, study says

Newborn babies can anticipate rhythm in pieces of music, researchers have discovered, offering insights into a fundamental human trait.

Babies in the womb begin to respond to music by about eight or nine months, as shown by changes in their heart rate and body movements, said Dr Roberta Bianco, the first author of the research who is based at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome.

Mark Francis Ford has been held without bail for five months after authorities arrested him in Indiana

A man accused of molesting a disabled boy whom he met while working as a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans has been indicted on child rape charges, according to authorities.

Grand jurors seated in New Orleans’ state criminal courthouse on Thursday handed up a nine-count indictment against Mark Francis Ford, nearly five months after authorities arrested him and jailed him without bail. The document charges Ford, 64, with aggravated rape of a child; raping a person suffering from a physical disability preventing resistance; two counts of molesting a juvenile; another three of indecent behavior with a minor; and kidnapping.

Former truck driver, now 80, allegedly one of many ‘sniper tourists’ who paid Bosnian Serb soldiers to be allowed fire on city

An elderly Italian man is under investigation as part of an investigation by prosecutors in Milan into individuals who allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army for trips to Sarajevo so they could kill citizens during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s.

The 80-year-old is being investigated on charges of aggravated murder, a source close to the case told the Guardian. The man, a former truck driver from the northern Italian region of Veneto, is the first suspect to be placed under investigation since the inquiry began in November.

Tech giant reports $213bn in revenue after its founder, who owns the Post, lays off a third of newspaper’s employees

Amazon announced plans to spend $200bn on artificial intelligence and robotics this year, the latest tech giant to vow fresh enormous investments in the artificial intelligence arms race.

The news of the investment comes one day after the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced it was cutting approximately a third of employees.

Featuring an unlikely animal friendship, the commercial boasts enough patriotic iconography to verge on self-parody

Three years after its sister brand, Bud Light, faced a rightwing boycott over a transgender spokesperson, Budweiser’s new Super Bowl ad, American Icons, contains absolutely nothing that could be mistaken for social progress. Instead, it features an unlikely friendship between two animals whose blood runs red, white and blue: a bald eagle and a Clydesdale horse, the Budweiser icon. An adorable foal trots out of a barn, and the viewer is injected with a single minute of American iconography so pure that it would make Lee Greenwood nauseous.

The horse meets a struggling baby bird who gets caught in the rain, prompting the horse to stand over the bird as a roof. The pair become pals and grow up together, the bird riding on the horse’s back as it grows larger. It falls off a few times, but, like George Washington at Valley Forge, it never gives up. Finally, the horse jumps over a log while the bird spreads its wings above, and we get a slow-motion image of something like Pegasus. We realize the bird, now fully grown, is a majestic bald eagle, taking to the sky as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird reaches its climax. Two farmers look on while drinking Budweiser, as the words “Made of America� appear on the screen. “You crying?� one asks. “The sun’s in my eyes,� says the other.

After weeks of talks mining companies say they cannot reach a deal that delivers value for shareholders

Rio Tinto and Glencore have abandoned plans for a $260bn merger, walking away from a deal that would have created the world’s largest mining company.

Rio Tinto said it was no longer considering a “merger or other business combination� with Glencore after it “determined that it could not reach an agreement that would deliver value to its shareholders�.

As we don our oilskins for the release of Emerald Fennell’s rain-lashed romance, we count down the films pitting their stars against the elements

Pathetic fallacy is the literary device in which the environment reflects a character’s mood. It is central to Disney’s animated classic, which is about a woman who gets so annoyed that she literally turns her surroundings into a perpetual winter. As such, she is responsible for untold miseries, not least the fact that her stroppiness directly caused the invention of Josh Gad’s annoying snowman.

(Sacred Bones)
The Manchester/Berlin band’s second album refines their industrial-club sound, as physical and hyper-detailed as being dragged under by a wave and admiring the flotsam

Mandy, Indiana are not a band inclined to make life easy for themselves. They wanted to record their debut album, 2023’s I’ve Seen a Way, in a Peak District cave known as the Devil’s Arse, although budget restrictions meant they had to settle for one day in Somerset’s Wookey Hole caverns. The Manchester/Berlin-based four-piece’s new album, Urgh, was written in what they’ve called “an intense residency at an eerie studio house� near Leeds; at the time, singer Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall were both undergoing multiple rounds of surgery. Given the industrial, siren-like intensity of their music, in which Caulfield chants about personal and societal horrors in her native French, impounding themselves in such a place might have seemed unnecessarily masochistic.

Mandy, Indiana seem to feel a moral imperative to embrace extremes. Caulfield has often reiterated her (accurate) stance that “if you’re not angry, then you’re not paying attention�; her incantatory lyrics to new song Dodecahedron indict complacency in the face of a burning world. Given the grievous state of things, the band’s short-circuiting assault may hold about as much appeal for some listeners as sticking your fingers in a live socket – but for those inclined to catharsis, they also fully understand the imperative to push beyond merely observing injustice to viscerally embody its head-spinning force. Otherwise, what’s the point?

It was a great year for Sinners and One Battle After Another but films with megastars like George Clooney, Julia Roberts and The Rock all struggled

Last year’s Oscars narrative might have been more about the little films that could, from The Brutalist to Anora to Emilia Pérez, but this year has become closer to the opposite with big-budget films like Sinners, One Battle After Another and Frankenstein all leading the way.

It’s therefore not quite as easy to explain why some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, from Julia Roberts to Dwayne Johnson to George Clooney to Emily Blunt to Adam Sandler, found themselves removed from the race. So here goes …

This troubling documentary charts the events leading up to and surrounding Jackson’s 2005 trial for molesting 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo (of which he was found not guilty) – and features newly released tapes of Jackson

In her 2019 essay Lost Boy, the Pulitzer-winning writer Margo Jefferson considered Michael Jackson’s legacy in the wake of Dan Reed’s Leaving Neverland, the HBO/Channel 4 exposé that starkly and devastatingly laid out the testimonies of two men who alleged that they had been sexually abused as children by the singer. “We’ve long seen how charming and generous [Jackson] could be,� opined Jefferson. “Now we’ve also seen how calculating, selfish and gripped by demons he was.�

Leaving Neverland remains the most effective résumé of that apparent duality, and of how – in the case of Wade Robson and James Safechuck – their memories of the singer’s dream-like ranch would take on an infernal quality. Michael Jackson: The Trial isn’t as stylised nor as groundbreaking – many of the people here have been telling their stories for decades, be it in books, podcasts, blogs or otherwise. Yet where Channel 4’s latest series triumphs is in collating these accounts from both sides, and letting you decide what is more plausible, as well as spotlighting details that can’t easily be explained away. And, of course, there are the tapes: recordings of Jackson from 2000 and 2001, many of which have never been heard before. They’re not definitive proof of any wrongdoing, but they’re certainly alarming. In one clip, Jackson declares: “If you told me right now … ‘Michael, you could never see another child’ … I would kill myself.�

Timothy Spall and Art Malik co-star in Aneil Karia’s intelligent and stark retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy, set in the world of shady family business

Screenwriter Michael Lesslie and director Aneil Karia have devised a stark and severe new interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; there are transpositions and cuts, some light modernisations, and the text is stripped down a good deal. It’s an austerely challenging reading and incidentally, right about now, nothing could be further from the richly empathetic and redemptive approach of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, about the play’s imagined origins.

The setting is modern London’s world of shady family business and family dysfunction, wedding parties, blandly scheming associates and SUVs speeding through the night-time streets. Hamlet looks here like no one as much as Kendall Roy from TV’s Succession. Riz Ahmed plays the prince, horrified by a ghostly vision of his dead father (Avijit Dutt) who, in a chilling scene, summons him to a bleak urban rooftop to announce he was murdered by his brother Claudius (Art Malik). Claudius now is a hard-faced property speculator who has evicted a tented community of people led by Fortinbras from some prime real estate, and who now intends to marry Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha).

This camp, light and touching documentary meets the founder of Butterflies Rising Funeral Care – a glamorous funeral director who talks to the bodies and pays tribute to her mum by drinking Strongbow at her grave

When it comes to funerals, we tend to cling to the solemn and the tasteful. We hate to think about death, so we cordon it off from all recognisable signs of life – particularly warmth and comedy. Enter Butterflies Rising Funeral Care, the subject of new Channel 4 documentary The Fabulous Funeral Parlour, which is shaking things up.

Our introduction to this funeral home, founded by Liverpudlian Hayley McCaughran, is seeing a casket with a gold plaque that reads “FUCK OFF�. McCaughran tells us that when making nameplates they always ask families whether the deceased had a favourite saying: “We don’t do it a traditional way.�

As Emerald Fennell’s provocative adaptation hits screens, this narration from the White Lotus actor reminds us of the brilliance of Brontë’s tempestuous novel

Rare is the Wuthering Heights adaptation that fails to ruffle the feathers of the Brontë faithful. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film was criticised for its grit and gloom while Emerald Fennell’s new version, which arrives in cinemas on Valentine’s Day, was described as “aggressively provocative� after test screenings. Perhaps now is the time to return to the source material. In the audioverse, there have already been readings by Michael Kitchener, Daniel Massey, Juliet Stevenson, Patricia Routledge and Joanne Froggatt, though I favour this 2020 edition narrated by Aimee Lou Wood, of Sex Education and The White Lotus fame.

Set in Yorkshire, Emily Brontë’s tempestuous novel opens with Mr Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, visiting his sullen landlord, Heathcliff, at his remote farmhouse where he gets snowed in. Bedding down for the night, he stumbles upon the diaries of the late Catherine Earnshaw, who writes of her love for Heathcliff, an orphan brought by her father to live with the family. Later Mr Lockwood has a nightmare in which the ghost of Catherine begs to be let in through the window (a scene immortalised in song by Kate Bush). The following day he returns to Thrushcross Grange where he asks the housekeeper, Nellie, to tell him about the Earnshaws. Nellie shares a dark tale of abuse, revenge and doomed love.

Yunchan Lim
(Decca)
The 21-year-old pianist gives a fine, muscular account of the Goldbergs, with touches of playfulness, in this live recording from Carnegie Hall

Yunchan Lim recorded the Goldberg Variations live at Carnegie Hall last year, riding the momentum of a run of performances, including two in London. Those who enjoyed his interpretation at Wigmore Hall will find plenty of the same rewarding elements here, not least the seeming ease with which the 21-year-old pianist untangles the music’s complex web of threads. Yet it’s good to find his interpretation wasn’t set in stone. Perhaps the New York performance had a more muscular bent, or perhaps the hints of romanticism in the later variations in London don’t register as strongly on a recording as in the hall.

What is more striking on the recording is a strength in the faster variations that sometimes verges on the mechanical: impressive, and a little overdone. There are touches of playfulness too – when in a couple of the variations he switches to a higher octave, the music sounds like it’s on helium, lighter than air. The slow variation halfway through is deeply felt, the long 25^th variation touchingly done without quite staring into the abyss in the way that some performances do. It will be interesting to hear how Lim’s interpretation of the Goldbergs develops over the years, but this is a fine account to start with.

Gay porn in the 80s was home to beautifully moody synth music that is only now getting rediscovered – tragically too late for many of its creators

Michael Ely knew from the first moment he met James Allan Taylor that he had found someone special. The pair had separately hitchhiked to a gay bar, with fake IDs, in Sunset Beach, California. They connected, they danced and stepped outside for a kiss in the thick fog. “I was only 18 but I knew I had just met my soulmate,� says Ely.

The pair remained a couple until 2015 when Taylor, who was nicknamed Spider, died from liver cancer. A new collection of Taylor’s music, Surge Studio Music – electronic pieces he composed for gay porn films – has just been released. “I was like: wait, there’s a fanbase for 80s gay porn music?� laughs Ely. “I had no idea. When Josh contacted me, I found the cassette tapes in a box in the back of the closet. They’d been there for ever.�

He crossed paths with William Burroughs, Terry Gilliam and Spitting Image while whipping up almighty grooves with his band Blurt. Now 82, he’s back on tour – and bracing for a warts-and-all documentary made by his many children

The big bloke in the khaki suit speaks quietly these days. We are nestled in the corner of Ted Milton’s studio above a rehearsal space in Deptford, London, cocooned by record boxes, poetry books, plus a single big, bright suitcase, and I have to nudge the recorder closer to pick up his voice. Milton – a saxophonist, poet, countercultural survivor and one-time avant garde puppeteer – is 82, and uses a couple of sticks to get around, yet he is once again going on the road across Europe with his long-running band Blurt, as well as releasing a new album with his duo the Odes.

Today, he is making record covers destined for the tour merch table with the help of his old woodblock setup. “That orange suitcase?� he points across the desk. “I just bought it.� He booms out a massive laugh, as if to prove he still has the lung power to command a room. “I’m a fetishist about luggage. I know how to survive touring. Haha!�

The ex-Home Secretary’s memoir of childhood racism is intimate and moving but raises difficult political questions

Sajid Javid’s memoir traces his journey from being a frightened child in racist 1970s Rochdale to becoming a leading member of a political party that attacks and marginalises people like him. However, it is an intimate, and sometimes moving, family portrait as well as a social history of race, class and aspiration in late 20th‑century Britain.

The opening chapters, with their ubiquitous skinheads and “Run, Paki, run� taunts, contain the book’s most arresting scenes. Racism is continuous and targeted: from graffiti on his father’s shop windows to the everyday humiliations at school, and on the buses where his father had bravely fought an informal colour bar to become a bus driver.

The Curious Incident author describes the upbringing that shaped him – and for which he can’t help feeling nostalgia

Attempting a psychological analysis of a literary work is a fool’s errand, for obvious reasons: you’re trying to assess the inside of the writer’s head from the inside of your own, using the inherently treacherous medium of make-believe. And the aim on their part, of course, is always to beguile, and often to deceive.

And yet the temptation is sometimes too great to resist. Mark Haddon, whose blistering memoir details a mainly miserable and loveless childhood and an adulthood studded with significant hurdles, hit the literary jackpot with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2003. In it, a teenage protagonist who struggles to communicate with the world around him uncovers a world of lying adults – most egregiously, he has been told his mother has died, rather than absconded with the nextdoor neighbour – and runs away from home. A more recent novel, The Porpoise, opens with a fatal air crash before morphing into a reworking of Pericles; in Leaving Home, we discover that Haddon is terrified of flying. We also learn that he borrowed heavily from childhood holidays in Brighton to create the atmosphere and texture for his story The Pier Falls, a merciless, documentary-style narration of a cataclysmic seaside disaster.

The follow-up to My Absolute Darling, this tale of best friends who dream of a better life features exquisite sports writing and a lovable heroine – but the plotting is unconvincing

Tamma and Dan are 17-year-old best friends growing up in a California desert town blighted by the strip-mall nihilism of late capitalism. They’re poor. They’re unpopular. Their families are a wasteland. But they have each other and their great shared passion: trad rock climbing. Whenever they can, they head to a climbing route – sometimes a boulder at the edge of a disused parking lot, sometimes a cliff an hour’s hike into a national park – and climb, often with no gear but their bloodied bare hands and tattered shoes.

This is the premise of Crux, the second novel from Gabriel Tallent, the author of the critically acclaimed My Absolute Darling. At its heart, it’s a sports novel, and Tallent’s prose here is precise and often exquisite, inching through a few seconds of movement in a way that reflects the unforgiving nature of climbing. We get a lot of closeups of granite and faint half-moons in rock that suddenly become “the world’s numinous edge�. The language of climbing – a dialect of brainy dirtbags – is a gift to the writer. Tallent’s characters talk about “flashing bouldering problems� and “sending Fingerbang Princess�; a list of routes with “Poodle� in the title includes Poodle Smasher, Astropoodle, Poodle-Oids from the Deep, A Farewell to Poodles, and For Whom the Poodle Tolls. Tallent also has an extraordinary gift for descriptions of landscape; a road is “overhung with stooping desert lilies, tarantulas braving the tarmac in paces, running full out upon their knuckly shadows, the headlights smoking with windblown sand�.

Making light of one of the darkest horrors of the 20th century is a risky business – but a new generation is taking ownership of family histories by making space for human foibles, says an award-winning graphic novelist

My beloved German-Jewish grandmother Gisela was not an affable person. She enjoyed laughing at her own jokes, revelling in the misfortunes of others, and telling people off. If an event combined opportunities for all three activities, so much the better.

When my father was six, he refused to eat the meatloaf that his mother had given him for lunch. Gisela took the piece of meatloaf, now rapidly turning rancid in the Zimbabwe afternoon heat, and served it to him for dinner, and breakfast, and every subsequent meal until he forced himself to eat it. It was the late 1950s – tyrannical parenting was de rigueur, and uneaten meatloaf was the hill that Gisela was willing to die on.

Perfect Tides perfectly captures the older millennial college experience, and a time when nobody worried about being embarrassing online

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I’ve noticed an interesting micro-trend emerging in the last few years: millennial nostalgia games. Not just ones that adopt the aesthetic of Y2K gaming – think Crow Country or Fear the Spotlight’s deliberately retro PS1-style fuzzy polygons – but semi-autobiographical games specifically about the millennial experience. I’ve played three in the past year. Despelote is set in 2002 in Ecuador and is played through the eyes of a football-obsessed eight-year-old. The award-winning Consume Me is about being a teen girl battling disordered eating in the 00s. And this week I played a point-and-click adventure game about being a college student in the early 2000s.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is set in New York in 2003 – a year that is the epitome of nostalgia for the micro-generation that grew up without the internet but came of age online. It was before Facebook, before the smartphone, but firmly during the era of late-night forum browsing and instant-messenger conversations. The internet wasn’t yet a vector for mass communication, but it could still bring you together with other people who loved the things that you loved, people who read the same hipster blogs and liked the same bands. The protagonist, Mara, is a student and young writer who works in her college library.

At a family gathering over Christmas, I took on my 76-year-old mother once again at virtual bowling. Could I finally best her?

My mother bore me. My mother nurtured me. My mother educated me. She has a resilience unmatched, a love all-forgiving. She is the glue that holds our family together. But right now, I am kicking her ass at video game bowling, and it feels good!

In the 00s, my mum was the best Wii Bowling player in the world. She was unbeatable. Strike after strike after strike. The Dudette in our family’s Big Lebowski. So when she said she was coming to visit us in Canada, I thought the time was right to buy the updated Nintendo Switch Sports version of her favourite game. She’s 76 now, and I might finally have a chance of beating her, I thought, especially if I allowed myself a cheeky tune-up on the game before she arrived.

From rhino-sized Rhyhorns to worm-like Diglett, visitors to PokéPark Kanto will roam a forest populated by lifelike Pokémon statues when the attraction opens next week

In Japan, February is normally a period of quiet reflection, a month defined by winter festivals in Sapporo’s snowy mountains and staving off the cold in steaming hot springs. Traditionally, international tourists start to arrive with the blossoms in spring – but thanks to the opening of Pokémon’s first ever amusement park on 5 February, this year, they are likely to come earlier.

Unlike the rollercoaster-filled thrills of Tokyo Disney Sea or Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, PokéPark Kanto is essentially a forest populated by models of the creatures from the perennially popular games. Nestled in the quiet Tokyo suburb of Inagi, half an hour from the city centre, the park is a walkable forest with more than 600 Pokémonin it. Where the Mario-themed Super Nintendo World slots neatly into the massive Universal Studios Japan, PokéPark Kanto is hidden in the back of the less glitzy, funfair-esque Japanese theme park Yomiuri Land.

I’ve been a games journalist since 2007, but still there isn’t much video games coverage that feels like it’s specifically for people like me. So I’m creating a home for it: Mothership

Whether you’re reading about the impending AI bubble bursting or about the video game industry’s mass layoffs and cancelled projects, 2026 does not feel like a hopeful time for gaming. What’s more, games journalists – as well as all other kinds of journalists – have been losing their jobs at alarming rates, making it difficult to adequately cover these crises. Donald Trump’s White House, meanwhile, is using video game memes as ICE recruitment tools, and game studios are backing away from diversity and inclusion initiatives in response to the wider world’s slide to the right.

The manosphere is back, and we’ve lost mainstream feminist websites such as Teen Vogue; bigots everywhere are celebrating what they see as the death of “woke�. Put it all together and we have a dismal stew of doom for someone like me, a queer woman and a feminist who’s been a games journalist and critic since 2007.

Old Vic, London
Stuffed with knowledge and often regarded as the playwright’s finest work, this drama’s sheer cleverness gleams in an exuberant production

When Tom Stoppard was asked what this play was about, just as it streaked its meteoric path from London to New York in the 1990s, he called it a drama of romance, mathematics, landscape gardening and Byron. It doesn’t quite cover it. Often regarded as his finest, Arcadia is about life, the universe and everything, to borrow a phrase.

It takes place in a single room, across time, alternately filled with a 19th-century past and a parallel setting in the 1980s. Director Carrie Cracknell suggests these worlds are a hair’s-breadth away from an encounter, virtually brushing past each other as they go. It opens with teenage prodigy Thomasina Coverly (Isis Hainsworth) conversing amicably with her tutor Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane). The ping-pong of their dialogue is amusing but heartfelt. The mysteries of the world that Thomasina seeks to solve through algebraic equation are accompanied by a slow flirtation between them and the romance that grows is tender, sparky and moving.

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon
Whitney White’s thrilling, song-filled show flips Shakespeare’s great characters and asks why we still lap up these tales of sexy men killing sexy women

It’s tempting to say that by programming All Is But Fantasy the RSC has put a grenade under its own repertoire, but that’s not quite right. Whitney White’s gig-theatre quartet isn’t so much exploding Shakespeare as needling at it. The writer-composer-performer has a love for these plays and their musicality, but she also wants to ask difficult questions about them. Who’s allowed to take up space in these works? Who gets to perform in them? And why do so many of the ugly things in these plays continue to speak to us today?

To grapple with these ideas, White takes on four of Shakespeare’s characters: Lady Macbeth, Emilia from Othello, Juliet, and Richard III. As a Black woman, she questions which parts of the canon are open to her, trying out a series of the playwright’s women before claiming one of his male leads. She is joined in her storytelling by a glorious, shape-shifting chorus of witches (Renée Lamb, Georgina Onuorah and Timmika Ramsay), a white male performer (Daniel Krikler) who is the ever-present “he� to her “she�, and a white female foil (Juliette Crosbie) representing the sorts of actors who will for ever be Juliets.

Octagon, Bolton
Three grownup daughters display childhood neediness in this well-acted production that explores unrequited desires as a mother comes back from the grave

The three grownup sisters in Shelagh Stephenson’s Olivier award-winning comedy have one thing in common. Forced together by the death of their mother, they each have a child’s neediness. They are divided, however, over what – or whom – it is they need.

What Teresa, the eldest, needs is respect for her devotion, especially as the primary carer in their mother’s final days of dementia. Played by Victoria Brazier, austere and brittle, she is trapped in a narrative of martyrdom, a woman forever convinced she is second-best and overlooked.

Theatro Technis, London
In Philip de Voni’s ambitious debut play, a clash over funeral rites exposes deep divisions in a British-Cypriot extended family

Ancient Greek literature teems with contested burials, as someone in Philip de Voni’s drama points out. There is one at the centre of this play, too, about the power struggle and culture clash in a mixed Cypriot-British family after its patriarch dies.

In 2009, in Nicosia, Aristeia (Lucy Christofi Christy) insists her late brother be buried in the Cypriot mountains, in a practice that goes back generations. But his British wife, Jennifer (Ruth Lass), demands her late husband’s body be taken to England, as was his dying wish, she claims. So Aristeia’s keen sense of sacred tradition is pitted against Jennifer’s arguments on freedom from a cultural rite that her husband did not value. Both attempt to reel in the younger generation: Jennifer’s daughter, Penelope (Han-Roze Adonis), and Aristeia’s niece, Xenya (Chrisanthi Livadiotis).

At Theatro Technis, London, until 22 February

Owner of local cinema says Amazon is upset at way they marketed movie as some in US say healthy ticket sales are not reflected by empty seats

An independent cinema in Oregon has claimed Amazon pulled screenings of their documentary about Melania Trump in protest at the cinema’s marketing strategy.

As reported by local newspaper the Lake Oswego Review, the general manager of the Lake Theater & Cafe has claimed the corporation cancelled future screenings of Brett Ratner’s authorised study of the first lady after being alerted to promotional pushes such as: “To defeat your enemy. You must know them. Melania� and “Does Melania wear Prada? Find out on Friday!�

After experiencing the strangeness of the Academy Awards with her last film The Brutalist, the indie actor has reunited with its creators for period curio The Testament of Ann Lee. But what she’d really like to get her teeth into is a certain dino franchise

Stacy Martin is “not a religious person�. Still, the actor insists things have happened in her life that have made her realise there’s “a whole expanse of things that are unexplainable�. Once, at home in north London, she noticed a lightbulb flickering. She couldn’t solve the mystery: no matter how many times she changed it, the bulb continued to blink. Instead of consulting the internet, Martin went to see her psychic, a tea leaf reader she meets annually, booking in under a fake name.

The psychic suggested that someone was trying to communicate with her. “I was like: ‘What if I just start talking to this person that apparently wants to talk to me?’� says Martin. “And so I did. And that light never flickered again.� Martin prefers not to use the word ghost, but she’s aware there are things the mind can’t make sense of; things the body somehow knows.