Sting and his former bandmates go to the high court over a royalties dispute this week – the latest chapter in the song’s remarkably fractious story
This week’s high court hearings between Sting and his former bandmates in the Police, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, are the latest chapter in the life of a song whose negative energy seems to have seeped out into real life.
Every Breath You Take is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Copeland and Summers against Sting, alleging that he owes them royalties linked to their contributions to the hugely popular song, particularly from streaming earnings, estimated at $2m (£1.5m) in total. Sting’s legal team have countered that previous agreements between him and his bandmates regarding their royalties from the song do not include streaming revenue – and argued in pre-trial documents that the pair may have been “substantially overpaid”. In the hearing’s opening day, it was revealed that since the lawsuit was filed, Sting has paid them $870,000 (£647,000) to redress what his lawyer called “certain admitted historic underpayments”. But there are still plenty of future potential earnings up for debate.
Prime minister wants cabinet ministers to move on from policies that have tanked with voters
Before the 2015 UK election, the Australian political expert Lynton Crosby devised a strategy for the Tories that became known as “scraping the barnacles off the boat” – shedding unpopular policies that hindered the party’s electoral appeal.
Instead, the party focused on core issues it believed would help win over floating voters: the economy, welfare, the strength of David Cameron (and weakness of Ed Miliband) and immigration. Everything else was deprioritised and the Conservatives stuck to their messages rigidly. It worked.
Sustainable fresh scallops are best treated simply, and this herby, garlicky breadcrumb topping ticks all the right boxes
As a kid growing up in West Bay, Dorset, I used to sit on the harbour wall and watch the small trawlers coming in with their catch. My friend Mark’s dad’s boat, along with all the others, would be stacked high with sacks of queenies that they’d dredged up only hours before, and Mark’s mum would pack us off to school with a tub each of queen scallop meat doused in Sarson’s vinegar and white pepper, to eat later as a playground snack. At the time, I thought nothing of it, but, looking back now, I realise quite what a luxurious schoolday treat this was.
These days, however, our local scallop fishermen don’t fish for queenies much any more, because the time it takes to shuck and clean them is more or less the same as that for larger king scallops, so they’re no longer financially viable; also, instead of all those trawlers that Lyme Bay had in the past, it’s now mostly divers who fish more sustainably for king scallops, without demolishing the sea bed in the process. There are two main dive boats that fish out of Lyme Regis nowadays, operated by Jon Shuker and Ali Day, and they’ve pretty much cornered the local market. They recently started experimenting with so-called “disco scallops”, which are caught in pots fitted with flashing lights that lure them in, which is much more efficient, crew-wise, than diving, because a boat with one diver is legally required to have a crew of four, comprising the working diver, a standby diver, a supervisor and a driver. Crazy, eh?
As I write my last regular column for the Guardian, my thoughts turn to the lessons and hope we can take from history
From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand, as the old hymn has it, we seem to inhabit a world that is more seriously troubled in more places than many can ever remember. In the UK, national morale feels all but shot. Politics commands little faith. Ditto the media. The idea that, as a country, we still have enough in common to carry us through – the idea embedded in Britain’s once potent Churchillian myth – feels increasingly threadbare.
Welcome, in short, to the Britain of the mid-1980s. That Britain often felt like a broken nation in a broken world, very much as Britain often does in the mid-2020s. The breakages were of course very different. And on one important level, misery is the river of the world. But, for those who can still recall them, the 1980s moods of crisis and uncertainty have things in common with those of today.
Billionaire and career Bond-villain cosplayer Elon Musk has been forced by public backlash into a humiliating backdown over use of his AI chatbot, Grok. Watching the world’s richest man eat a shit sandwich on a global stage represents a rare win for sovereign democracy.
The bandhgala jacket will no longer be part of the formal uniform for Indian Railways staff, following claims it symbolises a ‘colonial mindset’
It is one India’s most ubiquitous garments, with origins in the grand Mughal courts and Rajasthani kingdoms of times past, and still widely favoured by sharply dressed grooms at wedding receptions.
But this week, the distinctive high-collared bandhgala jacket – known to many as the “princely jacket” in a nod to its royal origins – found itself at the centre of a lively debate after it was denounced by the Indian railways minister as a symbol of a “colonial mindset”.
In countries such as South Sudan, the great herds have all but disappeared. But further south, conservation success mean increasing human-wildlife conflict
It is late on a January afternoon in the middle of South Sudan’s dry season, and the landscape, pricked with stubby acacias, is hazy with smoke from people burning the grasslands to encourage new growth. Even from the perspective of a single-engine ultralight aircraft, we are warned it will be hard to spot the last elephant in Badingilo national park, a protected area covering nearly 9,000 sq km (3,475 sq miles).
Technology helps – the 20-year-old bull elephant wears a GPS collar that pings coordinates every hour. The animal’s behaviour patterns also help; Badingilo’s last elephant is so lonely that it moves with a herd of giraffes.
Inua Ellams’ play takes you to different destinations for intimate conversations about sex, queerness, capitalism, football and much more
I first saw Barber Shop Chronicles on National Theatre at Home. It was during the first lockdown in 2020 and I was trying to find some entertainment while I was furloughed. I was 26 and hadn’t seen a lot of theatre, but had heard good things about it on social media.
For the first five minutes or so the audience are milling around the barber shop set. You’re not really sure who’s an actor and who’s an audience member. But there’s a real sense of camaraderie, jokes and vibes – you really feel part of it. The setting is not exactly domestic, not exactly business. There wasn’t a raised stage so you felt invited, and then kind of zoomed, into the action.
Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered
In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.
It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.
This hormone-fuelled tale of the training college for space voyagers is like Grange Hill, with phasers – and it has a female lead unlike any captain before
The original Star Trek TV series debuted in 1966, so trying to get your head round all the sequels, prequels and timeline-splitting spin-offs can often feel like homework. It was only a matter of time before the venerable sci-fi franchise used a school as a setting. But Starfleet Academy, the latest streaming series, is not some random cosmic polytechnic for aliens to study humanities or vice versa. This is the oft-referenced San Francisco space campus sited right next to the Golden Gate Bridge. With James T Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard on the alumni list, it is basically Hogwarts for wannabe starship captains.
Or at least it used to be. As this newest Trek opens we are in the 32nd century: as far into the future as the franchise has ever gone, boldly or otherwise. (The original 1966 five-year mission for Kirk and co took place in the 23rd century.) The universe is still recovering from the Burn, an all-encompassing cataclysm from 2020’s season three of Star Trek: Discovery that put the kibosh on faster-than-light warp travel. After an extended period of intergalactic isolationism, Starfleet Academy is about to receive its first new intake for over a century. Mega-fan Stephen Colbert is already on board as the school’s PA announcer. All it needs is a new chancellor.
The world’s largest Wetherspoon’s has seal-spotting views, a green leather banquette and a grand central staircase. I would do anything for that pub, so imagine my surprise when I was given my marching orders
In the most prime imaginable bit of Ramsgate beach real estate, right on the sand, stands a handsome, turn-of-the-last-century building that had claimed for the longest amount of time, some years in neon, to be a casino. I’d never been allowed in as a kid. Then in the 90s it was leaning towards defunct, by the 00s it looked a bit haunted, then there was a fire, and wham, 2017, it turned into a Spoons. It had been trailed for a few months ahead, and I’d sworn off it; the living nightmare that was Brexit was only a few months old and Wetherspoon’s Tim Martin was one of its most gracelessly triumphant fuglemen. He could keep his (incredibly cheap) pints and his (superhumanly fast) nuggets.
The US I grew up in was built on the rule of law. Now my Indian-born dad is scared ICE will take him from his American care home
As an American of mixed Danish and Indian heritage, who is also a citizen of France and, therefore, of the EU, Donald Trump’s contempt for the rule of law fills me with dread. “I don’t need international law,” he boasted on 7 January in an interview with the New York Times. For Louis XIV, it was “L’état, c’est moi”. For Trump, it’s the “Donroe doctrine”, or “the western hemisphere is mine for whatever profit I and my elite group of loyal courtiers can wring from it”.
At the same time, Trump’s honesty about his intention to use the astonishing military power he wields for unfettered plunder is at least refreshing. No more American pieties to democracy and human rights. The world hasn’t seen this kind of unabashed dedication to amassing wealth since the British East India Company. All hail the new king emperor! Or else.
Campaign beset by violence with supporters of rival candidate Bobi Wine teargassed and detained
Ugandans are preparing to vote in an election that is expected to result in Yoweri Museveni extending his nearly four-decade grip on power in the east African country, after a campaign beset by violence.
Security forces have frequently clamped down on supporters of Museveni’s main opponent, Bobi Wine, by teargassing and shooting bullets at events and detaining people. Authorities have also arrested civil society members and suspended rights groups. On Tuesday, they shut down internet access and limited mobile phone services countrywide.
Donald Trump has said he has been assured the killing of protesters in Iran has been halted, adding that he would “watch it and see” about threatened US military action, as tensions appeared to ease on Wednesday night.
Trump had repeatedly talked in recent days about coming to the aid of the Iranian people over the crackdown on protests that Iran Human Rights, a group based in Norway, said had now killed at least 3,428 people and led to the arrest of more than 10,000.
Mayor urged calm as protesters gathered on the scene, as city continues to reel in aftermath of Renee Nicole Good’s killing
A federal officer has shot a man in the leg during an enforcement operation in north Minneapolis, sparking protests in a city still on edge after the killing of Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent last week.
The shooting occurred about 7pm local time, according to witnesses. Several hundred protesters gathered at the scene on Wednesday night facing off with agents who blocked off the area and used smoke and other crowd control weapons.
Nearly a dozen pipe bombs, some of them already detonated, have been found on footpaths and in parks in the nation’s capital, sparking a major police investigation and warnings not to touch the potentially explosive items.
ACT police Det Acting Insp Anna Wronski could not say where the pipe bombs came from or who was behind them, but said the matter was being taken extremely seriously.
The new Adelaide festival board has issued a public apology to Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, and has promised she will be invited to Adelaide writers’ week in 2027.
Abdel-Fattah immediately accepted the apology, posting on Instagram that it was a vindication “of our collective solidarity and mobilisation against anti-Palestinian racism, bullying and censorship”.
Smith’s improbable run to the $1m prize made him a magnet on Thursday morning at Melbourne Park, amid more than a dozen local and international interviews, selfies, promotions and autographs.
Four astronauts undock from International Space Station, with the affected crewmember in a stable condition, says space agency
Four crew members have left the International Space Station (ISS) and are heading back to Earth after a medical issue prompted their mission to be cut a month short in Nasa’s first medical evacuation.
A video feed from Nasa showed American astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui undocking from the ISS at 2220 GMT on Wednesday, after five months in space.
Night-time temperatures dip close to -20C; minister outlines major problems with desertion and conscription evasion. What we know on day 1,422
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to declare a state of emergency in Ukraine’s energy sector to tackle disrupted power supplies after heavy Russian attacks. Energy imports would also be increased, the Ukrainian president said. Emergency crews in Ukraine have proceeded with round-the-clock efforts to restore power and heating supplies at a time when night-time temperatures are dipping close to -20C (-4F). Zelenskyy said the state of emergency would allow authorities “more options and flexibility”. He called for the establishment of more centres where residents can stay warm and charge electronic devices, and said nightly curfews could be lifted in areas where the security situation permitted it.
The president said Kyiv – whose mayor he regularly clashes with – had done considerably less than other major centres, notably Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, to prepare for the hardships inflicted by the attacks. “Even in recent days, I do not see sufficient intensity,” he said. “This must be urgently corrected. Decisions must be made.” The Kyiv mayor, Vitali Klitschko, countered that heating had been restored to all but about 400 of 6,000 affected apartment buildings and support centres were operating 24 hours a day. “Such statements, first of all, undermine the dedicated work of thousands of people, professionals,” Klitschko wrote. “They may not have weapons in their hands, but through their tireless efforts they are also fighting for their country.” Zelenskyy said a permanent coordination headquarters would be set up in Kyiv with Denys Shmyhal, the newly appointed first deputy prime minister and energy minister, overseeing the work.
Donald Trump has again claimed Ukraine – not Russia – is holding up a potential peace deal, rhetoric that stands in marked contrast to that of European allies, who have consistently argued Moscow has little interest in ending its war in Ukraine. “I think he’s ready to make a deal,” Trump said of Vladimir Putin, in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday. “I think Ukraine is less ready to make a deal.” Moscow and Kyiv remain at odds over the key issue of territory. There are few signs that Putin is prepared to soften his maximalist demands to end the full-scale invasion.
Zelenskyy urged the military to hold their positions along the 1,200km (775-mile) frontline and diplomats to keep working on securing peace. “From our side, maximum productivity is required,” he said. “We expect the same level of energetic work from the American side. I personally very much expect this.”
Ukraine will be able to buy military equipment from non-European suppliers when it is given access to a €90bn (£78bn) EU loan later this year under a proposal outlined by the EU executive, Jennifer Rankin writes from Brussels. “European preference first, but if not possible then purchase abroad,” said the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who added that Europe should have a return in jobs and research benefits from the “billions and billions that are being invested”. Her proposal represents a softening of the approach pursued by France that favoured a more restrictive “buy European” clause. The commission said an alternative plan based on using Russia’s frozen assets remained on the table.
Desertion by 200,000 troops and another two million people evading conscription are among many challenges facing the military, Ukraine’s new defence minister said on Wednesday. Mykhailo Fedorov told parliament that other problems included excessive bureaucracy, a Soviet-style approach to management, and disruptions in the supply of equipment to troops. “We cannot fight a war with new technologies but an old organisational structure,” Fedorov said.
The defence ministry was facing a shortfall of 300bn hryvnia ($6.9bn) in funding, Fedorov said. On the upside he said some sectors had emerged from scratch, including private missile producers, which now number about 20, and more than 100 companies manufacturing ground-based robotic systems.
The US treasury department has extended until 28 February a licence for companies to talk with Russian energy company Lukoil about buying its foreign assets. The US imposed sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, Russia’s two biggest energy companies, on 22 October as part of an effort to pressure Moscow over its war in Ukraine. Lukoil put its $22bn in global assets up for sale shortly after. It has been hard-hit by the US sanctions, with overseas operations disrupted from Iraq to Finland.
Items worth £59.7m allocated to museums, galleries, libraries and archives as part of Arts Council England scheme
Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli’s desk, a painting by Vanessa Bell and a rare artwork by Edgar Degas are among the items of cultural importance saved for the nation this year.
The items, worth a total of £59.7m, will be allocated to museums, galleries, libraries and archives around the UK as part of Art Council England’s cultural gifts and acceptance in lieu schemes.
Pressure mounting for use of glyphosate, listed by WHO since 2015 as probable carcinogen, to be heavily restricted
Children are potentially being exposed to the controversial weedkiller glyphosate at playgrounds across the UK, campaigners have said after testing playgrounds in London and the home counties.
The World Health Organization has listed glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen since 2015. However, campaigners say local authorities in the UK are still using thousands of litres of glyphosate-based herbicides in public green spaces.
The police chief who used “exaggerated and untrue” intelligence to justify a ban on Israeli football fans was clinging on to his job on Wednesday, despite the home secretary demanding he resign.
Craig Guildford, who leads West Midlands police, is determined to stay in his post for now, the Guardian has learned, despite a war of words that culminated in Shabana Mahmood declaring she had lost confidence in him.
Image with question ‘Which way, Greenland man?’ is a ‘key concept in neo-Nazi and white supremacist subculture’
The Trump administration has been called out, yet again, for using explicitly white supremacist verbiage in its increasingly aggressive social media strategy.
The White House posted a cartoon to X on Wednesday of two Greenlandic mush teams with three huskies each, pointing towards the choice of the white pillars and the South Lawn or a tempestuous scene by the Great Wall of China and Red Square in Russia.
Connexion
