Many of the Bulgarian seer’s predictions were never recorded, yet her name bolsters conspiracy theories and geopolitical narratives
In some corners of the internet, the Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga has taken on mythical proportions. Social media and tabloids across the globe credit her with predicting the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Last week, someheadlines went further, asking: “Did she foresee the Israel-Iran war, US interference, missiles and airspace shutdowns?” An earlier article mused on her “predictions for 2026”, which purportedly included the start of world war three and humanity’s first contact with aliens.
A search for the term on Google brings up millions of articles meticulously documenting every aspect of gen Z behaviour – from their finances and mental health, to their food habits and hobbies.
Impression of ‘casual operation couldn’t be further from truth’
Head coach hails captain Harry Brook’s ‘amazing job’
Brendon McCullum has defended his record as head coach after England’s elimination from the T20 World Cup, insisting the white-ball side will “achieve some special stuff”, but only if their talent is “harnessed the right way”.
The Guardian revealed on Friday that McCullum is to remain in his post despite the disappointment of a 4-1 Ashes series defeat, England’s semi-finals exit and widespread criticism of the New Zealander’s methods.
Senate blocks war powers measure and House follows suit – now president can bomb Iran free from congressional interference
Before US troops invaded Iraq, George W Bush asked Congress to pass a resolution authorizing military force against Washington’s longtime nemesis, a request that lawmakers obliged.
Twenty four years later, the United States is at war with a different Middle Eastern rival – Iran – under a different Republican president – Donald Trump. But this time, the president did not bother to seek permission from the Senate and House of Representatives before joining Israel in launching the air and naval campaign. And far from objecting, Congress’s Republican majorities have simply stepped aside.
The administration has been accused of failing to comply with hundreds of orders. The courts must not be paper tigers
Late last month, a Minnesota federal court judge, Patrick Schiltz, issued an opinion detailing hundreds of instances in which the Trump administration has failed to comply with court orders. He threatened to find it in contempt and to impose penalties.
Schiltz and other federal judges have made such threats before, but they have not followed through. It is time they did, lest they turn their courts into paper tigers.
The mad venture – which my mother nicknamed ‘your father’s ego’ – would swallow my childhood. Years later I went on a quest to understand what really happened to his glittering folly
BBC Television Centre, 2 May 1990. “Who would spend £7m on an egg?” The question echoes around the TV studio. At home, six million people watch as chatshow host Terry Wogan smiles knowingly, his brown eyes twinkling. “Seven million pounds,” he repeats in his Irish brogue.
There was strictly no mention of estranged son Brooklyn, missing from front row
The Beckham empire is a tangled web of family and fortune. After her Paris fashion week show on Friday evening, Victoria Beckham talked backstage about Tamara de Lempicka, the Polish art deco portrait painter from whose palette she took the glowing colours and sinuous lines of this season’s coral and jade party dresses. Strictly no mention of the other story of the night – the absence of her estranged eldest son, Brooklyn, from a front row packed with the rest of the Beckham clan.
The designer’s husband, David Beckham, brought her a fortifying glass of red wine as she spoke to reporters. “I relate to Tamara de Lempicka as a strong woman, and to how she conducted herself. She stuck to what she believed in.”
Mickey says his stint as a handyman transformed into a lucrative sex business due to the region’s ‘self-denial’
A western Texas fracker starring in a podcast about how his attempted moonlighting as a handyman turned into lucrative sex work largely solicited by distracted oil industry professionals’ housewives says he believes his region’s repressive sexual attitudes gave his side gig an opening to flourish.
“There’s an inherent kind of self-denial,” the subject of The Handyman of West Texas, identified only as Mickey, said in a recent interview. “We all have these thoughts. But we lie to ourselves and try to conform to … how you’re supposed to be repressing your own pleasure.”
Seeing people walking their pets in a snowstorm melted the heart of this New York-based photographer
Had Adela Ramirez’s puggle Teddy still been alive, she would have been out walking him in the snow. Instead, she was at home, in the art studio of her New York City apartment, watching from a window. “My view consists of the Empire State Building, which is art deco, the B Altman Building, which is Italian renaissance revival, and the beautiful Church of the Incarnation, which is neo-gothic. I’m originally from Texas, but have lived in New York for 40 years,” Ramirez says. “I always feel privileged when the universe seems to say, ‘Today I am going to present you with a fabulous snowstorm – enjoy the performance!’”
As Ramirez watched, she noticed that there were no cars or pedestrians; only dog walkers were braving the storm. “People were playing chase, carrying them across icy parts, giving them their necessary daily walk. That’s what we do,” she says. “It made me miss Teddy. He was half beagle, half pug, with an underbite and a princess attitude. He loved the snow, and had a winter coat and boots, but made it clear that he couldn’t be expected to walk in it. He would lift his paws and look me straight in the eye, as if to say, ‘Mom, please carry me.’ We had to say goodbye to him last spring. He’d been my loyal boy for 10 years.
Iran’s targeting of commercial datacentres in the UAE and Bahrain signals a new frontier in asymmetric warfare
It is believed to be a first: the deliberate targeting of a commercial datacentre by the armed forces of a country at war.
At 4.30am on Sunday morning, an Iranian Shahed 136 drone struck an Amazon Web Services datacentre in the United Arab Emirates, setting off a devastating fire and forcing a shutdown of the power supply. Further damage was inflicted as attempts were made to suppress the flames with water.
The Winter Paralympics return to Italy for the second time in 20 years. From the fashion capital of Milan to the dramatic peaks of Cortina d’Ampezzo, Milan Cortina will take place across northern Italy, marking the 50th anniversary of the first Paralympic Winter Games.
The medal table prioritises the number of gold medals won. If countries have the same number of gold medals, the order is then dictated by which has the most silvers, and finally bronze if the numbers are still identical.
In documentary The Pink Pill, the fight to provide access to the so-called ‘female Viagra’ exposes an industry that still discounts the needs of women
Barbara Gattuso had been happily married for decades when she signed up, in the late 2000s, for a clinical trial involving a potentially revolutionary new drug. She and her husband had once had a fulfilling sex life, both pre- and post-children. But at some point during her perimenopausal years, her desire disappeared. It wasn’t stress, fatigue or relationship issues, though her lack of libido certainly contributed to those. It was more like a mysterious evaporation – like “somebody pulled the plug”, as she recalls in a new documentary on flibanserin, the experimental drug that proffered potential relief.
Originally developed as an anti-depressant by the German company Boehringer Ingelheim, flibanserin had instead shown promise as a treatment for low female libido, working on neurotransmitters in the so-called “sex center” of the brain. In a video from that trial filmed by Dr Irwin Goldstein, the “godfather of sexual medicine” and a key consultant on Viagra – that revolutionary blue pill for men with erectile dysfunction – Gattuso appears nearly giddy. She was chasing her husband around again, she said. She felt “phenomenal”, like a “new woman on this drug”. She was plugged in.
Regime change, nuclear threat – or something else? US officials seem unable to land on one coherent reason for war
When the United States launched Operation Epic Fury last Saturday, the Trump administration had a major communications question to figure out: how to explain to the American public, Congress, and the world why it had just started a war with Iran.
During war time, talking points and propaganda reflexively fly in every direction, but the Trump administration still hasn’t been able to land on one coherent answer.
The presenter and writer on trying to become an air steward aged seven, daytime baths, and an on-air howler
Born in London, Fearne Cotton, 44, began presenting The Disney Club at 15. She went on to become a Radio 1 DJ, hosting her own show from 2009 to 2015; she currently presents Radio 2’s Sounds of the 90s. In 2017, she started the Happy Place community and now has an award-winning podcast, an annual festival and a publishing imprint. The author of bestselling personal development books, her latest, Likeable, is out next week. She lives in London and has two children with her former husband, Jesse Wood.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Impatience. I’m not very good at waiting around or dealing with things that aren’t moving at a pace that I want them to.
Extortionate costs, queueing in the cold and potentially life-altering injuries? No thanks. And don’t get me started on the EDM après-ski hell
There comes a time in every middle-class or upwardly mobile person’s life when they will hear the following six words: “Would you like to come skiing?” My answer: absolutely not.
Skiing, I have come to believe, is the emperor’s new clothes of leisure pursuits: a collectively sustained fantasy. People insist it’s magical in the same way they insist that cold-water swimming is “transformative” or small plates are “better for sharing”. At some point we forgot to ask whether any of this is actually true.
Emma Loffhagen is a freelance commissioning editor and writer covering culture and lifestyle
Billy Bragg, Sarah Lucas and Kojo Koram among those encouraging people to share cultural artefacts
For some people it’s a Morris Minor, for others, a beach windbreak, chicken tikka masala or Magna Carta.
A new campaign is aiming to collect 50 objects that sum up Englishness in an effort to move the conversation away from reductive arguments over whether to hang a St George’s flag or not.
The child killer Ian Huntley has died in hospital, just over a week after being attacked at a maximum security prison.
The former school caretaker killed Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both aged 10, in Soham, Cambridgeshire on 4 August 2002. The girls had left a family barbecue to buy sweets.
Donald Trump ordered the launch of the war on Iran last Friday afternoon while on board Air Force One, as the presidential plane made its descent towards Corpus Christi, Texas.
Trump was on his way to the port city to give a speech titled American Energy Dominance and had spent the three-hour flight chatting to Texas Republican politicians including the state’s two hawkish senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, about his options in Iran.
Her YA classic was inspired by racism in 1990s Britain. A quarter of a century later, she talks about success, death threats and getting shoutouts from Tinie Tempah and Stormzy
‘I’m useless at this bit,” Malorie Blackman laughs, shifting awkwardly in a plum-coloured jacket and smart black trousers. It is a gloomy February evening in the back room of a theatre in west London, and she is having her photograph taken, the rain pummelling the brick outside.
Blackman is, by any reasonable metric, one of the most significant writers Britain has produced in the past quarter of a century – the closest thing my generation, who were raised on her books, has to a literary rockstar. And yet, she seems faintly baffled by the notion that the spotlight should rest on her for long. “I hate being in front of the camera!”
Former batter says Rob Key has sounded him out before
‘I would never not look at helping England out’
Kevin Pietersen has said he would “absolutely” consider becoming part of a future England cricket coaching set-up and revealed Rob Key has previously sounded him out a couple of times.
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