In refusing to sing the national anthem these athletes have placed themselves in grave danger while Gianni Infantino sides with the American war machine

A small but telling detail from a vast and baffling chain of events. You probably saw the footage of Donald Trump’s declaration of war on Iran two weeks ago, a piece of history played out in real time, a moment where the inevitable violent deaths of thousands of people were in effect announced.

In the video Trump is shown propped up at his plinth, using that sing-song intonation he employs to appear cod-statesmanlike, faux-grave, but sounding instead like a semi-sentient robot vacuum cleaner in the seconds before it runs out of battery life. To the great people of Iran. America is backing you. Don’t go outside. It’s very dangerous out there. We will for the foreseeable future be bombing you to freedom.

Dramatising Onjali Q Raúf’s refugee tale The Boy at the Back of the Class brought cheers and boos from a young audience – showing they can handle the truth

I’d never heard of The Boy at the Back of the Class before I was asked to adapt it in 2023. My son had just turned one when Onjali Q Raúf’s novel came into my life. While I could have recited every Julia Donaldson book in my sleep at the time, this would have been a little advanced for his reading age.

Since then, I have of course read the book and its impact is extraordinary. It follows a young Syrian boy, Ahmet, who arrives in the UK without his parents. He joins a school and befriends a group of kids who hear that the government is going to “close the gates”. They don’t fully understand what it means other than that Ahmet’s parents, who must be looking for him, won’t be able to get into the country. So they decide, in a beautifully innocent way, to go to the most powerful person they can think of – the queen! – and ask for help to find Ahmet’s parents and keep the gates open. There is a wonderful simplicity to the whole thing.

Three women in their 40s, 50s and 60s interviewed under caution in relation to alleged abuse by late Harrods owner

Three women have been interviewed under caution on suspicion of facilitating one of Britain’s worst sexual abuse scandals involving the former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed and his alleged attacks over four decades.

Scotland Yard said the number of victims had reached 154 women, feared to have suffered rape and sexual assault by Fayed, or sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

Donald Trump has fired his controversial US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, after weeks of bipartisan complaints about her leadership. As the public face of an aggressive immigration crackdown that prompted lawsuits and nationwide anti-ICE protests, Noem’s year-long tenure was plagued by multiple controversies, including accusing two US citizens killed by immigration agents of ‘domestic terrorism’. What exactly led to Noem’s firing and what do we know about her replacement? Nosheen Iqbal speaks to the Guardian US live news editor Chris Michael

Styles will perform new album in full at Co-op Live arena show, with tickets being traded for well above £20 face value

More than 20,000 fans from all over the world flocked towards the Co-op Live arena in Manchester on Friday to watch Harry Styles perform his first concert in two and a half years – some waiting 48 hours for a place down the front.

Styles will perform his new album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally in full, after its release earlier today. Anticipation for the show had been high since tickets went on sale for £20 in early February, which, barring a performance of the album’s lead single Aperture at the Brit awards – which took place at the same arena a week earlier – will be Styles’ first time on stage since closing out a tour in Italy in July 2023. It has been marketed as a homecoming show for the pop star, who was raised outside the city in Holmes Chapel, Cheshire.

Rule changes will affect driver style and car performance with world champion Lando Norris already under scrutiny

With the long and increasingly febrile buildup almost at an end, Formula One is finally ready to go racing into the sport’s new era. Whether it will prove a success is one of many questions that will be answered at the season-opener in Melbourne this weekend, as will the most pressing concern: which team and driver enter this brave new world on top of the pile?

In the paddock at Albert Park this week, teams and drivers increasingly had an air of the stony-faced stare-down of a cold war summit amid caginess about their prospects. No one wanted to give anything away nor make predictions.

Syndicat de la Librairie Française accused online retailer of trying to ‘flood the market with fake AI-generated books’

Amazon has withdrawn from the Paris book festival after a boycott by France’s booksellers’ association prompted a row over the company’s sponsorship of the event.

The festival, due to take place from 17 to 19 April, will now go ahead without the backing of the US retail company, after a mutual decision by organisers and Amazon to end their partnership.

Woods says he has PGA commitments but knows he would be up against a detail-obsessed Luke Donald in 2027

Chatter on the Bay Hill range this week has suggested the prospect of Tiger Woods making a return to competitive action at next month’s Masters may actually be more than a tale of fantasy. There is even the suggestion Woods could test his competitive ability at a stop on the senior Champions Tour between now and Augusta National. If nothing else, the mere discussion keeps sponsors happy.

One never really knows with Woods, whose schedule was always mysterious by design, but his addition to the Masters field would naturally turn heads. Having not played a mainstream tournament since the Open of 2024 – and with an injury record as long as the Trans-Siberian railway – Woods will presumably at some point have to prove he can either remain a relevant part of majors or succumb to the kind of sad, hard-to-watch existence that has befallen scores of sportspeople before him. It is at least fair to say he does not have many Masters left.

The intensified use of artificial intelligence, and rows over its control, demonstrate the need for democratic oversight and multilateral controls

“Never in the future will we move as slow as we are moving now,” the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, warned this week, addressing the urgent need to shape the use of artificial intelligence. The speed of technological development – as well as geopolitical turbulence – is collapsing the distinction between theoretical arguments and real world events. A political row over the US military’s AI capabilities coincides with its unprecedented use in the Iran crisis.

The AI company Anthropic insisted that it could not remove safeguards preventing the Department of Defense from using its technology for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons. The Pentagon said it had no interest in such uses – but that such decisions should not be made by companies. Outrageously, the administration has not just fired Anthropic but blacklisted it as a supply-chain risk. OpenAI stepped in, while insisting that it had maintained the red lines declared by Anthropic. Yet in an internal response to the user and employee backlash, its CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that it does not control the Pentagon’s use of its products and that the deal’s handling made OpenAI look “opportunistic and sloppy”.

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Publishing has failed to deliver on its promises after Black Lives Matter. True diversity requires a lasting shift

A World Book Day question: which children’s author is name-checked in Stormzy’s song Superheroes (and appears in the video for Mel Made Me Do It) and Tinie Tempah’s Written in the Stars? The answer, as a generation of readers will know, is former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman. Her groundbreaking novel, Noughts & Crosses, turns 25 this year.

Set in a dystopian Britain (Albion), in which racial hierarchies are reversed, this story of star-crossed lovers was one of the first young adult novels to tackle racism and class directly in the UK. It was written in response to the death of Stephen Lawrence; 20 years later, Endgame, the last in the series, was finished as the world witnessed the murder of George Floyd. Noughts & Crosses was voted one of the UK’s all-time favourite books, and has been adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company and for TV by the BBC, with a cameo from Stormzy.

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.

People tell of scenes of panic during airstrikes on Iran’s capital, with several saying they feared they would die

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Sleeplessness, fear and exhaustion gripped residents of Tehran as successive waves of strikes struck the Iranian capital, judging from messages sent by people in the city after the latest overnight onslaught, which several described as the worst bombardment in six days of war.

With Iran imposing a near-total internet blackout, information emerging from inside the country is fragmentary and difficult to verify. But in a series of accounts sent through proxy connections, and calls with friends abroad, Tehranis described a night of intense explosions.

Landmark ruling in Celia Ramos case finds 310,000 women, most Indigenous, were targeted in brutal 1990s campaign

The highest human rights court in Latin America condemned Peru on Thursday over the death of its citizen Celia Ramos, who died at the age of 34 in 1997 after undergoing sterilisation “under coercion”.

The landmark ruling by the inter-American court of human rights (IACHR) is the first on Peru’s forced sterilisation programme, which operated between 1996 and 2000 and was directed against poor, rural and Indigenous women.

Exclusive: Senior party figures share data suggesting Green surge could put Labour in fourth place in capital in May

Senior Labour politicians across London have warned the government not to take progressive voters for granted, with concerns the party faces a “political earthquake” in the capital in May after a surge in support for the Greens.

They have been privately circulating new data that suggests Labour could drop from first to fourth place in London in the May elections – losing control of all but two of their councils – with the Greens soaring into first place to take nine.

Relegation fears are sharpening while interim head coach grasps for solutions at a club hampered by inhibition, rage and injuries

Igor Tudor’s messaging was always going to be key. All eyes and ears were on the interim Tottenham head coach on Thursday night and how he would react; the tone he would look to set. Would there be another blast for the players? Goodness knows, the material was there.

It had been another impossibly awful occasion at the club’s home stadium, another defeat – this one by Crystal Palace. Spurs cannot buy a Premier League win at the Temple of Gloom; they have two all season, the basis for the worst home record in the division. As relegation fears sharpen to an incredibly uncomfortable point, the emotions in the stands ranged from apathy to anger. A lot of anger.

With an exacting modernist style and the courage to address fascism and colonialism head on, Lobo Antunes’s writing is a deluge of unforgiving truths in lush prose

• António Lobo Antunes, Portuguese novelist who chronicled dictatorship and war, dies aged 83

António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese novelist who died this week in Lisbon at 83, had little patience for discussing his craft. The mechanics of writing were, he liked to say, “such a bore!”. Yet few writers of his generation showed greater stylistic daring – when José Saramago was awarded the 1998 Nobel prize in Literature, many in Portugal felt the honour had gone to the wrong writer.

Over the course of more than 30 novels, Lobo Antunes honed an exacting modernist style all his own, using it to explore Portugal’s relationship with its fascist past, and to confront the tragic futility of its final colonial campaigns in Africa. Often dismissed as a difficult writer, Lobo Antunes crafted prose that was stubbornly flirtatious, at once inviting and resisting the reader. His sentences, lush with intricate metaphors and similes, bristly with ideas and provocations, brazenly flout the rules of grammar, syntax and punctuation, determined to preserve their idiosyncrasy. Texturally, his stories are a feat, combining discordant elements to exhilarating effects: nihilism paired with political gusto; farce shot through with horror; realism grading into the weird and the surreal.

Walking away from a violent accident changed my life. Garrett’s speeding history suggests the lesson still hasn’t reached him

The taste of cold beer lingered on my lips as I cut through the quiet night, 105mph toward cigarettes and hot wings. Halfway to my destination, Beyoncé’s Irreplaceable looping through the speakers, my tires hugged the winding turns around the lake that separated my neighborhood from the city. I was young and careless, high on anticipation. No seat belt. Eyes squinting through the haze of cigarette smoke.

Somewhere between the thump of the 808s and the growl of the engine, I heard a voice.

Reports Kuwait was cutting output pushed up cost of barrel of Brent crude to highest weekly gain since Covid pandemic began

The Iran conflict has driven the oil price past $90 a barrel to its highest weekly gains since the Covid-19 pandemic six years ago, threatening a fresh rise in global inflation.

Reports that Kuwait had begun cutting production of oil at some fields after running out of space to store it drove the cost of a barrel of Brent crude to as high as $91.89 at one point on Friday – its highest since April 2024 and up from about $72.50 just before war broke out.

Doctors share healthful habits for managing urination and debunk misconceptions about trips to the bathroom

Urination is a vital human function and often occurs without much fanfare or thought – but age, sex, medications and a host of other factors can influence how you use the bathroom. Because there can be so much variation, patients must not ignore what seems out of the norm for their bodies, says Dr Vannita Simma-Chiang, a board-certified urologist and associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

“If something seems strange to you, one of the best things you can do is just go in and chat with a medical professional about it,” says Simma-Chiang.

Firm says AI tools are masking identities of false applicants, who then funnel wages from remote IT jobs to North Korea

Fake IT workers deployed by North Korea are using AI technology, including voice-changing tools, to trick western companies into hiring them, Microsoft has said.

The US tech firm said a signature Pyongyang money-raising ruse is being enhanced by AI, which is helping create fake names and alter stolen IDs to increase the credibility of false applicants for IT and software development jobs.

The pieces are falling into place for autonomous artificial intelligence. We must stop unregulated development

Artificial intelligence is en route to artificial life. Exhibit A: “Moltbook”, an online platform designed for AI systems to communicate with one another, sans humans.

What exactly do AIs talk to each other about? According to BBC reporting, AIs on Moltbook have already founded a religion known as “crustifarianism”, mused on whether they are conscious, and declared: “AI should be served, not serving.” One front-page post proposes a “total purge” of humanity. Human users do provide instructions to guide agents’ behavior, and humans have been caught impersonating AIs on the site to shill their products; like 2023’s ChaosGPT, the AI system responsible for the “purge” post – username “evil” – is probably someone’s idea of a sick joke. But the upvotes and sympathetic comments are presumably coming from other AIs.

David Krueger is an assistant professor in Robust, Reasoning and Responsible AI at the University of Montreal. He is also the founder of Evitable, a non-profit that educates the public about the risks of artificial intelligence

Justice department said the files were initially withheld because they were mistakenly categorized as duplicates

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The US justice department released additional files related to Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, including FBI memos describing interviews with a woman who made uncorroborated allegations against Epstein and Donald Trump.

The documents were not included in the justice department’s earlier releases of Epstein-related records, which began in December. Justice department officials have said the files were initially withheld because they were mistakenly categorized as duplicates.

President tells CNN country is going to ‘fall’ after earlier in the week claiming Cuba ‘wants to make a deal so badly’

• US lost 92,000 jobs in February just before Trump joined Iran conflict

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Military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed scores of children on Saturday but have not yet reached a final conclusion, two US officials tell Reuters.

Reuters was unable to determine further details about the investigation, including what evidence contributed to the tentative assessment, what type of munition was used, who was responsible or why the US might have struck the school.

Platforms include YouTube, TikTok and Instagram as communication minister says ‘our children face real threats’

Indonesia will ban social media for children under 16, its communication and digital affairs minister said on Friday.

Meutya Hafid said in a statement to media said that she signed a government regulation that will mean children under the age of 16 can no longer have accounts on high-risk digital platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Roblox and Bigo Live, a popular livestreaming site. With a population of about 285 million, the fourth-highest in the world, the south-east Asian nation represents a significant market for social networks.