In the latest in a long line of Irish tussles at fly-half, Jack Crowley takes over from Sam Prendergast at Twickenham

In the summer of 1979 Irish rugby jumped off a lower shelf in the nation’s sports shopand landed front and centre. This wasn’t prompted by a dramatic development on the field, rather it was a selection decision. Tony Ward, voted the first European Player of the Year two months earlier, was dropped. He had won the award largely for his dazzling form in that season’s Five Nations Championship. Then, ahead of the First Test on Ireland’s tour of Australia, he was canned. It made the six o’clock news.

Ward was a gifted footballer. He would go on to play in the League of Ireland for Limerick United FC, starring for them against Southampton in the Uefa Cup. He looked the part: stocky, sallow, not only could he shoot the lights out but he could step off either foot, leaving opponents on their rear end. If Ireland had a catwalk then Wardy would have been a model.

The 2026 MLS season kicks off on Saturday. Our writers discuss the teams, players and story lines they’re watching this year

Messi v Son. The two best players in the league play for the two “glamour” teams on opposite coasts, and each have large and dedicated fanbases. If both stay relatively healthy and perform up to capabilities, there’s no way the race between them for some honor (Golden Boot? MVP? Both?) won’t be fascinating to see unfold. AA

Many farmers in the Andes rely on growing blooms for export, but high water usage and risky pesticides threaten Indigenous communities

The fertile high valley near La Chimba trembles with sounds. The rhythms of brass bands and cumbia music clash like weather fronts, each playing its own beats in the Andean rain. A rainbow spans the slopes and white plastic greenhouses, protecting the region’s treasure: roses bred for beauty, shipped abroad, blooming far from home.

Amid the drizzle, Patricia Catucuamba and her husband, Milton Navas, share a jug of chicha, a maize brew vital to their harvest celebrations. Since 2000, they have worked as dairy farmers, but sustaining a milk business requires expanses of land beyond the reach of most smallholders.

Geoengineering does little to defuse most of the risks that really matter for people – and it runs the risk of making some harms worse

Planetary-scale solar geoengineering interventions involve the deliberate injection of either natural or artificial particulates into the stratosphere – stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI – with a view to offset some of the global heating caused by greenhouse gases. If implemented, the technology would create a metaphorical thermostat for the planet. Such a thermostat is advocated on the grounds that controlling global temperature reduces the harms associated with the climate crisis.

I wish to challenge this assertion.

Twenty-three years ago, a collective of 24 photographers agreed to document New Year’s Day for the following 24 years. Each artist has been given one hour to document, advancing by one hour each year, creating a cumulative, time-shifting narrative

• This year’s exhibition will run for 24 days from 21 February to 16 March in Soho Square, London

By portraying the young woman Heathcliff abuses as a sexily willing participant in her own degradation, Fennell’s adaptation betrays the book, and her audience

Tragedy is the beating heart of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; it’s a gothic novel that takes place in a society built on hierarchy and oppression, and exposes the fragility of love and how easily it is distorted into dangerous obsession. Unsurprisingly, there is no happy ending.

Although every character in the novel is stalked by tragedy, few suffer as much as Isabella Linton. Unaware of Heathcliff’s vindictive motives, she becomes trapped in an intensely abusive marriage, one she is only freed from by fleeing to London. While she is undoubtedly a victim, in the end the character also has agency; Isabella is able to escape her abuser, though not without considerable scars. It’s a pivotal moment for her character, and one that she’s been stripped of in Emerald Fennell’s quote-unquote “adaptation”.

Police in Pattaya confirm autopsy on body of British retail entrepreneur Quentin Griffiths found no signs of foul play

Quentin Griffiths, the co-founder of the online fashion retailer Asos, has died after falling from an apartment building in the Thai resort city of Pattaya.

An unnamed police investigator told the BBC that officers were called on 9 February after a man was found dead, having fallen from an 18-storey condominium in Pattaya, on Thailand’s eastern Gulf coast.

City of Catania calls ruse to avoid CCTV cameras installed to stop fly-tipping ‘as cunning as it is doubly wrong’

A man in Catania, Sicily, trained his dog to dump bags of rubbish by the roadside in an attempt to evade surveillance cameras installed to combat fly-tipping, municipal police have said.

The episode was detailed in a post on the city of Catania’s official Facebook page. Accompanying a video of the dog was a remark from the police that “inventiveness can never become an alibi for incivility”.

The TV screen’s jazz of drags, snaps, pops, and stops during the Milano Cortina Games have shown sport at its most powder-light and loveable

The mountains always promise escape from the squalor of existence at sea level, if not a kind of purification. The fortifying ruggedness of the terrain, the apple-crisp air, the high-albedo dazzle of sunlit snow: at altitude, it seems, everything is thinned to its essence. The Winter Olympics frequently play on this mythology of purity, but rarely has culture’s quadrennial ascent up the switchbacks felt as clarifying as it does this year. Propelling us into heights untroubled by the compromises and tradeoffs that blight sport’s lower zones, Milano Cortina has delivered images so brilliant and sharp they’ve also served to expose how ugly – and morally murky – most non-Olympic team sports have become over the past four years.

As a TV spectacle, the excellence of this Olympiad has been defined as much by absence as presence. No gambling ads, no live betting odds gunking up the screen, no win percentage trackers, no janky little segments in which the hosts joke about what the prediction markets are doing: these Games have brought delight and relief to a tired public’s eyes in equal measure. Cleaned of clutter and slop, sport, it turns out, can still be a thing of wonder and mystery, agony and beauty. Who would have thought?

The Bulgarian Booker winner on the letter he wrote to JD Salinger, the allure of Homer’s Odyssey and the magic of Thomas Mann

My earliest reading memory
I was taught to read quite early, at five or six, probably so that I would sit quietly and not be a nuisance to the adults. And it worked. Once I’d entered a book, I didn’t want to come out. I remember how Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl turned my heart upside down. I was living with my grandmother at the time, and I cried under the blanket, terrified that one day she, too, would die.

My favourite book growing up
I read greedily and indiscriminately, picking books at random from my parents’ library. Thomas Mayne Reid’s adventure novels were favourites, especially The Headless Horseman. Jack London’s Martin Eden, too. Clearly, the idea of being both a hero and a writer appealed to me. Writers were not usually heroes. I also loved a textbook on criminology, which explained how to make invisible ink, what traces criminals leave behind, and so on – matters of extraordinary importance to any 10-year-old boy.

Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade, and why most of Europe – including the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – dismissed them. As the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches and the world enters a new period of geopolitical uncertainty, Europe’s politicians and spy services continue to draw lessons from the failures of 2022

Trump has attacked judges and weakened global safeguards. Someone needs to stand up to the US and stop the erosion of democracy

In an era of overlapping crises, corruption is no longer a side issue – it is a structural threat to achievinginternational equality and even freedom itself. Each year, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a league table of 182 countries, is greeted with predictable theatrics: praise where it flatters power, condemnation where it can be weaponised, and hollow promises of reform that quietly expire once attention moves on. Instead of a moment of reckoning, it is ignored by those with the power to act.

As this newspaper reported, last week’s table showed a “worrying trend” of backsliding and a picture of “democratic institutions being eroded by political donations, cash for access and state targeting of campaigners and journalists”.

• Medal table | Live scores and schedule | Results | Briefing
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The first person down the half pipe was world champ, Finley Melville Ives, who lost a ski mid-air and is languishing at the bottom of the leader board.

Ah, here comes Gus Kenworthy, he of the the urinated ‘fuck ICE’ snow message, and silver medallist in the 2014 ski slopestyle for the US, before switching to Team GB. He’s a brave guy, and has received death threats since his protest.

⚽ Latest news, previews and updates before the weekend
⚽ 10 things to look out for | And email Tom

Eddie Howe had some words of praise for Pep Guardiola and Manchester City: ““Genuinely, I think we learn something more about ourselves and our game going forward every time we play them. They have been the benchmark for a number of years for many teams. Each painful defeat we suffer at the Etihad we try to grow from it, evolve and improve.

“They have been very, very good and are led by an outstanding manager. They continue to be the benchmark in my opinion.”

The arrest of the 66-year old former prince has sent shockwaves through the UK and abroad, with reaction rolling in from the US to Australia

• King: ‘The law must take its course’

• Friday’s newspaper front pages

The family of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls, responded last night to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest.

“Astonished to see Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested today over alleged misconduct in public office linked to material from the so‑called Epstein ‘Files’,” they posted on an X account run by Maxwell’s siblings.

Law enforcement have confiscated money, weapons, explosives and communications with Russian handlers

In a fortunate coincidence, the European Commission’s daily press conference is just getting under way. Let’s see if we hear more on sanctions there.

Kicking things off, we are told that the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will travel to Ukraine on Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of the full-scale Russian aggression.

Exclusive: Josh Simons pressed intelligence officials to investigate reporters, in emails described as ‘McCarthyite smear’

A Labour minister who claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf had been personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda, the Guardian can reveal.

Josh Simons, who was running the thinktank Labour Together at the time, was also involved in telling security officials that another journalist was “living with” the daughter of a former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Officials were told by Simons’ team that the former adviser was “suspected of links to Russian intelligence”.

(Cuculi)
The Bristol-based folk ensemble travel widely on their first album, exploring global influences with sparkling, springlike warmth

Hedera are a band of five tightly knit friends – violinist Lulu Austin, violin/viola player Maisie Brett, violinist/double bassist Beth Roberts, accordionist/harpist Tamsin Elliott, and clarinettist Isis Wolf-Light – named after the Latin botanical term for ivy. The group’s debut album combines influences from Bulgaria to Bali, Ireland to Georgia, and establishes its mood of knotted, hypnotic locked groove from its opening track, Sterretjie (named after an Afrikaans word for the coastal tern bird, which also means “little stars”). Brett’s violin passes the track’s melody to Wolf-Light’s clarinet and Elliott’s accordion with a bright, sparkling swiftness.

Many other moments of joy, lithe and spring-like, lift these 12 tracks. Roberts’ waltz about a Cornish meadow, Mayflies in June, travels from minor key to major and back again, buoyed along by Elliott’s harp-playing. (Elliott similarly impressed on 2023’s So Far We Have Come, her Anglo-Egyptian album with oud player Tarek Elazhary.) Sekar Jagat (Balinese for “flower of the universe”) twitches sweetly into life on prepared harp and plucked strings, then makes hay with a melody originally written for gamelan; on Shen Khar Venakhi, a 1,000-year-old Georgian hymn that survived Soviet purges, all five women’s voices join together in a dense, glowing mass.

The dark past of a seemingly perfect couple is gradually revealed in this observant debut of obsession and control

Glimpse them chatting in a restaurant or posing on Instagram, and you might think they have it all. The pair live in London but often travel, drawing the eyes of other guests, their skin glowing, their limbs artfully at ease. She writes affirmations on hotel stationery; he claims to taste notes of bark and tobacco in his chianti. As Sean Gilbert’s dark, observant debut opens in Istanbul, this apparently perfect couple bicker and sweat, for secrets lurk behind their facade – and one of them might be murder.

An unexpected reunion gets their sightseeing off to a shaky start. The unnamed narrator and his wife, Elle, have not seen Benny for 15 years when they cross paths outside the Hagia Sophia. An irksome university acquaintance who has become a second-rate rapper, Benny has the grip of a limpet. As the trio browse stalls and pull on saliva-slicked shishas, talk turns to the past.

Dane was initially only contracted to appear in one episode of series. He starred in a further 138, revolutionising the show along the way

• Eric Dane, Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria star, dies aged 53

Eric Dane, one of the most handsome men DNA has ever fabricated, has died at 53, just a year after announcing his ALS diagnosis. We just lost Dawson Leery, and now this. It’s a tough time to be a millennial.

It goes without saying: Dane was very good looking. Even in the 2000s, which treated us to a glut of ridiculously handsome TV stars (Chad Michael Murray, Jared Padalecki, Milo Ventimiglia), he was breathtaking. The voice. The eyes. The soul patch. Oof.

Joep Wennemars went under the previous Olympic record in the men’s 1500m speed skating. But so did three others

Picture this: you are on the verge of breaking an Olympic record. The cheers, the spotlight, your name etched in history. The magical initials – OR – next to your name until it is next broken. You have got a gold medal waiting to be draped around your neck? Wait, no gold? Silver, maybe? Nope? Surely bronze? No?! Fourth place?! Ouch.

Such is the life of Joep Wennemars of the Netherlands, who went under the previous Olympic record in the men’s 1500m speed skating. But so did three others.

Anthony Chen offers up a forthright but warm film that navigates romantic crises and Singapore’s infatuation with the rich

The warmth, richness and approachability of this lovely film from Singaporean director Anthony Chen, a graduate of Britain’s National Film and Television School, returns him to the family drama style of his 2013 debut Ilo Ilo; with care and connoisseurship, he again draws on the influences of Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang, but Chen’s instincts are less oblique. He dots the I’s and crosses the T’s; the film-making is forthright and wholehearted though not unsubtle.

The film is set in Singapore, criticising the city-state’s conformism and infatuation with the rich and western prestige, and satirically showing the high-wire dangers of its entrepreneurialism, as attempted by the poor. Koh Jia Ler plays Junyang, a goofy, good-natured but shiftless twentysomething guy who lives with his widowed father Boon Kiat (Andi Lim) in a cramped rented flat. Junyang is about to finish his military service and now needs to figure out what to do with his life – but he certainly doesn’t to work on his dad’s noodle stall, that humble business that puts food on their table. His girlfriend Lydia (Regene Lim) is far more aspirational, a gifted pianist with her sights set on university. Lydia’s stern, churchgoing single mother – hardened by her own husband walking out on them both – does not approve of Junyang one bit.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

The 22-year-old singer is up for two Brit awards thanks to her frank songs about family strife and predatory men. She explains why she’s fighting for her fellow council estate kids

Although she is on course for pop stardom, with two nominations at next week’s Brit awards, 22-year-old Skye Newman lives in a cabin at the bottom of her sister’s garden in London. It’s the backdrop for the music video to her song Hairdresser, which has 7.5m views on YouTube. In the clip, she is made up, her hair in rollers, lounging with a gaggle of friends. Licking her fingertips to roll a joint, she laments a one-sided friendship with another woman: “When I’m needed, know I’ll be there first / You don’t reciprocate and, girl, that hurts.”

It’s typical of Newman’s songcraft: ballad-driven contemporary soul that goes beyond romantic heartbreak to cover all kinds of pain and recrimination.