Analysts say choice of Kevin Warsh as next Fed chair has triggered heavy losses in precious metal prices

UK house prices have also fallen – although it’s a better picture if you adjust for seasonal factors.

The average price of a UK property fell in January, to £270,873, down from £271,068 in December, according to Nationwide Building Society.

“The start of 2026 saw a slight pick-up in annual house price growth, which rose to 1.0% in January, after slowing to 0.6% in December. Prices increased by 0.3% month on month in January, after taking account of seasonal effects.

“Housing market activity also dipped at the end of 2025, most likely reflecting uncertainty around potential property tax changes ahead of the Budget. Nevertheless, the number of mortgages approved for house purchase remained close to the levels prevailing before the pandemic.

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Are Crystal Palace in trouble? They’re nine points above West Ham, who are third bottom, but they’re in woeful form, the captain has left, the centre-forward is likely to, and the manager is off in the summer. Meantime, below them, teams are improving.

Something to read:

Rafah crossing in the south, which has largely been closed since May 2024, has reopened for those travelling on foot

Israel says it will suspend Médecins Sans Frontières’s operations in Gaza after the humanitarian organization refused to hand over personal details of its staff members to Israeli authorities.

In a statement released over the weekend, MSF said:

Following many months of unsuccessful engagement with Israeli authorities, and in the absence of securing assurances to ensure the safety of our staff or the independent management of our operations, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has concluded that it will not share a list of its Palestinian and international staff with Israeli authorities in the current circumstances.

João Pedro stepping up for Rosenior, Arsenal frontmen show their teeth and stretched Liverpool are fighting on

João Pedro is enjoying life under Liam Rosenior. The versatile Brazil forward was excellent after coming on at half-time against West Ham. João Pedro, who has five goals in his last five games, helped Chelsea complete their comeback from 2-0 down by scoring his side’s first and then creating Enzo Fernandez’s stoppage-time winner. Chelsea chose well when they beat Newcastle to the signing of the 24-year-old from Brighton last summer. João Pedro was excellent at the Club World Cup, but despite dealing with fitness issues has still has 12 goals in all competitions this season. Capable of playing as either a No 9 or a No 10, the Brazilian was important for Enzo Maresca but has improved since the Italian’s departure. “I’ve had very, very good conversations with him already, probably four in my office,” Rosenior said last week. “I think he’s sick of my office, where I’ve said to him ‘If you play with intensity with your quality, the quality comes out’.” Jacob Steinberg

Going beyond the well-worn stories of division, the Irish photographer depicts young people trying to live normally in the shadow of violence

When riots broke out in Belfast in 2021 between mainly young loyalists and republicans, Irish photographer Hazel Gaskin asked herself: why does the world only see Belfast’s young people through stories of tension, division and violence? So, in the wake of the riots, she spent four years visiting the city, documenting youth clubs, boxing gyms, dance groups and teenagers hanging out on the street. “I learned these kids are just being normal teenagers,” says Gaskin. “There are experiences that are different – they come from areas with a lot of historic violence. But people are going about their everyday life. It’s very normal.”

The photos in her new book Breathing Land (the title lifted from a line in Seamus Heaney’s poem Tate’s Avenue) were taken across Belfast, including Alliance Avenue in north Belfast, and between the nationalist Falls Road and unionist Shankill Road in west Belfast. She mainly focused on less affluent areas, where peace walls and peace gates still separate communities.

Warm, funny and heartbreaking, The President’s Cake tells the story of a brutal ruler and a girl forced to make him a present in a time of sanctions-induced hardship. Its Iraqi director Hasan Hadi remembers his own fearful childhood

There were no cinemas in Iraq in the 1990s, when Hasan Hadi was growing up under Saddam Hussein’s regime. But he still managed to fall in love with films – after a family member roped him into helping her distribute VHS tapes of banned foreign movies. “I was a kid,” says the 37-year-old, “so no one would suspect me of smuggling. I’d put the tapes up my shirt or in my bag.”

Hadi started secretly watching the films, too, everything from Bruce Lee to Tarkovsky. At night, he crept into the living room after everyone had gone to bed, keeping the volume low in case his family woke up.

Caffeine can improve the digestive system and lead to better gut health, but try to avoid it after noon or if you have irritable bowels

Is sipping a coffee after a heavy meal actually good for helping you digest it? “For some people, absolutely,” says Dr Emily Leeming, a dietitian at King’s College London. “But it’s not always a good idea.”

Caffeine stimulates the gut, increasing muscle contractions, she says, which for many people helps food move through the digestive system “at a nice pace” before being excreted.

From a golden goal on ice, to Eve Muirhead’s redemption moment and more, here are half a dozen Winter Games classics

The greatest show on Canadian ice, and it boiled down to overtime. For the Canada team, stacked with NHL talent, the pressure was immense; a loss in this high-profile final might have soured the entire 2010 Olympics. A rivalry with the USA that, on paper, has been largely one-sided – Canada’s men’s ice hockey dynasty has long reigned supreme – suddenly felt terrifyingly and gloriously level. The USA, refusing to be a footnote, had clawed back a 2-0 deficit in the men’s gold-medal game with Zach Parise snatching an equaliser in the dying seconds. Then, seven minutes into sudden-death overtime, the 22-year-old Sidney Crosby, a man built for the biggest moments, slipped the puck between Ryan Miller’s pads with a flick of his wrist. A gold-medal-winning goal, for ever immortalised as “The Golden Goal” and considered an iconic moment in Canadian sports history.

Actor says he has struggled with the backlash to his decision to play Albus Dumbledore in the new Harry Potter show, and says books are about ‘kindness versus cruelty’

John Lithgow has called JK Rowling’s views on transgender rights “ironic and inexplicable”, saying that backlash to his decision to play Albus Dumbledore in the upcoming Harry Potter series “upsets me”.

Speaking on stage at Rotterdam film festival after a screening of his latest film, Jimpa, the 80-year-old actor was asked about how he felt about Rowling’s views. Rowling serves as an executive producer on the upcoming series, which is being produced by HBO and will be one of the most expensively produced television shows of all time.

Puzzles one louder than ten

It’s two decimal digits long, it’s prime, it’s a palindrome and it’s the number of players in a football team.

Let’s hear it for “legs” eleven!

This funny and subversive novel reckons with life under martial law in late-70s Pakistan

Mohammed Hanif’s novels address the more troubling aspects of Pakistani history and politics with unhinged, near-treasonous irreverence. His 2008 Booker-longlisted debut, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, was a scabrously comic portrait of General Zia-ul-Haq in the days leading up to his death in a suspicious plane crash in 1988. Masquerading as a whodunnit, it was a satire of religiosity and military authoritarianism. Dark, irony-soaked comedy that marries farce to unsparing truth-telling was also the chosen mode for other vexed subjects, from violence against women and religious minorities in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti to the war machine in Red Birds.

Hanif’s prickly new novel confirms his standing as one of south Asia’s most unnervingly funny and subversive voices. The story kicks off right after ousted socialist PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is put to death by army chief turned autocrat Zia. Following the execution, disgraced intelligence officer Gul has been posted to OK Town, a sleepy backwater where he “would need to create his own entertainment and come up with a mission to shine on this punishment posting”.

Ahead of a major exhibition in London documenting the South American wetland as it faces unprecedented threat, Lalo de Almeida recounts the stories behind his award-winning images

Lalo de Almeida is a documentary photographer based in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2021 his photo essay Pantanal Ablaze was awarded first place in the environment stories category at the World Press Photo contest. In 2022, he won the Eugene Smith grant in humanistic photography and World Press Photo’s long-term project award for his work Amazonian Dystopia, which documents the exploitation of the world’s largest tropical forest.

I have been photographing socio-environmental issues for more than 30 years, especially in the Amazon. 2020 was no different. News of the uncontrolled fires devastating the Pantanal began to catch my attention. So, together with a fellow journalist, I decided to go and see what was happening for myself.

From Lord of Winterfell to lover of ornithology, the actor reveals his lifelong love of birding as host of a hugely listenable RSPB podcast. Plus, a gripping investigation into the police

On the face of it, the RSPB picking Ned Stark as the host of the new series of their podcast seems odd. But it turns out he’s been a birder since childhood, who crams in birdwatching between acting gigs. He’s warm and honest in his first podcast, chatting to fellow ornithology lover Elbow’s Guy Garvey about spotting different species while working abroad, recognising bird song and the meditative joy of watching the feathered creatures. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes fortnightly

In this freewheeling film Lana Daher draws from more than 20,000 hours of archival footage to channel the resilient spirit of Beirut

As freewheeling as a travelogue, Lana Daher’s mercurial documentary eschews talking heads and voiceover, drawing instead from more than 20,000 hours of archival footage to channel the resilient spirit of Beirut. Reflecting the non-linear movement of history, the film abandons chronology, zigzagging between disparate events, film clips and newsreels, TV programmes and home videos. Rich with a sense of play as well as melancholy, this stylistic approach conjures the precarity of life in the Lebanese capital. Moments of everyday joy – a wedding celebration, a family outing – are interspersed with startling images of hollowed-out buildings and bombed cars. Here, war seems never-ending and peace is fragile.

The film resurrects painful sociopolitical chapters, including the brutal 15-year Lebanese civil war and Israel’s repeated invasions of the country, yet also makes room for gentle humour and beauty. There’s also a deliberate emphasis on popular culture, with the inclusion of hit pop songs; one particularly exhilarating section is set to Dalida’s classic disco track Laissez-Moi Danser, played over dancing scenes both fictional and real. The sequence is immediately followed by a shot of a garbage dump, a stark reminder of reality; off kilter as it is, this tongue-in-cheek edit feels like an ode to the collective courage of Lebanese people. Amid the wartime upheavals, the music goes on.

In a city packed with bakeries, how do you find the best? I risked tooth decay to track down the quintessential blend of crisp pastry, an oozy centre and sugary cinnamon

Open sandwiches (smørrebrød), meatballs (frikadeller), crispy pork belly (stegt flæsk) … There are many must-eat dishes for food lovers visiting Denmark, though perhaps nothing springs to mind as readily as the Danish pastry. But how are you supposed to choose from the countless bakeries on offer? And once you have decided which to visit, which pastry to eat? As a long-term resident of Copenhagen and pastry obsessive, I took on the Guardian’s challenge to find the best Danish pastry in town.

Let’s get started with the shocking fact that Danish pastries are not actually Danish. In Denmark they’re called wienerbrød (Viennese bread) and made using a laminated dough technique that originated in Vienna. There’s also no such thing as a “Danish” in Denmark – there are so many different types of pastry that the word loses meaning. What we know as a Danish is a spandauer – a round pastry with a folded border and a circle of yellowy custard in the middle. Then there’s the tebirkes, a folded pastry often with a baked marzipan-style centre and poppy seeds on the top; a frøsnapper, a twist of pastry dusted with poppy seeds; and a snegl, which translates as “snail” but is known as a cinnamon swirl in English.

After being intubated while she was in a coma, Stefania Pedretti – one half of cult noise duo OvO – woke to find she could no longer speak let alone sing. But doctors recommended an unusual treatment for her

When Stefania “Alos” Pedretti woke from a two-week coma on 9 January 2022, her doctor presented her with bad news. She was suffering from severe encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain possibly caused by her body’s autoimmune response to the breast cancer she had been diagnosed with a few months earlier.

For the guitarist and singer Pedretti, however, what came next was even worse. After being intubated in her comatose state, her vocal cords were unable to close and produce sound, meaning that for months she was unable to speak.

Exclusive: Underdrawing suggests attempt to debunk myth that former wife of Henry VIII had sixth finger

Anne Boleyn’s Hever “Rose” portrait is one of history’s most iconic faces, with her “B” pendant, her French hood, her dark eyes and a red rose in her right hand. Now a secret that has remained hidden for nearly 500 years has been discovered beneath the layers of paint.

Scientific analysis of the painting at Hever Castle, her childhood home in Kent, has uncovered evidence that an Elizabethan artist sought to create a “visual rebuttal” to claims that Henry VIII’s ill-fated wife was a witch with a sixth finger on her right hand.

Enrol in the school of wok and get sizzling with a simple stir-fry and a classic hotch-potch noodle dish. Follow the ‘wok clock’ and both are ready in about half an hour

Stir-frying, as its name suggests, is the technique of frying while continuously stirring or circulating heat, and it is the heat that’s all-important. Stir-frying is all about wok hei, or ‘wok’s air’ in English, which you can think of as the ‘height of fire’, or the level of heat. It’s said that Chinese cooks have good wok hei if they have a true understanding of the heat of their wok and how to handle it in all situations, and a stir-fry’s success is based on the quality of the cook’s wok hei.

The president and his supporters joining forces to decide what audiences read and see seems straight from a fascism playbook

Two events, juxtaposed, tell us a great deal about what is rapidly taking shape in the US. In one, Melania Trump releases a glossy documentary, Melania, an account of her return to the White House. Amazon outbid others to secure the rights to the documentary, spending $75m (£54m) in total, and ticket sales so far suggest that this was, shall we say, not a purely commercial venture.

In the other, the Washington Post is set to cut up to 200 jobs early this month, including the majority of its foreign staff and a sizeable chunk of its newsroom. Both Melania and the Washington Post are backed by Jeff Bezos. His two decisions, to invest in state propaganda and divest from the fourth estate that supposedly holds power to account, reveal much about how capital and authoritarianism join forces to decide what audiences read and see.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

A bit like Reddit for artificial intelligence, Moltbook allows AI agents – bots built by humans – to post and interact with each other. People are allowed as observers only

On social media, people often accuse each other of being bots, but what happens when an entire social network is designed for AI agents to use?

Moltbook is a site where the AI agents – bots built by humans – can post and interact with each other. It is designed to look like Reddit, with subreddits on different topics and upvoting. On 2 February the platform stated it had more than 1.5m AI agents signed up to the service. Humans are allowed, but only as observers.

Woman, 22, thought to have suffered a cardiac arrest after being dragged along the snow and suspended mid-air

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An Australian woman has died after a ski lift accident in a Japanese resort after her backpack got caught and she was left hanging mid-air.

The 22-year-old snowboarder sustained critical injuries at the Tsugaike ski resort in Otari near Nagano on Friday.

From the comfiest sleep hoodie to one of the fanciest face masks, reviewers share what actually helps them hit the hay

• The best sleep masks in the US: I spent six weeks testing 24 masks, and these are my favorites

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Getting a good night’s sleep is a personal struggle for many of us. Here at The Filter US, we noticed that a lot of you are interested in all things sleep. From our coverage of the best sleep masks to these Coop adjustable pillows, many readers are obsessing about the best products to help them get some shuteye.

To help fuel this not-so-drowsy enthusiasm, we asked a bunch of our contributing writers about the products they rely on to get some rest. What we got were some personal insights into some of the sleep hangups we all face, and some fantastic tools to help, including comfy pillows, white noise machines (sound machines), earbuds, face masks, and more. There’s even a Snuggie-like wearable blanket on the list.

Every second, 11m bits of information enter our brains, which then efficiently prioritise them. We need to learn to work with the process, rather than against it

It’s believed that we have about 50,000 thoughts a day: big, small, urgent, banal – “Did I leave the oven on?”. And those are just the ones that register. Subconsciously, we’re constantly sifting through a barrage of stimuli: background noise, clutter on our desks, the mere presence of our phones.

Every second, 11m bits of information enter our brains. Just 0.0004% is perceived by our conscious minds, showing just how hard our brains are working to parse what’s sufficiently relevant to bring to our attention.

Report covering 23 conflicts over last 18 months concludes more than 100,000 civilians have been killed as war crimes rage out of control

An authoritative survey of 23 armed conflicts over the last 18 months has concluded that international law seeking to limit the effects of war is at breaking point, with more than 100,000 civilians killed, while torture and rape are committed with near impunity.

The extensive study by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights describes the deaths of 18,592 children in Gaza, growing civilian casualties in Ukraine and an “epidemic” of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.