Democrats, who haven’t won statewide race since 1994, aim to gain ground with liberal rising stars as Republicans clash between incumbent and embattled Maga ally
A Texas-sized showdown is brewing deep in the heart of the largest red state in the US. As early voting begins on Tuesday for the Lone Star state’s 3 March primaries, Republicans and Democrats alike face a high-stakes choice that could set the stage for one of the fiercest Senate races of the 2026 midterm cycle.
At the center of the fractious Republican contest is a clash between the party’s old guard and a Maga culture warrior, with four-term incumbent John Cornyn, a conservative fixture of Senate leadership locked in the fight of his political career against the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton.
When daily life feels like a black hole of apps and feeds, it’s no surprise we crave the intimacy of physical media
Usually, my handbag is a medley of digital devices and life essentials – my phone, iPad, chargers, keys, tampons. But lately, you’re likely to also find a half-done newspaper crossword, a ton of stationery, the book I’ve restarted three times, and whatever scraps and trinkets I’ve picked up throughout the day to put in my scrapbook.
Analog is back, and it feels like we need it more than ever. In a world where getting just about anything done means being sucked into a digital black hole of apps, sign-up forms, harrowing social media feeds and carnivorous advertisers, it’s no surprise that we keep reaching back for the comfort of the physical: Polaroids, vinyl records, real birthday cards. It all helps us slow down and appreciate a world where not everything is online.
Brines or rubs, spatchcocked or baked upside down, our expert panel picks apart the perfect bird
What’s the best way to roast a chicken? Nicola, by email
“Fundamentally, people overcomplicate it,” says Ed Smith, who has, rather conveniently, written a new book all about chicken, Peckish. “Yes, you can cook it at a variety of temperatures, use different fats, wet brine or dry brine, etc etc, but, ultimately, if you put a good chicken in the oven and roast it, you will have a good meal.”
To elaborate on Smith’s nonchalance, he has three key rules: “One, start with a good chicken: free-range, ideally slow-reared and under the 2kg mark – small birds just roast better, I think.” Second, it doesn’t need as long in the oven as you might think. “Whatever it says on the packet will be too long,” says Smith, who roasts his chicken for about 50 minutes in a 210C (190C fan) oven. And, last, give it a rest: “Your chicken will be better for sitting for 15-20 minutes, and will still be steaming hot when you cut into it.”
As a young player I had been told a few times that I wasn’t quite good enough. Wimbledon manager Dave Bassett was the one who looked at me in a different way. He was the man who gave me that all-important opportunity. In terms of structuring a team, he was on the ball in everything he did.
He was a long way in front of a lot of others, but because of the way he was, people looked at him in a different way. If he had been well-spoken and had what you might call an intelligent way about him, people would have looked at him differently. They would have said: “Wow, this guy is miles ahead.”
San Francisco’s AI startups are pushing workers to grind endlessly, hinting at pressures soon hitting other sectors
Not long after the terms “996” and “grindcore” entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. There was the one about the founder who hadn’t taken a weekend off in more than six months. The woman who joked that she’d given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or the employees who had started taking their shoes off in the office because, well, if you were going to be there for at least 12 hours a day, six days a week, wouldn’t you rather be wearing slippers?
“If you go to a cafe on a Sunday, everyone is working,” says Sanju Lokuhitige, the co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed-stage AI startup, who moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action. Lokuhitige says he works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, minus a few carefully selected social events each week where he can network with other people at startups. “Sometimes I’m coding the whole day,” he says. “I do not have work-life balance.”
Discussions held amid US naval buildup and Iranian announcement of live-fire exercises in straits of Hormuz
A fresh round of indirect talks in Geneva between Iran and the US on Tehran’s nuclear programme, focusing on the terms for Iran constraining its nuclear programme under the supervision of the UN nuclear weapons inspectorate, has ended after just over four hours, according to Iranian state media.
The talks were held against a backdrop of a now familiar slew of contradictory messages from Donald Trump, in which he said he believed Iran wanted a deal but also highlighted the US naval military buildup in the region.
‘Get the files out’, says former secretary of state, adding that she and Bill Clinton have ‘nothing to hide’
Senior Ukrainian and Russian officials are to meet this week in Switzerland for a third round of talks brokered by the Trump administration, days before the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The two-day meeting, kicking off on Tuesday, is expected to mirror negotiations held earlier this month in Abu Dhabi, with representatives from Washington, Kyiv and Moscow in attendance. Despite renewed US efforts to revive diplomacy, hopes for any sudden breakthrough remain low, with Russia continuing to press maximalist demands on Ukraine.
Critics have given the Flotus flick 11% on the aggregator site, but the ‘verified ticket buyers’ score is a near perfect 98%. A campaign by activists, or a sign of our politically disparate times?
If you’ve started to feel like you’re living in an entirely different reality from most of the world, there’s a good chance that it’s because you’ve been looking at the Rotten Tomatoes page for the Melania Trump documentary. There you will find two diametrically opposed numbers. First is the official Rotten Tomatoes score – the one aggregated across published reviews by professional critics – which sits at a minuscule 11%. But then there is the audience rating, which is based on scores from members of the general public. That score, incredibly, is 98%. (Admittedly, this is a score confined to “verified ticket buyers” – Rotten Tomatoes has another section it calls “All Audience” where the reaction is more … mixed.)
Of course, there has long been a chasm between public and critical opinion, which is why the film that won the most Oscars last year was a small character study about a disenfranchised stripper and the film that brought in the most money was about Minecraft. Even so, the disparity between the brutal reviews that Melania received (“The most depressing experience I have ever had in the cinema” – Mark Kermode) and the glowing public reviews (“Every red blooded American needs to see this movie to recognise the grace, sophistication and power of Flotius [sic]” – Jackie) is enough to give you whiplash.
South American and Caribbean partnership runs to 2031
Substantial rise contrasts with stagnant domestic rights
The Premier League has secured a 25% increase on the value of its broadcast contact in South America and the Caribbean by agreeing a new deal with the American network ESPN. The Guardian has learned that ESPN has agreed to extend its long-standing partnership with the Premier League until 2031, with the new deal understood to be worth about £450m.
The Premier League told the clubs about the new deal at the shareholders’ meeting last Friday, when they were also updated about TV rights contracts in other regions that are due to go out to tender shortly.
Aftermath of Storm Nils causes chaos across country with flooding under way or expected on Garonne, Maine and Loire rivers
France has issued red alerts for flooding in three départements as the aftermath of Storm Nils causes chaos across the country.
Flood waters have inundated homes and isolated villages after the Garonne River overflowed its banks, with hydrologists warning that rain is falling on soils that have hit record-breaking levels of saturation.
Former champions eliminated before final group match
Zimbabwe go through to Super 8 phase
Australia have been knocked out of the T20 World Cup after Zimbabwe’s match against Ireland was washed out.
With each side taking a point from the rained-off match it means Australia, who have two points, can no longer catch Zimbabwe, on five, even if they win their final match against Oman on Friday (Saturday 0030 AEDT).
As an assembly member, Mamdani backed the Stop Fakes Act. Now, the NYPD has admitted to spying online – but wielding actual power as mayor is complex
When Zohran Mamdani was a New York state assembly member, he sponsored the Stop Fakes Act, which would have prohibited law enforcement from creating fake electronic communication service accounts and collecting users’ account information.
“Digital dragnet surveillance is widespread and dangerous, yet it continues to go unregulated,” Mamdani co-wrote in a 2023 City & State op-ed. “Although the NYPD claimed in a Department of Justice report to keep detailed records of its undercover accounts, the department refuses to provide any documentation of its social media surveillance policies or practices for public review.”
Huge project by Norwegian-owned Scottish Sea Farms gets go-ahead amid concerns over the environmental cost of fish farming and threat to traditional way of life
At Collafirth, north Shetland, Sydney Johnson is unloading bags of two-dozen scallops by throwing them over his head like medicine balls to the pier above. Johnson, who has just finished a 10-hour shift on his boat, the Golden Shore, is concerned that plans for a new salmon farm will put fishers like him and his two sons out of business.
“They say it’s just one farm,” says Johnson. “But it’s one farm more. There’s only so much water and we’re at saturation point.”
A man accused of having placed secret cameras in Altach’s changing room is appearing in court next week
A man who has been accused of having videos from secret cameras in the changing room and showers of the Altach women’s team is appearing in court next week in a case that has shaken football in Austria.
About 30 women have been identified on the recordings, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Feldkirch, and some are considering a civil lawsuit against the accused. The team play in the top division in Austria.
This is an extract from our free email about women’s football, Moving the Goalposts. To get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions. Moving the Goalposts is delivered to your inboxes every Tuesday and Thursday.
His maximal studies of US institutions such as welfare bureaucracy and an intensive care unit were packed with human detail and free from explicit commentary
The documentary form is often thought to be governed by a manageable feature-length high concept: the story of a person, an institution, an historical episode. The subject itself and the film’s attitude towards it, its editorial slant, are habitually plain enough and the procedure is metonymic: the camera focuses on a part, and the whole is illuminated by implication. Often they have a sexed-up, quirky story to tell, which might mean a selective and sneakily tendentious approach to editing the material. But that is not quite the case with the films of Frederick Wiseman. His colossal, immersive movies about ordinary people and ordinary lives enclosed in some kind of institution, and characterised by the absence of voiceovers, intertitles or the off-camera directorial presence of the interviewing voice, are not amenable to the elevator pitch; they are the entire elevator shaft itself, and the whole building that houses it.
Whereas epic-length films might be generally held to be appropriate for big and distinctively historical subjects, such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah or Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, Wiseman applies the maximal approach to static cross-section studies of sometimes less obviously momentous topics such as Paris’s Crazy Horse nightclub or the French restaurant Le Bois Sans Feuilles. However his greatest works are top-to-bottom body-politic pictures of public institutions, huge, intricate constructions of unglamour; his movies themselves were virtual institutions, movie-edifices mirroring their subjects in architectural form and indeed almost always funded by one particular public institution: PBS, the Public Broadcasting System.
Ashleigh Nelson is in the mix for a bobsleigh medal at the Winter Olympics – but that doesn’t mean she enjoys it
Ashleigh Nelson was never meant to be in the Winter Olympics. If you’d asked her 18 months ago where she expected to be competing this week, she would have told you she would be at the Utilita Arena in Birmingham running the 60m at the UK Indoor Championships, not standing at the top of the world’s newest ice track riding a £75,000 bobsleigh.
“I was tricked into it,” Nelson says. “You laugh, but it’s true.” Nelson only got into it after the GB bob pilot Adele Nicole sent her a message on Instagram just after the Paris Olympics asking if she fancied giving it a go.
Israel accused of denying doctors re-entry into territory after they gave first-hand testimony on conflict
Medics in the UK and US believe they have been denied re-entry to Gaza after speaking out on the conflict.
Following reports of rising refusal rates, medical workers and organisationswho have provided humanitarian aid in Gaza have described what they see as arbitrary denials.
Look Mum No Computer is an inventor, musician and founder of a museum in Ramsgate. His YouTube videos range from restoring 1920s cars to creating synthesiser odysseys
Truth be told, this probably isn’t going to be a great Eurovision. Five countries – Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain – are boycotting the contest over the continued inclusion of Israel. Additionally, and perhaps not coincidentally, television viewership is falling through the floor. In 2024, the BBC’s coverage lost a quarter of its viewers year on year, and last year another million deserted it.
But there is good news on the horizon. The UK has just announced its entry for this year, and it seems like we’ve reacted to all this existential uncertainty by going weird. This, it turns out, is going to be the year of Look Mum No Computer.
Citizen Lab report suggests Cellebrite software was used to break into Boniface Mwangi’s phone while he was under arrest
When Boniface Mwangi, the prominent Kenyan pro-democracy activist who plans to run for president in 2027, had his phones returned to him by Kenyan authorities after his controversial arrest last July, he immediately noticed a problem: one of the phones was no longer password protected and could be opened without one.
It was Mwangi’s personal phone, which he used to communicate with friends and mentors, and contained photos of private family moments with his wife and children. Knowing that its contents could be in the hands of the Kenyan government made Mwangi – who has described harassment and even torture – feel unsafe and “exposed”, he told the Guardian.
The EU is to open a formal investigation into the Chinese retailer Shein over multiple suspected breaches of European laws including the sale of childlike sex dolls and weapons.
The European Commission said on Tuesday it had launched the inquiry after demanding information from the fast-growing company last year.
The Trump administration has bought warehouses across the US that could hold thousands. But resistance is growing
There is a vast building, reportedly the size of seven football fields, in Surprise, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix; ICE bought it for $70m. Another building, along the southern border in San Antonio, Texas, was valued at $37m; it’s 640,000 sq ft. In January, ICE bought a warehouse in Upper Bern Township, Pennsylvania, not far outside of Philadelphia, for $87.4m. In Williamsport, Maryland, outside Hagerstown, the cost of a facility on a nearly 54-acre plot was $102m.
These are massive, industrial spaces, built for holding goods to be shipped elsewhere. Warehouses are drafty and difficult to heat, hard-floored and high-ceilinged, not meant for human habitation. But the Trump administration is aiming to convert them into vast detention camps for immigrants. Some of the buildings could house as many as 9,000 people at a time. The rapid slew of new warehouse purchases by deportation agencies brings to mind the words of the ICE director, Todd Lyons, who told a conference last year that he wanted the effort to operate “like Amazon Prime, for human beings”.
Trump says everyday Americans deserve a chance to buy higher-risk ‘alternative’ investments. Critics say this could lead to big losses for small investors
On a summer day in 2018, Cathy Shubert, then 58, hopped in her Toyota Rav 4 and drove to the Jacksonville, Florida, office of Mario Payne, an investment adviser at the financial services firm Raymond James. She had a lot on her mind. She was not happy with her job at a local bank branch and wanted to see if Payne thought she had saved enough to retire.
“He said what I was retiring with would carry me and everything would be wonderful,” she remembered. “I went home and told my husband, ‘Oh my God, I want you to go meet him.’”
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