European foreign policy chief says ‘there is not going to be progress’ on sanctions package today
One other thing we will be keeping an eye on today is the latest on the EU-US trade relationship after last Friday’s US supreme court ruling on Trump’s tariffs.
The European Parliament is expected to discuss what to do with the EU-US trade deal later today.
The Moore County Sheriff’s Office confirms that on February 22, 2026, at approximately 1:38 a.m., a relative of 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin approached a deputy at a local business and reported him missing. He was subsequently entered into a national missing person database.
Following that report, federal authorities informed the Sheriff’s Office that they are conducting an active investigation in Florida involving Martin. At their request, the missing person case information has been turned over to federal investigators.
Is an artwork company that mainly focuses on bringing to life the hopeful feeling of being on a golf course by illustrating golf course scenes and providing framed copies of handmade works in various golf course gift shops while handling personal commissions on the side.
Combining the aesthetics of the sunny outdoors, and old digital aesthetics from the mid 2000s, Fresh Sky Illustrations hopes to awaken a sense of hope and comfort with this handcrafted webpage design.
The latest in our series of writers on their most important comfort films is a celebration of Nicolas Cage’s finest action moment
It’s easy to poke fun at Nicolas Cage. Between the meltdown memes, dodgy hairdos and his more taxman-friendly choices of roles, he has frequently made himself a target for ridicule among the masses.
Fresh off an Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas, the actor’s decision to follow up with three action films must have seemed baffling at the time. The gambit paid off, though. Consisting of The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off, this unofficial “trilogy” of blockbusters would showcase the fundamental unknowability of Nicolas Cage.
A huge vaccination drive has been launched after the country’s first outbreak in years of the paralysing disease. But the battle to wipe out the virus is struggling elsewhere, so how can it be eradicated?
As a seven-year-old boy is treated for polio at a hospital in Malawi, the country has launched a major vaccination campaign to stem an outbreak of the disease.
The effort in Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries and badly hit by the aid cuts, has seen an astonishing 1.3 million children already vaccinated against the disease in just four days after emergency supplies were airlifted in by the World Health Organization (WHO) just over a week ago.
Arousal may be spontaneous, or arise in response to sensory stimulation, memory, fantasy or emotional connection. Here’s how to understand the differences
What turns you on? Depending on the person, the answer to that question will vary wildly. But what is really going on under the, ahem, hood when we start to get in the mood?
The first scientists to really take the physiology of sex seriously – or at least break the taboos around talking about it – were William Masters and Virginia Johnson, sexologists who began their studies in the 1950s (and got married in 1971). “They came up with what’s known as the four-stage model, which was that the body gets aroused, you hit a plateau, you have an orgasm, you go back down to baseline,” says Dr Angela Wright, a GP and clinical sexologist based in Yorkshire.
It is huge, as demonstrated by the charity Art UK, which has announced it has reached a million artworks on its database and appointed a new chair who said: “We’ve only scratched the surface.”
With the Winter Olympics dominating screens, Dougie Wallace instead took his camera to Scotland’s ski areas of Glenshee, Cairngorm Mountain, Glencoe and Nevis Range, where a thaw, a band of rain, or a gust can change everything
When the snow comes, the car parks fill. Word spreads quickly, a good week, a belter of snow, and by mid-morning the access roads are tight with hatchbacks, hire skis and cautious optimism. In Scotland, the difference between a strong season and a poor one can be a weather front drifting 10 miles too far north. A thaw, a gust, a band of rain, and everything changes.
The project was partly inspired by the approach of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics and the idea of what they might look like if staged in Scotland. It was not about shiny podiums, more an exercise in imagining how weather, people and place might shape a very different kind of Games.
Cold air, small talk, a few quiet minutes before the ride, Glencoe.
New version of the sci-fi day-on-repeat sees a perplexed duo repeatedly battle monstrous plants but leaves you feeling as bored as the protagonist appears
The second film adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s 2004 eponymous novel, this new one is considerably inferior to Edge of Tomorrow from 2014, Tom Cruise’s own Groundhog D1ay with mechs. It’s not a question of budget or aesthetics – simply a gaping hole of engaging characterisation and inner spark that makes this time loop a grinding chore, rather than a thrilling jailbreak from eternal recurrence.
Directors Ken’ichirô Akimoto and Yukinori Nakamura do, to be fair, switch things up. Instead of the original story’s extraterrestrial “Mimics”, they concoct an entirely new big bad: a dormant alien flower, nattily named Darol, that one day begins spitting out what look like killer nasturtiums. The protagonists have been swapped: the point of view in this version is Rita (voiced by Ai Mikami), the female badass working for the United Defense Force that surveys the colossal plant. Exposure to its quartz spores are what forces her to live her imperfect day over and over.
Two uncannily similar men switch places in an existential farce that playfully explores the precarity of working life
In Isabel Waidner’s previous novel, 2023’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, a working-class writer wins a literary prize. As the trophy takes the form of an elusive UFO, Corey Fah – an outsider unfamiliar with the baffling inner workings of the system – is unable to collect or even confirm the award. Waidner has said that the novel was partly inspired by the experience of winning the Goldsmiths prize for their previous work Sterling Karat Gold, and by the ephemeral nature of success, with its “unfamiliar contexts of social power and opportunity”.
In Waidner-world the surreal is always lurking, gleefully waiting to trip the reader up. As If uses the acting profession and its inherent themes of performance and doubleness to explore the precarity of work. A Waiting for Godot transported to the housing estates and grotty sublets of Clerkenwell, London, the book opens with a gnomic Vladimir/Estragon-type exchange between two startlingly similar strangers in a flat. They are both in their late 40s, very tall, dark-haired, a mirror image of each other – “my unremarkable eyes, they were looking back at me”, Aubrey Lewis, who is subletting the flat, notices with some alarm. “Were we ever to be seen together, I thought, we would reflect badly on each other.” The other man, dressed in “a novelty T-shirt, the less said of it the better, and pyjama bottoms”, had “walked in through the door as if he owned the place”. He introduces himself as Lindsey Korine and announces he is cold. Rifling, with Pinteresque fuss and deliberation, among the “historic arrangement” of heavy coats left by the previous subtenant, he assumes a new guise for his next role in the narrative.
Manchester United manager last saw Ratcliffe on 25 January
‘I’m fine with that,’ says Carrick, in buildup to Everton game
Michael Carrick has revealed he and his Manchester United squad have not received an apology or a message of any sort from Sir Jim Ratcliffe after his claim that the United Kingdom has been “colonised by immigrants”.
Ratcliffe, United’s largest single shareholder and head of the club’s football policy, made the comments during a Sky News interview on 11 February. The outcry was strong and immediate, leading the 73-year-old to say the next day he was sorry if his “choice of language has offended some people in the UK and Europe”.
Motorway stretch plays music as a safety feature but those close to it say ‘intrusive’ noise is constant and distressing
Residents of one of India’s most upmarket neighbourhoods say the country’s first “musical road” has turned their daily lives into a nightmare soundtrack.
A stretch of Mumbai’s recently opened Coastal Road seafront expressway has been engineered to play the pulsating Oscar-winning tune Jai Ho from the movie Slumdog Millionaire when vehicles drive on it at lower speeds.
Jack Hughes lost his front teeth in men’s ice hockey final against Canada before scoring overtime winner
If the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics opening ceremony was a love letter to Italian heritage, the final day was a thunderous operatic finale, a crescendo of clashing sticks, soaring amplitude and the bittersweet tears of legends taking their final bows. As the sun dipped behind the peaks of the Dolomites for the last time this fortnight, the Olympic flame did not just flicker out – it was passed from the high-fashion streets of Milan to the ancient stones of Verona.
The final day’s headline act was the men’s ice hockey final which the weight of a 46-year ghost. Pitting the United States against Canada, the contest fell exactly on the anniversary of the 1980 Miracle on Ice. There was no need for a miracle this time, just the surgical precision of Jack Hughes. After Matt Boldy opened the scoring in the first period, the game transformed into a goaltending masterclass by Connor Hellebuyck, who turned aside 40 Canadian shots in normal time.
George Russell has been purring in a balanced car in pre-season while Aston Martin are still hunting for power
The big four – Mercedes, Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren – have been at pains throughout testing to claim they are not the top dog, in something of an inverse Mexican standoff, each decrying their own strengths. Undeniably, however, Mercedes emerge from the three pre-season tests looking strong.
After their poorest pair of tournament performances in years, Steve Borthwick’s project is inevitably under scrutiny
The band on the stadium concourse were playing a familiar tune in the immediate aftermath of England’s latest debacle on Saturday. “Zombie! Zombie!” the vocalist sang, ostensibly in tribute to Ireland’s record 42-21 victory at Twickenham. Alternatively he might just have been riffing on the horribly listless, blank-eyed performance that ended England’s Six Nations title hopes for another year.
“In your he-ad, in your he-ad…” The old Cranberries anthem, synonymous with Ireland’s 2023 World Cup campaign in France, will be heard a few more times over the next month if Andy Farrell’s team maintain their revitalised excellence and no-nonsense physical intent. For England’s players, though, the past two weekends have been truly grim, a return to the bad old days they had dared to hope were over.
Objectification, hate, rape threats: the politicians debating online abuse mean well, but to truly understand, they need to see what I see
If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.
Here’s a recent example from Instagram: “Do y’all females ever tell ur homegirls ‘Sis chill you letting too many dudes hit?’” Essentially, that means: “Women – do you ever tell your girlfriends that they’re whores and need to stop letting so many guys fuck them?” The reel, posted by a 19-year-old man, appeared on my Instagram feed without me wanting to see it, or ever interacting with any other similar content. The comments that followed were pure misogyny. “Women see body count as a leaderboard and they try to outdo each other,” was one of them. Translation: all women are competitively promiscuous.
In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
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Like I said right at the beginning, Pierre de Coubertin never wanted a Winter Olympics. If that line sounds a little familiar it might be because you read it here a fortnight or so ago. “The great inferiority of these snow sports is that they are completely useless,” Coubertin wrote, “with no useful application whatsoever.” But it’s true, too, that over time he changed his mind. And by the end of the International Olympic Committee’s very first Olympic “winter sports week” at Chamonix in 1924 he gave a speech in which he told his audience that “winter sports are among the purest”.
Rio Ngumoha lifts Liverpool, the tussle to be Harry Kane’s England deputy and Chelsea self-destruct
Tottenham weren’t quite as dreadful as they were in losing 4-1 to Arsenal in November, but they were still extremely so, devoid of wit, energy, solidity, creativity, quality, and everything else one would hope to see in a football team. Make no mistake, they are in serious danger of going down and, assessing their fixtures, it is not easy to see where they might win enough points to stay up – all the more so given the form of West Ham and Nottingham Forest who are both playing well. Spurs, on the other hand, haven’t won a league game in 2026 and look like they’ve forgotten how – partly, it must be said, because of an awful injury list. So, where does Igor Tudor go from here? It may well be that his only option is to pick both Dominic Solanke and Randal Kolo Muani, get balls into the box, and hope they can make enough of them to save him – which might not be The Tottenham WayTM, but is a lot better than relegation. Daniel Harris
Revisiting the Troubles in 1990s Belfast, Sapling is the result of intensive research in the city. And winning the Women’s prize, says Duncan, ‘is the maddest thing that’s ever happened to me’
It took Georgina Duncan a few seconds to realise that Indhu Rubasingham, when announcing the winner of the Women’s prize for playwriting last week, was talking about her drama, Sapling. The 30-year-old recalls the moment: “The first sentence I heard her say, I was like, ‘That could be any of the plays.’ Then I was like, ‘Holy shit! This is the maddest thing that’s ever happened to me.’”
The news still hasn’t fully sunk in, but anyone who has read Sapling will not be surprised by Duncan’s victory. Set in Belfast in the 1990s, the play follows 16-year-old Gerry, whose older brother Connor was murdered 10 years earlier by another child. “Someone described it as being about the scar tissue behind grief, which I thought was so eloquent,” Duncan says. The play was born out of her own fear of loss: “Grief is something we all experience in our lives. And it frightens me.”
Men tend to burn more energy at rest, but other factors also carry weight
‘Generally speaking, yes,” says Bethan Crouse, a performance nutritionist from Loughborough University, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all rule. Humans burn calories to fuel everything from movement to sleeping. For the general adult population aged from about 19 to 64, guidance puts daily energy needs at about 2,000 calories for women and 2,500 for men (the requirements are very different in children and adolescents, and tend to fall with age: they decline between 65 and 74, and drop again after 75). But averages hide a lot of variation.
One of the main reasons men typically need more calories is that they usually have a higher resting (or basal) metabolic rate, meaning they burn more energy at rest. This is largely explained by differences in body composition – on average, men have more lean muscle mass, while women tend to have a higher proportion of body fat – and muscle burns more calories than fat.
A rumour on social media brought dozens of fortune seekers to a field on the outskirts of mining town Springs
In a township 30 miles east of Johannesburg, a mechanical digger filled in holes in the dark brown earth, bringing to an end a brief but intense gold rush that saw dozens of fortune seekers descend on what was once a cattle field.
Less than two weeks ago, a rumour spread like wildfire on social media: someone had found gold while digging a hole for a fence post in a field on the edge of Gugulethu, an informal settlement of dirt roads and metal shacks on the outskirts of mining town Springs.
Vickie Hardin Woods was worried she would lose her identity when she retired. Instead, she came up with a plan that made her feel more creative, connected and valued than ever
When Vickie Hardin Woods retired, she knew she needed a plan. “I was worried about losing my carefully crafted identity as a professional. I was looking for something to carry me through that time … What else can I be?”
She decided to do – rather than be – something new. Hardin Woods would bake a pie every day for a year, using fresh ingredients local to her home in Salem, Oregon – and she would give each pie away.
Can a radical proposal to get rid of career politicians really be implemented?
No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.
If you think this idea sounds intriguing and refreshing, you might love Politics Without Politicians, Hélène Landemore’s argument for radically extending citizen power. If you think it sounds like maddening whimsy, ill-suited to the seriousness of the times we are living through – well, we’ll come to that later. But first, to the argument that politics is so broken as to be beyond repair, and that scrapping electoral representation is the best way of fixing it.
A fabled boutique hotel in the Atlas mountains makes a stunning base for hikes to spectacular viewpoints
Coming up the footpath from Imlil, Hussein and I step aside to let a laden mule go past and I look back. On the wooded lower slopes of the valley are clusters of tall houses, some plumed with wood smoke. There appears to be a lot of building work going on, some of it to repair the damage caused by the 2023 earthquake. The sound of a concrete mixer comes cutting through the cool mountain air mixed with birdsong and human voices. Turning back to face south, I can see the Atlas mountains, austere and aloof, a few snow patches on the upper slopes. That’s where we are going, to the top of Toubkal at 4,167 metres, the highest peak in North Africa.
Hussein has been a guide in this beautiful Moroccan valley all his adult life. “Most people here work in tourism now,” he says, waving a greeting to a muleteer who is passing us. The man is clutching the tail of his animal to steady himself up the steep track. “Twenty years ago everyone grew walnuts and subsistence food,” Hussein says. “Now we’ve still got walnuts, but we’ve also planted apple trees as a cash crop. It leaves time for the tourist work.”
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