PM says trade deal is a ‘huge win’ for Britons as MPs press him over winter fuel cuts
Keir Starmer starts by saying rising tensions between India and Pakistan will be of serious concern for many across Britain. The government is enouraging de-escalation, he says.
He says tomorrow the nation will fall silent to commemorate VE Day. The armed forces protect our freedom, he says.
Trials will test ways to block sunlight and slow climate crisis that threatens to trigger catastrophic tipping points
Real-world geoengineering experiments spanning the globe from the Arctic to the Great Barrier Reef are being funded by the UK government. They will test sun-reflecting particles in the stratosphere, brightening reflective clouds using sprays of seawater and pumping water on to sea ice to thicken it.
Getting this “critical missing scientific data” is vital with the Earth nearing several catastrophic climate tipping points, said the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), the government agency backing the plan. If demonstrated to be safe, geoengineering could temporarily cool the planet and give more time to tackle the root cause of the climate crisis: the burning of fossil fuels.
Chinese leader will attend Victory Day parade and hold talks with Vladimir Putin
Xi Jinping has arrived in Moscow at the start of a four-day visit to attend Russia’s military parade commemorating the anniversary of the end of the second world war, known in Russia as Victory Day.
The Chinese leader’s arrival coincided with Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian capital. Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said Russia’s air defence units destroyed at least 14 Ukrainian drones overnight.
How the global wrangle for natural resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is fuelling one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises
Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, after three months of fighting, a peace agreement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is in the works. I spoke to our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, about the conflict, how quickly it escalated and the prospects for peace.
Cast in bronze by sculptor Andy Edwards and containing the legendary Motörhead frontman’s DNA, the effigy underscores the West Midlands’ rock heritage
“That’s the street where Lemmy lived,” says sculptor Andy Edwards as we drive into the town of Burslem in the north of Stoke-on-Trent, past terrace houses and a ceramics factory. This Friday, a motorcade will travel the same route to Burslem’s Market Place to unveil a statue of the late Motörhead frontman, 10 years since his death – and 50 years since the metal band’s founding.
Phil Campbell, Motörhead’s longest-serving guitarist, will be there, placing a portion of Lemmy Kilmister’s ashes into the plinth. “It’ll be wonderful, finally getting an incredible statue in his home town,” says Campbell. “It’ll be solemn in a way, with enshrining his ashes, but also a celebration of the music and the fantastic character he was. Anything to do with Lem is significant and really special. He’s missed by many. He’s still in my dreams two or three times a week, getting on my case about something.”
Workers at the esteemed news service say they’re being silenced by the president – but they’re vowing to fight back
Carolina Valladares Pérez, a Washington-based correspondent for the government-funded international news service Voice of America, has reported from places where press freedom is severely restricted – war zones and autocratic states – in the Middle East and across Latin America. Intimidation and threats from state officials were not unusual – but she always managed to get the story out.
Now for the first time in her career, Valladares Pérez says she has been silenced – not by a faraway regime, but by the government of the United States.
SpaceX and Starlink owner may benefit from Trump cuts to projects that could have led to regulations and costs
The Trump administration is poised to kill federal research into pollution from satellites and rockets, including some caused by Elon Musk’s space companies, raising new conflict-of-interest questions about the billionaire SpaceX and Starlink owner.
The pollution appears to be accumulating in the stratosphere at alarming levels. Some fear it could destroy the ozone layer, potentially expose some people to higher levels of ultraviolet radiation or help further destabilize the earth’s climate during the climate crisis.
Barbican, London ThePakistani-American sculptor’s traumatised patchwork people more than hold their own against the great Swiss artist’s striding, emaciated statues in this thrilling clash
An artist has to ask big questions and have intense thoughts to get away with exhibiting among the profound masterpieces of Alberto Giacometti. I didn’t give much for Huma Bhabha’s chances. But she takes the Barbican’s new daylit art gallery by storm.
Grey morning light from windows that look across the brutalist ponds at St Giles Cripplegate pours through big holes in her 2019 sculpture Mask of Dimitrios. This roughly assembled human figure has plastic bags for breasts – not inflated but sagging pieces of dirty polythene – a metal chair for a skeleton enhanced by blackened dog bones, plaster arms and legs, a battered tray for a face, all tacked together over an inner emptiness.
There is surprising nostalgia and humour in Gerad Argeros’s story of healing after child abuse by a Catholic priest. He was an altar boy at St Cecilia Catholic church in north-east Philadelphia when, at age 11, he became one of the victims of paedophile James Brzyski. Decades later, the actor and father developed the one-man stage show Fox Chase Boy. Performing it to his close-knit parish he speaks directly about a crime cloaked in silence, and brings welcome insight into their collective trauma
Comparing someone at work to the Star Wars villain Darth Vader is “insulting” and “upsetting”, an employment tribunal has ruled.
A judge concluded that being told you have the same personality type as the infamous sci-fi baddie is a workplace “detriment” – a legal term meaning harm or negative impact experienced by a person.
Released on his 99th birthday and presented in the context of his remarkable career, Sir David’s authority is matched only by nature’s grandeur in this visually stunning film
A visual marvel like all his work, governed by his own matchless authority and striking a steady tonal balance between warning and hope, David Attenborough’s new film about the oceans is absorbing and compelling. He makes a passionate case against the ruin caused by industrial overfishing and the sinister mega-trawlers which roam everywhere, raking the seabed with their vast metal nets, brutally and wastefully hoovering up fish populations of which the majority is often simply thrown away, depleting developing countries and fishing communities of their share. Attenborough says that this is the new colonialism. The film is released in cinemas in anticipation of the UN’s World Oceans Day in June, which is campaigning for 30% of the world’s oceans to be preserved from exploitation – at present, only around 3% is protected in this way.
As he arrives at his 99th birthday, Sir David presents this new documentary in the context of his own remarkable life and career, studying and thinking about the oceans as the last part of the world to be fully understood and also, perhaps, the last part to be exploited – and despoiled. As he says, until relatively recently, the ocean was regarded as a kind of mysterious, undifferentiated Sahara, a wilderness, of interest largely for providing an apparently endless supply of food. But he shows us an amazing vista of diversity and life, an extraordinary undulating landscape, a giant second planet of whose existence humanity has long been unaware but now seems in danger of damaging or even destroying.
Are schools really providing litter trays for kids whose pronouns are Puss and Purr? Or is state representative Stan Gerdes just stoking the culture war with his proposed FURRIES Act?
Move over, Wagatha Christie: Furlock Holmes is investigating “non-human behaviour” in Texas schools. A Republican state representative called Stan Gerdes recently filed a bill called the Forbidden Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Educational Spaces (FURRIES) Act, which would ban schoolkids from acting like animals. No hissing during history, no meowing during maths, and absolutely no relieving yourself in a litter box during lunch break, according to the FURRIES Act.
Are animal impersonations a serious issue in Texas’s schools? Gerdes insists so, noting in a press release that he had heard reports of a “furry-related incident” in at least one school. When pressed on the issue, however, he was unable to provide any actual evidence of schools providing litter boxes for students who identify as felines.
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.
On average, five fatal whale strikes occur in the country’s waters each year, the highest in the world – and just a fraction of the total number killed, say researchers
Photographs by Francis Pérez
The memory of a blue whale gliding past his small boat haunts Patricio Ortiz. A deep wound disfigured the cetacean’s giant body – a big chunk had been ripped from its dorsal fin. Cargo ships are the only adversary capable of inflicting such harm on a blue whale, he says.
“Nothing can be done when they’re up against those floating monsters.”
Feeding the world sustainably is an incredibly complex challenge, yet some people are trying to sell us a bucolic fairytale
The fire that has just destroyed 500 hectares (1,230 acres) of Dartmoor should have been impossible. It should not be a fire-prone landscape. But sheep, cattle and ponies have made it so. They selectively browse out tree seedlings, preventing the return of temperate rainforest, which is extremely difficult to burn. In dry weather, the moor grass, bracken and heather covering the deforested landscape are tinder.
The plume of carbon dioxide and smoke released this week is one of the many impacts of livestock grazing. But several recent films, alongside celebrities, politicians, billionaires and far-right podcasts, seek to persuade us that cattle and sheep are good for the atmosphere and the living planet. This story, wrapped in romantic cottagecore, is now the most active and seductive frontier of climate-science denial. It is heavily promoted by the meat industry, which is as ruthless and machiavellian as the fossil fuel industry. It sows confusion among people desperately seeking to do the right thing in an age of misinformation.
China will cut interest rates and inject some much-needed liquidity into the domestic economy, as the country steels itself for a bruising trade war with the US.
The People’s Bank of China said on Wednesday it would make a half-point cut to the banks’ reserve requirement ratio, its benchmark interest rate, and release 1tn yuan (£103.6bn) into the banking system.
Supporter with spare ticket took the bait over offer
Around 50,000 supporters vying for just 480 seats
A Norwegian bartered five kilos of semi-dried fish for a ticket to Thursday’s semi-final clash between Bodø/Glimt and Tottenham in the Arctic Circle, as the hosts aim to become the first Norwegian club to reach a European final.
The mobile that fell out of Tom Bailey’s trousers when he was batting isn’t the strangest thing players have secreted in their whites
When Tom Bailey’s mobile phone fell out of his pocket on Saturday as he was turning for a quick second during Lancashire’s Championship match with Gloucestershire, it brought some cheap laughs, as well as a sharp letter of warning from the ECB’s anti-corruption officer. It was also another chapter in cricket’s pocket history: from sandpaper to sandwiches. What, as Gollum pondered, has it got in its pocketses?
For Derbyshire left-arm spinner Fred Swarbrook, the answer was a lucky pebble. After developing the yips, a psychologist had advised him to take a stone on to the pitch and rub it before he was about to bowl. Sadly, it didn’t work and the luckless Swarbrook was forced to retire.
Artist and photographer Phil Buehler captured some of the worst-hit properties from this year’s Eaton Fire in Altadena, Los Angeles and assembled them for this year’s Spring/Break art show taking place in New York City until 12 May. The exhibit will include a cyclorama with some of the 9/11 calls during the fires playing softly in the background
The former Baltimore Ravens guard had a lucrative career in professional football. But he chose to concentrate on his first love in academia
John Urschel lifts the blinds in his second-floor office in the mathematics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Outside is Cambridge in all of its springtime splendor on a mid-April afternoon. Everything about his office says “college professor” – the computer on one side of the desk, the stack of papers on the other, the books on the shelves behind him.
He grins through his beard and his eyes sparkle behind his glasses when he describes his research in linear algebra. When he gestures enthusiastically, you can imagine those huge hands protecting his quarterback from opposing pass rushers – which he once did as a guard for the Baltimore Ravens.
If you’d rather get up to date on the pomp and the politics of the conclave, the process to elect Pope Francis’s successor, good news: we’ve got you covered.
It is, as Guardian journalist Harriet Sherwood explains, an election rich in ceremony and ritual. Yet it can get very dirty too: cardinals lobbying in corridors and Vatican gardens; allegations of leaks to the media to discredit rivals; even the emergence of a video of one cardinal – a bookies’ favourite to be the next pope – singing ‘atheist anthem’ Imagine by John Lennon.
Paper in Nature Climate Change journal reveals major role wealthy emitters play in driving climate extremes
The world’s wealthiest 10% are responsible for two-thirds of global heating since 1990, driving droughts and heatwaves in the poorest parts of the world, according to a study.
While researchers have previously shown that higher income groups emit disproportionately large amounts of greenhouse gases, the latest survey is the first to try to pin down how that inequality translates into responsibility for climate breakdown. It offers a powerful argument for climate finance and wealth taxes by attempting to give an evidential basis for how many people in the developed world – including more than 50% of full-time employees in the UK – bear a heightened responsibility for the climate disasters affecting people who can least afford it.
Research also finds many trapped in abusive relationships and unable to afford sanitary products and other basics
Women who have fled war are being forced into sex work in the UK because of the extreme poverty of their living conditions here, while almost half cannot afford sanitary products, according to research.
In a report looking at the impact of the Home Office’s near-total ban on employment for people seeking asylum, the charity Women for Refugee Women has found that 10% of women interviewed have been forced into sex work in order to survive, in many cases to feed their children, while 38% were forced into abusive relationships or situations. Almost half could not afford basics like sanitary products and about 80% could not afford clothes, public transport or phone credit.
Ørsted cancels fourth stage of Hornsea project off Yorkshire coast, which was expected to include 180 giant turbines
One of the UK’s largest planned offshore windfarms has been cancelled by its developer, the Danish wind power company Ørsted, as a result of higher costs and greater risk.
The fourth phase of the huge Hornsea windfarm development, located off the Yorkshire coast, was expected to include 180 giant turbines, capable of generating the equivalent of enough green electricity to power 1m homes.
The only important woman in the Nazi movement entranced Hitler, directed Triumph of the Will – and spent the rest of her life alternately fearful and defiant
Andres Veiel’s sombre documentary tells the gripping, incrementally nauseating story of Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl, the brilliant and pioneering German film-maker of the 20th century who isn’t getting her name on a Girls on Tops T-shirt any time soon.
Riefenstahl was a dancer and actor in prewar movies by Arnold Fanck and GW Pabst, whose performance in 1932 in The Blue Light, her own Aryan romantic fantasy as director-star, entranced the Führer and secured her two historic directing commissions: Triumph of the Will in 1935, a monumentally euphoric and grandiose account of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, and Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Games, with whose undoubtedly stunning images and choreography Riefenstahl effectively invented the modern-day Olympics with its opening and closing ceremonies and media coverage.
An eye-opening account of the old Soviet tactic of embedding secret agents where you’d least expect them
One of the best series of the golden age of TV drama, The Americans (2013-2018), centred on a pair of Russian sleeper agents operating in suburban Washington DC during the height of the cold war. By day they seemed to be a boring married American couple; by night they set honey traps, sabotaged facilities, recruited traitors and assassinated enemies.
That story was based in part on the real-life pair of “illegals” – as spies living under deep cover in civil society are called – Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov, who pretended to be Canadians living in Cambridge, Massachussetts, until their arrest and deportation in 2010. In reality, they weren’t so successful: owing to the turning of another Soviet agent, they were closely monitored by the FBI for years and never managed anything nefarious enough to make it worth charging them with espionage.
Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some wonderful new paperbacks, from a genre-bending memoir to a sexy novel about finding meaning in life
Vulcan device ‘capable of grabbing three-quarters of items in warehouses’ fuels fears of mass job losses
Amazon said it has made a “fundamental leap forward in robotics” after developing a robot with a sense of touch that will be capable of grabbing about three-quarters of the items in its vast warehouses.
Vulcan – which launches at the US firm’s “Delivering the Future” event in Dortmund, Germany, on Wednesday and is to be deployed around the world in the next few years – is designed to help humans sort items for storage and then prepare them for delivery as the latest in a suite of robots which have an ever-growing role in the online retailer’s extensive operation.
The race for the Liberal leadership is becoming bitter as Angus Taylor’s allies dismiss speculation he is poised to pull out and clear the path for Sussan Ley to lead the party rebuild after Saturday’s election disaster.
It comes as Peter Dutton made his first brief remarks since his concession speech on Saturday night, saying he intended to make a “graceful exit” from politics.
Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars show has repeatedly felt like it was ripped from today’s headlines – but Mon Mothma’s radical speech was written two years ago
Warning: this contains spoilers for episode nine of Andor season two
Since it started in 2022, the Star Wars spin-off Andor has proved an unexpectedly bolshie addition to the Disney-owned mega-franchise. By portraying worker uprisings, surveillance states, sexual violence and prison industrial complexes, showrunner Tony Gilroy added fresh political nuance and human stakes to George Lucas’s endless galactic civil war.
And since its April premiere, the show’s second and final season has only doubled down. In the first episode, viewers saw smarmy spin doctors from the Empire’s “Ministry of Enlightenment” discuss how to “weaponise” galactic opinion to manufacture public approval for ethnic cleansing on the planet Ghorman. News anchors parrot Imperial talking points, while the military plots a long game: to provoke an uprising from “rebels you can depend on to do the wrong thing” to justify a mass crackdown – all in service of a long-planned land and resources grab.
Earl of Shrewsbury offers to reimburse taxpayer over use of first-class ticket and his ‘erroneous’ claims
A Conservative hereditary peer, who was previously punished for breaking the House of Lords rules, is facing fresh questions over whether he breached them again after he admitted he “erroneously” made claims last year for travel expenses he did not incur.
After inquiries by the Guardian, the Earl of Shrewsbury said he has offered to reimburse the taxpayer for the travel expenses he claimed, and any sums that could be due from part of a first-class ticket he used to attend a board meeting of a commercial company.
Collage artist Tshepiso Moropa uses archive photography to create surreal images that come to her in sleep and last long after she wakes
Ke Go Beile Leithlo (I’ve Got My Eyes On You) is part of a project called Ditoro, meaning “dreams” in my home language, Setswana. It is a growing body of work exploring archival imagery through the lens of dreams and memory – a space where the past and present blur, where ancestral fragments reappear in unexpected ways and where dreams become portals into untold stories.
This piece depicts a dream I had a while back that lingered long after I woke. In the dream, two figures commanded the space: a woman sitting gracefully on a dark leather couch, her white dress billowing around her, with a lace structure rising from her shoulders like wings. She was calm, majestic, almost otherworldly. Beside her stood a tall figure – a man, confident, dressed in white trousers and a flowing blouse, topped with a white hat. An enigmatic guardian or a silent observer.
Pea and mung bean pancakes with fried eggs and coconut coriander chutney, pea broth with bread dumplings, and pasta with lemony pea pesto
My earliest memory of kitchen duties is sitting on a stool in our courtyard in Kenya with a sack of peas that was bigger than me. I spent hours coaxing them from their pods, munching as I went; the result was a red plastic bucket brimming with peas like gleaming green marbles. As with asparagus, they have a short season, so grab them while you can: throw them whole into salads, broths and curries, or grind them down and use their starchy goodness to make pestos, pancakes and fritters.
The common perception is that Trump has largely moved on, leaving an emboldened Netanyahu to his own devices
The Israeli plan to occupy and depopulate Gaza may not be identical to Donald Trump’s vision of a new riviera, but his inspiration and the US’s walkaway diplomacy have ushered Benjamin Netanyahu to the precipice of a dire new chapter in the Israel-Gaza war.
The common perception in both Washington and Israel is that Trump has largely moved on, leaving an emboldened Netanyahu to his own devices, while his offhand proposals for turning Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” have provided cover for rightwing Israeli politicians to enthusiastically support the forced resettlement of the Palestinian population.
Faragism’s rise isn’t a surge of enthusiasm – it’s a symptom of exhaustion with two parties failing to offer vision, justice or renewal
Sir Keir Starmer promised change – and, in a way, he has delivered it. Gone are the days of bold, expansive pledges; in their place are cautious, measurable goals: 6,500 new teachers, 40,000 extra NHS appointments a week. Yet voters, oddly ungrateful, remain unmoved. Perhaps it is because these modest gains barely scratch the surface of national decline. The government has touched lives, just not in the ways it promised. Cuts to winter fuel payments for pensioners and proposed reductions in disability benefits have landed with jarring force. Sir Keir’s managerial style may promise stability, but voters expected transformation. The result: disillusionment with a government delivering change – but not the change voters thought they had chosen.
Labour’s poor local election showing could be shrugged off as low turnout in the shires. The party won the West of England mayoralty on less than 8% of the electorate. But the hammer-blow for Labour was the Runcorn and Helsby byelection. Reform UK, the hard-right party led by Nigel Farage, beat Labour by six votes. The swing towards Mr Farage closely mirrors the Tory collapse, suggesting that almost all the lost Conservative support in the seat shifted to Reform. Meanwhile, Labour’s base in the north-west largely stayed home. The result was a tight two-way race – driven by a rightward realignment and a lack of enthusiasm for Labour. Reform fed on Tory collapse and Labour’s weakened hold.
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.
Moco, London The former Take That singer’s show features line drawings filled with therapy speak, greeting-card banter and meaningless affirmations. Can this really be presented as art?
For a while there, Robbie Williams was pretty damn insistent that he would just rock all night, DJ. But artistic geniuses cannot live on rock alone, and the former boyband superstar has been looking for other ways to satisfy his pangs of creative hunger. And judging by the awkward, anxious paintings and sculptures here at Moco – London’s newest “museum” – it’s art that he’s decided to stuff his face with.
The big printed canvases of computerised line drawings on the walls are filled with therapy speak, greeting card banter and patronising, meaningless affirmations. An aeroplane flying across a blue sky pulls a banner that reads: “Yes you are self centred, but what a marvellous self to be centred on.” And my stomach starts turning. The words “roses are red, violets are blue, everyone’s a dickhead except you” are written across a cassette tape, while bubble font spells out: “I’m sorry about being incredibly charasmatic [sic] I tried to not be but there was nothing I could do about it.”
Even before his call for a net zero ‘reset’, there had been criticism of ex-PM’s lucrative links with fossil fuel nations
From the lush gardens of the Four Seasons luxury hotel in Sharm el-Sheikh, amid banks of bougainvillaea and trailing jasmine, green lawns and air-conditioned courtyards, the surrounding desert is kept at bay by hidden sprinklers, and the chaotic poverty of the rest of Egypt by high walls and discreet security.
In late 2022, on the sidelines of the Cop27 UN climate conference, the former UK prime minister Tony Blair was holding high-level meetings with senior figures from politics and business. His role in the negotiations raised questions for some, who began to worry that, having been a respected elder statesman on the subject – one who as prime minister crafted the UK’s first real climate measures, and made it the priority for the UK presidency of the G8 group of countries in 2005 – he might now be becoming, in the words of one Whitehall insider, “a serious threat to sensible climate policy”.
An excellent dig into the life – and sex scandal – of the controversial chatshow king. Plus, a new podcast on the Titanic … made by the nephew of a survivor
Long before he was a chatshow titan, Jerry Springer was a plucky young politician who held the post of mayor of Cincinnati before setting his sights on the state of Ohio at large. Slow Burn’s Leon Neyfakh goes all the way back to those beginnings for this nine-part series, marrying excellent journalism with some unbelievable source material – not least when it comes to Springer’s 70s sex scandal. Hannah J Davies Audible, all episodes out now
As she marks her 90th birthday with a UK tour and new album, the singer and activist will answer your questions
After a long career which has established her as one of the most significant folk singers on both sides of the Atlantic, Peggy Seeger is about to celebrate her 90th birthday with a final tour and album – and will answer your questions.
Born in New York to a musicologist father and a modernist composer, and with siblings including future folk legend Pete Seeger, she started out on piano at seven years old, eventually adding guitar, banjo, autoharp, dulcimer and concertina to her skillset.
The ‘worst allergy season ever’ in the US. A ‘pollen bomb’ in the UK. I asked experts how to tell if a runny nose is the result of allergies or a virus
Ah, spring. A time of thawing and rebirth, of blooms bursting forth from frost. Days become longer, warmer and – oh no, what’s this? A tickle in your throat. Pressure building in your sinuses. A runny nose. A sneeze. Another sneeze. Was there ever a time before sneezing?
But is it allergies or a cold? Beautiful as springtime may be, the emerging greenery can also expel waves of allergens. So how can you tell if your runny nose is the result of unruly pollen or a virus? Are you infectious or is your immune system overreacting to an outside stimulus?
When it comes to workouts, how much pain – specifically, how much post-workout soreness – is actually a good thing? The answer: it depends
Humans have long glamorized suffering, hailing it as an essential ingredient of growth. In the ancient Greek tragedy Elektra, Sophocles wrote: “Nothing truly succeeds without pain.” In the 1980s, the actor and aerobics instructor Jane Fonda told people: “No pain, no gain.”
But when it comes to workouts, how much pain – specifically, how much post-workout soreness – is actually a good thing? The answer: it depends.
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