Israel imposed blockade on devastated Palestinian territory in early March, cutting off supplies of food, medicine, shelter and fuel
Palestinian news agency Wafa, meanwhile, reports that at least 23 Palestinian people have been killed since dawn today in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza.
Rescuers said as many as 130 people, including many women and children, were killed in a wave of Israeli strikes overnight on Saturday and through Sunday on neighbourhoods in the north, centre and south of the territory.
Zara Zerny’s lucid and compassionate study gathers moving, candid interviews with bereaved partners remembering their lost loves
The Marvel bromide about “What is grief, if not love persevering?” comes to mind watching this metaphysically charged Danish documentary in which nine senior citizens discuss their departed life partners. Director Zara Zerny works hard in defining the miracle of lifelong companionship, and the ineffable essence of that significant other which persists after death. So much so that, in one final, oddly encouraging section, some of the interviewees here suggest that their loved one still watches over them, Patrick Swayze-style.
Awkward beginnings and lovestruck thunderclaps: it’s all here. Finn-Erik recalls his first sighting of Kirsten as a 17-year-old with ballet-dancer grace. Ove was rescued from a hotel-room orgy with multiple Norwegians by strapping six-footer Bent, who tells him: “You’re coming home with me.” Then there’s Elly, the trauma of whose first violent marriage “vanished like the dew before the sun” when she met her new partner Aksel. In Zerny’s intimate interviewing environment, nothing is off the table: sex and infidelity, domestic bliss and disaffection, partnerships that outlast passion, the pain of outlasting your partner.
Will new technology help to make the world a better place, or is AI just another tech bubble that will benefit the few?
At the beginning of this year, Keir Starmer announced an “AI opportunities action plan”, which promises to mainline AI “into the veins of this enterprising nation”. The implication that AI is a class-A injectable substance, liable to render the user stupefied and addicted, was presumably unintentional. But then what on earth did they mean about AI’s potential, and did they have any good reason to believe it?
Not according to the authors of this book, who are refreshingly sarcastic about what they think is just another tech bubble. What is sold to us as AI, they announce, is just “a bill of goods”: “A few major well-placed players are poised to accumulate significant wealth by extracting value from other people’s creative work, personal data, or labor, and replacing quality services with artificial facsimiles.”
Economic risks are weighing on the US dollar today, reports Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown:
‘’Like a long weekend hangover, a headache of worry is seeping into sentiment today. The FTSE 100 has opened lower, as investors mull over the downgrading of the US sovereign credit rating on Friday.
Moody’s stripped the US of its triple-A rating, citing the growing US fiscal deficit, and the higher borrowing costs the administration will be forced to pay. Given the pledge by Trump to cut taxes, it’s feared the situation could deteriorate further. More of a sombre mood is expected on Wall Street when trading opens later, with futures indicating falls of around 1% for the S&P 500 and 1.3% for the Nasdaq.
Expert tells court that phone records show ‘potential’ for accused to have been in Outtrim and Loch days after reports of deadly fungi were posted online
An analysis of Erin Patterson’s mobile phone records revealed she may have visited two locations soon after death cap mushroom sightings were reported, a court has heard.
Patterson, 50, has pleaded not guilty to three charges of murder and one charge of attempted murder relating to the lunch she served at her house in Leongatha, Victoria, about 135km south-east of Melbourne.
It is often down to genetics, but hair loss is also affected by hormones, stress and other factors
This is partially true, says Dr Thivos Sokratous, medical doctor and hair loss expert at Ouronyx. We all have two chromosomes (essentially strings of DNA) that code our genetic makeup. Males are born with an X chromosome, with genes inherited from their mother, and a Y chromosome, from their father.
Sokratous says some studies have shown a strong link between the androgen receptor gene on the X chromosome (passed down from the mother) and male pattern hair loss, with some suggesting this gene may account for up to 70% of the risk. “But male pattern baldness is more complex than that,” he says. “It’s the combination of genes from your mum and your dad alongside other factors.”
The Glasgow-born artist makes huge cocoon-like sculptures out of found fabric and videotape. We meet the team who helped her become the first learning-disabled person to make the award shortlist
One day, out of the blue, everything changed for Nnena Kalu. For more than a decade, she’d been making a certain kind of drawing, in a certain kind of way – repeated shapes, clusters of colour, all organised in rows. “Then, in 2013, she just suddenly started to go whoosh,” says Charlotte Hollinshead, Kalu’s studio manager and artistic facilitator, making big, swirling, circular hand gestures. “Everybody in the studio just stopped. She was somebody who had such a set way of working, for years and years and years, repeated over and over. For this to suddenly change was really quite shocking.” It was a shock that would set Kalu on the path to becoming the first learning-disabled artist to be nominated for the Turner prize, as she was last month.
Her drawings are incredible: vast, hypnotic, swirling vortices of repeated circular marks on pale yellow paper. But it’s her sculptural installations that have garnered the most attention: huge cocoons made of found fabric and VHS tape, wrapped into massive, tight, twisting, ultra-colourful knots. It was an installation of these heady sculptures at Manifesta 15, a pan-European art biennial held in Barcelona last year, that brought her to the attention of the Turner committee.
Eberechi Eze is too good for Palace, Morgan Gibbs-White is pushing for a call-up and is 2025 the year of the underdog?
Why would your fan-favourite player, scorer of That Historic Wembley Goal, in peak form under an excellent manager want to leave? Why would anyone be OK with it? How is this logical? Crystal Palace are now good enough to have Eberechi Eze in the team. Eberechi Eze is also too good to stay at Crystal Palace. Both of these things seem to be true. Oliver Glasner-era Palace are a seriously potent, organised and attractive team. But Eze’s progress is something else. At times during his early Palace career there was a sense of a slightly loose late-developer. His skill level was always exceptional. His use of it now is next-level, his finishing cold and his physique buffed up. Eze does not really have a ceiling. He could play for any team in Europe. But he is also 26 years old with two years left on his contract, and Palace have a model based on development with the likes of Romain Esse ready for a shot. There does not always have to be downside. Selling the man who made the thing happen can still be best for everyone. Barney Ronay
Sportspeople’s reluctance to open up is understandable given the unforgiving environment but doing so could help
You see it all the time these days. Players with their hands over their mouths at the end of matches, masking even the most banal of pleasantries from prying eyes. Not wanting to say anything that could be reported. Not wanting to let anyone in.
A generation or two ago, writers such as Gay Talese would hang out with global stars such as Floyd Patterson and hear the former heavyweight champion call himself a coward, describe how it felt to be knocked out, and even accompany him to his daughter’s school to see him confront the bullies who kept lifting up her skirt. And that all happened on the same day.
Health facilities were destroyed and staff killed in record numbers in conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Myanmar and Sudan
Last year saw more than 3,600 attacks on health workers, hospitals and clinics in conflict zones, a record figure reflecting “new levels of horror”, a new report has found.
The total is 15% higher than in 2023 and includes air, missile and drone strikes on hospitals and clinics, as well as the looting and takeover of facilities and arrest and detention of health workers.
Once an indicator of wealth, but for years stuck in burger-bun purgatory, the enriched dough is being embraced by a new generation of chefs and bakers for its versatility and delicious complexity
‘You shouldn’t have to fight your sandwich,” says Sacha Yonan, his voice rising to compete with the noise of London’s Soho on a Tuesday morning. Within half an hour, queues for the sandwiches at Crunch, the cafe he co-founded earlier this year, will be snaking out of its doors. Its secret? Fresh brioche, which comes toasted and filled with ingredients that give the place its name, including southern-fried chicken, baby pickles and lettuce. “We love a sourdough,” says Joni Francisco, his Crunch co-founder. “But if you’re talking about sandwiches, then you need something with an easier mouthfeel.”
Could brioche be the new sourdough? Insofar as anything can be, sourdough being to bread what black is to fashion. In 2023, the humble white sliced loaf was hailed as a better sandwich bread than sourdough, the sourfaux scandal continues to rumble and, while we’re not baking sourdough at home with quite the same zeal as we were during lockdown, our lust for the real deal is still very much around.
Older relatives might roll their eyes at this generation’s approach, but it is overdue in a country where smacking is still legal
A new trend is circulating on social media where adults ask their children to complete some of the toxic parenting phrases they remember from their own childhoods. Sayings such as “I’ll give you something to ... [cry about]”; “children are to be … [seen and not heard]”, and “I brought you into this world … [and I can take you out of it]” are reconfigured by a new generation of little kids who have been raised in more loving and respectful ways.
“I’ll give you something to …” one parent asks, as their child replies “help you with”. “Children are to be … children” and “I brought you into this world and … made you happy”. It’s powerfully moving, seeing how this generation of parents are trying their best to break the cycle of abuse that has frequently masqueraded as discipline over previous decades.
The adventures of great voyagers echo across centuries as a father and daughter flee from flooding in near-future China
The sea takes many forms in fiction. It was an adventure playground in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and a rowdy neighbour in Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. It played the wine-dark seducer in Homer’s Odyssey and the snot-green tormentor in Joyce’s Ulysses. But while its colour can change and its humour may vary, its fictional properties remain reassuringly stable. The sea is our unconscious, a repository of memory, the beginning and end of all things. It’s what Jules Verne described as the “Living Infinite”.
In Madeleine Thien’s rapturous fourth novel, The Book of Records, “the Sea” is the name given to a gargantuan migrant compound, sprawled on the shoreline a decade or two in the future. Lina and her ailing father, Wui Shin, occupy an apartment on the labyrinthine 12th floor, from where they can watch the refugee boats pull in and depart. The pair have fled the flooded Pearl River Delta, leaving behind Lina’s mother, brother and aunt but carrying three volumes from an epic biographical series entitled The Great Lives of Voyagers. These tattered instalments cover the respective histories of the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, the Chinese poet Du Fu and the Portuguese-Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza. They provide both a link to the past and a sextant to navigate by. The world exists in endless flux, Lina is told, and yet here in the Sea nothing ever goes missing. Its chambers fill and empty like locks on a canal. Different portions of the compound appear to correspond with different decades. “The buildings of the Sea are made of time,” Wui Shin explains.
With a stunning coastline, brilliant surfing and a B&B in the forest, this quiet corner north of the Algarve makes for an idyllic break
‘I declare this the best beach in the world,” my youngest son shouts, leaping from a three-metre-high dune on to the soft, golden sand. We’ve come to Praia de Monte Clérigo to watch the sun sink into the sea, and stumble upon a bay ripe for play with a babbling brook, rock pools, gentle swell, towering cliffs and rolling dunes. As I gaze across to colourful fishers’ cottages circling a simple beach bar, I can’t help but agree; this could indeed be the world’s best beach.
“Why’s it so empty?” my son asks. It’s a good question, given the beauty of our surroundings, but we soon realise that having the place to ourselves is a common occurance on our slow adventure exploring Portugal’s least-populated coastline.
Shakespeare sexts! Being dumped by a robot! The Britain’s Got Talent winners’ new series is chaotic fun. Plus: the ultimate girl talk with Vicky Pattison and Angela Scanlon
Dancers turned “media personalities” Ashley and Jordan Banjo team up with sibling Perri Kiely for this podcast, which is like dropping into a group chat with some silly (but well-intentioned) pals. If you’ve ever wondered how William Shakespeare might sext, whether it’s better to get dumped for a person or a robot, or whether Kiely is still thinking about the time he took a tumble at Downing Street (he is), then let them entertain you. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly
Dean Chalkley amassed a vast archive of images at the turn of the millennium when Ibiza clubbers would lose themselves for days on the Spanish party island
Exclusive: Survey commissioned by children’s charities shows UK voters want to see families prioritised
Charities and a Labour-aligned pressure group are ramping up calls on Keir Starmer to scrap the two-child limit on benefits, as polling shows support for action on youth poverty remains high, and is equally solid among Labour voters tempted by Reform.
As discussions continue in government ahead of the forthcoming child poverty strategy, a survey commissioned by a coalition of charities suggests voters want to see families prioritised.
Labour, Green and Lib Dem voters fare best overall and users rarely date on the other side of the political spectrum
Dating app users are more likely to be interested in a Reform voter than a Conservative, new research suggests.
Voters were unlikely to swipe right, or like, a profile of someone from the other side of the political spectrum – meaning that centre-right voters are more likely to pick a Reform supporter than someone who supports a leftwing party, analysis from the University of Southampton and Harvard University found.
Business secretary pressed on whether UK has agreed to give EU trawlers longer access to British waters
Q: Will the UK now be subject to EU rules?
Reynolds says he would push back against that. He says UK and EU rules are currently aligned. If EU rules were to change, the UK would want a say in shaping them.
The US president’s deference to his Middle Eastern allies is hollow if they cannot affect what happens in their own back yard
Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East last week was an exercise in disorientation. Both in terms of rebalancing the relationship between the US and the region, and in scrambling perceptions. In Riyadh, he told the Saudi royals there would be no more “lectures on how to live”. He lifted sanctions on Syria so that the country may have a “fresh start”, and he fawned over the camels and lavish architecture (“as a construction guy,” he said at one Qatari palace, “this is perfect marble”). Never has Trump appeared more in his element, surrounded by the wealth of sovereigns, the marshalling power of absolute monarchies, and their calculated self-orientalisation and over-the-top flattery.
The same man who enacted the Muslim ban in his first term was strolling around mosques and shrugging off the radical path to power of the Syrian president: “Handsome guy … Tough past, but are you gonna put a choir boy in that position?” His call for recognising the new role of Gulf states both as political and economic powerhouses, and matter-of-factly taking their lead on what Syria needs right now, whatever the history, is excruciating. Because it reveals how painfully sclerotic and inconsistent previous administrations were. Joe Biden promised to take a hard line with the Saudi government for its role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and in the Yemen war, and then seemed to forget about it, or realised he couldn’t follow through. From Trump, there is no such mixed signalling: you are rich, we need you. You do you.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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Brian Roberts’s plan was to use Sky to build an international powerhouse outside the US – after being beaten by Disney in the battle to acquire his prime target, Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox – but some analysts and industry figures wonder if he has been taken for a very expensive ride.
Who knows where you are right now? Your friends, your boss? Maybe your parents? How about your partner? According to recent research by the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, “nearly 1 in 5 young people believe it’s OK to track their partner whenever they want”.
As a long-term and stubbornly-vocal privacy advocate, I find this alarming. It’s hard to imagine a bigger red flag than someone wanting to keep tabs on my daily movements. It’s not that I’m doing anything remotely secretive: my days are most often spent working from home, punctuated by trips to the bakery – scandalous! But it’s not about whether I have anything to hide from my partner. Everyone ought to have the right to keep things to themselves, and choose when they do or don’t share.
Attempts to bring down the price of the Japanese staple have had little effect amid a cost-of-living crisis
Japan’s government is battling record-low approval ratings as consumers voice anger at soaring rice prices just weeks before key national elections.
Attempts to bring down the price of the Japanese staple have had little effect, prompting calls for a reduction in the consumption (sales) tax to ease the cost-of-living crisis.
The star had just finished shooting Poison, about parents torn apart by grief, when his own son died. He remembers their last days together – and what truths he learned from the darkly moving film
Tim Roth reclines in his chair and exudes an unexpected lightness, as if the Atlantic Ocean is casting a summer spray over this corner of Galway. He is upbeat about life, film and even acting, which he once called a nightmare profession he would not recommend to anyone.
“Oh, did I say that?” he asks, surprised. “I don’t feel that way at all, actually. I must have been having a bad one, but that’s OK.” He shrugs and smiles. “I actually love it more and more at the moment.”
The TV sewing judge is also a designer and clothing manufacturer who is fiercely anti-consumerism. He discusses how he balances his beliefs with his business
Patrick Grant is on his feet, giving the full tour of his outfit. He tugs down the waistband of his jeans to show off his white underpants elastic. His undies were made in south Wales, he says. His shoes in Bolton, the socks in Sussex. More than a man who got dressed this morning, he is a walking compendium of clothing.
The provenance of his garments is important to Grant. In fact, the provenance of his everything is important. We are meeting in the office of Cookson & Clegg, the Blackburn clothing factory he bought in 2015. Within a few minutes, I’ve learned that the table we’re sitting at came from Freecycle in Crystal Palace, the bookcase from a skip. I suspect these details have always mattered to Grant,53, who is best known as a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee, but they’re especially pertinent since his book, Less, argues that we should all buy fewer things. Grant is very exercised about this idea, and the book’s affably bossy subtitle is a much better clue to his personal energy than its minimalist title: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier.
In the post-Soviet states, statues can be removed and street names changed. But achieving sovereignty of memory is far harder
We often hear that it is Russia’s inability or unwillingness to deal with the crimes of its past that has led to the restoration of tyranny and the military aggression that we see now. Such a narrative usually focuses only on internal Soviet deeds: forced collectivisation, the Great Terror of the 1930s, the Gulag system and so on. Some of these things were nominally recognised as crimes, but no attempt was made to hold the perpetrators to account. Russia’s perestroika democrats were generally opposed to transitional justice.
However, the most politically sensitive Soviet crime is nearly always left out of the discussion. And Russia’s failure to address this particular crime is far more dangerous and affects the fate of many nations.
As the mercury soars, people have been told to shelter inside. But for those in poor housing in places like Bengalaru, there is no respite
At noon, Khustabi Begum is sitting on the steps leading to her three-room home, trying to escape the stifling April heat indoors. But respite is hard to come by in Rajendra Nagar, a slum in south Bengaluru. “It’s just as hot outside, but it feels worse indoors. It’s been really hot for the past five or six days, but at least there’s an occasional breeze outside,” says the 36-year-old.
Inside Begum’s dimly lit living room, ceiling fans whir. One corner is stacked with sacks of onions and just outside their home is a vending cart. “My husband sells erulli, belluli [onions, garlic],” she says.
Fremont emergency crews search the Sandusky river near Miles Newton Bridge for at least one missing person
Two people were killed, police said, and at least one person was missing after pedestrians were struck by a train on Sunday evening in northern Ohio, authorities said.
The incident occurred at around 7pm in Fremont, near Lake Erie between Toledo and Cleveland, WTOL-TV reported.
The band’s drummer since 1996 says there have been ‘weeks of mayhem’ since he was fired then reinstated three days later
The Who’s drummer Zak Starkey has been fired from the band for a second time, just one month after he was fired then quickly reinstated.
In an Instagram post on Monday, the group’s guitarist, Pete Townshend, announced that Starkey was no longer part of the band, just months shy of their farewell tour across North America.
Top Democrat condemns ‘flying grift’ as senior Republicans join chorus of disapproval – key US politics stories from Sunday 18 May at a glance
Donald Trump is coming under increasing pressure for accepting a $400m luxury plane from Qatar as several senior Republicans join the chorus of criticism.
Leading Democratic Chris Murphy on Sunday called it the “definition of corruption”, while even some of Trump’s close allies have been enraged, with some saying it was the opposite of Trump’s promise to drain the swamp and was “a stain on the administration”.
British Museum, London A lovable elephant deity and a floating serpent goddess are just two of the highlights in this sensual show about three of the country’s great religions
About 2,000 years ago, Indian art went through a stunning transformation led, initially, by Buddhists. From being enigmatically abstract it became incredibly accomplished at portraying the human body – and soul.
You can see this happen in the bustling yet harmonious crowd of pilgrims and gift-givers you meet about a third of the way through this ethereal and sensual show. Two horses bearing courtiers or merchants are portrayed in perfect perspective, their rounded chests billowing, their bodies receding. Around them a crowd of travelling companions, on horseback and foot, are depicted with the same depth. Their bodies and faces are full of life, in a frenetic pageant, a bustling carnival, yet this human hubbub is composed with order and calm.
Children in Great Britain with serious conditions 68% more likely to have limited ability to work as adults, report says
Children in Great Britain with serious mental health conditions are two-thirds more likely to have a limited ability to work in adulthood, according to research from a leading thinktank.
The report by researchers at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) looked at data from about 6,000 people who took part in the 1970 British Cohort Study, which is following the lives of individuals born in a single week in 1970 across Great Britain.
Just another Scottie Sunday. Major number three for Scottie Scheffler, the first outside Augusta National and the latest stride towards golfing immortality. A year on from being bundled into a police cell during his last attempt to lift the Wanamaker Trophy, Scheffler took no prisoners. Dancing to the jailhouse rock. Jon Rahm swung and missed at the new US PGA champion before capitulating under sheer frustration. Nobody else seriously featured.
Scheffler earned himself $3.4m (£2.5m) plus further daylight between himself and the rest at the summit of the world rankings. The most remarkable thing about Scheffler is how unremarkable he makes all this seem. This is a golfer who has walked up to the 72nd green of a major holding six-, five- and four-shot leads. He has no experience of anxiety in such scenarios because of his own ability to steady the ship as others waver.
Liverpool will try to add “extra weapons” this summer to take the Premier League champions to the next level, Arne Slot has said. In addition to plans to strengthen the squad via the transfer market, the head coach is plotting tactical tweaks to keep the team evolving.
The players were given four days off after the home draw with Arsenal but return to action on Monday night at Brighton. With top spot secured, thinking has turned to recruitment and Liverpool are set to invest this summer. Slot has been holding meetings with the sporting director, Richard Hughes, over plans to strengthen in certain areas. The Bayer Leverkusen defender Jeremie Frimpong is a key target and the club are set to trigger his €35m (£29.5m) release clause.
It was an act of terrorism that rocked the world. But though this well meaning BBC drama has some startling and impressive moments, it mainly forgets to actually find any drama
The bombing of Pan Am flight 103 on 21 December 1988 was an event so large, so complex and so significant that for a long time it was hard for anyone to take a clear view on it. Many elements remain murky to this day, despite – or perhaps because of – it being an act of terror that was unprecedented in its effect on Britain and the US. The plane exploded over the small town of Lockerbie in Scotland, having taken off from London on its way to New York and Detroit, completing a journey that began in Frankfurt. The hunt for the perpetrators soon focused on the Middle East and north Africa. With half the world demanding answers, the families of the 270 people killed found it difficult to be heard.
The hidden human cost of the post-crash chaos is where The Bombing of Pan Am 103, a six-part fictionalisation, initially tries to find its dramatic impetus: the series argues that the dignity of the victims and the sensitivities of their loved ones were trampled. More care should have been taken to respect the dead, it says. But it struggles to turn this admirable sentiment into drama.
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