Depot, Cardiff Twenty-five years on from their first UK tour, the Swedish band are at their cartoonish, snarling best, eager to prove themselves rather than wallow in nostalgia
‘I’m powering clothes, that’s how electric I am,” Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist quips, the trim on his LED-encrusted suit glowing as he climbs into the crowd. It’s funny, but on this evidence, it’s not really a joke. As an exhilarating Tick Tick Boom crashes back into the room, it’s easy to believe that the Hives could prop up the National Grid.
Twenty-five years on from their first UK tour, the Swedish punk’n’rollers are full of piss and vinegar, reinvigorated after breaking a decade-plus recording hiatus with two well-received albums in three years, all while playing some of the biggest shows of their career, from stadium support slots with Arctic Monkeys to an upcoming night at London’s Alexandra Palace.
US army secretary Daniel Driscoll expected to hold meeting today having reportedly already met with Russia on Monday night
Nordic correspondent
Meanwhile, Sweden has today announced it is investing an additional 3.5bn SEK (£280m) in air defences amid the increased threat from drones and other forms of aerial attack.
“Sweden’s defence needs to be strengthened against threats such as robots, drones and helicopters. The best way to guarantee peace and freedom is to invest in defence. The orders also contribute to growth, jobs and security of supply. It also improves the possibilities of increasing production capacity in the defence industry.”
Irish comedy writer cleared at Westminster magistrates court of harassing Sophia Brooks on social media
The Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan has been cleared of harassing a transgender activist on social media but found guilty of criminal damage of their mobile phone outside a conference in London last year.
The 57-year-old flew in from Arizona to appear at Westminster magistrates court in person on Tuesday, where judgment was delivered by district judge Briony Clarke.
The flowers and hamper that arrived at the Tower of London had been sent by a small energy company based in Sierra Leone. They were a gift to Richard Dannatt, the former head of the British army, who a few months earlier had introduced the company’s executives to the minister for Africa. It was a move they hoped would smooth the way for the fledgling company’s grand plans to build a £500m hydroelectric dam.
With support from the UK government, the company had a better chance of getting the dam built. The dam, they said, would bring much-needed cheap electricity to many people in Sierra Leone. But it could also bring profits to the company, and Dannatt was not only to receive flowers and upmarket produce, he was also given shares.
Gueye addressed players following 1-0 win at Old Trafford
De Ligt accuses United of lacking urgency in Monday loss
Idrissa Gueye received a round of applause from the Everton squad after apologising for his extraordinary red card in Monday’s victory at Manchester United.
The midfielder became the first Premier League player to be dismissed for striking a team-mate in 17 years when slapping Michael Keane at Old Trafford. Everton’s performed heroically with 10 men for 85 minutes, stoppage time included, to hand David Moyes his first win at Old Trafford as a visiting manager in 18 attempts and deliver only the club’s second victory at United in 33 years.
The infection is responsible for 800,000 newborn deaths each year, but clinics in eight countries are working together to find new treatments
Just a few minutes from the turquoise waters of Kenya’s Kilifi Creek, a world away from the tourists enjoying their time on the estuary, a team of clinicians, technicians and microbiologists is helping to shape a new era of care for newborns.
NeoSep1 is a pioneering clinical trial that aims to identify effective and safe antibiotic combinations to treat sepsis in newborns. One of the centres leading the second phase of this study is the Kemri-Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KWTRP) in Kilifi.
Maybe. Let’s hope it is not too late for Democrats to win back the working class and Washington
Since the Democrats’ sweepingvictories on 4 November, a strange thing has happened among the party factions: a semblance of unity has emerged.
At first, “affordability” became the slogan of rapprochement. Moderates, populists and socialists agreed Democrats must campaign around the cost-of-living crisis and hang the broken economy around Donald Trump’s neck.
Trump puts US in unflattering company as lack of representative reveals disdain for climate progress
More than two decades ago, the US railed against the “axis of evil”. Now, after international climate talks spluttered to a meagre conclusion, the US finds itself grouped with unflattering company – an “axis of obstruction” that has stymied progress on the climate crisis.
Donald Trump’s administration opted to not send anyone to the UN climate summit in Brazil that culminated over the weekend – a first for the US in 30 years of these annual gatherings and another representation of the president’s disdain for the climate crisis, which he has called a “hoax” and a “con job.”
The actor is a slightly distracting narrator in this documentary about a local ranger’s efforts to protect a group of rhinos from poachers – and from killing each other
Here is a rare wildlife success story. The world’s black rhino population has plummeted to just over 6,000 as rhinos are pushed to the brink of extinction by habitat loss and poaching. But conservation efforts have resulted in a rhino comeback in Kenya, where numbers are growing in fenced-off sanctuaries known as conservancies that employ local people and keep poachers out.
Tom Hardy provides a slightly distracting narration to this documentary, channelling David Attenborough with a dash of 19th-century aristo-explorer. The film opens with the fact that in the past three years, 1,900 rhinos have been poached across Africa, but not a single one in Kenya. In the Borana Conservancy we meet charismatic head ranger Ramson Kiloku, a man who knows every single rhino on his patch by its footprint and the nicks on its ears.
The EU’s highest court has ruled that same-sex marriages must be respected throughout the bloc and rebuked Poland for refusing to recognise a marriage between two of its citizens that took place in Germany.
The court said on Tuesday that Poland had been wrong in not recognising the marriage of the couple when they moved back to Poland, on the grounds that Polish law does not allow marriage between people of the same sex.
The boss of Domino’s Pizza Group who suggested the UK may have reached peak pizza as he expanded the chain into fried chicken has been ousted after tensions with its board.
Andrew Rennie is leaving after just two years at the helm and will be replaced on an interim basis by the company’s chief operating officer, Nicola Frampton, while Domino’s searches for a new leader.
Campaigners say closure of loophole making it cheaper to export rather than recycle will boost circular economy
The UK could end its reliance on exporting plastic waste by 2030 to support the creation of 5,400 new jobs and take responsibility for the environmental impact of its waste, according to research.
The report said up to 15 new recycling facilities could be built by the end of the decade, attracting more than £800m of private investment. The increase in capacity would help generate almost £900m of economic value every year, providing at least £100m in new tax revenues annually.
We turn the dial towards whimsy and revisit some of the moments that made the autumn internationals irresistible
South Africa and Ireland played out a slugfest for the ages and the discourse has been dominated by yellow cards and flying shoulders to the head. England held off a spirited Argentina to claim their 11th consecutive Test win and it seems all anyone can talk about is some alleged after-the-whistle shoving. Wales and New Zealand traded 11 tries in a ding-dong encounter and yet the narrative is weighed down by caveats concerning fading empires.
What, exactly, is the point of Test rugby? Beyond winning World Cups and regional crowns, does this chaotic sport hold any value? A bit of spice elevates almost every dish, sure, but it has felt as if this autumn’s brilliant rugby fare has been smothered in a sauce with a needlessly high Scoville count.
In Initiative, a group of young people in the early 2000s finds themselves via the role-playing game, the latest example of its undying popularity
It sounds like a big ask, the idea of presenting an audience with a five-hour play. (Or even a four-and-a-half-hour play with several intermissions.) Yet Initiative, a new off-Broadway coming-of-age epic of sorts, flies right by, as emotionally immersive as the Dungeons & Dragons games that enrapture most of its seven teenage characters. Playwright Else Went doesn’t seem worried about the show’s length. “It was very much part of the intent,” they said. (Went is non-binary and uses they/she pronouns.) “When you sit in the theater for long enough – without feeling like the thing that you’re watching is failing you – there’s a certain point that you cross as an audience member, where you enter a new type of commitment. And it is in that state that new things can happen, dramatically.”
Initiative certainly does new things with material that could have been familiar. It arrives, after a lengthy workshop period, at a time when Dungeons & Dragons seems resurgent in visibility, thanks in part to the Netflix smash-hit Stranger Things, which uses D&D players (and game-derived terminology) in its own ‘80s-set fantasy-adventure-horror story. (There’s even a Stranger Things prequel play on Broadway.) Initiative defies some of the cultural cliches about the game, starting with its setting; rather than a self-consciously retro ‘80s, it takes place during the early years of the millennium, following its characters between 2000 and 2004. More subtly but equally bold, the show doesn’t begin with a tight-knit nerd crew role-playing together before life pulls them in separate directions, a standard narrative for these types of stories. In fact, no one in the show plays the game until late in the first of three 90-minute acts, when Riley (Greg Cuellar) acts as Dungeon Master for his younger friends Em (Christopher Dylan White), Tony (Jamie Sanders), and Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez). Eventually, they’re joined by Riley’s best friend Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi), who finds the game to be an unexpected escape from her self-applied academic pressure, romantic/sexual traumas, and the horrors of a post-9/11 United States.
Study suggests human brain development has four pivotal ‘turning points’ at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83
Scientists have identified five major “epochs” of human brain development in one of the most comprehensive studies to date of how neural wiring changes from infancy to old age.
The study, based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives. This revealed five broad phases, split up by four pivotal “turning points” in which brain organisation moves on to a different trajectory, at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83 years.
Evidence that the whales and other marine animals are particularly vulnerable to sound is driving calls for quieter vessels
The delicate clicks and whistles of narwhals carry through Tasiujaq, locally known as Eclipse Sound, at the eastern Arctic entrance of the Northwest Passage. A hydrophone in this shipping corridor off Baffin Island, Nunavut, captures their calls as the tusked whales navigate their autumn migration route to northern Baffin Bay.
But as the Nordic Odyssey, a 225-metre ice-class bulk carrier servicing the nearby iron ore mine, approaches, its low engine rumble gives way to a wall of sound created by millions of collapsing bubbles from its propeller. The narwhals’ acoustic signals, evolved for one of Earth’s quietest environments, fall silent.
It used to be all boozy lunches and late-night carousing. Now it’s hyperbaric chambers and longevity chat. Andrew Carnie, CEO of the private club, explains how life and trends have changed since the Covid era
Friday night in the north of England. On the ninth floor of the old Granada Studios, a very chi-chi crowd is drinking tequila and eating crisps. Not Walkers out of the bag, mind, but canapes of individual crisps with creme fraiche and generous dollops of caviar. A young woman – leather shorts, chunky boots, neon lime nails, artfully messy bob – winks at me from the other side of the silver tray. “Ooh, caviar. Very posh for Manchester.”
Soho House’s 48th members’ club has caused quite the stir. Thirty years after Nick Jones opened the first club in Soho, London, the first north of England outpost of the empire is raising eyebrows. An exclusive club, in the city that AJP Taylor described as “the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery”. (The home, after all, of the Guardian.) An open-air rooftop pool, in the climate that fostered the textile industry because the rain created the perfect cool, damp conditions for spinning cotton. Will it work?
Twenty years after the league introduced its controversial policy, many players see it as helping them develop self-expression
Lonzo Ball’s froze in confusion. The question – “What do you think about the NBA dress code?” – hung in the air for a second before he cracked a sheepish grin.
Militant group Antifa Ost said to be behind assaults on rightwing extremists in Germany and Hungary
Seven alleged members of the German far-left militant group Antifa Ost go on trial on Tuesday accused of attacks targeting rightwing extremists that earned them the nickname “Hammer Gang”.
We’d like to hear about your favourite recipes that have passed down through generations
Recipes carry stories, and often when they have been passed down from generation to generation, these tales have a chapter added to them each time they are made. Family membersconcoct elaborate treats and seasoning mixes, which in some cases travel across oceans to end up on our dinner tables.
We would like to hear about the recipes that have stood the test of time for you, and never fail to impress. Who first made it for you? Did you stick to the recipe that was passed down or have you improvised? What are the stories you associate with your favourite family recipe?
While we don’t necessarily need another film version of Bram Stoker’s story, Besson’s has ambition and panache, and Caleb Landry Jones and Christoph Waltz are perfectly cast
Perhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu. There are some very bizarre touches, including one shot that appears to show a land border between France and Romania.
Christoph Waltz plays a witty yet careworn vampire-hunting priest – I can’t believe he hasn’t played this role before – who finds himself in Paris in 1889 for the French Revolution centenary celebrations. So does the evil Count Dracula, played by the body-horror veteran Caleb Landry Jones with a mangled central European accent reminiscent of Steve Carell’s Gru from the Despicable Me comedies. This is a part that he too was born to take on.
Genius and arrogance play leading roles in a new biography of the man who helped uncover the structure of DNA
Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness.
Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain”, questions that were usually discussed in religious or mystical terms but that he believed could be answered by science. In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress in achieving them, radically remaking two scientific disciplines in the process.
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