Project will make the famously confusing London landmark easier to navigate and more accessible
“Everything leaks,” says Philippa Simpson, the director of buildings and renewal at the Barbican, who is standing outside the venue’s lakeside area and inspecting the tired-looking tiles beneath her feet.
Water seeps through the cracks into the building below and serves as a reminder of the job facing Simpson and the team who are overhauling the 43-year-old landmark.
We know from recent hacks, and even the Snowden revelations, how vulnerable information gathered is to theft and misuse
One thing to remember about the modern world is that nothing online is ever secure. M&S and Jaguar taught us that. Edward Snowden taught us that. Every week, it seems, some giant corporation sees its system collapse at the touch of a button in an attic.
The government this week opened a consultation on its plan for nationwide facial recognition and surveillance. You would need only put your face outdoors and walk down the street and authorities will know and record it. Of course we will be assured that all will be kept secure. It will not. Cash or conspiracy will find it out and it will leak.
A Kremlin aide has said Russia is encouraged by negotiations with the US over the Ukraine war and is ready for more talks, according to Reuters.
Russia and the United States were making progress in talks over a deal on Ukraine and Moscow was ready to continue working with the current US team, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said.
Starmer hails child poverty strategy as a ‘moral mission’ which will include measures to help with childcare and getting families out of temporary housing
Too many families are still “struggling without the basics – a secure home, warm meals, and the support they need to make ends meet”, Starmer said in the statement announcing the full plan.
“I will not stand by and watch that happen, because the cost of doing nothing is too high for children, for families, and for Britain.
You’ll see the current crop of World Cup mascots at the top of the page. I’ll also list them below in case it changes. Anyways, this is a nice graphic. Personal favourites and the ones that have resonated are Willie (England 1966), Juanito (Mexico 1970), Naranjito (Spain 1982) and Ciao (Italy 1990).
(Brawl) The violinist sets out on her darkest exploration of yuletide yet, giving a murky and melancholy twist on familiar Christmas standards
Traditional music finds its popular, cosy home in the carol, despite the uncanniness that surrounds the nativity story, and the fraying thread back to the past that each winter brings. A veteran explorer of the season (in 2020’s sparkling Winter Rituals EP with cellist Kate Ellis, and 2022’s starker New Christmas Rituals, with amplified fiddle-playing from André Bosman), Laura Cannell sets out on her best and darkest journey yet here, exploring the time of year when, as she writes on the liner notes, “joy and heartache try to exist together”.
Named after the line in Good King Wenceslas before the cruel frosts arrive, Brightly Shone the Moon begins at the organ – a nod to Cannell’s childhood Christmases in the Methodist chapels and churches of Norfolk. Cannell’s fiddle then quivers around the 16th-century folk melody of O Christmas Tree/O Tannenbaum, as if the carol is swirling in a snowglobe, trying to settle in memory. All Ye Faithful follows, full of murky repetitions of the pre-chorus passages, where choirs usually sing “come let us adore him”. But here, love feels stuck, rooting around like an animal in the ground, a sonic reminder of how smothering and strenuous the winter can be for many.
Netflix is in competition with Paramount Skydance and Comcast, which owns assets including Universal Studios and Sky, to buy the owner of the Hollywood studio Warner Bros, HBO and the HBO Max streaming service.
From tackling child poverty to being honest about Brexit, the party seems to have recognised the growing electoral threat to its left
What does it take for a small child not to recognise their own name? I’ve been thinking about that for days, since reading the Local Government Association’s recent report on a growing crisis in early childhood. We’ve known for a while about children starting school still in nappies, or speaking in Americanisms absorbed from hours stuck in front of YouTube, or even struggling to sit uprightbecause they’ve spent too long slumped over an iPad to develop core muscles. So sadly, it’s not surprising to read of early-years workers telling the LGA they see more and more pre-schoolers who can barely speak, play with others or contain their rage when things don’t go their way. But it was the practitioner who noted that some children“don’t seem to respond to their name” who got to me. You have to wonder how often that child hears a loving adult trying to get their attention. Too often, another practitioner said, “children are not spoken to at home, but offered screens all day” – at mealtimes, out shopping, or in the car – with parents seemingly scared of provoking tantrums if they take the phone away.
The report describes a complex puzzle with multiple causes: poverty, and the parental exhaustion that comes of a hardscrabble life; growing up in a pandemic; changes in early-years provision; and way too much screen time. It can’t be solved by money alone, but certainly won’t be solved without it. So a two-pronged strategy of lifting the two-child limit on children’s welfare payments – as Rachel Reeves did last week – and intervening early wheretoddlers aren’t meeting their milestones makes sense. The Best Start family hubs rolling out gradually nationwide will, we learned this week, get Send (special educational needs and disabilities) co-ordinators, focusing particularly on speech and language. They’ll promote the upcoming National Year of Reading to wean kids off screens and on to books,and more generally attempt, on a shoestring, to mimic the support that their predecessor programme Sure Start once offered parents. There’s not enough funding – there never is – but there are the beginnings of joined-up thinking, accepting that tackling problems in nursery rather than in primary school is easier, cheaper and kinder on everyone involved.
The Portuguese credits his loyalty to his trusty Casio watch for helping the head coach lift the Lisbon club after Ruben Amorim’s messy exit
If there is a stoppage in what is sure to be a supercharged Dérbi de Lisboa on Friday, the Sporting head coach, Rui Borges, will likely look down to check the watch he considers a lucky charm.
The black Casio – bought for €20 while still playing for his hometown club Mirandela in north-east Portugal, 150km inland from Porto – is a symbol of his superstitious nature and one he has maintained on his journey from the obscurity of being an amateur coach to making a mark on the biggest stage in club football.
The Uzbek shone at London Classic and a 3,000+ tournament performance reaffirmed his place among world’s best
This week’s XTX London Classic at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium took place in an elegant arena with a full view of the football pitch. The English players suffered for most of the event, but hit back in style on Thursday when all four won their eighth-round games.
Scores after eight of the nine rounds were Nodirbek Abdusattorov (Uzbekistan) 7, Alireza Firouzja (France) 5, Nikita Vitiugov (England) 4.5, Luke McShane and Michael Adams (both England) 4, Nikolas Theodorou (Greece) and Pavel Eljanov (Ukraine) 3.5, Abhimanyu Mishra (USA) and Gawain Maroroa Jones (England) 3, Sam Shankland (USA) 2.5. The four English victories in Thursday night’s eighth round transformed what had been a difficult event into a demonstration of sustained national strength at the board.
(Double Double Whammy) One half of Water From Your Eyes re-records songs from the back catalogue of his other band, resulting in acoustic fare touched with regret and darkness
As one half of Brooklyn-based duo Water From Your Eyes, Nate Amos makes left-field pop that feels hypermodern: wry, memey lyricism; post-ironic genre-hopping; the kind of jilted chaos and tonal jumble that characterises a social media feed. Yet the band had actually been plugging away for seven years before their 2023 breakthrough. Amos’s solo project This Is Lorelei has been going even longer, only gaining proper traction with last year’s belated debut album Box for Buddy, Box for Star.
Now Amos is capitalising on this recent momentum with another release, this time a compilation of re-recorded songs dredged from his extensive Bandcamp back catalogue. Unlike his WFYE output, these tracks are mainly gentle folk-rock numbers that deal in honeyed melancholy. They tend to be brief and narratively vague, glancing at regret, disappointment and darkness (“you don’t want to know what my dreams are about,” he claims on But You Just Woke Me Up). His most obvious stylistic counterpart is indie-rocker Alex G, but while Amos can’t rival him for lyrical punch, he can match his knack for pleasingly diverting detail: see Name the Band’s chunky pop-punk bassline or the bright guitar twang on Dreams Away.
The coffee brand Lavazza engaged Alex Webb, a contemporary street photographer from the Magnum Photos agency, for its 2026 calendar, which explores the rich tapestry of elements that make up the Italian lifestyle
Up to 150,000 residents of El Fasher are missing since North Darfur capital fell to paramilitary Rapid Support Forces
The Sudanese city of El Fasher resembles a “massive crime scene”, with large piles of bodies heaped throughout its streets as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) work to destroy evidence of the scale of their massacre.
Six weeks after the RSF seized the city, corpses have been gathered together in scores of piles to await burial in mass graves or cremated in huge pits, analysis indicates.
The margin may have got smaller but the brilliant Spanish midfielder makes it a hat-trick of No 1 finishes
They say the best things come in threes, and Aitana Bonmatí has written herself into the Guardian’s top 100 history as the first player to finish at the top of the tree for a third consecutive year.
Last year the majestic midfielder emulated her Barcelona and Spain teammate Alexia Putellas by winning for a second year running, but the 27-year-old has now gone one better, establishing herself once again at the top of the women’s game.
Access to nature and essential services and friendliness of the people led ‘gateway to the Dales’ to top Rightmove index
It is nicknamed “the gateway to the Dales”, is home to one of England’s best-preserved medieval castles and, for trivia fans, was the birthplace of half of Marks & Spencer. Now, the Yorkshire market town of Skipton has been named “the happiest place to live” in Great Britain.
It received the accolade from the property website Rightmove, which runs a “happy at home” index that is now in its 14th year. The survey asks residents how they feel about their area based on a range of factors.
From Angels with Filthy Souls in Home Alone, to Deception in The Holiday, fake movies are taking on a life of their own
The cold was brutal and so were the gangsters. It was the first – and worse, only – day of shooting, and when cinematographer Julio Macat threaded some film into his camera, it was so cold that the film snapped. The gangsters flitted around menacingly, fedoras and machine guns at the ready.
Macat was hoping to make a movie that was frightening and strange. “The goal,” he says, “was to scare a kid.” And so, even though it was 1990, he chose to shoot the noir like it was the 40s, with black and white film, fog filters on the camera lenses, and an intense, old-fashioned lighting setup to cast deep shadows on the set.
Two film-makers who worked with the late playwright recall a man of extraordinary wit, endless invention and innate elegance
I was utterly knocked out by the way Tom Stoppard’s mind worked, his brilliance and by the fact he made Brazil out of a big lump of stone that I’d spent a year or two preparing. I gave that to him and out of that he carved a beautiful Michelangelo David.
Jahmyr Gibbs and a defense that suddenly generated pressure and turnovers helped the Detroit Lions stay in contention for a playoff berth.
Gibbs ran for three touchdowns, including a 13-yarder with 2:19 left that sealed the Lions’ much-needed 44-30 win over the Dallas Cowboys on Thursday night.
In this week’s newsletter: Coroners can’t agree on how to count heat fatalities – and the dismantling of climate investments is leaving fragile communities exposed
Donald Trump’s decision to boycott Cop30, withdraw the US from the Paris agreement and illegally terminate a slew of investments in renewable energy will not change the reality of climate breakdown for Americans.
In what has become an annual reporting tradition, I found myself in Arizona reporting on heat-related deaths during yet another gruelling heatwave, when temperatures topped 43C (110F) on 13 out of 14 straight days in Phoenix. Before embarking on this trip, I spent weeks combing through hundreds of autopsy reports, which I obtained from two county medical examiners using the Freedom of Information Act. Each death report gave me a glimpse into the person’s life, and I used clues from the case notes to track down friends and loved ones in the hopes of better understanding why heat is killing people in the richest country in the world.
Wonderful art, amazing design and beautiful locations have drawn our tipsters to chapels, churches and cathedrals from Norway to Bulgaria
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The Tromsøysund parish church, commonly called the Arctic Cathedral, in Tromsø is a modernist delight. The simple, elegant exterior that reflects the surrounding scenery and evokes traditional Sami dwellings is matched by an interior that has the most comfortable pews I have ever sat on. The stunning glass mosaic titled the Return of Christ at one end may not be to everyone’s taste, but to me had power and majesty. Exiting this magnificent building after an organ recital to be met by the northern lights flickering overhead was awe-inspiring. Bruce Horton
From Seamus Heaney’s collected poems and Simon Armitage’s animal spirits, to prizewinners Karen Solie and Vidyan Ravinthiran
Many of 2025’s most notable collections have been powered by a spirit of wild experimentation, pushing at the bounds of what “poetry” might be thought to be. Sarah Hesketh’s 2016 (CB Editions) is a fabulous example: it takes 12 interviews with a variety of anonymous individuals about the events of that year and presents fragments of the transcripts as prose poems. The cumulative effect of these voices is haunting and full of pathos, as “they vote for whoever, and their life stays exactly the same”.
Luke Kennard and Nick Makoha also daringly remixed their source material and inspirations. The former’s latest collection, The Book of Jonah (Picador), moves the minor prophet out of the Bible into a world of arts conferences, where he is continually reminded that his presence everywhere is mostly futile. Makoha’s The New Carthaginians (Penguin) turns Jean-Michel Basquiat’s idea of the exploded collage into a poetic device. The result? “The visible / making itself known by the invisible.”
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