After arresting political opponents, banning the most popular party and using violence to crush dissent, the military’s proxy is on course to win by a landslide
The polls have closed in Myanmar, but no one is waiting in suspense. After arresting political opponents, banning the most popular political party and using violence to crush dissent, the military’s proxy is on course to win by a landslide.
“This is a fake election,” says a man who voted on Sunday in Mandalay, the second most populous city, his finger freshly dipped in purple ink. Like many, he voted only out of fear, worried that junta officials could retaliate if he stayed home.
Preventing the mayor from returning to Westminster deprives the party of its most potent candidate in Gorton and Denton
When Labour dignitaries gathered at the Titanic hotel in Liverpool on Friday night, one question loomed above all others: to change captain or not?
For many, that question has become even more pressing after Keir Starmer’s allies brutally stopped Andy Burnham’s return to Westminster before it had even begun.
Crimefighting nuns, giant killer white balloons and Aubrey Plaza getting stuck in a wall … here are your favourite ever mind-bending TV series
Catterick is my favourite baffling TV show. It stars Vic and Bob and a stellar backup cast – Reece Shearsmith, Tim Healey, Mark Benton, Matt Lucas and Morwenna Banks. It starts off innocuously enough with Carl Palmer (Bob) returning to Catterick to visit his brother Chris (Vic) but quickly descends into anarchy. The extremely loose plot centres around the criminal antics of mummy’s boy Tony (Shearsmith) but there are more tangents than a geometry conference. From ripped up posters of George Clooney and haunting dance routines to Chris Rea and Foreigner, Catterick should be top of your TV destinations. Tom Whelan, South Shields
Exclusive: Outgoing director general indicates support for update to licence-fee model as part of wider changes
The BBC will face “profound jeopardy” over its future unless it embraces significant changes to its funding, its outgoing director general has said, as he signalled his support for an overhaul of the licence fee.
Speaking to the Guardian, Tim Davie called for supporters of the corporation to “stand up and fight” for it, amid increased hostility from its commercial and political critics.
Ministers plan to license content from institutions such as National History Museum and National Library of Scotland
Met Office data and legal documents from the National Archives could be used by artificial intelligence systems as the UK government pushes ahead with plans to employ nationally owned material in AI tools.
The government is providing funds for researchers to test how Met Office content could be used by the technology, such as in helping agencies and councils know when to buy more road grit. Another project will explore whether legal data from the National Archives – the UK’s repository for official documents – could help medium- and small-sized businesses with legal support.
Study finds top performers over past decade have companies in industries such software, marketing and finance
A southern town in the north: how Warrington has adapted to change
Eleven towns and cities in the UK, including Warrington, Barnsley and Wakefield, have seen their disposable incomes rise twice as fast as the rest of the UK over the past decade, a study has found.
A report from Centre for Cities, a thinktank, showed that between 2013 and 2023, disposable income for residents of these top performing towns and cities rose by an average of 5.2%, compared with an increase of 2.4% for urban areas in the UK overall.
Mediterranean chicken meatballs with feta and black olives, Persian-style saffron chicken and rice, and a garlicky, Korean-inspired chicken and potato traybake
When it comes to traybakes, chicken is the undisputed hero, because it’s endlessly adaptable and perfect for carrying bold, global flavours. First up, some eastern Mediterranean chicken meatballs, flecked with feta and black olives for a sharp, savoury punch. Then a Persian-style saffron chicken and rice; the rice cooks with the chicken, absorbing all the flavours of the sunshine-yellow saffron and crisping up at the edges. Finally, a Korean-inspired chicken and potato traybake in which gochujang and soy create a deeply savoury sauce that elevates a simple midweek meal.
Seven sisters constellation’s brightest members will be hidden from view for about an hour
On the night of 27 January, the moon passes in front of the Pleiades star cluster, temporarily hiding (occulting) some of its brightest members from view.
The Pleiades, also known as the seven sisters, lie about 440 light years away in the constellation Taurus, the Bull. They are one of the most recognisable structures in the winter sky. The stars were all born from the same giant cloud of molecular gas. Although in time they will be dispersed through the galaxy, at only 100m years old, they remain a relatively tight-knit community of stellar siblings.
Mark Carney and other custodians of the order are right to contemplate its death, but are they really willing to unpick the the entire system?
When precisely did the rules-based order die? Mark Carney’s speech last week at Davos was the first time a western head of state has said outright what has been hanging over political proceedings for some time. The rules-based order is “fading”, in the middle of a “rupture” and there’s no going back. But outside Davos, the G7 and Nato, that is old news – many believed the rules-based order had expired long ago, depending on what moment you take as your watershed.
There were several components to the order, which of course was a layered, complex thing. The first is structural, that is, the agreement between powerful and prosperous countries that there would be certain mechanisms and protocols to maintain political stability, contain the outbreak of wars and promote their mutual economic interests. All the bodies that direct international traffic – the EU, Nato, the UN, the WTO, the IMF – make up that top layer of organisation.
Rising fears that another US shutdown looms pushes gold price to new height amid nearly 90% rise since Trump’s inauguration
Gold has jumped above US$5,000 an ounce for the first time, as Donald Trump’s chaotic policies and proclamations drive more investors to seek safe harbour in the precious metal.
The price of the yellow metal jumped 1.8% to $5,078 an ounce on Monday, according to Bloomberg.
Molly Russell was just 14 when she took her own life in 2017, and an inquest later found negative online content was a significant factor. With many people now pushing for teenagers to be kept off tech platforms, her father explains why he backs a different approach
Ian Russell describes his life as being split into two parts: before and after 20 November 2017, the day his youngest daughter, Molly, took her own life as a result of depression and negative social media content. “Our life before Molly’s death was very ordinary. Unremarkable,” he says. He was a television producer and director, married with three daughters. “We lived in an ordinary London suburb, in an ordinary semi-detached house, the children went to ordinary schools.” The weekend before Molly’s death, they had a celebration for all three girls’ birthdays, which are in November. One was turning 21, another 18 and Molly was soon to be 15. “And I remember being in the kitchen of a house full of friends and family and thinking, ‘This is so good. I’ve never been so happy,’” he says. “That was on a Saturday night and the following Tuesday morning, everything was different.”
The second part of Russell’s life has been not only grief and trauma, but also a commitment to discovering and exposing the truth about the online content that contributed to Molly’s death, and campaigning to prevent others falling prey to the same harms. Both elements lasted far longer than he anticipated. It took nearly five years to get enough information out of social media companies for an inquest to conclude that Molly died “from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content”. As for the campaigning, the Molly Rose Foundation provides support, conducts research and raises awareness of online harms, and Russell has been an omnipresent spokesperson on these issues.
Researchers observed the primates switching social groups and passing information on where to find the ripest fruit
Spider monkeys share tips about where to find food by changing their social groups in a “clever system for sharing insider knowledge”, research has shown.
They were observed to frequently switch subgroups of three or more individuals in a way that enabled them to share information about the location of fruit trees and timing of when they would ripen.
When André Ricciardi found out he had cancer, he asked a friend to film his final years. André Is an Idiot, the result, mixes in stop-motion puppetry to create an astonishing record of an extraordinary life
When André Ricciardi turned 50, his best friend Lee made an unusual proposition: how about they go and get a colonoscopy together? The pair had reached the qualifying age for men in the US to access the health check, and Lee had visions of them farting merrily on adjacent toilets while the medication flushed out their bowels, then chatting on hospital beds as tiny cameras travelled through their anal passages. André was always up for ridiculous stuff, but on this occasion he surprised Lee: he said no.
“I was 100% shocked,” says Lee today. “I actually got jealous because I assumed he must have organised to go with somebody else!” But André had not made other colonoscopy plans. He just thought it was a crazy idea and for once, he was being sensible. That turned out to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done. Eighteen months later, perturbed by blood in his stools, André did go for a colonoscopy. It turned out he had stage 4 cancer.
Sundance film festival: the British actor gives a convincing performance as a man going through the drug court system in a grounded look at rehabilitation
At a festival where the focus is usually on the many micro and macro systemic wrongs in America, there’s something unusually uplifting to find a Serious Issues movie that hinges on something that actually works. Director Adam Meeks came across a rare piece of good news in the hellscape that is the opioid epidemic: the Ohio drug courts that help to rehabilitate addicts through a system of non-judgmental support and a strict, yet not unforgiving, schedule.
His feature debut Union County – an extension of a 2020 short – shows the positive outcome of treating addiction as a problem to be solved, rather than a lifestyle choice to be demonised.
Union County is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
Energy secretary Ed Miliband says clean energy project is part of efforts to leave ‘the fossil fuel rollercoaster’
The UK and nine other European countries have agreed to build an offshore wind power grid in the North Sea in a landmark pact to turn the ageing oil basin into a “clean energy reservoir”.
The countries will build windfarms at sea that directly connect to multiple nations through high-voltage subsea cables, under plans that are expected to provide 100GW of offshore wind power, or enough electricity capacity to power 143m homes.
Arsenal let game slip against Manchester United and need to quickly press the reset button
And then the gap was down to four points. It is still four points, but the thought that Arsenal will struggle to suppress is that it could have been more, that it should have been more.
Manchester City have won only one of their past five in the league, but Arsenal have not opened up clear water. Against Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, they failed to take advantage of City slip‑ups, drawing both those games 0-0, and that left them vulnerable to a game such as this. From an Arsenal point of view, the title race is disturbingly alive.
The winners of a breathless, brooding contest at Tynecastle were the team playing 50 miles away. Rangers moved to within four points of Hearts after the league leaders missed the chance to put considerable distance between themselves and Celtic. A three-horse race for the title should enthral.
A contender must land a convincing blow to dethrone a champion but despite equalising twice, facing 10 men for the final 21 minutes and creating several clearcut openings, Hearts were unable to overcome Martin O’Neill’s tiring team. Celtic impressed sporadically but made their flashes of quality count through Benjamin Nygren’s free-kick and the incisive break that created a second for Yang Hyun-jun.
Several beaches in Sydney are closed this morning after shark sightings in the water.
Lifeguards have evacuated the water at Manly beach, Dee Why beach and Palm beach this morning, all around 9am, after the sightings. The beaches are closed.
The search will continue as is in it current intensity for a number of days yet. We will act on all information coming forward.
Sundance film festival: a new documentary explores the author’s physical and spiritual healing from the 2022 knife attack that almost killed him
On 12 August 2022, as Salman Rushdie was about to launch into a lecture on the importance of protecting writers from harm at New York’s Chautauqua Institution, a man in a black mask rushed the stage with a knife. To the horror of the packed amphitheater, the man stabbed the Indian-born British-American author – once the subject of an infamous fatwa from the leader of Iran in the 1980s – 15 times in the face, neck and torso, before members of the audience rushed the stage and disarmed him. Rushdie survived, narrowly; the stabbing left him on a ventilator, severed tendons in his left hand, and cost him his right eye.
A full recreation of that attack from Rushdie’s perspective — 27 seconds of struggle, the mysterious man’s face, several sickening punches of blade — opens a new documentary on Rushdie’s recovery and resilience, which drew a standing ovation at the Sundance film festival. Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, directed by Alex Gibney and based on Rushdie’s memoir of the same name, is unsparing on the devastating results of the stabbing: in never-before-seen footage recorded by the author’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Rushdie appears gruesomely disfigured — his skin discolored, his entire abdomen bisected by stitches, his swollen neck held together by stitches, his eye indescribably mangled. His first coherent thought after regaining consciousness, he recalls in the film, was simply: “We need to document this.”
Sixth seed marches into quarter-finals with 6-3, 6-4 victory while the defending champion must pay forfeit agreed on with her podcast co-host
While speaking on a podcast before her big match against Madison Keys, Jessica Pegula was discussing their battle last January in the Adelaide final. Keys’s performance, Pegula recalled, had prompted Pegula to accurately predict to their mutual friends that Keys would win the Australian Open two weeks later. It is normal for players to discuss future opponents, but they do not usually do so in conversation with each other. With a chuckle, Keys interjected: “Jess is like, ‘I hope I don’t see that level [tomorrow].’”
She did not. Keys’s reign at the Australian Open came to a difficult end in the fourth round as the defending champion and ninth seed was crushed under the weight of her hefty unforced error count and a spotless performance from Pegula, the sixth seed, who marched into the quarter-finals with a 6-3, 6-4 win. This was, in some ways, a historic match on Rod Laver Arena: the first grand slam singles match between two podcast co-hosts.
Sam Darnold threw for three touchdowns, the Seahawks’ “Dark Side” defense came up with a critical fourth-down stop, and Seattle advanced to the Super Bowl, beating the Los Angeles Rams 31-27 in an electrifying NFC championship game on Sunday.
“It’s amazing,” Darnold said. “To be able to do it with these guys in this locker room, though, with this coaching staff, that’s why it means the world to me.”
This is the news we should be paying attention to. At least for the moment, everything else is a distraction
When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It’s easy, it’s meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie. Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government’s attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.
So let me break it down. There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian take-over. In Minneapolis an innocent poet and an ER nurse at a VA hospital were both killed in cold blood by federal agents. It is happening now. Toddlers are being sent to detention centers; videos of their gyms for kids recall the youth choruses that the Nazis so proudly showed off at the Terezin concentration camp. Intimidation and violence are being weaponized against the citizens of Minneapolis, some of whom are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being beaten, arrested and shackled, regardless of whether they are US citizens or asylum seekers or people from another country peacefully living and working here for decades.
Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Are the German people on board with the government’s massive militarisation programme? Kate Connolly reports
“Not so long ago, to be a German soldier dressed in German uniform was quite a difficult role to embody. I mean, you could be going down the street and you could be spat on, or you could have names called at you.
“I’ve recently seen people get into conversation with soldiers, which I hadn’t seen in the past, [and] more recently, somebody going up to a soldier and actually getting him into conversation about his role, and at the end of the conversation, thanking him.”
Rescuers save at least 300 people after inter-island ferry sank early on Monday en route from the port city of Zamboanga to southern Jolo island
At least 15 people have died after a ferry with more than 350 people sunk early on Monday near an island in the southern Philippines, according to local officials, with the coast guard warning that 28 people remained missing.
The M/V Trisha Kerstin 3, an inter-island cargo and passenger ferry, was sailing to southern Jolo island in Sulu province from the port city of Zamboanga with 332 passengers and 27 crew members when it apparently encountered technical problems and sank after midnight, coast guard officials said.
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