‘Longest period of job shedding’ in 16 years taking place as business activity grows at fastest rate since August

• Business live – latest updates

Companies in the UK’s dominate services sector cut jobs last month, as they turned to “automation” rather than hiring new staff, a closely watched survey showed.

The monthly purchasing managers’ index showed employment numbers fell more sharply in January compared with December, continuing a trend that started in October 2024.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Cheshire coroner says there is ‘reason to suspect unnatural deaths’, with proceedings to begin in September

A coroner has formally opened inquests into the deaths of five newborn babies Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering.

In a 20-minute hearing at Cheshire coroner’s court, the senior coroner Jacqueline Devonish heard brief details of the deaths before adjourning proceedings until September.

In the south American port city, an expressive Black ancestral community live full, self-fashioned lives protected by culture and identity

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Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, it comes to you from Cartagena, Colombia, where I was attending a literary festival but, to be honest, have been mostly eating empanadas. It was my first time in Latin America, and I was not quite ready for a strange sort of culture shock, one that was as much about alienation as it was about recognition. I walked around the city in circles, trying to pound my way into absorbing a place of complex, layered histories.

But it was Cartagena’s racial legacy that, at points, I found overwhelming. It sounds naive, but there is something about travelling halfway across the world to meet others of African descent that brings home the scale of the impact of centuries of enslavement. And it was in the “palenqueras” of Cartagena that I felt that history, in all its contradictions and legacies, resided.

Ryan Routh, convicted of attempting to kill the president at a West Palm Beach golf club in 2024, set to face sentencing

Federal prosecutors will ask that a man convicted of trying to assassinate Donald Trump on a Florida golf course in 2024 be sentenced to life in prison at a hearing on Wednesday.

Ryan Routh is scheduled to appear before US district judge Aileen Cannon in Fort Pierce.

At 56, I want to age naturally. Having breast implants ran counter to that, so I got explant surgery, which has surged in demand recently

For 22 years, I ran around with small bags of saline water on my chest – a fact I shared with only a handful of close friends. I felt ashamed of having chosen artificial enhancement.

I’m an outdoorsy mountain runner. At 56, I want to model ageing naturally, but having breast implants ran counter to that. Now they are gone, thanks to explant surgery – implant removal without replacement.

Philando Castile, a lawful gun owner, was shot and killed by a police officer in 2016 – gun rights groups were largely silent

The killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis has sparked a thorny conversation among gun rights groups and Trump administration officials about the second amendment and the right to carry concealed firearms at protests and demonstrations. Among the questions is which cases the movement rallies behind, and behind which it doesn’t.

In the hours and days after Pretti’s killing, dozens of local national and local gun rights groups lambasted federal officials like Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Gregory Bovino, a senior border patrol official, who baselessly claimed that Pretti’s carrying of a handgun proved that he planned to harm and kill border patrol agents. Prominent gun rights organizations, including Gun Owners of America (GOA) and the National Rifle Association (NRA), called for an independent investigation into the shooting and defended Pretti’s right to carry a gun.

After impressive work by Manchester United and Liverpool and disappointment for Chelsea, we assess every team’s business

With so many senior players’ contracts expiring in June, Arsenal’s focus was on preparing for the summer, when they are expected to go through a major rebuild. Therefore their quiet window was no surprise, but they will be relatively pleased to have brought in a star of the future, Smilla Holmberg, at right-back and to have fulfilled their need for a backup goalkeeper, with Barbora Votíkova’s deadline-day loan. Much more significant, though, is the positive progress they are understood to have made in their attempt to sign Georgia Stanway on a free at the end of the season, and big decisions such as not seeking to extend Katie McCabe’s stay, as they prepare to refresh the team.

Almost anything goes with these thrifty and delicious cookies

I often eat a bag of salty crisps at the same time as a chewy chocolate bar, alternating bite for bite between the two, because the extreme contrast of salt from the chips and the sweetness of the chocolate fire off each other and create an endorphin rush. The same goes for these cookies, adapted from a recipe by Christina Tosi at New York’s legendary Milk Bar.

It’s wrong that the disgraced politician can keep his title, but the real issue is the need for a second chamber the public can trust

• Jenny Jones is a Green party peer

Peter Mandelson has resigned from the House of Lords, but even if he is sentenced to prison for misconduct in public office he can still use the title Lord Mandelson until either an act of parliament, or death, takes it off him. That sums up the problem with living in a semi-feudal system.

Patronage first lifted Mandelson into the Lords in 2008, despite his being forced to resign twice as a minister. The first resignation came in 1998 when he failed to declare a home loan from a millionaire backer; the second time, in 2001, was because he helped a millionaire funder for the Millennium Dome get a British passport. So elevation to the Lords allowed him to maintain influence despite his conduct losing him two ministerial positions.

Jenny Jones is a Green party peer

Government blames ‘terrorist cells’ for attack in Woro village, one of country’s deadliest in recent months

Gunmen have killed at least 162 people in a village in Kwara state in western Nigeria, a Red Cross official has said, making it one of the deadliest attacks in recent months in the country, which has been plagued by interlinked security crises.

Armed gangs, known locally as bandits, who loot villages and kidnap for ransom, operate in swathes of the country, while jihadist groups are active in the north-east and north-west. Intercommunal violence is also prevalent in the central states.

Perfect Tides perfectly captures the older millennial college experience, and a time when nobody worried about being embarrassing online

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I’ve noticed an interesting micro-trend emerging in the last few years: millennial nostalgia games. Not just ones that adopt the aesthetic of Y2K gaming – think Crow Country or Fear the Spotlight’s deliberately retro PS1-style fuzzy polygons – but semi-autobiographical games specifically about the millennial experience. I’ve played three in the past year. Despelote is set in 2002 in Ecuador and is played through the eyes of a football-obsessed eight-year-old. The award-winning Consume Me is about being a teen girl battling disordered eating in the 00s. And this week I played a point-and-click adventure game about being a college student in the early 2000s.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is set in New York in 2003 – a year that is the epitome of nostalgia for the micro-generation that grew up without the internet but came of age online. It was before Facebook, before the smartphone, but firmly during the era of late-night forum browsing and instant-messenger conversations. The internet wasn’t yet a vector for mass communication, but it could still bring you together with other people who loved the things that you loved, people who read the same hipster blogs and liked the same bands. The protagonist, Mara, is a student and young writer who works in her college library.

Major obstacles to viable deal remain after Volodymyr Zelenskyy accuses Moscow of violating energy truce

• Europe live – latest updates

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators have begun a second round of US-led peace talks in Abu Dhabi as Washington seeks a pathway to end the nearly four-year war in Ukraine.

The two-day trilateral talks starting on Wednesday come after Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of exploiting a US-backed energy truce last week to stockpile weapons before launching a record number of ballistic missile attacks at Ukraine on Tuesday.

Dismantling rules will make children vulnerable to chronic diseases ‘make America healthy again’ wants to eradicate

Donald Trump’s aggressive rollback of environmental protections directly contradicts the promises of his “make America healthy again” campaign, according to new research.

Helmed by Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s health and human services department has touted pledges to “transform our nation’s food, fitness, air, water, soil and medicine” and “reverse the childhood chronic disease crisis”. But the president’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is pushing the country in the opposite direction, says the new report from the liberal research and advocacy non-profit Center for American Progress (CAP).

Dictator’s second son, a key figure in post-2011 Libyan politics, reportedly shot dead at home by masked assailants

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and for years the second most powerful person in the country, has been killed in a village south-west of Tripoli, officials said on Tuesday night.

The 53-year-old died from gunshot wounds in the town of Zintan, 85 miles south-west of the capital, according to the Libyan attorney general’s office. Gaddafi’s own office said he was killed in his home by masked assailants.

Bobi Wine’s whereabouts unknown since he fled what he said was night raid on his home by police and military

Bobi Wine, Uganda’s most prominent opposition figure, remains in hiding nearly three weeks after a disputed election, as a high-stakes social media feud with the east African country’s military chief escalates.

Wine’s whereabouts have been unknown since 16 January, when he fled what he said was a night raid by the police and military on his home, leaving his family behind.

Keep abreast of every event at the Winter Olympics with our day-by-day and sport-by-sport schedules

The Winter Olympics returns to Italy for the first time in two decades. From the fashion capital of Milan to the dramatic peaks of Cortina d’Ampezzo, the Milano Cortina Games – the first to be co-hosted by two cities – will stretch across northern Italy blending world-class winter sport with a strong sense of history and ambition.

Sixteen sports and more than 110 gold medals await, from the raw speed of alpine skiing and bobsleigh to the tactical endurance of biathlon and cross-country. Alpine fans will once again be drawn to Mikaela Shiffrin, still redefining excellence across the technical disciplines.

Bills mandate ICE cooperation, school status checks and criminalize information release, testing constitutional lines

The power to enforce immigration law rests with the federal government. But Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, has a vision for states working in coordination with federal immigration officials, and he’s attempting to test it out in Tennessee.

Earlier this month, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported that Miller had been meeting in Washington DC with Tennessee speaker of the house, Cameron Sexton, to craft model legislation for states around the country.

Chris Stokes, part of the 1988 team that inspired a film, is setting lofty goals as head of Jamaica’s bobsleigh federation

It did not make so much as a ripple outside of its minor sporting niche, but something particularly unusual occurred in the bobsleigh world earlier this year. Upon turning up in the New York outpost of Lake Placid for their final Winter Olympics warm-up competition, Jamaica’s four-man bobsleigh team were informed they were not allowed to take part. A hat-trick of gold medals over the preceding few weeks had seen them rise too high in the world rankings to take their customary place on the second-tier North American Cup circuit. They had simply become too good.

In the overwhelming majority of countries, the Winter Olympics is an assortment of sporting oddities held in an alternative climate that might pique attention every four years. Rarely does it break through to the mainstream, which is what makes Jamaican bobsleigh such a curious exception.

India are favourites by a long way but England are on form approaching tournament already hit by controversy

In the immortal words of Brenda from Bristol, not another one. Between 17 October 2021, the start of the tournament in the United Arab Emirates, and 8 March 2026, the date of this year’s final, four T20 World Cups will have been squeezed into four years, four months and 19 days.

If they come along more regularly even than British general elections – to which Brenda produced her timeless reaction in 2017 – they at least have more interesting results: the past five have had five different winners and the past three six different finalists. What’s more, though not much time has passed since the last one ended with India beating South Africa in Barbados, it seems to have been long enough for the game to shift into a fresh and exhilarating new gear.

She also smeared teen victim of former congressman Anthony Weiner as ‘despicable and disgusting’ , files show

Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of the film director Woody Allen, sent emails to Jeffrey Epstein telling the convicted sex offender that the #MeToo justice movement “has gone too far” – and smearing an underage girl at the center of a sexting case as “despicable and disgusting” rather than the former US congressman who went to prison for illicitly messaging the minor, according to recently released government files.

At one point, Previn also wrote about how her stepbrother Ronan Farrow received more “prestige … than he deserves” in a New York Times article published months after his journalism about Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul and now-convicted sex offender, won a share of a Pulitzer prize and kicked off the #MeToo movement.

Leaders had been trading hostile remarks for months but Gustavo Petro’s visit ended with warm words from US counterpart

After months of trading insults – from “sick man” and “drug trafficking leader” on one side, to “accomplice to genocide” with a “senile brain” on the other – the first meeting between Donald Trump and Gustavo Petro ended with pleasantries, autographs and a Maga cap.

The Colombian president was received by his US counterpart for a closed-door meeting at the White House, with no press access.

Running throughout the Winter Olympics and Paralympics, a guide to the day’s highlights and the best that is yet to come

The acclaimed latest version of the Emily Brontë bestseller is, however, not without controversies over race and age

Reviews might be embargoed until next Monday, but Los Angeles social media is getting hot under the collar after an early screening of Emerald Fennell’s highly anticipated adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

“Intoxicating, transcendent, tantalising, bewitching, lust worthy, hypnotic,” wrote Courtney Howard, adding that the film “expertly captures the breathtaking ache and essence of desire” and “is a god-tier new classic”.