After a career in accountancy, Sally Goldner decided to get in the ring – as Zali Gold – and live out her childhood dreams
On the night of her 60th birthday, Sally Goldner climbed on to the top rope of the wrestling ring, to the roars of the crowd, and launched herself on to her competitors with a missile dropkick. The crowd roared. For a second, she was completely airborne, before landing on her opponents.
“‘Wow, I’m doing this,’” she thought. “Exhilarating. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather be doing on my birthday.” She had seized her moment in an Alpha Pro battle royal, a multi-competitor elimination match. As her opponents – all men – threw her out of the ring, they wished her a happy birthday.
Club culture is notoriously hard to capture on film. Oscar-tipped director Oliver Laxe explains why he had to organise his own music festival in the Moroccan desert to find deeper meaning in dance-floor ecstasy
In the opening scene of Oliver Laxe’s existential mystery thriller Sirāt, a crowd of partygoers stack up a sound system for a rave in the southern Moroccan desert, where the paths of the film’s protagonists cross for the first time. Crucially, Laxe explains, the revellers were no ordinary extras. Most of them were committed, lifelong ravers who had travelled to the makeshift festival from across Europe. One of the DJs who played, Sebastian Vaughan AKA 69db, was a core member of Spiral Tribe, the pioneering British “free party” collective of the 1990s.
“In film, reality is usually made to adapt to the rules of cinema,” the French-born Spanish director tells me when we meet in Berlin. “But we do the opposite: we adapt cinema to reality.” When negotiating with the ravers how to best represent them in the film, he recalls, “they told us that the music cannot stop for three days. And we were really pleased with this idea”.
Ergonomic shape, quality materials and satisfying clicks, now with novel haptic feedback and repairable design
Logitech’s latest productivity power-house updates one of the greatest mice of all time with smoother materials, a repair-friendly design and a haptic motor for phone-like vibrations on your desktop.
The MX Master 4 is the latest evolution in a line of pioneering mice that dates back more than 20 years and has long been the mouse to beat for everything but hardcore PC gaming. Having given it a magnetic free-spinning scroll wheel, plenty of buttons and precise tracking, now Logitech is trying something different for its seven-generation: the ability to tap back at you.
Documentary following Laurence Philomène captures the vibrant palette of their work – and the shadows cast over it by prejudice
For non-binary trans photographer Laurence Philomène, art, life and identity are intimately entwined. Though drawing from art history, their photographs strike a distinctive note with their pastel colours; capturing queer subjects, including Philomène themself, in restful poses, these portraits bloom in soft hues of pink, purple, blue – the full rainbow. This style seems to seep into Catherine Legault’s intimate documentary, which captures not only the artist’s creative process but also their daily life with vibrancy.
Philomène’s home, just like their work, bursts with colour. As they prepare their first book, Puberty, which documents their transition, their home doubles as a photography studio. Philomène takes pictures of ordinary rituals, from taking their daily hormone shots to a gentle cuddle with their partner in bed. At a time when non-conforming gender expression is being policed, censored and even banned, these tableaux of trans life are more radical than ever. In contrast to conservative rhetoric demonising trans people, Philomène chooses to focus on moments of joy, love and respite.
Alison Spittle and Fern Brady’s hugely entertaining new show sees them tackle any topic they like. Plus, an amusingly personal take on how generative AI will affect the future of employment
“It’s clear that the theme of this podcast is us trying to talk about a topic and getting immediately sidetracked.” So say comedians Alison Spittle and Fern Brady about their new show. It’s a hugely entertaining ramble through subjects including Lily Allen’s “breakup album for narcissists” West End Girl, sex (“there’s more frigid people in England than Ireland”) and the length of pig orgasms (up to 90 minutes!). Lots of fun. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly, from Tue
A new biography reveals Brown to be a man of exceptional vision and probity – what a contrast with today’s politics
For a while, during the 13 years when Gordon Brown was at the apex of British politics, it became fashionable, and then a cliche, to depict him as a Shakespearean protagonist. He was the Scot who would be king, consumed by vaulting ambition for the throne, or else the powerful man of action, devoured by envy of his onetime friend. But in an illuminating new biography by the political journalist James Macintyre, Brown emerges as something closer to the hero of a Victorian novel: a man who leads an epic life shaped by early misfortune and later tragedy, driven onward by a moral purpose that burns to the very end.
His is a compelling story. Bill Clinton was once described as the most psychologically complex occupant of the Oval Office since Richard Nixon; the same is surely true if you substitute Brown, Downing Street and Winston Churchill. Macintyre hails him as a “titan”, brimming with both intellectual firepower and the urge, rooted in Christian faith, to do good. (When the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was asked to identify who in the current era most closely incarnates the values of the pastor and legendary anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he answered: “Gordon Brown.”) But Macintyre also describes his subject as “famously flawed”, with a volcanic temper, a talent for grudges – he stops speaking to Robin Cook and can barely remember why – a tendency towards “needless suspicion towards his perceived opponents” and a willingness to rely on a phalanx of “sometimes thuggish spin doctors”, expert in the blackest arts.
Detentions of senior Reformists Front figures follow criticism of the authorities’ handling of recent protests
The head of Iran’s Reformists Front, the organisation that was instrumental in securing the election of the country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has been arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in a move that will probably deepen the tensions over the handling of the recent street protests.
Azar Mansouri, the secretary general of the Islamic Iran People party, had expressed deep sorrow at protesters’ deaths, and said nothing could justify such a catastrophe. She had not in public called for the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to resign.
Forty-odd residents of Clydach Terrace in Ynysybwl, south Wales, relieved by council buyout after years in fear of fast flooding
When Storm Dennis hit the UK in 2020, a wall of dirty, frigid water from a tributary of the Taff threw Paul Thomas against the front of his house in the south Wales village of Ynysybwl. He managed to swim back into his home before the storm surge changed direction, almost carrying him out of the smashed-in front door.
“I was holding on to downpipes to stop myself being dragged out again. It was unbelievably strong, the water,” he said.
We’re often told the PM is a ‘decent’ man. But in appointing Peter Mandelson he chose political convenience over doing right by trafficked women and girls
Contempt everywhere. From Jeffrey Epstein’s email exchanges to the scandal of Peter Mandelson’s appointment, contempt radiates. Contempt for women and girls, for the law, for the public. A continuum of disdain runs from Epstein on the one end to our political establishment on the other. The other thing that joins them is a restless pursuit of power.
Contempt is not a byproduct of that power, it is the point of it. Procuring, trading, objectifying and violating women and girls is the summit of potency for those who already have everything else: money, status, respect. To subordinate another human being to your urges, to reduce her in all ways, is to be initiated into a club of super-predators who are above the law. The Epstein emails are a demonstration of how misogyny – there really should be a stronger word for it in this context – is a currency, lavishly spent to show how much power you have. The gut-twisting way that casual references to body parts would come up in correspondence is part of a whole language of signalling. Referring to women as “pussy” – or just “P” – is to flash your exclusive club membership card.
Alex Pretti’s death in Minneapolis reveals a painful contradiction – nurses are carers in times of crisis, often invisible, yet they carry our moral compass
Four decades ago, my parents were Cambodian refugees. As high school students, they were thrown into one of the darkest chapters of humanity’s history, surviving nearly five years in forced labour camps under the Khmer Rouge genocide. An estimated 2.7 million of my kin perished during that time. Fortunately for my family, they were accepted under Australia’s humanitarian program and arrived in Australia on 26 January, a date heavy with complexity for Australian identity, and our refugee story became another layer within it.
Our journey began when my mother discovered she was pregnant. Together with my father, they decided to flee on foot through landmine-ridden jungle toward the Thai-Cambodian border, carrying nothing but their lives and the hope that their unborn child might escape the suffering they had endured.
Art Not Evidence group wants change in law that currently allows lyrics by defendants to be presented as evidence of gang affiliation
Campaigners are urging ministers to change the law so that music lyrics are inadmissible in court, a shift that they say would stop a practice that disproportionately affects young black men and criminalises creativity.
At present, police can produce lyrics written by defendants, and even flag an appearance in the background of a music video, as evidence that a suspect is affiliated with a gang or involved in criminality.
The Grammy-winning Puerto Rican megastar delivered a powerful, detail-packed performance that paid tribute to his history and teased more greatness for his future
When the NFL announced in September that Bad Bunny would perform at the Super Bowl half-time show, the immediate expectation was that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio would Make a Statement.
There was, of course, backlash from the people who think a performance in Spanish is un-American (all while Puerto Rico remains a US territory). But there was also criticism from those who argued that, post-Kaepernick, there is no performance on an NFL stage that could meaningfully challenge the power whose invitation into its center of capital and nationalism these artists accepted. And as we’ve reached peak Bad Bunny this week, Puerto Ricans have pointed out that many fans’ investment in the island ends with the artist.
Study find nitazenes, which are up to 500 times stronger than heroin, can degrade significantly in portmortem blood samples
Deaths caused by a synthetic opioid that is hundreds of times stronger than heroin may have been underestimated by up to a third across the UK, according to research.
Nitazenes are a class of synthetic opioids that are extremely potent, and up to 500 times stronger than heroin. They were manufactured originally as a painkiller in the 1950s but their development was halted due to their extreme potencies resulting in a high risk of addiction.
People in Niscemi struggle to comprehend loss of homes and businesses and feel disaster could have been avoided
For days, the 25,000 residents of the Sicilian town of Niscemi have been living on the edge of a 25-metre abyss. On 25 January, after torrential rain brought by Cyclone Harry, a devastating landslide ripped away an entire slope of the town, creating a 4km-long chasm. Roads collapsed, cars were swallowed, and whole sections of the urban fabric plunged into the valley below.
Dozens of houses hang precariously over the edge of the landslide, while vehicles and fragments of roadway continue to give way, hour by hour, under the strain of unstable ground.
He has been jailed, tracked and threatened by China’s government. What was it like pay a visit home? As he publishes a polemic about surveillance and state control, he relives a momentous trip to see his mother
Ai Weiwei is talking me through the decision-making process before his first visit to China in over a decade. The artist, known around the world as the most famous critic of the Chinese communist regime, had to do some fraught arithmetic before deciding to head back home.
Before boarding a flight with his son, who had never met the artist’s elderly mother, Ai thought back to his time in detention when his captors told him he would spend the next 13 years in custody on bogus charges: “They said, ‘When you come out, your son won’t recognise you.’ That was very heavy and really the only moment that touched me.”
She was just 14 when she was groomed by the R&B star, and filmed in an explicit video. She tells the extraordinary story of how she survived
Picture Reshona Landfair in 1996 at 12 years old, when she met the R&B superstar R Kelly (real name Robert Kelly). Her world, she says, seemed like “a buffet” spread out before her. She was a popular girl, a seriously talented basketball player and the youngest member – in her words, “the pint-sized girl rapper” – of 4 The Cause, the singing group she had formed with three cousins. They’d been signed to a record label, made the Top 10 in eight countries and toured much of Europe. Her large extended family from the West Side of Chicago was tight-knit. Life was filled with music, sport, church, Sunday lunch at Grandma’s, family road trips and everybody knowing everybody’s business. “That was a beautiful time,” she says. “I had love and good people all around me. I was living in my true light of who I wanted to become. I felt like I was on my way.”
Fast forward to Landfair at 26 years old, when she finally left Kelly’s orbit. By then, half her family weren’t speaking to the other half, and the relationships that survived were charged with guilt, unasked questions and terrible past mistakes. She had no friends left, as Kelly hadn’t allowed it. Her hopes of a musical career were also long gone – Kelly had made her leave 4 The Cause when she was just 15. She had no qualifications beyond high school and no idea what she wanted to do because, for more than a decade, she’d relied on Kelly to tell her. She couldn’t imagine a healthy relationship; she’d learned sex, she says, “through the lens of a paedophile”. Every element of her 12-year-old life, everything on that “buffet table”, had been destroyed by Kelly. Yet she is still told regularly by total strangers that she must be a “gold digger”, that she “rode the gravy train” and took Kelly for all she could get.
With their carnival atmosphere, music and Bollywood stars, books often take a back seat. But that doesn’t mean writers and their works won’t make a lasting impression
Sounding amused, publisher Pramod Kapoor recalls the reaction of the Indian cricketing legend Bishen Singh Bedi when he learned Kapoor was printing 3,000 copies of his autobiography. “Only 3,000?” he protested. “I fill stadiums with 50-60,000 people coming to see me play and you think that’s all my book is going to sell?”
Kapoor, the founder of Roli Books, explains that Bedi’s legions of admirers were unlikely to translate into book buyers. “That was in 2021. Nothing has changed. The average book in English sells only around 3-4,000 copies. If it tops 10,000, it’s counted a bestseller.”
Revenge is a dish best served cold. Although seeing as theSeattle Seahawks had to wait 11 years to exact theirs on the New England Patriots, their fans would have been forgiven for moving on to other matters.
Not that you’d know it from the way the Seahawks played in Sunday’s Super Bowl, where their super defense smothered the Patriots in a rematch of the 2015 championship, when New Englandpulled off an extraordinary victory that has haunted Seattle for years.
Jeffries says Democrats will stop Donald Trump from trying to steal this year’s midterm elections – key US politics stories from Sunday 8 February at a glance
Democrats will stop Donald Trump from trying to steal this year’s midterm elections, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the US House of Representatives said on Sunday.
Jeffries’ comments come amid widespread concern after Trump said Republicans should “take over the voting”. The US constitution gives states the power to set election rules and says Congress can pass laws to set requirements for federal elections. The constitution gives the president no authority over how elections are run.
Jon Kudelka, the Australian political cartoonist, has died at the age of 53.
His wife, Margaret Kudelka, announced the news in a statement on Monday: “We are sad to tell you that our beloved, brilliant Jon Kudelka died peacefully in South Hobart on Sunday afternoon, surrounded by his family and friends.”
Ukrainian president says the power infrastructure generates money for Moscow so is akin to a military target. What we know on day 1,447
Russian energy infrastructure is a legitimate target for Ukrainian strikes because the energy sector is a source of funds for the production of weapons, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said. “We do not have to choose – whether we strike a military target or energy … it’s the same thing,” the Ukrainian president said on X on Sunday. “We either build weapons and strike their weapons. Or we strike the source where their money is generated and multiplied. And that source is their energy sector … All of this is a legitimate target for us.” Russia has targeted Ukraine’s energy grid in a campaign of attacks that has been called Moscow’s weaponisation of winter.
Russian strikes on Odesa and Kharkiv overnight killed at least three people, Ukrainian officials said on Monday. Iranian-made drones pummelled the southern port city of Odesa, igniting fires and damaging apartment buildings and a gas pipeline, said Sergiy Lysak, head of the city’s military administration. “A 35-year-old man died as a result of the nighttime attack,” he posted in an update. Regional governor Oleg Kiper said the city was “massively attacked”. Farther north in the Kharkiv region, a mother and her 10-year-old son were killed in a drone attack on a residential area of the town of Bohodukhiv, the regional prosecutor’s office said. Six people were hurt.
Authorities in Dubai have arrested and handed over to Russia a man suspected of shooting and wounding a senior officer in Russia’s intelligence services, according to Moscow’s security service. Rory Carroll and Pjotr Sauer report that Sunday’s announcement came two days after a gunman shot Lt Gen Vladimir Alekseyev on the stairwell of his Moscow apartment, leaving him in a critical condition. The federal security service (FSB) said a Russian citizen was detained in Dubai on suspicion of carrying out the shooting. Television images showed masked FSB officers escorting a blindfolded man from a jet in Russia in the dark. The FSB said it had also identified two “accomplices”, one of whom was detained in Moscow and another who “left for Ukraine”.
Zelenskyy said the US had given Ukraine and Russia yet another deadline to reach a peace settlement and was now proposing the war should end by June, reports Donna Ferguson. The Ukrainian president also hinted that the new deadline could be linked to Trump’s US midterm elections campaign. Zelenskyytold reporters that both Ukraine and Russia had been invited to further talks this week.
A Russian airstrike on a residential area in eastern Ukraine killed one person and wounded two, officials said on Sunday. The attack on the city of Kramatorsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region caused a fire in a nine-story apartment block, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. Russia also struck energy infrastructure in Ukraine’s Poltava region overnight into Sunday, Ukraine’s state-owned gas company Naftogaz said.
Kyiv’s foreign minister said the Ukrainian and Russian leaders needed to meet in person to hash out the hardest remaining issues in peace talks, and that only the US president had the power to bring about an agreement. “Only Trump can stop the war,” Andrii Sybiha told Reuters. From the 20-point peace plan that has formed the basis of recent trilateral negotiations, only “a few” items remained outstanding, Sybiha said. “The most sensitive and most difficult, to be dealt with at the leaders’ level.”
Zelenskyy said he was imposing sanctions on some foreign manufacturers of components for Russian drones and missiles which it uses against Ukraine. “Producing this weaponry would be impossible without critical foreign components, which the Russians continue to obtain by circumventing sanctions,” he said on X.
Australian white supremacist tells NZ court he was suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’ when he entered his guilty plea in March 2020
The Australian white supremacist who murdered 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, in the worst mass shooting in the New Zealand’s history, has asked a court to discard his guilty pleas, claiming harsh prison conditions had affected his mental health and compelled him to admit to the crimes.
Brenton Tarrant pleaded guilty in March 2020 to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and a terrorism charge, after initially saying he would defend the charges. In August 2020, Tarrant became the first person in New Zealand under current laws to be sentenced to life in prison without the chance of ever walking free.
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