Exclusive: Norway’s chief of defence Eirik Kristoffersen, who served in Afghanistan, was critical of Trump’s claim Nato troops stayed off frontlines
Norway’s army chief has said Oslo cannot exclude the possibility of a future Russian invasion of the country, suggesting Moscow could move on Norway to protect its nuclear assets stationed in the far north.
“We don’t exclude a land grab from Russia as part of their plan to protect their own nuclear capabilities, which is the only thing they have left that actually threatens the United States,” said Gen Eirik Kristoffersen, Norway’s chief of defence.
Miliband is one minister who doesn’t want to be PM, and is more than happy to let Starmer think he is still in control
It was a day for one of the Top Team. The safest of safe hands. A grownup. That didn’t mean the likes of Emma Reynolds. Emma looks permanently startled at the best of times. Especially when there’s a microphone around. Give her more than 30 seconds and she’ll confess to crimes she didn’t commit.
And certainly not Wes Streeting. Not even Wes trusts Wes. His denials over any involvement with Anas Sarwar’s Monday press conference weren’t 100% convincing. Nor was his insistence that he had never much liked Peter Mandelson. In his WhatsApps, Wes uses one kiss for those he hates and two for those he loves. Apparently.
Case is shrouded in fevered speculation as prosecutors say autopsies show two of the deceased were “probably” murdered
It has been dubbed Bulgaria’s “Twin Peaks”: a grim saga involving the mysterious deaths of six people in the middle of the mountains that has gripped the eastern European country.
Zahari Vaskov, the director of the national police general directorate, told a press conference on Monday that the deaths were “a case without comparison in our country”.
After a day of turmoil where the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, called for Keir Starmer to resign, Labour MPs and cabinet members seem to be rallying around the prime minister. Can Starmer bounce back from this latest blow to his leadership? And what might the road to recovery look like for Labour? Lucy Hough speaks to columnist Aditya Chakrabortty
There are times when it is better to wear underwear than not. Here’s what the experts say
In 2015, during a particularly energetic performance of the song American Woman in Stockholm, Lenny Kravitz split a pair of leather pants right down the crotch, revealing his manhood to the world.
I’m sorry to say I think about this incident somewhat regularly. Not out of titillation, but because it planted in my head a troublesome question: just how many people, rock stars or otherwise, aren’t wearing underwear in public?
As one of the longest-running battles in British heritage comes to an end, the listing of the London arts complex vindicates the audacity of this sensational droogs’ paradise
Britain’s battle of brutalism has finally reached an exhausted conclusion with the listing of London’s Southbank Centre. The so-called “concrete monstrosities” of the Hayward Gallery, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall and its skatepark undercroft have finally been Grade II-listed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Traditionalists may be spitting feathers, but as football pundits are apt to assert: “It was the right result.”
However, it turned out to be a very long and very tetchy game. Constructed between 1949 and 1968 in an uncompromisingly brutalist style, the Southbank Centre was once voted Britain’s ugliest building. Since 1991, the Twentieth Century Society (C20), champions of all things modern, and Historic England had recommended listing on six separate occasions, yet their advice was rejected by successive secretaries of state. Until now. The decision brings to an end an unprecedented 35-year-long impasse, one of the longest-running battles in British architectural heritage.
MEPs vote to allow people to be deported to places they have never been to, as NGOs express fears over new ‘safe third countries’ list
The EU has moved closer to creating offshore centres for migrants and asylum seekers, after centre-right and far-right MEPs united for tougher migration policies.
MEPs voted for legal changes that will give authorities more options to deport asylum seekers, including sending people to countries they have never been to.
Vote next month after FA board approves radical plan
New playoff format would begin as soon as next season
EFL clubs will next month vote on an expansion of the Championship playoffs to six teams after being given approval to pursue the radical change by the Football Association’s board.
The Guardian has learned that the 72 EFL clubs were on Tuesday invited to an extraordinary general meeting on 5 March, when the vote will take place on a new playoff format that would begin next season.
He survived a stroke, a lightning strike, a fire – and created one of the world’s most recognisable images. Now the Japanese artist’s ‘wild, fascinating’ life has inspired an opera
Opera has inspired many of the 20th century’s greatest artists to create extraordinary sets. Oskar Kokoschka designed a Magic Flute for Salzburg and a Ballo in maschera for Florence. Salvador Dalí produced a controversial Salome for London; David Hockney’s designs for Glyndebourne’s Rake’s Progress complement Stravinsky’s sound-world so miraculously that they are still in use 50 years after their creation. Marc Chagall’s ceiling fresco for Paris’s Opéra Garnier and murals for the New York Met testify to the intimate connection between opera and painting.
And yet remarkably few operas portray visual artists. Something about their painstaking work seems to resist representation in this most extravagant of artforms. Only two operas about artists are regularly performed: Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, depicting the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, and Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini– and Cellini gave Berlioz a head-start with his rollicking memoirs about his scandalous adventures in 16th-century Florence.
US, Britain, EU and Arab nations condemn plans that Israeli ministers say will ‘kill the idea of a Palestinian state’
Israeli measures to tighten its control of the West Bank have prompted a global backlash, including a signal from Washington restating the Trump administration’s opposition to annexation of the occupied territory.
Announcing the measures, which involve extending Israeli control in areas that are currently under Palestinian administration, Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, made clear they were aimed at strengthening Israeli settlements in the West Bank and pre-empting the emergence of an independent sovereign Palestine.
(Interscope) Bowing out after six consecutive US No 1 albums, Cole references rap greats and even conjures a convo between Biggie and 2Pac – but the lens rarely strays from himself
J Cole released his debut mixtape in 2007, and now, nearly two decades later and after six back-to-back US No 1 albums, the North Carolina MC is still wrestling with the weight of so much hope heaped upon him. He is framing The Fall Off as a graceful bowing out – “to do on my last what I was unable to do on my first”, he has said – and it’s almost as if he is a student coming to the end of a long period of study, with this double album as his graduate thesis.
Across 24 tracks and 101 minutes, The Fall Off is full of technical proficiency, raw lyrical skill, citation, interpolation and sampling, and it attempts nothing less than to embody a half-century of hip-hop. Through direct and indirect references, lessons unfold throughout. The Fall-Off Is Inevitable is inspired by Nas’s 2001 Stillmatic track Rewind. I Love Her Again is an obvious nod to Common’s I Used to Love HER. Bunce Road Blues borrows lyrics from Usher’s Nice & Slow but connects to R&B’s present with guest vocals from Nigerian singer Tems. The Let Out is reminiscent of SpottieOttieDopaliscious from OutKast’s Aquemini, and so forth: all ample material for audiences to think through hip-hop’s past and future.
We want to hear how the fall in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and ether are impacting people
Bitcoin sank to its lowest value in more than a year this week, faling to $63,000 on Thursday, about half its all-time peak of $126,000 in October 2025
It’s part of a wider shock to crypto prices. The second-largest cryptocurrency, ether, has faced losses of more than 30% this year alone.
Sturla Holm Lægreid stuns viewers watching in Norway
‘Three months ago I made the mistake of my life’
The Norwegian Sturla Holm Lægreid broke down in tears after winning bronze in the men’s 20km biathlon, apologising for having an affair and saying: “It has been the worst week of my life.”
Johan-Olav Botn won gold, with the Frenchman Éric Perrot in second, but it was Lægreid who stunned television viewers in Norway after opening up to the broadcaster NRK about his private life over the past six months.
In Lancashire, I met people living with dangerous levels of Pfas, including in their food. The government is failing them
Last week, on the morning the government published its Pfas action plan, I got a worried phone call from a woman called Sam who lives next door to a chemical factory in Lancashire. Sam had just been hand-delivered a letter from her local council informing her that after testing, it had been confirmed that her ducks’ eggs, reared in her garden in Thornton-Cleveleys, near Blackpool, are contaminated with Pfas.
Pfas – per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as “forever chemicals” due to their persistence in the environment – are a family of thousands of chemicals, and I have been reporting on them for years. Some, including those found in the eggs Sam and her family have been eating, have been linked to a wide range of serious illnesses, including certain cancers.
Thomas Massie, a US congressman, has said he knows the identity of six more men who are “likely incriminated” by their inclusion in the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files after he viewed an unredacted version of the documents relating to the disgraced late financier and sexual abuser.
The Kentucky Republican suggested he might reveal their names under congressional privilege if the justice department continued to conceal their identities in publicly available copies of the documents that are still redacted.
Under US pressure as part of the ‘war on drugs’, the WHO still categorises the sacred Indigenous remedy as akin to heroin or fentanyl, despite its many therapeutic properties
For thousands of years, Andean people living around what is now the town of Coripata, east of La Paz, Bolivia, have used coca leaves to relieve fatigue, hunger and altitude sickness (known as soroche), as well as to treat headaches and digestive problems.
Concerned about the future of this cultural and religious practice, Daynor Choque, heir to this ancient tradition, points to a pile of leaves on the table in front of him.
From Pennsylvania to Montana, the White House’s war on ‘woke’ has targeted US monuments that address topics like racism and Indigenous history
Blank spaces now exist where a series of panels about enslavement once appeared on the walls of the President’s House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The site, which honors the home of George Washington and John Adams, is a major landmark that bore artwork and informational signs for more than a decade. But on 22 January, National Park Service (NPS) workers used hand tools to pry off 34 panels to comply with a presidential executive order designed to reframe the national narrative. The panels that highlighted the lives of people enslaved by George Washington when Philadelphia was the US capital in the 1790s are now in storage.
The removal is one of several across the nation, as NPS staff aim to conform with Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” issued on 27 March 2025. Public markers, monuments and statues that the Trump administration considers disparaging to past or current Americans have been flagged at more than a dozen parks. Two exhibits at Montana’s Little Bighorn battlefield national monument that discuss Indigenous history and the Battle of the Little Bighorn have been targeted and deemed noncompliant. Additionally, signage about climate change at Muir Woods national monument in California and visitor brochures at Medgar and Myrlie Evers home national monument in Mississippi that referred to Medgar Evers’s killer as racist were also removed.
No suspect named yet as TV host’s mom still missing a day after deadline set by ransom note from alleged kidnappers
The search for television host Savannah Guthrie’s mother continued on Tuesday morning amid desperate family entreaties for her safe return.
The FBI still has yet to identify a suspect or person of interest. Nancy Guthrie remains missing, a day after the deadline set by a ransom note from her purported kidnappers.
Tech giants Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta to collectively invest $600bn on artificial intelligence this year
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Today in tech, we’re discussing the Persian Gulf countries making a play for sovereignty over their own artificial intelligence in response to an unstable United States. That, and US tech giants’ plans to spend more than $600bn this year alone.
Cowan-Dickie starts at hooker in only other change
Maro Itoje has been restored to the England captaincy for Saturday’s Calcutta Cup clash against Scotland while Luke Cowan-Dickie starts at hooker with Steve Borthwick otherwise keeping faith with the side who thrashed Wales on Saturday.
Fin Smith replaces namesake Marcus in the No 23 jersey but that, Itoje’s expected return to the starting lineup and the decision to utilise Jamie George’s experience from the bench, aside, Borthwick has challenged the majority of his players to repeat the trick at Murrayfield.
Connexion
