Women’s aerials: the qualifying rounds of accelerating down a ramp and flying through the air. Hanna Huskova, gold medallist in 2018, does a triple somersault, or the “the kiss arse blaster” in the commentator’s words, but it is only enough to leave her seventh.
Women’s curling: Back to the brushes, where Rebecca Morrison posts the final stone of the sixth end into perfect position, Team GB take two and go into a 4-3 lead against the USA with four ends left.
The Wicked star plays all 23 characters in a hi-tech London staging of Bram Stoker’s novel by Kip Williams. Here’s a bite-sized look at the critics’ verdicts
Dracula, the Ur-vampire and ultimate outsider of the literary canon, is played by Cynthia Erivo, along with every other character, in this deliciously wicked tale of the blood-sucking count. Except it’s not deliciously wicked in adapter-director Kip Williams’ stage reinvention. Williams has proven himself a Midas-touched spinner of old stories to new. His one-woman version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was deliriously original. His take on Jean Genet’s The Maids was punk inspired. What has happened here?
As in the Australian director’s hit adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray (immaculately interpreted by the Succession star Sarah Snook), the stage is sometimes so crowded with camera operators and stage crew that it’s not always easy to see Erivo. The shallow rake in the stalls makes this theatre a less than ideal setting for Marg Horwell’s handsome scenic design: I spent at least half the evening watching the action on the large screen hanging overhead. Yet it becomes a hallucinatory experience all the same.
Erivo dons wigs and skirts and recalibrates her voice to play Harker’s fiancee Mina and her friend Lucy; then spectacles to play psychiatrist Dr Seward and comic Saruman tresses for a guttural Van Helsing. It’s to her credit, and Williams’, that one sometimes loses track of which character is being broadcast live and which is recorded. The integration is mostly seamless. Personifications of Irish and American characters are knowingly ridiculous, but Dracula always had a vein of camp.
It’s refreshing to see Erivo get to own her queerness on stage, licking her lips lasciviously as a lace-decked Lucy who’s in sexual thrall to an androgynous Dracula – or strutting confidently in a masculine vest with silver chains (a welcome escape from her feminine get-ups in Wicked). She unleashes her ethereal voice to haunting, vulpine effect in the final scenes, where she finally gets to embody Dracula’s power on a bare stage, unobscured by tech and crowds.
The multi-faceted approach speaks to the way that Stoker cut between first-person perspectives using a document-sharing and epistolary form. Equally, Williams’ boundary-breaking artistic toolkit brings out the thematic heart of the matter; it emphasises the way in which the predatory count stokes fears but also embodies deep-rooted desires.
Erivo seems ill at ease with the material. There’s a hesitancy about her performance, as if she were wrong-footed by the technology that surrounds her. A scattering of arch, self-conscious moments and sly humour are part of the deal in Williams’ interpretation, but nothing feels truly felt and, as she switches between characters, the individual voices are not always properly differentiated. The overall effect is slightly ramshackle, sluggish and, in the end, frustratingly short on dash and drama.
Erivo’s range is remarkable – alternately placid, pert, prowling and predatory. A Tony award-winning star of musical theatre in The Color Purple, she despatches one melancholy torch song by Clemence Williams with wistful nonchalance. Otherwise, her athletic efforts are magnified by a filmic soundtrack encompassing Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, Chopin, Björk and even a bit of electro-trance music. For truly this is a mind-bogglingly complex show, which goes beyond the kitchen sink in its attempts to create an audio-visual hallucination.
The effects, with Craig Wilkinson as video designer, are impressive: a vampire flying by, Dracula crawling down the wall. The camera operators, wig providers, stage managers and props assistants are all assiduous and wonderfully efficient. Marg Horwell’s design is effectively flexible, Nick Schlieper’s lighting and the sound design by Jessica Dunn suitably dramatic, though Clemence Williams’ score becomes increasingly over-emphatic.
Despite stumbling over the odd line, Erivo is charismatic, game, and essentially does her best as a cog in Williams’ elaborate machine. But if you agree to tie your big comeback to a very specific directorial vision, there’s not much even a superstar actor can do if that vision is faulty.
News agencies, citing officials, are reporting that the latest peace talks – held in Geneva – have now ended
The Russian state-owned news agency Ria Novosti has reported some comments by Moscow’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky after today’s meeting ended.
“The negotiations lasted two days: a very long time yesterday in various formats, and about two hours today. They were difficult, but businesslike,” he was quoted as saying.
GMB union tells Labour delaying or halting equalisation to adult rates would be unacceptable
The US state department has confirmed that it still backs Britain’s deal with Mauritius handing over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, in return for an agreement allowing the UK and the US to carry on using the Diego Garcia airbase for at least another 99 years. Last month Donald Trump described the deal, which he had previously backed, as “an act of great stupidity”. But yesterday a state department spokesperson said:
The United States supports the decision of the United Kingdom to proceed with its agreement with Mauritius concerning the Chagos archipelago.
Starmer must urgently clarify whether the UK will be represented at these US-Mauritius discussions and if not, tell us why. It is vital for our defence and security interests that the US Government does not conclude any agreement about British territory without our input. The Conservatives have led the charge against the Chagos Surrender and we will continue to fight it every step of the way.
The prime minister reiterated his condemnation of Putin’s barbaric attacks on innocent civilians in Ukraine, and the leaders discussed the ongoing negotiations to deliver a just and lasting peace.
Turning to the situation in Gaza, the prime minister reflected on the current situation in the region and the importance of securing further access for humanitarian aid. He set out his support for the ongoing work to deliver the US-led peace plan.
A new exhibition brings together new dye-transfer prints of the classically American photographer’s work
As a small child, Winston Eggleston was only vaguely aware that his father, William Eggleston, was a famous photographer. For all he knew other children also had parents who were friends with Dennis Hopper, or who spent hours tinkering on a piano between occasional, fevered photography sprees, or who had taken the world’s most iconic picture of a red ceiling.
“It’s all normal to you, because you don’t know anything different,” Winston recently recalled. “Looking back, I was lucky.”
The Canadians began the Milano Cortina Games with a cheating scandal and a gold drought. In the second week of action, it’s woe Canada no more
Through the first 10 days of the Olympics, Canada had more memes than medals. More gaffes than golds. More “oh no” than “O Canada.”
Canada didn’t win their first gold medal of the Games until the ninth day of full competition. Meanwhile, the narrative centered on the Great Curling Kerfuffle of 2026 and its accompanying viral online content.
Rio de Janeiro’s carnival is full of contrasts: wealth brushes up against poverty, joyful abandon unfolds alongside hard labour. Its visual expression also explores notions of power. In a country with the largest Catholic population in the world, racy nun costumes are everywhere during the festival. Along with revellers dressing up in sexy police costumes, the Catholic cosplay reveals an element of carnival’s underlying subversive nature: authority figures softened, flipped, and reconsidered through street theatre and play
Mandelson, Trump, Send, political leadership: all need explanation with thought and clarity. We must end this obsession with ‘hot takes’
Roger Mosey is a former head of BBC TV News
Almost everybody, including Keir Starmer, can see that the Peter Mandelson affair provoked a genuine political crisis. The media were right to make it headline news. But it also shows the febrile atmosphere in which politicians and the media conspire to turn every incident into an issue of confidence in leadership, and we are becoming a country where it is impossible to focus on the long term. Hyped-up hot takes are far more loved in Westminster than bringing the nation the sustained change that it needs.
There is nothing new in the obsession with political process. I was guilty of it myself when I was editor of the Today programme during John Major’s attempt to ratify the Maastricht treaty in the 1990s. We gleefully put on air rebels and loyalists as the government battled for survival, and our listeners had a far better briefing on the meltdown within the Conservative party than they did on what was in the treaty. This was part of a pattern in which, for decades, EU affairs were seen through a British party prism rather than explaining what was going on in Europe.
Five countries responsible for 75% of world’s coffee supply record average of 57 extra days of coffee-harming heat a year
In Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, more than 4m households rely on coffee as their primary source of income. It contributes almost a third of the country’s export earnings, but for how much longer is uncertain.
“Coffee farmers in Ethiopia are already seeing the impact of extreme heat,” said Dejene Dadi, the general manager of Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperatives Union (OCFCU), a smallholder cooperative.
It used to be fairly easy to get work that paid at or around the minimum wage. But with a shrinking number of positions come ever more hoops to jump through, from personality tests, to trial shifts, to towers constructed of marshmallows
It is 10.30am, and Zahra is sitting in a business centre in Preston, attaching marshmallows to sticks of uncooked spaghetti. There are 30 interview candidates in the grey-carpeted room, split into groups of five, competing to build food towers. Already today they have had to solve anagrams, complete quizzes and rank the importance of various kitchen items. Just to be shortlisted for this two-hour interview round, Zahra had to write an online application consisting of 10 paragraphs about her work experience. As she builds her spaghetti and marshmallow tower, she thinks: “What am I actually doing here? This doesn’t relate to the job at all.”
The job in question is not what Zahra, 20, plans to do for ever. It is as a crew member for Wingstop, a chicken shop chain, with a salary of £10.80 an hour – 80p an hour above minimum wage for her age range. During the interview, she says, “a woman with a notepad was staring at us, and all the shift managers were watching. It was so awkward.” A week or so later, Zahra received a short rejection email. “It felt like a waste of time,” she says. “What a joke.”
Assistant to hard-left parliamentarian among those held over fatal attack on 23-year-old during protest in Lyon
French authorities have arrested 11 suspects over the killing last week of a far-right activist, including an assistant to a hard-left member of parliament, a prosecutor and an informed source said.
Quentin Deranque, 23, died after sustaining a severe brain injury when he was attacked by at least six people on the sidelines of a far-right protest against a leftwing politician speaking at a university in the south-eastern city of Lyon.
FTSE 100 company reports 6% fall in annual profits weeks after collapse of $260bn merger with Rio Tinto
Glencore is to give $2bn (£1.47bn) to shareholders after a turbulent year in which profits slumped and talks collapsed over a blockbuster $260bn merger with the fellow mining company Rio Tinto.
The FTSE 100 company announced the payout on Wednesday despite reporting that annual profits slipped 6% on the previous year to $13.5bn.
Written from exile after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this autofictional blend of memory and fable tracks a changing sense of self
M, a 50-year-old novelist living in an idyllic place by a lake, is travelling to a literary festival to give a talk. A sequence of events, mostly beyond her control, leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar town. It’s dead quiet, except for a travelling circus camped on the outskirts. M checks into a hotel, ignores her phone and wanders around, reminiscing about books read, films watched, museums visited. Some of these recollections are grounded in fable; others are vividly realistic. Among the latter are memories of her childhood and youth, spent in a “country that no longer exists apart from on old maps and in history books”.
M describes the country she comes from as a “beast” waging war against its neighbour. We can guess her meaning without turning to the author’s biographical note. Maria Stepanova – whose masterly In Memory of Memorycombined family memoir, essay and fiction – left her native Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We might also wonder how closely The Disappearing Act tracks her own life. But the novelist M is not here to discuss autofiction – she has more important things to reflect on.
Less than a decade ago, the Balkan country had just one breeding pair of the eastern imperial species of raptor left. Now things are changing, thanks to the dogged work of conservationists
At the start of every spring, before the trees in northern Serbia begin to leaf out, ornithologists drive across the plains of Vojvodina. They check old nesting sites of eastern imperial eagles, scan solitary trees along field margins, and search for signs of new nests.
For years, the work of the Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia (BPSSS) has been getting more demanding – and more rewarding. In 2017, Serbia was down to a single breeding pair. Last year, BPSSS recorded 19 breeding pairs, 10 of which successfully raised young.
Politicians and experts say police should be better trained and move away from ‘tickbox approach’ to suicides
Politicians and experts have thrown their weight behind calls for suicides to be investigated as potential homicides in cases where a person who takes their own life has been affected by domestic abuse.
They also called for better training for police so that officers understand the full impact of domestic abuse, and move away from “a tickbox approach” to suicides.
In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123 and the domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 988 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
This six-part extended brand advert follows the TV chef’s attempt to launch numerous eateries under one roof. It’s a lot of restaurant drama to have in your life
Six hours of advertising yourself on Netflix and – presumably – getting paid for providing streamer content at the same time? Nice work if you can get it, and Gordon Ramsay has got it. Being Gordon Ramsay, a six part – six part – documentary, follows the chef ’n’ TV personality as he embarks on his most ambitious venture yet. It’s “A huge undertaking”, “high risk, high reward”, a “once in a lifetime opportunity” and “one of my final stakes in the ground … If it fails, I’m fucked.” It is opening seven billion (five, but it feels like seven billion) restaurants on the top floors of 22 Bishopsgate at once. There is going to be a 60-seat rooftop garden place with retractable roof, a 250-seater Asian-inflected restaurant called Lucky Cat, a Bread Street Kitchen brasserie and a culinary school.
But we begin with a family scene. The youngest of Ramsay’s six children with wife of 30 years, Tana, are having pancakes. Gordon thinks they are too thick. They’re American-style, not the crepes he thinks they should have. “Darling,” says Tana, not for the first time even that morning, you suspect, “Could you just give it a rest?”
In the 2010s it described an insurgent rhetorical style; in the 2020s it is inadequate to account for the wildly diverging fates of the left and right
“Populism” may well have been the defining word of the previous decade: a shorthand for the insurgent parties that came to prominence in the 2010s, challenging the dominance of the liberal centre. But no sooner had it become the main rubric for discussing both the far left and far right than commentators began to question its validity: worrying that it was too vague, or too pejorative, or fuelling the forces to which it referred.
Now, with the fortunes of the two political poles heading in different directions – the right gaining ground across the west while much of the left struggles to rebound from serial defeats – the notion that this word could encompass such different players seems even less plausible. For a lucid account of these forces, we might have to shift our focus elsewhere: finding terms that can explain their unequal balance of power, so that we can in turn find the proper remedy.
Oliver Eagleton is managing editor at Phenomenal World
Davide Ghiotto, Andrea Giovannini and Michele Malfatti thrashed the world record-holders, world champions and favourites
The noise at the Milano Speed Skating Stadium has been through the roof every time a competitor in Italian blue has appeared on the ice. It was no different on Tuesday with the roar of the crowd powering the host nation to another gold medal.
Davide Ghiotto, Andrea Giovannini and Michele Malfatti thrashed the world record-holders, world champions and favourites Casey Dawson, Emery Lehman and Ethan Cepuran of the US to win the men’s team pursuit gold medal in speed skating. Buoyed by raucous cheering from the home crowd, the Italians won their country’s first Olympic title in this event since the Turin Games in 2006, beating the Americans by a whopping 4.51sec – a lifetime in speed skating. Giovannini even hit the NBA point guard Steph Curry’s trademark ‘night-night’ celebration as he crossed the finish line to signify this truly was a lights-out performance. How many hours, days and weeks had he dreamt of that moment?
Samir Sobha says Caf’s statutes are not being respected
Véron Mosengo-Omba is past compulsory retirement age
A member of the Confederation of African football’s executive committee has said the general secretary, Véron Mosengo-Omba, is “occupying the seat illegally” and must be made to stand down.
Samir Sobha, the president of the Mauritius Football Association, said he would not accept Mosengo-Omba’s presence at Caf meetings because the 66-year-old Swiss-Congolese lawyer no longer holds the position legitimately.
Given the average British woman may change dress size more than 30 times in adult life, flexibility is one route to feeling at home in a fluctuating body. But that’s not all it’s good for
I always think that the most stylish woman in a room is the one who looks the most comfortable. She might be nonchalant in a pair of wide trousers and a loose white shirt, or stroll in casually wearing the butter-soft leather loafers she’s had for years. It was a longing to be more like one of those women, as opposed to one who fell over regularly in public because I couldn’t balance in platforms, which made me give up wearing heels for good in 2012. So it was a natural progression, a decade later, to shunning another wardrobe constraint that was making me fidget in social situations: the waistband.
I’m about to turn 49 and in the past eight years I’ve been fluctuating between sizes 10 and 14, which is hardly surprising when you consider that the average British woman may change dress size a whopping 31 times in her adult life. I attribute my own yo-yo-ing partly to the hormonal changes that a body in its 40s inevitably goes through, but I should also acknowledge that during lockdown, I developed a taste for the elasticated tracksuit bottoms that working from home allowed, as well as a macaroni cheese, or two, each week.
Paying homage to 1956, when Cortina previously hosted the Winter Olympics, a trio of Getty Images photographers have been using vintage Graflex cameras at the 2026 Games. In a modern twist, they have been adapted to record images on smartphones, enabling live transmission of the content captured
“Has a footballer ever been sent off but still won player of the match?” asked Jimmy Clark. The short answer is yes, quite a few. We’ll kick off with a couple of recent examples.
“In 2024 Anthony Gordon was shown a second yellow card for Newcastle against West Ham just as the TNT commentary team were declaring him the player of the match,” writes Tom Reed. You can see the moment in question in this video (around 2:50), as Gordon is dismissed after kicking the ball away. Perhaps the substitute Harvey Barnes, who scored twice in the 4-3 comeback win, would have been a better choice.
In tandem with Game Day Vision, the Premier League club are improving the matchday experience for supporters with a variety of conditions
Thomas Clements’ eyes begin dancing as he recalls in vivid detail his first trip to Highbury. It was 1995 and Ian Wright was among the scorers as QPR were defeated. Clements – named after Mickey Thomas, scorer of Arsenal’s decisive second goal against Liverpool in their 1989 title win – points to his dad, Kevin, standing a metre away. “I was sat on his shoulders in the North Bank,” he says.
That is, in itself, not unusual for a child of the 1980s. However, whereas most regular match-goers might take for granted the seemingly small things – travel arrangements, the journey to the stadium, grabbing food and drink, meeting friends and family, entering and exiting the ground – for disabled supporters such as Clements, careful thought and planning go into all arrangements.
Sara Duterte, daughter of a former president who is facing charges of crimes against humanity at the Hague, pledged to offer her ‘life, strength and future’ in service of the Philippines
Philippine vice-president Sara Duterte, daughter of the imprisoned former leader Rodridgo Duterte, has announced she will run for president in the country’s 2028 election.
Sara Duterte, 47, said she would offer her “life, strength and future” in service of the Philippines, in a speech on Wednesday that accused President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, of presiding over a period marked by rampant corruption.
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