Amendment to victims and courts bill in England and Wales aims to remove anomaly in parental responsibility

A proposed law to restrict paedophiles’ parental rights in England and Wales is too weak because it does not protect children of theirs born after their conviction, parliament will hear this week.

Under the victims and courts bill, a parent convicted of serious sexual offences against any child and who is sentenced to four or more years in prison will lose parental responsibility but they could come out of jail and have other children who would not be protected.

It’s not the heart, but the stomach that will sometimes define whether a budding romance proves food for the soul, or reaches boiling point …

For Anna Jones, it’s lemons. For Ben Benton, it’s rice. For Gurdeep Loyal, it’s anchovies on pizza and, for me, it’s Yorkshire Tea in the morning. I could – did – date someone who “didn’t drink hot drinks”, but I would never have married a man I couldn’t make tea for when I woke up, or who couldn’t make me tea in turn.

These are what I’ve come to call “meal-breakers” – mouthfuls whose joys we feel our loved one must share, if we’re to share our lives with them. They are foods and drinks we cleave to as much for what they say about us and our values as we do for their smell, texture and taste. For most, it’s not so much the meal as the principle it conveys; not the anchovies on pizza so much as being with “someone who appreciates food as an act of collective joy – that embraces an ethos of all plates being communal,” says Loyal, author of the cookbook Flavour Heroes. The meticulous divvying-up of brown, salty silvers to ensure an even distribution on each pizza slice: that’s the sharing ethos he looks for in a potential soulmate.

Yes, we all know blueberries and kale are good for us. But what about some of the other less well-marketed food heroes that have fallen out of favour?

Think of a superfood. What comes to mind? Avocado? Turmeric? Quinoa? Many of us will have a grasp of the most mainstream so-called superfoods. The ones that have become dietary superheroes thanks to savvy marketing. Larger-than-life in the public imagination, they walk among us with a sheen: blueberries with their polyphenols; kale and its vitamin K; goji berries and all their antioxidants.

But what is and isn’t a superfood is actually down to trends – take the current resurgence of a previously shunned, tragically uncool food: cottage cheese. Beloved by Richard Nixon with pineapple (the Watergate tapes weren’t just illuminating in the ways Woodward and Bernstein hoped for) and a diet-culture favourite in the 60s and 70s, the creamy, tangy cheese curd concoction is back. And there are other supposed superfoods that are just as nutrient-rich, but that marketing hasn’t (yet) brought to our attention. Once a regular part of the UK diet, they have fallen, perhaps unfairly, out of favour. So which foods with serious nutritional chops have we forgotten? Which should we reintegrate?

The company’s clash with the Pentagon is a fight over the future of American privacy

The US military wants to use its state-of-the-art AI tools to supercharge surveillance against Americans, making it easier than ever to monitor our movements, our search history, and our private associations. That’s one of the major takeaways from a dramatic dispute between the Department of Defense and some of the leading AI companies in America. What this clash highlights most of all, however, is just how easily AI surveillance systems can be turned against the people in this country, and the urgent need for Congress to intervene.

Last week, the Pentagon and Donald Trump announced that the government would cease using Anthropic’s AI products, asserting that the safety guardrails proposed by the company – no mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons – were unacceptable. The Trump administration went even further, claiming that these positions render Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, and prohibited anyone doing business with the US military from conducting commercial activity with Anthropic in their military work.

Iran has named hardliner Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s new supreme leader; Donald Trump says oil price spike ‘a small price to pay’ as markets tumble

• Full report: Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba chosen as Iran’s new supreme leader

• Tell us: how have you been affected by the latest events in the Middle East?

Donald Trump has said a decision on when to end the war with Iran will be a “mutual” one he’ll make together with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Times of Israel has reported.

It said Trump also claimed in a brief telephone interview on Sunday that Iran would have destroyed Israel if he and Netanyahu had not been around. The US president said:

Iran was going to destroy Israel and everything else around it … We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel.

I think it’s mutual … a little bit. We’ve been talking. I’ll make a decision at the right time, but everything’s going to be taken into account.

Critics say sprawling corruption case against Ekrem İmamoğlu aims to stop him running as president against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

A mass trial of 400 people including the jailed mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, has opened in Turkey in a sprawling corruption case critics say is a politically motivated attempt to scupper his chances of challenging Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the presidency.

Hundreds of former and current employees of the Istanbul municipality are due to give evidence, including more than 106 people already in jail. All stand accused of involvement in a broad network of corruption and organised crime centred on İmamoğlu’s office.

Fire, believed to have started in vape shop, gutted building next to station and destroyed shops, salon and cafe

Glasgow Central is to remain closed until at least Tuesday after a building next door to Scotland’s busiest railway station collapsed during a major fire.

National Rail said the station would remain closed with no estimate on when it would reopen after the fire, believed to have started in a vape shop in Union Street on Sunday afternoon.

The next in our ongoing series of writers picking their favourite comfort films is an argument that Tarantino’s bloody revenge saga is a feelgood winner

Having older siblings had its upsides. The main one being I had early access to the very best age-inappropriate titles – my brother and sister loved films and our towering DVD collection was a sight to behold. While I can’t remember my exact age when I first watched Kill Bill: Volume 1, I was young, probably too young, and it was awesome.

Unlike most other films I’m fond of that tend to be endlessly quotable, there’s only one line from Kill Bill, emanating from a particularly repugnant character, that I’ve always recalled with clarity (“my name is Buck and I’m here to …” hazard a guess). What is unforgettable is its banging soundtrack and striking imagery – that bright yellow tracksuit splashed in ketchup-red blood – and the dizzying, stylised action that whisks me away from whatever mundane obstacle I’m facing and into a fantastical tale of revenge.

A new book traces how the Hall of Famer overcame humble beginnings in Indiana to take his place among basketball’s greatest players

How otherworldly was Larry Bird during his memorable season for Indiana State in 1978-79? At one point he made an assist while sprawled on the floor: From his end of the court, he made a one-armed throw to a teammate, who streaked coast-to-coast for a quick bucket.

That season ended with an epic showdown in the NCAA championship game against Magic Johnson and Michigan State. Magic got the better of Bird in that game, but the contest had wider repercussions. Not only did it spark interest in the NCAA Tournament, but Bird and Magic would help revitalize the NBA, after Bird joined the Boston Celtics and Magic the Los Angeles Lakers. But none of this was preordained, especially Bird’s trajectory.

The normally great director misses the mark with a wonderfully animated but narratively clunky retelling of the Shakespearean staple

Film versions of Hamlet are the new buses; you wait for ages for one, then three come along all at once: first Hamnet, then Riz Ahmed’s take on the Danish ditherer, and now this anime reinterpretation. But visually ravishing though it is, Scarlet is a hefty disappointment from director Mamoru Hosoda, a leading light from whom we expect more than an incoherent and overbearing fantasy.

Hosoda kicks things off with the exploitation version of the Dane: Claudius (voiced by David Kaye in the English version) and Gertrude (Michelle Wong) bragging about their intent to murder poor old King Amlet (Fred Tatasciore) and snatch the throne. His offspring Scarlet (Erin Yvette) is left, as in the play, to vacillate about payback – but Claudius gets there first by feeding her a vial of poison. She is given a reprieve though, when she wakes up in a wasteland purgatory populated by the usurper and his prowling knights. After being dispatched, these minions dissipate into the deeper “nothingness” that also awaits her if she doesn’t succeed in her quest for vengeance.

An vivid celebration of the once-maligned, now revered artist’s life and work

John Lennon once described Yoko Ono as “the world’s most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.” Others were more vicious, portraying her as a family wrecker (the family being the Beatles), a cultural vandal, an Asian virus, a shrieking harridan. As ventriloquised by Paul Morley in his appallingly titled Love Magic Power Danger Bliss, they saw her as someone whose “sole reason to be on the planet was to drive them up the wall with her lack of talent and decency”. Or, only slightly more generously, a “disorganised diva channelling the assumed genius of male creators”.

Morley’s book focuses on Ono’s life and art before she ran into Lennon at London’s Indica Gallery in 1966. The Beatles he refers to as “that other business”. His Ono is headstrong, questing. Born in 1933, into a wealthy banking family (her schoolmates included the sons of Emperor Hirohito), she survived the firebombing of Tokyo and took refuge in the country where she and her mother, now virtual beggars, were mocked by locals. Later, she would become the first woman to be accepted into the prestigious Gakushuin University philosophy department. She left early, just as she would also leave Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York after two terms.

Defeat in Italy confirmed this is a fast-developing crisis with supporters watching a team stuck on the boulevard of broken dreams

Even before the final weekend unfolds the 2026 Six Nations can be adjudged already as a vintage one. Three teams mathematically remain in the title race and all of them are still full of running. Whether it is France, Ireland or Scotland who ultimately pull clear, an eventful championship this year will be remembered fondly by almost everybody.

For every beaming winner, though, there inevitably has to be a frustrated, bruised loser. And to put it mildly things have not unfolded in the way England were hoping just a few short weeks ago. “On 14 March in Paris we want to be in a position entering that game where we can achieve what we’re all aiming to achieve,” Steve Borthwick said on 23 January. “We want England fans flooding across the Channel to watch the team in a massive encounter in the final round with the opportunity to achieve what we want.”

Max Dowman and Rio Ngumoha staked their claim for more game time while Fulham paid for a lack of ambition

Port Vale have only ever reached the last eight of the FA Cup once before in their entire history, in 1953-54, when they went one stage further, losing the semi-final at Villa Park 2-1 to West Brom thanks to a much-disputed winning goal. If only VAR had been present then, you might say. In their fifth-round victory over Sunderland this weekend, they were also unfortunate despite the presence of technology. Why was referee Anthony Taylor not asked to go and check the TV monitor when George Hall was cynically taken out by the Sunderland goalkeeper Melkor Ellberg, just outside the penalty area with the match on a knife-edge? Even if the striker’s run was going away from goal, he surely had the pace to have got a shot away. Let’s hope VAR give the remaining lower-division teams fair shrift when it comes to the rest of the competition. Peter Lansley

Match report: Port Vale 1-0 Sunderland

Match report: Mansfield Town 1-2 Arsenal

Match report: Newcastle 1-3 Manchester City

Match report: Wrexham 2-4 Chelsea (aet)

Match report: Wolves 1-3 Liverpool

Match report: Fulham 0-1 Southampton

As a new report reveals career ‘apartheid’ in newsrooms, I and many others wonder if the fine promises will ever bring genuine change

There’s a generally accepted ethical requirement for news organisations to reflect society, both in terms of the content they produce and the people who produce it. Unfortunately, this is just not happening. Look, for example, at the new study released this week by the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity revealing a DEI backlash in British journalism, with one respondent describing their office as an “apartheid newsroom”. Look, too, at the Press Awards, said to showcase “the best of national journalism in the UK”, and notably the individual awards shortlists. Search for the Black journalists in them. You’ll struggle. Diversity was clearly not a priority: several categories, including news reporter of the year, feature only men.

As the head of journalism and strategic communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, this all makes my heart sink.

Dr Omega Douglas is an academic and writer. Her latest book The Racial Dynamics of Reporting Africa: Colonial and Decolonial Practices is Mainstream Western News Media is published by Routledge.

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With its meditative pace and sincere interest in moral questions, Clint Bentley’s film of a rudderless man cutting down trees in Idaho’s verdant vistas has the air of a Hollywood classic from another era

Train Dreams is arguably the lowest-profile of all the Oscar best film nominees, and could have easily passed me by, destined instead to be lost in the sprawling Netflix library, if it weren’t for a phone call with a friend last year. She had just watched one of last year’s big films – which carried famous names, plenty of hype, and promised to generate lots of debate – and emerged feeling despondent about it as well as the state of cinema. It was a film that, like so many she had recently encountered, contained only empty provocations that amounted to nothing. “I don’t want to sound like a cliche,” she said, “but I believe this was all better in the 1970s!” Train Dreams was one of the few films of the year she had enjoyed.

So I came into Train Dreams, Clint Bentley’s adaptation of the Denis Johnson novella, with that idea in mind: that it was a thing out of step with our time and possibly better for it, too. Immediately, its use of a kindly voiced omniscient narrator recalled Hollywood classics of the late 20th century. Our voice of God drops us into Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in the early 1900s, to the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a man who drifts through his first two decades without much purpose before he falls in love with the free-spirited Gladys (Felicity Jones).

The Bavarian band known for a love of tinkering embraced a fresh ethos, ditching remote collaboration for a collective recording done in a week

‘It all went so fast,” Markus Acher says. “We’ve never been this fast at making a record.” He is sitting at the far end of a sofa in the Notwist’s Munich studio. On the other end is his brother Micha Acher; next to them, Cico Beck, who joined the band in 2014, balances on a stool. For a group known for meticulous studio craft, speed is an unfamiliar sensation. For most of their career, the Notwist have worked slowly, layering, revising, rethinking, as if wary of committing too soon to anything at all.

Formed in 1989 in the Bavarian town of Weilheim, the Notwist began as a heavy metal trio before evolving, over the next decade, into one of Germany’s most distinctive bands. Their breakthrough album, Neon Golden (2002), married indie songwriting to electronic textures, shaped largely by then-member Martin Gretschmann, also known as Console or Acid Pauli, in a way that felt inward-looking and strangely expansive. Its influence travelled far beyond Germany, securing the band a place in the canon of early-2000s indie experimentalism. Pitchfork named Neon Golden one of the best albums of the 2000s.

US among three countries so far backing measure triggered by Middle East war, according to reports

• Iran war drives oil prices above $100 a barrel

• Business live – latest updates

G7 finance ministers are preparing to discuss the release of emergency oil reserves, according to reports, after the US-Israel war with Iran sent the price of crude above $100 (£75) for the first time since 2022.

The ministers will discuss the release of the reserves in a call coordinated by the International Energy Agency (IEA), according to a report in the Financial Times.

It is estimated that every year more than one million bald people fly to Istanbul. They go for two reasons – hair transplant quality and competitive costs

“I used to look at my father and understand that I was destined to go bald,” says James McElroy. He smiles when he thinks back to his trip to Istanbul a year ago. “I had a few doubts at the beginning, but today I’m happy and satisfied. Yes, I had a hair transplant, I don’t hide it and I’m not ashamed of it. It was a somewhat intense experience, but I’d do it again – especially now that I’m single. I’m happy to talk about it and I’m happy to receive compliments. That wasn’t the goal, but I appreciate them.”

A patient is reading the terms and conditions of his contract before the transplant begins at Sule Hair Clinic.

There are sharply observed pleasures to be found in this black comedy of infidelity, revenge and intergenerational tension – but the plot is both implausible and predictable

John Lanchester has distinguished between his nonfiction and his novels as the line between “things happening in the world” and “the things that won’t leave you alone”. Over the last decade and a half that gap appears to have narrowed. His 2012 bestseller, Capital, used the global economic crisis (explained with characteristic verve and lucidity in the nonfiction Whoops!) to lend a sharply moral edge to a sprawling Dickensian story about the London property bubble, told through the class cross-section of a newly affluent south London street. His 2019 follow-up, The Wall, was a dystopian near-future tale in which rising sea levels have exacted a catastrophic toll: a heavily guarded sea wall encircles a Britain determined to fortify its vanishing coastline and keep out the refugees desperately seeking asylum. In 2019, global sea levels reached a record high.

Lanchester’s satirical chops are on full display in his latest, Look What You Made Me Do, but this time his focus is more personal than political. Set in a recognisably professional – for which read excruciatingly smug – north London peopled by architects and agents, Lanchester’s sixth novel is billed by its publishers as a black comedy.

A Guardian investigation with DeSmog reveals thousands of tonnes of fish are illegally turned into fishmeal and oil off the coast of Guinea-Bissau

The only ice factory on Bubaque, an island in west Africa’s Guinea-Bissau, is out of service. Local fishers, such as Pedro Luis Pereira, are forced to source ice from factories on the mainland, about 70km away – a six-hour round trip by boat.

“The machines have been broken for months,” Pereira says, as he pulls in his nets on the shore of the island inside the protected Bijagós archipelago. “We’ve alerted the ministry of fisheries, but so far, no one has come to fix them.”

Foreign industrial vessels anchored near the port of Bissau. Photograph: Davide Mancini

Maisie Adam and Scott Bryan talk comically and sensitively to people who found sudden tabloid and early internet fame in the 00s. Plus, Norse myths and history with Iain Glen from Game of Thrones

It’s all too easy to sneer at pop culture’s also-rans. This series from comic Maisie Adam and journalist Scott Bryan does the opposite, embracing people who found sudden fame – mostly in the 90s and 00s – and telling their stories with humour and care. Guests include Liberty X’s Kelli Young, who thinks she and her bandmates were seen as “too R&B” to win ITV’s Popstars – and is surprisingly grateful to the funk band who sued them. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Documentary reflects on how Victorian botanists began to remodel a barren ocean outpost, but omits some crucial environmental and social questions

From the dark belly of the ocean rises Ascension Island, a rocky outpost in the Atlantic Ocean born from volcanic eruptions and sediments accumulated over millions of years. While its formation feels like an act of cosmic creation, much of its landscape is human-made. During the Victorian era, British botanists brought plants to be cultivated locally, transforming a once barren land into a green oasis. Using this example as a starting point, Kevin Brennan and Laurence Durkin’s unhurried documentary contemplates the evolution of “terraforming,” a much-theorised ecological process in which humans alter a hostile environment to their needs.

Visually, this film unfolds in a series of static vignettes, which largely capture the natural topography of Ascension. Cracked lava fields and golden sands give way to lush forests, conjuring a striking colour palette of black, yellow, and green. The images are poetic, showcasing a stunning variety of flora and fauna; people are rarely seen on screen, their absence adding a touch of eeriness to the atmosphere.

From packrafting in Luxembourg to cycling in Slovenia and eclipse-spotting in Spain, here are some great ways to get the kids into the wild

Several companies offer affordable multi-activity trips for families in Greece, but if you’re looking for something less frenetic, and a bit more challenging for teenagers, how about Greek island-hopping by sea kayak? Running on regular dates through the summer months, Trekking Hellas’s three-day, two‑night odysseys in the Ionian Sea start in Nidri, on Lefkada, and paddle on past Skorpios to Meganisi, camping out at Lakka before continuing the next day to Mikros Gialos for a second night under the stars before turning for home. There are stops for swimming, resting and barbecues along the way, and some thrilling cave detours, but with about six hours of paddling a day, the minimum age is 14.
From €352pp including kayaking and camping equipment, guiding and meals (trekking.gr)

In search of a new adventure, Craig Munns went back to school. Now, at 65, he spends his days examining long-vanished life forms

Craig Munns has a large model of a T rex on his desk. He got it with a magazine subscription two decades ago. One day, a few years ago, he was sitting in his study, which was dense with books and yellow sticky notes and posters charting evolution from single cells upward, and he thought, “What am I going to do next in my life?” And his eyes lit upon the T rex.

Munns had recently taken on a job at the public library in Canberra, but it had always rankled with him that he had not studied for a degree, starting instead as an electronics trainee after he left school in Sydney, Australia. So he decided to enrol as a part-time student. He graduated at 62, with honours in palaeontology from the University of New England in Armidale, NSW.