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Ali Martin is our man on the ground, he’s dipped his quill early and sent us this:

Greetings from Lahore, where the sun is shining and a humdinger awaits. First time at the Gaddafi Stadium for me and have to say, it’s a pretty cool ground. It also feels box fresh after a refurbishment that beat its deadline in a way that any written journalist would doff a cap too. Speaking of which, there’s no Aussie press pack on the ground in Pakistan, sadly, although we’ll no doubt catch up with a few at the World Test Championship final this summer. Talk of a decent crowd today and the queues outside were promising. See what happens, might look sparse on the TV at first - security is very tight outside - but should hopefully fill up later.”

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© Photograph: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

© Photograph: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

Hamas says six captives to be freed from Gaza in swap for about 600 Palestinian prisoners and detainees

A masked militant has sat down at a table on the stage with a Red Cross representative and they appear to be signing documents.

Live images from Rafah are showing masked Hamas fighters taking to the makeshift stage, with one speaking into a microphone.

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© Photograph: Hatem Khaled/Reuters

© Photograph: Hatem Khaled/Reuters

St. Clair, 26, brought the legal action against the billionaire tech tycoon a week after her bombshell public claims that she gave birth to Musk's 13th child.

The Los Angeles Fire Department union boss blasted Mayor Karen Bass for firing department Chief Kristin Crowley, claiming the head firefighter was being used as a “scapegoat” for the city’s response to the deadly Palisades wildfire. United Firefighters of Los Angeles City President Freddy Escobar was left outraged by Bass’ decision to axe Crowley. “On...

The streamer rarely lets people try it out for free.

The freshness of pureed peas and mint and the tartness of lemony pickled peas combine to give pasta ‘rice’ a perky, vibrant lift

Today’s recipe is inspired by an Italian method of preserving, sott’olio, which translates to “under oil”. The most delicate of vegetables, such as peas, are picked at peak ripeness, plunged briefly in vinegar, then stored in oil to preserve them until desired. I’ll admit that my recipe wantonly uses frozen petit pois, which are then in part pickled and in part whizzed up to make a stock in which to cook the orzo; nevertheless, eating it brings its own warm and welcome Italian sunshine to my English kitchen in cold, dark February.

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© Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food styling assistant: Lola Salome Smadja.

© Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food styling assistant: Lola Salome Smadja.

All the way across the field there are mouthwatering head-to-heads with players pushing for the tour to Australia

For British & Irish Lions hopefuls, time is running out. Three Test matches left to stake their claim, to catch Andy Farrell’s eye and book a place on the plane. Farrell is due to be at Twickenham on Saturday and he will be analysing everything. As a player that’s precisely where you want to be.

At this stage of the Six Nations, England against Scotland feels all the more pivotal for Lions hopefuls. We can safely say that there will be a large Ireland contingent and, unless something dramatic happens in the coming weeks, a relatively small group of Wales players. That congested middle is full of England and Scotland players and that makes Saturday’s match all the more mouthwatering.

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© Composite: Getty Images/Guardian Design

© Composite: Getty Images/Guardian Design

Sunday’s clash between declining champions and their likely successors is a far cry from recent title battles

There has been something pleasingly old-fashioned about the Premier League title race this season. It may be a modern phenomenon that the side top of the table have lost only one of 26 games, and that the side in second have lost two, but after the years of champions habitually racking up 90 points and more, the general fallibility has been refreshing.

Liverpool are still on course for 89 points but they are not implacable, remorseless winners in the way Manchester City so often were. They reached a peak in their 2-0 home win over Real Madrid at the end of November and, although they were comfortable winners over City the following Sunday, there has been a sense since of a side, if not quite clinging on to the mountain top, then at the very least not striding quite so confidently along the ridge.

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© Photograph: John Powell/Liverpool FC/Getty Images

© Photograph: John Powell/Liverpool FC/Getty Images

Deaths on the road costs countries up to 5% of GDP. Centring transport around people, not cars, can propel development

If you had to guess the leading cause of death for children and young people around the world, what would you say? Malaria perhaps? Pneumonia? Suicide? They’re all high up there, but no, it’s road accidents.

Cars have been around for more than 120 years, and we know how to prevent these tragedies. Yet road crashes still claim more than two lives every minute – killing nearly 1.2 million people every year.

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© Photograph: Piyal Adhikary/EPA

© Photograph: Piyal Adhikary/EPA

French family behind project visited Kremlin in 2014 to discuss building ‘Tsarland’ in annexed Crimea

With its spectacular shows featuring Viking longboats, Roman charioteers and sword-wielding knights who perform death-defying stunts, Puy du Fou in France is consistently ranked among the world’s best theme parks. Each performance of its centrepiece Cinéscénie show, which depicts 700 years of French history, features more than 1,000 actors, hundreds of horses and about 800 fireworks.

Now the company has set its sights on bringing its brand of immersive history to the UK via a £600m investment to build its mock medieval castles, hotels and restaurants on farmland just off the M40 in Oxfordshire. It has asked the upmarket property firm Savills to help with its planning applications and is expected to look for British co-investors for a project that it says will create thousands of jobs.

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© Photograph: Jean-Sébastien Evrard/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Jean-Sébastien Evrard/AFP/Getty Images

At a snowy Berlinale, against a backdrop of political divisions, this year’s standouts include Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, Richard Linklater’s Broadway biopic of Lorenz Hart, and intensely sexual romance starring Jessica Chastain

Berlin can be a touch inhospitable in February; this year was no exception, with visitors to the film festival enduring heavy snow, treacherous pavements and a two-day, city-wide transport strike. But the Berlinale itself is contending with a frosty climate. Traditionally a hub for film-makers of forthright, oppositional persuasions, it must now attempt to flourish in the face of Europe’s swing to the right, with Germany’s elections imminent and the troubling rise of the extremist AfD party.

Every new festival head faces the challenge of reinventing the event they have inherited, and in the Berlinale’s 75th year, the bar was set especially high given the scrutiny the festival has received. Last year’s closing night brought controversy, with some German politicians taking exception to award acceptance speeches by the Palestinian and Israeli directors of the (now Oscar-nominated) protest documentary No Other Land, about Israel’s village demolitions on the West Bank. So new festival director, the American Tricia Tuttle – formerly head of the BFI London film festival – faces the challenge of giving the Berlinale a boost, while managing political expectations from different fronts.

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© Photograph: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images

A historic number of arrests were made, but the days of targeted murder or massive political influence are long gone

Palermo has not seen anything like it for years. Helicopters in the pre-dawn sky. Carabinieri barracks across Sicily emptied, with all 1,200 officers deployed. The Cacciatori – red-bereted shock cops – brought over from the wilds of Calabria. The Carabinieri’s own film units serving up a morning montage of flashing blue lights, balaclava-wearing officers with submachine guns, police dogs sniffing, cottage doors breaking, and burly, handcuffed men ushered into Alfa Romeos. And then, of course, in the press, the humiliating wiretaps of gangsters sharing their secrets. Cosa Nostra is back in the headlines, and back under the cosh.

Italian law enforcement is good at this stuff. Not a single one of the 181 men and women targeted for arrest on 11 February managed to go on the lam before the crackdown. Based on the numbers alone, this raid was the biggest anti-mafia operation since the 1980s. But Sicily was a very different place back then. It teetered on the brink of becoming a narco-state, and Cosa Nostra treated the Italian institutions with contempt, murdering any prosecutor, police officer or politician who got in its way.

You’ve got to get by on a slab of hash? Is that how far we’ve fallen? The guys from the old days, the ones who’ve tragically been sent to prison for life, would they be talking about a slab of hash? If they talked about hash, it was because a shipload was due in … We’re down in the dirt lads. We think we’re doing business, but it’s others who are really at it.

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© Photograph: Antonio Melita/Pacific Press/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Antonio Melita/Pacific Press/REX/Shutterstock

Dear Abby gives advice to a reader whose partner will leave their house, along with a husband who did not have his wife's back.

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© Illustration: Tom Gauld

© Illustration: Tom Gauld

Hamas on Saturday released all six remaining live Israeli hostages promised under the first stage of the ongoing cease-fire deal.

Gamboa faces charges of attempted kidnapping and battery of a child.

The writers of the new Wild Guide: Morocco share the best locations for hiking, surfing, swimming and sleeping under the stars

Extending from the Atlantic coast to the edge of the Sahara and with a huge variety of terrain – from lush oases and valleys peppered with thyme, rosemary, argan trees and date palms to rocky gorges and arid plains – the Anti-Atlas mountains cater for even the most indecisive traveller.

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© Photograph: John Weller

© Photograph: John Weller

The hasty regeneration of Corby’s old steelworks poisoned a generation. Now the story of how it came to court is told in a harrowing, if slightly melodramatic, new Netflix series

Jack Thorne writes the kind of meaningful, worthwhile dramas that you definitely – no, honestly – do plan to watch … but just maybe not tonight. Best Interests from 2023, about a distraught mother battling the NHS doctors who decide to allow her severely ill teenage daughter to die, was warm, miraculously funny, and as gripping as a thriller. It was also so traumatising that it could make the viewer feel as if they were in actual physical pain. Before that, there was The Accident, whose matter-of-fact title only hinted at the harrowing subject matter: the series covered the aftermath of a construction site explosion in Wales that killed eight children.

Toxic Town (Thursday 27 February, Netflix) – Thorne’s new four-part series – could be considered a companion piece to The Accident: it also deals with a deadly construction site and negligent moneymen. The difference is that this one genuinely happened. You may have never heard of the 2009 Corby toxic waste case, but it was a legal landmark – the first time a link between toxic waste and birth defects was properly established anywhere in the world.

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© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

Fast fashion and drinks cans among technological-age matter most likely to endure as fossils, say scientists

As an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy. But two scientists exploring which items from our technological civilisation are most likely to survive for many millions of years as fossils have reached an ironic but instructive conclusion: fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature.

“Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.”

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© Photograph: Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz

© Photograph: Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz

The US president is breaking every negotiating rule in the book, to the bewilderment of his allies. Europe is now at a crossroads

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© Illustration: Guardian Design

© Illustration: Guardian Design

Transgender teenager Brianna Ghey was stabbed to death by two 15-year-olds. The killers had been radicalised on the dark web, while the victim was trapped in an online world of her own. Now her mother has become friends with the parent of one of the murderers

The first thing I notice about Esther Ghey is a blossom tree trailing down her left arm to her hand. There is one pink flower on the tattoo. Pink was her daughter Brianna’s favourite colour. If Brianna had got her way, the whole world would have been pink. And just after she was murdered by two teenage schoolchildren in February 2023, Ghey says, the world did briefly turn pink. The local blossom trees filled with the blossomiest blossom she had ever seen. “It really felt she was with us and that she was sending us a sign she was OK,” she says.

Now Ghey has written a book, Under a Pink Sky. It’s a memoir of her and Brianna’s lives, and a manifesto of sorts; a shocking exploration of how deadly smartphones and online spaces can be. It’s also one of the most unflinching, inspirational autobiographies I’ve read, a remarkable cry of hope from the depths of despair.

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© Photograph: Fabio De Paola

© Photograph: Fabio De Paola

The ‘fantasticallly delicious’ semla has gone from a simple Nordic springtime favourite to a Noma-approved delicacy

The earliest version of the Swedish semla was a 16th-century plain bread bun served in a soup of warm milk eaten only on Shrove Tuesday in preparation for the 40-day fast of Lent.

It is a far cry from this year’s hit varieties, which include Dubai chocolate (the chocolate bar with a knafeh and pistachio filling that became a TikTok trend) and chokladboll (based on a Scandinavian oat, cocoa and butter ball – a popular fika item).

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© Photograph: Rebecka Uhlin/The Guardian

© Photograph: Rebecka Uhlin/The Guardian

The PM and his ministers are supporting illiberal laws that hard-right authoritarians could apply with zeal

If the Trump project implodes, it might take with it the extreme and far-right European parties to which it is umbilically connected. Like all such parties, the hard-right Reform UK poses as patriotic while grovelling to foreign interests, and this could be its undoing.

But we cannot bank on it. The UK government must do all it can to prevent the disaster that has befallen several other European nations. If it fails to meet people’s needs and keeps echoing far-right talking points, we could go the same way as Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Finland, Sweden and Austria.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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© Photograph: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock

From back, basting and zigzag to ‘the stuff that dreams are made of’, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 What TV cliffhanger was resolved on 21 November 1980?
2 Which body in the solar system has lakes of liquid methane?
3 What Yorkshire side were the first national women’s football league champions?
4 In a 1941 film, what was “the stuff that dreams are made of”?
5 Who writes the Empyrean fantasy book series?
6 What does the US defense department classify as UAP?
7 What arboreal project occupies 200 square miles of central England?
8 Which monarch was killed in 1057 at the Battle of Lumphanan?
What links:
9 Emotion icon; glamorous camping; smoke and fog; fan magazine; romantic comedy?
10 Cantuar; Dunelm; Ebor; Petriburg; Roffen; Sarum?
11 Tom Cruise (6.5 mins, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation); Kate Winslet (7.25 mins, Avatar: The Way of Water)?
12 Seth Pecksniff; Howard Roark; Anthony Royal; Rudolf Santonix?
13 Back; basting; blind; cross; running; slip; zigzag?
14 8 (1950-60); 9 (1961-90); 10 (1991-2009); 25 (since 2010)?
15 Truby King; Benjamin Spock; Donald Winnicott; Penelope Leach; Gina Ford; Jo Frost?

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© Photograph: David Clapp/Getty Images

© Photograph: David Clapp/Getty Images

Talk about precious cargo!

US president earlier drew criticism after saying Kyiv ‘should have never started’ war; Trump predicts Ukraine will soon sign minerals deal with US. What we know on day 1,095

• Europe live: latest news on the Ukraine war

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© Photograph: Francis Chung/EPA

© Photograph: Francis Chung/EPA

Experts warn young people should have limited use of devices and spend more time outdoors

Every hour young people spend in front of screens increases their chance of being shortsighted, researchers have found, with experts warning young children should have limited use of devices and spend more time outdoors.

Myopia is caused by having an over elongated eyeball and is a growing problem, with research suggesting about 40% of children and adolescents worldwide could have the condition by 2050.

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© Photograph: Suzi Media Production/Getty Images

© Photograph: Suzi Media Production/Getty Images

From balaclavas to open-necked shirts and floor-length frocks, here’s what caught the eye at the awards ceremony this year

• Baftas 2025: the red carpet, the ceremony, the winners – live!

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© Photograph: Scott Garfitt/BAFTA/Getty Images

© Photograph: Scott Garfitt/BAFTA/Getty Images

Mark Cohen’s evocative shot of a child with some bubble gum machines is part of a series capturing the vibrant characters and street life of the Big Apple

When he was about 30, the celebrated American photographer Mark Cohen lived in a dorm at New York University while spending a month at the film school there. In breaks from classes, he would wander the streets of the city taking pictures. Nearly all those images were unprinted and until recently existed only as negatives. A new book, Tall Socks, collects that work for the first time.

This picture of a kid with his hand in the bubble gum machine is freighted with the weight of time and place of that backstory; those of us of a certain age will be able to recall the exact fairground feel and resistance of the handle that ejected the gum in its little plastic pod, as well as that eternal childish hope that someone might, this time, have left the prize – with its free-gift creepy-crawly – in the chute, waiting to be discovered.

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© Photograph: Mark Cohen / Gost Books

© Photograph: Mark Cohen / Gost Books

Hamas freed more hostages on Saturday in exchange for more than 600 Palestinian prisoners as part of the delicate ceasefire agreement with Israel.

Conservatives are mistaking public dislike of the cultural left for enthusiasm for the opposite dogma

Despite Trump’s diplomatic cavalry charge, the Kremlin will continue to view the west as an enemy

Americans are finding a haven in Spain where their spending power goes a long way

The body of a woman who was presumed to have been one of four dead hostages Hamas handed over to Israel was positively identified Saturday morning.

Leftover cooked pork and bones are essential ingredients in this hearty Asturian winter stew

Fabada Asturiana is classic Spanish cooking at its simplest and best. This stew of creamy white beans cooked slowly with pork and cured meat is traditionally made with fabes de la Granja (or judion beans), morcilla (Spanish black pudding), chorizo and lacón (cured pork shoulder, and similar to pancetta); it’s also the perfect dish for using up leftover roast pork.

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© Photograph: Tom Hunt/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Hunt/The Guardian

Life drawing hit the headlines when a north London class, which had been running for more than 30 years, was told to cover up its naked models or find a new location. Ellie Heney, 32, from Lancaster, has been a life model for 13 years and hopes to be one for the rest of her life. She explains why

It was my first year of university in Liverpool and it was a typical broke student situation. I saw a poster saying £20 for life modelling and when you’re living on beans on toast you think: ‘Well, I can do that.’ So I gave it a go.

It’s the strangest thing in the world when you do it for the first time. I remember my heart was pounding and the adrenaline was rushing and the back of my head was prickly because I was thinking: ‘What on earth am I doing? This is crazy!’

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© Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

© Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

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© Illustration: The Guardian

© Illustration: The Guardian

My wife has developed an aversion to cooking while becoming increasingly fussy about what she’ll eat. Lucky me …

When the oldest one left home for the second time about six years ago, my wife made an announcement.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m never cooking again.”

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© Illustration: Selman Hosgor/The Guardian

© Illustration: Selman Hosgor/The Guardian

Gráinne, 31, a software engineer and musician, meets Alexander, 34, a civil servant

What were you hoping for?
A giggle with someone I fancy!

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© Composite: Paul McElane/The Guardian

© Composite: Paul McElane/The Guardian

Bibas’ remains were identified in the early hours of Saturday morning at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute after Hamas handed off ‘anonymous unidentified’ remains in a previous exchange, The Times of Israel reported.