© José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times
With the rhetoric not matching the reality, future Olympics hosts need to forge clearer sustainable standards
By the end of the 21st century, only eight of the 21 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics are projected to be cold enough to reliably host the Games due to climate change. Challenges faced by Milano Cortina 2026 organisers such as producing artificial snow, establishing transport links between remote locations and building new infrastructure are likely to become more omnipresent at future editions.
In response to a petition asking the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to prevent fossil fuel companies from sponsoring winter sports, the IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, said the governing body is “having conversations in order to be better” in its approach to climate change. A New Weather Institute report estimated that the fossil fuel giant Eni, carmaker Stellantis and ITA Airways sponsoring Milano Cortina 2026 will induce an additional 40% to the Games’ carbon footprint, enough to melt 3.2 square km of snow cover and 20 million tonnes of glacier ice.
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© Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP
© Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP
© Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP
Manager has already undergone a tactical evolution but needs further progress if his side seek highest honours
At first glance, Anthony Gordon appears to have little in common with Sir Keir Starmer but, like the prime minister, the Newcastle forward looks infinitely more surefooted on foreign soil than domestic battlegrounds.
In the Champions League, Gordon has scored 10 goals in nine games. In the Premier League, meanwhile, he has managed a modest three in 21 appearances, two of which were penalties. Whether deployed wide on the left or, following a recent positional shift, at centre-forward, Gordon seems emblematic of a wider Newcastle paradox. Just like Eddie Howe’s team, he is irrepressible one match and ineffective the next.
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© Photograph: AP
© Photograph: AP
© Photograph: AP
In the last of the series, the writer returns to three passed-over places where he used to live – Harrow, Clitheroe and Princetown in Devon
The last in this series of underexplored, overlooked, bypassed towns revisits three places loosely linked to somewhere I’ve lived at different stages of my life. Relocating is grand-scale vacationing, as there are a few months when the new place feels like a holiday destination – fresh, strange, not filtered and tainted by habit or prejudice. Going back years later is part-pilgrimage, part-funeral.
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© Photograph: Brian Anthony/Alamy
© Photograph: Brian Anthony/Alamy
© Photograph: Brian Anthony/Alamy
Mistaken identity, dementia, family dysfunction and a murky past entwine in this Spanish horror involving a spritely octogenarian with a penchant for torture
Understandably, we tend to think of elderly women as among the most vulnerable in society, and so that means they make excellent nemeses in horror films because no one thinks that an old dear could do much damage. Unless, that is, she’s got a fire poker, a house full of useful clutter, dementia and a violent streak, as is the case with Alicia, played here by the wonderful Carmen Maura, once the lead in Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Now 80 years old, still spry as a whippet and clearly up for movie mischief, Maura gives Alicia a dirty glint in her eye as she confuses her daughter’s ex-boyfriend Pedro (Daniel Hendler, showing great comic chops) with her late husband Cesar. He apparently turned Alicia on to some BDSM fun and games in their youth, and may have assisted Alicia in covering up a murder or two. Unless she’s just making that part up – it’s hard to tell what’s true or false given her murky memory.
On a dark and stormy night, Pedro arrives at the insistence of his ex Laura (Agustina Liendo) to check on Alicia in the decrepit mansion where she lives alone. Laura is on a road trip with her young daughter (Emma Cetrángolo), but she’s sensed that something’s up, especially since when she called Alicia’s carer, Alicia herself answered the phone. Pedro’s unfortunate resemblance to Cesar gets him lashed to an armchair in chains and duct tape while Alicia quizzes him on their history, with gory results.
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© Photograph: Vale Fiorini/Shudder
© Photograph: Vale Fiorini/Shudder
© Photograph: Vale Fiorini/Shudder
The film-maker’s passionate and richly textured new short Papillon (Butterfly) tells the heartbreaking story of French-Jewish swimmer Alfred Nakache, who was stripped of his citizenship in Vichy France
“My father would’ve loved me to swim competitively. I was in a club when I was young, but I always set off a little bit late in races – and so I had no chance of winning.” French animation director Florence Miailhe chuckles about her swimming career being over before it began. Happily, the same isn’t true of film-making. At 70, she may have left it late for her first Oscar nomination, in the animated short category; but the work in question – the passionate and richly textured Papillon (Butterfly), about world-record-holding French-Jewish swimmer Alfred Nakache – gives her every chance of taking the prize.
Miailhe isn’t sure why Nakache – whom her parents met while they were in the resistance – came to mind again in the mid-2010s. “Frankly, I don’t know why my memory was working like that. Maybe because I was thinking of my father,” Miailhe says. Memory is what runs through Papillon, which is swept away on surging tides of reminiscences as Nakache bathes for the final time at Cerbère on the Spanish border (where he died of a heart attack in 1983).
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© Photograph: Florence Miailhe
© Photograph: Florence Miailhe
© Photograph: Florence Miailhe
US photographer Jeff Mermelstein has been likened to the winged insect due to his passion for flitting from one attractive subject to the next, as shown in his new book of work
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© Photograph: Jeff Mermelstein
© Photograph: Jeff Mermelstein
© Photograph: Jeff Mermelstein
Detectives say tools supplied by Palantir were integral to convictions of a criminal gang that stole £800,000
It was fraud on a grand scale. The “Fuck the Police” criminal gang based in Luton and Romania stole £800,000 in more than 3,000 withdrawals from cash machines in dozens of locations throughout 2024.
The police investigation matched the crime in its complexity. When detectives in Bedfordshire seized the suspects’ two dozen smartphones, they were faced with a mountain of potential digital evidence – 1.4 terabytes of information, according to the authorities, connecting co-conspirators across eastern England and the Bacau region of Romania.
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© Photograph: GK Images/Alamy
© Photograph: GK Images/Alamy
© Photograph: GK Images/Alamy
Dark magic, fascism and romance in blitz-stricken London: this exuberant novel is a popcorny delight
When I teach creative writing, I often find myself insisting upon the essential importance of fun: that while the process of writing can and should be challenging, there’s no benefit to be had in martyrdom, and actually a level of relish is neither an indulgence or a distraction, but pretty compelling evidence of an author having found her proper form and subject. It’s what keeps you coming back. If you aren’t bent gigglingly over your manuscript, like a stock photo model alone with her salad, then what’s the point of any of it? There’s a stable of classics I draw on to evidence this claim, great novels where a big part of the appeal is feeling as though you’ve stumbled into a very interesting person’s exact idea of a very good time: Woolf’s Orlando, Nabokov’s Pnin, Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, The Pisces by Melissa Broder. A lot of Austen, but maybe most of all Emma. And from now on, I’ll be adding Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch to the list.
His fourth work of fiction in a genre-spanning oeuvre, Nonesuch is a historical fantasy set during the second world war, every paragraph of which is packed with authorial zest. The novel opens in London, August 1939: war has been declared, but hasn’t yet made its reality felt in the city’s streets, and Iris Hawkins, an ambitious office clerk, makes her way through the sun-baked West End in a slinky dress. One half of a disastrous date later, she’s being whisked away to a DIY surrealist film club in bohemian Bloomsbury – not her scene at all – and two extremely fateful introductions: the first to Geoffrey Hale, a sweetly apprehensive BBC television engineer; and the second to the object of Geoffrey’s guileless infatuation, one Lady Lalage Cunningham, an icy aristocratic beauty with amazing hair and worrisome political sympathies. Cue chaos. Nonesuch follows the bolshy Iris from her seedy summer’s night through a regrettable Hampstead hook-up, and, eventually, neck-deep into a time-travelling plot by “magical fascist lunatics” to assassinate Winston Churchill. The novel is a pleasing pasticcio of romance, occultism, non-Euclidean geometry and airborne adventure across the blitz-stricken rooftops of London. It is difficult to imagine it would hold together quite so well in other hands than Spufford’s.
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© Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images
© Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images
© Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images
In Japan to announce her switch to Uniqlo, the British No 1 says frustrations only fuel the fire as she looks to Indian Wells and beyond
Emma Raducanu has no immediate plans to appoint a new coach as she attempts to kickstart a frustrating season in the US next month. The British No 1 will play at Indian Wells and in the Miami Open in March without a full-time replacement for Francisco Roig – her ninth coach since she turned professional – with whom she parted company after her second-round exit at the Australian Open in January.
“Right now I wouldn’t say I’m actively looking for a coach,” Raducanu says in Tokyo, where on Tuesday she was unveiled as a global brand ambassador for the Japanese clothes retailer Uniqlo after ending her association with Nike.
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© Photograph: Uniqlo
© Photograph: Uniqlo
© Photograph: Uniqlo
Exclusive: Documents show Andrea Jenkyns asked how she could help firm after major gas find in Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire’s Reform party mayor, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, has courted the head of an American oil and gas dynasty in the hope of bringing fracking to the county, the Guardian can reveal.
Egdon Resources, a British subsidiary of the US fracker Heyco Energy, announced a major gas discovery in Lincolnshire’s Gainsborough Trough last year. Jenkyns, who became the first mayor of Greater Lincolnshire in May, reached out personally to the company asking how she “could help with your recent gas find in my county”, according to records released by the mayoral authority in response to a freedom of information request.
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© Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
British Retail Consortium warns over ‘endemic’ violence towards shop workers and says theft is causing anxiety
Criminal gangs are “systematically” targeting shops, retailers have warned, with 5.5m incidents of shoplifting detected last year, costing the industry an estimated £400m.
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has warned over “endemic” violence towards shop workers – who faced an average 36 incidents of violence involving a weapon every day last year – and said high levels of theft was causing “anxiety” among retail staff.
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© Photograph: Peter Titmuss/Alamy
© Photograph: Peter Titmuss/Alamy
© Photograph: Peter Titmuss/Alamy
On the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion, we look back on some of the powerful photojournalism documenting the conflict
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© Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
A fuss-free, comforting supper to see you through the last days of winter
This is everyday cooking, the kind that comes naturally in winter. Carrots are always around and often forgotten, but they give a lot when you treat them properly. The saffron brings warmth and colour, and always makes me think of home. February can feel quiet and grey, and this stew suits that mood. It is comforting without being heavy, made for evenings when you want something ready on the stove and bread on the table, eaten calmly and enjoyed without any fuss.
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© Photograph: Rita Platts/The Guardian. Food styling: Hanna Miller. Prop styling: Louie Waller. Food styling assistant: Isobel Clarke.
© Photograph: Rita Platts/The Guardian. Food styling: Hanna Miller. Prop styling: Louie Waller. Food styling assistant: Isobel Clarke.
© Photograph: Rita Platts/The Guardian. Food styling: Hanna Miller. Prop styling: Louie Waller. Food styling assistant: Isobel Clarke.
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