Rey Mysterio vows to unmask El Grande Americano at WrestleMania 41
Ukraine says five regions damaged overnight after wave of drone and missile attacks by Russia
Donald Trump has said the US will “take a pass” on a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine if “parties make it difficult”. The US president made the comments to reporters during the swearing-in ceremony for Mehmet Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Trump added that he believed there was a “good chance” of “solving the problem”. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had earlier said the US will abandon its efforts “within days” to broker a peace agreement unless there are clear signs a settlement can be reached.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Will Oliver/UPI/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Will Oliver/UPI/REX/Shutterstock
News outlets pull articles featuring ‘psychologist and sex adviser’ Barbara Santini amid doubts over her credentials
Over the past couple of years, the Oxford-educated psychologist Barbara Santini has been widely quoted as an expert. She has contributed thoughts on everything from the psychological impact of the Covid pandemic to the importance of vitamin D and how playing darts can improve your health.
However, her pronouncements have begun to disappear from articles after concerns that Santini may not be all that she appears. Major news outlets have removed entire articles featuring Santini, or comments made by her, after a series of questions were raised over her qualifications – and even whether her entire identity could be an elaborate hoax.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
© Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
The writer’s previously unpublished notes from her sessions with a psychiatrist offer an incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression and creativity
Last month, the New York Public Library opened the doors on one of its most thrilling acquisitions of recent times: the archive of Joan Didion and her husband and collaborator John Gregory Dunne. After two years of preparation, both scholars and anyone with a library card can arrange a visit to pore over the material contained in a total of 336 boxes of correspondence, photographs and screenplays from the couple’s joint projects, which included the 1976 version of A Star Is Born and the film that in 1971 provided Al Pacino with his first leading role, The Panic in Needle Park.
Alongside material evidence of two long writing careers, there is much that is deeply personal: paperwork recording the naming of orchids in honour of Didion, Dunne and their adopted daughter Quintana, the couple’s only child; kitchen notebooks and lists of party guests; the handmade cards and pressed flowers that the young Quintana made for “the best mom ever”. But it is infinitely more troubled times that are the subject of a new book drawn from the archive, Notes to John – accounts of Didion’s sessions with psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon at the turn of the century, in which she discussed her daughter’s struggles with alcohol addiction and depression and the writer’s attempts to excavate the roots of their relationship in her own formative years.
Continue reading...© Photograph: John Bryson/Getty Images
© Photograph: John Bryson/Getty Images
Social media is turning the spring festival into yet another opportunity for lavish spending. What’s in your #EasterBasket?
As a child, I was keenly aware of the inequitable practices of the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and the so-called Easter Bunny. How could it be that my teeth were less valuable than Abbie Smith-Arthur’s? Why was my stocking sock-sized, and the Walter boys next door had novelty sacks the size of their sofa? For what reason did I get but one big Easter egg, and Bethany down the road got 11?
If I was a child today, I would be even more confused (and radicalised), thanks to the relentless rise of “Eastermas”. More than quarter of British adults now buy Easter presents, giving their loved ones not only chocolate but flowers, toys and clothes. On TikTok, videos tagged #EasterBasket show the headphones, trainers, face creams, keyrings, hoodies, teddies and concert tickets that parents bestow upon their children – in short, more gifts than most people receive at Christmas. I won’t deny that it is nice to give each other nice things, but I fear the trend puts pressure on parents, and normalises a level of consumption that would perhaps have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Elisabeth Mandl/Reuters
© Photograph: Elisabeth Mandl/Reuters
A poet’s memoir of family, trauma, and Virginia Woolf pulses with feeling and intelligence
Like most kids, Heather Christle was drilled about “stranger danger”. Like some, she had a family codeword designed to show that an adult picking them up from school when her mother was busy could be trusted. But, in her American home town in the 1980s, no other kid’s word was a bygone British sweet. And so “Dolly Mixture” joins the growing list of things learned from her English mother that Christle, looking back, finds out of place. Things such as dining etiquette, cardigans, M&S outfits, margarine. But also bigger stuff: beliefs and behaviours. Assumptions. Silence. Shame.
With her mother in her 70s and their relationship strained, Christle, a poet and academic, embarks on a quest for new understanding – of her mother, of “Englishness”, and of herself. In a memoir that pulses with feeling and intelligence, she excavates the past to expose difficult truths. As she proved with her acclaimed 2019 cultural history of tears, The Crying Book, she excels at facing the unfaceable, weaving her personal experience into the wider tapestry of science, history, politics and other people’s lives.
Continue reading...© Photograph: The National Trust Photolibrary/Alamy
© Photograph: The National Trust Photolibrary/Alamy
Statistics can help assess a potential recruit’s emotional control and leadership, while highlighting red flags
“The players didn’t show enough fight.” Listen to any pundit’s post-match reaction and you will hear variations of that soundbite. But can you analyse an athlete’s state of mind, based on their on-pitch body language?
In an era when football is increasingly leaning on data to demonstrate physical attributes, statistics offering an accurate indication of a player’s psychological qualities, such as emotional control and leadership, are harder to come by. But Premier League clubs including Brighton are using a technique intended to help in that regard with selection and recruitment.
Continue reading...© Composite: Guardian pictures
© Composite: Guardian pictures
Nayib Bukele has shown how brutal control can be sustained not just through force, but by raising the cost of speaking out
The Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) maximum security prison in El Salvador is the crown jewel of President Nayib Bukele’s efforts to quash not only criminal gangs, but also criticism and political opposition to his government. The “mega-prison” is also one of the more visible destinations in the emerging map of American deportations – a sprawling archipelago that includes conservative US districts, the Guantánamo military base and Central American waypoints connected by a tangle of military and charter flights.
That the two states have connected their penal architecture is no coincidence. Donald Trump’s aggressive policies towards foreigners build on Bukele’s infamous iron fist crackdown against criminal gangs: it’s a political toolkit that leverages anti-establishment anger to justify an authoritarian slide. In deploying strongman tactics to address social concerns, both leaders also cultivate a chilling culture of fear.
Jordana Timerman is a journalist based in Buenos Aires. She edits the Latin America Daily Briefing
Continue reading...© Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
© Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Coconut yoghurt basmati with a lemony finish, served with fried spiced potatoes
These “pickled” potatoes are for anyone whose mouth waters at the idea of dousing chips in salt and vinegar, as mine does. They’re not actually pickled, but cooked in a similar way to the Indian achar style of cooking that uses particular spices alongside an acidic ingredient, such as lemon juice. They go really well with a typical south Indian curd (yoghurt) rice and a fiery little shop-bought pickle.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food Styling: Emily Kydd. Prop Styling: Jennifer Kay. Food Styling Assistant: Laura Lawrence.
© Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food Styling: Emily Kydd. Prop Styling: Jennifer Kay. Food Styling Assistant: Laura Lawrence.
Chicken chain has been buying up art since 2004, which it displays on walls of its restaurants
On a weekday lunchtime the Nando’s restaurant in Maponya Mall in Soweto, the sprawling former Black township on Johannesburg’s outskirts, was busy with couples, white-collar workers and older women dining alone. Behind them, a vivid graffiti portrait of a young Black woman filled the wall.
The mural, by the Cape Town artist Kilmany-Jo Liversage, is part of one of the largest private art collections in the world and, its curators believe, potentially the largest on public display.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Spier Arts Trust for Nando’s Art Collection
© Photograph: Spier Arts Trust for Nando’s Art Collection
City residents are working out how to fill their streets with trees as evidence grows of their benefits
“I wanted to do something that would benefit as many people from the community as possible,” says Chloe Straw, pointing at a small but promising sapling visible through the window of her local cafe.
In 2023, Chloe began chatting to her neighbours in Haringey, north London, about trees. “I thought it’d be really nice to raise some money for trees on the main road. Everyone uses West Green Road, regardless of whether you have a lot of money or not, regardless of your background.”
Continue reading...© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
Most working people can be put into one of three categories, from idealistic yet unambitious to greedy and immoral. But there is another option …
Of all the things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent. There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but don’t. I’m talking about the ones who have got the power to shape their own careers, though you would never know it from their utterly unsurprising résumés. About the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless or just plain harmful jobs.
There’s an antidote to that kind of waste, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that’s the climate crisis or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic. It’s a longing to make a difference – and to build a legacy that truly matters.
Continue reading...© Illustration: Bruno Mangyoku/The Guardian
© Illustration: Bruno Mangyoku/The Guardian
Sonia Bompastor has her shot at ending the European champions’ reign and moving Blues step closer to history
As Chelsea’s quest for a quadruple enters its final month, there is no more imposing obstacle to navigate than this. Barcelona, the European champions in three of the past four campaigns, are once again standing in the way of the English champions as Chelsea strive to lift the only major trophy that has eluded them, and there could be no more worthy adversary.
There is more than a hint of deja vu about this semi-final. Not only because the first and second legs are taking place on the same dates, 20 April and 27 April, as they did last season, but also because it is the third straight year in which they have gone head-to-head at this stage, which both clubs can feel a touch unfortunate about. Once was tantalising. The rematch was welcome. The trilogy sounds enthralling but comes with a lingering sense that it might have been the final.
Continue reading...© Composite: Guardian Sport/Shutterstock/UEFA/Getty
© Composite: Guardian Sport/Shutterstock/UEFA/Getty
The mysterious death of an artist causes havoc among siblings in a novel that astutely observes family dynamics
What would writers do without problematic patriarchs? From King Lear to Logan Roy, they are the linchpins of countless family dramas: adored fathers who dominate and damage their children in equal measure.
The new novel from Rachel Joyce, bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Miss Benson’s Beetle and others, revolves around one such man: Vic Kemp, a successful artist with four grown-up children. Vic is a widower who raised his offspring alone, and the story begins with him summoning them to a noodle bar to announce that he’s in love with a twentysomething called Bella-Mae he met online. He’s also the proud owner of a goatee, a surefire sign of an identity crisis. The offspring are aghast. “If he’s so lonely, he could get a cat,” says one.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Pål Hansen
© Photograph: Pål Hansen
The order is the latest example of how the courts are challenging the Trump administration’s overhaul of the immigration system
The US supreme court has ordered the Trump administration to temporarily halt the deportation of Venezuelan men in immigration custody, after their lawyers said they were at imminent risk of removal without the judicial review previously mandated by the justices.
“The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the justices said early on Saturday.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters
© Photograph: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters
Survey finds social media main cause of poor behaviour, with pupils mimicking Donald Trump and Andrew Tate
A rise in misogyny and racism is flooding UK schools as pupils ape the behaviour of figures such as Donald Trump and Andrew Tate after exposure through social media and online gaming, teachers have warned.
A survey by the NASUWT union found most teachers identified social media as “the number one cause” of pupil misbehaviour, with female staff bearing the brunt. Teachers also raised concerns about parents who refuse to accept school rules or take responsibility for their children’s behaviour.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock
Arne Slot has denied Darwin Núñez was dropped from Liverpool’s win against West Ham because of a training-ground row with a member of his coaching staff.
The Liverpool head coach said on Sunday that Núñez was absent from the 2-1 victory at Anfield having felt unwell during training the day before, although the striker sat behind the substitutes throughout the game. Speculation has been rife that the Uruguay international, whom Slot criticised for his work rate against Wolves and Aston Villa in February, was left out for disciplinary reasons.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
The new site features a photo of President Donald Trump walking between the words “lab” and “leak” under a White House heading
© PA Wire
Pair were issued a warning by Big Brother after their actions
© ITV
Final US-Ukraine minerals deal could be reached by the end of next week
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Leeds and Burnley would be promoted on Monday if they both win and the Clarets beat Sheffield United at Turf Moor
© Getty Images
© PA Wire
The case has become a symbol of the brutal mistreatment of immigrant women who rebelled against inflexible family rules
© AP Photo/Luca Bruno
Not all the robots completed the race, but some humanoids wore running shoes
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Researchers recommend that patients not take certain supplements before taking an MRI
© AFP via Getty
Donald Trump’s presidential envoy Steve Witkoff compared Élysée Palace to the Republican’s Mar-a-Lago resort during a visit to France for Ukraine security talks.
© AFP or licensors
Dementia is usually associated with older people, but it can affect anyone, even children
© Alamy/PA
The Olympic champion triumphed over Wout van Aert to win the Brabantse Pijl
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Police are appealing to identify a woman who was seen dancing in the middle of a Wembley road before a hit-and-run collision on Thursday, 17 April.
© Metropolitan Police
News arrives after months of confusion surrounding bar’s whereabouts
© Toblerone
Zverev asked the chair umpire to eject the heckler and the tournament confirmed the fan was removed
© Getty Images for BMW