One of the greatest mountain guides will attempt to scale the world’s highest peak for the 31st time — and possibly the 32nd time as well — and break his own record
There are tens of thousands of restaurants in Paris, but an overwhelming choice makes it all the more difficult to find the best ones, says destination expert Anna Richards
As a new report suggests that the number of young churchgoers has quadrupled, Helen Coffey investigates this potential UK spiritual revival – and asks why the next generation is more likely to be keeping the faith
U.S. Vice President JD Vance is set to visit India on a four-day tour as the two countries seek to strengthen their partnership by negotiating a bilateral trade deal
The Everglades is more than just swamps, fan boats and alligators and restoration efforts impact more than the land between Florida’s east and west coasts
A collection of Zimbabwean stone sculptures will be the centerpiece of an exhibition at Oxford University meant to “contextualize” the legacy of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes
Nearly six years after a man fatally shot 23 people in a racist attack targeting Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in Texas near the U.S.-Mexico border, the gunman's criminal case is set to come to a close
It’s worn by everyone from French mechanics to Harry Styles. What is it about the chore jacket that makes it so enduring – and can a modern version ever be truly authentic?
Look around you and before too long you are likely to spot a chore jacket. I saw a particularly fine example on a dad last weekend at a heritage railway. As warm days stretch into still-cold evenings, beer gardens are full of them. They are worn down allotments and in towns, and I have a few in my own wardrobe. Because what began as everyday workwear for French factory employees more than a century ago has today become a wardrobe stalwart. You can even find chore jackets in the supermarket, with Sainsbury’s Tu and Asda’s George offering the cheapest – the simple design lends itself to mass production.
They march across my Instagram feed, from workwear-inspired brands LF Markey, Folk or Uskees, down through high street stores such as Zara and John Lewis, as well as at hyper-expensive label The Row – your French machinist might have muttered a piquant “dis donc!” at its chore, with pockets too close together and a £1,500 price tag. The jacket has been worn by the likes of Brooklyn Beckham and Hailey Bieber, while Harry Styles is often seen in a version by SS Daley, the label inspired by British class tensions (and in which he has a financial stake).
Last week’s ruling clarified the legal safeguards of the Equality Act. However, it was a travesty that the battle needed to be fought at all
Middle-aged women are expected to fade into the background, to be apologetic for their existence, to quietly accept their lot. They’re not supposed to stick up for themselves, to enforce their boundaries, to say no. As a woman, these societal expectations have been drummed into me from day one. But still. The swell of anger and disgust that rose in response to the supreme court judgment last week that made clear women’s rights are not for dismantling – rights already won, that were supposed to be ours all along – has taken my breath away.
I was in court last Wednesday to hear Lord Hodge confirm that the Equality Act’s legal protections that were always intended for women are, indeed, reserved for women. He reiterated that trans people continue to have the same robust legal protections against discrimination and harassment as any other protected group, something I’ve always emphasised in my own writing. But men who identify as female – whether or not they have a legal certificate – are not to be treated as though female for the purposes of equalities law.
The German photographer captures a moment of tranquility one Scandinavian summer
“Who has known the ocean?” asked the pioneering American marine biologist, conservationist and writer Rachel Carson in her groundbreaking essay Undersea, published in the Atlantic in 1937. With our “earth-bound senses”, neither you nor I can grasp how profoundly the ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is shallow and deep, light and dark, placid and chaotic, benign and dangerous – filled with surprise and, possibly overall, beauty. For this reason, Carson observed, “no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry”.
The same is perhaps true of visually representing the ocean, from prints to films to multimedia installations. A new book, Ocean, accompanies a sprawling group show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, a country in which one is never more than 32 miles (about 51 kilometres) from the sea – the fluid, changeable body laps at every just-distant horizon. Anna Atkins, Jean Painlevé, Hiroshi Sugimoto and John Akomfrah are but a few of the artists whose marine visions are presented.
Ocean, edited by Tine Colstrup, is published by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art this summer and available to preorder now
A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movie
Most people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road” and the “Great North Road” (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone” of Britain.
As a frequent shuttler between north and south, I prefer the North Road to its rival, the bland, homogenous M1. It has verges and laybys, eccentric pit-stops where the coffee is not necessarily Costa, and a scruffy, improvised air, suggesting something organically arisen from the landscape. But whereas I have merely driven along the road, Cowen has communed with its ghosts.
The supreme court judgment gives protections to women at the same level as other groups
The meaning of “woman” and “female” in the Equality Act has become one of the most contested questions of recent years. Last week the supreme court settled it, in a landmark legal judgment that affirms the rights of women to the same level of legal protection afforded to other groups.
The Equality Act protects people against discrimination on the basis of nine protected characteristics, including their sex, race, sexual orientation and gender reassignment. The question at stake was whether “sex” means someone’s biological sex, or their “certificated sex”; in other words, should those who are male but who have a gender recognition certificate (GRC) be treated as a woman under equalities law?
SCOTUS previously ruled the president could conduct deportations under the Alien Enemies Act as long as suspected illegal aliens were afforded due process to challenge their removal from the US.
Badenoch is braced for heavy losses in the local elections on 1 May, but as Labour stumbles and Greens and Lib Dems surge, the contest is wide open
A byelection in a normally safe Labour seat was Keir Starmer’s first big electoral test as Labour leader. A similar scenario now provides his first test as prime minister. The loss of Hartlepool to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2021 provoked the biggest crisis of Starmer’s time as opposition leader, forcing sweeping changes in personnel and approach. The loss of Runcorn and Helsby to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK could be similarly bruising. Labour ought to start as favourites, having won this socially mixed marginal corner of Cheshire by a massive margin less than a year ago. But with polls showing a Labour slump, a Reform surge and a restive, dissatisfied public, all bets are off.
The Runcorn result will set the tone for this year’s round of local and mayoral elections. A Labour hold will take the pressure off a harried government; a Reform breakthrough will stoke the heat up further, boosting Farage’s claim to be parking his tanks on Labour’s lawn, and jangling the nerves of anxious Labour MPs in the restored “red wall”. While Farage may hurt Labour in Runcorn, it is the Conservatives who face the most pain in this year’s English local elections. Most are in blue-leaning parts of the Midlands and south, and the Tories swept the board when they were last contested in 2021, with Farage off the scene and the government riding a “vaccine bounce” in the polls. Nearly 1,000 Conservative councillors are up for re-election in May, and with Kemi Badenoch’s party polling below its disastrous showing last July, hundreds look set to lose their jobs. Nearly a year on from their worst ever general election result, the Conservatives still have further to fall.
Extraterrestrial rocks, recently delivered by a space probe, could answer the big questions about alien lifeforms and human existence
Several billion years ago, at the dawn of the solar system, a wet, salty world circled our sun. Then it collided, catastrophically, with another object and shattered into pieces.
One of these lumps became the asteroid Bennu whose minerals, recently returned to Earth by the US robot space probe OSIRIS-REx, have now been found to contain rich levels of complex chemicals that are critical for the existence of life.
Your job now is not to manage your wife’s feelings but to focus on your own behaviour
The question I am a man in my mid-50s, living with my wife and our children. Two years ago, I admitted to an affair, texting sex workers, watching porn and checking out women in public. I was not upfront with my wife and it badly affected her self-worth. Since then, I have been in therapy and some childhood issues have come to light around secrecy, lying and feeling unlovable. But I take responsibility for my actions. We have also done couples’ counselling and spent two difficult years working through it all while raising the family.
In recent months, things have been better. Trust has been rebuilding, we’ve felt closer and the future felt hopeful. But last week she caught me looking at a woman on the street in a way that upset her. I lied about it at first, then admitted it later. It reopened all the old wounds and I’m angry at myself for repeating the same damaging behaviours around dishonesty and ogling.
If the shoe fits. Ozempic and other weight loss drugs could have a skin-crawling side effect dubbed ‘Ozempic-feet,’ according to a report. The popular pound-shedding prescription drug is known to cause several unaesthetic side effects, including excessive sagging skin — which could even take place on the tops of users’ feet, according to a Daily...
Kremlin’s most prized spies were sent in to Czechoslovakia to whip up the 1960s reform protests in a move then replicated across the eastern bloc
During the spring of 1968, as revolutionary sentiment began to grow in communist Czechoslovakia, a group of friendly foreigners began arriving in Prague, on flights from Helsinki and East Berlin, or by car from West Germany.
Among them were 11 western European men, a Swiss woman named Maria Weber and a Lebanese carpet dealer called Oganes Sarajian. They were all supporters of what would become known as the Prague Spring, an ultimately doomed attempt to build a more liberal and free version of socialism and escape from Moscow’s suffocating embrace.Many of the visitors sought to get close to the movement’s leading lights, offering support in the battle to reform communist rule.
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