Updates from the R. Premadasa Cricket Stadium in Colombo
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Australia: Travis Head (capt), Josh Inglis (wk), Cameron Green, Tim David, Marcus Stoinis, Glenn Maxwell, Matt Renshaw, Ben Dwarshuis, Nathan Ellis, Adam Zampa, Matt Kuhnemann.
Cooper Connolly and Xavier Bartlett drop out of the XI with Tim David and Ben Dwarshuis coming in. Steve Smith is yet to join up with the group after all, but Head says – with a hint of uncertainty and a laugh – that he will arrive tonight. The Australia stand-in skipper seems typically relaxed.
We’re used to a bit of chaos early in a tournament. We just have to put another good performance in. I think given the conditions we did really well [against Ireland]. We did it in a different way to what we normally do but today is a different pitch and we’ll have to adapt again.
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© Photograph: Matthew Lewis-ICC/ICC/Getty Images
© Photograph: Matthew Lewis-ICC/ICC/Getty Images
© Photograph: Matthew Lewis-ICC/ICC/Getty Images
© Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
© ASSOCIATED PRESS
© Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
© ASSOCIATED PRESS
© Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
© Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
© Krystle Hickman
© Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Everyone should get their eyes tested every two years, but there are other ways to optimise your vision, say ophthalmologists – and yes, eating carrots may help
Eye health is often something that we take for granted until we encounter problems. But lifestyle choices such as screen time and smoking can affect your vision. Here, ophthalmologists share their tips on maintaining healthy eyes, from sight tests to sunglasses.
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© Composite: Guardian Design;Gorica Poturak; t_kimura/Getty Images
© Composite: Guardian Design;Gorica Poturak; t_kimura/Getty Images
© Composite: Guardian Design;Gorica Poturak; t_kimura/Getty Images
Kremlin’s repeated targeting of infrastructure has left thousands without heating, reliant on shelters and desperate home hacks
Natalya Pavlovna watched her two-year-old son, Danylo, play with Lego. “We are taking a break from the cold,” she said as children made drawings inside a warm tent. Adults sipped tea and chatted while their phones charged. The emergency facility is located in Kyiv’s Troieshchina district, on the left bank of the Dnipro River. Outside it was -18C. There was bright sunshine and snow.
“Russia is trying to break us. It’s deliberate genocide against the Ukrainian people. Putin wants us to capitulate so we give up the Donbas region,” Natalya said. “Kyiv didn’t use to feel like a frontline city. Now it does. People are dying of cold in their homes in the 21st century. The idea is to make us leave and to create a new refugee crisis for Europe.”
Natalia and Danylo near the ‘resilience point’ in Troyeshchyna district
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© Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
© Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
© Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
You have to be careful managing supplies – there is one delivery a year
The first time anyone goes to the Antarctic is truly special. Just getting there is an adventure: it takes several planes, and about three to five days. Travelling there was a childhood dream of mine. I saw it as a way to test myself against something so much bigger. I nearly applied for a role at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) 30 years ago, but then my wife and I were expecting our first child. Instead, I’ve worked as a chef in Michelin-star restaurants in Paris and London, hotels in Kuala Lumpur and St Moritz, and even at a school in Oxfordshire.
In 2016, I took a sabbatical and finally joined BAS as a chef for a summer. Five years later, I went back for the winter, and last year, I became the organisation’s full-time catering manager. I felt ready for an adventure. Now I oversee the catering across BAS’s five Antarctic stations: bases for the organisation’s research and also where the staff live. Each year, I spend three months there; for the rest of the time I work at BAS’s HQ in Cambridge.
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© Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos/The Guardian
© Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos/The Guardian
© Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos/The Guardian
Destined to a perilous life with no right to an education or to vote, state recognition ‘gives them hope’, campaigners say
Through the decades that the Daulatdia brothel in Bangladesh has existed, children born there have been invisible, unable to be registered because their mothers were sex workers and their fathers unknown. Now, for the first time, all 400 of them in the brothel village have their own birth certificates.
That milestone was reached after a push by campaigners who have spent decades working with Bangladesh’s undocumented children born in brothels or on the street. It means they can finally access the rights afforded to other citizens: the ability to go to school, to be issued a passport or to vote.
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© Photograph: Bengal Picture Library/Alamy
© Photograph: Bengal Picture Library/Alamy
© Photograph: Bengal Picture Library/Alamy
The Games could have showcased Milan’s abundant culture and architecture. Instead it has filled the city with gaudy pavilions and gentrification
On a bad day, Milan can feel less like a city than an open-air shopping mall. Since winning the bid to host the Winter Olympics in 2019, the urban landscape has been flattened into construction dust and swamped in corporate messaging. What started as a logo on a tram has gradually evolved into a feverish, full-scale takeover of the public realm. From Piazza del Duomo to the Sforzesco Castle, the city’s most popular spaces have been appropriated by gaudy pavilions, turning Milan into a bizarre spectacle staffed by dancing mascots.
Last Friday, I sat down with friends to watch the opening ceremony, broadcast live from the San Siro, the much-loved brutalist football stadium that has been slated for demolition The reaction in the room was telling. On the one hand, after so much buildup, most people were excited the big moment had finally arrived. But as the proceedings went on and the parade of familiar faces gave way to the peculiar sight of bobble-headed puppets of Rossini, Puccini and Verdi dancing to Italo disco hit Vamos a la playa, the melancholy kicked in. Was this really what these years of disruption had been for? Was this strange, kitsch pop concert worth all the political repression, the public inconvenience, the relentless marketing, the unspecified millions of euros in cost?
Jamie Mackay is a writer and translator based in Florence
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© Photograph: Sarah Stier/Getty Images
© Photograph: Sarah Stier/Getty Images
© Photograph: Sarah Stier/Getty Images
The genre-hopping bass virtuoso has backed Ariana Grande and Herbie Hancock, appeared in Star Wars and become a dedicated boxer. Ahead of his fifth album, Stephen Bruner explains his polymath mindset
It is an overcast Thursday afternoon at the end of January, and Thundercat is telling me about the time he tried to interest Snoop Dogg in the mid-70s oeuvre of Frank Zappa. He wasn’t Thundercat then, he explains. He was still Stephen Bruner, bass player for hire, who had fetched up in what he calls a “stupid-as-hell, Rick James-level band” backing the venerable rapper, packed with Los Angeles jazz luminaries who would later contribute to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Kamasi Washington, Josef Leimberg, Terrace Martin. Alas, their jazz chops were sometimes deemed surplus to requirements. At one point, while Bruner was playing an expansive bass solo on stage, Snoop sidled up to him and flatly announced: “Ain’t nobody told you to play all that.”
So perhaps it was in the spirit of horizon-broadening that Bruner took it upon himself to play Snoop the song St Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast, a knotty, marimba-heavy slice of jazz-rock from Zappa’s 1974 album Apostrophe, which switches time signatures three times in less than two minutes, and features lyrics about a man stealing margarine and urinating on a bingo card. “Yeah, I hit him with the rollercoaster,” Bruner chuckles. “He was smoking, and he almost ate his blunt, saying: ‘What the hell is going on?’ I said: ‘My sentiments exactly.’ I think I did a cartwheel after that and left the band: I played Snoop Dogg St Alfonzo’s Breakfast, my job is done here, I have no more work to do.” He thinks for a moment. “Or maybe I got fired: ‘Get out of here dude, you’re too weird.’ I forget. It was a great moment.”
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© Photograph: Ollie Tikare/The Guardian
© Photograph: Ollie Tikare/The Guardian
© Photograph: Ollie Tikare/The Guardian
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