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Men’s four-man bobsleigh In the workshop, a man carefully waxes down a sleigh. Another Canadian team next, under Dearborn, but they can’t improve on their countrymen.

Men’s four-man bobsleigh: The French have a cracking silver sled, but it all goes wrong at the start when one of the riders gets his foot stuck.

The Mumford & Sons frontman on farming, the fallout from contact sports as a kid and the four-letter word that’s banned at home

Born in California, Marcus Mumford, 39, formed the band Mumford & Sons in 2007. Two years later, they released their Brit award-winning debut Sigh No More, which included the song Little Lion Man. In 2013, Babel won album of the year at the Grammys, and in 2025 the band had their third No 1 album, Rushmere. Their latest release is Prizefighter and on 4 July they play BST Hyde Park in London. In 2022, Mumford made a solo record, Self‑Titled. He is married to the actor Carey Mulligan, has three children and lives in the West Country.

Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Sickeningly, it’s probably my wife, because she’s a legend.

In these times of social, political and even environmental instability, is it any wonder that we turn to influencers for instruction?

A group of young women are about to try colour analysis for the first time. One says she suspects she’s not “supposed to wear gold”, and then holds up both hands swathed in gold rings and bracelets. The video cuts to the same woman with a strip of gold fabric laid across her chest. A sad trumpet sound plays before the strip is whipped off and replaced with a silver one. “See?” the analyst says. “Way better here.” The woman says: “Yeah”, but she sounds unhappy.

Colour analysis is a method of picking out the shades that suit your skin tone. After its first life in the 1980s and 90s, “getting your colours done” found a new audience on TikTok in 2024 and has only become more popular since. This clip was one of many thrown up by my Instagram feed but it stuck with me, largely because it seemed so depressing in its portrayal of the trend as something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Directions on what you’re “supposed” or “not supposed” to wear, it intimated, should be followed even if it means sacrificing your own preferences.

Francesca Newton is a writer and editor

After surviving a coup, and with his critics chastened, No 10 insiders say a more combative PM is up for taking the fight to Reform UK

Two days after Keir Starmer had been disowned by the Scottish Labour leader last week, and as a row raged over another controversial peerage, the prime minister decided to pick a fight with a billionaire.

It was a dark week for the prime minister, with the departure of his longtime chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who had become a deeply divisive figure and who took the hit for the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, despite his links to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

BookTok influencer Jack Edwards motivates himself with reading goals – and he’s not alone. Authors and avid readers discuss the rise of metrics, and reveal how many books they finished last year

Every January, thousands of readers log on to Goodreads, Instagram or TikTok and make the same declaration: this is the year I read 50 books. Or 75. Or 100. Screenshots of spreadsheets circulate, templates for tracking pages and percentages are downloaded, friends publicly pledge to “do better” than they did last year. What was once a private pastime is announced, quantified and, in some corners of the internet, judged.

The appeal is obvious: in a distracted age, reading can easily become crowded out by work, screens and fatigue. Literacy rates in the UK are stagnating: in 2024, around 50% of UK adults read regularly for pleasure, down from 58% in 2015.

Church suspends Stephen Conway as police investigate claim man was sexually assaulted between 2018 and 2025

The bishop of Lincoln has been arrested on suspicion of sexual assault.

Lincolnshire police confirmed that a 68-year-old man was arrested as part of an “ongoing investigation following an allegation that a man was sexually assaulted between 2018 and 2025”.

⚽ Buildup to the weekend’s football action
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Johan Lange, the Tottenham sporting director, has explained the rationale behind Igor Tudor’s hire as head coach until the end of the season. Lange said: “it’s very important to go into a shorter process than you do if you are changing a head coach over the summer. We interviewed a few candidates. Igor impressed us very, very much in the interview.

“He comes in with very big experience at the highest level in football. As a player, playing for a very, very big club, one of the biggest clubs in the world in Juve. Of course he was part of this very good generation of Croatia national team in the late 90s. He has shown the capabilities of coming into clubs around this time, February, March, and also big clubs, and made an immediate performance impact. That was of course a very big reason.”

Updates from the T20I cricket at Adelaide Oval
Any thoughts? Get in touch with an email

2nd over: India 14-0 (Smriti 5, Shafali 3)

Gardner comes in for the second over to open from the other end. Shafali attacks immediately, coming down the pitch and attempts to drive it back over Gardner’s head, but the ball catches the edge instead. It falls safely, just past Litchfield and Shafali is off the mark. It’s a fairly tight over from Gardner, just four runs from it.

Amid the triumphs, failures and broken medals in Milano Cortina, here’s our countdown of the outstanding moments that will live long in the memory

Cheating has been part and parcel of the Olympics since at least Eupolus of Thessaly in 388BC. But crooked boxers from ancient Greece never confessed their indiscretions on live television. Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid did exactly that after winning bronze in the men’s 20km biathlon for his first individual Olympic medal, publicly admitting he’d two-timed his girlfriend three months earlier and calling it “my biggest mistake” in an overshare for the ages carried live by national broadcaster NRK. Lægreid’s shot appeared to have missed the target one day later when the wronged party, wishing to remain anonymous, told the Norwegian paper VG it was “hard to forgive” what he did.

Everything I still need to know after two weeks of the sublime and sometimes bizarre in Milano Cortina

Having avoided the horrific February weather by staying on my sofa for two weeks, I have embraced the Winter Olympics as a quadrennial extra Christmas holiday. It offers pine trees, baubles and the chance to gather around the TV while someone with an RP accent tells us how determined and courageous the British are.

The Olympic Games have always presented something of a paradox – on one hand, they are the peak of human athleticism, and on the other, they can look like an elite school sports day. There’s normally at least one activity that reminds you of your youth, whether it’s table tennis or trampolining. Presumably the skiing and snowboarding on display this month have felt very relatable to swathes of Surrey.

Daniela Maier and Fanny Smith did not need a courtroom to decide their fate at these Winter Games

They say if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. On day 14 of Milano Cortina, the slopes of Livigno proved that theory in spectacular fashion.

Four years ago at Beijing 2022, Daniela Maier of Germany and Fanny Smith of Switzerland were the unwilling protagonists of a convoluted medal dispute. Smith had crossed the finish line in third ahead of Maier in fourth. But the race jury flipped the result after ruling Smith had interfered with Maier, despite both skiers disagreeing. Smith appealed against the jury’s decision to the court of arbitration for sport (Cas), which overruled the officials’ decision and deemed that bronze medals should be awarded to both skiers. Smith got her bronze a year later in Switzerland.

Although the weather in Kandy looks precarious, England have been dealt a good draw and can make the last four with a fair wind

Late on Friday morning, after the entire playing surface had spent most of the preceding few days shrouded in plastic sheeting, the sun broke out. The covers were peeled back and the ground staff – a huge team of about 70 people, those covers don’t move themselves – set about trundling their roller slowly across a fresh pitch at Pallekele International Cricket Stadium.

The bad weather had lifted and, finally, work could begin. England were training at the time, hoping their own clouds are about to break and that after progressing awkwardly through the World Cup’s opening group stage they will, finally, in the words of Jacob Bethell, “go out there and give it the full shebang”.

Court in Madrid will soon decide whether developers are using construction to force people out of their homes

When the Madrid building where Jaime Oteyza had lived since 2012 was sold to an investment fund two years ago, a local tenants’ union swiftly warned him what to expect.

First the tenants would be told that none of their rental contracts – regardless of their expiry date – would be renewed, the union said. Then, as the 50 or so families in the building grappled with what to do next, a series of construction projects would probably be launched in the building to ramp up pressure on them to leave.

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

In this week’s newsletter: The race to crown a new 007 has become its own long‑running spectacle, turning the search for​ Bond into an event as big as the films themselves

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Callum Turner’s turn as James Bond lasted at most a couple of weeks. No sooner had he been enshrined as frontrunner to succeed Daniel Craig, than he was nudged from the DB5 driver’s seat by the latest heir apparent, Jacob Elordi, installed as the new bookies’ favourite after his smouldering, highly profitable performance in Wuthering Heights. Smarting somewhere in the background is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who seemed locked in for the job a couple of years ago, enjoying the backing of former 007s Pierce Brosnan and George Lazenby, but now seems to have fallen out of favour. And don’t forget the succession of other dead cert Bonds now banished to the back of the odds market: the long-rumoured likes of Tom Hardy and Idris Elba (both now likely to have aged out of the role); Theo James; James Norton; Josh O’Connor; Harris Dickinson; Bridgerton’s Rége-Jean Page; and approximately 5,000 other predominately British actors who have enjoyed box office success/led a successful TV drama/look good in a tuxedo.

On and on the hunt goes. Five years after Craig’s final outing, one that left absolutely no wriggle room for his return, and not far off a year since Denis Villeneuve was pegged as director of the next, still-untitled instalment, the next 007 has still not been found. Or if he has (and it seems certain to be a he), everyone involved in the Bond operation is keeping characteristically tight-lipped about it.

From thorn, seat, shout and stew to Bruno Mars and Bette Midler, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 What, in Spain, is the world’s largest Renaissance building?
2 Which rock group’s name was inspired by a label on a sewing machine?
3 The body produces about 2 million what every second?
4 What is the only non-US team to win baseball’s World Series?
5 Who did Violet Gibson try to assassinate in Rome in 1926?
6 Financially, what rose from £85,000 to £120,000 in December 2025?
7 Which bird can dive to depths of more than 500m?
8 The Sonderbund civil war in 1847 was what country’s last military conflict?
What links:
9 Thorn; seat; shout; stew?
10 Nicole Kidman; Bruno Mars; Bette Midler; Jason Momoa; Barack Obama?
11 Circular orders; rectangular information; triangular warning?
12 Hannah Montana: The Movie; Lara Croft: Tomb Raider; On Golden Pond; Paper Moon?
13 Argentina; Mexico; New Zealand; Qatar; Senegal; Spain?
14 Black; brown; Philippine forest; Polynesian; ricefield?
15 John Flamsteed (1675) and Michele Dougherty (2025)?

Dr Cox is still electrifying, the original cast’s interactions are a joy to watch, and after a couple of episodes it finds its tone – making it just the comfort TV we need right now

It is possible to believe contradictory things. For instance, I believe TV’s reliance on reviving old shows is a risk-averse, creative regression. On the other hand, I love it. I particularly love it when fictional characters have visibly aged. There’s a broken humanity that you don’t get with flawless, collagen-rich skin. You sense you could talk to them about your sciatica and they’d get it.

I got that feeling with the new series of Scrubs (Disney+, from Thursday 26 February), a show I once mainlined on E4. Scrubs was as comforting as tea and toast. Surprisingly malleable, too. In its bones, it was a coming-of-age workplace bromance between junior doctors JD and Turk, played by then newcomers Zach Braff and Donald Faison. Their chemistry was the show’s anchor, balancing sassy racial harmony with irreverence and heart, as they bore witness to universal human drama. But is it healthy enough to survive resuscitation, more than 15 years after its last episode aired?

Images include Mountbatten-Windsor with Virginia Giuffre, Jeffrey Epstein and an unknown female lying on a floor

Allegations about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Jeffrey Epstein have unfolded over several years – and in several pictures. Here is how they have dripped into the public’s consciousness and kept the pressure on the royal family.

A cricket match kindled my love affair with the Greek island, inspiring both a literary festival and my new novel

This is not where you would expect an article about one of the Mediterranean’s most beautiful islands to start. It’s the tail end of winter, 2021. Kensal Green Cemetery in west London: the imperial mausolea canted and crumbling, low clouds dissolving into rain. We are still  in that  strange phase of the pandemic when we are masked, newly aware of our bodies and the space around them. We are here to bury Nikos, a man who for me, for many, was the incarnation of Corfu.

I had spent my 20s trying to find the perfect Greek island, hopping from the well-trodden (Mykonos, Santorini, Cephalonia) to the more obscure (Kythira, Symi, Meganisi). None quite matched the vision I had dreamed into being as a child, when I segued from Robert Graves to Mary Renault, then to Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles. Greece was an idea before it was a place: freedom and deep thought, a constellation of sand, salt and thyme.

Exclusive: Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy says treating these objects as collectors’ items ‘should be looked at in horror’

An antiques auction selling chains linked to the enslavement of African people in Zanzibar has been accused of “profiting from slavery”.

Neck irons dated to the Omani-Arab dominated trade in enslaved people in east Africa, which ended after African resistance and British pressure in the late 19th century, will go on sale this weekend in Scotland.

A musical number about a woman’s letter to her husband on the second world war frontline unlocked my ability to blub – and made me a happier person

I am sure I must have cried as a child, but by the time I was a teenager it had stopped. It was probably a boarding school thing. Very stiff upper lip. My parents are not the most emotionally available human beings, either. I like to tease them by saying: “I love you.” You can see the panic in their eyes. They will normally say: “All right then, bye.”

My gran died when I was about 18, and I was sad, of course, but in terms of tears there was nothing, no water. I never cried at movies. I didn’t cry on my wedding day, nor at the birth of either of my daughters. It never alarmed me. I actually thought I might have underactive tear glands. Looking back, it was probably all about control.

• Wellington’s Josh Oluwayemi heads into his own goal from outside box

• Auckland FC’s 5-0 win prompts Giancarlo Italiano to resign

A comical own goal from Wellington goalkeeper Josh Oluwayemi sparked a 5-0 thrashing by Auckland FC, prompting coach Giancarlo Italiano to dramatically announce his resignation in the post-match press conference.

Oluwayemi’s 24th-minute howler looks destined to be a permanent feature on goalkeeper gaffe compilations after the Phoenix No 1 completely misjudged a Jake Girdwood-Reich clearance at Sky Stadium in Wellington on Saturday.

Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone’

When Karen Newton left home in late July 2025, she knew that international travellers were being locked up in immigration detention centres in the US. “I was aware,” she nods. “But I never thought it would have any impact on my holiday.” Karen, 65, had a British passport and a tourist visa. She hadn’t been abroad for eight years, and was keen for some guaranteed sun. “I really just wanted to get away from the house.”

She and her husband, Bill, 66, had an ambitious itinerary that would take them through California, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana and then on to Canada over two months. Las Vegas wasn’t to Karen’s taste: “Way too commercialised.” She much preferred Yellowstone, where they saw Old Faithful, the famous geyser, as it shot boiling water into the air, and got up close with some extraordinary wildlife. “There was a bison right next to the car. Another time, a wolf walked past.” Her eyes sparkle at the memory. “It was just amazing.”

Trump orders massive buildup of naval forces in Middle East, leading to fears of an imminent war

Iran’s foreign minister has said he expects to have a draft counterproposal ready within days after nuclear talks with the US this week, while Donald Trump said he was considering limited military strikes.

The US president has ordered a massive buildup of naval forces in the Middle East, including repositioning aircraft carriers and other warships, leading to fears of an imminent war. But it is not clear if the military movements are intended as an intimidation tactic to pressure Iran to make concessions on its nuclear programme.