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Ali Martin is our man on the ground, he’s dipped his quill early and sent us this:

Greetings from Lahore, where the sun is shining and a humdinger awaits. First time at the Gaddafi Stadium for me and have to say, it’s a pretty cool ground. It also feels box fresh after a refurbishment that beat its deadline in a way that any written journalist would doff a cap too. Speaking of which, there’s no Aussie press pack on the ground in Pakistan, sadly, although we’ll no doubt catch up with a few at the World Test Championship final this summer. Talk of a decent crowd today and the queues outside were promising. See what happens, might look sparse on the TV at first - security is very tight outside - but should hopefully fill up later.”

Hamas says six captives to be freed from Gaza in swap for about 600 Palestinian prisoners and detainees

A masked militant has sat down at a table on the stage with a Red Cross representative and they appear to be signing documents.

Live images from Rafah are showing masked Hamas fighters taking to the makeshift stage, with one speaking into a microphone.

The freshness of pureed peas and mint and the tartness of lemony pickled peas combine to give pasta ‘rice’ a perky, vibrant lift

Today’s recipe is inspired by an Italian method of preserving, sott’olio, which translates to “under oil”. The most delicate of vegetables, such as peas, are picked at peak ripeness, plunged briefly in vinegar, then stored in oil to preserve them until desired. I’ll admit that my recipe wantonly uses frozen petit pois, which are then in part pickled and in part whizzed up to make a stock in which to cook the orzo; nevertheless, eating it brings its own warm and welcome Italian sunshine to my English kitchen in cold, dark February.

All the way across the field there are mouthwatering head-to-heads with players pushing for the tour to Australia

For British & Irish Lions hopefuls, time is running out. Three Test matches left to stake their claim, to catch Andy Farrell’s eye and book a place on the plane. Farrell is due to be at Twickenham on Saturday and he will be analysing everything. As a player that’s precisely where you want to be.

At this stage of the Six Nations, England against Scotland feels all the more pivotal for Lions hopefuls. We can safely say that there will be a large Ireland contingent and, unless something dramatic happens in the coming weeks, a relatively small group of Wales players. That congested middle is full of England and Scotland players and that makes Saturday’s match all the more mouthwatering.

Sunday’s clash between declining champions and their likely successors is a far cry from recent title battles

There has been something pleasingly old-fashioned about the Premier League title race this season. It may be a modern phenomenon that the side top of the table have lost only one of 26 games, and that the side in second have lost two, but after the years of champions habitually racking up 90 points and more, the general fallibility has been refreshing.

Liverpool are still on course for 89 points but they are not implacable, remorseless winners in the way Manchester City so often were. They reached a peak in their 2-0 home win over Real Madrid at the end of November and, although they were comfortable winners over City the following Sunday, there has been a sense since of a side, if not quite clinging on to the mountain top, then at the very least not striding quite so confidently along the ridge.

Deaths on the road costs countries up to 5% of GDP. Centring transport around people, not cars, can propel development

If you had to guess the leading cause of death for children and young people around the world, what would you say? Malaria perhaps? Pneumonia? Suicide? They’re all high up there, but no, it’s road accidents.

Cars have been around for more than 120 years, and we know how to prevent these tragedies. Yet road crashes still claim more than two lives every minute – killing nearly 1.2 million people every year.

French family behind project visited Kremlin in 2014 to discuss building ‘Tsarland’ in annexed Crimea

With its spectacular shows featuring Viking longboats, Roman charioteers and sword-wielding knights who perform death-defying stunts, Puy du Fou in France is consistently ranked among the world’s best theme parks. Each performance of its centrepiece Cinéscénie show, which depicts 700 years of French history, features more than 1,000 actors, hundreds of horses and about 800 fireworks.

Now the company has set its sights on bringing its brand of immersive history to the UK via a £600m investment to build its mock medieval castles, hotels and restaurants on farmland just off the M40 in Oxfordshire. It has asked the upmarket property firm Savills to help with its planning applications and is expected to look for British co-investors for a project that it says will create thousands of jobs.

At a snowy Berlinale, against a backdrop of political divisions, this year’s standouts include Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, Richard Linklater’s Broadway biopic of Lorenz Hart, and intensely sexual romance starring Jessica Chastain

Berlin can be a touch inhospitable in February; this year was no exception, with visitors to the film festival enduring heavy snow, treacherous pavements and a two-day, city-wide transport strike. But the Berlinale itself is contending with a frosty climate. Traditionally a hub for film-makers of forthright, oppositional persuasions, it must now attempt to flourish in the face of Europe’s swing to the right, with Germany’s elections imminent and the troubling rise of the extremist AfD party.

Every new festival head faces the challenge of reinventing the event they have inherited, and in the Berlinale’s 75th year, the bar was set especially high given the scrutiny the festival has received. Last year’s closing night brought controversy, with some German politicians taking exception to award acceptance speeches by the Palestinian and Israeli directors of the (now Oscar-nominated) protest documentary No Other Land, about Israel’s village demolitions on the West Bank. So new festival director, the American Tricia Tuttle – formerly head of the BFI London film festival – faces the challenge of giving the Berlinale a boost, while managing political expectations from different fronts.

A historic number of arrests were made, but the days of targeted murder or massive political influence are long gone

Palermo has not seen anything like it for years. Helicopters in the pre-dawn sky. Carabinieri barracks across Sicily emptied, with all 1,200 officers deployed. The Cacciatori – red-bereted shock cops – brought over from the wilds of Calabria. The Carabinieri’s own film units serving up a morning montage of flashing blue lights, balaclava-wearing officers with submachine guns, police dogs sniffing, cottage doors breaking, and burly, handcuffed men ushered into Alfa Romeos. And then, of course, in the press, the humiliating wiretaps of gangsters sharing their secrets. Cosa Nostra is back in the headlines, and back under the cosh.

Italian law enforcement is good at this stuff. Not a single one of the 181 men and women targeted for arrest on 11 February managed to go on the lam before the crackdown. Based on the numbers alone, this raid was the biggest anti-mafia operation since the 1980s. But Sicily was a very different place back then. It teetered on the brink of becoming a narco-state, and Cosa Nostra treated the Italian institutions with contempt, murdering any prosecutor, police officer or politician who got in its way.

You’ve got to get by on a slab of hash? Is that how far we’ve fallen? The guys from the old days, the ones who’ve tragically been sent to prison for life, would they be talking about a slab of hash? If they talked about hash, it was because a shipload was due in … We’re down in the dirt lads. We think we’re doing business, but it’s others who are really at it.

The writers of the new Wild Guide: Morocco share the best locations for hiking, surfing, swimming and sleeping under the stars

Extending from the Atlantic coast to the edge of the Sahara and with a huge variety of terrain – from lush oases and valleys peppered with thyme, rosemary, argan trees and date palms to rocky gorges and arid plains – the Anti-Atlas mountains cater for even the most indecisive traveller.

The hasty regeneration of Corby’s old steelworks poisoned a generation. Now the story of how it came to court is told in a harrowing, if slightly melodramatic, new Netflix series

Jack Thorne writes the kind of meaningful, worthwhile dramas that you definitely – no, honestly – do plan to watch … but just maybe not tonight. Best Interests from 2023, about a distraught mother battling the NHS doctors who decide to allow her severely ill teenage daughter to die, was warm, miraculously funny, and as gripping as a thriller. It was also so traumatising that it could make the viewer feel as if they were in actual physical pain. Before that, there was The Accident, whose matter-of-fact title only hinted at the harrowing subject matter: the series covered the aftermath of a construction site explosion in Wales that killed eight children.

Toxic Town (Thursday 27 February, Netflix) – Thorne’s new four-part series – could be considered a companion piece to The Accident: it also deals with a deadly construction site and negligent moneymen. The difference is that this one genuinely happened. You may have never heard of the 2009 Corby toxic waste case, but it was a legal landmark – the first time a link between toxic waste and birth defects was properly established anywhere in the world.

Fast fashion and drinks cans among technological-age matter most likely to endure as fossils, say scientists

As an eternal testament of humanity, plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones are not a glorious legacy. But two scientists exploring which items from our technological civilisation are most likely to survive for many millions of years as fossils have reached an ironic but instructive conclusion: fast food and fast fashion will be our everlasting geological signature.

“Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.”

The US president is breaking every negotiating rule in the book, to the bewilderment of his allies. Europe is now at a crossroads

Transgender teenager Brianna Ghey was stabbed to death by two 15-year-olds. The killers had been radicalised on the dark web, while the victim was trapped in an online world of her own. Now her mother has become friends with the parent of one of the murderers

The first thing I notice about Esther Ghey is a blossom tree trailing down her left arm to her hand. There is one pink flower on the tattoo. Pink was her daughter Brianna’s favourite colour. If Brianna had got her way, the whole world would have been pink. And just after she was murdered by two teenage schoolchildren in February 2023, Ghey says, the world did briefly turn pink. The local blossom trees filled with the blossomiest blossom she had ever seen. “It really felt she was with us and that she was sending us a sign she was OK,” she says.

Now Ghey has written a book, Under a Pink Sky. It’s a memoir of her and Brianna’s lives, and a manifesto of sorts; a shocking exploration of how deadly smartphones and online spaces can be. It’s also one of the most unflinching, inspirational autobiographies I’ve read, a remarkable cry of hope from the depths of despair.

The ‘fantasticallly delicious’ semla has gone from a simple Nordic springtime favourite to a Noma-approved delicacy

The earliest version of the Swedish semla was a 16th-century plain bread bun served in a soup of warm milk eaten only on Shrove Tuesday in preparation for the 40-day fast of Lent.

It is a far cry from this year’s hit varieties, which include Dubai chocolate (the chocolate bar with a knafeh and pistachio filling that became a TikTok trend) and chokladboll (based on a Scandinavian oat, cocoa and butter ball – a popular fika item).

The PM and his ministers are supporting illiberal laws that hard-right authoritarians could apply with zeal

If the Trump project implodes, it might take with it the extreme and far-right European parties to which it is umbilically connected. Like all such parties, the hard-right Reform UK poses as patriotic while grovelling to foreign interests, and this could be its undoing.

But we cannot bank on it. The UK government must do all it can to prevent the disaster that has befallen several other European nations. If it fails to meet people’s needs and keeps echoing far-right talking points, we could go the same way as Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Finland, Sweden and Austria.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

From back, basting and zigzag to ‘the stuff that dreams are made of’, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 What TV cliffhanger was resolved on 21 November 1980?
2 Which body in the solar system has lakes of liquid methane?
3 What Yorkshire side were the first national women’s football league champions?
4 In a 1941 film, what was “the stuff that dreams are made of”?
5 Who writes the Empyrean fantasy book series?
6 What does the US defense department classify as UAP?
7 What arboreal project occupies 200 square miles of central England?
8 Which monarch was killed in 1057 at the Battle of Lumphanan?
What links:
9 Emotion icon; glamorous camping; smoke and fog; fan magazine; romantic comedy?
10 Cantuar; Dunelm; Ebor; Petriburg; Roffen; Sarum?
11 Tom Cruise (6.5 mins, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation); Kate Winslet (7.25 mins, Avatar: The Way of Water)?
12 Seth Pecksniff; Howard Roark; Anthony Royal; Rudolf Santonix?
13 Back; basting; blind; cross; running; slip; zigzag?
14 8 (1950-60); 9 (1961-90); 10 (1991-2009); 25 (since 2010)?
15 Truby King; Benjamin Spock; Donald Winnicott; Penelope Leach; Gina Ford; Jo Frost?

US president earlier drew criticism after saying Kyiv ‘should have never started’ war; Trump predicts Ukraine will soon sign minerals deal with US. What we know on day 1,095

• Europe live: latest news on the Ukraine war

Experts warn young people should have limited use of devices and spend more time outdoors

Every hour young people spend in front of screens increases their chance of being shortsighted, researchers have found, with experts warning young children should have limited use of devices and spend more time outdoors.

Myopia is caused by having an over elongated eyeball and is a growing problem, with research suggesting about 40% of children and adolescents worldwide could have the condition by 2050.

From balaclavas to open-necked shirts and floor-length frocks, here’s what caught the eye at the awards ceremony this year

• Baftas 2025: the red carpet, the ceremony, the winners – live!

Mark Cohen’s evocative shot of a child with some bubble gum machines is part of a series capturing the vibrant characters and street life of the Big Apple

When he was about 30, the celebrated American photographer Mark Cohen lived in a dorm at New York University while spending a month at the film school there. In breaks from classes, he would wander the streets of the city taking pictures. Nearly all those images were unprinted and until recently existed only as negatives. A new book, Tall Socks, collects that work for the first time.

This picture of a kid with his hand in the bubble gum machine is freighted with the weight of time and place of that backstory; those of us of a certain age will be able to recall the exact fairground feel and resistance of the handle that ejected the gum in its little plastic pod, as well as that eternal childish hope that someone might, this time, have left the prize – with its free-gift creepy-crawly – in the chute, waiting to be discovered.

Leftover cooked pork and bones are essential ingredients in this hearty Asturian winter stew

Fabada Asturiana is classic Spanish cooking at its simplest and best. This stew of creamy white beans cooked slowly with pork and cured meat is traditionally made with fabes de la Granja (or judion beans), morcilla (Spanish black pudding), chorizo and lacón (cured pork shoulder, and similar to pancetta); it’s also the perfect dish for using up leftover roast pork.

Life drawing hit the headlines when a north London class, which had been running for more than 30 years, was told to cover up its naked models or find a new location. Ellie Heney, 32, from Lancaster, has been a life model for 13 years and hopes to be one for the rest of her life. She explains why

It was my first year of university in Liverpool and it was a typical broke student situation. I saw a poster saying £20 for life modelling and when you’re living on beans on toast you think: ‘Well, I can do that.’ So I gave it a go.

It’s the strangest thing in the world when you do it for the first time. I remember my heart was pounding and the adrenaline was rushing and the back of my head was prickly because I was thinking: ‘What on earth am I doing? This is crazy!’

My wife has developed an aversion to cooking while becoming increasingly fussy about what she’ll eat. Lucky me …

When the oldest one left home for the second time about six years ago, my wife made an announcement.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m never cooking again.”

Gráinne, 31, a software engineer and musician, meets Alexander, 34, a civil servant

What were you hoping for?
A giggle with someone I fancy!

In the run-up to Sunday’s crucial election, the Guardian took a long journey through Europe’s heartland to talk to voters

Creaking, overcrowded, neglected, Germany’s railways, once a source of national pride, have taken a battering to their image in recent years. Amid wider concerns about the health of Europe’s stagnating largest economy, the state of its trains has become something of a metaphor for a more general sense of malaise.

On Sunday Germans will go to the polls in one of the most important elections in recent times, with an emboldened far right hoping to more than double its share of votes. In the run-up, the Guardian travelled more than 850 miles on trains across Germany to hear what its citizens have to say about the state of their nation.

Two years ago, transgender teenager Brianna Ghey was stabbed to death by two 15-year-olds. The killers had been radicalised on the dark web, while the victim was trapped in an online world of her own. Now her mother has become friends with the parent of one of the murderers. On the second anniversary of Brianna’s death, Esther sits down with Simon Hattenstone to discuss her daughter’s murder and her own extraordinary response.

Like the soldiers they battle to save, combat medics in Ukraine are under constant attack. Three years after the invasion, one NHS doctor bears witness

“The frontline here is cold, hard, true war. My comrades and I had more than 40 bombs dropped on us by drones over two hours. You can’t hide from drones in a trench, but you can’t outrun them either. Your only hope to live is to zigzag, to be cleverer than the drone.”

A gaunt 28-year-old former IT worker sits patiently beneath a window barricaded with sandbags, awaiting his turn on the operating table, cloaked in dust. Now an infantryman in the Ukrainian army’s Third Assault Brigade, “Sasha” (not his real name) has shrapnel embedded in his shoulder after the Russian assault on his foxhole. “When you hear a drone, you run as fast as you can and see if you can reach any trees,” he says. “If you’re out in the open, you try to get the drone behind you, so it won’t destroy your face. It’s not panic, this running; it’s a professional response. You know what you have to do to save your life and you do it.”

Some specialists suspect that constantly filtering out background noise may have unintended consequences

They are prized for making the commute more bearable and shielding against the din of daily life. But noise-cancelling headphones have come under scrutiny after audiologists raised concerns that overuse might impair people’s hearing skills.

While the technology has clear benefits, not least in helping people listen to music at lower volume, some specialists suspect that constantly filtering out background noise may have unintended consequences.

US secretary of defense had questioned whether history-making air force general CQ Brown Jr got job because of race

Donald Trump abruptly fired the air force general CQ Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff on Friday, sidelining a history-making Black fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign to purge the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.

The ouster of the second Black general to serve as chair of the joint chiefs comes three months after Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, outlined a plan for ridding the US military of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts during a podcast interview.

A stop-work order had been issued to government-funded attorneys to cease counsel for about 26,000 minors

The Trump administration has rescinded its decision to cut off legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children, just three days after it ordered government-funded attorneys across the country to immediately stop their work.

The Acacia Center for Justice and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) confirmed that the stop-work order affecting non-profits that provide legal counsel for about 26,000 unaccompanied minors had been lifted.

Extreme fire danger and total bans declared for large parts of the east coast with sweltering temperature accompanied by hot and dry winds

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Warnings have been downgraded for fires burning in multiple states but emergency services are urging caution as hot, gusty conditions continue.

A grassfire in central Victoria’s Willowmavin was burning out of control on Saturday evening but an emergency warning for residents to take shelter had been downgraded to advice level.

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Australian cyclist’s day began at 4.09am in Auckland, New Zealand, and ended 18-and-a-half hours later in Wellington

Throughout his career, Lachlan Morton – among the world’s pre-eminent ultra-endurance cyclists – has spent some long days on the bike. The Australian has raced the Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia, ridden from Land’s End to John o’Groats in the United Kingdom, and last year spent a month riding 14,200km around Australia.

But no single day has compared to an effort last month, beginning at 4.09am in Auckland, New Zealand, and ending 18-and-a-half hours later in Wellington. Covering the 648km from the New Zealand’s biggest city to its capital in less than a day, the Australian cyclist made history.

PM to claim if US rejects Mauritius’s claim to own the islands, Beijing will be drawn into the regional dispute

Keir Starmer is to urge Donald Trump to recognise that a US rejection of Mauritius’s legal claim to own the Chagos Islands, including the strategic US military base at Diego Garcia, may stoke tensions similar to those in the South China Sea.

Starmer is due to meet Trump next Friday mainly to discuss the future of Ukraine, but also a UK plan for Gaza’s reconstruction under international protection with no need for Palestinians to be required to quit the Gaza Strip. The paper is similar but not identical to proposals being discussed by Arab foreign ministers in Riyadh, which has a strong international component and would prevent Hamas ruling in Gaza.

After defeat in India, England start tournament against Australia, who are without their feared fast-bowling trio

In contrast to the drawn-out 50-over World Cup and its T20 equivalent, the Champions Trophy is quite a cutthroat affair, with one slip-up in the group stage manageable but two likely terminal. Jos Buttler called it a brutal format before England’s opener against Australia in Lahore on Saturday, while his opposite number, Steve Smith, spoke of needing a “quarter-final” mentality.

As unforgiving as it is, there is a fair bit riding on this Champions Trophy for Buttler, a captain who lifted the T20 World Cup in 2022 straight after replacing Eoin Morgan but has struggled to live up to it since. Series results have nose-dived, both world titles were surrendered meekly, and the messaging has often been confusing. Matthew Mott paid the price as head coach last year but not every shortcoming was his.

Like its predecessor, Denis Villeneuve’s second instalment is a true blockbuster that harnesses the full power of the art form. It’s a beautiful film to behold

A common complaint I’ve heard about Dune: Part Two is that it is too similar to the first Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s audacious gamble to adapt just half of Frank Herbert’s beloved sci-fi tome and hope for another greenlight from Warner Bros. This is correct. Part Two, like its predecessor, is arcane, surprisingly weird, oddly structured and deeply uninterested in pandering. This is actually a compliment, because though I have seen Part Two six times and still do not totally understand the Bene Gesserit, the film, like its predecessor, is a strange creature in modern cinema: a true blockbuster – a cinematic behemoth that makes millions, generates memes and cements the ever-vanishing movie star – that harnesses the full power of the art form.

That is no small feat – this is a movie with many moving parts and much potential for off-putting density. (An honest reader of the book will tell you: Herbert frequently gets in his own way. The rich source material itself is no guarantee of quality storytelling.) If Part One was a thrilling immersion into a rare universe that felt genuinely alien and remote from our times, Part Two is the spaceship hurtling at full speed – and that spaceship, gloriously designed and rendered in sleek silver, landing on a planet in one of Villeneuve’s signature shots of great, arresting contrasts in scale.

Death of actor Kim Sae-ron sparks renewed calls for changes to ease pressure on celebrities who face intense scrutiny from media and fans alike

On Friday, the South Korean columnist Yang Sung-hee asked a question to which no one appears to have an answer: “When will this ever end? How many more lives must be lost before this tragic cycle is broken?”

Yang’s question, asked in the Korea JoongAng Daily newspaper, is just one of many that has emerged since the actor Kim Sae-ron was found dead in her home in Seoul on Sunday in a case police are treating as suicide. She was 24.

Some residents say the agreement has harmed relations with New Zealand while others welcome the economic benefits it may bring

Standing under the shade of trees outside the Cook Islands parliament this week, Fe’ena Syme-Buchanan questioned a controversial deal signed with China that has sparked concern across the Pacific country.

The photographer from Rarotonga feels mixed emotions about the agreement prime minister Mark Brown struck with Beijing last week, describing it as a “double-edged sword”.