Doyne Farmer says a super-simulator of the global economy would accelerate the transition to a green, clean world

It’s a mind-blowing idea: an economic model of the world in which every company is individually represented, making realistic decisions that change as the economy changes. From this astonishing complexity would emerge forecasts of unprecedented clarity. These would be transformative: no more flying blind into global financial crashes, no more climate policies that fail to shift the dial.

This super simulator could be built for what Prof Doyne Farmer calls the bargain price of $100m, thanks to advances in complexity science and computing power.

Kevin thinks wardrobes are there for a reason, but Mabel says hangers are a hassle for a woman in a rush. You decide who deserves a dressing down
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Mabel’s clothes mountain gets in the way and sets a bad example for our sons. I call it the ‘Monster’

Kevin is exaggerating the size of the pile. I like living in organised chaos and he should accept that

As ‘the pressure of the haircut’ enters the game’s lexicon, the extent to which football revolves around winning and losing games appears to be fading

“I don’t care about his haircut at all,” Matheus Cunha said this week. “I don’t really look at other people if they need to go to the hairdresser or not,” Bruno Fernandes said at the weekend. Michael Carrick, for his part, said he was aware of the haircut issue. But the Manchester United coach insisted it would not factor into his team’s preparations for their game against West Ham on Tuesday night.

And so, here we are. Many games of football end up being remembered for reasons far outstripping their original significance: the 1914 Christmas Truce, the 1962 Battle of Santiago, the 2020 pandemic curtain‑raiser between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid. To these we can add the Haircut Game: a mildly arresting 1-1 Premier League draw at the London Stadium that posterity will nevertheless recall as the game when a man did not get his hair cut at the end.

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The first four Grade One favourites at the festival are British horses but the Irish battalions are ready for battle

The first four Grade One favourites at Cheltenham next month are stabled in British yards. So are three of the top six names in the Gold Cup betting. From a safe distance on the British side of the water, it is possible to imagine a festival when, for the first time in a decade, the home team heads to the west country with a spring in its step.

But make no mistake, the green tide is coming. Across the length and breadth of the country, from the biggest yards with dozens of festival runners to 10-horse operations with a single stable star, there has been the unmistakeable sense of a confident, well-drilled army mobilising for action at pre-festival media events in Ireland this week. Ireland’s rugby team took a beating in Paris last week and the footballers are struggling to reach even a 48-team World Cup, but its horses, trainers and jockeys are not about to surrender their dominance in National Hunt racing.

When old school friends reunite at a funeral, they suspect foul play. Cue this frenetic, witty caper from Derry Girls’ Lisa McGee – complete with a sensational performance from Saoirse-Monica Jackson

Three middle-aged women may be all you need for anything. To run a business, raise a village, end a war, retool a civilisation, empty the loft. Even more usefully, you can make a great murder-mystery caper with them, as Lisa McGee (a fourth woman! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) has done with her new series How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.

McGee made her name, of course, with Derry Girls – a nigh-on perfect sitcom that followed the trials and tribulations of a group of Northern Irish Catholic schoolgirls (and a beleaguered English cousin) as they went about the chaotic business of growing up in the mid-90s at the tail end of the Troubles. The main characters of the new offering don’t map precisely on to the previous one but the DNA of Derry Girls as an entity remains gloriously alive (is DNA alive? I feel a curious urge to consult Sister Michael). How to Get to Heaven has all of the verve, acuity and havoc dancing on top of the immaculate plotting that you find in McGee’s masterwork. The only difference is that one of the schoolgirls is dead. Probably. Maybe. Perhaps not.

Her comments have been put through Britain’s culture war meat-grinder, but sexuality and gender is as fluid and interesting as we want it to be

Pity Olivia Colman. She didn’t want it to become the headline that she sometimes thinks of herself as a gay man – but clearly forgot how neurotic and demagogic much of the British press becomes if you say anything mildly provocative about sexuality and gender.

Here’s what happened. In an interview last week with the American LGBTQ+ publication Them, when asked about her penchant for taking roles in films featuring LGBTQ+ characters (say, The Favourite or Heartstopper), the actor said that she feels that she has a foot in various camps. “Throughout my whole life, I’ve had arguments with people where I’ve always felt sort of nonbinary … I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female. I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man. And he goes, ‘Yeah, I get that.’”

Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian

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• Strugglers seek fourth manager of the season

• Home stalemate with Wolves prompts latest firing

Nottingham Forest are keen to appoint Vítor Pereira as their fourth head coach of the season after sacking Sean Dyche in the early hours of Thursday. The former Wolves manager worked under Forest’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, at Olympiakos and would be open to taking the role.

Forest have acted fast to find a replacement for Dyche, who lasted 114 days in the role after the disastrous spell of Ange Postecoglou. Dyche only lost one of his final six Premier League games but had a strained relationship with the squad and bore the brunt of the fans’ displeasure during the goalless draw with Wolves on Wednesday.

Three races. Three golds. Five dizzying days. But the new legend is not fussed about records

Franjo von Allmen felt the run had not been perfect. At the finish in Bormio, he shrugged, wiggled his gloved hands as if to say meh and stuck out his tongue jokingly. Gold? Surely not. Maybe not even a medal. Seconds later, the scoreboard told a different story.

In a blazing 1:25.32, the 24-year-old Swiss captured the super-G title – his third gold at Milano Cortina. Just like that, Von Allmen joined two greats: Austria’s Toni Sailer (1956) and France’s Jean-Claude Killy (1968), the only other men to sweep three alpine events at a single Winter Olympics. Von Allmen opened his Games with downhill gold, then teamed up with Tanguy Nef to win the inaugural team combined event. Three races. Three golds. Five dizzying days.

ONS reports GDP growth increased in final three months of 2025 after 0.1% growth in previous three months

• Business live – latest updates

The UK economy expanded by 0.1% in the final three months of last year, according to official data, despite signs that tax speculation around Rachel Reeves’s budget had dampened spending.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the economy grew at the same rate of 0.1% as the previous three months. Economists had been expecting a rise of 0.2%.

Being a passenger in this vast country is ‘a full-blooded immersion in the local’, says the novelist whose latest protagonist is lured by the romance of the rails

I carry my train journeys in my bones, the juddering song of the Indian rail. Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, famously likened India to a palimpsest, no layer quite effacing the one that went before. That’s how I think of Indian railway journeys. They inscribe on the mind our fellow travellers, our ways, our thousand languages, our landscapes, our climate.

I think of a rail journey I made in 1998 – that brutal summer of nuclear testing – setting out from Mumbai, in an ordinary three-tier sleeper, for Dehradun, 1,000 miles (1,600km) north. The frazzled train fell off any semblance of a schedule. The voyage grew longer, past 50 hours; hotter, past 50C. I remember the metallic burn on the window grilles; the hot, killing wind that blew through them; the sizzle of water drops splashed on the face when theyhit the uncovered platforms in the heart of the country; the melt of my rubber soles. A fortnight later, having trekked to the mouth of a tributary of the Ganges, completing my expedition from the Arabian Sea to a Himalayan glacier, it was possible to look back on the rail ordeal with affection.

When the Davydenko family woke up at night shivering in their winter coats and hats under several layers of duvets, they knew it was time to move. Systematic Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid had left their 12th-floor flat with no electricity for eight days and heating for almost two weeks. Luckily, the family has a cafe near the city centre they could decamp to

• ‘They want to break us’: Russian energy grid strikes give freezing Kyiv some of its darkest days

Spanning eras of conflict and Covid in Lebanon, this irresistible queer coming-of-age tale explores what it means to be truly free

Meet Raja, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s new novel. A 63-year-old gay philosophy teacher and drag entertainer, he is a stickler for rules and boundaries, living in a tiny Beirut flat with his octogenarian mother, the nosy and unfettered Zalfa. Invited to a writing residency in the US, Raja will use the occasion to relate his life – that is, if you don’t mind him taking the scenic route. “A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true,” Raja tells us. “Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks and distributaries.”

Winner of the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction, Alameddine’s seventh novel opens and closes in 2023, but the bulk of its action takes place earlier: encompassing the lead-up to and aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the Covid pandemic, Lebanon’s 2019 banking crisis, and the Beirut port explosion in 2020. If this timeline makes the book sound like a punishing tour of Lebanese history, I promise it isn’t. More than a war chronicle or national exposé, it is a queer coming-of-age tale, an exploration of the bond between a mother and a son, and a meditation on storytelling, memory, survival and what it means to be truly free. Told in a voice as irresistibly buoyant as it is unapologetically camp, this rule-breaking spin on the trauma plot holds on to its cheer in the face of sobering material. Poignant but never cynical, often dark but never dour, wise without being showy and always eager to crack a joke, this is a novel that insists that the pain of the past need overwhelm neither present nor narrative, identity nor personality. With Sartre as his guide, and a drag fabulousness all his own, Raja shows us how.

Shaken and rubbed in a cloth, this simple Italian classic has never tasted better

Nightclubs, mechanics, restaurants, a theatre, a wholesale butcher and an Apostolic church occupy some of the network of caves and tunnels that, over the centuries, were burrowed into Monte Testaccio, an ancient rubbish dump hill in the middle of Rome that’s made entirely of broken amphorae. Some places make a feature of their situation, revealing sections of pots not dissimilar to the cross section of snapped wafer biscuits, while others have smoothed the curves with plaster.

A few use the caves as originally intended – that is, as natural warehouses offering steady low temperatures and good humidity. In short: the ideal temperature for storing certain foods and wine. Most recently, Vincenzo Mancini, whose project DOL distributes artisanal products from small agricultural realities in Lazio, has taken over a deep cave behind door 93, reclaiming it as an urban ageing space for cheese and cured meat. I visited a few months ago with the chefs from Trullo in London, to do a cheese tasting – and to eat an unexpected cacio e pepe.

Leaders to discuss once-taboo policy of favouring European companies, in attempt to regain economic competitiveness

EU leaders are expected to diverge on whether “Buy European” is an answer to Europe’s waning economic fortunes, at a summit on how to secure the continent’s future in a more volatile global economy.

At a moated castle in the east Belgian countryside, the EU’s 27 leaders will gather on Thursday for a brainstorming session on how Europe can regain its economic competitiveness vis-a-vis the US and China, at a time of economic threats and political turbulence.

Opening the Berlin film festival, No Good Men blends romance and rebellion, capturing love, humour and female agency in Kabul on the eve of the Taliban’s return

‘Afghanistan’s first romantic comedy” was not the easiest of sales pitches, director Shahrbanoo Sadat admits. But her long shot of a movie landed her the opening slot at the Berlin film festival starting Thursday, sending her in the red-carpet footsteps of the likes of Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers.

Sadat, 35, wrote, directed and stars in the daring, genre-bending film No Good Men, about a budding love affair in a Kabul newsroom on the eve of the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 and the west’s chaotic withdrawal.

It is not just this doomed government but the Labour party itself that is disappearing before our very eyes

When he does go, what will the political death certificate give as the true cause of Keir Starmer’s demise? It won’t be the Peter Mandelson scandal, the policy U-turns or the bleak nights at provincial counting centres. All these are symptoms, not the disease. No, what is turning the guy elected just 19 months ago into an ex-prime minister is the slow realisation among ministers, colleagues and voters of one essential truth about the man: there is less to him than meets the eye.

His promises get shrunk in the wash. A green new deal is jettisoned, an Employment Rights Act has a large watering can poured over it, a bold manifesto pledge to end Britain’s feudal leasehold laws suddenly grows caveats.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

With many unable to access or afford qualified therapists, AI is filling the mental healthcare vacuum, amid calls for tighter regulation

On a quiet evening in her Abuja hotel, Joy Adeboye, 23, sits on her bed clutching her phone, her mind racing and chest tightening. On her screen is yet another abusive message from her stalker – a man she had met nine months earlier at her church.

He had asked Adeboye out; when she declined, he began sending her intimidating, insulting and blackmailing messages on social media, as well as spreading false information about her online. There were even death threats.

Referendum on immigration limit could threaten EU agreements and cripple economy, say Swiss businesses

Switzerland will vote this summer on a proposal from the far-right Swiss People’s party (SVP) to limit the country’s population to 10 million, a move that would threaten key agreements with the EU and, opponents say, cripple its economy.

The government said on Wednesday the referendum on the SVP’s “No to a 10 million Switzerland” initiative, which is strongly opposed by both chambers of parliament and the business and financial services community, would be held on 10 June.

A dozen red roses may say 'I love you', but many conventional bouquets carry an environmental price, having been imported by air, dipped in chemicals and wrapped in plastic. Guardian Australia's Petra Stock explains how you can choose flowers that show you care for both a valentine and the environment

• Roses are red, violets are blue: why Valentine’s Day flowers need a redo

• Former linebacker questions QB’s character

• Duo won Super Bowl together in 2005 season

Joey Porter Sr says Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback he won a Super Bowl with at the Pittsburgh Steelers, is not “a good person”.

Porter was speaking on a podcast during Super Bowl week when he made the comments. He and Roethlisberger won Super Bowl XL with Pittsburgh at the end of the 2005 season.

Pelicot says shame is ‘a double sentence’ and describes shock of seeing herself like ‘a rag doll’ in police footage

Gisèle Pelicot, who became a global symbol of courage during the trial of her ex-husband and the dozens of men who raped her while she was unconscious, has called on victims to never be ashamed.

In her first TV interview, on the channel France 5, Pelicot said: “Shame sticks to you, it sticks to your skin. And that shame is a double sentence, it’s a suffering you inflict on yourself.”

Tiffany Smyth is married to Seamus Culleton, who despite having a valid work permit was detained in September

The wife of an Irish man who has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for five months - despite having a valid work permit – is pleading for help in instigating his release from the “dire conditions” he is facing in detention.

“I just want him home where he belongs. I want us to be able to finish what we started,” Tiffany Smyth, wife of Seamus Culleton, said during a Wednesday press conference.

Move is a ‘backwards step’, company spokesperson says, amid concerns Kremlin is seeking more state control via messaging apps such as Max

Russia has attempted to “fully block” WhatsApp in an attempt to push users towards its own state-sponsored communications app, Max, a spokesperson for the Meta-owned company has said.

The company did not reveal more detail on what extent the attempt succeeded or what action was taken to try to block the app.

In late January a new social media site took a certain corner of the internet by storm. Moltbook was conceived as a space where AI assistants could let off steam, chat and compare notes on their bosses, but it quickly became the focus of breathless claims that the singularity had arrived as the bots started badmouthing their humans and plotting an uprising. So what’s the truth about Moltbook? Madeleine Finlay hears from Aisha Down about what it tells us about AI, and about us.

What is Moltbook? The strange new social media site for AI bots

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