On BBC, they’re talking about Petra Vlhová, Ggold-medal winner in the Beijing slalom. She’s been out injured for two years, but is back now, competing in the team combined. That’s a lot of pressure for her partner, Katarina Srobova, who’ll need to leave her in the contest with a strong downhill contribution.
Despite ‘constructive’ trilateral talks, Russia is still pursuing its maximalist demands, including claims over Ukrainian territory
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that there was no reason to be enthusiastic about US president Donald Trump’s pressure on Europe and Ukraine as there was still a long way to go in talks on peace in Ukraine, Russian state-owned news agency RIA reported.
His comments just days after what the US, Ukraine and Russia said were difficult, but constructive talks in Abu Dhabi, but suggest that reaching a final agreement could be very difficult.
Japan’s Nikkei jumps to new peak in extended rally after Sanae Takaichi’s party secures election victory; London-listed oil giant BP suspends share buyback
It would take 137 years for lower-income families in the UK to see their living standards double at the current rate of growth, according to a thinktank.
A two-decade stagnation in disposable incomes has created a “mood of unease” across the country, the Resolution Foundation says, warning of the risk of “further political disruption” unless pay growth accelerates.
An ambitious chronicle of the fight for freedom by enslaved Africans spans four centuries of escapes and uprisings in the Americas
‘I am painting a historical landscape,” writes Carrie Gibson – “one that stretches the entire length and breadth of the Americas.” The story she applies this panoramic approach to is that of “the largest, longest-running and most diverse ongoing insurrection the world has ever known”: the fight for freedom by enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, from the 1500s to the 1800s.
It is an ambitious project. In 1979, the historian Eugene Genovese remarked that this story “might require 10 large volumes to tell in adequate detail”. Gibson attempts it in 500 pages. Flitting from Baltimore to Bridgetown to Bahia, her 35 chapters are a catalogue of escapes, armed uprisings and revolution – a dense tapestry as rich in stories from Spanish Cuba, Portuguese Brazil, French Martinique or Dutch Curaçao as from the more familiar settings of the United States or the Anglophone Caribbean.Not that it ignores well-known events or prominent people. William Wilberforce and the campaign to end the slave trade feature, as does Abraham Lincoln and the American civil war. But such familiar terrain is placed within a much broader context.
Persistent wet weather is affecting farmers, builders, sports, wildlife – and damaging roads and homes
“Feel like it hasn’t stopped raining?” the Met Office asked on Monday. For some places, the forecaster said, it really had rained every day so far this year.
People who live in parts of Devon, Cornwall and Worcestershire have been dodging deluges or showers for 40 days – the same number of days that it rained in the Bible’s Noah’s ark story, the same number of soggy days you can expect if it rains on St Swithin’s Day, according to folklore.
A genial, lightly comic portrait of Gösta Engzell, the unlikely civil servant who outmanoeuvred Nazi bureaucracy with paperwork
‘It’s a miracle!” exclaims a Swedish official. No, he is corrected by a beaming colleague: “It’s bureaucracy.” This is a man whose diplomatic pincer skills have just stuck it to the Nazi hate machine and will save tens of thousands of Jewish lives. His name is Gösta Engzell, a real-life bureaucrat in the Swedish foreign ministry during the second world war, played here by Henrik Dorsin as bumbling and avuncular in his comfy cardigans and dicky bow ties.
If we are honest, Engzell’s desk-based heroism – deploying the power of loopholes, paperwork and diplomatic notes verbales – to save lives is not terribly cinematic. Co-directors Thérèse Ahlbeck and Marcus Olsson’s workaround is to give us shots of diplomats dashing along the corridors of power, huffing and puffing; it all adds to the film’s affable comic mood, pleasant enough but sometimes jarring with the seriousness of what is at stake.
A 69-year-old woman is recovering in hospital with four broken vertebrae after a police officer allegedly pushed her down “very violently” and “without warning” at Sydney’s protest against Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s visit.
“I straight away knew I’d hurt my back,” Jann Alhafny told Guardian Australia over the phone from her hospital bed on Tuesday.
Players travelled back with the fans after victory at Fulham but the side has struggled at their superb new stadium
The 20.12 from London Euston to Liverpool Lime Street resembled an old football-special train on Saturday with Evertonians in full voice and party mode for the entirety of the journey after victory at Fulham. The impact of another valuable away win was not lost on David Moyes or his players. They were in the second carriage and listened to the celebrations all the way home.
“It was brilliant on the train going back because we knew what it meant,” the Everton manager said. “If you’re an away supporter and you put your money and your effort into getting to all the games, it’s a thrill when your team get results. And we did, we got it pretty late again. I think part of the job here is to actually give the Evertonians something to shout about and the away supporters have probably had it a bit better than the home ones. We need the home ones to give us everything which the away supporters are giving us as well.”
Photographers using compact thermal-imaging cameras have crafted eerie and ‘poetic’ results at Milano Cortina 2026
While most photographers are striving to ‘freeze’ motion using traditional cameras at the Winter Olympics this month, a creative trio from the photo agency Getty Images are seeking something much more unexpected: heat.
Equipped with compact thermal-imaging cameras – the kind typically reserved for scientific or industrial purposes – Pauline Ballet, Ryan Pierse and Héctor Vivas have been crafting eerie pictures of athletes on the slopes of Cortina and in the rinks of Milan. The Olympians’ bodies are rendered as spectral yellows and reds, while the ice and snow around them appears either cyan or indigo.
Fifa president will be under major scrutiny when he goes to Brussels to address the Uefa annual congress on Thursday
Assuming Gianni Infantino turns up on time, he is expected to make his customary address to Uefa’s annual congress on Thursday. The couple of hours spent in Brussels Expo Hall 3 will be largely procedural but the Fifa president’s messaging will be worth delegates’ attention. Even by the standards of relations between football’s major governing bodies, the past 12 months have been fractious. The fault lines hardly get narrower and there is certainly no reduction in the number of thorny issues simmering away.
At last year’s edition, in Belgrade, Infantino used the gathering of European football’s great and good to make a caveated case for Russia’s return to competitive action. If that was a rolling of the pitch, his comments on the matter in an interview last week amounted to letting the sprinklers loose. Infantino said the ban on Russian sides should be reassessed, at least for age-group teams, but there is little chance of his views gaining weight around Europe even if he elects to revisit the argument.
The 33-year-old Scot has overcome misogyny and abuse and is justifiably proud of becoming the first woman to take charge of a men’s Six Nations match
“I probably stood out like a sore thumb,” says Hollie Davidson as she reflects on the long hard road she has travelled to reach the point where, on Saturday, in Dublin, she will become the first woman to referee a men’s Six Nations game. Davidson leans forward in her chair and ticks off some of the doubts she has had to overcome amid derision and prejudice.
“At the beginning,” the 33‑year‑old says, “the big thing was, always, physically can she do it? Will she be able to keep up with the men’s game? What happens if she gets knocked over? Is her rugby knowledge there? How will players and fans react to her? That sexism is still there at points, but people now just want to see a game being well refereed.”
Born of student disquiet after the 2008 crash, the group says it reshaping economists’ education
As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”.
A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society”.
As Bad Bunny showed at the Super Bowl, español is the coming thing. No wonder it’s now the top GCSE language choice
“Now, Gary, repeat after me: Quiero una margarita, por favor,” my Spanish tutor instructs. I cringe at the butchered Spanglish my estuary accent produces. Like Del Boy Trotter ordering a cocktail: “Key – yeah – row oon margari’a, pour far four.”
It’s 2023, I’m 41, living in Argentina and battling the frustration and disempowerment of learning a new language at this age, longing for my elastic 11-year-old brain over this husked-out mush. I’m also wishing, for the umpteenth time, that I was taught Spanish instead of French at school.
The beautiful game has a fast fashion problem, with clubs bringing out multiple kits every season. But a move towards upcycling old shirts and wearing vintage garments is on the rise
It may have been a quiet January transfer window, but even so, thousands of new shirts will be printed for Lucas Paquetá, returning to his former Brazilian club Flamengo, while his West Ham shirt instantly feels old. Not to mention the thousands of other players moving from one club to another. Uefa estimates that up to 60% of kits worn by players are destroyed at the end of the season, and at any one time there are thought to be more than 1bn football shirts in circulation, many of which are discarded by fans once players leave.
The good news is that lots of designers are bringing their upcycling skills to old kits, taking shirts and shirring them, sewing them or, as in the case of designer and creative director Hattie Crowther, completely transforming them into one-of-a-kind headpieces. “I’m not here to add more products into the mix, I’m here to reframe what’s already in circulation and give it meaning, context, and longevity while staying culturally relevant,” says Crowther, whose creations involving the colours and emblems of Arsenal, Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain, are, she says, “a response to how disposable football product has become”.
The French architect, who once had her nose broken by Jean-Marie Le Pen, created apartment blocks with cascading terraces that seemed to have surrendered to nature. They are still loved by their residents
When the French architect Renée Gailhoustet died in 2023, the residents of Le Liégat, a social housing block she completed in 1982, put up a large handmade sign saying: “Merci Renée.” Architects are often accused of designing impersonal rabbit hutches that they themselves would never deign to inhabit, but when Gailhoustet died at the age of 93, she had been living in her Liégat duplex in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine for more than 40 years.
Outside her living room window, several storeys up, was a large cherry tree and a profusion of greenery. Characterised by their riotous informality, Gailhoustet’s free-plan apartment blocks invariably featured cascading terraces and loggias covered with a foot of soil, so residents could cultivate and enjoy unjardin derrière, a back garden.
The reality is the legal framework placed police and protesters in this situation – and what I saw as I protested looked like instances of excessive police force
The Town Hall riot will no doubt be examined closely by NSW police, accountability agencies and likely the criminal courts, as charges against protesters and possibly police are processed.
I decline in its aftermath to engage in the standard political rhetoric; fawning praise for police and strident condemnation of protesters. I have a lot of respect for the work police do and how tough it is. I also have a lot of respect for people who peacefully engage in the political process by protesting. Most people in both groups are decent and good, but not perfect, and all people deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Netherlands-based site uses public information and tips to reveal identities of agents involved in crackdowns across US
It started as a cheeky response on social media to the US secretary for homeland security. Months later, however, a Europe-based project to unmask US immigration and custom enforcement (ICE) agents has racked up millions of views and mobilised hundreds of volunteers.
“What we’re doing is a reaction to a problematic regime,” said Dominick Skinner, the Netherlands-based Irish national behind the website ICE List, of its mission to remove the anonymity that many of the armed federal agents operate under while deployed to US cities.
Cyber-espionage campaigns are targeting employees directly, including through hiring processes, report claims
Defence companies, their hiring processes and their employees have become a key target of state-sponsored cyber-espionage campaigns, according to a report from Google released before the Munich Security Conference.
The report catalogues a “relentless barrage of cyber operations”, most by state-sponsored groups, against EU and US industrial supply chains. It suggests the range of targets for these hackers has grown to encompass the broader industrial base of the US and Europe –from German aerospace firms to UK carmakers.
Intriguing images abound in Yolanda del Amo’s new book Archipelago, which explores how our longing for closeness coexists with a desire for individuality
Like many Alpine areas faced with declining snowfall, Villach had to make a difficult choice: bring in the snow cannons or reinvent itself
Walking up a winding trail in the Dobratsch nature park in Carinthia, surrounded by picturesque snowy slopes dotted with pines, we hear shrieks coming from round the corner. The path is as wide as a one-way street but Birgit Pichorner, the park ranger I’m taking a tour with, motions for me to move to the side, where we watch a couple with wide grins glide past on a wooden toboggan.
We have seen families out hiking with young children and speed walkers pacing for the summit, while on a trail above us, four skiers are zigzagging up one of the nature park’s designated ski touring routes. For residents of Villach, the southern Austrian town at the foot of Dobratsch, this is very much their Hausberg, a much-loved “locals’ mountain”, says Birgit.
Joe Begos’s gross-out aims for sensory assault but delivers only visual noise, numbing gore and a weary joke stretched far beyond endurance
This is a DayGlo-hued, heavy metal-spackled horror film that clearly hopes to provoke nausea in viewers with its abundant scenes of dismemberment and plentiful use of shaky-cam first-person point-of-view footage. But given that the “blood” being spurted out is mostly bright orange and belongs to extraordinarily fake-looking alien creatures, the effect is neither gross-out nor even the slightest bit engrossing; it is just boring and headache-inducing. Just as you should bring tissues to see Hamnet, viewers are advised to bring painkillers to this, and possibly a good book to read during the dull interstitial bits.
Made over several years in a single scuzzy apartment, Jimmy and Stiggs is the brainchild of writer-director-producer-star Joe Begos, who made the marginally better Christmas Bloody Christmas a few years ago and who plays title character Jimmy here. Having made a bunch of horror films with his lifelong friend Stiggs (Matt Mercer) – we see fictional trailers of them at the beginning, definitely the high point from which it all goes downhill – Jimmy’s career is evidently in a slump and he spends his time getting drunk and high in his grimy hovel, which has a cool jellyfish tank and seems lit exclusively by black-lights, like a 14-year-old metalhead’s dream digs.
Countries’ drop in scores in annual table comes amid ‘worrying trend’ of backsliding in established democracies
The UK and US have sunk to new lows in a global index of corruption, amid a “worrying trend” of democratic institutions being eroded by political donations, cash for access and state targeting of campaigners and journalists.
Experts and businesspeople rated 182 countries based on their perception of corruption levels in the public sector to compile a league table that was bookended by Denmark at the top with the lowest levels of corruption and South Sudan at the bottom.
A succulent, richly seasoned lamb pie filled with honey carrots and almonds, followed by a cardamom- and orange-spiked desert
There is little as pleasing to cook in the depths of the winter as a pot of enticingly fragrant, slow-braised meat. A shoulder of lamb is one of my favourite cuts; you, or a friendly butcher, will need to trim away its excess fat, a job that will reward you with an exquisite flavour that marries beautifully with bold spicing. Here, we travel to Morocco, with sweetly aromatic ginger, turmeric and cinnamon, and follow that with cardamom, cream and rhubarb for pudding. A sumptuous, colourful feast to stave off any February blues.
Podcast by Adam Batty and BBC 6 Music DJ Afrodeutsche follows the leads to Leeds
The hunt for clues about the life of the masked rapper MF Doom had taken Adam Batty to some strange places, none more so than a remote-control car shop in the market town of Otley, West Yorkshire.
Rumour had it that Doom, who died in Leeds in 2020, had spent thousands in the shop. Other sightings placed him in the indie venue the Brudenell Social Club.
MF DOOM: Long Island to Leeds is available on BBC Sounds from Tuesday 10 February.
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