The Russian Navy has reportedly deployed a submarine and other naval vessels to escort the tanker, previously involved in Venezuelan oil exports, amid growing speculations the US and allies are monitoring its movements.
Exclusive: Getting rid of premium seats, ensuring flights are near full and using efficient aircraft could slash CO2, analysis suggests
Climate-heating emissions from aviation could be slashed in half – without reducing passenger journeys – by getting rid of premium seats, ensuring flights are near full and using the most efficient aircraft, according to analysis.
These efficiency measures could be far more effective in tackling the fast-growing carbon footprint of flying than pledges to use “sustainable” fuels or controversial carbon offsets, the researchers said. They believe their study, which analysed more than 27m commercial flights out of approximately 35m in 2023, is the first to assess the variation in operational efficiency of flights across the globe.
As a teenager, the actor landed her first ever job in the blockbuster film series. The experience was fun – but also led to horrendous online abuse. Now she’s back, playing a tough and surprising matriarch in the Regency smash hit
Some actors might have been a little put out to audition for the role of the beautiful young romantic lead, and instead be cast as her mother, but not Katie Leung. “Absolutely not,” she says with a laugh. “I look young for my age – as most people in the west think Asians do – but I felt really seen to finally get to play the role of a mother.” She is a mother, she points out, and anyway, the role of Lady Araminta Gun, the steely aristo who is about to rock the new series of Netflix’s Regency behemoth Bridgerton, is so delicious, who could be insulted?
Araminta, widowed, has seen off two husbands, and now she’s trying to marry off her two teenage daughters, ideally to a Bridgerton, while keeping her stepdaughter, Sophie, in her place – as a Cinderella-style servant for the family. “The showrunners reassured me that it wasn’t going to be the archetypal evil stepmother role,” says Leung. “They wanted to find the humanity in Araminta. They wanted to ensure I knew her background, her struggles, why she makes these decisions, and why she’s so formidable.”
This now venerable hardware remains an ideal platform for classics such as Minecraft and daring experiments from the brightest new developers
Now surely approaching their twilight years, the Xbox Series S and X machines nevertheless still have plenty to offer both new and veteran owners. We have selected 15 titles that show the range of what’s on offer, from the biggest blockbusters to lesser known indie gems you may have missed. Whether you’re after tense psychological horror or wild escapism, it’s all here and more.
Exfoliating, plumping and hydrating, the best products will leave your skin glowing without costing a fortune
Lactic acid – always the bridesmaid for the more hyped glycolic acid – is my first choice of alpha hydroxy acid for all manner of reasons. It exfoliates without stripping or stinging (its bigger molecule size makes it particularly well tolerated by even sensitive skins), can stimulate collagen and ceramide production to firm, plump and protect mature skins, has antibacterial properties for more problematic ones, and binds with water to keep every type more hydrated. Lactic also imparts an unmistakable glow to the complexion and deflakes rough areas brilliantly.
I’ve always loved it, but have rarely been so spoilt for choice. Beauty Pie’s new Youthbomb Extreme Retinal Triple Renewal Serum (£49 to members) is their best formula in some time, which goes some way to justify its high (for Beauty Pie) price point.
Another day, another Jørgen Strand Larsen rumour. The latest speculation concerning the Wolves striker has Tottenham tussling with Newcastle for his services. With Mohammed Kudus sidelined by injury, Thomas Frank needs attacking reinforcements for his ailing side and Strand Larsen could fit the bill. Newcastle’s interest remains solid though, and they had scouts at Molineux last weekend, the Newcastle Chronicle reports.
Chelsea being Chelsea, Liam Rosenior’s arrival at Stamford Bridge has excited the gossip peddlers, and there’s talk in Spain of a cheeky move for Trent Alexander-Arnold. The Spanish outlet Fichajes claims: “Sources close to the club suggest that Chelsea could be preparing a multimillion pound offer to try to convince Real Madrid, assuming the deal must be a permanent transfer.” Though a move for the former Liverpool full-back wouldn’t particularly fit Chelsea’s transfer MO.
Chalamet’s nogoodnik ping-pong hustler character is the latest in cinema’s rich history of protagonists with shabby morals. So why the backlash?
In the new hit movie Marty Supreme, the story is pushed forward by how lead character Marty Mauser keeps making messes then, rather than cleaning them up, manages to expand their scope beyond reason. Marty is attempting to prove himself as the world’s greatest table-tennis champion, to escape his meagre mid-century New York City circumstances and achieve a dream he’s locked on to, seemingly more out of desire to achieve it than a particular love for the sport.
And just as he’s presumably blown up some natural athleticism into a monomaniacal quest, all of Marty’s misdeeds across the film escalate. He cajoles, then lies. He quickly turns a pushy request to borrow money into petty theft, which then becomes armed robbery. At one point, a little ping-pong hustle at a New Jersey bowling alley literally blows up into a gas-station fire. Marty will not accept anything less than ultimate victory, which means he will especially not accept responsibility for his actions. And we, in the audience, are invited to like him anyway, at least in part because he is played by Timothée Chalamet.
The Londoner from Lagos wowed the fringe with a show about language, family and cross-cultural identity. She talks about dread, dreams and her bid for ‘controlled chaos’
Before her first Edinburgh fringe run last summer, Ayoade Bamgboye put a question to her comedy friends: “How do you debut?” She recalls their advice: “You introduce yourself, and there’s a point of view. There should also be a narrative arc. And you need to establish who you are as a comedian.” This was a lot to hear. “It filled me with dread,” says the 31-year-old. “There’s this recurring thought that you can only debut once. If it falls flat, then you’re just a shit debutante, forever.”
Reader, Bamgboye avoided this fate, and then some. A fringe first-timer with a very slender comedy CV behind her, the Londoner-via-Lagos arrived at the festival with a fresh-minted show, Swings and Roundabouts, and left clutching the prestigious best newcomer award, as formerly won by Harry Hill, Sarah Millican and Tim Minchin. (She was the first Black woman to win the award.) It’s a ticket to the big time and Bamgboye is still reeling. “These past months have been very difficult, getting out of my head and out of my own way. That question of: why me, why this, why now?” Sometimes, only a cliche will cover it. “It changed my life,” says Bamgboye flatly. “I hate to say stuff like that, but it did.”
How billions of trees left their mark on an empire’s psyche – shaping ideological and literal battles up to the present day
When Sophie Pinkham opens her fascinating book with the claim that “Russia has more trees than there are stars in our galaxy”, it might seem as though she is merely using a poetic turn of phrase. But the statistic is correct: while the Milky Way is estimated to have roughly 200bn stars, Russia has something in the region of 642bn trees. Stretching from the Arctic tundra to central Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the Russian forest is vast, mighty and inhospitable. Yet while it is a source of potential danger, it is also a place of great beauty and potential riches, providing furs, minerals and rivers overflowing with salmon.
Pinkham, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University whose last book explored the intricacies of post-Soviet Ukraine, here charts the landscape’s influence on the Russian psyche, and its imprint on history, society and literature. The forest is deeply entwined with Russian national identity – the country is often symbolically represented as a bear – yet attitudes towards it have fluctuated. Different leaders have proposed different strategies for extracting value from the land, leading to cycles of deforestation and tree-planting depending on whether the priority was boosting agriculture, building Peter the Great’s imperial fleet, extracting minerals or constructing hydroelectric dams. Politically, it has been a place of resistance and of ultranationalist rhetoric glorifying the idea of Russian self-sufficiency.
Here are the wildest theories about who is beneath the red cloak. Brace yourself for handwriting analysis, Jekyll and Hyde vibes and crucial slips of the tongue
It’s the question on everyone’s lips. No, not “Why am I half a stone heavier and in dire need of an afternoon nap?” but “Who is the Secret Traitor?” And thankfully, we’re about to find out.
The curveball new role has proved a gamechanging twist in BBC mega hit The Traitors. Swishing around Ardross Castle in a red cloak, as opposed to the Traitors’ familiar green, the Secret Traitor’s identity is unknown to contestants and viewers alike. It hasn’t just stoked paranoia in the Traitors’ turret but enabled the audience to play along at home, turning us all into armchair sleuths as we try to crack the case.
Newsflash: Britain’s construction sector continued to shrink in December, as housing, commercial and civil engineering activity suffered sharp falls again.
Data provider S&P Global has reported that activity across the UK construction sector, and new orders, both fell again last month.
The three remaining hunger strikers have been convicted of nothing. Yet with astonishing cruelty, ministers refuse to listen to their reasonable demands
They are far into the lethal zone. Three people who are being held in prison on charges connected with the protest group Palestine Action have been on hunger strike for 45, 59 and 66 days. A fourth prisoner, Teuta Hoxha, ended her strike this week, after 58 days. She could suffer lifelong health effects. The remaining strikers, Heba Muraisi, Kamran Ahmed and Lewie Chiaramello, could pass away at any time. The 10 IRA and INLA hunger strikers who died in 1981 survived for between 46 and 73 days. Muraisi, whose strike has lasted the longest, is, according to supporters, now struggling to breathe and suffering uncontrollable muscle spasms – possible signs of neurological damage. Yet the government refuses to engage.
It created this situation. The Crown Prosecution Service states that the maximum time a prisoner can spend on remand is 182 days (six months). Yet Muraisi and Ahmed were arrested in November 2024, and are not due to be tried until June at the earliest, which means they will be remanded for 20 months. Chiaramello, who was arrested in July 2025, has a provisional court date in January 2027, which means 18 months in prison without trial.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Liam Rosenior looks up at the towering Strasbourg Kop. He shouts and pleads as he points to his players, demanding the fans applaud them. Met with hostility, boos and jeers in the stands, he cuts a lone figure, one at pains to sow unity at a divided club. Strasbourg had just won the game, beating Le Havre 1-0 earlier this season, but the club’s fans were in no mood to celebrate.
Behind an image are a thousand words, or three banners in this case. One called for the club president Marc Keller to leave Strasbourg; another criticised the bizarre Ishé Samuels-Smith back-and-forth transfer; and the one to which Rosenior took particular exception concerned his captain, Emmanuel Emegha. It read: “Emegha, pawn of BlueCo, after changing shirts, hand back your armband.” Emegha had agreed a deal to join Chelsea a few days earlier, once again confirming to Strasbourg fans that they were subservient to “big brother” Chelsea in the multi-club hierarchy.
CFG have ditched Mumbai City and losing the glamour will hurt the game in the world’s most populated nation
The world’s biggest multiclub network shrank from 13 to 12 in the last week of 2025 but few blame the City Football Group for walking away from Mumbai City and India after six years. The reason for divesting their shares which gave them 65% ownership was addressed, not that anyone needed enlightening in a statement. “CFG has made this decision after a comprehensive commercial review and in light of the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the future of the Indian Super League (ISL).”
Uncertainty is an underestimation. The 2025-26 ISL season was supposed to kick off in September. However, with a 15-year Masters Right Agreement between the All India Football Federation (AIFF) and its commercial partner ending in December and no new agreement or partner in place, it never started. Most assumed that it would be a short-lived delay but here we are, in 2026, and there is still no football. A meeting took place in Delhi on Tuesday and produced a start date of 14 February, just six weeks short of a year since Mumbai’s last ISL game. How it works, if it works, remains to be seen.
“After St Mirren beat Celtic in the Scottish League Cup, I wondered where it actually is,” writes Dan J. “The answer is (as everyone bar me knew) Paisley, right next to Glasgow airport. Which got me wondering, which team is closest to an airport? I reckon Glentoran, next to Belfast City, and Eastleigh, virtually in Southampton airport, are in with a shout. And Charlton if you are happy to swim part of the way. Any closer ones?”
We had so many answers to this question, so thank you to one and all. Let’s start with a ground that is but a thunderclap away from the nearest airport. “The Icelandic football club Valur is near Rekjavík airport, which is mostly a domestic airport, but also has some international flights,” writes Kári Tulinius. “The distance from the fence around the airport to Valur’s fence is about 150 metres. From training pitch to the nearest piece of airport tarmac is 230m, and from corner flag to the end of the runway is 380m. All of these distances were measured with Google Maps.”
Tourists lead by 119 after late wickets let hosts back in
It was good. So good. So unbelievably good. On the penultimate day of a tour packed with regret for England, a star was born as Jacob Bethell, 22 years young, compiled a truly golden hundred that offered hope for the future.
There were no histrionics upon getting there either, no suggestion this was a maiden first-class century compiled in the heat of an Ashes Test. Instead, having skipped down to the off-spin of Beau Webster and belted a four, he reacted like an old pro – albeit one with parents welling up in the stands.
Drawing on his own near-death experience, the author finds a powerful intensity in this tale of a young man’s convalescence in a Cornish village
“I had to pick through the wreckage, blind at first. I had to find all the pieces of me, scattered all around, and put them back together, one by one.” Following a cardiac arrest which left him clinically dead for 40 minutes, Jago Trevarno, the young narrator of Patrick Charnley’s moving debut novel, has retreated to the Cornish village where he grew up, to shelter under the protection of his “off-gridder” uncle, Jacob.
His mother dead of cancer and his father long gone, at 20 Jago’s world seems to have shrunk to nothing but the hard daily labour of working a subsistence farm high above the rugged Atlantic coast. The life Jago had begun to construct in the city, “a runaway train” in flight from his mother’s death and everything that reminded him of her, has evaporated abruptly in the aftermath of his near-death experience. He has “gone from someone who needed to slow down, to be present, to someone having no choice about it”, and must start from scratch.
The sight of my work, torn and singed but still legible, made me realise the importance of translating and protecting stories – so they remain when everything else falls away
In the rubble of a collapsed apartment block, a single image stayed with me: a book I had translated from English to Persian, lying half-buried in dust and ash. Its cover was torn and smudged, its pages curled and singed, but it was still legible. Still speaking.
Two days earlier, on 13 June 2025, missiles from Israel began striking Tehran. There were no sirens, just sudden, violent blasts. The internet was completely cut off. I was in my apartment, translating Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others – a book about what it means to transport words across languages, and the ethics and anxieties of inhabiting another’s voice. As buildings fell, I sat editing a text that argued, in its quiet way, for the endurance of meaning.
Saudi air strikes hit the home province of Aidarous al-Zubaidi on Wednesday after he reportedly did not travel to Riyadh
Saudi Arabia on Wednesday said the leader of a separatist movement in Yemen “fled” to an unknown location after saying he would travel to the kingdom for negotiations over the future of southern Yemen.
A statement from Maj General Turki al-Malki, a spokesperson for a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, represents the latest twist in tensions between it and the Southern Transitional Council (STC), backed by the United Arab Emirates.
Harbaugh was NFL’s second longest-tenured head coach
Ravens went from Super Bowl favorites to 8-9 finish
The Baltimore Ravens have fired head coach John Harbaugh after 18 seasons in charge, the team announced on Tuesday.
Harbaugh is the most successful coach in the history of the franchise and was the second longest-tenured head coach in the NFL before his dismissal. Ironically, his final game with the Ravens came against the only name ahead of him in terms of tenure length – Mike Tomlin, who has been in charge of the Pittsburgh Steelers for 19 seasons.
Across Africa, baobabs have rich symbolic meaning, but the breakneck expansion of the DRC’s capital has reduced their number in the city centre to one
The older inhabitants of Kinshasa can remember when trees shaded its main avenues and thick-trunked baobabs stood in front of government offices.
Jean Mangalibi, 60, from his plant nursery tucked among grey tower blocks, says the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s frenzied expansion has all but erased its greenery. “We’re destroying the city,” he says, over the sound of drilling from a nearby building site.
The PM won’t call out Trump over Venezuela, and won’t commit to Europe. His refusal to choose leaves vital choices for Britain to be made by others
For an inveterate liar, Donald Trump is remarkably honest. The best guide to what he thinks is what he says. When forecasting his likely course of action, start with his declared intentions – removing the president of Venezuela, for example – and assume he means it. When he says the US must take possession of Greenland, he is not kidding.
The motives are sometimes muddled but rarely hidden. Trump likes making deals, especially real estate deals, and money. He wants to be great and to have his greatness affirmed with praise and prizes. He craves spectacle. The world as he describes it doesn’t always resemble observable reality, but there is an effortless, sociopathic sincerity to his falsehoods. The truth is whatever he intuits it to be in the moment to advance his interests and manipulate his audience.
Groups are coming together across the country to help refugee families settle and integrate into local life
“Our children correct us when we don’t pronounce some words with the proper Derbyshire accent,” says Samir*, an Afghan refugee whose family have settled into their new lives in the north of England.
Initially, he says, it was difficult for the family to get used to rural life in Derbyshire, but after a while they had integrated into the local community so well that his children, who have adopted the Derbyshire accent, tease him about his.
Connexion
