A devastated Vladyslav Heraskevych has been talking to reporters in the mixed zone.
“[I am feeling] Emptiness. Yesterday was amazing at training. I could be among the medallists in this event but because of some interpretation of the rules which I don’t agree with I am not able to compete…rememberance is not a violation of the rules.”
Labour mayor of Greater Manchester joins those criticising Ratcliffe over his comments
Sir Simon McDonald, the former permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, has urged No 10 to do “more due diligence” as it prepares to replace the cabinet secretary, Chris Wormald, with Antonia Romeo, the frontrunner for the role. Rowena Mason has the story.
Steven Swinford from the Times says McDonald’s comments have provoked a furious backlash from people within government. He has posted this comment from a government source.
This is a desperate attempt from a senior male official whose time has passed but spent their career getting Britain into the mess it finds itself in today. A computer says no culture, that cannot challenge the status quo.
Antonia is a disrupter. She isn’t settled with the status quo. She is one of the few senior officials that has always fought against the computer says no culture embedded in the British state
From One Battle to Another to Marty Supreme, supermarket magnates, professors and special agents have been stealing scenes on screen
Striving for realism, Timothée Chalamet knew what the scene required. “I’m really getting in the guy’s face and I’m really trying to get him angry with me,” the lead actor recalled recently about the making of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. “I was saying to Josh, ‘He’s not getting angry with me, he’s not getting angry with me.’”
But it turned out the unnamed extra had been paying attention. Chalamet added: “I did another take, and then the guy said, ‘I was just in jail for 30 years. You really don’t want to fuck with me. You don’t want to see me angry.’ I said to Josh, ‘Holy shit, who do you have me opposite, man?’”
Club’s former manager says Spurs reluctant to take risks
Spending and wage structure holding them back, he feels
Ange Postecoglou has described “curious” Tottenham as “not a big club” after their sacking of Thomas Frank. Frank succeeded Postecoglou last summer but was unable to reverse their fortunes in the Premier League and was shown the door on Wednesday with Spurs 16th.
“Having been in that position now twice in the last six months, it’s tough,” Postecoglou told The Overlap’s Stick to Football podcast. “You know that he can’t be the only issue at the club. It’s a curious club, Tottenham. It’s made a major pivot at the end of last year, not just with me but with [the executive chair] Daniel [Levy] leaving as well, and you’ve created this whole sort of environment of uncertainty.
Marineland Antibes, the French government and animal welfare groups all agree on the need to rehome the listless killer whales but no one can agree where
In a sprawling aquarium complex in south-eastern France that once drew half a million visitors a year, only a few dozen people now move between pools that contain the last remaining marine mammals of Marineland Antibes. Weeds grow on walkways, the stands are empty and algae grows in the pools, giving the water a greenish hue.
It is here that Wikie and Keijo, a mother and son pair of orcas, are floating. They were born in these pools, and for decades they performed in shows for crowds. But since the park’s closure in January 2025, they no longer have an audience. When they are alone, they “log”, or float at the water’s surface, according to a court-ordered report released last April.
Andreas Graf lived without screens and no idea of the date or time. The conditions were often brutal – but he found kindness and friendship as he rode
In April 2022, Andreas Graf set off on his bike from his home in Norway. His dream was to cycle to India. A week later, having reached Sweden, it was already becoming more of a nightmare. “It was pouring with rain and I was lying in my tent in my half-wet sleeping bag and I was like, I could be in my very cosy Oslo apartment,” he says. “I had this good life, a career, a partner, and I had left everything behind.”
He was 31. Friends were settling down. Graf had a well-paid job in industrial engineering, but was still renting in a houseshare. “I had started to think about whether to make a financially reasonable and sensible decision, or do something else. I went for option two.”
Before the Post’s sweeping layoffs and Lewis’s abrupt resignation, his tenure was marked by controversy and clashes with staff
Standing on the seventh floor in the center of the Washington Post’s open newsroom on the morning of 3 June 2024, publisher Will Lewis decided to deliver some tough love to a news organization he had taken charge of five months earlier.
Lewis, a veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, had replaced Fred Ryan, a former Ronald Reagan aide who had presided over some of the Post’s profitable years – during the first Trump administration – but lost the confidence of some staffers after clashing with employees during a late 2022 town hall.
Local officials say strikes were part of widespread attacks across the country targeting energy infrastructure
Away from Ukraine, EU leaders are gathering this morning in the bucolic setting of the Alden Biesen castle in the east Belgian countryside for a summit dedicated to economic revival in the face of Donald Trump’s tariff threats and fierce competition from China.
The venue, founded by Teutonic Knights in the 13th century, was chosen because it offers a change of scene for the leaders. The summit, in EU parlance, is an informal meeting, i.e. a brainstorming session, rather than a day for big decisions.
Head coach’s deal was due to finish after World Cup
Tuchel keen to lead team at Euros co-hosted by England
Thomas Tuchel has signed an extension to his England contract that will keep him in charge of the national team until after Euro 2028.
The fresh deal means Tuchel, who took over in January 2025, will remain manager regardless of England’s fate at the World Cup this summer. He originally signed an 18-month deal but will now be at the helm for a home European Championship in two and a half years’ time.
Suddenly, venerable figures presumed immune to sordid compromise have been exposed – although some have shown that moral courage is possible
In 2016, the French luxury fashion house Hermès decided to pull an item it had donated to a charity auction after it appeared to have been bought by Jeffrey Epstein. In an email made public in this month’s tranche of Epstein files, Epstein’s assistant says someone at the auction platform had relayed to them that Hermès was “not comfortable” with Epstein as a donor and that he would be refunded. It’s a reminder that institutions – and the people at their helms – can, when they wish, still recognise a line they will not cross. No sermon, no press release: just a quiet act of moral housekeeping that now reads like a lesson in basic civic hygiene.
France is discovering how rare that reflex proved to be at home. The latest cache of Epstein files – emails, memos and legal documents released by the US Department of Justice – does not reveal a hidden French paedophile ring. So far, the only confirmed French sexual connection to Epstein remains Jean‑Luc Brunel, the modelling agent who died in police custody in 2022 while being investigated on suspicion of trafficking women to Epstein. Instead, the new files trace how Epstein ingratiated himself into parts of the country’s political and cultural elite, providing private jets, introductions and offshore structures to people long accustomed to thinking of themselves as beyond reproach.
Agnès Poirier is a political commentator, writer and critic for the British, American and European press
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Amy Berg’s arresting documentary delves into the early life and untimely death of the 90s singer-songwriter, with extensive contributions from his mother and girlfriends
Some moths are drawn to the flame and some butterflies to the wheel. The exquisitely beautiful, mercurial and prodigiously talented 90s singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley was drawn to the music business. And this contractually demanded endless touring and a multi-album commitment when he’d already poured his twentysomething-year-old life and soul into the first one, Grace, a hipster-critical smash whose commercial underperformance in the US caused execs to push him ever harder for a follow-up to recoup their investment. The business also created a world where he got to meet his heroes (such as Paul McCartney and Robert Plant), whose extravagant, good-natured praise for him sent this already highly strung young soul over the edge. He was as handsome as Jim Morrison in his sleek prime as well as – to my eye – Adam Ant with a touch of Neil Innes.
Amy Berg’s arresting documentary of a death foretold explains how young Jeff and his mother were abandoned when he was an infant by his father, Tim Buckley, a singer and counterculture figure who was to die of a heroin overdose in his late 20s. Jeff was to die at about the same age, in an accidental drowning in Wolf River Harbor, Memphis, Tennessee, in 1997, when he was just 30.
A portrait of the company whose ‘toymaker philosophy’ stands in contrast to the tech giants that rule our lives
What is the highest-grossing entertainment franchise of all time? You might be tempted to think of Star Wars, or perhaps the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Maybe even Harry Potter? But no: it’s Pokémon – the others don’t come close. The Japanese “pocket monsters”, which star in video games, TV series and tradable playing cards, have made an estimated $115bn since 1996. Is this a sign of the lamentable infantilisation of postmodern society?
Not a bit of it, argues Keza MacDonald, the Guardian’s video games editor, in her winsomely enthusiastic biography of Nintendo, the company that had become an eponym for electronic entertainment long before anyone had heard the words “PlayStation” or “Xbox”. Yes, Pokémon is mostly a children’s pursuit, but a sophisticated one: “Like Harry Potter, the Famous Five and Narnia,” she observes, “it offers a powerful fantasy of self-determination, set in a world almost totally free of adult supervision.” And in its complicated scoring system, “it got millions of kids voluntarily doing a kind of algebra”.
The Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych has been kicked out of the Winter Olympics after he refused to back down from wearing a “helmet of memory” in honour of Ukraine’s war dead.
The decision was announced by the International Olympic Committee just 21 minutes before the first round of the men’s skeleton competition in Cortina on Thursday after last-ditch talks between the IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, and Heraskevych failed to find a breakthrough.
Warning: this video contains footage that may be distressing to some viewers.
In October 2025, 122 people were killed in what would become Rio’s deadliest police operation. ‘Operation Containment’ was designed to arrest members of one of Brazil's most powerful organised crime groups, the Red Command.
Three months after the police raid many questions still remain, but the Guardian's investigation found that at least one person killed was not a gang member. Police chiefs and conservative politicians have hailed it as a historic blow to organised crime but activists, security experts, the families of the dead, and even Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have called a disastrous and futile massacre.
A team of journalists across the Guardian has pieced together police body-camera footage, satellite imagery and pictures and video posted to social media to get the clearest picture to date of what happened that day.
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.
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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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.
The UK economy expanded by only 0.1% in the final three months of last year, according to official data, as falling business investment and weak consumer spending led to little momentum going into 2026.
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. This was less than a 0.2% rise that economists had been expecting.
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.
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