The BBC are showing replays from yesterday’s ski mountaineering, where ridiculously fit men and women ski up a mountain, sprint a flight of steep stairs, before skiing back down again, with jeopardy at each boot change, and in high winds and heavy snow. Truly a different breed of human.
Some beautiful, and blizzard heavy pictures, from Thursday have been curated by our talented picture desk.
The family of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls, responded last night to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest.
“Astonished to see Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested today over alleged misconduct in public office linked to material from the so‑called Epstein ‘Files’,” they posted on an X account run by Maxwell’s siblings.
Negotiations between Ukraine and Russia have made limited progress so far
Meanwhile, Poland has officially left the Ottawa Convention, which bans the use of antipersonnel mines, amid growing concerns about Russia’s aggressive posture.
The withdrawal means Poland will be able to lay anti-personnel mines along its eastern border in the space of 48 hours if a threat emerges, prime minister Donald Tusk said yesterday.
Exclusive: Josh Simons pressed intelligence officials to investigate reporters, in emails described as ‘McCarthyite smear’
A Labour minister who claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf had been personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda, the Guardian can reveal.
Josh Simons, who was running the thinktank Labour Together at the time, was also involved in telling security officials that another journalist was “living with” the daughter of a former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Officials were told by Simons’ team that the former adviser was “suspected of links to Russian intelligence”.
(Cuculi) The Bristol-based folk ensemble travel widely on their first album, exploring global influences with sparkling, springlike warmth
Hedera are a band of five tightly knit friends – violinist Lulu Austin, violin/viola player Maisie Brett, violinist/double bassist Beth Roberts, accordionist/harpist Tamsin Elliott, and clarinettist Isis Wolf-Light – named after the Latin botanical term for ivy. The group’s debut album combines influences from Bulgaria to Bali, Ireland to Georgia, and establishes its mood of knotted, hypnotic locked groove from its opening track, Sterretjie (named after an Afrikaans word for the coastal tern bird, which also means “little stars”). Brett’s violin passes the track’s melody to Wolf-Light’s clarinet and Elliott’s accordion with a bright, sparkling swiftness.
Many other moments of joy, lithe and spring-like, lift these 12 tracks. Roberts’ waltz about a Cornish meadow, Mayflies in June, travels from minor key to major and back again, buoyed along by Elliott’s harp-playing. (Elliott similarly impressed on 2023’s So Far We Have Come, her Anglo-Egyptian album with oud player Tarek Elazhary.) Sekar Jagat (Balinese for “flower of the universe”) twitches sweetly into life on prepared harp and plucked strings, then makes hay with a melody originally written for gamelan; on Shen Khar Venakhi, a 1,000-year-old Georgian hymn that survived Soviet purges, all five women’s voices join together in a dense, glowing mass.
The dark past of a seemingly perfect couple is gradually revealed in this observant debut of obsession and control
Glimpse them chatting in a restaurant or posing on Instagram, and you might think they have it all. The pair live in London but often travel, drawing the eyes of other guests, their skin glowing, their limbs artfully at ease. She writes affirmations on hotel stationery; he claims to taste notes of bark and tobacco in his chianti. As Sean Gilbert’s dark, observant debut opens in Istanbul, this apparently perfect couple bicker and sweat, for secrets lurk behind their facade – and one of them might be murder.
An unexpected reunion gets their sightseeing off to a shaky start. The unnamed narrator and his wife, Elle, have not seen Benny for 15 years when they cross paths outside the Hagia Sophia. An irksome university acquaintance who has become a second-rate rapper, Benny has the grip of a limpet. As the trio browse stalls and pull on saliva-slicked shishas, talk turns to the past.
It goes without saying: Dane was very good looking. Even in the 2000s, which treated us to a glut of ridiculously handsome TV stars (Chad Michael Murray, Jared Padalecki, Milo Ventimiglia), he was breathtaking. The voice. The eyes. The soul patch. Oof.
Joep Wennemars went under the previous Olympic record in the men’s 1500m speed skating. But so did three others
Picture this: you are on the verge of breaking an Olympic record. The cheers, the spotlight, your name etched in history. The magical initials – OR – next to your name until it is next broken. You have got a gold medal waiting to be draped around your neck? Wait, no gold? Silver, maybe? Nope? Surely bronze? No?! Fourth place?! Ouch.
Such is the life of Joep Wennemars of the Netherlands, who went under the previous Olympic record in the men’s 1500m speed skating. But so did three others.
Anthony Chen offers up a forthright but warm film that navigates romantic crises and Singapore’s infatuation with the rich
The warmth, richness and approachability of this lovely film from Singaporean director Anthony Chen, a graduate of Britain’s National Film and Television School, returns him to the family drama style of his 2013 debut Ilo Ilo; with care and connoisseurship, he again draws on the influences of Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang, but Chen’s instincts are less oblique. He dots the I’s and crosses the T’s; the film-making is forthright and wholehearted though not unsubtle.
The film is set in Singapore, criticising the city-state’s conformism and infatuation with the rich and western prestige, and satirically showing the high-wire dangers of its entrepreneurialism, as attempted by the poor. Koh Jia Ler plays Junyang, a goofy, good-natured but shiftless twentysomething guy who lives with his widowed father Boon Kiat (Andi Lim) in a cramped rented flat. Junyang is about to finish his military service and now needs to figure out what to do with his life – but he certainly doesn’t to work on his dad’s noodle stall, that humble business that puts food on their table. His girlfriend Lydia (Regene Lim) is far more aspirational, a gifted pianist with her sights set on university. Lydia’s stern, churchgoing single mother – hardened by her own husband walking out on them both – does not approve of Junyang one bit.
The 22-year-old singer is up for two Brit awards thanks to her frank songs about family strife and predatory men. She explains why she’s fighting for her fellow council estate kids
Although she is on course for pop stardom, with two nominations at next week’s Brit awards, 22-year-old Skye Newman lives in a cabin at the bottom of her sister’s garden in London. It’s the backdrop for the music video to her song Hairdresser, which has 7.5m views on YouTube. In the clip, she is made up, her hair in rollers, lounging with a gaggle of friends. Licking her fingertips to roll a joint, she laments a one-sided friendship with another woman: “When I’m needed, know I’ll be there first / You don’t reciprocate and, girl, that hurts.”
It’s typical of Newman’s songcraft: ballad-driven contemporary soul that goes beyond romantic heartbreak to cover all kinds of pain and recrimination.
Puerto Rican singer sells out concerts in Portuguese-speaking Brazil with breakthrough ‘anti-American agenda of emancipation’
There is a saying in Brazil that Brazilians realise they are Latin only when they travel to the US or Europe.
Among the many reasons for this is that the largest country in Latin America is also the only one in the region where Portuguese is spoken rather than Spanish.
In this week’s newsletter: The south-east of the country is suffering through the worst heatwave since 2019’s ‘black summer’, while the government continues to back fossil fuel projects
Australians are no strangers to blistering weather – being a “sunburnt country” of “droughts and flooding rains” is baked into our national identity. But since the 2019-20 bushfires, which burned through an area almost the size of the UK, and killed or displaced 3 billion animals, the arrival of warmer weather each year is accompanied by dread. This summer has brought punishing extremes of heat and fire that are brutal even by Australian standards.
Within the first 20 minutes of Love Story, Ryan Murphy’s new take on the often tumultuous relationship between John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette, the youngest son of the former US president is depicted wearing five different caps. They include a Kangol flat cap as he cycles to a newspaper kiosk in uptown NYC to read the latest headlines about himself, a Yankees cap as he runs topless on a treadmill and a navy baseball cap as he joins his mother, Jacqueline, for dinner, where she promptly reminds him “no hats at the table, please”.
For Kennedy Jr, hounded by the paparazzi and tabloid press who nicknamed him “The Hunk” and more often than not “The Hunk Who Flunked”, you might think this penchant for peaked caps was thanks to the fact that they let him go somewhat incognito. But he preferred to wear his backwards, pulling the cap downwards over his signature flop of lush black hair, and leaving his full face on view.
Saint-Jorioz in Haute-Savoie will provide a springtime lift for your spirits. On the shore of Lake Annecy, it’s a short bus ride from the city of Annecy, but less busy and with superior lake and mountain views. Hike to the surrounding peaks, towards the lesser-known Col de l’Arpettaz, or cycle on the excellent greenways. Relax by the cool blue alpine water. Behind you lies the underratedLes Bauges Unesco Geopark. The department only joined France in 1860, and has its own Italian-influenced regional cuisine. Brian Lowry
It caused a scandal in imperial Russia, then became a staple of popular art in the USSR. But when I spied a copy of Ivan Kramsky’s portrait in the film Sentimental Value, it opened a door to an untold case of life imitating art
Sentimental Value is one of those films you have to watch very closely. In the Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s latest work, which swept the board at the European film awards and is nominated for eight Baftas and nine Oscars, stories are hidden in closeups, half-tones and peripheral objects. Some of these stories are so well hidden, in fact, that they aren’t even apparent to the people who made the film.
In one scene, roughly an hour in, the camera glides down a corridor, and suddenly there she is: a woman’s portrait on the wall. Anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union and later Russia between the 1950s and 2000s, like me, would recognise her instantly. She has been endlessly reproduced: as prints, embroideries, portrait medallions, even on boxes of chocolates. In Britain, people may have encountered her on the covers of various editions of Anna Karenina.
Stranger Things’ Joe Keery is joined by a stellar cast battling an outbreak of virulent brain spores, but the film doesn’t offer much more than endless wisecracks and a splatterhouse grossfest
‘Pay attention! This shit is real!” screams an on-screen warning at the start of this overstuffed horror-comedy-action outing. As much as the deadly fungus it foists on Earth, an outbreak of sardonic attitude runs rampant here. It falls to two bantering storage facility workers, played by Stranger Things’ Joe Keery and Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell, to contain a potential apocalypse event – with intermittent high-grade thespian help from Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave and old faithful Liam Neeson. (Somebody clearly called in a few favours here.)
Things kick off as the Skylab space station falls out of orbit in 1979 – one of its research containers winds up in the Australian outback. Fast-forward to the early 00s and a team of bioterror operatives, including Robert (Neeson) and Trini (Manville), wipe out the virulent fungus that escapes – though not before it turns one of them into a human smoothie. But the Kansas facility where they stow a sample is later decommissioned, and the ground floor converted into storage lockers. Before you can say “heinous government negligence”, night-shifters Teacake (Keery) and Naomi (Campbell) are itching to check out the random alarm sounding somewhere behind the walls.
Leaving behind Cumbria for Oxford in the late 1950s, Bragg navigates class and culture in a world on the brink of change
It’s October 1958, and a nearly 19-year-old Melvyn Bragg is on the platform at Wigton railway station, saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah. He is off to read history at Wadham College, Oxford, one of the youngest in his cohort because national service is being phased out. Another World starts here, picking up the story left off in Back in the Day, Bragg’s previous memoir about his childhood and youth in this small Cumbrian town.
Oxford to Bragg seems “more a theatre than a city, a spectacle rather than a habitation”. After his prelims, the weeding-out exams in his second term, he is left alone until his finals. He discovers Ingmar Bergman and has many earnest pub conversations about whether Pasternak will get the Nobel prize, or jazz is superior to rock’n’roll. He goes on the Aldermaston march and joins the anti-apartheid movement – although in hindsight he sees this as inspired by a residual faith in empire, with South Africa as Britain’s moral responsibility. Even after Suez, he owns a pencil sharpener in the shape of a globe on which the empire is “a continuous governing blur of pink”.
The youth minimum wage is set to rise over this parliament, but it’s putting off employers from hiring people into their first roles
When Keir Starmer was 14 years old, he got a part-time job clearing stones from a local farmer’s field. At 16, Kemi Badenoch was flipping burgers and cleaning toilets in McDonald’s. Me, I waitressed at weekends from the age of 15 in an Essex pub owned by an ex-paratrooper with two formidable rottweilers roaming behind the bar, which was a life lesson all of its own.
But whatever your first job may have been, there’s a reasonable chance it combined the thrill of hard cash with several mortifying mistakes and a crash course in handling stroppy customers, taking criticism more or less gracefully and moaning about it only out of earshot. Though teenage starter jobs have been in decline for decades – for reasons varying from academic pressures on sixth-formers to the rise of side hustles on Vinted that don’t show up in official statistics – everyone still has to start somewhere, even if it’s now more likely at 18 than 14. But getting that start is becoming harder than it was.
A year-long commission has been launched by Mind to examine AI and mental health after a Guardian investigation exposed how Google’s AI Overviews, which are shown to 2 billion people each month, gave people “very dangerous” mental health advice.
Here, Rosie Weatherley, information content manager at the largest mental health charity in England and Wales, describes the risks posed to people by the AI-generated summaries, which appear above search results on the world’s most visited website.
FCAS, which also involves Spain, is imploding at a high-stakes moment for Europe, as threat rises from Russia
France and Germany’s plan to build a fighter jet of the future, planned to come with a swarm of drones and a “combat communications cloud”, is collapsing.
Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said this week that the €100bn programme no longer worked for him. He insisted it was “not a political dispute”, but a technical one. France needs a jet that can carry nuclear weapons and launch from aircraft carriers, while Germany does not. However, the problems go back much further.
Mind is launching a significant inquiry into artificial intelligence and mental health after a Guardian investigation exposed how Google’s AI Overviews gave people “very dangerous” medical advice.
In a year-long commission, the mental health charity, which operates in England and Wales, will examine the risks and safeguards required as AI increasingly influences the lives of millions of people affected by mental health issues worldwide.
A bright, fruity pudding topped with a toasted pebbly crumb
Rhubarb brings its late-winter brightness to this favourite pudding, while ripe, buttery pears soften the edges and add a gentle creaminess. Instead of the traditional rubbing-in method, the crumble is made by pouring warm browned butter straight into the dry ingredients, creating a pebbly topping with a deeper toasted flavour. Leave out the crushed fennel seed, if you prefer, but this small addition, bloomed briefly in the butter, gives the whole thing a subtle aromatic lift.
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