Defence secretary has not made a final decision but multiple sources say the deployment of HMS Duncan is under consideration

Ellie Chowns, the Green party’s foreign affairs spokesperson, has said she has tabled an “armed conflict (requirements) bill’” which would require any UK military intervention to have a lawful basis, viable objective and approval from MPs.

In a letter addressed to the prime minister, which she shared to X, Chowns, who is the Green’s MP for North Herefordshire, wrote:

In recent days we have seen a deeply concerning escalation in conflict in the Middle East following a series of illegal and dangerously irresponsible airstrikes on Iran by the United States and Israel.

You have now confirmed that UK bases will be used by the US for their operations in the area. This is a significant concession to President Donald Trump and one which risks drawing the UK into a dangerous conflict.

ChatGPT owner’s CEO says it will bar its technology being used for mass surveillance or by intelligence services

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OpenAI is amending its hastily arranged deal to supply artificial intelligence to the US Department of War (DoW) after the ChatGPT owner’s chief executive admitted it looked “opportunistic and sloppy”.

The contract prompted fears the San Francisco startup’s AI could be used for domestic mass surveillance but its boss, Sam Altman, said on Monday night the startup would explicitly bar its technology from being used for that purpose or being deployed by defence department intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA).

Though the art world is supposed to be inclusive, that isn’t the experience of many disabled creatives – and in a groundbreaking online exhibition at dis_place they have poured their frustrations into art

“I had a lot of frustration about the performance of diversity, equality and inclusion,” says curator Nathalie Boobis. Feeling that the art world’s commitment to access for disabled people was often performative rather than manifesting a sincere commitment to change, Boobis decided to step away. But then came an opportunity to be the in-house curator for Disability Arts Online’s new exhibition space dis_place, and she felt this was finally her chance to highlight disabled experiences in art.

Her inaugural exhibition for dis_place is called I Need to Be More Than a Lesson You Learned. Featuring the work of nine artists and collectives working across several media, it explores the ways in which disabled artists have experienced inaccessibility within the art world and wider society.

Our cartoonist on a decade of magic moments in the big job for world football’s leading ‘man of the people’

• Buy a cartoon | David’s favourite work of 2025

• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

This is a war without a plan, without a strategy, and without any clear understanding of where it leads or how it ends

I’ve spent the last several days checking with foreign policy experts, analysts and specialists in the Middle East for their understanding of Donald Trump’s real goal in Iran, and how anyone (including him) will know he’s achieved it.

Several told me that Trump is seeking the kind of “war” that the US executed in Venezuela – an abduction of a leader by special forces or, as in June, surgical airstrikes on locations where Iran appeared to be building nuclear bombs.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and on 15 March in the UK

Though coffee is one of the world’s most important commodities, little of the profit trickles down to the farmers, while workers are abandoning the countryside in search of more lucrative jobs in the city

Mary Luz Pérez Arrubla and her brother, Rodrigo, are fourth-generation farmers cultivating coffee on steep Andean slopes near the town of Líbano, in the rich agricultural region of Tolima. Along with the rest of Colombia, the family has enjoyed a historic harvest amid surging global coffee prices, which hit record highs for the second year in a row in 2025.

Severe US tariffs imposed on Brazil and Vietnam, – the world’s two largest coffee producers – as well as poor harvests there, helped drive the surge. Both countries were hurt by the El Niño phenomenon, a cyclical weather pattern characterised by dry spells and aggravated by the climate crisis.

Italy matched France physically and, while England have never lost to the Azzurri, Saturday is a Six Nations chance as good as any for the hosts

Italy and England. On level points in the Six Nations table. Two rounds to go. And England have already played their Wales joker.

All in all, there is quite a lot riding on the fixture in Rome on Saturday, especially if you are interested in the lower reaches of the Six Nations table, a purgatory with which even England are quite familiar. They started this championship ranked third in the world, a whisker behind the All Blacks in second, and feeling (not unreasonably) rather good about themselves after 11 Test wins in succession. Then it was 12 (Wales), and then … oh dear.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon among companies using algorithms and AI to influence what crops are grown and how, say critics

Tech companies and industrial agriculture are “playing with the food system” by using AI and algorithms to undermine farmers in choosing what the world eats, leading food security experts have warned.

Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Alibaba are working with industrial agriculture firms to influence what crops are grown and how, according to a report by the thinktank International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).

• Players silent before loss to South Korea in Australia

• Game is Iran’s first since war in Middle East began

Iran’s women’s football team declined to sing their national anthem ahead of their opening match of the Asian Cup in Australia on Monday, their first fixture since the war in the Middle East began.

Every member of the team stood silently, facing straight ahead, during the anthem prior to kick-off in their Group A match against South Korea, who went on to win 3-0 at the Gold Coast Stadium in Queensland. Iran’s head coach, Marziyeh Jafari, and her players declined to comment on either the war or the death of their long-serving leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, when asked by the media.

Oscar-winning director returns to his breakout 2000 hit for an exhibition seven years in the making, giving visitors a new experiential look at his debut film

Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director, has been widely celebrated for his innovative approach to storytelling. His 2000 debut, Amores Perros, was labeled a “hypertext film” for how its three main threads spiraled out of a central car crash, but were otherwise disconnected. In an interview where he discussed his new Lacma show, Sueño Perro – which sees Iñárritu return to hundreds of hours of footage that never made it into his debut movie – he shared that his father was the one who inspired his unique approach to film.

“My father was naturally a great storyteller,” Iñárritu told me via video from Los Angeles. “He always started with what was almost the end of the story, so he threw you a hook, but then he went back to the middle. He was a great storyteller, always finding ways to get new hooks here and there, to get you to listen to a long story.”

With more than 350 establishments closing last year, social media accounts such as Proper Boozers and London Dead Pubs have rallied to fight their sticky-carpeted corner – and bring the ‘old-man pub’ a new clientele

The Calthorpe Arms on Gray’s Inn Road is a fairly atypical central London pub. With patterned red carpets, brass fittings, leather bar stools, a pool table and Christmas tinsel still hanging in early February, it feels very much a “local”, although on a Thursday evening it’s busy with the post-work crowd.

It’s the fifth time Niall Walsh, who works nearby and runs the Proper Boozers Instagram account, has visited in recent months. “It’s just off the beaten track, but easy to get to,” Walsh says over a pint of Harvey’s. “You can get a real, authentic pub experience.”

It’s easy to let your credit card balance mount up – and hard to admit you have a problem. But help is at hand. We talk to four people who worked their way back into the black

Abbie Marton Bell, a National Debtline adviser, is often the first person her clients will speak to about their debt, after years of carrying the weight of their financial worries alone. Most of the time, they haven’t even told their partner or family, she says, and “you can literally hear the relief in their voice”.

Debt carries a lot of shame, but it’s more common than people might think. In the UK, 84% of adults had some form of credit or loan in the year leading up to May 2024. The average household holds about £2,700 in credit card debt, and it’s only getting worse. Borrowing has been rising at its fastest rate for almost two years, with those hit hardest by the cost of living crisis increasingly using credit to pay for essentials.

The technology most people use only as a chatty tool for daily tasks is reportedly aiding US military aggression. And there is not much we can do about it

There are a lot of things that AI can do. It can sort out your shopping list, and it can keep your kids entertained when they’re mutinous by spinning up a tailor-made bedtime story for them. It can make you more efficient at work, and can help our government operate more effectively.

What is written less about, and what we need to shout louder about now, are the risks inherent in the militarisation of AI. In the last three months Donald Trump’s White House has reportedly used AI twice to effect regime change, or to – in the most recent case in Iran – get as close to doing so as possible, and leaving it up to rank-and-file Iranians to finish the job.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

This natural pesticide may work on a small infestation – it just requires elbow grease and repeat treatments

The problem
Mealybugs are the clingy exes of the pest world, wedging themselves into leaf joints, hiding in roots and coating everything in white fluff. Left untreated, they suck sap, stunt growth and spread quickly from plant to plant. Once you notice them, they’re usually everywhere.

The hack
Neem oil is a natural pesticide that coats soft-bodied pests and interferes with their ability to feed and reproduce. Used properly, it can eliminate mealybugs without the need for harsher chemicals.

After the league gathered for the combine, we look at the plots that will dominate the news cycle in the coming weeks and months

Barring a gas mask situation, we know who will be the No 1 overall pick in the draft. The Raiders need a viable long-term solution at quarterback after Geno Smith flamed out last year. Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza, the Heisman Trophy winner and national champion, is the top quarterback on the board and will be the first named called on 23 April. After Mendoza, the real intrigue begins.

British, Czech, Italian and Polish media report first successful returns from Oman and the United Arab Emirates

Greek defence minister Nikos Dendias is in Cyprus today, after the Greek government’s decision to send reinforcements to help protect the island.

Four Greek F-16 arrived in Cyprus last night, stationing at Andreas Papanderous Paphos base, with two frigates also believed to be on their way.

Iran continues to target American bases and Hezbollah fires at Israel as conflict spreads across Middle East

• US-Israel war on Iran – live updates

Iranian drones hit the US embassy in Riyadh as Tehran continued to launch waves of retaliatory strikes at the Gulf and Israel, while Israeli soldiers began operating in southern Lebanon on the fourth day of an increasingly regional war in the Middle East.

The drone attack on the US embassy in Riyadh caused a minor fire, prompting the diplomatic mission to tell Americans to distance themselves from the compound. The attack followed an earlier Iranian drone strike on the US embassy in Kuwait, as Iran continued to target US bases, facilities and personnel in Arab Gulf states.

At the start of Lent, men dressed as rampaging creatures pursue women through medieval villages. The families who maintain these traditions are sceptical of change, but increasingly female revellers want to play more active parts

In the early afternoon of Ash Wednesday, dread creatures dressed in white walk the streets of the medieval southern French village of Cournonterral. They wear long masks of black badger hair, top hats crowned by feathers and sprays of boxwood, and body armour comprising sacks stuffed with straw. Despite the early hours, some of them stagger from drink, whips of hessian sacking dangling from their hands.

These menacing characters are exclusively male – the only women taking part in the traditional festivities today are their prey. Among les blancs – also dressed in white but with no armour except red ribbons in their hair and around their waists – are a few teenage girls in heavy makeup.

Minimalist but never austere, this mother-daughter portrait from the Danish author finds its power in everyday detail

The Danish author Helle Helle’s They, published in the UK in a pin-sharp translation by Martin Aitken, charts the subtle and shifting bond between a teenage daughter and an ailing mother in prose that is minimalist but never austere. It’s one of those novels where little is spoken but everything, by the end, gets said.

The unnamed mother and 16-year-old daughter live above a hairdresser’s in a Danish backwater on the island of Lolland, where nothing much goes on. They walk across the spring-awoken fields, they shop for groceries, they join an evening class. Details of their past are scanty, fugitive: a few house moves, but nothing about the daughter’s father, who exerts a vague apophatic presence. Mostly, they enjoy a frictionless, symbiotic closeness: “They sit by the window a lot, and on the settee, and with the free local weekly … They lift their mugs, sip synchronous mouthfuls.”

Those not up to speed on the Miss Kobayashi manga may struggle with the full nuance of this dimension hopping anime, but the visuals are stunningly to look at

You know fantasy has a different constituency these days when, at a pivotal point in this candy-coloured, realm-hopping anime, the protagonist casts a spell that temporarily boosts local mobile-phone signal. During the climactic battle, it’s salarywoman Miss Kobayashi (voiced by Mutsumi Tamura) who is dialling up extra help from Kanna (Maria Naganawa), the moony, bobby-soxed poppet who’s one of the dragons in human guise that have invaded her life (and demanded a smartphone).

Kanna is very much sought after: with a big smackdown brewing between the forces of chaos and harmony in the dragon dimension, her father Kimun Kamui (Fumihiko Tachiki) turns up at Kobayashi’s flat to demand either his daughter return to fight, or give him the dragon orb into which she has loaded her manna. Offended by his saurian sangfroid, Kobayashi refuses to give Kanna up; when her posse start digging around in the other realm, it appears that human mage Azad (Nobunaga Shimazaki) has been stoking tensions between the two factions.

US president says ‘relationship is not what it was’ after PM defends decision not to allow use of British bases

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• US-Israel war on Iran: what we know on day four

Donald Trump has criticised Keir Starmer again over the UK’s refusal to aid the offensive strikes on Iran, saying the “relationship is obviously not what it was”.

Starmer had issued his strongest rebuke yet of Trump’s action in Iran, saying the UK did not believe in “regime change from the skies” and defended his decision not to allow the use of British bases to conduct the strikes.

Guillermo del Toro has overcome the Academy’s aversion to fantasy before and with this heartfelt telling of the monster classic he should do it again

Guillermo del Toro has spent his career humanising monsters, once calling them the “patron saints of our blissful imperfection”, so his adaptation of Frankenstein was always going to be a match made in heaven. The Mexican film-maker’s passion project turns Mary Shelley’s famous novel about the dangers of hubris and playing God into a touching tale about generational trauma, parental abandonment and the healing power of forgiveness. It’s a meticulously crafted, visually sumptuous and powerfully told story that deserves to take home that best picture Oscar.

But it’s not going to be easy. The gothic fantasy seamlessly blends horror, sci-fi and melodrama in its opulent retelling; here Oscar Isaac plays the eccentric scientist, Victor, who brings a hulking creature (Jacob Elordi) made up of dead body parts to life. Fantasy, horror and sci-fi, however, are genres that notoriously don’t do well at the Academy Awards, apart from in the technical categories. Yes, Del Toro is one of the few film-makers to get a best picture Oscar for a fantasy/sci-fi film in 2018 for his amphibian love story, The Shape of Water, but that win was an exception, not the rule.

By speaking to women across the continent, I discovered how reclaiming pre-colonial rites and rituals can help us find joy in our bodies

In the kitchen of my Airbnb in Dar es Salaam I stripped down to my underwear and wrapped a colourful kanga cloth around my hips. It was day three of my dance lessons with Zaishanga, but I was showing no improvement. Zaishanga, or Auntie Zai as I called her, is a traditional sex educator, known locally as a somo or kungwi. She told me that learning to dance seductively would ensure that, “no man would ever want to leave you, unless you want him gone”. I never did master the dance, and I really don’t care much if a man chooses to leave me, but my time with Auntie Zai was enlightening.

Dance is just one of a range of seduction tips and tricks that Zaishanga teaches at her “kitchen parties”. She also counsels women on how to maintain a healthy marriage, and gives advice on the importance of self-care, and the need to maintain a standard of beauty and style. These gatherings, where experienced older women – aunties, big sisters, grandmothers – share advice with brides-to-be are rooted in traditional rites of passage into womanhood that date back centuries.

Intolerance is in vogue and leaders are failing to meet the moment. When King Charles seems the best and bravest hope, the problem is clear

How should the UK deal with the increasing fracturing of multiculturalism right now, and how we are all being pitted against each other? This idea was on the mind of a man named Steve, who featured on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions on Friday in the aftermath of the Gorton and Denton byelection. Steve asked if the Green victory was an indication that Labour needed to “get back to its roots”, adding, to great applause, that “we’re a relatively wealthy country, we should not be demonising minority groups to square the balance”.

Listening, I was struck by the response of one of the panellists, New Labour minister David Blunkett, who criticised Labour’s current technocratism, but did not reflect on what Steve said about demonisation. It was especially striking considering Blunkett’s earlier comments, that when listening to the victorious Green MP Hannah Spencer’s speech, he thought: “I could have delivered that speech back in 1987 … What is it that has driven this young woman … to join the Greens rather than the Labour party?”