Internet calling service that disrupted landline industry to close in May as tech giant says it will focus on Teams

Skype will ring for the last time on 5 May as owner Microsoft retires the two-decade-old internet calling service that redefined how people connect across borders.

Shutting down Skype will help Microsoft focus on its homegrown Teams service by simplifying its communication offerings, the office software giant said on Friday.

Pete Hegseth viewed his political odds as being unchanged in pushing Trump to fire Gen Charles Brown

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The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, saw few political consequences in supporting Donald Trump’s ouster of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff because he never had the support of the senators who wanted Gen Charles Brown to remain in the role, advisers close to the secretary said.

The ramifications of Trump’s decision to fire Brown and seven other senior officials at the Pentagon took on new urgency on Thursday after five former defense secretaries, outraged at Trump’s firings, urged Congress to hold hearings and extract justifications for their dismissals under oath.

Murch was just a rookie when he was hired to edit Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up to The Godfather, but studying Hackman taught him all he needed to know

I never formally met Gene Hackman. I glimpsed him once, in November 1972, when he bounded upstairs to the offices of American Zoetrope in San Francisco, but I didn’t recognise him until he told the receptionist that he was here to see Mona Skager.

Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation was about to start shooting in two weeks, and Mona was Francis’s associate producer. I was to be the film’s editor. That brief and solitary glimpse of Gene in real life was counterbalanced by 16 months of daily screen contact with Harry Caul, the character brought to life by Hackman.

Moscow says Alexander Darchiyev will take up Washington post that has been unfilled since October last year

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Russia has announced it will appoint a new ambassador to Washington, signalling a further diplomatic thaw in relations just a day after Russian and American officials met in Istanbul to discuss strengthening ties.

Moscow said Alexander Darchiyev, a career diplomat who is currently the head of the foreign ministry’s North America department, will soon leave for the role in Washington.

A spoonable, salty-sweet, squidgy treat, to serve with or without banana ice-cream, and ready in all of 20 minutes

This speedy dessert, which you can have ready in less than 20 minutes (and 14 of those being baking time), can be scaled up according to how many mouths you want to feed. I like the umami hit of miso and its saltiness next to the soft and sweet banana ice-cream, but it can be swapped for peanut butter, if you prefer.

• Briton’s switch to Scuderia has been questioned
• ‘I will work to be better … I use that as fuel’

Lewis Hamilton says the criticism he has received throughout his career has only made him strive harder to improve.

On Thursday Hamilton dismissed criticism from the former F1 team owner Eddie Jordan and the former F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone. On Friday, the final day of pre-season testing in Bahrain, the seven-time champion doubled down against his detractors, saying the comments only encourage him to prove them wrong.

We’d like to hear from Canadians about any plans you have made or changed because of the US president’s stance towards the country

Since taking office, US President Donald Trump has threatened steep tariffs on Canadian exports and made comments about the country becoming the 51st US state.

Canadian travel agents have said that clients have cancelled trips to the US in reaction to the president’s rhetoric. Some stores have said that shoppers are avoiding US brands.

A Complete Unknown’s best actor nominee might lose out on the prize to The Brutalist favorite Adrien Brody but his journey to the stage has been award-worthy

On Sunday, Timothée Chalamet could become, at 29 years, two months and three days, the youngest best actor winner in Oscar history. But whether or not his performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown beats out presumed frontrunner Adrien Brody – the current youngest best actor, at 29 years, 11 months and nine days in 2003 – Chalamet has already won arguably the most important prize of modern movie stardom: the hearts and minds of the internet.

If we’re in the business of giving out awards for deserving, boundary-pushing work, then Chalamet’s best actor campaign – unofficial and often unspoken efforts to sway awards voters and build public sentiment – deserves its own Oscar. For the past several months, ostensibly in support of A Complete Unknown but seemingly just as much for laughs, Chalamet has embarked on a rare press run of consistent wins that generated viral moments and appealed to the reference-averse, absurdist sensibilities of his generation, bucking the usually staid methods of Hollywood promotion. Whereas past best actor hopefuls have erred on the side of grateful, serious and dutiful to the self-importance of the boomer-skewing Academy, Chalamet has worn kitschy outfits to red carpet events, treated social media like an ironic art experiment and made the rounds with influencers. In other words, though Chalamet is technically a millennial (born in 1995), we are witnessing the first genZ Oscar campaign.

Sighting of Evyatar David in Hamas video brought joy to his brother Ilay but his appearance indicated his suffering

When Hamas brought two captive Israelis to watch Saturday’s release of six of their fellow hostages and then beg for their own liberation, it was purposely jabbing at a deeply painful divide in Israeli society.

Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal were 22-year-old best friends when they were kidnapped at the Nova music festival on 7 October 2023. The Hamas video showed them sitting in a minivan watching the propaganda-laden handover ceremony, and then turning to the cameras to plead with Benjamin Netanyahu to agree a second phase in the current ceasefire, which would allow the release of all the remaining 59 hostages (only a minority of whom are thought to be still alive).

Feeling sadness is essential for feeling happiness, but unlearning the avoidance mechanisms your partner has put in place may take time

• Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a relationship problem sent in by a reader

As a teenager, my partner lost their father to illness. He was their idol, so of course this led to profound grief, which I feel is unresolved.

We recently watched a movie that was hauntingly emotional, and my partner was angry afterwards. This led to an argument, with them saying they never want to watch something that will make them feel sadness again. I encouraged them to sit with sadness; they went to bed.

In this week’s newsletter: Hollywood is literally rising from the ashes for this year’s ceremony, and as usual it won’t be without controversy

Caffeinated energy drinks at the ready! Sunday is Hollywood’s biggest night of the year – and quite possibly the longest night of the year for those of us in the UK who plan to stay awake for it. Yes, the Oscars are upon us, and the Guardian has you covered as you swot up on this year’s ceremony.

We’ve got guides to the best picture, actor, actress and director races, and our annual hustings, where Guardian writers go to bat for the best picture nominees (I backed The Brutalist). Plus deep dives into the anonymous Oscar ballots, the annual class photo and even the goody bags attenders at the ceremony will receive. Want even more? Rachael Healy gets the full red carpet makeover, this award season’s speeches are scrutinised, there’s a piece looking at why religion was the year’s big theme and there’s a roundup of the Oscar-baity films that didn’t get nominated this year.

Back with his new film Day of the Fight, the reluctant star recalls anxiety about his looks, a strange dinner with Guillermo del Toro, spats with Trump and Weinstein … and hints at his plan to save the world

Ron Perlman could be mistaken for Will Ferrell’s grumpy older brother. Today, however, he mostly looks trapped. That slab of a face, frosted with a white beard and moustache, seems too formidable to be contained by the narrow vertical frame of his iPad camera. Wearing a stonewashed grey denim jacket over a black shirt, he peers down at me, brow crinkled, as if from a great height. It’s like being on a Zoom call with Goliath.

Though he introduces himself as “Ron from Brooklyn”, the actor, who is a few weeks shy of 75, is sitting at home in Los Angeles. No, the fires didn’t touch him, but the nearest ones were only three miles away, close enough to make him jittery. “Scary times,” he says. His voice rumbles like a freight train. Tom Waits, whom he was once plausibly but falsely rumoured to be playing in a movie, sounds like Charles Hawtrey by comparison.

The former marine was able to plumb depths of nastiness that set him apart from other ‘hard men’ actors of his generation, such as Robert Duvall and Clint Eastwood

It’s the dog that gets me about Gene Hackman. Decades ago he went off to New Mexico, away from the bright lights of fame. And the dog went with him and his wife. Hackman was a firm man – you might say hard. He had been a marine, and seldom bowed to all the suck-up stuff about being lovable and a movie star. He was 95. Clint Eastwood is 94, Robert Duvall the same. Jack Nicholson is only 87, still the kid.

Dustin Hoffman is 87 too, Robert Redford 88, Warren Beatty 87. Harrison Ford is 82, and he seems older, or worried. We can’t expect these guys to go on for ever, just because they’re geezers, veterans and not forgotten.

In unequal households – the majority of heterosexual homes – domestic and emotional pressures on women can have a direct effect on libido

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Zoe and her husband, Charles, can’t keep their hands off each other. They were like this in the early stages of their relationship, too – “there was something wrong with us” – Zoe jokes about their prolific lovemaking. But this new, “giddy” phase is different.

“It feels like we’ve just started again. But with all this history, and this amazing child, and all this other stuff that binds us together,” she says.

The World Nature Photography awards have announced their winners for 2025. From white-cheeked terns to a blue-tailed damselfly peeking through a daisy, the photographs are a stark reminder of the beauty and chaos of the natural world. The top award went to Maruša Puhek’s image of two deers running through a Slovenian vineyard

Forget about inflation. Now it’s all about cutting ‘waste’ in the form of jobs and our already paltry social safety net

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump never missed an opportunity to harp on inflation, promising that “on day one” he would “end inflation” and lower the costs of groceries, cars and other common goods.

Well, it’s day 40, and inflation saw its largest increase in over a year. Blink and you might have missed that Trump and his fellow Republicans have largely abandoned their concerns about inflation to focus on government “waste”.

When Amy Gledhill and Harriet Kemsley both realised the other was newly unattached, the standups decided to create Single Ladies in Your Area, a hit podcast about divorces, dating and unwanted DMs

A few months ago, comedians Amy Gledhill and Harriet Kemsley went speed dating. Tentatively hopeful and giddily anxious, they settled their nerves with a drink before arriving at the venue, a trendy south-east London pizzeria. In the event, any excitement was unwarranted: Kemsley “dissociated” and went quiet, while Gledhill found herself in “corporate team-building mode”, using humour to grease the wheels of other people’s dates while disengaging on a personal level. The men weren’t perfect, either: one avoided all eye contact; another recognised Gledhill – who has become a familiar face since winning last year’s Edinburgh fringe prize – and started doing her own material at her. There was a promising development, though: one attender slid into Gledhill’s DMs later that evening – and she replied.

How do I know all this? Because since October, Kemsley and Gledhill have been routinely spilling the beans about their love lives on their candid and hugely endearing podcast Single Ladies in Your Area. The show sees the 37-year-olds grapple with modern dating, a premise that requires them to share their hopes, fears and deepest vulnerabilities. “We divulge too much,” says Kemsley, sitting in the offices of the podcast’s production company, fresh from another heart-on-sleeve recording. “And then we listen to it and go: ‘That’s fine, put it out!’” laughs Gledhill beside her.

• Player pulls off feat at the South African Open in Durban
• Odds of two aces in one round estimated at 67,000,000-1

The Englishman Dale Whitnell made two holes-in-one during a once-in-a-lifetime round on day two of the South African Open.

The 36-year-old, whose DP World Tour breakthrough came in the 2023 Scandinavian Mixed, aced the 179-yard 2nd in soft, calm conditions at the Durban Country Club and then repeated the feat at the 149-yard 12th. It is estimated the odds of making two holes-in-one in the same round are 67 million to one.

Sebastian Padrón explains how ice-cream brought his family closer with fellow Argentinian and neighbour

When Sebastian Padrón opened his ice-cream parlour around the corner from Pope Francis’s home in Casa Santa Marta in Vatican City, his wife, Silvia, came up with a clever way of ingratiating her husband with his fellow Argentinian.

“She told me: ‘Go and bring an ice-cream to Pope Francis,’” said Padrón. “I said: ‘Impossible.’”

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Patel has signalled he isn’t interested in pursuing insurrectionists amid resurgence of extremist groups

With Kash Patel officially appointed as the new FBI director and Dan Bongino as his number two, experts are warning the fate of federal law enforcement investigations into the far right face a grim future.

Patel taking the reins of the FBI also coincides with a resurgence of the Base, an accelerationist neo-Nazi group with terrorism designations around the world, along with other emboldened extremists connected to the January 6 attacks on the Capitol.

Stephen Graham’s new show about a boy arrested for murder is utterly chilling. Its team talk rage, panic attacks and being bowled over by a 14-year-old

The first few minutes of Netflix’s new drama Adolescence are among the most incredible you will ever see. Two police officers drive to a house, smash its doors in, sweep from room to room and apprehend a teenage boy suspected of murdering a female classmate. They load him into a van, drive to a police station then process him for arrest.

On the surface this sounds like any workaday drama, but the incredible thing about Adolescence is this: the whole sequence is conducted in one take. From car to house to van to station, the camera never leaves the action. Even more incredibly, the entire series follows in kind. There are four episodes, each without a single edit.

Olympic gold medallist on his strained departure from Ineos Grenadiers, moving to Q36.5 and feeling revitalised

It’s July 2022 and Tom Pidcock is flying down the towering Col du Galibier at 100km an hour, pushing the boundaries of what is achievable on a road bike, his rear wheel sliding through each snaking vertiginous bend, leaving his peers far behind and French TV commentators aghast.

A couple of hours later, he raises his arms at the top of Alpe d’Huez, one of the Tour’s most feared climbs, taking an exhilarating stage win in his debut Tour de France. A new star is born. Few doubt that it’s only a matter of time until he wears the yellow jersey.

As Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to Washington to meet Donald Trump, a number of questions remain unanswered

As Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to Washington to meet Donald Trump, questions remain over the future of Ukraine and the country’s war with Russia. Here are five things we don’t know about a possible deal to end the conflict.

The reportedly outgoing Lucasfilm president has brought a raft of new movies to the sci-fi franchise but some plans have crashed and the narrative has the look of random splashing

If the reports are true, and Kathleen Kennedy is to step down as president of Lucasfilm, it is possible to look back on her near 13-year reign over the Star Wars movies and wonder how one person managed to oversee an entire industry of sci-fi fantasy dreams, decrees and doomed announcements that always seemed to fall apart as quickly as they were constructed. Like any of the Death Stars that have permeated these films, Kennedy’s apparently well-constructed visions for future episodes always seemed to be blown to smithereens just as they were about to take over the Hollywood nebula. From Josh Trank’s mysteriously vanished Boba Fett film to Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron crash-landing before takeoff, her time at the helm of Lucasfilm will be marked by vast, ambitious projects that promised to be “fully operational” – only for the scrappy reality of budget concerns and creative differences to transform them into little more than unfinished, floating chunks of cinematic debris, drifting aimlessly through the void.

It is fair to say that while her predecessor George Lucas procrastinated, toiled, and employed as much energy as a protocol droid attempting to jog through quicksand, Kennedy, in terms of bringing new Star Wars films to the multiplexes (after the mixed reception to his midichlorian-infested, blue-screen-heavy prequel trilogy), moved like a hyperspace-jumping Millennium Falcon. Initially at least: no sooner had the ink dried on Disney’s galactically ambitious purchase of Lucasfilm for a $4.5bn (£2.5bn) in 2012 than Kennedy was off hunting down JJ Abrams to oversee 2015’s The Force Awakens. It was a movie that – at the time – felt as if fans of the saga had finally been gifted a return to the knockabout space romps of Lucas’s original trilogy – but these days it feels like a gleaming hyperspace lane to nowhere: a void at the heart of everything that is wrong about modern-day Star Wars.

UK PM hopes charm offensive will yield benefits but Eurosceptics in president’s coterie could scupper plan

Is there enough love left in the US-UK special relationship or has the magic faded?

That is the question that Keir Starmer arrived in Washington to pose at what Sir Peter Westmacott, Britain’s ambassador to Washington from 2012 to 2016, called “one of the most consequential meetings of a British prime minister and president that we have had since the second world war”.

Exclusive: International development minister warns it will be ‘impossible’ to retain funding in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine

• Anneliese Dodds: soft left intellectual pushed to resign
• How much does the UK spend on overseas aid

Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister, has quit her post over Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the international aid budget by almost half to pay for a generational increase in defence spending.

The senior Labour MP, who attended cabinet, predicted that the UK pulling back from development would bolster Russia, which has already been aggressively increasing its presence worldwide, as well as encourage China’s attempts to rewrite global rules.

President wants radical overhaul of state department, including fewer diplomats and embassies, Politico reports; Noaa expects more cuts after hundreds fired

US aid cuts have forced the UN children’s agency Unicef to suspend or scale back many programmes in Lebanon, with more than half of children under the age of two experiencing severe food poverty in the country’s east, a Unicef official said on Friday.

“We have been forced to suspend or cut back or drastically reduce many of our programmes and that includes nutrition programmes,” Unicef’s deputy representative in Lebanon, Ettie Higgins, told reporters in Geneva via video link from Beirut, Reuters reports.

Ukrainian president makes his fifth visit to White House as Russia announces new US ambassador

in Athens

The peaceful scenes in central Athens have now been eclipsed by the eruption of full scale clashes between rock-throwing youths and riot police.

Thousands of tourists arrived to see lava in recent weeks, but not all were prepared for treks up the Sicilian volcano

A river of fire from the depths of the Earth carves its way through the black rocks of a mountain blanketed white with snow. Above, the setting sun tints the clouds red. Fountains of lava that explode from a crater soar hundreds of metres into the air and Etna’s roar echoes across the Sicilian sky.

Its recent eruptions were a breathtaking spectacle, drawing thousands of tourists and unwary daytrippers – many there for a selfie. For some, the outcome was catastrophic.

Nothing I have done is more impactful than a day’s work in this battleground in the south, the graveyard of politicians’ abandoned promises

The tentacles of disinformation have already claimed their first young victim. This week, an unvaccinated child in Texas died of measles – an entirely preventable disease. Right now, the state is seeing its largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years. Yet at a White House briefing, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services, falsely noted “it is not unusual”, and did not offer any plans for containment.

I am a pediatrician in Texas, and I can assure you the situation is so abnormal that most younger physicians have never seen a case of measles, thanks to successful vaccination campaigns.

Seema Jilani is a pediatric physician based in Texas, a first-generation American, and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations

Cats in two states tested positive after eating raw food from Wild Coast Raw, which issued voluntary recall

As the bird flu outbreak continues gaining force in the US, a second company selling raw pet food issued a voluntary recall after cats from two different households in Oregon contracted H5N1 from the tainted meat earlier this month.

Two more cats in different households in Washington state have tested positive for bird flu after eating the same brand of raw pet food nearly two weeks after the recall, officials announced on Wednesday. One cat was euthanized, while the other remains under veterinary care.

Barely known to each other before they were abducted by the brutal al-Shabaab militants, a friendship forged in adversity helped them and their children find safety

Ancha*, who was 20, had been kidnapped and held captive in a house in northern Mozambique for two months when 17-year-old Fatima* was brought there. What their captors did not know – even after the young women’s daring escape together – was that they were cousins.

Both had grown up around Mucojo, a small coastal town 130 miles (210km) south of the Tanzanian border, from where they had been abducted in separate raids in 2020 by Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jamaa militants, an Islamic State-affiliated group known locally as al-Shabaab (though it has no links with the Islamist militants of the same name in Somalia).

While last year’s Academy Awards progressed with relative predictability, this year pundits are split and the four big categories are too close to call

The red carpet is being vacuumed, the manicurists are working overtime and, across Hollywood, an unprecedented number of acceptance speeches are getting a polish.

The four big categories at this year’s Oscars – best picture, director, actor and actress – are being deemed too close to call as the remarkable drama of this year’s award season reaches a peak.

USAid cuts to clinics dispensing antiretroviral drugs will be ‘death sentence for mothers and children’, expert warns

Sweeping notices of termination of funding have been received by organisations working with HIV and Aids across Africa, with dire predictions of a huge rise in deaths as a result.

After the US announced a permanent end to funding for HIV projects, services across the board have been affected, say doctors and programme managers, from projects helping orphans and pregnant women to those reaching transgender individuals and sex workers.

Gram’s Pizza owner and chef is boycotting US products after Trump threatened to add 25% tariff on Canadian goods

Tucked away in a former garage space in Toronto’s west end, Gram’s Pizza is usually packed with diners hankering for anything from a classic pepperoni to vodka and hot hawaiian.

Lately, however, owner and chef Graham Palmateer has made some changes to how he makes his pizzas.

Of the many lessons arising from this week’s report into the presenter’s alleged bullying and misogyny, one is the corporate cynicism that sustained him

More than 30 years have passed since Tim Westwood joined the BBC, 12 since he left and three since Guardian and BBC journalists reported on allegations of abuse by a man considered by the corporation to be the voice of hip hop. Then this week, some of the many concerns raised during his 19 years working there were detailed in the latest edition of one of the BBC’s weightiest and longest-running series, Official Reports into Men We Employ Behaving Very Badly.

Westwood’s career at the Beeb ended in 2013, amid a flurry of accusations and a sense of deja vu best summarised as “oh God, not another one”. But the 174-page report is well worth reading, not just for what it says about the BBC but, as so often with the media, what it says about attitudes in Britain.

Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist

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As business leaders fall in line behind the president and his policies, Americans are using their wallet to hurt where it matters – bottom lines

• Don’t let a billionaire’s algorithm control what you read. Download our free app to get trusted reporting.

In late January, Lauren Bedson did what many would likely find unthinkable: she cancelled her Amazon Prime membership. The catalyst was Donald Trump’s inauguration. Many more Americans are planning to make similar decisions this Friday.

Bedson made her move after seeing photos of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, sitting with other tech moguls and billionaires, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, just rows behind Trump at his inauguration.

Together, we must fight for our long-held values and work with people around the world who share them

For 250 years, the United States has held itself up as a symbol of democracy – an example of freedom and self-governance to which the rest of the world could aspire. People have long looked to our declaration of independence and constitution as blueprints for how to guarantee those human rights and freedoms.

Tragically, all of that is changing. As Donald Trump moves this country towards authoritarianism, he is aligning himself with dictators and despots who share his disdain for democracy and the rule of law.

Bernie Sanders is a US senator and a ranking member of the health, education, labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress

The new administration are targeting trans people because they think they can be bullied without great political pushback

In the video, she sounds exasperated. Hunter Schafer, a 26-year-old actor best known for her roles on the HBO series Euphoria and in the Hunger Games film The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, appeared in an eight-minute video last Friday in which she revealed that due to a Trump administration order, she had been assigned a passport with the gender marker “male”.

Schafer, who is trans, began living as a girl in her early teens; she has lived as a woman for her entire adult life. In her video, she says that her IDs have been marked “female” for just about as long as she has had them. But after her passport was stolen in a car break-in in Barcelona, she has been issued a government identity document that represents a fiction that she is a man. Every time she travels now, she will have to present this document, she will have to account for the discrepancy between what it says about her, and what she clearly is.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist