Chancellor-in-waiting put forward proposal to relax debt brake and backing of Greens is tantamount to getting deal through
Germany’s conservative chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, has said he has secured the support of the Green party for his radical plan to increase spending on defence and infrastructure after marathon talks that went through the night, paving the way for its approval in parliament.
“Germany is back,” Merz said in Berlin on Friday. “Germany is making its large contribution to the defence of freedom and peace in Europe.”
Eight teams from US and Europe to meet in Portugal
Prize money could eclipse that won by WCL finalists
Eight of the world’s leading women’s clubs, including big-name sides from the US and Europe, will compete in a new, lucrative seven-a-side tournament in Portugal during the week leading up to this season’s Women’s Champions League final there, the Guardian can reveal. It will kick off a series of global “grand slam” events that is expected to run beyond this year.
The independently run competition, funded by private US-based investment, has a prize pot believed to extend to a significant seven-figure sum that may rival the money on offer for the Women’s Champions League finalists.
Light, airy sponge meets sticky syrup topping – and it’s entry-level to make, too
This simple British pudding is a nod to tradition, and a nostalgic, school dinner favourite. With its light, airy sponge and sticky treacle topping, it’s comforting and indulgent. Quick to prepare and best served warm with custard or cream, it’s ideal for rounding off a long Sunday lunch, or for brightening a rainy afternoon. It’s a guaranteed crowdpleaser with minimal effort.
From the workplace to romance to friends, everything you need to know about rejection – and how to move on from it
Rejection is an inevitable part of the human experience, but despite suffering major and minor rebuffs throughout our lives, every time it happens still feels painful. From the first “no thanks” from someone you fancy at school to the kick in the stomach of a “we have decided to move forward with another candidate” letter, every rejection dents our ego.
Humans are hardwired to crave acceptance. “It’s in our blood,” says Hilda Burke, a psychotherapist, couples counsellor and author. In early human societies, she explains, “to be rejected by your community would have posed a serious threat, as individuals did not have the resources to survive alone. We are pack animals.”
Not for Australia the brutal humiliation meted out on camera to Ukraine in the Oval Office. Nor Canada’s escalating war of invective and retaliatory sanctions.
The diagnosis may have brought up feelings of anger and unfairness about the care you didn’t receive as a child. Could your brother offer you solace and support?
Last year, I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. I have told a few people, but not my family, other than my brother, and I don’t know if I should. They live abroad.
I have a lot of unresolved childhood issues, which I’ve mostly been able to put aside. But the diagnosis is making it harder to deal with the hurt, resentment and unfairness of it all.
Edgar Charles Frederick, 79, was killed in the hit-and-run incident in Nairobi on Thursday
A British national has died in Kenya after being struck by a government vehicle that was part of the president’s motorcade.
Edgar Charles Frederick, 79, was killed on Thursday as President William Ruto’s motorcade made its way to a public engagement in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
The duo count Elton and Rage Against the Machine among their fans, but being two Black women in a largely white, male scene means working twice as hard. The duo discuss winning over the mosh pit – and why they’ve banned synths
Nova Twins vocalist-guitarist Amy Love is trying to make me feel better about the litany of things that have gone wrong during our one-hour chat. She and her bandmate Georgia South enteredthe shabby-chic dressing room of London’s Omeara in a whirlwind of denim, arraying themselves on the mismatched armchairs after a soundcheck that didn’t entirely go to plan – my Dictaphone broke, South’s battling a cold, I realised I had the wrong notebook with me … We’re all feeling a little frazzled as trains rumble by and South boils the kettle for a Lemsip.
The fact chaos swirls around Nova Twins is fitting, perhaps. Their brand of boot-stomping rock takes the pop and R&B music they’d grown up with and distorts it to hell. Nu-metal adjacent, they play a kind of grimy rap-rock with the energy and hooks of the pop end of punk.
Tom Lowndes was a sound designer on McLeod’s Daughters before reinventing himself as a ‘time-travelling DJ’ who fast became a global festival phenomenon
“I think DJing is the professional wrestling of the music industry,” he says. “Wrestling, in the end, no matter how good it is, it’s still people pretending to fight. The DJ, no matter how good you are, you’re still pretending to be a musician.”
As the UK, Australia and Denmark mount joint diplomatic push, grieving families fear Laos’ investigation into the suspected methanol poisonings won’t deliver justice
The poolside bar at the Nana backpackers hostel in central Laos should have been an idyllic spot for a free happy hour on a mid-November evening.
Among those staying at Nana were two pairs of best friends – 19-year-old Australians Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles, and Freja Vennervald Sorensen, 21, and Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman, 20, from Denmark. All four were drawn to south-east Asia’s famed backpacking route that has for decades enticed young travellers seeking carefree, sun-drenched moments.
My freedom of information request revealed the inane use of ChatGPT by the tech secretary. Is this the future? I hope not
Two tech-related things made me laugh this week. One was Donald Trump’s childlike exuberance at seeing the dash panel of a Tesla on the White House lawn, and his wondrous exclamation that “everything is computer”.
The other was equally hilarious, also tied to politics. Keir Starmer stood up yesterday in Hull and said waste would be thrown by the wayside and the civil service would lose its bloat … thanks to the transformative effects of AI.
Near my home in Melbourne’s inner city sits a dilapidated but grand old house. In the nearly four years I’ve lived nearby, it has sat empty, falling deeper and deeper into disrepair, its garden becoming more wild, creating more and more problems for us as its neighbours.
There’s the pile-up of hard rubbish that often spills into neighbouring properties and onto the street. There are the bugs and rodents drawn to the place, which, of course, visit us as they come and go. And there are the worrying crashes, shouts and foul language you can occasionally hear from the house’s temporary inhabitants as you walk by.
Our homesteading journey began with self-sufficiency and a dream, but it evolved through loss and social media fame
Our homesteading experiment began before tradwives, before Donald Trump, before Covid-19. It was the summer of 2015 when we were all sure no one would vote for a former reality TV star. I was 25 years old and desperate for a security blanket, working a sales job and looking for excuses not to return to college.
My husband, Patrick, and I had talked about farming since our first date. We wanted goats. At his 2-acre property in a quiet suburb of Portland, Maine, we kept a few chickens and a scrawny vegetable garden.
Lawyers demand in updated lawsuit that Columbia University graduate student be released from custody
Mahmoud Khalil felt as though he was being kidnapped when he was handcuffed and shackled and rushed from New York to immigration detention in Louisiana last weekend, his lawyers wrote in an updated lawsuit demanding that the Columbia University graduate student be released from custody immediately.
The activist has told his lawyers that agents who arrested him at his university housing last Saturday night, in front of his eight-month pregnant wife, never identified themselves.
The midwest princess embraces her roots with a queer country banger about pleasure that toys with the genre’s gender and class cosplay
It’s easy to forget that in the year that Chappell Roan became one of the world’s biggest pop stars, she only released one single. Good Luck, Babe! came out in April 2024, precipitating the explosion of the US pop star as a live phenomenon who made pop hyper fun and queer again, while also remaining strikingly principled about how far she was willing to go for her art.
When streaming demands that pop stars pebbledash releases in order to stay buoyant on playlists, her disinclination to capitalise on Good Luck, Babe!’s success with more material is reflective of Roan’s confidence in her way of doing things, whether persisting with a vision that her previous label rejected – and being totally vindicated for it – or using her recent Grammys win to call for labels to provide musicians with proper healthcare. The tactic has paid off: in the absence of new songs, Pink Pony Club – the song Atlantic dropped her over – reached UK No 1 last week, almost five years after its original release. Her debut album, 2023’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, has been in the UK Top 10 since June, taking two separate weeks at No 1.
Dutchman says his job is not to please people as he sets out on road for a fifth consecutive F1 drivers title in Melbourne
On the eve of what might be the hardest fought championship of his career opening in Melbourne this weekend one thing is clear, Max Verstappen will not go gently into that night. The defending Formula One world champion, never one to shy away from speaking his mind, a compelling character trait reflected in his driving, is eyeballing the opposition and demanding they bring it on.
The 27-year-old took his fourth consecutive F1 title last season, the toughest since his first, the titanic battle with Lewis Hamilton that ended controversially in Abu Dhabi, in 2021. In both, when the Dutchman was pushed to the limit, to scrap tooth and nail, he was uncompromising, an elbows-out battler, obdurate, driven by belief in himself and the righteousness of the Verstappen cause.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk face increasing headwinds in their attempt to brutally slash federal budgets and staffing, after two judges ruled against the firing of probationary employees by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and public polling revealed strong disapproval of the Tesla billionaire’s work.
Nonetheless, the gathering effects of the cuts were illustrated by news that federal agencies will begin to vacate hundreds of offices across the country this summer.
For years many brave Filipinos have worked tirelessly, in and out of the spotlight, to expose the horrors of the deadly campaign
Facing charges of crimes against humanity and hauled off to The Hague, the arrest this week of the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is a pivotal moment for those seeking justice for the many thousands of lives lost during his reign.
Soon after his inauguration in 2016, the then Philippine leader embarked on a violent crackdown on drugs and crime that catalysed a wave of extrajudicial killings. Rights groups say that up to 30,000 people were killed in Duterte’s “war on drugs”.
UK economy unexpectedly contracts by 0.1% in January in blow to the chancellor ahead of spring statement
Let’s look at the GDP figures in more detail.
The 0.9% drop in production output in January, which came after 0.5% growth in December, was mainly caused by a 1.1% slump in manufacturing while mining and quarrying also declined. Basic metals and metal products were down along with pharmaceutical products.
Soldier Edan Alexander could be released along with remains of four other Israeli-US nationals, but unclear what Hamas will ask for in return
Hamas has said it is ready to free an Israeli-US soldier held hostage in Gaza and hand over the remains of four other Israeli-US nationals in what may be a breakthrough in continuing negotiations over the fragile ceasefire in the devastated territory.
The militant Islamist organisation announced in a statement on Friday that it was ready to release the Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, who holds American citizenship, along with the remains of four other dual Israeli-US nationals.
Twelve people taken to hospital with minor injuries after flight forced to divert about 30 minutes after takeoff
An American Airlines flight heading from Colorado Springs to Dallas-Fort Worth was forced to divert about 30 minutes after takeoff to make an emergency landing at Denver on Thursday evening, whereupon one of the plane’s engines dramatically caught on fire on the tarmac.
Passengers were swiftly forced to evacuate, including via wing and emergency slide, and could be seen running for safety through thick smoke with flames behind them.
Fearing release of distressing material, lawyers have petitioned a Santa Fe court to seal records to protect the family’s right to privacy
A representative for the estate of actor Gene Hackman is seeking to block the public release of autopsy and investigative reports, especially photographs and police body-camera video, related to the recent deaths of Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa, after their partially mummified bodies were discovered at their New Mexico home in February.
Authorities last week announced Hackman died at age 95 of heart disease with complications from Alzheimer’s disease as much as a week after Arakawa, 65, died from a rare rodent-borne disease, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. Hackman’s pacemaker last showed signs of activity on 18 February, indicating an abnormal heart rhythm on the day he probably died. The couple’s bodies weren’t discovered until 26 February.
She’s the breakout star of the cult banking drama who went on to play Amy Winehouse and has now been handpicked by Steven Soderbergh for his latest thriller. But at 23, a shock diagnosis changed her world
Marisa Abela finds it very difficult to go to the gym. Not for the usual reasons – lack of time or motivation – but because she says the reception she gets there is “insane”. The actor lives near the City of London, and her local gym is nestled between the gigantic, glinting glass offices of the capital’s financial district – which also happens to be the natural habitat of Yasmin Kara-Hanani, the hyper-privileged and extravagantly troubled junior banker Abela plays in the hit BBC drama Industry. And it’s not just while she’s exercising – that swarm of real‑life bankers desperate to tell Abela how much they love the show means meals out can be an issue, too. “If I tried to go to a salad bar at lunchtime in the City …” she trails off, looking slightly dazed.
Abela isn’t just highly recognisable for her part in Industry, a satire of the reckless, hedonistic, egomaniac-littered world of finance that since its 2020 debut has blossomed from niche concern to TV’s spiciest workplace drama. The 28-year-old also gets stopped in the street for being “the girl who played Amy Winehouse”. (Recently, people have finally started to ask her if she is Marisa. “And I’m like, ‘Yes, I am!’” she says, with mock grandeur.) Last year, she starred in Back to Black, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of the late singer, an oddly paced film rescued by Abela’s performance, which combines Winehouse’s trademark wit and stubborn iconoclasm with an endearing vulnerability. In her hands, Amy was, above all, a doting daughter and an adorably guileless romantic.
The documentary maker has received constant death threats from Jackson fans ever since his devastating Leaving Neverland aired. He reveals why he had to make a follow-up
‘I’ve kept company with very violent people for a very long time,” says documentary-maker Dan Reed, in his office whose location has to be kept secret – I was led here, from a decoy address, by the Channel 4 publicist. “I’ve had murderers try to find me. I’ve had people threaten to shoot me who are armed. I’ve been threatened many, many times. I don’t want to say I’m a tough guy, but the needle doesn’t go into the red until I’ve got something quite specific. The threats delivered face to face I took seriously. People trying to find my home address to post me a parcel I took seriously. People in China sending me emails? I don’t take so seriously. They’re going to have to get on a plane.”
OK, well he does sound like a tough guy, or at least a foreign correspondent of the old school, and that’s fair enough. From the Kosovan war (The Valley, 1999) to the Russian mafia (From Russia With Cash, 2015), Reed’s films have long been threaded together by the reasonable fascinations of the hard-hitting documentary-maker – corruption, crime, natural disaster, war.
You don’t need to hold sympathy for Mahmoud Khalil’s views to see why his targeting is an immense threat to free expression
The dust is starting to settle on the conflicting reports emerging after immigration officers’ arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University protest leader and green card holder, last weekend – and Americans should be alarmed by the similarities to authoritarian regimes’ speech policing.
The White House has confirmed the arrest took place under a law granting the secretary of state unilateral power to act when given “reasonable ground to believe” an immigrant’s “presence or activities in the United States … would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the country.
China has criticised the sale of the business that controls ports in Panama to US investors, saying the Hong Kong-based parent company should “think twice” and that the $22.8bn deal is “power politics” that is not in the country’s national interest.
Shares in the Hong Kong-based conglomerate CK Hutchison fell more than 6% on Friday after a critical commentary appeared in the Beijing-backed newspaper Ta Kung Pao in Hong Kong.
Exclusive: It is imperative humans expand their understanding of space, argues Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock
Life must exist beyond Earth, a leading space scientist says, adding it is yet another example of human pride to suppose otherwise.
The British space scientist Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who will be giving the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures this year, said that while science had made giant leaps in the understanding of space, including the sheer size of the universe, there was still much to learn – not least whether humans were alone.
The Christmas Lectures from the Royal Institution supported by CGI will be broadcast on the BBC and iPlayer in late December
Rebecca Ratcliffe and Kate Lamb have written this profile for the Guardian of some of the people instrumental in bringing the case against Rodrigo Duterte to the international criminal court in The Hague. They wrote:
To some Duterte’s arrest this week came as a sudden shock. But for years many brave Filipinos, from priests, politicians, pathologists, to relatives of the victims and journalists, have worked tirelessly, in and out of the spotlight, to expose the horrors of the deadly campaign and collect enough evidence to hold Duterte to account.
Whether the Meta boss and his ex-lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg are truly beyond awful is neither here nor there. I thought he was done with factchecking
I am as shocked as I am confused that Mark Zuckerberg is going all-out to block a memoir by Facebook’s former director of global public policy, Sarah Wynn-Williams. I thought information wanted to be free? I definitely heard that speech should be. We know Meta’s revolting oligarch doesn’t write his self-serving public pronouncements, but he should at least make time in his busy Magafication schedule to read them.
Anyway, even if you think the stories in Careless People are untrue – and I don’t, for a single nanosecond – I thought the Meta boss said disinformation wasn’t a thing any more? He recently binned off all his factcheckers to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship”. Yet here we are reading stories of how Meta this week launched an emergency action in the US to ban Wynn-Williams from promoting or further distributing copies of her book. It argued – successfully, for now – that it would face “immediate loss … in the absence of immediate relief”.
Context dictates that England have to be on the front foot in Cardiff – let’s have that as their modus operandi
Play the match, not the occasion. Lap up the theatre, the dramatics, the pyrotechnics, the hostility, if that is what gets you going, but when you cross the white line, play what is in front of you. If there is one message that should have been hammered home to England’s players this week, it is exactly that.
Sport rarely plays out the way we fully expect it to, otherwise the Principality Stadium would not be sold out on Saturday, there would not be a growing sense of belief among Wales supporters that this is the day their desperate run of defeats ends, there would not be a nervousness, a tension among England fans heading to Cardiff. It’s why we love our sport but if England can play the match and not the occasion, they have the potential and the players to put Wales away comfortably.
League Cup final against Manchester City is a chance to continue their dominance despite change of manager
What happens when a leader departs a sporting dynasty? How can the transfer of power cause as little disruption to the team as possible? History has all too often illustrated that it is a far from easy adjustment; that it will take a little time to regroup and recalibrate.
For Chelsea, however, the transition from Emma Hayes’s decade-long reign to new beginnings under Sonia Bompastor appears to have caused barely a ripple. The club are unbeaten, registering 25 wins in 27 games. On Saturday they have the chance to claim the campaign’s first trophy – the League Cup final against Manchester City is a real an opportunity to stamp their mark as the business end of the season begins.
Course was run over 1,129 miles of Alaska wilderness
Holmes has appeared on Life Below Zero
Jessie Holmes, a former reality television star, won the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on Friday negotiating the longest-ever course in the event’s history.
Holmes was first to the finish line in Nome on the Bering Sea coast. The race began on 3 March in Fairbanks after a lack of snow forced changes to the route and starting point. That made the normally 1,000-mile race a 1,129 miles slog across the Alaska wilderness. Holmes finished in 10 days, 14 hours, 55 minutes, 41 seconds.
More than 200mm of rain fell in 24 hours, destroying 900 homes and leaving 40,000 people without power
Cyclone Jude was the third cyclone to hit Mozambique this season. First spotted as a depression last Friday to the south-west of the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, it intensified over the next few days to a moderate tropical storm, affecting northern Madagascar on Saturday and killing at least one person.
Jude strengthened into a tropical cyclone as it tracked westwards over the Mozambique Channel, where sea surface temperatures of close to 30C provided the heat and moisture necessary to fuel the cyclone.
The Elon Musk backlash, boos for JD Vance, Meghan naming protocol, a wombat botherer and – OMG! – buying kittens
To the people who parked their consciences and voted for Donald Trump because they thought he’d slash regulation, cut corporate taxes and eviscerate the federal government to send their stock holdings soaring, I’d like to ask: “How’s that working out for you?” For anyone with a pension, college savings or other assets in the US market this was an unrelaxing week, during which the Dow fell by almost 900 points on Monday and some $4tn (£3tn) was wiped off the S&P 500.
Flamstead residents – tall men, in particular – are under attack from a Harris’s hawk that has gone on a rampage
When Michael Hart went for his morning run in rural Hertfordshire last week, he never imagined that he would be attacked. “I felt something come at me from behind,” said the 31-year-old, who works in IT.
The perpetrator has been quietly stalking the streets of Flamstead for months but in the past fortnight has gone on a rampage, having bumped and slashed more than 20 men, including Hart. A hunt for the serial attacker is under way.
The author on growing up with tales of swooning heroines, the thrill of Dylan Thomas and the genius of George Saunders
My earliest reading memory
One of my older sisters taught me to read using Mills & Boon romance novels. I grew up autistic and queer and feel a nostalgic bewilderment about this genre, which at that time was populated by strong heroines who would – predictably but unfathomably – go weak at the knees for their male love interests. Otherwise, we had few books in the house. There are talented storytellers in my family, particularly my mother. I preferred to hide under the stairs and deliver my stories by writing them down.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. I had known it in childhood in the vinyl format, my late father had the Richard Burton recording. Even though it is a play for voices, I found reading the text myself thrilling. I loved the opulence of the language and the narrative range of it.
The disproportionate violence against Indigenous people is deeply felt on and around the reservation, where families must become their own investigators. Words and photography by Wayan Barre
On a cold January evening in 2021, Joey Apachee, a Navajo father of two, set out to meet a friend near the water tower in Steamboat, Arizona. Hours later, he was found beaten to death. However, despite a confession from a suspect, no trial has taken place. Joey’s father Jesse Apachee, a retired police officer, says the family feels abandoned by the Navajo Nation’s justice system.
Indigenous people experience violence at alarmingly high rates. According to the Urban Indian Health Institute, in some parts of the US, Indigenous women are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average. Additionally, 10,123 Native American people were recorded as missing in 2022, though the real tally is probably higher due to inconsistencies in reporting and data collection. In recent years the crisis has expanded to affect more men and boys, who now account for 46% of missing person cases.
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