Former cabin crew member Charlotte May Lee, 21, reportedly accused of trying to bring 46kg of cannabis strain kush into country
UK officials have said they are supporting a British woman arrested in Sri Lanka amid reports a former cabin crew member has been accused of smuggling cannabis into the South Asian country.
MailOnline and the Sun reported that Charlotte May Lee, 21, from Coulsdon, south London, was detained at the main airport in the country’s capital Colombo on Monday after arriving on a flight from Bangkok.
The San Rafael valley in Arizona is home to bears, mountain lions and wolves – now their movement will be restricted
Donald Trump is forging ahead with a new section of border wall that will threaten wildlife in a remote area where many rare animals – but very few people – roam.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has invited private sector companies to bid for contracts to erect nearly 25 miles of barrier on the US-Mexico border, across the unwalled south of Tucson, Arizona, one of the most biodiverse regions in the US.
Just spaghetti, butter, lemon, cheese and basil. Easy to perfect, and here’s how …
Al limone (no translation needed) is perhaps the perfect primo for this time of year, when we’re still waiting for the produce to catch up with the temperatures. The zesty citrus sings of the south, of heavy yellow fruit against a blue Mediterranean sky, while the butter gives just enough richness to make up for any chilly spring breezes. As Nigella observes, this is a dish that can “equally offer summer sprightliness or winter comfort”.
Ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas have been continuing in Qatar for a second day as Israeli warplanes and artillery launched a fresh wave of strikes across Gaza, killing at least 103 people, according to health officials in the Palestinian territory.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, signalled on Sunday that Israel was open to a deal with Hamas that would include “ending the fighting” in Gaza, but laid out conditions that have been repeatedly refused by the militant Islamist organisation.
The actor and co-star Robert Pattinson have each spoken about their experiences of early parenthood ahead of the premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love
Jennifer Lawrence has spoken of the “extremely isolating” effect of the postpartum period, while discussing a new film in which she portrays a mother descending into psychosis.
In Scottish art-house director Lynne Ramsay’s moody psychodrama Die, My Love, Lawrence’s character Grace is left alone to look after her newborn in a ramshackle house in the remote woods of Montana while her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) goes off to work.
The Triangle of Sadness and Babygirl actor has made a strong, singular and sometimes surrealist first film behind the camera, with a superb central turn from Frank Dillane
Harris Dickinson makes a terrifically impressive debut here as a writer-director with this smart, thoughtful, compassionate picture about homelessness – engaging and sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory setpiece sequences and challengingly incorrect thoughts about the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.
Frank Dillane is Mike, a guy who has spent five years living on the streets in London: begging, stealing, eating at charity food trucks. Dillane’s performance shows Mike’s nervy, twitchy, live wire mannerisms have been cultivated over what feels like a lifetime of abandonment: he has a kind of suppressed pleading quality as he asks passers by for the “spare change” that fewer people carry in these post-covid times; his open smile has a learned survivalist determination only - what he is is not exactly charm, he is slippery and unreliable, but also intelligent and heartbreakingly vulnerable.
His one non-friend on the street is Nathan (played in cameo by Harris Dickinson himself) who steals Mike’s money which fatefully leads Mike to a despicable act of theft and violence for which he is entirely unrepentant and which leads to a prison sentence and a hostel place, a hotel kitchen job a period of sobriety on release in which it seems as if he is turning his life around, dreamily lost in his meditation takes and even buying a little present for his probation supervisor – to whom he also confides his plans to start a luxury chauffeur business.
But, very disturbingly, it seems possible that what undermines Mike’s fresh start is his restorative justice session with his victim, an encounter which is supposed to be healing and cathartic but which Mike has no idea how to approach. Dickinson shows that he simply doesn’t understand the new register of emotional intelligence now expected of him. Amusingly he objects to the session’s convenor’s breathy, patronising voice and singularly fails to apologise.
But he clearly is, at some level, aware that he has failed a test, failed at being a good person. His job at the hotel kitchen goes south and his new job picking up littler is uncertain, despite a new relationship with a woman working alongside him (a smart performance from Megan Northam) who is much closer to sorting her life out than him. Mike has good mates in the litter-picking job and good mates in the hotel kitchen job.
But it is one of the pickers that offers him some ketamine and things spiral inevitably downwards from there. Did drug addiction mean things were always hopeless, whatever resources his Mike’s personality might have offered, The film does not offer easy answers or answers of any sort.
When it looked as if Mike on the way up or on the way out, he avoided his old acquaintances: when he sees the appalling Nathan in a charity shop, he scurried out. The old ways were contagious. His old life was contagion. But did he get infected by the restorative justice session, which confronted him with evidence of his selfish aggression, evidence which triggered only resentment?
And all the time his plagued with vision-memories of a reproachful woman (his mother?) and a huge mossy, beautiful cave (some fantasy? childhood holiday?) These are the visions of a complex past and a compromised future.
A headspinning novel from Japan alongside a high concept tale from Denmark, and a French account of migrant tragedy … our critic weighs up the contenders
What unites the books on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize? Brevity, for one thing: five of the six are under 200 pages, and half barely pass 100. They are works of precision and idiosyncrasy that don’t need space to make a big impression. Themes are both timely – AI, the migration crisis – and evergreen: middle-class ennui; the place of women in society. And for the second consecutive year, every book comes from an independent publisher, with four from tiny micropresses. Ahead of the winner announcement on 20 May, here’s our verdict on the shortlist.
Solvej Balle’sOn the Calculation of Volume, Book I(Faber, £12.99; translated by Barbara J Haveland) is easiest to introduce through the film Groundhog Day: its heroine, Danish antiquarian book dealer Tara Selter, is stuck in time. “It is the 18th of November,” she writes. “I have got used to that thought.” Each time she wakes up, it’s the same day again, same weather, same people passing the window.
Fed up with being inside all day? Missing fresh air and nature? Five people who ditched their desks reveal the truth about their new lives
Steve Kell, 59, countryside ranger, Warwickshire Country Parks
I always loved being in nature. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was 18, so I got a job at a high-street bank. My grandfather was made up – he was convinced I was going to be the governor of the Bank of England. But over the years I became disenchanted. Then, in my early 30s, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer and had to take months off work. I couldn’t help thinking about how finite life is. I decided I wanted to do something I really enjoyed.
Ex-Texas representative, who lost gubernatorial election to Greg Abbott, joins Democrats lambasting former president
Joe Biden “failed this country in the most important job that he had” by deciding to run for another term as US president before dropping out of the election that returned Donald Trump to the White House, where he has unflinchingly assaulted democratic norms, the former representative Beto O’Rourke said recently.
“We might very well lose the greatest country that this world has ever known,” the Texan who has unsuccessfully run for the presidency and his state’s governorship said on Pod Save America. “And it might be in part because of the decision that Biden and those around him made to run for re-election.”
But older children, who had no access to the shots, had higher rates this winter compared with last
New vaccines and treatments are linked to a dramatic decline in RSV hospitalizations for babies, according to a new study from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
This past winter was the first RSV season with widespread availability of a vaccine given during pregnancy and a monoclonal antibody treatment given in the first eight months of life to prevent RSV (respiratory syncytial virus).
History shows that if western governments mount a defense, the human rights movement will survive this rough patch
As Donald Trump abandons any pretense of promoting human rights abroad, he has sparked concern about the future of the human rights movement. The US government has never been a consistent promoter of human rights, but when it applied itself, it was certainly the most powerful. Yet this is not the first time that the human rights movement has faced a hostile administration in Washington. A collective defense by other governments has been the key to survival in the past. That remains true today.
Trump no doubt poses a serious threat. He is enamored of autocrats who rule without the checks and balances on executive power that he would shirk. He has stopped participating in the UN human rights council and censored the US state department’s annual human rights report. He has summarily sent immigrants to El Salvador’s nightmarish mega-prison, proposed the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and threatened to abandon Ukraine’s democracy to Vladimir Putin’s invading forces.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, was published by Knopf and Allen Lane in February
Trump’s animosity towards China isn’t going to disappear, and his past actions do not bode well for a quick resolution
Donald Trump’s massive Chinese tariffs are on pause. The media debated. Wall Street rejoiced. Many of my clients breathed a sigh of relief. Big retailers jumped for joy. But for how long?
For starters, the tariffs that weren’t paused – a 10% levy on all Chinese goods, plus a bonus 20% tax that somehow relates to fentanyl, are still in place. When you take into consideration existing tariffs on steel from previous Trump and Biden administrations, the effective tariff rate on Chinese goods is actually closer to 40%, according to an analysis done by the Wall Street Journal.
Labour has good ideas and years left to change Britain. Why is it acting as if its time is almost up?
Just under a week on from Keir Starmer’s latest pronouncements about immigration, plenty of people on his own side are still gripped by a queasy sense of fury and disappointment, and it shows no signs of fading away. His aides and allies will now try to gladden left-liberal hearts by emphasising gains from Monday’s UK-EU summit, and the prime minister’s remodelling of Brexit. But the acrid cloud hanging over Starmer will surely remain, and with good reason.
Whatever the surrounding context – and whether or not he was consciously echoing Enoch Powell – his suggestion that Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” still sounded like a horribly calculated provocation. The insistence that the government was set on closing “a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy, and our country” was even more brazen. So was the suggestion after years of “a one-nation experiment in open borders…the damage this has done to our country is incalculable”. That last claim, in fact, might have been the worst of the lot: a shameful example of a prime minister reducing a story replete with complexity and nuance – and raw humanity – to cheap and nasty hyperbole.
Midfielder criticises Fifa for timing of competition
Final home game on Tuesday is ‘going to be weird’
Kevin De Bruyne has revealed he “probably won’t play” for Manchester City in this summer’s Club World Cup, with the Belgian critical of Fifa for staging the competition when contracts are still running.
City’s decision not to offer De Bruyne fresh terms means Bournemouth’s visit to the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday and Sunday’s trip to Fulham on the final day of the Premier League season will be his final games for the club he joined 10 years ago. City play their three Club World Cup Group G games in June and De Bruyne’s deal finishes at the end of that month, so he could participate but has decided not to.
Actor will receive a lifetime achievement award on Tuesday for his ‘enduring impact on cinema and the arts’ and ‘decades of artistic brilliance’
Kevin Spacey is to accept a lifetime achievement award in Cannes next week, in what may constitute one of the most high-profile “uncancellings” of the #MeToo era.
On Tuesday, the Oscar-winning actor is set to receive an award for excellence in film and television at the Better World Fund’s 10th anniversary gala dinner at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes.
Utilita Arena, Birmingham Performing solo to a backing track, the rapper nevertheless generates extraordinary heat with his fluid and furious flow atop foundation-rumbling bass
Fireworks explode, flames burn, smoke engulfs the room and a screech erupts from the audience as a masked Tyler, the Creator emerges from a thick green haze to the gut-rumbling bass of St Chroma. It’s rare to hear such a frenzied response to new songs but it establishes the mood for an evening during which the LA rapper’s most recent work, from 2024’s Chromakopia, is received with the same level of adoration as old favourites. And he runs through the album almost in its entirety.
Performing solo on stage to a backing track, he bounces giddily but gracefully across the vast space. The bass frequently hits outrageously hard throughout the evening, shaking the building’s foundations, such as during the grinding charge of Noid. While effective, the frequent bass drops do sometimes kill some of the detail in the music, as well as perhaps overcompensating for the lack of live instrumentation.
When Mary Ann Kenny lost her husband, she hoped therapy or medication would help. But soon she was losing touch with reality – and panicking about what she might be doing to her two young sons
Mary Ann Kenny first met her husband in 2000, at a conference in Dundee. “It was a coup de foudre – ‘a bolt of lightning’,” the 60-year-old languages lecturer says with a smile. “We had finally found what had taken both of us a very long time to find.”
John was from Chester, Kenny was from Dublin, and the couple had a long-distance relationship until he moved to Ireland to live with her in 2008. “We had our two small kids, our lovely house, our friends; it just seemed like we had all our ducks in a row. It had taken a long time to get there – we had our kids a little bit later in life – but I felt that everything was perfect. Then John left my life just as suddenly as he entered it; one day he was there, then he was gone.”
Leon Emirali has created digital versions of all UK MPs, including a Wes Streeting avatar who is unabashedly frank about who the next PM should be
If you are one of the few people on the planet who fancies a chat with Keir Starmer, then there’s a new AI model for you.
A former chief of staff to a Tory minister has created Nostrada, which aims to enable users to talk with an AI version of each of the UK parliament’s 650 MPs – and lets you ask them anything you want.
Some conservatives rejected Francis for his leftist leanings, but Leo could be able to realize his forerunner’s visions
Rightwing Catholic Americans in positions of power – from the vice-president, JD Vance, to Leonardo Leo – may have breathed a brief sigh of relief when, after the white smoke cleared, Pope Leo XIV emerged on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica donning a traditional red mozzetta with a papal stole.
It was, observers pointed out, a starkly different choice than his predecessor Pope Francis, a reviled figure among many staunch conservatives, who had worn all white on the same occasion in 2013 to symbolize his desire for simplicity and humility.
Kyiv officials believe Moscow is not interested in peace despite talks in Istanbul and Trump’s intervention
Ukrainian officials believe a largely stalemated war of attrition with Russia is likely to continue for several more years, despite international efforts pushed by Donald Trump to end the fighting.
After the inconclusive breakup of the first direct talks between Kyiv and Moscow in Istanbul on Friday, and despite the US president’s planned calls with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, they see no evidence that Moscow is serious about peace.
It was the political satire that gave us omnishambles, pet asbos and the terrifying Malcolm Tucker. Two decades on, creator Armando Iannucci and stars including Peter Capaldi and Rebecca Front lift the lid on its chaotic creation
Twenty years ago this month we were plunged straight into the middle of an omnishambles. It was a moment in time when petrified politicians lurched from crisis to crisis, scrambling desperately to control the narrative as their endless gaffes derailed even the vaguest attempts to change this country for the better. But am I talking about the tail-end of the Blair years or the televisual tour-de-force that was Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It?
It could be either. It could even be right now – such was the show’s prescient genius. This was a satire that didn’t just mimic the government’s calamities but seemed somehow to foresee them. Over its seven-year run, The Thick of It came up with farcical policies that the government went on to adopt (pet asbos, anyone?), coined new words in the dictionary (the aforementioned omnishambles) and, in Malcolm Tucker, created one of the great malevolent forces of British comedy. Here’s how they did it …
Central Coast 1-1 (aet) Melbourne Victory; Mariners win 5-4 on pens
Bianca Galic slots winning penalty to seal Mariners’ first championship
The weight of the world was on Bianca Galic’s shoulders. After 120 minutes of football, nothing could separate her Central Coast Mariners and Melbourne Victory and the first shootout to decide an A-League Women grand final was needed. Eight successive penalties had rippled the back of the net to that point, with only Alana Jančevski’s initial attempt failing to do so. It meant that the game, a title – a fairytale – all came down to this.
The 26-year-old bent down to adjust the ball. At the end of the third game that had been played on AAMI Park across the weekend, and after rain had blanketed Melbourne the day prior, the penalty area at both ends of the pitch was churned up. Player of the match Isabel Gomez had slipped as she struck her shot on goal, the relief pouring over her as Victory keeper Courtney Newbon proved just unable to get enough of a touch on the ball to keep it out.
Monday’s meet-up could provide the piece of the jigsaw to unlock UK growth and draw a line under the Brexit years
For veterans of the Brexit years, such as Keir Starmer, the next 12 hours will feel painfully familiar. Negotiations will go until the final hours. But this time, there is belief on both sides that things can be different.
For the UK, Monday’s UK-EU summit is the most crucial piece of the three-part jigsaw to unlock growth, after the recent deals with India and the US.
Jamie Vardy will be having a goodbye party when he bids farewell to Leicester this afternoon. The 39-year-old wanted to end his Foxes career on 500 appearances and at the King Power Stadium, meaning he will not feature on the final day of the Premier League season next weekend. Today also happens to be the 13th anniversary of Vardy’s move to Leicester, marking what is set to be a full-circle occasion.
Be sure to also message me with any thoughts, feelings or score predictions for any of today’s games. I want to know what you’re up to, where you’re off to and what you’ll be watching this afternoon. Also, let me know if you have any stand-out memories of Goodison or any favourite Jamie Vardy moments. I want to hear from you!
Exclusive: In The Mood For Love, curated by grandson of early Hockney champion and art dealer, John Kasmin, will feature works from 1960-63
When one of David Hockney’s iconic swimming pool pictures sold for $90.3m (£70.3m) in 2013, he became the world’s most highly valued contemporary artist. Now paintings, drawings and prints that he sold for a few pounds in the 1960s are being brought together for the first time in a new exhibition.
John Kasmin, an art dealer who first recognised Hockney’s potential in the early 1960s when the artist was studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA), told the Guardian that Hockney’s prices then “rarely ever went above 20 quid”.
Comeback to see off Saracens highlights Northampton’s cutting edge – and how quickly a game can change
It ended with the Lions captain in forlorn negotiation with the referee. Australians may be encouraged that Maro Itoje was unable to work his magic to save Saracens’ match, to save their season.
They desperately needed the win – in a way that Northampton did not – but they were staring down the barrel of the most dramatic of last-minute defeats, 28-24, courtesy of Tarek Haffar’s second try. There were two passes in the buildup, both of which looked forward, but by the arcane procedures of the television match official protocols the decision-making was constrained by the referee’s initial instinct, which was that the try was good.
The book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson presents a scathing account of a president cocooned from reality – and fuels questions about his role in the party
George Clooney “felt a knot form in his stomach” as a frail and diminished Joe Biden approached him, apparently failing to recognise one of the most famous actors in the world. “George Clooney,” an aide eventually clarified for the US president. “Oh, yeah!” Biden said. “Hi, George!”
The excruciating encounter at a glitzy Los Angeles fundraiser last June is one of several damning anecdotes contained in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, an upcoming book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
Thousands have been displaced and conservation work halted as series of killings jeopardises decades of work in Niassa, one of Africa’s biggest protected areas
One of Africa’s largest protected areas has been shaken by a series of attacks by Islamic State-linked extremists, which have left at least 10 people dead.
Conservationists in Niassa reserve, Mozambique, say decades of work to rebuild populations of lions, elephants and other keystone species are being jeopardised, as conservation operations grind to a halt.
Wednesday’s all-English Europa League final in Bilbao is a huge game that shows football still has a sense of humour
The best thing about football is what a silly, mercurial game it is. You can have all the money or political clout in the world. You can put in place meticulously thought-out projects. You can think and prepare and invest and plan, and football will still spit out a Europa League final between Tottenham and Manchester United. Strategise that.
Thousands will travel to Bilbao without tickets, many will end up sleeping rough, the phone network may collapse. It will be chaotic and anarchic and at its heart will be a game between two teams desperate for victory, whose presence in the final is utterly bewildering. And in that bonkersness may lie brilliance.
Evidence shows that arguing our case rarely convinces others. It’s social relationships and actions that have that power
Sarah Stein Lubrano is the author of Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds
It may seem paradoxical to write this in an opinion piece. But it needs saying: arguments alone have no meaningful effect on people’s beliefs. And the implicit societal acceptance that they do is getting in the way of other, more effective forms of political thinking and doing.
I’m a researcher who studies the intersection of psychology and politics, and my work has increasingly led me to believe that our culture’s understanding of how political persuasion works is wrong. In the age of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the rise of the far right, commentators have endlessly opined on the problems of fake news, polarisation and more. But they’ve mostly been looking in the wrong places – and have focused too much on words.
One woman killed in Kyiv region in air offensive that follows first direct peace talks between the two sides
The largest known Russian drone attack since full-scale war began in 2022 killed a woman in the Kyiv region and wounded at least three people, Ukrainian authorities said early on Sunday.
The attack came two days after Ukraine and Russia held their first direct talks since 2022 and a day before a planned phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.