The US early on Friday boarded another oil tanker, the US military said, as part of efforts to target sanctions-busting vessels traveling to and from Venezuela.
US forces were seen in video footage that officials posted online landing on the ship’s deck as the vessel named Olina was seized in the Caribbean near Trinidad. It is the fifth such interdiction of such ships in recent weeks, separately from the series of previous US operations since the start of the fall to strike suspected drug boats off the coast of Venezuela.
From talent shows to the big screen, the actor’s performance in Hamnet has made her a leading awards contender
Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel about William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway, is a tender meditation on love and grief. Charting the couple’s anguish over the death of their 11-year-old son – said to have inspired the play Hamlet – it has moved audiences to tears and united critics in their praise.
The film’s emotional force is carried by the Irish actor and singer Jessie Buckley, who portrays Hathaway (opposite Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare) with a rawness and intimacy that has already earned her a Critics’ Circle award for best actress, and marked her out as a leading contender for the Golden Globes, Baftas and Oscars. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw called her “unselfconsciously beguiling”, while Rolling Stone predicted audiences “will be talking about Jessie Buckley’s performance for years”.
Deal understood to lift pay to about £300,000 a week
Arsenal keen to reward Declan Rice with new deal
Bukayo Saka has agreed a new five-year contract at Arsenal that will make him one of the highest-paid players in the club’s history.
The England forward’s deal that he signed in May 2023 is thought to be worth about £200,000 a week and is due to expire in 2027. Saka said before the Champions League quarter-final victory against Real Madrid in April that he wanted to “win wearing this badge” but also said he was in “no rush” to sign a new contract.
Freddy Guevara will never forget the 34 excruciating days he spent inside Venezuela’s most notorious political prison after being snatched by masked men from President Nicolás Maduro’s intelligence agency.
The black hood, the interrogations, the stress positions, the salsa music his captors blasted at him in an attempt to make him crack.
It is one of the most tantalising – and entertaining – puzzles in art, stretching from the Louvre to the Loire via, well, Norfolk. And our critic thinks he has just worked it out
Increased security after the recent heist has made the queues at the Louvre even slower, yet on this rainswept, very wintry morning, no one grumbles. After all, the Mona Lisa is waiting inside for all these tourists who have come from the world over. Leonardo da Vinci’s woman – swathed in dark cloth and silk, smiling enigmatically as she sits in front of a landscape of rocks, road and water – draws crowds like no other painting. But if the Mona Lisa can attract such attention fully clothed, what would the queues be like if she was nude?
Strangely, this is not just amusing speculation – because in 18th-century Britain, she was. An engraving issued by a publisher called John Boydell gave libertine Georgians the opportunity to hang “Joconda” in their boudoir. It must have been popular because many copies survive. This Mona Lisa sits in a chair with her hands crossed in front of a fading view of distant rock formations. And, like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, she smiles enigmatically. But there is one key difference. She is naked from the waist up.
With strong showings for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and target hit for 50% female directors, criticism that has dogged the prizes in recent years may have been headed off
For now, the Bafta film awards appears to have headed off further criticism over its long-running diversity crisis after revealing its longlists on Friday.
European Union member states have backed the biggest ever free trade agreement with a group of Latin American countries, ending 25 years of negotiations but stoking further tensions with farmers and environmentalists around the bloc.
The contentious Mercosur deal with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, prompted immediate protests in Poland, France, Greece and Belgium, with farmers blocking key roads in Paris, Brussels and Warsaw.
France and Germany battered by strong winds and plunging temperatures, as schools closed and travel disrupted
Germany is expecting heavy snowfalls of up to 20cm after record winds of more than 210kph left almost 400,000 homes in France without electricity, as Storm Goretti battered north-western Europe.
No major or widespread damage to property was reported in France on Friday but one man was seriously hurt after slipping from his roof while trying to replace fallen tiles and 27 others suffered minor injuries, several requiring hospital treatment.
Amid an affordable housing crisis, renting a room from a friend can seem like the perfect solution. But without clear rules, it can lead to power imbalances, feuds and even unfair evictions …
When Rachel needed a place to live, Maya was only too happy to offer her spare room. What are friends for?
Rachel had recently returned to her home town to start afresh, having been made redundant. Maya, a childhood friend, owned her three-bedroom home, having been helped to buy it by her parents.
The Austrian has thrived at teams who do not expect to have much of the ball but this style may not work at Old Trafford where possession is expected
Oliver Glasner has shown a penchant for one-liners, as well a 3-4-2-1 formation, since he took over at Crystal Palace almost two years ago. The Austrian declared he was “not David Copperfield” in his first press conference and usually has a saying for whatever situation Palace are in, such as declaring they must not be “one-hit wonders” after winning the FA Cup.
It was therefore no surprise to find Glasner had come prepared when he played a straight bat to questions about his future this week after Ruben Amorim’s sacking by Manchester United. “I’m not a gambler,” he said when asked to comment on the fact he is the bookmakers’ favourite to take over at Old Trafford in the summer.
Robot vacuums that can climb stairs and device for BlackBerry lovers also on display at annual Las Vegas tech show
This year will be filled with robots that can fold your laundry, pick up objects and climb stairs, fridges that you can command to open by voice, laptops with screens that can follow you around the room on motorised hinges and the reimagining of the BlackBerry phone.
Those are the predictions from the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas that took place this week. The sprawling event aims to showcase cutting-edge technology developed by startups and big brands.
It is a rollercoaster of emotional extremes that will be familiar to many who have gone through IVF treatment: hope and joy turns to despair and back again. This is especially true for women over 35, the age when IVF success rates decline steeply and for whom the only real way to improve the odds is to keep trying.
While there has been huge progress in IVF in the past decades, including the advent of genetic testing, egg freezing and techniques to overcome male infertility, the primary cause of age-related female infertility – egg quality – has not been directly addressed.
Downing Street has condemned the move by X to restrict its AI image creation tool to paying subscribers as insulting, saying it simply made the ability to generate explicit and unlawful images a premium service.
The ad campaign ended in late 2025, the Swedish streaming giant confirmed, having previously said, despite protests, that it did not violate advertising policies
Spotify is no long running advertisements for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the streaming service has confirmed, after the Trump administration campaign ended in late 2025.
“There are currently no ICE ads running on Spotify,” the Swedish company said in a statement. “The advertisements mentioned were part of a US government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms.”
Keir Starmer accuses Kremlin of ‘using fabricated allegations’ to justify attack after call with Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron
Pope Leo also chooses to express a view on the recent events in Venezuela, calling for world governments –I think he means US president Donald Trump in particular– to “respect the will” of the Venezuelan people.
Goes without saying that it’s particularly important coming from the first US pope.
“I wish to repeat my urgent appeal that peaceful political solutions to the current situation should be sought, keeping in mind the common good of the peoples and not the defence of partisan interests.”
“This pertains, in particular to Venezuela. In light of recent developments in this regard, I renew my appeal to respect the will of the Venezuelan people and to safeguard the human and civil rights of all ensuring a future of stability and concord.”
“The Holy See strongly reiterates the pressing need for an immediate ceasefire and for dialogue motivated by a sincere search for ways leading to peace.
I make an urgent appeal to the international community, not to waver in its commitment to pursuing just and lasting solutions that will protect the most vulnerable and restore hope to the afflicted peoples.”
As the Gerard Butler film Greenland 2 becomes one more addition to the list of action movies to tamper with the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty or Golden Gate bridge, isn’t it time they mixed it up a bit?
Realistically there was never going to be a good time to release a sequel to 2020’s Greenland. This is partly because Greenland was one of those films in which Gerard Butler runs around looking as if he’s desperately trying to hold in a whopper of a fart. However, releasing a film about Americans focusing all their effort on Greenland at this precise moment in time feels a little on the nose.
Also, and hopefully this isn’t a spoiler, but it’s weird to make Greenland 2 when the entire world was destroyed at the end of Greenland 1. In that film, you will remember, Butler and his family had to get to Greenland because the planet was about to be pummelled by meteors.
Kim Elms, a speech pathologist, shares her experience as an auditory-visual synaesthete
Read more stories of synaesthesia in the way I feel series
Car journeys with my partner are a nightmare. He’s an ex-DJ so he likes to crank the music up, but for me this means seeing static images and flashes of light in my mind’s eye while I’m trying to drive. It’s hard to describe exactly what I see when I hear sound. But it’s almost like the sound waves you’d see if you watched an audio recording on a screen, or these little neurons connecting and space nebulas exploding in front of me.
I’m 44 now and only realised I had auditory-visual synaesthesia in my 30s. What I did know was that I seemed to have an extraordinary ability for linguistics. In school I studied Japanese and did really well without trying because I could literally see the words and sounds presented as images in front of me, making them easy to remember. At university I majored in Spanish, Korean and Indonesian and it was no effort at all. I then joined the air force as an intelligence officer because I didn’t want to become a teacher or translator. I walked away from the language aptitude test thinking I’d either messed it up or that it had been the easiest thing I’d ever done in my life. No one’s ever managed to get every answer right, they said when the results came back. But I hadn’t even tried. It just came naturally.
Study of man often featured in works by the Flemish master reveals hidden painting of woman beneath model’s beard
Is it a bald elderly man with a big bushy beard and a wine-addled stare? Or a friendly young woman with flowing locks and a crown of braids?
To Belgian art dealer Klaas Muller, an answer to that question mattered less than the fact that this particular take on the duck-rabbit optical illusion was painted by one Peter Paul Rubens.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calls protesters ‘vandals’ and ‘saboteurs’ and blames the US for instigating the unrest
Iran’s supreme leader has vowed that authorities will “not back down” in the face of growing protests, blaming the US for instigating demonstrations that started over economic conditions and have since expanded to calls for political reform.
In his first speech since the protests started 13 days ago, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, signalled on Friday that a greater crackdown was coming. He described protesters as “vandals” and “saboteurs”, and accused them of working on behalf of foreign agendas.
An afterlife sitcom, an angry penguin, tossed salad and scrambled eggs, and a Corby trouser press … our writers pick the shows they would happily watch on a loop for ever
I love every character and every aspect of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There isn’t a weak link in the cast and they work together as seamlessly and apparently joyfully as you could wish.