A light but filling no-bechamel souffle with a zingy citrus salad to add a sharp burst of flavour and colour
There is a skill in not wasting food and it’s all about good, old-fashioned housekeeping. If you learn how to store ingredients properly (cool, dark places are handy for spuds, for example) and keep tabs on what’s in your fridge/freezer, you can use everything up before it goes off – and make delicious things in the process. This golden, cheese-crusted souffle uses up the celeriac and spuds left after the festive season, plus any odds and ends of cheeses. It is spectacularly good, especially paired with a sparkling citrus salad.
Prominent Australian author Craig Silvey has been charged with possessing and distributing child exploitation material.
Silvey, 43, had a search warrant issued at his Fremantle home on Monday, 12 January, where detectives allegedly found him “actively engaging with other child exploitation offenders online”.
Former Labor ministers, the defence department boss and a career diplomat are among the names being touted by government figures to replace Kevin Rudd as Australia’s ambassador in Washington.
Rudd, the former prime minister and foreign minister, won praise for stabilising relations with the US president, Donald Trump, on Monday, after the surprise announcement he would depart a year early to return to the Asia Society thinktank.
Broadcaster’s submission calls on Florida court to throw out defamation case where US president is suing over editing of 6 January 2021 speech
The BBC will take legal steps to have Donald Trump’s $10bn defamation lawsuit over a Panorama programme edit dismissed, court documents have shown.
Panorama faced criticism in 2025, over an episode broadcast in 2024, for giving the impression the US president had encouraged his supporters to storm the Capitol building in 2021.
A rise of murders is traumatising inmates and staff, and making life harder for staff. But even in prison, violence isn’t inevitable
There are hotspots for violence in prison. The exercise yard, the showers. There are peak times, too. Mealtimes and association periods are particularly volatile.
But first thing in the morning is not when you expect to hear an alarm bell. I certainly didn’t, at 6am in my office on the residential wing of a high-security prison in late 2018. All prisoners were locked up at that time. But overcrowding has long been a problem in UK prisons, and keeping three men in cells designed for one can be a recipe for disaster.
Despite internet blackout, a small number of Iranians are risking their lives to share messages as protests continue
For most of Iran, the internet was shut off on Thursday afternoon – the most severe blackout the country has seen in years of internet shutdowns, coming after days of escalating anti-government protests.
For a very small sliver of the country, it is still possible to get photos and videos to the outside world, and even to make calls. The Telegram channel Vahid Online on Monday posted photos of dead bodies lying next to a street in Kahrizak, on the southern outskirts of Tehran; on Sunday, it shared a video of Iranians chanting “death to Khamenei” at a funeral.
As the writer turns 80, his masterful adaptation of the French novel is being revived at the National Theatre. It highlights his lifelong interest in political power play
I once dubbed Christopher Hampton, who celebrates his 80th birthday this month, “the quiet man of British theatre”. By that I meant that he was less prone to expressing his views in opinion pieces than contemporaries such as David Hare and David Edgar. The term also implied that his plays possessed a less idiosyncratic style than the work of, say, Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard. But I suspect that Hampton’s regard for the classical virtues of objectivity, lucidity and irony means that his work will prove as durable as anyone’s.
He is also, as I have seen, a man of considerable private passion. One incident in particular is branded on my memory. In November 1990 I was one of a group, including the director David Leveaux and set designer Bob Crowley, despatched by the British Council to Cairo to give a number of talks ahead of a visit by the National Theatre. We were privileged to be given a private night-time tour of the pyramids and were enjoying a quiet drink in the neighbouring hotel in Giza when in burst Hampton, who had just arrived from London. “Have you heard the news?” he cried. “Mrs Thatcher has been attacked in the Commons by Geoffrey Howe and it looks as if she’s in trouble.”
Paris trial’s outcome will determine whether leader of far-right National Rally can run for French presidency in 2027
The French far-right party leader Marine Le Pen will face a fresh trial on appeal on Tuesday over the embezzlement of European parliament funds in a case that will determine whether or not she can run in the 2027 presidential election.
Le Pen, 57, who leads the far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN), was considered to be a contender for next year’s election until she was barred from running for public office last March after being found guilty of an extensive and long-running fake jobs scam.
It is the most essential thing we do - yet many of us arguably breathe badly. The author of Breath explains how that can be changed
In the last stages of writing his book, Breath, James Nestor was stressed. “Which was ironic when writing a book about breathing patterns and mellowing out,” he says. The book was late; he’d spent his advance and was haemorrhaging even more money on extra research that was taking him off in new, potentially interesting, directions – was it really necessary, he wondered, to go to Paris to look at old skulls buried in catacombs beneath the city? (It was.)
Then a couple of months before the book’s May 2020 publication date, the Covid pandemic hit, and Nestor was advised to wait it out. He couldn’t afford to. “One of the main motivations for releasing it at that time was to get that [on-publication] advance,” he says. “But I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to release it. I said: ‘How are you going to promote a book that can’t be sold in stores, that I can’t tour for?’” He expected, he says, “absolutely zero to happen”.
A deadly fungus has already wiped out 90 species and threatens 500 more but Anthony Waddle is hoping gene replacement could be their salvation
Standing ankle-deep in water between two bare cottonwood trees on a hot spring day, eight-year-old Anthony Waddle was in his element. His attention was entirely absorbed by the attempt to net tadpoles swimming in a reservoir in the vast Mojave desert.
It was “one of the perfect moments in my childhood”, he says.
Security chief Diosdado Cabello is nicknamed the Octopus for good reason, with the regime’s fate said to rest with him
His nickname is the Octopus, he hosts a TV show called Hitting it with a Sledgehammer and many Venezuelans consider him the real power in the land.
Diosdado Cabello runs the regime’s security apparatus and is perhaps the most feared, reviled and, in some quarters, revered government figure, with influence to rival that of the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez.
In the new dog-eat-dog world order, appeasement doesn’t work. Time for the EU to grow up
Fabian Zuleeg is chief executive of the European Policy Centre
Donald Trump’s intervention in Venezuela is not a one-off shock. It epitomises his approach of interventionist isolationism based on a revisionist, neo-nationalist agenda in which power is exercised bluntly, international rules are optional and alliances are transactional. In such a dog-eat-dog world, hesitation and ambiguity do not stabilise the system; they become vulnerabilities to be exploited by a volatile and predatory Washington.
The seizure of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, combined with Trump’s renewed musings about acquiring Greenland, potentially by using the US military, should dispel any lingering illusion that this is merely erratic behaviour. It reflects a worldview in which sovereignty is conditional, spheres of influence are legitimate, and coercion is normalised when it delivers results in the interest of Trump and his administration. The real question now is not whether Europeans disapprove, but how pro-European liberal democratic forces respond. Three imperatives stand out.
Fabian Zuleeg is chief executive and chief economist at the European Policy Centre
Sheldon Rankins returned a fumble by Aaron Rodgers 33 yards for a touchdown early in the fourth quarter to highlight a dominant performance by the NFL’s top-ranked defense, and the Houston Texans beat the Pittsburgh Steelers 30-6 on Monday night for the first road playoff win in franchise history.
The Texans’ win means they will play the New England Patriots in the divisional round on Sunday night.
After a four-year wait, the abundant fruiting of the rimu tree could inspire the world’s heaviest parrots to boost their population
It has been four long years, but the world’s heaviest parrots, the kākāpō, are finally about to get it on again. The mass fruiting of a native New Zealand tree has triggered breeding season – a rare event conservationists hope will lead to a record number of chicks for the critically endangered bird.
Kākāpō, the world’s only nocturnal and flightless parrot, were once abundant across New Zealand. But their population plummeted after the introduction of predators such as cats and stoats, and by the 1900s they were nearly extinct.
Wild success of television series drives huge demand for Game Changers novels, with Australian booksellers reporting significant customer orders
A seventh book in Rachel Reid’s gay romance series that inspired the TV drama Heated Rivalry will be out later this year but Australian fans are still struggling to get their hands on a physical copy of any of the preceding six books.
Unrivalled, the next instalment in the Canadian author’s Game Changers series, will be released internationally on 29 September, the publisher HarperCollins announced on Tuesday.
Adelaide writers’ week 2026 has been cancelled after days of turmoil as more than 180 authors and speakers dropped out in protest of the decision to disinvite the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah.
In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, the Adelaide festival board announced the event, which was scheduled to begin on 28 February, would no longer go ahead. The three remaining members of the festival board have resigned immediately, following the resignations of four others – with the exception of the Adelaide city council representative, whose term expires in February.
Seven out of 10 targets have little likelihood of being met by 2030, Office for Environmental Protection says
The government will not meet its targets to save wildlife in England and Northern Ireland and is failing on almost all environmental measures, the Office for Environmental Protection watchdog has said.
In a damning report, the OEP has found that seven of the 10 targets set in the Environment Act 2021 have little likelihood of being met by 2030, which is the deadline set in law.
A teenager in New South Wales was charged after allegedly making multiple hoax reports to emergency services – a practice known as “swatting” – falsely claiming mass shootings were taking place at major retail and educational institutions in the US.
The Australian federal police (AFP) charged the boy on 18 December, claiming he is part of an alleged decentralised online crime network hiding behind keyboards in order to trigger an “urgent and large-scale emergency response”.
Officers seized a number of electronic devices and a prohibited firearm in the juvenile’s possession as part of Taskforce Pompilid established in October 2025.
Exclusive: Chinese officials are using a ‘highly specific’ interpretation of EU rules to suggest Taiwanese figures should not be granted visas, officials say
Chinese officials have been pushing “legal advice” on European countries, saying their own border laws require them to ban entry to Taiwanese politicians, according to more than half a dozen diplomats and officials familiar with the matter.
The officials made demarches to European embassies in Beijing, or through local embassies directly to European governments in their capital cities, warning the European countries not to “trample on China’s red lines”, according to the European diplomats and ministries who spoke to the Guardian.
Strike on Lviv that used nuclear-capable ballistic missile a ‘dangerous, inexplicable escalation’. What we know on day 1,420
The US and Britain have condemned Russia for dropping a nuclear-capable Oreshnik ballistic missile on Ukraine. At an emergency meeting of the UN security council, Tammy Bruce, US deputy ambassador, called the Lviv strike a “dangerous and inexplicable escalation”. Britain’s acting UN ambassador, James Kariuki, called the attack “reckless”, adding that “it threatens regional and international security and carries significant risk of escalation and miscalculation”.
Russia claimed the Oreshnik targeted an aviation repair factory. Ukraine has not confirmed what was hit but said the missile struck during a wider attack using drones and other rockets. The rarely used, multiple warhead Oreshnikmissile is thought to be in limited supply – Ukraine’s military and special forces claim to have destroyed at least one of them on the ground in Russia. Observers have rated the two Oreshnik strikes so far on Ukraine as largely political and symbolic, with dummy warheads probably used, and any damage caused by their sonic boom and physical impact rather than live explosives. Analysts have questioned whether the Oreshnik is accurate enough to deliver non-nuclear bombs, which have to be more closely targeted than nuclear warheads to be effective.
Russian forces launched attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv early on Tuesday, killing at least four people in Kharkiv, according to its mayor, Igor Terekhov, and injuring another six. In the southern city of Odesa, residential buildings, a hospital and a kindergarten were damaged, with at least five people wounded in two waves of attacks, said Sergiy Lysak, the regional governor.
Kyiv on Monday buried medic Sergiy Smolyak, 56, who was killed in a drone attack as he rushed to rescue residents from a housing block that Russia struck minutes earlier in a massive attack on the Ukrainian capital on Friday. “He was very kind, always calm and even-tempered. He saved so many people,” said Ryta Dorosh, a nurse who worked with Smolyak before the war.
Russia has bombed two more civilian ships transporting food products in the Black Sea, according to Ukraine. “An enemy drone struck a Panamanian-flagged tanker that was waiting to enter port to load vegetable oil. Unfortunately, one crew member was wounded,” said Ukrainian regional development minister Oleksiy Kuleba. “There was also an attack on a ship flying the flag of San Marino, which was leaving the port with a cargo of corn ... This is further proof that Russia is deliberately attacking civilian ships, international trade and maritime safety,” he added. Odesa regional governor Oleg Kiper said the attacks happened around the Chornomorsk port on the southern Ukrainian coast.
President posts online as US weighs response to situation in Iran, which is major facing anti-government protests
Donald Trump has said any country that does business with Iran will face a tariff rate of 25% on trade with the US, as Washington weighs a response to the situation in Iran, which is seeing its biggest anti-government protests in years.
“Effective immediately, any Country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay a Tariff of 25% on any and all business being done with the United States of America,” the US president said in a post on Truth Social on Monday. Tariffs are paid by US importers of goods from those countries. Iran has been heavily sanctioned by Washington for years.
‘Historic’ moment in biggest coal-consuming countries could bring decline in global emissions, analysis says
Coal power generation fell in China and India for the first time since the 1970s last year, in a “historic” moment that could bring a decline in global emissions, according to analysis.
The simultaneous fall in coal-powered electricity in the world’s biggest coal-consuming countries had not happened since 1973, according to analysts at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and was driven by a record roll-out of clean energy projects.
Allen wins five frames in a row against Mark Williams
Zhao Xintong cruises to 6-2 win over Gary Wilson
Mark Allen shrugged off a bout of food poisoning to beat Mark Williams 6-2, winning five successive frames, and book a Masters quarter-final with Judd Trump or Ding Junhui, who play on Wednesday.
Speaking to the BBC, Allen, the 2018 champion, said: “I prepare properly for these events, but I couldn’t prepare for this at all as I’ve been lying in bed all week with food poisoning. I just thought: ‘Go out there and give my best.’ I wouldn’t have had much left if it had got much closer.”
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