Heraskevych held up ‘No War in Ukraine’ sign in Beijing
IOC have contacted Ukrainian officials over his protest
Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych trained on Monday at the Winter Olympics in a helmet with images of compatriots killed during the war in Ukraine, delivering on a promise to use the event to keep attention on the conflict.
“Some of them were my friends,” Heraskevych, who is his country’s flag bearer, said after his training session at the Cortina sliding centre.
Findings suggest smaller cognitive decline, but US study cannot prove daily caffeine hit is good for the brain
People who have a couple of teas or coffees a day have a lower risk of dementia and marginally better cognitive performance than those who avoid the drinks, researchers say.
Health records for more than 130,000 people showed that over 40 years, those who routinely drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee or one to two cups of caffeinated tea daily had a 15-20% lower risk of dementia than those who went without.
US president not challenged over false claims climate change is ‘hoax’ and parts of London have sharia law
The UK’s media regulator Ofcom has been accused of abandoning “any pretence” of guarding against misleading and biased television coverage, after it refused to investigate a series of complaints about a GB News interview with Donald Trump.
During the interview with the rightwing network, broadcast last November, the US president falsely claimed human-induced climate change was “a hoax” and that London had no-go areas for police. He said parts of the capital had “sharia law”.
Tom Homan suggested that a widespread approach to immigration operations would lose public support
Tom Homan – the Trump administration’s “border czar” sent to Minnesota in January after federal agents fatally shot two US citizen protesters – warned last year that the government’s aggressive, widespread approach to immigration enforcement would cost it public support.
Homan made the observation in an interview with NBC in June for the forthcoming book Undue Process, by the network’s homeland security correspondent, analyzing the immigration policy of mass deportation that Donald Trump has pursued during his second presidency.
This year’s set of $8m TV spots gave us new looks at alien conspiracy thriller Disclosure Day, slasher sequel Scream 7 and an unlikely new David Fincher film
With Super Bowl spots now up to a reported $8-10m, the market has grown a little less welcoming to Hollywood, an industry still not quite up to pre-pandemic numbers (the global box office for 2025 was down almost $10bn on 2019).
So while last night saw us assaulted with ads for beer and, depressingly, AI, there was a continued decrease in the number of major film ads, a harder spend to justify in this weakened climate. But the biggest of guns still came out, from Spielberg to Ghostface to the Minions …
Refereeing is the most thankless of jobs. There are times when you can get a decision absolutely right and still you get criticised on all sides.
In the final seconds at Anfield on Sunday, with the Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson caught upfield, Rayan Cherki rolled the ball towards the Liverpool goal. Erling Haaland gave chase and would have gotten there to nudge the ball definitively over the line but he was pulled back by Dominik Szoboszlai, who would then have caught up with the ball to clear had he not been pulled back by Haaland. The ball crossed the line but the referee Craig Pawson, after a VAR review, gave not a goal but a free-kick for the first offence, sending Szoboszlai off for the denial of an obvious goal-scoring opportunity.
Successful reruns are rare in the NFL. And New England showed enough holes on Sunday to suggest making it back to the big dance soon will be tough
The greatest lie a fanbase tells itself is that there is always next year.
It is the softest landing spot in sport, a comfort blanket after a crushing defeat. Next year, we’ll be healthier. Next year, we’ll fix our offensive line. Next year, we’ll add that superstar receiver and retain all our guys. Next year.
‘Our producer was toasting sesame seeds in a pan. Coming from a working-class family, I’d never seen such a thing’
Ed and I had just come off a long tour of Europe and North America supporting Simple Minds and needed a break. I immersed myself in music-making with a synth, drum machine and a four-track Tascam Portastudio. I was very inspired by Brian Eno. I’d seen the words “found sounds” on his album credits. The notion that any sound could be included in a recording struck me as magical. I just held a mic out of my bedroom window. Black Man Ray started out as an ambient number with an intro featuring the sound of a boy I recorded singing in the street below. In the end, he actually featured in the opening bars of our song The Highest High.
Shadowy urban terror gives way to airborne exuberance as the festival celebrates its 20th edition with a programme that disturbs and delights
Suited dancers swing around a streetlight in Spanish choreographer Marcos Morau’s Horses but it’s not exactly Singin’ in the Rain. The mood is more like a stray dog has sidled up to that lamp-post and cocked its leg. The lamps multiply on these squalid, mean streets: uprooted, they become giant props for performers to illuminate and edit the action on a vast stage with its wings exposed and no artificial backdrop. A suspicious figure roams the outskirts with a torch; another drives a vehicle back and forth in the distance. One long-necked light snakes down from above like a tendril, its glow deepening the chiaroscuro. Bodies melt and morph. It is as if a film noir has caught fire in the projector, distorting each scene.
Nederlands Dans Theater’s production, at the 20th edition of Holland Dance festival, confounds from its ragged beginnings to the final seconds, when even the curtain is not allowed to fall in peace. Horses starts with the house lights up and a solo with instinctive flinches and hoof-like hands suggesting hunter and hunted before a second dancer arrives nose-first, as if led by scent. The animality briefly evokes NDT’s Figures in Extinction but this is an acutely urban nightmare, with humans’ survival skills put to the test. Suddenly, the auditorium’s doors slam shut and we are plunged into darkness.
Emerald Fennell’s lust-fuelled take on Emily Brontë’s novel has cued a hot flush of merchandise ranging from themed snacks to thongs. What exactly are they buying into?
That appetite for Emerald Fennell’s bodice-ripping adaptation of Emily Brontë’s yarn of doomed romance is high is not in doubt. Whether it’s high enough to sustain sales for an official Wuthering Heights açai bowl seems less certain.
Yet this is exactly what is on offer in food aisles across the US, with two bespoke bowls churned up for hungry film fans with the explanatory slogan: “This is what happens when you turn yearning into flavour.”
To understand Marseille’s season, you need not watch all of their games; those played against PSG will suffice. After Marseille’s 1-0 win over the European champions in September – their first at the Vélodrome in the league in 14 years – the word “finally” was the word scrawled across the front page of local paper La Provence. That victory brought relief, but also hope and optimism: the Empire could be toppled. But it struck back on Sunday night.
“Rubbish,” read the front page of La Provence on Monday. And there really was only one word for it. It was a 5-0 defeat that could have been 10 – a humiliation. The Marseille defender Facundo Medina had spoken about “seeking revenge” for his team’s defeat to PSG in the Trophée des Champions in January, a defeat on penalties so narrow and frustrating that it left Roberto De Zerbi in tears in the dressing room.
Milton Court, London Live on stage the Oscar-winning composer’s score is disorientating, ecstatic and strange. Its star, Amanda Seyfried’s pure voice is the anchor in a brief but absorbing set
A few days ago, Amanda Seyfried was on the Graham Norton couch alongside Margot Robbie and Johannes Radebe from Strictly. Tonight, the star of Mean Girls, Les Misérables and Mamma Mia is seated among a rather different set of luminaries: key figures from London’s avant garde jazz scene.
The link here is composer Daniel Blumberg. When he accepted an Oscar last year for his extraordinary score to The Brutalist, Blumberg namechecked Cafe Oto, the leftfield Dalston venue whose improvising musicians have long formed the bedrock of his work. While scoring The Testament of Ann Lee – a biopic starring Seyfried as the founder of the Shaker religious movement – Blumberg was struck by parallels between Shaker worship and free improvisation: a shared ascetic intensity, a cult-like devotion, and moments of wild, euphoric release. The speaking-in-tongues qualities of Shaker devotional singing, he realised, had uncanny echoes in the work of vocal improvisers such as Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols, both of whom feature in the film – and in this performance.
British skier breaks down after making crucial mistakes
‘I’m obviously a bit sad – it’s a tough place to be, fourth’
Long after the finale of this compelling women’s freeski slopestyle competition, Kirsty Muir was still struggling to process the cruellest loss of her young career.
“I’ll be proud of myself in a minute,” the 21-year-old Team GB star told one reporter, through the sobs and the pain. “But I’m in a bit of a hole right now.”
Nine members of police’s CRS division allegedly ‘repeatedly struck non-hostile demonstrators’ in Paris in 2018
Nine officers from the French riot police have gone on trial in Paris accused of beating peaceful protesters who were sheltering from teargas during the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) anti-government demonstrations in 2018.
The case at Paris’s criminal court is one of the biggest trials over alleged police violence during the unrest in 2018 and 2019, when hundreds of thousands of protesters in fluorescent jackets took to the streets over rising fuel taxes in what morphed into broader anti-government protests against the president, Emmanuel Macron.
Son says Hong Kong media figure, 78, fears dying alone while legal team say Lai is now world’s highest profile political prisoner
The UK, the UN, EU and rights groups have condemned the sentencing of the pro-democracy activist and publisher Jimmy Lai, a British citizen who has been jailed for 20 years in Hong Kong for national security convictions that critics say are politically motivated.
Yvette Cooper, the UK foreign secretary, said: “For 78-year-old Jimmy Lai, 20 years is an effective life sentence, following a politically motivated prosecution under a law that was imposed to silence China’s critics. The Hong Kong authorities must end Jimmy Lai’s appalling ordeal and release him to be with his family.”
Trading social media for Pokémon battles and evolutions in Kanto on a Game Boy Advance has been surprisingly serene
Cutting back on doomscrolling must be one of the hardest new year resolutions to keep. Instinctively tapping on the usual suspects on your phone’s home screen becomes a reflex, and vast quantities of money and user data have been specifically employed to keep you reaching for the phone, ingraining it into our work, leisure and social lives. You’ll get no shame from me if you love your phone and have a healthy relationship with your apps, but I’ve found myself struggling lately.
This year, I’m attempting to cut back on screen time – sort of. I’m replacing the sleek oblong of my smartphone with something a little more fuzzy and nostalgic. In an attempt to dismantle my bad habit, I’m closing the feeds of instant updates and instead carrying around a Game Boy Advance. I’ve been playing Pokémon FireRed, a remake of the very first Pokémon games, which turn 30 this month. Even this refreshed version is more than two decades old.
Peter Mandelson helped Morgan McSweeney privilege Labour’s reactionary forces in a Faustian pact to sustain the PM. What they sowed, we’ll reap
A chicken that loses its head can still, for a short period, run around and flap its wings: the illusion of life sustained by residual nerve impulses. After the downfall of Morgan McSweeney – our de-facto prime minister – this is the phase Britain’s government has now entered. Those who have worked closely with Keir Starmer emphasise his lack of politics, while his own aides privately boast that he is merely their frontman. McSweeney was the head, and the head has gone. There will be some flapping about in every direction. Starmer’s director of communications, Tim Allan has stepped down, the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, is calling for Starmer’s resignation and the question of whether and when he will go is still open. But this political project is all over.
This was not supposed to happen, at least according to conventional political wisdom. Before his collision with real power, Starmer was sold as competence incarnate: a figure committed to public service, presiding over a team of adults in the room who would spare us from the psychodramas of the Tory era. They had, we were told, discovered an electoral elixir. Ruling out significant tax rises on wealthy elites, attacking the welfare state and bashing migrants placed them in the fabled centre ground and would appeal to mainstream public opinion.
The NFL appeared keen to welcome the sport’s non-Maga contingent back into the tent. But the theater and violence of capitalism was still there
Roger Federer smiling wolfishly to the crowd: a return to woke? Adam Sandler hangdog in the Levi’s Stadium stands, Jon Bon Jovi mooching on the sideline like a retired dentist on a cruise, Billie Joe Armstrong belting out American Idiot during the pre-game show under his motionless meringue of fogey-blond hair: were they a sign? A New England Patriots team who were neither favored to win nor widely reviled, then promptly repaid a grateful public by losing: was this the Super Bowl which proved that history really can move on, that America is not fated to remain hostage to the tremors and hatreds of the past? Well, yes and no.
A year after Donald Trump made American football’s showpiece all about him, Sunday’s game in Santa Clara always promised a sort of correction – a cooling of the mood, perhaps even an end to the manipulation of sport for political ends. As always the best way to gauge the success of this mission was as the gods intended: through a TV screen. Trump – saddled with historically low approval ratings, facing a massacre in this year’s midterms, and no doubt wary of risking a public appearance in the deep blue sea of the Bay Area – was absent on this occasion, and he kept the F-22 fighter jets that were scheduled to be part of the pre-game flyover away from Levi’s Stadium too. (Unspecified “operational assignments” were the reason offered for the jets’ withdrawal, which means there’s probably a low-ranking member of the Trump administration putting big money on a US military strike somewhere in Latin America as we speak.) And yet, the absent autocrat still weighed on proceedings, his curdling influence turning every moment and gesture on Sunday into a referendum on the prospects for a post-Trumpian sporting future. Could football be normal again?
Parents, it’s time to introduce your child to the blank slate of boredom: languid days without plans, the sweet simplicity of a logged-off life
When your child turns 18, graduates school and becomes an adult, you momentarily feel the finality of their childhood. Cue: tears.
Endings bring memories to the fore, and rather than reflect on the big celebrations and milestones, I find myself capturing glimpses of the most ordinary days accompanied by a visceral longing for what was: his curious face in the rear-view mirror as I drove, a small hand tugging on my skirt, the lull of his sleepy body curled into mine. Early parenthood is rooted in the monotonous and the domestic but there is an undeniable comfort in the humdrum of home life.
Push to restart uranium mining in Patagonia has sparked fears about the environmental impact and loss of sovereignty over key resources
On an outcrop above the Chubut River, one of the few to cut across the arid Patagonian steppe of southern Argentina, Sergio Pichiñán points across a wide swath of scrubland to colourful rock formations on a distant hillside.
“That’s where they dug for uranium before, and when the miners left, they left the mountain destroyed, the houses abandoned, and nobody ever studied the water,” he says, citing suspicions arising from cases of cancer and skin diseases in his community. “If they want to open this back up, we’re all pretty worried around here.”
Twenty hot lesbians in a cabin in the snow. It sounds like a budget porn plot from the 70s, but it was the pitch my sister gave when she convinced me to try out skiing for the first time.
I am not a sports dyke. I am a like-to-read-books-and-sit-in-saunas dyke.
For people who love the middle seat, the attractions are many, from a taste of humility to ethical entitlement to the armrests to ‘strangermaxxing’
Embracing friction and inconvenience in our lives is a 2026 trend, but the New York Times has drawn my attention to individuals who are frictionmaxxing further than most of us might be able to fathom: travellers who choose the awkward, inconvenient middle seat on planes.
Airlines expect us to pay extra to choose our seat now, and refusing means becoming the filling in a stranger sandwich, but actively embracing that seems perverse. Some, I learned, claim middle seats offer the best of both worlds – you can see out of the window but enjoy a relatively easy escape – and you’re “ethically entitled to both arm rests” (good luck explaining that to your neighbours). Others treat it as an exercise in Zen humility. I suppose relinquishing main-character energy could make travel less painful? “Be grateful that you’re flying and that’s it,” as James Cashen, a middle seater, explained his philosophy on TikTok.
Green Streets failed to turn up for last game of season
Team stayed up on goal difference, rivals relegated
There is uproar in the Dhiraagu Dhivehi Premier League, the leading football competition of the Maldives, after it was alleged one of the tropical archipelago’s leading clubs sought to escape relegation by failing to turn up for a match.
The Premier League side Green Streets beat the drop last Thursday after failing to turn up for their final league match of the season against New Radiant.
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