A serious plan to tackle low birthrates could include addressing the fact that if people could afford to house themselves, they might be quicker to settle down

I almost never wonder how I’d feel if I were a 29-year-old French woman. I fear the question would lead to dissatisfactions too profound (would I be eating oysters right now? Would my socks be cashmere? Would I know what existentialism meant – no, I mean really know?). This morning, however, I did stop and give it some serious thought: specifically, how would I feel if my government wrote to me, reminding me to have children? To get that letter from childless Macron would be like getting told off about your BMI by a nurse whose BMI is definitely the same as yours, if not greater: on the one hand, it’s none of your business who has kids or what anyone’s BMI is. But on the other, how about we just all keep out of each other’s business? Luckily the letter is going to be sent out by the health ministry, and say what you like about ministries, you can’t criticise their lifestyle choices.

Before you get your panties in a twist, feminists, this letter will be sent to both men and women of the 29-year-old variety, and the government underscored that “fertility is a shared responsibility between women and men” – a statement that is both true and woke (yup, I’m reclaiming “woke” to mean “things I approve”).

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The media mogul and prominent pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in Hong Kong for national security offences. His family has described the sentence as ‘heartbreakingly cruel’, given the 78-year-old’s declining health. Lai was convicted in December on charges of sedition and conspiracy to collude with foreign forces, after pleading not guilty to all charges.

Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s senior China correspondent, Amy Hawkins.

Seamus Culleton, who has lived in US for two decades, faces deportation after being arrested on way home from work

• US politics live – latest updates

• Europe live – latest updates

An Irish man has spent five months in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and faces deportation despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record.

Seamus Culleton was a “model immigrant” who had become the victim of a capricious and inept system, said his lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye.

Investigation in apparent abduction enters second week as deadline for purported ransom note demanding $6m looms

The search for television host Savannah Guthrie’s missing mother entered its second full week on Monday, with investigators returning over the weekend for a new search of her Arizona home. They appear no closer to finding her, or identifying an alleged abductor.

Detectives are analyzing a purported ransom note giving a deadline of 5pm MT (7pm ET) Monday for Guthrie’s family to pay $6m, a development that prompted the Today show presenter and her siblings to record a video released on Saturday saying: “We will pay”.

A diminutive young buck aspires to compete with rhinos and horses in ‘roarball’, but this by-numbers tale is not the greatest of any time

Greatest of all time? No. Possibly not even the greatest of half-term. This loud, chaotic and unlovable animated kids’ comedy feels as though it is bordering on AI slop, algorithmically generated and instantly familiar from Zootropolis, Sing and other movies with talking animals. It is a shame, because it has a real-life inspiration: basketball star Stephen Curry, who was repeatedly told at the start of his career that he was too skinny and too small to make it as a pro. Curry is a producer here, and has a performing role. But in spite of this connection, Goat lacks heart and soul, and a sense of genuine emotions.

What it does have is some pretty decent voice acing, bringing a degree of charm to the movie. Will Harris (voiced by Caleb McLaughlin) is a goat who has grown up dreaming of playing professional “roarball”, a fiercer and faster version of basketball. But Will is a “small” and roar players are all “bigs” – powerful beasts such as rhinos and horses. Will’s hero and the star of his favourite team, the Thorns, is a panther called Jet (Gabrielle Union), a champ close to retirement but determined to win the league. When Will gets a shot at joining the Thorns, he is laughed at, underrated but undeterred.

While Trump has attacked the Grammy-winning Puerto Rican star, celebrities have come out in force to support the half-time show

As blue, red and white fireworks filled the sky at the end of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show, a message filled the screen in all capitals: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

It was the enduring statement from a 13-minute spectacle that invited an estimated 135.4 million viewers into Bad Bunny’s world, with richly textured references to politics, history and Puerto Rican culture. The artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio transformed the pitch of the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, into his own love letter to the island, with cinematic set pieces including sugarcane fields, a house party, and a lively wedding ceremony featuring a surprise performance by Lady Gaga.

• Athletes report medals are chipped, cracked or damaged

• ‘We are aware. We are looking into what the problem is’

They are among the most prized possessions in sport, yet embarrassingly for Olympic officials the medals in Milano Cortina keep breaking.

On Monday organisers promised to launch an investigation into why it was happening after Winter Olympic medallists, including the American downhill skiing champion Breezy Johnson, reported chipped, cracked and damaged medals.

Democratic representative says Epstein associate’s decision to invoke fifth amendment points to ‘White House cover-up’

Ghislaine Maxwell refused to answer questions during a closed-door congressional deposition on Monday, prompting criticism from a House representative backing efforts to release Jeffrey Epstein investigative files.

Robert Garcia, ranking member of the committee on oversight and government reform, said in a statement that Maxwell invoked the fifth amendment and refused to testify during her scheduled deposition. Maxwell’s attorney, David Oscar Markus, also said that she invoked her fifth amendment right.

• American was competing with ruptured ACL

• Vonn fractured leg after crashing in Sunday’s race

Lindsey Vonn’s fellow skiers have defended her decision to compete in the women’s downhill at the Winter Olympics while dealing with a ruptured ACL.

The American crashed out early in her run on Sunday. She suffered a fractured leg and was airlifted from the course. Some users on social media said she should not have been racing only a week after injuring her knee. But those who know the risks of skiing best supported Vonn’s decision.

Director and composer of 2017 drama allege breach of agreement after score reused in controversial documentary

Paul Thomas Anderson and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, the director and composer, respectively, for Phantom Thread, have requested that music from the 2017 film be removed from the controversial new documentary on Melania Trump.

“It has come to our attention that a piece of music from Phantom Thread has been used in the Melania documentary,” the pair said in a statement to Variety. “While Jonny Greenwood does not own the copyright in the score, Universal failed to consult Jonny on this third-party use which is a breach of his composer agreement. As a result Jonny and Paul Thomas Anderson have asked for it to be removed from the documentary.”

Budgets have been slashed, morale is through the floor and the company has been forced to find a second base in Manchester. But the new musical director is up for a challenge. We meet the man with the hardest job in music

André de Ridder is either brave or stupid. He has accepted the role as the music director of English National Opera – its chief conductor and keeper of its musical flame. He will take up the role formally in 2027. The post has been empty for several anguished years, sparked by Arts Council England’s 2022 announcement that the company would lose all its funding unless it moved out of London. Amid a fightback that, to cut a long story short, resulted in the company retaining a foothold in the London Coliseum, but partially moving to Manchester, De Ridder’s predecessor, Martyn Brabbins, abruptly quit in 2023, saying that the company was heading into “managed decline”. Brabbins’s predecessor, Mark Wigglesworth, had also resigned suddenly in 2016, saying ENO was evolving into “something I do not recognise”. It was beginning to sound like an opera plot. Bluebeard’s Castle, maybe. A murdered conductor behind every door in the mansion.

And yet: De Ridder’s enthusiasm is irrepressible. For some, it would be daunting to come into a company whose world-class orchestra and chorus have had their full-time contracts slashed to seven months of the year; from which the chief executive has just resigned; where morale (insiders tell me) is rock bottom. But the Berlin-raised 54-year-old sees only the opportunities. From his perspective, the shake-ups are in the past.

You could do the weekly shop on your own, or you could turn it into the ultimate compatibility test by inviting a date along. And there’s always that flatpack furniture to assemble ...

Name: Choremancing.

Age: About four months.

• 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

• Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show review – a thrilling ode to Boricua joy

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 …

Referee Craig Pawson sent off Dominik Szoboszlai by the letter of the law; the only way it should be done

• Sign up for Soccer with Jonathan Wilson here

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.”

Roberto De Zerbi’s team has stood up to PSG this season, but they were humiliated at the Parc des Princes on Sunday

By Get French Football News

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.