The UK, like many other countries, has a falling birthrate. But Danny Kruger’s perverse 1970s-style policies offer nothing to mothers-to-be

Babies are beautiful. I always want to smile at them in the street, perhaps because they are a rarer and more precious sight in this ageing country or because they remind me of my grandchildren. There are about 3.5 million children aged four and under, while dogs on the streets are a more plentiful 13.5 million. Is the dog boom compensating for fewer children? As time goes by, there are going to be ever more grandparents and ever fewer children to beam at foolishly.

That is not only a sadness and a loss, but becoming an aged society is a cultural and economic threat. Older people, by and large, are not the innovators or new thinkers. An ageing society risks declining in optimism, creativity and, above all, risk-taking: a top-heavy preponderance of older people makes for a conservative and fearful electorate. We are there already – and it’s getting worse.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
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Extension of Geneva negotiations into the night suggest gaps between the two sides remain

• Middle East crisis – live updates

High-stakes talks between the US and Iran over a permanent end to Tehran’s nuclear programme were to continue late into the night on Thursday, with apparent gaps between the two sides leaving open the possibility that Donald Trump will launch an unprecedented punitive military assault on Iran.

Iran’s foreign ministry tried to dampen suggestions that the talks in Geneva had broken down, insisting new ideas had been raised requiring more consultation in both capitals.

Liz Kendall to launch consultation next week that will explore alternatives such as curbs on infinite scrolling

Ministers will take another step towards banning social media for under-16s next week as they launch a consultation on the policy, with government insiders increasingly certain that Keir Starmer will back the idea.

Liz Kendall, the technology secretary, will publish the terms of reference for the consultation, which is expected to explore options including an age limit and less hardline action such as curbs on infinite scrolling.

The actor, long open about his struggle with sobriety, was also ordered to undergo drug testing and pay $100,000 bond

Shia LaBeouf on Thursday was ordered to enroll in substance abuse treatment, undergo a drug testing program and pay a $100,000 bond as conditions of his release from custody after the actor allegedly battered and hurled homophobic slurs at two men at a New Orleans bar.

The requirements imposed on LaBeouf, 39, by New Orleans judge Simone Levine came after the Transformer film franchise star was initially allowed to leave jail without being required to pay a bond in the hours after his 17 February arrest on two counts of misdemeanor battery.

This year’s crop of tops draw on Venus flytraps, cherry blossoms and classic soccer jersey designs – to varying degrees of success

The 2026 NWSL season is upon us, and so are its kits.

All 16 of the league’s clubs got new kits ahead of this season, and for the first time the league gave select clubs the opportunity to design third kits. The resulting collection, which includes initial home and away looks for debutants Boston Legacy and Denver Summit, is a mixed bag.

Lawsuit against the Trump administration says penalties against Francesca Albanese violate the first amendment

The family of independent UN investigator Francesca Albanese has sued the Trump administration over US sanctions imposed on her last year for her criticism of Israel’s policies during the war with Hamas in Gaza, saying the penalties violate the first amendment.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the US district court in Washington, Albanese’s husband and minor child outlined the serious impact those sanctions have had on the family’s life and work, including the ability to access their home in the nation’s capital.

Court documents from Los Angeles county describe the artist, 20, as the target in legal case over death of teen girl

More than six months after the body of a teenage girl was found in his abandoned Tesla, it emerged this week that the singer D4vd is the target of a Los Angeles county grand jury investigation.

In previously sealed subpoenas issued last month and recently obtained by the Associated Press, prosecutors described the 20-year-old artist, who is popular for hits such as Romantic Homicide, as the target in the legal case over the death of Celeste Rivas Hernandez.

• Premier League to have its own streaming service

• Shock move to sell direct to viewers in place next season

The Premier League is to launch its own streaming service, with live coverage of all 380 matches over a season available directly to fans – but only if you live in Singapore.

Known as Premier League Plus, the new app will be launched before next season and will be the first time match coverage will be sold direct to consumers.

Yorkshire plant has been criticised for taking material from some of British Columbia’s most environmentally important forests

The owner of Drax power plant has started reducing the amount of Canadian wood pellets it burns, and will stop burning trees from British Columbia entirely within the next year.

The FTSE 250 company Drax Group said its Canadian wood pellet plants, which once supplied millions of tonnes of biomass to be burnt in its North Yorkshire power plant, had cost the company almost £200m in financial impairments last year.

Sadiq Khan reveals 100 officers will use roaming technology for six months but opponents call its use ‘alarming’

Metropolitan police officers are to start scanning citizens’ faces using automated facial recognition technology to check their identities, in a move backed by the mayor Sadiq Khan but branded “alarming” by opponents.

The pilot was revealed on Thursday when Khan said 100 officers would use the roaming technology – commonly deployed on smartphones – for six months. He was responding to questioning from an opposition politician amid rising concern about the rollout of AI-powered policing tools. The Met’s website still states it “does not presently use the so-called operator initiated facial recognition”.

Hosting an audience-friendly festival in a highly political capital city has always been a challenge. If Berlinale’s organisers push out Tricia Tuttle over the latest Gaza row, they may as well give up trying

Berlin is a difficult place to hold a major international film festival. Perhaps, as the events of the last two weeks have shown, an impossible one. The main cause of this difficulty is that Berlin, unlike all of its major competitors, is a national capital. Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Sundance are all hosted in locations far removed from political centres of gravity. In Berlin, world events are for ever on the cinema doorstep and keep on spilling inside.

The event has long embraced its geographic fate: unlike Cannes and Venice, it is not simply an industry-facing launching pad for new films but also a public-facing festival selling tickets to new films to ordinary Berliners, and the world’s largest of its kind. But that openness also has downsides: the corridors of the Berlinale Palast are teeming with locally based film critics who are quick to perceive a drop in quality on screen or glamour on the red carpet as a reflection of their own diminished standing. The press conferences are rammed with political journalists who struggle with film-makers that find it tough to give unequivocal answers compared with lawmakers in the Bundestag down the road. (The video journalist who pressed jury president Wim Wenders on the festival’s stance on Gaza usually grills spokespeople at government press conferences.) And the closing gala is attended by politicians who constantly feel they must position themselves for or against whatever is happening on the stage. To make all this worse, the Berlinale takes place in what are usually the last weeks of the city’s interminably grey winter, when everyone is in a bad mood and impatient for the first blossoms of the spring.

Mette Frederiksen hopes to profit from her stand against Donald Trump’s attempt to claim the Arctic territory

Denmark’s prime minister has called an early election to take advantage of a “Greenland bounce” after Donald Trump’s threats to invade the Arctic territory.

Mette Frederiksen, who has been in office since 2019, is required by Danish law to call an election by 31 October. Setting a date with eight months to go appears to be an attempt to ride improved poll ratings after disastrous local elections in November that saw her Social Democrats lose control of Copenhagen for the first time in a century.

Treating the underlying acne can help. But stress relief measures like meditation can too – and may depend on the severity

Hi Ugly,

I tend to get pimples, especially around my period. This is fine and normal. What’s not fine is that I cannot stop picking at them, making my skin irritated and red.

Why is this column called ‘Ask Ugly’?

How should I be styling my pubic hair?

How do I deal with imperfection?

My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done

I want to ignore beauty culture. But I’ll never get anywhere if I don’t look a certain way

Feature for supervised accounts rolls out as Meta platforms faces US trials over alleged harms to children

Instagram said on Thursday it will start alerting parents if their kids repeatedly search for terms clearly associated with suicide or self-harm. The alerts will only go to parents who are enrolled in Instagram’s parental supervision program.

Instagram says it already blocks such content from showing up in teen accounts’ search results and directs people to helplines instead.

Børge Brende admitted dining with the convicted sex offender on three occasions between 2018 and 2019

The boss of the World Economic Forum (WEF) has quit following criticism of his connections to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Børge Brende said he will step down as president and chief executive after more than eight years leading the body, which is best known for its annual meeting held each January in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos.

Late-night hosts discussed the response to the long-winded speech and suspicious redactions from the Epstein files

Late-night hosts tore into Donald Trump’s extremely long State of the Union address and a bombshell new report on redactions from the Jeffrey Epstein files.

• Interim manager: ‘Now it’s a question of life and death’

• Fulham clash is ‘not time to think about performance’

Igor Tudor says the salvage operation he has taken on at Tottenham is tougher than he envisaged and is most likely his hardest job in management.

The interim coach, who is preparing for Sunday’s Premier League trip to Fulham, has worked with his new squad since the beginning of last week, having replaced the sacked Thomas Frank. Tudor lost his first game 4-1 at home to Arsenal on Sunday, which left Spurs four points above the relegation zone.

Neve Campbell, Kevin Williamson and Courtney Cox return for another Ghostface whodunnit that is messy but mostly entertaining

Whether you love or hate the Scream franchise, it’s hard at this stage not to at least respect it. Even without the subterranean bar set by other lazy slasher sequels (stalk, stab, repeat, yawn) it’s a series that has now been around for 30 years and tasked itself with extending an ongoing narrative of insanely convoluted soap, finding new ways to comment on the horror genre and appealing to a savvier generation of younger fans (the sixth film managed to be the highest-grossing in the US). If nothing has rivalled the 1996 original, it’s still hard to argue that there’s been an objectively bad Scream movie, even at the franchise’s less effective moments, there’s been a buzz of effort and energy present.

The run continues, albeit with perhaps more notes than usual, with Scream 7, a scrappy, passably entertaining new chapter that limps to the screen with wounds on show. The original plan had been to continue the story of the Carpenter sisters, introduced in 2022’s hit relaunch, but after the shameful firing of star Melissa Barrera who dared to speak out about a genocide, it was back to the drawing board. Said drawing board was then just a headshot of Neve Campbell, the original Scream queen, and a bunch of dollar signs next to it as the actor had rightfully turned down the sixth film over what she said was a lowball offer. Some seven million reasons to rejoin later (according to reports) and she’s back front and centre, along with many amusing “why weren’t you in New York?” references, and with some familiar, and confusing, old friends.

It took Ellen Baum about 16 hours to finish clearing one section of hair ties, condoms and tissues woven into the fencing

On a blisteringly cold day earlier this month, Ellen Baum was not in the best mood as she walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to meet some friends in Manhattan.

“I had read particularly horrible news that morning about, you know, the general state of the world,” said Baum, who is 37 and works in tech. And then there was the garbage. Baum stared at the dirty tissues, hair ties, trash bags and socks affixed to the suspension bridge’s frame – sometimes she even sees condoms and tampons woven into the fencing – and had a thought. “I can’t do anything about some of these big problems that the world and the city are facing. But I can do one modicum of something nice.”

Cuba says it thwarted armed exiles on a Florida-registered speedboat who were trying to infiltrate from the US

A deadly exchange of fire between two boats off the coast of Cuba, killing four and wounding six, has raised already high tensions between Washington and Havana.

Cuba’s government said a US-registered boat was carrying 10 people, most of whom it claimed “have a known history of criminal and violent activity”. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the US was gathering its own information but called the open sea shootout “highly unusual”.

The statement came after the leadership team elections won by the rival The Many slate, which backs Jeremy Corbyn

The number of asylum seekers being housed temporarily in hotels has fallen to the lowest level for 18 months, Home Office figures show. Rajeev Syal has the story.

A minister has confirmed that the government is pressing ahead with the deal to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

Yes. My colleague the foreign secretary Yvette Cooper has been talking to Marco Rubio, her opposite number in the US, about it. Foreign policy is never easy. We will make progress on the Chagos deal.

‘Dynasty: The Murdochs’ will debut on the streamer on 13 March

The real-world drama that is said to have inspired the hit HBO show Succession is set for its own four-part series when Netflix debuts Dynasty: The Murdochs on 13 March.

The docuseries, based on thousands of pages of documents, emails and text messages, presents an exhaustive history of Rupert Murdoch’s rise while homing in on the tensions that have built for decades between him, his chosen heir Lachlan, and Rupert’s three other adult children: James Murdoch, Elisabeth Murdoch and Prudence MacLeod.

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Not so much a bad night at the office as a high-stakes, avant-garde masterpiece of self-destruction, Ramy Bensebaini’s performance for Borussia Dortmund as they crashed out of Bigger Cup is destined to go down in the annals as one of the most hapless in the tournament’s history. While there have been costlier mistakes (hello, Loris Karius) and far more high-profile disintegrations (bonjour, b@nter-era PSG), it is difficult to recall any one elite professional footballer being responsible for quite so many howlers in one game as the hapless Algerian left-back.