A shout of ‘racist’ could also be heard during the segment at France’s version of the Oscars

A tribute to Brigitte Bardot at the Césars, France’s version of the Oscars, on Thursday was greeted with boos. In a video clip posted by Paris Match, boos can clearly be heard among the applause as the tributes, and a shout of “racist!” is also audible.

Bardot, who died in December aged 91, became arguably the most celebrated figure in postwar French cinema for films such as And God Created Woman and Contempt, but after quitting acting in the early 1970s her later years were marred by increasing political activity on the far right, resulting in a string of convictions for inciting racial hatred.

Pakistani forces launched airstrikes against military targets in the Afghan capital, Kabul, as well as other provinces close to the border

Both sides are reporting they have inflicted heavy casualties on each other, but it is difficult to know the true numbers when they are presenting sharply divergent figures.

Pakistan’s information minister Attaullah Tarar claims 133 Afghan Taliban fighters were killed, with more than 200 injured. Of its own soldiers, Tarar says that two were killed in the cross-border fighting, while three were injured.

The UK is deeply concerned by the significant escalation in tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We urge both sides to take immediate steps toward de‑escalation, avoid further harm to civilians, and re‑engage in mediated dialogue.

Met arrests man on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage after slogans including ‘Zionist war criminal’ sprayed

A 38-year-old man has been arrested after the statue of Winston Churchill outside the Houses of Parliament was defaced with graffiti calling the former prime minister a “Zionist war criminal”.

The Metropolitan police said the man was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage on Friday morning.

• Australian F1 driver was replaced after 2025 Miami GP

• Doohan revealed threats and abuse on Drive to Survive

Jack Doohan has said he received death threats and called police to resolve an encounter with armed men around the time of last year’s Miami Grand Prix, just before he lost his Formula One drive with Alpine.

In the latest series of the Netflix documentary Drive to Survive, released on Friday, the Australian driver said he had been threatened by email, describing the atmosphere around what proved to be his final race as “pretty heavy stuff”.

Knowing how much water and warmth different seeds need to germinate will improve your changes of getting a great crop of vegetables

Many of our minds will soon – if they haven’t already – turn towards sowing seeds. While germination appears to happen willy-nilly in the wild, this process requires a certain set of factors to take place. Different seeds require different conditions, and knowing what your seeds need will mean more successfully germinate and fewer are wasted.

To an unimaginative eye, a seed looks inert. Yet they are packed with genetic information and biological processes poised to unfold. All it takes is the right configuration of signals and stimuli from the environment to let them know it’s time to dare to grow.

Local river defenders force U-turn by occupying grain terminal operated by one of US powerhouses of world trade

“A victory for life.” That was the triumphal message from Indigenous campaigners in the Brazilian Amazon this week after they staved off a threat to the Tapajós River by occupying a grain terminal operated by Cargill, the biggest privately owned company in the United States.

“The river won, the forest won, the memory of our ancestors won,” said the campaigners in Santarém when it was clear their actions had forced the Brazilian government into a U-turn on plans to privatise one of the world’s most beautiful waterways and expand its role as a soy canal.

The Egyptian queen has fascinated me from childhood, but following the archives led only to ancient gossip and Roman propaganda. Fiction was the way to liberate her from misogynist myth

Witch, whore, villain – there are few women who have been as vilified through history as Cleopatra VII. The disdain of ancient sources that sought to dismiss her as exotic and seductive has corrupted her legacy. But I take pleasure in knowing that her name has permeated through time with far more recognition than the men who wrote about her. Ask a 10-year-old child who Plutarch is and they’ll scrunch up their brows – but Cleopatra? Their eyes light up with glee.

Mine did when I was tasked by my schoolteacher to draw Cleopatra. My small hands searched through the box of crayons. I picked up the brown, its tip pristine from lack of use. It was the loneliest colour in the box, used only to draw mud or bark. The face I drew reflected my own in features and colour.

The US spent months promoting a false case for the invasion of Iraq. This time, we’re in the dark about Washington’s goals

In October 2002, George W Bush laid out his case for taking the US to war against Iraq in a half-hour speech televised around the world. Bush warned that Saddam Hussein’s regime could attack the US “on any given day” with chemical or biological weapons, including anthrax, mustard gas or the nerve agent sarin. He argued Iraq was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons and could develop a bomb in less than a year. And if those warnings weren’t enough to terrify the US public, Bush invoked the ultimate fear of an unprovoked nuclear attack: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

The world soon learned that Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq was based on manipulated intelligence and outright lies; the Iraqi regime no longer had any weapons of mass destruction and was not developing them. But the administration’s relentless campaign to convince Americans that Saddam was a threat had paid off by generating significant support. As the invasion got under way in March 2003, many polls showed public approval of the war at more than 70%. Bush’s own approval rating hovered around a similar high, underscoring that war can boost the popularity of America’s commander-in-chief as few other things can.

He gets more streams than Taylor Swift or Bad Bunny, thanks to a shamelessly corny and cannily timeless style. Close collaborators and industry experts explain his secret

Sixteen years since his sugary debut Just the Way You Are became a megahit, Bruno Mars is the most-streamed musician in the world. Last year, the Hawaiian-born 40-year-old became the first (and still only) artist to reach 150m monthly listeners on Spotify, and his staying power shows little sign of waning: Mars now has more listeners than even Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift. His latest, funk-inspired single I Just Might – which he performed at the Grammys earlier this month, with a brass band, slick suit and his trademark bandana – shot to the top of the US Hot 100, making him only the fourth male soloist in chart history to achieve 10 No 1 singles there, after Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and Drake.

“We always say, I don’t know when that happened,” laughs Philip Lawrence, the songwriter and producer who has helped shape Mars’s story, when asked about their huge success together. The two musicians were introduced in 2006 and bonded over a shared dream to get signed and get on stage. “That was our connection – let’s perform!”

The fourth season of TV’s once underrated drama has maxed out on everything – sex, nastiness, nihilism – and it’s been a major miscalculation

There’s a lot of talk about growth on Industry, the hit HBO/BBC drama concerning the ruthless world of London finance. Characters wax poetic and soothingly incoherent (to the layperson) about stocks and shorts, asset values and private funds. Charismatic entrepreneurs peddle the latest groundbreaking green energy company or democratized bank or, to quote one particularly foul-mouthed character in a show full of scoundrels, “the Paypal of bukkake”. All espouse and consecrate the profit motive.

Naturally, there’s a lot of hot air; in the show’s caustic nexus of business, politics and global media – not so much a fun-house mirror as a high-budget, impressionistic rendering of five minutes scrolling X – your worth is not in dollars or pounds but in narrative confidence. “We don’t need proof,” says one short-seller out for the kill, “because we finally have a good story to tell”. Cooked books can be explained as “simply a misalignment between the velocity of my vision and the velocity of regulation”, according to the slippery fintech entrepreneur Whitney Halberstram, played with reptilian cool by Max Minghella, in the fourth season’s most recent episode. The gap in between is “where smart people have always made money”.

• Wage bill increased by £42m to £428m, accounts show

• Revenue hit record £703m but profit was modest £8m

Liverpool had the highest wage bill in the Premier League when winning their 20th league title last season, the club’s latest set of accounts have revealed.

Liverpool’s wage bill increased by £42m to £428m in the year ending 31 May 2025, when a Premier League title triumph in Arne Slot’s debut season as head coach and a return to the Champions League increased revenue to a record £703m. The club’s wages-to-revenue ratio stood at a healthy 61%. It was the biggest wage bill in the division, ahead of Manchester City on £408m.

With original dialogue in Turkish, this shuffling of potential partners in a sequence of meaningless encounters ranks with the finest auteur movies

I spent Valentine’s Day not with my wife but with 18 Turkish women. No, wait, I can explain. It’s a new game called Speed Dates – Winter Edition, which I only chanced upon when I searched “Winter Games” on Xbox Live hoping for some Olympics fare. And boy, did I find it!

The game is in Turkish, with English subtitles. It already feels arthouse; like those films Channel 4 used to show with a red triangle in the corner of the screen.

Happy Mondays frontman says forthcoming book will include bullet-dodging scrapes in Jamaica and New York as well as ‘bust-ups and benders’ with his bands

Happy Mondays and Black Grape frontman Shaun Ryder is publishing a new memoir and will personally sign every copy.

“I’ve done more books now, I think, than Shakespeare, sort of,” said Ryder, announcing the release of 24 Hour Party Person.

The British-American author on arguing about Jane Austen, the joys of Jerome K Jerome, and revising his opinion of Philip Roth

My earliest reading memory
I used to read Donald Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown stories with my mother. It’s a classic American kids’ series about a boy detective and his brilliant sidekick, Sally, who protects him as they tackle their arch enemy, Bugs Meany, a kind of high school bully version of Professor Moriarty. We’d sit in the kitchen together and try to solve the crimes. Of course, for me it was also an opportunity to hang out with my mom. I’m one of five kids; attention was hard to come by. But I was also drawn to the picture Sobol paints of small-town all-American life, which I don’t think I ever felt a part of. We moved around too much.

My favourite book growing up
I remember finishing JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at elementary school and already feeling sad about the fact that I’d never be able to read it again for the first time. I have a dim memory that I was in school, because the feeling has something of the flavour of the school hallway and the bright lights on the shiny tiled floors, and the general sense of being shut in for the rest of the day. Some of my older brother’s friends had already introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, which shaped the next few years of my life. Most of my favourite novels started with the idea of some lonely figure wandering out into the world to see what the world would do to him. (Later, Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers was another favourite.)

Winter Storm Hernando, which struck north-eastern regions this week, described as a ‘bomb cyclone’

Winter Storm Hernando swept across the north-eastern US on Sunday and into the start of the week, unleashing blizzard conditions across much of the region as heavy snowfall combined with gale-force winds. Blizzard warnings were issued for several cities including New York City, Portland and Boston. More than 10,000 flights were cancelled, and schools closed in many states.

The storm intensified rapidly through Sunday. Coastal areas of Massachusetts and Rhode Island recorded gusts of about 70mph, and Montauk Point in New York reporting stronger gusts of 84mph.

• Updates from the match at Bellerive Oval in Hobart

• Any thoughts? Get in touch with an email

3rd over: India 14-0 (Rawal 11, Mandhana 3) Mandhana stretches to make use of Schutt offering too much width for a single to deep point. Schutt has the ball moving around but Rawal hits against the swing into her to crunch the first boundary of the innings through cover. Rawal repeats the shot for the same result as the fast outfield favours the batters.

2nd over: India 5-0 (Rawal 3, Mandhana 2) Darcie Brown takes the new ball but wastes her opening delivery with a full toss that Mandhana dispatches to deep square leg. Brown is fortunate to get away with a single. Rawal picks up two with a flick to the same region.

⚽ Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend
⚽ Champions League draw from 11am (GMT) | Mail Barry

Football Association news: Kevin Thelwell has been appointed the FA’s Elite Coach Developer, tasked with supporting the progression of elite homegrown coaches.

The former Rangers and Everton sporting director’s strategic role at St George’s Park will span men’s and women’s football and he will report to Dan Ashworth, the chief football officer at the national football centre.

(Sub Pop)
Lillie West’s fourth album is a hazy, mid-tempo meditation on escape that gets stuck in a numbing mid-tempo mode – though there is a gorgeous moment of release

Over fidgety, impatient keys, Lala Lala – UK-born, US-based Lillie West – declares her intention to leave. “Get me out of America,” she whispers, frustrated, on opener Car Anymore. Yet West’s fourth album (and first for Sub Pop) is about stillness – or trying to fight the urge to run.

After darting between Chicago, New Mexico, Reykjavík and London, West found love in Los Angeles and started to put down roots. But Heaven 2 (produced by Jay Som’s Melina Duterte) is shrouded in uncertainty, with cloaks of reverb, and lyrics buried beneath breathy deflection. Scammer toys with the romantic tension of threatening to split town, over an austere soundscape of purring synths and crisp snare, while Anywave battles a crisis of self – “If I existed, I don’t any more” – across bleary sirens and a spinning drum machine, like a nihilist sibling to Lorde’s Melodrama.

Greens first, Reform second, Labour trailing – and the Tories losing their deposit. This felt like a rejection of the status quo

• Cost of Ten Hag exit then having Amorim may hit £36.3m

• Settlement for Amorim and his staff revealed in filing

Manchester United sacking Ruben Amorim could end up costing the club almost £16m. Amorim’s 14-month reign ended on 5 January after his public attack on United’s hierarchy, with his five coaches also leaving Old Trafford.

A filing to the New York Stock Exchange revealed the potential payments to Amorim and his staff, a day after the club confirmed they had made a £32.6m profit in their second-quarter results to 31 December 2025.

Javier Milei’s boosters say law will revive employment, but critics decry cuts to severance and longer working hours

Argentina’s senate is poised to approve a sweeping overhaul of labour laws aimed at weakening trade unions and lowering labour costs for businesses.

The government of the self-styled “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, says the initiative will help revive formal employment, after 290,600 registered jobs were lost between December 2023, when he took office, and November 2025.

Could the royal family’s latest troubles usher in a new era of diplomatic dressing?

As Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was taken into police custody last week, his brother King Charles made a “surprise” appearance on the front row at the opening of London fashion week. Styled in one of his staple jaunty ties, clashing pocket handkerchief and British-made suit, it sent the message loud and clear: this was business as usual.

That message persisted when, at the Baftas at the weekend, the Prince and Princess of Wales showed a united front in coordinated burgundy velvet (“Pantone diplomacy”, as the New York Times put it). Catherine’s blush Gucci gown showed not just solidarity in hue but also, arguably, signalled her ethics in a week when the royal family’s came under fire: she’d worn the dress before, on a previous outing.

The president and his allies have never been interested in helping or elevating female athletes. His true feelings were exposed on Sunday

This past week Team USA won gold in both the women’s and men’s ice hockey at the Winter Olympics, presenting Donald Trump with a golden opportunity. Instead of seizing the easy political points, he embraced his chance to ingratiate himself with the boys by inviting them to the State of the Union address. He followed up his offer of a military jet shuttle to Washington DC with a lament that he would have to also invite the women’s team. It was a bit that lit up the locker room with laughter.

The women’s gold medal had been a prime opportunity for Trump to live up to his stated commitment to “protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports”, a claim made last February when he sought to position himself as the figure saving women’s sports. Instead, he decided to make a joke at the expense of Olympic champions.