The World Cup is out of reach for many. The hope lies outside the stadiums | Leander Schaerlaeckens

The opportunity for this tournament’s legacy is in the fan fests, camps and tune-ups accessible to more than the lucky few

In Germany, fans watched the games on screens in crowded town squares, their roars careening off ancient buildings, or from the banks of rivers, peering at floating, double-sided big screens on barges. At the next World Cup, in South Africa in 2010, people gathered in parks and open-air markets and hotel lobbies and unlicensed, makeshift bars in people’s garages. In Brazil, four years later, fans spilled from the bars on the Copacabana or watched in restaurants or in streets closed for the occasion – not as if anybody was driving during the Seleção’s games anyway.

During the 2018 World Cup, Russia surprised visitors – and its own citizens – with its friendliness as spontaneous parties broke out all over the country. The reason the 2022 World Cup in Qatar didn’t entirely feel like a real World Cup is that those sorts of spontaneous soccer gatherings just didn’t seem to be happening, or not at the same scale, at any rate. The absence of hordes of supporters just milling about everywhere contributed to the feeling of being at a Potemkin World Cup.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:40 pm

It’s the ‘golden age’ of nonalcoholic beer: the 12 best booze-free beers to try in the US

From booze-free IPAs to lagers to stouts, here are our beer expert’s picks for the best-tasting nonalcoholic beers

• The 13 best nonalcoholic wines in the US

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

It’s the golden age of nonalcoholic beer. Not only are there far more options to choose from than ever, but technological advances in brewing means these booze-free beers taste better and better with every batch.

I find myself reaching for a nonalcoholic beer at happy hour when I know I’ll be driving later. It’s the best of both worlds – I get to keep socializing and get home safely. Like me, more Americans are dabbling with sobriety and even semi-sobriety. In fact, most people who purchase nonalcoholic versions of beer, wine or spirits reportedly switch between counterparts depending on the situation.

For classics, the best (actually good) celebrity brand: Tom Holland’s Bero

For gifting, the most beautifully designed can: RationAle Brewing

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:14 pm

‘The most dangerous man in America’: how Paul Robeson went from Hollywood to blacklist

The groundbreaking singer, actor and athlete became a victim of McCarthyism and saw his shining career destroyed and his legacy tarnished

In August 1972, the front page of the New York Times arts section published a story titled, Time to Break the Silence on Paul Robeson? The legendary bass-baritone spent the first half of the 20th century as one of the greatest talents the US had ever produced, and its second, both in life and in death as an outcast, the greatest casualty of the second Red Scare period to which today’s current attacks on liberal and progressive politics draw comparison.

This week marks 50 years since Robeson’s death and the silence remains. His erasure from the lineage over the decades shows that what Robeson’s political opponents did not take from him, the years have most certainly. Robeson’s decoupling from the story of African American culture has been so complete that in the half-century since his death, even generations of Black Americans have never heard of him.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:00 pm

‘Do not ignore your body’s signals’: how to really look after your neck

Mini breaks and micro-stretches could help strengthen your neck and reduce pain and stress, say experts

• Read more summer essentials

If you’re reading this on your device, chin tucked into your chest, or leaning over your desk shaped like a question mark, pause for a moment. How’s your neck feeling?

The way we sit, scroll and work means we often hold static positions for too long, creating tension and stiffness that radiates through the upper body.

Published: January 21, 2026, 2:00 pm

NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich on covering Trump’s America: ‘I don’t agree with everything the administration is doing’’

The Fox News alum launched her own show for the upstart cable channel this week and has already booked Trump

The conservative commentator Katie Pavlich didn’t want to give anything away before her debut as a primetime host for NewsNation, a cable news channel that launched in 2020 with the goal of attracting politically independent viewers.

Sure, she told the Guardian, she would leverage her relationship with the Trump administration to try to book key decision-makers on her new 10pm show, Katie Pavlich Tonight, which launched on Monday.

Published: January 21, 2026, 1:00 pm

Here’s how to fix America’s immigration system. Trump’s path is not the solution | Kenneth Roth

A grand bargain on immigration could address problems with both the old approach and Trump’s new approach

Immigration is one of the most divisive issues facing the United States, as it is in many countries. An ICE agent’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis is only the latest outrage that has brought the issue to the fore.

Facing a 30 January deadline to renew funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, Democrats are now insisting on limits on ICE, at risk of another shutdown. It may be a pipe dream, but it is worth asking whether now might finally be a time to forge the long-elusive bipartisan agreement on immigration.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, is published by Knopf and Allen Lane

Published: January 21, 2026, 3:00 pm

Trump scraps tariffs on Europe and claims ‘framework of a future deal’ on Greenland after speaking with Nato chief – live

US president touts ‘very productive meeting’ with Nato secretary general Mark Rutte and says planned tariffs will not go into effect as a result

House Republicans are starting a push on Wednesday to hold former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, opening the prospect of the House using one of its most powerful punishments against a former president for the first time.

The contempt proceedings are an initial step toward a criminal prosecution by the Department of Justice that, if successful, could send the Clintons to prison.

They’re not above the law. We’ve issued subpoenas in good faith.

For five months we’ve worked with them. And time’s up.

Published: January 21, 2026, 8:14 pm

Speak hysterically and carry a big stick: Trump’s foreign policy threats

In his second term, Trump’s bluster has been accompanied by an emotional and aggressive approach to foreign policy

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland; sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, characterized his approach to international relations as “speak softly and carry a big stick”. It was an approach that won him a Nobel peace prize in 1906, for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese war.

In recent days, Donald Trump’s own take on diplomacy has come into focus, one that might be characterized thusly: speak hysterically and threaten to use (and sometimes actually use) a big stick. This idiosyncratic approach to statecraft has yet to win Trump a Nobel peace prize, although that is something that the president has said – many, many times – does not bother him at all.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:29 pm

Trump paints himself as great white hope in racism-drenched Davos speech

President’s anti-Somalia tirade and insults to European leaders were in line with aide Stephen Miller’s worldview

Donald Trump turned up in Davos wielding an insult bazooka. He mocked Emmanuel Macron’s aviator sunglasses, chided Mark Carney (“Canada lives because of the United States”), asserted that the Swiss are “only good because of us” and had a dig at Denmark for losing Greenland “in six hours” during the second world war.

But beyond the fractious rhetoric, the US president brought a deeper message on Wednesday that sought to unify the west rather than divide it. It was his most dark, insidious and sinister project of all.

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:16 pm

Trump’s rambling Davos speech rehashes warped ideas of US supremacy

The president’s fixation on ‘piece of ice’ Greenland carries an echo of Vladimir Putin’s claims about Crimea

The good news headline from Donald Trump’s trip to Davos was that he seemed to rule out force for now in his urgent quest to acquire Greenland. The bad news: he started talking about Iceland as well.

What might have been a big reveal about the next step in Trump’s imperial ambitions was more likely a slip, though all speculation about the workings of the presidential brain is by now a guess at best.

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:04 pm

Eight wars settled and Chinese windfarms: factchecking Trump’s Davos claims

The president’s address in Switzerland featured a range of dubious assertions, from exaggerated to false

Donald Trump’s address at the World Economic Forum in Davos featured a parade of dubious claims about everything from peace deals to windfarms. Several assertions ranged from exaggerated to provably false.

Here’s what Trump got wrong.

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:12 pm

US supreme court appears skeptical of Trump’s bid to oust Lisa Cook from Fed board

Conservative and liberal judges questioned administration over president’s authority to fire without due process

• US politics – live updates

US supreme court justices appeared skeptical of Donald Trump’s case for firing a Federal Reserve governor on Wednesday, in a key test of the president’s power – and his administration’s battle to exert greater control over the US central bank.

Five months after Trump tried to fire Lisa Cook over apparent discrepancies on mortgage applications his officials claim are evidence of fraud, both conservative and liberal justices grilled the administration over whether the US president has the power to fire a Fed governor with seemingly no process.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:52 pm

Pregnant woman in medical distress being deported from US, attorney says

Woman who is eight months pregnant on verge of being sent to Colombia by ICE

A 21-year-old woman who is eight months pregnant and in a state of medical distress is being deported from Atlanta on Wednesday afternoon, a human rights attorney said, pleading for emergency assistance for his client.

“We are trying to get her the medical attention she needs immediately,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice-president of US advocacy and litigation at the Kennedy Human Rights Center, whose client, Zharick Daniela Buitrago Ortiz, is on the verge of being sent to Colombia.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:47 pm

Washington Post demands government return electronics seized in raid of reporter’s home

The paper says ‘outrageous seizure’ of Hannah Natanson’s devices threatens press freedom

The Washington Post has asked a federal court in Virginia to force the US government to return materials belonging to reporter Hannah Natanson, whose apartment was raided last week.

Natanson, who has closely reported on the ways in which the Trump administration has reshaped the federal government, had two laptops, two phones, a Garmin watch and other devices seized as part of an investigation into a government contractor’s alleged retention of classified materials, an action that press freedom groups decried as highly unusual and wildly inappropriate.

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:34 pm

Doge improperly shared sensitive social security data, DoJ court filing reveals

Trump administration acknowledges that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting operation accessed Americans’ sensitive data

After months of denials, the Trump administration has acknowledged in a federal court filing that employees working for Elon Musk’s supposed cost-cutting operation accessed and improperly shared Americans’ sensitive social security data.

The justice department court filing, submitted on Friday in an ongoing lawsuit, reveals that a member of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) signed a secret data-sharing agreement with an unidentified political advocacy group whose stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and overturn election results in certain states.

Published: January 21, 2026, 3:39 pm

Fired DHS worker sues agency after he criticized Noem on an alleged fake date

Brandon Wright alleges criticism of the homeland security secretary is protected by the first amendment

A former employee of the Department of Homeland Security who was fired after video circulated of him on a date criticizing the agency’s head, Kristi Noem, sued the department on Monday, alleging the termination violated his first amendment rights.

Brandon Wright, who worked at DHS for eight years in IT, said in a federal lawsuit that his time at the agency came to an “abrupt end” because of the “yellow journalism tactics” deployed by an unidentified woman he met on the dating app Bumble.

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:26 pm

Sheinbaum defends transfer of Mexican cartel members amid efforts to appease Trump

Analysts warn that Trump will probably demand more action from Mexico to counter drug-trafficking groups

Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum has defended the latest transfer of 37 Mexican cartel operatives to the US as a “sovereign decision”, as her government strives to alleviate pressure from the Trump administration to do more against drug-trafficking groups.

It was the third such flight in the year since Donald Trump returned to the White House, but analysts warn that while it remains an effective pressure valve, the returns may be diminishing.

Published: January 21, 2026, 8:05 pm

Three journalists among 11 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza

Reporters had been in car on way to new camp, says media group, as two 13-year-old boys killed in separate incidents

Hospitals in Gaza say Israeli forces killed at least 11 Palestinians on Wednesday, including two 13-year-old boys and three journalists, in the latest violence to undermine a three-month-old ceasefire.

Palestinian health officials said the Israeli airstrike killed three Palestinian journalists who were travelling in a car to film a newly established displacement camp in the Netzarim area of central Gaza.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:09 pm

Snow, ice and subzero temperatures to sweep across US this weekend

The storm will stretch 2,000 miles from south-west to east, disrupting travel and threatening power outages

A vast winter storm is set to descend across much of the US starting on Friday, sweeping snow, ice and brutal cold across nearly 2,000 miles from the south-west to the east coast and affecting more than 200 million people.

The system is expected to disrupt travel, bring down trees and power lines, and create the risk of prolonged power outages, followed by dangerously cold air.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:34 pm

Marseille v Liverpool: Champions League – live

⚽ Champions League updates from the 8pm GMT kick-off
⚽ Live scores | Table | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail Michael

Arne Slot speaks to the TNT cameras pitchside:

It’s not the first time we play in a hostile stadium. We played at Galatasaray. It’s a great stadium [here], great atmosphere.

The moments where I didn’t play him, we were struggling and I tried something else. We have steadied the ship now but we miss goals from all the ball possession and chances that we have. Salah is one of the players that can score a goal.

First of all, it’s really sad that Ibrahima can’t be here. But Joe is a good replacement but he has not played a lot since I have been here. But he has shown he can be a really good player for us.

Published: January 21, 2026, 8:11 pm

American democracy on the brink a year after Trump’s election, experts say

Scale and speed of president’s moves have stunned observers of authoritarian regimes – is the US in democratic peril?

Three hundred and sixty-five days after Donald Trump swore his oath of office and completed an extraordinary return to power, many historians, scholars and experts say his presidency has pushed American democracy to the brink – or beyond it.

In the first year of Trump’s second term, the democratically elected US president has moved with startling speed to consolidate authority: dismantling federal agencies, purging the civil service, firing independent watchdogs, sidelining Congress, challenging judicial rulings, deploying federal force in blue cities, stifling dissent, persecuting political enemies, targeting immigrants, scapegoating marginalized groups, ordering the capture of a foreign leader, leveraging the presidency for profit, trampling academic freedom and escalating attacks on the news media.

Published: January 21, 2026, 12:00 pm

‘Who will stand up and oppose it?’: Trump’s relentless campaign of retribution in his second term

From firing lawyers and government officials to pursuing indictments – president has created a culture of vengeance

During his first year in the White House, Donald Trump has pursued a campaign of retribution unlike any other president in US history.

That Trump would pursue such a campaign is not surprising. Since he launched his first run for president in 2015, Trump has channeled the politics of grievance into political success. Returning to the White House after surviving two impeachments and four different criminal cases against him, Trump has used the might of the federal government to punish those he believes have wronged him.

Published: January 21, 2026, 12:00 pm

Might is right: US ‘foreign policy’ held hostage to mad king Trump’s whims

Increasingly unpopular at home, a president obsessed by his legacy has turned his scattergun on the world stage

One year into the second Trump administration, an actual US foreign policy remains just a nice idea. Instead, the world has been forced to adapt to the world according to Donald Trump: one increasingly shaped by his erratic shifts and unpredictable decisions, his fury at perceived slights and his growing desire to stamp his legacy in the model of an imperial leader from centuries past.

Think of it as the mad king’s court, where every day is a carnival.

Published: January 20, 2026, 2:40 pm

‘I would lose my vision’: Americans relying on ACA health plan face uncertainty

Expiration of expanded subsidies has left many with higher healthcare costs – and some with no coverage at all

The final day for most Americans to enroll in an Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance plan that begins in February passed earlier this month, closing a critical window at a moment of deep uncertainty for millions who rely on the law for coverage.

The deadline arrives as federal subsidies that once kept premiums affordable have expired, sharply increasing costs while lawmakers remain deadlocked over whether, and how, to restore them.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:00 pm

‘I could not stay silent’: Palestinian prisoner tells of sexual abuse in Israeli jail

Sami al-Saei has defied social stigma to speak out about what a report calls a ‘grave pattern’ of sexual violence

• Warning: contains graphic descriptions of torture

Sami al-Saei said he heard the Israeli prison guards who raped him laughing through the assault, before they left him lying blindfolded, handcuffed and in agony on the floor to take a cigarette break.

At least one of the group knew a crime was being committed and intervened, not to stop the torture but to prevent its documentation. Al-Saei said he heard the man warning others “don’t take a photo, don’t take a photo” as they attacked.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:00 am

‘Every time I look at one, I smile!’: how axolotls took over the world

Our passion for these cute-looking salamanders means they are everywhere – except in the wild, where the species is under increasing threat

Axolotls are the new llamas. Which were, of course, the new unicorns. Which triggered a moment for narwhals. If you are an unusual-looking animal, this is your time. Even humans who have never seen an axolotl – a type of salamander – in the smooth and slimy flesh will have met a cartoon or cuddly one. Mexican axolotls have the kind of look that is made for commercial reproduction. The most popular domestic species is pink. Some glow in the dark – and their smile is bigger than Walter’s in the Muppets.

At Argos or Kmart, you can buy axolotls as cuddly toys, featured on socks, hoodies and bedding, or moulded into nightlights. You can crochet an axolotl, stick a rubber one on the end of your pencil or wear them on your underpants. The Economist says they’re a “global megastar”. More than 1,000 axolotl-themed products are listed on Walmart’s website. They grace US Girl Scouts patches, McDonald’s Happy Meals, and the 50-peso bill, a design so popular that, last year, the Bank of Mexico reported that 12.9 million people were hoarding the notes.

Published: January 21, 2026, 10:00 am

The return of measles: how a once-vanquished disease is spreading again

A year after the Texas outbreak began, new US cases reveal gaps in vaccination and rising risk for children

The measles outbreak in South Carolina now stands at 664 cases, more than doubling in a few weeks, officials said this week. The highly contagious virus has also spread onward to North Carolina, Ohio and Washington state, and similar outbreaks are unfurling in Arizona and Utah as well.

The outbreak, which first began in Texas a year ago this week, has spread to most US states – and as the US passes the one-year mark, its measles-elimination status will probably end, a symbol indicating an expected wave of year-round preventable disease. The outbreak has been plagued by misinformation, with Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and longtime vaccine critic, framing measles vaccination as a personal choice and promoting unproven treatments.

Published: January 21, 2026, 11:00 am

House burping: should we all adopt this German habit?

It’s a simple way to keep homes fresh and mould-free, and has caught on in the US. But there are a few potential downsides ...

Name: House burping.

Age: New to America, ancient in Germany.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:39 pm

Stephen Colbert on Trump’s first year back: ‘Today’s maniacal criminality distracts us from yesterday’s maniac crimes’

Late-night hosts discussed the first year of Trump’s second term and his release of private messages other world leaders

Late-night hosts acknowledged one full, maniacal year of Donald Trump’s second term as president of the United States.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:49 pm

‘A cash advance on your death’: the strange, morbid world of Aids profiteering

In Oscar-shortlisted documentary short Cashing Out, a little-known industry that saw dying LGBTQ+ people sell their life insurance policies is remembered

During the summer of 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic, the documentary director Matt Nadel was back home in Boca Raton, Florida. He remembers one particular evening walk that he took with his father, Phil, as they weathered out those early months.

As they strode through the neighborhood, Nadel, now 26, said that the prospect of a vaccine was exciting, but the idea of pharmaceutical executives profiting off a devastating virus left him feeling uneasy. Phil grew concerned by the complex ethical predicament that his son laid out, and Nadel could quickly tell that his father was acting strangely.

Published: January 21, 2026, 2:43 pm

World leaders in Davos must stand up to Trump. This is their chance | Robert Reich

The world needs global leaders to clearly and firmly denounce the havoc Trump is wreaking on the US and international order

Hundreds of global CEOs, finance titans, and more than 60 prime ministers and presidents are in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual confab of the world’s powerful and wealthy: the World Economic Forum.

This year’s Davos meeting occurs at a time when Donald Trump is not just unleashing his brownshirts on Minneapolis and other American cities, but also dismantling the international order that’s largely been in place since the end of the second world war – threatening Nato, withdrawing from international organizations including the UN climate treaty, violating the UN charter by invading Venezuela and abducting Nicolás Maduro, upending established trade rules, and demanding that the US annex Greenland.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now

Published: January 21, 2026, 11:00 am

Ben Jennings on the tool-using cow – cartoon

Continue reading...

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:51 pm

‘The powerful have their power. We have the capacity to stop pretending’: the Canadian PM’s call to action at Davos | Mark Carney

In a rousing speech, Mark Carney made the case for unity in the face of Donald Trump’s new world order. We reproduce it here

Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics – where the large, main power, geopolitics – is submitted to no limits, no constraints.

On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.

Published: January 21, 2026, 2:24 pm

We ran high-level US civil war simulations. Minnesota is exactly how they start | Claire Finkelstein

Developments in Minnesota closely mirror a scenario explored in a 2024 exercise conducted at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, which I direct

Since January 6, roughly 2,000 ICE agents have been deployed to Minnesota under the pretext of responding to a fraud investigation. In practice, these largely untrained and undisciplined federal agents have been terrorizing Minneapolis residents through illegal and excessive uses of force – often against US citizens – prompting a federal judge to attempt to place limits on the agency’s actions. The Trump administration is encouraging the lawlessness by announcing “absolute immunity” for ICE agents. But if the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, does not heed the court ruling, the consequences may be nothing short of civil war.

In just the past week, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, shortly after she returned from dropping her child off at school. They blinded two protesters by shooting them in the face with so-called “less deadly” weapons. They fired teargas bombs around the car of a family carrying six children, sending one child to the emergency room with breathing problems. They violently dragged a woman out of her car and on to the ground screaming. They have shot protesters in the legs. They have forcibly taken thousands of individuals to detention facilities, separating families and casting people into legal limbo – often without regard to their legal status.

Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is also the founder and faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center

Published: January 21, 2026, 11:00 am

The ‘rules-based order’ Davos craves has bigger problems than Trump: it represents a world that no longer exists

The global economic system doesn’t even benefit its US and European creators any more – let alone indebted nations or emerging giants

Donald Trump represents everything that the Davos crowd hates – and it is unlikely they are any more well-disposed towards him after being forced to listen to more than an hour of the president’s rambling speech today. He is a protectionist, not a free trader. He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax and is suspicious of multilateral organisations. He prefers power plays to dialogue and he doesn’t have any time for the “woke” capitalism that Davos has been keen to promote, with its focus on gender equality and ethical investment. The shindig’s organisers, the World Economic Forum (WEF), had to agree to sideline those issues in order to secure Trump’s appearance.

For decades, anti-globalisation protesters have sought to shut down the WEF. Thanks to Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, their prayers may soon be answered. In today’s world, Davos is an irrelevance and it seems fitting that Trump should be on hand this week to deliver the coup de grace to the liberal international rules-based order that the WEF prides itself on upholding.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:19 pm

I had an eye-opening experience in the queue for a pub toilet | Adrian Chiles

There was the struggle to make chitchat, a whiff of humiliation – and a sobering recognition of what women have to put up with

I had an unusual experience just before Christmas. I think it did me good. This was at a gathering of some old friends of mine, a group of dentists as it happens, but’s that’s not relevant. The assembled were all blokes, which is relevant. This was at a pub/restaurant that was doing a roaring trade. A lost afternoon was had by all. Nice food, nice drink and surprisingly amusing anecdotes about teeth. Naturally enough, the time came for visits to the gents. Those who went, I half-noticed, seemed to be away a long time. I didn’t dwell on why this might have been so, but when it came to my turn all became clear. I turned the corner, and what should I find but a long queue for the gentlemen’s toilet. No queue at all for the women’s toilet, but a great long one for the men’s. What fresh hell was this? This wasn’t a world any of us in this queue recognised.

For the avoidance of doubt, I neither court nor expect sympathy from any woman here. I am obviously aware that, for women, having to queue to use a public toilet is the norm. How many times have I seen women standing in a queue while men in the same establishment have to do no such thing? Apart from the inconvenience of having to queue to use a convenience, there’s a whiff of humiliation about standing there, waiting for something that men generally don’t have to wait for. It was decidedly bracing to get a taste of it myself, watching the other sex breeze through the door while I was forced to stand solemnly in line with my fellow fellas, angling away at whatever we had in our pockets and consulting our phones.

There’s a whole conversational genre here – toilet queue chitchat – of which men have scant experience. Women, I imagine, have learned to be rather good at it, exchanging pleasantries and an interesting observation or two. On this I’ve consulted some women of my acquaintance. The consensus is that intra-queue communication is limited to the odd eye roll and: “Fuck this, I’m going to use the men’s.” A colleague told me it’s only at the washbasins afterwards that conversation tends to break out.

If I was a woman, I’d waste no time on either pleasantries or silence. If I was forced, time and again, to stand in a public line merely for the opportunity to empty my bladder, I’d vent my spleen like nobody’s business at the sheer injustice of it. A useful metric for any civilised society would be gender parity in wee waiting times. I’m seeking out research on this.

Back in my queue, I tried to get some brotherly banter going about this novel situation of ours. I tutted a bit, rolled my eyes and said something along the lines of: “Well, this makes an unpleasant change, doesn’t it lads?” Someone smiled, someone else looked blank, a third looked sheepish. Another shook his head as if this was yet another manifestation of broken Britain, woke madness etc. Otherwise, silence reigned. Someone emerged, zipping up. The queue shuffled up a place. Two more men joined the back of it. I sighed.

A woman wafted out of the adjacent facility, all fragrant and relaxed. It was all right for some. I grinned bashfully at her, trying to communicate acknowledgement of this topsy-turvy scenario. She said: “Don’t look to me for solidarity, you bastard. Come back when you’ve done this another hundred times and then I might give you the time of day.” Actually, she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything. But I know that’s what she was thinking. And I really wouldn’t blame her.

• Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and a Guardian columnist

Published: January 21, 2026, 3:02 pm

Trump’s tariff threat leaves Europe with a choice: fight back or cease to matter | Georg Riekeles

Appeasing Trump has only emboldened him. But European leaders are not as helpless as the US president believes

• Georg Riekeles is the associate director of the European Policy Centre

EU leaders’ tough rebukes to Donald Trump in Davos must be followed by concrete action when they convene in Brussels on Thursday night. The US president’s attempt to strong-arm Greenland and Denmark, backed by explicit tariff threats against those who refuse to comply, is not bluster or improvisation. It is economic coercion, openly deployed to force political submission and territorial concessions. The danger lies in the demand itself, but also in how Europe responds.

The EU has reached a moment of truth. If it cannot defend one of its member states whose most basic interests are under direct threat, then the EU is weakened as a geopolitical actor and emptied of purpose.

Georg Riekeles is the associate director of the European Policy Centre

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.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:13 pm

The Guardian view on Keir Starmer and Donald Trump: quiet diplomacy has reached its limit | Editorial

The prime minister has a duty to be candid with the British public about the scale of the global realignment caused by a volatile US president

One foreign policy achievement that Donald Trump prefers not to boast about is his role in helping Mark Carney win last year’s Canadian general election. The incumbent Liberal party faced crushing defeat before Mr Trump threatened to annex Canada. Mr Carney’s candidacy was buoyed up by a patriotic rally against US bullying.

Perhaps because his country has also been coveted by Mr Trump, Mr Carney has given one of the most clear-sighted responses of any democratic leader to the US president’s designs on Greenland. Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, the Canadian prime minister set out the challenge for countries whose security and prosperity have depended on a global system underwritten by the US.

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.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:39 pm

Chelsea v Pafos, Newcastle v PSV, Juventus v Benfica, and more: Champions League – live

⚽ Champions League updates from the 8pm GMT kick-offs
⚽ Live scoreboard | Table | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail Luke

“Just a heads up that, while I would love it to be true, a win tonight for Newcastle doesn’t put us in the last 16,” writes David. “It puts us in the first round of 16, which is really the last 24 (playoffs), to then get into the actual last 16. Two extra matches just what everyone wants right now …”

Silly me. Thanks David.

Published: January 21, 2026, 8:14 pm

Storm brews over new F1 rules loopholes as Mercedes and Red Bull gain advantage | Giles Richards

Compression ratios will be at the top of the FIA’s agenda in a meeting with F1 teams to head off growing fears before the 2026 season gets under way

Unveiling their new engine in Tokyo should have been a significant moment for Honda to celebrate but behind the scenes, the storied marque – as well as plenty of their Formula One rivals – are worried that a looming row over new engine regulations is threatening to overshadow the opening of the 2026 season.

So significant is the concern that it will be the key topic of discussion at a meeting between the FIA and the engine manufacturers set for Thursday before the first day of pre-season testing at Barcelona.

Published: January 21, 2026, 3:25 pm

Mayfield claps back at former coach Stefanski and says Browns treated him like ‘garbage’

• Pair will face off in NFC South next season

• Stefanski reportedly said QB ‘failed’ with Browns

Tampa Bay quarterback Baker Mayfield has vented his frustrations over the treatment he received from his former head coach Kevin Stefanski, who he will now face twice a year as an opponent.

Mayfield played for Stefanski at the Cleveland Browns before he was traded to the Carolina Panthers in 2022. The two are now major figures in the NFC South after Atlanta hired Stefanski as head coach on Saturday.

Mayfield appeared to be angered after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter posted that Stefanski said Mayfield and another Browns quarterback, Deshaun Watson, had “failed” in Cleveland.

Published: January 21, 2026, 12:42 pm

Cody Bellinger stays with New York Yankees on five-year deal worth $162.5m

• Yankees lock up Bellinger for $32.5m annually

• Lefty slugger hit .302 at Yankee Stadium in 2025

• Deal includes no-trade provision and opt-outs

Cody Bellinger became the last of the top free-agent hitters to reach a deal, agreeing Wednesday to stay with the New York Yankees for a $162.5m, five-year contract, a person familiar with the negotiations told the Associated Press.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the agreement was subject to a successful physical.

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:10 pm

‘Pay up’: Rory McIlroy delivers Ryder Cup warning to LIV pair Hatton and Rahm

• LIV rebels are appealing against DP World Tour sanctions

• Forthright McIlroy wants duo to show their commitment

Rory McIlroy has challenged Tyrrell Hatton and Jon Rahm to demonstrate their commitment to the Ryder Cup cause by settling fines for their LIV Golf participation.

McIlroy pointed towards motivation used by Europe during victory at Bethpage last September after it emerged the United States players were paid to play in the Ryder Cup.

Published: January 21, 2026, 10:51 am

Olympics chief admits she has not spoken to US president Trump about LA 2028 Games

• Kirsty Coventry steers clear of global politics in buildup

• Organisers will meet with vice-president JD Vance

The International Olympic Committee has yet to establish formal communications with the US president Donald Trump on preparations for the Los Angeles Games in 2028, the IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, has confirmed.

Trump has been speaking in Davos in Switzerland after a turbulent start to 2026 during which he has suggested he will invade Greenland, threatened a trade war with Europe and ousted the Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:21 pm

As their midwinter slump goes on, what exactly is going wrong at Manchester City? | Jamie Jackson

Manchester City have issues with injury and form, and need their big players to step up and turn the ship around

At Bodø/Glimt, in a first Champions League outing since 1 October, the 29-year-old appeared what he is: a player still recovering after 18 months out with a serious knee injury and several related setbacks. This was only a third start since his latest return began with the second 45 minutes of the goalless draw at Sunderland on New Year’s Day. Last week Rodri declared he was “ready to go” and said: “I’m really happy to be on the pitch every single day.” Yet in Saturday’s 2-0 loss at Manchester United he was a one-paced, non-factor unable to do what he did with ease pre‑anterior cruciate ligament rupture: run midfield and so the contest. In Tuesday’s 3-1 humbling in Norway the Spaniard was the same, and two moments tell the tale of his form. First Jens Petter Hauge left him a statue before registering a memorable long-range strike for Bodø’s third goal; then came the two yellow cards in two minutes that had Rodri sent off.

Published: January 21, 2026, 1:54 pm

World would be a ‘better place’ if US took over Greenland, says Nigel Farage

Reform leader says he agrees ‘strategically’ with Trump but adds that views of Greenlanders must be respected

The world would be a “better, more secure place” if America took over Greenland, Nigel Farage said at Davos, while insisting that he still believed in the sovereignty of nation states.

During a panel at the World Economic Forum’s “America House” in the Swiss ski resort on Wednesday, the Reform UK leader said he had “no doubt” that the world would be safer if a “strong America” was in Greenland “because of the geopolitics of the high north, because of the retreating ice caps and because of the continued expansionism of Russian icebreakers, of Chinese investment”.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:25 pm

Concern over north-east Syria security amid fears IS militants could re-emerge

US military says it has transported ‘IS fighters’ to Iraq after Kurdish-controlled prisons and camps changed hands

Concerned western officials said they were closely monitoring the deteriorating security situation in north-east Syria amid fears that Islamic State militants could re-emerge after the Kurdish defeat at the hands of the Damascus government.

The US military said it had transported “150 IS fighters” from a frontline prison in Hasakah province across the border to Iraq, and said it was willing to move up to 7,000 to prevent what it warned could be a dangerous breakout.

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:20 pm

Prince Harry accuses Daily Mail publisher of wanting to drive him ‘to drugs and drink’

Duke of Sussex says Associated Newspapers has made Meghan’s life ‘an absolute misery’ and alleges it used unlawful means to secure stories

Prince Harry has accused the publisher of the Daily Mail of wanting to drive him “to drugs and drinking” by placing his life under surveillance, as he told the high court that it continued to “come after” him and his wife.

The Duke of Sussex was on the verge of tears as he said Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) had continued to make Meghan’s life “an absolute misery” during his litigation against it.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:42 pm

Rollout of AI may need to be slowed to ‘save society’, says JP Morgan boss

Jamie Dimon warns of civil unrest but Nvidia’s Jensen Huang argues tech will create rather than destroy jobs

Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, has said artificial intelligence “may go too fast for society” and cause “civil unrest” unless governments and business support displaced workers.

While advances in AI will have huge benefits, from increasing productivity to curing diseases, the technology may need to be phased in to “save society”, he said.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:18 pm

US officials tried to lobby against Marine Le Pen election ban, French judge says

Magali Lafourcade says the two envoys were convinced the far-right leader’s corruption trial had been political

A French magistrate has said two Trump administration emissaries approached her seeking to lobby against an election ban on the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Magali Lafourcade, the secretary general of France’s human rights commission (CNCDH), an independent body that advises the government, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) she had reported the content of the meeting to the French foreign ministry immediately, fearing a potential “manipulation of the public debate in France”.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:38 pm

Hand shape in Indonesian cave may be world’s oldest known rock art

Archaeologists say stencil painted with ochre in limestone cave on Muna Island was created at least 67,800 years ago

The faded outline of a hand on a cave wall in Indonesia may be the world’s oldest known rock art, according to archaeologists who say it was created at least 67,800 years ago.

The ancient hand stencil was discovered in a limestone cave popular with tourists on Muna Island, part of south-eastern Sulawesi, where it had gone unnoticed between more recent paintings of animals and other figures.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:00 pm

‘Treated like shirkers’: German unions cry foul over Merz’s sick-note crackdown

Opponents say proposal to end sick notes issued over phone would fill up doctors’ waiting rooms unnecessarily

A German proposal to end the right to get short-term sick leave from a doctor over the telephone as a means of cracking down on skiving has met with outcry from labour groups and the medical profession.

Germans enjoy some of the most generous employee illness policies in Europe, a fact the conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says is undermining efforts to kickstart the EU’s biggest economy, whose growth has largely stalled since 2022.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:23 pm

Chile’s president-elect names staunch abortion opponent as gender equality minister

Far-right incoming president picked Judith Marín, who has publicly decried bills to decriminalise abortion, for the role

Chile’s incoming far-right president José Antonio Kast has named a vehement opponent of abortion who has repeatedly stated her support for life “from conception to natural death” as the country’s new women and gender equality minister.

Judith Marín, 30, was once ejected from Chile’s senate by police for screaming “return to the Lord” during a vote to decriminalise abortion under restricted circumstances.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:56 pm

Suni Williams, Starliner astronaut, retires after 27 years at Nasa

She set the record for most spacewalk time by a woman and spent nine months at the International Space Station

Suni Williams, one of two Nasa astronauts whose 10-day test flight mission turned into a nine-month odyssey on the International Space Station (ISS), has retired from the US space agency.

The 60-year-old former navy captain left in December after 27 years with Nasa, according to a press release from the agency on Tuesday. Jared Isaacman, the agency’s new administrator, praised her as “a trailblazer in human spaceflight”.

Published: January 21, 2026, 3:04 pm

Half of world’s CO2 emissions come from just 32 fossil fuel firms, study shows

Critics accuse leading firms of sabotaging climate action but say data increasingly being used to hold them to account

Just 32 fossil fuel companies were responsible for half the global carbon dioxide emissions driving the climate crisis in 2024, down from 36 a year earlier, a report has revealed.

Saudi Aramco was the biggest state-controlled polluter and ExxonMobil was the largest investor-owned polluter. Critics accused the leading fossil fuel companies of “sabotaging climate action” and “being on the wrong side of history” but said the emissions data was increasingly being used to hold the companies accountable.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:00 am

Looking for Miracle: why have so many dugongs gone missing from Thailand’s shores?

The Andaman coast was one of very few places in the world with a viable population but then dead dugongs began washing up. Now half have gone

A solitary figure stands on the shore of Thailand’s Tang Khen Bay. The tide is slowly rising over the expanse of sandy beach, but the man does not seem to notice. His eyes are not fixed on the sea, but on the small screen clutched between his hands.

About 600 metres offshore, past the shadowy fringe of coral reef, his drone hovers over the murky sea, focused on a whirling grey shape: Miracle, the local dugong, is back.

Published: January 20, 2026, 11:03 am

Huge amounts of extra land needed for RFK Jr’s meat-heavy diet guidelines

Even 25% increase in meat and dairy consumption would require 100m more acres of agricultural land, analysis says

The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.

A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.

Published: January 20, 2026, 12:30 pm

Antarctic penguins have radically shifted their breeding season – seemingly in response to climate change

Changing temperatures may be behind change in behaviour, which experts fear threatens three species’ survival

Penguins in Antarctica have radically shifted their breeding season, apparently as a response to climate change, research has found.

Dramatic shifts in behaviour were revealed by a decade-long study led by Penguin Watch at the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, with some penguins’ breeding period moving forward by more than three weeks.

Published: January 20, 2026, 5:01 am

Claudette Colvin obituary

US civil rights activist who as a schoolgirl protested against segregation on Alabama’s buses

Although she was a pivotal figure in the US civil rights movement, Claudette Colvin, who has died aged 86, never received the full recognition she deserved for her courageous and groundbreaking protest against segregation.

On 2 March 1955 Colvin, aged 15, was riding a bus home from school in Montgomery, Alabama, with seats in the front reserved for white passengers, while those in the rear were designated for black people. She was in a “neutral” zone from which, as the bus filled up, the driver could order black passengers to move to the back. When she refused to give up her seat to a white woman, the driver called the police, and Colvin was arrested. Soon afterwards she appeared before a juvenile court. Charges of violating segregation laws and disturbing the peace were eventually dropped on appeal, but her conviction for assaulting a police officer was upheld.

Published: January 21, 2026, 1:28 pm

US senator calls veterans affairs’ data collection of non-citizen workers ‘thinly veiled effort to instill fear’

In letter to VA and DHS, Adam Schiff expressed alarm after Guardian reported on memo to gather information

Adam Schiff, a Democratic US senator, is expressing alarm in a letter to the Departments of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Homeland Security (DHS), following a report from the Guardian that revealed the VA was gathering data on its “non-citizen” workforce.

The VA told the Guardian some of the information gathered could be shared with other agencies for immigration enforcement purposes.

Published: January 21, 2026, 11:00 am

Coyote stuns observers by braving rough waters to swim to Alcatraz

Coyote is thought to be the first ever to reach the notorious former prison island off the coast of San Francisco

A coyote recently stunned observers by swimming to Alcatraz, braving the treacherous waters surrounding the notorious former prison island off the coast of San Francisco in plain view of a tourist recording video.

The coyote in question is thought to be the first ever to reach Alcatraz, now a tourist attraction, in that manner. While it’s uncertain why the animal doggy-paddled there, the consensus is that the creature probably came from San Francisco – about 1.25 miles away – or other islands near Alcatraz where coyotes have been spotted.

Published: January 21, 2026, 11:00 am

Lindsey Halligan leaves post as US attorney after judges’ sharp criticism

Trump-appointed federal attorney with no prosecutorial experience led failed cases against president’s political foes

Lindsey Halligan, a Trump-appointed federal attorney who led the failed prosecutions of two of the president’s political opponents, has left her position at the US justice department, attorney general Pam Bondi said on Tuesday.

The departure of Halligan, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney, comes after multiple judges have sharply criticized her and cast doubts on her ability to lawfully remain in her position.

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:34 pm

Snapchat’s parent company settles social media addiction lawsuit before trial

Snap’s chief executive had been due to testify in civil action also involving Meta, TikTok and YouTube

Snapchat’s parent company has settled a civil lawsuit shortly before it was due to start in California, but other large tech companies still face a trial under the case.

Snap’s chief executive, Evan Spiegel, had been due to testify in a tech addiction lawsuit which also involves the Instagram owner, Meta; ByteDance’s TikTok; and Alphabet-owned YouTube – which have not settled.

Published: January 21, 2026, 1:42 pm

Spain’s rail network under scrutiny after second deadly crash in three days

Trainee driver killed in accident near Barcelona just days after 43 died in collision between two high-speed trains

Spain’s rail network is under scrutiny after a commuter train crashed near Barcelona just days after at least 43 people died and 152 were injured in a collision between two high-speed trains.

The second crash in three days occurred at approximately 9pm on Tuesday when a retaining wall collapsed on to the track near Gelida in the region of Catalonia in north-east Spain, derailing a local train.

Published: January 21, 2026, 12:47 pm

Vienna closes museums and cuts opening hours as part of austerity drive

Director of Wien Museum says ‘we all have to economise’ as city temporarily reduces access to cultural sites

It prides itself on its reputation as the world’s home of classical music. But Vienna will temporarily close several museums dedicated to famous composers this year as the Austrian capital cuts its culture budget to meet public spending targets.

The apartment where the Austrian composer Franz Schubert died, the residence of “Blue Danube” writer Johann Strauss, as well as the house where Joseph Haydn lived are to be closed temporarily as cost-saving measures, the director of Vienna’s museums announced on Wednesday.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:36 pm

Iran’s central bank using vast quantities of cryptocurrency championed by Farage, says report

Regime appears to have turned to digital currency issued by Tether in the face of sanctions

Iran’s central bank appears to have been using vast quantities of a cryptocurrency championed by Nigel Farage, according to a new report.

Elliptic, a crypto analytics company, said it had traced at least $507m (£377m) of cryptocurrency issued by Tether – a company touted by the Reform UK leader – passing through accounts that appear to be controlled by Iran’s central bank.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:00 am

‘We played to 8,000 Mexicans who knew every word’: how the Whitest Boy Alive conquered the world

He lit up Europe with bands ranging from Peachfuzz to Kings of Convenience. But it was the Whitest Boy Alive that sent Erlend Øye stratospheric. As they return, the soft-singing, country-hopping sensation looks back

If you were to imagine the recent evolution of music in Europe as a series of scenes from a Where’s Wally?-style puzzle book, one bespectacled, lanky figure would pop up on almost every page. There he is in mid-90s London, handing out flyers for his first band Peachfuzz. Here he is in NME at the dawn of the new millennium, fronting folk duo Kings of Convenience and spearheading the new acoustic movement. There he is strumming his guitar in the vanguard of Norway’s “Bergen wave”. Then he’s off spinning records in Berlin nightclubs during the city’s “poor but sexy” post-millennial years. By the 2010s, he’s driving a renaissance of Italian chamber pop as part of La Comitiva, his bandmates hailing from the southern tip of Sicily.

It’s hard to think of a figure more musically cosmopolitan than Erlend Otre Øye, connecting the dots across a continent where national scenes rarely overlap – and making magic happen. No wonder his debut solo album, with 10 tracks recorded in 10 different cities, was called Unrest. Of all his reincarnations, though, the one that has best endured (if you go by Spotify) is his four-piece, The Whitest Boy Alive. And this spring and summer, they’re reuniting for a tour of Mexico and Europe to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dreams, their debut album.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:31 pm

The shot that got me a police beating: Rod Morris’s best photograph

‘After I took this, police officers bundled me into the back of a car and drove me to the local station where I was questioned for a long time. On the way out, they took turns to punch and kick me’

In 1993, a photograph I’d taken of a bus driver in Luxor, Egypt, won a competition. The prize was some money, a camera and a return ticket to anywhere in the world. I chose Chile. The camera was an all-bells-and-whistles model: I sold it to a taxi driver at 3am. I’ve always preferred working with light 35mm cameras.

After three months in Chile, I caught a train that rose up to the high Bolivian Altiplano plateau, leaving me with a splitting headache only relieved by some coca tea. I had an open-ended commission with the Financial Times to provide photographs from financial areas of the South American cities I went to, so while my main aim was to wander around photographing exciting things I came across, I also made sure to head to the financial district and government quarters in the city of La Paz, which is where this was taken.

Published: January 21, 2026, 3:00 pm

Mercy review – Chris Pratt takes on AI judge Rebecca Ferguson in ingenious sci-fi thriller

It is the year 2029 and an LA cop finds himself accused of murdering his wife. He has 90 minutes to clear his name before robo-justice sends him down

Irish writer Marco van Belle delivers an entertaining script for this real time futurist thriller-satire set in LA in 2029, in a world (as they say) where AI is wholly responsible for assessing criminal guilt or innocence. You’ve heard of RoboCop. This is RoboJustice. Veteran Russian-Kazakh film-maker Timur Bekmambetov directs, bringing his usual robust approach to the big action sequences, and Chris Pratt stars as the LAPD cop accused of murder. (Longtime Pratt fans will appreciate a cameo appearance here of Pratt’s fellow cast-member from TV’s Parks and Recreation, Jay Jackson, effectively reprising his performance as sonorous TV newsreader Perd Hapley.)

The film’s ostensible target is the insidious power of AI, though the movie partakes of today’s liberal opinion doublethink, in which we all solemnly concur that AI is very worrying while not having the smallest intention of doing anything about it. Pratt plays Detective Chris Raven, an officer with a drinking problem but nonetheless a poster boy for LA law enforcement in 2029 for having brought in the first conviction under the city’s creepy new hi-tech justice system, ironically entitled Mercy (it doesn’t appear to be an acronym). AI is now the sole arbiter of justice and defendants each have a 90-minute trial to make their case in front of Judge Maddox, an AI-hologram played by Rebecca Ferguson who icily insists on the facts but is capable of weird Max-Headroom-type glitches.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:00 pm

Return to Silent Hill review – video game horror series births another middling movie

Director Christopher Gans returns to the haunted town franchise but can’t seem to figure out what to do with it

There’s an admirable loyalty, maybe even poetry, in a film-maker returning to an unpromising, barely there movie series 20 years after his first crack became a minor hit. The horror film Silent Hill, based on a video game of the same name, has garnered a cult following in the decades since its 2006 release, but it’s not exactly a genre classic nor beloved franchise, with a single little-seen 2012 sequel to its name – until now. Return to Silent Hill brings back the first film’s director, Christopher Gans, for a new story set in the same ash-strewn ghost town, this one based on the Silent Hill 2 video game. Characters in these movies tend to wander into a place that is obviously haunted or cursed, refusing to leave even after it becomes clear that they should, and only decide to escape after it’s too late. Maybe Gans can relate.

Or maybe he’s the only man for the job because no one else will take it. That could almost describe James (Jeremy Irvine), the hapless protagonist of Return to Silent Hill. After a chance traffic-accident meeting with Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson) that unconvincingly thwarts her attempt to leave home, the two fall in love, and after a time James even moves to Mary’s oddball town; as a painter, he can go anywhere (though if there’s a reason that Mary couldn’t leave, given that she was already ready to hop a bus when they meet, I missed it). Despite the movie skipping over what makes them so instantly compatible, James is all in; someone has to be.

Published: January 21, 2026, 4:13 pm

Steal review – you long for Sophie Turner to triumph in this wild thriller

This breathless and hugely entertaining financial heist show isn’t just packed with twists. It’s a clever meditation on the evil of money – in which you’re rooting for the Game of Thrones star

The trick, Zara Dunne tells her new underling as she shows her round the trades processing floor of the pension management company for which they both now work, is not to dwell on the fact that every day that passes is another day wasted. And to know where the nice biscuits are. This is very good advice for any twentysomething starting their first job, but especially one called Myrtle, as this one is, whom I imagine has already had much of the stuffing knocked out of her by her peers’ reactions to this odd parental choice of moniker.

Soon, however, they are all in need of substantially more comfort than even a chocolate Hobnob can provide, as a team of armed villains swarms the floor. From there, the glossy new six-part thriller Steal kicks into high gear and doesn’t let up for a moment. The baddies – sporting not masks but sophisticated, subtle prosthetics that can fool all the facial recognition software the police will soon be applying to the CCTV footage – herd Zara (Sophie Turner, continuing to deliver sterling work post-Game of Thrones), Myrtle (Eloise Thomas), Zara’s friend and colleague Luke (Archie Madekwe) and the rest of the rank into one conference room while the management committee is locked in another. A couple of gruesome beatings later, so that nobody is in any doubt about the dedication of the villainous gang, Luke and Zara are yanked out and forced to help them execute a set of trades worth £4bn, and the committee is forced to sign off on them all. At one point, Luke crumbles and Zara must step in to save the day. She is hailed as a hero once the thieves have completed their hi-tech heist and left the building.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:00 am

Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart review – her frankness about her ordeal is truly inspiring

Taken from her bedroom at the age of 14 and sexually abused for nine months, Smart, now a child safety activist, rails powerfully against shame in this true-crime documentary

New year, new true-crime documentary from Netflix. Age cannot wither the genre made famous by the streamer all the way back in 2015 with Making a Murderer, which explored the wrongful conviction of Steven Avery for sexual assault and attempted murder who spent 18 years in prison for that and who was later tried and convicted of another murder. That documentary was a decade in the making. Things move more quickly now, and the preferred content is more palatable to a mass audience – tales of victims’ survival and the very rightful conviction of perpetrators meet the voyeuristic appetite and proxy lust for vengeance without requiring too much painful thinking abut the inadequacies of a country’s legal system, say, or the corruption of its law enforcement.

Still, the new approach has brought some astonishing untold stories of forgotten victims into the light and – usefully or not – given us a better measure of the depraved depths to which men can go. (And it is almost always men, who either have an innate problem or need to bring a suit against an incredibly biased set of film-makers and commissioners tout damn suite.)

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:00 am

Release the beast! How Iron Maiden and a naked Ralph Fiennes created the ultimate big-screen needle drop

The Number of the Beast lights up an unforgettable scene in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple thanks to director Nia DaCosta expertly blending ‘craziness and romance’

There were laughs of surprise around me in screen three of the Everyman in Muswell Hill, north London, as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple drew to its conclusion. Without giving too much away for those who haven’t seen it, Ralph Fiennes dancing semi-naked among piles of human bones to Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast is not how you expect one of our greatest thespians to deport himself on screen.

“Alex Garland chose that song,” says the film’s director, Nia DaCosta. “He wrote it into the script. And you can’t get better than that in a film about satanists.”

Published: January 20, 2026, 8:30 am

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood review – getting through the day

Alex Jennings’s performance hums with buried rage in Christopher Isherwood’s landmark exploration of grief

At the start of A Single Man, George Falconer wakes up at home in the morning and drags himself despondently to the bathroom. There he stares at himself in the mirror, observing not so much a face as “the expression of a predicament … a dull harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle”.

Set in 1962, Christopher Isherwood’s landmark novel follows a day in the life of a 58-year-old British expat and college professor living in California. George is silently trying to come to terms with the death of his partner, Jim, after a car accident. We accompany him from his morning ablutions – during which he reflects on the judgment of his homophobic neighbour Mrs Strunk – and his drive to work, to a teaching session, a gym workout and a drink with his friend Charley. Throughout we are privy to his internal monologue, which reveals George as a man prone to existential dread and who is isolated in a world that, owing to his sexuality, regards him with suspicion.

Published: January 21, 2026, 3:00 pm

Is listening to an audiobook as good as reading?

Queen tells reading campaign that listening counts too – and the publishing industry increasingly agrees

Queen Camilla has met many disreputable characters in her time as a royal, but her encounter this week with two celebrity reprobates was at least for a good cause. The queen has appeared in the Beano alongside its celebrated bad boy Dennis the Menace and his dog, Gnasher, as part of a campaign to promote reading.

It wasn’t the cartoon Camilla’s waspish waist that captured the headlines (“I wish,” she said of her comic strip avatar), but what she had to say while encouraging the tween menace to “go all in” for reading: “Comics and audiobooks count too!”

Published: January 21, 2026, 8:00 am

Vigil by George Saunders review – will a world-wrecking oil tycoon repent?

The ghosts of Lincoln in the Bardo return to confront a dying oil man’s destructive legacy – but this time they feel like a gimmick

George Saunders is back in the Bardo – perhaps stuck there. Vigil, his first novel since 2017’s Booker prize‑winning Lincoln in the Bardo, returns to that indeterminate space between life and death, comedy and grief, moral inquiry and narrative hijinks. Once again, the living are largely absent, and the dead are meddlesome and chatty. They have bones to pick.

They converge at the deathbed of an oil man, KJ Boone. He’s a postwar bootstrapper: long-lived, filthy rich and mightily pleased with himself. “A steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through him, regarding all he had managed to see, cause and create.” Boone is calm in his final hours, enviably so. He seems destined to die exactly as he lived, untroubled by self-reflection. But as his body falters, his mind becomes permeable to ghosts, and they have work to do. The tycoon has profited handsomely from climate denial, and there is still time for him to acknowledge his fossil-fuelled sins before the lights go out.

Published: January 21, 2026, 7:00 am

Cameo by Rob Doyle review – a fantasy of literary celebrity in the culture war era

In this larky autofiction, the ups and downs of creative life are cartoonishly dramatised as the writer becomes an action hero

Rob Doyle’s previous novel, Threshold, took the form of a blackly comic travelogue narrated by an Irish writer named Rob. In one episode before Rob becomes an author, we see him as a sexually pent-up teacher abroad, masturbating over an essay he’s marking. That the scene is an echo of one in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (once named by Doyle as the best book from the past 40 years) hardly lessens our discomfort, and it’s hard not to feel that our unease is precisely the point. “Frankly, a lot of my life has been disastrous,” he once told an interviewer – which might not be quite as self-deprecating as it sounds, given that Doyle has also argued that “great literature” is born of “abjection” not “glory”.

The autofictional game-playing continues in his new novel, Cameo, but instead of self-abasing display, we get a perky book-world send-up for the culture war era, cartoonishly dramatising the ups and downs of creative life. It takes the form of a vertiginous hall of mirrors centred on gazillion-selling Dublin novelist Ren Duka, renowned for a long novel cycle drawn on his own life, the summaries of which comprise the bulk of the book we’re reading. Duka’s work isn’t autofiction à la Knausgård: hardly deskbound, still less under the yoke of domesticity, he leads a jet-set life of peril, mixing with drug dealers, terrorists, spies, and eventually serving time for tax evasion before he develops a crack habit, a penchant for threesomes in Paris and – perhaps least likely of all – returns to his long-forsaken Catholicism.

Published: January 20, 2026, 9:00 am

Animal Crossing’s ​new ​update ​has revive​d ​my ​pandemic ​sanctuary

After years away​ revisiting my abandoned island uncovers new features, old memories and the quiet reassurance that ​you can go home again

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Nintendo’s pandemic-era hit Animal Crossing: New Horizons got another major update last week, along with a £5 Switch 2 upgrade that makes it look and run better on the new console. Last year, I threw a new year’s party for my children in the game, but apart from that I have barely touched my island since the depths of lockdown, when sunny Alba was my preferred escape from the monotonous misery of the real world. Back then, I spent more than 200 hours on this island. Stepping out of her (now massive) house, my avatar’s hair is all ruffled and her eyes sleepy after a long, long time aslumber.

I half-expected Alba to be practically in ruins, but it’s not that bad. Aside from a few cockroaches in the basement and a bunch of weeds poking up from the snow, everything is as it was. The paths that I had laid out around the island still lead me to the shop, the tailors, the museum; I stop by to visit Blathers the curatorial owl, and he gives me a new mission to find a pigeon called Brewster so that we can open a museum cafe. “It’s been four years and eight months!” exclaims one of my longtime residents, a penguin called Aurora. That can’t be right, can it? Have I really been ignoring her since summer 2021? Thankfully, Animal Crossing characters are very forgiving. I get the impression they’ve been getting along perfectly fine without me.

Published: January 21, 2026, 1:00 pm

TR-49 review – inventive narrative deduction game steeped in the strangest of wartime secrets

PC; Inkle
The UK game developer’s latest is a database mystery constructed from an archive of fictional books. Their combined contents threaten to crack the code of reality

Bletchley Park: famed home of the Enigma machine, Colossus computer, and, according to the premise of TR-49, an altogether stranger piece of tech. Two engineers created a machine that feeds on the most esoteric books: treatises on quantum computing, meditations on dark matter, pulp sci-fi novels and more. In the mid-2010s, when the game is set, Britain finds itself again engulfed by war, this time with itself. The arcane tool may hold the key to victory.

You play as budding codebreaker Abbi, a straight-talking northerner who is sifting through the machine now moved to a crypt beneath Manchester Cathedral. She has no idea how it works and neither do you. So you start tinkering. You input a four-digit code – two letters followed by two numbers. What do these correspond to? The initials of people and the year of a particular book’s publication. Input a code correctly and you are whisked away to the corresponding page, as if using a particularly speedy microfiche reader. These pages – say, by famed fictional physicist, Joshua Silverton – are filled with clues and, should you get lucky, further codes and even the titles of particular works. Your primary goal is to match codes with the corresponding book title in a bid to find the most crucial text of all, Endpeace, the key to understanding the erudite ghosts of this machine.

Published: January 21, 2026, 11:15 am

‘A new form of theater’: can Ian McKellen, 52 cameras and ‘mixed reality’ reinvent a medium?

At the Shed in New York, attendees wearing enhanced glasses are witnessing an experimental new play where actors appear in video form

You sit in a circle at the Shed, the cultural center in Manhattan’s futuristic Hudson Yards, waiting for the show to begin. Through your enhanced glasses, you see four empty chairs facing you, just out of reach. You watch strangers look out for the actors to arrive. As they do, one at a time, you feel unsettled – each locks eyes with you, specifically. “Don’t panic,” the esteemed British actor Ian McKellen assures you, as the actors take their seats.

Except the actors are not there, really – McKellen, along with co-stars Golda Rosheuvel, Arinzé Kene and Rosie Sheehy, appears in An Ark, a new play at the Shed, in video form, a nearly opaque specter overlaid on the candy-apple red carpeting and crisp white walls of the theater and the outlines of your 180 or so fellow audience members. The experimental new play, written almost entirely in the second person by Simon Stephens (whose most recent show, the Andrew Scott-starring Vanya, wowed audiences at the Lucille Lortel theater last year), is one of the first so-called “mixed reality” shows staged in New York, blending physical experience with digital elements. Over 47 minutes, the actors address you, the viewer, directly. Their gaze remains trained on you. Don’t panic, they repeatedly assure. (Though due to some technical malfunctions at the preview I attended, there was some panicking.)

Published: January 21, 2026, 10:13 am

‘The rise of fascism makes our work even more important’: Montez Press, champions of queer, feminist art

They published a raunchy book inspired by the Guardian’s Owen Jones; broadcast interviews with obscure punk legends; and make calendars to navigate the world of underground art. Now they’re going global

Stuart McKenzie turns towards a fan on a makeshift stage so his long brunette hair blows in the wind. The artist is dressed in a power suit with thick rimmed glasses, flamboyantly smoking a cigarette as he performs the confessional poetry he’s been writing since the 80s. “Stuart is this fantastic London staple who is just coming out of the woodwork now,” says Emily Pope, the director of Montez Press, who hosted the fundraiser where McKenzie performed to support their queer, feminist press and radio.

McKenzie is a typical Montez Press collaborator: an experimental artist who doesn’t fit neatly into either art, literary or music spaces (although he did recently support the indie band Bar Italia). He’s later in his career than some of the emerging artists they collaborate with but he has Montez Press’s “desire to push boundaries and ask questions,” as Anna Clark, one of the organisation’s founding members, puts it.

Published: January 21, 2026, 11:20 am

‘Soviet attitudes framed local culture as backward’: the record label standing up to Russian imperialism

Ored Recordings documents chants, laments and displacement songs of the Caucasus threatened by erasure. After the invasion of Ukraine, its ‘punk ethnography’ has never been more urgent

In May 2022, a few weeks after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, musician Bulat Khalilov was attending a demonstration in Nalchik, a southern Russian city in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. As he joined a group congregating around the monument to the Circassian victims of Russo-Circassian war, Khalilov was approached by a policeman and sensed trouble. To his surprise, the officer asked: “Are you from Ored Recordings? I follow you on Instagram. You’re doing great.”

Their gathering still had to be dispersed, but the enthusiasm that Ored Recordings inspires even among enforcers of the law speaks volumes about the power of what Khalilov and his friend and label co-founder Timur Kodzoko call “punk ethnography”: the recording of religious chants, laments and displacement songs at family gatherings, local festivals, in people’s kitchens, to fight against the erasure of Circassian culture.

Published: January 21, 2026, 9:01 am

‘I’d come back to the UK – but I’m not playing a cop’: Oscar-tipped Wunmi Mosaku on sensational vampire smash Sinners

She grew up on a Manchester council estate. Now she’s gone stratospheric for her pivotal role in Sinners. The star talks about leaving Britain for LA – and the £30 bus trip that changed her life

‘I do love a Greggs,” says Wunmi Mosaku, as she settles into a sofa in a hotel in London’s Holborn. She’s extolling the virtues of the high-street baker after I jokingly suggested that’s what she could have for lunch, now she’s back in the UK from her base in Los Angeles. Despite being Stateside for the best part of a decade, she has lost none of her Manchester twang or sense of humour.

“You know what I love about Greggs?” she asks, leaning in. “In each city, they have something specific to that place. So in London, they’ve got the Tottenham cake. Manchester’s got the Eccles cake. In Liverpool, they’ve got the scouse pie. In Newcastle, they’ve got … a ton of breads. You can’t get them anywhere else!”

Published: January 20, 2026, 4:35 pm

The place that stayed with me: on a wild, misty river I learned I have the strength for almost anything

At first Stephanie Wood felt out of her depth rafting the Franklin, but by the end, a world of new possibilities had opened up

I am old, I am unfit for this project and I am colder than hell frozen over but I am also stuck. A helicopter will not winch me out because my only injuries are the agonies of dodgy hips, screaming arm muscles and deeply wounded pride.

And there are miles and days to go before I sleep again on a mattress with clean sheets and a pillow and luxuriate in a hot shower and can be propelled forward in ways that do not require the use of my arms.

Published: January 21, 2026, 2:00 pm

Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: 2026 will be the year of the skirt – and no, it doesn’t have to be short

I’ve got a feeling this is the year skirts regain their main character energy

I never stopped wearing skirts, I just sort of stopped thinking about them. They were a plus-one, not the main event. For the past few years I have planned my outfits around my obsession with pleated trousers, or my latest experimental jean shape. Or I have worn dresses. Sometimes I have ended up in a skirt, but the skirt was kind of an afterthought. For instance, at one point last year when it was chilly and I needed to look smart as well as cosy, I picked out a sweater and a pair of knee-high boots, and then slotted in a plain midi in satin or wool, just something to sit in between.

Things could be about to change. I’ve got a feeling that 2026 could be the year that skirts get main character energy again. For a start: hemlines are getting shorter again, which makes skirts more attention-grabbing. If you left the house with your eyes open at any point in 2025, you will have noticed this happening: generation Z and Alpha wear very, very short skirts – she says, trying and failing not to sound about 150 years old – but the trend for above-the-knee hemlines crosses all generations. Adult women with their legs out was very much a feature of the pre-Christmas party season. But what is noticeable is that the mini renaissance is much more about a skirt, than it is about a dress. A short skirt feels cooler; more about your style and less about your body than a minidress.

Published: January 21, 2026, 2:00 pm

‘I’d give anything just to see her again’: owners’ grief for their beloved pets

As a study says a pet death can hurt as much as that of a relative, three people describe their emotions

Grief over the death of a pet could be as chronic as that for a human family member, according to research. The study, published in the academic journal PLOS One, suggests grieving pet owners can suffer from prolonged grief disorder (PGD).

PGD is a mental health condition that can last months or even years, and often involves intense longing and despair, and problems socialising and going about daily tasks. Currently, only those grieving the loss of a person can be diagnosed.

Published: January 20, 2026, 6:00 am

Divorce rings: why women are celebrating their breakups

From repurposed engagement rings to parties, tattoos and the wild home renovations of #DivorcedMomCore, relationship splits have entered a surprising new era

Name: Divorce rings.

Age: Relatively new. British Vogue is reporting that they are a thing. And if it’s in Vogue the chances are it’s in vogue.

Published: January 20, 2026, 2:47 pm

Does it even need to be said? No, you don’t need to do a ‘parasite cleanse’

Pricey deworming remedies are being touted as cure-alls. Supermodel Heidi Klum gave it a go – experts roll their eyes

Last August, supermodel Heidi Klum revealed that she and her husband, Tom Kaulitz, were planning a worm and parasite cleanse.

“Everything on my Instagram feed at the moment is about worms and parasites,” she told the Wall Street Journal, ominously adding: “I don’t know what the heck is going to come out.”

Published: January 20, 2026, 12:00 pm

Gut check: are at-home microbiome tests a way to ‘hack your health’ or simply a waste? | Antiviral

Spruiked by online influencers as a way of gaining insight into our health, experts say at-home tests oversimplify complex factors and can cause unnecessary distress

• Read more in the Antiviral series

For a few hundred dollars you can put your poo in an envelope and post it off to a laboratory. In return you’ll get a report (sometimes generated by AI) outlining your food sensitivities, metabolic fitness, and what pathogens or fungi you’re harbouring.

These at-home gut microbiome tests or “GI mapping” kits are frequently promoted by influencers as a way to “hack your health” and “take control” through analysing some of the trillions of organisms that live in your digestive tract.

Published: January 20, 2026, 2:00 pm

Write a card, read a poem, take fewer photos: how to feel more human in 2026

While ‘touch grass’ has become a popular prescription for a less digital life, choosing social friction over efficiency can also feel curative

At the turn of the millennium daily life looked very different. The modern internet was just a decade old, mobile phones were far from universal and our social lives were mostly physical – and local.

In the 25 years since, technology has changed how we live in profound ways. Most people check their phone within minutes of waking and return to it on average 186 times a day. Computers and the systems that sit behind them mediate every aspect of modern life, shaping how we move through the world.

Published: January 20, 2026, 2:00 pm

The truth about health patches: can they really treat stress, spots and lost libido?

For three weeks, I wore stickers on my skin supposed to address all sorts of conditions. Are they a panacea, problem or performance?

This morning, I woke up feeling a little groggy. My go-to remedy is usually a coffee and cold-water face plunge, followed by a compulsive phone scroll. But today called for something more, so I unpeeled a small, yellow “energy” patch the size of a walnut, popped it on to my upper arm and hoped for the best.

The patch (£12 for 30) contains – so the packaging says – vitamins B5, B3 and a “microdose” of caffeine. It is made by Kind Patches, which is one brand in an increasingly crowded market of wellness stickers that claim to treat everything from lack of sleep to period pains to pimples. They are coin-sized, and often come in TikTok-friendly shades of sunflower yellow and peachy orange: you may have seen a teenager sporting a star-shaped one on their face to treat spots, or influencers patting blue magnesium ones on their wrists before bed.

Published: January 20, 2026, 5:00 am

‘A new aristocracy’: Jonathan Anderson muses on eccentricity at Dior menswear show

Musée Rodin was the venue for the designer’s second men’s show for the house, and he sought to shun normality

He is one of fashion’s greatest ruminators so where better than the Musée Rodin in Paris to stage Jonathan Anderson’s second menswear show for Dior. Guests including the actors Robert Pattinson and Mia Goth, and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton wandered past Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker as they made their way to their seats on Wednesday afternoon.

Speaking backstage before the show, Anderson, dressed in his signature faded Levi’s jeans and a navy cashmere sweater, described the collection as “another character study”, explaining that this time he set out to explore “the idea of a new aristocracy”, questioning “what it means today” and “what can it be?” The-41-year old designer said when it came to the social hierarchy he wanted to “ignore the aspect of money” and instead home in on “their eccentricity”.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:06 pm

My analogue month: would ditching my smartphone make me healthier, happier – or more stressed?

When I swapped my iPhone for a Nokia, Walkman, film camera and physical map, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But my life soon started to change

When two balaclava-clad men on a motorbike mounted the pavement to rob me, recently, I remained oblivious. My eyes were pinned to a text message on my phone, and my hands were so clawed around it that they didn’t even bother to grab it. It wasn’t until an elderly woman shrieked and I felt the whoosh of air as the bike launched back on to the road that I looked up at all. They might have been unsuccessful but it did make me think: what else am I missing from the real world around me?

Before I’ve poured my first morning coffee I’ve already watched the lives of strangers unfold on Instagram, checked the headlines, responded to texts, swiped through some matches on a dating app, and refreshed my emails, twice. I check Apple Maps for my quickest route to work. I’ve usually left it too late to get the bus, so I rent a Lime bike using the app. During the day, my brother sends me some memes, I take a picture of a canal boat, and pay for my lunch on Apple Pay. I walk home listening to music on Spotify and a long voice note from a friend, then I watch a nondescript TV drama, while scrolling through Depop and Vinted for clothes.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:00 am

The pub that changed me: ‘I was snowed in there for four days’

We had a mass snowball fight and a disco, and I slept in a room full of drunk men with wet socks. It was fun, but in future snowstorms I won’t be rushing to the pub

In all my years of reporting, nothing seems to fascinate people more than the four days I spent snowed in at Britain’s highest pub last year. It was early January and the Met Office had issued severe warnings for snow. It dawned on me that people were about to live out a British fantasy of being snowed in at their local pub. I knew where I needed to be: The Tan Hill Inn, high up in the wilderness on the very northern edge of the Yorkshire Dales national park.

Published: January 21, 2026, 11:00 am

A moment that changed me: my client was accused of a crime he didn’t commit – and it led me to confront my past

As a defence lawyer, I rely on witness statements. But one unusual case prompted me to reconsider the role of memory, and a traumatic experience that had affected me for years

I spent nearly 20 years working as a criminal defence lawyer in the remote communities of the Canadian Arctic. Nunavut – roughly the size of western Europe – is home to fewer than 40,000 people, most of whom are Inuit. The brief summers boast endless days, while polar night descends over long winters where temperatures occasionally drop as low as -50C. Despite the lack of urban centres and a small, homogenous population, the territory records one of the highest violent-crime rates per capita in the world.

There are no roads connecting Nunavut’s 26 communities. Aircraft is the only option, except for a brief ice-free window in late summer when supplies and fuel can be delivered by boat. Several times a year, the justice system arrives: a travelling circuit court sets up a temporary courtroom in local gymnasiums or community halls for three to four days.

Published: January 21, 2026, 6:55 am

I do not want to reconcile with my family, says Brooklyn Peltz Beckham

Son of David and Victoria Beckham takes to Instagram to open up about feud with parents

A very public spat on social media captured global attention and filled the front pages on Tuesday with its grave consequences for a once close relationship.

No, not the US president Donald Trump slamming the UK for its “extreme stupidity” but this was Brooklyn Peltz Beckham, son of David and Victoria Beckham, apparently permanently cutting ties with his family.

Published: January 20, 2026, 8:46 am

The influencer racing to save Thailand’s most endangered sea mammal

Amateur conservationist and social media influencer Theerasak 'Pop' Saksritawee has a rare bond with Thailand’s critically endangered dugongs. With dugong fatalities increasing, Pop works alongside scientists at Phuket Marine Biological Centre to track the mammals with his drone and restore their disappearing seagrass habitat. Translating complex science for thousands online, Pop raises an urgent alarm about climate change, pollution and habitat loss — before Thailand’s dugongs vanish forever

Published: January 20, 2026, 10:58 am

‘All these souls deserve a dignified rest’: Ukraine’s ‘body seekers’ bring home the fallen

Driven by a belief in a common humanity, the Platzdarm search team bring the bodies of soldiers back from the frontline – no matter which side they fought on

Alexei clears his throat without showing the slightest expression on his face. Squatting and wearing gloves, he shakes the military uniform that once belonged to a man. The jacket and trousers still hold their shape, but inside there is nothing. Just air.

Alexei pulls out a worn, stained piece of paper from one of the pockets. “Andrei. Moscow,” he reads aloud. “There’s a phone number written here. Good. It helps us trace his origin.” Whoever he was, he was a Russian soldier.

Finding bodies from both sides is common at the front – the remains pile up after a battle

Published: January 21, 2026, 8:00 am

‘I felt numb’: German bank heist victims devastated after thieves ransack 3,000 deposit boxes

Gelsenkirchen savings bank was raided over Christmas by criminals who used huge drill to access vault

Faqir Malyar, a carpet trader from the western German city of Gelsenkirchen, was on his way to visit one of his customers during the Christmas holidays when he heard news on the radio of an astonishing bank heist. Thieves had drilled a hole in the wall of the vault of a local Sparkasse – savings bank – and made off with the contents of almost 3,250 deposit boxes.

The robbery, likened by a police spokesperson to the Hollywood film Ocean’s Eleven, made international headlines: it is estimated that the thieves’ haul could have been worth as much as €300m (£260m), a sum that would make it the one of the biggest bank heists in a country wearily familiar with them.

Published: January 21, 2026, 5:00 am

Tell us: what are you wearing and why does it matter?

Our clothes can be one of the most powerful non-verbal communicators – tell us yours reflect who you are and what you do?

From uniforms to suits to tracksuits to costumes, clothes keep us warm and covered – but they are also one of the most powerful non-verbal communicators, a second skin which reflects who you are and what you do.

We want to hear from people about why they wear what they wear. Do your clothes help you in the workplace? Are they making a statement? Maybe you’re a waiter and have worn the same work uniform for years, or maybe your job involves wearing very little. Please tell us about yourselves.

Published: January 20, 2026, 2:44 pm

Trump, tractors and camels on parade: photos of the day – Wednesday

The Guardian’s picture editors select some of the most powerful photos from around the world

Published: January 21, 2026, 1:19 pm