‘Oh my God, did someone accuse me of killing my mom?’

Rachel Waters gave morphine to her dying mother to ease her in her final hours. Then came the murder charge

Rachel Waters was in her apartment in Queens, watching food reviews on YouTube, when a nurse called: her mother was dying.

She needed to get to the memory care facility in Evans, Georgia, immediately. A physician had said Marsha could pass within hours.

Published: April 7, 2026, 11:00 am

DC’s highly qualified workers can’t find jobs: ‘What is happening?’

Washington DC has the highest unemployment rate in the US

Alicia Contreras was in Tunisia, working as the deputy country representative for Libya for USAID, when she received the news: she was fired. The Trump administration had ceased the cooperation agency’s operations and terminated most overseas staff. What she didn’t expect back then was that after a double major, an MBA and 17 years of experience as a public servant, she wouldn’t be able to find a job back at home.

Contreras moved back to the Washington DC area last September and immediately started her job search. She looked for positions in both the public and private sectors, in-person, hybrid and remote. She focused her search mostly on the US capital city and its two nearby states, Maryland and Virginia, because of her family commitments: she has two children, ages three and six. Six months later, none of her close to 100 applications have been successful.

Published: April 7, 2026, 11:00 am

‘Italy has the best benefits’: Milan takes on Dubai as home for the super-rich

With the UAE under fire from Iranian missiles, wealthy investors are turning to Italy’s flat-tax haven

Just over a month ago, Dubai was the obvious destination for wealthy Britons in search of a new home. Few cities allow you to earn vast sums tax-free and spend them across any number of luxury hotels, restaurants and shops.

But as the United Arab Emirates comes under Iranian fire, Dubai’s reputation – in part created by emigrant influencers – as a haven for the global elite is eroding. Super-rich UK nationals are now looking for a route back to Europe; and Milan, the financial centre of Italy, is climbing to the top of the list.

Published: April 7, 2026, 4:00 am

From ‘stink bugs’ to ‘enemies of the people’: how Viktor Orbán blazed a trail for Trump’s media assaults | Amrit Singh

Hungary’s prime minister has conducted a systematic attack on independent media. The parallels with the US are chilling

During his state of the nation address earlier this year, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, outlined a chilling vision of the country’s future. Signalling a new level of aggression in his campaign against the truth if he is returned to power in elections on 12 April, Orbán vowed to purge the country of “bought journalists” and “fake civil society organisations”.

Media repression isn’t just a Hungarian problem. According to the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, a leading democracy monitor, it is the most commonly used weapon in the authoritarian arsenal. Strikingly, its latest report finds that US democracy is now at its worst level since the 1960s, marked by a sharp decline in media freedom.

Amrit Singh is professor of practice and founding faculty director of the Rule of Law Lab at NYU School of Law

Published: April 7, 2026, 4:00 am

‘Coke and booze didn’t help my creativity’: Joe Eszterhas on his wild times – and his supernatural, anti-woke Basic Instinct reboot

He was the screenwriting colossus behind Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Showgirls and more. Now clean, ‘Hollywood’s Shakespeare’ talks about today’s scared studios, his refugee trauma – and taking acid with Hunter S Thompson

Joe Eszterhas was the swaggering pitchman of 80s and 90s Hollywood; the king of the high-concept, precision-tooled blockbuster. He wrote Jagged Edge, co-scripted Flashdance, and pocketed a then record $3m for his Basic Instinct screenplay. Writers typically skulk near the bottom of the industry food chain but Eszterhas flipped the script to make himself a boss and a brand. ABC called him a “living legend”, while Time magazine posed a breathless rhetorical question: “If Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Eszterhas?”

Pride, as any hack writer will tell you, usually comes before a fall, and so it was with Eszterhas, who confused success with excess and barely got out of the business alive. “The coke and the booze,” he says, remembering. “Those weren’t helping my creativity, they were holding it back.” His best years in Hollywood were conversely his worst.

Published: April 7, 2026, 4:00 am

As Iran war exposes global dependence on fossil fuels, the biggest emitters are reaping the rewards

Worst polluters hold world’s future in their hands as they benefit from higher fossil fuel prices, but global trends favour renewables

Oil stands at about $110 a barrel and some forecasts have predicted it could reach $150. Food prices are on the rise and are expected to leap further owing to the fertiliser supply crunch, leading the World Food Programme USA to warn that global food insecurity could reach record levels, with 45 million more people pushed into acute hunger. Industries from steel to chemicals have alerted markets that they face shortages and soaring costs, while households across the world are feeling the pinch – people have been told to turn down their thermostats, take the bus or cycle, and cut their speed on motorways.

The impact of the US-Israel war on Iran – the third global shock in six years, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic – has laid bare how reliant our economies still are on fossil fuels. Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, said in March: “Fossil fuel dependency is ripping away national security and sovereignty and replacing it with subservience and rising costs.”

Published: April 7, 2026, 5:00 am

Middle East crisis live: Trump says he is ‘not at all’ worried about possible war crimes as his deadline for Iran nears

Israel warns Iranians to immediately stop using trains or being near railway lines, saying it would ‘endanger’ their lives

Here are some of the latest images coming in from the Middle East as the war continues in week six.

The Israeli military has just warned the people of Iran not to use trains, saying that doing so “endangers your life”.

Dear Citizens, for the sake of your security, we kindly request that from this moment until 21:00 Iran time, you refrain from using and travelling by train throughout Iran.

Your presence on trains and near railway lines endangers your life.

Published: April 7, 2026, 11:11 am

US is ‘using Mexico as a garbage sink’ leading to ‘toxic crisis’, UN expert says

Marcos Orellana, a special rapporteur, found lax environmental standards and lack of oversight allowed pollution to accumulate

Mexico is facing a “toxic crisis” and has become a “garbage sink” for the US, exposing Mexican communities to dangerous pollution, a UN expert has warned.

In an interview with the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab, an investigative outlet, Marcos Orellana, an environmental specialist, said pollutants ranging from imported waste to dangerous pesticides are affecting people’s right to live healthy lives.

Published: April 7, 2026, 10:00 am

Melissa Gilbert denies being ‘naive’ or ‘complicit’ in standing by Timothy Busfield despite sexual abuse claims

The actor whose husband is charged with child sexual abuse says she believes ‘his side of the story’ is ‘the truth’

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Melissa Gilbert contends she is “neither naive nor … complicit” having married and deciding to stand by her fellow actor Timothy Busfield amid numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, saying she exclusively has “heard his side of the story” and that it is “the truth”.

“I know this man in my bones,” the former Little House on the Prairie cast member remarked in an interview on Monday’s edition of Good Morning America. “No one knows him better than I do.”

Published: April 7, 2026, 9:00 am

Members of neo-Nazi ‘active clubs’ join combat events at secretive Virginia compound

Licensed school teacher and one-time police officer among those participating in riot-style gatherings as experts warn of threat to public safety

A network of militant neo-Nazi active clubs from around the US has been participating in riot-style combat events with other white nationalist groups in Virginia as part of what their founder called a “tip-off point for a fascist cultural revolution”.

Social media posts and group chats show members of so-called active clubs from Texas, Tennessee and Pennsylvania have in recent weeks and months travelled to Lynchburg, Virginia to train together at a secretive compound. The compound is run by the Wolves of Vinland, which the civil rights watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a neopagan white nationalist hate group. Also present were members of the white supremacist hate group Patriot Front and the neo-Nazi skinhead group known as the Hammerskins.

Published: April 7, 2026, 11:00 am

Wisconsin votes in supreme court race amid threat of midterm election attacks

Liberals see chance to strengthen majority in state where Trump and allies could try to overturn election results

Wisconsin voters on Tuesday will select a state supreme court judge to replace an outgoing conservative in a race that could further solidify the liberal majority on the bench ahead of the midterms, when Trump and his allies could try to overturn election results again.

Justice Rebecca Bradley, a conservative, is retiring, giving liberals a chance to further consolidate their hold on the high court ahead of the next presidential election, when the swing state is sure to see challenges to election results.

Published: April 7, 2026, 10:00 am

Government shutdown enters eighth week as Johnson faces GOP revolt over DHS funding deal – US politics live

The partial government shutdown has now lasted eight weeks with Congress on recess until 13 April

Mexico is facing a “toxic crisis” and has become a “garbage sink” for the US, exposing Mexican communities to dangerous pollution, a UN expert has warned.

In an interview with the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab, an investigative outlet, Marcos Orellana, an environmental specialist, said pollutants ranging from imported waste to dangerous pesticides are affecting people’s right to live healthy lives.

Published: April 7, 2026, 10:58 am

Blackouts, broken records and a message from the past: five key moments from Artemis II’s lunar flyby

Crew of Orion capsule spent emotional day documenting surface of moon – and paying homage to astronauts who paved the way

• Artemis II sets new record as astronauts travel farther from Earth than ever before

On the sixth day of a lunar mission that has rekindled global interest in space exploration and reinvigorated Nasa’s aims to return to the moon, the astronauts of Artemis II flew further from Earth than any human before them.

Across a six-hour flyby, the crew of the Orion capsule captured views of the moon’s far side that have never been seen before – while honouring the astronauts who paved the way for their record-breaking mission.

Published: April 7, 2026, 1:17 am

JD Vance meets Orbán on visit ahead of knife-edge Hungarian election – Europe live

Hungary’s opposition leader Péter Magyar responds to JD Vance’s visit by saying ‘no foreign country may interfere in Hungarian elections’

… and here they are!

JD Vance and Usha Vance off the Air Force Two, welcomed by Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó as they begin their two-day trip to the Hungarian capital.

Published: April 7, 2026, 11:14 am

Ben Roberts-Smith arrested: former Australian soldier charged with five war crime murders in Afghanistan

Roberts-Smith previously failed in his attempt to sue three newspapers which published allegations he murdered unarmed civilians and bullied comrades

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Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, has been arrested at Sydney airport and charged with war crimes.

The Australian federal police and the Office of the Special Investigator announced details of the investigation in Sydney on Tuesday after midday.

Published: April 7, 2026, 9:06 am

Drone racing to drone strikes: have war and sport become indistinguishable?

The Trump administration’s pushing of the war in Iran reflects a sporting culture driven by clipped-up content, shameless tribalism and a lust for escalation

Among the more surprising continuities of 2026 has been the visual kinship between the Winter Olympics and the US’s illegal and unprovoked war in Iran. High-speed camera drones were a highlight of TV coverage of the recent Games in Milano Cortina, bringing viewers within kissing distance of the action as Olympic athletes hurtled down the slopes and around the tracks in the skiing and sliding events. The incessant screech of the drones aside, the introduction of quadcopter-borne cameras felt like a real step forward in coverage of the winter sports, bringing a (literal) new perspective to events that had become, over recent decades, fairly static as a viewing experience.

No sooner had the Olympics finished than aerial video was back on our screens – only the footage, in this case, was of a far darker variety. In place of the ludicrous hip flexibility of the slaloming skiers and the high-speed cornering of the monobobbers, for the past month our feeds have been flooded with satellite and drone imagery of the US military blowing Iranian aircraft, ships, vehicles, munitions buildings, and citizens to smithereens. The aerial perspective that brought the strength and speed and elasticity and joy of Olympic competition to our screens now transmits the daily horrors of war in easily snackable, two-minute clips on to our phones. In the era of the milkshake duck, it’s almost expected that anything positive in our culture will eventually turn sour – and technology, of course, is ethically agnostic, a tool that can be used for both good and evil ends. But even in a culture as depraved and hypocritical as ours, the seamless transition from drone-supplied footage of Olympic excellence to drone-supplied footage of war crimes has felt genuinely jarring.

Published: April 7, 2026, 11:00 am

A gangster, a bogus inheritance and a dead 19-year-old: the mystery Patrick Radden Keefe couldn’t ignore

When Zac Brettler jumped to his death in London, the coroner recorded an open verdict, admitting: ‘I don’t know what happened.’ The acclaimed author of Say Nothing and, now, London Falling, talks about his search for answers

In the summer of 2023, the American writer and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe was in London for the filming of Say Nothing, the television adaptation of his much-lauded, much-awarded account of a Troubles murder. It was there, on set, that Keefe got talking to a visitor, a friend of the director, who happened to tell Keefe about friends of his, the Brettlers, a London family who had experienced something tragic, strange and terrible.

Rachelle and Matthew Brettler’s 19-year-old son, Zac, had died in November 2019 when he jumped from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. There had been no reason to believe he was suicidal – but plenty to suggest that he was very afraid. Zac had spent his last few months in the orbit of two men who believed him to be the son of a Russian oligarch, heir to a £200m legacy. Both men had been with Zac on the night he died – one had been in the apartment at the time – and gave varying accounts in police interviews. The family believed that the Met response had been full of holes – key witnesses hadn’t been formally interviewed, bloodstains on the apartment walls hadn’t been tested – and the investigation concluded in 2021 with the Crown Prosecution Service deciding there was insufficient evidence to bring charges for murder and perverting the course of justice. The inquest in 2022 ended in an open verdict. “I can’t fill in the gaps; I can’t speculate,” the coroner concluded. “I don’t know what happened.”

Published: April 7, 2026, 4:00 am

‘I see it as trafficking’: the brutal reality of life as a foreign student in the UK

Universities in Britain rely on overseas applicants paying full fees, which has given rise to some unscrupulous recruiters and left many hopefuls and their families deep in debt

When Sam started looking into studying abroad, it didn’t take long for his phone to start ringing. At 24, he was living with his parents in a small city in the southern Indian state of Odisha and he’d been stuck in an entry-level job for four years. He hoped a master’s degree in the UK might lead to a high-flying finance job in London, or at least give him an edge when he came back home.

After filling in a few forms on study abroad websites, Sam soon started receiving calls from unknown numbers. Eventually, he answered one. The person on the phone was an education agent – a recruiter who helps students apply to foreign universities – pitching his services. The offer sounded appealing. The agency would help Sam decide which universities to apply to, advising on the most suitable courses and where he had the best chance of admission. They would help draft his application, and if he got in, assist with immigration. They would do all of this for free. “I was sceptical,” said Sam. “Like, why would you do that?”

Published: April 7, 2026, 4:00 am

The Stranger review – lustrously beautiful and superbly realised modern take on the Camus classic

François Ozon’s adaptation of the 1942 novella L’Etranger passionately honours the original text while bringing a contemporary perspective to its themes of empire and race

A heatstricken reverie of violence and mystery unfolds in this film, a numb ecstasy of the inexplicable, as experienced by a sensitive white European under the unbearable noonday sun. Set in 1940s French Algeria (and filmed in Morocco), François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.

An archive reel introduces us briskly to Algiers and its casbah, with a hint of Julien Duvivier’s Pépé Le Moko; then we are shown our antihero Meursault, remanded there on trial for the capital crime of murder, played with many an unreadable moue of listless unconcern by Benjamin Voisin. Flashbacks show us his dull office job in Algiers, where he turns down a promotion and transfer to Paris, one of his many shrugging gestures of indifference to his own interests.

Published: April 7, 2026, 8:00 am

‘I felt ashamed and scared’: how an online friendship became a sextortion nightmare

Thomas found connection online after moving to a rural village with no friends nearby. Then things started to spiral

• Children in UK report online sextortion attempts in record numbers

“I still describe them as the best friend I’ve had.”

Thomas* knows how it sounds, but it’s his honest description of what he initially thought was an online friendship with another teenager who, just as he did, felt lonely and like he didn’t quite fit in at school.

Published: April 7, 2026, 5:00 am

Sluts, simps and body shaming: the rise of Africa’s manosphere

Experts have been alarmed at the growth of deep misogyny dressed up as self-help on social media. We profile seven men from across the continent who are gaining traction

It is not just Europe and the US that are grappling with a growing landscape of misogynistic influencers online. While Andrew Tate, Myron Gaines, Sneako and other voices grow in toxicity in the manosphere of the west, across Africa – which has more than 400 million people aged between 15 and 35 – several individuals are gaining traction.

The manosphere is a loose network of communities that claim to address men’s struggles such as dating and fitness, but often promote harmful misogynistic attitudes. Sunita Caminha, who leads UN Women on ending violence against women and girls in east and southern Africa, first started noticing its presence in Africa about five years ago, and believes it is on the rise. “Research and data that keeps coming out is very consistent [in] showing this is an alarming issue in different countries and contexts across the continent.”

Published: April 7, 2026, 6:00 am

‘I couldn’t see, breathe or sing. I blacked out twice’: why are so many metal bands wearing masks?

From Sleep Token to Ghost and Slaughter to Prevail, the genre’s biggest stars are using freaky facial disguises. Are they hiding behind them – or revealing their true nature?

When US avant garde metal band Imperial Triumphant decided that their image needed a shake-up in 2015, they considered putting on corpse paint, the ghastly makeup popularised by 90s black metal. But, their singer/guitarist Zachary Ezrin says, they then realised how much effort it would take – and how uncool the post-gig rituals would feel: “You just rocked a show, and now you have to sit backstage and wipe off your makeup.” (Perish the thought of being the average female pop star.)

They instead chose to wear striking gold masks modelled after 1920s art deco architecture, though these brought their own problems when they got lost in transit. “We had to do one show where Steve [Blanco, bass] was wearing a new mask that we put together from parts. We went to some Hungarian costume shop and just started grabbing stuff and piecing it together.”

Published: April 7, 2026, 9:25 am

Want to know capitalism’s endgame? Just look at private equity – it has captured our everyday lives | Hettie O'Brien

These companies now own everything from nurseries to care homes, squeezing vital services for profit while we foot the bill

It was the free croissants that gave it away. And the Scandinavian-style furniture. And the tasteful pastel walls. It was different from other nurseries I’d viewed: marginally more expensive, the aesthetic equivalent of a WeWork for toddlers. I was eight months pregnant, on a tour of various nurseries in south-east London for my daughter. At the time, I didn’t realise that this wasn’t just a nursery, but a prototype for an immense experiment that is quietly playing out across Britain.

The nursery I visited is backed by private equity, a surreptitious and tremendously powerful realm of finance that now has its hands on just about everything. Private equity funds and related asset managers own water companies, apartment blocks, student accommodation, care homes, children’s homes, funeral parlours and more. The titans of this industry have perfected a cradle-to-grave model of investment focused on the places we live, work, grow old, and eventually die, capturing these core services and squeezing them for profit.

Hettie O’Brien is a regular contributor to the Guardian Long Read, an assistant Opinion editor and the author of The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself, published 9 April

Published: April 7, 2026, 5:00 am

Let’s stop going into space. There’s nothing to see and no one to talk to | Zoe Williams

I’ve nothing against astronauts or scientific innovation. But what’s the point of Artemis II?

It is absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless, and the more urgent the crises besetting this planet we live on, the more pointless it becomes. I can see why people got excited about it in the 1960s, back when the world was young and we still thought there might be little green people out there – who wouldn’t want to meet them? Most serious opinion, however, has now settled on the “Where is everybody?” paradox first framed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. If there is intelligent life anywhere, why has it not sought to make contact? It’s because there isn’t. There’s nothing out there except planets infinitely less beautiful than this one we live on.

All that seems pretty uncontroversial, and I almost never mention it, except for when astronauts yet again pointlessly go into space, as with the latest moon mission. Here’s what I’ve noticed: people get really annoyed. I have loads of opinions way more vexatious than that one, yet none of them attract the same ire. Everyone’s annoyed for a different reason – some of them think I’m deliberately setting out to ruin a festivity; others act as though I’m opposing innovation and modernity, which I absolutely am not. They point to all the discoveries that wouldn’t have been made without the space-based wanderlust, most of which seem to involve finding better ways to kill each other, and then they mourn the kind of world I want to live in, where nobody can see beyond their own horizon.

Published: April 7, 2026, 10:00 am

A new economic superpower could spark a global retreat from fossil fuels | Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope

Eighty-five countries have sought a roadmap to phasing out fossil fuels. A conference this month offers hope they could unite

• This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now

The Iran war is also a climate war. Beyond its terrible human costs, the war’s disruptions of oil, gas, fertilizer and other shipments is another reminder of the risks inherent in basing the world economy on fossil fuels. The war’s jets, missiles and aircraft carriers, and the tankers, refineries and buildings they blow up, represent millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions that further imperil a climate system that is already “very close” to a point of no return, scientists say, after which runaway global warming could not be stopped. Nevertheless, petrostate leaders around the world continue doing their utmost to stave off a desperately needed course correction.

Now, a little noticed ray of hope may be peeking over the horizon.

Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope are co-founders of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now

Published: April 7, 2026, 10:00 am

In the Rohingya refugee camps, we really want you to keep the gas running | Ajas Khan

Aid cuts mean the ethnically-cleansed refugees from Myanmar face a return to cooking over toxic flames, or keeping children out of school to spend all day scouring for firewood

Four years ago the US recognised the genocide of my people, and nations around the world came to our aid. Today, we ask the world to reaffirm that commitment. What do we ask for that will save lives, the local habitat and even dollars for Rohingya refugees?

Cooking gas.

Published: April 7, 2026, 5:00 am

Nicola Jennings on Artemis II reaching the far side of the moon – cartoon

Continue reading...

Published: April 6, 2026, 2:59 pm

The Guardian view on Trump’s apocalyptic threats: a sign not of strength, but of moral and strategic weakness | Editorial

An expletive-ridden post on social media shamed the office of the US president. Its substantive message, if acted on, would be a war crime

Article 52 of the first additional protocol to the Geneva conventions prohibits attacks on civilian targets. It is on those grounds that the international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for Russian military officers and officials responsible for attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Such assaults, and the missiles rained on Ukrainian cities and towns in order to terrify and demoralise, constitute war crimes. Exactly the same would apply to the United States, should Donald Trump’s threats to bomb Iran back to the “stone age” this week be carried out.

Such basic tenets of international law bear repeating at a time when Mr Trump and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, appear to speak as if from within a bloodthirsty fever dream. Glorying repulsively in his capacity to order death and destruction from the Pentagon, Mr Hegseth, an Evangelical Christian, has presented Operation Epic Fury as a 21st-century crusade “to break the teeth of the ungodly”. On social media at the weekend, Mr Trump topped that by unleashing a stream of expletive-ridden abuse, ranting that unless Iran reopens the strait of Hormuz to shipping, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day … Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell”.

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: April 6, 2026, 6:09 pm

Michigan outlasts UConn to win first NCAA men’s basketball title since 1989

• Elliot Cadeau scored 19 points and won Final Four MOP

• Foul trouble haunts Huskies in low-scoring affair

• As it happened: Read Beau Dure’s live play-by-play

High-scoring Michigan had to get down and dirty to dig out the national title Monday, making only two three-pointers all night but still muscling its way to a 69-63 victory over stingy, stubborn UConn.

Elliot Cadeau led the Wolverines with 19 points, including the team’s first basket from beyond the arc, which came 7:04 into the second half. He was later named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four.

Published: April 7, 2026, 3:38 am

Jason Day hits out at ‘selfish’ Tiger Woods after DUI charge

• Australian golfer saddened by his ‘hero’ facing struggle with addiction

• Five-time Masters champion to miss first major after car crash and arrest

Australian ace Jason Day has expressed sadness at Tiger Woods’ plight but taken issue with the golf great’s “selfish” judgement for driving under the influence.

Woods has reportedly checked himself into rehab in Switzerland after being arrested and charged on 27 March after crashing his car near his home on Jupiter Island in Florida.

Published: April 7, 2026, 12:38 am

The FA Cup still has an important place. This weekend was proof

From exposed anxieties to unexpected heroes, this weekend’s cup contests papered over a weird three-week Premier League break

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The soccer calendar has been particularly quirky this year. There’s always an international break in March, but because this year’s edition involved World Cup qualifying playoffs, most games were scheduled for the Thursday and the Tuesday, which meant there was very little soccer played over the weekend; barely even a smattering of friendlies.

For a Saturday in early spring, it all felt very weird; it was a day for pacing the floors, wondering how on earth people who don’t like soccer fill the time. And with the Carabao Cup final falling the previous Sunday, and the FA Cup sixth round this weekend, that has meant a three-week hiatus in the title race. Which has been disorienting and, perhaps, not entirely to Arsenal’s benefit.

Published: April 6, 2026, 3:45 pm

USMNT striker Patrick Agyemang leaves Derby County game on stretcher

• Agyemang went down with a non-contact injury

• US striker scored in friendly v Belgium

Patrick Agyemang left Derby County’s match on a stretcher after an apparent non-contact injury. The US international striker rose to settle a ball in the 37th minute and collapsed to the ground, with photographs from Pride Park showing the Derby medical staff tending to his left ankle.

On-site accounts reported that the 25-year-old leapt to control the ball with his chest before landing awkwardly and falling to ground. Play was stopped for five minutes before Agyemang was stretchered off. His replacement, Jaydon Banel, scored the opening goal to boost the Rams’ chances of promotion.

Published: April 6, 2026, 4:42 pm

Pogacar among riders under investigation after running red light during Tour of Flanders

• Slovenian cyclist said signal to stop came too late

• Riders could face fine and suspension if found guilty

Tadej Pogacar is among the riders being investigated for running a red light at a railway crossing during the Tour de Flanders on Sunday. Pogacar, who won the race for a record-equalling third time, was in a group of riders who went through the crossing without stopping. Most of the peloton behind them had to stop before the railway.

Belgian officials confirmed on Monday there was an investigation into the riders who allegedly ran the red light. They said no further details were immediately available. Local media said the riders could face a fine and driving suspension if found guilty.

Published: April 6, 2026, 2:06 pm

Retirement gnome? Masters miniatures rumoured to have short future at Augusta

• Gnomes have become collectors’ items since 2016 debut

• 2026 edition retailing at $49.50 inside Augusta National

Everyone says goodbye to the Masters eventually. Sandy Lyle, Ben Crenshaw, Ian Woosnam and Bernhard Langer used recent years to wave goodbye. Will 2026 be the end for a renowned Augusta National element of more recent times … the Masters gnome?

Speculation is rising that this Masters will be the final time gnomes will be on sale inside Augusta’s merchandise outlets. On face value, this hardly feels dramatic. The quirk, though, is that the household essential for any golf lover has become a victim of its own success. Augusta National has offered no comment when approached on the gnome’s future but the race feels on to collect the final batches of stock before the 14-inch ceramic doll is consigned to Masters history.

Published: April 6, 2026, 1:28 pm

MLS weekend wrap: Revel in the joy and agony of absurd long-range goals

In the era of VAR where most goals get picked apart, strikes from distance offered a much-needed immediate emotional hit

In an era where the sport’s biggest moments are scrutinized in slow-motion to find an inch of infraction, the long-range goal has become a necessary thrill. VAR only comes into play if a loitering teammate is caught between the shooter and goalkeeper. They also hatch a comfortingly familiar point of debate: was there anything that could’ve been done to save it?

We can safely count Zavier Gozo’s wonder goal this weekend among the unsaveable. The Real Salt Lake homegrown has been one of the best players in Major League Soccer’s early weeks, a 19-year-old danger down the right flank who can slot in as a winger or wing back with similar impact. He’s quickly become one of the most proven progressive dribblers in the entire US player pool, and has shot up the scouting priority queues of several major European clubs.

Published: April 6, 2026, 11:00 am

‘Mum, I have to go to Moscow as I am fighting a bear’: Makhmudov on Russia’s grizzlies, God and Tyson Fury

The heavyweight from Dagestan now lives in Canada and describes Saturday’s opponent as the ‘professor’ of boxing

“This guy is the professor,” Arslanbek Makhmudov says of Tyson Fury as he looks forward politely to their fight on Saturday night at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. There is none of the usual bluster and malice of heavyweight boxing as the huge Russian from Dagestan shows considerable respect for the former world champion who is making yet another comeback to the ring.

“Tyson Fury is the professor of mind and boxing,” Makhmudov continues in his functional but effective English. “A lot of boxing is mental and he is a master. But boxing is also spiritual. I am going to be strong, spiritual and smart. You can say this is a war between mental and spiritual and we’ll see who is more successful. Inshallah it is spiritual.”

Published: April 6, 2026, 11:30 am

Hockey fans pack Madison Square Garden as PWHL breaks US women’s attendance record – in pictures

A sold-out crowd of 18,006 electrified Madison Square Garden on Saturday night when the New York Sirens hosted the Seattle Torrent, setting a new US attendance record for women’s hockey

Published: April 6, 2026, 8:00 am

Second ex-staffer accuses Texas lawmaker of sending sexually explicit messages

Republican Tony Gonzales ended re-election bid in March after admitting to having affair with a different aide

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A second former female staffer for Tony Gonzales, a Republican congressman from Texas, has come forward claiming Gonzales sent her sexually explicit messages.

The San Antonio Express-News first reported the text messages on Monday and NBC News later confirmed the report.

Published: April 6, 2026, 11:00 pm

‘We fear the epidemic will return’: Senegal’s harsh anti-gay law puts decades of HIV progress in jeopardy

Arrest toll mounts and gay men flee the country as new, harsher legislation cracks down on ‘promotion’ of homosexuality

Amadou Ndiaye has spent the past two months watching members of his organisation disappear – fleeing across borders, being arrested or simply going silent.

Ndiaye is the secretary-general of UJEC (Union des Jeunes Engagés pour Notre Communauté), a Dakar-based NGO that runs a refuge providing emergency shelter and community support for LGBTQ+ people facing homophobic violence.

Published: April 7, 2026, 11:00 am

Steve Bannon appears likely to have criminal conviction dismissed

US supreme court files brief order vacating lower court ruling that had upheld rightwing media host’s conviction

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Steve Bannon, the rightwing media host and ally of Donald Trump, appears likely to have his criminal conviction dismissed.

The US supreme court filed a brief order on Monday that vacated a lower court ruling that had upheld Bannon’s conviction and sent the case back to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit for “further consideration in light of the pending motion to dismiss the indictment”. The Trump administration had moved to dismiss Bannon’s conviction.

Published: April 6, 2026, 3:11 pm

Trump threatens to jail journalist to find source of second missing airman report

Trump targets media to find ‘leaker’ who revealed that a US airman was missing after being shot down by Iranian forces

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Donald Trump threatened to jail a journalist – or journalists – who reported that a second US airman was missing after being shot down by Iran on Friday in an effort to identify their source.

The badly injured airman hid in a mountain crevice to avoid capture before being rescued by a US recovery team that received heavy fire. The US president announced on Sunday that the service member had been recovered.

Published: April 6, 2026, 8:00 pm

Universal Music, home to Taylor Swift and Drake, receives €55bn takeover offer

Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square claims world’s biggest music company has suffered due to delay of US listing

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Billionaire Bill Ackman’s hedge fund has offered to buy Universal Music Group (UMG) in a deal that values the world’s biggest music company at around €55bn (£48bn).

Pershing Square, the New-York based hedge fund, has offered to buy the business, which is home to artists including Taylor Swift and Elton John, in a cash and stock deal.

Published: April 7, 2026, 9:03 am

Spanish politicians clash over request to move Picasso’s Guernica

Madrid and Basque government leaders call each other ‘provincial’ in dispute over the artwork

A row has broken out between the Madrid and Basque regional governments in Spain over the latter’s request for Guernica, probably Picasso’s most celebrated work, to be housed temporarily in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to mark the 90th anniversary of the bombing of the Basque town.

The work has hung in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid since 1992 and repeated requests for it to be moved to the Basque Country have been refused.

Published: April 7, 2026, 4:00 am

Scientists identify ‘neural fingerprint’ of psychedelic drugs in the brain

Analysis of more than 500 brain scans finds LSD, psilocybin and other psychedelics increase cross-talk between brain systems

Scientists have identified a hallmark signature produced by psychedelic drugs in the human brain when users experience their mind-altering effects.

The “neural fingerprint” of the psychedelic trip was spotted among hundreds of brain scans of people on LSD, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline and ayahuasca, pointing to a shared impact on the brain’s behaviour.

Published: April 6, 2026, 4:18 pm

Hatchings of two California bald eagle chicks delight vast livestream audience

Jackie and Shadow’s eaglets emerged from eggs on Easter weekend in Big Bear Valley as watched by thousands online

Over Easter weekend, thousands of people tuned in to celebrate something spectacular unfolding 145 feet up a pine tree in southern California’s San Bernardino national forest – the hatchings of two bald eagle chicks.

Two eaglets were born to Jackie and Shadow, the southern California pair that have become avian celebrities thanks to the webcam that has livestreamed their activities since 2018.

Published: April 6, 2026, 8:53 pm

War in Iran is boosting profits for oil and defense companies as US gas prices soar

As Americans struggle with rising prices, Lockheed Martin, Shell and other companies are experiencing gains

Two weeks into the US-Israel war with Iran, the White House was fielding heavy criticism that the conflict would drive up gas prices and frustrate voters. Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to appease Americans about gas prices, which were slowly climbing toward $4 a gallon.

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote.

Published: April 6, 2026, 11:00 am

‘A surrender to special interests’: alarm as Utah shields fossil-fuel companies

New legislation comes amid push from big oil, as critics warn polluters’ profits prioritized over Americans’ health

Utah has made it nearly impossible for residents to hold fossil fuel companies legally accountable for climate damages in a move one advocacy group described as putting “profits for the biggest polluters over communities”, with other states expected to follow suit.

The new state legislation comes as part of a push from big oil and its political allies – including groups tied to rightwing impresario Leonard Leo – for legal immunity in red statehouses and Congress, with a goal of winning state and federal legal immunity similar to the liability waiver granted to the firearms industry in 2005.

Published: April 6, 2026, 11:00 am

German mayors call for night-time ban on robot lawnmowers to protect hedgehogs

Leaders say automated mowers’ blades threaten nocturnal animals as studies highlight risks to wildlife

German mayors have called for a nationwide ban on night-time use of robot lawnmowers to protect hedgehogs and other small nocturnal animals from being killed or maimed in the dark.

Recent studies have highlighted the threat lawnmower blades pose to wildlife active between dusk and dawn, prompting growing calls for regulation. Hedgehogs also tend to curl into a ball when threatened rather than running away, making them harder for a robot mower’s sensors to detect.

Published: April 6, 2026, 12:20 pm

Iowa can restrict LGBTQ+ books and topics at schools, appellate court rules

Ruling, vacating lower court’s temporary block, applies to classrooms and libraries up to sixth grade

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Iowa can enforce a law that restricts teachers from talking about LGBTQ+ topics with students in kindergarten through the sixth grade and bans some books in libraries and classrooms, an appellate court said on Monday.

The decision for now vacates a lower court judge’s temporary blocks on the law.

Published: April 6, 2026, 9:27 pm

ICE agents reportedly detain wife of US soldier just days after their marriage

‘She got ripped away from me,’ army soldier Matthew Blank said after his wife Annie Ramos was detained in Louisiana

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents under the command of the Trump administration have reportedly detained the wife of a US army staff sergeant at his military base in Louisiana amid his preparations to deploy.

The arrest of Annie Ramos, 22, took place last Thursday, just days after she married 23-year-old Matthew Blank, a soldier who has served for more than five years and previously deployed to the Middle East and Europe, the New York Times first reported on Sunday.

Published: April 6, 2026, 4:59 pm

California county records sixth person bitten by rattlesnake in under a month

Two fatalities reported in southern California so far, with warmer spring bringing reptiles out on trails earlier

A sixth person has been bitten by a rattlesnake in southern California’s Ventura county in just under a month, two-thirds of the number of people bitten in all of 2025.

Andrew Dowd, a Ventura county fire department spokesperson, said paramedics responded to a call on Sunday for a man who had been bitten by a rattlesnake. The victim said he had been bitten near California State University Channel Islands.

Published: April 6, 2026, 9:24 pm

Arizona hiker stung more than 100 times by bees left in critical condition

Man had to be airlifted out of mountain in north Phoenix by rescue teams and was transported to hospital

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A hiker was taken to a hospital in critical condition after bees stung him more than 100 times on an Arizona mountain trail over the Easter weekend – an emergency which required the help of a helicopter crew.

The man reported “over 100 stings” had left him “unable to continue his descent” from the summit of Lookout Mountain Preserve in north Phoenix at about 10am on Saturday, the local fire department said in a statement.

Published: April 6, 2026, 4:29 pm

Kanye West offers to meet UK’s Jewish community after Wireless backlash

Rapper who has previously made antisemitic remarks responds to criticism over his booking at London festival

The rapper formerly known as Kanye West has broken his silence and offered to “meet and listen” to members of the UK’s Jewish community after a fierce backlash over his booking at London’s Wireless festival.

West, who is legally known as Ye, has been criticised for making antisemitic remarks, including voicing admiration for Adolf Hitler. Last year he released a song called Heil Hitler a few months after advertising a swastika T-shirt for sale on his website.

Published: April 7, 2026, 9:19 am

Some might pay: Noel Gallagher guitar used to write Oasis’s second album to be auctioned

Signed acoustic guitar used on (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? – the bestselling album of the 90s – could fetch up to £60,000 at Sotheby’s

Incredibly, some critics were lukewarm about Oasis’s second album, with one calling it “laboured and lazy” and another dismissing it as a “marginally less hook-laden reprise” of their debut.

But (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? went on to become the bestselling British album of the 90s and a guitar Noel Gallagher used to write it will, Sotheby’s has announced, be a star lot of its April rock and pop sale.

Published: April 7, 2026, 5:00 am

Bangladesh launches measles vaccination drive as child death toll passes 100

UN assists in emergency vaccination drive as country battles worst surge in cases in years amid fall in vaccination rates

Bangladesh is battling its worse measles outbreak in years, with more than 100 children dead amid a rise in unvaccinated infants.

The government, in partnership with the United Nations, has begun conducting an emergency measles-rubella vaccination drive for children across the country, after more than 900 cases were confirmed since March.

Published: April 7, 2026, 6:08 am

Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy reiterates truce offer ahead of Orthodox Easter

Ukrainian president says Russia unlikely to accept – ‘for them, nothing is sacred’; Australian police arrest army reservist for joining war. What we know on day 1,504

Ukraine’s president has renewed his offer to Russia of a mutual ceasefire on strikes against energy infrastructure. “If Russia is ready to stop strikes on our energy infrastructure, we will respond in kind,” he said. “This proposal has been conveyed to the Russian side through the Americans.” Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered last week to observe a ceasefire for Easter, which Orthodox adherents mark on Sunday (13 April) in Russia and Ukraine.

In his remarks on Monday, after an overnight attack on the Black Sea port of Odesa killed three people and injured at least 16, Zelenskyy said Russia appeared unwilling to agree to the ceasefire. “We have repeatedly proposed to Russia a ceasefire at least for Easter,” he said. “But for them, all times are the same. Nothing is sacred.”

Ukrainian drones attacked the Caspian Pipeline Consortium’s oil shipping terminal in southern Russia early on Monday, damaging a mooring point and setting four oil tanks on fire, the Russian defence ministry claimed. The Ukrainian army said it had attacked a different terminal in the port of Novorossiysk – without mentioning the CPC, which did not immediately comment. The CPC pipeline handles about 1% of the world’s oil supplies, as well as about 80% of Kazakhstan’s oil exports.

A reservist in the Australian army has been charged after allegedly working as a drone operator for Ukraine. The 25-year-old man from Felixstow, in the South Australian city of Adelaide, was charged by the Australian Federal Police with working for a foreign military without authorisation, the AAP news agency reported. It is the first time someone has been charged with the offence, with the man facing up to two decades in jail if found guilty. Australian laws limit the work defence personnel can perform with a foreign military, government or company without authorisation. The man allegedly travelled to Ukraine in May 2025 and returned to Australia in January 2026.

A Russian ship carrying wheat believed to have sunk in the Sea of Azov after a drone attack has been found and towed to shore, Russia’s state news agency Tass said on Monday. The death toll has risen to three, it added. Crew abandoned the ship last Friday and made it to shore on Monday, according to Russian reports.

Russia jailed on Monday a former governor of the Kursk border region, where Ukraine’s army broke through in 2024, for 14 years over alleged kickbacks for government contracts related to the construction of fortifications. Since August 2024, the Kremlin has gone after top regional and military officials for failing to stop the incursion – a massive embarrassment for Vladimir Putin. Alexei Smirnov, the former Kursk governor, was “sentenced to 14 years in prison and a fine of 400 million rubles [£3.8m/US$5m]”, a court statement said. Another former Kursk governor, Roman Starovoyt, who led the region until just before the Ukrainian breakthrough, died last year by alleged suicide – a fate that regularly befalls officials who run foul of the Russian president.

Published: April 7, 2026, 12:34 am

Upward Bound by Woody Brown review – extraordinary debut from a non-speaking autistic author

This garrulous, charming story of a young man stuck in a daycare centre for disabled adults offers a vital insider’s perspective

Upward Bound is a dismal adult daycare centre in the Los Angeles suburbs, with “poop-coloured” walls and a small swimming pool out the back. The name on the sign is cruelly misleading because Upward Bound serves as a dumping ground for the city’s disabled community, a pen to hold people who have aged out of school. Any inmate who manages to clamber free – be it up, down or sideways – has slipped the net, beaten the odds and might therefore be viewed as a small miracle.

The author Woody Brown feels similarly touched with magic, having swerved the hell of adult care in pursuit of a professional writing career. He’s the first non-speaking autistic graduate of UCLA and a 2024 alumnus of the writing programme at Columbia University; Upward Bound, his triumphant first novel, looks back not with anger but with compassion and grace. Brown feels for the centre’s exhausted staff almost as much as he does for its mouldering, desperate “clients”, who are forced to map out their days with pointless time-wasting activities. Upward Bound – a jailbreak story of sorts – suggests that practically everyone here has been falsely imprisoned. His book is the literary equivalent of sending the ladder back down.

Published: April 7, 2026, 9:53 am

Becky Shaw review – Alden Ehrenreich shines in dysfunctional dating comedy

Hayes Theater, New York
Ehrenreich is electric alongside The Pitt’s Patrick Ball in this very 2008 send-up of fallout from one disastrous blind date

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more relatable selling point for a New York play than a bad date. The humiliation, disappointment, confusion and hilarity of a date gone awry is an evergreen anecdote, the grist for good gossip and perhaps even better comedy. Such is the pitch of Becky Shaw, Second Stage Theater’s new production of Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 play, which promises a blind date that, of course, “spirals spectacularly off the rails”. Even nearly 20 years later, one person’s bad date is another’s great theater, though the inciting incident for this taut and frequently funny play’s interpersonal disaster is less romantic horror than four cases of festering emotional trauma. It makes for a strange brew of narcissism, cynicism and manipulation which still somehow, despite its poison, manages to cast a nostalgic glow on the pre-smartphone dating era.

Director Trip Cullman wisely decided against updating the original play’s text for its Broadway debut this season. Instead, the onetime Pulitzer finalist exists, for better and for worse, as a relic of a not-so-distant but totally foreign time to the modern dater. We transport to 2007, an era of flip phones and nude patent leather heels (period-lite costumes by Kaye Voyce), a time when you could plausibly send someone to physically track down the person who has not texted you back. The central foursome in this two-act production, now at the Hayes Theater, may spout dated references to the Green party and the Iraq war, but their archetypes are evergreen: the well-meaning but self-absorbed intellectual, the self-deflecting misanthrope, the self-affirming do-gooder and, last not but least, the perpetual victim.

Published: April 7, 2026, 2:00 am

Slither review – James Gunn’s Troma-style comedy horror debut gets a reboot for reputational glow-up

DC Universe supremo Gunn’s thinly conceived debut feature gets a glossy repackaging for seemingly no other reason than his later success

This grotesquerie-heavy exercise in comic body horror was writer-director James Gunn’s first feature in 2006; a commercial flop at the time, it was Gunn’s crack at the big time, made long before he went on to direct the likes of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, the most recent iteration of Superman and take over as head honcho for the DC cinematic universe. His subsequent success (apart from that time he got briefly cancelled for ill-advised tweets) might partially explain why this early work is getting a glossy repackaging now. It’s the film industry equivalent of a reputational glow-up, as if a flawed, underwhelming early work should now be considered a misunderstood work of genius.

Sadly, Slither is by no stretch of the imagination a work of genius. Its science fiction elements are thinly conceived, while the use of rubbery practical effects and lame jokes feel much closer to the work of the Troma brand where Gunn got his training wheels. The main conceit here is that an alien lifeform, whose larvae look like flaccid phallic worms with severe sunburn, crash lands on Earth via an asteroid and then proceeds to take over a small South Carolina town. The first to be possessed is Grant (Michael Rooker, a Gunn regular ever since), a good ol’ boy with a unhealthy obsession with his wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks, displaying her typically professional comic chops); she still has a soft spot for local head of police Bill (Nathan Fillion). One by one, members of the town are penetrated through various orifices by the worm larvae, some of them becoming evil minions and some, like unlucky area woman Brenda (Brenda James), turning into hideously swollen incubators for further larvae.

Published: April 7, 2026, 6:00 am

The Drama: sex, secrets and that gobsmacking twist – discuss with spoilers

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s dark dramedy is a stylish acting showcase, but does it do justice to its weighty themes?

Ever since its first trailer dropped – and, on certain corners of Reddit, even before that – the internet has been abuzz with speculation over just what goes down in The Drama. The auteur production powerhouse A24 somewhat ingeniously pitched writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s pitch-black film as a tart romantic comedy, with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a seemingly happy couple derailed by a disturbing revelation a week before their wedding. The actors, among a cohort of vanishingly few young movie stars, appeared as their characters in a fake wedding announcement in the Boston Globe; Zendaya’s rumored marriage to actor Tom Holland became a meta discussion point on a press tour that saw her method dressing in “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”, her wardrobe slowly darkening in a nod to something gone horribly awry.

The Norwegian film-maker’s second English-language film depicts what we could loosely call premarital jitters as a psychological unraveling with a surrealist touch. The Drama is lustrously filmed, virtuosically acted and crisply edited – but, inevitably, attention will focus on its very combustible, deliberately provocative premise, one somewhat spoiled by a pre-embargo TMZ headline citing a recent American tragedy. There’s no way to talk about this movie without talking about “the twist” – which plays out less as a dramatic turn of events than as an unsettling divulgence that, depending on your view, the film may or may not justify. Obviously, spoilers ahead, so tread carefully and, presuming you’ve seen it … let’s discuss.

Published: April 6, 2026, 6:08 pm

‘An orgiastic pandemonium’: Elvira Notari, the ‘low-life cinema’ pioneer erased by fascism

Italy’s first female director made 60 features depicting the gritty squalor of early 20th-century Naples. Most were lost to Mussolini’s censorship and she died in obscurity – but now a new documentary gives her a voice again

The seething Neapolitan melodrama È piccerella (1922), written and directed by Elvira Notari, follows the fraught relationship between the manipulative Margaretella and her morbidly besotted suitor, Tore, who steals from his elderly mother to buy expensive gifts for his reluctant inamorata, despite her roving eye.

The movie opens with documentary shots of middle-class pilgrims, including Margaretella and her shabbily genteel mother, arriving in carriages and cars at Naples’s Candelora festival – an “orgiastic pandemonium of Bacchantes,” notes an intertitle. Challenging the camera’s gaze as much as the smouldering femme fatale, an obese drinker quaffs exultantly from a pint glass of wine; in another scene, an unshaven little pauper gleefully drops his jaw to display his two remaining teeth.

Published: April 6, 2026, 5:00 am

House of Gloss review – tender portrait of a young trans couple finding refuge in new kind of family

Away from outside discrimination, this documentary brings us into the home of graffiti artist Lana and drag queen Opal

In the small flat shared by Opal and Lana, a young queer couple living in Dundee, love is everywhere. Countless photos of them on fun outings line the walls, interspersed with colourful sketches by Lana, a talented graffiti artist. Scattered around Opal’s makeup table are beautiful wigs, with which she transforms into a glamorous drag persona at night. As trans femme, they face immense discrimination from the outside world. Within these walls, however, there is an oasis of tenderness and care.

In a media landscape that continues to sensationalise trans existence, director Mark Lyken deploys a slice-of-life visual approach. It is as if we are not merely watching Opal and Lana, but are hanging out with them as friends. Closeups and interior shots draw beauty out of the ordinary every day as the bond between the couple is captured through seemingly simple acts of affection and household chores such as cooking or washing-up. Considering that both have faced rejection from their families, these mundane gestures hold a world of meaning.

Published: April 6, 2026, 6:00 am

‘We’re bigger than the news!’ How spine-tingling paranormal show Uncanny took over the world

Knife-wielding skeletons, wild experiments with toilets, an audience with the bassist from The Jam … the team behind the globe-conquering spookfest open up about their astonishing success

‘Oh. Em. Bloody. Gee.” Danny Robins, “high priest of the paranormal”, has removed his trademark red anorak and is pacing around the London Palladium stage telling ghost stories. A phantom baby. A haunted Teams meeting. A … “hairy flasher”. He dissects each tale with parapsychologists Evelyn Hollow (Team Believer) and Ciarán O’Keeffe (Team Sceptic – he exposed Most Haunted’s medium, Derek Acorah, as a fraud in a rift Robins calls “the Biggie and Tupac of the paranormal”). The rapt audience – a harmonious mix of millennials, boomers and gen Z – are eager to share their own stories, too: a woman’s voice quivers into a microphone as she describes a skeleton that wanted to stab her sister. This is the enthralling world of Uncanny.

A lot has happened in the five years since Uncanny started life as a Radio 4 paranormal investigations podcast, with those spine-tingling opening lyrics, “I know what I saw.” In the first episode, The Evil in Room 611, Robins met scientist Ken, who recalled unexplained scares from decades ago in his university halls. Details of an evil dark figure and shaking doors were met with the reaction: “Bloody hell, Ken.” Two experts then shared their theories: parapsychologist Caroline Watt proffered hypnagogic hallucinations, while ordained minster Peter Laws claimed poltergeist activity.

Published: April 6, 2026, 11:19 am

One of the stars of smash hit comedy The Studio launches a quizshow: Best podcasts of the week

Mindy Kaling is the first celebrity to join Ike Barinholtz in a lovable new series. Plus: a moreish pod about being single in your 30s

“Oh, this is a quizshow?!” exclaims Mindy Kaling, not so much maligning actor and gameshow champ Ike Barinholtz’s (pictured) new podcast as misunderstanding it. She’s soon up to speed with his mix of trivia questions and meandering chat (which in Kaling’s case touches on everything from Chevy Chase to New Jersey Italian food). It is an amiable, low-stakes entry to the arguably oversaturated celebrity interview canon. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Published: April 6, 2026, 9:00 am

‘Barbara Windsor smacked our bottoms!’ Pet Shop Boys on showstopping visuals, horrified bosses – and snubbing the queen

As a 600-page doorstopper celebrates their groundbreaking costumes, gigs, sleeves and videos, the duo talk about ‘side-stepping the pop-star thing’ – and the naked trampolinist EMI had to censor

In 1988, when he was 20, Wolfgang Tillmans tore an A0 poster off a building site hoarding and nailed it to a wall in his flat in Hamburg. It was advertising Pet Shop Boys’ new album, Introspective, and consisted of thick vertical bars in different colours. “It was just so cool in the context of the time,” the artist says today, admiring how the pop group had gone “one level more abstract”.

Around the same time in Doncaster, teenager Alasdair McLellan – now an A-list fashion photographer – was impressed by the clothes of Pet Shop Boys’ keyboard-player Chris Lowe; for instance the cap, stripy T-shirt and Issey Miyake glasses on the cover of their single Suburbia. “I always thought he was the best-dressed man of the 80s,” McLellan says. “Obviously, he just stood there playing the keyboard and I always noticed what he was wearing, especially all that sportswear stuff. He just seemed to do it better than everyone else.” McLellan couldn’t get style magazines in his village, so his visual education came from pop and the music press. “I got into photography through album covers, Smash Hits and NME.”

Published: April 6, 2026, 4:00 am

Into the Wreck by Susannah Dickey review – an immersive exploration of grief

Set in County Donegal, the poet’s polyphonic third novel wittily explores the fragile dynamics of a family navigating the loss of a father

The dark hull of a shipwreck, beached and rotting on the sand, provides the powerful symbolism in award-winning poet and author Susannah Dickey’s third novel Into the Wreck. Five members of a family mourn the death of a gentle but distant father: a man shaped into silence by the Troubles, and whose absence leaves each of them trying to comprehend a family truth that was never fully articulated.

The story is set in a coastal town in modern-day County Donegal, delivered to us in five separate narratives. Gemma, the middle child of three, is studying for A-levels alongside an awkwardly timed new obsession with boys; she harbours a self-imposed responsibility to maintain the fragile equilibrium of the family home. Anna, the eldest, fled to London at 16 to escape constant confrontations with her mother and is now forced to return for her father’s funeral, while Matthew, the youngest, silently and heartbreakingly carries the weight of the world’s and the family’s problems on his 15-year-old shoulders.

Published: April 6, 2026, 8:00 am

Jan Morris by Sara Wheeler review – masterly account of a flawed figure

The journalistic adventurer and trans trailblazer is revealed as brilliant, prolific and deeply selfish

Jan Morris had two stipulations before she would agree to sit for a painting for the National Portrait Gallery in London. Ibsen, her Norwegian forest cat, should feature. And so should one of her calves. The gallery acceded, and the resulting portrait shows Morris, then just shy of 80, in a yellow jumper and dark green skirt, Ibsen glowering beside her bare legs. She was pleased with the portrait, though she thought it could, perhaps, have been a little larger.

Could any canvas contain Jan Morris? Janus-faced hardly does her justice. She was a sympathetic historian of empire who became a republican Welsh nationalist ( and who nevertheless accepted a CBE). The author of more than 50 books ranging across travel writing, biography, history, memoir and fiction, she was a workaholic who, as some of those books testify, could be shockingly lazy. A preacher of the “religion of kindness”, she was cruel to her children.

Published: April 6, 2026, 6:01 am

Pet Shop Boys review – no hits? No problem on first night of a masterful obscurities run

Electric Ballroom, London
The era-defining duo’s ultras are suitably spoiled in the first of this intimate five-day run, showered with rarities that put a different spin on their well-known history

‘Tonight …” says Neil Tennant, with a suave pause, “no hits!” The crowd roars. “B-sides?” he teases. “Album tracks! And what we’re calling – although really it’s both of those – fan favourites.” It is a rare gig when the singer of a history-defining pop band can promise that no one will be hearing some of the best songs of all time tonight – West End Girls, Always on My Mind, Rent, to name some of several dozen – and get a hero’s welcome. But Pet Shop Boys have been on their Dreamworld greatest hits tour since 2022, one that’s barely even made room for their excellent and underrated 2024 album Nonetheless on the set list, let alone many wildcards. The Pet Shop Boys casual has been lavishly fatted in recent years. The Pet Shop Boys ultra, however, has been a little parched.

It’s something this five-day run of intimate shows at Camden’s Electric Ballroom seeks to remedy, drawing from the band’s margins to promote a new tome on their highly intentional visual history: in typical one-word fashion, the tour is called Obscure. Tennant and synths foil Chris Lowe announced beforehand that they had rehearsed 35 possible songs from their 42-year run, but their enduring commitment to the single format, with its considered B-sides and remixes, makes the possibilities endless: one fan compiled a pre-game playlist of 226 “B-sides and non-singles”, and doubted even then that it was comprehensive. Tennant has a tray containing the lyrics – fair play, given that two songs tonight have never been played before, while others are getting their first trip out of the cupboard in decades.

Published: April 7, 2026, 10:13 am

Trailblazers, trumpets and the theremin: 10 soundtracks that changed the way we listen to movies

From soundtracking the silent era, via 50s rock’n’roll and the ‘symphonic pop’ of Henry Mancini to iconic works by John Williams and Hans Zimmer, movies are unimaginable without music. Ahead of the London soundtrack festival its artistic director picks 10 scores that moved the dial

The music of cinema’s earliest years played a crucial role in how audiences – with a live pianist or organist soundtracking the silent movie – experienced the stories on screen. But it wasn’t until the advent of synchronised sound that they were guaranteed the same musical experience.

Even that moment, widely regarded to be 1926’s Don Juan – an otherwise silent film – wasn’t a true soundtrack. Warner Bros used the Vitaphone system, essentially a recording on disc that was played with the picture. The same system was used for 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first film for which voices were synchronised to the picture as well. Playing a disc to picture was unreliable, and it wasn’t long before music could be printed directly on to the celluloid of the film itself and the soundtrack proper was born.

Published: April 6, 2026, 10:23 am

Rapper Offset hospitalised after being shot outside Florida casino

The former member of Migos is in a stable condition after being shot on Monday, with police detaining two people

The rapper Offset is in a stable condition in hospital after he was shot outside a Florida casino on Monday.

The former member of the Atlanta hip-hop trio Migos, whose real name is Kiari Kendrell Cephus, was shot in a valet area outside the Seminole Hard Rock hotel and casino, Offset’s spokesperson confirmed to media.

Published: April 7, 2026, 5:21 am

‘I over-articulated to stop my braces sticking to my lips’: how Five Star made Rain Or Shine

‘We performed it everywhere, even on Miss World. Once, on tour, a fan pulled me into the pit – but my hunky Italian security guard put me back on stage’

I had come to England from St Louis, Missouri, in the 1970s to do an album for a singer, and decided to stick around. I was in Slim Chance with Ronnie Lane for a while, and went on tour with Gallagher and Lyle. Then, come the 80s, I started doing more writing and co-wrote songs for Shakin’ Stevens, Elkie Brooks and Paul Young.

Published: April 6, 2026, 1:45 pm

‘Before I can stop her, my daughter is licking crumbs from the table’: my search for the perfect kids’ menu

Chips, fish fingers, pizza … restaurant food for children is depressingly predictable. Are there more adventurous options? I took my four-year-old daughter on a month-long mission to find out

We’re heading out for dinner. Before I tell my four-year-old where we’re going, she has already announced that she’s going to have fish, chips and lots of ketchup. It sounds delicious; a classic. But there’s the irksome feeling that the intrepid impulses of childhood should be met with food that expands palates rather than feeding into the well-trodden path to a beige meal.

My guilt is only slightly assuaged by the ungenerous thought that maybe I can lay some blame at other people’s feet. Namely – as if it hasn’t got enough on its plate already – the hospitality industry. A certainty of fish and chips hasn’t come from nowhere – so often, regardless of the type of restaurant, kids’ menus have the same fodder.

Published: April 7, 2026, 9:00 am

On the shoulders of giants: roaming among England’s famous chalk figures

Ancient hill carvings of horses, crosses and crowns have fascinated artists, writers and travellers for centuries. I went in search of their stories

In the churchyard next to Wilmington Priory in East Sussex, I found a yew so ancient and stooped that its trunk had eaten half a gravestone. Its boughs were supported by long poles, a creepy sight that made me shudder. I had come here to see something just as strange, but more benign than this folk-horror vision – the figure of the Long Man of Wilmington on the hillside opposite, on the steep scarp of the South Downs. He treks over the hill, a stave clasped in each hand. Climbing Windover Hill, just beneath the South Downs Way, I saw that while he was once a chalk giant, his lines are now marked with concrete blocks.

The Long Man may be Anglo-Saxon in origin – the shape is similar to the design on a buckle discovered in Kent in 1964 by the archaeologist Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, which probably represents the god Odin (or Woden); but he may be a much later adornment for the hillside, made to be viewed from the priory. His form entranced the photographer Lee Miller and her husband, the artist Roland Penrose, who lived close to the Long Man. Penrose painted a surrealist representation of the Long Man on the inglenook fireplace at Farleys, their home – for them the figure was a protective spirit. It also inspired the Black composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor, the folk collective the Memory Band, and Benjamin Britten picnicked at its feet.

Published: April 7, 2026, 6:00 am

Moka pot coffee: unlock cafe-quality iced lattes at home with this $50 Italian staple

Long beloved in Italy, this humble stovetop brewer makes cafe-quality drinks for a fraction of the price

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Despite my Italian heritage, it took a temporary move to Rome to discover the magic of the moka pot. I instantly fell in love with this Italian coffee maker’s ability to brew a beverage on par with the $10 lattes found at my favorite cafes.

Recommended by the Guardian and now subject of an endless library of TikTok tutorials, people have praised the moka pot for steaming mugs of cafe-quality coffee more cheaply than an espresso machine (or a Nespresso machine).

Published: April 6, 2026, 7:15 pm

The pet I’ll never forget: Beau, the labrador who saved my life

After I collapsed during a run along a beach, my loyal dog Beau sprang into action

When I lost my wife, Jo, to cancer eight years ago, I knew it was time for a fresh start, so I packed up my London home and moved to Poole on the Dorset coast. I longed for a companion, so I welcomed a labrador puppy into my life, naming him Beau in a nod to the time Jo and I had spent living in France.

A gun dog from Derbyshire with a sleek black coat and deep brown eyes, Beau was an adorable and mischievous puppy who kept me on my toes right from the start. When he was six months old, he rummaged in a fisherman’s bucket and swallowed a fishing line and hook. Thankfully, it came out the other end, narrowly avoiding surgery.

Published: April 6, 2026, 10:00 am

I never text back – and it’s ruining my relationships

Experts weigh in on why some people have an inexplicable barrier to responding – and what they can do about it

“There’s no such thing as a bad texter. They just don’t want to respond,” said influencer Delaney Rowe last year on the online talkshow Subway Takes. “People go around thinking being a bad texter is like a pathology, but it’s not. It’s a cop-out.”

“I don’t believe in bad texters,” announced radio host Dan Zolot last year. “If you want to answer you will answer.”

Published: April 6, 2026, 4:00 pm

Is it true that … more testosterone means more muscle?

Popular diet tweaks may boost the hormone a little, but the effect on your pecs is likely to be limited

It’s an increasingly popular idea: “boosting” testosterone with diet tweaks – increasing foods rich in zinc and magnesium – hoping to build muscle faster. But the reality is more nuanced.

Testosterone is an androgen hormone that plays a key role in development, particularly in boys during puberty. Its effect on muscle isn’t simply about how much of it you have, but how your body responds to it.

Published: April 6, 2026, 7:00 am

Houseplant hacks: do eggshells deter fungus gnats from laying eggs?

It sounds thrifty and natural, but kitchen waste won’t help. Here’s what will

The problem
Fungus gnats are one of the most annoying houseplant pests because they seem to appear out of nowhere, hovering around the soil and your face with equal enthusiasm. One internet fix suggests crushing eggshells and adding them to the compost to keep the gnats away. It sounds thrifty and natural.

The hack
The theory is that a layer of crushed shell will stop adult gnats from laying eggs and maybe even add a little natural fertiliser to the soil. It’s also the kind of hack people love because it recycles kitchen waste.

Published: April 7, 2026, 9:00 am

Can’t face another mouthful of chicken? You’re probably coming down with the ick

One minute you can’t get enough southern fried drumsticks or peri-peri wings, the next it all tastes foul. Here’s how a psychologist explains it

Name: The chicken ick.

Age: Chickens have been around since, well, eggs …

Published: April 6, 2026, 4:05 pm

A new start after 60: I jacked in my job in tech to become a professional poker player

As a child, Gary Fisher was terrible at card games. How did he end up making his living from one?

Gary Fisher has always enjoyed a game of poker, but after he turned 60, his partner suggested he take it seriously. “She said, ‘You’re really good at it, but you don’t study. You just turn up and play.’” It wasn’t what Fisher expected to hear, but he set about researching the game, completed some online courses, got a coach – and now plays professionally.

So far this year, Fisher, who lives in London, has travelled to competitions in Cyprus, Marrakech, Amsterdam, Tallinn and Paris. He pays to enter, and has won $200,000 (£150,000) in prize money. “I’ve had a very good start,” he says. He is speaking on a video call from his hotel in Dublin where he is taking part in the Irish Open. Next he will travel to Melbourne.

Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?

Published: April 6, 2026, 6:00 am

From volcanic wilds to world-class art: 10 fun and fabulous reasons to visit France in 2026

Some of the best under-the-radar attractions across the Channel include steampunk wonders in Calais and the largest collection of impressionist works outside Paris

You don’t need to venture too far into France to find its wow factor. Indeed, within minutes of exiting the ferry or Channel Tunnel, you can be staring a fire-breathing dragon in the face. The Dragon de Calais is a 25-metre-long mechanical beast that stomps along the renovated sea front carrying 48 passengers on its back (adult ticket €9.50), emitting jets of fire, steam and water from its nostrils. It was created by the team behind Les Machines de L’île, a collection of steampunk wonders including a 12-metre elephant, in Nantes.

Published: April 6, 2026, 5:45 am

My mother, Audrey Hepburn: the star’s son Sean on her movies, marriages, good works and fascist parents

The heroine of Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s knew war and poverty, riches and fame, love and betrayal – yet claimed to have lived a ‘terribly boring’ life. Sean Hepburn Ferrer paints a very different picture in his new biography

Growing up, Sean Hepburn Ferrer says he never felt like the son of a movie star – but he very much is. His mother was Audrey Hepburn, one of the biggest names in the golden age of Hollywood, an Oscar-winner, a screen star and a fashion icon. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world recognise her from classics such as Roman Holiday, Funny Face and My Fair Lady – besotted with the way she laughs, dances, or poses tastefully in Givenchy couture.

Audrey’s image is so ubiquitous in posters, art prints, magazines, on handbags, keyrings or T-shirts, that the family has made hunting for her likeness into a game. “I must have made this crack to my kids,” Sean says. “We were probably waiting for a train or a plane that had been delayed: ‘Three minutes to find Grandma.’ And it became a thing. Now the kids are grown-up, but they do it on their own. I do it by myself and send a snapshot to my wife and we giggle privately.”

Published: April 6, 2026, 4:00 am

‘Creepy surveillance’: why some cities are shutting down Flock cameras amid privacy concerns

Some cities are cutting ties with firm that provides license plate reader cameras, others are signing new contracts and many are still looking for their footing

In recent city council meetings in Dunwoody, Georgia, a spokesman for Flock Safety, a Georgia-based firm that provides automated license plate readers, has found himself in the hot seat again.

For two months running, some residents of the affluent north Atlanta suburb in the region’s tech corridor have been demanding an end to the city’s contract with the security firm, which has drawn similar protest from California to New York.

Published: April 6, 2026, 11:00 am

‘The events still haunt’: New York stage production examines aftermath of Finnish school shooting

Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence delves into guilt, grief and anger over a phenomenon largely thought of as distinctly American

Gun violence, particularly the high-profile incidents that take place on school campuses, are often seen as a uniquely American phenomenon, one that exemplifies the nation’s deep history and complicated relationship with guns.

But an opera set around a mass shooting at a Finnish international school 10 years ago approaches this topic through a global lens. Innocence, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on Monday, is performed in nine different languages including English, Swedish and Spanish, and delves into themes like guilt, grief, anger and how time doesn’t always heal the damage done by violence.

Published: April 6, 2026, 12:00 pm

Gangnam styles: South Korea’s brutalist gems – in pictures

It’s all about the austere beauty of concrete in photographer Paul Tulett’s starkly stunning shots of the country’s jaw-dropping, rapidly evolving architectural highlights

Published: April 7, 2026, 6:00 am