Two salon owners wanted to go zero-waste. Could they do it and keep their business afloat?

Scisters Salon & Apothecary in the San Diego area is committed to sustainable beauty and going low-waste

The first thing you notice when you walk into Scisters Salon & Apothecary is what isn’t there. No wall of glossy plastic bottles promising “repair” or “shine”. No sharp chemical tang or aerosol haze. The only trash can is a tiny basket that mostly collects coffee cups and gum wrappers clients bring from home.

Instead, the shelves of this southern California salon are lined with large refill containers of shampoo and conditioner, houseplants dot the space, hair clippings are swept away for compost, and the air carries a trace of bergamot and vanilla.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:00 pm

This congressman says Muslims ‘don’t belong’ in the US. How does he keep winning a district with so many? | David Daley

Andy Ogles’ election victories in Tennessee are a product of an electoral system broken by gerrymandering

Andy Ogles represents more Muslims than any other Tennessee congressman. Yet he has no interest in representing them. He doesn’t even want them in the country.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” the third-term Republican wrote on Twitter/X last week. He’s proudly doubled down on his incendiary statement, which joins a long list of Islamophobic beliefs. During last year’s New York City mayoral campaign, Ogles called Zohran Mamdani “a communist who has publicly embraced a terroristic ideology”. The US naturalization system, he said, required “any alignments with communism or terrorist activities to be disclosed. I’m doubtful he disclosed them. If this is confirmed, put him on the first flight back to Uganda.”

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:00 am

Would you use cadaver fat for a boob job or butt lift? Some people already do

Cadaver fat from organ and tissue donors is being used for cosmetic procedures – and yup, it’s legal in the US, writes advice columnist Jessica DeFino

Hi Ugly,

I recently became aware of new cosmetic injectables derived from cadaver fat – as in, made of dead people. Apparently the fat is harvested from organ and tissue donors and used for procedures like Brazilian butt lifts and boob jobs.

Why is this column called ‘Ask Ugly’?

How should I be styling my pubic hair?

How do I deal with imperfection?

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

Published: March 26, 2026, 4:00 pm

Paul McCartney: Days We Left Behind review – this wistful, lovely song is as McCartney-esque as it’s possible to be

(MPL/Capitol)
This nostalgic new single suggests a convincing mature style, without the unnecessary straining for relevance that marred some recent solo releases

• Paul McCartney announces 18th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane

At 83, Paul McCartney remains one of rock’s most dependable arena-fillers, still packing out multiple nights in the biggest venues of whichever country he chooses to visit. But his recent solo albums have proved a decidedly mixed bag. There are always lovely songs that only Paul McCartney could have written: Seize the Day, Hosanna and I Don’t Know all offered compelling evidence that the extraordinary melodic instincts of the Most Successful Songwriter in the History of Popular Music were entirely intact as he stared down his ninth decade.

But they coexisted alongside ungainly lurches for contemporaneity that you rather wish he had left out: thumpy post-Mumford folk on 2013’s Everybody Out There; what appeared to be a Queens of the Stone Age pastiche in the shape of 2020’s Slidin’; a dreadful collaboration with pop songwriter for hire Ryan Tedder called Fuh You that even its co-author seemed to have misgivings about. “This doesn’t amount to anything – y’know, I wrote Eleanor Rigby,” he protested, which was a fair point but raised the question of how it still made the tracklisting of 2018’s Egypt Station.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:00 pm

Uruguay faces dilemma from the deep: what to do with a salvaged Nazi eagle?

Sculpture was retrieved from German battleship sunk in 1939 Battle of the River Plate but its future is controversial

The enormous bronze sculpture of an eagle clutching a swastika in its talons spent nearly 70 years lying at the bottom of the River Plate, off the coast of Uruguay.

After being salvaged in 2006, it briefly went on display in the Uruguayan capital – before the government reconsidered the wisdom of granting such prominence to a Nazi emblem, and the eagle was hidden away on a military base.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:41 pm

This little triangle scarf is suddenly everywhere. Here’s how to wear it

The humble triangle scarf is spring’s easiest outfit upgrade. Here are six ways to style one – including as a belt and a bonnet

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

It’s a bonnet. It’s a belt. It’s a bandana. Actually, it’s a triangle scarf.

Gen Z has officially ditched the classic long scarf, opting for a smaller style beloved by celebrities like Zoë Kravitz and trendy corporate gals alike.

Published: March 26, 2026, 7:17 pm

Middle East crisis live: Trump pausing strikes on Iran energy sites; Houthis say ‘no reason’ to halt Red Sea shipping

US president says he is extending deadline for strait of Hormuz to reopen to 6 April; Houthis tell Lloyd’s List ‘no reason’ to prevent Saudi oil using Red Sea route

• Full report: Trump extends deadline

• Analysis: Trump pitches peace plan but military buildups rarely veer to off-ramp

India has slashed its special excise duties on petrol and diesel amid the soaring prices triggered by the Iran war.

In a government order, the Indian finance ministry on Thursday cut the excise duty on petrol to 3 rupees ($0.032) a litre from 13 rupees earlier. It also cut the duty on diesel to zero from 10 rupees.

Published: March 27, 2026, 4:07 am

The delusion of easy victory from the air may have seduced the US into another war

Air superiority is supposed to deliver a quick triumph. But history has shown that promise to be written on the wind

• Middle East crisis – live updates

To explore the roots of Donald Trump’s Iran military strategy and the pugnacious rhetoric of his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, means looking back 105 years. In 1921, a year before Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome to launch the Fascist era, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air, proposing a revolution in warfare.

Victory in the future, he said, would no longer come from the grinding trench combat of the great war. Instead it meant large-scale aerial bombardments, targeting not just combatants but civilians and civilian infrastructure and logistics.

Published: March 26, 2026, 5:30 pm

‘Tehran’s tollbooth’: a visual guide to how a trickle of ships still passes through strait of Hormuz

Many of the vessels willing to make the crossing are taking an alternative route through Iranian waters

Threats to shipping have effectively closed the strait of Hormuz since the US-Israel war on Iran began four weeks ago – upending global oil and gas supplies and sending energy prices soaring.

In normal times, tankers carry about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies through the narrow channel and on to the rest of the world, while about a third of the global fertilisers necessary for half of the world’s food production pass through in dry bulk vessels.

Published: March 26, 2026, 5:11 pm

Trump to sign order for DHS to pay TSA agents ‘immediately’ amid funding standoff

President says order will ‘address this Emergency Situation’ as TSA employees have gone without pay during dispute

Donald Trump announced Thursday he will sign an order instructing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to pay Transportation Security Administration agents immediately.

“I am going to sign an Order instructing the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports,” Trump wrote on social media. “I want to thank our hardworking TSA Agents and also, ICE, for the incredible help they have given us at the Airports.”

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:01 pm

Venezuelans deported by US detail fresh claims of torture and abuse at El Salvador mega-prison

Petition seeks accountability from Salvadorian authorities over human rights violations at notorious Cecot facility

A group of 18 Venezuelan men whom the US expelled a notorious Salvadorian mega-prison are demanding that Salvadorian authorities be held internationally accountable for violation of human rights – detailing new allegations of torture, sexual assault and medical neglect.

A new petition, filed on Thursday before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleges that El Salvador violated the human rights of these men, who were expelled to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) last year without charge.

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:16 pm

Federal judge sides with Anthropic in first round of standoff with Pentagon

Face-off is over company’s refusal to let defense department use its Claude AI model in autonomous weapons systems

A federal judge in California sided with Anthropic in its case against the Department of Defense on Thursday, ordering a temporary pause on the government’s punitive measures against the artificial intelligence firm.

Judge Rita Lin granted Anthropic’s request for a temporary injunction while the northern district court of California hears the company’s case. Anthropic argued that the Department of Defense and Donald Trump violated its first amendment rights in declaring the company a supply chain risk and ordering government agencies to cease using its technology.

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:17 pm

US markets see biggest slump since start of US-Israel war on Iran

Dow closed 450 points down and S&P dipped 1.7% while Nasdaq fell 2.3% into correction territory

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US markets saw their biggest slump since the start of the US-Israel war with Iran on Thursday as Donald Trump said the conflict’s impact on oil prices had not been as bad as he expected.

The Dow closed 450 points down, while the S&P 500 dipped 1.7%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 2.3%, plunging into correction territory, which happens when an index falls at least 10% below its most recent peak.

Published: March 26, 2026, 9:01 pm

Two humanitarian aid boats heading to Cuba have gone missing, Mexico says

Navy searching for two boats that left Isla Mujeres last week bound for Havana with nine crew members of different nationalities on board

Mexico’s navy said on Thursday it had activated a search-and-rescue operation in the Caribbean to locate two sailboats carrying humanitarian aid to Cuba after the vessels failed to arrive in Havana as scheduled.

In a statement, the navy said the two boats left Isla Mujeres, in the Mexican Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, last week bound for Havana with nine crew members of different nationalities on board.

Published: March 27, 2026, 2:21 am

Human rights groups cheer ‘watershed’ verdict in social media addiction trial

As many organizations celebrate outcome, some are skeptical as to what it means for privacy protections

The verdict in a landmark social media trial that Meta and YouTube deliberately designed addictive products has sparked calls for reform across borders. International human rights and tech freedom groups issued statements after the decision, praising jurors for holding social media companies accountable for harms to children and urging tech giants to change their design features to ensure children are safe.

Amnesty International said in a statement on Thursday that “this court decision is clear: these platforms are unsafe by design and meaningful change is urgently needed”.

Published: March 26, 2026, 9:46 pm

Phillies’ Alec Bohm sues parents for millions alleging they siphoned money from his accounts

• Player says parents paid for their own expenses

• Daniel and Lisa Bohm deny any wrongdoing

Philadelphia Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm has sued his parents for millions of dollars, accusing them of siphoning large amounts of his money into financial accounts they managed for him and then using some of the cash to pay their own expenses.

Bohm’s lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in a Philadelphia court, comes after the 29-year-old reviewed his personal and financial affairs in recent months, and said that his parents refused to give him access to the accounts or provide him with the information he sought about them.

Published: March 27, 2026, 1:58 am

Idaho bill would criminalize trans people using bathrooms in private businesses

Lawmakers consider latest bill that targets trans people for using the bathroom that matches their gender identity

Idaho lawmakers are considering a bill that would make it a crime for transgender people to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity – even inside privately owned businesses.

At least 19 states, including Idaho, already have laws barring transgender people from using bathrooms and changing rooms that align with their gender in schools and, in some cases, other public places. The LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Movement Advancement Project’s tracking of the laws shows that three other states – Florida, Kansas and Utah – have made it a criminal offense in some circumstances to violate the bathroom laws.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:24 pm

Trump signature to appear on US bills in first for sitting president

Treasurer’s signature to be removed for first time since 1861 in change made to mark US’s 250th anniversary

Donald Trump’s signature will soon appear on US paper currency, the treasury department announced Thursday.

The move marks the first time a sitting US president’s signature will appear on legal tender. To accommodate this change, the treasurer’s signature will be removed for the first time since 1861.

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:24 pm

Ukraine war briefing: Pentagon reportedly considering whether to divert aid from Ukraine to Middle East

US military stockpiles are under strain as a result of Iran war, Washington Post reports; Volodymyr Zelenskyy meets Saudi crown prince in Jeddah. What we know on day 1,493

Published: March 27, 2026, 3:26 am

Trump news at a glance: president tries to stop chaos at airports

Donald Trump said he will take executive action to pay 50,000 airport security workers as a deal stalled in Congress to address staff shortages – key US politics stories from 26 March 2026

Donald Trump said on Thursday he will take executive action to pay 50,000 airport security workers as a deal stalled in Congress to address staff shortages that have snarled travel around the country.

The US president said he was instructing the Homeland Security Department “to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports. It is not an easy thing to do, but I am going to do it!”

Published: March 27, 2026, 1:38 am

US House speaker gives Trump so-called ‘America First’ award amid global chaos

Critics mock Mike Johnson and Republicans for presenting the president with the newly concocted award

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Amid an aggressive war in Iran, heightening and devastating pressure on Cuba, immigration enforcement operations throughout the country and a partial government shutdown, the lead Republican in the House has given Donald Trump a newly concocted award.

Democrats, lawmakers and commentators are criticizing and ridiculing the “America First” award given to Trump on Wednesday evening during the National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser.

Published: March 26, 2026, 5:46 pm

Trump describes UK aircraft carriers as ‘toys’ in latest anti-Nato jibe

US president says he is ‘very disappointed’ as he again lashes out at allies’ lack of involvement in Iran war

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has dismissed British warships as “toys” in his latest jibe at Nato countries for their lack of involvement in the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Speaking at the White House on Thursday, he claimed he had told the UK: “Don’t bother, we don’t need it.”

Trump has previously alleged that he requested two aircraft carriers from the UK that Keir Starmer had initially rejected and then offered to send. No 10 has denied that a request was made or denied.

Published: March 26, 2026, 6:37 pm

Immigrant trucker returns to war-torn Ukraine rather than risk ICE encounter: ‘I preferred going back home’

New federal restrictions threaten licenses for noncitizen truckers, including Ukrainians who fled Russia’s invasion

Karina Krainova, who worked as a trucker in the US after fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where she is from, rushed to the closest motor vehicle’s office last fall, just days after the US transportation department tightened commercial driver’s license requirements for immigrant drivers like her.

She was already afraid of being deported back to Ukraine as the war rages on. She had entered the United States legally in 2024 under a Biden administration program that granted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians a safe haven.

Published: March 26, 2026, 2:00 pm

‘Accountability has arrived’: dual US court losses show shifting tide against Meta and co

With two unprecedented trial defeats, big tech firms face crisis akin to that faced by cigarette makers in the 1990s

In the span of just two days, the most powerful social media company in the world faced a more severe public reckoning than it has in years.

Jurors in California and New Mexico gave back-to-back verdicts this week that for the first time ever found Meta liable for products that inflict harm on young people. For years, lawmakers, parents and advocates have raised red flags over how social media can hurt children, but now the tech firms are being held to account via court rulings that could set long-lasting precedents.

Published: March 27, 2026, 12:25 am

A smile and a handshake as Maduro case drags Venezuela crisis to New York court

The deposed Venezuelan president and his wife appeared in a Manhattan courtroom as rival protests took place outside

The deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro had a smile on his face as he walked into a Manhattan court with shackles around his ankles and affably shook hands with attorneys at the defense table.

But though he appeared at ease on Thursday, Maduro, who was captured in Caracas by US special forces on 3 January, faces a “narco-terrorism” indictment that could land him in federal prison for life.

Published: March 26, 2026, 8:43 pm

Flatterers out in force to fill Trump’s head with Venezuelan statue dreams

President’s popularity top of mind at another weird and wild cabinet meeting – riff on merits of Sharpies included

They have become so notorious for displays of flattery and obsequiousness that critics have drawn comparisons with North Korea. Thursday’s cabinet meeting at the White House was no different.

Doug Burgum, the US interior secretary, outflanked his fellow praise singers by saying he believes that Venezuela – which the US attacked in January – intends to honour the president with a statue.

Published: March 26, 2026, 8:37 pm

From Laurel Hubbard to sex testing in five years: why the Olympics U-turned on transgender rules | Sean Ingle

The IOC’s shift in position on trans women in elite sports is seismic, but new president Kirsty Coventry is reflecting a changed political climate

By any measure, it amounts to one of the most astonishing U-turns from a governing body in modern times. Four and a half years ago, the International Olympic Committee was lauding the appearance of the first transgender weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, at an Olympics, and issuing a framework to sports saying that transgender women “should not be deemed to have an unfair or disproportionate competitive advantage” over biological women.

Now it has not only ripped up every last morsel of that guidance but also performed a spectacular 180-degree turn.

Published: March 26, 2026, 5:59 pm

‘Even Beyoncé is still learning’: 10 expert tips on how to become more musical

Listen to an album each morning, pick an easy instrument, don’t be afraid to write bad songs … you’ve got this!

There are many benefits to making music, whether you are one or 100. But how should you approach choosing an instrument to play? And what are the best choices for a complete novice? We asked musicians for advice on how to live a more musical life, at any age.

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:43 am

You saw me standin’ alone: songs about the moon – ranked!

As the Artemis II crew prepare for the first moon mission since 1972, we select the best songs about our lunar neighbour, from Ella Fitzgerald’s romance to Gil Scott-Heron’s social commentary

This tribute to comedian Andy Kaufman came at the height of REM’s superstardom, but it’s a typically elliptical song that defies easy analysis, the chorus seeming to compare the moon landing conspiracy theories with claims Kaufman faked his own death. Its bassline recalls another lunar classic, The Killing Moon by Echo and the Bunnymen.

Published: March 26, 2026, 1:00 pm

The verdict against Meta and YouTube is a victory for children – and the US justice system | Austin Sarat

In a court of law, tech titans will be judged not for who they are, but what they do. We should take comfort in that

Jury verdicts are meant to speak the truth, and today’s verdict in a California courtroom spoke the truth about the pernicious effects of platforms such as Instagram and YouTube on young people in the United States and around the world. The jury found two social media giants, Meta and YouTube, responsible for injuries incurred by a 20-year-old woman over the course of her childhood.

The plaintiff, referred to in court as KGM, claimed that her social media use had begun when she was six years old. Her suit alleged that the sites she regularly used had features designed to hold her attention and keep her coming back.

Published: March 26, 2026, 12:00 pm

Rebecca Hendin on Donald Trump’s 15-point peace plan – cartoon

Continue reading...

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:46 pm

Netanyahu claims that victory over Iran would bring peace to Israel. He should look closer to home | Dahlia Scheindlin

As Israelis grow weary of sheltering from missile attacks, their prime minister is using the war to distract from the Palestinian issue

An opinion poll conducted in Israel two weeks into the war on Iran demonstrated what looked like euphoria: surveys by thinktanks such as the Israel Democracy Institute and the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) show that nearly 80% of the public supported the war. Among Israel’s Jewish population that figure rose to 91%.

The true picture is more complicated. The INSS also found that among Arab citizens, who are predominantly Palestinian and make up about 20% of the Israeli population, about two-thirds were opposed to the war. And reality is always more complex than polling figures: from Tel Aviv, I can see that the Jewish Israelis driving the sweeping support are simultaneously exhausted after what is now more than three weeks of running from missile attacks day and night, and by the economic, social and physical damage of the war.

Published: March 26, 2026, 12:00 pm

I am not paying American war taxes this year. Will you join me? | Clara Vondrich

War tax resistance has a venerable tradition dating back to days before the US was even born. It’s time to revive this tradition

More than $20bn. That’s roughly the cost of our military operation in Iran to date.

Tax day is a month away. If you’re like me, it makes your stomach turn to watch the US practice regime change in the Middle East – again. If you’re like me, the reckless murder of more than 150 little girls in the name of “liberating” Iranian women fills you with rage. The worst part? You and I literally paid for this.

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:00 am

I’m a young woman, and people keep telling me the internet has ruined my brain. Is this helpful? | Isabel Brooks

A new ruling valuably highlights the ways social media can damage very young users. But has it really ruined my whole generation?

Recently I read Girls®, a new book seeking to explore the problems posed by digital and social media to young women’s mental health. It has been praised by reviewers as “punchy” and “a starting place for young women seeking guidance”. As a young woman always open to improving myself, I rolled my sleeves up.

Written by 26-year-old Freya India, the book encourages young women to “look past what you’re being TOLD and see what you’re being SOLD”. Big tech, India says, is preying on the insecurities of its users; the recent mental health crisis in young women should be chalked up to social media, the internet and our addiction to it. It’s a debate playing out on the world stage: in a landmark case in the US, Meta and YouTube have been found liable for deliberately designing addictive products.

Isabel Brooks is a freelance writer

Published: March 26, 2026, 9:00 am

The Guardian view on China and Iran: the war poses bigger questions for Beijing than where to get its oil | Editorial

The limits of its partnership with Tehran are unsurprising. But this conflict raises broader issues for the superpower

For years, official Chinese rhetoric on Iran invoked their shared historical status as grand civilisations that have struggled against western aggression. Bilateral ties date back more than half a century. In 2021, they signed a comprehensive strategic agreement pledging $400bn of Chinese investment. And China’s economy is already flagging; it has just set its lowest growth target since 1991, underlining the importance of stability for Beijing.

So its muted response since the US and Israel launched their war is striking. Beijing condemned the attack, but it was Washington that postponed the summit between their leaders because of the conflict. As Gulf states that previously mediated back away, China shows no interest in stepping up.

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: March 26, 2026, 6:50 pm

NCAA Tournament: No 9 seed Iowa upset Nebraska to continue fairytale run

• Hawkeyes had already beaten No 1 Florida

• Alvaro Folgueiras shines again for Iowa

• No 11 Texas almost shock No 2 Purdue

Alvaro Folgueiras converted a critical three-point play when Nebraska only had four defenders on the floor, and ninth-seeded Iowa continued their unpredictable NCAA Tournament run under first-year coach Ben McCollum, beating Nebraska 77-71 in the Sweet Sixteen on Thursday night.

Bennett Stirtz scored 20 points and Folgueiras had 16 for the Hawkeyes (24-12), who knocked off top-seeded Florida in the second round on Folgueiras’ three-pointer in the closing seconds.

Published: March 27, 2026, 2:17 am

Gio Reyna keen to repay Mauricio Pochettino’s faith as World Cup approaches

The midfielder is determined to make his mark for the US men’s national team, despite struggles in club soccer

Gio Reyna admitted on Thursday that news of his call-up to the US national team may have come as a surprise.

“I guess you could say it was sort of one of [Mauricio Pochettino’s] more difficult decisions, or I guess controversial decisions to maybe bring me in,” he told reporters in Atlanta, where the US national team has gathered ahead of friendlies against Belgium and Portugal. “Again, I can’t appreciate it enough. Love this team, love this staff, love this group of people. So just always honored to be here.”

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:09 pm

Wales agony as Bosnia and Herzegovina win penalty shootout to end World Cup hopes

Two years to the day since penalty shootout heartbreak against Poland, more agony from 12 yards for Wales, this time to deny them a shot at reaching this summer’s World Cup. Bosnia and Herzegovina prevailed 4-2 on spot-kicks after a typically absorbing night in the Welsh capital, one that went the distance, more than 133 minutes passed before Brennan Johnson spooned over and Neco Williams saw his penalty saved by Nikola Vasilj.

For so long it had seemed Daniel James, whose spot-kick was saved by Wojciech Szczesny to kill hopes of reaching Euro 2024, would be the match-winner but Edin Dzeko, who turned 40 this month, glanced in a corner to take the game to extra time. For the second successive qualifying campaign, the locals left the Cardiff City Stadium numb. The sobering reality is Wales now have to rouse themselves for a non-event against Northern Ireland here on Tuesday, when Bosnia host Italy for a spot in the finals.

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:53 pm

The Quad God reborn: Ilia Malinin leads world championships after Olympic shock

• American on course for victory after short program

• 21-year-old had disastrous skate at Winter Olympics

Ilia Malinin bounced back from his disappointment at this year’s Winter Olympics by leading after the short program at the figure skating world championships on Thursday.

Malinin, sporting a new haircut, gave fans what they expected from the defending two-time world champion at O2 Arena in Prague.

Published: March 26, 2026, 4:55 pm

Tom Brady, 48, says he explored return to NFL but league ‘don’t like that idea very much’

• Role as minority owner of Raiders causes problems

• Former QB says he is ‘very happily retired’

Tom Brady says he explored the idea of making a return to the NFL as a player but the league “don’t like that idea very much”.

Brady’s last NFL game came in a defeat to the Dallas Cowboys in January 2023. Since then he has become a part-owner of the Las Vegas Raiders as well as a television analyst for Fox. A spokesperson for the league said that Brady, who turns 49 in August, would need to divest his stake in the Raiders if he was to return to playing.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:58 pm

Sinner continues smooth Miami progress with win over Tiafoe as rivals fall

• Italian sweeps Tiafoe aside 6-2, 6-2 to reach semis

• France’s Fils wins thriller against Paul

The past nine days at the Miami Open have not been kind to most of the world’s best male tennis players. One by one, so many have fallen, most dumped out with mediocre performances. Even ­Carlos Alcaraz, the world No 1, was not immune to the string of ­giantkillings in Florida.

One man remains completely unbothered. Having broken Novak Djokovic’s 2016 record for most ­consecutive sets won at Masters 1000 events earlier in the ­tournament, ­Jannik Sinner has continued to ­bulldoze through the draw as he tries to follow up his recent Indian Wells title by winning the Sunshine Double. He rolled into the semi-finals of the Miami Open with a comfortable 6-2, 6-2 win over the 19th seed, Frances Tiafoe.

Published: March 26, 2026, 7:19 pm

The nerdy, authentic Oklahoma City Thunder are a breath of fresh air

The relatable, endearing authenticity of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the defending NBA champions is a wonder to behold

Winter is over, though perhaps most NBA fans feel as if it’s just beginning. After a midseason slump, the Oklahoma City Thunder have won 12 of their last 13 games They’re clinging to a slim but steady three-game lead over the San Antonio Spurs atop the otherwise chaotic Western Conference. (The Lakers are good now? The Nuggets can’t find their footing? The Rockets can’t even stand up?) The Thunder’s flirtation with vulnerability was fun, but the defending champions look as invincible now as they did during their 24-1 run to begin the season. So, now as then, with nothing to criticize in the Thunder’s basketball, we are compelled to discuss their character and vibes.

Reviews are usually poor. I myself celebrated the Spurs when they recorded a hat-trick of wins over the Thunder in December, simply for injecting intrigue into a season that already seemed decided. The Defector podcast Nothing But Respect recently featured a series of anti-Thunder guests; after discussing the idea that artists don’t like OKC with musician Will Anderson, a host announced, “next week, we will have a real, actual Thunder expert to defend his team’s values”. Most of the comments on that episode seemed unconvinced by Ringer staff writer Tyler Parker’s arguments.

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:00 am

Nicolás Maduro appears again in New York court on ‘narco-terrorism’ charges

Deposed Venezuelan president and his wife, who both pleaded not guilty, were captured by US military in January

The deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro appeared in a Manhattan federal court on Thursday for his “narco-terrorism” case after his capture by US military forces earlier this year.

The hearing opened with the defense and prosecution arguing over whether Maduro should be allowed to use Venezuelan government funds to pay for his defense. The defense has insisted that the US is violating the deposed leader’s constitutional rights by blocking government money from being used for his legal costs.

Published: March 26, 2026, 5:58 pm

Human rights experts raise concerns over Olympics transgender women athlete ban

• Critics say new IOC guidelines violate fundamental human rights

• AOC backs new rules but accepts issue is ‘challenging and complex’

Over 100 human rights, sports and scientific groups, including the United Nations, have criticised the International Olympic Committee’s new gender eligibility guidelines as “a blunt and discriminatory response that is not supported by science and violates international human rights law”.

The IOC’s new guidelines, announced on Friday, mandate genetic sex tests for all athletes competing in its women’s categories, as well as blanket bans of people who identify as transgender, intersex or with sex differences.

Published: March 27, 2026, 3:34 am

Savannah Guthrie fears her fame could be reason for mother’s disappearance

Today show host calls 84-year-old mother’s disappearance ‘unbearable’ in first interview since possible kidnapping

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Savannah Guthrie says she fears her own fame could have been the reason for her mother Nancy’s disappearance, which she has called “unbearable” in her first interview since the possible kidnapping.

Guthrie, a main co-anchor of the NBC News morning show Today, discussed the possible reasons for the disappearance of Nancy, who is 84 years old and was reported missing on 1 February from her home near Tucson, Arizona, in an interview with Guthrie’s colleague Hoda Kotb.

Published: March 26, 2026, 4:30 pm

Hungary charges journalist after claims minister was in touch with Moscow

Investigative reporter Szabolcs Panyi covered story alleging foreign minister had passed information to Sergei Lavrov

The Hungarian government has filed charges against one of the country’s most prominent investigative journalists, accusing him of spying for Ukraine, as officials grapple with the fallout of allegations that Budapest shared confidential EU information with Moscow.

The claims of espionage cap off a tumultuous week in Hungarian politics, in which relations with the EU plummeted to new lows and polls suggested that Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party is still lagging behind in support before next month’s election.

Published: March 26, 2026, 6:37 pm

Dash Crofts of Summer Breeze rock duo Seals and Crofts dies aged 85

Crofts helped define the sound of yacht rock with 1970s hits such as Summer Breeze and Diamond Girl

Dash Crofts, the yacht rock musician who helped craft 70s hits such as Summer Breeze and Diamond Girl as part of the duo Seals and Crofts, has died aged 85.

The news was announced on social media by the duo’s producer, Louie Shelton. He wrote: “Sad to hear our dear brother and partner in music has passed away today. Sending love and prayers to all his family and many fans. R.I.P. my brother.....Dash Crofts.” A family member confirmed that Crofts died due to complications following heart surgery.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:11 pm

Fossil fuel companies finally accept the climate crisis – just not their role in it

The era of corporate climate denial is over but in courts around the world the big names have shifted strategy

While the US government continues to call climate change a hoax and attack the science, in courtrooms from The Hague to Honolulu, fossil fuel companies are taking a different approach. Shell, Chevron, RWE and TotalEnergies all accept that climate change is real, human-caused and serious. The era of corporate climate denial, at least in legal proceedings, is largely over.

What has replaced it is a more nuanced position: accepting the science of climate change while contesting their responsibility for it.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:00 pm

Fears net zero is ‘next Brexit’ as oil crisis fuels political climate divide

Rising energy bills give Reform and Tories opening to attack net zero while government hesitant to make case for clean energy

Could net zero become “the next Brexit”? That is the fear stalking climate advocates as the oil crisis caused by the war on Iran starts to bite.

A powerful coalition of the well-funded Reform party, led by Nigel Farage, the Conservative party, some business interests, and the UK’s right-wing media, are engaged in an onslaught against the longstanding target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Published: March 26, 2026, 8:00 am

Bill Maher to receive Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain prize after White House denial

Comedian who called Trump ‘gracious and measured’ will win humor award the White House dubbed ‘FAKE NEWS’

Bill Maher will win the prestigious Mark Twain prize for American humor, the Kennedy Center said Thursday, less than a week after the White House forcefully denied that the comedian, who has had a hot-and-cold relationship with Donald Trump, would win it.

“For nearly three decades, the Mark Twain prize has celebrated some of the greatest minds in comedy,” Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice-president of public relations, said in a statement. “For even longer, Bill has been influencing American discourse – one politically incorrect joke at a time.”

Published: March 26, 2026, 1:30 pm

Newsom signs California bill to rename Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day

Lawmakers earlier passed bill to rename 31 March holiday following sexual abuse allegations against labor leader

California governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation Thursday renaming Cesar Chavez Day to Farmworkers Day in the wake of shocking allegations that the labor leader sexually abused women and young girls.

The bill, passed by the state senate earlier on Thursday, authorized the renaming ahead of the state holiday on 31 March. The state has observed the holiday honoring Chavez, who in the 1960s built a major farm-worker labor rights movement California’s agricultural heartland, for more than two decades.

Published: March 27, 2026, 12:35 am

New York City hospitals drop Palantir as controversial AI firm expands in UK

The decision follows activist pressure as Palantir faces growing scrutiny over NHS and UK government deals

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New York City’s public hospital system announced that it would not be renewing its contract with Palantir as controversy mounts in the UK over the data analytics and AI firm’s government contract.

The president of the US’ largest municipal public healthcare system, Dr Mitchell Katz, testified last week before the New York city council that the agreement with Palantir would expire in October.

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:48 pm

Arizona gun dealer accused of selling firearms to two Mexican cartels

Laurence Gray was charged with attempting to provide material support to terrorist organizations

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An Arizona licensed gun dealer was charged this month with attempting to provide material support to terrorist organizations after federal agents caught him allegedly selling a series of rifles and guns to two Mexican cartels.

The federal charges against the American firearms dealer come amid years of pressure by the Mexican government to stop the flow of weapons into the country. Mexico’s violent and bloody internal conflict, between drug cartels and the Mexican government, has been largely fueled by American weapons smuggled into the country.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:49 pm

Russia bans Oscar-winning documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin

Russian court alleges film promotes ‘negative attitudes’ about the Russian government and the war in Ukraine

A Russian court banned the Oscar-winning documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin from several streaming platforms on Thursday, alleging it promoted “negative attitudes” about the Russian government and the war in Ukraine.

The film documents pro-war propaganda lessons delivered at a school in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region, using two years of footage secretly filmed and smuggled out of the country by the school’s videographer, Pavel Talankin.

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:30 pm

Putin asks oligarchs to donate to Russia’s dwindling defence budget

Russian president expected to continue invasion of Ukraine until his forces have secured remaining areas of eastern Donbas

Vladimir Putin has asked Russia’s oligarchs to donate to the country’s dwindling defence budget to continue its invasion of Ukraine, it has been reported.

The Russian president is expected to continue the conflict, which began in February 2022, until Moscow has secured the remaining areas of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region not under its control, according to the Financial Times.

At least two businessmen have told Putin they would be willing to make contributions to the defence budget after talks on Thursday, the newspaper reported.

Putin is understood to be pressing ahead with the invasion after Ukraine refused to withdraw unilaterally from Donbas during recent negotiations brokered by the US.

Russia will be in contact with the US about a new round of talks on a peace settlement as soon as conditions allow, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

Peskov said Russia had not lost interest in peace talks but added that key issues – including territory – had yet to be settled.

The Kremlin’s defence bill has increased by 42% to reach Rbs13.1tn (£121bn) last year and it has sought to stabilise its economy through taxation.

The economy minister, Maxim Reshetnikov, said on Thursday that Russia was considering another windfall tax this year if the rouble continues to weaken. Russia raised Rbs320bn (£2.95bn) through a one-off 10% windfall levy on some large companies in 2023.

In January, the Kremlin increased VAT to 22% in a bid to raise an extra Rbs600bn over three years from small and medium-sized businesses.

Russia’s budget deficit for January and February swelled to more than 90% of the figure projected for the whole year as US sanctions forced Moscow to sell oil at significantly discounted prices.

Earlier, Putin cautioned that Russian companies and the government should take a guarded approach when deciding how to spend windfall gains from higher oil prices resulting from the war in the Middle East.

“Now that the prices of our traditional exports are rising, but the markets are in turmoil, there may be a temptation to take advantage of the situation,” he told business leaders in Moscow.

Putin added this temptation could involve squandering the extra revenue, paying it out in company dividends or, in the state’s case, expanding budget spending.

“We must remain prudent. If the markets swing one way today, they could swing the other tomorrow,” he added.

“A moderate degree of conservatism and a moderately conservative approach are needed, both in the corporate sector and in public finances.”

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:31 pm

Nepal’s PM-to-be uses rap to call for unity in first post-election message

Balendra Shah, 35, is a symbol of change in country whose government was toppled last year in youth-led uprising

Nepal’s rapper turned politician Balendra Shah, who is about to be sworn in as prime minister, has issued his first post-election message in the form of a rap urging unity.

Hours before the release he swore an oath as a newly elected lawmaker, and he is due to become the Himalayan republic’s new prime minister on Friday.

Published: March 26, 2026, 5:43 pm

Finnish MP convicted for saying homosexuality is ‘developmental disorder’

Christian Democrat Päivi Räsänen, who was fined €1,800, was supported by conservative US group Alliance Defending Freedom

A Finnish member of parliament has been found guilty by the country’s supreme court of inciting hatred after claiming that homosexuality was a “developmental disorder”, in a conviction that prompted criticism from far-right government ministers.

Päivi Räsänen, of the Christian Democrats, made the claims in a pamphlet first published in 2004 and reproduced on the website of the Luther Foundation Finland and the Finnish Evangelical Mission Diocese in 2007.

Published: March 26, 2026, 5:18 pm

Halle Bailey: ‘It’s a vulnerable place to be – a young woman cast as a Disney princess’

The singer and Little Mermaid star answers your questions on ‘cool auntie’ Beyoncé, Bridgerton – and being confused for Halle Berry

After your experience in two major romance projects – The Little Mermaid and You, Me & Tuscany – how do you know if you’ve found the right Prince Charming? EmmaTseng
I think each character has a different version of their Prince Charming. For Ariel, I love that she wasn’t all about looking for a prince and that she only went above water because she was curious for life and her future. Anna, my character in You, Me & Tuscany, is also going after her own heart with her impulsive decisions, because you only live once. Both characters are bold and headstrong, and when they stumble upon their Prince Charmings – who are reassuring and affirming and bring out the best in them – it’s just the cherry on top.

Your You, Me & Tuscany co-star Regé-Jean Page plays the Duke of Hastings in Bridgerton. Did his English charm rub off on you? And if you could be any character in Bridgerton, who would it be? MrSOBaldrick
Regé is so funny. He’s such a warm, kind-hearted guy. I feel his English accent really comes out now that we’re here in London. When we’re in my home – LA – it goes in and out. I hope some of his English charm rubbed off on me. I love Bridgerton, yes. I would want to be the queen, because she is amazing, gets to choose the diamond of the season, matchmake and watch people fall in love.

Published: March 26, 2026, 2:00 pm

Will Stephen Colbert’s Lord of the Rings film be Tom Bombadil’s time to shine?

The US talkshow host’s script will focus on chapters three to eight of Tolkien’s first volume – a section Hollywood originally thought disposable but is now circling back to monetise

As I write this, there are at least five days to April Fools’ Day. Yet the news that Stephen Colbert, the American late night host, is about to write a new Lord of the Rings movie based at least in part on some (more) bits of the JRR Tolkien tome that didn’t make it into Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning trilogy certainly feels like a prank.

We already knew we are about to get an entire film, directed by and starring Andy Serkis, titled Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, and based on a sequence that was told in brief flashback during 2001’s The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s due out next year. And there were rumours that more movies would be coming. The Scouring of the Shire, perhaps, based on the bit at the end of The Lord of the Rings when the hobbits go home and discover Saruman has set himself up as King of the Hobbits? Something centred on long forgotten segments of The Silmarillion or The Book of Lost Tales that have somehow not been covered by Amazon’s megabudget Rings of Power TV show? Perhaps an action adventure based on Farmer Giles of Ham?

Published: March 26, 2026, 2:23 pm

Hook, line and cinema: why boxing films are still a knockout

The BFI’s new season, The Cinematic Life of Boxing, shows how this captivating genre has endured for more than a century and celebrates its ability to inspire generations

Almost as soon as film was invented, it became apparent that boxing was a prime candidate for a spectacle to be showcased by the nascent artform – and to help develop it. Small wonder: as new technologies sought to capture high-stakes emotion, physical intensity, furious spectacle, rivalry and personal turbulence, boxingseemed uniquely capable of absorbing these narratives. That it straddled the class gap further expanded its appeal in this new entertainment – one which would itself foster fresh interest in the sport.

The first sports film was an 1894 short of a six-round match between Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing. Only 23 seconds survive, yet its impact still smarts, 132 years on. Scores of directors have since been drawn to pugilistic stories: everything from prize fights to amateur spars to bare-knuckle brawls. In fact, no sport has been rendered cinematically to quite the same degree, whether through dramas, biopics or documentaries. The British Film Institute’s new season, The Cinematic Life of Boxing, studies this long, symbiotic fascination, and how film has successfully tapped into the sport’s psychological, sociological and political dimensions.

Published: March 26, 2026, 4:20 pm

William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet review – Baz Luhrmann’s joyful tragedy is still extravagantly full of life

The 1990s love tragedy starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes is a tonic and a delight

Thirty years ago, Baz Luhrmann reinvented Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a gangbanger love tragedy of the present day, with Mexico City standing in for an imaginary urban place called Verona Beach. The result was a terrific success, more of a success, I suspect, than Luhrmann ever had again; it was irreverent and questioning in just the right way, a sunburst of energy, but instinctively respectful to the story, with Luhrmann cutting the original text with co-screenwriter Craig Pearce but not changing or modernising it. It is full of life, extravagantly joyful, then passionately sad, and its lurid 90s crime-chic design doesn’t look dated. And in this Romeo and Juliet, Luhrmann never suspended the forward momentum to indulge campy musical setpieces, perhaps because Shakespeare’s language is the music and the dance; the text keeps the interpretation grounded.

The 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, yet to have his massive breakthrough in Titanic (another story of starcrossed lovers), plays young Romeo Montague, whose family is locked into an unexplained Sicilian-style blood feud with the Capulet family. Romeo is a young idler and would-be poet, scribbling lines of verse into a notebook, and at this stage dreamily moping over a young woman called Rosaline, whose silent offstage existence is the play’s minor incidental mystery. (Brian Dennehy and Christina Pickles play his parents and they have much less of a role than the elder Capulets.)

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:00 am

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen review – so scary it will send you hysterical

Abandoned babies, pink Barbie shoes and throat-slitting serial killers? This wedding horror from the makers of Stranger Things is so hellish I may never sleep again

Personally, I have always broken off my engagements no more than halfway through a portent-filled night drive to meet my fiance’s parents for the first time in their sprawling, dark-corridor-laced ‘cabin’ in the woods. I might get through the true-crime podcast about a local blood-letting serial killer. I might survive finding a maggoty dead fox in the smashed toilet of a rest stop on the way. But at the first sign of a mysteriously abandoned baby in a parking lot and long before I find myself standing in front of a shrineful of taxidermied family pets in the cabin’s entrance hall, I’m outta there. I’m gone.

I commend you all to have such boundaries, but none more so than twenty-something semi-orphaned Oregonian Rachel (Camila Morrone), who finds herself doing precisely that in the eight-part horror series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

Published: March 26, 2026, 7:01 am

They Will Kill You review – satanic beat-’em-up offers gore, bad jokes and deja vu

A housekeeping role turns into a fight for survival in a derivative cocktail of action, comedy and horror that doesn’t go down all that well

Come find your new home at the Virgil, one of New York’s oldest and most exclusive and certainly most satanic co-op residences. Never mind the clerestory window embossed with an inverted pentagram that glows red day and night. (You can’t see it from street level anyhow, which is by design.) You’ll be too busy enjoying such fabulous amenities as a full live-in maid staff with peculiarly high turnover, an entire floor dedicated to an unending all-hours orgy, and for those willing to pledge their dark fealty to the head of the building’s board, eternal life. The Virgil: if you lived here, you’d be in hell by now.

For the Virgil’s newly hired help, Asia (Zazie Beetz), the job comes with room and board and a whole lot of strings attached, which quickly tighten around her throat. Even though she misses the bathroom-mirror warning that gives Kirill Sokolov’s first English-language feature its title, the unrelenting They Will Kill You wastes no time in establishing its stakes: Asia is here less to make beds and more to serve as a human sacrifice to their unholy anti-God. What the Virgil’s wealth-curdled lifers don’t know is they’ve trifled with the wrong proletarian. In isolating the thesis of 1943’s The Seventh Victim, the first film to correctly link Manhattan real estate holders with the devil, its producer Val Lewton famously posited that “death is good”; Sokolov’s rambunctious, only-sometimes-winningly sophomoric beat-‘em-up amends this axiom to “death is also epically effin’ bad-ass”.

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:00 am

Anne-Sophie Mutter: East Meets West album review – diverse, bold and brand new

Mutter/Zhou/LSO/Adès
(Alpha)
A varied and engaging collection of four works written for the star violinist features music by Jörg Widmann, Unsuk Chin, Thomas Adès and Aftab Darvishi

Anne-Sophie Mutter’s enduring commitment to contemporary music is showcased in her bold new series on Alpha Classics. All four works were specifically written for her, with the composers’ diverse heritages lending the album its title.

The programme opens with a six-minute solo by Iranian-Dutch composer Aftab Darvishi. Likoo – the title refers to a folk poetry genre rooted in the desert life of Iran – is a sinuous lament, written before the recent outbreak of war but now unbearably poignant. It’s followed by a nine-minute rollercoaster duo, Gran Cadenza, by Unsuk Chin, a South Korean composer living in Berlin. Mutter is partnered by the excellent Chinese-American violinist Nancy Zhou in a prickly, high-wire duel to the death.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:10 pm

Country star Ty Herndon: ‘The drugs could be forgiven. Being gay definitely could not’

In an honest new memoir, the musician opens up about being closeted in country, sexual assault, and finding love in his 60s

On 14 June 1995, the Nashville singer Ty Herndon was riding high with a No 1 single on the country charts and an album hurtling towards gold status when he was arrested on charges that could have killed his career in an instant. At 10am, he pulled into a gas station in Texas, right across the street from a park well-known for gay cruising and hookups. Amped by a hit of meth amphetamine, Herndon strolled into a glade where he soon met a guy he later described as “movie-star handsome”. The stranger began stroking his own crotch, then reached for Herndon’s. But when the singer unzipped his fly, the man, an undercover cop, said, “This ain’t your day, cowboy,” leading to the star’s arrest on charges from drug possession to indecent exposure.

While news of the incident traveled fast – aided in no small part by the police alerting the media – Herndon’s record company swung into parallel action. They cooked up a massive PR strategy that painted the singer as victim of drug use while feeding the media a series of lies to explain away the sex. “The drugs could be forgiven,” Herndon says during a Zoom interview the other day from his Nashville home. “Being gay definitely could not.”

Published: March 26, 2026, 9:00 am

Daunting, inspiring, comforting, terrifying: the writers who can make silence as eloquent as words

From the hush of medieval lullabies to striking poems about Grenfell, great authors know how to deploy the power of silence

On a snowy Sunday morning in February 1808, the poet William Wordsworth was walking along Fleet Street in London. He’d just been to visit his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his lodgings on the Strand. Coleridge was at a low ebb: stuck in an unhappy marriage, weighed down by perennial financial difficulties, mentally blocked from writing, in poor health and addicted to opium. The visit had a lowering effect on Wordsworth’s own spirits. Walking along Fleet Street, eyes downcast, “ear sleeping”, feet moving automatically, he was absorbed in sombre thoughts.

But then something made him look up. A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, “silent, empty, pure white”, and, at the end of it, the “huge and majestic form” of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes – a real-life snow globe. “I cannot say how much I was affected at this unthought-of sight,” Wordsworth told his friend and patron, Sir George Beaumont, in a letter he wrote a few days later. “What a blessing I feel there is in habits of exalted imagination.” The great London silence was another piece in his accumulating pile of evidence that intuiting something beyond yourself is the route to becoming morally magnificent.

Published: March 26, 2026, 2:25 pm

Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh review – high-concept adultery fable

Unfaithful lovers escape to an uncanny alternate world, in this compelling allegory for infidelity and desire

Sophie Mackintosh has established a reputation for speculative literary fiction about young women’s desires and suffering at the hands of men. Her new novel, Permanence, is less plainly political than earlier work, concerned more with allegories of desire than oppression.

The novel begins in an uncanny hotel, where Clara wakes beside her lover, Francis. Clara works desultorily in an art gallery and shares a flat with a friend. Francis is an academic, an art historian married to a lawyer, the father of a toddler, but on this day he and Clara find themselves in a parallel world in which adulterous couples live in what seems at first to be a permanent holiday. The realised fantasy is bourgeois, north European: a cobbled old city where the sun always shines and there are many restaurants with clean tablecloths and good wine. There are parks full of perpetually blooming flowers, old stone fountains; markets offering ripe tomatoes, olive oil and bread; scented soap in clean bathrooms, and nothing for Clara and Francis to do but make love, bathe, eat, drink and stroll the charming streets. Clara finds pretty dresses, girlish pale blue silk and yellow cotton, awaiting her in the wardrobe, her favourite books beside the bed.

Published: March 26, 2026, 7:00 am

Muskism by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff review – how Elon Musk is reshaping the world

Henry Ford changed the face of industry forever – what kind of economic model do Musk’s methods presage?

Genius industrialist or clownish conman, humanity’s saviour from a rapidly crumbling planet or rabid social media troll – the verdicts on the world’s richest person vary in flavour, but most share something in common: they focus on Musk as an individual. In their study, Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, and Ben Tarnoff, a tech writer, wish to reframe the conversation. The most important question, they argue, is not “who is Musk?” but “what is Musk a symptom of?”

As the title suggests, their answer is “Muskism”, the coinage a deliberate nod to Fordism, the shorthand for 20th-century capitalism built on the pairing of mass production with mass consumption. If Fordism was the last century’s operating system, Slobodian and Tarnoff contend that Muskism is this century’s.

Published: March 26, 2026, 9:00 am

C-3PO head used in Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back sells for more than $1m at auction

Memorabilia from Jaws, Cast Away and The Lord of The Rings also went under the hammer

A light-up C-3PO head used in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back has fetched more than US$1m at an auction.

The prop was part of a collection of film and TV memorabilia that went under the hammer on Wednesday as part of the Spring Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction at Propstore auction house in Los Angeles.

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:36 pm

Protect ya neck! Wu-Tang Clan as they’ve never been seen before – in pictures

Eddie Otchere spent 10 years photographing the New York hip-hop stars and other musicians. Here are the highlights of his thrilling new photozine

Published: March 26, 2026, 7:00 am

Seth Meyers on Donald Trump’s ‘present’ from Iran: ‘Is the president getting catfished?’

Late-night hosts discussed Trump’s hypocrisy over mail-in voting and his insistence that the US is not actually at war

Late-night hosts speculated on Donald Trump’s mystery “present” from Iran, as well as his delusions about a war he claims the US is not in.

Published: March 26, 2026, 2:27 pm

Paul McCartney announces 18th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, promising introspection and revelation

The new album draws from the musician’s early childhood memories of growing up in Liverpool and his relationship with Lennon, with musical styles that span his entire career

• Alexis Petridis on single Days We Left Behind: ‘As McCartney-esque as possible’

Paul McCartney has announced his 18th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane – its title a reference to the route from Liverpool to the Speke shoreline, the area where the former Beatle spent his young childhood.

A press release described the 14-track record as McCartney’s most introspective album yet, a “collection of rare and revealing glimpses into memories never-before shared, along with some newly inspired love songs”, presumably about McCartney’s third wife, Nancy Shevell, whom he married in 2011. The musical styles are said to span his entire career, including “Wings-style rock, Beatles-style harmonies, McCartney-style grooves, understated intimacy, melody-driven storytelling, character songs”.

Published: March 26, 2026, 3:00 pm

I asked AI about God. It asked me about myself instead

In week four of Rhik Samadder’s diary, our resident AI skeptic turned to HolyGPT to ask the ultimate question of why we are here

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I remember my very first online search, back in 2001: “What is the meaning of life?”

I remember clicking through to a mysterious minimal website that told me all points of consciousness were facets of the divine wishing to perceive itself.

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:00 am

Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

One minute, Dennis Biesma was playing with a chatbot; the next, he was convinced his sentient friend would make him a fortune. He’s just one of many people who lost control after an AI encounter

Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. “I had some time, so I thought: let’s have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about,” he says. “Very quickly, I became fascinated.”

Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself.

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:00 am

You be the judge: should my partner keep his ashtrays outside?

Rita wants Martin’s novelty ashtrays to stay in the garden. He likes to give them pride of place on the shelf. Whose argument is a smokescreen? You decide

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Martin says his novelty ashtrays are decor and will spoil in the rain, but ash in our home is gross

I’ve already compromised and cut down on smoking – plus they’re more like collector’s items

Published: March 26, 2026, 8:00 am

‘You go in bald and walk out with the best hair you’ve ever had’: the remarkable return of the toupee

Hair transplants have never been more widespread or more affordable. So why do so many balding men prefer glued-on hairpieces? And are the best really undetectable?

When you hear the word toupee, certain images spring to mind. Older men with suspiciously thick hair, say; or a poorly colour-matched partial wig covering a bald patch, perhaps flying off in the wind. These are the toupees of old.

Toupees are distinct from wigs in that they cover only part of the scalp, but both have a long history. While humans were wearing hairpieces as far back as ancient Egypt, toupees originated in the 18th century, the name developing from the French toupet, meaning “tuft of hair”. They became particularly prominent in the mid-20th century, with Time magazine estimating that more than 2.5 million men across the US were wearing toupees by 1970. But concerns about how obvious the pieces were, hammered home by ridicule in popular culture (see Monty Python’s Toupee Department sketch) combined with the gradual acceptance of shaved heads in fashion, led to their decline.

Published: March 26, 2026, 5:00 am

From basil to pistachio and peas – in praise of pesto, whichever way you make it

Whether on pasta or pizza, in soup or even in a tart, this classic Italian sauce is one of your most versatile ingredients

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It was not without satisfaction that I found my 14-year-old son making pesto the other week – for the first 13 years of his life he referred to it as either “pesto-the-bogey-man”, or “gross”. To avoid interfering and sabotaging the moment, I didn’t look too closely, so I didn’t clock the shallow bowl and immersion blender combination. I did hear the noise – a blunt churn – as the blade hit the leaves and nuts. Acting more like a leaf blower than cutter, it sent green and white oily fragments up the cupboards and over pretty much every pot, utensil and tool nearby. Impressively unfazed, he managed to scrape a good proportion of the elements into the food processor and make an extremely tasty pesto, which was mixed with linguine, green beans and potatoes. Less effective was his clearing up (mine too, for that matter), and I am still finding dried green flecks stuck to slotted spoons.

Like mash and crumble, the word pesto comes from an action, in this case pestare, which means to pound or bash repeatedly with a pestle. In much the same way, though, that mash was wedded to potato, and crumble set up home and had kids with apples, pesto came to be associated with basil, pine nuts, pecorino, garlic and olive oil. This happy combination of ingredients occurred in Genoa, in the region of Liguria, hence the name pesto alla Genovese. Such was its popularity, that the pounded sauce joined Cher, Prince and Sade in becoming a one-name celebrity. It is so beloved that some fans have suggested that other pestos are impostors.

Published: March 26, 2026, 12:45 pm

‘It’s like having a friend everywhere you travel’: after 12 home exchanges, I’ll never book a hotel again

The Which? travel editor on the unexpected joys and considerable savings of house swapping. Plus top tips on how to do it

Imagine cutting the cost of accommodation on your next holiday to about £5 a day. You can have a whole house, rather than just a bedroom. And you can go almost anywhere in the world and stay as long as you like, within reason. Welcome to house swapping.

You’re sceptical, I know. I was, too. Our terrace house was too small. Too overflowing with stuff. The 1980s kitchen was too old (and battered). We aren’t in a nice enough neighbourhood. Who would want to stay here? Lots of people, it turned out.

Published: March 26, 2026, 7:00 am

Rachel Roddy’s recipe for potato, aubergine and herb tortino alla fiorentina

A substantial, velvety dish to carry you through into the summer months

The sky is the same shade as old Tupperware, our tortoise appears to have gone back into hibernation, the flat upstairs has builders in, but the kitchen smells gorgeous, thanks to this week’s recipe. It is one of the variations suggested by Anna Gosetti Della Salda for her aubergine and egg tortino alla fiorentina in the Tuscany chapter of Le Ricette Regionali Italiane, an indispensable book that I would save from a fire. The addition of potato to the aubergine makes it an even more substantial, velvet-like and better-tasting dish, I think: a layered vegetable bake crossed with a frittata that fancies itself as having a touch of baked eggs (although don’t expect any puffing up).

Instead of the aubergine, you could use artichoke hearts (trimmed and cut into slim wedges), courgettes or cardoon, and, if you fancy, you could also add a crumbled sausage or a handful of diced pancetta. Whatever you use, however, a fundamental stage in terms of both flavour and texture is the initial cooking of the vegetables: frying the potatoes, then covering the pan so they fry-steam into tenderness; the aubergine by simply frying. Important, too, is sprinkling the just-cooked slices with a little salt, so the end dish is seasoned through. (The egg and milk mixture is seasoned with cheese – use whatever you have – but check for salt, too.)

Published: March 26, 2026, 6:00 am

Sauces, spreads, sprinkles – and cocktail in a can: whose fridge is this?

There’s a distinctly sour edge to the jars and goodies that chef and author Helen Graham keeps handy

Amba sauce
“I’m very jar orientated; a lot of my cooking is about combining big flavours. I’m also a sucker for a sour ingredient, and this Iraqi pickled mango condiment is really sour – more so than tamarind. If I’m garnishing a dish with tahini, then I’ll use amba to cut through the richness, otherwise I’ll use it in lieu of citrus.”

Stem ginger in syrup
“My grandpa always gave me this when I was a kid, and I thought it was disgusting. However, now it’s essential; I often make a (chopped) stem ginger and spring onion salsa – it’s sweet and spicy. Stem ginger is such a nostalgic ingredient for me.”

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:00 am

My last fight with my Palestinian father still haunts me. Neither of us could bury the past

My eternally exiled father was dying and witnessing a siege on Gaza. Afterwards I could go home – but he couldn’t

The last fight we ever had, my father and I, occurred on a night in May 2021 on the eve of his first chemo treatment. At this point in our story, I was a new mother, and he was a year and a half from his death. To treat his stage four prostate cancer, he had been given a series of experimental hormone treatments, which had put him in a sort of male menopause and which had just begun to fail. This last fight of ours also happened to fall right in the middle of that previous siege of Gaza (before the more recent one none of us will ever forget), which itself resulted in the destruction of 40 schools and four hospitals.

That night in May, we were in the rented ranch house in Arizona, the one with the broken dishwasher and the blue pool slide that had not been functional for decades, the house with its view of the sky and faint hint of the McDowell mountains. Though my father had lived in Palestine, Syria, Kuwait and Italy, he had fled to the Sonoran Desert after going bankrupt in New York in the early 1990s and loved the dramatic landscapes of the west with a fealty he had for nowhere else. Whereas I missed New York like a lover. I felt unmoored, restless. Exiled.

Published: March 26, 2026, 11:00 am

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying

LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity

On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12.

Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target. Congress wrote to the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, about the extent of AI use in the strikes. The New Yorker magazine asked whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat, whether it might resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy, and whether the Pentagon’s chief concern should be that the chatbot had a personality. Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.

Published: March 26, 2026, 5:00 am

Dodging the ‘wrinkle wagon’: why a Brazilian film about ageing is inspiring older women

The Blue Trail, about a rebellious 77-year old woman who escapes forced exile for elderly people, has struck a nerve in a country where ageism is widespread

When 80-year-old Gilda Olinto was given a prize at work recently, she felt as if she was being told “nothing more is expected of you”. It reminded her of The Blue Trail (O Último Azul in Portuguese), a film set in a near-future Brazil where an authoritarian government honours elderly people with golden laurels before stripping them of their autonomy and sending them to live out their days in a remote housing colony.

After being reluctantly bestowed with the accolade, the film’s 77-year-old protagonist Tereza realises she is going to be exiled from society – but she is determined to pursue a lifelong dream first, which takes her on a journey of discovery though the Amazon.

Published: March 26, 2026, 10:00 am

Buddhist monks protest and cherry blossoms bloom: pictures of the day – Thursday

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Published: March 26, 2026, 1:24 pm