Following Taylor’s death, the US limited no-knock warrants. But the Trump administration has quietly rescinded those limits The night Breonna Taylor died began quietly. She had spent the evening at home in Louisville. The 26-year-old was an emergency room technician, someone who worked to prevent other people’s tragedies. Continue reading...

From war zones and socially virtuous farming to ever-changing boards and role-playing with 167 dice, here’s our pick of the most absorbing table-based entertainment Video games have long been heavily inspired by physical games, from chess and Scrabble to Dungeons & Dragons. The deck-building collectible card game, for example, has become immensely popular in digital form, thanks to hits such as Slay the Spire, Marvel Snap and Balatro. Now, an increasing number of games are going in the opposite direction, trading pixels for pieces and screens for spinners. Here are six of our favourites. Company of Heroes 2nd Edition (Bad Crow Games, £119.70) Continue reading...

A state visit is a connecting of people, not governments; of cultures, not commentators – our national bonds should be honoured Should King Charles’s state visit to the United States next month be cancelled? The case for doing so is powerful. America is waging an unprovoked war on Iran in which more than 1,000 innocent people have already been killed. The collateral damage to the global economy, including Britain’s, is becoming astronomical. All Donald Trump can do is insult Britain’s prime minister as a “loser” and “no Winston Churchill” for failing to join him. Should the monarch honour such a man by attending a Washington banquet? The call is close. The occasion is the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the declaration of independence. Of course this merits celebration. But now? British public opinion is emphatically opposed to the US war on Iran. Many more Britons think the royal visit should be abandoned (46%) than think it should go ahead (36%), with 18% undecided. Just as the war is staged by Trump for personal political gain, so he can be expected to exploit a royal visit. Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist and the author of A Short History of America: from Tea Party to Trump Continue reading...

The Booker-shortlisted author on a momentous teenage encounter with The Bone People, getting a buzz from Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla, and trying to avoid The Lorax My earliest reading memory Memories from my childhood are opening up as I read to my own young children at the moment. Something in the pictures of Helen Cooper’s The Bear Under the Stairs or Lane Smith’s The Big Pets takes me back to being four years old and being read to. My favourite book growing up I love the Sabriel series by Garth Nix and first read it alongside my father and, later, my younger brother. It was truly a shared joy to be immersed in that world, for a book to give us a new connection to one another. Continue reading...

Calls for Alexandra Căpitănescu’s Choke Me to be banned, as campaigners say lyrics are ‘dangerous’ and ‘reckless’ Romania’s Eurovision entry Choke Me has been labelled “dangerous” and “reckless” for appearing to glamorise sexual strangulation, an unsafe practice that can lead to brain injury and death. Campaigners against sexual violence said the entry, in which the words “choke me” are repeated 30 times during the three-minute song, was “playing fast and loose with young women’s lives”. Continue reading...

Something for every mother: a posh bloody mary prawn brioche, crumbly lime and passion fruit curd sandwich biscuits, and an elegant elderflower lemon drizzle cake Few things say “I love you” more than an unbidden cup of tea, but if you want to show true appreciation to the maternal figure in your life this Mother’s Day, there’s nothing better than a few indulgent snacks to go with it. I love the British tradition of afternoon tea, but I find finger sandwiches in hotel lobbies a little too fussy. I would much rather a fortifying savoury sandwich, a slab of good, old-fashioned cake and buttery biscuits that crumble into a million sweet crumbs. Continue reading...

In the National Year of Reading, teachers say a culture of enthusiasm, from dress-up days, story time and book clubs, can reverse a national decline Ajmal, 7, is an avid fan of the InvestiGators comic books. They feature two crime-busting alligator secret agents called Mango and Brash. “It’s really funny,” he says, then outlines the plot of his current favourite in exhaustive detail. Wren, 8, is making her way through Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. “I didn’t read lots when I was in year 1,” she says, but now she’s loving chapter books. A beaming boy called Siva, 8, who’s enjoying one of Neill Cameron’s Donut Squad series, adds: “I like chapter books and I like comic books.” Continue reading...

Austrian officials took action after airline ignored court order to pay €890 to unnamed women Bailiffs have boarded a Ryanair aircraft after the airline refused to pay compensation to a passenger whose flight was delayed. Austrian officials took action after the airline ignored a court order to pay the unnamed woman €890 (£742) in legal costs and compensation for a delayed flight two years ago. Continue reading...

The chancellor is set to meet with energy bosses over concerns that companies are profiteering from oil and gas prices Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of UK politics. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has asked the competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), to “crack down” on “rip off” fuel prices as she prepares to meet energy bosses amid concerns companies are profiteering off the US and Israel’s war with Iran. The Conservative party continue to accuse the government of a “cover-up” after it released documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s 2024 appointment as ambassador to the US. Shadow housing secretary James Cleverly said the government published the “wrong versions of the documents”, while shadow Cabinet Office minister Alex Burghart suggested there was “missing” correspondence in the published material. Downing Street has rejected the accusations. The UK economy entered the Middle East crisis after a weak start to the year, according to official figures showing flatlining January output before the US-Israel war on Iran hit global energy prices. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed 0% growth in gross domestic product (GDP), down from an increase of 0.1% in December, as the economy failed to recover from uncertainty surrounding Reeves’s autumn budget. Prime minister Keir Starmer could suffer further resignations when ministerial WhatsApp messages are published in the next tranche of the Mandelson files, senior government sources have told the Guardian. Starmer apologised again yesterday over his handling of Mandelson’s appointment, saying: “It was me that made a mistake, and it’s me that makes the apology to the victims of [Jeffrey] Epstein, and I do that.” Continue reading...

⚽ All the latest football news and buildup ⚽ Ten things to look out for | Read Football Daily | Mail Taha Arne Slot’s been speaking to reporters ahead of his side’s meeting with Spurs on Sunday. He’s hoping that Alisson, who missed Liverpool’s loss at Galatasaray on Tuesday, will train today. “He’s been with the physios and rehabbed until now,” said Slot. “We are training today and let’s see if he can join the team session. That’s something I expect but I am not 100% sure because I have not spoken to him or the medical staff this morning. I am hopeful.” Continue reading...

Updates as Matildas and Korea DPR meet at HBF Park Kick-off time in Perth is 6pm local/9pm AEDT Any thoughts? Get in touch with an email Much of the coverage of the Women’s Asian Cup across the past few days has focused not on any of the competing teams but, instead, on Iran, as their time in Australia came to an end following their elimination. Shiva Mokri and Moones Mansoubi, two members of Hamava Collective, a volunteer group of Iranian Australian women in Sydney advocating for gender equality, women’s rights and family wellbeing, have penned this, which you should read. Continue reading...

In director Amy Wang’s debut movie Slanted, a mysterious procedure allows people of colour to become white, speaking to her own difficult feelings as a teen In March 2021, six Asian women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta. Amy Wang, an Asian Australian writer and director, who emigrated to America in 2015, remembers that tragedy well. “It was the first time I felt genuinely unsafe here,” she says. Alongside a growing fear, childhood memories resurfaced – the internal and external racism and the exhaustion of never quite fitting in. “I moved to Australia when I was seven and didn’t speak English – it was a tough time for me,” she admits. And then there was one particular recurring thought. “There were many times when I’d wake up as a teenager and think to myself: ‘Wouldn’t life be easier if I were white?’” So, she turned that past feeling into art. The art is Slanted, Wang’s audacious feature debut – a film whose premise is, by design, completely unhinged. An insecure Asian American high schooler undergoes a procedure at a mysterious cosmetics clinic called Ethnos (tagline: if you can’t beat them … be them) that renders people of colour visibly white, permanently. It’s taking ‘I don’t see colour’ to the ultra-extreme: equality achieved only when we all look the same, and that means whiteness. The surgery works. And then things get complicated. Continue reading...

The smash-hit period drama gets the Hollywood treatment as Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby strides into 1940’s wartime Birmingham, while Hugh Jackman and Zen McGrath try to repair their fractured relationship Whether the Birmingham-set period crime drama needed another outing after six series is a moot point, but Tommy Shelby is back to brood magnificently one final time. Creator Steven Knight and director Tom Harper keep things reassuringly familiar (glowering vistas, anachronistic songs, random acts of violence) but we’re now in 1940, and the Nazis are coming. While Tommy (Cillian Murphy) is holed up in a decaying mansion haunted by the ghosts of his past, his impetuous son and heir Duke (Barry Keoghan) forms an alliance with British fascist John Beckett (a cool Tim Roth) to flood the country with counterfeit currency. And only Tommy can stop them … Friday 20 March, Netflix Continue reading...

More than 20% of weekend availability lost in England since 2022, forcing some to turn to A&E, says national association People who need to obtain medication at the weekend are having to undertake long trips because more pharmacies are cutting their opening hours on Saturdays and Sundays. One in six pharmacies in England have reduced their hours at weekends since 2022, with some shutting altogether, as a result of “unsustainable” pressures on their budgets. Continue reading...

(Knekelhuis) Music boxes, miaows and strange melodies pepper the whimsical and charmingly lo-fi post-punk of Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay The lyrics for Diagonale des Yeux’s debut album were written in the style of an exquisite corpse game, with members Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay taking it in turns to patch together ephemeral thoughts and themes in a mix of French, German, English and Spanish. The bizarre, multilingual stories that emerged match the French duo’s ramshackle, home-recorded sound, which features everything from toybox percussion to farmyard sound effects. Their whimsical approach is anchored in the outsider pop and post-punk of 1980s Europe, which embraced discordant instrumentation and disaffected vocals. These 12 tracks are charmingly lo-fi, built around rudimentary synth and guitar melodies that often careen into strange directions. Acolytes jumps from frenetic punk jam into swooning breakdown and back again within just 90 seconds; Le Rayon Orchidée stumbles groggily to a halt like a malfunctioning music box. Both sing, adding to the theatrics: playing around with effects, they range from pitch-shifted, kitten-like miaows to macho groans. Continue reading...

This prose work from the Nobel literature winner opens up her novels and offers beautiful imagery When Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024, the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. In other words, Han’s work looks both out at the world – towards the 1980 Gwangju massacre fictionalised in her novel Human Acts –  and inward to the human experience, as with The Vegetarian’s portrait of one woman’s claustrophobic struggle. Much of the appeal of Han’s work is in its mystery, the gaps she leaves for the reader to close. So it is tantalising to have this collection of prose, “a book of reflections” that might illuminate the darker corners of her work. Continue reading...

A project in London is helping hundreds of people, providing a genuine alternative to traditional treatments “What you’ve got there from the sun on your face is a massive boost of serotonin!” says Alison Greenwood, founder of Dose of Nature, the charity successfully prescribing time outside as a treatment for mental health. Greenwood is striding round Pensford Field, a tiny patch of wildness tucked behind houses in south-west London. The bright day is illuminating the early blackthorn blossom, gleaming off the pond where a heron watches tiny froglets and shadows of birch trees on a wood-chip path. “All these trees and plants are giving off phytoncides, and they’re good for your immune system too,” the former NHS psychologist says. Continue reading...

(Good Boy) Amid the stylistic shifts of Blake’s seventh record come samples of Dusty Springfield and Dizzee Rascal: gripping distractions from some preachy sentiments Of all the things you might expect from a James Blake album – exquisite minimalism, plaintive vocal distortion, appearances from hip-hop’s great and good – chin-stroking socio0political commentary probably isn’t one of them. But as the title suggests, our current predicament is precisely what the 37-year-old aims to address on his seventh solo record. Unfortunately, preachy, banal sentiments (“Everyone’s getting different information / So how can we get on the same side?”) sit awkwardly amid the ethereal melancholia he long ago perfected as the poster boy for London’s 2010s indie-electronica scene. Subsequently, however, Blake became better known for collaborating with huge US rappers, including Kanye West: the pair recorded a succession of still-unreleased tracks in 2022. Through the High Wire – seemingly a repurposing of one of those songs – scans as a bold defence of his disgraced former colleague. “People love a story,” croons Blake, explaining that “whispers change” until “we all fall from glory”. Continue reading...

US space agency says it is working towards new date after February launch delayed by technical difficulties Nasa said on Thursday that the long-delayed launch of Artemis II, the first crewed flyby mission to the moon in more than 50 years, could come as soon as 1 April. “We are on track for a launch as early as April 1, and we are working toward that date,” Lori Glaze, a senior Nasa official, told a press conference, after technical difficulties delayed a launch originally expected in February. Continue reading...

This Netflix’s documentary about Rupert’s warring children blurs the lines with HBO drama Succession. But, ultimately, it’s a depressing catalogue of nepotism that it’s hard to be enthused about ‘To explain the Murdochs, you have to understand the television show Succession.” So quips New York Times writer Jim Rutenberg a few minutes into this four-part documentary about Rupert Murdoch’s empire – and, specifically, his children’s battle for control of it when he dies. It’s a canny opener. Jesse Armstrong’s series about media mogul Logan Roy and his warring children, thought to be based on the Murdochs, was a gripping smash hit, and this documentary is soon excitedly matching the eldest Murdoch siblings – independent Prudence from Rupert’s first marriage, dutiful favourite Lachlan, “problem child” James and brilliant but overlooked (pesky X chromosomes!) Elisabeth – to their Succession counterparts. (Rupert’s two younger daughters from his third marriage aren’t in the running.) But don’t be fooled: despite the suspenseful strings and off-key piano motifs, this is no Emmy-award-winning drama. Rather, it is an exhausting if exhaustive rundown of all things Murdoch, with the siblings’ manoeuvrings often the least interesting part. In the documentary, as in life, they are overshadowed by their dad. Dynasty: The Murdochs is on Netflix now Continue reading...

From violent collision contests to celebrity-backed offshoots, spin-off sports are finding captive audiences. Their spectacle masks something more sinister A few weeks ago a clip went viral of a strange new contact sport emerging from the antipodes. Two burly men, one of them holding a football, sprint at each other on a kind of catwalk, waiting for the bloop-bloop-bloop of an electronic countdown before they launch into their runs. Neither wears any kind of padding or protective gear. Surrounded by baying spectators, the men collide in the middle of the track, making impact through shoulders, knees, hips, stomachs: in most instances, one of the runners is knocked flat on his back or face from the force of the collision, and the other stands tall in triumph. “We are literally getting dumber as a civilization,” noted one of the many comments on the clip on X. Run Nation Championship, as this new sport is known, launched in Australia last year, and is now holding combines ahead of RNC03, its third instalment. Many of the competing athletes seem, from the early video evidence, as wide as they are tall; the risk of injury – to their limbs, to their heads, to their brains – is obvious. But this is all part of the pitch. Like all new mixed martial arts and contact sports, RNC owes an obvious debt to UFC in the way it’s named, structured, and promoted; like UFC and UFC boss Dana White’s newer sport, Power Slap, in which two opponents face each other across a table and slap the side of each other’s faces as hard as they can until one collapses, Run Nation is not so much a sport as an exploration of the frontier of sporting violence, a macabre social experiment to see how far athletes will push their bodies in the pursuit of victory and money. Continue reading...

Masochistically rewatching the horror show against Atlético confirms that in a season of disasters this is perhaps the biggest The Guardian published a story on its website late on Wednesday with the headline: Igor Tudor to carry on at Spurs but future in doubt beyond Liverpool match. Given the past four games, and especially Tuesday night, most Tottenham fans may find it surprising that the (seemingly-disastrously-poor-at-making-decisions) decision makers are giving the emotionless Croat one more roll of the dice. But beneath the headline, in slightly smaller font: “Harry Redknapp rules himself out of return.” A real human person wrote the words that a 79-year-old has had to rule himself out of managing Tottenham again. In March 2026. Continue reading...

Have you followed the big stories in football, winter sports, cricket, rugby, horse racing, athletics, basketball and F1? Continue reading...

Despite being set in the 50s, the film masterfully reflects modern-day anxieties, disconnection and obsession with nostalgia, all while reigniting interest in an unsung sport First things first: the best picture Oscar should go to Marty Supreme for the incredible job it has done in bringing new eyes to ping pong. A declining sport that has to be propped up by subsidy, this movie has single-handedly kept wiff waff alive even though no one cares about it any more. Kudos. Next, a confession. I watched this film the day it came out and haven’t seen it since*. That day also happened to be my birthday, a big birthday, and I wasn’t entirely steady when I entered the cinema that evening. I have sketchy recollections of the middle section – the bit between the bath collapsing and the plane to Japan. I also didn’t really like it much; I found it inconsequential and a bit amoral and I instantly resolved to forget the words to 4 Raws Remix (sample lyric: “my life is an opera”) as a result. Continue reading...

Two-thirds of voters want an elected second chamber. The government needs a radical legacy: it should use its rare majority for this Goodbye (almost) to the hereditary peers, voted out on Tuesday night. But they didn’t go without a vicious tooth-and-nail fight. Labour should be making much more noise about how the Tories blackmailed and threatened to the very last to hold on to the hereditary peerage (almost all Tories), despite 66% of voters wanting a democratically elected second chamber. Tories in the Lords, fully backed by Kemi Badenoch, did that despite the abolition pledged in Labour’s manifesto. They trashed the Salisbury convention, which expects the Lords to nod through anything in a government’s manifesto that has been approved in an election. But never mind conventions: the good chaps who are supposed to keep the unwritten constitution on its feet are no more. Instead of upholding convention, they vandalised it. Continue reading...