Gentler take on mullet has flowed over shoulders at Winter Olympics and is now tossed on red carpets Hair cut ideas are typically drummed up in the salon, but recently a more unconventional source of inspiration has appeared: the vegetable aisle. “Lettuce hair” is trending. A gentler take on a traditional mullet, the new salad style consists of more subtle differences in the length between the back, sides and top of the hair. Lettuce hair features a loose and often wavy top, softly tapered sides and a feathery tail that skims the back of the neck, resembling leafy greens. Continue reading...

Guardian investigation showed Josh Simons falsely linked journalists to ‘pro-Kremlin’ network in emails to GCHQ Politicians from across the spectrum have said a minister should be sacked after a Guardian report that he had accused journalists of having links to Russian intelligence. Their comments came after an investigation showed that Josh Simons, who was running Labour Together at the time, had falsely concluded the journalists had obtained information about the thinktank from a Russian hack. Continue reading...

As Ryan Murphy’s new mini-series focuses on their explosive relationship, aides and experts explain the real-life couple behind the myth He only met John F Kennedy Jr for five minutes but, three decades later, the memory lingers on. “Oh my God, he had it all,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist, recalling their encounter at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington. “He had his mother’s poise and his father’s charisma; it was a perfect combination of the two. If there was anybody destined to be president, it was him.” In the US, the Kennedys occupy territory somewhere between the British royal family and Greek tragedy, a tale of impossible glamour pierced by spectacles of public mourning. More than a quarter of a century after the single-engine plane piloted by John Kennedy Jr plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing him; his wife, Carolyn Bessette; and her sister, Lauren Bessette, Camelot is being mined for content once more. Continue reading...

⚽ Latest updates from the Premier League and beyond ⚽ Live scores | Follow us on Bluesky | And email Dom Current scores in the Championship: Hull 0-1 QPR Stoke 1-0 Leicester Swansea 1-0 Bristol City West Brom 0-2 Coventry Continue reading...

Updates from 2.10pm kickoff (GMT) at Twickenham Follow us over on Bluesky | And you can email Lee “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” were the parting words of John Lydon at the last ever Sex Pistols gig in 1977, before the lead singer moved on to his long fermentation into a middle England MAGA muppet. Fans of both these teams may be asking themselves some version of the same question. England’s crowd must wonder what is the reality of their side. Are they the team of twelve undefeated matches and months and the growing confidence it brought, or that which looked so very second best at Murrayfield last week? Continue reading...

The US supreme court ruled against the president. Let’s hope the court removes its pro-Trump glasses on other issues and stands up for the rule of law There’s no denying that the US supreme court’s long-awaited ruling that overturned Donald Trump’s global tariffs is important, and if the ruling turns out to be a harbinger that the court is ready to abandon its startling sycophancy toward the US president, it could prove hugely important. The ruling this Friday is the first time during Trump’s second term that the justices have struck down one of his policies. Not only that, the policy they struck down is Trump’s signature economic policy – he has used tariffs to bash, lord over and terrorize dozens of other countries and make himself the King of the Economic Jungle. In the court’s main opinion, joined by three conservative justices and three liberals, chief justice John Roberts used some sharp language to slap down Trump’s tariffs, writing that the constitution specifically gives Congress, not the president, the power to impose taxes and tariffs. (Roberts noted that tariffs are indeed taxes.) Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues Continue reading...

The Working Arts Club is working to counter the stark class disparity within the UK creative sector ‘The problem the art world has with class is a systemic issue and the need for support is everywhere,” says Meg Molloy, the founder of Working Arts Club, which aims to help people from working-class backgrounds secure jobs in the arts. Founded in 2024 as an independent initiative in London, it has collaborated with the likes of the V&A, Royal Academy, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Frieze London. Continue reading...

Which supermarket shortcrust pastry puffs up proudly, and which comes up short? • The best supermarket unsalted butter Puff pastry is made by wrapping a block of fat (ideally butter) in a sheet of dough, then rolling it out, folding it over itself, and repeating the rolling and folding process several times more. This creates dozens of thin layers of fat between each layer of pastry. It’s skilled, arduous work, but that’s where ready-rolled puff pastry comes in. This miraculous product makes baking your own pastries, vol-au-vents and upside-down tarts very simple indeed. I baked a small rectangle of pastry from each brand for 10-15 minutes at 180-200C (or according to the manufacturer’s instructions). I noted the height of the rise as well as the lamination (the separation of layers), texture, flavour, ingredients and value relative to quality. Continue reading...

With waits for council plots in England decades-long, Roots is renting out green space – but some communities are digging in When police arrived at the field outside Bristol in October 2023, two old cars, wheels removed, were blockading the gates. Protesters had hauled them across the entrance to stop developers building on the slice of north Somerset green belt. The threat was not housing or industry, but a company building vegetable patches. Roots builds privatised allotments to give city dwelling customers a place to grow food. It was co-founded in 2021 by Christian Samuel, Ed Morrison and William Gay, who were frustrated by a 28-year waiting list for a plot in their area of Streatham, south London. “We thought: ‘This is crazy’,” says Samuel, 32. “‘Why don’t we just build our own?’” Continue reading...

Victory in 50km mass start breaks record from 1980 Teammates Nyenget and Iversen lock out podium Johannes Hoesflot Klæbo completed an historic gold medal sweep of the men’s cross-country skiing events on Saturday by winning his sixth race and set the record for the most golds by one athlete in a single Winter Olympics. The Norwegian’s victory in the 50km mass start race shattered the nearly 50-year record set by the American speed skater Eric Heiden, who won five golds in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. All of Heiden’s wins were in individual races and two of Klaebo’s have come in team events, so Heiden’s record for individual wins still stands. Continue reading...

Wax technicians apologise after mass-start failure Sweden’s trio finish 18th, 21st and 26th in event Sweden’s biathletes have struggled to deliver medals at the Winter Olympics and on Friday they finally ran out of patience with their waxing team, blaming a bad job on their skis for an embarrassingly poor performance in the men’s mass start. Often among the favourites in biathlon events, the Swedes had a dismal day in the final men’s race of the Games, with Sebastian Samuelsson finishing 18th, Martin Ponsiluoma 21st and Jesper Nelin 26th in the 30-man field. Continue reading...

Omar Yaghi’s invention uses ambient thermal energy and can generate up to 1,000 litres of clean water every day A Nobel laureate’s environmentally friendly invention that provides clean water if central supplies are knocked out by a hurricane or drought, could be a life saver for vulnerable islands, its founder says. The invention, by the chemist Prof Omar Yaghi, uses a type of science called reticular chemistry to create molecularly engineered materials, which can extract moisture from the air and harvest water even in arid and desert conditions. Continue reading...

As Botswana’s president here is my plan to renew this country’s beleaguered health system – and my vision for a stronger Africa Shortages of medicine in Botswana forced me to declare a public health emergency last year. Patients went without treatment – not because health workers failed them, but because the system did. For a nation committed to universal healthcare, free at the point of use, it was a moment of hard truth. Even outwardly strong public health systems can be fragile. As donor assistance bites across the continent, governments cannot afford to delay building resilience. Continue reading...

Influential documentary-maker whose films eavesdropped on the relationships between people and institutions In 1960, when a small group of American documentary film-makers named their work direct cinema, they might have been accurately describing the films of Frederick Wiseman, who has died aged 96. Although he came along a few years later, Wiseman, more than the others in the movement, exemplified the credo of direct cinema, which believed in an immediate and authentic approach to the subject matter. Avoiding planned narrative and narration, Wiseman recorded events exactly as they happened. People were allowed to speak without guidance or interruption, while the camera watched them objectively, not interfering with the natural flow of speech or action. This was made possible by the advent of light, portable cameras and high-speed film, which allowed more intimacy in the film-making – what Wiseman called “wobblyscope”. Continue reading...

Recent incidents involving Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert suggest things are not well at the network after the acquisition financed by Trump supporter Larry Ellison Anderson Cooper decides to walk away from broadcast TV’s most prestigious news show, 60 Minutes. Stephen Colbert takes his interview with a rising Democratic politician to YouTube instead of his own late-night show. The CBS Evening News anchor presents a misleading version of the network’s own exclusive reporting on Ice arrests. And a news producer writes a farewell note to her CBS News colleagues blaming the loss of editorial independence. If you connect the dots, the picture of what’s happening at CBS becomes all too clear. That picture comes into even sharper focus once you recall an underlying factor: the network’s parent company is trying to get a big commercial deal done and needs the help of the Trump administration to bring it over the finish line. Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture Continue reading...

I mourn the vibrant life we lived before. But though our faces anxiously turn to the sky, our hands are joined in a solidarity that rises above hunger Every year, Ramadan comes as a sanctuary for the soul. For Muslims like me, it is a sacred pause in the chaos of life. But this year, as a woman displaced from the familiar streets of Gaza City to a rented room in Al-Zawayda, I am searching for a peace that feels like a ghost. The world calls this a “ceasefire”, yet from my window the silence feels heavy. We are holding our breath because the fear of death has not disappeared, it has just become unpredictable. I did not welcome Ramadan this year with the golden lanterns that once adorned our balconies. I welcomed it to the roar of bulldozers clearing the bones of neighbouring houses and with the constant buzz of the zanana, the Israeli surveillance drones, overhead. Even as we stand in prayer, that metallic humming drowns out the adhan, the call to prayer, reminding us that we are still watched and that our “calm” rests at the mercy of a sudden strike. Majdoleen Abu Assi is a project coordinator and humanitarian practitioner based in Gaza, Palestine Continue reading...

Few UK nominations this year as industry tries to balance attracting global attention and celebrating homegrown projects It may be billed as Britain’s premier film awards, but when nominations for the Baftas were announced last month, the lack of British representation in the top categories was hard to ignore. Just one British actor, Robert Aramayo, appeared in the leading actor category, while there were no British nominees at all for leading actress (the UK-based Irish actor Jessie Buckley notwithstanding). The supporting categories fared little better, with Peter Mullan and Emily Watson the sole British nominees. Of the films themselves, only one British co-production, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet – about Shakespeare and his wife Agnes’s grief over the loss of their son – made it into the best film race. Continue reading...

My fellow Brits seem weighed down by endless swiping – I went to the Europeans for a fresh perspective Last year, I went through a breakup and threw myself into internet dating. I started experimenting with mirror selfies, and spent whole evenings trying to take artful photographs of my own bum. I agonised over my three-line bio. I even put a notebook by my bed with the Hinge prompt “most spontaneous thing I’ve done” written on the first page, so if the answer came to me in a dream, I’d have a pen and paper handy. I’d spent my early 30s trying to cling on to a failing relationship, which had made me feel stuck in a holding pattern. As if I was fated to have a slightly different version of the same argument every night until I was dead. The thrill of scrolling on Hinge, when I first started dating, was that it felt like shopping for an alternate future. I’d pore over pictures of men cradling small dogs and swinging tennis rackets, and get high on the thought of all the tiny dogs and tennis games we would enjoy together. I started hiding my phone in a cupboard in the kitchen before I went to sleep, because when I kept it in my room, I could feel all my new lives calling to me. Sometimes, when I got up to hide it, I had motion sickness from scrolling so hard and so fast. Continue reading...

Culture ministry hails ‘exceptional historical importance’ of prints that show resistance fighters’ final moments In his book-filled office, Vangelis Sakkatos took in the images of the men lined up before a firing squad. The executions on May Day 1944 have haunted him since he was a boy. “Their heroism was the stuff of myth,” said the veteran leftist, casting his eyes over the photographs that have dominated Greece’s press in recent days with a mixture of fury and awe. “The years may have passed, but I haven’t forgotten.” Continue reading...

Exclusive: Rami Ranger, who was suspended temporarily in 2023, makes successful bid at party fundraising event A Conservative donor who was suspended from the party after being accused of bullying and inappropriate language spent £50,000 last week to have dinner with Kemi Badenoch, the Guardian has learned. Rami Ranger was the successful bidder for the dinner at a Tory fundraising event and will attend the meal with a small group of friends, infuriating those in the party who believe he should not have been readmitted. Continue reading...

LIV rebel rejects European Tour Group’s offer Tyrrell Hatton has settled over seven-figure fine Jon Rahm’s Ryder Cup future is in serious doubt after the Spaniard failed to join his teammate Tyrrell Hatton in settling a dispute over a seven-figure fine with the European Tour Group over participation in LIV Golf. Hatton is one of eight golfers who have agreed to settle all outstanding fines due in Europe and withdraw any appeals in return for releases to play on LIV tournaments in 2026. Luke Donald, who is expected to remain in office for a third stint as Europe’s Ryder Cup captain, wanted the situation with Hatton and Rahm resolved. Donald has only partly got his wish, with Adare Manor in 2027 looming ever closer. Continue reading...

The case against her former husband shocked the world, while her response inspired awe. As she publishes a memoir, she discusses chemical submission, the abuse hidden within her apparently perfect marriage – and why she decided to go public At Gisèle Pelicot’s new home on Île de Ré off France’s Atlantic coast, she likes to take bracing walks along the beach in all weathers, play classical music loud, eat nice chocolate and, as a gift to each new morning, always set the table for breakfast the night before. “It’s my way of putting myself in a good mood when I wake up: the cups are out already, I just need to put the kettle on,” she says. But one of her most treasured possessions is a box of letters she keeps on her desk. The envelopes from across the world – some sent on a prayer, addressed only with her name and the village in Provence where she once lived – piled up at the courthouse in Avignon in southern France in late 2024, when she became famous worldwide as a symbol of courage for waiving her right to anonymity in the trial of her ex-husband and dozens of men he had invited to rape her while she was drugged unconscious. Continue reading...

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Files show accuser in 2011 provided extensive account of abuse as questions mount over why action was not taken The Department of Justice’s release of millions of Jeffrey Epstein files has not only prompted questions about his crimes – but renewed attention on authorities’ failure to stop him after an accuser reported him in 1996. This new cache of Epstein files has provided more insight into authorities’ familiarity with allegations against him in the years that followed, including time between his sweetheart plea deal in 2008 and federal arrest nearly six years ago. Continue reading...

Banner at justice department just the latest example of how president has imposed himself on daily US life You wouldn’t be alone if you feel that the US more closely resembles North Korea these days – with giant images of the dear leader scowling down on the citizenry, and his name inscribed everywhere from public buildings to street signs, transportation hubs and self-aggrandizing monuments. Thursday’s unfurling of a massive banner bearing the visage of Donald J Trump, the 47th US president, on the exterior of the Washington headquarters of the federal justice department was only the latest example of how he has imposed himself on every facet of American life. Some critics have called it “dictator vibes”. Continue reading...