The rapper discussed his 2024 sexual assault lawsuit and the Kendrick-Drake beef in a new GQ cover story Jay-Z has spoken out about his recent sexual assault lawsuit in a new interview. The suit alleged that Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs raped a a 13-year-old girl at a party in 2000. Combs and Jay-Z denied all allegations after the lawsuit was filed in late 2024, and the case was voluntarily dismissed in February 2025. Continue reading...

Now the rightwing press are accusing the PM of cowardice over Iran. He must stop letting them craft his narrative and create his own If there was one thing Keir Starmer might have hoped the UK media would support him over, it was his refusal to follow a US president blindly into war in the Middle East. After all, his Labour predecessor Tony Blair only really got hammered in the press over warmongering in Iraq. Those hopes must now be dashed. On Sunday, three major newspaper groups led with dire warnings from the Israeli Defense Force about Iran’s ability to hit London. Leaving aside the lack of official evidence or impartiality of the source, the tone of attack against the prime minister was striking. The Telegraph gave the floor to Starmer’s conservative rivals, mainly Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, who accused him of cowardice and presiding over a party “moving to a very extreme hard-left, Islamist-allied position”. The Express was equally dismissive (“Donald Trump brutally mocks Keir Starmer by sharing skit showing ‘scared’ Prime Minister”). And even the Sunday Times repeated the Israeli scaremongering, before adding far lower down that “it is not known for certain that Iran possesses a missile capable of reaching Diego Garcia”. Let alone London, 400 miles further. Continue reading...

His films about Rome’s ringroad and the islanders and refugees of Lampedusa have won awards. Now Gianfranco Rosi is completing his trilogy, capturing a Naples ‘that is not immediately there’ A uniform grey nimbostratus has blocked the rays of the London sun the day I speak to Gianfranco Rosi, but this consummately Italian film-maker is feeling right at home. “When Jean Cocteau visited Naples, he wrote a letter to his mother in which he said, ‘Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.’ And I think that’s a beautiful image.” He gives a gracious nod to the blanket of grey outside the window. “I am sure there is one cloud over London today that has come straight from southern Italy.” Rosi, 62, has earned his reputation as one of Europe’s most important documentary-makers with highly original and poetic portraits of Italian places. His 2013 film Sacro GRA – the first documentary to win the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival – followed a motley cast of characters who live or work on the ringroad that circles Rome. Fire at Sea, which scooped the Golden Bear at the Berlinale three years later, was a study of the inhabitants of the island of Lampedusa and the people who arrived there on perilously crowded boats at the height of the refugee crisis. It elevated Rosi to an elite circle of directors to have won the top prize at two of Europe’s three main film festivals. Continue reading...

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basic they scrimp on? Henry Holland talks Labubus, vintage Prada and swapping Calvins for Skims with the Filter • Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Henry Holland rose to prominence in 2006 with his collection of “fashion groupie” T-shirts, displaying rhyming slogans referencing fashion icons (such as “I’ll Show You Who’s Boss Kate Moss”), and founded his own brand, House of Holland, in 2008. He discovered a passion for ceramics during the pandemic, and in 2021 launched the lifestyle brand Henry Holland Studio, selling handmade ceramics and homeware. Continue reading...

Oahu residents face gruelling cleanup as floods damage hundreds of homes and losses are expected to top $1bn Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox The worst flooding to hit Hawaii in two decades has swept homes off their foundations, floated cars out of driveways and left floors, walls and counters covered in thick, reddish volcanic mud. Authorities said hundreds of homes had been damaged, along with some schools and a hospital. On Monday, new downpours set off a fresh round of flooding on Oahu’s south side while residents on the island’s North Shore cleaned up and assessed the destruction from last week’s torrents. The National Weather Service said showers and thunderstorms were expected to wane but the Big Island remained under a flash flood watch. Continue reading...

Shiffrin wins slalom to move 85 points clear overall Aicher must win Wednesday’s giant slalom finale American star eyes record-tying sixth overall crown Mikaela Shiffrin v Emma Aicher for the most prestigious title in women’s skiing will go to the season-ending final race on Wednesday. Shiffrin won yet another slalom on Tuesday – her ninth in 10 World Cup starts this season – by a massive margin of 1.32sec ahead of Wendy Holdener. Continue reading...

Festival theatre, Cambridge Buddhist Centre Cambridge Handel Opera Company capture the self-referential charm of this mid-career novelty operetta Any opera with two pairs of young lovers inevitably gets compared to Così fan tutte. But in the case of Handel’s mid-career novelty Imeneo, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a better point of reference. There may be unexpected Mozartian depths to this intimate comedy of duty and desire, but there’s none of Così’s cynicism or cruelty in a piece whose games are played strictly at opera’s own expense. With the vogue for Italian opera all but over, deposed in the 1740s by the new fashion for English oratorios, Imeneo is Handel in mischievous, end-of-term mood. This operetta (the composer didn’t dignify it with the weight of a full opera) sets up conventions only to knock them down. Da capo arias? Occasionally. Mad scene? Not really. Happy ending? Certainly not. It’s exhilarating, often meta-theatrical stuff, and director Guido Martin-Brandis and the Cambridge Handel Opera Company capture all its knowing, self-referential charm in this delightful staging. Continue reading...

Want a good view of the cinema screen? You’ll need to sign up to the VIP scheme. A quick chat with your doctor? An extra $50,000 will let you jump the queue ‘What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol wrote in 1975. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke [and] you can drink Coke, too … The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is.” Fifty years later, it’s still true that the Diet Coke Donald Trump is chugging by the caseload in the Oval Office is exactly the same stuff his public can buy in a local shop. But the idea that mass consumerism is characterised by equality is about as dead as Warhol is. There are precious few products or experiences that haven’t been segmented into multiple tiers, from “embarrassing pauper” to “ultra-VIP”, in order to extract as much money from the consumer as possible. Continue reading...

Anna Dempsey’s This Is About an Alligator and Nothing Else, a coming-of-age story set in Florida, took the award, which aims to support unpublished and un-agented writers Anna Dempsey has been named the winner of the inaugural Hilary Mantel prize for fiction, taking home £7,500 for her unpublished novel This Is About an Alligator and Nothing Else. The newly established award, launched to honour the legacy of the late Booker prize-winning novelist, aims to support unpublished and un-agented writers across the UK and Ireland. Continue reading...

Royal Academy, London Wautier’s mighty paintings have been misattributed to her male peers for 300 years, but now UK audiences can enjoy their first encounter with a 17th-century trailblazer Art history is currently in the process of revising the accepted white male canon by uncovering overlooked female artists. We have had the recent explosion in interest of the extraordinary work of Artemisia Gentileschi, of whom major exhibitions such as the National Gallery’s have been at pains to extricate from the violent sexual assault that tends to overshadow her biography. By contrast, we have scant documentary evidence of her direct contemporary Michaelina Wautier (about 1614–1689) other than that she was born in Mons in the Spanish Netherlands (present day Belgium) and lived with her artist brother Charles in Brussels near the royal court. Both share the commonality of being so technically accomplished – while operating in a patriarchal society that prevented women easily enjoying successful artistic careers – that their work has since automatically been misattributed to their male counterparts and thus obfuscated in art history for 300 years; for Artemisia her father Orazio, and Michaelina her brother Charles or other contemporary baroque painters. Wautier is also elusive in straddling several genres, all executed with consistent quality: portraits, history or religious painting, and decorative floral work – the latter more commonly associated with female artists – further preventing identification. Continue reading...

Critics say £15 toy designed for children aged two and over risks exposing them to ‘a very adult, performative world’ Argos has ignited a debate among parents and child development campaigners after promoting a wooden “influencer kit” aimed at toddlers. Critics have warned that the play set could normalise the precarious world of digital labour and prematurely expose children to the pressures of online visibility. Continue reading...

Chancellor says package offered by Liz Truss’s government was unaffordable and any future help will be targeted Rachel Reeves has ruled out universal support to deal with any future rise in energy bills, saying any government help would be targeted, and criticised the support offered by Liz Truss’s government as unaffordable and irresponsible. The chancellor also said she would review the planned fuel duty rise in September, but she did not commit to delaying or postponing it. Continue reading...

We’re told that sleep is a superpower, making us smarter, healthier and happier. But how much is enough? And is insomnia as bad for us as we think? ‘Once, after I did a presentation, someone came up to me and said, ‘I don’t get eight hours of sleep a night. Am I going to die?’” says Prof Russell Foster, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford. “And I said, ‘Well, yes, you’re going to die. But, you know, we all die eventually.’” This exchange is, hopefully, comforting, but it also shouldn’t be too surprising. Over the past decade or so, we’ve been repeatedly told that sleep is everything from a legal performance-enhancer to an actual superpower – and, conversely, that if we don’t get enough shuteye we’re risking an early start to our eternal slumber. But how bad is a lack of sleep, really? And if we seem to be coping fine on six hours a night, is there a chance we’re still setting ourselves up for problems further down the line? Continue reading...

Big tech believes the future is AI while everyday Americans remain wary; and the dangers of riding in a Tesla Cybertruck Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery. This week in tech, we discuss a moment of divergence between Silicon Valley and everyday people; deep cuts at Meta to maximize spending on AI; writers caught using AI; and the frightening, fiery crashes of the Tesla Cybertruck. How the FBI can conduct mass surveillance – even without AI Kash Patel admits under oath FBI is buying location data on Americans Why is the FBI buying people’s location data and how is it using the information? Continue reading...

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has threatened US, being weighed up as potential interlocutor to bring war to an end Middle East crisis – live updates Just as in 1967 when a rank outsider won the Grand National due to a massive pile-up of other horses at one of the final fences, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and Donald Trump’s putative interlocutor, appears to have come to the front as the field around him rapidly thinned. In the pantheon of Iran’s leaders, ruthlessly reduced by targeted assassinations, Ghalibaf stands out as a survivor, but if the US president hopes he has finally located the Delsy Rodríguez of Iran – a pragmatic leader from within the regime willing to do business with America – he may need to think again. Continue reading...

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

Moscow appears to step up spring offensive amid concerns international focus on Iran war leaves Kyiv more vulnerable Russia has launched a fresh wave of missile and drone strikes on civilian areas across Ukraine, killing at least five people, as Moscow appears to be stepping up a spring offensive intended to break Ukrainian resistance along the front. Moscow fired nearly 400 long-range drones and 23 cruise missiles overnight, Ukraine’s air force said, marking one of the largest attacks in weeks after a relative lull. Continue reading...

He’s done it again. The convicted sex offender, creator of victims, has gone and created another one – himself I see Huw Edwards is still not the subject of any of his verbs. The BBC’s former iconic newsreader (trademark: Huw Edwards) has emerged from a minibreak in the wilderness to excoriate Channel 5’s forthcoming dramatisation of his downfall. “Mental illness is misunderstood by many but can never be an excuse for criminality,” Huw informed the public, the overwhelming majority of whom are already well across this particular point. “It can, however, at least help explain why people sometimes behave in shocking and reprehensible ways, and why things fell apart for me in the way they did.” Fell apart because of you, I think you’ll find. Anyway, there was a lot more of Edwards’s lengthy statement. “I have been open about my struggle with persistent mental illness over a period of 25 years,” he continued. “What is less well known is the severity of that condition, which was managed successfully until the downward spiral which led to an appalling outcome.” Again, note the tragic passivity of “an appalling outcome”, as though a flow chart and not a person has led us somewhere we’d very much rather not be. Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist 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. Continue reading...

Nasa reports show repeated warnings of close calls before crash that killed two pilots and injured 41 others Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox Pilot safety concerns about New York’s LaGuardia airport were filed to aviation officials months before Sunday’s collision between an airplane and a firetruck left two pilots dead and 41 other people hospitalized. According to the aviation safety reporting system administered by the US space agency Nasa, a pilot using the airport in the summer wrote, “Please do something,” after air traffic controllers failed to provide appropriate guidance about multiple nearby aircraft. Continue reading...

Exclusive: UK regulator makes U-turn over TalkTV and Talk Radio complaints after claims it let some broadcasters ‘spout dangerous climate lies’ A U-turn by the UK’s broadcasting regulator Ofcom means it will investigate complaints of climate change denial on television and radio for the first time since 2017. The move marks a victory for campaigners who have accused the regulator of allowing some broadcasters “to spout dangerous climate lies” and “flout” rules on accuracy and impartiality. Complaints about programmes on TalkTV and Talk Radio were assessed by Ofcom, which then decided not to investigate, the same result as more than 1,000 other climate complaints since 2020. However, after a letter from the Good Law Project (GLP) in January, requesting an explanation for the rejections, Ofcom said it had withdrawn its original decision and would “consider afresh” the complaints. Continue reading...

Our roster of experts explain what makes the best chopping board, and give tips on how to care for them I saw an influencer advocating for titanium chopping boards. Are they really the way to go? If not, which material is best? My wooden one has some black mould. Lenka, by email “From the off, no!” says Itamar Srulovich, whose latest cookbook, Honey & Co Daily, co-authored by Sarit Packer, is published later this spring. “The technology of chopping boards works, it’s bulletproof – this is criminal!” Sam Clark, co-founder of London’s Moro and Morito, couldn’t agree more: “The idea of chopping on a titanium board, with metal against metal, sends shivers down my spine,” he says. Of course, the surface on which you choose to chop will impact your knife, and for Milli Taylor, who is behind the When in Rome Substack, she “couldn’t imagine anything worse than titanium”. As Hugh Worsley, founder of knife brand Allday Goods, puts it: “Every time you cut, the very fine edge of your knife, which is microscopically thin, meets the chopping surface. If that surface is too hard, it damages the edge, causing it to dull faster.” A titanium board, which has no give, is just going to slowly destroy your knives: “I can see the benefit of it from a cleanliness point of view,” Worsley concedes, but, other than that, “it just makes no sense”. Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com Continue reading...

West Ham’s 1970s striker gets due respect with a stellar lineup of talking heads in a film that explores the wider implications of racism in football It may seem as, if in the streaming era, every conceivable football story has already been told. But that’s clearly not the case: here is an uplifting film that has important things to say about racism and empowerment in the game via the life story of Clyde Best, the barnstorming West Ham striker from the early 1970s. Best’s pioneering status as one of English elite football’s first black players is reasonably well-known – but not, of course, as well-known as it should be, which this film sets out to remedy. As well as, of course, the respect he is due for his pathfinder role for succeeding generations of black footballers in the UK. No doubt that fact is behind the stellar lineup of talking heads who appear on camera to acknowledge the significance of Best’s career, from West Ham contemporaries including Geoff Hurst and Harry Redknapp to those who followed in Best’s tracks, like Viv Anderson, John Barnes, Les Ferdinand, Shaka Hislop and Garth Crooks. Anyone with hazy memories of Best thundering around the pitch from early 1970s editions of Match of the Day will be interested to learn of his remarkable journey to London from Bermuda as a 17-year-old for what was effectively a one-off trial session, after which he was signed by future England manager Ron Greenwood (who, in truth, comes out of this film pretty well). Best says he was quickly accepted by his West Ham teammates, but elsewhere it was less pretty; he found himself at the sharp end of some virulent racism in the post-imperial Enoch Powell 1970s, and it’s sobering to realise that when Alf Garnett yells gruesome abuse from the football terraces, it’s basically Best he is shouting at. Continue reading...

World Snooker Tour agrees long-term deal with venue 500 seats to be added to the theatre in major revamp Snooker’s world championship will remain at the Crucible for at least the next two decades after the World Snooker Tour agreed a long-term arrangement with the venue to keep the sport’s most prestigious tournament in Sheffield. The future of the event at the 980-seat venue has been in doubt for years, with Matchroom’s president, Barry Hearn, repeatedly hinting the tournament may have to leave its spiritual home in favour of a bigger venue when their previous deal expired next year. As recently as 2024, Hearn said there would need to be a new Crucible built to resist the lure of Saudi Arabia and others. Continue reading...

Health department says ‘too many’ doctors have been using racist and antisemitic language, particularly on social media, without rebuke An overhaul of the General Medical Council is expected to lead to more doctors that face accusations of racism and antisemitism on social media being struck off. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has launched a consultation on changes to the legislation governing the regulation of doctors, saying the move will lead to the biggest reform of the medical regulator, the GMC, in four decades. Continue reading...

Conservationists celebrate second twin birth just two months after another found in Virunga national park A second set of mountain gorilla twins has been born in Virunga national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in what conservationists are celebrating as an “extraordinary” event for the endangered primates. Just two months after tiny twin mountain gorillas were discovered by rangers in the Virunga massif, in eastern DRC, another rare twin birth has been found by park wardens. This time, an infant male and female have been spotted in the Baraka family, a troop of 19 mountain gorillas that roam the region’s high-altitude rainforests. Continue reading...