My group, Swim Deep, plays to crowds of hundreds across the UK – but in China, we play to tens of thousands. And we’re not the only ones When I joined the band Swim Deep 13 years ago, my dreams were much like those of any young musician: to play Glastonbury, to tour America and to hear our music on the radio – all of which we’ve managed to achieve. But what I hadn’t counted on was finding a fanbase in China. Despite us never having knowingly released our music there, Swim Deep recently returned triumphant from our fourth run of shows on Chinese soil in barely 10 years, and we’re not the only British indie band benefiting from this unexpected opportunity. China has had an enthusiasm for British and Irish pop acts for years, long before its ¥500bn (£531m) music industry overtook France to become the world’s fifth largest in 2023. Jessie J became a phenomenon after winning the country’s premier singing competition in 2018, while Westlife have spent decades playing to thousands in Chinese arenas and stadiums. But less heralded is a growing interest in grassroots UK indie bands, for whom the unexpected demand – and promise of excellent pre-gig catering – presents a financial and spiritual lifeline as returns increasingly diminish on home soil. Continue reading...

Former Tory minister one of a raft of likely appointments to counter accusations Reform is a ‘one-man band’ Nigel Farage is expected to name Robert Jenrick as his potential future chancellor, as part of a series of appointments of key Reform UK politicians on Tuesday. The appointment of the recently defected former Conservative cabinet minister is likely to raise eyebrows within the party when the role had previously been widely expected to be handed to the former leader Richard Tice. Continue reading...

Programme launched by last Tory government was worked on by Deloitte and IBM but was paused in 2024 Business live – latest updates The UK government has shelved a project to simplify trade border processes post-Brexit, after spending £110m on a contract with Deloitte and IBM for it, according to reports. The last Conservative government promised in 2020 to create the “world’s most effective border” by 2025 as part of their plan for a new trade system after Britain left the EU. Continue reading...

Medal table | Live scores and schedule | Results | Briefing Follow us over on Bluesky | Get in touch: email Daniel Buongiorno a tutti e benvenuti alle Olimpiadi invernali 2026 – undicesimo giorno! Rio Ferdinand once said he didn’t feel right in the morning until he’d done a rondo, and we’re getting to that point with curling – which is just as well, given that’s how we open today, and there’s more to come mid-morning. Continue reading...

Carlo Ancelotti and Zinedine Zidane’s impact is clear but where the Spanish giants go post-Xabi Alonso only Florentino Pérez knows All eyes are on Real Madrid again but in a different way than to which the 15-time Champions League winners are accustomed. Every fan expects Real to be among the best eight in Europe but they are in the playoffs for a second season in a row after a 4-2 defeat at Benfica in the final league fixture. Looking back, Carlo Ancelotti’s impact at Real is even clearer, as is the case with Zinedine Zidane, who won three successive Champions League titles with the club. Why were they suited to this club? Because they themselves once stood on the pitch alongside outstanding footballers. Ancelotti also played under Arrigo Sacchi at Milan while Zidane scored key goals in Champions League and World Cup finals. People with this aura are respected by the best. Continue reading...

Franjo von Allmen has led the way for the men with three golds and Loïc Meillard’s slalom victory brought a fourth gold Switzerland’s men have dominated the ski slopes of Milano Cortina. Not since the super-G and the team combined were added to the Olympic programme in 1988 has one country won four of the five events – a feat achieved with Loïc Meillard’s victory in the slalom on Monday. Only Brazil managed to stop them in these Games. Franjo von Allmen has been their undisputed star, heading home with three golds in his hand luggage. After winning the downhill on the opening weekend, he was given a helping hand by Tanguy Nef’s scintillating slalom run as they won the team combined. Nef deserved an individual medal of his own and sat in the leader’s chair for a while on Monday until tumbling out of the podium places all together. Continue reading...

A high street is punctuated by burned-out buildings like rotten teeth in an otherwise perfect smile – what’s going on? On the banks of the River Clyde, half an hour to the south-east of Glasgow, Bothwell is one of the city’s prettiest and most prosperous commuter towns, famous for its medieval castle and annual scarecrow festival. Bothwell’s Victorian villas and secluded enclaves of luxury modern mansions sell into the millions to the TV personalities, professional footballers and entrepreneurs who favour its environs. Bothwell Main Street, a designated conservation area, showcases glorious floral displays in summertime and year round an array of independent boutiques, jewellers and beauticians buck the trend for high street degeneration. Continue reading...

There’s a lesson here for the UK and the anti-WHO Nigel Farage – Trump attacks it in public, but in private he knows he still needs it Donald Trump is persistent. In his first term as president, he withdrew the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) on 6 July 2020, giving the necessary one-year notice period. Soon after, Joe Biden was elected, and he reversed this executive order within days of being in office, reinstating the US support for the agency on 20 January 2021. While many hoped this would be the end of the story, Trump came back with a vengeance in his second term and immediately signed an executive order withdrawing on 20 January 2025. This means that – buried under news of other Trump-related chaos – the US formally left the WHO at the end of last month. It is just the second time in the agency’s history a major power has left. In 1949, during the cold war, the USSR withdrew citing unhappiness with the US influence over the organisation. In 1956, with concerns over disease surveillance and spread, the USSR re-engaged with the UN system. Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh Continue reading...

In an extract from his book, Richard Fitzpatrick reveals in the early 1960s the grand Italian club was equipped for doping like ‘a small hospital’ The quantity of drugs floating around the campus at Inter in the early 1960s meant the club was equipped like “a small hospital”, to borrow an expression used about the doping culture at Juventus in the 1990s. Inter’s coach Helenio Herrera – or “HH”, as he was known in the world of football – used the players on the youth team as “guinea pigs” for his drug experiments, according to Ferruccio Mazzola, who was on the books at Inter’s academy at the time (and a younger brother of Sandro Mazzola, one of the team’s star players). “I can describe the effects of those white tablets,” he wrote in a confessional memoir. He said he couldn’t sleep after taking HH’s pills. The hallucinations left him like a fish thrown up on the bank of a river. “I was shaking all over. I looked like an epileptic. I was scared. Also, the effect lasted for days and was followed by a sudden, tremendous tiredness.” Continue reading...

Figure from ONS will be closely watched by Bank of England as it makes interest rates decision Business live – latest updates Unemployment in the UK has risen to 5.2%, the highest level in nearly five years, official figures have revealed. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the rate of unemployment was 5.2% in the three months to the end of December, the highest rate since the quarter to January 2021. This was in line with what economists had been expecting and was up from 5.1% in the three months to November. Continue reading...

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news Good morning. Unemployment across the UK has hit a near five-year high, and wage growth has slowed. The latest labour market data, just released this morning, shows that the UK jobless rate rose to 5.2% in the October-December quarter. “The number of workers on payroll fell further in the final quarter of the year, reflecting weak hiring activity, although it is largely unchanged in the latest month. Over the same period the unemployment rate increased, with data showing that more people who were out of work are now actively looking for a job. “The number of vacancies has remained broadly stable since the middle of last year. Alongside rising unemployment this means that the number of unemployed people per vacancy has increased, reaching a new post-pandemic high. Meanwhile, redundancies are also showing an upward trend. 7am GMT: UK labour force data 7am GMT: German inflation report 9.30am GMT: UK productivity data for Q4 2025 10am GMT: ZEW’s eurozone economic sentiment survey 1.30pm GMT: NY Empire State Manufacturing Index Continue reading...

Despite the best efforts of the fine cast this psychological thriller about a war correspondent returning to her home town falls short of exploring the full scope of family trauma Fans of Nuala Ellwood’s bestselling psychological thriller about a war reporter revisiting the horrors of her childhood in Herne Bay may decide to stick with the book after this drab adaptation. Like a black sock that has infiltrated a wash-load of white bedsheets, the story has come out a dreary dull grey. The movie is stubbornly unintriguing despite a fine cast of actors doing their utmost. Even the almighty twist ending fails to pick up the pace. Jenny Seagrove plays Kate Rafter, a hardened correspondent haunted by PTSD. She’s back from a stint in Aleppo for her mum’s funeral and staying in her childhood home. Seagrove plays it imperiously, eyes flashing; Kate has witnessed terrible atrocities, and seems irritated by the smallness of the lives in her home town. But she is raw and damaged; there are flashbacks to Iraq where she befriended a young boy, and some unconvincing scenes of sessions with a psychologist trying to unpick the trauma of her childhood in a home terrorised by a violent alcoholic father. When Kate starts hearing a child crying in the next door house, no one believes her. Continue reading...

Three women, two real and one fictional, seek social justice in an ambitious novel that explores power in 1970s America What kind of justice can we have in a world driven by power? The actor turned writer Sophie Ward likes to fuel her novels with philosophical conundrums and set herself complex writerly challenges. Her ingenious, Booker-longlisted Love and Other Thought Experiments was structured around philosophical thought experiments, from Pascal’s Wager to Descartes’ Demon, with a chapter narrated by an ant living inside a character’s brain. The Schoolhouse explored the ethics of self-directed schooling and of policing in a complicated cross-period procedural. Now she turns her attention to questions of justice, freedom and power in the 1970s United States, with a tripartite structure bringing together three women – two real and one imagined. It’s 1971: the Manson Family have just been found guilty and hundreds of thousands are marching against the Vietnam war. In the Netherlands, 25-year-old Andrea Dworkin escapes her abusive husband and attends a debate between Chomsky and Foucault on justice and power. Back in the US, the poet Muriel Rukeyser throws herself into protesting once again, though her lover, the literary agent Monica McCall, tells her rightly that her health won’t stand it. The third character is loosely based on the family history of Ward’s own Korean-American wife. Phyllis Patterson welcomes her son home to rural Illinois from the army base in South Korea, and attempts to build a relationship with her new Korean daughter-in-law and grandchildren. All three women are testing their own capacity for justice in an unjust world. Continue reading...

Many women reading this will have experienced something similar: a warning that sharing public space isn’t a man’s job, it’s a woman’s What motivates a stranger to push a woman in public? That’s a question I’ve been stuck on this week after a man shoved me out of his way on an empty pedestrian street. I didn’t even see him coming – well, I wouldn’t have, as he came up from behind me. I had walked in his path, he barked at me. “What path?” I thought, baffled, as I took in the huge expanse of empty pavement around us. I was so stupefied by the encounter that I found myself frozen to the spot, watching him walk away in his blue anorak and technical rucksack. He could have been any man from anywhere on his way to work. Lucy Pasha-Robinson is a Guardian assistant Opinion editor Continue reading...

The iconic photographer believed his two years shooting horse fairs, pubs and dance halls in the 1980s had been overlooked. A new exhibition aims to put that right Continue reading...

A cabin on a farm near Hawick, known for its whisky and woollens, offers wild seclusion – and a great base for exploring an overlooked region The tiny, off-grid cabin looked almost unreal: made of repurposed oak it stood by a private lochan, with separate cedar sauna, cold outdoor shower, sunken hot tub, and a jetty with two hammocks and a pair of paddleboards. It screamed Finland or Sweden, not a sheep and deer farm in the Scottish Borders. It was the sort of isolated location that would set Ben Fogle’s heart racing in New Lives in the Wild. Two swans bugled my arrival. I felt a little embarrassed that all of it was mine. Sometimes, we need to escape to a place where the phone coverage is bad enough to make you believe you’re somewhere truly wild. Tiny Home Borders, hidden in rippling foothills 10 miles east of Hawick, is such a place. Last August, owners David and Claire Mactaggart opened a second two-person cabin on their farmland (the first opened in 2022) and I jumped at the chance to stay, swim, soak, and – crucially – switch-off. Continue reading...

Its ‘fibre checker’ tool confirmed I could have a connection, but a month later it changed its mind My internet provider informed me by email that full fibre broadband had become available for my property, confirmed by Openreach’s “fibre checker” tool. After a month, Openreach declared the connection uneconomical due to blockages in the conduits below the road. Continue reading...

Tarique Rahman set to take oath and become prime minister after landslide victory prompted by ousting of Sheikh Hasina Bangladesh’s incoming prime minister Tarique Rahman and other politicians were sworn into parliament on Tuesday, becoming the first elected representatives since a deadly 2024 uprising. Rahman is set to take over from an interim government that has led the country of 170 million people for 18 months since the autocratic government of Sheikh Hasina was overthrown. Continue reading...

The first of a three-part series about the former prime minister’s path to power. Plus, the Fukushima catastrophe 15 years on. Here’s what to watch this evening 9pm, Channel 4 “Never lose your temper. Except on purpose.” Tony Blair’s advice on negotiation to his chief of staff Jonathan Powell is a neat insight into the man in general. This three-part deep dive shows Blair as a calculating communicator, but an insubstantial political thinker whose greatest achievements were founded upon being all things to all people. What fuelled his insistent will to power? From his constituency of Sedgefield to the horror of Iraq, this singular political journey is tracked but never quite explained. Phil Harrison Continue reading...

NPCC lead for domestic abuse says officers dealing with huge caseloads, made worse by justice system backlogs Revealed: The true toll of female suicides with domestic abuse at their core Police are “determined to do more” to hold to account domestic abusers who drive victims to kill themselves, the National Police Chiefs’ Council has said. Assistant Commissioner Louisa Rolfe, the NPCC lead for domestic abuse, has said that “more posthumous investigations are taking place”, but that officers struggle with a lack of resources, adding that 20% of all crime relates to domestic abuse in most forces. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Expert analysis of images from one hospital suggests severe trauma to the face, chest and genitals was caused by metal birdshot and high-calibre bullets Across the planes of Anahita’s* face, white dots shine like a constellation. Some gleam from inside the sockets of her eyes, others are scattered over the young woman’s chin, forehead, cheekbones. A few float over the dark expanse of her brain. Each dot represents a metal sphere, about 2-5mm in size, fired from the barrel of a shotgun and revealed by the X-ray camera for a CT scan. Shot from a distance, the projectiles, known as “birdshot”, spray widely, losing some of their momentum. At close range, they can crack bone, blast through the soft tissue of the face, and easily pierce the eyeball’s delicate globe. Anahita, who is in her early 20s, has lost at least one eye, possibly both. Continue reading...

Reina Sofía’s three-year rehang of works by artists from Spain and beyond is billed as a ‘critical reinterpretation’ The Reina Sofía’s new rehang opens, quite pointedly, with a painting of a detained man sitting, head bowed and wrists shackled, as he waits for the arbitrary hand of institutional bureaucracy to decide his fate. The picture, Document No …, was painted by Juan Genovés in 1975, the year Francisco Franco died and Spain began its transition to democracy after four decades of dictatorship. Genovés’s faceless, everyman victim of the Franco regime’s control and repression is the natural starting point for the Madrid museum’s exploration of the past 50 years of contemporary art in Spain. Continue reading...

Reform’s version of patriotism is opportunistic and bogus, but it is swaying voters. Labour must look to its roots to find a reply In the mid-1980s, a remarkable German television series became appointment viewing in my house each Thursday evening. Heimat, an epic portrait of the life and times of a fictional Rhineland village, tracked the inhabitants of Schabbach as they navigated the tumultuous 20th century. Across the course of 15 hours, Edgar Reitz’s drama conveyed a romantic, almost religious, sense of rootedness and love of place. As the aged local gravedigger liked to tell outsiders: “Down on earth as you all know, there’s high and low German, but in heaven – as you’d expect – they speak the Hunsrück dialect.” Half-playful, half-serious, those words express something both mysterious and beautiful about belonging. But on the political spectrum, where does such a vision sit? James Orr, recently recruited as an intellectual outrider for Nigel Farage, would have a ready and confident answer to that question. A professor of the philosophy of religion at Cambridge, Orr has been trying to lend some highbrow lustre to Faragism. In a recent piece for the Times, he argued: “Reform is beginning to articulate what is routinely dismissed and demonised as rightwing populism, but which is much better understood as a vision animated by the politics of home.” Other parties, his column continued, have governed Britain as if it were “nowhere in particular”, managing a zone rather than cherishing and protecting a place. Continue reading...

This bold, traditional taste of Vietnam is a joy both by name and to eat There’s something endearing and confident about a dish named after the feeling it gives you. Bánh khoái means “delight” or “joy” cake. This crisp, savoury pancake originates from Hue, the historic capital of Vietnam’s central region. Traditionally served with a rich hoisin dipping sauce, my take swaps that out for a lighter nước chấm with sesame seeds. It stays true to the spirit of the original, though, preserving its joyful texture and bold, satisfying flavours, while using more accessible ingredients. This recipe is an edited extract from One Pan Vietnam, by Thuy Diem Pham, published by Quadrille at £22. Continue reading...

Japanese prime minister’s refusal to back down over Taiwan comments brings more criticism and travel warnings from China Chinese tourists are continuing to shun Japan in large numbers, with the country falling out of the top 10 destinations for those celebrating the lunar new year with a trip abroad. Japan has had a dramatic drop in the number of Chinese visitors since the end of last year as a diplomatic row between Tokyo and Beijing over the security of Taiwan continues. Continue reading...