Experts say dangerous sleep apnoea affects an estimated 8 million in the UK alone, and everything from evolution to obesity or even the climate crisis could be to blame When Matt Hillier was in his 20s, he went camping with a friend who was a nurse. In the morning she told him she had been shocked by the snoring coming from his tent. “She basically said, ‘For a 25-year-old non-smoker who’s quite skinny, you snore pretty loudly,’” says Hiller, now 32. Perhaps because of the pervasive image of a “typical” sleep apnoea patient – older, and overweight – Hillier didn’t seek help. It wasn’t until he was 30 that he finally went to a doctor after waking up from a particularly big night of snoring with a racing heartbeat. Despite being young, active and a healthy weight, further investigation – including a night recording his snoring – revealed that he had moderate sleep apnoea. His was classed as supine, the most common form of the condition, meaning it happens when he sleeps on his back, and is likely caused by his throat muscles. Continue reading...

Mergers and acquisitions will shrink number of operators from more than 100 to five or six, says Be.EV co-founder British electric charger companies are asking rivals to buy them as they run out of cash amid rising costs and intense competition, according to industry bosses. A wave of mergers and acquisitions is likely to shrink the number of charge point operators from as many as 150 to a market dominated by five or six players, said Asif Ghafoor, a co-founder of Be.EV, a charging company backed by Octopus Energy. Continue reading...

NFU warn it could take years to restore Brexit losses despite efforts to smooth negotiations on farming and other elements of UK-EU reset Exports of British farm products to the EU have dropped almost 40% in the five years since Brexit, highlighting the trade barriers caused by the UK’s divorce from the EU in 2020. Analysis of HMRC data by the National Farmers’ Union shows the decline in sales of everything from British beef to cheddar cheese has dropped by 37.4% in the five years since 2019, the last full year before Brexit. Continue reading...

Peaceful demonstrations force a delay in measures aimed at improving revenue collection but which many fear will be fatal for small traders Demonstrations across Malawi’s four main cities during the past week have achieved a delay in the introduction of a new tax regime that business owners claim will cripple their livelihoods. Tens of thousands had signed petitions which this week were presented to tax officials and on Monday thousands of small traders shut up shops and businesses to hold protest marches in Blantyre, Lilongwe, Zomba and Mzuzu. Continue reading...

⚽ Premier League updates from the 12.30pm GMT kick-off ⚽ Live scores | Tables | Follow us on Bluesky | Email Scott Michael Carrick is in an if-it-ain’t-broke frame of mind. His Manchester United are unchanged from the 3-2 win over Fulham. Matthijs de Ligt, Mason Mount and Patrick Dorgu are all injured. Spurs boss Thomas Frank makes three changes to his starting XI following the 2-2 draw with Manchester City. Micky van de Ven, Wilson Odobert and Pape Matar Sarr are in; Randal Kolo Muani, Radu Drăgușin and Yves Bissouma drop to the bench. Continue reading...

The astonishing case of the missing Today morning show anchor’s mom is six days in so far and without resolution A missing 84-year-old mother of a famous TV morning show anchor; droplets of blood and a mysterious white van; a ransom note sent to a celebrity news website; no suspects; a city surrounded by desert near the US-Mexico border; frustrated investigators; and a concerned US president. It is for all these reasons that the astonishing case of the missing Nancy Guthrie has captivated US public attention in a six-day mystery that still has no resolution. It leads the US news and dominates the headlines, fusing crime and celebrity together in ways not seen since OJ Simpson or the Lindbergh baby. Continue reading...

I understand the appeal of avoiding all human contact. Still, good old-fashioned taxis have so much to offer It’s Super Bowl weekend here in America, which means a few things: copious amounts of gut-busting food, controversial half-time show performances, extravagant commercials, and occasionally a bit of football. For the tens of thousands rich enough to afford tickets to the Big Game, transportation to and from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, will be paramount. Thankfully, our robotic saviors are here to rescue the throng from the indignity of sharing a ride with an actual human being. This year’s Super Bowl is a test of the driverless taxi industry, currently lorded over by Waymo – a company that’s about to get a $16bn cash injection to further expand its business to cities all around the world. Smaller American metro areas like Sacramento and Nashville are next up to get Waymo service, as are global capitals like London and Tokyo. Fleets of robotaxis are seeming more and more inevitable, yet another soldier in the onslaught of shiny gadgets designed to sand off the sharp edges of modern life. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist Continue reading...

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The Seahawks quarterback was once seen as just another high-profile quarterback bust. But now he is one win from clinching the NFL title For the teams, the reality of the Super Bowl hits like deja vu: a ritual they’ve watched and fantasized about for years suddenly arrives, sucking them into its vast, chaotic center. For Sam Darnold, though, it’s a reality come full circle. San Francisco, after all, was the city that gave him a chance after he crashed and burned in New York and washed out in Carolina, long after most around the NFL had consigned him to history’s pile of first-round draft busts. Continue reading...

Ombudsman found bank wrongly rejected 34% of complaints last year, with NatWest and HSBC close behind Monzo has wrongly denied refunds to thousands of fraud and scam victims, the Guardian can reveal. The digital-only bank wrongly rejected more than 1,000 fraud and scam complaints that were closed last year alone, according to data from the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). Continue reading...

Cooped up during Covid, the Spanish photographer found inspiration in a broom … and a nail in the wall “Telekinesis,” says Dominic Dähncke, when asked how this errant broom is standing upright. He took this shot on the rooftop of his home in El Médano, Tenerife; a communal terrace filled with laundry rooms and cleaning supplies. This was 2021, in the throes of a Covid lockdown, so he would walk around in circles on the rooftop of his building, enjoying the fresh air. “To be honest, there was a nail stuck in the wall, but I didn’t put it there,” he admits. One morning, he absent-mindedly propped the broom against the nail and noticed that it stayed at a 45-­degree angle. He returned to the rooftop for several days, waiting until the shadow of the small ceiling above matched, then captured the moment with his phone. Continue reading...

Once a highly visible figure despite being wanted on human trafficking charges, the former leader has not been seen since shortly after the US kidnapped Venezuela’s president For more than a year, he stayed hidden in plain sight: despite an arrest warrant for human trafficking charges, former president Evo Morales moved freely in at least one region of Bolivia, attended rallies, received foreign journalists and went to the polls to cast his vote in the 2025 presidential election. But shortly after the United States attack onVenezuela – and the detention of Nicolás Maduro – Morales disappeared from view; a month later his whereabouts remain a mystery. Continue reading...

Disclosures show figures cited by authority’s leader rested on unfunded ideas listed briefly in budget papers Reform UK’s flagship council has been accused of telling a “blatant lie” after its claim of nearly £40m in savings on net zero were found to be based on hypothetical projects for which there was no documentation. Kent county council, which has a £2.5bn annual budget, is one of 10 where Nigel Farage’s party has outright control and is seen as a test case for whether the insurgent party can govern competently. Continue reading...

Events at San Siro and the other venues were a visual treat and a joyous celebration of the host country and the Games Continue reading...

Grammy-winning Puerto Rican star is in the center of US culture wars before leading this weekend’s half-time show A few days after Christmas 2022, Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaetonero, appeared without warning on one of the most unlikely of stages: the roof of a Gulf Oil gas station in San Juan. To a massive crowd singing every word, he performed a surprise concert, along with friend and collaborator Arcángel, that was part hype-y music video shoot, part exultant post-tour homecoming, and part pointed critique. He ended the set with El Apagón (“The Power Outage”), a clubby protest anthem about local displacement and the rolling blackouts that have plagued Puerto Rico, a US “commonwealth” (read: colony), since Hurricane Maria in 2017. Bad Bunny sang it from a roof on Santurce’s Calle Loíza, a thoroughfare in a former working-class Black neighborhood now dotted with Airbnbs. But you do not need the full context to get the show’s contagious energy. Though I have never walked Calle Loíza, nor do I speak Spanish, the gas station show is still my favorite concert to rewatch via online fan clips: electric, organic, genuinely popular. In terms of reach, critical acclaim and longevity, Bad Bunny rivals – and sometimes outsells – the likes of Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé and Drake, though it is hard to imagine those peers appearing so unguarded, so public, as he does on that roof. Continue reading...

Campaigners welcome criminalisation of non-consensual AI-generated explicit images but say law does not go far enough Victims of deepfake image abuse have called for stronger protection against AI-generated explicit images, as the law criminalising the creation of non-consensual intimate images comes into effect. Campaigners from Stop Image-Based Abuse delivered a petition to Downing Street with more than 73,000 signatures, urging the government to introduce civil routes to justice such as takedown orders for abusive imagery on platforms and devices. Continue reading...

Really, what is the point of this endless conversational back and forth? Step out of the loop, and change your life You get a coffee. The barista tells you how much you need to pay. You say thank you. They take your card for payment. They say thank you. They give you the coffee. You say thank you. They say thank you for your thank you. Then you say thank you for their thank you. By this point, the words “thank you” have lost all meaning, and both parties are exhausted by the pointless stream of politeness. Growing up in India, I learned that thank yous are only for distant strangers, and that close friends and family get offended if you thank them. I would say thank you to a speaker delivering a formal talk but never to a friend helping during a crisis or a family member making me dinner. But living in the UK for two decades has forced me to adopt our incessant “thank you” culture. I now find myself saying thank you at least 10 times a day and sometimes many more. Nevertheless, there are some British “thank yous” that I would ban completely, if I could. Sangeeta Pillai is a south Asian feminist activist, author of Bad Daughter and the creator of Masala Podcast 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...

The actor on a disastrous speech, his rules for how people should get around cities and an embarrassing encounter with a doorman Born in New York state, Billy Crudup, 57, made his film debut in Sleepers in 1996. His subsequent movies include Almost Famous (2000), Big Fish (2003), Mission: Impossible III (2006), Spotlight (2015), Alien: Covenant (2017) and most recently Jay Kelly. On TV he has a long-running role in The Morning Show, for which he has won two Emmys. He stars in High Noon at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre until 6 March. He has a son and is married to Naomi Watts. He lives in New York City. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Flashes of hubris. Continue reading...

Milano Cortina Games: updates from day one’s action Schedule | Results | Medal table | Briefing | Email Barry Lindsey Vonn passed a key test of her damaged knee on Friday as she completed her first downhill training run, keeping alive her hopes of a fourth Olympic medal, writes Yara El-Shaboury. Skiing with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, the American clocked a time of 1min 40.33sec in her first official run in Cortina d’Ampezzo, and simply responded “yeah” when asked if “all good” by reporters. The training was delayed for more than an hour owing to fog hanging over the Olimpia delle Tofane piste and Vonn entertained her teammates by singing along to some Usher. The Swiss team, including the reigning downhill Olympic champion Corinne Suter, passed the time by playing Yahtzee. Italy’s Federica Brignone was the first to get all the way down the piste, with a time of 1:40.66, as she goes for a first Olympic gold after coming back from a double leg break just in time to compete. “Some things were good, some things so-so,” Brignone said. “I’m trying to recover my leg because after skiing it’s always swollen and painful. I’m also working on my confidence because I’m still missing it.” Jennifer Dodds said she and her partner Bruce Mouat had produced their best performances yet as the duo recorded another two wins in Friday’s round-robin matches in the mixed doubles curling competition. The pair beat Sweden 7-4 before a comprehensive 8-2 defeat of South Korea, with an end to spare in both games. “We said yesterday there were a couple of things we wanted to work on,” said Dodds. “We came out today and executed exactly what we wanted to do.” The Team GB pair were also in a buoyant move after the American rapper Snoop Dogg asked for a photo. “We walked past and we were just kind of like ‘there’s Snoop Dogg’, a bit starstruck and we got ushered back,” said Dodds. “They said ‘he wants a selfie with you’ and we said ‘OK’. So, if Snoop Dogg’s team is reading this, can we please get the photo?” Continue reading...

England T20 captain eager to move on from furore ‘It’s not been a very nice time of my life,’ he says Harry Brook wants to draw a line under a “pretty horrendous” past few weeks when revelations about his conduct in Wellington cast doubt on his leadership as he prepares to lead England at the T20 World Cup. More than three months on from Brook being punched by a nightclub bouncer in New Zealand, hours before captaining England, the saga took on fresh legs when the Yorkshireman claimed to have been on his own, only for the Daily Telegraph to uncover he was accompanied by Jacob Bethell and Josh Tongue. Continue reading...

Former PM says he believes current prime minister is a man of ‘integrity’ who was ‘misled and betrayed’ by Peter Mandelson As speculation over Starmer’s future as prime minister continues, Brown has come to his defence, saying he is “a man of integrity”. But he acknowledged that Starmer is facing a “serious” battle to keep his job. Continue reading...

Forget its reputation as a performative read for a certain breed of intense young man, thirty years after its publication, David Foster Wallace’s epic novel still delivers, says the Crying in H Mart author I’m not what you might consider Infinite Jest’s target demographic. The novel’s reputation precedes it as a book infamously few ever finish, and those who do tend to belong to a particular breed of college-age guys who talk over you, a sect of pedantic, misunderstood young men for whom, over the course of 30 years, Infinite Jest has become a rite of passage, much as Little Women or Pride and Prejudice might function for aspiring literary young women. Most readers come to the novel in their formative years, but I was a late bloomer. It wasn’t until the winter of 2023 that, at the age of 34, smoking outside a party in Brooklyn, I found myself suddenly motivated to embark on the two-pound tome. A boy I knew from high school brought it up, and as I happened at the time to have developed a casual interest in those works one might attribute to the “lit-bro” canon (Bret Easton Ellis, Hemingway, etc), it seemed the appropriate time to take it on. Continue reading...

Chalk artwork sold for record price at a New York Sotheby’s auction with proceeds going to the Panthera charity A tiny chalk drawing of a lion by Rembrandt recently sold for the record-setting price of $18m in New York City to benefit the conservation of big cats. After selling at a Sotheby’s auction Wednesday, Young Lion Resting shattered the previous mark for the most expensive drawing by the 17th-century Dutch painter ever auctioned: the $3.7m Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo. Continue reading...

‘Catastrophic failure of safeguarding’ highlighted by fact Zuber Bux’s lay practice is legal, campaigners say A doctor who was struck off over a “reckless” circumcision that risked killing a toddler is still performing the procedure as a layperson, the Guardian can reveal. Campaigners say Zuber Bux’s private circumcision business highlights a “catastrophic failure of safeguarding”, as alarm grows about the absence of regulation of the procedure. Continue reading...

Boy, 15, also charged with possession of bladed article on education premises, after incident at school on Thursday A pupil who allegedly assaulted a teacher at a school in Milford Haven has been charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm and possession of a bladed article on education premises. Dyfed-Powys police said the 15-year-old boy had been remanded in custody and was scheduled to appear at Swansea magistrates court on Saturday. The senior investigating officer, DCI Matthew Briggs, said: “We are continuing to support the victim whilst they recover from this traumatic event. Continue reading...