A reclusive man is visited by a woman who claims to be seeking the truth about his daughter’s murder in this taut but predictable thriller There are no prizes for guessing the twist at the end of this claustrophobic two-hander set entirely in a field in Gloucestershire. It starts with a promising premise for a low-budget psychological thriller, and there are solid performances from its two actors, but the film never quite generates enough genuine emotion or moments of intrigue to keep it interesting. Dave, played by Joseph Millson, is a middle-aged man who lives in a caravan in a field in the middle of farmland and keeps a gun in the kitchen cupboard. Millson’s physical presence does a lot to create a sense of foreboding at the start of the film – all fear and self-loathing, coiled with barely repressed rage. Dave has isolated himself from the world, but then a young woman (Natalie Spence), claiming to be a YouTuber, stomps into his field brandishing a camera. Continue reading...

What is a very private struggle – coming to terms with one’s own appearance – is being reshaped into a site of competition and ridicule I felt something akin to devastation reading that the actor Barry Keoghan sometimes “doesn’t want to go outside” because of the scale of online abuse about his appearance. It’s not just the viciousness of the abuse, but how difficult I imagine it must have been for him to articulate, as well as what was not said – what parts of his face he’s likely now had to obsess over and scrutinise. As a man, it is often hard to say out loud that you have been made to feel insecure in yourself, or that there are things that you do not like about your physical appearance. Keoghan’s vulnerability as a grown man is striking, but I have also been thinking about how much harder it is to articulate this as a teenager or boy. I was well versed in the language of bodily dissatisfaction from a young age, though these were thoughts I would keep to myself: that I did not like my thinning hair, how narrow my shoulders were, my large forehead, or the eczema on my right hand that often drew questions like, “Were you in a fire?” I did not like that I was not as tall as my brothers, or even that my voice did not break with a deep manly husk but retained some squeakiness. Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian Continue reading...

Grief, betrayal and moral complications are explored across nine tales of quiet power that take us from Argentina to County Wexford The title of Colm Tóibín’s new story collection seems to promise, at first glance, a return to familiar territory: a tour, perhaps, of old stomping grounds; a reconnection with earlier work. But as the pages turn, that suggestion of affinity is revealed to be a subtle bait and switch. The stories in this collection, it turns out, have to do with displacement, not familiarity; their news is not from Dublin, but from the places where Dublin’s news might land. They interrogate what it means, and how it feels, to live at one remove: from home, from loved ones, from the past. That sense of dislocation is established in the opening story, The Journey to Galway, set during the first world war, in which once again the interaction between title and content proves delicately wrongfooting. This “journey”, we discover, is not about attaining a longed-for destination, nor even really about forward motion; rather, it’s a moment of suspension, between one reality and the next. An unnamed woman remembers the morning on which she received a telegram telling her that her son, a pilot in the British airforce, had been killed in action over Italy. On hearing the news, she knows she must take the train to Galway, to inform her son’s wife, Margaret. “In Margaret’s mind,” the woman realises, as she stares out of the train window, “Robert was still alive. Maybe that meant something; it gave Robert some strange extra time …” And it is this liminal time, untethered and provisional, that is the “journey” of the title – a Schrödinger’s-cat caesura, in which the terrible event both has and hasn’t taken place. “Until she appeared in the doorway of that house, there would not be death,” the woman thinks. “But once she appeared, death would live in that house.” Continue reading...

Former mill towns in the West Pennine Moors tell the story of the workers’ rebellion against power looms, the new machines decimating their livelihoods There’s a massive hole in the ground at the top of Whinney Hill – a shale quarry that once supplied raw materials for Accrington’s famous Nori brickworks (as used in the Empire State Building and Blackpool Tower). It’s fitting, as there’s a chasm-wide gap in history when it comes to this unprepossessing spot on the edge of the West Pennine Moors. On the morning of 24 April 1826, about 1,000 weavers met on the hilltop to plan their day and, no doubt, get the lie of the land and the weather before setting off. A banking crisis in December of the previous year – dubbed the Panic of 1825 by historians – had hammered the cotton industry. Lancashire’s weavers, who had already suffered years of declining wages and living standards, faced destitution and even starvation. Continue reading...

Prints for sale by more than 100 Magnum photographers – including Eve Arnold, Alec Soth and Chris Killip – trace the paths we take through memory, across borders, and into the unknown Continue reading...

Video shows seven dogs including a golden retriever, Labrador, German shepherd and Pekinese, being led by a corgi A group of seven dogs that went missing in China have gone viral after a video emerged of them walking more than 17km back home to their village, reuniting with owners who had been searching for them for days. The video, first posted online on 15 March, shows the dogs – including a golden retriever, labrador, German shepherd and Pekinese – walking along the highway in Changchun, the capital of China’s north-east Jilin province, where temperatures are dropping below 0C overnight. Continue reading...

It tells the story of the newsreader’s fall from grace. Plus, what happened to Pa Salieu after his prison sentence? What to watch this evening 9pm, Channel 5 Continue reading...

Enslaved by debt, victims often feel compelled to sell an organ to repay loans – but can find themselves even worse off after the procedure Shafeeq Masih* faced an impossible choice: remain trapped for ever by the debt he owed to the owner of the brick kiln where he worked, just outside the Pakistani city of Lahore, or try to pay it off by selling the only thing he had of any value: one of his kidneys. The brick kiln owner was harassing him to repay the debt, which he claimed stood at 900,000 rupees (£2,420), but however hard he worked, it just kept growing. Masih knew the owner was fiddling the books but says, “whatever they put in writing, we can’t question that. They see us as slaves. We just have to obey.” There are an estimated 20,000 brick kilns in Pakistan, employing as many as five million workers, the vast majority of whom are believed to be in debt bondage Continue reading...

Internet Watch Foundation verified 8,029 pieces of realistic AI-made content, with 65% of videos in worst category The amount of AI-generated child sexual abuse material found online rose by 14% last year, with the majority of videos showing the most extreme type of content, according to a safety watchdog. The Internet Watch Foundation said it identified 8,029 AI-made images and videos of realistic child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2025. It added that there had been a more than 260-fold increase in videos. Continue reading...

When James Prescott Joule lent his name to a unit of energy, he could not have foreseen today’s alarming calculations The primary unit of climate collapse is the zettajoule. If you have never heard of this term, you are not alone. Even scientists who work on a planetary scale struggle to relate the immensity of the change measured by this titanic unit of energy. Continue reading...

Every home is missing someone, every person is carrying grief. We went not to celebrate but to sit with the bereaved Eid al-Fitr is meant to bring release. It comes at the end of Ramadan, after a month of fasting and prayer, and in Gaza it has always carried its own kind of joy. The day begins with prayer. Men and boys gather in clean clothes, neighbours congratulate one another, friends embrace, and supplications rise with the first light. Families return home for breakfast, then begin the long round of visits to sisters, daughters, aunts, uncles and neighbours. Children wait for eidiya, the money given to younger relatives. Coffee is poured, sweets are shared and doors remain open. This year, the rituals remained. The feeling had gone. Continue reading...

The Last Princesses of Punjab opens on Thursday at Kensington Palace The extraordinary life of an exiled Punjabi princess, embraced by the British royal court and a goddaughter of Queen Victoria, but who would become a pioneering suffragette and challenge the very authority of the elite social circles in which she moved, is to be told in a new exhibition. Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was the daughter of Duleep Singh, the last Sikh maharajah of the Punjab. As a child he was forced to surrender his lands to the East India Company in 1849, and sign away the famous Koh-i-noor diamond, now a potent symbol of colonial exploitation and set in the crown of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Continue reading...

A speedy sauce for pasta lovers and a wholesome plateful of pulses served with a crunchy alternative to home fries and a vibrant green sauce I love pasta sauces that come together while the pasta is cooking. This one is lovely and wholesome, great for when the weather starts to warm up a little, and one of those that you can make pretty much year-round. The polenta chips, meanwhile, came about when I wanted to bulk up a plate of beans without the mess (and the pan of hot oil) that comes with making chips. The polenta can be made and set ahead, either during the day or the night before, or it will sit happily in the fridge for a couple of days. Continue reading...

As Iran war threatens to exacerbate living costs, children’s beds have become ‘like a luxury item’, says Barnardo’s Mr Motivator is lobbying the government to tackle the number of children in the UK who have no bed of their own as Barnardo’s reveals demand for furniture from struggling families has surged by 40% in the last year. The children’s charity said beds had become“like a luxury item” as the war in Iran threatens to exacerbate cost of living pressures. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Housing minister wrote to Criterion Capital seeking urgent answers after MP said it issued at least 130 section 21 notices A property company accused of trying to mass-evict tenants in the weeks before no-fault evictions are banned has denied doing so, saying it is simply implementing “routine and lawful tenancy management”. A statement from Criterion Capital, set up by the billionaire property magnate Asif Aziz, was issued in response to Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, who wrote to the company to seek “urgent” answers about its plans. Continue reading...

Declan Conlon will argue officials have failed to act despite clear evidence of the ecological collapse of Lough Neagh An eel fisher is to argue at the high court in Belfast that the authorities have allowed the ecological collapse of Lough Neagh by failing to take action over pollution. Declan Conlon, whose family have for generations fished the inland lake in Northern Ireland that once hosted the largest wild eel fishery in Europe, is seeking to take a judicial review against the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Daera). He will argue the department has failed to act against polluters despite clear evidence of the ecological collapse of the lake. Continue reading...

Charles county sheriff’s office alleges Dayton James Webber fatally shot passenger in car during argument A sheriff’s office in Maryland has alleged a professional cornhole player, who is also a quadruple amputee, fatally shot a passenger in a car he was driving during an argument. Dayton James Webber, 27, was arrested and charged as a fugitive from justice by police in Albemarle county, Virginia, the Charles county sheriff’s office said in a statement. Continue reading...

Welburn, North Yorkshire: Limited to the garden, I’m able to admire up close how buds are, very literally, a force of nature It’s been a rough winter. Profound personal loss, multiple global crises, surgery to remove a chunk of my thigh affected by melanoma and a perimenopausal body and brain that simply don’t bounce back like they used to have left me feeling not broken exactly, but fragile. Much as I did in the Covid lockdowns, I’ve been shifting my focus to nearby nature for a distraction and solace. A few days in bed, a few more propped in the kitchen window seat that I wisely insisted on when we rebuilt several years ago, then incrementally extending my hobble range to the front garden, I’ve experienced the arrival of spring in ways that are both limited and infinite, focusing closer and finding, once again, that seemingly small things expand exactly in proportion to the attention you give them. Continue reading...

Opening in May, Camden museum has 100,000-item archive telling story of British youth subcultures, from mods and rockers, to ravers and emo In the basement of a new-build housing block in Camden, the ventilation system is working flat out. The fans whir like a chainsaw orchestra bouncing around the concrete room as they attempt to deal with a slight damp problem. “This is what it’d sound like if there was a fire!” shouts Jon Swinstead, the driving force behind the Museum of Youth Culture, as he tries to make himself heard above the din. It’s hard to imagine but in a few weeks this empty, slightly soggy space will be transformed into an institution dedicated to all things teenage – a project Swinstead has been working on in one way or another for almost 30 years. Continue reading...

Shipments to Russian smelters from Aughinish Alumina have increased sharply since the invasion of Ukraine A leading Irish metals refinery is part of an international aluminium supply chain that appears to conclude with shipments to arms producers feeding the Kremlin’s war machine in Ukraine, leaked records and public data suggests. Trading records show that shipments to Russian smelters from Aughinish Alumina, which is located on the Shannon estuary in the west of Ireland and has been owned by the Russian aluminium group Rusal since 2006, have increased sharply since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Continue reading...

They’re not armed and they keep a relatively low profile. But the Home Office’s immigration compliance and enforcement officers have searched thousands of business in pursuit of illegal workers. Are they abusing their powers? Diners were tucking into their upmarket Indian lunch when the Ice agents slid through the restaurant’s back fence. Armed with stun guns and clad in stab vests, the 11-strong unit blocked off every entrance before moving in on their target: Mandira’s Kitchen. This wasn’t a scene from California or Texas. It happened near Guildford, England, among the rolling Surrey Hills. Before the Home Office’s immigration compliance and enforcement (Ice) officers stormed the restaurant in September, they came up with a codeword in the event they were attacked with any weapons that might be at hand in a kitchen. What they found were customers eating biryani and samosas in a converted barn decorated with plants and a rickshaw bicycle hanging from the ceiling. When they reached the kitchen, they found five junior members of staff cooking. The officers demanded to see their passports. “They didn’t explain. They didn’t ask for permission,” says the restaurant’s owner, Mandira Moitra Sarkar. That 11 officers could burst into her business with no warrant and question staff is “astounding”, she says. Moitra Sarkar was on holiday in Tanzania when Ice arrived; she was notified by a frantic call from a member of staff. Continue reading...

The great Italian entertainer’s plays, such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist, have not lost their power to make audiences roar with laughter while confronting injustice In Britain we tend to separate political and popular theatre. The genius of Dario Fo, who was born 100 years ago on Tuesday, is that he brought them together in his multiple roles as dramatist, actor, director and designer. Along with his wife, Franca Rame, he took satire to the people and in plays such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! he achieved a global reach that justly earned him the Nobel prize for literature in 1997. You could say that protest and performance were in his genes. His father was a stationmaster and part-time actor whom he joined in wartime resistance to the Nazis in northern Italy, helping to smuggle Allied soldiers across the border to Switzerland. He became famous, however, in 1962 when he and his wife fronted a weekly TV variety show that attracted huge audiences: an engagement that was abruptly ended when they refused to accept censors’ cuts. Continue reading...

Polling for anti-immigration DPP is relatively low, but many feel its ideas have been co-opted by Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats Mayasa Mandia, a recent graduate living in the small Danish town of Kokkedal, will be voting for the left in Tuesday’s general election – but it won’t be for Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats. The 23-year-old, a practising Muslim, says that under Frederiksen’s government far-right commentary has become normalised in the Danish mainstream. She has seen this, she says, at her own university, where there were discussions about banning prayers. Continue reading...

The PM is figurehead of the international rightwing movement but that has alienated his most loyal voter base “Viktor Orbán is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social last month. The US president followed up with a video message to far-right leaders meeting in Budapest, describing Orbán as a “fantastic guy”. Orbán, a long-term friend and ally of Trump, may need all the support he can gather ahead of the Hungarian parliamentary elections on 12 April. The prime minister and his Fidesz party are trailing in most opinion polls. His main challenger, Péter Magyar, and his Tisza party are leading by nearly 10 percentage points. The public debate in Hungary has shifted dramatically: the question is no longer whether the opposition can win, but whether Orbán will accept defeat. Gellert Tamas is a Swedish-Hungarian author and journalist. His next book, 56 Days, will be published in 2027 Continue reading...

It’s one thing to remove a PM from office, as happened to the former cricketer in 2022. But it’s another thing to try to eradicate the most famous person in Pakistan’s history This article originally appeared in Equator, a new magazine of politics, culture and art Just so we’re clear, the following is a fact. Not opinion, not a point of view, not a hot take. Fact. There is no Pakistani – male, female, dead, alive, real, imagined – as famous as Imran Khan. Every turn in a multifarious public life has abounded in fame, first as a cricket legend, then as a beloved philanthropist who built a cancer hospital for the poor, latterly as a maverick politician who swept to power promising reform, and now, as the sole occupant of a cell in Pakistan’s most notorious jail. So famous he’s been the subject of two death hoaxes – most recently in November, when he went unseen for so long that many concluded he had died. There have been others with greater accomplishments. There may come others in the future. But in almost 79 years of Pakistan, in the pure currency of fame, of being known and recognised, of being talked about, of being the one Pakistani everyone can name, there is nobody beyond Imran. (He is almost universally known by his first name alone.) It holds even now, two years into the state’s attempts to erase him from public life. In that time, they’ve barred TV channels from saying his name on air and stopped newspapers from publishing his picture; they’ve even scrubbed him from the footage of his greatest sporting triumph. Continue reading...