Iran says passage through waterway will depend on Iranian authorisation and accuses Donald Trump of multiple falsehoods Iran says strait of Hormuz ‘completely open’ to commercial vessels as oil prices fall Separate to the Pakistani army chief’s trip to Iran (see post at 07:53), the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, and foreign minister Ishaq Dar also concluded a trip to the Middle East after visiting Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey for talks. “We have just concluded the last leg of our engagements following productive and fruitful visits … where we held meaningful bilateral discussions aimed at strengthening cooperation across key areas,” Dar said on X. Continue reading...

Ten years after his debut novel, the poet and musician has written a follow-up exploring self-discovery and a life lived on the edge. He talks about sexuality, pronouns and drawing strength from the literature he loves Kae Tempest sidles into a pub near his house on a weekday afternoon and orders a pint of mineral water. At his side is Murphy, an enormous, 14-year-old alaskan malamute dog with startling blue eyes who settles down on the floor next to his master and goes to sleep. “He’s all right,” Tempest says. “He’s very friendly. He won’t even put his nose up.” The rapper, performance poet, playwright and novelist has a ginger beard and is wearing Timberland boots, baggy jeans and a black hoodie over a blue-and-white striped collared shirt. His hair is hidden by a cap. Years ago, his dramatic russet hair was long, but he cropped it when he dropped the “T” from his first name and came out as nonbinary, a watershed moment in his gender transition. Now testosterone has deepened his voice and his journey has reached its final stage – from they/them to he/him. As Tempest has been famous since his late 20s, showered with accolades ranging from Mercury nominations for two of his albums (including his debut, Let Them Eat Chaos) to becoming the youngest poet ever to receive the Ted Hughes award for the epic performance poem Brand New Ancients, this odyssey has taken place in public. On his song I Stand on the Line, from his last album Self Titled, Tempest vividly describes the anxiety of having to deal with the hostility of some people’s reactions to his “second puberty” (“Out in the limelight like, please, nobody look at me / I’m looking for myself, all I’m seeing is the bitterness / Coming my way when I’m using the facilities”). So is it a heavy burden to be such a visible trans person? “It’s just my life,” Tempest replies, his voice a soft south London growl, much quieter than the thrilling, declamatory style of his performances. “I’m just glad to be alive. How beautiful,” he adds. “Because you felt like you might not be at some point.” Continue reading...

Exiled leader to revive push for change amid US backing of Delcy Rodríguez and delays to democratic transition Venezuela’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, will seek to revive her push for political change with a rally in Madrid on Saturday, having found herself sidelined by Donald Trump after the abduction of the president Nicolás Maduro. “Venezuela will be free,” the Nobel peace prize winner insisted in an interview on the eve of this weekend’s demonstration in the Puerta del Sol square, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of protesters. Continue reading...

Victoria Bonya says authorities too scared to raise issues with Vladimir Putin, whose approval ratings are declining The Kremlin is grappling with the fallout from the viral spread of a celebrity blogger’s criticism of Russian authorities, as Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings register their sixth consecutive weekly decline. Victoria Bonya, a household name in Russia who rose to fame in 2006 on Dom-2, the country’s answer to the reality TV show Big Brother, posted a video on Monday warning the Russian president that a string of mounting problems risked spiralling out of control. Continue reading...

Inquiries into who knew what, and when, will be pored over in coming weeks and could ultimately decide Starmer’s fate When the Guardian revealed that Peter Mandelson had failed his vetting checks before being appointed as British ambassador to Washington, members of Keir Starmer’s cabinet, who were scattered around the world on government business, were caught by the same element of surprise. In Washington for the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had just come out of a meeting with the Ukrainian finance minister when she was told the breaking news. Continue reading...

⚽ Today’s games | Latest tables | Premier League top scorers ⚽ Follow us on Bluesky | And you can get in touch via email Good morning, welcome to matchday live! We’ll be bringing you all the latest news and buildup to all of the weekend’s football, plus reaction to Coventry’s return to the Premier League after a 25-year wait. The end of the season is in sight and we’re finally getting some answers to the questions we’ve been asking since the beginning of the campaign. There’s plenty to discuss, so let’s get into it. As ever, you can get in touch with via the email at the top of the page. Continue reading...

Manchester City v Arsenal is a rare late-season title decider and comes with a set of surprising plotlines OK, so it was all building to this, then. The slow‑burn plotlines. The room‑temperature action sequences. The winter afternoons on the sofa watching men wrestle unhappily, staring out of the window as the frigid wind tousles the clouds, wondering about the death of all things, and also why referees not only have to speak now but speak in the same awkward Yorkshire bingo‑caller voice. All of this. It’s all actually fine. Because it turns out this was just delayed resolution, cinematic build, the sporting equivalent of a really long closeup of a man in a wide-brimmed Mexican hat narrowing his eyes and chewing a cigar. And now we get the payoff. The Etihad on Sunday afternoon. The clink of spurs. The tick of the clocktower. Townsfolk huddled at the saloon-bar shutters. Get ready for an old-school shootout. Continue reading...

The three-time Olympic champion is brilliant, charismatic, relatable, basically the best British athlete of all-time. But he’s also a victim of the decline of minority sports The Austrian philosopher and novelist Robert Musil once wrote a lengthy meditation on human capacity based around seeing the phrase “a racehorse of genius” in a newspaper sports section. Musil was disturbed by this idea. His basic question was: can a horse really be a genius? If we are to ascribe the label of genius to a horse, based on its ability to run fast and successfully eat oats, where does this leave the unmapped capacities of the actual human genius? What is consciousness? What is a human? Should the question in fact be: will there ever be a human of sufficient genius they are able to actually perceive the genius of a horse? Continue reading...

The US attack on Iran has made the need for renewable energy inarguable. Environmentalists are now being seen for the pragmatists that they are Donald Trump has done more to accelerate the energy transition than anyone else alive. Fossil fuel companies bankrolled his presidential campaign to stop the transition in its tracks. But when you back a volatile narcissist, unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, you shouldn’t expect to control the outcome. It’s not that the fossils are suffering yet. As prices have soared since Trump and Netanyahu attacked Iran, oil executives have been selling shares at gobsmacking prices: the CEO of Chevron, for example, has cashed $104m so far this year. Vladimir Putin has also received a massive boost to his Ukraine invasion budget. As promised, Trump has gutted clean energy rules and programmes, green alternatives and environmental science. A fortnight ago, he stated, with the usual quantum of evidence (zero): “The environmentalists, I mean, they are terrorists … I call them environmental terrorists.” George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Elisabeth Zetland, a senior researcher at MyHeritage, found that the actual Luigi has immigrated to US from Italy The Washington state businessman who inspired Nintendo to give the name Mario to its mustachioed, superhero plumber did not have a brother named Luigi like the fictional video game star famously does. But it has only just been determined that Nintendo may have unknowingly named its mascot’s brother after another of the real-life Mario’s close relatives: his father, Luigi, whose biography evokes that of millions of 20th-century US immigrants from Italy. Continue reading...

Bush theatre, London Secrets are exposed during a pub singalong as Franky returns home to find her parents divided in Kit Withington’s drama You can hear this play before you enter the auditorium. Inside, a karaoke session is in full force with audience members blasting out Friday night pub bangers on stage. The singing resumes when Kit Withington’s family drama begins, with karaoke as the glue that binds together characters at emotional odds with each other. Several of them are at odds with themselves too, including Franky (Rowan Robinson), who drops into her parental home in a north-west town in the opening scene. Her life is in London now, with a boyfriend and job that prove she is moving on. This town hasn’t done the same and neither have her parents since a tragedy more than two decades ago. Her father, Dez (Deka Walmsley), is behaving oddly, still seemingly overwhelmed by grief and guilt, while her mother, Linda (Sophie Stanton), is seeking happiness elsewhere. Continue reading...

Passengers face risk of cancellations due to fuel shortages – and long airport queues due to EU entry-exit system What are your rights if your holiday flight is cancelled? Holidaymakers have faced numerous stresses in recent years when planning and budgeting for the sacred summer holiday. Holiday flights to Europe have kept growing despite a pandemic, a cost of living crisis and long airport queues, but summer 2026 threatens to bring fresh anxieties. Legacies of Brexit mean longer border checks for Britons and most non-EU nationals to get into much of Europe, and the US-Israel war on Iran has prompted fears that airlines may not have enough fuel for every scheduled flight. Continue reading...

Voters broadly split along generational lines as pro-Russian former president leads in polls Anna Bodakova’s days tend to be rather hectic at the moment. Hopping between meeting voters on the street, political debates and recording videos for social media, the 23-year-old is standing to become an MP in Bulgaria’s general election. Last year she was among the many young Bulgarians who participated in countrywide mass protests over the government’s economic policies and perceived failure to tackle corruption. Those protests ultimately resulted in the resignation of the prime minister, Rosen Zhelyazkov, and his cabinet in December. Continue reading...

Supporters and club insiders look back at the Sky Blues’ journey, from the depths of text-a-sub ridicule and fan mutinies to promotion To understand the extraordinarily wild ride that Coventry have been on, culminating in the promotion achieved at Blackburn on Friday night, you need only look at the text-a-substitute idea that has become part of football folklore. In less than a decade, the club were relegated from the top flight for the first time after 34 years, lost their stadium and came within half an hour of extinction before being bought by a Mayfair-based hedge fund in 2007. The story goes that, as a way to generate extra revenue, fans would be able to text substitution suggestions to a premium-rate number during a match. It is frequently recalled in local and national newspapers. Fans are still asked about it today. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: A year after its US debut, the buzzy hospital thriller finally lands in ​the UK and traces the long, messy evolution of a genre that reflect​s the state of our healthcare systems • Don’t get The Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up here After a wait more interminable than most spells in an A&E reception area, medical-drama-of-the-moment The Pitt finally made it on to UK screens last month, via the arrival of streaming service HBO Max, and just about everyone I know has spent the following weeks hoovering it up. Some, in fact, are already up to speed with its second season (the finale aired last night on US TV) and so are trying very, very hard not to blurt out major plot points at the office tea point/on public transport/in an actual hospital waiting room – we’re in a post-spoiler age, remember. I’ve been a little bit slower off the mark – mainly because it took so long to figure out if I actually had access to HBO Max as part of my bafflingly arcane Sky TV package – but I’m racing through it now, and so am ready to share the same observations that everyone else made weeks, or in the case of the US, a full year ago. The main one being: how did not one TV producer have the idea to mash together ER and 24 before? It was right there, staring you all in the face! (Jed Mercurio, whose forgotten 2015 medical drama, Critical, also had a real-time element, might have a finger raised in objection at this point.) Continue reading...

The Plaza Prizes offered 10 awards in 2025 but some judges say they were not paid, while a number of winners hit back over AI accusations A competition for new writers that promised a £20,000 prize fund appears to have shut down, leaving winners and judges, including a Booker prize-winning novelist, out of pocket. Established in 2022, the Plaza Prizes last year offered 10 awards that were judged by the “finest poets and writers in the world”. Continue reading...

Hannah Spencer says minister ‘continuously offends people by saying working-class people don’t care about dogs’ Labour is “offensively caricaturing” working-class people by saying they do not want a greyhound racing ban in England, the Green party MP Hannah Spencer has said. The sport has traditionally been associated with working-class culture and has historically been popular in so-called red wall areas, which Labour insiders suggest is part of the reason why there are no plans for England to follow bans announced last month in Scotland and Wales. Continue reading...

Gadd and Jamie Bell are so frank they’re almost feral in a show so violent you’ll think you can taste blood in your mouth. This man can hit a nerve like no other Part of the thrill of Baby Reindeer was the feeling of watching the birth of a monster. Comedians starring in their first scripted drama tend to base their characters gently on themselves, prodding at their own foibles without doing proper damage – but Richard Gadd set fire to that safety net by dramatising his own experience of being stalked, along with other, even darker moments of victimhood, with an honesty that was transgressive. On screen and in his old real life, the helpless Gadd’s unhinged admirer Martha (Jessica Gunning) pursued him unstoppably, like the fiend in a horror movie; once Baby Reindeer’s word-of-mouth popularity exploded and Gadd won major awards for playing himself at his most vulnerable, though, his success made him one of the most powerful creators in television. That queasy disconnect was fascinating. The prospect of watching a new Richard Gadd show is exciting, of course. It’s also a bit frightening. Continue reading...

From early English and perpendicular to Deal or No Deal Nigeria, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz 1 Which world-famous ancient site was the capital of the Nabataean people? 2 What is a shark’s skeleton made of? 3 On 15 February 1971, what went from 240 to 100? 4 Which England footballer presented Deal or No Deal Nigeria? 5 Ju Ae is the daughter and possible heir of which leader? 6 United Downs in Cornwall is the UK’s first of what type of power plant? 7 Which US magazine was founded in 1925 by Harold Ross and Jane Grant? 8 Who was the first British entrant to win Eurovision? What links: 9 Dead Man Walking; Monster’s Ball; The Green Mile; True Crime? 10 Early English; decorated; perpendicular? 11 Flute-playing rapper; tears in Turin; Paranoid singer? 12 Gretna, Scotland and Marshall Meadows Bay, Northumberland (c2,700 miles)? 13 Solon; Hammurabi; Moses; Justinian; Napoleon? 14 Christie’s rostrum; Comic Relief nose; Coronation emblem; Linn turntable? 15 1949 Orwell novel (35); 1982 Prince song (17); 2014 Taylor Swift album (25)? Continue reading...

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes ​Submit a question Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World. Continue reading...

He is no progressive but unlike the old opposition, the Tisza leader listened to Orbán’s rural base The international audience observing the Hungarian election result is likely to settle on a view that feels familiar. That this election was about east v west or that it was a “youthquake”, a win secured by the unprecedented participation of young voters. These narratives have some truth to them, of course, but, especially for those interested in fighting back against regimes such as Viktor Orbán’s, it’s worth taking a closer look at this campaign. Understanding Péter Magyar’s success will require progressives to rethink their strategies in similar political scenarios. Orbán’s defeat was against all odds. The Hungarian electoral system was designed by his government after 2010 with only one thing in mind: the interests of his party, Fidesz. His cronies control vast sections of Hungarian society and economy, including most offline media. Orbán had been effective in perpetuating the myth that he could not be removed from power democratically, which limited the political imagination of many Hungarians. Nóra Schultz is a Hungarian political theorist and podcaster Continue reading...

Even as we empathise with these intelligent animals, our relentless push for resources kills them in their thousands, just as whalers once hunted them to the brink of extinction For weeks now, a humpback whale has been trying to die. Entangled in ropes, it had wandered into the shallow Baltic Sea. Unable to feed, it is now subject to extreme dehydration, since whales satisfy their thirst through the fish they eat. In such a parlous situation, the whale’s last resort was to strand itself on Poel Island, in the Bay of Wismar. Sadly, it has been a slow death. Beached whales die because they are crushed by their own weight. The German humpback’s agony may have been prolonged because it lay in shallow water and was thus only partly submerged. Continue reading...

The machair is nature’s dazzling display on these remote islands, but this rare habitat also plays a vital role for wildlife and the resurgent crofting community Some 8,000 years ago, behind the retreating glaciers, a remarkable environment was born on the western fringes of Scotland’s Outer Hebridean islands, forged by the wind and waves. It began with rising sea levels and sweeping Atlantic gales depositing crushed shell-sand inland; this settled over glacial sediment to form a coastal belt of lime-rich soil. Buffered from the sea by mounting sand dunes, this winter-wet and summer-sunned substrate produced one of Europe’s rarest habitats: the “machair”, Gaelic for “fertile grassy plain”. Abounding in diverse, colourful wildflowers and an array of associated wildlife, coastal machair is a precious, globally important outpost of biodiversity, supporting everything from purple orchids and nodding blue campanulas to endangered birdlife, otters and rare bumblebees. As a wildflower fanatic, visiting the Outer Hebrides in peak machair bloom has long been an aspiration. Over the years, I’d read accounts of its arresting, vibrant seasonality – its shifting blankets of red and white clover, yellow trefoil and creamy eyebright, bold against the sky. Although remnant machair is also found in north-west Ireland, its greatest extent lies on this Scottish archipelago, notably the islands of Barra, Uist and Harris. Continue reading...

I initially dismissed the Wid Waker’s cartoonish visuals as juvenile. But now I try to carry the game’s sense of joy into all aspects of my life I had a complicated relationship with video games when I was a teenager. I had straightforwardly, wholeheartedly loved the Nintendo games that I’d grown up with, tumbling around primary-coloured dreamscapes in Super Mario 64 and having the time of my life. But as I grew into a pretentious young adult in the early 00s, I started to want more from games, and I wasn’t finding it. So many of them were mindless, or juvenile, or needlessly violent. So few seemed to have anything to say. I started to wonder whether games might really be a waste of time, like the judgy adults in my life kept telling me. My response to this was to relentlessly intellectualise the games I played, in order to justify the time and attention I was expending on them. I mainlined highbrow gaming magazines and wrote grandiose blogs about serious adult themes in Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid and the ancient Fallout computer games. My childhood love of Nintendo, with its bright hues and unselfconscious approach to play, felt embarrassing. Then I switched on The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and had a realisation about the nature and importance of play that would shape my life. Continue reading...

It’s all gun toting and great hair in The Murder Line. Plus: World’s Most Secret Hotels returns. Here’s what to watch this evening 10pm, ITV1 Continue reading...