C M Taylor’s book, which will raise funds for charity, follows teenagers whose favourite swim spot is contaminated A water company discharges sewage into a river with impunity and the government fails to stop them. The story may sound familiar, but this one is different: there’s a satisfying comeuppance all round. The ongoing saga of sewage being pumped into the Thames has inspired a new YA (young adult) novel, Floaters – and when its limited first edition is published later this month, 50% of all profits will go to conservation and campaign charity Surfers Against Sewage (SAS). Continue reading...

The US has amassed an arsenal of military assets in the Middle East that would allow it to launch an aerial bombing campaign against Iran Experts say there are already sufficient US military assets in the Middle East to begin an aerial bombing campaign against Iran, potentially in conjunction with Israel, though it is less clear what this would achieve. The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and other warships in a strike group have been in the Arabian Sea for nearly a month, with nine squadrons of aircraft including F-35 Lightning IIs and F/A-18 Super Hornets. Continue reading...

As the film-makers behind the seemingly neverending river of Tolkien adaptations seek to wring every last drop of story from Middle-earth, it risks running the whole ting into the ground Now in his 80s, Ian McKellen appears to have taken astrategically sedentary routefor his appearance as Gandalf the Grey in the next year’s Lord of the Rings weird-quel The Hunt for Gollum. You’ve probably heard about this thing: it’s the new movie that’s based on bits and pieces of JRR Tolkien’s esteemed high-fantasy epic that were only mentioned in passing during the three original three-hour movies, and didn’t get much more of a mention in the extended cuts that came out later. In the original novels, Gandalf reveals to hobbit Frodo Baggins that he and Aragorn, AKA Strider, AKA the future King of Gondor and Arnor, searched for decades for the creature Gollum in an effort to find out what might have happened to the ring he once held. In the new movie, though, things will be different. According to McKellen, Aragorn will take charge of the quest to find Gollum, while Gandalf will operate more like a wizardly mission controller. “The script is designed to appeal to people who like Lord of the Rings,” McKellen told the Times. “It’s an adventure story, Aragorn trying to find Gollum with Gandalf directing operations from the sidelines.” “Before the Fellowship, one creature’s obsession holds the key to Middle-earth’s survival – or its demise. In The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, we meet young Sméagol – an outsider drawn to trinkets and mischief – long before The One Ring consumed him and began his tragic descent into the tortured, deceitful creature Gollum. With the ring lost and carried away by Bilbo Baggins, Gollum finds himself compelled to leave his cave in search of it. Gandalf the Grey calls upon Aragorn, still known as the ranger Strider, to track the elusive creature whose knowledge of the whereabouts of the ring could tip the balance toward the Dark Lord Sauron. Set in the shadowed time between Bilbo’s birthday disappearance and the Fellowship’s formation, this perilous journey through Middle-earth’s darkest corners reveals untold truths, tests the resolve of its future king, and explores the fractured soul and backstory of Gollum, one of Tolkien’s most enigmatic characters. Continue reading...

Soho theatre, London Allen, one half of the influential Pajama Men comedy duo, mines his personal trauma for a slightly undercooked show about his high-octane upbringing in New Mexico Shenoah Allen swallows the characters that surround him. They stretch out in his face and spill out of his mouth. He’s a magnet for oddity, imitating the peculiarities of the people he’s grown up with: his grandmother’s lipstick eyebrows; his big-hearted uncle’s old-lady arm candy. In this meandering collection of anecdotes from the comedian’s high-octane upbringing in New Mexico, Allen – best known as one half of the influential comedy duo the Pajama Men, kings of mime and improv – browses through his dressing-up box of voices, trying them on for size. He’s done this since he was a kid, he tells us, to help him get through “the tetchy bits” of life. Of which his has been extremely full. Continue reading...

The updated QuickShot II brings retro gameplay into the modern era while preserving the no-frills button smashing and endearing flaws that fans loved Nostalgia is big in the modern games industry. It’s ironic that the most technologically obsessed art form on the planet is just as watery-eyed about the past as cinema and music. And to prove it here is the new version of the legendary QuickShot II, a plasticky joystick from the early 1980s that wasn’t even that good the first time round. It was, however, cheap and it resembled an actual fighter plane control stick with its multiple fire buttons and ergonomic shaft. If you wanted a rugged and precise controller you’d go for the Competition Pro, but that one didn’t let you pretend to be in Star Wars or Airwolf. Plus, the QuickShot II had suckers on its base so you could stick it to your cockpit control panel – sorry, I mean MDF computer table. The new QuickShot II from Retro Games and Plaion Replai is almost an exact replica in terms of its dimensions. You can grasp it in your fist and wrap your thumb and forefinger around its large red buttons. Yes, you can stick it to your table; the designers have even included the original auto-fire switch at the rear for players who weren’t prepared to hit the fire button repeatedly while playing Green Beret. Continue reading...

We would like to hear your story of serving a nightmare patron A diner in a Sydney restaurant has been caught on CCTV sprinkling armpit hair into their food “in attempt to get a free meal”. After confronting the head chef, the man allegedly then left without paying, having ordered the most expensive items on the menu. With this delightful story in mind, do you have a story of dealing with a rude or generally bad customer while working in hospitality? Continue reading...

Plea follows 2017 death of UAE’s Abdullah Hayayei UKA could face fine of between £1.2m and £5m UK Athletics is facing a seven-figure fine after pleading guilty to corporate manslaughter following the death of a Paralympian who was hit on the head by a metal pole while preparing for the London World Para Athletics Championships in 2017. The incident occurred at Newham Leisure Centre when the pole, which was attached to a throwing cage, fell on Abdullah Hayayei while he was training. Continue reading...

The 2026 MLS season kicks off on Saturday. Our writers discuss the teams, players and story lines they’re watching this year Messi v Son. The two best players in the league play for the two “glamour” teams on opposite coasts, and each have large and dedicated fanbases. If both stay relatively healthy and perform up to capabilities, there’s no way the race between them for some honor (Golden Boot? MVP? Both?) won’t be fascinating to see unfold. AA Continue reading...

In the latest in a long line of Irish tussles at fly-half, Jack Crowley takes over from Sam Prendergast at Twickenham In the summer of 1979 Irish rugby jumped off a lower shelf in the nation’s sports shopand landed front and centre. This wasn’t prompted by a dramatic development on the field, rather it was a selection decision. Tony Ward, voted the first European Player of the Year two months earlier, was dropped. He had won the award largely for his dazzling form in that season’s Five Nations Championship. Then, ahead of the First Test on Ireland’s tour of Australia, he was canned. It made the six o’clock news. Ward was a gifted footballer. He would go on to play in the League of Ireland for Limerick United FC, starring for them against Southampton in the Uefa Cup. He looked the part: stocky, sallow, not only could he shoot the lights out but he could step off either foot, leaving opponents on their rear end. If Ireland had a catwalk then Wardy would have been a model. Continue reading...

Geoengineering does little to defuse most of the risks that really matter for people – and it runs the risk of making some harms worse Planetary-scale solar geoengineering interventions involve the deliberate injection of either natural or artificial particulates into the stratosphere – stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI – with a view to offset some of the global heating caused by greenhouse gases. If implemented, the technology would create a metaphorical thermostat for the planet. Such a thermostat is advocated on the grounds that controlling global temperature reduces the harms associated with the climate crisis. I wish to challenge this assertion. Continue reading...

Many farmers in the Andes rely on growing blooms for export, but high water usage and risky pesticides threaten Indigenous communities The fertile high valley near La Chimba trembles with sounds. The rhythms of brass bands and cumbia music clash like weather fronts, each playing its own beats in the Andean rain. A rainbow spans the slopes and white plastic greenhouses, protecting the region’s treasure: roses bred for beauty, shipped abroad, blooming far from home. Amid the drizzle, Patricia Catucuamba and her husband, Milton Navas, share a jug of chicha, a maize brew vital to their harvest celebrations. Since 2000, they have worked as dairy farmers, but sustaining a milk business requires expanses of land beyond the reach of most smallholders. Continue reading...

Monty Don loves these harbingers of spring, and I’m beginning to think he is on to something When I was a child I was always mystified by the walks around the garden that my father and grandfather would undertake shortly after the latter arrived to visit. I’d see them as I was playing outside, or through the window from inside, and be baffled. What could they possibly be looking at? Fast-forward three decades and I’m the one pinching my mum’s clogs to inspect my parents’ dinky and beautifully appointed garden. My dad’s complaining about the hellebores, which haven’t naturalised as well as in the garden I used to watch him walk his father around. It’s something else that catches my eye: the bold, bright green crown of leaves of a primrose (Primula vulgaris to come. In the midst of a drizzly, gloomy month, there it was: a beacon of hope. Continue reading...

Twenty-three years ago, a collective of 24 photographers agreed to document New Year’s Day for the following 24 years. Each artist has been given one hour to document, advancing by one hour each year, creating a cumulative, time-shifting narrative This year’s exhibition will run for 24 days from 21 February to 16 March in Soho Square, London Continue reading...

By portraying the young woman Heathcliff abuses as a sexily willing participant in her own degradation, Fennell’s adaptation betrays the book, and her audience Tragedy is the beating heart of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; it’s a gothic novel that takes place in a society built on hierarchy and oppression, and exposes the fragility of love and how easily it is distorted into dangerous obsession. Unsurprisingly, there is no happy ending. Although every character in the novel is stalked by tragedy, few suffer as much as Isabella Linton. Unaware of Heathcliff’s vindictive motives, she becomes trapped in an intensely abusive marriage, one she is only freed from by fleeing to London. While she is undoubtedly a victim, in the end the character also has agency; Isabella is able to escape her abuser, though not without considerable scars. It’s a pivotal moment for her character, and one that she’s been stripped of in Emerald Fennell’s quote-unquote “adaptation”. Continue reading...

Mopping floors, dressing up as kids’ entertainers and fishing unmentionable things from swimming pools: the Dyers’s new TV show sees them investing in a caravan park. Can they revive the UK’s love of them? “You wouldn’t see Olivia Colman doing this bollocks would you?” jokes Danny Dyer as he clears up a dustbin at Priory Hill & Nutts Farm Holiday Park in Kent. But over the past year – around filming the return of the hit Disney+ series Rivals – the actor, and his daughter Dani, have been spending weekends on the Isle of Sheppey, filming The Dyers’ Caravan Park (Sky One) in an attempt to boost the fortunes of Priory Hill and make caravanning cool. Continue reading...

City of Catania calls ruse to avoid CCTV cameras installed to stop fly-tipping ‘as cunning as it is doubly wrong’ A man in Catania, Sicily, trained his dog to dump bags of rubbish by the roadside in an attempt to evade cameras installed by local authorities to combat fly-tipping, municipal police have said. The episode was detailed in a Facebook post on the city of Catania’s official page. Accompanying a video of the dog was a remark from the police that “inventiveness can never become an alibi for incivility”. Continue reading...

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Police in Pattaya say autopsy on body of British retail entrepreneur Quentin Griffiths showed no signs of foul play Quentin Griffiths, the co-founder of the online fashion retailer Asos, has died after falling from an apartment building in the Thai resort city of Pattaya. An unnamed police investigator told the BBC that officers were called after a man was found dead on 9 February, having fallen from an 18-floor condominium in Pattaya, which is on Thailand’s eastern Gulf coast. Continue reading...

The Bulgarian Booker winner on the letter he wrote to JD Salinger, the allure of Homer’s Odyssey and the magic of Thomas Mann My earliest reading memory I was taught to read quite early, at five or six, probably so that I would sit quietly and not be a nuisance to the adults. And it worked. Once I’d entered a book, I didn’t want to come out. I remember how Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl turned my heart upside down. I was living with my grandmother at the time, and I cried under the blanket, terrified that one day she, too, would die. My favourite book growing up I read greedily and indiscriminately, picking books at random from my parents’ library. Thomas Mayne Reid’s adventure novels were favourites, especially The Headless Horseman. Jack London’s Martin Eden, too. Clearly, the idea of being both a hero and a writer appealed to me. Writers were not usually heroes. I also loved a textbook on criminology, which explained how to make invisible ink, what traces criminals leave behind, and so on – matters of extraordinary importance to any 10-year-old boy. Continue reading...

The TV screen’s jazz of drags, snaps, pops, and stops during the Milano Cortina Games have shown sport at its most powder-light and loveable The mountains always promise escape from the squalor of existence at sea level, if not a kind of purification. The fortifying ruggedness of the terrain, the apple-crisp air, the high-albedo dazzle of sunlit snow: at altitude, it seems, everything is thinned to its essence. The Winter Olympics frequently play on this mythology of purity, but rarely has culture’s quadrennial ascent up the switchbacks felt as clarifying as it does this year. Propelling us into heights untroubled by the compromises and tradeoffs that blight sport’s lower zones, Milano Cortina has delivered images so brilliant and sharp they’ve also served to expose how ugly – and morally murky – most non-Olympic team sports have become over the past four years. As a TV spectacle, the excellence of this Olympiad has been defined as much by absence as presence. No gambling ads, no live betting odds gunking up the screen, no win percentage trackers, no janky little segments in which the hosts joke about what the prediction markets are doing: these Games have brought delight and relief to a tired public’s eyes in equal measure. Cleaned of clutter and slop, sport, it turns out, can still be a thing of wonder and mystery, agony and beauty. Who would have thought? Continue reading...

Whether you’re hanging a picture or putting up a shelf, we’ve drilled down to find the best tools for every DIY job • 11 clever home storage hacks There’s immense possibility in a good cordless drill, electrically and functionally. These tools can be creators, destroyers and connectors, with functions (depending on the type of drill) including screw driving, hammer-drilling into brick or stone, mixing building materials, and plain-old drilling. Most DIY drills are powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery – so there’s no cause to swear at an innocent power cable as you accidentally yank it from the plug socket. Usually, the same battery can also be used across a brand’s range of tools, including Bosch, Makita and Ryobi. Best cordless drill overall: Makita DHP490Z 18V LXT brushless combi drill Best budget cordless drill: Guild 18V cordless impact drill with 100 accessories Continue reading...

Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade, and why most of Europe – including the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – dismissed them. As the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches and the world enters a new period of geopolitical uncertainty, Europe’s politicians and spy services continue to draw lessons from the failures of 2022 Continue reading...

Trump has attacked judges and weakened global safeguards. Someone needs to stand up to the US and stop the erosion of democracy In an era of overlapping crises, corruption is no longer a side issue – it is a structural threat to achievinginternational equality and even freedom itself. Each year, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a league table of 182 countries, is greeted with predictable theatrics: praise where it flatters power, condemnation where it can be weaponised, and hollow promises of reform that quietly expire once attention moves on. Instead of a moment of reckoning, it is ignored by those with the power to act. As this newspaper reported, last week’s table showed a “worrying trend” of backsliding and a picture of “democratic institutions being eroded by political donations, cash for access and state targeting of campaigners and journalists”. Continue reading...

⚽ Latest news, previews and updates before the weekend ⚽ 10 things to look out for | And email John A good night in the Europa League and Conference League for English teams. Less so Celtic, ouch. Continue reading...

• Medal table | Live scores and schedule | Results | Briefing • Follow us over on Bluesky | And you can email Tanya Some beautiful, and blizzard heavy pictures, from Thursday have been curated by our talented picture desk. The Norwegians still reign supreme, but the USA have leap-frogged the hosts to settle into second. Continue reading...