Meeting could coincide with possible Commons debate on claims he lied to MPs about Mandelson’s vetting If there is a Commons debate tomorrow on allegations that Keir Starmer lied to MPs about Peter Mandelson’s vetting for his appointment as ambassador to the US, it may coincide with Keir Starmer chairing a meeting of the government’s Cobra emergency committee to discuss the economic consequences of the Iran war. A scheduling clash like that would allow No 10 to make the argument that Starmer is focusing on important issues that matter to voters while the opposition is obsessed with Westminster procedure (although Downing Street would prefer the privileges inquiry debate not to go ahead in the first place). Starmer announced the Cobra meeting in his speech to the Usdaw conference. Whatever happens in the Middle East, we’ve cut your energy bills, and we have capped them until July. Delegates, that’s another thing that I will always stand firm on. I will never let this country be dragged into a war that is not in our interests. Never. That is a lesson British politics should have learned a long time ago with Iraq. And yet, when the rush to war began on Iran, I was heavily criticised by others who had no thought for the consequences for our country, for your family. Continue reading...

The horror of sports lessons put three in 10 of British 50 to 65-year-olds off exercise for life. I wish I’d known sooner that movement can feel so good Surprising news: three in 10 50- to 65-year-olds in a recent Age UK survey said school sports memories had put them off exercise “for life”. Only three in 10? When it comes to exercise, there are surely two kinds of people – the handful who enjoyed school PE lessons and everyone else. I’m guessing the first category are out smashing their marathon PBs, meaning we indoor sorts can safely share war stories. Mine: forced to walk half an hour to the sports field in the tiny synthetic pleated skirt that was mysteriously designated mandatory sportswear, heckled by local perverts and youths shouting “jolly hockey sticks”, then skulking, motionless, in the mud, avoiding various projectiles while being shouted at by the sporty girls and contemplated with bafflement by (mostly benign) PE teachers. Continue reading...

I suspect the main reason they avoid criticizing Israel is that they believe that would be antisemitic. But this is both dangerous and wrong In an extraordinary article published on 7 April, the New York Times described how Donald Trump decided to go to war with Iran. It is highly unusual for the White House Situation Room to be used for in-person meetings with foreign leaders. But this time, the Situation Room was not just used for a meeting with a foreign leader. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin, Netanyahu took over the presentation space, backed on a screen by the leader of the Mossad as well as Israeli military officials. As the New York Times describes the scene, “Arrayed visually behind Mr. Netanyahu, they created the image of a wartime leader surrounded by his team.” The article makes it clear that Netanyahu’s “hard sell” of a quick war was pivotal to the US president’s decision to partner with Israel in attacking Iran. Continue reading...

Viktor Nordenskiöld’s film follows Ukraine’s deputy minister Olha Stefanishyna as she negotiates her country’s path into the EU, but lacks some of the rigour needed After the Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian deputy minister Olha Stefanishyna embarked on the herculean challenge of steering her country’s pathway into the European Union. Shot over the course of two years, Viktor Nordenskiöld’s documentary portrait closely chronicles her race against time, as the war escalates. Always on the move, Stefanishyna is often seen on trains or in the back of cars, as she and her staff attend seemingly endless meetings with EU officials and other world leaders. Working towards the deadline of 14 December, 2023, the date on which the European Council would decide on Ukraine’s accession, Stefanishyna is under immense pressure at home and abroad. Around the same time that a proposed bill concerning national minorities hits a snag in the Ukrainian parliament, politician Viktor Orbán, then the prime minister of Hungary, publicly voices his opposition to the enlargement of the EU. Continue reading...

Secret Service director says security succeeded in stopping shooter before he could do further harm but others disagree The shooting in the White House correspondents’ gala has prompted questions over security with some asking how a shooter was able to get close to where Donald Trump and many other senior administration officials were gathered and many others praising the actions of law enforcement that swiftly stopped the attack. As details about the shooting at the Washington Hilton continued to surface, the alleged shooter Cole Tomas Allen, 31, mocked an “insane” lack of security at the Washington dinner in a manifesto reportedly send to his family 10 minutes before his assault started. Continue reading...

After Donald Trump’s second election, I realised the insidious hold my phone had over my life. So I turned to something I’d loved in childhood to better occupy my attention After a long day of looking at screens for work, I used to go to bed and stare at my phone until I fell asleep. When not doomscrolling news headlines, I’d crash out to hateful comments on social media or revisit workplace dramas via mobile versions of Teams and Slack. I was always plugged in. It was a ritual that would start well before bedtime. As the evening wound down, I’d surf algorithms for hours on end, barely paying attention to whatever television programme was on in the background, only half-listening to conversations around me. Whether it was the incessantly dystopian news cycle, toxic opinions on pop culture, or posts railing against obtuse LinkedIn speak, there was always another online scab to pick. Continue reading...

Midfielder went through ‘four days of hell in hospital’ Hopes her talking will stop others ‘suffering in silence’ Missy Bo Kearns has described experiencing “a different type of grief” after having a miscarriage last month. The Aston Villa midfielder had announced her pregnancy just over two weeks before sharing the tragic loss of her and her partner Liam Walsh’s baby. Speaking to ITV News, the 25-year-old said she thought she was experiencing symptoms from the pregnancy on 18 March when she was shaking and had a temperature of 42C but Aston Villa team doctor, Dr Jodie Blackadder-Weinstein, told her she needed to call Walsh and get to hospital. Continue reading...

US president says there’s ‘no reason to meet’ Tehran unless they agree never to have nuclear weapons Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem on Monday rejected Lebanon’s planned direct talks with Israel, calling them a “grave sin” that will destabilise Lebanon. “We categorically reject direct negotiations with Israel, and those in power should know that their actions will not benefit Lebanon or themselves,” Qassem said in a statement, calling on authorities to “back down from their grave sin that is putting Lebanon in a spiral of instability”. Continue reading...

Updates from day four of the latest round of matches Sign up to The Spin | Email Tanya or comment BTL This looks good. If you have or know a child from a state school background in Surrey, point them in the direction of Twenty20 Community Cricket. They are looking for a ‘state school superstar’ from boys in years 4–6 and girls in years 7–9 . The winners will get a full bursary place at the Twenty20 Community Cricket academy. The competition consists of a skills assessment (bowling accuracy, catching consistency, shot selection, agility and athleticism) and then a hard-ball match. For more details and to register, see here. Continue reading...

Critical week for global economy as banks expected to issue warnings over conflict driving up prices Business live – latest updates The world’s most powerful central banks are poised to hold borrowing costs unchanged this week amid growing concerns over the unfolding inflation shock from the Iran war. In a critical week for the global economy, each of the central banks in the G7 are expected to issue warnings over the risks from the Middle East war driving up prices for households and businesses. Continue reading...

Even though she was unwell, the last surviving Ronette was full of poignant memories and saucy asides when I met her last year. And she had a rich life after pop success • Nedra Talley Ross dies aged 80 – news Nedra Talley Ross wasn’t a household name any longer, but she had been once upon a time. When she turned 18 in January 1964, George Harrison was among the guests who helped her celebrate. She and her cousins were feted, surrounded, adored. For she and her cousins were the Ronettes, the girl group above all others, the sound of teenage emotional extremity set to soaring, symphonic pop. Nedra was the last surviving Ronette and now she is gone. Nedra’s cousins were Veronica and Estelle Bennett, and the three of them had sung and danced and played as long as they could remember. She was only a Ronette between 1963 and 1967, but in a few short years she was part of some of the greatest pop ever recorded: Be My Baby, Walking in the Rain, Sleigh Ride and the rest. Not that she was taken with Phil Spector, who produced them. “I wasn’t impressed by him, and he didn’t stir me with what he was saying, didn’t scare me with what he was doing,” Nedra told me when I interviewed her just before Christmas last year. “He was quite arrogant, and who wants to deal with an arrogant person?” Continue reading...

The latest in our series of writers drawing attention to their most rewatched comfort films is a celebration of an easily quotable western On 26 October 1881, four men – gambler and lawman Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and his tubercular dentist friend Henry “Doc” Holliday – strode through the silver mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, and advanced on an alley next to Fly’s Boarding House and Photography Studio, just west of the OK Corral. Thirty seconds of gunfire later, two men were dead and another lay dying; over the years, what was, depending on your viewpoint, either a law enforcement operation or a triple homicide became romanticized as a heroic tale of good defeating evil. Continue reading...

Before meeting my fluffy-eared friend, I had lost my brother and was exhausted by the hamster wheel of work. His zest has made me feel alive My trip to South America in 2025 was something I’d been planning for a long time. I wanted to break up my mundane 9-to-5 life. Four months before I was due to leave, I broke my back and thought I might have to cancel. Luckily, I pulled through. I was expecting breathtaking views, vibrant wildlife and memories to last a lifetime. What I wasn’t expecting was to fall in love with a fluffy-eared street dog and spend four months battling bureaucracy and world travel to bring him home. But I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Continue reading...

It can take years to properly evaluate if a prospect works out. But here are a few early takes on the ups and downs from this year’s selection process Grading a draft immediately after it happens is an interesting concept – a bit like giving out marks for a meal in a restaurant right after you order. But the NFL Draft Industrial Complex will not rest until verdicts are handed out, so here we are. So, with the standard disclaimer that we won’t know for years just how these moves turn out – who had the last pick of the 2022 draft leading his team to a Super Bowl appearance? – here’s a rundown of what caught our eye over the last few days. Continue reading...

Hundreds of senior staff in territory benefit from nearly £30,000-a-year grant per child not available to staff in group’s other hubs HSBC is reportedly reviewing a perk that covers school fees for bankers in Hong Kong as part of a big overhaul of the bank under chief executive Georges Elhedery. Europe’s largest bank is considering whether to scrap the perk for new employees or make changes to total compensation, Bloomberg News reported. No decisions have been made yet. Continue reading...

Conservatives expected to push for privileges committee involvement in a Commons vote on Monday A series of senior Labour figures have dismissed calls for a new investigation into what Keir Starmer told MPs about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as political point scoring, before a possible Commons vote on the issue. The Conservatives have called for the cross-party privileges committee, the remit of which includes examining whether MPs broke rules, to look at whether the prime minister misled parliament when he said normal procedures were followed with Mandelson’s appointment. Continue reading...

The Girls creator has endured brickbats and breakdowns – but she doesn’t always make it easy to feel sorry for her At the end of last year, Netflix released Too Much – a sickly, indie-sleaze romcom about an American transplant who falls for a troubled British muso. It was created by Lena Dunham and her musician husband Luis Felber, and apparently loosely based on the couple’s backstory. It felt, to many critics, like second-screen fare, decidedly Lena Dunham-lite. Was this really the same person who had given us the spiky, self-absorbed world of Girls, the millennial Sex and the City complete with brutal situationships, toxic besties and, er, one of the main characters accidentally smoking crack? Famesick sheds almost all the Richard Curtis-isms to find that old, controversy-courting Dunham alive and – if not exactly well – then learning to cope with it. Her second memoir (Not That Kind of Girl was published in 2014) charts the chronic illness and seemingly unending stress that came to define her 20s and 30s after she had snagged her own HBO series aged just 24. The afflictions described across its 400 pages include – though are not limited to – OCD, colitis, the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, endometriosis, early menopause, PTSD and addiction to both opioids and benzodiazepines. At one point, Dunham accidentally sets herself on fire; at another, she panics about how Vogue will cover up the impetigo on her face, “a waterfall of golden blisters, turning a sickly green as they dried”. The book is scattergun and sometimes lacking in self awareness (who cares that Dunham had to give her designer booties up, like contraband, when she entered rehab?). It’s also undeniably frank and exhaustive: a lifetime of therapy condensed into something you could conceivably rip through in a weekend. Continue reading...

Musk’s lawsuit accuses Altman of fraud, while OpenAI says that Musk is ‘motivated by jealousy’ A lawsuit between two of Silicon Valley’s biggest tycoons goes to trial Monday in California, the culmination of a years-long bitter feud. Elon Musk has accused Sam Altman of betraying the founding agreement of the non-profit they started together, OpenAI, by changing it to a for-profit enterprise. Musk accuses Altman, OpenAI, its president Greg Brockman, and its major partner Microsoft of breach of contract and unjust enrichment in the lawsuit. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday morning at a federal courthouse in Oakland, with opening arguments from both sides expected later this week. The trial is slated to last two to three weeks. Along with internal communications from Musk and key executives at OpenAI, the trial promises a who’s who of Silicon Valley on the witness stand, including Musk, Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Continue reading...

Inadelso Cossa’s documentary grapples with the trauma left by the conflict through witness that wavers between real and imagined truths Lasting from 1977 to 1992, the Mozambique civil war left deep scars on the psyche of the whole nation. In his second feature, Inadelso Cossa attempts to grapple with the psychological wreckage of this harrowing period by combing through his own family history; returning to the village where he grew up, the film-maker conducts a series of interviews with his grandmother, whose testimony is rendered unreliable by her worsening dementia. The film wavers between real and imagined truths, a liminal state echoed by the evocative cinematography. Nocturnal sequences, in which wooden sheds, grassy fields, and even Cossa’s grandmother, are wrapped in a cloak of darkness inspire a deceptive sense of calm. In the dead of night, though, the spectres of the past linger. Cossa also speaks to other historical witnesses: Macuacua and Zalina, an older couple, spend much of their screen time bickering but these domestic moments are underlined with unease. A former soldier, Macuacua was once a participant in the violence against civilians but his life now, however, is marred by poverty. In a striking scene, Macuacua holds up a tree branch shaped like a rifle and reenacts a patrol route from his youth with astonishing matter-of-factness. As his muscle memory kicks in, the past and the present collapse together to startling effect. For Cossa, history is distilled in these kinds of gestures, moving beyond linear time. Although the film is bookended by archival footage, the director prioritises non-traditional forms of documentation, such as monologues, songs, and reenactments. While this approach embodies the slipperiness of memory, it also renders the film difficult to follow on occasion. But across these streams of oral history, what we find are not merely facts and figures, but feelings, in which pain and healing entwine. Continue reading...

Across country, more than 10 people have been injured as Ukrainian prime minister Julia Svyrydenko prepares to visit Poland Another night of Russian drone attacks on Ukraine overnight left more than 10 people injured, particularly damaging residential buildings in the Odesa region. The strikes caused the biggest damage in the central Prymorskyi district, where residential buildings, a hotel and facilities in the center of the city were damaged, Serhiy Lysak, the head of the local military administration, said on Telegram in comments reported by Reuters. Continue reading...

Owner of Pink Punters vows to reopen club as police call on the public not to speculate A man has been arrested on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life after a fire at an LGBTQ+ nightclub, police have said. Officers have called on people not to speculate about why the fire may have been set at Pink Punters in Fenny Stratford, near Milton Keynes, saying it is too early to tell. Following the fire, the club’s owner said he was relieved no one was hurt – and vowed the club would reopen. Continue reading...

It’s not just the money-making studio execs – fans, too, are often happy for the darker parts of a subject’s life to be ignored Like millions of other people, I went to see Michael this week. I knew what I was getting into – most reviews have been brutal. It is a “whitewash”, “ghoulish”, a “127-minute trailer montage” of “cruise-ship entertainment”. And yet the film of Michael Jackson’s rise to global stardom has broken the record for the biggest opening in biopic history, and made $217m (£160m) worldwide on its first weekend of release, with over $900m projected by the end of its run. So I found myself thinking: if we know these films are often sanitised pap, that the estates and lawyers have excised entire chapters of a musician’s life, why do we still go in droves? There’s the obvious explanation, of course. The biopics give audiences a way to experience a favourite artist at their peak and to dip into their much-loved musical catalogue. Nadia Khomami is the arts and culture correspondent at the Guardian Continue reading...

Men tend to have a higher ratio of muscle to fat, but women respond just as well to resistance training This is a common misconception, says Prof Leigh Breen, a muscle physiology specialist at the University of Leicester, though it’s easy to see where it comes from. Men typically have a higher ratio of muscle to fat than women, largely because of differences established during puberty, when testosterone levels rise significantly in males. Women, by contrast, tend to have a higher proportion of body fat – linked, in part, to oestrogen. “Although there is a relationship between testosterone and the amount of muscle mass we have, this doesn’t determine how effectively we can build muscle with resistance training,” says Breen. “Women have much lower testosterone levels – around 15 to 20 times lower than men. There is a perception that men gain muscle more easily because of higher testosterone and more androgen receptors in muscle, but that’s not quite right. If you look at relative change – the percentage increase – men and women respond very similarly to training.” Continue reading...

The half-human, half-horse star has bounced back from the brink with a grass-themed album that’s ‘a love letter to Mother Earth’. Is it true she was discovered by Whitney Horseton? ‘I’m trilingual because I speak English and German – but also neigh. We could have done the interview in horsey.” Welcome to the world of DJ and pop provocateur horsegiirL, AKA Stella Stallion, the Berlin-based half-human, half-horse, whose potent mix of Eurodance, 90s techno, happy hardcore and gabba has polarised the dance music community. On one side of the paddock are her loyal fans, or “farmies”, who fully accept the horsegiirL lore – that she was born and raised in the idyllic Sunshine farms, surrounded by animal friends, and later discovered by local legend Whitney Horseton. Lurking on the other side, near the manure, are the dance bros who derided Stallion’s meteoric rise in 2022 – aided by viral sets at HÖR Berlin and Boiler Room – as a cheap gimmick that highlighted how far dance music had strayed from its roots. “I don’t remember his name,” laughs Stallion, 26, “but some legendary DJ from, like, 1902, said, ‘This is the face of commercialisation.’” She’s speaking from Brazil, where she is currently shooting a video for That’s My Beach, a sunkissed pop gem taken from her forthcoming climate crisis-focused debut album, Nature Is Healing. “I had to laugh because at that point I was mainly playing small underground queer and trans raves. It just showed what they were actually protecting, which was a very different space to where I see myself.” Continue reading...

France remain on track for grand slam showdown with Red Roses, whose injury-hit squad depth is being tested Ireland sent out mixed messages from their camp before their game with France on Saturday: was this a revenge mission for their Rugby World Cup quarter-final exit or not? The head coach, Scott Bemand, had denied it but the captain, Erin King, admitted the World Cup game had added some “venom” to the encounter and the full-back Stacey Flood said France should be “worried if I was them”. The Irish team may have had the image of Axelle Berthoumieu biting Aoife Wafer, an action that was not caught during the quarter-final but the France back row was given a nine-game ban afterwards, for added motivation if any was needed. There was certainly no love lost between the teams, with the fixture full of tension, squabbles and huge hits. Continue reading...