Experts argue sensor and satellite data reveal targeted attacks on farming communities by the Rapid Support Forces were intended to prevent villages producing food There is strong evidence that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed a war crime by depriving the villagers of north Darfur of the means to produce food, legal experts argue in a new analysis published today calling for the Humanitarian Research Lab’s (HRL) revelations to be used in international courts. The destruction of the villages, farming equipment and infrastructure all provide strong evidence of a “starvation strategy” against a population already struggling with food insecurity because of the war, says Tom Dannenbaum, a professor at Stanford Law School and a leading expert on the use of starvation in war. Continue reading...

An exhibition of rare photographs by the Italian photographer highlights the abstraction and poetry of his lesser-known works Continue reading...

This sappy and ill-conceived tale about a father, his autistic son and a lifesize toy bear suffers from sanctimonious religious messaging and dreadful dialogue Anyone with autism or close to someone with the condition might feel inclined to be forbearing of this family drama about a father and his autistic son, given its plea for acceptance and love. But yikes – it is so sappy, ill-conceived and bloated with sanctimonious religious messaging, it is a slog to get through. If, however, you feel that watching it is almost an act of charity in itself (apparently some of the proceeds will go toward supporting carers), admire this at least for being one of the few feature films that tries to depict more challenged autistic people who need support (also known by the now-contested label of “low functioning”). Also to its credit, the film opens with a disclaimer that acknowledges that “the autism spectrum is wide and varied” and that “this film reflects the individual experiences of two characters and is not intended to represent every autistic story”. The main character here is Elijah (played as a child by Reece Turley and then as an adult by Caleb Milby), a young man first met just after a violent meltdown that has ravaged the family’s Christmas decorations. Elijah’s father Ty (John Wells) attempts to comfort the distraught teen, with help from Elijah’s favourite stuffed toy, polar bear Nook. Flashforward seven years, and Elijah is now in some kind of secure hospital, barely distinguishable from a jail, partly because his mother Pam (Layla Cushman), divorced from Ty, just wants to offload him on the state and wash her hands of him while Ty struggles to maintain his career as an architect. Continue reading...

Airline has refused refund after our flight was diverted because of bad weather and we were left on the plane for six hours I was on a Ryanair flight from Bristol to Dublin that took off during Storm Amy in October last year. It was unable to land at Dublin after two abortive attempts and was diverted to Manchester, where we sat on the plane for six hours, with no complimentary refreshments, before being unceremoniously ejected at nearly midnight. We were told Ryanair staff would organise taxis and hotels, but no crew disembarked with us, and the terminal was deserted. Continue reading...

From jazz in Rotterdam and hip-hop in Paris to brass bands on the beach in Blackpool, the Guardian’s music editor chooses the best European festivals that can be reached by rail Paris has some great festivals, such as Cercle (22-24 May), with dance music stars against the backdrop of planes and rockets in an outdoor aerospace museum, but the most accessible and democratic is Fête de la musique, which began in Paris in 1982 but is now popular across the country. It is a loose event encompassing dozens of free, semi-impromptu outdoor performances all over each host city, including plenty in Lille, which is even cheaper and quicker to get to than Paris on the Eurostar from London. Continue reading...

Ellis and her trusty sidekick uncover small-town grudges as they investigate a murder. Plus, catch the Bafta award-winning film I Swear. Here’s what to watch this evening 9pm, Channel 5 “It’s all about hiding the evidence in plain sight – it’s a Godfather move.” Sharon D Clarke is back as formidable DCI Ellis, who is parachuted in to rural northern England to solve failing cases, with DS Chet Harper (Andrew Gower) in tow. Their first murder is that of a village’s well-respected businessman, but it turns out that many of the locals held secret grudges against him. Hollie Richardson Continue reading...

Both campaigns have been framed differently at different times, with dubious claims of defensive action and a curious reluctance to label it war Shifting goals, unclear timelines and a flimsy pretext: at times, the US-Israel campaign against Iran carries curious parallels of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The comparison is far from exact. In 2022, Putin sent a massive army across Ukraine’s borders in an unprovoked invasion of a democratic state, a campaign that quickly resulted in heavy losses. The United States has so far largely limited its involvement to airstrikes against Iran’s authoritarian regime. Continue reading...

I can’t get enough of cabbage right now, and it’s the perfect wrap for this warmly spiced picadillo filling I love stuffed vegetables. When I was young, I came across a recipe for stuffed aubergines in an old book of my mother’s and must have cooked it a score of times. Later, in the early 1990s and to the echoes of nouvelle cuisine, Delia Smith showed us how we could work similar magic with peppers and tomatoes. Then the technique went deeply out of fashion, but I stayed loyal, and continued quietly stuffing tomatoes, pumpkins and courgettes, all no doubt influenced by my travels in Mexico. Thoday’s stuffed cabbage is inspired by the most delicious tongue in a tantalisingly light escabeche that I once had at Nicos in Mexico City, and also because I can’t get enough of cabbage at the moment. Continue reading...

Calls for a popular uprising and empty promises of help are reckless in the extreme – and no answer to my country’s plight Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran I have been watching the news from inside Iran, unable to hold in my sorrow. As an Iranian who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime, I have been pleading with the world’s human rights organisations and media to keep a focus on the country’s plight. But now I see US-Israeli bombs falling on Iran, and some Iranians celebrating this war while innocent people die. My heart is breaking for my country. Let us be clear: when Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conspired to launch their war, it was not out of a desire to free the Iranian people from the tyranny of the regime. Netanyahu said on the second day of the war: “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He has named this operation “Lion’s Roar”. Meanwhile, Iranian monarchists celebrate the carnage, waving the shah’s version of the country’s flag with its crowned lion and sun. Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran. Her books include A Prison Memoir: One Woman’s Struggle in Iran, and the novel The Secret Letters from X to A Continue reading...

About 10,000 writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman join copyright campaign Thousands of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman have published an “empty” book to protest against AI firms using their work without permission. About 10,000 writers have contributed to Don’t Steal This Book, in which the only content is a list of their names. Copies of the work are being distributed to attenders at the London book fair on Tuesday, a week before the UK government is due to issue an assessment on the economic cost of proposed changes in copyright law. Continue reading...

To some it was a reckless experiment but scientists hope the dispersal of 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine could ease the climate crisis For four days last August, a thick slick of maroon bruised the waters of the Gulf of Maine. The scene, not unlike a toxic red tide, was the result of 65,000 litres of an alkaline chemical, tagged with a red dye, that had been deliberately pumped by scientists into the ocean. Though it sounds perverse, the event was part of a scientific experiment that could advance a technology to combat both global heating and ocean acidification. Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), as the approach is called, acts like natural weathering, but on human – rather than geological – timescales. Continue reading...

Trump has blamed Iran for the mass killing at Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school but geolocation, videos and satellite imagery indicate otherwise The bombing of a primary school in Minab on 28 February killed scores of people, most of them seven- to 12-year-old girls. The strike is the worst mass killing of the US and Israel’s war on Iran so far – and has been described by Unesco as a “grave violation” of international law. On Saturday, the US president, Donald Trump, declared that Iran was responsible for the school bombing. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran … they’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.” Continue reading...

Chancellor raises prospect of help after prices almost treble since start of conflict • How will war in the Middle East affect your finances? Rural households that rely on heating oil to warm their homes and provide hot water are facing a “sudden and frightening” surge in their bills, with prices almost trebling since the start of the Iran war. The cost of heating oil is not covered by Ofgem’s energy price cap and varies between suppliers. In examples seen by the Guardian, customers who were typically paying 62p a litre before the war are now being quoted about £1.73. Continue reading...

St Albans Cathedral, Hertfordshire: The chapel here is a wonderful curiosity, thanks to its restoration by a green-fingered Victorian sculptor All’s quiet in the Lady Chapel, sheltered from the bustle of the city by thick limestone walls of Totternhoe clunch, quarried just a few miles north-west in Bedfordshire. But though I’m aware of being alone in a vast vaulted space, when I look at the stonework, I feel surrounded by the echoes of women who’ve stood here before me and left their legacy on the chapel walls. By the late 19th century, the Lady Chapel was dilapidated, the 14th-century ornamental stonework almost all obliterated, and an extensive restoration project was under way. John Baker, a London-based ecclesiastical sculptor, was commissioned to recreate the decorative capitals, bosses and corbels on the arches. Baker, known for his naturalistic masonry work, asked the ladies of the parish to bring in plants as models, perhaps to help him replace botanical carvings from the original medieval stonework. Continue reading...

First he came for Berlin’s film festival. Now it’s books. Wolfram Weimer seems to be on a mission to curb progressive thinking There is a particular kind of danger that smells like paper and dust. You find it in independent bookshops. Those with uneven wooden floors and handwritten staff recommendations, where someone has shelved Audre Lorde next to Karl Marx and a debut novelist from Neukölln. Places where no algorithm is trying to guess who you are before you have the chance to change your mind. I walk in for a novel and walk out with a theory of the state, a pamphlet on housing struggles, a Palestinian poet I had never heard of. No “for you” page in an online store would have suggested it. The bookseller did. Independent bookshops are dangerous because they interrupt us. They do not optimise our curiosity. They derail it. Is that the reason why Germany’s culture commissioner, Wolfram Weimer, is now consulting the domestic intelligence agency before approving funds to bookshops? Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist Continue reading...

Psychologist Leanne ten Brinke has spent decades studying toxic personality traits. What are the red flags to look out for among workmates, politicians and potential partners? Coming face to face with a probable psychopath was enough to make Dr Leanne ten Brinke rethink her career choices. Early in her 20s, while studying forensic psychology in Halifax, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Ten Brinke was volunteering at a parole office, which would hold weekly group meetings for released sex offenders. “Most of the men showed contrition,” says Ten Brinke. “They really seemed to recognise the damage that they had done.” Except for one. The treatment programme seemed “like a game to him”, she says. One week, in a discussion about the impact their crimes had on victims, this rapist stared at Ten Brinke and, smiling slightly, started to say how much his victim looked like her, “and how I was ‘his type’. Clearly he was trying to scare me, and he did.” It put her off a career working with convicted criminals, but she remained fascinated with “dark personalities” – psychopathy, mainly, but also narcissism, machiavellianism (manipulating and exploiting others) and sadism. From politics to business to the media, it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of people to study. There were selfish, callous, impulsive and manipulative people everywhere, often presenting as gregarious and charming. “It started to occur to me that these traits aren’t just confined to an underworld. These traits appear in all aspects of our lives,” she says. Continue reading...

The Milk and Good Will Hunting director’s new film is about ‘a little guy’ taking violent revenge against the system. He talks about the parallels between Dead Man’s Wire and the homicide case currently dividing Gen Z and boomers In February 1977, a middle-aged Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis took hostage an employee at his local mortgage brokers, who he was convinced had cheated him out of the profits of a piece of real estate. The system was weighted against the little guy, Kiritsis decided, and he was going to be the one to make it pay. He attached one end of a wire to the trigger of a shotgun, the other to the hostage’s head, and demanded $5m and an admission of guilt from the brokers’ boss. The final moments of the standoff, which lasted 63 hours, were broadcast live on TV. It has already been the subject of a 2018 documentary (Dead Man’s Line) and a 2022 thriller podcast (American Hostage) which starred Jon Hamm as the DJ who broadcast an interview with Kiritsis live from the crime scene. Now Gus Van Sant, whose 40-year-plus career incorporates queer landmarks (My Own Private Idaho, Milk), mainstream crowdpleasers (Good Will Hunting) and arthouse award-winners (the Columbine-inspired Elephant), is dramatising the events in Dead Man’s Wire. This wry thriller cuts between the volatile captor (Bill Skarsgård) and the media circus swirling around him, which includes the DJ, played here by Colman Domingo, and a female TV journalist (Myha’la) fed up with being fobbed off. Al Pacino has a cameo as the boss of the mortgage company, sunning himself in Malibu and unconvinced he has anything much to apologise for. Continue reading...

When Trump granted white South Africans refugee status, he was echoing a falsehood about Black people taking revenge for years of brutality. But no one flourishes in a repressive police state There’s a little town in the scrub in South Africa – a full day’s drive from the country’s big cities – that has become perhaps the most scrutinised place on earth, given its size. It is 9 sq km (3.5 sq miles) of suburban-style houses harbouring about 3,000 people, with a main drag, a municipal swimming pool, one gas station and some pecan farms. Nothing of consequence ever really happens there, a fact the townspeople take as a point of pride. And yet over the past three decades, dozens of English-language news outlets have made a pilgrimage to it, often more than once. The New York Times alone has run four dedicated profiles. The essays have kept pace year after year, quoting the same people over and over, even as nothing of note occurred. There’s been no war, no disaster. That changelessness is the point. No people of colour are allowed to live in the town, called Orania. The name is a nod to the river that runs nearby – and to the Orange Free State, the apartheid-era designation for the province in which it lies. Orania’s founders established it in 1991, the year after South Africa’s best-known Black liberation leader (and future president), Nelson Mandela, was freed following 27 years in prison. Continue reading...

Monitors admit they are struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from widening war Israel’s bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure will have major long-term environmental repercussions, experts have warned, as monitors admitted they were struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from the widening war. Even as Iranians filled the streets to mark the appointment of a new supreme leader, the Shahran oil depot north-east of Tehran and the Shahr-e fuel depot to its south continued to burn on Monday, two days after they were bombed by Israeli warplanes. Continue reading...

Scientists hope results analysed after the mice watched video footage will help them understand their perceptions Scientists have reconstructed short movies from the brain activity of mice that watched videos for a project that aspires to lift the veil on how animals perceive the world. The brief movie clips are grainy and pixellated, but provide a glimpse of how mice processed footage that featured people taking part in various sports from gymnastics to horse riding and wrestling. Continue reading...

US president says war is ‘very complete’ and threatens worse strikes if passage of oil via strait of Hormuz is blocked; IRGC says it will not let out ‘one litre of oil’ Oil prices drop sharply after Trump moves to reassure markets Trump says Iran war is ‘very complete, pretty much’ as economic toll rises Continue reading...

Royal commission says response led by Jacinda Ardern was broadly ‘appropriate’, in a wide-ranging report featuring recommendations for future pandemics A royal commission into New Zealand’s Covid response has found it was one of the best in the world but acknowledged the period had left “scars”. The second of two inquiry reports on the pandemic was released on Tuesday and focused on the period between February 2021 to October 2022, when the government changed from an elimination strategy to one of suppression and minimisation of the virus. It also examined vaccine safety and the government’s immunisation programme, lockdowns and tracing and testing technology. Continue reading...

After oil prices surged on Monday the US president sought – and failed - to offer a clear vision for when the largest US intervention in the Middle East in years will end Middle East crisis live At one of the most consequential moments of his two terms in office, wartime president Donald Trump on Monday delivered a vague and contradictory forecast for how long the United States will continue to fight in Iran and what the ultimate goal of the US military campaign there will be. With oil hovering above $100 a barrel for much of Monday and Middle Eastern allies fearing a further tumble into regional conflict, Trump appeared in Doral, Florida with the mission of calming global markets and reassuring skittish allies that he has a clear vision for how to end the largest US intervention in the Middle East since the Iraq war. Continue reading...

As speculation mounts that Kim Jong-un and Trump could meet this month, analysts say Pyongyang will continue to see nuclear weapons as a matter of survival North Korea’s launch last week of a missile from a naval destroyer elicited an uncharacteristically prosaic analysis from the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. The launch was proof, he said, that arming ships with nuclear weapons was “making satisfactory progress”. But the test, and Kim’s mildly upbeat appraisal, were designed to reverberate well beyond the deck of the 5,000-tonne destroyer-class vessel the Choe Hyon – the biggest warship in the North Korean fleet. Continue reading...

Five Iran footballers already granted asylum get offer from Brisbane Roar Advocates working to inform remaining players of their rights Australia’s responsibilities for the welfare of the Iran women’s football team are not over, as advocates expect more players to seek asylum amid a frantic but “delicate” effort to inform the entire squad of their rights. Five of the players, led by captain Zahra Ghanbari, were formally granted protection in Australia by home affairs minister Tony Burke early on Tuesday morning. The group has already been given an offer to train with A-League Women club Brisbane Roar. Continue reading...