Hoda and Yasmin help US Muslims navigate the path to true love. Plus: a tender film about a throuple having a baby. Here’s what to watch this evening 10pm, BBC Three “Wait, did my mom send you?” Muslim singletons across the US are set up by lively match-making duo Hoda and Yasmin in this fun, eye-opening dating show that first aired over there last year. First up in the opening double-bill is 30-year-old Mariam in Houston, who has been engaged three times but won’t settle until she finds the perfect potential husband – which includes him being an 80s music lover. Hollie Richardson Continue reading...

Government told to focus on transition to mix of wind, solar, tidal and nuclear energy More drilling in the North Sea would do nothing to improve the UK’s energy security, former military leaders have said, as a new analysis finds no fossil fuel importer is safe from chokepoints in the global supply chain. The government should focus on a rapid transition to a mix of wind, solar, tidal and nuclear energy to ensure the UK’s future security, the former military leaders told the Guardian, as well as a programme of energy efficiency and a “major renewal” of the electricity grid. Continue reading...

This Easter feast is steeped in the flavours and traditions of the Middle East Whenever I’m asked about my favourite dish to serve to friends and family, in most cases I’d say slow-cooked lamb at the centre of the table. After a long, slow cook, the meat becomes tender and rich, and the spices melt into every bite. Served with flatbreads, tahini, fresh herbs and sharp pickles, it invites everyone to build their own perfect mouthful. Across the Middle East and Mediterranean, lamb symbolises generosity and celebration, especially at Easter, when roasting it remains an adored tradition. Continue reading...

Feminists and rights defenders say online threats have rapidly escalated, forcing some to leave the country for their safety Yordanos Bezabih, an Ethiopian women’s rights activist, had faced online threats for years: of acid attacks, gang-rape and death. She tried her best to ignore the abuse as she continued her advocacy work. But in 2025, the threats became more menacing. In April, an anonymous Telegram group with 6,000 subscribers organised an effort to track down her location. They shared deepfakes of her – nude images and videos. The following month, a stranger started to film her in the streets, calling her by her social media handle. Continue reading...

England and Wales pioneered the criminalisation of coercive control, but it doesn’t apply outside of intimate or family relationships. Why stop there? When Rachael Reign finally left her relationship and called the police, she came with a litany of allegations. She felt parts of her life had been controlled, she told the call handler. She said she had been given instructions about what to wear, which included a ban on certain shades of nail varnish. She felt pressured to give up a portion of her income. She had been told that bad things would happen if she left. Continue reading...

‘Precious ocean life is being pushed to the brink,’ say campaigners, arguing that overfished marine areas are ‘protected only on paper’ Almost 40% of England’s seas are designated as marine protected areas. Their purpose, the government says, is “to protect and recover rare threatened and important marine ecosystems … from damage caused by human activities”. And yet in the four years to 2024, trawlers using vast nets, including those that scour the seabed, caught more than 1.3m tonnes of fish within them, according to official figures that campaigners say show they are “little more than lines on a map”. Continue reading...

Practice of using apartments to store relatives’ ashes has risen as rapid urbanisation and aging population increases competition for cemetery plots China is introducing a law to stop people storing the ashes of their dead relatives in empty high-rise flats rather than paying steep costs for increasingly scarce cemetery plots. China’s new funeral management legislation will prohibit the use of “residential housing specifically for the purpose of storing cremated remains” and the burial of corpses or construction of tombs in “areas other than public cemeteries”. Continue reading...

New York-based Gao Zhen was detained in 2024 during a family visit to China and then tried for ‘defaming national heroes’ The Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen, known for making satirical sculptures of China’s former leader Mao Zedong, has been tried over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs”, his wife and a rights group have said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit to China from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, his wife, Zhao Yaliang, and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese human rights defenders group, said. Continue reading...

If all goes to plan, Artemis II, Nasa’s mission to return humans to the moon, will launch this week. The mission will mark the farthest that humans have travelled from Earth, and the first return to the moon in more than 50 years. It will also pave the way for landing on the moon again as soon as 2028. But given the Apollo missions have already achieved that feat, does going back to the moon still matter today? To find out, Madeleine Finlay hears from the Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample, the Atlantic journalist Ross Andersen, and Jan Wörner, a former director general of the European Space Agency Clips: ABC, Nasa Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod Continue reading...

In Hungary, the Iran war is exposing tensions. Voters may decide on 12 April that the prime minister’s geopolitical contortions are a liability On 3 March, Viktor Orbán held a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin. According to official Hungarian reporting, the discussion focused on “energy issues” and other routine matters. What followed was anything but routine. Within days, the Hungarian foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, had flown to Moscow, and returned with two freed prisoners of war, dual citizens of Ukraine and Hungary. Hungary is not part of the military conflict in Ukraine, but the message was unmistakable. With his PoW diplomacy, Putin was not only signalling goodwill towards Hungary, he was effectively endorsing Orbán’s re-election on 12 April. Péter Krekó is a political scientist, behavioural scientist, economist and director of the independent thinktank the Political Capital Institute in Budapest Continue reading...

Madeleine Sumption says politicians make big claims about things they only partially control to appeal to voters Keir Starmer’s pledge to “smash the gangs” profiting from small boat crossings has followed a pattern set by Conservative-led governments of employing “bullish rhetoric” with little evidence that it can be delivered, an expert has claimed. Madeleine Sumption, the director of the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, says the prime minister has repeated the mistakes of Rishi Sunak and David Cameron by making “bold claims with great certainty about things governments only partially control” . Continue reading...

He went from a Glasgow council estate to Hollywood fame. Now, in his directorial debut, the X-Men star is challenging stereotypes about his homeland via the remarkable tale of a real-life hip-hop hoax It’s the final night of the Glasgow film festival and James McAvoy is a wee bit out of breath. His directorial debut, California Schemin’, is playing across all three screens at the Glasgow Film Theatre in the city centre, taking the festival’s prestige closing slot. Usually, a big name would say a few words of introduction in the main cinema then bask in the glory. Not McAvoy. Getting in among it still comes naturally 25 years after he left this city to pursue a career that has blazed from his award-winning Cyrano de Bergerac in the West End of London to playing Professor X, the founder of the X-Men, in the blockbuster Hollywood franchise. Continue reading...

It costs the UK economy £700m a year, and criminal gangs are operating with near impunity. Every time a lorry gets robbed, raided or hijacked, it’s Mike Dawber who investigates In August 2021, Mike Dawber, the UK’s leading detective in cargo crime, got a call from officers in Bradford CID. They were planning to search two warehouses that contained, in their words, an awful lot of suspicious goods. This was a job that required Dawber’s expert eye. He drove an hour from his home, in the unmarked police car that doubles as his office, and arrived to discover the description barely did it justice. As soon as he walked in to the first warehouse, he noticed 17 pallets of golfing equipment. They had, he knew, been stolen three weeks before from a truck at Lymm motorway services, just outside Manchester. He reckoned they were worth about £1m. As Dawber continued his survey, he came across 18 pallets of Asics trainers, stolen three years before, at Warwick services. Then 14 pallets of lawnmowers: five years before, from a truck on the A1 at Colsterworth. He came across IT equipment, sportswear, high-end fashion, electrical goods, toasters, microwaves, beauty products. One pallet was simply labelled “Eyelash technology”. Dawber didn’t know what eyelash technology was, exactly, but he later learned that a pallet of it was worth more than £500,000. Continue reading...

Nationwide reforms aim to standardise collections and expand food waste recycling to tackle stagnating rates Recycling rules across England have long been inconsistent – but that will change from Tuesday when the government’s Simpler Recycling legislation comes into effect. Continue reading...

A torn page bearing Dylan’s lyrics for the 1967 song I’m Not There is set to go under the hammer in April when it could fetch £40,000 Almost 60 years after it was first typed out by Bob Dylan, a torn page of lined paper bearing a draft for the lyrics of I’m Not There has been discovered, tucked inside an Allen Ginsberg paperback. During the summer of 1967 in New York, just outside Woodstock, Bob Dylan wrote and recorded more than 100 songs with his then-backing group The Band, including I’m Not There. A small collection of these tapes would be released eight years later by Columbia Records, while more songs, including I’m Not There, would only be released over the following decades. Continue reading...

The Philippines is uniquely exposed to the surging oil price caused by the war in the Middle East. The government is facing protests and widespread anger Jayson Naga is a tricycle taxi driver on the streets of Manila. In a normal day he brings home P500 (US$8) to feed his four children. But these days he is struggling. He requires four litres of gasoline a day to ferry his passengers around the city and the 60% surge in fuel prices has wiped out nearly a third of his take home pay. “If gas prices go up any further, there will be nothing left for us,” he told the Guardian. His family’s only luxury – driving to air-conditioned malls on weekends to escape the heat – was the first to go. Continue reading...

President says he is open to scaling back strikes on oil and wider energy industry if Moscow reciprocates. What we know on day 1,496 Continue reading...

If approved, move is latest in series of buildings, warships, institutions, programs and currency named after president He has buildings, institutions, government programs, warships, currency, and now Donald Trump is getting an airport that bears his name even as he looks forward to a towering Trump presidential library in Miami. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, signed a bill on Monday saying the Palm Beach international airport was being renamed to the President Donald J Trump international airport. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Environmental impact assessments are ‘incomplete’, say leaders, and private beach club could harm fragile ecosystems Indigenous community leaders in Vanuatu have raised concerns over plans by the cruise operator Royal Caribbean to build a private beach club on the island of Lelepa, arguing environmental impact assessments by the company are “incomplete” and “misleading”. The community leaders outlined the issues in a letter sent to Royal Caribbean on 26 February, which has been seen by the Guardian. The leaders also said the development could harm fragile ecosystems and a nearby Unesco world heritage site. Continue reading...

Clowns in Bolivia have been upset by a new school mandate that cuts off the events from which they earn a living Dozens of clowns marched through the streets of Bolivia’s capital on Monday to protest against a government decree that limits extracurricular activities in schools, threatening their livelihoods. Wearing full face paint and their signature red noses, the clowns gathered in front of the ministry of education in La Paz to oppose a decree published in February. The new mandate says schools must comply with 200 days of lessons each year – in effect banning schools from hosting the special events where the entertainers are frequently employed. Continue reading...

The great naturalist, who is about to turn 100, is still surprised by wildlife in his new series about British gardens. But not every pet owner will be happy with his top tips Whenever David Attenborough speaks, the world listens – so his latest BBC programme, which heralds the broadcaster’s 100th birthday, is bound to attract attention. Secret Garden, which features five different UK gardens, might not be what people normally expect from Attenborough, says the show’s series producer, Bill Markham, as “there’s no lions and tigers”. Continue reading...

As ties with Washington sour, China is reviving a cold war strategy to defend against a US attack Dotted across the mountainous roads of Sichuan and just a few hours’ drive from some of China’s most bustling cities, the crumbling ruins of an abandoned military experiment are eerily quiet. Top secret factories that once housed thousands of workers are now overgrown with vegetation; nearby villages, empty of young people who were once shipped in from across the country to build China’s future, are plastered with advertisements for hearing aids and, in once case, a bundle deal on coffins. Millions of workers were deployed to these remote mountain locations as part of a huge defence program that stayed secret for over a decade. Continue reading...

Ayman Ghazali, naturalized US citizen from Lebanon, often consumed content linked to Lebanese group online The assailant who attacked a synagogue in Michigan earlier this month was inspired by Hezbollah, the FBI said on Monday. Jennifer Runyan, head of the FBI’s Detroit field office, announced during a press conference that Ayman Ghazali, 41, had frequently consumed Hezbollah-related content online before the attack. In a video recorded before he drove his truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township – a north-western suburb of Detroit – on 12 March, Ghazali said he wanted to “kill as many of them as I possibly can”. Continue reading...

Cable signed by Marco Rubio and seen by Guardian suggests staff work with Pentagon psychological operations unit The United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool to help do it. The cable, signed by secretary of state Marco Rubio on Monday and obtained by the Guardian, also suggests embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s psychological operations unit to address the problem of rampant disinformation. It lays out a sweeping set of instructions for how embassy staff should push back against what it describes as coordinated foreign efforts to undermine American interests abroad. Continue reading...

Two AH-64 Apache helicopters on training run maneuvered near hillside home of Trump-supporting musician The army has launched an administrative review after two AH-64 Apache helicopters on a training run hovered near the hillside home of Kid Rock as the outspoken supporter of Donald Trump saluted their crews. Kid Rock posted two videos on social media on Saturday. Each shows a helicopter hovering alongside his swimming pool while the entertainer claps, salutes and raises his fist in the air. The Nashville skyline can be seen in the background. Continue reading...