Octogenarian leftist, who has defended child marriage, replaces Jose Jeri, who was voted out after a scandal Peru’s congress elected José María Balcázar, an octogenarian leftist lawmaker who has defended child marriage, as the country’s new interim president on Wednesday ahead of general elections in April. Balcazar is Peru’s ninth president since 2016. The surprise election, in which Balcázar beat the favourite, conservative lawmaker María del Carmen Alva, came after lawmakers voted to remove his predecessor José Jerí, on Tuesday, after just four months in office, due to a scandal over secretive meetings with Chinese businessmen. Continue reading...

Law defines animals including horses, donkeys and mules as pets and is backed by opposition parties Italy could soon be set to ban horse meat as part of a law that would define equine animals including horses, donkeys and mules as pets, therefore making it illegal to kill them. The bill has been drafted by Michela Vittoria Brambilla, a politician with Noi Moderati, a member of Giorgia Meloni’s ruling coalition, and is backed by opposition parties. Continue reading...

Racism allegations in Portugal overshadowed another fine result in the Arctic and the holders being pushed by their Ligue 1 rivals Nothing should divert attention away from what happened after Vinícius Júnior’s goal for Real Madrid in their 1-0 victory at Benfica on Tuesday. It would be frivolous to do so. The Brazilian scored one of the finest goals of a career marked by spectacular strikes, but this week’s Champions League action will be remembered for the regrettable flashpoint that followed. Continue reading...

St John’s Smith Square, London The London Handel festival opened with Arcangelo’s agile and elegant performance of the operatic oratorio. Christopher Purves dominated as the king, as David, Hugh Cutting’s voice was liquid honey Oratorios tend to be more sober-minded affairs than operas, but not Handel’s Saul. Originally intended to prop up a faltering Italian opera season, its orchestral novelties included a carillon – a keyboard imitating chiming bells – to celebrate the victorious Israelite army, a harp for the shepherd boy David, three trombones for the famous Dead March and a set of supersized kettledrums borrowed for the occasion from the Tower of London. When it premiered in 1739 it was the longest music theatre work ever written in English. Arcangelo, the London Handel festival’s principal ensemble in residence, seized on the music’s operatic intensity. Its founder Jonathan Cohen is one of the most expressive of Handelians with a keen ear for instrumental colour and a nose for drama. His pacing was urgent, though never excessively so, phrasing and dynamics were elegant and elastic, and the playing was outstanding (as you might expect for an orchestra packed with early music luminaries). An agile chorus of 30 sounded like double that number. Continue reading...

Timely and powerful exhibition in Manchester marks the achievements and exclusions of black players in England Walking around the Score Gallery at the National Football Museum in Manchester, seeing exhibits celebrating everyone from Nikita Parris to Bobby De Cordova-Reid and Pelé, it quickly becomes clear this is a collection like no other. Among the items on display are an impressive number of match-worn shirts and a handmade banner celebrating Marcus Rashford pressuring Boris Johnson into a U-turn on free school meals for vulnerable children. The Black in the Game exhibition aims to showcase not only sporting success but the cultural impact of key football figures from African and Caribbean communities, including administrators, officials and other non-playing staff. It celebrates some modern-day stars such as the Manchester City striker Khadija Shaw, the WSL’s current top scorer, and was curated across three years by a panel of footballers and academics. Continue reading...

Ahead of this Sunday’s awards night, we remember Joanna Lumley’s humourless stint at hosting, acrobats dressed as astronauts and the rage of Russell Crowe Typically, the Baftas have fewer memorable moments than, say, the Oscars. This is partly because the ceremony isn’t broadcast live, so viewers are essentially treated to edited highlights. However, when Russell Crowe won for A Beautiful Mind in 2002, it was his speech that got edited out. That was because he decided to recite the Patrick Kavanagh poem Sanctity, and it went on and on. When Crowe realised what had happened, he tracked down the show’s director at the afterparty, pinned him against a wall, called him a “cunt” and then allegedly kicked three chairs across the room. Continue reading...

Late Wolves leveller means seven dropped points from winning positions in 2026 – and Manchester City are lurking It was left to Bukayo Saka to sum up the mood in Arsenal’s dressing room. “Very flat,” admitted the England forward after watching his side surrender a 2-0 lead at Wolves on Wednesday night. A couple of hours earlier, Saka’s first goal in 15 games in all competitions – his longest drought since breaking into the first team as a fresh-faced teenager in 2018 – looked to have set up an easy victory over the Premier League’s bottom side to restore Arsenal’s seven-point cushion over Manchester City. Made captain for the night by Mikel Arteta in the continued absence of Martin Ødegaard, Saka celebrated his rare headed goal by mimicking signing the lucrative five-year contract worth more than £300,000 a week that he has agreed. But his broad smile had turned to a frown by the time he faced the television cameras in the tunnel at Molineux. Continue reading...

Corn Exchange, Edinburgh With winningly deadpan delivery, Mike Skinner’s concept album about losing £1,000 behind a TV is performed in full with a formidable band On a stage in Edinburgh, thick with dry ice, a bus shelter materialises and a man in black steps out. Mike Skinner, AKA the Streets, has come to take us back in time. Pint in his right hand, mic in his left, he begins: “It was supposed to be so easy …” And just like that it’s 2004 again. Had he been trying to court a mass audience, Skinner wrote in his memoir, “I certainly wouldn’t have made a concept album about someone losing a thousand pounds down the back of the TV”. Yet that is indeed the premise of his 2004 album A Grand Don’t Come for Free, a British classic which, judging by the noisy Corn Exchange crowd, is loved by more than one generation. Continue reading...

Carriers could accept expired passport ‘at their own discretion’, Home Office says, as new rules imminent UK politics live – latest updates British dual nationals may be able to use expired UK passports to prove to airlines they are British when controversial new immigration rules come into force, the Home Office has said. New rules, coming into force on Wednesday, require anyone who is coming into the UK with British dual nationality to present a British passport when boarding a plane, ferry or train or buy a “certificate of entitlement” costing £589 to attach to their foreign passport. Continue reading...

New technology has workers spooked, but experts say it’s creating an opening for a resurgence in worker power In 2026, it’s a scary time to work for a living. Gone are the days of quiet quitting, the Great Resignation, and the highly visible union-organizing battles that began the decade and signaled that perhaps worker power was on the rise again in the US. Instead, much of that momentum is being crowded out of our minds by anxieties: a worsening affordability crisis, geopolitical instability, and the specter of artificial intelligence looming over the workplace. Continue reading...

Byrne delivers a barnstorming performance as a shrink – counselled by an impatient Conan O’Brien – being pushed to the edge by stress of parenting Here is a psychological horror-comedy of postnatal depression and lonely parental stress, like a flip-side to Eraserhead or Rosemary’s Baby; it’s a scary movie with a heroine shot almost solely in looming closeup – but instead of supernatural apparitions, there are simply the banal problems of childcare and no time to deal with them. It’s also a film about therapy and transference when there’s nothing left to transfer. Mary Bronstein is its writer-director, and her film-maker husband Ronald Bronstein serves as producer – as does Josh Safdie, whose influence, through movies such as Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme, can perhaps be detected in the sprint towards a nervous breakdown. Rose Byrne delivers a barnstormer as Linda, a psychotherapist whose husband is away, leaving her to deal with a sick infant daughter whose face is not shown until the very end, indicating perhaps the way in which the little girl’s identity is simply that of a gigantically blank all-pervasive problem to be managed. The girl is intubated via a feeding machine that must be carted around with her, especially to the day-care hospital whose brusque doctor in charge (played by Mary Bronstein in cameo) supervises group therapy sessions that blandly reassure the parents present that all this is not their fault, while curtly reprimanding Linda for her failure to turn up to appointments and to discuss her daughter’s failure to gain the weight necessary for the tube to be removed. Continue reading...

The homeland security department is reportedly seeking information on critical social media accounts. Look no further The New York Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security has sent Google, Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and other media corporations subpoenas for the names on accounts that criticize ICE enforcement. The department wants to identify Americans who oppose what it’s doing. I’ll save them time. Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now Continue reading...

Dubbed ‘the holiest of holies’, produce from this former Soviet republic today boasts a variety and deftness that’s sending sales surging France, Italy and Spain purport to be the best-loved classical wine regions, but if you’re in the market for the real old-world deal, look no further than Georgia, which has more than 8,000 years of winemaking prowess. There’s something about this place on the lush intersection of the silk roads between Europe and Asia that gets under the skin. Perhaps it’s the combination of unpolished authenticity paired with profound generosity (guests are considered a gift from God and fed accordingly), all while being gently rocked in a cradle of civilisation, that make Georgian wine so beguiling. (My first visit in August 2023 – a khachapuri-fuelled reconnaissance for my book, Drinking the World: A Wine Odyssey – lingered in my mind long after my flight touched back down on British tarmac. What I find most refreshing is that the country, and its wine, is completely itself, despite being hemmed in by empires with a proclivity for invasion (Persians, Turks, Mongols et al), as well as the decades spent under USSR rule, which between 1922 and 1991 switched the grape-growing focus to yield over quality. Today, you really feel the Georgian delight at flipping that old Soviet diktat on its head. Victoria Brzezinski is co-author of Drinking the World: A Wine Odyssey, published by Pavilion Books/HarperCollins at £22. To order a copy for £19.80 go to guardianbookshop.com Continue reading...

Film editor who made an important contribution to the work of the directors Terry Gilliam and Richard Attenborough Lesley Walker, who has died aged 80, edited films as lively and varied as Letter to Brezhnev (1985), a salty romantic comedy about two Merseyside women who fall for Soviet sailors; the thriller Mona Lisa (1986), a kind of Soho spin on Taxi Driver; and a pair of escapist, female-led crowd-pleasers revolving around Greek getaways: Shirley Valentine (1989) and the Abba musical Mamma Mia! (2008). “It was unusual to have a woman editing at that level when Lesley began,” said her friend and former assistant editor, Sue Kingsley. “She was well ahead of the game there.” Continue reading...

Abbey theatre, Dublin The sale of the parental home triggers a generational showdown in Una McKevitt’s droll play about money, inheritance and caring for ageing relatives On a brief stopover in Dublin to settle some scores, celebrity interior designer Sandra (Aislín McGuckin) makes a forceful impact. Una McKevitt’s black comedy brings members of the Thornton family together to mark the sale of their parental home. If family is the psychological battleground here, the house itself is alive with “triggering” elements, with designer Liam Doona’s faded decor and crammed furnishings playing a key part in the unfolding conflict. Having inherited the house from her grandmother, Sandra’s estranged daughter Kiera (Caroline Menton) now envisages a new life, free from caring responsibilities and the watchful eye of her grandmother from her full-length portrait, which dominates the room. Upstairs, unseen, Kiera’s uncle Terry is lying in a coma, and about to be moved to a nursing home. A second uncle, Daragh, arrives: “a character actor, in demand”, played with downbeat charm by Garrett Lombard, as Kiera ushers Rio (Jack Weise) out of the house, following a quick hook-up that is so contrived it clearly signals trouble. Continue reading...

Five changes to the XV that stunned England Wales call up Bath-born Gabriel Hamer-Webb Blair Kinghorn and Duhan van der Merwe have been restored to Scotland’s starting XV for Saturday’s Six Nations meeting with Wales in Cardiff. The British & Irish Lions duo were omitted from the 23 for the first two matches against Italy and England amid question marks about their form. Toulouse back Kinghorn will start at full-back in place of Tom Jordan, who drops to the bench, while Van der Merwe, Scotland’s record try-scorer, returns at wing to take over from Jamie Dobie, who is out due to injury. Continue reading...

As pancake day and Orthodox Maslenitsa – or cheesefare week – overlap, I’m leaning into halloumi scones, oozy taleggio galettes, and sweet and savoury crepes • Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast In terms of religious food festivals, this week is kind of a double whammy. First up was pancake day, which is always a whole-day affair in our kitchen, with both sweet and savoury stations, crepe pans and all the toppings (you can always rely on Felicity Cloake for a foolproof recipe). And, because of the way the calendars fall this year, we are also celebrating Orthodox Maslenitsa, or cheesefare, week at the same time. OK, so the sentiment is pretty much the same (it’s the week before the start of Lent, when people ease into their strict fasting period), but these two celebrations can often be weeks apart (blame the battle of the Gregorian and Julian calendars). For those of Orthodox faith, last week was all about eating meat, and this week is all about dairy. Essentially, you are trying to consume all the animal products and get them out of the house in preparation for the 40-plus-day fast. And, whether or not you are religious, in my book any tradition that means you get to eat loads of cheese is a win. Continue reading...

Faaborgs rail against oppressive industrial agricultural system with unexpected evolution into indy artisan food firm As a sixth-generation Iowa farmer, Tanner Faaborg is all too aware that agricultural traditions are hard to shake. So when he set in motion plans to change his family’s farm from a livestock operation housing more than 8,000 pigs each year to one that grows lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms, he knew some of his peers might laugh at him. He just did not necessarily expect his brother to be chief among them. “My older brother has worked with pigs his entire adult life, managing about 70,000 of them across five counties,” says Tanner. “But we got to a point where he went from laughing at me to saying: well, I guess maybe I’ll quit my job and help you out.” Continue reading...

Aerospace firm proposes two separate warplanes amid dispute over who leads €100bn project Airbus has suggested splitting Europe’s faltering future fighter jet programme into two separate warplanes, amid a dispute between manufacturers over who leads the €100bn (£87bn) project. The company’s defence arm – which represents Germany and Spain – and the French partner, Dassault Aviation, are locked in a battle over the jet part of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a wide-ranging project that will also include autonomous drones and a futuristic “combat communications cloud”. Continue reading...

British and French activists write to Air France, AlbaStar, Titan and Corendon airlines over ‘shameful involvement’ Campaigners have urged airlines deporting asylum seekers to France as part of the UK’s controversial “one in, one out” scheme to stop facilitating the “cruel and forced deportations”. Letters have been sent by 28 refugee and human rights NGOs on both sides of the Channel to four airlines believed to be involved with deportation flights – Air France, Titan airways, AlbaStar airlines and Corendon airlines – urging them to halt what signatories call “shameful involvement” with the flights. Continue reading...

A bill banning the sale and use of plastic and metallic glitter has yet to go through in Brazil as the capital’s sandy shores bear cost of carnival’s shine Whether it is embellishing elaborate costumes, delicately applied as eye makeup, or smeared across bare skin, glitter is everywhere at Rio de Janeiro’s carnival in Brazil. The world’s largest party, which ended on Wednesday, leaves a trail of sparkles in its wake. At one bloco last weekend, a huge sound truck and dancers in leopard print led thousands of revellers down the promenade at Flamengo beach. Among them was Bruno Fernandes, who had jazzed up an otherwise minimalist outfit of navy swimming briefs by smearing silver glitter over his body. Continue reading...

(Dead Oceans) Whether retreating from fame or heartbreak, the US musician writes gorgeous songs about the appeal of disconnection, flecked with horror and humour Last month, Mitski released Where’s My Phone?, the first single from her eighth album Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. Its raging alt-rock is a more robust take on the lo-fi fuzz of her third album Bury Me at Makeout Creek, while UK listeners might detect a certain Britpoppy swing about its rhythm, and it ends with a guitar solo so jarringly distorted it sounds as if something is wrong with the stream. It was accompanied by a video that featured the singer as a headscarf-sporting rural mother, trying to protect her family from the attentions of the outside world with increasing violence: a milkman gets attacked, her daughter’s potential suitor is beaten bloody. It’s both funny and unsettling; there are references to Rapunzel, Grey Gardens, Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle – a litany of the wilfully isolated. The visuals set the tone for the rest of Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, an album on which you’re never far from its author expressing a longing to disappear; to be, as she puts it on Instead of Here, “where nobody can reach”. On opener In a Lake, she extols moving to the city from a small town, not in search of bright lights and excitement, but obscurity, a means of obliterating your own history: “Some days you just go the long way to stay off memory lane.” On I’ll Change for You, she hymns bars – “such magic places” – precisely because of their anonymity: “You can be with other people without having anyone at all.” And on Rules, she’ll “get a new haircut … be somebody else”. All this is set to beautifully crafted music that splits the difference between alt-rock, country-infused acoustic lamentation and grander ambition: the brilliance of Rules lies in the disparity between the hopelessness of its lyric and the thickly orchestrated, perky, early 70s easy listening backing. Continue reading...

Joe McCann of the Melksham News was tipped off by a contact about the image and raised issue at council meeting A local newspaper journalist has said he was left “shocked” after a picture of his face was printed out and attached to punchbag at a town hall. Joe McCann, who has worked for the Melksham News for 10 years, was tipped off by a contact that a print-out of his face had been attached to a freestanding punchbag inside the building. Continue reading...

As Trump slashes science funding, young researchers flee abroad. Without solid innovation, the US could cease to have the largest biomedical ecosystem in the world In April 2025, less than three months after Donald Trump returned to the White House, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out its latest public health alert on so-called “superbugs”, strains of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. These drug-resistant germs, the CDC warned, are responsible for more than 3m infections in the US each year, claiming the lives of up to 48,000 Americans. Continue reading...

First cohort to be impacted by change – part of Send system overhaul – are currently in key stage 1, it is understood Children with a legal right to special needs support will face a review when they move to secondary school, with the first cohort to be impacted currently in key stage 1, the Guardian understands. A total overhaul of the special educational needs and disabilities (Send) system is due to be unveiled on Monday in a landmark schools white paper that could face major opposition from Labour MPs. Continue reading...