Russian attack on gas facility in Poltava region kills three energy firm employees and two emergency service workers Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused the Kremlin of “utter cynicism” for killing five people in overnight strikes at the same time as seeking a truce so it can stage a military parade in Moscow. Three employees of the state energy firm Naftogaz were killed in an initial attack on a gas facility in Ukraine’s central Poltava region, and two emergency service workers died at the scene in a follow-on bombing. Thirty-seven people were injured in the strikes. Continue reading...

Some chats can get up to 600 voice notes a day and reach the 1,024-member limit in less than 24 hours The WhatsApp groups have one simple rule: typing and speaking are forbidden, on pain of immediate removal. Only voice notes with whistling are allowed, although the choice of content is up to the sender: it can be an imitation of a bird or a tune such as the theme from The Pink Panther or the introduction to Scorpions’ Wind of Change. Continue reading...

Thousands of Afghans who assisted US forces are stuck in limbo in Qatar. Instead of promised resettlement in America, they face an uncertain future in another war-torn country Hasina Nasimi* had been counting down to 27 January 2025, the day she was booked on a flight with her husband and four children, to Denver, Colorado. Her brother, four sisters and mother were already there, rebuilding their lives after fleeing Afghanistan. Nasimi’s father and brother were killed by the Taliban; her brother shot in 2018 because the family’s eldest son Mohammad had worked as a translator for American forces during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Since then, the family had received threats and lived cautiously. When the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, they knew they had to leave. Continue reading...

Alzheimer’s Research UK says patients at risk of being left behind as lack of formal or accurate diagnoses closes door to trials People with Alzheimer’s disease are missing out on experimental treatments because they are not diagnosed early or accurately enough to be enrolled in clinical trials, a UK charity has said. Trials of Alzheimer’s drugs reached a record high this year, according to data published on Tuesday, but Alzheimer’s Research UK said too few UK patients were taking part because their diagnoses were delayed or were not specific enough. Continue reading...

Fahad Ansari says it was ‘chilling’ that police ‘equated him with his client’ after he was stopped on return from family holiday in Ireland A lawyer who filed Hamas’s challenge to proscription in the UK was recorded by police as being a member of the banned group, “equating him with his client”. On a risk assessment form, a detective inspector, who authorised the detention of Fahad Ansari under the Terrorism Act on his return from a family holiday in Ireland, wrote “Hamas” in the space reserved for “membership of a known group”. Continue reading...

Appeal launched to buy Nottinghamshire cottage, where tree was planted in 19th century, and turn it into heritage centre Campaigners have launched an appeal to try to save for the nation the mother tree of perhaps the most popular cooking apple in the world. The original bramley apple tree, which grows in the garden of a cottage in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, is for sale, with the cottage put on the market by its owners, Nottingham Trent University. Continue reading...

Trump-endorsed candidate facing a long-shot challenge from car designer and YouTube provocateur Casey Putsch Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is hoping to lock in his position as candidate in the race to become Ohio governor. Donald Trump has threatened that Iran will be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacks US vessels trying to reopen a route through the strait of Hormuz. The US launched an operation to help hundreds of ships trapped with their crews in the Gulf, dragging the region back to the brink of full-scale war. While the US military claimed to have destroyed six Iranian small boats and intercepted both Iranian cruise missiles and drones, this was denied by Iran. More here. The Trump administration moved to block a lawsuit Minnesota officials filed almost six years ago alleging oil companies and a petroleum trade group deceived state residents about climate change. The justice department, the administration’s law enforcement arm, filed an action in federal court in Minneapolis arguing that the federal government has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, not states, and that Minnesota officials are trying to improperly impose their policy preferences on the rest of the country. The US supreme court went out of its way to help Louisiana Republicans redraw their congressional maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The procedural move comes less than a week after the court’s landmark decision striking down Louisiana’s congressional map and gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Trump administration is continuing to pressure the United Nations and the international aid sector more broadly to adopt trade-focused policies to benefit US firms – or face the threat of further budget cuts. Donald Trump’s second term has already seen USAID suffer mass layoffs and have its remaining operations folded into the state department, with a ripple effect across the globe that has many experts warning will cost thousands of lives as vital programs are cut. More here. The Trump administration’s attack on the 87-year-old food aid program that supports tens of millions of low-income Americans escalated last week as the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, claimed that 14,000 Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (Snap) recipients included owners of luxury vehicles such as Ferraris, Bentleys and Teslas. More here. Continue reading...

BEV sales jumped nearly 60% in April, taking total electric car registrations to more than 2m, says SMMT Business live – latest updates A recent jump in electric car sales in the UK is likely to be “tempered” by worries over rising inflation and energy prices caused by the Iran war, a leading industry body has warned. New car sales in the UK rose by 24% year on year to 149,247 in April, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). Continue reading...

Zohran Mamdani’s suggestion King Charles should return diamond to India has reopened old wounds It may not be the biggest or most precious jewel ensconced in the Tower of London, but few diamonds have a legacy to rival that of the Koh-i-noor. Likely to have originated in southern India, the diamond’s history is that of a great disruptor across the subcontinent, exchanging hands over centuries through acts of war, violence and assassination from Mughal emperors, Persian invaders, Sikh Kings and eventually snatched by the British colonial rulers of India. Continue reading...

The improved form of McLaren and Red Bull and in Florida suggests the 2026 title race is likely to run and run There is a long old way to go but after Formula One emerged from its enforced early season break with an entertaining romp around the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, it indicated that there may yet be a decent tale to be told this season. One where Mercedes do not have it all their own way. Regulation changes dominated the buildup – of which more later because honestly paragraph two is too early to subject readers to the increasingly soul-destroying phrase “energy management” – but what really mattered in Miami was the sporting imperative of upgrades making a competitive difference. Continue reading...

London-headquartered bank’s shares slide as it sets aside an extra $300m to cover effects of Middle East conflict Business live – latest updates HSBC has taken a $1.3bn (£961m) hit to profits, fuelled by the fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran and fraud in the troubled private credit sector. The London-headquartered bank said profits fell 4% in the first three months of the year, dropping $100m to $9.4bn, compared with the same period in 2025. Revenue increased 6% to $18.6bn. Continue reading...

Tahar Rahim and Izuka Hoyle had only just met when the crew snapped cuffs on their wrists – and made them do roly-polys. The stars of Sky drama Prisoner talk bravery, breast milk and Denzel Washington Few devices in film and television are as enduring as the “odd couple handcuffed together”. Think Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, or Bob Hoskins sawing cuffs off a cartoon Roger Rabbit. It has been parodied and recycled – and yet, as Sky’s new show Prisoner makes clear, the idea of being stuck with a stranger still packs a punch. In Prisoner, the odd couple are Amber Todd, a prisoner transport officer played by rising star Izuka Hoyle (Boiling Point, Big Boys) in her first leading role, and Tibor Stone, a contract killer played by French star Tahar Rahim (The Serpent, The Mauritanian). It is Todd’s job to get Tibor to his high-profile court hearing at the Old Bailey. But when their convoy is ambushed, they’re forced to flee a relentless crime syndicate. The result is a propulsive six-parter with plenty of twists, turns and handcuffed fight scenes. Continue reading...

Our cartoonist on a weekend of genuine excitement at the top and bottom of the English top-flight table Buy a cartoon here | His favourites from 2025 And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now Continue reading...

I thought the ceremony, at my mother’s cottage, would pass without a hitch. I don’t think she’d have been impressed by what followed … If you’re looking for sound, practical advice on what happens when an elderly parent dies – the so-called “sadmin” – then you shouldn’t come to me because all the bits that went OK, my sister did, and all the bits that went unaccountably awry were when I got involved. If, however, you are looking for advice on the ceremony of ash-scattering, then I have loads, all of it learned five to 10 minutes after it would have been good to know. We’d actually planned this pretty carefully, insofar as we knew where we wanted to go – a cottage our mum rented for years, which is still empty. When my mum died, a friend gave me a lovely hanky, so I took that, in case I got upset. It was a beautiful day; I had my cherished loved ones, a bottle of water and my vape. What could possibly go wrong? Continue reading...

England suffered four defeats in dismal Six Nations Bill Sweeney says improvement not ‘one simple answer’ Steve Borthwick and his coaching staff are to remain in charge of England’s men’s team despite the squad’s worst Five or Six Nations for 50 years. The Rugby Football Union has opted to back Borthwick and his lieutenants through to next year’s Rugby World Cup in Australia having completed what it described as “a detailed and robust review” of England’s latest campaign. Despite having lost four Five or Six Nations games in the same season for the first time since 1976, the RFU has chosen to keep faith with the Borthwick regime in the belief that things can only get better. The union has decided that sacking the head coach is not the optimal solution, having previously dispensed with Eddie Jones’s services nine months prior to the 2023 World Cup. Continue reading...

Orban Wallace’s documentary avoids big clashes between landowners and campaigners in favour of wide-ranging exploration Orban Wallace’s film about the right-to-roam movement shows us a campaigning group with a simple, reasonable aim: to give walkers in England and Wales the same rights that people have in Scotland, courtesy of the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, brought into being by the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003. There, walkers have the right to temporary, non-motorised access – which is to say walking, cycling and camping, carried out responsibly – to most land, public or private. These rights have now existed for some time without the apocalyptic end to the countryside as we know it. Whether some in the right-to-roam movement in England want something more than that, or are prepared to protest more vehemently than simply organising peaceful mass trespass events, is another question. The film interviews landowners such as Francis Fulford, who has long been the media’s favourite outspoken reactionary toff, a sort of posh version of Viz Comic’s Farmer Palmer, snarling “Get off my land”. There are other, more thoughtful landowners, including Hugh Inge-Innes-Lillingston, who cheerfully admits how silly his name is, and is open to developing new ideas about managed access. As far as profiteering goes, I found myself thinking of a remark made by Tara Palmer-Tomkinson: “Land doesn’t really bring in a lot of money until they build a motorway through it.” Continue reading...

The incendiary Japanese group who emerged out of late-60s unrest were suspicious of studios so their legacy was long left to bootleg obsessives. But unheard recordings are revealing their lesser-known gifts for melody By 1969 student protests were raging across Japan, as anti-university, anti-war and anti-government movements mingled in strikes and classroom blockades. “Students were getting really violent,” Makoto Kubota recalls of Kyoto’s Doshisha University, leaving his studies in shambles. But when his quiet, magnetic fellow student Takashi Mizutani invited Kubota to the first gig by his band les Rallizes Dénudés, their deafening psych-rock became his calling. “I’d never experienced that amount of volume. My body ached.” Les Rallizes Dénudés, which Kubota soon joined, have become the stuff of rock mythology: a mysterious, ever-shifting group whose early use of extreme distortion has won fans ranging from Osees’ John Dwyer to Lady Gaga. As its sole constant member since founding it in 1967, vocalist-guitarist Mizutani’s secretive nature and aversion to studio recordings have meant their story is still being pieced together, and their music chiefly circulated as live bootlegs. Discovering these had generated a cult international fanbase long after the band’s final gig in 1996, and Mizutani and Kubota reconnected in 2019 with plans to reunite – cut short by Mizutani’s death later that year. In his memory, Kubota is restoring and releasing their music, including an extraordinary lost album. Continue reading...

Minor damage to gates is believed to have been caused by fire that CCTV shows was started deliberately, Met says Counter-terrorism officers are investigating a suspected arson attack at a former synagogue in east London, the Metropolitan police have said. The Jewish security charity Shomrim said fire crews were called out to the building in Nelson Street, Whitechapel, in the early hours of Tuesday. Continue reading...

Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary wants to bring the epic poem to the big screen using the power of artificial intelligence. It can’t be any good The thing about unfilmable works of literature is that most of them eventually turn out to be quite filmable after all. The Lord of the Rings was a bit of a mess when shot in rotoscope on a minuscule budget by the guy who filmed Fritz the Cat; it won Oscars when handed to Peter Jackson, given the GDP of a small nation and a visual effects department the size of Gondor. The 1984 version of Dune was a disappointment, despite the presence of David Lynch in the director’s chair, largely because all that gleaming, tawdry galactic opulence couldn’t make up for the comprehensively bad acting, clotted exposition and obsession with freaky heart plugs. And yet the 2021 adaptation from Denis Villeneuve ended up being a tour de force of masterly restraint and monolithic scale. Milton’s Paradise Lost? The 17th-century epic poem has always felt like an outlier, a work of literature too religiously inspired to be filmed purely as a work of fantasy, yet too riotously bonkers to be treated with puritanical reverence. It contains more drama than the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in every line of thunderous God-baiting iambic pentameter. And now Roger Avary, co-writer of Pulp Fiction and director of Killing Zoe and The Rules of Attraction, wants to bring it to the big screen using the power of AI. Continue reading...

Trailer offers glimpses of Matt Damon as mythological hero Odysseus, Tom Holland as his son Telemachus and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Penelope The first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey has been released. Starring Matt Damon as mythological hero Odysseus, the epic film retells the story of Odysseus’ 10-year voyage back to his homeland of Ithaca after the Greek victory at the siege of Troy. Continue reading...

Game is in danger of losing its integrity by howling about referees’ decisions and unedifying actions on the field under the notional banner of player welfare It felt like a proper occasion in Bordeaux on Sunday. The trams were so jammed en route to the ground that the kick-off had to be delayed to allow spectators extra time to find their seats. For those who dismiss the notion of club rugby rivaling football for vibrant mass interest here was a compelling counterpoint: a heaving 42,000-capacity stadium, off-the-scale passion, top-class sport in every respect. Later on, after the game was done, there was another revealing snapshot at the airport. As Bath’s beaten players headed for their flight home they were warmly applauded down to the gate by their travelling supporters. A corner of a foreign departure lounge was briefly akin to north-east Somerset. Despite the outcome, the fans instinctively wanted to show how much they have enjoyed their team’s efforts this season. Continue reading...

As a cheap, easy solution for when you’re away from home for a few days, it quietly does its job The problem Going away for a week and leaving your plants to fend for themselves is a specific kind of anxiety. You water thoroughly before you leave, move them out of direct sunlight, group them together and then spend your holiday picturing a wilted peace lily. The hack One hack suggests wrapping damp towels around the base and sides of your pots, creating a slow-release moisture jacket that keeps the root zone cooler and hydrated, while also acting as an insulating layer that slows evaporation from the soil surface. Unlike wicking systems that actively draw water in, this is purely about retention – holding on to the moisture that’s already there. Continue reading...

The Renters’ Right Act has finally given tenants in England more security over their housing, but landlords still hold the upper hand when setting rents You never welcome an email from your landlord, or in my case, my landlord’s agent. I happened to be in an airport waiting for a flight when something landed in my inbox that made my stomach drop. Two words popped out in the subject line: “Section 21”. Miles from home, staring at my phone, I felt useless and despondent at being served a no-fault eviction notice days before the new Renters’ Right Act made them illegal at the start of May. Once a feature of England’s rental market, section 21s had allowed landlords to force tenants out of their homes with only a minimum of two months’ notice. Presumably not wanting the hassle of having to use a section 8 notice – citing one or more legal grounds to end a tenancy – my landlord evicted me at the 11th hour. George Francis Lee is a recipient of the 2025/26 Scott Trust Bursary Continue reading...

WhatsApp group has bought tens of thousands of meals for people via Facebook page Carl used to own pubs – several of them – and a string of hotels. Then two years ago, rising costs forced him into bankruptcy. Now he sleeps on the beach in summer, and in winter sits in an all-night McDonald’s nursing a single cup of coffee. Carl’s daughters are in a different part of the country with his ex-wife. To maintain the illusion that he lives a normal life, Carl is careful only to video-call them from the local Wetherspoon’s with a meal and a drink carefully positioned in shot. That way, he reasons, he looks like a man with somewhere to be. Continue reading...

An exodus of workers will be damaging – and electoral change might help Britain escape instability and low growth While all eyes are on the Middle East and the risk of a global recession, a possible scenario with significant downside risk for the UK economy after the next general election is building: the impact of anti-immigration policies. We do not know enough about the actual policy changes a Reform UK-led government would impose, but if we get forced repatriation (including of some who were born in Britain) combined with a climate of fear, the economic disruption could be highly significant. Continue reading...