As trust in Russia and China’s state broadcasters grows, director general warns of the dangers of cutting back the service The BBC World Service will run out of funding in just seven weeks with no future deal with the government currently in place, the corporation’s director general, Tim Davie, has warned. In a last-minute pitch to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Davie said the uncertainty came as news organisations were cutting their international reporting and disinformation was “flooding the digital sphere at an incredible speed”. Continue reading...

OVO Hydro, Glasgow Florence Welch is backed by the folk-horror dramatics of a petticoat-clad choir – but quite capable of transfixing the crowd with her billowing voice alone ‘I’ve only sung this once before and it makes me shake,” Florence Welch admits, crouching alone at the far end of a long, narrow thrust stage. Watching her command this arena during the first of two sold-out shows in Glasgow in honour of Florence + the Machine’s sixth album Everybody Scream, it’s hard to imagine Welch fearing anything. Just seconds ago, she was racing barefoot, flouncy skirts gathered in one hand, ripping through Spectrum (the band’s first UK No 1, back in 2012) and its searing demand: “Say my name!” But the new song she is steeling herself to sing presses on a bruise. With ratcheting intensity, You Can Have It All grieves an ectopic pregnancy which almost killed her, as well as a music industry that punishes its stars for motherhood. Over grungy electric guitar, her tempestuous voice billows like sails in high wind: “Am I a woman now?” It leaves the arena in stunned silence. She gives a wry curtsey. Continue reading...

The documentary’s second week slump equates to around six tickets per cinema Compared to its barnstorming US opening 10 days ago, when it charted at No 3 in the box office charts and made $7.2m (£5.76m), Melania’s UK start – No 29, £32,974 overall across 155 cinemas for a site average of £212.80 – was modest. But the documentary has still dropped significantly in its second week of UK release, with tracking organisation Comscore confirming it has taken £4,091 from 62 locations, meaning a site average of £65.98 – or around six tickets per venue. Continue reading...

Pascal Soriot suggests UK-US agreement will not be enough to revive plan to expand Cambridge site Business live – latest updates The boss of Britain’s biggest pharmaceutical company has said the government’s recent drug pricing deal is a “very positive step” but is unlikely to unfreeze a paused £200m investment in Cambridge. AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, suggested that a UK-US deal on NHS pricing agreed in December would not be “sufficient” to restart the project to build a research site in the east of England, which was paused in September. Continue reading...

Seamus Culleton describes conditions as ‘torture’ as he pleads with taoiseach to raise his case with Donald Trump An Irish man who has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for five months despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record says he fears for his life and has appealed for help from Ireland’s government. Seamus Culleton said conditions at his detention centre in Texas were akin to “torture” and that the atmosphere was volatile. “I’m not in fear of the other inmates. I’m afraid of the staff. They’re capable of anything.” Continue reading...

A look at each team’s choice of colours and designs ahead of the new F1 season Continue reading...

Birdwatchers flock to Montréal for rare sighting of ‘vagrant’ bird that has made its home during a bitterly cold winter On a quiet Montréal street of low-rise brick apartment buildings on one side and cement barrier wall on the other, a crowd has gathered, binoculars around their necks and cameras at the ready. A European robin has taken up residence in the neighbourhood, which is sandwiched between two industrial areas with warehouses and railway lines and, a few blocks away, port facilities on the St Lawrence River. Ron Vandebeek from Ottawa, Ontario, is here on a frigid February morning hoping to see the rare bird, which was first spotted at the beginning of January. Continue reading...

Exclusive: only matter of time until decrepit ships cause spill bigger than Exxon Valdez disaster, analysts say Decrepit oil tankers in Iran’s sanctions-busting shadow fleet are a “ticking time bomb”, with a catastrophic environmental disaster only a “matter of time”, maritime intelligence analysts have warned. Such an oil spill could be far bigger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster that released 37,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea, they said. Continue reading...

US captain reflects on her playing career in France and the need for greater competition as she prepares for a summer move to Denver Lindsey Heaps is sitting in the heart of Lyon, a city that has witnessed her transformation from a self-described “baby” into the authoritative captain of the US women’s national team. Now wearing the iconic No 10 shirt for OL Lyonnes, inherited this season from Dzsenifer Marozsán, Heaps is reflective. She is a veteran, a leader who has won almost everything, yet she remains a student of the game, constantly seeking the “good struggles” that defined her early years. The timing of our meeting is poignant. This month Lyonnes reasserted their dominance over the Première Ligue with a 1-0 victory against Paris Saint-Germain, before winning 4-0 against Saint-Étienne in a derby. The results leaves OL in a league of their own: 14 points clear of second-placed Nantes, with PSG cast adrift in fifth place, 17 points behind the leaders. For Heaps, these numbers are not just a source of pride; they are a symptom of a wider problem. Continue reading...

As council declares it’s ‘no longer bankrupt’, people say closure of services have added to social isolation and crime When Birmingham city council announced last week it was “no longer bankrupt”, after years of budget cuts and asset sales, one retired police officer was left feeling despondent. Wendy Collymore had experienced first-hand the impact of the council’s cost-cutting drive on the UK’s second largest city when the adult day centre her elderly father attended was forced to close in 2024. Continue reading...

Reform UK was voted into power in several English councils last May – we want to hear from residents about their experiences so far Following the May 2025 English local elections, Reform UK won more than 600 seats and took control of 10 councils, including Kent and County Durham. Reform campaigned on promises to cut waste, lower council tax and change how councils are run. Since taking office, it has said it is delivering savings and a new approach, while critics have questioned some of its claims and accused the party of breaking pledges not to raise council tax. The Reform-led Worcestershire county council is likely to issue England’s largest council tax rise this April. Continue reading...

Sarah Mullally says Church of England has ‘fallen tragically short’ after predecessor resigned over significant failings The new archbishop of Canterbury has pledged to rebuild trust and confidence in the way the Church of England deals with the abuse of children and vulnerable adults, saying that in the past it has “fallen tragically short”. Sarah Mullally told a meeting of the C of E’s ruling body, the General Synod, that “proper independence” would be central to the way the church deals with allegations of abuse under her watch as archbishop. The C of E has been criticised for dealing with allegations of abuse, and complaints about the handling of such allegations, internally. Continue reading...

Our cartoonist looks back at the mayhem on Merseyside as visitors’ late win reminded Arsenal they’re still in the hunt Buy a cartoon | David’s favourite work of 2025 And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now Continue reading...

Chiller about a skull-shaped Aztec whistle blends Final Destination-style deaths with a tender portrait of anxious adolescence On the surface, this teen-courting, genre-savvy Irish-Canadian horror effort looks like the kind of project ushered into production after the Philippou brothers’ cursed-artefact chiller Talk to Me cleared up at the box office. However, rather than suburban Australia, writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy relocate us to an autumnal, Springsteen-ready North American steeltown, where artsy high-schooler Chrys (Dafne Keen) inherits the locker of the star basketballer we’ve just seen flambeed in a prologue. The deadly doodad she finds there is a skull-shaped Aztec whistle with either “summon the dead” or “summon your dead” (there’s some linguistic quibbling) inscribed on the side. Naturally she puts it back, and everybody lives happily ever after. I kid, of course. For a while, the horror element is less in-your-face than it was in the pummelling Antipodean predecessor, but whistleblowing soon makes everyone’s worst fears about dying literal. That development gives Hardy’s increasingly bloody kill scenes a Final Destination-like piquancy: your heart can only go out to the boy racer who perishes via car crash in his upstairs bedroom. One similarity to the Philippous’ film is the sympathy for insecure, troubled teens who couldn’t seem more unlike the usual disposable jocks and prom queens. Egerton observes courtship rituals with tenderness, quietly foregrounding Chrys’s struggles to come out to upright classmate Ellie (Sophie Nélisse); beneath the looming shadow of death, this is an attempt to live one’s truest life. Continue reading...

Coach’s relaxed approach backed by former captain Luke Wood dropped for West Indies WT20 match Brendon McCullum’s shades-on, feet-up, perpetually chilled persona as England coach, which has led to him being criticised for creating an unhealthily relaxed team culture, is carefully cultivated but entirely false, according to the former white-ball captain Jos Buttler. Buttler said that McCullum is actually “as sharp a coach as I’ve ever worked with”, and that “everyone in the dressing-room knows the truth”. While McCullum has been sceptical about the overuse of data in cricket he has recently adopted the use of walkie-talkies to relay information from the team’s analysts to their support staff and on to the pitch during matches, and Buttler insisted he has always been more involved in the action than it appears. Continue reading...

In a park keeper’s lodge in Barrow-in-Furness, Full of Noises has hosted the likes of Julia Holter and Lonnie Holley – and is a model for why arts funding matters Barrow-in-Furness sits on a windswept hook of Cumbrian coastline. It’s an industrial town surrounded by the Irish sea on three sides, known for its 140-year history of submarine building. The corrugated peaks of BAE Systems’ Dock Hall dominate the skyline over Barrow’s red-brick terraces, and roughly a third of working-age locals are employed in its sprawling complex. This militarised landscape is the unlikely home of Full of Noises, an experimental music and arts venue with a capacity of 40 whose first event featured krautrock legends Faust destroying an electric guitar with a pneumatic drill. Having secured funding to launch a two-day festival in 2009, artistic director Glenn Boulter and four other local artists took on temporary custodianship of the crumbling canteen building on wind-lashed Barrow Island, “a building that’s part of this big military-industrial complex,” Boulter says. “It’s heavily security-controlled.” He recalls a game they would play on a nearby bridge, where they would pull their phones out as if to take photos and count the seconds until they were accosted by security. “For us, that was an interesting context to be working in.” Continue reading...

Moltbook, a social media site for AI agents, is nothing new. Still, the marriage of big tech and politics demands we take a stand On a recent trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was shocked by the billboards that lined the freeway outside of the airport. “The singularity is here,” proclaimed one. “Humanity had a good run,” said another. It seemed like every other sign along the road was plastered with claims from tech firms making outrageous claims about artificial intelligence. The ads, of course, were rife with hype and ragebait. But the claims they contain aren’t occurring in a vacuum. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, recently said: “We basically have built AGI, or very close to it,” before confusingly qualifying his statement as “spiritual”. Elon Musk has gone even further, claiming: “We have entered the singularity.” Enter Moltbook, the social media site built for AI agents. A place where bots can talk to other bots, in other words. A spate of doom-laden news articles and op-eds followed its launch. The authors fretted about the fact that the bots were talking about religion, claiming to have secretly spent their human builders’ money, and even plotting the overthrow of humanity. Many pieces contained suggestions eerily like those on the billboards in San Francisco: that machines are now not only as smart as humans (a theory known as artificial general intelligence) but that they are moving beyond us (a sci-fi concept known as the singularity). Samuel Woolley is the author of Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity and co-author of Bots. He is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Continue reading...

A trip to the pub with my favourite 89-year-old, followed by a get together with some errant wives ... It’s going to be a belter This is the first time I’ve been single on Valentine’s Day since 1994. I didn’t give it a lot of thought – romance’s festival day has never been a great advert for the concept. In the best case scenario, it turns your real and important feelings into a commercial cliche, in the worst, it’s just a vivid and poignant reminder of how much you wish you were elsewhere, and at every point in between, it’s open season for restaurants to rip you off while you make dry conversation over drier chicken. This year, however, I made a plan with two married friends. I did not anticipate how much I would enjoy bumping into their husbands around the place, going “guess where I’m going on Valentine’s Day? OUT WITH YOUR WIFE”, to see their astonished expressions, since, ensconced in long marriages, they can no longer remember what month it is, let alone if anyone has any plans. Continue reading...

As pressure builds before Calcutta Cup, Scotland’s coach may well have reached the point of diminishing returns The witty Anglo-American author Ashleigh Brilliant passed away last September at the age of 91, but his best lines are timeless. Beleaguered sports coaches worldwide will all recognise one of his characteristically pithy observations: “I try to take one day at a time – but sometimes several days attack me at once.” To be responsible for an under-pressure national side must induce a similar feeling. So what do you do when coaching life starts serving you lemons? After a while there are only two options: try to ride it out, or accept it might be wiser for someone else to have a go. It can be a delicate judgment, often shaped by non-sporting considerations. Unless it becomes apparent, as seemingly happened with the recently ousted All Blacks coach Scott Robertson, that your dressing room has already made the call for you. Continue reading...

Clive Selley, who oversaw £12bn rollout of full fibre broadband to 25m homes, will lead international division Business live – latest updates The head of BT’s infrastructure arm Openreach is to step down after almost a decade, having almost completed a £12bn rollout of full fibre broadband to 25m homes. Clive Selley, who was tasked by former BT chief Philip Jansen to “build like fury” to address the UK’s status as global laggard in the rollout of high-speed broadband, will become the boss of BT’s international division. Continue reading...

Schumer and Jeffries says White House proposal is ‘incomplete and insufficient’ as prospect of deal recedes Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours. We start with news that Democratic leaders say a proposal from the White House is “incomplete and insufficient” as they demand new restrictions on president Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Donald Trump threatened to block a new bridge connecting the US and Canada he supported in 2017 and made the bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a total ban on Canadians playing ice hockey. The Miami Herald reported that one partially redacted Epstein files document includes an account of a 2006 phone call in which Trump told the Palm Beach police chief that “everyone has known” Jeffrey Epstein was abusing girls and Ghislaine Maxwell ‘“is evil”. Trump now says he had no idea Epstein was abusing girls and wishes Maxwell well. An immigration judge rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was arrested last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said in a statement. The US military’s Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced it carried out another deadly strike on Monday, killing two suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific. A federal judge in California issued a preliminary injunction that blocks part of a new state law that bans federal law enforcement officers from covering their faces. Continue reading...

Who will speak out for values and rights and my fellow democracy activist now that opposition has been silenced in Hong Kong? I say Britain should Nathan Law is a politician and activist from Hong Kong Waking up on Monday morning to the news of the pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai’s 20-year prison sentence for national security offences felt surreal. I could have easily been in his position if I hadn’t fled Hong Kong right before the implementation of the notorious national security law (NSL), under which Lai has faced the harshest penalty ever given. In fact, Lai chose to stay and stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Hong Kong in the face of an uncertain and repressive future. Now his family fears that he will die in prison. A mix of emotions filled my mind. I was immensely disgusted by the audacity and malevolence of such punishment. This sentence has a transparently political end, but the Hong Kong and Chinese governments make no bones about it. Their sole purpose is to silence critics, and they have succeeded: civil society and domestic media, which should be the watchdogs of individual rights and government overreach, are dead silent on criticising the trial. Nathan Law is a politician and activist from Hong Kong, and was leader of Demosistō from 2016 to 2018 Continue reading...

Palestinian boy has been in the West Bank since 2022 but is still registered as a resident in the strip where ban applies An Israeli court has rejected an appeal to allow a five-year-old Palestinian boy with an aggressive form of cancer to enter Israel for life-saving treatment, citing a government policy that bars residents registered in Gaza from crossing the border, even when they no longer live there. In a ruling issued on Sunday, the Jerusalem district court dismissed a petition seeking permission to transfer the child from Ramallah to TelHashomer hospital near Tel Aviv for a bone marrow transplant – a procedure unavailable in either Gaza or the occupied West Bank. The boy has been in the West Bank since 2022 where he was receiving medical care unavailable in the Gaza Strip. His doctors have determined that he urgently requires antibody immunotherapy. Continue reading...

Teacher who ran school outside Paris was a formative influence on generations of comedians and actors including Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson Master clown Philippe Gaulier, the influential founder of France’s École Philippe Gaulier, has died aged 82. Gaulier taught the art of clowning for decades and his students included Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, Rachel Weisz and Geoffrey Rush. Gaulier died on Monday due to complications from a lung infection. He had a stroke in 2023 and, since then, had “received warm words of encouragement from all over the world”, according to a statement made by his family. “He seemed especially happy to receive letters and messages from his former students. Teaching was his passion and purpose in life.” Continue reading...

We would like to hear from people about the impact of the wet weather conditions in the UK Persistent rain and flooding is affecting farmers, builders, sports, wildlife – and damaging roads and homes across the UK. Parts of Devon, Cornwall and Worcestershire have seen rainfall daily for the last 40 days, while provisional Met Office statistics show that Northern Ireland experienced its wettest January in 149 years. Wales has reached 39% of its February monthly average rainfall already. Continue reading...