Put your phone down and focus: the four best ways to watch movies

An expert shares advice for tuning out distractions when screening films at home – plus our favorite movie snacks

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Each week we cut through the noise to bring you smart, practical recommendations on how to live better – from what is worth buying to the tools, habits and ideas that actually last.

If there’s one thing I learned from working on Do not disturb, our series where we share ideas for living more mindfully, it’s that not all screen time is created equal.

Published: March 14, 2026, 2:15 pm

‘Everyone will tune in – she’s one of our own’: Jessie Buckley’s home town abuzz before Oscars

Excitement in Killarney will reach fever pitch on Sunday, when the actor is hotly tipped to become the first Irish woman to win best actress

If Jessie Buckley wins the Oscar for best actress on Sunday night, County Kerry will need no further proof of a cherished truism: to be born in this corner of Ireland really is the greatest gift that God can bestow. The award would be for Buckley’s performance in Hamnet, but for Killarney, her home town in the county nicknamed the Kingdom, credit will stretch back to her childhood, when she acted in local plays.

“Hollywood here we come!” proclaimed the newspaper Kerry’s Eye, underlining a sense that Buckley’s path to Hollywood for the 98th Academy Awards has been a collective journey propelled by her talent, determination and roots.

Published: March 14, 2026, 7:00 am

Please drive carefully: scientists plan to transport volatile antimatter for first time

Cern researchers are testing traps capable of moving antimatter, which explodes into energy as soon as it comes into contact with regular matter

When the truck pulls away from the building at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, all eyes will be on its precious cargo, a one-tonne device containing some of the most exotic material on Earth.

The 20-minute test run around the campus, pencilled in for later this month, will mark the world’s first attempt to transport antimatter, a substance so delicate that when it meets normal matter, both are consumed in a burst of pure energy.

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:00 am

‘Rugby is growing in America’: Sammy Sullivan on life as a US Eagle, army captain and Lego influencer

As top teams land in New York for world sevens this weekend, the Olympic star discusses her uniquely American story and her sport’s search for the spotlight

On Saturday, World Rugby’s HSBC SVNS lands in New York – well, New Jersey – for two days at Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, a short ride from downtown Manhattan. The governing body will be watching keenly, as two days of traditional warm-weather sport are held at the end of a north-eastern winter. In New York/New Jersey on Thursday, it snowed.

The men’s US Eagles are not playing, having lost their place at the top table. But the Eagles women have hopes of a home-soil win after a third-place finish last week in Vancouver, beating France in a thriller after a narrow loss to New Zealand. Coach Emilie Bydwell’s team are third in the season standings, set for Championship tournaments in spring and summer.

Published: March 14, 2026, 9:00 am

‘It would be an earthquake for France’: is Marseille about to vote in the far right?

A National Rally victory in France’s second city in municipal elections that start on Sunday would be hailed by the party as a step towards taking the presidency next year

Nathalie, a market trader in her 40s, had woken early to prepare a pan of paella rice. She was spooning it into tubs at a market in southern Marseille last week when a crowd of far-right canvassers approached, promising cleaner and safer streets if she voted for them in the local elections.

“Our cash tin was stolen right here at Christmas time,” Nathalie said. “I’ve had a bag stolen too. It tends to happen at the end of the day, around 7pm. I worry for the elderly grandmas. I had a necklace ripped off me in the city centre once.”

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:00 am

Former NBA star Chris Washburn reflects on drugs, downfall and second chances

The former No 3 overall NBA draft pick opens up about addiction, homelessness and redemption in a candid memoir revisiting basketball’s cocaine era

When the Golden State Warriors drafted Chris Washburn with the No 3 pick in 1986, it should have been a dream come true. Instead, it might have been the worst thing that could have happened for the 6ft 11in NC State prospect.

“I put on a smile because they were paying me to be out there,” Washburn, a former three-time high school All-American, tells the Guardian. “But I felt alone.”

Published: March 14, 2026, 9:30 am

Middle East crisis live: Trump calls on China, France, UK and others to send ships to keep strait of Hormuz open

US president earlier warned strikes on Kharg Island oil facilities would follow hit on military targets if Tehran did not allow maritime traffic through key channel

• How have you been affected by the latest Middle East events?

Iranian media has reported there is no damage to its oil infrastructure on Kharg Island, following US attacks that Trump claimed had “obliterated” military targets on the Island.

Iran’s armed forces have threatened to destroy US-linked oil infrastructure if its own energy facilities are hit. Kharg Island serves as the export terminal for 90% of Iran’s oil shipments.

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:19 pm

‘Worst nightmare’: anger and frustration as Gulf states bear brunt of war they did not start

Closure of strait of Hormuz puts pressure on region’s economies amid growing resentment about conflict started by US and Israel

• Middle East crisis – live updates

An eerie quiet hangs over Ras Al Khaimah’s industrial port. Usually a thriving maritime hub of the United Arab Emirates, now ships stand docked and silent. Not far out along the hazy horizon, a backlog of hundreds of tankers have lined up in recent days, halted along a waterway flooded with danger.

Any vessel heading past Ras Al Khaimah out to the Arabian Sea must traverse the world’s most treacherous strip of water for shipping today: the strait of Hormuz. Just over 20 nautical miles from Ras Al Khaimah, two oil tankers heading for the strait were attacked by Iranian missiles this week, one catching fire.

Published: March 14, 2026, 2:27 pm

‘You are all worse than each other’: anti-regime Iranians turn on Trump

Mood among some in Iran shifts from hope of being rescued to dismay at destruction of infrastructure, culture and lives

After years of arrests, disappearances and mass killings of protesters, the hatred in Iran from some quarters for the hardline, oppressive governing regime had boiled into such a desperate rage that many believed Donald Trump’s promise that the US would “come to their rescue”.

Now, after a fortnight of war, with US and Israeli airstrikes killing hundreds as they hit residential blocks, shops, fuel depots and even a school, the mood is changing.

Published: March 14, 2026, 8:00 am

Trump wages war on Iran his own way: commander-in-chaos

Erratic rhetoric, shifting goals and mixed signals leave allies, foes and voters unsure what the president wants from war

“Mr President,” said a reporter. “You’ve said the war is ‘very complete’ but your defence secretary says, ‘This is just the beginning’. So which is it?” Donald Trump’s eyes darted left and right then down. “Well, I think you could say both,” he parried.

The confusing answer at a press conference in Doral, Florida this week did not befit a wartime leader armed with stirring rhetoric and a lucid plan. But it was entirely on brand for the 47th US president. The tumultuous style that Trump brings to election campaigns, dealing with Congress and global trade relations has now been imported to the theatre of war.

Published: March 14, 2026, 10:00 am

The escalation trap: how the Iran war could become more costly and complex

Iran is trying to create wedges between Gulf states and the US, but Trump is very comfortable on the ‘escalatory ladder’

• Middle East crisis – live updates

In its current phase, the Israeli-US war against Iran and its proxies has become a proving ground for two competing concepts of military escalation, each of which threatens to become a trap.

On one side, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have failed thus far in their ill-defined and shifting strategic aims. Despite killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and other key leaders in the opening salvo of the campaign, the clerical regime remains and Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium is unsecured. Airstrikes are intensifying and hitting a greater number of targets.

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:00 am

‘Everything is going up’: Americans struggle with affordability despite Trump’s claims

US workers are finding it difficult to afford basic necessities as the president claims ‘the economy is roaring back’

US workers are still struggling with the cost of living despite Donald Trump’s campaign promises to fix the US affordability crisis.

The Guardian spoke to workers as an exclusive poll showed cross-party concerns about the Trump administration’s handling of the US economy.

Published: March 14, 2026, 12:00 pm

Trump administration to be paid $10bn for brokering TikTok deal

Exceptionally rare ‘fee’ to be paid by investors who took control of US operations from Chinese parent company

Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly poised to be paid $10bn by investors as part of a deal to create a US-controlled version of TikTok.

The $10bn, considered by the US government as a sort of transaction fee, will be paid by the administration-friendly investors who took control of TikTok’s US operations from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, according to reporting that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:13 pm

Trump administration set to expand migrant family detention at Louisiana airport

Alexandria airport center would hold migrant families and children inside converted barracks before deportation

The Trump administration is poised to expand immigration detention operations at a controversial site inside a rural Louisiana airport, the Guardian has learned.

The administration is seeking to establish a “first of its kind” short-term facility that would hold migrant families and unaccompanied children next to a runway that has become a central node for the White House’s mass deportation agenda.

Published: March 14, 2026, 11:30 am

Fetuses likely have more ‘forever chemicals’ in blood than thought – report

US test of 120 umbilical blood cord samples identified 42 Pfas compounds, which do not naturally break down

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New peer-reviewed research shows fetuses likely have much higher levels of Pfas “forever chemicals” in their blood than previously thought.

Testing of umbilical cord blood typically looks for a small number of common Pfas compounds, like Pfoa and Pfos. However, thousands of Pfas exist, and a new Mount Sinai study tested 120 umbilical blood cord samples that were previously found to contain up to four compounds.

Published: March 14, 2026, 12:00 pm

Jürgen Habermas, German philosopher and sociologist, dies aged 96

Habermas’ political consensus-building theory argued formation of public opinion vital for democracies to survive

The influential German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas has died at the age of 96, his publisher has said.

Habermas, a towering figure in the intellectual history of postwar Germany, is best known for his theory of political consensus-building. Widely considered one of most influential philosophers of the 20th century, he also helped to shape the discourse around European integration and the formation of the EU.

Published: March 14, 2026, 4:57 pm

Palestinian actor says he can’t attend Oscars because of US travel ban

Motaz Malhees is an actor in The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film about a Palestinian girl killed by the IDF in Gaza in 2024

Palestinian actor Motaz Malhees said a travel ban imposed by Donald Trump is preventing him from attending Sunday’s Academy Awards, whose nominees include a movie in which he has a starring role.

The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film about a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2024, has been nominated for best international feature film.

Published: March 14, 2026, 3:00 pm

Justice department drops charges against veteran who burned US flag

Jan ‘Jay’ Carey torched the Stars and Stripes to protest against Trump’s executive order banning flag burning

The prosecution of a man who burned the American flag near the White House in protest of an executive order against flag burning has been dropped by the US Department of Justice.

On Friday, the justice department moved to dismiss charges against Jan “Jay” Carey, 55, a military combat veteran who set the flag on fire in Lafayette Square in Washington DC in August, the day that Donald Trump signed a presidential order to crack down on flag burning.

Published: March 14, 2026, 2:28 pm

Homicide charge dropped against Georgia teen after teacher’s prank death

Jason Hughes died after falling and being struck by a car driven by a student who had just pranked the teacher

A Georgia prosecutor has decided to drop charges against a teenager who police say was driving the truck that struck and killed a beloved high school teacher when a prank turned deadly, the teen’s lawyer said. The victim’s family had urged authorities not to compound the tragedy by prosecuting the teen driver and his friends.

The 40-year-old teacher, Jason Hughes, died after slipping and falling into the street as the teens started to drive away after participating in a community tradition of pranking teachers by throwing toilet paper on to his front lawn.

Published: March 14, 2026, 12:30 pm

New study raises concerns about AI chatbots fueling delusional thinking

First major study on ‘AI psychosis’ suggests chatbots can encourage delusions among vulnerable people

A new scientific review raises concerns about how chatbots powered by artificial intelligence may encourage delusional thinking, especially in vulnerable people.

A summary of existing evidence on artificial intelligence-induced psychosis was published last week in the Lancet Psychiatry, highlighting how chatbots can encourage delusional thinking – though possibly only in people who are already vulnerable to psychotic symptoms. The authors advocate for clinical testing of AI chatbots in conjunction with trained mental health professionals.

Published: March 14, 2026, 11:00 am

The ‘Jolene doctrine’: retired US army general likens Trump foreign policy to Dolly Parton song

Stanley McChrystal said White House has a ‘we should do because we can’ approach to international relations

The retired US army general who once led Nato forces in Afghanistan says the bellicose foreign policy Donald Trump has pursued during his second presidency can be summed up as “we should do because we can” – invoking the lyrics of the Dolly Parton classic Jolene to emphasize the point.

Stanley McChrystal delivered those remarks on Friday at Tulane University’s New Orleans book festival during a fireside chat hosted by the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who asked in part about US military strikes Trump has ordered in Nigeria, Venezuela and Iran since Christmas.

Published: March 14, 2026, 1:56 pm

Trump news at a glance: Hegseth attacks media over war coverage as Trump calls Iran leaders ‘scumbags’

Defense secretary offers alternative TV headlines to reporters to more favourably reflect US military campaign in Iran – key US politics stories from 13 March 2026

Pete Hegseth has used a press conference at the Pentagon to criticize journalists over their coverage of the war in Iran, at one point proposing alternative TV headlines.

The US defense secretary claimed Iran had been left without a functioning air force, navy or missile defense network after 13 days of strikes, and said the combined US-Israeli air campaign had hit more than 15,000 targets since the war began.

Published: March 14, 2026, 2:04 am

What does Trump’s restrictive voting bill include – and does it have a chance of becoming law?

Every voter would be affected by the Save America act, as people would face more barriers to voting: ‘It’s a recipe for disaster’

Donald Trump has vowed that he will not sign any other legislation until Republicans’ massive voting bill, the Save America act, is passed. The bill would upend voting for all Americans in the middle of a federal midterm election year and create costly, chaotic changes for elections workers.

The Senate is set to consider the legislation next week, though Senate leaders say they don’t have the votes to get over the filibuster hurdle, essentially dooming the bill for failure.

Published: March 13, 2026, 4:23 pm

Trump’s ‘racist hate speech’ and migration crackdowns violate human rights, UN panel says

Watchdog ‘disturbed’ by president and US political leaders’ use of dehumanising language to target migrants

The “racist hate speech” being used by Donald Trump and other US political leaders, along with the country’s intensified crackdowns on migration, has led to “grave human rights violations,” a UN watchdog has said.

In a non-binding decision issued this week, the UN‘s committee on the elimination of racial discrimination (CERD) called on the US to uphold its obligations as a signatory to the international convention on combating racism and discrimination.

Published: March 13, 2026, 2:55 pm

This doctor treated migrants’ severe injuries at the US-Mexico wall: ‘Political decisions made it as violent as possible’

Dr Brian Elmore witnessed a public health crisis unfold at the border near El Paso. He reflects on why it was like a ‘perverse Groundhog Day’

In late spring 2024, Dr Brian Elmore was working out of a mobile clinic, providing medical treatment to migrants in Ciudad Juárez, just south of the US-Mexico border wall. One of his patients, a Venezuelan man with a fractured arm and a detached left chest from his sternum and clavicle, told Elmore that Mexican immigration officials broke his arm when he first got to town, and that rubber bullets fired by Texas national guardsmen had caused his chest injuries.

The man somehow had managed to fashion a shoddily made splint for his arm, but his chest would require surgery. When an ambulance arrived, the criminal group that controlled the riverine area refused to let him leave. The Texas guardsmen looked on from the US side of the river. “It was heartbreaking,” Elmore said of the spectacle.

Published: March 14, 2026, 10:00 am

Gas prices are soaring – but one Los Angeles gas station is taking it to the extreme

A Chevron station just outside downtown charges more than $8 a gallon – nearly $3 more than the city’s average

It’s tempting to think that a gas station charging more than $8 a gallon is a glamorous Los Angeles curiosity. Sort of like shopping at Erewhon, the healthy grocery chain that wows with a premium experience – and commands up to $22 a smoothie.

But there’s no glamour at the 901 N Alameda Street station. It’s just a dingy Chevron on the edge of LA’s Chinatown, regularly featured in news stories to illustrate the high cost of fuel in California. Midday on Tuesday, the station charged $8.31 for a gallon of regular gas.

Published: March 14, 2026, 4:00 pm

US immigrant parents are taking intense precautions in case of detention: ‘I need to prepare for the worst’

From wills and guardianship papers to advance healthcare directives, parents are anticipating dying in custody or being deported without warning

She called it the “end times”.

In a quiet living room in south Florida, a 42-year-old South American woman sat at her kitchen table signing her will. Her hands trembled, and the ink smeared when tears fell hard enough that she had to reprint the pages.

Published: March 14, 2026, 1:00 pm

Meta and Google trial: are infinite scroll and autoplay creating addicts?

Features woven into the fabric of platforms have been central to landmark social media harm case in US. How do they work?

It was as “easy as ABC”, claimed the lawyer prosecuting a landmark social media harm case against Meta and Google which heard closing arguments this week. The defendants were guilty, said Mark Lanier, of “addicting the brains of children”. Not true, replied the tech companies. Meta insisted providing young people with a “safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work”.

Features such as autoplay videos, infinite scrolling and constantly chirruping alerts woven into the fabric of online platforms were central to the six-week trial in Los Angeles, which has been compared to the cases against tobacco companies in the 1990s. But how do these features work and what are their consequences? Are they creating addicts rather than users or are they just giving consumers more of what they want?

Published: March 14, 2026, 12:00 pm

My sisters and I had the same parents but were raised apart. It taught me there’s more to siblings than meets the eye

After my parents split up, my older sister and I lived with our dad while the youngest stayed with our mum. It became an experiment in nature v nurture – and had a profound effect on our relationships

There is a paradox at the heart of sibling relationships and it is this: that children raised in the same family are for ever bound by shared experiences, yet have different childhoods. The paradox is partly (and most commonly) explained by the topic of birth order theory – the idea that your position in the family shapes your personality and potential. Oldest children, for example, are born into an adult world, full of grown-up language and behaviour. Governed by anxious, inexperienced but still fresh parents, they bask in the glow of undivided attention. Their infancy will be markedly different to that of their little brother or sister who will be born into a family. These second-born children have a toddler as their role model/ally/nemesis, no new clothes, and they also have to share their parents’ attention. These parents are a little less fresh and little more savvy. By the time any subsequent children come along, parents are at their most relaxed and most exhausted. Youngest children get away with a lot (spoken as a true middle sibling).

But neat as birth order theory may be, our place in the family roll call cannot fully account for the ways in which we grow up “together apart” as siblings. To do that, we must examine – and in some cases untangle – all of the knottiness underpinning our accepted roles as “responsible firstborns”, “problematic middles” or “spoilt babies”. We need to look at the home environment, the state of the parents’ relationship, their careers, the pressures placed on each child on account of gender or aptitude, the expectations in families where a child has additional needs – or indeed, in the worst-case scenario, where a child may not have survived – before we can begin to comprehend our brother’s or sister’s version of events. Difficulties typically arise because of the slipperiness of memory, often shot through with profound emotions – making it hard to pull together a coherent and agreed-upon story of our pasts.

Published: March 14, 2026, 12:00 pm

‘Negatives are photographic truths’: the collector who fled Russia with a haul of second world war images

Ukrainian-Russian photojournalist Arthur Bondar has amassed a huge collection of pictures from often unknown photographers

After pulling on white cotton gloves, Arthur Bondar carefully takes a handful of 4cm by 9cm negatives from an old cigarette box and holds them up to the light of his study window. Inverted images of a woman on a horse, a group of women tending cabbages in a field, laughing figures at the seaside, a woman posing as a military ship sails by, hover in front of him, almost ghostlike. Although they are tiny, he is able to make out key details such as the insignia on a uniform, or the name of a ship, that trigger his curiosity and give him a starting point for his research.

Arthur Bondar examines some of his negatives. Photograph: Oksana Yushko/The Guardian

Published: March 14, 2026, 11:00 am

‘We were at a loss’: the couples trying to get pregnant by removing plastics from their lives

New Netflix documentary The Plastic Detox follows an epidemiologist’s radical new plan to boost fertility in three months. We meet the couples whose lives were turned upside down – and in some cases, hugely for the better

Two years into an emotionally draining mission to get pregnant, with no sign of a positive result, Idaho couple Darby and Jesse Nubbe were feeling desperate. “We were $16,000 (£12,000) out of pocket, with weekly blood work, invasive ultrasounds, sperm quality testing, genetic testing, eating well, exercising, daily cold plunging, expensive vitamins, excessive pregnancy testing and more tears than I would like to remember,” Darby tells me. “We were at a loss, with an official diagnosis of ‘unexplained infertility’.”

It hadn’t crossed the couple’s minds that the problem might be the everyday products inside their home, from water bottles to clothes. Then Dr Shanna Swan entered their lives.

Published: March 14, 2026, 3:00 pm

‘My ideas are a little revolutionary’: ecologist Suzanne Simard on intelligent forests, the climate and her critics

Her research popularised the idea of the wood wide web, but the scientific backlash was brutal. As the author of The Mother Tree returns to the forest in a new book, she discusses her battle to reimagine our relationship with nature

In 2018, the ecologist and writer Suzanne Simard was conducting research in the forested Caribou Mountains of western Canada when a thunderstorm rolled in. She was with her two teenage daughters and her close friend and colleague, Jean Roach. They saw flashes of lightning, heard a loud rumble and then they smelled smoke. They were forced to run the half kilometre back to Simard’s truck as the trees behind them caught alight and the air grew thick. As they ran, animals burst out of the forest: a deer, a rabbit, a grey wolf. They reached the truck with no time to spare, all four of them covered in soot and dirt. Overhead, helicopters began circling the orange-black air, dropping water on the flames below.

Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia’s history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City. The cause is not only global heating, which has brought hotter, dryer summers, but also the changing makeup of the forest. When logging companies clear forest, they replant it with fast-growing conifer species, but these trees are much more flammable than Canada’s diverse, native forest.

Published: March 14, 2026, 9:00 am

Six great reads: Louis Theroux’s reluctance to answer questions, Apple’s hits and misses, and boomers v gen Z

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days

Published: March 14, 2026, 6:00 am

‘As soon as I saw it, I knew the image’: Robby Ogilvie’s best phone picture

A Ford Cortina the colour of the sky against brightly coloured houses in Cape Town was a gift to the Scottish photographer

Edinburgh native Robby Ogilvie was visiting South Africa when he took this image. “I’d spent the first week in and around Kruger national park, photographing the culture, landscapes and wildlife, before moving on to Cape Town.”

Along with a friend from South Africa, Ogilvie visited the neighbourhood of Bo-Kaap. “The area is known for its brightly coloured houses, but it also carries a rich and complex history. There was a real feeling of community, and many of the houses felt like open studios; artists had taken over spaces to exhibit and sell their work.”

Published: March 14, 2026, 11:00 am

Sarah Perry: ‘I’m monstrously judgmental. It’s like talking to the pope’

The author on failing at atheism, why she lost her place at Cambridge, and bringing back Hilary Mantel

Born in Essex, Sarah Perry, 46, studied English at Anglia Polytechnic University and worked as a civil servant before taking a PhD in creative writing and the gothic at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, was published in 2014. Her second, The Essex Serpent, was Waterstones Book of the Year in 2016, a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and adapted for television. Her other works include Melmoth and Enlightenment, the latter of which was longlisted for the Booker prize, and Death of an Ordinary Man, which won the 2025 Nero Non-Fiction Book award. She is married and lives in Norfolk.

What is your greatest fear?
Not being loved.

Published: March 14, 2026, 10:00 am

Trump faces a ‘personal Vietnam’ in Iran | Sidney Blumenthal

He is stuck in a quagmire. His goals are elusive. His bombing does not force a surrender. He has no exit strategy. Good morning, Vietnam

Donald Trump is lost in his fog of war. He compounds confusion with improvised fabrications as his naive expectation of a lightning victory has been sunk in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, he felt certain, would easily follow the “perfect scenario” of Venezuela, accede to naming a leader who would instantly do his bidding, and there would be no disruption of the oil markets – “a strong game plan”, stated Karoline Leavitt, his White House press secretary, who defends each of his changeable excuses with equal ferocity.

There may be few if any facts underlying the delusions upon which Trump constructs his vapid explanations and evanescent strategies. The belief that coherent sense can be made out of Trump’s shuffling words is a weakness of the rational mind that refuses to accept the impulses of the inveterate demagogue for what they are. Searching for reason in the jungle of Trump’s tales may compel hopelessly sensible people to superimpose logic where there is none in order to satisfy the need for some semblance of soundness.

Published: March 14, 2026, 10:00 am

I had a ringside seat for the Iranian revolution. Foreign meddling didn’t work then either | Paul Taylor

Even as the first western journalist to interview Ayatollah Khomeini, I had no inkling of what was to come. Perhaps we should have learned from history

Watching Iran in flames, I can’t help wondering whether history is coming a grotesque full circle 47 years after the fall of the US-backed Pahlavi dynasty, or whether western powers are simply repeating past errors by attempting violent regime change from outside.

As a young reporter, I had a ringside seat for part of the 1979 revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and installed an austere Islamic republic headed by a Shia Muslim cleric with the titles of “leader of the revolution” and “guardian jurist” (vali-e faqih).

Published: March 14, 2026, 7:00 am

Don’t denounce Timothée Chalamet for what he said about opera and ballet – prove him wrong | Rebecca Humphries

For these art forms to thrive, they need to attract young people. The Oscar contender’s comments are just the conversation starter they need

• Rebecca Humphries is an actor and author

Timothée Chalamet thinks no one cares about opera or ballet. He told Matthew McConaughey so. Also, the entire world.

“I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this any more’,” Chalamet said in a recorded conversation for Variety.

Rebecca Humphries is an actor and author

Published: March 14, 2026, 10:00 am

Trump is the weakest he’s ever been. That makes him so dangerous on Iran | Moira Donegan

Why would Trump launch a foreign war when he is so domestically weak? Precisely because he is weak

In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, members of the George W Bush administration presented the case for war exhaustively, repeatedly, and in public. The then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who played a major role in green-lighting waterboarding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, wrote an editorial in the New York Times claiming that Iraq was lying about its so-called “weapons of mass destruction”.

Meanwhile, Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, went to a meeting of the United Nations security council in New York. There, before America and the world, he held up a tiny vial of substance meant to represent anthrax, a chemical weapon that had terrorized the US in a series of mail attacks just over a year before; Powell claimed that Iraq had the weapon and was willing to use it. Bush himself routinely addressed the American people, making the case for war. They were all lying, it turned out, but the lie served a purpose: it was a concession to the idea that the American people would have a say in whether or not their country went to war.

Published: March 13, 2026, 11:00 am

Even taking Trump’s confused reasons for the Iran war at face value, it’s still a total disaster | Jonathan Freedland

Two weeks in, it’s increasingly clear that the US-led war has taken every problem it aimed to solve – and made it worse

It’s not easy, but let’s try to look at this war in the best, most charitable light. Let’s try to see the US-Israel conflict with Iran as its prosecutors and advocates would want us to see it.

They would say that it has two aims, both legitimate. The first is to weaken if not remove a regime that has done terrible evil to its own people. Who could mourn the supreme leader of a government that, according to one report, gunned down 30,000 of its citizens on the streets in just two days on 8 and 9 January? Listen to those Iranians who long ago reached the glum conclusion that the only way they could be rid of their tormentors was through external military action. As one exiled Iranian put it to me this week: “The Iranian people have been begging the world for help for so many years. They tried voting for change in 2009; they were killed. They tried protesting in 2019, 2022 and this year; they were massacred in the tens of thousands … They were out of all other options.”

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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Published: March 13, 2026, 5:18 pm

Ella Baron on Trump, Netanyahu and the victims of the war in the Middle East – cartoon

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Published: March 13, 2026, 5:56 pm

Six years after Breonna Taylor’s death, America is weakening the rules that could have saved her | Jamil Smith

Following Taylor’s death, the US limited no-knock warrants. But the Trump administration has quietly rescinded those limits

The night Breonna Taylor died began quietly.

She had spent the evening at home in Louisville. The 26-year-old was an emergency room technician, someone who worked to prevent other people’s tragedies.

Published: March 13, 2026, 10:00 am

How does Trump keep henchmen like Rubio in check? He literally makes them wear shoes that are far too big | Marina Hyde

The art of the heel: if you want a shot at the US presidency, you better be ready to sartorially debase yourself on the world stage

The secretary of state of the United States of America is openly slopping around in a pair of too-big shoes that he has to wear because the president gave them to him. Why? Possibly as a piece of exquisite and complex satire about the size of his penis; possibly because Marco Rubio exaggerated his shoe size because he rightly assumed it would be linked to presidential speculation about the size of his penis.

According to the vice-president, JD Vance, Donald Trump gives all his best boys a particular brand of shoe, either after guessing their size or making them disclose it. “The president, he kind of leans back in his chair,” explained Vance a couple of months ago, “and he says: ‘You know, you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.’” Strong words, particularly from a president with such famously tiny hands. Incidentally, Vance casually dropped it into the anecdote that he wore a 13.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Published: March 13, 2026, 12:58 pm

The Guardian view on the Iran war and international law: it’s worse than a mistake; it’s a crime | Editorial

Double standards in Europe and elsewhere are laid bare by the muted response to US and Israeli aggression and the killing of civilians

When Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the international condemnation from Europe and elsewhere was loud and clear. Leaders did not expect legal threats to shift Vladimir Putin or end war crimes by his troops. But they understood the importance of naming what had happened as an illegal act of aggression, and of seeking to hold those responsible accountable.

The same countries have been strikingly muted since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran. This too was an act of aggression. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez has been lonely in his forthright condemnation, though Norway and others also pointed to the breach of international law. Meanwhile, Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, offered unreserved support and Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, declared that it was “not the moment to lecture our partners and allies”.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Published: March 13, 2026, 6:08 pm

Great haul of China: how table-topping nation rose to be a Winter Paralympic power

Their sporting dominance is all the more striking after winning a solitary medal eight years ago but no country can match them now

With two days of competition left at the Winter Paralympics there is no doubt who will finish top of the medal table. At close of play on Friday, China had a total of 33 medals, the same as their nearest rivals the USA and Italy combined. They have won gold in four of the Games’ six sports – cross-country skiing, curling, snowboarding and biathlon – and are in line for a medal in para-ice hockey too. This sporting dominance is all the more striking because, only eight years ago, China was nowhere.

At the Pyeongchang Games, the Chinese won a solitary medal, gold in the mixed team curling. Three of that team are competing here at Milano Cortina and a fourth, Wang Meng, already has a gold medal around her neck after winning the inaugural mixed doubles alongside her partner Yang Jinqiao. “I’m very, very proud, very, very honoured, and also very grateful,” she said after beating the Korean pair 9-6 following a tie-break end. “I’m so grateful to so many people who have helped us along the way, and [to be] finally standing on this podium”.

Published: March 13, 2026, 4:22 pm

Farmer hat-trick fires USA to fifth straight Paralympic sled hockey final

• USA 6-1 Czech Republic

• Americans aiming for fifth straight Paralympic gold

The United States defeated Czech Republic 6-1 on Friday in the semi-finals of the Paralympic sled hockey tournament in Milan, advancing to the gold medal game for a fifth consecutive Games.

Declan Farmer scored three goals and assisted on the other three as the Americans pulled away after conceding the opening goal. Farmer’s hat-trick – his fourth in four games at these Games – set records for most goals and most points in a single Paralympic tournament. He now has 14 goals and 24 points in Milan.

Published: March 13, 2026, 4:16 pm

USA’s Noah Elliott and Kate Delson win Paralympic banked slalom gold

• Elliott wins men’s SB-LL1 banked slalom title

• Delson captures women’s SB-LL2 gold for US

• Schultz earns bronze in final Paralympic race

Noah Elliott of the United States won gold in the men’s SB-LL1 banked slalom on Friday at the Milan Cortina Paralympics, while fellow American Kate Delson captured the women’s SB-LL2 title in para snowboarding.

Elliott posted the two fastest times of the competition, finishing the course in 58.96sec on his first run and improving slightly to 58.94sec on his second. In banked slalom, riders take two runs down the course and their fastest time determines the final standings.

Published: March 13, 2026, 12:17 pm

Milano Cortina Winter Paralympics 2026: day seven – in pictures

We take a look at the best images from the Games, including skiing, snowboarding and ice hockey

Published: March 13, 2026, 7:16 pm

Arsenal v Everton: Premier League – live

⚽️ Premier League updates from the 5.30pm GMT kick-off
⚽ Live scores | Tables | Follow us on Bluesky | Email Tim

The players are out there. Bukayo Saka, Arsenal’s stand-in captain, leads his team as they hand-slap their way along the Everton line. Mikel Arteta greets David Moyes with the obligatory hug, plus a broad smile. The crowd sing North London Forever and give themselves a round of applause.

“Bayern have just drawn 1-1 at Leverkusen too,” says Lenny Peters. “So it’s clearly a tough place to go.”

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:44 pm

Fatal shooting near Sawgrass delays opening of gates at Players Championship

• Police find suspect after incident near course

• Third round began on time despite delays

Police have captured a man who they say killed two people on Friday night about a mile from TPC Sawgrass. The incident led the Players Championship to delay opening the gates to the public for the third round by a couple of hours.

The St Johns County sheriff, Rob Hardwick, said the suspect, whom he identified as Christian Barrios, shot two people multiple times about 10:30pm on Friday in the parking lot of Walgreens in a domestic violence situation. The store is located about a mile away from the course.

This report will update

Published: March 14, 2026, 1:29 pm

USA see off Canada to book World Baseball Classic semi-final with Dominican Republic

• Judge keys early surge as US top Canada 5-3

• Americans advance to face Dominican Republic

• Miller fans side in ninth to seal quarter-final

Aaron Judge doubled and Pete Crow-Armstrong and Brice Turang each had two hits as the United States beat Canada 5-3 on Friday night to reach the World Baseball Classic semifinals.

The US squad rebounded after an 8-6 loss to Italy in pool play left them needing help to advance to this round.

Published: March 14, 2026, 3:38 am

‘Every lap is survival’: Max Verstappen reflects on F1 Chinese GP qualifying woe

• Four-time world champion eighth in qualifying

• Failed to finish in the points in sprint race

Max Verstappen condemned his Red Bull’s performance as having reduced his efforts to a matter of “survival” in merely trying to complete a lap in Shanghai.

From the off the four-time champion had not been happy in the buildup to Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix, dismissing his car on Friday as undriveable and saying: “We have never had anything this bad.”

Published: March 14, 2026, 11:22 am

Yankuba Minteh’s lucky strike earns Brighton first win at Sunderland for 45 years

Wearside will always be a special place for James Milner. On Boxing Day 2002 he scored his first Premier League goal for Leeds here, at the age of 16 years and 356 days. Who, back then, could possibly have imagined that the 40-year-old Milner would have been back at the Stadium of Light on Saturday as an impressive part of Fabian Hürzeler’s Brighton midfield?

He played the entire game too, helping guide the 33-year-old Hürzeler’s team to their first win at Sunderland since 1981 as the injury-hit hosts could find no riposte to Yankuba Minteh’s fortuitous second-half winner.

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:21 pm

Toronto Maple Leafs’ Auston Matthews out for season with torn MCL after hit

• Leafs lose American star for rest of NHL season

• Toronto star suffered Grade 3 tear of left MCL

• Radko Gudas could face suspension after hit

Toronto Maple Leafs captain Auston Matthews has a torn medial collateral ligament in his left knee and will miss the rest of the NHL season.

The team provided an injury update Friday night, a little under 24 hours since Matthews was knocked out of a game against Anaheim on a knee-on-knee hit from Radko Gudas.

Published: March 14, 2026, 12:29 am

From Run Nation to Power Slap: what is leading the dumbing down of sports?

From violent collision contests to celebrity-backed offshoots, spin-off sports are finding captive audiences. Their spectacle masks something more sinister

A few weeks ago a clip went viral of a strange new contact sport emerging from the antipodes. Two burly men, one of them holding a football, sprint at each other on a kind of catwalk, waiting for the bloop-bloop-bloop of an electronic countdown before they launch into their runs. Neither wears any kind of padding or protective gear. Surrounded by baying spectators, the men collide in the middle of the track, making impact through shoulders, knees, hips, stomachs: in most instances, one of the runners is knocked flat on his back or face from the force of the collision, and the other stands tall in triumph. “We are literally getting dumber as a civilization,” noted one of the many comments on the clip on X.

Run Nation Championship, as this new sport is known, launched in Australia last year, and is now holding combines ahead of RNC03, its third instalment. Many of the competing athletes seem, from the early video evidence, as wide as they are tall; the risk of injury – to their limbs, to their heads, to their brains – is obvious. But this is all part of the pitch. Like all new mixed martial arts and contact sports, RNC owes an obvious debt to UFC in the way it’s named, structured, and promoted; like UFC and UFC boss Dana White’s newer sport, Power Slap, in which two opponents face each other across a table and slap the side of each other’s faces as hard as they can until one collapses, Run Nation is not so much a sport as an exploration of the frontier of sporting violence, a macabre social experiment to see how far athletes will push their bodies in the pursuit of victory and money.

Published: March 13, 2026, 8:00 am

Anti-ICE protesters accused of being part of antifa found guilty of support for terrorism in Texas

Case was seen as major test of the first amendment and whether the US could use broad anti-terrorism statute to prosecute leftwing protesters

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A group of protesters in Texas was found guilty of providing support for terrorism and other charges on Friday in a closely watched case in which prosecutors alleged anti-ICE activists were actually part of an antifa cell.

The case was seen as a major test of the first amendment and whether the government could use a broad anti-terrorism statute to prosecute leftwing protesters. It marked the first time the government alleged individuals were part of an antifa terrorist cell in a criminal prosecution.

Published: March 13, 2026, 10:29 pm

Democratic lead in Georgia special election signals change in party’s fortunes

Race to fill Marjorie Taylor Greene’s seat provides glimpse into midterms with Iran and immigration on voters’ minds

Earlier this week, a steady trickle of voters casting ballots in Dalton at Georgia’s City Hall offered a glimpse into what may be changing fortunes for Democrats in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former congressional district.

The district hasn’t elected a Democrat since it was created after the 2010 Census. But the party’s candidate Shawn Harris drew the most votes district-wide – about 37% – on Tuesday and now faces Clay Fuller, a Trump-endorsed former prosecutor as his opponent in an April runoff election. The winner will finish Greene’s term until November, when a whole new election will take place.

Published: March 14, 2026, 12:00 pm

Five arrested in Cuba after protest at local Communist party office

Rare action began peacefully but ‘degenerated into vandalism’ according to state-run newspaper

Five people have been arrested in Cuba for acts of “vandalism” after a small group of protesters broke into a provincial office of the Cuban Communist party and set fire to computers and furniture.

The incident, which also affected a pharmacy and another shop, took place in the town of Moron, a little more than 300 miles (500km) east of Havana.

Published: March 14, 2026, 4:42 pm

Invisible datacentres and capricious chips: is UK’s AI bubble about to burst?

Datacentre investment boom is one of the biggest infrastructure gambles of this era, and Britain may be uniquely exposed

Stargate was to be the world’s biggest AI investment: a $500bn infrastructure project to “secure American leadership in AI”. Never shy of hyperbole, its key backer, the ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, promised “massive economic benefit for the entire world” with facilities to help people “use AI to elevate humanity”.

Now, OpenAI appears to be dropping out of a part of the deal – the expansion of a flagship datacentre stretching across a swathe of land in Abilene, Texas, which has become one of the most visible manifestations of a frenzy of investment in the chips and power plants required to build and run AI. There has been a breakdown in negotiations over project financing, as well as the timeline of when the expanded capacity might come online.

Published: March 14, 2026, 6:00 am

War prompts Europeans to switch holidays away from eastern Mediterranean

Summer holidaymakers opting for ‘more familiar, easy-to-reach locations’ as travel industry counts cost of Middle East conflict

Holidaymakers who had planned to visit the eastern Mediterranean this summer are moving their trips to the west and the Caribbean because of the US-Israel war on Iran, travel companies have said.

Travellers from the UK and mainland Europe are increasingly swapping their holiday destinations away from Cyprus, Turkey and Greece towards Italy, Spain, Malta and Croatia, as the region around the Middle East grapples with flight cancellations and airspace closures.

Published: March 14, 2026, 10:07 am

Fake rooms, props and a script to lure victims: inside an abandoned Cambodia scam centre

Sprawling compound, including mock-up banks and police offices, uncovered by Thai military during border clashes

It is as if you have walked into a branch of one of Vietnam’s banks. A row of customer service desks, divided by plastic screens, with landline phones, promotional leaflets and staff business cards. A seated waiting area and a private meeting room. All of it features the OCB bank’s logo, or its trademark green colour.

This is not a genuine bank branch, however. It’s one of various “mock up” rooms inside a sprawling compound on the Thai-Cambodian border, where criminal groups are accused of using elaborate and industrial-scale fraud schemes to trick victims into handing over money.

Published: March 14, 2026, 2:25 am

Germany misses climate targets as emissions barely fall in 2025

Greenhouse gases dropped just 0.1% last year as environment minister criticises lack of improvement

Greenhouse gas emissions in Germany have again missed targets set by the Climate Protection Act and barely fell at all in 2025.

Emissions decreased by just 0.1% last year compared to the previous year, according to data from the German Environment Agency.

Published: March 14, 2026, 1:04 pm

Trump policies set to increase rates of lung disease and death, study finds

Experts warn of ‘attack on Americans’ lungs’ from cuts to health programs, environmental rollbacks and other plans

Donald Trump’s policies are likely to drive soaring rates of lung disease and premature death, according to a wide-ranging new study by pulmonary specialists and public health experts.

The analysis, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, examines policies adopted during Trump’s second term across 10 areas, including healthcare access, environmental regulation, workplace protections and vaccine uptake.

Published: March 13, 2026, 12:00 pm

Week in wildlife: a wet macaque, four little pigs and a stowaway fox

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

Published: March 13, 2026, 7:00 am

Mining’s toxic timebomb: dams full of poisonous waste are dotted around the world. What happens when they burst?

While tailings dams are meant to last for ever, extreme weather events are making many unstable – with devastating consequences for nature and humans

As soon as the barrier broke, a flood of poison brought death to the river. Gushing through the fragile wall built to hold back mining waste in Zambia’s copper belt in February 2025, more than 50m cubic litres of acid and heavy metals poured into the Chambishi stream – a tributary of the Kafue River, the country’s longest waterway.

Thousands of lifeless fish rose to the surface as a plume of acid floated downriver, leaving dead crocodiles and other wildlife in its wake.

Published: March 13, 2026, 5:00 am

Judge blocks justice department from subpoenaing Fed chair Jerome Powell

Trump DoJ’s investigation was purportedly about the management of the central bank’s renovation

A federal judge on Friday blocked the justice department from serving subpoenas to Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell in an inquiry purported to be about the management of the central bank’s renovation.

Powell disclosed the surprise investigation on 11 January, and described the move as a threat to Fed independence and part of the Trump administration’s attempts to pressure the Fed to cut rates.

Published: March 13, 2026, 8:45 pm

Kyrsten Sinema says in court filings she had a ‘romantic’ relationship with guard

Former US senator’s admission comes after Heather Ammel sued her under North Carolina’s ‘homewrecker’ law

Kyrsten Sinema, a former US senator, admitted in court filings to having a “romantic and intimate” relationship with a married man who was a member of her security detail during her final year in office – but argues that his estranged wife should not be able to sue her over it.

The admission to the multi-state affair came in response to a lawsuit filed by Heather Ammel, who accused the former Arizona senator in federal court of breaking up her marriage under North Carolina’s so-called “homewrecker” law.

Published: March 13, 2026, 11:19 pm

Meta reportedly plans sweeping layoffs as AI costs increase

Sources tell Reuters layoffs could affect 20% or more of company as plans reflect broader tensions within big tech

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said.

Published: March 14, 2026, 12:55 am

Trump announces Ric Grenell departure as Kennedy Center head

President thanks Grenell for ‘outstanding work’ and says Matt Floca, vice-president of operations, will take over

Donald Trump has announced that Ric Grenell, the longtime Republican foreign policy adviser who oversaw far-reaching changes at the Kennedy Center, which prompted many artists to abandon the performing arts venue, will be replaced by Matt Floca, vice-president of operations at the center.

Trump made the announcement on social media that he has replaced Grenell, thanking him for the “outstanding work he has done”. Floca was photographed in December personally overseeing the addition of Trump’s name to the center’s facade. Grenell’s departure comes as the Kennedy Center prepares to close this summer for a two-year renovation.

Published: March 13, 2026, 11:20 pm

Trump urges other countries to deploy ships to help reopen strait of Hormuz

President calls on China, France, Japan and the UK to send vessels after US strikes Kharg Island oil facilities

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has called on other countries to send ships to help reopen the strait of Hormuz, the critical chokepoint for global oil supplies which Iran has closed to almost all shipping in retaliation for the joint US-Israeli offensive launched two weeks ago.

In the latest flurry of social media posts, Trump wrote on Saturday on Truth Social that “many countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe.”

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:19 pm

What is the strait of Hormuz and can the US stop Iran from blocking it?

Energy prices have soared as Iranian strikes and reports of mines prevent ships from transiting the chokepoint

• Middle East crisis – live updates

More than 1,000 cargo ships, mainly oil and gas tankers, have been blocked from transiting the strait of Hormuz by the Israeli-US war against Iran after Tehran closed the key maritime passage.

Officials in the Trump administration have suggested ways to get ships moving again, but amid continued Iranian strikes on tankers, and reports that Iran has started mining the narrow waterway, the proposed naval escorts have failed to materialise – even as energy prices have soared.

Published: March 13, 2026, 1:21 pm

‘Deliberate attack’: explosion damages Jewish school in Amsterdam

Mayor condemns ‘cowardly act’ on south side of city that caused limited damage and no reported injuries

An explosion has damaged a Jewish school in Amsterdam in what the city’s mayor described as “a deliberate attack against the Jewish community”.

The explosion early on Saturday in a residential neighbourhood on the south side of the city caused limited damage, the mayor, Femke Halsema, said in a press release, as police and firefighters arrived at the scene quickly.

Published: March 14, 2026, 8:57 am

‘You cannot unsee it’: what happened next for this year’s Oscar documentary nominees?

Films about prison abuse, ovarian cancer, women’s rights in Iran and more have impressed the Academy, but what real-world impact have they had?

• Oscars 2026: how to watch, nominations, what to read and predictions

The year 2025 was a banner one for nonfiction film, with several extraordinary documentaries that provided windows to unfathomable acts of courage, heart and vulnerability. Less so, unfortunately, for nonfiction cinema, it’s a difficult time for the production of politically challenging documentaries, whether in and about the US or abroad, and many projects struggled to find distribution after torturous paths to completion. (Cutting Through Rocks, the first Iranian documentary ever nominated for an Oscar, still has no streaming distribution and is only available in select theaters.)

Nevertheless, five incredible films make up the Oscars documentary slate this year – films that demonstrate how individual actions can challenge immense systems of oppression; how national agendas trickle into the idiosyncratic, marginal every day; and how one can find transcendence in the smallest of daily miracles. The very existence of these films feels improbable: one is composed almost entirely of police footage acquired through legal action. Another was filmed on contraband cell phones within Alabama state prisons. There’s a remarkably candid approach to processing terminal illness; an unprecedented record of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda efforts, filmed by a schoolteacher in rural Russia and smuggled out of the country; and an extremely rare glimpse into small-scale women’s rights efforts in north-west Iran.

Published: March 14, 2026, 9:04 am

My cultural awakening: a 60s folk band helped me find my place as a person of colour in Britain

Dragged along by my dad to see Pentangle, I heard something ancient that kickstarted my obsession with this country’s folklore – an enchanted, subversive and strange version of a Britain where I could truly belong

I was 15 years old; at that fumbling, awkward age on the precipice of adulthood, desperately trying to figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, and where I belonged in the world. I grew up feeling perpetually “in-between”: half-white, half-black; half-British, half-Caribbean, and on the faultline between what sometimes felt like two worlds at war.

One night in 2008 my dad took me to see Pentangle play at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. The band had risen to fame in the late 60s, known for fusing British folk melodies with blues and jazz syncopation. I must have stood out in the crowd – among the bearded men in sandals and socks – with my big hoop earrings and scraped-back hair. And although I dragged my feet on the way in, when I stepped out of the concert later that auspicious summer’s evening, I was changed for ever.

Published: March 14, 2026, 7:00 am

The Madison review – Michelle Pfeiffer’s new drama is thuddingly simplistic

This yawnsome homespun six-parter from the creator of Yellowstone aims to teach the womenfolk a lesson by dropping them into untamed, plain-talkin’ Montana. It’s full of terrible jokes and cloying aphorisms

Preston Clyburn (Kurt Russell) is laughing at trout. “Hah-hah,” says the rugged retiree, up to his buttocks in river as a Yellowstone cutthroat sploshes obligingly into his net. “I’m keepin’ it, and you’re cookin’ it,” he barks at his younger brother, Paul, who would rather Preston release the hapless vertebrate back into the wild but nevertheless respects his sibling’s need to connect with his inner Cro-Magnon (“the love of fishin’ goes back to early man …”).

Paul is played by Matthew Fox, who was once in Lost but is now marooned in a drama that requires him to say things like: “I make a memory a day, brother … sometimes more.” Despite this, Paul, too, is laughing. “Heh,” he says, as he and Preston splash and frolic in their matching utility slacks. “Heheheh.”

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:00 am

Oscars 2026: who should win… and who actually will? - The Latest

After months of red carpets and awards season campaigns, it’s all eyes on Hollywood’s night of nights - the Academy Awards. It looks like it will be a fight between Ryan Coogler’s thriller Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation One Battle After Another for most of the big prizes, with Jessie Buckley’s performance in Hamnet the clear favourite for best actress. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s film editor, Catherine Shoard

Published: March 13, 2026, 5:34 pm

Sinners or One Battle: what can we learn from this year’s anonymous Oscar ballots?

While Academy voters are supposed to keep their picks secret, another batch of anonymous ballots have leaked – giving us some insight on a hard-to-call race

• Oscars 2026: how to watch, nominations, what to read and predictions

It took a great deal of blood, sweat and tweets, but in 2016 the Academy finally took notice and started to embrace both diversity and modernity. The #OscarsSoWhite furore over two straight years of all-white nominees (Michael B Jordan’s Creed snub was in my opinion the cruelest) led to a dramatic shake-up and one that has continued ever since with more women, people of colour and international voters added to what had been an overwhelmingly homogenous base.

It has all led to an Oscars race that is increasingly harder to predict using old-fashioned thinking in ways that have become rather thrilling over time, the idea of an “Oscar movie” now far more slippery. Films such as Parasite, Anora, Moonlight, Anatomy of a Fall, Nomadland, Get Out and The Zone of Interest have now found their way into the major categories in past years, and this year’s crop showcases further progression – from foreign language picks to outsider narratives to pricklier characters than ever before.

Published: March 13, 2026, 3:02 pm

‘Wouldn’t life be easier if I were white?’: inside a provocative race-swap body horror

In director Amy Wang’s debut movie Slanted, a mysterious procedure allows people of colour to become white, speaking to her own difficult feelings as a teen

In March 2021, six Asian women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta. Amy Wang, an Asian Australian writer and director, who emigrated to America in 2015, remembers that tragedy well. “It was the first time I felt genuinely unsafe here,” she says. Alongside a growing fear, childhood memories resurfaced – the internal and external racism and the exhaustion of never quite fitting in. “I moved to Australia when I was seven and didn’t speak English – it was a tough time for me,” she admits. And then there was one particular recurring thought. “There were many times when I’d wake up as a teenager and think to myself: ‘Wouldn’t life be easier if I were white?’” So, she turned that past feeling into art.

The art is Slanted, Wang’s audacious feature debut – a film whose premise is, by design, completely unhinged. An insecure Asian American high schooler undergoes a procedure at a mysterious cosmetics clinic called Ethnos (tagline: if you can’t beat them … be them) that renders people of colour visibly white, permanently. It’s taking ‘I don’t see colour’ to the ultra-extreme: equality achieved only when we all look the same, and that means whiteness. The surgery works. And then things get complicated.

Published: March 13, 2026, 9:04 am

Elisabeth Leonskaja review – piano legend’s unerring sense of architecture reveals connections and kinships

Wigmore Hall, London
In her recital programme of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Chopin, Webern and Schubert, the Austrian pianist brought new insights and expressive playing

Eighty-year-old piano legend Elisabeth Leonskaja throws herself on to the piano stool and into the two tumultuous descending chromatic scales that open Beethoven’s Op 77 Fantasia in G minor in a single gesture. We have a long way to go in a recital programme that reads like an Mittel-European lucky dip – Beethoven, Schoenberg, Chopin, Webern, Schubert – and Leonskaja isn’t messing around.

Of course, there was nothing chance about the programming. The Austrian pianist’s expressive, emotional playing may grab the headlines, but it’s the unerring sense of underlying architecture that’s the thread through her long career. We heard that here, not just within each of the works, but in the shared foundations, and sometimes secret connecting passages, she revealed between them.

Published: March 13, 2026, 1:09 pm

Add to playlist: the dadaist cubist racket of Angine de Poitrine and the week’s best new tracks

This hyped anonymous duo match the oddness of their costumes with shredding metal, microtonal flourishes and Dalek-style vocals

From Saguenay, Quebec
Recommended if you like Holy Fuck, Prescott, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
Up next New LP Angine de Poitrine Volume II released 3 April. Touring the UK in May

In 2023, two young men – their earthly identities a jealously guarded secret – began “a joke that spilled into reality” intended to simulate something like its namesake heart condition. Weary of the solemn aura that attaches to guitar rock, they began playing what their website describes as “mantra-rock dada pythago-cubiste” as Angine de Poitrine. It is a joke delivered with mesmerising finesse.

Published: March 13, 2026, 12:00 pm

James Blake: Trying Times review – platitudes about politics and Kanye can’t detract from an excellent album

(Good Boy)
Amid the stylistic shifts of Blake’s seventh record come samples of Dusty Springfield and Dizzee Rascal: gripping distractions from some preachy sentiments

Of all the things you might expect from a James Blake album – exquisite minimalism, plaintive vocal distortion, appearances from hip-hop’s great and good – chin-stroking socio0political commentary probably isn’t one of them. But as the title suggests, our current predicament is precisely what the 37-year-old aims to address on his seventh solo record. Unfortunately, preachy, banal sentiments (“Everyone’s getting different information / So how can we get on the same side?”) sit awkwardly amid the ethereal melancholia he long ago perfected as the poster boy for London’s 2010s indie-electronica scene.

Subsequently, however, Blake became better known for collaborating with huge US rappers, including Kanye West: the pair recorded a succession of still-unreleased tracks in 2022. Through the High Wire – seemingly a repurposing of one of those songs – scans as a bold defence of his disgraced former colleague. “People love a story,” croons Blake, explaining that “whispers change” until “we all fall from glory”.

Published: March 13, 2026, 8:40 am

The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup

The Library of Traumatic Memory by Neil Jordan; The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan; Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison; Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman; Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran

The Library of Traumatic Memory by Neil Jordan (Head of Zeus, £20)
Better known as a film-maker, Jordan has never stopped writing novels. His latest opens in 2084 in rural Ireland, where Christian Cartwright works for the Huxley Institute in the titular library, secretly misusing its memory storage technology to talk with his dead lover Isolde, restoring her to a semblance of digital life. The story moves between Christian’s experiences and similar events two centuries earlier in the life of his ancestor, Montagu Cartwright, the architect responsible for the Huxley Mansion and local church, who owned an ancient obsidian mirror, believed to have been the famous scrying glass of John Dee. Lyrically written, brimming with ideas, sometimes sinister and often humorous, it’s an enchanting read.

The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan (Tor, £22)
This debut novel is based on the historic Beast of Gévaudan, a wolf-like creature that terrorised a region of France between 1764 and 1767. But it is much more than another werewolf fantasy. The narrator, Sebastian Grave, seems immortal, writing a memoir in the 21st century about his adventures in the 1700s. Even then he was old, and shared his mind and body with a demon called Sarmodel, whose occult powers helped him to destroy a terrible beast. Twenty years later, the same area is once again ravaged by a bloodthirsty creature: since Sebastian is sent for by the man who had been his boon companion on the first hunt, and his lover, he hopes this means an end to their long estrangement. A wonderfully original, engrossing novel, combining history and fantasy, with a unique narrative voice and fascinating characters.

Published: March 13, 2026, 12:00 pm

Hooked by Asako Yuzuki review – follow-up to global hit Butter

A Tokyo high-flyer tries to befriend her favourite blogger in a novel that wears its aura of black comedy lightly, and its political statements more heavily

Asako Yuzuki’s international bestseller Butter was a taste sensation based on the true story of a Japanese female serial killer and gourmet chef who scammed and poisoned male victims with her culinary offerings. Attempting to get a scoop, a journalist bonds with the convicted prisoner by asking her for recipe tips, and gradually reassesses her own life and values as a result of this peculiar relationship. One review described the book as “the Martha Stewart Show meets The Silence of the Lambs”, but as well as the crime thriller/foodie mashup, a critique of capitalist society and deep-seated misogyny also emerged from the narrative. Yuzuki’s prose style, a mix of the banal and the profound, proved to be catnip for sales.

Hooked is the follow-up for English-language readers, though it was written earlier, in 2015, and like the previous novel is translated with crackling verve by Polly Barton. While a more introspective work, its high-wire plot and uneven trajectory make for a relentlessly dizzying experience. Fans of Butter might even view it as a trial run.

Published: March 13, 2026, 7:00 am

Daisy Johnson: ‘I wasn’t a fan of David Szalay, but Flesh is a masterpiece’

The Booker-shortlisted author on a momentous teenage encounter with The Bone People, getting a buzz from Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla, and trying to avoid The Lorax

My earliest reading memory
Memories from my childhood are opening up as I read to my own young children at the moment. Something in the pictures of Helen Cooper’s The Bear Under the Stairs or Lane Smith’s The Big Pets takes me back to being four years old and being read to.

My favourite book growing up
I love the Sabriel series by Garth Nix and first read it alongside my father and, later, my younger brother. It was truly a shared joy to be immersed in that world, for a book to give us a new connection to one another.

Published: March 13, 2026, 10:00 am

Light and Thread by Han Kang review – a tantalising book of reflections

These essays from the Nobel literature winner open up her novels and offer beautiful imagery

When Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024, the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. In other words, Han’s work looks both out at the world – towards the 1980 Gwangju massacre fictionalised in her novel Human Acts –  and inward to the human experience, as with The Vegetarian’s portrait of one woman’s claustrophobic struggle.

Much of the appeal of Han’s work is in its mystery, the gaps she leaves for the reader to close. So it is tantalising to have this collection of prose, “a book of reflections” that might illuminate the darker corners of her work.

Published: March 13, 2026, 9:00 am

Less respawning, more re-rolling: six of the best board games based on video games

From war zones and socially virtuous farming to ever-changing boards and role-playing with 167 dice, here’s our pick of the most absorbing table-based entertainment

Video games have long been heavily inspired by physical games, from chess and Scrabble to Dungeons & Dragons. The deck-building collectible card game, for example, has become immensely popular in digital form, thanks to hits such as Slay the Spire, Marvel Snap and Balatro. Now, an increasing number of games are going in the opposite direction, trading pixels for pieces and screens for spinners. Here are six of our favourites.

Company of Heroes 2nd Edition (Bad Crow Games, £119.70)

Published: March 13, 2026, 10:00 am

From Björk’s swan dress to Céline’s back-to-front tux: the most iconic Oscar red carpet looks

Ridiculed, ‘memed’ and consigned to worst-dressed lists, seven standout Oscar outfits from over the years

At the 2001 Oscars, Gladiator won best picture with Russell Crowe picking up best actor. But, if those facts might have faded to fodder for a pub quiz, the red carpet produced a moment of fashion legend – Björk wearing what is now known as “the swan dress”.

Made by the Macedonian designer Marjan Pejoski, the tutu skirt with the swan draped around the musician’s neck – and egg accessories – was panned. “It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen,” said the TV fashion critic Steven Cojocaru.

Published: March 13, 2026, 1:04 pm

‘I’m wearing the tree fibre undies right now!’ An audience with the organisers of the Oscar goodie bags

Diamond watches, customisable pre-nups and five brands of marijuana are amongst the rich pickings for the starfluencers in line for acting honours. Our film critic gets a preview

It is now 20 years since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences discontinued their official Oscars goodie bag. Modest by today’s standards, this bundle of presents was subject to a distinctly non-glamorous IRS crackdown regarding the taxation of its contents, which it viewed as non-cash compensation.

But no sooner had that been taken away than a flurry of beneficent gifting moguls swooped in to take their place. Hollywood this week has been gripped by a discreet yet intense gifting frenzy, as rooms in luxury hotels and spas are requisitioned as gifting suites for the A-listers upon whom hugely expensive items will be pressed in the hope that these starfluencers will mention them on their Instagram feed.

Published: March 13, 2026, 4:53 pm

Jimmy Kimmel on Trump being gifted an Olympic medal: ‘Yet another award he didn’t win’

Late-night hosts addressed Melania Trump’s women’s history month speech, Maga’s Iran messaging and the ongoing oil crisis

On Thursday night, late-night hosts discussed an odd White House women’s history month event, the fallout of the war on Iran and why Melania Trump is starting to sound an awful lot like her husband.

Published: March 13, 2026, 3:36 pm

Oscars 2026: how to watch, nominations, what to read and predictions

Get ready for drama and glamour. Hollywood’s annual end-of-season party is on Sunday – here is your guide on where to watch and what to expect

The end is in sight: after months of campaigning, roundtables, red carpets and hot takes, it’s time for the big show. The Academy Awards are Hollywood’s end of season party, its senior prom and sports day all rolled into one, as the film world’s great and good stuff themselves into their tuxedos and/or fanciest frocks for a night of (we hope) entertaining mutual backslapping.

It’s fair to say that, so far, this awards season has been somewhat eventful, from the N-word fiasco at the UK’s normally sedate Baftas to the Timothée Chalamet Balletgate. Now the dust has settled, it looks like a straight fight between Ryan Coogler’s vampire thriller Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Thomas Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another for most of the big prizes. Anderson’s chunky auteur project looked for a while as though it might have the edge, but since nomination day, when Sinners got more nods than any other previous film, momentum has appeared to move decisively in its direction. We shall see.

Published: March 13, 2026, 12:19 pm

Pristine waters teeming with marine life: a deep dive into the Greek island of Alonissos

Divers come for one of the world’s most significant marine reserves, but there’s plenty to do on land too – from hiking trails and beaches to seafood tavernas

Greek divers surface around me shouting about “megalo” groupers. I’m surrounded by enormous grins above the water and big fish below. A happy place to be. A bunch of us, divers and snorkellers, are hanging around Agios Petros reef off the island of Alonissos, and there’s a reason the groupers are big here. The National Marine Park of Alonissos Northern Sporades, established in 1992, is Greece’s largest working marine protected area (MPA) – two bigger MPAs have just been created, but are not yet operational. The protective measures appear to be working, judging by the size, abundance and diversity of marine life – glassy waters teeming with colourful fish and precious shells make swimming here an absolute dream.

For those who like to go deeper, Alonissos is the site of Greece’s first underwater archaeological park and museum – the impressive Peristera wreck, with its giant cargo of amphorae preserved from the 5th century BC. This one is for certified divers descending with accredited local dive centres. I’m with one of those schools, Ikion Diving, but today we’re doing something more accessible. We’re in the village of Steni Vala for the launch of a citizen science project, the Highly Protected Mediterranean Initiative (much more fun than it sounds). Ikion is partnering with the universities of Thessaloniki and the Aegean to offer free snorkelling and diving trips logging native and alien species. I’m worried about my fish ID skills, but the effervescent biologist Katerina Konsta runs a great briefing and we’re given dive slates with images to mark (imparting a childish delight at playing scientist).

Published: March 14, 2026, 7:00 am

My mother’s best advice: go in to bat for the ones you love

She wasn’t a great one for dispensing wisdom. Instead, she fought for me whenever I most needed it

Mum was a brilliant non-giver of advice. Now Dad, he had his pearls. “If you do something, do it with a good heart.” It sounded platitudinous to me, but he had a point. And then there was his favourite: “If you think something bad about someone, say it up there [pointing to his head] but not out loud.” Dad was a good man, but that infuriated me.

Mum played a bigger part in my life. She often had to fight like crazy for me – to keep me in school when I’d told the dinner lady to fuck off at the age of five (no, I don’t know where it came from); to take on the doctors who labelled me a malingerer when I had encephalitis; to allow me back into mainstream education after I’d had three years off, and finally to persuade the University of Leeds to let me in after I’d messed up my A-levels.

Published: March 14, 2026, 5:00 am

‘I could barely think because it was so bad’: how pain changes us

After living with chronic pain, Darcey Steinke wanted to know how it affected others. Her memoir, This Is the Door, explores both isolation and freedom

Chronic pain has a way of upending a life.

In her memoir This Is the Door, writer Darcey Steinke writes that “pain, like failure, breaks into our everyday lives and upsets who we thought we were and what we thought we could do”.

Published: March 13, 2026, 4:00 pm

Blind date: ‘He looked at me, 5ft, and said he was looking for someone around 5ft 6in’

Robin, 68, a retired property manager, meets Jacquie, 69, a retired secretary

What were you hoping for?
To meet someone with a nice personality and similar interests.

Published: March 14, 2026, 6:00 am

Tim Dowling: a curious incident with the dog in the nighttime

Every night I wake up to find the dog staring at me, but tonight a terrifying noise disturbs us all …

In the middle of the night I feel the warm breath of a creature stirring my hair. It’s too dark to see anything, but I know from experience that the dog is standing by the bed, chin resting on the mattress next to my head, gently exhaling into my face.

The point is this: to wake me up without waking my wife.

Published: March 14, 2026, 6:00 am

In my 20s ‘treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen’ felt like power. In my 50s I see that dating strategy for what it is: fear

I am capable, a woman of substance. Yet I get a ‘maybe’ from a man I meet on a dating app and I regress three decades

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I was raised on the scripture of the 1990s: Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen. It was the Golden Rule. The dating equivalent of Slip, Slop, Slap. Whispered at sleepovers. Bolded in the margins of Dolly magazine. Never pick up on the first ring. Never say you’re free on a Saturday. Be the prize, not the contestant.

In my 20s, this felt like power. (It was mostly fear in better lighting but I didn’t know that yet.) I mastered breezy indifference. I timed my texts to the minute: double the time he took, plus 10 for mystery. I thought I was teaching men my value. I thought I was training them to love me.

Published: March 13, 2026, 2:00 pm

My mother’s best advice: you’re allowed to enjoy nice things

Whether it was a solo trip to a cafe, a nice lipstick or merely wandering around a shop that was out of her price range, my mum showed me that a little luxury goes a long way

My mum’s best advice was “You’re allowed to enjoy nice things.” Both elements – the nice things and being allowed them – were equally important. She was a fervent believer in the restorative power of a treat, taking herself out for solo breakfasts most weeks (a bacon muffin and a cup of coffee in the cosseted calm of Bettys Tea Rooms), ordering chips at the slightest provocation, staying in chic hotels she had a pre-internet gift for ferreting out and being coaxed by department store salesladies into buying expensive unguents.

She was even keener on treating others, including me. During my teens and early 20s, when I was ill and unhappy in my body, she took me for lavish lunches, booked me massages and accompanied me on spa trips. I recently found a note she had sent me when I was slogging, lonely and sad, through my finals, which had obviously come with some cash. “Buy yourself something frivolous darling,” it read. “A nice nail polish?”

Published: March 13, 2026, 12:00 pm

‘Beauty is always changing’: Alessandro Michele’s Roman tribute to Valentino

The first proper show since Valentino’s death is about the late designer, about beauty – and about Michele’s mother

Valentino Garavani wanted to make beautiful clothes for the women who could afford them. The perpetually tanned designer, whose vision of jet set glamour was matched only by his own yacht-and-pug lifestyle, died in January. So there was an obvious logic in taking the first proper catwalk show since his death off the fashion week schedule and back to Rome, where he lived, worked, and died. Milan and Paris may be the capitals of European style, but Rome looks better.

Garavani left his own brand almost 20 years ago. But his singular approach to beauty has not been without its obstacles for his most recent successor, Alessandro Michele, who took over the fashion house in 2024. “It’s a complicated DNA because beauty is always changing,” he said after the show, which took place in the 17th-century Palazzo Barberini. “This collection is about Valentino. It’s about beauty. But it’s [also] about the tension between me and the brand, a beauty I’m trying to translate.”

Published: March 13, 2026, 12:17 pm

Experience: I suffered terrible burns as a child – then became a firefighter

I was sick and tired of the world treating me like a victim, so I decided to flip the narrative. At 25, I tried out for my local volunteer fire academy

When I was six years old, my entire body went up in flames. It was 1992, in my home town of Hawthorne, Nevada. My older brothers were out playing and I went to call them for dinner. I followed their voices, just a few houses down from ours, to find them playing with a bowl of kerosene they’d found and a lighter. When they flicked the lighter, the bowl caught fire. My brother freaked out and kicked it over in a bid to contain the flames. They weren’t aware I was just inches away.

Soon I was submerged in flames. The pain was excruciating. I was tackled to the ground by a neighbour I’d never met, who covered me in a sleeping bag, extinguishing the flames. It haunts me to this day to think of what he would have seen: a six-year-old boy on fire outside his house.

Published: March 13, 2026, 5:00 am

Plant a blossom tree in your garden and feel its magic for years to come

The sight of blossom against a bright blue sky is one of the joys of spring, and the right tree will keep on giving year after year

Just shy of three years ago, I planted a cherry tree in my garden. It was the result of a deeply postpartum, vaguely chaotic research mission: to find a tree that was small yet substantial enough for my compact London garden. I wanted a pollution-hardy tree with flowers the right shade of pale pink that would bloom around the time of my newborn son’s vernal equinox birthday. Celebrating a baby’s new arrival with a tree or a shrub is one of the most romantic, and hopefully enduring, gifts one can give.

I chose a Prunus ‘Accolade’ (pictured above). It feels funny to associate that tree with the boisterous little boy I live with. But the blossom was undeniably magic. There was a window on our stairway that framed it perfectly. Every time we popped up or down we got a hit of candyfloss pink. Six months later, when we marked his half-years with the autumn equinox, the tree’s leaves would begin to turn golden.

Published: March 13, 2026, 11:00 am

Second world war veteran, 100, becomes oldest-known US organ donor

Dale Steele, who died in February, ‘is a powerful reminder that generosity has no age limit’, says CEO of non-profit

After spending some of his prime years aiding German concentration camp survivors and guarding Nazi leaders tried for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, a US second world war veteran is now believed to have become his country’s oldest known organ donor.

The story of 100-year-old Dale Steele, who died in February after a head injury led to his being placed on life support, demonstrates how donors’ health is a more important consideration than how old they are, according to Live On Nebraska, an organ-procurement organization in his home state.

Published: March 13, 2026, 11:00 am

Ex-CIA analyst David McCloskey on the Mossad’s intelligence inside Iran: ‘I was surprised’

The podcast host and author of The Persian reflects on why Israel’s precision in Iran caught him off guard

As the author of a novel depicting the Mossad’s snatch-and-assassination squads inside Iran, David McCloskey was less shocked than most by the stunning killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the theocratic regime’s most powerful figure, in a strike carried out by Israel.

What caught him more off guard were reports that the up-to-the-minute, pinpoint accurate intelligence essential for its success was provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Published: March 13, 2026, 11:00 am

Anthropic-Pentagon battle shows how big tech has reversed course on AI and war

Less than a decade ago, Google employees scuttled any military use of its AI. Now Anthropic is fighting Trump officials not over if, but how

The standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon has forced the tech industry to once again grapple with the question of how its products are used for war – and what lines it will not cross. Amid Silicon Valley’s rightward shift under Donald Trump and the signing of lucrative defense contracts, big tech’s answer is looking very different than it did even less than a decade ago.

Anthropic’s feud with the Trump administration escalated three days ago as the AI firm sued the Department of Defense, claiming that the government’s decision to blacklist it from government work violated its first amendment rights. The company and the Pentagon have been locked in a months-long standoff, with Anthropic attempting to prohibit its AI model from being used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons.

Published: March 13, 2026, 11:00 am

The week around the world in 20 pictures

Crisis in the Middle East, Ramadan in Gaza, the Milano Cortina Winter Paralympics and Paris fashion week – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Published: March 13, 2026, 7:00 pm