Residents in Oleshky have been enduring a worsening humanitarian crisis due to the lack of food, electricity and other resources
The French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu has just issued a statement on a shooting in a town west of Paris this morning where one person was killed and four others injured.
Police said a gunman had opened fire in Trappes, in the Yvelines, and neighbouring La Verriere. The gunman was later arrested in nearby Coignieres.
Tory leader claims prime minister is avoiding difficult decisions as she urges him to increase defence spending
Kemi Badenoch has accused Andy Burnham of “fiddling while Europe is at risk of burning”, as she repeated her call for the prime minister to cut the welfare budget to fund increase spending on defence.
Speaking to the Telegraph, the Tory leader said that “Burnham may be a people pleaser but difficult choices cannot be avoided through dither and delay”.
Queen speaks of love of reading at festival for charity she founded after success of her Instagram book club
Queen Camilla has spoken of her love for books with a “life-enhancing power” after a series of allegations were made about King Charles in extracts from Earl Spencer’s memoir about the life of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Camilla was welcomed to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire for the first day of the festival for the Queen’s Reading Room, a charity she founded after the success of her Instagram book club during the pandemic.
Players in Everton v Ipswich Town match wear black armbands as supporters join in minute’s applause
Players wore black armbands during Everton’s home match against Ipswich Town on Saturday, as part of a tribute to three-year-old Noah Woods, whose body was found after he went missing in Suffolk this week.
A photograph of the boy was shown on the big screen before the Premier League game in Liverpool, and three minutes after kick-off both sets of supporters stood to applaud in memory of Noah.
Leader says party ‘won’t give up the fight’ to defeat ‘nasty populism’ in first-day speech to delegates in Brighton
The Liberal Democrats’ leader, Sir Ed Davey, took aim at Nigel Farage and Elon Musk on the first day of his party’s annual conference, saying Lib Dems would not give up the fight to defeat “nasty populism” and Reform UK’s “£72m arsenal of hate and lies”.
On stage at Brighton Centre, Davey called on the assembled delegates not to be deterred in the face of Reform’s hope “that the anger and the hatred and the lies will grind us down until eventually we just give up”.
Authorities issued warnings for city in first such alerts for Riyadh since fighting with Iran-backed Houthis escalated in July
Yemen’s Houthis said they attacked “sensitive” sites in the Saudi capital with missiles and drones, hours after flames and a large plume of black smoke were seen rising above Riyadh airport on Saturday.
The Saudi government sent air raid alerts to citizens by phone overnight warning of aerial attacks, marking the first time the government has issued such alerts for Riyadh since fighting with the Iran-backed Houthis escalated in July.
More than 100 people reported to have joined search for Noah, who is autistic, non-verbal and has partial hearing loss
Police are urging people to check their gardens and sheds for a three-year-old boy who went missing on Tuesday during a visit to a playground near the Suffolk-Essex border.
The boy, named Noah, was last seen at 3pm in Merriam Close in Brantham, near Manningtree, before being separated from a relative. Officers from Suffolk constabulary said Noah was reported to have run down an alleyway near the playground towards a housing estate.
Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud has reported the mood in Gaza this morning following news of Hamas’s potential disarmament.
Palestinians have heard repeated statements about their fate in the three years since the current war began between Israel and Hamas, so last night’s announcement by Donald Trump wasn’t met with any particular joy or celebration. “There is scepticism and cautiousness among Palestinians,” Mahoud writes from Gaza City in the north of the Strip.
US president says his Board of Peace reached ‘historic’ deal for disarmament of Hamas while militant group says if Israel does not implement deal, ‘neither will we’
A liquefied natural gas tanker controlled by QatarEnergy exited the strait of Hormuz overnight – the first such vessel visible on ship-tracking data to leave the waterway since 11 July, data from analytics firms showed on Thursday.
The Al Areesh tanker, which loaded a cargo at Qatar’s Ras Laffan terminal around 4-6 July, sailed out of the strait overnight on 29 July, according to Kpler and LSEG data.
Project a Black Planet: Film, a new season of screenings at the Barbican in London exemplifies how the movement was an act of solidarity, resistance and fierce creativity
Algiers, 1969. What had, for seven years, been the metropolis of a newly independent country became, over the course of 12 days in July, the cosmopolitan centre of an entire continent. That summer, Algeria played host to the first Pan-African Cultural festival (Panaf) and the capital’s streets were transformed into a vista of energising performers, flanked by placards announcing each country’s delegation: Ethiopia, Liberia, Mali.
Picture an Olympics-style opening ceremony, then discard it, for the images captured in William Klein’s documentary of the event, The Pan-African Festival of Algiers, hint at the very dissolving of barriers between spectacle and spectator – an act that brings to life a quote, shown on screen, from Guinea’s first president Sékou Touré: “We must make this revolution with the people … and the songs will come.”
From one hostile environment to another, the documentaries and dramas ranging from Nigeria and Syria to British immigration give vivid life to an experience that can feel very remote
As World Refugee Day approaches on Saturday, this year’s Refugee Week offers a multitude of events taking place across the UK, including a film festival that takes audiences from Ain el-Helweh – Lebanon’s largest refugee camp for Palestinians – in Mahdi Fleifel’s A World Not Ours and to an immigration removal centre in Dreamers, directed by Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor.
The UK’s asylum system is the focus of Allies in Exile, a first-person documentary from Syrian film-makers Hasan Kattan and Fadi al-Halabi that premiered on Tuesday at the BFI Southbank, which explores the labyrinth facing asylum seekers. Meanwhile, refugee charity Choose Love, in partnership with Tarot productions, curated a selection of four short films that together chronicle different stages in the search for asylum, from the difficulties of everyday life in a person’s home country through the perilous journeys made over land and sea, and arrival in a hostile environment marked by ostracism and ongoing trauma.The event, which took place on Thursday at Picturehouse Central, London, was entitled Fearless Stories and showcased films that “challenge division”.Josie Fernandez-Marelli, chief executive of Choose Love, says: “The UK wouldn’t be what it is today without all the incredible people and cultures that make it up. As division is growing, it’s more important than ever to work together to make sure that refugees are seen as human beings, with hopes, dreams and ambitions.”
Short story collection All Around the World will be available for £1 in attempt to widen access to quality fiction
An initiative that aims to widen access to Booker prize-winning authors is set to launch this week, as research finds that more than a third of UK adults find it hard to read books through to the end.
The Booker Prize Foundation is launching a short story collection entitled All Around the World, including works by the Booker prize winners Anne Enright, David Szalay and Booker prize nominee Nadifa Mohamed. The collection was curated by another former winner, Roddy Doyle.
While the population of southern Lebanon have sometimes felt abandoned by their own state, a show in London told their stories and celebrated their resistance
In one room of London’s Palestine House, a large screen plays looped news footage from southern Lebanon. Tanks and armoured vehicles plough their way through a rural landscape of hills and villages, amid frequent interruptions of mortar fire. As a person turns away from the screen, she says that “it’s like watching the news now”.
For all its similarities to current events, the archival video actually dates from 2000 – the year of Israel’s withdrawal from the region, following an 18-year-long military occupation. Another corner of the room plays host to broadsheet pages from newspapers of the time, including a front-page report from the Guardian’s then Middle East correspondent, Suzanne Goldenberg.
With the island back in Washington’s sights, the Screen Cuba festival is taking UK audiences beyond the blockade
At a packed trade union meeting in Havana, one of the workers calls out management’s delays in sending a technician to repair faulty machinery. Perhaps, he suggests, the required specialist has yet to be born. Another labourer called Lina – one of the few women employed at the site – stands up to criticise the dilapidated state of the dockyard.
All the while, a bourgeois theatre director named Oscar looks on in search of characters for his next creative project. This is Hasta Cierto Punto (“Up to a Certain Point”), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1983 film interrogating the state of gender relations in post-revolutionary Cuba.
Remembering and documentation are radical acts in Lebanon, a country with a tumultuous history and no national archive. Daher’s effervescent cultural collage is a direct challenge to collective amnesia
At one point in Lana Daher’s film Do You Love Me, a woman questions the repeated advice of those around her to simply forget Lebanon’s 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Why does she insist on “digging into the past”, especially when “this war was no worse than the others”? Yet it is precisely her act of remembering – of knowing that she “did not dream” the actuality of war – that prompts her to dig “into the present”.
The Lebanese director’s debut feature is itself a substantive feat of excavation, with more than 20,000 sources consulted in collaboration with the editor, Qutaiba Barhamji (who worked on The Voice of Hind Rajab), to unearth the footage that would produce this 76-minute film. It is substantive also in the sense that this work was done in relation to a country that does not have a national archive.
Rammed earth sourced from, or near, the grounds of a proposed building site is attracting attention as an eco-friendly construction material
From afar, the low-rise homestead perched in the Wiltshire countryside may look like any other rural outpost, but step closer and the texture of the walls reveal something distinct from the usual facade of cement, brick and steel.
The Rammed Earth House in Cranborne Chase is one of the few projects in the UK that has been made by unstabilised rammed earth – a building material that consists entirely of compacted earth and which has been used as far back as the Neolithic period.
Volunteer workers say increasing case numbers and dozens of dead birds raise fears spread is wider than recorded
Members of the public and charity volunteers are working to contain a suspected outbreak of bird flu among swans in the Thames Valley, amid signs that confirmed cases are continuing to rise.
Since October, 324 cases of bird flu in swans have been recorded by the Animal and Plant Health Agency (Apha), which is sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Of these, 39 were recorded in the first four weeks of 2026 alone.
This year’s RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, which begins on Friday, could reveal ‘some surprise migratory visitors’
The chances of spotting a fieldfare or redwing in 2026 have risen, thanks to cold and unsettled weather in Europe, prompting a bumper year in birds migrating to the UK.
The RSPB highlighted the trend on the eve of the Big Garden Birdwatch, an annual event that constitutes the world’s largest garden wildlife survey, which will take place between 23 and 25 January.
Manual for building design aims to encourage low-carbon construction as alternative to steel and concrete
An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it’s time we took it seriously as a building material, too.
This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be “bamboo-ready” as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper alternative to steel and concrete.
Poet’s sixth collection explores the destruction of the natural world, with a perspective shaped by her upbringing in rural Canada
The Canadian poet Karen Solie has won the 2025 TS Eliot poetry prize for a collection of work, Wellwater, which explores the destruction of the natural world.
Solie was announced as the winner at a ceremony held at the Wallace Collection on Monday evening, and will receive £25,000 in prize money from the TS Eliot Foundation. Wellwater, her sixth collection, co-won the Forward prize for best collection last October, alongside Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Avidyā.
Wellwater by Karen Solie (Pan Macmillan, £12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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