World news | The Guardian

Picture of Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, is likely to be by Sir Anthony van Dyck, finds Courtauld’s reportAs a leading art historian, Christopher Wright has uncovered several old master paintings in public and private collections over five decades. Now he has discovered that a copy of a painting by Sir Anthony van Dyck, which he bought for himself for £65 in 1970, may actually be an original by the 17th-century Flemish court painter to King Charles I.“I bought it from a jobbing dealer in west London,” he said. “I was buying it as a copy, as an art historian. I took no notice of it, in a strange way. The syndrome is the cobbler’s children are the worst shod. So the art historian’s collection is the least looked at.” Wright estimated the painting might be worth around £40,000, although some Van Dycks have fetched seven-figure sums. Continue reading...

The port near Beijing began mass testing after 20 children and adults tested positive, including at least two with OmicronTianjin, a major Chinese port city near the capital Beijing, has begun mass-testing its 14 million residents after a cluster of 20 children and adults tested positive for Covid-19, including at least two with the Omicron variant.Those infected include 15 students aged between eight and 13, a staff member at an after-school centre and four parents. The citywide testing, begun on Sunday, is to be completed over two days. Continue reading...

Leading dancers and directors say they find the classic costume both physically and artistically restrictiveThe ballerina’s tutu remains a traditional object of desire for many young girls: an enduring emblem of diaphanous femininity, as well as the twirling centrepiece of many a childhood music box. But is its longstanding link with the world of professional dance now out of date?Several leading performers and choreographers think so, and while the twinkly costume of The Nutcracker’s Sugar Plum Fairy may not quite have been consigned to the wardrobe archives, its days may be numbered. Continue reading...

Mohamud Hassan, 24, died hours after being released without charge from Cardiff Bay police stationThe family of a man who died suddenly after being released from police custody are calling on the attorney general and home secretary to intervene and demand that the police watchdog release bodycam and CCTV footage showing the final hours of his life.Mohamud Mohammed Hassan, 24, died hours after he was released from Cardiff Bay police station a year ago. He was arrested at his Cardiff home on suspicion of breach of the peace, but released without charge. Continue reading...

Paul Gardner recounts his mostly unsuccessful efforts to get to know the starPaul Gardner bagged himself a rare interview with Robert De Niro for the Observer Magazine of 7 August 1977 (‘Making It – the man from Mean Streets’).Gardner had met De Niro in Rome for the filming of Bertolucci’s 1900 – ‘an extravagant tapestry of Italian history’ – but was rebuffed. Then three years later he caught up with him in Hollywood, De Niro having spent five months on Martin Scorsese’s film musical New York, New York. Continue reading...

The adventurous part of you is tricking your sensible side into falling back down a hole you’ve just climbed out ofThe question I’m 47 years old. Five years ago, I got involved with a married man with two kids. The relationship was intense, hyper-sexual and obsessive. I felt uneasy and tried to end it many times, but was always easily persuaded otherwise by him. He started living separately from his wife two years back and there was terrible heartache with the children going back and forth. I was getting unhappier, more neurotic, and not in control of my see-saw emotions.Then the pandemic brought immense trauma. First, my mother died, swiftly followed by my father and then, in the second wave, my sister-in-law also died of coronavirus. I have become entwined with my brother’s life, helping him resurrect a routine, looking out for his two daughters. Continue reading...

‘Critical’ or ‘essential’ workers who are asymptomatic no longer required to self-isolate if job is essential for growing, manufacturing or transporting food

As she prepares for crunch EU talks this week, the foreign secretary says her priority is to protect Northern Ireland’s peace dealThe foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has warned she is prepared to unilaterally override parts of the post-Brexit agreement on Northern Ireland if the negotiations she is newly leading fail.Truss said she would suggest “constructive proposals” to her EU counterpart, Maroš Šefčovič, this week during their first face-to-face talks. Continue reading...

Portraits by fashion photographer Paolo Roversi show Kate wearing Alexander McQueen dressesThe Duchess of Cambridge has marked her 40th birthday by releasing three glamorous portraits of herself.Pictured in different Alexander McQueen dresses, Kate posed for fashion photographer Paolo Roversi, who has worked with stars such as Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss and described photographing the duchess as “a moment of pure joy”. Continue reading...

Latest developments as Philippines reports record 26,458 cases and scientist says Omicron variant could become endemic in UK

Reciprocal restrictions on missile deployments in region could also be on table in Geneva negotiations on Monday

I remember intense fear and despair, and the objectively correct understanding that we could die

On Saturday, Britain became the seventh nation to reach the milestone after the US, Brazil, India, Russia, Mexico and Peru

The French president is imposing more social curbs in bid to convince unvaccinated to get jabbedAnti-vaccine protesters rallied in cities across France on Saturday, denouncing President Emmanuel Macron’s intent to “piss off” people refusing Covid-19 shots by tightening curbs on their civil liberties.Macron said this week he wanted to irritate unvaccinated people by making their lives so complicated they would end up getting jabbed. Unvaccinated people were irresponsible and unworthy of being considered citizens, he added. Continue reading...

Western Scotland, Northern Ireland, north-west England and north Wales forecast to see frosty conditionsSnow and ice are expected to hit parts of the UK this weekend as bands of rain move in from the west, the Met Office has warned.Western Scotland, Northern Ireland, north-west England and north Wales are forecast to experience frosty conditions as downpours continue into Sunday morning. Continue reading...

Met seeks information after Albanian national was caught in fire at a lock-up garage on New Year’s EveA man died after a fire in a cannabis factory on New Year’s Eve in east London.Police said a manslaughter investigation is under way and are appealing for information after the fatal incident at a lock-up garage on Southwold Road in Clapton. Continue reading...

For the late-blooming, quietly bestselling author, inhabiting her characters is crucial. And so in her new novel, Free Love, she becomes a middle-aged woman in 1960s London who abandons her family for a much younger man…Tessa Hadley walks into the sitting room of a hotel in London’s West End that is a pleasant mixture of Christmassy, deserted and library-quiet – a welcome side-effect of the pandemic. At 65, she has an eager, intelligent, girlish face and an elegant angularity (I’ve not seen her handwriting but would bet on forward-sloping italics). She is wearing a long string of red beads against a white sweater that is reminiscent of her character Alice’s fashion advice in her 2015 novel, The Past: “you should go for this understated thing, that the French women do”.I feel, from the minute we meet, as if Hadley were a friend unaccountably not seen for years, and, as swiftly, recognise this as an explicable illusion because, like all her admiring readers, I have met her through her beautifully written, quietly bestselling novels, including The Past and Late in the Day (2019) – and now through her bold new book, Free Love. It is not that her writing is autobiographical, more that she has the gift for bringing everything she has, sees and knows to the characters she creates. As soon as she is sitting down, we order a pot of Ceylon tea for two – our excuse, we agree with relief, for shedding our face masks. There is so much to talk about, I say. Continue reading...

Award-winning journalist says comments about businessman were in the public interestThe Observer and Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr will appear in court in London next Friday to defend herself against an accusation of defamation brought by Arron Banks, the multi-millionaire businessman and outspoken backer of Brexit. The case concerns a remark made in a talk at the Ted technology conference by Cadwalladr in April 2019, and a related tweet.In the widely viewed 15-minute talk about the pernicious effects of Facebook on the democratic electoral process, Cadwalladr spoke about the 2016 Brexit referendum and noted briefly that Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign, largely funded by £8m from Banks, the largest donation in British political history, had been found by the Electoral Commission to have broken electoral and data laws. Continue reading...

At least 22 tourists died in freezing temperatures after being stranded in their vehicles in northern Pakistan, where thousands had flocked to enjoy the snow.Some 1,000 vehicles are still stranded in Murree, 40 miles north-east of the capital Islamabad.'The local people are delivering blankets and food. Now we are only allowing vehicles carrying blankets and food towards Murree,' Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, Pakistan's interior minister, said.Army platoons and paramilitary forces have been deployed to help the civil administration in rescue operations, he said. Continue reading...

Eighteen-year-old and 15-year-old to appear at Thames magistrates court after incident in OctoberTwo teenagers have been charged with manslaughter and arson after an 88-year-old woman was killed in a fire in east London.Metropolitan police officers were called to reports of a fire at a residential address in Queens Park Road, Romford, in October where Josephine Smith was pronounced dead at the scene. Continue reading...

The writer, 59, on working in a disco, being an introvert and growing up JewishIn college I worked as a tour guide on the Costa del Sol. It was a weird scene. I saw some wild stuff; some violence I’d like to forget. I lived in one hotel room with four or five people for a while. I worked in a discotheque. But it inspired my first attempt at really writing. I needed to get it all down.I think most writers have impostor syndrome. On the one hand you think, “I suck, I’ve got nothing to say, this isn’t working at all,” and the next moment you have the hubris to say, “I’m going to write 500 pages and people are going to pay me to read it.” Continue reading...

The Queen’s favourite child, under siege in the press as he awaits a critical court ruling, is not the first obnoxious royal. But he has damaged ‘the Firm’ – and it will have to changePrince Andrew, the Duke of York, KG, GCVO, CD, ADC, turns 62 next month. It is long past the age at which a man is expected to stop being a cause of concern and embarrassment to his parents. And yet Andrew, who is said to be the Queen’s favourite child, has exposed his mother to the greatest threat to the royal family’s reputation in living memory.As he awaits the decision of a New York judge, Lewis Kaplan, in the sex assault case brought by Virginia Giuffre, the prince finds himself in the deeply unedifying position of trying to evade court with a secret silencing deal struck by his late friend and convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. Continue reading...

The artist’s £3m Cotswolds pile, which has remained empty and unrenovated since 2005, has been described as an ‘eyesore’When Damien Hirst bought a historic manor in the Cotswolds he had grand plans. The crumbling 19th-century Toddington Manor, which the world’s richest artist bought for £3m in 2005, would be restored to its former glory, turned into his family home and be a spectacular gallery for his personal art collection.But years 17 years after its purchase, the property remains uninhabited and covered in scaffolding and tarpaulin. Locals have branded it an “eyesore,” a “white blob” and “a blight on the countryside”. Continue reading...

At least 30 wounded as aid workers report seeing children among casualties in Tigray regionAn airstrike in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray has killed 56 people and wounded at least 30 in a camp for the internally displaced, two aid workers have said.Both aid workers, who asked not to be named, said the number of dead has been confirmed by the local authorities. Continue reading...

The brothers recreate a family photo and talk about how they came back from a huge fallout – and a best man’s speech starring a puppet testicleJustin and Dan Hawkins are the Lowestoft brothers behind rock band the Darkness. Puncturing the genteel Dido and Keane-era mainstream of the early noughties with their stadium rock and low-cut catsuits, their music had a short-lived period of ridicule before their debut album Permission to Land went on to sell 3.5m copies. At the peak of their commercial powers they won three Brit awards, an Ivor Novello, and penned the modern Christmas classic, 2003’s Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End). The band split in 2006 after the release of their second album, but they’ve since reformed and released five more records. They are currently on tour. Continue reading...

The decluttering queen on Japanese comfort food, learning to take breaks and her love for a black bearBorn in Tokyo, Marie Kondo, 37, was 19 and studying sociology at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University when she launched a consulting business to help people declutter and organise their homes. In 2014, she published her first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up; it has been translated into 44 languages and sold more than 13m copies worldwide. She was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2015 and has a hit Netflix show, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Her latest book is Joy at Work: Organising Your Professional Life. She is married with three children and lives in Los Angeles.What is your earliest memory?

I’ve had hundreds of chances to become a better husband over the years – and I’ve seized none of themI am sitting at the kitchen table. My wife is standing at the sink with her back to me, washing something up while telling me about all the upcoming social obligations she has managed to extract us from.“Is it a good idea,” I ask, “us never going anywhere again?” Continue reading...

Rescue workers in Chongqing searched the debris into the night after Friday’s blast with one survivor in a critical conditionA lunchtime explosion at an office canteen killed 16 people in southwest China and injured 10 others, authorities said.A gas leak is the suspected cause of the blast on Friday, the Chongqing city government said in an online statement. Continue reading...

Leaked video shows Tennis Australia boss saying organisation is choosing to stay out of public despite pressure to explain its travel advice to players

UK experts say protection against hospitalisation still 90% three months after booster; Germany also cuts isolation for boosted people after a Covid contact

Attack on media denounced as police say bodies of two Haitian reporters had ‘large-caliber bullet wounds’Two Haitian journalists have been killed by gang members while reporting in a conflictive area south of Port-au-Prince, as a surge in violence continues to shake the Caribbean nation.One of the journalist’s employers and some media reports said the men had been shot then burned alive, but police did not confirm this. A police statement said only that the bodies had “large-caliber bullet wounds”. Continue reading...

But Tony Blinken warns progress impossible while Russia escalates pressure along border and ‘gaslights’ worldThe US secretary of state, Tony Blinken, has said that a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine crisis was still possible and preferable, but warned that progress was impossible while Russia continued to escalate pressure along the border.Blinken was speaking after a virtual meeting of Nato foreign ministers and before a week of intensive diplomacy in Europe aimed at fending off a threatened Russian invasion of Ukraine. Continue reading...

25m-high hill had ‘teething problems’, an initially negative reaction and cost almost double its budget of £3.3mLondon’s heavily criticised Marble Arch Mound is to close this weekend.The 25m-high human-made hill, which sits at the corner of Hyde Park and Park Lane, will no longer be open after Sunday. Continue reading...

Stefan R murdered man he had met on dating portal, cut up his body and left parts around BerlinA Berlin teacher has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for the killing of another man that the judge said was carried out as part of “cannibalism fantasies”.The 42-year-old, identified only as Stefan R, in keeping with German privacy rules, was also convicted of disturbing the peace of the dead after a trial that opened in August. Continue reading...

The people who harass me are executives and electricians; ordinary people. They can’t imagine I’m simply motivated by wanting to save livesOn Christmas Eve I received an email to let me know I’d been added to the “accused” list on a website called Nuremberg NZ. “Kind regards”, ended the sender. Those behind Nuremberg NZ want people like me to have “thier (sic) day of reckoning” in a similar way to how Nazi war criminals were tried after the second world war. According to the website, my crimes are “misleading the public” and “supporting a government to perform medical experiment (sic) on it’s (sic) citizens”. Nuremberg NZ gives people the opportunity to leave a comment about each accused and to vote on whether they should be listed. User bennyman88 comments with one word, “Murderer”, and votes “agree”.Great Barrier Island is about 90 kilometres off the coast of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Completely off-grid, the island is home to about 1,000 people and boasts calm bays and surf beaches as well as a dark sky sanctuary, natural hot springs, and native forests. In 2015, island local Gendie Somerville-Ryan started the ‘No Barriers: Small Island Big Ideas’ event series based on the BBC programme Big Ideas. The first event’s theme was pandemics and brought together a virologist, a young adult fiction writer, a sociologist, and a representative from Civil Defence to discuss how the island’s residents should behave if a pandemic was sweeping the world, killing all in its wake. Continue reading...

New ONS figures reveal inequality gap growing ever wider before the coronavirus pandemicThe richest 1% of households in the UK each have fortunes of at least £3.6m, according to new official figures that show the inequality gap was yawning even before the pandemic struck.At the other end of the scale, the poorest 10% of households have just £15,400 or less, with almost half burdened with more debts than they had in assets, according to figures released on Friday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Continue reading...

Figures from across the tennis world have weighed in on the controversy surrounding Novak Djokovic's entry – and now hotel detention – in Australia, as the world number one awaits a court ruling on his entry visa after his vaccine exemption was revoked.The 34-year-old is being held in isolation at the Park Hotel in Carlton, Melbourne, awaiting the outcome of an appeal against the decision to cancel the reigning Australian Open champion's entry visa and deport him.Players offered a range of views about Djokovic's predicament. 'In some way, I feel sorry for him. But at the same time, he knew the conditions since a lot of months ago, so he makes his own decision,' said the Spanish player Rafael Nadal

Chief executive expresses ‘deep disappointment’ that bureaucrats ignored government advice

Darren Collins, 56, downloaded thousands of images from police databasesA police worker who illegally downloaded and took home thousands of images, including those showing murder victims and postmortems, has been jailed for three years.Darren Collins, a digital forensic specialist from Stafford, admitted misconduct in a public office last month after being sacked by Staffordshire police for gross misconduct. Continue reading...

Antrim musician Feargal Lynn offers Royal Mail ‘hearty applause’ for successfully delivering letter to himSherlock Holmes might have balked, but the Royal Mail detectives came up trumps when they correctly delivered a letter with an address that was more like an episode of This Is Your Life than a conventional street name and postcode.Writing on Twitter, the County Antrim musician Feargal Lynn said the postal system deserved “hearty applause” for successfully delivering the letter addressed by following a brief history of his family in the area. Continue reading...

Poitier, who has died aged 94, came to fame via a trio of movie roles defined by race and racial differenceFor postwar America, Sidney Poitier became something like the black Cary Grant: a strikingly handsome and well-spoken Bahamian-American actor. He was a natural film star who projected passion, yet tempered by a kind of refinement and restraint that white moviegoers found very reassuring. Poitier was graceful, manly, self-possessed, with an innate dignity and a tremendous screen presence. He also had a beautiful, melodious voice – the result of his childhood spent in the Bahamas, and then struggling early years in New York, trying to make it as an actor and privately studying the voices of mellifluous white radio announcers. He was a traditional, classical actor in many ways, following in the footsteps of Paul Robeson and Canada Lee, but eminently castable in a new generation of modern roles.Almost all his famous movie roles are defined by race and racial difference, particularly that extraordinary trio of movies that came out in one year, 1967. In To Sir With Love, he was the visiting black teacher in swinging London who gets through to the kids by challenging them to be adults. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner he is the black man who wants to marry a young white woman, in an America where this was still illegal in many southern states. (This proposal causes excruciating discomfiture in his fiancee’s liberal parents, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.) And in In the Heat of the Night he was the black homicide detective forced to assist a bigoted white cop, played by Rod Steiger. Continue reading...

Celebrities join politcians in condemning ‘political harassment’ of Belgrade-born tennis playerSerb politicians and celebrities have described the treatment of Novak Djokovic as shameful scapegoating, as the foreign ministry in Belgrade suggested the world tennis No 1 had been “lured to Australia … to be humiliated.”The 34-year-old champion, who was born in the Serb capital, is in detention in an immigration hotel in Melbourne pending a legal challenge to Australia’s decision on Wednesday to cancel a visa allowing him to play in the Australian Open. Continue reading...

Authorities say they are searching for bandits who terrorised areas of Zamfara state for three daysMore than 100 people have been killed in Nigeria’s troubled northern region, survivors havesaid, as authorities continue to search for bodies and for suspects after three days of violence.Bandits arrived in large numbers in the Anka and Bukkuyum local government areas of Zamfara state on Tuesday evening, shooting and burning down houses until Thursday, according to Abubakar Ahmed, a resident in Bukkuyum. Continue reading...

Sarah Atkinson, professor of screen media, on whether the trend for big, epic films is leading to big, epic runtimesZack Snyder’s Justice League: 4hrs 2mins. The Irishman: 3hrs 29mins. The latest James Bond, the longest ever: 2hrs 43mins. Some of the most hyped films of the past few years have been as known for their length as their plot. So is this the new normal – are films getting longer? I asked Sarah Atkinson, professor of screen media at King’s College London.I loved Tenet, but I remember craving an interval and an ice-cream. Am I the only one feeling films are longer?

People juggle work and Friday prayer as country switches to Saturday-Sunday weekendEmployees and schoolchildren juggled work and studies with weekly Muslim prayers on the first ever working Friday in the United Arab Emirates, as the Gulf country formally switched to a Saturday-Sunday weekend.Some grumbled at the change and businesses were split, with many moving to the western-style weekend but other private firms sticking with Fridays and Saturdays, as in other Gulf states. Continue reading...

Move to appoint Justice Ayesha Malik, who banned virginity tests for rape survivors, described as ‘defining moment’ for the countryPakistan’s top judicial commission has nominated a female judge to the supreme court for the first time in the country’s history.The move to pave the way for Justice Ayesha Malik to join the court has been widely praised by lawyers and civil society activists as a defining moment in the struggle for gender equality in Pakistan. Continue reading...

Free resource proves widely successful with more than 2,000 schools across the UK signing upWhen 12-year-old Rose learned about the Bristol bus boycott in her history class, she felt an immense sense of pride. She knew there was a civil rights movement in the US, but wasn’t aware of the UK’s own struggle for racial justice.“I’ve felt quite proud that there were big stands here as well,” she says. Her schoolmate Ruqiiya, also 12, agrees and spoke of her frustration of initially struggling to find more information about the boycott online. They both love learning about it in class. Continue reading...