52 m. ago Major high street coffee chain to shut branch today after string of closures

The major coffee chain has surprised the general public with yet another blow, closing a busy Swindon branch amongst recent policies customers are calling 'health and safety gone mad'

Politics

99 m. ago The Illegals by Shaun Walker review – Russian spies hiding in plain sight

The strange stories of the agents who lived apparently normal lives in the west as part of Soviet espionage programmes make compelling readingOne muggy afternoon in June 2010, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann, were relaxing over a bottle of champagne with their two sons, Tim and Alex, when they heard a loud knocking at the door. The family was celebrating Tim’s 20th birthday at their comfortable home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after lunch in a restaurant. Tim’s mother went to answer the door, calling out as she did so that some of his friends must have arrived to wish him a happy birthday. Instead she found a group of men dressed in black waiting on the doorstep. Bellowing “FBI”, they barged their way into the house and handcuffed Ann and her husband, before marching them outside and driving them away.Alex assumed that there had been a terrible mistake; his parents were much too boring to warrant such a dramatic arrest. But there was no mistake. His parents were not Don Heathfield...

Events

2 h. ago 'A family reunion': WU LYF are back and it's like the last 12 years never happened

REVIEW: WU LYF, The King's Arms, Salford, April 19

Politics

4 h. ago Delusions of Paradise by Maiwand Banayee review – a compelling rejection of fundamentalism

An Afghan exile’s account of life in war-torn Kabul and a Taliban-dominated refugee camp is an unflinching study of how radicalisation takes root, and his own renunciation of itBorn in Kabul, Maiwand Banayee aspired to become a Talib when he was 16. In 1994, living in a Pakistan refugee camp, there was little to do except sleep, eat, pray and dream of the afterlife: “Islam dominated every aspect of life in Shamshatoo. Even during the volleyball and cricket games the spectators were prevented from clapping because it was seen as un-Islamic.” Banayee joined the camp’s madrasa when he was 14 in an attempt “to fit in”. The only educational opportunity open to Afghans at that time, the religious school offered structure and purpose, although “instead of teaching us to live, they were teaching us to die”.In this illuminating book, Banayee, now resident in England, describes the circumstances that led to his indoctrination, and what eventually saved him. Brutalised by conflict, his Pashtun...

Politics

5 h. ago Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark by Dan Richards review – night owls of all feathers

This immersive exploration of how we experience the nocturnal world is beautifully illuminatingAs children, we’re primed by literature to think of the night as a time for adventure as well as rest, but by early middle age, we’ve mostly ringfenced its darkness for sleep (or, for the insomniacs among us, anxieties about sleep’s absence). Author Dan Richards is no exception, and it took a nuit blanche stranded 3,600 metres up a Swiss mountain to reawaken his sense of night-time’s vast and varied potential. Hopelessly lost, he drew comfort from the occasional blips of aircraft in the sky above and from moving lights in the town below: others, too, were out and about, albeit in less of a fix. What could they all be doing?Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark details his subsequent investigation into “the who and the how of the nocturnal world”. Its pages, immersive and personal, span encounters with night owls of all feathers, from the heroic (Richards hears tales of ...

Politics

6 h. ago NHS doctor shares three symptoms of pancreatic cancer you 'cannot ignore'

Pancreatic cancer has one of the lowest survival rates of any form of the disease.

Science

6 h. ago Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story review – richly bittersweet portrait of an Irish literary great

The dizzy highs and painful lows of the late writer’s life are laid bare in Sinéad O’Shea’s moving documentaryHer raw, sexually and emotionally frank prose made her a sensation and got the Irish Catholic church hot under the cassock. She was an eloquent wit, a provocateur who could hold her own in literary circles and in the glittering party circuit of 1960s London. It’s now widely acknowledged that she was one of the greats of Irish literature. But the slightly bitter aftertaste left by this otherwise richly enjoyable documentary portrait of the writer Edna O’Brien comes from the decades of bullying and ridicule she had to endure before her talent was fully recognised.Much of it originated uncomfortably close to home: Blue Road, which features interviews with the 93-year-old O’Brien shortly before her death last year, tells of her tumultuous marriage to fellow writer Ernest Gébler, who was not a man able to graciously accept the fact that his wife’s success had eclipsed his own. Je...

Politics

6 h. ago It’s not too late to stop Trump and the Silicon Valley broligarchy from controlling our lives, but we must act now | Carole Cadwalladr

In her final piece for the Observer, Carole Cadwalladr reveals what happened when she returned last week to give the opening speech at technology conference Ted, where she gave her first – life-changing – talk six years agoTo walk into the lion’s den once might be considered foolhardy. To do so again after being mauled by the lion? It’s what ill-advised? Reckless? Suicidal? Six years ago I gave a talk at Ted, the world’s leading technology and ideas conference. It led to a gruelling lawsuit and a series of consequences that reverberate through my life to this day.And last week I returned. To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I’d learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving “broligarchy” – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before. The key point I wan...

Politics

7 h. ago Customers call latest Costa Coffee policy ‘health and safety gone mad’

High street coffee chain has disappointed regular customers with the switch-up

Economics

7 h. ago Rape survivor opens up how 'savage attack' by friend's boyfriend 'changed her'

Emily Peebles, 28, was raped while sleeping by Kyle Kernachan at a property in Edinburgh on January 21, 2017.

Events

7 h. ago Sister Europe by Nell Zink review – ramshackle wanderers in Berlin

Zink’s seventh novel, about a night of conversation and adventure, is full of wit and marvellous writing, but ultimately trails offCalifornia-born, Berlin-based Nell Zink is an idiosyncratic writer. You never quite know where her sentences are going to go. “Oh God, Toto, you won’t believe what just happened,” says Avianca, a character in her new novel. “This angel stole my hat. Like a winged monkey. It was blue and kind of glowing and had feather wings.”Such delightfully surprising lines are frequent in Sister Europe, Zink’s seventh novel, which follows acclaimed titles The Wallcreeper, Doxology and Avalon, and is set over the course of a Tuesday night in 2023.Sister Europe by Nell Zink is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Continue reading...

Politics

7 h. ago Scotland: Lively lamb with wonky walk beats odds to survive after being squashed in the womb by huge brother

Videos of wonky the lamb running around and playing with her brother have gone viral on social media.

Events

9 h. ago The horror Siege of Leningrad: How 1.5million people died during Nazi starvation blockade that saw mothers resort to feeding their babies BLOOD and families turn to cannibalism

A baby sucking blood rather than milk from its mother; a human leg found in a worker's locker; children ending up stooped and hairy.

Events

9 h. ago In brief: The Homemade God; Mythica; There Are Rivers in the Sky – review

Long-buried truths leave siblings reeling when their father dies; a fascinating reclamation of Homer’s forgotten women; and still waters run deep in a centuries-spanning novelRachel JoyceDoubleday, £20, pp384 Continue reading...

Politics

9 h. ago The Edwardians: Age of Elegance; Cartier review – excess all areas

King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace; V&A, London British royal history in the era of Fabergé, photography, empire, war and tiny waists is an expertly spangled soap opera. And a blockbuster Cartier show of jewels, maharajas and movie stars rises above the gossipThe future Edward VII looks out from a white marble bust at the start of The Edwardians: Age of Elegance. His eyes have a familiar exophthalmic bulge beneath heavy Saxe-Coburg lids. The sculptor has turned the prince’s head a fraction, to give him a flatteringly distant air of authority, but is otherwise faithful to the facts: Edward’s love of upturned wing collars, of informal jackets and the wide tie knot he popularised, known to this day as the Windsor.Edward (1841-1910) – Bertie, as he was familiarly known – was the eldest son of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. She is said to have blamed the boy, or at least his chronic philandering, for her husband’s premature death. Prince of Wales until the age of almost 60, waiting...

Events

10 h. ago 'I tested Tropic's affordable lip stain that rivals Wonderskin—I couldn't believe the results'

Shopping Writer Meghan has been trying to find a lip stain that rivals Wonderskin after the viral product became a firm favourite of hers - and she might have just found it with this Tropic lip stain

Politics

10 h. ago ‘I tried Tropic’s lip stain to compare with Wonderskin and I’m shocked by the results’

Shopping Writer Meghan is a sworn fan of Wonderskin’s viral lip stain, but she’s recently tried a lip stain from Tropic, she says, ‘it genuinely shocked me how easy it is to use’

Events

11 h. ago The North Road by Rob Cowen review – the poetry and pain of Britain’s backbone

A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movieMost people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road” and the “Great North Road” (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone” of Britain.As a frequent shuttler between north and south, I prefer the North Road to its rival, the bland, homogenous M1. It has verges and laybys, eccentric pit-stops where the coffee is not necessarily Costa, and a scruffy, improvised air, suggesting something organically arisen from the landscape. But whereas I have merely driven along the road, Cowen has communed with it...

Politics

11 h. ago Review: Bluetooth travel adapter AirFly Pro 2 can give new life to your old kit

The adaptor is targeted at the frequent traveller - but it's so much more than that

Transport

12 h. ago 15 years after Deepwater Horizon oil spill, lawsuits stall and restoration is incomplete

Fifteen years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster off the Gulf Coast, the effects of the largest oil spill in U.S. history are still being felt

Politics