Labour council says flags must not be ‘surrendered’ to far right but there are concerns in town hit by racial tensionA Labour council has been accused of embracing “flag terror” after offering £500 grants to groups to erect union jack and St George’s flags in a town previously rocked by racial tension.The leaders of Rotherham council, in South Yorkshire, said they wanted the flags to be a “symbol of unity” and did not want to “surrender them to extremist or far-right groups”. Continue reading...

11 Feb 2026 17:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Judges’ verdict on embezzlement challenge will determine whether far-right leader can stand in 2027 electionDefence lawyers for Marine Le Pen have told a Paris appeals court she did not orchestrate a system to misuse European parliament funds, at the close of an embezzlement trial that will determine whether the far-right leader can run in the 2027 French presidential election.Le Pen’s lawyer, Sandra Chirac Kollarik, told the court on Wednesday: “At no moment did Marine Le Pen imagine that she broke the rules.” She added: “Never in her life would she have deliberately accepted making a false contract.” Continue reading...

11 Feb 2026 16:41 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Pelicot writes of ‘brain stopping working’ when police told her of crimes of man she shared her life with for 50 yearsGisèle Pelicot, who became a global symbol of courage during the trial of her ex-husband and the dozens of men who raped her while she was unconscious, has described her shock when police first showed her images of the crimes, likening herself to a “rag doll”.In extracts from her forthcoming memoir, A Hymn to Life, Pelicot, 73, describes her shock when police told her of the actions of her ex-husband Dominique, whom she considered “a great guy” and had shared her life with for 50 years. Continue reading...

11 Feb 2026 14:25 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

The archdiocese agreed to pay 600 abuse survivors a $305m settlement before the Vatican confirmed Aymond’s exitPope Leo XIV accepted the resignation of the Roman Catholic archbishop of New Orleans, Gregory Aymond, on Wednesday – one day after the archbishop concluded a series of meetings with survivors of a clergy molestation scandal that has embroiled the city’s church leadership for years.Aymond had submitted his resignation to global Catholic church leaders at the Vatican, as he was required when he turned 75 in November 2024. But the Vatican didn’t immediately accept it, plotting for Aymond to remain in position until the New Orleans archdiocese settled a federal bankruptcy protection case that it filed in the spring of 2020 amid the continuing fallout of the decades-old worldwide clerical abuse crisis. Continue reading...

11 Feb 2026 14:32 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

FAA initially cited ‘security reasons’ for shutting off skies around El Paso airport in area along border with MexicoThe top US aviation agency has lifted a surprise 10-day closure of airspace above the US-Mexico border town of El Paso, Texas, just hours after it abruptly announced that it would close off the skies for “special security reasons”.While some officials claimed that Mexican cartel drones invaded US airspace, in recent days a balloon was reportedly mistaken for a drone. Continue reading...

11 Feb 2026 19:28 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

‘In Florida, people were told to keep the length of a baby alligator apart. So I included a character wearing an alligator mask in my pandemic-themed masked ball’When Covid started, everybody was talking about masks. I thought about the face coverings we all had to wear, and I thought about masks more widely. I researched masked balls and carnival masks and read a lot about the many outbreaks of plague in Venice starting in the 14th century, and about pandemics in general.This photograph, Danse Macabre, was inspired by Covid. If you take a close look at the paper lamps hanging from the ceiling, you’ll see some Covid-19 viruses smuggled in among them. In the middle of the scene, a doctor in a plague mask – the type still sold at carnival in Venice – is dancing with the rat that caused the plague. The couple on the left reference the fact that the Bolsonaro-led Brazilian government at the time of the pandemic was accused of allowing many Indigenous people to die unnecessarily [he denied any wrongdoing]. So those two deal with colonialism – the woman in the yellow hat represents an Indigenous person, the guy she’s dancing with is wearing a mask with the face of Pedro de Alvarado, a Spanish conquistador responsible for massacring Indigenous populations in Guatemala in the 16th century. Continue reading...

11 Feb 2026 14:57 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

What if loving your child is destroying you and all you want to do is escape? That’s the nightmare the Oscar-nominated Byrne faces in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The star and its director reveal why backers were scaredIf I Had Legs I’d Kick You, for which Rose Byrne just won a Golden Globe and is Oscar-nominated for best actress, is unmistakably a horror film. And yet how can it be? It’s the story of a mother, Linda, with a very sick child. You never see the child, only the outlines of the anxious medics. You never find out what’s wrong with her, only that it involves a feeding tube. Linda is going steadily crazy, because who wouldn’t? On paper, this is a painful yet heartwarming tale of love and adversity. Instead, it is claustrophobic and vertiginous. It sometimes has the panic-attack surrealism of an anxiety dream, and other times is so real you can barely look directly at it. I’ve never seen the maternal condition drawn as a trip to the abyss. The only film I’ve seen that’s anything like this is Eraserhead.“I was very influenced by that film,” writer and director Mary Bronstein says, carefully. She’s a fascinating conversationalist, frank and open but watchful. Byrne is more reserved. Both are darkly funny, all the time. They look Hollywood-polished, in this central London hotel, but fair play, they’ve just come out of a photoshoot. “Eraserhead is about a type of parental anxiety that only men can have,” Bronstein says. “And this is a film about a parental anxiety only a woman can have. In Eraserhead, he can leave and that’s his angst. Linda cannot leave. That’s hers.” Continue reading...

11 Feb 2026 08:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN