Brief Report

News from Guardian

Nigel Slater’s sweet and savoury recipes for early rhubarb

The greengrocer has a frayed wicker basket of rhubarb, the pale pink stalks laid in a soldierly row, like sticks of rock in a Blackpool sweetshop. I part with a king’s ransom for a kilo of spears so delicate they wouldn’t be out of place in a vase....

Sunday, 10:25 in Lifestyle

On my radar: Anand Giridharadas’s cultural highlights

Raised in Ohio, Paris and Maryland, Anand Giridharadas was educated at Michigan, Oxford and Harvard universities. In 2003, he worked as a consultant for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company; in 2005, he moved into journalism, working...

Sunday, 10:15 in Art & Culture

Police condemn 'reckless' pipe bomb attack in Armagh

Police have criticised as “reckless” an incident in county Armagh in which a pipe bomb exploded close to a house where young children were living. Residents in the Enniskeen area of Craigavon reported hearing a loud bang between 11.20pm and 11.30pm on...

Sunday, 10:12 in World News

Is the era of artificial speech translation upon us?

Noise, Alex Waibel tells me, is one of the major challenges that artificial speech translation has to meet. A device may be able to recognise speech in a laboratory, or a meeting room, but will struggle to cope with the kind of background noise I can...

Sunday, 09:56 in Art & Culture

The big picture: Santu Mofokeng’s train church

This picture was taken by Santu Mofokeng, a Soweto-born South African photographer, in 1986. It is part of a series of pictures that Mofokeng, then aged 30, took of a spontaneous ritual that had emerged among the workers who took the early morning and...

Sunday, 09:56 in Art & Culture

Alexa Chung’s crisis dress code: tights and rollneck

“I feel like I’ve aged about a thousand years in the last six months,” said Alexa Chung backstage after her second London fashion week show. The progression from being a model and muse to designing capsule collections and, as of last year, to staging...

Sunday, 09:37 in Lifestyle

Manchester United and Chelsea seek some salvation in a Wembley return

The fast-moving world of football has managed to overtake what promised to be an FA Cup treat at Stamford Bridge on Monday night. When the draw was made, Chelsea’s pairing with Manchester United was the obvious fifth-round highlight, but that was...

Sunday, 09:36 in Sport

Families threaten to boycott IRA Birmingham pub bombs inquest

Bereaved families and lawyers are threatening to boycott the long-awaited inquests into the 1974 IRA Birmingham pub bombings because of concern over missing documents, lack of legal funding and what the process can deliver. They are anxious that the...

Sunday, 09:14 in World News

'We won't be trampled on': striking Mexican workers vow to fight the fight

Despite the winter chill in the air, the mood on the picket line outside the Matamoros Coca-Cola bottling plant was optimistic. “We’re not fighting for ourselves, but for a better quality of life for our kids and their children. They won’t be screwed...

Sunday, 09:14 in World News

El Chapo and the men who live by rules shaped by the blood of feuds

Since I started writing movies and television series on organised crime, the question I’m most often asked is: why do the stories of crimes committed by men such as El Chapo command such passion across generations and across continents? When I tried...

Sunday, 08:30 in World News

Beauty tips: putting the focus on both eyes and lips

Eyes or lips? At Chanel’s couture show, loosely inspired by David Bowie and 18th-century fashion, makeup artist Lucia Pica threw out the rule that says you can’t have both. There is something glorious about looking “done”, the audacious sister of “no...

Sunday, 08:14 in Lifestyle

Stars implode to hand Renegades their first Big Bash title

The Melbourne Renegades are BBL champions for the first time, with the Melbourne Stars suffering a stunning collapse of 7-19 with a maiden title in sight. Chasing a target of 146 runs, the Stars were cruising to victory at 0-93 in the 13th over, but...

Sunday, 07:59 in Sport

Sharp rise in methane levels threatens world climate targets

Dramatic rises in atmospheric methane are threatening to derail plans to hold global temperature rises to 2C, scientists have warned. In a paper published this month by the American Geophysical Union, researchers say sharp rises in levels of methane –...

Sunday, 07:29 in World News

Warsaw-Jerusalem tensions rise over ‘Nazi link’ claims

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to build friendly relations with central European nations are being tested, on the eve of a Jerusalem summit aimed at showcasing the alliance, by disputes over Holocaust history. Netanyahu has long...

Sunday, 07:16 in World News

Agonising hunt by US father for children trapped in Isis enclave

In late March 2015, Bashiurul Shikder made an urgent call home to ask about his wife and children. The 37-year-old American had just completed a pilgrimage to Mecca and his repeated messages to his wife in Florida had gone unanswered for over a week....