Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax changes encourage more people to invest in previously unloved product
The government’s “inheritance tax raid” on pensions has helped drive sales of retirement annuities to new highs.
Industry data this week revealed they enjoyed a “record-breaking” 2025, with sales growing by 4% to £7.4bn and the average amount invested in an annuity surpassing £80,000 for the first time.
Epstein files release shows David Stern advised against mentioning ‘being denied previously or criminal charges’
An aide to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor advised Jeffrey Epstein to illegally hide his child sexual abuse conviction to obtain a visa to China, according to the latest Epstein files release.
Auditorium to remove bacon and sausages from cafe during stage run after request from campaign group
Campaigners are calling on theatre bosses to stop serving bacon, sausages and ham in their cafes – at least while Peppa Pig and her family are performing in the same building.
A family struggled to rebuild their lives after an abusive marriage ended in tragedy and financial ruin
Family life ended for Francesca Onody on a late summer evening in 2022 when her abusive husband doused their cottage with petrol as police arrived to arrest him. She and her children escaped seconds before the building exploded. Her husband Malcolm Baker died in the blaze.
That night, Onody lost her husband, her home, her pets and her possessions.
A thatcher, gardener and others on keeping their business afloat in the bad weather – and their fears for the future
With76 flood warnings still in force across the UK and further downpours forecast this week and next, parts of the country have endured rain almost without pause since the start of the year.
The prolonged wet weather is disrupting livelihoods as well as daily life, particularly in rural areas, where flooded roads, waterlogged ground and repeated storms are making it harder to keep businesses afloat, protect crops and maintain steady work.
Bizarre idioms for downpours are just one facet of how the UK uses dark humour and ritual to brave the wet
May it fall as a blessing, not as a curse. So goes the ancient prayer inviting us to embrace days of rain.
It is a prayer that would not be welcomed by anyone on the floodplains the UK persists in filling with houses. It would be met with outright hostility by any farmers who are now unable to do any of the things they need to do in February because their land has had literally 40 days and nights of rain.
With so many platforms rife with racism, misogyny and far-right rhetoric, there must be a point where decent people walk away
In a week during which Keir Starmer has been under pressure to resign, cabinet ministers took to X to show their support. “We’ve all been made to tweet,” one Labour figure told a political journalist. Theironyis hard to escape: as the prime minister is embroiled in the scandal of Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and now his former aide’s links to a sex offender, MPs are defending him on a platform that has in thepast monthallowed users to create sexualised images of women and girls.
This says something about the unprecedented way in which X has been tied to modern politics since it was still known as Twitter, as well as how widespread the culture of indifference is to the violation of female bodies, both online and off. But it also points to a growing dilemma facing not just politicians, but all of us: is it possible to post ethically on social media any more? And when is it time to log off?
For centuries in Ireland lifting huge boulders was a way to test strength and bond communities, says Instagram sensation Indiana Stones
David Keohan surveyed the County Waterford beach and spotted a familiar mound half-buried in sand: an oval-shaped limestone boulder. It weighed about 115kg.
He wedged it loose with a crowbar, wiped it dry with a cloth, dusted his hands with chalk and paused to gaze at the Irish Sea, as if summoning strength from the waves pounding ashore.
Exclusive: High levels of banned ‘forever chemical’ have been detected in rivers and groundwater at 25 sites
A string of toxic pollution hotspots has been uncovered across Cumbria and Lancashire, with high levels of the banned cancer-causing “forever chemical” Pfos detected in rivers and groundwater at 25 sites.
The contamination, spread across a large area, was uncovered by Watershed Investigations and the Guardian after a freedom of information request revealed high concentrations of Pfos in Environment Agency samples taken in January 2025.
Lawmakers left Washington for a long weekend without resolving an impasse over much-criticized agency’s funding
The Department of Homeland Security has begun a partial shutdown, after funding for the much-criticized agency expired, with a range of services, including domestic flights and the US Coastguard, now vulnerable to disruption.
The shutdown was all but confirmed on Thursday, after the Senate failed to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to pass the DHS appropriations bill and lawmakers left Washington for a long weekend without resolving the impasse.
Ukraine-Russia war high on the agenda at Munich Security Council; France’s Macron says world must not accept Ukraine defeated. What we know on day 1,452
Democratic representative also condemns US capture of Nicolás Maduro, Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and US support for Israel’s war on Gaza – key US politics stories from Friday, 13 February at a glance
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused Donald Trump of tearing apart the transatlantic alliance with Europe and of seeking to introduce an “age of authoritarianism”, as she condemned his administration’s foreign policy in front of its allies’ top policymakers at the Munich security conference.
Speaking at a panel on populism on Friday, the New York representative outlined what she called an “alternative vision” for a leftwing US foreign policy, challenging the Trump administration’s shift to the right in front an audience of US allies who have grown increasingly wary of the US’s increasingly nationalist – and militaristic – global posture.
New York congresswoman criticizes ‘unconditional’ US aid and calls for enforcement of Leahy laws
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said during a Munich security conference panel on Friday on the future of foreign policy that the Democratic party’s next presidential nominee should reconsider the country’s military aid to Israel.
Hagar Shezaf of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked the US congresswoman if she thought “the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2028 elections should re-evaluate military aid to Israel”.
British PM to tell Munich Security Conference that Europe together is ‘sleeping giant’ and will say UK won’t turn away from its allies
Keir Starmer will say the UK and Europe need to step up their commitments to Nato and avoid the risk of overdependence on the US for defence, as he sets out one of the main planks of his foreign policy vision on Saturday.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, the prime minister will warn against the idea of the UK turning inwards on security, instead calling for a focus on what he will call the “sleeping giant” of shared European defence capabilities.
US homeland security eyeing 24 buildings, some as ‘primary locations’ for deportations, in escalation of Trump agenda
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) expects to spend an estimated $38.3bn on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees, according to documents the agency sent to the governor of New Hampshire.
The documents, published on the state’s website on Thursday, disclose that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates it will spend $158m retrofitting a new detention facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and an additional estimated $146m to operate the facility in the first three years.
A skier from France is also killed with manslaughter investigation to be carried out by mountain rescue police
Two Britons are among three skiers to have been killed in an avalanche in the French Alps.
The pair were part of a group of five people, accompanied by an instructor, off-piste skiing in Val d’Isère, in south-east France. A French national, who was skiing alone, was also killed.
Letter says it is clear the former US ambassador ‘holds critical information’ for their investigation into Epstein
Peter Mandelson has been asked to testify to the US Congress over his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Robert Garcia, ranking member of the committee on oversight and government reform, and congressman Suhas Subramanyam have written to Mandelson requesting he be questioned as part of the investigation into Epstein.
German chancellor rebuts idea of American unilateralism and says ‘democracies have partners and allies’
The US acting alone has reached the limits of its power and may already have lost its role as global leader, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, warned Donald Trump at the opening of the Munich Security Conference.
Merz also disclosed he had held initial talks with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, over the possibility of joining France’s nuclear umbrella, underlining his call for Europe to develop a stronger self-standing security strategy.
Protests in Buenos Aires, Lindsey Vonn crashes at the Winter Olympics and Bad Bunny performs at Super Bowl LX – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Nikhil Gupta faces up to 40 years over alleged India-backed attempt to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun
The Indian man who US prosecutors accused of plotting to kill a prominent US-based activist after being recruited by an agent of the Indian government has pleaded guilty to three criminal charges, according to a spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Manhattan.
Nikhil Gupta faces a maximum 40 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, and money-laundering charges in connection to the failed attempt to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a US resident who is an advocate for a sovereign Sikh state in
northern India.
Customers flock to Daoxiangcun to pick up cakes selected by the president during lunar new year tour around city
A Beijing pastry shop visited by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, on a lunar new year tour this week has been swarmed by customers hoping to get their hands on Xi-approved sweet treats.
Traffic was brought to a standstill in Beijing’s capital as the president took a tour around the city on Monday and Tuesday.
Lindy Mechefske first fell in love with food as a very young girl, helping her grandfather roll out dough or shell peas in his ancient kitchen in Yorkshire, England. Read More
Check Point is rolling out a new four-pillar cybersecurity strategy to give security teams an edge in the ongoing AI arms race with threat actors and is making three acquisitions that will play a critical role in getting it going.
At a moment of stagnation and political drift, Andy Burnham’s push for a new plan suggests the centre-left debate has moved beyond Downing Street
Once a political leader’s net favourability sinks deep into negative territory, recovery is the exception, not the rule. It usually takes an economic rebound, a dramatic political reset or an opposition implosion to reverse the slide. Sir Keir Starmer’s personal ratings are in a danger zone from which few escape.
Yet the prime minister, like the Bourbons, has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. He made a speech this week after coming close to being ousted suggesting he would “fight” on. He doubled down in parliament despite glaring errors in judgment. He forced out his cabinet secretary while his own failures remain unaddressed. He seemed to blame everyone but himself. When support slips and a leader answers with defiance, voters don’t see strength – they see denial.
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With just seven weeks before its funding runs out, the UK’s greatest cultural asset and most trusted international news organisation must be supported
“The programmes will neither be very interesting nor very good,” said the then BBC director general John Reith, when he launched its Empire Service in December 1932. Nearly a century later, the BBC World Service, as it is now known, broadcasts in 43 languages, reaches 313 million people a week and is one of the UK’s most influential cultural assets. It is also a lifeline for millions. “Perhaps Britain’s greatest gift to the world” in the 20th century, as Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, once put it.
But this week Tim Davie, the corporation’s director general, announced that the World Service will run out of funding in just seven weeks. Most of its £400m budget comes from the licence fee, although the Foreign Office – which funded it entirely until 2014 – contributed £137m in the last year. The funding arrangement with the Foreign Office finishes at the end of March. There is no plan for what happens next.
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Tree has never been granted preservation order to protect it under law and prevent it from being cut down
The future of the original Bramley apple tree, which is responsible for one of the world’s most popular cooking apples, is at risk now that the site where it grows has been put up for sale, campaigners have warned.
The tree is situated in the back garden of a row of cottages in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, which has been owned by Nottingham Trent University since 2018 and has been used as student accommodation.
Flawed evidence by psychologist Melanie Gill was used to remove children from woman in 2019
A mother who did not see her children for nearly six years after they were taken away by the family courts has been reunited with her son after the flawed evidence used in her case was overturned.
An assessment by an unregulated psychologist led to “extraordinary” and “draconian” orders that effectively terminated her relationship with her children, lawyers told the high court.
The Puerto Rican star’s album Debí Tirar Más Fotos jumps to No 2, while the song DTMF rises to No 4
Despite being one of the most streamed musicians in the world, Bad Bunny had never had a solo UK Top 10 hit – until now.
The Puerto Rican musician has attracted a huge number of curious new fans – and jubilant preexisting ones – after last week’s Super Bowl, where he performed in a half-time show described by many people as one of the greatest in NFL history.
Byelection candidate accused of indulging ‘alt right fantasy’ by suggesting women need ‘biological reality’ check
Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection has been accused of wanting a “Handmaid’s Tale future” after unearthed YouTube footage revealed he called for “young girls and women” to be given a “biological reality” check.
In a clip posted to his personal YouTube channel in November 2024, Matt Goodwin stated that “many women in Britain are having children much too late in life”.
Miles Kwan, a politics student, was detained for two nights by the city’s national security police last year for “seditious intent” after handing out flyers calling for an independent investigation into a fire that killed 168 people in November.
Francis Bown says its grey concrete and childlike composition expressed the fatalism and despair of the time, while Helen Keats reflects on other brutalist builds
USS Gerald R Ford will take about three weeks to sail to region, amid push for Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions
Donald Trump has ordered the world’s largest aircraft carrier to sail from the Caribbean Sea to the Middle East in an effort to increase pressure on Iran amid discussions over curbing its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
The USS Gerald R Ford and its supporting warships should take about three weeks to return to the region, where they will join the USS Abraham Lincoln, dramatically increasing the military firepower available to the US leader.
From ‘honour’ killings to nuclear war, some screen works have led directly legislative action – despite what jury head Wenders suggested at the Berlin film festival
Should film festivals be more than just screenings and red carpets? Should they prompt us to think about the role cinema plays in the world? Novelist Arundhati Roy certainly thinks so. She pulled out of the jury at the Berlin festival in protest at jury president Wim Wenders’ claim that films should “stay out of politics”; she said Wenders’ stance was “unconscionable”, and that to “hear [him] say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping.”
Wenders had suggested that cinema is a way to build empathy, but not directly change politicians’ minds. However this is simply not true. Some films – both documentary and narrative – have not only changed public opinion about social issues but led directly to legislation. Despite evidence to the contrary, politicians are people too. They can be moved. And sometimes they are even moved to action.
The co-founder of Palestine Action has won a legal challenge to the home secretary’s decision to ban the group under anti-terrorism laws. Palestine Action was the first direct action protest group to be proscribed. The decision was widely condemned and was defied by a civil disobedience campaign, during which more than 2,000 people have been arrested. From July last year, being a member of – or showing support for – the group became an offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian columnist Owen Jones
Annexe holding 6,000 women and children is now mostly empty, raising security and humanitarian concerns
Most of the foreign families of suspected Islamic State fighters have left al-Hawl camp since the Syrian government took control of the facility, prompting security and humanitarian concerns over their whereabouts.
About 6,000 women and children from 42 different countries were previously held in the foreigners’ annexe of al-Hawl camp in north-east Syria, which housed some of the most radical former members of the extremist group. The foreigners’ annexe was separate from the part of the camp that contained about 20,000 Syrians and Iraqis.
With their profile and vile words, these malign provocateurs are tearing down decency’s guardrails
It lacks the elegance of “greed is good”, but as a distillation of the spirit of the age, it’s right up there. “I feel liberated,” a top banker told the Financial Times shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”
So that’s what they meant by “vibe shift”. Though, as the Epstein files reveal daily, the top 0.01% were hardly primly biting their tongues before Trump’s win, at least not in private. Those with telephone-number fortunes and great power felt able to speak, and write, to each other about women in language so vicious, so filled with hate – women discussed as body parts, as “less than human”, in Gordon Brown’s apt phrase – that they didn’t need the encouragement of a “grab ’em by the pussy” president to cast off their inhibitions.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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An undercover operative stopped the pair from carrying out what could have been UK’s deadliest terrorist attack
Two men have been jailed for life after attempting to stage one of the UK’s deadliest terrorist attacks before it was thwarted by an undercover operative.
Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, who had sworn allegiance to Islamic State (IS), planned a marauding firearms attack targeting Greater Manchester’s Jewish community.
The home secretary has vowed to fight the judgment, but she and the government are on the wrong side of history
This is a day of humiliation for those who facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza – and a moment of vindication for those who stood against “the crime of crimes”. It is worth underlining what the high court in London has today ruled to be unlawful: our government’s decision to place the direct-action group Palestine Action on the same legal footing as al-Qaida and Islamic State. Legally speaking, simply showing support for it risked a jail sentence of up to 14 years. The consequences? More than 2,700 people arrested for holding placards opposing genocide and supporting Palestine Action, many of them elderly, including a retired octogenarian priest.
No one who engages in criminal damage for a political cause imagines they will avoid arrest. As the court ruling makes clear, normal criminal law remains available for such acts. But when a government applies the badge of “terrorism” to movements that, however disorderly, are clearly not terrorist movements, an alarming precedent is set. As the court recognised, the proscription interferes with rights to freedom of expression, to peaceful assembly and free associations with others. You do not need a fevered imagination to see how a future Reform UK government could build on such a precedent. (As things stand, the ban on the group remains in effect so the government has time to appeal.)
Ex-husband of Nicola Sturgeon and former CEO of party is due to appear in Glasgow court next Friday
The former chief executive of the Scottish National party (SNP) Peter Murrell has been accused of embezzling £459,000 from the party over a period of more than 12 years, according to court documents that emerged ahead of a hearing.
Murrell, the ex-husband of the former first minister and party leader Nicola Sturgeon, is due to appear at the high court in Glasgow next Friday for a preliminary hearing in the case.
Negotiators disbanded on Friday without a plan for the basin supplying water to 40m people, thrusting the region into uncertainty
The future of the American west hung in the balance after seven states remained at a stalemate over who should bear the brunt of the enormous water cuts needed to pull the imperiled Colorado River back from the brink.
Negotiators, who have spent years trying to iron out thorny disagreements, ended their talks on Friday without a deal – one day before a critical deadline to form a plan that had been set for Saturday.
Whether you blame the US or the communist regime, there is no doubt that this is an island spiralling into tragedy
Felix Valdés García was nine years old when the revolutionaries came to blow up his trees. It was the verge of the 1970s and his father, Felin, was losing the family farm to Cuba’s 10-year-old communist regime. A push called the Revolutionary Offensive was under way, mobilising the people to sow, clean and harvest 10m tonnes of sugar cane in an effort to make Cuba financially independent. The land needed to be cleared.
For decades the family had nurtured their 800 hectares of rich loam alongside the meandering Sagua River. Eight couples, all related, worked the fields, while Felix and his sister had fruitful adventures among the royal palms, avocado, mango and magnificent ceiba.
Roblox says it has removed account after massacre that left nine people including the shooter dead
The 18-year-old suspect in a high school shooting in British Columbia had previously created a mass shooting simulator on the gaming platform Roblox, it has been revealed.
The simulator, set in what appeared to be a virtual shopping mall, allowed users – represented as Roblox-style avatars – to pick up weapons and shoot other players, 404 Media reported on Thursday.
This article was amended on 14 February 2026. An earlier version said there was more than one attacker in the Christchurch attack and incorrectly named the platform the attacker streamed on as Twitch.
Dean Hamilton pleads guilty to rape of Joanne Young, ex-wife of former Tory councillor Philip Young
A man has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a woman who was also raped and drugged by her husband for years, police have said.
Dean Hamilton, 47, appeared at Winchester crown court on Friday, where he admitted one count of rape, one count of assault by penetration and two counts of sexual assault against Joanne Young, 48, who can be named as she has waived her right to anonymity.
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