It is natural for young people to feel they have all the time in the world. For Liam Rosenior, though, part of the challenge with Chelsea’s tyros is making them knuckle down. They have to realise the competition is about to heat up. The sun was shining at training this week and the warmer weather brings a greater sense of urgency. The yellow footballs have gone into storage, signalling that the bu...
It is natural for young people to feel they have all the time in the world. For Liam Rosenior, though, part of the challenge with Chelsea’s tyros is making them knuckle down. They have to realise the competition is about to heat up. The sun was shining at training this week and the warmer weather brings a greater sense of urgency. The yellow footballs have gone into storage, signalling that the business end of the season is approaching. “Today it’s the first time we trained with the white balls,” Rosenior said. “That’s normally a sign we’re into that period. When those white balls come out, we can’t make those mistakes that we’re making. You’re running out of time – and that’s the message myself and my staff have given the players this morning.” There were obvious points to discuss during the debrief. Discipline has been the main focus since Pedro Neto’s dismissal during the 2-1 defeat at Arsenal on Sunday. Rosenior, alarmed by his side’s ninth red card this season, wants a culture of accountability. The 41-year-old’s predecessor, Enzo Maresca, often tried to downplay suggestions of indiscipline but Rosenior has no interest in diversion tactics. He knows it is costing Chelsea in their hunt for Champions League qualification – they have dropped out of the top five before Wednesday night’s trip to Aston Villa – and has warned that he will drop players who cannot stay out of trouble. Time to get serious. Rosenior talked of a “deep-lying” issue after the Arsenal game, when Chelsea played well but lost to the league leaders because of two lapses at corners. It cannot be dismissed as a blip. This is why Chelsea continue to face accusations that investing so heavily in youth has left them short of experience and leadership. The narrative is inescapable when the statistics show a team with 12 yellow cards for dissent this season. There is a petulance to Chelsea when momentum swings against them. The red mist descends. Enzo Fernández, the vice-captain, is a repeat offender. ...
The temperatures are rising, the daffodils are out and, within the England camp, the time has come for a major spring clean. Steve Borthwick has certainly snapped on his marigolds with rare vigour in his bid to banish his side’s February blues, with most areas of his team sheet either hosed down or completely flushed away after the less‑than‑fragrant performance against Ireland. A grand total of 1...
The temperatures are rising, the daffodils are out and, within the England camp, the time has come for a major spring clean. Steve Borthwick has certainly snapped on his marigolds with rare vigour in his bid to banish his side’s February blues, with most areas of his team sheet either hosed down or completely flushed away after the less‑than‑fragrant performance against Ireland. A grand total of 12 changes, three of them positional, is almost approaching Thames Water-levels of murky discharge. Not since the infamous tombola days of the 1960s and 70s, when England’s selectors sometimes called up any old Tom, Dick or Harrovian, has a red rose head coach deviated more strikingly from the strong and stable gospel of devil‑you‑know cohesion. The resultant mix is unquestionably fresher-looking if, in places, slightly eclectic. If the aim is more first-quarter certainty, it is an interesting gambit to select a half-back pairing, a midfield duo and a back three which, as combined units, have never played a Test together. Where’s the instinctive logic, for example, in reinstating a pair of Northampton players at 10 and 13 and then removing the 12 jersey from their club colleague Fraser Dingwall? And so on. If Ben Spencer is suddenly the man at scrum-half with Alex Mitchell injured it offers the possibility of a more kick-based gameplan. If that event why drop your best kicking fly‑half in George Ford? And if you are picking both Fin Smith and Tommy Freeman, does it not strengthen the case for their fellow Saint George Furbank at full‑back rather than Elliot Daly? The resulting patchwork quilt of a selection is far removed from the backline that, until recently, was supposedly first among equals. Which backs up the sense that Borthwick’s patience has snapped. Remember those furious old‑school coaches who, after a disappointing defeat, would scream: “I’m going to drop the lot of yers!” In this case, with just three players wearing the same shirt they wore against Ireland, that...
A new exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich revisits the Belgian artist whose wild women of the demimonde scandalised the belle epoque – and still shock audiences today During an oppressively hot week in Paris in 1878, the bohemian Belgian artist Félicien Rops painted a picture of a woman walking her pet pig. In it, the woman is blindfolded and naked – bar some stockings, long black gloves and a jaunty f...
A new exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich revisits the Belgian artist whose wild women of the demimonde scandalised the belle epoque – and still shock audiences today During an oppressively hot week in Paris in 1878, the bohemian Belgian artist Félicien Rops painted a picture of a woman walking her pet pig. In it, the woman is blindfolded and naked – bar some stockings, long black gloves and a jaunty feathered hat – and the pig has a cute, pink curlicue of a tail. Pornocrates – which roughly translates as “the ruler of fornication” – is an eye worm. Once seen, it’s hard to forget. Rops recalled composing his most famous work “in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction”. As viewers of Laboratory of Lust, a new exhibition on Rops at Kunsthaus Zurich, will discover to their amazement, or perhaps indignation, mating and painting were indelibly linked in Rops’ psyche. Continue reading...
Horizons and highways: Franco Fontana’s stunning photographic experiments – in pictures A mesmerising new exhibition showcases the work of the Italian colour pioneer whose landscapes, motorways and swimming pools often seem more like abstract paintings
Horizons and highways: Franco Fontana’s stunning photographic experiments – in pictures A mesmerising new exhibition showcases the work of the Italian colour pioneer whose landscapes, motorways and swimming pools often seem more like abstract paintings
In Will Self’s 1991 debut collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, an art therapist named Misha Gurney finds himself involuntarily sectioned in the psychiatric hospital where he is employed. In the title story, Misha’s father is revealed as a friend and early associate of the hospital’s chief psychiatrist Zack Busner, a recurring character in Self’s fiction until the present day. In his first i...
In Will Self’s 1991 debut collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, an art therapist named Misha Gurney finds himself involuntarily sectioned in the psychiatric hospital where he is employed. In the title story, Misha’s father is revealed as a friend and early associate of the hospital’s chief psychiatrist Zack Busner, a recurring character in Self’s fiction until the present day. In his first incarnation, Busner is engaged in testing the titular theory, by whose metric “the surface of the collective psyche was like the worn, stripy ticking of an old mattress. If you punched into its coiled hide at any point, another part would spring up – there was no action without reaction, no laughter without tears, no normality without its pissing accompanist.” Outlandish? Maybe not. However plausible or implausible the theory itself, The Quantity Theory of Insanity was an enthralling work, the announcement of a talent that has continued to reinvent the concept of narrative fiction even as it gloomily advertises its demise. Thirty-five years on, Self augments his earlier hypothesis with The Quantity Theory of Morality, in which Zack Busner – now in his dotage – proffers the warning that there is only so much good to go around. “I estimate that when a social group’s morality quotient begins to decline, a sequel of bad behaviour will inevitably be bad feeling, as well.” Juries, jewellers, the Jews – no matter the size or derivation of the group in question, the new theory applies to all. The novel opens on a Hampstead dinner party. One of the guests is Will, a writer who knows the assembled company as only their creator could. Johnny Freedman is regaling everyone with his scheme to farm vicuña in the Aylesbury Hundreds; Cathy McCluskey is worried that her husband might be having an affair; Phil Szabo is mixing cocktails. Phil is rumoured to be some sort of spy, but Will is quick to dismiss him as a Foreign Office functionary. “I’d always thought of Phil as a sort of minor chara...
A guided walk through North Yorkshire woodland throws up some thrilling surprises by honing in on sound over sight At the outset, Richard Baines says: “You don’t need binoculars.” This is not what I expect to hear on a walk where the main focus is birds. The sun has yet to rise, but we can see our way across muddy ground crunchy with ice. That is the next surprise in a day that will be full of the...
A guided walk through North Yorkshire woodland throws up some thrilling surprises by honing in on sound over sight At the outset, Richard Baines says: “You don’t need binoculars.” This is not what I expect to hear on a walk where the main focus is birds. The sun has yet to rise, but we can see our way across muddy ground crunchy with ice. That is the next surprise in a day that will be full of them: we are still in February but Richard points out that ornithological spring is well under way. “Birds are starting to sing,” he says. “Some, like the crossbill, might already have laid eggs.” We follow a path up to an open ridge, but bird sounds are conspicuously absent. Richard turns back and heads down into a sheltered wooded valley. We have driven up from Pickering to the North York Moors , an area he has been exploring for more than 40 years, his experiences charted in recent memoir The Rarity Garden . As a 14-year-old budding ornithologist he decided to learn bird songs and calls. “I had spent too many woodland walks being disappointed by not seeing any birds, but I could hear a great deal,” he says. “When I started to prioritise sound above sight, the trees came alive and I have never had a bad woodland walk since.” Our walk today aims to land that message for me. Continue reading...
In June 2025, I accompanied a group of Siekopai women along the Aguarico River in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Mothers, daughters, cousins and granddaughters had reunited to participate in the Binational Ceramics Gathering in Siekoya Remolino, a community that has remained free from oil extraction, mining and African palm monocultures. They were welcomed by the Keñao Productive Women’s Association, whic...
In June 2025, I accompanied a group of Siekopai women along the Aguarico River in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Mothers, daughters, cousins and granddaughters had reunited to participate in the Binational Ceramics Gathering in Siekoya Remolino, a community that has remained free from oil extraction, mining and African palm monocultures. They were welcomed by the Keñao Productive Women’s Association, which was founded in 2022 by 26 Siekopai female artisans to promote Indigenous women’s participation and economic autonomy. The Siekopai Nation, which has historically occupied territories along the northern border between Ecuador and Peru, was separated and displaced during the 1941 border war between the two countries, a conflict with consequences that extended into the 1990s. According to Justino Piaguaje, leader of the Siekopai in Ecuador, the nation’s original population was close to 20,000 but diseases brought by colonisers, Jesuit missions, conditions of slavery during the rubber boom, and the impacts of the oil industry led to a drastic decline. Today they number about 800 in Ecuador and 1,200 in Peru. I first visited Siekoya Remolino in 2024 to conduct a documentary photography and storytelling workshop with Indigenous women of several nationalities, as part of my work with the CatchLight global fellowship. But my connection with northern Ecuador’s Amazon began years earlier as a photojournalist documenting oil spills, gas flares burning day and night, monocultures, refineries, river erosion, obstetric violence against Indigenous women, and structural abandonment in the region. Meeting the Keñao women and the Siekopai Nation transformed my understanding of territory, not as landscape, but as a living body and collective memory. The Siekopai people have lived for generations along the Aguarico and its tributaries: clay rivers whose mineral-rich sediments are essential for soil fertility, fish reproduction and forest regeneration. However, in Peru and Ecuador, oil spills...
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is on track to lose $14bn this year. Its market share is collapsing, and its own CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted it “screwed up” an element of the product. All it takes to accelerate that decline is 10 seconds of your time. A grassroots boycott called QuitGPT has been spreading across the US and beyond, asking people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. More tha...
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is on track to lose $14bn this year. Its market share is collapsing, and its own CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted it “screwed up” an element of the product. All it takes to accelerate that decline is 10 seconds of your time. A grassroots boycott called QuitGPT has been spreading across the US and beyond, asking people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. More than a million people have answered the call. Mark Ruffalo and Katy Perry have thrown their weight behind it. It is one of the most significant consumer boycotts in recent memory, and I believe it’s time for Europeans to join. Here’s what triggered it. Early this year, the news broke that OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, donated $25m to Maga Inc, Donald Trump’s biggest Super Pac. This made him Trump’s largest donor of the last cycle. When Wired asked him to explain, Brockman said his donations were in service of OpenAI’s mission to benefit “humanity.” Let me tell you what that mission looks like in practice. Employees of ICE – the agency whose agents killed two people in Minneapolis in January – have used a screening tool powered by ChatGPT. The same company behind your friendly chatbot is helping the government decide who to hire for deportation raids. And it’s not stopping there. OpenAI helped launch a $125m lobbying initiative, a Super Pac, to make sure no state can regulate AI. It’s attacking any politician who tries to pass safety laws. It wants Trump, and only Trump, to write the rules for the most powerful technology on earth. Every month, subscription money from users around the world flows to a company that is embedding itself in the repressive infrastructure of the Trump administration. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business strategy. Things got even worse last week. When the Trump administration demanded that AI companies give the Pentagon unrestricted access to their technology – including for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons – Anthropic, the c...
A basement-bound thriller begins with a grisly jolt of invention before succumbing to diminishing returns As Carlos Goitia’s low-budget horror movie opens, we begin in medias res as a woman (Paula Brasca) wakes up in a standard murder basement: muted decor, very little natural light, a sturdy workbench with an impressive array of rusty tools, various masks made of skin. She immediately realises sh...
A basement-bound thriller begins with a grisly jolt of invention before succumbing to diminishing returns As Carlos Goitia’s low-budget horror movie opens, we begin in medias res as a woman (Paula Brasca) wakes up in a standard murder basement: muted decor, very little natural light, a sturdy workbench with an impressive array of rusty tools, various masks made of skin. She immediately realises she is lying in a pile of corpses – all mutilated women. She herself is badly injured. Not a happy awakening for the character, but it’s not a bad jumping-off point for a horror movie. In short order, the killer (Damian Castillo) heaves into view. Naturally, he’s an absolutely massive man in a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-type get-up – and our heroine very sensibly plays dead. This is a creepy and interesting conceit – how long is she going to be able to keep up the pretence? What happens once he rumbles the ruse? Unfortunately, Goitia can’t quite assemble enough material to keep the “what if you had to pretend to be dead?” idea in play for a whole feature film, and proceedings start to feel thin and stretched at a point where there is still plenty of movie left to play out. Continue reading...
With major Persian Gulf aviation hubs largely paralysed by airspace closures amid the escalating conflict involving the US, Israel and Iran , travellers have flocked to direct Asia-Europe routes, driving a sharp surge in airfares. This week, economy class on most direct one-way Beijing-Paris flights is fully booked, with a small number of economy seats – plus premium economy and business class sea...
With major Persian Gulf aviation hubs largely paralysed by airspace closures amid the escalating conflict involving the US, Israel and Iran , travellers have flocked to direct Asia-Europe routes, driving a sharp surge in airfares. This week, economy class on most direct one-way Beijing-Paris flights is fully booked, with a small number of economy seats – plus premium economy and business class seats – remaining. Economy seats on an Air China flight on Sunday are already booked out, with a one-way Beijing-Paris business-class ticket priced at around 77,000 yuan ($11,127), according to Trip.com Group, China’s largest online travel agency. Advertisement A one-way economy ticket on an Air France flight now costs 26,000 yuan, more than triple the usual price of 5,000 yuan to 8,000 yuan, data from the platform showed. But there are none left for Sunday and only business-class seats costing 51,000 yuan one way are available for Monday. “The Middle East accounts for a relatively small share of China’s international air route network,” said Guo Jia, a senior independent civil aviation industry analyst based in Guangzhou. “Major China-Europe flights typically fly via Central Asia and Turkey, rather than Middle Eastern airspace. Therefore, the direct impact of the conflict on Chinese carriers’ international routes is limited.” Advertisement He said Chinese carriers could see an uptick in demand on their established routes to Europe, Canada and Australia as a result of the disruption in the Gulf.
Germany's Corporate Tax Collapse Signals Economic Crisis By Thomas Kolbe The ten-minute applause of delegates at the CDU party congress still echoed when the Federal Ministry of Finance spoiled the festive mood in Stuttgart. Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil’s (SPD) department reported a nationwide collapse of corporate tax revenue by 79 percent in January 2026 compared to last year. At the same tim...
Germany's Corporate Tax Collapse Signals Economic Crisis By Thomas Kolbe The ten-minute applause of delegates at the CDU party congress still echoed when the Federal Ministry of Finance spoiled the festive mood in Stuttgart. Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil’s (SPD) department reported a nationwide collapse of corporate tax revenue by 79 percent in January 2026 compared to last year. At the same time, revenue from assessed income tax fell by 14.2 percent, while wage tax revenue rose by 9.1 percent. VAT revenue grew by two percent — a reflection of persistent inflationary tendencies in the country, to which the state itself contributes significantly through its taxation policies . While price increases may be slowed by continued economic weakness, cumulative inflation continues to weigh on consumers even if the annual rate declines. Inflation is always good for the state, which is why it persists. Corporate tax burdens corporate profits at 15 percent plus a solidarity surcharge. Last year, revenue totaled roughly €40 billion, less than one percent of GDP. Even in 2025, revenue had fallen six percent, showing a long-term negative trend. Its temporary collapse in January will likely have no immediate fiscal consequences. Corporate tax revenue is split — 50 percent to the federal government, 42 percent to the states, and eight percent to municipalities, which appear at least partially shielded at this tax level. However, municipalities already suffered a fiscal blow last year, especially in the centers of the industrial crisis. Cities such as Wolfsburg and Stuttgart saw sharp declines in their key tax base, the trade tax. It is undeniable: the situation is becoming serious, and the damage from political mismanagement is now visible. For the first time, fiscal effects appear in a country where policy had long relied on ever-growing tax revenues, postponing social issues with generous spending. January’s alarming figures allow a troubling diagnosis: the companies that gener...
File photo of Wang Shouren. Photo: Shenzhen Venture Capital Association Wang Shouren, a key architect of China’s venture capital industry and a longtime advocate for ChiNext, China’s Nasdaq-style startup board, died in Shenzhen last week at the age of 84, according to the Shenzhen Venture Capital Association (SZVCA). Wang, who served as secretary-general of the SZVCA, died after living with cancer...
File photo of Wang Shouren. Photo: Shenzhen Venture Capital Association Wang Shouren, a key architect of China’s venture capital industry and a longtime advocate for ChiNext, China’s Nasdaq-style startup board, died in Shenzhen last week at the age of 84, according to the Shenzhen Venture Capital Association (SZVCA). Wang, who served as secretary-general of the SZVCA, died after living with cancer for more than a decade and undergoing chemotherapy that affected his vocal cords, making it difficult for him to speak, a person familiar with him told Caixin.