The Guardian

Climate activists have thrown tomato soup over two Sunflowers paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, just an hour after two others were jailed for a similar protest action in 2022.

Maggie Smith, the prolific, multi-award-winning actor whose work ranged from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Harry Potter to Downton Abbey, has died aged 89.

Another pandemic as big as the Covid crisis that killed 7 million people worldwide is “a certainty”, Prof Sir Chris Whitty has warned, as he said that the UK’s lack of intensive care capacity for the sickest patients was a “political choice”.

Underage marriage is illegal in South Sudan yet so commonplace it rarely attracts attention. But the case of Athiak Dau Riak, whose mother says she is only 14, has gone viral, polarising her family and the country.

Loved-up brown bears and whispering raccoons feature in this light-hearted look at a selection of finalists from the Nikon Comedy Wildlife awards. A winner will be announced on 10 December.

The escalating conflict between Israeli forces and Hezbollah has put a renewed focus on the battle-hardened Lebanese militant group. The violence is seen as the most likely avenue for the war in Gaza to explode into an uncontrollable regional conflagration. Here is a guide to the “Party of God” and its position in – and testy relationship with – the fragile Lebanese state.

More than 100 artists, curators and art historians are making a plea for two activists who hurled tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to be spared a jail sentence.

A restaurant dedicated to Giorgia Meloni has opened in the vicinity of a camp in Albania where the asylum claims of people who seek to enter the EU by sea will be processed as part of a controversial pact promoted by the Italian far-right prime minister.

The London Marathon raised a record £ 73.5 million ($98.28 million) for charity, race organisers said on Wednesday in what they described as the world’s largest annual one-day fundraising event.

The Labour leadership has lost a highly anticipated motion at the party’s conference that called on ministers to reverse the cuts to winter fuel payments.