Briton apologised for his ‘big mouth’ and asked for forgiveness, saying he had written a song for the female star

Madonna has said she has “buried the hatchet” with Sir Elton John and hinted she will collaborate with him, after watching the pianist and singer perform with Brandi Carlile on Saturday Night Live (SNL).

The strained relationship dates back to 2002, when John was quoted by CBS News as describing her theme to Die Another Day as “the worst Bond tune ever”.

Thinktank says solar has been fastest-growing energy source for last 20 years, but remains dwarfed by hydro power

The world used clean power sources to meet more than 40% of its electricity demand last year for the first time since the 1940s, figures show.

A report by the energy thinktank Ember said the milestone was powered by a boom in solar power capacity, which has doubled in the last three years.

Amnesty International confirms 1,518 people executed in 2024 but says real total is likely to be thousands more

More people were executed in 2024 than in any other year over the past decade, mainly reflecting a huge increase in executions in Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, according to Amnesty International’s annual report on the use of the death penalty.

The human rights NGO said that although the number of countries carrying out executions was the lowest on record, it had confirmed 1,518 executions globally in 2024, a 32% increase over the previous year and the highest since the 1,634 carried out in 2015.

This tale of two British army sergeants who filmed the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp uses their profoundly disturbing footage. It’s TV that could alter your whole world view

What They Found, the first documentary by the film and theatre director Sam Mendes, is a short, stark shock. The film straightforwardly combines two precious artefacts held at the Imperial War Museum in London: 35mm film, shot by Sgt Mike Lewis and Sgt Bill Lawrie of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, before and during the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near the town of Celle in northern Germany in April 1945; and audio interviews given by the cameramen in the 1980s. Lewis and Lawrie did not record sound when they visited Belsen; the words they spoke years later are the only sounds we hear.

Lewis and Lawrie do not arrive at Belsen until almost halfway through the film’s 36-minute running time. First, laid over generic archive footage, we hear how they came to be army photographers, and we get a flavour of their prewar civilian life. This is particularly pertinent in the case of Lewis, a son of Jewish immigrants from Poland who looked on in dismay in 1936 as fascists held rallies in his parents’ adopted home country. “I could not, like most English Jews, really believe this of England,” he says. “But the world began to assume a shape more real than those things we were taught about it.”

The most interesting character was sidelined, the deaths were riddled with lazy logic and it all felt frustratingly middling. Season four will have some redeeming to do

Warning: this article contains spoilers for the finale of season three of The White Lotus. Do not read on unless you have seen episode eight, season three.

In the Hollywood Reporter’s recent oral history , Mike White bristled at the thought of The White Lotus lapsing into a formula. For most of its third season, this didn’t make a lot of sense. After all, in its depiction of the obliviously wealthy, its whodunnit structure and its now mandatory transgressive sex scenes, a lot of this year’s season felt like The White Lotus by numbers.

President, sitting in Oval Office with Benjamin Netanyahu, warns Tehran of ‘great danger’ if talks are not successful

Donald Trump has announced that the US is to hold direct talks with Iran in a bid to prevent the country from obtaining an atomic bomb, while also warning Tehran of dire consequences if they fail.

Sitting beside Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the Oval Office, Trump indicated that discussions would start this coming weekend, though he also implied communications had already begun.

The historian’s unflinching Holocaust documentary doesn't just chronicle horror. It also asks: how much was Europe to blame – and is any nation immune from antisemitism?

It is 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. That means it won’t be long before all the people who lived through the Holocaust are gone. It is now left to those who weren’t there – such as the historian Simon Schama, born in London two weeks after the liberation – to ensure it is never forgotten or misremembered, and to preserve its lessons for future generations.

But how to go about it? In his new show, one of Schama’s main methods is to unflinchingly relive the depravity. The Road to Auschwitz holds you in its grip and forces you to absorb the details. We hear of Jewish people being murdered using high-pressure water hoses. We see photographs of the cramped, repellent ghettoes, in which they were starved until they resembled walking skeletons as children froze to death in the streets. We see the piles of shrivelled corpses in Auschwitz. We hear that the slaughter was so prolific that the camp’s purpose-built crematoriums became clogged with fat; in Schama’s words, “the furnaces were gagging”. An inmate of Auschwitz – who buried his testimony in the ground before he perished – describes the burning of corpses: the skin blisters and bursts in seconds, the stomach explodes, blue flames come out from the eye sockets, the head burns longest.

Defeat against Valencia may have dented their title hopes, but it still takes courage to bet against Carlo Ancelotti’s side

At the end of Real Madrid’s 4-4 draw with Real Sociedad last week, Carlo Ancelotti was asked whether there had been any point at which he feared for their place in the Copa del Rey final. He had watched his team go 1-0, 3-1 and 4-3 down, the game heading into extra time before Antonio Rüdiger’s goal after midnight finally gave them a 4-4 draw, allowing them to scrape through 5-4 on aggregate. But still he said no.

“Because,” he reasoned, “anything can happen here.” And that, you couldn’t help wondering, may be precisely the problem. One day, anything would not happen, and then what?

The performances – including that of Rose Ayling-Ellis – are outstanding, while the way it switches between spoken and signed language is utterly seamless. It feels shocking that it's taken so long for a show like this to exist

In many ways, Reunion is a fairly conventional thriller. Daniel Brennan (Matthew Gurney) is released from prison after serving a long sentence for killing his childhood friend Ray (Ace Mahbaz). He confessed to the murder but has never explained why he did it. Brennan’s wife died when he was inside and he is now trying to reconnect with his daughter, Carly (Lara Peake), while seeking vengeance (also unexplained) on a figure from his past and putting himself in danger of being recalled to prison as he does so.

Beyond Brennan himself, we have Anne-Marie Duff as Ray’s widow, Christine, and Rose Ayling-Ellis as their daughter, Miri, whose fragile new life is hit hard by the news that the killer of their beloved husband and father is out on probation. Christine’s boyfriend, Stephen (Eddie Marsan), is a former police officer and promises to look out for them.