Reform’s new candidate for mayor claims people pity Londoners for living in an unsafe capital. But the evidence is clear: we’re making our streets safer

Last year, something extraordinary happened in London. As the conversation about crime got even louder, London quietly reached the lowest per capita homicide rate in its recorded history. Even London’s harshest critics have to accept this is impressive progress.

For too many, it will no doubt come as a surprise. In recent years, politicians and commentators have sought to spam our social media feeds with an endless stream of distortions and untruths – painting a dystopian picture of a lawless place where criminals run rampant.

Sadiq Khan is the mayor of London

Our politically engaged mother loved deriding me and my sister for being stroppy and delinquent. This picture tells another story – and is a testament to our sunny dispositions

My mother, Gwen, liked to describe things in broad brush strokes. Me and my sister’s teenage years, mid-80s to early 90s, she’d cover with: “Zoe was delinquent, couldn’t get a word of sense out of her.” Or: “1986? That was the year Stacey was awful.” Going through photo albums to make a montage for her funeral, all her pictures from that era were testament to our ill-behaviour: me, sniffing a geranium, sarcastically; Stace, outside a cafe in an indeterminable European city where you can almost lip-read her stroppy “piss off” to camera in the still moment.

Gwen was politically engaged – you’d come downstairs on a Wednesday morning to find a handwritten letter starting, “Dear Pérez de Cuéllar, I cannot deplore enough your silence on the matter of the Western Sahara” – and heavily involved in progressive politics: our kitchen was full of posters that would have to catch on fire before they’d ever get taken down. There was one fighting pit closures, for example, right next to one about having no planet B, and mum went heavy on the spoof public information campaigns. Instead of the government’s “protect and survive” leaflets, telling you how to survive a nuclear war by taking a door off its hinges and propping it against a wall, there was a “protest and survive” poster; a rip-off of the “Don’t Die of Ignorance” HIV campaign, which said something like “Don’t Die of Tories”, and “Heroin isn’t the only thing that damages your mind”, featuring a man reading (I think?) The Sun.

He has survived loss, breakdown and schooling by ‘scary nuns’, but the anguish is still there in his art. As his new show thrills Paris, the US-based, Irish-born artist talks about the pain that drives him

When I ask Sean Scully what an abstract painting has over a figurative one it’s music he reaches for. “You might ask, what’s Miles Davis got over the Beatles? And the answer is: doesn’t have any words in it. And then you could say, what have the Beatles got over John Coltrane? Well, they’ve got words.”

It’s clear which choice he has made. Scully, who paints rectangles and squares and strips of colour abutting and sliding into each other, is an instrumentalist in paint rather than a pop artist. The meaning of his art is something you feel, not something you can easily describe. He has more in common with Davis and Coltrane than with the Beatles. In addition to improvisational brilliance, his new paintings even colour-match with Coltrane’s classic album Blue Train and Davis’s Kind of Blue. For Scully, the greatest living abstract painter, is playing the blues in Paris. In his current exhibition at the city’s Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, long, textured blue notes as smoky as a sax at midnight alternate and mingle with black and red and brown in a slow, sad, beautiful music that doesn’t need words, art that doesn’t require images.

British Museum, London
This retelling of Captain Cook’s death and the merging of two cultures is a trove of miraculously preserved wonders – but beware of the shark-toothed club!

Relations between Britain and the Pacific kingdom of Hawaii didn’t get off to a great start. On 14 February 1779 the global explorer James Cook was clubbed and stabbed to death at Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay in a dispute over a boat: it was a tragedy of cultural misunderstanding that still has anthropologists arguing over its meaning. Cook had previously visited Hawaii and apparently been identified as the god Lono, but didn’t know this. Marshall Sahlins argued that Cook was killed because by coming twice he transgressed the Lono myth, while another anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere, attacked him for imposing colonialist assumptions of “native” irrationality on the Hawaiians.

It’s a fascinating, contentious debate. But the aftermath of Cook’s death is less well known – and the British Museum’s telling of it, in collaboration with indigenous Hawaii curators, community leaders and artists, reveals a surprisingly complex if doomed encounter between different cultures.

As galling as it is to see young people refer to the items I wore 10 years ago as ‘vintage’, surely the real problem is that so many of them believe their best years are behind them

‘I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” wrote TS Eliot in 1915, in his seminal poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. And as I sit here in 2026 with my jeans turned up (as per the style of the thirtysomething urban millennial), well, I can relate. What has brought on this bout of contemplation? The latest TikTok craze. Loosely known as “Bring Back 2016”, it involves TikTokers urging their mostly gen Z audience to “live 2026 like it’s 2016” – complete with mannequin challenges, a Major Lazer soundtrack and the promise of never-ending summer. And it’s sure to get heads spinning quicker than the fidget spinners it’s resurrecting.

Admittedly, most of the content is just plain silly: 2016 challenges and dances (the bottle flip, the dab); nostalgia for tech crazes (Pokémon Go and that Snapchat dog filter that made you look like a slobbering puppy but in a weirdly sexy way); and a return to 2016 makeup, fashion and low-effort aesthetics. Remember when “vintage film” filters were all the rage (RIP Instagram’s Mayfair and Sierra)? When videos didn’t need a number of takes, lengthy edits, and border on a professional production? When it was OK to just be online without considering what it said about you as a personal brand? Or when the internet wasn’t divisive politics everywhere? Well, that’s 2016 according to TikTok, and it’s time to “Bring! It! Back!”

Unlike in food, there is no upper limit on the amount of pesticide residue levels in flowers. But after French officials linked the death of a florist’s child to exposure in pregnancy, many in the industry are now raising the alarm

On a cold morning in December 2024, florist Madeline King was on a buying trip to her local wholesaler when a wave of dizziness nearly knocked her over. As rows of roses seemed to rush past her, she tried to focus. She quickly picked the blooms she needed and left.

I’m not doing this any more, she thought.

Sadiq Khan says ‘public health’ approach has made the capital one of the safest cities in the western world

London’s murder rate has dropped to its lowest in more than a decade with police in the capital and the mayor saying it is now one of the safest cities in the western world.

The figures come as those on the radical right criticise the city for having a crime problem, hoping to gain politically from such claims being believed.

US president claims ‘Iran wants to negotiate’ as rights groups report that regime’s crackdown on protest has killed hundreds

Donald Trump has claimed Iran has reached out and proposed negotiations, as he considers “very strong” military action against the regime over a deadly crackdown on protesters that has reportedly killed hundreds.

Asked on Sunday by reporters aboard Air Force One if Iran had crossed his previously stated red line of protesters being killed, Trump said “they’re starting to, it looks like.”

Dozens including TUC join force to oppose ‘wide-ranging’ move to increase police powers in England and Wales

More than 40 civil society groups including the TUC, Greenpeace and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have joined forces to oppose “dangerous” plans to increase police powers to ban protests in England and Wales.

They said an amendment in the crime and policing bill, which would require police to consider the “cumulative impact” of repeated protests in the same area when imposing conditions on demonstrations, represented a “draconian crackdown on our rights to freedom of expression and assembly”.

Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah accused British intelligence services of providing questions to his CIA interrogators

The UK has settled out of court by paying a “substantial sum” to a Guantánamo Bay detainee who was suing the government for its alleged complicity in his rendition and torture, according to the inmate’s legal team.

Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah have accused the British intelligence services of providing questions to his CIA interrogators to put to him while they were torturing him at a string of CIA “black sites” around the world where he was held between 2002 and 2006.