The crown of French Empress Eugenie recovered after last year’s Louvre heist was left damaged – but remains largely intact and will be restored, the museum has said. 

Jewels worth an estimated £76m were stolen in an audacious raid at the museum in Paris on 19 October last year.

The thieves, who pulled off the heist in minutes while the attraction was open to visitors, left a diamond-studded headpiece belonging to the wife of Napoleon III – who ruled France in the 19th century – after dropping it during their escape.

The crown suffered “crushing damage” and was “significantly deformed” – but restoration will be possible without the need for reconstruction or re-creation, the museum said in a statement.

The museum also released photographs of the damaged crown, which it said is missing one of eight golden eagles that adorned it but retains its 56 emeralds and all but 10 of its 1,354 diamonds.

The restoration will be overseen by an expert committee led by the Louvre‘s director Laurence des Cars.

Five people have been charged with involvement in the heist, however, the stolen haul – which included jewellery linked to other royal figures from French history – has not been recovered.

The gang used a stolen furniture lift to access the second floor Galerie d’Apollon, a room in the Louvre outside which Empress Eugenie’s crown was found.

They then cracked open display cases with angle grinders before escaping with their loot and fleeing on the back of two scooters driven by accomplices.

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Speaking shortly after the heist, art detective Arthur Brand told Sky News: “These crown jewels are so famous, you just cannot sell them.

“The only thing they can do is melt the silver and gold down, dismantle the diamonds, try to cut them. That’s the way they will probably disappear forever.”

HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong’s pro-democracy former media tycoon Jimmy Lai will be sentenced Monday following his conviction in December under a Beijing-imposed national security law.

Lai, the 78-year-old founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper, could face up to life in prison in the case that has stirred criticism from some foreign governments.

The judiciary said Friday on its website that it’s calling for the sentencing session at 10 a.m. Monday.

Lai was an outspoken critic of China’s ruling Communist Party and was arrested in 2020 under the national security law that Beijing deemed necessary for the city’s stability following anti-government protests the previous year.

His trial was widely seen as an indicator of the decline of press freedom in the former British colony, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997. But the city’s government insists the case has nothing to do with media freedom.

The sentencing could create tensions between Beijing and foreign governments. Lai’s conviction already drew criticism from the U.S. and Britain. After the December verdict, U.S. President Donald Trump, who had raised Lai’s case with China, said he felt “so badly.” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration has called for the release of Lai, who is a British citizen.

Hong Kong’s Chief Justice Andrew Cheung said in January that calls for prematurely releasing a defendant based on political causes or identity circumvent legal procedures to ensure accountability and “strike at the very heart of the rule of law itself.”

Lai was found guilty of conspiring with others to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to publish seditious articles. He was accused of conspiring with senior executives of Apple Daily and others to ask foreign forces to impose sanctions or blockades or engage in other hostile activities against Hong Kong or China.

Lai pleaded not guilty to all charges, while the six former Apple Daily journalists and two activists who are co-defendants entered pleas that could result in reduced sentences. They all are expected to return to court Monday to hear their fate.

Lai previously was convicted of several lesser offenses related to fraud allegations and his actions in 2019. He is serving a nearly six-year prison term for the fraud case.

In October 1945, George Orwell responded to a letter from Mr J. Stewart Cook in the leftwing weekly newspaper Tribune calling for more science education.

The call can hardly have come as a surprise. War had brought science and engineering to the fore – from the Spitfire fighter plane and radar to Bletchley Park’s codebreakers – and now that war was over, many thought it was time to build a brave new world. Science had won the war; the view was that it should build the peace.

Only the week before, in the same newspaper, Orwell had warned of the dangers posed by the atomic bomb. He was not a pacifist – far from it. But he started off by saying how likely it was that the world would “be blown to pieces by it within the next five years”, and ended with a stark warning against big science.

The bigger and more scientific the weapons, Orwell argued, the bigger and more authoritarian the state. And the bigger and more authoritarian the states that held those weapons, the greater the likelihood that an unstable stand-off between them would run and run, until the unthinkable happened.

Given this scenario, which he was the first to call a “cold war”, Orwell wanted to know exactly what Mr Cook meant by asking for more science education: did he want more scientists in laboratories, or did he want more people in general trained to think more scientifically?

If it was a call for more scientists in lab coats, Orwell pondered whether there was any plausible reason for expecting it to be in the public interest. Chemists might think so, clearly, but what about the rest of us? Why more chemists over more historians, say, or more writers, or philosophers, or economists?

In Orwell’s view, scientists at war had shown themselves to be just as self-interested, just as nationalist, just as Nazi, and just as politically illiterate and mistaken as everybody else. A few million more was not going to make things better – and maybe worse.

He wrote: “The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook. The physicists of half a dozen great nations, all feverishly working away at the atom bomb, are a demonstration of this.”

On the other hand, more science as a way of thinking had Orwell’s full support. In his Tribune response (republished in the third volume of his collected essays), he defined this as “a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind”.

Only, Orwell averred, you don’t have to be a scientist to think like this. And away from the test tubes and reactors, a scientist might not think like this. An illiterate peasant could be just as rational, just as sceptical and just as experimental, in his own domain at least. Yet no one, least of all a fellow of the Royal Society, was going to call him a “scientist”.

The whole argument, Orwell feared, might end up dropping the notion of more scientific thinking across the population, and “simply boil down to” more physics, less literature, and a narrowing of thought all round.

Orwell leaves it there. Not very profound, you might think, but in the best Orwellian manner, designed to catch your sleeve and make you think.

The blessings of science

When he was at Eton, Orwell wrote a short story for the school magazine called A Peep into the Future. In it, a mad professor takes over the school to impose a reign of terror based on the “blessings of science”.

Until, that is, one Sunday morning in chapel, a mighty proletarian woman – “massive hands on her hips” – comes striding down the aisle to take a swipe that relieves the professor of his dignity and his position. “A good smackin’ is what you want,” she said. And a good smackin’ is what he got. “He was never seen again … the reign of science was at an end.”

There might be shades of Big Brother in this schoolboy story, except that Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, is not about the reign of science but a reign of terror devoted to the complete eradication of science.

The whole point of the ruling party “Ingsoc” (a left-fascist totalitarian regime) is the destruction of the concept of objective truth, discoverable in nature. Instead of experimentation, there is only manipulation. Instead of reasoning, there is only fear. Instead of facts, there are only lies. It is axiomatic that two plus two equals five and always will, so long as the party says so.

Winston Smith’s interrogator, an intelligent man by most other measures, tells Winston that he (the interrogator) could identify as a soap bubble if he wanted to, and float off. And nobody was going to say he couldn’t. Winston tries and has his brain reprogrammed for the effort.

Seeing things ‘as they are’

Orwell’s fiction was more concerned with essences than probabilities. As for his non-fiction, although he rarely invoked statistics or empirical research, he operated as near to the general scientific method as possible, given the human condition.

Getting it right, seeing things “as they are”, was one of his four reasons for writing. Orwell is forever at pains to establish the facts, to reason in plain sight, to show due caution, and to experiment in the only way politico-literary criticism can experiment – by imagining the alternatives.

With or without Donald Trump, there are always alternative facts, and writers must search them out. Thomas Hobbes’s view of man in a state of nature is not the same as fellow philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, and the facts are legion on both sides.

Orwell’s personal library contained a few popular science volumes but was mainly literary. He adhered to the scientific method like the “illiterate peasant” he was at heart – a man who was at his happiest in his garden, eyeing the weather and measuring the soil by instinct and experience.

Let Orwell find a problem, and he would bring the full width of his reasoning to bear. But in the end, words are an art not a science, and there are no rules except a pitch for the truth.

This article includes references to books included for editorial reasons, and links to bookshop.org. If you click a link and go on to buy something from bookshop.org, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Willow’s parents say there are still no answers as to what happened to their little girl

A couple whose 17-month-old daughter died unexpectedly with no prior symptoms say they have been left without “answers” for her cause of death, describing the sudden loss as “surreal”. Ella McNally, 23, a nurse, and her partner Josh Forrest, 24, a joiner, who live in Nottingham, welcomed their “beautiful daughter” Willow Poppy Forrest into the world on June 4 2023.

On the evening of November 11 2024, Ella said she put Willow to bed as normal and checked the baby monitor throughout the night but, when she called her name in the morning to wake her up, she did not respond. After calling an ambulance and performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), Willow was then blue-lighted to hospital, where it was confirmed she had died on November 12 2024, aged 17 months old.

A post-mortem examination and further testing was carried out, and Willow’s cause of death was ruled as Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy (SUDI), leaving Ella and Josh without “any answers”. Now, in Willow’s memory, the couple are preparing to take on the London Landmarks Half Marathon in April to raise awareness and funds for the charity SUDC UK.

“We were waiting and hoping we’d get answers,” Ella said. “But even now, it has been nearly 15 months since she passed away, so she’s almost been gone as long as we had her, and the questions still nag because there aren’t any answers.

“I’m doing (the marathon) for Willow, and for any other family who has experienced this, and I know she’ll be with me all the way.”

SUDC UK says Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (SUDC) is the sudden and unexpected death of a child, between one and 18 years of age, which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation is conducted. Approximately 40 children in the UK are affected by SUDC each year, and the charity says no-one can predict or prevent these deaths, neither parents nor medical professionals, at this time.

If a child is under 24 months, some guidelines use the term Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy (SUDI) instead of SUDC, and therefore this may be listed as the cause of death. Ella said Willow was born on June 4 2023 with “no complications” and she had no health issues, other than one case of hand, foot and mouth disease, which is a common childhood illness.

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Describing Willow, Ella said: “She was bubbly, clever and really cheeky. She had everyone wrapped around her finger.” On November 11 2024, Willow spent the day with Ella’s parents while she was on placement for her nursing degree and Josh was away for work, and they noticed she had a higher temperature.

However, by the evening, Willow’s temperature had returned to normal after taking the medicine Calpol. “She had a bath and she was splashing around and singing nursery rhymes, so she seemed totally fine,” Ella explained. Ella and her sister brought Willow home, read her bedtime stories and gave her a bottle of milk before putting her to bed.

Ella kissed her goodnight, said “I love you” and put on some calming white noise with her Tonie device, checking the baby monitor several times throughout the night. In the morning, Ella checked the baby monitor again and said, from the angle of the monitor, it just looked like Willow was asleep and “nothing was out of the ordinary”.

However, when she went to wake Willow up, she said her name a few times and she did not respond. “I thought she was just messing about at first,” Ella said. “I didn’t think anything of it because I was just stood at her door, but by the fourth time I’d said it and she didn’t respond, I rushed to get her.”

With Willow “unresponsive”, Ella rushed her downstairs and said she “screamed at (her) sister to ring the ambulance” before performing CPR. Willow was then blue-lighted to King’s Mill Hospital and Ella was transported in a police vehicle, and Ella had to call Josh to explain what was happening.

Not long after their arrival, Ella said she was called into a room by medical professionals and told Willow had died that morning. “I feel like my heart just dropped when Willow wasn’t replying because it was very unusual,” Ella explained. “I couldn’t really believe it. It was just a normal morning and she was fine the night before.

“With my healthcare background, I knew that there wasn’t anything more we could do, but I didn’t want to accept that. It’s just surreal.”

Ella and Josh were able to see Willow to say their goodbyes in the hospital, and they were given a 4Louis memory box, which offers a way for bereaved families to store meaningful keepsakes and mementos. In the following days, the couple and family members visited Willow while she was in the mortuary for around an hour each day, and they read her books, including one of her favourites, We’re Going On A Bear Hunt.

Her funeral was held in December 2024, when she was buried with her favourite elephant blanket that she called “her baby”, a pink bunny toy and her Crocs, among other cherished possessions. “It was just a blur, the whole day was surreal,” Ella said.

“Seeing how many people were there to say their goodbyes, that’s what set me off and it hit me – this is real.”

Ella said she and Josh underwent genetic testing afterwards to see if that would provide any answers, but the results came back as normal. Months after her death, the couple received a coronial post-mortem report, which ruled Willow’s cause of death as SUDI, and they said “nothing was flagged” other than her being a “healthy, happy child”.

“I don’t think anything’s ever going to be answered or eased, and to be honest, most of the time it doesn’t actually feel like it’s happened,” Ella said. “It just feels like the time we had with her is like a fever dream.”

She added: “You can try going back to normal, but I feel like with grief, it sneaks up on you when you least expect it.”

Ella explained that she and Josh have not moved or rearranged Willow’s possessions in their home, even leaving her snacks in the cupboard and her water bottle in the fridge, as they want to “memorialise it”. Ella said she returned to university to finish her degree, as she knew Willow would not want her to “wallow at home”, and she graduated in September 2025 and was nominated for the most inspirational student award.

The couple know they have to “keep going” and have found comfort “leaning” on each other and family members, and they want to speak out to help other families affected by SUDI or SUDC. Now, they are preparing for the London Landmarks Half Marathon to raise more awareness and funds for the charity SUDC UK, with a current target of £3,000, and Ella said it will be an “emotional” day.

“We had never heard of SUDC until it happened to us… but we just want every child to be remembered and for the message to be put across,” Ella said. “We will never stop talking about Willow.”

Pascale Harvie, president and general manager at JustGiving, said: “Ella’s decision to run the London Landmarks Half Marathon is a deeply moving tribute to Willow’s memory. By championing the work of SUDC UK, she is turning her personal grief into a lifeline for other families.

“Everyone at JustGiving is in awe of her strength and resilience, and we’ll be cheering her on every step of the way.”

To donate or find out more, visit the JustGiving page at www.justgiving.com/page/ella-mcnally-1

On a bright and unseasonably warm February day, hordes of people gather four or five deep around the perimeter of the Olympic Village. The phones and selfie sticks are out, clutches of policeman keep a watchful eye, and the horses hoping for a glimpse of… something, at least, as no one seems to be going in or out bar police cars.

Luckily the athletes are largely spared feeling like they’re in a zoo, because there’s a walled perimeter around the Village and several control points intruders must get through in order to access the oasis that is the Village itself.

Once inside the vibe is different: the dismal rain of the last few days has stopped and athletes and staff are dotted around, reclining on sun loungers and milling about, looking for all the world like ordinary people and not world-class sports stars.

A group of Polish athletes take pictures of each other by the Olympic rings in a central plaza; I spot an Italian gymnast slumped on a beanbag chair and a young Taiwanese athlete grinning ear to ear as she tests her coach’s air hockey skills.

It’s a bright, leafy, airy space – and perhaps surprisingly corporate, with brand names emblazoned everywhere. There are umpteen different spaces to relax, from a Corona Cero plant shop (if you keep your plant alive until the end of the Games, you get a gift) to a dimly-lit Samsung gaming room. There are also mindfulness sessions and a DJ – although not at the same time.

Unlike at a Summer Olympics, Team GB share a building with other teams; France, China, Georgia and Latvia are essentially just down the hall. The 10 British athletes in Milan – figure, short-track and speed skaters – have a corridor to themselves. It’s got the feeling of a high-class uni halls, with an inviting lounge space far nicer than any common room.

Two rooms have birthday balloons stuck to the doors – figure skater Luke Digby and physio Callum are celebrating their birthdays on the day I visit – and Team GB’s Carly Hodgson says “We try to make it a home away from home”. Before the athletes arrived good luck cards from friends and family were already waiting on their windowsills, while each of the athletes and staff were given a bracelet with the Team GB symbol. Most of the decor in fact is GB merch, from flags in every room to the endless clothes each athlete is provided. And of course there are the 5,000 tea bags stashed in the kitchen.

The GB space features a physio room, presided over by doctor Victoria, and drawers and drawers full of medical equipment – 4.3km worth of surgical tape included. There’s also a stretching area and a corner with a well-used PS4; short track skater Niall Treacy says the lads in the squad all compete to record the fastest lap on a Silverstone simulator. “I went on the bike for an hour and a half and found my coach trying to beat my time,” he says.

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Treacy is one of the lucky ones to have his own room; some of the others share, with rooms allocated based on who has early morning alarms to get to the ice rink, to avoid waking up those in action later in the day.

Everything has been thought of, from 120 spare pairs of snow socks to 310 plug adaptors.

For the athletes all that needs to be done is to settle in, relax, and then get themselves in the zone to compete when the time comes.

open image in gallery

As at Paris 2024 pin-trading is a favourite pastime – ice dancer James Hernandez is said to have an impressive collection already – and Treacy says ruefully, “I got scammed by someone from Athlete365 [an IOC initiative], he asked if we could trade pins and then I found out my coach got one for nothing.”

But the 25-year-old is not too worried about the pins at the moment, with practice to get on with. Team GB cars and special Olympic transport are on hand to ferry them to the rink – and bring them back to this little haven at the end of the day.

Twinless is a classic comedy, in that no matter how much you laugh, you can never shake the feeling that the essence of the situation is tragic.

Roman is grieving the death of his identical twin brother Rocky in a traffic accident. He finds solace in a new friend, Dennis, whom he meets at a support group for people whose twin has died. Dennis provides the missing half Roman grieves for, and accompanies him as he shops for groceries, folds laundry and goes to hockey games.

Roman is stereotypically straight, and is also drawn to Dennis because, like Rocky, Dennis is gay. Dennis is talkative where Roman is taciturn, worldly where Roman is naive, and seems to have been able to move on while Roman remains grief-stricken. But Dennis harbours a shameful secret that threatens not only his friendship with Roman, but his own safety.

Twinless is likely to be the sleeper hit of the year, a great piece of entertainment that takes on life’s absurdities and its mundanities.

Not a single detail is out of place in its observational humour, from the grief support group leader who yearns to do stand-up, to the defensive office manager whose response to receiving a surprise birthday cake is to complain that her workmates have brought her personal life into the workplace.

It is the latest in a spate of films that includes Saltburn, Friendship and Lurker, which depict male friendship as at once intense and alienating. In each of these films, the protagonist’s attraction to his potential friend is motivated more by a need for self-validation than genuine interest in the other person. Friendship here becomes narcissistic, and is won through deception rather than a desire for genuine connection.

What gives these films their pathos is the context of the so-called epidemic of male loneliness. US data show that the number of men with six close friends or more has dropped from 40% in 1990 to 15% in 2021, while the number of men who report no close friends at all rose in the same period from 3% to 15%.

Such loneliness can be exploited by misogynists such as Andrew Tate, whose fantasies of domination present masculinity as a rigid hierarchy.

This finds its alternative in the so-called incel community, an identity whose novelty is its own definition as unwanted. Donald Trump won a majority of males in the 2024 US presidential election not through conventional campaign methods of slick messaging, but by showing them he had time for them, in events like his three-hour podcast “hang” with Joe Rogan.

Exploring masculinity in film

There is nothing new in saying that ideas of masculinity sit uneasily with those of friendship. Competition, self-reliance and – horror! – the implication of homosexuality load male relationships with the potential for anxiety. One way of overcoming these anxieties is found in the buddy movie, a genre in which the joyous energies of comedy-action provide a licence for regression to boyhood.

The buddy movie’s negative counterpart is the gothic figure of the double or doppelganger, whose terror is that the masculine virtues of individualism may be less stable than they seem. What these twin possibilities leave out is any positive model of what it looks like to be adult, male and friends.

This more recent spate of films combines comedy and threat, buddy and double. Rather than contrast joyous sociability with anxious individuality, it is sociability itself that is the source of anxiety. This speaks perhaps to a more insecure contemporary desire, one where self-affirmation is achieved by gaining a public. We are already long past the point where social media redefined the very meaning of the word “friend”.

Such distanced intimacy offers the classic comic potential of incongruity, between an image of suave assurance and a reality of bumbling pettiness. But it also foreshadows a tragic fate that our contemporary times might hold up as especially acute: that one might simply be a nobody.

Where Twinless differs from Saltburn, Friendship and Lurker is that its combination of comic absurdities and potential danger contains also a deep heart. In his friendship with Dennis, grief-stricken Roman depicts something that our culture usually finds very difficult to imagine: an image of straight masculinity that is actually lovely.

Roman may be monosyllabic, reactive, basic and naive – but he is also caring, uncritical, open and warm. Most exceptionally of all for a depiction of masculinity, he listens to others, and this listening helps him grow.

This recent cycle of black comedies dramatises how dangerous it can be when masculinity remains stuck in the view that social validation means winning a fight. Twinless touchingly, funnily and even beautifully at times demonstrates the transformative potential of what it might mean if masculinity were also to be seen as being a friend.

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Iranian and American officials will kick off face-to-face talks in Oman today, following weeks of threatened military action by Donald Trump.

The US is sending its Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the Muscat summit, where he will meet with Tehran’s foreign minister Abbas Araqchi.

It comes amid a continued American naval build-up near Iran, which Mr Trump has described as an “armada”.

He has repeatedly threatened to take military action since the Iranian regime launched a bloody crackdown against protesters who took to the streets of cities across the country last month.

While his rhetoric has cooled somewhat from its bombastic peak, the White House has maintained that the president remains willing to forego diplomacy.

His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Thursday: “While these negotiations are taking place, I would remind the Iranian regime that the president has many options at ​his disposal, aside from diplomacy as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world.”

Iran has also threatened to hit back in the event of strikes, which saw the US withdraw some personnel from its large military base in Qatar.

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Iran threatens US with ‘regional war’

So what’s the point of the talks?

Iran has been in a long-running dispute with the West over its nuclear ambitions.

The regime insists its programme is meant for peaceful, not military purposes, but the US and Israel have accused the regime repeatedly of seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

A spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry has said it would engage in the talks “with responsibility, realism, and seriousness”, with a willingness to reach a “mutually acceptable and dignified understanding on the nuclear issue”.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio has suggested they should cover more ground – including the regime’s arsenal of ballistic missiles, support for armed groups in the wider Middle East, and “treatment of their own people”.

Tehran has flatly ruled out talks on ‌its “defence capabilities, including missiles and their range”.

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An analyst at US thinktank FDD, Edmund Fitton-Brown, said it was “very difficult” to envisage a breakthrough.

Military conflict, therefore, “is more likely than not”, he said.

Stamford Bridge Community Pool is described as one of the village’s “greatest assets”.

Hosting generations of birthday parties, swim sessions and children’s lessons, the pool in Church Road is well used, year-round.

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But in recent weeks, fears have mounted about its future.

The pool needs up to four new lifeguards or it will be forced to close for open swims and private hires this summer.

Speaking about this, chairperson of the pool committee Shelley Lawton said: “Our two lovely lifeguards are leaving us before summer.

“Ideally we would hire up to four new lifeguards, two of whom will receive a training package kindly paid for by the parish council.”

Shelley explained that sadly, small community pools like Stamford Bridge’s do not have the resources to train their lifeguards in-house.

(Image: Supplied)

She said that lifeguards are required to re-train every two years – something that is usually self-funded by employees.

Faced with the possibility of losing the pool, Shelley’s committee had begun turning customers away.

She said: “We have been so stressed – our pool means everything to us.

“It caters for all ages in the community – from babies first swims, to hosting five primary school lessons, family sessions and classes for those over 55.

“Our elderly users particularly benefit from regular visits; it’s important to them, their health and serves as a means to make friends.”

‘Without support, we risk losing something truly special’

A spokesperson for Stamford Bridge Parish Council said that the pool was a facility most villages of its size could “only dream of”.

They added: “Without support, we risk losing something truly special.

“We were proud to give funding to the pool to ensure new lifeguards can be trained.”

Shelley said the pool wanted to hire the new lifeguards in time for a taster session given by the facility’s current lifeguards in the coming months.

An appeal has since been shared widely on social media – and has received more than 15 applicants, the parish council confirmed.

For more information, please email info@sbcpool.org.

For Shakespeare’s Hamlet “the world is out of joint”. In screen writer Michael Lesslie’s collage of Shakespeare’s play, directed by Aneil Karia, Riz Ahmed’s intense, grief-wrecked Hamlet pays a high price as he tries to “set it right” in a corrupt corporate world.

This Hamlet is a radical adaptation that mostly uses Shakespeare’s words but relocates to contemporary, uber-wealthy south-Asian London. Hamlet has had a south-Asian makeover before now, most famously in Haider; a 2014 action packed Hindi film set in 1990s Kashmir. Karia’s Hamlet, however, is far moodier, more muted and uneven. Some of it is brilliant, some less so. But there is a stunning pay off at the end.

The recent film Hamnet repositioned Hamlet as a response to Shakespeare’s son’s death. Ahmed’s prince also returns the focus to fathers – after all Shakespeare’ father died around the time Hamlet was written. The film asks the audience: whom can we trust?

The opening has Hamlet performing Hindu funeral rites on his father’s body, guided by his concerned uncle Claudius (Art Malik).

Within moments of the coffin going into the furnace and the lavish wake beginning, Hamlet is taken into a side room where Claudius announces he will marry his brother’s poised and pragmatic widow, Gertrude (Sheeba Chadha). This will protect Elsinore, the ruthless family business of developers and builders.

With Hamlet in shock from this announcement, his friend Laertes (Joe Alwyn) takes him off to the drug-fuelled sensory overload of a night club. Laertes and his sister Ophelia (Morfydd Clark) in this film take on the role traditionally played by Horatio, becoming close friends and confidantes.

Ophelia, like Hamlet, is disgusted by corporate corruption although, as the daughter of Claudius’s chief adviser, Polonious (Timothy Spall), she benefits from Elsinore’s rapacious deals. But as Laertes tells the pair, she is no bride for the future head of Elsinore. An arranged marriage within his culture and one that is advantageous for Elsinore is assumed to be in store for Hamlet.

Overwhelmed by the nightclub music, dance and drugs, Hamlet flees out into the night and a decaying London, with skyscrapers on the horizon and walls graffitied with anti-Elsinore slogans. It is here that Hamlet encounters the ghost of his father, King Hamlet (Avijit Dutt).

The existence of the ghost of King Hamlet is witnessed in Shakespeare’s play by several characters other than Hamlet, including the sensible Horatio. However, in this film only Ahmed’s Hamlet sees this ghost. Is the ghost real?

Hamlet follows his father to the top of a half-built skyscraper. Speaking in Hindi, with no subtitles provided, King Hamlet tells his son that he was murdered by his brother, Claudius. Or at least that is what audiences familiar with the play might infer.

The play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzago, which Hamlet stages in order to confirm his uncle’s guilt is here presented as a blistering south-Asian dance at Gertrude and Claudius’s splendid wedding banquet. The dance depicts Gonzago’s murder by poison, leading to his wife’s hasty remarriage – a clear parallel to Hamlet’s situation. As in Shakespeare’s play, Ahmed’s Hamlet believes that Claudius’s reaction proves he murdered his father. However, this where the film begins to diverge from Shakespeare’s story.

The brilliant choreography (by classical Kathak dancer Akram Khan) reads, within the logic of this film’s narrative, as a direct threat of violence towards Claudius. The dancers’ fists create a funnel for poisoned wine to be tipped into the dancer Gonzago’s ear while Hamlet, apparently deranged by grief, watches eagerly.

After his nephew has caused maximum embarrassment at the wedding, Claudius’s subsequent attempts to dispose of Hamlet make sense. The dance delivered a warning to Claudius and the long term future of Elsinore is at stake. But crucially, while Shakespeare shows Claudius subsequently trying to pray, and explicitly acknowledging his guilt, Karia’s film cuts this confession.

The risk to others as Hamlet works through his grief is clear. “To be or not to be” is delivered as Hamlet drives at manic speed in a high-performance car on the wrong side of the road towards an oncoming lorry, briefly lifting both hands off the steering wheel. While the audience may still believe in Hamlet, mesmerised by the intense closeups on Ahmed’s anguished face, they might also start questioning his judgment as he enacts his revenge.

Spurts of blood fly everywhere as Timothy Spall’s Polonius has his throat slashed after responding to Gertrude’s cries for help when a manic Hamlet corners her. Disposing of the body, Hamlet encounters a statue of Ganesh, the remover of obstacles.

It seems, however, that the god might not be totally on his side when one of Claudius’s thugs attempts to dispose of Hamlet by staging his suicide, forcing him to slash his own wrists. Luckily, he is rescued by Fortinbras, the leader of a band of homeless tent-dwellers, all dispossessed by Elsinore. Shocked by their misery, Hamlet decides to give it all away and signs over his shares in Elsinore to Fortinbras.

After divesting himself of his stake in the business, Hamlet heads home seeking revenge. When Claudius flees into the garden of the palatial family residence, he stops and waits for a dying Hamlet to catch him up. This is puzzling.

As his nephew sticks a broken bottle into his guts, Claudius states with his very last breath, “I loved my brother”. Prince Hamlet unravels. The ghost is, like the witches in Macbeth, untrustworthy. In grief, Hamlet has, he acknowledges, become “bewitched”. King Hamlet was part of the corruption and so now is his son.

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Stuart Diamond murdered 17-year-old Christopher Hartley by strangling and dismembering him in 1997, but has never disclosed where the teenager’s severed head is located

Stuart Diamond, a man who brutally murdered 17 year old Christopher Hartley in 1997 and has since refused to disclose the location of the teenager’s decapitated head, has been deemed safe for release. Diamond lured the teenager to a flat on December 30, 1997, where he strangled and dismembered him.

Christopher’s mutilated remains were discovered in a bin behind a hotel. Diamond was subsequently convicted of the murder and detained at Ashworth High Security Hospital in Maghull, Liverpool under the Mental Health Act, reports the Liverpool Echo..

During his sentencing, the judge warned: “It is clear you are a very dangerous young man. The most anxious consideration will be given as to whether it will ever be safe to release you.”

Despite serving beyond his minimum sentence, Diamond remained behind bars largely due to the relentless efforts of Christopher’s mother, Jean Hartley. She told the Liverpool Echo last week that her son’s murderer had never provided them with closure by revealing the location of Christopher’s severed head.

In February 2025, Diamond was granted a deferred conditional discharge by a mental health review tribunal, indicating that arrangements for community care were yet to be established. However, the now 48 year old Diamond appeared before the Parole Board last month, where it was determined that further imprisonment was no longer necessary for public safety.

He is now set to be released back onto the streets of the north west, subject to stringent licence conditions imposed by the Parole Board.

Parole documents obtained by the Liverpool Echo reveal that the panel identified several risk factors that could increase the likelihood of Diamond reoffending. Diamond informed the panel he had been carrying a kitchen knife because of growing paranoia and acknowledged he had needed support.

He also discussed the devastating effect the crime had on the victim’s family, and the panel determined he had demonstrated “significant victim empathy”, according to the documents. The panel noted that during the period of Diamond’s offending, he was misusing drugs and alcohol and “had been willing to involve himself in violence and to act without thinking about the consequences”.

The panel concluded: “In this case, protective factors, which would reduce the risk of reoffending, were considered to be Mr Diamond’s improved ability to manage violent situations and the fact that there had been a lack of evidence of violence for a number of years. Mr Diamond had also developed a sense of structure and routine in his life.”

The documents reveal that Diamond had been assessed through independent living arrangements and had been granted unescorted community leave. He has previously spent periods in the community on overnight stays.

Ms Hartley, who resides in Kirkby, told the Liverpool Echo last month that Diamond’s crimes had inflicted “unimaginable suffering”. She said: “I still to this day have nightmares – it has destroyed my whole family.”

Ms Hartley added: “I hate Diamond. I can’t forgive him for putting my family through hell.”

Christopher was raised in Burnley before relocating to Blackpool, where he secured employment at the seaside resort’s Pleasure Beach.

On the day he was killed, he had left his sister’s house and encountered Diamond, who had relocated to Lancashire from Ireland.

Diamond’s 1999 trial heard how the killer strangled and smothered Christopher before dismembering his body into three pieces in the bathroom shared by residents of the flats. Police discovered blood stains and tissue in the property, along with Diamond’s fingerprint in Christopher’s blood on a stool leg.

The jury dismissed his claims that drug dealers had carried out the killing to frame him for the crime. Diamond fled to Ireland following the murder and was extradited to face trial.

It later emerged Diamond had two prior convictions for violence, including an 18-month stint in a young offenders’ institution after slashing a man’s face with a knife.

A psychiatric assessment from an earlier conviction revealed Diamond had fantasised about committing murder. He had been released on licence just weeks before he killed Christopher.

Ms Hartley told the ECHO that Diamond’s absence of remorse and agonising refusal to admit his guilt meant he should never have been freed from prison. She added that if he were ever released, she would live in constant fear of coming face-to-face with her son’s killer.

Following the hearing, the parole panel concluded: “Mr Diamond had completed necessary work to address identified risk factors and areas of his life that had impacted on his behaviour towards others. The panel noted there was no ongoing evidence of problematic behaviour, emotional instability, poor compliance or pro-violent attitudes.”

Diamond’s release conditions include:

• To comply with requirements to reside at a designated address, to be of good behaviour, to disclose developing relationships, and to report as required for supervision or other appointments.
• To submit to an enhanced form of supervision or monitoring including a specified curfew.
• To comply with other identified limitations concerning contacts, activities, residency and an exclusion zone to avoid contact with victims.
• To continue to work on addressing defined areas of risk in the community.

Christopher’s family have previously voiced concerns that a killer shouldn’t be freed into society if they’ve never spent any time in a mainstream prison. Current legislation permits those convicted of murder to apply for parole directly from high-security psychiatric facilities.

Ms Hartley questioned: “How can he be fit to live in the community if he has never been fit to be in a normal prison?”.

The bereaved family have launched a petition demanding changes to UK parole laws for those found guilty of murder. Their online campaign states: “While mental health care is vital for the rehabilitation of offenders, it must not replace the core principle of accountability for serious crimes such as murder. Allowing parole without prison time undermines justice, erodes public confidence and places additional emotional strain on victims’ families.”

A representative for the Ministry of Justice informed the ECHO: “Being held in a psychiatric hospital does not change the minimum time a life-sentence prisoner must serve before they can be considered for release. The offender’s liberty is restricted, and they must complete treatment before any return to prison or release into the community.”