You might already keep a weather eye out for phishing emails, dodgy texts, and suspicious calls.

But it seems scammers have found an unlikely new way into your phone: your calendar app.

Cybersecurity company Malwarebytes raised the alarm about the “fake calendar invites” back in November of last year.

Since then, the trend seems only to have risen.

It involves fake invites sent to your device’s calendar that you often can’t delete, or that come back no matter how many times you get rid of them.

Apple lists “unwanted Calendar invitations and subscriptions” among possible phishing attempts to look out for.

These invites might say something really attention-grabbing, like “impending payment” or “phone security compromised”; they could ask you to call a number, and they may sometimes contain a link.

On iPhones, “the spam alerts generally don’t require an app to be installed, so they can fill up a user’s calendar without passing through the App Store and show up directly in a user’s iOS notifications,” Newsweek said.

That can be a sneaky way to get around Apple’s strict security rules.

Once these invites have been sent, scammers hope that their victims will panic and click the link or call the number included in the entry.

From there, they might try to get your banking details, sell you an overpriced product, or get you to install software that’ll give them enough details to access your accounts.

Whatever they try after you click a link or call a number, scammers almost certainly will be after money. Don’t click or call these.

If you notice unexpected calendar invites, especially those with alarming names and/or phone numbers or links, that’s a huge red flag.

“If you’re suspicious about an unexpected message, call or request for personal information, such as your email address, phone number, password, security code or money, it’s safer to presume that it’s a scam – contact that company directly if you need to,” Apple said.

Apple says people with iPhone iOS 14.6 and later should:

• Open Calendars,
• Tap the event you want to get rid of,
• Tap “unsubscribe from this Calendar”, which should appear at the bottom of the screen,
• Tap “unsubscribe” to confirm.

And if your iPhone uses an earlier iOS:

• Open the Calendars app,
• Tap Calendars in the bottom part of the screen,
• Tap the More info button next to any calendar you don’t recognise or want,
• Scroll down and tap Delete Calendar.

• Open Settings,
• Tap Calendar > Accounts, or, for iOS 13, tap Passwords & Accounts > Accounts,
• Tap Subscribed Calendars,
• Look for calendars you don’t recognise or want and tap them,
• Select “delete account”.

Days before International Women’s Day (Sunday, 8 March), King’s College London has published a report that found Gen Z men, born between 1997 and 2012, are most likely to say women should always obey their husbands.

Almost a third (31%) of Gen Z Men surveyed said they felt that way.

That’s over twice as much as Baby Boomer men (born from 1946-1964), who were least likely to express the sentiment at 13%.

And for Boomer women, that number plummeted to 6%.

In this research, which involved 23,000 people from 29 countries, including the UK, US, Brazil, and Australia, the breakdown was as follows:

1. Baby Boomers (1946-64)
   Men: 13%, Women: 6%
2. Gen X (1965-1980)
   Men: 21%, Women 13%
3. Millennials (1980-1997)
   Men: 29%, Women 19%
4. Gen Z (1997-2012)
   Men: 31%, Women 18%.

Interestingly, Millennial women seem slightly more likely (1%) than their Gen Z counterparts to agree with the statement. Gen Z women were the only group in the survey that disagreed more with it than their gender’s prior generation.

Gen Z men were also twice as likely as Boomer men (24% vs 12%) to say a woman shouldn’t appear too independent or self-sufficient.

59% of Gen Z men say their gender is asked to do too much for equality compared to 45% of Boomer men.

57% of Gen Z men said we’d gone so far to promote women’s rights, we’ve become sexist towards men; 42% of Boomer men agreed.

And 21% of Gen Z men said “real women” never initiated sex, vs 7% of Boomer men.

In all of these, women were significantly less likely to agree with the statements.

“It is deeply concerning to see traditional gender norms persisting today,” Professor Heejung Chung, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s Business School, said.

“Our data reveals a striking gap between people’s personal views, which are far more progressive, and what they imagine society demands of them.

“This gap is particularly pronounced among Gen Z men, who not only appear to feel intense pressure to conform to rigid masculine ideals, but in some cases seem to also expect women to retreat to more traditional ways of being.”

And the Hon Julia Gillard AC, Chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, King’s Business School, added, “It is troubling to see that attitudes towards gender equality are not more positive, particularly among young men. Not only are many Gen Z men putting limiting expectations on women, they are also trapping themselves within restrictive gender norms.

“We must continue to do more to dispel the idea of a zero-sum game in which women are the only beneficiaries of a gender-equal world… As a society we need to resist the pressure to go backwards.”

A former head of MI6 has hit out at Donald Trump’s “unnecessary war” with Iran.

Sir John Sawers, said the conflict was “not required” and could lead to the country becoming a “failed state” and even bigger danger to the world.

The US and Israel began their bombing campaign against the Tehran regime last Saturday, but since then the apparent rationale for the military action has changed on a number of occasions.

Speaking to CNN, Sawers – who was chief of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service from 2009 until 2014 – warned of the chilling consequences which could transpire as a result.

He said: “This is an unnecessary war. It was not required because it was not as if it was to pre-empt an imminent threat against the United States or indeed against Israel.

“The rationale, to the extent that there is one, is that it secures Israel for decades to come … but this will come at a cost.

“The very best outcome you can expect from the current conflict is that a successor leadership comes in and behaves differently from its predecessors. That is what some in America are calling the Venezuela option.

“I think just as dangerous is the possibility that the regime might corrode or collapse and lose control of parts of the country, and then you could have a situation like the one we’ve faced in Syria for the last year or so, where the country fragments into several different parts.”

Sawers also said it was “unwise” for Trump to call on the Iranian people to rise up against the country’s ruling regime.

He added: “If the country dissolves into component parts, it will be basically a failed state, and we’ve known from the last 40 years what happens in failed states – it becomes a centre for terrorism, for smuggling, for gun running, for drugs, for criminality of all sorts.

“If you just dismantle the regime completely, you could end up with the sort of chaos we’ve had to deal with in Afghanistan, or indeed in Lebanon, Libya and Syria.”

Described by one critic as “Fleabag for 50-somethings”, Netflix’s steamy new comedy-drama, Vladimir, looks set to become your new binge-watch obsession.

Starring Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall, Vladimir follows a fourth wall-breaking narrator as she becomes obsessed with her young, attractive colleague while also trying to manage her husband’s sexual misconduct allegations in the workplace.

Set in the world of academia, Vladimir’s unpicking of cancel culture and middle-aged desire is already sparking debate, with some critics loving the depiction of the complexities of the situation and others struggling with the show’s “unlikeable protagonist” and apparently shallow exploration of a serious subject.

If you’re looking for something spicy and addictive to stream this week, here’s everything the critics have been saying about Vladimir and why it deserves a spot on your Netflix watchlist…

“Vladimir is that rare visitor to the screen – proper television for proper grownups. The eight-part adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s provocative 2022 debut novel of the same name has not shied away from the properties that made the book great – black comedy, bleak insight, evisceration of accepted pieties – and fitted them perfectly to the new form.

“The screenwriter, Jeanie Bergen, who has obviously absorbed the book into her very bones, retains all of Jonas’s wit, confidence and, crucially, her willingness to dwell in grey areas and luxuriate in the complexities that govern life in middle age.”

“It’s not flattering and it’s certainly not nice, but it feels honest and maybe even – oh, let’s just admit it – relatable.

“Dig into the heart of your deepest desire, Vladimir argues, and you’ll find nothing more or less than your own face staring right back at you.”

“Weisz is tremendously funny as she navigates this crush while her life unravels. The style of the series takes a bit of getting used to – it’s fourth-wall breaking, with Weisz addressing the camera throughout and speaking in sometimes quite stilted, stagey language. But before long you fall into the rhythm of it. Think of it as Fleabag for 50-somethings.”

“Why shouldn’t we see a story through the eyes of a chaotic and flawed woman? It’s still quite rare, even in 2026, for female anti-heroes to be afforded the same treatment as their male counterparts, decidedly doing away with any need to make them palatable, or to give you a driving reason to root for them. She’s fun to watch, and that should be enough.”

“Weisz meanwhile, is a terrific actor (even if her American accent occasionally hits those Rs like a back wheel bumping the curb when parking) and the chemistry with Vladimir feels, rightly, elliptical.

“But she is an unlikeable protagonist – her decision-making at times even sociopathic – and the tone of the show, its frequent collapse of the fourth wall, can be grating. Your tolerance for that device might correlate with your judgment of the show’s rather unhinged ending.”

“Vladimir takes on a host of knotty issues, from changing sexual mores to aging to infidelity to – imagine the loudest sigh ever sighed – cancel culture. Given that self-assigned degree of difficulty, Vladimir is far from the catastrophe it could easily be in clumsier hands.

“But while Weisz is reliably magnetic and the eight episodes often amusing as farce, Vladimir is an imperfect translation of the novel’s hothouse subjectivity to TV’s three-dimensional space, where canvases for projection and conduits for desire take the form of flesh-and-blood human beings.

“Come for the steamy obsession and stay for everything else. Rachel Weisz shows her onscreen mastery in this completely unexpected Netflix show that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.”

“Almost all of the eight episodes feature a hot and heavy sex scene, and showrunner (and original author) Julia May Jonas has spectacularly nailed the spice. Nothing is gratuitous or unnecessary, and desires are explicitly explored with nothing off-limits.”

“As far as darkness goes, Vladimir is little more than a run-of-the-mill narcissist, not asking for the protagonist’s book when she requests to read his. However, most narcissists are significantly more charming, whereas Vlad’s cool guy personality is more ‘meh’.”

“Like the film After the Hunt with Julia Roberts, Vladimir looks at campus misconduct in the later #MeToo era. But it plays the goings-on as dark comedy rather than psychological drama.

“Consider its tongue firmly in its cheek, which works sometimes but on other occasions can be confusing. “

“Vladimir raises interesting, timely questions about power, feminism, and the #MeToo movement, but it stops short of engaging with them in a meaningful way. Because it doesn’t seem to know quite what it wants to say about the topics, it ends up not saying much at all, the commentary staying close to the surface rather than diving deep into the intricacies. It revels in its main character being messy and subversive, but after all is said and done, it’s more thematically clean and conventional than it wants to be.”

“Ms. Weisz never seems quite comfortable as the so-called M. And only if she were would the story about inappropriate lust between students and faculty – and faculty and faculty – be as amusing as she has to pretend it is.”

“Vladimir offers viewers a front-row seat to its protagonist’s frantic inner monologue by having her deliver her thoughts straight to camera. Look, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag doesn’t own the art of fourth-wall breaking, but it’s impossible not to see its influence in the professor’s asides. If you’re going to use a technique that’s almost synonymous with another TV show about a spiraling, complicated, unnamed woman, you’d better bring something new to it.

“To its credit, Vladimir tries, but doesn’t quite pull it off.”

All eight episodes of Vladimir are now streaming on Netflix.

Donald Trump sent the Middle East into chaos when he decided to launch strikes against Iran along with his Israeli allies on Saturday.

Tensions were already rising between Tehran and Washington over Iran’s nuclear capabilities after talks on a settlement failed last week, but the US and Israel launched the first blow.

Now, as Iran hits American military bases across the region – after targeting a UK RAF base in Cyprus – the aggression continues to escalate.

The US president has since warned the war could last “far longer” than four or five weeks.

While his vice president JD Vance has insisted that Trump would not allow the US to fall into a multi-year war with “no clear objective”, the reasons behind the White House’s aggression remain unclear.

Here are the varying reasons both the president and his top officials have come up with in recent days.

Immediately after bombing Iran, Trump said his goal was to eliminate threats from the Iranian regime – though he had no evidence to back it up.

He also sent a message to the protesters in Iran, saying when the US was “finished”, the country was “yours to take”.

That call for an Iranian revolution has faded significantly since the attacks started at the weekend.

Two days after the attack, US secretary of war Pete Hegseth said it was not a “regime change” war.

Instead he said the operation was meant to “destroy Iranian missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and security infrastructure” – all to prevent Iran from developing its own nuclear weapons.

But Trump and Israel already launched a 12-day offensive on Iran last summer, and claimed to have obliterated its nuclear capabilities at the time.

It’s worth remembering Trump actually pulled the US out of an international agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear abilities back in 2018.

Tehran subsequently terminated the entire agreement in October 2025, following the US-Israel strikes.

US intelligence has previously indicated Iran was not building a nuclear weapon any time soon, though Trump has said that information was “wrong”.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered up a different theory, telling reporters that it was all down to planned actions from Israel.

He said: “We knew there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that was going to precipitate an attack against American forces.”

“We knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them [Iran] if they were to launch those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he claimed.

Bizarrely, Trump then contradicted his top diplomat, saying, “I might have forced Israel’s hand” to attack Iran.

Rubio then U-turned, insisting he had never said the “imminent threat” pushing the US to attack Iran was a pre-planned strike from Israel.

He said: “The president made a decision, and the decision he made was that Iran was not going to be allowed to hide behind its ballistic missile program, that Iran was not going to be allowed to hide behind its ability to conduct these attacks.”

He insisted that is what he said the day before too, accusing the press of flipping his statement “to reach a narrative that you want”.

Rubio also told the press that the US attacked because Iran is “run by lunatics”.

Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt had yet another reason to explain the violence.

She told reporters on Wednesday: “This decision to launch this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the United States of America, and the president’s feeling, based on fact, that Iran does pose an imminent and direct threat to the United States of America.”

She added: “The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States, was going to strike our assets in the region, and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons.”

The president also suggested that this may have all come down to his own desire to hit out at a particular individual.

“I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first,” Trump told ABC, alluding to Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

US intelligence believes there was a plot to kill Trump in 2024 during his presidential campaign though Iran has denied that it plotted to kill the president.

Hegsethalso told reporters on Wednesday: “Yesterday, the leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed.

“Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”

He did not name any individuals.

Then he said this was not the goal of the attack.

Hegseth claimed: “While that was not the focus of the effort by any stretch of the imagination, in fact, never raised by the president or anybody else, I ensured, and others ensured, that those who were responsible for that were eventually part of the target list.”

Nicola Coughlan has laid out why she’s definitely not here for the discussions about her body that have arisen since she shot to international fame in Bridgerton.

During a new interview with Elle UK, the outspoken former Derry Girls star explained: “The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is I have no interest in body positivity.

“When I was a kid growing up, I never thought about that. I didn’t look at actors and think about their bodies. So, I actually don’t care.”

Nicola pointed out that there are “a lot of things I’m passionate about”, but discussions about body positivity are not one of them, insisting that this is something that’s been projected onto her by “someone else”.

She went on to explain that ahead of Bridgerton’s third season – in which she took the lead alongside co-star Luke Newton – she’d been exercising “a lot” and had lost “a bunch of weight”.

“I was probably a size 10 and one of the corsets was a size eight,” she said. “And then people talked about how I was ‘plus size’ and I was like, ‘How fucked are we that I am the biggest woman you want to see on screen?’.”

Nicola went on to recall one incident in which she was cornered in a public bathroom and told by a “really drunk girl” about how much she loved Bridgerton “because of your body”.

As the person in question began talking more about her body, Nicola admitted she became deeply uncomfortable (“I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much’,” she commented).

“It’s really hard when you work on something for months and months of your life, you don’t see your family, you really dedicate yourself and then it comes down to what you look like,” she concluded. “It’s so fucking boring.”

Back in 2024, around the release of Bridgerton’s third season, Nicola shared that she’d grown tired of people suggesting her nude scenes in the Netflix period drama were “brave”.

“Don’t call me brave. I have a cracking pair of boobs,” she said at the time. “There’s nothing brave about that, that’s actually just me showing them off.”

She noted: “I’m a few sizes below the average size of a woman in the UK and I’m seen as a ‘plus-size heroine’.”

“Making it about how I look is reductive and boring,” she added. “What if I was suddenly going to play a ballerina and lose a shit ton of weight, are you not going to like me anymore? That’s insane and so insulting.”

Before that, Nicola claimed that she’d “specifically asked for certain lines and moments to be included” in the latest season of Bridgerton as a direct response to body-shaming she’s experienced in her career.

“There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice. It just felt like the biggest ‘fuck you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body,” she said, describing the sequence as “amazingly empowering”.

Read Nicola Coughlan’s full interview with Elle UK here.

Victoria Beckham has joined her husband Sir David in wishing their son Brooklyn a happy birthday, despite their eldest child no longer being on speaking terms with them.

Across several social media posts, he accused them of “performative” and “controlling” behaviour over the course of his “entire life”, as well as claiming that they had tried “endlessly” to “ruin” his relationship with his wife Nicola Peltz Beckham.

Neither Sir David nor Victoria has commented publicly on Brooklyn’s claims, but on Wednesday, the football legend shared an old family photo to commemorate his son’s 27th birthday.

After reposting her husband’s message, the former Spice Girls star then shared one of her own, writing alongside an old photo of herself and her son: “Happy 27th birthday Brooklyn, I love you so much.”

The morning after Brooklyn’s social media post confirming the fall-out, Sir David made an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he dodged numerous questions about the family drama.

During a subsequent interview, he made a timely comment about social media use among young people, explaining: “I’ve tried [with] my children to educate them. They make mistakes. Children are allowed to make mistakes. That’s how they learn.

“That’s what I try to teach my kids. But you know, you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.”

In the weeks before Brooklyn’s posts, it had been reported in the press that Sir David and Victoria had unfollowed him on Instagram, to which his brother Cruz Beckham made a public statement in retaliation.

“My mum and dad would never unfollow their son,” he insisted, before alleging: “They woke up blocked… as did I.”

A representative for Victoria also told People magazine around this time that it was “not true” that she had unfollowed Brooklyn.