F our races into what has been a disjointed opening to the Formula One season, the sport is still in a period of rapid adaptation and adjustment as drivers and teams come to grips with their new cars. While this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix may offer some indication of the form to come and championship ambitions, it is also something of an outlier.
The focus in Montreal will be of twofold interest centred largely on Mercedes. The team have opened the new season with a dominant car that has claimed all four poles and all four wins. Yet with the new regulations offering enormous scope for improvement, a fierce development fight will define 2026. McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari all brought their first major upgrades to the last round in Miami ; Mercedes bring their opening salvo of major parts to Quebec.
In Florida, Red Bull and, particularly, McLaren made a major step forward. The latter bring another tranche of upgrades to Canada, most importantly a new front wing, the schwerpunkt of the aerodynamic battle. The McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella, estimated Mercedes to still have about a 10th of a second on McLaren in Miami but, with all the new carbon fibre in place, some sense of the revised pecking order will be on show at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
Certainly, should Mercedes have made the same advances that their rivals did in Miami, they will retain the whip hand – and with it the intensity of the title fight between their drivers, Kimi Antonelli and George Russell, will surely ratchet up.
The 19-year-old Antonelli, in only his second season in F1, has been enormously impressive, having won the last three races in a row to lead the world championship by 20 points from his far more experienced teammate. Russell, the pre‑season favourite, who could manage only fourth in Miami, unsurprisingly had to bat away inquiries in Canada as to whether he was starting to feel the pressure.
“It’s been a turbulent start but the truth is Miami felt like the first tough race of the season,” he said. “It’s still so early days and I know how to deal with it. It’s not the first time in my career that I’ve had a bad race or two but in this sport it does change so quickly: one week you have a tough race and the next week you come back and everything goes back to normal.”
Russell enjoys Canada – he has taken pole at the last two meetings and won last year – but while he rightly notes there is still an awfully long way to go with 17 meetings to follow, he knows reasserting himself over his precociously talented teammate would be more than welcome.
However, the meeting in Montreal is anything but clearcut for drivers or teams. It is a sprint weekend, so time to assess and adjust around upgrades is extremely limited with only one practice session. The circuit itself is marked by the absence of high‑speed corners, where aerodynamic developments are enjoyed to their maximum effect.
The track’s long straights are interrupted by short, stop-start chicanes and the two hairpins at each end. It is a superb, technical challenge for drivers who relish the test but not one towards which car design is optimised.
It is similar in that sense to the low-speed Monaco circuit that follows and it may well be that the real impact of this week’s developments are not felt until the Barcelona-Catalunya race in June.
Bringing the Canada meeting forward by three weeks in the calendar to sit adjacent to Miami rather than between European races has likely complicated matters even further for teams. The temperatures are lower than usual – potentially down to 11C on Sunday – which will be a factor, especially in how the cars work their tyres.
Rain is also forecast and if it does arrive it will be the first competitive session these new cars have run in the wet. With them high on power and lower on downforce and grip than recent models, it would be something of a rude awakening, with Pierre Gasly, who has just completed a two-day wet tyre test at Magny Cours, warning that his fellow drivers would be “shocked”.
“I’m glad I’ve done these two days. You guys? Yeah, it’s going to be interesting for you guys,” he said at a press conference on Thursday. It is an intriguing prospect on every level, then, as the new formula shakes out on the Île Notre-Dame.
Off-track too the new regulations remain under scrutiny, as crunch talks take place behind the scenes in Montreal in an attempt to find agreement to change the engine regulations. The intent to do so had recently been accepted in principle, changing the power balance in the cars from 50-50 combustion and electric to 60-40 to address driver dissatisfaction at the volume of energy management.
The proposed change was welcomed by Max Verstappen, who had been so unhappy that the four-times world champion had warned he might leave the sport. In Montreal he said it was a positive move but “the minimum I was hoping for”.
However, it is understood there is now a split between manufacturers who wish to implement the change for 2027 and those who want to put it off until 2028, which may not satisfy Verstappen or many other drivers.
A rya the great dane was two years old when this image was taken. She was at home in Pretoria, South Africa, with Johan Van Aarde and three other dogs. “It was May 2021, which is our winter season,” van Aarde says. “The courtyard doors that lead to our pool would usually be open, but as the sun and the moon exchanged places and we started getting cosy inside, I closed them.”
That evening, as he prepared dinner, Van Aarde noticed Arya sitting on the sofa, gazing into the distance. “It was as if she was contemplating time and memory, admiring the reflection of the moon on the pool,” he says. “Great danes are majestic creatures with gentle souls who communicate their thoughts with their facial expressions – and, oh boy, do they tell a story.”
Just before Arya’s second birthday, she got lost. She was found safe and well the next day, and Van Aarde remembers ending that evening with “a glass of wine, warm soup and good music”. But the incident had quite an impact on him, and how lucky he feels to have her around. The average life expectancy of this breed is between eight and 10 years; Arya is seven now.
“Great danes are soulmates for life, but as a result of their size the time they share with you is limited,” Van Aarde says. “The photograph evokes a feeling of sadness and longing for me, and the fear of ever having to say goodbye.”
London assembly officials are weighing up whether to launch an investigation into Zack Polanski after he admitted he may have failed to pay the correct council tax while living on a houseboat in the capital.
The Green party leader has faced questions over whether the houseboat, moored in east London, was his primary residence. A spokesperson for his party had described the situation as an “unintentional mistake” and said Polanski had “immediately taken steps” to pay any tax owed.
Last week, Anna Turley, the chair of the Labour party, wrote to the Greater London authority (GLA) monitoring officer to call for an investigation into Polanski , as an elected member of that body, over whether he had breached the standards to which he was bound.
The monitoring officer is understood to be considering whether to launch an investigation into the issue. In email correspondence reported by the Times, they said: “I am treating your correspondence as a formal complaint under the GLA’s standards regime.
“The monitoring officer is required to consider complaints about the conduct of elected members in accordance with the approved GLA member code of conduct complaints procedure.
“This will now be considered in accordance with the authority’s established procedures, including an initial assessment of whether an investigation is required.”
When a formal complaint is made, the subject of the complaint has seven to 10 days to respond in writing. After two independent people outside the GLA, which comprises the mayor of London and the 25 London assembly members, are consulted and provide advice, the monitoring officer will make a decision.
Assembly members can face sanctions if found to be in breach of ethics rules, though these are often minor and can result in a meeting or apology.
The Green party had told the Times that Polanski rented a room at another address where council tax was included in the rent and stayed on the boat only “occasionally”. Government guidance says a person may be liable for council tax on a boat if it is their “sole or main” residence. The Times also reported the existence of an advertisement for the sale of the boat in which Polanski’s partner wrote: “We are moving to a house and so will sadly be leaving the gorgeous community behind.”
Waltham Forest council has confirmed it launched an investigation into whether any council tax was owed on the mooring where the houseboat was situated.
When writing to the monitoring officer last week, Turley cited section 106 of the Local Government Finance Act 1992, which requires public office holders, including GLA members, who are two months or more in arrears on their council tax to declare that fact at meetings considering certain financial matters. It also prohibits them from voting on such matters.
A Green party spokesperson said: “Zack is aware of complaints made by the Labour party and the Conservative party. He denies any wrongdoing and will cooperate fully with the official process to answer any queries.”
A GLA spokesperson said: “The monitoring officer has received two complaints that AM Zack Polanski breached the Greater London authority’s members’ code of conduct.
“Those complaints are being considered under the GLA’s usual process. It would not be appropriate to comment further while this process is ongoing.”
O nce upon a time, every German village had its own Tante Emma laden (Aunt Emma shop), a family-run hub of community life where local people bought their groceries at affordable prices and shot the breeze with their neighbours.
But in recent years the loose network of small businesses throughout Europe’s biggest economy has come under huge pressure from staffing shortages, competition from supermarket chains and rising inflation, which the Iran war has again sent surging.
Concerned that the creeping death of the stores is also fuelling the rural disaffection that has driven many voters to political extremes, governments in several regions have stepped in with some 21st-century innovation.
In Rhineland-Palatinate, where the far-right Alternative für Deutschland came third with nearly 20% in a state election in March – a record in a west German region – officials are seeking to root out the wellsprings of the party’s appeal in rural areas.
Under a pilot programme known as hybrid village stores, existing businesses are being retrofitted so villagers over the age of 18 can shop out of hours autonomously: letting themselves in with an electronic fob or card, shopping and paying on their own. Because they are available to customers at all hours with lower labour costs, the shops make more money and are able to stay afloat.
Irmtraut Ehtechame, 68, is the manager of the Dorfladen village shop that went hybrid in December in Seibersbach, a tidy community of 1,200 residents in the verdant Hunsrück hills. She said a range of factors beyond her control had previously threatened her business’s future.
“I had written a cry for help that our shop wasn’t going to make it because we kept slipping into the red, between energy price hikes from the Ukraine war and the minimum wage increase [which rose to €13.90 an hour this year],” she said.
“Last year and the year before it was really touch and go with the shop and so we decided to try something new.”
Ehtechame, with her husband and business partner, Hamid, offers a full selection of staples from a major supplier, paired with specialty items including locally produced sausages, mustards and cheeses and crisp white wines from the nearby Moselle region.
“We want customers to be able to buy everything on their list because if they go elsewhere for one or two products then they’ll buy the rest there,” she said. The nearest big supermarket is about 10km away. “Some say the food tastes better when they buy it here.”
Over kaffee und kuchen (coffee and cake) on the shop’s sunny terrace off the village square, Ehtechame admitted that even with six security cameras on the premises, the shift to allowing villagers to come and go as they please in her shop was initially a leap of faith. But it ended up paying off, with no thefts or vandalism reported during the unstaffed hours.
Frank Wilhelm, 66, a retired auto mechanic, said it did not take much for him and his fellow shoppers to get used to the new system.
“It’s quite easy,” he said as he demonstrated how his plastic customer card gains him entry to the store he has frequented for more than three decades.
“I love the freedom of being able to shop really early, before everyone is up, and if I’ve forgotten something at night or friends drop by, I can pop in to pick up some drinks and snacks.”
But the best part for him is knowing that an anchor of community life will endure. “I still prefer to shop here when it’s staffed and see the ladies,” he said, nodding to Ehtechame and her team of cashiers.
Wilhelm and a group of friends who call themselves the “robust retirees” regularly deliver supplies from the shop to their elderly neighbours, such as a case of bottled water or a sack of potting soil too heavy for them to carry.
“And we meet here at the shop once a week after planting flowers or cleaning up the village square flower beds, to keep the centre looking pretty. Then we drink a coffee and have a bite here on the terrace of the shop and watch people come and go.”
Volker Bulitta, 69, who received Ehtechame’s “cry for help”, leads an advisory programme sponsored by the Rhineland-Palatinate government aimed at shoring up rural businesses. It has spearheaded the hybrid village shops in the region.
He said stores like Seibersbach’s would not survive without state aid in areas too remote for online deliveries. But the dividends paid are well worth the one-off investment to revamp the shops, usually costing between €30,000 and €50,000.
Bulitta, whose background is in management consulting, said the idea was never to make the stores fully automated. “Then you wouldn’t have this character of the meeting place any more,” he said.
Rhineland-Palatinate has backed four hybrid village stores since early 2025 with Bulitta’s guidance, with 40 more to come pending approval from the new conservative-led state government, after initial reports found a rise in customer satisfaction and a boost in profits of up to 20%.
Several states including Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and Lower Saxony have tried similar schemes, as big retail chains roll out various models of autonomous shopping in other regions.
“The good news is that the hybrid systems are getting cheaper – we assume that in two or three years they’ll cost maybe 20% less,” Bulitta said.
The state currently assumes 90% of the transformation costs, which he also sees as a step toward banishing the spectre of “dead villages” – a fear the AfD often stokes .
Cashier Tanja Behr, 55, said she had been “very sceptical” about the change at the store where she had worked for 16 years: “What sets us apart is actually talking to customers and listening to them. I had this feeling that we’d lose that personal touch with customers.”
By concentrating staffing during peak shopping hours, however, Behr said the new system allowed her to catch up with her regular patrons with a minimal – and she said, welcome – reduction in her working time.
“The customers are delighted about it every single day. And that’s just naturally a joy for me to hear,” she said. “And we cashiers wanted to cut back our hours a bit so it all worked out well.”
About 57% of German residents – 47 million people – live in rural areas, according to the publicly funded Thünen institute . The regions are often marked by a lack of access to high-speed internet and sufficient public transportation among other key services, compounding a sense of isolation and abandonment.
Daniel Posch, a researcher at Berlin’s Bertelsmann Foundation thinktank, has been looking at how effective regional policy can counter political polarisation and weaken support for the far right.
Saving village stores can help restore community stability shaken by rapid change, he said.
“I’m not sure if it immediately can win back voters, but it can make some space where everyday interactions recreate this kind of infrastructure for democracy. Denser local networks contribute to a more nuanced, less polarised and less radicalised electorate.”
French police have temporarily suspended extra EU border checks at the port of Dover as thousands of holidaymakers face long delays in the hot weather.
Waiting times of more than two hours were reported at the terminal in Kent for the cross-Channel ferry to France .
The EU’s entry-exit system (EES), which replaces passport stamps with a digital registration, became fully operational last month. The port of Dover said Saturday was the “first peak period” since the new procedures were introduced.
Describing the situation as “challenging”, the port posted on X: “We are pleased that Police Aux Frontières (PAF) have responded positively by invoking the article 9 clause of the EES regulations.” This allows for checks to be temporarily relaxed.
“While conventional border checks will still be undertaken, this will now enable PAF to significantly reduce the border processing time,” the port added.
“We will be working with PAF and all our partners to get customers into and through the port as swiftly as possible and keep the roads clear for our local community.”
Temperatures were expected to reach up to 29C in parts of England on Saturday. Images at Dover showed long queues of cars at the congested terminal, which is the departure point for ferries to Calais in northern France, a popular route for British tourists, especially at the start of the half-term school holidays in England and Wales.
The port said passengers who missed their ferry crossing because of delays would be able to travel on the next available crossing. It advised drivers to stay in their cars and treat its staff with “kindness and respect”, adding that “unacceptable behaviour towards staff will not be tolerated”.
EasyJet has called on EU countries – particularly Spain – to drop the new rules over concerns holidaymakers could face lengthy delays, with the company’s chief executive, Kenton Jarvis, saying the additional checks would “put [holidaymakers] off” travelling.
With the exception of Ireland and Cyprus, the EES is used by EU countries and other countries that are part of the Schengen free movement area, including Switzerland, Norway and Iceland.
Non-EU passengers and some transport providers have raised concerns about the system, especially those in Britain, which left the EU in 2020 under Brexit .
The European Commission said the system was designed to make the EU’s borders more secure, efficient and strong against irregular migration.
Temperatures are forecast to rise throughout the bank holiday weekend , with record-breaking May temperatures as high as 33C (91F) expected in parts of the UK.
The Met Office has issued amber heat health alerts, which indicate a possible risk to life as well as potential damage to properties, significant travel delays and power cuts. They are in place for the East Midlands, West Midlands, the east of England, London and the south-east until 5pm on Wednesday.
The UK is forecast to have its hottest ever day in May over the long weekend, marginally exceeding the 32.8C recorded around parts of London, West Sussex and Kent on 29 May 1944.
O ne by one, the visitors descend through a tight tunnel cut through volcanic rock into the damp foundations of the Teatro Romano buried beneath Herculaneum, with the weight of 2,000 years of city above them. “This is a time machine,” the guide says, “and we are going back.” It is pitch black as film-maker Gianfranco Rosi ’s camera finds torchlight catching the tourists’ transparent waterproof capes, making them appear like ghosts.
Released on the streaming platform Mubi this March, Rosi’s documentary Pompei: Below the Clouds threads a needle from classical antiquity to the present day. Presented in ashen black and white, without narration or interviews, it places the viewer inside the region surrounding Naples and leaves us there, each scene presenting a place and a moment in the area’s long history.
Naples is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and most visitors see only a fraction of it before boarding the Circumvesuviana at Porta Nolana and riding the narrow-gauge railway east to Pompei or Herculaneum. In Below the Clouds, Rosi does not alight there. He stays on the train, camera in hand, and traverses this seismic landscape – from the Sorrentine peninsula, crowned by Vesuvius in the east, to the lesser-known craters of the Phlegraean Fields in the west. The train, Rosi says, is “my time machine”. His lens draws us into the Naples most visitors never see.
As a film-maker myself, who has lived and worked in Naples for the past 15 years, I was inspired by Below the Clouds to make my own pilgrimage, and boarded the overcrowded, noisy trains I usually avoid.
Before the Circumvesuviana reaches the archaeological site of Pompei, it skirts the Bay of Naples, passing through a number of overlooked towns characterised by a stratification of history visible in the architecture. Drawing into the station of Torre Annunziata, Rosi holds the camera on the visible layers of the town’s history: diamond-patterned Roman brickwork cut from nearby volcanic quarries, Doric columns from an excavated Roman villa, and the still-lived-in mid-century housing blocks rising above them. That Roman villa is worth stopping for. Believed to have been built for Poppaea Sabina, the second wife of Emperor Nero, Villa Oplontis feels like a secret discovery. Its frescoes are almost untouched, its colonnade pristine, and on this day, as always, there was scarcely another soul in sight.
Back on the Circumvesuviana, I head east to Somma Vesuviana. A team from the University of Tokyo has been excavating here for decades, slowly uncovering the Villa Augustea , the imperial estate where the Emperor Augustus is believed to have died in AD14. It was not the great eruption of AD79 that buried the villa, but a later one in AD472. The archaeological treasures still buried across the region are so numerous that tomb raiders have long burrowed into the soft volcanic stone looking for loot to sell on.
A second train line, the Cumana , runs in the opposite direction. It departs from Montesanto station in central Naples and heads west, reaching Pozzuoli in 25 minutes. At the end of the line lies a working port city of 75,000 people living in the basin of one of the world’s most geologically active calderas (volcanic craters). The lore surrounding Vesuvius has long overshadowed the dangers posed by the Phlegraean Fields, which rumble daily beneath the city’s foundations.
Stepping off the train at Pozzuoli, I was hit by the pungent sulphuric smoke drifting over the port. I had timed my arrival for a simple lunch at Abbascio ù Mare (a local favourite serving fish landed from the boats that morning) before visiting the Macellum of Pozzuoli , a 2nd-century Roman market near the harbour. Here, I found the clearest record of what is known as bradyseism, the movement of magmatic fluid and gas beneath the surface of the Earth that lifts and lowers the land, sinking entire towns and raising them again centuries later. Halfway up the ancient columns, I spotted bands of small holes in the stone. These were bored by molluscs when the columns once stood metres below the bay. Rosi’s camera follows the phenomenon underwater, descending into the submerged ruins of nearby Baia, where robed marble figures stand upright on the seabed as shoals of fish drift over mosaics and between their feet.
Between east and west, at the intersection of the Circumvesuviana and the Cumana, lies Naples – known to the Greco-Romans as Neapolis (the new town) because it was new compared with Pompei and Baia. In the centre of the city, at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli , Rosi films Maria, the museum’s archaeologist, deep in the storage vaults. This is what he calls the casaforte (the safe of memory) – shelf upon shelf of fragmented marble torsos, legs and busts, the overflow of 2,000 years of excavation. These artefacts are down here, Maria says, until it is their turn to return to the museum floor above – a mirror, Rosi suggests to me when we speak, of society’s own hierarchies. Like Rosi, I am obsessed with these perfectly formed marble figures, the survivors of catastrophe, that live in the galleries of the museum upstairs among the frescoes and bronzes, pulled from the same volcanic earth that buried thousands of people under Vesuvius.
Rosi juxtaposes the marble torsos with shots of dismembered ex-voto , small metal plates shaped like individual body parts. These are offerings, often left in churches or street shrines along with prayers to saints in exchange for bodily cures.
At the small church of Santa Maria Francesca delle Cinque Piaghe in the Quartieri Spagnoli, one of my favourite corners of the city, hundreds of ex-votos in the shape of pregnant women have been left for the saint of fertility. These practices, still very much alive today, speak to the Neapolitan impulse to marry the sacred and the profane.
Rosi’s film ends in an abandoned cinema somewhere along the train line, its seats destroyed, its screen partly intact. Into this ruin, Rosi projects clips from Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy , a film about the past, playing in a ruin, in a city built on ruins, above a city that was itself once buried. Like a Chronovisor (a mythical 1950s invention that supposedly broadcast actual historical events), the cinema is where the present tense becomes the past even as you watch it. Just like Naples. Just like Below the Clouds.
By the end of the film’s nearly two-hour runtime, the viewer has made the same journey as those visitors descending into the foundations of the Teatro Romano in Herculaneum to behold and reflect on a civilisation buried mid-sentence. Below the Clouds insists, however, that this confrontation does not require a museum ticket. “We are already living inside the catastrophe,” says Rosi.
Pompei : Below the Clouds is available on Mubi . Herculaneum , Pompei , Villa Oplontis , Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli are open to visitors. The Circumvesuviana runs from Napoli Porta Nolana east to Pompei and Herculaneum. The Cumana line runs from Montesanto station west to Pozzuoli . Sophia Seymour offers bespoke city walks and itineraries through Looking for Lila
O n the eve of the most controversial sports event of the 21st century so far, one swimmer is explaining how it felt to take banned drugs for the first time. “I was anxious, to be honest,” says Andriy Govorov, the 50m butterfly world record-holder. “Because there’s no way back.”
The 34-year-old Ukrainian points to his backside. That is where the first needle carrying performance-enhancing drugs went into his body. Then to his stomach. That one hurt less. “I don’t like needles being stuck in me,” Govorov says. “When I was younger, I would pass out when I had blood tests.”
But Govorov is being mightily rewarded for signing up for the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas this Sunday. The event has been called the Steroid Olympics, because it allows athletes to use anabolic steroids, testosterone and human growth hormone, which are outlawed in elite sport. But the rewards are great for those involved. If all goes well, Govorov could end up around $1m richer.
Yet he is far from alone in chasing riches in the desert. There are 42 athletes competing in the Enhanced Games, in swimming, athletics and weightlifting, of whom around half are Olympians. They include Britain’s Ben Proud, who won a 50m freestyle swimming silver medal at the Paris Games, and Fred Kerley, the 2022 world 100m champion and Paris 2024 bronze medallist.
Proud is on a mid-six-figure salary with Enhanced. If he were to win the 50m and 100m freestyle, and swim faster than the current world records, he could walk away with another $2.5m. Not bad money for a swimmer who was struggling to get by on lottery funding when he was training for the Paris Olympics.
Yet the idea of an event that trumpets the use of banned drugs has appalled traditional sports and the bodies that regulate them. The World Anti-Doping Agency, for instance, calls it a dangerous and irresponsible concept. “Over the years, there have been many examples of athletes suffering serious long-term side-effects from their use of prohibited substances and methods,” it says. “Some have died.”
However, the Enhanced Games’s co-founder Christian Angermayer is unrepentant. The 48-year-old German became a billionaire betting early on unconventional industries such as bitcoin, biotech and psychedelic drugs. He is confident that anti-ageing and performance enhancers will be the next big thing.
“I believe we are just at the beginning of a global, decade-long megatrend of human enhancement and consumer biotech,” he says. “Products that slow or reverse ageing, tap into human vanity, and measurably improve health, performance and happiness have a 100% total addressable market.”
Angermayer believes that people will watch the Enhanced Games and then go to its website where a range of prescription drugs, including testosterone cream, peptides and human growth hormone are available for sale.
Wada warns that while these drugs have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration it does not mean they are safe. It points out that taking testosterone, the most common banned drug, “can lead to an increased risk of hypertension, heart attack, and blood clots, as well as infertility and testicular shrinkage, increased aggression, anxiety and depression”.
Angermayer insists that such drugs, when used under strict medical supervision, are far healthier than substances such as alcohol and cigarettes which society permits.
“I’m a conservative libertarian,” he says. “I am very much for body autonomy. Freedom only makes sense with knowledge. That’s why I want to have this limiting factor of medical supervision. I believe alcohol and sugary drinks should need a prescription. You should have to go to your doctor and he might say, ‘OK, you can have one Coke a week.’”
Other critics have claimed that Enhanced Games is inherently Maga, given early backers included Donald Trump Jr and Peter Thiel. That is something Angermayer denies. “No, we’re not,” he says. “Science is not political. Sport is not political. We are not political.”
Angermayer is not a typical tech-bro billionaire. He is gay. He doesn’t drink alcohol. He also owns the world’s biggest triceratops skull, which he plans to install in his London apartment. But he does share an instinct for knowing where society is heading, for better or worse.
When asked what success for the Enhanced Games looks like, he is blunt. “A few world records broken and hopefully hundreds of millions if not billions of people watching it, not from A to Z, not for four hours, but in a world of social media having eyeballs on our clips.” But ultimately it is about selling products isn’t it? “Yes,” he says.
Meanwhile, as Govorov prepares to race he insists he has carefully balanced the risks and rewards. “It’s not a blind overuse of enhancements,” he says. “You have to undergo a health check, are told about the benefits and the risks, and you decide for yourself if you want to do it or not.”
Govorov, who also holds a master’s degree in political science, says when he broke his world record aged 26, he was fuelled only by creatine, a legal supplement, and espressos. But now, with drugs and the aid of a swimsuit that would also be banned in competition, he believes he can go faster than his old best. If he does, he will make $500,000 for 20 seconds of work, to go with his salary.
Does he worry about the side effects? “I don’t have major ones,” he says. “The only thing is sometimes oily skin and more pimples. And other than that, some anxiety.” He pauses. “And besides that, I now have financial stability. I have 10 times more financial benefit than I used to have.”
S ebastian Brandt, chief technician of the Immanuel hospital in the leafy, affluent Wannsee district of Berlin, guessed something was wrong as soon as he opened the window of his home and smelled diesel. It was 3 January, a freezing Saturday morning, and luckily the hospital opposite had relatively few patients on this post-holiday weekend. As he looked out, the diesel fumes told him that the emergency generator – a huge, deafening, decades-old machine in the basement – had kicked in. That meant the hospital was no longer getting power from the grid. And that meant Brandt was not going to have a quiet weekend.
Although an emergency generator keeps a hospital running, it has its limitations. Surgical procedures have to be cancelled, and though generators are tested regularly, no one can be certain what will happen when they are kept running for days on end. The generator tank in the Immanuel hospital contained about 3,000 litres of diesel, and Brandt had calculated it would burn about 550 litres a day; when the grid operator informed the hospital that the outage might last until the end of the following week, Brandt was quickly dispatched to fetch more diesel from the nearest petrol station that was still on the grid. Meanwhile, he’d heard that a neighbouring hospice was going to move its patients to the hospital, too.
What Brandt didn’t know – and what would have soured his mood even more – was that his hospital was cut off because a couple of hours earlier, at about 6am, approximately 12km away, someone had set fire to five high-voltage cables fixed to the underside of a bridge over the Teltow canal, a long waterway that cuts through the southern part of the German capital.
Virtually all of Berlin’s 22,400 miles of electricity cables are buried underground, but there are vulnerable points, especially crossing water; these five cables, each 10cm thick, led from a natural gas power station and supplied about 45,000 homes, 2,200 businesses and four hospitals. A picture released later that day by Stromnetz Berlin, the city’s state-owned grid operator, showed them burning brightly as they dangled above a pile of burning debris.
Four districts of the city were affected – some of Berlin’s wealthier suburbs, though far from exclusively so – and despite power being restored to 10,000 homes by the next day, the other 35,000 went without electricity for five more days. Whoever had done this had caused the longest power cut Berlin had seen since the second world war.
A few kilometres from Immanuel, the attack had caused Michael Schmidt, director of the Hubertus hospital, his own problems. This was a much larger hospital, and several operations had been planned for that morning. “It was good that it happened before 8am, so no one was actually lying on the table,” he tells me, sitting in his office a few weeks later.
Within hours, Schmidt found himself making plans to evacuate the 150 patients he had in the building, because although the generator had kicked in, the heating system had failed. It turned out the pumps that supplied it with gas were outside the hospital grounds and not connected to the generator. “The outside temperature that morning was around -1C. If the temperature dropped too far, we would have had a problem,” says Schmidt.
In the end, the hospital’s technicians found a way to reroute power to the gas pumps, and the city’s grid operator managed to use emergency power lines to restore electricity to all four hospitals by the next morning. And Brandt didn’t have to spend his week fetching cans of diesel. The surrounding residential homes, however, remained dark for another five days. Some older residents had to be moved to emergency accommodation, and local TV news was filled with people angry at the lack of information and the way the authorities had handled the situation. “It was a bit of a dystopian atmosphere around here,” says Schmidt, as he recalls travelling to and from work by the glow of the last few Christmas lights still out on people’s balconies. A blackout that lasts a few days has a way of both making people feel less safe – extra security personnel were briefly hired to guard the hospital – but also galvanising a sense of community: local people began to appear at the hospital door, hoping to charge various appliances, and the canteen became a provisional meeting point.
Within a day or so, Schmidt learned that the blackout had been triggered deliberately, apparently for political reasons. He pauses when I ask him how he feels about this. “I think the people or the organisation that did this maybe didn’t completely anticipate what would happen in this supposedly rich district – not everyone who lives here is rich,” he says thoughtfully. “There are old people who need help here, in the hospitals but also at home. This didn’t hit the system, it hit normal individuals, and we’re lucky that we got away with a black eye.”
H ow this act of sabotage had been committed was relatively clear, but the who is still a mystery and the why a matter of some controversy. About 24 hours after the lights went out, a confession was sent to media outlets and posted on leftwing platforms such as Indymedia.org, which allow anonymous, untraceable texts to be uploaded and published. The meandering statement, pushing 4,500 words, was titled “Shutting down fossil fuel power stations is handiwork. Take courage. Militant new year’s greetings” . The author was named as “Volcano Group: Turn off the juice of the rulers”.
This byline put the blackout into the context of a series of intermittent attacks on Berlin’s critical infrastructure carried out over the past 15 years. There have been at least seven “Volcano Group” attacks in and around Berlin since 2011, the first of which was apparently inspired by the disruption caused by the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010, which knocked out air traffic for several days across much of central and northern Europe. The Volcano Group has caused much less damage and inconvenience, and no injuries or directly attributable deaths. The first spate of attacks, between 2011 and 2013, targeted railway power lines and cable boxes, and each of the early confessions namechecked a different Icelandic volcano – there was the “The Roar of Eyjafjallajökull”, followed by “The Hekla Reception Committee – Initiative for More Social Eruptions” and “Anonymous/Volcano Katla”. The actual name “Vulkangruppe”, or Volcano Group, only appears to have been adopted in 2018, in confessions to later attacks – and even then the names vary: “Volcano Group against continuing destruction” or “Volcano Group: Tear up net authority”.
After an apparent hiatus between 2013 and 2018, there were further Volcano Group attacks in Berlin, as well as two, in 2021 and 2024, on the power lines supplying the Tesla Gigafactory just outside the city. The latter sabotage was claimed by “Volcano Group shut down Tesla” and knocked out the factory’s power supply for several days, causing Elon Musk’s auto company financial losses “in the high nine-figure range”, according to a Tesla official at the time.
The investigations into all these acts of sabotage have been taken over by Germany’s federal state prosecutor’s office, which means they are being treated as crimes endangering the functioning of the German state – in other words, terrorism. Police and state prosecutors in Germany never give interviews or statements about ongoing investigations, but according to responses given to Green party MPs in February, there are four separate federal Volcano Group investigations still in progress, the oldest dating back to the initial attacks in 2011.
From what little they are willing to divulge, the authorities seem to be stumped as to who the Volcano Group actually are. Not a single arrest has been made in connection with any of the attacks. There have been other suspicious cases: in 2023, two people active in the leftwing scene were arrested with flammable materials near railway lines in the Adlershof district of Berlin, but the ensuing trial ended when a judge concluded the state had no hard evidence against them. Otherwise, the authorities’ responses have appeared broad and speculative: on 24 March, about 500 police officers raided 14 properties associated with Berlin’s far-left scene in connection with an arson attack on two pylons in September 2025 that knocked out power to a technology park – again, in the Adlershof district – where several IT security companies are based. But although the confession statement, published a few days afterwards, resembled the others in style and ideology, it was not written by anyone calling themselves a “Volcano Group”. In any case, no arrest warrants were issued.
There are good reasons for that, according to Hendrik Hansen, professor of political extremism at Germany’s Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences. “There are simply no physical clues as to who the perpetrators are,” he says, though that in itself is telling: “It’s not that easy to carry out a crime without leaving DNA traces at the scene.”
Felix Neumann, extremism and terrorism prevention researcher at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a thinktank affiliated with the conservative Christian Democratic Union, also thinks the perpetrators of the Berlin blackout were highly skilled. “They knew from the start what they were doing, and that’s the big difference to, for example, far-right extremists or Islamists, where we often have perpetrators who do things for the first time and don’t inform themselves enough about how to do them,” he says.
Much of this “professional” knowhow is available on the internet. Even without dipping into the dark web, you can find manuals that explain not only how to build rudimentary incendiary devices with cheap parts available in electronics and hardware stores, but how to avoid being caught on CCTV, how to buy and pass on tools and materials without being noticed, how to time attacks, and even how to remove plastic gloves without leaving your DNA on them. These manuals also provide pointers about how to recruit people with the right psychological profile, and how to organise cells of just two or three people into structures that offer a high degree of autonomy with a minimum of hierarchy.
Considering how public all this information is, Hansen says it’s impossible to tell whether the members of such groups even know each other personally: “It could just be that they took the label and decided: we’ll do something similar.” In other words, the Volcano Group is a kind of franchise – an open-source label that anyone can adopt if they have a can of flammable liquid and the determination to find a vulnerable spot on the power grid.
So much for the who. As for the why, the claim of responsibility for the blackout that was posted online on 4 January was less a manifesto than a rambling blog post, full of spleen and non sequiturs. It threw up as many questions as it answered, but it did have one clear point to make: “We can no longer afford the rich,” it began. “We can trigger the end of the imperial lifestyle. We can stop the plunder of the Earth.” It went on to declare: “The attack on the gas power station is an act of self-defence and international solidarity with all those who defend the Earth and life itself.” Unlike those who carried out the original attacks in 2011, whose beef was largely Germany’s participation in overseas wars, this Volcano Group clearly had an environmentalist bent.
January’s statement catalogued the many acts of ecological violence being inflicted on the planet by the capitalist system (“Those that call us eco-terrorists are themselves the true eco-terrorists”) while digressing into almost poetic observations about the damage digital technology has inflicted on our lives: “We serve our own surveillance and it is total … We feed on the colourful pictures that machines filter and put in front of us and stare at our screens in loneliness and alienation.”
What the statement lacked was any attempt to formulate a set of principles. But defining an ideology wasn’t really the point of the text; its purpose was a call to arms. If enough people join in, they were saying, we can bring down the whole show, or as they put it: “Sabotage the fossil fuel infrastructure, the power grids, the plundering of the Earth, the server centres, the chip industry and its supply operations, destroy the preconditions of the automobile industry and the arms industry, of airline travel, the villas, the yachts, the spaceships and the golf courses. Destroy the police headquarters, which are the guarantors of patriarchal property relations, because the Earth belongs to itself and all its creatures, and not the people, or rather the men alone, and not the richest among them.”
The Berlin police described the statement as “authentic” and both the federal and Berlin governments were eager to show how vigorously they were pursuing leftwing extremism. Federal interior minister Alexander Dobrindt posted a reward of €1m for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators of the Berlin blackout. This was 10 times larger than the reward posted to catch the Islamist who killed 13 people in Berlin’s Christmas market attack of 2016 , and about 40 times larger than the reward paid out for the arrestof one of the last remaining Baader-Meinhof group members , Daniela Klette, who was apprehended in Berlin in 2024 after more than three decades on the run.
Despite having disbanded in the late 1990s, the group, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), still casts a heavy shadow over the German psyche. An armed communist militia that was at one stage supported and trained by the East German Stasi, the RAF carried out more than 30 killings and kidnappings. It has been invoked in the climate debate before: in 2022, Dobrindt, then in opposition, demanded tougher punishments for climate protesters who blocked roads, telling the Bild am Sonntag newspaper: “The emergence of a climate RAF must be prevented.”
Such comparisons to climate activists are far-fetched, according to Hansen. “Just ideologically, the RAF was Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, and so stood for an idea that the revolution would bring a dictatorship of the proletariat,” he says. “That’s a completely different ideological current. Second, the RAF carried out targeted murders with guns and bomb attacks. We haven’t had that in recent attacks.”
And yet, in the aftermath of the Berlin blackout, the government was certain that leftwing eco-terrorists were indeed at large. But internet sleuths were not so sure. Linguists went to work on the Volcano Group’s statement and concluded that some of the German sounded off. They pointed to incorrect spellings of well-known names (JD Vance, for example, was written as “Vans”). Reddit threads appeared where people reverse-engineered the text through AI translation programmes and declared it had originally been written in Russian.
All this might sound unlikely but, a month later, the federal government admitted investigators had not ruled anything out. “The federal security forces generally pursue all evidence … including that pointing to potential other groups of perpetrators as well the possible Russian authorship of the letter of confession,” the interior ministry said, in response to questions submitted by Green party MPs.
“We think it’s outrageous that in 15 years they haven’t got one step further in identifying these people,” the Green MP Irene Mihalic tells me. “The investigative authorities should have enough powers to throw some light on to it. It’s interesting that they know so little.”
Public opinion has been largely hostile to the Volcano Group, not least because, in the days after the January blackout, local TV news was full of images of pensioners forced to camp out in emergency shelters. Unsurprisingly, Berlin’s leftist scene, a kaleidoscope of different political currents, was virtually united in disowning the group. “Historically, you never see an underground leftwing group without some kind of above-ground periphery. But here, absolutely no one on the left is defending them. That’s unusual,” as Nathaniel Flakin, a Berlin journalist and historian, puts it to me.
Inspired by the Russian rumours, some concluded that those behind the Volcano Group weren’t even leftists. Two months before the Berlin blackout, German media had reported that the far-right Alternative for Germany, often accused of being sympathetic to Russia, had submitted a suspicious number of questions to the government about Germany’s critical infrastructure. Could this have been a false flag attack carried out by Russian agents with the help of Germany’s biggest far-right political party? The notion is “ridiculous”, says Frank-Christian Hansel, an AfD representative in the Berlin state parliament. It was Hansel’s questions in the parliament in 2024 about the safety of Berlin’s power grid that triggered a small flurry of conspiracy theories online in the aftermath of the blackout. “It was my duty as a parliamentarian to ask about resilience. It’s absurd to blame us, who want [Berlin] to be resilient, to suggest that we want to give information about how to attack.”
The Volcano Group appeared to be offended by the idea they might be Russians or their far-right agents in Germany. On 8 January, a second statement appeared on Indymedia, saying such speculation would in the past have been treated as “irrelevant rubbish”, but now “fake news, AI-generated reports and hybrid attacks have caused uncertainty”.
By this stage, the situation had started to get really confusing. On 7 January, a statement claiming to be from another Volcano Group had popped up on Indymedia. This text, entitled “Against appropriation and false continuities”, claimed to be from the group that carried out the original 2011 attacks, and distanced itself from this year’s blackout. Their quarrel, back in the day, had been with Germany’s involvement in foreign conflicts and the country’s arms industry, they said. They would never have tried to cause a blackout: “We wanted interruption, not escalation. Disruption of normality, not its destruction.”
The 3 January Volcano Group was annoyed by this, and sniped back in response that the above statement was obviously a fake, possibly planted by “intelligence agencies and/or fascists”. “This is about disorientation, sowing confusion and division,” it said.
Nevertheless, there was an odd tone of remorse in the latter statement, too. The 3 January Volcano Group appeared to regret causing such a major disruption to people’s lives. The target had been the fossil fuel economy, they claimed, not the people of Berlin, and their intention had simply been to cut a fossil fuel-burning plant from the grid. “The scope of the effect on around 40,000 private homes was neither intended nor factored in,” they said. “With today’s knowledge about the consequences for sections of the population, we would have moved the action to a warmer season,” they wrote, somewhat sheepishly. In other words, it seemed, this whole thing had been a major cock-up.
Well, of course, thought Tadzio Müller, a veteran of Berlin’s leftist climate movement. “This act was indefensible,” he tells me. He learned about the blackout the day after it happened, while on a train back to Berlin. “I heard ‘power cut’, I heard ‘arson attack’, and I was thinking, ‘Please no, please no’ – and then I hear ‘Volcano Group’. And I was like: ‘Fuck.’”
Meeting him in his book-lined flat over a herbal tea, I can see why Müller has become a prominent figure – he is an intense, garrulous presence, a fit-looking 49-year-old with a hyperactive energy. His conversation is a roiling stream of war stories from three decades of struggle, punctuated with allusions from a century of leftist and anarchist thinkers. And he has the scars to show for it: Müller has been beaten up by cops in Prague, and sobbed with helpless rage at the fence of a British military airfield as planes took off to join the bombing of Iraq in the early 2000s.
In 2015, Müller co-founded the environmentalist action group Ende Gelände, the most militant of Germany’s “above-ground” climate protest organisations. In 2024, Müller published a book about his journey through climate grief to renewed action, entitled Between Peaceful Sabotage and Collapse: How I Learned to Love the Future Again.
When he read the Volcano Group’s initial confession, Müller also felt something was off about the language, but he doesn’t think this necessarily means the blackout was orchestrated by Russian agents. “I think it was a leftist action, and I think it went horribly wrong,” he says.
Müller is adamant the Volcano Group is not just made up of frustrated climate activists – people who used to be in groups such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil or the Last Generation and then decided to go militant; the kind of people imagined, for example, by Swedish academic Andreas Malm in his much-discussed 2021 book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Instead, Müller locates the Volcano Group within a particular strand of radical leftism called anarcho-primitivism, which has long advocated destabilising the economy through physical sabotage, and which in the past few years has taken on a more eco-activist tone. Hansen seems to agree: they may be disgruntled climate activists, he tells me on the phone, “but I think it’s more likely that they’re people from the militant leftwing extremist scene”.
Müller has never considered going underground, but he does think there’s a fruitful gap to explore between what is legal and what is legitimate. “I’ve said for years that we need to think about the possibility of some type of publicly legitimisable sabotage,” he says. “Like shutting down some tracks to block a train with nuclear waste. Sure, it’s illegal, but the country to some extent accepts that it is a legitimate protest.”
The legal grey zone of civil disobedience is very much the space occupied by Ende Gelände, whose name approximates to “end of the road”, and which marries environmentalism with anti-capitalism. Since 2024, the group has been designated as engaging in “suspected” leftwing extremism (rather than actual leftwing extremism like the Volcano Group) by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Ende Gelände staged several mass interventions in the late 2010s, where thousands of people occupied Germany’s coalmines. Unlike the Volcano Groups, Ende Gelände’s actions are public and sometimes involve thousands of demonstrators, as they are able to draw many of their activists from the climate movement at large.
Despite also targeting fossil fuel power stations, Ende Gelände conspicuously refrained from expressing support for the Volcano Group. But I do find one Ende Gelände activist willing to offer at least some sympathy with the cause – if not endorsement of the method. Scully, who does not want to give her full name, and who has taken part in several Ende Gelände actions, is ambivalent on the subject of sabotage. “I wouldn’t say I was happy,” she tells me over the phone, when I ask what she made of the blackout. “But I am a proponent of talking about whether we want to carry out sabotage and how we carry out sabotage.”
Scully thinks the chaos of 3 January wouldn’t have happened if the “above-ground” climate movement offered space to debate such tactics within its ranks, so that bad ideas could be shot down before people carried them out. She is convinced the threat of direct militant action has a place in the fight for climate justice. Like the anarchist group Kommando Angry Birds, thought to be responsible for at least seven attacks on the German train system since 2023, and which cited the inspiration of Nelson Mandela’s speech on acts of sabotage on critical infrastructure , Scully draws a comparison with the anti-racism movement. “It’s the typical argument: Martin Luther King wouldn’t have been so successful without Malcolm X.”
T his Saturday, artists Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn are auctioning off their work from the past decade and a half. The reason? To help fund a community-led renewable power station in Nigel Farage’s Clacton constituency. Former YBA Gavin Turk will be wielding the gavel and the couple hope to raise at least £250,000 for the project.
The big-ticket item going under the hammer will be the remnants of a gold Ford Transit van containing £1.2m in fake banknotes that the pair blew up in London’s Docklands in 2019 as the climax – or money shot, if you will – of Bank Job , a film about their attempts to fight toxic debt culture with art, a battle that involved printing cash to wipe out more than £1m debt .
Van wreckage and charred banknotes were gathered up and reconstituted as an Alexander Calder-like mobile that, for a while, hung in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. Now, for perhaps £100,000, this sculpture could be the centrepiece of your living room. (You’d need a pretty big living room.)
Powell hopes that the exploded van will be bought by a public institution, and has been contacting the likes of the V&A and the Arts Council to see if they are interested in buying it for their collections. “I’ve spent a week sending off many, many emails and then getting quite patronising replies,” she says.
Also up for grabs will be bottles of vodka from a 2009 project for which Edelstyn traced his family’s Jewish ancestry back to a Ukrainian village. Once there, he attempted to revive his ancestors’ distillery – and ended up selling high-end Zorokovich 1917 vodka to Selfridges.
Alongside the in-person auction, the pair are hosting an online iteration that will run until 31 May. “We have £750 at the moment,” says Edelstyn. “We need about 250 times that to fund the project.”
But what exactly is the point of building a power station in Clacton? Edelstyn refers to a report by climate campaigners DeSmog claiming that Reform UK has received more than £2.3m from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers since December 2019, amounting to 92% of the party’s donations. “Building a community-owned renewable power station in Reform’s first seat,” he says, “is the most direct response we can think of.”
The pair call what they do Method Art. Which is? “Living ideas into existence rather than representing them. The work is the action: abolishing real debt, building a real power station, planning a real community-owned renewable in Clacton. Artists not as commentators but as people who get the thing built.”
The pair’s conviction that art should change the world came after Edelystn made a film about his Ukrainian vodka enterprise , and had an existential crisis. It was brought about, he says, by a Guardian review (it happens) that called him a businessman rather than an artist. “Just calling me that made me wonder what I was doing.”
Two writers, George Orwell and Viktor Frankl, helped him to come up with answers. “In [the 1946 essay] Why I Write, Orwell laid out all the different reasons people do so: to participate in the crazy world around us; to look clever; to take revenge on people who told you you’d never amount to anything. And then there was the pure joy of aesthetic expression. Orwell suggested that there can be all these desires in varying degrees in one person as they create, and that thought inspired me.”
Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist and neurologist Frankl inspired Edelstyn in a different way. “In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl disagreed with Freud and Adler and said the desire to lead a meaningful life was the primary driver for human lives. I thought that was beautiful and it helped me want to participate and live meaningfully, usefully.”
In the middle of his crisis, he and Powell learned about an American group that was buying and abolishing debts. “That was the inspiration for Bank Job,” says Powell. “We were going to really participate and consciously shape the world we live in, engage with political and economic arguments. And it was from there that Power Station came about.”
He is referring to how, on the street where they live in London’s Waltham Forest, the couple helped fund, build and operate a community-owned solar power station. How was this possible? “There are about 20,000 high net worth people across Britain who buy shares in community benefit societies that fund these sort of things,” says Powell. “Shareholders put in the capital that buys the solar panels, then the host building gets solar panels for no upfront cost, but buys the energy from the community benefit society at a cheaper rate than it would cost from the grid.”
Edelystn says more than 130 streets in Waltham Forest have signed up to follow suit, with another 50 across the UK.
The proceeds from Saturday’s auction won’t directly fund the mooted power station’s solar installations. Rather, they will bankroll the work the pair are doing to set up in Clacton and to make a film about the project. If they sell the blown-up van, the proceeds will be core funding for their not-for-profit production company. The funding for the power station will come from issuing shares and other fund-raising to create a community benefit society.
The idea of going off-grid may seem appealing to those of us struggling with rising fuel bills, but there is a problem with this model. “Most solar co-ops prefer to work with councils or long-term businesses that have security and stability,” says Edelstyn. “Domestic is really complicated because you get mixed tenureships in one street. Some people are renting, some people are in council houses, and some people have got mortgages. That’s hard to organise.”
Yet, inspired by Frankl, the pair are determined to make the seemingly impossible exist. “That utopian sensibility, against all the odds, is definitely why we are the kind of artists we are.”
Their Power Station film has already influenced UK community energy policy: apparently, Ed Miliband came to visit the pair two weeks ago. Now they are taking their model to the stronghold of Reform UK and hoping that there will be enough local enthusiasm to make it work there, ideally on Clacton’s Electric Avenue, which runs from the pier and includes Reform UK’s local office. Winning over locals is key to the project’s success. To that end they’ve arranged a screening of the film at Walthamstow’s Forest Cinema and invited councillors and other bigwigs from the Essex seaside resort to attend. But aren’t the couple missing a trick? Surely their first port of call should be to approach Clacton’s MP for some funding. After all, the £5m Farage received from a Thai-based crypto billionaire suggests he isn’t short of a bob or two. “I mean, he would presumably want to get the bills down of everyone on the street where the power station would be,” muses Edelstyn. “So why wouldn’t he put some of his money behind what we’re doing?”
Quite. Mr Farage, if you’re reading this, do consider getting in touch with the artists to support what, I’m sure you’ll agree, is just what your constituency needs at this difficult time.
The Everything Must Go auction takes place 23 May 2026 . Visit the online auction here
A fraudster who tried to sell fake ancient statues to Sotheby’s was foiled when his bogus accompanying paperwork was found to be written with printing methods that were 25 years too modern, a court has heard.
Andrew Crowley, 46, asked the auctioneers to value three Cycladic figures and one Anatolian stargazer statuette that he had inherited from his grandfather, Southwark crown court in London was told on Friday.
Prosecutors alleged that, if real, the items collectively would have been worth about £680,000 based on previous sales.
However, Judge Rimmer said that estimate hinged on multiple hypotheticals and therefore reduced the value to £340,000.
Crowley, of Longwell Green, Gloucestershire, had presented spurious invoices for the statues that purported to be written in 1976, using a typewriter on paper embossed with an antique’s dealers logo and a nine-pence stamp.
However, his forgery was discovered after forensic scientists found they were made using printing methods invented in 2001. Sotheby’s experts also spotted spelling mistakes, including in the supplier’s title.
Handing Crowley a two-year suspended sentence, the judge said: “It was a crude attempt because Sotheby’s rumbled, to use the vernacular, or spotted, these documents as bogus fairly early on.”
The judge accepted that Crowley inherited the statues from his grandfather and did not at any point believe they were counterfeits. The Cycladic statues were each about 30cm (12in) tall weighing about 1kg, police said.
Legitimate Cycladics were made in the Cyclades islands in Greece during the bronze age, about 3,000 years ago. Therefore, “the offending and dishonesty in this case must turn around the paperwork”, the judge said.
Crowley previously admitted dishonestly making a false representation to Sotheby’s auction house intending to make gain between 4 November 2022 and 27 July 2023.
He was also ordered to complete 200 hours of unpaid work and pay £1,630 in costs over three months.
DC Ray Swan, who led the Metropolitan police’s investigation, said in a statement: “This case also highlights the crucial role played by industry experts in helping to protect the integrity of the London art market.
“Sotheby’s staff acted responsibly and swiftly in raising their concerns, and their cooperation was instrumental in preventing a significant fraud.”
A spokesperson for the auctioneers praised the force’s “meticulous and superbly executed investigation that has helped prevent fraudulent material entering the market”.
