Touch-typing with thumbs on a mobile phone keyboard is a pretty familiar way to input text, and that is part of what led to BiTipText, a method of allowing bimanual text input using fingertips. The idea is to treat the first segments of the index fingers as halves of a …read more

The myth of the American west meets the energy of riot grrrl in Justine Kurland’s photographs of free-spirited teenage girls

In 1997, Justine Kurland, then a fine arts student at Yale University, went in search of teenage girls to photograph. At a time of increasing conformity and commercialised ideas of beauty, the girls she had in mind were free-spirited and wild-haired; making dens and hanging out in woods, messing about in rivers, smoking in parking lots, lost in languid afternoons, careless not only of the male gaze but any onlookers at all.

Kurland started out on her quest in New Haven’s semi-industrial hinterland before travelling further afield over the next five years on a mazy road trip; if the girls were on the margins, then she would be too. She loosely choreographed the groups of teenagers that she found, but mostly invited the girls into a promising setting and let them do their thing. She took this photograph of four girls in an abandoned car in the millennium year, and called it Shipwrecked. The girls she chose invariably understood the idea of the pictures. “I can always spot people,” she has said. “It’s, like, really one of my superpowers. I can always tell which teenage girls would love living in the woods with their friends.”

When Rhys Graham first picked up his camera in lockdown, he assumed he would take a few portraits of friends. Now, weeks in, it has turned into a sprawling project documenting Australia’s new domesticity

In these strange, suspended times, a camera and lens can be an emotional bridge from one person to the next.

As a film-maker you become reliant on the manic energy of shooting and the warmth of your community – crews, actors, colleagues or subjects – to keep you buoyant.

Try a dark matt lipstick, but don’t be scary

Unless you are into goth, you wouldn’t look to The Addams Family for beauty inspiration. However, there’s a modern way to go there without alarming anyone on Zoom, and the fresh take at the Max Mara SS20 show makes the case. If you find the requisite black lips intimidating, replace with a less macabre deep burgundy or aubergine. Swap matt alabaster skin for something a little less lifeless – a decent tinted moisturiser will warm things up. Finish with a pastel wash of colour across the eyes. Immediately, everything looks less intense. Morticia would be mortified.

1. Jimmy Choo Seduction Lipstick in Purple Night £50, harrods.com
2. Huda Beauty Pastel Obsessions £27, selfridges.com
3. Laura Mercier Caviar Mascara £22, spacenk.com
4. Smashbox Always On Liquid Lips in Disorderly £19, smashbox.co.uk
5. Glossier Skywash Eyeshadow £15, glossier.com

Sales from online dealers has shot up during the lockdown. Here’s your chance to find some great deals and also to try some new bottles and grapes

Shaw and Smith Sauvignon Blanc, Adelaide Hills, Australia 2019 (£14.95, slurp.co.uk) With most of us living out most of our lives in the virtual world at the moment, it’s not surprising that a lot of wine buying has migrated online, too. Depending on which statistical data gatherer you believe, sales of alcohol online were up by as much as 50% in the first weeks of the crisis v “normal” times. A lot of those sales went through the virtual tills of the supermarkets, of course. But the online wine specialists have been benefiting, too. If you’re looking to dip a toe into online wine buying for the first time, many retailers are offering discounted mixed cases to get you started. Slurp.co.uk, for example, has a 10-bottle “Indulge in Isolation” case, which at £120 works out as a £50 discount. There are some nice wines in there, although, personally, I’d rather go à la carte on slurp’s extensive list, filling a case with bottles such as Shaw and Smith’s superbly zingy, pristine sauvignon.

De Martino Viejas Tinajas Cinsault, Itata, Chile 2018 (£14.95, virginwines.co.uk) One mixed case that I do like the look of is Virgin Wine’s selection of contemporary German bottles, which, includes pinot blanc and pinot noir as well as a scintillating example of the country’s most famous grape variety, Gunderloch Fritz’s Riesling, Rheinhessen 2017 (a bottle of which is £14.99 on its own; The Best of Modern Germany case of 12 bottles is £140). You could also include any of those Germans in a mixed case with a wine such as the gorgeously light, rosehippy-red fruited, clay amphora-made Viejas Tinajas from Chile. Meanwhile, the UK’s oldest wine retailer, and one of the first to make a success of online, Berry Bros & Rudd, has a tempting 12 for £200 mix and match offer of 30 smart bottles, which is pretty good value for wines from the likes of De Martino, the Loire’s Vincent Carême, Beaujolais’ Julien Sunier and the Douro’s Quinta de la Rosa.

A loving touch will get seedlings ready to plant

As spring turns to summer, gardeners everywhere will be itching to plant the seedlings and cuttings they’ve been raising indoors out in the garden. However, particularly for newbies, the effects of this transition from the cosseted conditions of a warm windowsill to the great outdoors can be a significant hurdle.

The reason why this switch is tricky is that plants have the amazing ability to adapt their anatomy to shield themselves from environmental threats, however they are only triggered to do so when stimulated by the threat itself. Indoors, plants enjoy stable temperatures, limited air movement and much lower light levels (as window glass filters out UVB rays). This means they tend to direct most of their energies into growing, instead of investing in these defences.

And they’re off! The baby peas and beans are out on their own. But will they survive?

Sleep restless, anxiety dreams, and if there wasn’t enough to be concerned about I am worrying about our baby beans and peas.

It is often like this in spring. The responsibility, it comes with the shorter nights and longer light, maybe I have more time on my hands. I have saved two hours a day on travelling and I only work a few miles’ walk from home. This extra time has now become a trip to the plot, or perhaps pottering on the terrace. A more intimate gardening relationship cemented in the spring mornings. Deepened, more dependent.

We may be spending less by not travelling to work, but with an uncertain future it’s time to take stock of personal finances

With gyms shut, taps turned off in pubs and the prospect of a holiday a distant dream, many people are finding their outgoings have dropped since lockdown. But the shadow of a looming recession and concern about whether jobs will even exist when offices reopen, means many are looking at their finances even more closely.

So what are the best ways to improve them amid extraordinary times and an uncertain future?

Eliza Hittman’s coming-of-age story about a US teenager seeking a termination is heartbreaking and painfully authentic

From Eliza Hittman, the remarkable writer-director of It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats, comes another drama that manages to blend the gritty authenticity of a documentary with the poetic sensibility of pure cinema. In her impressively measured and beautifully understated third feature, Hittman tells an oft-hidden story of reproductive rights – an age-old issue that has urgent contemporary relevance. Yet Never Rarely Sometimes Always never feels polemical. On the contrary, it is perhaps best described as a perfectly observed portrait of female friendship; a coming-of-age story with road-movie inflections, piercingly honest and deeply affecting.

Feature first-timer (and accomplished musician) Sidney Flanigan is superb as Autumn, a 17-year-old from Pennsylvania who discovers that she cannot get an abortion in her home town without parental consent. Quietly desperate, Autumn reluctantly confides in her more outgoing cousin Skylar (rising star Talia Ryder, soon to be seen in Spielberg’s West Side Story), who agrees to accompany her across state lines to New York. The pair imagine that the trip will be brief but find themselves spending days and nights on the streets, waiting for the procedure that Autumn was denied in Pennsylvania.

The former EastEnders actor talks about shooting a pilot on a deadly virus, telling British stories with a difference – and how playing a bit part as a pigeon changed his career

The so-called “curse of EastEnders” – the struggle for soap actors to transition into more prestigious dramatic roles after leaving the show – always weighed heavily on the mind of Himesh Patel.

So when he decided to leave the soap in 2016, after nine years playing Tamwar Masood, he knew whichever role he chose next would be critical in breaking typecast, perhaps even defining the rest of his career. He went to a friend whose theatre company, withWings, took inventive musical adaptations to the Edinburgh fringe. That year they were doing Le Bossu, a retelling of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Patel mentioned that he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and do some theatre. “He came back to me and said, ‘Cool, well, I can offer you the role of a pigeon.’”

Rise of spy chief to premier comes as Iran struggles to maintain momentum months after killing of powerful general

In late February, six weeks after the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was killed by a US drone, a candidate for Iraq’s vacant premiership was nervously preparing for an interview that would secure him the role.

Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s rise from intelligence chief to the seat of national power had been unorthodox, as was the journey he had just made – from Baghdad, where high-stakes appointments like his had mostly been made over the past decade.

Modest changes expected to include relaxing exercise rules and reopening garden centres

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Boris Johnson’s plans to ease the UK lockdown are likely to be in line with Wales, which would result in only modest changes such as the reopening of garden centres and libraries, and a relaxation of exercise rules, the Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, said on Saturday.

Drakeford said the prime minister’s announcement for England would be in line with the very smallest easing granted in Wales.

The museums of Europe have begun reopening their doors to art lovers desperate to see old favourites and new works

I am cursing my bad luck not to be stuck in lockdown in the Prado. A friend wishes she had stowed away in a closet before they bolted the doors of the National Gallery. Others would give anything for a week in the Rijksmuseum, a day in the Uffizi, an hour with Rembrandt or Vermeer, even just a few minutes with a Samuel Palmer moonscape in the Ashmolean or a Turner sunrise at Tate Britain. Museums are places of the heart.

We see art in time and place; we cannot see it otherwise. Of course there are other whereabouts of the works we most long to set eyes on again, during this evil pandemic: the cave paintings at Chaumet in France, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in a Florentine monastery, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty coiled in the glistening waters of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. These were all chosen in an unofficial and entirely self-selecting Twitter survey (mine), along with Leonardo’s The Last Supper and James Turrell’s Deer Shelter Skyspace, framing the blue heavens above Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Thatcher’s simplistic aversion to borrowing still haunts fiscal policy, but interest rates have been falling for many years

It is clear Boris Johnson has favoured his health advisers as he looks to ease the lockdown. Worries about a second coronavirus outbreak have clinched victory over concerns about keeping much of industry and commerce in a state of suspended animation.

After weeks of pleading by the Treasury to get the nation back to work, No 10 has opted to play it safe with people’s health, and particularly older people. And no wonder, after a hapless first few months in which the UK leapt to fourth place in probably the most ignominious league table in modern history – that of Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 population – behind Belgium, Spain and Italy.

The rights of the most vulnerable, including those with dementia, should not be violated

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Last week, driving to the shops, I passed a care home and saw a figure standing at an upstairs window: an old woman looking out at a world she could not enter. She looked like a prisoner. And in a way, that’s probably what she was.

Let’s talk about old people. Let’s talk about people in care homes, about people living with dementia and dying with dementia, out of sight and out of mind, and what the lockdown means for them. Let’s talk about what we are not talking about enough, not thinking about enough, not caring about enough.

Research finds that both male and female judges are more likely to employ female clerks if they have worked with women

Discrimination over jobs is bad. Bad for those discriminated against, and bad for society, as talent is wasted and divisions sown.

Women reaching senior leadership positions in organisations is generally a sign of success for gender equality – but it can also lead to increased equality elsewhere. That is the important finding from new research on the (not famously diverse) world of judges. The study looks at the hiring of law clerks by senior judges in the US.

Marta was right when saying Formiga will retire eventually but PSG’s record-breaking midfielder is preparing for a seventh Olympic Games next summer

When England stepped out at Meadow Lane in October 2018, having qualified unbeaten for the Women’s World Cup, all eyes were on one opponent: Brazil’s six-times Ballon d’Or winner, Marta. Necks prepared to strain for a glimpse of the ageing giant of women’s football. It may have been a friendly but at 34 the Brazilian’s career clock was ticking. For most, it would be the only time to see her in the flesh.

When Marta limped off after 22 minutes the disappointment of the crowd was palpable. The Brazil performance matched Marta’s lacklustre mood but in the then 40-year-old Formiga they had a player who would not subscribe to her teammates’ indifference – with the young winger Ludmila the exception alongside her.

• Sarries players urged to focus on international future
• ‘I’m quite confident that they will make good decisions’

Maro Itoje and Mako Vunipola have been urged to make “good decisions” for their international careers by the England defence coach, John Mitchell, with both players yet to commit to Saracens next season.

Itoje had hoped to receive dispensation to continue his England career while spending next season on loan in France at Racing 92 rather than in the Championship with relegated Saracens. However, that move was blocked by the other Premiership clubs since it did not meet “exceptional circumstances”, the loophole that allows England’s head coach, Eddie Jones, to select overseas-based players in the event of an injury crisis.

Two players and a photographer remember what it was like to face Castilla at an empty Upton Park in 1980

At half-time West Ham’s former chairman Len Cearns was sent on a futile mission by his fellow directors. They wanted him to go down to the home dressing room to ask John Lyall if there was any way his team could possibly remember that the foul language being used in the heat of battle was floating away from the pitch, rattling around the empty terraces and causing some discomfort for the people sitting in the posh seats.

“There was a lot of swearing going on in the game,” Alvin Martin says as he recalls West Ham hosting a European tie behind closed doors in the autumn of 1980. “You don’t realise it. You’re communicating in a factory way.”

Volunteers who help the British Grand Prix run smoothly want to get back trackside but questions remain on safety and testing

“We are like one big family,” says Carolyn Doyle of the bond between the marshals of the British Grand Prix. “We are there because we love it and we want to achieve the same thing – that’s what makes it really special.”

Much as it does bring great pleasure to this selfless collective, the sport knows their presence is invaluable. As Silverstone considers hosting two consecutive races behind closed doors in July, the volunteer marshals are having to consider the new realities imposed on Formula One by the coronavirus crisis.

Marcus Arbery Sr says Ahmaud’s death at the hands of two white men, while he was out for a run, was an act of racism

Marcus Arbery Sr says his son was just like him, fit and athletic.

Related: ‘Every stone will be uncovered’: how Georgia officials failed the Ahmaud Arbery case

The White House press secretary has made a confident start in a notoriously difficult role. Those who know her say the media and opponents underestimate her at their peril

It was a mic drop designed to thrill conservatives and infuriate liberals and the media.

Related: 'You can't ask the virus for a truce': reopening America is Trump's biggest gamble

Acclaimed photographers from around the world share a single image reflecting on their experience of the coronavirus outbreak

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Neighbours of Tamsin Calidas, who moved to Scotland from London, are keen to put their side as her book I am an Island looks set for success

Tamsin Calidas’s memoir about swapping Notting Hill for a croft on a small Hebridean island luxuriates in its landscape. The heather and the Munros, the raw skies and the wild tides of the Atlantic are lavishly described. The islanders, by contrast, are largely anonymous, thoughtless and cruel.

State forbids preaching to under-18s without parents’ permission

The Israeli government is threatening to take off air a Christian television channel that launched in the country to preach to Jews, warning that it will be barred if it breaks strict rules around proselytising.

GOD TV, an evangelical media network that broadcasts across the world, signed a seven-year deal with a major Israeli cable television provider, HOT, to host its new Hebrew-language channel that began airing last month.

Campaigners call for return of 1930s wording to Twentieth Century Fox Film Co former offices

Disney, titan of the media and entertainment world, has enraged a group of Londoners attempting to preserve one of Soho’s best-known squares. And the battle is over one word: “Fox”.

In the south-west corner of Soho Square stands Twentieth Century House, a grand emblem of the American film industry’s key role in this part of the city since 1937. It is now in the hands of Disney.

Tatiana Akhmedova wants high court to have access to son’s papers in her fight for £453m – but he says her claim is unlawful

It is proving to be a very modern divorce. Armies of lawyers and advisers; hundreds of millions of pounds at stake; priceless art; a superyacht; a key lieutenant switching sides; the son dragged into the proceedings by his mother. No wonder some involved have likened it to The War of the Roses, the dark Hollywood comedy about a feuding couple starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas.

But now attempts to secure the assets awarded following Britain’s biggest, bitterest marital breakup may hinge on how the high court views an arcane financial practice dating back to feudal times.

Follow the science, they say… So here are 12 new ‘observations’ about life in a post-pandemic world

Apologies in advance: this column will be distressing to scientists (including those in my own family, but thankfully none of them read what I write).

The rules of the physical world seem to be abandoning us. The virus acts like no other pathogen. Two metres is entirely subjective now, expanding and contracting to meet our needs. Time is non-Newtonian, like the cornflour you’ve probably resorted to if you have small children to entertain, stiff and fluid at once. Numbers are basically meaningless: in pandemic maths, a figure such as 413 deaths – the one released on the day I am writing, an unthinkable catastrophe at another time – is encouraging, a cause for some optimism.

Taking Britain safely out of lockdown will necessitate unpopular policies of more spending and surveillance

A commonplace criticism of political parties is that they have drifted “into their comfort zone”, which mostly means that Labour talks a lot about raising spending, while the Conservatives talk about cutting taxes. But politicians have comfort zones that are operational as well as ideological: ways of working that they find more attractive than others.

In late 2014, one ambitious young shadow cabinet minister asked his aides to draw up a 14-point plan to help him become leader of the Labour party. Step two involved an itemised list of Labour MPs, each of whom, he was told, he needed to wine and dine if he was to have any hope of making a successful bid at the job. The frontbencher in question contemplated evening after evening spent in conversation with his colleagues versus time spent with his wife and children. Surely, he reasoned, he could achieve the same end by writing thoughtful columns in the newspapers and delivering wide-ranging speeches? His leadership bid never recovered.

Pre-school providers tell ministers they can take the strain from crowded primary classes when the lockdown eases

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Leading nurseries are urging the government to let them help primary schools cope with social distancing rules by allowing children to stay in their pre-school classes for months longer than planned.

Primary schools are expected to be the first to reopen, but many are concerned about the basic practicalities of doing so. A group of 70 prominent providers has written to ministers, setting out how the nurseries can help. It says that encouraging more children to start school in January or April next year, rather than this September, could ease the problems and help children cope with life after lockdown.

As hundreds of test kits claim to offer accurate results on previous Covid-19 infection, scientists around the world are working hard to assess their accuracy

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At the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Marion Koopmans and a team of scientists are going throught the laborious process of verifying antibody tests for Covid-19. Over the last two months, dozens of prospective tests have hit the market, and with many governments wanting to feed the results of large-scale testing into their decisions whether to end lockdowns, biological tests have rarely carried such weight.

Most of the tests are enthusiastically marketed, boasting of their ability to accurately detect whether someone has previously been infected with the Sars-CoV-2 virus. The painstaking job of proving whether the tests do what they say has fallen to a worldwide network of 12 independent centres, of which Koopmans’s team is one.

Since the UK confirmed its first case, its response has proved one of the least effective

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It is 100 days since the first coronavirus case was confirmed in the UK on 31 January. The official death toll so far from the epidemic has topped 33,000 and is still rising fast. The actual total could be far higher, many analysts say – leaving Britain among the countries hit hardest by Covid-19.

The government has struggled to get on top of the crisis, facing growing criticism for its lack of early preparation to tackle the virus, its abrupt shifts in strategy, its failure to provide adequate protective equipment for its medical staff and other key workers, and its inability to organise testing on the scale that many say is vital.

Prime minister expected to outline ‘roadmap’ to new normality in address on Sunday

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Boris Johnson is expected to unveil a coronavirus warning system for England when he outlines his plans to gradually ease the lockdown.

The prime minister will drop the “stay home” slogan and instead tell the country to “stay alert, control the virus and save lives” when he outlines his “roadmap” to a new normality during an address to the nation on Sunday. Johnson is planning to tell workers who cannot do their jobs from home to begin returning to their workplaces while following social distancing rules.

Reaction from Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and Republican presidential candidate.

"I totally support your mask policy," a comment on Costco's Facebook said. "It is small minded individuals who don't understand the reason for it."

The head of the Food and Drug Administration will also self-quarantine; all three are on the coronavirus task force.

Tia has decided to work at a migrant camp in Calais instead of returning home to her family during lockdown.

The government says "operational issues" in the UK meant 50,000 samples had to be flown to US labs.

Laura Fuchs is capturing New Yorkers who are trying to stay positive in the midst of the pandemic.

Willy Thuan is a French photographer who started to travel the world early and never stopped until he settled in Thailand in 1994. Then for the past 25 years, his passion for photography has taken him to every corner of Thailand. He has been a Phuket blogger since January 2011. 

One day, during a casual lunch with friends on the Bangtao beach in Phuket, he saw this baby elephant walking towards the water and with the instincts of an experienced photographer, he started taking photos. 

On his blog, he recalls that day: "I saw a small elephant walking alone toward the water and I, of course, thought he would stop there and wait. But no, once approaching the sea, he just started to run faster and rammed into the waves like the kid he was! He came in and out several times; his mahout was casually waiting nearby, apparently used to the elephant's behaviour. The elephant suddenly did something hilarious, totally unexpected: he put his head into the sand and pushed himself forward. I happened to carry a 28-300 mm lens on that day, giving me this perspective, and the photo of a lifetime"

Soooo cute! 

Here's something different! You know that popular subreddit, "Explain It To Me Like I Have 5?" Well, this is sort of like that but better because it only involves one thing...

Cows. 

Imagine, things you were never quite sure about finally explained to you in a language you can comprehend, in terms of cows. Thankfully, NewsTalkZB had created such a thing and learning has never been easier! 

So buckle in, folks! And get ready to learn things you may or may have not known, all in terms of cows. 

Astra Lost in Space anime, Shinkalion film, 2019 Godzilla film, Fly Me to Saitama film, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim game also nominated