Two sides set for first direct negotiations since March 2022 but Russia’s lower-level delegation in Istanbul seen as snub

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sent a delegation to Istanbul for peace talks with Russia, paving the way for the first direct negotiations between the two countries since March 2022 – although Washington has warned that no breakthrough is likely unless Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agree to meet.

The talks are set to begin on Friday and Zelenskyy said that Kyiv would focus on pushing for an immediate 30-day ceasefire.

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Exclusive: Firm close to insolvency says using £3bn loan to pay ‘substantial’ bonuses is vital to retain senior managers

Ministers plan to use new powers to block bosses from Thames Water taking bonuses worth hundreds of thousands of pounds as the company fights for survival, the Guardian can reveal.

Britain’s biggest water company admitted this week that senior managers are in line for “substantial” bonuses linked to an emergency £3bn loan .

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More than 20 years since they suffered on Jimmy Anderson’s famous Test debut, the tourists are back

A biting wind swept across Grace Road on Thursday and though the crowd was thin, there was just enough stardust to keep the autograph hunters happy. Andrew Flintoff was perched on the pavilion balcony, while Mark Wood, trying his hand at coaching during his latest injury layoff, patrolled the boundary’s edge with a smile.

Out in the middle there were also runs for Josh de Caires, son of Mike Atherton, who compiled a fluent 79 from 93 balls on a green-tinged pitch. De Caires is a player in the modern mould charting his own course but some of the old man’s mannerisms were there to see. Mercifully, the lower back appears to be much less creaky.

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Ovaeed Rahman charged with animal cruelty offences after police, RSPCA and council officials visited Billericay property

A man has been charged with a series of offences after the remains of 37 dogs were found at an address in Essex.

Essex police said officers, colleagues from the RSPCA and Basildon council visited a property in the Crays Hill area of Billericay on Tuesday and the remains were discovered.

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Cannes film festival
A taut, charged procedural from Dominik Moll follows a conflicted officer investigating violence to a teenage protester

Dominik Moll’s Dossier 137 is a serious, focused, if slightly programmatic movie about police brutality in France; there are docu-dramatic storytelling reflexes and a determined procedural tread. The movie takes its cue from the horrifying real-life cases of gilets-jaunes protesters in France’s 2019 demonstrations who suffered near fatal injuries due to the police’s trigger-happy use of the LBD gun : the lanceur de balle de défense or “flash ball” gun which (deafeningly) fires vicious rubber bullets.

Stéphanie, played by Léa Drucker, is a conscientious police officer in the IGPN, the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale, effectively the Internal Affairs bureau, investigating horrific head injuries suffered by a teen protester, which could only be caused by the cops’ flash-ball weapons. She is divorced from a cop, Jérémy (Stanislas Merhar) who along with his new girlfriend – also in the police – is gloweringly resentful of what he sees as her bureau’s disloyal undermining of the police, and the way she is questioning the corners they (supposedly) have to cut to keep France safe, especially after the Bataclan attacks .

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Failure to recruit NHS radiologists risks creating vicious cycle whereby doctors are drawn to private work, royal college says

The NHS handed private firms a record £216m last year to examine X-rays and scans because hospitals have too few radiologists.

The amount of money NHS organisations across the UK are paying companies to interpret scans has doubled in five years as demand rises for diagnostic tests.

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Letters sent by broadcaster and MPs with medical backgrounds call for action to change law

Esther Rantzen has urged all MPs to back Kim Leadbeater’s “strong, safe, carefully considered bill” to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, which faces its next Commons test on Friday.

In an impassioned letter, the broadcaster, who has stage-four lung cancer , said she and other terminally ill adults asked MPs to allow “a good, pain-free death for ourselves and those we love and care for”.

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£20,000 award for writers aged 39 or under goes to story ‘tackling trauma and grief with bold and poetic moments of quirkiness and humour’

A novel about a Palestinian woman who participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut novel The Coin. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

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Coller-Dolittle award won by US team for discovering call that triggers avoidance and could be used as alarm signal

A $100,000 prize for communicating with animals has been scooped by researchers who have shed light on the meaning of dolphins’ whistles.

The Coller-Dolittle Prize for Two-way Inter-species Communication was launched last year by the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University.

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