A collection of 3,000-year-old artefacts at Battersea power station gives Egypt’s most ambitious, self-aggrandising pharaoh a chance to emerge from Tutankhamun’s shadow

The mummy of Egypt’s most ambitious pharaoh, Ramses II (often spelt Ramesses), is a masterpiece of the embalmer’s art. The amazingly preserved 3,000-year-old face with its proud, beaky nose looks much as it must have when he died at the age of 90 or 91, after ruling for 66 years, fathering more than 100 children, smiting his enemies and making ancient Egypt great again. And that’s even before you notice how his hand seems to reach forward to grasp spookily at power from beyond the grave.

I’ve never forgotten Ramses since looking on his face, and that hand, in Cairo. But the world at large seems more interested in Tutankhamun, whose unspoiled tomb was found by Howard Carter in 1922.

Millions of people aged 50 to 64 are out of work – sidelined by sickness, care duties or ageism. If Labour can’t convince them they’re a priority, Farage will step in

Penny Lancaster was 50 when she retrained as a special constable. Wrangling Saturday night drunks and shoplifters might seem an odd fit for the ex-model and wife of Sir Rod Stewart; she got the idea after making a Channel 4 show in which she temporarily swapped jobs with a police officer. But to Lancaster, who has previously disclosed that she was sexually assaulted as a teenager by a senior figure in the fashion industry, it makes perfect sense: she has said her weekly shifts with City of London police are a way of dealing with things that happened to her as a younger woman, where “the suspects never got found, justice was never had”.

Buried memories have a habit of resurfacing in middle age. But with them sometimes comes a fierce urge to be useful: to make changes in your working life while there’s still time, look out for other people’s kids now your own are nearly grown and pass on life lessons you didn’t realise at the time were valuable. On a policing podcast recently, Lancaster talked about drawing on her experience as a mother of teenagers to talk down a suicidal 19-year-old who approached her on a bridge. Not everything in policing, she pointed out, is about chasing bad guys down the street. Steadiness, patience and emotional maturity matter too.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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I disliked my first encounter with pole, but two years later my experience with the sport has made me appreciate my body and my self-determination

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When my friend Bea took up pole dancing she enthusiastically tried to convert everyone she knew to it – a common trope, I’d later find out. As a childhood gymnast and dancefloor enthusiast, I was scouted as a potential recruit, so along with my sister, in 2023 we joined her for a class.

The class was packed and the studio felt overly commercialised. The friction of the metal pole against my skin was straight-up painful and spinning around made me so dizzy I had to sit down to reorientate myself several times.

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The queen of children’s edutainment is back after four very long months, with her most extraordinary, envelope-pushing and moving special yet. Cue absolute relief for parents the world over

For those whose cultural experiences are largely absorbed through the prism of their mewling infants’ demands for the same thing 437 times in a row, it’s been a long four months. In late October last year, Rachel Accurso released Brush Your Teeth Song with Ms Rachel and Elmo. The 48m views it has since racked up reflect its status as a solid addition to the Ms Rachel canon, and the whole thing is obviously enhanced by Elmo’s guest spot. But it was studded with reheated clips from previous compilations, such as The Wheels on the Bus from Blippi & Ms Rachel Learn Vehicles, and It’s Potty Time from Potty Training With Ms Rachel. There is a limit to the number of plays an adult can reasonably be expected to endure of a bear puppet in a nappy hymning his ability to relieve himself, and the Ms Rachel hive is thirsting for something new.

Enter, on Friday, Learn With Ms Rachel – Friendship & Social Skills, an hour-long compendium, in which the leviathan of contemporary children’s edutainment helps her guests “model important social skills such as kindness, taking turns, sharing, asking a friend to play and helping others”. A few minutes on any of the subreddits that pore over Ms Rachel content clarifies the weight of this cultural moment. Or you could ask my two-year-old about it.

Kicking off this year’s series in which our writers advocate for one Academy Award nominee, our chief critic on why the Brazilian drama-thriller is the most audacious and fully realised film in the race

As ever, this year’s Oscars have their half-dozen or so favourites and frontrunners, some truly outstanding movies among them. But the one that has stayed in my mind is a knight’s move away from the talking-point consensus: an amazingly sophisticated, wayward and garrulous film from Brazil, a film about love and fatherhood, tyranny and resistance, and coming to terms with the past. It is digressive and droll and yet in its final act escalates stunningly from lugubrious mystery to cold-sweat tension and violence.

When the best picture Oscar is announced, my heart would sing to see its husband-and-wife producers Emilie Lesclaux and Kleber Mendonça Filho go on stage to accept it for their drama-thriller The Secret Agent. Directed by Mendonça Filho, it’s a movie made with effortless style and touched with pure cinematic inspiration. The opening scene alone, with its queasy black-comic unease, is itself a kind of masterpiece. It is like Antonioni’s The Passenger mixed with Leone and Peckinpah and a pulp shocker by Elmore Leonard. Yet it has a kind of novelistic, episodic quality – a cool, discursive self-awareness. You might call it a little miracle, although at near-epic length (2hrs 40mins), it’s actually a very big miracle.

Williams team principal on pre-season travails, why McLaren are an inspiration and closing the gap to the top

“I didn’t realise it until I saw the notice,” James Vowles says of the third anniversary in January of his arrival at Williams as their team principal. On a rainy afternoon he smiles wryly in his London office. “I probably should have allowed myself a moment to reflect, but you are too caught up in the work. That reality defines Formula One.”

Vowles is one of the most interesting men in F1 and not just because, as the director of strategy, he helped two teams to win nine constructors’ championships and eight drivers’ titles. He will soon reveal a reflective side to his character and touch on the adversity he overcame at the outset of his career. His relish for a challenge in pure racing terms is obvious because in 2022 he left Mercedes, who had finished second in the championship, for Williams, after they ended that season in 10th and last place.

Donald Trump said they projected the mission to go on for four-five weeks at the beginning, but adds they have ‘capability to go far longer’

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Bahrain has said that one person was killed by shrapnel from an intercepted missile. The death of a foreign worker at Salman Industrial City, working on a boat there, marks the kingdom’s first reported fatality in the war.

Bahrain, home to the US navy’s 5th fleet, said it intercepted 61 missiles and 34 attack drones launched against it. It said some shrapnel had gotten through, striking buildings and the naval base.

Trump says the US is already ‘substantially ahead’ of its time projections after telling New York Post, ‘I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground’

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While speaking today, Pete Hegseth acknowledged the fourth US service member killed in Iran’s counterattacks.

“War is hell and always will be,” he said. “Our grateful nation honors the four Americans we have lost thus far and those injured – the absolute best of America.”

Meeting of six-country cooperation council says option to respond to attacks by Tehran remains on the table

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Gulf states, encouraged by Donald Trump, are on the verge of ending their neutrality in the war against Iran in reprisal for Tehran’s repeated “reckless and indiscriminate attacks” on their territory and infrastructure.

The calls, led by the United Arab Emirates from inside the six-country Gulf Cooperation Council, are for the Arab states to act in self-defence against Iran, but it would be a huge step for Gulf leaders in effect to side with Israel in a war that will determine the future shape of the Middle East, probably to the advantage of Israel.

PM defends use of UK bases for defensive action but says Britain has ‘learned the lessons from Iraq’ on need for ‘thought-through plan’

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Keir Starmer has said the UK will not join offensive strikes by Israel and the US on Iran, saying the UK does not believe in “regime change from the skies”.

But the prime minister defended the use of UK bases for defensive action, saying that was “the best way to protect British interests and British lives”.