World news Best photographs of the day Photo highlights of the day: from Puffins in Northumberland to the Bubble Nebula

Picture editors bring you a selection of the best photographs from around the world, including puffins in Northumberland, the Bubble Nebula, Obama in Riyadh and watermelons in Lahore
Paul Bellsham

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  • Bubble Nebula, which is an emission nebula located 11 000 light-years away. This new image was observed by the Hubble Space Telescope to celebrate its 26th year in space
    The Bubble NebulaAn emission nebula 11,000 light years away. This image was taken by the Hubble telescope to celebrate its 26th year in space
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  • Children play on a destroyed fighter plane
    Juba, South SudanChildren play on a destroyed fighter plane. Fragile hopes for an end to the civil war are being tested by the rebel leader Riek Machar’s failure to return to the capital to form a unity government
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  • Riyadh, Saudi ArabiaOman’s Deputy Prime Minister Fahd bin Mahmoud al-Said, President Barack Obama Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa participate in the leaders photo at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit
    Riyadh, Saudi ArabiaOman’s deputy prime minister Fahd bin Mahmoud al-Said, the US president Barack Obama, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit
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  • Visitors walk in the Government Gardens of the Port Arthur Historical Site
    Port Arthur, AustraliaVisitors walk in the Government Gardens. Port Arthur became infamous on 28 April 1996 when Martin Bryant began shooting indiscriminately with a high-powered rifle at people visiting the site
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  • Farmers gather to sell watermelons at a fruit market
    Lahore, PakistanFarmers sell watermelons at a fruit market
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  • Workers wash statue of Lenin on the eve of the 146th anniversary of his birth
    Krasnoyarsk, SiberiaWorkers wash the statue of Lenin on the eve of the 146th anniversary of his birth
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  • Puffins just off the Northumberland coast at the start of the breading season
    Farne Islands, UKPuffins just off the Northumberland coast at the start of the breeding season. Rangers are hoping for a more successful summer after flooding wreaked havoc last year
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  • Policeman stand guard as a health worker administers polio drops to a child during a vaccination campaign
    Karachi, PakistanPolicemen stand guard as a health worker administers polio drops to a child during a vaccination campaign
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  • People walk around ‘The Starry Paradise’, a recreation of Van Gogh’s painting ‘The Starry Night’ made from discarded plastic bottles
    Keelung, TaiwanPeople walk around ‘The Starry Paradise’, a recreation of Van Gogh’’s painting ‘The Starry Night’ made from discarded plastic bottles at the Embrace Cultural and Creative Park
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  • A man bends iron to recycle, at a post-earthquake debris field
    Manta, EcuadorA man bends iron to recycle at a post-earthquake debris field
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  • Teresita Gapayao wades through garbage using a makeshift raft made from styrofoam on the Estero de Vitas river
    Manila, PhilippinesTeresita Gapayao wades through garbage using a makeshift styrofoam raft on the Estero de Vitas river 
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  • A man smokes marijuana as thousands of people gather to celebrate the plant’s unofficial holiday
    Vancouver, CanadaA man smokes marijuana as thousands of people gather to celebrate the plant’s unofficial holiday
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  • Nuns of the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa, at a polling booth during the West Bengal state Assembly elections
    Kolkata, IndiaNuns of the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa, at a polling booth during the West Bengal state assembly elections
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  • The full moon above the lighthouse
    Westerhever, GermanyThe full moon above a lighthouse 
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Isabelle Huppert: ‘When I act, I don't think about anything’


‘Not all movies are definitive – but there is always a necessity for me, a reason for me to have done the movie” … Isabelle Huppert
 ‘Not all movies are definitive – but there is always a necessity for me, a reason for me to have done the movie” … Isabelle Huppert Photograph: Peter Lindbergh

Isabelle Huppert strides into the salon, full of pep and vinegar, as you would expect. “Right now, I am completely immersed in theatre,” she says, not especially apologetically. “That’s why I might sound a little asleep at times.” It’s true: she is midway through a two-month Paris run of Phaedra(s), the classical Greek tragedy as reinterpreted by Sarah “Blasted” Kane, Wajdi Mouawad and JM Coetzee. “It is a very demanding production,” she says, and you wouldn’t want to doubt her.
But she doesn’t sound in the remotest bit asleep. One of Huppert’s principal attributes, and one that has served her brilliantly as an actor over the decades, is her wide-awake steeliness and resolution beneath the unassuming exterior, the toughness and wariness of someone who is not going to be messed with. Now 63, she has been making films for more than 40 years, ever since bagging a small role in the 1972 teen comedy Faustine et le Bel Été. (She didn’t play Faustine, but the cast also included future heavy-hitters Isabelle Adjani and Nathalie Baye.) She’s now completed more than 100 films, a decent percentage of which are masterpieces. What’s her secret and why does she keep going? Has she ever thought of packing it in?
Huppert snorts politely. “Oh, I don’t think so. You do one film after the other, and of course sometimes you have peaks, and sometimes it gets quieter, but no matter what, you keep going.” What keeps her motivated? “It has a lot to do with the encounter with the director. It’s really a process. Not all movies are successful, not all movies are definitive – but there is always a necessity for me, a reason for me to have done the movie.”
Huppert has a deep, unshakeable – and very French – commitment to the cult of the auteur, the master director in whom she says a “complete belief” is a prerequisite, the vessel of a film’s “spiritual and creative power”. Huppert’s directors are the great and good of European art cinema: Michael Haneke, Claude Chabrol, Claire Denis, Raul Ruiz, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Catherine Breillat, Bertrand Tavernier, Bertrand Blier. She’s made occasional forays into American cinema, too: Heaven’s Gate, Hal Hartley’s Amateur, I Heart Huckabees. Directors, she says, are her “only criterion of choice”.
“All movies are intense,” she says, “but the commitment may not be exactly the way people think it is. It’s a total engagement with the film; it’s beyond work, it’s beyond effort.”

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This certainly sounds like the Huppert we are familiar with: the total-immersion actor who simulated genital self-mutilation in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, or the isolated plantation owner facing down armed rebels in Denis’ White Material. She played a pyschopathic killer and a wartime abortionist for Chabrol in La Cérémonie and The Story of Women respectively.

No doubt principally becuase of Huppert’s involvement, Elle will premiere at Cannes in May (Verhoeven hasn’t troubled the festival circuit for a decade, not since 2006’s Black Book). Despite the fact that no one has seen it, Huppert is animated on the subject. She says it’s a “portrait of a prototype of contemporary woman” who “can handle everything, including being raped by an unknown man”. The woman runs a videogame company (and no, Huppert says, she didn’t bone up on Call of Duty to prepare for the role) and “plays a strange game with her rapist”. But she “is never a victim, which she could be, because of her past”. She says that Verhoeven, the mastermind behind Robocop, Starship Troopers and Showgirls, turned out to be a “very attentive” director, and a “very delicate” one to boot; she was as surprised as anyone else.Huppert’s frenetic workrate means that you are never far from a new film from her, and with the film world’s chaotic schedules, we are right on top of four of them. Of immediate interest is Louder than Bombs, a moody, knotted drama in which Huppert plays the small but key role of a veteran war photographer who may or may not have deliberately killed herself in a car crash. Out shortly in France is L’Avenir, or Things to Come, where she plays a teacher who has to fend off a midlife crisis after her husband leaves her. Hovering in the distance (for UK audiences at least) after a successful debut at Cannes last year is Valley of Love, where Huppert is a grieving mother opposite Gerard Depardieu, as the two perform an odd ritual in Death Valley to honour their dead son. And most remarkably of all, perhaps, Huppert has taken the lead role in Elle, a new film from seemingly dormant Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, a typically lurid thriller about a woman stalking her rapist.

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Louder Than Bombs, she says, was another case of directorial attraction: she met Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier at a film festival in Stockholm, and happily agreed to take the small-but-memorable role he offered her, “as it would be nice to spend some time together”. There’s one particular shot in the film, a long-held close-up of her staring fixedly out of a front door, that is a striking testament to her ability to hold the camera. Huppert says she finds it “horrible”, but accepts it “impresses people because it’s very intense and dramatic”.
But she lets on she pretty much blanked out, mentally, to do the scene: the Huppert gaze does not involve method acting, inner investigation or any psychological gymnastics. “In fact, when I act I don’t think about anything. My acting depends on the staging: you know, you put the camera in front of me, and I do it.”
She won’t be drawn on the subject of Depardieu, whose epic form she shares the screen with in Valley of Love, and whose increasingly raddled physique and wayward lifestyle appears to be part of the film’s fascination: “We act together very easily” is the most she’ll say.

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Huppert is famous for being intensely private, presenting a poker face when asked about her political thoughts or family life. She is happy enough to talk about the Action Christine, the cinema she bought and which her son Lorenzo programmes. (“It is one of the mythical cinemas in Paris. I had the opportunity to buy it, so I did.”) But I get a taste of the freezer when I mention her husband, film-maker Ronald Chammah; the shutters slam down, and she instantly changes the subject.
We’re back on less tricky ground when I ask about her (possibly not entirely serious) suggestion that she would like to play a “power villain” in a Hollywood blockbuster. The mind boggles at the thought of Huppert sneering, Blofeld-style, or yukking it up in a comic-book movie. “Yes, why not? It would be an experience. These kinds of roles never really happened to me, but it would be interesting. It would be for my children, really; they ask me: why don’t you do this kind of a superhero? I have not been asked yet, but I would say: ‘OK.’”
Hollywood, what are you waiting for?
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Fertility problem.- Are you worried about your fertility? Young people share their stories

..Pregnant woman
Rising house prices and financial instability are putting young people off starting families. But some fear they might be leaving it too late
W
hen do your chances of getting pregnant start to decline – late 20s, early 30s or after the age of 35? If your answer is the latter, you might be surprised to hear that in fact fertility rates for both men and women decline gradually from their late 20s.

Most people, however, are not aware of this. A poll, conducted to mark theFertility Health summit, found worrying gaps in many 16- to 24-year-olds’ knowledge of fertility and reproductive health. 


The Guardian asked young readers about the subject, and we heard from lots of people who said that they couldn’t even think about starting a family until they had a home and stable income – which tend to come much later for young adults today.
Aimee, 26, from Norwich said that money was a big factor: “We can’t afford to buy a house and don’t want to have a baby in rented accommodation because there’s not enough security. Our landlord could decide to sell at any time.”
But do young people still worry about their fertility? Here they share their stories.

Alex, 34: I wish I’d tried earlier – the ideal age for a man is your mid-20s

Like many men I assumed that there would not be any issue with my fertility. However after two years of trying for a child, me and my partner got IVF. This revealed that I had low sperm motility, the most likely cause of our problems. We have since frozen some embryos so we can hopefully have another child in the future.


The clinic that we used made simple suggestions that improved my sperm motility significantly over a few months. I started drinking a lot more water and taking some vitamin supplements, which increased my sperm count and motility by 400%. By this point we had started the IVF process with success.
The ideal age to start trying is your mid-20s for a man, and early to mid-20s for a woman. However, it also depends on your relationship, emotional and financial stability, which now tend to come about towards the early to mid-30s. Therefore I think the only true answer can be that the ideal age differs for every individual based on these major factors.
Couples are now finding it much more difficult to find stable accommodation and incomes to be able to meet the demands of having a young family. The social welfare system is no longer the “safety net” that it once was, in giving young couples the confidence that there is adequate social housing and benefits available for those struggling to get by. 

Hattie, 29: Constant scaremongering does not help


As I am single at the moment and would like to be with someone for several years before starting said family then it is likely that I won’t be trying until my early to mid-30s. I am hopeful that I will be able to get pregnant when I am ready, but have to face the possibility that my fertility or my partner’s may be an issue, as we will be considered old parents.I am not worried as such, however, as a 29-year-old single female, I have other people telling me that I should “start thinking about having a family” and get on with it.
However, I don’t think constant scaremongering and pressure from the media and society in general helps.

Kylie, 25: My generation is really struggling

I worry about my fertility because I have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and am concerned that I will struggle to conceive. I have a long-term partner and we know we want children, but we are simply not in a financially stable enough position to do so yet. Hopefully we will be within the next few years, but I am worried it will keep being pushed back and we will run into problems.
Ideally I would have children around now as I feel both fit and healthy enough to have the best chance of a healthy pregnancy. I have the energy to run around after young children and I am at the peak of my fertility.
My generation are finding it takes longer to get established in a career, to save enough to buy a home, find a partner and settle down. There is also an attitude that careers need to come first – I particularly notice this among my male colleagues of a similar age, one of whom made a comment that a woman falling pregnant at this stage in her career would “have to get rid of it”.

Nina, 34: I’ve made a lot of lifestyle changes to improve my chances

I have mild PCOS and started trying to get pregnant in January 2015, after being on the pill for 15 years. Nothing happened for six months and I went into a queue for an appointment with an NHS gynaecology consultant. After eight months of tests (blood, ultrasound and radiology), I was given the fertility drug Clomid. My husband was told he needed to change his lifestyle, so gave up smoking and cut back on beer.


Still nothing has happened but I have an increasing feeling of anxiety, pressure and a sense of doom. I’ll be 35 in three months and my husband is 40, which doesn’t help. The NHS does all it can with limited means. Private clinics charge high prices for alternative treatments such as acupuncture. Education is key: reading up on lifestyle changes and alternative medicines helps to keep the anxiety at bay. Feeling impotent and powerless to kickstart the miracle of conception is all-consuming at times.

Aisha, 29: I used to worry about this, but then I learned to relax


I was panicking about being nearly 30 and not in any way ready for a baby (no house, no marriage, no permanent job). I was considering just having a baby right now, even though the timing would be entirely wrong. Now I’m a lot more relaxed. If I have a baby then great, if not then I’ll find other things to do with my life instead.My mother had lots of children, and didn’t have the oldest until she was 30. I work in a scientific field and I used to be worried about fertility but recently was at a conference with lots of other female academics, all of whom were older than me. Both they and the people they work with all started their families at about 40 without a problem. This reassured me massively. Also, I’m not sure I even want children or if I’m feeling the pressure of expectation. If I didn’t or couldn’t have children my partner and I would be pragmatic enough to be OK with that.
I think the best age to have a child is between 32 and 35, depending on the individual. This is old enough to be in a stable career, to have a well-tested and stable relationship and to be in a decent house (owned or rented). You’ll have had plenty of time for travelling, partying and everything else you might feel you’ve missed out on by having kids younger.

Kirsty, 34: Get fertility tests before it’s too late

We have been trying for three years now to have a baby with no success and I have just been diagnosed with premature ovarian decline, meaning I’ve very few eggs left. It’s heartbreaking.


We are both eating healthily and drinking less alcohol. I’ve changed my fitness regime and now have regular acupuncture. Life feels very much on hold at work and socially. I wish I’d frozen my eggs in my 20s.
The right time to have a baby is very individual but men and women should not take fertility for granted. It’s important to be armed with information both in general terms and about your own individual profile. Get tests done before it’s too late. Then you know if you can wait or if you should take some action, such as freezing eggs, if you haven’t met the right person.
Education has prolonged the youth phase of life, and as social security and welfare become reduced and stigmatised people rightly want to be in a decent position to support a family before they have one. The housing situation also changes things – as average age at buying a first home rises, it’s inevitable that having a family is put off too. These aren’t choices so much as the effect of changing social and economic policies.


Neil, 34: My parents didn’t have the luxury of living abroad

One of my brothers cannot have children and I worry that I have the same problem. That said, I am not at the stage where I want to have children, although I realise time is running out. I think that the ideal age to have a child is probably 32, that means you have had time to enjoy your 20s and to mature.
Young people are choosing to have children later because our options are very different. My parents would never have had the luxury of having the choice to live abroad, take time to travel or even study at university. Rural Ireland in my parents’ generation was a different world (and one where contraception was illegal).
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