The human impulse to steal has been accelerated by AI, inequality and our political leaders – with profound consequences Continue reading...

On a soaked Brixton pitch, the club launch their latest programme as part of a widening mission that now stretches from Glasgow’s soup kitchens to Gaza relief You would not expect to find coaches from the Celtic FC Foundation in Brixton. But even the torrential rain in south London has not stopped them and four local teams from turning out to help launch a programme that will provide girls and young women from underprivileged backgrounds in the local area with a chance to play football. It is one of several initiatives established since the foundation began working in London to mark Celtic’s 125th anniversary in 2013. Another, based in Hackney, called Breaking Barriers helps integrate refugee and asylum-seeking communities through the sport. Continue reading...

Dollar drops against basket of currencies after Donald Trump brushed off concerns over slide Business live – latest updates The US dollar has fallen to its lowest level in four years after Donald Trump brushed off concerns over the currency’s fall, sending investors fleeing to traditional havens including gold and the Swiss franc. The dollar dropped by 1.3% against a basket of currencies after the president’s comments on Tuesday, marking its fourth day of declines, then slipped by a further 0.2% on Wednesday morning. Continue reading...

World’s richest person targeting symbolic date in June for flotation of rocket company Elon Musk’s SpaceX is considering a flotation valuing the rocket company at $1.5tn (£1.1tn) that will reportedly be timed for early summer to coincide with a planetary alignment and the multibillionaire’s birthday. The world’s richest person is targeting a symbolic date of mid-June for the initial public offering, according to the Financial Times. This would be around the same time as Jupiter and Venus appear in close proximity to each other and shortly before Musk turns 55 on 28 June. Continue reading...

When it comes to origin stories, comedians have some of the strangest – from performing for a £5 bet to getting back at their boss to making an unlikely pact with a friend Not all standup comedians wake up one day and decide to be funny for a living. That wasn’t the case for John Bishop, anyway. He took up comedy to avoid paying a bar’s cover charge and to escape his failing marriage – a story that inspired Bradley Cooper’s new film, Is This Thing On? And Bishop is not the only comic with an unusual origin story. From impressing girlfriends to losing their voices, brain tumours to bad bosses – or not wanting to lose a £5 bet – British comics told us the reasons they became standup comedians and the lengths to which they went to get on stage for the first time. Continue reading...

Video shows the Hudson frozen partially frozen near the George Washington Bridge in New York City after a heavy winter snowstorm. Eight people were found dead outside over the frigid weekend in the city, according to officials, as New York experienced its snowiest day in years, with neighbourhoods recording 20-38cm (8-15in) of snow. Over the weekend at least 30 deaths were linked to a winter storm that hit North America's north-east. Some regions may not see temperatures rise above freezing until early February. The Midwest, in particular, is forecast to be hit with exceptionally frosty temperatures Continue reading...

Newton Aycliffe was meant to be a model town for a fairer postwar Britain. But unaffordable rents on a high street amounting to 0.12% of its property tycoon owner’s holdings have made it a symbol of decline – and a warning for Labour How has your local high street changed since 2019? Check your postcode Labour risks election wipeout unless it improves Britain’s high streets Under blue skies and bunting, the whole of County Durham seemed to turn out for the young Queen Elizabeth II. They lined the streets in their thousands, waving flags and marvelling at the grand royal procession weaving past their newly built homes. It was 27 May 1960 and the recently crowned queen was officially opening the town of Newton Aycliffe on her first provincial tour after the birth of her third child, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, three months earlier. A 16-page commemorative pamphlet, priced at two shillings and sixpence, records the local Light Infantry buglers playing to the giddy crowd. Continue reading...

Decay of town centres a top issue among voters especially Reform UK supporters and is fuelling resentment against Westminster How has your local high street changed since 2019? Check your postcode The struggling billionaire-owned high street that shows Reform’s road to No 10 Labour will be “washed away in a tide of discontent” at the next general election unless it tackles the decline of Britain’s high streets, a study has warned, as Guardian analysis lays bare the changing face of town centres. Research by the University of Southampton found people feel high streets have declined more than any other part of their local area over the past decade, as household brands collapsed and shoplifting rose. Continue reading...

Each year, about 80 British people are victims of a homicide overseas, and grieving loved ones have to navigate the aftermath. Eve Henderson describes losing her husband, and her fight to help others On a Sunday in October 1997, Eve Henderson looked down at her husband, Roderick, as he lay in a hospital bed, unable to make sense of what she saw. She was, she says, “a block of stone”. They were in the neurological ward of a huge hospital on the outskirts of Paris. Travelling on the Métro, the hospital name scribbled on a scrap of paper, it had taken Henderson an hour to find. Roderick looked comfortable when she arrived; he was a good colour, but there was a round red mark in the centre of his forehead and a small tube inside his mouth, attached to something she later learned was breathing for him. “He looked fairly alive,” says Henderson, “and I just stood there. A doctor came in. She was in tears and I thought: ‘Bloody hell, am I meant to be crying?’ You’ve got no emotion, you’ve got nothing. You don’t know what to say or where you are. That’s what shock does to you.” Continue reading...

Makeup textures embrace the flash and clash of formulas that you can ‘smoosh on carelessly’ I’ve always judged the Pantone colour of the year to be way less interesting to readers than to journalists. But the 2026 winner (an unremarkable off-white called Cloud Dancer) struck me as even less relevant when trends are finally looking interesting again. Around the time of that news, Mac named glam pop queen Chappell Roan as its new global ambassador. The appointment of Roan – all grunge glitters, colourful face jewels and clumpy mascara – celebrates the experimental, edgy and playful Mac aesthetic, and signals what may be the end of what industry figures often describe as the “beige buffet” of post-Covid fashion and beauty. Continue reading...

The top categories are stacked with quality, from Bad Bunny to Kendrick Lamar, Chappell Roan and K-pop hits – but here are the artists who most deserve to triumph Bad Bunny – DTMF Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild Doechii – Anxiety Billie Eilish – Wildflower Kendrick Lamar & SZA – Luther Lady Gaga – Abracadabra Chappell Roan – The Subway Rosé & Bruno Mars – APT. Continue reading...

The prime minister has said he will ‘raise the issues that need to be raised’ on human rights in talks with Xi Jinping tomorrow Keir Starmer has arrived in China on the first visit by a British Prime Minister in eight years, PA Media reports. PA says: A delegation of almost 60 representatives of British businesses and cultural institutions is accompanying the prime minister as he continues his efforts to build bridges with Beijing. But concerns over the risk China poses to national security and Xi Jinping’s record on human rights mean Starmer’s visit is politically sensitive. Labour believe the answer is more state control. Reform believe the same thing, they just want their hands on the levers instead. Continue reading...

Today’s fluff is matching its ambitions Only five days remain of what has felt like a mercifully underheated winter window, but Manchester United could be about to fire it up a bit with an audacious bid for Cole Palmer. Teamtalk claims that a move for the Chelsea and England star is “building up a serious head of steam”. The departure from Stamford Bridge of Enzo Maresca, with whom Palmer was close, has apparently made Palmer susceptible to the idea of returning to his home city. He’s under contract until 2033 though, such is the Chelsea way, and would cost a British record £150m. Meanwhile, the interim United manager, Michael Carrick, could face an internal battle with club bosses over Harry Maguire, whom Carrick wants to keep despite the desire of others in the Old Trafford hierarchy to give younger players such as Leny Yoro and Ayden Heaven more of a chance. Continue reading...

Message erroneously said affected employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed Business live – latest updates Amazon has told workers of a fresh round of global job cuts in an email that appears to have been sent in error. Workers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) received a meeting invitation from a top executive on Tuesday for the following day – subsequently cancelled – that also contained a draft email. Continue reading...

A father and son move to the Patagonian woods – but intensity wanes when a search for home becomes an obsessive quest for revenge When the protagonist of Daniel Wiles’s debut novel Mercia’s Take, set in a mining community during the industrial revolution, left a bag of gold downstairs unprotected and then went to bed, I actually closed the book, in an attempt to stop the unfolding disaster. After finding this seam of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son will be able to go to school, rather than join the other children who work in the mine, like “blind, bald rodents unearthing themselves in search of scraps of candlelight”. In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask prize, everything closes in on Michael: lungs clog, tunnels collapse, horse-drawn narrowboats are attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It’s a vivid reminder of the cost, in bodily suffering, of resource extraction. The Puma, Wiles’s second novel, is also a serious and intense historical novel about a father with limited resources who attempts to break a cycle of violence. In the early 1950s Bernardo, a more morally ambiguous figure than Michael, has brought his young son James across the Atlantic from England to the house in the Patagonian woods where he himself grew up. James chatters blithely about becoming a footballer, but Bernardo is distracted. He thinks he sees “shadows of his family walking in and out”, reminding him of a childhood in which “his eyes were wide and hurt by the twilight and he was barefooted and emptyhearted”. Continue reading...

The 70s musicians who choose to lay down some tracks in remote Welsh countryside may not really surprise, but one young local is startlingly memorable There’s an oscillation of weirdness in this feature debut from Bryn Chainey, who takes us deep into the traditional folk-horror thicket with a fervently atmospheric and intriguingly acted, if finally directionless drama set in 1970s Wales. Like Daniel Kokotajlo’s recent Starve Acre or Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, Rabbit Trap swathes you in ambient sound design and insists on a kind of atavistic authenticity in the 70s stylings themselves: the woollens, the gloom and the analogue recording equipment. Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen play Darcy and Daphne, an English couple involved in the music scene; she is a folk singer whose last LP was called Mono Moon. They have come to the remote Welsh countryside to work on her new album, a bit like Led Zeppelin, whose experience recording in primitive Welsh cottages in the early 70s deserves a folk-horror treatment of its own. They rent a cottage featuring the kind of windows at which, in Withnail’s immortal words, faces look in at. Darcy is Daphne’s producer and sound engineer and tapes interesting sounds thereabouts for use on the record – birdsong, rainwater dripping into a barrel – but is also picking up a strange thrumming from the shroomy netherworld. Soon this English couple find themselves befriended and yet menaced by a smudgy-faced, jumper-wearing feral Welsh child (rather brilliantly played by Jade Croot) who could be any age from nine to 54, telling uneasy Darcy about the Tylwyth Teg fairy folk and showing him a rabbit trap in which the captured bunnies are transformed into fetish sacrifices. Continue reading...

Kaja Kallas warns that shift in transatlantic system is ‘structural, not temporary’ and bloc must respond by raising defence spending We are also getting first lines from a public event with Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenlandic’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen at Sciences Po university in Paris. Picking up the theme of the morning so far, Frederiksen has warned that “the world order as we know it is over and I don’t think it will return.” Continue reading...

Treatment needed for ‘non-life-threatening injuries’ Chelsea fans report having knives pulled on them Chelsea have told fans to take “extreme caution” in Naples after two supporters were treated in hospital there before their Champions League tie in the Italian city. Napoli and Chelsea meet at the Diego Armando Maradona Stadium on Wednesday night in the competition’s final round of group games. Continue reading...

A silent-era classic has been reframed for the vertical scroll of phone screens. Is this innovation, sacrilege, or just another way to repackage cinema history? ‘Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake,” said Alfred Hitchcock. Who knew that anyone would take the knife to one of his most beloved silent films, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), and turn it into a vertical microdrama? The Tattle TV app has announced that it will be streaming serial killer drama The Lodger on its phone-friendly vertical platform, telling Deadline that it is “one of the first known instances of a classic feature film being fully reframed for vertical, mobile-first consumption”. So will it set a trend? And if so, how can we stop it? I’m only joking, of course. There will always be those who see archive cinema as just so much more content to be re-appropriated in new formats. And there will always be old-guard purists – who, me? – who wince at the thought. Still, Tattle TV, you have my attention, so let’s talk about it. We won’t be getting this mini-Hitch in the UK, or the EU for that matter, due to rights, but lucky US viewers will be able to watch the film that Hitchcock considered “the first time I exercised my style” in a format that largely disregards that style. The Lodger will be presented with its squarish 4:3 image either extended or cut down to fill a vertical phone screen. So there will often be parts of the image missing, which is a problem. The opening shot of The Lodger is a chilling closeup of a woman screaming, her head tilted so that her entire face fills the frame, lit from behind to emphasise her blond hair. Hitchcock told Truffaut that in The Lodger, he presented “ideas in purely visual terms”. This closeup represents the terror spreading across London as a ripper targets young, golden-haired women. Is the idea intact, even if the image isn’t? Hitchcock, a well-known stickler for carefully composed frames, may well disagree. I would. Continue reading...

Quarter-finals updates from day 11 at Melbourne Park Djokovic through to semi-finals | Email Daniel here Earlier today: Regular readers will know we called this one. Rybakina might just have hit a new level the last few months – I can’t wait to see her against Pegula in tomorrow’s semi. Continue reading...

Former Wasps forward Kearnan Myall is now performance director of GB Snowsport and using F1 tech and brain science to prepare for Milano Cortina 2026 It is not every day that a former rugby player is pivotal to Great Britain’s Winter Olympic prospects. Until recently Kearnan Myall, who spent 15 seasons playing professionally for Leeds, Sale and Wasps, had never skied so it has been a steep learning curve. “The most humbling thing is being at the top of the run with the Paralympic team, who are mostly visually impaired, and they just disappear into the distance while I’m still putting my boots on.” As performance director of GB Snowsport, nevertheless, Myall’s job is to give the nation’s talented crop of snowboarders, freestyle, alpine and mogul skiers a decisive edge when the Games commence in Milan next week. And if Zoe Atkin, Kirsty Muir, Mia Brookes, Charlotte Bankes and others secure medals, helped by Formula One technology – liaising with McLaren to find a new type of material for ski bindings, brain science, cutting-edge coaching and the creative example of Mercury Prize-winning musicians, it will further establish the 39-year-old Myall as one of sport’s smartest thinkers. Continue reading...

Dana White has promised boxers a new deal. But the deal he’s offering looks worse than the old one. Will Congress give Zuffa the power to dominate boxing? Even Turki al-Sheikh’s most severe critics acknowledge that, under his guidance, the Saudi interests that have dominated professional boxing in recent years have paid generous purses to fighters. Now the Saudis have turned to TKO Group Holdings and Dana White to oversee Zuffa Boxing – a newly created vehicle designed to expand the footprint of its equity partners in the United States. Zuffa Boxing is taking a far less generous approach toward fighters than Sheikh did. That’s evidenced by the contract that many of the fighters being recruited by Zuffa are being asked to sign. Continue reading...

Plus: two sets of fathers and sons involved in one match, more record wins and losses and ‘sixes and sevens’ Mail us with your questions and answers “Twelve of the 18 Bundesliga teams have a negative goal difference,” notes Damian Cerase. “I suppose this is down to Bayern handing out weekly drubbings, given that their GD is +57 after only 18 games. What’s the greatest disparity in a full season between the number of teams registering positive or negative GDs?” “At the time of writing in the Bundesliga, all teams haven’t quite played the same number of games but nevertheless 66.6% of the teams have a negative goal difference,” begins Chris Roe. “For a complete season, the highest percentage in the English league system is from tier two in 2005-06 when 17 of the 24 teams (70.83%) had a negative goal difference; no doubt this was in part due to champions Reading, who had a +67 goal difference for the season. This example is narrowly ahead of two Premier League seasons (1998-99 and 2017-18) when six of the 14 (or 70%) had negative GD at the end of the season. Continue reading...

Gurban Gurbanov has been in charge of Qarabag since 2008 and continues to prioritise a squad mentality ahead of star signings Remember the summer of 2008? That was when Pep Guardiola was appointed as first-team coach at Barcelona, Jürgen Klopp arrived at Borussia Dortmund and Chelsea gambled on a certain Luiz Felipe Scolari. Since then the west London club have had 12 different permanent managers. Qarabag, who Liverpool play in the Champions League on Wednesday, have had one: Gurban Gurbanov, also known as the Azeri Sir Alex Ferguson. Gurbanov has become one of the longest serving elite coaches in the world and he has built a remarkable empire, turning the club into a force to be reckoned with in European competitions. Continue reading...

We need an honest reckoning with other factors that threaten young people’s wellbeing, from poverty to academic stress Our children’s feelings are not for sale, and nor are they to be manipulated. So said Emmanuel Macron this week, after French lawmakers voted to ban under-15s from social media. Admittedly, he then repeated these sentiments in a post on X, in the time-honoured manner of parents solemnly lecturing children to do as we say, not as we do. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org Continue reading...