With talks of a confrontation over Greenland receding, attention turns back to ending the four-year war between Ukraine and Russia The Trump administration has been pushing for a peace settlement, with its envoys shuttling between Kyiv and Moscow in a flurry of negotiations that some worry could force Ukraine into an unfavourable deal. The US president, Donald Trump, said on Wednesday that Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be “stupid” if they failed to come together and get a deal done. Continue reading...

Sales volume rise of 0.4% in December confounds forecasts as new survey shows sharp rebound in consumer confidence Davos: Global economic outlook in focus, as gold approaches $5,000 – live updates UK retail sales were stronger than expected last month, as the nation’s shops received a surprise boost during the crucial Christmas trading period. Sales volumes across Great Britain rose by 0.4% in December, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), with internet sales doing particularly well, especially online jewellers. Continue reading...

⚽ The latest football news heading into the weekend ⚽ Premier League: 10 things to look out for | Mail Niall Aston Villa sealed a top-eight finish in the Europa League after Jadon Sancho’s first goal for the club gave them a 1-0 win over Fenerbahce in Turkey. But the Villa manager, Unai Emery, was involved in a touchline spat with Youri Tielemans after the midfielder was substituted in stoppage time. Emery, who appeared to shove Tielemans as the Belgian left the pitch, appeared to laugh off the incident saying: “He’s my son. He’s my son.” Emery went on to say he was pleased to secure progress to the last 16, and said: “Europa League is important for us and we have got in the top eight. Building the team with some circumstances not helping us but next week we can finish the transfer window and hopefully we can get everything we need to complete the squad for the competitions we have.” No Premier League team has a win streak longer than one game, and a turbulent month shows no sign of settling down. Manchester United are enjoying a rare spell as the form side in their city after a derby demolition – Sunday’s trip to leaders Arsenal, fresh off two goalless draws in a row, feels less daunting than it might for Michael Carrick’s men. Continue reading...

Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winner about the family who live next door to Auschwitz will leave you awestruck, while Jeremy Allen White embodies the Boss. Plus: Marilyn Monroe at her most beautiful Other awards-garlanded films may come and go, but this drama will inspire awestruck discussion for decades to come. Christian Friedel – unrecognisable from his role in The White Lotus – stars as Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant who lived with his wife (Sandra Hüller) and children in an idyllic country home adjoining the notorious concentration camp. For the Höss family, domestic life continues as normal, while the screams of industrial-scale murder are often audible just over the garden wall. Jonathan Glazer’s film is an immersive historical drama, but it also makes chilling comment on our present moment, and humanity’s capacity to carry on as genocide takes place. Saturday 24 January, 9.45pm, Channel 4 Continue reading...

Feigel uses her own experience as a starting point to examine the past, present and future of separation This book about child custody is, unsurprisingly, full of pain. The pain of mothers separated from their children, of children sobbing for their mothers, of adults who have never moved on from the trauma of their youth, and of young people who are forced to live out the conflicts of their elders. Lara Feigel casts her net across history and fiction, reportage and memoir, and while her research is undeniably impressive and her candour moving, at times she struggles to create a narrative that can hold all these tales of anguish together. The book begins with a woman flinging herself fully clothed into a river and then restlessly walking on, swimming again, walking again. This is French novelist George Sand, driven to desperate anxiety as she waits to go into court to fight for the right to custody of her children. But almost immediately the story flicks away to Feigel’s own custody battle, and then back into the early 19th century, with Caroline Norton’s sons being taken away in a carriage in the rain by their father. Continue reading...

(Tiny Tiger) Moving from dream pop to acoustic clarity, the Dutch-British songwriter delivers her most personal record yet where loss is transformed into something quietly powerful The warm sounds of folk guitar provide the roots of Tessa Rose Jackson’s first album under her own name, time-travelling from Bert Jansch to REM to Sharon Van Etten in every strum and squeak. The Dutch-British musician previously recorded as Someone, creating three albums in dream-pop shades, but her fourth – a rawer, richer affair, made alone in rural France – digs into ancestry, mortality and memory. The Lighthouse begins with its title track. Strums of perfect fifths, low moans of woodwind and thundering rumbles of percussion frame a journey towards a beacon at “high tide on a lonesome wind”. The death of one of Jackson’s two mothers when she was a teenager informs her lyrics here and elsewhere: in The Bricks That Make the Building, a sweet, psych-folk jewel which meditates on “the earth that feeds the garden / The breath that helps the child sing” and Gently Now, which begins in soft clouds of birdsong, then tackles how growing older can cosset the process of grief. Her approach to the subject is inquisitive, poetic and refreshing. Continue reading...

Care minister Stephen Kinnock criticises US president over claim Nato troops stayed away from frontline in Afghanistan Good morning. Donald Trump enjoys causing offence but the problem with having a reputation for being outrageous and provocative is that, as people get used to your outrages, you have to go further and further to continue to get a response. We are seeing the outcome of that this morning. In his meandering ramble at Davos (a cavalcade of falsehoods, as explained by CNN here), Trump repeated a criticism of Nato he has made before, saying: “What we have gotten out of NATO is nothing, except to protect Europe from the Soviet Union and now Russia.” This was so wrong that even Nigel Farage felt impelled to speak out and say so. We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan … and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines. Many, many British soldiers and many soldiers from other European Nato allies gave their lives in support of American missions, American-led missions in places like Afghanistan and Iraq … I think anybody who seeks to criticise what they have done and the sacrifices that they make is plainly wrong. I think the reaction to President Trump’s comments are very clear from right across the political spectrum, and I think the British public feels very strongly about the need to defend our armed forces and to support them in the incredibly important work that they do in the dangerous and turbulent world in which we live. Continue reading...

(Interscope) On her third LP, Lennox balances jazz-soaked tradition with flashes of unruly humour and a surefire viral hit Ari Lennox is one of contemporary R&B’s premier sophisticates, preferring a palette of lush jazz, soul and 90s hip-hop over the more genre-fluid sound pushed by contemporaries SZA and Kehlani. But a few songs into her new album, Vacancy, she makes it eminently clear that tradition and wildness can coexist, with fabulously sparky results: on Under the Moon, she describes a lover as “vicious / Like a werewolf / When you’re in it” and proceeds to howl “moooooooooon” as if she is in an old creature feature. Vacancy, Lennox’s third album, is far and away her most fun, and if it isn’t quite as ingratiating as her 2022 Age/Sex/Location, it makes up for it with canny lyrics and an airy, open sound. Cool Down is a reggae/R&B hybrid that practically feels as if it is made of aerogel, and which pairs its summery lightness with witty lyrics telling a guy to chill out. On Mobbin in DC, she pairs lounge-singer coolness with withering come-ons (“You know where I be / This ain’t calculus / No ChatGPT”), while the strutting Horoscope, with its hook of “That boy put the ho’ in ‘horoscope’,” is as surefire a future viral hit as I’ve ever heard. Continue reading...

Rolling coverage of the final day of the World Economic Forum in Davos Davos is now hearing about the geopolitical risks of the year ahead. Jane Harman, chair of the bipartisan US Commission on the National Defense Strategy, warns that America is leaving a “huge vacuum” around the world, which China is moving into. Continue reading...

James Bord’s consortium is the preferred bidder to take over Sheffield Wednesday but his data-led player recruitment record is mixed, especially with United Sheffield Wednesday fans will be delighted to hear that one associate of James Bord describes the preferred bidder for their club as “a mini Tony Bloom”, although the professional poker player’s references from the other side of the Steel City are rather less complimentary. Until it became clear late last year that Bord was planning to buy Wednesday his data company, Short Circuit Science, had a consultancy contract with Sheffield United to assist with their recruitment, which, as their position in the lower reaches of the Championship indicates, has delivered limited success. Continue reading...

Since the end of the second world war, all eyes have been on Russia. Yet Trump’s increasingly erratic, hostile presidency is shattering old assumptions One of the things that the depleted, often denigrated British state is still pretty good at is persuading the public that another country is a threat. As a small, warlike island next to a much larger land mass, Britain has had centuries of practice at cultivating its own sense of foreboding. Arguably, preparing for conflict with some part of the outside world is our natural mindset. Warnings about potential enemy countries are spread by our prime ministers and major political parties, intelligence services and civil servants, serving and retired military officers, defence and foreign affairs thinktanks, and journalists from the right and the left. Sometimes, the process is relatively subtle and covert: reporters or MPs are given off-the-record briefings about our “national security” – a potently imprecise term – facing a new threat. Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world Continue reading...

First round at Wijk aan Zee delayed for over an hour after protesters dump coal at venue and unveil banner reading ‘no chess on a dead planet’ Tata Steel Wijk aan Zee, the “chess Wimbledon”, has been sponsored for all its 88 years by the local steelworks, either in its previous incarnations as Hoogovens and Corus or under its current Indian management. Its relations with the local community have previously been good, but this year protesters targeting Tata Steel drew attention to the company’s heavy use of coal by dumping two tons of coal in front of the entrance, and draping a banner reading “No chess on a dead planet” over the sports hall. Play in the opening round eventually began one and a half hours late. Continue reading...

England wing on handling Test pressure, the ‘awesome’ setup at Pennyhill Park and Northampton’s big ambitions Tommy Freeman is known for being multi-talented, so it is fitting that he arrives brandishing a golf club. Thankfully none of the ensuing questions provoke its use in a non-sporting capacity. The Northampton back’s handicap will have to wait, because after a trip to Sale on Saturday he will dive into England’s Six Nations camp, surfacing in mid-March after the concluding fixture in Paris. Les Bleus are the tournament favourites but if Steve Borthwick’s team stay on an upward curve – they have won 11 straight Tests – there is a decent chance that encounter at Stade de France in seven weeks’ time will decide the title. An expansive Saints side also top the Prem before round 10, and the ever-improving Freeman personifies the prevailing effervescence of club and country. Continue reading...

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Oasis, Macca and Radiohead made Help a smash for War Child in 1995. A new reboot packs comparable star power – and was partially produced from a hospital bed When Kae Tempest was asked to contribute to a new track by Damon Albarn, which would also feature Fontaines DC frontman Grian Chatten, Tempest says he jumped at the chance. It wasn’t just the artists involved, nor the fact that it was for a new compilation benefiting War Child, called Help(2): a sequel to the charity’s hugely successful 1995 compilation Help. After seven solo albums, Tempest had begun thinking about working with others, and so the night before the recording session, he and Chatten repaired to Albarn’s studio and wrote their verses together, “responding to each other”. It seemed to work really well, he says: “A true collaboration.” Nevertheless, he concedes, the actual recording of Flags proved to be quite the baptism of fire. “Johnny Marr was on guitar, Femi [Koleoso] from Ezra Collective was drumming,” he laughs. “Plus, there was a children’s choir.” Continue reading...

The Free Solo star will attempt to climb the 1,667ft skyscraper without ropes in a live Netflix broadcast, drawing awe, ethical concern and global attention Alex Honnold has spent the past three months training for this moment: free soloing – climbing without ropes or a harness – one of Asia’s tallest skyscrapers, Taipei 101. It is an ambition that began more than a decade ago and is now close to being realized. Th climb will be broadcast globally on Skyscraper Live, Netflix’s latest foray into live sports programming. The star of the 2019 Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo insists that climbing Taipei 101 will feel no different from any other of his ascents. Continue reading...

Fulham, Chelsea, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest and Liverpool could be making moves before the window closes By WhoScored Shock: Chelsea have been linked with another young player. This time it is the Rennes centre-back Jérémy Jacquet, who would offer something the team is lacking. Continue reading...

UK MPs and veterans condemn US president’s comments and highlight his avoidance of military service in Vietnam Donald Trump has provoked outrage among British MPs and veterans after claiming Nato troops stayed away from the frontline in Afghanistan. The US president made his comments in an interview with Fox News in which he reiterated his suggestion that Nato would not support America if asked. Continue reading...

Updates from the evening session at Melbourne Park Mboko sets up Sabalenka clash after win | Mail Katy Let’s get straight to the John Cain Arena, because Jovic, having served for the match twice, has been taken to a tie-break by Paolini. The first four points of the breaker go against serve, and there are plenty of oooohs and aaaaaahs as Paolini turns defence into attack in an absorbing point to charge forward to the short ball. Paolini shows superb defence on the next point too, but Jovic is eventually able to pierce it. They change ends at 3-3 … G’day and welcome to our coverage of day six, where the stories so far are aplenty. Both the world No 1s have won: Aryna Sabalenka in two tight, tense, tie-break sets against her friend Anastasia Potapova, while Carlos Alcaraz advanced more comfortably, 6-2, 6-4, 6-1 against the Frenchman Corentin Moutet. Continue reading...

AI evangelist Peter Kyle wants to scale up businesses, attract overseas investors and look out for UK’s poorer regions The UK business secretary, Peter Kyle, has said he is “betting big” and “picking winners” as the government takes direct stakes in growing businesses to boost economic growth. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have been talking up Britain’s prospects, Kyle said ministers were taking an “activist” approach to industrial policy. Continue reading...

Slim frames and tinted lenses are reshaping how men present themselves. Glasses have become the must-have accessory – even if you don’t have a prescription • Don’t get Fashion Statement delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Last spring, Tom Broughton, founder of eyewear brand Cubitts, was asked to comment on a meme that was going viral, that featured a pair of his company’s ‘Plimsoll’ frames. The small, delicate, and slightly round unisex shape had been worn by British actor, Jonathan Bailey, in leaked stills from the 2025 movie, Jurassic World Rebirth – and had been dubbed by the internet as a pair of ‘slutty little glasses’. “It all just blew up,” remembers Broughton, noting how the brand struggled to deal with the sudden demand for what had become the sexiest specs on the market. A subsequent capsule collection, made in partnership with Bailey’s LGBTQ+ charity the Shameless Fund, sold out almost instantly, too. Thousands of pairs were gone in minutes, and after multiple restocks, “we’re maybe down to our last 15 pairs,” adds Broughton. Nearly the entire run was bought by men. Continue reading...

Millions of graduates are trapped by ballooning debts, as their repayments are dwarfed by the interest added Helen Lambert borrowed £57,000 to go to university and began repaying her student loan in 2021 after starting work as an NHS nurse. Since then she has repaid more than £5,000, typically having about £145 a month taken from her pay packet. But everything she hands over is dwarfed by the £400-plus of interest that is added to her debt every month, thanks to rates that have been as high as 8%. Continue reading...

Move over, Wonder Woman! The latest MCU spin-off is an intriguing and surprisingly meta affair. Plus: a brilliant documentary about the boyband – and more regency raunch as Bridgerton returns In terms of audience recognition, Wonder Man is no Wonder Woman. But, as this latest addition to the MCU shows, that can afford a certain freedom. This miniseries is a surprisingly meta affair; a superhero fantasy by way of the kind of behind-the-camera machinations familiar to fans of Seth Rogen’s The Studio. It tells the story of a pair of struggling actors, Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), who are hustling hard to be cast in eccentric European director Von Kovak’s movie Wonder Man. But what seems like a simple Hollywood satire soon develops special powers as Simon finds he shares certain attributes with his fictional persona. Intriguing. Disney+, from Wednesday 28 January Continue reading...

The Andaman Coast has one of the largest concentration of dugong in the world, so why are numbers falling dramatically and what can they tell us about a biodiversity warning cry • Don’t get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Thailand’s Andaman Coast is home to one of the largest dugong populations in the world, with 273 of the plump marine mammals, sometimes called sea cows, estimated to be living there as of 2022. In recent years, though, more and more dead or stranded dugongs have been washing ashore. Now the Andaman Coast population may have fallen by more than half, experts say. In late November, I travelled to Phuket, following in the footsteps of film-makers Mailee Osten-Tan and Nick Axelrod, who have been investigating Thailand’s dugong crisis over the past year for a new Guardian documentary. The fate of the planet’s coastlines depends on how fast Antarctica’s ice sheets melt. We don’t know what’s coming ‘Every time I look at one, I smile!’: how axolotls took over the world Labour’s warm homes plan is all carrot and no stick for UK households Continue reading...