A call to Liverpool supporters: share your thoughts on the title win over here.
Joel writes in: “This win means so much to Liverpool fans – mostly for being able to celebrate with each other. I grew up with my uncle Nick telling me tales of the glory years, yearning for them again. He’s sadly no longer with us, but to finally see the scenes he spoke of has warmed my heart – this one really does mean more.”
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© Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA
© Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA
There’s a crude fascination in seeing the contents of a literary celebrity’s therapy sessions, but we’re surely invading her privacy
Motherhood is a state of continuous loss that is meant to culminate when the dependent baby becomes an independent adult. Joan Didion survived this, as many mothers have, by keeping constant watch over her adopted daughter Quintana, fearing “swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet”. She also survived it, as fewer mothers have, by writing obsessively about the loss she feared. In her arid, fevered masterpiece Play It As It Lays, published when Quintana was four, the narrator’s breakdown is precipitated by her daughter’s long-term hospitalisation with an unnamed mental disorder. A Book of Common Prayer is about the disappearance of the protagonist’s criminal revolutionary daughter. “Marin was loose in the world and could leave it at any time and Charlotte would have no way of knowing” – a description that could be applied to motherhood in general.
The coddling failed. Quintana drank to self-medicate for anxiety and by 33 she was an alcoholic whose therapist wanted her mother to participate in the treatment. And so in 1999 Didion, who had hitherto protected her inner life with her trademark dark glasses and stylish sentences with their wilfully “impenetrable polish”, found herself seeing Freudian analyst and psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon. Now her notes on their sessions have been, in my view misguidedly, gathered from her archive and packaged as a book.
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© Photograph: Dorothy Hong/Dorothy Hong (commissioned)
© Photograph: Dorothy Hong/Dorothy Hong (commissioned)
Captivating film based on a true story follows an older man, and the man caught burgling his home, on a poignant journey to lay his wife to rest
Love is a many-splendored thing in this idiosyncratic, highly stylised debut from Vietnamese film-maker Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc. Blurring the lines between genres and styles, the first half of the film unfurls through a technique commonly seen in silent cinema: the iris shot. Within a circular frame we see a burglary gone wrong, a puzzling plaster cast in the shape of a woman and the burgeoning of a strange friendship, all set within an ordinary flat.
Inspired by a news story, the central premise is at once macabre and moving. Inside the plaster cast is the body of the owner’s wife, who died 10 years ago. Having caught a young burglar (Psycho Neo) red handed, the older man (Lưu Đức Cường) asks for his help on an unusual quest: transporting the body to the couple’s chosen resting place in a faraway desert. Though powered by love, it’s also a journey towards death.
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© Photograph: Courtesy IFFR
© Photograph: Courtesy IFFR
We would like to hear Liverpool fans’ highlights of the season after the team’s Premier League victory
It’s been a formidable season for Liverpool, who were crowned Premier League champions after beating Tottenham 5-1 at Anfield. They have won a record-equalling 20th league title bring them level with Manchester United.
It’s the club’s second title in 35 years, although they had chances to potentially win three trophies. Still, manager Arne Slot couldn’t have asked for a much better first season after taking over from the legendary Jürgen Klopp.
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© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Marks & Spencer are leading the FTSE 100 fallers this morning, as it reels from the damage caused by a cyber attack.
Shares in M&S are down 2.3% this morning at 376p, as traders digest the ongoing disruption at the company.
Marks and Spencer’s recent run of success has been partly down to how it been so efficient at managing its multi-channel operations with click and collect services particularly popular.
It’s been reducing its store footprint focusing on smaller food stores where customers can swing buy and pick up products bought online. This ease of shopping and delivery has been upended. Even though stores are open, many simply don’t stock the popular ranges from online.
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© Photograph: Alex Plavevski/EPA
© Photograph: Alex Plavevski/EPA
Alleged attack on facility holding African detainees raises fresh questions over US military operations in region
Yemen’s Houthi rebels say a US airstrike has killed 68 people in a prison holding African detainees. The US military had no immediate comment.
The alleged strike in Yemen’s Saada governorate, a stronghold for the Houthis, is the latest incident in the country’s decade-long war in which people from Ethiopia and other countries who have risked crossing Yemen for a chance to work in neighbouring Saudi Arabia have died.
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© Photograph: Houthis Al-Masirsah Tv/HANDOUT HANDOUT/EPA
© Photograph: Houthis Al-Masirsah Tv/HANDOUT HANDOUT/EPA
Threat from jihadists had widely been perceived to be extinguished, but recent clashes suggest otherwise
On the road running from Maiduguri’s airport to the city, the freshly repainted walls of a girls’ college stood in defiant opposition to a years-long campaign by the jihadists of Boko Haram to make good on their name, which translates as “western education is forbidden”.
At a nearby roundabout on the outskirts of the capital of Nigeria’s north-eastern Borno state, three uniformed men sprinted after a cement truck, hoping to collect a road levy. As the driver sped away, they slowed down in the 42C heat, smiled regretfully, and waited for the next heavy duty vehicle to pass.
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© Photograph: Eromo Egbejule/The Guardian
© Photograph: Eromo Egbejule/The Guardian
Ten men nicknamed ‘grandpa robbers’ accused of stealing jewellery worth millions from American TV star in 2016
Ten people nicknamed the “grandpa robbers” by French media are to go on trial charged with stealing jewellery worth millions of euros from the American reality TV star Kim Kardashian when she attended Paris fashion week in 2016.
The suspects, whose ages range from 35 to 78, will appear in a court in the French capital on Monday afternoon at the start of a month-long trial in which Kardashian, 44, will testify in May.
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© Photograph: Lionel Cironneau/AP
© Photograph: Lionel Cironneau/AP
Turki al-Sheikh had booked a second date before Saturday’s dramatic slugfest although loser’s promoter fears for fighter
“I want my revenge, man,” Conor Benn said quietly in the early hours of Sunday morning as his bruised face reflected his emotional pain after he lost against Chris Eubank Jr in a wild brawl at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. “I want my revenge.”
Those typical boxing words echoed the misguided clamour for a rematch with Eubank Jr. Eddie Hearn admitted that he would prefer Benn to move back down two divisions to welterweight but the promoter grinned helplessly: “The public, His Excellency, everybody’s going to want the rematch.”
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© Photograph: Mark Thomas/Tottenham Hotspur FC/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Mark Thomas/Tottenham Hotspur FC/REX/Shutterstock
Booker-nominated writer Deborah Levy is thrilling audiences with her play about a psychoanalyst dealing with a very unusual patient, seized with anxiety about modern life. She explains how it came about
Two years ago, Deborah Levy came across a cartoon that sparked her imagination. It featured a Freud-like figure sitting opposite a rabbit on an analyst’s couch. Levy, a three-times Booker nominated novelist and award-winning author of nonfiction, had began her career as a playwright but had not written a script for 25 years until she came across the image. “As soon as I saw it,” she says, “I heard dialogue in my mind: a conversation, a serious, difficult conversation between a professor and a rabbit, about contemporary anxiety. I knew it was a play,” says Levy.
The premise may seem absurd but that is precisely the point – absurdism is a way of dealing with themes that have proved, in the wider world, divisive and even explosive to debate. Because the two-hander includes a rabbit, it makes space for humour, for misunderstandings.
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© Photograph: William Waterworth
© Photograph: William Waterworth
From the Canadian elections to universities and civil society, the campaign to turn the tide against anti-liberal nationalists is at last underway
Liberals of all countries, unite! Just as anti-liberal powers outside the west are becoming stronger than ever, the assault on everything we stand for has been joined by the United States. Against this massed onslaught of anti-liberal nationalists we need a determined fightback of liberal internationalists. Canada’s election this week can contribute a strong mounted brigade.
A core insight of liberalism is that, if people are to live together well in conditions of freedom, power always needs to be dispersed, cross-examined and controlled. Faced with the raw, bullying assertion of might, whether from Washington, Moscow or Beijing, we now have to create countervailing concentrations of power. In the long history of liberalism, a free press, the law, labour unions, a business community kept separate from political power, NGOs, truth-seeking institutions such as universities, civil resistance, multilateral organisations and international alliances have all served – alongside multiparty politics and regular free and fair elections – to constrain the men who would be kings.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
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© Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian
© Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian
Palace’s best-paid player shows his class, Ipswich meet their fate and Mateo Kovacic sounds a warning
In April 1964 a side from north London came to Anfield with Liverpool one good result from winning the league, and conceded five. “Arsenal did little to allay the general suspicion that they were there just to be sacrificed,” Eric Todd wrote in his report for the Guardian. This time it was Tottenham but otherwise, for anyone whose memory stretches back 61 years it was a familiar story. Time and again Spurs meekly surrendered possession in dangerous areas, and while they defended in numbers – which suggests willing – they did so with terrifying inefficiency, which suggests poor organisation. Their focus is now fully on the Europa League, but if Liverpool had been a little more ruthless this would have been truly another real embarrassment in a season full of them. In April 1988 it was Spurs themselves who came to Anfield with Liverpool needing one point to guarantee the title. It had been a terrible season for Tottenham, and they were only just outside the bottom three. They lost 1-0. “Tottenham remain in the relegation penumbra,” wrote Stephen Bierley in his Guardian report. “Strange it seems that nobody much under the age of 30 will remember them being champions. Who would have thought it?” Simon Burnton
Match report: Liverpool 5-1 Tottenham
FA Cup report: Nottm Forest 0-2 Man City
Match report: Bournemouth 1-1 Man Utd
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© Composite: Guardian Picture Desk
© Composite: Guardian Picture Desk
Caffeine can increase fat oxidation, but there are more effective ways to change your body composition
‘When you talk about ‘burning fat’, you’re talking about the oxidation of body fat; the breakdown of lipids into fatty acids to use them as fuel,” says Bethan Crouse, a performance nutritionist from Loughborough University. It’s the process that needs to occur for someone to lose weight or go through “body recomposition”; losing fat and gaining muscle.
Regular exercise can increase rates of fat oxidation, Crouse says. (When we work out at low-moderate intensity, fat provides the majority of the fuel for working muscles. As intensity increases, this will shift more towards carbohydrates.) However, she says, “There’s not necessarily a food that burns fat.” For a food to oxidise fat, consuming it would have to “replicate the effects of exercise”.
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© Illustration: Edith Pritchett/The Guardian
© Illustration: Edith Pritchett/The Guardian
An impassioned plea to save our rivers combines poetry and adventure
Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a “dying” river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: “Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants – well, where would you even start?”
He’s in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, “this small country with a vast moral imagination”, became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, “since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for existence of all living beings”. This enshrinement of the Rights of Nature set off similar developments in other countries. In 2017, a law was passed in New Zealand that afforded the Whanganui River protection as a “spiritual and physical entity”. In India, five days later, judges ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna should be recognised as “living entities”. And in 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu (AKA Magpie River) became the first river in Canada to be declared a “legal person [and] living entity”. The Rights of Nature movement has now reached the UK, with Lewes council in East Sussex recognising the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse.
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© Photograph: sasaperic/Getty Images/iStockphoto
© Photograph: sasaperic/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Riddles with long paper cylinders
The most heated puzzle about the drinking straw is “does it have one hole or two?” (This debate periodically goes viral and for those who want to suck up its delicious complexities I recommend this chat with mathematician Jordan Ellenberg.)
Today’s puzzles are also about straws, but are much less controversial.
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© Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
© Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
The ursine protagonists are largely relegated to fart-gag sidekicks in this phoned-in attempt at a dystopian sci-fi
When George Michael recorded Careless Whisper, there can be no doubt his ultimate ambition for it would have been to soundtrack a garish animated sequence in which two anthropomorphic bears gambol through a prairie of giant fungus experiencing ecstatic visions as hallucinogenic spores rain down on them. Such is the frantic way of this Chinese cartoon franchise, as relentless and exhausting as ever in its 11th feature-film instalment. Five minutes in, before the credits, it has crammed in a post-apocalyptic prologue, oodles of eco-babble, a time-travelling tyke and an avalanche.
This latest one jumps on the fungal-panic bandwagon: Saylor (voiced by Nicola Vincent in the English-language version) has nipped back 100 years to locate the original spores at the root of a pestilence that has eradicated most of life on Earth. It turns out that hapless nature guide Vick (Chris Boike), seen polluting the forest with his tourists, was responsible for spreading them After Saylor fails to kill the mushroom in the cradle, the pair – along with Vick’s forest buddies, the bears Bramble (Joseph S Lambert) and Briar (Patrick Freeman) – are whisked back to the future. They discover a fungus-carpeted nightmare of a planet, overshadowed by a giant skyscraping toadstool.
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© Photograph: Publicity image
© Photograph: Publicity image
Dashing through labyrinthine courses of tunnels, jumps and seesaws at breakneck speed, agility shows prioritise skill over pedigree. But can Tim Dowling last the course?
Before every dog agility event, the human handlers walk the course as a group – without the dogs – wandering slowly round the ring with one hand or the other outstretched. It’s an eerie thing to watch, like a crowd of bleary eyed tourists wearily progressing through an airport.
But it’s important: the dogs don’t get to try the course beforehand, so their handlers have to formulate a strategy to guide their pets from jump to tunnel to seesaw in the correct order.
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© Photograph: Joshua Bright/The Guardian
© Photograph: Joshua Bright/The Guardian
We want to hear from people about their tipping habits
People in the US are tipping less than they have in years, with gratuities falling from a Covid pandemic peak.
Average full-service restaurant tips in the fourth quarter of 2024 fell to 19.3%, a six-year low and down from a high of 19.9% in the first quarter of 2021, according to data from Toast.
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© Photograph: Mariusz Szczawinski/Alamy
© Photograph: Mariusz Szczawinski/Alamy
Arne Slot led the team to the top-flight title in his first year at Anfield as Liverpool won the Premier League for a second time in five years
© EPA
Kyiv has rejected Moscow's formal authority over Crimea
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New details about Oscar-winner’s medical history have come to light in final report
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Donald Trump has claimed that Volodymyr Zelensky is ready to give up Crimea to Vladimir Putin after the pair met on the sidelines of Pope Francis's funeral over the weekend.
© AFP via Getty Images
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Yunice Abbas is among suspects going on trial in Paris
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