Djibril Cissé, Lord of Frodsham and a former player of both these sides, is also at the Vélodrome. The Frenchman, now 44, is looking sharp.
Another huge talent that Marseille will add to their squad in the coming days is Arsenal’s Ethan Nwaneri, who has struggled for minutes this season. The wonderkid will join the French side on loan until the end of the season.
Thomas Frank was backed into a corner on every level, including team selection. The Tottenham manager had next-to-no options, only 11 established outfield players for the Champions League home game against Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday night.
The expectation was for an either/or choice between Djed Spence and Destiny Udogie at left-back. But when the teamsheets dropped, it turned out Frank had picked them both and left Randal Kolo Muani on the bench. It was the latest low point for Kolo Muani, who has to be regretting his decision to join on a season-long loan from Paris Saint-Germain.
The prime minister has a duty to be candid with the British public about the scale of the global realignment caused by a volatile US president
One foreign policy achievement that Donald Trump prefers not to boast about is his role in helping Mark Carney win last year’s Canadian general election. The incumbent Liberal party faced crushing defeat before Mr Trump threatened to annex Canada. Mr Carney’s candidacy was buoyed up by a patriotic rally against US bullying.
Perhaps because his country has also been coveted by Mr Trump, Mr Carney has given one of the most clear-sighted responses of any democratic leader to the US president’s designs on Greenland. Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, the Canadian prime minister set out the challenge for countries whose security and prosperity have depended on a global system underwritten by the US.
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Jamie Dimon warns of civil unrest but Nvidia’s Jensen Huang argues tech will create rather than destroy jobs
Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, has said artificial intelligence “may go too fast for society” and cause “civil unrest” unless governments and business support displaced workers.
While advances in AI will have huge benefits, from increasing productivity to curing diseases, the technology may need to be phased in to “save society”, he said.
Reporters had been in car on way to new camp, says media group, as two 13-year-old boys killed in separate incidents
Hospitals in Gaza say Israeli forces killed at least 11 Palestinians on Wednesday, including two 13-year-old boys and three journalists, in the latest violence to undermine a three-month-old ceasefire.
Palestinian health officials said the Israeli airstrike killed three Palestinian journalists who were travelling in a car to film a newly established displacement camp in the Netzarim area of central Gaza.
Musée Rodin was the venue for the designer’s second men’s show for the house, and he sought to shun normality
He is one of fashion’s greatest ruminators so where better than the Musée Rodin in Paris to stage Jonathan Anderson’s second menswear show for Dior. Guests including the actors Robert Pattinson and Mia Goth, and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton wandered past Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker as they made their way to their seats on Wednesday afternoon.
Speaking backstage before the show, Anderson, dressed in his signature faded Levi’s jeans and a navy cashmere sweater, described the collection as “another character study”, explaining that this time he set out to explore “the idea of a new aristocracy”, questioning “what it means today” and “what can it be?” The-41-year old designer said when it came to the social hierarchy he wanted to “ignore the aspect of money” and instead home in on “their eccentricity”.
Keir Starmer has noticeably hardened his rhetoric towards Donald Trump, telling the Commons that the US president’s condemnation of the Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius was intended to weaken the UK’s resolve over Greenland.
In a sometimes angry exchange with Kemi Badenoch at prime minister’s questions, Starmer denounced the Conservative leader’s use of Trump’s words to push back against the Chagos deal, saying the president had not been sincere in his objections.
Club also in market for striker, with Mateta among targets
Aston Villa are exploring a move for Milan’s Ruben Loftus-Cheek, as they seek to absorb the absence of Boubacar Kamara amid fears he will miss the rest of the season with a knee injury.
Villa are poised to step up interest in the former Chelsea midfielder, who in September was recalled to the England squad after a six-year absence but was omitted from Thomas Tuchel’s most recent camp in November.
The opportunity for this tournament’s legacy is in the fan fests, camps and tune-ups accessible to more than the lucky few
In Germany, fans watched the games on screens in crowded town squares, their roars careening off ancient buildings, or from the banks of rivers, peering at floating, double-sided big screens on barges. At the next World Cup, in South Africa in 2010, people gathered in parks and open-air markets and hotel lobbies and unlicensed, makeshift bars in people’s garages. In Brazil, four years later, fans spilled from the bars on the Copacabana or watched in restaurants or in streets closed for the occasion – not as if anybody was driving during the Seleção’sgames anyway.
During the 2018 World Cup, Russia surprised visitors – and its own citizens – with its friendliness as spontaneous parties broke out all over the country. The reason the 2022 World Cup in Qatar didn’t entirely feel like a real World Cup is that those sorts of spontaneous soccer gatherings just didn’t seem to be happening, or not at the same scale, at any rate. The absence of hordes of supporters just milling about everywhere contributed to the feeling of being at a Potemkin World Cup.
Reform leader says he agrees ‘strategically’ with Trump but adds that views of Greenlanders must be respected
The world would be a “better, more secure place” if America took over Greenland, Nigel Farage said at Davos, while insisting that he still believed in the sovereignty of nation states.
During a panel at the World Economic Forum’s “America House” in the Swiss ski resort on Wednesday, the Reform UK leader said he had “no doubt” that the world would be safer if a “strong America” was in Greenland “because of the geopolitics of the high north, because of the retreating ice caps and because of the continued expansionism of Russian icebreakers, of Chinese investment”.
Several justices question Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve governor including Kavanaugh, who says firing Cook could ‘shatter’ Fed’s independence
House Republicans are starting a push on Wednesday to hold former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, opening the prospect of the House using one of its most powerful punishments against a former president for the first time.
The contempt proceedings are an initial step toward a criminal prosecution by the Department of Justice that, if successful, could send the Clintons to prison.
They’re not above the law. We’ve issued subpoenas in good faith.
For five months we’ve worked with them. And time’s up.
Opponents say proposal to end sick notes issued over phone would fill up doctors’ waiting rooms unnecessarily
A German proposal to end the right to get short-term sick leave from a doctor over the telephone as a means of cracking down on skiving has met with outcry from labour groups and the medical profession.
Germans enjoy some of the most generous employee illness policies in Europe, a fact the conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says is undermining efforts to kickstart the EU’s biggest economy, whose growth has largely stalled since 2022.
Appeasing Trump has only emboldened him. But European leaders are not as helpless as the US president believes
Georg Riekeles is the associate director of the European Policy Centre
EU leaders’ tough rebukes to Donald Trump in Davos must be followed by concrete action when they convene in Brussels on Thursday night. The US president’s attempt to strong-arm Greenland and Denmark, backed by explicit tariff threats against those who refuse to comply, is not bluster or improvisation. It is economic coercion, openly deployed to force political submission and territorial concessions. The danger lies in the demand itself, but also in how Europe responds.
The EU has reached a moment of truth. If it cannot defend one of its member states whose most basic interests are under direct threat, then the EU is weakened as a geopolitical actor and emptied of purpose.
Georg Riekeles is the associate director of the European Policy Centre
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As Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen decide ‘to live in truth’, what will it take for Starmer to call out Trump?
Donald Trump has told the Davos economic forum “without us, most countries would not even work”, but for the first time in decades, many western leaders have come to the opposite conclusion: they will function better without the US.
Individually and collectively, they have decided “to live in truth” – the phrase used by the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel and referenced by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, in his widely praised speech at Davos on Tuesday. They will no longer pretend the US is a reliable ally, or even that the old western alliance exists.
It is the year 2029 and an LA cop finds himself accused of murdering his wife. He has 90 minutes to clear his name before robo-justice sends him down
Irish writer Marco van Belle delivers an entertaining script for this real time futurist thriller-satire set in LA in 2029, in a world (as they say) where AI is wholly responsible for assessing criminal guilt or innocence. You’ve heard of RoboCop. This is RoboJustice. Veteran Russian-Kazakh film-maker Timur Bekmambetov directs, bringing his usual robust approach to the big action sequences, and Chris Pratt stars as the LAPD cop accused of murder. (Longtime Pratt fans will appreciate a cameo appearance here of Pratt’s fellow cast-member from TV’s Parks and Recreation, Jay Jackson, effectively reprising his performance as sonorous TV newsreader Perd Hapley.)
The film’s ostensible target is the insidious power of AI, though the movie partakes of today’s liberal opinion doublethink, in which we all solemnly concur that AI is very worrying while not having the smallest intention of doing anything about it. Pratt plays Detective Chris Raven, an officer with a drinking problem but nonetheless a poster boy for LA law enforcement in 2029 for having brought in the first conviction under the city’s creepy new hi-tech justice system, ironically entitled Mercy (it doesn’t appear to be an acronym). AI is now the sole arbiter of justice and defendants each have a 90-minute trial to make their case in front of Judge Maddox, an AI-hologram played by Rebecca Ferguson who icily insists on the facts but is capable of weird Max-Headroom-type glitches.
Harry Brook’s side begin Sri Lanka ODI series in poor form but confidence is needed ahead of crucial winter period
A subcontinental World Cup to close an Ashes winter? History tells us this does not end well for England. In 2014 a whitewash in Australia was followed by a group-stage exit at the World T20 with a 45-run defeat to the Netherlands in Chattogram. In 2011 the 50-over side – largely made up of Test regulars – were brutalised by Kevin O’Brien in Bengaluru before exiting with a 10-wicket quarter-final loss to Sri Lanka at the Premadasa Stadium in Colombo. Vic Marks, writing for the Observer, wondered beforehand if England had “anything left to give” after so many months on the road.
And so to the Premadasa again, 15 years on, this time without the goodwill of a recent series victory in Australia. The first one-day international against Sri Lanka will begin just two weeks after Alex Carey struck the winning runs at the SCG, and open the second half of England’s winter, with three T20s to follow in Pallekele. They will hope to end it on 8 March, at the final of the T20 World Cup in Ahmedabad, or Colombo should they face Pakistan, such is the geopolitical mess underpinning the upcoming tournament.
Far-right incoming president picked Judith Marín, who has publicly decried bills to decriminalise abortion, for the role
Chile’s incoming far-right president José Antonio Kast has named a vehement opponent of abortion who has repeatedly stated her support for life “from conception to natural death” as the country’s new women and gender equality minister.
Judith Marín, 30, was once ejected from Chile’s senate by police for screaming “return to the Lord” during a vote to decriminalise abortion under restricted circumstances.
A French magistrate has said two Trump administration emissaries approached her seeking to lobby against an election ban on the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
Magali Lafourcade, the secretary general of France’s human rights commission (CNCDH), an independent body that advises the government, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) she had reported the content of the meeting to the French foreign ministry immediately, fearing a potential “manipulation of the public debate in France”.
Director of Wien Museum says ‘we all have to economise’ as city temporarily reduces access to cultural sites
It prides itself on its reputation as the world’s home of classical music. But Vienna will temporarily close several museums dedicated to famous composers this year as the Austrian capital cuts its culture budget to meet public spending targets.
The apartment where the Austrian composer Franz Schubert died, the residence of “Blue Danube” writer Johann Strauss, as well as the house where Joseph Haydn lived are to be closed temporarily as cost-saving measures, the director of Vienna’s museums announced on Wednesday.
He lit up Europe with bands ranging from Peachfuzz to Kings of Convenience. But it was the Whitest Boy Alive that sent Erlend Øye stratospheric. As they return, the soft-singing, country-hopping sensation looks back
If you were to imagine the recent evolution of music in Europe as a series of scenes from a Where’s Wally?-style puzzle book, one bespectacled, lanky figure would pop up on almost every page. There he is in mid-90s London, handing out flyers for his first band Peachfuzz. Here he is in NME at the dawn of the new millennium, fronting folk duo Kings of Convenience and spearheading the new acoustic movement. There he is strumming his guitar in the vanguard of Norway’s “Bergen wave”. Then he’s off spinning records in Berlin nightclubs during the city’s “poor but sexy” post-millennial years. By the 2010s, he’s driving a renaissance of Italian chamber pop as part of La Comitiva, his bandmates hailing from the southern tip of Sicily.
It’s hard to think of a figure more musically cosmopolitan than Erlend Otre Øye, connecting the dots across a continent where national scenes rarely overlap – and making magic happen. No wonder his debut solo album, with 10 tracks recorded in 10 different cities, was called Unrest. Of all his reincarnations, though, the one that has best endured (if you go by Spotify) is his four-piece, The Whitest Boy Alive. And this spring and summer, they’re reuniting for a tour of Mexico and Europe to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dreams, their debut album.
Kirsty Coventry steers clear of global politics in buildup
Organisers will meet with vice-president JD Vance
The International Olympic Committee has yet to establish formal communications with the US president Donald Trump on preparations for the Los Angeles Games in 2028, the IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, has confirmed.
The global economic system doesn’t even benefit its US and European creators any more – let alone indebted nations or emerging giants
Donald Trump represents everything that the Davos crowd hates – and it is unlikely they are any more well-disposed towards him after being forced to listen to more than an hour of the president’s rambling speech today. He is a protectionist, not a free trader. He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax and is suspicious of multilateral organisations. He prefers power plays to dialogue and he doesn’t have any time for the “woke” capitalism that Davos has been keen to promote, with its focus on gender equality and ethical investment. The shindig’s organisers, the World Economic Forum (WEF), had to agree to sideline those issues in order to secure Trump’s appearance.
For decades, anti-globalisation protesters have sought to shut down the WEF. Thanks to Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, their prayers may soon be answered. In today’s world, Davos is an irrelevance and it seems fitting that Trump should be on hand this week to deliver the coup de grace to the liberal international rules-based order that the WEF prides itself on upholding.
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