Actor allegedly also made remarks to man who dresses in drag, and was seen dancing on Bourbon Street after arrest

The actor Shia LaBeouf allegedly aimed homophobic slurs at two men – one who identifies as queer and the other who dresses in drag – as the Transformers star was arrested for purportedly battering them at a bar early on Tuesday morning in New Orleans, the victims said.

Jeffrey Damnit – who was born with the last name Klein and was listed as one of the victims by New Orleans police – said in an interview on Wednesday that he was wearing mascara, eye shadow and lipstick when LaBeouf tried to beat him up “while screaming, ‘You’re a fucking faggot’”. He also shared a cellphone video showing LaBeouf in the back of a vehicle being examined by first responders, glancing over at Damnit and saying, “Faggot.”

• Woman says she was pregnant during alleged assaults

• Lawsuit seeks monetary damages of more than $1m

• Rice was suspended to start 2025 for role in car crash

A former girlfriend of Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Rashee Rice filed a civil lawsuit this week in Texas alleging he assaulted her during a span from December 2023 to July 2025.

Dacoda Jones, with whom Rice has two children, said she was pregnant during many of the alleged assaults. She filed the suit on Monday in Dallas County, Texas, and is seeking monetary damages of more than $1m, according to attorney Ron Estefan.

Dangerous days have nearly tripled in past 45 years – and increase largely driven by human-made warming

The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy – ideal to spark extreme wildfires – has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows.

And more than half of that increase is caused by human-caused climate change, researchers calculated.

Whichever way you look at it, Arsenal did not produce a performance worthy of champions. No one in red and white will want to remember this freezing cold night at Molineux but it will live long in the memory of Wolves’ Tom Edozie, whose debut goal was a just punishment for the Premier League leaders’ ineptitude.

Arsenal are five points clear of Manchester City, having played a game more, and will feel their icy breath on their shoulders after winning twice in their past seven matches.

A hard-fought 3-1 victory over OH Leuven at Meadow Park sent Arsenal through to the quarter-finals of the Champions League. The visitors tested Renée Slegers’ side when Sara Pusztai cancelled out Alessia Russo’s goal but a penalty from Mariona Caldentey and second from Russo secured the win, earning them a comfortable 7-1 aggregate score.

Confidence is flying high around Arsenal, they are almost at the end of one of the most taxing periods of the season to date. Since the return from the winter break, they have won seven of their nine fixtures and lost just one, featured in five different competitions, lifted the inaugural Champions Cup and now reached the quarter-finals of the Women’s Champions League. It has been a month that will have tested every single one of the playing squad and staff to their limits but one that will have given them belief that they can still challenge on multiple fronts.

The greatest American skier of all time won her first Olympic medal in 2014. The 12 years in between have been marked by brutal ups and downs

A lot can happen in 12 years. If you’re Mikaela Shiffrin, as a teenager you can become the youngest ever person to win the Olympic slalom, stack a couple more medals at the next Olympics, become the most successful World Cup skier of all time with a record 108 victories, go 10 more Olympic races in a row over three Winter Games without reaching the podium, overcome the two biggest crashes of your career and subsequent battles with self-doubt and post-traumatic stress disorder and eroding trust in your own skiing, and then bring it all back home with a second Olympic slalom gold.

You can also lose your dad.

State regulators walk back suspension threat and say Tesla has stopped misleading drivers about the safety of its cars

Tesla will avoid a 30-day suspension of its dealer and manufacturer licenses in California, its biggest market, after the US electric vehicle maker stopped using the term “autopilot” in the marketing of its vehicles in the state.

Tesla now uses the term “supervised” in references to its full self-driving technology and has stopped using “autopilot” entirely in its marketing in the state.

Yoon Suk Yeol could face the death penalty when judges rule on the martial law crisis that many in South Korea see as a dark moment they would rather forget

South Korea is awaiting one of the most consequential court rulings in decades this week, with judges due to deliver their verdict on insurrection charges against the former president Yoon Suk Yeol and prosecutors demanding the death penalty.

When Yoon stands in courtroom 417 of Seoul central district court on Thursday to hear his fate, which will be broadcast live, he will do so in the same room where the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan was sentenced to death three decades ago. The charge is formally the same. Last time, it took almost 17 years and a democratic transition to deliver a verdict. This time, it has taken 14 months. Chun’s death sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment on appeal, and he was eventually pardoned.

US president had recently said the plan was the best deal Starmer could make

Donald Trump has urged Keir Starmer not to hand the Chagos Islands over to Mauritius, warning he was “making a big mistake”.

Under the deal agreed last year, Britain would cede control over the British Indian Ocean Territory but lease the largest island, Diego Garcia, for 99 years to continue operating a joint US-UK military base there.

Unite Here, the US’s largest hospitality workers’ union, says ICE crackdown is harming tourism and costing jobs

Donald Trump’s immigration policies are having a chilling effect on the hospitality industry, where nearly a third of workers are immigrants, according to the largest hospitality union in the US.

The number of employed hospitality workers dropped by 98,000 from December 2024 to December 2025, according to a report from Unite Here, which represents 300,000 workers across the hospitality, food and tourism industries in the US and Canada.

Through more than 300 photos, the New York City artist Clémence Polès Farhang captures the immigrant story and unconventional womanhood

Clémence Polès Farhang started Passerby magazine around the time she immigrated to New York City. She says she wanted to explore womanhood as she navigated her own, and used publishing as a way to “deconstruct the internalized misogyny” from her own education. Polès Farhang’s mother, who left Iran during the revolution, believed women should have the right to choose what to do with their bodies, “yet would dismiss any woman who didn’t conform to conventional expectations”, says Polès Farhang, such as those didn’t dress “in a way she considered put together, or didn’t marry into heteronormative relationships within the right social class”.

“I remember being scolded in my early 20s for embarrassing her by leaving the house barefaced,” she says.

When the Qarabag manager, Gurban Gurbanov, declared before kick-off that Newcastle possess “a style of play that does not suit us”, there were suggestions that he was playing mind games. Long before half-time it was fully apparent that he had rather understated things.

Had this been a boxing match it would surely have been stopped by the 20th minute. Qarabag were utterly overwhelmed by the pace of their guests, and that of Anthony Gordon in particular. Gordon scored four times, boosting his tally in the Champions League this season to 10 goals.

Meta chief says it has improved identifying underage users but adds ‘I always wish we could have gotten there sooner’

The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified at a landmark trial of social media companies on Wednesday. Plaintiffs’ lawyers grilled Zuckerberg about internal complaints that not enough was being done to verify whether children under 13 were using the platform.

Zuckerberg claimed Meta had improved in identifying underage users but also said: “I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner.”

Dozens of world leaders head to Washington for what White House says will largely be a fundraiser on Thursday

Dozens of world leaders and national delegations will meet in Washington DC on Thursday for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, as major European allies declined to join the group and criticised the organisation’s murky funding and political mandate.

The White House has indicated that the summit for his new ad hoc council at the renamed Donald J Trump Institute of Peace will heavily function as a fundraising round, with Trump announcing on social media that countries have pledged more than $5bn toward rebuilding Gaza, which has been devastated in the war with Israel and remains in a humanitarian crisis.

• Americans rely on Quinn Hughes’s OT winner

• Mitch Marner seals Canada’s 4-3 overtime win

• Canadians lose star Sidney Crosby to injury

With NHL players returning to the Winter Olympics for the first time since 2014, these Games were expected to be a relative stroll for Canada and USA. However, both star-packed teams struggled in Wednesday’s men’s ice hockey quarter-finals.

Quinn Hughes scored in overtime to put the US past Sweden 2-1 after giving up the tying goal to Mika Zibanejad with 91 seconds left in the third period. Dylan Larkin deflected Jack Hughes’ shot in for the only US goal in regulation.

Exclusive: After investigators concluded an abuse incident occurred, women speak out for first time – ‘I was so scared to tell anybody’

Two women incarcerated in a California prison are calling for the prosecution of a staff cook who they say sexually assaulted them.

The women say Marcus Johnson, a former supervisory cook at the California Institution for Women (CIW), raped them in 2020 while they were working for him in kitchen jobs. The women, who were making under 40 cents an hour, said in federal civil complaints he threatened disciplinary action if they reported him.

Leadership disputes claim of political motive for ousting Jeffrey Rosen, who was praised for non-partisan approach

The first and only museum dedicated to the US constitution has been plunged into turmoil over the sudden departure of its president, a legal scholar widely respected for his commitment to non-partisanship.

The National Constitution Center (NCC) in Philadelphia announced last month that Jeffrey Rosen would step down after 12 years to be replaced by Vince Stango on an interim basis.

Trump’s disapproval rating indicates he’s less popular with Americans than some insects like ants. Will it mean anything in November?

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland; sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

A couple of years ago, the polling company YouGov asked people about insects. The resulting survey found that butterflies are America’s favorite insect, with eight in 10 people having a “very or somewhat positive” reaction to them.

Many journalists will tell you to never trust the polling, and they’ve been proven right many times over. Still, aren’t you curious how a random group of 1,148 adults feels about bugs?

⚽ Premier League updates from the 8pm GMT kick-off
⚽ Live scores | Follow us on Bluesky | And email Scott

2 min: It’s not a pleasant evening weather-wise. It’s raining in the West Midlands, and that rain could turn to sleet or snow later. Slapstick entertainment not yet off the menu.

Wolves get the ball rolling. “A quiet night is wanted, I think, from all parties, at least in the sense of avoiding the ghastly shenanigans on view in the notorious match last night,” begins Charles Antaki, who speaks for us all. “Raucous is good, animated is fine, full bloodedness welcome, but none of the other stuff, please. British football has been pretty free of it these last years, for which we should all be grateful.”

⚽ WCL updates from the second leg (first leg: 0-4)
⚽ Live scores | Follow us on Bluesky | Email Sarah

There is going to be a revival of el Clasico in the quarter-finals as Real Madrid secured their spot in the last eight where they will play Barcelona. Real beat Paris FC 5-2 on aggregate to go through.

I would love to hear from you. Anything from how you think this tie will shake out, what you might be giving up for Lent or, on the opposite end of the scale, what you are treating yourself to in terms of snacks while watching the game. Email me and let me know.

While most hybrids are said to use one to two litres of fuel per 100km, a study claims they need six litres on average

Plug-in hybrid electric cars (PHEVs) use much more fuel on the road than officially stated by their manufacturers, a large-scale analysis of about a million vehicles of this type has shown.

The Fraunhofer Institute carried out what is thought to be the most comprehensive study of its kind to date, using the data transmitted wirelessly by PHEVs from a variety of manufacturers while they were on the road.

The Brazilian has seen this before, football has seen this before, and yet why does it feel like nothing ever changes?

José Mourinho: against provoking opposition fans. José Mourinho: in favour of restrained celebrations. José Mourinho, once of the poke‑in‑the‑eye, sprint‑down‑the‑touchline, accost‑the‑referee-in-the-car-park school of footballing expression: now apparently very big on showing respect to the game. Well, it seems like we’ve all been on a journey here.

“I told him the biggest person in the history of this club was Black,” Mourinho recounted when asked about his conversation with Vinícius Júnior on Tuesday night. “This club, the last thing that it is, is racist.”

Portuguese managed Fenerbahce and leads his new side into their Europa League playoff sounding confident

As Vítor Pereira wrapped up his pre‑match media duties at Sukru Saracoglu Stadium on Wednesday evening, his assistant Luís Miguel Moreira da Silva waited at the mouth of the tunnel. “Let’s go?” he said as Pereira eventually emerged, before the Nottingham Forest squad followed the pair on to the pitch.

Then it was down to business, Pereira’s first assignment in charge of Forest at one of his 13 former clubs, Fenerbahce. For Pereira, the Kadikoy district of Istanbul represents familiar territory, having lived in the city across two enjoyable but trophyless spells here as a manager, most recently in 2021.

The threat of Russian aggression makes a compelling case for urgent continental cooperation

For Vladimir Putin, peace talks with Ukraine are war pursued by other means. That is why progress has been so slow in negotiations, which resumed in Geneva this week. The Russian president demands the surrender of territory that his army has failed so far to win in combat. Since Mr Putin cannot be trusted to honour any agreement, Volodymyr Zelenskyy rightly insists on robust security guarantees. The Kremlin remains committed to restoring national pride through territorial expansion. Mr Putin might accept a lull in the Ukraine conflict, but only to regroup. He must be deterred from resuming a campaign aimed at extinguishing Ukraine’s sovereignty.

His country’s economy and propaganda apparatus are increasingly oriented towards sustaining a long war. He has shown little sign of abandoning efforts to weaken Nato and punish European democracies for backing Kyiv. The intent is signalled by a campaign of constant provocations: sabotage, maritime and air incursions, cyber-attacks and online disinformation.

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