After years away​ revisiting my abandoned island uncovers new features, old memories and the quiet reassurance that ​you can go home again

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Nintendo’s pandemic-era hit Animal Crossing: New Horizons got another major update last week, along with a £5 Switch 2 upgrade that makes it look and run better on the new console. Last year, I threw a new year’s party for my children in the game, but apart from that I have barely touched my island since the depths of lockdown, when sunny Alba was my preferred escape from the monotonous misery of the real world. Back then, I spent more than 200 hours on this island. Stepping out of her (now massive) house, my avatar’s hair is all ruffled and her eyes sleepy after a long, long time aslumber.

I half-expected Alba to be practically in ruins, but it’s not that bad. Aside from a few cockroaches in the basement and a bunch of weeds poking up from the snow, everything is as it was. The paths that I had laid out around the island still lead me to the shop, the tailors, the museum; I stop by to visit Blathers the curatorial owl, and he gives me a new mission to find a pigeon called Brewster so that we can open a museum cafe. “It’s been four years and eight months!” exclaims one of my longtime residents, a penguin called Aurora. That can’t be right, can it? Have I really been ignoring her since summer 2021? Thankfully, Animal Crossing characters are very forgiving. I get the impression they’ve been getting along perfectly fine without me.

This creamy grain-free dish contains flaked almonds for extra crunch and protein – perfect if you’re cutting down on carbs

I’m fasting for three days a week for the whole of this month. It’s not for everyone, I know, and it’s important to talk to your doctor first, but the benefits are well researched and include improved digestion and immune function, and lowered blood pressure. When we fast, the body goes into ketosis, which breaks down fat for energy, and to stay in ketosis afterwards it helps to reduce carbs and increase protein, which is where today’s low-carb, zero-waste recipe comes in.

While Senegal’s victory in the chaotic final has made the headlines, we look at five other big takeaways from the tournament – from the strong diaspora representation to the floor-filling tunes

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Hello and welcome to The Long Wave! We are now a few days removed from Senegal’s dramatic win at the 35th Africa Cup of Nations. I made the trip to Morocco to experience my first Afcon, and it didn’t disappoint. The tournament, especially the final, had the sporting world talking – for better or worse.

From the iconography on display in the stands to the histrionics of those final moments in Rabat, and what it all means for Morocco’s grand events strategy, this week’s newsletter examines five key cultural and sporting reflections from an unforgettable tournament that had something for everyone, regardless of how much you like football. But first, this week’s news.

Trainee driver killed in accident near Barcelona just days after 43 died in collision between two high-speed trains

Spain’s rail network is under scrutiny after a commuter train crashed near Barcelona just days after at least 43 people died and 152 were injured in a collision between two high-speed trains.

The second crash in as many days occurred at approximately 9pm on Tuesday when a retaining wall collapsed on to the track near Gelida in the region of Catalonia in north-east Spain, derailing a local train.

• Pair will face off in NFC South next season

• Stefanski reportedly said QB ‘failed’ with Browns

Tampa Bay quarterback Baker Mayfield has vented his frustrations over the treatment he received from his former head coach Kevin Stefanski, who he will now face twice a year as an opponent.

Stefanski was Mayfield’s head coach at the Browns before Cleveland traded the quarterback to the Carolina Panthers in 2022. The two are now in the NFC South after Atlanta hired Stefanski on Saturday.

Mayfield appeared to be angered after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter posted that Stefanski said Mayfield and another Browns quarterback, Deshaun Watson, had “failed” in Cleveland.

• Minister says there is ‘no desire’ to boycott tournament

• But Coquerel says US should be stripped of World Cup

The French government is not in favour of boycotting this year’s World Cup being co-hosted by the United States over Donald Trump’s Greenland threats, France’s sports minister has said.

Trump has targeted France among the eight European countries threatened with tariffs for their opposition to his drive to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.

From firing lawyers and government officials to pursuing indictments – president has created a culture of vengeance

During his first year in the White House, Donald Trump has pursued a campaign of retribution unlike any other president in US history.

That Trump would pursue such a campaign is not surprising. Since he launched his first run for president in 2015, Trump has channeled the politics of grievance into political success. Returning to the White House after surviving two impeachments and four different criminal cases against him, Trump has used the might of the federal government to punish those he believes have wronged him.

Scale and speed of president’s moves have stunned observers of authoritarian regimes – is the US in democratic peril?

Three hundred and sixty five days after Donald Trump placed his hand on the Bible and completed an extraordinary return to power, many historians, scholars and experts say his presidency has pushed American democracy to the brink – or beyond it.

In the first year of Trump’s second term, the democratically elected US president has moved with startling speed to consolidate authority: dismantling federal agencies, purging the civil service, firing independent watchdogs, sidelining Congress, challenging judicial rulings, deploying federal force in blue cities, stifling dissent, persecuting political enemies, targeting immigrants, scapegoating marginalized groups, ordering the capture of a foreign leader, leveraging the presidency for profit, trampling academic freedom and escalating attacks on the news media.

• League wants tournament dates switched to summer

• Clubs and players believed to be opposed to schedule

The inaugural Women’s Club World Cup’s January 2028 dates “could be catastrophic”, the Women’s Super League has said, with the league raising serious concerns over the potential impact of the tournament on domestic calendars.

A WSL spokesperson said on Wednesday that the league is firmly against the dates and have made their case strongly to Fifa, who have announced that the competition will be held from 5–30 January 2028.

The Canadian poet, whose winning collection explores environmental and personal loss, discusses making art in existential times

Early on in her latest collection, the Canadian poet Karen Solie apologises: “I’m sorry, I can’t make this beautiful.” The line appears in a poem, Red Spring, about agribusiness and its sinister human impact: the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate, is “advertised as non-persistent; but tell that to Dewayne Johnson // and his non-Hodgkin lymphoma”. In 2018, a jury ruled that Monsanto’s glyphosate weedkiller, Roundup, caused the former groundskeeper’s cancer.

Solie’s admission – that real horror can’t be prettified – recalls Noor Hindi’s viral 2020 poem, Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying. We can’t “treat poetry like it’s some kind of separate thing” to what’s going on around us, says Solie, speaking to me in Soho, London, the morning after finding out she has won the TS Eliot prize for her collection Wellwater. “We all have to keep our eyes open”, but “that doesn’t mean we can’t say we’re scared, because it’s scary”.

We sat down with the basketball legend at the O2 to discuss his ties to Tottenham, Vancouver, Majorca and Macclesfield

By No Helmets Required

Does your background, growing up outside basketball’s mainstream on Vancouver Island with English parents, help you appreciate how people in places such as London or Berlin feel when a big NBA game comes to town? Yeah. That’s true. I didn’t watch much basketball on TV until I started playing at 13, so can relate to coming upon something new and exciting. At the same time, the world’s so small now with social media access. But it is interesting to go to parts of the world where basketball is smaller and see how can we make the game accessible to them.

Dirk Nowitzki, Tony Parker and John Amaechi were guests at the O2. But every team had a foreign player on opening night this season, with 135 players from 43 countries across the league; up from 7% in 1992 to 24% now. Are the current Europeans different to that generation or have they just had more opportunities? Europeans have always been quite good. It’s not like Serbia wasn’t always great at basketball but, as the game has grown, the possibilities grow. The world gets smaller with the internet and social media. There’s not as much difference; everyone has access to all the pertinent information. The NBA is more accessible nowadays to people from Europe, Africa and every corner of the world. It’s only natural that more Europeans have success in the NBA.

Revivals of this history play usually reflect the politics of the moment. Now a fresh RSC retelling arrives in a world of instability and fractured alliances

I have long argued that Shakespeare’s history plays have more urgent relevance today than his tragedies. The issues they raise – such as the nature of good governance and the difficulty of deposing a tyrant – are precisely those that still haunt us. Henry V, shortly to be given a new RSC production directed by Tamara Harvey, seems especially timely as we are living in a world where the threat of war is painfully real.

It is also a play that constantly changes its meaning. James Shapiro wrote in the Guardian in 2008: “There’s no better way to know which way the cultural and political winds are blowing than by going to see a performance of Henry V.” He reminded us that in 1599, when the play was first performed, playgoers anxiously waited to hear whether an Irish uprising had been suppressed.

They published a raunchy book inspired by the Guardian’s Owen Jones; broadcast interviews with obscure punk legends; and make calendars to navigate the world of underground art. Now they’re going global

Stuart McKenzie turns towards a fan on a makeshift stage so his long brunette hair blows in the wind. The artist is dressed in a power suit with thick rimmed glasses, flamboyantly smoking a cigarette as he performs the confessional poetry he’s been writing since the 80s. “Stuart is this fantastic London staple who is just coming out of the woodwork now,” says Emily Pope, the director of Montez Press, who hosted the fundraiser where McKenzie performed to support their queer, feminist press and radio.

McKenzie is a typical Montez Press collaborator: an experimental artist who doesn’t fit neatly into either art, literary or music spaces (although he did recently support the indie band Bar Italia). He’s later in his career than some of the emerging artists they collaborate with but he has Montez Press’s “desire to push boundaries and ask questions,” as Anna Clark, one of the organisation’s founding members, puts it.

PC; Inkle
The UK game developer’s latest is a database mystery constructed from an archive of fictional books. Their combined contents threaten to crack the code of reality

Bletchley Park: famed home of the Enigma machine, Colossus computer, and, according to the premise of TR-49, an altogether stranger piece of tech. Two engineers created a machine that feeds on the most esoteric books: treatises on quantum computing, meditations on dark matter, pulp sci-fi novels and more. In the mid-2010s, when the game is set, Britain finds itself again engulfed by war, this time with itself. The arcane tool may hold the key to victory.

You play as budding codebreaker Abbi, a straight-talking northerner who is sifting through the machine now moved to a crypt beneath Manchester Cathedral. She has no idea how it works and neither do you. So you start tinkering. You input a four-digit code – two letters followed by two numbers. What do these correspond to? The initials of people and the year of a particular book’s publication. Input a code correctly and you are whisked away to the corresponding page, as if using a particularly speedy microfiche reader. These pages – say, by famed fictional physicist, Joshua Silverton – are filled with clues and, should you get lucky, further codes and even the titles of particular works. Your primary goal is to match codes with the corresponding book title in a bid to find the most crucial text of all, Endpeace, the key to understanding the erudite ghosts of this machine.

Han Duck-soo verdict marks first judicial ruling stemming from ex-president Yoon Suk Yeol’s 2024 martial law decree

South Korea’s former prime minister Han Duck-soo has been sentenced to 23 years in prison for his role in an insurrection stemming from the former president Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed martial law declaration.

The judge, Lee Jin-kwan, ordered Han’s immediate detention.

Data informs many decisions now but Australia legend showed how some just have a knack for reading the game

Have you ever accurately predicted what will happen on a cricket pitch before the ball has been bowled? It’s an incredible feeling. That moment when you glance at the field, remember who’s on strike and think: “Here comes the short ball,” only for it to arrive, be pulled and then safely pouched by the fielder you had mentally circled at deep square. For a split second you feel omniscient. Like you’ve cracked the code. Cricket, more than any other sport, invites this kind of clairvoyance. Its patterns are legible, its traps visible, its repetitions comforting.

Even the greats get a kick out of playing soothsayer. During the third Test of the recent Ashes, Ricky Ponting was calling the action for Channel 7 when Pat Cummins was at the crease getting ready to face Brydon Carse. “We saw Cummins last over get unsettled by one that angled back up into the left armpit,” Ponting said. “He’s not a great ducker of the ball, he tries to ride the bounce and that’s why I like this field. You got one back on the hook so you can’t play that, you got one waiting under the helmet at short leg.”

Scott Bessent replied to a question on Danish investments by saying that ‘Denmark’s investment in US treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant’

Former Nato secretary general and former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned that the “time of flattery has ended” as Europe needs to step up its response to Trump’s threats over Greenland – but still look for off-ramps to avoid escalation whereever possible.

Speaking to BBC News this morning, he warned that a US attack on Greenland “would be the end of Nato,” and push Europeans to urgently step up its defence in its own right, regardless of the US.

“I think those three areas would accommodate the concerns of President Trump.”

“Time has come to stand up against Trump.”

“So I think that we should solve this problem in a diplomatic way. Of course, I appreciate Denmark’s voice, … it’s our partner, but I’m looking at the Greenland as a strategic point in a [broader] geopolitical issue between the free world of democracies … and Russia.”

PM says Trump’s Chagos Islands comment designed to put pressure on him to ‘yield’ over Greenland, but he will not comply

We’re not far off PMQs. Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

There will be two statements in the Commons after PMQs. At 12.30pm Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, will give one about the warm homes plan, and about an hour later Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, will give one on the water white paper.

Israeli prime minister accepts position on US-proposed body with initial remit to oversee Gaza ceasefire

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Wednesday that he had agreed to join a US-backed “board of peace” proposed by Donald Trump, despite his office having earlier criticised the composition of its executive committee.

The body, chaired by the US president, was initially presented as a limited forum of world leaders tasked with overseeing a ceasefire in Gaza. More recently, however, the initiative appears to have expanded well beyond that remit, with the Trump camp extending invitations to dozens of countries and suggesting the board could evolve into a vehicle for brokering conflicts far beyond the Middle East.

The arrest of Frenchie Mae Cumpio has been described as a ‘travesty of justice’. On Thursday a court will deliver its verdict, potentially sentencing her to 40 years in prison for alleged terrorism

For weeks before the police came for her, Frenchie Mae Cumpio had noticed odd incidents. The Filipino journalist – just 21 years old but already hosting a radio show and working as executive director of a local news website – told colleagues that a stranger had begun turning up and asking after her at the boarding house where she lived. She was sent a bouquet of flowers designed for a grave. She reported that two men had been following her on a motorcycle.

Cumpio believed it was deliberate intimidation. She had recently published a series of reports after visiting poor rural farmers who said they were being harassed by army units in the region.

Developments in Minnesota closely mirror a scenario explored in a 2024 exercise conducted at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, which I direct

Since January 6, roughly 2,000 ICE agents have been deployed to Minnesota under the pretext of responding to a fraud investigation. In practice, these largely untrained and undisciplined federal agents have been terrorizing Minneapolis residents through illegal and excessive uses of force – often against US citizens – prompting a federal judge to attempt to place limits on the agency’s actions. The Trump administration is encouraging the lawlessness by announcing “absolute immunity” for ICE agents. But if the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, does not heed the court ruling, the consequences may be nothing short of civil war.

In just the past week, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, shortly after she returned from dropping her child off at school. They blinded two protesters by shooting them in the face with so-called “less deadly” weapons. They fired teargas bombs around the car of a family carrying six children, sending one child to the emergency room with breathing problems. They violently dragged a woman out of her car and on to the ground screaming. They have shot protesters in the legs. They have forcibly taken thousands of individuals to detention facilities, separating families and casting people into legal limbo – often without regard to their legal status.

Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is also the founder and faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center

We had a mass snowball fight and a disco, and I slept in a room full of drunk men with wet socks. It was fun, but in future snowstorms I won’t be rushing to the pub

In all my years of reporting, nothing seems to fascinate people more than the four days I spent snowed in at Britain’s highest pub last year. It was early January and the Met Office had issued severe warnings for snow. It dawned on me that people were about to live out a British fantasy of being snowed in at their local pub. I knew where I needed to be: The Tan Hill Inn, high up in the wilderness on the very northern edge of the Yorkshire Dales national park.

Our nation’s fascination with rubbish knows no bounds – as was proved by one recent online debate

Even if you’ve never been anywhere near it, the Mumsnet message board is legendary. Since it launched in 2000, it has changed the vernacular – “am I being unreasonable?” is not just a question, it’s a shorthand for the type of person who asks it – and introduced us to the penis beaker (one maverick husband’s postcoital hygiene regime, made infamous). It’s a screenshot of society, a cultural thermometer; if it’s happening on Mumsnet, it’s big news. And one of the most popular recent threads is about bins.

The post that kicked it off was written by a woman who lived opposite an empty house where tenants had moved out. The landlord popped round late at night to drag the bins out for collection, and the next morning, at 6.45am, she could hear the lorry approaching. The coast was clear, and she still had a backlog of rubbish from Christmas. Deciding it was a victimless crime, she slipped one of her bags in their bin, which easily had room. Enterprising? Without a doubt. Moral, though?

As lottery picks and MVP candidates pile up, North Texas is emerging as one of the NBA’s most fertile talent pipelines

Another season, another name, another kid from Dallas. At street level, the city appears to be like any other – yet it continues to produce league-shaping NBA players. The main highway through Dallas cleaves down the middle of Texas. Taking it south brings you closer to the center of the state’s basketball talent pool. The road slopes downward as the city’s cosmopolitan polish thins out, neighborhoods split cleanly from downtown by sun-baked concrete and beige. Pink, green, and blue houses sit behind chain link fences, where yards are scoured down to dirt. Auto mechanic shops line the frontage roads with open bays and hand-painted signs peeling in the sun. Farther south, the road dips again, and space opens up to the heart of the story.

Welcome to Duncanville.