The prime minister has said he will ‘raise the issues that need to be raised’ on human rights in talks with Xi Jinping tomorrow
Kemi Badenoch is delivering her speech now. There is a live feed here.
At Davos last week there was wide consensus that the most significant speech was that given by Mark Carney, the Canadian PM. Donald Trump may have recieved more attention, but Carney was more coherent and profound. He argued that the world has changed, and that “middle powers” like Canada must accept that.
When it comes to origin stories, comedians have some of the strangest – from performing for a £5 bet to getting back at their boss to making an unlikely pact with a friend
Not all standup comedians wake up one day and decide to be funny for a living. That wasn’t the case for John Bishop, anyway. He took up comedy to avoid paying a bar’s cover charge and to escape his failing marriage – a story that inspired Bradley Cooper’s new film, Is This Thing On? And Bishop is not the only comic with an unusual origin story. From impressing girlfriends to losing their voices, brain tumours to bad bosses – or not wanting to lose a £5 bet – British comics told us the reasons they became standup comedians and the lengths to which they went to get on stage for the first time.
*Shelton 1-1 Sinner A big serve makes 15-0, but a decent return on to the line incites a netted forehand. No matter, Shelton shows good variety in the next rally, an inside-out backhand clipping the sideline for a winner, before an ace makes 4-15. But caught at the net having not done enough with the volley, he’s passed, then a netted slice takes us to deuce, and pressure. Shelton cannot afford to be be broken in the first game; he punishes down an ace, but is immediately hauled back, then another big serve allows the clean-up forehand. Ach, but just when a fantastic serve out wide looks to have set up the point, an overhit forehand restores deuce, and Shelton, despite nailing 10/10 first serves in this game, is having to deploy his entire array of shots to hold. He makes advantage again, sends down a decent second serve with the wind behind it, and a quality return renders it useless; back to deuce we go, Sinner slowly extracting his soul, but this time, Shelton makes advantage and closes out the game. Already, this is a lot of fun.
Shelton 0-1 Sinner* (*denotes server) Sinner hooks a forehand long, a shot that looks pretty relative to the mustard trainers, olive top and white hat, shorts and socks he’s been handed – why do they continually dress him in nonsense? Why does he let them? He soon makes 30-15 and Shelton misses the chance to properly get after a short second serve … but a framed forehand sends the ball into orbit and at 30-all, he has the sniff of a sniff. And this is more like it, the American coning in off a deep forehand, and it earns him break point; here we go. Ahahahaha, but you know what’s coming next: yes, a service winner that makes it 23 out of 29 break points saved in the tournament, backed up with a succession of forehands which facilitate the overhead putaway then, when Shelton goes with a drop, but down the line, not cross, which allows Sinner to rush in and mete out forehand treatment. He’s into the match.
Video shows the Hudson frozen partially frozen near the George Washington Bridge in New York City after a heavy winter snowstorm. Eight people were found dead outside over the frigid weekend in the city, according to officials, as New York experienced its snowiest day in years, with neighbourhoods recording 20-38cm (8-15in) of snow. Over the weekend at least 30 deaths were linked to a winter storm that hit North America's north-east. Some regions may not see temperatures rise above freezing until early February. The Midwest, in particular, is forecast to be hit with exceptionally frosty temperatures
Labour will be “washed away in a tide of discontent” at the next general election unless it tackles the decline of Britain’s high streets, a study has warned, as Guardian analysis lays bare the changing face of town centres.
Research by the University of Southampton found people feel high streets have declined more than any other part of their local area over the past decade, as household brands collapsed and shoplifting rose.
Each year, about 80 British people are victims of a homicide overseas, and grieving loved ones have to navigate the aftermath. Eve Henderson describes losing her husband, and her fight to help others
On a Sunday in October 1997, Eve Henderson looked down at her husband, Roderick, as he lay in a hospital bed, unable to make sense of what she saw. She was, she says, “a block of stone”. They were in the neurological ward of a huge hospital on the outskirts of Paris. Travelling on the Métro, the hospital name scribbled on a scrap of paper, it had taken Henderson an hour to find. Roderick looked comfortable when she arrived; he was a good colour, but there was a round red mark in the centre of his forehead and a small tube inside his mouth, attached to something she later learned was breathing for him.
“He looked fairly alive,” says Henderson, “and I just stood there. A doctor came in. She was in tears and I thought: ‘Bloody hell, am I meant to be crying?’ You’ve got no emotion, you’ve got nothing. You don’t know what to say or where you are. That’s what shock does to you.”
The top categories are stacked with quality, from Bad Bunny to Kendrick Lamar, Chappell Roan and K-pop hits – but here are the artists who most deserve to triumph
Bad Bunny – DTMF
Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild
Doechii – Anxiety
Billie Eilish – Wildflower
Kendrick Lamar & SZA – Luther
Lady Gaga – Abracadabra
Chappell Roan – The Subway
Rosé & Bruno Mars – APT.
Only five days remain of what has felt like a mercifully underheated winter window, but Manchester United could be about to fire it up a bit with an audacious bid for Cole Palmer. Teamtalk claims that a move for the Chelsea and England star is “building up a serious head of steam”. The departure from Stamford Bridge of Enzo Maresca, with whom Palmer was close, has apparently made Palmer susceptible to the idea of returning to his home city. He’s under contract until 2033 though, such is the Chelsea way, and would cost a British record £150m.
Meanwhile, the interim United manager, Michael Carrick, could face an internal battle with club bosses over Harry Maguire, whom Carrick wants to keep despite the desire of others in the Old Trafford hierarchy to give younger players such as Leny Yoro and Ayden Heaven more of a chance.
Amazon has told workers of a fresh round of global job cuts in an email that appears to have been sent in error.
Workers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) received a meeting invitation from a top executive on Tuesday for the following day – subsequently cancelled – that also contained a draft email.
The 70s musicians who choose to lay down some tracks in remote Welsh countryside may not really surprise, but one young local is startlingly memorable
There’s an oscillation of weirdness in this feature debut from Bryn Chainey, who takes us deep into the traditional folk-horror thicket with a fervently atmospheric and intriguingly acted, if finally directionless drama set in 1970s Wales. Like Daniel Kokotajlo’s recent Starve Acre or Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, Rabbit Trap swathes you in ambient sound design and insists on a kind of atavistic authenticity in the 70s stylings themselves: the woollens, the gloom and the analogue recording equipment. Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen play Darcy and Daphne, an English couple involved in the music scene; she is a folk singer whose last LP was called Mono Moon. They have come to the remote Welsh countryside to work on her new album, a bit like Led Zeppelin, whose experience recording in primitive Welsh cottages in the early 70s deserves a folk-horror treatment of its own.
They rent a cottage featuring the kind of windows at which, in Withnail’s immortal words, faces look in at. Darcy is Daphne’s producer and sound engineer and tapes interesting sounds thereabouts for use on the record – birdsong, rainwater dripping into a barrel – but is also picking up a strange thrumming from the shroomy netherworld. Soon this English couple find themselves befriended and yet menaced by a smudgy-faced, jumper-wearing feral Welsh child (rather brilliantly played by Jade Croot) who could be any age from nine to 54, telling uneasy Darcy about the Tylwyth Teg fairy folk and showing him a rabbit trap in which the captured bunnies are transformed into fetish sacrifices.
A father and son move to the Patagonian woods – but intensity wanes when a search for home becomes an obsessive quest for revenge
When the protagonist of Daniel Wiles’s debut novel Mercia’s Take, set in a mining community during the industrial revolution, left a bag of gold downstairs unprotected and then went to bed, I actually closed the book, in an attempt to stop the unfolding disaster. After finding this seam of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son will be able to go to school, rather than join the other children who work in the mine, like “blind, bald rodents unearthing themselves in search of scraps of candlelight”. In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask prize, everything closes in on Michael: lungs clog, tunnels collapse, horse-drawn narrowboats are attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It’s a vivid reminder of the cost, in bodily suffering, of resource extraction.
The Puma, Wiles’s second novel, is also a serious and intense historical novel about a father with limited resources who attempts to break a cycle of violence. In the early 1950s Bernardo, a more morally ambiguous figure than Michael, has brought his young son James across the Atlantic from England to the house in the Patagonian woods where he himself grew up. James chatters blithely about becoming a footballer, but Bernardo is distracted. He thinks he sees “shadows of his family walking in and out”, reminding him of a childhood in which “his eyes were wide and hurt by the twilight and he was barefooted and emptyhearted”.
A silent-era classic has been reframed for the vertical scroll of phone screens. Is this innovation, sacrilege, or just another way to repackage cinema history?
‘Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake,” said Alfred Hitchcock. Who knew that anyone would take the knife to one of his most beloved silent films, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), and turn it into a vertical microdrama?
The Tattle TV app has announced that it will be streaming serial killer drama The Lodger on its phone-friendly vertical platform, telling Deadline that it is “one of the first known instances of a classic feature film being fully reframed for vertical, mobile-first consumption”. So will it set a trend? And if so, how can we stop it?
I’m only joking, of course. There will always be those who see archive cinema as just so much more content to be re-appropriated in new formats. And there will always be old-guard purists – who, me? – who wince at the thought. Still, Tattle TV, you have my attention, so let’s talk about it.
We won’t be getting this mini-Hitch in the UK, or the EU for that matter, due to rights, but lucky US viewers will be able to watch the film that Hitchcock considered “the first time I exercised my style” in a format that largely disregards that style. The Lodger will be presented with its squarish 4:3 image either extended or cut down to fill a vertical phone screen. So there will often be parts of the image missing, which is a problem.
The opening shot of The Lodger is a chilling closeup of a woman screaming, her head tilted so that her entire face fills the frame, lit from behind to emphasise her blond hair. Hitchcock told Truffaut that in The Lodger, he presented “ideas in purely visual terms”. This closeup represents the terror spreading across London as a ripper targets young, golden-haired women. Is the idea intact, even if the image isn’t? Hitchcock, a well-known stickler for carefully composed frames, may well disagree. I would.
Dana White has promised boxers a new deal. But the deal he’s offering looks worse than the old one. Will Congress give Zuffa the power to dominate boxing?
Even Turki al-Sheikh’s most severe critics acknowledge that, under his guidance, the Saudi interests that have dominated professional boxing in recent years have paid generous purses to fighters. Now the Saudis have turned to TKO Group Holdings and Dana White to oversee Zuffa Boxing – a newly created vehicle designed to expand the footprint of its equity partners in the United States.
Zuffa Boxing is taking a far less generous approach toward fighters than Sheikh did. That’s evidenced by the contract that many of the fighters being recruited by Zuffa are being asked to sign.
Former Wasps forward Kearnan Myall is now performance director of GB Snowsport and using F1 tech and brain science to prepare for Milano Cortina 2026
It is not every day that a former rugby player is pivotal to Great Britain’s Winter Olympic prospects. Until recently Kearnan Myall, who spent 15 seasons playing professionally for Leeds, Sale and Wasps, had never skied so it has been a steep learning curve. “The most humbling thing is being at the top of the run with the Paralympic team, who are mostly visually impaired, and they just disappear into the distance while I’m still putting my boots on.”
As performance director of GB Snowsport, nevertheless, Myall’s job is to give the nation’s talented crop of snowboarders, freestyle, alpine and mogul skiers a decisive edge when the Games commence in Milan next week. And if Zoe Atkin, Kirsty Muir, Mia Brookes, Charlotte Bankes and others secure medals, helped by Formula One technology – liaising with McLaren to find a new type of material for ski bindings, brain science, cutting-edge coaching and the creative example of Mercury Prize-winning musicians, it will further establish the 39-year-old Myall as one of sport’s smartest thinkers.
Gurban Gurbanov has been in charge of Qarabag since 2008 and continues to prioritise a squad mentality ahead of star signings
Remember the summer of 2008? That was when Pep Guardiola was appointed as first-team coach at Barcelona, Jürgen Klopp arrived at Borussia Dortmund and Chelsea gambled on a certain Luiz Felipe Scolari. Since then the west London club have had 12 different permanent managers. Qarabag, who Liverpool play in the Champions League on Wednesday, have had one: Gurban Gurbanov, also known as the Azeri Sir Alex Ferguson.
Gurbanov has become one of the longest serving elite coaches in the world and he has built a remarkable empire, turning the club into a force to be reckoned with in European competitions.
“Twelve of the 18 Bundesliga teams have a negative goal difference,” notes Damian Cerase. “I suppose this is down to Bayern handing out weekly drubbings, given that their GD is +57 after only 18 games. What’s the greatest disparity in a full season between the number of teams registering positive or negative GDs?”
“At the time of writing in the Bundesliga, all teams haven’t quite played the same number of games but nevertheless 66.6% of the teams have a negative goal difference,” begins Chris Roe. “For a complete season, the highest percentage in the English league system is from tier two in 2005-06 when 17 of the 24 teams (70.83%) had a negative goal difference; no doubt this was in part due to champions Reading, who had a +67 goal difference for the season. This example is narrowly ahead of two Premier League seasons (1998-99 and 2017-18) when six of the 14 (or 70%) had negative GD at the end of the season.
This warm, inoffensive but undeniably mawkish comedy about a therapist is cosy but preposterous. Sometimes it’s like the excellent Ford is in a totally different programme
Such is the surfeit of TV offered up to us in the streaming age that there are whole shows featuring A-list actors that only two of your friends have heard of and even fewer are watching. A case in point: Apple’s Shrinking, a dramedy from the creator of Scrubs and Ted Lasso about a grieving therapist who, rather than merely nodding and looking sad, decides to get brutally honest with his patients.
Now in its third season, its brightest star remains Harrison Ford, who plays our protagonist Jimmy’s (Jason Segel) grouchy but good-hearted boss. It’s probably for the best that it isn’t in the big leagues: while Shrinking has its moments of greatness, the series is – by and large – an unapologetically soapy confection best enjoyed, like most sweet things, in moderation.
We need an honest reckoning with other factors that threaten young people’s wellbeing, from poverty to academic stress
Our children’s feelings are not for sale, and nor are they to be manipulated.
So said Emmanuel Macron this week, after French lawmakers voted to ban under-15s from social media. Admittedly, he then repeated these sentiments in a post on X, in the time-honoured manner of parents solemnly lecturing children to do as we say, not as we do.
American was caught on camera smashing racket following defeat
‘It would be nice to have some privacy,’ says Polish second seed
Iga Swiatek backed up Coco Gauff’s complaints about a lack of privacy at the Australian Open by claiming tennis players are treated like zoo animals.
Gauff sought a spot away from public view to let her frustration out by smashing a racket following her quarter-final loss to Elina Svitolina on Tuesday, only to find out she was on camera after all.
Man arrested and charged with assault after spraying strong-smelling liquid at Minnesota Democrat from syringe
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unidentified substance by a man with a syringe on Tuesday as she gave her first in-person town hall of the year in Minneapolis, during which she called for ICE to be abolished “for good” and DHS secretary Kristi Noem to resign.
Omar had only been speaking for a few minutes when a man in the audience got up and began to shout, while spraying her with the liquid. People at the meeting said the liquid had an acidic smell.
Syrian government forces have seized swathes of territory from Kurdish groups – including camps holding IS prisoners. Will Christou reports on why this is a dangerous moment
Will Christou reports on Syria for the Guardian and has been watching the new government’s lightning-fast takeover of territory in the country’s north-east. “All of a sudden, two major provinces that were under the Kurdish forces’ control fell in a number of hours and Syrian government forces swept in,” he tells Annie Kelly.
Soon the forces were at al-Hawl camp, the largest camp holding suspected Islamic State militants – and then they were taking it over. In the chaos of the handover, more than 100 prisoners escaped and not all were found again. The camps have long been controversial: al-Hawl has an area filled with foreign fighters whose governments, for the most part, refuse to take them back. Then there are the women and children, some of whom have grown up at the camp. Thousands are languishing there, suspected but never tried.
Citing four unidentified sources, ESPN reported on Tuesday that Belichick didn’t receive the necessary 40 votes from the 50-person panel of media members and other Hall of Famers. ESPN said Belichick received a call from the Hall of Fame last Friday with the news.
The Hall of Fame declined to comment before its class of 2026 is announced at NFL Honors in San Francisco on 5 February.
Cisco chief executive says technology ‘will be bigger than the internet’ but current market is probably a bubble; dollar selling intensifies, gold climbs through $5,200 an ounce to new record high
Royal Mail has been criticised for offering an “unacceptable” performance over the crucial Christmas period after it failed to deliver letters and cards on time to about 16 million people, Citizens Advice found.
The consumer watchdog, which carried out research into Christmas deliveries, said that figure was 50% higher than in 2024, and the highest level over the festive period in five years, excluding when Royal Mail was hit by strike action in the run-up to Christmas four years ago.
No 4 seed moves into semi-final despite struggles against Italian
Djokovic to meet Ben Shelton or Jannik Sinner for place in final
Novak Djokovic said he will double his prayers on Wednesday night after receiving a massive slice of luck in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open as the Serb was thoroughly outplayed for two sets by an inspired Lorenzo Musetti before the Italian was forced to retire due to injury while leading 6-4, 6-3, 1-3.
Musetti had been working towards one of the best victories of his career, dominating Djokovic from the baseline and establishing an authoritative lead before his retirement.
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