Today’s rumours are misty-eyed

The fun has only just begun at Old Trafford where Michael Carrick will become the head coach until the end of the season. As someone who knows a thing or two about central midfielders, Carrick will immediately realise Manchester United are desperately in need of one. Al-Hilal’s Rúben Neves is on the radar, as is Atlético Madrid’s Marcos Llorente. The 30-year-old is valued at £30m, leaving Jason Wilcox and chums plenty to ponder.

There are, supposedly, admirers of Sassuolo’s Tarik Muharemovic at United but if they really want to acquire the centre-back’s services they will need to overcome competing interest from Tottenham and Newcastle.

Biopic charting Naseem Hamed’s rise has reopened old wounds but is also a reminder of what was and what might have been

The first time I watched Prince Naseem Hamed train, my jaw couldn’t have dropped any faster if he had hit me with one of his lassoing uppercuts. I had followed all his fights on TV, of course. But to see him in the flesh in September 1994, a year before he became world champion, was an altogether more visceral and mesmeric experience.

Hamed’s punches sounded like firecrackers welcoming in the new year as they smashed into the pads. He was almost impossible to hit. And, most staggering of all, despite standing 5ft 4in tall and weighing only nine stone, he would bully far bigger men in sparring – including fighters such as John Keeton, who went on to become the British cruiserweight champion – until my great uncle, Brendan Ingle, called time.

Specialists in choreographing sex scenes have come under fire from the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Mikey Madison – is there any weight to their complaints?

When intimacy coordinator Adelaide Waldrop gets asked about her job at parties, she contemplates lying. “I’ve considered saying I’m an accountant,” she says. When she reveals the truth, the response is almost always seedy. There are questions about erections, merkins, and inappropriate celebrities. “Or it’s a lot of, ‘Oh we could use one of you at home with me and the missus’, and questions about my sex life,” Waldrop adds. “We’re a hot button topic.”

Lately, the heat has been on high. To some, intimacy coordinators are an auspicious part of a post-#MeToo industry, one that protects cast and crew while providing crucial creative input – Michelle Williams, Alexander Skarsgård, and Emma Stone are among those to have gushed about their experiences. To others, they’re the sex police, impeding artistry for the sake of avoiding an HR headache. Mikey Madison didn’t want an intimacy coordinator for her Oscar-winning sex worker film Anora. Gwyneth Paltrow asked hers to “step back a little bit” while making Marty Supreme. Jennifer Lawrence couldn’t even remember if she had one while filming Die My Love (she did), but said it wouldn’t have been necessary because her co-star, Robert Pattinson, “is not pervy”.

Former England midfielder needs to avoid the same pitfalls as Ruben Amorim, but he showed a dogmatic streak at Boro

In many ways Michael Carrick is the antithesis of Ruben Amorim but Manchester United’s soon-to-be-appointed interim head coach does have something significant in common with his Portuguese predecessor.

Like Amorim, Carrick has proved remarkably resistant to tactical change. So much so that at Middlesbrough the former United and England midfielder’s determination not to compromise a philosophy constructed around a patient, possession-heavy passing game arguably cost him his job.

Eastern region on high alert as authorities try to track animal tearing through villages in Jharkand after apparently becoming separated from herd

Forest officials in India are on the hunt for an elephant that has killed more 20 people in a days-long rampage through the eastern state of Jharkand.

Since the beginning of January, 22 people have been killed by a single-tusked elephant that has been tearing through forests and villages in West Singhbhum district of Jharkand.

The sociology professor is suitably comfortable with AI helpers that he creates his own – it’s their inventors’ motives and unregulated environment he argues we should be concerned about

If much of the discussion of AI risk conjures doomsday scenarios of hyper-intelligent bots brandishing nuclear codes, perhaps we should be thinking closer to home. In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them. A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren’t merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead.

To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in “synthetic personas”.

A brutal nomadic sport, quiet childhood reveries and stark human endurance define the photographs that wowed this year’s judges

Tibetan directors, who all live outside Tibet, deliver a quartet of films that explore the pain of separation and migration

The wrench of exile is the theme of this quartet of short films from Tibetan directors, who themselves all live outside Tibet. Their intimate, emotional family dramas tell stories of separation and migration. In two of them, the 90-year-old Dalai Lama smiles out from photographs on shrines, a reminder of the precariousness of Tibet’s future. As a character in one of the films puts it bluntly: will there be anything to stop China erasing Tibetan identity when its rock-star spiritual leader is no longer around?

In the first film a Tibetan man lives in a kind of complicated happiness in Vietnam. He loves his wife, and they both adore their sunny-natured little daughter, but he has mournful eyes. Home is a town on the banks of the Mekong River, which has its source in Tibet. The river is a constant reminder of the region – and of Chinese might too, since Chinese hydropower dams are the cause of drought downstream in Vietnam.

This was even though I had revoked my citizenship and now have dual British and German nationality

I want to flag a discriminatory experience I’ve had with the Co-op’s will-writing service.

I asked it to update a will it had drawn up for me in 2020, with my partner and our daughter as the beneficiaries. I received no follow-up for two months.

In the days after the worst mass shooting in Australia since Port Arthur, a wave of misinformation spread across social media. A video of Australian federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett claiming four Indian nationals had been arrested, with a Guardian watermark on screen, was in fact a deepfake made from a genuine video of a press conference Barrett had given on 18 December. The video was flagged by online factcheckers, but not before being watched hundreds of thousands of times. As Guardian Australia's technology reporter Josh Taylor explains, these deepfakes are only getting easier to make

• Fake Minns, altered images and psyop theories: Bondi attack misinformation shows AI's power to confuse

Relatives pay tribute to ‘extraordinary mother’ and hope killing by ICE agent leads to meaningful change

Renee Good’s extended family said on Monday it wanted justice and accountability for her death at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, but urged people stirred to outrage by the shooting of the 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three to root their conversations in “humanity, empathy, and care for the family most affected”.

In a statement and in interviews with the Guardian, the family members – most of them relatives of Good’s late husband Timmy Macklin Jr, the father of her youngest son – paid tribute to Good, her children, and to Macklin, and said they hoped the “unimaginable loss” the family had suffered would lead to meaningful change and “fewer families [who] have to endure this kind of pain”.

Warrington 16-year-old is inspiring young boys to embrace drama

Standing on stage at the Golden Globes in front of Hollywood’s elite, Owen Cooper said that the experience simply “did not feel real”.

The 16-year-old from Warrington picked up best supporting male actor for his performance in Netflix’s “incel” drama, Adolescence, which was one of the big winners at the ceremony and dominated the cultural conversation around male toxicity for much of 2025.

A light but filling no-bechamel souffle with a zingy citrus salad to add a sharp burst of flavour and colour

There is a skill in not wasting food and it’s all about good, old-fashioned housekeeping. If you learn how to store ingredients properly (cool, dark places are handy for spuds, for example) and keep tabs on what’s in your fridge/freezer, you can use everything up before it goes off – and make delicious things in the process. This golden, cheese-crusted souffle uses up the celeriac and spuds left after the festive season, plus any odds and ends of cheeses. It is spectacularly good, especially paired with a sparkling citrus salad.

The PM’s technocrat tendencies and lack of obvious backbone make him a target for amorphous rage

Jasper Jones and Runt writer charged after search warrant issued at his Fremantle home on Monday

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Prominent Australian author Craig Silvey has been charged with possessing and distributing child exploitation material.

Silvey, 43, had a search warrant issued at his Fremantle home on Monday, 12 January, where detectives allegedly found him “actively engaging with other child exploitation offenders online”.

Analysts and experts say the PM would do well to consider the Aukus alliance and reactions from Maga base in making his choice

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Former Labor ministers, the defence department boss and a career diplomat are among the names being touted by government figures to replace Kevin Rudd as Australia’s ambassador in Washington.

Rudd, the former prime minister and foreign minister, won praise for stabilising relations with the US president, Donald Trump, on Monday, after the surprise announcement he would depart a year early to return to the Asia Society thinktank.

Broadcaster’s submission calls on Florida court to throw out defamation case where US president is suing over editing of 6 January 2021 speech

The BBC is to attempt to have Donald Trump’s $10bn defamation lawsuit over the editing of a speech for Panorama thrown out, according to court documents.

The broadcaster faced criticism for airing an episode of the investigative documentary series that featured an edited clip of Trump’s address to a rally on 6 January 2021, which it is alleged gave the impression he encouraged supporters to storm the Capitol building in Washington DC.

A rise of murders is traumatising inmates and staff, and making life harder for staff. But even in prison, violence isn’t inevitable

There are hotspots for violence in prison. The exercise yard, the showers. There are peak times, too. Mealtimes and association periods are particularly volatile.

But first thing in the morning is not when you expect to hear an alarm bell. I certainly didn’t, at 6am in my office on the residential wing of a high-security prison in late 2018. All prisoners were locked up at that time. But overcrowding has long been a problem in UK prisons, and keeping three men in cells designed for one can be a recipe for disaster.

Despite internet blackout, a small number of Iranians are risking their lives to share messages as protests continue

For most of Iran, the internet was shut off on Thursday afternoon – the most severe blackout the country has seen in years of internet shutdowns, coming after days of escalating anti-government protests.

For a very small sliver of the country, it is still possible to get photos and videos to the outside world, and even to make calls. The Telegram channel Vahid Online on Monday posted photos of dead bodies lying next to a street in Kahrizak, on the southern outskirts of Tehran; on Sunday, it shared a video of Iranians chanting “death to Khamenei” at a funeral.

As the writer turns 80, his masterful adaptation of the French novel is being revived at the National Theatre. It highlights his lifelong interest in political power play

I once dubbed Christopher Hampton, who celebrates his 80th birthday this month, “the quiet man of British theatre”. By that I meant that he was less prone to expressing his views in opinion pieces than contemporaries such as David Hare and David Edgar. The term also implied that his plays possessed a less idiosyncratic style than the work of, say, Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard. But I suspect that Hampton’s regard for the classical virtues of objectivity, lucidity and irony means that his work will prove as durable as anyone’s.

He is also, as I have seen, a man of considerable private passion. One incident in particular is branded on my memory. In November 1990 I was one of a group, including the director David Leveaux and set designer Bob Crowley, despatched by the British Council to Cairo to give a number of talks ahead of a visit by the National Theatre. We were privileged to be given a private night-time tour of the pyramids and were enjoying a quiet drink in the neighbouring hotel in Giza when in burst Hampton, who had just arrived from London. “Have you heard the news?” he cried. “Mrs Thatcher has been attacked in the Commons by Geoffrey Howe and it looks as if she’s in trouble.”

Paris trial’s outcome will determine whether leader of far-right National Rally can run for French presidency in 2027

The French far-right party leader Marine Le Pen will face a fresh trial on appeal on Tuesday over the embezzlement of European parliament funds in a case that will determine whether or not she can run in the 2027 presidential election.

Le Pen, 57, who leads the far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN), was considered to be a contender for next year’s election until she was barred from running for public office last March after being found guilty of an extensive and long-running fake jobs scam.

It is the most essential thing we do - yet many of us arguably breathe badly. The author of Breath explains how that can be changed

In the last stages of writing his book, Breath, James Nestor was stressed. “Which was ironic when writing a book about breathing patterns and mellowing out,” he says. The book was late; he’d spent his advance and was haemorrhaging even more money on extra research that was taking him off in new, potentially interesting, directions – was it really necessary, he wondered, to go to Paris to look at old skulls buried in catacombs beneath the city? (It was.)

Then a couple of months before the book’s May 2020 publication date, the Covid pandemic hit, and Nestor was advised to wait it out. He couldn’t afford to. “One of the main motivations for releasing it at that time was to get that [on-publication] advance,” he says. “But I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to release it. I said: ‘How are you going to promote a book that can’t be sold in stores, that I can’t tour for?’” He expected, he says, “absolutely zero to happen”.

A deadly fungus has already wiped out 90 species and threatens 500 more but Anthony Waddle is hoping gene replacement could be their salvation

Standing ankle-deep in water between two bare cottonwood trees on a hot spring day, eight-year-old Anthony Waddle was in his element. His attention was entirely absorbed by the attempt to net tadpoles swimming in a reservoir in the vast Mojave desert.

It was “one of the perfect moments in my childhood”, he says.

Security chief Diosdado Cabello is nicknamed the Octopus for good reason, with the regime’s fate said to rest with him

His nickname is the Octopus, he hosts a TV show called Hitting it with a Sledgehammer and many Venezuelans consider him the real power in the land.

Diosdado Cabello runs the regime’s security apparatus and is perhaps the most feared, reviled and, in some quarters, revered government figure, with influence to rival that of the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez.