The last time Leeds beat Manchester United? Sixteen years and one day ago. Not in the Premier League but in the FA Cup, when Jermaine Beckford’s goal at Old Trafford delivered a massive upset. What a lovely finish:
Co-defendants include alleged gang founder Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, indicted two weeks ago
The superseding federal indictment unsealed against Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro on Saturday immediately after his capture closely resembles 2020 charges against him but has several important new twists: the new indictment appears to embrace controversial claims made by the Trump administration about a Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA).
Maduro was captured by US forces early Saturday and ferreted out of the country after a series of explosions in the Venezuelan capital. The operation has drawn widespread international criticism and outrage from Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Analysts and investors voice caution about tech valuations and Trump’s influence on the US central bank
Investors expect global stock markets to keep rising in 2026, despite fears that the AI bubble could burst, and anxiety about chaos engulfing the US central bank.
Wall Street strategists broadly expect the S&P 500 share index of US-listed companies to continue to rise over the next 12 months, but said it could be a volatile year if geopolitical tensions increase and inflation fails to fall.
North Carolina home preserved to commemorate legendary musician and civil rights activist, and to serve as arts hub
It was a surreal experience for Dr Samuel Waymon, Nina Simone’s youngest sibling, to walk back into the renovated childhood home that he once shared with the singer and civil rights activist. On that day in the fall of 2025, Waymon, an 81-year-old award-winning composer, said that memories flooded back of him playing organ in the house and cooking on the potbelly stove with his mother as a child in Tryon, North Carolina. He was overjoyed to see the large tree from his youth still standing in the yard. Simone, born Eunice Waymon, lived in the 650 sq ft, three-room home with her family from 1933 to 1937.
After sitting vacant and severely decayed for more than two decades, the recently restored home is now painted white, with elements of its former self sprinkled throughout the interior. On the freshly painted mint-blue wall hangs a shadow box that encases the rust brown varnish of the original home. A small piece of the Great Depression-era linoleum sits on the restored wooden floor like an island of the past in a sea of the present.
A psychotherapy trainee and a retired software engineer bonded over living abroad, but did they agree on gentrification, second homes and mental health?
Psychologist Chris Moore saw first-hand how powerful and complex an emotion it is
Fuelled by the relief of having finished end-of-year exams, the pleasure of a warm late spring evening and quite a lot of alcohol, the house party was one of those that should have been remembered for all the right reasons. At some point, later in the night, Chris Moore and three friends were ready to leave. The party was some way out of town – Cambridge – and too far to walk, and, anyway, there was a car, temptingly, in the driveway, its keys in the ignition.
Somebody – Moore can’t remember who – suggested they drive back, and with the recklessness of youth and too much beer, they all got in. “I ended up in the front passenger seat and fell asleep,” he says. He came to, being taken out of the car by paramedics, then sitting by the side of the road, his face streaming with blood, surrounded by the lights of the emergency services. They had been in an accident, and Moore had hit the windscreen, asleep, and had deep lacerations on his forehead. He was the only one of the four who had been injured. What he didn’t know until the next day, in hospital after surgery, was that they had driven into a cyclist and killed him.
The US bombardment of Venezuela and the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro, have renewed fears of an American takeover of Greenland, as members of Donald Trump’s Maga movement gleefully set their sights on the Danish territory after the attack in South America.
Just hours after the US military operation in Venezuela, the rightwing podcaster Katie Miller –the wife of Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s powerful deputy chief of staff for policy – posted on X a map of Greenland draped in the stars and stripes with the caption: “SOON.”
Maximus Textoris Pulcher, an official resident at Rue de la Loi 16, shows a warmer side of Bart De Wever
For nearly 15 years, Britain’s Larry the Cat has charmed visitors to 10 Downing Street. Now another prime ministerial pet is proving a social media hit in Belgium.
Maximus Textoris Pulcher was announced in August as an official resident at the Belgian prime minister’s office, Rue de la Loi 16 in central Brussels.
Anthony Joshua has issued his first public update after the car crash in Nigeria which injured him and killed two of his close friends and team members.
Sina Ghami and Latif Ayodele, also known as Latz, died after the vehicle they were travelling in along with Joshua struck a stationary truck on a major road near Lagos on Monday. Joshua was taken to hospital before being discharged on Wednesday and he has flown back to the UK ahead of the funerals of Ghami, his strength and conditioning coach, and Ayodele, one of his trainers.
Playing without a spinner is one thing, but Webster and Green are only good enough to be the fifth bowler
In the end, it was a relief. Not to say that a lot of Australians would exactly have been tuning into the Sydney Ashes Test hoping to hear that England were doing well, but at least seeing a couple of sessions yield a score of 211 for three felt normal. The run rate was trending towards the adventurous, but it was a day within the accepted frame, and that is a template that not many days this series have been able to match.
In the context of this current England team, a fast opening stand of 35 from 40 balls was normal. The wickets of both openers in quick succession to follow was normal. When first drop Jacob Bethell nicked off on 10 though, having looked in excellent early touch both defensively and in attack, the score of 57 for three put a little tremor through onlookers.
With 2025 but a distant memory, it’s time to get stuck into a huge year of entertainment. To help with this daunting task, we’ve provided a handy, alphabetised guide to the big releases and trends coming in the next 12 months, from AI’s continued rise to a whole lot of Zendaya
Bad news: the intellectual property equivalent of The Terminator is here to obliterate the concept that the mug who actually wrote something matters somewhat. Better news: cinemas are fighting back against AI with films anxious about the new tech, including Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (13 February), in which a man apparently from the future (Sam Rockwell) wants to warn people about an incoming AI hellscape, followed by The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (title says it all really), from the film-makers behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, in March. Then, later in the year, Luca Guadagnino unveils Artificial, his biopic of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Catherine Bray
Other firms are taking advantage of Tesla’s sales slump, while technological advances mean that glitches are being left in the rear-view mirror
In another era, before Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed its name to X to mark the spot of its descent into barbarism, honed Grok, a generator of far-right propaganda, swung behind Donald Trump and made what appeared to be a Nazi salute, I already knew he was a wrong ’un. The year was 2019, and I was test-driving a Tesla; while I was ambling off the forecourt, the PR told me jauntily that the windscreen was made of a material that would protect the driver from biohazards. I hit the brakes. “You what? What kind of biohazard? Like, a war?” She misconstrued me, thinking I intended to go and find some toxic waste site to see if it worked, and said: “I’m not sure it’s operational in the press fleet.”
That wasn’t my question: rather, what kind of a world was Tesla preparing for? One so unstable that an average (though affluent) private citizen would do well to prepare for a chemical weapons attack? What model of consumption was this, that the rich used their wealth to prepare for the mayhem their resource-capture would unleash, while the less-rich prepared slightly less well? Was Musk trying to bring to market the apocalypse planning that elites had already embarked on? Because if he was, then it was possible that he was not a great guy. And that turned out to be correct.
Security Service was able to compile detailed files on members of legitimate protest groups infiltrated by undercover police officers
Thousands of surveillance reports compiled by undercover police officers who spied on political campaigners were routinely passed to MI5, documents obtained by the spycops inquiry have revealed.
Police sent undercover officers on long-term deployments to infiltrate mainly leftwing protest groups and gather enormous quantities of information about their political and personal activities.
Maduro and Chávez used fears of American aggression to tighten their grip on power – but now an even greater fantasist has imposed his will on their country
It was the fever dream of the revolution, a dark fantasy spun so many times – each version wilder than the last – until it almost became a joke: the Yankees are coming.
Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 to 2013, conjured the scenario again and again, warning that the US president and his henchmen in the CIA and Pentagon were mobilising forces to strike.
Exclusive: Patriotic Alternative’s Mark Collett addressed forum along with ideologue described as ‘Putin’s brain’
The head of a leading British far-right group spoke at a summit of European extreme nationalist groups convened in Russia by an influential oligarch linked to Vladimir Putin, it can be revealed.
The revelation has led to renewed concern among MPs over the Kremlin’s links to extremist groups and its attempts to disrupt democracy and sow societal divisions in the UK.
Dystopian warnings once reserved for the far right have found a wider audience – but there are good reasons for scepticism
It is a darkly dystopian vision of Britain’s future, in which tens of thousands die in a bitter civil war in just a few years time.
Yet such forecasts are no longer limited to niche corners of the internet or the X feed of Elon Musk, condemned by Downing Street for claiming that war in Britain was inevitable after the post-Southport rioting.
When Cinzia de Santis woke up to the news that Nicolás Maduro had been captured by US troops in a pre-dawn assault on Caracas, she had mixed emotions. “My first reaction was he’s gone, which is kind of good news,” she said.
But the manner in which the Venezuelan president and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken to New York to face criminal charges – in a military operation that, at this point, appears to have little to no legal or constitutional authority – has sparked concern.
News and buildup to the day’s action ahead of six Premier League games and more last-16 ties at Afcon
Have you played On the Ball – our new football game exclusive to the Guardian app? The daily puzzle involves guessing the identity of Premier League footballers, past and present.
My score … I fluked it a bit this time due to the answer being a player I was a big fan of. My score of 65 puts me in the top 10% of players today apparently. Better than yesterday’s abysmal effort with Emile Heskey.
Erik Irmer has been documenting the spread of invasive plant and animal species that disrupt native ecology across Europe. He focuses on humans’ interactions with these plants and animals. Aliens is published by Fotohof
Populists rewrite the history of this nation because they were complicit in much of its ugliness. The progressive fightback must start now
A couple of the more disruptive boys in the class put red laces in their Dr Martens, because someone had told them that was how you showed your support for the National Front. “Jew” was an everyday insult and the N-word was in regular circulation. There were no more than four or five non-white kids in the whole school: I can recall one Asian girl finding her art folder had been covered in racist abuse, and some adolescent desperado singling out a black boy for a spoken version of the same treatment, before insisting that his victim was in on the joke. He wasn’t: he looked at the ground and rushed away, full of the hurt he must have felt every day.
This was what it was like in a Cheshire comprehensive school in the early-to-mid-1980s. Teenage racism was there in plain sight, and there was a scattering of people who seemed to take their prejudices – presumably passed down from parents and elder siblings – very seriously indeed. In what is now known as year 7, for example, each class was given a group of “sixth-form counsellors”, meant to show up once or twice a week and encourage ambition and hard work. One of ours was a tense, soft-spoken young man who liberally used racist epithets, backed the National Front and said he wanted to be a policeman. His view of the world, as far as I could tell, was summed up in a chant that a certain sort of playground thug knew by heart: “There ain’t no black in the union jack/Get back, get back, get back.”
Nobel prize for László Krasznahorkai provides a rare glimpse of unity in a nation divided on party lines
Gyula, a tranquil and picturesque town in the east of Hungary, is best known for its sausages. It has no direct rail connection to Budapest, but it does have a library and a castle. Soon, it will also have an official copy of a Nobel medal.
“Congratulations to László Krasznahorkai, the first Nobel winner from Gyula,” proclaim billboards in the town, paying tribute to the 71-year-old writer who won this year’s Nobel prize in literature for “his compelling and visionary oeuvre.”.
Climbing, skiing and paddleboarding also feature in our round-up of this year’s charity challenges
SwimQuest’s annual Isles of Scilly challenge is a 15km island-hopping swim, broken into five sessions with walks in between. The longest swim is the 6km leg from St Agnes to Bryher; the shortest is 600 metres from Bryher to Tresco; and the island walks in between are no longer than 45 minutes. Swimmers can opt to complete the challenge in one tough day, or space it out over two – there is a party after both events. Entry is £299 for the one-day challenge on 20 September or £379 for two days (17 and 18 September), no minimum fundraising, scillyswimchallenge.co.uk
Fraudsters use phishing to steal card details, which fund a spending spree using Apple Pay or Google Pay
You get a call from your bank and the informed voice asks to you to confirm the personal details they have on file, which you do. You are then asked whether you bought something at an electrical retailer recently for £120 and spent £235 in Birmingham, but neither transaction rings true.
The caller tells you they have blocked the payments but they must now secure your account, and say they will send you a notification to approve, or a code to pass on to them. You feel under pressure to protect your money, so you do what is asked.
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