2 mins: No Granit Xhaka in Sunderland’s midfield could make this interesting. It does look like a straight 4-4-2, with Sadiki testing Areola early on with a sweet left-footed volley after a long throw was headed into no man’s land.
Colombia’s Sierra Nevada has become a strategic prize for drug traffickers and paramilitaries, leaving its Indigenous people threatened with ‘physical and cultural extinction’
Around a fire in a ceremonial hut in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Arhuaco people make a pledge. Tying traditional cotton threads around their wrists, they promise to guard the land beneath them – and then they ask for protection.
“Our culture has been preserved for thousands of years,” says Ati Quigua, an Indigenous leader. “We are a peaceful community, but now violence is coming to our land.”
The 46th president largely exists as Trump’s foil, with his successor blaming him for the country’s woes
In bitter cold beneath the US Capitol dome, he walked to a marine helicopter and shared parting words with Donald Trump. Then, arriving at Joint Base Andrews, Joe Biden offered farewell remarks to his loyal staff. “We’re leaving office,” he said, “We’re not leaving the fight.”
But, one year later, Washington, and the world, have mostly moved on from the 46th president. Biden, 83, has been writing a lucrative memoir, planning a presidential library and fighting prostate cancer. He was once the most powerful man on the planet, but now Biden’s public appearances have been scarce and his influence has palpably diminished.
Ceasefire to be extended for one month to allow transfer of suspected Islamic State members from Syria to Iraq
The Syrian government and Kurdish forces agreed to extend a ceasefire on Saturday, according to Syrian diplomatic sources, temporarily staving off a looming war between the two sides in Syria’s northeast.
Diplomatic sources told Agence France-Presse the ceasefire would be extended for “a period of up to one month at most,” citing the need to facilitate the transfer of suspected members of Islamic State from Syria to Iraq.
Scottish links last staged championship 13 years ago
‘It’s one of the best courses on the rota and in the UK’
Rory McIlroy has endorsed Muirfield’s case for an Open revival despite reaching a golfing nadir there when the major was last staged at the Scottish links in 2013.
McIlroy famously declared he felt “unconscious” and “brain dead” while en route to a missed cut in East Lothian 13 years ago. The refusal of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers to admit women – a scenario that changed in 2017 – and the low attendance at Muirfield on that last visit played a part in the absence of the Open. Yet the venue is still rightly regarded as one of the finest in the world.
US legal cannabis industry seeks new ways to incorporate weed into meals after a tough year for business in 2025
Food and stoner culture have always gone together, but these days chefs and cannabis professionals are working together to find thoughtful, new ways to incorporate weed into meals.
For National Hot Pastrami Day on 14 January, a celebrated Jewish deli in Chicago teamed up with a local Illinois dispensary to give customers free pastrami sandwiches garnished with cannabis-infused mustard.
I was 16 when the course of my life changed, and for years I was unable to speak about about what had happened
I am lying in bed listening to the radio at my boarding school as my roommate is getting dressed. As she walks out of the door she says, “See you at breakfast – don’t be late.” I’m about to get up when the early morning news comes on the radio, and I hear the announcer saying my parents’ names.
By the time my roommate arrives at breakfast, everyone has heard. My friends run to be with me. The housemaster and his wife stand in the corridor outside my bedroom, not allowing anyone in. All they can hear are my screams and the smashing of furniture. It is beyond comprehension, but then everything from now on is beyond comprehension.
Prosecutors say cuts to funding and training limits their ability to bring child predators to justice
The US Department of Justice has slashed funding and training resources for law enforcement working on investigations and prosecutions of sex crimes against children under the Trump administration, which limits their ability to carry out this work.
Major cuts include the cancelation of 2025 National Law Enforcement Training on Child Exploitation, due to be held in Washington DC in June. The conference is an annual event that provides technical training to prosecutors, state and federal law enforcement officers on investigating online crimes against children.
To win votes, Trump can afford to face up to corporate power – to deliver his promised 1.5m homes, Starmer can’t
In an incredibly polarised society, there are fewer and fewer things that seem to unite both sides of the aisle in the US political system. Yet it turns out that an objection to Wall Street’s grand heist of single-family homes has done just that.
We might expect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren to rail against the incursion of institutional investors into residential real estate markets, causing rent prices to jump and effectively locking millions of households out of home ownership. However, I admit I was surprised to see JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene striking a similar note. But I was completely dumbfounded to see the real estate tycoon and Wall Street darling Donald Trump sing from the same hymn sheet.
Adam Almeida is a writer and researcher living in London
A beautiful lake, gorgeous fabric: how could the Myanmar photographer resist?
When Aung Chan Thar was 25, he was selected to represent Myanmar as part of Asean Centre for Biodiversity’s (ACB) Young Asean Storytellers programme. A cohort of 20 young artists and writers visited Asean Heritage Parks in their own countries to tell stories of biodiversity, nature and culture.
Aung first travelled to Inlay Lake Wildlife Sanctuary, known for its floating gardens, in 2022. “The Intha people live around the lake and build floating houses: structures made from bamboo on stilts,” Aung says. “Fishing is a common occupation; they use their feet to paddle their boats. So is the production of colourful cloth.”
Thousands of Palestinian cancer patients are living without treatment as they await medical evacuation
When the Gaza war began, Ismail Abu Naji was just 18 months old, his small body covered in swollen, bleeding lesions. Months earlier, doctors had diagnosed him with a rare blood cancer, one that, if untreated, is often a death sentence.
In the weeks before the war, Ismail’s family had arranged for him to be transferred to Al-Makassed hospital in Jerusalem, a charitable institution for Palestinians, for specialised care. But the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack that triggered the conflict meant Ismail could not leave the territory.
3rd over: Sri Lanka 7-0 (Nissanka 4, Mishara 1) A decent maiden from Overton who beats a driving Mishara with one that jags away late off the seam. Bright sunshine beating down in Colombo, it looks a scorcher. If England have to chase leather for 50 overs they could be a bit cooked later on.
2nd over: Sri Lanka 7-0 (Nissanka 4, Mishara 1) Sam Curran zips in from t’other end. He starts with a wide outside off and then is too straight, flicked off the hip by Mishara for a single.
The adventurer on his family’s escape vessel, his crush on the Princess of Wales, and a disgusting toenail habit
Born in Northern Ireland, Bear Grylls, 51, served as a soldier in the 21 SAS regiment and went on to star in adventure series, including seven seasons of Discovery Channel’s Man vs Wild. Other shows are Running Wild With Bear Grylls, the Emmy award-winning You vs Wild, and Bafta-winning The Island With Bear Grylls. His new series, Wild Reckoning, starts on BBC One next month. He is married with three sons and lives in London, north Wales and Switzerland.
What is your greatest fear?
Small things make me anxious – like social things – but I have no big fears because I have faith in my heart.
The Philadelphia Union product has added end product to his trademark hustle – can he keep the good form going?
Timing is everything in a World Cup year, and Brenden Aaronson’s has been pretty much perfect.
Scoring a goal and putting in a top performance against your team’s biggest rival is something all players dream of. To do so when your family is watching in the stands and a reporter from your home town newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, is in the press box makes it all the better. Aaronson did all of the above at Elland Road for Leeds United against Manchester United earlier this month.
While the threat of retaliatory measures to stop the annexation of Greenland worked, it remains to be seen if Europe has the unity to follow through
The past couple of weeks have seen the most spectacular crisis escalation in the transatlantic relationship, over the US threat to annex Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark. It risked becoming a major conflict among the members of Nato, the most powerful security alliance in world history – until now.
On Wednesday, after a meeting with Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, the US president, Donald Trump, backtracked on his threats to slap tariffs on countries that got in the way of his annexation project. As European leaders huddled together over dinner for a post-crisis debrief in Brussels on 22 January, they congratulated themselves on their unity and appreciated the intervention of Rutte, or “Daddy diplomacy”. If these really were the conclusions of the latest debacle in transatlantic relations, they are missing important parts of the story.
The native of Thunder Bay, Canada, has been compared to Pablo Escobar and El Chapo – but is he really as big a figure as US prosecutors have claimed?
To compete at the highest levels of snowboarding, racers must master carving, edging and balance at speeds stretching the limits of imagination. They can fluently read the nuances of snow and fine-tune their bodies to cross the finish line faster than anyone else.
The Canadian snowboarder Ryan Wedding had these skills – but also the quality that catapults amateurs to an elite level: a highly competitive instinct to succeed that can at times manifest in a desire to crush fellow competitors.
Better regulation and enforcement urged before launch of oral treatments, which criminals are likely to try to exploit
Experts are warning that fake weight-loss treatments could become more prevalent as tablet forms of the medications, currently available only via injections in the UK, are launched.
They say stronger regulation and enforcement are needed to prevent fraudsters from cashing in on tablets which will be easier to counterfeit.
Osaka cites abdominal injury linked to prior pregnancy
Two-time champion withdraws before Inglis match
Naomi Osaka withdrew from the Australian Open just hours before she was due to take the court against the qualifier Maddison Inglis, citing an abdominal injury linked to body changes from her pregnancy.
The news landed late on a Saturday in Melbourne that had been heavily affected by soaring temperatures that triggered the tournament’s heat protocols, forcing arena roofs closed and suspending play on outside courts.
As a bookish child with a distant father and a disapproving mother, the Curious Incident author retreated into a world of his own. Looking back, he asks what it means to lose parents who never showed you love
When I see washed-out photographs of English life in the 60s and 70s – cardiganed grandmothers eating roadside picnics beside Morris Minors, pale men sunbathing in shoes and socks on stripy deckchairs, Raleigh Choppers and caged budgerigars and faux leather pouffes – I feel a wave of what can’t properly be called nostalgia, because the last thing I’d want is to return to that age and those places where I was often profoundly unhappy and from which I’d have been desperate to escape if escape had been a possibility. Why then this longing, this echo of some remembered comfort?
Is it that, as children, we live inside a bubble of focused attention that gives everything inside a memorable fierceness? The way one could lie, for example, on a lawn and look down into the jungle of the grass to see earwigs and woodlice lumbering between the pale green trunks like brontosauri lumbering between the ferns and gingkos of the Late Jurassic. The way a rucked bedspread could become a mountain range stretched below the wings of a badly painted Airfix Spitfire. Or do objects, in their constancy, provide consolation in a world where adults are unpredictable and distant and unloving?
Really, why wouldn’t you wash yourself after using the toilet? If you won’t listen to me, then listen to Zohran Mamdani – and get your straddle on
The first time I heard a bidet mentioned in the US – or at least what it’s used for – was at the start of an off-Broadway play I saw in 2015 called Threesome. An Egyptian-American couple are in bed waiting for a white man they’ve invited to join them for the tryst of the title. He bounds on to the stage after using the bathroom, and the couple yell at him, “Go back and wash your ass!”
Like that couple, and Threesome’s playwright, Yussef El Guindi, I’m Egyptian. In Egypt, bathrooms in every home, as well as those in public buildings, are fitted with some kind of contraption for washing after using the toilet: a bidet, a standalone low oval basin next to the toilet that one straddles – or, more popularly, a shattaf, a fixture in the toilet itself through which water streams out. Sometimes, the shattaf is a small showerhead attached to the wall next to the toilet. I’ve recently learned that its name in English is a bum gun. It’s my favourite kind of shattaf, because you can control the water pressure.
Health secretary will describe plan to offer tax relief on private healthcare as ‘tax cut for the wealthiest’
Reform UK’s policy of tax relief on private health insurance could cost the country £1.7bn, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, is expected to say on Saturday.
Streeting will make the claim at a conference organised by the Fabian Society, a socialist thinktank aligned to the Labour party, and will describe the Reform proposal as a “tax cut for the wealthiest”.
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