Eight-year agreement deepens Qatar’s role in the sport
Inaugural Nations Championship is in London next year
Qatar Airways has agreed a deal worth up to £80m to become title sponsors of the new Nations Championship in a move that underlines rugby union’s determination to follow other sports in securing investment from the Middle East.
The Guardian revealed in October that Qatar had been chosen to stage the second finals series of the Nations Championship, in 2028, and the national airline has now come on board as headline sponsors. The eight-year deal will cover the qualifying matches and finals series for the first four editions of the new competition running from 2026 until 2034.
(Domino) The Scottish art rockers’ sixth album benefits from an infusion of fresh blood, but can’t maintain the standards of the first few songs
A sparkling 2015 collaboration with Sparks aside, Franz Ferdinand’s career has felt like an exercise in diminishing returns, each successive album slightly less interesting than its predecessor. Seven years on from the paradoxically titled Always Ascending, their sixth set finally bucks that trend. Part of that could be down to an infusion of fresh blood, with frontman Alex Kapranos and bassist Bob Hardy the only surviving members of the original lineup.
From the opener Audacious on, it’s clear that revitalisation rather than reinvention is key, with Kapranos’s distinctive, arch delivery very much retaining centre stage, and the penchant for a big chorus undimmed. Indeed, there’s a long-absent freshness to the first few songs, which simply fizz with ideas: The Doctor possesses a manic energy; the standout Hooked deserves to fill dancefloors. But that early charge isn’t sustained and there’s a distinct sag to the middle of The Human Fear, the likes of Tell Me I Should Stay (its bassline’s unlikely nod to Oxygène-era Jean-Michel Jarre aside) and Cats (seemingly an act of watered-down auto-pastiche) distinctly less engaging. A comeback that’s only fitfully pleasing.
If time management is all life is, asks the author and narrator, why do we treat it as such a depressingly narrow-minded affair?
The title refers to the time most humans spend on Earth, assuming they live until their 80s. When the author Oliver Burkeman first made the calculation, he felt unexpectedly queasy at our “insultingly” short lifespans. He also began thinking about how we manage our time.
“Arguably, time management is all life is,” he notes. “Yet the modern discipline known as time management is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch.” But what is the point of all that “doing” when life is so short?
Never trust a hippy selling pine-flavoured butter. Plus, a watch that finally explains it all
The AFSCA (Belgium’s federal agency for ensuring food supply chain safety – but of course you knew that) has been forced to issue a warning to the good people of Poirot’s homeland not to eat their Christmas trees. This is after the city of Ghent – an environmentalism hotspot in northern Flanders – posted tips on how to recycle their obsolete festive conifers into food, including using them to make pine-flavoured butter.
Norwegian capital’s sites were 98% free of fossil fuels last year, and it aims to increase use of electric machinery
Tafseer Ali felt no need to raise his voice as the pair of diggers lumbered past him, their treads weighing heavy on the rock and asphalt.
Quiet electric machines like these make it easy to work in the city centre, the construction manager said – and keep the neighbours happy. “If they have less noise, we get fewer complaints.”
Neil Robertson replaces 2024 winner at Alexandra Palace
O’Sullivan had withdrawn from Championship League
Reigning champion Ronnie O’Sullivan has withdrawn from the upcoming Masters snooker event on medical grounds.
The world No 3, who has won the competition eight times, was due to face John Higgins in the opening match on Sunday afternoon. Neil Robertson has replaced O’Sullivan in the draw for the tournament, which runs until 19 January at Alexandra Palace in London.
Raducanu snubs spray after Swiatek and Sinner sagas
‘I’m going to tough it out because I don’t want to risk it’
Emma Raducanu says the chance of ingesting a contaminated substance is a notable concern on the minds of tennis players at a time when Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek continue to navigate the fallout of two of the most high profile anti-doping cases in the history of the sport.
Speaking at her pre-tournament press conference at the Australian Open before her first round match against the 26th seed Ekaterina Alexandrova on Monday, Raducanu said players must “manage the controllables” as well as they can. She had suffered a significant insect bite the previous day but declined the antiseptic spray she was provided because she did not want to risk taking a banned substance.
Three people arrested after group escapes Johannesburg house by breaking a window and burglar bar
South African police have rescued 26 Ethiopians from a suspected human trafficking ring in Johannesburg after the group broke a window and burglar bar to escape from a house where they were being held naked.
Three people were arrested on suspicion of people trafficking and possessing an illegal firearm on Thursday night after neighbours in the Sandringham suburb heard the commotion and tipped off the police, the Hawks serious crime unit said in a statement. Police urged the public to report any other escaped naked people in the area.
The judgment has been welcomed as an important shift in perceptions by human rights and mental health groups
A Kenyan judge has declared as unconstitutional sections of the country’s laws that criminalise attempted suicide. In a landmark ruling on Thursday, Judge Lawrence Mugambi of the country’s high court stated that section 226 of the penal code contradicts the constitution by punishing those with mental health issues over which they may have little or no control.
While the constitution says in article 43 that a person has the right to the “highest attainable standard of health”, criminal law states that “any person who attempts to kill himself is guilty of a misdemeanour and is subject to imprisonment of up to two years, a fine, or both”, with the minimum age of prosecution for the offence set at eight years old.
Sadly, the Amazon-Melania deal has much the same flavor as the rest of Trump appeasement moves – not just by Bezos but by others of his ilk
The language in a New York Times article was extremely restrained as it described Jeff Bezos’s evolving stance regarding Donald Trump.
The Amazon founder and the president-elect had had a rocky relationship in the past, “but in recent months, Amazon and Mr. Bezos have taken steps to repair it”.
Premier of most populous province says rhetoric clouds trade relationship worth hundreds of billions of dollars
The United States will “feel pain” if Donald Trump doesn’t back down from his threat to impose steep tariffs on its northern neighbour, the leader of Canada’s most populous province has warned.
After a tumultuous week that left Canadian leaders flailing for a coherent national response to Trump’s provocations – including the suggestion that the US would annex its closest ally – Ontario premier Doug Ford told the Guardian: “We will never be for sale.”
The company’s plan to end its factchecking program is about appeasing Trump. That signals the making of a mafia state
This week Meta announced the elimination of its factchecking program in the US and rollbacks to content moderation policies on “hateful conduct”. These measures undoubtedly open the floodgates to more hateful, harassing, and inciting content on Facebook and Instagram. Immigrants and LGBTQ+ communities are two of the groups most likely to be affected.
Last month, after Donald Trump won the election, Zuckerberg visited Trump in Mar-A-Lago and then Meta sent $1m to his inauguration fund. When asked for comment about Meta’s policy changes, Trump admitted that Zuckerberg was “probably” influenced by his threats to imprison the tech CEO.
With a new year comes new plans, but don’t forget to relax in and enjoy your garden at this time of year, too
I don’t love gardening to-do lists – they make it feel too much like work – but I do think there’s value in thinking about what you’d like to do with your garden this year. Perhaps you haven’t been out in it for weeks, or maybe just for a few minutes here and there, to add the sprout leaves to the compost bin. But while January might be the sleepiest time in the garden – perhaps a snowdrop swelling somewhere, but otherwise fallen leaves and perennials tucked well beneath the earth – it’s still the start of a new year.
I have never been a huge one for new year resolutions, but I make gentle exceptions for my garden. Gardening is a practice that exists in the temporal space of hope. At this time of year, we imagine warmer days and flick through seed catalogues (if you want something more substantial, I recommend Katharine S White’s Onward and Upward in the Garden, a collection of the New Yorker fiction editor’s columns reviewing 1950s seed catalogues). The whole horticultural year unfurls before us: what will we do with it?
Biden signed a law banning the app in January – if parent firm ByteDance fails to block it, here’s what could happen
The US supreme court will hear arguments on Friday from TikTok and its China-based owner ByteDance, which is seeking to block a law signed by Joe Biden that will ban the short-form video app beginning on 19 January unless it is divested from ByteDance. TikTok has said divestment is “not possible technologically, commercially, or legally” and requested an injunction to pause the ban during the legal process.
More than 170m Americans use TikTok. Lawyers for the company contend that banning the app violates the first amendment rights of those tens of millions of users; the argument did not sway a federal appeals court, which upheld the ban-or-sale bill in December. Congress passed the legislation with a bipartisan majority in April. US legislators fear that China will spread propaganda through the app, though they have produced no documentation of such manipulation. Donald Trump, who first championed banning the app in 2020, now opposes it after finding a large audience there during the presidential election. He has filed a brief on TikTok’s behalf to stay the ban until he takes office on 20 January.
As multiple fires rage around the Los Angeles basin, the 7,500 fire and emergency personnel on the ground are facing unprecedented conditions.
At least five LA residents have been killed, and the death count is expected to rise as responders search burned areas. At least 10,000 structures have been destroyed, and several of the five blazes are still burning out of control.
The justices are increasingly operating by the sheer force of raw power. That should trouble us all
We’re supposed to believe that it was about a job interview. On Tuesday, president-elect Donald Trump spoke on the phone with supreme court Justice Samuel Alito; the call came just a few hours before Trump’s attorneys petitioned the supreme court to put a stop to his criminal sentencing, scheduled for this Friday, in a New York state court.
Alito insists that this was all perfectly innocent. “William Levi, one of my former law clerks, asked me to take a call from president-elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position,” the justice told ABC News after word of the call leaked on Wednesday.
Cinephiles and industry insiders explain why the most-watched films in 2024 were made in France
The most-watched films in French cinemas last year were a feelgood comedy featuring a cast of non-professional, disabled actors and a swashbuckling three-hour costume drama based on a 1,500-page novel first published in 1844.
Both were made in France, where, according to 2024’s box office figures from the national film board, CNC, more people saw each of them than watched Disney and Pixar’s Inside Out 2, the most successful animated film of all time and global blockbuster of the year. In fact, almost half the cinema tickets sold in France in 2024 were for French films.
The sand swirled, and cleared. A flash of gold appeared and my heart leapt
I was 10 when I went on my first archaeological dig. I’d been exploring a clay pit near Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, where I grew up, and found the fossilised jawbone of a small ichthyosaurus, complete with tiny teeth. I took it to a local geologist – he was amazed at what I’d found and put me in touch with an archaeologist in Buckinghamshire, who took me to a dig site. I found a bucket full of historical items in a spoil heap. From then on, I went to dig sites every weekend.
I like to work with my hands, so pursued a career as a brick- and stonemason; I even taught the trade in a college for three years. In 1984, I was working as a builder when a former student invited me to try scuba diving. It was exciting being able to see underwater. Over the next two years, I trained for a diving qualification and became close with some guys in a scuba club.
Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s first novel, Blessings, about love in a hostile climate, was written after a life-changing encounter with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Shortly after his 18th birthday, Chukwuebuka Ibeh embarked on his first trip outside his home city of Port Harcourt. He drove more than eight hours north to Lagos for a 10-day creative writing workshop led by fellow Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of Half of a Yellow Sun.
It was a life-changing event for Ibeh, who last year published his own novel, Blessings, at the age of 24.
Trump, who was found guilty of committing 34 felonies, is first ever US president to face a criminal trial and sentencing
Donald Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in his New York hush-money case on Friday, marking both a dramatic and anticlimactic development in historic criminal proceedings weeks before he assumes the presidency.
Trump, whose presidential inauguration is scheduled for 20 January, is the first US president – former or sitting – to face a criminal trial, let alone a guilty verdict and subsequent sentencing. But the judge presiding over Trump’s case, Juan Merchan, has strongly implied that Trump will not face any meaningful consequences for committing 34 felony counts in an effort to tilt the 2016 election in his favor.
England should be allowed to play next month’s cricket match against Afghanistan, the culture and sport secretary has said, despite calls for a boycott over the Taliban government’s treatment of women.
Lisa Nandy backed a decision by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to allow the game to go ahead, saying on Friday that cancelling it would “deny sports fans the opportunity that they love”.
I loved to scour apps and charity shops for cheap clothes and toys – but now I know it is another kind of overconsumption
‘Guess how much this was,” I say to my partner mischievously, revealing with relish the latest toy I’ve found for our youngest son. It’s wooden, Montessori in style (apparently a ball dropping through a hole teaches him object permanence), and retails at about £20 new. “A quid,” my partner proffers, wearily: he is savvy to this game by now. This time, though, I can go one better. “Free!” I screech with glee. “Free! Can you believe that? Someone was giving it away on that secondhand WhatApp group.” I’m giddy with my find, drunk on the size of the bargain, but, as I add the new (to me) toy to the teetering pile of others – dolls, a tunnel, toy cars, a lunchbox – I can feel something – guilt, I think – gnawing away at me. Am I a secondhand overconsumer?
I’ve always been a champion of secondhand shopping. I was plundering charity shops before it was cool and, in a tale that has become family folklore, once found a standard lamp in a branch of the British Heart Foundation and carried it home on the bus. In fairness, that lamp has moved house with me seven times and still stands, resplendent, in my living room. But I fear too many of my other secondhand purchases have been flash-in-the-pan dopamine hits. These purchases gather dust in our bedroom, the study, my son’s toy box. Clothes I’ve bought from charity shops, heady with the exhilaration of them being “only £5”, lie crumpled and forgotten in the depths of my wardrobe before, months later, being dragged out and sold on Vinted for a couple of quid. And still I buy more, ensnared in the grip of what I’ve started to believe is something akin to an addiction.
(ECM) Played by world-class personnel including Bill Frisell and the late, great alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, this 2014 set is full of subtle, spontaneous ideas
When Miles Davis led the 1948-50 sessions that became jazz’s Birth of the Cool releases, the most bewitching solo voice apart from his own trumpet was that of a little-known 21-year-old called Lee Konitz. The alto saxophonist’s quietly captivating work still shimmers as a central feature of Danish guitarist Jakob Bro’s Taking Turns, also recorded in New York but more than 60 years later, and strangely consigned to ECM’s vaults from 2014 until now.
Bro’s reputation grew when he succeeded Bill Frisell in drum master Paul Motian’s band in 2006, the connection that first introduced him to Konitz, who can instantly invent fresh lines to any composition put in front of him. Bro credits this ability with his own understanding of how to lead an improviser’s band that plays composed music with looseness and flow.
Latest battle over whether to ban the app will force justices to weigh importance of security with freedom of speech
The US supreme court will hear oral arguments over the fate of TikTok on Friday. It’s the latest battle in the long war over whether to ban the tremendously popular social media app in the US – and will force the justices to weigh the importance of national security with the freedom of speech.
TikTok and its parent company, Chinese-based ByteDance, asked the supreme court to review the case after a lower court ruled last month to uphold a law to ban the app in the US. That ban is scheduled to go into effect on 19 January, unless ByteDance sells TikTok’s assets to a non-Chinese company. While ByteDance has the option to divest, it claimed in a legal filing that divestiture “is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally”.
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Populist trolling thrives on the oxygen of publicity. It’s on all of us – media and voters – to start looking away
Even more than other forms of politics, populism needs an audience. Populist politicians want to be famous personalities, to make attention-getting claims and promises, to create new national myths. Like other ambitious but less ideological entertainers, they want their act to be widely noticed, and then requested again and again. Without a receptive audience, populism can just seem cranky and simplistic – little different from fringe political movements down the ages.
In Britain, the US and many other democracies from India to Argentina, populism’s current dominant variant is rightwing, and much of its intended audience is the rightwing media. Conservative commentators, reporters and public intellectuals are constantly required to amplify populism’s messages and help maintain the public profiles of its leading figures. With only five Reform UK MPs, Nigel Farage needs the Tory press – just as the Tory press needs him, with rightwing politics in Britain otherwise at a low ebb.
After Hollywood farce of Chelsea and two years out of game, rags-to-riches manager has seized chance to join ‘family club’
Remember Angrygate? For a few surreal days in February 2023, pretty much the entire talking apparatus of English football was engaged – as is its habit – in a fevered, earnest and yet entirely fatuous debate about whether Graham Potter was angry enough to be the Chelsea manager.
Under an increasingly persistent line of questioning, Potter coped pretty well. He firmly pointed out that you do not go from the ninth tier to one of the biggest clubs in the world without a certain ruthless streak. He subtly rebuked the hypocrisy of the media for demanding greater touchline theatrics from Premier League managers and then pontificating about the culture of abuse towards grassroots referees. So subtly, in fact, that the media blissfully ignored that bit.
The World No 1, who wed Ella Victoria Malone last Saturday, will play for St Pauli in the Bundesliga, where he may meet the new classical champion, Gukesh Dommaraju
Magnus Carlsen, the 34-year-old world No 1 and candidate for the greatest of all time, married Ella Victoria Mallone last Saturday in Oslo, where the congregation included a film crew from Netflix. The new Mrs Carlsen, 26, was born in Hong Kong to a Norwegian mother and an American father, was educated in the US, the UK and Canada, and has spent several years in Singapore.
Carlsen’s stellar chess career, boosted by his controversial shared World Blitz title, is set to resume as early as this weekend, when the Norwegian will lead the newly promoted St Pauli team in the German Bundesliga, the strongest chess league in Europe.
From non-smudgy mascara to the surprisingly worth-the-hype Dyson AirStrait, here are my top purchases of 2024
I was struck by how dominant makeup and devices were in 2024, after years of skincare mania in the market. Saie, a fairly priced US makeup startup, stormed it. With the notable exception of its complexion products (improvement needed), the line is excellent. Dew Bronze (£20), an extremely easy, natural-looking bronzing liquid, was its best launch. I reached for it again and again, fluffing it into cheeks and temples with their now-indispensable Base Brush (£21). Saie could get away with less for the money, but mostly overdelivers.
Speaking of price, the high-street hits kept on coming. Elf’s non-smudgy, seven quid Lash XTNDR would have been my mascara of the year at any price.
Conflict has forced a fifth of the country’s schools to close. One teacher, determined to keep working despite threats from marauding Islamist militias, shares their testimony
Teaching in Burkina Faso is a dangerous commitment. Thousands of schools are closed and teachers forced out of the profession because of the risks they face, mostly from Islamist militants attacking schools.
Fifty years on from their dissolution, admirers from Joan Jett to Dave Vanian explain the appeal of a band who ripped up rock’n’roll in high heels – and pointed towards punk
Fifty years ago, the most important American underground rock band of its generation was dying. The New York Dolls, the androgynous-but-tough band who mixed the Rolling Stones, girl groups and garage rock, were imploding under the weight of their own addictions and failures. You wouldn’t say they split, per se – there was still a version of the band led by David Johansen in existence until the end of 1976. But 1975 was the end for Johnny Thunders, Arthur Kane and Jerry Nolan, and the Dolls stopped being the Lower East Side’s rock’n’roll street gang.
They only made two albums, and barely played outside New York. But the band laid the foundations for punk, and taught a generation of outsiders and refuseniks they could be something different, as those whose lives were changed by them recall.
My work bag is closer in scale to a laundry basket than the tiny handbags clutched by models
Fashion sometimes excludes people on grounds that are truly nasty and toxic and which reflect and drive fundamental problems in our culture: race, weight, wealth. So I hesitate to bring up what I’m about to say because it is small-fry compared with those issues. What I want to talk about today is not, in the scheme of things, any kind of hard luck story. But I am going to bring it up anyway.
The microaggression for which I would like to call out fashion, today, is for all the times it has made me feel excluded because my handbag is inelegantly big and heavy. I have quite often felt like a no-hope outcast from glamour, on the grounds that the outfits fashion celebrates on catwalks or billboards or red carpets feature a handbag no bigger than a hardback novel, while the bag I carry to the office and back every day is closer in scale to a laundry basket.
A revelatory account of the composers and performers whose lives were determined by the whims of a dictator
The fact that Joseph Stalin loved music and believed it mattered was both a blessing and a curse for the men and women who made it. If your work found favour you were treated as a secular god with all the trimmings – palatial apartment, good food and freedom to roam as far as the decadent West (assuming you came back when called).
But for those who offended Stalin’s arbitrary and shifting tastes it was another matter. The Father of Nations regularly took time out from his busy killing schedule to vet each new classical music record that came across his desk, noting on the sleeve whether it was “good”, “average” or “rubbish”. A bad rating could earn you a stint in the gulag or, if there were aggravating circumstances (homosexuality, say), a bullet in the back of the head. It has been calculated that 68 composers were sent to Siberia during Stalin’s 30-year reign of terror. Hundreds of other musical artists, from virtuoso composers to popular songbirds via second violinists, were consigned to oblivion when the paper trails concerning them were deliberately destroyed.
Amid the devastation in Ukraine, the photojournalist Robin Tutenges has captured how skateboarding provides a vital escape for the country’s young people – an act of resilience and freedom as they reclaim the streets in the face of conflict and trauma
Far from the frontlines, the streets of some Ukrainian cities may seem to be returning to a semblance of normality, but nothing is quite the same. War imposes itself at every turn, between the shell-torn buildings, the sandbags on the corners of caulked windows and the antitank obstacles – dozens of them are piled up under a tarpaulin, as pictured below. By reclaiming these scarred spaces, Ukrainian skateboarders want to give themselves permission to live. To regain control of their lives in the face of a war that blurs their bearings.
‘Ukraine is like a jail you can’t get out of and Kyiv is my cell. Only skateboarding allows me to escape’ Alexandr
Donald Trump Jr came here, but I sometimes wonder if the world knows anything about us. Our dream is independence
The news that Donald Trump Jr was about to visit Nuuk felt like a flashback to almost six years ago, when his father, Donald Trump, famously floated the idea of buying Greenland. At the time, I had just moved back to Nuuk after finishing film school in Denmark. I remember working on the production of a segment for a travel series by the comedian Conan O’Brien. He came to Nuuk to film an episode poking fun at the idea of Trump buying us.
This time, there’s no late-night comedian in sight, and the next president of the United States has just refused to rule out using military force to take control of my country. Instead of poking fun at the latest US intervention, I found myself in my kitchen with four other women, planning a demonstration against Denmark’s practice of removing Inuit children from their families.
Last year saw dazzling cover art for records by Fontaines DC, Julia Holter and more. But Rajni Perera’s soulful blue painting for Hiatus Kaiyote’s Love Heart Cheat Code proved to be the ultimate winner of the 20th Best Art Vinyl award
Though few welcome idea of being acquired by the US, status quo as part of Denmark is not universally popular
Greenland’s prime minister has called for unity and calm after Donald Trump reheated his global row with Nato allies on Tuesday, when the US president-elect said he was prepared to use tariffs or military force to seize control of Greenland.
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