Former players Scholes and Butt critical before derby
‘If he wants to say something … he can come to my house’
Lisandro Martínez has criticised Paul Scholes for mocking him on a podcast but not directly to the Manchester United defender’s face, following Saturday’s 2-0 win over Manchester City at Old Trafford.
Scholes and Nicky Butt, another prominent former United player, were each scathing about the diminutive Martínez and his ability to mark Erling Haaland, when speaking on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly before the 198th derby.
History teaches that new technologies always make possible new forms of exploitation, and this basic fact has been spectacularly exemplified by the rise of society-scale digital platforms. It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.
Demonstrations against the Iraq war proved protest works. Now we must halt destruction before it more powerfully starts
In spring 2004, Gen Anthony Zinni uttered about Iraq the dreaded words in US politics: “I spent two years in Vietnam, and I’ve seen this movie before.” A year after George W Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished” – when the war had hit its peak popularity at 74% – the invasion had descended into quagmire, marked by a raging insurgency, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and US casualties nearing 1,000. For the first time, a majority of Americans judged the war a “mistake”. In this, they echoed what millions of Americans, predicting fiasco, had been saying since before its start.
By the summer of 2005, with Iraq exploding in civil war, public support further eroded. Vietnam comparisons abounded. Running against the war, Democrats had blowout wins in the 2006 midterms. The new Congress empaneled the bipartisan Iraq study group, which concluded that the war had to end. Its fate was sealed by the election of Barack Obama, who made good on his pledge to withdraw US troops (though US forces later returned to take on the Islamic State).
Jeremy Varon is the author of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Lila Dominguez was working on an article as agents came on to school grounds – their presence has jolted Minneapolis’s young people
When immigration enforcement agents came on to her Minneapolishigh school’s grounds on 7 January, Lila Dominguez was in the school’s basement working on an article about an ICE agent shooting Renee Good earlier that day.
The high school junior was glued to her phone watching videos from outside the school.
From the remnants of my great-grandparents’ Cuban home near the sugar plantation that is part of Unesco’s Slave Route programme – where they were once enslaved - to personal artefacts, each piece reconstructs an uncertain past
Gathering information on our origins that might help with constructing self-identities could be a beautiful endeavour.
Unfortunately, for millions of people worldwide, retracing a past filled with unfinished stories is like trying to nurture a tree whose roots have been severed.
I still remember that narrow ribbon of earth winding down from my grandfather’s house towards the old Triunvirato plantation – the same fields where an enslaved woman called Carlota, who led an uprising in 1843, raised her voice against chains. In the silence of that road, it feels like a place that has been frozen in time
Multiple survivors claim Epstein dangled admission to top universities to ensnare them in his sexual abuse network
A New York City artist who said Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell shopped her around to men is among the survivors claiming that Epstein used the lure of a university education to ensnare her in their sexual abuse network.
Rina Oh was a 21-year-old art student when she was introduced to Epstein in 2000 by Lisa Phillips, a model and Epstein survivor who has since emerged as a powerful voice in the survivors’ network pressuring for full accountability in the long-running money, sex and power scandal.
As survivors face pressure to sell their land in Altadena, a historic Black community, experts say we’re witnessing ‘climate gentrification’
Ellen Williams’ left hand played with her long dark hair as her right hand guided the steering wheel, her phone resting face-down in her lap. Born and raised in Altadena, an unincorporated area in Los Angeles county, she didn’t need to look at a map as she drove to where her home of 22 years burned down.
We passed empty lots with gaping holes where foundations once stood. The banging of hammers rang through the neighborhood and wood frames rose from the dirt, the smell of fresh lumber in the air.Perched on street corners were signs declaring: “Altadena is not for sale.”
One is a Reform voter who supports Tommy Robinson and thinks Muslims want to take over. The other works with immigrants and knows they’re not here to steal jobs or get benefits. Can they make it through a meal together?
Mid-level and senior officials uncomfortable with award
Fifa says it still ‘strongly’ supports the peace prize
There is a growing sense of embarrassment among mid-level and senior officials within Fifa over the awarding of its peace prize to Donald Trump. The US president was handed the award at the World Cup draw in Washington DC in December with the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, telling Trump: “We want to see hope, we want to see unity, we want to see a future. This is what we want to see from a leader and you definitely deserve the first Fifa Peace Prize.”
Ten years ago, Eugene Teo was obsessed with lifting weights. But, gradually, he realised his extreme mindset was making him unhappy. So he changed his outlook
Eugene Teo, 34, began lifting weights at the age of 13, looking for validation. “I was short, skinny and I thought it would give me confidence,” he says. “Bodybuilding for me was the ultimate expression of that.”
Now living on the Gold Coast in Australia, with his partner and daughter, the fitness coach spent from age 16 to 24 training and competing. At times, he lifted weights for up to four hours a day, aiming to get as muscular and lean as possible. The ideal he was chasing? “If you grab your eyelid and feel that skin,” he says, “that’s the skin thinness you want on your bum and abs.”
From Lily Allen to Raven Leilani’s Luster, a new generation is re-writing the script around love and cheating, argues the author of The Ten Year Affair
O n the first track of Lily Allen’s breakup album West End Girl, we hear a long phone call that leads to a marriage’s unravelling. Allen listens, confused then hurt, for almost two minutes as a presumed husband on the other end asks to open up the relationship. Fans made the obvious connection to Allen’s own marriage to David Harbour, the cop from Stranger Things (who is perhaps equally well known for his tasteful Brooklyn townhouse). The two dabbled in polyamory, goes the tabloid story, only to have Harbour break the rules and hurt Allen in the end.
The album is good – pretty and catchy, with an appealing edge of anger. But public reaction went beyond appreciation for the work. The breakup became the object of gruesome rubbernecking. It was a juicy story about one of the oldest topics: infidelity, betrayal, an affair.
Glasner’s outburst following the 2-1 defeat, when the Austrian also admitted he doesn’t care if he sees out his contract until the end of the season having already confirmed he will leave Selhurst Park, is understood to have dismayed Palace’s chair, Steve Parish. He is said to be weighing up if there is any other option than parting company with the manager who led Palace to their first major trophy when they won the FA Cup only eight months ago, with a decision expected on Sunday after Glasner went public over his dissatisfaction in two extraordinary press conferences.
Elissa Slotkin, under investigation over Pentagon video, says president using ‘well-worn playbook’ to silence debate
Donald Trump is borrowing a strategy from authoritarian regimes to intimidate potential critics and discourage them from speaking out, according to a senator under investigation by his administration.
Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, faces questioning after she organised and appeared in a video with other Democrats imploring military service members to refuse “illegal orders”. Fellow senator Mark Kelly and three Democrats from the House of Representatives are also being investigated.
Korey LaVergne, 37, jailed Friday evening on three counts of indecent behavior with a juvenile, according to officials
Authorities in south-west Louisiana recently arrested a Roman Catholic priest on accusations of behaving indecently with a child, igniting a new scandal in the diocese where the US church’s reckoning with clergy abuse began – an institution that just disclosed it could lose up to $162m over pending litigation.
Korey LaVergne was jailed Friday evening on three counts of indecent behavior with a juvenile, according to Acadia parish sheriff KP Gibson, whose agency arrested the priest. LaVergne had presided over mass at St Edward church in Richard – where the Lafayette diocese had assigned him as pastor – hours before he was booked into the Acadia lockup.
At the start of the first festive shift, the other bartender and I silently pulled our crackers and grimly donned paper hats. Yet it worked a treat and taught me the value of making your own fun
I was an employee and a customer at this pub as a teenager in the early 1990s. This was one of four or five pubs clustered around the high street in the town where I grew up in Somerset. We gravitated towards the Blue Ball as teenagers, not because they served underage drinkers. They didn’t. And we could only afford to drink lime and soda anyway. No, we loved this place because it had (drumroll) two bars. So we were not only cool enough to go down the pub (never “to the pub”, strictly “down the pub” or, better still, “down the Blue”), but we even had our own bar.
Emirates Arena, Glasgow The lived-in dustiness of her voice only enriches her storytelling, with her greatest songs now more devastating than ever
For Emmylou Harris, it’s no cliche to say that every song is a story. The country legend has spent 50 years roaming between folk, bluegrass, rock’n’roll and Americana, curating her own songbook of deeply humanitarian music. On this first stop of her European farewell tour, she says goodbye to Scottish fans as part of the Celtic Connections festival, offering up a suitably career-spanning set-list accompanied by memories of Gram Parsons, Nanci Griffith, Bill Monroe, Townes Van Zandt and Willie Nelson, to name just a few.
But the show hardly feels like an ending. “I turn 79 in April, so there!” she crows, after the rowdy honky-tonk of Two More Bottles of Wine makes the East End sports hall feel like a dive bar. Her voice is still spine tingling, now with a lived-in dustiness that only enriches her storytelling: Red Dirt Girl, her great blues tragedy, devastates now more than ever. It is majestic to watch her conduct three-part harmonies for an earthy, spiritual a cappella of Bright Morning Stars, and her delight in her band is infectious: “It’s alright to cheer the boys!” she urges, after a show-stopping mandolin solo from Eamon McLoughlin. She even throws in a brand-new cover of Johnny Cash’s Help Him, Jesus (“I’ve always longed to do it”), digging into her lower end with real swagger.
When funding cuts closed National Theatre Wales, the actor saw it as an emergency, and set about building a replacement. As its first show comes to the stage, he explains his plan to bring big productions back to his homeland
Since Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in 1938, it is said that not a day has passed when the Pulitzer prize-winning show hasn’t been performed. “Every time I read it, I come away with the feeling of having been woken up,” says Michael Sheen, star of the upcoming touring production of Wilder’s play about a close-knit community in small-town America. “With this urgent sense of ‘I have to not waste this.’”
Transposing the heart of the American classic to Wales, this new production also marks the launch of Welsh National Theatre, a hugely ambitious company formed – and financed – by Sheen in response to the collapse of the former National Theatre Wales. “Opening night is going to be more than just the opening night of a play,” says Russell T Davies, the show’s creative associate. “I think in 10 years, we’ll be having a marvellous celebration that all began with Our Town.”
Vice-president has emerged as key defender of Maga flame – and is backed by big tech billions. Is this the heir apparent?
“We did not have a lot of money,” said JD Vance, placing hand on heart as he recalled his childhood in Middletown, Ohio in the 1990s. “I was raised by a woman who struggled often to put food on the table and clothes on her back.”
There was an earnest cry from the audience. “Mamaw!” shouted a man.
The food, beauty and pharmaceutical industries poison our self-image. GLP-1 drugs will only make them richer – and strengthen the hold they have over us
Fifty years ago, I started thinking about the demand for women to look a certain way and the rebellions against the narrow ways in which we were supposed to display (and not display) our bodies. For a while, there was a conversation about the strictures. Some young women refused to conform. Some women risked being in the bodies they had rather than embodying the dominant images of being Madonna or the whore. But troubled eating abounded, even if it wasn’t always visible, stoked by the food and diet industries and their bedfellows in the beauty and fashion industries. These industries targeted appearance as crucial to girls’ and women’s identity and their place in the world.
Today, a new kind of troubled eating is stalking the land, entirely induced by the new GLP-1 weight-loss drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies and promoted by their willing agents on social media. It is totally understandable that people want relief from obsessive and invasive thoughts about their bodies and food. The explosion of GLP-1 drugs has provided a kind of psychological peace for many who feel less frightened of their appetites.
Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst and social critic. She is the author of many books, including BodiesandFat Is a Feminist Issue
I’m not sure why, but I can’t get commentary on Bublik v Brooksby, which isn’t helpful, but Bublik leads 3-1; Tiafoe is up a break in set three, so at 4-2 is only two games away from seeing off Kubler; Zheng leads Korda by a break at 4-3 in the fifth; and Norrie is up a set on Bonzi, but serving to stay in the second at 4-5.
We’re away on Laver, Sabalenka in dayglo straight out of 1989 … and Rakotomanga Rajaonah immediately makes 0-30 on her serve. Oh! And when the champ swats a backhand long, she’s down three break points! All three are saved, but then the underdog raises a fourth on advantage, thrashes a deep return, and Sabalenka nets a forehand! Rakotomanga Rajaonah need only hold five times and she’s a set up! Er yeah, let’s see…
European leaders hit back at Trump ‘blackmail’ as president escalates plan for the US to acquire Greenland
The United States will also suffer if president Donald Trump implements threats to impose tariffs on European countries opposing his plans to acquire Greenland, a French minister said on Sunday.
“In this escalation of tariffs, he has a lot to lose as well, as do his own farmers and industrialists,” French agriculture minister Annie Genevard told broadcasters Europe 1 and CNews.
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