2nd over: Australia 12-1 (Inglis 5, Green 0) Cameron Green joins Inglis in the middle. Ireland buzz around but Inglis calms a few nerves with a languid back cut for four through the off side.
Head is run out! Squirts a shot behind square and sets off for as dodgy single, doesn’t get there and is gone!
The riders are having to squint into the sun to see their scores come up. There’s lots of USA support on the slopes, first for 19-year old Bea Kim, who looks happy to settle into fifth, then for the queen of half pipe, Chloe Kimm, who is aiming for her third consecutive gold medal in this discipline. Oh and she’s also just finished a degree at Stamford. It’s a cracking start – a big backside 720, frontside 900, and something floaty and turny which the commentators describe as “the penny black” of halfpipe. She immediately settles into first.
Women’s halfpipe qualifying: Thinking about my attempts to stand on a skateboard as young women in baggy snow trousers zig-zag and float across the halfpipe.
Russian attacks show no sign of slowing as fourth anniversary of full-scale invasion approaches
Meanwhile, the European Commission has outlined its plan to counter drone threats after months of disruptions caused by drones and meteorological balloons causing chaos on major airports across the EU.
The plan sets out proposals to rapidly increase technological development and industrial production of anti-drone technologies, and their testing through a new EU Counter-Drone Centre of Excellence.
Whether making microtonal pop or playing Renaissance instruments with sheep bones, a crop of bold artists are making genuinely strange music go mainstream – but are they at the mercy of the algorithm?
Chloë Sobek is a Melbourne musician who plays the violone, a Renaissance precursor to the double bass. But instead of playing it in the traditional manner, she puts wobbling bits of cardboard between its strings or uses a sheep’s bone as a bow, and these weird interventions have become catnip for Instagram’s algorithm, getting her tens of thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of views for each of her self-made performance videos. “Despite how it might appear, I’m a reasonably shy person,” she says.
When Laurie Anderson’s robo-minimalist masterwork O Superman hit No 2 in the UK charts in 1981, thanks to incessant airplay on John Peel’s radio show, it was a signal of a media outlet’s power to propel experimental music into the mainstream. That’s now happening again as prepared-instrument players such as Sobek, plus experimental pianists, microtonal singers and numerous other boundary-pushing solo performers, are routinely breaking out of underground circles thanks to videos – generally self-recorded at home – going viral on TikTok and Instagram.
Police search for more possible victims of Jacques Leveugle, whose alleged crimes span many countries and date back to 1960s
French police have made a rare international appeal for victims and witnesses in the case of a 79-year-old former teacher accused of raping and sexually assaulting 89 children across five continents from the 1960s until 2022.
Police in Grenoble said Jacques Leveugle, who has been in pretrial detention in France since April 2025, was a “textbook example” of a serial sexual offender in an unusually sprawling case spanning many countries from Germany to India over more than five decades.
Fatema Rajwani’s comments come after she and five others were cleared of aggravated burglary over break-in at Israeli defence firm
The youngest of six Palestine Action activists cleared of aggravated burglary over a break-in at an Israeli defence firm’s UK site has said the verdicts were a vindication of their cause.
After 18 months in jail, Fatema Rajwani, 21, was released on bail last Wednesday, having also been acquitted by a jury at Woolwich crown court of violent disorder in relation to the raid on the Elbit Systems factory in Filton, near Bristol, on 6 August 2024.
Cancelled flights and petrol shortages are disrupting daily life across the island. We want to hear from people living in Cuba about what it’s like right now
Severe fuel shortages are disrupting daily life across Cuba after the US tightened its oil blockade on the island. International flights have been cancelled and petrol stations have closed with people reportedly struggling to access fuel.
The US has threatened any country that sends oil to Cuba with increased tariffs, claiming the island’s government is a threat to US national security and comes amid wider tensions between Havana and the Trump administration.
Sturla Holm Lægreid opened up after winning bronze
Woman thanks family and friends for support received
The former girlfriend of the Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid has responded to his public apology for having an affair, saying it “is hard to forgive” what he did.
It was after Lægreid had won bronze in the individual 20km on Tuesday that he, unprompted, opened up on what he described as the “hardest week of my life,” saying: “Half a year ago I met the love of my life. The world’s most beautiful and nicest person. Three months ago I made the mistake of my life and cheated on her, and I told her about that a week ago. This has been the worst week of my life.”
Club five points above drop zone after Newcastle defeat
Spurs have not won in the Premier League in 2026
Thomas Frank has been sacked by Tottenham, the final straw for the head coach coming on Tuesday when his team lost at home to Newcastle, leaving Spurs 16th in the Premier League, five points above the relegation zone.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium crowd again rebelled against Frank, booing him and chanting that he would be sacked in the morning.
Korean-American artist’s work has continued to resonate in many years since her tragic murder in 1982 at the age of 31
If there’s one thing the late avant-garde artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is known for, it’s almost certainly her experimental 1982 book Dictée, a hard-to-classify work that has become a mainstay of college curriculums and ambitious writers. Poet Juliana Spahr has described the work as “part autobiography, part biography, part personal diary, part ethnography, part auto-ethnography, part translation”, noting that it collages “multiple voices – American, European, and Asian – so as to build a history”.
A major new retrospective of Cha at the Berkeley Art Museum – Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings – aims to go far beyond Dictée to present the artist’s varied and prodigious output, bringing attention to her full complexity as a creative force and the many contemporary thinkers who have been inspired by her career.
Surprisingly few products cater for people with a mixture of dry, balanced and oily skin. The ones that do shoulld be key to your regime
Given that combination is probably the most common skin type, it’s frustratingly under-served, especially when it comes to moisturisers.
In practice, day creams, lotions and gels marketed for those with a combination of dry, balanced and oily areas often only play to the latter condition. They add no oil and shine to the chin, nose and forehead, but offer only fleeting comfort to tight, parched areas around the cheeks.
Some Russians have dismissed the Games over the continued exclusion of their athletes. But the truth is international sport is still important to Moscow
Duma member Vitaly Milonov didn’t mince words when asked four years ago about the international ban against Russian athletes.
“There’s no point in humiliating ourselves and begging to be let in,” said the St Petersburg deputy, a member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. “We have our pride.” International events had been corrupted by the United States, he claimed in a 2022 interview, just weeks after the International Olympic Committee and other governing bodies imposed the ban. “Only Russia can say no. Other countries will accept whatever nonsense the Americans force on them – teams of vegans, queers and lesbians.”
In interviews with community leaders, lawyers, security specialists and bereaved relatives, the Guardian pieces together how an operation targeting a criminal gang left 122 people dead last October
Warning: contains graphic images
Juliana Conceição startled awake as the first shots of an infamous day were fired in the Complexo da Penha, the labyrinthine Rio favela where she was born and raised.
It was 4.30am on 28 October. Thousands of police had surrounded the community’s barricaded entrances and were preparing to swarm up its streets on foot and in black armoured personnel carriers with firing ports and bullet-cracked ballistic windows.
After decades of recovery, southern right whales are showing signs of a climate-driven decline in breeding rates, which scientists say is a “warning signal” about changes in the Southern Ocean.
After being hunted to near extinction by commercial whaling in the 19th and 20th centuries, southern right whales remained endangered in Australia.
Downing Street was not aware that Keir Starmer’s longstanding communications chief had campaigned for a paedophile when his peerage was announced, a minister has said.
Matthew Doyle, who stepped down as the No 10 head of communications last March, was suspended on Monday from the Labour whip in his new role in the Lords after it emerged that he had campaigned on behalf of a friend who had been charged with possessing indecent images of children.
Based on a 2000 novella, this sweet animation follows a young girl who wakes from a vegetative state on the verge of feral, but begins to bond with others after an intervention by her grandmother
This tender and sweet animation from film-makers Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is an involving, poignant study of early childhood; how fragile it is, and how strong you feel yourself to be to have outlived or surpassed it. It is based on the autobiographical novella The Character of Rain by Belgian author Amélie Nothomb, published in 2000.
Loïse Charpentier voices the role of Amélie, a little girl living in Kobe, Japan, with her Belgian family in the late 60s; mum, dad and older brother and sister. Until the age of three, she was in a persistent vegetative state, but was miraculously jolted free of it by a terrifying earthquake; yet she emerges quarrelsome and almost feral, to the despair of her parents. That is until her elegant grandmother Claude (Cathy Cerda) comes to visit and gives her a piece of narcotically delicious white Belgian chocolate, which causes Amélie to bloom into a lovely, biddable child who adores her Japanese nanny Nishio-san (Victoria Grosbois).
Marseille beaten 5-0 by PSG and 3-0 by Club Brugge
De Zerbi joined as head coach in 2024 after Brighton exit
Roberto De Zerbi has left Marseille in the wake of a 5-0 thrashing at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain. The nine-time French champions said on Wednesday that they had ended “their collaboration by mutual agreement.”
The heavy loss Sunday at the Parc des Princes restored PSG’s two-point lead over Lens after 21 rounds, with Marseille fourth. De Zerbi’s team also endured an embarrassing 3-0 loss at Club Brugge two weeks ago that resulted in Marseille exiting the Champions League.
“We got lost out there,” 13-year-old Austin Appelbee tells the triple-zero operator, after swimming 4km (2.5 miles) in the rough, open ocean and running 2km (1.25 miles) to save his family.
The operator asks how long it is since he set off.
The 21-year-old has dominated speed skating for three years running. In the next 11 days, he could become not just an Olympic champion but the face of the Winter Games
Each Winter Olympics produces one or two figures who come to define it. The stars whose performances transcend result sheets and medal tables and settle into memory as shorthand for the event itself. For decades, America has waited for their next one: someone capable of cutting through the noise of the crowded sports landscape and centering themselves in the national conversation.
The 28 January raid of the Fulton county election office also came after a referral from a White House lawyer
The FBI’s rationale behind raiding the Fulton county election office in Georgia last month was based on debunked claims from election deniers and came after a referral from a White House lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election, a search warrant affidavit unsealed on Tuesday reveals.
The warrant offers the first insight for the basis for the FBI’s 28 January raid on the Fulton county election office. FBI officials seized nearly 700 boxes of election materials in the raid.
White House tells investors ‘they shouldn’t panic’ but says job numbers will be lower in future because of US deportation programme; Heineken hit by slower beer sales
Barratt Redrow shares plunged after Britain’s biggest housebuilder reported lower profits and warned of a subdued market.
In contrast with rival Bellway, which talked of “clear signs of improvement” in housing demand yesterday, Barratt Redrow sounded less optimistic.
During the first half we delivered a resilient performance in a subdued market while making strong progress integrating Redrow. As that integration nears completion, our focus is on disciplined execution. We are embedding our proven operating model across the enlarged group, delivering operational excellence, strengthening efficiency, and positioning Barratt Redrow to deliver volume growth, margin progression, and capital returns through the cycle.
However, while progress made on planning reform is encouraging, a stable and supportive demand environment is essential to enable increased delivery at scale across the sector.
Along with its peers, Barratts suffered an extended period of uncertainty from buyers ahead of the budget, although once this hurdle was overcome, many customers then decided to complete before the end of the calendar year.
Even so, the currently unstable political environment continues to weigh on consumer confidence, while affordability concerns remain in sharp focus particularly for first-time buyers. That being said, mortgage availability constraints are easing and the possibility of interest rate cuts later this year could help to spark the sector as a whole into life.
The big reveal from tech start-up Altruist Corp, which is led by former Wall Street professionals, is a new tool helping financial advisers personalise tax strategies for clients and deal with all the admin. The worry is that this is just the tip of the iceberg and fresh efficiencies will be unleashed by AI to disrupt the financial advice and investment industry and reduce the fees which can be charged. As the AI cards are shuffled, the pile of potential losers is mounting up, and speculation about which sector will be hit next is rife.
The medals stacked up for the Scandinavians and Johannes Høsflot Klæbo basked in his main-character era
Day four of the Milano Cortina Games, and one question is starting to feel a little rhetorical: how do you stop Johannes Høsflot Klæbo? Short answer – you don’t. You just race for second and hope he smiles at you on the way past.
On Tuesday, the Norwegian cross-country phenomenon did what he has been doing all week: made world-class athletes look as if they were chasing a mirage. Technique? Flawless. Tactics? Ruthless. Power, speed and a hill-climbing gear that seems to defy physics? Check, check and check. Klæbo cruised through the sprint classic rounds, detonated the field on the final climb and skied away with his second gold of these Games and his seventh gold overall, putting him just one shy of the all-time Winter Olympic record.
The clamour for change is growing on the south coast and the pressure is growing on the Seagulls’ young head coach
When Paul Barber referenced “growing fan impatience across large parts of the football landscape” in his programme notes before Sunday’s game against their arch rivals Crystal Palace, the Brighton chief executive must have feared what was to come.
The clamour for change on the south coast that began as a murmur last spring after Fabian Hürzeler’s side had collected one point from four Premier League matches and been knocked out of the FA Cup in the sixth round has been steadily building ever since. Despite recovering from a slow start to this season, a second successive December without a victory has been followed by more disappointment in the first few weeks of 2026 to heap pressure on the German head coach’s slender shoulders.
“In their Champions League match against PSV Eindhoven, Bayern Munich made four substitutions in the 62nd minute,” writes Stephan Wijnen. “The four players entering the pitch together had a combined estimated value of €265m (Harry Kane, Michael Olise, Serge Gnabry and Alphonso Davies). Is this the most expensive combined substitution ever?”
Before we go any further – a player’s estimated value is not an objective measure, but using transfer fees doesn’t necessarily work, with some players moving for no fee (Kylian Mbappé, for example). Like Stephan in his question, we are going to use Transfermarkt’s valuations in a bid for consistency, and will focus on the value of players coming on.
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