Media bosses expect web referrals to plunge and want journalists to emulate content creators, report finds
Media companies expect web traffic to their sites from online searches to plummet over the next three years, as AI summaries and chatbots change the way consumers use the internet.
An overwhelming majority are also planning to encourage their journalists to behave more like YouTube and TikTok content creators this year, as short-form video and audio content continues to boom.
Reform’s new candidate for mayor claims people pity Londoners for living in an unsafe capital. But the evidence is clear: we’re making our streets safer
Last year, something extraordinary happened in London. As the conversation about crime got even louder, London quietly reached the lowest per capita homicide rate in its recorded history. Even London’s harshest critics have to accept this is impressive progress.
For too many, it will no doubt come as a surprise. In recent years, politicians and commentators have sought to spam our social media feeds with an endless stream of distortions and untruths – painting a dystopian picture of a lawless place where criminals run rampant.
Complaint against Cécile Desprairies over Nazi collusion novel alleges that ‘resentment permeates the entire work’
The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz is famously credited with the line: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” In contemporary European literature, a book these days is often the beginning of a familial feud. With thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of family strife undergoing a sustained boom across the continent, it can increasingly lead to family reunions in courtrooms.
Such was the case with the French historian Cécile Desprairies, who on Wednesday was sued for defamation by her brother and a cousin over the depiction of her late mother and her great-uncle in her 2024 novel La Propagandiste.
Beat the winter blues with a soul-soothing, Senegalese-inspired spiced chicken pie and hearty Nigerian plantain boats stuffed with black-eyed beans
If there’s anything that can assuage my winter blues, it’s a soul-soothing chicken pie. I’ve long enjoyed innovating fusions between west African and other cuisines, and today’s marriage of a deeply flavourful Senegalese chicken yassa-inspired filling in buttery, flaky puff pastry is one of my all-time favourites. But, first, my take on hearty Nigerian stewed beans – ewa riro – using tinned beans for added convenience. Typically paired with ripe plantain, I use the rich beans to fill canoas (plantain boats) in a playful, Latin American-inspired twist.
Sadiq Khan says ‘public health’ approach has made the capital one of the safest cities in the western world
London’s murder rate has dropped to its lowest in more than a decade with police in the capital and the mayor saying it is now one of the safest cities in the western world.
In the face of Nigel Farage, flag-waving and a longstanding housing crisis, some Glaswegians are taking on anti-immigration rhetoric
Selina Hales has a thing about pineapples. She is talking in a quiet office, set aside from the bustle of Refuweegee, the charity she founded 10 years ago, and the walls are festooned with tissue paper cutouts of the fruit, which is an international symbol of hospitality.
Refuweegee – its name a combination of the words “refugee” and “Weegee”, local slang for Glaswegian – has expanded exponentially over the decade into an operation that supports hundreds of asylum seekers and refugees in the city every day. Back then, she had a simple idea about making welcome packs, each one including a handwritten letter from a Glasgow resident. “One of our very favourite early letters said: “Welcome to Glasgow. I like pineapples. What do you like?”
Company says doll is the latest expansion of its commitment to representation and inclusion
With an animated Barbie film in development, following the success of Greta Gerwig’s 2023 blockbuster movie, Mattel Studios will certainly have a diverse range of characters to bring to life.
On Monday, Mattel launches its first autistic Barbie. Coming barely six months after its first doll with type 1 diabetes, this newest addition to Barbie’s Fashionistas range is designed so that more children “see themselves in Barbie” and to encourage all children to play with dolls that reflect the world around them.
Neuroscientist Ben Rein is on a mission to show that being around others not only feels good, but can even improve recovery from strokes, cancer and heart attacks. So why are so many of us isolated and glued to our phones?
‘I hate it.” I’ve asked the neuroscientist Ben Rein how he feels about the online sea of junk neuroscience we swim in – the “dopamine fasts”, “serotonin boosts” and people “regulating” their “nervous system” – and this is his kneejerk response. He was up early with his newborn daughter at his home in Buffalo, New York, but he’s fresh-faced and full of beans on a video call, swiftly qualifying that heartfelt statement. “Let me clarify my position: I don’t hate it when it’s accurate, but it’s rarely accurate.”
He draws my attention to a reel he saw recently on social media of a man explaining that reframing pain as “neurofeedback, not punishment” activates the anterior cingulate cortex (a part of the brain involved in registering pain). “That’s genuinely never been studied; you are just making this up,” he says. He posted a pithy response on Instagram, pleading with content creators to “leave neuroscience out of it”. “That’s why I think it’s especially important for real scientists to be on the internet,” he says. “We need to show the public what it looks like to speak responsibly and accurately about science.”
Dr Ahmed Muhanna, one of the country’s most senior emergency care consultants, says the scale of destruction he saw on his release brought him to tears
The only thing that kept Dr Ahmed Muhanna going during his 22 months inside Israeli prisons and detention centres was dreaming of his return to his family and to Gaza. When he was finally released after 665 days as a prisoner, he arrived home to find every place he had returned to in his memories had been obliterated.
While in prison, he and the other inmates were “completely cut off from the outside world”, he says. When he was released he was driven over the border and through Gaza to his hospital, the al-Awda. The scale of the destruction he saw “made my skin crawl … my chest tightened and my tears began to flow”.
Our politically engaged mother loved deriding me and my sister for being stroppy and delinquent. This picture tells another story – and is a testament to our sunny dispositions
My mother, Gwen, liked to describe things in broad brush strokes. Me and my sister’s teenage years, mid-80s to early 90s, she’d cover with: “Zoe was delinquent, couldn’t get a word of sense out of her.” Or: “1986? That was the year Stacey was awful.” Going through photo albums to make a montage for her funeral, all her pictures from that era were testament to our ill-behaviour: me, sniffing a geranium, sarcastically; Stace, outside a cafe in an indeterminable European city where you can almost lip-read her stroppy “piss off” to camera in the still moment.
Gwen was politically engaged – you’d come downstairs on a Wednesday morning to find a handwritten letter starting, “Dear Pérez de Cuéllar, I cannot deplore enough your silence on the matter of the Western Sahara” – and heavily involved in progressive politics: our kitchen was full of posters that would have to catch on fire before they’d ever get taken down. There was one fighting pit closures, for example, right next to one about having no planet B, and mum went heavy on the spoof public information campaigns. Instead of the government’s “protect and survive” leaflets, telling you how to survive a nuclear war by taking a door off its hinges and propping it against a wall, there was a “protest and survive” poster; a rip-off of the “Don’t Die of Ignorance” HIV campaign, which said something like “Don’t Die of Tories”, and “Heroin isn’t the only thing that damages your mind”, featuring a man reading (I think?) The Sun.
The territory and the European bloc are trying to see off the US president, who has said control of Greenland is essential to national security
The Trump administration has said repeatedly that the US needs to gain control of Greenland, justifying its claim from “the standpoint of national security” and warning that it will “do something” about the territory “whether they like it or not”.
This puts the EU and Nato in a difficult spot. Greenland, a largely self-governing part of Denmark, is not a member of the bloc but Denmark is; while the Arctic island is covered by the defence alliance’s guarantees through Denmark’s membership.
He has survived loss, breakdown and schooling by ‘scary nuns’, but the anguish is still there in his art. As his new show thrills Paris, the US-based, Irish-born artist talks about the pain that drives him
When I ask Sean Scully what an abstract painting has over a figurative one it’s music he reaches for. “You might ask, what’s Miles Davis got over the Beatles? And the answer is: doesn’t have any words in it. And then you could say, what have the Beatles got over John Coltrane? Well, they’ve got words.”
It’s clear which choice he has made. Scully, who paints rectangles and squares and strips of colour abutting and sliding into each other, is an instrumentalist in paint rather than a pop artist. The meaning of his art is something you feel, not something you can easily describe. He has more in common with Davis and Coltrane than with the Beatles. In addition to improvisational brilliance, his new paintings even colour-match with Coltrane’s classic album Blue Train and Davis’s Kind of Blue. For Scully, the greatest living abstract painter, is playing the blues in Paris. In his current exhibition at the city’s Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, long, textured blue notes as smoky as a sax at midnight alternate and mingle with black and red and brown in a slow, sad, beautiful music that doesn’t need words, art that doesn’t require images.
One Battle After Another and Adolescence have led this year’s Golden Globes with four wins apiece.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture epic took home best comedy or musical film. It also earned him best director and screenplay, marking his first-ever Golden Globe wins.
Anthony Albanese will push the Coalition and the Greens to support urgent legislation establishing tougher hate speech laws and gun reform, bringing MPs back to Canberra next Monday to debate laws proposed in the wake of the Bondi terror attack.
Recalling parliament two weeks early, the prime minister said the new hate speech and anti-vilification laws would be considered in the same legislation as provisions to establish the biggest gun buyback program since the Port Arthur massacre.
US president claims ‘Iran wants to negotiate’ as rights groups report that regime’s crackdown on protest has killed hundreds
Donald Trump has claimed Iran has reached out and proposed negotiations, as he considers “very strong” military action against the regime over a deadly crackdown on protesters that has reportedly killed hundreds.
Asked on Sunday by reporters aboard Air Force One if Iran had crossed his previously stated red line of protesters being killed, Trump said “they’re starting to, it looks like.”
US president says company is ‘playing too cute’ after CEO responds sceptically to his push for oil investment after deposing Nicolás Maduro
Donald Trump has said he might block ExxonMobil from investing in Venezuela after the oil company’s chief executive called the country “uninvestable” during a White House meeting last week.
Darren Woods told the US president that Venezuela would need to change its laws before it could be an attractive investment opportunity, during the high-profile meeting on Friday with at least 17 other oil executives.
Fed chair accuses DoJ of threatening criminal charges over building renovation projects because central bank defied Trump’s interest rate demands
The Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve, a significant escalation in Donald Trump’s extraordinary attack on the US central bank.
Powell said the Department of Justice had served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas on Friday, threatening a criminal indictment related to his testimony before the Senate banking committee in June last year, regarding renovations to the Fed’s historic office buildings in Washington DC.
Brock Purdy threw a go-ahead touchdown pass to Christian McCaffrey late in the fourth quarter, San Francisco used a trick play on a TD toss from wide receiver Jauan Jennings, and the 49ers eliminated the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles with a 23-19 wildcard victory on Sunday.
The 49ers head to top-seeded Seattle next weekend for an NFC divisional playoff game. The NFC West rivals split the season series.
UK government starts contest to have deep-strike prototypes delivered within 12 months; heat-starved Kyiv under Russian attack again. What we know on day 1,419
Britain is to develop a new deep-strike ballistic missile for Ukraine, the government has announced. Under the project, named Nightfall, the British government said on Sunday that it had launched a competition to rapidly develop ground-launched ballistic missiles that could carry a 200kg (440lb) warhead to a range of more than 500km (310 miles).
“Nightfall missiles will be capable of being launched from a range of vehicles,” said the UK defence ministry (MoD), “firing multiple missiles in quick succession and withdrawing within minutes – allowing Ukrainian forces to hit key military targets before Russian forces can respond.”
Three industry teams would each get £9m to design, develop and deliver their first three Nightfall missiles within 12 months for test firings, said the MoD. Ukraine’s current ballistic missiles include Atacms, for which it relies on the US, and the self-developed Sapsan.
Russia was again attacking Kyiv early on Monday, the Ukrainian military said, sparking a fire in at least one district. Ukrainian air defences were at work against incoming targets, said Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration.
The renewed attack came as more than 1,000 apartment buildings in the Ukrainian capital remained without heating because of a Russian bombardment on Friday. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, said that despite repairs the situation was “still extremely difficult”, particularly in border regions.
At the Vatican, Pope Leo offered prayers for the people of Ukraine, saying the “particularly serious” strikes on energy infrastructure were “hitting the civilian population hard, just as the cold weather is getting worse … I pray for those who are suffering and renew my appeal for an end to violence and for efforts to achieve peace to be intensified.”
Ukraine’s forces hit three drilling platforms operated by Russian oil company Lukoil in the waters of the Caspian Sea, the Ukrainian military general staff announced on Sunday. The strikes on Russian energy sites aim to deprive Moscow of oil export revenue used to fund the war. Moscow meanwhile said a Ukrainian drone strike killed one person and wounded three others in the Russian city of Voronezh.
Paul Thomas Anderson, Jessie Buckley, Stephen Graham, Wagner Moura and Rose Byrne are among this year’s big winners
It’s not an awards ceremony without a pregnancy reveal is it? Wunmi Mosaku, the British Nigerian star of Sinners is wearing a canary yellow bespoke gown and sheer veil by Matthew Reisman, and the colour is steeped in meaning. “In Yoruba, we say Iya ni Wúrà which means ‘mother is golden’”, she wrote in Vogue. Top tier stuff. More colour please.
Wanda Sykes is the first celeb I’ve seen on the red carpet tonight with a “Be Good” pin, which some are wearing in honor of Renee Good, the unarmed woman shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week, sparking national outrage. Others are wearing “ICE OUT” pins as part of an ACLU-endorsed protest of the Trump administration’s persecution of undocumented immigrants and larger $100m recruitment campaign aimed at expanding ICE presence in communities across the country.
An outstanding critical voice, his deep knowledge and love of music was evident in everything he wrote
The Guardian’s long-serving and much admired classical music critic Andrew Clements died on Sunday aged 75 after a period of illness.
Clements joined the Guardian arts team in August 1993, succeeding Edward Greenfield as the paper’s chief music critic. His appointment was clinched by a personal recommendation to the editor from the late Alfred Brendel, who argued for Clements to get the job on account of his deep understanding of contemporary music. For the next 32 years, Clements ranged across all fields of classical music in his writing for the Guardian, and often beyond.
I do not need to share Randa Abdel-Fattah’s views to believe that removing her is wrong. This is why I’ve withdrawn from Adelaide writers’ week
If there has been a bright red thread running through my career, it’s the importance of freedom of speech. It underpinned my life as a journalist and correspondent, became central to the campaign to get me out of prison in Egypt and, perhaps paradoxically, it is why I have reluctantly withdrawn from this year’s Adelaide writers’ week.
On Thursday the Adelaide festival board announced it had removed the writer and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the program, not because of anything she was proposing to say at the festival but because of things she said previously, reassessed in the aftermath of the Bondi attack.
Peter Greste is a professor of journalism at Macquarie University and the executive director for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom
The defending champion Shaun Murphy is out of the Masters after a shock 6-2 defeat against China’s Wu Yize on the opening day of the 2026 tournament at Alexandra Palace.
Wu, the world No 13, dominated from the outset and won the opening three frames, recording a superb break of 137 in the second. Murphy, the top seed, rallied briefly but, with a highest break of only 49, could not get back into the contest.
Meta has deactivated more than half a million accounts for teenagers across Facebook, Instagram and Threads as a result of Australia’s under-16s social media ban, the company has announced.
Just over one month since the ban came into effect, Meta announced on Monday that between 4 December, when the company began deactivating accounts, and 11 December, 544,052 accounts Meta believed to be held by users under 16 were deactivated.
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