Russian star scores two goals in win over Blackhawks
39-year-old has chance to beat record on Sunday
Alex Ovechkin tied Wayne Gretzky’s NHL record by scoring the 893rd and 894th goals of his career, the second the game winner, as the Washington Capitals rallied to beat the Chicago Blackhawks 5-3 on Friday night.
Ovechkin scored No 894 on the power play with 13:47 left in regulation to put Washington ahead after Dylan Strome tied it earlier in the third period. The 39-year-old Russian superstar also opened the scoring with his 893rd less than four minutes into game.
The Labor government is on the hunt for a buyer for the port of Darwin despite the Chinese-owned company who holds the lease insisting it is not for sale.
Anthony Albanese revealed the plan after calling in to local Darwin radio on Friday afternoon in a deliberate attempt to get ahead of a similar announcement the Coalition made on Saturday.
Agency that sends volunteers to countries around world expects ‘additional visits’ from Musk cost-cutting team
The Peace Corps is the latest federal agency to be targeted by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”. It appears “Doge” could be eyeing cuts to the agency, which sends US volunteers around the world to work in local communities on health, education and environmental initiatives.
“Staff from the Department of Government Efficiency are currently working at Peace Corps headquarters and the agency is supporting their requests,” the agency said in an email to the Guardian on Friday.
Nine children among the dead in strike on Kryvyi Rih residential area as Kyiv says Moscow’s claim it targeted military gathering is false. What we know on day 1,137
A Russian missile strike killed at least 18 people, including nine children, in a residential area of Ukraine’s central city of Kryvyi Rih on Friday, local officials said – one of Moscow’s deadliest attacks this year in the war. The strike in President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home town damaged residential blocks and sparked fires, the regional governor said on Telegram. More than 30 people, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital, Serhiy Lysak said. At least 50 people were wounded, the emergency services said, adding that the figure was growing. Zelenskyy said rescue efforts were still under way and called on the west to exert greater pressure on Moscow. “All Russian promises end with missiles, drones, bombs or artillery,” he said in his nightly video address. “Diplomacy means nothing to them.”
Russia’s defence ministry said the strike on Kryvyi Rih was targeted at a military gathering, a claim the Ukrainian military denounced as “false information”. “The missile struck a residential area with a playground,” the military’s general staff said on Telegram. The city’s military administrator said after the strike that Russian drones had later attacked private homes there, triggering fires at four sites. Oleksandr Vilkul said an elderly woman had died in her home and five others were injured.
The US secretary of state said Donald Trump was not “going to fall into the trap of endless negotiations” with Russia over Ukraine, adding Washington would know within weeks whether Moscow was serious about pursuing peace. “We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace,” Marco Rubio told journalists in Brussels on Friday after talks with Nato allies. “Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later.” Pjotr Sauer reports that Rubio also appeared to strike a more sympathetic tone towards Kyiv, saying the Ukrainians “have shown a willingness to enter, for example, into a complete ceasefire”.
The Kremlin said on Friday that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump had no plans to talk after a visit to Washington by the Russian president’s investment envoy as wider negotiations over a Ukraine truce appeared stalled. According to NBC News on Thursday, Trump’s inner circle was advising him not to speak to Putin again until the Russian leader commits to a full ceasefire in Ukraine.
Ukraine and Russia accused each other of fresh attacks on energy infrastructure, in breach of a US-brokered moratorium. Zelenskyy said Moscow launched a drone attack on a thermal power plant in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson on Friday, while Russia’s defence ministry accused Kyiv of attacking Russian energy facilities six times in the past 24 hours.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that European military planners could be ready within a month with details of a foreign troop contingent in Ukraine seen as critical to ending the war with Russia. Speaking to reporters in Kyiv after meeting British and French military chiefs, the Ukrainian president said many other countries would also contribute to the effort, which envisages foreign troops patrolling Ukrainian land, sea and airspace. “I think the teams need about a month, no longer, and we will be fully ready with an understanding of this infrastructure.”
The Vatican’s foreign minister spoke with his Russian counterpart on Friday to discuss the war in Ukraine and plans to stop the fighting, the Vatican said. Russia’s foreign ministry later said the phone call between Sergey Lavrov and Archbishop Paul Gallagher had been initiated by the Vatican and that they had discussed “ways to resolve the Ukrainian crisis with the obligatory reliable elimination of its root causes”.
The Guardian joins a pest controller on the city’s streets as residents fear a rise in rodents during bin workers’ strikes
“They’re not fussy,” said Martin Curry, describing the far from epicurean appetites of the scurrying rodents that the residents of Birmingham fear could flood the streets of their city.
“Rats all have their own personal tastes but if food is scarce they’ll eat anything,” he said. Curry, who has been called the “rat king” locally, runs MC Environmental Pest Control. He has been on the frontline of stamping out the rodent threat amid a weeks-long bin strike that has caused bins to pile up on Birmingham’s streets.
Move ends bid for site near Whitehaven, Cumbria after planning permission was quashed by high court
The Whitehaven coalmine’s planning application has been withdrawn, bringing an end to a process that could have created the UK’s first deep coalmine in 30 years in Cumbria.
Planning permission for the mine was quashed in the high court last year which meant the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government had to reassess the planning application. However, the company has now written to the government withdrawing its planning application.
Plan to add 90 turbines to Rampion will create 4,000 jobs in construction and could power 1m homes
The government has approved plans to build an offshore windfarm capable of powering about 1m British homes before the end of the decade.
The plan to extend the Rampion offshore windfarm by adding 90 turbines off the Sussex coast is expected to add about 1.2 gigawatts of clean power for British households and businesses.
There’s a roo carcass on the side of the road, near the turnoff to one of Kangaroo Island’s many excellent cellar doors. Black ravens lift sullenly from their feast as cars speed past.
Some think this sort of roadkill is how Valerie, the miniature dachshund that has been missing for more than 500 days, has survived since running away from her owners. It’s hard to picture the 4kg, adorable, goofy-eared, big-eyed sausage dog choosing this particular meal, but that’s a prevailing theory.
The extent of flood waters that have engulfed Queensland over the past fortnight is so widespread it has covered an area more than four times the size of the United Kingdom. The inundation is larger than France and Germany combined – and is even bigger than Texas.
The seemingly endless plains of outback Queensland are so vast and remote as to boggle any attempts to visualise the scale of what is being described as one of the most devastating floods in living memory.
Brosnan, who co-stars with Mirren in new series MobLand, said ‘there’s always going to be conflict’ when it comes to the 007 spy series
Pierce Brosnan, who played James Bond in four films between 1995 and 2002, has said he has qualified sympathy for Helen Mirren’s feelings about what she called the “profound sexism” of the spy series.
Speaking last week, Mirren said she had “never liked James Bond” because the concept is “drenched and born out of profound sexism.”
Verdict marks end of the first trial of 42 lawsuits filed about 12 years ago, alleging firm’s projects destroyed the regions
Chevron has been ordered to pay more than $744m in damages for destroying parts of south-east Louisiana’s coastal wetlands over the years.
The ruling, which came in the form of a civil jury verdict on Friday, marks the conclusion of the first trial among 42 lawsuits filed about 12 years earlier which alleged that the company’s oil and gas projects have led to the degradation of the region’s wetlands. Among other things, the wetlands play a key role in offering the area a measure of protection from hurricanes.
Slumps on S&P 500, Dow and Nasdaq cap dismal day for global indices but US president doubles down on tariff plan
Wall Street suffered its worst week since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis five years ago as investors worldwide balked at Donald Trump’s risky bid to overhaul the global economy with sweeping US tariffs.
The US president doubled down on his plan on Friday, insisting he would not back down even as the chairman of the Federal Reserve warned it would likely raise prices and slow down economic growth.
Traditionalists rail at the ‘Plastic National’ but a third of all adults will have a bet on the world’s most famous race
The numbers are nearly as breathtaking as the sight of 34 horses soaring over Aintree’s famous fences. Before Saturday’s Grand National, a third of adults in Britain will place some sort of bet on the world’s most famous steeplechase. £150m will be wagered in total. And six million will then tune in for the spectacle.
But amid all the noise and fanfare surrounding the 177th running of the “people’s race”, organisers are increasingly engaged in a delicate high-wire act. Because the more they try to ensure the thrills come without horrific spills – and potential deaths – the more they upset traditionalists, who fear that the National has gone too soft.
We have had to be resilient because no one has come to our aid. Myanmar needs tangible support before the humanitarian crisis claims even more lives
Two thoughts entered my head as soon as I saw that Myanmar, my home country, had been hit by an earthquake: “Is everyone OK?”, followed by, “We just can’t catch a break”.
My loved ones thankfully turned out to be badly shaken but physically OK. There were material losses but nothing compared with what so many others are going through.
County’s offer – largest of its kind – would settle lawsuits filed over alleged abuse in juvenile facilities since 1959
Los Angeles county has reached a $4bn agreement to settle nearly 7,000 claims of sexual abuse in juvenile facilities since 1959, officials said Friday.
The agreement, which still needs approval from the Los Angeles county board of supervisors, would be the largest of its kind and have long-lasting financial effects for the county, officials said.
Harry Kane scores in 3-1 victory at 10-man Augsburg
Espanyol up to 15th after 4-0 win against Rayo Vallecano
Bayern Munich came back from a goal down to beat 10-man Augsburg 3-1 away on Friday and move nine points clear at the top of the Bundesliga but Jamal Musiala went off injured and looks unlikely to be fit for next week’s Champions League quarter-final.
Musiala equalised before Harry Kane’s header and a deflected own goal from Augsburg’s Chrislain Matsima gave Bayern the points after the hosts took the lead thorugh Dimitris Gianoulis’ strike but ran out of steam when Cedric Zesiger was sent off. Bayern now have 68 points with six games left, nine ahead of Bayer Leverkusen, who travel to Heidenheim on Saturday.
Millions in grants that would promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives may be frozen following ruling
The US supreme court is letting the Trump administration temporarily freeze $65m in teacher-training grants that would promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in a 5-4 decision.
The decision came down on Friday afternoon, with five of the court’s conservatives – Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh – in the majority. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson all dissented.
Slot: ‘Nothing else matters’ if Liverpool win league title
Owen suggested cup exits left ‘bitter taste’ on season
Arne Slot has hit back at Michael Owen’s suggestion that the Premier League title would not be enough for Liverpool this season by insisting nothing matters more than becoming champions of England again.
The former Liverpool striker was taken to task by Virgil van Dijk after the Merseyside derby on Wednesday for claiming the campaign was “building into something really special” until Slot’s team exited the Champions League and lost the Carabao Cup final. Owen agreed it would still be special for Liverpool to win the title for a record-equalling 20th time but with the caveat that the two cup defeats in six days would leave “a bitter taste”.
England moved to the top of their Nations League group with a commanding win over Belgium in Bristol.
Sarina Wiegman’s side had shown they could turn up and beat the best, their stunning performance in a 1-0 win over Spain two months ago demonstrating a fluency that had been lacking. Here they had the chance to prove they could deliver against lower ranked opposition and they did so in style.
The teams are out on the Ashton Gate pitch. And the packed house is being treated to come pyrotechnics before the anthems.
“There was a lot of thinking,” Wiegman tells ITV of the decision to replace Park with Mead in the starting lineup. “Because I think we have many opportunities in that position … we expect Belgium to drop deep. I think they both can play there … we made the decision to start Beth.
McLaren driver is determined to succeed as a nice guy in F1 but don’t mistake his kindness for a lack of fight
His credentials as a potential Formula One world champion have been questioned but Lando Norris is unperturbed. With an almost startling level of honesty, highly unusual in the sport, the British driver has considered conventional wisdom and its implications and rejected it. That he wants to win is in no doubt but he will not allow his sense of self to be subsumed at the altar of success at all costs.
“I feel like there is a very prescribed version of how people say a world champion needs to be – overly aggressive,” he says in his McLaren team’s hospitality on a chilly day in Suzuka before this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix. “I want to win a championship. I’d rather just be a good person and try to do well. I’ll do whatever I can to win a championship but maybe I won’t sacrifice in my life as much as some others, in terms of who I am as a person and have the ‘fuck you’ mentality people say you’ve got to have. I still believe I can be a world champion but doing it by being a nice guy.”
The sophomore led the Trojans to a historic season
Watkins’ season ended with a brutal ACL tear
JuJu Watkins, the sensational sophomore who led Southern California to its best season in nearly 40 years, was honored Thursday as The Associated Press women’s basketball Player of the Year. Duke’s Cooper Flagg captured the equivalent award on the men’s side.
Watkins, whose Trojans won the Big Ten regular-season title for their first conference crown in 31 years, received 29 votes from the 31-member national media panel that votes on the AP Top 25 each week. Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo got the other two. Both were first-team AP All-Americans.
Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, Trump tariffs, the bin strike in Birmingham and the Grand National Meeting at Aintree: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing
Appeals court sides with Jefferson Griffin, who lost supreme court election and wants thousands of ballots thrown out
More than 65,000 people in North Carolina who believed they were eligible to vote could have their ballots thrown out nearly five months after election day, flipping the results of a supreme court election, a state appeals court ruled on Friday.
The 2-1 ruling from the North Carolina court of appeals came in response to Republicans’ months-long effort to overturn the results of the state supreme court election in November. The Democrat Allison Riggs, who currently sits on the court, defeated appellate judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, by 734 votes. After the election, Griffin filed a protest seeking to get around 60,000 votes thrown out.
The City midfielder made his teammates look like geniuses and once more he is making just the right move at just the right moment
Not for the first time, Kevin De Bruyne read the situation to perfection. Not for the first time, he spotted the right play just a little earlier than everyone else. And of course this was always his gift: not simply to pick the right option but to do it faster than anyone else, buying him those crucial fractions of a second when everything else was in flux and only he in stillness.
And of course this was not the only respect in which De Bruyne understood the game of football better than most. As a struggling teenager in the Genk academy, he noticed the way the club abruptly stopped paying for a foster family to house him, and then quietly resumed when he started banging in goals for the second team. Cast adrift at Chelsea, he noticed how he was ignored while first-team players were lavished with attention and bespoke coaching.
The white nationalist has been in Trump’s orbit for years, although the White House has tried to sideline her at times
Laura Loomer, a rightwing extremist and political influencer known for her incendiary social media presence, appeared to have been sidelined at points by Donald Trump’s election campaign and then by his new administration.
But she has long had the US president’s ear and may have it again, at least for now.
The Trump administration is taking aim at Brown University with threats to freeze $510m in grants, widening its promise to withhold federal funding from schoolsit accuses of allowing antisemitism on campus, according to multiple media outlets including Reuters and the New York Times.
University officials said they had not yet been formally notified, but the school was among dozens warned last month that enforcement actions could be coming as the administration seeks to crack down on academic institutions .
At least 25 killed in attack on Khan Younis in south as Israel says it is aiming to pressure Hamas into releasing hostages
Israel has restarted ground operations in the northern Gaza Strip and killed at least 25 people in airstrikes on the southern city of Khan Younis in what it says is a renewed military campaign aimed at pressuring Hamas into releasing Israeli hostages.
At least 25 people were killed in the attack on Khan Younis early on Friday, the local Nasser hospital told AFP, as the search for survivors continued.
Deadline set by US president was supposed to be Saturday, with Trump now considering decreasing tariffs to get deal
Donald Trump said he will sign an executive order to extend the TikTok ban deadline. This is the second time the president will have delayed the ban or sale of the social media app, and will punt the deadline to 75 days from now.
The TikTok deal “requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed”, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform on Friday.
We’re moving toward a society where genetic information is a part of everyday life – and we don’t want it in the wrong hands
With a heavy heart, I clicked on my 23andMe account on a recent morning, confirming that I wanted to delete my data. The genetic testing company filed for bankruptcy late last month and the California attorney general and others have recommended that users delete their data lest it be acquired by less scrupulous companies as the company is stripped for parts during bankruptcy proceedings.
I was one of the company’s earliest customers and had used their service to genotype not just myself but my entire extended family. I even got my kids’ babysitter a kit.
Dalton Conley is Henry Putnam university professor of sociology at Princeton University and author of The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture
Released court statement says alleged Chinese spy helped draft private letters to Chinese president
The Duke of York sent letters directly to China’s president, the prince’s former senior adviser told a special immigration tribunal, with an alleged Chinese spy advising him on how to write them.
Dominic Hampshire, who worked for Andrew from 2019-22, said Andrew had “always had a communication channel” with Xi Jinping that was “accepted” and may even have been encouraged by Buckingham Palace and the late queen.
White House has said US courts can’t order return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose wife has been protesting outside court
A federal judge on Friday afternoon ordered the US to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison after a Trump administration attorney was at a loss to explain what happened.
The wife of the man, who was flown to a notorious Salvadoran prison had earlier joined dozens of supporters at a rally before a court hearing on Friday, where his lawyers had asked the judge – Paula Xinis – to order the Trump administration to return him to the US.
China has hit back hard against Donald Trump’s “bullying” tariffs, raising fears that the escalating trade war could trigger a global recession and prompting fresh turmoil in financial markets.
Beijing retaliated on Friday with punitive 34% additional tariffs on all goods imported from the US – mirroring the US decision and exacerbating a sell-off on global stock markets.
Secretary of state says Putin ‘will have to make a decision’ as US officials appear to be growing impatient
The US will know within weeks whether Russia is serious about pursuing peace with Ukraine, the secretary of state has said, warning that Donald Trump was not “going to fall into the trap of endless negotiations” with Moscow.
“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace,” Marco Rubio told journalists in Brussels after talks with Nato allies. “Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later.”
As the White House retools US imperialism with import duties, others must resist dependency – deepening regional ties and reducing exposure to chokepoints
When Donald Trump stood before union auto workers in the Rose Garden he declared “Liberation Day”, promising to stand up for Main Street. Whether that pledge will be fulfilled is moot. He will declare victory either way. What the US president offered was not just an economic programme, but an imperial one.
Mr Trump’s logic, if it exists, lies in the 397-page report on “foreign trade barriers” he brandished on Wednesday. Its message is brutally simple: you may sell your goods to Walmart shoppers, but only if you let US cloud services hoover up your data, US media flood your screens and US tech monopolies operate on their terms – not yours. TikTok is the test case for Trump’s platform nationalism: only US firms may mine data, reap profits and rule the digital empire.
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Dangerous weather comes after Trump administration job cuts left nearly half of offices with 20% vacancy rates
Donald Trump on Friday approved an emergency declaration for Kentucky as the central US braces for what experts in the region have warned could be a “generational” flooding event, as severe spring storms that have killed at least seven continue to wreak havoc.
Millions are affected across a swath of the US stretching from Texas to Ohio, and the powerful storm system that has raged for two days is expected to stall over the country’s midsection, the National Weather Service (NWS) said, fueling further deluges and possible tornadoes in areas already drenched from thunderstorms bringing heavy rains.
Broadcaster wants to branch out with shows covering crime, history and sport and says he has investors lined up
Piers Morgan is planning to create a YouTube empire covering true crime, history and other genres, claiming to have “significant players” already lining up to invest.
Morgan said he was looking to branch out from his Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel and find a series of “mini-mes” to front other shows under the brand. He said his current show was already turning a profit since he broke away from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in January.
Moderate Democrat believes she can unseat Republican Derrick Van Orden, who was at the Capitol on January 6
Wisconsin’s third congressional district has voted for Donald Trump every time he’s been on the ballot, but the moderate Democrat Rebecca Cooke, a waitress who grew up on a dairy farm, thinks she can flip the state’s most competitive seat next year.
Last year, Cooke outperformed other Democrats when she tried to unseat incumbent Derrick Van Orden, a retired US Navy Seal who attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol and shouted “lies” during Joe Biden’s 2024 state of the union address. She lost the race by less than three points.
(Island EMI) The British star and the US country artist spur each other on in this tuneful, swinging set with poignant moments
In the twilight years of his career, Elton John has been anointing the next generation with a keener ear than most, championing new stars from Chappell Roan to Wet Leg via his Rocket Hour radio show and collaborating with artists as genre-diverse as Britney Spears, Gorillaz and Young Thug. Who Believes in Angels?, however, feels like a genuine meeting of minds. Created alongside American country rock royalty Brandi Carlile, an 11-times Grammy winner, there is the audible sense of two artists pushing each other and raising the other’s game; on the rollicking rock’n’roll romp of Little Richard’s Bible, or the full-blooded country duet Swing for the Fences, 78-year-old John sounds like a man half his age.
Where many of his recent collaborations have seen him enter the sonic palettes of modern pop, Someone to Belong To’s interweaving harmonies, or the rousing piano balladry of the record’s title track, live firmly in the world of classic, melody-driven songwriting, created by two artists supremely gifted at exactly that. The album ends with the remarkably poignant, Elton-led end-of-life reflection When This Old World Is Done With Me. Who Believes In Angels? is a fine reminder that he’s certainly not there yet.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that Donald Trump’s implementation of swingeing tariffs poses a “significant risk” to the global economy, as stock markets were hit by a punishing worldwide sell-off by investors.
Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the IMF, said it was important that the US and its trading partners avoided further escalating Trump’s trade war, while stock markets plunged on Friday as China retaliated against the tariffs.
Indore in Madhya Pradesh, India, was once dotted with fetid waste dumps but after a huge campaign is now virtually spotless
This is what happens usually in India: a politician wakes up and launches a cleanliness “drive” with fanfare. They ostentatiously start sweeping a street and speak solemnly about civic duty while the media take photos. The next day it’s over and things go back to how they were before.
But not in Indore in Madhya Pradesh. From 2017, when it won the prize for being the cleanest city in the country, it kept winning for eight straight years, until last year.
The US president’s announcement has caused market chaos and threatens a trade war and US recession
Donald Trump’s announcement of a long slate of new tariffs on the US’s trading partners has caused chaos in global markets and threatens a global trade war and US recession.
Long trailed on his election campaign, Trump’s plans were even more sweeping than many had predicted: a baseline 10% tariff on all imports and higher tariffs for key trading partners, including China and the EU.
The Democrat delivered the longest Senate speech in history. We asked urologists one pressing question about it
On Monday evening, Cory Booker, a Democratic senator for New Jersey, took the floor to denounce the harm he believes Donald Trump and his administration have inflicted on the United States. “Our country is in crisis,” he said, decrying the economic chaos, mass layoffs and tyrannical acts of the administration’s first 71 days. He stopped speaking 25 hours and five minutes later, making it the longest Senate speech in history.
Many praised Booker for the rousing political act. Some were also impressed by a particular physical feat: namely, he seemingly didn’t pee once the whole time. (A rep for Booker confirmed to TMZ that he did not wear a diaper during his speech.)
The singer answers your questions about her drum skills, friendship with Joni Mitchell and more – and reveals unheard music with both Prince and Sia
Can you remember the precise moment you realised you had a gift as a vocalist? SalfordRed64 I was doing a talent show at the Burning Spear in Chicago. My group, the Crystallettes, graced many a nightclub stage in competitions, and every time either us or [fellow Chicago girl group] the Emotions would win. But I remember singing some Aretha Franklin songs and people in the audience were throwing money on the stage, and they started calling me “little Aretha”. That’s when I connected the dots: “Oh, I see what this is all about.” I realised I didn’t have to become a teacher or a whatever I wanted to be when I grew up back then – I could be a singer!
You have so much confidence and you just knew you and [the band] Rufus were going to make it big. Where does that confidence come from? stifwhiff When I was with Rufus, I knew I loved what we were doing, and I could only hope and pray everyone else loved it like I did. That’s all you can ask for. And that’s still how I am about the music I make. I have confidence in everything I do – all the time. And that is a necessary thing to have if you want success – if you’ve created something and you want everyone to love it, you have to love it first. And that’s applicable to everything in life, not just music.
Rap mogul has pleaded not guilty to charges of racketeering and sex trafficking as trial begins in Manhattan on 5 May
Sean “Diddy” Combs was hit with a new federal indictment on Friday charging the hip-hop mogul with five criminal counts including racketeering and sex trafficking, court records showed.
Combs had previously faced three criminal counts, to which he has pleaded not guilty and is in federal jail in Brooklyn awaiting trial in Manhattan federal court on 5 May.
The BBC and ITV have declined to pursue the chance to televise this summer’s Club World Cup, leaving Fifa increasingly concerned about the visibility of its flagship new tournament in a key market.
The streaming platform Dazn agreed to pay $1bn (£787bn) for global Club World Cup rights in a deal which involved the company pledging to make all 63 matches available free-to-air on its app.
Experts say UK may have to raise taxes in autumn as senior MPs caution against too many concessions in US trade talks
Donald Trump’s tariffs signal a new global economic era, Downing Street has said, as economists warned that the British government would probably have to raise taxes in response.
Donald Trump’s global tariffs assault is set to raise prices and slow down economic growth, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has warned, defying the US president’s demands for an immediate interest rate cut.
While the US economy remains robust, Powell cautioned that there is high uncertainty over its direction. “Downside risks have risen,” he told an event in Arlington, Virginia, on Friday.
Doing laundry can be a tedious task and how often you wash each type of item depends on how much contact it has with your skin
Is there any domestic task more sisyphean than laundry? No sooner have you pulled a crisp, clean sheet on to your bed than it is time to strip it off and start over. Blink and a clean towel becomes dirty. Somehow, lives, careers and relationships must fit into the tiny slivers of time between loads.
I don’t enjoy laundry; give me dish duty any day. I do, however, enjoy living in a clean space that doesn’t smell like a locker room. Textiles can really trap scent – and bacteria.
Bafta endorsement could have escalated actor’s allegedly abusive behaviour towards women, Katharine Viner said
The editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Katharine Viner, has told the high court there was a “very high public interest” in reporting allegations made against Noel Clarke after he received a special Bafta award.
In a witness statement, Viner said she believed it was conceivable that the actor’s endorsement by the British academy film awards could lead to an escalation of his allegedly abusive behaviour towards women.
No 2 pick in 2013 spent six seasons with Washington
Seven-time WNBA All-Star Elena Delle Donne, a two-time league MVP and a key part of Washington’s 2019 championship, is retiring after 11 seasons.
Delle Donne, 35, made the announcement on social media Friday and referenced a line from one of her favorite childhood books that reads, “How did get so late so soon?”
President’s move has no historic parallels, but the deep uncertainty for the global economy may prove as destructive as the tariffs
From world leaders, to the tiniest manufacturers thousands of miles from Washington, decision-makers across the global economy are racked with uncertainty as they scramble to come to terms with Donald Trump’s historic tariffs.
Experts are all but unanimous that the impact on global growth of Wednesday’s extraordinary Rose Garden press conference will be negative – but just how bad remains highly uncertain.
I worked as a dialogue coach on Oliver Stone’s Alexander in 2003. Val was playing Alexander’s father, Philip II of Macedon. Oliver wanted the Macedonians to have Celtic accents in contrast to the Greeks, who looked down on the Macedonians, as the English have only too frequently done to neighbours of the UK. We were prepping in Morocco and I had been working for a while with Val on his Irish accent when my 95-year-old mother died and I had to leave for a couple of days for her funeral. During my absence, Val had to go home for a short while. When I returned I opened my hotel room door to find it awash with beautiful white roses. Val had sent them before he left, leaving a note of condolence and both his personal phone numbers so that I might call any time if I needed someone. Such unexpected kindness I have never forgotten. Catherine Charlton, voice coach, St Leonards-on-Sea
The sweeping package of tariffs unveiled by Donald Trump on Wednesday includes an exemption for the energy sector, which is a clear sign of the president’s fealty to his big oil donors over the American people, advocates say.
Trump’s new 10% universal tariffs – which are higher for many major economies – are wreaking havoc on the global economy and are expected to increase consumer prices in the US. But the levies will not apply to many fossil fuel products, including liquefied natural gas imports, crude oil from Canada, and materials needed for making petrochemicals.
The same economic forces that led to stagnation today are already in practice at the world’s biggest clubs
The problem with running a modern top-flight football club is that raising revenue is hard to do. Once you’ve grabbed your slice of league-wide media rights, made a vaguely colonial-sounding pre-season tour of the “Far East,” stitched up some sponsorship deals with a gambling company or a country’s tourism agency, and shipped as many shirts as the global merch market can handle, you hit the ceiling of your earning capacity. At that point, as a club, what do you do?
You can raise ticket prices, which risks alienating fans and the local community you’re supposed to represent. You can try your hand at a few miserable little crypto or AI plug-ins to build “engagement” among supporters or become a pioneer in the nascent field of fan “activations,” with limited potential returns. You can promise to build a new 100,000-seat stadium, but that takes time and money and doesn’t solve your immediate (or even future, should you go into debt to finance the project) need for cash. You can flog off a hotel or two to a sibling subsidiary of your parent company, though for that you need to start off with a couple of hotels. You can hope to sell to a monied investor, but the days of loss-indifferent billionaires making vanity investments in clubs seem over, and there are only so many publicity-hungry sovereign wealth funds to go around.
There is a principle that even the most powerful leaders must be accountable. Increasingly, that is under threat, but it must be defended
It was unsurprising that Benjamin Netanyahu praised Viktor Orbán’s “bold and principled” stand, in response to Hungary’s announcement yesterday that it will leave the international criminal court (ICC). More dismaying is that too few governments seem ready to stand up against impunity at a time when, because of Donald Trump, the very existence of the Hague court is under threat.
Hungary’s leader described the ICC as “a political forum”; the Israeli prime minister, during his defiant visit to Budapest this week, complained of a “corrupt organisation”. That is all logical enough. Four months ago, the court confirmed an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. He could hardly be expected to praise his own indictment.
From hyper-intelligent analysis to heated arguments, the 21st-century home of buzzy chatter about big television shows is Reddit. We go behind the scenes to hear about millions of Severance and White Lotus fans, wild freebies – and accusations of racism
They say that ancient civilisations celebrated significant televisual events by gathering around a plastic watering hole in a building known as an “office”. These so-called “water-cooler moments” were characterised by buzzy chatter, as colleagues chewed over what they’d seen on TV the night before. “Who shot JR?” they asked. “You can’t kill everyone at a wedding!” they cried. Tissues were passed around because “She got off the plane!.”
Today, there are too many streaming apps and too few days in the office for people to catch up in quite the same way. Instead, online forums dedicated to dissecting TV episodes are thriving: on Reddit, more than 776,000 people have joined a subreddit about The White Lotus, while 765,000 discuss everything that happens in Ben Stiller’s dystopian workplace thriller Severance. Like colleagues around a cooler, people praise their favourite characters and share theories about what will happen next. Unlike colleagues around a cooler, they also accuse each other of being stupid, bigoted and perverted.
Exhibition of 456 works by the Bradford-born Francophile underscores Paris’s efforts to reclaim its status as Europe’s art capital
Poised to open its doors on Wednesday, Paris’s biggest art show of the year carries the humble title David Hockney 25. A more accurate description of its ambition would have been the name of the artist’s best-known painting: A Bigger Splash.
Purportedly focused only on the past 25 years of the Yorkshire-born painter’s career, the 456 works on display at the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s 11 vast galleries in fact span 1955-2025.
It’s just two days since Donald Trump launched his extraordinary tariff assault on the world in a bid to rebuild the US economy and roll back an era of globalization. But already shopkeepers are bracing for recession, and their customers spending less, as they prepare to increase prices.
“We’re going to have to put our prices up and people aren’t going to like it,” said Ian Anderson, store manager at Tea and Sympathy, a UK grocery store, restaurant and fish-and-chip shop stalwart in Manhattan’s West Village.
Belgian to leave Manchester City in summer after 10 years
Guardiola certain De Bruyne will get Etihad statue
Pep Guardiola lauded Kevin De Bruyne as “one of the greatest” players in Premier League history and said it was a “sad day” after the Manchester City captain announced he would depart at the end of this contract in June. The Belgian is one of the club’s most decorated players, winning 16 major trophies, but was not offered an extension.
De Bruyne will be the final player to leave City who was in the first-team squad before Guardiola’s arrival. City signed him for €55m from Wolfsburg in 2015 and he has been an integral part of their success, winning six Premier League titles and helping the club lift the Champions League for the first time.
From mealtime chats with strangers to lifelong friendships forged in hostels, the travel guide’s team say travelling alone can be very far from lonely
Learning to get comfortable being by yourself can be challenging. Here, the Lonely Planet team share their advice for women traveling solo. Covering everything from making friends to personal safety to crying in public, most of these tips work well for anyone who finds themselves adventuring unescorted.
A rich and indulgent layered chocolate dessert, with a crunchy biscuit base and a tangy, salted creme fraiche topping
This is one for the chocolate lovers (myself included). It’s rich and indulgent, which is why I love it. I can be a bit of a brownie purist – no nuts, ever! – but here I make an exception. The biscuit base stays nice and crunchy, while the tangy, salted creme fraiche topping cuts through some of the richness. You can serve this while it’s still warm for something a little more gooey, but it’s much easier to slice if you let it cool completely.
Using the platform was dangerous and wrong – but officials appeared to prioritize shielding themselves from litigation
No senior US government official in the now-infamous “Houthi PC Small Group” Signal chat seemed new to that kind of group, nor surprised by the sensitivity of the subject discussed in that insecure forum, not even when the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, chimed in with details of a coming airstrike. No one objected – not the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was abroad and using her personal cellphone to discuss pending military operations; not even the presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, who was in Moscow at the time. Yet most of these officials enjoy the luxury of access to secure government communications systems 24/7/365.
Reasonable conclusions may be drawn from these facts. First, Trump’s national security cabinet commonly discusses secret information on insecure personal devices. Second, sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China intercept such communications, especially those sent or received in their countries. Third, as a result, hostile intelligence services now probably possess blackmail material regarding these officials’ indiscreet past conversations on similar topics. Fourth, as a first-term Trump administration official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request. And fifth, no one seems to have feared being investigated by the justice department for what appears to be a violation of the Espionage Act’s Section 793(f), which makes gross negligence in mishandling classified information a felony; the FBI director, Kash Patel, and attorney general, Pam Bondi, quickly confirmed that hunch. Remarkably, the CIA director John Ratcliffe wouldn’t even admit to Congress that he and his colleagues had made a mistake.
Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux is a shot-for-shot labour of love made with amateur actors, beanbag dinosaurs and an army of volunteers. Three years later it is finished – and ‘bigger than Ben-Hur’
This morning’s location: a field outside Castlemaine, Victoria. The air is thick with flies, attracted to the cow dung but ignoring the nearby dinosaur poo, sturdily constructed from papier-mache.
“Oh god,” Sam Neill groans – though these words aren’t actually uttered by Neill but local builder Ian Flavell, who has taken on Neill’s role as palaeontologist Alan Grant – and drops to his knees in front of an ailing triceratops.
Whoever becomes president later this year has unenviable task of healing divisions and rebuilding trust in democratic institutions
It had been a long and at times intolerable wait. But the South Korean constitutional court’s decision on Friday to oust Yoon Suk Yeol from office may have restored the public’s faith in their democracy.
For 22 minutes, millions of South Koreans held their breath as the chief justice of the constitutional court, Moon Hyung-bae, began delivering the court’s verdict on Yoon’s impeachment over his chaotic declaration of martial law in December.
Actor and comedian charged with rape, indecent assault, oral rape and two counts of sexual assault, say police
The comedian and actor Russell Brand has been charged with one count each of rape, indecent assault and oral rape as well as two counts of sexual assault.
Brand will appear in court in London on 2 May, according to the Metropolitan police, which began investigating him in September 2023 after a range of allegations.
Health secretary says roles will need to be reinstated amid Trump administration’s push to slash federal workforce
Around a fifth of the 10,000 jobs cut from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were done in error and will need to be corrected, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has admitted.
Mass layoffs from the health department began this week amid a push by Donald Trump’s administration to shrink the size of the federal government workforce. Union representatives were told around 10,000 people were to lose their jobs ahead of further reductions that could see the department’s 82,000-strong workforce slashed by nearly a quarter.
I’m 16 and have never really had crushes. Along with that, I moved around a lot as a kid and never really had many friends until year 7. I’ve struggled a lot with maintaining friendships and I’ve always felt a bit awkward and isolated from my peers. I guess part of it was Covid; I never really developed social skills and have always relied on others to help me make friends.
Recently, I met this really nice guy at a debate competition. He seemed genuinely interested in me and kept trying to talk to me. I liked talking to him; it felt really comfortable. For the first time, it felt as if I had met someone I “clicked” with. I actively sought out interactions with him and was praying he’d be on my team, which he was. I just thought I liked him as a friend at first, so I didn’t get any sort of contact information and assumed I’d forget about him.
There are major concerns about the potentially ‘catastrophic’ impact US policy will have on vehicle makers
Emerging into the springtime sun from gate 17 at Volkswagen’s main factory in Wolfsburg at the end of his shift, Carsten, 63, pulled heavily on a cigarette and shook his head when asked about Donald Trump’s US tariff policies.
“It’s just another nail in the coffin for the German car industry,” the assembly line worker said on Thursday. He cited managers’ plans to slash jobs and close factories earlier this year, and a decade before that the “dieselgate” scandal –costly financially and reputationally – when Germany’s largest carmaker was found to have falsified CO2 emissions tests.
Trump’s moves have pushed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians into a state of insecurity after they were welcomed to a safe haven
Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Danyil packed everything he could in a bag and traveled 15 hours by bus from the Zakarpattia region in western Ukraine to the Czech Republic.
He fled the war at 17, just as the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, forbade men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country. Now aged 20, he watches from the US as the war drags on. In December, Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and another 370,000 have been wounded in the war.
A glass factory in Wigan that produces fibreglass for electric cars and wind turbines faces closure and the loss of 250 jobs unless its Japanese owner can find a new partner or a buyer.
In the latest blow to Britain’s industrial base, Nippon Electric Glass (NEG) announced a “strategic review” of its composites business Electric Glass Fiber UK (EGF), which it expects to last approximately two months, putting about 250 jobs at risk.
California cases over AI trainers’ use of work by writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Chabon transferred to consolidate with New York suits from John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen and more
Twelve US copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft have been consolidated in New York, despite most of the authors and news outlets suing the companies being opposed to centralisation.
A transfer order made by the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation on Thursday said that centralisation will “allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings”.
We’re interested to hear how people’s invested pension savings have been faring amid sharp ups and downs in recent months and years, and how this may affect them
US president Donald Trump’s trade war, political elections and societal shifts ushering in dramatic change and dire public finances in multiple countries, the war in Ukraine and the Covid pandemic have been creating tumultous conditions on international markets for the past few years.
We’d like to hear how people’s invested pension savings have been affected by this series of economic shocks. Has your invested portfolio sustained big losses, or have you enjoyed staggering stockmarket gains? How may you and your plans be affected by it all? Tell us.
In 1985, a star-studded lineup of Black UK musicians, including Aswad, Dennis Brown and Janet Kay, recorded a charity single to raise funds for famine-stricken Ethiopia. Why are their efforts so little known?
The Ethiopian famine of the early 1980s was one of the defining news stories of the decade, an exposure of the stark divide between developed and developing nations, still referred to at the time as the Third World. It is a received wisdom that the general public in Britain learned about the crisis when shocking images of emaciated men, women and children were shown on BBC news reports. This is not entirely true. In fact, plenty of Rastafarians were already aware of the situation.
The east African country was their spiritual home – many in the movement viewed its former emperor Haile Selassie as their messiah – and a place free from the iniquities of the west. “A lot of Rastafarians went to Ethiopia [before they] came to London,” says the musician and campaigner Leon Leiffer. “I knew many of them, and there was a rumour going around that things were really bad because of the drought. We heard it like that before the mainstream media. And I had the idea to do something to help before we saw anything on the BBC.”
The Inside Out studio’s latest, long-awaited project is a neon-drenched star-straddling adventure featuring an orphan, a tardigrade and a wannabe astronaut
Pixar’s film-makers are famously asked to pitch three unique ideas when proposing new projects. In terms of Elio, unique is very much the operative word. Presumably that pitch went somewhere along the lines of: “A lonely kid is mistaken for Earth’s ambassador by a UN-style council of sentient celestial bath bombs dipped in day-glow glitter and floating in a malfunctioning lava lamp.”
If you thought Inside Out, with its candy-coloured Freudian crisis management team, was pushing it, the studio’s latest project may make you suspect Pixar has fully surrendered to the void, and is now making films for children who are made of sherbet and tie-dye, rather than flesh and bones.
Nests on Amsterdam canals provide archive of plastic waste and show how the material ‘is really here to stay’
One day in 1996, someone ate a McDonald’s McChicken burger in Amsterdam.
Perhaps it was a quick bite after work? A leisurely stroll down the canals? A family outing? These details are lost to time, but others are hard to erase completely.
Journalists now effectively banished say Kremlin’s aim is to make them ‘toxic’ to anyone thinking of speaking to media
Russian BBC journalists who have been labelled “foreign agents” by Vladimir Putin’s regime have spoken of being unable to see their children, forced to sell homes and in effect being banished from their home country.
They are now meant to report their finances to the state, down to supermarket receipts, while there have already been practical effects for family members inside Russia. The journalists said the label was designed to make them “toxic” to any Russians thinking about speaking to independent media.
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