Arthur Ashe Stadium will be overhauled as part of project
Project will not use public funds or taxpayer money
The site of the US Open will undergo an $800m transformation, the US Tennis Association said on Monday, with a “top-to-bottom” modernisation of the famed Arthur Ashe Stadium and a new player performance center planned for the sprawling Queens campus.
Work at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center will be completed by the 2027 US Open, with construction taking place in phases to avoid any interruption of the 2025 or 2026 editions of the tournament.
Patient, 41-year-old man, was able to to go off dialysis with technique that two doctors worked for years to develop
Surgeons in California have performed the first ever successful bladder transplant, aiding a patient who previously had his bladder and both kidneys removed as a result of cancer treatment and end-stage kidney disease.
The treatment allowed the patient, 41-year-old father of four Oscar Larrainzar, to go off dialysis – although the surgery comes with considerable short- and long-term risks and unknowns.
Site in French Guiana once received prisoners who were sent to notorious Devil’s Island off the coast
French plans to build a maximum-security prison wing for drug traffickers and Islamic militants near a former penal colony in French Guiana have sparked an outcry among residents and local officials.
The wing would form part of a $450m (£337m) prison announced in 2017 that is expected to be completed by 2028 and hold 500 inmates. The prison would be built in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, a town bordering Suriname that once received prisoners shipped by Napoleon III in the 1800s, some of whom were sent to the notorious Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana.
For weeks, Keir Starmer had stayed tight-lipped about what he was putting on the table in his negotiations as part of the UK-EU deal, saying in line with Brussels: “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”
But then just days before Monday’s summit, the prime minister appeared to make a concession and pave the way for a youth mobility scheme, telling the Times in an interview: “Youth mobility is not freedom of movement.”
Cannes film festival Akira Kurosawa’s downbeat noir High and Low is retooled with Washington on magnificent form as a record producer whose godson is kidnapped by mistake
Spike Lee has made a brash, bold, big-city movie with this pulsing New York adventure that doubles as a love letter to NYC’s sports and its music. It is a remake (or maybe cover version) of Akira Kurosawa’s classic downbeat noir High and Low from 1963, transplanting the action from Yokohama to New York – or rather returning it there, because the original source material, Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom, is set in a fictional city based on the Big Apple.
It’s got a terrific throb of energy and life, moving across the screen with the rangy grace of its superstar Denzel Washington – though a little of the minor-key sombreness and complex pessimism and cynicism of the first film has been lost and the modern technology of GPS (unknown in Kurosawa’s day) has indirectly left it with a very small plausibility issue.
‘I’m starting to like clay more,’ says British No 2
Emma Raducanu continued her impressive clay-court form as she swept aside the sixth seed, Daria Kasatkina, in the first round of the Internationaux de Strasbourg.
The British No 2, who won three games on the surface for the first time in her career last week as she reached the last 16 of the Italian Open, beat the world No 17 by a comprehensive 6-1, 6-3 scoreline.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have held a rare phone call, which the US leader described as “excellent,” but the Kremlin refused to agree to a ceasefire in the war with Ukraine, despite pressure from Washington and European allies.
Speaking to reporters in Sochi after the two-hour conversation on Monday, Putin described the call as “very meaningful and frank,” and said he was prepared to work with Ukraine on drafting a memorandum for future peace talks.
Key allies call escalation ‘egregious’ and promise ‘concrete’ response if Israel does not end renewed offensive and allow aid into strip
Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that Israel will “take control” of all Gaza, as three key allies attacked his “egregious” escalation of the military campaign and blockade on humanitarian aid.
Britain, France and Canada attacked Israel’s expansion of its war as disproportionate, described conditions in Gaza as “intolerable” and threatened a “concrete” response if Israel’s campaign continues.
It can be hard for gym-goers to know what’s reasonable to expect from a workout or class. Here, trainers and coaches share common problems – and their solutions
It’s an uncomfortable feeling: you walk out of your fitness class and know the vibe was off but can’t say exactly why. The coach was perfectly polite and the workout itself was fine, but you’re sure you won’t go back. How come?
I have a few hunches because I’ve spent a lot of time in gyms. I played three sports in high school, was on the swim team in college, started CrossFit in 2016 and have been a CrossFit coach and personal trainer for the past four years. I’ve written forMen’s Healthfor almost a decade, and dropped into at least 50 gyms, from luxury boutiques to basement sweat boxes.
The actor and co-star Robert Pattinson have each spoken about their experiences of early parenthood ahead of the premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love
Jennifer Lawrence has spoken of the “extremely isolating” effect of the postpartum period, while discussing a new film in which she portrays a mother descending into psychosis.
In Scottish art-house director Lynne Ramsay’s moody psychodrama Die, My Love, Lawrence’s character Grace is left alone to look after her newborn in a ramshackle house in the remote woods of Montana while her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) goes off to work.
5 min: Liverpool are dominant with the ball. Harvey Elliott, playing in central midfield tonight, has shown a few neat early touches. It looks like Chiesa is playing as a centre forward for Liverpool, with Gakpo left and Salah right.
3 min: “I hope you enjoy the game tonight!” emails Steve G. “I’m one of many – seems well over a thousand from the ticket site – season ticket holders unable to make the game tonight because Sky dictated a move of the fixture to 8pm on a Monday while so many have families, or themselves, with pretty important school exams this week for example. If there any opportunity to point out how unfair it is on fans to move fixtures to times that don’t take them into any consideration please do so, last home game of the season too. A bit like when during lockdown much was made of football not being the same without fans…then a few months after we were allowed back they scheduled Brighton v Brentford for evening on Boxing Day when all public transport had stopped for the day. Empty seats tonight aren’t because we don’t care - I’ll be at Spurs on Sunday - and it’s not because we think we’ve got nothing to play for, it’s because Sky made it impossible to go.”
Family sought $30m in damages after Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot by police during 2021 US Capitol breach
The Trump administration has reportedly reached an agreement to pay nearly $5m to the family of the woman who was fatally shot by police while participating in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol carried out by the president’s supporters.
Citing multiple sources, the Washington Post reported on Monday that the Trump administration had agreed to pay the family of Ashli Babbitt to settle the wrongful death lawsuit they filed after the attack.
Protester is engineer who worked on Azure software, which enabled Israeli surveillance of Palestinians
A Microsoft employee disrupted a keynote speech by the company’s chief executive with a pro-Palestinian protest at the company’s annual developer conference on Monday.
Joe Lopez, a Microsoft firmware engineer who worked on parts of the company’s cloud-computing platform, Azure, was escorted out the Build conference by security nearly immediately after he confronted Satya Nadella.
Ruth López, an outspoken critic of President Nayib Bukele, was detained late on Sunday under an order from the prosecutor’s office which accused her of “embezzlement” when she worked for an electoral court a decade ago, the human rights group Cristosal said in a statement.
Tangible gains from these negotiations will be limited, but the prime minister has at last set a positive tone
So much remains to be worked out in Sir Keir Starmer’s deal with the EU that it must be regarded as a staging post rather than a final destination. In several key areas, the agreement announced in London on Monday is really a commitment to have more meetings at which negotiators will try to make more agreements.
On the issue of visas for young people and the UK’s mooted return to the Erasmus university-exchange scheme, there is little clarity beyond the rebranding of “youth mobility” as “experience”. A decision on the level of fees that European students must pay has also been booted forward. So have some details of how the UK will work with the bloc on policing and security, including the use of controversial facial-recognition technology in tackling drug and people smuggling across borders.
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Police make chance find of sculpture that adorned Doors singer’s Paris grave until its 1988 disappearance
Carved out of white marble and covered in graffiti, the hefty bust disappeared in 1988. Now, 37 years later, the doe-eyed sculpture that once adorned the grave of the American singer Jim Morrison has been found, in what Paris prosecutors described as a “chance discovery”.
Police in France said they had been carrying out a search related to a fraud case when they happened to stumble upon the bust of the frontman of the Doors. The announcement, made on social media on Monday, was accompanied by a photo showing the graying sculpture still covered in graffiti and missing a chunk of its nose, reportedly sliced off by souvenir hunters before its disappearance.
A stunning comeback victory for the centrist mayor of Bucharest was also good news for Kyiv. But elsewhere in Europe, the far right continues to flourish
As Romanians voted on Sunday in arguably the most consequential election in the country’s post-communist history, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will have been preparing to welcome a fellow disruptor to the European stage. The first round of a controversially re-run presidential contest had been handsomely won by George Simion, a Eurosceptic ultranationalist who views Donald Trump as a “natural ally” and opposes military aid to Ukraine. On the back of a 20-point lead, Mr Simion, a 38-year-old former football ultra with a taste for violent rhetoric, was so confident of winning that he made a confrontational visit to Brussels in the last days of his campaign.
Those expectations were confounded in remarkable fashion at the weekend. In a dramatic reversal of fortunes, Nicușor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest, benefited from the highest voter turnout in 30 years to triumph comfortably. One of the first foreign leaders to congratulate Mr Dan was a relieved Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who, in Hungary and Slovakia, already has to contend with two Putin-friendly governments on Ukraine’s western border.
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Charlotte May Lee, 21, from south London, flew from the same Bangkok airport as Bella May Culley, who was arrested a day earlier
Within a day of Bella May Culley being arrested at a Georgian airport for allegedly trying to smuggle 14kg of cannabis, the same fate met another Briton 3,000 miles away.
As Charlotte May Lee stepped off her flight at Bandaranaike International airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka last Monday, the 21-year-old former cabin attendant was arrested for an alleged attempt to bring in £1.2m worth of a synthetic cannabis strain known as kush in her two suitcases.
With concerns remaining over the theatrical experience, some key figures are working hard at ensuring it survives
Throughout film history, there have been vanishingly few directors whose brand names reach the heights of the movie stars who log time in front of the camera. That’s natural; we see people like Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Paul Newman, Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise in movie after movie, sometimes experiencing a love-at-first-sight lightning-strike moment, sometimes developing a relationship over many years, and sometimes a combination of the two. Directors, for the most part, remain hidden, with a select few – Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese – popping through to broader public consciousness, a process that seems to take twice as long. (Martin Scorsese became a commercial prospect roughly 30 years into his career.)
It’s a little surprising, then, that the newest crop of directors reaching for (or in some case, already attaining) brand-name status have become the public faces of saving an imperiled theatrical experience. Christopher Nolan was out front to an arguably foolhardy degree, lobbying for theaters to reopen and show his planned 2020 summer blockbuster Tenet before Covid vaccines were in place. He was understandably pilloried at the time, though now he’s celebrated for his big-canvas vision to the point where an Imax re-release of Tenet (at a safer time for public health) was a big ticket-seller for Warner Bros and helped inspire a similar reissue of his once-maligned sci-fi epic Interstellar.
‘He would punch her, choke her, slap her,’ says Richard as second week of music mogul’s sex-trafficking trial resumes
The second week of Sean “Diddy” Combs’s racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking trial began on Monday morning with the singer Dawn Richard returning to the witness stand.
Combs, 55, is facing charges of sex-trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution. He was arrested in September 2024 and has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.
Sidewinder Ranch, a 40-acre property built over natural rock formations, comes with desert views and a bulldozer
Want to commune with nature? Bring the outside in? Ditch your white-noise machine for a babbling brook going through your living room?
A home that went on the market last monthin Arizona offers all this and more. Sidewinder Ranch is a 40-acre hillside property built over natural rock formations. Every room is of geological interest, with a TV shelf perched on rock and boulders creeping to the foot of the bed. A fountain built inside has the feel of a mountain stream, and the property has stunning desert views. “Buy 40 acres but it might as well be 400,” read the listing.
The ‘Southern Hemisphere Seven’ long ago proved their commitment, making criticism of selection unwarranted
For the class of 2017 it was the Geography Six and for the current crop, it may prove to be the Southern Hemisphere Seven. Andy Farrell’s squad announcement was low on controversy, on glaring omissions or shock inclusions, and even the Owen issue was dealt with diplomatically. In the days since, however, provenance has been raised as a problem.
Farrell selected in his squad three players born in New Zealand, two in Australia and two in South Africa. Willie John McBride – a legend of five Lions tours – is apparently “bothered” by it and is not alone in expressing concerns at the number of foreign-born players in the 38-man squad.
Cheaper food, passport e-gates, youth exchanges – we are finally on a path to repair the colossal damage Brexit has done
Circle the wagons: Europe draws together confronting an enemy to its east and a rogue state to its west. “Everything has changed,” said the prime minister and chancellor, and so it has. Once nestled in the arms of Nato, now alarmingly alone, we have no choice but to embrace neighbours we shunned. Thanks to Vladimir Putin, (nearly) all Europeans now see clearly what was always the case. In danger we need each other, never mind fish or dynamic alignment.
But talking about less important things was always the British way. So headlines and the Today programme bang on about the 12-year continuance of the fishing deal struck by Boris Johnson, allowing French boats into our waters. It’s hard on fishing communities, but not worse than before. The Brexiters used and cheated fishers. But a government has to weigh up winners and losers when fishing contributes just 0.03% to UK GDP and 10,000 jobs. Now set that against the 2.5% of GDP we spend on defence with 164,000 jobs. As the pathway opens up for British defence industries to bid for contracts from the giant €150bn EU defence fund, that’s altogether another kettle of fish.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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Predictions of 80,000 fans in city ‘not unreasonable’
Uefa warns fans second-hand tickets will not be accepted
The head of English football policing, chief constable Mark Roberts, has urged Tottenham and Manchester United fans not to travel to Bilbao if they do not have a ticket for the Europa League final on Wednesday.
Tens of thousands of ticketless fans are expectedin the city and Roberts says Uefa, local organisers and police share a “real desire” to make the event work for supporters after the chaos of recent Champions League finals in Paris and Istanbul.
President urges ‘major investigation’ of Beyoncé, Oprah, Bruce Springsteen and others in late-night social media rant
Donald Trump laced into a few celebrities who endorsed Kamala Harris in late night and early morning screeds on Monday, saying he would investigate them to see if they were paid for the endorsements – repeating a common refrain on the right about the star-studded list of Harris supporters.
“How much did Kamala Harris pay Bruce Springsteen for his poor performance during her campaign for president?” Trump posted in all caps on Truth Social at 1.34am Monday. “Why did he accept that money if he is such a fan of hers? Isn’t that a major and illegal campaign contribution? …And how much went to Oprah, and Bono???”
A landmark deal clinched between the UK and EU to remove checks on food exports will add £9bn to the UK economy and lower food prices, No 10 has said, as the last-minute agreement was secured early on Monday morning.
Keir Starmer said the deal, billed as a “historic” turning of the page, delivered the “reset” he had promised after winning the general election last July.
The former Fox News host once branded ‘nasty’ by Trump is now a cheerleader for him and her podcast is surging in the rightwing media-sphere
It was the night before a US presidential election that Donald Trump had called the most important in history. Who could close the deal at his campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? The answer was Megyn Kelly. Trump “will keep the boys out of girls’ sports where they don’t belong”, the rightwinger podcaster said to rapturous applause. “And you know what else? He will look out for our boys, too. Our forgotten boys and our forgotten men.”
Turning around and pointing at Trump supporters wearing hard hats, Kelly eulogised guys “who’ve got the calluses on their hands, who work for a living, the beards and the tats, maybe have a beer after work, and don’t want to be judged by people like Oprah and Beyoncé, who will never have to face the consequences of her [Kamala Harris’s] disastrous economic policies. These guys will. He gets it. President Trump gets it. He will not look at our boys like they are second-class citizens.”
The chef, author and presenter wants to be John Bonham and might be found busting out Baker Street at karaoke, but which song reminds him of lost love?
The first single I bought
I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats from Sounds Nice on Birtley High Street, when I was in my teens. I know it was about a school shooting, but at the time, I thought: I have a visceral reaction to Mondays as well.
The first song I fell in love with
Still in Love With You from Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous album. I was learning to play drums and Brian Downey, Thin Lizzy’s drummer, used to do this wonderful shuffle beat because it’s a relatively slow track, and his playing is beautiful. I still play the drums. I’ve never stopped being a musician.
OVO Hydro, Glasgow Her Tension world tour reaches the UK, and it’s the work of a relaxed but inherently flamboyant singer with a bold new vision for her back catalogue
The lights go down in Glasgow, and Kylie Minogue ascends from underneath the stage like a pop deity: head-to-toe in electric blue PVC, sitting in the centre of a giant neon diamond. After acclaimed runs in Australia and the US, she’s kicking off the UK leg of her Tension tour, celebrating an era that started two years ago with lead single Padam Padam – a phenomenon everywhere from gay clubs to TikTok – and continued with her equally hook-filled albums Tension and Tension II.
In contrast to some recent over-complicated arena tour concepts from the likes of Katy Perry, the Tension show is admirably straightforward after Kylie’s big entrance, allowing her to remain the focus at all times. She races through hits – some condensed into medleys – at an astonishing pace; from 1991’s What Do I Have To Do, to Good As Gone from Tension II. For Better the Devil You Know, she changes into a red sequin jumpsuit and matching mic, leading a troupe of highlighter-coloured dancers in front of a minimalist, impressionistic backdrop. There’s something of the Pet Shop Boys’ art-pop flair in the show’s considered design choices, and in Kylie’s inherent – rather than costume-driven – flamboyance.
Tourist authority backtracks on use of influencers after one tiny cove is swamped by 4,000 visitors a day
The authorities in Spain’s Balearic Islands have said they will stop using social media influencers to promote popular destinations, saying “selfie tourism” is damaging some of its most beautiful locations.
In an attempt to quell the effects of overtourism, the Balearics had hoped that influencers, many of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers, might relieve the strain on some better-known sites by directing visitors elsewhere.
At about 2am on Sunday, Basel al-Barawi was dozing fitfully in his home in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza. For hours, he had listened fearfully to the sound of explosions and shooting.
Then there was a massive blast. Barawi ran out to the street and saw that his cousin’s house had been bombed, with 10 people inside. The strikes on Beit Lahiya came days after Israel launched a major new offensive, named Operation Gideon’s Chariots.
US vice-president delivers letter from Donald and Melania Trump during talks with pontiff at the Vatican
Donald Trump has issued a White House invitation to Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born pontiff who as Cardinal Robert Prevost previously criticised Trump’s administration.
The invitation came via a letter from the US president and the first lady, Melania Trump, that was delivered to the pope by the US vice-president, JD Vance, during a meeting at the Vatican on Monday morning.
Rehashing 20-year-old Blairite ideas that were stale then will inspire nobody. Britain is crying out for bold, transformative policy-making
Just why has Keir Starmer’s government proved such a catastrophe? This is a question that must be posed to his cheerleaders, or at least those who were at one time cheerleaders: the road from the last general election is lined with silently discarded pompoms. The idea here is not to rub their faces in a political project that is now both electorally toxic and morally bankrupt, but to determine what happens next.
First off, the failure should be considered absolute. It is projected that a Labour government will drive more than a million Britons into – or more deeply into – poverty through an assault on disability benefits. The same government imposed hardship on many pensioners by stripping away the winter fuel payment, and it refuses to reverse the Tories’ two-child benefit cap, the UK’s biggest single generator of child poverty. Not content with waging war on the poor only at home, the government opened a new front abroad by slashing the international aid budget. It alsocan’t bring itself to condemn Israel for a single crime – including deliberate starvation – and continues to supply crucial components for F-35 jet fighters to rain more death on Gaza’s traumatised survivors. The government not only demonises immigration and promotes punitive crackdowns, but it also echoes the rhetoric of Enoch Powell. It does all of this while its polling collapses to the low 20s, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party boasting a 10-point lead over it in one poll.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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Jamie Dimon says possibility of stagflation far higher than investors realize as markets shake off Moody’s triple-A cut
JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon warned on Monday that investors were being too complacent as markets shook off news that the US has lost its last triple-A credit rating amid fresh concern over the federal government’s burgeoning debt pile.
Credit ratings agency Moody’s dealt a blow to Washington on Friday when it stripped the US of its top-notch rating, downgrading the world’s largest economy by one notch to AA1 and become becoming the last of the big three agencies to drop its triple-A rating for the US.
One thing is certain: motion sickness, which happens to one in three people, is not a sign of weak character
The other day, I tried to read an email on my phone while in the backseat of a moving car. Almost immediately, I was overwhelmed with nausea. Next to me, my boyfriend was happily scrolling through news articles. He tried to show me a headline, but I was too busy staring out the window, breathing deeply and trying not to vomit.
This happens basically any time I am in a moving vehicle that I am not personally piloting. It’s a little embarrassing. But I’m in good company: approximately one in three people are considered “highly susceptible to motion sickness”.
The Yellow Submarinewon at Barcelona to seal fifth place and vindication for a manager they sacked nine years ago
Villarreal had given everything all season when with one game left the roof fell in on them, but not like that. It had been 10 long, hard months of “solidarity and commitment … methodology, work, honesty and dedication”, their manager said, yet this was no late lament, all that for nothing; instead, this was reward and release, “time to enjoy it”, to let go, so they did. Outside at Montjuïc, Barcelona had begun their party, even 2025’s first league defeat and killjoy keeper Wojciech Szczesny saving an outrageous overhead kick from his own son not spoiling the fun; inside the dressing room, the club from the small town 200 miles south had begun theirs too, and nothing could ruin this either. Someone put La Morocha on and the players were bouncing about, drumming the rhythm on the ceiling when, in another triumph for cheap construction, the first beam came down. Captain Juan Foyth, looking like a kid who’d put a football through the neighbour’s window, raised his arm to protect his teammates, quietly laid it to one side, and they carried on.
The track was changed, Handel now, and they lined up. Some tipped their heads back, gazing at the ceiling they had broken. Others put hands on hearts. Most laughed. All of them scatted and sang, at least the word they knew: maybe not die meister, maybe not die besten or les grandes équipes, and definitely not eine grosse sportliche veranstaltung, but certainly the champions. The flag they carried read “the village wants the Champions League” and now they had it. Villarreal, the team from the place whose population could fit into Montjuïc, had come to Catalonia, handed the newly crowned champions a guard of honour and then beaten them 3-2, helped by Barça’s hangovers, to secure fifth and a return to Europe’s biggest competition with a week to spare. The season, Santi Comesaña said, had been “almost perfect”.
Romania’s new president, a modest but driven maths prodigy who made a name for himself fighting corrupt property developers in Bucharest before becoming the capital’s crusading mayor, is expected to keep his country firmly on its pro-European track.
Club won fourth consecutive league title last week
The French champions Olympique Lyonnais Féminin have been renamed OL Lyonnes, as part of a series of announcements made by their owner, Michele Kang.
The American businesswoman has also revealed the team will make the Groupama Stadium – home of the Lyon men’s team – their regular home stadium. Kang said other mid-sized stadium alternatives, including a local rugby stadium, were explored before they reached the conclusion that the stadium that hosted the 2019 Women’s World Cup final is the best venue for them.
Met police say 34-year-old arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life
A third man has been arrested over suspected arson attacks on two properties and a car linked to Keir Starmer.
The 34-year-old man was arrested on Monday morning in Chelsea, west London, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life, the Metropolitan police said.
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