German magazine Der Spiegel has reported the warning, quoting a leaked note from a recent call between the European leaders
But on a more serious note, we are hearing that German chancellor Friedrich Merz has postponed his planned visit to Norway scheduled for Friday and will travel to Brussels instead.
Merz will travel to Belgium for a private dinner with Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, his spokesperson said in comments reported by Reuters.
NYT accuses Pentagon of infringing on the constitutional rights of its journalists
A law has come into effect in Texas that will allow individuals in the state to sue abortion pill providers in other states. Proponents say it is a way to enforce abortion restrictions in Texas. Opponents worry about the methods complainants might use to find their evidence.
In this special episode of Politics Weekly America, the Guardian US reproductive health and justice reporter Carter Sherman speaks to people who are using, providing and protecting abortion pills and those fighting against them in Texas.
With the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, already in the hot seat over the 2 September boat strike and the inspector-general report on his use of the Signal messaging app in March, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Hegseth had asked Admiral Alvin Holsey to step down after he had expressed concerns over the legality of the attacks in the Caribbean.
Reds goal ruled Sunderland own goal in blow to Wirtz
Mohamed Salah ‘still important’ after being dropped
Florian Wirtz should ignore his Premier League numbers and not lose confidence in his world-class ability at Liverpool, believes Virgil van Dijk.
Liverpool’s £116m summer signing thought he had scored his first goal for the club against Sunderland on Wednesday only for the 81st-minute equaliser to be deemed an own goal by defender Nordi Mukiele. The decision means the 22-year-old is still without a goal or an assist in 13 league appearances for the champions. Van Dijk, however, is convinced Wirtz is on the right path at Liverpool and will prove he is an elite level player.
Swiss bank says bequests made 91 people billionaires, while overall number jumped from 2,682 in 2024 to 9,919 this year
The super-rich are inheriting record levels of wealth as they pass down billions of dollars to their children, grandchildren and spouses, research by a Swiss bank favoured by billionaires shows.
Globally, there are 9,919 billionaires this year, up from 2,682 in 2024, UBS found.
England fans were bracing themselves for a familiar and depressing few hours before the opener finally came good
Anthems over, Zak Crawley left the field and took the water handed to him by Matt Potts. If he was a little dry of mouth it would hardly be a surprise – even without the burden of the brace of ducks he took from the first Test, the situation he was about to walk into might have verged awkwardly close to terrifying. He downed half the bottle, donned his helmet and turned back around.
Mitchell Starc, the bowler who dismissed him in the opening over of each innings in Perth and is even more effective in these day-night games, dried his hands on the sun-baked turf as Crawley made his way to the middle, and picked up the new pink ball.
The scourge of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) is global. While their consumption is particularly high in the west, forming more than half the average diet in the UK and the US, for example, UPFs are replacing fresh food in diets on every continent.
This month, the world’s largest review on the health threats of UPFs was published in the Lancet. It warned that such foods are exposing millions of people to long-term harm, and called for urgent action. Earlier this year Unicef revealed that more children around the world were obese than underweight for the first time, as junk food overwhelms diets, with the steepest rises in low- and middle-income countries.
Pentagon’s Law of War manual clearly prohibits attack, but justification for whole campaign also faces tough questions
Graphic depictions of two survivors being killed by a second US military strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug ferrying boat have provoked outrage where previously there was none – or at least relatively little.
A firestorm of controversy has greeted a recent Washington Post report which suggested that a deadly attack on a vessel carrying 11 people in the Caribbean was followed with a second assault after the initial strike failed to kill everybody onboard.
Study reveals US earmarked billions to stockpile critical minerals for military use, including precision-guided weaponry and AI-driven warfare
The accelerating global arms race is hindering climate action as critical minerals that are key to a sustainable future are being diverted to make the latest military hardware, according to a report
The study from the Transition Security Project – a joint US and UK venture – reveals how the Pentagon is stockpiling huge stores of critical minerals that are needed for a range of climate technologies including solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and battery storage.
Once home to gold and prospectors, the Nevada desert is now the site of a new kind of expansion: tech data centers
Driving down the interstate through the dry Nevada desert, there are few signs that a vast expanse of new construction is hiding behind the sagebrush-covered hills. But, just beyond a massive power plant and transmission towers that march up into the dusty brown mountains, lies one of the world’s biggest buildouts of data centers – miles of new concrete buildings that house millions of computer servers.
This business park, called the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, has a sprawling landmass greater than the city of Denver. It is home to the largest data center in the US, built by the company Switch, and tech giants like Google and Microsoft have also bought land here and are constructing enormous facilities. A separate Apple data center complex is just down the road. Tesla’s gigafactory, which builds electric vehicle batteries, is a resident too.
Innocent people were caught up in an assassination attempt on a former Russian spy in Salisbury in March 2018. How did this happen?
The novichok attack on Salisbury in south-west England in March 2018 was an extraordinary event, sending shock waves across the world. The targeted man, the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, recovered from an audacious assassination attempt, but an innocent British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, died. An inquiry was heard in Salisbury and London last year investigating the attack on the Skripals, the response of the emergency services and other public bodies, and how Sturgess was tragically caught up in an international incident. Here are some of the key questions it examined.
Starc takes six but Root and Archer add 61 for final wicket
It was one of the most intense opening days to a Test match in recent memory. The Gabba was like a cauldron, the air as thick as soup, and with the pink ball zipping around for Mitchell Starc as he continued his bulldozing start to the series, the pressure on England felt relentless.
And yet at 8.38pm local time this all melted away as Joe Root tickled Scott Boland for four to seal his 40th Test century and – far more notably – his first on Australian soil. Root insisted this tour was never about addressing the gap in his otherwise stellar CV but, even for the most self-effacing of masters, the sense of relief out in the middle was palpable.
Vinay Prasad memo said at least 10 children had died from Covid vaccination – but offered scant evidence for claim
America’s top vaccines official promised, in a long and argumentative memo to staff on Friday, to revamp vaccine regulation after claiming that at least 10 children died from Covid vaccination – but he offered no evidence for that allegation and scant details on the new approach.
The top-down changes, without input from outside advisers or publication of data, worries experts who fear vaccines such as the flu shot may quickly disappear and that public trust will take a major hit.
Calls for disenfranchisement rest on a single assumption: that women’s citizenship is partial and conditional
Sexism can be very modern and tech savvy. Misogyny is an ever-evolving idiom, and men and women alike have found particularly of-the-moment ways to operate within the genre. Think of the apps that take images of women and remove their clothes, or the AI bots that men and boys can use to generate pornography or depictions of graphic violence against women and girls for the crime of going to the same school as they do or running for office. Think of the influencers of the so-called “womanosphere” who tell their female audiences that women who seek out friendship or equality with men are morons or cows, all through the gleam of a TikTok filter. Sexism may be the world’s oldest prejudice and its first unjust hierarchy, but it is continually innovating, adapting to new technologies and the most recent rhetorical needs of male supremacy.
But some of the forms of misogyny that have been bubbling up in American political discourse lately can seem a bit retro. I don’t just mean the tradwives, who dress alternately like June Cleaver or like Ma Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie – evoking bygone eras, or at least the ways those eras are depicted on television. And I don’t just mean the pro-natalists, either, who don weird bonnets and propose national breeding medals for prolific mothers. Since last month’s massive election victories for Democrats, some on the right have looked to revive a form of sexism that has been out of fashion for more than one hundred years: the idea that women should not have a right to vote.
Team are Saudi PIF’s ‘favourite investment’, CEO adds
Newcastle United’s chief executive regards the club as a rocket ship and believes that, by 2030, it could house the world’s best team. David Hopkinson has hit the ground running since succeeding Darren Eales at St James’ Park in September and the Canadian’s five-year plan is nothing if not ambitious.
“By 2030, I see this club being in the debate about being the top club in the world,” he said. “That kind of progress doesn’t take as long as you might think. What it takes is clarity of conviction.
Space-travelling telepaths, LGBTQ+ activism, a war-torn Britain, online alter egos and feminist trailblazers
Torchfire Moira Buffini (Faber)
In her 2024 YA debut Songlight, Buffini plunged young adult readers into a dystopian landscape inspired by John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, with nations bitterly divided by attitudes to telepathy. The second in the trilogy pits the Brightlanders, who persecute those with “songlight”, against the Aylish, who prize them – and the Teroans, spacefaring telepaths who see ordinary humans as disposable. As multiple finely drawn protagonists – including Elsa, searching desperately for sanctuary, Nightingale, forced to appease a terrifying captor, and Rye, trying to understand an extraordinary discovery – fight to find love, acceptance and safety, the book blazes like its title, consuming the reader more fiercely with every page. Fans will find it hard to wait for the final instalment.
We Are Your Children David Roberts (Two Hoots)
“Words, when hurled like stones, wound deeply,” asserts Roberts, introducing his bright, brilliant history of LGBTQ+ activism by describing his own childhood experience of homophobic bullying. The power of words to wound, but also to tell of authentic living, courage and change, delivered via sit-ins, marches and protests on every scale, is apparent throughout this book, which chronicles queer activism in the UK and US from the 1950s to the early 21st century. Though it contains many stories of violence and suffering, from the assassination of Harvey Milk to the ravages of HIV/Aids, the prevalent mood, emphasised by Roberts’s bold, colourful, expressive artwork, is of defiance, joy and proud hope – from Quentin Crisp’s flamboyance to the iterations of the Pride flag, Julian Hows wearing a skirt as a London Underground worker in the 70s to the first same-sex pre-watershed kiss. An outstanding achievement, setting out via individual, accessible narratives the hard-won rights that remain continually under threat.
Two make-ahead Italian after-dinner treats: a rich chocolate and hazelnut tart, and a traditional boozy dessert that will send nonna to sleep
When you’re the cook of the house, you spend quite enough time in the kitchen on Christmas Day as it is. And, after those time-consuming nibbles, the smoked salmon starter and the turkey-with-all-the-trimmings main event, the last thing you want is a pudding that demands even more hands-on time at the culinary coalface. For me, the main requirement of any Christmas dessert is that it can be made well in advance, not least because, by the time the pudding stage comes around, I’ll be completely knackered and more than ready to put up my feet and finally relax (or, more likely, fall asleep on the sofa).
New Celtic manager may not be a big name but he won over the US league with leadership style and attractive football
Other managers won more in Major League Soccer than Wilfried Nancy. Bruce Arena, say, certainly has a fuller trophy cabinet. Nancy, however, lifted more than just trophies. He lifted standards. At Columbus Crew, he set a benchmark for the rest, showing what was possible even with limited resources. Columbus didn’t have Lionel Messi or Son Heung-min, but they had Nancy as head coach, and that was often enough.
For the past three seasons, the Crew have been the most dynamic, boundary-pushing team in MLS. Nancy’s CF Montreal team weren’t bad either, establishing the style of play that would come to be known as Nancyball. He changed MLS’s managerial landscape for ever. It was only a matter of time until a call came from Europe.
We publish the full breakdown of the 104,140 votes cast this year plus a chance to search for any player who has ever received a point
Aitana Bonmatí has been voted the best female footballer in the world 2025 by the Guardian’s panel of experts. We asked 127 people in total, including players, coaches and journalists from all over the globe to create our definitive list for the year.
We asked the judges to choose 40 names each and rank their selection in order from 1-40, No 1 being their choice of the best player. The No 1 choice of each judge was awarded 40 points, No 2 given 39pts, down to 1pt for their No 40 choice. All the votes were added together to give a raw score. To minimise the influence of outliers in the list, the highest score awarded to a player was then deducted to give a final score.
Reform UK’s deputy leader has described a celebrated film director and a large and growing group of corroborating witnesses as liars over their allegations of Nigel Farage’s teenage antisemitism and racism.
With the bigotry row continuing to dog Reform, whose lead in the national polls has slipped in recent weeks, Richard Tice turned on those who claimed to have been abused and those who say they saw it.
As the band celebrate their 60th anniversary, a California exhibition draws attention to the unique psychedelic artwork that has long told their story
Artist Bill Walker is one of those guys who always seems to be in the right place at the right time. Having met Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead bassist and avant-garde classical composer, as a student at Nevada Southern University (now the University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Walker was invited in 1967 to make an album cover for the band’s second album, Anthem of the Sun. This experience led to an epic LSD and ayahuasca trip in the Valley of Fire outside Las Vegas over New Year’s Eve and when Walker returned to San Francisco, he painted Anthem of the Sun, complete with figures he came across in the desert.
The Anthem of the Sun painting visually demonstrates the intense innovation that happened in the psychedelic revolution, when music was electrified and LSD became central to the burst of culture that defined the 1960s. The Grateful Dead encapsulated this spirit in their music and came to be considered the most American band of all time for being at the center of the psychedelic movement and its transition from the Beat generation that preceded it.
The new Data (Use and Access) Act, which criminalises intimate image abuse, is a huge victory won fast in a space where progress is often glacially slow
For Jodie*, watching the conviction of her best friend, and knowing she helped secure it, felt at first like a kind of victory. It was certainly more than most survivors of deepfake image-based abuse could expect.
They had met as students and bonded over their shared love of music. In the years since graduation, he’d also become her support system, the friend she reached for each time she learned that her images and personal details had been posted online without her consent. Jodie’s pictures, along with her real name and correct bio, were used on many platforms for fake dating profiles, then adverts for sex work, then posted on to Reddit and other online forums with invitations to deepfake them into pornography. The results ended up on porn sites. All this continued for almost two years, until Jodie finally worked out who was doing it — her best friend – identified more of his victims, compiled 60 pages of evidence, and presented it to police. She had to try two police stations, having been told at the first that no crime had been committed. Ultimately he admitted to 15 charges of “sending messages that were grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing nature” and received a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years.
Up against the brilliant Mitchell Starc and his band of bowlers, even a dot ball for England in the Ashes is a moment of relief
“Must be amazing to be in Australia for the Ashes, what’s the atmosphere like?” It’s an understandable, if slightly daft question. Brett Lee isn’t in my house. I don’t wake up next to a furious Jonathan Agnew. “WHY AREN’T YOU IN CANBERRA, MAX?” I’m 850 miles from Brisbane.
Apart from me the atmosphere is one of wild indifference amongst the family. The good news is I’m hosting the Guardian Ashes Weekly podcast - now a professional excuse to watch another five (or two) days of agony.
Global Witness says plan to upgrade railway line from DRC to Angola puts up to 1,200 buildings at risk of demolition
Up to 6,500 people are at risk of being displaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project funded by the EU and the US, amid a global race to secure supplies of copper, cobalt and other “critical minerals”, according to a report by campaign group Global Witness.
The project, labelled the Lobito Corridor, aims to upgrade the colonial-era Benguela railway from the DRC to Lobito on Angola’s coast and improve port infrastructure, as well as building a railway line to Zambia and supporting agriculture and solar power installations along the route. Angola has said it needs $4.5bn (£3.4bn) for its stretch of the line.
As leaders try to break smugglers’ business model, research suggests strategy so far has had opposite effect
Hardline migration policies adopted by governments across the globe have been a boon for people smugglers, fuelling demand and allowing them to raise their prices, according to a report.
The findings, released on Thursday by the Mixed Migration Centre of the Danish Refugee Council, and based on interviews with thousands of migrants and hundreds of smugglers, come as officials prepare to gather next week in Brussels to discuss how best to combat smuggling.
Connexion
