Fifa has announced a 50% increase in World Cup prize money for next year’s tournament, with the champions set to take home $50m (£37.5m) as a reward for their success.
The news comes days after there was widespread public outrage over the price of seats at the tournament, to be held in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Fifa this week announced a limited number of discount tickets for fans of participating countries.
ShinyHunters group reportedly behind the hack affecting data of 200m users thought to be from before 2021
Hackers have accessed the search history and viewing habits of premium users of Pornhub, one of the world’s most popular pornography websites.
A gang has reportedly accessed more than 200m data records, including premium members’ email addresses, search and viewing activities and locations. Pornhub is a heavily used site and says it has more than 100m daily visits globally.
Trump has ordered a ‘total and complete’ blockade of sanctioned oil tankers to and from the country
We will get a sense later in the day on whether the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has any misgivings about Donald Trump’s strategy towards Venezuela, when a war powers resolution intended to halt his escalation against the country comes up for a vote.
Proposed by Democrat James McGovern, the resolution would require the president to remove troops from the country’s vicinity. It has 39 Democratic co-sponsors, and, perhaps crucially, three Republicans: Don Bacon of Nebraska, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Kentucky. The latter two are not on good terms with the president.
Food bloggers liken Richard Hart to Christopher Columbus for ‘stomping’ on a country that has welcomed him
A noted British baker has provoked a furore in Mexico by saying on a podcast the country does not “really have much of a bread culture”.
Richard Hart, who opened the Green Rhino bakery in Mexico City in June, also said the country’s wheat was “not good … completely highly processed, full of additives” and its sandwiches – tortas – were made “on these white ugly rolls that are pretty cheap and industrially made”.
Make ahead and impress your guests with crunchy-topped hazelnut creme brulees and a centrepiece chocolate fondant bundt cake
Even though our to-do lists are longer and our homes busier than ever, there’s something about Christmas that gives us the extra chutzpah to bake. And not just any baking, but baking for a crowd. So, with this in mind, here are two crowdpleasing recipes – a rich hazelnut “Nutcracker” creme brulee and a resplendent chocolate fondant bundt cake – with a few make-ahead and shortcut secrets to give you a head start.
Nicola Lamb is a pastry chef and author of the weekly Kitchen Projects newsletter and Sift, published by Ebury Press at £30. To order a copy for £27, go to guardianbookshop.com
I don’t want to sound dramatic but, a few weeks ago, something happened that has completely changed how I view online material. I fell for AI-generated content. For someone who is constantly squabbling with older relatives about how little they question what they see online, this was a profoundly unsettling and humbling experience. And it made me think about how, during this holiday period, we could all use this as an opportunity to approach those conversations with the “WhatsApp aunties” more sensitively.
EarthQuaker Devices has served Smashing Pumpkins, PJ Harvey and Radiohead but says tariffs add costs up to 30%
Julie Robbins and her team atEarthQuaker Devices have made guitar pedals for some of the biggest names in the world of music. The Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, PJ Harvey and others have sought out the company’s bespoke, handmade pedals for their unique sounds and designs. Its most popular model, Plumes, has sold over 67,000 devices.
Their made-from-scratch effects petals use more than 1,000 components, many which are imported directly from countries such as China and Vietnam or are bought from companies that bring them in from overseas.
A delicious, gelatine-free panna cotta that saves yoghurt from the waste bin
I was really shocked to learn from environmental action NGO Wrap that, of the 51,000 tonnes of yoghurt that’s wasted in the UK every year, half of it is in unopened pots! The reason is our old arch enemy, date labels, which can cause confusion and trick us into thinking that perfectly safe yoghurt is not OK to eat. That’s one reason many supermarkets have scrapped use-by dates on the likes of yoghurt, but they still use best-before dates. Remember, if a product doesn’t have a use-by date, always do the sniff test before throwing it away.
Today’s recipe is a light, gelatine-free version of panna cotta that’s instead set with agar agar (a type of seaweed), which gives it a soft-set texture. It’s refreshing, deliciously sour and simple to make. I use brown sugar for flavour and micronutrients, but regular sugar, honey and other sweeteners will all also work well.
WBD had agreed to sell to Netflix but Paramount swiftly countered with an all-cash offer, which WBD’s board is calling ‘inadequate’
Warner Bros Discovery has urged shareholders to reject a $108.4bn hostile takeover offer from Paramount Skydance, branding it “inadequate” amid an extraordinary corporate battle to control the legacy media conglomerate.
WBD agreed to sell its storied movie studios, HBO cable network and streaming service to Netflix in a $82.7bn deal earlier this month, setting the stage for a seismic shift in Hollywood’s industrial landscape.
The UK will formally issue instructions to transfer £2.5bn from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC to humanitarian causes in Ukraine, telling the billionaire to commit the funds or face court action.
Keir Starmer told the House of Commons the funds from the oligarch, who is subject to UK sanctions, would be converted into a new foundation for Ukraine and that the issuing of a licence for the transfer was the last chance Abramovich would have to comply before legal action was taken.
An intense surge in flu cases driven by a newly dominant virus strain is sweeping across Europe, placing healthcare systems in several countries under severe pressure, the World Health Organization has said.
The WHO said on Wednesday that at least 27 of the 38 countries in its European region were reporting “high or very high influenza activity”, with more than half of patients with flu-like symptoms testing positive in six countries including Ireland, Serbia, Slovenia and the UK.
Amazon is in talks to invest more than $10bn (£7.5bn) in OpenAI, in the latest funding deal being struck by the startup behind ChatGPT.
If it goes ahead, the market valuation of OpenAI could rise above $500bn, according to The Information, a tech news site that revealed the negotiations.
Apple’s smash hit sci-fi drama has confounded and compelled in equal measure and provided hope for small screen innovation at an underwhelming time
In many ways, it feels like 2025 was the year that television gave up. Old favourites such as The White Lotus and Severance let us down, with gaping plotholes and a total absence of forward momentum respectively. New shows have failed to break through, too, largely due to an expectation that television shows are now the things people put on in the background while they scroll on their phones.
All in all, it seems like there hasn’t been a show that people could really get their teeth into this year. That is, until Pluribus came along.
The Guardian followed immigration attorney Milli Atkinson as she pivoted from case to case – and tried to keep herself sane. This is what her typical day looks like
It’s been a chaotic year in San Francisco immigration court. At least 88 asylum seekers have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at their court hearings. More than half of the immigration judges have been fired. A climate of fear and uncertainty pervades.
At the center of it all, immigration attorney Milli Atkinson has been holding things together. She leads the San Francisco Bar Association’s Attorney of the Day program, which provides people from all over Northern California with free legal advice when they show up to immigration court. She also leads San Francisco’s Rapid Response Network, finding legal representation for anyone in the city arrested by ICE.
Experts decry Jason Reding Quiñones’s ‘fishing expedition’ as subpoenas reportedly issued to John Brennan and others
A Maga loyalist US attorney in Miami is expanding an investigation of ex-FBI and intelligence officials who incurred Donald’s Trump’s wrath with an inquiry into how Russia helped him win in 2016, despite the US justice department suffering stinging recent court rejections of indictments of two foes of the US president.
Former prosecutors and legal experts call the Miami-based inquiry, which has issued some two dozen subpoenas so far, a “fishing expedition”. The investigation’s apparent focus is to identify ways to criminally charge ex-FBI and intelligence officials who have already been investigated and effectively exonerated by two special counsels and a Republican-led Senate panel, which mounted exhaustive inquiries into Russia’s efforts to boost Trump in 2016.
Latest Liverpool alumnus to join Saudi Pro League will not have to worry about a lack of funds at Al-Qadsiah
The path from Liverpool to the east of Saudi Arabia is becoming increasingly well-worn, but Brendan Rodgers has a bigger job on his hands than Robbie Fowler, Steven Gerrard and Jordan Henderson. On Tuesday, the 52-year-old was confirmed as the new head coach of Al-Qadsiah, with the target in his new job simple: to turn the Big Four in Saudi Arabia into the Big Five.
If he had concerns about the lack of investment at Celtic, the club he left in October, then that shouldn’t be an issue at the Khobar-based Al-Qadsiah. In July, they splashed out a reported €65m (£57.15m) on the Italy striker Mateo Retegui. Few clubs around the world have an owner with pockets – or oil wells – as deep as those that belong to Aramco. The state-owned oil enterprise usually makes the top 10 lists of the world’s biggest companies.
Greece is hoping that protected areas will help keep daytrippers away and allow vulnerable monk seals to return to their island habitats
Deep in a sea cave in Greece’s northern Sporades, a bulky shape moves in the gloom. Someone on the boat bobbing quietly on the water close by passes round a pair of binoculars and yes! – there it is. It’s a huge Mediterranean monk seal, one of the world’s rarest marine mammals , which at up to 2.8 metres and over 300kg (660lbs), is also one of the world’s largest types of seal.
Piperi, where the seal has come ashore, is a strictly guarded island in the National Marine Park of Alonissos and Northern Sporades, Greece’s largest marine protected area (MPA) and a critical breeding habitat for the seals. Only researchers are allowed within three miles of its shores, with permission from the government’s Natural Environment and Climate Change Agency.
David Gentleman’s brilliant career spans eight decades, from watercolour painting to tube station murals to drawing the Tottenham riots. Here his daughter, the Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman, dispenses his invaluable advice
When we were children, my father, the painter David Gentleman, never offered much advice to me or my siblings. If we wanted to draw, he would hand out pencils and let us get on with it. He was encouraging, but never gave us instructions. If we were enjoying ourselves, more paper was available; but if we wanted to go and do something else, that was fine too. The idea of teaching people how to do things still makes him uncomfortable, so his latest book, Lessons for Young Artists, has come as a surprise to us all. At 95, he has attempted to distil everything he has learned about working as a painter since the late 1940s into clear advice. These lessons are not aimed exclusively at art students, or even at older people who want to paint, but are for anyone wondering how to build a life and career as a creative person.
I haven’t inherited his artistic talents, but I have picked up other important things from growing up with someone who has managed to spend the past eight decades earning a living from what he enjoys doing most. Over the past two years, as he wrote this book, I’ve spent hours in his Camden studio, talking about painting and drawing and helping him search for pictures to illustrate his ideas. Here are 10 things I’ve learned from a lifetime watching him work.
Welcome to the fourth Football Daily Christmas Awards. This is the bit where, in our old guise, we would bang on about becoming so jaded that we’d lost count of how many years we’d been churning out this old tat. Hmm … So OK, here we are, refreshed and ready to go! Pour yourself a pint of wine, throw your boots up on the desk, decompress, de-depress, and enjoy!
PC, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2; Simogo A suite of iOS classics is lovingly preserved in this collection from the Swedish developer, early standard-setters of the meaningful smartphone game
Fifteen years ago in Malmö, Sweden, animator Simon Flesser and programmer Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck left their jobs at the now-defunct games studio Southend Interactive to strike out on their own. Tired of the fussy nature of console development, the pair would stake their claim on Apple’s App Store, which in 2010 was regarded as one of the most exciting frontiers in games. Mashing their names together to form a portmanteau, Flesser and Gardebäck became Simogo, and a consistently wonderful and forward-thinking games studios was born.
Simogo Legacy Collection represents the Swedish indie studio’s first seven games, released across its first five years. Originally released for iPhone and iPad from 2010 to 2015, Apple’s constantly changing standards meant that Simogo, like all iOS developers, had to either regularly update their games to comply with the latest specifications, or see their games rendered unplayable. The only solutions are either to perpetually issue updates, or find a way to bring the mobile game experience to other platforms.
Relative of Sir Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales, accused of three offences from 2022 to 2024
The Duke of Marlborough, formerly known as Jamie Blandford, has been charged with intentional strangulation.
Charles James Spencer-Churchill, a relative of Sir Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales, is accused of three offences between November 2022 and May 2024, Thames Valley police said.
Conservationists appeal to public for help after rare birds disappear in suspicious circumstances
One of the first white-tailed eagles to fledge in England for hundreds of years has vanished in suspicious circumstances, alongside two more “devastating” disappearances of the reintroduced raptor.
Police are appealing for public help as they investigate the disappearances, which are a setback to the bird’s successful reintroduction. Their disappearance is being investigated by several police forces and the National Wildlife Crime Unit.
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