It’s official: Antoine Semenyo is now a Manchester City player after signing a £62.5m deal. The 26-year-old’s transfer from Bournemouth, who could receive £1.5m in add-ons and are due 10% of any future profit, was confirmed this morning. Semenyo could make his debut against Exeter in the FA Cup on Saturday.
A great move for everyone? Or will Semenyo find himself in an Eberechi Eze situation i.e. going from being the main man to one who occasionally looks devastating but spends plenty of time warming the bench?
US president says move was reaction to Caracas releasing large numbers of political prisoners as ‘sign of seeking peace’
Good morning. Posting on his social media platform, Truth Social, in the early hours of this morning, Donald Trump claimed that he had cancelled a second wave of attacks on Venezuela that would have followed Saturday’s raid, in which the US seized the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
The US president wrote:
Venezuela is releasing large numbers of political prisoners as a sign of “Seeking Peace.” This is a very important and smart gesture. The U.S.A. and Venezuela are working well together, especially as it pertains to rebuilding, in a much bigger, better, and more modern form, their oil and gas infrastructure. Because of this cooperation, I have cancelled the previously expected second Wave of Attacks, which looks like it will not be needed, however, all ships will stay in place for safety and security purposes. At least 100 Billion Dollars will be invested by BIG OIL, all of whom I will be meeting with today at The White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Experts are urging guideline changes for doctors and nurses as surgical masks offer ‘inadequate protection against airborne pathogens’ such as Covid
Surgical face masks provide inadequate protection against flu-like illnesses including Covid, and should be replaced by respirator-level masks – worn every time doctors and nurses are face to face with a patient, according to a group of experts urging changes to World Health Organization guidelines.
There is “no rational justification remaining for prioritising or using” the surgical masks that are ubiquitous in hospitals and clinics globally, given their “inadequate protection against airborne pathogens”, they said in a letter to WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Deal with Bournemouth has add-ons and sell-on clause
Semenyo says he is aiming to get City into the title race
Antoine Semenyo says he has arrived at Manchester City with the intention of getting the club back into the Premier League title race. The £62.5m signing joins a team six points behind the leaders, Arsenal, with 17 matches remaining.
The 26-year-old’s transfer from Bournemouth, who could receive £1.5m in add-ons and are due 10% of any future profit, was confirmed on Friday and Semenyo could make his debut against Exeter in the FA Cup on Saturday. City fought off competition from Liverpool and Manchester United to secure his signature.
If this reform succeeds it will be a blueprint for African self-reliance. But the state has failed to deliver the most basic services for decades. No wonder Nigerians are suspicious
Let’s not mince words. Nigeria’s new tax regime, which landed on our heads this January, is the most ambitious attempt to reshape the state since, well, since the last time someone had a “bright idea” in Abuja. They’re calling it a “generational reset”.
From where I sit, and from where millions of Nigerians actually sit – in traffic, in market stalls, in offices – wondering how to make ends meet, it feels more like a grand, high-stakes gamble.
(Self-released) The Beirut-born producer’s masterly second album revels in dark tension to cinematic effect, finding beauty in ruinous sound
Arabic electronic experimentalism is thriving. In recent years, diaspora artists such as Egyptian producer Abdullah Miniawy, singer Nadah El Shazly and Lebanese singer-songwriter Mayssa Jallad have each released records that combine the Arabic musical tradition of maqam and its slippery melodies with granular electronic sound design, rumbling bass and metallic drum programming to create a dramatic new proposition.
Beirut-born and Amsterdam-based composer Toni Geitani is the latest to contribute to this growing scene with his masterfully produced second album Wahj (“radiance” in Arabic). Working as a visual artist and sound designer, Geitani is well versed in creating imaginative soundscapes for films such as 2024 sci-fi Radius Collapse, as well as referencing the shadowy nocturnal hiss of producers such as Burial on his dabke-sampling 2018 debut album Al Roujoou Ilal Qamar. On Wahj, he harnesses soaring layali vocalisations, reverb-laden drums and analogue synths to leave a cinematic impression.
The postseason kicks off on Saturday. Our writers pick the dark horses, players to watch and make their tips for the NFL’s championship game
Melissa is right about the Lions (see below), but how about the Dallas Cowboys? Their defense was nauseating, and nobody wants a playoff weekend spoiled watching that. But their offense was electric. They finished fifth in the league in EPA/play in the regular season. And with Dak Prescott, a solid o-line and George Pickens and CeeDee Lamb, they had the potential to drop 30 points on any playoff group. If they’d snuck in and managed to knock off a top seed, it would have convinced Jerry Jones that he was on the right path. And nothing is funnier than Jones failing to recognize that the reason why Dallas is stuck is the reflection in his mirror. Oliver Connolly
Russia’s military has said it fired its new hypersonic Oreshnik missile at a target in Ukraine during a massive overnight strike.
Ukraine confirmed the attack, saying it took place in the west of the country near the European Union border. Moscow said the launch of the intermediate-range ballistic missile was retaliation for a supposed attempted Ukrainian drone attack on Vladimir Putin’s residence late last month – an allegation both Kyiv and Washington have said is false.
(Transgressive) In Jenny Hollingworth’s first solo venture, her singular songwriting powers shine in swooping vocals and transcendent pop melodies
Over the past decade, 27-year-old Jenny Hollingworth’s musical output has become steadily less strange. As half of Let’s Eat Grandma, the Norwich native started out making freaky synth-folk the arch syrupiness of which chimed with the then-nascent hyperpop scene: I, Gemini, the duo’s 2016 debut, was outsiderish juvenilia of the most thrilling variety. For its follow-up, I’m All Ears, Hollingworth and her bandmate, Rosa Walton, sharpened their songwriting skills while holding tight to their eccentricities; the result was an album of sensational futurist pop. By 2022’s Two Ribbons, they were slipping into slightly more subdued, conventional territory – albeit retaining enough idiosyncratic sonic detailing to maintain their place at the edge.
So it takes a moment to adjust to the overt familiarity of Hollingworth’s first solo venture. Like Two Ribbons, it reflects on grief (she lost her partner in 2019) and the temporary disintegration of her lifelong friendship with Walton, except this time the introspection is set to knowingly nostalgic 1980s new wave. When the choruses don’t sparkle, Quicksand Heart can feel like plodding through the past, but the moment Hollingworth lands on an irresistible melody – see: Every Ounce of Me, whose bittersweet bounce bridges the gap between Olivia Rodrigo and the Waterboys – the effect is transcendent. The record peaks with the archetypally perfect powerpop number Appetite and the genre-bending Do You Still Believe in Me? in which Hollingworth patchworks together breakbeats, vertiginously swooping vocals, squealing hair metal bombast and shoegazey dissonance, reminding us of her singular powers in the process.
In Tehran this week, young adults told the Guardian about collapsing living standards, the mass anti-government protests and their hopes for the future
Mahsa is single and lives with her family. She has been working in fashion design for years and runs a page online where she sells her clothes. In recent months, she says she had achieved good sales and arranged for a prominent influencer to run a major promotion for her. But because of the current situation, the influencer returned the money, and her sales and page activity came to a halt.
IM Alex Golding, 22, who earned nearly £2,000, is among the rising talents aiming to match the leading English grandmasters
Hastings is the grandfather of international chess tournaments, first staged in 1895 and then every year since 1920, with breaks for war and pandemics. Its vintage years were the 1930s, 50s and 70s, when world champions and challengers lined up to compete, while the badminton legend Sir George Thomas and the Bletchley Park codebreaker Hugh Alexander both shared first after defeating renowned opponents.
Nowadays, Hastings has publicity problems, sandwiched as it is between the London Classic and Tata Steel Wijk and Zee, and running simultaneously with the Magnus Carlsen show in the World Rapid/Blitz.
His brutal movies put Korean cinema on the map. Now the director of Oldboy is back with a blistering satire about a man driven to murder after redundancy
The Korean wave is being feted around the world right now but Park Chan-wook is not feeling too celebratory. From the outside, South Korea seems to be a well-oiled machine pumping out a stream of world-conquering pop music, cuisine, cars, cinema (especially the Oscar-winning Parasite) and TV shows, as well as the Samsung flat-screens to watch them on. But Park’s latest film, No Other Choice, bursts the balloon somewhat. It paints modern-day Korea as an unstable landscape of industrial decline, downsizing, unemployment and male fragility – with no KPop Demon Hunters coming to save the day.
“I did not mean it for it to be a realistic portrayal of Korea in 2025,” says Park, a serene, almost professorial 62-year-old. “I think it’s more accurate to view it as a satire on capitalism.”
Oceans absorb 90% of global heating, making them a stark indicator of the relentless march of the climate crisis
The world’s oceans absorbed colossal amounts of heat in 2025, setting yet another new record and fuelling more extreme weather, scientists have reported.
More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s carbon pollution is taken up by the oceans. This makes ocean heat one of the starkest indicators of the relentless march of the climate crisis, which will only end when emissions fall to zero. Almost every year since the start of the millennium has set a new ocean heat record.
Talismanic forward’s spat with teammate Ademola Lookman highlights the problematic behaviour threatening to overshadow his talent
Victor Osimhen is the talisman, the attacking arrowhead of Nigeria’s Super Eagles at the Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco, his three goals offering a warning to Algeria before Saturday’s quarter-final. But the focus on the 27 year old this week has fallen less on his talent and more on his behaviour.
Osimhen’s volatile temperament, displayed in a spat with his teammate Ademola Lookman during Monday’s 4-0 win against Mozambique, has grabbed the headlines. The Galatasaray striker scored twice to underline his world-class finishing but that has been rendered almost an afterthought.
Ben Stokes: 184 runs at 18.4; 15 wickets at 25.1; two catches A body unable to match his will, a team unable to match his ambition and, surely, a screaming sense that he made mistakes when preparing for this challenging but winnable series all adds up to a horrible seven weeks for the England captain. His personal form inevitably buckled – and you have to feel a little sympathy for a man more guilty of giving too much rather than too little.
X to limit editing function to paying subscribers after platform threatened with fines and regulatory action
Grok, Elon Musk’s AI tool, has switched off its image creation function for the vast majority of users after a widespread outcry about its use to create sexually explicit and violent imagery.
The move comes after Musk was threatened with fines, regulatory action and reports of a possible ban on X in the UK.
Earlier this week we published an investigation that found hundreds of UK peregrine falcon nests have been raided in the past decade, in order to feed a growing appetite to own prized birds for racing and breeding in the Middle East.
This piece has been a year in the making, working with a great team of reporters from Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) to shed light on a multimillion-dollar industry that stretches around the world.
This poignant debut about two strangers who fall in love offers a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain
“Love is not an easy thing … It’s both the disease and the medicine,” a character says in Manish Chauhan’s meditation on modern love. This poignant and perceptive coming-of-age story, about two strangers who become star-crossed lovers, is a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain, and of love as home, hope and destiny.
Newly arrived in England following an arranged marriage with British-Indian Rajiv, Mira feels increasingly out of place as she finds out that Rajiv holds secrets and loves someone else. On the eponymous Belgrave Road in Leicester, entire days go by “without sight of an English person”, and Mira feels “disappointed that England wasn’t as foreign or as mysterious as she had hoped”. She takes English classes, finds companionship in her mother-in-law and fills her days with household chores, but nothing shifts her deep loneliness.
Bray/Vann/Grainger/Schofield (Chandos) The easy fluency of Bray and pianist William Vann guides us through familiar and less well known Kurt Weill songs with the haunting Youkali as the lodestar on our journey
Youkali, for Kurt Weill, was the land of desires, promised but never to be attained – a strong image for an exiled and itinerant composer. The 1935 song in which he captured the idea, a lilting tango, forms the lodestar of Katie Bray’s voyage through Weill’s chameleonic songwriting career, undertaken alongside the pianist William Vann, accordionist Murray Grainger and double bassist Marianne Schofield, the latter moonlighting from the Hermes Experiment.
First, we hear a haunting, unaccompanied musing on the Youkali melody, then more of these punctuate the programme until we reach the song in full at the end. The journey takes in numbers in German, French and English – some familiar, some not – including a couple of songs written for the Huckleberry Finn musical Weill was working on at the time of his death.
Against a backdrop of rising white nationalism, the ‘global authority on colour’ has chosen white as the shade of 2026. Four experts wade in on the implications for everything from interior design choices to racial politics
For more than 25 years, Pantone, which describes itself as “the global authority for colour communication and inspiration”, has attempted to prophesy the year ahead by choosing its specific colour.For 2026, it is hedging its bets on something called cloud dancer.
While it’s highly unlikely that the next 12 months can be neatly summarised by one colour before the year has even kicked off (Pantone’s announcement took place in December), it still garners headlines because, in a way, Pantone’s decision does reflect on some level what is happening in the zeitgeist – or, at least, what is expected to happen. After the economic crash in 2009 came mimosa, a “warm and engaging” shade of yellow said to represent hope and optimism (it rang true with a mimosa-coloured sofa becoming a must-have and everyone taking up daily affirmations). In 2016, there was the blending of serenity and rose quartz – AKA the ubiquitous millennial pink – while last year’s mocha mousse is the reason you are seeing brown everywhere.
Forecasts suggest that global heating could create a shortcut from Asia to North America, and new routes for trading, shipping – and attack
Another week, another freak weather phenomenon you’ve probably never heard of. If it’s not the “weather bomb” of extreme wind and snow that Britain is hunkering down for as I write, it’s reports in the Guardian of reindeer in the Arctic struggling with the opposite problem: unnaturally warm weather leading to more rain that freezes to create a type of snow that they can’t easily dig through with their hooves to reach food. In a habitat as harsh as the Arctic, where survival relies on fine adaptation, even small shifts in weather patterns have endlessly rippling consequences – and not just for reindeer.
For decades now, politicians have been warning of the coming climate wars – conflicts triggered by drought, flood, fire and storms forcing people on to the move, or pushing them into competition with neighbours for dwindling natural resources. For anyone who vaguely imagined this happening far from temperate Europe’s doorstep, in drought-stricken deserts or on Pacific islands sinking slowly into the sea, this week’s seemingly unhinged White House talk about taking ownership of Greenland is a blunt wake-up call. As Britain’s first sea lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, has been telling anyone prepared to listen, the unfreezing of the north due to the climate crisis has triggered a ferocious contest in the defrosting Arctic for some time over resources, territory and strategically critical access to the Atlantic. To understand how that threatens northern Europe, look down at the top of a globe rather than at a map.
Donald Trump’s latest attack on climate action takes place amid rapidly rising temperatures, rising sea levels, still-rising greenhouse gas emissions, burgeoning costs from extreme weather and the imminent danger that the world will trigger “tipping points” in the climate system that will lead to catastrophic and irreversible changes.
The US president’s decision to withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the world’s leading body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will not alter any of those scientific realities.
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