Keir Starmer accuses Kremlin of ‘using fabricated allegations’ to justify attack after call with Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron

Pope Leo also chooses to express a view on the recent events in Venezuela, calling for world governments – I think he means US president Donald Trump in particular – to “respect the will” of the Venezuelan people.

Goes without saying that it’s particularly important coming from the first US pope.

“I wish to repeat my urgent appeal that peaceful political solutions to the current situation should be sought, keeping in mind the common good of the peoples and not the defence of partisan interests.”

“This pertains, in particular to Venezuela. In light of recent developments in this regard, I renew my appeal to respect the will of the Venezuelan people and to safeguard the human and civil rights of all ensuring a future of stability and concord.”

“The Holy See strongly reiterates the pressing need for an immediate ceasefire and for dialogue motivated by a sincere search for ways leading to peace.

I make an urgent appeal to the international community, not to waver in its commitment to pursuing just and lasting solutions that will protect the most vulnerable and restore hope to the afflicted peoples.”

As the Gerard Butler film Greenland 2 becomes one more addition to the list of action movies to tamper with the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty or Golden Gate bridge, isn’t it time they mixed it up a bit?

Realistically there was never going to be a good time to release a sequel to 2020’s Greenland. This is partly because Greenland was one of those films in which Gerard Butler runs around looking as if he’s desperately trying to hold in a whopper of a fart. However, releasing a film about Americans focusing all their effort on Greenland at this precise moment in time feels a little on the nose.

Also, and hopefully this isn’t a spoiler, but it’s weird to make Greenland 2 when the entire world was destroyed at the end of Greenland 1. In that film, you will remember, Butler and his family had to get to Greenland because the planet was about to be pummelled by meteors.

Kim Elms, a speech pathologist, shares her experience as an auditory-visual synaesthete

• Read more stories of synaesthesia in the way I feel series

Car journeys with my partner are a nightmare. He’s an ex-DJ so he likes to crank the music up, but for me this means seeing static images and flashes of light in my mind’s eye while I’m trying to drive. It’s hard to describe exactly what I see when I hear sound. But it’s almost like the sound waves you’d see if you watched an audio recording on a screen, or these little neurons connecting and space nebulas exploding in front of me.

I’m 44 now and only realised I had auditory-visual synaesthesia in my 30s. What I did know was that I seemed to have an extraordinary ability for linguistics. In school I studied Japanese and did really well without trying because I could literally see the words and sounds presented as images in front of me, making them easy to remember. At university I majored in Spanish, Korean and Indonesian and it was no effort at all. I then joined the air force as an intelligence officer because I didn’t want to become a teacher or translator. I walked away from the language aptitude test thinking I’d either messed it up or that it had been the easiest thing I’d ever done in my life. No one’s ever managed to get every answer right, they said when the results came back. But I hadn’t even tried. It just came naturally.

Study of man often featured in works by the Flemish master reveals hidden painting of woman beneath model’s beard

Is it a bald elderly man with a big bushy beard and a wine-addled stare? Or a friendly young woman with flowing locks and a crown of braids?

To Belgian art dealer Klaas Muller, an answer to that question mattered less than the fact that this particular take on the duck-rabbit optical illusion was painted by one Peter Paul Rubens.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calls protesters ‘vandals’ and ‘saboteurs’ and blames the US for instigating the unrest

Iran’s supreme leader has vowed that authorities will “not back down” in the face of growing protests, blaming the US for instigating demonstrations that started over economic conditions and have since expanded to calls for political reform.

In his first speech since the protests started 13 days ago, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, signalled on Friday that a greater crackdown was coming. He described protesters as “vandals” and “saboteurs”, and accused them of working on behalf of foreign agendas.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

• Warning: graphic content

An afterlife sitcom, an angry penguin, tossed salad and scrambled eggs, and a Corby trouser press … our writers pick the shows they would happily watch on a loop for ever

I love every character and every aspect of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There isn’t a weak link in the cast and they work together as seamlessly and apparently joyfully as you could wish.

Elon Musk’s reckless and degrading AI could be built differently. But Americans will have to speak up

Over the past year, Elon Musk has made a series of protocol changes to Grok, the proprietary AI chatbot of his company xAI, which runs prominently on his social media site X, formerly Twitter. Many of these changes have been geared to make the bot more amenable to producing pornography. In August 2025, Grok launched an image generator, branded as Grok Imagine, which featured a service geared toward creating nude, suggestive, or sexually explicit content, including computer-generated pornographic images of real women. The feature, which was quickly used to create naked images of celebrities like Taylor Swift, also allowed users to create brief videos, complete with animations and sounds.

Musk also rolled out AI girlfriends on the platform: animated personas – including female characters with exaggerated breasts and hips – that interacted in sexually explicit ways with users. One of the characters, “Ani”, was an anime-style cartoon blonde with a series of skimpy outfits; the bot blew kisses and addressed users as “my love” while directing the chats toward sexual content.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

A sweet and sparkly way to use up cocktail cherries at the 19th hole

If, like many people, you’ve got an opened jar of cocktail cherries in the fridge after the festivities, here’s a very classy way to use up some of the syrup.

Emilio Giovanazzi, head bartender, The American Bar, Gleneagles, Auchterarder, Perthshire

From the V&A to the Stranger Things finale, the pop icon still looms large – but with lower streaming figures than his peers, how many new listeners are discovering his music?

• ‘A perplexing, astonishing finale’: world pays tribute to David Bowie a decade after his death

When David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, such was the scale of media coverage and public mourning that one would have presumed his music would be everywhere for ever, elevated as he was, to misquote Smash Hits, to the position of the People’s Dame. It was briefly – Starman reached No 18, and Space Oddity No 24 – but then it wasn’t.

Each year, Forbes compiles a posthumous celebrity rich list. Bowie appeared in 2016, ranked at No 11 with estimated earnings of $10.5m (£7.8m), and again in 2017, in the same position but with earnings of $9.5m (£7m). This was unsurprising given the enormous spike in interest there is in the immediate aftermath of a superstar’s death. Yet he didn’t appear in the Forbes list again until 2022, when he was at No 3 with earnings of $250m (£195m) – the highest-ranked musician that year – but that was almost all attributable to the sale of his music publishing rights to Warner Chappell.

• Head coach defends methods and leadership after Ashes

• Team culture likely to be main focus of ECB review

At the end of a sorry Ashes loss capped off by news of Harry Brook’s involvement in a late-night incident two months earlier, Brendon McCullum set out his position as England head coach: if his wings are clipped and his ethos compromised then “maybe there is someone better” to do the role.

The caveat is key here. McCullum is keen to continue and having held talks with Richard Thompson and Richard Gould, chair and chief executive respectively of the England and Wales Cricket Board, he appears set to – at least for the white-ball tour of Sri Lanka that begins in less than a fortnight.

I love the way we are both looking in astonishment at my son. It shows the unwavering support she gave me when he was born

This picture of my mother, me and my eldest son, Theo, was taken the morning after he was born in May 2002, in University College Hospital, London.

There are a lot of things I love about it. I love the fact my mother is exquisitely dressed – she’s wearing her pearls! She always looked very elegant at this time in her life and enjoyed clothes (we bought that suit on a day out together). I love the composition too – our three dark heads, faces in profile and the way our three hands are aligned. I love the miracle of my son’s intricate little shell of an ear, the nose (his dad’s) and lips (mine) still visible now in his 23-year-old face.

As Americans worry about healthcare and affordability, the ‘no more wars’ president is helping oil companies instead

Immediately after Donald Trump ordered a military strike in Venezuela, many critics focused on how that attack violated international law as well as the US War Powers Resolution. But there hasn’t been nearly enough focus on the domestic implications of Trump’s move.

Trump seems to have ordered his Venezuela venture in part to flip the script away from domestic matters, where things aren’t going well for him. His approval ratings are under water, and he’s getting low marks on the economy, health policy (just 30% approval), inflation (31% approval on the cost of living), his immigration crackdown (41% approval) and his sending the national guard into US cities. Then there’s the big thumbs down that Americans are giving to his tariffs, which have helped push up prices even though candidate Trump promised to lower prices on day one.

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues

Nearly 16,000 nurses set to join union-led strike Monday to demand large hospitals across NYC ‘put patients over profit’

Nearly 16,000 nurses in New York City are set to strike on Monday amid a battle over pay during contract negotiations.

The action, due to take place across five large hospitals, is being organized by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), which is demanding the hospitals put patients over profit.

Godfall by Van Jensen; The Salt Bind by Rebecca Ferrier; The Poet Empress by Shen Tao; A Hole in the Sky by Peter F Hamilton; Hello Earth, Are You There? by Brian Aldiss

Godfall by Van Jensen (Bantam, £20)
The debut novel by a popular comic-book writer is set in a small town in Nebraska, after the landing of a three-mile-long alien figure dubbed “the Giant”. Local sheriff David Blunt is struggling to do his job following the sudden boom in population: in addition to scientists, government agents and soldiers at the highly classified research area established around the mystery from outer space, many more enthusiasts flood to the town, possibly including a serial killer. Two people have been killed in a horrifically brutal way when the FBI takes over and tries to shut him out. But when the next victim is a man he’s known all his life, Blunt is more determined than ever to catch the killer. His investigation draws him to infiltrate a doomsday cult and to discover more about the tangled lives of the people he grew up with, along with the possibility that there could be a clue in the physical composition of the Giant. A suspenseful, well-written blend of science fiction and serial killer thriller.

The Salt Bind by Rebecca Ferrier (Renegade, £18.99)
In 1770s Cornwall, Kensa’s father was hanged as a smuggler, and she now feels a despised outsider, especially in contrast to her quiet half-sister. Only when the local wise woman, Isolde, accepts Kensa as her apprentice can she imagine a future in which she could be respected as a healer. But there’s more than useful potions and a helpful dose of trickery to the role: the wise women of Cornwall are responsible for making sure an ancient pact between land-dwellers and the creatures of the sea continues to hold. Kensa has learned little of the Old Ways when she must suddenly act alone. She has seen Isolde summon the Father of Storms from under the sea, but when she does the same, she finds she has made a horrifying bargain. If she can’t put things right, the sea will rise and drown the whole area. A moving exploration of sisterhood and community, this is an evocatively written folkloric fantasy.

‘We have our own medics,’ bystanders were told after ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis

Witnesses to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shooting Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday say federal officers impeded the response of emergency medical personnel to the scene, blocking the road with their vehicles.

Emily Heller, a witness who lives near the intersection of 34th Street and Portland Avenue, recorded the scene as it unfolded. She told NBC News that agents blocked people from approaching Good’s vehicle. Her video shows a man who identified himself as a physician asking to check for a pulse and being rebuffed.

There is palpable tension: not because anyone trusts the president and the US, but because now there is opportunity for change

• Jesús Piñero is a historian at the Central University of Venezuela

In 1936, Venezuelans learned for the first time what it meant to transition towards democracy. While this was not the only period of transition the country would experience (since the process that began in 1958 consolidated a more open and enduring political regime), the transition of 1936 was longer and more complex, resembling the one Venezuelans are now experiencing after the capture of Nicolás Maduro on 3 January 2026.

Coromoto Escalona, a 35-year-old woman, was preparing her baby’s feeding bottle when she heard some strange noises in the house. It was two o’clock in the morning. She wondered whether the fridge had broken down, since it sometimes made strange noises when it was damaged. Her eldest daughter, who was scrolling on WhatsApp, shouted from her room: “Mum, they’re bombing us.” The two of them stopped what they were doing, grabbed the essentials – the feeding bottle, water and some food – and ran to an underground room in their house, an old colonial mansion in La Pastora, a working-class neighbourhood in central Caracas.

Jesús Piñero is a journalist and a historian at the Central University of Venezuela

• His demeanour after defeat by former club causes upset

• Nuno has two wins from 16 games since replacing Potter

West Ham are losing faith in Nuno Espírito Santo’s ability to save them from relegation and unhappy with their manager embracing Nottingham Forest players on the pitch after losing to his former side on Monday.

Nuno, fired by Forest last September, finds his position under increasing threat after 10 games without a win. West Ham remain reluctant to make their second sacking of the season but are increasingly unimpressed with the Portuguese’s tactics and did not like his demeanour after their latest defeat.

Teaser reels for next December’s coming episode give no clues to the story, still less to how these old characters are returning via the multiverse

Avengers: Doomsday may still be almost a year off, but already it feels as if Hollywood has entered a new era of confidence marketing, built around a sort of ritualised roll-call of legacy characters who really need everyone to know they haven’t been retired yet. In the last few weeks we’ve had three almost completely pointless short trailers online, with another reportedly playing in cinemas ahead of Avatar: Fire and Ash. First there was Captain America cradling his baby, then Thor praying to his dear old dead omnipotent dad. This week we got our first proper look at the classic X-Men lineup in the new film, and there are suggestions that an encounter between the Fantastic Four’s The Thing and half of Wakanda is imminent.

Something weird is clearly happening. These aren’t teaser trailers in any meaningful sense, because these half-cocked, chord-drenched promotional entries tell us absolutely nothing about what is to come. Assembled fandom wants to know who Doctor Doom is in the new movie, and why he looks exactly like Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man (because if this is just stunt-casting there are going to be walkouts). We want to know how all the Fantastic Four and X-Men have suddenly turned up in the main Marvel timeline, when the last 17 years of these movies made no mention of them whatsoever. And we’d really like it not to just be explained away by … “the multiverse”.

Bournemouth will find it hard to replace a player at the peak of his powers, an attacker polished up perfectly for the elite

Antoine Semenyo’s rise is a reminder the big clubs’ scouting systems are not infallible, that not all players will flower at the same time. Fulham, Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Millwall, Reading and Tottenham rejected the schoolboy Semenyo. At 15, he took a year’s absence from the game.

A decade on, a circuitous route to the top alights at Manchester City, who beat a queue of big hitters to his signature. Bournemouth’s ability to find talent the elite passed over continues to prove profitable. Pep Guardiola’s squad has another player who pairs physical power with a high skill level. It also adds a long-throw specialist to the armoury; City are towards the bottom of the metrics in that voguish category.

The whole plant is edible and they don’t need much light – so they’re an easy, tasty treat

January can hardly be considered an abundant time of year. All but the evergreens are barren and bare. Yet there is an approach to year-round growing that, in the depths of winter, feels all the more miraculous. Microgreens are not a “type” of plant, but a method of growing leafy crops which doesn’t require much space or effort – and, importantly for now, can be done indoors – in order to achieve an unseasonably fresh burst of flavour on your dinner plate.

Any plant that is edible from top-to-toe can be grown as a microgreen. From salad leaves like lettuce and sorrel to herbs such as basil, dill, coriander and fennel, plus all the brassicas from the very delicious mustard greens and rocket to the far less spicy broccoli and kale. Also on the fuller side of the flavour profile are nasturtiums and sunflowers, which produce juicy shoots with a nutty flavour. Peas also produce a substantial shoot with pretty leaves and tendrils. Amaranth, carrot and perilla are other edible plants I am eager to try.

Labour party chair says government having conversations about use of platform in light of sexualised Grok images

• UK politics live – latest updates

UK ministers are considering leaving X as a result of the controversy over the platform’s AI tool, which has been allowing users to generate digitally altered pictures of people – including children – with their clothes removed.

Anna Turley, the chair of the Labour party and a minister without portfolio in the Cabinet Office, said on Friday that conversations were happening within the government and Labour about their continued use of the social media platform, which is controlled by Elon Musk.

Today’s fluff could soon be impenetrable

He was on the way to Liverpool last year and Manchester City are gunning for him now, reinforcements required after injuries to Josko Gvardiol and Rúben Dias. It’s only natural then that Arsenal feel a little bit left out. Yes, the league leaders are reportedly having a look at Crystal Palace’s in-demand captain, Marc Guéhi, whose contract runs out in the summer. Guéhi fighting it out with William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhães in central defence? That wall at the back could become impenetrable.

A re-jig in the Tottenham backline is also in the offing. They’re pushing hard for the Santos left-back Souza, 19 years young, after an £8m bid was rejected, while the former Genoa centre-back Radu Dragusin – who recently returned from an ACL injury – is rumoured for a move back to Italy, Roma the proposed destination. Brentford’s Kevin Schade continues to be linked with Spurs, which would set up a reunion with his former coach Thomas Frank.

US envoy welcomes pause in hostilities in contested region although it is unclear whether deal will hold

Syria’s government has announced a ceasefire after three days of clashes with Kurdish fighters in Aleppo, which has led to more than 140,000 people being displaced.

The pause in the fighting, which was the most intense in the country for more than six months, came into effect at 3am local time (midnight GMT). Under the terms of the ceasefire, Kurdish militants were to leave the three contested neighbourhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud, Ashrafieh and Bani Zaid, where clashes were happening. They would be provided safe passage to the north-east of the country, which is controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and be allowed to take light arms with them.