US president accuses Norwegian leader of Nobel snub and says he will focus on what ‘is good and proper for America’ as he ramps up Greenland rhetoric
Meanwhile, Greenland’s dogsled federation said that the new US special envoy to the Arctic island had been disinvited to its annual race, as Washington repeatedly threatens to take over the autonomous Danish territory, AFP reported.
Jeff Landry had been invited to attend the race by a private Greenlandic tour operator, an invite the KNQK federation has previously called “totally inappropriate”.
Experts call for tighter regulation as GPS tracking reveals how people’s behaviour affects the lives of some of the world’s largest birds
Many people look up to admire the silhouette of raptors, some of the planet’s largest birds, soaring through seemingly empty skies. But increasingly, research shows us that this fascination runs both ways. From high above, these birds are watching us too.
Thanks to the development of tiny GPS tracking devices attached to their bodies, researchers are getting millions of data points on the day-to-day lives of these apex predators of the skies, giving us greater insight into where they hunt and rest, and how they die.
This contrived addition to a sub-genre popularised by H is for Hawk and Raising Hare falls to earth with a thud
In July 2020, Candida Meyrick, better known as the novelist Candida Clark, became the owner of Sophia Houdini White Wing, better known as Bird. Bird is a Harris hawk, a feathered killing machine who hunts the rich Dorset fields on the edge of the New Forest. She can take down a rabbit but much prefers cock pheasants. Recently she has been eyeing up the peacocks that the Meyricks keep on their estate.
Meyrick’s starting point in this puzzling book is that Bird has a rich interior life that we flightless clod-hoppers would do well to emulate. What follows are 20 brief “life lessons” inspired by the hawk’s assumed musings. So, for instance, the fact that Bird prefers to hunt her own dinner rather than accept substitute snacks from Meyrick is used to urge the reader to “stay true to your higher self”. Likewise, her ability to keep cool under threat from a pair of thuggish buzzards becomes an exhortation to “hold your ground, you’re stronger than you think”. Other maxims include “Stay humble. Keep working at it” and the truly head-scratching “Just show up; and when you can’t, don’t”.
The Adams-Poser clan, a family of four who make low-budget horror films, return with a menacing tale of Solveig, a woman attempting to cheat death by strange means
If you had a vision board for parenting goals, it would no doubt be dominated by images of the ultra-cool Adams-Poser family, a clan comprising upstate New York hep cat parents (Toby Poser and John Adams) and their hep kitten kids (Zelda and Lulu Adams) who make low-budget thriller-horror features together. The family members multitask above and beyond, serving not just as co-directors, co-writers, producers and stars, but also operating the camera and making the costumes. The results are genuinely striking, professional and effective (especially in terms of scare-generation). And if the scripts are often a smidge pretentious, they are never less than interesting and always original.
Their previous offerings include Hellbender, Halfway to Zen and Rumblestrips, tales that often revolve around families or familial units, although John Adams doesn’t always play the dad character and Poser isn’t always the mother. In their latest, Poser has cracked open the indigo pot and spun up some wool to make a witchy, cerulean outfit to play weird woman Solveig, a figure with strong maternal feelings, not least towards the many bluebottles that follow her everywhere; she isn’t, however, technically a mother to the protagonist, college student Mickey (Zelda Adams). The economical dialogue eventually reveals that Mickey survived cancer some years ago which resulted in a hysterectomy, but a new inoperable tumour the size of an apple (very biblical) has recently grown in her abdomen and she has maybe six months to live.
Liam Rosenior is eager to sign a defender and Chelsea have their eye on Jérémy Jacquet of Rennes. The Ligue 1 club want around £44m for the 20-year-old centre-back, a fee Chelsea may be willing to pay with Levi Colwill and Tosin Adarabioyo injured. The Blues could also consider selling skipper EnzoFernández, who is a target for Real Madrid.
There may be a shortage of centre-backs at Internazionale soon. With Marc Guéhi on his way to Manchester City, Liverpool need to reconfigure their recruitment plan, and the 26-year-old Nerazzurri defender Alessandro Bastoni is on their list of targets.
A man believed to be in his 20s is in a critical condition after being bitten by a shark in the third attack at Sydney beaches in two days.
He was taken to Royal North Shore hospital on Monday evening after New South Wales Ambulance officers treated the man at Manly beach in Sydney’s north following the attack.
This 1970s notion is a bit of a myth – but it’s still a good idea to wear a hat if it’s cold out
‘Always keep your head covered. You can lose 40–45% of body heat from an unprotected head.” That’s the advice in a 1970s US Army Survival Manual, which is probably where this myth originated, says John Tregoning, a professor of vaccine immunology at Imperial College London.
The reality is that there is nothing special about your head. When you go out in the cold, you lose more body heat from any area you leave exposed than from those parts protected by clothing. Out in a snowsuit but no hat? You’re going to lose heat quickly from your face and head, while the suit slows down the cooling of your body.
Under Trump, the world-class centre for performing arts is one of many US cultural institutions changing beyond recognition. Will others buckle?
A year ago – just a year ago – the Kennedy Center in Washington DC was a world-class centre for the performing arts. It had a resident opera company, respected artistic teams, and a run of the acclaimed musical Hamilton to look forward to. It had a bipartisan board that upheld the dignity of an organisation that, since it was conceived of in the mid-20th century, had been treated with courtesy and supported by governments of both stripes.
How quickly things unravel. Donald Trump inserted himself as chair of the organisation soon after his 20 January inauguration, dispatched the hugely experienced executive director, and installed his unfortunate loyalist Richard Grenell to run it. This former ambassador to Germany might have wished for better things; at any rate, entirely inexperienced in the arts, he seems utterly out of his depth. Things have unravelled. Artists have departed the centre in droves. Hamilton pulled out. So have audiences. In November, Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of the Washington National Opera, told me that ticket sales had tanked for the opera. Analysis by the Washington Post showed it was the same pattern across the centre.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
From the Space Raiders cooked up by a 2000AD artist to Odduns with their Dark Side of the Moon style packet, we pop open a new 140-page celebration of crisps and the garishly beautiful bags they’re sold in
Would you eat a smoky spider flavour Monster Munch? What about a Bovril crisp, cooked up to celebrate the release of Back to the Future? Then there’s hedgehog flavour – and even a Wallace and Gromit corn snack designed to capture the unique taste of moon cheese, which the duo rocketed off to collect in A Grand Day Out.
All these salty, crunchy and perhaps even tasty snacks are celebrated in UK Crisp Packets 1970-2000, a 140-page compendium that delves into the colourful, often strange and occasionally wild world of crisp packet design. The book will come as a heavy hit of nostalgia for many people, featuring various childhood favourites – Chipsticks, Frazzles, Snaps – along with the lesser known and the rare.
Former Newcastle goalkeeper opens up on the abuse he has received and using the platform footballers have to support an anti-racism charity
It was a chance encounter that would ultimately help change countless lives for the better but, at the time, all Shaka Hislop wanted to do was escape.
As the then Newcastle goalkeeper stood on a petrol station forecourt, filling his car on a dark November night in 1995 his overriding emotions were outrage and fear. Hislop was heading home after an evening out with his wife and young daughter when, with the fuel gauge edging towards the red zone, he pulled into a garage just across the road from St James’ Park.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe was present to see the best victory and performance of his two years of minority ownership. When Ratcliffe bought in, the public impression given was of a billionaire signing up to taste the magic for himself. Saturday, and beating Manchester City, was an undoubted revival act where Michael Carrick’s team played the football of yore. That will almost certainly be unsustainable in the medium term, since most opposition will not play City’s high-line, high-wire act. But in engaging their supporters with determination and aggression, United jogged memories. There was a time when just about every big game had Old Trafford rocking like this, when the opposition could not hear themselves think. Surely that was the myth and legend Ratcliffe wanted to be part of? Would that be possible in the new stadium the Ineos chief has plans for instead of Old Trafford? Tottenham’s recent experiences suggest otherwise. Would Liverpool’s owners cash out the Anfield experience? Surely not. John Brewin
Memoir merges with fiction as the author reflects on failed love, ageing and the end of life in this last instalment to his writing career
Julian Barnes tells us that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last instalment of a writing career spanning 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction. Many of these works turn up here, whether obliquely or overtly, referred to through subject matter, style, tone or connotation; in the contemporary cultural argot, which Barnes is fond of examining, these writerly winks might be known as Easter eggs.
The other form of leave taking is the “departure without subsequent arrival”: death. It is, as Larkin had it, “no different whined at than withstood”, and the truth is that most of us are both whiners and withstanders, querulous until there’s nothing left to complain at, stoic until pushed too far. Barnes is perhaps the great interpreter of mundane grandiosity, or grandiose mundanity – understanding that even as we attempt to inhabit the heroic mode, or to reach an intellectual accommodation with both mortality and morality, we will slip on a banana skin (or in Barnes’s case, he tells us here, a wooden staircase approached with bath-damp feet in a rush to answer the doorbell).
As a boy, Tom Stoltman was diagnosed with autism and bullied at school. When he became depressed in his teens, his older brother, a bodybuilder, suggested a trip to the gym
Tom Stoltman was a skinny kid: 90kg, 6ft 8in, with glasses and sticking‑out teeth. Diagnosed with autism as a young child, he felt he didn’t fit in. “I was really shy,” he says. “I got bullied in school for being different.” Back then, the boy from Invergordon didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. He lived in baggy hoodies. “Hood up. That was my comfort.” He loved football but “I used to look at people on the pitch and think, ‘He’s tinier than me, but he’s pushing me off the ball.’”
By 16 he’d hit a “crashing point”. He went from football-obsessed to playing Xbox all day. He’d skip meals in favour of sweets. “Sometimes it was four or five, six bags.”
Charente-Maritime is a more affordable, less manicured family destination than nearby Île de Ré
Dinner comes with a spectacle in La Tremblade. Before I sit down to a platter of oysters at La Cabane des Bons Vivants, one of the village’s canal-side restaurants, I stand and watch orange flames bellow up from a tangle of long, skinny pine needles inside a large, open oven. They are piled on top of a board of carefully arranged mussels and, by setting fire to the pine needles, the shellfish cook in their own juices.
This is the curious tradition of moules à l’éclade, a novel way of cooking mussels developed by Marennes-Oléron oyster farmers along the River Seudre in the Charente-Maritime, halfway down France’s west coast. The short-lived flaming spectacle is a prelude to sliding apart the charred shells and finding juicy orange molluscs inside – and just one highlight of our evening along La Grève. The avenue that cuts between the oyster beds, lined by colourful, ramshackle huts and rustic pontoons is an alluring venue for a sunset meal by the canal, the atmosphere all the more lively and fascinating for it being in a working oyster-farming village.
Shot in black-and-white over seven years, Brittany Shyne’s film is poetic and political in its portrayal of families fighting to maintain a vanishing way of life
Brittany Shyne’s stunning documentary observes Black farmers in the American south over the course of seven years, and portrays the beauty and the hardships of working with the land. The black-and-white cinematography lends a visual sumptuousness to the rituals of harvest: we see giant machines extracting cotton buds from open bolls, leaving behind a whirl of white fluffs fluttering in the air. The painful legacy of slavery in the country means that the choreography of farm work is rich with poetic and political meaning. Owning land is more than an economic matter; it also allows for autonomy of labour and preservation of heritage, to be passed on to future generations.
Hardworking as the farmers are, however, systematic discrimination continues to hinder their financial security. While their white neighbours have easy access to federal support, Black farmers are faced with near-insurmountable red tape, resulting in much longer waiting times for funding. With the landslide effect of operational costs and taxes, many have had their land taken away from them. One particularly poignant sequence follows 89-year-old Carlie Williams, who has farmed since his teens, as he struggles to negotiate the price of prescription glasses. Most of the subjects in the documentary also hail from older generations; the implication is that, with all its precariousness, this line of work is no longer viable for younger people.
This unbelievable, Alice Levine-narrated true story sees governments fooled by a fake bomb detector. Plus, Peter Bradshaw’s darkly comic thriller about a charming nurse
Alice Levine narrates this scam story in customary wry fashion. We meet Steve, an ex-copper who helps his childhood best pal sell his cutting-edge bomb detector, only to end up with detectives arresting him. It’s a slickly produced tale of a con that fooled governments and militaries, with action flitting from questionable Hong Kong banks to the Iraqi airports in which it’s installed as a security measure – with potentially lethal consequences. Alexi Duggins Widely available, episodes weekly
Morocco head coach furious after Senegal leave pitch in protest
Post-match press conference held up by arguments among media
The Morocco head coach, Walid Regragui, accused Senegal’s Pape Thiaw of having brought shame on African football after Morocco failed to win the Africa Cup of Nations in what he termed “a final with a Hitchcockian script”. After Senegal had had a goal ruled out in stoppage time, his side were awarded a penalty by the video assistant referee, prompting Senegal’s players to walk off the pitch in protest. When they returned, Brahim Díaz missed the penalty with a duffed Panenka, and Senegal went on to win in extra time.
“The image we’ve given of Africa is shameful. A coach who asks his players to leave the field … What Pape did does not honour Africa,” Regragui said. “He had already started in the [pre-match] press conference. He wasn’t classy. But he is a champion, so he can say whatever he wants. We stopped the match in the eyes of the world for 10 minutes. That didn’t help Brahim. That doesn’t excuse Brahim for the way he hit the penalty. He hit it like that and we have to accept it. We were one minute from being African champions. That’s football. It’s often cruel. We missed what for some was the opportunity of a lifetime.”
Economy weathered a fraught geopolitical landscape to reach 5% target but structural challenges at home ‘are not going away’, say experts
Chinese authorities can say they hit their growth goals last year, but Donald Trump’s ongoing trade aggression, a slow-motion housing market collapse and unhappy consumers remain major challenges for the world’s second-largest economy.
Data released on Monday showed the Chinese economy grew by 5% in 2025, steady on the year before and hitting the official target of “around” that pace.
This shocking moment is the outcome of a political, institutional and media environment that is not far off Britain’s
There is not much that can still shock about Donald Trump’s second administration. But the killing of Renee Good earlier this month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, as well as the regular, often violent confrontations that ICE stages on US streets, show so much that is unravelling in plain sight. The rule of law, the freedom to protest, and even the right to walk or drive in the streets safely without being assaulted by the state, seems to exist no longer in the towns and cities where ICE has made its presence felt. The most disturbing aspect of all this is how quickly it has happened. But for a government agency such as ICE to become the powerful paramilitary force that it is, several factors need to be in play first. Only one of them is Donald Trump.
ICE may look as if it came out of nowhere, but the sort of authoritarianism that results in these crackdowns never does. It takes shape slowly, in plain sight, in a way that is clearly traceable over time. First, there needs to be a merging of immigration and security concerns, both institutionally and in the political culture. Established in the wake of 9/11, ICE was part of a government restructuring under President George W Bush. It was granted a large budget, wide investigative powers and a partnership with the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce. The work of enforcing immigration law became inextricably linked to the business of keeping Americans safe after the largest attack on US soil. That then extended into a wider emphasis, under Barack Obama, beyond those who posed national security threats, and on to immigrants apprehended at the border, gang members and non-citizens convicted of felonies or misdemeanours.
Aid groups say rise of far-right rhetoric in politics has fed into intimidation, vandalism and hate graffiti around migrant camps
Not far from a camp in Dunkirk where hundreds of asylum seekers sleep, hoping to cross the Channel to the UK, are some chilling pieces of graffiti. There is a hangman’s noose with a figure dangling next to the word “migrant” and, close by, another daubing: a Jewish Star of David painted in black surrounded by red swastikas.
Utopia 56, a French group supporting migrants in northern France, posted the image on X on Christmas Day with the comment: “This is what comes from normalising the extreme right’s rhetoric, a visible, unapologetic, unabashed hatred.”
A hearty seafood stew of haddock, leeks and barley, and an almost indecently rich and comforting cheesy rarebit
For me, the best winter cooking is about comfort, warmth and connection – food that feels familiar, yet still tells a story. I’ve always been drawn to dishes that celebrate simple, honest ingredients and local tradition, and these two recipes are inspired by that spirit, and by a childhood spent doing lots of fishing in Wales. The seafood cawl is a lighter, coastal take on the Welsh classic, while the rarebit is rich and nostalgic. Both are designed to be cooked slowly and shared generously, and an ode to home kitchens, good produce and quiet moments around the table.
After lengthy delays, the $836m market has opened its doors with dozens of new venders seeking to lure visitors with everything from bánh mì to artisan cheese
When the new Sydney Fish Market flung open its doors for the first time on Monday morning, one regular clientele was notably absent.
There were no seagulls. And, by extension, no poo.
Two people detained in Kermanshah, including 16-year-old, tell group they were subjected to sexual abuse during arrest
A 16-year-old was among protesters sexually assaulted in custody by the security forces in Iran during the nationwide uprising that has left thousands dead, according to a human rights group.
Two people, one of them a child, detained in the city of Kermanshah in western Iran told the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) that they were subjected to sexual abuse by riot police during their arrest.
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