1,500 people evacuated from Niscemi after battering by Cyclone Harry triggers 4km-long chasm in hillside

The mayor of a hilltop town on Sicily said “the situation is dire” after a powerful storm brought down a long section of hillside, leaving houses perched perilously on a cliff edge.

About 1,500 people have so far been evacuated from their homes because of the landslide, which began to show signs of movement on Sunday before developing a 4km-long front. The chasm continues to widen, raising fears it could swallow the town’s historic centre.

Now the US is vying regional dominance, experts point to War Plan Red as proof its Canadian allyship has always been flimsy

First, American forces would strike with poison gas munitions, seizing a strategically valuable port city. Soldiers would sever undersea cables, destroy bridges and rail lines to paralyze infrastructure. Major cities on the shores of lakes and rivers would be captured in order to blunt any civilian resistance.

The multipronged invasion would rely on ground forces, amphibious landing and then mass internments. According to the architects of the plan, the attack would be short-lived and the besieged country would fall within days.

Funding cuts, conspiracy theories and ‘powder keg’ pine plantations have seen January’s forest fires tear through Chubut in southern Argentina

Lucas Chiappe had known for a long time that the fire was coming. For decades, the environmentalist had warned that replacing native trees in the Andes mountain range with highly flammable foreign pine was a recipe for disaster.

In early January, flames raced down the Pirque hill and edged closer to his home in the Patagonian town of Epuyén, Argentina, where he had lived since the 1970s. Thirty people with six motor pumps fought for hours, hoses stretched for kilometres, but “there was no way”.

Folk duo Pound & Stevens have transformed, and added to, Holst’s The Planets Suite and tour the new work this week with Britten Sinfonia. Will Pound explains why playing by ear is his greatest strength

I’m a harmonica and accordion player and one half of folk-classical duo Stevens & Pound. As a multi-instrumentalist I am rooted in a folk tradition that is oral, aural and communal. Music and song are passed down by ear, either through recordings or – more fun – traditional music sessions. Here, players and singers get together to share, swap and play tunes, drawing from a repertoire that is always evolving. While collections of tunes are certainly notated, their scores act as a skeleton – providing the basic architecture of pitch and rhythm but rarely offering explicit guidance on how the music should be played.

Delia Stevens and I are about to head out on tour, performing with the Britten Sinfonia and Robert Macfarlane in a new work called The Silent Planet, a recomposition of Holst’s Planets suite. It’s the culmination of 18 months of rehearsals and revisions, and the score for this 60-minute work, orchestrated by Ian Gardiner, totals 165 pages and includes Earth, an entirely new composition.

Accused, isolated and constantly under scrutiny, The Traitors contestant drew on years of social deduction gaming to stay calm under pressure

The latest series of The Traitors, which ended last week on a nail-biting finale, featured some of the usual characters – from guileless extroverts to wannabe Columbos endlessly observing fellow contestants for the slightest flicker of treachery. But one faithful stood out for her quiet determination, despite a ceaseless onslaught of suspicion and accusation. That person was Jade Scott, and I wasn’t at all surprised when, quite early on in the series, she revealed she was a keen gamer.

“Minecraft was my way in, when I was 15,” she says. “I made loads of friends at school playing that.” From this innocent introduction, however, she moved on to darker titles: the first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and the multiplayer battle-arena game Dota. “That’s where my interest in strategy gaming really kicked in,” she says.

We may know the sport’s future is bright when trendsetters worldwide are wearing Fabien Galthié-style shades

On the surface it was business at usual at this year’s Six Nations launch in a chilly Edinburgh. Had the city’s most famous literary sleuth poked his nose into the venue at the top of the Royal Mile, Inspector Rebus would have clocked the usual suspects: head coaches trying not to divulge any secrets, captains quietly studying their opposite numbers and content creators seeking to “jazz up” their tournament previews.

This year’s booby prize went to the “influencer” who asked Caelan Doris, Ireland’s captain, whether or not he liked Fabien Galthié’s thick-rimmed glasses. It was almost on a par with the Breakdown’s all-time classic: the day someone asked Rob Baxter, Exeter’s director of rugby, to pick his favourite motorway service station. “Taunton Deane,” came the instant reply. “Because it means we’re almost home.” Brilliant.

The singer-songwriter has donated access to his music archive to ‘ease the unwarranted stress and threats’ Greenlanders have experienced from the US government

Neil Young has donated a year’s worth of access to his music and documentary archive to the people of Greenland after the territory’s future became the subject of a fraught dispute with the US.

“I hope my music and music films will ease some of the unwarranted stress and threats you are experiencing from our unpopular and hopefully temporary government,” Young wrote in a statement on his website, Neil Young Archives, which offers comprehensive access to the 80-year-old songwriter’s recorded and live catalogues and other output.

Leaders and voters who formerly applauded US president’s aims have been growing increasingly uneasy

Donald Trump’s attempted Greenland grab has driven a wedge between the US president and some of his ideological allies in Europe, as previously unstinting enthusiasm and admiration collides with one of the far right’s key tenets: national sovereignty.

Trump’s subsequent disparaging remark that Nato allies’ troops “stayed a little off the frontlines” while fighting with US forces in Afghanistan has only deepened the divide, piquing far-right patriotic sentiments and prompting an avalanche of criticism.

Our cartoonist on anxiety at the Emirates as Michael Carrick oversees another thrilling win

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Their faces may not have been given any airtime, but they remain some of the most beloved characters in television history – in shows like Friends, Frasier and This Country. Take a bow, Ugly Naked Guy …

When you think of television characters, chances are you remember the ones you can actually see. But this is a wildly unfair slight on a small but powerful minority: the characters who remain staunchly offscreen. For decades – mostly in comedies, with a handful of dramatic exceptions – these invisible workhorses have more than earned their keep, and they deserve their props. Here are the 10 best characters whose faces you have never actually clapped eyes on.

A chance encounter reminded me: there are two ways to look at what’s happened in Minneapolis

One of the few advantages of being as conspicuous as I am is that many people come up to me whom I don’t know, to talk about what’s happening in America. It’s like a free-floating focus group.

On Monday morning, I was at a restaurant counter finishing my breakfast when a middle-aged man sat down next to me and said he didn’t want to intrude. (He just had, so I put down my knife and fork, wiped my mouth with my napkin, and turned toward him.) He wanted me to know that although he’d been a life-long Republican, the events of the past weeks had caused him to leave the Republican party.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now

My pup Romeo and daughter Harper share names with the Beckham offspring. Could VB not just have laid claim to ‘Posh’ instead?

As a sidebar to the civil war in the House of Beckham, it emerged at the weekend that Victoria has trademarked all her children’s names. A lot of people think this is a peculiar parenting move, and a lot of other people think this a perfectly natural thing to do, for someone who has built a global brand from just their name and raw talent – but I thought, wait a second: my daughter is also called Harper and my dog is called Romeo, and even though neither of them has imminent plans to launch a perfume, I still should have been consulted on this.

My Harper was born two years before the Beckhams’, and therefore by any reasonable metric, Posh copied me. But – see brand-building, above – by the time my Harper was four, even her own father couldn’t remember which one had come first. No such excuse for Romeo the dog, who started out 14 years younger than Romeo Beckham^TM, but is now 46 years older, thanks to dog years. The name clash couldn’t be helped: he came from a themed litter (featuring Rogue, Rebel, Ricky, Ross and Raoul) and he was the most loving. You can’t mess with that kind of nominative determinism.

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A wave of violence has left transgender people afraid to go out, as experts say the global rise of far-right ideology is fuelling transphobia

It was past midnight but Zehrish Khanzadi and Bindiya Rana were still up, drinking tea, when the doorbell rang. Within seconds of Rana unlocking the door remotely from the kitchen, three shots rang out. “The men fled and she narrowly escaped all three bullets,” Khanzadi says of her colleague and housemate.

Both trans women work for the Gender Alliance Interactive (GIA), an organisation that advocates for transgender rights, Rapa as its head and Khanzadi as a rights activist.

The terrifying animal at the centre of Burke Doeren’s thriller is convincingly ferocious but the supporting humans don’t match its power

Despite its lurid poster art, as an ursine rampage film this falls closer to the serious Grizzly Man/Timothy Treadwell end of the scale, rather than the Cocaine Bear one. Based on a freak August 1967 tragedy in which two women were separately mauled to death by grizzlies in Montana’s Glacier National Park (described here as a “trillion to one” occurrence), Burke Doeren’s debut grips in tooth’n’claw terms, but is considerably less sure-footed when it comes to people.

Down at the park, fire season is all the rangers think they have on their plate, but they’re not reckoning with wayward teenagers and rogue bears. At the giftshop, Michele (Ali Skovbye) leans on Paul (Jacob Buster) to join her posse and help her shoo off an unwanted suitor at Trout Lake. So he leaves colleague Julie (Brec Bassinger) to a sexy bivouac with boyfriend Roy (Matt Lintz) in a separate location. Meanwhile, with smoke plumes occupying the rangers, rookie Joan (Lauren Call) is commandeered to lead a tour group heading out to a remote lodge.

Sally Lane fears son Jack Letts, who left UK aged 18, may face death penalty if airlifted to Iraq under US operation

The mother of a British-born man detained for nearly nine years without trial in Syria has called for his repatriation to the UK or Canada as the US plans to airlift 7,000 Islamic State-linked prisoners from Syria to Iraq.

Sally Lane, the mother of Jack Letts, 30, said she was “frantically trying to find out as much as possible” and that it was unclear if he would face the death penalty in Iraq or remain in Syria – or be sent to Canada or the UK in line with US demands.

Updates from the decider in Colombo, 9am GMT start
Dawson’s moment beckons at last | Email Rob

6th over: England 17-0 (Rehan 10, Duckett 6) Six dot balls in a row from Liyanage to Rehan. I thought England might go after the seamers, given how spin-dominated this series has been, but Fernando and Liyanage have bowled well.

5th over: England 17-0 (Rehan 10, Duckett 6) Duckett slashes Fernando behind square for two; it would have been four but for a good sprawling stop. All very quiet at the moment.

Meta, YouTube and TikTok accused of making products intentionally addictive and harmful to young people

For the first time, a massive group of parents, teens and school districts is taking on the world’s most powerful social media companies in open court, accusing the tech giants of intentionally designing their products to be addictive. The blockbuster legal proceedings may see multiple CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, face harsh questioning.

A long-awaited series of trials kicks off in Los Angeles superior court on Tuesday, in which hundreds of US families will allege that Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube’s platforms harm children. Once young people are hooked, the plaintiffs allege, they fall prey to depression, eating disorders, self-harm and other mental health issues. Approximately 1,600 plaintiffs are included in the proceedings, involving more than 350 families and 250 school districts.

A country where safety is under threat from federal violence on the streets is not fit to stage soccer’s showpiece event

Removing the United States as co-host of the 2026 World Cup would hurt for pretty much everyone. Fans would miss out on seeing the sport’s pinnacle in their home towns (or somewhere nearby). Cities and businesses small and large would lose the financial benefits they had banked on. It would be a logistical and political nightmare on an international scale, the likes of which have never been seen before in sports. It would be eminently sad. And it would be entirely justified.

It brings me no pleasure to say this. The United States has been eager to host a men’s World Cup for more than a decade and a half. The desire survived and even grew after 2010’s failure to out-bid Russia and Qatar (in public and behind closed doors) for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. With hosting rights for 2026 later secured alongside Canada and Mexico, the US soccer scene prepared to show off that the sport is now part of the nation’s fabric, 32 years after hosting the tournament for the first time in 1994. Soccer’s growing popularity in America has helped inspire other US sports to try new formats, encouraged us to engage more fully with the world in a sporting context, and has been at the center of conversations about our society and culture. The 2026 World Cup was seen as the best chance for the world to fully experience not just how much the US has improved at soccer, but how much soccer has improved the US.

Since the Trump administration sent ICE agents into the city in December, there have been 3,000 arrests and two fatal shootings. In the freezing cold, as the crisis deepens, the Minnesotan people continue to resist

In many ways, Alex Pretti and Renee Good could have been any of the dozens of Minneapolis residents I met last week. Among them were teachers, store clerks, Uber drivers, charity workers and clergymen – a patchwork of humanity withstanding what many have called the Trump administration’s siege on their city, which began in December last year and has led to 3,000 arrests, two fatal shootings, and routine rights violations in an operation defined by government brutality.

What the administration has attempted to laud as the largest immigration operation in US history has instead become a fully fledged crisis, and the sharpest test of American democracy under Trump’s second term.

Today’s rumours are wet

It’s been a quiet transfer window, all things considered, with even the worst internet attention-seekers refusing to don their yellow ties and take a day off school for its final day, their mum’s toy spaceship left idling in a shoebox under the bed. But there might yet be some action – not like that, how dare you – so let’s dive in.

Crystal Palace are enduring a miserable season, rapidly slipping down the table and now in danger of relegation, the perfect example of how to ruin unexpected success. On the other hand, Steve Parish’s quiff still looks pristine, so swings and roundabouts, but he’s now faced with a problem: does he stop lovingly tending it to consider Nottingham Forest’s £35m bid for Jean-Philippe Mateta, or simply pretend that no such thing ever happened?

Tariffs reduced to zero for a many industrial products, including iron and steel, plastics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals

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India and the EU have finalised a landmark free trade agreement, which the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, hailed as the “mother of all deals”.

The agreement comes after almost two decades of on-off negotiations between India and the EU, which vastly accelerated in the past six months and were finally concluded late on Monday night.

• England captain’s deal runs to end of next season

• Kane and his family are settled in Munich, CEO says

Bayern Munich have confirmed they are in talks to extend Harry Kane’s contract. The England captain joined from Tottenham in 2023 on a deal to the end of next season and secured a long-awaited first major trophy when Bayern won the Bundesliga last May.

He has been the Bundesliga’s top scorer twice and, with 21 goals in 19 Bundesliga games this season, could chase down Robert Lewandowski’s single-season record of 41 goals.

Gregory Bovino, an aggressive promoter of Trump’s deportation agenda, is said to have been stripped of ‘commander at large’ title

Gregory Bovino, the border patrol commander who has become the public face of the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, is expected to leave the city on Tuesday as the Trump administration reshuffles the leadership of its immigration enforcement operation and scales back the federal presence after a second fatal shooting by officers.

A senior Trump administration official told Reuters that the 55-year-old, who has been a lightning rod for criticism from Democrats and civil liberties activists, would be leaving Minnesota along with some of the agents deployed with him.

A quietly revolutionary account of cohabiting captured a nation’s heart – but what does it mean for the rest of the world?

When Sunwoo and Hana met on Twitter, they were in their 40s and committed bachelorettes. Both raised by the sea in Busan, they studied in Seoul before entering the city’s famously brutal rat race, Sunwoo as a fashion journalist, Hana as a copywriter. They shared the same taste in music and books, and importantly, both had rejected marriage. No wonder. In South Korea’s stubbornly patriarchal culture, women in dual-income families spend nearly three hours more a day on household chores than men. Instead, Sunwoo and Hana joined the large number of South Koreans living alone. At first, independence felt exhilarating. By middle age however, loneliness was beginning to gnaw, and their boxy studio apartments felt oppressively small.

Two Women Living Together, a 2019 South Korean bestseller that spawned a popular podcast, charts Sunwoo and Hana’s decision to buy a sunlit house together and live not as a romantic couple but as friends. Across 49 warm, chatty essays, they invite us into the life they share with four cats, reflecting on everything from the food they love to their retirement fantasies.