Some pre-game chat from Pep Guardiola, who confirms Nico O’Reilly is out of the squad after “feeling uncomfortable” in training with a knock.
“We can only focus on ourselves for the rest of the games … I don’t know what is going to happen. Today is how we behave against Forest. Haaland has made an incredible impact since he arrived years ago. In the first quarter of this season he was outstanding. We need everyone. Everyone has to be ready.”
Gen Caine said today that the US will “now begin to expand inland, striking progressively deeper into Iranian territory”, after forces were able to establish air superiority.
“The throttle is coming up,” Caine said, “as opposed to ramping down”.
Eddie Howe speaks to TNT Sports. “It’s always a difficult decision with the goalkeepers … we have two outstanding players for that position … I’ve decided to make a change … hopefully [Aaron Ramsdale] comes in and does well … our home form for a long time has been really strong … [the recent bad form] is not a nice feeling … we want to make this place the fortress that it has been again … the crowd have been magnificent … this is on us as a team … we’ve made too many mistakes … we’re looking to put that right tonight … tonight and the game at the weekend [in the FA Cup against Manchester City] are so important … I think we can do it … football changes really quickly … results haven’t aligned with performances … we’re scoring goals which is a great thing … we just need to get tighter at the back … [Manchester United] have outstanding players … but we’ve got players who can hurt them … it could be quite open.”
Newcastle make two changes to their starting XI following their 3-2 home defeat to Everton. Nick Pope, an error or two in him of late, loses his place in goal to Aaron Ramsdale, while Harvey Barnes comes in for the ill Nick Woltemade.
Iraq team due in Mexico for playoff final on 31 March
Middle East crisis has made travel plans uncertain
The intercontinental World Cup playoffs are in doubt with officials from the Iraq Football Association (IFA) in crisis talks with Fifa over concerns they may be unable to take part in the final scheduled for Mexico later this month.
The Guardian has learned that the IFA received a letter from Iraq’s national airline, Iraqi Airways, and the Ministry of Transportationearlier today informing them that the country’s airspace will remain closed for “at least four weeks”, which would leave around 40% of the squad unable to travel.
It was a claim uttered repeatedly on the 2024 campaign trail: “I’m the only president in 72 years that didn’t start a war,” Donald Trump said in Sioux City, Iowa.
Fact checkers cried foul and pointed out that Jimmy Carter, president from 1977 to 1981, did not start any wars either. But Trump won the election anyway.
It was perhaps the most attention-grabbing moment of prime minister’s questions. Responding to yet another Conservative salvo about his approach to Iran and how it might affect ties with America, Keir Starmer was direct.
“American planes are operating out of British bases – that is the special relationship in action,” he said. “Sharing intelligence every day to keep our people safe – that is the special relationship in action. Hanging on to President Trump’s latest words is not the special relationship in action.”
An unreliable and volatile American president makes a compelling case for closer security and defence cooperation with continental allies
There is truth to Donald Trump’s declaration earlier this week that the UK-US relationship is “not what it was”, although there is no indication that he understands the reasons for the change.
The US president is “very disappointed” that Sir Keir Starmer has been “uncooperative” in the war against Iran, offering only limited logistical support to American forces. The prime minister’s concession that RAF resources can be involved in defensive operations does not compensate for the prior refusal to put Britain’s military assets at American disposal. It came too late for Mr Trump, whose irritation turned to culture-war jibes about “windmills” ruining British landscapes and a false claim about the prevalence of sharia courts.
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Bereaved families have marked the final day of witness testimony in the long-running Covid inquiry by saying government “incompetence, chaos and callousness is now on the public record”.
Matt Fowler, the co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK (CBFFJ), urged officials to use the inquiry as a blueprint “to take brave, decisive, urgent action” and warned that the country was still not prepared for a future crisis.
From butch alter egos to radical images of motherhood, the photographer rises to the challenge of capturing her community in imposing and glorious style
Catherine Opie has done for butches what Hans Holbein the Younger did for the Tudor nobility. Since she graduated in the late 1980s, amid the Aids crisis, Opie has made portraits of her community, friends and family, adopting unflinching realism, saturated colours, and dramatic tonal contrasts from the 16th-century portrait painters. Many of Opie’s most famous portraits – included in her new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery – use these devices deliberately, a declaration that these people deserve, as the title of the show underlines, to be seen.
Opie has always been interested in construction – how we can be transformed by costume, posture, pose, role-play. This show is a testament to that, and her love of tattoos, piercings and body modifications (she does live in LA, after all). She’s especially drawn to the performance and presentation of masculinity – in the 1991 series Being and Having, one of the earliest bodies of work in the show and still one of Opie’s best known. She has 13 lesbian friends dress up as their masculine alter egos – Opie also appears as her own, Bo. They don a range of fake moustaches and are photographed close, so their faces fill the frame against an egg-yolk yellow background, the glue attaching the hair to their faces clearly visible. Their nicknames are engraved into name tags, like they’re trophies.
Pretty coloured eggs from fancy breeds can now cost as much as £4.50 for half a dozen. But some people have found a sneaky way to avoid paying a premium
It’s monstrously presumptuous? Unforgivably glib? Perhaps. But this stylised drama is the show we all need right now
If you are looking for a break in the clouds from this terrible news cycle, can I direct you towards Love Story, the nine-part series executive-produced – but crucially, not written! – by Ryan Murphy, which documents the love and untimely deaths of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette. You might think this isn’t for you, that it’ll be too tabloidy or that you’re not interested in JFK Jr. But while Love Story, which takes us back to a very particular version of early-1990s New York, might not seem like the show we want right now, it is exactly the show that we need.
This probably sounds like a heartless summary of a true story that ends in the terrible deaths of two young people (in 1999, while flying his wife and her sister from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy crashed his light aircraft, killing everyone on board). But that tragic end only suffuses the preceding nine hours of storytelling with a kind of pearly, nostalgic light, just the thing to see off the iron-grey wash of today’s reality. The New York of Love Story isn’t the city’s current iteration, with its impossible rents and charmless finance bros ruining downtown. Nor is it the 1990s New York of, say, Home Alone 2, in which Donald Trump strides through the Plaza Hotel and Central Park is a crime-ridden disaster.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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Black Caps opener Allen blasts 100 not out from 33 balls
South Africa won every match they could afford to lose in this tournament and then lost the first one that they had to win.
They were completely marmalised by New Zealand, who won the first semi-final by nine wickets. Finn Allen ripped through South Africa’s feared fast bowling attack, and hit an unbeaten hundred off just 33 balls. It was the fastest century in the history of the competition, and, as Allen said himself, the innings of his life. Only two batters have ever hit a faster ton in international T20 cricket.
A war engulfing the Middle East has cleared the region’s skies, forcing airlines to make drastic rerouting plans and leaving a massive void in usually busy global airspace.
With Israel and the US bombing Iran day after day – and Tehran responding with waves of missiles and drones attacks – airlines have been forced to divert their passenger jets away from the Gulf or risk a catastrophic accident.
Plan, which aims to preserve jobs in clean tech and low-carbon sectors, could include UK if there is reciprocal market access
The European Commission has proposed a “Buy EU” plan to boost domestic low-carbon industries and help the continent compete against China.
The commission published a draft regulation – called the Industrial Accelerator Act – on Wednesday, setting demands for EU-made and low-carbon content on bodies spending public money. The rules mark a big shift in economic thinking from Brussels, long a bastion of open markets.
Global oil and gas prices have spiked as the conflict in the Middle East halts energy exports from the region. The strait of Hormuz has been in effect closed since the war began, causing fears of a global economic crisis. About a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped through the narrow passage of water, but, according to reports, traffic has dropped by about 80%, with little sign of return. How long until we feel the effects? Nosheen Iqbal speaks to John Collingridge, the Guardian’s head of business.
‘Divorce rings’ have been gaining popularity. But for some women, freedom warrants a stronger, more defiant symbol
I have been a divorce coach for five years. Every client’s process is different, but occasionally I notice new trends. One afternoon, a woman showed up to her session fuming. Her soon to be ex-husband was trying to claw back her engagement ring through his attorney.
“Absolutely not,” she said, her jaw stiffening. “That ring is mine. I earned it. And I already know exactly what I’m doing with it.”
McLaren could start slowly, Mercedes may set the pace, while newcomers – and returning heroes – add huge interest
Car MCL40 Engine Mercedes Principal Andrea Stella Debut Monaco 1966 GPs 994 Constructors’ titles 10 Last season 1st. Held their nerve to close out the constructors’ and drivers’ double last season, albeit with the latter going to the wire as they rather tied themselves in knots trying to be fair to both drivers. Enter this year a little off the front but in a season likely to be marked by a fierce development battle, will expect to exploit their huge strengths in bringing the car on with alacrity and be in the mix in no short order.
Climate deniers expected more resistance to the fossil fuel blitz. But Democrats, billionaires and activists have gone silent
This story is published in partnership with DeSmog, the climate investigations site
As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil-fuel agenda.
“In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the World Prosperity Forum, a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a rightwing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
German government convened a crisis meeting after several prize winners condemned Israel’s actions against Palestinians
The American head of the Berlin film festival, Tricia Tuttle, will keep her job after a free speech row over Gaza, but the event will have to consider a new code of conduct to “fight antisemitism”, the German culture ministry has said.
The House ethics committee said on Wednesday that it has opened an investigation of Tony Gonzales, a Republican representative from Texas, over allegations that include having an affair with an aide.
The top Republican and Democratic members on the committee said in a joint statement that an investigative panel would look into whether Gonzales engaged in sexual misconduct toward an employee in his office and whether he discriminated unfairly by dispensing special favors or privileges.
The TV drama Love Story has brought their fashion back into the spotlight – and inspired nine big trends, from bootcut jeans to backwards caps
When images taken on the set of the Disney+ series Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette were teased on social media in June, fans were adamant that the show had got the styling wrong. The fictionalised drama details the relationship between John F Kennedy Jr, then the world’s most eligible bachelor, and the fashion publicist Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, tracing their courtship and marriage, which was lived out under the scrutiny of the press.
“This is fashion murder,” wrote one user underneath a picture of Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Bessette Kennedy, and Paul Anthony Kelly, who depicts Kennedy Jr. Such was the outrage that the executive producer Ryan Murphy was forced to defend the styling as “a work in progress”, which led to him hiring a new costume designer, Rudy Mance, to focus on the historical precision. Nine months later, the internet has done a U-turn, with fans now rushing to emulate the couple’s on-screen and off-screen 90s looks. In the past week alone, searches for “Carolyn Bessette style” have increased by 150% on Google. Here are nine trends that the fans are championing.
It seemed hard to believe, and it was even harder to clean. All I know about the culprit is that they must be agile
Last summer, I found poo in the wheelie bin. Nothing unusual there: you can’t blame dog walkers for a reluctance to tote warm sacks in a heatwave. But this was different. This was unbagged and … not canine.
Had our bin really moonlit as a loo? It seemed hard to believe. Someone would have had to trundle it from its traditional position by the path, line it up with the wall, flip its lid, walk into the neighbours’ garden, climb on to their bike shed and strategically crouch, conscious that one false wobble could be, if not fatal, then certainly quite messy. In full view of the street. On a sort of podium. When a handy hedge was right there. Surely not?
Europe’s largest trade union is trying to gain control of the works council at Elon Musk’s Tesla gigafactory near Berlin, in an industrial relations showdown marked by lawsuits and mutual accusations of slander.
The works council, an elected body of employees that negotiates everything from working hours to pay deals with a company’s management, is considered an entrenched aspect of the German corporate world, particularly in the car industry.
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