Manchester United supporters group The 1958 has called for a vote of no confidence in the club’s ownership model, calling Sir Jim Ratcliffe “an incompetent clown”. The organisation will also hold a protest at the home match against Fulham on 1 February to make their voices heard at Old Trafford.
The group wants the removal of the Glazer family and Ratcliffe from the club. Concerns were also expressed in relation to the work of the chief executive, Omar Berrada, and the director of football, Jason Wilcox, in the aftermath of Ruben Amorim’s sacking, which will lead to an interim replacement.
Security forces reported to have killed at least 45 people since protests began 12 days ago, as protesters gather in Tehran
Iran was plunged into a complete internet blackout on Thursday night as protests over economic conditions spread nationwide, increasing pressure on the country’s leadership.
While it was unclear what caused the internet cut, first reported by the internet freedom monitor NetBlocks, Iranian authorities have shut down the internet in response to protests in the past.
Hajar Abdelkader won just three points in 6-0, 6-0 loss
‘Wildcard should not have been granted’ to Egyptian
Tennis Kenya said a controversial wildcard granted to Hajar Abdelkader should not have happened after the young Egyptian’s performance at a professional tournament in Nairobi went viral.
The 21-year-old won three points and served 20 double faults on her way to a 6-0, 6-0 defeat against German world No 1,026, Lorena Schaedel. Videos shared on social media showed the Egyptian struggling to serve and position herself on the court.
An almost admiring feeling pervaded the early coverage – and not just among right-leaning outlets
If you believe the early public opinion polls, Americans are uncertain about last weekend’s raid on Venezuela and the seizure of the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.
But many in the media seem to be trying to move that wavering needle to approval.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
Preceding the release of My Days of 58, the Americana legend once known as Smog discusses his Yorkshire youth, why Spotify is like the mafia and the bleak state of AI
We got married to [Smog’s] Our Anniversary. When you write songs, do you think about how listeners might carry them into their own lives, or do the songs stop being yours after they are done?Vanearle When I wrote [2019’s] Watch Me Get Married, I thought maybe people would have that as their wedding song. But mostly it’s inconceivable what people are gonna do with a song. I don’t think about it too much because there are 100,000 places where it’s gonna live. Have I ever heard about any inappropriate uses of songs? I think having Our Anniversary as a wedding song is a little surprising, but maybe they’re realists.
As an appreciator of dub, if you could spend a week in a studio to collaborate with any dub artist at their peak, who would you go for? albertoayler I’d have to say Lee “Scratch” Perry just because he was so crazy. He was like a little kid – just infectious excitement. I think that he would have been easy to hang out with. But also, King Tubby was such a minimalist and I’d be curious about how he determined when enough was enough – investing so much power in the fewest elements. Have Fun With God [the 2014 dub remix album of 2013’s Dream River] was very traditional – all the moves were taken from 70s Jamaican records. Maybe once is enough. But I do like the idea of recycling recorded things to make something else – that’s what initially attracted me to dub. If I did [a new remix album], I may do a chopped and screwed record.
City targeted by Trump has seen swarm of immigration agents on the streets – and residents say the tension is palpable
Edwin Torres DeSantiago received a text message on Wednesday morning as he was tracking immigration enforcement across Minneapolis – a person was shot by ICE at 34th Street and Portland Avenue.
He jumped into his car to head to the scene. Torres DeSantiago manages the Immigrant Defense Network, a group that monitors ICE activity and responds to community needs after someone is taken. He has responded to dozens of scenes in the past few months, and even more in the last few days since the federal government surged its presence in the midwestern city.
The Trump administration has said repeatedly that the US needs to gain control of Greenland, a mineral-rich, largely self-governing part of Denmark with foreign and security policy run from Copenhagen.
The White House has said using the US military is “always an option”, but few analysts believe an armed operation is likely and France’s foreign minister has said the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has ruled out the possibility of an invasion.
South London house to feature never-before-seen archival items and creative workshops for young people
On the evening of 6 July 1972, thousands of young people across the UK had their lives changed when the sight of David Bowie performing Starman on Top of the Pops was beamed into their living rooms.
Come the end of 2027, Bowie fans will be able to walk the very floorboards where the young David Jones had his own Damascene cultural conversion, when his childhood home in south London, is opened to the public for the first time.
Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy confirms he has no time for rules or process. America’s allies must find new ways to guarantee their own interests
Occasionally, history generates smooth changes from one era to another. More commonly, such shifts occur only gradually and untidily. And sometimes, as the former Downing Street foreign policy adviser John Bew puts it in the New Statesman, history unfolds “in a series of flashes and bangs”. In Caracas last weekend, Donald Trump’s forces did this in spectacular style. In the process, the US brushed aside more of what remains of the so-called rules-based order with which it tried to shape the west after 1945.
The capture of Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro has precedents in US policy. But discerning a wider new pattern from the kidnapping is not easy, especially at this early stage. As our columnist Aditya Chakrabortty has argued this week, the abduction can be seen as a assertion of American power, but also as little more than a chaotic asset grab.
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A wave of humiliating sexualised imagery must prompt regulators and politicians to step up
An online trend involving asking Grok, the Elon Musk-owned chatbot, to undress photographs of women and girls and show them wearing bikinis has rightly sparked outrage in the UK and internationally. Earlier this week Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, described the proliferation of the digitally altered pictures, some of which are overtly sexualised or violent, as “unacceptable in decent society”. What happens next will depend on whether she and her colleagues are prepared to follow through on such remarks. The government’s generally enthusiastic approach to AI, and the growing role they see for it in public services, do not inspire confidence in their ability to confront such threats.
In addition to the deluge of bikini images, the Internet Watch Foundation, a charity, has evidence that Grok Imagine (an AI tool that generates images and videos from prompts) has been used to create illegal child sexual abuse images. Yet while X says that it removes such material, there is no sign of safeguards being tightened in response to bikini images that are cruel and violating even where they do not break the law.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The FBI has taken full control of the investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) officer in Minneapolis, it emerged on Thursday.
In a statement, the Minnesota bureau of criminal apprehension (BCA) said it was initially called upon to help investigate the shooting before federal officials “reversed course” and said the case would be “solely led by the FBI”. With its access to the case materials, witnesses and evidencerevoked, the BCA said it had to “reluctantly” withdraw from the investigation.
The Nigerian novelist has said that she is ‘devastated’ after the death of Nkanu Nnamdi, who was one of twin boys
One of the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s one-year-old twin sons has died after a brief illness.
“We’re deeply saddened to confirm the passing of one of Ms Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Dr Ivara Esege’s twin boys, Nkanu Nnamdi, who passed on Wednesday,” read a statement made by Adichie’s communications team.
Lawsuit accuses AI chatbots of harming minors and includes case of Sewell Setzer III, who killed himself in 2024
Google and Character.AI, a startup, have settled lawsuits filed by families accusing artificial intelligence chatbots of harming minors, including contributing to a Florida teenager’s suicide, according to court filings on Wednesday.
The settlements cover lawsuits filed in Florida, Colorado, New York and Texas, according to the legal filings, though they still require finalization and court approval.
From vitamins C and D to calcium and magnesium, it’s critical to know whether you’re taking the correct dosage to avoid health problems
There are more than 100,000 supplements on the US market – capsules, powders, tablets and gummies sold to improve or maintain health. Supplements can contain vitamins, minerals, botanicals and amino acids on their own or in various combinations.
The consumption of these products is surging. But it’s a common misunderstanding that these products are entirely safe, says Dr Pieter Cohen, an internist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. Excessive amounts of nutrients can cause health problems, so it’s critical to know whether you’re using the correct dosage of high-quality products.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva rejects bill passed by congress as he marks anniversary of 2023 Brasília riots
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has vetoed a bill that would dramatically reduce the prison sentence of the country’s far-right former leader Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted last year of plotting a coup.
Lula vetoed the bill, which was passed by congress in December, on the third anniversary of riots by Bolsonaro supporters in the capital, Brasília, over his defeat by Lula in the 2022 general election.
There have to be consequences for Rob Key and Brendon McCullum but English cricket’s problems lie much deeper and will be much harder to fix
It seemed fitting, as the final moments ticked down at the Sydney Cricket Ground, as the day, the match, the tour seemed to ooze and melt a little at the edges under a hard white January sun, that Ben Stokes should finish this Ashes series still standing, but only just.
It was at least a suitably slapstick final session in front of a scattered, holiday-ish crowd. Australia custard-pied their way to a victory total of 160, narrowly avoiding falling pianos, dangling off giant clocktowers along the way.
NASUWT members at Ravensfield and Lily Lane schools say nine-day stoppage follows ‘almost daily’ attacks by pupils
Teachers at two primary schools in Greater Manchester say they have been driven to strike because of “almost daily” attacks by pupils, leaving parents bewildered by the industrial action.
Members of the NASUWT teaching union at Ravensfield and Lily Lane primary schools are taking nine days of strike action, from this week until 22 January, because of what the union called “a culture of violence” involving an increasing number of assaults by pupils against staff and other children.
Players will stay at club’s Seixal training ground
Benfica lost 3-1 to Braga in League Cup semi-finals
José Mourinho has turned on his Benfica players after the team’s 3-1 defeat by Braga in the Portuguese League Cup semi-finals, suggesting that the squad would be staying at the club’s Seixal training base until further notice.
“The players will sleep in Seixal, and on Thursday there is training, and the day after there will be training,” Mourinho said at his post-match press conference. “When we arrive in Seixal, everyone will go to their rooms.”
Ewes and lambs coaxed out of store in Burgsinn after about 20 minutes, leaving trail of destruction in drinks section
About 50 wayward sheep broke off from their flock and stormed a discount supermarket in a German town, startling and delighting customers as the animals rushed to explore the aisles before being escorted from the premises.
The woolly incursion occurred on Monday during a routine seasonal migration of the sheep in the Bavarian municipality of Burgsinn. A few dozen of the sheep had other ideas about the route and made their way into a store of the Penny retail chain.
Police close murder case of Alys Eberhardt after confession from Richard Cottingham, known as the ‘Torso Killer’
Richard Cottingham, a US serial killer widely known as the “Torso Killer”, has confessed to the 1965 killing of an 18-year-old woman in New Jersey.
On Tuesday, New Jersey police announced the closure of the murder case of Alys Eberhardt after Cottingham, 79, admitted to killing her nearly six decades ago. Eberhardt, then a nursing student, was found brutally beaten and dead in her family home in Fair Lawn.
The Son of Saul director recalls how getting his first job as assistant to the austere master was a hard but inspiring lesson in the most ambitious kind of movie-making
The last time I saw Béla Tarr was a few years ago at the Nexus conference in Amsterdam. We were invited to speak about the state of the world and of the arts. We both thought light and darkness existed in the world, even if our perception about them differed. Béla was already weakened in his body, but the spirit was still ferocious, rebellious, furious. We sat down to talk. It seemed fairly obvious this would be our ultimate, and most heartfelt, conversation. As the former apprentice, I was able to see the master one last time, with all his rage, sorrow, love and hate.
I first met Béla in 2004 when he was preparing The Man from London. I wanted to learn film-making and applied to become an assistant on the film. He gave me my first real job: as an assistant, I had to find a boy for one of the main parts. I spent months in the casting process, for a part that eventually was cut from the shooting script. But for Béla, every effort put into a given movie was never lost – it was integrated into the energy field of the enterprise. The final outcome had to be the product of difficult processes. The harder the task, the better quality one could expect. He wanted to film life, and its constant dance. The choreography was a revelation for me: 10-minute, uninterrupted takes, unifying space, characters and time. All in black and white.
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