Minute-by-minute updates on the 2pm (GMT) kick-off
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Leeds’ Sean Longstaff gets the ball rolling.
The teams are out at a damp Elland Road, with very grey skies overhead. Kick-off is next.
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© Photograph: Ryan Browne/ProSports/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Ryan Browne/ProSports/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Ryan Browne/ProSports/Shutterstock
Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to America has a precedent: the Maga evangelical perversion of Jesus’s message of radical love to one of hate and aggression
Trumpism’s most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. In the course of a few weeks, the US president started showing everyone his plans for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it. Then, after nationwide protests against his rule, he posted on social media an AI video of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet labeled “King Trump”, which proceeded to bomb American cities and Americans with a graphically vivid load of human poop.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and this week a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have dared – really, no other president would have imagined – unilaterally destroying large sections of the White House in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, almost all of whom have business with the government. And no one – not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Jackson, not Warren Harding, not anyone – would have imagined boasting about defecating on the American citizenry. Even the worst American leaders were willing to maintain the notion that they represented all the people; Trump has managed to turn America’s idea of itself entirely upside down. And he has done it with the active consent of an entire political party. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, when asked about the poop video, for once did not bother lying that he had not seen it. Instead he said: “The president uses social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media.”
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© Illustration: Guardian Design
© Illustration: Guardian Design
© Illustration: Guardian Design
I was doing a good job of staying upright and dignified, until a surge of people rushed towards me
Read more in the kindness of strangers series
I was 19 and thought I was invincible. I’d just broken up with my boyfriend and to boost my ego, I decided to put on a skirt that was probably a bit too short and a pair of heels that were definitely too high. The stiletto heel was about 13cm tall – crazy! – but oh, how I loved those shoes.
I really shouldn’t have been wearing those shoes on public transport, especially not on a train. I remember how difficult it was to walk across the platform and how worried I was that I was going to go hurtling on to the tracks. I was already regretting my life choices at this point, but I successfully managed to totter my way off the train at Oxford station and start walking down what were then very steep stairs, holding on to the handrail for dear life with every step.
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© Illustration: Victoria Hart/Guardian Design/Alamy
© Illustration: Victoria Hart/Guardian Design/Alamy
© Illustration: Victoria Hart/Guardian Design/Alamy
Unable to reunite with their families in Gaza due to the closed border, Palestinian workers have spent two years in a refugee camp at Nablus stadium
Inside a dim locker room at the Nablus municipal stadium, in the occupied West Bank, the television rarely goes dark, streaming day and night the relentless news from Gaza. Gathered in front of it are a group of men from Khan Younis. For more than two years, they have lived in this stadium converted into a refugee camp, their lives suspended between exile and the war they watched on a screen.
They are mostly construction workers who were in Israel on the morning of 7 October 2023 when Hamas launched its attack. As Israel rounded up Palestinians from Gaza, they fled to the West Bank, where they remain – cut off from wives and children living in makeshift tents inside the strip. With very few exceptions, civilians are not currently allowed in or out of Gaza.
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© Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian
© Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian
© Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian
For those who live far from home, feeling a mix of grief and gratitude is not as contradictory as it may seem
The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work
“I don’t have the words to describe it properly, I just feel I’m in the wrong place and I don’t want to be here.”
For the past few years, *Suzanne has travelled each year halfway around the world to visit family and close friends in her birth country. While the farewells are always hard, Suzanne usually settles back home after a few weeks, staying connected with video calls and regular messaging even when time differences made it difficult.
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© Photograph: Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images
© Photograph: Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images
© Photograph: Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images
It is said to be harder to make friends as you age. But I found that a mix of apps and other tools, as well as a happy attitude, led to a world of potential new pals
Tonight, Rachel, Elvira and I will meet for dinner. A year ago, none of us knew the others existed. Six months ago Rachel and Elvira were strangers until I introduced them. But now, here we are, something as close to firm friends as is possible after such a short time.
If you’ve ever consumed any media, you would be forgiven for thinking that life after 35 is a burning wasteland of unimaginable horrors: the beginnings of incessant back pain, an interest in dishwasher loading, the discovery that you’re ineligible for entire industries billed as “a young person’s game”, and, apparently, an inability to make friends.
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© Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
© Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
© Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
TV personality wants homeowners and businesses to shun ‘dishonest’ firms Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex
Grenfell United and the TV architect George Clarke are calling on businesses and homeowners to take a “moral decision” and boycott the companies criticised in the Grenfell inquiry for “systematic dishonesty”.
Clarke, best known for his series George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces, said he had made the decision not to use products from Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex, three companies that were heavily criticised in the findings of the Grenfell inquiry published last year and who have continued to deny wrongdoing.
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© Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
© Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
© Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
James Beard-winning chef Sean Sherman’s cookbook Turtle Island pushes readers to view food systems through an Indigenous lens
As a child growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1970s and 80s, Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota member and a James Beard award-winning chef, recalls pounding dried bison and mixing it with chokeberry to create a snack called wasná. He and his cousins would often hunt for pheasants and grouse, or harvest wild berries and Thíŋpsiŋla, a wild prairie turnip that’s a staple Lakota food. Sherman’s earliest memories of food were full of history, culture and spiritualism.
His idealistic experiences of harvesting and hunting for food on the reservation were juxtaposed with the legacy of colonialism. Most of the time, Sherman and his family ate government-issued food such as canned beef, or blocks of cow cheese, which diverged from their traditional diet. It’s a tale that Sherman, co-founder of the Minneapolis-based Indigenous restaurant Owamni, shares along with other stories in a new cookbook that highlights Indigenous cuisines throughout North America.
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© Photograph: David Alvarado
© Photograph: David Alvarado
© Photograph: David Alvarado
Losing the first Test to Australia by eight wickets after being 105 ahead with one man out could derail the entire tour
Stuart Broad was a highly meme-able cricketer and it turns out that talent now extends into commentary. As Joe Root chopped Mitchell Starc on to his stumps during England’s subsidence on Saturday afternoon, Broad summed up the mood of a nation without uttering so much as a word.
In a clip that has since gone viral, Broad is in the Channel 7 box with his eyes shut, arms folded, letting out an exasperated sigh; the kind of internal “FFS” triggered by a toddler doing the very thing they were just warned against. Watching from the far end as two teammates fall to expansive drives on a bouncy, nippy surface, only to attempt a repeat against Mitchell Star, is a bit like pulling on the cat’s tail. Root did it anyway.
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© Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP
© Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP
© Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP
Artworks to go on display in January at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital
From images of empty community rooms and a colourful canvas crammed with caricatures to a baby linked by an umbilical-like cord to a seated stranger, artworks on the subject of mental health are to go on display in an exhibition that examines social bonds against the backdrop of today’s polarised times.
Artists have long drawn on their own experiences of mental ill health. Staged at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, in the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, in south-east London, Kindred will explore the power of communities to make people feel comforted as well as isolated.
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© Photograph: Benji Reid/Bethlem Museum of the Mind
© Photograph: Benji Reid/Bethlem Museum of the Mind
© Photograph: Benji Reid/Bethlem Museum of the Mind
The Derry Girls star and his mother, Jackie, on an unfortunate vomiting incident, struggling at school and ‘bare bottom’ scenes
Born in Reigate in 1992, the actor Dylan Llewellyn graduated from Rada in 2011. He began his career with roles in Hollyoaks and Call the Midwife, but is best known for playing James Maguire in the Channel 4 comedy Derry Girls and Jack in its sitcom Big Boys. He competes in the latest series of Celebrity Race Across the World with his mother, Jackie, on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
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© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian
© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian
© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian
The bespoke agreements are full of peril for the universities, allowing the federal government to quietly exert control
In October, President Trump proposed a compact for higher education, a federal takeover of state and private institutions thinly disguised as an offer of preferential funding consideration. Most of the initially targeted universities rightfully have rejected Trump’s unlawful and unconstitutional compact, but some schools, including the University of Virginia and Cornell, have since signed separate agreements with the federal government. Initial media coverage largely portrayed the deals as compromises that allowed the universities to preserve institutional autonomy and resolve outstanding federal investigations. But subsequent revelations about the coercive ouster of UVA’s former president underscore how, in fact, “deals” like these represent a dangerous new front in the Trump administration’s war on higher education.
UVA’s settlement, announced on 22 October, appeared to focus narrowly on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, to safeguard academic freedom, and to avoid external monitoring or monetary penalties. Cornell paid $60m and made various promises related to admissions, DEI, antisemitism, and foreign financial ties in exchange for a restoration of federal funding. UVA’s leaders hailed “a constructive outcome” that “uphold[s] the university’s principles and independence”, while Cornell’s declared that federal funding would be restored without sacrificing academic freedom. But the reality is very different.
Serena Mayeri and Amanda Shanor teach law at the University of Pennsylvania
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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
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