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Kári Tulinius has messaged in to say:

“Given that eight out of twelve third-place teams will get to the knockout stage, four points should be enough to get through. Given the potential disparity in quality between France, Senegal and Norway on the one hand, and one of Bolivia, Suriname and Iraq on the other, it’s not unlikely we’ll get a group where the third place team has four points and a positive goal difference. It could be the Group of Everybody Lives. The era of group stage drama may be over.”

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© Photograph: Guerin Charles/Abaca/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Guerin Charles/Abaca/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Guerin Charles/Abaca/Shutterstock

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission awarded 172 bear hunt permits by random lottery for this year’s season, allowing hunters to kill one bear each in areas where the population is deemed large enough.

Film-maker Marshall Curry pulls back the curtain on the beloved institution in a revealing and celebratory new film

When young film-makers ask Marshall Curry what makes a documentary idea, he tells them: “There are some stories that make great New Yorker articles, but they’re not movies.” It was only a matter of time before the director found himself testing his own wisdom with The New Yorker at 100, a new Netflix film about the magazine. “Somebody said to me that trying to make a 90-minute movie about the New Yorker was like trying to make a 90-minute movie about America. Ken Burns does that with one war.”

The film pulls back the curtain on the mystical media shop. Curry and his crew spent a year rummaging through the archives, listening in on production meetings, shadowing famous bylines – none more venerated in the industry than editor David Remnick, the magazine’s abiding leader. Curry had hoped to make a meal out of staffers pushing to meet the February 2025 publishing date, the magazine’s centennial anniversary issue, but the scenes he found didn’t quite approximate anything from the boiler room-centered dramas of film fiction or even The September Issue doc on Anna Wintour’s clannish Vogue operation. “I wanted to see people running around each other and saying, ‘We’ve got to get this thing done before the deadline!’” Curry says. “But they don’t do that.”

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

In a post on X, Grijalva said she was "pushed aside and pepper sprayed" after identifying herself as a member of Congress while seeking information from officers during a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) operation near the Taco Giro restaurant.

New novels from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ian McEwan, plus the return of Slow Horses and Margaret Atwood looks back … Guardian critics pick the must-read titles of 2025

Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan picks the best of the year, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count to Thomas Pynchon’s return, David Szalay’s Booker winner and a remarkable collection of short stories.

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© Illustration: Debora Szpilman/The Guardian

© Illustration: Debora Szpilman/The Guardian

© Illustration: Debora Szpilman/The Guardian

Power blackouts, public chaos and loss of communication with space were all thrown at troops in seven days

Russia and China were barely mentioned, but they were the threats in everyone’s minds in Tallinn this week, where Nato hosted its largest ever cyber war game.

The goal of the war game, conducted 130 miles from the Russian border in Estonia, was to test the alliance’s readiness for a rolling enemy assault on civilian and military digital infrastructure.

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© Photograph: Tanel Meos/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tanel Meos/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tanel Meos/The Guardian

The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) seized the weapons this week at the Anzalduas Port of Entry in Mission, a town on the Texas-Mexico border, the agency said. 

Zaghari-Ratcliffe made clothes for her daughter while waiting for her eventual release. Now, the idea of creativity as a form of resistance is the theme of a new collaboration between London’s Imperial War Museum and the fabric department of Liberty.

When Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe returned home to London after six years of arbitrary detention in Iran, she brought back with her a small patchwork cushion. Pieced together from scrap material and made with the single sewing machine available in the prison, it was the product of a communal craft circle.

“It’s something very, very precious to me,” she said. So precious, in fact, that she has worked on a new collaboration between London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) and the fabric department of Liberty, creating three new prints that explore experience as a prisoner.

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© Photograph: Liberty

© Photograph: Liberty

© Photograph: Liberty

The match between Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios opens up a direct channel between the BBC of old and a world of toxic internet hatred

It’s always best to take a sceptical view of the constant flow of BBC-bashing newspaper stories, which are often simply bogus outrage expressed for commercial gain. Even the war-on-woke, cod-ideological stuff – Clive Myrie INSISTS hamsters can breastfeed human robots – the bits that make you want to smear your face with greengage jam and weep for England, our England, with its meadows, its shadows, its curates made entirely from beef. Even these come from a hard, transactional place.

Basically, it’s the licence fee. The BBC is free at the point of delivery, but paid for by a national levy. The BBC is also a direct commercial competitor to every other form of legacy media, all of which are trying to find ways to survive and recoup revenue.

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© Illustration: David Lyttleton/The Guardian

© Illustration: David Lyttleton/The Guardian

© Illustration: David Lyttleton/The Guardian

Clashes between rival factions are the culmination of a long-running feud involving claims of racism

It should have been a night for Crystal Palace supporters to savour. About 1,500 officially made the trip to Strasbourg for their second away match of the Conference League group stage last week, although plenty more had gathered in the pretty Alsatian city famous for its expansive Christmas market.

Yet while most were enjoying being part of Palace’s first European campaign after May’s FA Cup win, “a tiny majority” – as the club’s statement the following day described them – had different ideas. Footage of bottles and chairs being thrown as two rival groups of supporters of the same club clashed before the game in one of the city’s squares went viral on X. “Palace fans fighting each other in Strasbourg,” read the message, not surprisingly sparking widespread confusion.

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© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

In 2020 Steve Thompson revealed he could not remember winning the Rugby World Cup and since then his case and others have been caught up in a warren of legal argument

The Royal Courts of Justice are a warren. They were built piecemeal over 125 years of intermittent construction, wings were added, blocks were expanded and then joined by a web of twisting staircases and long corridors. You navigate your way to whichever corner of it you have business in by checking the tiny print on the long daily case lists that are posted in the lobby early each morning, when the building always seems to be full of people hurrying in the other direction. For the last three years, three separate sets of legal action about brain damage in sport have been slowly making their way through here, lost in the hallways.

One is in football, one is in rugby union, one is in rugby league. The same small firm, Rylands Garth, is behind all three. Sometimes these hearings take place in the modern rooms of the east block, where the carpet is peeling and the roofs are gap-toothed with missing panels, and sometimes they take place in the cold old stone rooms off the great hall, which are wood-cladded, and contain rows and rows of heavy leather-bound books. Progress is slow. Events often go unreported.

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© Composite: The Guardian

© Composite: The Guardian

© Composite: The Guardian

The actor, who starred as a Marxist academic in the acclaimed 2006 play at the Royal Court, remembers an astonishing writer of ideas and elegance

By the time I was cast in Rock’n’Roll in 2006 I had been following Tom for years. I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when it came to London in 1967 with the wonderful Graham Crowden as the Player King. It was a big sensation. The Real Thing was a great play and Arcadia was extraordinary.

Rock’n’Roll was at the Royal Court in London, directed by Trevor Nunn, and starred Rufus Sewell as Jan, a Czech student who returns to Prague in 1968. I played Max, a Marxist academic. It was a fascinating experience, because there were two plays there: the play about Sappho, the Ancient Greek poet, and the play about the Soviet takeover in Czechoslovakia.

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© Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

© Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

© Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

This reader asks Dear Abby if he should start seeing other people after his partner appears to be uninterested in him.

An underworld heavyweight was plotting to kill one rival and have another’s chest “carved up” a year before he was assassinated outside his Sydney home, text messages reveal.

Thousands of Taylor University students stormed the basketball court as part of the prestigious school's cherished -- yet chaotic -- annual "Silent Night" Christmas tradition on Friday night.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill were asked whether they believe U.S. citizen victims or drug traffickers were more important to them..

The Australia captain has missed the first two Tests with a back injury

© PA Wire

The Department of Justice instructed prison auditors across the country to simply stop assessing whether facilities are violating laws designed to shield LGBT+ prisoners from sexual abuse

© SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

George Clarke has admitted Strictly Come Dancing gives him an easy excuse to cancel plans with his friends.

© PA Media

Ireland would face a group comprising hosts Mexico, South Africa and South Korea if they progress to the World Cup

© AP

Authorities cite fraud, cybersecurity risks, and potential disinformation as reasons for one-year ban

© Getty Images

Whether it’s wildly speculating about Charlie Kirk’s murder or forcing Brigitte Macron to prove that she is a woman, the far-right podcaster and conspiracy theorist has millions of listeners hooked on her unique brand of dangerous misinformation. So, how has Candace Owens been allowed to become so powerful, asks Katie Rosseinsky?

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The star of ‘Almost Famous’ and ‘The Morning Show’ talks to Patrick Smith about forcing out tears in ‘Jay Kelly’, playing the lawman in ‘High Noon’, and bumping into ‘golden god’ Robert Plant

© Invision/AP

As NOTTO prepares to open its new Broadgate site, Michelin-starred chef Phil Howard shares four simple, flavour-first pasta dishes – from silky crab linguine to a deeply comforting root veg ragù – offering exactly the kind of winter cooking we all want right now

© Supplied