• News, buildup and discussion before the day’s action

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It’s a Manchester 1-2 in the Women’s Super League although City are absolutely running away with it. United travel to Leicester in the only WSL fixture today. It kicks off at 12pm which is a bit daft given that the men’s team are in action at 12.30pm. What if you’re a big fan of both? Anyway, here’s the table. United will hope to cut the gap to eight points.

Premier League team news. Okay, the fantasy deadline has already gone due to Leeds playing Nottingham Forest last night but for those who love to ponder starting XIs, see who’s crocked and check current form along with each club’s top scorer, this is the article just for you.

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© Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

© Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

© Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

• Milano Cortina Games: updates from day one’s action

• Schedule | Results | Medal table | Briefing | Email Barry

Curling mixed doubles: Team GB are currently in action against Canada and having won their opening five matches before today, Bruce Mouat and Jen Dodds are not so much knocking on the door to a place in the semi-finals as battering it down. They lead 5-2 against Canada at the break, with matches against the United States (today), Switzerland and defending champions Italy (tomorrow) to come.

The Opening Ceremony: The showpiece to kick off the Games happened across multiple venues but politics and protests were also present, writes Bryan Armen Graham.

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© Photograph: Abbie Parr/AP

© Photograph: Abbie Parr/AP

© Photograph: Abbie Parr/AP

Grammy-winning Puerto Rican star is in the center of US culture wars before leading this weekend’s half-time show

A few days after Christmas 2022, Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaetonero, appeared without warning on one of the most unlikely of stages: the roof of a Gulf Oil gas station in San Juan. To a massive crowd singing every word, he performed a surprise concert, along with friend and collaborator Arcángel, that was part hype-y music video shoot, part exultant post-tour homecoming, and part pointed critique. He ended the set with El Apagón (“The Power Outage”), a clubby protest anthem about local displacement and the rolling blackouts that have plagued Puerto Rico, a US “commonwealth” (read: colony), since Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Bad Bunny sang it from a roof on Santurce’s Calle Loíza, a thoroughfare in a former working-class Black neighborhood now dotted with Airbnbs. But you do not need the full context to get the show’s contagious energy. Though I have never walked Calle Loíza, nor do I speak Spanish, the gas station show is still my favorite concert to rewatch via online fan clips: electric, organic, genuinely popular. In terms of reach, critical acclaim and longevity, Bad Bunny rivals – and sometimes outsells – the likes of Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé and Drake, though it is hard to imagine those peers appearing so unguarded, so public, as he does on that roof.

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© Photograph: Étienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Étienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Étienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images

To access the files, lawmakers will need to give the Justice Department 24 hours’ notice

Campaigners welcome criminalisation of non-consensual AI-generated explicit images but say law does not go far enough

Victims of deepfake image abuse have called for stronger protection against AI-generated explicit images, as the law criminalising the creation of non-consensual intimate images comes into effect.

Campaigners from Stop Image-Based Abuse delivered a petition to Downing Street with more than 73,000 signatures, urging the government to introduce civil routes to justice such as takedown orders for abusive imagery on platforms and devices.

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© Photograph: Lucy North/PA

© Photograph: Lucy North/PA

© Photograph: Lucy North/PA

Really, what is the point of this endless conversational back and forth? Step out of the loop, and change your life

You get a coffee. The barista tells you how much you need to pay. You say thank you. They take your card for payment. They say thank you. They give you the coffee. You say thank you. They say thank you for your thank you. Then you say thank you for their thank you. By this point, the words “thank you” have lost all meaning, and both parties are exhausted by the pointless stream of politeness.

Growing up in India, I learned that thank yous are only for distant strangers, and that close friends and family get offended if you thank them. I would say thank you to a speaker delivering a formal talk but never to a friend helping during a crisis or a family member making me dinner. But living in the UK for two decades has forced me to adopt our incessant “thank you” culture. I now find myself saying thank you at least 10 times a day and sometimes many more. Nevertheless, there are some British “thank yous” that I would ban completely, if I could.

Sangeeta Pillai is a south Asian feminist activist, author of Bad Daughter and the creator of Masala Podcast

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.

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

The actor on a disastrous speech, his rules for how people should get around cities and an embarrassing encounter with a doorman

Born in New York state, Billy Crudup, 57, made his film debut in Sleepers in 1996. His subsequent movies include Almost Famous (2000), Big Fish (2003), Mission: Impossible III (2006), Spotlight (2015), Alien: Covenant (2017) and most recently Jay Kelly. On TV he has a long-running role in The Morning Show, for which he has won two Emmys. He stars in High Noon at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre until 6 March. He has a son and is married to Naomi Watts. He lives in New York City.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Flashes of hubris.

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© Photograph: Aldara Zarraoa/Getty Images

© Photograph: Aldara Zarraoa/Getty Images

© Photograph: Aldara Zarraoa/Getty Images

The Warriors have had Green's back. And he's had theirs. 

The US has given Ukraine and Russia a June deadline to reach an agreement to end the nearly four-year war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters.

• England T20 captain eager to move on from furore

• ‘It’s not been a very nice time of my life,’ he says

Harry Brook wants to draw a line under a “pretty horrendous” past few weeks when revelations about his conduct in Wellington cast doubt on his leadership as he prepares to lead England at the T20 World Cup.

More than three months on from Brook being punched by a nightclub bouncer in New Zealand, hours before captaining England, the saga took on fresh legs when the Yorkshireman claimed to have been on his own, only for the Daily Telegraph to uncover he was accompanied by Jacob Bethell and Josh Tongue.

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© Photograph: Ishara S Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ishara S Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ishara S Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images

Your official "how-to" guide for the Winter Olympics.

Three-way peace talks are expected to take place in Miami within a week

Law enforcement agents confiscated a car parked inside the garage of Nancy Guthrie's Arizona home Friday, where they also removed a wired device from the roof after they received a tip from a neighbor.

It was crunch time, and St. John’s needed a basket. So, of course, the ball found its way to Dylan Darling. The backup point guard has a knack for coming up big in the clutch. It happened recently in come-from-behind wins over Xavier and Seton Hall, and again Friday night. Darling’s stepback 3-pointer with 3:13...

Forget its reputation as a performative read for a certain breed of intense young man, thirty years after its publication, David Foster Wallace’s epic novel still delivers, says the Crying in H Mart author

I’m not what you might consider Infinite Jest’s target demographic. The novel’s reputation precedes it as a book infamously few ever finish, and those who do tend to belong to a particular breed of college-age guys who talk over you, a sect of pedantic, misunderstood young men for whom, over the course of 30 years, Infinite Jest has become a rite of passage, much as Little Women or Pride and Prejudice might function for aspiring literary young women.

Most readers come to the novel in their formative years, but I was a late bloomer. It wasn’t until the winter of 2023 that, at the age of 34, smoking outside a party in Brooklyn, I found myself suddenly motivated to embark on the two-pound tome. A boy I knew from high school brought it up, and as I happened at the time to have developed a casual interest in those works one might attribute to the “lit-bro” canon (Bret Easton Ellis, Hemingway, etc), it seemed the appropriate time to take it on.

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© Photograph: Bridgeman Images

© Photograph: Bridgeman Images

© Photograph: Bridgeman Images

OTTAWA — During a ceremony this week to unveil his official portrait, former prime minister Stephen Harper made a point of mentioning the tie he’s wearing in the painting. Read More

Even supporters of the band seemed confused by the statement, with one writing, "I love you guys but this is a terrible PR decision."

The Knicks were already banged up before Josh Hart limped off the court with another ankle problem.

The joint statement, released Friday, came after US President Donald Trump announced his plan last week to reduce import tariffs on the South Asian country

Drawing on opera, music, art, fashion, dance and more, the events at San Siro and beyond were spectacular

The curtain rose on a moment of myth and magic: Cupid’s kiss awakening Psyche, a tender beginning that blossomed into a dazzling tribute to Italy itself. From opera and art to fashion, music and dance, the Milano Cortina opening ceremony unfolded as a vibrant celebration of culture. An explosion of colour, romance and theatrical flair that felt unmistakably Italian.

The spectacle then drifted into a dreamlike Fantasia chapter. The Italian actor Matilda De Angelis, wielding an enormous conductor’s baton, guided swirling dancers across San Siro, flanked by the larger-than-life figures of Italy’s operatic greats – Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini and Gioachino Rossini – brought to life with towering papier-mache bobble heads. Performers in radiant hues paraded in a joyous passeggiata, evoking the everyday elegance of an Italian stroll.

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© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Coach should not ‘stick to football’ when football strays into politics and death but his role as fluffer for his club’s autocratic owners cannot be ignored

You may find yourself living in a glass and steel yak-fur-lined penthouse. You may find yourself with six Premier League titles and a sport refashioned in your image. You may find yourself in front of a large advert board covered in words such as Experience Abu Dhabi, haunted by images of suffering, a scythe clanking gently at your shoulder. And you may say, well, how did I get here?

There are only ever two types of Pep Guardiola article. First, articles announcing that Guardiola’s influence has reached some new level of annihilating dominance, that what we have here is our own cashmere-draped, cranium-whirring Ideal Tactics Man, that Pep-ism is bigger than smartphones, bigger than internet porn, bigger than a mother’s love, that playing out from the back is now visible from space.

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© Illustration: Matthew Green

© Illustration: Matthew Green

© Illustration: Matthew Green

Tests on both versions of Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata were unable to detect brushstrokes of 15th-century master

An analysis of two paintings in museums in the US and Italy by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck has raised a profound question: what if neither were by Van Eyck?

Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, the name given to near-identical unsigned paintings hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Royal Museums of Turin, represent two of the small number of surviving works by one of western art’s greatest masters, revered for his naturalistic portraits and religious subjects.

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© Photograph: Alamy

© Photograph: Alamy

© Photograph: Alamy

The off-field politics are toxic, Wales are on a terrible run and England are flying, but everyone needs Saturday’s game to be competitive at Twickenham

Are you a Wales fan reading this on the train to London? If so, let’s huddle in tight and try to stay positive. In round one of the Six Nations everyone starts equal. There is rain around and England have a couple of significant injuries. Steve Tandy is a capable guy and there are some talented individuals at his disposal. In this grand old championship miracles have been known to happen.

C’mon boys, believe. That red jersey still represents something special. All that history, all that fabled lineage. Gareth, Gerald, Jiffy, Alun Wyn … they’re all right with you. It’s only 80 minutes and opportunity knocks. Under the radar is a useful place to be. And, look, it’s not even called Twickenham these days. Allianz Stadium could be anywhere.

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© Photograph: Tom Sandberg/PPAUK/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Tom Sandberg/PPAUK/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Tom Sandberg/PPAUK/Shutterstock

Manager caught in the first sticky patch of her career, but has agreed a new contract despite falling out of WSL title race

Dejected body language, talk of a crisis, and a 12-point gap ruling them out of the title before the second week of February. For a Chelsea team so used to winning the Women’s Super League, this is uncharted territory after their 5-1 loss to Manchester City.

For Sonia Bompastor, who has had more defeats in her past five league matches than in her previous 104 games in charge of Chelsea and Lyon, this is also an unfamiliar scenario, but Chelsea have placed their full faith in her – and vice versa – by agreeing a new, extended contract with the Frenchwoman and putting their trust in each other that recent results amount merely to a temporary blip, rather than a longer-term downward spiral.

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© Photograph: Steve Taylor/PPAUK/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Steve Taylor/PPAUK/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Steve Taylor/PPAUK/Shutterstock