Email! “Could this be the first time that a player with the surname Henry will grace the Arsenal pitch since Thierry’s retirement? wonders Peter Oh – no, I’m sure Karl Henry played there for Wolves, as well as Rico himself, and how good it is to see him back.
“As a Liverpool fan I would love to see Arsenal drop points today and feel some Schade-freude. Ouattara the chances?”
Russian leader’s rejection of latest peace proposal was predictable and shows the Kremlin continues to hold the trump card
Before the harsh white glare of the Kremlin reception room came a telling prologue: Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s self-described “deal guys”, being led by Kremlin officials through the sparkling streets of a festive Moscow.
Wasn’t it lovely, Vladimir Putin asked later, as both sides sat down to a five-hour negotiation that seems to have led right back to where they started. “It’s a magnificent city,” Witkoff replied. Then the cameras cut out.
Arne Slot has admitted feeling unease at dropping Mohamed Salah after the striker’s eight phenomenal seasons at Liverpool, and said he wants him “doing something special” on the pitch rather than sitting miserably on the bench.
Omitting Salah was Slot’s big call at West Ham on Sunday when the Liverpool head coach found a solution to the Premier League champions’ dismal run of results. The Egypt international, who will depart for the Africa Cup of Nations on 15 December, has struggled to hit his customary heights this season and is not guaranteed to return against Sunderland at Anfield on Wednesday.
O’Neill has been in interim charge since Rodgers’ exit
Celtic two points behind Hearts with a game in hand
Celtic have appointed Wilfried Nancy, coach of Columbus Crew in Major League Soccer, as their new permanent manager to replace Brendan Rodgers, who was dismissed in October. He has signed a two-and-a-half year contract.
The Glasgow club are two points behind the Scottish Premiership leaders, Hearts, with a game in hand after winning all four of their league matches under Martin O’Neill. The interim manager also beat Rangers in a League Cup semi-final to set up a match at Hampden Park against St Mirren scheduled for 14 December and takes charge of the side for the final time tonight in the league encounter with Dundee at Celtic Park.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his wife joined by King Charles and Queen Camilla on carriage ride through Windsor at start of three-day visit
German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier was welcomed with military pomp, a 41-gun royal salute and a celebratory oversized Royal Standard flag flown above Windsor Castle on the first state visit by a German leader to the UK in 27 years.
King Charles and Queen Camilla accompanied the president and his wife, Elke Büdenbender, on a carriage ride through Windsor’s streets at the start of the three-day visit, which will also see the German leader pay a poignant visit to the ruins of Coventry cathedral, bombed during the second world war.
Washington’s betrayal of its allies has been averted for now, but preparations must be made for a world where its support cannot be relied on
Donald Trump’s desire to end the war in Ukraine might be sincere, but his motives are selfish. He wants the glory of having brokered a deal and does not care whether it is fair or not. As for Vladimir Putin, he only wants peace on terms that achieve things which the Russian army has failed to manage with force. The Kremlin demands territory not yet won on the battlefield and limitations to Ukraine’s capacity to act as a fully sovereign state.
Mr Trump has never shown much natural aversion to giving Mr Putin what he wants. He has not applied serious pressure on the Kremlin to end its aggression, nor rebuked the Russian president for starting the war. He sees nothing wrong with a process that discusses the fate of a country, including de facto partition of its territory, without representatives of that country at the table.
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England’s teacher shortage is fuelled by burnout and unpaid overtime. New working patterns would help without compromising results
Can you guess which professionals in England work 26 hours of overtime a week without compensation, give up time with friends and family to deal with the workload and often find themselves on call in the holidays? Not CEOs, bankers or even doctors, but teachers. No wonder, then, that teaching vacancies are at the highest level ever. Workload is the top concern that teachers cite for leaving the profession, with almost as many quitting as those who joined last year. The consequences are stark: a quarter of English schools do not have a physics teacher, and many key subjects aren’t being offered at A-level in the poorest places.
The 4 Day Week Foundation believes that a shorter working week could alleviate these pressures if trialled in a way similar to the Scottish proposals of a four-day week, with a flexible fifth day that allows dedicated time for marking and lesson preparation. This means the work that teachers are currently forced to do at weekends and evenings would be integrated into the working week instead of being unpaid overtime.
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Ian Cooper allegedly called Khan ‘narcissistic Pakistani’ and made comments about lawyer Shola Mos-Shogbamimu
A Reform UK council leader has been accused of racism after allegedly describing Sadiq Khan as a “narcissistic Pakistani” and saying a black British lawyer should have “F’d off back to Nigeria”.
Ian Cooper, the leader of Staffordshire county council, is also said to have attacked the justice secretary, David Lammy, in a social media post that said: “No foreign national or first generation migrant should be allowed to sit in parliament.”
House Democrats released a handful of photos and videos from Jeffrey Epstein’s private Caribbean island on Wednesday, offering a rare glimpse into a secretive place where Epstein is alleged to have trafficked young girls.
The new images and videos show Epstein’s home, including bedrooms, a telephone, what appears to be an office or library, and a chalkboard on which the words “fin”, “intellectual”, “deception” and “power” are written. One photo shows a room with a dentist chair and masks hanging on the wall. The New York Times reported that Epstein’s last girlfriend was a dentist who shared an office with one of his shell companies. The videos appear to be a walk-through of the property.
England ‘welcome whatever comes’ says bullish captain
Ireland and Scotland meet for third successive tournament
Maro Itoje has set his sights on Rugby World Cup glory in Australia in 2027 after England were handed a potentially favourable path through the tournament when the draw was made in Sydney on Wednesday.
England, who have risen to third in the world rankings after an 11-match winning streak, emerged on the other side of the draw from the reigning world champions, South Africa, the three-times winners New Zealand and France.
Democrat-led city has been bracing for arrival of federal agents for weeks, with some businesses closing their doors
Federal agents are preparing to descend on New Orleans on Wednesday, making Louisiana’s most populous city the latest front in the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrant communities.
Tricia McLaughlin, homeland security department assistant secretary, said in a statement that the aim of “Operation Catahoula Crunch” was to capture immigrants who were released after their arrests for crimes including home invasion, armed robbery, grand theft auto and rape. “It is asinine that these monsters were released back onto New Orleans streets to COMMIT MORE CRIMES and create more victims,” she said.
Will the captain return? Will Nathan Lyon play? Who will open? Ashes hostilities are renewed and the hosts don’t need to ask too many questions
At last, at long last, an Ashes series is about to start. It feels that way, anyway, after so many months of lead-up, such an eternal blur of preview and prediction and preamble, were supposed to reach their end – only to find that the end was instead a momentary interruption, a hiccup, an indigestion-dream of a Test from Perth, a contest done in the span of 31 hours, leaving everyone to return to punditry and prognostication for a further 11 blasted and benighted days.
We are, for pity’s sake, in a discussion cycle about Ben Stokes correctly applying a bike helmet while not on a bike, or Steve Smith correctly applying eye-black stickers in his Tim Tebow tribute act, or the archaeologically uncovered fact that Australian teams have a good record at the Gabba. Like farmers waiting for the rains, we are praying for play to start to let us talk about something that has happened, rather than something that might. Even the day-night format means another wait, four more hours than would usually be the case before the balm of the first ball.
Gustavo Petro responded to intimations by US president of military strikes on Colombian soil to fight drug trafficking
Colombia’s president has warned Donald Trump that he risked “waking the jaguar” after the US leader suggested that any country he believed was making illegal drugs destined for the US was liable to a military attack.
During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, the US president said that military strikes on land targets inside Venezuela would “start very soon”. Trump also warned that any country producing narcotics was a potential target, singling out Colombia, which has long been a close ally in Washington’s “war on drugs”.
Charity director warns ‘more deaths will follow’ unless government changes tack and closes women’s prisons
Over the past decade 97 women have died in prisons in England and Wales and incidents of self-harm among female prisoners have reached the highest level on record, a report has found.
Inquest, the charity that produced the report, collated Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures since 2015 to arrive at a total number of deaths. It said the numbers were evidence for its case that all women’s prisons should be closed.
Carrie Cracknell, Nina Raine and Belarus Free Theatre’s Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin share memories of working with the playwright and ‘guardian angel’
Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, co-founding artistic directors of Belarus Free Theatre
The musician, who wrote My Way and Puppy Love among others, talks career longevity, shrewd business and which star bullied him in his youth
In 1956, when Paul Anka was 15 years old, he idolized Chuck Berry. So, when the star came to play his home town of Ottawa, Canada, the ambitious kid made sure to sneak backstage with his guitar to play him a song he’d just written. “I started singing Diana to Chuck Berry when, suddenly, he stops me and says, ‘That’s the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life, go back to school.’”
Rather than slink away from such a pronouncement, however, Anka used it as a spur. “Revenge is a motivator like you won’t believe,” the 84-year-old star said with an eruptive laugh the other day. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to show him.’ That attitude has prevailed for me through my entire life.”
Exclusive: report into Blackpool Victoria hospital by Royal College of Physicians finds systemic failings have affected patient safety
A culture of systemic bullying and harassment has been allowed to flourish among staff at one England’s most scandal-hit hospitals, a damning leaked report reveals.
The safety of patients at Blackpool Victoria hospital was affected as a result of the failings, the report by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) found.
Surrey retain 51% share in franchise after auction
Oval Invincibles, the Hundred’s most successful franchise, will be competing as MI London next year, the name favoured by their new Indian co-owners.
The change of name brings the men’s and women’s teams, who between them have won Hundred titles in each of the past five years, in line with the rest of the Ambani family’s Mumbai Indians holdings which, in addition to its Indian Premier League team, includes MI Cape Town in the SA20, MI Emirates in the ILT20 and MI New York in Major League Cricket.
She brought the house down as a stripper in Gypsy, going on to star in films with Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson. Now, at 96, she’s stealing the show in Eleanor the Great. What’s her secret? ‘Be a looker-ahead’
It is surely a comfort to anyone still awaiting mega-success to know that June Squibb was in her mid-80s before she hit the big time. Her role as a foul-mouthed matriarch in the 2013 film Nebraska brought her an Oscar nomination, and she had her first leading role in last year’s action comedy, Thelma. Now she’s playing the lead again, in the new film Eleanor the Great and she’s currently in rehearsals for a show on Broadway. Is Squibb, who has just turned 96, sick of talking about her late-peaking success? “I think people are interested, so no, it’s not a bad thing,” she says. “But it is funny, because when I first came to New York – it was the 50s – I did The Boy Friend, a musical, and I was a big hit.” But it was theatre, she concedes. “The film thing is so different.”
In Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Squibb plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a 94-year-old woman who, mourning the loss of her best friend Bessie, moves from Florida to New York to be near her daughter. Encouraged to make new friends, Eleanor goes to the local Jewish community centre to join a choir, but the woman belting out Stephen Sondheim is enough to make anyone rush for the door. “Oh god,” mutters Eleanor, backing away, before being scooped up by the Holocaust survivors group, meeting at the same time, who erroneously assume she’s one of them. Lonely and grieving, US-born Eleanor finds herself passing off Bessie’s survival story as her own.
Researchers find children who own dogs score lower for social problems, aggressive behaviour and delinquency
Having a dog in the home could help boost teenagers’ mental health, research suggests, with scientists adding this could in part be down to the sharing of microbes.
Prof Takefumi Kikusui, of Azabu University in Japan, who led the work, said being with dogs could reduce owners’ stress and stimulate the release of the bonding hormone oxytocin.
This is the UK’s second-largest listed company, and the European bank most exposed to declining US-China relations
It turns out that Sir Mark Tucker, 67, retired as chair of HSBC in September to make way for an older man. Say hello to Brendan Nelson, 76, a former KPMG partner, who has been doing the job on an interim basis for a couple of months but was regarded as a rank outsider to get the gig permanently.
Just how permanent remains to be seen because the HSBC chief executive, Georges Elhedery, clearly unaware that Nelson had thrown his hat into the ring, appeared to rule him out when speaking at an FT conference only on Monday. He said Nelson didn’t wish to do a full term of six to nine years, a remark that didn’t feel controversial at the time. After all, while US presidents may go on into their 80s these days, chairs of globally important banks tend not to.
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