Club to talk to staff about changes in meeting on Monday
Manchester United employees have been warned that they are committing “gross misconduct” if they leak confidential information by the chief executive, Omar Berrada, with staff potentially losing their jobs if found guilty of doing so.
Berrada sent an email, which has been seen by the Guardian, to all staff on Monday and indicated the club has launched an investigation into leaks.
His capitulation to Putin over Ukraine reveals a pattern. He’s the patsy: giving everything away, getting little in return
He parades as a strongman, but in fact he’s weak, weak, weak. In the face of America’s adversaries Donald Trump is, as he might put it, a patsy, a sucker, a pushover. He folds like a pack of cards. He’s a human doormat. A loser.
Just consider the gifts he has handed Vladimir Putin this week. He has brought Russia in from the diplomatic cold after three years of ostracism following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, whose anniversary is nearly upon us. Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, was meant to be persona non grata; he remains under international sanctions. Nevertheless, this week in Riyadh he met Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in so-called peace talks.
A toffeeish, caramel cream delight all wrapped up in buttery flaky pastry
Whenever I think of sweet galettes, my mind usually goes towards something fruity and jammy. However, I’ve decided to break the rules and go in a different direction with a nutty, buttery filling that feels reminiscent of a florentine. I think these fit the bill for a good Sunday lunch pudding, too. Serve warm and still a little gooey with some cold cream.
The singer castigated record labels in her Grammys speech – but, as music industry insiders explain, issues around artist health and support run even deeper
At this year’s Grammys, as she accepted the award for best new artist, Chappell Roan made an appeal to the labels and industry reps in the audience to “offer a liveable wage and healthcare, especially to developing artists” – and in so doing, heated up long-simmering tensions in the music industry over artists’ wellbeing and remuneration.
Roan said that after she was dropped by Atlantic Records, a subsidiary of Warner, in the 2010s, she had little real-world job experience and “could not afford health insurance”. She added that “it was devastating to … feel so betrayed by the system”. She is now signed to Island, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group (UMG), and her speech seemed to be addressed specifically to major labels, whose profits have soared in recent years even as revenue for artists has gone down.
After the Austalian soap’s previous false ending, it’s almost impossible to imagine it getting a second starry finale – or it finding a new home. This time, its farewell needs to stick
It’s always sad to write an obituary, especially so when it’s for the second time. Neighbours, the Australian soap opera that made stars of everyone from Kylie Minogue to a man who will forever be known as Toadfish, is five months away from death. Again.
Yesterday, the show announced that Amazon, the company that resuscitated Neighbours two years ago after its dramatic 2022 finale, would be bringing production to an end. In July, filming will cease. In December, the final episode will be shown. True, there is the possibility that another buyer will leap in and save it, but that is looking more and more unlikely. After all, as the saying goes, you can’t make a zombie out of a zombie.
It’s very rare that one individual is wholly responsible for the difficulties in a relationship. Perhaps you should go to counselling alone, where you can be heard
I am 60 and I’ve been in a long-term relationship with my partner for more than 20 years. We have been extremely unhappy for a number of years.
Our relationship has frequent conflicts over small things. When we disagree on something, I am blamed for my stubbornness or lack of empathy. Innocuous exchanges can turn into confrontations that end frequently with my partner blaming my behaviour. I have been described as moody, insensitive, immature and condescending.
Amazon has paid more than $1bn for “creative control” of the James Bond franchise, the Guardian understands, in a deal that has met with a mixed response from stars of the films.
Amazon MGM Studios said on Thursday that it had struck a deal with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the British-American heirs to the film producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and longtime stewards of the Bond films.
Ministry of Defence says lessons learned from death will make military safer, but victims and families say they have heard it all before
A soldier left suicidal after complaints about a senior officer were ignored. Two women told they needed to grow up or their heads would be banged together after they complained about sexual harassment by their major. A servicewoman raped and left with post-traumatic stress disorder while her attacker was given a slap on the wrist.
Online army forums have been flooded this week with testimonies of abuse – and the military’s failure to tackle it – sparked by the inquest into the death of 19-year-old gunner Jaysley Beck. The head of the army, Gen Sir Roly Walker, has expressed his disgust and suggested senior ranks may even be “actively complicit” in abusive behaviour. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has promised that lessons will be learned.
With one of the film industry’s most lucrative franchises signed over to Amazon MGM, 007 could be facing down the barrel of spin-offs, quasi-crowdsourcing and a cinematic universe to rival Marvel
The ink could hardly have dried on the contract between Amazon MGM and Eon Productions, the legendary Bond film company run by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, before Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos put up a social media post that went to the heart of the conundrum faced by one of the film industry’s most lucrative franchises: “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?”
The reality underlying Broccoli and Wilson’s decision to cede control to Amazon, the company that has since 2021 been responsible for co-producing Bond films after its purchase of MGM, is that since it became apparent that Daniel Craig wanted to leave the role, the franchise has been struck by a kind of creative paralysis. We are used to increasingly long gaps between their release, but with no new lead actor in sight, Bond 26 has still not even reached the starting gate. Eon kept the quest for a new Bond behind completely closed doors, like a sort of state secret, but Bezos’s first act has been to throw the gates open, with an Elon Musk-esque act of quasi-crowdsourcing. It may be just a PR-grabbing gesture, but it demonstrates that Amazon is planning to do things differently from now on.
Launched in an era when voyeurism reigned supreme, The Sims was both a curious pleasure and a Lynchian oddity. A new program in Melbourne celebrates its legacy
“Who would you put in your pool these days?” asks my friend while we stand in a giant lime-green dollhouse. We’re at Acmi’s celebration of The Sims’ 25th birthday, inside a Y2K-inspired pop-up styled by the interior designer influencers and diehard Simmers Josh and Matt. There are a couple of blocky PCs where people can play the original Sims. There is also a grim reaper and a llama wandering around.
The pool question makes a lot of sense to anyone who has ever spent hours on the blockbuster game. Any dedicated player knows the terrifying death by drowning that awaits their Sim if they take away the pool ladder.
Israel, seemingly with the US president’s blessing, has kept troops inside Lebanon. Renewed conflict with Hezbollah is looming
As global attention remains focused on the hostage-prisoner swaps between Hamas and Israel, another ceasefire in the region hangs in the balance.
The 14-month war between Israel and Hezbollah, a Shia Muslim militia which has been the most dominant political faction in Lebanon for the past two decades, was paused by a US-brokered ceasefire in late November. The agreement also paved the way to end years of political deadlock in Beirut. Lebanon has formed a new government, and finally has leaders chosen for their promises to carry out reforms, rather than their sectarian affiliations – but the future of the ceasefire deal has left them facing an immediate crisis.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor at New York University
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Six players with minimal international experience are at the tournament in Pakistan and can expect to play a role
Fewer than three months have passed since Australia’s Test team was seen to be in crisis as an ageing side that had shoehorned in a first debutant in almost two years was dismantled by India in Perth. A dramatic turnaround for a 3-1 series victory, followed by a clean sweep in Sri Lanka, went a long way to justifying selectors’ steadfast faith in the proven performers. Presenting baggy greens to five debutants across seven matches was an added bonus while suggesting the selectors might have had a much grander plan in mind all along.
Planning around Australia’s white-ball sides has been much more haphazard. Opportunities have been handed out to emerging talents and second-stringers while frontliners have been on personal or parental leave, injured, or simply rested with eyes on bigger, more lucrative prizes. In the past 18 months alone, Australia blooded enough ODI players to fill a full XI. The hope seemed to be that a handful of them would not only stick to the international white-ball squads, but eventually push their Test credentials too. The broad brush approach now looks like a masterstroke, after Australia’s initial Champions Trophy squad was decimated by a raft of withdrawals and injuries, leaving six of the debutants during that recent period to take the reins on a global stage.
Exclusive: Mustafa Hajj-Obeid, who left Australia in 2015, is being held in Panorama prison, a detention centre for accused IS members run by the SDF
An Australian member of Islamic State who was wounded in the extremist group’s final battle and whose fate was not publicly known has been discovered alive and in custody in a prison in north-eastern Syria.
Mustafa Hajj-Obeid, 41, who is one of a cohort of accused IS members whose Australian citizenship was stripped and then restored in 2022 after a legal challenge, has been reported as missing for the past six years since the military defeat of IS.
Winnings as yet unclaimed by thieves in Toulouse who bought scratchcard amid legal debate over who gets payout
Two homeless men who bought a winning lottery scratchcard with a stolen credit card have been offered a potentially lifechanging deal by their victim: a share of the €500,000 jackpot if they can produce the ticket.
The situation has left legal experts scratching their heads over who is the rightful owner of the so far unclaimed winnings: the person who bought the scratchcard, or the person who paid for it? And will the lottery operator pay out?
Europa League: Spurs v AZ, Man Utd v Real Sociedad
Rangers face Fenerbahce; Chelsea draw Copenhagen
Liverpool will face Paris Saint-Germain in a Champions League last-16 tie that provides a significant hurdle in their attempt to lift the trophy for the first time since 2019.
It is the toughest-looking assignment of those presented to the Premier League’s three representatives. Arsenal will fancy their chances of overcoming PSV Eindhoven over two legs, while Aston Villa will be favoured to navigate a rematch with the surprise packages Club Brugge for a place in the quarter-finals. The standout tie by some distance, though, is a Madrid derby between age-old rivals Real and Atlético.
Fears that cuts will ‘decimate’ ability to react to crises as sector loses expertise and skills at every level, report finds
Some of the world’s largest aid organisations are axing thousands of jobs as a result of US president Donald Trump’s freeze on overseas aid, potentially “decimating” the sector’s ability to react to future crises.
Those that have already announced job cuts include the International Rescue Committee, Danish Refugee Council, Norwegian Refugee Council and war zone-focused Norwegian People’s Aid.
Trump can try to co-opt hockey. But Thursday showed that wherever where you’re from, when you step onto the ice, something about you will always be Canadian
In a clip from ESPN sports talkshow Get Up that went viral last week, former National Hockey League player PK Subban weighed in on the differences between the culture in the NHL and NBA. Usually, comparing the two is a game of numbers: revenue, viewers, salaries, that kind of thing. But over the past 10 days, passion has emerged as a differentiator. “You can step on to an NBA floor and go through the motions,” Subban said on ESPN. “You can’t do that in hockey – you can’t. Like, the culture of our sport, you have to play it with passion. You have to be willing to fight. You have to be willing to leave it on the ice. That’s what fans are investing in.”
That investment has paid off most recently with the 4 Nations Face-off tournament, which wrapped up on Thursday night in Boston. The thrilling final between Canada and the US was a rematch of last Saturday’s marquee round-robin clash, a contest marked by three fights in the opening nine seconds. The rest of the game was pretty good, too, ending with a US win. On Thursday, the tables turned. It was Canada that scored first – again – and last. Canada won the game narrowly 3-2, after the US left Connor McDavid, the best player on the planet, open in the slot in sudden-death overtime. He made no mistake.
This is ‘probably one of the most alarming times for Britain’s defence since the second world war’, says Lib Dem leader Ed Davey as he calls for more spending
In case you missed it, Nigel Farage addressed the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) in Washington last night.
Farage praised Elon Musk as a “hero” just a month after the billionaire suggested he should stand down as leader of Reform UK, PA reports.
National security adviser Mike Waltz told a crowd of Donald Trump loyalists that he believes the president will receive the Nobel peace prize.
“This is the presidency of peace. He’s going to end the war in Europe. He is going to end the wars in the Middle East. He is going to reinvest the United States and our leadership in our own hemisphere, from the Arctic to the border to Panama all the way down to our good friends in Argentina,” Waltz told the Conservative Political Action Conference.
The pause comes after CNN reported on Wednesday that the mass terminations, which could affect over 50,000 civilian employees across the Pentagon, could run afoul of Title 10 section 129a of the US code. Following that report, Pentagon lawyers began reviewing the legality of the planned terminations more closely, the officials said.
That law says that the secretary of defense “may not reduce the civilian workforce programmed full-time equivalent levels unless the Secretary conducts an appropriate analysis” of how those firings could impact the US military’s lethality and readiness. The law also says that mitigating risk to US military readiness takes precedence over cost.
The steel industry needs to modernize. Tariffs can help, but the government must go beyond trade policy
Last week, Donald Trump revived a trade war from his first term, implementing a 25% tariff on all imported steel. In doing so, he’s using tariffs as a blunt-force tool under the assumption that they’ll be sufficient to jump-start the American steel industry.
But that’s not the case.
Mike Williams is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former deputy director of the BlueGreen Alliance
From being told she couldn’t act to winning an Oscar, the Hollywood star has had a wild life. She talks old flames, being tucked up in bed for her new Agatha Christie mystery, and why she’s happiest when surrounded by donkeys
Given that Lady Tressilian rarely leaves her boudoir, it was an enjoyable role. “I was very happily in bed, one of my favourite places, generally,” says Anjelica Huston, of the regal aristo she plays in the new BBC adaptation of the 1944 Agatha Christie mystery Towards Zero. Despite the fact she is mostly horizontal, occasionally at a chair by the window and peering through a telescope at the Devon bay beyond, Tressilian is a domineering character, presiding over the younger relations she has assembled at her seaside home and making her displeasure known at their various life choices. There will, of course, be murders.
Huston was reminded of the older women she had known from her childhood in Ireland, “mostly on the hunting field, but occasionally in their bedrooms. They were very dignified and gracious, and they ran life with a rod of steel. They were very brave and had big reputations. The men were always a bit in the background.” Tressilian’s bell rings, and everyone from servants to her relations and lawyer (he’s there on the thorny matter of her will), is commanded to attention. “It’s a great way to presage a character, an inbuilt warning,” says Huston.
“I don’t think that this ‘peace process’ is for Ukrainians’ sake. It is laughable that they pretend it is,” said Iryna, 26, a lawyer from Kyiv.
Iryna was among thousands of Ukrainians who got in touch with the Guardian to share how they felt about the Trump administration-led peace talks with Russia, which exclude Ukraine.
After news that a film course is to consider the depiction of donkeys, what other species have been portrayed in a poor light?
Donkeys have featured in many films, from the Eddie Murphy-voiced animation in Shrek through to Eeyore in the Disney version of Winnie the Pooh, as well as taking lead roles in cinema classics such as Robert Bresson’s celebrated Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s recent EO.
But after news that the University of Exeter is to offer a film studies module looking at how the portrayal of donkeys in films has affected public attitudes towards them by representing them in a negative light as stubborn or comedic, are there other animal species that deserve rehabilitation from their depiction in the movies? Here are four suggestions …
Emilli Beck says army failed to protect her sibling and she would not advise other young women to enlist
The older sister of Gnr Jaysley Beck, the 19-year-old soldier who killed herself after allegedly being sexually assaulted and harassed, has said the army has “blood on its hands” and claimed her sibling would still be alive if the abuse she suffered had been properly investigated.
Speaking to the Guardian, Emilli Beck, 25, said the army had swept Jaysley’s case under the carpet rather than protecting her, and said she would not advise any young woman to join the service.
Julia Wandel allegedly sent letters, calls, WhatsApps and visited family of missing girl
A woman who claimed to be Madeleine McCann has been remanded in custody after being charged with stalking the missing girl’s family by turning up at their home and contacting them repeatedly.
Julia Wandel, also known as Julia Wandelt, was arrested at Bristol airport on Wednesday and appeared in Leicester magistrates court on Friday.
A 30-acre construction lab is helping reshape Colombia’s architecture with ancestral knowledge and direct ecological action. We head inside their smoking doughnut
A curious doughnut-shaped structure rises from an overgrown field on the outskirts of Tenjo, a rural town in central Colombia. It looks like a thatched UFO. Bamboo lattice walls curve up from the ground to form its bulging shell, tapering to a central chimney where wisps of smoke waft into the sky. Through the mesh walls, it is possible to make out bodies dancing in a circle around a fire, to the sound of drumming and chanting.
“As architects, we need to unlearn everything we have been taught,” says Ana María Gutiérrez, standing outside this momentous structure in muddy overalls, boots and a broad-brimmed black hat. “Our idea of progress is completely based on colonialist, extractivist practices. People talk about sustainability, but what exactly are we sustaining?”
The woven doughnut, Gutiérrez explains, is The House of Thought – an “intercultural temple” at the heart of her Centre for Regeneration. This is a 30-acre outdoor laboratory for indigenous construction techniques that she’s been building for 16 years. It is a place scattered with experiments, from structures that look like coil pots, to little domed houses built from sandbags. Some of the cavorting bodies inside the thatched temple belong to architects, who have come here for the day to cleanse themselves of their desk jobs, and get their hands dirty in workshops focusing on earth construction, ecological restoration, biodynamic agriculture and the healing properties of medicinal plants. Some are busy making bricks from troughs of mud.
US government stripping funds from domestic and overseas research amid warnings for health and public safety
The Trump administration is stripping away support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contains a word it finds particularly inconvenient: “climate.”
The US government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development.
Rule dating from 2009 that limits borrowing looks vulnerable as main political parties promise to revive stalled economy
Germany is used to running its economy with the brake on. Ever since the 2008 financial crisis Berlin has sought to burnish a reputation as the world capital of fiscal discipline, with a near-pious aversion to debt and pride in strong government finances.
Under a rule known as the “debt brake” – introduced in 2009 by Angela Merkel to show Germany was committed to balancing the books after the banking crash – the federal government is required to limit annual borrowing to 0.35% of GDP.
A wide-ranging and thoroughly entertaining portrait not just of Queen Elizabeth II but of the psyche of her subjects
The funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 was watched by around 28 million people in the UK alone. In her lifetime, she was one of the most photographed and scrutinised figures in the world. Yet few could say they knew the late monarch since, says biographer Craig Brown, she kept “her interior world screened from public view” and was “a human looking-glass: the light cast by fame bounced off her, and back on to those she faced”.
Little wonder, then, that A Voyage Around the Queen does not follow the usual conventions of a biography. Instead of a chronological account of its subject, it is a patchwork of news reports, letters, diary entries, secondhand anecdotes, tweets and even dreams. The result is a wide-ranging and thoroughly entertaining portrait not just of the woman but the psyche of her subjects. You don’t have to be a royalist to enjoy such titbits as Kingsley Amis anxiously loading up on Imodium prior to meeting the queen lest he fart in her orbit, or the list of wedding gifts given to the royal couple in 1947 which includes bibles, tea cosies, bookends, paperweights, 500 cases of tinned pineapple from the state of Queensland and 148 pairs of nylon stockings “from Americans sensitive to Britain’s postwar shortage”.
The US has chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it, but it is right to call for a realignment
It’s tough being rightwing these days. You have to find something nice to say about Donald Trump. That is hard. He thinks Kyiv started the Ukraine war and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a “dictator”. But what about JD Vance? The US vice-president thinks that Europe’s “threat from within”, which is putting “free speech … in retreat”, is worse than any threat from Russia or China. These men are deranged. What more is there to say?
The answer is quite a lot. John Stuart Mill warned that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”. We must try to understand the case they are making, whether we agree with it or not.
The president punished the AP for choosing its own language, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The press must show unity
It might seem like a small matter, just a disagreement over whether a body of water should be called one name or another.
But it’s really about much bigger things: Trump-style intimidation, a clear violation of the first amendment – and the extent to which news organizations will stick together in each other’s defense, or will comply with the powerful for the sake of their own access.
Once a prestige genre with lavish spectacle and global stars, it’s since grown pretty dusty and drear. But Nolan’s Odyssey may yet revive its bronzed vigour
Back in the 1950s and 60s in the twilight of Hollywood’s golden era, the sword-and-sandals movie stood as tall as the Colossus of Rhodes. It was a time when burly men in togas and gleaming bronze breastplates fought existential battles with fate. When Ben-Hur had its chariot race, Spartacus roused cries of defiance and the odd moment of splendid anachronism, and Cleopatra had Elizabeth Taylor burning through costume changes like a pharaoh with an Amex card.
And then, it all collapsed. By the 1970s, audiences weren’t interested in ancient glories any more; they wanted Vietnam war movies, paranoid political thrillers and antiheroes who didn’t spend half their films glistening in olive oil. By the time Star Wars arrived in the late 70s and early 80s, the genre had been survived only through low-rent Italian productions, where togas were optional but bad dubbing was essential, and the occasional made-for-TV slog where the biggest battles were against budget constraints.
Partnership comes as London station looks at ways to almost triple passenger numbers
St Pancras railway station in London and the Channel tunnel operator have agreed to work together to open up more trains from Britain to France, and routes to Germany and Switzerland.
The agreement is the latest sign of growing momentum for new passenger rail links from England across the Channel, after Great Britain’s only international station announced plans to triple the number of people who can travel through every hour.
President’s order means a race to the bottom rigged against US, argues anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International
Bribery is not a victimless crime. Stories listing the amount paid or the fine imposed can make them sound more like distasteful financial transactions, but they have harmful – sometimes deadly – outcomes.
Bribes have been paid to building inspectors to ignore safety violations later cited in catastrophic collapses, and to officials to ignore worker standards that result in disabling and lethal outcomes. They have even helped divert weapons into the hands of rogue and dangerous actors.
Gary Kalman is the executive director of Transparency International US.
Maira Martini is the CEO of Transparency International.
Show removed from iPlayer as ‘further due diligence’ carried out and critics ask if any Hamas members were paid for filming
A BBC documentary about Gaza has been pulled from its iPlayer service while the broadcaster deals with intensifying accusations that the film was biased because it failed to make clear the father of its child narrator was a Hamas deputy minister.
BBC sources indicated the intention was to make the documentary available to watch again once a “due diligence” exercise had taken place, but the decision reflects a frustration that the filmmakers did not inform the broadcaster of the situation before transmission.
In November 1940, Winston Churchill sent a telegram to Franklin Roosevelt expressing relief both at the US president’s re-election and the victory of his anti-appeasement policy. “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must now avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us safely to anchor,” he wrote.
As Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron prepare to meet a very different US president, things are once again afoot that will live long in the memory – but this time the lights seem to be going out on a ship adrift in a sea of chaos.
Europa League: Spurs face AZ, Man Utd face Sociedad
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A video explains just how the draw works. I was confused eight seconds in. It’ll be done soon.
Live scenes from Nyon show some men in suits watching football highlights. Giovane Elber, a former Champions League winner with Bayern, is the special guest. He looks particularly smart.
Under the radar for a decade, the artist formerly known as Mos Def is back. He talks about rejection, revival, and his new partnership with the Alchemist
It’s the penultimate night of Paris fashion week, and at Le Trianon, a storied 1,000-capacity music hall beneath Montmartre, Yasiin Bey – the artist formerly known as Mos Def – is holding court. “Fashion week is exhausting, especially when you be swagging this hard,” grins the dandyish MC and sometimes streetwear designer. “People see me and be like: ‘What’s the event?’ Today. Life is the event.”
Bey is showcasing his new project, Forensics, a partnership with DJ and producer the Alchemist (Eminem, Nas, Earl Sweatshirt). Over beats steeped in psychedelia and spiritual soul, Bey skips between the personal and political with profundity, as has long been his gift. This is Bey’s deepest, most focused work in years, from Ondasz, a meditation on resistance that finds Bey reflecting: “I don’t know if Goliath made David afraid / But I do know David threw his stone anyway,” to Kidjani, a mesmerising, moving tribute to his late mother, Sheron Smith (the “Umi” in his 1999 hit Umi Says). The material signals a rebirth for an MC and movie star who, for the last decade and a half, seemed content to disappear from the limelight.
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