Arsenal will move back into the top three with a win today. It’s crucial they get three points if they want to remain in contention for the title – which is already a huge ask at this point in the season.
Arsenal stars Alessia Russo, Mariona Caldentey and Leah Williamson were named in the top 10 of The Guardian’s 100 best female footballers in the world for this year.
Police launch ‘manhunt’ after 25 people are shot in early morning Saulsville township attack
Gunmen have stormed into a hostel in South Africa’s capital and killed at least 11 people, including a three-year-old child, and injured more than a dozen others.
Police said they had launched a “manhunt” for three people and were investigating whether the killings were linked to a bar selling alcohol illegally. The attack is the latest in a series of mass shootings in the country of 63 million people, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world.
The Trump administration released a policy paper on Friday that made explicit Washington’s support for Europe’s nationalist far-right parties
Donald Trump’s advisers and Ukrainian officials said Friday that they will meet for a third day of talks as the US president pushes Kyiv and Moscow to agree to a US-mediated proposal to end nearly four years of war.
“Both parties agreed that real progress toward any agreement depends on Russia’s readiness to show serious commitment to long-term peace, including steps toward de-escalation and cessation of killings,” officials said in a statement released after a second day of meetings in Florida on Friday.
Targets of more than Russian 650 drones and 51 missiles include western regions with sirens sounding in eastern Poland
Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack on Ukraine in the early hours of Saturday, as US and Ukrainian officials continue talks in Miami that the White House hopes will bring an end to the conflict.
Russia used more than 650 drones and 51 missiles overnight, Ukraine’s armed forces said, with drones targeting locations across the country, including in the western regions hundreds of miles from the frontline. Warning sirens also sounded in parts of eastern Poland, close to the Ukrainian border.
David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, promised ‘everyone’ would win by combining the storied Hollywood studios with his reality TV giant. Instead, many lost
It’s less than five years since David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, negotiated what looked like the deal of his career. Now as Netflix plans a landscape-changing takeover of Warner Bros, he’s in the middle of an even bigger one.
Zaslav, or Zaz, is a hard-charging, well-connected executive who cut his teeth inside NBC, and ascended into New York’s media elite as he transformed Discovery Inc from a nature- and science-focused cable broadcaster into a reality TV giant.
How the photographer captured this split image of sardine fishermen taken from above
Freelance photographer Ahmad Mansour was visiting Al Max, a fishing neighbourhood in Alexandria, Egypt, when he took this image on his mobile phone. Mansour was there with friends, documenting the area and the fishermen who resided there.
“The sun was bright and it was very loud; the water was running strongly and the men were shouting,” Mansour says. “I climbed a small building to reach this vantage point above the men with the sardines. I love the top view angle; I’d been inspired by another image that was split that way and it suited the colours to balance them like this, too.”
The persecution of brown people and mass deportations will not create the white country of far-right fantasy
As Donald Trump deteriorates and his grasp on power fades, he has been lashing out furiously at female journalists and ethnic groups, most recently Somali Americans. His insults land because of their animosity and his power, not their accuracy. Likewise, his administration’s attacks on immigrants are sloppy and driven by lies. It’s strikingly clear that the target is not individuals with criminal records. It’s anyone and everyone guilty of being brown. Native Americans with tribal identification cards, US citizens, people doing crucial work from construction to nursing, military veterans, college students, people sleeping in their own beds, small children: all kinds of residents of this country are under attack.
“ICE raids are cruel, inhumane, and do nothing to serve public safety,” declares Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor-elect. Masked thugs smashing car windows and dragging parents away from their babies, terrorizing whole swathes of the population, and interfering with the ability of schools and businesses to function does the opposite. The rounds of targeted hatred by Trump and his minions – for people from Haiti during the 2024 campaign, for people from Venezuela this spring and summer, and most recently for people from Somalia – rely on defamatory lies and insults, because the facts about these groups don’t support the hate.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology
Some say it’s overdiagnosis, others say it’s greater recognition. But it’s clear we must think about how our society is impacting human development
Gabor Maté is the author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Does the rise in diagnoses of ADHD mean that normal feelings are being “over-pathologised”? The UK’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, seems to suspect so. He is said to be so concerned about a sharp rise in the number of people claiming sickness benefits that he has ordered a clinical review of the diagnosis of mental health conditions, and autism and ADHD.
I was diagnosed with ADHD (ADD, as it was then most often called) decades ago, in my early 50s. As I wrote in my book on the subject, Scattered Minds, it “seemed to explain many of my behaviour patterns, thought processes, childish emotional reactions, my workaholism and other addictive tendencies, the sudden eruptions of bad temper and complete irrationality, the conflicts in my marriage and my Jekyll and Hyde ways of relating to my children … It also explained my propensity to bump into doorways, hit my head on shelves, drop objects, and brush close to people before I notice they are there.”
Gabor Maté is an international public speaker and retired physician. His most recent book is The Myth of Normal: Illness, Health and Healing in a Toxic Culture
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“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.”
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.”
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
The Guardian’s fiction editor 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The desperate search for economic growth is pushing the party to confront the issue that dare not speak its name
For much of the last week, Keir Starmer’s government has been suggesting that a closer relationship with Europe will be a more prominent part of his agenda in the future.
But it was a little-noted personnel change that might prove the most telling shift: Nick Thomas Symonds, the minister in charge of EU negotiations, was promoted to full cabinet rank.
This documentary on the musician interviews everyone from Flea to … Rowan Williams. It’s a thoughtful take on his songs and Christianity
Devouring the new Nick Cave documentary on Sky, I am reminded how critics go wild for arty musicians who constantly change direction and dabble in everything. This is its own kind of myth. I know plenty of artists who keep moving – one week they’re sewing fish scales on to jackets, the next they’re painting mirrors or putting seahorses in samovars. The problem is, no one cares. If poet and ceramicist Nick Cave didn’t also write classic songs, he’d just be a local weirdo. I definitely wouldn’t buy a hardcover transcription of conversations he’d had with a mate about God. I’m glad I did, though.
The documentary, Nick Cave’s Veiled World (Saturday 6 December, 9pm, Sky Arts), is timed to promote the TV adaptation of his filthy novel The Death of Bunny Munro. It’s a glorious opportunity to revisit his early, intense masterpieces: electric chair confessionals, murderous duets with pop princesses, profane love songs. They’re still in my head, days later. It’s also a reminder that, in a joyfully perverse career, the assertion of his Christian faith has been his most divisive move. Audiences love biblical imagery in rock songs, provided the singer doesn’t actually believe.
From Cecil at Waitrose and Slinky at Tesco to an app designed to be deleted, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 In 1932, Australia declared war on which bird? 2 What became the world’s tallest church in October? 3 Matthew Streeton is the voice of which much-maligned rail announcement? 4 Which recent US president’s mother was called Stanley? 5 In which country has the TV crime drama Tatort run since 1970? 6 Which football club’s new stadium contributed to a loss of world heritage status? 7 Which app’s makers claim it is “designed to be deleted”? 8 Four-month-old Spencer Elden appeared on which album cover? What links:
9 Amy Adams; Kate Bosworth; Rachel Brosnahan; Teri Hatcher; Margot Kidder? 10 Boardwalk; Rue de la Paix; Schlossallee; Shrewsbury Road? 11 Hasbani, Banias and Dan rivers; Sea of Galilee; Dead Sea? 12 Dian Fossey; Biruté Galdikas; Jane Goodall? 13 Christopher Wren; John Houblon; Matthew Boulton and James Watt; Alan Turing? 14 Cecil at Waitrose; Cuthbert at Aldi; Slinky at Tesco; Wiggles at Sainsbury’s? 15 King John (2); Henry VIII (3) and (2); John Mortimer (2); Ben Affleck (2)?
Moscow ‘continuously reinforcing’ its presence in the region, says Swedish chief of operations Capt Marko Petkovic
The Swedish navy encounters Russian submarines in the Baltic Sea on an “almost weekly” basis, its chief of operations has said, and is preparing for a further increase in the event of ceasefire or armistice in the Ukraine war.
Capt Marko Petkovic said Moscow was “continuously reinforcing” its presence in the region, and sightings of its vessels were a regular part of life for the Swedish navy. Its “very common”, he said, adding that the number of sightings had increased in recent years.
Watching the Broadway actor’s joyous energy, along with his calmness and openness, I was convinced that I could step out into the world and be myself
My first encounter with Broadway actor Jonathan Groff was innocuous. Stuck in the wilds of Donegal for two weeks as part of teacher training, I listened to Broadway musicals while the rest of the lads watched the Gaelic fixtures and got drunk. I stumbled upon the recent production of Merrily We Roll Alongwith Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe and like most of the internet, I became obsessed.
Afterwards, I went down a Groff rabbit hole tracking down interviews and cast recordings. I was drawn to how bubbly he was, how smiley he was. Groff had a joyous energy that was infectious. His voice was like melted chocolate. I both loved – and envied – his calmness and his openness to the world.
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