Danish prime minister MetteFrederiksen has issued a statement reacting to the vague agreement apparently reached after talks between Donald Trump and Mark Rutte last night.
Frederiksen says it is “good and natural” that Arctic security was discussed between the US president and the Nato secretary general here in Davos last night.
“I have been informed that this has not been the case.”
Brazilian endured hard times in the Swedish fifth tier after his father’s death but has found a home in the Championship
Seven years ago Léo Scienza’s life broke into a thousand small pieces. On his 20th birthday his father died and the young footballer locked himself in his room for two months, having lost the will to live. “You know when everything is bad and nothing makes sense any more?” the Southampton midfielder says. “My life had no meaning any more.
“Look, everyone has a dark side and I’m not the best person to talk about depression or what depression is. In fact, I only understood it later. My father died on my birthday – that will always be marked in my life. After he died I just wanted to stay in my dark room doing nothing. I didn’t want to see anyone, I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
One of the Broncos, Rams, Seahawks and Patriots will claim the championship in a few weeks. Here are the factors that will help decide the result
A month ago, the Rams looked like a near-complete team. Special teams aside, they had answers everywhere. Coaching. Quarterback. Playmakers. A defense that could steal a game if necessary. They’re still a formidable opponent, but cracks have started to emerge.
Described by one researcher as looking ‘already dead’, the enigmatic creatures are one of the least understood species on the planet
It looks more like a worn sock than a fearsome predator. It moves slower than an escalator. By most accounts, it is a clumsy and near-sightless relic drifting in the twilight waters of the Arctic, lazily searching for food scraps.
But the Greenland shark, an animal one researcher (lovingly) said, “looks like it’s already dead”, is also one of the least understood, biologically enigmatic species on the planet.
In the UK, 98% of two-year-olds watch screens on a typical day, on average for more than two hours – and almost 40% of three- to five-year-olds use social media. Could this lead to alarming outcomes?
At Stoke primary school in Coventry, there are many four-year-olds among those starting in reception class who can’t sit still, hold a pencil or speak more than a four-word sentence. Lucy Fox, the assistant headteacher and head of foundations, is in no doubt what is causing this: their early exposure to screens, and a lot of it. When the children experiment with materials and creativity, and make things in the classroom, she says, “We notice a lot of children will cut pieces of cardboard out and make a mobile phone or tablet, or an Xbox controller. That’s what they know.”
At another school in Hampshire, a longtime reception teacher says in the last few years she has noticed children getting frustrated if activities aren’t instant and seamless – something she thinks comes from playing games on a phone or tablet. There is a lack of creativity and problem-solving skills, noticeable when the children are playing with Lego or doing jigsaw puzzles and turning the pieces to fit. “I find their hand-eye coordination isn’t very good, and they find puzzles difficult. Doing a puzzle on an iPad, you just need to hold and move it on the screen. They get really frustrated and I feel like there are certain connections the brain is not making any more.”
Today’s rumours are squeezing a lot into a short time
Kostas Tsimikas may be enjoying the Roman sunshine on loan, but Nottingham Forest are still peering longingly across the Mediterranean at Liverpool’s spare left-back. The arrival of Milos Kerkez has left Tsimikas firmly behind Andy Robertson in the Anfield pecking order but Forest’s interest has never gone away. Roma would be willing to end his loan period early provided they can find someone else first – understandable given he has only four Serie A starts this season under Gian Piero Gasperini, whose wing-back system does not suit the 29-year-old.
Sunderland are reportedly clutching Noah Sadiki with the kind of white-knuckled intensity usually reserved for a North Sea ferry in a gale. Manchester United are admirers of the 21-year-old DR Congo midfielder and have even toyed with the idea of a player-plus-cash deal involving Manuel Ugarte, but the Black Cats have no interest in a deal. Sadiki’s value has apparently doubled since his £15m arrival from Union Saint-Gilloise and Sunderland seem in no mood to cash in just yet. The player has started every Premier League match under Régis Le Bris bar the games he was away for Afcon.
Youngest son of US president raised alarm after woman was allegedly attacked during video call last January
Barron Trump, the youngest son of the US president, alerted police in London after witnessing a woman allegedly being attacked by a former boyfriend, possibly saving her life, a court has heard.
Trump was on a video call a year ago with the woman, who cannot be named, when he saw Matvei Rumiantsev, a Russian citizen, repeatedly punch her, Snaresbrook crown court was told on Wednesday, according to reports.
Dark obsessions drive this debut about the golden era of magazines – but its vile and hilarious heroine is not someone you want to spend so much time with
Last year the New York Times ran a quiz entitled “Could You Have Landed a Job at Vogue in the 90s?” It was based on the fabled four-page exam Anna Wintour had would-be assistants sit – a cultural literacy test containing questions about 178 notable people, places, books and films. I’m afraid that this former (British) Vogue intern did not pass muster: wrong era, wrong country.
A woman who almost certainly would pass with flying colours is the former Vogue staffer Caroline Palmer, now the author of a novel, Workhorse, set at “the magazine” during the dying days of a golden age of women’s glossies, when the lunches were boozy, the couture was free and almost anything could be expensed. In this first decade of the new millennium, we meet Clodagh, or Clo, a suburban twentysomething “workhorse” trying to make it in a world of rich, beautiful, well-connected “show horses”, and willing to do almost anything to get there.
Australians urged to do a good deed – or mitzvah – as Anthony Albanese says day is ‘opportunity for us as a nation to wrap our arms around the Jewish community’
Fresh wreaths of flowers have been laid at Bondi beach, children have cooked meals for those in need and Anthony Albanese has welcomed the opportunity to “wrap our arms around” the Jewish community as Australia holds a national day of mourning for the victims of last month’s terror attack.
Under the banner of the New South Wales government’s One Mitzvah for Bondi initiative, all Australians were urged to do a good deed – or mitzvah – on Thursday to mark the day of mourning.
1st over: Sri Lanka 7-0 (Nissanka 3, Mishara 4) This is the first time Overton has opened the bowling in an ODI. He starts with a short ball that is pulled smoothly for two by Nissanka. A single behind square brings the left-handed Mishara on strike; he’s beaten first ball, chasing a short delivery that snaps away off the seam.
Mishara gets off the mark with a cross-bat edge that lands short of Buttler and bounces through for four.
Cilic has punched his ticket into round three for the first time since 2022, with the 37-year-old and 2014 US Open champ taking out the 21st seed Shapovalov in straight sets. Decent win, that. He’ll face the winner of Casper Ruud v Jaume Munar.
Stan is still alive! He’s broken Gea in the final game of the fourth set to snatch it 7-5, finishing off with a vicious backhand winner down the line. It’s got to be one of the most devastating shots in tennis hasn’t it? I don’t think even Federer’s single-handed backhand quite had the equal beauty and brutality that Wawrinka’s does. They’re going to a fifth.
Does your movie call for a golden, diamond-encrusted Furby or replica nuclear missile? The prop master will find one for you – or even make it from scratch
The red and blue pills in The Matrix. The Rosebud sled in Citizen Kane. Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction, contents unknown. The (real) severed horse head in The Godfather. Every sword, gun, wand and lightsaber that has been brandished by an actor on a screen or stage. What do these items have in common? Nothing, except that they are a tiny sample of the staggering range of objects, from the iconic to the instantly forgotten, known as props – or, to use their formal name, “properties”.
Props are, properly defined, anything used in a performance that is not part of the set or costumes. Sourcing or fabricating them is the job of a team overseen by the prop master; the term is gender-neutral, although the prim-sounding “prop mistress” is occasionally heard. It’s a massive undertaking, but not one that gets much attention. “It’s nice that you are asking about props, because they’re not really acknowledged,” says Jode Mann, a TV prop master in Los Angeles.
No one is suggesting the sort of decision Brooklyn made is taken lightly, but support networks and the language of therapy seem to lessen the sting
As we continue to unpack the meaning of the Beckham family feud, I don’t think enough attention has been paid to the roast chicken. Perhaps you were busy having a life in December and missed it. But this week’s explosion by Brooklyn Beckham was the culmination of a chain of events triggered last month when Victoria Beckham, advisedly or otherwise, chucked a like at her son’s video of a roast chicken on Instagram.
For some, the takeaway was that Brooklyn’s chicken looked undercooked. For others, it was a reminder that you could draw a face on a balloon and achieve roughly the same level of sentience as Brooklyn in his cooking videos. All of which was to miss the point: that according to the new semiotics of family alienation, Brooklyn’s mother, by liking his post, had crossed a fraught boundary between “NC” (no contact) with her son to “VLC” (very low contact). Had Brooklyn not blocked her and the rest of the family immediately, she may have gone the whole hog and escalated to LC – “low contact” – at which point all bets would’ve been off.
Gerard Piqué spoke to his former Spain teammate Iker Casillas on his podcast last February and the topic of goalless draws came up. You might expect a centre-back and goalkeeper to be excited about the art of defending but rather Piqué suggested that teams should be punished for participating in goalless draws.
“It can’t be that you go to a football stadium, spend €100, €200 or €300, and the match ends 0-0,” said Piqué. “Something needs to change. One proposal to consider would be that if the match ends 0-0, the teams would score zero points. Then the match would open up in the 70th minute.”
Ambitious owners and financial growth have allowed WSL and WSL2 clubs to assert dominance in the transfer market
“If anyone didn’t take our ambition seriously, I hope they really do after this window, because it shows what we’re pushing for.”
Amy Merricks was answering a question about Birmingham City breaking the second-tier transfer record to sign Wilma Leidhammar from Norrköping, but the head coach’s words could easily sum up the English January transfer window as a whole, as teams in the Women’s Super League, and in WSL2, demonstrate where the financial power lies in the women’s game.
Policy allowed Max Verstappen back into 2025 title race
Team due to unveil new car in Bahrain on 9 February
McLaren will continue pursuing a policy of rigorous fairness towards Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri for the 2026 Formula One season, despite their insistence on not imposing team orders almost costing Norris his world title by allowing a late challenge from Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
Last year McLaren enjoyed the most competitive car for most of the season and insisted their drivers would be free to race one another, applying their “papaya rules”.
GeoKarst is a new EU-funded project highlighting a unique landscape of caves, gorges and medieval villages near Trieste
Our guide turns out the lights and suddenly there is nothing. Just total darkness, the sound of gentle dripping and a creeping feeling of unease. The switch is flicked back on and the shadowy world that lies deep beneath the Karst returns. I’m in Vilenica, thought to be the first cave in the world ever opened to tourists, with records of visitors dating back to 1633. It’s a magical sight: a grand antechamber sculpted through erosion, filled with soaring stalagmites and plunging stalactites streaked in shades of red, terracotta and orange by iron oxide, and dotted with shimmering crystals.
Vilenica is just one of a network of thousands of caves located in the Karst region of western Slovenia and eastern Italy, which is known for its porous, soluble limestone rock. Above ground, this creates a distinctive landscape, filled with rocks bearing lined striations and pockmarked by hollows known as dolines, where the limestone has collapsed underneath. But below ground is where it’s really special, with enormous caves, sinkholes and subterranean rivers. Later in the day, I visit the region’s other main visitor cave, Škocjan, where I’m amazed to see an underground river thunder through a chamber almost 150 metres high. It’s an almost surreal sensory experience, with the rush of the rapids echoing around the walls.
Saipan, about Keane’s infamous World Cup row with manager Mick McCarthy, has become a hit film in its native Ireland – as it opens in the UK screenwriter Paul Fraser explains how he aimed to avoid the mistakes of the past
The best bit of football action in Saipan happens on a tennis court. The forthcoming movie about the schism between Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane that led to the latter departing the 2002 World Cup before it started does not attempt to recreate any of the action from the tournament. In fact, it largely takes place in a decrepit hotel. But we do get one exception: Keane, played by Éanna Hardwicke, practising alone in the grounds. At the back of a court, the sullen, spartan athlete stands as a ball is fired up and over the net towards him. He tracks it with his eyes, opens up his right foot, takes the ball on his instep and kills it dead. And with that, his sporting bona fides are confirmed.
Saipan is a movie about masculinity, about men and their egos. It’s also about an era in Irish history; the roaring of the Celtic tiger, where questions of national identity came to the fore. What it’s not, really, is a movie about football. Which might be a canny choice, because while the world’s most popular sport only continues to grow its audience, football’s track record on the big screen is, how shall we say, like Manchester United after Sir Alex.
China isn’t the only country imposing limits on creative expression, argues the provocative artist
‘Chinese culture is the opposite of provocation,” Ai Weiwei once told an interviewer. “It tries to seek harmony in human nature and society.” Harmony has never been his bag. Provocation though? In spades. As a student at the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s, he joined an artist group called Stars that had a slogan: “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom”. In the 1990s, returning to Beijing after a decade in downtown New York, he and a couple of friends published and distributed samizdat-style books devoted to off-piste, often-political art of the kind that government censors tend to fear.
Ai’s own work was bolshie and anathema to custodians of good taste. His Study of Perspective series showed him raising a middle finger at global sites – among them Tiananmen Square, the Eiffel Tower, the White House – that are expected to produce awe, delight, reverence. In the self-explanatory photographic sequence Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), itself the follow-up to Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo (1994), he asked viewers to decide who was the bigger cultural vandal: himself, a mere artist – or a Chinese state for whom iconoclasm was a defining feature of its modernising project. A 2000 exhibition in Shanghai that he helped to stage bore the name Fuck Off. (Its Chinese subtitle was “Ways to Not Cooperate’”.)
Australians perform good deeds, say prayers and hold each other close on Thursday as they remember the 15 victims of the mass shooting at the Hanukah event in Bondi on 14 December
Superintendent says Liam Ramos and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway and sent to Texas
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained a five-year-old Minnesota boy on Tuesday as he returned home from school and transported him and his father to a Texas detention center, according to school officials.
Liam Ramos, a preschooler, and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway, the superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, said at a press conference on Wednesday. Liam, who had recently turned five, is one of four children in the school district who have been detained by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in the region over the last two weeks, the district said.
‘Salah was fit to play 90 after one day’s training’
Liverpool manager highlights Joe Gomez’s contribution
Arne Slot saluted Mohamed Salah’s professionalism and singled out Joe Gomez for praise after Liverpool climbed to fourth in the Champions League table with a commanding win in Marseille.
Liverpool, who host Qarabag at Anfield next week in their final group game, delivered a fine performance and result against Roberto De Zerbi’s team to record a ninth win in 11 European away fixtures.
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