1 min: Sandro Tonali takes the ball deep as Newcastle attempt to pass their way through. Harvey Barnes gets an early touch from a Woltemade layoff. Good energy from the home fans. How long will that last?
Here’s Jeff Beck’s Hi Ho Silver Lining, with the Led Zep medley you will always hear in pre-match at Molineux.
Major retrospective in Plymouth, her adopted city, presents her as a skilful chronicler of social transformation
In her lifetime Beryl Cook’s colourful, vibrant paintings tended to be dismissed by most critics as mere kitsch or whimsy.
A major retrospective of Cook’s work opening in her adopted city of Plymouth at the weekend makes the case that she was a serious, significant artist who skilfully chronicled a tumultuous period of social transformation.
There are so many koalas in some places that food is the issue – while elsewhere populations are threatened by habitat loss. And there are no easy fixes
On French Island in Victoria’s Western Port Bay, koalas are dropping from trees. Eucalypts have been eaten bare by the marsupials, with local reports of some found starving and dead. Multiple koalas – usually solitary animals – can often be seen on a single gum.
Koalas were first introduced to French Island from the mainland in the 1880s, a move that protected the species from extinction in the decades they were extensively hunted for their pelts. In the absence of predators and diseases such as chlamydia, the population thrived.
Ultra-processed foods have been linked to various health issues, but are a ubiquitous part of the modern western diet. Can Emma Joyce avoid them for a whole week?
I’ve been eating ultra-processed foods (UPFs) all my life. Breakfast as a child was often Coco Pops, Rice Bubbles or white toast slathered in spreadable butter. Dinners usually involved processed sauces, such as Chicken Tonight or Dolmio, and my lunchboxes always contained flavoured chippies or plasticky cheese.
I don’t blame my parents for this. Now I’m a parent too, I have cartons of juice and flavoured yoghurt as part of my parenting arsenal. Packaged foods are omnipresent in our lives. But, unfortunately, some of these foods are very bad for our health.
These microscopic mites, which burrow under your skin and cause ferocious itching, are incredibly hard to get rid of – and cases in the UK have soared. What is causing the outbreak, and is there anything we can do about it?
Louise (not her real name) is listing the contents of a bin liner she has packed with fresh essentials in case of emergency. Clothes, toothbrushes, hairbrushes, a teddy … “Although it should be two teddies,” she re-evaluates, quickly. I can hear her trying to quell her panic.
A diehard survivalist preparing for catastrophe? Actually, a beleaguered 44-year-old mother recovering from scabies – an itchy rash caused by microscopic mites that burrow under human skin. Far-fetched as it sounds, emergency evacuation is exactly what she, her partner and children (six and four) resorted to in November in a desperate bid to beat the bugs. She is now on tenterhooks in case they return.
Vegan restaurants are closing, RFK Jr is sounding the drum for carnivores, and the protein cult is bigger than ever. But eschewing animal products helps me ward off a sense of impotence – and despair
Let’s get this out of the way, because I’m itching to tell you (again): I’m vegan, and this is our time, Veganuary! Imagine me doing a weak, vitamin B12-depleted dance. Unlike gym-goers, vegans are thrilled when newbies sign up each January, for planetary and animal welfare reasons, but also, shallowly, for the shopping. This is when we can gorge on the novelties retailers dream up: Peta’s round-up for this year includes the seductive Aldi pains au chocolat and M&S coconut kefir.
I need retail therapy, because Veganuary has become quite muted and that’s part of a wider inflection point in vegan eating that I’m sad about. “Where have all the vegans gone?” Dazed asked in November, and now New York Magazine has investigated, with the tagline: “Plant-based eating was supposed to be the future. Then meat came roaring back.” It details a wave of vegan restaurant closures (plus the high-profile reverse ferret performed by formerly vegan Michelin-three-starred Eleven Madison Park to serving “animal products for certain dishes”), declining sales of meat substitutes and a stubbornly static percentage of people identifying as vegan (around 1%). It’s not new (rumours of veganism’s demise have been swirling around since at least 2024) and it’s not just a US phenomenon; many UK vegan restaurants have closed this year, including my lovely local.
In an era of TikTok and YouTube, teens have never watched old-school television less – yet zoomers love this broadcast drama series
Hannah Leef knows she should be studying for midterms this week. But she has to also make time to watch her all-time favorite episode of The Rookie, an ABC procedural drama about Los Angeles cops. (That would be season two, episode eight.) The 15 year old, who lives in New England, calls the show her “hyperfixation”.
Leef first watched the entire series, which is currently in its eighth season, in three weeks. “Which is, like, not healthy,” she admits. She keeps up with new episodes while constantly rewatching the series – which she’s done 10 times now. She’s hooked “about 12 or 13” of her friends on The Rookie, and one of them ploughed through the entire series in a week: “She did not sleep.”
AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots
I am a science-fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.
What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean we couldn’t change it.
In 1996, I travelled around Indonesia with my then-boyfriend. We’d been exploring Surabaya when we heard about an island off the coast called Madura that could be reached via ferry. It didn’t turn up in any of the tourist guides, which appealed to us, being adventurous types. We knew Madura wouldn’t be touristy, but expected there’d be some streets to explore and somewhere to sit down and have a cup of tea.
As soon as Madura came into sight, we realised our visit may not have been a great idea. We were expecting to see houses and buildings dot the shore, as well as the hawkers who’d typically crowd around piers in Indonesia with food and wares to sell. There was none of that. It was just a pier next to a tiny village.
The superstar singer on his itinerant childhood, brutally honest mother, and the moment of anger that led him to write Grace Kelly
Born in Beirut in 1983, Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr, otherwise known as Mika, was raised in Paris and London. He attended the Royal College of Music, before his breakthrough in 2007 with debut album Life in Cartoon Motion and its No 1 single, Grace Kelly. He went on to sell 20m records, and worked as a presenter and judge on TV shows such as Eurovision and The Piano. Mika now lives in Italy and in Hastings, East Sussex, with his partner. His first English-language album in six years, Hyperlove, is out on 23 January.
This was taken in our kitchen in Paris. It doesn’t surprise me that I am covered in chocolate. My earliest memories are of being on the floor surrounded by delicious food.
Nacho Elvira takes advantage for Dubai Invitational title
Rory McIlroy finishes in tie for third after final-day drama
Shane Lowry blew a one-shot lead on the last hole as Nacho Elvira recovered to claim victory in a dramatic finish to the Dubai Invitational.
Lowry, who had started the final round in a tie for second, two strokes behind the Spaniard, barged into the lead after a birdie on the 15th and appeared to have the title at his mercy. But the Irishman found both bunker and water on the 18th, finishing with a double bogey that shattered his hopes and allowed Elvira, who had struggled early in the round, to duly par the 18th for victory.
Discover the joys of creamy soy bean curd in this spicy Sichuan dish that comes together in minutes
Mapo tofu is a Chengdu favourite typical of the “spicy generosity” of Sichuan food, Fuchsia Dunlop explains, though it’s perhaps better not translated as “pock-marked old woman’s tofu”. It may even convert you to the joys of tofu itself, should you still be on the fence about the stuff, because its creamy softness is the perfect foil for the intensely savoury, tingly seasoning involved here. It’s also ready in mere minutes.
The US snatched Nicolás Maduro but, frozen out by Trump, anti-government activists are unsure how to proceed
As the harsh reality sets in that Venezuela’s authoritarian regime remains essentially unchanged even without Nicolás Maduro, activists who have spent years fighting for the country’s return to democracy are unsure about what the next steps should be.
They agree that the country should very soon either hold new elections or install the retired diplomat Edmundo González – widely believed to have won the 2024 election – but neither option appears to be on the White House’s agenda at the moment.
Five exchange-traded funds have been launched by Trump Media, owner of the president’s social media platform Truth Social
The word “Truth” was plastered all around the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning. At 9.30am, when the market opened, a small crowd stood on the balcony above the trading floor to ring in the day.
The group was celebrating the launch of five exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that are tied to Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media platform that has spun into a menagerie of products over the last few years.
Finance minister says Netanyahu should back annexation and settlement, and attacks Turkey and Qatar’s role on Gaza ‘executive board’
Far-right members of Israel’s governing coalition on Sunday rejected a US-backed plan for postwar governance in Gaza, criticising their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for failing to annex the Palestinian territory and establish new Israeli settlements in the territory.
After the announcement of the White House’s pick of world leaders who will join the so-called Gaza “board of peace”, which includes representatives of Turkey and Qatar, both of which have been critical of Israel’s war in the strip, Israeli far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, described Netanyahu’s “unwillingness to take responsibility for Gaza” as “the original sin”.
Institute of Race Relations says violence in Southport and elsewhere often reduced to ‘mindless’ thuggery
The response to the 2024 riots in England and Northern Ireland failed to address its root causes and delinked the violence from racism, a thinktank has claimed.
A paper by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) reported that an obfuscation of the causes and consequences of the riots risks legitimising further far-right mobilisation and vigilante violence.
PTPA had launched lawsuit against four grand slams
Djokovic says he still has issue with PTPA leadership
The civil war engulfing tennis has been laid bare on the opening day of this year’s first grand slam event, with details of Tennis Australia’s peace deal with the Professional Tennis Players’ Association (PTPA) published for the first time.
The PTPA launched an anti-trust lawsuit against the four grand slams, the ATP Tour, WTA Tour, and the International Tennis Federation last year, accusing them of collaborating to reduce prize money, impose a restrictive ranking system and repress player promotional opportunities, but Tennis Australia was dropped from the claim last month after reaching a settlement agreement with the players’ union.
Opinion polls suggest three candidates, including anti-immigration Chega party leader, close to final two
Portuguese voters queued at polling stations on Sunday to elect a new president, with opinion surveys showing three candidates, including the leader of the far-right Chega party, close to a spot in a probable top-two runoff.
In the five decades since Portugal threw off its fascist dictatorship, a presidential election has only once before – in 1986 – required a runoff, highlighting how fragmented the political landscape has become with the rise of the far right and voters’ disenchantment with mainstream parties.
Thai opponent shines in first set before falling away
Emma Raducanu rallied impressively from a slow start and early deficit to open her Australian Open with a solid victory, moving into the second round with a 6-4, 6-1 win over Mananchaya Sawangkaew.
Raducanu had struggled early on, trailing 1-3, 15-40 against an impressive Sawangkaew. However, she found her form quickly, rolling through 11 of the subsequent 13 games to close out a comfortable victory.
Former players Scholes and Butt critical before derby
‘If he wants to say something … he can come to my house’
Lisandro Martínez has criticised Paul Scholes for mocking him on a podcast but not directly to the Manchester United defender’s face, following Saturday’s 2-0 win over Manchester City at Old Trafford.
Scholes and Nicky Butt, another prominent former United player, were each scathing about the diminutive Martínez and his ability to mark Erling Haaland, when speaking on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly before the 198th derby.
History teaches that new technologies always make possible new forms of exploitation, and this basic fact has been spectacularly exemplified by the rise of society-scale digital platforms. It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.
Demonstrations against the Iraq war proved protest works. Now we must halt destruction before it more powerfully starts
In spring 2004, Gen Anthony Zinni uttered about Iraq the dreaded words in US politics: “I spent two years in Vietnam, and I’ve seen this movie before.” A year after George W Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished” – when the war had hit its peak popularity at 74% – the invasion had descended into quagmire, marked by a raging insurgency, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and US casualties nearing 1,000. For the first time, a majority of Americans judged the war a “mistake”. In this, they echoed what millions of Americans, predicting fiasco, had been saying since before its start.
By the summer of 2005, with Iraq exploding in civil war, public support further eroded. Vietnam comparisons abounded. Running against the war, Democrats had blowout wins in the 2006 midterms. The new Congress empaneled the bipartisan Iraq study group, which concluded that the war had to end. Its fate was sealed by the election of Barack Obama, who made good on his pledge to withdraw US troops (though US forces later returned to take on the Islamic State).
Jeremy Varon is the author of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Lila Dominguez was working on an article as agents came on to school grounds – their presence has jolted Minneapolis’s young people
When immigration enforcement agents came on to her Minneapolishigh school’s grounds on 7 January, Lila Dominguez was in the school’s basement working on an article about an ICE agent shooting Renee Good earlier that day.
The high school junior was glued to her phone watching videos from outside the school.
From the remnants of my great-grandparents’ Cuban home near the sugar plantation that is part of Unesco’s Slave Route programme – where they were once enslaved - to personal artefacts, each piece reconstructs an uncertain past
Gathering information on our origins that might help with constructing self-identities could be a beautiful endeavour.
Unfortunately, for millions of people worldwide, retracing a past filled with unfinished stories is like trying to nurture a tree whose roots have been severed.
I still remember that narrow ribbon of earth winding down from my grandfather’s house towards the old Triunvirato plantation – the same fields where an enslaved woman called Carlota, who led an uprising in 1843, raised her voice against chains. In the silence of that road, it feels like a place that has been frozen in time
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