“I’m not usually one to cut any of the Big Six some slack (even with PSR most of them have got more brass na wit, as they might say in Yorkshire),” begins Richard Hirst, “but you look at the strength of the two benches and you feel just a little bit of sympathy for Ange.”
Yeah but look at the strength of Spurs’ treatment room.
Sweeping changes to the policing of Meta’s social media platforms have set the tech company on a collision course with legislators in the UK and the European Union, experts and political figures have said.
Lawmakers in Brussels and London criticised Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to scrap factcheckers in the US for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, with one labelling it “quite frightening”.
US Anti Doping Agency says move ‘protects athletes’
Wada retaliates by barring US from key committees
The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) is facing a crisis after the US government defaulted on a $3.6m contribution to the global sport watchdog’s annual budget.
Wada said the US had missed the 31 December 2024 deadline for payment and retaliated by saying representatives from the US would now be ineligible to sit on its foundation board or executive committee.
Men who attacked Samuel Luiz, 24, outside nightclub in A Coruña jailed for total of 74 years
Four men have been jailed for a total of 74 years for the homophobic murder of a young gay man whose killing almost four years ago shocked Spain and led to nationwide protests.
Samuel Luiz, a 24-year-old nursing assistant, was out with friends in the Galician city of A Coruña in the early hours of Saturday 3 July 2021 when an argument started outside a nightclub.
Family seeks to show a united front as French minister condemns ‘shameful’ celebrations of his demise
The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen looked likely to reignite rivalries in his family over who is the rightful heir to the far-right political dynasty, as the French government condemned as “simply shameful” crowds of people who took to the streets to celebrate the politician’s demise.
Marine Le Pen, daughter of the co-founder and leader of the far-right National Front party, which she has rebranded as the anti-immigration National Rally, on Wednesday paid tribute to her father, who died the previous day at the age of 96.
Geir Pedersen tells security council the HTS administration has great opportunities but also risks making missteps
A credible process leading to a new transitional government involving all strands of Syrian society is the best way for the country’s caretaker administration to secure a smooth lifting of sanctions, the UN special envoy Geir Pedersen has told the UN security council.
Giving his assessment of how the government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was meeting its commitment to inclusiveness, Pedersen said it had tremendous opportunities but also risked making missteps.
Loosening already limited safeguards on social media platforms is not just damaging. It could ultimately prove deadly
Mark Zuckerberg famously boasted that Facebook had a saying: “Move fast and break things”. His product has not just destroyed industry models but also social mores and expectations of the reliability of information and, in the global south, has upended people’s lives. The technology writer Kara Swisher described him as “not just a technologist; he’s a social engineer”.
Meta’s Tuesday announcement shows that it still moves at speed. Having previously been pressured into insufficient improvements in moderation, it is abruptly scrapping factcheckers on platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, starting in the US, and loosening other content restrictions. This purportedly addresses overreach by moderators. Other controls remain. But the signal is clear. Its new guidelines will allow users to call others mentally ill on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity. Meta will also “recommend more political content based on ... personalized signals” – which sounds a lot like buttressing echo chambers.
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The US president-elect has refused to rule out military force to take control. This is why it is important – and what Greenlanders think
Hours after his son Donald Trump Jr touched down in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk, on Tuesday in a Trump-branded plane, the US president-elect, Donald Trump, held a press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, where he refused to rule out using military force to make Greenland part of the US, and threatened to impose “very high” tariffs on Denmark, of which Greenland is an autonomous territory, if it gets in his way.
As the classical music world celebrates his centenary, musicians tell us why the French iconoclast remains a towering figure, and his music still casts a spell
Composer, conductor, polemicist and iconoclast Pierre Boulez was born 100 years ago and, on his death in 2016, left classical music utterly changed. Ahead of two festivals in which the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony celebrate a musician with whom both orchestras had close and enduring relationships we speak to composers, conductors and performers who worked with the legendary musician, and tell us why his music remains essential listening - so long as we put our ‘Boulez ears’ on.
Film director and producer whose hit comedies, co-written with his second wife Nancy Meyers, drew on their relationship
Charles Shyer, who has died aged 83, co-wrote a string of bubbly and often female-focused comedies with his second wife, Nancy Meyers. The couple, so closely linked that they were known affectionately in the industry as the Shmeyers, were not yet married when their first script together turbo-boosted Goldie Hawn’s career: the star found her biggest success playing a pampered young widow duped into joining the army in Private Benjamin (1980), which Shyer and Meyers also produced.
The screenplay, co-written with Harvey Miller and nominated for an Oscar, had been turned down by most of Hollywood. In the wake of its success, an executive at Paramount, which had rejected the script, sent Shyer a letter admitting: “When we fuck up, we fuck up big.”
Cuban artist who moved to Puerto Rico in the 1970s and manipulated flat canvases into ‘erotic topographies’
One night when Zilia Sánchez was a young woman in 1950s Cuba, she was sitting out on the roof of her parents’ house in Havana. There her mother had constructed a washing line, and Sánchez recalled seeing the drying bedsheets blow against a length of wood that protruded from the wall, the white material taking the form of the structure beneath. The memory of this accidental sculpture became an enduring influence on the artist’s paintings.
From the 60s onwards, mostly working out of the limelight, Sánchez, who has died aged 98, pulled and pushed the canvas beyond the frame, shaping the material around armatures into points and mounds.
Despite bold scenes for mainstream American cinema, the sexy dom/sub age-gap film can’t quite figure out what it’s saying about desire
Arguably the most transgressive scene in Babygirl, A24’s erotic drama from the Dutch writer and director Halina Reijn that has Nicole Kidman on the awards circuit, is the first one. The film opens with an orgasm – for both Romy Mathis (Kidman) and her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), together, in the marital bed. But as Jacob slumbers in post-coital bliss, Romy scampers down the hall – the shot of Kidman’s bare, apple-cheeked behind recalls her first scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, one of several erotic 90s touchstones Reijn seeks to invoke and invert through the female gaze. In another room, we witness a private ritual. Her hands desperately flutter across a laptop keyboard; she prostrates herself on the ground, and makes herself come – for real this time – to porn.
It’s a bold opening salvo for a film, a statement of sorts: this film, arriving amid Hollywood’s long slide toward sexlessness, is not about sex so much as female desire. In less than two minutes, we glimpse a tangle of lust, shame, inner chaos, deception, actualization – what Romy sounds like when she’s faking it and when she’s not. For her, as for many women, desire is a maze, bent by societal pressures and warped by internalized incuriosity, non-linear, combustible and not fully comprehensible.
Manager criticised Puma ball after Carabao Cup defeat
Puma will manufacture Premier League ball next season
The English Football League (EFL) has defended the ball being used in this year’s Carabao Cup in response to Mikel Arteta complaining that it “flies differently” after Arsenal’s defeat to Newcastle on Tuesday.
Arsenal lost the first leg of their semi-final at Emirates Stadium 2-0 despite having 23 shots, with three on target. Arteta suggested the ball, which is manufactured by Puma, could have played a role in their defeat because it is different to the Nike balls used in the Premier League.
Chiefs lost crucial game to allow Denver into postseason
Kansas City have struggled against Cincinnati in playoffs
Travis Kelce has rebutted claims that the Kansas City Chiefs rested starters in their final game of the regular season in order to deny the Cincinnati Bengals a place in the playoffs.
After the Bengals won their final game of the regular season last Saturday against the Pittsburgh Steelers, they needed the Denver Broncos to lose to the Chiefs and the New York Jets to beat the Miami Dolphins the following day. The Jets duly overcame the Dolphins, but a severely weakened Chiefs team lost 38-0 to the Broncos, allowing Denver to claim the final wildcard spot in the AFC.
In world of elite tennis, not everyone believes rivals can be trusted to make fair calls in umpire-free practice sessions
During a calm, quiet afternoon in the buildup to Wimbledon last year, the former US Open champion Sloane Stephens was working on her game in a practice set against another player when her opponent’s mood suddenly soured. Stephens prides herself on her integrity and, having contested hundreds of practice matches over the years, she says she always veers on the side of caution when charged with calling her own lines. Only when she is certain there is a clear gap between the ball and line does she call an opponent’s shot out.
Halfway through the set, Stephens believed her opponent had missed a second serve and called a double fault. “She thought I cheated her in the practice,” says Stephens, smiling. “I didn’t know this happened [during] the practice. I was like: ‘Second serve out, double fault.’ Apparently, she looked back at her coach in disgust.”
Social media is rife with alarming advice and warnings – experts share red flags to avoid
Wellness advice abounds on social media: warnings about “toxic foods”, assertions that parasites are driving your sugar cravings, or claims about solving the “root cause” of bodily complaints with unproven remedies.
“Wellness woo” appears in many domains, like nutrition, dermatology, parenting and psychology, says Dr Jonathan Stea, clinical psychologist and author of a new book about mental health misinformation, Mind the Science. Common themes include distrust in mainstream medicine, the flawed belief that “natural” is always best, and an overreliance on anecdotal evidence – for instance, “I believe smearing beef tallow on my face cured my acne, so it will also cure yours!”
The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergannounced on Tuesday his company, Meta, would be scrapping factcheckers in the US, accusing them of making biased decisions and saying he wanted to enable greater free speech. Meta uses third-party independent factcheckers around the world. Here, one of them who works for the Full Fact organisation in London, explains what they do and reacts to Zuckerberg’s “dispiriting” allegation.
I have been a factchecker at Full Fact in London for a year, investigating suspicious content on Facebook, X and in newspapers. Our bread and butter includes a lot of video disinformation about wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and AI-generated fake video clips of politicians, which are getting harder to disprove. Colleagues work on Covid disinformation, cancer cure hoaxes and there’s a lot of climate stuff as we’re seeing more hurricanes and wildfires.
This year’s SAG noms see a strong showing for music-led films while Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie are snubbed
Music-led films Wicked and A Complete Unknown and TV shows Shôgun and The Bear lead this year’s Screen Actors Guild nominations, it was announced this morning.
Blockbuster musical Wicked heads up the film side with five nominations including for actors Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey, as well as the ensemble. It was also nominated for stunt ensemble. The film, based on the long-running Broadway hit, has made more than $680m at the global box office.
We want to hear about the TV shows that have forced you to switch off because they were too controversial
Some TV shows just go too far with some people refusing to watch them because they’re too “gut-wrenching”.
We want to hear about the programmes you’ve had to turn off because you felt they were too controversial. What moment in particular made you feel enough was enough? Have you tried to revisit the show again? If so, how did you feel about it?
Grandad, Alan Sugar, a man I met in the pub: I’ve ignored them all. No wonder I don’t have any advice of my own to pass on
What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever had? It’s a common question to lob in at the end of an interview. I mean the kind of interview you might be doing to promote a book or a film or something, rather than an interview for a job. Although I suppose it might crop up there too. I wouldn’t know, as I believe the last interview I had of that kind was for a job at the Birmingham Post in 1992. Not quite sure how I’ve managed to swerve all that stress ever since.
When I’ve asked the question of someone, on the radio, the interviewee has invariably been stuck for an answer. Now I see why. I’ve been asked it several times in recent months, at literary festivals and whatnot, talking about a book of these columns. In the absence of a prepared answer, it’s difficult to come up with anything interesting in reply. And preparation has never been my strong point, even though I’m well aware of its importance, thanks in part to all the sage advice available on the subject: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” (Benjamin Franklin); “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” (Seneca); “Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure” (Confucius); “Chance favours the prepared mind” (Louis Pasteur).
Sánchez accuses X owner of inciting hatred as country marks 50 years since start of its return to democracy
Pedro Sánchez has hit out at Elon Musk and his allies for “openly attacking our institutions, inciting hatred and openly calling for people to support the heirs of nazism”, saying the politics of division, disinformation and hatred risk ushering in a new age of authoritarianism.
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