The teams are out on the Ashton Gate pitch. And the packed house is being treated to come pyrotechnics before the anthems.
“There was a lot of thinking,” Wiegman tells ITV of the decision to replace Park with Mead in the starting lineup. “Because I think we have many opportunities in that position … we expect Belgium to drop deep. I think they both can play there … we made the decision to start Beth.
McLaren driver is determined to succeed as a nice guy in F1 but don’t mistake his kindness for a lack of fight
His credentials as a potential Formula One world champion have been questioned but Lando Norris is unperturbed. With an almost startling level of honesty, highly unusual in the sport, the British driver has considered conventional wisdom and its implications and rejected it. That he wants to win is in no doubt but he will not allow his sense of self to be subsumed at the altar of success at all costs.
“I feel like there is a very prescribed version of how people say a world champion needs to be – overly aggressive,” he says in his McLaren team’s hospitality on a chilly day in Suzuka before this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix. “I want to win a championship. I’d rather just be a good person and try to do well. I’ll do whatever I can to win a championship but maybe I won’t sacrifice in my life as much as some others, in terms of who I am as a person and have the ‘fuck you’ mentality people say you’ve got to have. I still believe I can be a world champion but doing it by being a nice guy.”
The sophomore led the Trojans to a historic season
Watkins’ season ended with a brutal ACL tear
JuJu Watkins, the sensational sophomore who led Southern California to its best season in nearly 40 years, was honored Thursday as The Associated Press women’s basketball Player of the Year. Duke’s Cooper Flagg captured the equivalent award on the men’s side.
Watkins, whose Trojans won the Big Ten regular-season title for their first conference crown in 31 years, received 29 votes from the 31-member national media panel that votes on the AP Top 25 each week. Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo got the other two. Both were first-team AP All-Americans.
Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, Trump tariffs, the bin strike in Birmingham and the Grand National Meeting at Aintree: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing
Appeals court sides with Jefferson Griffin, who lost supreme court election and wants thousands of ballots thrown out
More than 65,000 people in North Carolina who believed they were eligible to vote could have their ballots thrown out nearly five months after election day, flipping the results of a supreme court election, a state appeals court ruled on Friday.
The 2-1 ruling from the North Carolina court of appeals came in response to Republicans’ months-long effort to overturn the results of the state supreme court election in November. The Democrat Allison Riggs, who currently sits on the court, defeated appellate judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, by 734 votes. After the election, Griffin filed a protest seeking to get around 60,000 votes thrown out.
The City midfielder made his teammates look like geniuses and once more he is making just the right move at just the right moment
Not for the first time, Kevin De Bruyne read the situation to perfection. Not for the first time, he spotted the right play just a little earlier than everyone else. And of course this was always his gift: not simply to pick the right option but to do it faster than anyone else, buying him those crucial fractions of a second when everything else was in flux and only he in stillness.
And of course this was not the only respect in which De Bruyne understood the game of football better than most. As a struggling teenager in the Genk academy, he noticed the way the club abruptly stopped paying for a foster family to house him, and then quietly resumed when he started banging in goals for the second team. Cast adrift at Chelsea, he noticed how he was ignored while first-team players were lavished with attention and bespoke coaching.
The white nationalist has been in Trump’s orbit for years, although the White House has tried to sideline her at times
Laura Loomer, a rightwing extremist and political influencer known for her incendiary social media presence, appeared to have been sidelined at points by Donald Trump’s election campaign and then by his new administration.
But she has long had the US president’s ear and may have it again, at least for now.
The Trump administration is taking aim at Brown University with threats to freeze $510m in grants, widening its promise to withhold federal funding from schoolsit accuses of allowing antisemitism on campus, according to multiple media outlets including Reuters and the New York Times.
University officials said they had not yet been formally notified, but the school was among dozens warned last month that enforcement actions could be coming as the administration seeks to crack down on academic institutions .
At least 25 killed in attack on Khan Younis in south as Israel says it is aiming to pressure Hamas into releasing hostages
Israel has restarted ground operations in the northern Gaza Strip and killed at least 25 people in airstrikes on the southern city of Khan Younis in what it says is a renewed military campaign aimed at pressuring Hamas into releasing Israeli hostages.
At least 25 people were killed in the attack on Khan Younis early on Friday, the local Nasser hospital told AFP, as the search for survivors continued.
Deadline set by US president was supposed to be Saturday, with Trump now considering decreasing tariffs to get deal
Donald Trump said he will sign an executive order to extend the TikTok ban deadline. This is the second time the president will have delayed the ban or sale of the social media app, and will punt the deadline to 75 days from now.
The TikTok deal “requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed”, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform on Friday.
We’re moving toward a society where genetic information is a part of everyday life – and we don’t want it in the wrong hands
With a heavy heart, I clicked on my 23andMe account on a recent morning, confirming that I wanted to delete my data. The genetic testing company filed for bankruptcy late last month and the California attorney general and others have recommended that users delete their data lest it be acquired by less scrupulous companies as the company is stripped for parts during bankruptcy proceedings.
I was one of the company’s earliest customers and had used their service to genotype not just myself but my entire extended family. I even got my kids’ babysitter a kit.
Dalton Conley is Henry Putnam university professor of sociology at Princeton University and author of The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture
Released court statement says alleged Chinese spy helped draft private letters to Chinese president
The Duke of York sent letters directly to China’s president, the prince’s former senior adviser told a special immigration tribunal, with an alleged Chinese spy advising him on how to write them.
Dominic Hampshire, who worked for Andrew from 2019-22, said Andrew had “always had a communication channel” with Xi Jinping that was “accepted” and may even have been encouraged by Buckingham Palace and the late queen.
White House has said US courts can’t order return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose wife has been protesting outside court
A federal judge on Friday afternoon ordered the US to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison after a Trump administration attorney was at a loss to explain what happened.
The wife of the man, who was flown to a notorious Salvadoran prison had earlier joined dozens of supporters at a rally before a court hearing on Friday, where his lawyers had asked the judge – Paula Xinis – to order the Trump administration to return him to the US.
China has hit back hard against Donald Trump’s “bullying” tariffs, raising fears that the escalating trade war could trigger a global recession and prompting fresh turmoil in financial markets.
Beijing retaliated on Friday with punitive 34% additional tariffs on all goods imported from the US – mirroring the US decision and exacerbating a sell-off on global stock markets.
Secretary of state says Putin ‘will have to make a decision’ as US officials appear to be growing impatient
The US will know within weeks whether Russia is serious about pursuing peace with Ukraine, the secretary of state has said, warning that Donald Trump was not “going to fall into the trap of endless negotiations” with Moscow.
“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace,” Marco Rubio told journalists in Brussels after talks with Nato allies. “Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later.”
As the White House retools US imperialism with import duties, others must resist dependency – deepening regional ties and reducing exposure to chokepoints
When Donald Trump stood before union auto workers in the Rose Garden he declared “Liberation Day”, promising to stand up for Main Street. Whether that pledge will be fulfilled is moot. He will declare victory either way. What the US president offered was not just an economic programme, but an imperial one.
Mr Trump’s logic, if it exists, lies in the 397-page report on “foreign trade barriers” he brandished on Wednesday. Its message is brutally simple: you may sell your goods to Walmart shoppers, but only if you let US cloud services hoover up your data, US media flood your screens and US tech monopolies operate on their terms – not yours. TikTok is the test case for Trump’s platform nationalism: only US firms may mine data, reap profits and rule the digital empire.
Dangerous weather comes after Trump administration job cuts left nearly half of offices with 20% vacancy rates
Donald Trump on Friday approved an emergency declaration for Kentucky as the central US braces for what experts in the region have warned could be a “generational” flooding event, as severe spring storms that have killed at least seven continue to wreak havoc.
Millions are affected across a swath of the US stretching from Texas to Ohio, and the powerful storm system that has raged for two days is expected to stall over the country’s midsection, the National Weather Service (NWS) said, fueling further deluges and possible tornadoes in areas already drenched from thunderstorms bringing heavy rains.
Broadcaster wants to branch out with shows covering crime, history and sport and says he has investors lined up
Piers Morgan is planning to create a YouTube empire covering true crime, history and other genres, claiming to have “significant players” already lining up to invest.
Morgan said he was looking to branch out from his Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel and find a series of “mini-mes” to front other shows under the brand. He said his current show was already turning a profit since he broke away from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in January.
Moderate Democrat believes she can unseat Republican Derrick Van Orden, who was at the Capitol on January 6
Wisconsin’s third congressional district has voted for Donald Trump every time he’s been on the ballot, but the moderate Democrat Rebecca Cooke, a waitress who grew up on a dairy farm, thinks she can flip the state’s most competitive seat next year.
Last year, Cooke outperformed other Democrats when she tried to unseat incumbent Derrick Van Orden, a retired US Navy Seal who attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol and shouted “lies” during Joe Biden’s 2024 state of the union address. She lost the race by less than three points.
(Island EMI) The British star and the US country artist spur each other on in this tuneful, swinging set with poignant moments
In the twilight years of his career, Elton John has been anointing the next generation with a keener ear than most, championing new stars from Chappell Roan to Wet Leg via his Rocket Hour radio show and collaborating with artists as genre-diverse as Britney Spears, Gorillaz and Young Thug. Who Believes in Angels?, however, feels like a genuine meeting of minds. Created alongside American country rock royalty Brandi Carlile, an 11-times Grammy winner, there is the audible sense of two artists pushing each other and raising the other’s game; on the rollicking rock’n’roll romp of Little Richard’s Bible, or the full-blooded country duet Swing for the Fences, 78-year-old John sounds like a man half his age.
Where many of his recent collaborations have seen him enter the sonic palettes of modern pop, Someone to Belong To’s interweaving harmonies, or the rousing piano balladry of the record’s title track, live firmly in the world of classic, melody-driven songwriting, created by two artists supremely gifted at exactly that. The album ends with the remarkably poignant, Elton-led end-of-life reflection When This Old World Is Done With Me. Who Believes In Angels? is a fine reminder that he’s certainly not there yet.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that Donald Trump’s implementation of swingeing tariffs poses a “significant risk” to the global economy, as stock markets were hit by a punishing worldwide sell-off by investors.
Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the IMF, said it was important that the US and its trading partners avoided further escalating Trump’s trade war, while stock markets plunged on Friday as China retaliated against the tariffs.
Indore in Madhya Pradesh, India, was once dotted with fetid waste dumps but after a huge campaign is now virtually spotless
This is what happens usually in India: a politician wakes up and launches a cleanliness “drive” with fanfare. They ostentatiously start sweeping a street and speak solemnly about civic duty while the media take photos. The next day it’s over and things go back to how they were before.
But not in Indore in Madhya Pradesh. From 2017, when it won the prize for being the cleanest city in the country, it kept winning for eight straight years, until last year.
The US president’s announcement has caused market chaos and threatens a trade war and US recession
Donald Trump’s announcement of a long slate of new tariffs on the US’s trading partners has caused chaos in global markets and threatens a global trade war and US recession.
Long trailed on his election campaign, Trump’s plans were even more sweeping than many had predicted: a baseline 10% tariff on all imports and higher tariffs for key trading partners, including China and the EU.
The Democrat delivered the longest Senate speech in history. We asked urologists one pressing question about it
On Monday evening, Cory Booker, a Democratic senator for New Jersey, took the floor to denounce the harm he believes Donald Trump and his administration have inflicted on the United States. “Our country is in crisis,” he said, decrying the economic chaos, mass layoffs and tyrannical acts of the administration’s first 71 days. He stopped speaking 25 hours and five minutes later, making it the longest Senate speech in history.
Many praised Booker for the rousing political act. Some were also impressed by a particular physical feat: namely, he seemingly didn’t pee once the whole time. (A rep for Booker confirmed to TMZ that he did not wear a diaper during his speech.)
The singer answers your questions about her drum skills, friendship with Joni Mitchell and more – and reveals unheard music with both Prince and Sia
Can you remember the precise moment you realised you had a gift as a vocalist? SalfordRed64 I was doing a talent show at the Burning Spear in Chicago. My group, the Crystallettes, graced many a nightclub stage in competitions, and every time either us or [fellow Chicago girl group] the Emotions would win. But I remember singing some Aretha Franklin songs and people in the audience were throwing money on the stage, and they started calling me “little Aretha”. That’s when I connected the dots: “Oh, I see what this is all about.” I realised I didn’t have to become a teacher or a whatever I wanted to be when I grew up back then – I could be a singer!
You have so much confidence and you just knew you and [the band] Rufus were going to make it big. Where does that confidence come from? stifwhiff When I was with Rufus, I knew I loved what we were doing, and I could only hope and pray everyone else loved it like I did. That’s all you can ask for. And that’s still how I am about the music I make. I have confidence in everything I do – all the time. And that is a necessary thing to have if you want success – if you’ve created something and you want everyone to love it, you have to love it first. And that’s applicable to everything in life, not just music.
Rap mogul has pleaded not guilty to charges of racketeering and sex trafficking as trial begins in Manhattan on 5 May
Sean “Diddy” Combs was hit with a new federal indictment on Friday charging the hip-hop mogul with five criminal counts including racketeering and sex trafficking, court records showed.
Combs had previously faced three criminal counts, to which he has pleaded not guilty and is in federal jail in Brooklyn awaiting trial in Manhattan federal court on 5 May.
The BBC and ITV have declined to pursue the chance to televise this summer’s Club World Cup, leaving Fifa increasingly concerned about the visibility of its flagship new tournament in a key market.
The streaming platform Dazn agreed to pay $1bn (£787bn) for global Club World Cup rights in a deal which involved the company pledging to make all 63 matches available free-to-air on its app.
Experts say UK may have to raise taxes in autumn as senior MPs caution against too many concessions in US trade talks
Donald Trump’s tariffs signal a new global economic era, Downing Street has said, as economists warned that the British government would probably have to raise taxes in response.
Donald Trump’s global tariffs assault is set to raise prices and slow down economic growth, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has warned, defying the US president’s demands for an immediate interest rate cut.
While the US economy remains robust, Powell cautioned that there is high uncertainty over its direction. “Downside risks have risen,” he told an event in Arlington, Virginia, on Friday.
Doing laundry can be a tedious task and how often you wash each type of item depends on how much contact it has with your skin
Is there any domestic task more sisyphean than laundry? No sooner have you pulled a crisp, clean sheet on to your bed than it is time to strip it off and start over. Blink and a clean towel becomes dirty. Somehow, lives, careers and relationships must fit into the tiny slivers of time between loads.
I don’t enjoy laundry; give me dish duty any day. I do, however, enjoy living in a clean space that doesn’t smell like a locker room. Textiles can really trap scent – and bacteria.
Bafta endorsement could have escalated actor’s allegedly abusive behaviour towards women, Katharine Viner said
The editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Katharine Viner, has told the high court there was a “very high public interest” in reporting allegations made against Noel Clarke after he received a special Bafta award.
In a witness statement, Viner said she believed it was conceivable that the actor’s endorsement by the British academy film awards could lead to an escalation of his allegedly abusive behaviour towards women.
No 2 pick in 2013 spent six seasons with Washington
Seven-time WNBA All-Star Elena Delle Donne, a two-time league MVP and a key part of Washington’s 2019 championship, is retiring after 11 seasons.
Delle Donne, 35, made the announcement on social media Friday and referenced a line from one of her favorite childhood books that reads, “How did get so late so soon?”
President’s move has no historic parallels, but the deep uncertainty for the global economy may prove as destructive as the tariffs
From world leaders, to the tiniest manufacturers thousands of miles from Washington, decision-makers across the global economy are racked with uncertainty as they scramble to come to terms with Donald Trump’s historic tariffs.
Experts are all but unanimous that the impact on global growth of Wednesday’s extraordinary Rose Garden press conference will be negative – but just how bad remains highly uncertain.
I worked as a dialogue coach on Oliver Stone’s Alexander in 2003. Val was playing Alexander’s father, Philip II of Macedon. Oliver wanted the Macedonians to have Celtic accents in contrast to the Greeks, who looked down on the Macedonians, as the English have only too frequently done to neighbours of the UK. We were prepping in Morocco and I had been working for a while with Val on his Irish accent when my 95-year-old mother died and I had to leave for a couple of days for her funeral. During my absence, Val had to go home for a short while. When I returned I opened my hotel room door to find it awash with beautiful white roses. Val had sent them before he left, leaving a note of condolence and both his personal phone numbers so that I might call any time if I needed someone. Such unexpected kindness I have never forgotten. Catherine Charlton, voice coach, St Leonards-on-Sea
The sweeping package of tariffs unveiled by Donald Trump on Wednesday includes an exemption for the energy sector, which is a clear sign of the president’s fealty to his big oil donors over the American people, advocates say.
Trump’s new 10% universal tariffs – which are higher for many major economies – are wreaking havoc on the global economy and are expected to increase consumer prices in the US. But the levies will not apply to many fossil fuel products, including liquefied natural gas imports, crude oil from Canada, and materials needed for making petrochemicals.
The same economic forces that led to stagnation today are already in practice at the world’s biggest clubs
The problem with running a modern top-flight football club is that raising revenue is hard to do. Once you’ve grabbed your slice of league-wide media rights, made a vaguely colonial-sounding pre-season tour of the “Far East,” stitched up some sponsorship deals with a gambling company or a country’s tourism agency, and shipped as many shirts as the global merch market can handle, you hit the ceiling of your earning capacity. At that point, as a club, what do you do?
You can raise ticket prices, which risks alienating fans and the local community you’re supposed to represent. You can try your hand at a few miserable little crypto or AI plug-ins to build “engagement” among supporters or become a pioneer in the nascent field of fan “activations,” with limited potential returns. You can promise to build a new 100,000-seat stadium, but that takes time and money and doesn’t solve your immediate (or even future, should you go into debt to finance the project) need for cash. You can flog off a hotel or two to a sibling subsidiary of your parent company, though for that you need to start off with a couple of hotels. You can hope to sell to a monied investor, but the days of loss-indifferent billionaires making vanity investments in clubs seem over, and there are only so many publicity-hungry sovereign wealth funds to go around.
There is a principle that even the most powerful leaders must be accountable. Increasingly, that is under threat, but it must be defended
It was unsurprising that Benjamin Netanyahu praised Viktor Orbán’s “bold and principled” stand, in response to Hungary’s announcement yesterday that it will leave the international criminal court (ICC). More dismaying is that too few governments seem ready to stand up against impunity at a time when, because of Donald Trump, the very existence of the Hague court is under threat.
Hungary’s leader described the ICC as “a political forum”; the Israeli prime minister, during his defiant visit to Budapest this week, complained of a “corrupt organisation”. That is all logical enough. Four months ago, the court confirmed an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. He could hardly be expected to praise his own indictment.
From hyper-intelligent analysis to heated arguments, the 21st-century home of buzzy chatter about big television shows is Reddit. We go behind the scenes to hear about millions of Severance and White Lotus fans, wild freebies – and accusations of racism
They say that ancient civilisations celebrated significant televisual events by gathering around a plastic watering hole in a building known as an “office”. These so-called “water-cooler moments” were characterised by buzzy chatter, as colleagues chewed over what they’d seen on TV the night before. “Who shot JR?” they asked. “You can’t kill everyone at a wedding!” they cried. Tissues were passed around because “She got off the plane!.”
Today, there are too many streaming apps and too few days in the office for people to catch up in quite the same way. Instead, online forums dedicated to dissecting TV episodes are thriving: on Reddit, more than 776,000 people have joined a subreddit about The White Lotus, while 765,000 discuss everything that happens in Ben Stiller’s dystopian workplace thriller Severance. Like colleagues around a cooler, people praise their favourite characters and share theories about what will happen next. Unlike colleagues around a cooler, they also accuse each other of being stupid, bigoted and perverted.
Exhibition of 456 works by the Bradford-born Francophile underscores Paris’s efforts to reclaim its status as Europe’s art capital
Poised to open its doors on Wednesday, Paris’s biggest art show of the year carries the humble title David Hockney 25. A more accurate description of its ambition would have been the name of the artist’s best-known painting: A Bigger Splash.
Purportedly focused only on the past 25 years of the Yorkshire-born painter’s career, the 456 works on display at the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s 11 vast galleries in fact span 1955-2025.
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