Trailer shows Matt Damon as the Greek hero, with Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus

The first trailer has been released online for Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey.

Starring Matt Damon as the classic Greek hero, the trailer offers a series of shots of a bearded Damon as he sets out to return from the fall of Troy as his gravelly voiceover announces: “After years of war … no one could stand between my men … and home … not even me.”

Some US citizens, grappling with issues from LGBTQ+ rights to the economy, are looking to the countries their families once left behind

Daniel Kamalić was born and raised in New York City, where he spent his summers riding his bike around Brighton Beach before pedaling home to his “Brooklyn Jewish” mother and his “smooth talker” father. He went out for Cub Scouts and soccer before realizing, during his time studying at MIT, that he loved sailing most of all. Now 48, he is a professional tenor with the opera, performing in and around New York.

Kamalić never considered that he might want to be anything but American – why would he? His life was shaped by the freedoms and opportunities that his father, Ivan Kamalić, risked everything for.

Liam Gallagher, Paul Weller, David Beckham and former bandmates among the mourners at Manchester cathedral

The Stone Roses singer, Ian Brown, has remembered his bandmate Gary “Mani” Mounfield as a “true musical comrade” and “always a beautiful soul and spirit” as hundreds gathered for the charismatic bassist’s funeral.

Paul Weller, Liam Gallagher, Peter Hook, Tim Burgess, Bez, David Beckham and Gary Neville were among the mourners at the service at Manchester Cathedral on Monday morning. Outside, fans packed the street.

• Milan have option to buy German at end of season

• West Ham interested in Wolves’s Jørgen Strand Larsen

Milan have agreed to sign West Ham’s Niclas Füllkrug on loan with an option to buy at the end of the season. The Germany striker has toiled since moving to the London Stadium from Borussia Dortmund for £27.5m in the summer of 2024 and it is hoped that his exit will free up funds for Nuno Espírito Santo to boost his side’s fight against relegation by bringing in a new forward during next month’s transfer window.

West Ham are interested in Wolves’s Jørgen Strand Larsen but are reluctant to meet his valuation. It is believed that Wolves, who are bottom of the Premier League, want £40m for the Norwegian. West Ham’s budget is limited and they feel that the package for Strand Larsen, who has scored once in the league this season, is too expensive.

Middlesbrough-born musician had hits with Driving Home for Christmas, On the Beach and The Road to Hell

Chris Rea, the British singer-songwriter whose hits included Driving Home For Christmas, has died at the age of 74, a spokesperson for his family said.

The statement said that he died “peacefully in hospital … following a short illness”.

Once loose, erratic and reliably unreliable, Jacksonville have hardened into something far more serious, with Trevor Lawrence’s control and confidence turning a hot streak into a genuine AFC threat

Seven weeks ago, the Jaguars were still that team: loose, entertaining, unreliable. The kind that could light up a quarter and then spend the next three undoing it. Now, they’re a wagon.

After beating the Broncos on Sunday, the Jaguars have ripped off six straight wins. They’ve won 11 regular-season games for the first time since 2007. And with two winnable games to close the season, they have a solid path to the No 1 seed, with the AFC potentially running through Jacksonville.

Patson Daka’s injury-time equaliser earned Zambia a 1-1 draw with Mali in Group A at the Africa Cup of Nations

She’s offered £36k under asking price. Surely she has no chance.

We are the business end of A Place in the Sun on 4Seven before the football starts. Will they make an offer on a property? The tension is palpable!.

WBD had urged shareholders to reject $108.4bn hostile takeover bid from Paramount, which is controlled by the Ellisons, following $82.7bn Netflix deal

The tech billionaire Larry Ellison has agreed to provide a personal guarantee of more than $40bn for Paramount Skydance’s fight to gain control of Warner Bros Discovery, amid an extraordinary corporate battle over the entertainment giant.

WBD urged shareholders to reject a $108.4bn hostile takeover bid from Paramount – which is controlled by the Ellisons – last week, having agreed to sell its storied movie studios, HBO cable network and streaming service to Netflix in a $82.7bn deal earlier this month.

On the final night before it returns to the shelf, our hanukiah blazes. Being Jewish in Australia feels increasingly hazardous

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Our hanukiah is ridiculous. I love it precisely for its absurdity; a chunky, oversized piece designed by a dear friend and crafted from aircrete. It looks like a forgotten set piece from The Flintstones. In a family home that also contains challah covers, mezuzahs, kippot and Shabbat candles, our menorah is easily the most overtly Jewish thing we own. Its presence badges us immediately. Brash and proud. Up until last week, this never struck me as a problem.

In my many overlapping circles of friends and collaborators, I am one of the only Jews they know. I spend a lot of time explaining our traditions to film directors, musicians, editors and producers. Why we fast on Yom Kippur. How often we observe Shabbat. How kashrut works, even though I am partial to pepperoni pizza. Hanukah, by all accounts, is the fun one. When I was a teenager, Adam Brody’s Seth Cohen married it with Christmas on The OC and made it something everyone could get behind. Like all Jewish festivals, it is a celebration of survival in the face of annihilation. But it comes with candles, doughnuts and dreidels. Much joy, minimal fasting.

The documents are disturbing. But they seem largely to reflect information that has already been made public

After months of public outcry and pressure from within the Maga coalition, Donald Trump’s justice department released what it called The Epstein Files, with the Trump world’s typical fanfare. A media frenzy ensued. But the “files” that were released by Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice left many observers frustrated and confused. The release was partial and heavily redacted; much of the information had already been made public. Media figures were incensed, and members of Congress pledged to push the Trump administration for more. The episode left Washington watchers frustrated. It fueled speculation that Trump, who had long opposed the release of the documents, had something to hide.

That was on 27 February, when a group of 15 rightwing media figures who had taken a special interest in the Epstein case were summoned to the White House and given white binders labeled “The Epstein Files.” The release was meant to allay pressure from the president’s conspiracy-minded base and neutralize the Epstein issue, which has dogged Trump since the financier sex offender and former close friend of the president died in prison during his first term in 2019. But those who received the binders said that there was little new information in them. The episode only further inflamed tensions and increased the salience of the Epstein issue.

Online activity shows the Base, headed by alleged Russian asset Rinaldo Nazzaro, sees US and Ukraine as key centers

Amid high-profile arrests in its Spanish cell, the American-born and designated neo-Nazi terrorist group the Base – once a major preoccupation of FBI counter-terrorism efforts – has all but faded from US headlines. But a flurry of online activities shows the group is still active stateside and considers the US an operational nerve center.

Headed by Rinaldo Nazzaro, an ex-Pentagon contractor turned alleged Russian intelligence asset, the Base has been busy of late pursuing European expansion: besides its heavily armed members in Spain, its Ukrainian wing is linked to multiple acts of terrorism inside of the country and claimed the high-profile July assassination of an intelligence officer in Kyiv.

As number of lunar satellites soars, sites will be marked out where defunct hardware can be crash-landed

Patches of the moon are destined to become spacecraft graveyards where dead lunar satellites and other defunct hardware can be crashed into the ground, far away from sites of cultural and scientific importance, researchers say.

The number of satellites circling the moon is set to soar in the next two decades as space agencies and private companies build moon bases and dabble with mining operations and constructing scientific instruments on the barren terrain.

The bookshop chain said the bestselling author will ‘no longer be appearing’ at a Dundee event after HarperCollins announced it won’t publish new titles by him following allegations of inappropriate behaviour

David Walliams has been dropped from the Waterstones Children’s book festival following allegations of inappropriate behaviour. The decision comes days after his publisher, HarperCollins, cut ties with the author. Walliams has denied the allegations.

Walliams was set to appear at the Dundee leg of the festival on February 7. He has now been removed from the list of speakers on the festival’s website. A spokesperson for Waterstones told the Guardian: “HarperCollins have confirmed that David Walliams will no longer be appearing at our festival in Dundee.”

A fightback win over RB Leipzig before the Christmas break is just reward for coach who faced a thankless task

Leipzig might not be every Bundesliga fan’s idea of a weekend idyll but as the sun set on 2025, the venue for the final Saturday night Topspiel of the year might have been the scene of a minor Christmas miracle. It had already been a worthy showpiece to draw the curtains on pre-Christmas Bundesliga but the end result – achieved not without a smidgeon of controversy – left us with a satisfying tale to tell by an open fire over holiday season.

Bayer Leverkusen can enjoy their brief break with a rosy glow of satisfaction with their win against a direct competitor a clear measure of how far they have come; or, if you like, a measure of how far Kasper Hjulmand has taken them. Leverkusen sit third over the bridge to the new year which, if we were to return to the closure of the summer transfer window, looked a long way off.

Move made after first phase of anti-subsidy investigation widely seen as retaliation for bloc’s EV tariffs

China will impose provisional duties of up to 42.7% on certain dairy products imported from the EU from Tuesday after concluding the first phase of an anti-subsidy investigation widely seen as retaliation for the bloc’s electric vehicle tariffs.

The tariffs will range from 21.9% to 42.7% – although most companies will pay about 30% – and target products such as milk and cheese, including protected origin brands such as French roquefort and Italian gorgonzola.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

• Up to 80% of league and 20% of union claims face strikeout

• Appeal over medical record disclosure denied on all grounds

Two appeals launched by the legal firm representing former players in rugby league and rugby union have both been denied in a significant blow to the ongoing legal action about brain damage caused by the sport. It means that after five years of legal arguments a large number of the claimants in both codes face the risk of having their cases struck out before they come to trial.

The appeal judge, Mr Justice Dexter Dias, ruled that the judge presiding over the management of the case, Senior Master Jeremy Cook, had been right to find that the claimants firm, Rylands Garth, had failed to fulfil its obligations to disclose necessary medical material to the defendants, World Rugby, the Wales Rugby Union, and the Rugby Football Union in one case, and the Rugby Football League in the other.

The world record holder on his remarkable year, that viral kiss and why he’s serious about music

Plenty of sports stars strive for perfection. In 2025, Mondo Duplantis achieved it. He broke the pole vault world record four times. Retained his world indoor and outdoor titles. Won all 16 competitions that he entered. Was voted World Athletics’ male athlete of the year. And, for good measure, was named the BBC’s overseas personality of the year too.

“There’s not necessarily such a thing as a perfect season,” Duplantis says on a bright December day in Monaco. He pauses. “But that’s as perfect as it can get.”

Mayor of La Bañeza says winning El Gordo Christmas lottery ‘is something that has fallen from the heavens’

When the village of La Bañeza in Castilla y León was engulfed in one of the worst forest fires in Spanish history, the rain came too late to save it.

But now the Christmas lottery has showered its 10,000 inhabitants with hundreds of millions of euros.

Crucial tonal shifts mean the film asks harder questions than the series ever has before. Share your thoughts in the comments below
• This article contains spoilers for Avatar: Fire and Ash

For more than a decade now, James Cameron’s Avatar films have been built on the reassuring idea that the universe is alive, connected and spiritually pure. Part of the pleasure of making it to the end credits of one of them is the comforting feeling that we are nothing like all those evil humans who want to destroy Pandora’s gorgeous bioluminescent utopia of giant blue cat people and navel-gazing whale creatures. Cameron wants to remind us that if we only spent less time chasing profit and more listening to nature, everything would probably be fine.

Fire and Ash is where that reassurance starts to curdle. It is still recognisably an Avatar movie: the tech is absurd, the sincerity remains weaponised, and the creatures appear to have been designed by a benevolent god with a doctorate in marine biology. But something has shifted. Harmony is no longer guaranteed; nature does not reliably pick a side. What emerges is a threequel that feels oddly argumentative, sometimes with the audience, sometimes with itself. The saga that once promised balance now seems fascinated by fracture. Avatar has started asking much harder questions than it ever has before.

Research shows 97% of band’s streaming revenue comes from 1973 single I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday

If you listen closely to the start of Wizzard’s yuletide standard I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday, you’ll hear the kerching of a cash register.

The sound might have been “a winning speck of cynicism in the tinselly facade” of 70s consumerism, according to the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis, but five decades on it has proved prophetic – the song accounts for nearly all of the band’s streams on Spotify.

Medetomidine has extreme and fast-acting withdrawal symptoms – and the detox centers that help patients are struggling with how best to cope

The staff at harm reduction hub Sunshine House in the middle of Kensington, a neighborhood in north-east Philadelphia home to the most notorious open drug scene in the US, often reverse at least one overdose per day.

But the mutating illegal drug supply is regularly conjuring new drugs with novel sets of potentially deadly risks. For the past 18 months, there has been a new drug in circulation, the veterinary sedative medetomidine, also known as “rhino tranq”. It has perhaps the most extreme and fast-acting withdrawal symptoms of all known street drugs.

It was 1995, and I had spent the evening carousing and drinking neat vodka. Now I was trapped in a friend’s flat in Paris, with no phone – and he had flown to New York

Winter 1995: I wake to the sound of a vacuum cleaner repeatedly striking the door near my head. I’m in a small bed in a tiny room. Wherever I am, I’m hungover.

I remember: I’m in Paris, after a big night out. Just the one night – I’d arrived on the Eurostar the previous afternoon with a friend. We’d gone out for drinks, then to a cool restaurant, then somewhere to drink more. The rest was blurry, but we ended up back at this apartment – owned by the company my friend worked for – drinking neat vodka until my friend remembered he was catching an early plane to New York.

While the country’s capital is loosening regulations, the Catalan city is strengthening social housing. Their outcomes will affect all our futures

In Spain, two cities face the same crisis, but are responding in fundamentally different ways. Over the past decade, the cost of housing in Madrid and Barcelona has soared – with rents rising by about 60% and sale prices by 90% – leaving young people, working families and retired people struggling to stay in their homes or even find one.

Yet, while one city is betting everything on construction and giving free rein to big investors, the other is cautiously trying to steer the housing market towards the public good, despite political and institutional constraints.

Jaime Palomera is a researcher on housing and inequality, author of The Hijacking of Housing, and co-founder of the Barcelona Urban Research Institute (IDRA) and the Tenants’ Union