Newsflash: Low sun means that the officials are omitting some hurdles. Three have been taken out so there will be just five obstacles to jump. This is never very satisfactory.
Ans they’re off … Starmount jumps the first in the lead with hot favourite Mydaddypaddy in second … and now they have nearly a mile to run before they jump another flight annoyingly … Mydaddypaddy jumped the second well … and again the third … he looks a class act … so now just one hurdle to jump … and now a very long run home … Starmount leads with Mydaddypaddy challenging the new leader Idaho Sun … he comes to take it up but can’t get past Idaho Sun and Mydaddypaddy is beaten in a big shock at Aintree!
Nigerians across Sokoto state told of their shock at Christmas Day strikes by the United States.
Agence France-Presse spoke to people around Jabo town, who said that their area was sometimes a target of armed “bandit” gangs and jihadists, but was not a stronghold for the groups.
There will have been no shortage of glasses raised in Nottingham, Scotland and beyond yesterday in memory of John Robertson, following news of his death at the age of 72. The winger was a hugely important member of Brian Clough’s great Forest team that rose from the second tier of English football to win multiple major honours, most famously back-to-back European Cups.
President’s professed satisfaction with his cabinet may be a reflection of how difficult it would be to get a replacement confirmed
For more than a decade he built his brand on two words: “You’re fired!” And in his first term in the White House, Donald Trump did not hesitate to show his staff the door, often via an abrasive tweet.
But since resuming the US presidency in January, Trump, the former host of the reality TV show The Apprentice, appears to have become an uncharacteristically bashful boss, more disposed to hiring than firing.
Texas governor among those to call for expanded access to ibogaine, said to help with treating veterans with PTSD
For half a century, psychedelics largely belonged to the cultural left: anti-war, anti-capitalist, suspicious of the church and state. Now, one of the most politically consequential psychedelic drugs in the US – ibogaine – is being championed by evangelical Christians, Republican governors, military veterans, and big tech billionaires.
Many of them see ibogaine, an intense psychedelic derived from a central African rootbark, as a divine technology. In fact, some pointedly do not refer to it as a psychedelic, given the apparent baggage of the term in some circles.
Legend has it that in 1920 Bhupinder Singh, the maharaja of Patiala, was determined that his cricket team would triumph over a visiting English team. To gain the upper hand, he hosted a grand party the night before the match at which he served his guests Patiala pegs, famously generous four-finger whisky pours traditionally measured from pinky to index finger. Unsurprisingly, the English players overindulged, leaving them very hungover and, inevitably, defeated the next day, and the legend of the Patiala peg was born. This Punjabi kind-of old fashioned is inspired by Singh’s drink. At the restaurant, we serve it from a bespoke five-litre bottle, but we’ve adapted the recipe to make it more suitable for a domestic environment.
Armed groups have moved in to the space left by the Farc after the civil war, cutting down rainforest to control land and build thousands of kilometres of smuggling routes
High above the Colombian Amazon, Rodrigo Botero peers out of a small aircraft as the rainforest canopy unfolds below – an endless sea of green interrupted by stark, widening patches of brown. As director of the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS), he has spent years mapping the transformation of this fragile landscape from the air.
His team has logged more than 150 overflights, covering 30,000 miles (50,000km) to track deforestation advancing along the roads, illicit crops and the shifting frontiers of human settlement. “We now have the highest road density in the entire Amazon,” says Botero.
I had gone out with friends to mark the end of university, and one by one they disappeared. With the music throbbing, I learned I could be comfortable in my own company
Between the ages of 16 and 21, the big night out wasn’t just a hobby, it was a calling. Getting together with friends, getting drunk, being blasted by music, meeting new friends in the smoking area, getting more drunk, somehow making it home eight hours later – these were things I excelled at, the precious moments where I could try to lose myself and avoid the anxiety that inevitably came with daybreak.
The escapism wasn’t just selfish fun. It felt like a necessary avoidance of reality, which for me consisted of having a mother with a terminal illness who would die when I was 19, leaving me at university to cope with my grief. Going out, dancing and chatting rubbish to friends was one way to survive.
No rational judge could have expected England’s fall guys to succeed at the MCG where they were thrown on to a festive bonfire by a lack of red-ball cricket and a slack set-up
Guess who just got back today? Those wild-eyed boys that had been away. This was a day of brittle, over-caffeinated cricket, on an MCG pitch streaked with faint green ridges. But it was also a day when the boys were, however briefly, back in town.
Ben Duckett and Jacob Bethell have been the two protagonists in the grainy, Zapruder-style footage from England’s six-day, mid-series jig-about by the sea. True to apparent recent form, both were here for a good time not a long time as England were bowled out for 110 in 29.5 overs. Both batted like men groping for the light switch in the dark against a new ball that seamed the width of the bat at times.
New polling shows 65% of registered US voters believe global heating is affecting cost of living
Most Americans now connect the worsening climate crisis with their cost of living pressures, with clear majorities also disagreeing with moves by the Trump administration to gut climate research and halt windfarms, new polling has found.
Mikel Arteta hopes Kai Havertz is ready to return from a long-term knee injury and has predicted the German will bring “a different dimension” to Arsenal’s attack.
Havertz has been sidelined since undergoing knee surgery in August and had been expected back at the start of December before a setback in his rehabilitation. The 26-year-old was Arsenal’s top scorer in the Premier League last season with nine goals despite missing several months with a hamstring issue. He was pictured training this week and Arteta revealed Havertz had been “quite close” to being considered for the Carabao Cup quarter-final win over Crystal Palace on Tuesday.
After the writers’ and actors’ strikes, the pandemic, and structural shifts in technology, LA’s trying to find its footing in a changed industry
The veteran Hollywood cinematographer Bruce McCleery knows all about Los Angeles’s struggles to maintain its dominance in the entertainment industry, because for most of the past 16 years he has lived on the road, never short of work but unable to land a major job within striking distance of his home and family in southern California.
It’s an increasingly common experience for many successful professionals in Hollywood who are hired by studios and production houses still largely based in Los Angeles, but do the actual work in Atlanta, or Toronto, or London, or Budapest.
When Trump began deploying troops to US cities, Janessa Goldbeck’s Vet Voice Foundation was ready – now they’re preparing for what may be next
Whatever the worst case scenario, Janessa Goldbeck has probably imagined it. In 2023 the US Marine veteran consulted on a documentary that war-gamed a presidential candidate staging a military coup. Last year she advised local leaders on the hypothetical of troops being deployed to their streets for immigration enforcement.
Then Donald Trump won and Goldbeck’s nightmare came true.
Wintering Well boxes to counter effects of low light on mental health are ‘super popular’, says island librarian
“Boxes of light” are being used to help people who struggle with low winter mood while living in one of Scotland’s darkest communities as part of a wider research initiative to support the million-plus sufferers of seasonal affective disorder across Britain.
Residents of the Orkney Islands have been able to borrow a Wintering Well Box from their library since the clocks went back in October, with the kits already proving “super popular” according to Sue House, an assistant librarian at Orkney Library – the oldest public library in Scotland and coincidentally an online sensation, thanks to its goofy social media presence.
A ceasefire was announced on 10 October. But despite ‘peace’ being on the lips of world leaders ever since, we Palestinians are still under siege and afraid
Here in Gaza we hear the word “peace” constantly – even more often than we hear the roar of warplanes or the thuds of shelling. It appears on television screens, in the statements of world leaders, in promises repeated again and again. Every country claims to want peace for Palestinians. Yet have we ever lived it for a single day? The truth is that we have not.
We are now living under a ceasefire, or at least that is what the US and the rest of the world have been telling us. But in Gaza, we haven’t felt it at all. It was announced on 10 October, amid great celebrations in Sharm el-Sheikh. Since then, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians, including about 70 children, in Gaza.Because of the explosions I keep hearing, I am still afraid to leave the house. We are trapped in an endless maze of waiting: for the suffering to stop, for our lives to begin again and above all, for thedeath to end.
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy; Darkrooms by Rebecca Hannigan; The Nancys and the Case of the Missing Necklace by RWR McDonald; Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino; Your Every Move by Sam Blake
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Canongate, £9.99) The award-winning Australian writer’s third adult novel begins with a lone woman, Rowan, washed up on a remote island between Tasmania and Antarctica. Shearwater is a research outpost, home to the global seed vault created as a bulwark against climate catastrophe and to colonies of seals, penguins and birds. For eight years, Dominic Salt and his children have lived there, but dangerously rising sea levels mean that they, and the vault, will shortly be evacuated. Dominic cannot understand why Rowan has ended up on Shearwater, and Rowan is mystified by the absence of the scientists and researchers, about whom the family are tight-lipped – and the island’s communication centre has been mysteriously sabotaged, isolating them still further. McConaghy writes beautifully about the natural world and expertly ratchets up the tension, as mutual suspicion increases and secrets are gradually revealed. This is a powerful read that encompasses not only grief, sacrifice and perseverance in the face of disaster, but also survival strategies and their concomitant moral dilemmas.
Darkrooms by Rebecca Hannigan (Sphere, £20) When chaotic kleptomaniac Caitlin returns to her small Irish home town after the death of Kathleen, the mother from whom she has been estranged for many years, she’s pleased to be welcomed by the Branaghs, friendly neighbours she remembers from childhood. Less pleasant is being forced to confront past traumas, including the disappearance of her nine-year-old friend Roisin from a local wood 20 years earlier. Caitlin feels guilty about this, as does Roisin’s older sister Deedee, who is sure that Caitlin is still hiding something. Having joined the garda to find answers that never materialised, Deedee is drinking heavily, making poor decisions and jeopardising both her job and her relationship, and both women desperately need closure … This impressive, if bleak, debut is a slow-burning but well paced story of shame, guilt, misplaced loyalty and generational trauma, the conclusion of which, once one is in possession of all the facts, has a heartbreaking inevitability.
When my family emigrated to Malmö, I wanted to stick to our traditions, but my husband was keen to embrace the local customs. Why were we butting heads?
It was 3pm on Christmas Eve and already getting dark. As I stripped off on a wooden pier over the Baltic Sea in Malmö, Sweden, my husband and five-year-old boy, bundled up against the harsh wind, chanted: “Go Mummy, go Mummy, go Mummy!” Just as I was about to heroically slither out of my final layer, a bearded, completely naked man, who can only be described as Viking-esque, ascended the wooden ladder from the sea, looked at me with horror and possibly hypothermia in his eyes and shook his head. I put my five layers of clothing back on and, feeling deflated, suggested we crack open the Thermos. I knew I had failed at Swedish Christmas.
My family and I emigrated to Sweden from the UK last winter, and while the days seemed impossibly short and dark, we were buoyed up by optimism, glögg (Swedish mulled wine) studded with almonds and raisins, and our new city, scattered with fairy lights. However, as the advent countdown began, a cold front harsher than the Baltic Sea swept through our cosy new home. My husband wanted to be “more Swedish than the Swedes”; I wanted some familiar traditions to pass on to my son. And so, December became a period of friendly but fierce negotiations.
Surgeon leading xenotransplantation trial aimed at solving shortage of human organs says edits can lessen risk of rejection
A leading surgeon behind a clinical trial of transplanting pig kidneys into living humans has said they could one day be superior to those from human donors.
Dr Robert Montgomery, the director of NYU Langone’s Transplant Institute, said the first transplant of the trial had already been carried out, with another expected to take place in January. Six patients are initially expected to receive the pig organs, which have been gene-edited in 10 places to reduce rejection by the human body.
Temperatures plunge below -50C in the Yukon, while swaths of US experience springlike weather
Northern Canada has been gripped by an intense and prolonged cold spell, with temperatures hovering between -20C and -40C for weeks. On Tuesday, Braeburn in the Yukon recorded -55.7C, its coldest December temperature since 1975.
Meanwhile, Mayo and Dawson endured 16 consecutive nights below -40C, with Mayo plunging to -50.4C on Monday. Whitehorse also recorded 10 nights when temperatures dropped below -30C.
Imran Ahmed of Center for Countering Digital Hate files complaint against senior Trump allies
A US judge has blocked US authorities from detaining or deporting a British anti-disinformation campaigner who is among five European nationals targeted by the Trump administration because of moves to push back against hate speech and misinformation.
Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), filed a complaint on Thursday against senior Trump allies including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the attorney general, Pam Bondi, in an attempt to prevent what he says would be an unconstitutional arrest and removal.
Forest great was loved in Nottingham but under-appreciated in Scotland before going on to thrive as a coach
On the eve of a Celtic European tie 25 years ago, Stiliyan Petrov cut an increasingly agitated figure. The young midfielder, soon to shoot to prominence under Martin O’Neill, was finding it impossible to snatch the ball from a rotund, wizened coach during a possession drill. Petrov’s teammates were cackling with laughter. John Robertson’s brilliance was understated enough in Scotland. Word of his talent in the game was never likely to reach Petrov as he grew up in deepest Bulgaria.
Petrov is part of a recent generation who owe a debt of gratitude to Robertson the coach. More of them later. When news of Robertson’s death filtered through on Christmas Day, the prevailing sense was that his country had lost one of a kind. He was also an individual who, for reasons associated with his own modesty, really never received the kudos he deserved in the land of his birth.
From shock Strictly news to shock flatulence, plus a roundup of the most hilarious news fails, here are the year’s wildest bits of television
One of the most critically acclaimed and most watched shows of the year was Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s staggering Adolescence. At the heart of the plot: why did an innocent-looking kid called Jamie (Owen Cooper) commit such a brutal murder? The third episode lifted the lid. As Jamie is interviewed by psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty), we see him slowly reveal that he’s not an innocent kid, but warped by misogyny and a twisted sense of entitlement. The episode was captivating in its acting, but it stayed with you: from Jamie’s sudden switch from vulnerability to manipulation, to the moment the camera zooms in on Briony’s face as she registers who Jamie really is. Horrifying.
Our circadian cycle doesn’t just affect our sleeping and waking, but our motivations, mood, behaviour and alertness. Whether you are a lark or an owl, here’s how to recognise your own rhythm
It’s easy to hate clocks. Their unstoppable forward churn wakes us up and shames us for running late. They are a constant reminder that every enjoyable moment, just like life itself, is ephemeral. But even if we rounded up all our time-telling devices and buried them deep in the earth, we could never escape clocks. Because we are one.
We don’t need to have studied the intricacies of circadian rhythms to know that we are ravenous at certain times and not others, that the mid-afternoon slump is real, and if we party until 4am we’re unlikely to sleep for eight hours afterwards, because the body clock has no sympathy for hangovers. But to better understand this all-encompassing daily cycle is to truly know our animal selves.
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