I’ve worked as a surgeon in disaster zones. Nothing compares to the nightmare I saw in Iran’s hospitals when the state started shooting protesters
By 8 January, Iran’s anti-regime protests that began in late December had spread across the country with reports of at least 45 people killed by security forces. Over the next three days the regime appears to have instigated a brutal crackdown on protesters that is now estimated to have led to the deaths of more than 5,000 people.
By the time I reached the hospital in Tehran on Thursday (8 January) night, the sound of the city had already changed.
Alex Pretti’s death could be a moment of reckoning for Democrats to call time on Trump waging war on his people
Wearing helmets, gas masks and camouflage fatigues, the federal agents took aim and prepared to open fire. “It’s like Call of Duty,” one could be heard saying via a TV mic, referring to a first-person shooter military video game. “So cool, huh?”
This was the scene on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday after armed agents, wearing masks and tactical vests, wrestled 37-year-old Alex Pretti to the ground and shot him dead. The killing took place just over a mile from where Renee Good was fatally shot on 7 January, a scene that itself was less than a mile from where police murdered George Floyd in May 2020.
Signed at 13 and dropped by 16, Beer’s path to stardom has not been easy. Now 26, she says she’s finally making music for herself and happy to wear her heart on her sleeve
Madison Beer may only be 26, but she is something of a veteran in the pop industry. She got her start at 13, after Justin Bieber tweeted a link to a YouTube video of her covering Etta James’s At Last, and has spent the intervening decade-plus toiling away in mainstream pop, amassing a huge gen Z fanbase in the process – including more than 60 million followers between Instagram and TikTok. It’s an understatement to say that her career has been a slow burn: the day before we speak, it’s announced that her single Bittersweet, released in October, has become her first song to reach the US Hot 100 chart, entering at No 98. When I suggest congratulations are in order, she shrugs off the achievement. “I’m obviously super excited and thankful whenever a song performs well, but I think I’m at the point where I love what I make, and I’m proud of it regardless,” she says amiably, before laughing. “Only took me like, 15 years! But it’s cool.”
Beer’s attitude is indicative of someone whose career has progressed in fits and starts, a far cry from the kind of meteoric rise that fans and onlookers sometimes expect to see in aspirant pop stars. As she prepares for the release of her third album, Locket, she is in prime position to break through to pop’s upper echelon: Her 2023 album Silence Between Songs featured the sleeper hits Reckless and Home to Another One, the latter a sorely underrated Tame Impala-inspired cut, and in 2024 she released Make You Mine, a Top 50 single in the UK which was nominated for a best dance pop recording Grammy.
The comedian’s dad got him into Bob Marley, and Jamiroquai takes him to another dimension. But which girl band classic does he secretly love?
The first single I bought
Rollout (My Business) by Ludacris from HMV in Lewisham Shopping Centre. I played it over and over.
The first song I fell in love with
I grew up listening to a lot of reggae – my dad was a Rastafarian – so Get Up, Stand Up by Bob Marley was always playing in the house when my mum was dishing out the chores. It’s ironic that it’s a song about redemption when you’re being told to clean the house.
Leicester cope remarkably after illness swept through their squad but Quins cannot bring Champions Cup form to the Prem
English rugby long ago gave up trying to explain the phenomenon that is Harlequins. Quantum physicists would struggle. Two weeks ago here, we watched this same team put 60 past the thitherto unbeaten Stormers from South Africa on the way to qualifying from the Champions Cup, a competition for the best domestic sides in Europe and, as if that were not enough, South Africa, a land of frightening beasts and double World Cup-winners.
This is the same team that won in La Rochelle only last weekend to clinch that home tie in the last 16. Ridiculously, it was Quins’ win against all odds on the west coast of France that afforded Leicester last-gasp entrance by default into that very same elite of the elite. Well, you would never have guessed it, had you been here to witness the latest capitulation at the Stoop, a 34-7 humiliation on Saturday.
De Minaur is playing in the fourth round for the fifth consecutive year - a feat that not even Hewitt, Mark Philippoussis and Pat Rafter achieved at their home slam – but he’s never been past the quarter-finals. Which largely sums up his career: he’s so consistent in beating the players he’s expected to, but is underpowered against the very best. De Minaur does send a bullet of a backhand winner down the line to get to deuce on Bublik’s serve, though. But two errors then give the Kazakhstani the game.
There is also a big game in the Championship today as Portsmouth take on rivals Southampton at Fratton Park. Pompey really need a win to get out of the relegation zone, but do have a game in hand on most of the teams around them. Should they win both of those, Portsmouth would be just a point behind Saints in 15th, which goes to show jusy how tight things are at the foot of the Championship.
Saints have eased away from the drop zone since Tonda Eckert replaced Will Still in the dugout but their only win in their last six matches was against Sheffield United last time out. These two drew 0-0 back in September, will we get a different result today?
As sleep hygiene becomes received wisdom, growing numbers turning to one-to-one consultants for support
Before he sought out an adult sleep coach, Thorsten had spent countless hours trawling online advice about sleep.
“I devoured advice and implemented it all,” he said. “From the moment I got out of bed, virtually everything I did was tailored towards getting a good night’s sleep the following night.”
A generation of overexposed children are being used by their parents for social media clout. What happens when they start to speak out?
A child is born. Before they even landed “Earthside”, in the language of Instagram, a scan of them as a foetus in utero was uploaded to a waiting audience. The room in which they will sleep – the pale pastel paintwork, the carefully curated nursery furniture – is all there, ready, waiting: an advertorial empty of its model. Then comes the photo of the baby being born, held aloft to their audience while still covered in vernix, eyes not yet open, their mother smiling, hair perfect.
From now on, their every moment and milestone is documented for the camera and monetised. That first smile, first word, first step, all mediated by a device and sent to an audience of strangers, many of whom have formed a parasocial relationship with that mother, that father, that child. The child comes to know and understand the black mirror that is regularly put in front of them. There will be days when the child happily performs for the camera; others when they push it away, when they don’t want to be filmed. A natural feeling, but one they may well have learned to suppress. Because performing for the camera makes mummy and daddy happy, although they don’t call it performing. They call it authenticity.
January is a prime time for people looking to get fit, so fraudsters create fake websites and apps
A new year means a new start – it’s time to get fit and there are quite a few deals out there. On Facebook you see a local gym advertising a discount on membership if you sign up within the next few hours. There are limited spaces so you act quickly.
It’s only after you pay that you realise the ad was a fraud: you’ve received no membership details and when you contact the gym it has no record of your payment.
Change your life – or just kick back and relax – by connecting with nature, trying a creative workshop, or taking a yoga course somewhere beautiful
Playfulness is at the heart of the Art and Playholiday, based on a farm outside the Bay of Kotor. A family-friendly retreat designed to reignite joy and reconnect with the inner child, it’s one for solo travellers and couples as well as parents with kids. There are creative sessions on everything from dance to painting, as well as time to enjoy the farm – feeding the animals, collecting eggs or helping harvest vegetables for farm-fresh meals. Excursions include hikes to hidden beaches, kayaking and trips to Kotor and Budva, but there’s time to chill by the pool too; evenings are for board games, music and campfires. Accommodation ranges from camping and glamping to cabins, a treehouse and restored farmhouse. Seven daysfrom £695, children 5-12 £350, under-fives free, includes brunch, dinner and snacks,3 May and 23 August,responsibletravel.com
Australian cycling star holds on to lead the hard way
Kangaroo caused Vine and others to crash during final stage
The Australian cycling star Jay Vine has survived a race crash caused by a kangaroo to win the Tour Down Under for the second time.
Despite losing two more UAE Team Emirates colleagues on Sunday’s last stage, Vine’s commanding lead was enough of a buffer. He also won the event in 2023.
Head coach highlights away game in Champions League
Slot questions fixture list after difficult away trip
Arne Slot conceded his side ran out of steam in defeat at Bournemouth, after Amine Adli’s 95th-minute winner condemned Liverpool to a first loss since November. Liverpool pulled level from 2-0 down late on courtesy of Dominik Szoboszlai’s sensational free-kick, but Bournemouth responded impressively and Adli struck a winner from a long throw with almost the last kick.
The Liverpool head coach felt the referee, Michael Salisbury, should have played more second-half stoppage time taking in substitutions and video assistant referee checks but admitted he feared a Bournemouth winner. “I think it is safe to say they could have scored 3-2 a little bit earlier,” Slot said, alluding to chances for the Bournemouth pair Evanilson and Ryan Christie. “A few of our players ran out of energy and I cannot even criticise them for that because two days ago [three] we had to play an away game. We’re the only team that played in the Champions League that has two games in between.
Greater Manchester mayor has applied to stand for Labour in Gorton and Denton, setting up potential fight for PM’s political future
Keir Starmer’s allies are urging him to block Andy Burnham from running in the Gorton and Denton byelection, after the Greater Manchester mayor declared his intention to stand, setting up a potential fight for the prime minister’s political future.
Burnham said on Saturday he wanted to contest the seat after the sitting MP, Andrew Gwynne, said he intended to stand down.
World No 1 claims 7-6 (6), 6-4, 7-5 victory over 19th seed
Alcaraz recovers from slow start to navigate first real test at tournament
Carlos Alcaraz continued to build momentum in his pursuit of the career grand slam as he navigated a slow start and pushed through his first test at the Australian Open to reach the quarter-finals with a 7-6 (6), 6-4, 7-5 win over the 19th seed Tommy Paul.
Alcaraz, the world No 1, has now reached the quarter-finals at Melbourne Park for three consecutive years and this is his first time doing so without dropping a set.
Having already won each of the three other grand slam tournaments twice, he will be attempting to break new ground by reaching the semi-finals of the Australian Open for the first time in his career.
Things were far from easy for Alcaraz, who has played many tough matches with Paul over the past four years, losing to the American twice in their seven meetings.
Queensland government says pack linked to 19-year-old’s death pose ‘unacceptable public safety risk’ as Indigenous traditional owners say they were not consulted
The dingo pack linked to the death of Canadian tourist Piper James on Australian island K’gari will be destroyed, the Queensland government has announced.
Environment minister Andrew Powell said on Sunday that an entire pack of 10 animals would be euthanised.
In the search for stability, some western nations are turning to a country that many in Washington see as an existential threat
If geopolitics relies at least in part on bonhomie between global leaders, China made an unexpected play for Ireland’s good graces when the taoiseach visited Beijing this month. Meeting Ireland’s leader, Micheál Martin, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China’s president, Xi Jinping, said a favourite book of his as a teenager was The Gadfly, by the Irish author Ethel Voynich, a novel set in the revolutionary fervour of Italy in the 1840s.
“It was unusual that we ended up discussing The Gadfly and its impact on both of us but there you are,” Martin told reporters in Beijing.
I sat there in my pyjamas, headset against my ear, and knew I was not doing the right thing
I’m not psychic. During the six months I spent working as a telephone psychic, my only supernatural gift was the ability to sound fascinated by a stranger’s love life at 2.17am. Yet for hundreds of billable hours, I sat on my living room floor wearing plaid pyjamas and a telemarketing headset, charging callers by the minute for insights into their lives. Perhaps this made me a con artist, but I wasn’t a dangerous one.
When it started, I’d recently quit my job as an editor at a publishing company to write a novel while doing telemarketing shifts from my kitchen table. Instead of knocking off a bestseller, I found myself cold-calling strangers about energy bills while gripped by writer’s block and an inconvenient yearning to have a baby.
It was life-affirming to meet the residents of Rainbow Way in Minehead. But so much still stands in the way of Labour’s vision for social housing
I met Carole Guscott, a retired former carer, on a clear winter’s morning in the Somerset town of Minehead. She was walking her whippet, Gracie, on the way back to her new flat, past the local Premier Inn and on to a cul de sac called Rainbow Way. “I knew as soon as I saw it,” she told me. “I just thought: ‘I can make this place my home.’”
Up until recently, she was living in a private rented place near the centre of town and paying £780 a month in rent. For four years she had known that Rainbow Way was being built. She also knew that its houses and flats were an example of something that is vanishingly rare in post-Thatcher Britain: new council housing, which meant security for the people chosen to be the tenants but also intense competition for places.
This all-day Essex cafe next to a garden centre is a scone-fuelled delight
A tipoff to try the Tin Roof Cafe in Maldon came with prior warning: I wouldn’t get a table easily as this all-day spot serving brunch, lunches and sweet stuff from the in-house bakery is constant, scone-fuelled bedlam. Red brick walls, greenery throughout, alfresco spaces, allotments growing fresh veg and herbs. Capacious, family-run, dog-welcoming, pocket-friendly. There’s bubble and squeak with hand-cut ham, Korean-style chicken burgers and a vegan burger called, rather brilliantly, “Peter Egan” after, I’m guessing, the animal-loving actor who played Paul in Ever Decreasing Circles.
Could this place be any more adorable? No, but still, brace yourself. “It’s one in, one out,” I was told. “There’s a seated holding pen at the front where you wait for a table. Stand your ground in there. There’s loads of sharp-elbowed garden-centre folk. I think they’re there for the Basque cheesecake.” Ah, yes, the equally vast Claremont garden centre, just a few steps away. Cake, as we all know, is catnip to gardeners. Sends them daft. Come for 20 litres of alkaline topsoil and a terracotta trough, stay for the seasonal pavlova and thick wodges of billionaire’s shortbread. That’s millionaire’s shortbread with an extra layer of caramel decadence. Clearly real billionaires would never eat this shortbread, as they’re all on longevity hunts fuelled by OMAD (one meal a day), that meal being a posh spin on Trill budgie food.
Maxwell Alejandro Frost says attacker ‘told me Trump was going to deport me’ as police say suspect arrested
The Florida congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost said he was assaulted by a man who said Donald Trump would deport him at a party during the Sundance film festival in Utah.
“Last night, I was assaulted by a man at Sundance Festival who told me that Trump was going to deport me before he punched me in the face,” Frost said in a Saturday post on X. “He was heard screaming racist remarks as he drunkenly ran off. The individual was arrested and I am okay.”
Sophie Quinn was sitting in a car with her partner, John Harris, outside a house in Lake Cargelligo on Thursday afternoon when a ute approached from the opposite direction.
From the driver’s side window, at least three shots were fired, killing her and Harris. Quinn was seven months pregnant with a boy her family say she planned to name Troy.
Pair testify that Pretti did not hold weapon and was trying to help woman federal agents had shoved to the ground
Two witnesses to the killing of Alex Pretti have said in sworn testimony that the 37-year-old intensive care nurse was not brandishing a weapon when he approached federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, contradicting a claim made by Trump administration officials as they sought to cast the shooting of a prone man as an act of self-defense.
Their accounts came in sworn affidavits that were filed in federal court in Minnesota late Saturday, just hours after Pretti’s killing, as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of Minneapolis protesters against Kristi Noem and other homeland security officials directing the immigration crackdown in the city.
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