⚽ News and previews heading into the weekend’s action
⚽ Premier League: 10 things to look out for | Mail Dominic

Marc Skinner has said Manchester United are unlikely to sign any more players in this transfer window, as Tuesday’s WSL deadline day approaches, and that the club are pleased with the early business they did this winter.

United added Hanna Lundkvist, Lea Schüller and Ellen Wangerheim, while Geyse and Rachel Williams left and the full-back Hannah Blundell was among those to go on loan.

“Right now, there’s nobody that’s imminent,” the head coach said before Sunday’s meeting with Liverpool. “I’m really happy with the work that we’ve done as a collective, in this window, but we’re still working towards summer targets as well.

“Unless there’s a miracle, probably not [any more signings in this window], at this moment. We’ll wait and see, but right now we’re in a space where nobody is imminently coming in.

“We’ve prepped and we’ve done our work early [and] you can already see them coming up to speed.”

Forgive me for picking out my own passage in the Rumour Mill. This, on clubs’ summer plans, I found extraordinary. We’ll wait to see if any of it comes to pass.

Plenty of clubs have seemingly given up the ghost on the notoriously tricky January window and are already plotting their summer swoops. In totally-feasible transfer news, Chelsea want Jude Bellingham, Arsenal and Liverpool are chasing Eduardo Camavinga and Real Madrid, in this scenario having been gutted and stripped of their best assets, are targeting … Diogo Dalot.

Ukrainian president doubles down on target for accession despite pushback from some European leaders

Separately, the Ukrainian air force reported that Russia launched over 100 drones and just one missile at Ukraine overnight.

On Thursday, US president Donald Trump has claimed that Vladimir Putin has agreed to halt strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for one week after he issued a personal appeal to the Russian leader due to the extreme cold in Ukraine.

Updates from the second semi-final in Melbourne
Alcaraz beats Zverev | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail Katy

We’ll have a bit of a delay before the next semi-final as the spectators leave and the night session ticket holders come in.

So what does this mean for Sinner and Djokovic? Well if either of them goes on to win the title on Sunday, they owe Zverev a huge favour for beating up Alcaraz tonight. “It’s one of the most demanding matches I have ever played,” says Alcaraz, whose brother then helps him carry his bags as he hobbles off court. Alcaraz looks like Djokovic did after his five-hour, 53-minute 2012 Australian Open final against Nadal; absolutely spent. But Alcaraz has somehow got to find a way to play another match in less than two days’ time.

It comes after the US president threatened to impose tariffs on Canada if it went through with economic deals struck with China

Good morning, Taz Ali here to bring you the latest news in UK politics.

The US president, Donald Trump, said it was “very dangerous” for the UK to deal with China moments after Keir Starmer announced a successful trip to Beijing, where he discussed business with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

After a very hard landing into fame in the 00s, he decided to take a softer approach – and hit on a winning formula for classic comedy. The star talks his fantastical new show Small Prophets, his obsession with middle-age and being ‘weird-looking’

In Small Prophets, BBC Two’s new six-parter, Mackenzie Crook plays Gordon, the manager of a massive DIY store. Sometimes it feels as if we’re falling through time, because it’s like watching Gareth, Crook’s breakthrough part in The Office, a quarter of a century on. “Pedantic and jobsworthy, he could be Gareth grown up, just with more disappointment, without the West Country accent,” says Crook. “I wrote Gordon as a monster, but by the end, I was actually quite fond of him.”

In person, Crook has a jumpy, modest energy. When he was young, on screen it used to look like nerves, but now looks more like curiosity. He has a surprising number of tattoos, but maybe I should stop being surprised when people have those.

Today’s rumours are heavy on one side

The January transfer window is about to close (surely it cannot slam shut with the same melodrama as its summer counterpart) and, as always, certain clubs are getting a little twitchy as the deadline looms. A fine example is Raheem Sterling who has not kicked a competitive football in eight months yet somehow finds himself on more wishlists than a Tamagotchi in the late nineties.

Seven “Champions League level” clubs are said to be keen on Sterling – now a free agent after he and Chelsea went their separate ways – most notably Tottenham, whose manager Thomas Frank is ‘on board’ with the idea of signing the 31-year-old. Heaven knows Frank needs a boost from somewhere. Having represented Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal in a frankly remarkable career to date, a move to Spurs would leave Raheem with just one more to complete the big six set. Old Trafford in 2028, here we come. Napoli, Juventus and Burnley are also linked with Sterling, Champions League level clubs all.

(Ronin Rhythm)
The composer’s first unaccompanied album turns extended harp technique into music of intimacy, restraint and conviction – inspired by the women who shaped her world

When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche’s avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn’t coexist with a campaigner’s political urgency on environmental and social issues. But Campiche is too much of a visionary to overwhelm the eloquence of pure sound with polemic, as her new album, the unaccompanied Unspoken, confirms more than ever.

Campiche’s extra-musical agenda here is a celebration of sisterhood, dedicated to women in public and private lives who have inspired her. The opening Anonymous is built around a Virginia Woolf quote – “for most of history, ‘anonymous’ was a woman” – repeated by a chorus of women’s voices in different languages building to a clamour. Grisélidis Réal is named after the Swiss artist and writer who took her physical and mental life to every precipice, including sex work, expressed in gently lyrical harp lines around the spooky sounds of footsteps clicking on pavements.

Leonkoro Quartet
(Alpha)
The young quartet give a fiercely alert account of Berg, Webern and Schulhoff – beautifully capturing Vienna’s prewar musical fault lines

Founded in Berlin in 2019, the Leonkoro Quartet is no stranger to the UK having won first prize and nine special awards at the 2022 Wigmore Hall international string quartet competition. In their new disc they explore three composers who embody the musical cutting-edge that might have been encountered in the Austrian capital either side of the Great War.

Alban Berg and Anton Webern took Schoenberg’s theories of free atonality and the 12-tone system in rather different directions. Berg’s Lyric Suite was a fervent outpouring to his mistress, and the quartet aptly captures the moody sensuality of this intense, intricate music. The Andante Amoroso swoons; the Allegro Misterioso tiptoes on muted strings; the Presto Delirando is positively coital. The playing is unflinching and seethes with imaginative detail.

• American stars meet at sold-out Madison Square Garden

• Stevenson rises to 140lb in bid for title in fourth division

• López enters in rare underdog role that suits his history

When Teófimo López and Shakur Stevenson come together on Saturday night inside the big room at Madison Square Garden, a junior welterweight title and a claim to American fistic supremacy will be on the line before a sold-out crowd of more than 20,000 spectators.

Two of the finest US-born fighters of their generation are set to collide in a delicious matchup that pits volatility against control, power against precision, chaotic ambition against measured discipline. Both men arrive as world champions across multiple weight classes, both are 28 and prime, and both view the contest as a gateway to pound-for-pound recognition and the untold opportunities it confers.

Construction works for Milano Cortina have been a lightning rod for suspected infiltration by organised crime, but anti-mafia groups have adopted an approach that will help future hosts

Early on the morning of 8 October, the Provincial Command of the Carabinieri in Belluno put out a press release announcing three arrests, in the culmination of a year-long investigation they called “Operation Reset”. Two of the three were brothers, were both known members of the notorious SS Lazio Ultras, the Irriducibili, it was stated in the release, and had boasted of having personal ties to former boss Fabrizio Piscitelli, who was murdered in 2019. The crimes the brothers had been arrested on suspicion of had not been committed in Rome, but 400 miles north, in the small alpine ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, high in the Dolomites, and home, for the next three weeks, to the Winter Olympics.

The brothers are still awaiting trial, but the local public prosecutor’s office has alleged that they were running an operation in three phases. The first was taking control of the drug distribution network in Cortina, the second was to take control of three local nightclubs, and the third was to extort the local council into awarding the construction contracts for the works being done for the Games. Among the evidence the prosecutor says it possesses is a note on one of the brothers’ phones saying: “We want the cemetery area for the garages, the former pastry shop, the slip road and the new ring road, the construction of the tourist village.”

The Uzbek GM, 21, has a half-point edge, but rivals from his own country, the Netherlands, Germany, the US, and Turkey are all within one point

Nodirbek Abdusattorov still has a narrow lead as the “chess Wimbledon” at Tata Steel Wijk aan Zee heads into its final three rounds this weekend, but the Uzbek, 21, is battling to stay ahead of a quintet of rivals after being held to two draws and a loss in his last three games.

Leading scores after 10 of the 13 rounds are Abdusattorov 6.5, Javokhir Sindarov (Uzbekistan), Matthias Blübaum (Germany) and Jorden van Foreest (Netherlands) 6, Hans Niemann (US) and Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus (Turkey) 5.5. The world champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, is among three players on 5.

Ahead of the centenary of Davis’s birth, musicians including Terence Blanchard and John Scofield analyse his brilliance: from his soft phrasing and spiritual feel to his raspy cussing and leather outfits

The architect of the bestselling jazz album of all time, 1959’s Kind of Blue, trumpeter Miles Davis is a towering figure in the history of the genre. Possessed of a piercing tone, innate melodic sensibility and a singularly uncompromising approach on the bandstand, Davis spent his five-decade career presiding over numerous stylistic shifts: bebop to “cool” jazz, modal jazz, electronic fusion, jazz funk and even hip-hop. Always honing his ear for fresh talent, he turned his bands into incubators for rising artists, providing early starts for the pianists Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, saxophonists Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, and drummers Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette.

With 2026 marking the centenary of Davis’s birth, I asked several of his surviving collaborators to select his greatest recordings and discuss his enduring influence, including the 95-year-old Rollins, who played with Davis in the 1950s; the guitarist John Scofield and the saxophonist Bill Evans, who both played with Davis in his 80s fusion groups; and several contemporary jazz stars.

(Nettwerk)
The quartet edge away from their trademark sound with louder guitars and bolder intentions – but their reinvention is more gradual than radical

Yumi Zouma are breaking up with dream pop. After a decade together, the New Zealand four-piece have honed an airy, lush, lightly melancholic sound – but now they want change. “More extreme everything, more boldness,” guitarist Charlie Ryder has said of fifth record No Love Lost to Kindness, written during the band’s “most friction-filled creative period” to date. While it’s true that their latest singles are faster, louder and more distorted, these bright, pretty tracks will rattle only their longest-serving fans.

Bashville on the Sugar locks eyes with an ex on the subway and rushes with Olivia Campion’s breathless drumming, while Blister flips the band’s knack for whistleable melodies into pogoing, enjoyably predictable pop punk that professes “venom and rage” but is far more fun than furious. Drag begins as a genuine switch-up, with threatening bass and an uncharacteristically deadpan performance from singer Christie Simpson as she picks apart an ADHD diagnosis, but soon blossoms into billowy, even dreamy, layered vocals and luminous guitar.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

In the first part of our series on digital politics, we look at how centrists have lost ground fighting disinformation – when the real battle is over emotion and attention

• Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

There’s a strange tendency to describe social media as something other people use – those young people on TikTok, that conspiratorial uncle on Facebook, the rightwing trolls on X. In truth, we’re all online now. The number of global social media users surpassed 5 billion in 2024. To put that into perspective there are 8 billion people on the planet.

The internet has totally transformed the ways in which we communicate and share information. First the internet came for print. As free online content began outcompeting subscription newspapers, publishers briefly found new audiences on Facebook, only to see referral traffic plummet after the platform began suppressing posts with external links.

Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

Four points separate first from eighth in the Ekstraklasa and the aim is to establish Europe’s most interesting league as its sixth biggest

The temperature will be far below zero when Zaglebie Lubin and GKS Katowice restart Poland’s top flight on Friday evening. A bitter new wave of winter is about to hit central and eastern Europe, forecasts suggesting this is only the start. When the surprise Ekstraklasa leaders, Wisla Plock, play Rakow Czestochowa two days later the thermometer may plummet to -12C. It will take serious resolve to make these games happen but, after a break of almost two months, appetites to get back up and running are strong.

Why would they not be? The Polish league is in its best shape for at least 30 years, feeling the benefit of a booming economy that is outperforming most of its European Union peers. Attendances are soaring and its football infrastructure, whose transformation was catalysed by co-hosting Euro 2012, sets standards for much of the continent. Then there is the remarkable way in which this season’s competition is poised. The gap between first and eighth is only four points; even Bruk-Bet Termalica Nieciecza, at the bottom, are only 11 points from the summit.

Lawmaker from Estonia says photo celebrates ‘the greatest war criminal of the 21st century’

Donald Trump has apparently added a framed photo of himself standing with Vladimir Putin to the White House decor, prompting criticism from a senator, members of the media and beyond.

Newly surfaced photos from the Palm Room, which connects the West Wing to the executive residence, show a framed image of the US president and the Russian president at their summit in Alaska last August. Notably, that event marked the first in-person meeting between US and Russian leaders since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. The meeting drew complaints from Democrats who accused him of “cozying up” to Putin, and rolling out “the red carpet” for the Russian leader “instead of “standing with Ukraine and our allies”.

Saunas, island-hopping, mountain hikes, great design and cosy cafes abound in our readers’ treasured memories of the Nordic countries
• Tell us about a romantic break in Europe – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

A week’s hiking in Jotunheimen national park (230 miles north of Oslo) last summer brought me tranquillity and peace. During four days of challenging hiking and wild camping through the area we saw hardly anyone else, having entire lush green valleys and still glacial lakes to ourselves. We were fortunate to have stunning weather throughout and, despite it being July, still had a reasonable amount of snow to traverse. Norway has a fantastic network of signposted trails and huts which can be found on the Norwegian Trekking Association website.
Ben

A psychologist’s gripping guide to surviving dark nights of the soul offers both comfort and insight

I’m proud of how mild-mannered my midlife crisis is. While the cliche involves the purchase of a Porsche or a frantic fling with a colleague, I’ve mainly fallen back into the geeky preoccupations of my youth, such as founding poetry clubs and playing niche racket sports. Nevertheless, on the cusp of turning 50, and having just been beaten by my 11-year-old at Scrabble, I’m thrilled to have found a book that addresses my small struggle: an elegant discourse on the deep wisdom that I’m hoping will characterise my remaining years.

First, the author, a clinical psychologist named Frank Tallis, diagnoses the problem. Following some of the arguments in Ernest Becker’s 1973 study The Denial of Death, he proposes that such crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality. In Britain, we eschew open coffins, for instance. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. We can hardly even bring ourselves to say “die”, preferring euphemisms such as “pass away”. In this Instagram age, our lives are dominated by filters and distractions. The crisis strikes when reality can’t be held at bay any longer. We lose our parents. Then we notice, inevitably, that we are now at the front of the queue.

Tenth edition showcases Belgian talent and introduces global themes and artists in a celebration of creativity

Where better to be in the midst of Belgium’s biting winter but in the warmth of Lee Shulman’s creation, The House. Cloaked in cosy mid-century nostalgia, the staging of this flagship exhibition at Hangar Gallery sets a fitting scene for Shulman’s collection of found photography, The Anonymous Project. The playful curation features all manner of family snaps from holidays to birthday parties, and sees characters peeping out of kitchen cupboards or lounging on the beach, photographed through the window of a caravan. The effect is a seductive step into the past, even if only the past of your dreams.

All the furniture used in the staging of The House has been sourced from online websites

Older men seen as ‘gaining wisdom’ but women must keep looking younger or be ‘idiosyncratic’, review hears

Older women disappear from presenting roles across the BBC while older men are regarded as “gaining gravitas and wisdom”, according to an internal review of the broadcaster’s record on representation.

A “noticeable mismatch” in the number of staff and freelance male and female presenters over the age of 60 was uncovered by the review.

Pre-2008, voters with prosperous and improving lives didn’t mind being excluded from the conversation. Those days are over

Who was the last politician you listened to for any length of time? Perhaps it was Andy Burnham or Zack Polanski. Or maybe it was Wes Streeting, Nigel Farage or Zarah Sultana. Perhaps your dark secret is that it was Donald Trump.

One thing these politicians have in common is that they are all unusually good communicators. From Farage’s drawling provocations to Polanski’s pithy directness, Sultana’s concentrated blasts of outrage to Trump’s mesmerising ramblings, they compel you to listen. The completely forgettable passages that voters across western democracies have associated with political speech for decades are largely absent.

When temperatures drop suddenly, trapped water can freeze and expand, splitting trunks with a gunshot-like sound

During the recent cold spell in the northern US, meteorologists issued warnings about exploding trees.

A tree’s first line of defence against freezing is its bark, which provides efficient insulation. In cold conditions, trees also enter a form of hibernation, with changes at a cellular level: cells dehydrate, harden and shrink, increasing their sugar concentration. This is the botanical equivalent of adding antifreeze, helping to prevent the formation of ice crystals.

The Institute for Public Policy Research also argues that tech companies must pay publishers for content they use

AI-generated news should carry “nutrition” labels and tech companies must pay publishers for the content they use, according to a left-of-centre thinktank, amid rising use of the technology as a source for current affairs.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said AI firms were rapidly emerging as the new “gatekeepers” of the internet and intervention was needed to create a healthy AI news environment.