Former British doubles No 1 has same legal firm as PTPA
The 33-year-old doubles star has always denied doping
The breakaway players’ union that is suing the tours and grand slam tournaments has thrown its weight behind Tara Moore’s $20m (£14.7m) legal battle against the Women’s Tennis Association in a new front in the sport’s civil war.
The Guardian has learned that Moore, the former British No 1 doubles player who this week brought a legal action for negligence against the WTA after being handed a four-year ban for doping, is using lawyers from the Professional Tennis Players Association’s (PTPA) legal partner, King & Spalding.
Emergency meeting called to discuss festival’s ‘future direction’ after series of controversies
The organisation that manages the Berlin film festival is to meet for talks amid reports that its American director faces dismissal after a series of rows over Gaza.
In a statement on Wednesday, the office of Germany’s federal government commissioner for culture and media said the emergency meeting on Thursday had been called to debate the “future direction of the Berlinale”.
João Francisco Inácio Brazão and Domingos Inácio Brazão sentenced for murder of Marielle Franco, a gay Black woman and rising political star
Two influential Brazilian politician brothers have been convicted by Brazil’s supreme court of ordering the murder of Marielle Franco, the Rio de Janeiro city councillor, nearly eight years ago.
João Francisco Inácio Brazão, the former congressman known as Chiquinho, and the former adviser to Rio’s court of auditors Domingos Inácio Brazão were sentenced to 76 years and three months in prison for the murders of Franco, 38, and her driver, Anderson Gomes, 39.
The BBC is under fire over its failure to remove a racial slur shouted by John Davidson, who has Tourette syndrome, from its broadcast of the Bafta awards. Davidson was heard shouting the N-word while two stars of the film Sinners, Delroy Lindo and Michael B Jordan, were on stage. He said controversy over the incident had left him “distraught” and that he had been assured any offensive words would be edited out. The BBC has apologised for the error and said producers overseeing the coverage did not hear the slur. Lucy Hough is joined by the Guardian’s assistant opinion editor Jason Okundaye – watch on YouTube
Spokesperson for Rolling Stones tells Guardian band did not liaise with Marc Beckman and his team on use of Gimme Shelter in first lady documentary
A source close to Mick Jagger has cast doubt on a claim byMelania producer Marc Beckman that his team was closely involved with the singer over the use of a Rolling Stones song in the film.
The film, which follows the first lady in the 20 days leading up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, opens with a sequence in Mar-a-Lago soundtracked to the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. Despite being owned by music company ABKCO, Beckman told Variety that Jagger “was actually involved” and “gave us his blessing”.
Moves to pave the way for the handover of the Chagos Islands have been paused, MPs have been told by a minister, amid continuing discussions with the US over the controversial deal.
The comments by Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister and former diplomat, were swiftly played down by government sources, who said he had misspoken. But opposition parties said they appeared to describe the reality of the UK’s position as the deal comes under increasing pressure from Donald Trump.
My new oven has a touchscreen – and demanded to be connected to my broadband. Now it won’t give me a moment’s peace
I bought an oven. I wish I hadn’t. Ovens are like homes, cars, pets and partners, in that you can like the look of them but can’t know what it’s like to live with them until you’re living with them. And by then, it’s too late; you’re stuck with them. All I wanted was an oven that gets hot, to a temperature of my choosing, until the cooking is done, at which point I can switch it off. That’s it. But functionality this simple exists only in the good old days. In ovens, as in all things, manufacturers seek to excite our feeble minds with ever more fantastical features. One knob is all I want, all I need. But, as Feargal Sharkey might sing to himself, a single knob these days is hard to find.
My new oven actually has no knob at all, which is worse. This curates the vibe of simplicity but is only a mask for unconscionable complexity. It’s like the cleverdickery of a Tesla car’s cabin. Look how simple it is, how clean, how clever! Nothing but a steering wheel and a giant touchscreen, but thereon and therein – as with my wretched oven – lies a world of pain, confusion and entirely unnecessary nonsense.
Opposition campaigners claim top figures in regime use state wealth to fund lifestyles counter to those they preach
Members of Iran’s ruling elite have been accused of brazen hypocrisy by allegedly using the state’s wealth to help to fund their adult children’s lives in the west while presiding over growing economic misery and repression at home.
Opposition campaigners made the accusation against some of the clerical regime’s most powerful figures as a military confrontation with the US appears increasingly likely. Donald Trump has deployed a vast armada in the Middle East and confirmed he is considering strikes.
Corporation says broadcasting of N-word by Tourette syndrome campaigner was ‘serious mistake’ as anger at error rises
The BBC is to undertake a fast-track investigation into how a racial slur broadcast during its coverage of the Bafta film awards was not edited out, amid rising anger inside the corporation over the error.
Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has now instructed the corporation’s complaints unit to investigate what the BBC describes as a “serious mistake”.
Their unnerving songs about car crashes and suburban ennui, sung in a sparkling yet unemotional RP, stood out from the Britpop bloat. Now, thanks to a certain singer taking their streams stratospheric, the band are back
John Moore, the guitarist in Black Box Recorder, adopts a weary tone as he tells this story. “Our daughter said to us, ‘Have you heard of Billie Eilish?’” His response was not what she was expecting. “Yes,” he said. “She’s fucked up our retirement.” This spring, he, Luke Haines and vocalist Sarah Nixey (the mother of said daughter, though she and Moore are long separated) will return to the stage for the first time since 2009, in part thanks to their streaming numbers going stratospheric after Eilish posted videos of herself listening to their 1998 debut single Child Psychology.
The song, about a disruptive girl who has refused to speak, been expelled from school and fallen out with her family, is typical of Black Box Recorder’s obsession with psychological breakdown in a peculiarly English, often suburban and middle-class setting: stories related by Nixey in her sparkling yet deadpan vocals. It’s a mix that later broke Black Box Recorder into the UK Top 20 with 2000 single The Facts of Life, and produced three albums that still stand apart from the rest of British pop.
A newly revealed diplomatic cable calls on US diplomats to work against attempts by foreign nations to regulate how US tech companies handle their citizens’ data, as “data sovereignty initiatives” gather steam in Europe over security concerns.
More from Reuters:
President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against attempts to regulate U.S. tech companies’ handling of foreigners’ data, saying in an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters that such efforts could interfere with artificial intelligence-related services.
Experts say the move signals the Trump administration is reverting to a more confrontational approach as some foreign countries seek limits around how Silicon Valley firms process and store their citizens’ personal information - initiatives often described as “data sovereignty” or “data localization.“
Bill Gates apologized to staff of his foundation for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and admitted to two affairs but stated he did not participate in the convicted sex offender’s crimes, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
At a town hall on Tuesday, Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, said it was a “huge mistake to spend time with Epstein” and to bring Gates Foundation executives to meetings with Epstein.
A record 129 journalists and media workers were killed in the course of their work in 2025, and two-thirds of them were killed by Israel, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said.
It was the second straight year that killings set a record and the second straight year that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of them, the CPJ, a New York-based independent organisation that documents attacks on the press, said in its annual report.
I looked back to discover the untold story of how western intelligence was misread, even in Kyiv. The conclusion offers a stark warning for the future
Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and at this time of year it’s hard not to recall memories of the morning of 24 February 2022, when the fate of Ukraine and the history of Europe were irrevocably changed by the decision of the man in the Kremlin.
Around 9pm the evening before, I had received a message from a colleague at another news outlet. It was an unequivocal warning from an intelligence source that the war would start that night. We discussed it among the Guardian’s Ukraine reporting team and international editors. My colleague Emma Graham-Harrison, who was on an overnight train from Kyiv towards the frontline city of Mariupol, decided she would get off halfway, in the middle of the night, and beg a spot on the first train heading back to Kyiv. It turned out to be a wise move: Mariupol was soon under siege and the scene of much of the worst carnage of the war. Emma remained in Kyiv, part of our team covering the initial Russian attack on the capital.
The Metropolitan police has apologised to the Commons speaker for giving Peter Mandelson’s lawyers information pointing to him as the source of a claim that the former UK ambassador planned to flee the country.
Senior Scotland Yard officers are also understood to be meeting in person with Lindsay Hoyle on Wednesday afternoon to explain their error, which is regarded internally as a serious breach of protocol.
‘These guys wanted to leave the chaos and fighting of a neo-Nazi skinhead band playing a school hall – and causing horror. “We’re using your car to count up the takings,” one told me. “As long as I can take a photo,” I said’
In 1990, I was working in photojournalism but doing music photography on the side to make money. At the time there was a rise in neo-Nazi music, with bands such as Skrewdriver and the Blood and Honour movement. I was initially going to do a magazine piece on it but it grew into a much bigger project and I ended up spending two years following these people around the country. It led to a book and a documentary.
It was a difficult project and there were moral and ethical challenges as well as dangerous ones, but that was part of the attraction. The people were suspicious of me but I was honest about what I wanted to do. They knew I didn’t agree with their politics but that I didn’t have an agenda.
Coalition government agrees to remove parts of controversial law and allow homes to rely on fossil fuels
Germany’s coalition government has been accused of abandoning its climate targets after agreeing to scrap parts of a contentious heating law mandating the use of renewables in favour of a draft law allowing homeowners to rely on fossil fuels.
While the previous law required most newly installed heating systems to use at least 65% renewable energy, often with a heat pump, the amended legislation will allow households to keep using oil and gas.
Hamas to almost certainly reject plan described in Israeli press, say experts, as no guarantee Israel will withdraw on surrender of weapons
Progress in the Gaza peace plan has stalled over disagreements on how Hamas should be disarmed, with Israel threatening to go back to full-scale war if the condition is not carried out quickly.
The second phase of the US-brokered ceasefire, which Washington declared had begun in January, was meant to involve Hamas disarming, Israeli forces withdrawing, and a Palestinian interim administration moving into Gaza backed by a Palestinian police force and an international stabilisation force (ISF).
The sex offender could exploit these masters of the universe because, despite their privilege, they still felt short-changed by life
One of the things that has been frequently puzzled over as the effluent of the Epstein story flows on, is how a college dropout who thought it was cool to do typos managed to persuade the world’s most powerful into his lair. What, precisely, was the nature of his “genius”? Was it blackmail? Was it the social pyramid scheme of using one big name to reel in another? Nothing has come close to explaining it until, with the latest crop of details from the Epstein files, something has become suddenly clear: that it wasn’t the trafficked girls and women who Jeffrey Epstein groomed. The man’s real talent, if we want to call it that, was in the grooming of his cohort of associates.
This isn’t to say, of course, that the men and occasional woman who threw in their lot with a man we must straight-facedly refer to as “the dead paedophile” weren’t culpable. Nonetheless, if you study the huge amount of Epstein-related material, from the New York Times’s deep dive into his finances to the vast cache of correspondence contained in the files, a picture emerges of a man who did the kind of number on his peers that you would more commonly see directed at victims. While multiple survivor testimonies indicate that Epstein regarded the girls and women he trafficked as of such low consequence he didn’t even need to bother to groom them – per Virginia Giuffre’s account, Epstein raped her the first time they met – all of his resources, via a variety of tactics, went into capturing the allegiances of powerful men.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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Goalhanger’s Tony Pastor says Serie A has ‘disappeared’
‘You have to embrace this idea of fragmentation’
Football “has eaten almost every sport worldwide” thanks to its dominance of TV and digital markets, according to the head of the leading podcast production company Goalhanger.
Tony Pastor, CEO of the studio behind the Rest is Football among other podcasts, said that broadcasters were struggling to get value for money for sports rights and that competitions should “embrace fragmentation” to reach audiences where they are.
Advocates often assume communities of color just don’t know any better when it comes to eating healthy
I met the man I’ll call Randy Johnson 13 years ago, as I began research in South Central Los Angeles. I’m an anthropologist who explores how people think about food and use food in their everyday lives. As executive director of a large food justice organization focused on K-12 education throughout the city, Randy was a key source. He talked to me about South Central’s status as a food desert, where its majority Latinx and Black residents had little access to groceries or healthy food. A middle-aged white man, Randy told me of his work in South Central, which centered around encouraging school-age children to eat more fresh vegetables.
He described South Central as a wasteland of sorts. “There is just nothing there,” he said, pointing to the common but false idea that there were no grocery stores there. He then pivoted to talking about the residents. “I see them having almost zero education when it comes to [making healthy eating choices]. They don’t know that what they’re eating is destroying them slowly. It’s just that we, as a society, have failed our citizens to educate them that they shouldn’t be buying the fries every day.”
Hanna Garth is assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton University
The director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E has made an ambitious yet entirely baffling mess with the help of Rashida Jones and Kate McKinnon
In the first few minutes of In the Blink of an Eye, director Andrew Stanton’s long-gestating, epoch-spanning sci-fi epic, a Neanderthal man (Jorge Vargas) explores a perilously rocky beach 45,000 years ago. For some reason, he decides to climb one of the larger, steeper rocks – for food? For a view? But he loses his grip and falls backward, landing on the sharp stones below with a sickening, visceral squelch.
That moment is, I think, supposed to convey the fragility of early human existence – one second you’re foraging, the next you’re impaled and/or imperiled – though I couldn’t help but think of the film’s own cursed journey. Shot all the way back in 2023, In the Blink of an Eye is just now arriving on Hulu about three years later after many delays – not unheard of in the relatively glacial world of movie production, though never a good sign, especially considering that Stanton is the creative force behind such sentimental juggernauts as Wall-E and Finding Nemo (as well as several other Pixar movies, plus John Carter). The protracted timeline suggested that it was either going to be tricky and ambitious, a hard-fought journey of space and time, or, more likely, a complete mess.
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