Richard Hirst, time-honoured Cottager, gets in touch: “Fulham need to bring Cairney on early then we can channel the 2018 play off final: Sessegnon to Cairney, 1-0. Although there won’t be the added delight of the pass beating John Terry.”
Unai Emery spoke to TNT ahead of the game: “We’re so focused to try to get Europe. Europe is the highest ambition we can dream of, and to play Champions League again.
As infections pummel communities in the US, Mexico and Canada, fear of ‘the most contagious human disease’ grows
A leading immunologist warned of a “post-herd-immunity world”, as measles outbreaks affect communities with low vaccination rates in the American south-west, Mexico and Canada.
The US is enduring the largest measles outbreak in a quarter-century. Centered in west Texas, the measles outbreak has killedtwo unvaccinated children and one adult and spread to neighboring states including New Mexico and Oklahoma.
Standing up to the erratic US president will be a key task for Mark Carney, but experts say economic challenges might prove far more testing
For most of his adult life, Mark Carney has thrived in a world where facts matter and logical arguments can suffice.
But Canada’s prime minister, who until this week had never held elected office, now enters a domain in which personal slights, ambition and ego often hold more sway than truth or reason. And Carney, who dealt with politicians, some hostile, as a central banker, has now become one, occupying a role in which he’s all but guaranteed to disappoint someone.
The Encampments tells the story of campus activism last year. But Palestinian films are facing intimidation campaigns
Recently, The Encampments opened at the Angelika Film Center in New York to a record-setting box office for an independent film – along with a storm of controversy. For us, as the distributor, the atmosphere was far from celebratory. The theater was forced to hire additional security, notify police and prepare staff for harassment in response to protests and threats from people who hadn’t even seen the film.
Growing up, I had so many questions about Marshall, my hippy older sibling who left home and got embroiled with the Manson Family cult. Years later, I embarked on a quest to find out his true story
One morning in March 1995, my father and I were having coffee at the kitchen table when somehow the conversation deviated to my brother Marshall. As always, I had questions.
“He was tall for his age,” my father said, gazing at the memory of his estranged son, as if he was standing beside us in the kitchen. “At school they always wanted him for the football team. His hair was red, deep red like your grandmother’s, and his eyes …” my father paused, searching for the right comparison. “Copper. His eyes were copper-coloured and he’d tan so well in the summer he looked as if he’d been dipped in wood stain.”
The 29-year-old charged with ‘battery-touch or strike’
Fred Kerley, twice an Olympic 100m medallist, has been arrested for allegedly punching the hurdler and his former girlfriend Alaysha Johnson in the face, and the American sprinter will not compete in the Grand Slam Track event in Miami this weekend.
The alleged incident occurred on Thursday at a hotel where Johnson, who is listed as a competitor in the Miami event, had an appointment with her conditioning coach when she told police she ran into Kerley.
The president’s little used social media platform offers him a forum for his nonstop haranguing and score-settling
No political leader has used social media quite like Donald Trump. But his recent posts on Truth Social, the social media platform he founded in 2021, have become increasingly bizarre: the president using the lack of scrutiny afforded by the platform’s small user base to truly let loose.
In the hundreds of “Truths” since he took office, Trump has variously used Truth Social to reimagine himself as a king and to urge Americans to “BE COOL!” as the stock market tanked in the wake of his trade war, the president’s seemingly random use of capital letters, punctuation and inaccurate spelling consistent across the messages.
Recording concerts has become a compulsion for many. I’m resolving to put my device away and just dance: I hope others follow
I’m making a public vow, which I fear I may abandon the moment Lana Del Rey comes on stage at Wembley in July: to stop recording concerts on my phone. Last Sunday, producer and DJ Kaytranada responded to a fan on X who was frustrated at motionless concertgoers with their phones in the air, writing: “I think we have come in this age where everybody’s trying to catch a moment for their own social media presence. It shows their appreciation instead of them dancing and enjoying shows like we used to.” Even though I wasn’t at Kaytranada’s show, he had me bang to rights.
I have in the past incessantly recorded gigs, insisting to myself that there is no impairment of my enjoyment, or that determinedly rejigging the camera for a panoramic shot of the entire stage was all part of the concert experience. Lost in the spirit of a moment, it can be nice to snap yourself and friends singing along to your favourite artist, and to create a personal archive of a concert’s best bits.
Jason Okundaye is an assistant newsletter editor and writer at the Guardian
Webcam set up to monitor egg-bearing nest atop oak tree guarded by dozens of volunteers in Usk valley
At 9.15am the male bird took off and soared towards the reservoir in search of a meal. Sixty minutes later he was back, and over the next hour or so he and his mate took turns sharing the fish he had caught and sitting on their three eggs.
Soaad Al Shawa had been barred from spending final days with her family, who fled Damascus to settle in Glasgow
A Syrian grandmother who is dying of cancer has been given permission to come to the UK to spend her final days with the grandchildren she has never met, after a Home Office U-turn.
The government had wanted to bar Soaad Al Shawa, who has liver cancer and has been given just weeks to live by doctors, from travelling to spend her last days with her daughter Ola Al Hamwi, son-in-law Mostafa Amonajid and their three children aged seven, five and one. Al Shawa has only been able to communicate with her grandchildren on video calls.
The genre-bending cult singer is the subject of an offbeat new documentary where he invites people into a long life filled with ups, downs and LSD
Swamp Dogg has only just stopped seeing monsters. Since being spiked with LSD back in the 1960s, which also influenced his distinct take on left-field soul music, the 82-year-old says he could still feel the impacts of it up until just a few years ago. “I was paranoid of crowds and paranoid of being alone,” he says. “I had high anxiety and could be sitting in a room with you and if I looked at you long enough, you’d start looking like some kind of monster.”
For a long period of time it was only through the help and support of his late wife that he was able to hold it together. “I didn’t trust but one person in life, and that was Yvonne,” he says. “I wouldn’t do anything without her. She’s why I’m still alive. Yvonne was my god.” There are similarly touching sentiments expressed about her in the offbeat, funny and strangely poignant new documentary about the cult artist and his curious world: Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted.
People Power party trail in polls in election called after President Yoon Suk Yeol was removed for trying to impose martial law
South Korea’s conservative People Power party has picked former labour minister Kim Moon-soo as its candidate for the 3 June presidential election, which was called after the removal of Yoon Suk Yeol over his failed attempt to impose martial law.
Kim will face the liberal Democratic party’s candidate, Lee Jae-myung, who has led each of the declared conservative candidates by large double-digit margins in polls.
Italian youngster sprung surprise of the season by taking pole for the Miami GP sprint, the youngest F1 driver to do so
Kimi Antonelli sprung the surprise of the season so far by taking pole position for Saturday’s sprint race at the Miami Grand Prix, the youngest F1 driver to do so.
The Italian teenager, just six rounds into his rookie campaign as a replacement for Lewis Hamilton, was born five years after the double world champion Fernando Alonso became the youngest F1 driver to take a pole position.
Residents – most of them SpaceX workers – in remote Texas community expected to approve plan to create new city
Voters in a small patch of south Texas are casting their ballots on Saturday in an election that could give Elon Musk a town to call his own. The vote would officially create a new city called Starbase in the area where Musk’s SpaceX holds its Texas rocket launches.
A couple of hundred residents of what was previously known as Boca Chica will decide whether to make their unincorporated neighborhoods into a town that would grant them the authority to pass city ordinances. The outcome, which will be decided almost entirely by SpaceX employees and their families, who make up the majority of the local population, is nearly guaranteed to result in incorporation.
The act of labelling journalists ‘foreign agents’ is deliberately chilling. On World Press Freedom Day, be aware of the peril involved in seeking the truth
Last month, Georgian president Mikheil Kavelashvili approved a new law inflicting criminal charges, including prison sentences and fines, on any organisation or individual who fails to comply with the country’s “foreign influence” bill.
The news didn’t trouble the front pages of the international press and went largely unnoticed, but it marks a significant inflection point in the decline of global press freedom.
The actor on social anxiety at parties, the gap between her front teeth, and missing the days of video rentals
Born in Nigeria, Nikki Amuka-Bird, 49, studied at Lamda and began her career with the RSC. In 2017, she was Bafta nominated for her role in the BBC adaptation of Zadie’s Smith’s book NW. The same year, she played the lead in the Donmar’s production of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. Her recent television work spans Armando Iannucci’s comedy Avenue 5; the action series Citadel; and I, Jack Wright, which is on U&Alibi. She is divorced and lives in London.
What is your greatest fear?
I’m quite scared of bats. I’m just seeing rats with wings – no, thanks.
Dogs, budgie smugglers and democracy sausages were all part of the 2025 federal election as Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton sought to win votes on the final day
Our writers provided all the latest football news as we counted down to Saturday’s football action
The best dead rubbers in the world
The 2000-01 season is another contender for this dubious award. The biggest thing at stake on the last day of the season was whether Liverpool would qualify for the Champions League ahead of Leeds (they did).
Headteachers are taking legal action against Ofsted, England’s schools watchdog, over fears that its new inspection regime is “even worse than before” and likely to harm the mental health of school leaders.
The National Association of Head Teachers said it had lodged a claim for a judicial review against Ofsted “over the potential impact of their inspection proposals” and for inadequate consultation over its new system of grading schools.
Somehow the focus on school leader mental health and wellbeing has got lost along the way during Ofsted’s consultation process.
We must not forget that the catalyst for these changes was the tragic death of Ruth Perry and widespread acceptance that the inspection regime was placing school leaders under intolerable pressure. However, there appears to have been very little thought given to the impact on the wellbeing of school leaders in the drawing up of these plans and the consultation that followed.
Demonstrations against the US president have been underplayed and dismissed, but a lifetime of activism has taught me how powerful collective action can be
On 5 April, millions of people rallied against the Trump administration and its campaigns of destruction. In small towns and big cities from Alaska to Florida, red counties and blue (and a handful of European cities), they gathered with homemade signs full of fury and heartbreak and sarcasm. Yet the “Hands Off” protests received minimal media coverage, and the general response was that they didn’t do anything, because they didn’t have immediate and obvious, and most of all quantifiable, consequences. I’ve heard versions of “no one cares”, “no one is doing anything” and “nothing came of it” for all my activist life. These responses are sometimes a sign that the speaker isn’t really looking and sometimes that they don’t recognise impacts that aren’t immediate, direct or obvious. Tracking those indirect and unhurried impacts, trying to offer a more complex map of the world of ideas and politics, has been at the heart of my writing.
For more direct impact, at least when it came to the rally I attended in San Francisco, you could have walked six or seven blocks to the Tesla dealership. Weekly protests there since February, like those across the country and beyond, have helped tank the Tesla brand and Tesla shares. They remind Elon Musk that he’s in retail, where the customer is always right – and right now the customer would like him and his Doge mercenaries to stop dismantling the US government the way a hog dismantles a garden.
Focus on Reform or reassure the left – Keir Starmer’s next move could define his premiership
In a week of difficult local elections, there was a special guest in No 10 to give a pep talk to staff: Arsène Wenger, the former manager of Arsenal, beloved of the prime minister. Keir Starmer has sought his advice before, on the importance of building a team. And they have faced some common challenges, rebuilding their clubs and parties from low ebbs to extraordinary success.
Now Starmer may face a similar challenge – and criticism – to Wenger in his later years: whether he can adapt his tactical rigidity when results start to suffer.
Barcelona’s 17-year-old forward is a once-every-20-years talent who is causing the internet to spasm with man-worship
There’s always that guy. Never be that guy. Fight the urge to become that guy, to yearn always for the old, good, safe things, to feel headphone-panic and selfie-disgust, to see moral decay in haircuts. Except, sometimes it turns out you just are that guy, propped up in your easy chair, eyes blazing, smelling slightly of damp laundry, and holding forth on a theme as old as all human life.
That theme is always the same. You know that thing you like? Well, it’s actually bad. And in a way that I will now explain at great length. So here he comes again, that guy. And this time he’s talking about Lamine Yamal. Enjoyed that, did you?
The world No 1 returns at next week’s Italian Open after a three-month anti-doping suspension amid a saga that left players questioning the fairness of the system
Jannik Sinner could not help but crack a wry smile when he faced the media before the US Open last year in the aftermath of his anti-doping case, one of the most high-profile in the history of tennis.
Sinner, the best player in the world, had been attempting to emphasise just how low the concentration of the banned substance clostebol had been in his urine sample, and therefore how irrelevant it was to his performances on the court.
Parachute payments system benefits the elite when teams such as Burnley and Leeds rejoin top tier within three years
For the second year running, all three clubs promoted from the Championship to the Premier League will make an immediate return to the second tier. It would be tempting to say this is the natural order of things given the financial challenges faced by clubs suddenly thrown into the world’s richest domestic football competition.
Even when they do spend huge amounts in order to give themselves a chance of survival, as Southampton and Ipswich did, respectively spending £62.8m and £106m net in the summer of 2024, the gap appears too big to close. Yet what has happened to them used to be an exceptional occurrence.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The champions have proved buying the best makes you the best – a hard lesson for the Blues’ struggling youngsters
If there is one key lesson from Liverpool’s title triumph for Chelsea to absorb then it is surely the importance of sometimes paying the going rate for players capable of changing a team’s mentality and raising the level as soon as they join.
That is not to say there is no logic to Chelsea’s wider strategy of scouring the world for young talent and betting on their potential by handing out heavily incentivised long contracts. They have been ridiculed at times but believe vindication will arrive. The club are sticking with this approach and will be able to argue with some justification that the project is on schedule if Champions League qualification is in the bag at the end of the season.
Growth in the first three months was challenged by Trump’s overhaul plans, and execution of his tariffs created widespread confusion and uncertainty
Donald Trump promised to usher in a new “golden age” for the US economy – one with lower prices, more jobs and greater wealth. This week, his first quarter report card came in, and the new age is off to a chaotic start.
Gross domestic product (GDP) shrank for the first time in three years during the first quarter, abruptly turning negative after a spell of robust growth as trade distortions and weaker consumer spending dampened activity.
Many jails still in use today were built by the Victorians. Here’s how their 19th-century design is contributing to a 21st-century crisis
England in the 1840s was a place of dizzying industry, rapid urbanisation and technological progress.
Among the proliferation of inventions, a new type of building was unveiled to the world. A prison, K-shaped with long corridors made of sure, thick walls, and small windows in cold, solitary cells.
The new prison will be most conducive to the reformation of prisoners and to the repression of crime … It resolves itself into a greater uniformity of plan and purpose than has yet been exhibited in prison architecture. The Illustrated London News in its coverage of the new facility on August 13, 1842.
The piers or partitions between them are 18 inches thick, and are worked with close joints, so as to preclude as much as possible the transmission of sound. A description of HMP Pentonville in the Illustrated London News, 1843
How often do you come across a beauty product that genuinely changes the game? Not just a nice-to-have, but something that actually works, solving a problem you’d given up on. The shampoo that really defrizzes. The foundation that lasts all day without creasing. The serum that calms, rather than irritates, sensitive skin.
Most of us have drawers full of abandoned products: lipsticks that smudge, sunscreens that pill, serums that sting too much. So when something delivers, it’s a big deal – often earning a permanent spot in your routine (and a place in your emergency backup stash).
CIA to lose 1,200 while NSA among other agencies reported to face downsizing amid president’s drive to shrink federal workforce
The White House plans to cut staffing at the Central Intelligence Agency by 1,200 positions while other intelligence agencies including the National Security Agency will also shed thousands of jobs, the Washington Post has reported.
A person familiar with the plan confirmed the changes to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
When I saw Bill Murray’s classic comedy I realised that I was trapped in my own unfulfilling time loop
I didn’t know anything about the plot of Groundhog Day before I decided to watch it 10 years ago. I remember collapsing on to the sofa after work – completely exhausted – and putting it on. My girlfriend was already asleep in the next room. Her drinking had been getting steadily worse that year, but I think we were both in denial about it. Most evenings I’d spend alone, so I’d put a movie on in the background for company.
I found it funny at first, watching Bill Murray’s character trapped in a time-loop. But about 20 minutes in, I started feeling this creeping sense of dread. I remember seeing Murray’s white alarm clock going off, waking him up to begin the same day and feeling this horrible spark of recognition. It was like watching my own life play out on the screen in front of me.
Cynthia Erivo plays sextuplets! Katie Holmes is an undertaker! And Kumail Nunjiani is the new Tiger King! The super cool, celebrity-packed show is even wilder than ever
The best thing about Poker Face is that it doesn’t bother trying to shore up what it knows is a flimsy premise. Fans of the first season will recall that Charlie Cale, Natasha Lyonne’s wisecracking 70s detective homage, has an in-built ability to detect a lie as soon as someone tells it. Instead of trying to explain this gift away as the result of a gamma storm or spider bite or covert government experiment, it now accepts that, yeah, she has a “freaky little lie detector trick”, that’s the extent of the idea, got a problem with that? These days, Charlie waves away any queries about it with an “Eh”, a shrug and a cheeky nudge of the baseball cap and aviator shades.
After using her talent to work her way through a series of increasingly preposterous case-of-the-week murders last time, then ending up with the mafia putting out a hit on her, Charlie begins the second season (starting 8 May, 9pm, Sky Max) on the lam once more, only now goons with guns keep popping up and shooting at her. For what could have been a high-concept show, Poker Face is surprisingly fuss-free about all of this, and barely lets a violent mob-based subplot get in the way of what Charlie does best. That is, wandering around small-town America, working out who is a killer and how/why they did it, then exposing them for their terrible crimes. She has to dodge bullets on occasion, sure, but she always keeps her eyes on the prize: coughing out the word “bullshit” and cracking the case.
Our street party tea was a muted celebration, full of uncertainty. Then, as now, we faced a long struggle towards a better world
It is May 2025, it is 4am, and I am sitting up in bed, sleepless, looking out at a huge moon illuminating the still world.
Eighty-five years ago, in 1940, a silently weeping seven-year-old lay on a cracked leatherette sofa in urine-soaked pyjamas, looking through an alien window, praying that that same moon would protect my mum and dad from the killer bombs falling in London.
Today on World Press Freedom Day, there are warnings that US attempts to withdraw from promoting independent journalism will have far-reaching effects
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) – the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda – he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration.
Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law”. The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people.
From Proxima Centauri b and Trappist-1 system to ophidiophobia, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 The longest direct flight from London goes to which city? 2 Until 1752, when did the new year officially begin in England? 3 Which action film hero suffers from ophidiophobia? 4 AE Stallings succeeded Alice Oswald in what role? 5 Which country’s president was shot by his intelligence chief in 1979? 6 Which marsupial is native to North America? 7 Vanwall, in 1958, was the first winner of what title? 8 Who wrote Natural History, the longest surviving single Roman text? What links:
9 Lumbini; Bodh Gaya; Sarnath; Kushinagar? 10 51 Pegasi b; Kepler-22b; Proxima Centauri b; Trappist-1 system? 11 Miller; Marshall; O’Hanlon; Little; Gilet? 12 Gun; orlop; poop; quarter; upper; well? 13 Chateau de Châlus-Chabrol; Pontefract Castle; Bosworth Field? 14 Birmingham (1); Liverpool (6); London (2); Manchester (4); Nottingham (2)? 15 Kim Deal; Kim Gordon; Carol Kaye; Esperanza Spalding; Tina Weymouth?
Saudi Arabia’s extension of its soft power through sport reached into the heart of New York City on Friday night with a grandiose boxing card for a select audience backed by Turki al-Sheikh, the chairman of the Kingdom’s General Entertainment Authority
Tina Fey returns with a starry sitcom, Chalamet’s Dylan biopic is on streaming and the New York quartet make a joyful noise. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews
Connexion
