The platform was, of course, set by Jürgen Klopp. Arne Slot made note of that through the medium of song.
This is a fun thought from Robert Winiker: “Would it be an idea to stage a joint celebration with the title win five years ago, which was cancelled due to the pandemic? With Jürgen Klopp and the players included?”
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Britain’s stock market is on track to match its longest run of gains in eight years.
The FTSE 100 index has risen by 20 points, or 0.25%, in early trading to 8436 points. That puts the blue-chip shares index on track for its 11th daily rise in a row, a record last set in December 2019 after Boris Johnson’s election win.
Comments from foreign minister Sergei Lavrov about ‘ownership’ follow suggestions from Trump that Ukraine could cede Crimea
Russia claimed it was ready to conduct talks with Ukraine ‘without any preconditions’, AFP said state media reported, after US president Donald Trump questioned Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s willingness to halt the three-year offensive.
But then in other comments, reported almost simultaneously by AFP, the country’s most senior diplomat said that its claims over five Ukrainian regions including Crimea were “imperative” to talks aimed at resolving the conflict.
There’s a crude fascination in seeing the contents of a literary celebrity’s therapy sessions, but we’re surely invading her privacy
Motherhood is a state of continuous loss that is meant to culminate when the dependent baby becomes an independent adult. Joan Didion survived this, as many mothers have, by keeping constant watch over her adopted daughter Quintana, fearing “swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet”. She also survived it, as fewer mothers have, by writing obsessively about the loss she feared. In her arid, fevered masterpiece Play It As It Lays, published when Quintana was four, the narrator’s breakdown is precipitated by her daughter’s long-term hospitalisation with an unnamed mental disorder. A Book of Common Prayer is about the disappearance of the protagonist’s criminal revolutionary daughter. “Marin was loose in the world and could leave it at any time and Charlotte would have no way of knowing” – a description that could be applied to motherhood in general.
The coddling failed. Quintana drank to self-medicate for anxiety and by 33 she was an alcoholic whose therapist wanted her mother to participate in the treatment. And so in 1999 Didion, who had hitherto protected her inner life with her trademark dark glasses and stylish sentences with their wilfully “impenetrable polish”, found herself seeing Freudian analyst and psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon. Now her notes on their sessions have been, in my view misguidedly, gathered from her archive and packaged as a book.
Captivating film based on a true story follows an older man, and the man caught burgling his home, on a poignant journey to lay his wife to rest
Love is a many-splendored thing in this idiosyncratic, highly stylised debut from Vietnamese film-maker Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc. Blurring the lines between genres and styles, the first half of the film unfurls through a technique commonly seen in silent cinema: the iris shot. Within a circular frame we see a burglary gone wrong, a puzzling plaster cast in the shape of a woman and the burgeoning of a strange friendship, all set within an ordinary flat.
Inspired by a news story, the central premise is at once macabre and moving. Inside the plaster cast is the body of the owner’s wife, who died 10 years ago. Having caught a young burglar (Psycho Neo) red handed, the older man (Lưu Đức Cường) asks for his help on an unusual quest: transporting the body to the couple’s chosen resting place in a faraway desert. Though powered by love, it’s also a journey towards death.
We would like to hear from Liverpool fans all over the world and their highlights of the season after the team’s Premier League victory
It’s been a formidable season for Liverpool, who were crowned Premier League champions after beating Tottenham 5-1 at Anfield. They have won a record-equalling 20th league title bring them level with Manchester United.
It’s the club’s second title in 35 years, although they had chances to potentially win three trophies. Still, manager Arne Slot couldn’t have asked for a much better first season after taking over from the legendary Jürgen Klopp.
Alleged attack on facility holding African detainees raises fresh questions over US military operations in region
Yemen’s Houthi rebels say a US airstrike has killed 68 people in a prison holding African detainees. The US military had no immediate comment.
The alleged strike in Yemen’s Saada governorate, a stronghold for the Houthis, is the latest incident in the country’s decade-long war in which people from Ethiopia and other countries who have risked crossing Yemen for a chance to work in neighbouring Saudi Arabia have died.
Threat from jihadists had widely been perceived to be extinguished, but recent clashes suggest otherwise
On the road running from Maiduguri’s airport to the city, the freshly repainted walls of a girls’ college stood in defiant opposition to a years-long campaign by the jihadists of Boko Haram to make good on their name, which translates as “western education is forbidden”.
At a nearby roundabout on the outskirts of the capital of Nigeria’s north-eastern Borno state, three uniformed men sprinted after a cement truck, hoping to collect a road levy. As the driver sped away, they slowed down in the 42C heat, smiled regretfully, and waited for the next heavy duty vehicle to pass.
Ten men nicknamed ‘grandpa robbers’ accused of stealing jewellery worth millions from American TV star in 2016
Ten people nicknamed the “grandpa robbers” by French media are to go on trial charged with stealing jewellery worth millions of euros from the American reality TV star Kim Kardashian when she attended Paris fashion week in 2016.
The suspects, whose ages range from 35 to 78, will appear in a court in the French capital on Monday afternoon at the start of a month-long trial in which Kardashian, 44, will testify in May.
Turki al-Sheikh had booked a second date before Saturday’s dramatic slugfest although loser’s promoter fears for fighter
“I want my revenge, man,” Conor Benn said quietly in the early hours of Sunday morning as his bruised face reflected his emotional pain after he lost against Chris Eubank Jr in a wild brawl at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. “I want my revenge.”
Those typical boxing words echoed the misguided clamour for a rematch with Eubank Jr. Eddie Hearn admitted that he would prefer Benn to move back down two divisions to welterweight but the promoter grinned helplessly: “The public, His Excellency, everybody’s going to want the rematch.”
Booker-nominated writer Deborah Levy is thrilling audiences with her play about a psychoanalyst dealing with a very unusual patient, seized with anxiety about modern life. She explains how it came about
Two years ago, Deborah Levy came across a cartoon that sparked her imagination. It featured a Freud-like figure sitting opposite a rabbit on an analyst’s couch. Levy, a three-times Booker nominated novelist and award-winning author of nonfiction, had began her career as a playwright but had not written a script for 25 years until she came across the image. “As soon as I saw it,” she says, “I heard dialogue in my mind: a conversation, a serious, difficult conversation between a professor and a rabbit, about contemporary anxiety. I knew it was a play,” says Levy.
The premise may seem absurd but that is precisely the point – absurdism is a way of dealing with themes that have proved, in the wider world, divisive and even explosive to debate. Because the two-hander includes a rabbit, it makes space for humour, for misunderstandings.
From the Canadian elections to universities and civil society, the campaign to turn the tide against anti-liberal nationalists is at last underway
Liberals of all countries, unite! Just as anti-liberal powers outside the west are becoming stronger than ever, the assault on everything we stand for has been joined by the United States. Against this massed onslaught of anti-liberal nationalists we need a determined fightback of liberal internationalists. Canada’s election this week can contribute a strong mounted brigade.
A core insight of liberalism is that, if people are to live together well in conditions of freedom, power always needs to be dispersed, cross-examined and controlled. Faced with the raw, bullying assertion of might, whether from Washington, Moscow or Beijing, we now have to create countervailing concentrations of power. In the long history of liberalism, a free press, the law, labour unions, a business community kept separate from political power, NGOs, truth-seeking institutions such as universities, civil resistance, multilateral organisations and international alliances have all served – alongside multiparty politics and regular free and fair elections – to constrain the men who would be kings.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
Palace’s best-paid player shows his class, Ipswich meet their fate and Mateo Kovacic sounds a warning
In April 1964 a side from north London came to Anfield with Liverpool one good result from winning the league, and conceded five. “Arsenal did little to allay the general suspicion that they were there just to be sacrificed,” Eric Todd wrote in his report for the Guardian. This time it was Tottenham but otherwise, for anyone whose memory stretches back 61 years it was a familiar story. Time and again Spurs meekly surrendered possession in dangerous areas, and while they defended in numbers – which suggests willing – they did so with terrifying inefficiency, which suggests poor organisation. Their focus is now fully on the Europa League, but if Liverpool had been a little more ruthless this would have been truly another real embarrassment in a season full of them. In April 1988 it was Spurs themselves who came to Anfield with Liverpool needing one point to guarantee the title. It had been a terrible season for Tottenham, and they were only just outside the bottom three. They lost 1-0. “Tottenham remain in the relegation penumbra,” wrote Stephen Bierley in his Guardian report. “Strange it seems that nobody much under the age of 30 will remember them being champions. Who would have thought it?” Simon Burnton
Caffeine can increase fat oxidation, but there are more effective ways to change your body composition
‘When you talk about ‘burning fat’, you’re talking about the oxidation of body fat; the breakdown of lipids into fatty acids to use them as fuel,” says Bethan Crouse, a performance nutritionist from Loughborough University. It’s the process that needs to occur for someone to lose weight or go through “body recomposition”; losing fat and gaining muscle.
Regular exercise can increase rates of fat oxidation, Crouse says. (When we work out at low-moderate intensity, fat provides the majority of the fuel for working muscles. As intensity increases, this will shift more towards carbohydrates.) However, she says, “There’s not necessarily a food that burns fat.” For a food to oxidise fat, consuming it would have to “replicate the effects of exercise”.
We want to hear from people about their tipping habits
People in the US are tipping less than they have in years, with gratuities falling from a Covid pandemic peak.
Average full-service restaurant tips in the fourth quarter of 2024 fell to 19.3%, a six-year low and down from a high of 19.9% in the first quarter of 2021, according to data from Toast.
An impassioned plea to save our rivers combines poetry and adventure
Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a “dying” river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: “Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants – well, where would you even start?”
He’s in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, “this small country with a vast moral imagination”, became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, “since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for existence of all living beings”. This enshrinement of the Rights of Nature set off similar developments in other countries. In 2017, a law was passed in New Zealand that afforded the Whanganui River protection as a “spiritual and physical entity”. In India, five days later, judges ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna should be recognised as “living entities”. And in 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu (AKA Magpie River) became the first river in Canada to be declared a “legal person [and] living entity”. The Rights of Nature movement has now reached the UK, with Lewes council in East Sussex recognising the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse.
The most heated puzzle about the drinking straw is “does it have one hole or two?” (This debate periodically goes viral and for those who want to suck up its delicious complexities I recommend this chat with mathematician Jordan Ellenberg.)
Today’s puzzles are also about straws, but are much less controversial.
Exclusive: Force, which had dropped objection to plan, says protests of more than 500 people would impede traffic and require extra resources
China’s proposed “super-embassy” in London would require additional police officers to deal with any large protests involving thousands of people, the Metropolitan police have said before a decision by ministers.
Despite having dropped its official objection to the proposals, the Met “maintains concerns” that large protests of more than 500 people outside the embassy would impede traffic and “require additional police resource”, said the deputy assistant commissioner Jon Savell
Prosecutors are using harsh anti-smuggling laws to jail people who have no connection to criminal offences, say migrants’ lawyers
Former law student Samuel, 19, fled his home town of Geneina shortly after it was ransacked during one of the worst massacres of Sudan’s brutal civil war, which has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than 13 million people.
After making it overland to Libya, Samuel spent two days crossing the Mediterranean in June before being rescued by a cargo ship and escorted by the Greek coastguard to Crete.
The ursine protagonists are largely relegated to fart-gag sidekicks in this phoned-in attempt at a dystopian sci-fi
When George Michael recorded Careless Whisper, there can be no doubt his ultimate ambition for it would have been to soundtrack a garish animated sequence in which two anthropomorphic bears gambol through a prairie of giant fungus experiencing ecstatic visions as hallucinogenic spores rain down on them. Such is the frantic way of this Chinese cartoon franchise, as relentless and exhausting as ever in its 11th feature-film instalment. Five minutes in, before the credits, it has crammed in a post-apocalyptic prologue, oodles of eco-babble, a time-travelling tyke and an avalanche.
This latest one jumps on the fungal-panic bandwagon: Saylor (voiced by Nicola Vincent in the English-language version) has nipped back 100 years to locate the original spores at the root of a pestilence that has eradicated most of life on Earth. It turns out that hapless nature guide Vick (Chris Boike), seen polluting the forest with his tourists, was responsible for spreading them After Saylor fails to kill the mushroom in the cradle, the pair – along with Vick’s forest buddies, the bears Bramble (Joseph S Lambert) and Briar (Patrick Freeman) – are whisked back to the future. They discover a fungus-carpeted nightmare of a planet, overshadowed by a giant skyscraping toadstool.
The people of the Sierra Norte have achieved a rare balance – preserving an ancient way of mountain life while welcoming visitors
When I reach the mountaintop chapel, I slump on the dry stone wall, wheezing in the thin air, marvelling at what combination of brawn and piety must have been needed to build such a thing at such a height. It might not be a Sunday, but I can tell that mass at 3,000 metres must be magnificent. Open walls reach out to the rolling slopes of the Sierra Norte, 35 miles east of Oaxaca City in southern Mexico, with virgin pine in every direction. Somewhere unseen, a brown-backed solitaire bird lifts a lonely song over the valley. Then comes the bark of warring crows and, most exciting of all, the quick peeps of a hummingbird, believed here to ferry messages between the living and dead. At this height, even to a heathen like me, the urge to pay tribute is understandable.
My guide, Eric, who must have a third lung, judging by his ability to tell stories on the climb, becomes quiet and crosses himself before the altar. I’m a little surprised at this show of devotion. Down in the small town of Tlacolula de Matamoros, he had shown us a site the Indigenous Zapotecs used to praise the sacred mountain above – before the Spanish came and plonked a church on the same spot. The colonialists’ intention, Eric explained, was erasure. But when conversion comes at the point of a sword, some resistance seems inevitable. Here, Indigenous signs hide in Catholic icons. Dark stones in holy corners hold animist engravings. Duality is everywhere. Praise whispered in the name of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother of Christ to Mexican Catholics, is also meant for Huitzilopochtli, the old sun god.
Dashing through labyrinthine courses of tunnels, jumps and seesaws at breakneck speed, agility shows prioritise skill over pedigree. But can Tim Dowling last the course?
Before every dog agility event, the human handlers walk the course as a group – without the dogs – wandering slowly round the ring with one hand or the other outstretched. It’s an eerie thing to watch, like a crowd of bleary eyed tourists wearily progressing through an airport.
But it’s important: the dogs don’t get to try the course beforehand, so their handlers have to formulate a strategy to guide their pets from jump to tunnel to seesaw in the correct order.
After years of civil war and precarious peace, Covid-19 and the Beirut explosions of 2020 once again plunged Lebanon into crisis. But photographer Rania Matar has found inspiration for her project Where Do I Go? in the country’s women. ‘Instead of focusing on destruction, I chose to focus on their majestic presence, their creativity, strength, dignity, and resilience,’ she says
Margaret Murphy left her family in Brisbane to make a career for herself in London. Fifteen years on, she and her husband Peter have both grown – but they haven’t grown apart
Margaret Murphy had a lovely house in Brisbane, Australia, and four children when she noticed “a cumulative feeling” that she wanted a different sort of life from that of her husband, Peter. They had been happily married for 30 years but their children had grown up, and in the emptier house their “different expectations” became more pronounced. “I wanted to see the world before I got too old, and have adventures,” she says.
So, at 56, Murphy travelled alone to the UK, where she knew no one, and at 60 started the first full-time job of her life.
The suspect in a car-ramming attack that killed 11 people and injured dozens at a Filipino heritage festival in the Canadian city of Vancouver has been charged with eight counts of second degree murder, prosecutors have said.
More charges were possible against Kai-Ji Adam Lo, 30, the British Columbia prosecution service said. Investigators ruled out terrorism and said Lo had a history of mental health issues.
Centrists won’t beat Reform UK by echoing its messages. They should emphasise the true unworkability of policies like Brexit
In the middle of an election or the early stages of an administration, populist politics can feel like a liberation. The unsayable is said. Political rules are broken. Constitutional restrictions are flouted. Populist rallies are boisterous, seemingly uninhibited, with enemies of the movement taunted or intimidated.
For many voters, and even some activists and politicians, conventional politics can be boring, with its careful rhetoric and predictably choreographed campaigns, its compromised and complicated centrist policies. Populism promises something much more visceral, with larger-than-life leaders and dramatic national goals: “make America great again”, “take back control”. Digital media, with its constant hunger for brevity and straightforward narratives, is a perfect environment for populism’s seductive claim that politics is actually quite simple.
A seafood pasta laced with butter and Malaysian flavours, and gloriously squidgy lasagne ‘noodles’ tossed with spiced lamb mince
My mum always says our love of pasta comes from the noodle culture we grew up with, and she’s spot on. Sometimes, I crave a buttery bowl of carbs, but one that’s layered with the bold, fishy flavours of Malaysia. This bucatini with prawns is one of my favourite meals when no one is watching. And when I’m short on time but craving squidgy carbs tangled with spiced lamb mince, the cuminy noodles are my self-loving pleasure. Completely incorrect in its origins, but undeniably delicious.
At vigils across the Canadian city, a host of nationalities and communities gather to remember victims of Saturday’s car-ramming attack
The vigil on Sunday evening drew a crowd so large that police in Vancouver had to move the crime scene barriers back so that people would not spill out on to the busy traffic along 41st Avenue.
“It’s amazing. It’s really a show of how important the Filipino community is just very broadly,” says Chelsea Brager.
About 14% of premature deaths in England attributable to unhealthy food, the most among surveyed countries
Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to a international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.
Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%, according to research in countries including the US and England.
Investing in space vital for sustaining quality of life amid ‘volatile geopolitical’ landscape, says Josef Aschbacher
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has prompted a shift away from ties with America by European political leaders and a rapid increase in defence spending as the continent’s security reaches a “turning point”. The ripples from Europe’s newfound desire for self-reliance could go even further: as far as space.
Europe’s drive for more autonomy means it must also increase its invesment in space technology, according to Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency (Esa), the intergovernmental body tasked with overseeing the space exploration ambitions of European countries including much of the EU and the UK.
From its cavernous domed bazaar to its ravishingly muscular museum, the Uzbek capital has one of the world’s wildest collections of modernist gems. Will its bid for world heritage status succeed?
A pair of huge turquoise domes swell up on the skyline of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, perching on the jumbled horizon like two upturned bowls. One gleams with ceramic tiles, glazed in traditional Uzbek patterns. The other catches the light with a pleated canopy of azure metal ribs. Both recall the majestic cupolas that crown the mosques of the country’s ancient Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Khiva and Bukhara. But here, they cover structures of a very different kind.
The ribbed metal dome crowns the home of the state circus, its futuristic-looking big top seeming to have been crossed with a UFO. Built in 1976, it’s big enough to hold an audience of 3,000. The ceramic dome, meanwhile, looms over the bustling chaos of the city’s main market, Chorsu Bazaar, built in 1980 as a wonderworld of fruit, meat and fish, sprawling across an area the size of two football pitches. Both are dazzling works of Soviet modernism, and part of a remarkable group of buildings that the country has just submitted to Unesco, in the hope of having them granted world heritage status.
Meeting will hear how exposure to verbal abuse leads to biological changes and can make mental ill-health likelier
Being shouted at by their parents reshapes children’s brains and makes them more likely to have mental ill-health and struggle to maintain friendships, MPs will hear on Monday.
Verbal abuse by adults can leave children unable to enjoy pleasure and seeing the world as threatening, experts in child development and mental health will tell a meeting at Westminster.
Exclusive: Previously unseen footage of actor larking about with friends at home upends Garbo’s aloof image
She is remembered as the ultimate reclusive film star, following her shock retirement at the height of her success. But the enduring image of Greta Garbo is being challenged by a new documentary, which will show that, far from withdrawing from life – as in her most famous line, “I want to be alone” – she lived it to the full, partying with close friends.
The British film-maker Lorna Tucker has been given access to previously unseen behind the scenes footage in which the star, once described as “the most alluring, vibrant and yet aloof character ever to grace the motion picture screen”, can be seen larking about and laughing.
Social media incitement following last summer’s riots appears to be new tactic against Hong Kong exiles
One morning last August, a troubling message appeared in a social media group for Hongkongers in the UK. It was already a tense time to be an immigrant. Rioters, propelled by false claims online that the man who had murdered children in Southport was an asylum seeker, were descending on hotels housing refugees, trying to burn them alive.
The message alerted the Hongkongers to posts on far-right channels suggesting some new targets. “They all help refugees who come to the UK to take resources,” one of them read.
Our political history is one of catastrophe, communism, and developing powerful antibodies against oppression
In 2016, one year after the rightwing populist Law and Justice party won an overall majority in Poland, there was a knock at a door. The mother of a young journalist opened it. To her astonishment, it was the security services looking for her son. No details were provided. Thus began an informal campaign by the authorities against the media and civil society in Poland, including our thinktank, Kultura Liberalna. After hearing the news about the journalist, we called Aleksander Smolar. The legendary anti-communist dissident, who ran his own NGO, told us that the security services were also trying to arrange “informal” meetings with his staff. And he comforted us: “Don’t worry, we’ve had a playbook for this kind of situation since the 1960s.”
At that moment, we almost travelled back in time. We spoke about responding to this new regime as if we were once again under communism. What is striking in retrospect is that we all knew what to do. Our eastern European political culture, shaped by historical catastrophes, has developed some antibodies against oppressive power. Over the past centuries, the state has often been wiped off the map or occupied by foreign aggressors. Adversity sparks initiative.
Each year, hundreds of potentially world-changing treatments are discarded because scientists run out of cash. But where big pharma or altruists fear to tread, my friend and I have a solution. It’s repugnant, but it will work
The actor has seen the best and worst of Hollywood, from directors like Paul Thomas Anderson to the notorious Harvey Weinstein. She talks about her #MeToo moment, her difficult childhood and her new movie, Chosen Family
For almost all her life, Heather Graham says, she was a “people pleaser”. It was encouraged in childhood, she says, this obligation to put others’ needs above her own, and it endured even after the 1997 film Boogie Nights had made her a star and she had severed all contact with her “judgmental, authoritarian” parents.
Now 55, Graham was in her 40s before she recognised her self-sabotaging tendencies, and tried to correct course. “I realised, no, actually I can just ask myself, ‘What do I want?’ and make myself happy,” she says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “I wish I could have had this when I was 20 or 15. If I wasn’t trying to please other people, what would I have done?” It affected her romantic life and sometimes her work. “There were moments where I feel like I could have stood up for myself more,” she says.
Trump expresses newfound sympathy for his Ukrainian counterpart, saying he ‘wants to do something good for his country’ – key US politics stories from Sunday 27 April at a glance
Donald Trump appears to have warmed to Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the two presidents met at the Vatican, with the US leader emerging from talks with a plea for Vladimir Putin: “stop shooting”.
Trump on Sunday said Zelenskyy “wants to do something good” for Ukraine and is “working hard”, adding he was also “surprised and disappointed” that Russia continued to strike Ukraine after discussions between his peace envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Putin.
What does it mean to be working class in Britain in 2025? Danny Lavelle reports
How much does the way you speak define your social class? What about your parents’ jobs or your source of income, schooling and housing?
The journalist and author Danny Lavelle has long been fascinated by the concept of class because of the way his life has unfolded. Moving between foster care, university, sleeping rough and becoming an Orwell prize-winning writer has led him to question how much the notion of class can help us understand life in 21st-century Britain.
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