Record signing and Liverpool talisman continue to toil but it is crumbling foundations at back where real problems lie
The time has come to start judging Alexander Isak fairly as a £125m Liverpool centre forward, Arne Slot said on Friday. In that case judgment must be harsh but, as Britain’s most expensive footballer sat alongside Mohamed Salah on the Liverpool bench while the Premier League champions tried in vain to force an equaliser against Manchester United without them, it was not Slot’s misfiring forward line that warranted the fiercest criticism at Anfield. His defensive foundation has evaporated.
Yes, Isak was largely anonymous in the No 9 role and Salah again poor as his individual toils continued against the club he usually plunders. The Sweden international had his first shot on target in the Premier League as a Liverpool player in the 35th minute, well saved by United’s latest goalkeeper Senne Lammens. Salah squandered a glorious second-half chance in front of the Kop and neither could complain when their numbers eventually came up. Cody Gakpo also struck the woodwork three times and somehow failed to score a second moments after Harry Maguire’s winner.
Australian band’s decision to remove catalogue in protest of CEO’s military investments an easy one, frontman says, and making music with friends remains ‘top of the triangle’
Over their mind-boggling 15-year, 27-album career, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have switched gears with the speed and abandon of a stunt driver in a Fast and Furious film. Can you even describe the six-piece as a psychedelic rock band any more?
Their music to date has encompassed metal, folk, jazz and dance music; they have experimented with dense concept records and microtonal tunings, and this year they’ve been touring both an orchestral show and a rave show, alongside residencies in European prisons and amphitheatres.
The Argentine is widely expected to win league MVP
Playoffs begin with wild-card matches on Wednesday
Lionel Messi left no doubt on Decision Day.
The Argentine icon s cored a hat-trick in a 5-2 victory over Nashville on Saturday night to wrap up Major League Soccer’s Golden Boot award with 29 goals this season.
India fail to chase down target after Knight’s century
England won a last-over thriller against India at Indore on Sunday to seal their place in the World Cup semi-finals, holding two crucial catches at the death to defend 288 and win by just four runs. Earlier Heather Knight’s third ODI century in her 300th international set up the exciting finale.
India were left needing 27 off 18 but, defying England’s recent reputation of falling to pieces under pressure, Linsey Smith conceded just four runs from the 48th over and then defended 14 off the last to ensure England came out on top.
Manchester United fans recognise the pre-match shiver of optimism. Maybe it is blind hope but they know that their team have been able to raise their level in some of the very biggest Premier League matches under Ruben Amorim. They know there have been signs of improvement this season. And was this not a good time to play Liverpool?
It is often the case that it is the prompt for a sharp reality check. After all, nobody ever really knows which United will turn up. Here, it was the version that Amorim has craved, the one he has claimed has been ready to show itself on a regular basis.
Plug-in hybrids pollute more than their manufacturers claim – and delay the real shift to electric and shared mobility
“Why the future is hybrid,” chirruped the Economist in 2004. While electric vehicles (EVs) looked like science fiction, that prediction looked prescient. Fast‑forward 20 years and battery technology has improved dramatically; EVs are affordable. Last week it emerged that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) aren’t very green. The sales pitch had been that motorists could use “clean” battery power for city jaunts and dirty petrol for longer trips. This promised sustainable travel without the anxiety of a limited range. But real‑world tests, by the European non-profit Transport and Environment, show that PHEVs emit just 19% less carbon dioxide than petrol and diesel cars – far short of the 75% claimed in the lab.
Hybrid vehicles are, however, very profitable. Carmakers can charge top dollar for what are essentially re-engineered petrol cars with a battery bolted on. They also remain attractive to policymakers keen for industry sops. By weakening electric vehicle targets, the UK government risks a scandal in pushing hybrids that emit five times more CO2 than claimed.
Grave shortcomings in the care offered to mothers and babies are well documented. But it is not clear that the right lessons have been learned
The startling rise in the cost to the NHS in England of medical negligence cases, and a sharp increase in birth injuries to mothers, are the latest warning signs of deeply troubling failures in maternity services. The £60bn estimate of negligence liabilities, from the National Audit Office, represents a quadrupling in less than 20 years. While some medical specialties have seen falling payouts, those in obstetrics rose. The reason why payments in such negligence cases are so high is that when babies are injured, awards must cover lifetime care needs.
Grave shortcomings in maternity care are widely recognised, along with unjust disparities in outcomes for women from different socioeconomic and racial groups. Preventable deaths and injuries at units in Morecambe Bay, Shrewsbury and Telford, and East Kent, have been among the most shocking patient safety scandals of recent years.
Exclusive: If Keir Starmer made promises to China it could constitute ‘predetermination’, Lord Banner legal opinion concludes
Approving a Chinese super-embassy in east London could be unlawful if ministers gave Beijing assurances about the project in advance, one of the UK’s top planning lawyers has concluded.
If Keir Starmer or his team made promises to the Chinese government about the embassy, it could constitute “actual or apparent predetermination” of the planning application, according to the legal opinion by Lord Banner.
Election in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus will determine whether peace talks to reunify island can be revived
Voters in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus have been casting ballots in a presidential poll seen as pivotal to determining whether peace talks on the divided Mediterranean island can be revived.
In an election watched closely by the international community, the 218,000-strong Turkish Cypriot electorate has a choice: to either support the nationalist incumbent, Ersin Tatar, who advocates a two-state solution to the complex Cyprus problem, or the leftwing veteran, Tufan Erhürman, who backs a return to UN-brokered peace talks.
Given Mo Salah’s recent form (poor) and record against Man Utd (peerless), we may well hear the phrase “Who else?” at some point this afternoon. Opta’s supercomputer reckons there’s a 74.19 per cent chance.
Photojournalist who covered the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the collapse of communism in eastern Europe
The photographer Brian Harris, who has died aged 73 of cancer, left school at 16 to become a messenger boy, and went on to become one of the most respected British photojournalists of his generation.
He travelled the world as a freelance or a staffer for Fleet Street titles including the Times, the Independent (where he was the founding chief photographer), the Sun and the Guardian, covering such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, famine in Ethiopia and Sudan, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, war zones in the Balkans and across Africa, the aftermath of the Falklands war and four US presidential campaigns, including Bill Clinton’s. He also created lyrical landscapes of the countryside around his Essex home.
The leader of Reform UK’s flagship local authority has told her fellow councillors that she launched a hunt for the “cowards” who leaked a recorded meeting in which she said those who disagreed with decisions would have to “fucking suck it up”.
Bitter divisions among Reform members of Kent county council, one of 10 controlled outright by Nigel Farage’s party, were laid bare at the weekend by the Guardian in a leaked video of a chaotic internal meeting.
Former French president set to start five-year sentence for scheme to obtain campaign funds from Muammar Gaddafi’s regime
The former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, will go to prison on Tuesday after a court sentenced him to five years for criminal conspiracy over a scheme to obtain election campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Sarkozy, who was the rightwing president of France between 2007 and 2012, will become the first former head of an EU country to serve time in prison, and the first French postwar leader to be jailed.
Former political adviser to the Irish taoiseach who was at the heart of negotiations for the Good Friday agreement in 1998
As one of the most influential architects of the Northern Ireland peace process, Martin Mansergh was an unexpected figure. Resembling a rumpled academic and speaking with an English accent, he coordinated the Irish government’s engagement with the IRA for several decades.
Mansergh, who has died aged 78 of a heart attack during a trip to Western Sahara with other retired Irish parliamentarians, was educated at a British boarding school and Oxford University yet helped shape the Irish republican dimensions of the agreement.
Ilia Malinin began his Olympic season in devastating form, winning the Grand Prix de France by an extraordinary 40-point margin to underline his dominance of men’s figure skating.
The 20-year-old American, nicknamed the Quad God, landed five quadruple jumps in his free skate on Sunday in Angers to finish with 321.00 points overall – well clear of France’s three-time defending champion Adam Siao Him Fa on 280.95. Georgia’s Nika Egadze was third with 259.41.
Triple-action therapy drug amivantamab could be given as an injection to help treat recurrent or metastatic cancers
Doctors have hailed “incredibly encouraging” trial results that show a triple-action smart jab can shrink tumours in head and neck cancer patients within six weeks.
Head and neck cancer is the world’s sixth most common form of the disease. If it spreads or comes back after standard treatment, patients may be offered immunotherapy and platinum chemotherapy. But if this fails, there is often little else doctors can do.
It has been one of the curiosities of Thomas Tuchel’s rapidly evolving England side that until today the man in possession of the No 10 shirt had not scored all season.
Morgan Rogers put paid to that statistic with a sumptuous strike to equalise for Aston Villa near half-time, before the substitute Emiliano Buendía grabbed an unexpected winner for the visitors with 13 minutes remaining.
Five Yemenis and 15 foreign workers held as Iran-backed group steps up its campaign against international agencies
Houthi rebels have detained 20 employees at a UN facility in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen.
They are holding five Yemenis and 15 international workers but released another 11 after questioning them on Sunday. It was the second raid on a UN building in Sana’a in 24 hours.
Social media didn’t live up to its promises. So why do we think artificial intelligence will be any better?
There is a “hype cycle” that maps the euphoria and hysteria generated by new technology and then the consequent plunge into the “trough of disillusionment” when it fails to deliver on its promises.
The Gartner Hype Cycle was coined in 1995, timely for the dotcom boom, and now traces the trajectory of artificial intelligence. We are at the “peak of inflated expectations” before we nosedive into that aforementioned disillusionment. Some would say we are already in freefall, with companies struggling to convert their investments into productivity.
Wearable sleep trackers may help you measure hours asleep but experts ask how accurate they are, how useful the data is and even what good sleep looks like
The first thing Annie and her partner do when they wake up in the morning is ask each other how well they slept. “And I literally say, ‘I’m not sure yet, let me check,’” – and Annie, a chief people and safety officer, reaches for her smartwatch.
Annie started monitoring because she worried she wasn’t getting enough good-quality sleep. Now she’s a self-confessed sleep data “nerd”, mining her sleep data for insights into her general health and wellbeing, using it to inform lifestyle decisions and even occasionally to guide how much she aims to accomplish in a day.
I grew up in Kabul and Karachi. In both, I learned the value of the quiet rituals observed while no one is watching
When I was leaving London for Melbourne, my eldest sister-in-law told her kids not to forget the “tradition” – to throw a bowl of water behind me as I stepped out the door. Just a small splash on the ground, a gesture older than borders. “La har azaab po aman se,” she whispered in Pashto under her breath – may all hardship stay away from you. The little ones giggled and waved their goodbyes as they spilled the water, somewhere between shy and amused.
My mother used to do this too, back in Afghanistan. Every time I left for a journey, especially international ones, she’d quietly follow me to the gate with a bowl of water, whispering prayers I couldn’t always hear. But this moment, between two western cities, with children growing up in a world so far from where that habit began, felt different. It was softer. Bittersweet. Like watching an old song being hummed in a new language.
Late one evening in 1986, I had stopped at the pub with some friends for what was meant to be one drink. We’d parked in a nearby supermarket car park and I’d left my dog in the back seat with the window rolled down, thinking we wouldn’t be gone long. As my friends continued drinking, I walked alone to fetch my dog, not wanting to leave him alone any longer.
I was having some trouble getting the car door to open when I suddenly felt hands around my neck. A voice behind me said “Give me your purse”. In the grip around my neck, I could feel something sharp, cool and metal against my skin.
Connexion
