Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong pro-democracy media tycoon, is facing life in prison after being found guilty of national security and sedition offences, in one of the most closely watched rulings since the city’s return to Chinese rule in 1997.
Soon after the ruling was delivered, rights and press groups decried the verdict as a “sham conviction” and an attack on press freedom.
Josh Tongue comes in for Gus Atkinson for Adelaide Test
Brook rues ‘shocking shots’ in Perth and Brisbane
England have made one change to their line-up for the third Ashes Test, with Josh Tongue coming in as a like-for-like replacement for Gus Atkinson in the bowling attack.
Seamer Atkinson failed to take a wicket in the series opener in Perth, although he did make a useful 37 runs with the bat in the second innings, before returning figures of 3-151 in the second Test in Brisbane.
Australia experienced one of its deadliest mass shootings in its history on Sunday when two gunmen opened fire on a Jewish celebration at Bondi in Sydney. At least 16 people are dead, including one of the alleged killers.
Here is what we know so far:
On Sunday at 6.47pm local time, police and emergency services were called to Archer Park next to Sydney’s Bondi beach after reports of gunshots.
Footage shared on social media showed two gunman firing continuously at a large group who had gathered to celebrate the Jewish festival of Hanukah.
At least 16 people are dead, including one of the alleged shooters. Among the dead are holocaust survivor Alexander Kleytman, London-born rabbi Eli Schlanger, French national Dan Elkayam, businessman Reuven Morrison, retired police officer Peter Meagher and a 10-year-old girl. Police believe the oldest victim is 87.
Forty-two people were taken to hospital after the attack. At 1pm local time on Monday, there were 27 people in Sydney hospitals. Six were in a critical condition, six were in a critical but stable condition and 15 were in a stable condition.
Two police officers were among the injured and were both in a critical but stable condition.
Police said they were treating the attack as an act of terrorism.
The alleged gunmen were a 50-year-old, who was shot by police and died at the scene, and his 24-year-old son, who suffered critical injuries and was taken to hospital under police guard where he remained on Monday.
Police have not named the alleged gunmen, but media have identified them as Naveed Akram and his father, Sajid Akram.
Naveed Akram is an Australian-born citizen, the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said. His father arrived in 1998 on a student visa, transferred in 2001 to a partner visa and, after trips overseas, had been on resident return visas three times.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said the son first came to the attention of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) in October 2019. He was examined “on the basis of being associated with others”.
New South Wales police and the director general of Asio, Mike Burgess, said one of the shooters was known to authorities, “but not in an immediate threat perspective”.
The NSW police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, said the father was a licensed firearms holder with six guns.
Bomb disposal experts removed two active improvised explosive devices from the scene. Police said on Monday a third IED was located at Bondi.
The outrageous Scottish sitcom became a sleeper hit – then its co-creator died tragically. Ahead of its festive special, the stars open up about the show’s poignant comeback
When taxi drivers in London started shouting punchlines at him – that’s when Jonathan Watson knew that Two Doors Down, the BBC Scotland sitcom set in a Glasgow suburb, had gone from slow-burn to blazing.
The yelling is appropriate in itself, since Watson’s character, Colin, is congenitally unfiltered. Whether it’s telling his neighbours they needn’t worry about a spate of burglaries because “nobody’ll target your place – they’ll want stuff they can actually sell”, or sharing the secrets of his Tinder success: “You have a chat: ‘How are you? I just put on a wash,’ and the next thing she’s in my bed, well more on top of it with a towel down …”
Revolution is still being sought three decades after the landmark ruling with a Dutch lawyer calling for a collective bargaining agreement for players
On 15 December 1995, judges at the European court of justice (CJEU) took two minutes to bring an end to a legal process that had lasted five years. The Bosman rule, as it was known, was to stand, the judges said. European football clubs were no longer allowed to demand transfer fees for players whose contracts had expired, with governing bodies stopped from capping the number of Europeans in any team. The man whose dogged legal pursuit had brought about these changes, Jean‑Marc Bosman, emerged from a crowd of cameras and well‑wishers to give his verdict. “I have got to the top of the mountain and I am now very tired,” he said.
For Bosman himself, it was downhill from there. “In the past I got a lot of promises but never received anything,” he told the Observer in 2015, claiming he “earned nothing” from the changes that ensued. He went bankrupt, was treated for alcoholism and was found guilty of assault against his then partner in 2013, resulting in a community service order that included mowing the grass of his local football pitch. There can be no argument, however, that the ruling that took his name was historic and, 30 years on, it has helped bring about a revolution in the sport from which the man himself was ultimately shunned.
Resolution Foundation report comes in week when data is expected to show October unemployment rise
Young people are bearing the brunt of Britain’s jobs downturn, according to a report, before official figures this week that are expected to show the UK unemployment rate rising to 5.1%.
The Resolution Foundation thinktank said a “jobs deficit” was pushing a growing number of graduates and non-graduates into unemployment as employers reduced hiring.
He wrote poems named after Kylie songs and named his collection of erotic fiction after her indie album. He even loved the B-sides. So what did the avant garde writer find so inspiring about the mini Melbourne marvel?
Kevin Killian was obsessed with stars. Not in a metaphysical sense, like the grand lineage of poets that went before him, but the celebrity kind. Some were A-listers – he kept a vast database on Julia Roberts – and some more obscure. In 2000, taken by the work of cult literary sensation JT LeRoy, and confusion about their identity, Killian gave public readings of their work in San Francisco, where he had lived for 20 years after moving from New York. He would also turn unknown poets into local celebrities, hosting poetry events and making rapturous introductions to crowds that were occasionally outnumbered by the people on stage. “Anyone he admired was an A-lister,” says poet and friend, Evan Kennedy, “especially unknown poets. He’d enthuse about someone, and I’d say ‘Who?’ Kevin engaged the Bay Area poetry scene like Warhol did his Factory – but unlike Warhol, it wasn’t centred around him or his work.”
Killian – a figure in San Francisco’s New Narrative movement, alongside writers such as Kathy Acker and Robert Glück – saved his biggest celebrity obsession, however, for Kylie Minogue. She ran through his work like letters in a stick of rock. In 2008, he published Action Kylie, a poetry collection that included works named after Kylie songs (Slow, Spinning Around, Your Disco Needs You), and more abstract scenarios, such as the lovelorn An Audience with Kylie Minogue, in which lyrics from Fever intertwine with the mundanity of Love Hearts sweets. A year later, in 2009, Killian published Impossible Princess, an award-winning collection of gay erotic fiction named after Kylie’s misunderstood 1997 opus. She’d crop up elsewhere too, reflecting Killian’s bonafides as a proper fan. Tightrope, from 2014’s Tweaky Village collection, is named after a Kylie B-side, and highlights how “All her best songs saved as B-sides or just leaked on to the internet, where they live on as fan favourites”.
After weeks of allegations of schoolboy racism, the Reform leader is doubling down. And our political establishment is allowing it
Just as I was starting to write this column, an email alert popped up on my screen. “Punters back Nigel for prime minister after Keir Starmer,” it read, placing the Reform leader second in the odds market after Wes Streeting. What a weird, dissonant duality this is. Nigel Farage is in his fourth week of revelations about alleged racist behaviour at school, and yet, here we are. This is one of those twilight-zone moments in British politics, where it seems something is going to “cut through” any minute now. For a moment it seems as if it absolutely will. And then, there’s a loss of momentum and a return to the status quo. In my mind it manifests like a battle of physical forces, acting on one another. Journalistic investigations, testimonies, whistleblowers, all as a sort of storm that blows on a political actor who may be knocked off his feet, but still manages to cling on by his fingernails, until the gale blows over.
Up scrambles Farage, a few pieces and more than a few polling points knocked off him, but still in place. This is, so far, what he is managing to survive – the testimonies of some 28 of Farage’s contemporaries at Dulwich college who have told the Guardian that they experienced or witnessed racist or antisemitic behaviour when he was a teenager. Jewish students were taunted; “gas them,” Farage said, “Hitler was right”. A black student, much younger than the then 17-year-old Farage, was told: “That’s the way back to Africa.” The allegations amount, in my reading, to a sort of obsessive campaign against minority students, pursued with the kind of bewildering commitment that anyone who has ever been bullied will feel in their bones.
RHS predicts big shift in gardening habits as green-fingered Britons adapt to climate breakdown
Bouquets of cut flowers will be swapped for tabletop vegetable plants next year, the Royal Horticultural Society has said, as the UK charity announces its top plant trend predictions for 2026.
Mini-planters of aubergines, chillies, peppers and tomatoes will be displayed in homes instead of flowers, as breeders develop dwarf varieties that are decorative and capable of supplementing the weekly shop, the RHS says.
At least two people were killed and nine others injured in Saturday attack that occurred in engineering building on Providence, Rhode Island campus
A person of interest detained after a mass shooting at Brown University that killed two students and injured nine is being released after the investigation took law enforcement authorities in a “different direction,” officials said Sunday night.
The disclosure, made at a hastily convened late night news conference, represents a stunning turn of events in an investigation into killings that rattled the Ivy League campus, and came more than 12 hours after officials had announced that they had taken a person into custody.
The Rhode Island attorney general, Peter Neronha, said of the man who was detained earlier, there is “no basis to consider him a person of interest.”
Crisis-hit Paris institution still reeling from jewel heist in dispute over staffing, renovations and ticket price rises
The crisis-hit Louvre museum in Paris was closed on Monday as workers began a strike to demand urgent renovations and staffing increases, and protested against a rise in ticket prices for most non-EU visitors, including British and American tourists.
The world’s most-visited museum – which has had a difficult few months after a jewel heist, a damaging water leak and safety fears over a gallery ceiling – could face days of partial or total closure at one of its busiest times of the year if many of its 2,100-strong workforce vote to continue striking.
Family friend, sources in Russia and Syria, and leaked data help give rare insight into life of dictator’s reclusive household
In 2011, a group of teenage boys spray-painted a warning on to a wall in their school playground: “It’s your turn, Doctor.” The graffiti was a thinly veiled threat that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, a London-trained ophthalmologist, would be next in the line of Arab dictators toppled by the then raging Arab spring.
It took 14 years, during which 620,000 were killed and nearly 14 million displaced, but eventually the doctor’s turn came and Assad was deposed, fleeing to Moscow in the middle of the night.
Emergency help should be available, but some being forced to travel 100 miles or go private, says Healthwatch England
People needing emergency dental care in England are being denied help from the NHS despite guidance saying that it should be available, in some cases resorting to risky self-treatment such as pulling out their own teeth, the patient watchdog has found.
Patients who experience a sudden dental crisis such as a broken tooth, abscess or severe tooth pain are meant to be able to get help from their dentist or by calling NHS 111.
After years as Hollywood’s romcom darling, Hudson is putting music at the centre of her career – and after her show-stealing turn in Song Sung Blue, the Oscar buzz is growing
The first voice I hear when I enter the hotel room to meet Kate Hudson belongs to her 21-year-old son, Ryder, who speaks from the end of a phone: “Love you, Mum!”
Doesn’t everyone? You don’t have to be related to Hudson to consider her a joyous proposition – a great performer who hasn’t yet made a great film. It was a quarter-century ago in Almost Famous, her breakthrough picture, that she first proved she could hoist a movie out of the doldrums while making the task appear as effortless as blow-drying her hair. Without her performance as Penny Lane, the rock’n’roll muse who describes herself as a “band-aid” rather than a groupie, Cameron Crowe’s dopey valentine to the 1970s of his youth would have been Almost Forgettable.
It started out as a fringe musical about an outlandish war plan – and became a West End and Broadway smash. As the show hits China, Australia and Mexico, its ‘nerd’ creators explain how they went global with a box of hats and a dream
Natasha Hodgson is wondering what to make of all the straight women who have developed a crush on her. Or, to put it more accurately, all the straight women who have developed a crush on her when she’s dressed as a second world war naval intelligence officer and speaking in a silly voice. But is it really Hodgson these woman have fallen for? Or is it Ewen Montagu, the bombastic, braces-wearing war hero she plays in the hit musical Operation Mincemeat?
“The confusion is real,” says Hodgson. “These women come to the show believing themselves to be straight, then they have a total identity crisis. But hey – if that’s not what musical theatre is for, I don’t know what is!”
Though once so despairing she thought of giving up the law for art, Kateryna Rashevska is still pushing for the return of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by the invaders
At only 28, the human rights lawyer Kateryna Rashevska has become the public face of Ukraine’s campaign to repatriate children forcibly deported to Russia. She knows this means she is being watched.
The past two years have seen the Ukrainian addressing the UN security council, the US Senate and writing submissions to the international criminal court (ICC), which then issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children.
The comforting tourist-brochure idea of what Italian food looks like obscures a story shaped by hunger, migration and innovation
Alberto Grandi is the author of La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste and a professor of food history at the University of Parma
Italy’s cuisine has now joined Unesco’s “intangible” heritage list, an announcement greeted within the country with the sort of collective euphoria usually reserved for surprise World Cup runs or the resignation of an unpopular prime minister. Not because the world needed permission to enjoy pizza – it clearly didn’t – but because the news soothed a longstanding national irritation: France and Japan, recognised in 2010 and 2013, had beaten us to it. For Italy’s culinary patriots, this had become a psychological pebble in the shoe: a tiny, persistent reminder that someone else had been validated first.
Yet the strength of Italian cuisine has never rested on an ancient, coherent culinary canon. Most of what passes for ancient “regional tradition” was assembled in the late 20th century, largely for tourism and domestic reassurance. The real history of Italian food is turbulent: a saga of hunger, improvisation, migration, industrialisation and sheer survival instinct. It is not a serene lineage of grandmothers, sunlit tables and recipes carved in marble. It is closer to a national long-distance sprint from starvation – not quite the imagery Italy chose to present to Unesco.
Alberto Grandi is the author of La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste and a professor of food history at the University of Parma
Authorities investigating ‘apparent homicide’ after 78-year-old director of Stand By Me and The Princess Bride was discovered dead at LA home with wife
Rob Reiner, the director of beloved films including When Harry Met Sally, Misery, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride and This is Spinal Tap, has died aged 78 in an apparent homicide, along with his 68-year-old wife Michele Singer Reiner.
Reports first began to emerge on Sunday afternoon that the bodies of a 78-year-old man and a 68-year-old woman had been found by authorities inside a home owned by Reiner in Brentwood, Los Angeles, after a medical aid request was made to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Progressing from child labourer to billionaire, Lai used his power and wealth to promote democracy, which ultimately pitted him against authorities in Beijing
The verdict was expected. Long a thorn in the side of Beijing, Lai, a 78-year-old media tycoon and activist, was a primary target of the most recent and definitive crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Authorities cast him as a traitor and a criminal.
Rozen had attended the Chanukah by the Sea event with her family when the terrorist attack began that evening, bringing a terrifying end to the day’s Jewish celebration of light.
Blaise Metreweli expected to say UK faces new ‘age of uncertainty’ in speech identifying Kremlin as key threat
Assassination plots, sabotage, cyber-attacks and the manipulation of information by Russia and other hostile states mean that “the frontline is everywhere”, the new head of MI6 will warn on Monday.
Blaise Metreweli, giving her first speech in the job, is expected to say the UK faces a new “age of uncertainty” where the rules of conflict are being rewritten, particularly in light of wider Kremlin aggression after the invasion of Ukraine.
The alleged gunmen behind the Bondi beach attack are a father-son duo suspected of using legally obtained firearms to commit the massacre, according to police.
MI6 chief to deliver remarks on Monday warning ‘chaos is a feature not a bug in the Russian approach’; European leaders to join day two of talks in Berlin. What we know on day 1,391
The head of Britain’s foreign spy service, known as MI6, will warn that Russia poses an “aggressive, expansionist, and revisionist” threat, in her first speech since taking office. Blaise Metreweli took over from Richard Moore in October, becoming the first female chief of MI6. “[Vladimir] Putin should be in no doubt, our support is enduring. The pressure we apply on Ukraine’s behalf will be sustained,” Metreweli will say on Monday, according to advance extracts of her remarks. “The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in the Russian approach to international engagement, and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus,” she said, according to the extract.
Separately, Richard Knighton, head of Britain’s armed forces, will also call in a separate speech on Monday for a “whole society” approach to defence in the face of growing uncertainty and threats, and highlight an increased probability of Russia invading a Nato country.
The Ukrainian leader called on Sunday for a “dignified” peace and guarantees that Russia would not attack Ukraine as he attended talks with US figures in Berlin – the latest efforts to end the war with Russia. “Ukraine needs peace on dignified terms, and we are ready to work as constructively as possible. The coming days will be filled with diplomacy. It is critically important that it delivers results,” Zelenskyy said on X. He later added ahead of a meeting with US officials: “The key thing is that all the steps we agree on with partners must work in practice to deliver guaranteed security. Only reliable guarantees can deliver peace.” Zelenskyy is expected to comment on the talks once they are completed on Monday, when they are expected to be joined by other European leaders.
The Ukrainian leader said that a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia along the current frontlines would be a fair option in any peace deal. Russia has demanded Kyiv withdraw its troops from parts of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions that Ukraine still holds. Answering questions from reporters in a WhatsApp chat, Zelenskyy reiterated that option would be unfair, adding that the issue of territory remained unresolved and very sensitive.
US special envoy Steve Witkoff said “a lot of progress was made” at the first day of talks. The meeting between US and Ukrainian delegations included Witkoff, president Zelenskyy, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and European officials. “Representatives held in-depth discussions ... a lot of progress was made, and they will meet again tomorrow morning,” Witkoff said in a post on X. The talks ended after more than five hours on Sunday.
Ukraine’s offer to forgo joining the Nato military alliance probably will not significantly change the course of peace talks, two security experts said on Sunday. “This doesn’t move the needle at all,” said Justin Logan, director of defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. “It’s an effort to appear reasonable.” Nato membership for Ukraine has not been realistic in a long time anyway, said Logan and Andrew Michta, a professor of strategic studies at the University of Florida. Michta called Ukraine’s Nato admittance a “non-issue” at this point.
The Kremlin said on Sunday that Nato secretary general Mark Rutte’s remarks about preparing for war with Russia were irresponsible and showed that he did not really understand the devastation of the second world war. Rutte, in a speech in Berlin on Thursday, said that Nato should be “prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured” and asserted that “we are Russia’s next target”. “Kremlin spokespersonDmitry Peskov told state television reporter Pavel Zarubin: “They have no understanding, and unfortunately, Mr Rutte, making such irresponsible statements, simply does not understand what he is talking about.”
Drone fragments caused a fire near the Afipsky oil refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region without inflicting any injuries or damage, an emergency centre said on Sunday. “A gas pipe caught fire outside the refinery near one of the checkpoints. The fire covered an area of 100sqm and has since been extinguished,” the centre said on the Telegram messaging app. Ukraine had said earlier that its military had hit the refinery and an oil depot in the Russian Volgograd region.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that its forces had captured the village of Varvarivka in Ukraine’s eastern Zaporizhzhia region. Reuters could not verify battlefield reports of the both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
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