Britt, whose marriage to Davis in 1960 provoked threats due to racism and anti-miscegenation laws in the US, has died of natural causes in Los Angeles
May Britt, the Swedish actor whose marriage to Sammy Davis Jr in 1960 was the subject of controversy due to US attitudes towards interracial marriage, has died at 91.
Her son Mark Davis confirmed the news to the Hollywood Reporter, saying his mother died on 11 December of natural causes at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana medical center in Los Angeles.
A tearful Jacinta Allan says she’s “deeply shocked, disappointed and embarrassed” after her husband lost his licence for drink-driving during a trip to the supermarket.
The Victorian premier on Friday revealed her husband, Yorick Piper, was intercepted for a random breath test in Bendigo on his way to buy some groceries just before 9am on Thursday morning. He had been involved in a minor collision at an intersection shortly before the test.
Exclusive: Clashes over rural plots are increasing, as people whose big-city plans have evaporated return home to face local governments groaning under huge debt
Standing inside the temple armed with buckets of rice, the villagers gaze out at police officers armed with riot shields and sticks, the sound of shouting audible over banging drums.
Then the tension erupts. A scuffle breaks out, some villagers throw handfuls of rice at the officers, a traditional custom for dispelling evil, while others hoist religious artefacts onto their shoulders and march away, past groups of police and other officials.
Opposition parties say Labour is ‘scared of voters’ but government says merging authorities have voiced concerns
Local elections could be delayed again as merging councils lack the capacity for reorganisation, the government has announced, triggering claims from opposition parties that Labour is “scared of the voters”.
Sixty-three council areas could opt to postpone elections until 2027 after some were already delayed until May 2026 as two-tier authorities are being combined into single unitary councils.
Chelsea are fourth in the Premier League and Newcastle 12th but the gap between them is only six points. It dictates that, given Eddie Howe’s ambitions of qualifying for the Champions League via the league, this is a pivotal fixture. How Newcastle’s manager must hope Enzo Maresca’s recent cryptic hints about potential discord behind the scenes at Stamford Bridge somehow help to undo the visitors on Tyneside, cutting the aforementioned gap in half. If off-pitch harmony endures at St James’ Park, Newcastle’s Saudi Arabian ownership will, nonetheless, be keen to see Howe and his players make further amends for last Sunday’s ignominious defeat at Sunderland. Falling nine points behind Chelsea may not be well received in Riyadh. Howe might have been tempted to start with a back five but with Tino Livramento the latest victim of a defensive injury crisis, he only possesses sufficient fit personnel to staff a four-man rearguard. Assuming Howe sticks with his preferred 4-3-3 it will be intriguing to see whether he drops a winger and fields Yoane Wissa to Nick Woltemade’s left in attack. Or does he opt for a potentially more fluid 4-2-3-1 with Woltemade as the No 10 and Wissa at No 9? Louise Taylor
Newcastle v Chelsea, Saturday 12.30pm (all times GMT)
Exclusive: Book to detail life from child poverty and teenage pregnancy to unions and Labour deputy leadership before fall from grace
Angela Rayner is writing a memoir about her rise to become deputy prime minister and her subsequent fall from grace, the Guardian can confirm, in a move that will be seen as an attempt to set the narrative ahead of any leadership contest.
The book, which will detail the Labour politician’s life story from her impoverished childhood and leaving school at 16 while pregnant through the union movement and the Labour party to the second highest office in the land, is to be published in the second half of 2026.
Enough talk, Scott Boland is about to bowl the first over of day three. It’s much cooler in Adelaide, around 26 degrees.
“Honestly, it’s not England’s batting – that’s pretty much on par with Australia’s,” writes Andy Roberts. “The glaring difference is the bowling. If Australian batters look better, it’s because they are getting a lot more bad balls to hit. England couldn’t score any faster yesterday because the bowling was consistently accurate and tested the batter’s technique and concentration over after over, with no weak links. Compare that to England, with Jacks and Carse sending down rubbish time and time again.
Deal will allow app to continue operating in US as Elizabeth Warren condemns Trump and his ‘billionaire buddies’
TikTok has signed a deal to sell its US business to three American investors – Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX – ensuring the popular social video platform can continue operating in the United States.
The deal is expected to close on 22 January, according to an internal memo seen by he Associated Press and Reuters. The TikTok chief executive officer, Shou Zi Chew, said in the memo that ByteDance and TikTok have signed binding agreements with the three investors.
WNBA players have authorized their union’s executive council to call a strike if necessary, the union announced Thursday as it continues to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the league.
The WNBPA and league have been negotiating a new agreement for the past few months, extending the deadline a couple of times with the latest one set to expire on 9 January. The move gives union negotiators another tool to use in talks.
Sources say person of interest identified in attack at university and death of prominent physicist 50 miles away
Authorities said Thursday that they’re looking into a connection between last weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University and one two days later near Boston that killed a professor at another elite school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That is according to three people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss an investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity. Two of the people said investigators had identified a person of interest in the shootings and were actively seeking that individual.
Cessna jet crashed during attempted return to airport
Police say Biffle and family among seven fatalities
FAA and NTSB responding to North Carolina crash
A business jet carrying seven people, including retired Nascar driver Greg Biffle and his family, crashed Thursday at an airport in North Carolina, killing everyone aboard, authorities said.
The Cessna C550 erupted into a large fire when it hit the ground. It had departed Statesville Regional Airport, about 45 miles (72km) north of Charlotte, but soon crashed while trying to return and land, North Carolina highway patrol said.
The bad news for Oliver Glasner is that Crystal Palace’s marathon season is about to get even longer. A thrilling draw against Finnish side KuPS in their 27th game of the campaign means that they must now contest a two-leg playoff at the end of February after finishing just outside the top eight in the Conference League table.
Having selected an entirely different starting lineup including four teenagers from the side who lost to Manchester City at the weekend, the Palace manager saw his second string impress as Christantus Uche gave them a deserved half-time lead.
Change will loosen limits on research and certain regulations but stops short of making marijuana legal
Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to move cannabis out of the most restrictive drug category, a change that would loosen limits on research and certain regulations but stop short of making marijuana legal nationwide.
“I’m pleased to announce that I will be signing an Executive Order to reschedule marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III controlled substance with legitimate medical uses,” the president said from the Oval Office.
The Trump administration unveiled new actions aimed at eliminating transition-related medical care for minors across the US on Thursday, referring to such treatments as “sex-rejecting procedures”, a term used by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
As part of the effort, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will initiate a rule-making process that would prevent hospitals from offering puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or surgical procedures to minors if they wish to participate in Medicare or Medicaid.
People who signed up for a US ‘self-deportation’ scheme say their payoffs were delayed, misdirected or never arrived – leaving them empty-handed in their home countries
Germán Pineda, 32, just wanted to go home.
After his arrest by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June, Pineda, a Honduran immigrant, spent four miserable days in immigration detention at Federal Plaza in Manhattan, sleeping on a concrete floor without sufficient food or a shower. Next, he was transferred to a detention center in Brooklyn, where staff treated him like a criminal, he says, though he’d lived in the country, working as a delivery driver, for 14 years. He couldn’t even call home.
TMTG, which owns president’s Truth Social platform, unveils link-up TAE Technologies to respond to AI boom
Donald Trump’s loss-making social media business has announced plans to merge with a fusion power company.
Trump Media and Technology Group, owner of the US president’s minnow Truth Social platform, unveiled an extraordinary merger worth more than $6bn with TAE Technologies, combining its social media operation with a vast bet on the AI boom driving a surge in energy demand.
Democrats on the House oversight committee have released a new batch of photos from the estate of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as the deadline for the justice department to release its files related to Epstein looms.
The images, released on Thursday, are undated and lack captions or context. Among them are photographs of what appear to be lines from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita written on different parts of a woman’s body.
Intelligence service says attacks were work of groups connected to Russian state in ‘clear evidence’ of hybrid war
The Danish government has accused Russia of being behind two “destructive and disruptive” cyber-attacks in what it describes as “very clear evidence” of a hybrid war.
The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyber-attack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal and regional council elections in November.
ECB and Cricket Australia could bring in UltraEdge
Snicko hit by more bad decisions on day two in Adelaide
The England and Wales Cricket Board has held talks with Cricket Australia about the possibility of replacing the decision review system (DRS) technology Snicko with an alternative UltraEdge for the Boxing Day Test at Melbourne after controversy on the opening two days of the Adelaide Test.
In bilateral series, DRS technology is the responsibility of the home board, which in practice is passed on to the main domestic broadcast rights holder, in this case Fox Sports. However, the Guardian has learned that Cricket Australia’s free-to-air rights holder, Channel 7, has a DRS contract with Hawk-Eye Innovations, the company behind UltraEdge, so there is an alternative available should the hosts seek to make a change amid unhappiness from players on both sides.
Turner, appointed ambassador to UN in May, now replaces Peter Mandelson who was sacked over Epstein links
Keir Starmer has appointed the career diplomat Christian Turner as the UK’s ambassador to Washington, replacing Peter Mandelson who was sacked over his links to Jeffrey Epstein.
Turner, who was appointed ambassador to the UN in May, had previously been political director at the Foreign Office and had brokered a close relationship with the new Labour administration before taking up his UN role in New York.
Critics of the Trump administration have praised Vanity Fair’s interview with the White House chief of staff, and particularly the unvarnished photographs of Trump’s inner circle that accompanied it, as overdue scrutiny of a controversial cabinet even as his allies rallied to dismiss it as a hit piece.
Over what the magazine said was 11 separate interviews by reporter Chris Whipple, Susie Wiles spoke candidly about her colleagues, describing Trump as having “an alcoholic’s personality”, JD Vance, the vice-president, as being a “conspiracy theorist for a decade” and Russell Vought, the budget chief, as a “right-wing absolute zealot”.
Report on Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump would be a ‘distraction’ as party is ‘putting our learnings into motion’
The Democratic National Committee won’t release a review of its election loss in 2024, saying it would be a “distraction” from helping the party win going forward.
The party has been working on a so-called autopsy of 2024 since Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump.
The plan to mobilise Russia’s frozen assets is morally compelling and ingenious. The problem is that its enemies will never see it that way
Morally, the decision facing the European Council in Brussels this week has been a no-brainer. Russia invaded Ukraine illegally and unilaterally. Moscow shows no sign of wanting peace. It actively threatens other countries too, including Britain. Ukraine is running out of money. Yet £184bn worth of Russian assets remain frozen in Europe, notably in Belgium. That money should therefore be mobilised to fund Ukraine. To many, this would be the enactment of a clear and present duty, proof positive that Europe can still be a heavy hitter.
In the messy reaches of the real world, however, things have not been straightforward. Law, economics and politics all managed to insinuate themselves, sometimes venomously, into the intense buildup to Brussels. Reparations can have lethal political consequences. Seizure of assets will undoubtedly face legal challenge. It is also bitterly opposed by Donald Trump, who wants the unfreezing of assets to form a key part of his pro-Russian peace plan. Mr Trump is pressing hard for a quick deal, and US and Russian negotiators are poised to meet again in Miami at the weekend.
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