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Jack Grealish is making his third return to Villa Park since leaving for Manchester City in 2021. He’s yet to score against his old club in five games home or away. Could today be the day?

Grealish record v Aston Villa:
With Manchester City – P4 W3 D0 L1, 0 goals, 0 assists
With Everton – P1 W0 D1 L0, 0 goals, 0 assists

A$AP Rocky steals the show during Finn Wolfhard’s first ever go as host with surprise appearances from Sabrina Carpenter, Jason Momoa and more

Saturday Night Live returns from the holiday hiatus to catch us up on all things Trump: the president (James Austin Johnson) addresses the nation from the Oval Office, bragging about his favorite Christmas present: “My very own somebody else’s Nobel prize … and in my stocking: Maduro … we did a reverse Santa on him.”

Joined by cabinet members “Little” Marco Rubio (Marcello Hernández) and JD Vance (Jeremy Culhane, taking over for departed cast member Bowen Yang), who are all trying to “help me do so many legal-ish things to try to get people to stop talking about Epstein.” Said things include an impending invasion of Cuba, “trans in menswear”, new tariffs, and Greenland, only to be interrupted by Trump wandering behind them and looking out the window in a senile fugue state.

Exclusive: DNA test means patients could be offered most effective treatment first, boosting their chances of beating the disease

Scientists have developed a simple DNA blood test that can predict how well patients with breast cancer will respond to treatment.

More than 2 million people globally each year are diagnosed with the disease, which is the world’s most prevalent cancer. Although treatments have improved in recent decades, it is not easy to know which ones will work best for which patients.

• Pool 4: Bristol 15-27 Bordeaux

• Bielle-Biarrey lights up match to secure top spot

The odds on Bordeaux-Bègles successfully defending their Champions Cup crown shortened considerably on a damp, grey Sunday lunchtime in Bristol. Good sides can adapt their game to suit awkward conditions and, for the second weekend in a row, French class outflanked English energy and optimism with a hat-trick of tries from the spectacularly prolific French winger Louis Bielle-Biarrey.

The Bears, seeking to play billionaire rugby on a day crying out for more prudent housekeeping, made far too many unforced errors and duly paid the price against opponents who are now perfectly placed in this year’s tournament. They will have the luxury of playing all their subsequent knockout games either on French soil or, if they reach the final, just across the Spanish border in Bilbao and at this rate it will require something special to prevent them claiming back-to-back titles.

Exclusive: Letter signed by figures on right and left of party says UK should follow Australia’s example by enacting ban

More than 60 Labour MPs have written to Keir Starmer urging him to back a social media ban for under-16s, with peers due to vote on the issue this week.

The MPs, who include select committee chairs, former frontbenchers and MPs from the right and left of the party, are looking to put pressure on the prime minister as calls mount for the UK to follow Australia’s precedent.

It’s far from radical to reject a system predicated on violence – despite what thinktanks might claim

On 7 January 2026, Renee Good was killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross; video captures a man’s voice calling her a “fucking bitch” afterwards. Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, maligned Good as having committed “domestic terrorism”. Good’s killing became a national flashpoint as protests erupted demanding justice for the mother of three.

Good’s killing is no anomaly. A Wall Street Journal investigation revealed 13 instances of ICE firing into civilian vehicles since July 2025, with at least eight people shot and two killed. ICE detentions are notorious for their inhumane conditions; 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 alone, matching a record set two decades prior in 2004.

Heba Gowayed is an associate professor of sociology at Cuny Hunter College and Cuny Graduate Center and author of the book Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential

Victor Ray is the F Wendell Miller associate professor of sociology at the University of Iowa and author of the book On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Booker prize winner, 80, says he has reached point of having ‘played all my tunes’ after new book Departure(s)

The Booker prize-winning author, Julian Barnes, has confirmed his new novel, Departure(s), will be his last book, saying that he has the sense “that I’ve played all my tunes”.

Barnes, who celebrates his 80th birthday on Monday and whose works over a 45-year career include 15 novels and 10 works of nonfiction, said: “One way of thinking about how long you go on is, ‘As long as they’ll still publish you’.

Major retrospective in Plymouth, her adopted city, presents her as a skilful chronicler of social transformation

In her lifetime, Beryl Cook’s colourful, vibrant paintings tended to be dismissed by most critics as mere kitsch or whimsy.

A major retrospective of Cook’s work opening in her adopted city of Plymouth next weekend makes the case that she was a serious, significant artist who skilfully chronicled a tumultuous period of social transformation.

There are so many koalas in some places that food is the issue – while elsewhere populations are threatened by habitat loss. And there are no easy fixes

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On French Island in Victoria’s Western Port Bay, koalas are dropping from trees. Eucalypts have been eaten bare by the marsupials, with local reports of some found starving and dead. Multiple koalas – usually solitary animals – can often be seen on a single gum.

Koalas were first introduced to French Island from the mainland in the 1880s, a move that protected the species from extinction in the decades they were extensively hunted for their pelts. In the absence of predators and diseases such as chlamydia, the population thrived.

Ultra-processed foods have been linked to various health issues, but are a ubiquitous part of the modern western diet. Can Emma Joyce avoid them for a whole week?

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I’ve been eating ultra-processed foods (UPFs) all my life. Breakfast as a child was often Coco Pops, Rice Bubbles or white toast slathered in spreadable butter. Dinners usually involved processed sauces, such as Chicken Tonight or Dolmio, and my lunchboxes always contained flavoured chippies or plasticky cheese.

I don’t blame my parents for this. Now I’m a parent too, I have cartons of juice and flavoured yoghurt as part of my parenting arsenal. Packaged foods are omnipresent in our lives. But, unfortunately, some of these foods are very bad for our health.

These microscopic mites, which burrow under your skin and cause ferocious itching, are incredibly hard to get rid of – and cases in the UK have soared. What is causing the outbreak, and is there anything we can do about it?

Louise (not her real name) is listing the contents of a bin liner she has packed with fresh essentials in case of emergency. Clothes, toothbrushes, hairbrushes, a teddy … “Although it should be two teddies,” she re-evaluates, quickly. I can hear her trying to quell her panic.

A diehard survivalist preparing for catastrophe? Actually, a beleaguered 44-year-old mother recovering from scabies – an itchy rash caused by microscopic mites that burrow under human skin. Far-fetched as it sounds, emergency evacuation is exactly what she, her partner and children (six and four) resorted to in November in a desperate bid to beat the bugs. She is now on tenterhooks in case they return.

Vegan restaurants are closing, RFK Jr is sounding the drum for carnivores, and the protein cult is bigger than ever. But eschewing animal products helps me ward off a sense of impotence – and despair

Let’s get this out of the way, because I’m itching to tell you (again): I’m vegan, and this is our time, Veganuary! Imagine me doing a weak, vitamin B12-depleted dance. Unlike gym-goers, vegans are thrilled when newbies sign up each January, for planetary and animal welfare reasons, but also, shallowly, for the shopping. This is when we can gorge on the novelties retailers dream up: Peta’s round-up for this year includes the seductive Aldi pains au chocolat and M&S coconut kefir.

I need retail therapy, because Veganuary has become quite muted and that’s part of a wider inflection point in vegan eating that I’m sad about. “Where have all the vegans gone?” Dazed asked in November, and now New York Magazine has investigated, with the tagline: “Plant-based eating was supposed to be the future. Then meat came roaring back.” It details a wave of vegan restaurant closures (plus the high-profile reverse ferret performed by formerly vegan Michelin-three-starred Eleven Madison Park to serving “animal products for certain dishes”), declining sales of meat substitutes and a stubbornly static percentage of people identifying as vegan (around 1%). It’s not new (rumours of veganism’s demise have been swirling around since at least 2024) and it’s not just a US phenomenon; many UK vegan restaurants have closed this year, including my lovely local.

In an era of TikTok and YouTube, teens have never watched old-school television less – yet zoomers love this broadcast drama series

Hannah Leef knows she should be studying for midterms this week. But she has to also make time to watch her all-time favorite episode of The Rookie, an ABC procedural drama about Los Angeles cops. (That would be season two, episode eight.) The 15 year old, who lives in New England, calls the show her “hyperfixation”.

Leef first watched the entire series, which is currently in its eighth season, in three weeks. “Which is, like, not healthy,” she admits. She keeps up with new episodes while constantly rewatching the series – which she’s done 10 times now. She’s hooked “about 12 or 13” of her friends on The Rookie, and one of them ploughed through the entire series in a week: “She did not sleep.”

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

I am a science-fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean we couldn’t change it.

Noticing how out of place we looked, she asked in English if she could help us

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

In 1996, I travelled around Indonesia with my then-boyfriend. We’d been exploring Surabaya when we heard about an island off the coast called Madura that could be reached via ferry. It didn’t turn up in any of the tourist guides, which appealed to us, being adventurous types. We knew Madura wouldn’t be touristy, but expected there’d be some streets to explore and somewhere to sit down and have a cup of tea.

As soon as Madura came into sight, we realised our visit may not have been a great idea. We were expecting to see houses and buildings dot the shore, as well as the hawkers who’d typically crowd around piers in Indonesia with food and wares to sell. There was none of that. It was just a pier next to a tiny village.

The superstar singer on his itinerant childhood, brutally honest mother, and the moment of anger that led him to write Grace Kelly

Born in Beirut in 1983, Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr, otherwise known as Mika, was raised in Paris and London. He attended the Royal College of Music, before his breakthrough in 2007 with debut album Life in Cartoon Motion and its No 1 single, Grace Kelly. He went on to sell 20m records, and worked as a presenter and judge on TV shows such as Eurovision and The Piano. Mika now lives in Italy and in Hastings, East Sussex, with his partner. His first English-language album in six years, Hyperlove, is out on 23 January.

This was taken in our kitchen in Paris. It doesn’t surprise me that I am covered in chocolate. My earliest memories are of being on the floor surrounded by delicious food.

• Nacho Elvira takes advantage for Dubai Invitational title

• Rory McIlroy finishes in tie for third after final-day drama

Shane Lowry blew a one-shot lead on the last hole as Nacho Elvira recovered to claim victory in a dramatic finish to the Dubai Invitational.

Lowry, who had started the final round in a tie for second, two strokes behind the Spaniard, barged into the lead after a birdie on the 15th and appeared to have the title at his mercy. But the Irishman found both bunker and water on the 18th, finishing with a double bogey that shattered his hopes and allowed Elvira, who had struggled early in the round, to duly par the 18th for victory.

Discover the joys of creamy soy bean curd in this spicy Sichuan dish that comes together in minutes

Mapo tofu is a Chengdu favourite typical of the “spicy generosity” of Sichuan food, Fuchsia Dunlop explains, though it’s perhaps better not translated as “pock-marked old woman’s tofu”. It may even convert you to the joys of tofu itself, should you still be on the fence about the stuff, because its creamy softness is the perfect foil for the intensely savoury, tingly seasoning involved here. It’s also ready in mere minutes.

Prep 10 min
Cook 7 min
Serves 2

⚽ Premier League updates from the 2pm GMT kick-off
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1 min: Sandro Tonali takes the ball deep as Newcastle attempt to pass their way through. Harvey Barnes gets an early touch from a Woltemade layoff. Good energy from the home fans. How long will that last?

Here’s Jeff Beck’s Hi Ho Silver Lining, with the Led Zep medley you will always hear in pre-match at Molineux.

The US snatched Nicolás Maduro but, frozen out by Trump, anti-government activists are unsure how to proceed

As the harsh reality sets in that Venezuela’s authoritarian regime remains essentially unchanged even without Nicolás Maduro, activists who have spent years fighting for the country’s return to democracy are unsure about what the next steps should be.

They agree that the country should very soon either hold new elections or install the retired diplomat Edmundo González – widely believed to have won the 2024 election – but neither option appears to be on the White House’s agenda at the moment.

Five exchange-traded funds have been launched by Trump Media, owner of the president’s social media platform Truth Social

The word “Truth” was plastered all around the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning. At 9.30am, when the market opened, a small crowd stood on the balcony above the trading floor to ring in the day.

The group was celebrating the launch of five exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that are tied to Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media platform that has spun into a menagerie of products over the last few years.

Finance minister says Netanyahu should back annexation and settlement, and attacks Turkey and Qatar’s role on Gaza ‘executive board’

Far-right members of Israel’s governing coalition on Sunday rejected a US-backed plan for postwar governance in Gaza, criticising their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for failing to annex the Palestinian territory and establish new Israeli settlements in the territory.

After the announcement of the White House’s pick of world leaders who will join the so-called Gaza “board of peace”, which includes representatives of Turkey and Qatar, both of which have been critical of Israel’s war in the strip, Israeli far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, described Netanyahu’s “unwillingness to take responsibility for Gaza” as “the original sin”.