In Trump’s first term, activists focused on lobbying and voting. Now tactics are shifting to nonviolent civil disobedience

On 24 January, Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents while he was helping another civilian in Minneapolis who had been knocked to the ground – just weeks after an ICE agent killed Renee Good. In response to this second killing of a Minnesotan, demonstrations spread across the United States to protest the Trump administration and its ultra-violent immigration enforcement tactics.

Minneapolis has been in a state of sustained protest. Its general strike on 23 January mobilized tens of thousands of Minnesotans to participate in an economic blackout and march in the streets. Solidarity protests, strikes and marches also took place across the country, including the Free America Walkout, which involved more than 900 local actions across all 50 states on the anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

There are lots of guidebooks for parents of young children – but what happens when your offspring hit adulthood? A psychotherapist shares her guiding principles for raising grownups

When one of my daughters turned 18, our relationship hit a crisis so painful it lasted longer than I knew how to bear. I was a psychotherapist, trained in child and adult development, yet I was utterly flummoxed. Decades have passed since then, but when I recently spoke to her about that time, a flood of distress washed through me as if it were yesterday.

This is how my daughter, now a mother herself, put it when I asked her to describe that era:

From building resilience to boosting artistic creativity, there are unexpected benefits to being rebuffed

Rejection hurts. Whether in a professional, social or romantic setting, there is a particularly painful sting to the discovery that one has been judged undesirable in some way. If you have ever experienced proper rejection – and that would be most of us – it may stand out in your mind for a long time, like a boulder lodged in the landscape of memory.

And it can hurt literally. The late anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studied human behaviour in the context of romantic love, showed that rejection and physical injury have much in common. In 2010 she led a study of people who had been recently rejected romantically. Functional MRI scans of their brains revealed that areas associated with distress and physical pain were more active. The passage of time did seem to reduce the pain response for Fisher’s participants, but for some people rejection can resonate for months or years. This overlap in the brain’s response to what we think of as physical and mental pain isn’t limited to romance. Social psychologist Naomi Eisenberger scanned the brains of people who were socially excluded from a ballgame in an experiment. Her results showed that “social pain is analogous in its neurocognitive function to physical pain, alerting us when we have sustained injury to our social connections”.

Exclusive: Thousands of pounds unlocked to fund more diversity initiatives in diocese of capital

• What is Project Spire and why is it dividing the church?

Church of England clergy will be encouraged to promote antiracism in sermons as senior figures unlock thousands of pounds in funding to promote diversity initiatives in London.

Church Commissioners, the body that manages C of E assets, is funding the Diocese of London, which covers more than 400 parishes and 18 boroughs north of the River Thames, to boost inclusion work as part of the three-year Racial Justice Priority (RJP) project.

• Alcaraz defeats Djokovic 2-6, 6-2, 6-3, 7-5

• Spaniard is youngest male to win career grand slam

• See live reaction with Daniel Harris

Carlos Alcaraz has defeated Novak Djokovic to win the Australian Open men’s singles title, becoming the youngest male player to win a career grand slam. The 22-year-old Spaniard has won seven major tournaments: two each at Wimbledon, the French Open and the US Open, now one at Melbourne Park.

Alcaraz’s four-set victory – 2-6, 6-2, 6-3, 7-5 – makes it nine consecutive men’s grand slam events won by either him or his Italian rival Jannik Sinner: the most recent victor apart from them was Djokovic, who won the US Open in September 2023. By beating the 10-times Australian Open champion, the world No 1 Alcaraz consolidates his place atop the ATP men’s singles rankings ahead of Sinner in second. He is the ninth male player to win all four grand slam events.

Networks created after police killed George Floyd were reactivated to challenge Trump’s mass deportation policy

Cory never expected he’d spend hours each day driving around after immigration agents, videotaping their moves. The south Minneapolis resident is “not the type of person to do this”, he said.

The dangers of what he’s doing, even after the killings of two observers, largely stay out of his mind when he’s watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents – even when he’s gotten hit with pepper spray. In quieter moments, it occurs to him that agents likely know where he lives. Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old whom agents killed while he was filming them, “100% could have been me”, Cory said.

App endured a major outage and user backlash over perceived censorship. Now it’s facing an inquiry by the California governor and an ascendant competitor

A little more than one week ago, TikTok stepped on to US shores as a naturalized citizen. Ever since, the video app has been fighting for its life.

TikTok’s calamitous emigration began on 22 January when its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, finalized a deal to sell the app to a group of US investors, among them the business software giant Oracle. The app’s time under Chinese ownership had been marked by a meteoric ascent to more than a billion users, which left incumbents such as Instagram looking like the next Myspace. But TikTok’s short new life in the US has been less than auspicious.

Tranche of government-held files filled with ‘ham-fisted redactions’ and expose survivors’ identities, say attorneys

Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation have reacted to the voluminous – and possibly last – tranche of government-held investigative documents with calls for further accountability for the scheme’s alleged clients.

“It is without question that a significant piece of Epstein and [his convicted associate Ghislaine] Maxwell’s vast sex trafficking operation was to provide young women and girls to other wealthy and powerful individuals,” said Sigrid McCawley, a partner with Boies Schiller Flexner, a firm representing survivors of the scheme.

• Stevenson seals title in fourth weight class with win

• Britain’s Benn enters ring, sparks buzz as future foe

Shakur Stevenson described his dominant victory over Teófimo López as the product of discipline, preparation and years of studying his opponent, after producing what many observers viewed as the finest performance of his career at Madison Square Garden.

The unbeaten American outboxed López over 12 rounds to become a four-division world champion, a moment Stevenson said validated his long-held belief that he belonged among boxing’s elite.

Eric’s libido always outstripped Bea’s, but with the perimenopause she experienced a surge of desire. Is Eric fully onboard with their new ménage à trois?
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

When I kissed him in front of Eric during a meet-up in a bar, the chemistry was pretty electric

Nigel Farage’s party was on the charge in Wales – but after the seismic Caerphilly byelection, progressives now believe they can come out on top in May

The night after Plaid Cymru decisively beat Reform UK in the Caerphilly byelection last autumn, spraypaint reading “Now u can fuck off home” appeared on the shutters of the rightwing party’s offices on Cardiff Street.

It was quickly cleaned off, but stickers bearing Welsh nationalist and anti-fascist slogans have popped up in its place, either scratched off or covered with duct tape. Reform is still there: the lights are on, and a shop owner next door said people go in and out every day, although no one answered the door when the Guardian rang the bell.

Israel says residents will be allowed to cross on foot only, with a reported 20,000 Palestinians waiting to leave for medical care

Preparations to reopen Gaza’s main border crossing into Rafah have begun, though it is uncertain if any Palestinians will pass through it before the day’s end, officials have said.

Before the war, the Rafah crossing with Egypt was the only direct exit point for most Palestinians in Gaza to reach the outside world as well as a key entry point for aid. It has been largely shut since May 2024.

Voters to choose president and 57 members of congress, with current president’s hardline pick Laura Fernández expected to win first round

Costa Rica heads to the polls on Sunday in an election dominated by increasing insecurity and warnings of an authoritarian turn in a country long seen as a model of liberal democracy in the region.

Crime is a big concern for many voters as criminal groups battle to control lucrative cocaine trafficking routes to Europe and the US, casting a shadow on the Central American country famous for its wildlife tourism.

As apps and gadgets capitalise on loss of stigma, consumers are advised to look for evidence-based solutions

For any bodily function you want to measure these days there is a gadget – a wristband for step-counting, a watch to track your heart rate or a ring for measuring sleep.

Now the march of wearable tech is coming to the aid of what some say is a long underserved market: menopausal women.

Three decades after having his Grammy rescinded as part of the notorious duo, he is a nominee once more, for the audiobook of his unflinching memoir. ‘I had to tell my story,’ he says

It may not be the most auspicious way to start an interview, but I have to ask: Fab, is it you reading your audiobook? Please confirm you aren’t just a pretty face hired to front it?

Fabrice Maxime Sylvain Morvan considers my question, then laughs. I’m teasing: it definitely is Morvan narrating You Know It’s True: The Real Story of Milli Vanilli. But as the recording of his book has been nominated for best audiobook, narration and storytelling recording at the 2026 Grammy awards – and Milli Vanilli are the only winners to have had their Grammy (given in 1990 for best new artist) rescinded, due to the revelation that the duo didn’t sing on their records – I do need confirmation.

• Centre-back scores emotional goal against Newcastle

• Slot: ‘Everyone was cheering for Ibou in dressing room’

Arne Slot revealed Ibrahima Konaté was not due to face Newcastle after the recent death of his father. The centre-back was rewarded for responding to Liverpool’s defensive crisis with his first Premier League goal at Anfield.

Konaté returned from compassionate leave after three matches out to cap Liverpool’s convincing 4-1 comeback win against Eddie Howe’s team. The France international was in tears after scoring in front of the Kop and admitted he did not “have words to describe what I feel right now” after the poignant goal.

Updates from the men’s singles final at Melbourne Park
Big-match preview | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail Daniel

Our players are ready to come out. This is going to be special.

I keep saying it, but it bears repetition: we’re at the start of a golden age in women’s tennis. Sabalenka, Rybakina, Gauff, Swiatek and Osaka at their peaks, Anisimova coming, Andreeva getting there, then Mboko, Baptiste and Jovic on the match; ooooh yeah.

⚽ All the latest pre-match news and analysis
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Marco Silva at Manchester United? It’s not a bad shout. Out of contract in summer, of course.

Have you played ‘On the ball’ yet?

The Winter Olympics was first staged in Italy, 70 years ago. We take a look back at some archive imagery from the settimana bianca

Saturday’s home defeat leaves Rovers in relegation trouble amid pitch problems and fan anger with Venky’s

For Blackburn managers of the recent past, this has been the cruellest month. Jon Dahl Tomasson and John Eustace left the club in February 2024 and 2025 respectively when they became disconnected from the club’s unpopular owners, Venky’s. The problem for the current manager, Valérien Ismaël, is that fans are growing increasingly anxious for another change in the dugout as the cycle repeats itself. It has been another winter of discontent at Ewood Park.

After finishing seventh last season thanks to a late season surge under Ismaël, there will be no push for the top six this time. A scrappy defeat by Hull via Lewis Koumas’s 81st-minute winner made it one win in 15 games in all competitions, Rovers now mired in the relegation zone and the prospect of dropping to League One is alarmingly real with a three-point gap to West Brom in the last safe position.

About 20 countries including G7 states in talks on rare earths including calls for US to guarantee minimum price

Ministers from the US, EU, UK, Japan, Australia and New Zealand will meet in Washington this week to discuss a strategic alliance over critical minerals.

The summit is being seen as a step to repair transatlantic ties fractured by a year of conflict with Donald Trump and pave the way for other alliances to help countries de-risk from China, including one centred on steel.

In the final part of this series, we look at how infighting has ripped the left apart online while the right has flourished – and how some progressives are turning the tide

• Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

• Part one: How liberals lost the internet

• Part two: How the right won the internet

There is politics before the internet, and politics after the internet. Liberals are floundering, the right are flourishing, and what of the left? Well, it’s in a dire state. This is despite the fact that the key political problems of the last decade – rising inequality and a cost of living crisis – are problems leftists claim they can solve. The trouble is, reactionaries and rightwingers steal their thunder online, quickly spreading messaging that blames scapegoats for structural problems. One reason for this is that platforms originally built to connect us with friends and followers now funnel us content designed to provoke emotional engagement.

Back when Twitter was still the “town square” and Facebook a humble “social network”, progressives had an advantage: from the Arab spring to Occupy Wall Street, voices excluded from mainstream media and politics could leverage online social networks and turn them into real-life ones, which at their most potent became street-level protests that toppled regimes and held capitalism to account. It seemed as though the scattered masses would become a networked collective empowered to rise up against the powerful.

Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

Five years after the junta’s coup, the civil war devastating Myanmar has reached a turning point. The military is carrying out large-scale counter-offensives across the country to reclaim territory seized by pro-democracy rebels of various ethnic and religious backgrounds

In Tanintharyi, the southernmost region of Myanmar, the local resistance has managed to contain the military. After five years of guerrilla warfare, the revolutionary youth there remain determined to restore democracy through armed struggle.

A long, narrow stretch of land at the southern tip of Myanmar, between the Andaman Sea to the west and Thailand to the east, Tanintharyi region is one of the areas where the resistance challenges the military’s authority. For decades, the region has been home to an armed rebellion led by the Karen ethnic minority, which operated mainly in the peripheral mountains.

Soldiers from the Karen National Union (KNU) inspect the ruins of a Buddhist monastery destroyed by a junta airstrike in Myeik district, Tanintharyi region

Pressure mounts after government said it would publish names of those killed during recent unrest

Calls are growing inside Iran for an independent inquiry into the number of people killed during recent protests after the government said it would oversee the publication of the names of the deceased.

The highly unusual government move, announced on Thursday, is designed to head off claims that crimes against humanity have been committed and that as many as 30,000 Iranians have been killed. Iran’s official death toll released by the Martyr’s Foundation is 3,117, including members of the security services.