Kangaroos 9.2.56 defeat Lions 2.4.16 in decider at Ikon Park
Invincible Roos create history as first premiers to be undefeated
Q1: 16 mins remaining: North Melbourne 0.0.0 – Brisbane 0.0.0
The Lions begin the game just as the would have wanted by winning the first centre clearance and locking the ball forward. The Kangaroos defence looks impenetrable from about 30m out.
Paris Saint-Germain head to Monaco in Ligue 1 today and the hosts’ confidence has been low. The lack of confidence within Sébastien Pocognoli’s side was clear on Wednesday, when Monaco drew 2-2 with Pafos in the Champions League, twice letting the lead slip.
The eight-time French champions have won only one of its past five matches across all competitions, with Pocognoli saying he is still struggling to find the right formula since replacing Adi Hütter in October.
We have too many variations in character and it’s up to me to bring that under control. I’ve been working on it for a month. I’m trying to understand [the team], push it and stimulate it, it’s something that takes time.
Vitinha is growing and the team also. He’s so special, so different. I’m very happy for him because he deserves that. He works so hard, shows such personality.
[Pedri] will play some minutes, but [won’t be in the starting] lineup. If it’s possible, then he will come on in the second half. We’ll see. [Araújo] has a stomach virus, and he’s out for today and also for tomorrow.
I missed [Raphinha]. I see him as one of the most important players in our team … he also has the hunger and the will to show how good he really is.
I really appreciate what I see in training. We’re focused, we have a lot of quality. And of course, players coming back now, Pedri is back … Raphinha, Marcus [Rashford] from the cold he had. We nearly have everyone.”
I was also a player and maybe sometimes I did not show the right reaction. But it’s emotion.
The next step for Lamine must be to show, again, it’s not about this match, forget it. Alavés is now the important thing and he has to show his best level.
Account of visit to Gaza by French professor describes Israeli military attacks on security personnel protecting convoys
A historian who spent more than a month in Gaza at the turn of the year says he saw “utterly convincing” evidence that Israel supported looters who attacked aid convoys during the conflict.
Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies at France’s prestigious Sciences Po university, entered Gaza in December where he was hosted by an international humanitarian organisation in the southern coastal zone of al-Mawasi.
In the wake of the deadly Washington DC shooting, Trump claimed immigrants are ‘destroying everything America stands for’. Here’s what the data shows
Donald Trump’s hateful, falsehood-filled rant on Thursday blaming immigrants for crime, “social dysfunction” and economic hardship is refuted by a wide range of immigration statistics, which show clearly that immigrants dramatically bolster the US economy and commit crimes at far lower rates than people born in the US.
On Thursday evening, Trump condemned immigrants in a broad and vicious invective, painting them as “illegal and disruptive populations” and attacking “those that hate, steal, murder and destroy everything that America stands for”. He vowed to block all migration from “third world countries” to allow the “US system to fully recover”.
The singer on going solo, bringing back George Michael, and why a dog made her rethink motherhood
Born in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Rebecca Lucy Taylor, 39, was in the duo Slow Club. After 10 years, she went solo as Self Esteem and received Mercury prize, NME and Brit nominations for her second album, 2021’s Prioritise Pleasure. This year, she won the Ivor Novello Visionary award and released a book and album, both called A Complicated Woman. In March, she stars in David Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles at the Duke of York’s theatre, London. She lives in London with her partner.
When were you happiest?
Five to 10, when I was just playing out and I didn’t realise I was a girl. Before my boobs came in, basically.
A harrowing US podcast documents a community’s struggle against immigration raids – and warns us about herd mentality
Earlier this year, the Trump administration reversed the convention that nobody would be snatched by immigration and customs enforcement, or ICE, by a school, church or hospital. Since then, teachers have reported classrooms a third empty, as parents are too scared to send their kids in – volunteers walk them there and back.
In the Rogers Park area of Chicago, a group of citizens are organising to resist such immigration raids. Sometimes, it’s simple non-violent tactics, such as slowing officers down by walking in front of them.Last month, 50 people rushed to a church, where the congregation was trapped, having got word that there were ICE agents waiting outside. Maybe their most evocative tactic is whistles – coded blasts for when a convoy is suspected to be ICE agents, a different code when it’s confirmed. They have numerous accounts of undocumented migrants warned off driving right into a raid, which is galvanising, but they also see and hear dismaying things all the time: vehicles standing empty, one door open, not robbed, merely relieved of their drivers; landscape gardeners arrested off ladders. Earlier this month, the Protect Rogers Park group got 1,500 calls in a day.
Welsh government grants used to fund football club even though it is owned by wealthy movie stars
Wrexham AFC has risen meteorically through the English football leagues thanks to the deep pockets of Hollywood movie star owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. Yet the club has also had £18m in help from other, unwitting backers: Welsh taxpayers.
The club has received almost £18m in nonrepayable grants from the Welsh government via the local council, according to UK government state aid disclosures – far in excess of the direct aid listed for any other football club in Britain.
Democracy, birds and hangover cures – famous fans put their questions to the visionary author
After the phenomenal global success, not to mention timeliness, of the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017, Margaret Atwood has been regarded as “a combination of figurehead, prophet and saint”, the author writes in her new memoir Book of Lives. Over 600 pages this “memoir of sorts” ranges from her childhood growing up in the Canadian backwoods to her grief at the death of her partner of 48 years, the writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019, with many friendships, the occasional spat and more than 50 books (including Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace and the Booker prizewinning The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) in between.
The author, who turned 86 last week, always likes to take the long view, often from a couple of centuries’ distance. As Rebecca Solnit notes below, she now has a long view of our times. Age and the freedom of being a writer (as she says, she can’t get sacked) make her fearless in speaking out.
More than 100 still missing on Sumatra island, where authorities to start cloud seeding to reduce rain, as Thailand sees one of worst floods in a decade
The death toll from devastating floods and landslides in south-east Asia climbed past 350 on Saturday as clean-up and search and rescue operations got under way in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.
Heavy monsoon rain overwhelmed swathes of the three countries this week, killing hundreds and leaving thousands stranded, many on rooftops awaiting rescue.
There have been many good points – challenging orthodoxies and Ben Stokes talking openly about male emotions – and even when it was bad, it was unignorable
The Life Cycle of a Cult 1. The Big Idea.A charismatic leader or leaders propose a new and transcendent idea that promises a panacea for alienated and vulnerable people.
So here we are then. They’re getting ready to storm the compound down in Brisbane. The gunships are circling. Smoke is rising from the out-houses. A lone figure, naked, shivering, the words HIGH RELEASE POINT smeared across his chest in chicken blood, has come staggering through the lines and is being led away under a blanket towards an inconclusive loan stint at Derbyshire.
Enzo Maresca’s young side face league leaders Arsenal on Sunday on a high but have moved on from the emotional swings of old
The worst way for Chelsea to respond to their demolition of Barcelona would be to believe the hype. The problem is that emotions in football swing from one extreme to another, as the people running things at Stamford Bridge have quickly come to appreciate.
They have faced plenty of ridicule for their alternative approach since buying the club from Roman Abramovich three years ago, so perhaps they are entitled to be a little sceptical now that Chelsea are being praised for their transfer strategy and talked up as potential title challengers before hosting Arsenal on Sunday.
Troubled times at Carrington as the club proud of producing the next generation of stars is in flux under fresh leadership
The standards of Manchester United’s academy have “really slipped” in recent years, according to Sir Jim Ratcliffe. The club is renowned as one of the world’s best schools for young players, so the words of the man at the top of the football operation will have stung those trying to create the next generation of stars.
The academy is in flux after Nick Cox, its long-time leader, left in September to become technical director at Everton. His replacement, Steve Torpey, joined from Brentford and is an ally of United’s director of football, Jason Wilcox. The pair worked together at Manchester City and the introduction of another former employee from there implies a literal blueprint is being followed.
It may not be as glamorous as Monaco, but it was on the raceway where a seven-year-old Norris first caught the eye of motor sport trainers
Monaco, Las Vegas, Singapore. The list of pitstops on Lando Norris’ road to the top of Formula One is like a luxury travel agent’s catalogue.
So when I was asked to trace the young man’s journey ahead of a weekend in which he could become the first British champion driver since Lewis Hamilton, my hopes were high.
Dawn Butler leads calls for humanitarian visas and fee waivers for vulnerable relatives of UK nationals affected by storm
British MPs have joined campaigners calling for more aid and humanitarian visas for Jamaicans to enter the UK after Hurricane Melissa demolished parts of the country, plunging hundreds of thousands of people into a humanitarian crisis.
The UK has pledged £7.5m emergency funds to Jamaica and other islands affected by the hurricane, but many argue that the country has a moral obligation to do more for former Caribbean colonies.
One line from Ridley Scott’s classic movie was the shove I needed to walk out on my husband after years of his controlling behaviour
It was 1991, I was in my early 40s, living in the south of England and trapped in a marriage that had long since curdled into something quietly suffocating. My husband had become controlling, first with money, then with almost everything else: what I wore, who I saw, what I said. It crept up so slowly that I didn’t quite realise what was happening.
We had met as students in the early 1970s, both from working-class, northern families and feeling slightly out of place at a university full of public school accents. We shared politics, music and a sense of being outsiders together. For years, life felt full of promise. When our first child arrived, I gave up my local government job to stay at home. That’s when the balance between us shifted.
Survey data suggests more and more girls can’t imagine getting married, while their male counterparts are keener. That disparity holds a clue
According to recent data, marriages in England and Wales are down by nearly 9% after a post-pandemic spike, while civil partnerships have risen by almost the same percentage. This downward trend is also reflected in the US. The Vatican has piped up in defence of the institution, releasing a 40-page doctrinal note, Una Caro (One Flesh): In Praise of Monogamy: Doctrinal Note on the Value of Marriage as an Exclusive Union and Mutual Belonging. Sworn celibates would not be my personal first port of call when seeking relationship advice, but to each their own – exclusively and indissolubly, if the Catholic church is to be believed.
Among the younger crowd, gendered expectations about marriage are changing, at least according to a survey by the University of Michigan, which found that only 61% of high-school girls want to be married one day, compared to 74% of the boys. Perhaps this is behind the burgeoning genre of opinion pieces in which a rightwing man complains that women don’t want to date him. Often enough, he is an avowed libertarian, leaving it a mystery why he does not simply accept the workings of the free market.
In this week’s newsletter: The turn-of-the-2000s produced a frenzy of cultural crystal-ball gazing. Two decades on those bold forecasts reveal as much about us as they do about the era itself
I love revisiting articles from around the turn of the millennium, a fascinatingly febrile period when everyone – but journalists especially – briefly lost the run of themselves. It seems strange now to think that the ticking over of a clock from 23:59 to 00:00 would prompt such big feelings, of excitement, terror, of end-of-days abandon, but it really did (I can remember feeling them myself as a teenager, especially the end-of-days-abandon bit.)
Of course, some of that feeling came from the ticking over of the clock itself: the fears over the Y2K bug might seem quite silly today, but its potential ramifications – planes falling out of the sky, power grids failing, entire life savings being deleted in a stroke – would have sent anyone a bit loopy. There’s a very good podcast, Surviving Y2K, about some of the people who responded particularly drastically to the bug’s threat, including a bloke who planned to sit out the apocalypse by farming and eating hamsters.
The PM becomes the first Australian leader to celebrate a wedding while in office with a private ceremony followed by a reception at his official residence, the Lodge
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has married his partner, Jodie Haydon, in Canberra, making him the first Australian leader to tie the knot in office.
The ceremony took place on Saturday afternoon at Albanese’s official residence, the Lodge, witnessed by a small group of close family and friends, including Albanese’s son, Nathan, and Haydon’s parents, Bill and Pauline.
Locked away in prison for decades, Marwan Barghouti is a longstanding advocate for a two-state solution
A global campaign is being launched to secure the release of Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian prisoner seen by many as the best hope of leading a future Palestinian state, as negotiations continue in the context of the current Gaza ceasefire.
The campaign, being led by Barghouti’s West Bank-based family with UK civil society support, is seeking to put the 66-year-old’s fate at the centre of the next stage of the ceasefire.
The Daily Mail owner has the Telegraph titles in his sights as part of a long-held ambition to create a dominant stable of rightwing newspapers
Waiting two decades for another chance to snaffle a prized business acquisition is a luxury not afforded to many executives. The Rothermere family, however, takes a more relaxed approach to time.
While most business boards draw up five-year plans, the Rothermeres, having compiled a feared media empire over more than a century, are used to thinking in terms of generations.
Exclusive: UCL scientists find large swathes of southern Europe are drying up, with ‘far-reaching’ implications
Vast swathes of Europe’s water reserves are drying up, a new analysis using two decades of satellite data reveals, with freshwater storage shrinking across southern and central Europe, from Spain and Italy to Poland and parts of the UK.
Scientists at University College London (UCL), working with Watershed Investigations and the Guardian, analysed 2002–24 data from satellites, which track changes in Earth’s gravitational field.
Methanol, a cheap relative of ethanol, is entering the supply chain, causing thousands of deaths around the world
For Bethany Clarke, poison tasted like nothing. There was no bitter aftertaste, no astringent sting at the back of the tongue. If anything, she thought in passing, the free shots she and her friends were drinking at a hostel bar in Laos had probably been watered down – she wasn’t detecting a strong vodka flavour through the veil of Sprite she had mixed it with.
All in all, Clarke remembers drinking about five of those shots, sitting with her best friend, Simone White, and a crowd of others at the hostel’s happy hour. CCTV footage shows the group laughing in the warm air of the open bar in the town of Vang Vieng, green and red lights dancing over their shoulders.
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