Hopes rise of a breakthrough in using £78bn of frozen Russian assets to bankroll Kyiv

European leaders rallied behind Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday night amid hopes they might finally achieve a breakthrough to allow Ukraine access to billions of pounds of frozen Russian assets.

Despite vociferous support for the Ukrainian president, who has come under heavy pressure from Donald Trump to cede territory in order to bring the war to a speedy end, there was still no agreement on the thorny question of turning immobilised assets into a loan for Kyiv.

• Minute-by-minute report of the 8pm GMT kick-off

• Amorim: Mainoo is proof I trust United’s academy

• Get in touch! Email Will with any thoughts

Matt Burtz emails: “There are some who don’t believe in xG, and that’s fine. For those who do, Wolves’ xG per 90 minutes is -0.44. Not great, but it’s only the fourth worst in the Premier League. (Interestingly enough, it’s ahead of Sunderland’s -0.52.) But the main stat for Wolves is an xG against of 18.9, which is seventh in the PL (and better than that of third place Aston Villa). This means they’ve been incredibly unlucky in keeping goals out. Clearly they need to score more goals as one every two games isn’t going to cut it at any level, but if their luck balances out defensively there is a theoretical chance of them putting some results together.”

It’s a nice theory.

Resignation comes despite administration’s efforts to keep her in place after courts found she was serving unlawfully

• US politics live – latest updates

Donald Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba says she is resigning as top federal prosecutor in New Jersey, she announced on social media.

Habba’s resignation came after district and appellate court rulings which found she was unlawfully serving in the role, a powerful post charged with enforcing federal criminal and civil law.

• F1’s new superstar shares memories from road to glory

• Briton tells of ‘cool flashbacks’ on track in Abu Dhabi

After becoming Formula One world champion for the first time, Lando Norris revealed that he had enjoyed the final moments of the Abu Dhabi grand prix on Sunday by considering all the moments that had brought him to the pinnacle of the sport.

Norris was speaking the day after he won the world championship by taking third place at the Yas Marina circuit. His title rival Max Verstappen won the race but fell short of Norris by just two points. The fight remained tight to the decisive last round with Norris’s McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri, who had led the championship for a large part of the season, also in the mix for the final race but who ultimately finished third.

Attorneys for the victims struck deal with the church’s largest insurer to increase $230m settlement approved earlier

• New Orleans Catholic archdiocese gains approval to pay $230m to sexual abuse survivors

Roughly 600 survivors of the clergy molestation scandal that drove the New Orleans Catholic archdiocese into bankruptcy have secured the opportunity to collectively be paid $305m after attorneys for the victims and the church’s largest insurer struck a deal Monday, according to some of the lawyers.

The insurer in question, Travelers, had refused to join a proposal officially approved Monday to pay $230m to the abuse survivors to effectively wrap up a bankruptcy protection case that the US’s second-oldest archdiocese filed in May 2020.

MPs, media and supporter groups accuse club of attacking press freedom with bar after reporting on owner

Brighton & Hove Albion has been accused of setting a “dangerous precedent”, as it faced criticism for banning Guardian reporters and photographers from home matches after reports on allegations concerning the club’s owner.

MPs, media and football supporter groups accused the Premier League club of attacking press freedom after its decision to bar the Guardian from the Amex Stadium, after coverage of allegations relating to Tony Bloom.

Club gets boost for development of Racecourse Ground, but move comes months after it received £14m state aid

The Wrexham AFC owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have sold a stake in the company to the US private equity investors Apollo, less than three months after the football club was given £14m in state aid.

The Welsh club on Monday announced the investment by Apollo Sports Capital, part of the New York-listed investor. It did not reveal the size of the investment, but said Reynolds and McElhenney, who has changed his name to Rob Mac, would remain majority owners.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s new book, The Diary of a Prisoner, is being released this week – and also details the time he spent in jail

The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has said Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party is “not a danger” to France, and he would not support a united front of parties against Le Pen at the next election.

In his new book, written at a “small plywood table” in prison where he recently served 20 days of a sentence for criminal conspiracy, Sarkozy said many of his former supporters were now potential Le Pen voters, and he appeared to include the RN in his vision of a broad French right.

Linklater is missing from the best director list despite having two nominated films, and actors including Sydney Sweeney and Josh O’Connor are nowhere to be seen. It looks like Paul Thomas Anderson’s year

• Golden Globe nominations: One Battle After Another leads the charge

• Golden Globes 2026: full list of nominations

It’s become traditional to look for the snubs in any award list – and heaven help anyone whose job it is to curate the “in memoriam” montage on the night and then the next morning apologise for the inevitable hurtful omissions.

Snubs have become a cliche of awards season commentary, but you have to wonder about the best director list of this year’s Golden Globes nominations. No Richard Linklater? This amazing director actually has two films in the “best musical or comedy” section (so I guess he can’t really be that depressed). There’s his amazingly witty and poignant chamber piece Blue Moon, with Globe-nominated Ethan Hawke playing depressed Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, and his eerily accomplished pastiche-homage Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Godard’s classic Breathless, shot not in the boring old colour in which these events happened but in a beautifully realised monochrome – a little reverential for my tastes but still a marvellously accomplished picture. Two films in one year, and such different films. Quite a feat.

Actor, who starred in The Passion of the Christ, will play the disgraced ex-Brazilian president in film written by his one-time secretary of culture

Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president now in prison for plotting a coup, is getting the biopic treatment.

Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, is reportedly filming a “heroic” portrait of the rightwing ex-politician in secret. Dark Horse, directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh and written by Mário Frias, who served as secretary of culture under Bolsonaro, started shooting three months ago in Brazil, where Bolsonaro served as president from 2019 until 2023. He was sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison in September 2025 for leading a criminal conspiracy to stop his leftwing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, taking power, though his supporters deny the allegations and have compared the prosecution to the “lawfare” allegedly faced by Donald Trump before he was re-elected.

The answer to today’s engineering challenge

Earlier today I asked you to reinvent a component of the sixteenth century Dutch sawmill, which – according to a new book – was the world’s first industrial machine. You can read that post here, along with some great BTL discussion about the world’s greatest inventions. (Spoon or spear? Plough or spectacles? Transistor or trousers?)

Round and up

The minimum bet rule model is there in Australia for all to see and the Gambling Commission should act now

Racing enjoyed its biggest win for many years in last month’s budget. The threatened harmonisation of duty rates for betting and gaming was not simply seen off, but routed, with the differential between the two rates significantly increased. As an added bonus, meanwhile, racing was excluded from the small rise in the duty rate for bets on football and other sporting events.

Having celebrated the win, though, the next step is to ensure that the benefits are maximised. And since, in relative terms, racing has just become a more attractive product for bookmakers, what better moment could there be to address one of the major obstacles that many punters face when they want to bet on the horses?

Cyril Ramaphosa says theories, promoted by Donald Trump, ‘conveniently align with wider notions of white supremacy’

White supremacist ideology and false claims that South Africa’s Afrikaner minority is being racially persecuted pose a threat to the country’s sovereignty and national security, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has warned.

Since taking office for his second US presidential term in January, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that South Africa’s government is seizing land and encouraging violence against white farmers.

The proposed acquisition would see yet more of Hollywood controlled by a tech company and one that doesn’t seem to care about the theatrical experience

Did Netflix just exacerbate a bunch of seasonal affective disorders in cinephiles? Timed to ruin holidays like a round of end-of-year layoffs, the streaming giant announced plans to buy Warner Bros, a movie and television studio with a full-century legacy. It’s possible that the acquisition won’t actually go through – and if it does, it won’t be for at least a year. But the news still looms over year-end awards and list-making, and it’s going to take more than a jingle-bell heist to steal back any holiday cheer for the entertainment industry, much less halt the march of corporate consolidation and monopolization. Even more depressing: the entity that seems most able to take action against this is … another attempted consolidation. Paramount has launched a bid for a hostile takeover of Warner Bros Discovery, which would bring two big studios under one extremely Trump-friendly umbrella. This would almost certainly further cull the number of wide-release movies released each year.

Depression might not seem like a rational response, especially for anyone who doesn’t actually work in said industry. (There are plenty of reasons that various unions are making their opposition to either sale known.) Yet the news last week had hundreds of film fans posting eulogies and defenses not just of Warner Bros as a studio – which on its own includes a vast history encompassing classics like Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Departed, Bonnie and Clyde, The Searchers and The Matrix, among hundreds – but the very fabric of theatrical moviegoing.

Bunches appear on West Sussex beaches after containers fell off ship, but council asks for space for cleanup

It isn’t quite Whisky Galore! – the classic British film in which residents of a Scottish island attempt to pilfer 50,000 cases of spirits from a shipwreck.

Rather than a warming dram or two, people on the south coast of England have been finding bunches of bananas from containers that fell off the back of a ship and washed up on beaches in West Sussex.

Settlement also includes major changes to how church identifies and discloses past claims of abuse by clergy

After more than five years of litigation, a federal bankruptcy judge has approved the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans’ proposal to pay $230m to roughly 600 survivors of sexual abuse by the church’s priests, deacons and other personnel.

Judge Meredith Grabill on Monday confirmed the settlement, which also includes major changes to how the church identifies and discloses past claims of sexual abuse by clergy and protects children and vulnerable adults going forward.

Forget sprawling mansions or quirky architecture, Zoopla’s most-viewed listing in 2025 was notable for being relatively affordable and surrounded by countryside …

Name: Britain’s most desirable home.

Age: Newly crowned.

Civil rights leaders decry administration’s move to downplay Black American history and promote president

The US’s National Park Service (NPS) will offer free admission to US residents on Donald Trump’s birthday in 2026 – which also happens to be Flag Day – but is eliminating the benefit for Martin Luther King Jr Day and Juneteenth.

The new list of free admission days for Americans is the latest example of the Trump administration downplaying America’s civil rights history while also promoting the president’s image, name and legacy.

Hosts were shown five cards in 38 seconds before Williot Swedberg delivered the coup de grace that left them bereft

Sunday night’s final scene at the Santiago Bernabéu was the way a final scene should be. Like something from a war film or a western, a heist movie or the truest romance, Williot Swedberg just walked calmly through the chaos and the noise, nothing the defeated could do now. Some had fallen, others just froze: all of them left behind with only the realisation, watching in slow motion as he went, their fate sealed and his victory secured, the story finished even before he had. Suitably cinematic and so cool.

When did you last see someone literally walk the ball in? Here, of all places, it happened, and it was the perfect picture. An hour had gone when Swedberg, unseen, appeared like a shadow, providing a flick so subtle it wasn’t seen at first either and so soft it was like he was wearing slippers. That had deservedly delivered the opening goal, Celta leading 1-0. Now, into added time 19 years since they last won a league game here and having resisted the bugle call, the Bernabéu doing its Bernabéu thing, it was time to add the coup de grace.

Pamela Smith, first Black woman to lead the department, quits amid battle with Trump over control of police

• US politics – live updates

Washington’s police chief, Pamela Smith, is resigning after less than two years in the role amid an ongoing battle over control of the city’s law enforcement as Donald Trump moved to federalize the Metropolitan police department.

Mayor Muriel Bowser announced Smith’s departure on Monday, praising her leadership during a period of “significant urgency” for the nation’s capital.

Paramount’s bid for the entire company counters $82.7bn Netflix deal for WBD’s studio and streaming operation

David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is not giving up in its aggressive campaign to acquire Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), launching a hostile bid for the entertainment company despite the announcement on Friday that Netflix had agreed to buy its studio and streaming operation.

Netflix’s bid for WBD’s storied Hollywood movie studio, as well as its premier HBO cable network, valued the company at $82.7bn. But it did not agree to acquire WBD’s traditional television assets, including the news network CNN and the Discovery channel.

90,000 people advised to take shelter after 7.5-magnitude quake, but tsunami warnings downgraded

A powerful 7.5-magnitude earthquake has shaken north-eastern Japan, prompting orders for about 90,000 residents to evacuate and tsunami warnings that hours later were downgraded to advisories.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) initially said a tsunami as high as 3 metres (10ft) could hit Japan’s north-eastern coast after the earthquake struck off the coast at 11.15pm (2.15pm GMT).

• Wales could meet Canada at World Cup after playoffs

• Bellamy riled by Jesse Marsch’s high fives in September

Craig Bellamy has revived his feud with Jesse Marsch after Wales were put on the same World Cup path as co-hosts Canada.

Bellamy felt slighted by Marsch and his staff celebrating with touchline high fives before the final whistle sounded on Canada’s 1-0 September friendly victory in Swansea. The Wales head coach reacted to those premature celebrations by saying after the game: “I hope I see you at the World Cup.”