On Monday night, the US military said it attacked three more boats believed to have been smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing eight people
On Monday night the US military said it launched a fresh round of deadly strikes on foreign vessels suspected of trafficking narcotics, killing eight people.
The US Southern Command posted footage of the strikes on social media on Monday, announcing it had hit three vessels in international waters.
The Zen-like US representative from Minnesota has had the highest level of death threats of any congressperson because of the president’s attacks
“That’s Teddy,” said Tim Mynett, husband of the US representative Ilhan Omar, as their five-year-old labrador retriever capered around her office on Capitol Hill. “If you make too much eye contact, he’ll lose it. He’s my best friend – and he’s our security detail these days.”
The couple were sitting on black leather furniture around a coffee table. Apart from a sneezing fit that took her husband by surprise, Omar had an unusual Zen-like calm for someone who receives frequent death threats and is the subject of a vendetta from the most powerful man in the world.
Region struggling with drought now threatened by energy-hungry facilities – but some residents are fighting back
The sign outside Tom Hermes’s farmyard in Perkins Township in Ohio, a short drive south of the shores of Lake Erie, proudly claims that his family have farmed the land here since 1900. Today, he raises 130 head of cattle and grows corn, wheat, grass and soybeans on 1,200 acres of land.
For his family, his animals and wider business, water is life.
Hannah Hampton has won the Fifa Best women’s goalkeeper 2025 award, completing a global goalkeeper award double after she received the Ballon d’Or ceremony’s equivalent prize for keepers in September.
Hampton, 25, saved two penalties in the European Championship final as England beat Spain in July. The Fifa Best award for this year takes performances between 11 August 2024 to 2 August 2025 into account, and therefore acknowledges not only Hampton’s shootout heroics but also her helping Chelsea win a domestic treble of major trophies last season.
Dispute related to contract before exit for Real Madrid
Court sided with player amid accusations of betrayal
A Paris labour court has ruled Paris Saint-Germain must pay more than €60m to Kylian Mbappé in a dispute over unpaid wages and bonuses linked to the end of his contract before his 2024 move to Real Madrid.
Lawyers argued last month before the Conseil de prud’hommes. The court sided with the player amid accusations of betrayal and harassment surrounding the breakdown of their relationship. PSG had been seeking €440m from Mbappé, citing damages and a “loss of opportunity” after he left on a free transfer.
The director’s incredible versatility and talent meant that he could reduce to tears with anguish or laughter, effortlessly pivoting from comedy to courtroom drama, romcom to rock mockumentary
Obviously The Shining remains the greatest Stephen King adaptation ever made, but Stand By Me is the one I love beyond all measure. It’s the warmest, the saddest and the funniest, too: a lovely, grubby ode to the joys of misspent youth. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12,” remarks small-town adventurer Gordie Lachance, who sets off with his pals to find a dead body in the woods. “Jesus, does anyone?”
Since 2008, struggling communities have been told they are in competition with migrants. Only a model that gives them hope will halt the populists
How much does Europe’s future resemble its gruesome past? That question was already pressing before Donald Trump retook the White House, and turned support for the European far-right “patriotic” parties into US policy. That is, of course, what his newly published National Security Strategy means, committing the US to “cultivating resistance” in European nations against the supposed “civilisational erasure” represented by immigration.
With or without US interference, far-right authoritarianism is now an entirely plausible European future, unless there is drastic change. After all, it is already the US’s present reality. American exceptionalism once held that such an outcome was impossible in the world’s oldest continuous constitutional republic, with its system of separation of powers and no history of despotism. Yet the country is now ruled by a self-styled king, centralising executive power, weaponising the justice system, attacking civil society and neutralising the media.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
Comments on this article will open after 1500 GMT.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy says proposals negotiated with US officials on a peace deal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine could be finalised within days, after which American envoys will present them to the Kremlin.
After two days of talks in Berlin, US officials said on Monday they had resolved “90%” of the problematic issues between Russia and Ukraine, but despite the positive spin it is not clear that an end to the war is any closer, particularly as the Russian side is absent from the current talks.
Mia Tretta has advocated for gun-violence prevention since being shot as a high school student in California in 2019
As federal and local authorities in Providence, Rhode Island, continue searching for the person who killed two Brown University students and injured nine others on Saturday, campus members and the broader community are grieving and dealing with a shattered sense of safety.
But for 21-year-old Brown University junior Mia Tretta, it’s familiar territory.
I am in awe of the children and their parents as they live through raids. How can you call an operation targeted when it blankets a city in fear?
There is snow on the ground, but for some Chicago families, this is a moment of unfreezing. ICE is still out there, but Commander Gregory Bovino and his strike force have moved on. After months, Operation Midway Blitz has quieted.
In places like the elementary school where I am principal, some parents who were hiding are poking their heads out doors. Children holding their breath since September are beginning to exhale.
Michaela’s husband is away 14 hours a day amid Trump’s ban on remote work, the threat of layoffs is ever-present and their health premiums are set to multiply
Michaela felt a sharp pain shoot from her hip while she bent over to water some plants in early May 2025. Then she fell over and couldn’t get back up.
Her husband called an ambulance and she spent the night in a hospital, where, at 57, she found out she had a mass on her spine. It was metastatic breast cancer.
The Guardian's Jonathan Liew visits the World Darts Championships at Alexandra Palace to explore how the game went from the working men's clubs to the world stage, what the next 10 years looks like, and how it continues to have a ever-developing cultural impact around the world
Milan are preparing a loan deal for Niclas Füllkrug, who is available after a disastrous spell at West Ham. The Germany striker has toiled since moving to the London Stadium for £27.5m in the summer of 2024 and is not part of Nuno Espírito Santo’s plans.
Füllkrug, who has failed to score in nine appearances this season, was again left out of the matchday squad when Nuno’s struggling side lost 3-2 at home to Aston Villa on Sunday. The 32-year-old has not started since 4 October and his signing is regarded by West Ham as one of the worst mistakes made by their former technical director Tim Steidten.
His early career was defined by the Vietnam war with early roles in political films such as Hail, Hero! and Summertree. So it felt natural for Michael Douglas, just 31, to make his first foray into producing withOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a tale of one man raging against the system.
Fifty years since its release, Douglas is struck how Cuckoo’s Nest resonates anew in today’s landscape. “It’s about as classic a story as we’ll ever have and it seems timeless now, with what’s going on in our country politically, about man versus the machine and individuality versus the corporate world,” the 81-year-old says via Zoom from Santa Barbara, California.
The president continues to preach austerity and hate to people struggling to make ends meet. No wonder voters are turning on him
Trump gave what was billed as a “Christmas speech” in rural Pennsylvania this past week that began with his “wishing each and everyone one of you a very merry Christmas, happy New Year, all of that stuff” and boasting that now, under his presidency: “Everybody’s saying ‘merry Christmas’ again.”
He then claimed – contrary to the experience of nearly everyone in the crowd – that he had gotten them “lower prices” and “bigger paychecks”. He also asserted that anyone having difficulty making ends meet should just cut back on buying stuff. “You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils … Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two,” he said, adding: “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls.”
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now
Exclusive: Seven-country survey finds strong opposition to increasing migration and support for deportations
Many Europeans mistakenly think most migrants are in their country illegally, according to a poll that found overwhelming opposition to any increase in migration and strong support for a significant reduction in numbers, including deportation.
Pluralities or majorities of between 44% and 60% of respondents polled in a survey by YouGov in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain said they thought “many” or “somewhat” more migrants were staying illegally than legally.
The assorted items that I would class as rubbish sold within five minutes – and I have never wanted so much to engage in dialogue with a buyer
We have a lot of differing opinions about Vinted activity in my household. My son thinks [sic] “old people have a massively inflated idea of how much things are worth”, so he would never flog anything on my account, lest he get tainted with oldness. It was hard to know where to start on this argument, between “maybe we just have nicer stuff”; “the worth of everything is determined by the price people will pay for it, in a citizen economy”; and “I am not old”.
My daughter, conversely, is happy to funnel her wares through me, which is how I arrived at peak Vinted, its very spirit in a single item: I posted a bag of random tat for £2. It sold within five minutes.
President claims broadcaster ‘intentionally, maliciously and deceptively’ edited 6 January speech before Capitol attack
The BBC has vowed to defend itself against the $10bn lawsuit that the US president, Donald Trump filed against it.
In a complaint filed on Monday evening, Trump sought $5bn in damages each on two counts, alleging that the BBC defamed him, and that it violated Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
Flight logs reveal three British women onboard who were allegedly trafficked by convicted sex offender, according to BBC
Nearly 90 flights linked to Jeffrey Epstein reportedly arrived at and departed from UK airports, some with British women onboard who allege they were abused by the convicted child sex offender.
Analysis by the BBC found three British women who were allegedly trafficked appear in Epstein’s records of flights in and out of the UK and other documents related to the late disgraced billionaire.
In the UK, close to half of 25-year-olds now live with parents who, in many cases, would expect their nest to have long since emptied. How does this change families, for good and bad?
If life had worked out differently, Serena would by now be coming to terms with an empty nest. Having brought up seven children, she and her husband might even have been enjoying a little more money and time for themselves. But as it is, three of their adult children are now at home: the 23-year-old finishing his degree; the 28-year-old, a teacher, saving for a house deposit; and the 34-year-old, after a mental health crisis. At 63, Serena comes home from her job as a social worker to a mountain of laundry, and a spare downstairs room requisitioned as a bedroom.
Having a houseful is “really good fun”, she says, and makes life richer and more interesting. But it took a while to get used to partners staying over – “I’m not a prude, but you don’t necessarily want to be part of that life for your children, do you?” – and lately, she has felt the lack of an important rite of passage. “I’ve become old and I never really felt it, because I’ve been in that parent mode for such a long time,” she says. “It’s suddenly hit me that I didn’t have that transition that often happens, with kids who leave when you’re in your 40s and 50s – that just hasn’t happened. It’s odd.”
Joesley Batista is credited as a major force behind the reconciliation between Trump and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Six international airlines had suspended flights to Venezuela over the risk of possible US military strikes when an ultra-long-haul executive jet from São Paulo, Brazil, landed calmly in Caracas.
On board that flight on 23 November was the Brazilian meat tycoon Joesley Batista – twice jailed for corruption and whose companies have a long record of environmental violations. After a meeting with the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, he returned to Brazil the following day.
Companies such as Udio, Suno and Klay will let you use AI to make new music based on existing artists’ work. It could mean more royalties – but many are worried
This was the year that AI-generated music went from jokey curiosity to mainstream force. Velvet Sundown, a wholly AI act, generated millions of streams; AI-created tracks topped Spotify’s viral chart and one of the US Billboard country charts; AI “artist” Xania Monet “signed” a record deal. BBC Introducing is usually a platform for flesh-and-blood artists trying to make it big, but an AI-generated song by Papi Lamour was recently played on the West Midlands show. And jumping up the UK Top 20 this month is I Run, a track by dance act Haven, who have been accused of using AI to imitate British vocalist Jorja Smith (Haven claim they simply asked the AI for “soulful vocal samples”, and did not respond to an earlier request to comment).
The worry is that AI will eventually absorb all creative works in history and spew out endless slop that will replace human-made art and drive artists into penury. Those worries are being deepened by how the major labels, once fearful of the technology, are now embracing it – and heralding a future in which ordinary listeners have a hand in co-creating music with their favourite musicians.
Connexion
