⚽ Updates from the 4.30pm Premier League kick-off
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It’s a cold day in London, and Selhurst awaits the teams, who are both in the tunnel and will enter the pitch from the corner.

Richard Hirst gets in touch: “Watching the video of John Robertson in the piece you linked to I was reminded not only of his ability but also of the state of the pitches. It really was a different game then: maybe football did begin in 1992!”

Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s starling metamorphosis from an almost forgotten man to a striker on the verge of an England recall continued as his seventh goal in the last six games earned Leeds a potentially important point by the River Wear.

There were moments when Calvert-Lewin and company threatened to end Sunderland’s unbeaten Premier League record here but Régis Le Bris’s side are no pushovers these days and, by the end Daniel Farke looked happy enough with a draw.

Online audiences seeking out authentic and passionate voices as antidote to AI-generated content

For years, social media fame has been associated with the red carpet glamour of the Kardashians and Cristiano Ronaldo’s megawatt sporting celebrity, but millions of users globally are increasingly turning their attention to unassuming heroes drawn from everyday life.

TikTok says a range of accounts, from a bird enthusiast to an Italian grandmother and a doubledecker bus fan, have grown in popularity this year as social media users latch on to authentic voices.

UKHSA warns vulnerable and elderly people may be at risk with temperatures to drop severely overnight

Amber cold health alerts have been issued for northern England, with low temperatures predicted to cause a “rise in deaths” among vulnerable and elderly people.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has issued two amber warnings for north-east and north-west England, which will be in place between 8pm on Sunday until midday on Monday 5 January.

While the Melbourne curator had to face the media and say sorry, some of the players owe him an apology in return

You know that something has gone wrong when the man in charge of the cricket pitch is giving a post-match press conference. Australian pitches are celebrities in their own right, each with a distinct perceived personality. Perth – gasoline, bounce. Sydney – intrigue, spin. Adelaide – graft, a late finale. Like any possessor of fame who has been around long enough, some trade on past glories that no longer apply, but what those ideas mean to the people repeating them is worth more than the truth itself.

Aptly, these celebrities have agents, representatives, fluffers, heading to media appearances before each Test to prognosticate. Where the English grass gaffers are still called groundsmen, clomping around in gumboots yelling at interlopers to get off their giant lawn, the Australians are curators, artfully synthesising the elements of sun and rain and dew and morning mist into something tangible. Their pre-match appearances are oracular, reading the grass clippings like Babylonians did the heavens to say what might happen, to give the mood of the soil, to press one ear to the ground and tell you whether she be restless or still.

Metal ‘needed in many industrial processes’, says Tesla boss as supply fears grow over price surge and new rules

A surge in the price of silver to record highs this month has prompted a warning from Elon Musk that manufacturers could suffer the consequences.

Silver has risen sharply during December, part of a precious metals rally that also pushed gold and platinum to record levels on Boxing Day.

• Bangal, Catamo and Calila score in 3-2 victory

• Defeat leaves Gabon’s hopes hanging by a thread

Mozambique ended a 40-year wait for victory at the Africa Cup of Nations as they beat Gabon 3-2 in Agadir.

Goals from Faisal Bangal, Geny Catamo and Diogo Calila earned the southern African side a deserved victory in which they were led by 42-year-old winger Elias Pelembe. It is their first win at the continental finals since their debut in 1986 in what was their 17th game.

This story will be updated

• Morris was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2022

• Glamorgan lead tributes to ‘fine human being’

Hugh Morris, the former England and Glamorgan batter who went on to hold senior positions with country and county, has died at the age of 62.

Born in Cardiff in 1963, Morris became Glamorgan’s youngest ever captain at the age of 22 before returning to the role later in his career, leading them to the Sunday League title in 1993, their first trophy in 24 years.

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

• Forward scores twice in 3-0 win over Verona

• Højlund on target again as Napoli beat Cremonese

Milan beat Hellas Verona 3-0 on Sunday to leapfrog leaders Inter and provisionally move top of the Serie A standings thanks to a brace from Christopher Nkunku.

Milan struggled to break down a disciplined Verona side in the first half but made the breakthrough from a corner in added time when Christian Pulisic volleyed home near the far post.

This story will be updated

The public is looking for relief from terrorism and violence. But Donald Trump’s words bolster narratives of foreign ‘crusader’ aggression

The response of Nigerians to the airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) targets in Sokoto state, north-western Nigeria are complicated. The rationale behind them has been widely opposed, but the strikes themselves have been welcomed.

The airstrikes were framed as a response to what have been described as genocidal attacks on Christians in the country. But the Nigerian authorities have consistently rejected this narrative, arguing that armed groups in the country do not discriminate based on religion, and that Christians and Muslims largely coexist peacefully. Ironically, it was Trump’s redesignation of Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” in November that deepened Muslim-Christian tensions. Many northerners, who are predominantly Muslim, blamed southern Nigerians for championing a narrative that ultimately resulted in US sanctions and international stigma.

Onyedikachi Madueke is a security analyst at the University of Aberdeen

Athletics’ breakout star of 2025 is taking a gap year before university and says the break will help him focus more on the track

Sprint phenomenon Gout Gout turned 18 on Monday, marking the formal end to the childhood of Australia’s fastest man. It’s a sentence as ridiculous as the Queenslander’s times, which have propelled him towards a medal assault at the 2026 Commonwealth Games and World Junior Championships.

The past 12 months delivered Gout a first national title and a first senior world championships semi-final appearance. He was clocked under 10s in the 100m and under 20s in the 200m, even if the times were scrubbed from records due to excessive tailwinds.

My centre of gravity has shifted. The holidays are no longer something to construct but something to receive

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

Just over a year ago, my mother died. It was a few months after my second baby was born and a month before Christmas. She was the last in the generation above me, and this fact reordered things in ways that are only just revealing themselves.

This time last year, I was still unravelling – months of hospitals, grief and the unmanageable weight of suffering pressing into my postpartum body.

The time will come

when, with elation,

The chipmaker’s sprawling partnerships are driving extraordinary growth but also bank its future on the AI boom paying off quickly

Nvidia is, in crucial ways, nothing like Enron – the Houston energy giant that imploded through multibillion-dollar accounting fraud in 2001. Nor is it similar to companies such as Lucent or Worldcom that folded during the dotcom bubble.

But the fact that it needs to reiterate this to its investors is less than ideal.

⚽ Updates from the 2pm Premier League kick-off
⚽ Live scores | Table | Follow us on Bluesky

A reminder of the teams

Sunderland (possible 4-2-3-1) Roefs; Hume, Mukiele, Alderete, Cirkin; Xhaka, Geertruida; Rigg, Le Fee, Adingra; Brobbey.
Subs: Patterson, Tutierov, J Jones, Hjelde, H Jones, Neil, Mundle, Mayenda.

Released documents detail the assembly line-like process with which Jeffrey Epstein procured underage victims

By the mid-2000s, Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen girls was routine. From 2002 to 2005 alone, the late financier victimized “dozens” of underage teens by luring them into sex acts for payment under the auspices of massage work, some as young as 14, prosecutors said.

Epstein leaned on a coterie of employees and associates – including British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell – to secure a “steady supply of minor victims”. He also enlisted his victims to recruit other girls under the false pretense of providing massages, prosecutors said.

Swerve the stress on New Year’s Eve and serve up a buffet comprising one big dish with plenty of sides, like this chicken and rice with amba, an amazing, tangy Iraqi condiment

New Year’s Eve has always struck me as the most treacherous of nights. Not because of the drink, or the fireworks, or the pressure of staying awake past midnight (although that alone should qualify as an endurance sport). Like Valentine’s Day and your birthday, what makes New Year’s Eve perilous is the collective insistence that this night has to deliver: the best meal, the best party, the best version of ourselves. High expectations that will inevitably lead to disappointment, and haven’t we had our fair share of that already?

There was one year in the restaurant when we convinced ourselves that the only way to rise to the occasion was a set menu of showstoppers. We thought we had predicted everything, and we assumed (boldly, wrongly) that everyone would choose the chocolate dessert. It made sense: who wouldn’t want chocolate on the most celebratory night of the year? So the tarte tatin went on the menu as a polite alternative, a back-up singer, not the star. Except, of course, everyone wanted the tarte tatin.

Key topics include security guarantees from Europe and the US, with Putin yet to signal interest in latest negotiations

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates

Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are to meet on Sunday to discuss a plan to end the war in Ukraine, amid continuing Russian attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, and scepticism that Moscow is willing to drop any of its maximalist demands.

Zelenskyy arrived in Florida on Saturday night with a Ukrainian delegation, before talks with the US president at his Mar-a-Lago residence. The two leaders are expected to discuss the latest iteration of a 20-point peace plan and the unresolved question of the future of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Batter says changing management would be ‘silly’ but questions remain over whether the current setup is producing the best players

In fairness to Australian cricket, it rarely sticks its head in the sand. On Sunday in Melbourne, when 90,000 fans should have been enjoying day three of the fourth Test, they put Matt Page, chief curator at the MCG, in front of the media to face a grilling over that casino of a two-day pitch.

Page was contrite, admitted his mistakes, and vowed to never repeat the 10mm of grass that, while designed to guard against hotter weather later in the match, delivered a second hammer blow to Cricket Australia’s finances this series. For all the public anger Stuart Fox, the ground’s chief executive, did not sound as if he was about to issue Page with his marching orders.

The new film adaptation by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell looks set to be provocative – but nowhere near as shocking as Emily Brontë’s original

The most astonishing thing about the first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not the extreme closeup of dough being kneaded into submission. It’s not that in the lead roles Margot Robbie is blonde and 35, and Jacob Elordi is white, when Emily Brontë described Cathy as a teen brunette and Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gypsy”. It’s not the gaudy splendour of the interiors – silver walls, plaster Greek gods spewing strings of pearls, blood-red floors and a flesh-pink wall for clutching and licking. It’s not Robbie’s gobstopper diamonds or her scarlet sunglasses or her stuffing grass into her mouth or the loud snip of her corset laces being slashed with a knife or her elaborately – erotically – bound hair as she contemplates multiple silver cake stands stacked with vertiginous fruit puddings. It’s not any of her dresses – the red latex number or the perfectly 1980s off-the-shoulder wedding dress topped by yards of veil half-wuthered off her head. Nor is it any of the times Elordi takes his top off.

The most astonishing thing is that the trailer says Wuthering Heights is “the greatest love story of all time”. Which is almost exactly how the 1939 Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon film was trailed – as “the greatest love story of our time … or any time!” Have we learned nothing? I am not talking about the fact that (like Oberon’s!) Robbie’s wedding dress is white, which is not period-correct. This has exercised many people on the internet. I’m more worried about the fact that almost a century since Olivier’s film, we are still calling it a love story – a great one! The greatest! It’s being released the day before Valentine’s Day! – when what actually happens is that Cathy rejects Heathcliff because she’s a snob, and he turns into a psychopath.

Two film producers discuss second homes, the use of the word ‘woke’, and the importance of the BBC. Could they find any common ground?

Alex, 28, London

Occupation Assistant producer for documentaries

From companionship to psychotherapy, technology could meet unmet needs – but it needs to be handled responsibly

There is much anxiety these days about the dangers of human-AI relationships. Reports of suicide and self-harm attributable to interactions with chatbots have understandably made headlines. The phrase “AI psychosis” has been used to describe the plight of people experiencing delusions, paranoia or dissociation after talking to large language models (LLMs). Our collective anxiety has been compounded by studies showing that young people are increasingly embracing the idea of AI relationships; half of teens chat with an AI companion at least a few times a month, with one in three finding conversations with AI “to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real‑life friends”.

But we need to pump the brakes on the panic. The dangers are real, but so too are the potential benefits. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that – depending on what future scientific research reveals – AI relationships could actually be a boon for humanity.

The Caatinga in the north-east has been transformed by the heating climate in just a generation and could become the country’s first desert

Every Tuesday at dawn, Raildon Suplício Maia goes to the market in Macururé, in Brazil’s Bahia state, to sell goats. He haggles with buyers to get a good price for the animals, which are reared in the open and roam freely.

Goats are the main – and sometimes only – source of income for the people of Macururé, a small town in the Brazilian sertão. This rural hinterland in the country’s north-east is known for its dry climate and harsh conditions.

Raildon Suplicio Maia, a goat farmer from Macururé sells his animals at the market. Grazing has disappeared and he now spends any profit on feed

Ukrainian president will meet US president at his Mar-a-Lago home later today for their first in person meeting since October

The Ukrainian military said on Sunday that it hit the Syzran oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region in an overnight drone attack.

The strike caused a fire and damages were still being assessed, Kyiv’s General Staff said.