An email: “G’Day Bazza,” writes Chris Paraskevas from Australia. “It’s a civilized 0700 kickoff for those of us Down Under and there is only one question on Newcastle fans’ collective hive mind: will Anthony Gordon and Anthony Elanga wear matching headbands tonight?
“As the season has progressed, Gordon has moved from plain black headband to a branded Adidas one, but Elanga’s game and fashion have comparatively stalled this season - maybe he’ll go fot something spicey, like one of the bandanas the gangsters wear in Blood In Blood Out.
The unwritten rule in professional tournaments? Do not hog the practice court. But as leading players testify – the reality is very different
On a cool Wednesday afternoon before the US Open last year, Daniil Medvedev and Alexander Zverev were busy fine-tuning their games in an intense practice set at Louis Armstrong Stadium. Danielle Collins and Christian Harrison, semi-finalists in the mixed doubles tournament, were scheduled to take their place at the hour and the American pair duly arrived a couple of minutes before their allotted slot.
An amusing scene soon unfolded. Medvedev and Zverev were clearly desperate to continue playing for a little longer, but their court time had run out. The pair began to sheepishly deliberate over whether to attempt to play another game, even lining up on the baseline again, and they still occupied the court past the hour. Finally, they admitted defeat, allowing Collins and Harrison, who had been standing quietly on the sidelines, to begin.
Dr Ezekiel J Emanuel, a former Obamacare adviser, has deceptively simple advice for living a healthy life
Being healthy shouldn’t feel this complicated. Yet every week brings a new wellness fixation, from “fibermaxxing” to “zone 2 training”, creatine and cortisol-hacking.
Between prescriptive plans, complex science and often contradictory advice, it can seem like being healthy is a full-time job – or a hopeless cause.
Prime minister is yet to receive a formal invitation, but the Guardian has been told that Starmer is expected to accept
Keir Starmer has been offered a place on the Gaza “peace board” set up by Donald Trump as part of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
The prime minister was asked to sit on the board by a senior member of the Trump administration. The Guardian has been told that Starmer is expected to accept but has not yet received a formal invitation, while conversations about the exact makeup of the board are continuing.
Head coach Mike Tomlin is leaving the Pittsburgh Steelers after 19 seasons, the team confirmed on Tuesday.
“Obviously, I am extremely grateful to Mike for all the hard work, dedication and success we have shared over the last 19 years. It is hard for me to put into words the level of respect and appreciation I have for Coach Tomlin,” Steelers president Art Rooney II said in a statement. “He guided the franchise to our sixth Super Bowl championship and made the playoffs 13 times during his tenure, including winning the AFC North eight times in his career.”
The UK government is threatening Elon Musk’s X with a ban. The social media platform is under pressure from ministers over the use of the Grok AI tool to manipulate images of women and children to remove their clothes. Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, has launched an investigation into X – and the government says it will support a ban if Ofcom decides to press ahead.
Toby Ovens of Broughton Transport called Brexit a nightmare, and said he hoped a reset with the EU would mean ‘light at the end of the tunnel’
British vets have been forced to chase lorries down the motorway on their way to Dover due to the “pure hell” of Brexit paperwork needed by inspectors in Calais, MPs have been told.
Toby Ovens of Broughton Transport told the business and trade committee that Brexit has been a costly and logistic nightmare, and hopes of a reset with the EU represented “light at the end of the tunnel”.
Attacking Jerome Powell distracts from Republicans’ thin legislative record and policies that continue to squeeze American household incomes
The US government’s authoritarian and vexatious attack on Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, should be seen in the light of America’s affordability crisis, which Donald Trump once dismissed, but is now scrambling to claim as his cause. The cost of living is eroding his support ahead of the congressional midterms. By launching a legal assault on the Fed, Mr Trump is trying to shift blame for borrowing costs.
Yet despite controlling the presidency, Senate and the House, Republicans have passed little beyond a large tax-cutting bill that benefits the rich. They have not legislated on housing supply, childcare, healthcare costs or wages. Indeed most of their actions are worsening affordability, notably deferring action even though millions face a sharp rise in their health insurance bills. Mr Trump’s sudden enthusiasm for credit card caps and housing interventions is pure opportunism.
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Approval shortly before Keir Starmer’s trip to Beijing would come despite widespread concern among Labour MPs
A vast new Chinese embassy complex in east London is almost certain to be formally approved next week despite renewed worries among Labour MPs about potential security risks and the effect on Hong Kong and Uyghur exiles in the capital.
The green light for the super-embassy at Royal Mint Court near Tower Bridge would smooth relations before Keir Starmer’s visit to China, which is expected to take place at the end of January, but officials insist there has been no political input in the planning process.
An ophthalmologist in Tehran has documented more than 400 eye injuries from gunshots in a single hospital, as overwhelmed medical staff struggle to cope with the toll of an increasingly violent crackdown on nationwide protests by Iranian authorities.
Three doctors, in messages forwarded to the Guardian on Monday, described overwhelmed hospitals and emergency wings overflowing with protesters who had been shot. Medical staff said the gunshot wounds were mostly concentrated on protesters’ eyes and heads – a tactic that rights groups said authorities used against demonstrators in the country’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
In 2026, when it feels as though the world is moments away from any number of disasters, there is nothing hotter than watching someone do their job really, really well
Defense secretary says AI tool will join military systems later this month as it comes under fire for sexual imagery
Pete Hegseth announced on Monday that the US military will begin integrating Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks.
Speaking at the SpaceX headquarters in Texas on Monday evening, the US defense secretary said that the integration of Grok into military systems would go live later this month. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said.
Ballot initiative, opposed by the ultra-wealthy, would levy one-time 5% tax on individuals worth more than $1bn
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, renewed his pledge this week to fight a controversial plan to tax billionaires in the state. The proposed ballot measure, which could go to voters in November, has gained public attention recently amid heavy criticism and threats from tech moguls to leave the state.
In interviews with Politico and the New York Times published on Monday, Newsom described his office’s efforts to kill the proposed billionaire tax and told the Times he would “do what I have to do to protect the state”. As a direct-to-voters ballot initiative, Newsom would not have the power to veto the tax if the proposal passed.
Cartoonist – who was dropped from US papers in 2023 after calling Black people a ‘hate group’ – had prostate cancer
Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the satirical comic strip Dilbert and conservative commentator, has died aged 68 after being diagnosed with prostate cancer.
On Tuesday, Adams’s ex-wife Shelly Miles revealed his death in a tearful livestream of his YouTube channel Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
Donald Trump may not be unafraid to use military force against Iran, according to the White House, but the reality is the US president has few to no options that could obviously help that country’s protest movement, never mind the fact that the history of US intervention in the region has hardly been a success.
Emboldened by the seizure of the erstwhile Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, after an operation that took months of planning, Trump talked up military intervention against the Iranian regime with no military pre-positioning having taken place. In fact, there has been a drawdown in the last few months, reducing military options further.
A study has shown the devastating impact of arts funding cuts on institutions across America and many within the industry are concerned for what’s next
From Times Square to the Washington Monument, America saw in the new year with a bigger bang than usual, celebrating the fact that 2026 marks the nation’s 250th birthday. Yet as the US looks back, precious repositories of the nation’s history are facing an uncertain future.
Museum attendances are down. Budgets are precarious. Cuts in federal funding are taking their toll. And Donald Trump’s culture wars are spreading fear, intimidation and self-censorship among some directors and donors.
Impact of raid on infrastructure rivals early weeks of war when tanks tried to force their way into Ukrainian capital
On the night of 9 January, amid warnings from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of massive and imminent Russian airstrikes, Tetiana Shkred began cooking for her children at midnight.
Concerned that the power was once again about to be knocked out in her apartment block on Kyiv’s left bank – the side of the city that has been most affected by Moscow’s attacks on energy infrastructure – she cooked until 3am, when her flat was plunged into freezing darkness.
World No 2’s victory continues run of 6-2 match results
John Higgins faces Barry Hawkins in late Tuesday game
Kyren Wilson, the 2024 world champion, defeated Si Jiahui in impressive fashion to reach the Masters quarter-finals with the 6-2 result continuing a curious statistic: every match at Alexandra Palace this week up to their encounter had finished with the same scoreline.
After edging the first frame following a run of snookers, Wilson – yet to win a tournament this season having broken his cue at the start of the campaign – looked set to build a maximum in the next, but just missed the 11th red into the bottom corner pocket as he moved 2-0 ahead.
A rainstorm swept across the Gaza Strip, flooding hundreds of tents and collapsing homes sheltering families displaced by two years of war. At least six people have been killed, local health officials said. Three months since a ceasefire halted major combat, Israeli forces have ordered the near-total depopulation of nearly two-thirds of Gaza. More than 2 million people have been forced into a narrow strip near the coast, with most living in makeshift tents or damaged buildings
Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London There’s no escape from the torments of the past in this show, which celebrates the German artist at his most Wagnerian, enchanting and sickening you simultaneously
Born in 1921, Joseph Beuys was the “perfect” age to fight for Hitler and he did, with the wounds to prove it. The Andy Warhol portraits that complement this exhibition, without actually being part of it, brutally catch his gaunt, ravaged face in the glare of a photo flash under the hat he wore to hide burns sustained in a plane crash while serving in the Luftwaffe. The most haunting portrait turns Beuys into a spectral negative image, all darkness and shadow, his eyes wounded, guilty, lost. This was in the 1970s when Beuys was a charismatic one-man artistic revolution, inspiring young Germans to plant trees, lecturing about flows of ecological and human energy – and, in breathtaking performances, speaking to a dead hare or spending a week locked in a cage with a coyote.
All that remains today of those actions, protests and performances are posters, preserved scrawls on blackboards and mesmerising videos. Yet the moment Beuys disappeared – he died in 1986 – his solid, material sculptures took over. He believed passionately in flow and flux, promoting an animist vision of humanity and the cosmos. When he stopped talking and acting, entropy gripped his art, making it a static, slumped set of dead objects. And all the greater for it.
Yoon is on trial for insurrection charges, after trying to declare martial law in late 2024
South Korean prosecutors have demanded the death penalty for former president Yoon Suk Yeol over his failed martial law declaration in December 2024, in the first insurrection trial of a Korean head of state in three decades.
Prosecutors characterised the case as the “serious destruction of constitutional order by anti-state forces”, telling Seoul central district court that Yoon had “directly and fundamentally infringed upon the safety of the state and the survival and freedom of the people”.
Hired as a systems coach, the manager was undermined at a club where players – and Florentino Pérez – call the shots
Pep Guardiola sat in the press room at the Santiago Bernabéu and told Xabi Alonso to do it his way but around here, he knows, it tends not to work out like that, which is precisely why he said so. Saying it is one thing, doing it another, doing it successfully something else entirely and a month and day after being offered that advice, handed that defence, Alonso was gone. On Monday afternoon, not long after landing from Saudi Arabia, a meeting was held at Valdebebas and then came the statement, short and unsentimental. He was a “legend” as a player, but no longer coach at Real Madrid.
Alonso is the 11th manager to last less than a year in two decades under the president, Florentino Pérez. He had begun work only seven months before, and that was earlier than he intended. It had started with the Club World Cup in the US, his first big decision to accept the demand to take over sooner than he wanted, and it ended with the Spanish Super Cup in Jeddah, where it was an open secret that final judgment awaited. For a month it had been impossible to avoid the feeling of a manager on borrowed time, especially for the manager himself, exposed and undermined, and you cannot go on like that. There will be hurt pride, regret, but release too.
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