We are living in the midst of a polycrisis, where nothing feels stable or sustainable. If you feel trapped – you’re not alone
A new year is upon us. Traditionally, we use this time to look forward, imagine and plan.
But instead, I have noticed that most of my friends have been struggling to think beyond the next few days or weeks. I, too, have been having difficulty conjuring up visions of a better future – either for myself or in general.
It’s not just potatoes that you can turn into these moreish fried cakes – just about any root veg will do the trick
Crisp, savoury and satiating latkes are my idea of the perfect brunch and, rather than sticking to potatoes, I often make them with a mixture of root vegetables, using up whatever I have to hand – just 25-50g of any vegetable will make a latke – and adding some ground linseeds or flax, which gives breakfast some nutrition-boosting omega-3s. I usually have them with a poached egg for protein or apple compote and soya yoghurt.
Graffiti included ‘Fuck Zionism’ and ‘RIP Renee’, an apparent reference to killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis
The property of a Los Angeles-area Jewish temple that was destroyed in last year’s wildfires was vandalized this week, officials said.
On Sunday, a member of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center spotted the lines “Fuck Zionism” and “RIP Renee” spray-painted on an exterior wall on the campus – the second line an apparent reference to the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on 7 January.
BP has said it expects to write down the value of its struggling green energy business by as much as $5bn (£3.7bn), as it refocuses on fossil fuels under its new chair Albert Manifold.
The oil company said the writedowns were mostly related to its gas and low-carbon energy divisions in its “transition businesses”, but added that wiping between $4bn and $5bn off their value would not affect its underlying profits when it reports its full-year results in February.
Giannis Antetokounmpo couldn’t remember hearing boos from his home crowd during his brilliant 13-year career in Milwaukee. But it happened on Tuesday midway through the Bucks’ 139-106 loss to a Minnesota Timberwolves team playing without Anthony Edwards and Rudy Gobert.
“I’ve never been a part of something like that before,” Antetokounmpo said after the game. “Something new for me.”
The Trump administration received approval from the justice department to use the military to seize Nicolás Maduro even as it declined to address whether the operation would violate international law, according to its legal memo released on Tuesday.
The dark-of-night raid to capture Venezuela’s president has raised a host of legal issues concerning the president’s power to start an armed conflict without congressional approval and possible breaches of international law.
Spanish singer, 82, had already been accused of sexually assaulting two female former employees
The Spanish singer Julio Iglesias, who has been accused of sexually assaulting two female former employees, is also alleged to have ordered some women who worked for him to undergo tests for sexually transmitted diseases, local media have reported.
The sexual assault allegations against the 82-year-old singer, whose career spans six decades, were published on Tuesday after a three-year joint investigation by the Spanish news site elDiario.es and the Spanish-language TV network Univision Noticias.
McKinsey is asking graduate applicants to “collaborate” with an artificial intelligence tool as part of its recruitment process, as competence with the technology becomes a requirement in competing for top-level jobs.
The blue-chip consultancy is incorporating an “AI interview” into some final-round interviews, according to CaseBasix, a US company that helps candidates apply for posts at leading strategic consulting companies.
Donald Trump has hit out at the JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon, saying the Wall Street executive was wrong to suggest he was undermining the independence of the Federal Reserve.
The US president and his administration have come under fire for their attacks against the Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, who is facing a criminal investigation by the US Department of Justice over alleged “abuse of taxpayer dollars” linked to renovations to the central bank’s headquarters in Washington.
After Guardian writers shared their choices, readers responded with picks from films including Withnail and I, Emily the Criminal and Chopper
The fact that he manages to save a kid’s life while remaining a sweary alcoholic without an ounce of dignity and self-respect … is positively heartwarming. GusCairns
We’d like to hear from young people, parents and teachers about how Elon Musk’s controversial chatbot is affecting you
Degrading images of real women and children with their clothes digitally removed by Elon Musk’s Grok tool continue to be shared online, despite widespread alarm and a pledge by the platform to suspend users who generate them.
While some safeguards have been introduced, the ease with which the AI tool can be abused has raised urgent questions about consent, online safety and the ability of governments worldwide to regulate fast-moving AI technologies. Meanwhile, the misuse of AI to harass, humiliate and sexually exploit people – particularly women and girls – is rapidly escalating.
Coca-Cola has reportedly abandoned plans to sell its Costa Coffee chain after bids from private equity firms failed to meet its expectations.
The US soft drinks company halted discussions with remaining bidders in December, according to the Financial Times, ending a months-long auction process.
The eccentric, sharp-eyed sitcom was so loved that it was once the fastest-selling DVD ever. A quarter of a century on from its Channel 4 debut, why has it fallen so far off the radar?
There are few British comedy shows that were as popular, yet now completely extinct, as Phoenix Nights. The sitcom – which ran for just two series between 2001-2002 – is set in a fictional working men’s club in Bolton, and was a huge hit of the physical media era. Its second series was once the fastest ever selling UK TV show on DVD, shifting 160,000 copies in its first week of release. However, it is now 25 years since it was first broadcast on Channel 4, and it does not feature, nor has it ever, on any streaming service. Instead, it’s confined to dodgy fan uploads on YouTube and the secondhand DVD market. It is also almost entirely absent from all of the major publications’ best TV of the 21st century listicles.
Nevertheless, it remains a programme like few others. Distinctly northern and working class, it crucially uses neither as the butt of its jokes. In the same way that The Royle Family turned the everyday routine of watching TV, bickering, having a brew and asking each other what they had for tea into a relatably funny yet poignant shared living-room experience, Phoenix Nights invites people through its sparkling tinsel curtains into the familiar yet fading glory of clubland.
Barrister turned novelist Harriet Tyce is playing a blinder in the fourth series of the show. As a thriller writer myself, I recognise the traits that make her such a formidable Faithful
This time last year a rumour swept through the close-knit British crime-writing community, not whispered in a quiet moment in the billiard room but shared on group chats and message boards. The producers of The Traitors were recruiting contestants for 2026, and wanted one of us to take part. Of course they did! The Traitors is a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of the golden age country house whodunnit, which is itself a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of real-life murder. It is crime writers’ job to examine the dark side of human behaviour. Betrayal of trust and manipulation are all in a day’s work. We often write from multiple perspectives, identifying with victim, perp and detective, giving us a unique kind of empathy. We spent the rest of the year wondering who it would be. (I didn’t get the call.)
Last November, in that howling no man’s land between the finale of Celebrity Traitors and the transmission of series four, I went along with 13 fellow crime novelists to the Traitors Live Experience in Covent Garden. Despite being professional pattern-finders with highly tuned powers of observation, none of us at the replica round table guessed that the Chosen One was among us, and had already completed her stint on the real thing.
West Midlands police will be criticised in a report about their handling of intelligence used to justify banning Israeli fans from a football game in Birmingham, the Guardian understands.
The inquiry was ordered by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and carried out by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, the policing inspectorate.
In a might-makes-right world, US allies, not to mention the emerging powers of the global south, would begin to hedge their bets in dangerous ways
What is wrong with resurrecting the prerogative of major powers to claim a sphere of influence in which they dictate and others must follow? That idea informs the “Donroe Doctrine” behind the US invasion of Venezuela to seize Nicolás Maduro. Donald Trump seems to believe that, as the world’s strongest military power, the United States should be allowed to invade other countries at will. Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, says “the real world” is “governed by strength”, by “power”, so we should get used to it.
There is a beguiling simplicity to this abandonment of the norms long designed to govern the behavior of states big and small. China has touted it as the reality that its Asian neighbors must live with. Russia, a third-tier power by comparison but still a nuclear-armed regional heavyweight, has periodically treated the boundaries of post-Soviet states as mere suggestions. But do we really want to return to the law of the jungle in which the guy with the biggest stick calls the shots?
The ESPN broadcaster’s comments about the ICE shooting in Minnesota moves him closer to the stance of another media figure he has long attacked
This past weekend there were hundreds of demonstrations across the United States after Renee Good, an American citizen and mother of three, was shot dead by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, in Minnesota.
The anger has permeated throughout the NBA as well. Steve Kerr and Doc Rivers, the head coaches of the Golden State Warriors and Milwaukee Bucks respectively, described Good’s death as “murder”. Kerr also attacked the Trump administration’s attempts to portray Good as a terrorist.
A January camp for domestic players allows Jesse Marsch to boost a development system that will outlast his tenure
Men have stood broken on her piers. It can be a desolate place, too, especially in winter, which is of course when the lobster boats do the bulk of their fishing. But the weather had improved by the time Canadian men’s national team head coach Jesse Marsch ferried his squad from around the world to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a training camp ahead of last summer’s Gold Cup. It was the first time the men’s national team had visited the province.
But it was not Marsch’s first time in town, having previously kicked off a cross-country coaching clinic – a whirlwind tour meant to share with local soccer communities what he’d done with the national team at Copa América in 2024 – at a local hotel and convention centre. He’d promised, and pitched a vision, to make the national team truly national in a way no coach had before him. And he was delivering, having also made similar coaching stops in Québec City, Saskatoon and Calgary.
This week, Trump’s granddaughter announced she definitely doesn’t want to go into politics. Expect a run for office very soon
Last week Kai Trump, Donald Trump Jr’s daughter and the president’s eldest grandchild, publicly declared she had no plans to run for office. The 18-year-old appeared on Logan Paul’s Impaulsivepodcast, where she stated that “politics is such a dangerous thing … I think if both sides met in the middle, everyone would be so much more happier.” (Maybe tell that to your grandpa, kid.) “To be honest with you,” she said, “I stay out of politics completely … I don’t want anything to do with politics.”
Look, I know you’re still very young, Kai, so here’s a little advice from an old lady: maybe work just a teeny bit harder at keeping a safe distance from politics. It has not gone unobserved that the influencer and golfer has made a lot of content about life behind the scenes at the White House. She’s also launched an apparel collection, which she’s modelled on the White House lawn. And, notably, she spoke at the 2024 Republican national convention (RNC), where she insisted Trump was “just a normal grandpa”. I don’t know about that; my grandad didn’t invade Venezuela.
Kai, by the way, stressed to Logan Paul that she was the one who decided to speak at the RNC; it was “literally all my idea”. But the nasty media, she noted, spun it otherwise. “[They said] ‘Oh well, that’s like a political plan that was put in place, to like get more voters or anything like that’.” Well, yes, because it was a political convention. They tend to be, you know, political.
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Jonathan Gerlach remains in custody after officials say they found skulls, bones and other remains in his car and home
The Pennsylvania man suspected of stealing more than 100 pieces of human remains from a historic cemetery has allegedly admitted to selling some of them online – while the graveyard solicits donations to upgrade its security.
Jonathan Gerlach’s purported admission, along with the most complete account yet of how he caught the attention of law enforcement, are contained in search warrants obtained by authorities investigating a case one government official called “a horror movie come to life”.
Fraser plays a hapless Tokyo-based actor working for a firm that offers bespoke therapeutic role-play services in director Hikari’s silly and saccharine film
Brendan Fraser is a bland and ingratiating presence in this glib, silly and pointless film from Japanese actor turned director Hikari. It is bafflingly complacent in its sentimentality and its sheer, fatuous implausibility, which makes it valueless and meaningless as drama and comedy.
Fraser plays Phillip, a hapless unemployed actor from the US who a few years previously came to Tokyo to do a goofy TV ad for toothpaste and, having no friends or family back home, simply stayed on. He lucks into a weird new source of income: working for a “rental family”, based on firms in Japan which really do offer bespoke therapeutic role-play services, such as errant spouses, deceased loved ones or unsatisfactory co-workers – people who can be chatted with, or mourned, or yelled at for cathartic purposes.
Semi-automated offside technology was not available
High number of bodies in the box prevented its use
The delay in ruling out a Manchester City goal for offside in Tuesday’s Carabao Cup win at Newcastle was extended because semi-automated offside technology could not be used in the incident.
It took more than five minutes for a check to determine that Erling Haaland was offside and had interfered with play by holding the defender Malick Thiaw, with the referee Chris Kavanagh disallowing what would have been a second goal of the night for City’s new signing Antoine Semenyo.
For Hannah Thorogood, a first-generation Lincolnshire farmer, grazing her sheep on solar land gave her a leg-up in the industry
On a blustery Lincolnshire morning, Hannah Thorogood paused between two ranks of solar panels. Her sheep nosedived into the grass under their shelter and began to graze.
“When I first started out, 18 acres and 20 sheep was as much as I could afford,” said the first-generation farmer. “Now, because I can graze this land for free, I have 250 acres and over 200 sheep. Solar grazing has given me a massive leg-up.”
Exclusive: Discovery comes amid growing concern over lax regulation and children being put at risk by rogue operators
Circumcision kits have been found on sale on Amazon UK, highlighting lax regulation as concerns grow about deaths and serious harm to baby boys.
In December, a UK coroner issued warnings about insufficient circumcision regulation after the death in 2023 of a six-month-old boy, Mohamed Abdisamad, from a streptococcus infection.
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