• Game at Gtech Community Stadium starts at 2pm (GMT)
• 10 things to look out for this weekend in the top flight
• Share your thoughts with Daniel via email

And another transfer line:

Postecoglou advises that Van de Ven is OK, they’re just trying to manage his minutes, while explaining that 17-year-old Moore has earned his go.

• Play at Wankhede Stadium set to begin at 1.30pm (GMT)
• England lose series amid substitution controversy
• Share your thoughts with James via email

2nd over: India 21-1 (Abishek 5, Varma 0) Tilak Varma is the new batter. England move a leg slip in place for the flick in the air. Wood goes outside off stump and the new batter leaves it alone. A lesser spotted leave.

Roger Binny and Rishi Sunak are in the crowd at the Wankhede. There’s a joke to be made there somewhere but I don’t have the time.

Spanish football federation’s former president is accused of sexual assault and coercion over incident in 2023

Spain’s former football chief Luis Rubiales will go on trial in Madrid on Monday over the unsolicited kiss he planted on the World Cup winner Jenni Hermoso, a gesture that stunned millions of TV viewers and unleashed a backlash against sexism in sport.

Rubiales, 47, is accused of sexual assault as well as coercion after allegations that he tried to force Hermoso, 34, into publicly declaring that the kiss, which occurred as she celebrated her team’s victory in the 2023 World Cup in Australia, was consensual.

Employees condemn ‘unprecedented and scary’ effort to push out those who had worked on diversity programs

Jeremy Wood thought he was safe from the shuttering of federal government diversity initiatives that he expected to start as soon as Donald Trump was sworn in.

A Raleigh, North Carolina-based career civil servant in the US agriculture department, Wood had been among those tasked with implementing policies ordered by Joe Biden to curtail discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation and gender identity in the federal government.

The UK is likely to make a cut this week; Trump has made it very clear he wants his central bank to follow suit

The Bank of England is preparing to announce a cut in UK interest rates on Thursday, with central banks around the world facing increased scrutiny as Donald Trump ramps up his attacks on the US Federal Reserve.

Trump wants lower borrowing costs to boost the economy, even though the US has maintained the highest rate of growth in the G7 richest nations for several years and has every prospect of topping the G7 poll in 2025.

Silver W196 R Stromlinienwagen sold at Stuttgart auction for highest amount ever made by a grand prix car

A streamlined Mercedes raced by the Formula One greats Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio in 1955 set a record for a grand prix car on Saturday, selling at auction for €51.15m (£42.7m).

The sleek, silver W196 R Stromlinienwagen, one of only four complete examples in existence, was sold by RM Sotheby’s at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, on behalf of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS).

Belgium leads calls for suspension of agreement after Rwanda-backed rebels captured city of Goma

The EU is under mounting pressure to suspend a controversial minerals deal with Rwanda that has been blamed for fuelling the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Calls to freeze the agreement have grown after fighters from the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group captured the city of Goma in the eastern DRC, escalating a decades-old conflict and raising fears of a regional war.

Critics decry ‘politically motivated’ decision to revisit civil war-era charges against leaders of anti-mining campaign

Five Salvadorian environmental defenders who were exonerated of bogus civil war charges will face retrial this week amid growing evidence of political interference.

Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega, were acquitted in October over the alleged killing of an army informant in 1989. The court in Cabañas in northern El Salvador ruled that the state had failed to prove a crime had taken place, or that the defendants, former leftwing guerrilla fighters, were linked to any wrongdoing.

I saw them killed by sniper fire and drones. Why doesn’t Labour condemn it? Why do arms keep flowing in Israel’s direction?

I had never imagined, when working as a professor of transplant surgery at a large teaching hospital in London, that one day I would find myself operating on an eight-year-old child who was bleeding to death, only to be told by the scrub nurse that there were no more gauze swabs available. But I found myself in that situation last August while operating at Nasser hospital in Gaza as a volunteer with Medical Aid for Palestinians (Map). Reduced to scooping out the blood with my hands, I felt an overwhelming wave of nausea – I was anxious that the child would not survive. Luckily she did, although many others did not.

Having retired from the NHS, I decided to go to Gaza because it had become clear that there was a desperate need for surgical help, and I had the skills to contribute. Life as a transplant surgeon in London had been tough but hugely rewarding, and as a senior member of the transplant community I had enjoyed a certain status. This was going to be a different experience – but nothing prepared me for what I found when I arrived.

Nizam Mamode is a humanitarian surgeon and retired professor of transplant surgery. He was a volunteer surgeon in an emergency medical team in Gaza, which was organised by Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) in August/September 2024

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• Versatile attacker keen to leave Bayern Munich
• Tel rejected permanent move to Tottenham last week

Arsenal are exploring a loan deal for Mathys Tel but face competition from Manchester United for the Bayern Munich forward.

Tel, who rejected a permanent move to Tottenham after they had agreed a £50m fee with Bayern last week, has expressed his desire to leave in this window having played only 252 minutes in the Bundesliga this season.

• England were ‘outperformed in every facet’ by Australia
• Director refuses to comment on Knight and Lewis futures

Clare Connor, the managing director of women’s cricket at the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), has admitted that England are way behind Australia in terms of fitness and ability to perform under pressure.

Connor also revealed she is considering bringing in voices from outside the current ECB setup to ensure a “thorough and honest” review in the wake of England’s embarrassing 16-0 Ashes whitewash.

The paranormal has hit prime time, with scary stories on podcasts and TV shows more popular than ever. We head to UncannyCon to meet fans and creators to understand the thrill of the chill

A Sunday afternoon in early December and London’s Southbank Centre draws its usual eclectic crowd: tourists, young families, culture lovers, out-of-towners. But as I move through the people, a pattern starts to emerge. The cavernous space is dotted with people wearing the same black T-shirts printed with bold white lettering. Many read “Team Sceptic”, even more say “Team Believer”. Some, curiously, bear the phrase “Bloody Hell, Ken!”

If you’re into the paranormal – ghosts, UFOs, demons, witchcraft, Bigfoot, etc – you’ll recognise them as slogans from the lexicon of Uncanny, a hit BBC podcast that first aired in late 2021 and has since snowballed into a many-pronged behemoth of ghoulish entertainment, replete with a TV show, a mammoth live tour and a bestselling book. (Ken, by the way, was the protagonist of the first ever episode, recounting his experience at the hands of a poltergeist in his student halls of residence.)

Harriet Walter’s acclaimed portrayal is the latest of many screen versions. So how do you create the Thatcher persona?

Harriet Walter has become the ­latest in a line of actors, from Meryl Streep and Gillian Anderson to Fenella Woolgar and Jennifer Saunders, to accept the challenge of becoming Margaret Thatcher on screen. How do you play a woman who, 45 years on from her ascension, exists almost as a national caricature?

Walter plays the part in Brian and Maggie, Channel 4’s two-part drama tracing Thatcher’s relationship with Labour MP turned journalist Brian Walden, which culminated in a fraught TV interview in October 1989, as Thatcher’s fortune began to fail. The series, written by Sherwood creator James Graham, directed by Stephen Frears and co-starring Steve Coogan, digs into the former prime minister’s private persona.

Two weddings, one double booking and a series of cliches are the order of the day in Nicholas Stoller’s Bride Wars-lite comedy

Any film combining the comedy talents of Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon is unlikely to be entirely terrible. That said, the wildly uneven wedding clash comedy You’re Cordially Invited is certainly in the vicinity of terrible on numerous occasions. Ferrell plays Jim, the smothering, widowed dad of Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan); Witherspoon is Margot, the overprotective older sister of Neve, played by Meredith Hagner. When, due to an administrative snafu, Jenni’s and Neve’s weddings are double booked at the same venue, Jim and Margot are determined that their loved ones will still get their day to remember, no matter the cost to the rival party or to personal dignity. Wedding catastrophe cliches abound (cakes, hair and frocks take the brunt of the physical comedy). Ferrell’s crocodile wrestling scene notwithstanding, this just feels like a Bride Wars rip-off without the bite.

On Amazon Prime Video

Goods from China are to face an extra 10% levy from Tuesday alongside additional 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports into US

After Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Volkswagen, Germany’s largest carmaker, said that tariffs would have a “harmful economic impact” on American consumers, as well as the international automotive industry.

German automakers say the tariffs will cause inflation for consumers.

President’s ‘culture war’ crusade targets DEI and LGBTQ+ rights in bid to spread rightwing agenda, experts say

Donald Trump didn’t need to wait for the black box flight recorder. He knew what caused the mid-air collision of a passenger plane and army helicopter that killed 67 people. Or he thought he did.

“They actually came out with a directive – ‘too white’,” the US president told reporters on Thursday, seeking to blame former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for including Black and Latino people in the federal workforce. “We want the people that are competent.”

For the artist and film director acts of protest were as much a part of growing up as playing in the local park. Here he recalls his first encounters with activism

My first encounter with resistance was unbeknownst to me, and I was annoyed by it. At nine years old, I found myself attending Saturday school, missing Football Focus and not being with my friends playing in the local park. First my sister and I went to the Marcus Garvey Saturday school in Hammersmith. Later we went to the Saturday school in Acton, organised by Mr Carter. He was a light-skinned Black man with slightly ginger hair and freckles, bearing a strange resemblance to Jimmy Carter, who was the president of the United States.

The sole purpose of the Saturday school was to help Black children who were underachieving or being failed by the education system. At that time, I didn’t know that these facilities were organised throughout the United Kingdom by Black parents, teachers and academics. In 1971, a London schoolteacher, Bernard Coard, wrote a pamphlet called How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain. Although there had been efforts to support Black children prior to this, this was the launching pad for a nationwide and organised act of self-determination.

But it’s important to not limit our sense of what resistance looks like

All those lists and instructions and editorials on how to resist authoritarianism and stand up for human rights, the rule of law and climate are good, and I both wholly support them and want to veer off from their recommendations here. Yes, everyone with any capacity to do so should join things, call politicians, support the groups and campaigns protecting the above. But it’s important to not limit our sense of what resistance looks like to these versions of doing something. In addition to these formal, structured ways of defending what you believe in, there are ways of doing so woven into everyday life and our conversations and communications.

Each of us needs to stand on principle, loudly, whenever, wherever we can. Used strategically, our voices can do a lot to preserve anti-authoritarian worldviews about facts, science, history, rights, justice and inclusion. In this moment, it matters to just be a person who, wherever the opportunity arises, affirms that the climate crisis is real and climate solutions benefit us all, immigrants are vital to our economy and their rights matter, trans people harm no one by their existence but face terrible harm, diversity strengthens enterprises and communities and our country, women’s rights and equality should be non-negotiable.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

Interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa arrives in Riyadh on trip that appears to signal shift away from Iran alliance

Syria’s interim president has made his first trip abroad, travelling to Saudi Arabia in a move that is likely to be an attempt to signal Damascus’s shift away from Iran as its main regional ally.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was once aligned with al-Qaida, landed in Riyadh alongside his government’s foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani. The two men travelled on a Saudi jet, with a Saudi flag visible on the table behind them.

It’s time to celebrate celery with a soothing soup, and a nice potato pancake to go with it

Most of the soup I make is in an effort to deal with my over-enthusiasm at the shops, a need to tidy up a vegetable rack overflowing with beetroot or leeks. A case of waste not, want not rather than to spotlight a vegetable in season. The results can be good or less so, depending on just how many turnips and swedes I am also trying to get rid of. This week, I made soup simply to celebrate a particularly fine head of celery.

I carried it home with my shopping, the celery’s plume of leaves poking pertly from my bag. The soup was good, using the entire head, or at least those stalks I hadn’t torn away and munched raw the moment I arrived home. The like-it-or-loathe-it vegetable was mellowed and sweetened by sour cream and potato.

• Spurs beat Wolves to signing with £20.9m buy obligation
• Ange Postecoglou still hoping to add an attacking player

Tottenham have completed the signing of the Lens centre-back, Kevin Danso, on an initial loan with an obligation to buy for €25m (£20.9m) in the summer.

The Spurs manager, Ange Postecoglou, had said on Friday that the club might need to strengthen in central defence as they waited for an update on Radu Dragusin. The Romanian centre-back suffered what looked a worrying knee injury against Elfsborg in the Europa League on Thursday night.

Manga and anime brands are now revealed as some of the biggest sellers in the £510m sector

At the Toy Fair in London’s Olympia last month, there were some less familiar faces alongside the Bluey plushies and Minions fart blasters. Hatsune Miku, Tanjiro Kamado and Labubu aren’t household names in the UK, but collectible figurines and merchandise based on manga, anime and video games, are some of the biggest sellers for the British toy industry.

Collectibles – ornamental toys sold with the objective of collecting a definable set – are now a £510m sector in the UK, according to research by the British Toy & Hobby Association and Circana.

It’s time to hand out final grades as the dust settles on one of the busiest free-agency windows in WNBA history

One of the most dynamic periods of the WNBA offseason is coming to an end as free agents are signing contrasts with their teams at the start of February. This year was particularly exciting as a huge crop of the league’s stars – including Breanna Stewart, Kelsey Plum, Jewell Loyd, Brittney Griner and more – were able to test the waters of free agency, some for the first time.

As with any period of growth and upheaval, women’s basketball is in the middle of a truly critical moment. TV ratings are up, attendance is way up; Unrivaled is pulling in impressive viewership each week in Miami, and AU Pro Basketball kicks off its newest season in Nashville this month.

According to a new poll, half of our 13- to 27-year-olds can’t see the point of all those time-wasting elections and parliaments. Why do they not know that authoritarianism is worse?

The phrase “shocking findings” is hugely overused in the media, which is strange because it’s so clumsy. The word endings nearly rhyme, but not quite, and there’s something infantile about the word “finding” for something you’ve found. Is your lunch your eatings? Did you do any pooings this morning? Always go for a weeing before leaving the house – or building.

Most “shocking findings” don’t turn out to be that shocking. The phrase gets deployed to dupe you into reading on and then it’s just some study that’s come out with something predictably depressing. Not this time. Last week, there were some genuinely shocking findings. I’d go so far as simply to call them shockings. Never mind that they were found – that’s not their key characteristic at all. They’re shockings, infuriatings and frankly frightenings.