Israeli assault enters its third day as army says it is targeting militants to prevent them ‘from regrouping’
Hundreds of people have fled the Jenin refugee camp and surrounding areas as an Israeli assault on the West Bank city enters its third day, amid a deepening crackdown across the occupied Palestinian territory.
“Most of the camp’s residents were forced out, and I was made to leave my neighbourhood,” said 65-year-old Saleh Ammar, who fled the Jouret al-Dhahab neighbourhood inside the camp. “I saw with my own eyes the 12 large bulldozers they brought in: if they wanted to destroy an entire city, they could have done so.”
This unprecedented slaughter could not have happened without powerful cheerleaders. Hold them to account
Unless those complicit in the Gaza genocide are held to account, the brutal consequences will be felt far beyond that shattered land.The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas offered a respite for traumatised survivors. But Donald Trump’s declaration that he is not confident it will last has prompted renewed terror. From the new president’s decision to lift the pause on shipments of 2,000lb bombs to Israel, which were dropped repeatedly on civilians in so-called safe zones, to his pick for the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who once said there was “really no such thing as a Palestinian”, those hoping for lasting peace are right to worry that the carnage will soon begin again.
The assault on Gaza is normalising an almost limitless violence against civilians, all facilitated and justified by multiple western governments and media outlets. It is worth recalling the destruction of Guernica by Nazi and Italian forces during the Spanish civil war nearly nine decades ago. Guernica was one of the first aerial mass bombardments of a civilian community, and it scandalised the world. The then US president, Franklin D Roosevelt, deplored how “civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered from the air”. The Times journalist George Steer wrote that, “In the form of its execution and the scale of destruction it wrought, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history.” Alas, Guernica turned out to be a trial run for the aerial obliteration of European cities a few years later: the Nazi military leader Hermann Göring told the Nuremberg trials that Guernica allowed the Nazis to test out their Luftwaffe.
Some ownerships have legal entities in several countries
Manchester United, Villa and Spurs among clubs named
The ownership structures of Premier League clubs could enable money laundering and other financial crimes, academic research has found. In a study published in the journal Sport in Society, criminologists from Manchester University looked at the ownership structures of each top-flight side in the 2023-24 season.
They observed a prevalence of complex set-ups, with Manchester United having 13 legal entities within their ownership chain and Aston Villa’s structure featuring companies registered in four overseas territories. The researchers said they were unable to fully identify the owners of a majority of clubs.
The US state department has frozen all applications for passports with “X” sex markers and changes to gender identity on existing passports, following a new executive order signed by Donald Trump on his first day of office.
In an internal email shared with the Guardian, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, instructed department staff on Thursday to implement the strict new guidelines for official documentation.
The Department of Justice has ordered its civil rights division to halt new cases, further signalling the new administration’s hostility to racial and gender equality since Donald Trump’s return to power.
The decision came amid a blur of frenzied activity across a range of sectors that sent out simultaneous signals of incipient purges and revenge against political opponents, along with a determination to act on radical campaign pledges.
So the strange process of Oscar-night groupthink consensus begins, and a certain film becomes mysteriously garlanded as the obvious choice to be preferred over the others as the big winner. Jacques Audiard’s baffling, amusing, preposterous and (to some) artlessly offensive Mexican trans crime musical Emilia Pérez leads the field with 13 nominations. But for me, Emilia Pérez is pretty much the weakest movie on the best picture list, certainly not as good as, say, Nickel Boys, which doesn’t get much of the conversation.
But Emilia Pérez could be heading for the same kind of tulip-fever acclamation that greeted the phantasmagoric Everything Everywhere All at Once from 2022 which cleaned up on Oscar night. Awards season connoisseurs know how, in the world of bland streaming content, films that are different, which get Oscar voters excitedly alerting each other to their unusualness – without being too unusual – can generate their own momentum. It’s certainly a remarkable success story for Audiard, a French director in the classic mould, entirely and magnificently unaware of liberal Anglo-Hollywood squeamishness over whether or not certain stories are “his to tell”. A French auteur’s prerogative covers everything.
Brat scores the British pop star five nominations, while male acts make up 53% of the overall field and mixed acts 12%
Charli xcx leads this year’s Brit awards with five nominations for her 2024-dominating record Brat – the Guardian’s album of last year. With four nominations apiece, Dua Lipa, the Last Dinner Party, Ezra Collective and Myles Smith are close on the pop star’s trail.
xcx is nominated for album, artist and song of the year – the latter for the remix of Guess featuring Billie Eilish – and in the dance and pop genre categories.
Jan Johnson arrested after deputies made discovery during search warrant in investigation into animal neglect
A woman in California was arrested on Wednesday after authorities discovered 27 dead horses across multiple properties, police said.
Jan Johnson of Clements, California, was arrested and booked into the San Joaquin county jail on multiple charges, officials said, including cruelty to an animal, threatening a public official, criminal threats, and possession of a short-barrel shotgun.
Red state legislators have also introduced a slew of bills targeting abortion pills and minors’ access to the procedure
Legislators in at least four states have introduced bills this year that would change the legal definition of “homicide” to include abortion – proposals that pave the way for states to charge abortion patients with murder.
Pregnancy Justice, a group that tracks these kinds of efforts, says it has recorded more “homicide” bills this yearthan ever before. Abortion bans have typically penalized providers, rather than patients.
Sam Kuffel’s departure comes after far-right radio host slams her condemnation of X owner’s apparent Nazi salute
A Milwaukee meteorologist has been fired from her TV station after she criticized Elon Musk’s apparent fascist salutes during Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations.
On Wednesday, staff members at the CBS affiliate Channel 58 were notified of the meteorologist Sam Kuffel’s departure from the news station, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Friedrich Merz says he will boost border controls if he wins power in next month’s elections
Germany’s opposition leader has pledged to strengthen border controls and step up deportations if he becomes chancellor after elections next month, a day after an Afghan man was arrested over a knife attack in which two people died.
Friedrich Merz, whose conservative CDU/CSU alliance is leading in polls, said he would not allow attacks like the one in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg on Wednesday to become a “normal affair”.
US federal judges have criticized Donald Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,500 people involved in the January 6 insurrection, arguing that the clemency “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake” and that the president’s reasoning for the pardons was based on a “revisionist myth”.
The fierce condemnation came as the GOP scrambled to deal with Trump’s move, which was broader in scope than some Republicans had expected and included pardons for people convicted of assaulting police officers.
Documents uncover ties between extremist group and conservative politics, police and legal establishment in Utah
Documents from a Utah offshoot of the rightwing Oath Keepers militia show that two 2023 leadership meetings of the extremist group were attended by former law enforcement officers, a serving prosecutor and a former elected official.
The meetings – whose minutes record discussions on “Helicopter Landing Zone (HLZ) Bird Training”, “Hand to Hand Training” and the “role of an armed responder” – show how deeply intertwined the organization had become with conservative politics, law enforcement and the legal establishment in the cities of Utah’s metropolitan Wasatch Front region and beyond.
Consider what kind of therapist you’d like to work with – and keep searching until you find the right fit
A lot of people feel bad. One in five American adults experienced symptoms of anxiety and depression in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In the UK, 40.5% of people with anxiety experienced “medium” or “high” levels in 2022 and 16% of adults experienced moderate to severe depressive symptoms.
For many, psychotherapy is an effective way to address a range of concerns – from diagnosed mental illnesses to a general sense of dissatisfaction or inertia.
The historical action series has taken us to Baghdad, ancient Greece and the pyramids of Egypt. As it moves to feudal Japan, the stakes for its developer have never been higher
It’s no secret that the video game industry is struggling. The last two years have seen more than 25,000 redundancies and more than 40 studio closures. Thanks to game development’s spiralling costs (blockbuster titles now cost hundreds of millions to make), overinvestment during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a series of failed bets to create the next money-printing “forever game”, the pressure for blockbuster games to succeed is now higher than ever.
It’s a predicament that feels especially pertinent for Ubisoft. Employing in the region of 20,000 people across 45 studios in 30 countries, its most recent big licensed games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially. It has had two expensive, failed live-service experiments in the past year, Skull and Bones and X-Defiant. With Ubisoft share prices plummeting and investment partners circling like sharks, rarely have the fortunes of a massive games company relied so heavily on a single release. It has already been delayed multiple times, to ensure its quality.
Nikki High’s Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena was spared by the fire, but touched by change, it became a hub of relief
Nikki High, founder of Pasadena’s Octavia’s Bookshelf, couldn’t shake the words of her bookstore’s namesake, science-fiction legend Octavia Butler: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”
The past week had made that truth painfully clear to her and her community. A devastating wildfire, known as the Eaton fire, tore through Pasadena and Altadena, leaving destruction in its wake. Twenty-seven lives were lost and dozens still remained unaccounted for. Homes were reduced to ash and families were left searching for basic necessities.
Eighteen-year-old had pleaded guilty to murders of Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe and 10 charges of attempted murder
The Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been jailed for a minimum of 52 years for the “ferocious” and “sadistic” murders of three young girls and attempted murder of 10 others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.
The 18-year-old refused to appear in the dock when a judge said the teenagerwould likely “never be released and he will be in custody for all his life” for the “harrowing and atrocious premeditated attack” last summer.
Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, defended on Thursday what he described as an “innocent” hand salute made by US billionaire Elon Musk this week, as he criticised “woke ideology” in a fiery speech to the World Economic Forum.
Musk ignited controversy with two fascist-style salutes during Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, with critics accusing him of giving the Nazi salute.
Part of a gifted generation of writers from Northern Ireland, Longley also gave years of service to the province’s arts council
Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, whom Seamus Heaney described as “a custodian of griefs and wonders”, has died aged 85, his publisher has confirmed. The writer, who won the TS Eliot prize in 2000 for his collection The Weather in Japan, died in hospital on Wednesday due to complications following a hip operation.
Robin Robertson, Longley’s longstanding editor, said it was “an honour to work with him … Not that I had to work very hard, as every poem was close to perfect.”
High court case demands inquiry into 1985 Cradock Four killings and ‘constitutional damages’ worth £7.3m
Lukhanyo Calata’s first memory of his father was the funeral. His mother sobbing, the earth beneath his feet shaking from the number of people gathered at the graveside, and the fear he felt aged three as the red box holding his father, Fort, was lowered into the ground.
The original cotton totes have a ‘disarmingly short’ life cycle – so demand is high for a more environmentally friendly version
This year’s It bag isn’t made by any of the usual designers. And if this bag could talk, it wouldn’t say “calf leather” so much as “wash me at 40C”. What’s more, in an ideal world, you would never want to buy another again.
The “forever tote” is big business. Usually made from calico, an unbleached cotton designed to be reused, it’s similar to the cotton bags you have balled up at the bottom of a drawer, except it’s sturdy, with a reinforced base and handles, sometimes a pocket, often coloured (Yves Klein blue seems especially popular), and always conspicuously branded with logos. Demand is high.
Joe Biden delivered an ominous message to Americans in his 15 January farewell address, warning that a privileged few could soon be poised to wield enormous power in the US.
Biden described a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked”.
Instead of burning or transporting their garden waste, residents of an English village built their own composting site
In the village of Thrupp, where houses are spread out over steep winding roads in the narrow Frome Valley, it’s difficult for lorries to get through to collect garden waste.
It leaves some people with the choice of lengthy car trips to a nearby town to take their green waste to a facility, or burning their rubbish in small bonfires that have prompted many irate social media posts.
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