‘Fascism is here now’: the US athletes pushing back on Trump’s America

World Series winner Sean Doolittle, Super Bowl champion Doug Baldwin and college star McKenzie Forbes have strong opinions on a troubled era

At 6.38pm CST on Saturday January 24, Indiana Pacer star Tyrese Haliburton posted on X: “Alex Pretti was murdered.”

The NBA star was one of the first athletes to respond to what can only be described as the public execution by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Pretti’s death was the culmination of a weeks-long campaign of terror conducted against residents of the city, including Renee Good, who was herself killed by DHS forces just two weeks earlier. Indeed, “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis has accounted for two-thirds of homicides in the city in 2026.

Published: January 28, 2026, 11:00 am

Gonna be golden? Who will – and should – win the big awards at the 2026 Grammys

The top categories are stacked with quality, from Bad Bunny to Kendrick Lamar, Chappell Roan and K-pop hits – but here are the artists who most deserve to triumph

Bad Bunny – DTMF
Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild
Doechii – Anxiety
Billie Eilish – Wildflower
Kendrick Lamar & SZA – Luther
Lady Gaga – Abracadabra
Chappell Roan – The Subway
Rosé & Bruno Mars – APT.

Published: January 28, 2026, 10:00 am

Copyrighted art, mobile phones, Greenland: welcome to our age of shameless theft | Jonathan Liew

The human impulse to steal has been accelerated by AI, inequality and our political leaders – with profound consequences

Last week I discovered that an article I wrote about the England cricket team has already been copied and repackaged, verbatim and without permission, by an Indian website. What is the appropriate response here? Decry and sue? Shrug and move on? I ponder the question as I stroll through my local supermarket, where the mackerel fillets are wreathed in metal security chains and the dishwasher tabs have to be requested from the storeroom like an illicit little treat.

On the way home, I screenshot and crop a news article and share it to one of my WhatsApp groups. In another group, a family member has posted an AI-generated video (“forwarded many times”) of Donald Trump getting his head shaved by Xi Jinping while Joe Biden laughs in the background. I watch the mindless slop on my phone as I walk along the main road, instinctively gripping my phone a little tighter as I do so.

Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist

Published: January 28, 2026, 10:38 am

Wonder Man review – a Marvel TV show with almost no superhero action … and it’s all the better for it

This gem of a series, about an actor with superpowers, is a clever, tender take on male friendship and the film industry. It’s a triumph of storytelling – and a masterclass in acting

We are back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you feel fatigue stealing over you already, banish it! It’s going to be OK. Even though Wonder Man is (by my incredulous reckoning) about the 30th MCU series produced by Marvel Television and companions – from the dizzying heights of WandaVision to … well, She-Hulk – it is a little gem.

And it is quite little, in MCU terms. Not only are the eight episodes only around half an hour long but they also eschew spectacle in favour of storytelling. It’s a radical idea, but you never know, it might catch on.

Published: January 28, 2026, 5:00 am

‘This train isn’t going to stop’: shocking Sundance film shows promises and perils of AI

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, co-directed by Daniel Roher, delves into the world of AI through the lens of personal anxiety

Are we barreling toward AI catastrophe? Is AI an existential threat, or an epochal opportunity? Those are the questions top of mind for a new documentary at Sundance, which features leading AI experts, critics and entrepreneurs, including Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, with views on the near-to-midterm future ranging from doom to utopia.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell and produced by Daniel Kwan (one half of The Daniels, the Oscar-winning duo behind Everything Everywhere All At Once), delves into the contentious topic of AI through Roher’s own anxiety. The Canadian film-maker, who won an Oscar in 2023 for the documentary Navalny, first became interested in the topic while experimenting with tools released by OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT. The sophistication of the public tools – the ability to produce whole paragraphs in seconds, or produce illustrations – both thrilled and unnerved him. AI was already radically shaping the filmmaking industry, and proclamations on the promise and peril of AI were everywhere, with little way for people outside the tech industry to evaluate them. As an artist, he wondered, how was he to make sense of it all?

Published: January 28, 2026, 2:40 am

Families in Maine scramble to halt ICE’s transfer of detainees out of state

Officials are quickly moving people they’ve apprehended out of state, making it difficult for loved ones to reach them

Family members have been scrambling to learn the whereabouts of more than 200 people arrested during a federal immigration crackdown that has swept across Maine this week, immigration attorneys said, as federal authorities quickly ferried detainees out of the state.

“We were buried in phone calls,” said Jenny Beverly, an immigration attorney with Haven Immigration Law. She said her team worked long hours to locate detainees and stop their transfer out of Maine.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:55 pm

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar sprayed with unknown substance at Minneapolis town hall

Man arrested and charged with assault after spraying strong-smelling liquid at Minnesota Democrat from syringe

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unidentified substance by a man with a syringe on Tuesday as she gave her first in-person town hall of the year in Minneapolis, during which she called for ICE to be abolished “for good” and DHS secretary Kristi Noem to resign.

Omar had only been speaking for a few minutes when a man in the audience got up and began to shout, while spraying her with the liquid. People at the meeting said the liquid had an acidic smell.

Published: January 28, 2026, 12:49 pm

Threat of US-Iran war escalates as Trump warns time running out for deal

US president says armada heading towards Iran is ‘prepared to fulfil its missions with violence if necessary’

The threat of a US-Iranian war may be looming closer after Donald Trump warned time was running out for Tehran and said a massive US armada was moving quickly towards the country “with great power, enthusiasm and purpose”.

Writing on social media, the US president said the fleet headed by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was larger than the one sent to Venezuela before the removal of President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month and was “prepared to rapidly fulfill its missions with speed and violence if necessary”.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:52 pm

US dollar sinks to its lowest level in four years

Dollar drops against basket of currencies after Donald Trump brushed off concerns over slide

• Business live – latest updates

The US dollar has fallen to its lowest level in four years after Donald Trump brushed off concerns over the currency’s fall, sending investors fleeing to traditional havens including gold and the Swiss franc.

The dollar dropped by 1.3% against a basket of currencies after the president’s comments on Tuesday, marking its fourth day of declines, then slipped by a further 0.2% on Wednesday morning.

Published: January 28, 2026, 10:23 am

Amazon tells workers it will cut 16,000 jobs worldwide in second big wave of layoffs

Workers informed after message erroneously said affected employees in US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been told

• Business live – latest updates

Amazon has told workers it is cutting 16,000 jobs around the world to streamline its operations, hours after sending out a message to staff about the layoffs apparently in error.

It is the second big wave of job cuts at the US online retail company, and comes just three months after the company said it was slashing 14,000 roles. Amazon employs about 1.5 million workers worldwide.

Published: January 28, 2026, 12:23 pm

Rearming to reduce dependence on US should be Europe’s top priority, says Danish prime minister – Europe live

Mette Frederiksen says ‘world order as we know it is over’ as she meets Emmanuel Macron and Greenland’s PM in Paris

in Paris

In other news, a former French senator has been found guilty of drugging a fellow politician in order to sexually assault her, in a case that has shaken French politics.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:50 pm

Texas man scheduled to be executed for killing ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend

Charles Victor Thompson would be the first person executed in the US this year for the 1998 shooting deaths

A Texas man who at one time escaped from custody and was on the run for three days after being sentenced to death for fatally shooting his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend nearly 27 years ago was scheduled on Wednesday to be the first person executed in the US this year.

Charles Victor Thompson was condemned for the April 1998 shooting deaths of his ex-girlfriend, Glenda Dennise Hayslip, 39; and her new boyfriend, Darren Keith Cain, 30, at her apartment in the Houston suburb of Tomball.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:24 pm

TikTok virality gives Jeff Buckley his first US Top 100 hit 29 years after his death

Lover, You Should Have Come Over enters charts at No 97, after becoming popular on social media platform

Jeff Buckley has achieved his first US Hot 100 hit single, 29 years after his death, with Lover, You Should Have Come Over at No 97 this week.

TikTok virality is behind the success, as a new generation of listeners discover Buckley’s spirited, romantic songwriting and pair it with videos on the social media platform. TikTok videos don’t count towards US chart positions, but viral trends drive listeners towards songs on streaming services that do count.

Published: January 28, 2026, 11:27 am

Maine’s ‘Lobster Lady’ who fished for nearly a century dies aged 105

Virginia ‘Ginny’ Oliver, had entered the business when she was eight and liked ‘being along the water’

Maine’s governor has hailed the life of a woman who spent nearly 100 years fishing for lobsters as “amazing” and expressed hopes that her memory inspires “the next century of hardworking” fishers in the state.

The subject of Governor Janet Mills’ tribute, Virginia “Ginny” Oliver, died on 21 January at age 105, according to an obituary published on Monday by her family.

Published: January 28, 2026, 11:00 am

‘Shameful’: Trump’s EPA accused of prioritizing big business over public health

A year into Trump’s second term, critics say the EPA is rolling back dozens of protections and giving a leg up to polluters

After a tumultuous year under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has adopted a new, almost unrecognizable guise – one that tears up environmental rules and cheerleads for coal, gas-guzzling cars and artificial intelligence.

When Donald Trump took power, it was widely anticipated the EPA would loosen pollution rules from sources such as cars, trucks and power plants, as part of a longstanding back and forth between administrations over how strict such standards should be.

Published: January 28, 2026, 12:00 pm

Iraq’s former prime minister denounces ‘blatant American interference’ in election

Nouri al-Maliki responds to Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw US support for Iraq if he is returned to power

• US politics live – latest updates

Iraq’s former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has angrily denounced “blatant American interference” in the country’s election after Donald Trump threatened to withdraw US support if he was returned to power.

“We reject the blatant American interference in Iraq’s internal affairs and consider it a violation of its sovereignty,” al-Maliki, who is nominated by the country’s dominant political bloc to return to the premiership, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:14 pm

Rubio to warn that US is ‘prepared to use force’ in Venezuela if leaders stray from goals

Secretary of state does not rule out further US military action in Venezuela, according to prepared remarks

The Trump administration is ready to take new military action against Venezuela if the country’s interim leadership strays from US expectations, according to Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state.

In prepared testimony for a hearing before the Senate foreign relations committee, Rubio says the US is not at war with Venezuela and that its interim leaders are cooperating, but he notes that the Trump administration would not rule out using additional force following the capture of Nicolás Maduro early this month.

Published: January 28, 2026, 12:55 pm

Can Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez become a Latin American Deng Xiaoping?

Maduro’s Sorbonne-educated successor is talking up an era of ‘reform and opening up’ modelled on China’s post-Mao boom

After years of political and social upheaval, hunger and despair, the Great Helmsman departs and is replaced by a francophile economic reformer who catapults a traumatised country into a new era of prosperity and growth.

That is what happened in China half a century ago when the croissant-loving communist Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader after Chairman Mao Zedong’s 1976 death and set in motion one of history’s biggest economic booms.

Published: January 28, 2026, 4:00 am

Pressure grows on Stephen Miller after Alex Pretti killing but Trump unlikely to cut ties

Outrage followed ‘would-be assassin’ lie but experts say architect of ICE drive too dominant a figure to be shunned

Pressure is growing on key White House senior adviser Stephen Miller over the killing of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by border patrol agents in Minneapolis and its politically divisive aftermath.

Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy, finds himself in the rare position of being contradicted and excluded from crucial decisions by the US president.

Published: January 28, 2026, 12:00 pm

Eight people have died in dealings with ICE so far in 2026. These are their stories

The high-profile killings of Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good are only two among many

The killings of 37-year-old Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal agents have sparked protests and outrage throughout the nation. Pretti and Good are just two people out of at least eight who have either been killed by federal agents or who have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2026 so far.

The high-profile fatal shootings follow the deaths of at least 32 people in ICE custody in 2025 – the highest amount since 2004. One of the people killed included Keith Porter Jr, a 43-year-old Black man who was fatally shot by an off-duty ICE agent outside of his Los Angeles apartment complex on the evening of 31 December 2025. The father of two was firing a gun into the air, a Los Angeles police department spokesperson said, before the off-duty ICE agent, Brian Palacios, went to investigate. Porter was pronounced dead at the scene when police officers responded.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:00 pm

Chicago’s United Center to offer cannabis drinks – could other arenas follow?

Drinks to be sold at concerts under federal legislation but attenders may have to wait to imbibe at sporting events

THC-infused beverages will now be available at special events in the United Center, the home of the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago Blackhawks, which some experts suggest may pave the way for other arenas to do the same.

These drinks can be sold outside of state-legal recreational dispensaries because they are part of the hemp-derived cannabis market that is currently legal on the federal level.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:07 pm

Why Max Richter’s Hamnet needle-drop left me cold | Tom Service on music

In a new weekly column about the world of classical music, Tom Service bemoans Hollywood turning pieces into slop through overuse. Plus: Philip Glass withdraws his symphony from the Kennedy Center

Back in 2008, Transport for London came up with a ruse to dispel antisocial behaviour: it piped classical music into supposedly problematic stations in the crime hotspots of south London. I think that was when I realised just how far the association of classical music with relaxing affect instead of real emotion had gone. Once an entire genre has become associated with relaxification, it’s enough for you to hear the sound of an orchestra and think, “This isn’t for me”. Whatever its BPM, classical music will only be a backdrop, the sound of luxury goods, the sound of cultural anaesthetic.

The playlist included the finale of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony – music that is obsessive and wild, the sound of barely controlled hysteria, full of harmonic grind and rhythmic assault. This radical and Dionysian music, that was literally made to push communities of orchestras and listeners to their extremes in the early 19th century, was being reduced to calming and inoffensive aural wallpaper.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:26 pm

‘It’s not too late to fix it’: internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul of the web’

Founder of the world wide web says commercialisation means the net has been ‘optimised for nastiness’, but collaboration and compassion can prevail

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When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.

Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.

Published: January 28, 2026, 2:00 pm

Shrinking season three review – Harrison Ford is the best thing about this unapologetically soapy show

This warm, inoffensive but undeniably mawkish comedy about a therapist is cosy but preposterous. Sometimes it’s like the excellent Ford is in a totally different programme

Such is the surfeit of TV offered up to us in the streaming age that there are whole shows featuring A-list actors that only two of your friends have heard of and even fewer are watching. A case in point: Apple’s Shrinking, a dramedy from the creator of Scrubs and Ted Lasso about a grieving therapist who, rather than merely nodding and looking sad, decides to get brutally honest with his patients.

Now in its third season, its brightest star remains Harrison Ford, who plays our protagonist Jimmy’s (Jason Segel) grouchy but good-hearted boss. It’s probably for the best that it isn’t in the big leagues: while Shrinking has its moments of greatness, the series is – by and large – an unapologetically soapy confection best enjoyed, like most sweet things, in moderation.

Shrinking is on Apple TV now.

Published: January 28, 2026, 8:00 am

My husband was murdered on holiday – and my whole world collapsed

Each year, about 80 British people are victims of a homicide overseas, and grieving loved ones have to navigate the aftermath. Eve Henderson describes losing her husband, and her fight to help others

On a Sunday in October 1997, Eve Henderson looked down at her husband, Roderick, as he lay in a hospital bed, unable to make sense of what she saw. She was, she says, “a block of stone”. They were in the neurological ward of a huge hospital on the outskirts of Paris. Travelling on the Métro, the hospital name scribbled on a scrap of paper, it had taken Henderson an hour to find. Roderick looked comfortable when she arrived; he was a good colour, but there was a round red mark in the centre of his forehead and a small tube inside his mouth, attached to something she later learned was breathing for him.

“He looked fairly alive,” says Henderson, “and I just stood there. A doctor came in. She was in tears and I thought: ‘Bloody hell, am I meant to be crying?’ You’ve got no emotion, you’ve got nothing. You don’t know what to say or where you are. That’s what shock does to you.”

Published: January 28, 2026, 10:00 am

‘A catalyst for change’: how sustainable Copenhagen became fashion’s ‘fifth city’

In 20 years, Danish capital’s fashion week has pushed for greener standards and catapulted homegrown talent to global success

When it comes to fashion weeks, there used to be four key cities: New York, London, Milan and Paris. While they remain titleholders, a host of other cities from Berlin to Seoul and Lagos have been vying for the same recognition to become “the fifth fashion week”. But so far only one real winner has emerged: Copenhagen fashion week.

On Tuesday, the Danish showcase, which has helped catapult homegrown brands including Ganni into the international spotlight while spearheading sustainability initiatives, kicked off the start of its 20th-anniversary celebrations.

Published: January 28, 2026, 2:01 pm

A moment that changed me: I went on holiday – and for the first time I felt I stood out

Leicester, where I grew up, was a ‘super diverse’ city. But when I went on a short trip with a friend, it gave me a glimpse of another world

When I was 24, I visited Ireland for the first time. It was the autumn after I graduated from university, and a friend who had won an award for her dissertation used her prize money to rent a beach hut on Valentia Island, so that we could spend a week working on our novels.

The stone hut stood very close to the water’s edge on the western tip of Ireland, overlooking the expansive metal-blue of the Atlantic. The island possessed a rugged kind of beauty – cliff edges, a lush rainforest, cold frothing water. It astounded us. As did the tranquillity. It was what we had come in search of.

Published: January 28, 2026, 10:54 am

Trump wants our attention. Let’s stop falling for his geopolitical clickbait | Catherine De Vries

Whether he’s targeting Greenland, tariffs or Iran, Trump’s agenda is to distract – because a Europe that is always reacting is never planning

When Donald Trump reassured the world that he would not, after all, use force to acquire Greenland – after days of threatening as much – he was doing what he does best: turning geopolitics into a spectacle. Whether Trump ever truly believed the US should acquire a vast Arctic territory belonging to a Nato ally is secondary to the fact that, once again, he ensured that Europe and the rest of the world were focused on his agenda.

Trump is not a politician who responds to events – he seeks to make them. Not because he is deeply invested in policy detail, but because he understands a defining feature of contemporary politics: attention is power. In an era of information overload, there is no scarcity of data or analysis; what is lacking is attention. And whoever controls that controls the debate.

Published: January 28, 2026, 5:00 am

Why would anyone buy Lily Allen’s haunted house? I have an inkling ... | Polly Hudson

The Brooklyn townhouse is filled with spectres of her ill-fated marriage to David Harbour. But perhaps the buyer has some creative ideas

How long a minute is depends which side of the bathroom door you’re on. Now it appears that how much a $1m loss matters depends how eager you are for your business to be concluded.

That’s pretty eager apparently – and unsurprisingly – if you’re Lily Allen and David Harbour. The former couple have just accepted $7m for the Brooklyn townhouse they listed for $8m in October.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Published: January 28, 2026, 11:00 am

Sanctions are not a humane alternative to bombs. They are economic warfare with civilians as collateral damage | Kenneth Mohammed

In the Caribbean and Latin America, the lived reality of these measures – presented in the language of diplomacy – is stark

Across borders, cultures and faiths, most ordinary people want the same things: the ability to earn a living, put a roof over their heads, feed their families and watch their children grow up with a future. These are not radical ideas, but they are today routinely sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics.

When power and profit take precedence, governments abandon the everyday realities of those they claim to protect and serve, especially when domination of another country’s resources, markets or political direction is at stake.

Published: January 28, 2026, 7:00 am

America has reached a tipping point on fascism – and on opposition to it | Robert Reich

A chance encounter reminded me: there are two ways to look at what’s happened in Minneapolis

One of the few advantages of being as conspicuous as I am is that many people come up to me whom I don’t know, to talk about what’s happening in America. It’s like a free-floating focus group.

On Monday morning, I was at a restaurant counter finishing my breakfast when a middle-aged man sat down next to me and said he didn’t want to intrude. (He just had, so I put down my knife and fork, wiped my mouth with my napkin, and turned toward him.) He wanted me to know that although he’d been a lifelong Republican, the events of the past weeks had caused him to leave the Republican party.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now

Published: January 27, 2026, 11:00 am

Masked thugs, sneering elites and terrified citizens: a picture of the US today. We used to have a name for this | Marina Hyde

Truly, I am the country’s biggest fan. But in the spirit of free speech its leaders apparently love, here’s a few things the rest of the world needs them to know

We in the rest of the world have had to hear a lot – such a lot – about what this US government and its hardcore fanbase thinks about us. So you know they’ll be super-relaxed and free-speechy about hearing some thoughts about how they look from the outside. Let’s use last Saturday as a single snapshot. In Minneapolis, they had the shooting by federal agents of a protesting nurse who posed no threat – an event promptly, provably and blatantly lied about at the highest level by Donald Trump’s politburo. Then that evening in Washington, a lot of those same politburocrats turned out for the White House premiere of a ridiculous propaganda film about the president’s wife, also attended fawningly by bloodless Apple oligarch Tim Cook. And he’s not even the oligarch who paid an insane amount for the film. Top line, guys: all this makes you look like what your president likes to call a “shithole country”. Sorry! I assume it’s fine to use officially licensed vocabulary?

Obviously, it’s not a proper shithole country until the soft-skinned puppetmasters in the presidential palace cut some grizzled local warlord off at the knees for following orders, so it’s good to learn overnight that border patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino has been pulled out of Minneapolis, possibly locked out of his social media accounts, and may soon “retire”, presumably a fall guy for the likes of stage 4 homeland security tumour Stephen Miller. Bovino’s the guy who’s literally got the same haircut and outfit as the Sean Penn character in One Battle After Another. But hey, at least he wears a uniform. Again, what are international outsiders to make of the spectacle of ICE’s federal officers coming masked and frequently dressed in civilian clothes, while images from protests across the States show resisting civilians increasingly drawn to military-style clothing? Can Trump’s storm detachment not at least be issued with matching shirts? They don’t have to be brown, but Maga chic desperately needs to make even a first step to getting itself together. In the entire history of the movement, only one follower – the QAnon shaman – has ever had true style.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Published: January 27, 2026, 1:43 pm

‘Insane’: LeBron and Mahomes lead backlash after Belichick’s reported Hall of Fame snub

• Belichick widely seen as one of greatest ever coaches

• Hall of Fame declines to comments on ESPN report

Six-time Super Bowl champion head coach Bill Belichick has been snubbed by the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, according to a report from ESPN.

Citing four unidentified sources, ESPN reported on Tuesday that Belichick didn’t receive the necessary 40 votes from the 50-person panel of media members and other Hall of Famers. ESPN said Belichick received a call from the Hall of Fame last Friday with the news. According to the report, Belichick said “Six Super Bowls isn’t enough?” when he was told the news.

The Hall of Fame declined to comment before its class of 2026 is announced at NFL Honors in San Francisco on 5 February.

Published: January 28, 2026, 2:23 am

Zuffa Boxing says it will save the sport – but the fine print shows that fighters might pay the price

Dana White has promised boxers a new deal. But the deal he’s offering looks worse than the old one. Will Congress give Zuffa the power to dominate boxing?

Even Turki al-Sheikh’s most severe critics acknowledge that, under his guidance, the Saudi interests that have dominated professional boxing in recent years have paid generous purses to fighters. Now the Saudis have turned to TKO Group Holdings and Dana White to oversee Zuffa Boxing – a newly created vehicle designed to expand the footprint of its equity partners in the United States.

Zuffa Boxing is taking a far less generous approach toward fighters than Sheikh did. That’s evidenced by the contract that many of the fighters being recruited by Zuffa are being asked to sign.

Published: January 28, 2026, 8:00 am

Novak Djokovic survives at Australian Open as Lorenzo Musetti retires hurt while two sets up

• No 4 seed moves into semi-final despite struggles against Italian

• Djokovic win sets up blockbuster with Jannik Sinner for place in final

Novak Djokovic will double his prayers on Wednesday night after receiving a massive slice of luck in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open as the Serb was outplayed for two sets by an inspired Lorenzo Musetti before injury forced the Italian to retire while leading 6-4, 6-3, 1-3.

Musetti had been working towards one of his best victories, dominating Djokovic from the baseline and establishing an authoritative lead before his retirement. “I don’t know what to say except that I feel really sorry for him. He was a far better player, I was on my way home tonight,” Djokovic said.

Published: January 28, 2026, 7:10 am

‘Animals in the zoo’: Iga Swiatek backs Coco Gauff over Australian Open privacy concerns

• American was caught on camera smashing racket following defeat

• ‘It would be nice to have some privacy,’ says Polish second seed

Iga Swiatek backed up Coco Gauff’s complaints about a lack of privacy at the Australian Open by claiming tennis players are treated like zoo animals.

Gauff sought a spot away from public view to let her frustration out by smashing a racket following her quarter-final loss to Elina Svitolina on Tuesday, only to find out she was on camera after all.

Published: January 28, 2026, 7:44 am

Vingegaard crashes on training ride in Spain after being tailed by amateur cyclist

• Amateur rider claims Dane ‘got angry’ when followed

• Team ask for riders to be given space after Málaga crash

Visma-Lease a Bike have reminded amateur cyclists of the dangers of interacting with professional riders on the road following the revelation that Jonas Vingegaard crashed on Monday after being tailed by a fan during a descent near Málaga, Spain.

“Jonas Vingegaard crashed during training on Monday. Fortunately, he is OK and did not sustain any serious injuries,” read a team statement. “In general, as a team we would like to urge fans on bikes to always put safety first. For both your own and others’ wellbeing, please allow riders to train and give them as much space and peace as possible.”

Published: January 27, 2026, 4:54 pm

Chelsea urge fans to take ‘extreme caution’ in Naples after two taken to hospital

• Treatment needed for ‘non-life-threatening injuries’

• Chelsea fans report having knives pulled on them

Chelsea have told fans to take “extreme caution” in Naples after two supporters were treated in hospital there before their Champions League tie in the Italian city.

Napoli and Chelsea meet at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona on Wednesday night in the competition’s final round of group games.

Published: January 28, 2026, 8:35 am

Removing US as World Cup host would be eminently sad – and entirely justified | Alexander Abnos

A country where safety is under threat from federal violence on the streets is not fit to stage soccer’s showpiece event

Removing the United States as co-host of the 2026 World Cup would hurt for pretty much everyone. Fans would miss out on seeing the sport’s pinnacle in their home towns (or somewhere nearby). Cities and businesses small and large would lose the financial benefits they had banked on. It would be a logistical and political nightmare on an international scale, the likes of which have never been seen before in sports. It would be eminently sad. And it would be entirely justified.

It brings me no pleasure to say this. The United States has been eager to host a men’s World Cup for more than a decade and a half. The desire survived and even grew after 2010’s failure to out-bid Russia and Qatar (in public and behind closed doors) for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. With hosting rights for 2026 later secured alongside Canada and Mexico, the US soccer scene prepared to show off that the sport is now part of the nation’s fabric, 32 years after hosting the tournament for the first time in 1994. Soccer’s growing popularity in America has helped inspire other US sports to try new formats, encouraged us to engage more fully with the world in a sporting context, and has been at the center of conversations about our society and culture. The 2026 World Cup was seen as the best chance for the world to fully experience not just how much the US has improved at soccer, but how much soccer has improved the US.

Published: January 27, 2026, 10:00 am

Concerns grow over fairness of Women’s Champions Cup timing, location, and Fifa support

Some clubs have been dismayed at the built-in advantages afforded to Arsenal in the inaugural edition of Fifa’s women’s club competition

There are growing concerns over the integrity and fairness of the Fifa Women’s Champions Cup, with Arsenal viewed as having a significant financial and logistical advantage over fellow competitors Gotham FC, AS Far and Corinthians due to the competition being played in London and the final hosted at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.

The Guardian understands that while there is widespread support for a global club competition in women’s football and the announcement of the record-breaking £1.7m / $2.4m prize pot for the tournament is very welcome, clubs have been frustrated by the timing and other details of the inaugural edition, with some feeling that not enough is being done by Fifa to address the significant advantage afforded to Arsenal.

Published: January 27, 2026, 9:24 pm

Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight amid threats from climate crisis and AI

Planet closer to destruction as Russia, China and US become more aggressive and nationalistic, says advocacy group

Earth is closer than it has ever been to destruction as Russia, China, the US and other countries become “increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic”, a science-oriented advocacy group said on Tuesday as it advanced its Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds until midnight.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist members had an initial demonstration on Friday and then announced their results on Tuesday.

Published: January 28, 2026, 12:43 am

SpaceX mulls $1.5tn IPO timed to ‘align with Musk’s birthday and the planets’

World’s richest person targeting symbolic date in June for flotation of rocket company

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is considering a flotation valuing the rocket company at $1.5tn (£1.1tn) that will reportedly be timed for early summer to coincide with a planetary alignment and the multibillionaire’s birthday.

The world’s richest person is targeting a symbolic date of mid-June for the initial public offering, according to the Financial Times. This would be around the same time as Jupiter and Venus appear in close proximity to each other and shortly before Musk turns 55 on 28 June.

Published: January 28, 2026, 10:18 am

Pregnant, 19 and facing down a mutiny: how did Mary Ann Patten steer her way into seafaring lore?

Finding herself in charge of her sick husband’s clipper, a self-taught working-class teenager overcame storms, icebergs and a disloyal first mate to get her ship to safety

No one knows exactly what Mary Ann Patten said in September 1856 when she convinced a crew on the verge of mutiny to accept her command as captain. What is known is that Patten, who was 19 and pregnant, was a force to be reckoned with.

After taking the helm from her sick husband in the middle of a ferocious storm off the coast of Cape Horn, the notoriously hazardous tip of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago off southern Chile, she successfully put down the mutiny and navigated her way to safety through a sea of icebergs.

Published: January 28, 2026, 11:00 am

Budapest mayor charged over his calls for people to defy Hungary’s Pride ban

Gergely Karácsony urged people to take to streets in June in pushback against Orbán government’s attack on rights

Prosecutors in Hungary have filed charges against the progressive mayor of Budapest, seeking to fine him months after hundreds of thousands of people heeded his call to take to the streets in defiance of the government’s ban on Pride.

The June march made headlines around the world after the ruling Fidesz party, led by the rightwing populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, backed legislation that created a legal basis for Pride to be banned, citing a widely criticised need to protect children.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:33 pm

Human remains found in search for Belgian backpacker missing in Tasmanian wilderness since 2023

Police say Celine Cremer’s family was told of the discovery on Wednesday and that forensic testing was yet to take place

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Human remains have been discovered near a remote location where a Belgian hiker disappeared more than two years ago.

Police say a bushwalker found the remains during a search for Celine Cremer, who was last seen in the Philosopher Falls area near Cradle Mountain in Tasmania’s north-west on 17 June 2023.

Published: January 28, 2026, 6:49 am

Stable genius? How a defective ‘crying horse’ toy went viral in China

Toy becomes a popular symbol of workplace fatigue after manufacturing error gave it a frown instead of a smile

On 17 February China will celebrate the start of the year of the horse, the zodiac sign symbolising high energy and hard work. But the runaway success of a defective stuffed toy suggests that many Chinese are not feeling the vibe.

A red horse toy produced by Happy Sister in the city of Yiwu in the west of China was meant to wear a broad grin, but a factory error meant it hit the shops sporting a despairing grimace. Because the smile was placed upside down, the horse’s nostrils could be interpreted as tears.

Published: January 28, 2026, 4:22 am

Stephen Colbert announces date of final episode of The Late Show

CBS announced in July that Late Show would end in May, more than 30 years after 1993 debut under David Letterman

The final episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert will air on 21 May, the host has announced.

Colbert, who has hosted the show since 2015, revealed the date on Monday during a taping of NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers to air on Tuesday night. Colbert will appear on Meyers’s show as a guest.

Published: January 28, 2026, 12:51 am

‘My Tesla has become ordinary’: Turkey catches up with EU in electric car sales

Popularity of EVs in country is part of global trend of emerging markets spurning fossil fuel cars at surprising speeds

When Berke Astarcıoğlu bought a BMW i3 in 2016, he was one of just 44 people in a country of 80 million to buy a battery electric vehicle (BEV) that year. By the time he bought a Tesla in 2023, BEVs were no longer a complete oddity in Turkey, making up 7% of new car sales.

Fast-forward two years and electric cars are selling so fast that Turkey has caught up with the EU in its rate of adoption. Its market is now the fourth largest in Europe, behind Germany, the UK and France.

Published: January 28, 2026, 5:00 am

Gelatinous horde of red stinging jellyfish washes into Melbourne beaches

A ‘massive smack’ of lion’s mane jellyfish has appeared across Port Phillip Bay, but experts say fears of a ‘jellygeddon’ are overblown

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Swimmers have been advised to steer clear if they see red jellyfish in the water after a gelatinous horde descended on Melbourne beaches.

Thousands of lion’s mane jellyfish have washed into the shallows and on to the sand across Port Phillip Bay, from Altona in the west to Blairgowrie on the Mornington Peninsula.

Published: January 27, 2026, 11:23 pm

Why is Greenland so rich in natural resources?

Island’s mineral and resource wealth is result of mountain building, rifting and volcanic activity over 4bn years

As recent manoeuvres over Greenland have made plain, this mostly ice-covered island contains some of the greatest stores of natural resources in the world, with huge volumes of oil and gas, rich deposits of rare-earth elements and rocks bearing gems and gold. So why did all the planetary goodies end up here?

Writing in The Conversation, the geologist Dr Jonathan Paul from Royal Holloway, University of London, explains how this mineral and resource wealth is tied to the country’s geological history over the past 4bn years. Greenland is a bit of a geological anomaly, with land that has been pummelled in three different ways: mountain building, rifting and volcanism.

Published: January 28, 2026, 6:00 am

Smothering, bullying, stabbing: how it feels to be in one of the hottest places on Earth

Everything felt like it was swelling, and despite my diligent consumption of water and Hydralyte, I couldn’t quite escape the persistent, low-level nausea. Even thinking took longer

My mother grew up in Warracknabeal, a speck of a town four hours from Melbourne, Australia, in the wide, wheat country of the Wimmera – that part of Victoria where the sky starts to stretch, where you can see weather happening 100 kilometres away.

Once or twice a year, our family would pack into the rattling old LandCruiser and drive up to visit my grandmother. It can’t always have been blistering weather but my memories of those trips are shot through with summer heat: the peeling paint of my grandmother’s house, the blasted-dry grass of the reserve over the road and its ancient metal monkey bars, so hot they burned your hands. Once, a dust storm blew up while we were there, engulfing the small weatherboard house in howling dirty orange.

Published: January 28, 2026, 6:52 am

Man in hospital after shooting by border agent in Arizona

Authorities say suspect, who escaped from facility in 2024, ran from traffic stop and fired shots at helicopter

A shooting involving a border patrol agent near the US-Mexico border in Arizona has left an accused smuggler in critical condition, local authorities said Tuesday.

Border patrol agents attempted to stop a car at about 7am, Pima county sheriff Chris Nanos said at a press conference. Several people exited the car and ran off, and the vehicle drove away, Nanos said. About half an hour later, agents relocated the car and attempted to stop it again. The driver fled on foot, and a border agent chased after him.

Published: January 28, 2026, 2:55 am

Investigators say deadly midair collision near Washington DC followed years of ignored traffic warnings

Crash that killed 67 was ‘100% preventable’, says NTSB chair at hearing that addressed history of missed opportunities

National Transportation Safety Board members were deeply troubled on Tuesday over years of ignored warnings about helicopter traffic dangers and other problems, long before an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk collided a year ago, killing 67 people near Washington DC.

The placement of a helicopter route in the approach path of Reagan national airport’s secondary runway created a dangerous airspace and a lack of regular safety risk reviews made it worse, the board said. That was a key factor in the crash along with air traffic controllers’ over reliance on asking helicopter pilots to avoid other aircraft.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:52 am

Judge strikes down Virginia Democrats’ plan to redraw congressional districts

Ruling is a setback for Democrats looking to increase number of seats in midterm House elections in November

A Virginia judge ruled on Tuesday that a proposed constitutional amendment letting Democrats redraw the state’s congressional maps was illegal, setting back the party’s efforts to pick up seats in the US House in November.

Tazewell circuit court judge Jack Hurley Jr struck down the legislature’s actions on three grounds, including finding that lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session.

Published: January 27, 2026, 11:19 pm

Meta allowed minors access to sex-talking chatbots despite staff concerns, lawsuit alleges

Filing by New Mexico’s attorney general includes Meta staff emails objecting to AI companion policy

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, approved allowing minors to access artificial intelligence chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents filed in a New Mexico state court case and made public on Monday.

The lawsuit – brought by the state’s attorney general, Raul Torrez, and scheduled for trial next month – alleges Meta “failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children” on Facebook and Instagram.

Published: January 27, 2026, 10:38 pm

Dutch parties strike minority coalition deal three months after D66 election upset

Christian Democrats and VVD join centrist D66 party three months after surprise win left fragmented parliament

The leaders of three Dutch political parties have agreed a new coalition deal, paving the way for a rare minority government in the Netherlands almost three months after elections that produced an upset victory for the centrist D66 party.

The liberal-progressive, pro-European party, led by the probable new prime minister, Rob Jetten, will join up with the conservative Christian Democrats and the right-wing VVD in a government that holds only 66 seats in the 150-seat lower house.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:05 pm

What is Nipah virus? Key things to know about the disease amid cases in India

Highly contagious virus, which spreads from animals to humans, has a high fatality rate and there is no vaccine

Airports across Asia have been put on high alert after India confirmed two cases of the deadly Nipah virus in the state of West Bengal over the past month.

Thailand, Nepal and Vietnam are among the countries screening airport arrivals over fears of an wider outbreak of the virus, which can spread from animals to humans and has a high fatality rate.

Published: January 28, 2026, 11:36 am

‘Attacks day after day’: Odesa in Russia’s crosshairs as war pivots back to Black Sea

Unable to get near Ukraine’s main port, Moscow is pounding the city from afar with missiles and drones

Outside the Kadorr apartment complex in Ukraine’s Black Sea city of Odesa, about 500 metres from the seafront, residents and rescue workers mill around in freezing temperatures.

Above an office on the 25th floor, a block of wall has been blown out by a Russian drone. Below, rubble and glass have been moved quickly into piles as owners survey cars crushed by the falling masonry.

Published: January 28, 2026, 5:00 am

Cuts leave deadly mines in the ground and push hundreds of women out of work

De-mining organisations forced to cut staff, many of whom were women, despite landmines littering Zimbabwe-Mozambique border

Ten days before schools reopen for the summer term in eastern Zimbabwe, Hellen Tibu is worried about how she will pay the fees for her sister’s education. The 22-year-old landmine-disposal expert smooths the creases from her younger sister’s uniform as it hangs on the washing line outside a relative’s rooms in Sakubva, a densely populated township in Mutare. The shirt is faded around the collar and a new one is needed.

Tibu could afford the school fees and uniform – before the US funding cuts last year meant she no longer had her job clearing landmines. Now she can no longer pay her rent or look after her parents and siblings.

Published: January 28, 2026, 5:00 am

David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God by Peter Ormerod review – the making of a modern saint

An exhilarating account of Bowie’s spirituality and the quasi-religious nature of his work, from Space Oddity to Blackstar

It has become a tired cliche among fans to say that everything went wrong in the world after Bowie died in 2016. It also misses the point: rather than being one of the last avatars of a liberal order that has crumbled around our ears, Bowie prophesied the mayhem that has replaced it.

In his later years, he thought that we had entered a zone of chaos and fragmentation. This is what allowed him to be so prescient about the internet – not its promise, but its menace. There is no plan and no order. There is just disaster and social collapse. Those looking for reassurance should not listen to Bowie (please listen to something, anything, else). His world, from Space Oddity through to the background violence of The Next Day and Blackstar, was always drowned or destroyed or incinerated: “This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide” as he exclaims at the beginning of Diamond Dogs.

Published: January 28, 2026, 7:00 am

The Weight review – Ethan Hawke leads sturdy adventure set in the 30s

Sundance film festival: the recent Oscar nominee lends gravitas to a decent matinee movie on gold smuggling

For Ethan Hawke, 2025 was quite the year, showing impressively jarring range as both a bitter gay lyricist in Blue Moon and a demonic child-killer in Black Phone 2, both out at the same time in cinemas, a uniquely terrifying double-bill for diehards. He also led critically adored new noir series The Lowdown, airing simultaneously, all serving as reminder of how he’s one of the hardest-working established actors we have, not many five-time Oscar nominees have made eight films in the last four years (while also directing two other films on the side).

It doesn’t all hit (Raymond and Ray, anyone?) but there’s something unusually invigorating about someone with his level of fame still seeming so excited about the many different opportunities he can maximise (this is, after all, the guy who made millions from his crafty back-end deal for The Purge). He’s on far safer ground, at least as an actor, in The Weight, a conventional adventure drama about gold smuggling in the early 1930s, but his increased versatility has earned him an increase in confidence and while the work here might err more on the physical, he easily anchors the film.

The Weight is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:34 am

Rabbit Trap review – feral child lends eerie magic to Dev Patel fairy folk rock horror

The 70s musicians who choose to lay down some tracks in remote Welsh countryside may not really surprise, but one young local is startlingly memorable

There’s an oscillation of weirdness in this feature debut from Bryn Chainey, who takes us deep into the traditional folk-horror thicket with a fervently atmospheric and intriguingly acted, if finally directionless drama set in 1970s Wales. Like Daniel Kokotajlo’s recent Starve Acre or Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, Rabbit Trap swathes you in ambient sound design and insists on a kind of atavistic authenticity in the 70s stylings themselves: the woollens, the gloom and the analogue recording equipment. Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen play Darcy and Daphne, an English couple involved in the music scene; she is a folk singer whose last LP was called Mono Moon. They have come to the remote Welsh countryside to work on her new album, a bit like Led Zeppelin, whose experience recording in primitive Welsh cottages in the early 70s deserves a folk-horror treatment of its own.

They rent a cottage featuring the kind of windows at which, in Withnail’s immortal words, faces look in at. Darcy is Daphne’s producer and sound engineer and tapes interesting sounds thereabouts for use on the record – birdsong, rainwater dripping into a barrel – but is also picking up a strange thrumming from the shroomy netherworld. Soon this English couple find themselves befriended and yet menaced by a smudgy-faced, jumper-wearing feral Welsh child (rather brilliantly played by Jade Croot) who could be any age from nine to 54, telling uneasy Darcy about the Tylwyth Teg fairy folk and showing him a rabbit trap in which the captured bunnies are transformed into fetish sacrifices.

Published: January 28, 2026, 9:00 am

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass review – silly, scattershot Hollywood comedy

Sundance film festival: Zoey Deutch is a small-town girl hunting down Jon Hamm for sex in David Wain’s disposable yet often funny lark

There’s been the expected amount of heavy-weighted seriousness at this year’s Sundance – stories about sexual assault, climate change, opioid addiction and dementia – but also a remarkable amount of silliness. Perhaps realising we might be in desperate need of an uplift, the festival has given us a cartoonish dom-sub romance, a killer Barney horror, a pop star mockumentary, a Weekend at Bernie’s art world caper and a film where Olivia Colman shags a man made of wicker. But those films are all pretty stern-minded in comparison to David Wain’s disposable, dopey comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, a film without a single serious moment, driven by the sole purpose of making us laugh.

It succeeds in fits and starts – I laughed more than I have at many a comedy in the past year – but its wild, scattershot humour is so hit and miss, too many jokes going nowhere, that it’s not quite the rousing win I wanted it to be. Wain has previously toyed with more conventional studio comedies like Wanderlust and Role Models (which for me was one of the best examples of the form in the 2000s) and spoofs, targeting 80s sex comedies with Wet Hot American Summer and romcoms with They Came Together. Gail Daughtry belongs in the latter group but it doesn’t have quite as direct of an aim, a Wizard of Oz-inspired, Hollywood-set action comedy about marriage, fame, espionage and the burning desire to have sex with Jon Hamm.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Tape is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Published: January 27, 2026, 4:45 pm

‘I have Yes tattooed on my foot!’ Zoey Deutch on playing Jean Seberg in a joyous celebration of Godard classic Breathless

The Hollywood actor is about to go stratospheric thanks to Nouvelle Vague, a film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece. How did she feel about playing the blond gamine in some of cinema’s best loved scenes?

Richard Linklater’s latest film Nouvelle Vague is not so much a re-enactment of cinema history, but a celebratory tribute act – joyously reliving the spirit of the early French New Wave, as it re-imagines 1959 Paris and the chaotically innovative shooting of Jean-Luc Godard’s epoch-making Breathless (A Bout de Souffle). Most of the cast are newcomers, but there’s one familiar face: American actor Zoey Deutch. She plays Jean Seberg, already a Hollywood star when Godard cast her as expat student and newspaper vendor Patricia. Seberg’s stroll with Jean-Paul Belmondo on the Champs-Elysées, in T-shirt, slacks and ballet flats, is one of the legendary duets of French cinema.

Deutch has Seberg’s style down impeccably: her awkward American-accented French, her balletic bounce in that scene, her exuberant shout of “New York Herald Tribune!” On a Zoom call from Los Angeles, Deutch – Seberg’s blond gamine cut now grown out into symmetrical black bangs – admits that when Linklater first suggested she might play the role, she knew nothing about Seberg, or about Breathless. That was way back in 2014, when they were shooting Linklater’s college baseball comedy Everybody Wants Some!! “I was 19,” says Deutch, “and I know there are plenty of 19-year-olds who are cinephiles and know a ton about that world, but I didn’t.”

Published: January 27, 2026, 4:30 pm

10 of the greatest songs by Sly Dunbar – from reggae classics to Grace Jones and Bob Dylan

After his death aged 73, we look back at a selection of the hundreds of tracks the Sly and Robbie drummer had a hand in making

It isn’t Sly Dunbar’s most spectacular performance as a drummer – although his playing is right in the pocket: listen to the lightness of his touch on the cymbals and the tightness of his occasional fills – but as recording debuts go, appearing on an early 70s reggae classic in your teens, a single that furthermore went to No 1 in the UK and sold 300,000 copies despite British radio’s disinclination to play it, is quite the impressive way to open your account.

Published: January 27, 2026, 12:49 pm

Know the score? I don’t read music, but that’s no hindrance to reimagining great classical works

Folk duo Pound & Stevens have transformed, and added to, Holst’s The Planets Suite and tour the new work this week with Britten Sinfonia. Will Pound explains why playing by ear is his greatest strength

I’m a harmonica and accordion player and one half of folk-classical duo Stevens & Pound. As a multi-instrumentalist I am rooted in a folk tradition that is oral, aural and communal. Music and song are passed down by ear, either through recordings or – more fun – traditional music sessions. Here, players and singers get together to share, swap and play tunes, drawing from a repertoire that is always evolving. While collections of tunes are certainly notated, their scores act as a skeleton – providing the basic architecture of pitch and rhythm but rarely offering explicit guidance on how the music should be played.

Delia Stevens and I are about to head out on tour, performing with the Britten Sinfonia and Robert Macfarlane in a new work called The Silent Planet, a recomposition of Holst’s Planets suite. It’s the culmination of 18 months of rehearsals and revisions, and the score for this 60-minute work, orchestrated by Ian Gardiner, totals 165 pages and includes Earth, an entirely new composition.

Published: January 27, 2026, 12:00 pm

Anti-pop and an alien sigil: how Aphex Twin overtook Taylor Swift to become the soundtrack to gen Z life online

The mysterious Cornish electronic music pioneer has gained an extraordinary second life in the TikTok era. Writers and musicians explain why his glitchy slipperiness is so in tune with life today

QKThr, an obscure cut from Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs, sounds like an ambient experiment recorded on a historic pirate ship. Shaky fingers caress the keys of an accordion to create an uncanny tone; clustered chords cry out, subdued but mighty, before scuttling back into dreamy nothingness.

This 88-second elegy has always been overshadowed by another song on Drukqs, the Disklavier instrumental Avril 14th, which alongside Windowlicker is the Cornish producer’s best-known track. But QKThr has become a weird breakaway success, featuring on nearly 8m TikTok posts, adorning everything from cute panda videos to lightly memed US presidential debates, and a fail video trend dubbed “subtle foreshadowing”.

Published: January 27, 2026, 5:00 am

The Puma by Daniel Wiles review – a visceral tale of cyclical violence

A father and son move to the Patagonian woods – but intensity wanes when a search for home becomes an obsessive quest for revenge

When the protagonist of Daniel Wiles’s debut novel Mercia’s Take, set in a mining community during the industrial revolution, left a bag of gold downstairs unprotected and then went to bed, I actually closed the book, in an attempt to stop the unfolding disaster. After finding this seam of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son will be able to go to school, rather than join the other children who work in the mine, like “blind, bald rodents unearthing themselves in search of scraps of candlelight”. In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask prize, everything closes in on Michael: lungs clog, tunnels collapse, horse-drawn narrowboats are attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It’s a vivid reminder of the cost, in bodily suffering, of resource extraction.

The Puma, Wiles’s second novel, is also a serious and intense historical novel about a father with limited resources who attempts to break a cycle of violence. In the early 1950s Bernardo, a more morally ambiguous figure than Michael, has brought his young son James across the Atlantic from England to the house in the Patagonian woods where he himself grew up. James chatters blithely about becoming a footballer, but Bernardo is distracted. He thinks he sees “shadows of his family walking in and out”, reminding him of a childhood in which “his eyes were wide and hurt by the twilight and he was barefooted and emptyhearted”.

Published: January 28, 2026, 9:00 am

Glyph by Ali Smith review – bearing witness to the war in Gaza

This second novel in a sharp duology offers a powerful interrogation of language in the age of mechanical mass destruction

Never knowingly unknowing, Ali Smith pre-empts the most likely criticism of her latest novel, Glyph, when a character says: “I’m just not sure that books that are novels and fiction and so on should be so close to real life … or so politically blatant.”

Glyph, which follows sisters Petra and Patch as they reflect on childhood attempts to grapple with the finality of death following the loss of their mother, goes further than any of Smith’s recent work in robustly answering this charge. While the Seasonal Quartet playfully anatomised the social fracture of post-Brexit Britain, and immediate predecessor Gliff dealt with the violence of the securitised state, Glyph, in its explicit engagement with the Israeli government’s apartheid and genocide in Palestine, raises the ethical stakes decisively. To engage in a Smithian pun – this is Art in the Age of Mechanical Mass Destruction.

Published: January 27, 2026, 7:00 am

Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo review – the Korean bestseller about platonic partnership

A quietly revolutionary account of cohabiting captured a nation’s heart – but what does it mean for the rest of the world?

When Sunwoo and Hana met on Twitter, they were in their 40s and committed bachelorettes. Both raised by the sea in Busan, they studied in Seoul before entering the city’s famously brutal rat race, Sunwoo as a fashion journalist, Hana as a copywriter. They shared the same taste in music and books, and importantly, both had rejected marriage. No wonder. In South Korea’s stubbornly patriarchal culture, women in dual-income families spend nearly three hours more a day on household chores than men. Instead, Sunwoo and Hana joined the large number of South Koreans living alone. At first, independence felt exhilarating. By middle age however, loneliness was beginning to gnaw, and their boxy studio apartments felt oppressively small.

Two Women Living Together, a 2019 South Korean bestseller that spawned a popular podcast, charts Sunwoo and Hana’s decision to buy a sunlit house together and live not as a romantic couple but as friends. Across 49 warm, chatty essays, they invite us into the life they share with four cats, reflecting on everything from the food they love to their retirement fantasies.

Published: January 27, 2026, 9:00 am

A poor surprise reveal for Highguard leaves it fighting an uphill battle for good reviews

​In the fiercely competitive market ​of the online multiplayer game, Highguard​’s rocky start means it now has a lot to prove

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In the fast-paced, almost psychotically unforgiving video game business, you really do have to stick the landing. Launching a new game is an artform in itself – do you go for months of slowly building hype or a sudden shock reveal, simultaneously announcing and releasing a new project in one fell swoop? The latter worked incredibly well for online shooter Apex Legends, which remains one of the genre’s stalwarts six years after its surprise launch on 4 February 2019. What you don’t do with a new release, is something that falls awkwardly between those two approaches. Enter Highguard.

This new online multiplayer title from newcomer Wildlight Entertainment has an excellent pedigree. The studio was formed by ex-Respawn Entertainment staff, most of whom previously worked on Titanfall, Call of Duty and the aforementioned Apex Legends. They know what they’re doing. But the launch has been … troubled.

Published: January 28, 2026, 12:35 pm

‘It turned out I had a brain tumour …’ Six standup comics on what spurred them to get on stage

When it comes to origin stories, comedians have some of the strangest – from performing for a £5 bet to getting back at their boss to making an unlikely pact with a friend

Not all standup comedians wake up one day and decide to be funny for a living. That wasn’t the case for John Bishop, anyway. He took up comedy to avoid paying a bar’s cover charge and to escape his failing marriage – a story that inspired Bradley Cooper’s new film, Is This Thing On? And Bishop is not the only comic with an unusual origin story. From impressing girlfriends to losing their voices, brain tumours to bad bosses – or not wanting to lose a £5 bet – British comics told us the reasons they became standup comedians and the lengths to which they went to get on stage for the first time.

Published: January 28, 2026, 10:10 am

Hitchcock’s The Lodger has been turned into a vertical microdrama. What’s next – Psycho on Snapchat?

A silent-era classic has been reframed for the vertical scroll of phone screens. Is this innovation, sacrilege, or just another way to repackage cinema history?

‘Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake,” said Alfred Hitchcock. Who knew that anyone would take the knife to one of his most beloved silent films, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), and turn it into a vertical microdrama?

The Tattle TV app has announced that it will be streaming serial killer drama The Lodger on its phone-friendly vertical platform, telling Deadline that it is “one of the first known instances of a classic feature film being fully reframed for vertical, mobile-first consumption”. So will it set a trend? And if so, how can we stop it?

I’m only joking, of course. There will always be those who see archive cinema as just so much more content to be re-appropriated in new formats. And there will always be old-guard purists – who, me? – who wince at the thought. Still, Tattle TV, you have my attention, so let’s talk about it.

We won’t be getting this mini-Hitch in the UK, or the EU for that matter, due to rights, but lucky US viewers will be able to watch the film that Hitchcock considered “the first time I exercised my style” in a format that largely disregards that style. The Lodger will be presented with its squarish 4:3 image either extended or cut down to fill a vertical phone screen. So there will often be parts of the image missing, which is a problem.

The opening shot of The Lodger is a chilling closeup of a woman screaming, her head tilted so that her entire face fills the frame, lit from behind to emphasise her blond hair. Hitchcock told Truffaut that in The Lodger, he presented “ideas in purely visual terms”. This closeup represents the terror spreading across London as a ripper targets young, golden-haired women. Is the idea intact, even if the image isn’t? Hitchcock, a well-known stickler for carefully composed frames, may well disagree. I would.

Published: January 28, 2026, 8:13 am

‘Question the status quo!’: Britain’s queer immigrants – in pictures

Asafe Ghalib photographs his friends and fellow artists with one aim – to transform them into their ‘rawest, most beautiful and most empowered’ form

Published: January 28, 2026, 7:00 am

Philip Glass withdraws world premiere of his Lincoln symphony from Kennedy Center

Composer says values of Trump-dominated Kennedy Center ‘are in direct conflict’ with symphony’s message

Philip Glass, the celebrated US composer, has withdrawn the world premiere of his latest symphony at Washington DC’s John F Kennedy Center in protest of Donald Trump’s presidency.

In a statement on Tuesday, the 88-year-old composer said: “After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Symphony No 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.

Published: January 27, 2026, 6:29 pm

24 creative and unexpected Valentine’s Day gifts for him

From indestructible wallets to Crocs (yes, Crocs), we rounded up the best guy-approved Valentine’s Day gifts they won’t know how they lived without

• The 15 US gifts to give the women in your life

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

Whether you have been together for years or just made it official, one thing remains certain: he is going to claim he doesn’t need anything. But secretly, he will appreciate a really good Valentine’s Day gift. Many men in our lives default to what they have always used and loved, from threadbare T-shirts to melted spatulas. (And if that’s you too, we won’t judge if you peek at this list for yourself.)

When thinking of a present for your go-to guy, prioritize the gift of novelty. Introduce him to a new gadget he hasn’t thought of. Show him that it’s OK to cry with a personalized keepsake commemorating your shared history. Introduce a little color into his life if his year has been a bit bleak.

Published: January 27, 2026, 6:17 pm

‘Are we reaching peak hot honey?’ Why the ‘swicy’ taste is everywhere – from pizzas to crisps

What began as an exciting gen Z food trend has become ubiquitous. Is the bubble about to burst under the weight of ‘fake’ honey and cheap, mass-produced knock-offs?

When hot honey started popping up on restaurant menus about five years ago – drizzled over pizza perhaps, or used as a glaze for meat or halloumi – it seemed novel; something unusual and exciting to try. Word soon got out, particularly among gen Z, about its “swicy” (sweet and spicy) appeal, and the product has “gone a bit crazy over the last couple of years”, according to Laurence Edwards, owner of Black Mountain Honey, which has seen its hot honey sales shoot up.

Like salted caramel, its forebear in the world of food trends, hot honey – generally made by adding or infusing chilli to honey – now seems to be everywhere. Not only can you buy supermarket own-brand versions, but products such as hot honey Jaffa Cakes, hot honey Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut cereal and, most recently, hot honey flavoured Walkers crisps, have now come into existence.

Published: January 27, 2026, 5:11 pm

Knit pants, waterproof boots and more: 20 things to wear to stay warm this winter, tested

Ultra-warm coats, knit pants, waterproof boots: our guide to the 20 best things to wear to stay warm this winter

• Eight winter clothing essentials Scandinavians swear by – from heated socks to ‘allværsjakke’

• This piece was originally published in the Filter US newsletter on buying fewer, better things. Sign up here to read more

Bear with me: I’m going to be that annoying person who talks about the weather.

Lately, New York has been bone-chillingly cold. I’ve lost count of how many layers I’ve had to throw on every morning, and my nose turns red the minute I leave the warmth of my apartment.

For an ultra-warm coat: Patagonia Down Drift Parka

Gloves that keep your hands warm: ATG MaxiFlex Work Gloves and M Mcguire Wool Glove Inserts combination

Published: January 27, 2026, 4:17 pm

Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: Still wearing a cross-body bag and French-tucking your shirt? Sorry to say, your wardrobe is cringe

If you’re wearing tight clothes and flashing your ankles, you may want to make some bold changes

Is your wardrobe cringe? Does it make you look out-of-touch and cause younger and cooler people to look upon you with pity? Do you really want me to answer that? Never mind, I’m going to anyway, so buckle up. Brutal honesty is very January, so I will give it to you straight. But before we get down to dissecting your wardrobe, two quick questions for you. Do you put full stops in text messages? Were you baffled by Labubus? If the answer to those two questions is yes, then I’m afraid the signs are that your wardrobe is almost certainly cringe.

Being cringe is essentially being old-fashioned, but worse. Being old-fashioned is what happens when you grow older with grace and dignity. Cringe is when you lose your touch while convincing yourself you are still down with the kids.

Published: January 28, 2026, 2:00 pm

Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel fairytale continues with haute couture debut

Designer’s third collection confirms his dream start at the label, as warmth for the women who wear it shines through

It is the biggest job in fashion and Matthieu Blazy is knocking it out of the park. Chanel, the most famous fashion house in the world, with annual sales of almost $20bn (£14.6bn) and a designer lineage that includes Coco Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld, is an intimidating prospect for a 41-year-old Belgian designer who, until his appointment last year, was little known outside the industry. But this haute couture debut, his third collection for the house, confirmed that Blazy is off to a dream start.

The show concluded with a standing ovation from the audience, which included Anna Wintour, Nicole Kidman and Dua Lipa. Backstage, veteran Chanel personnel were high-fiving each other – a remarkable display of giddiness in an industry where cool is all. In the Grand Palais venue, transformed into a willow wood of sugar-pink trees and fairytale giant mushrooms, clients tossed sable coats to the ground and clustered for grinning selfies. By every metric, approval ratings for the new-look Chanel are off the charts.

Published: January 27, 2026, 1:38 pm

How to convert kitchen scraps into an infused oil – recipe

All those odds and ends of chillies, garlic skins and rind can be used to flavour oil for dunking, dipping and marinating

Today’s recipe began life as a way to use up garlic skins and herby leftovers, all of which contain a surprising amount of flavour, but it has evolved over time. Infused oil has countless uses – drizzle it over carpaccio, pasta or salad, use it to marinate meat, fish and vegetables, or simply as a dip for chunks of sourdough – and some of my favourites include lemon rind, garlic skin and rosemary; star anise, cacao and orange rind; and makrut lime leaf, lemongrass husk and coriander stems, which I found especially delicious drizzled over some noodles and pak choi. Freshly infused oils of this sort aren’t suitable for long storage, however, so use them up within a day to two.

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:00 pm

Protecting one of Europe’s last wild rivers: a volunteering trip to the Vjosa in Albania

Now a ‘wild river national park’, the Vjosa needs more trees to be planted to preserve its fragile ecosystem. And visitors are being asked to help …

Our induction into tree-planting comes from Pietro, an Italian hydromorphologist charged with overseeing our group of 20 or so volunteers for the week. We’re standing in a makeshift nursery full of spindly willow and poplar saplings just above the Vjosa River, a graceful, meandering waterway that cuts east to west across southern Albania from its source 169 miles away upstream in Greece.

Expertly extricating an infant willow from the clay-rich soil, Pietro holds up the plant for us all to see. Its earthy tendrils look oddly exposed and vulnerable. “The trick is not to accidentally snick the stem or break the roots,” he says. Message registered, we take up our hoes and head off in pairs to follow his instructions.

The volunteering week is the brainchild of EcoAlbania and the Austria-based Riverwatch. Back in 2023, these two conservation charities succeeded in persuading the Albanian government to designate the River Vjosa as Europe’s first “wild river national park”. It was a timely intervention. According to new research co-funded by Riverwatch, Albania has lost 711 miles (1,144km) of “nearly natural” river stretches since 2018 – more, proportionally, than any country in the Balkans. Now, the question facing both organisations is: what next?

On our first evening, Riverwatch’s chief executive, Ulrich (“Uli”) Eichelmann, gives a presentation setting out his answer. But before he does, we have a dinner of lamb and homegrown vegetables to work through. The traditional spread is a speciality of the Lord Byron guesthouse in Tepelenë, a small town in the heart of the Vjosa valley and home to EcoAlbania’s field office – our base for the week.

Published: January 28, 2026, 7:00 am

Slurp the blues away: Ravinder Bhogal’s recipes for winter noodle soup-stews

Heaven in a bowl: sweet-and-sour peanut with pasta, Burmese noodle soup with coconut, noodles and myriad garnishes, and an easy and flavourful dumpling soup

One of the best things for lifting deflated spirits is a deep bowl of steaming, restorative soup – perfect for warming the places your old woolly jumper can’t reach. I love the romance and cosiness of creamy European soups drunk straight out of a mug around a fire in November, but in the icy tundra that is January I need something with more heat and intensity, something sustaining, spicy, gutsy and textured, so that I need a fork or chopsticks to eat it, rather than just a spoon. These punchy soups are simply rapture in a bowl, and make for extremely satisfying slurping.

Published: January 28, 2026, 6:00 am

Rejection spreadsheets: would 1,000 knockbacks make you a better person?

Online, people are documenting their attempts to clock up as many ‘nos’ as they can this year. Is this actually the best possible route to more ‘yeses’ than you’re used to?

Name: Rejection spreadsheets.

Age: There’s nothing new in rejection. JK Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers, Elvis was told he couldn’t sing. Going back a little further, Cain had an offering of produce rejected by God himself, would you Adam and Eve it?

Published: January 27, 2026, 4:27 pm

How ICE is using facial recognition in Minnesota

Mobile Fortify app being used to scan faces of citizens and immigrants – but its use has prompted a severe backlash

Immigration enforcement agents across the US are increasingly relying on a new smartphone app with facial recognition technology.

The app is named Mobile Fortify. Simply pointing a phone’s camera at their intended target and scanning the person’s face allows Mobile Fortify to pull data on an individual from multiple federal and state databases, some of which federal courts have deemed too inaccurate for arrest warrants.

Published: January 27, 2026, 2:00 pm

‘Delays, lowballs, outright denials’: how the LA wildfires have exposed the US’s broken insurance industry

Insurance practices in an age of climate volatility raise troubling questions about home ownership and housing affordability – the bedrock of the American middle class

For a few frenetic days last January, after losing their midcentury ranch home to the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Jessica and Matt Conkle thought they could see a glimmer of hope.

Their insurance company, State Farm, had sent emergency response teams to Altadena, where they lived, and they filed a claim right away. It wasn’t long before they received a check that covered four months of living expenses.

Published: January 27, 2026, 3:00 pm

Five-year-old deported to Honduras despite being US citizen is latest child victim of Trump crackdown

Mother whose visa application was pending says she will send girl back to US soon accompanied by another relative

Five-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos misses her cousins, classmates and kindergarten teachers in Austin, Texas. Despite being a US citizen, she was deported on 11 January alongside her mother, Karen Guadalupe Gutiérrez Castellanos, to Honduras, a country Génesis had never known.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were acting on an administrative deportation order against Gutiérrez, 26, issued in 2019, before Génesis was born.

Published: January 27, 2026, 2:34 pm

An artist’s tent in Gaza and Starmer in China: photos of the day – Wednesday

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

Published: January 28, 2026, 1:11 pm