[
    {
        "id": "acace59380e825faffc0c44d5fc3be8cb860aa8f",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Wilson\u2019s last-gasp West Ham winner deepens Frank\u2019s Tottenham crisis",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/tottenham-west-ham-premier-league-match-report",
        "words": "995",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T17:31:39Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/e17e2d94a900cba1c81dd89a4ad87cb0ac0a3910\/820_440_4420_3537\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "David Hytner at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium",
        "description": "The pressure on Thomas Frank mounted further as Tottenham fell to a 2-1 defeat to West Ham after a stoppage-time winner from Callum Wilson",
        "text": "It was the chant that had simmered for many weeks and there was an inevitability when it was belted out by the Tottenham support at the very last. \u201cSacked in the morning,\u201d they yelled at Thomas Frank, the frustration unbearable. They have seen enough. In their opinion, the manager has to go.\n\nWhether the club\u2019s board agree is unclear. They know the problems that Frank has faced and continues to face during a season of turmoil and transition. The acid test of nerve is upon them.\n\nIt was the West Ham substitute Callum Wilson who took a match to the tinderbox of emotions in the third minute of stoppage time. The striker had just been kept out by a last-ditch Pedro Porro block. But when Oliver Scarles dropped over the corner and the Spurs goalkeeper, Guglielmo Vicario, was boxed in, lacking the strength to make his presence felt, the ball broke for Wilson and he shot home.\n\nWhat a result this was for Nuno Esp\u00edrito Santo and his relegation-threatened West Ham team. Their first Premier League win in 11 matches represented hope and was deserved, certainly on the back of an excellent first-half performance, the high point being Crysencio Summerville\u2019s goal. It was the best period of football under Nuno.\n\nIt had been billed as El Dissatisfactico and all of the angst and misery belonged to Spurs. When Porro whipped in the cross from which Cristian Romero scored a desperately needed equaliser midway through the second-half, what happened next seemed to sum up the emotions. Porro turned to the Spurs fans in the West Stand and cupped his ear in their direction. And then he celebrated with a guttural roar.\n\nIt was a wildly conflicting day, the home crowd yo-yoing between wanting to show their support and venting their spleen. In the end, the takeaway was the latter. The boos rang out in venomous style.\n\nNuno had won on his previous visit here \u2013 with Nottingham Forest last April \u2013 and he watched his team cut through their recent woes to assume a grip on proceedings. They settled after Spurs had made a fast start, Mateus Fernandes influential in midfield, Summerville in the mood off the left wing.\n\nIt was hard to know where the West Ham belief had come from after the shattering home loss to Forest on the Tuesday before last, which had come hard on the heels of the embarrassing defeat at Wolves. The visiting fans were not complaining and they descended in a mixture of joy and disbelief when Summerville put them ahead.\n\nNuno had his January signings, Pablo Felipe and Taty Castellanos, as a strike partnership \u2013 it was an old school 4-4-2; a statement of intent \u2013 and the latter fired the first warning shot to Spurs when he hooked over the crossbar after Summerville headed back an Aaron Wan-Bissaka cross.\n\nWest Ham were in front shortly afterwards. Summerville was eager to run at the Spurs defence, to ask questions and he profited after cutting in from the left after a well-worked counter. It was ignited by Jarrod Bowen, who shrugged off a Ben Davies challenge in which the Spurs left-back seriously injured himself. Davies was given oxygen and taken off on a stretcher. When Summerville bought himself a yard of space and let fly, the shot flicked off Micky van de Ven to wrongfoot Vicario.\n\nMathys Tel had shot high for Spurs at the outset when well-placed \u2013 a big miss \u2013 and the Spurs crowd came to be locked in an internal battle after the Summerville breakthrough. They wanted to stay with the team and yet they could not keep the howls inside them as their players laboured, pockmarking their play with mistakes.\n\nThey were hugely edgy when Vicario tried to begin moves with low passes from the back; they wanted greater urgency. The first boos from them were heard when Castellanos blew a free header at the far post following a corner in the 26th minute. There were more when Xavi Simons misplaced a pass for Djed Spence, who had come on for Davies. And of course there was a loud and angry blast of them upon the half-time whistle.\n\nWest Ham ought to have been further in front by then. They created a fistful of good openings. Castellanos could not control in a good position; Bowen had a shot blocked by Van de Ven; Bowen had the ball in the net only to be pulled back for offside and Vicario had to stretch to repel a Konstantinos Mavropanos header. Spurs\u2019s only response in the first half was a Wilson Odobert header on 25 minutes that Alphonse Areola blocked brilliantly. The goalkeeper would deny Spence on the rebound.\n\nFrank introduced Yves Bissouma for the second-half \u2013 it was the midfielder\u2019s first football of the season \u2013 and the Spurs support really did have to stay with the team. The red rags endured, the biggest one being Vicario in possession, playing out with little conviction. There were more boos for him and his efforts on the hour, the situation not helped when his teammates repeatedly went back to him.\n\nThe tackles flew in, including some bad ones. Bowen on Simons. Van de Ven on Bowen in retaliation. There was also a death-or-glory slide challenge from Van de Ven on Summerville as the winger ran through. He came up with glory.\n\nBissouma worked Areola and there was yet more anger in the South Stand when Frank introduced Dominic Solanke at the expense of Tel. The fans had wanted him to stay on. It was febrile. But it lurched the other way when Romero equalised, the thumping header a real captain\u2019s contribution.\n\nIt looked as though Spurs might pinch the win. West Ham got away with one when Scarles touched the ball inside the area with his fingertips before the Spurs debutant Conor Gallagher crossed. No penalty, said the video assistant referee. Simons would also be denied by Areola. The finale added up to agony for Frank.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "4bd527d3276411a7e7ea22ee5431a033063d9c82",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Brobbey and Le F\u00e9e seal Sunderland comeback to add to Palace\u2019s gloom",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/sunderland-crystal-palace-premier-league-match-report",
        "words": "520",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T17:26:14Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/be5c3b6070cb77ea0ebd55cf1cf7736e9dd28beb\/403_0_4120_3296\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Louise Taylor at the Stadium of Light",
        "description": "Goals from Enzo Le F\u00e9e and Brian Brobbey helped Sunderland come from behind to beat a beleaguered Crystal Palace 2-1",
        "text": "When, on Friday, it became clear that Crystal Palace were selling Marc Gu\u00e9hi to Manchester City and Oliver Glasner announced he would be leaving at the end of the season, Sunderland supporters turned a little nervous.\n\nThey fretted that Palace might react to not merely the loss of their best defender and the impending departure of a much-admired manager but the ignominy of last weekend\u2019s FA Cup calamity at non-league Macclesfield by demonstrating that they are not so shabby after all.\n\nSuch fears would prove unfounded as Sunderland came from behind to extend Palace\u2019s winless run to 10 games in all competitions thanks to goals from the excellent Enzo Le F\u00e9e and Brian Brobbey.\n\nAfter a series of creditable draws, it was Sunderland\u2019s first Premier League victory since Newcastle were sunk here last month and left a side unbeaten here this season with 33 points. Palace possess five fewer but their horizon looks considerably bleaker.\n\nSunderland began in utterly dominant mode, but Granit Xhaka, uncharacteristically, ceded possession in central midfield and Y\u00e9remy Pino cued up Jean-Philippe Mateta. Palace\u2019s advancing centre-forward seemed certain to score and would surely have done so had not Robin Roefs, once again, highlighted his goalkeeping quality by expertly narrowing the angle before making the save.\n\nIf Roefs is very much in form so, too, is Le F\u00e9e. Not for the first time, virtually all Sunderland\u2019s best moves originated from the Frenchman and his knack of taking a mean dead ball could have conjured a goal for Trai Hume had the unmarked wing-back not headed a whipped-in corner wide.\n\nPino made no such mistake when, under pressure from Chris Richards, he intercepted a soft punch from Roefs from a Will Hughes corner and, at full stretch, flicked out a boot and lifted the ball over the home goalkeeper and into the roof of the net.\n\nThe visiting celebrations had barely subsided before Sunderland hit back. The equaliser began with one of their trademark passing triangles and concluded when Nordi Mukiele\u2019s low cross looked to be heading for Brobbey until the striker selflessly stepped aside and left the ball to run to the man standing just behind him. That player was Le F\u00e9e and his low, first-time shot proved far too good for Dean Henderson.\n\nAlthough Mateta directed the ball into the back of the net before half-time his powerful half volley \u2013 unleashed after he skilfully tamed the ball with a knee \u2013 was disallowed for a fairly obvious offside.\n\nPalace\u2019s Gu\u00e9hi-less defence struggled to track Le F\u00e9e, who was nominally deployed on the right of midfield but revelled in drifting all over the place. Noah Sadiki, too, can be difficult to second guess and when the DR Congo midfielder, freshly returned from the Africa Cup of Nations, swivelled away from his marker his pass was deflected to Brobbey and Palace were in trouble. The centre-forward still had a lot to do but Brobbey somehow succeeded in using the outside of his right foot to lash the ball over Henderson and in off the underside of the crossbar.\n\nHenderson did well to deny Hume, but Palace were already sunk.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "6a3a5b8ed405eaa422ae8d5eef8d6a168c791780",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/4b14d73c387ebc10ff5f818d83dd83d2ddf055e5\/183_0_2009_1608\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Trump buys $1m in Netflix and Warner Bros bonds days after saying he\u2019ll \u2018be involved\u2019 in merger",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/trump-netflix-warner-bros-discovery",
        "words": "433",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T17:21:38Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/4b14d73c387ebc10ff5f818d83dd83d2ddf055e5\/183_0_2009_1608\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Adam Gabbatt",
        "description": "Warner Bros is also being pursued by Paramount Skydance, helmed by David Ellison, son of president\u2019s ally",
        "text": "Donald Trump bought at least $1m worth of bonds in Netflix and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), according to a financial disclosure form, days after he said would \u201cbe involved\u201d in a proposed merger between the two companies.\n\nThe White House released a financial disclosure report on Friday which showed that Trump made two purchases from Netflix and two purchases from WBD, each amounting to at least $502,000.\n\nTrump bought the bonds on 12 December and 16 December, a little more than a week after Netflix agreed to buy WDB in an $82.7bn deal.\n\nThe purchase is subject to regulatory clearance and is sure to raise eyebrows given Trump has said he will be engaged in that process.\n\n\u201cThey have a very big market share,\u201d Trump told reporters at the Kennedy Center on 7 December, two days after the deal was announced and five days before he began to purchase Netflix and WBD bonds.\n\n\u201cWhen they have Warner Bros, that share goes up a lot. So, I don\u2019t know. That\u2019s going to be for some economists to tell and also \u2013 and I\u2019ll be involved in that decision too. But they have a very big market share.\u201d\n\nThe next day, Paramount Skydance launched a $108.4bn hostile takeover bid, financially backed by its chief executive officer, David Ellison, and his father, the billionaire tech mogul Larry Ellison. Both men are friendly with the Trump administration.\n\nThe Netflix-WBD deal has faced backlash from US politicians, with US senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts calling it \u201can anti-monopoly nightmare\u201d in a statement shortly after the announcement.\n\nThe deal, which would bring shows such as Game of Thrones into Netflix\u2019s streaming library, was also criticized by the Writers Guild of America, which said it would \u201cwould eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers\u201d.\n\nTrump bought about $100m in municipal and corporate bonds from mid-November to late December, Friday\u2019s financial disclosure showed. He previously bought more than $100m in company, state and municipal bonds during the first six months of his second term, including bonds in Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.\n\nThe White House did not immediately respond to questions from the Guardian. However, an unnamed administration official reportedly told the Washington Post that Trump\u2019s \u201cstock and bond portfolio is independently managed by third-party financial institutions\u201d.\n\nThe official reportedly added: \u201cNeither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested or when investments are bought or sold.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "b6cecf5722b1942f8d44fcd005892e10495659ae",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/388b768f8c3efef22cb287107e8b98693a4c9a98\/130_0_3377_2703\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Edwards stuns Liverpool with Burnley equaliser as Szoboszlai pays the penalty",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/liverpool-burnley-premier-league-match-report",
        "words": "867",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T17:21:14Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/388b768f8c3efef22cb287107e8b98693a4c9a98\/130_0_3377_2703\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Andy Hunter at Anfield",
        "description": "Marcus Edwards rescued a shock 1-1 draw for Burnley at Liverpool after cancelling out Florian Wirtz\u2019s goal with Dominik Szoboszlai hitting the bar from a penalty",
        "text": "Arne Slot had made his wishes clear before kick-off. \u201cWe want to do better in making more chances from all the ball possession we have. I am waiting for the moment it really clicks,\u201d he had said. Thirty two shots on goal with 11 on target would suggest Liverpool obliged against Burnley, but Anfield still waits for Slot\u2019s side to click.\n\nLiverpool were held to a fourth consecutive Premier League draw as Marcus Edwards stunned the champions by cancelling out Florian Wirtz\u2019s first half opener. Scott Parker\u2019s visitors were far more enterprising after the interval but Edwards\u2019 fine equaliser came from their only shot on target while Liverpool were left to rue a procession of missed opportunities and careless final balls. Boos greeted the final whistle as Liverpool dropped points yet again.\n\nBurnley posed a familiar puzzle to Liverpool with their deep, five-man defence and block of four midfielders in close attendance. Unlike many contests this season, however, the visitors\u2019 reluctance or inability to break out ensured the first half resembled a training ground exercise of attack versus defence. Armando Broja cut a lonely, isolated figure as sole outlet in the Burnley forward line. Also, unlike recent fixtures, Liverpool appeared to have some answers long before Wirtz opened the scoring shortly before the interval.\n\nWith Wirtz and Cody Gakpo offering close support to Hugo Ekitik\u00e9, and Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong constantly pressing forward from full-back, Slot\u2019s side stretched Burnley frequently. A Hungarian one-two between Kerkez and Dominik Szoboszlai opened up the visiting defence from Liverpool\u2019s first meaningful attack. The improving left-back, who delivered another confident display, could have taken on a shot but opted to find the unmarked Curtis Jones at the back post. Lucas Pires denied them both with a fine clearance.\n\nMainly it was Martin Dubravka who came to Burnley\u2019s aid. The goalkeeper\u2019s first save came from Ekitik\u00e9 when the France international found space to cut on to his right foot and sweep a low drive towards the far corner. The former Newcastle keeper also thwarted similar efforts from Gakpo and Wirtz as Liverpool took up residence inside the Burnley half.\n\nSlot\u2019s team were gifted a chance to take the lead when awarded a soft penalty by the referee Andrew Madley. Receiving Jones\u2019 pass inside the area, Gakpo turned onto his favoured right foot and straight into Florentino Lu\u00eds before going down under the challenge. The Burnley midfielder was in close proximity to Gakpo and could do little about the ensuing collision, but he did catch Gakpo with his knee. The visitors unsurprisingly raged against the decision and would consider justice done when Szoboszlai smacked the spot-kick against the crossbar.\n\nSzoboszlai encapsulated growing frustration among the home fans when gesturing at the lack of movement in front of him. But Liverpool broke the deadlock before dissent could bubble over. When Dubravka saved at his near post from Ekitik\u00e9, Jones had the presence of mind to locate Wirtz inside a crowded penalty area. The German playmaker fired an emphatic finish into the top corner through a pack of incoming defenders for his fourth goal in six games. Ekitik\u00e9\u2019s part in the breakthrough must be singled out for praise. The forward controlled Virgil van Dijk\u2019s cross-field ball exquisitely before spinning away from both Kyle Walker and Axel Tuanzebe and testing Dubravka from a tight angle. Wirtz was the ultimate beneficiary of his dazzling turn.\n\nLiverpool almost added a second on the break in first-half stoppage time only for Maxime Est\u00e8ve to intervene with a superb challenge. It never felt so at the time, but how pivotal a moment that proved to be.\n\nBurnley had to show more commitment to attack in the second half. They would be surrendering to defeat without a fight if they did not. And Parker\u2019s side delivered.\n\nLiverpool remained the dominant force and went close to doubling their advantage several times before being stung by the equaliser. Dubravka denied Wirtz at close range when the goalscorer was played through on goal by Szoboszlai. Bashir Humphreys then made a vital goalline clearance after Wirtz had slalomed between two Burnley defenders and flicked open a chance for Gakpo.\n\nBut the visitors served notice of their newfound intent when Edwards broke clear on the right and attempted to find Jaidon Anthony unmarked in front of goal. Ibrahima Konat\u00e9, lunging to intercept, almost converted into his own net but Alisson reacted sharply to scoop clear. Moments later, and to Anfield\u2019s general astonishment, Burnley were level. Lu\u00eds prised open a static Liverpool defence with a fine pass into Edwards who, in space on the left of the area, rifled a powerful finish beyond Alisson and into the far corner.\n\nLiverpool besieged the Burnley penalty box as they strove to regain the lead. Humphreys made another goalline clearance to deny Gakpo, Ekitik\u00e9 had a goal disallowed when coming back from an offside position to convert a Van Dijk header and Alexis Mac Allister sliced badly wide seconds after his introduction from the bench. Jones was left in despair when he dragged a shot across the face of goal and Ekitik\u00e9 just failed to connect in front of an open goal. Anfield would end up feeling the same.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "cb490c80e0eb46f420219cabfe652af9cfba69c0",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Yoweri Museveni wins Ugandan election as opponent condemns \u2018fake result\u2019",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2026\/jan\/17\/yoweri-museveni-wins-ugandan-election-as-opponent-condemns-fake-result",
        "words": "468",
        "section": "World news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T17:20:15Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/d16aa432d1d3a5524f145188e1bfc219ef3cc3c4\/390_0_6827_5464\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "William Christou",
        "description": "Museveni\u2019s opponent, Bobi Wine, alleges that members of polling staff were kidnapped and called for peaceful protests",
        "text": "Yoweri Museveni, has won the Ugandan election and his seventh term with more than 70% of the vote, state election authorities have said, amid an internet shutdown and claims of fraud by his opponent.\n\nHis opponent, a youthful musician known as Bobi Wine, condemned what he called \u201cfake results\u201d and alleged that members of polling staff were kidnapped, among other election irregularities. He called for peaceful protests to pressure the authorities to release what he called the \u201crightful results\u201d.\n\nWine also alleged that he fled his home to escape arrest by security forces who raided his house on Friday, with his political party claiming earlier that he had been taken from his home in an army helicopter.\n\n\u201cLast night was very difficult at our home \u2026 The military and the police raided us. They switched off power and cut off some of our CCTV cameras,\u201d Wine said in a post on X.\n\nIn an earlier statement, Ugandan police said that Wine had not been arrested, but that they were restricting the area to the public to prevent unrest.\n\nAmong the irregularities was the failure of biometric voter ID machines which delayed voting in cities \u2013 large bases of support for the political opposition. Pro-democracy activists had asked that the machines be used in elections to prevent any allegations of voter fraud and rigging.\n\nElectoral officials then resorted to manual lists of voters, which Wine alleged allowed for \u201cmassive ballot stuffing\u201d, as well as claims of favouritism to the incumbent\u2019s party. Museveni endorsed the use of the manual voter register.\n\nDespite the internet shutdown and allegations of fraud, the election passed with largely little incident, save a clash between police and opposition in central Uganda. Seven people died and three were injured after police fired in self-defence against opposition \u201cgoons\u201d, police said, a claim disputed by MP Muwanga Kivumbi, who said security forces killed 10 people in his house.\n\nUganda is termed as \u201cnot free\u201d by rights monitor Freedom House, which noted that while the country holds regular elections, they are not considered credible. Museveni, 81, has been the president of the country for 40 years, making him the third-longest-serving non-royal national leader in the world.\n\nUganda has not had a peaceful transition of power since it gained its independence from British colonialism six decades ago.\n\nMuseveni has rewrote Uganda\u2019s laws to stay in power, including by removing term and age limits from the constitution. He has also jailed opposition opponents.\n\nHe has also overseen a period of stability in Uganda, which has allowed the economy to grow, with growth forecasted to rise next year.\n\nWine wore a flak jacket and helmet due to fears over his safety, as he alleged security forces harassed him and his supporters including through the use of teargas against them.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "caa559acde62eb03d60c426d3630a1a99115ff63",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Chelsea end wait for league win after Jo\u00e3o Pedro and Palmer sink Brentford",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/chelsea-brentford-premier-league-match-report",
        "words": "692",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T17:11:45Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/29aa059cf7a7828c88a80a29722d70d1bdb84653\/270_28_2062_1650\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Matt Hughes at Stamford Bridge",
        "description": "Cole Palmer\u2019s 76th-minute penalty sealed Chelsea\u2019s 2-0 against Brentford and a first Premier League victory in six matches",
        "text": "As he watched Cole Palmer smash a penalty past Caoimh\u00edn Kelleher to secure his first three points at Chelsea, Liam Rosenior may have briefly wondered why such a fuss is made about Premier League management.\n\nThe 41-year-old calmly exchanged low fives on the bench with members of his coaching staff before springing to his feet and pointing to his temple, imploring his players to keep their heads and close out the remaining 15 minutes, which they achieved with minimal trouble.\n\nThe preceding 75 had been far from straightforward and with better finishing Brentford could have secured at least a point rather than suffering their first defeat in six. The visitors spurned three good chances before Jo\u00e3o Pedro gave Chelsea the lead with a video assistant referee-assisted goal in the 26th minute and again in the second half, with the game in the balance, until Nathan Collins\u2019s calamitous back-pass led to Kelleher fouling the substitute Liam Delap, with Palmer making no mistake from the spot.\n\nGiven Chelsea\u2019s tumultuous start to the year this was one of those games where it was only the result that mattered, which is just as well given elements of their performance. As in Wednesday\u2019s 3-2 defeat by Arsenal in the first leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final, Chelsea looked vulnerable at the back and open in midfield for long periods, but the visitors were unable to take advantage leaving Rosenior celebrating his first Premier League win.\n\nIn a sign of the troubled times there was a protest against the club\u2019s ownership, which featured chants in support of Roman Abramovich and, more bizarrely, Enzo Maresca, although it only attracted about 200 fans.\n\nRather more supporters were concerned at widespread suggestions that Rosenior had rested Palmer and Reece James against Arsenal as knockout competitions are not the owners\u2019 priority, a theory that will have hardened when they were named in the starting lineup here.\n\nChelsea showed five changes, with Brentford making eight from their FA Cup third-round win against Sheffield Wednesday last week, but there was no immediate sign of the overhaul bringing more freshness and energy.\n\nChelsea started slowly in a becalmed atmosphere, enabling the visitors to take the initiative. Mathias Jensen twice got in behind Marc Cucurella in the opening exchanges, with one deflected shot bringing a good save from Robert S\u00e1nchez. Kevin Schade should have given Brentford the lead in the 21st minute, but opted to square the ball to Mikkel Damsgaard when he was in a good position to shoot, allowing Tosin Adarabioyo to make a scrambled clearance.\n\nChelsea\u2019s attacking efforts by that stage midway through the first half had been limited to Jo\u00e3o Pedro appealing for a penalty after slight contact from Michael Kayode. That was waived away by tJohn Brooks in a decision upheld by the VAR, Stuart Attwell.\n\nChelsea secured a crucial call in their favour from Attwell shortly afterwards, taking the lead against the balance of play with a goal that contained two elements of fortune. Kayode\u2019s clearance was deflected off Enzo Fern\u00e1ndez into the path of Jo\u00e3o Pedro, who beat Kelleher with a smart left-foot finish only to be ruled offside.\n\nA relatively brief review by recent standards established the Brazilian was narrowly onside with the 24-year-old claiming his eighth goal of the season. Brentford spurned two further chances before half-time, with Schade heading wide from Vitaly Janelt\u2019s corner and Jansen hitting the post with a left-foot volley. They survived a major let-off themselves with Alejandro Garnacho shooting wide at the far post from Neto\u2019s cross when Kelleher was beaten.\n\nThe second half followed a similar pattern, Igor Thiago missing a good chance with a header, before Collins\u2019s shocking pass to Kelleher ended the contest. The Northern Ireland goalkeeper did his best to salvage the situation, but clearly caught Delap as he stretched to clear his penalty area and could do nothing to stop Palmer\u2019s spot kick.\n\nChelsea\u2019s first win in six Premier League games was sorely needed, both to keep them on Manchester United\u2019s heels in the Champions League qualification race after their impressive win over City and to build faith among players in fans in Rosenior\u2019s methods.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "04c78fde485d0d2b8364364331a5c1486436c0b3",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Carrick has dream start as Mbeumo and Dorgu give Manchester United derby delight",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/manchester-united-manchester-city-premier-league-match-report",
        "words": "742",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T14:52:23Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/47894e149c1285ed41303e6b9915a280b0e79fb7\/350_0_2917_2333\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Jamie Jackson at Old Trafford",
        "description": "Diogo Dalot could have seen an early red card but second-half goals from Bryan Mbeumo and Patrick Dorgu gave Manchester United a 2-0 win over City",
        "text": "On 65 minutes Michael Carrick\u2019s second tenure went electric as Manchester United scored a classic breakaway goal by Bryan Mbeumo that sent the interim head coach berserk in the technical area.\n\nAfter a clearing Harry Maguire header, the ball evaded Rayan Cherki and Bruno Fernandes galloped forward. He had Amad Diallo to the right and Patrick Dorgu and Mbeumo on the left; United\u2019s streetwise captain delayed the pass, then found the Cameroonian, whose finish beat Gianluigi Donnarumma.\n\nOld Trafford \u2013 the blue zone apart \u2013 went into near combustion, the atmosphere supercharged as the neighbours from across town went behind in the 198th derby.\n\nThis was precisely what United deserved for taking the contest to City all afternoon, and more soon followed. Carrick had dropped the in-form Benjamin Sesko for Mbeumo. Six minutes after the opener, he removed the scorer, due to his recent Africa Cup of Nations endeavours, in favour of Matheus Cunha and the Brazilian created the second.\n\nThis was simple as Cunha whipped in a cross from the right and Dorgu nipped in front of a slumbering Rico Lewis to pinball home off the right post.\n\nThe red congregation was in raptures, Pep Guardiola a picture of impotency, slumped in his seat. Further glee for the home fans followed when Erling Haaland was taken off, making it no goals from open play in seven matches for Manchester City\u2019s No 9.\n\nAfter brickbats from Roy Keane and only four days at the helm, this was the very best of starts for Carrick, as United finished the day in fifth, only one point behind fourth-placed Liverpool. Next, he will plot how to overturn Arsenal in north London on Sunday week.\n\nFor City\u2019s title challenge this was a dark day \u2013 at the final whistle they remained in second, six points off the leaders, but Mikel Arteta\u2019s team can extend that at Nottingham Forest in the late game.\n\nCity were unable to contain the pace of United, who refused to let go of the jugular \u2013 Amad\u2019s curving run then shot that crashed off the right post as the regulation 90 minutes ran down as emblematic as Mason Mount\u2019s strike, ruled out for offside, in added time.\n\nThe first half intrigued, as United went toe-to-toe with City, edging a period in which they were composed while those in blue started nervously, with Max Alleyne making three errors.\n\nTwo of these were balls aimed for Nathan Ak\u00e9 that went into touch on the left, and the third a weak backpass that nearly allowed Mbeumo to beat Donnarumma to the ball. Further City shakiness featured J\u00e9r\u00e9my Doku scuffing a corner low to Fernandes, the first defender at the near post, with United also in ruthless mode, as illustrated when Diogo Dalot caught Doku high on the shin.\n\nAnthony Taylor booked the right-back \u2013 Guardiola believed it should have been a sending-off \u2013 but this was a calling card as clear as Luke Shaw\u2019s upending of Rodri that likewise drew a yellow, tempers fraying further when Maguire manhandled Bernardo Silva in front of the Stretford End.\n\nYet after United had sliced through City in two or three early forays, a warning was sent, Antoine Semenyo the messenger via a cross that Silva blazed over from close in.\n\nEarlier, Maguire\u2019s header hit City\u2019s bar from a Fernandes corner, and further dalliances with the visitors\u2019 goal featured Dalot\u2019s misplaced pass meant for Amad and Mbeumo refusing a volley so that Dorgu could shoot, Donnarumma repelling the effort at close range.\n\nThere was a pleasing flow to the contest. Amad would knife into City\u2019s area, Doku would expertly dispossess him and two or three seconds later Kobbie Mainoo was blocking the Belgian\u2019s effort near his D, after a lightning counter. Amad then rounded Donnarumma and finished but was offside.\n\nAs Matheus Nunes had flu, Guardiola drafted Rico Lewis in at right-back yet a player beloved by his manager for locating pockets was stopped from doing so by the United express train.\n\nFor the second half Guardiola removed Alleyne and the anonymous Phil Foden for Nico O\u2019Reilly and Rayan Cherki. Here was proof that City had been inferior and when O\u2019Reilly began with a booking \u2013 for holding Amad \u2013 there was further encouragement for United.\n\nThen, a curio for being a curio \u2013 a Haaland shot that came from his right foot and was blocked, before Senne Lammens collected the resulting corner. Then came United\u2019s grandstand finish and Carrick walking off, at the final whistle, to applause.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "604d682b1ca2bc622ff9cf3fdabe834370871b1a",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018You don\u2019t want this smoke\u2019: US sheriff reflects on her viral remarks about ICE",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/philadelphia-sheriff-viral-remarks-ice",
        "words": "1075",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T17:00:31Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/9be9fe71b04e298feef3f0d02e14dfa1f8711282\/560_0_5600_4480\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Melissa Hellmann",
        "description": "Philadelphia sheriff Rochelle Bilal\u2019s words have become a rallying cry against Trump\u2019s immigration crackdown",
        "text": "\u201cYou don\u2019t want this smoke,\u201d Rochelle Bilal, Philadelphia\u2019s sheriff, warned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during an 8 January press conference. Her words have since become a rallying cry for resistance to the Trump administration\u2019s immigration crackdown. At the conference with Larry Krasner, Philadelphia\u2019s district attorney, and city council members, Bilal spoke out against the 7 January fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. \u201cWe stand here today with all those who stand against the made-up, fake, what you can call ICE, professional law enforcement,\u201d she said at the conference. \u201cI don\u2019t call them none of that. I call them made-up, fake, wannabe law enforcement. Because what they do is against not only legal law, but the moral law.\u201d\n\nBilal is part of a growing body of elected officials who are speaking out against the Trump administration\u2019s immigration policies and ICE\u2019s alleged misconduct and aggressive enforcement tactics. As the first Black female sheriff of Philadelphia elected in 2019, Bilal has faced perhaps the most vitriol from opponents who have targeted her for her race and gender. \u201cRace played a big [role in the] response,\u201d Bilal told the Guardian in a conference room on her Philadelphia office floor. \u201cThe negative, nasty messages that are being received is ridiculous.\u201d Since the video of her speech went viral, Bilal told the Guardian that death threats that she\u2019s received have required her to increase her security detail. In a Facebook post, ICE also said that she should resign.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not going anywhere,\u201d Bilal said. The gold, seven-pointed star of her sheriff\u2019s badge gleamed above the pocket of her white blouse. \u201cI\u2019ve been elected by the people of Philadelphia, and I abide by the constitution of the United States, the Philadelphia home rule charter, the state constitution, and I basically work for the people, not the ICE agents.\u201d\n\nBilal\u2019s comments diverged from the stance of Mayor Cherelle Parker\u2019s administration to avoid criticism of the Trump administration\u2019s immigration policies. The sheriff said it was important for her to be vocal after seeing a change in ICE\u2019s conduct under the Trump administration. Historically, ICE agents would detain someone with a warrant signed by a judge before people were transported, she said. But over the past year, she\u2019d seen national reports of people \u201cbeing pulled and dragged out of cars, dragged by their hair down the streets \u2026 The death of Renee Good showed me as a law enforcement professional, that\u2019s what we don\u2019t do.\u201d\n\nBilal called the officers \u201cfake\u201d law enforcement during the press conference, she said, in reference to the abridged training for ICE agents under the Trump administration, which has been reduced from several months to weeks under Trump.\n\nWhen asked what she meant by \u201cyou don\u2019t want this smoke,\u201d Bilal chuckled. \u201cYou know that\u2019s the famous one,\u201d she said, adding that she was referring to the agony that results from committing a crime. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to get charged, you don\u2019t want to go to jail, and you don\u2019t want to get convicted and have to stay in jail. That\u2019s the smoke. So that\u2019s not only for ICE agents \u2026 that\u2019s for any individual,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd for citizens, we\u2019re trying to tell them: \u2018Don\u2019t allow the ICE agent to pull you into a situation where you will be dealing with all that smoke.\u2019 You will be dealing with arrests. You will be dealing \u2026 with getting charged, you would be dealing with getting arrested, you would be dealing with going to jail, and now you have to pay out all this money to deal with that kind of stuff.\u201d\n\nPrior to her speech condemning ICE and the Trump administration, Bilal said that she has advocated for justice and fairness from a young age. Growing up in north Philadelphia, a predominantly Black area with a high poverty rate, Bilal watched law enforcement mistreat her family, she said. \u201cI made a decision back then that I was going to stand up for what was right,\u201d Bilal added.\n\nBut she had no desire to be a law-enforcement professional until the Guardian Civic League, a local non-profit composed of former and current police officers aimed at bettering community relationships, visited her neighborhood during her youth. They encouraged her, she said, \u201cto be the change that you want to see\u201d.\n\n\u201cThey think I\u2019m just coming out for Renee Good, but my life since I\u2019ve been a teenager has been about advocacy,\u201d Bilal said. She served in the Philadelphia police department for 27 years, as the secretary of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for more than 14 years, and as the president of the Guardian Civic League. Previously, she was a delegate for Black Cops Against Police Brutality, and is a delegate for the National Black Police Association, a US organization for Black officers. \u201cI\u2019m about fairness,\u201d Bilal said. \u201cSo no, none of this is new to me.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m just a girl from Philly trying to keep everybody safe.\u201d\n\nThe circulation of the press conference video spurred confusion about the role of law enforcement officials in Philadelphia, causing the city\u2019s police commissioner Kevin J Bethel to issue a statement on X clarifying that the sheriff\u2019s department was a separate body. \u201cThe Philadelphia Police Department is the City\u2019s primary law enforcement agency,\u201d he wrote on 9 January. \u201cOur officers are responsible for citywide patrol, criminal investigations, emergency response, and the enforcement of state and local laws. I serve as Police Commissioner by appointment of the Mayor of Philadelphia and operate within the City\u2019s executive structure.\u201d\n\nFor her part, Bilal said that she is responsible for executing court orders, civil processing, courtroom security, prisoner transport, and service of warrants. ICE agents must not enter courthouses with their masks on, she said: \u201cThey don\u2019t make any attempts to take anybody out of a courtroom or in a courthouse.\u201d\n\nOn 14 January, Bilal and Krasner held a press conference on public safety, in which Krasner stated that ICE agents who break the law would be arrested.\n\nBilal encouraged people to continue exercising their first amendment rights and to safely protest. \u201cYou got to resist because we have democracy, and we want to keep it that way,\u201d she told the Guardian. \u201cStand up against things that are happening around the world, but keep yourself safe, and don\u2019t let them pull you into harming yourself. Don\u2019t let them pull you into the smoke.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "d3112c8bb39f832c00e31f064234ae7060e2fda5",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Tech companies\u2019 access to UK ministers dwarfs that of child safety groups",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/politics\/2026\/jan\/17\/tech-companies-access-to-uk-ministers-dwarfs-that-of-child-safety-groups",
        "words": "935",
        "section": "Politics",
        "date": "2026-01-17T17:00:31Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/bbc2072919a029d9316a0c1ca05217f1e13200e4\/185_0_5948_4758\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Robert Booth and Michael Goodier",
        "description": "Exclusive: Amazon, Meta and X among firms holding hundreds of meetings with people at heart of government, data shows",
        "text": "Tech companies have been meeting government ministers at a rate of more than once per working day, enjoying high-level political access that dwarfs that of child safety and copyright campaigners, who called the pattern \u201cshocking\u201d and \u201cdisturbing\u201d.\n\nAmazon, Meta, Microsoft and Elon Musk\u2019s X, whose Grok AI image generator has sparked outrage with its sexualised images of women and children, were among the US tech companies holding hundreds of meetings with people at the heart of government, a Guardian investigation has found.\n\nGoogle, the $4tn California company, had the greatest access, with more than 100 ministerial meetings, according to an analysis of meeting records for the two years to October 2025, which campaigners said showed the tech industry\u2019s \u201ccapture\u201d of government. The industry lobbying group Tech UK met ministers at the rate of more than once every eight working days.\n\nX attended 13 meetings, a small proportion of the overall number, but still more than the child safety campaign group the NSPCC or the Molly Rose Foundation, founded by the family of 14-year-old Molly Russell who killed herself after viewing harmful online content.\n\n\u201cThe frequency of meetings between government and big tech and their advocates is astounding and points to the incredible power imbalance at stake when it comes to protecting children online,\u201d said Andy Burrows, the chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation.\n\nThe government defended its position, saying \u201cregular engagement with technology companies is vital to delivering economic growth and transforming public services\u201d. Campaigners said the government should stop \u201cbending the knee to US big tech companies\u201d and that the figures revealed an \u201cincredible power imbalance\u201d when it came to protecting children online.\n\nThere has been growing controversy over X\u2019s Grok AI tool, and a resurgence in the campaign for the government to follow Australia and ban social media for under-16s, which is opposed by tech companies. In the UK, 84% of people are concerned ministers will prioritise tech company partnerships over the public interest when it comes to AI regulation.\n\nDame Chi Onwurah, the Labour chair of the science and technology select committee, said the findings underscored \u201cthe reality that these firms have turnovers larger than the GDP of many countries, and their ability to influence stands in stark contrast to that of their users, our constituents, or those campaigning to make the internet safer\u201d.\n\nShe said it was \u201ccrucial for big tech to be accountable to parliament \u2013 something that the disturbing recent news about \u2018nudification\u2019 tools has only underlined further\u201d.\n\nThe technology companies and their lobbyists attended at least 639 meetings with ministers compared with just 75 meetings attended by the organisations and campaigners fighting for greater protections for children online, such as the NSPCC.\n\nThe tech firms\u2019 access was also more than three times greater than that of organisations and campaigners seeking to protect creatives\u2019 copyrighted works from being mined to build AI models, a development that figures including Elton John and Kazuo Ishiguro have said risks giving away artists\u2019 \u201clifeblood\u201d.\n\nEd Newton-Rex, a campaigner for creators\u2019 rights, called the figures \u201cshocking\u201d and said they explained why ministers had launched their consultation on AI and copyright \u201cwith a \u2018preferred option\u2019 that read like a wishlist from big tech\u201d.\n\n\u201cIt is imperative that the government stop bending the knee to US big tech companies \u2013 which, as the recent Grok debacle has shown, don\u2019t have the interests of the British people at heart,\u201d he said.\n\nRecords of more than 11,000 meetings under both Labour and the Conservatives show there were almost 160 meetings with technology companies, more than 100 with organisations lobbying for protections over AI and copyright, and 25 with those involved in child safety.\n\nThe US and Canadian AI start ups Anthropic, OpenAI and Cohere together had 27 meetings with ministers. Last summer they each signed memorandums of understanding with the UK government which included exploring using AI more in public services.\n\nA Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) spokesperson said regular engagement with tech companies was essential to ensure safe deployment of their technology in the UK.\n\n\u201cThese meetings cover a wide range of issues \u2013 from investment and innovation to implementing our recent laws for a safer online world,\u201d they said. \u201cDSIT ministers also routinely meet with campaign and civil society groups. As her actions on online safety this week have shown, the science and tech secretary [Liz Kendall] is always prepared to stand up and uphold the law and British values.\u201d\n\nJulian David, the chief executive of Tech UK, said that given its central role in so many aspects of the economy and society, \u201cit is normal that the technology sector engages regularly and broadly with government\u201d.\n\nGoogle said it worked closely with the government to ensure it had \u201ca positive and safe impact in the UK through our investments in communities, digital skills training, new AI products and enhanced product design \u2013 including age assurance and compliance with the Online Safety Act\u201d.\n\nLady Beeban Kidron, who campaigns on child safety and copyright as a cross-bench peer, said: \u201cSuccessive governments\u2019 naivety in relation to tech lobbying is disturbing. This privileged access is mirrored in their policy, and tech industry talking points are parotted by officials. This capture creates harm.\n\n\u201cIn opposition, Labour promised safety for women and children, and to protect the creative industries, but in government they have refused to take necessary actions on both. It is not wrong to meet with tech companies, but these numbers tell us all we need to know. A government of a sovereign state has a duty to its own citizens, not to the tech bros.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "f45e7282e971595d13dff93b1b72dd2aa8fc080b",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/6d11f39c7668c0f4ac341967a799573a455341e5\/383_0_1917_1534\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018A version of normal\u2019: Carrick asks for consistency after Manchester derby triumph",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/a-version-of-normal-carrick-asks-for-consistency-after-manchester-derby-triumph",
        "words": "474",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T16:57:05Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/6d11f39c7668c0f4ac341967a799573a455341e5\/383_0_1917_1534\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Jamie Jackson at Old Trafford",
        "description": "Michael Carrick praised Manchester United\u2019s \u201cfantastic\u201d display in their 2-0 derby defeat of Manchester City",
        "text": "Michael Carrick praised Manchester United\u2019s \u201cfantastic\u201d display in their 2-0 derby defeat of Manchester City and said the challenge for his remaining 16 games as interim coach was to maintain such high standards as a \u201cversion of normal\u201d.\n\nCarrick revelled in his first match back in charge as goals from Bryan Mbeumo and Patrick Dorgu capped an impressive performance against Pep Guardiola\u2019s side.\n\nCarrick has been appointed until the end of the season and is clear that with only European qualification left to play for, his team have to maintain the same level and strive for consistency.\n\n\u201cThe boys were fantastic, in so many ways,\u201d Carrick said. \u201cAnd to manage it emotionally with the information we\u2019ve given them and pulling it together it was pretty good. That\u2019s the challenge ultimately \u2013 it needs to be a version of normal, certainly we\u2019re not going to have games with the emotion and the feeling of everything that today brought.\n\n\u201cWe all understand that, but there\u2019s definitely a level of standards and expectation that we need to live up to from ourselves as much as anyone on the outside, so I\u2019m fairly aware of that.\u201d\n\nCarrick, who took over on Wednesday, next takes United to Arsenal on Sunday week. He said: \u201cConsistency is the key to any success, and if you can find that then you\u2019re on to a winner. So that\u2019s our challenge. We\u2019ve got to find a way of doing that. Big one next week, another tough one, but on the back of today we\u2019ve got a good foundation to build on.\u201d\n\nWith City winless in their opening four league games of the year \u2013 drawing the other three \u2013 Guardiola was asked about their title credentials. \u201cIf you analyse the results, yeah, we are not ready,\u201d he said. \u201cBut performances I have been satisfied with. I could sit here and say the opposite. Today was not enough but the previous games. we were enough. It\u2019s not about not running or not trying, I know how they commit [to] all of them, but sometimes at 12.30pm on Saturday one team is better than the other and you have to accept it.\u201d\n\nGuardiola believed Diogo Dalot should have been sent off for stamping on J\u00e9r\u00e9my Doku in the 10th minute. \u201cIt\u2019s a red card but it would be poor as a manager to analyse that as the reason for the game,\u201d he said. \u201cFor 80 minutes, it would have been 10 against 11, I believe, but if we played with the energy that we did then no change. I could say that and blame [it for the defeat] but we will not move forward. We have to look at ourselves and today Man United were better.\u201d\n\nAsked about Marc Gu\u00e9hi\u2019s projected move from Crystal Palace, Guardiola said \u201capparently it\u2019s close\u201d but that he had nothing from the club\u2019s executives.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "04b46b0a59b27b8746efefffae29b5f80465abd1",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Withdraw Hillsborough law amendment, urge Liverpool and Manchester mayors",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/withdraw-hillsborough-law-amendment-liverpool-manchester-mayors",
        "words": "569",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T16:56:13Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/310fe5a210989abf97dec58608ba6e17c8d74381\/525_0_5000_4000\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Robyn Vinter",
        "description": "Draft creates \u2018too broad an opt-out\u2019 for intelligence chiefs to decide what information is released after major incident",
        "text": "The mayors of Liverpool and Manchester have said an amendment to the Hillsborough law should be withdrawn, saying it does not do enough to prevent future cover-ups.\n\nThe Liverpool city region mayor, Steve Rotheram, and the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, said the amendment \u201ccreates too broad an opt-out\u201d by allowing intelligence officials to decide what information is released to investigators after a major incident.\n\nWarnings had already been issued from Hillsborough campaigners that a draft version of the legislation \u2013 formally known as the public office (accountability) bill due to be debated on Monday, might allow security officials to \u201chide serious failures behind a vague claim of national security\u201d.\n\nThe mayors said the amendment \u201crisks undermining the spirit of the legislation\u201d and urged the government to withdraw it. Rotheram and Burnham said they had both seen \u201cdevastating incidents\u201d in their regions and would never support anything that compromised national security.\n\nIn a joint statement posted on X, the mayors said: \u201cAn important part of strengthening the country\u2019s defences is establishing the truth at the earliest opportunity when things go wrong and that is why, if drafted correctly, the Hillsborough Law could create a culture in all public services where that is the norm.\n\n\u201cAs it stands, we believe the government\u2019s amendment in relation to the security services creates too broad an opt-out and risks undermining the spirit of the legislation.\n\n\u201cWe appreciate that the government has made huge strides in working to deliver the Hillsborough Law and are grateful for their willingness to work with campaigners thus far to make it the strongest law possible.\n\n\u201cIt is in that spirit that we call on them to withdraw their amendment ahead of Monday\u2019s debate and work with the families and the Hillsborough Law Now campaign to find a solution acceptable to all sides.\u201d\n\nCalls for a Hillsborough law began in 2016 after a second inquest into the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans \u2013 later becoming 97 \u2013 at the Hillsborough football ground in South Yorkshire during a 1989 FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.\n\nThe club\u2019s supporters were crushed and trampled due to negligent crowd control by South Yorkshire police, in what remains the worst sporting disaster in British history.\n\nThe deaths, and 766 injuries, were compounded when the Liverpool fans were improperly blamed for the disaster after false reports of hooliganism were fed to the press by the force.\n\nElkan Abrahamson, a lawyer for the Hillsborough Law Now campaign, said the amendments allowed the heads of the security services to make \u201cwhatever decision they want\u201d on whether to disclose information and left them \u201cunchallengeable\u201d.\n\nHe said it should be up to the head of an inquiry to decide whether information was relevant, adding there were already national security exemptions that allowed evidence to be heard in private.\n\nLiverpool West Derby MP, Ian Byrne, has also tabled several amendments of his own that would mean duty of candour applies not only to intelligence organisations but also to people who work for them.\n\nOn Thursday night, he said he could not back the bill in its current form. \u201cI am absolutely gutted writing this,\u201d Byrne said, \u201cbut we need to be clear about what is happening.\n\n\u201cI made a commitment to deliver the Hillsborough law without exemptions, without loopholes, and without carve-outs \u2026 if the government\u2019s amendments are passed then this legislation, in its current form, is not that.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "691a10f1faa150a03db84b10aef7fecc3e82a073",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/f2dafc0d9c41d80f6cbcc4f18f9ecce4fcb2305f\/425_0_2125_1700\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Ali Khamenei says thousands killed in Iran protests, some in \u2018inhuman, savage manner\u2019 ",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2026\/jan\/17\/senior-iranian-cleric-calls-for-protester-executions-in-defiance-of-trump-claims",
        "words": "586",
        "section": "World news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T13:25:02Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/f2dafc0d9c41d80f6cbcc4f18f9ecce4fcb2305f\/425_0_2125_1700\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "William Christou",
        "description": "Supreme leader blames US for death toll and calls Donald Trump a criminal for support of demonstrations",
        "text": "The Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has acknowledged for the first time that thousands of people were killed during the protests that rocked Iran over the last two weeks.\n\nIn a speech on Thursday, Khamenei said that thousands of people had been killed, \u201csome in an inhuman, savage manner\u201d, and blamed the US for the death toll. The supreme leader railed against the US president, Donald Trump, whom he called a \u201ccriminal\u201d for his support of demonstrations, and called for strict punishment of protesters.\n\nKhamenei said: \u201cBy God\u2019s grace, the Iranian nation must break the back of the seditionists just as it broke the back of the sedition.\u201d\n\nIranian authorities also released a compilation of footage on Saturday that purported to show armed individuals carrying guns and knives alongside regular protesters \u2013 evidence, they said, of foreign saboteurs.\n\nAnother senior Iranian cleric demanded the execution of protesters, demanding that \u201carmed hypocrites should be put to death\u201d.\n\nHe described protesters as \u201cbutlers\u201d and \u201csoldiers\u201d of Israel and the US, vowing that neither country should \u201cexpect peace\u201d.\n\nKhatami, a member of the Guardian Council and a senior member of the Assembly of Experts, which appoints the supreme leader, is a hardline, influential cleric in Iran.\n\nThe speech was in striking contrast to statements from Trump, this week, who appeared to postpone a military strike in Iran, telling reporters that Iranian authorities had agreed to halt the executions of protesters.\n\nOn Friday night, Trump thanked Iran for stopping the execution of what he said was 800 protesters, though it was unclear where he was drawing those figures from.\n\nRights groups have said the repression of protesters is continuing, with more than 3,090 people killed in the unrest and nearly 4,000 more cases still waiting to be reviewed, according to the Human Rights Activists news agency. More than 22,100 people have been arrested in protests, leading to fears of mistreatment of detainees.\n\nThe two-and-a-half weeks of protests started on 28 December when traders took to the streets in Tehran in response to a sudden dip in the value of the rial. Protests spread and demands expanded to include calls for an end to the country\u2019s government, creating the most serious, and deadliest unrest the country has seen since the 1979 revolution.\n\nThe brutal quashing of demonstrations by authorities, which Human Rights Watch said on Friday included the \u201cmass killings of protesters\u201d, has largely driven people off the streets.\n\nWith the immediate unrest addressed, authorities were making a public show of punishing those involved in the action, which they had styled as a foreign-backed plot to destabilise the country.\n\nKhatami, in his Friday sermon, claimed 350 mosques, 126 prayer halls and 20 other places of worship had been damaged by protesters. He also said 400 hospitals, 106 ambulances, 71 fire trucks and 50 other emergency vehicles had been damaged.\n\nIt was unclear what the fallout of the protest movement will be, or if it will reignite in the coming days. Iran continues to be cut off from the rest of the world, as authorities maintain the more than week-long internet shutdown.\n\nReza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran who had become a prominent opposition voice during the protests, continued to call for the overthrow of the government on Friday and urged Trump to intervene.\n\n\u201cI believe the president is a man of his word,\u201d Pahlavi said, adding that \u201cregardless of whether action is taken or not, we as Iranians have no choice to carry on the fight\u201d.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "52d997aa153cde7137f64c547c9b8d0f228a9feb",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/4d2d9bc7c85cb4e94bebe98372cd489cbdd43408\/85_2230_4580_3662\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018Without strength training I wouldn\u2019t survive\u2019: the woman who joined a CrossFit gym in her 80s",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/lifeandstyle\/2026\/jan\/17\/older-woman-80s-joined-gym-strength-training",
        "words": "470",
        "section": "Life and style",
        "date": "2026-01-17T16:00:30Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/4d2d9bc7c85cb4e94bebe98372cd489cbdd43408\/85_2230_4580_3662\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Kate Lloyd",
        "description": "At 81, Jean Stewart was frustrated by her growing frailty, so she decided to get active. Now 96, push-ups, kettlebell squats and pushing a weight-loaded sledge keep her strong",
        "text": "I see people 30 years younger than me and they\u2019ve given up,\u201d Jean Stewart, 96, says. It\u2019s not an attitude she relates to. \u201cI like to do things for myself.\u201d\n\nStewart was very active in her youth: she played hockey and softball at school and worked for the Girl Scouts for years. As she got older, however, everyday tasks became harder.\n\n\u201cI got to the point where I didn\u2019t have the strength to prune my roses,\u201d she says.\n\nBecoming frailer was frustrating. Worse, she was tired of being treated as incapable by those around her. Aged 81, she read about a local CrossFit gym and went along to ask for help \u2013 it was the start of what would become 15 years of on-and-off training with its owner, Cheryl Cohen. Back then, Stewart was her only client older than 60. Today, she specialises in classes for older adults, helping them stay independent.\n\nStewart was nervous and excited during her first session. Training focused on movements that would support her day to-day life, including getting up and down from the ground, and walking while carrying 4kg kettlebells. Each session, the weights increased gradually.\n\nSoon, she was doing full-body press\u2011ups, keeping pace with women 10 years younger. She could hold a plank long enough for another member of the senior group to tell a two-minute story. By 83, she could deadlift 70kg. \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe it,\u201d she says. \u201cI thought it was light.\u201d\n\nAs she reached 90, her progress was interrupted by a bout of MRSA and \u201ca serious car accident \u2013 I was almost demolished\u201d. Stewart lost feeling in her feet and lower legs, and spent two months in rehabilitation. Soon after, she fell again while walking her dog: \u201cHer leash got twisted in my legs.\u201d At 91, she required surgery for a broken hip. \u201cI continued with exercise and got the strength back,\u201d Stewart says. What kept her going? \u201cI\u2019m stubborn.\u201d\n\nThese days, she can\u2019t deadlift due to spinal stenosis, but still trains twice a week. Her sessions include elevated push-ups, kettlebell squats and pushing a weight-loaded sledge. \u201cThe older I get, the more I tell myself I\u2019ve got to keep going,\u201d Stewart says. Cohen recalls a story of her carrying a heavy pail of cat litter at the store. \u201cThey say, \u2018Ma\u2019am, would you like help with this?\u2019 And she goes, \u2018No!\u2019 and walks away.\u201d\n\nStewart can now get down to prune her plants, rise easily from a chair, and is strong enough to help herself up if she falls. \u201cWithout strength training I wouldn\u2019t be alive,\u201d she says. She\u2019s evangelical about exercise to friends who think they\u2019re too old to start. To younger people who say they are too busy, her advice is simple: \u201cMake time. Do what you need to do to live longer.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "df4c35c7a0d29ed748fefc70b265e2a30089cddb",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/c93dca57078f0e450903b892301db46052aaa7d7\/0_0_3000_2400\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "How Trump\u2019s promise to slash energy bills in half has failed across the US",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/trump-energy-bill-prices-increase",
        "words": "1609",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T15:00:29Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/c93dca57078f0e450903b892301db46052aaa7d7\/0_0_3000_2400\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor, with data reporting by Aliya Uteuova",
        "description": "Guardian analysis shows electricity bills were up 6.7% last year, and much higher in some states, and gas bills up 5.2%",
        "text": "Donald Trump has comprehensively failed to meet a key election promise to slash Americans\u2019 energy bills in half within the first year of his presidency, with power prices instead surging across the US.\n\nThe average household electricity bill in the US was 6.7% more expensive in 2025 compared with the previous year, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Department of Energy\u2019s statistical arm. The increases meant that, on average, US households paid nearly $116 more across 2025 than they did in 2024.\n\nThe power bill increases have been extreme in many parts of the US, with residents of Washington DC experiencing the biggest increase, a 23% jump in electricity costs, followed by Indiana, with a 17% rise, and then Illinois, with a 15% increase, the EIA data shows. The midwest is the region of the US that has been hit by the steepest bill rises, which include utility costs laden on top of an underlying 4.9% average increase in the unit cost of the electricity itself.\n\nOn top of soaring electricity bills, US households have also been confronted by rising gas prices, which have jumped 5.2% on average in the past year, according to the EIA. As a result, there has been a spike in power disconnections for unpaid bills across many states \u2013 in New York the rate of disconnections rose fivefold from a year previous \u2013 with some households having to forgo other essentials in order to keep the lights on.\n\nThis all means that, with just days until the first anniversary of his inauguration, Trump has missed his self-imposed target of cutting bills in half in his first year. The president\u2019s promise to slash power bills was, along with similar pledges to cut grocery costs and to reduce immigration to the US, a key pillar of his 2024 election triumph.\n\n\u201cYou have some states where the power bills are instead up 10% or 20%, which is why so many people are angry about this now,\u201d said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA).\n\n\u201cInstead of reducing electric bills by 50%, the president\u2019s actions have raised the cost of home energy for all Americans. It used to be the poorest Americans who struggled with their power bills, but now we are seeing more and more middle-income families who have to make sacrifices to avoid being shut off. But there\u2019s a limit to how much people are able to sacrifice, which we are very concerned about.\u201d\n\nDuring his election campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to tackle power bills. \u201cI will cut the price of energy and electricity in half,\u201d he said at one rally in Detroit in October 2024. \u201c12 months from January 20 \u2013 I take office on January 20 \u2013 your electric bill, including cars, air conditioning, heaters, everything, the total electric bill will be 50, 5-0 per cent, less.\u201d\n\nTrump told voters at a separate event that \u201cyour energy bill within 12 months will be cut in half. I\u2019ll have your energy bill down within 12 months, throughout the country \u2026 That\u2019s my pledge, all over the country.\u201d\n\nBut this rhetoric has sharply reversed as electricity has replaced eggs as the most-talked-about area of inflation, with Trump recently claiming that the affordability crisis is a \u201choax\u201d and a \u201cfake narrative\u201d invented by his political enemies. On Tuesday, the president said he had overseen the \u201cgreatest first year in history\u201d for the economy.\n\n\u201cThe administration is tone-deaf about this \u2013 the president said it\u2019s all made up, when it is in fact quite clear,\u201d said Wolfe. \u201cFamilies are struggling to pay energy bills and yet the Trump administration\u2019s actions have made it worse.\u201d\n\nAngie Shaneyfelt, a 52-year-old resident of Baltimore, Maryland, has seen her bill shoot up rapidly this year, from less than $300 in December 2024 to $400 last month. In an effort to keep up with the increases, Shaneyfelt has considered taking up a second job, even signing up to deliver food with DoorDash last month.\n\nMore work hours would give her even less time with her twin 13-year-old daughters, but with another gas and electric rate hike planned for next month, she may be forced to bring in more income. \u201cI\u2019ve already slimmed back so much stuff,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd now I have to give up my time with my family?\u201d\n\nTrump pushes oil and gas \u2013 and AI The administration\u2019s energy policy has centered on ramping up the drilling of oil and gas \u2013 already at record levels in the US \u2013 while tearing up environmental rules that delay projects and limit the amount of pollution Americans are exposed to.\n\nTrump has also embarked upon the aggressive promotion of an artificial intelligence industry that is raising US electricity demand for the first time in decades, while at the same time blocking numerous renewable energy projects he calls a \u201cscam\u201d and a \u201ccon job\u201d but were set to provide electricity for millions of American homes.\n\nThis agenda \u2013 coupled with administration edicts to reverse the closure of ageing coal plants and to restart the overseas export of liquified natural gas, both actions that can raise costs for domestic consumers \u2013 has ensured that Trump\u2019s election promise to cut bills had little chance of being met, experts say.\n\n\u201cThe fundamental dynamic is that we are using more electricity than we did 12 months ago and the infrastructure isn\u2019t keeping pace with that extra demand \u2013 if anything, we have fallen further behind,\u201d said Abe Silverman, an expert in the energy transition at Johns Hopkins University.\n\nThe cost of Americans\u2019 power bills largely matched overall inflation until around 2020, when they started to diverge, driven by a constellation of regionally varying factors such as utility upgrades of transmission lines, Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine and disruption from extreme weather events worsened by the climate crisis.\n\nThe rapid advance of AI has accelerated this trend, Silverman said, only for the administration to block available clean-energy projects, particularly offshore wind, from meeting soaring demand. In December, Trump halted construction of five windfarms off the east coast, a move that has been challenged in the courts. \u201cWe have not approved one windmill since I\u2019ve been in office, and we\u2019re going to keep it that way,\u201d Trump said this month.\n\n\u201cIf you think of it as a race, the demand-growth horse has got a shot of adrenaline and is galloping around the track at a faster pace,\u201d Silverman said. \u201cThe supply horse is losing, by a lot. Unfortunately with the ideologically driven attack on certain technologies, such as wind and solar, it\u2019s made it very difficult for investment to proceed and get the extra electrons we desperately need.\u201d\n\nAs stress grows over bills, help is being cut Electricity bills are now a \u201cmajor\u201d source of stress for more than a third of all Americans, polling has found, with colder-than-expected temperatures this winter pushing up heating bills by 9.2% on average compared with a year ago. The average household will pay $995 on heating this winter, an increase of $84 from last winter, as families struggle with electricity prices that are the highest in a decade, according to the NEADA.\n\nAs more Americans face higher bills, the Trump administration has slashed federal assistance, eliminating tax credits for home energy efficiency upgrades and attempting to scrap a federal program that helps low-income people with their energy bills, a move that would affect more than 6m households that rely on this support for heating and cooling.\n\nTrump\u2019s promise to bring down gasoline costs has seen more success, with retail prices at the gas pump falling by 6% on average in the last year. This decrease, the third year in a row in which gasoline prices have dropped, is due to a global glut of crude oil and a fall in demand due to concerns over an economic downturn, according to the EIA. Trump has claimed that the US seizing control of Venezuela\u2019s oilfields will help drive down the cost of gasoline for American drivers.\n\nPerhaps cognizant of a growing political backlash to persistently high power bills, Trump said this week he is pressing tech companies to foot the bill for the rising costs associated with their datacenters. \u201cWe are the \u2018HOTTEST\u2019 Country in the World, and Number One in AI,\u201d the president posted on Truth Social. \u201cData Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must \u2018pay their own way.\u2019\u201d\n\nThe overall cost of living is likely to remain a salient topic for voters this year, though, before the midterm elections in November that will determine the balance of power in Congress. Democrats and their allies have warned Trump that his broken promise on energy bills will haunt his fellow Republicans.\n\n\u201cTrump and Republicans are making life more expensive by taking energy options off the grid while demand skyrockets,\u201d said Jesse Lee, senior adviser to Climate Power, a climate advocacy group. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make sure that every Republican who rubber-stamps Trump\u2019s anti-energy agenda pays the political price in 2026.\u201d\n\nA White House spokesperson said that lowering energy prices is a \u201ctop priority\u201d for the president and said that Democratic-run states have seen higher costs than Republican-led states.\n\n\u201cThe Trump administration will continue to aggressively implement President Trump\u2019s energy dominance agenda because cheaper energy can unleash unprecedented growth in every facet of our economy,\u201d she said.\n\n\u201cAre blue states going to adopt President Trump\u2019s commonsense energy agenda to bring energy prices down in their states?\u201d\n\nThe Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian\u2019s coverage is editorially independent\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "1f032e2ad343ee4640e49fee78b3b70fe889853d",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/45dc44782d61d7c39d77a86b689e8b481de47f82\/634_0_6343_5076\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Trump\u2019s failed energy bill pledge leaves US households struggling: \u2018It\u2019s obscene\u2019",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/ng-interactive\/2026\/jan\/17\/trump-promise-energy-bills-costs",
        "words": "1437",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T15:00:29Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/45dc44782d61d7c39d77a86b689e8b481de47f82\/634_0_6343_5076\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Dharna Noor, with photographs by Thalia Juarez",
        "description": "A year after then candidate Trump promised to cut energy bills in half, rising costs are pushing many Americans\u2019 household budgets to the brink",
        "text": "Before she sat down to speak with the Guardian, Zattura Sims-El leaned over to plug a table lamp into the wall.\n\n\u201cI keep everything in this house unplugged when I\u2019m not using it, because I heard that as long as it\u2019s plugged into the wall, it\u2019s costing you,\u201d she said. \u201cThe only things I don\u2019t unplug are my stove, my dishwasher, my refrigerator and my washing machine.\u201d\n\nThe 76-year-old resident of Baltimore, Maryland, adopted the habit in an attempt to rein in her utility costs. Despite her efforts, her monthly gas and electricity bills last year always topped $500, and one month reached $975.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s obscene,\u201d said Sims-El, who has lived in her home for 46 years. \u201cHow is anyone supposed to keep up with this?\n\nDuring his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised that, if elected, he would halve Americans\u2019 energy bills within a year of returning to the White House. He has thoroughly failed to meet that pledge, a Guardian analysis has found.\n\n\u201cTrump is a liar, and that\u2019s something I know from the bottom of my heart,\u201d Sims-El said when asked about the president\u2019s promise.\n\nThe average US household paid nearly $116 more for electricity in 2025 than the year before, a 6.7% increase, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Gas prices rose as well, jumping 5.2% on average, federal data shows.\n\n\u201cIf they keep rising, who is going to be able to pay their bills?\u201d Sims-El asked. \u201cCertainly not me, not anyone except the super-wealthy.\u201d\n\nSacrifices\n\nSims-El said she has had to make lifestyle changes to cope with her energy costs. While she used to buy her groceries at a Giant supermarket nearby, she now drives to multiple stores each week to hunt for bargains \u2013 a process that can take hours.\n\nHalfway across the country, Samantha Lott, a resident of Denton, Texas, has found herself tailoring her shopping habits to cope with rising energy costs, too. Last year, after Lott was diagnosed with endometriosis, her doctor suggested she adopt an anti-inflammatory diet. But the cost of energy has made it impossible to afford \u201canything but the basic groceries that I can find deals on\u201d. And there\u2019s an even more difficult sacrifice she now finds herself making: cutting back on medical appointments.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s really hard, because I have to choose: do I go to the doctor this month and get the follow-up appointment I need, or do I pay for electricity?\u201d she said. \u201cThe copay is $70 for an appointment, but I need that $70 to pay my bills.\u201d\n\nLiz Jacob, the lead staff attorney and energy insecurity coordinator at the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice in Detroit, Michigan, said she has seen many clients pushed to make those kinds of choices, \u201ccutting back on food, toys, resources for their kids and everything they can\u201d. With both gas and electricity prices so high, said Jacob, some are forced to choose between the two utilities.\n\n\u201cSome folks make the choice to cut off their gas service and just keep electric in the winter, using space heaters to heat their rooms that they\u2019re frequenting because they can\u2019t afford to heat the whole house,\u201d she said. \u201cOther folks talk about cutting off their electric service and just going with gas because they need heat, though they then don\u2019t have any access to light in their homes.\u201d\n\nDatacenters and gas exports\nOne driver of 2025\u2019s soaring energy bills was the nationwide proliferation of datacenters for artificial intelligence. In October, PJM \u2013 the grid operator covering 13 mid-Atlantic and midwest states as well as the District of Columbia \u2013 called datacenters the \u201cprimary reason\u201d for the increased price of power. In July, Trump rolled out a scheme to streamline permitting for datacenters, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and fossil fuel infrastructure.\n\n\u201cThey\u2019re going to strain the grid with these datacenters, which are massive developments,\u201d said David Jones, a 45-year-old resident of south Baltimore. \u201cWhy should we have to take on the price of that?\u201d\n\nJones, who lives in Baltimore\u2019s industrial Curtis Bay neighborhood, said his monthly bills in 2025 were \u201cat least $100\u201d more than they were the previous year.\n\nAmid growing outrage over steep power bills, the president last week announced that he is pressing tech companies to foot the bill for the rising costs associated with their datacenters.\n\n\u201cWe are the \u2018HOTTEST\u2019 Country in the World, and Number One in AI,\u201d Trump posted on Truth Social. \u201cData Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must \u2018pay their own way.\u2019\u201d\n\nOn Friday, Trump officials also met with current and former governors of east coast states to discuss the energy demands of the AI datacenter boom, then released a plan to urge PJM to make deals with technology companies to ensure that they foot the bill for upping the country\u2019s power supply.\n\nBut Trump has not backed away from his unabashedly pro-fossil fuel agenda, which has also pushed up energy costs. His administration\u2019s efforts to increase liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, for instance, cost US households a combined $12bn in the first nine months of 2025, according to a December report from the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen.\n\nJones cast his vote for Trump in the 2024 election because he felt the US needed a \u201cbusinessman\u201d in office, and because he could not bring himself to vote for Joe Biden. He still has a fondness for the president, he said. But he believes Trump has been too influenced by donors from big tech and the fossil fuel industry.\n\n\u201cHis \u2018drill, baby, drill\u2019 agenda does a disservice to Americans,\u201d he said. \u201cI know he means well \u2026 but if I would have known about a lot of things that he\u2019s done, as far as energy and things like that, I probably wouldn\u2019t have voted for him.\u201d\n\nReached for comment, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said federal officials \u201cwill continue to aggressively implement President Trump\u2019s energy dominance agenda because cheaper energy can unleash unprecedented growth in every facet of our economy\u201d.\n\n\u201cBlue states are stubbornly choosing Green Energy Scam policies that are making electricity bills unaffordable,\u201d she said in an email. \u201cMeanwhile, GOP-led states are successfully lowering energy costs for their residents by embracing President Trump\u2019s commonsense \u2018DRILL, BABY, DRILL\u2019 agenda.\u201d\n\nAid cut\nAs the Trump administration has presided over rising electricity and gas costs, White House officials have also made it more difficult for Americans to access energy aid.\n\nLast year, the administration eliminated tax credits for cost-cutting home energy-efficiency upgrades. It also attempted to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps 6 million low-income Americans with their energy bills each year.\n\nThe program survived, but has been significantly hampered after the administration laid off the entire LIHEAP staff. The cuts and a record-breaking government shutdown caused unprecedented delays in getting energy assistance aid to low-income households.\n\n\u201cDetroit is not even taking aid applications right now because there\u2019s so much backlog from that time,\u201d said Jacob. \u201cThey have so many applications to process that they\u2019re not taking new applications.\u201d\n\nAngie Shaneyfelt, a 52-year-old resident of Curtis Bay, Baltimore, has seen her bill shoot up rapidly this year, from less than $300 in December 2024 to $400 last month.\n\nToward the end of last year, she applied for funding from a LIHEAP-funded Maryland program after receiving a gas and electric cutoff notice over a past-due balance. Her application was quickly denied.\n\n\u201cThey said that because of the volume of applications \u2013 by the time they got to me the funds would be gone,\u201d she said. \u201cThe only place I was able to find aid was from a church \u2026 and it wasn\u2019t easy. Just finding aid that is available is a full-time job.\u201d\n\nShaneyfelt averted the cutoff but is still struggling to keep up with her bills, especially because she lost her husband in February. She is considering taking up a second job, even signing up to deliver food with DoorDash last month.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not young, and I already work full-time, and I think working more would bust my body down,\u201d she said. \u201cBut what am I going to do?\u201d\n\nMore work hours would give Shaneyfelt even less time with her 13-year-old twin daughters, but with another gas and electric rate hike planned for next month, she may be forced to bring in more income.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve already slimmed back so much stuff,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd now I have to give up my time with my family?\u201d\n\nThe Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian\u2019s coverage is editorially independent\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "dd04c2ac18c01068a4186f9e0226fdb4c3ece905",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018Brainwashing\u2019: the shocking case of a Native American healer accused of sexual abuse",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/nathan-chasing-horse-actor-sexual-abuse-trial",
        "words": "1413",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T15:00:28Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/425cbb19a2dba1d45915fee6884fcaad1af6c1d0\/513_0_5842_4672\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Eric Berger",
        "description": "Nathan Chasing Horse, who had part in Dances with Wolves, accused in trial that spotlights influence of \u2018medicine men\u2019",
        "text": "After learning she was of Lakota descent around 1996, Melissa Leone, who was adopted, hungered to connect to her Native American tribe.\n\n\u201cI was grabbing a hold of any and all connections that felt good or safe,\u201d she said.\n\nLeone thought she found that after a relative recommended she talk with a self-described medicine man named Nathan Chasing Horse. As a child, Chasing Horse had acted in the 1990 Oscar-winning movie Dances with Wolves. As an adult, he traveled North America performing healing ceremonies.\n\nIn 2005, Leone, then a mother of a seven-year old daughter, attended a ritual in which Chasing Horse said he was connecting with ancestral spirits. \u201cIt was like he turned the lights on in a dark room,\u201d Leone said. \u201cIt all just felt like I belonged. He had this ability to charm you.\u201d\n\nEventually, after becoming part of Chasing Horse\u2019s group, the Circle, attending healing ceremonies and surviving cancer, Leone started to see him as a messianic figure.\n\n\u201cHe could say, ask or do anything, and there was no wrong,\u201d Leone said.\n\nAnd that was where it all went bad.\n\nThe belief that Chasing Horse had healing powers made it easy for him to sexually abuse minors, including Leone\u2019s daughter, according to a criminal indictment. Chasing Horse now faces 21 charges, including sexual assault, sexual assault with a minor, first-degree kidnapping of a minor and the use of a minor in producing pornography.\n\nHe has pleaded not guilty, and his trial started last Tuesday in Las Vegas, throwing light on a shocking case of what seems to have operated like a cult and also on the often under-reported area of sexual or violent exploitation of Native American women.\n\nLeone and others say the indictment is about more than Chasing Horse facing justice for his alleged sexual abuse. They see his behavior, including also allegedly sexually abusing and manipulating adults, as part of a larger problem of people in his position taking advantage of those they offer to heal \u2013 and of police not doing enough to stop them.\n\n\u201cThis is about medicine people, and all Indian country, exploiting their people under the guise of spirituality,\u201d Leone said. \u201cThat must end.\u201d\n\nIn Dances with Wolves Chasing Horse starred as a character named Smiles a Lot and made a \u201cnoticeable cameo\u201d, the New York Times reported. \u201cThe beautiful Indian child Smiles a Lot \u2026 comes of age during the film through his first tomahawk murder,\u201d the newspaper wrote.\n\nAs an adult, Chasing Horse spoke at powwows around the country.\n\nAt a 2013 Fort Mojave tribe gathering, Chasing Horse shared how doctors diagnosed his mother with terminal throat cancer and told the family to \u201cprepare because she\u2019s not going to be here very long\u201d.\n\nBut they held a ceremony, during which a messenger told her she would live. When she returned to the \u201cwhite doctors\u201d in New York, tests showed she was cancer-free, Chasing Horse said.\n\nHe then explained how a ceremonial whistle\u2019s healing powers worked.\n\n\u201cThe purpose of blowing this whistle is you\u2019re going to give a part of your life to that person you\u2019re blowing for, so be sure that you mean it because your life will be shortened a few years,\u201d Chasing Horse said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t do it from your heart, maybe they\u2019ll take your whole life. That\u2019s the exchange.\u201d\n\nChasing Horse frequently instilled that sort of fear in his followers, said Fernando Trujillo, who from 2006 until 2014 was part of the Circle, which at its peak had about 300 members, the Associated Press reported.\n\nChasing Horse asked Trujillo to travel with his crew after a ceremony because he learned Trujillo could sing.\n\n\u201cI felt honored to know somebody like that,\u201d Trujillo said.\n\nBut he started to see how Chasing Horse womanized and convinced people to give him their money.\n\n\u201cLet\u2019s say you need help in some way, and the doctors ain\u2019t trying to do much for you, you might say, \u2018Hey, I think I want to go to a healer,\u2019\u201d said Trujillo. Chasing Horse \u201cwas able to manipulate a lot of people\u201d by portraying himself as \u201cthe ultimate of medicine people or somebody with a spiritual connection that others didn\u2019t have\u201d.\n\nWhen Leone was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, her 14-year-old daughter, Ren Leone-LaCroix, traveled to Las Vegas to ask Chasing Horse for help, according to court records. She prepared a meal and a pipe for him. He then took her into his bedroom closet, where he told her it was \u201ca life for a life and explained that it meant taking her first born and her virginity\u201d, records state.\n\nChasing Horse allegedly raped her and then took her on the road with him, where he raped her every night, she told ABC News.\n\nLeone also survived cancer three times.\n\n\u201cHe was saving people\u2019s lives,\u201d Leone said she believed at the time.\n\nHe allegedly continued to sexually abuse Leone-LaCroix for years.\n\nIn 2015, leaders of the Fort Peck tribe in Montana banned Chasing Horse from holding ceremonies on their reservation because of alleged human trafficking, drug dealing, spiritual abuse and intimidation of tribal members, IndiJ Public Media, an Indigenous news organization, reported.\n\n\u201cLilda Christian, another supporter of Chasing Horse, said [she was] to seek out the actor because there are no legitimate medicine men around the reservation and the local ones have served time in prison for sex crimes,\u201d IndiJ Public Media reported in 2015.\n\nMore than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence and more than half have experienced sexual violence, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.\n\nChasing Horse is \u201cnot a one-off\u201d, said Crystal Lee, CEO and founder of the organization United Natives, which offers services to victims of sexual abuse. Since 2024, purported medicine men among the Saskatchewan Cree; the Ojibway-Anishinaabeg; and the Ute Mountain Ute have all been convicted of sexual assault.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a big elephant in the room of holding our Native men accountable for being perpetrators among our own women, children and family community,\u201d Lee said.\n\nAt 16, the age of consent in Nevada, Leone-LaCroix told her mom she wanted to become one of Chasing Horse\u2019s spiritual wives.\n\nChasing Horse told Leone nothing had happened between them and that they were asking her permission, she said.\n\nLeone told ABC News that she \u201clooked at it as an honor\u201d and that \u201cwhen she told me that she loved him, that was enough\u201d.\n\nShe said she had not been aware that he had allegedly previously raped her daughter and threatened her that if she said anything, her mother would die. She also did not learn until later that after Leone-LaCroix became one of his wives, he allegedly regularly beat her.\n\nHowever, Leone had heard other allegations.\n\n\u201cHe would always have evidence to justify that what the victims were saying was not true,\u201d Leone recalled. \u201cI\u2019m not ignorant, but the brainwashing and the spiritual manipulation he uses to control each one of us in there. I didn\u2019t understand what happened to me.\u201d\n\nTrujillo said he left the Circle when he learned that Chasing Horse had sexually abused a girl, who had become like a niece to Trujillo.\n\nHe wanted to leave before 2014, but Chasing Horse would \u201cfearmonger that if you left his Circle, your family would die\u201d, Trujillo said.\n\nIn 2023, eight years after the Fort Peck tribal leaders banished Chasing Horse, Las Vegas police arrested him at the home he shared with five wives.\n\nThe Associated Press reported that Chasing Horse told his wives to \u201cshoot it out\u201d with police officers if they ever tried to \u201cbreak their family apart\u201d. Police also found video of him having sex with a minor and sexual photos of a young girl, according to court records.\n\nChasing Horse also faces sexual exploitation and assault charges in Canada.\n\nA Nevada judge dismissed the case stemming from the 2023 arrest because of the prosecution\u2019s \u201cimproper instruction to the grand jury\u201d, But a grand jury again indicted him in 2024.\n\nThe prosecuting and defense attorneys did not respond to the Guardian\u2019s interview requests.\n\nDespite the earlier dismissal, Leone said she was \u201c100% confident\u201d he will be convicted.\n\nShe also remains cancer-free \u2013 but now realizes it wasn\u2019t because of Chasing Horse.\n\nWhen Leone\u2019s daughter left Chasing Horse and told her she had been raped, she said: \u201cBut mom, this is the reason why you\u2019re not sick.\u201d\n\nLeone told her: \u201cI am not giving Nathan the power over my wellness or my sickness.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "79ace7a7fd14de767e0134575353029671bb860f",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Trump campaign manager quietly drops defamation suit against the Daily Beast",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/trump-campaign-manager-chris-lacivita-defamation-suit-daily-beast",
        "words": "419",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T15:00:04Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/fc57e5044b2736380f85cef6a2de3a39886e39fb\/134_0_3513_2810\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Adam Gabbatt",
        "description": "Chris LaCivita sued news outlet over 2024 story about large payments from Trump campaign to his consulting firm",
        "text": "A manager for Donald Trump\u2019s 2024 presidential election bid has abandoned a high-profile lawsuit against the Daily Beast, 10 months after complaining the news outlet had defamed him in reporting on campaign expenditures.\n\nChris LaCivita, who co-managed the campaign that led to Trump\u2019s second presidency, quietly dropped his legal action on Friday, the Daily Beast said. The outlet said it had not retracted the story, made no apology and had not made any cash payment to LaCivita.\n\nThe lawsuit alleged the Daily Beast fabricated claims about his campaign compensation and deliberately damaged his professional reputation in its reporting about millions of dollars LaCivita\u2019s company received from the Trump campaign.\n\nLaCivita said the Daily Beast\u2019s reporting had created a \u201cfalse impression that he was personally profiting excessively\u201d and prioritized personal gain over campaign success. The lawsuit did not specify damages sought but said: \u201cIt is estimated that it would cost millions of dollars to repair Mr LaCivita\u2019s reputation.\u201d\n\nDespite that bullishness, the lawsuit will no longer go ahead. It represents quite a turnaround from LaCivita, who last March said of the legal action, \u201cFuck around and Find Out,\u201d and claimed: \u201cI\u2019m really looking forward to making my case in front of a jury.\u201d\n\nThe lawsuit centered on a series of reports from the Daily Beast which suggested LaCivita had \u201craked in\u201d huge payments, including a piece by the journalist Michael Isikoff that was headlined \u201cTrump in Cash Crisis \u2013 As Campaign Chief\u2019s $22m Pay Revealed\u201d.\n\nLaCivita said the reporting harmed his personal reputation. The lawsuit claimed the multimillion-dollar figure represented gross campaign advertising expenditures, not personal income.\n\nAfter initial correction demands from LaCivita\u2019s legal team, the Daily Beast modified its reporting, reducing the claimed compensation to $19.2m and clarifying that funds went to LaCivita\u2019s consulting firm. However, the lawsuit argues these changes did not adequately address the fundamental misrepresentation.\n\nLaCivita\u2019s lawsuit against the Daily Beast was one front in a broader pattern of legal standoffs pitting Trump and those in his orbit against media organizations \u2013 often centering on defamation complaints. Trump and his allies have spent years resorting to litigation to challenge journalistic reporting they perceive to be hostile or inaccurate.\n\nAs the Daily Beast noted, the Atlantic had reported in November 2024 that Trump furiously questioned LaCivita about the monetary figure the latter would eventually sue over while they were both on a campaign plane. Trump told LaCivita, \u201cYou should sue those bastards,\u201d and would later teasingly refer to him as \u201cmy $22m man\u201d, according to the Atlantic\u2019s reporting.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "af92058f8ce32e7788e960d7ffb3d7132b8fda31",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/927fbcfdc97f3d67ff1309f5f75e07c9006eeb39\/792_35_3336_2669\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "London City Lionesses avoid FA Cup shock as Sangar\u00e9 header sinks Sunderland",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/sunderland-london-city-lionesses-womens-fa-cup-match-report",
        "words": "461",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T14:35:56Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/927fbcfdc97f3d67ff1309f5f75e07c9006eeb39\/792_35_3336_2669\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Tom Garry at Eppleton Colliery Welfare Ground",
        "description": "Wassa Sangar\u00e9 scored a 50th-minute winner as London City Lionesses secured their place in the Women\u2019s FA Cup fifth round with a 1-0 victory at Sunderland",
        "text": "The fabled magic of the cup is yet to truly cast its spell on the women\u2019s game and London City Lionesses avoided a shock exit with a professional display to win at Sunderland.\n\nSince the WSL kicked off in 2011, no side in the third tier or below has knocked out a top-tier club, and even second-tier clubs doing so has been a rarity.\n\nNeither Birmingham beating top-tier Everton in 2023, nor an already promoted Leicester winning at Manchester United in 2021, the two most recent examples, could be remotely compared with Macclesfield\u2019s men stunning Crystal Palace.\n\nHad second-tier side Sunderland defied the 13 places between themselves and big-spending London City Lionesses, it would have been a surprise injection of drama into the increasingly predictable middle rounds of this competition.\n\nA calm performance from London City dashed any chances of that and Wassa Sangar\u00e9\u2019s glancing header from a Grace Geyoro corner early in the second half gave them the lead. They dominated most of the possession thereafter and the arrival of one of Sweden\u2019s greatest players, Kosovare Asllani, from the bench only added to their control.\n\nIt followed an away victory for another of the WSL\u2019s London clubs, West Ham, away at Newcastle on Friday, with Rita Guarino\u2019s side claiming a 3-0 win thanks to goals from Viviane Asseyi, Riko Ueki and Sarah Brasero-Carreira. So it was over to Sunderland to try their best.\n\nHere, in theory, the scene was set for a quintessential cup upset as the dark outline of an unwelcoming-looking row of deciduous trees flanked one side of the ground stood under a low cloud, with fans leaning on the side of railings as they held steaming cups of coffee and a Ha\u2019way the Lasses\u2019 flag hanging from a brick wall behind one goal and a queue for a cafe winding behind the other.\n\nSunderland, 5-1 winners at Derby in the third round in December, were hosting a side whose new head coach, Eder Maestre, was taking charge of his second game in English football after a goalless draw at Liverpool in his WSL managerial debut. The slight bobbles in the pitch awill have felt a world away from his previous job managing in Tenerife.\n\nSunderland battled and set pieces offered them some glimmers, but Rhiannon Roberts\u2019s blocked shot was perhaps as close as they came while at the other end their goalkeeper, Grace Moloney, did well to punch the ball clear when Isobel Goodwin looked set to head home. In the middle the class of Geyoro was obvious, making the pitch look like a carpet.\n\nTo their credit the home side defended well to keep the scoreline at 1-0 but the visitors were rarely troubled as Maestre got his first win in charge.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "ef5ef90d8ef49de1cfedb70911c7d51ddcd8ad0a",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Racial quotas for immigration are back",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2026\/jan\/17\/racial-quotas-for-immigration-are-back",
        "words": "1116",
        "section": "Opinion",
        "date": "2026-01-17T14:11:03Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/922364ae9aa59ffc69c7c349cf9c2083fd680312\/688_0_6880_5504\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Heba Gowayed",
        "description": "The Trump administration\u2019s immigration policies hearken back to the racist 1924 Immigration Act, meant to whiten the US",
        "text": "On 14 January, the Trump administration announced a stop on issuing immigrant visas for applicants from 75 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as 10 countries from eastern Europe. The Department of Homeland Security justified the decision by claiming that immigrants from these countries are at \u201chigh risk\u201d of reliance on welfare and becoming a \u201cpublic charge\u201d.\n\nAs an immigration scholar, I was immediately struck by the falsehood of this economic justification. The vast majority of immigrants have been legally disqualified from cash welfare since 1996. Those who do qualify for benefits like Snap and Medicaid use them at much lower rates than non-immigrants. Through their taxes, immigrants are net contributors \u2013 especially undocumented immigrants who are excluded from federal benefits.\n\nI also noted a pattern uniting the countries on the list: nearly all were also restricted through the 1924 Immigration Act\u2019s racial quotas.\n\nAbolished in 1965, due to the civil-rights movement\u2019s demands for equality of all races under the law, racial quotas were at the heart of the 1924 Immigration Act, also called the Johnson-Reed Act, which for four decades restricted immigration to the United States on the basis of nation of origin.\n\nAlbert Johnson, its lead author, was a representative from Washington, and a eugenicist, who believed that \u201cour capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood\u201d. Johnson, who boasted about participating in Ku Klux Klan violence against south Asians, wrote the Immigration Act to exclude anyone who was not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.\n\nThe 1924 law set a cap on total immigration to just a fifth of the pre-first world war number. It used the 1890 census to determine annual quotas for who could come from where, allocating nearly nine out of 10 slots to people from northern and western Europe, with the remaining largely set aside for people from southern and eastern Europe. Asians were totally barred, save for a few slots for people from the Levant, and total African admissions were capped at 1,200 people each year.\n\nThe Immigration Act also established the category of \u201cillegal alien\u201d for the first time, as well as visa requirements. An accompanying act later that year allocated funds for the first border patrol.\n\nTrump\u2019s rhetoric almost a century later bears a jarring resemblance to Johnson\u2019s. The president has also claimed that immigrants are \u201cpoisoning the nation\u2019s blood.\u201d He too has said that he prefers the \u201cnice people\u201d of Sweden, Norway and Denmark to people from \u201cfilthy, dirty, disgusting\u201d countries like Somalia.\n\nThe Johnson and Trump policies also developed in similar ways. Just as this administration is evoking the specter of immigrants becoming a \u201cpublic charge\u201d, and instructing consular officers to test immigrant\u2019s English through an interview, Johnson ushered through a bill in 1917, as a precursor to the 1924 Immigration Act, that excluded anyone who was a \u201cpublic charge\u201d and required a literacy test for immigrants. Both sets of policies demanded more stringent testing on immigrant health \u2013 Johnson was a proponent of sterilizing the mentally disabled.\n\nAt the time, the Johnson-Reed Act was very popular. It passed with over 80% support in both houses of Congress. And it was signed into law by Calvin Coolidge, who believed that \u201cAmerica must be kept American\u201d, echoing the mantra of the Ku Klux Klan, which was a proponent of the law.\n\nThe Immigration Act achieved its goals of keeping America white and stopping migration. In the coming four decades, immigration to the United States would come to a screeching halt, dropping from 13% foreign-born in the 1920s to less than 5% in 1970. That year, the US was 87.5% white.\n\nBy contrast, today 15% of people in the US are foreign-born, and the country is 57.8% white. The concern that the United States could become majority non-white as of 2045 is likely a driving force for Project 2025\u2019s mass deportation vision that Trump is enacting today.\n\nThen, like now, refugees were also denied. In one harrowing example, in 1939, more than 900 Jewish passengers aboard the SS St Louis were forced to return to Europe, almost a quarter of whom later died in Nazi concentration camps. Even after the horrors of the Holocaust were fully revealed, it was not until 1948 that the United States took in Jewish refugees, and even then, just 200,000 people. Signing that bill into law, Harry Truman described himself as reluctant, denouncing the bill\u2019s restrictions as antisemitic and xenophobic.\n\nIt is no surprise then that Adolf Hitler, who wrote about the Johnson-Reed Act in Mein Kampf, praised it, writing that the US was the \u201cone state\u201d that \u201csimply excludes the immigration of certain races\u201d.\n\nA century later, the 1924 Immigration Act still has fans. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump\u2019s mass deportation policy as the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, has praised Coolidge and the four decades of low immigration to the United States.\n\nWith the return of immigration to the United States after the abolition of racial quotas in 1965 came economic growth. New arrivals breathed life into US industry at all levels, injecting trillions of dollars into the economy, and filling key labor shortages. Yet, as the number of non-white people increased, pathways to admissions narrowed. The United States spent three times as much on the detention of immigrant detention as adjudicating immigrants\u2019 claims. The idea that Trump is closing an open border belies the fact that $410bn has been spent on border securitization alone in the last two decades.\n\nNone of these facts matter. The purpose of this immigration ban, like the other travel bans this administration has passed, has nothing to do with economics. Just as the mass deportation agenda has nothing to do with immigrant criminality \u2013 which has long been a myth. The purpose of this latest immigration ban is to whiten the nation, period, just as was the purpose of the ban a century prior. This administration has said and has shown time and time again that there is \u201cno price tag\u201d on accomplishing this goal.\n\nBut just as this latest immigration ban has precedent in US history, so too does the resistance to it. We can learn from the civil rights movement, from the Black led multiracial coalition that insisted that the rights of all people of color were deeply connected, that they needed to be treated equally under the law. We can recognize too that the work of that movement continues, that the white supremacy it fought is enduring, and that we need to organize and protest, and fight for a system that once and for all refuses enduring racist reasoning, and recognizes the humanity of all.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "df38def2859846ed32f597c664667d92fa1b40e1",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/c34fbbeec3545cf04365dccbb74930491dacefdc\/299_0_4560_3648\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018I\u2019m losing \u00a31,800 a day\u2019: the stark reality for Britain\u2019s dairy farmers",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2026\/jan\/17\/the-stark-reality-for-britains-dairy-farmers-milk-price",
        "words": "1103",
        "section": "Environment",
        "date": "2026-01-17T14:00:28Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/c34fbbeec3545cf04365dccbb74930491dacefdc\/299_0_4560_3648\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Joanna Partridge",
        "description": "The cost of producing milk is higher than that being paid by milk processors, leaving farmers operating at a loss",
        "text": "\u201cEvery morning that I roll out of bed at 4.40am, I know I\u2019m losing \u00a31,800 that day, just by getting up.\u201d This is the stark daily reality for Paul Tompkins, as he and his fellow dairy farmers struggle in the face of plummeting milk prices.\n\nTompkins, who is the third generation to run his family\u2019s 234-hectare (600-acre) farm in the Vale of York, can produce milk for about 40p a litre from his 500-strong herd of black and white Holstein cows. However, he is being paid only 29p a litre by his milk processor, leaving him operating at a loss, despite trying to run his business as efficiently as possible.\n\nMargins have always been tight, in an industry where supermarkets have traditionally used low milk prices to tempt shoppers through to door. Tesco, Sainsbury\u2019s, Morrisons and Asda are currently charging \u00a31.65 for four pints, which equates to 41p a pint, or 73p a litre. The UK processing industry is dominated by three main players \u2013 Arla, M\u00fcller and First Milk.\n\nTompkins, the chair of the dairy board at the National Farmers\u2019 Union (NFU), is no outlier: his cost of production is the same as the national average.\n\n\u201cDairy farmers are really good at sharing information, so I can benchmark myself against other businesses,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery day we get up and try to do more with less.\u201d\n\nIf farmgate milk prices remain at the current level, Tompkins believes his farm will make a loss of at least \u00a3660,000 this year. However, they appear to be on a downwards trajectory, which could make the hit even bigger.\n\nDairy is a globally traded commodity and farmers are used to market volatility, as the price fluctuates according to supply and demand. However, the speed of the current decline in prices appears to have caught many producers by surprise.\n\nIt has prompted some to ask whether falling prices could also help cool food price inflation and bring costs down for cash-strapped consumers.\n\nThe price decline has been blamed on global oversupply of milk, which is outstripping demand.\n\n\u201cIt is a scary time for producers,\u201d says Mike Houghton, a farm consultant and partner at Andersons.\n\n\u201cAmerican production is up and New Zealand is hanging on in there. A lot depends on China and how much they buy and that has not gone up. It all comes together and is a perfect storm. There is too much milk.\u201d\n\nMore than 7% extra milk was produced by British farmers in the final three months of 2025 compared with the five-year average, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB).\n\nSome of the current UK overproduction can be traced back to the dry spring and drought conditions experienced across the country in early 2025. A lack of grass for grazing caused many dairy farmers to buy animal feed for their herds \u2013 which was relatively cheap at the time, leading to well-fed cows producing record-breaking volumes.\n\nProcessors struggled to cope with the quantity of milk. In the past few months, the situation has worsened and some producers and processors have had to throw milk away.\n\nThe picture for dairy producers looks very different from a year ago, when some were benefiting from higher wholesale prices.\n\nSome of Britain\u2019s largest supermarkets, including Tesco and Sainsbury\u2019s, have committed to paying their farmers based on the cost of production, and other farmers are part of cooperatives, but these groups are not open to all. However, many farmers say they have little choice in who collects their milk, nor the price they are paid, as they are reliant on local processors.\n\n\u201cUnless you\u2019re on a cost-of-production-aligned retail contract now, you\u2019re losing money, or, at very best, breaking even. How long this goes on for, no one really knows,\u201d says Robert Craig, a dairy farmer from Cumbria who is the current chair of the Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers.\n\nThe latest price shock comes as farmers have been knocked by a host of other cost increases \u2013 such as fertiliser and fuel \u2013 as well as chronic labour shortages after Brexit and the pandemic. The government\u2019s move to introduce inheritance tax on agricultural assets above \u00a32.5m has been an additional concern.\n\nThe environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, recently told an agricultural audience at the Oxford Farming Conference that the government \u2013 which has faced a backlash in rural constituencies it fought hard to win at the election \u2013 would support British farmers, as she praised their resilience in the face of volatile markets.\n\nHowever, in the face of financial pressures, significant numbers of dairy farmers have left the industry since the pandemic. Nearly 20% of British producers have quit since October 2019, according to figures from the AHDB, cutting their numbers from 8,720 to 7,010 in just six years.\n\nDespite this, the volume of milk produced in Britain has stayed steady, thanks in part to consolidation in the sector, ever-larger herds and remaining producers working to become more efficient.\n\nNow farmers and industry experts warn the latest milk price shock will lead to more calling it a day.\n\nHoughton predicts that as many as 10% of dairy producers \u2013 or 700 farmers \u2013 could leave the industry for good.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a combination of factors, if you don\u2019t have a successor, if you have got to reinvest in slurry and silage capacity just to manage production which won\u2019t put on the bottom line, then why would you do all that at a milk price of 35p?\u201d he says.\n\nMany shoppers will wonder whether falling wholesale prices will be reflected in the cost of dairy products in their shopping baskets, after months of persistently high food inflation.\n\nSome consumers may be waiting a while. The average time lag for lower prices feeding through to consumers is seven months, according to the AHDB. Retail prices for butter are expected to fall \u201cbut not until April, with the biggest price drops from June\u201d, wrote Grace Withers, AHDB\u2019s lead retail insight manager in a recent research note. The price of cheddar is also expected to start coming down from July.\n\nMorrisons said it had reduced the prices of some milk, butter and cheese products in recent days.\n\nMeanwhile, the nation\u2019s coffee lovers are unlikely to enjoy lower prices for their cappuccinos any time soon.\n\n\u201cMilk and dairy are a significant cost but far and away not the only one\u201d, says Jeffrey Young, the chief executive of the consultancy Allegra Group. \u201cRent and people costs are way more substantial. The minimum wage is going up again. Chains might reduce their price increases but it\u2019s unlikely that lower prices will be passed on to consumers.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "163b3ff27ecb79a4efd79e716eb759921336db51",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Buddhist monks pass halfway mark on 2,300-mile Walk for Peace through US",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/buddhist-monks-walk-for-peace",
        "words": "635",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T14:00:28Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/09b6f9f9922ba54fba32688fcb14a7e2fd5319e6\/676_0_4904_3922\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Adam Gabbatt",
        "description": "Despite injuries, walkers and pet dog continue trek to promote \u2018peace, loving kindness and compassion\u2019 in the US",
        "text": "A group of Buddhist monks has passed the halfway mark on a 2,300-mile Walk for Peace, as they seek to raise awareness of \u201cpeace, loving kindness and compassion\u201d in the US and the world.\n\nThe 18 monks, two of whom are following a Buddhist practice of never lying down during the three-month journey, were in North Carolina on Saturday, their 83rd day on the road. Led by the Venerable Bhikkhu Pa\u00f1\u00f1\u0101k\u0101ra, who is conducting the walk barefoot, they have already overcome a serious injury to one member of the group as they head towards Washington DC.\n\nThe monks set off on 26 October from a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Fort Worth, Texas, before passing through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The monks stop at the capitol of each state they pass through, frequently drawing crowds of thousands of people, while their social media has attracted more than a million followers. When they arrive in Washington DC they will ask Congress to recognize Vesak, the Buddha\u2019s day of birth and enlightenment, as a federal holiday.\n\n\u201cWe are planning to go to Washington DC, because Washington DC is the heart of the nation. By reaching to the heart of the nation, we believe that we can reach to the heart of all Americans across the United States, and by being able to deliver the peace message from there, we think that we can reach to all these American people across the United States,\u201d said Neeraj Bajracharya, government liaison and press coordinator for the walk.\n\nBajracharya said Buddhist monks had undertaken peace walks for 2,000 years. Pa\u00f1\u00f1\u0101k\u0101ra undertook a 112-day walk across India in 2022, also barefoot, but has found the American roads to be more challenging. Each day, his feet are heavily bandaged to treat injuries from stepping on rocks, nails and glass.\n\nPa\u00f1\u00f1\u0101k\u0101ra is not the only one suffering. Two of the monks are adhering to dhutanga \u2013 a set of practices taught in Buddhism \u2013 during the march, which means they are only allowed to adopt three \u201cpostures\u201d during the walk, specifically walking, standing or sitting, never lying down, even to sleep.\n\n\u201cThey sit down in a meditation position, and they meditate all night. And that\u2019s how they replenish their energy,\u201d Bajracharya said.\n\nThe monks have already had to overcome adversity. Three weeks after setting off, a truck hit the group\u2019s escort vehicle, propelling it into two of the monks, one of whom lost his leg. That reduced the number of walkers to 18, Bajracharya said, although he stressed that the amputee was \u201cdoing fine\u201d.\n\nThat isn\u2019t the only time a member of the group has been stricken.\n\nAloka, a dog who was rescued by Pa\u00f1\u00f1\u0101k\u0101ra in India in 2022, set out with the monks in October, but aggravated a pre-existing leg injury. Aloka, whose name means \u201cdivine light\u201d in Sanskrit, underwent surgery in South Carolina on Monday, and rejoined the monks in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Thursday.\n\nBajracharya said Aloka will be eased back into the action, walking for 10 minutes or so six times a day as he continues his recovery. A video shared on the monk\u2019s Instagram showed Aloka being reunited with the monks, tail wagging as he greeted his walking companions.\n\n\u201cEven on his journey of recovery, his bond with the venerable monks remains so strong. This brief visit has brought so many smiles and a wonderful sense of peace to the whole team,\u201d a caption under the video read. In a sign of the monks\u2019 growing popularity, the post was liked by more than 200,000 people.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s amazing how, how the response has been. We are getting calls from all over the world,\u201d Bajracharya said.\n\n\u201cThe core, foundational stone of this initiative is peace, unity, compassion and healing. And we want to reach out to each and every individual in America.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "15e7619322d3910696d434370f3495ba3473856e",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/f509ac7d1e5c944b37c30c1af3bfba8f6370fad5\/169_0_2519_2016\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "The Republicans\u2019 latest Clinton stunt will not work",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2026\/jan\/17\/clintons-trump-epstein-files",
        "words": "1330",
        "section": "Opinion",
        "date": "2026-01-17T14:00:27Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/f509ac7d1e5c944b37c30c1af3bfba8f6370fad5\/169_0_2519_2016\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Arwa Mahdawi",
        "description": "Focusing on the ex-president won\u2019t distract Americans from the Trump administration\u2019s foot-dragging on the Epstein files",
        "text": "The Clinton-Epstein connection I\u2019ve got a sneaking suspicion that, somewhere in a makeshift situation room in Mar-a-Lago, there\u2019s a whiteboard with \u201cvery high IQ strategies to distract everyone from Jeffrey Epstein\u201d written on the top.\n\n\u201cKidnap a foreign head of state\u201d will have already been crossed off this hypothetical whiteboard. The capture of the Venezuelan president, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, dominated headlines for a while but it hasn\u2019t stopped the ghost of Epstein from haunting Donald Trump.\n\nAll the chest-beating around annexing Greenland doesn\u2019t seem to be doing much to memory-hole the Epstein files either. During a visit to a Ford plant in Michigan this week, Trump was heckled by an autoworker who reportedly called the president a \u201cpedophile protector\u201d. And Shawn Ryan, an influential podcaster, who supported Trump\u2019s 2024 run, also publicly accused the president of \u201cprotecting pedophiles\u201d by not fully releasing the Epstein files. \u201cI voted to get these damn files released, and it\u2019s like a total 180 just happened,\u201d Ryan complained on a podcast released Thursday. Your first problem, sir, was ever believing a word the convicted felon said.\n\nThe newest plan to take the heat off Trump\u2019s Epstein connection? Judging by recent events, it seems to be to try and make us all focus on the Clintons\u2019 Epstein links instead.\n\nWhile things escalated this week, the Trump administration has been slinging mud at Bill Clinton for a while. Which, to be fair, isn\u2019t difficult to do, considering the Democratic former president\u2019s personal history, and his well-documented ties with Epstein. The disgraced financier visited the White House at least 17 times during the early years of Clinton\u2019s presidency. The pair also travelled together. However, Clinton maintains that (unlike several other powerful people) he cut ties with Epstein in 2005, before the sex offender pleaded guilty to solicitation of a minor in Florida. Clinton has never been formally accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.\n\nThe Trump administration, however, has done a lot of informal accusing. Last year the Department of Justice released a number of photos of Clinton alongside Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, posted one photo on X in December with the caption \u201cOh my!\u201d\n\nAnd, last August, the House oversight committee issued subpoenas to Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with various others, demanding \u201ctestimony related to horrific crimes perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein\u201d.\n\n\u201cGiven your past relationships with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, the Committee believes that you have information regarding their activities that is relevant to the Committee\u2019s investigation,\u201d the committee\u2019s Republican chair, James Comer, wrote in a letter to Bill Clinton. A much vaguer version of this letter was issued to Hillary Clinton.\n\nThis week the Clintons made it clear they have no plans to cooperate with the committee\u2019s investigation, announcing they would not comply with the subpoena demanding testimony. Comer said in response the committee would seek to hold both Clintons in criminal contempt of Congress.\n\nIn a letter addressed to Comer, and posted on social media on Tuesday morning, the Clintons issued a scathing statement about the Trump administration and the contempt proceedings.\n\n\u201cEvery person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences,\u201d the Clintons wrote. \u201cFor us, now is that time.\u201d\n\nOh, give me a break. I don\u2019t doubt that the Trump Administration is going after the Clintons to create a sideshow, but is this really the moment when the power couple have decided that they\u2019ve had enough? Spare me the sanctimony from two people who worked overtime to justify (and deny) Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza. For many people in the US, seeing children in Gaza burned alive with their taxpayer dollars was when they stood up to fight for their principles, no matter the consequences. For the Clintons, however, the moral red line seems to be harm to their personal brand. They are not fighting for the country here, they are fighting for themselves.\n\nThis isn\u2019t to say the Clintons should just quietly go along with this sham of an \u201cinvestigation\u201d. As the comedian Jon Stewart said this week, the Clintons should comply with the subpoenas, but only as part of a process where everyone is fully complying. \u201cWhy should [Clintons] comply if the Department of Justice is not complying with releasing the files?\u201d Stewart said. \u201c[But] do I personally think [the Clintons] should comply? Abso-fucking-lutely, absolutely. And if they\u2019ve got something to hide nefarious, yes, we should know about all this. This is bonkers how long this is going on.\u201d Quite.\n\nAnyway, here\u2019s a little memo to Maga: focusing on the Clintons is not going to work for you. I\u2019m sure the Clintons have some superfans but they don\u2019t preside over a cult the way Trump does. If they have done anything immoral concerning Epstein, I think you\u2019d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks they should be shielded from consequences because they\u2019re Democrats. The little stunt of holding the Clintons in contempt while the Trump administration drags its feet on releasing all the Epstein files just demonstrates the government\u2019s contempt for the American public.\n\nCalifornia refuses to extradite doctor over abortion pill Louisiana officials have been trying to extradite a doctor in California who they claim sent abortion pills to the southern state. Medication abortion, to be clear, has been available in the US since 2000 and decades of studies have shown it is safe and effective. However, Louisiana has banned almost all abortions and the state\u2019s Republican attorney general has described sending abortion pills to the state as \u201cillegal drug trafficking\u201d. California has said there is no way an extradition is happening.\n\nRenaming the Department of Defense the \u2018Department of War\u2019 could cost up to $125m There always seems to be money for nonsense like this and never any money for universal healthcare. Someone should create a \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d to look into this \u2026\n\nTexas A&M University is banning Plato because of \u201cgender ideology\u201d The public research university has a new policy of restricting discussions of race and gender, which means around 200 courses have had to be revised. It turns out Plato\u2019s Symposium is problematic because of the \u201cMyth of Androgyne,\u201d in which Aristophanes describes three genders.\n\nAlabama library denied state funding because of inappropriate books The Fairhope public library will take a funding hit because it kept The Handmaid\u2019s Tale and certain other books in its teen section, rather than moving them to the adult section.\n\nHow gender bias impacts math education A new Rutgers University\u2013New Brunswick study has found that children are more inclined to believe incorrect math information from men than accurate information from women. This plays into the well-documented \u201cbrilliance bias\u201d: studies show girls as young as six think boys are more likely to be \u201creally, really smart\u201d.\n\nMike Pompeo wants \u201cto make sure history books don\u2019t write about the victims of Gaza\u201d The former US Secretary of State received rapturous applause at a pro-Israel conference on Tuesday after saying that \u201cwe need to make sure that the story [of October 7] is told properly so that when the history books write this, they don\u2019t write about the victims of Gaza, right?\u201d The good news for Pompeo is that journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, and there is precious little journalism coming out of Gaza \u2013 by design. The international press still isn\u2019t freely allowed to report from Gaza, where babies are continuing to freeze to death.\n\nThe week in pawtriarchy Some emu-sing news out of Florida, where police have been on the lookout for a runaway bird. The escaped emu was finally captured by a deputy who secured it with a makeshift lasso, resulting in some wild bodycam footage. The emu was returned home unharmed. Someone send that deputy to St Louis, now, where multiple monkeys are on the loose. The world really is going bananas.\n\nArwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "8b0a65577e5a4810b5c0a34d159bf0bee1f3532a",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/a197f8cba35e915096f8e95b2292cdbea325f06b\/476_0_4758_3806\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018It will take a generation\u2019: Iranians abroad on the protests \u2013 and change",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2026\/jan\/17\/iranians-abroad-protests-change",
        "words": "1925",
        "section": "World news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T13:39:00Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/a197f8cba35e915096f8e95b2292cdbea325f06b\/476_0_4758_3806\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Jane Clinton",
        "description": "We asked some of those who have family in Iran to tell us their views on the current crisis",
        "text": "Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran\u2019s former shah, has called on the west to help unseat Ali Khamenei, Iran\u2019s supreme leader.\n\nSpeaking on Friday at a news conference in Washington, Pahlavi said: \u201cThe Iranian people are taking decisive action on the ground. It is now time for the international community to join them fully.\u201d\n\nWith the protests in Iran appearing to slow down, Donald Trump seems to have temporarily pulled back from threats to strike the country.\n\nIn recent days, he had repeatedly spoken about how the US was \u201clocked and loaded\u201d if Iran started to shoot at the protesters.\n\nEstimates of the number of people killed during the unrest vary from less than 2,000 to more than 12,000.\n\nHowever, earlier this week, the US president said he had been told \u201con good authority\u201d the \u201ckilling in Iran is stopping \u2013 it\u2019s stopped,\u201d adding that \u201cthere\u2019s no plans for executions\u201d.\n\nWe asked Iranians living abroad who have family in Iran to tell us their views on the current crisis.\n\nSome welcomed foreign intervention and some wanted regime change without it. Others believed change would take \u201ca generation\u201d.\n\n\u2018The people need to take back Iran by ourselves and for ourselves\u2019\nLike many Iranians living abroad, Roya had been desperately waiting for days to hear from her family.\n\nTheir usual communication via Telegram and WhatsApp was not working after the internet blackout.\n\n\u201cPeople had sent messages to family and friends but heard nothing back \u2013 we are a nation waiting for the double tick,\u201d she says, referring to the message delivery confirmation on WhatsApp. \u201cIt was exhausting not knowing if they were OK. Some of my friends have spoken to their families \u2013 it seems that they can call from Iran, but we can\u2019t call into Iran.\n\nTo her relief, her mother was able to phone her on Tuesday to speak, but only \u201cfor a few seconds\u201d as it is so expensive to call.\n\n\u201cMy heart was in my mouth when she called, I thought I was going to throw up,\u201d says Roya, 27, who has lived in Switzerland since 2017 and works in marketing. \u201cShe sounded like she hadn\u2019t slept in days. She sounded exhausted and sad. I was just able to check that they were OK and my brother was OK.\n\n\u201cIt was such a relief, I could hear the dog barking in the background, but it also made me hungry for more time to speak to my family.\u201d\n\nRoya said she had been in touch with some of her friends who left Iran on Monday night to travel to Turkey.\n\n\u201cThey called us from Turkey and said the number of dead is way higher than the news is making it out to be,\u201d she says. \u201cHowever, they said that the people are hopeful, they\u2019re strong, they\u2019re angry.\u201d\n\nShe is concerned about what the future holds for Iran.\n\n\u201cI worry about what comes after because I know the voices of the monarchists are really, really loud,\u201d she says. \u201cThey want the \u2018prince\u2019 [Reza Pahlavi] to return, but it is not a view that I, or a lot of people, share. Many people say we do not want a recycled monarchy. What is this guy going to do? He has barely lived in Iran. What does he understand about the people and how the country is run?\n\n\u201cThe people calling for intervention by foreign powers are also loud, but that doesn\u2019t mean that is what most people want. If anybody has opened a history book, they will see that foreign intervention in Iran has never gone well.\n\n\u201cMy view is that the people need to take back Iran by ourselves and for ourselves; we can\u2019t count on foreign intervention. I am sick and tired of all these politicians sitting in their very comfortable spots in their private jets and giving opinions on what other countries should be doing.\n\n\u201cI am hopeful that the government is going to fall, I just don\u2019t know when. The lucky thing for the monarchists is that they have a figure whose name they can yell. The problem with the opposition is we don\u2019t really have any one figure to rally behind.\n\n\u201cWho is going to come into power, and what is going to happen if there is going to be a war? These things are at the forefront of our minds because, in addition to being worried about the physical safety of our family and our friends, there is also the question of: what\u2019s going to come after? Roya* 27, Switzerland\n\n\u2018The change needed will probably take a generation\u2019\nReza, a teacher in the UK whose parents are in Iran, is not hopeful that any regime change will have much effect in the immediate term.\n\n\u201cMy wife had a very brief conversation with her family to check that they are OK,\u201d he says. \u201cGenerally and understandably, people are a bit afraid to go out. My family are not in the capital, and the protests in our city have certainly died down.\n\n\u201cThe general, ordinary person, and that would be our family, just won\u2019t go out. They don\u2019t want to be caught in some sort of crossfire. I am not worried about my parents; the only worry would be if they needed the hospital, as the staffing has been much reduced, so services are stretched.\u201d\n\nReza, who was born in the UK to Iranian parents, would normally visit Iran two or three times a year. His last visit was in June. He is not optimistic about a solution to the current crisis.\n\n\u201cIt is a cultural problem, not a political one,\u201d he says. \u201cWe must rid Iran of corruption. Too many countries are sticking their noses in where they\u2019re not welcome, which won\u2019t bring the change that we need. Throughout history, only Iranians have changed Iran, no one else.\n\n\u201cAs for the idea of Trump intervening: Iran is not Venezuela \u2013 it is a huge country, with vastly diverse ethnic backgrounds, political views and religious views \u2013 it is way too diverse to do that. Trump has this idea that he can point the finger and intervene, but it just won\u2019t work. It is not logistically possible.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a change that will probably take a generation, and I don\u2019t see any one person who can do that.\u201d Reza*, UK\n\n\u2018We want President Trump to help us urgently\u2019\nRose, who is from Iran but has been living abroad for 10 years and is a student living in the UK, wants intervention from the US.\n\n\u201cThe situation has been emotionally devastating and deeply distressing,\u201d she says. \u201cDue to widespread internet and communication blackouts, I have lost contact with family and friends inside Iran. Not knowing whether loved ones are safe, detained, injured, or alive creates constant fear and anxiety.\n\n\u201cThe world also will never know the exact number of innocent people getting killed right now. People in Iran are being killed for protesting and demanding basic human rights. Watching this unfold while feeling helpless from abroad has had a profound emotional and psychological impact on all of us.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat people want most is strong international pressure, protection of civilians, and a regime change, we want President Trump to help us urgently,\u201d she says.\n\n\u201cMy greatest concern is for the safety of civilians who are being targeted for peacefully protesting. I am also deeply concerned about mass arrests, possible executions, lack of medical access, and the complete isolation of people due to communication blackouts. There is a real fear that crimes against civilians are happening without witnesses, accountability, or a global response.\u201d Rose*, 26, UK\n\n\u2018I am constantly checking the news, mourning those who have lost their lives\u2019\n\nArta, 38, who lives in Europe, visited Iran in December 2025 to see her parents for a holiday and left a few days before the demonstrations began to spread.\n\n\u201cI had not seen my parents for a year,\u201d she says. \u201cDuring my stay, I visited my home town in western Iran and spent most of my time in Tehran. I witnessed a protest and a strike in the Tehran grand bazaar; the gold bazaar was completely closed, which was something entirely new to me.\n\n\u201cThe economic situation is unimaginable; prices were tripled or even four times higher,\u201d she says. \u201cMy parents can only afford a basic life. After we returned, I was talking to a friend in Iran when I noticed she did not have internet any more, and this was still the case days later. I received a text from a distant friend that my parents are fine, and my mother made a brief call on Tuesday.\n\n\u201cI am constantly checking the news, mourning those who lost their lives, and wishing to hear my mom\u2019s voice once again.\n\n\u201cI really hope for an internal change, although it seems almost impossible.\u201d Arta*, 38, Europe\n\n\u2018The world needs to intervene\u2019\nMani, 27, a student living in Scotland, says he cannot sleep for worrying about his family, who are among the protesters.\n\n\u201cWe do not want this regime,\u201d he says.\n\n\u201cMy wife is also having panic attacks, and our normal life has completely stopped. Yesterday I got a phone call from my brother, and I heard his voice for less than 10 seconds.\u201d\n\nMani wants swift intervention.\n\n\u201cWe are happy for President Trump to intervene,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is the only chance for us to get rid of this hateful government. The world needs to intervene because if the Iranian regime knows that the world just talks and does nothing, they will kill more. I am concerned that my people are dying for nothing.\n\n\u201cReza Pahlavi is the best alternative that we have, and I believe in him. He is the opposition to this regime. He has some plans for Iran.\u201d Mani*, 27, Scotland\n\n\u2018The current situation in Iran is heartbreaking\u2019\nHana, 40, who left Tehran 14 years ago to study in Germany and has remained there ever since, believes any foreign intervention in the current situation would be a \u201cdisaster\u201d for both Iran and the region.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t believe that President Trump has any good intentions,\u201d says Hana, who works in IT. \u201cAny US involvement could lead to civil war and the disintegration of Iran, causing lots of issues for the region. I do believe Trump\u2019s involvement would be bad for both the future of democracy and the stability of Iran and the region.\u201d\n\nHana says she had been trying to contact her family, who live in northern Tehran, since lastThursday, when she \u201csuddenly lost connection\u201d with them. However, on Tuesday morning, she received a very brief phone call from her mother.\n\n\u201cI had been so stressed as I didn\u2019t know if they were safe, then I saw the call from my mother, and I was so relieved to speak to her and know that my family is safe that I burst into tears,\u201d she says.\n\nHana does not believe a regime change in Iran is the answer.\n\n\u201cThe current situation in Iran is heartbreaking,\u201d she says. \u201cI am strongly against regime change in Iran, not because I support the current structure of the government, but mainly because I don\u2019t see a viable alternative to this regime at the moment.\n\n\u201cI understand that people are frustrated and have lost their hope and trust in the system. They are in survival mode and are looking for someone who gives them a reassurance that things will get better. To think that any foreign country can bring hope and stability to Iran is a wrong assumption. Hana*, 40, Germany\n\n*Names have been changed\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "102ddde3fe883a9b1fd14620702f9f78ea46c4a2",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/3c8f67c8cfc845b80abb331a05186b6a691bc67b\/452_0_4515_3612\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Senegal accuse Morocco of putting \u2018players in danger\u2019 before Afcon final",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/senegal-morocco-africa-cup-of-nations-final-protest",
        "words": "451",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T13:18:16Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/3c8f67c8cfc845b80abb331a05186b6a691bc67b\/452_0_4515_3612\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Jonathan Wilson in Rabat",
        "description": "The Senegalese Football Federation protested about security and accommodation concerns as well as training facility and ticket worries",
        "text": "The Senegalese Football Federation (FSF) has accused Morocco\u2019s local organising committee of undermining their preparations for Sunday\u2019s Africa Cup of Nations final against the hosts. In a statement on social media, the FSF protested about a lack of adequate security on arrival, inadequate accommodation, confusion over training facilities and insufficient tickets being provided for Senegal fans.\n\nHaving beaten Egypt in Wednesday\u2019s semi-final in Tangier, the Senegal squad made the 75-minute journey south to the capital on the Al-Boraq high-speed train. On arrival in Rabat they were surrounded by fans and local people demanding selfies and videos released on social media show them being jostled as they made their way through the station to the team bus.\n\nThe FSF spoke of a \u201cclear lack of adequate security measures\u201d that \u201cexposed the players and technical staff to overcrowding and risks incompatible with the standards of a competition of this magnitude and the prestige of a continental final\u201d.\n\n\u201cWe have to say what happened is abnormal, abnormal for a team like Senegal to be left with the crowd like that,\u201d the Senegal manager, Pape Thiaw, said on Saturday. \u201cThe players were in danger. Anything could have happened through the actions of malicious people.\u201d\n\nOn reaching their hotel, the Senegal delegation was unsatisfied and filed a formal complaint to secure better facilities. The FSF also refused to train at the Mohammed VI complex just outside Rabat, saying that to be expected to train where the Morocco squad has been based since before the tournament began \u201craises a question of sporting fairness\u201d.\n\nThe FSF also protested that Senegal have been allocated 2,850 tickets for its fans, which it termed \u201cinsufficient given the demand\u201d, saying that it \u201cdeplores the imposed restrictions, which penalise the Senegalese public.\u201d The Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium has a capacity of 69,500.\n\nTensions have been inflamed over the past few days with visiting teams accusing Morocco of seeking every conceivable advantage. Nigeria were unhappy with the refereeing during their penalty shootout loss to the hosts in the semi-final, while the Nigeria goalkeeper, Stanley Nwabali, had his towel stolen three times by a ballboy and Moroccan officials.\n\nRefereeing has been a recurring problem with the officials for all four quarter-finals changed less than 24 hours before kick-off, in part because Morocco protested about the Egyptian official they had been allocated for their game against Cameroon.\n\nSamuel Eto\u2019o, the president of the Cameroonian football federation, was subsequently fined $20,000 (almost \u00a315,000) and banned for four matches after complaining about decisions during the game. The Confederation of African Football delayed announcing the referee for the final to try to prevent a similar protest.\n\nThe organising committee has been approached for comment.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "472aeeca340d2ae00b1108436e594a1b7ef3b191",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/39e00d14b0cd861b410ccda9b408b132b1bb1b6f\/0_0_5212_4170\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Confidence runs high in London\u2019s Little Morocco as Afcon glory beckons",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/afcon-little-morocco-london-confidence-high",
        "words": "694",
        "section": "UK news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T13:00:28Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/39e00d14b0cd861b410ccda9b408b132b1bb1b6f\/0_0_5212_4170\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Matthew Weaver",
        "description": "Atlas Lions face Senegal in final of Africa Cup of Nations on Sunday and Moroccan diaspora scents victory",
        "text": "London\u2019s Little Morocco is brimming with pride and anticipation. The Moroccan diaspora in North Kensington is in no doubt that on Sunday the Atlas Lions will triumph against Senegal in the final of the Africa Cup of Nations.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s not just an excitement, it has completely taken over everything else,\u201d said Souad Talsi, who runs the Al-Hasaniya Moroccan women\u2019s centre at the base of 31-storey Trellick Tower, at the north end of Golborne Road.\n\nShe added: \u201cThere is so much gloom and doom around at the moment and people are depressed about Gaza, but football has given us a respite from all that. It has completely united the Moroccan diaspora and given us a purpose and a sense of belonging.\u201d\n\nMohamed Chelh said that if Morocco prevail it will be first time they have lifted the Afcon trophy since 1976, a tournament he cannot even remember.\n\nSipping mint tea in the Trellick Lounge cafe after Friday prayers, he said: \u201cThey should win. They\u2019ve got the best team.\u201d He points to Morocco\u2019s success in the last World Cup when they reached the semi-finals and beat Spain and Portugal on the way.\n\nChelh, who works in a bakery, plans to head to Trafalgar Square to celebrate Morocco\u2019s anticipated victory.\n\nOn a big screen at the back of the cafe, the Trellick Lounge has shown all of Morocco\u2019s games in the tournament so far. On Friday, more than 48 hours before Sunday\u2019s game, it was already showing a buildup programme on the satellite channel Maghreb TV. On Sunday there will also be a screen on the street outside the cafe.\n\nAli Mssr, who runs the cafe, predicts that hundreds will turn up to the watch the final. \u201cOutside there will be even more,\u201d he said.\n\nMohamed, a retired gardener, said he could hear the celebrations in the cafe from his flat down the street when Morocco scraped through on penalties against Nigeria in the semi-final.\n\n\u201cIt was a beautiful atmosphere. They were really happy. And I\u2019m very proud. I love Morocco, my mum and dad are there. And I love it when they play well and win.\u201d\n\nFurther down Golborne Road, at Hakim\u2019s cafe, Yassim, a courier, said: \u201cThe mood is very good. I have confidence we will win. We beat Nigeria and they are the toughest team in the tournament. We will win whether it is 90 minutes or 120 minutes.\u201d\n\nTalsi is planning to watch the game with her extended family, including her 85-year-old-mother, her brothers and their children, after a meal of couscous.\n\nShe said: \u201cFootball reminds us that people are not always bad and people can come together and forget their differences. Whether you are an international trader or a cleaner, all they want is for Morocco to win.\n\n\u201cIt has also broken the gender barrier. At the semi-final there was an outdoor screen and there were as many loud girls as there were loud boys.\u201d\n\nLailah Khallouk, a senior outreach worker at the women\u2019s centre, said: \u201cI hate football but I love to watch the Moroccan team. There\u2019s huge excitement and a lot of organising about where to watch the game \u2013in cafes or social clubs or house parties.\n\n\u201cMy son Adam, who is 11, is passionate about it, he\u2019s like a professional fan.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s something that brings us all together. Despite where we were born, our ages, our social classes, is a just a great event. Finally we have something to be proud of.\u201d\n\nMohamed Rhiam, an Uber driver, has just got back from a visit to relatives in Casablanca. \u201cThe atmosphere was crazy. There will be great disappointment if they lose, because everyone is into it now. But we\u2019ll win.\u201d\n\nRhiam witnessed protests before the tournament on the amount of money spent on stadiums rather than public services. \u201cI share those concerns. I believe the money they spent on it they could have done more for the economy. But the football still makes me proud.\u201d\n\nAsked if an Afcon win would make up for the disappointment of the last World Cup, Rhiam said: \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a disappointment, we got to the semi-final.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "eae0e27effc1e8b4767b4f4024ac3636d3b1cb41",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/062441e023f806569c27e4ffe570f6d555d45d7e\/500_0_5000_4000\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "US federal forces blind two protesters shot in face with \u2018less-lethal\u2019 munitions",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/protesters-blind-us-federal-agents",
        "words": "636",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T13:00:28Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/062441e023f806569c27e4ffe570f6d555d45d7e\/500_0_5000_4000\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Roque Planas",
        "description": "Kaden Rummler and Britain Rodriguez tell KTLA and LA Times of being shot at close range during California protest",
        "text": "Two protesters have been blinded by so-called \u201cless-lethal\u201d munitions deployed by federal officers during an anti-ICE protest last week in Santa Ana, California, according to reports.\n\nThe blindings come amid rising scrutiny of federal authorities\u2019 use-of-force policies, after the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer set off nationwide protests.\n\nWidely seen video recorded at the Santa Ana protest showed a homeland security agent shoot Kaden Rummler, 21, in the face with a less-lethal munition at a distance of only a few feet. Doctors found glass shards and plastic fragments in his skull and a fragment of metal lodged just shy of his carotid artery.\n\nVideo also showed the federal officer drag Rummler several yards across the pavement and into a federal building after shooting him. The shooting left him blind in his left eye.\n\n\u201cI can\u2019t sneeze or cough because it\u2019s dangerous,\u201d Rummler told KTLA. \u201cThey pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel out of my eye.\u201d\n\n\u201cThey said it was a miracle I survived,\u201d he added.\n\nRummler is 5ft 1in tall and weighs 102lbs, he said.\n\nA second person, 31-year-old Britain Rodriguez, described taking a similar close-range shot to the face with a less-lethal round at the same protest, saying it felt like his \u201ceye exploded in my head\u201d, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published on Friday.\n\nThe shooting appeared to take place at roughly the same time as the one that blinded Rummler.\n\nHomeland security use-of-force policies describe \u201cuses of impact weapons to strike the neck or head\u201d as a form of \u201cdeadly force\u201d.\n\nThe Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not immediately respond to the Guardian\u2019s request for comment about the Santa Ana incidents.\n\nBut a DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, has described the protesters as a \u201ca mob\u201d, accusing them of throwing rocks, bottles and fireworks at federal officers. Local police and media reports, however, said protesters threw only traffic cones. There is no evidence of anything being thrown at officers in the video of Rummler being shot.\n\nAbout 150 people gathered last week for a procession and vigil honoring Rene Good at which the shootings took place. The event culminated with a demonstration in front of a federal building used by ICE.\n\nOrange county supervisor Vicente Sarmiento described the event as \u201cvery peaceful\u201d. Attendees included local elected officials and \u201cmany parents with strollers\u201d, he said.\n\nA handful of homeland security officers stood at the top of the steps to the federal building during the protest. When protesters moved closer to them, the officers confronted them, according to Sarmiento. Videos of the shooting that blinded Rummler show him approaching the officers with a bullhorn after they grabbed another protester and dragged them up the stairs to detain them.\n\n\u201cI feel just outraged that some of our federal delegation and others are considering continuing to fund these federal agencies that have now gone rogue and are no longer protecting us, but are putting people in critical harm \u2013 killing people and maiming people,\u201d Sarmiento said. \u201cI\u2019m just really, really distressed.\u201d\n\nCrowd control is not a typical function for homeland security. It is not clear why the federal officer chose to engage with protesters who were not the target of immigration enforcement and who appeared to be demonstrating on public property, outside the federal building.\n\nArizona State University criminologist Edward Maguire, who has studied crowd control, did not observe the Santa Ana protest, but said he had noted recent DHS actions elsewhere \u201cappear inconsistent with basic principles of crowd management and de-escalation\u201d.\n\n\u201cDecades of research show that when law enforcement responds to crowds and protests in this way, it tends to escalate tension and conflict and increases the risk of harm to both officers and civilians,\u201d Maguire wrote in an email.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "7bc4b548931058fb819a193bf766331d3dfc378a",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/20eb043f1f99cde85862a96d9ddaf409735f18dd\/667_0_6674_5342\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018Big, firm, crunchy\u2019: the best supermarket granola, tasted and rated",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/thefilter\/2026\/jan\/17\/best-supermarket-granola-tasted-rated",
        "words": "769",
        "section": "The Filter",
        "date": "2026-01-17T13:00:27Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/20eb043f1f99cde85862a96d9ddaf409735f18dd\/667_0_6674_5342\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Tom Hunt",
        "description": "This week, we got crunching on a batch of widely available granolas, tasting for flavour, ingredient quality and provenance",
        "text": "Granola is similar to muesli, but baked with a sugar syrup (maple syrup, honey or golden syrup, say). It\u2019s by definition sweet, and I find sugar addictive, so I enjoy it only rarely as a treat. The best ones come in golden clusters; sweet, but not too sweet (under 10% is low, over 15% high), with a touch of salt and a range of whole grains, dried fruit, nuts and seeds. I also love ones that include toasted coconut, because it adds complexity and flavour at not too much extra cost.\n\nThe quality of this test group was pretty high across the board, with nutty bargains, luxuriously indulgent, sugar-packed treats and, to my surprise, some really healthy, low-sugar wholefood options.\n\nThe best supermarket granola ***\n\nBest overall:\nEat Natural low-sugar granola \u00a34.10 for 450g at Sainsbury\u2019s (91p\/100g) \u00a34.10 for 450g at Ocado (91p\/100g) \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\n\nClusters of medium-roast oats with a generous helping of toasted coconut, sunflower seeds, almonds and pumpkin seeds. Flavoured with buckwheat, and just 4.4% sugar (sweetened with coconut blossom nectar and prebiotic chicory root fibre).\n\nBest bargain:\nTesco Finest super nutty granola \u00a33 for 500g at Tesco (60p\/100g) \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\n\nGenerous clusters of dark roasted oats, spelt and barley, alongside 15% nuts, including almonds. At 12% sugar, not too sweet, but it also contains flavouring, which seems unnecessary. Brilliant value for a tasty, classic granola.\n\nAnd the rest \u2026 Scrumshus the premium granola \u00a34.80 for 500g at Waitrose (96p\/100g) \u00a34.80 for 500g at Amazon (96p\/100g) \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\n\nLarge clusters of dark-roast oats sweetened with a generous amount of honey and a drizzle of maple syrup, creating a floral, aromatic and deeply flavourful granola. Full of delicious nuts, seeds and dried fruit (raisins and cranberries). Super-sweet (31.6% sugar) but wonderfully indulgent. More a dessert granola than a breakfast staple.\n\nBio&Me super seedy & nutty granola \u00a32.95 for 360g at Waitrose (82p\/100g) \u00a33.50 for 360g at Tesco (97p\/100g) \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\n\nA healthy, almost savoury wholefood granola with small, dark-roasted clusters of oats, puffed brown rice, buckwheat and quinoa, with an incredible range of nuts and seeds. Made with extra-virgin olive oil and no added sugars (9.7% overall). Contains dates, dried carrots and chicory root.\n\nNibs Etc rye, hazelnut & cacao granola \u00a35.50 for 360g at Ocado (\u00a31.53\/100g) \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\n\nSmall-batch, UK-made, cacao-rich rye clusters sweetened with upcycled British apple pulp (saved from juice makers) and a drizzle of maple syrup. Generously fortified with sunflower seeds, hazelnuts and extra virgin rapeseed oil. Quite savoury (just 11% sugar), and my best splurge for the health and eco-conscious.\n\nMorrisons the Best nuts & seed granola \u00a33 for 500g at Morrisons (60p\/100g) \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\n\nA classic granola with small clusters of oats, seeds and nuts, including pecans. Almost 20% nuts and seeds, a great ratio for this price, though it doesn\u2019t feature any dried fruit. The coconut stands out, though. Uncertified palm oil and 13% sugar.\n\nSpoon x Manilife peanut butter granola \u00a33 for 400g at Waitrose (75p\/100g) \u00a33.50 for 400g at Ocado (88p\/100g) \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\n\nSmall dark clusters of peanut-coated granola with raisins and peanuts with 13% peanut butter, too, which makes it very nutty. Contains 16% sugar, but this one is sweetened with date syrup, which has a low to moderate GI. Spoon donates 1% of turnover to planetary charities.\n\nGail\u2019s toasted coconut rye & maple granola \u00a35.50 for 350g at Waitrose (\u00a31.57\/100g) \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\n\nSmall, well-roasted clusters of oat, rye and millet, with lots of coconut and a hint of vanilla. Very sweet with muscovado sugar and maple syrup (17% sugar). No nuts, seeds or dried fruit.\n\nDorset Cereals nutty granola \u00a34 for 450g at Tesco (89p\/100g) \u00a34 for 450g at Sainsbury\u2019s (89p\/100g) \u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606\n\nSmall, medium-roast oat and rye clusters sweetened with golden syrup (13.1% sugar). No dried fruit and, at just 7.5%, scant on nuts (almond, hazelnut and cashew), too. Naturally flavoured, and with desiccated coconut.\n\nFuel10K chocolate chunks granola \u00a33 for 400g at Asda (75p\/100g) \u00a33.80 for 400g at Co-op (95p\/100g) \u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606\u2606\n\nBig, firm, crunchy oat clusters with pumpkin seeds and pieces of dark chocolate. Fortified with wheat protein (which gives it an odd taste of baby rusks) and vitamins. Contains glucose and 17.5% sugar, which seems at odds with the health messaging.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "2e921c03c7616066e5c2337ec3c6db239a1f86df",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/e9f40c376d32493da1d3a95f87f8703923029325\/464_0_4640_3712\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Trump inauguration anniversary walkouts: here\u2019s what to know",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/trump-inauguration-walkouts-explainer",
        "words": "704",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T13:00:27Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/e9f40c376d32493da1d3a95f87f8703923029325\/464_0_4640_3712\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Cecilia Nowell",
        "description": "Amid escalating ICE raids and attacks on gender-affirming care, organizers ask people to join \u2018Free America Walkout\u2019",
        "text": "On 20 January, the anniversary of Donald Trump\u2019s inauguration, grassroots organizers are calling on people across the United States to walk out of their offices, schools and businesses to protest the administration and call for \u201ca free America\u201d.\n\nIn the wake of escalating ICE raids, attacks on gender-affirming care, cuts to healthcare and the deployment of national guard troops in US cities, the organizers behind the Women\u2019s March are asking Americans to participate in the \u201cFree America Walkout\u201d.\n\nAs opposed to the large-scale weekend rallies that the Women\u2019s March became known for following Trump\u2019s first inauguration, organizers have planned a weekday walkout this year. The group says its aim is to show the administration that as it escalates its attacks \u201con our rights, our bodies, and our livelihoods\u201d, that Americans can escalate in response.\n\n\u201cWe really felt like it was important for us to have a mobilization that tested some additional tools in the toolbox,\u201d said Rachel O\u2019Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women\u2019s March. \u201cWhat will it look like if we do an action on a weekday? Where we are withdrawing our labor. Where we\u2019re refusing no shopping, no working, no commerce.\u201d\n\nAlthough the Women\u2019s March put out the call-to-action, local groups are organizing \u201cwalkout\u201d events across their communities. So far, the group has tallied more than 600 events scheduled across the United States to take place at 2pm local time on 20 January.\n\n\u201cWe are seeing people walk out and walk in \u2013 and what they\u2019re walking into are very different,\u201d said Carmona.\n\nIn Houston, she said, people are planning to walk out of school and work, and walk into their elected representatives\u2019 offices instead. Other cities are planning mutual aid events, rallies, craft and conversation circles and talks with groups like Leaving Maga. Carmon said it\u2019s important that each community assess its own needs.\n\n\u201cThe movement can only get so big if organizations are always at the center of it,\u201d she said. \u201cOur goal is always putting the people at the center of it.\u201d\n\nHow effective are walkouts? Walkouts have long been a tool of activist movements in the United States, from the civil rights movement to calls to end gun violence. In recent weeks, hundreds of students have staged walkouts in Minneapolis and other school districts in response to ICE raids in their communities.\n\nLike other organizing tools, however, it can take time to see the results.\n\nIn March 1968, around 15,000 students walked out of classrooms across East Los Angeles to protest discrimination in the education system against Chicano students. The groups that organized those protests eventually formed the Educational Issues Coordinating Committee, which went on to present a list of students\u2019 demands to the Los Angeles board of education.\n\nAlthough the Board initially rejected those demands, the walkouts created a cultural shift, showing the power of students and their commitment to racial justice in education. Over the ensuing decades, many of the students\u2019 demands would be met: schools began integrating Spanish-language instruction and Chicano history into the curriculum, the percentage of Latino teachers increased, and in 1990, William R. Anton became the first Latino superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District.\n\nOrganizers with the Women\u2019s March are eager to study how effective the Free America Walkout turns out to be, and are partnering with American University sociologist Dana Fisher, who will collect and analyze data on participation.\n\n\u201cThis is a stress test,\u201d said Carmona. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to see what we can do as a movement and what we need to continue to build on so that we can achieve the goals that we want to achieve, which is obviously driving fascism back away from American democracy.\u201d\n\nShe doesn\u2019t know what the results of Fisher\u2019s research will show, but she has a hypothesis. \u201cI go to the gym,\u201d she said. \u201cI know that practice builds muscle.\u201d\n\nBased on the number of events the Women\u2019s March has vetted and counted so far, she can say: \u201cThis is the most engagement in action we\u2019ve had in our organization\u2019s history.\u201d While many people are fretful about the state of American democracy, she says, that shows organizers that everyday people are \u201cready to lace up our boots and get out in the street\u201d.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "7530d1e6439bc9a14f4d78c468579e3d14d9b2b2",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018She had a hidden identity\u2019: new film uncovers a mother\u2019s second world war secrets",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/film\/2026\/jan\/17\/my-underground-mother-second-world-war-documentary",
        "words": "1987",
        "section": "Film",
        "date": "2026-01-17T13:00:26Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/10344ad2ac2eab1db516126bd80f0eb1157a1d8f\/80_0_1106_885\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Jim Farber",
        "description": "In harrowing documentary My Underground Mother, a woman finds out what really happened to her mother in the war",
        "text": "When journalist Marisa Fox was a young girl, her mother would regale her with stories of her own youth, all of which roiled with drama and consequence. When she was a 13-year-old girl living in Poland in the late 1930s, on the brink of the Nazi occupation, her mother told her she was pulled away from her mother and put on a boat to Palestine where she spent the rest of the second world war. As a teenager in that country, she said she became part of a radical Jewish underground group for whom she acted as a spy and a saboteur, smuggling bombs and guns which they used against the British army who ran the country at the time and who they very much wanted to force out. \u201cI was a hero,\u201d her mother would often boast, \u201cnever a victim.\u201d\n\nStories like those both dazzled and horrified the young Fox, but by the time she was nine she began to realize that certain parts of the tale didn\u2019t add up. \u201cI would say to her: \u2018Wait a minute, if you were born in 1935 and [the second world war] started in 1939, you would have been four, not 13,\u2019\u201d Fox said. \u201cWhenever I would say that, she would say: \u2018No more questions.\u2019\u201d\n\nFox never got any clearer answers from her mother before she died of colon cancer in 1993. A college student at the time, Fox not only felt loss but also bafflement. It wasn\u2019t until 2010 that she received her first glimpse of the truth. She was having tea with an elderly great-aunt who, by then, was suffering from dementia, a condition which, Fox believes, made her inadvertently blurt out: \u201cYour mother had a hidden identity,\u201d after which she darkly added: \u201cYou\u2019re not going to be happy with what you find.\u201d\n\nThat tidbit fired a mission in Fox to finally uncover the true story of her mother, a tale that turned out to be even more dramatic, troubling and sad than the one she had always been fed. That\u2019s the story that\u2019s finally being told in a revelatory new documentary directed and written by Fox, titled My Underground Mother. Through relentless sleuthing over a 15-year period during which she tracked down sources from around the world, Fox discovered that her mother had lied to her, as well as to her father, her siblings and everyone else in her adult life about key information including her true age, her real name, as well as the fact that she had actually lived in Poland for the entire duration of the war.\n\nTalking to Fox in her New York apartment as she traces her mother\u2019s complex story has an eerie resonance since they share a number of physical features. \u201cWe even wear our hair the same way,\u201d she said.\n\nThat\u2019s the reason, she now believes, her mother was so shaken when Fox entered adolescence. \u201cWhen she saw my body changing, and she saw the male gaze coming into view, she became protective in a way that went beyond the normal pale of Jewish mothers,\u201d Fox said. \u201cShe was always nervously trying to tell me to cover up. And I didn\u2019t understand it. Her relationship with me began to change and harden.\u201d\n\nFox believes her mother was triggered by her budding womanhood due to the specific circumstances of the secret part of her history. When the Nazis began their reign of terror in Poland, her mother was actually about 14 and living in a small town near the German border. Her birth mother wound up being sent to Auschwitz while she, and hundreds of the other teenage girls in the area, were taken to a forced labor camp named Gabersdorf. There, they were imprisoned and made to work back-breaking shifts to provide free labor and assets that the Nazis used to help finance the war. The first-hand testimonies Fox offers in the film couldn\u2019t be more moving, drawn from scores of women who had been at Gabersdorf who she tracked down in countries from Sweden and Australia to the US and Israel. The way she accomplished that forms the movie\u2019s main plot, creating an edge-of-your-seat experience for the viewer. The scores of women Fox found, 18 of whom made the film\u2019s final cut, were by then in their 80s and 90s. Since filming began, all but three of those women have died. \u201cWhenever I would hear about somebody relevant to the story, I would hop on a plane to speak to them,\u201d Fox said. \u201cThere was no time to waste.\u201d\n\nTracking them down was one thing, but getting them to speak about their most traumatic experiences became a psychological challenge. \u201cI had to earn their trust,\u201d the director said. \u201cA lot of them asked: \u2018Do you love your mother?\u2019 because they wanted to make sure I wasn\u2019t out to tell some salacious story. Then, there was a tension between their loyalty to my mother and however much they felt she had abandoned them by lying about her past. They didn\u2019t understand how she could do like that. These women had been everything to each other and, after the war, my mother cut them off.\u201d\n\nIn the end, the women\u2019s role as witnesses to history, as well as their earlier connection to Fox\u2019s mother, won them over. \u201cThey were curious to find out what the hell happened to their friend and why she did what she did,\u201d the director said.\n\nThe stories the women told Fox about Gabersdorf paint a picture of a harrowing place that grew exponentially worse as the war slogged on. In a coup, Fox not only had the women\u2019s riveting testimony but also a journal they created at the time, to which 60 of the girls contributed. Lines written by Fox\u2019s mother in the journal when she was a teen are among the most eloquent, imagining a defiant future beyond the camp, a sign of her deep survival instincts. \u201cMy mother was a badass, even at a young age,\u201d Fox said.\n\nCrushing and depressing as their workload and their isolation was, Fox found some fascinating nuances in the lives of certain girls through their relationships with some British PoWs who were later brought to the camp. While the Jewish girls were barely sustained, the PoWs were allowed to receive Red Cross packages, including food and chocolate which they used to entice the girls into sex. With striking honesty, the journal reveals the flings that went on between the PoWs and some of the girls. \u201cThe Diary of Anne Frank this wasn\u2019t,\u201d Fox quips in the film.\n\nTellingly, the women who speak on that subject only talk about relations experienced by other girls, never themselves. \u201cThese girls were so young, so they had no sexual experience before this,\u201d Fox said. \u201cTheir life was completely uprooted, and they were utterly dehumanized right when they were beginning to feel those raging hormones. When all of a sudden, a guy wants you, in that context it becomes exciting. Of course, sexual bartering is a war crime and perhaps some of the girls reported their agreement to the sex just to prove they had agency, but there could also be love and lust. Several of the women later married those PoWs.\u201d\n\nTwo years into their imprisonment, however, the sexual aspect of life in the camp took a far darker turn. In 1943, when the killing apparatus of the Nazis went into overdrive, SS men and women took over the camp. They instituted practices like nude inspections in which the guards would select certain women to be trafficked as sex slaves for Nazi soldiers on the eastern front. \u201cThose women who were taken from the camp were never heard from again,\u201d Fox says.\n\nOther girls at the camp were raped right there, turning the place into a kind of corollary to the \u201cJoy Division\u201d brothels at places like Auschwitz, a grotesque practice later alluded to the 1953 novella House of Dolls by the novelist and camp survivor credited as Ka-Tzetnik 135633, as well as in the name for the dark, post-punk band led by Ian Curtis in the late 1970s. In the film, Fox reveals the horrors certain girls experienced at Gabersdorf, including one who was murdered for becoming pregnant from a rape.\n\nNo record of sexual crimes by the Nazis was kept, a striking feature given the fact that the Germans left incredibly detailed documentation of their other crimes, a key reason we know so much about them. One reason the Nazis omitted sex crimes, Fox believes, was because it was illegal there for non-Jews to have sexual relations with Jews. \u201cIt was considered \u2018racial defilement\u2019,\u201d she said.\n\nIn 1945, when the war finally ended, the incidents of rape didn\u2019t cease. The Russian liberators at Gabersdorf violated the girls as well. Even after Fox\u2019s mother made it to Italy on her way to Palestine, one man tried to use sexual coercion as payment for his aid.\n\nGiven her mother\u2019s treatment in Poland, when she finally got to Palestine, she wanted to remake herself and she joined an insurrectionist movement that, eventually, had a hand in the creation of the state of Israel. Though her mother always saw herself as a freedom fighter, Fox says it wouldn\u2019t be unfair to consider her a terrorist. \u201cThese people were taking the law into their own hands,\u201d she said.\n\nAfter Israel was established, survivors of the Holocaust were often looked upon in the country with suspicion and condescension or seen as damaged goods. For that reason and others, Fox\u2019s mother came to the US hoping to create a life far removed from both her time at a camp and as a bomb-carrying subversive. After getting financial help from an American uncle to emigrate, she married in the 1950s and raised a family in New York. While she would often talk proudly to her daughter about her time as an outlaw in Palestine, not a syllable was ever spoken about the great drama that came before, a decision that could be seen by some fellow survivors as its own kind of Holocaust denial. In a similar way, when her mother was told she had cancer in the 1990s, she ordered her family never to tell a soul. \u201cOne of her biggest worries was to be seen as a figure of pity,\u201d Fox said. \u201cShe never wanted to be seen as a victim of any kind.\u201d\n\nAs to why she sustained her lies throughout her life, even to her husband, Fox can only speculate. \u201cThere were probably many layers of shame in her,\u201d she said. \u201cShame about having survived the camp, shame about whatever sexual abuse she experienced, which I can never know for sure, and shame about discovering at one point that she had been a love child, which was why she had changed her name.\u201d\n\nFox admits to having experienced doubts about revealing secrets her mother fought her whole life to conceal. \u201cMy brothers said: \u2018Doesn\u2019t mom have a right to retain her privacy?\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cBut at the end of the day, who wants to hide from themselves? You only do that because you feel bad about something that happened to you, something so horrific that you feel that people won\u2019t understand. Clearly, she never came to peace with that, but I feel like deep down my mother would have liked to have told me. Don\u2019t we all want to be at peace with who we are?\u201d\n\nBeyond her own story, Fox believes her mother\u2019s saga can also help others. \u201cI made this film so women who survive these horrific experiences during war don\u2019t feel guilty,\u201d she said. \u201cShame needs to change sides. The shame doesn\u2019t belong to the women. It belongs to the men who did this to them.\u201d\n\nMy Underground Mother is screening at the New York Jewish film festival on 19 and 20 January before a wider release later this year\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "9aa96b6e9726d90ec6a91ee554d65855e2a14d78",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/17e659fb2071de799fb42fdf967b51101ecca587\/223_0_3098_2479\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "My picture was used in child abuse images. AI is putting others through my nightmare",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2026\/jan\/17\/child-abuse-images-ai-exploitation",
        "words": "1838",
        "section": "Opinion",
        "date": "2026-01-17T12:00:27Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/17e659fb2071de799fb42fdf967b51101ecca587\/223_0_3098_2479\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Mara Wilson",
        "description": "I was a child actor, exploited by strangers on the internet. Now millions of children face the same danger",
        "text": "When I was a little girl, there was nothing scarier than a stranger.\n\nIn the late 1980s and early 1990s, kids were told, by our parents, by TV specials, by teachers, that there were strangers out there who wanted to hurt us. \u201cStranger Danger\u201d was everywhere. It was a well-meaning lesson, but the risk was overblown: most child abuse and exploitation is perpetrated by people the children know. It\u2019s much rarer for children to be abused or exploited by strangers.\n\nRarer, but not impossible. I know, because I was sexually exploited by strangers.\n\nFrom ages five to 13, I was a child actor. And while as of late we\u2019ve heard many horror stories about the abusive things that happened to child actors behind the scenes, I always felt safe while filming. Filmsets were highly regulated spaces where people wanted to get work done. I had supportive parents, and was surrounded by directors, actors, and studio teachers who understood and cared for children.\n\nThe only way show business did endanger me was by putting me in the public eye. Any cruelty and exploitation I received as a child actor was at the hands of the public.\n\n\u201cHollywood throws you into the pool,\u201d I always tell people, \u201cbut it\u2019s the public that holds your head underwater.\u201d\n\nBefore I was even in high school, my image had been used for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). I\u2019d been featured on fetish websites and Photoshopped into pornography. Grown men sent me creepy letters. I wasn\u2019t a beautiful girl \u2013 my awkward age lasted from about age 10 to about 25 \u2013 and I acted almost exclusively in family-friendly movies. But I was a public figure, so I was accessible. That\u2019s what child sexual predators look for: access. And nothing made me more accessible than the internet.\n\nIt didn\u2019t matter that those images \u201cweren\u2019t me\u201d, or that the fetish sites were \u201ctechnically\u201d legal. It was a painful, violating experience; a living nightmare I hoped no other child would have to go through. Once I was an adult, I worried about the other kids who had followed after me. Were similar things happening to the Disney stars, the Strangers Things cast, the preteens making TikTok dances and smiling in family vlogger YouTube channels? I wasn\u2019t sure I wanted to know the answer.\n\nWhen generative AI started to pick up a few years ago, I feared the worst. I\u2019d heard stories of \u201cdeepfakes\u201d, and knew the technology was getting exponentially more realistic.\n\nThen it happened \u2013 or at least, the world noticed that it had happened. Generative AI has already been used many times to create sexualized images of adult women without their consent. It happened to friends of mine. But recently, it was reported that X\u2019s AI tool Grok had been used, quite openly, to generate undressed images of an underage actor. Weeks earlier, a girl was expelled from school for hitting a classmate who allegedly made deepfake porn of her, according to her family\u2019s lawyers. She was 13, about the same age I was when people were making fake sexualized images of me.\n\nIn July 2024, the Internet Watch Foundation found more than 3,500 images of AI-generated CSAM on a dark web forum. How many more thousands have been made in the year and a half since then?\n\nGenerative AI has reinvented Stranger Danger. And this time, the fear is justified. It is now infinitely easier for any child whose face has been posted on the internet to be sexually exploited. Millions of children could be forced to live my same nightmare.\n\nIn order to stop the threat of a deepfake apocalypse, we need to look at how AI is trained.\n\nGenerative AI \u201clearns\u201d by a repeated process of \u201clook, make, compare, update, repeat\u201d, says Patrick LaVictoire, a mathematician and former AI safety researcher. It creates models based on things it\u2019s memorized, but it can\u2019t memorize everything, so it has to look for patterns, and base its responses on that. \u201cA connection that\u2019s useful gets reinforced,\u201d says LaVictoire. \u201cOne that\u2019s less so, or actively unhelpful, gets pruned.\u201d\n\nWhat generative AI can create depends on the materials the AI has been trained on. A study at Stanford University in 2023 showed that one of the most popular training datasets already contained more than 1,000 instances of CSAM. The links to CSAM have since been removed from the dataset, but the researchers have emphasized that another threat is CSAM made by combining images of children with pornographic images, which is possible if both are in the training data.\n\nGoogle and OpenAI claim to have safeguards in place to protect against the creation of CSAM: for instance, by taking care with the data they use to train their AI platforms. (It\u2019s also worth noting that many adult film actors and sex workers have had their images scraped for AI without their consent.)\n\nGenerative AI itself, says LaVictoire, has no way of distinguishing between innocuous and silly commands such as \u201cmake an image of a Jedi samurai\u201d and harmful commands, such as \u201cundress this celebrity\u201d. So another safeguard incorporates a different kind of AI that acts similarly to a spam filter, which can block those queries from being answered. xAI, which runs Grok, seems to have been careless with that filter.\n\nAnd the worst may be yet to come: Meta and other companies have proposed that future AI models be open source. \u201cOpen source\u201d means anyone can access the code behind it, download it and edit it as they please. What is usually wonderful about open-source software \u2013 the freedom it gives users to create new things, prioritizing creativity and collaboration over profit \u2013 could be a disaster for children\u2019s safety.\n\nOnce someone downloaded an open-source AI platform and made it their own, there would be no safeguards, no AI bot saying that it couldn\u2019t help with their request. Anyone could \u201cfine-tune\u201d their own personal image generator using explicit or illegal images, and make their own infinite CSAM and \u201crevenge porn\u201d generator.\n\nMeta seems to have stepped back from making its newer AI platforms open source. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg remembered that he wants to be like the Roman emperor Augustus, and that if he continued down this path, he might be remembered more as the Oppenheimer of CSAM.\n\nSome countries are already fighting against this. China was the first to enact a law that requires AI content to be labelled as such. Denmark is working on legislation that would give citizens the copyright to their appearances and voices, and would impose fines on AI platforms that don\u2019t respect that. In other parts of Europe, and in the UK, people\u2019s images may be protected by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).\n\nThe outlook in the United States seems much grimmer. Copyright claims aren\u2019t going to help, because when a user uploads an image to a platform, they can use it however they see fit; it\u2019s in nearly every Terms of Service agreement. With executive orders against the regulation of generative AI and companies such as xAI signing contracts with the US military, the US government has shown that making money with AI is far more important than keeping citizens safe.\n\nThere has been some recent legislation \u201cthat makes a lot of this digital manipulation criminal\u201d, says Akiva Cohen, a New York City litigator. \u201cBut also, a lot of those statutes are probably overly restrictive in what exactly they cover.\u201d\n\nFor example, while making a deepfake of someone that makes them appear nude or engaged in a sexual act could be grounds for criminal charges, using AI to put a woman \u2013 and likely even an underage girl \u2013 into a bikini probably would not.\n\n\u201cA lot of this very consciously stays just on the \u2018horrific, but legal\u2019 side of the line,\u201d says Cohen.\n\nMaybe it\u2019s not criminal \u2013 that is to say, a crime against the state, but Cohen argues it could be a civil liability, a violation of another person\u2019s rights, for which a victim requires restitution. He suggests that this falls under a \u201cfalse light, invasion of privacy\u201d tort, a civil wrong in which offensive claims are made about a person, showing them in a false light, \u201cdepicting someone in a way that shows them doing something they didn\u2019t do\u201d.\n\n\u201cThe way that you can really deter this type of conduct is by imposing liability on the companies that are enabling this,\u201d Cohen says.\n\nThere\u2019s legal precedent for that: the Raise Act in New York, and Senate Bill 53 in California, say that AI companies can be held accountable for harms they have done past a certain point. X, meanwhile, will now block Grok from making sexualized images of real people on the platform. But it appears that policy change doesn\u2019t apply to the stand-alone Grok app.\n\nBut Josh Saviano, a former practicing attorney in New York, as well as a former child actor, believes more immediate actions need to be taken, in addition to legislation.\n\n\u201cLobbying efforts and our courts are eventually going to be the way that this is handled,\u201d says Saviano. \u201cBut until that happens, there are two options: abstain entirely, which means take your entire digital footprint off the internet \u2026 or you need to find a technological solution. \u201c\n\nEnsuring the safety of young people is of paramount importance to Saviano, who has known people who\u2019ve had deepfakes of them, and \u2013 as a former child actor \u2013 knows a little about losing control of one\u2019s own narrative. Saviano and his team have been working on a tool that could detect and notify people when their images or creative work are being scraped. The team\u2019s motto, he says, is: \u201cProtect the babies.\u201d\n\nRegardless of how it may happen, I believe that protection against this threat is going to take a lot of effort from the public.\n\nThere are many who are starting to feel an affinity with their AI chatbots, but for most people, tech companies are nothing more than utilities. We may prefer one app over another for personal or political reasons, but few feel strong loyalty to tech brands. Tech companies, and especially social media platforms like Meta and X, would do well to remember that they are a means to an end. And if someone like me \u2013 who was on Twitter all day, everyday, for more than a decade \u2013 can quit it, anyone can.\n\nBut boycotts aren\u2019t enough. We need to be the ones demanding companies that allow the creation of CSAM be held accountable. We need to be demanding legislation and technological safeguards. We also need to examine our own actions: nobody wants to think that if they share photos of their child, those images could end up in CSAM. But it is a risk, one that parents need to protect their young children from, and warn their older children about.\n\nIf our obsession with Stranger Danger showed anything, it\u2019s that most of us want to prevent child endangerment and harassment. It\u2019s time to prove it.\n\nMara Wilson is a writer and actor living in Los Angeles\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "91620ccd3684f4421197f74a701bdad8fdbbbb79",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018We could hit a wall\u2019: why trillions of dollars of risk is no guarantee of AI reward",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2026\/jan\/17\/why-trillions-dollars-risk-no-guarantee-ai-reward",
        "words": "1433",
        "section": "Technology",
        "date": "2026-01-17T12:00:27Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/a0eef0b4544b41b055733e7d0826315830269b70\/547_0_5468_4374\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Dan Milmo",
        "description": "Progress of artificial general intelligence could stall, which may lead to a financial crash, says Yoshua Bengio, one of the \u2018godfathers\u2019 of modern AI",
        "text": "Will the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) lead us to a land of financial plenty \u2013 or will it end in a 2008-style bust? Trillions of dollars rest on the answer.\n\nThe figures are staggering: an estimated $2.9tn (\u00a32.2tn) being spent on datacentres, the central nervous systems of AI tools; the more than $4tn stock market capitalisation of Nvidia, the company that makes the chips powering cutting-edge AI systems; and the $100m signing-on bonuses offered by Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Meta to top engineers at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.\n\nThese sky-high numbers are all propped up by investors who expect a return on their trillions. AGI, a theoretical state of AI where systems gain human levels of intelligence across an array of tasks and are able to replace humans in white-collar jobs such as accountancy and law, is a keystone of this financial promise.\n\nIt offers the prospect of computer systems carrying out profitable work without the associated cost of human labour \u2013 a hugely lucrative scenario for companies developing the technology and the customers who deploy it.\n\nThere will be consequences if AI companies fall short: US stock markets, boosted heavily by the performance of tech stocks, could fall and cause damage to people\u2019s personal wealth; debt markets wrapped up in the datacentre boom could suffer a jolt that ripples elsewhere; GDP growth in the US, which has benefited from the AI infrastructure, could falter, which would have knock-on effects for interlinked economies.\n\nDavid Cahn, a partner at one leading Silicon Valley investment firm, Sequoia Capital, says tech companies now have to deliver on AGI.\n\n\u201cNothing short of AGI will be enough to justify the investments now being proposed for the coming decade,\u201d he wrote in a blog published in October.\n\nIt means there is a lot hanging on progress towards advanced AI, and the trillions being poured into infrastructure and R&D to achieve it. One of the \u201cgodfathers\u201d of modern AI, Yoshua Bengio, says the progress of AGI could stall and the outcome would be bad for investors.\n\n\u201cThere is a clear possibility that we will hit a wall, that there\u2019s some difficulty that we don\u2019t foresee right now, and we don\u2019t find any solution quickly,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that could be a real [financial] crash. A lot of the people who are putting trillions right now into AI are also expecting the advances to continue fairly regularly at the current pace.\u201d\n\nBut Bengio, a prominent voice on the safety implications of AGI, is clear that continued progress towards a highly advanced state of AI is the more likely endgame.\n\n\u201cAdvances stalling is a minority scenario, like it\u2019s an unlikely scenario. The more likely scenario is we continue to move forward,\u201d he says.\n\nThe pessimistic view is that investors are backing an unrealistic outcome \u2013 that AGI will not happen without further breakthroughs.\n\nDavid Bader, the director of the institute for data science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, says trillions of dollars are being spent on scaling up \u2013 tech jargon for growing something quickly \u2013 the underlying technology for chatbots, known as transformers, in the expectation that increasing the amount of computing power behind current AI systems, by building more datacentres, will suffice.\n\n\u201cIf AGI requires a fundamentally different approach, perhaps something we haven\u2019t yet conceived, then we\u2019re optimising an architecture that can\u2019t get us there no matter how large we make it. It\u2019s like trying to reach the moon by building taller ladders,\u201d he says.\n\nNonetheless, big US tech companies such as Google\u2019s parent Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft are ploughing ahead with datacentre plans with the financial cushion of being able to fund their AGI ambitions through the cash generated by their hugely profitable day-to-day businesses. This at least gives them some protection if the wall outlined by Bengio and Bader comes into view.\n\nBut there are other more worrying aspects to the boom. Analysts at Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank, estimate that $2.9tn will be spent on datacentres between now and 2028, with half of that covered by the cashflow from \u201chyperscalers\u201d such as Alphabet and Microsoft.\n\nThe rest will have to be covered by alternative sources such as private credit, a corner of the shadow banking sector that is activating alarm bells at the Bank of England and elsewhere. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has borrowed $29bn from the private credit market to finance a datacentre in Louisiana.\n\nAI-related sectors account for approximately 15% of investment grade debt in the US, which is even bigger than the banking sector, according to the investment bank JP Morgan.\n\nOracle, which has signed a $300bn datacentre deal with OpenAI, has had an increase in credit default swaps, which are a form of insurance on a company defaulting on its debts. High-yield, or \u201cjunk debt\u201d, which represents the higher-risk end of the borrowing market, is also appearing in the AI sector via datacentre operators CoreWeave and TeraWulf. Growth is also being funded by asset-backed securities \u2013 a form of debt underpinned by assets such as loans or credit card debt, but in this case rent paid by tech companies to datacentre owners \u2013 in a form of financing that has risen sharply in recent years.\n\nIt is no wonder that JP Morgan says the AI infrastructure boom will require a contribution from all corners of the credit market.\n\nBader says: \u201cIf AGI doesn\u2019t materialise on expected timelines, we could see contagion across multiple debt markets simultaneously \u2013 investment-grade bonds, high-yield junk debt, private credit and securitised products \u2013 all of which are being tapped to fund this buildout.\u201d\n\nShare prices linked to AI and tech are also playing an outsized role in US stock markets. The so-called \u201cmagnificent 7\u201d of US tech stocks \u2013 Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia \u2013 account for more than a third of the value of the S&P 500 index, the biggest stock market index in the US, compared with 20% at the start of the decade.\n\nIn October the Bank of England warned of \u201cthe risk of a sharp correction\u201d in US and UK markets due to giddy valuations of AI-linked tech companies. Central bankers are concerned stock markets could slump if AI fails to reach the transformative heights investors are hoping for. At the same time the International Monetary Fund said valuations were heading towards dotcom bubble-levels.\n\nEven tech execs whose companies are benefiting from the boom are acknowledging the speculative nature of the frenzy. In November Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet, said there are \u201celements of irrationality\u201d in the boom and that \u201cno company is going to be immune\u201d if the bubble bursts, while Amazon\u2019s founder, Jeff Bezos, has said the AI industry is in a \u201ckind of industrial bubble\u201d, and OpenAI\u2019s chief executive, Sam Altman, has said \u201cthere are many parts of AI that I think are kind of bubbly right now.\u201d\n\nAll three, to be clear, are AI optimists and expect the technology to keep improving and benefit society.\n\nBut when the numbers get this big there are obvious risks in a bubble bursting, as Pichai admits. Pension funds and anyone invested in the stock market will be affected by a share price collapse, while the debt markets will also take a hit. There is also a web of \u201ccircular\u201d deals, such as OpenAI paying Nvidia in cash for chips, and Nvidia will invest in OpenAI for non-controlling shares. If these transactions unravel due to a lack of take-up of AI, or that wall being hit, then it could be messy.\n\nThere are also optimists who argue that generative AI, the catch-all term for tools such as chatbots and video generators, will transform whole industries and justify the expenditure. Benedict Evans, a technology analyst, says the expenditure numbers are not outrageous in the context of other industries, such as oil and gas extraction which runs at $600bn a year.\n\n\u201cThese AI capex figures are a lot of money but it\u2019s not an impossible amount of money,\u201d he says.\n\nEvans adds: \u201cYou don\u2019t have to believe in AGI to believe that generative AI is a big thing. And most of what is happening here is not, \u2018oh wow they\u2019re going to create God\u2019. It\u2019s \u2018this is going to completely change how advertising, search, software and social networks \u2013 and everything else our business is based on \u2013 is going to work\u2019. It\u2019s going to be a huge opportunity.\u201d\n\nNonetheless, there is a multitrillion dollar expectation that AGI will be achieved. For many experts, the consequences of getting there are alarming. The cost of not getting there could also be significant.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "f3dce41068a0e6de5d99473ab5efb868b796d109",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/7a606ec26cf1fd92e452d0b035fce74eea0e16f3\/888_0_8250_6600\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018It took time to love my soft, larger shape\u2019: the body-positive writer who recovered from an eating disorder",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/lifeandstyle\/2026\/jan\/17\/body-positive-writer-recovered-eating-disorder",
        "words": "599",
        "section": "Life and style",
        "date": "2026-01-17T12:00:26Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/7a606ec26cf1fd92e452d0b035fce74eea0e16f3\/888_0_8250_6600\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Kate Lloyd",
        "description": "Megan Jayne Crabbe was diagnosed with anorexia at 14. When she hit her \u2018goal weight\u2019 and still didn\u2019t feel happy, a supportive online community showed her a new way to live",
        "text": "Megan Jayne Crabbe\u2019s transformation goes beyond the physical. \u201cMy \u2018before\u2019 was trying to make myself as small as possible in every conceivable way: my body, voice, emotions, opinions,\u201d she says. \u201cMy \u2018after\u2019 is allowing myself to be my biggest self, however that looks.\u201d\n\nCrabbe, 31, became aware of diets before she turned 10. As she entered puberty that intensified and she became fixated on magazine articles about how to change her body, eating as little as possible as a way to manage anxiety about school and growing up.\n\nAt 14 Crabbe was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphia: \u201cI was convinced I was fat and disgusting and needed to lose more weight.\u201d For years she concealed how unwell she was, until the physical symptoms became impossible to ignore. Her body began shutting down \u2013 severe fatigue, low blood pressure, hearing loss and dizziness: \u201cThere\u2019s hair that grows all over your body, because it\u2019s trying to keep itself warm.\u201d\n\nShe spent several months between mental health facilities and hospital. At her lowest point, after her parents were warned her body could fail at any moment, she was hospitalised and fed through a tube. \u201cIn that time where your eating disorder is saying to you, \u2018You have to stay in control\u2019, having that taken away is torturous.\u201d\n\nThe first shift towards recovery came when her father, usually stoic, broke down in tears. \u201cSeeing the pain my eating disorder had caused him was a massive jolt for me,\u201d she says. She committed to recovery with the same \u201call or nothing\u201d mindset that had once fuelled her anorexia. \u201cI covered up all the mirrors in the house because I didn\u2019t want to see my body changing, and I couldn\u2019t eat in front of other people yet, but I ate meals by myself.\u201d\n\nBy 17, she was declared recovered. \u201cNot the case,\u201d she says. \u201cI was sent back into the world in this newly soft, larger body, and I didn\u2019t know what to do with that. I fell straight back into the diet culture trap.\u201d\n\nThe turning point came at 21. \u201cI had been crash dieting all summer, had reached my elusive \u2018goal weight\u2019 and I still hated everything about how I looked. Something started to click in my brain of, \u2018Wait, this isn\u2019t working.\u2019\u201d\n\nShe discovered the online body positive community \u2013 \u201cPeople of all shapes and sizes saying, I\u2019m not dieting, not hating my body, I\u2019m wearing what I want, living my life\u201d \u2013 and a decade on is one of its leading voices. She\u2019s seen grinning in a swimming costume in Little Mix\u2019s Strip video, celebrating her body\u2019s softness on Instagram and has written books on self\u2011empowerment. Getting here took reshaping her cultural environment: setting boundaries with friends who talked about weight loss, disengaging from influencers who triggered shame, and reading books such as The Beauty Myth and Health at Every Size.\n\n\u201cI started realising the problem was not me. The problem was how we are taught to see ourselves.\u201d Reconnecting with her body became central to healing: relearning hunger and fullness cues and moving for enjoyment. \u201cMy eating disorder years were trying to detach from my body and feel nothing. And now the goal is to be with my body and listen to her.\n\n\u201cIf I look back at my ancestors, this is the body they had. I\u2019m strong. I\u2019m fit. I can do everything I want to, and I can also enjoy food as a nice part of my life that I don\u2019t obsess over.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "e242d1f6e183d649e995f4de1c69a739a50f1e2b",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/cda5eeee46c37e6541b14f7ae86f71babd2e3f17\/80_218_2101_1680\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "UK supermarkets go all out for \u2018Jab-uary\u2019 with food for those on weight-loss drugs",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/business\/2026\/jan\/17\/uk-supermarkets-go-all-out-for-jab-uary-with-food-for-those-on-weight-loss-drugs",
        "words": "971",
        "section": "Business",
        "date": "2026-01-17T12:00:26Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/cda5eeee46c37e6541b14f7ae86f71babd2e3f17\/80_218_2101_1680\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Zoe Wood",
        "description": "M&S, Morrisons and Ocado among retailers bringing out ranges targeting shoppers taking Wegovy or similar",
        "text": "Veganuary and dry January are among the new year health kicks enthusiastically endorsed by supermarkets, but this year the buzz is around \u201cJab-uary\u201d as pricey diet foods aimed at people on weight-loss drugs hit the shelves.\n\nMarks & Spencer, Morrisons, Asda, Ocado and the Co-op are among the big names targeting shoppers who use weight-loss injections, known as GLP-1 agonists, but better known by brand names such as Wegovy and Mounjaro.\n\nOcado\u2019s new virtual \u201cweight management\u201d aisle includes a \u201ccurated range of GLP-1-friendly products\u201d that runs the gamut from tiny (100g) portions of steak costing \u00a33.50 to a trendy \u201cpowdered greens\u201d supplement, AG1, at \u00a3107 a pack.\n\nThe online supermarket said it was seeing strong demand for protein-rich staples such as steak, chicken, cottage cheese, health drinks and vitamins and supplements.\n\nOcado also sells M&S\u2019s new \u201cNutrient Dense\u201d range of meals, snacks and drinks that it says contain \u201chigh amounts of nutrients per calorie\u201d. The \u00a37 chicken satay ready meal and \u00a32 coconut water shot \u201cH\u2085O\u201d, it says, are ideal for people \u201creducing their food intake\u201d. Meanwhile, the Co-op is plugging \u201cmini meals\u201d \u2013 250g-280g pots \u201cinspired by global cuisines\u201d costing \u00a33.50 a go.\n\nAbout 6% of UK adults are thought to be taking GLP-1 drugs, said Jonny Forsyth, a senior analyst at the market research company Mintel. However, he argues the hype around them is having an \u201coutsize influence\u201d on consumer behaviour and amplifying other diet trends, such as eating high protein foods.\n\nIn the recent flurry of Christmas trading updates, some big high street names said the drugs were starting to change how people shopped. This included eating fewer sausage rolls, and Roisin Currie, the Greggs chief executive, commented that people were looking for \u201csmaller portions\u201d and healthier options.\n\nSainsbury\u2019s has also spotted new behaviour. \u201cFor customers using these products, we\u2019re seeing more of that switch into healthier choices, into fresh food, into fibre,\u201d said its chief executive, Simon Roberts. This month the grocer introduced more low-calorie and high-protein ready meals. The 300g \u201cSmall but Mighty\u201d range includes dishes such as teriyaki chicken and costs \u00a33.\n\nKen Murphy, the Tesco chief executive, said the supermarket was watching \u201cvery closely\u201d how the GLP-1 trend was developing.\n\nIndeed, while total UK grocery sales rose 2.5% in value terms over the four weeks to 27 December, the amount of food and drink sold declined 0.2% on a volume basis, according to the market researcher NielsenIQ.\n\nFor food and hospitality businesses the fear is that the widespread uptake of these drugs could put a dent in profits. A 2024 Cornell University study found households with at least one GLP-1 user cut their grocery spend by 5.3% within six months, while for higher-income households it was 8.2%.\n\nAlthough there were declines in most food categories over the period studied, in some areas they were marked, with savoury snacks such as crisps down 10.1% and an 8% drop in spending at fast-food chains and coffee shops. In the US almost 20% of adults are taking weight-loss drugs.\n\nHowever, can supermarkets turn small portions into a virtue, given consumers are fed up with shrinkflation (where shoppers get less product for the same or higher price)? There is also a question mark over whether people want ranges with \u201cGLP-1\u201d stamped on the front as they may not be open about the fact they are using medication.\n\nThe Morrisons \u201cGLP-1 friendly\u201d own-label ready meals, which include a chicken casserole, weigh just 280g but cost the same as dishes in its other diet ranges. The \u00a33.75 price is fairly typical in ready meals, but if one compares the price per kilo it is a different story, said Charlotte Derra, fast-moving consumer goods category consultant.\n\n\u201cMorrisons Counted and Protein ranges are the same price for typically 380g v the 280g GLP-1 friendly range,\u201d she said. \u201cAt \u00a30.99 v \u00a31.34 per 100g for the GLP-1 friendly ranges this is at a 35% price premium.\u201d The M&S Nutrient Dense ready meals come in 400g packs and cost \u00a37 (\u00a31.75\/100g), which she said was within typical ready meal pack sizes.\n\nM&S, Co-op and Iceland have \u201crightly\u201d avoided explicitly mentioning GLP-1 drugs on the front of packs, Forsyth said. \u201cThis is smart marketing because we know from our data that if you group people into a club, such as Weight Watchers, where people feel there is a stigma attached to belonging, you restrict your potential audience.\u201d\n\nThe M&S range is the \u201cmost likely to do well because its user base are among the minority of Brits who can afford to pay for these drugs privately\u201d added Forsyth, who found it \u201cbizarre\u201d that Greggs had said the drugs were hitting sales. \u201cI suspect it has more to do with people cutting back on discretionary food spend in response to much higher food prices since 2022. Even Greggs\u2019 iconic sausage roll has soared in price by 30%,\u201d he said.\n\nThe GLP-1 ready meals in Morrisons mean it is now sells four healthy chicken tikka masala dishes. However, in a cutthroat UK grocery market worth \u00a3250bn a year, food market product developers are under pressure to react, given the outlook for some food categories is \u201cpretty bleak\u201d, said Mark Whalley, a co-founder of the video insights company Explners.\n\n\u201cUK supermarket retail is dominated by everybody worrying that the other guys are on to something,\u201d he said. The hard part will be convincing shoppers: \u201cBeing small is in itself a benefit. That\u2019s what they\u2019re effectively saying when the price doesn\u2019t go down with the portion size.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s just whether there\u2019s an actual need for these products, or whether people could just eat a little bit less of the products that they already buy. Does it specifically need a new product, an extra thing on shelf that\u2019s just 100g smaller?\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "e344ea0e0985c0d19678107dd23234fb6073003e",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/5eadfad04df946709186bbd1cefc31d73d53dbc5\/303_0_4549_3640\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Stress-free travel: plan now to avoid holiday scams and pitfalls",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/money\/2026\/jan\/17\/stress-free-travel-plan-now-to-avoid-holiday-scams-and-pitfalls",
        "words": "1634",
        "section": "Money",
        "date": "2026-01-17T12:00:25Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/5eadfad04df946709186bbd1cefc31d73d53dbc5\/303_0_4549_3640\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Zoe Wood and Shane Hickey",
        "description": "Top tips on holiday booking essentials, from how to pay to what insurance to buy and when",
        "text": "It\u2019s chilly and the days are short, so, to beat the January blues, many people\u2019s thoughts are turning to holidays.\n\nAlthough the high cost of living is continuing to put a strain on household finances, for many the annual getaway to somewhere sunny is sacrosanct, with travel companies predicting a 5% rise in bookings this year.\n\nIf you haven\u2019t yet booked a break, but are sizing up your options, here is what to do to make sure you get your money back if something goes wrong.\n\nPackage or DIY? While it can feel more adventurous to put together your own itinerary via different websites, it is hard to beat a package holiday for the peace of mind it provides.\n\nAll UK companies selling holidays including flights must be signed up to the Air Travel Organisers\u2019 Licensing (Atol) scheme. To get its protection, you need to book a combined flight and hotel package with a UK-based firm. (Atol is not travel insurance, so it will not cover you if you fall ill and cannot travel).\n\nGuy Hobbs, a travel expert at consumer group Which?, says: \u201cThere is nothing wrong with putting your own itinerary together, but it is good to be aware of risks.\u201d\n\nHe adds: \u201cIn the summer of 2024 and spring 2025 we searched Booking.com reviews for the word \u2018scam\u2019 and found hundreds of people from the past few months complaining that they\u2019d paid for accommodation that didn\u2019t exist.\u201d (Booking.com provided a detailed response to the allegations and said cybersecurity was a top priority.)\n\nSays Hobbs: \u201cWe always recommend booking a package holiday as the Atol scheme ensures you won\u2019t be left out of pocket or, worse, stranded abroad if your holiday company were to go bust.\u201d\n\nIf you opt for a package, you will be covered financially and legally by the Package Travel Regulations, which means the holiday operator is responsible for sorting out any problems, from disruption caused by wildfires, to the hotel not being up to scratch.\n\nSome people turn their noses up at the idea of a package holiday, but if you buy two big elements of a holiday \u2013 flights and accommodation, for example \u2013 in a single transaction, from the same travel company, it\u2019s a package. How adventurous that package is, is up to you \u2013 it could be cruising the Med from the safety of a sun lounger or cycling across Sri Lanka on a guided tour.\n\nThis means you can book an Atol-protected break though an online travel agent such as Expedia or Lastminute.com, but be careful when you put together the itinerary, and read through the site\u2019s policy carefully.\n\nThe Lastminute.com site spells out its policy. Your \u201cbooking is protected under the Atol scheme when it includes flights and accommodation booked together as a flight + hotel package (ie, a city break or a holiday). Additionally, flight and car rental bookings are also covered, when both of these products are booked in the same transaction. If you do receive an Atol certificate, but not all of the products you have booked in the transaction are listed on it, then the missing products are not Atol-protected.\u201d\n\nFor cruises and package holidays without a flight, look for the safety net provided by a travel association such as Abta. The operating name of the Association of British Travel Agents, it provides some financial protection if you make a booking and the travel company goes bust. Another option is the Travel Trust Association.\n\nAbta members sign up to a code of conduct, and if you have a complaint and can\u2019t resolve it directly with the company, you can turn to its dispute resolution service.\n\nFor those who prefer to book the different elements of a holiday \u2013 flights, transfers, accommodation \u2013 themselves for flexibility, you can get extra protection, mainly by using a credit card to pay (more on this later).\n\nWhat it will cost A consumer poll issued by Nationwide this month found that despite more than half (54%) being concerned about the cost of living, travel is a \u201ctop priority\u201d for Britons in 2026.\n\nThey plan to spend, on average, \u00a35,517 a year on longer trips and \u00a32,348 on short trips, according to the survey.\n\nIf cost is the deciding factor, then Spain\u2019s Costa Blanca, best-known for its sandy beaches and resorts such as Benidorm and Alicante, is the cheapest choice for a peak-summer holiday in Europe, according to Which? Travel\u2019s price check of more than 5,000 holidays.\n\nIt is the only trip that costs less than \u00a3900 a person, on average, for a week in August, it found. But two other regions of mainland Spain \u2013 the Costa Brava and Costa Dorada \u2013 made its top 10, at \u00a31,125 pp and \u00a31,133 pp, respectively. Six of the 10 locations are in Spain.\n\nIt\u2019s hard to avoid the January sales hype, but the consumer organisation says it may pay to wait. It tracked more than 40,000 summer package holiday prices this time last year and found that, on average, they actually came down after January. July was the cheapest month to book in August for popular destinations, including France and Turkey.\n\nThere is no certainty the same will happen this year \u2013 not least because of the apparent increased demand \u2013 and if you wait, the risk is that there might be less choice.\n\nHow to pay If you can, the best option is to use a credit card. Although holiday firms and hotel chains increasingly offer buy now, pay later (BNPL), using this option can mean missing out on vital financial protection.\n\nIf you pay with a credit card, section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act means that if a purchase between \u00a3100 and \u00a330,000 goes wrong, the credit card provider is jointly liable with the retailer.\n\nThis cover is not there if you pay by debit card, though you may be able to get a refund via the chargeback scheme. If you make a bank transfer, neither applies.With BNPL, if there is a problem, you will usually have to chase the retailer or travel company yourself. It is worth checking if the firm has a dispute process, but these aren\u2019t as robust or guaranteed as section 75.\n\nIf an airline goes bust, and you have booked directly with it, you can at least get your money back from the card company. But to get section 75 protection, you have to have paid the supplier directly.\n\nYou don\u2019t get it if you used an online travel agent to make a flight-only booking.\n\nIs it refundable? Most package holidays are refundable, but there is a sliding scale in terms of how much money you will get back depending on how close to the departure date it is.\n\nFor example, with Jet2holidays if you cancel 70 days or more before departure you lose the deposit. However, the firm keeps a bigger percentage of the holiday cost the closer it gets, and if it is under a fortnight, you lose all your money.\n\nIf you have booked the flight yourself, the flight will often be non-refundable if you do not travel. Ryanair will not refund you if you cancel, and you will have to pay \u00a345 a flight, for each person, as well as the difference in cost to rebook (if the new flight costs more).\n\nMeanwhile, easyJet lets you cancel within 24 hours of booking, but you must pay a \u00a349 fee.\n\nBooking.com and Expedia are among the sites that let you search for hotels and apartments offering free cancellation, which may appeal to some who worry that their plans could be affected by life events during the year.\n\nThe cutoff time for when this ends will vary \u2013 typically from one to two weeks, to up to 24 hours before check-in. And usually you pay more for this flexibility.\n\nWe went on to Booking.com and looked at hotels in central Amsterdam that advertised various rates for the same room based on whether you chose free cancellation, or a non-refundable booking. The premium for free cancellation for a weekend break around Valentine\u2019s Day varied widely, from 4% to 40%, so shop around. Some may feel a small premium is worth peace of mind.\n\nA big advantage of selecting free cancellation is that you can keep checking the websites and switch to a new deal if the price falls, or you find something cheaper. This strategy can also work with things such as car hire.\n\nBuy insurance, quick Arguably the biggest mistake people make is to book an expensive holiday and then wait until the last minute to buy travel insurance. By buying both at the same time, you will get all-important cancellation cover, which should kick in if a serious accident or illness, involving one of those going on the trip, or a close family member, prevents the holiday from going ahead.\n\nHobbs says: \u201cWe can\u2019t emphasise enough how important it is to buy travel insurance as soon as you book. It means you\u2019re much more likely to be covered for any pre-departure issues that mean you can\u2019t travel.\n\n\u201cMany holiday companies and airlines will try to sell you their own insurance \u2013 don\u2019t take it. It isn\u2019t usually any cheaper, and it\u2019s certainly not better.\u201d\n\nIf you buy a single-trip policy, this should insure you from the point of purchase right until you return home from holiday. An annual multi-trip policy will cover all trips that take place during the period it is valid.\n\nIt is vital that you are honest with your travel insurer about any medical conditions. Failure to do so may invalidate the cover.\n\nIt is also important to let your insurer know if there are any changes to your health after you buy the policy \u2013 this is known as \u201congoing duty of disclosure\u201d. The insurer will then review the cover and may increase the cost.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "cacb55e8fc546cba0b825f5b4b0054eaf4ce2933",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Principles jettisoned, is former Trump foe Marco Rubio playing the long game?",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/marco-rubio-trump-foreign-policy",
        "words": "1768",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T12:00:25Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/44c346c4cfa522375c0129d588f27dcdf3bd1179\/500_0_5000_4000\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Robert Tait in Washington",
        "description": "The secretary of state \u2013 a neoconservative foreign policy hawk turned America First cheerleader \u2013 has defied expectations that he would not last in Trump\u2019s cabinet",
        "text": "The exchange seemed to crystallize a master-servant relationship in a single instant.\n\nEarly in January, in a White House gathering with oil executives invited to discuss investment in Venezuela after the US overthrow of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, its strongman president, Macro Rubio discreetly passed a note to Donald Trump.\n\nThe message was meant to be private. But to Rubio\u2019s obvious discomfiture, the president acknowledged it publicly and divulged its contents to the assorted gathering, to be captured on live television.\n\n\u201cMarco just gave me a note,\u201d Trump announced. \u201cGo back to Chevron. They want to discuss something.\u201d\n\nRubio at first appeared horrified before forcing a frozen smile, as Trump patted him condescendingly.\n\nThe secretary of state\u2019s indignity came less than 48 hours after Trump described Rubio, 54, and the vice-president, JD Vance, as \u201ckids\u201d in an interview with the New York Times, disclosing that he bought each man four new pairs of shoes to replace their \u201cshitty\u201d footwear.\n\nThe two episodes were all the more striking after what was widely seen as a high water mark in Rubio\u2019s standing in Trump world \u2013 his success in persuading Trump to take military action against Venezuela, a stark departure from the president\u2019s earlier promise to his Maga base to avoid foreign wars.\n\nIt is a far cry from 10 years ago, when Rubio and Trump went head-to-head to capture the Republican presidential nomination \u2013 all while espousing starkly contrasting outlooks.\n\nRubio \u2013 then a senator from Florida \u2013 campaigned strongly on his foreign policy credentials, gleaned as a member of the Senate\u2019s foreign relations committee. His views were neoconservative hawkish orthodoxy \u2013 characterized by fierce opposition to President Vladimir Putin of Russia while supporting free trade and a globalized economy, and championing human rights.\n\nHe summarized his worldview in a 2015 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2015. He vowed to \u201csupport the spread of economic and political freedom by reinforcing our alliances, resisting efforts by large powers to subjugate their smaller neighbors, maintaining a robust commitment to transparent and effective foreign assistance programs, and advance the rights of the vulnerable, including women and religious minorities who are so often persecuted\u201d.\n\nFast forward to today and Rubio\u2019s outlook has undergone a sea change that has transformed him into a vocal exponent of Trump\u2019s America First foreign policy \u2013 even while retaining elements of the interventionist neoconservative philosophy that previously defined him. His altered approach has allowed him to carve out an influential role in an administration that some observers said he would struggle to survive in.\n\nDaniel Drezner, an international politics professor at Tufts University, said Rubio had confounded speculation that he would be the first member of Trump\u2019s cabinet to depart. Far from being fired, Rubio has gained in strength \u2013 acquiring the additional post of national security adviser in April following the ousting of Mike Waltz, who had inadvertently invited a journalist on to a supposedly classified Signal chat to discuss military strikes against Yemeni Houthis.\n\n\u201cHe has clearly made a political calculation that he is better bending to the winds of Maga than sticking to whatever previous principles he\u2019s held,\u201d said Drezner. \u201cThe whole idea of promoting the rule of law, the idea of promoting democracy and human rights \u2013 he\u2019s basically turned his back on all of that. Now, if you asked me what Marco Rubio\u2019s core foreign policy principles are, the only answer I could legitimately give you is he\u2019s a hawk on Latin America.\u201d\n\nRubio\u2019s compromises include diluting his once staunch support for Ukraine and criticism of Putin, and abandoning USAID, the government overseas development body whose dismantlement by Elon Musk\u2019s \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d he acquiesced in, despite having previously praised it.\n\nOn Putin, Rubio was once an unambiguous hardliner, writing in 2015 that the Russian leader \u201cwants nothing less than the recognition of Russia as a geopolitical force\u201d and calling for the US to \u201cconfront [his] assault on international security\u201d.\n\nHe still explicitly supported arming Ukraine after Moscow\u2019s 2022 invasion, even while growing close to Trump\u2019s camp as the former president sought to recapture the White House.\n\nYet as Trump has consistently sided with Putin in attempts to end the near four-year war, the secretary of state has been forced to navigate an awkward path. He has been excluded from the immediate negotiations involving Moscow and Kyiv, which Trump has put in the hands of his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and has likewise been marginalized from negotiations in the Middle East involving Gaza and Iran, areas historically considered the preserve of the secretary of state.\n\nIndeed, veteran state department watchers says Rubio\u2019s relationship to the department has been akin to that of an absentee landlord.\n\n\u201cHe is invisible at the state department. I\u2019ve heard that over and over again,\u201d said Eric Rubin, a retired US ambassador who interacted with Rubio repeatedly when he was a senator.\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s spending most of his time at the White House with Trump being national security adviser. He only comes to state for official visits and ceremonies, and he has no role in running the department whatsoever. Most people, myself included, expected him to be more of an advocate for foreign policy engagement. They expected him to be a little better than the rest of the Trump administration \u2013 and he hasn\u2019t been.\u201d\n\nInstead, from having once vocally championed immigration, Rubio \u2013 the son of immigrants who left Cuba before the country\u2019s takeover by Fidel Castro\u2019s communist forces in 1959 \u2013 has refashioned himself into one of the most vigorous enforcers of Trump\u2019s fixation with restricting immigration.\n\nIn a departure from his previous human rights advocacy, Rubio struck a deal with El Salvador\u2019s autocratic president, Nayib Bukele to accept more than 250 Venezuelan alleged gang members and accommodate them at a notorious detention facility known as Cecot, where many of the men, denying the accusations of gang membership, said they were tortured.\n\nRubio has embraced Trump\u2019s restrictive immigration agenda in other ways, cancelling the visas of thousands of people he deemed to be a threat to the US, sometimes based on their social media postings or articles in student publications. This week, the state department announced it was indefinitely suspending immigrant visas for citizens of 75 countries \u2013 including Cuba.\n\n\u201cAll of these visa xenophobic decisions are being made at the White House, not in the state department,\u201d said Rubin. Someone could say Marco Rubio probably doesn\u2019t want to be banning immigrant visas, given his family history \u2013 his wife\u2019s parents were immigrants too \u2013 but I don\u2019t know what he thinks.\u201d\n\nYet it is Rubio\u2019s changed tune on Trump himself that most eloquently attests to the extent of his volte-face.\n\nIn 2016, after Trump disparaged him as \u201clittle Marco\u201d when the pair clashed heatedly in a televised debate, Rubio \u2013 in terms that have an ironic resonance a decade on \u2013 likened his opponent to a \u201cthird world strongman\u201d.\n\n\u201cNo matter what happens in this election, for years to come there are many people on the right in the media and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump, because this is not going to end well,\u201d Rubio told CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper. The clip is still regularly posted on social media by critics as evidence that he has renounced his principles.\n\nHaving fallen into the \u201ctrap\u201d himself, the secretary of state now regularly praises Trump as a \u201cpresident of peace\u201d and \u201cpresident of action\u201d whose contribution surpasses his predecessors.\n\nWhit Ayres, a Republican pollster who worked on Rubio\u2019s successful 2010 Senate campaign and his failed presidential campaign, said his former client faced a choice of adapting or becoming politically extinct.\n\n\u201cRepublican elected officials in the Trump era have two choices. They can accommodate themselves to the new leader of their party, or they can leave office,\u201d he said. \u201cMarco has accommodated himself to the new leadership, and has succeeded as a result.\u201d\n\nHe has done so, Ayres insists, without compromising his basic beliefs.\n\n\u201cHe has always believed that the world is a better and safer place when America plays a leading role, which is one reason why he\u2019s been so active in this effort to take out Maduro,\u201d he said. \u201cHe has believed for at least 10 years that Maduro was a cancer on Venezuela society and needed to go.\u201d\n\nErnesto Casta\u00f1eda, the director of Latin American studies at American University, agreed that Rubio\u2019s career had been defined by one unifying theme \u2013 determination to topple the communist government of Cuba, which for years has been sustained by subsidized oil from Venezuela but is now highly vulnerable after Maduro\u2019s ouster.\n\n\u201cHe has always been \u2013 and I think this is the right word \u2013 obsessed with Cuba and bringing down the regime there,\u201d Casta\u00f1eda said. \u201cThat explains his worldview. That\u2019s how he got elected many times in Florida, and now he\u2019s espousing that policy in the White House.\u201d\n\nThat obsession \u2013 fueled by the anti-communist sentiments of the Cuban exile community in Florida \u2013 has occasionally landed him in trouble. In 2011, he was forced to correct his own false statements, repeated on his Senate biography website, that his parents had fled Cuba after Castro\u2019s takeover, when they had in fact left in 1956, three years before he seized power.\n\nBut it had also underpinned his successful effort to persuade Trump to finally act against Maduro, Casta\u00f1eda argued.\n\nNow the contrast between Rubio\u2019s inflexible stubbornness on his ancestral homeland and biddable willingness to serve an erstwhile political foe may be about to pay dividends.\n\nThis week Trump vowed to force Venezuela to cut off Cuba\u2019s oil lifeline in an effort to bring the regime to its knees.\n\nThe threat came after he suggested that Rubio might soon have a new job to add to his bulging portfolio \u2013 as president of Cuba. \u201cSounds good to me,\u201d the president wrote, in response to a post jokingly suggesting the idea.\n\nBut, according to close Rubio observers, the presidency he really has his sights on is that of the US \u2013 for which he is reported to be playing a long game.\n\n\u201cWhat I observe is that Rubio is very careful to not get crossways with Trump, and I can only ascribe it to ambition,\u201d said Rubin.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve heard from people who\u2019ve been at events with him that his plan seems to be not to run for president next time [in 2028], but instead to let maybe JD Vance run on the assumption that Vance is not a good candidate and that the Democrats will take the White House. That\u2019s anecdotal but it makes sense. Rubio is young enough that he could run in seven years.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "0c6d02e26d3bb1aecd89b3440fe7f5a37a0dfa03",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Manager of women\u2019s football club banned for 12 years after bombarding players with indecent images",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/football\/2026\/jan\/17\/manager-of-womens-football-club-banned-for-12-years-after-bombarding-players-with-indecent-images",
        "words": "544",
        "section": "Football",
        "date": "2026-01-17T11:33:40Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/f9b4bebe25f440232a6ea86441929797dddb4f7b\/211_0_5000_4000\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Tom Garry",
        "description": "Ryan Hamilton, formerly of fourth-tier Sutton Coldfield, has been banned for sending indecent images of himself to players and sexually inappropriate behaviour",
        "text": "The former manager of a fourth-tier women\u2019s team has been banned by the Football Association from all involvement in the sport for 12 years after he sent indecent images of himself to players and a member of staff as well as subjecting them to sexually inappropriate behaviour.\n\nRyan Hamilton, who left his role as Sutton Coldfield Town Women\u2019s manager in November 2024, was found to have sent photographs of his penis to a player and a staff member via social media, as well as to have sent naked or partially naked photographs of himself to two of the other players, and to have sent a player a video of himself masturbating.\n\nHamilton denied 24 FA charges of improper conduct, all relating to his time in charge of the club, but an independent regulatory commission concluded that 23 of the 24 were proven. The FA received evidence from four players and a staff member, all of whom detailed examples of Hamilton trying to elicit sexual activity between May 2022 and November 2024.\n\nThe regulatory commission written ruling stated: \u201cWomen should be able to participate in football without being subjected to the sort of behaviour Mr Hamilton exhibited towards them. Women\u2019s football is prospering, and for it to continue to flourish, a clear message needs to be sent that the sort of misconduct Mr Hamilton committed will not be tolerated and will be met with the most severe consequences.\u201d\n\nThe commission also noted \u201cwith sadness\u201d that one of the victims appeared to blame herself, and that more broadly the complainants \u201cfeared the consequences of complaining and that it would impact on their chances of being selected\u201d, adding: \u201cWorst of all, some of them somehow felt that it might be their fault.\u201d\n\nThe commission had \u201cno doubt\u201d Hamilton\u2019s behaviour would have continued had one of the players not instigated the complaint.\n\nHamilton attended an interview requested by the FA and he answered allegations made by two of the players, before taking a phone call and terminating that interview early. He subsequently failed to engage with the FA and did not rearrange his interview. He was requested to provide material from his phone but did not do so.\n\nHamilton has been approached for comment by the Guardian.\n\nThe commission decided he had \u201cno more than bare denials\u201d in relation to three of the complainants, adding: \u201cHe has shown no introspection, contrition or remorse. The closest he has come is to say that he is \u2018not proud of\u2019 his behaviour.\u201d\n\nAll of the complainants names were redacted within the commission\u2019s report, which was made public on Friday.\n\nOf the 24 charges, one \u2013 where it had been alleged that Hamilton had asked the staff member to go home with him while they were working in another job \u2013 was found not proven. Additionally, all the witness statements contained accounts of Hamilton\u2019s \u201cverbally aggressive and bullying management style\u201d and he was said to \u201cbelittle and humiliate\u201d individuals to such an extent that they wanted to leave the club, but this alleged behaviour was not included in the 24 charges made against Hamilton and the commission noted them only for background purposes.\n\nThe FA said it had nothing further to add beyond the ruling.\n\nSutton Coldfield Town Women have been contacted for comment.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "072fdd19924d6777799cc80007d7102a70a55f5e",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018Make no mistake, this is an occupation\u2019: ICE\u2019s deadly presence casts long shadow over Minneapolis",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/minneapolis-twin-cities-ice-dispatch",
        "words": "2430",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T11:00:25Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/0d6ffd7b4e3fb140e9ecdaaaf7ae305c7aa58263\/250_0_2500_2000\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Rachel Leingang and Maanvi Singh in Minneapolis",
        "description": "Classrooms have emptied, shops have shut, and the mood is tense \u2013 but as the federal operation has ramped up, so has residents\u2019 response",
        "text": "At 6.15am, Jac Kovarik revs up their SUV and snakes through the iced-over streets of south Minneapolis, eyes scanning for federal immigration agents.\n\nThe neighborhood where Renee Good was killed by a federal officer has been eerily quiet. The bus stops are depleted of early shift workers.\n\nBy 7am, a contingency of parents is walking their kids to kindergarten and elementary school \u2013 down from its usual bustling size to just one or two parents who are now escorting not just their own children, but also those of their immigrant neighbors and friends too afraid to leave the house.\n\nAs the sun rises, there are volunteers on nearly every corner of the neighborhood, clutching bright orange whistles. They blow them all in unison when they spot what looks like an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle.\n\nThe Trump administration in recent weeks has mobilized 3,000 federal agents to the state of Minnesota \u2013 a force that now outnumbers the Minneapolis police force five to one. Armed, masked agents have been arresting people on their morning commutes, at grocery stores and outside churches. The Department of Homeland Security has called the operation the largest in the agency\u2019s history.\n\n\u201cMake no mistake, this is an occupation,\u201d said Angela Conley, a commissioner for Hennepin county, which includes Minneapolis.\n\nTheir presence has transformed the Twin Cities. \u201cIt\u2019s affecting every aspect of daily life,\u201d said Ryan P\u00e9rez, the organizing director of Copal, a nonprofit group that supports Latine families in Minnesota.\n\nHe was late to his meeting with the Guardian because ICE had been outside his organization\u2019s office on Tuesday. Two immigrants and an observer were taken.\n\nSome federal agents have been operating here since early December. Many others deployed in January, as the Trump administration fixated on Minnesota as it grappled with several high-profile cases of fraud of social services. Even more have mobilized in the past week, following the killing of Renee Good, a US citizen, by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.\n\nGood\u2019s killing spurred protests throughout the state. In response, Donald Trump this week threatened the Insurrection Act in Minnesota on Thursday, raising the prospect of sending US troops into Minneapolis and St Paul to subdue demonstrators. On Friday, the administration upped the ante, with the Department of Justice announcing it had opened an investigation into Minnesota officials, including governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, over an alleged conspiracy to impede federal immigration agents.\n\nAlong with law enforcement, rightwing influencers and content creators have also descended on the city, amplifying the president\u2019s xenophobic messages about Somalis, and in several instances harassing Somali businesses, non-profits and childcare centers they accused of fraud but are not connected to the federal fraud investigation.\n\nFederal agents, who have said they are seeking to arrest undocumented immigrants with criminal and dangerous backgrounds, have been using escalating, aggressive tactics to detain US and tribal citizens, as well as legal residents, refugees and longtime Minnesotans without any criminal record. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Minnesotans who allege racial and ethnic profiling.\n\n\u201cWe are living in a nightmare,\u201d said Kate, a teacher at Minnesota Public Schools. \u201cIt\u2019s dystopian.\u201d The Guardian is not using her full name to protect her students.\n\nGarrison Gibson, a Liberian man, was arrested after agents used a battering ram to bust into his home last weekend. A federal judge ordered ICE to release Gibson on Thursday, which it did, only to arrest him again on Friday. He was then released again.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m just scared to go outside. I\u2019m scared of them,\u201d said Daisy Martinez, whose husband Tomas Martinez Gregorio was arrested on New Year\u2019s Eve in the suburb of Brooklyn Park. The couple had been pulled over by agents while driving their six-year-old son to the hospital for a tonsillectomy. While her son was in the backseat, multiple agents pinned her to the car and took Tomas. \u201cIt\u2019s almost as if he was kidnapped,\u201d she said.\n\nNow Martinez said she\u2019s unsure every day what to tell her son \u2013 who has started to see a therapist to help him cope in the aftermath of what he\u2019s witnessed. \u201cHe does tell me that he doesn\u2019t want to go to school,\u201d Martinez said. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t want me to be taken away too.\u201d\n\nAfter federal immigration agents came to Roosevelt high school in Minneapolis last week, used chemical irritants outside the campus and detained a staffer, all Minneapolis public schools closed for two days. This week, parents are being offered a choice between sending their children to class in person, or online.\n\nKate, an early childhood educator who works with mostly Spanish-speaking children and their families, now works alone, in an empty classroom.\n\nHer room has now become a sort of distribution center for supplies. Piles of diapers are stacked to the side. At her desk, she has set up a system using sticky notes \u2013 color-coded by neighborhood \u2013 to keep track of which families need what supplies when. She forgot to fish the pink stickies out of her pockets before running the laundry this week \u2013 so many of her clothes have since been tinted rose.\n\nSome of Kate\u2019s students have parents who are pregnant \u2013 too afraid to attend prenatal appointments. In local Facebook groups, neighbors have made callouts for midwives and doulas who could help attend to expecting mothers at home.\n\nICE agents have been inside the Hennepin county medical center for a week, according to the county commissioner Angela Conley. Healthcare workers at the hospital told Sahan Journal agents at one point shackled the patient\u2019s feet. The county is working to figure out how it can get them to leave and assessing its policies, she said.\n\nAs Kovarik surveyed for ICE on Tuesday morning, Lake Street, an immigrant-heavy corridor, was especially quiet. When Kovarik spots an agent, they usually try to follow them, alert residents to ICE\u2019s presence using whistles and car horns, and document what the agents are doing. They also work to verify which vehicles ICE agents is driving for others on patrol.\n\nAs federal law enforcement has surged, so has the response. \u201cIf we really have patrollers on every corner, it\u2019s going to be really hard for ICE to do what they\u2019re trying to do,\u201d said Kovarik.\n\nLater that morning, a massive group of agents confronted a larger group of neighbors at 34th and Park at about 9.40am. Agents pulled a woman who said she was on her way to a doctor\u2019s appointment from her car and carried her through the street and into their vehicle, video of which spread widely.\n\n\u201cThe people of the Twin Cities are extremely determined,\u201d Kovarik said. \u201cWe just are more and more determined as they send more and more agents. And at the end of the day, there\u2019s way more of us than them.\u201d\n\nIn past days, agents have increasingly spread into the suburbs and more rural parts of the state, where rapid response networks aren\u2019t as robust, picking people up at shopping centers and restaurants. In the small town of Willmar, ICE agents reportedly dined at a Mexican restaurant earlier in the day, then arrested workers at the same restaurant later that day, the Star Tribune reported.\n\nOnly a smattering of patrons are trickling into the coffee shops, many of which are plastered with signs saying \u201cFederal agents are not permitted\u201d and \u201cFuck ICE\u201d. At the Pow Wow Grounds cafe, a second sign signalling that the doors will remain locked throughout the day, and customers should knock and wait to be let in.\n\nAt lunchtime, one of the only restaurants open on East Lake was an American diner. At least four Mexican restaurants in that block had been shut, indefinitely.\n\nApproximately 80% of immigrant-run businesses in Minneapolis and St Paul had been closed this week amid the ICE crackdown, and sales at these businesses had plummeted since late December. The Minneapolis city council now wants the state to install an eviction moratorium \u2013 hoping to relieve the people risking their safety to work and pay the rent.\n\nOn Sunday, federal agents Nimco Omar \u2013 a US citizen who is Somali \u2013 was walking toward a Somali shopping center in the late morning when four ICE agents got out of a car and and repeatedly asked her to verify her citizenship, telling her they were doing an \u201cimmigration check\u201d. In a video of the encounter that has gone viral in the city and beyond, she responds: \u201cI am a US citizen. I don\u2019t need to carry around an ID in my home.\u201d\n\nOmar told the Guardian she saw no reason to hand over personal information to \u201ca masked person walking around my neighborhood\u201d. No law, she said, required her to prove her citizenship in that moment.\n\n\u201cPeople come to this country to feel safe, to work hard, and to raise their families with dignity. Instead, many of us are now living in fear,\u201d she said. \u201cIt feels like our own country has turned against its people, and that is heartbreaking.\u201d\n\nThe mall where Omar had been headed \u2013 the 24 Somali Mall in central Minneapolis \u2013 has been hollowed out in recent weeks. Patrons and vendors alike carry their passports, just in case.\n\nAbout 84,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota, and most of them are US citizens or legal residents. In December, after a cabinet meeting, Donald Trump called Somali immigrants \u201cgarbage\u201d and denounced a fraud scandal in Minneapolis involving social services run by Somalis. Subsequently, he said his administration intended to strip some naturalized Somali Americans of their US citizenship.\n\n\u201cWe are really at a point of existential crisis,\u201d said Julie Decker, a policy director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. \u201cWe have to be honest with people, and tell them, \u2018You may be detained regardless of your status.\u2019\u201d\n\nIn the afternoons, Juan Leon \u2013 who owns Leo\u2019s Tow in West St Paul \u2013 said he has been fielding an overwhelming number of calls to help move cars that have been abandoned after ICE agents arrest the drivers.\n\nIn mid-December, the company spent hours digging out a car that had been left for days, with its windows open, during one of the first big cold snaps of the season. \u201cWe had to wrench it out of the snow,\u201d he said. Normally he\u2019d charge at least $300 for a job like that. But Leon has been offering free towing in his neighborhood and a $100 discount to people in surrounding areas.\n\nThe demand has been high. Sometimes, families call him. Other times, he said, families aren\u2019t even immediately aware that their loved ones have been taken by ICE. So observers and witnesses call him, asking if he can tow cars to a safe place until someone can come forward to claim them. Other times, families don\u2019t know where their cars have been left, so Leon and his girlfriend have to embark on an investigative mission.\n\nLeon only launched his company a couple of months ago, and is now raising funds so he can keep the service going. \u201cWe\u2019ve often got observers who are paying for [strangers\u2019] tows,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just such a beautiful thing to see everybody coming together. I wish it was under better circumstances.\u201d\n\nAd hoc mutual aid centers had popped up all around the city. In Uptown Minneapolis, the sex shop Smitten Kitten has transformed into a donation center, stacked with piles of canned food and toilet paper. Volunteers stand guard outside as a steady stream of neighbors pop in to drop off food and other supplies.\n\nIn the Franklin Avenue East Cultural District \u2013 the city\u2019s Native American cultural hub \u2013 an art gallery has become a resource center, stocked up with free groceries, hot soup and fry bread. At the coffee shop in front of the gallery, the barista collects donations via Venmo or cash, and offers free coffee for anyone who needs it. Teams of legal observers pop in throughout the day to grab hand warmers, as well as goggles and respirators to shield themselves against the chemical irritants that federal agents have been using against observers and protesters.\n\nThe Rev Ashley Horan, vice-president for programs and ministries at the Unitarian Universalist Association, lives a block from where Renee Good was killed. She has brought in donations from $5 to $500 from well-meaning people around the country and estimates she\u2019s moved about $20-25,000 in cash to people in her network \u2013 for rent, for food and gas, for supplies like whistles and hand warmers for observers.\n\n\u201cMinneapolis could be and will be anywhere else in the country,\u201d Horan said. \u201cI want other communities around the country to be doing the prep work so that when it happens in your town, you\u2019re ready.\u201d\n\nThe sun goes down early here, before 5pm \u2013 it\u2019s the middle of winter. Teachers head back home in pairs or groups after class.\n\nLately, parents and coaches have been rethinking evening sports events. The Southside Red Bears \u2013 a co-ed youth basketball team in Minneapolis\u2019s south side \u2013cancelled their game in the north side this weekend. \u201cThat\u2019s too far away for our kids\u2019 to be, in case something happens,\u201d said Jolene Jones, at the Native American Community Development Institute, which helped launch the team. \u201cOur children are all brown or black.\u201d\n\nOn Monday, Elliott Payne, the president of the city council, was himself shoved by an ICE agent. He was on Central Avenue observing and saw ICE harassing a resident. He said he was keeping his distance when an ICE agent pushed him from behind while Payne was watching another ICE agent point his taser at people. He had introduced himself at the scene as the council president and tried to start a conversation.\n\n\u201cThis is the type of reckless behavior that is unfolding in our city,\u201d he said at a press conference Wednesday. \u201cEven when the council president is present and aware, they\u2019re still assaulting us.\u201d\n\nOn Wednesday night, agents shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg in north Minneapolis, drawing people out to document the aftermath and protest against agents\u2019 actions. One family loaded up their car with their six children and tried to leave the neighborhood amid the unrest, but ICE set off teargas and flash-bangs around the vehicle. The youngest child in the car was six months old.\n\nThe next night, outside the Graduate hotel, near the University of Minnesota \u2013 a crowd, including many students \u2013 trashed electric guitars, blew whistles, played trombones and banged on all manner of drums, pots, pans and paint cans.\n\nThey wanted to make sure that any ICE agents staying at the hotel wouldn\u2019t be able to sleep.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "3a9c1e0c86401d1da93cd614a15a152896cc3543",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "How local and national news outlets are covering the aftermath of ICE shooting: \u2018Get there, bear witness, ask questions\u2019 ",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/minneapolis-ice-shooting-media-coverage",
        "words": "1613",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T11:00:25Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/db15c70b319ad3d587a5d51b7ccf3c7301280013\/506_0_5055_4046\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Jeremy Barr",
        "description": "Strong media presence in Minneapolis has ensured Renee Good\u2019s shooting, and its fallout, has received wide coverage",
        "text": "After a federal immigration agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with grisly videos quickly going viral on social media, news organizations from around the state, country and world dispatched correspondents and anchors to the scene.\n\nIn the days since, that media presence has ebbed and flowed \u2013 though a well-resourced local news corps and many national journalists have remained, including reporters for the Guardian, covering additional clashes between police and protesters.\n\nAnother shooting (of a man attempting to flee arrest, the government said) on Wednesday drew more coverage, and on Thursday a CNN crew was hit with projectiles while covering a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).\n\nWhile cuts and closures have thinned out local news reporting around the country, the Minneapolis media market remains strong, ensuring the shooting \u2013 and what has followed \u2013 have received robust coverage.\n\n\u201cI think we have the strongest media ecosystem of any city that\u2019s parallel to our city,\u201d said Matt Carlson, a Minneapolis-based professor of journalism for the University of Minnesota, mentioning the Star Tribune newspaper, Minnesota Public Radio, and smaller outlets such as the Sahan Journal, which covers immigrant communities, including the Somali refugee population that has come under attack from conservatives. (There\u2019s also Alpha News, a conservative outlet that made headlines by publishing cell phone video taken by the ICE officer who killed Good.)\n\nWhile there are always debates about national and international journalists parachuting in to cover catastrophes, \u201cI think people in Minneapolis are actually excited to see national coverage of this, because we know that we can\u2019t stop what\u2019s happening by ourselves,\u201d Carlson said.\n\nHe also predicted that Minneapolis will remain an epicenter of ICE activity and counter-protests, with Donald Trump recently threatening to invoke the Insurrection Action and send troops to the city.\n\n\u201cI would be very happy if the national news were able to leave because things have died down,\u201d he said. \u201cUnfortunately, this is not a case where things are dying down.\u201d\n\nHere are some of the journalists and newsroom leaders who have participated in coverage.\n\nOmar Jimenez, anchor and correspondent, CNN Jimenez, 32, came to the story last week with a lot of experience reporting in Minneapolis.\n\nIn May 2020, Jimenez was arrested live on CNN while covering protests in the city following the murder of George Floyd, which occurred just blocks away from where Good was killed.\n\nWhile Jimenez\u2019s team was quickly released, the incident made international headlines as an extraordinary incursion into the activities of journalists.\n\nSince then, Jimenez has returned to the city multiple times for reporting trips. He said his antenna is always up for stories involving Minneapolis. So he flew to Minnesota a few hours after the shooting, arriving on the evening of 7 January and driving straight from the airport to the spot where Good was shot.\n\n\u201cWhen it became clear that obviously this was going to be as big as it has become, that\u2019s when a manager of mine kind of walked in and said, \u2018Hey, are you able to go to Minnesota as soon as possible?\u2019\u201d (He was only delayed, he said, because he needed to go home and get warmer clothes after seeing the weather forecast in Minnesota.)\n\nDuring his reporting in Minneapolis last week, Jimenez said he met several people that he first encountered back in 2020.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a little bit of a balance in the sense that you obviously don\u2019t want to be the story,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I do think what you want is to try and be able to convey an authentic space, especially when you have the luxury of a camera. Even though everyone is seeing what you\u2019re seeing, they\u2019re not feeling it. There is a little bit of a barrier still. And so that\u2019s why it is a constant balance of: \u2018how close do we want to get?\u2019\u201d\n\nJimenez got pretty close to the action on 8 January, when CNN viewers watched him and his crew running away from law enforcement agents who had moved aggressively toward protesters after someone threw a water bottle at them.\n\nWhile Jimenez is now back in New York City, he said: \u201cI am not done with this story. I can tell you that.\u201d\n\nKathleen Hennessey, editor and senior vice-president, Minnesota Star Tribune A veteran of the Associated Press and the New York Times, Hennessey only took on the top editorial position at the newspaper (which was previously called the Minneapolis Star Tribune) last May. It\u2019s fair to say that she\u2019s been busy, considering the number of major stories that have happened in the state since then, including the June 2025 assassination of state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s been maybe busier, newsier than I expected to some degree, but it\u2019s also been really rewarding to be at a place that feels so needed,\u201d she said.\n\nHennessey\u2019s newsroom of about 200 people has broken several major stories since the shooting, including being the first outlet to report the ICE officer\u2019s name. That story drew a sharp rebuke from DHS press secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who called the outlet \u201creckless\u201d and said it should \u201cdelete their story immediately\u201d (it didn\u2019t).\n\nHennessey said the decision to name the shooter (Jonathan Ross) was \u201ca very deliberate, much-discussed decision\u201d \u2013 but she added that it \u201cwasn\u2019t a particularly tough call\u201d.\n\nShe said her news team had been \u201con edge and prepared and ready\u201d for the Good story, considering the surge of deportation enforcement in recent weeks in the community.\n\n\u201cBy this time, we feel pretty well practiced in sort of the quick mobilization of an all-hands-on-deck moment,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd so this was another one of those, really. Just about everybody immediately ran to their stations and did what they do.\u201d\n\nConsidering how widely covered this story has been, \u201cI encourage our newsroom to remember that nobody knows this place better than we do,\u201d she said, \u201cand nobody can be as close to the people involved, and be a more reliable source for people who actually live here.\u201d\n\nUnsurprisingly, Hennessey said the Star Tribune\u2019s website has received a very large number of online readers over the last week and a half \u2013 though it\u2019s a bit harder to net paying subscribers.\n\nGoing forward, she said she expects her newsroom to remain in overdrive covering the story. \u201cIt\u2019s ongoing, it\u2019s unfolding, and it feels very everywhere all at once,\u201d she said. \u201cAt any given moment, there\u2019s just a million videos popping up everywhere of incidents and encounters with ICE that feel newsworthy.\u201d\n\nAlex Tabet, political reporter, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) Tabet, who arrived in Minnesota at 1am on 7 January, made it to the scene of the shooting extremely quickly. He had already been tipped off by an ICE observer that there was an enforcement action going on in the neighborhood, and then got word that someone had been shot. It was his third reporting trip to Minnesota over the past month. \u201cWe were the first \u2013 at least \u2013 TV crew on the ground,\u201d he said.\n\nTabet\u2019s first call was to his network\u2019s editorial leaders and standards officials, telling them, \u201cHey, this is what we know, this is what we don\u2019t know,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we started vetting all of the information that we had to try to figure out what is appropriate to put on air, what should we hold off on, basically making sure we had hit the threshold of understanding what was going on.\u201d\n\nTabet, who left Minnesota on Tuesday after almost a full week, said he\u2019s \u201choping to go back as soon as possible\u201d \u2013 though he said the network is well staffed on the story. The decision to leave \u201cwas a discussion between my bosses and I, because there\u2019s only so many days [you can go] without sleep\u201d.\n\n\u201cI know MS NOW is committed to having a strong presence on the ground, because they recognize how important of a story this is right now,\u201d he said.\n\nMegan Burks, deputy managing producer, MPR News (Minnesota Public Radio) Burks, who coordinates daily news coverage for the NPR member station, said the newsroom had been settling into a new rhythm since the 7 January killing of Good. And then on Wednesday, a federal officer shot a man in the leg, leading to new protests and clashes with law enforcement.\n\n\u201cJust as it felt like we were settling into a manageable rhythm, this new twist came and now we\u2019re back to trying to figure out what is our new normal, what is our new rhythm,\u201d she said.\n\nBurks said that MPR journalists have focused less on competition with other outlets and more on answering the questions of viewers.\n\n\u201cKnowing that we can\u2019t focus on everything, we\u2019re trying to let the audience drive some of what we choose to put our stamp on,\u201d she said.\n\nNicole Sganga, homeland security correspondent, CBS News Sganga arrived in Minneapolis two days before the shooting. She participated in a ride-along with immigration agents and interviewed Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, pressing her on how she can \u201cjustify\u201d the government sending 2,000 DHS agents to the city.\n\nIn addition to reporting on the ground about Good\u2019s killing, Sganga covered the intensification of immigration raids after the incident.\n\n\u201cMy approach is always, \u2018get there, bear witness, ask questions,\u2019\u201d Sganga said.\n\nShe said it\u2019s been important to cover the story from Minneapolis to be able to press government officials on \u201ccontradictory accounts\u201d of what happened and what is happening.\n\n\u201cThat kind of independent reporting and verification is critical to holding power to account and to clarifying the facts for the public,\u201d said Sganga, who has reported for the network for a decade.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "b93d3946d663ce7e7a5444597be93e4406690401",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "\u2018It\u2019s whiplash\u2019: reversed cuts \u2018incredibly disruptive\u2019 for US mental health and substance abuse programs",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/trump-reversal-cuts-mental-health-substance-abuse",
        "words": "693",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T11:00:24Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/93ec488a3d418be8b4e7cfac37eb2fabb1eb8fe4\/111_0_4049_3238\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Melody Schreiber",
        "description": "Grantees outline risks to vulnerable populations over uncertainty of funds creating gaps in care",
        "text": "A counseling program in Alabama for people with HIV, helping them get into treatment and housing. A training program in New Hampshire for first responders learning how better to respond to people in mental health crises. Mental health counseling for children in Tennessee experiencing trauma.\n\nOn Wednesday, the funding for these and thousands of other programs was rescinded. The halt affected about 2,800 organizations across the nation offering mental health and substance use services, often on the front lines of the dual crises, in partnership with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Samhsa).\n\nDirectors of these programs woke up on Wednesday to a letter saying their funding from the US government had been cut, effective immediately. They scrambled to set up emergency meetings to go over the payroll, agonize over who would be laid off and trying to find other ways to keep their doors open and programs running.\n\nOn Thursday, they received a new notice: the federal award cancellations were \u201chereby reinstated\u201d, according to a letter obtained by the Guardian. \u201cPlease disregard the prior termination notice and continue program activities,\u201d the notice said.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s whiplash,\u201d said Reuben Rotman, president and CEO of the Network of Jewish Human Service Agencies, which provide mental health counseling and other services. It\u2019s \u201cincredibly disruptive\u201d for organizations, and the communities that they serve, to have funding yanked, even when it is later restored, he said.\n\n\u201cIf you\u2019re doing the work and you\u2019re reporting to the government and you\u2019re in full compliance with everything, you\u2019re not expecting your contract, with no warning and no communication from anybody\u201d to be \u201cabruptly terminated\u201d in an email at 3am, Rotman said.\n\nThe biggest blow was not knowing whether they would be able to continue providing services, said Devin Lyall, founder of Wilkes Recovery Revolution in rural North Carolina.\n\n\u201cThe threat to people that are already a vulnerable population, that are in care and receiving treatment and receiving help to rebuild lives, that that care might disappear overnight, I think is the biggest concern,\u201d Lyall said.\n\nWilkes Recovery Revolution is in the third year of a five-year Samhsa grant of $300,000 a year, totaling one-fifth of their funding. The award covered transitional housing, peer support services, transportation to treatment, work and doctors\u2019 appointments, and more. The programs were created because \u201cthere was a gap in our system of care here, and so individuals were falling through the cracks at no fault of their own\u201d, said Lyall.\n\nParticipants in the housing program have done the hard work of going through treatment, finding employment and \u201cbecoming a part of the community again, and then a decision like that can set someone back\u201d, Lyall said. While other projects with different funding sources would have continued, removing housing would\u2019ve been like \u201cpulling a piece of the puzzle out\u201d of recovery.\n\nWhen she received the letter saying that the program no longer aligned with the Trump administration\u2019s funding priorities, it felt like \u201ca direct hit\u201d, Lyall said. Now that the funding has been restored, she\u2019s still afraid it will be yanked again one day.\n\n\u201cIf it can happen [on Wednesday], and that authority can be exercised with no warning and no transparency, no safeguards, then why can\u2019t that happen again two weeks, a month, two months, three months down the road?\u201d Lyall said.\n\nThat makes it difficult to know how to plan for the future, grantees said.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to feel any confidence that the funding is secure,\u201d Rotman said. \u201cWe are in a very volatile state right now.\u201d\n\nThe episode underscored a deeper issue, that \u201clife-saving care cannot operate on instability\u201d, said Saeeda Dunston, CEO of Elmcor Youth & Adult Activities Inc, a Black-led non-profit serving Queens communities hit hard by overdose and behavioral health disparities.\n\n\u201cIf we are serious about addressing disparities impacting Black communities in overdose and behavioral health outcomes, we must invest in systems that can withstand political shifts and ensure care is available today and remains available for the long term,\u201d Dunston said.\n\nRotman noted that \u201cthe safety net for the most vulnerable is most surely being eroded, and it\u2019s raising a lot of concern\u201d.\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "8b2e0949579903706b38ffbcaa2fa5e09333ebeb",
        "thumbnail": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/b68a29ddbcea0bde4e353258b860698c9c1eb330\/365_0_3653_2923\/500.jpg",
        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Americans disapprove of Trump\u2019s foreign policy. His escapades are likely to cost him",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2026\/jan\/17\/americans-on-trump-foreign-policy",
        "words": "2634",
        "section": "Opinion",
        "date": "2026-01-17T11:00:24Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/b68a29ddbcea0bde4e353258b860698c9c1eb330\/365_0_3653_2923\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Sidney Blumenthal",
        "description": "History tells us what happens when American presidents focus on foreign policy and neglect domestic economic policy",
        "text": "Donald Trump\u2019s blitzkrieg since his 3 January seizure of the Venezuelan leader Nicol\u00e1s Maduro has been guided by his triumph of the will, as he told the New York Times. \u201cYeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It\u2019s the only thing that can stop me \u2026 I don\u2019t need international law.\u201d\n\nTrump treats the spectacle as a reality TV show in which he is both the executive producer and the host who ultimately declares himself the winner. At his 3 January press conference on the day of Maduro\u2019s seizure, Trump mentioned \u201coil\u201d 27 times, \u201cmoney\u201d 13 times and \u201cdemocracy\u201d not once. He trashed the democratic opposition as lacking \u201crespect\u201d and \u201csupport\u201d. The capture of Maduro was a decapitation, not regime change. Indeed, Trump served as a convenient agent of an internal coup of the existing powers, whom he declared \u201can ally\u201d. \u201cWe have to fix the country first,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t have an election.\u201d\n\nTrump has dubbed his Venezuelan exploit as the \u201cDonroe Doctrine\u201d. It is of a piece with his rebranding of history, along with dropping mention of his impeachments from his picture caption at the National Portrait Gallery and coercing the Smithsonian not to focus on \u201chow bad slavery was\u201d. He told the Times that the civil rights movement of the 1960s resulted in \u201cwhite people\u201d being \u201cvery badly treated\u201d. He presents himself anachronistically as the White Citizens\u2019 Council president.\n\nHis \u201cDonroe Doctrine\u201d runs against the intent of the author of the original Monroe Doctrine, the then secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, who stated that the United States \u201cgoes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy \u2026 She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.\u201d\n\nTrump announced that he would \u201crun\u201d Venezuela, \u201cmoney will be controlled by me\u201d and he would control the oil industry there \u201cindefinitely\u201d. His White House released a photo imitating a Wikipedia page that depicted him as \u201cThe Acting President of Venezuela\u201d.\n\nHe invited CEOs of big oil companies to the White House to convince them to take the plunge into Venezuela, where the oil infrastructure is dilapidated and the oil resembles tar, difficult to extract and refine into usable products like gasoline. The ExxonMobil chief told Trump that realistically \u201cit\u2019s uninvestable\u201d and that the country lacked a proper legal system.\n\nTrump interrupted his meeting to say, \u201cWe have many others that were not able to get in. I said, \u2018If we had a ballroom, we\u2019d have over a thousand people.\u2019 I never knew you had that many people in your industry.\u201d He got up to gaze from the East Room window at the gigantic hole in the ground he had made of the South Lawn, where his gargantuan ballroom is being constructed. \u201cWow! What a view. This is the door to the ballroom.\u201d When he returned to his seat he continued discussing the ballroom. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019ll be anything like it in the world, actually.\u201d Later, he said about Venezuela, \u201cI will probably be inclined to keep Exxon out.\u201d Of course, Exxon did not want to go in. No matter. His foreign policy is like a vanity ballroom, or plastering \u201cTrump\u201d above the John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts: schlock and awe.\n\nIn the meantime, Trump has turned again to his dream of annexing, purchasing or invading Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, a Nato ally. The US has maintained military bases on Greenland under a separate agreement since 1951. \u201cIf we don\u2019t do it the easy way, we\u2019re going to do it the hard way,\u201d said Trump. He told the Times that he must have \u201cownership\u201d, which was \u201cpsychologically necessary for success\u201d. The leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom issued a rebuke that Greenland \u201cbelongs to its people\u201d. Trump\u2019s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, would-be viceroy, declared that \u201cnobody [is] going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.\u201d Danish and Greenland officials told the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, there was a \u201cfundamental disagreement\u201d.\n\nTrump\u2019s imperialism centers on his imperial self. Vladimir Lenin, in his determinist tract, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917, saw finance capital driving colonialism in search of profits, leading to great power rivalry, the world war and \u201cproletarian revolution\u201d. Trump turns Lenin on his head. He drives the reluctant capitalists into freebooting imperialist adventures with uncertain consequences. Trump represents, in Leninist terms, the lowest stage of imperialism.\n\nHis \u201cDonroe\u201d atavism fits with his other primitive throwback policies, from tariffs (recalling the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that deepened the Great Depression) to immigration, racial discrimination and restriction (recalling the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 excluding southern and eastern Europeans and barring Asians).\n\nWhile Trump strides across the stage posing as a world conqueror, the Quinnipiac poll shows him to be an incredible shrinking man \u2013 57% opposed to \u201crunning\u201d Venezuela; 73% opposed to sending troops there; 55% opposed to taking over its oil sales; 86% opposed to militarily seizing Greenland; 55% opposed to buying it; and 70% against military action against Iran. According to the AP-NORC poll, 61% disapprove of his foreign policy in general. The Reuters-Ipsos poll showed only 17% in favor of Trump acquiring Greenland and 4% in favor of military force.\n\nPublic disapproval of Trump\u2019s foreign policy now nearly equals the disapproval of his economic policy, on cost of living at minus 25 points. Trump has repeatedly derided the reality of the \u201caffordability crisis\u201d as a \u201choax\u201d, \u201cscam\u201d or \u201ccon job\u201d, lately on 13 January, as a \u201cfake word\u201d, as though he could magically make it vanish.\n\nThe last thing that might occur to Trump is any historical lesson, especially a cautionary story about a president who was far more popular than he has ever been, achieved great military victories and yet was politically defeated.\n\nShortly after President George HW Bush lost the election of 1992, I went to his White House to learn how the mighty had fallen from the pinnacle of victory in the Gulf war. I met with Richard Darman, one of the most thoughtful and capable people there, who had been at the center of both the Reagan and Bush administrations and was especially close to James Baker, who had left as secretary of state to take charge of Bush\u2019s campaign at the end. Darman had been Reagan\u2019s staff secretary, deputy secretary of the treasury to Baker, and under Bush the budget director. I had been speaking as a journalist with Darman since the start of the Reagan administration.\n\nDarman told me about the research that the Bush campaign had conducted that exposed the phenomenon of how the positive transformation of his image had become his undoing in public opinion. Darman\u2019s story of a reversal of fortune casts an unexpected historical light on how the perception of Republicans in the forthcoming midterm elections as supine weaklings and Trump\u2019s psychodrama as a strongman may combine to undermine them all. The performance of supreme power is not always what it seems.\n\nIn October 1987, on the eve of the campaign when Bush would emerge from the vice-presidency, Newsweek published a cover story headlined, \u201cFighting the Wimp Factor\u201d. \u201cBush suffers from a potentially crippling handicap \u2013 a perception that he isn\u2019t strong enough or tough enough for the challenges of the Oval Office. That he is, in a single mean word, a wimp.\u201d The story was wildly unfair to the college athlete, the second world war pilot who had been shot down and former CIA director, but it captured the awkward conundrum he faced as the Connecticut Yankee who donated to Planned Parenthood and ridiculed Ronald Reagan\u2019s tax cuts as \u201cvoodoo economics\u201d to remake himself into the Texas congressman opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and uncomfortably sought to assume Reagan\u2019s mantle.\n\nConstrained by his belief that boastfulness was coarse, Bush\u2019s overcompensation was embarrassing, half-joking he was a \u201cpit bull\u201d. On the eve of his invasion of Panama and seizure of its military dictator, Gen Manuel Noriega, Bush was subjected to scathing criticism. \u201cPrudent Meets Timid\u201d, ran the front-page headline in the New York Times. The conservative columnist for the Washington Post, George Will, ripped \u201cAn Unserious Presidency\u201d. A Democratic congressman stated, \u201cThere\u2019s a resurgence of the wimp factor.\u201d When Bush launched Operation Just Cause on 20 December 1989, he consulted with congressional leaders of both parties who gave their approval; Noriega, who had come to power through a coup, was removed; and the rightfully elected president took office. Bush\u2019s popularity rose to 80% in the Gallup poll. Yet \u201cthe wimp factor\u201d lingered.\n\nOn 2 August 1990, Iraq\u2019s dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait to grab its vast oil reserves. The United Nations security council issued the ultimatum to withdraw or face \u201call necessary force\u201d. In the Gulf war, a coalition of 43 countries led by the US defeated Saddam to restore Kuwait, but did not march to Baghdad or occupy Iraq. Bush\u2019s popularity soared to 89%, the highest of any president ever recorded. At last, he had vanquished \u201cthe wimp factor\u201d.\n\nOn 6 March 1990, Bush spoke to a joint session of the Congress, to proclaim \u201ca victory for every country in the coalition, for the United Nations. A victory for unprecedented international cooperation and diplomacy \u2026 a victory for the rule of law.\u201d The jubilant Republican members waved small American flags. The big-name potential Democratic presidential candidates declined to run.\n\nDarman explained to me that Bush\u2019s Gulf war triumph had persuaded the public that he was not a \u201cwimp\u201d, but truly strong. They believed he was a leader with a steely core. When the recession deepened, they believed he was strong, but reasoned that he would not help them and became embittered against him. Enter Bill Clinton who felt their pain with his program of \u201cPutting People First\u201d.\n\nOn its surface, Darman\u2019s explanation seemed counterintuitive. Through a strange political alchemy, however, the stronger Bush appeared, the weaker he became. The greater his accomplishment loomed, the more he was diminished. His towering act was unquestioned, but led paradoxically to his political demise.\n\nWhen Bush lost, it was a commonplace that he had been a foreign policy president who neglected economic policy, that he was a patrician whose strained attempts to establish rapport with those falling into the vertigo of a recession \u2013 \u201cMessage: I care\u201d \u2013 jangled as off-key. But it was not so simple. The metamorphosis of his image also propelled the dynamic.\n\nGeorge W Bush remained a captive of his father\u2019s dilemma, which he sought finally to dispel. His invasion of Iraq in an elusive quest to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction was widely understood at the time as \u201cUnfinished Business\u201d, as the Economist put it, in part a reaction to his father\u2019s war, followed by his political defeat, and the lingering smoke of the \u201cwimp factor\u201d.\n\nDonald Trump smashed the Bush legacy to gain control over the Republican party and recast it in his own image. Trump humiliated and shoved aside Jeb Bush, the family and party heir apparent, the brother of George W Bush and son of George HW Bush, and the former Florida governor, in a debate on 13 February 2016. \u201cObviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?\u201d Trump said. He added, \u201cThey lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction \u2013 there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.\u201d Then Trump blamed the terrorist attack of September 11 on George W Bush. Jeb sputtered, \u201cI am sick and tired of him going after my family.\u201d Trump surged to a two-to-one lead for the Republican nomination.\n\nAfter the death of Barbara Bush in early 2018, President Trump issued an official White House statement that he would not attend her funeral. A frail George HW Bush was soon hospitalized. Trump trashed him at a rally, ridiculing Bush\u2019s signature slogan for his program of voluntary civic engagement. \u201cThousand points of light,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWhat does that mean? I know one thing. \u2018Make America Great Again\u2019 we understand. Putting America first we understand. Thousand points of light, I never quite got that one. What the hell is that? Has anyone ever figured that one out? It was put out by a Republican, wasn\u2019t it?\u201d\n\nBush died a few months later. Trump\u2019s insult was his imprimatur on his own Republican party that on bended knee pays him tribute or else. On 14 January, the Republican Senate, its internal dissenters crushed, blocked a resolution to require Trump to seek congressional approval for military force in Venezuela.\n\nSo, the Republicans defer again to Trump, evade their constitutional role and careen heedlessly toward the midterm elections. They define themselves as weak and useless in service to his perceived unchallengeable strength. The more he struts, the more they falter; the more dramatically he postures, the weaker they are perceived. But the strongman, never thought to be a \u201cwimp\u201d, not only ignores the economic plight of the majority but displays open contempt.\n\nAt the Detroit Economic Club on 13 January, Trump boasted that all is swell: \u201cWe\u2019re the hottest country.\u201d Trump has launched a criminal investigation of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom he has insulted as \u201cbonehead\u201d, \u201clow IQ\u201d, \u201cstupid\u201d, \u201cnot a smart person\u201d. Powell responded that the investigation was a \u201cpretext\u201d for political retaliation in Trump\u2019s attempt to destroy the Fed\u2019s independence and a threat to the economy\u2019s stability.\n\nIn Minneapolis, an ICE agent killed a US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, driving away from a protest scene. Trump blamed her for her killing as \u201chighly disrespectful of law enforcement\u201d. A flood of ICE agents into the city has since fostered violent melees, which have provided the excuse for Trump to threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act. \u201cTrump has made ICE a 70-30 issue \u2013 for Democrats,\u201d states the pollster G Elliott Morris.\n\nTrump claims to stand above any and all restraints: \u201cMy own morality. My own mind. It\u2019s the only thing that can stop me.\u201d He has articulated his justification for his rapacious behavior from the intimacy of the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room to the icy expansive of Greenland. He is the Superman, the Ubermensch.\n\nTrump\u2019s brief words to frame his philosophy were better explained by Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1889, which later became an ur-text against the \u201cslave-faith\u201d of the Enlightenment and for Naziism and the cult of personality. Nietzsche contrasted the superior \u201cmaster morality\u201d with the \u201cslave morality\u201d. The \u201cnoble\u201d and \u201caristocratic\u201d master \u201cdoes not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: what is injurious to me is injurious in itself; he knows that it is he himself only who confers honor on things; he is a creator of values. He honors whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality equals self-glorification.\u201d Nietzsche exalted this as the \u201cDOCTRINE OF THE WILL TO POWER\u201d. He wrote that \u201cin real life it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.\u201d He mocked the \u201cenchained class of spirits\u201d who spoke of \u201cEquality of Rights\u201d as well as the \u201cChristian faith\u201d as \u201cself-mutilation\u201d, leading to the \u201cDETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN RACE\u201d.\n\nIt would be eminently safe to wager on the betting markets that Trump has never read Nietzsche or could offer the thinnest account of his work. Nonetheless, Trump has fashioned himself as a child of Nietzsche. A thousand points of light? The lights are going out all over America.\n\nSidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "51e2616f8e15e3b237c84981270f61b2a7c66577",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Zahawi defection pushes Reform\u2019s vaccine scepticism into spotlight",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/zahawi-defection-pushes-reforms-vaccine-scepticism-into-spotlight",
        "words": "948",
        "section": "UK news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T10:00:24Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/e5b29b0ff96f7ffba038c734c0d17c3a9613a27a\/441_0_6697_5357\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Ben Quinn Political correspondent",
        "description": "The views of the former Tory vaccines minister clash with those of high-profile members and the party faithful",
        "text": "There was no shortage of ammunition for reporters seeking to pepper Nadhim Zahawi with questions when the former Conservative chancellor was unveiled as Reform\u2019s newest recruit on Monday.\n\nBut one persistent line of questioning seemed to draw a flash of real anger from the defector: did he reject the views of a doctor who was permitted by Reform to use the main stage at its annual conference to claim that the Covid vaccines, which Zahawi had himself rolled out as vaccines minister during the pandemic, were responsible for King Charles and the Princess of Wales\u2019 cancers?\n\nWould he seek to change Reform\u2019s medical policies if they had been influenced, as the party\u2019s chair previously admitted, by the same vaccine-sceptic doctor?\n\n\u201cThat was a really stupid question and it doesn\u2019t even deserve an answer,\u201d Zahawi told a Daily Telegraph journalist, repeating the line when another reporter asked it again.\n\nYet, away from the plush Westminster venue which Reform had chosen for Zahawi\u2019s unveiling, his recruitment has caused disquiet among Reform UK members for whom hostility to the Covid vaccine programme has become an article of faith.\n\nParty Facebook groups lit up with a small but significant number of members saying they would be resigning their membership.\n\nCombined with this, a strand of Islamophobia in the party\u2019s membership again reared its head. Fresh from their anger at the unveiling of Laila Cunningham as Reform\u2019s London mayoral candidate, Zahawi\u2019s recruitment was cast by some of the same vaccine sceptics as another example of a \u201cMuslim takeover\u201d of Nigel Farage\u2019s party.\n\nIts head of policy, Zia Yusuf, has long been a target of racist ire from some Reform members and critics of the party on the right.\n\n\u201cAnother ex-Tory and another Muslim and another that pushed the vaccine, sorry to say but Reform are losing my support rapidly,\u201d posted one member on a private Reform Facebook group, in response to Zahawi\u2019s defection.\n\nThe comment, on a group with 135,000 members including key figures in the party, was just one of many in a similar vein across it and other online spaces used by Reform members.\n\n\u201cDoesn\u2019t fill me with confidence, the vaccine deployment guy, a man who advocated for an amnesty on illegal migrants,\u201d added another.\n\nAnother added: \u201cyes gonna be loads of us thinking same Especially us with badly disabled son caused by jib [sic] pushed by him.\u201d\n\nWhile Farage initially provided qualified support for vaccines during the pandemic, he later shifted to a more sceptical view, and then towards hostility to the World Health Organization.\n\nHe was accused of \u201cflirting with vaccine conspiracy\u201d after falsely saying earlier this month that people were being told they needed to keep having Covid vaccinations every six months.\n\nOther senior figures, such as Richard Tice, have long raised doubts about the safety and necessity of the vaccine. Last month, it emerged that a third of Reform\u2019s council leaders across the country have expressed vaccine-sceptic views, openly questioning public health measures that keep millions safe.\n\nBut such views in the party reached a nadir when a controversial doctor was given top billing at the Reform party conference and used his speech to claim the Covid vaccine caused cancer in members of the royal family.\n\nThe speech was delivered by Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who was appointed as a senior adviser to the US health secretary and vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy, and who was described by Reform\u2019s chair, David Bull, as someone who had helped write the party\u2019s health policy.\n\nThe issue may continue to be the source of rifts in the party. Among 20 councillors who defected to the party last week \u2013 mainly from the Tories \u2013 was Dr Chandra Kanneganti, a former chair of the British International Doctors Association who has held policy leads at the British Medical Association and other respected health bodies.\n\nWhile he cited the cost of living, immigration and pressure on public services as the reasons for his defection, Kanneganti said he would also be seeking to share his experience when it came to developing Reform\u2019s health policies and that he disagreed with the views expressed by figures such as Malhotra.\n\n\u201cI have a national expertise on this and I will hopefully be involved in the discussions,\u201d said Kanneganti, who was at the forefront of urging the public to get vaccinated and has spoken about how the pandemic exposed ethnic inequalities.\n\n\u201cI have only just joined but I will hopefully be able to express my views and guide a policy that is actually evidence based,\u201d he told the Guardian. \u201cIt\u2019s about following the evidence, while at the same time not forcing people to accept something they disagree with.\n\n\u201cSocial media has a lot of false information on it but all the scientific evidence shows that getting vaccinated is much, much safer than not getting vaccinated; it\u2019s about getting that point across.\u201d\n\nAs for Zahawi, he refused several times this week to say if he had been given any assurances on Reform\u2019s position on vaccines before joining, but he did say: \u201cI would not be sitting here, nor would Nigel be sitting next to me, if we didn\u2019t agree we did the right thing to get the vaccine programme to the nation.\u201d\n\nBull, however, was more measured when he came under pressure in an interview last week on Talk TV from callers angry at Zahawi\u2019s defection and his vaccines role.\n\nOne man said he and his wife felt let down and no explanation would secure their vote or that of many of their friends.\n\nBull replied: \u201cRemember, Nadhim doesn\u2019t have a formal role. He has just joined us. Nigel, Richard and I have not changed out stance on compulsory vaccines.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
    },
    {
        "id": "8f1a6be7fca684997a067965fa11e173dcf0ada6",
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        "showTableOfContents": "false",
        "title": "Republican dissent as key figures warn Trump against Greenland pursuit",
        "url": "https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/jan\/17\/republicans-trump-greenland",
        "words": "793",
        "section": "US news",
        "date": "2026-01-17T10:00:24Z",
        "image": "https:\/\/media.guim.co.uk\/e8d67d78590bd0870549a389573202b9d66bc44d\/1376_0_6880_5504\/1000.jpg",
        "author": "Chris Stein in Washington",
        "description": "Congressional Republicans criticize \u2018absurd\u2019 idea as polls show most Americans oppose taking control of territory",
        "text": "Donald Trump\u2019s renewed interest in taking control of Greenland has become a subject of pointed dissent among congressional Republicans, with several allies speaking out in recent days against the idea after the president reintensified his interest following the US raid that captured Venezuelan president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro.\n\nCongressional Republicans are typically loath to disagree openly with the president, who has repeatedly called for his party\u2019s dissenters to be voted out of office. But amid polling that shows an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose taking control of the island and warnings from Denmark that an invasion would spell the end of Nato, some congressional Republicans have issued forceful warnings against pursuing the issue.\n\n\u201cThe thought of the United States taking the position that we would take Greenland, an independent territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, is absurd,\u201d North Carolina senator Thom Tillis said in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday. \u201cSomebody needs to tell the president that the people of Greenland, up until these current times, were actually very, very pro-American and very, very pro American presence.\u201d\n\nNebraska congressman Don Bacon told the Omaha World-Herald: \u201cIf he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency. And he needs to know: the off-ramp is realizing Republicans aren\u2019t going to tolerate this and he\u2019s going to have to back off. He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.\u201d\n\nMitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader, compared the possibility of the US seizing Greenland to Joe Biden\u2019s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, which became an unpopular moment in the Democrat\u2019s presidency.\n\n\u201cFollowing through on this provocation would be more disastrous for the president\u2019s legacy than withdrawing from Afghanistan was for his predecessor,\u201d McConnell said, warning that it would amount to \u201cincinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in US access to the Arctic\u201d.\n\nTrump has displayed an expansionist streak in his second term as president and publicly declared that he would like the United States to annex Canada, the Panama canal and Greenland, even though it is part of Denmark, a Nato ally.\n\nThe subject appeared to have fallen by the wayside in recent months as Trump grappled with slumping approval ratings driven by public concern over the cost of living and his militarized immigration enforcement campaign but he began fixating on Greenland again after the successful raid in Venezuela that saw Maduro taken to stand trial in a New York court.\n\nEuropean countries have reacted with alarm to Trump\u2019s comments, and troops from France, Germany, the UK, Norway and Sweden arrived in Greenland this week in a show of political support that one country said doubled as a scoping mission for what a sustained deployment in the territory would look like.\n\nThe foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark sat down with Trump, vice-president JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio on Wednesday, but the meeting did not change the US president\u2019s demands. Trump later said that the US still \u201cneeds\u201d Greenland for national security reasons, and on Friday, the president warned he may impose tariffs on countries that oppose his campaign.\n\nTrump has kept the bulk of Republicans in line, even on foreign policy issues. After the Senate last week advanced a war powers resolution that would have required Congress be notified before attack Venezuela again, the president said the five Republicans who joined with Democrats in supporting the measure \u201cshould never be elected to office again\u201d. On Wednesday, two of the GOP senator changed their votes this week to kill the resolution.\n\nTillis \u2013 who broke with Trump over his signature domestic policy bill \u2013 along with Bacon and McConnell, are not seeking re-election this year. Other Republicans who spoke out against Trump\u2019s campaign for Greenland are among the few to frequently disagree with the president.\n\n\u201cThis senator from Alaska does not think it is a good idea, and I want to build on the relationship that we have had,\u201d centrist Lisa Murkowski on Friday said during a visit by a bipartisan congressional delegation to Copenhagen. \u201cGreenland needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset.\u201d\n\nThere are signs that Republicans closer to the president are uncomfortable with his campaign as well, and in particular the threat it poses to Nato.\n\n\u201cAs head of the US delegation to the [Nato parliamentary assembly] , I can not overstate the importance of our transatlantic relationships,\u201d Ohio congressman Mike Turner wrote on X. \u201cWe must respect the sovereignty of the Danish and Greenlander people.\u201d\n\nIn an interview with CNN last week, Lousiana senator John Kennedy said: \u201cTo invade Greenland and attack its sovereignty, a fellow Nato country, would be weapons-grade stupid. President Trump is not weapons-grade stupid.\u201d\n\nThis text was served up from the Guardian API via Hacking with Swift, and all copyright belongs to Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliate companies. Please don't rely on it for production apps, commercial purposes, or indeed anything important, because the feed might go away at any point in the future without warning and your code will just break."
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