The Guardian - 05.11.2026 — 2026-11-05

'Blue wave' sees president's party stripped of control of Congress by Democrats Pages 2-13

Inside

Texas turns blue

How progressive voters flipped the ruby-red state Page 4 →

Beginning of the end? What the result means for Trump's presidency Page 6 →

The Guardian view

Joy for Democrats and a reprieve

for democracy Opinion, page 2 → ▲ Jubilant supporters of Democratic Senate race winner James Talarico

State by state

A visual guide to gains and losses across the US Page 8 →

News

US midterms

▲ Voters across the US moved towards the Democrats, many motivated by animosity towards the Trump administration PHOTOGRAPH: BRYNN ANDERSON/AP

President left counting cost of Iran war as Democrats seize Congress

← Continued from page 1

his first remarks since the vote from the construction site of his White House ballroom as senior Republicans, including the vice-president, JD Vance, blamed him for the rout.

Sidestepping the catastrophic blow to his political standing, and what it meant to his party and the country, Trump focused on his self-aggrandising building projects in the US capital. “I grew up on construction sites,” he told the crowd.

Within hours of polls closing, the political fallout had begun.

The White House put out an Instagram post saying “PSA: TRUMP IS STILL YOUR PRESIDENT”, without adding that his power was now vastly diminished.

Vance, whose former Ohio Senate seat fell to the Democrats, began his long and no doubt fraught journey to distance himself from Trump before the 2028 presidential election. He instantly blamed the Republican rout on Trump's war with Iran.

"The reason we lost is the war," he said on X. "If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest."

Pressed by reporters on whether he agreed with Vance's assessment, Trump replied: "I think it's largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit, but at the same time, if I had to do it again, I'd have to do it again."

One of the early casualties of the blue tide was the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who indicated he would not seek re-election when Democrats took over in January.

As Vance made clear in his statement, the election channelled the anger of a seething electorate, Republicans and Democrats alike. In addition to Trump's war, they were furious about the cost of living and inflation, aggravated by the president's tariffs and foreign exploits.

The president had spent weeks pleading with the American people to pretend that he was on the ballot - a tactic he might now rue after the American people took him at his word and rewarded him with lame-duck status.

Trump appeared last night to have changed his mind, declaring on social media: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”

As the counts progressed, the shocks mounted up.

Top of the Democrat victories was Texas, the state that has come to epitomise the iron fist of modern Republican rule. In a seismic shift, James Talarico became the first Democrat sent by Texas to the Senate since 1988. A dream of flipping the state had finally come to pass.

In a double whammy, out too went Greg Abbott, the titan of Texas Republican politics ousted by Gina Hinojosa, who becomes the first Democratic governor of Texas in 36 years.

Less than 24 hours after suffering historic losses in the US midterms, Donald Trump gathered reporters and TV cameras to the White House to congratulate his team.

"The whole thing is a miracle, and it's all because of you," the US president said into a microphone yesterday afternoon. He was not referring to the blue wave of Democratic victories but to his White House ballroom.

Standing on the construction site, Trump boasted about the ballroom's “magnificent” columns 'The whole thing is a miracle'

Trump focuses on new ballroom

carved out of limestone, 50ft ceilings, capacity to hold more than 300 guests, “drone-proof” roof, thick marble floors and military-grade bunker.

For more than 20 minutes, there was no mention of the fact that dozens of Trump-endorsed candidates for the Senate and House of Representatives lost to Democrats on Tuesday.

When Doug Burgum, the secretary of the interior, took the microphone he declared yesterday to be “a day of celebration and a day of gratitude”.

Only when the president finally took questions from reporters did he address his party's dismal performance. "Look, I'll get along probably with the Democrats, unless they want to be destructive, but I have the power of the veto," Trump said. He said it was "largely true" that the war with Iran had helped Democrats, because it drove up fuel prices, but added that the conflict was worth it.

Meanwhile, Americans have grown increasingly frustrated with Trump's performance as president. But Trump continued to claim yesterday that voters were not rejecting him. "Look, if I were on the ballot we would've won," he said. Ariana Baio

Her elevation to the state's highest office as its first Latina governor stands in itself as a repudiation of the Trump administration.

The brutal mass deportation campaign unleashed by ICE against Hispanics in Texas was one of Trump's most resounding own goals, pushing away droves of voters who had backed him only two years ago.

The pattern of stunning Republican defeats was repeated across the country, from the east coast through the plains and even deep into the south. It amounted to a withering rebuke of Trump's broken promises, economic follies and war with Iran at a time when many American families are struggling to put food on the table and fuel in their tanks.

The list of astounding results extended to Kansas, a state that until recent days had been well beyond even the most optimistic Democrats' wildest fantasies. Adam Hamilton, a mega-church pastor, becomes the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat there in almost a century.

He defeated Roger Marshall, the incumbent, who became a poster boy for Republican callousness when it was revealed he had sued 700 of his own patients for failing to pay him their medical bills when practising as a doctor.

Even in deeply conservative Mississippi, the Democrat candidate for Senate, Scott Colom, was slightly ahead of the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith. The race was too close to call last night.

▲ The president speaks at the new White House ballroom’s building site

Democrats in Texas celebrate the victory of senator-elect James Talarico, ending a 32-year wait to turn the Republican stronghold blue

PHOTOGRAPH: BRANDON BELL/GETTY

▼ The campaign headquarters for the North Carolina senator-elect Roy Cooper and, bottom, the official watch party for New York City Democrats

PHOTOGRAPHS: JONATHAN DRAKE/REUTERS; OLGA FEDOROVA/EPA

Among the most jaw-dropping results was the victory of Annie Andrews, a Democratic paediatrician, in deeply conservative South Carolina. She defeated Darline Graham, the late Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham's sister, marking the first time South Carolina has sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1998.

Trump had personally persuaded Graham to stand for election in her brother's seat despite her misgivings.

In Maine Susan Collins conceded to the Democrat Troy Jackson, letting go of a Senate seat she had held for almost 30 years.

Trump spent the night watching his party's disaster unfold on a White House TV set. He was reportedly fuming.

The emphatic outcome could have enormous implications for Trump's final two years in office, and with it the immediate future of the US and the world.

Hakeem Jeffries is now poised to become the first Black speaker of the House in US history.

“America is back,” he said. “Today begins the great American comeback. The American people have spoken all across the land, from sea to shining sea, and made clear they have had enough of the extremism and corruption.”

The incoming Democratic majority is promising to move swiftly from January on a 100-day plan prioritising affordability. They are also focusing on reversing cuts to healthcare costs and Medicaid as they seek to show voters they have their personal livelihoods at the centre of their agenda.

With such a large cushion in both chambers, the Democrats will also be emboldened to use newly acquired oversight and subpoena powers aggressively to investigate the most egregious of Trump's excesses, including the president's financial enrichment of himself and his family. Democratic leaders have said it amounts to corruption.

The senior Democrat on the House oversight committee, Robert Garcia of California, had a stern warning for the administration: “Lawyer up.”

The Democratic majority is also likely to hit the White House with a series of war powers resolutions to pressure Trump to end the Iran war.

Democratic leaders are preparing to challenge his tariffs regime and work to rein in ICE, as well as hold investigations into Pete Hegseth, the combative defence secretary.

With the Senate also under control, Democrats will have the power to block many of Trump's judicial and cabinet appointments. The Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, said: “Americans want Washington to bring down the cost of living, and clean up corruption.”

Meanwhile, the Democrats' rising star Jon Ossoff's convincing re-election to his Georgia Senate seat, announced shortly before 8pm on the east coast, is likely to elevate him in the hearts of the party as a potential 2028 presidential candidate.

Ossoff proved himself during the campaign to be a fearsome debater, fundraising juggernaut and savvy social media operator - three skills that the Democrats will be desperately seeking in two years' time as they look to succeed Trump in the White House.

Winners and losers Key points on a day that changed the US

ballot, in the hopes of generating support for Republicans.

The blue wave

Democrats saw their hoped-for “blue wave” become reality by flipping seven Senate seats, more than two dozen House

seats and expanding the number of Democratic governors.

Shortly after polls closed, Democrats saw winning streaks in closely watched Senate races. Before midnight, the Associated Press had declared the Democrats would hold the majority in Congress's upper chamber. Less than two hours later, they secured the House.

With control over both chambers, Democrats gain the authority to push back on Trump's agenda. Tuesday evening's results were sweeping, with states and districts that voted for Trump two years ago abandoning the president's allies in the midterms. Even Republican incumbents who were running in comfortably red areas, such as Florida, found themselves locked in close races with Democrats.

In one of the most closely watched races of the night, the Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won in Michigan in the face of a largely Islamophobic campaign against him.

2 Republicans suffer historic losses The Democrats' win was underscored by Republicans' historic losses across

the country. For the first time in 94 years, a Democrat won a Senate seat in Kansas, with Adam Hamilton defeating Roger Marshall.

Republicans lost a South Carolina Senate seat for the first time in nearly 30 years when Annie Andrews defeated Darline Graham - the sister of the late senator Lindsey Graham and a close ally of Trump.

James Talarico, a progressive Democratic newcomer, defeated Ken Paxton, the state's conservative attorney general, in Texas's Senate race, ending the Republicans' 38-year streak.

Iowa and North Carolina also had not elected a Democratic senator since 2008.

After suffering major losses, Trump asserted that he was not on

ballot papers and would have won if he had been - a reversal from his request that voters act as though he was. For weeks, Trump had encouraged supporters to vote as though he was a candidate on the

However, on Tuesday night he dismissed concerns that the midterm results were a reflection of that.

“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Trump said.

He reiterated his claim to the New York Times, saying: “I wasn’t on the ticket, and because I wasn’t on the ticket, we couldn’t get enough people out to vote.”

The US president, who has a long history of making false election fraud claims, also told the newspaper he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results of the midterms.

Democrats outperform the polls In the lead-up to the election, polls had indicated that the Democrats were poised to win the House and possibly the Senate, with Democratic candidates holding narrow leads over Republicans in competitive Senate races.

But pre-election polls were more reserved about Democratic candidates' prospects, in part due to the failed predictions over the 2024 presidential election.

In the Kansas Senate race, pre-election polls indicated Hamilton had a small lead over Marshall. But pollsters from the Washington Post warned that the prediction could be misleading because Democratic voters were more likely to respond than Republicans.

Trump's handpicked candidates lose In another example of voters' rebuke of Trump, the US president's handpicked candidates

in key races lost their bids to Democrats.

Historically, candidates endorsed by Trump perform well in primaries and general elections. But this time around those candidates could not convince voters to cast their ballot for them.

In the Texas Senate race, Paxton lost even after securing Trump's support in a contentious primary.

In the South Carolina Senate race, Darline Graham failed to defeat Annie Andrews, even after Trump elevated Graham to take over her late brother's seat and campaigned for her heavily.

Trump chose Michael Whatley to fend off the Democrat Roy Cooper in North Carolina's Senate race, but he failed to do so.

Ariana Baio

Senator-elect James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, the governor-elect, celebrate their victories in the midterms

PHOTOGRAPH: JAMES TALARICO/X/REUTERS

▼ Talarico is the first Democrat to be elected as a senator in Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, the year before he was born

PHOTOGRAPH: BRANDON BELL/GETTY

Texas turns blue Democrats savour seismic victory in Trump heartland

David Smith

Austin, Texas

“This is amazing,” exclaimed Tiffany Dunsmore, 44, the owner of Austin Scavenger Hunt, as the city

skyline gleamed on a balmy night. "I cannot believe Texas went blue!"

For 32 long years, turning Texas blue had been an elusive prize for Democrats in the US's second biggest state. There were false dawns, nearly men and broken dreams. But on Tuesday, the party's agony finally came to an end.

James Talarico was elected the youngest member of the US Senate, and Gina Hinojosa the state's first Latina governor. The pair delivered the party's first statewide win since 1994 and the jewel in the crown of Donald Trump's midterm humiliation.

The plaza of the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin buzzed like a political festival, packed with taco trucks, craft stalls selling handmade ceramics and vendors stitching bandanas on demand. Expectations had mounted as giant TVs showed Democrats storming Republican strongholds across the nation.

Then came a great roar of jubilation when, at 10pm local time, it was confirmed that Democrats had claimed the ultimate prize: the Lone Star State. Supporters wearing Talarico T-shirts punched the air and hugged one another. Nearby drivers tooted their car horns. The weight of three decades had finally been lifted.

▲ Ken Paxton was dogged by scandal throughout his campaign for senator

The last Democratic senator elected in Texas was Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, the year before Talarico was born, while the state's last Democratic governor was Ann Richards, elected in 1990. Talarico's breakthrough, defeating the scandal-plagued, Trump-endorsed Republican Ken Paxton, helped power Democrats to retake control of the US Senate. Hinojosa, meanwhile, beat the incumbent governor, Greg Abbott, a titan of Texas politics who was running for a record fourth term.

Lynn Jones, an 80-year-old writer from Round Rock, which is Talarico's home town, watched the results in near disbelief. “Ann Richards is dancing in heaven right now - with Gina,” she declared. Asked what message the outcome sent to Trump, she answered simply: “It’s over.”

Dustin Hall, a 44-year-old IT worker and journalism student, saw it as a profound restoration of trust. He said of Talarico: “He’s a very honest, very decent person, a Christian who doesn’t use Christianity as a weapon.”

Hall added: “Ken Paxton was bankrolled by Elon Musk and other oligarchs. I do believe that James Talarico will be working for the people of Texas and not for the oligarchs.” He viewed the election as a clear “rejection of the Maga philosophy and the Maga mentality”.

Ziad Fanous, a 59-year-old software company chief financial officer sporting a Talarico campaign T-shirt, said: "I'm so happy, just ecstatic about it. It was wonderful. Texas needed this badly.

"I am surprised by the landslide and that makes me feel so good because it shows there is goodness still with people, that they're not going to vote for somebody like Paxton, and they're going to lean towards somebody like Talarico, which is amazing."

Fanous added: “The biggest thing frankly goes beyond affordability. It’s about corruption on one side and honesty and integrity on the other. I hope that it changes the culture of America back to what it should be.”

Paul Fletcher, a 33-year-old tech worker born and raised in Austin, admitted he had never expected

to see his home state turn blue. "Common-sense Texans were tired of what has been happening to them in their state for generations."

He cited rising living costs across Texas's urban areas as a key driver alongside Paxton's scandals, adding that the message to Trump and the Maga movement was clear: "Their policies aren't popular in this country any more."

Talarico arrived at the venue in his customary outfit: dark jacket, white open-collar shirt and blue jeans. In the main auditorium he spoke from a lectern mounted with a sign that said: "Love thy neighbor." He was joined on stage by more than a hundred supporters, some wearing caps or cowboy hats.

The Democrat spoke of his tough upbringing, his Christian faith and his hope that Texas, and the US, were ready to move on from the Trump era.

"We are tired of being told to hate each other," he said. "It has been 10 years of this kind of politics. Politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as professional wrestling.

"It tears families apart. It ends friendships, and it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time. People across the political spectrum are hungry for a different kind of politics, not a politics of hate. Not a politics of fear, not a politics of division, but a politics of love."

He added: “This is a win the size of Texas. And now we have a mandate the size of Texas.”

It is, indeed, a Texas-sized shock to the US political system in general and the Republican party in particular. Texas was home to the former president George HW Bush and is still home to his son, former president George W Bush. Trump won it by 14 percentage points in the 2024 election. Now it is the ground zero of his failure - a loss many Republicans believe might have been salvageable if he had not intervened in the primary to boost Paxton against the incumbent Republican senator, John Cornyn.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, tweeted: “Texas has been the most significant Republican state this century. A Democrat sweep of statewide races - and possible capture of the Legislature - takes away one of the anchors of the modern GOP. A huge loss.”

Yet in 2026, Republicans and their allies had been reduced to branding their Democratic opponent “James Talafreako”, “Tofu Talarico” and “Six-gender Jimmy”, implying falsely he is gay, producing an AI-generated ad showing him dressed in an outfit resembling Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and falsely claiming that - horror of horrors - he is vegan. None of it worked.

Here Trump's tactics failed, and the people rebuked him. Sasa Rodriguez, a 53-year-old graphic designer, said: “Everybody’s had enough. We’re not all stupid. Finally, this is happening. On The Daily Show when they go and interview people at Maga events they all just look like a bunch of idiots. We’re not all a bunch of idiots. Even the idiots are not idiots.”

Analysis

Rachel Leingang

This is no ordinary midterms backlash. It is a wholesale rebuke of the Maga movement

N

o single Democratic coalition can claim victory after Tuesday's resounding midterm results - all parts of the Democratic coalition can.

Their wins were so sweeping, so resounding, that factional divisions fail to explain them. This year, the most important thing Democrats had to be to win was, simply, not Republicans.

Trump gave Democrats the political gifts of a deeply unpopular war against Iran that led to rising prices, chaotic tariffs that devastated small businesses, farmers and international alliances, healthcare cuts, a deadly deportation scheme, self-enrichment, corruption, a never-ending debacle over a reflecting pool renovation.

Democrats took the ball and ran with it, taking on Trump as popularity continued to slide. It wasn't just the typical midterm backlash a sitting president's party faces; it was a wholesale rebuke of the president's Maga movement, the clearest sign yet that voters have had enough of Trumpism.

Democrats of all stripes declared victory on Tuesday night: moderates, progressives, populists, Democratic socialists. And they won up and down the ballot, flipping both chambers of Congress, several governor's mansions and delivering multiple new legislative trifectas in the states. These victories will provide avenues for Democrats to hold Trump accountable and act as a functioning branch of government, something voters have said they've been missing in Trump 2.0.

Democrats competed deep in Republican strongholds - places that wouldn't have made the map even six months ago. US senators will join Democratic ranks from Kansas and South Carolina. Texas went blue, and not just in one race. Voters in rural districts that Democrats had previously written off showed they could be persuaded. Maine voters ousted a 30-year veteran of the US Senate despite a scandal-plagued Democratic candidate, who was eventually replaced.

▲ Experts said the turnout of angry voters drove the Democratic victory

These wins will give Democrats a chance to hold Trump accountable at all levels of government – and to prove to voters that they can competently govern, should they harness the momentum.

The depth of the Democratic wins underscores the unpopularity of the Republicans, something voters around the country have been signalling all year. In talking to voters over this past year, I felt their deep discontent, an anger that animated their votes, on a level I hadn't seen before. On the campaign trail, voters of all political stripes were fed up, their fury at the status quo rose above all else on their list of voting priorities.

When I asked the progressive political consultant Anat Shenker-Osorio about this months ago, she predicted that the midterms would be decided by the “mad as hell, ain’t going to take it any more” vote, as midterms often are. It would not be a sudden embrace of Democrats, but a “plague on both your houses”, she said. The size of Democrats’ wave would depend on how persuasive they were at convincing angry and disillusioned voters to turn out. Given the blue tsunami, it seems they were convinced their vote was worth it.

In most instances, Democratic candidates showed up and listened. They held town halls all over their districts, hearing the anger that punctuated politics. The Democrats raged vertically, at the billionaires and elites who rule the US political system, blaming them for rising income inequality that leaves Americans feeling like it's impossible to get ahead.

Voters, the results showed, are done with Trump's Republican party. Trump's coalition has all but driven out any remaining factions that publicly disagreed with the president. The Republicans, now, need to contend with what they will become after Trump.

Could there have been a lane for Republicans who explicitly ran against the Trump agenda, saying they would work to rein in the executive? We don't know. No one really tried.

The attempts at fearmongering - over trans people, or Arab Americans, or Hasan Piker - didn't work. The fundamentals of Americans' lives were worse. It was Republicans' fault, voters decided.

They paid far more for gas because of a war they didn't support. They dropped their healthcare because they couldn't afford it after Congress allowed subsidies to expire. They watched as datacentres moved into their towns, a physical manifestation of the disruption artificial intelligence could bring to their lives. Trump dismissed their concerns over these issues, claiming they essentially weren't happening, or were a necessary step toward greater goals. Voters even rebelled against Republican attempts to gerrymander seats more favourable to their party, with major defeats in seats that the party should have easily carried by double digits.

Trump repeatedly told voters to pretend he was on the ballot, believing it would rally his base and help stave off huge losses for Republicans. But, as some voters said today, his presence was clear - and it backfired. In Rochester, New Hampshire, an independent voter, Rebecca Connors, said she voted for Democrats to send a message to Trump that “he’s wreaking havoc”.

▲ Democrats held on to positions in states such as Michigan and California, while making inroads in Republican strongholds PHOTOGRAPH: MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS

▶ Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim senator, makes his victory speech next to his wife, Sarah Jukaku

PHOTOGRAPH: JULIA DEMAREE NIKHINSON/AP

"All across the state and all across this country, people are saying: ‘Enough is enough,’” Minnesota Democratic US senator-elect Peggy Flanagan said after her victory. “You just beat Donald Trump. America did too.”

Though eyes will quickly shift toward 2028, Democrats now have an opportunity to seize the power voters have entrusted them with and use it to rebuild their party. The Republicans, though, have even more soul-searching to do, with the midterm results fresh in the rearview mirror.

Michigan El-Sayed celebrates historic Senate win

Joseph Gedeon

Detroit

Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor and progressive Democrat, made history on Tuesday in winning the closely watched US Senate race in Michigan, defeating the Republican Mike Rogers to become the country's first Muslim senator.

El-Sayed's win added to a decisive Democratic majority in the Senate after the party wrested control of the upper chamber with shock victories in Texas, Kansas and South Carolina.

El-Sayed, 42, declared victory early yesterday at the state Democratic party's headquarters in Detroit.

“You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates,” El-Sayed told the crowd of supporters in his election night speech. “You welcomed me in your homes, your churches, your synagogues.”

He credited a movement that had been built over a year and a half of campaigning in Michigan's biggest cities and smallest towns, and said supporters had given him strength in his lowest moments.

His opponent and detractors, including Donald Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, led a largely Islamophobic campaign against him, often pointing to his name and faith, including the president alleging he was a “jihadist” who would need to walk through a metal detector before entering the Senate chamber.

'They want an America that is too small for some of us. We know that America is big enough for all of us'

Abdul El-Sayed

Progressive Democrat

El-Sayed said his denigrators had chosen to be divisive rather than address the cost of fuel and groceries because they did not have an answer to the problems he said they created.

“They want an America that is too small for some of us,” El-Sayed said. “We know that America is big enough for all of us.”

Addressing Vance, he noted: “JD, habibi [my dear], there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in January.”

Rogers, a former congressman who was endorsed by Trump and ran as his close ally, had lost the 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin by roughly 0.3 percentage points.

This time he ran against El-Sayed, a former Wayne county health director who upset the Democratic establishment favourite, Haley Stevens, in the primary in August. He advocated for the Medicare for All proposal for universal healthcare and called for an end to US military aid for Israel.

Both candidates were running to succeed Gary Peters, the outgoing Democratic senator, who has held the seat since 2015.

Republicans cast the general election as a referendum on the Democratic left, and El-Sayed's nomination prompted Trump to call him a “communist”, and to slander him as a “jihadist” and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist group founded in Egypt.

The race was seen as a test of whether a progressive Democrat could win a swing state.

The pro-Israel lobby Aipac, through its Super Pac the United Democracy Project, spent about \$30m (£22m) in the primary trying to stop El-Sayed, a record for a single race. More than \$220m in total ad spending had been poured into the general election by mid-October by both parties, according to the advertising platform AdImpact.

In his victory speech, he said: "We want our taxes spent here, for schools here and healthcare here and infrastructure here. We don't want our money sent to do apartheid or genocide or war."

Rogers had backed Trump's aggressive tariff policy and war with Iran before breaking with the president on both issues in the closing weeks of the campaign, calling for an end to the US-Canada trade war and a swift conclusion to the Iran conflict. He had opposed the Affordable Care Act, defended the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, and had repeated Trump's false claims about the 2020 election.

Beginning of the end? What this poll disaster means for Trump presidency

David Smith

Austin, Texas

Donald Trump posted a document on social media this summer by a supposed historian that looked at similarities

between him and, among others, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. That now seems fitting: the US president has fought one battle too many, and appears to have brought about his own destruction.

Tuesday's US midterm elections were a thumping, a shellacking and an extinction-level event rolled into one. Ruby-red Republican strongholds once deemed safe toppled like dominoes. Democrats won Senate seats for the first time in Kansas since 1932, in Texas since 1988 and in South Carolina since 1998.

The House of Representatives and Senate had flipped from one party to the other in the same midterm election just three times since the second world war - in 1946, 1994 and 2006 - but now it has happened again, ensuring that the US Congress will be a bulwark against Trump's expansion of executive power.

The president, who swiftly noted he was not on the ticket on Tuesday, is the architect of his own lame-duck status. Indeed, having spent months repeatedly urging voters to pretend he was on the ticket, he could hardly have done any more to sabotage his own party. In 2024 he won the presidency promising to lower prices and end foreign wars; his tariffs added to upward pressure on prices, and his ill-starred attack on Iran pushed them higher still.

Then there was Trump's wild and bizarre campaign, which consisted of long and rambling speeches about architectural projects,

outbursts of vile Islamophobia and musings about the “ass” of a Republican senator from Ohio. It culminated at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, where he declared victory in the war on algae.

The voters said: enough is enough. Now for the Republican postmortem. According to exit polls from the Associated Press, Americans said the cost of living and government corruption were their two top issues. Trump, who was purported to be an economic populist, had flaunted his self-enrichment and fancy ballroom even as people struggled to put food on the table. It was too much even for some in his supposedly rock-solid base.

How will Trump cope with this new political reality? Is this the beginning of the end?

From January, Democrats will have the power to block legislation, launch investigations into Trump's administration and thwart his judicial and senior government appointments. Life could suddenly become uncomfortable for the likes of Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, or big tech leaders such as Elon Musk. Democrats may even consider impeaching Trump for a third time.

That potentially leaves the president under siege - a diminished figure mired in Washington gridlock and reduced to wielding a veto pen, which he had already starting threatening to use on Tuesday evening.

However, it must be said that Trump paid little attention to Congress during his first two years in office, apart from the passage of his One Big Beautiful Bill Act of

Beginning of the end? What this poll disaster means for Trump presidency

David Smith

Austin, Texas

Donald Trump posted a document on social media this summer by a supposed historian that looked at similarities

between him and, among others, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. That now seems fitting: the US president has fought one battle too many, and appears to have brought about his own destruction.

Tuesday's US midterm elections were a thumping, a shellacking and an extinction-level event rolled into one. Ruby-red Republican strongholds once deemed safe toppled like dominoes. Democrats won Senate seats for the first time in Kansas since 1932, in Texas since 1988 and in South Carolina since 1998.

The House of Representatives and Senate had flipped from one party to the other in the same midterm election just three times since the second world war - in 1946, 1994 and 2006 - but now it has happened again, ensuring that the US Congress will be a bulwark against Trump's expansion of executive power.

The president, who swiftly noted he was not on the ticket on Tuesday, is the architect of his own lame-duck status. Indeed, having spent months repeatedly urging voters to pretend he was on the ticket, he could hardly have done any more to sabotage his own party. In 2024 he won the presidency promising to lower prices and end foreign wars; his tariffs added to upward pressure on prices, and his ill-starred attack on Iran pushed them higher still.

Then there was Trump's wild and bizarre campaign, which consisted of long and rambling speeches about architectural projects,

outbursts of vile Islamophobia and musings about the “ass” of a Republican senator from Ohio. It culminated at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, where he declared victory in the war on algae.

The voters said: enough is enough. Now for the Republican postmortem. According to exit polls from the Associated Press, Americans said the cost of living and government corruption were their two top issues. Trump, who was purported to be an economic populist, had flaunted his self-enrichment and fancy ballroom even as people struggled to put food on the table. It was too much even for some in his supposedly rock-solid base.

How will Trump cope with this new political reality? Is this the beginning of the end?

From January, Democrats will have the power to block legislation, launch investigations into Trump's administration and thwart his judicial and senior government appointments. Life could suddenly become uncomfortable for the likes of Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, or big tech leaders such as Elon Musk. Democrats may even consider impeaching Trump for a third time.

That potentially leaves the president under siege - a diminished figure mired in Washington gridlock and reduced to wielding a veto pen, which he had already starting threatening to use on Tuesday evening.

However, it must be said that Trump paid little attention to Congress during his first two years in office, apart from the passage of his One Big Beautiful Bill Act of

Reading the room The war on algae, freedom-fighting in space and a new way to shift blame

Sam Levin

Standing at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool on Monday afternoon, Donald Trump zeroed in on his closing message of the

high-stakes midterm elections: it takes a long time to get rid of filth.

Less than 24 hours before Americans headed to the polls, the US president staged a bizarre press briefing in which he touted his troubled \$14m renovation of the Washington DC landmark. Holding up a big photo of the pool covered in algae, Trump said: "This was in the Biden era ... They just spend money after money after money. Look, it's not an easy thing. The algae is brutal. It forms easily ... All you saw was dirt and filth and paper and everything else for years ..."

It was a head-scratching event just one day before election day, particularly as polls have shown that Americans aren't too pleased with the president's intense focus on renovation projects. Never mind that the reflecting pool project itself was badly botched and became an international joke earlier this year when Trump's promise to turn the water "American flag

▶ Donald Trump focused on the troubled renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington DC as he addressed the media on the eve of the elections

PHOTOGRAPH: FINN GOMEZ/GETTY

blue” ended with a green algae takeover. The press briefing was yet more evidence that Trump was struggling to read the room, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that he viewed “beautification of Washington” as one of his strongest legacies, despite aides’ advice to

focus on other matters. Trump has not listened to such guidance. On one tangent at the reflecting pool, he said he had achieved more in two years than any other administration in history. “I’ve kept every single promise I made, except far more,” he claimed,

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adding: “I’ve actually kept far more promises than I made.”

By election day, he was turning to other priorities - publishing an “American declaration of freedom in space” which proclaimed “the solar system and all of outer space beyond Earth are the province of

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all humans", and declaring this week "Anti-Communism Week" in honour of "the victims of socialism and communism". It was unclear how the White House would be marking the occasion.

On Tuesday morning, as polls opened nationwide, Trump

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ tax and spending measures. He has acted unilaterally on tariffs and military strikes on Venezuela and Iran. Like his predecessors, he will surely continue to pursue foreign policy as a legacy project, an alarming prospect for the world.

He will also push on with his other obsession: giving Washington a radical makeover with a new White House ballroom, a triumphal arch and more gold. Congress may take the view that this is a relatively harmless activity to keep him occupied compared with the havoc he could be wreaking elsewhere.

More threatening to Trump than any Democratic investigation is the inexorable march of time. The race to succeed him in 2028 begins now.

He is psychologically ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of the spotlight leaving him to focus on JD Vance, Marco Rubio and other potential candidates.

That shift could also eat away at Trump's cult-like dominance of the Republican party and the Maga movement. He has shaped the

ENT OF THE

turned up on the rightwing Fox News network with a surprise announcement: he would end military aid to Israel at the end of the year, he claimed. "We were giving them \$4bn (£3bn) ... But it gets cut off at the end of the year," he said by phone. It was a position party in his own image for a decade and it will not easily snap back. But members of Congress picking through the wreckage of Tuesday may well conclude that Trump is a creature of the past - and their survival depends on placing the right bets on the future.

Every swing of the electoral pendulum gets over-interpreted. Trump's two presidential election victories were seen as a fundamental shift, even though he never achieved $50\%$ of the national popular vote. His defeat in 2020 was hailed as the end of the Trump era, only for him to rise from the political dead four years later.

Anyone re-proclaiming the end of that era after Tuesday's landslide should remember that the president is not yet halfway through his second term, and that his id will relish the prospect of fighting Democrats.

A wounded Trump who feels he has nothing to lose over the next two years may turn out to be the most reckless and dangerous of all.

more in tune with the views of voters, with a Quinnipiac poll in September finding nearly half of Americans believed the US was too supportive of Israel.

The president also said the quiet part out loud: he was sick of Democrats hammering him on the issue, citing the effective messaging of Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate in Michigan who has criticised military aid to Israel. Trump said “the left” had used the \$4bn figure as a “signal of unfairness, and we can’t allow that to happen”. “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed when they don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point,” he said.

By Tuesday evening, as polls began to close, the president was angrily ranting about Fox, the leading conservative news network that he long considered his ally, but which has increasingly drawn his ire.

"The FoxNews Poll, always the worst, is so insulting with the questions they ask," he posted on his Truth Social website at 6.36pm. "Every question is a hit job, and every answer is 'BULLSHIT!'" Twenty minutes later, he posted again: "FoxNews Ratings are way down (27%! because they're spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats! All of those people who used to watch Fox, and no longer do, get it. It's them, not me - My numbers are better than they have ever been."

Within an hour, results started pouring in: major wins for Democrats in Georgia, New Hampshire and North Carolina.

As the bad news for Republicans continued at a rapid pace, signalling a stunning rebuke of the president, Trump issued a short statement with a simple message: it's not his fault.

"I wasn't on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!" he wrote on Truth Social, adding: "Thank you for your attention to this matter."

Maine Senator's 30-year tenure comes to abrupt end

Robert Tait

Portland, Maine

▲ Republican Susan Collins at her watch party on Tuesday night in Bangor, Maine. She was defeated by Troy Jackson PHOTOGRAPH: JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

The political demise of Susan Collins - a fixture of Maine and Washington politics for three decades - recalls the famous

line in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises about how one of the novel's characters experienced bankruptcy: gradually and then suddenly.

In the run-up to Tuesday's stunning Democratic “blue wave” election triumph, it seemed obvious that Collins’ 30-year tenure as Maine’s Republican senator was vulnerable to the challenge of Troy Jackson, the Democrats’ explicitly working-class candidate, as voters prepared to unleash pent-up anger with Donald Trump’s presidency.

Rather like the Berlin Wall in the days before it finally fell in 1989, however, no one seemed to believe it could really happen until it did.

Collins, after all, had survived seemingly credible electoral challenges before and appeared primed - despite opinion polls showing a close race - to win a sixth Senate term, having once pledged to serve only two. She had become something of a state institution, with her assertions that Washington connections brought federal funds and contracts to Maine carrying weight with many constituents.

Jackson, meanwhile, seemed a less-than-polished prospect for a state that had previously sent such august figures as Ed Muskie, George Mitchell and Bill Cohen to the US Senate before they went on to become international statesmen.

His candidacy had been founded on the withdrawal of the party's original nominee, Graham Platner, whose progressive populist platform generated real excitement before the emergence of serious sexual misconduct allegations. Platner denied the allegations but withdrew from the race. Jackson, a former logger, had just 101 days to campaign after being nominated as his replacement.

On the eve of polling day, one activist, Doug Emerson, was so sceptical of local voters' willingness to jettison Collins that he festooned his car with Trump policy miscues he believed she had been complicit in, and parked it outside the senator's office in Portland - Maine's biggest city - in the hope that it would raise awareness.

Even as polls closed and the count got under way, hopes for Jackson's success seemed restrained at the Democrats' watch party. Early returns showed Jackson with a small lead, but within catching distance, even as former Republican bastions once thought impregnable fell to the gathering Democratic wave.

The realisation that this political force was about to sweep Collins away came late in the evening, when - with about 60% of the ballots counted - returns showed Jackson with a convincing lead. Within minutes, MS Now reported that Collins had called to concede; wild cheers and chants of “Troy, Troy” filled the ballroom at Portland’s Holiday Inn.

Amid the euphoria, it was left to Jackson to deliver a message of humble, down-to-earth populism that emphasised his trade union background and underlined that his unlikely triumph had been driven by grassroots discontent.

"You understood what it would mean to send one of your own to the United States Senate," he told the crowd. "Donald Trump and the billionaires need to understand one thing very clear - something about your new senator. I don't owe them a damn thing.

"When they threaten your health care, your livelihood, or your freedoms, I am going to stand up to them. You know where I'll stand. You know how I'll vote. And when you've got a question about it, you'll be able to ask me yourself."

It was a promise of accessibility that critics say Collins never provided - despite her claims of

'Having a working-class person and a union member in the US Senate is an historic change'

Cynthia Phinney

Union federation president independent-mindedness and protestations of frequently voting against Trump, who failed to carry Maine in any of his three presidential campaigns.

Jackson, who as a state legislator once opposed abortion rights, won the backing of pro-choice campaigners by stressing Collins' 2018 vote for the conservative US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, who subsequently voted for the court's ruling that overturned Roe v Wade, which had previously guaranteed abortion rights nationally. Jackson placards reading “abortion is on the ballot” were widespread.

Trump, in contrast to his giving stump speeches for multiple other Republican Senate candidates, did not visit Maine to campaign for Collins. Yet there was clear scepticism about her self-image as a critic of the US president.

One key campaign moment came in the first televised debate when Collins cited as an example of her willingness to defy Trump on tariffs from Canada her work in getting road salt exempted. “You can’t eat road salt,” Jackson replied tersely, a phrase that became a slogan used in Democrat campaign material.

It reflected an attack on Collins' credentials as a champion of the state. “She’s very good at letting us all know what she has done,” Elizabeth Wise, 59, a registered nurse working as a vote canvasser for Jackson said at a canvass event in Yarmouth. “But she has really been manipulating Maine voters into thinking that she is a moderate. She makes big deals for the very wealthy in the billionaire class and corporate America on the backs of very small deals that she brings home to Maine.”

Jackson now stands as a potential antidote, say his supporters. “The Senate has been an elite group of millionaires, and Troy comes from a working-class background,” said Cynthia Phinney, Maine president of the AFL-CIO union federation, which made 65,000 canvassing calls on Jackson’s behalf.

“Having a working-class person and a union member in the US Senate is an historic change,” added Phinney. “People are ready to demand change that they haven’t got from their elected officials. It’s a moment in history.”

Senate

Thirty-three of the 100 members of the upper chamber are being elected this year, along with two other special elections. Senators serve six-year terms

How to read the map ☐ Not up for election, incumbent shown ☐ Held ☐ Gained ☐ Yet to declare

Michigan - Dem hold

Progressive Democrat

Abdul El-Sayed won a highly contested race against Mike Rogers, becoming the first Muslim in the Senate

Texas - Dem gain

James Talarico flipped the traditionally ruby-red seat with a more than 10-point lead, becoming the Senate's youngest member

Kansas - Dem gain

The first Democratic senator elected since 1932, Republicans are used to regularly achieving double-digit margins

How Democrats' blue wave swept across the country

Visual representations of how the party has taken control of the Senate and the House, as well as winning most of the governor elections

Governors

Elections took place in 36 states, as well as three territories

20-5

28+5

34 of 36 races called

House

Democrats

237 +29

Republicans were defending a majority in the 435-member House. Democrats held 212 House seats and needed 218 to win control. Members of the House of Representatives serve two-year terms

How to read the map

Battlegrounds

Battleground seats classified by the Cook Report. Most seats are repeatedly won by the same party, so control of Congress comes down to these key competitive races

Senate

House

Lean Democrat

218 needed for a majority

all 435 seats were up for election

Ohio 9th - Dem hold

Marcy Kaptur won re-election, extending the longest tenure of any woman in Congress. She has held her seat since 1983

Pennsylvania 7th - Dem gain

Democrat Bob Brooks secured one of four flips in Pennsylvania

North Carolina 11th - Dem gain Democrats flipped the district after Republican Chuck Edwards abandoned his re-election bid following an ethics investigation, leaving his replacement under 90 days to campaign

Source: Data for election results and race calls provided by the Associated Press. Cartogram map sourced from the Downballot. Data analysis and visualisation by Antonio Voce, Alex Clark, Will Craft, Seán Clarke and Ashley Kirk. Print spread by Harvey Symons. Note: House seat changes may not equal zero due to boundary changes. Situation at 8pm UK time yesterday

Historic Senate wins

Texas Senate Winning margin

Kansas

North Carolina

The historic firsts Winners who have changed America

First Black female governor in US Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor, beat the Republican billionaire Rick Jackson in the Georgia governor's race to become the first Black female governor in the country. Bottoms had faced scrutiny over her rocky single-term tenure as mayor between 2018 and 2022, when violent crime surged. But on the gubernatorial campaign trail she emphasised her ability to fight Donald Trump's administration. She also made history as the first Black person and woman in Georgia's top office.

First Muslim in the US Senate

Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's

Senate race, defeating the

Republican Mike Rogers, to

become the chamber's first Muslim

member. His identity frequently

came under attack throughout the

race from both Rogers and Trump.

California's first elected Latino governor

Xavier Becerra has made history as the state's first elected Latino governor. He was widely expected to defeat the Republican challenger, the British-born conservative pundit Steve Hilton, since the state is a Democratic stronghold. The son of Mexican immigrants, Becerra will govern a state where more than $40\%$ of its residents identify as Latino.

Texas's first Latina governor The Democrat Gina Hinojosa pulled off a stunning upset, unseating the three-term governor Greg Abbott. She will be the state's first Latina governor and the first Democrat to win the office since 1990.

First female Native American governor

Deb Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo and a former US interior secretary, comfortably won New Mexico's gubernatorial race.

Florida's first Black governor

The Republican Byron Donalds will be Florida's first Black governor, succeeding Ron DeSantis who has reached his term limit. The three-term congressman, who was endorsed by Trump, made affordability central to his campaign, while avoiding mention of the unpopular war with Iran.

First openly gay man elected to US Senate

Chris Pappas, a New Hampshire representative, was elected to the US Senate, making him the first out gay man to serve in the chamber.

First Native American woman elected to Senate

Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota's lieutenant governor, is the first Native American woman to be elected to the US Senate. Flanagan is Ojibwe and a member of the White Earth Nation.

First Black governor of Wisconsin

David Crowley won Wisconsin's

governor race, becoming the first

Black person to hold the office.

Crowley's victory was against

many odds. He dropped out of

the race over the summer, only to

rejoin at the urging of the outgoing

Democratic governor, Tony Evers;

and his Republican opponent, Tom

Tiffany, greatly outspent him.

First Black female governor of a US territory

Stacey Plaskett made history in the US territories in the Virgin Islands.

First female senator elected for South Carolina

The Democratic candidate, Annie Andrews, beat Darline Graham in what is typically deeply conservative South Carolina. She is also the first Democrat in the position since 1998.

New York's first all-female gubernatorial ticket

New York elected women for governor (Democrat Kathy Hochul) and lieutenant governor (Democrat Adrienne Adams), giving the state its first all-female gubernatorial ticket. The result also makes Adams the first Black woman in her new role.

Minnesota's first female governor Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, beat the Republican state house speaker Lisa Demuth to be the first woman to serve as governor in Minnesota. She is taking the reins from Tim Walz, the Democrat who ran for vice-president under Kamala Harris in 2024. Uwa Ede-Osifo

Journal

Aditya

Chakrabortty

The return of

class politics

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'Smeared in the dirt' Iran renews taunts as US president left counting cost of war

Patrick Wintour

Diplomatic editor

Iran this week unveiled a huge billboard and banners over Enqelab Square in central Tehran. The billboard pledged in English: “We will kill Trump” - elevating the

degree of personal animus with which Donald Trump is viewed in official Iranian circles.

The poster depicts the US president behind bars with his head bowed. And in a sense, given the US midterm election results on Tuesday, Iran has indeed killed Trump, or at least the second term of his presidency. Trump's reverse is all the more piquant because it comes on the day Iran's leadership celebrates the anniversary of the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, an event that ensnared Jimmy Carter, and a reminder of how Iran has ruined the prospects of more than one US president.

Not surprisingly, the keenly followed election results have led to a good degree of triumphalism inside Iran.

Ehsan Movaheidian, an international relations scholar, claimed: “The Islamic Republic of Iran has succeeded in regime change in America. The same will soon happen in Europe as well. Bow down before the power of Iran.”

Meisam Zohurian, a conservative member of parliament, said: “The joy over the outcome of the US

▲ Iranians mark the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy

elections has nothing to do with the arrival of this party or the departure of that party.

"The issue is the aggressor was smeared in the dirt and Iran had an impact on the result."

Ali Nikzad, the first deputy speaker of the parliament, said: "These electoral defeats are the aftershocks of Trump's defeat by the Iranian people."

Iran's supreme leader said anyone expecting a shift in US policy was “seriously mistaken”, however.

“Those who still harbour even the slightest hope that the behaviour of the hegemonic system might change through partisan or factional shifts are seriously mistaken,” Mojtaba Khamenei wrote.

Others predicted further electoral defeats for those they considered to be the warmongers in Europe, and the expulsion of US bases from the entire Middle East.

The resistance - or bloody-mindedness - shown by Iran for

Federal records Officials warned over retention of documents

Lauren Aratani

New York

Democratic lawmakers have asked the Trump administration to preserve records in accordance with federal law or risk criminal penalties after voters across the country gave Democrats control of Congress.

In a letter sent out to department and agency heads yesterday, Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the House committee on education and workforce who is expected to become chair in January, noted the requirements to “collect, retain and preserve records that document the transaction of public business or contain informational value under the Federal Records Act of 1950".

He said any federal official or employee who “wilfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys” records would be subject to fine or imprisonment up to three years.

The letter was sent out to the heads of 10 departments and agencies overseen by the committee including education, agriculture and labor, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Labor Relations Board.

Over the last two years, the Trump administration has dramatically overhauled the federal government and reduced its workforce. The Department of Education alone has seen its workforce cut in half since Donald Trump took office.

Robert Garcia, the ranking member of the House oversight committee, told Republicans to “lawyer up”, vowing to launch investigations into Trump’s business dealings, immigration enforcement and the handling of the Epstein files.

the past eight gruelling months did allow the strait of Hormuz to become an Iranian-controlled channel through which inflation and high diesel prices were transmitted to the US system. Even Trump himself yesterday accepted, and lamented, that the American people had decided the “short-term” pain of inflation was not a price worth paying to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear power.

But the big question now is whether either side will regard these seismic results as a moment to review their diplomatic strategy. Iran's chief negotiator, Mohammad ▼ Iran's rhetoric, exemplified in this Tehran billboard, claims victory but it could still seek peace by talking

PHOTOGRAPH: FATEMEH BAHRAMI/GETTY IMAGES

Bagher Ghalibaf, was quick to call on Trump to accept the wisdom of the American people. On social media he urged Trump to bow to the verdict of America: “Whether driven by conscience or the cost of living, America said no to war.”

Ghalibaf added: “If the US government betrays the public will, it will learn our ‘no’ comes with a nightmare.”

Yet Iran will also be asked to reflect on the wisdom of war by the Gulf monarchies, and possibly by Russia and China - the latter a country that finally seems to be stirring itself to find a solution

to the blockade in the strait of Hormuz, which is preventing badly needed Middle East oil exports from reaching its industries.

China tends to knock only on doors it knows are going to open, so it is probably testing

'Trump will feel trapped and he will react aggressively'

Hillary Clinton

US Democratic party the feasibility of a deal in which Iran “downblends” - or dilutes - its stockpile of highly enriched uranium inside Iran under international supervision. A Chinese special envoy is travelling to Oman, Iran and Saudi Arabia almost immediately.

These countries, some sympathetic to Iran's predicament, can point out that if Tehran ever thought in the run-up to the elections Trump would capitulate and turn his carrier fleet around, it was mistaken. Some Iranian diplomats had indeed hoped that the prospect of defeat in the

midterms would have led Trump to make concessions to Tehran.

In fact, both sides and the chief mediator, Qatar, clearly did try to use polling day as a lever, but in the end neither retreated. Trump refused to allow the darkening opinion polls to reduce his determination to keep Iran in his vice. Confined to a holding bay of “neither war nor peace”, Trump’s priority was to keep the oil price as low as possible by repeatedly suggesting a settlement might be imminent.

For the next two months before the new Congress convenes in January - so reducing his budgetary options - Trump has greater latitude, and little accountability. The damage to the Republican party cannot be undone.

Unsurprisingly the Trump influencers who advocated for the war in the first place are piling on pressure to strike again quickly. Laura Loomer wrote on X: “Time for President Trump to deal with Iran once and for all. Nothing to lose now. Finish the job.”

But the credibility of Loomer and her like has been severely damaged. Benjamin Netanyahu is now touting intelligence showing that Iran is preparing to use chemical weapons. The ease with which the Israeli prime minister conjures up intelligence to justify another assault on Iran may by now have struck the White House.

Hillary Clinton is one who thinks Trump will probably launch the long-delayed attack. She said: “I think he will feel trapped. He will feel angry and resentful and he will react aggressively.”

Having come so far, and paid so high a political price, Trump may in the next two months try to secure a legacy by finishing the job - however he defines that. He is convinced, as he told Fox News this week, that “Iran has very few missiles and drones left, and even less capacity to build any more”. He crowed: “We are dealing with total strength. We can end it any time.”

Unfortunately, such blithe optimism has been heard before.

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Stocks rise but dollar slides as investors size up election results

Joanna Partridge

US stocks have surged as investors digest the Democrats' victories in the midterm elections, lifted by hopes that Donald Trump's turbulent policymaking will be restrained and shaking off initial fears about the impact on growth in the world's largest economy.

The Dow Jones rose close to 3%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the benchmark S&P 500 gained close to 2% each by midday in New York, turning around overnight falls in US stock futures after the news that the Democratic party had won control of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The price of oil dropped sharply as traders assessed the Democrats' win on the war in Iran. However, the US dollar fell against the currencies of America's major trading partners, hitting a one-month low yesterday while coming under pressure from falling bond yields. Investors moved into US treasuries, viewed as a haven from the political gridlock anticipated for the rest of Trump's final term in office.

The dollar index, which measures it against a basket of six currencies, slid to its lowest level in a month, with the pound hitting its highest level since mid-September on the back of a fragile dollar, while the euro also made gains. The dollar also slid against the yen and the Swiss franc, currencies that traders tend to turn to during times of uncertainty.

Meanwhile, the yield, or interest rate, on the benchmark 10-year US treasury bond has fallen 4.7 basis points to 4.918%. On two-year bonds it has dropped 3.7bps to 4.597%. Yields fall when bond prices rise.

Across the US, voters rejected Trump and the Republican agenda, with the Democrats securing Senate seats in traditional Republican strongholds such as Texas, Iowa, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Axel Rudolph, the chief technical analyst at the trading platform IG, said: "The scale of the losses will inevitably raise questions about Trump's ability to push through his agenda, and markets are already reacting. The

'There are still areas where Trump can influence the markets - trade and tariffs'

Tai Hui

Market strategist

dollar is under pressure as investors reassess the political outlook, while gold and silver are benefiting as safe-haven plays.”

Futures trading initially indicated US stock markets would open sharply lower, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq expected to slide on fears over the prospects for AI companies. However, indicators later suggested Wall Street could open higher as Trump's conciliatory tone and rises on European markets cheered investors.

European markets climbed in early trading, with London's FTSE 100 rising by $0.2\%$ , Germany's Dax up by almost $0.6\%$ , France's Cac 40 $0.4\%$ higher and Italy's FTSE MiB index jumping by almost $1.4\%$ .

Bank and clean energy stocks, which have borne the brunt of Trump's policies, were among the top risers in Europe. Bank stocks rose by 2.8%, while Denmark's Vestas Wind Systems jumped nearly 5% and ∅rsted soared 7.4%.

"Some individual names are nursing significant losses today," said Kathleen Brooks, the UK research director at XTB. "SpaceX is down 5% in the premarket, and Tesla is lower by more than 4%. Elon Musk is considered an anathema to most Democrats." Musk pumped \$446m (£331m) into the midterms, funding Republican-aligned political action committees and groups.

Brooks said investors were reacting to expectations that a Democrat-controlled Congress could mean greater scrutiny for AI companies, which could also cast doubt on a merger of Musk's two companies.

The price of gold, a traditional haven asset, rose by 2.2%, soaring past \$4,000 an ounce.

AI-related shares tumbled during Asian trading hours, on expectations that Democrats will want to bring in greater regulation of the sector.

Chris Turner, the global head of markets at ING, said: “Investors will be parsing what this all means. For example, Gina Hinojosa won the Texas governor’s race on a ticket of wanting an immediate moratorium on datacentre buildouts.”

He added: “Given AI’s role in the US economy, speculation over whether a new Democrat Congress would slow AI plans briefly hit markets.”

Trump's style of governing through executive orders has prompted some analysts to question whether the Democrats regaining control of Congress will have much change on US policymaking.

"There's still a number of areas where Donald Trump can influence the markets - trade and tariffs, foreign policy and existing regulations," said Tai Hui, a market strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management.

'You did it, we did it, this is redemption time' Celebrities welcome historic Democratic victory

Celebrities have been reacting to last night's historic midterm victory for the Democrats after the party regained control of both the House and the Senate.

The night saw a string of major victories for the party as voters expressed their disapproval of Donald Trump.

“You did it, we did it, this is redemption time,” John Leguizamo, predicted to be an Oscar contender for The Odyssey, said in a video on Instagram. He added: “It’s time to fix this mess.”

Bette Midler, who has been a longtime opponent of Donald Trump, wrote online: “I am

OVERJOYED! What a great, great night! Thank you, America! You've saved your beloved country!!”

Viola Davis celebrated the historic victory of Keisha Lance Bottoms, who became the first Black female governor in US history. “We the people .....THE PEOPLE!!” she wrote on Instagram. “We are the orchestrators of this nation....and we have spoken...through our vote.... CONGRATULATIONS, my sistah.”

John Cusack wrote that “impeachment and removal is non negotiable; no accountability means it will happen again and again” online also praising Abdul

PHOTOGRAPHS: LEV RADIN/SHUTTERSTOCK; IMAGE/NURPHOTO/SHUTTERSTOCK; MIKE COPPOLA/GETTY

Elon Musk SpaceX and Tesla owner's \$446m fails to move the needle for Republican candidates

Nick Robins-Early

▲ A Democratic campaign volunteer holds up an anti-Elon Musk sign outside a polling station in Keller, Texas, on election day PHOTOGRAPH: LAURA BRETT/EPA

E lon Musk set a record for election spending this year after pouring nearly half a billion dollars into backing Republicans in the

US midterms. It turned out to be a poor investment.

The SpaceX and Tesla chief executive gave at least \$446m to Republican-aligned Super Pacs and groups over the course of the elections, specifically targeting several Senate races in an effort to help the Trump administration retain control of Congress. He outdid his 2024 spending of nearly \$290m. Yet as Democrats swept to power across the country, it became clear that Musk would get nearly nothing in return for his hundreds of millions in spending.

Actor Danny Trejo also paid tribute to the groundbreaking victory of Xavier Becerra, who became California's first Latino governor. "History in the making!" he wrote. Benjamin Lee

Democrats won every one of the five Senate races where Musk's America Pac spent the most money backing Republican candidates. In Texas, where Musk's empire is based and where he directed most of his political efforts, Republicans lost the Senate race, governor's office and are expected to relinquish control of the state house.

After months of Musk posting attacks on Democrats and amplifying election conspiracy theories on X, he was unusually quiet on election night. He jokingly posted “datacentres in space looking pretty appealing right now”, but was otherwise largely silent on the results.

Musk's losses from the midterms go beyond the enormous sums that he dumped into failed campaigns, however. An era of lax regulation and cosy relations with state officials that has benefited his companies may be ending. The world's richest man will soon face a House, Senate and Texas government filled with Democrats who have vowed to take a tougher stance on tech and specifically scrutinise his operations.

After referring to the “blue-nami”, the Chicks kicked off a concert by celebrating the results on stage. “Texas is blue,” they said. “The Senate is blue, the House is blue.” Singer Normani also posted on X: “TEXAS YOU MADE ME PROUD.”

Altogether, Musk's political spending flowed into at least eight Republican-aligned Super PACs that targeted races across the country, with the largest donation of at least \$216m going into his own America Pac. He also gave \$168m to the Senate Leadership Fund, which backed a series of candidates that included the Texas Republican Ken Paxton.

Out of all of Musk's political activity in the midterms, the contest where he put the most money and focus was the Texas Senate race between Paxton and the Democrat James Talarico. America Pac spent at least \$28m on anti-Talarico ads and messaging alone, while Musk repeatedly posted attacks on X, his social

media platform, such as: “Talarico wants to trans your kids and destroy the border.”

After Talarico achieved a commanding win on Tuesday night, the Democrat referenced Musk in his victory speech.

“We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas,” Talarico

El-Sayed as a “smart progressive Bernie Sanders Dem” who beat “every smear machine dirty money can buy”.

After urging his followers to vote, The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal then celebrated the many victories on his Instagram stories, including a blue map of Texas with the word “sobbing”.

The Gilded Age's Carrie Coon also praised “human decency” as a driving force for the result.

Author Stephen King had been posting pre-election that he hoped the “enabling will stop” and after the wins, he simply wrote: “Buyers’ remorse.”

said. “We just sent a message to every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor.”

Senate races in Michigan, Maine, Ohio and Iowa similarly went for Democratic candidates after America Pac spent tens of millions supporting Republican campaigns. The Pac's money had gone into attack ads that focused on trans rights or accused Democrats of being radical socialists.

Even if Musk's spending was not successful, it doesn't mean it wasn't impactful. Musk and the Super Pacs made for several of the most expensive races in US history and may have set a precedent for how much spending will take place in the 2028 presidential election. It will also likely spur months of analysis about the limits of what money can buy in politics.

Musk's businesses have benefited greatly from lucrative contracts with the Trump administration, as well as Trump's hands-off approach to regulating artificial intelligence. In Texas, the state legislature and governor Greg Abbott have given him a friendly environment to do business while passing laws backed by the billionaire's lobbyists.

The incoming Democratic governor, Gina Hinojosa, appears likely to take a more critical stance. Hinojosa has called for a datacentre moratorium and has been in a legal battle to gain access to unredacted emails between Abbott's office and Musk. House Democrats have also called for investigations into Musk's conduct in government.

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National

Immigration officers to use face recognition at transport hubs

Phoebe Davis

Daniel Boffey

The Home Office is preparing to deploy facial recognition technology at transport hubs and public events as part of the biggest immigration enforcement crackdown in British history.

Policy documents show the government has been developing a programme to deploy live facial recognition (LFR) cameras for “general immigration enforcement”, including non-criminal immigration offences.

The technology will be used to identify people “seeking to re-enter the UK unlawfully”, target those subject to removal action and crack down on broader “immigration-related criminality”.

The Home Office states the cameras will be used to locate undocumented people so it can resolve their cases, which it says will reduce “disruption to the wider public compared to repeated enforcement visits at residential addresses or workplaces”.

The documents further suggest that people could be included on LFR watchlists for overstaying a visa without permission, or entering without leave, all of which are considered civil rather than criminal matters.

The developments are contained in a new guidance document for immigration enforcement officials published on 8 October and a data protection impact assessment made public later in the month.

Their publication follows the decision by Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, to double the budget for immigration enforcement and boost its workforce by 60% to allow “tens of thousands” more raids, arrests and deportations.

Between November last year and February, immigration enforcement conducted three trials of LFR technology at Holyhead port in north Wales.

The trials were narrowly focused on locating people travelling to the UK from Ireland through the common travel area in breach of deportation orders or on a warrant for “an immigration-related criminal offence”.

The documents suggest that, in the future, individuals “liable to detention under immigration legislation" and who have "failed to comply with immigration conditions of entry or stay" could also be put on a watchlist.

Locations where enforcement could deploy facial recognition cameras have also been expanded to include “proactive” deployments at transport hubs and “specific” events.

A list of higher-risk deployments includes locations with “heightened community sensitivity”. When the Home Office was asked for clarity on what was meant by “events” or “sensitive” locations, it refused to comment.

A spokesperson for the department confirmed that it was “considering further trials” of LFR by immigration enforcement officers and that it was “actively exploring the potential benefits, implications and future use of the technology”.

Rise in immigration enforcement staff planned by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood

Griff Ferris of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants said immigration enforcement already employed tactics that “persecute and terrorise migrant communities” and that giving it more power to use a “racist mass surveillance tool in public places is frightening”.

Knockin' on heaven's door

Pope Leo met Bob Dylan at the Vatican during the Italian leg of the singer's Lights of Autumn tour. The pontiff gave Dylan a rosary, while Dylan gave Leo a copy of his memoir.

PHOTOGRAPH: VATICAN MEDIA

Fleabag star donates flat to help budding writers live in London

Nadia Khomami

Arts and culture correspondent

The actor and screenwriter Phoebe Waller-Bridge has donated a London flat so that early-career writers can afford to live in the capital.

The creator and star of the hit TV series Fleabag bought the property for Writers' Block, a new scheme tackling class barriers in theatre. The flat will be offered to writers from disadvantaged backgrounds, who will pay only bills. Waller-Bridge also made what the initiative described as a generous financial contribution.

▲ Phoebe Waller-Bridge also made a ‘generous financial contribution’

Jack Thorne, who co-created Adolescence and wrote Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is also backing the scheme financially. He said: “For many writers, the need for a roof makes writing impossible, which is why this pilot is so important. If we want stories told about our complicated world, we need writers of every background writing them.”

Research by the Sutton Trust charity and the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre found just 16% of people working in the creative industries came from working-class backgrounds. It found that class imbalances were more pronounced in the sector than in any other.

The scheme invites Londoners to offer their spare rooms at reduced rates, capped at £30 a night or £500 a month. It has signed up 15 homes and helped 12 writers find accommodation, from overnight stays to longer-term placements.

The organisers said the scheme could appeal to older people living alone who would welcome companionship and extra income but feel uncomfortable advertising a room to strangers.

Post Office inquiry KC to lead review of Cambridge role in Arday death

Richard Adams

Education editor

The lead barrister for the Post Office Horizon inquiry will conduct an independent review of the death of the Cambridge academic Jason Arday.

Jason Beer KC will examine the handling of allegations of “research and other misconduct” made against Arday before his resignation as well as the university’s recruitment of and support for him as its youngest ever black professor at the age of 37.

Beer said he would consider whether institutional changes were needed at Cambridge after looking into the protection it offered to academics facing significant public and media scrutiny and the procedures around Arday's appointment.

The professor of sociology of education died at his home while facing widely publicised allegations of plagiarism and inconsistencies in statements about his career. Arday denied plagiarism but Cambridge said on 5 August it would investigate his academic qualifications. He resigned hours after this was announced and was found dead nine days later.

Beer said Cambridge had asked him to conduct an independent, thorough and searching examination of its institutional arrangements and the decisions it made over Arday.

He said: “I will look not simply at what the university’s policies and procedures required but also at whether they were themselves reasonable; how they operated in practice; who was responsible for making decisions; what information was reasonably available to them; whether relevant concerns were recognised and properly addressed; and whether the university’s various structures and functions worked together effectively – all in the case of Prof Arday, and more broadly.”

Beer's review is the second of two independent reviews of Cambridge's involvement with Arday. The first, announced in September, asked Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor, to focus on the support given to Arday in the immediate period before his death.

Beer was the lead counsel to the inquiry that investigated the wrongful criminal prosecution of hundreds of post office operators.

▲ Jason Arday was found dead nine days after resigning as a professor

Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband at the Hells Gate Steel Orchestra's pan yard in St John's yesterday

PHOTOGRAPH: KIN CHEUNG/POOL/AFP/GETTY

Debt relief and development funding no substitute for reparations, say campaigners

Natricia Duncan

St John's

Offers of debt relief and development assistance from the UK cannot be a replacement for reparations for centuries of slavery, leading figures in the Caribbean reparatory justice movement said yesterday.

Their comments followed Andy Burnham's announcement on Friday that he wanted to begin a structured dialogue on slavery and reparations and was open to Britain apologising, but he ruled out reparations.

Instead, he proposed discussions on debt relief for smaller Commonwealth nations and announced £40m for critical infrastructure in the Caribbean over the next three years.

As leaders of the 56-member Commonwealth bloc meet in a private retreat at their summit in Antigua, Ralph Gonsalves, a former prime minister of St Vincent and the

Grenadines and a senior figure in the reparatory justice movement's Repair Campaign, said that while countries in the region were likely to welcome Burnham's offer, the Caribbean would resist any attempt to treat debt restructuring or development assistance as a form of reparation.

£40m

The Caribbean Community Reparations Commission's 10-point plan, which outlines the region's vision for reparations, specifically asks for “debt cancellation” - not debt restructuring - and “monetary compensation”, arguing that “existing debts are intergenerational and are ultimately and intimately tied to centuries of colonial extraction”.

Gonsalves told the Guardian:

Critical infrastructure funding for the Caribbean over three years announced by Andy Burnham

"When I listened to Andy Burnham, and I listened to the king, and they're talking about what is helpful is not reparations, but for them to work on specific things like debt relief, and education, and health, and climate change infrastructure.

"Now all those things are within the 10-point plan. But they are also within the sustainable development goals of 2015, which we all signed on to at the United Nations."

Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations, said the question was fundamentally about agency.

Speaking at an event on Tuesday to launch a “global reparations caravan”, which will educate and engage people in the reparations movement, she said: “When you think about what was taken from peoples of African descent when they were enslaved, it was their agency, their

Reparatory justice Three possible routes

The debate in much of the British media over reparations has focused almost entirely on cash. But campaigners say this overlooks broader goals. Here are three ways reparatory justice could work.

First, building climate resilience. The most prominent framework for reparation is the Caribbean Community's 10-point reparations plan, which explicitly links climate justice to the legacy of colonialism.

Second, hold a public inquiry. For campaigners in Britain, one longstanding demand is for a national commission to investigate the country's involvement in slavery and colonialism. “I feel that there’s too much of a jump to solutions without us even having the national dialogue,” said Esther Stanford-Xosei, a British reparations campaigner and legal scholar.

Third, return cultural artefacts. The Caribbean Community has called for the return of objects in European collections. Its manifesto proposes cultural exchanges, support for artists and scholars, and programmes reconnecting descendants of enslaved Africans with their ancestral communities. Aamna Mohdin

right to decide all of these different things about their lives. So when reparative justice arrangements are being made, it absolutely has to be made with those who were affected."

Prof Kingsley Abbott, a human rights lawyer and the director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, also stressed the importance of harmed communities having a decisive say in what reparations should entail.

Speaking at the global reparations caravan launch, he said: "I've met with many different victims of serious human rights violations, atrocity crimes, and their families and their descendants.

“They all had one thing in common. They all said that they wanted justice. And they wanted not only justice, but they wanted to be made whole again.”

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “The prime minister wants to build stronger relationships to renew the relevance of the Commonwealth in a new era.

“We will do that by facing our past together and focusing on a future where every person living within it has equality, security and hope.

“We are already committed to working with Commonwealth partners on issues facing the world, including the role of private finance in tackling global debt issues, addressing the climate crisis, and supporting economic development.”

King Charles and Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, at a dinner at the summit

PHOTOGRAPH: ISABEL INFANTES/PA

Diplomacy

Has Britain's apology pledge defused a potential clash?

Jessica Elgot

Peter Walker

Kiran Stacey

beach in Antigua is not the ideal place for a prime minister to be photographed less than a week after his first budget, where

the focus was the crushing cost of living crisis.

Add to the beachside cocktail a row about reparations for the British role in the slave trade, one of the favoured punching bags of the rightwing press, and it becomes easy to see why Andy Burnham was wary of even attending the Commonwealth heads of government meeting (Chogm).

But behind the scenes, Foreign Office officials are convinced they have pulled off a quiet diplomatic victory. A clear offer of an apology, which will now be worked on behind the scenes, and a path for the summit to move on from a focus on reparations, which had driven many leaders from countries where that subject is not high on the agenda to avoid it altogether.

Caribbean leaders reject the idea that the reparations debate drowns out other subjects - instead arguing that it is a vital mechanism for breaking new ground.

Last week, the Barbadian prime minister, Mia Mottley, told the Guardian: “On reparations in particular, our views differ, and we

'Honest disagreement should not hold back progress'

Mia Mottley

Barbadian PM

will say so plainly and respectfully. Honest disagreement on some questions should not hold back progress on the many others where we can readily agree." She cited investment in education and fairer debt as some of those issues.

It is in that context that Ed Miliband had told officials that the UK could not work from the same playbook as usual for Chogm by simply demanding the issue was not on the agenda. His view was that even if direct reparations remained ruled out, the UK should put something substantive on the table, such as the formal apology, and use its forthcoming presidency of the G20 to start a serious conversation about debt restructuring.

It is difficult for a British prime minister to swerve a summit where King Charles is attending. But that, according to reports, was the plan of Keir Starmer before he was ousted. He had planned to send his then deputy, David Lammy, in his place, after feeling he was ambushed with a reparations row at the last summit in Samoa in 2024.

But Miliband wanted to give the gathering another chance to have a meaningful role. When he entered the Foreign Office, allies say he wanted to preserve and elevate the Commonwealth as a political force, despite the pessimism, believing it would be in the UK's interest to be in a grouping that represents one-third of the world's people - and in a forum away from powers such as China and Russia. The US is also unable to dominate any of its proceedings.

But crucial to that was a path to enable the gathering to move away from being dominated by the issue of reparations and towards issues such as investment, trade and climate change. Milband's view - similar to his approach on Israel and Palestine - was that the issue of reparations and Britain's history had to be confronted head-on rather than angrily dismissed.

Government strategists believe this apology will eventually lead to a more productive forum than allowing the summit to drift. "Two years ago, the Keir Starmer approach was to just say we're not talking about it," one said.

"The PM and Ed Miliband took a view that that is just not tenable, that you have to show willingness to do the right thing, which is to open this apology discussion because it's morally the right thing to do."

Neets 'Flexi-job' call for disabled young people

Patrick Butler

Social policy editor

The British state should create and subsidise paid jobs for thousands of disabled young people as part of an “opportunity revolution” aimed at reversing years of labour market discrimination, the Milburn review of youth employment will recommend.

The review, due to report this month, will say the government should introduce “flexi-jobs” alongside employment subsidies and intensive skills support to make it easier for disabled and chronically ill 16- to 24-year-olds to get work.

It will argue the state should step in to underwrite jobs for youngsters who are locked out of employment and training opportunities as part of an overhaul of what it sees as an outdated welfare and skills system.

About 1 million young people are now classified as “Neet” - meaning they are not in education, employment or training. Nearly half (45%) are disabled or in ill health, and they are three times as likely to be Neet as their non-disabled peers.

The review's author, the former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn, has described soaring numbers of Neets as a moral and economic crisis, warning that failure to tackle rising youth disengagement from work risks creating a “lost generation”.

The review will say young people with disabilities need a flexible and supportive approach to work that acknowledges fluctuating medical conditions and lack of work experience, and recognises the importance of part-time roles in helping them build confidence.

One eye-catching recommendation is for the UK to adopt a Danish-style “flexi-job” scheme. This guarantees disabled participants employment while allowing them to set working hours - in some cases starting with as few as four hours a week - that suit their individual capacities, with wages topped up by the government.

Nearly half of 24-year-old Neets have never worked, and Milburn argued in his interim report earlier this year that abandoning a cohort of Covid-era youngsters coping with high levels of depression, anxiety, autism and ADHD would have a scarring effect on their life chances and lifetime earnings.

Alan Milburn says young people need an ‘opportunity revolution’

Sketch

John Crace

Two fading politicians: Nige wisely keeps quiet after humiliating night for his best pal Donald

In what counts as breaking news on the slowest of slow days in Westminster - most eyes were on the US midterm elections - it was nice to be able to report that Nigel Farage was in the Commons for prime minister's questions.

Despite Reform tanking in the polls, Nige still regards himself as the official opposition and considers it a major insult that he isn't given six questions every week. Today he was happy not to get even one.

On Tuesday night, Farage used his GB News show to insist the American pollsters had got it wrong. Sticking his neck on the line against what he dismissed as “the liberal consensus”, he was adamant the Republicans would come good. It didn’t quite turn out that way. The Donald had said “pretend I’m on the ballot” and Americans had taken him at his word.

Nige was the last true believer left in the UK. Even the Tories have realised that a close association with Trump is toxic. Kemi Badenoch and her shadow cabinet are busily going through their social media accounts, deleting all Trump brown-nosing posts.

So you can just imagine how it would have played out. The speaker calls Farage. You can hear the derision already. It wouldn't matter what the Reform leader asked, the response would have been the same. Nige would never live it down. One of the worst election calls of all time. The final piece of sycophancy from one fading politician to another.

In reality, it was a battle of the two deputies: Louise Haigh and Alex Burghart. Haigh was making her

Dismissing the 'liberal consensus', Farage had been adamant the Republicans would come good. It didn't quite turn out that way primetime debut and declared she was taking the place of Andy Burnham, who was in Antigua for the Commonwealth heads of government meeting. This was said mainly for the benefit of the absent Kemi, who had been under the impression that the prime minister had gone to the Caribbean for a midweek break.

The exchanges between Haigh and Burghart can safely be filed under “forgettable”. The last thing any leader wants is a deputy who

does better than them. Particularly Kemi. The myth around her renaissance of the Tory party – up a few points from an all-time low – rests on her MPs and party members buying in to her talent. It’s amazing how good you can look when you surround yourself with mediocrity.

Not that this was Burghart's fault. He's more an academic than a showman. So he read out his prepared questions in the order they were written, seemingly oblivious to whether they had been answered or not.

Haigh was not much better, relying on tightly scripted replies. Burghart asked about the welfare bill and no one was any the wiser how Labour planned to bring it down despite Lou's insistence that everything was in hand. You'd imagine the Labour comms team would have come up with a better line on this by now.

Speaking for the Lib Dems, Daisy Cooper was openly celebrating the Democratic victory in the US and was wondering now if the government could help in releasing the rest of the Epstein files and putting the president back in the dock.

Haigh was diplomatically restrained. Pleased at the turn of events but noncommittal about the prospect of British intervention. Several rows behind Cooper, Nige stared into the middle distance. Seeking divine help. Fearing the end of days.

There's a funny thing going on in advertising.

Almost everyone reads, watches or listens to the news.

Yet advertisers are often afraid of appearing there.

Even in the big stories of the day like these ones.

Why? That's a good question.

It's because they might appear next to a politician they don't agree with.

Or near a conflict.

And then they worry the readers might think they endorse the politician. Or military conflict.

If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is.

So if you're an advertiser, get news back on the plan.

#AskForNews

Big rise in historic sites at risk as climate crisis takes its toll

Steven Morris

A castle built by William the Conquerer, a Swiss-style chalet where Charles Dickens wrote and a swathe of fire-blasted moorland are among sites that have been added to Historic England's heritage at-risk register.

Almost 200 historic places have been added to the already extensive list, including Hastings Castle in East Sussex, Dickens's wooden writing retreat in Kent and Fylingdales Moor in North Yorkshire, which was devastated by a wildfire in the summer.

Some of the stress on the sites is

National

being put down to the climate emergency, with hotter summers and stormier winters placing some of England's most treasured places in greater peril.

Historic England also highlighted more cheerful stories, with sites ranging from a historic Cornish fishing harbour to a rustic West Country hut regarded as the birthplace of vaccinations being removed from the list.

Emma Squire, the joint chief executive of Historic England, said the 197 additions were diverse, and she accepted some people would be surprised that such high-profile sites could be in danger. "It highlights that even places regarded as very special can sometimes be at risk of decay or loss," she said.

Hastings Castle was one of the fortifications commissioned by William the Conqueror after 1066 to secure his position on the English south coast. Historic England said recently sections had become vulnerable because of extreme weather events.

Squire said: “More extreme weather events and coastal erosion

197

Additions to Historic England's heritage at risk register, with climate damage frequently cited are definitely themes. Water ingress and subsidence feature more than they have done in the past because of changing weather patterns.”

Dickens's writing chalet in Rochester has been added to the register because it is judged to have become fragile and in need of repair. The wooden two-storey building originally stood in Dickens's garden at Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent. The chalet was moved to its present position in Rochester in the 1960s.

The Fylingdales Moor wildfire in 2025 caused damage to about 25 sq km of moorland and forest. Historic England said it affected thousands of people living and working in the area

Fylingdales

Moor, far left,

Dickens' writing

chalet and

Hastings Castle

are all said to be

at risk

PHOTOGRAPH:

HISTORIC ENGLAND

as well as having a major impact on the natural environment.

Also added to the list is Hall's Croft in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where William Shakespeare's daughter lived. Funding is needed to save the exterior of the 17th-century timber-framed building.

The 18th-century Bidston windmill in Wirral, Merseyside, which has spectacular views, has also been added. A friends group keeps it open but urgent repairs are needed.

Historic England said 85 sites had been “saved” and removed from the register, including Newlyn harbour, one of Cornwall’s most important fishing ports. Local specialists have restored its granite structures and 19th-century wrought iron railings.

Edward Jenner's hut in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, a rustic summer-house described as the site of the world's first vaccination clinic, has also been saved.

Historic England said it spent more than £12m on grants for support and repairs to 135 sites during 2025-26.

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SECTION 48 PLANNING ACT 2008 THE INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING (APPLICATIONS: PRESCRIBED FORMS AND PROCEDURE) REGULATIONS 2009 REGULATION 4

[CASTLE WAY ENERGY] NOTICE PUBLICISING A PROPOSED APPLICATION FOR A DEVELOPMENT CONSENT ORDER

Notice is hereby given that BSSL Derbyshire 1 Ltd (company number 15467612) (the “Applicant”), whose registered office is at Lamplighter Works – Third Floor, 49–51 Farringdon Road, London, United Kingdom, EC1M 3JB, proposes to apply to the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero under section 37 of the Planning Act 2008 for a Development Consent Order (“DCO”) authorising Castle Way Energy (the “Proposed Development”).

The Applicant is a wholly owned subsidiary of Brockwell Energy and was established to develop the Proposed Development.

The Proposed Development

The Proposed Development would comprise a solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity generating station capable of generating over 100MW Alternating Current (AC) of electricity with co-located Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). The Proposed Development is located within the administrative boundaries of South Derbyshire District Council, Derbyshire County Council and Derbyshire Dales District Council.

The Proposed Development requires development consent under the Planning Act 2008 on the basis that the proposed generating station will constitute a nationally significant infrastructure project (NSIP) under section 14(1)(a) and section 15 of the Planning Act 2008.

It may also require development consent on the basis that any proposed overhead electric lines may themselves constitute an NSIP under section 14(1)(b) and section 16 of the Planning Act 2008, where it is 132 kV or above and at least 2 km in length. Any overhead lines and/or underground cables that do not themselves constitute an NSIP will instead be included within the DCO as associated development to the NSIP.

The Proposed Development therefore constitutes an NSIP for which development consent is required under section 31(1) of the Act.

The Proposed Development includes the following elements:

\- Seven solar development sites (Sites 1a, 1b, 2–6) which will include solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays and inverters;

• A central substation, BESS and associated infrastructure, located in Site 3;

\- Underground and/or overhead cables to connect the solar development sites, BESS and associated electrical infrastructure to one another, and to the National Grid at the Willington 400kV substation;

\- Accesses and internal access tracks required for construction, operation, maintenance and decommissioning;

• Temporary construction infrastructure, including construction compounds, laydown areas and staff welfare facilities;

\- Fencing and security measures including closed-circuit television (CCTV);

• The intent to provide an area for environmental mitigation and an agrivoltaics research area to be delivered in partnership with an independent scientific research institute.

The Proposed Development is an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) development for the purposes of the Infrastructure Planning (EIA) Regulations 2017. This means that the proposed works constitute development for which an EIA is required and the proposed application for a DCO will therefore be accompanied by an Environmental Statement (ES). The Secretary of State adopted a Scoping Opinion for the Proposed Development on 28 July 2026.

Consultation

Alongside publicising its proposed application under section 48 of the Planning Act 2008, the Applicant is consulting on the Proposed Development from 12 November to 13 December 2026. Responses must be received by 11:59pm on 13 December 2026 to ensure that they are considered.

Consultation documents, including plans and maps showing the nature and location of the Proposed Development and an overview of the project and key environmental assessment topics will be available free of charge during the consultation period until at least 11:59pm on 13 December 2026 on the 'Our Proposals' section of the project website (www.castlewayenergy.co.uk) which is maintained on behalf of the Applicant. Physical copies of consultation documents may be requested by contacting the project team at info@castlewayenergy.co.uk. A reasonable charge may apply in respect of any documentation it is requested to provide in hard copy. You can contact the Applicant for enquiries in relation to the documents, plans and maps using the freephone voicemail line on 0800 699 0081. Please leave a message and a member of the project team will call you back (between Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm excluding public holidays).

Public consultation events

Members of the public are invited to attend the following in-person consultation events to meet the project team, view the proposals and ask questions: | Date | Time | Location | Venue and address | Friday 20 November 2026 | 2pm – 5pm | Hilton | Hilton Village HallPeacroft LaneHiltonDE65 5GH | Saturday 21 November 2026 | 5pm – 8pm | Hilton | Hilton Village HallPeacroft LaneHiltonDE65 5GH | Five online consultation webinars will be held on different topics, times and dates, set out below: | Date | Time | Topic | Monday 30 November | 6pm – 7pm | General Project Update | Tuesday 1 December | 6pm – 7pm | Emissions (Noise, Air Quality and Climate), Socio–Economic Impacts and Health | Monday 7 December | 6pm – 7pm | Transport, Access and Public Rights of Way | Monday 7 December | 7pm – 8pm | Landscape, Heritage, Archaeology and Visual Impacts | Tuesday 8th December | 6pm – 7pm | Natural Environment (Ecology, Ground Conditions, Agricultural Land, Water and Flood Risk) | Registration details are available at www.castlewayenergy.co.uk (from 12 November). If you have not been able to attend or your question was not able to be answered at either the in-person events or webinars, or you would be interested in a follow-up meeting to discuss your feedback, a meeting with the project manager may be available upon request (on a case-by-case basis and subject to availability) using the contact details below.

How to respond

Feedback may be submitted in any of the following ways:

• Online: complete the feedback form at www.castlewayenergy.co.uk;

• Email: info@castlewayenergy.co.uk;

• Post: FREEPOST CASTLE WAY ENERGY (no further address or stamp required)

Responses should include the respondent's name and postcode. Responses may be made public as part of the DCO process, but personal information will be handled in accordance with GDPR requirements and the Applicant's privacy notice.

Contact the project team

For questions about the Proposed Development or the consultation documents, plans or maps, please see the project website (www.castlewayenergy.co.uk) or contact the project team: Email: info@castlewavenergy.co.uk:

• Post: FREEPOST CASTLE WAY ENERGY (no further address or stamp required)

\- Phone: using the freephone voicemail line on 0800 699 0081. Please leave a message and a member of the project team will call you back (between Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm excluding public holidays).

BSSL Derbyshire 1 Ltd

5 November 2026

National

British citizen with case of Ebola is evacuated from DR Congo to UK

Sarah Johnson

A British healthcare worker with Ebola is being evacuated from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the UK for medical treatment, it has been confirmed.

"A British citizen currently in the DR Congo has tested positive for Ebola," a UK government spokesperson said in a statement yesterday. "The UK has well-established procedures for dealing with cases like this, and those processes have been activated ... The risk to the UK public from Ebola remains low."

The patient, whose identity is unknown, is in a stable condition and is expected to arrive in the UK today before being transferred in a specialist ambulance to a “high consequence” infectious disease unit, according to an official document seen by Reuters.

A humanitarian organisation sent the worker to DR Congo to help in the response to the outbreak, which is the second largest on record. It is the first case involving a British national contracting Ebola in the outbreak.

The Royal Free hospital in London has a high-level isolation unit for infectious diseases such as Ebola; other centres are in Newcastle and Liverpool.

Ebola is a highly contagious, severe and often fatal illness. It is spread through direct contact with body fluids such as the blood or vomit of infected people, or dead bodies.

The outbreak, declared on 15 May by DR Congo's health ministry, has surpassed 10,000 cases and 5,000 deaths. It is the 17th in DR Congo since Ebola was identified, was caused by the Bundibugyo virus, and has become the largest and deadliest in the country's history. The Bundibugyo virus has no approved treatment, though vaccine trials are under way.

Since the outbreak started, it has spread to Kenya and Uganda in east Africa, while last month Nigeria confirmed a case in the capital, Abuja, after a woman who arrived from Uganda tested positive for the virus. She, along with a close contact, were evacuated to Switzerland for treatment.

In an interview with the Guardian last month, Dr Jean Kaseya, the director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said the “unprecedented” spread of the Ebola outbreak meant it could reach the UK and other countries.

“We want all countries to know that they are not safe if they don’t take appropriate measures,” he said. “Each country, not only in the African region, but all continents, must now increase the preparedness level and the possibility for treatment.

"It is the first time three African regions have been affected [by Ebola]. The geographic extension of this outbreak is unprecedented."

Since the beginning of the outbreak, two other patients who have been medically evacuated for specialised care; two to Germany and one to the Netherlands. A fourth case was reported in France in July. All four cases involved people working in healthcare or humanitarian roles in DR Congo.

There have been four confirmed cases recorded in Britain since 1976, according to the UK Health Security Agency.

Campaigners call for firework noise reduction to help wildlife

Joe Pinner

Campaigners are calling on the UK government to protect the welfare of wild animals by cutting the maximum noise level of fireworks sold to the public from 120 to 90 decibels.

The Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW) has said lowering the limit to 90dB - which is about one-eighth of the loudness of 120dB - would help to protect millions of wild animals from acute stress by reducing the area over which a firework disturbs surrounding wildlife.

This would prevent harm, such as mass temporary displacement and fatal collisions among birds, it said.

The government recently consulted on proposals to lower the maximum noise level of fireworks sold to the public from 120dB to 110dB, which would equate to their loudness being roughly halved.

But CWAW said the limit did not go far enough and cutting it to 90dB would leave the area disturbed by each firework about 100 times smaller than under the government's plan.

Richard Parr, the CWAW director, said: “A loud firework can penetrate surprisingly far - up to 10km. Because decibels work on a [logarithmic] scale, each 10-decibel cut to the limit reduces the area affected by the noise by 10 times.”

Parr said that while many people were aware of the distress to pets, there was not enough awareness of wild animals. “There’s no reason to think that wild animals would be any less affected than pets,” he said.

"It might even be worse because it's completely unnatural. It's surprising, stressing, and disturbing for their natural rhythms of life to be suddenly and very unexpectedly disrupted. Particularly for prey animals, who have evolved to be cautious and are naturally jumpy, these random, unannounced bangs are terrifying."

▲ Campaigners want the maximum noise level reduced to 90 decibels

TikTok delivered a £10 billion boost to the UK economy in 2025

It's success stories like these that all add up.

From popular café desserts to practical gardening tips and clever cleaning demos, small businesses share what they know on TikTok and get discovered. For these businesses, discovery can mean new customers, steady growth and a real contribution to the wider economy.

See how TikTok activity adds up tiktokuk.publicfirst.co

JAD

National

Queen of the iron age? Ruler pivotal to Britain may have been female

Nicola Davis

Science correspondent

It was a moment that changed the course of British history: in AD43 Roman troops, under the Emperor Claudius, landed in Kent. Now an archaeologist has claimed the British ruler who persuaded Claudius to invade was not a king, but a queen.

The controversial conclusion, made by Dr Miles Russell, the director of archaeological fieldwork at Bournemouth University, could throw new light on Britain's history.

“It’s critical because ... without Verica, there probably would be no Roman invasion,” he said. “Also, it changes the politics, it changes the dynamics of iron age Britain.”

Verica was a Romanised Briton who ruled the Atrebates tribe which controlled parts of what is now southern Hampshire and West Sussex. After the death of another powerful tribal leader in Britain called Cunobelinus - and the rise of Cunobelinus's son Caratacus - Verica was exiled and fled to Claudius in Rome.

Russell says among the evidence for a rethink of Verica's sex is that Latin names which end in the letter A often belong to women.

What's more, Verica used the term “Rex” on coins - a word that Russell says was used to refer to firm allies on the edge of the Roman empire in that period. Unlike the words “Regina” (queen) and “Regis” (king), Russell said “Rex” did not imply a sex.

Russell also noted that coins minted under Verica appeared to show a naked woman on horseback, whereas those minted under rulers including Cunobelinus and Caratacus show overtly male naked characters on a horse.

“I think the imagery is overtly feminine because that’s basically saying that’s who Verica is,” said Russell. And while abbreviations on the coins have been taken to mean “son of”, Russell says they could also mean “daughter of”.

Russell's claims will appear in a

'Without Verica, there probably would be no Roman invasion'

Dr Miles Russell

Bournemouth University

A female horse rider on a coin struck in Verica's reign is claimed as evidence that she was a British queen, below, not a king

new book: Caratacus: Great King of Britain. The idea that Verica was a woman chimes with criticisms made of Claudius by the Roman writer Cassius Dio, who claimed the emperor was influenced by slaves and women, he added.

Work by Russell and colleagues has previously revealed women were extremely important within iron age society.

Prof Roger Tomlin, a British archaeologist specialising in the translation of Latin text and epigraphy based at the University of Oxford, says the existence of the masculine “Vericus” is the best argument that “Verica” is feminine.

However, Tomlin said the Roman historian Cassius Dio already assumed the ruler was a man, referring to him as “Bericus” - something Russell argues could be down to Cassius Dio writing more than 200 years after the events.

Tomlin also said there was little evidence the term “Rex” had been used for both male and female rulers. “Russell must prove, by finding other examples, that they referred to them both as ‘Rex’,” he said, adding that the depiction of what appears to be a bare-breasted warrior on the reverse of the coin did not prove Verica was a woman.

"It reminds me of the argument that Queen Victoria was really a man, because the reverse of her gold coinage depicts her as a male horseman," Tomlin said.

Dr Daphne Nash Briggs, a British iron age archaeologist and coin expert, also voiced scepticism, noting some coins bearing Verica's name depict a clearly male form on horseback, while others appear to show a portrait of Verica himself in male priestly dress, and some show Verica with an Adam's apple.

Russell is aware his arguments may cause controversy.

"If it does create debate and argument I think that's for the better," he said. "The one-sided story's been there for so long. We need to have this discussion."

Will you help fill a Winter Survival Kit?

Sleeping mat

Fuel

Winter clothes +

Solar lamp

Thermal blanket

As you read this, displaced families in countries like Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria are facing a threat as dangerous as the conflict that forced them from their homes – the freezing winter weather. Living in flimsy shelters without heat or insulation, they are at the mercy of the icy winds and snowfall the coming weeks are set to bring.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has the logistical reach to help the most vulnerable displaced families, but recent global aid cuts have left programmes desperately underfunded – will you help?

Your gift of £89 could help provide a Winter Survival Kit containing lifesaving essentials such as bedding, warm clothes and a payment for fuel.

The situation in Russian-occupied Ukraine is especially dangerous. Attacks on energy infrastructure continue and power outages are common. People like Natalia, from Zaporizhzhia, don't know how they are going to survive: "It's very cold, and we now don't have a gas supply, which was cut off during the missile attack. It is very difficult to keep warm."

These items help save refugee lives

Plastic sheeting

Winter Survival Kits are filled with items that displaced families, depending on their circumstances, most need.

Last winter, two-year-old Habib from Afghanistan fell ill with a chest infection. His family had to burn plastic to try and keep warm – they couldn't afford wood.

Refugee families are used to making do or going without. But when temperatures fall below zero, people living in uninsulated or bomb-damaged shelters are at grave risk of potentially fatal conditions like pneumonia and TB. And heavy rain, fierce winds and snow are on their way.

Please give £89 or whatever you can afford today to help UK for UNHCR's work helping refugees and displaced families.

To give £89 now, visit unrefugees.org.uk/survivalkit

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National

Alexander the Great 'blockbuster' wins £50,000 book prize

Emma Loffhagen

Edmund Richardson has won the 2026 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for Alexander: God, King, Man - his account of the life of Alexander the Great.

Richardson was awarded the £50,000 prize at a ceremony in London last night, beating a six-strong shortlist that included the former winner Patrick Radden Keefe's London Falling.

The chair of judges, the broadcaster Kirsty Lang, described the book as “blockbuster history” with “page-turning narrative pull”, and a “cracking cinematic story about the ancient world involving a masterful assembly of research materials alongside exceptional literary craft".

Richardson, she added, “combines the use of new technology and recent archaeological discoveries to tell the story of an extraordinary leader who conquered an empire stretching from ancient Greece to the Indian subcontinent”.

The book - the first volume of ancient history to win the prize since it was founded in 1999 - traces Alexander's life from 336BC, when at 20 he took charge of a near-bankrupt kingdom and a barely controllable army, through his conquest of the Persian empire, to his death in Babylon aged 32. Richardson drew on more than a decade of research across four continents, and translated sources from 12 ancient languages himself.

▲ Edmund Richardson is a professor of classics at Durham University

Caroline Davies

He also folds in recent archaeological finds, including newly decoded records kept by Babylonian astronomers of Alexander's time.

Celebrity stylist and ‘true icon of the hair industry’: John Frieda dies aged 75

John Frieda, the celebrity hairstylist who launched his own bestselling hair product range, has died aged 75.

In an Instagram post, his salon wrote: "It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that our dear John passed away peacefully ... surrounded by his family.

“His talent and passion touched so many, and his legacy will live on in every single one of us. We will continue to do him proud. Our thoughts are with John’s family and everyone who loved him. Rest in peace, John. You will be forever in our hearts.”

“John was more than a mentor to us; he was a true icon of the hair industry. He was the person who taught us everything, believed in us, and made us better.

The Baillie Gifford is the first major prize for Richardson, a professor of classics at Durham University whose previous books include Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City (2021) and Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity (2013).

The London-born businessman, whose father was a hairdresser and whose grandfather was a barber, styled celebrities from Twiggy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis to Scarlett Johansson, Madonna, Nicole Kidman and Diana, Princess of Wales.

He created the “Purdey” hairstyle - a statement bowl cut - for Joanna Lumley in 1976 for her role in The New Avengers TV series, and opened his first salon that same year, aged 25.

Lang was joined on the judging panel by the novelist Elif Shafak; the Waterstones head of books, Bea Carvalho; the cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins; the Spectator literary editor, Sam Leith; and the editor and reporter Ravi Mattu. The winner was selected from more than 350 eligible titles published between 1 November 2025 and 31 October 2026, narrowed to a longlist of 13 in September.

Richardson's win caps a bumper year for the classical world. Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey sent sales of Homer's epic soaring and last month Anne Carson, the Canadian poet and classicist, was awarded the Nobel prize in literature.

He went on to launch the Frizz Ease haircare line and open salons around the world. He also styled for British Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.

▲ John Frieda with Lulu, his first wife, in 1983. Left, the 'Purdey' cut he created for Joanna Lumley in 1976. Below, in 1999 PHOTOGRAPH: FRANCESCO GUIDICINI/SHUTTERSTOCK

Frieda married his first wife, the Scottish singer Lulu, in 1977. They had one child, Jordan Frieda. Frieda moved to the United States in 1990 to focus on his growing haircare brand, and his relocation contributed to the end of the marriage.

He met his second wife, Avery Agnelli, widow to an heir of the Fiat car company, in 2002 and they married in 2019. They had two children together, Jackson and Leyla, and Frieda was stepfather to her daughter, Asia Agnelli Lagrange.

Agnelli Lagrange shared a series of photos of them together on Instagram, writing: “Sadly my J has passed away. Today we lost the best man to ever exist. I share this because I know he touched the lives of so many.”

The cause of death has not been made public.

Born Alan Howard Frieda in Kenton, Middlesex, he began his career at London's House of Leonard salon and adopted the name John because another stylist was also named Alan.

In 2002, Frieda sold his haircare company to the Japanese conglomerate Kao in a deal valued at \$450m. He held on to five salons: two in London, two in New York and one in Los Angeles.

Tactics used by Palestine Action 'similar to suffragettes', court hears

Haroon Siddique

Legal affairs correspondent

Palestine Action was banned as a terrorist group after using tactics similar to - or less extreme than - the suffragettes, the UK's highest court heard yesterday.

Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action, is challenging last year's decision to proscribe the direct action organisation, placing it alongside groups such as al-Qaida and Boko Haram.

On the first day of the supreme court hearing in central London, Raza Husain KC, representing Ammori, told the five judges: “Palestine Action never advocated for violence against the person and the home secretary has never advocated - and could not advocate - to the contrary.

"The uncontroverted evidence shows, moreover, that [the] suffragettes, anti-war groups, environmental groups, animal rights protesters all used tactics similar to or more extreme than Palestine Action, yet they were not regarded as terrorists or proscribed."

He said the suffragettes' activities included arson and bombing attacks, but they were now venerated as being on the right side of history. The court of appeal had erred by saying that Palestine Action's tactics had "little or nothing in common with the suffragettes ... or Iraq war protest groups", Husain told the court.

Ammori has argued that proscription represents a disproportionate interference with the rights to freedom of speech and protest.

Husain said the ban had affected the entire Palestinian solidarity movement, regardless of any connection with Palestine Action, and chilled the expression of journalists, academics and artists.

In written submissions for the home secretary, Sir James Eadie KC said the court of appeal's decision - against which Ammori is appealing - was lawful and proportionate and had been reinforced in two ways.

He cited the convictions (including one for grievous bodily harm) of four people and the finding of a “terrorist connection” in the case of the Palestine Action activist’s raid on a factory owned by the Israeli arms company Elbit Systems in Filton, near Bristol. It was reinforced by US sanctions imposed on Palestine Action as a global terrorist group, said Eadie.

"As a matter of law, the proscription of PA [Palestine Action] does not prevent public expressions of support for the Palestinian cause or opposition to Israel and to the Israel Defense Forces, or demonstrations targeted at Elbit," he said.

The court case is due to conclude today, with judgment expected at a later date.

World

Netanyahu claims of voting fraud rejected by election commission

Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum

Jerusalem

Israel's election commission yesterday confirmed the final results of last week's vote that stripped Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right coalition of its governing majority, rejecting claims of mass fraud promoted by the prime minister.

The main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, said Netanyahu had launched a “pogrom against democracy” in attempting to hold on to power by discrediting valid votes and weaponising security forces against parties led by Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Hours earlier, Israel's attorney general said she had blocked a demand from the Shin Bet security service to interrogate senior politicians from the Palestinian-led parties because she had not been presented with any evidence of wrongdoing.

"In a country governed by the rule of law, neither citizens nor elected officials can be interrogated without evidence that justifies doing so," Gali Baharav-Miara said in a statement, after Haaretz reported on the attempt to target four politicians.

Election authorities presented the final results to the president, Isaac Herzog, yesterday after rejecting allegations they had been tainted by large-scale foreign interference and voter fraud.

"The review found no evidence of irregularities that compromised the integrity of the election or affected its results," the Central Elections Committee said in a statement.

▲ Supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister and Likud leader, celebrating on election night in Jerusalem PHOTOGRAPH: JOHN WESSELS/AFP

The organisation's chair, Noam Sohlberg, said some “suspicions” were still under investigation but “they do not cast doubt on the election as a whole or justify delaying the election results”.

When the results were handed over, Herzog denounced racist attacks on Palestinian citizens who had turned out to vote at historic rates. “I condemn the coarseness and racist expressions that we have heard recently,” he said. “I hold Arab society in Israel in great respect. I value its contribution to the country in every area of life, and its desire to integrate.”

Herzog will play a key role in the formation of the next government by choosing which politician has the first chance to create a coalition. He is expected to name Eisenkot, and the announcement could come as early as this evening.

A former leader of the Israeli military who lost his son fighting in Gaza, Eisenkot has secured the public support of all of the Jewish Israeli opposition parties.

Palestinian-led parties have said their priority is removing Netanyahu, so they are expected to back him as the strongest contender to achieve that. However, negotiations could take weeks and Eisenkot warned of continuing attempts to undermine trust in the election results.

◀ Gadi Eisenkot appears likely to get the first chance to form a coalition and succeed

Benjamin

Netanyahu,

above, as Israel's

prime minister

PHOTOGRAPH: AMIR

LEVY/GETTY IMAGES

He accused Netanyahu of weaponising the security services against domestic opponents in an effort to hold on to power.

"The employees of the Ministry of Defense, law enforcement and the civil service in Israel are servants of the state, not the king," he said in a statement. "Woe to anyone who abuses their authority and role for political considerations."

The Shin Bet chief, David Zini, handpicked for the role by Netanyahu, had ordered the interrogations and sought to classify the investigation as a security file, which would have allowed harsher conditions including barring the politicians from having legal counsel.

French national blood bank is latest victim of cyber-attacks on fridges

Jon Henley

Paris

France's national blood service said yesterday that hackers had accessed control systems and boosted temperatures at three cold stores stocking vital blood products, in an apparent escalation of recent cyber-attacks on fridges and freezers across Europe.

The French blood service (EFS) said temperature and defrosting thresholds had been raised to “very high levels” in the attack but that its alarm systems had allowed technicians to intervene before the products were compromised.

It said there had been “no health impact” and that “no loss of blood products” had been reported.

The EFS is France's public blood transfusion operator, collecting, testing, preparing and distributing blood, plasma and platelets to more than 1,900 hospitals around the country. It supports more than a million patients a year.

The attack, which the EFS said had occurred overnight on Monday, came as the temperatures of refrigerators and freezers in supermarkets in 11 European countries were raised to as high as 50C (122F), causing millions of euros of food damage.

Retailers in Italy, Germany, Romania and the UK were targeted on Tuesday, after Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden reported problems with their refrigeration systems the previous day.

In a wave of attacks in France last month, hackers seized control of cooling units in as many as 700 supermarkets. A regional branch of France's Crédit Mutuel bank said yesterday it had been the victim of a cyber-attack.

Something similar may have happened in the US in early August, when a series of mysterious fridge malfunctions hit commissaries in at least six military bases. The Pentagon is investigating a suspected hack.

After Italy's government held emergency talks with intelligence officials on Tuesday, Thomas Regnier, an EU spokesperson, said the bloc's agencies were holding urgent discussions with national authorities to formulate a collective response.

The number of European countries affected by problems with retail freezers and refrigerators this week

"These are not isolated incidents and of course we have to be collectively resilient and prepared for such cyber incidents," he said, declining to name any potential culprits.

No motive for the attacks is known and no one has claimed responsibility for them.

A growing range of devices, including commercial refrigeration systems, can be monitored and controlled remotely. Without patching to repair emerging vulnerabilities, internet-connected software can leave code open to hackers.

Some authorities and experts fear government-sponsored hybrid attacks in the aftermath of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Western intelligence officials say Moscow is waging a campaign of sabotage in Europe that is taking many forms.

Rafe Pilling, the senior director for threat intelligence at the cybersecurity company Sophos, told the Guardian this week the most plausible attribution scenarios were a “state-based signalling and demonstration of capability” or a lone-wolf hacker.

EFS said it was not directly targeted, with the attacks hitting cold stores run by its contractors. Products stored in the affected rooms, which included plasma bags for transfusions and medicine manufacturing, had been moved to other sites.

It added that France's national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, and the health ministry had been alerted, and monitoring of all its equipment had been reinforced.

▲ A supermarket employee sorts through perished goods in Paris. Last month a hack affected 700 stores across the country PHOTOGRAPH: LUCIEN LIBERT/REUTERS

Reddit calls Australia's under-16s social media ban 'over-broad' in court

Nadav Eyal, an Israeli journalist and commentator, said the public should be braced for more extreme attempts to dismiss election results and discredit the leading opposition parties.

"The groundwork is steadily being laid for violence," he wrote on X. "What you're hearing breaking right now is the foundation of the legal and governmental orders in Israel."

Netanyahu presided over a racist campaign targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel - about 20% of the population - and on election day began promoting the unfounded accusations of mass fraud now rejected by election authorities.

Ahmad Tibi, a prominent Palestinian politician, was reportedly among those the Shin Bet sought to interrogate. He responded to the latest allegations, as news broke of sweeping victories for Democrats in the US midterms, with a swipe at Netanyahu's fear of democracy.

"[The] attorney general is checking suspicion of ties between the Joint List and Democrats in the US," Tibi wrote in a social media post. "According to the suspicion, in both cases the same sophisticated method was employed: people arrived in droves at the polling stations, cast a slip, and went home."

Josh Taylor

Technology reporter

Australia's social media ban is not a “blunt tool” but the most direct way to target addictive features that lead to under-16s experiencing harm online, the Australian government has told a high court hearing.

In its challenge to the ban on Tuesday, Reddit had argued that the government's rush to pass the ban in 2024 had led to an “ill-thought-out, over-broad legislation” that the government had since had to refine with rules written by the communications minister in 2026.

Reddit challenged the social media ban on the grounds that it impinges the implied freedom of political communication for under-16s.

Reddit cited comments made in 2021 by the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, that a ban on accounts was a “blunt tool” for reducing harms experienced by teenagers on social media.

In court yesterday, the government barrister, Stephen Lloyd SC, argued the legislation was designed at the outset to expect rules to be set by the minister at a later date as required, and should be considered by the court in terms of how it was operating today, rather than when the legislation was passed by parliament.

Lloyd said the ban was aimed at the features that kept people engaged on social media, such as endless scrolling, likes and comments, personalised recommendations and push notifications, and the “credible risk” that those features led to harms for under-16s, such as depression, anxiety and suicide ideation.

He said it was “not a blunt instrument but ... designed to minimise the adverse effects of these features” which were experienced by users who held accounts on the platforms.

Reddit allows users to read the site without an account, but Lloyd argued that features such as personalisation were limited to account holders.

Lloyd raised the hypothetical argument that if Reddit were to offer a “Reddit Kids” version without the harmful features, then teenagers under 16 could regain the ability to engage in political communications online as that app would not be subject to the ban. He said, however, any such version would still require Reddit to assess the ages of users.

'[It is] not a blunt instrument but ... designed to minimise the adverse effects'

Stephen Lloyd SC

Government barrister

Since the ban came into effect in December, more than 5 million accounts the platforms understood as belonging to under-16s across 10 sites have been suspended or deactivated.

The platforms currently covered by the ban include Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Kick, X, Twitch and Threads. Apart from YouTube Kids, none of the other platforms have been able to obtain an exemption for a version of their site designed for teenagers.

Lloyd said the government accepted that the ban was in effect a burden on the ability of under-16s to politically communicate, but said this was narrow, indirect and modest.

Reddit's barrister, Perry Herzfeld SC, said under the legislation, once a platform such as Reddit was declared as needing to comply with the ban, there was no option for it to remove addictive or harmful features without creating a separate app that would not allow children to interact with users on the main platform.

The digital duty of care bill before parliament would allow platforms to remove these features for teenage accounts or otherwise ban under-16s, Herzfeld said. The high court has reserved its decision.

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World

The satellites image so 'awesome' viewers think it's an AI fake

Eva Corlett

Wellington

A photograph showing thousands of satellites cross-hatching the night sky over New Zealand appeared so extraordinary that the astrophotographer who captured it is fighting accusations it was created by AI.

To create his image - now viewed millions of times online - Brendan Larsen spent two hours in September taking hundreds of photographs of the night sky over Mount Taranaki in New Zealand's North Island.

Larsen, 51, says he set up his camera to take an unlimited number of eight-second shots, with a two-second gap between each. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos ... That was the easy part.”

The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 40 hours layering the individual photos - each of which contained about 25 satellites - over one another, using Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.

"I could start to see the pattern emerging and realised: 'Wow, this looks really awesome.' I knew if I carried on it would look even better."

The resulting image shows the sky inundated with about 1,400 satellites and 14,000 trails forming a dense crisscrossing pattern.

When Larsen uploaded the image to his social media channels in mid-October, it quickly went viral, gaining him 15,000 new followers, clocking up tens of millions of views and igniting thousands of comments.

Some dismissed it as AI. “AI generating software is becoming so good it is becoming difficult to tell AI images from real images ... especially if you’re not familiar with the location or with astrophotography,” he said. Still, it was “frustrating”.

PHOTOGRAPHS: BRENDAN LARSEN

▲ Brendan Larsen at the spot where he captured the satellites image

It was also exasperating, he said, to see his image downloaded and recreated by AI, with obvious flaws.

In anticipation of the AI accusations and backlash, Larsen documented his creative process on video, which he hoped would also allow viewers to form an emotional connection to the landscape.

As a child, Larsen was “absolutely blown away” by the number of stars over parts of rural New Zealand. But he has noticed an increase in light pollution and the number of satellites over the six years he has been photographing the sky.

“It’s interesting and fascinating seeing satellites, but it’s also disturbing,” he said.

"I've got about 10,000 comments on my Facebook page ... nine out of 10 of the comments are like: 'Wow, beautiful photo, but horrifying, terrifying and really concerning about what's happening to the night sky.'"

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World

'A threat to Putin' The small Arctic news outlet whose staff are in Russia's crosshairs

Miranda Bryant

Nordic correspondent

T he official newspaper

of the Russian

government is an

unlikely source

of recognition for

a European news

outlet critical of Vladimir Putin and providing sanctuary to exiled Russian journalists. But in May, two days after Russia tested its new intercontinental ballistic missile system nicknamed “Satan II” by Nato, an article in Rossiyskaya Gazeta prompted celebrations in a remote newsroom in the Arctic.

The story about how “leading global media” reacted to the Sarmat missile test referred to just a handful of outlets including the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and France 24. But among them was the Barents Observer, a small, journalist-owned online newspaper publishing in English and Russian about northern Russia and the Euro-Arctic region from a modest office in the north-eastern Norwegian town of Kirkenes.

It was especially surprising, given that the publication had been declared an “undesirable organisation” by the office of Russia’s prosecutor general, and half of its staff journalists are on Russia’s wanted list.

Its editor, Thomas Nilsen, said: "We were listed among what the Russian government newspaper itself called ‘leading global media’. That was a very good day at the Barents Observer because it means we had reached into the inner circle of the Kremlin."

A short drive from the Norway-Russia border and the only remaining legal land border crossing from Russia into the European Schengen free travel area, Kirkenes is a place where rising tensions with Moscow are felt acutely. But since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the town has also become a refuge for Russians who have found themselves targeted by Putin's regime -

including journalists who have been hired by the Barents Observer.

Recently, the journalist Denis Zagore, originally from the Russian city of Murmansk, appeared in the Russian interior ministry's database, accused of involvement with an “undesirable” organisation and failing to comply with the legal requirements for “foreign agents”. Officials in Murmansk have filed a motion to detain Zagore in absentia. He is the third Barents Observer journalist living in exile in Kirkenes to be put on Russia’s wanted list. He remains determined to continue his work. “I can’t say this came as a surprise, given that the actions of the Russian state are quite predictable and the initiation of criminal cases was only a matter of time. I don’t intend to change anything in my life because of this. Besides, they could have found me without declaring me wanted.”

Zagore's entry to the Russian wanted list came after his colleague Olesia Krivtsova was sentenced in absentia in July to six years in a penal colony on charges of “justifying terrorism” and “discrediting” the Russian army.

Last year, the paper's news editor, Farida Kurbangaleeva, was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for “spreading false information” about the Russian army and “justifying terrorism”. She had previously been labelled a “foreign agent” and an unsuccessful extradition request was made to the Czech Republic, where she was living at the time.

Another Barents Observer journalist, Georgii Chentemirov, has also been added to the “foreign agents” registry, criminally charged and fined. In the newspaper's office, staff try to make light of the threats and intimidation by making a “wanted” wall with pictures from their Russian wanted listings.

While they have been living and working with pressure from across the border for years, Nilsen said there had been a “dramatic escalation” in the last few months.

“We are living very close to the border, so we probably saw things earlier than the rest of Europe,” he said. But as a journalist, what concerns him most is the way the Russian president is trying to assert Russian media control beyond his own borders by targeting publications and exiled journalists in Europe.

Often when people are targeted by Russian authorities, he said, they remove their names from public view and stop criticising the war in Ukraine on social media. At the Barents Observer, they try to do the opposite. “We maintain that Putin is not a threat to us, we are a threat to him. Free and independent journalism is a threat to any dictatorship,” Nilsen said.

Since being labelled a criminal organisation, making it a crime for people in Russia to speak to its journalists, the newspaper has had to work even harder. Its journalists do so using open sources, talking to people who are crossing the border, using satellite images, monitoring flight and shipping radars and speaking to exiled Russians. “I don’t want to say that this is easy. It’s getting harder and harder every day. But still possible,” Nilsen said.

But they now face legal action in the high court in London from the Russian billionaire Vitaly Orlov, which they fear could bankrupt the newspaper. The complaint centres on five news stories published between 2025 and 2026 about Norebo, a fishing company that Orlov co-founded and of which he is the majority owner.

Krivtsova, 23, was a 19-year-old student when she escaped house arrest in Arkhangelsk, Russia, by cutting off her electronic ankle bracelet and fleeing via Belarus to Lithuania. A criminal case was opened against her after she reposted a message online about an explosion on the Crimean Bridge and was openly critical of the war.

When she first spoke to the Guardian at the newspaper's office in Kirkenes in 2023, she had recently been hired as a journalist there. She arrived suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. “I was really afraid to be detained, captured, somehow sent to Russia,” she said. Now, despite her recent sentencing, she speaks with cool pragmatism. “It doesn’t matter actually for Russian special services where you are. It doesn’t matter if you are in Kirkenes, Australia or somewhere else,” she said. “If they want to kill you, if they want to poison you or capture you, they will find you.”

◀Clockwise from left: the border crossing with Russia near Kirkenes; the Barents Observer editor, Thomas Nilsen; and journalists Denis Zagore, Olesia Krivtsova and Georgii Chentemirov

PHOTOGRAPHS: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/GETTY; BARENTS OBSERVER

Canada joins countries refusing to play ice hockey against Russia

Guardian staff

Canada has joined a coalition of countries refusing to play ice hockey teams from Russia, with the prime minister, Mark Carney, saying that Russian skaters will not be able to compete in a world junior championship next month due to the war in Ukraine.

“While Russia and Belarus are supporting this illegal, unjustified, horrific war in Ukraine, as long as that's going on, there will be none of those athletes competing for their countries in Canada," Carney said.

The national hockey federations said they would not play Russian teams after a decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to allow Russians to compete in International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) events.

An IIHF ban on Russian teams took effect after Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and had been extended annually. After several appeals by Russia's hockey federation, CAS finally lifted the ban last Friday, saying safety and security worries were not supported by sufficient evidence.

On Monday, the Finnish Ice Hockey Association asked other nations to stand against the decision. Federations representing Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Latvia and the Czech Republic announced on Tuesday they were siding with Finland.

Ukraine's foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, thanked European nations for “refusing to share the ice with Russia”.

"If CAS lacks a moral compass, let's show that hockey still has values," he said in a post on X. "Refuse to play against Russia and deny visas to its players. Keep Russia off the ice!

A war of aggression and hockey are incompatible."

The Norwegians were the first to announce on Tuesday their intention to refuse to play Russia. In a social media post, Norway's ice hockey federation said: "Our position that

▲ Canada will host the world junior ice hockey championship next month

Russia should be excluded from all international championships as long as the war in Ukraine continues ... remains unchanged.

"At this time, this decision is based on our responsibility to protect the safety and wellbeing of our players, team staff and their families. We believe playing against Russia under the current circumstances could expose our players and team staff to significant security risks."

The CAS ruling means organisers of tournaments must decide if to continue with Russian participation. The world junior tournament is due to begin on 26 December in the Canadian province of Alberta.

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M&S boss calls budget ‘whole lot of nothing’ as profits soar

Sarah Butler

The chief executive of Marks & Spencer yesterday called John Healey's first budget as chancellor a “whole lot of nothing” and bemoaned an “onslaught of taxation and regulation” from the Labour government despite welcoming an expected deal on EU border checks.

Stuart Machin said the chancellor's “real terms” freeze on business rates, for example, would add £10m to M&S's £170m rates bill.

He also criticised plans for the “most ridiculous” deposit return scheme, under which retailers must install machines for the return of cans and plastic bottles in stores in England and Scotland from October to drive up recycling rates. In Wales, the scheme is to include glass bottles.

The M&S boss said he was “very supportive” of a new food trade deal between the UK and EU, which is expected to be completed this month.

Machin said this would help reduce a £10m post-Brexit hit to the retailer caused by the paperwork, packaging and logistical costs involved in sending goods to the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. He added that the deal would also help UK exports of food to mainland Europe.

The comments emerged as M&S said a sustained cyber-attack that forced it to shut down its website last year had continued to hurt clothing sales over the summer.

The retailer said profits bounced back to £355m in the six months to 26 September from only £3.4m a year before, as it partly recovered from the hack. The attack, which began over Easter 2025, forced M&S to shut its website, which sells clothing and homewares, for more than six weeks.

Total sales over the half year rose 16.2% to £9.2bn. M&S said sales and profit from its clothing and homewares arm remained below those of two years ago as “availability was constrained due to the longer-than-expected impact of manual ordering processes after the incident, while profitability was diluted by an increased mix of online sales, which have higher fulfilment costs”.

Machin said the impact of the cyber-attack had “lasted longer than we expected”, but added: “That’s now behind us.”

M&S said it had been able to take its biggest ever share of a declining clothing market despite the availability problems, but added: “Market conditions remain challenging.”

sales lost across the industry in the last six months owing to hot weather, low consumer confidence and a shift away from spending on non-essentials.

He added that the industry was still “heavily discounting” and M&S was trying to avoid the trend by pricing its goods affordably.

M&S clothing, beauty and home-wares sales rose 17.5% to almost £2bn in the half year compared with the same period last year, which was affected by the hack.

Performance is expected to improve in the second half as M&S said availability had now recovered “creating a better balance between core and seasonal stock”.

Its food business increased sales by almost 14% to £5.2bn in the half year as it opened seven stores and expanded or refurbished others.

Machin said the UK clothing market was down by 11%, with £1bn in

The group's Ocado joint venture also swung to a half-year profit of £25.6m from a loss of £3.1m a year before as sales rose 16% and it improved the efficiency of deliveries

£355m

M&S profits in the six months to 26 September, up from £3.4m in 2025, when a cyber-attack hit sales

M&S said it expected to cut £120m in costs this year across technology, logistics and stores. Machin said the retailer would not be making redundancies but was likely to be cautious on hiring as it tried to offset new costs, including £35m related to a new packaging levy.

BMW issues further profit warning amid restructuring

Lisa O'Carroll

BMW has issued its second profit warning in a year, blaming the costs of a restructuring programme, including significant job losses in the face of continuing competition from China.

The company is the latest to issue a profit downgrade in the German car sector, after Mercedes-Benz last week cut its profit outlook. Western car firms have struggled to keep pace with lower-cost domestic rivals in China, which has led to reduced sales there and an increase in China's exports to Europe.

BMW signalled a potential for losses after slashing its profit margin to between -0.5% and 0.5% this year but blamed fourth-quarter costs tied to the restructuring that includes 8,000 job cuts in its home market. At the beginning of the year, BMW had still considered a margin of 4-6% would be possible.

Yesterday it reported an 11% drop in third-quarter pre-tax earnings to €2.1bn (£1.75bn).

Sales in China fell 22% in the first nine months of the year, but BMW said this was in line with the broader downturn in that market.

▲ The Mini plant in Oxford. BMW has struggled with stiff competition from Chinese car makers

PHOTOGRAPH: GRAEME ROBERTSON/GUARDIAN

“Current developments in our industry call for decisiveness and swift implementation. We will therefore specifically intensify and accelerate structural measures,” said BMW’s chief executive, Milan Nedeljković.

China “remains a key focus”, Nedeljković added, with the group’s revamp of its model offering beginning in China this month with the launch of the electric iX3.

Like Volkswagen, BMW has experienced painful restructuring costs caused by the rapidly changing market. Because of the rapid launch of its new generation of electric vehicles, the company is writing off parts of its previous vehicle and technology generations and pricing in the costs of the redundancy programme.

The operating margin in BMW's core business narrowed to 3.4%, beating analysts' forecast of 3.1% but declining from 5.2% a year earlier.

Excluding restructuring charges, the margin would be above 2%, within its previous forecast range, the company said, adding that it planned to focus on cutting management functions.

Revenue fell 6% to €30.4bn in the third quarter, hurt by the declining sales in China.

Although Mercedes-Benz also reported lower profits in the third quarter, Porsche has rebounded slightly, but only after steep charges last year as it overhauled its model lineup and retreated from China.

'Nightmare' for suppliers if Poundland is broken up

Sarah Butler

Suppliers facing millions of pounds in losses if Poundland collapses have said the chain's US owner “should not be permitted” to maximise its return at their expense, as ministers attempt to intervene in the situation.

The fate of the retail chain, its 12,000 staff and about 2,000 suppliers remains uncertain after it filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators at the high court last Thursday.

The US restructuring specialist Gordon Brothers, which bought the now 600-store Poundland chain for £1 last summer, remains in talks with at least two possible buyers for the company. They include Northern Ireland's Martin Property Group, whose offer has been backed by the retailer's management team.

However, Gordon Brothers is understood to prefer the option to break up Poundland, selling off its stock and parcelling up stores for sale to other retailers, including Tesco and the owner of Poundstretcher, because this would pay off more of a £30m shareholder loan.

This route could save some retail jobs but would leave suppliers with unpaid debts and millions of pounds' worth of stock without a retailer to sell it to.

Karan Shah, a director of Universal Toiletries, a major fragrance and toiletries supplier to Poundland, told the Guardian the company faced financial risk of about £1.5m, including almost £700,000 in stock already delivered but yet to be paid for and the rest in undelivered stock and components.

“Gordon Brothers should not be permitted to maximise its own financial return at the expense of suppliers without exploring all the alternatives of a solvent deal,” he said. “We are unfortunately significantly exposed,” said Shah, adding that Poundland was his firm’s biggest UK client and “we are a family business, not a multinational that can afford to take a hit”.

Andrew Kay, the chief operating officer of the Oldham-based toy ball supplier John Leisure, said he would have to “rehome” more than 1m products, many of which had already been manufactured and were in transit for next spring.

He said doing so would be difficult because many items had been made specifically for Poundland and other retailers would not want the same sizes and quantities. "It is going to be a nightmare that will hurt me badly to deal with all that inventory," he said.

Interest rate rise expected after surge of activity in service sector

Phillip Inman

The Bank of England is expected to raise interest rates today after a closely watched survey showed growth across the services sector leapt to an eight-month high last month, bolstered by spending on AI.

S&P Global's survey of the services sector in October showed businesses regained much of the momentum they had lost after the start of the Iran war, but they also felt the impact of renewed input price inflation, which accelerated to a five-month high.

Officials at the Bank have become concerned about inflation after the consumer prices index (CPI) rose from 3.1% in August to 3.5% in September.

While the nine-member monetary policy committee (MPC), which sets interest rates, has been split in recent months, a majority is expected to vote for a 0.25 percentage point increase to 4%.

Tim Moore, the economics director at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said a survey of the manufacturing sector this week also showed businesses facing strong price pressures.

He said: “These signals underscore the near-certainty of a Bank of England rate hike in November and collectively raise the likelihood of further Bank of England policy tightening into 2027.”

Financial markets expect three further increases in the cost of borrowing, though most City economists believe inflation is likely to peak in the spring, allowing the Bank to limit the number of rate rises to one or two.

Moore said service providers indicated the fastest upturn in activity since February.

The S&P Global services purchasing managers' index, which gauges growth across sector, rose from 52.1 to 52.8. A reading above 50 indicates a period of expansion. Bigger workloads prompted businesses in the services sector to take on additional staff in October, the survey found.

This ended two years of job-cutting across the sector, with many businesses during that period not replacing employees who had left.

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MPs say UK is 'dangerously' dependent on China for key minerals

Lisa O'Carroll

Senior staff correspondent

The UK is “dangerously” dependent on China for critical raw materials needed for the military, renewable energy infrastructure and AI, a parliamentary investigation has found.

MPs on the business select committee called for an urgent centralised policy and the creation of a “critical minerals finance facility” to help fund rare earth and other critical mineral mines, and use grants, equity and debt to accelerate a diversification programme.

“Critical minerals are the alpha of the new economy,” said the committee’s chair, Liam Byrne. “We cannot rearm Britain, build AI or deliver net zero unless we secure the minerals these technologies depend on.

“Yet 16 years after China first weaponised its chokehold over rare earths, Britain remains dangerously exposed,” said Byrne.

It is the second time in a week that the government's policy on China has been criticised by Byrne's committee.

China has a stranglehold on the world's supply of rare earths and other critical minerals, as well as their refined byproducts that are used in everything from military jets to car locking systems and consumer products such as fridges and washing machines.

The committee heard that “the processing stage” was where the bottlenecks were, with China dominating the refining of seven categories of minerals, including refined lithium needed for electric vehicles and rare earths used in the fuselage and wings of military aircraft to help withstand temperature extremes.

MPs were told that demand for lithium alone would increase 45-fold between now and 2030, leaving the UK in a high-risk dependency relationship with China.

The demand for rare earths needed for permanent magnets used in military jets and other applications would rise 16-fold in the same period as Britain seeks to rebuild its military capabilities.

But with China capable of suddenly cutting off rare earth supplies, as it did in 2025, a dependency on Beijing was a strategic vulnerability for the UK economy and national security, the committee found. Separate restrictions of legacy chips after a row over a Dutch intervention in the Chinese-owned Nexperia left the European car industry “days away” from stoppages last October.

The EU, the US and other countries faced the same risk of supplies of rare earths being cut off by China, and the committee said the UK was not putting enough effort into finding alternative supplies.

The most “realistic” solution was for the UK to work closely with G7 partners, the rest of Europe and Indo-Pacific countries, to “aggregate demand” and bring in new suppliers.

The government was approached for comment.

▲ China dominates the refining of seven critical categories of minerals

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US inflation has risen this year

% CPI change from a year earlier

5784

-53

始 5787

高 5869

安 5741

日製鋼

5784

-71

始 5838

高 5898

安 5784

古河電

2621.0

-134.0

始 2746.0

高 2747.5

安 2601.0

オークマ

4605

+5

始 4600

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安 4580

コマツ

6277

+64

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5456

-64

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日精工

1002.0

+2.1

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安 1000.0

三菱電

4940

+184

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高 4987

安 4870

^\* イレント

11605

-25

始 11805

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安 11470

News

US midterms

NTN

349.4

-1.2

始 352.3

高 357.0

安 349.4

富士電機

12105

+25

始 12380

高 12380

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2666.5

+25.0

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高 2674.5

安 2645.0

ジェイ外

1993.0

+27.5

始 1978.5

高 2022.5

安 1974.5

安川電

3882

-35

始 3953

高 3976

安 3879

EC

4720

-132

4799

4802

4684

3672

-69

3720

3742

3662

ミネアミミ

3073

-72

始 3151

高 3157

安 3063

KOKUSAI

6431

-347

始 6678

高 6793

安 6413

富士通

3463

-51

始 3565

高 3572

安 3437

ソニーG

4002

+36

始 3963

高 4027

21145

+140

21155

21245

21095

始高安

日 立

4932

-38

始 4929

高 4965

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ツネクト

1719.0

-97.0

始 1789.5

高 1795.5

安 1715.0

ルネサス

2764.0

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TDK

2480.5

-34.5

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1891.0

+34.5

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高 1911.0

安 1863.5

レザーテク

39750

-970

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6087

-253

6440

6448

6063

横浜FG

1667.0

+13.5

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高 1682.0

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マツダ

1092.0

+11.5

始 1085.0

横河電

4566

+7

始 4570

高 4614

安 4552

ファナック

5652

+4

5700

5721

5637

Japan's stock prices in Tokyo yesterday. Asian markets initially dropped in overnight trading but rallied as investors weighed up the results of the US midterms

PHOTOGRAPH: EUGENE HOSHIKO/AP

日東電

3407

+92

始 3385

高 3418

安 3368

日産自

263.4

+0.8

264.0

264.8

262.2

ホンダ

1805.0

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始 1800.5

Richard Partington

Senior economics correspondent

Donald Trump's loss of control of the House of Representatives and the Senate has put the world economy on notice for an unpredictable final two years of his presidential term.

Certain uncertainty What a lame-duck Trump will mean for the global economy

After Democrats swept aside his Republican party in the midterm elections, analysts said the prospect of a highly erratic lame-duck president would have significant implications for financial markets, growth, inflation, government borrowing costs and living standards.

Here are the biggest expected consequences.

Stock markets

Markets initially dropped in early trading in Asia overnight but rallied as investors weighed up the midterm results.

Investors typically dislike uncertainty and political chaos. The fact that the president conceded the result and acknowledged the impact of the Iran war has been taken as a positive in markets. However, his warning that he will become “Mr Veto” raises the prospect of a turbulent finale to his time in the White House. Holger

Schmieding, the chief economist at Berenberg, said the result showed that US voters had “rejected Trump and his somewhat authoritarian penchant for crony capitalism. [That] shows that US institutions and its checks and balances work. That is a positive, in my view.”

Much of the outlook for stock markets, inflation and growth is contingent on the war in the Middle East and the pace of the advance of artificial intelligence.

Traders expect the Democrats to take a tougher line on AI regulation and the datacentre rollout, raising questions over a driver of stock market growth. There are also concerns that Trump, with control over domestic policy weakened, will take a more aggressive approach to foreign policy, in particular the war in Iran.

Inflation

The cost to US households from surging inflation triggered by a deeply unpopular war, alongside a chaotic tariff policy that has devastated small businesses, was key to the midterm result. US diesel prices surged to a record high in August, while the headline inflation rate has risen to 3.7%.

The US-Israeli attack on Iran, leading to the closure of the critical strait of Hormuz, reignited

Interest rates

global inflationary pressures amid the biggest energy price shock in decades. Oil prices fell back yesterday to trade below \$100 a barrel for the first time in a month, as investors digested the midterm results amid hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough. However, trading at about \$94, Brent crude remained significantly higher than its prewar level of about \$70. As a consequence, the International Monetary Fund expects global headline inflation to rise to 4.7% this year, with energy-importing countries hardest hit. The possibility of Trump ramping up hostilities against Iran would add to the inflationary shock.

Higher inflation has forced central banks to raise interest rates, with the US Federal Reserve defying pressure from Trump by increasing the cost of borrowing for the first time since 2023.

Against a volatile backdrop in the war and as inflationary pressures persist, investors anticipate at least one more rate increase from the Fed. The Bank of England is expected to raise rates today, while the European Central Bank is also set to push up borrowing costs.

After losing control of Congress, Republicans will lack the votes to confirm new appointments to critical public bodies, including new Fed governors. Trump could still use his veto powers, which can be overturned only if two-thirds of both chambers agree.

Government finances

Higher inflation and interest rates triggered by the Iran war have driven up borrowing costs, adding to the pressure on countries with high levels of public debt.

In the US, the logjammed political system will face its first major test on 11 December, when politicians have to agree to authorise government spending to avoid a shutdown. The gridlock could prevent Trump launching new tax and spending measures, restricting the capacity for fiscal stimulus to boost the economy, but also limiting a further rise in borrowing and debt. Analysts say the crushing midterm defeats for Maga candidates will hurt the president's authority and could pave the way for more bipartisan cooperation in Congress.

Economic growth

Analysts say political turbulence and presidential actions on trade and immigration could put US growth at risk, but inflation and, most importantly, the prospects for de-escalation in the Middle East, are the main factors to watch.

Investors fear that a clampdown by the Democrats on AI could hit investment and growth in the US. The spillovers from the tech boom have been felt around the globe, with AI investment helping to bolster the UK economy.

However, tech industry leaders were already cooling on the rollout of AI amid concerns over cyber risks. Many investors also feared the emergence of a bubble in the US stock market. Analysts at Allianz say the scale of AI investment, and its capacity to power global economic growth, could mean the left-right political playbook is less predictable than in the past. Environmental and social impacts are also increasingly important.

Source: LSEG

As recently as last month, the IMF forecast that US growth would remain stable at 2.3% this year and next, despite the heightened risks from the Iran war and uncertain path for AI investment. Analysts at Berenberg, however, said US growth could slow to a pace of about 1.5% in 2028 amid political gridlock, a slowdown in AI, and a drag from Trump's hard clampdown on immigration. As a result, the US will contribute less to global growth than before.

US market performance

Indexed to 2 Jan 2025

● S&P 500 ● Nasdaq composite

Source: LSEG. Note: data as of 0900 GMT, yesterday

Source: LSEG

Ten-year US government bond yields

Source: LSEG

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Forecasts and graphics provided by AccuWeather ©2026

[Weather Thursday 5 November 2026] UK and Ireland Noon today | Sunny | Mist | Fog | Sunny intervals | Hazy | Mostly cloudy | Overcast/dull | Sunny showers | Sunny and heavy showers | Light showers | Rain | Sleet | Light snow | Snow showers | Heavy snow | Ice | Thundery rain | Thundery showers | Temperature, °C | Wind speed, mph | Windy |

Carbon count

Daily atmospheric CO $_{2}$ readings from Mauna Loa, Hawaii (ppm): | 03 Nov 2026 | 428.84 | Weekly average | 25 Oct 2026 | 427.28 | 04 Nov 2025 | 425.16 | 04 Nov 2016 | 402.47 | Pre-industrial base | 280 | Safe level | 350 | Source: NOAA-ESRL |

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......

Trough

High tides | Aberdeen | 1039 | 3.8m | 2244 | 4.0m | Avonmouth | 0348 | 11.0m | 1611 | 11.6m | Barrow | 0823 | 8.0m | 2038 | 8.4m | Belfast | 0809 | 3.1m | 2015 | 3.5m | Cobh | 0200 | 3.5m | 1433 | 3.7m | Cromer | 0310 | 4.5m | 1609 | 4.4m | Dover | 0802 | 6.0m | 2043 | 6.0m | Dublin | 0845 | 3.7m | 2055 | 4.0m | Galway | 0203 | 4.4m | 1422 | 4.5m | Greenock | 0940 | 3.2m | 2126 | 3.4m | Harwich | 0811 | 3.5m | 2051 | 3.8m | Holyhead | 0728 | 5.0m | 1938 | 5.3m | Hull | 0238 | 6.6m | 1530 | 6.7m | Leith | 1141 | 5.0m | 2356 | 5.2m | Liverpool | 0806 | 8.3m | 2022 | 8.7m |

© Crown Copyright and/or database rights. Reproduced by permission of the Keeper of Public Records and the UK Hydrographic Office | London Bridge | 1026 | 6.2m | 2302 | 6.6m | Lossiemouth | 0850 | 3.7m | 2056 | 3.8m | Milford Haven | 0259 | 6.0m | 1522 | 6.4m | Newquay | 0155 | 5.8m | 1418 | 6.3m | North Shields | -- | -- | 1243 | 4.5m | Oban | 0310 | 3.2m | 1517 | 3.6m | Penzance | 0131 | 4.7m | 1351 | 5.1m | Plymouth | 0231 | 4.7m | 1447 | 5.0m | Portsmouth | 0847 | 4.5m | 2055 | 4.3m | Southport | 0721 | 8.0m | 1937 | 8.4m | Stornoway | 0405 | 4.1m | 1616 | 4.5m | Portland | 0330 | 1.7m | 1540 | 1.8m | Whitby | 0027 | 5.0m | 1315 | 5.0m | Wick | 0825 | 3.1m | 2028 | 3.3m | Workington | 0831 | 7.2m | 2047 | 7.6m |

Sun & Moon

Lighting up | Belfast | 1641 to 0737 | Birm'ham | 1630 to 0712 | Brighton | 1628 to 0701 | Bristol | 1637 to 0713 | Carlisle | 1626 to 0725 | Cork | 1659 to 0737 | Dublin | 1645 to 0733 | Glasgow | 1629 to 0735 | Harlech | 1638 to 0723 | Inverness | 1621 to 0740 | London | 1626 to 0702 | M'chester | 1629 to 0717 | Newcastle | 1621 to 0721 | Norwich | 1617 to 0701 | Penzance | 1652 to 0720 |

Weatherwatch

The world's wettest rainstorms produce about half of the global annual rainfall. Now a study shows these intense downpours have become shorter and fewer, compressing the same amount of rain into quicker and more extreme events, with implications for flood and drought risk.

Chiyuan Miao and colleagues from Beijing Normal University analysed daily measurements between 1980 and 2022 from more than 19,000 rain gauges around the world. They found an average of half the world's rainfall fell in nine multi-day storms, delivered over a cumulative time of about 28 days.

But they also found that since 1980 the average length of an intense storm has reduced by about 86 minutes a decade, cutting the time to deliver half of the world's annual rainfall by over 9.5 hours.

The findings, published in Earth's Future, show these changes across all continents but with regional differences. Europe and South America have recorded the strongest rate of compression of storms, with the wettest shortening by as much as 144 minutes a decade. Implications will also vary and include changes to water security, soil erosion and wildfire susceptibility. Kate Raviliou

Around the world

Algiers

Ams'dam

Athens

Auckland

B Aires

Bangkok

Barcelona

Basra

Beijing

Berlin

Bermuda

Brussels

Budapest

C'hagen

Cairo

Cape Town

Chicago

Corfu

Dakar

Dhaka

Dublin

Florence

Gibraltar

H Kong

Harare

Helsinki

Istanbul

Jo'burg

K Lumpur

K'mandu

Kabul

Kingston

Kolkata

L Angeles

Lagos

Lima

Nations Championship Qatar will not host 2028 finals due to Middle East crisis

Tennis Burrage offered support by WTA after death threats Page 39 →

Page 39 →

Sport

▲ Fallon Sherrock wins Beat Luke Littler, which had been billed as amateurs taking on the darts world champion

TOM DYMOND/SHUTTERSTOCK

Soft target

Sherrock's synthetic success over Littler symbolises the slow death of the amateur

he walked in here a hairdresser from Milton Keynes - and walks out £501,000 richer!" Gary Lineker announced at the end of Netflix's Beat Luke Littler on Friday. Which, while strictly accurate as a description of the winner Fallon Sherrock, arguably fell short

of providing the full picture. “She walked in wearing socks - and walks out £501,000 richer!” “She walked in here a vertebrate mammal - and walks out £501,000 richer!” I mean, if we’re reciting facts without context.

Because while Sherrock may still theoretically be qualified to cut hair, much of her past decade has been spent on darts: playing darts, practising darts, travelling to and from darts, promoting her darts career. Though she may never have held a Professional Darts Corporation tour card, she is - by any sane definition of the term - a professional darts player. Indeed, as a result of her historic run to the third round of the world championship at Alexandra Palace in late 2019, she may still be the second most famous darts player in the country, after Littler himself.

All of which ensured that the double-top Sherrock hit to beat a flagging Littler and end the competition also marked the start of a feverish and fraught discussion over what, exactly, we had just been watching. A show billed explicitly as “20 amateur players” taking on the world champion over a single leg of darts, in which members of the public were invited to apply and queue and audition, had ultimately been won by a player who will appear next month at her 13th world championship.

Another of the contestants on Friday, the 15-year-old prodigy Mitchell Lawrie, is by common consent the best junior player in the world and well capable of beating Littler over a longer format. Sherrock and Lawrie followed the rules, filled out the form, queued up like everyone else. So was this a genuine meritocratic sporting competition? Or a confected, curated primetime game show?

his matters, and not merely for the reason that sporting prize money is taxed while television game show windfalls are not. Across the sporting landscape, from influencer boxing to Baller League to six-figure bonuses for Olympic athletes, what was once a rigid divide has become increasingly porous. Where does the amateur realm end and the professional realm begin? And to what extent is it even meaningful to draw a distinction between the two?

“I don’t think she should have been selected to play,” the former world champion Mark Webster complained, while also making it clear that no blame should be attached to Sherrock herself. And much of the criticism of the event was trained on Netflix for selling the event as a golden rags-to-riches opportunity, intentionally evoking the spectre of some no-name pub player defenestrating the greatest dartist on earth.

At which point it is probably worth tightening up some of the terminology here. Let's start, by way of example, with "pub player". Which in reality encompasses an entire spectrum of ability: from the lad with the sideburns 14 pints deep who can barely see past the point of his dart, to elite pros such as Chris Dobey or Jonny Clayton or Stephen Bunting, who will often still turn out for their local league or Super League team when a punishing schedule allows. So, in terms of averages, we're talking everything from 100 down to about four. Not that useful.

The issue, of course, is decades of professionalism, investment, industrialised training methods and best practice have rendered the gulf between the gods and the mortals virtually unbridgeable. Your average professional tennis player may as well be a different species to the doubles champion down your local club. Fleetwood Town's victory against Arsenal in the League Cup last week may have felt outlandish, impossible,

Beat Luke Littler felt dissatisfying ... sport pretending not to be sport

an otherworldly triumph for the little guy and, narratively, it was, but all the same this was a team of paid footballers most of whom had come through the ranks at Premier League clubs, and had far more in common with the polyglot millionaires they were facing than they ever will with the likes of you or me.

Darts has gone on this journey too in recent years: the coaching, the academies, the dramatic stratification of talent. To the point where the very concept of Beat Luke Littler actually felt vaguely insulting, a wilful diminution of the dedication and craft and skill and guts and stagecraft required to play this sport to a high level in front of a baying crowd. “Do you want just a series of 20 matches where someone can’t even throw a dart?” the PDC president, Barry Hearn, argued afterwards. “No, we want excellence competing against excellence.”

You can have excellence against excellence, or you can have amateur against professional, but you can't have both. Perhaps this was why the show felt so dissatisfying: a kind of synthetic sport substitute, sport pretending not to be sport, sport paid by the view, the invocation of amateur ideals when the reality was no such thing. Of course you can't blame Sherrock for grasping the opportunity, in the same way you can't blame Littler for playing along, in the same way you can't really blame a global streaming giant for wanting a piece of one of this country's fastest-growing sports, in the same way you can't really blame the columnist for writing about it. We are all playing for money now, and in this sense at least we are all ultimate professionals.

▼ Nations Championship silverware on show at the Tower of London this week

NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP/GETTY IMAGES

New-look November comes with a cost to fans and players

In-game welfare and spectator experience were seemingly low down the priority list for the Nations Championship

Andy Bull

It was a loose kick, tumbling aimlessly end over end into the All Blacks' half. Their wing Billy Wallace gathered it and sprinted into midfield, through a gap and on into

through a gap and on into the Welsh half, only their full-back ahead of him now, and with his teammate Bob Deans in the corner of his eye, coming on the inside calling for the ball. Wallace gave the pass and Deans was away, making straight for the posts, tackled at the last moment by Rhys Gabe, and the two of them went sliding for the try-line together. The ball finished in the tips of Deans's fingers, at the end of his outstretched arm.

No one knows. The referee John Dewar Dallas insisted that Deans never made it. The match finished 3-0 to Wales: the All Blacks' solitary defeat in 35 games on their 1905 autumn tour of Europe. Lloyd Jones wrote a great novel about that tour, Carl Nixon turned it into a successful play, Nigel Wray paid £180,000 for the jersey the All Blacks captain Dave Gallaher wore on the day. You can still buy a DVD of a “dramatic reconstruction” of the match, and a century later two Kiwi journalists published a book offering what they considered new, definitive proof about what happened.

This weekend's games

Over the line? On the line? Inches away from the line? | Tomorrow | All matches on ITV1 | Ireland v Argentina | 8.10pm | Saturday | Italy v South Africa | 11.40am | Scotland v New Zealand | 2.10pm | Wales v Japan | 4.40pm | France v Fiji | 8.10pm | Sunday | England v Australia | 3.10pm | Northern Hemisphere | P | W | D | L | F | A | B | Pts | France | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 116 | 75 | 4 | 12 | Scotland | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 108 | 97 | 3 | 11 | England | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 125 | 77 | 2 | 10 | Ireland | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 90 | 91 | 2 | 10 | Wales | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 60 | 102 | 1 | 5 | Italy | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 37 | 131 | 0 | 0 | Southern Hemisphere | P | W | D | L | F | A | B | Pts | South Africa | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 130 | 49 | 3 | 15 | New Zealand | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 121 | 70 | 3 | 15 | Australia | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 114 | 85 | 4 | 8 | Argentina | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 97 | 99 | 3 | 7 | Japan | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 62 | 88 | 0 | 4 | Fiji | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 49 | 145 | 0 | 0 | Some 121 years later, if you ever want to start an argument, you can walk into the backroom of any Welsh rugby pub and tell the first old boy at the bar that of course Deans scored. Or walk into any Kiwi rugby club bar and say you're sure he never did.

There are no autumn tours this year. Instead we have the conclusion of the new Nations Championship, starting in Dublin when Ireland play Argentina tomorrow night. It's a tournament designed to provide a context that was apparently lacking in that legendary match between Wales and New Zealand.

Over the next three weekends France, Ireland and Italy all have matches against Argentina, Fiji and South Africa. England, Scotland and Wales play Australia, Japan, and New Zealand, and at the end there are six games in three days across a long weekend at Twickenham, sixth place in the northern group against sixth in the southern, and so on, all the way until the top two teams play each other at tea-time on Sunday. The “Hemisphere Shield” will be awarded to whoever comes out top in what is being described as a “Ryder Cup style” competition.

It took the sport the best part of a decade to cobble this competition together. World Rugby first suggested it in 2018, but it took the massive debts left by the Covid pandemic to concentrate minds and get the Six Nations, Sanzaar and all their respective private

investors to collaborate on making it happen. After all that time they have ended up with a competition that brings to mind the old line about a camel being a horse designed by committee. God knows the game needs the money, but you have to ask if the organisers needed to give away so much of what people love about the sport to get it.

The Nations Championship has been designed with commercial returns in mind. It is a tournament that seems to have

been made almost entirely made for TV. Which is why there are so many compromises. The integrity of the competition wasn't high on the priorities list, which is why Fiji played their “home” games against Wales in Cardiff, England in Liverpool, and Scotland at Murrayfield in the summer, and Japan were made to stage their own match against Ireland in Australia, to save their opponents an extra trip after a fixture against the Wallabies. Player welfare doesn't seem to have played much of a part in anyone's thinking either, so England found themselves flying 25,000 miles to play three fixtures in three weeks.

Nor did spectator experience: it seems to have been designed to deter travelling fans, and risk gate revenue, since the organisers now have to find a way to sell half a million tickets for six fixtures where it won't be clear who is playing when until six days before kick-off, something they've done by offering "support your team" tickets that guarantee you a seat at a match you actually want to watch, regardless of when it's played. It's a small mercy that the deal with Qatar has just fallen through so at least we've been spared the second edition being staged in the Gulf.

It will work. We'll all watch. If you love rugby the chances are you were going to tune in for these games anyway. France v South Africa in Paris on a Friday night, England v Australia at Twickenham on a cold autumn afternoon, Scotland v New Zealand on a Saturday at Murrayfield: these matches don't need selling, their significance has nothing to do with a competition structure that has been cooked up in the commercial department. It's enough to make you wonder if the people who sell the sport even really understand why people buy it in the first place.

England ‘pretty optimistic’ over Fin Smith’s race to face Australia

← Continued from back page

offered further qualified backing after the Six Nations before Borthwick was again endorsed by the anonymous post-championship review.

England proceeded to lose heavily against the Springboks, thrash Fiji and edge past Argentina to sit third in the northern hemisphere Nations Championship pool but discipline - one of the few areas in need of improvement identified by the review that was made public - remained a problem with Borthwick's side receiving 14 yellow cards and one red in 2026 to date.

"It was a really thorough review," Sweeney said. "It happens after every competition. The mini version happens virtually after every single game, but we have a review after every comp. We were clearly very disappointed about the Six Nations this year. Nobody wanted to see that performance. It did highlight some areas that required action that happened, were followed up on, and we're confident that's had an effect."

Smith is primed to line up against the Wallabies after completing yesterday's training session. The 24-year-old fly-half has been nursing a calf injury but remains on track to give Borthwick a timely fillip.

“Fin trained today and got through all right so we are cautiously optimistic that he’s available for selection,” said England’s defence coach, Richard Wigglesworth, who revealed the 200-metre world silver medallist and five-time European champion sprinter Amy Hunt visited the squad. "We'll need to see what the next 24 hours are like in terms of his reaction but he did well today. We're training Friday, so he's got to train then, but we'll know before then the state of availability. We're pretty optimistic."

▲ The Team GB sprinter Amy Hunt visits an England training session

Smith has emerged as an integral part of Borthwick's side, having started the past five England Tests and cemented his position as Borthwick's first-choice fly-half.

“He looked good,” the back-rower Ben Earl said. “He’s been in unbelievable form for a number of years. He deserves to be given the time to give himself the best chance to play. I’m looking forward to seeing him go.”

Qatar pulls out of hosting 2028 finals amid war uncertainty

Matt Hughes

Qatar will not host the 2028 Nations Championship finals owing to uncertainty caused by the war in the Middle East, in a development that has also led to the cancellation of a planned title sponsorship deal for the new tournament with Qatar Airways.

Following months of negotiations both parties have agreed to withdraw from an agreement in which Qatar would have staged the six-match finals series in 2028 and 2032, as well as a title sponsorship for four editions of the competition with the national airline.

The total value of staging rights and title sponsorship is understood to have been worth around £80m to the Nations Championship for each tournament held in Qatar. However, the Six Nations and four leading Sanzaar unions that run the competition are confident those funds can be recouped by replacement deals.

The Nations Championship resumes this weekend following matches last summer in the southern hemisphere, with the finals to be held over three days at Twickenham's Allianz Stadium this month.

While the inaugural competition this year will take place without a title sponsor, the Qatar Airways sponsorship is understood to have been worth £15m of a deal in which the main value was hosting rights, so the initial write-off will not be that significant. In addition there have already been informal expressions of interest from France and Spain to host in 2028 with the Nations Championship planning to issue an invitation to tender at the start of next year.

The US has been pencilled in to host the finals in 2030 the year before staging the Rugby World Cup in 2031, with a 2028 finals event at the Stade de France regarded as the most likely outcome at this stage.

The outline of the Qatar deal was agreed last year, but Donald Trump's decision to order US airstrikes on Iran in March and the subsequent escalation in the region caused complications. The Qatar government decided against implementing the deal before the first series of matches in July due to sensitivity around the conflict, leaving the Nations Championship without a title sponsorship, although at that stage it was hoped that the agreement would begin this autumn.

With the US and Israel continuing to threaten further strikes on Iran despite peace talks hosted by Qatar last weekend, a mutual agreement has been reached to cancel the deal.

▲ Twickenham will host this year's finals weekend from 27-29 November

Six Nations and Sanzaar agree unique profit-sharing TV deal

Matt Hughes

The Six Nations and Sanzaar unions have agreed to sell all their media rights and commercial deals collectively for the first time in a new revenue-sharing model.

In an innovative arrangement that is the first of its kind in sport, the southern hemisphere nations will receive a share of the profits generated by the Six Nations and British & Irish Lions tours, while the European countries will benefit from broadcast and sponsorship deals generated by the Rugby Championship and the Rugby's Greatest Rivalry series between New Zealand and South Africa.

The sales process will be managed by a new rights management agency to be set up by a 10-person board that has been created to run the Nations Championship, which resumes this weekend.

Commercial and media rights for the Nations Championship are already sold collectively and the revenue shared between the 10 founding members - the Six Nations plus New Zealand, South Africa, Australia and Argentina - with Fiji and Japan given much smaller appearance fees. Having worked together to create the Nations Championship the 10 biggest unions have moved to pool rights for international rugby outside the World Cup in the hope of achieving growth, particularly in a difficult media market.

The new strategy represents a global extension of Project Light, through which the four Home Nations unions have collectively sold Six Nations rights since 2019. “In effect, we are creating a commercial rights agency which sits underneath the 10 Nations Championship founding unions,” the Rugby Football Union chief executive, Bill Sweeney, said.

“We think that will result in a much better and more efficient approach to the market, obviously with the intention of increasing overall valuations and growing the commercial side of the game.”

The new arrangements are expected to affect sponsorship and commercial deals from 2028, which coincides with the second edition of the Nations Championship, but will not have an impact on TV rights sales until two years later, as all the Six Nations and Sanzaar's broadcast rights are secured until 2029.

Cricket

'I wanted the ball to be hit at me': life fielding in the most dangerous position

James Taylor looks back on the moments of pure elation and intimacy of being under the batter's nose at short leg

James Wallace

On the outskirts of Tombstone, Arizona, stands Boothill Graveyard, the final resting place for the many cowboys

who died “with their boots on” in the seconds-long but deadly shootouts of the wild west.

In cricket, “Boothill” is the nickname for the most dangerous fielding position, under the batter’s nose and directly in the line of fire for any full-blooded sweep or pull shot. No one in their right mind wants to wind up at short leg, surely?

"I always loved it in there because you're right in the thick of the action," the former England batter James Taylor says. "You're so close to it and involved every ball. Honestly, you feel so alive! There's plenty of people that - excuse my language - shit themselves when they go in there. But I was very fortunate that I didn't have that fear, I wanted the ball to come to me, be hit at me."

A decade ago Taylor pulled off two cortex-frying catches at short leg in the space of half an hour that helped England to win a Test against South Africa in Johannesburg. “That has to be two of the most sensational catches I’ve ever seen on a cricket field,” the usually gnarled former South Africa captain Graeme Smith cooed on commentary in the seconds after Taylor’s second grab to dismiss Dane Vilas. “I don’t think you’ll ever know how tough that is.”

Taylor's first catch saw the back of Hashim Amla who had crisply timed a front-foot flick off the bowling of Stuart Broad. Taylor stayed low in his stance a few paces deeper than a regular short leg and grasped the catch millimetres above the turf. The whole drama unfolded in only 0.4 seconds.

“It’s very rare in any sport, that you practise something really hard the day before and then it pays off straight away," Taylor says. He had spent hours practising this exact catch with England's then assistant coach Paul Farbrace; the latter would deflect balls at high pace off a boxer's sparring pad down at Taylor's toes repeatedly.

"The Vilas catch that happened a few overs later looks better as I'm diving, but actually the Amla one is the better catch because it came faster and lower."

Vilas is good-natured as he relives the dismissal: “Let’s say I played that clip off my hips 1,000 times in my career, 999 times it’s going for runs. I couldn’t believe this little guy caught it.”

At 5ft 6in and nicknamed “Titch”, Taylor was, well, tailor-made for short leg. “That’s the stereotypical way it works, the smallest guy is shoved in there or the youngest guy in the team … but I was always in there! Even in schoolboy cricket when I was captain, I’d put myself there because I genuinely enjoyed it and was good at it.”

Fielders who brave these close-in positions enter into a twisted kind of intimacy with the batter - they can see them sweat, hear them breathe, are privy to their whispered mantras as the bowler runs in.

"It was intense in there," Taylor recalls. "You can see when a batter is struggling and is scared. There's a lot of eye contact. You hear exactly what the bowler is saying in his follow through. I've been in there when Jimmy Anderson has being going hard at a batter. You're thinking: 'This is really spicy and I've got front-row tickets.'"

In the years that have passed, Taylor's catches have taken on a poignancy. "That was my last shot as a Test cricketer," Vilas says. "I never played another." The South African went on to make "some of the happiest memories" of his career at Lancashire where he became club captain.

James Taylor loved being ‘in the thick of the action’ at short leg

A crueller fate lay in store for Taylor. A few months after the tour of South Africa he was forced to retire from professional cricket aged 26 after being diagnosed with an incurable heart condition.

He spent four years in selection roles at the England and Wales Cricket Board and is now the assistant head and lead batting coach at Leicestershire, his passion undimmed. Taylor holds the memory of those catches dear.

"To have those moments of pure elation ... to be lucky enough to get two of them that day, just that feeling inside ..." He trails off, momentarily. "I'm not really an emotional guy ... but to have that feeling, like I can almost feel it now just talking about it. It was one of the last games I ever played. It's special. Really, really special."

▲ Jodie Burrage lost 3-6, 6-3, 7-5 against Vaishnavi Adkar in Chennai

Tennis

Burrage given support by WTA after death threats

Eleanor Crooks

The WTA has offered additional support to Jodie Burrage after she received death threats and online abuse following a first-round defeat at a tournament in India on Tuesday.

Burrage shared a raft of abusive messages sent to her Instagram account after a gruelling 3-6, 6-3, 7-5 defeat against India's Vaishnavi Adkar at the Chennai Open. The 27-year-old, who was playing her first WTA Tour match since last summer, accompanied the messages with the caption: “Nice welcome back to the tour. I remember why I left.”

It is three years since the WTA - in partnership with Wimbledon, World Tennis and the United States Tennis Association - launched the AI-led Threat Matrix service, which aims to identify and tackle online abuse against players and officials.

A WTA spokesperson said in a statement: “Protecting players and the wider tennis family from online threats and abuse is a key priority for the WTA. We have WTA staff on the ground in Chennai offering Jodie support, along with our wider player welfare and Threat Matrix team.

"As much of the abuse players receive comes through direct messages, the WTA has offered Jodie additional support, including a private channel to report abusive direct messages, and moderation that hides abusive comments on public channels before she sees them.

“Threat Matrix is also reporting the abuse Jodie received to the platforms, and investigations are under way to identify those responsible. Where the abuse is linked to betting, they will be added to the Bad Actor programme so betting operators can act against their accounts.”

Burrage is one of a number of players to have spoken out previously about the level of abuse received and a failure of the governing bodies and social media companies to tackle it effectively. She spoke out on the abuse after her first-round exit from Wimbledon in 2025.

Data from Threat Matrix showed female tennis players faced more than 12,000 abusive posts and messages on social media in 2025, with angry gamblers responsible for 42% of verified abuse and 59% of serious abuse. Press Association

Sport

Football

Owono feels 'huge pain' after collision that led to De Miguel's death

Sid Lowe

The FC Andorra goalkeeper Jesús Owono said he was enduring the “hardest days of my life” after he was involved in the collision that led to the death of the Tenerife striker Jesús de Miguel.

Owono had raced out of his goal and crashed into De Miguel in added time at the end of the Spanish second division match on Monday afternoon, causing the striker to experience a cardiorespiratory arrest. De Miguel was taken to hospital in Santa Cruz de Tenerife but never regained consciousness and died on Tuesday.

"These are being the hardest days of my life," Owono said in a statement published by Andorra. "I find it hard to find the words and very difficult to assimilate what has happened. I feel a huge pain, the loss of Jesús. I am thinking about him, his family and all the people who loved him.

"I know that there will be many questions to address and I will face up to whatever comes with respect. But right now, sincerely, I cannot think about anything other than Jesús and the pain that we are going through. Rest in peace, Jesús."

Andorra's statement said that the club remained "deeply affected" by De Miguel's death and demanded "the greatest respect and sensibility". The homicide division of the

▲ Flowers are left in tribute to Jesús de Miguel following his death

Spanish national police opened an investigation, which is standard procedure in Spain whenever there is a death not by natural causes. Santa Cruz de Tenerife's chief prosecutor, José Luis Sánchez-Jáuregui, told the Spanish news agency EFE that criminal proceedings against the goalkeeper were “very unlikely”.

The investigation will focus on the events that preceded De Miguel's death, including the attention he received after medics sprinted on to the pitch. De Miguel was treated on the field for five minutes before being

'I find it hard to find the words to assimilate what has happened'

Jesús Owono

FC Andorra

taken off on a stretcher and to an ambulance that waited in the corner. Tenerife had reported that medics were able to recover a pulse in the ambulance before he was admitted to intensive care.

Tenerife's majority shareholder, Rayco García, told Cadena Ser radio: "There are those who say that the impact caused his death, and that later they were able to stabilise him artificially even though it was very difficult to bring him back. I prefer to wait for the autopsy and then we can take steps. I would like to see [the results of] the investigation to know if there is something to ensure this doesn't happen again, something that could have prevented this tragedy."

Owono had earlier been defended by his teammate Lautaro Spatz, who wrote on social media: “I also want to say a few words about my teammate, goalkeeper and friend, who is deeply affected by what has happened. Those of us who know him know the kind of person he is, how much he is suffering at this moment, and that he would never intentionally hurt anyone. In football, unfortunate incidents can happen, but no one could imagine that one of them might end with such tragic consequences.”

Owono was sent off for the challenge and walked towards the touchline, only to turn back as staff began running in the other direction. The goalkeeper deactivated his Instagram account on Tuesday after receiving abuse online. Andorra said they were offering psychological support to anyone at the club who needed it.

De Miguel, 30, was married and had an 18-month-old child, both of whom were in the stadium when the incident happened. Flowers have been left at the stadium by gate nine, his shirt number, and a minute's silence was held at the Canarian government building.

Parker checks in to power up Hammers for epic comeback

Scott Parker's return to West Ham had had looked like beginning in painful fashion but instead featured a stunning comeback from 3-0 down. The east London club's new head coach had watched Cardiff's Jack Moylan help himself to a first-half hat-trick, before a rousing response after the break ended with Max Kilman levelling the scores at 3-3 eight minutes from time. Elsewhere in the Championship, leaders Middlesbrough went down 1-0 at Wrexham.

Parker had been confirmed as West Ham's head coach earlier in the day, taking over from Nuno Espírito Santo, who was sacked on Tuesday. The club's former midfielder was appointed on a two-and-a-half year contract.

Moylan halted the initial feelgood factor among the visiting support in the 11th minute at Cardiff City Stadium. His right-foot drive from the tip of the D left visiting goalkeeper Mads Hermansen helpless as it sped into the top left corner. Moylan was then brought down for a penalty - the

▲ Scott Parker was in the dugout for West Ham on his first day in charge

DAVID DAVIES/PA

Ireland midfielder got up to spank it home to the left as Hermansen dived right in the 37th minute.

Within two minutes, Will Fish thought he had turned in a corner for Cardiff's third - the centre-back deftly headed towards goal, but Moylan was directly behind him and claimed his hat-trick after making the final touch.

After the break, it was a completely different story. Divine Mukasa reduced the deficit in the 58th minute, finishing calmly over the stranded Nathan Trott after a fine ball over the top from Jarrod Bowen, before Arne Engels capitalised on a mix-up in the home defence to make it 3-2.

In the 82nd minute, Bowen was again the supplier, curling in an inviting cross from the right that was turned in by centre-back Kilman to make it 3-3 from close range.

At the Racecourse, Wrexham waited until the 70th minute to break the deadlock, before George Thomason smashed a shot into the ground from just outside the area, which rocketed past a crowd of defenders and through the unsighted visiting goalkeeper Radek Vítek. Oli Rathbone then made it 2-0 in the 84th minute.

Scott Twine scored a stunning free-kick at Ashton Gate for Bristol City but Wolves turned things around through a late Sean Neave double to win 2-1. Guardian sport

Wild Roma win showed angry fans that we care, says Dalot

David Hytner

Diogo Dalot believes Manchester United's comeback against Roma in the Champions League on Tuesday can transform their troubled season and, as importantly, showed unhappy supporters that the players care.

The Glazer family, who have owned United since 2005 and loaded £1.2bn of debt on to the club, continue to be the focus for fan anger and there was yet another protest against them before kick-off at Old Trafford, with thousands of green-and-gold balloons released from the Stretford End. The home crowd sang anti-Glazer songs and threw tennis balls on to the pitch when the clock showed 20 minutes and five seconds, to symbolise the year 2005. The team have seven points from their opening nine games of the Premier League season, their worst start since 1987-88.

The players have also been criticised, with the Stretford End turning on them as they left the pitch after the recent 3-0 defeat against Bournemouth. The fans had previously serenaded the manager, Michael Carrick, who they back to the hilt.

Dalot was the last player to depart that day. He walked off slowly and looked defiant in the face of jeers. It was a much happier story for him and the team against Roma, with Matheus Cunha's two late goals sealing a 3-2 victory. United had been booed off at half-time as they trailed 2-0.

"These moments are really tough, I'm not going to lie," Dalot said. "Unfortunately, I've had a few moments like this in the past and the only way for us to get out is by winning football games. Nights like this [against Roma] give you an extra confidence that makes you believe you can create these moments - not just for us but for the fans. And it's important from everyone around the club feeling that we care, that we want to turn this around. I think we showed, especially in the second 45 minutes, that we really want to turn this around."

Dalot, now into his ninth season as a United player, is a symbol of the club's muddled thinking. Forced to play out of position at left-back as the only specialist in the position - Luke Shaw - is injured, he has given his all. But with imbalances and weaknesses elsewhere in the defence, the Portuguese's best efforts have not always been enough. The decision of the United hierarchy not to sign any defensive reinforcements over the summer continues to dumbfound.

Dalot, who has been a target for social media abuse, was a part of the dismal first-half performance against Roma. Carrick took a risk by asking him to push high up the field at the outset, knowing that any turnovers could lead to problems. Which is precisely what happened for the first goal after Kobbie Mainoo lost the ball in central midfield. Their winning of the penalty for the second goal also came as Dalot was forward.

He was asked whether Carrick had told him to play so high. “Yes, obviously,” Dalot replied. “We knew that they were going to play man-to-man but that requires some things that we need to avoid - especially losing balls in the middle because we knew that we’re going to be too open. Obviously, after the second goal, we tried to fix it straight away. I think we balanced a little bit more the game [after that].”

"If you analyse it really cold, we had nothing more to lose," the 27-year-old said. "I mean, that's the unfortunate situation we are in. So we just had to really go at it. In the first five, 10 minutes of the second half, we were winning duels. The crowd came with us.

“Once you create that energy inside the stadium, it’s really tough for the opponents to create even a chance. That’s the biggest thing we need to get out of this game – when we play like this we can be a very strong team. It is not just the manager, everyone is under pressure. We felt it, obviously. Nights like this can change momentum, they can change seasons.”

United host Aston Villa on Sunday and will need to show the same resilience. “The key message from us [during half-time against Roma] ... it’s like we’re getting disappointed too quick,” Dalot said. “Every moment in the game where it doesn’t go the way that we want, it’s like we let ourselves down a little bit. That’s the momentum we need to change.”

▲ Manchester United players remember what victory feels like on Tuesday

OLI SCARFF/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Sport

Football Champions League

◀Erling

Haaland,

Manchester

City's captain

for the night,

celebrates

giving them

the lead for the

third time

ANNEGRET HILSE/

REUTERS

Haaland settles thriller for City to end lively Leipzig's resistance

RB Leipzig

Baku 49, Nusa 61

Manchester City

Lukeba 37og, Fernández 58, Haaland 78

Jamie Jackson

RB Arena

Feed Erling Haaland and Manchester City's totemic No 9 will score. The problem, recently has been a paucity of openings for him.

This was true again before, on 77 minutes, Elliot Anderson crossed and Haaland slid home for a priceless winner for Enzo Maresca's disjointed unit, Rayan Cherki hitting a post late on.

The win ends City's sequence of two losses in three games yet the manager has major issues. He has to plug a leaky defence and drill his midfield to exert control.

And there is a shaky Gianluigi Donnarumma: City's goalkeeper was culpable for Ridle Baku's first equaliser for Leipzig, as he was for Nicolas Jackson's winner in the recent defeat at Aston Villa, plus two more in last month's Paris Saint-Germain loss.

City's quest to return to victorious ways featured an XI of four changes from Saturday's Brighton reverse. Most noteworthy was Maresca's dropping of Rúben Dias as Abdukodir Khusanov's pace was preferred at centre-back with the captain, Haaland taking the armband.

This may have been with an eye on Antonio Nusa, Leipzig's fleet-footed left forward, Martin Demichelis' main ploy being to carve City open on the counter. A cute inside Enzo Fernández pass did precisely this - to the Germans: instantly Cherki was in, his shot curving wide of Maarten Vandevoordt's right post, a first warning of City intent.

While the 2,000-plus travelling support were stationed in a quadrant to the right of Donnarumma's goal, the noise came from the congregation behind Vandevoordt's where a sea of red and white bounced to the tempo of a booming drum. They could roar particularly loud when Nusa flitted across City's D and unloaded and what should have been a regulation gather for Donnarumma became a fumble - and corner for Leipzig.

The Italian tipped this away but those in white soon, again, threatened. A break along the right closed with David Raum's effort being blocked by Matheus Nunes, the visitors' right-back.

The Brighton defeat featured close to zero service for Haaland and City's 13-goal man was again hard to find, Nunes' loose cross, when the captain lurked, emblematic. So, too, as a sign of Leipzig's ascendancy, was Marc Guéhi scrambling to clear danger, Nusa firing in the ball from the left, and Christoph Baumgartner having space to shoot marginally wide of Donnarumma's left post.

“Keep the ball and shift it faster” might have been Maresca’s instruction and when this happened City fashioned the breakthrough.

Cherki speared a diagonal right-left into a galloping Nico O'Reilly, whose instant cross caused Castello Lukeba to panic and inadvertently turn home, via a trailing left knee. City had forced the issue and, now, twice went close to a second moments later.

First, O'Reilly floated the ball into Leipzig's area but Haaland's header faltered. Then the left-back was set up by Iliman Ndiaye's cross only for O'Reilly to miss with the same part of his anatomy, too.

Yet as the second half began Leipzig were staring at a fifth defeat in the fixture, having won only once in six previous meetings, all in this competition.

So, intent was signalled by Nusa's mazy run along the left, his chip causing Donnarumma to push away when he might have caught. This roused the home fans and better followed for their team - but not Donnarumma.

Anderson's loose ball for O'Reilly near halfway was snaffled by Leipzig, who marauded down the right before Brajan Gruda fed an overlapping Baku.

Now, came Donnarumma's folly because, while the right-back's shot was true, it was steered along a very tight angle, yet City's No 1 allowed it to go in between him and his left post.

Here was the latest goal-costing error from the Italian and one for Maresca to ponder. Yet 1-1 was still a fair result away from the Etihad Stadium so relief emanated from those in black when Ezechiel Banzuzi's shot hit side-netting only. Donnarumma's wobble continued, though, as he fumbled another Baku attempt, narrowly recovering.

City were about to show character and quality: Ndiaye's pinpoint cross from the left had Fernández arriving to head home supremely and Maresca's team led again. Not for long. For a countless time Leipzig waltzed through with ease and with Nunes out of position, Nusa finished expertly from the left.

After Anderson skied over from close-range, Haaland did what makes him so lethal: net his sole chance.

RB Leipzig

4-3-3

Vandevoort; Baku (Henrichs 74), Orbán, Lukeba, Raum; El Ayanaoui (Seiwald 74), Baumgartner (Nkunku 57), Banzuzo; Gruda, Cardosa (Gomis 67), Nusa (Reitz 73)

Manchester City

4-1-1-3-1

Donnarumma; Nunes (Dias 79), Khusanov ●, Guéhi, O'Reilly; Anderson (Bouaddi 83); Fernández (Kovacic 83); Foden (Doku 64 ●), Cherki, Ndiaye (Allan 83); Haaland

Referee Marco Guida (It)

[Results] Football

CHAMPIONS LEAGUE

AEK Athens (1) 2

Koïta 12, Pilios 75

Borussia Dortmund (0) 2

Silva 49, Karetsas 72

Fenerbahce (1) 3

Greenwood 29, Brown 73

Muriqi 79

Lens (0) 1

Aguilar 65

Porto (1) 4

Bednarek 11, Veiga 71

Kiwior 80

Aghehowa 90pen

PSV (0) 1

Sano 54

RB Leipzig (0) 2

Baku 49, Nusa 61

Slavia Prague (0) 1

Nowak 90

Como (3) 9

Douvikas 7 32 57, Paz 40

Da Cunha 47, Kempf 53

Liberali 62, Baturina 69

Papaccioli 90+1

Napoli (1) 1

McTominay 43

Club Brugge (1) 2

Tresoldi 25, Forbs 65

Manchester City (1) 3

Lukeba 37og, Fernández 58

Haaland 78

Arsenal (2) 2

Madueke 9, Gyökeres 38 | Viking | (1) 4 | Sabah | (1) 1 | Botheim 27 90+4 | Mbina 11 | Tripic 69, Falchener 81 | EUROPA LEAGUE | Rennes | (0) 0 | Olympiacos | (0) 0 | SKY BET CHAMPIONSHIP | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | Middlesbrough | 14 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 30 | 19 | +11 | 28 | Wolves | 14 | 8 | 3 | 3 | 25 | 17 | +8 | 27 | Birmingham | 14 | 7 | 5 | 2 | 26 | 13 | +13 | 26 | Stoke | 14 | 8 | 2 | 4 | 22 | 17 | +5 | 26 | Swansea | 14 | 8 | 2 | 4 | 21 | 16 | +5 | 26 | West Brom | 14 | 7 | 4 | 3 | 20 | 15 | +5 | 25 | Southampton† | 14 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 29 | 14 | +15 | 24 | West Ham | 14 | 6 | 5 | 3 | 36 | 21 | +15 | 23 | Sheffield Utd | 14 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 20 | 17 | +3 | 22 | Portsmouth | 14 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 19 | 16 | +3 | 22 | QPR | 14 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 22 | 17 | +5 | 21 | Norwich | 14 | 6 | 0 | 8 | 27 | 24 | +3 | 18 | Millwall | 14 | 5 | 3 | 6 | 23 | 24 | -1 | 18 | Blackburn | 14 | 5 | 3 | 6 | 20 | 22 | -2 | 18 | Bristol City | 14 | 5 | 3 | 6 | 16 | 19 | -3 | 18 | Wrexham | 14 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 17 | 19 | -2 | 17 | Bolton | 14 | 5 | 2 | 7 | 19 | 26 | -7 | 17 | Cardiff | 14 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 22 | 23 | -1 | 15 | Lincoln City | 14 | 4 | 3 | 7 | 14 | 24 | -10 | 15 | Watford | 14 | 4 | 2 | 8 | 13 | 23 | -10 | 14 | Charlton | 14 | 3 | 5 | 6 | 11 | 22 | -11 | 14 | Burnley | 14 | 1 | 7 | 6 | 18 | 26 | -8 | 10 | Derby | 14 | 1 | 4 | 9 | 11 | 29 | -18 | 7 | Preston | 14 | 1 | 2 | 11 | 12 | 30 | -18 | 5 | †Southampton deducted 4pts | Bristol CityTwine 34 | (1) 1 | WolvesNeave 82 89 | (0) 2 | CardiffMoylan 11 37pen 39 | (3) 3 | West HamMukasa 58, Engels 65Kilman 82 | (0) 3 | Wrexham | (0) 2 | Middlesbrough | (0) 0 | Thomason 70, Rathbone 8410,532 | SKY BET LEAGUE ONE | SKY BET LEAGUE ONE | (top eight) | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | Huddersfield | 14 | 8 | 5 | 1 | 28 | 12 | +16 | 29 | Stockport | 14 | 8 | 2 | 4 | 26 | 14 | +12 | 26 | Oxford Utd | 13 | 7 | 5 | 1 | 22 | 11 | +11 | 26 | Luton | 14 | 7 | 3 | 4 | 27 | 21 | +6 | 24 | Plymouth | 14 | 7 | 2 | 5 | 21 | 19 | +2 | 23 | Reading | 14 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 25 | 15 | +10 | 22 | Bradford | 13 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 10 | 8 | +2 | 22 | Cambridge Utd | 14 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 21 | 21 | 0 | 21 | Oxford Utd | (0) 2 | Reading | (0) 0 | O'Donkor 71, Missanna 78, 11,470 |

Cricket

FIRST MEN'S ONE-DAY INTERNATIONAL

Auckland New Zealand 185 (A Singh 4-70). India 143-5 (V Kohli 74). India beat New Zealand by five wickets (DLS method).

Tennis

PARIS MASTERS (France)

Second round: N Borges (Por) bt K Khachanov (Rus) 6-3 6-4; T Fritz (US) bt A Molcan (Svk) 6-7 (6-8) 7-5 7-6 (7-5); R Hijikata (Aus) bt N Djokovic (Ser) 2-6 6-3 6-3; I Buse (Per) bt D Medvedev (Rus) 6-4 6-4; T Etcheverry (Arg) bt A de Minaur (Aus) 7-6 (7-2) 6-3); L Musetti (It) bt A Zverev (Ger) 7-6 (7-5) 6-2; T Paul (US) bt D Merida Aguilar (Sp)

6-1 6-1; L Van Assche (Fr) bt L Tien (US) 7-6 (7-4) 6-4; A Rinderknech (Fr) bt M Bellucci (It) 6-4 6-1; Q Halys (Fr) bt F Tiafoe (US) 6-3 1-6 7-6 (11-9); M Berrettini (It) bt U Humbert (Fr) 7-6 (7-3) 7-5; JL Struff (Ger) bt T Tirante (Arg) 6-7 (5-7) 6-1 7-6 (7-3); C Alcaraz (Sp) bt A Michelsen (US) 7-6 (7-4) 6-3; A Fils (Fr) bt T Machac (Cz) 6-3 7-6 (7-4).

HONG KONG OPEN (China)

First round: A Ruzic (Cro) bt A Charaeva (Arm) 7-6 (7-5) 6-4; M Stojavljevic (GB) bt S Kenin (US) 6-3 4-6 6-4.

Last 16: A Sasnovich (Blr) bt T Gibson (Aus) 6-1 5-7 7-6 (9-7); C Liu (US) bt K Boulter (GB) 7-5 6-4; M Sakkari (Gre) bt M Joint (Aus) 4-6 6-3 6-3.

CHENNAI OPEN (India)

Last 16: R Montgomery (US) bt J Vandromme (Bel)

6-4 3-6 7-5; P Kudermetova (Uzb) bt O Selekhmeteva (Sp)

6-3 6-0; J Tjen (Ido) bt J Garland (Tai) 7-6 (7-1) 6-1;

M Rajeshwaran Revathi (Ind) bt W Falkowska (Pol) 6-4 6-3.

Snooker

INTERNATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP (Nanjing, China)

Quarter-finals: K Wilson (Eng) bt Ding J (Chn) 6-4; Fan Z (Chn) bt H Vafaei (Irn) 6-3; Chang B (Chn) bt Zhao X (Chn) 6-3; J Higgins (Sco) bt M Fu (HK) 6-3.

Fixtures

Football (7.45pm unless stated)

Europa League

Milan v Ferencvaros (5.45pm); AZ v Juventus (8pm); Anderlecht v RB Salzburg (5.45pm); Bayer Leverkusen v Marseille (8pm); Benfica v Lech Poznan (8pm); Celta Vigo v Union SG (8pm); Celtic v Besiktas (8pm); Crystal Palace v Hoffenheim (5.45pm); Hapoel Be'er Sheva v OFI (8pm); Levski Sofia v Jagiellonia Bialystok (5.45pm); Lillestrøm v Plzen (5.45pm); NEC v Omonia Nicosia (5.45pm); Sociedad v Lyon (5.45pm); Sparta Prague v Bournemouth (5.45pm); Sturm Graz v Celje (8pm); Sunderland v Dinamo Zagreb (8pm); Torreense v Ararat-Armenia (8pm)

Conference League

AGF v Braga (5.45pm); Atalanta v Kairat (5.45pm); Copenhagen v Iberia 1999 (8pm); Getafe v Brighton (8pm); KuPS v Gent (5.45pm); Lincoln Red Imps v Hajduk Split (5.45pm); Lugano v Kauno Zalgiris (8pm); Midtjylland v Ajax (5.45pm); Mjällby v Borac (5.45pm); Monaco v Nordsjaelland (8pm); Panathinaikos v CSKA Sofia (8pm); Red Star Belgrade v Inter d'Escaldes (5.45pm); Riga FC v Jablonec (8pm); Sint-Truiden v Brann (8pm); Thun v Hearts (5.45pm); Trabzonspor v Freiburg (5.45pm); Twente v Pafos (8pm); Universitatea Craiova v Egnatia (8pm)

Cricket

First Men's Test (day one of five)

Afghanistan v Zimbabwe, Sharjah (6am)

Second Men's Test (day one of five)

Bangladesh v West Indies, Sylhet (4am)

Greg Wood's racing tips

Plumpton 12.33 Bond Broker 1.08 Sweet Caryline

1.43 Jenny France 2.15 Ferret Jeeter 2.47 Central Command 3.22 Bel Ombre 3.55 Crest Of Arms

Newbury 12.42 King William Rufus 1.17 Merlin Allen

1.52 Princess Day 2.25 Kilwaughter 2.58 Percy De Courcy

3.33 Manu Du Noyer 4.05 Newgrove

Newcastle 12.59 Brace For Landing 1.34 Evaluation

2.07 Thorneylands 2.40 Looking Splendid

3.15 Tom Creen 3.50 That Guy

Chelmsford 1.57 Jenson Benson 2.30 Makes Me Wonder

3.05 Chaise Longue 3.40 Pyleates 4.15 Havana Touch

4.45 Galimix 5.15 Marhaba Ya Tayib

5.45 Missmisfortune 6.15 Fuseboard

Southwell 2.20 Ten Cuidado 2.53 Oneforthegutter

3.28 Dovey Moon 4.00 Fenaroli 4.30 Enola Grey (nap)

5.00 Pride's Queen 5.30 Celestial Fire 6.00 Modern Times

6.30 Infinity Blue (nb)

Sport

Football Champions League

Muriqi makes Liverpool pay for wilting in Istanbul cauldron

Andoni Iraola arrived in Istanbul seeking improvement from Liverpool's attack but departed with sudden cause for concern at the opposite end of the pitch. Fenerbahce ignited Dirk Kuyt's interim spell with a tumultuous victory after Liverpool detonated their 100% Champions League record with several defensive lapses.

Liverpool's second successive defeat left Iraola exasperated for entirely different reasons to Sunday's loss to Arsenal. Blame was found only in the mirror this time around. It was so careless and so unnecessary.

The visitors led twice, through Trey Nyoni's first senior goal and a header from substitute Alexander Isak, but Fenerbahce twice hit back quickly and snatched victory when Vedat Muriqi emerged as the strongest player from a pack of red shirts. Fenerbahce's first goal came from a free-kick, their second from a corner and their third from a long throw-in.

▲ Alexander Isak came off the bench and instantly gave Liverpool the lead

ADAM DAVY/PA

“Cheap goals, messy goals,” as the Liverpool head coach put it. “We knew set pieces were one of the strengths of Fenerbahce. We have been dealing with them well, both this season and today, it has been something we have been working on since pre-season, but it cost us today. The last goal was maybe because they are strong and tall but the other two we have to control better."

Ronald Araújo resting on the bench offers one explanation for Liverpool's weak defensive display but does not cover every fault. The visitors enjoyed large spells of control and, despite an anonymous display from Bradley Barcola as the central striker, should never have given hope to an ageing, average Fenerbahce side packed with familiar names from the Premier League.

As expected, Turkish supporters tested the eardrums with incessant whistling whenever Liverpool took possession. Liverpool sought to dilute the atmosphere by controlling possession. Rio Ngumoha was prominent and N'Golo Kanté should have been booked for halting one promising run by leaping on the teenager's back. Referee Clément Turpin was in a lenient mood with both sides.

Fenerbahce had struggled to hold up play in the Liverpool half or create a chance of note when Archie Brown exposed the visiting defence with a superb ball from left-back. The pass sailed over the struggling Kostas Tsimikas and was controlled well by Mason Greenwood, before he was pushed over by the Liverpool defender. Neither Turpin nor the video assistant referee deemed it a penalty kick.

The decibel levels cranked up and went even higher when Liverpool took the lead moments later. Ngumoha was heavily involved with a darting run and shot that was charged down into the path of Dominik Szoboszlai. Brown, under pressure from Virgil van Dijk, headed the midfielder's cross clear but only as far as Nyoni. The young midfielder swept a low volley beyond Ederson with the aid of a slight deflection off Kojo Peprah Oppong. It was a memorable milestone in the continued rise of Nyoni; the first goal of his career at the highest level.

It was also the cue for Fenerbahce to rouse themselves. The hosts almost levelled straight from the restart when Brown's low centre was turned against Alisson's crossbar by Irfan Can Kahveci, who may have been ruled offside. They did not have to wait long for the equaliser. After Szoboszlai was penalised for a foul on Kanté, Greenwood's resulting free-kick took a huge deflection off Jérémy Jacquet's stomach and sailed past the wrongfooted Alisson. The Liverpool keeper did not hide his anger at Jacquet turning away from the free-kick and leaving a costly hole in the wall.

The second half mirrored the first with Liverpool in control until scoring and provoking a reaction from the Turkish side. Substitutes Cody Gakpo

From Kop to Cadillac? Fenway holds talks over £2bn stake in F1 team

Liverpool's owner, Fenway Sports Group, has held talks about buying a majority stake in the Cadillac Formula One team for more than £2bn as Mark Walter continues to sell off his sporting assets amid allegations of insurance fraud. Walter is under investigation by the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission over alleged fraud involving the management of funds at his insurance companies Delaware Life, Clear Spring, and EquiTrust. TWG has said “there has been no fraud”.

TWG has denied that a sale of Cadillac is imminent, but the Guardian has learned it has had talks with a number of interested parties including FSG, whose sporting investments include majority stakes in the Boston Red Sox and the NHL team Pittsburgh Penguins.

A source with knowledge of FSG's plans disclosed it is looking at other sporting investments after selling $38\%$ of Liverpool this summer to a consortium that includes the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, whose group has also secured the option of a full takeover at Anfield before August 2027. Cadillac are bottom of the constructors' championship in their debut season, and yet to win a point. FSG declined to comment on its investment plans. Matt Hughes and Isak had only been on the pitch three minutes when they combined to restore the visitors' advantage, the Swedish striker heading past Ederson from Gakpo's left-wing cross.

But Fenerbahce again levelled swiftly when Kanté swept in a cross following a corner and Gakpo, attempting to head clear, glanced the ball away from Alisson's grasp to give Brown a simple tap-in at the back post. "In the stadium it was almost impossible to communicate," Iraola admitted. "It was difficult for me to give instructions and the communication must have been difficult between Cody and Ali."

Worse was to come for Liverpool when Birmingham-born Brown looped a cross into the heart of Liverpool's box. Muriqi, a second-half replacement for Romelu Lukaku, managed to hold off three Liverpool players - Jacquet, Alexis Mac Allister and Nyoni - and plant a header into the bottom corner. Iraola added: "It's so frustrating because this is a difficult place to play and we were winning twice. We need to look at how we conceded the goals."

Fenerbahce

4-3-2-1

Ederson; Semedo (Muldur 75), Skriniar, Oppong, Brown●;

Guendouzi, Kanté; Greenwood (Aydin 89)

Can Kahveci (Arturkoglu 75);

Lukaku (Muriqi 63)

Liverpool

4-2-3-1

Aliisson; Gomez (Wirtz 66), Jacquet, Van Dijk, Tsimikas (Kerkez 76); Nyoni (Koumas 85), Mac Allister●; Muñoz (Isak 66), Szoboszlai, Ngumoha (Gakpo 66); Barcola

Referee Clément Turpin (Fra)

How they stand | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | Paris Saint-Germain | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 5 | +15 | 12 | Real Madrid | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 13 | 7 | +6 | 12 | Arsenal | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 8 | 3 | +5 | 10 | Como | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 19 | 6 | +13 | 9 | Barcelona | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 14 | 6 | +8 | 9 | Aston Villa | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 12 | 6 | +6 | 9 | Manchester City | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 12 | 7 | +5 | 9 | Liverpool | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 14 | 10 | +4 | 9 | Club Brugge | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 11 | 7 | +4 | 9 | Sporting | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 8 | 4 | +4 | 9 | Real Betis | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 8 | 6 | +2 | 9 | Borussia Dortmund | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 7 | 5 | +2 | 9 | Bayern Munich | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 12 | 5 | +7 | 8 | Stuttgart | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 4 | +3 | 7 | Inter | 4 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 8 | 6 | +2 | 6 | Lask | 4 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 10 | 9 | +1 | 6 | Manchester Utd | 4 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 8 | 8 | 0 | 6 | Galatasaray | 4 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 8 | 9 | -1 | 6 | Fenerbahce | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 6 | 11 | -5 | 5 | Roma | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 10 | 8 | +2 | 4 | Shakhtar Donetsk | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 4 | Viking | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 9 | 10 | -1 | 4 | Atlético Madrid | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 5 | -1 | 4 | PSV | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | -1 | 4 | Bodø/Glimt | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 9 | -5 | 4 | Porto | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 6 | 7 | -1 | 3 | Napoli | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 6 | 11 | -5 | 3 | Villarreal | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 8 | 14 | -6 | 3 | AEK Athens | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 11 | -6 | 3 | RB Leipzig | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 11 | -6 | 3 | Sabah | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 4 | 10 | -6 | 3 | Feyenoord | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 4 | 11 | -7 | 3 | Lens | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 4 | 16 | -12 | 3 | Slavia Prague | 4 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 9 | -4 | 1 | Lille | 4 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 10 | -6 | 1 | Slovan Bratislava | 4 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 17 | -16 | 0 |

Gyökeres comes alive as Arsenal dispatch Slavia Prague

◀ Vedat Muriqi (No 19) runs away in delight after scoring the winner against Liverpool in Istanbul

DILARA SENKAYA/REUTERS

Slavia Prague

Nowak 90

Arsenal

Madueke 9, Gyökeres 38

Ed Aarons

Fortuna Arena

Another away day, another victory for Arsenal. This time, the much-maligned Viktor Gyökeres stole the show as poor Slavia Prague matched the longest winless streak in European Cup and Champions League history despite a spirited late comeback. That now stands at 23, equalling the mark set by AEK Athens and FCSB - formerly known as Steaua Bucharest - while Arsenal are now unbeaten in their last 10 away European trips. After last week's wobble against

Fleetwood, there was no prospect of Arsenal making the same mistake again as soon as Noni Madueke fired them ahead early on after being superbly set up by Gyökeres.

That was his third assist in his last five appearances, although Mikel Arteta will have been even more encouraged by the emphatic finish that had seemed to put the game beyond Slavia's reach just before the break. While Kai Havertz remains his undoubted first choice, having another striker in form will only boost Arsenal's challenge and it was noticeable that there was an extra spring in the 28-year-old's step after his goal.

Slavia's solitary victory in this competition came in their first-ever match in 2007 and, after losing 3-0 to Arsenal here exactly a year ago, the Czech champions knew their chances of avoiding the unwanted milestone were extremely slim. While Fleetwood's giant-killing against the Premier League champions in the EFL Cup last week may have given them some hope of an upset, Arteta's side has developed a killer instinct on their travels in Europe. Not since May 2025, in the second leg of their semifinal against Paris Saint-Germain, have Arsenal lost an away game. The 2-2 draw at Bayern Munich two weeks ago underlined their credentials as genuine contenders once again.

After their exploits at Anfield on Sunday that took them three points clear at the top of the Premier League, Arteta heavily rotated his side again with six changes. Martín Zubimendi was handed only his third start of a frustrating campaign for the Spain World Cup winner, while Gyökeres led the line for the third time in Arsenal's past four matches.

The Sweden striker finished as top scorer last season with 21 goals and finally got off the mark against Fleetwood with a scrappy finish, although he has clearly been struggling for form and confidence. Yet there was no doubting the quality of his assist for Madueke's goal after just eight minutes. David Raya's long ball should have been dealt with by the Slavia defence but they made the criminal error of allowing it to bounce. That was the cue for Gyökeres to come alive as he beat his marker to the ball, chested it down and played the perfect pass for the England forward to run on to and score. Arteta's reaction on the touchline suggested he enjoyed it too.

Mikel Merino was Arsenal's hero here last year with two goals and he could have extended their lead on three occasions before the half-hour mark. The lively Madueke created his best opportunity after cutting the ball back to Merino but he could not beat Nazar Domchak in Slavia's goal.

With Martin ∅degaard watching from the bench next to William Saliba, on his return from a long-term ◀ Viktor Gyökeres scores Arsenal’s second goal after setting up their first DAVID PRICE/ARSENAL FC/GETTY IMAGES

back injury, Arsenal lacked some of their usual fluency in attack. But Slavia were still no match for them and their task became almost impossible seven minutes before the break. Gyökeres exchanged a smart one-two with Merino inside the area before curling a brilliant shot into the far corner. It needed a goalline clearance from Michal Sadilek to prevent a rampant Arsenal inflicting more damage before half-time.

To their credit, Slavia started the second half with much more aggression after introducing their record signing Ange N'Guessan from the bench. The hosts came within a few centimetres of being awarded a penalty when Emmanuel Ayaosi was brought down by Ezri Konsa on the edge of the area. The England defender and Rice both found themselves in the book as Arsenal struggled to recapture their rhythm from the first half without ever looking in danger of conceding.

But that all changed in the last 20 minutes after David Jurasek let fly from long range and his effort was deflected just wide of Raya's goal. From the resulting corner, Gabriel Magalhães somehow managed to clear two goalbound headers off the line in a matter of seconds. The Brazilian celebrated with a massive fist pump.

Mikulas Konecny should have done much better with another chance as Arsenal's formidable defence was put to the test. A spectacular save denied Oskar Kubiak as Raya managed to push the ball on to the post at full stretch. Slavia eventually scored the goal all their endeavour deserved in the final minute of normal time when Wiktor Nowak fired in at the far post. There were a few nervous moments in stoppage time and Arteta breathed a sigh of relief at the full-time whistle as Slavia were condemned to their fate.

Slavia Prague

4-2-3-1

Domchak; Vlcek (Konecny 61), Holes, Zima, Kubiak; Moses (Chaloupek 81), Sadilek; Ayaosi (Jurasek 71), Suleiman (Chytil 46), Sturm (N'Guessan 46); Nowak

Arsenal

4-2-3-1

Raya; White (Timber 78),

Konsa ● (Mosquera 62),

Gabriel, Hincapié;

Zubimendi, Rice ●;

Madueke (Dowman 93),

Merino, Eze (Tzolis 62);

Gyökeres (∅degaard 78)

Referee Tobias Stieler (Ger)

[In brief] Champions League Valverde's late winner breaks hearts in Athens

Federico Valverde lashed home a stunning effort from distance to snatch Real Madrid a late 3-2 victory at AEK Athens to preserve their 100% start in the group phase. José Mourinho's side twice came from behind against the Greek champions before Valverde claimed all three points for his side. "We fought and with the score at 2-2 we didn't settle,"

Mourinho said. Aboubakary Koïta sent AEK ahead after 12 minutes before Jude Bellingham equalised with a sublime flick for the record 15-time winners. Stavros Pilios sent the Greek champions ahead with 15 minutes to go but Kylian Mbappé swiftly pulled Madrid level once again, setting the stage for Valverde's late winner. Madrid have now won seven straight games across all competitions. Valverde thanked his teammates for backing him when he gets the chance to shoot: "Sometimes I overthink it, and well, as I always say, I'm grateful to the players, to my teammates, because they're the ones who give me the confidence so that, in those moments, I can make that decision and have the courage to hit it," he said. Agencies

Crystal Palace

Mateta to miss three games after appeal fails

Crystal Palace striker Jean-Philippe Mateta will serve a three-match ban after an appeal against his red card in Saturday's 2-0 league defeat at Tottenham was rejected.

▲ Jean-Philippe Mateta was sent off for his challenge on Micky van de Ven

The France international, 29, was dismissed in the 13th minute at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium following a late challenge on Spurs captain Micky van de Ven. Referee Michael Oliver originally gave a yellow card, but it was upgraded after a VAR review. Mateta will be suspended for Palace's league match at home to Liverpool on Sunday, in addition to fixtures against Coventry and Hull later this month. A statement from the Football Association read: "An independent regulatory commission has dismissed claims of both wrongful dismissal and excessive punishment in relation to Jean-Philippe Mateta." The forward has just one goal this season but managed 15 in all competitions in the 2025-26 campaign. PA

City's slicker Happy Haaland has final word in topsy-turvy Leipzig clash

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'Hardest days of my life' Jesús Owono on the pain of De Miguel's death

The Guardian

Thursday

5 November

2026

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Fenerbahce

Liverpool

2 Nyoni 25, Isak 69

Greenwood 29,

Brown 73, Muriqi 79

Reds old boy

Kuyt trips up

Iraola's men

Liverpool led twice in Istanbul but allowed their former forward (above) to helm the hosts to victory Champions League Page 42 →

MURAD SEZER/REUTERS

The Real deal? Madrid close in on signing United 16-year-old Gabriel

Will Unwin

Jamie Jackson

Real Madrid are closing in on signing JJ Gabriel, though Manchester United will consider legal action if the club believe any rules have been broken.

Madrid have offered the 16-year-old forward a multi-year contract and, subject to final talks, hope to bring him to the Bernabéu in January. Gabriel is registered with United's academy until the end of the season and it is understood the club have yet to be contacted by the player's camp or Real Madrid regarding the proposed move.

Madrid intend to sign Gabriel via a Fifa loophole that allows clubs in the EU to secure young players on professional contracts if they have an EU passport, which Gabriel is eligible to acquire through both his parents.

Fifa would have to sign this off and United are on alert regarding any potential breach of regulations. A compensation fee would be due to United if Gabriel joined Madrid or any other team. Madrid have been approached for comment. Gabriel walked out on United in September and is believed to be training in Spain. A move to Madrid offers the prospect of progression to senior football via their B team, Castilla, who play in the regionalised Spanish third tier.

Gabriel played in a pre-season friendly for United against Atlético Madrid in Stockholm in August at the age of 15 and had been training with the first team. If he had not informed United of his wish to depart, he would have been in Michael Carrick's squad for the Carabao Cup third-round defeat against Brighton on 16 September. Had Gabriel featured, he would have become the youngest player in the club's history.

Last season Gabriel became the youngest winner of United's academy player of the year award and was the Premier League's under-18 player of the season.

Dalot: win shows we care Page 40 →

Borthwick backed by RFU even if England flop in autumn

Gerard Meagher

Steve Borthwick has been given the Rugby Football Union's unequivocal backing to lead England into the World Cup next year even if the team flop this autumn.

Borthwick's contract was extended in September to end after the 2028 Six Nations - despite England posting their worst Six Nations performance this year - to avoid speculation in the buildup to the tournament next year. But the head coach remains under pressure on the back of five defeats in the past seven matches.

England have, however, been boosted with the fly-half Fin Smith coming through a key training session yesterday before an autumn campaign that features matches against Australia, Japan and New Zealand as well as a rankings match on the inaugural Nations Championship finals weekend.

Nearly four years ago, Eddie Jones was sacked after an autumn that featured a defeat by Argentina, victory against Japan, a draw with the All Blacks and defeat by South Africa, which was greeted with boos by the Twickenham faithful. But the RFU chief executive, Bill Sweeney, said he could not see a scenario where Borthwick would be replaced, irrespective of results this month.

“We’re committed to Steve, we’ve extended his contract to the middle of 2028,” Sweeney said. “We believe in what he’s doing. We had a difficult Six Nations this year, we accept that, but we just want to see continued progress and we’re backing him to get that done.

“We just felt that going into a World Cup is a tough enough challenge anyway. We wanted our coaching team just to be focused on the World Cup, not be thinking about: ‘Oh, I don’t have a role lined up,’ and be thinking about that in the buildup. It was to take away any distraction around that, and take that same coaching team into the Six Nations in 2028. That was the sole intention. It was the same process with the women’s team.”

After England's first defeat by Italy in March, the RFU took the unprecedented step of offering conditional support for Borthwick, backing the head coach but calling for improvements in summer Tests against South Africa, Fiji and Argentina. Sweeney 38