2 h. ago Australia lead England by 356 runs: Ashes third Test, day three – live

Hosts heading towards series victory in Adelaide Ashes top 100 | Get The Spin newsletter | Email MartinEnough talk, Scott Boland is about to bowl the first over of day three. It’s much cooler in Adelaide, around 26 degrees.“Honestly, it’s not England’s batting – that’s pretty much on par with Australia’s,” writes Andy Roberts. “The glaring difference is the bowling. If Australian batters look better, it’s because they are getting a lot more bad balls to hit. England couldn’t score any faster yesterday because the bowling was consistently accurate and tested the batter’s technique and concentration over after over, with no weak links. Compare that to England, with Jacks and Carse sending down rubbish time and time again. Continue reading...

Politics

6 h. ago Spencer Matthews says he's never dealt with his brother Michael's death as he reveals he's 'carried shame through my 20s and regretted a lot of my behaviour'

The reality star, 37, has said he has never dealt with his brother Michael's death and reflected on carrying 'a lot of shame through his 20s' in a new candid interview.

Economics

9 h. ago It's beginning to look a lot like...Easter? B&Q shoppers left 'disgusted' after hardware store stocks rabbit decorations before Christmas

Usually Easter decorations tend to pop up in supermarkets around the end of February or start of March. But shoppers at a were horrified to see Easter decorations instead.

Events

16 h. ago Major update on hero wounded tackling Bondi Beach gunman amid gruelling surgery

Ahmed al-Ahmed, hailed as a national hero by PM Anthony Albanese, is in "a lot of discomfort" after complex nerve surgery and will undergo another 8-hour operation following the Bondi Beach massacre

Politics

17 h. ago North Berwick Heritage in Pictures: Here are 27 photos of the East Lothian town in the 1950s and 1960s

The town looked a lot different over 55 years ago.

Culture

18 h. ago Adrian Chiles says 'it was a lot' as he addresses surprising reaction to skin cancer news

TV presenter Adrian Chiles addressed the overwhelming public response to his skin cancer announcement, while reassuring fans that his health was fine

Politics

18 h. ago A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke audiobook review – an honest and hilarious memoir

The no-nonsense comic actor and author further cements her status as a national treasure with her trademark gobby one-linersA lot of terrible things happen to Kathy Burke in her memoir, though you won’t find her mired in self-pity. Burke was a toddler when her mother died from stomach cancer, meaning she has no memory of her. In the Islington council flat where she grew up, she shared a bedroom with her alcoholic dad who would give up booze only to fall off the wagon and, at his worst, became violent. When a stranger on the estate called her ugly in front of her friends, she cannily deflected the insult with laughter. “I’m the best dancer at the ugly bug ball though,” she hooted, and did a little dance.Burke would find her tribe on London’s punk scene and, in her teens, got the acting bug and a place at London’s Anna Scher Theatre school. This put her on the path to a brilliant and varied acting and writing career that saw her appearing in comedy sketches with Harry Enfield and Fren...

Politics

21 h. ago Six festive food swaps that will help cut calories over Christmas

Whilst we are all looking forward to winding down for Christmas, for a lot of us it can be a daunting time as we watch the number on the scales slowly creep up.

Politics

22 h. ago Seven festive food swaps that will help cut calories over Christmas

Whilst we are all looking forward to winding down for Christmas, for a lot of us it can be a daunting time as we watch the number on the scales slowly creep up.

Politics

23 h. ago "We talk a lot about the value of green space, but our silty brown 'blue space' often remains an afterthought"

"We talk a lot about the value of green space, but our silty brown 'blue space' often remains an afterthought"  Dezeen

Politics

26 h. ago Amazon shoppers can snap up 'brilliant' £45 Echo Pop speaker for £4 this week

It could make Christmas Day a lot easier thanks to its many features

Economics

26 h. ago Disgusting trolls call me a ‘scrounger’ for living in a council house but no, it’s not free – haters need to pipe down

A MUM-OF-TWO has hit back after cruel trolls labelled her a "scrounger" and a "beggar" because she lives in a council house. Student nurse Rianne and her other half moved into the Tyneside property alongside their two children in August. The house has needed a lot of work, with Rianne documenting their transformation in videos...

Politics

27 h. ago Thursday news quiz: AI mishaps, fan fury and a tiny baby hippo

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?Welcome to the final Thursday news quiz of the year – a small festive tradition involving the news, a handful of jokes, and the knowledge that somewhere there are 1,057 pedants limbering up to find something to nitpick. And it is a bumper 20-question edition. Thank you for quizzing throughout the year, for your comments, corrections and good-natured quibbles, and most of all for the kind messages literally hundreds of you sent the quizmaster during the Great Thursday Quiz Hiatus of 2025™, when he was off sick. It really meant a lot. Allons-y!The Thursday quiz will return in the new year and wishes you a Merry Christmas, a great festive holiday period and all the best for 2026. Sign up for First Edition to get a Thursday quiz-style quiz of the year in your inbox on Christmas Day. Continue reading...

Politics

27 h. ago Why Labour needs 'betray Brexit' a lot more than it's currently doing

It’s time for Labour to seriously consider rejoining the EU Customs Union because of the economic benefits this would bring

Politics

28 h. ago ‘Pretty birds and silly moos’: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act

In the 50 years since equal rights for women were enshrined in UK law, the campaigners have been reduced to caricatures, or forgotten. But their struggle is worth rememberingCelia Brayfield was at her desk in the Femail section of the Daily Mail’s Fleet Street office when an editor called her over. It was July and Wimbledon had started. “He said: ‘We want you to go down and get into the women’s changing rooms and report on lesbian behaviour.’ One didn’t normally swear at that time but I declined. That was the attitude then,” she told me.From the late 1960s until the early 70s, Brayfield was one of a small group of female journalists working on women’s pages in newspapers. “We were dealing with everyday sexism on an unbelievable scale,” she said. “You learned to wear trousers or take the lift because if you took the stairs someone would try to look up your skirt. But then you couldn’t go to a lot of press conference venues in trousers. In the Savoy, for example, women in trousers wer...

Events

28 h. ago When panto goes horribly, painfully wrong: ‘it was the worst chafing of my life’

Panto season is upon us, and for the performers, anything could happen. Actors recall their most excruciating moments – from a panic attack while dressed as a cow, to dripping blood while in flight as Peter PanWhen panto goes wrong, the show must always go on. And there is a lot that could go wrong: malfunctioning pyrotechnics, panic attacks, chafing thighs, broken props, broken bones, bruised egos – and that’s before you get live animals involved. Missed cues and forgotten lines are small potatoes by comparison. So with panto season once again in full swing, we speak to seasoned professionals about the exhausting, error-laden, explosive truth behind the most “magical” season of the year.Adam Buksh played The Genie in Aladdin at Howden Park Centre, Livingston, West Lothian, in 2013 It was halfway through the show when Aladdin got trapped in the cave. Our version was based on the original story, One Thousand and One Nights (not Disney’s), in which Aladdin possesses two magical entiti...

Politics

43 h. ago The 50 best albums of 2025: No 3 – Blood Orange: Essex Honey

Dev Hynes’ deeply personal response to his mother’s death embodied the many unexpected shades of grief in pastoral hymnals and post-punk• The 50 best albums of 2025• More on the best culture of 2025There’s a lot of grief across the best albums of this year. It’s unsurprising: 2025 has felt like a definitive and dismal break with government accountability, protections for marginalised people and holding back the encroachment of AI in creative and intellectual fields, to cherrypick just a few horrors. Anna von Hausswolff and Rosalía reached for transcendence from these earthly disappointments. Bad Bunny and KeiyaA countered colonial abuse and neglect with writhing resistance anthems. On a more personal scale, Lily Allen and Cate Le Bon grappled with disillusionment about mis-sold romantic ideals. For Jerskin Fendrix, the Tubs, Jennifer Walton, Jim Legxacy and Blood Orange, grief was, straightforwardly, grief for lost loved ones.Each of those albums was as distinctive and profound as a...

Events

47 h. ago ‘A festive tour de force’: Guardian writers on their favorite underrated Christmas movies

From a John Cusack 80s teen comedy to the other Frank Capra Christmas crowd-pleaser, here are some seasonal picks you might not have seenSomething that bugs me about a lot of contemporary Christmas movies is how insistently self-conscious they are about the whole production – the ostentatious decorations, checklist of soundtrack chestnuts, the dialogue about the true meaning of the holidays that sounds canned even when the movie is trying to acknowledge its various stressors. Maybe because the idea of a holiday movie hadn’t yet ossified into routine, I’ve found that the versions of these films that came out in the 1940s tend to approach Christmas from more inventive, less neurotically obsessive angles. One of my favorite discoveries in sifting through 1940s Christmas comedies is It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a 1947 semi-romantic farce with a great starting hook: a cheerful vagrant Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) winters in New York every year, because he knows a way into a particu...

Politics

48 h. ago EU talks on using Russian assets to fund reparations loan for Ukraine enter final stages ahead of crunch meeting – Europe live

Negotiations among EU leaders continue ahead of critical European Council meeting in Brussels on ThursdayIf you want to test various scenarios ahead of tomorrow’s debate on Russian frozen assets, you can use this handy calculator to see what is needed to get the proposal passed under the so-called qualified majority vote, or QMV (expect to hear a lot about it in the next 48 hours).As we know, the opposition is led by Belgium and its outspoken prime minister Bart de Wever, with Bulgaria, Czech Republic, and Malta also against. Italy has some doubts too (at least for now?), and Hungary, traditionally, is against anything that would help Ukraine. Continue reading...

Politics

49 h. ago Sign we all saw at Easter tells us if it'll be a white Christmas

Traditional folklore sayings have been used for centuries to interpret nature's signs around Christmas, with old beliefs suggesting Christmas Day weather can predict Easter conditions

Events