Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – Manchester City, Erling Haaland, Porto, Champions League, European club football, Football, Sport
Title – Rosario ‘grabbed my bottom’ during Manchester City’s win at Porto, claims Haaland | Manchester City | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jamiejackson
Link – Rosario ‘grabbed my bottom’ during Manchester City’s win at Porto, claims Haaland | Manchester City | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:42:55.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/sep/09/erling-haaland-pablo-rosario-manchester-city-porto-champions-league

Erling Haaland has claimed Pablo Rosario “grabbed my bottom” during Manchester City’s 2-0 win at Porto on Tuesday. The incident occurred in the 92nd minute, with Haaland having scored City’s goals. The forward and midfielder grappled, went to ground and were booked after being separated.

“I was really keen on a hat-trick and it seemed like he was very eager to stop me from getting it,” Haaland told Norway’s TV 2. “It was a little interesting, that – you’ll be seeing a picture where he’s grabbing my bottom. It’ll be interesting to see that picture.”

The flashpoint followed one as half-time neared in a niggly encounter. After Marc Guéhi and Gabriel Veiga had a coming together that left the latter with a head injury, tempers frayed. When the teams walked off for the interval a bust-up occurred involving players and staff near the tunnel.

Images showed Rúben Dias placing a hand on what appeared to be Francesco Farioli, the Porto head coach. Uefa will wait for the match report of the referee, Szymon Marciniak, and its delegate, Stéphanie Ford, before deciding whether to bring any action against the defender or City.

Haaland’s 47th-minute opener was a header and the No 9 revealed he had been working on the skill recently with his dad, Alf Inge, a former City player.

“Two days ago I was practising headers with my dad in the garden,” he said. “Over the years, I’ve worked a lot on my heading. I’ve improved it massively and it’s become a strength of my game. I think a lot of it comes down to experience.”

Haaland concurred with his manager, Enzo Maresca , that he may need a break soon. “It’s not easy to get any rest in this business,” the 26-year-old said.

“Like during the international break, we play four games in 10 or 11 days, so it’s not easy. But you have to try to squeeze in a few days here and there and give your mind a bit of a break.”

Keyword – Business
Trefwoorden – Oil, Commodities, Business, US-Israel war on Iran, Gas, World news, UK news, US news
Title – Oil prices rise above $100 a barrel for first time since July as Iran war escalates | Oil | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/lauren-almeida,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/marksweney
Link – Oil prices rise above $100 a barrel for first time since July as Iran war escalates | Oil | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:30:56.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/09/oil-prices-rise-iran-war-brent-crude-inflation-higher-interest-rates

The price of oil has risen above $100 a barrel for the first time since July as the escalating conflict in the Middle East threatens further disruption to global supplies.

Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, rose by more than 3% to top $101 after tensions increased in the Gulf amid the latest tit-for-tat exchange of fire between the US and Iran.

The US military said it had “destroyed” multiple Iranian tankers , after Tehran attempted to strike a US navy warship with ballistic missiles. The previous nightm Iran-backed Houthis attacked four cities in Saudi Arabia , wounding more than 70 people and setting oil installations ablaze.

UK and mainland Europe gas prices also soared on Wednesday. The benchmark Dutch gas contract rose by almost 4% to €78.73 a megawatt hour, the highest since January 2023. Meanwhile, the British contract rose by 7.77p to 196.57p a therm, the highest since December 2022.

On Tuesday, the Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, said the latest rise in oil prices was putting pressure on inflation and interest rates. “The risks, I’m afraid, are on the upside,” he told MPs . “And that’s really the risks coming from energy prices.”

The oil price has jumped by a quarter since early August as hopes for a permanent resolution to the six-month-old war faded.

The climb in costs has hit UK motorists, with petrol at the pump reaching an average of 166.2p a litre on Tuesday, the highest level in four years, according to the motoring body the AA.

The AA said diesel hit an average of 187.7p, a price it last reached in May. Prices for a litre of petrol have risen 4.4p since the August bank holiday, with diesel up 4.1p.

Households will face further pressure on their bills when Ofgem’s energy price cap rises by 4% in October . Andrew Goodwin, the chief UK economist at the consultancy Oxford Economics, has predicted that the cap could now rise by a further 13% in January.

“Wholesale prices are currently well above the level of the previous observation window, and our commodities team expect them to remain high in the near term,” he said.

The energy companies BP, Shell and the British Gas owner, Centrica, were among the top performers across the FTSE 100 on Wednesday morning, with their shares rising by at least 1% on the back of the higher oil price. The index was down by 0.5% overall.

Brent is up more than 60% this year, and has risen above the $100 mark for three periods so far in 2026.

China, the world’s largest importer of crude, has increased purchases in recent days, after a hiatus that had been a factor keeping oil prices somewhat in check in the early part of the conflict.

Giovanni Staunovo, a commodity analyst at UBS Global Wealth Management, said: “For the direction of crude prices, we are also monitoring Chinese crude imports as a key indicator.

“Chinese crude imports recovered to nearly 9m barrels per day in August, up from the June low of 7.15m, but still lower compared to the [pre-conflict] February imports of 12.6m. It looks like the recovery trend could continue.”

Oil prices have fluctuated in the six months since the start of Tehran’s block on the strait of Hormuz prompted what many feared would be the greatest energy supply disruption in history.

In the first weeks after the first US-Israeli attacks on Iran in late February, oil prices soared past $100 a barrel. The oil price peaked at $126 in April but later fell back amid hopes of a ceasefire. The price then began to climb again after the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran fell apart and hostilities restarted.

The rise in energy prices has stoked fears about inflation and the prospect of higher interest rates this year. In the US, economists are expecting at least one interest rate rise from the Federal Reserve by the end of the year.

Keyword – Life and style
Trefwoorden – Life and style
Title – Young people: are you doom-saving or doom-spending? How are you approaching the future? | Life and style | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/guardian-community-team
Link – Young people: are you doom-saving or doom-spending? How are you approaching the future? | Life and style | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:24:33.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/09/young-people-are-you-doom-saving-or-doom-spending-how-are-you-approaching-the-future

The future feels a little hard to plan for right now.

We’ve just lived through the hottest summer on record, global conflict looms large and AI has people wondering whether their job will still exist in five years – assuming they’ve got one in the first place.

So, with all that hanging over us, are young people simply thinking: we might as well enjoy ourselves while we can?

We want to hear from people under 30 about how you feel about the future and whether it’s changed the way you live your life, for better or worse.

Have you stopped bothering to save because what’s the point? Are you spending your money now rather than worrying about some hypothetical future version of yourself? Have you embraced a more carpe diem outlook – going out on a Monday because why not, dating someone because they seem fun, booking a holiday on a whim because …

Or perhaps all this uncertainty has made you more cautious, more focused on getting your finances in order and determined to build a future you can rely on.

Whatever your approach, we want to hear from you. How has the state of the world changed the way you live your life?

If you’re having trouble using the form click here . Read terms of service here and privacy policy here .

Keyword – Politics
Trefwoorden – Andy Burnham, Israel, Palestine, Labour, Politics, UK news, Middle East and north Africa
Title – Burnham sees sanctions against Israeli settlements as an electoral asset | Andy Burnham | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/kiran-stacey
Link – Burnham sees sanctions against Israeli settlements as an electoral asset | Andy Burnham | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:18:48.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/sep/09/sanctions-israeli-settlements-trade-andy-burnham-analysis

There was a time when placing Israel under strict trade sanctions would have been a politically risky thing for a British prime minister to do. Andy Burnham , however, considers it an electoral asset.

As Kemi Badenoch attacked him over defence spending at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Burnham deliberately turned the topic to the trade ban on illegal settlements which he had announced on Tuesday.

With the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, sitting to his left, the prime minister said: “In this difficult and dangerous world Britain has to stand for something, Britain has to show leadership, Britain has to stand for fairness against injustice.

“Where people are being bullied out of their homes and intimidated, we will always stand with the underdog and take what action we can to support them. That, Mr Speaker, is leadership on the world stage: Britain being true to what it’s always been about.

“That is what the British people expect of us and that is what this government will do.”

Under the new sanctions announced on Tuesday , goods produced in illegal settlements in occupied Palestine will be banned from being imported into the UK and those who help build or finance settlements will face sanctions.

The measures drew a sharp response from the Israeli government, which announced the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem.

Domestically, the opposition has been led by Badenoch, who has long been a staunch ally of Israel.

In a piece in the Jewish Chronicle , the Conservative leader warned that the prime minister risked “fanning the flames of antisemitism here at home”.

“For all Labour claim to have rooted out antisemitism internally, the degree of anti-Israel hatred means that Labour’s approach to many of these issues is Corbyn in all but name,” she added.

Others in her party, however, have struck a less aggressive tone.

On Tuesday, the shadow foreign secretary, Tom Tugendhat, said: “None of us here rejects the government’s stated aim that we must do everything we can to end the circle of violence and support the Abraham accords and the two-state solution.

“What we reject is performative politics, acting alone, that leaves our envoys irrelevant and our voice weaker.”

Some senior Conservatives even backed the government.

Edward Leigh, who as father of the house has held his seat longer than any other MP, told the Commons on Tuesday: “I am proud to say that I absolutely and fully support what he is doing today, because it is about standing up for freedom, for morality and for justice for all people in this world.”

The government has reason to believe it is on strong electoral ground with this decision.

A poll by YouGov earlier in the summer found 50% of British voters supported a ban on trade with West Bank settlements, while only 16% were opposed.

While Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters were the strongest backers of such a move, even Conservative and Reform voters were in favour overall.

Labour officials hope the announcement may help them make up ground with progressive and Muslim voters who have moved away from the party since the 2024 election.

Many say they remain angry about an interview given by Keir Starmer soon after the Gaza war began in which the then prime minister said he thought Israel had the right to withhold water and electricity from Palestinians.

The disillusionment among Muslim voters was particularly important in the Green party’s victory in Gorton and Denton .

Meanwhile Labour lost a large part of its broader progressive base during the local elections, in which the Greens took a number of councils and mayoralties in central London.

Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens in England and Wales, tweeted on Tuesday : “Ed Miliband’s statement on Israel is only a first step. We need to go further: a full ban on goods, services & investment.”

Labour and the Greens are now again locked in battle, over the Holborn and St Pancras seat, which Starmer has vacated .

Though the policy was in train long before that byelection was called, it could prove an important campaign tool for Labour canvassers looking to reassure their core voters.

Keyword – Media
Trefwoorden – BBC, Industrial action, Matt Brittin, UK news, Media
Title – BBC boss concedes real prospect of strikes over pay and job cuts | BBC | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/michael-savage
Link – BBC boss concedes real prospect of strikes over pay and job cuts | BBC | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:18:20.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/sep/09/bbc-boss-matt-brittin-strikes-pay-and-job-cuts

The BBC’s director general has conceded there is a real prospect of strikes at the broadcaster, as he faces a continuing dispute over pay and pushes ahead with plans to cut as many as 2,000 jobs.

In a call with staff on Tuesday, Matt Brittin faced a series of questions over the corporation’s plans for huge cuts , as well as pay talks in which staff rejected an average 2.1% salary increase.

With staff across the BBC already anxious over job cut plans, to be announced in the next few weeks, Brittin acknowledged there was a serious prospect of strike action.

“I understand that there might be [strikes],” he told staff. “I think it would be difficult. But I think we have to face the fact that we are in a really disruptive time for the entire industry. So I hope that people listening to this and talking to colleagues and union leaders as well understand where we are.”

Brittin, who took on the BBC’s top job in May, is overseeing cuts designed to save £500m by 2028. The plan was drawn up before his arrival, but he is attempting to make significant changes to reshape the BBC as part of the process.

He acknowledged there was anger that the alleged failure to grasp the BBC’s financial problems earlier had meant the corporation now needed to make deep cuts.

Brittin pointed to previous internal findings that the BBC had lost £1.3bn in revenue in the last 10 years, most from government decisions such as freezing the licence fee. However, 40% comes from more people choosing not to pay the fee amid the rise of streamers and digital platforms.

Brittin repeated that he had not fully understood the extent of the BBC’s financial woes when he started the job. He said the broadcaster had run out of reserve funds, while income from its commercial division had already been spent.

“There’s really not a lot of elbow room for anything,” he said. “That’s quite tough … that’s the context that we’re in.”

He suggested that increasing the pay offer further would hamper the BBC’s ability to reduce job cuts. “One per cent on pay for everybody is equivalent to about 180 jobs,” he said. Asked if it was a choice between job cuts and more pay, he said: “That’s the choice that you have to make at a management level … to award more, you’re going to have to find the money from elsewhere. The cupboard is bare.”

As part of the increased pay offer, he said the most senior executives would not receive a pay rise, while the lowest paid would get an increase above 2.5%.

Strike action by BBC staff would come as a huge blow, at a time when Brittin is championing its national importance as talks continue with the government over its future funding.

Such is the anger that it could yet result in the biggest strike in more than a decade. A strike over pay was called off at the last minute in 2014 . Schedules were disrupted by a smaller strike in 2023 over job losses and changes to local programming.

Despite the BBC’s financial struggles, it still commands a unique place in global media as one of the most trusted brands in the world, and reaches 94% of adults every month in the UK.

During the staff call, several employees confronted Brittin and Kate Phillips, the BBC’s chief content officer, over the decision to renege on a guaranteed job offer made to a group of apprentices, as revealed by the Guardian earlier this month .

“I absolutely get the devastation that we can’t guarantee that now because of the recent savings challenges,” Phillips said. “I do know that [BBC News] are doing everything they can to find placements for those people.”

It comes with all traditional broadcasters facing financial pressure. Channel 4 is planning to cut 340 jobs, equating to 28% of its workforce.

Keyword – Music
Trefwoorden – Classical music, Music, Culture, Proms 2026
Title – Forget vinyl v digital debates, this kind of musical ‘authenticity’ brings real rewards | Classical music | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/tomservice
Link – Forget vinyl v digital debates, this kind of musical ‘authenticity’ brings real rewards | Classical music | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:16:11.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/sep/09/period-instruments-early-music

N ostalgia. What a kick. And what a commercial boon for the music industry. Love the sound of 60s pop and 70s disco? You need the original synths if you’re a composer or producer. You listen to music on digital streams? Loser! Join the retro-future of vinyl enthusiasm, and feel the grooves under your fingers like your parents or grandparents used to. Or you can even make music physical again through the horrible medium of cassettes: all that plastic, all those tiny liner notes, all that high-speed dubbing.

Retro-futurists cherish what they claim is the extra warmth and sonic richness of vinyl, but there is no acoustic reason why vinyl is better. It is in fact objectively worse as a carrier of sonic information than any high-resolution stream of the same track, song or symphony. For cassette nostalgists, if it’s got that old-fashioned tape hiss, it sounds more “real”. We’re now looking for things to sound less clean. Because we distrust today’s technological utopia, we want signs that our music is less polished, less perfect, and thus more human.

But what the recording industry is doing now with its return to vinyl, classical music has been doing for decades. Musicians and musicologists have long been obsessed with learning about the origins of the music they study and play, to experience what the technology of instruments and performing cultures of earlier centuries actually sounded like, whether the 12th-century Germany of Hildegard of Bingen or the 19th-century Vienna of Beethoven and Schubert.

David Munrow brought medieval and Renaissance music to the mainstream across TV, radio and recordings in the 1970s and showing what instruments such as shawms and crumhorns could do; Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner set up choirs and ensembles to do the same for 17th and 18th-century music, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt led the charge through the music of later centuries, putting the ethos of early music research into the lifeblood of chamber groups and large-scale symphony orchestras in music from Schubert to Bruckner.

But where the claims for vinyl or cassettes’ “authenticity” are bogus when it comes to actual sonic fidelity, it’s different when comparing older instruments in classical cultures and their modern counterparts. Earlier instruments have different qualities of sound and expression. The sound and feel of a harpsichord that Bach was writing for in the 18th century is vastly different to a grand piano made today: the plucked strings of the harpsichord mean that the sound of each note disappears quickly, where a Steinway can create halos and continuities of sound. French horns that can play in any key are taken for granted today, where previous generations had to literally pull their brass instruments apart to play one set of notes or another. It’s a similar story for strings and woodwinds, as earlier generations of musicians had to play with the temperamental realities of gut strings that don’t stay in tune, and reeds that couldn’t be relied on.

But the sounds that earlier orchestral instruments make aren’t “worse” in the way that cassettes or vinyl are. Instead, their differences invite other ways of playing for the musicians, and they open up new dimensions of feeling for us. The difference between Bach’s music when it’s played on modern instruments in what is now – ironically – an old-school approach, using vibrato in the strings, lush lyricism in the rest of the orchestra, and full-scale choral forces, compared with the leaner sounds that smaller period instrument ensembles make, isn’t only a difference of soundworld, it’s a gulf of meaning and feeling.

Listen to these two performances of the opening chorus of Bach’s Matthew Passion: Karl R ichter conducting his massed Munich forces in 1979 , and Paul McC reesh leading the Gabrieli Consort in 2003. They’re playing the same piece, but these are radically different experiences. Richter’s reading of the work is about making a vast immovable musical monument, while McCreesh’s – played nearly twice as fast, using just one voice to each part – is an invitation to us as individuals to empathise, to bear witness, to be part of the drama.

That’s the key: these are new, contemporary feelings that period instrument performances open up. As the pianist Vikingur Ólafsson said , the idea that if you play on old instruments you’re making the exact sounds that Bach, or Beethoven or Mahler would have heard is neither truly possible, and nor is it the point. Our ears, our bodies, and our whole listening culture is different. (Which reminds me of Janeane Garofalo’s immortal cameo as the “serving wench” Melinda in the medieval-themed restaurant in The Cable Guy: “There were no utensils in medieval times, hence there are no utensils at Medieval Times. Would you like a refill on that Pepsi?”)

In the final few Proms concerts of the season you can hear the latest developments of classical’s retro-future explorers, all playing “period instruments”. On Thursday, the musicians of Arcangelo perform Bach’s B Minor Mass on original instruments, and the next night, there’s Mahler’s Ninth symphony from the Mahler Academy Orchestra playing instruments that fit the specifications of the ones that Mahler himself ordered for the Vienna opera in the early 1900s. Period instruments have more grain, more colour, more guttural directness and more lyrical intensity than their modern counterparts and so to my mind are better equipped to reveal the emotional imperfections, ambiguities, and expressive complexities of the music they’re playing.

That makes me sound like a cassette-fetishising nerd. Oh dear … In fact, I’ll go further and say that performances such as the Mass in B Minor and Mahler’s 9th at the Proms will have an authenticity that no recording format, analogue or digital, can reproduce. These are one-off performances that will be made and witnessed by those human beings, true to themselves in every moment. All these historical instruments aren’t really about getting closer to past times but to the power of the present tense.

This week Tom has been listening to: On repeat, the Berlin Philharmonic’s Proms with Kirill Petrenko. I know, I’m a broken record on this, but their Elgar and Tchaikovsky was inspired and inspiring: they found new depths of feeling and resonance in every moment. Magic.

Keyword – Sport
Trefwoorden – LIV Golf Series, Rory McIlroy, Golf, Saudi Arabia and sport, Sport
Title – McIlroy warns tours have ‘decisions to make’ as LIV Golf exodus edges closer | LIV Golf Series | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ewanmurray
Link – McIlroy warns tours have ‘decisions to make’ as LIV Golf exodus edges closer | LIV Golf Series | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:15:24.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/sep/09/rory-mcilroy-tours-will-decisions-to-make-liv-golf-exodus-edges-closer

Rory McIlroy believes traditional tours will soon have “decisions to make” as a player exodus from LIV Golf edges closer. LIV filing for bankruptcy in the United States on Tuesday means its deals with several high-profile golfers will soon be invalid, leaving them free to negotiate a route back to the PGA and DP World Tours.

When asked whether remaining with LIV in its planned, far-less lucrative form would hold appeal, McIlroy was characteristically candid. “I’m not in their shoes but LIV at the start looked a lot more attractive than what LIV 2.0 might be from a financial standpoint,” said the Masters champion.

The Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing – stating around $45m (£33.2m) is owed to players – represented LIV’s latest step in rebooting the business due to the removal of funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). Sources familiar with the situation insist contracts have not yet been breached. Terms in place with star names are now unaffordable for LIV. Contracts will inevitably either be renegotiated or cancelled.

The prevailing sense has been for some time that players such as Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton and Cameron Smith will seek to relaunch their careers on the PGA Tour – in return for some form of sanction – when it becomes legally feasible for them to do so. Others, who are less attractive to the PGA Tour, are facing career limbo.

“I’m not trying to predict the future but I would predict that you’ll see some guys leave,” said McIlroy. “I think that means other tours have decisions to make. Obviously there’s a lot of players on LIV that can strengthen golf tournaments and make them more competitive. So I would see that as a good thing for the DP World Tour.

“I think the health of the DP World Tour is in a really good spot. They have a wonderful alliance with the PGA Tour. I think that alliance is only going to get stronger, especially with the PGA Tour committing to working with the DP World Tour for some of these international events at this time of the year.

“So you have PGA Tour players really with nothing to do for five months in this period. If they are incorporated or whoever else is incorporated into these tournaments, that makes them more competitive. Overall, you know, I think with the way things are working out, it’s a very good thing for the golf ecosystem. I think it only makes these tournaments stronger with more competitive players in them.”

LIV’s stated aim is to play 10 events, worth $10m each, with 75-man fields in 2027 with the monetary backing of BC Partners. However, huge questions exist over the calibre of player willing to feature. Bryson DeChambeau has been widely tipped to remain with LIV. Lee Westwood has suggested he could do likewise, albeit he has potential to play for high purses on the PGA Tour Champions for over-50s in the United States. “I think some will stay and some won’t,” Westwood told TalkSport. “We’re obviously all independent contractors and everybody’s got different options at different times in their careers, stuff like that. But my plan is to have a good look at LIV 2.0 and make a decision after that.

“The new partner is coming in to make it a sustainable tour and a sustainable operation so that’s very good but, obviously, whenever bankruptcy is mentioned, that’s never a good idea. It’s bad for a lot of people.”

Intriguingly, the PIF plans to loan LIV close to $50m to assist with the bankruptcy process. The role of Saudi Arabia in any future version of LIV is not at all clear. The LIV project has cost the PIF an estimated $5bn. Also unknown is the pace with which the courts will determine LIV’s next steps. Bankruptcy paperwork states LIV has secured $300m in sponsorship contracts from 2027 until 2029 with “blue chip partners.” A large number of staff have already left the business.

McIlroy was speaking from the Irish Open at Donald Trump’s Doonbeg resort. The expectation there is that the US president will attend the event over the weekend. “They obviously have to lock down a specific area and make sure that it’s safe for him to travel into, and the entire delegation, whoever that is,” McIlroy said. “Logistically, it provides a bit of a challenge but we are at one of his properties that he has kindly provided for us to play a golf tournament.

“The president of the United States wants to come watch a little bit of golf. I think we are all happy to be here, grateful to be here. His presence at the Irish Open makes it a truly international event. That brings more attention and eyeballs to the Irish Open and it can only be a good thing.”

Keyword – Sport
Trefwoorden – US Open Tennis 2026, Tennis, US Open tennis, US sports, Sport, Carlos Alcaraz
Title – Ben Shelton wins on a night of vomit, sweat and home hopes at US Open | US Open Tennis 2026 | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/andrew-lawrence
Link – Ben Shelton wins on a night of vomit, sweat and home hopes at US Open | US Open Tennis 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:15:00.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/sep/09/ben-shelton-carlos-alcaraz-us-open

I n yet another graveyard shift at the US Open, Ben Shelton showed he can hang around late, ousting defending champion Carlos Alcaraz in five sets in a quarter-final that started on Tuesday night and finished on Wednesday morning . When Shelton fired the final ball out wide for his seventh ace of the night, the clock on the Arthur Ashe Stadium court read 3.33am. It was the latest-ever finish at the Open and the fifth-latest finish in grand slam history.

After embracing Alcaraz at the net, he pumped his fists and greeted his coach’s box with a primal scream. Parents have a name for this: the zoomies. Then Shelton looked to the stands and gestured at his mother and his girlfriend, soccer star Trinity Rodman. In his on-court interview, he asked that his sister, Emma, be given the day off. She had spent the entire night and much of the early morning watching her little brother play.

“I’m tired,” he told a gaggle of bleary-eyed reporters. “That was a war, an epic match.”

Shelton had not only equaled his deepest run in a grand slam; he made sure that the US will have at least one representative in Sunday’s final – he will play compatriot Frances Tiafoe in the semi-finals. The victor could become the first American man to win the US Open since Andy Roddick in 2003. One of them will become the first Black American man to reach a US Open final since Ashe in 1972.

Shelton, seeded eighth, enters the semi-final with a 3-1 head-to-head edge, including a win over Tiafoe in the 2023 US Open quarter-final that announced him as a force to be reckoned with. And as much as Shelton believed in his potential to contend for major titles (“I wanna be that dude in the draw that there’s not one player who wants to see me”, he said three years ago ), he still had yet to prove he could meet the big moments.

That’s not to knock Shelton. A 6ft 4in southpaw with a thunderous serve, he’s the best American men’s prospect to come along in a generation. He’s also exactly what US commentators had been wishing for with their pleas for some basketball forward or football wide receiver to pick up a racket and focus on tennis instead. In short order, Shelton went from winning a college national championship at the University of Florida to cracking the top 50 in the world to pushing Novak Djokovic in the 2023 US Open semi-finals. During that tournament, Shelton celebrated his victories by holding an imaginary phone to his ear, a gesture meant to show he had “answered the call”. But when Djokovic beat him en route to winning the title, the Serb infamously stole the celebration for himself.

This season has seen Shelton overtake Tiafoe, Tommy Paul and Taylor Fritz as the American men’s standard bearer while racking up titles on Munich clay and Stuttgart grass and defending his Masters 1000 crown in Canada. But despite that progress, there remained a gap between what Shelton looked capable of doing and what he actually did on the biggest stages: he held a 9-24 record against top-10 players and an 0-17 mark against the top three coming into the match against Alcaraz. The fact that the last three of his top-10 victories had all come against Fritz didn’t exactly portend a star turn against Alcaraz – who entered Tuesday’s match with a 3-0 record against Shelton.

Early on, it seemed the seven-time grand slam champion would find his way to the finish line even as he was still shaking off the rust from an extended layoff to heal an injured wrist. Alcaraz struck the ball firmly enough to stay in the long rallies with Shelton and nose ahead in a first-set tiebreak. (“I was pissed,” Shelton said afterward.) But no sooner had Alcaraz taken the match lead, his feel deserted him and the errors began piling up on his forehand and serve.

Seeing his opening, Shelton pounced, reeling off nine straight games on the way to a two-sets-to-one advantage. Shelton outmuscled Alcaraz from the service line, lashing 145mph fastballs with ease. He also outfoxed him at net, retrieving Alcaraz’s surprise drop shots and countering with some impressive volley work of his own. He extended what are ordinarily short rallies for Alcaraz by forcing him to hit extra balls for winners, pressing to end exchanges that went on too long, and goading him into more mistakes.

“I made him play a lot,” Shelton said. “I didn’t worry or stress too much when he hit his spot, hit unreturnable or an ace. I think for me to be able to hang in there in the rallies, have a gameplan from the ground and be able to execute that gameplan and not be losing all the baseline points also helps with the return.”

Altogether, Alcaraz finished with 134 errors – 53 of them unforced. Making matters worse, he didn’t have his own reliable serve or even his steady return game to fall back on. “Obviously when he’s serving, he puts a lot of pressure on you,” the Spaniard said afterward, smiling despite the tough loss. “You’re trying to put the return in. It’s an unknown if you’re going to play the point or [if] he’s going to get a free point with his serve. In these moments, he takes a lot of [the] advantage. It’s not an excuse, but I would say [his serve] is an important weapon in those moments.”

Alcaraz would storm back, of course, compensating for his miscalibrated game by chipping away at Shelton’s lethal first strike to give himself 11 break-point chances, converting three. (Until this match, Shelton hadn’t been broken in his prior eight sets.) As the pressure mounted, the defending champion showed signs of wear, hunching over his racket for support and angrily shooing away a cameraman from his chair before vomiting into a towel monogrammed to commemorate his US Open victory last year. Meanwhile Shelton held his nerve through to the tiebreak, scoring a late mini-break to go up 7-6 and consolidating with a pair of aces, the last torching the radar at 146mph to become the first American to defeat Alcaraz at a major. (The 14th try was the charm.)

Long before that blistering final shot touched down, the tennis center custodians were mopping up the aisles inside the stadium in preparation for Wednesday’s matches. When the diminished crowd that hung on till the bitter end wasn’t tearing their hair out over which player to support, the beeping of the grounds crew utility trucks trundling outside the stadium would pierce through the din like a bedside alarm clock. Shelton now has a golden opportunity to contend for a major, without Alcaraz and the injured Jannik Sinner standing in his way. It’s a big moment – one that, after Tuesday night and some of Wednesday morning, is so hazy it almost feels like a dream.

Keyword – Opinion
Trefwoorden – Humanitarian response, War crimes, Ukraine, Israel-Gaza war, Aid, World news
Title – Seven of my colleagues were killed in Gaza. There and in Ukraine, aid workers are no longer safe | José Andrés | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jos–andr-s
Link – Seven of my colleagues were killed in Gaza. There and in Ukraine, aid workers are no longer safe | José Andrés | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:00:01.000Z
Category – Opinion
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/09/gaza-ukraine-aid-workers-world-central-kitchen-workers-idf-geneva-conventions

I n times of war, the hard and vital work of supplying food, water and medicine has been protected by international agreements for almost 80 years . Yet those protections have been systematically and repeatedly ignored in the two most bloody wars of recent years: Ukraine and Gaza.

Russia has attacked healthcare targets in Ukraine more than 3,200 times since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to the World Health Organization : about twice a day on average. That includes many “double-tap” attacks on the same target in quick succession, which are especially lethal for first responders.

In April, the UN security council heard that in the past three years, at least 1,010 humanitarian workers had died in 21 countries. More than half of those were in Gaza and the West Bank. That is three times more than the 377 killed in the previous three years.

“This is not an accidental escalation,” said Tom Fletcher, the UN’s undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs. “It is the collapse of protection.” This collapse of protection has led directly to the airstrikes on aid workers in Gaza, including seven of my own World Central Kitchen (WCK) team, who were killed by the IDF in April 2024 despite full cooperation and coordination with the military.

At the time, the IDF concluded that the attacks had been “a grave mistake” and a breach of its own standard operating procedures. It stated : “We consider the vital humanitarian activity of international aid organizations to be of utmost importance, and we will continue to work to coordinate and assist their activities, while ensuring their safety and safeguarding their lives.” The reserve colonel who ordered the strikes, Nochi Mendel, was dismissed for his actions.

However, these fine words were undercut by the IDF itself, when its military prosecutor decided last month not to open a criminal investigation into the airstrikes on our convoy. Now we understand, because of a Guardian investigation, that the targeting of the WCK convoy was the result of a military tactic of guilt by association . It means that lethal force can be triggered by suspicions, shadows, or simply prejudice. This undefined, unjustified and unlawful tactic is a mortal threat to all humanitarians. What are the protections under these conditions?

It is worth remembering why the fourth Geneva convention was created in 1949 and embraced by the world, with the express intention of protecting civilians in war and meeting basic humanitarian needs. In the immediate aftermath of the second world war, the scale of civilian suffering shocked the world’s conscience. Indeed, one of the key architects of the convention was Georges Cahen-Salvador, a French Jewish civil servant, whose family was imprisoned at the Drancy internment camp. They were being deported to Auschwitz in 1943 when they managed to escape to Switzerland. He was one of several survivors who drafted the fourth convention.

The convention’s assertions of shared values in war are not lost today, but they are struggling to survive.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, famously said: “The fate of Israel depends on two things: its strength and its righteousness.” It’s something that Israel’s military leaders like to quote, but their record falls far short. Humanitarian values are the foundation of righteousness; they are what separate responsible nation states from terrorist groups or rogue states who don’t care about civilian suffering. The protection of aid workers allows the world to ensure that civilians are cared for.

We might be numb to the sight of Russia disregarding our values. But we surely cannot tolerate the only democracy in the Middle East behaving the same way.

José Andrés is the founder of the food aid charity World Central Kitchen, and a Michelin-starred chef

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

Keyword – Games
Trefwoorden – Games, Culture
Title – Streaming from the cloud was meant to change games forever – what happened? | Games | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/keza-macdonald
Link – Streaming from the cloud was meant to change games forever – what happened? | Games | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-09T14:00:00.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/sep/09/streaming-from-the-cloud-was-meant-to-changes-games-forever-what-happened

I n August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza.) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future.

Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later.

Despite the fact that people simply don’t seem to want game streaming services – or at least not enough to pay a stand-alone monthly subscription for them – Sony and Microsoft have remained steadfastly committed to the idea, bundling game streaming into their PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass services. I use both quite regularly when I want to check out a game quickly, mostly because modern download sizes are ridiculous (Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, say, takes up nearly 150GB of my PS5 space, almost a quarter of its usable storage). Who wants to do 30 minutes of hard drive management every time they want to play something new?

Last week, however, Microsoft announced that it was introducing time limits for game streaming: you’re now allowed 5-15 hours a month, depending on your subscription tier. And yes, you’re right: that is not enough time to play through even one single average-sized game. This brings Microsoft’s previously unwavering commitment to cloud gaming into question – and when even Microsoft with its infinite resources can’t seem to make it work, is the writing on the wall for game streaming as a whole?

In the early days, the biggest problem with streaming was input lag: the time it took for the game to respond to your button-pressing. Normally, when you’re playing a game this lag is imperceptible. Via streaming, it would often be horribly obvious, your character taking maybe a full second to jump after you’d pressed the A button. Not all games rely heavily on timing and finesse, but a lot of them do, and playing games on a minor time-delay felt nauseating.

This is much less of an issue now, but another problem has only gotten worse: game streaming requires the instantaneous transmission of a lot of data, making it taxing on your internet connection and expensive for the service provider. Here’s a comparison: watching an hour of Netflix uses about 1GB of data. An hour of game streaming via Xbox requires about 4GB. Microsoft’s servers have to stream you the video of your live gameplay, and continually receive and interpret your controller inputs. No wonder Microsoft suddenly wants to limit your hours.

The cloud gaming model has always been based on the idea that data infrastructure would become faster and cheaper in the future. Its selling point is outsourcing computing power so that you can play whatever you want without upgrading your console or PC, or even without having one at all. Unfortunately, thanks to AI companies and their chatbots’ bottomless demand for computing power and energy, the opposite has happened. Data and computing power are now more expensive. Ironically, this change has been driven by Microsoft itself as much as anything else: a huge chunk of the company’s spending went on data centres and AI infrastructure in the last fiscal year. This suggests that Microsoft is choosing to prioritise data provision for users of Azure and Copilot over its gaming customers.

Will this affect you? Probably not. Only 4% of all Game Pass subscribers use it for more than 15 hours a month, Microsoft said in a blog post announcing the changes. Which brings us right back to the question: if cloud gaming really is the future, why is nobody using it? It’s been a long time since that 2009 demo, and this technology has still yet to meaningfully break through. Is it time to give up on it?

Alongside Sony and Microsoft, there is one other player left in this death match: the US-based tech firm Nvidia, whose GeForce Now game-streaming service (launched in 2013 and revamped many times since) might just be the world’s most successful. Nvidia has been riding high on the AI boom, becoming the most valuable company in the world. Its computing hardware powers all the datacentres that the rest of the tech industry has been building, to satisfy imagined future AI demand. Perhaps, when all of this shakes out, it will be the only company left that can afford to provide game streaming services at all.

What to play

I have been variably unwell for most of the summer, and in need of something absorbing, so I dived into Kingdom Come Deliverance II – think Skyrim, but 15th-century historical fiction.

I was impressed immediately by the outstanding script, story and performances, all of which are much more humorous and entertaining than I was expecting from a hardcore medieval RPG. And I also love how unashamedly laborious this game is: you must control each swipe of a drawn-out sword fight; you have to manually grind and mix herbs for health-restoring concoctions; and if you want anyone to speak to you, you must regularly wash your face (and grubby tunic) so you don’t stink. Last night, I spent 20 minutes hammering out horseshoes in the forge. The opening hours have you hauling sacks of flour around while a tavern landlady swears at you.

I can’t help but respect this naturalist commitment to grime and busywork; knight-life isn’t all horseplay, you know. I have spent many, many hours with this game and I am still basically a stinking peasant. I may well never finish it, but I am resolved to at least get to the point where I have my own steed and a pair of decent boots.

Available on: Xbox, PlayStation 5, PC Estimated playtime: 55+ hours

What to read

A Nintendo broadcast on Tuesday spilled a bunch of new details about the upcoming Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, which I’m relieved to say is looking beautiful. Link looks doll-like in the updated style, and Hyrule Castle Town looks a bit like a living Playmobil village overlaid with a watercolour-ish filter that makes the whole game look like something half remembered. (I am somewhat less enthused by the addition of voice acting to the cutscenes; Navi was already annoying enough.) Check out the demo here .

For the Ringer, frequent Guardian games contributor Lewis Gordon has written this excellent long-read on Japanese publisher Capcom ’s current streak of brilliance, talking to a host of executives and developers about exactly how the company has bucked the trend while the rest of the games industry is on fire.

Patrick Miller – better known as pattheflip – has published a thought-provoking reflection on how and why some players become overinvested – even dependent – on video games. “I say this as someone who has loved video games his whole life; if games serve a load-bearing function in someone’s life, it’s the life that needs fixing, not the games.”

At the end of last week, the White House released this horrible little propaganda arcade , featuring nasty riffs on popular games, such as a version of Tetris where you have to build a wall on the Mexican border to stave off “the coming horde”. That particular game was later removed after The Tetris Company expressed its opposition.

What to click

Grand Theft Auto VI: can playing a video game count as cheating on your partner?

Thieves target mail order sales as Pokémon card prices soar

‘Ruin and decay bring a chance of rebirth’: Hidetaka Miyazaki on uniting players in a damaged world

Question Block

Reader Piero sent in this question (along with some super-nice feedback on the newsletter – thank you, Piero!):

“I enjoy the occasional foray into story-driven RPGs, such as Kingdom Come Deliverance , Skyrim and the Baldur’s Gate series, but as I get older I’m finding the continual combat sections overwhelming and dull. Could you recommend me some good RPGs that don’t rely on combat as the main game mechanic?”

You’re not alone, Piero – for a surprising proportion of players, combat is just something you have to do in order to get to the bits of a game that you find more interesting. Most RPGs these days have a “story mode” option that at least makes all the fighting trivially easy, if you’re not interested in engaging with it. There is of course Disco Elysium , a complex role-playing game with no combat at all; like Citizen Sleeper , it is mostly text-based. I have heard good things about Eastshade , an open-world game where you’re a painter rather than a fighter. I’d also suggest Pentiment , though it’s a very different style from Skyrim. And Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is worth a look if you don’t mind cutesy.

If you have a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com .