The jury in the trial of two prisoners accused of murdering the paedophile Lostprophets frontman, Ian Watkins, has been discharged for legal reasons.
The disgraced singer was stabbed to death in his cell at high-security HMP Wakefield by Rico Gedel, 25. Watkins was serving a 29-year sentence for child sexual offences.
Leeds crown court heard that after walking out of the cell, Gedel handed the makeshift knife to his fellow prisoner Samuel Dodsworth, 44, who threw it in a bin.
Both defendants denied murdering Watkins and possessing a knife in prison.
On Friday the judge, Mr Justice Hilliard, discharged the jury, telling them: “Very reluctantly, I’m going to discharge you and the case will have to be retried.
“That’s disappointing for you and for everyone.”
Gedel told the trial he hated being housed with sex offenders at Wakefield and had threatened to hurt “any number of paedophiles” if he was not transferred.
He said he chose Watkins largely due to “proximity”, as he had been put in the cell next to him the night before, after being moved from another wing for assaulting three prisoners there.
Gedel said “part of him” wanted to kill Watkins, but another part did not, adding: “Sometimes what your heart wants is not what your brain wants.”
Prosecutors had said Gedel and Dodsworth were both guilty of murder because Dodsworth “knew the attack was going to happen” and assisted Gedel by disposing of the knife.
Dodsworth, who is serving a sentence for raping a woman, said he played no part in the attack and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He said Gedel handed the knife to him after emerging from Watkins’s cell, and he tried to give it back but ended up throwing it away after panicking at the sight of an injured Watkins.
Watkins was jailed for 29 years in December 2013, with a further six years on licence, after admitting a string of sex offences, including the attempted rape of a fan’s baby.
D on’t call Boots Riley an anti-capitalist, at least not without qualification. “I’m a communist,” he clarifies. “A lot of stuff that calls itself anti-capitalist is doing so because they’re afraid of calling themselves socialist or communist or something else.”
But the one-size-fits-all label persists for a reason. From his early work with the Coup, a subversive hip-hop group that gleefully mocked the genre’s prevailing culture of wretched excess on albums like Kill My Landlord and Genocide & Juice, Riley has made art that treats capitalism less as the operating system for daily life, complete with its expected bugs, than an axeman lurking under the bed.
As a director, Riley uses dark comedy and magical realism to render capitalism a tangible bogeyman, suffocating the ambitions of young strivers. His debut feature Sorry to Bother You, which shares its title with a Coup album, skewers telemarketing avarice and predation; his limited series I’m a Virgo, about a 13ft-tall Black teen raised in near-total isolation, extends the critique into the commodification of Black bodies, where value is assigned before agency is even possible.
His latest film, I Love Boosters , turns shoplifting into a Robin Hood–style proletarian allegory, where stealing itself is a mode of survival. And it arrives amid renewed debate over retail theft, with some on the left framing small-scale “boosting” as a form of resistance , and labor advocates warning that it ultimately harms workers while giving retailers cover to escalate enforcement and pursue felony charges . “Theft is not outside of capitalism; it’s what capitalism was built on – and not even, like, metaphorically,” Riley says. “The bourgeoisie was no different in that they stole land, stole minerals, stole labor. But that theft is thought of as legal.”
Boosting, he adds, is a moral distinction that gives cover to industrialists who pursue perpetual growth at all costs. “I don’t buy the idea that retailers have to raise their profits because of shoplifting; they’re just using it as an excuse,” he says. “We found a clear example of that here with [Walgreens] in the Bay Area saying shoplifting was causing them to close and restructure – and then a recording of [executives] telling shareholders that, really, shoplifting had nothing to do with it .”
In I Love Boosters, Keke Palmer plays Corvette, a sharp, fashion-obsessed design aspirant haunted by a literal boulder of debt. She squats inside an abandoned fried chicken shack and leads the Velvet Gang, an all-female shoplifting crew that hits high-end San Francisco stores and funnels the goods back to her working-class Oakland community.
Demi Moore is Christie Smith, a haute couturier who embodies capital itself, treating fashion as a form of population control – selling color while styling herself in monochrome – and raging at the Velvet Gang’s repeated disruptions to her business. Christie declares war on those “low-class, urban bitches”; Corvette responds by upping the ante, and a Chinese factory worker – Hacks’ Poppy Liu – actually teleports into the situation and ties the street-level class struggle to labor unrest overseas. Along the way, there’s Don Cheadle in a fat suit, demon cunnilingus, a treatise on Hegelian dialectics – or so I thought until Riley jumped in again to clarify: “It’s Marx’s dialectical materialism. Hegel’s is more historical as opposed to economic.”
In person, Riley, 55, reads less like an avant-garde auteur than a tweedy university professor. He speaks in full paragraphs and delivers his lines with an office-hours kind of unguardedness, his ideas about economics and culture as bold and idiosyncratic as his trademark hats and mutton chop side burns. While Riley was holding forth about his new film for the New Yorker , the Daily Show and NPR’s Fresh Air , his cast took a less traditional promotional route. The highlight was a stop at an Oakland gas station where Palmer and LaKeith Stanfield posed with customers and gave away free fill-ups as a live rooster looked on from the roof of an SUV.
“The roosters are out ,” Riley beamed when I asked him about the pop-up. “What’s crazy is I think they just passed an ordinance to ban roosters in Oakland. You can have chickens, but you can’t have roosters – which to me is the fun part, living in an area that’s got roosters. You wake up, and it feels like nature.”
The bizarre scene is par for any production tied to Riley, a lifelong Oakland resident who has made the city a consistent backdrop for his work; in fact, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in I Love Boosters, which delights in far-fetched and over-the-top imagery – from Corvette looking like the Michelin Man as she hauls off in a tracksuit full of stolen goods to Christy taking up residence inside a leaning tower that looks close to toppling.
When I ask Riley if he could land his anti-capitalist criticisms as effectively without surrealism as a Trojan horse, he is unequivocal. “The style and content are inextricably linked,” he says. “I could just say to people, hey, we need a world in which the people democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor. But I’m wanting people to have emotional and visceral reactions, to have this push and pull where they think about the ideas in a different way.”
That sensibility doesn’t stop at aesthetics; it extends to his support for Palestinian freedom and for other Hollywood figures who have expressed solidarity. Melissa Barrera, who was fired from a leading role in Scream 7 and effectively branded an antisemite over social media posts criticizing Israel in 2023, has been held up as a cautionary tale about the risks of bringing radical views too close to the set. “It doesn’t stop me from speaking out,” Riley says. “It didn’t stop Melissa Barrera. And she’s not squatting in a chicken shack. But that’s the lesson they want to give.”
Riley also gestured at the controversy around Rachel Zegler’s public comments on the Gaza war during the promotional run for Disney’s live-action Snow White, which fueled online rumors of Hollywood producers compiling informal lists – via spreadsheets or group chats – of actors and other industry talent perceived as sympathetic to Palestinians.
He claims that his own name was added to a blacklist while he was advocating on behalf of the writers’ and directors’ unions during their contentious collective bargaining sessions in 2023, and that he pushed back when a reporter reached out to confirm the story. “I argued with the reporter, saying: ‘What is the service that this coming out does?” he recalled. “Like, are you exposing those in power, or are you making people scared of those in power?’ I find it’s the latter.”
As an independent film-maker, Riley considers himself relatively insulated from the kinds of industry pressures that can make Hollywood creators vulnerable to shifting moods and backlash – an irony he acknowledges as a self-styled champion of the working class. “I’m never trying to get a job. I’m trying to make the things I’m trying to make,” he says. “I might make the $5,000 version or the $50m version. I can do that.”
It’s perhaps why he has drawn criticism for collaborating with Annapurna Pictures, the boutique production company run by Megan Ellison, daughter of the Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a major donor to pro-Israel causes whose wealth and influence over American media have expanded amid the consolidation of tech and political power. Of course, Riley is quick to clarify the relationship: Annapurna acquired Sorry to Bother You after its 2018 Sundance premiere, and he separately developed I Love Boosters under a deal at the company before the project was ultimately picked up and financed by Neon. “Annapurna may have boosted the signal, but that’s the extent of the connection there,” he says.
As for the Ellison name, Riley adds: “The only thing Megan has ever said in relation to that is: ‘I just want you to know I’m not my father.’ But it’s interesting that it’s such an issue when BlackRock and Vanguard – major shareholders in Disney and Netflix, as well as Regal, Cinemark and AMC – also give billions upon billions to Israel. So I get the critique, unless you’re saying: don’t make a movie, don’t show it in theaters, because they get 50% of the income. Even if you make an independent movie, you’re still in this business. It’s really a liberal critique.”
Even so, the corporate contradictions underpinning Riley’s work haven’t proved potent enough to smother its political charge. He often hears from viewers inspired to organize labor movements in their own communities after watching his projects. He fondly recalls a group of telemarketers who approached him eager to go on strike after Sorry to Bother You. There was just one problem: they had already agreed to work from home. “I was like, that’s not gonna work,” he joked.
He can resist the anti-capitalist label all he wants. The shoe still fits. “I’m someone who believes that what gets us the world that we want starts right now with a mass militant radical labor movement – one that uses the withholding of labor as a tactic to shut down parts of industries, whole industries. We can do our own version of the strait of Hormuz.”
I Love Boosters is out now in the US and in the UK and Australia later this year
‘Hope is in the air,’ says Burnham at campaign launch
Andy Burnham has welcomed supporters at his campaign launch, telling them “this means the world to me”.
“Hope is in the air, can you feel it?” he said.
“This is not business as usual. This is not more of the same … British politics is tired. It needs a new script. And over the next four weeks, the people of Makerfield are going to write that script.”
Burnham said the government was “moving in the right direction” on immigration, after figures this week showed net migration to the UK fell by nearly 50%.
Commenting on plans for retrospective changes for those being granted indefinite leave to remain , he said: “I know there have been concerns raised by members of parliament on that issue. So, I have indicated broad support for what the home secretary is trying to do, but I do think on that issue care needs to be taken.”
His remarks came after the Guardian reported that he backed Shabana Mahmood’s controversial changes to the immigration system, according to his allies. Deputy political editor Jessica Elgot and policy editor Kiran Stacey wrote:
[Mahmood] set out a major package of changes earlier this year that included scrapping permanent refugee status and removing government support from asylum seekers who are deemed not to need it or who break the law. Anyone who has been granted asylum but whose country is then deemed to be safe will be asked to leave.
She also promised to double the length of time it takes for some people to achieve settled status in the UK from five years to 10, a measure which officials say will apply to many already in the country. That is due to come in later this year once the government has completed a consultation on which groups should be exempted from the longer timetable.
Some senior Labour MPs have criticised the changes as un-British and mimicking Donald Trump.
Burnham said he thought the NHS was “almost being overwhelmed” by a “broken” care system.
The Greater Manchester mayor, whose father has Alzheimer’s, said he believed there should be a different way of paying for care.
He said: “It’s a reverse of the NHS principle, social care, that the most unfortunate can just like lose everything, and it’s an awful thing.”
He added:
I know there’s a great resentment about inheritance tax, so actually just, you know, take that away, perhaps, and look at a care levy.
It’s not about asking people to pay more, it’s just people paying in the most unfair way possible at this moment in time and I think there’s a much better way of doing it, and people just have peace of mind while they’re alive, because they get the care that they need, and then it will be dealt with in a much better way.
He continued:
Our hospitals are full of people who are medically fit to be at home or in a care home, but can’t be discharged.
The cost of that to the NHS, in my view, is getting bigger than the cost of fixing social care.
Actually, the NHS is almost being overwhelmed by a broken care system.
Burnham said the Labour manifesto presented in 2024 could be “more radical”.
He said he wanted to see more council houses being built and that Labour should “be more radical on rail re-nationalisation”.
PA has reported more of his remarks:
I’m personally keen to see reform of council tax. It’s a highly regressive tax, and I think it’s not justifiable based on those 1991 valuations. I see a big case for land and property and business taxation to be changed.
Asked about new guidance on single sex spaces, Andy Burnham said: “I think the time has come to take the Supreme Court ruling and the guidance and implement it, but to do it in a way that protects those spaces but does not marginalise already marginalised communities, that’s my view.
“My mum and dad brought me up to live and let live. I think Britain needs to get back to a more ‘live and let live’ approach to life, not where we’re constantly arguing with each other, being judgmental about each other.
“Lets implement the guidance, but to do it in the fairest and most compassionate way possible.”
He said he thought Britain had done too much of rerunning arguments. “We’ve got to stop arguing with each other. We’ve got to start by finding some common ground and start pulling together,” he added.
Speaking to the media at his campaign launch, Andy Burnham said he would want to commit to changing the electoral system in the next Labour manifesto.
He said:
I support electoral reform. Now, I know there’s different ways you can do it, but I believe any move in that direction is going to be good and I would want a commitment in the next Labour manifesto to introduce a proportional system.
He ruled out changing the system before the next election, saying:
I think you’ve got to honour manifestos.
A Green MP has announced she is to take a leave of absence after suffering “burnout”.
Carla Denyer, the party’s former co-leader, said she would be off work for several weeks in order to try to recover following advice her doctor.
The MP for Bristol Central said she had been struggling with “persistent health issues” over the last few years and that she hoped to “combat the stigma” surrounding burnout by being open about her experience.
Her constituency office will continue to function as usual over the coming weeks, she said.
In a statement on Friday, Denyer wrote:
Over the last few years, I have been struggling with persistent health issues, and I have been trying to manage these alongside the long hours and significant responsibility my work entails.
It has become clear that this is not an effective strategy and that doing so is inhibiting my ability to recover. Having taken advice from my doctor, I will be taking several weeks off in order to try to get back to full health.
I want to be open about the fact that what I am suffering from is burnout – and the mental and physical symptoms that arise from it.
Burnout is a condition that does not tend to get better on its own. If left unmanaged, it can worsen and increase your risk of long-term health problems.
Here are some photos from Andy Burnham’s official campaign launch earlier today:
In other news, the defence secretary, John Healey, has urged Nigel Farage to provide transparency about the £5m gift he received from a billionaire businessman, in particular over whether any of the sum could have been linked to Russia-connected profits, the Guardian’s senior political correspondent Peter Walker reports.
In a letter to the Reform UK leader, Healey also asked him to address the possibility that the war against Iran might boost the revenues of AML Global, an aviation fuel company owned by Christopher Harborne, who gave Farage the £5m in 2024. Farage initially supported the US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
The letter, seen by the Guardian, asked Farage to confirm that none of the sum was “derived from transactions with Russian state-linked energy companies”, and to give assurances that AML Global had complied fully with all sanctions on Russian energy since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Read more here:
Liberal Democrats announce Makerfield byelection candidate
Burnham has finished his speech, just as we get an announcement from the Liberal Democrats on their candidate for the Makerfield byelection .
Stockport councillor Jake Austin will stand for the party. He was born in the constituency and contested the Greater Manchester mayoral election against Burnham in 2024, coming sixth, according to PA.
Austin said:
I’m thrilled to have been selected as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Makerfield.
Voters in Makerfield deserve so much more than the failing Labour government or the divisive politics of Reform UK.
We have a real opportunity to champion the issues that matter most to people: the cost of living, protecting our natural environment and supporting our local high streets and businesses.
Burnham: ‘A vote for me is a vote to change Labour’
Continuing on the theme of change, Burnham said a vote for him in the Makerfield byelection is “a vote to change Labour”.
I know my own party needs to change. We need to be better than we’ve been. We’ve not been good enough. And I want to leave people in no doubt today, a vote for me in this byelection campaign is a vote to change Labour.
He hailed the successes of Greater Manchester and Liverpool since he left Westminster in 2017.
We’ve stood side by side, making the argument for something better for the north-west, through the devolved power that we have got and that we hold together.
And in those ten years we have built a new politics. We’ve worked on a place first basis, rather than party first. We’ve focused on problem solving rather than point scoring. And you know what? When you do that and you work differently, it’s amazing what you can achieve, isn’t it?
SpaceX publicly released an investor prospectus on Wednesday as part of its plan for a $1.75tn debut on the US stock market next month, revealing unseen details about the finances and future plans of Elon Musk ’s flagship company. In addition to new information on operating costs and revenue, the filing also included trademark Muskian sweeping proclamations about the universe and insights into some of the quirks of his tech empire.
Scattered throughout the 300-plus-page prospectus are several disclosures and risk warnings that show the eccentricities of Musk’s company and its cosmic ambitions. Other financial details in the document highlight how interdependent Musk’s various businesses have become and the risks that they carry.
As SpaceX barrels towards the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the history of the US stock market, here is a look at some of the strange details buried within its filing.
SpaceX spent about $131m on Cybertrucks last year
SpaceX appears to have done extensive business with Tesla , spending hundreds of millions of dollars with Musk’s electric car company in recent years. Although much of that money – $506m to Tesla in 2025 and $191m in 2024 – went to purchasing Tesla’s Megapack battery product, SpaceX also spent lavishly on Cybertrucks.
The prospectus discloses that in 2025 SpaceX obtained $131m worth of Cybertrucks at the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, which ranges between about $69,900 and $99,900, depending on the options. At that price, SpaceX would have acquired at least 1,300 vehicles.
Tesla only sold a total of 20,237 Cybertrucks last year, according to auto industry sales reports , meaning that SpaceX’s purchases made up a significant portion of its overall sales.
Extend ‘the light of consciousness’ to the stars
Throughout the investor prospectus, SpaceX reiterates that its ultimate goal is to establish colonies on the moon and Mars that will usher in human civilization’s next evolution and expand humanity’s presence in the universe.
“By moving beyond the only home we have ever known, we ensure species-level redundancy and that the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet subject to the inevitable hazards of a harsh and vast universe,” the prospectus says. “We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.”
At one point, the prospectus includes what appears to be an AI-generated rendering of life on Mars . The image shows a family on Mars looking out at a rocket launch amid a field of geodesic domes and rows of solar panels.
The sci-fi rhetoric is not theoretical; it bears financial stakes. Musk will receive an award of 1bn shares in the company if SpaceX achieves “the establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants”.
The interplanetary ambitions of SpaceX’s central mission also result in some warnings to investors. Reaching such unusual business goals as understanding the “true nature of the universe” may prove difficult, the company advises.
“We face a number of challenges relating to our business and growth strategy and, ultimately, the achievement of our mission to make life multiplanetary, understand the true nature of the universe, and extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” the prospectus reads.
Warnings about Grok
The section of SpaceX’s filing that outlines risks to investors contains an array of legal and regulatory issues that reference various investigations, lawsuits and scandals involving Musk. Several of these relate to xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company that SpaceX acquired in February.
One passage in the prospectus discloses that xAI’s Grok chatbot, especially its “spicy” and “unhinged” modes, present a heightened risk of creating numerous harms including “the generation of potentially explicit content and misinformation or deceptive outputs, potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery, intellectual property infringement, or content that could be viewed as exploitative, harmful, harassing, abusive, or discriminatory”.
The prospectus also states that the company is the subject of numerous domestic and international law enforcement investigations and inquiries related to allegations of Grok creating nonconsensual images.
Grok generated more than 3m sexualized images in the span of just 11 days earlier this year before the company increased some restrictions on its output, according to an estimate from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. The bot itself disclosed that it had generated images of “minors in minimal clothing”. Several people, including minors, have filed lawsuits since alleging the company profited off of sexual predation and child sexual abuse material.
SpaceX spent $4m last year on Musk’s personal security
Musk has long expressed public concern about his personal safety and threats to his security. Through his private foundation and one of his top lieutenants, Musk has registered security companies in both California and Texas to provide him protection.
SpaceX’s filing shows that it has funneled increasing amounts of money in recent years to Musk’s security firm, with expenses of $2m in 2023, $3m in 2024 and $4m last year related to the company. It also stated that it spent $1m during the first three months of 2026 on its services.
Musk has repeatedly claimed that he frequently faces death threats and risks to his safety, especially during the period when he became the face of his “department of government efficiency” effort to gut federal agencies and humanitarian aid.
SpaceX may never become profitable
While outlining risk factors, SpaceX includes several large caveats surrounding its products and plans. The company disclosed that its massive amounts of spending have resulted in huge losses, including $4.9bn in 2025 and $4.3bn in the first quarter of this year alone. Such disclosures accounting for potential future risks and the uncertainty of guaranteed revenue are standard in IPO filings.
“We have a history of net losses and may not achieve profitability in the future,” the prospectus states.
Elsewhere in the filing, SpaceX disclaims that, in order to make its vision successful, it will have to continue to pour more money into experimental and unproven technologies. These big swings, core to its business, may simply not work out: “Many of the innovative products and services described elsewhere in this prospectus may ultimately be unsuccessful and may require great expense.”
T his dreamlike, intimate album unites one of experimental music’s current stars with one of its most prolific veterans. During an interview promoting 2024’s acclaimed Sentir Que No Sabes , 34-year-old Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti praised Bill Orcutt, the 64-year-old US guitarist whose disjointed, aggressive four-string playing – honed in 90s noise-rock band Harry Pussy – graces more than 100 records. Orcutt reached out, and they started sharing files. While their friendship is new, Almost Waking reveals a deep kinship between these true originals.
The album centres on conversational duets between Fratti’s cello and Orcutt’s guitar. On the overdriven Forced & Forced & Forced, Orcutt’s trademark string-snapping plucking is matched by Fratti’s fragmented, agitated bow-scraping. Just as both players can wrestle with their instruments, they know how to make them feel like voices. On Steps of the Sun, the cello and guitar harmonise tenderly and take turns as lead, performed with the complex phrasing and dynamism of a sung duet.
Fratti’s soaring vocals appear on two tracks. El Inicio Es Cuestión de Suerte is a stately ballad set to a looping guitar melody, while Todo Puede Ser Error has more showmanship, featuring a jangling Orcutt solo. If the instrumentals reveal how naturally Fratti fits in Orcutt’s spidery world – her lusher, warped art-pop shaped by the same fragmentation – these tracks prove his adversarial style can work in more melodic settings. While Almost Waking feels like an aside for Fratti and Orcutt, both are reframed in this wonderfully alive-sounding album.
W hen Matthias Herget, flanked by Horst Feilzer and Norbert Brinkmann, lifted der Pott on a sun-dappled evening at Berlin’s Olympic stadium four decades ago, a unique moment passed in the stolid world of German football. A cup shock, the kind of wonderful giant-killing that is fairly routine in the English game but barely translates elsewhere.
Looking back now, it remains a seismic inverting of the natural order in a nation more used to an honour roll dominated by a handful of major clubs. Bayer 05 Uerdingen had just beaten Bayern Munich , the holders, 2-1 to win the 1985 German Cup final. As Goethe wrote: “Nothing is worth more than this day.”
Incredibly, Uerdingen wrenched the big bronze-and-gemstone trophy from the southern aristos’ grasp at the Olympiastadion in (then) West Berlin, before German reunification. It was the first time the DFB-Pokal final has been staged in the former German capital, and the script did not go to plan.
Since 1953, the climax of the competition had been a moveable feast, staged all over West Germany in neutral venues – from Düsseldorf, to Kassel, to Stuttgart, to Hannover and places in between – but that year, at long last, the grand old stadium that staged the 1936 Olympic Games had been spruced up and once more held 72,000 spectators, with the rest of the nation tuning in.
The magnitude of Uerdingen’s upset must be gauged against the supremacy of Bayern Munich. By 1985 the Bavarians had won the German Cup seven times since its first iteration in 1953, as well as the European Cup hat-trick of 1974, 1975 and 1976 that placed them among the first rank of the continent’s football powerhouses. This season they are again in the final and will face Stuttgart on Saturday evening.
By contrast Uerdingen were the club of Krefeld, an unassuming German city of about 300,000 souls on the north Rhine, a place perennially eclipsed by its showy neighbour Düsseldorf. They were a modest club who had hitherto won little of note but, with the backing of the German chemicals giant Bayer AG, Uerdingen – along with their near neighbours at fellow works-backed Bayer 04 Leverkusen – were prospering.
Under the canny leadership of the head coach, Kalli Feldkamp, and the club’s ambitious chair, Arno Eschler, Uerdingen – who had only been promoted to the Bundesliga a couple of years earlier – were unheralded, the underdogs who were never expected to bite. And that despite taking Bayern to a replay in their previous DFB-Pokal meeting in 1984. Bayern went on to beat Borussia Mönchengladbach on penalties in the 1984 final.
The team in white that afternoon, 26 May 1985, were devoid of household names. Horst Feilzer and Wolfgang Schäfer were the goalscorers. Playmaking in midfield were the Funkel brothers, Friedhelm and Wolfgang. Udo Lattek’s celebrated Bayern, meanwhile, had Dieter Hoeness – who scored Bayern’s only goal – a young Lothar Matthäus and Klaus Augenthaler in their ranks.
Bayern grab an early lead in the eighth minute through Hoeness. But Uerdingen come back in a flash, equalising a minute later through Feilzer. The winner arrives in the second half, as Schäfer scores the decisive goal in the 66th minute and, implausibly, Uerdingen hold on for a historic victory.
There is delirium among fans of the Blue and Reds, a parade of sorts along the Ku’damm back to the team hotel, where even the normally reserved Berliners flock on to pavements to cheer the winners. The players’ wives greet them with more bottles of champagne. Celebrations at the bar on the 14th floor of the Hotel Intercontinental rage late into night. There is a banquet and speeches. Bleary eyed the following morning, Eschler muses: “ Ich hoffe dass dies keine einmmailie [I hope this is not a one-off].”
There was indeed more to follow for Uerdingen. They blazed a trail to the European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-finals in 1986. Their tumultuous quarter-final against East Germany’s Dynamo Dresden became embedded in the club’s lore as the “Miracle of the Grotenburg” after an improbable second-leg comeback at their home ground. That tie was watched by 18m television viewers, the German broadcaster ZDF airing that match instead of Bayern’s game against Anderlecht in the European Cup. They finished third in the Bundesliga in the season after their cup win.
But their Icarus moment passed soon enough and the club’s fortunes declined when Bayer AG withdrew financial support in 1995, opting instead to invest their football budget in Leverkusen alone. They were renamed KFC Uerdingen but tumbled down the German leagues, endured insolvencies along the way and now play in the fifth-tier Oberliga.
KFC remain a proud and well-supported side. Last November, they celebrated the club’s 120th anniversary. Their open concrete bowl of a stadium, the Grotenburg, stands adjacent to Krefeld’s zoo. On matchdays, fans down alt beer and consume hot currywurst to the background noise of elephants and big cats, after they have picked their way past the emptying stalls of the morning’s regular Trödelmarkt flea market.
There is progress on the pitch, too. Under Julian Stöhr, Krefeld were finishing the season strongly, pressing for promotion, until a 6-1 drubbing by Schonnebeck dented their prospects. After a lively 1-1 draw against Kleve, they sit third in the Oberliga Niederrhein table with two matches remaining.
Insolvency proceedings against the club were lifted at the end of April, to their understandable relief, and marks “a crucial milestone for our club,” according to the chairman, Norbert Philipp, who took over in March. He understands only too well the club has has struggled to find backers, but remains optimistic about the future, telling the Westdeutsche Zeitung : “There’s a lot of bad blood in the past, and yet we’ve still managed to attract more than 60 sponsors. The club’s appeal is so strong that there are still people who support it.”
Football is littered with the tales of clubs that have flared brilliantly but all too briefly. In Krefeld they know this only too well. They are beginning to understand the cruel footballing fates in Leicester , too.
The English city boasted the Premier League champions a decade ago, but Leicester City have sunk into League One after a calamitous season in the Championship. Coincidentally, since 1969 Leicester has been twinned with the small city on the Rhine that once celebrated Bayer Uerdingen’s monumental giant-killing.
The parents of a girl critically injured in the Southport attack were allowed no more than 12 counselling sessions after the atrocity, while others described a “woeful” lack of support.
The victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, Claire Waxman, said she would raise the “deeply concerning” experiences of Southport families with ministers, after their accounts were shared with the Guardian .
Nicola Ryan-Donnelly, of Fletchers solicitors, which represents 22 of the 23 surviving children, said a number of the parents had not received proper psychological help nearly two years after the attack.
Families were “passed from pillar to post” and had to “really fight” for support, she said, adding: “There are countless problems in the system highlighted by this attack, but support for survivors in the aftermath of something like this has to change. We have to do better than this.”
Three girls – Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine – were murdered, and eight other children and two adults were stabbed repeatedly in the attack on a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club on 29 July 2024.
The parents of five girls who were seriously injured in the stabbings have spoken for the first time about their ordeal in interviews with the Guardian. They described the incredible acts of heroism by their daughters that day, as they shielded and helped each other escape the killer, Axel Rudakubana.
Some of the families discussed their frustration at the lack of psychological support in the aftermath. Many of the parents had rushed to the scene and described searching frantically for their children, not knowing if they were alive. They then spent days in hospital as their daughters underwent life-saving operations.
The mother of a seven-year-old girl who was critically injured said her husband – who rushed to the scene to find their daughter – was refused more than 12 counselling sessions by Victim Support, despite still suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder.
She said that while the charity’s support for their daughter, who the Guardian is calling Daisy, was “incredible” and an “absolute lifeline”, the counselling for them as parents was “not fit for purpose”.
“For the adult services, Victim Support was just really unhelpful and it felt incredibly pressured and stressful,’” she said, describing how the sessions felt like “chit chat, with no direction”.
“The whole offering for the parents has been really disappointing for us. I know Victim Support is a charity, but there was absolutely no mechanism in place to support the parents once [its] service ended.”
Parents were offered a maximum of 12 sessions each with a Victim Support counsellor which meant, they said, having to “ration” when they accessed help in order to save some therapy for the trial and public inquiry. “Our experience has been more frustrating than we would have liked,” said Daisy’s mother. “It’s hard to have to justify why you’re traumatised.”
Victim Support said its offer of eight to 12 therapy sessions for parents aimed to help stabilise people at a crisis point rather than being a long-term solution and that, if they need further help, they would be referred to the NHS.
The charity said its approach followed guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). However, these state that adults suffering PTSD should “typically” be offered eight to 12 sessions “but more if clinically indicated”.
A Victim Support spokesperson said the Southport attack was devastating for all involved and its thoughts were with all those affected, adding that the wellbeing of victims and witnesses was its “absolute priority”.
They added: “We take any concerns raised extremely seriously. We continually assess the support we provide and seek ongoing feedback from those who use our services as part of our commitment to shape and improve them. We are grateful for the feedback we receive, and we are dedicated to providing vital, high-quality services to all victims, whenever they need us.”
Waxman, the victims’ commissioner, said that in addition to speaking to ministers, she would raise parents’ concerns with the chief executive of Victim Support.
She said: “These are deeply concerning accounts, echoing what I have heard from victims and families. Those affected by the Southport attack, including very young children, were victims of an act of extreme violence that caused life‑changing injuries and profound trauma that will shape the rest of their lives.
“These experiences, as described by those affected and their families, raise serious questions about whether people received the kind of support they should reasonably expect after such extreme trauma.”
Sefton council, which oversees Southport, was given £665,000 by central government for psychological support for those affected. However the money, which was not allocated to Victim Support but to other sources of help, ran out after little more than a year.
It is understood that the council held discussions this week about requesting more money from ministers given the continuing psychological effects.
Cancelled government projects such as the Rwanda deportation scheme and the road tunnel under Stonehenge are wasting billions of pounds of taxpayer money a year, parliament’s spending watchdog has found.
About £6.6bn was written off by government departments last year alone – state spending that did not achieve its intended objectives or create any value for the taxpayer, the public accounts committee said.
The PAC said successive governments’ propensity to cancel projects after spending significant sums of public money was a “particularly egregious” example of poor value.
The committee’s deputy chair, the Labour MP Clive Betts, said the high costs were a sign of government “complacency”, adding: “Those who work hard to pay their dues should be rightly aggravated by this figure.”
The cross-party group of MPs analysed spending across the 17 main government departments, with help from the National Audit Office, and found the most significant reported losses related to write-offs and debts no longer being pursued, departments cancelling or retiring assets, and fraud.
The Ministry of Defence was one of the most wasteful departments, incurring a £1.6bn loss in the 2024-25 tax year through cancelling projects. The Treasury said this was largely owing to retiring assets or changes in government policy with the shift to a Labour administration in July 2024.
Similarly, the Home Office registered a loss of £290m for the Conservatives’ Rwanda deportation scheme that Labour dumped , while the Department for Transport incurred a £472m loss from cancelling eight road projects, including the planned A303 tunnel under Stonehenge .
Betts said: “At a time of such straitened financial circumstances for so many, we should never, ever be satisfied with time or money wasted at no benefit to the public. Yet here our report finds £6.6bn last year simply boiled off into the atmosphere as a loss, the victim of cancelled projects or changed priorities.”
He added: “We must reject the argument that high levels of fraud and waste are simply the cost of doing business in the public sector. They are not – they are the cost of complacency.”
James Bowler, the permanent secretary at the Treasury, told the committee that write-offs could happen if there was a change in government and “people have slightly differing objectives”. He added: “There is a value for money trade-off in this, because it is not necessarily the right answer that once you have said ‘Go’ you must always complete it.”
The report also found that the money the government owed in various compensation schemes had reached £73.4bn by the end of the last financial year, an £11.8bn increase on the previous year.
The committee said that while it did not question the validity of these compensation schemes, it was “not clear whether value for money has properly been considered in how these schemes have been designed”.
Material levels of fraud were another significant factor behind the amounts written off each year, it found. The report pointed to the Department for Work and Pensions, where fraud and errors have persisted for 36 years and stood at £9.3bn in overpayments in its most recent accounts, excluding the state pension.
“The PAC believes this enormous figure has been accepted for far too long, and is not at all persuaded that such high levels can or should be regarded as inherent features of government systems. Action led by the Treasury should be taken to reduce it,” the report said.
A Treasury spokesperson said: “We will never tolerate fraud, error or waste – every pound of taxpayers’ money must be spent with care. That is why this government took the decision to end the Rwanda scheme and cancel unaffordable road projects to protect the public finances.
“As usual, the government will provide a formal and substantive response to the report directly to Parliament in due course.”
I f any year demanded a soundtrack of self-aggrandising female mayhem, it’s 2026. Amid the terrors of war, AI and the climate crisis, women are expected to be symbolic vessels of order and stability: thin, beautiful and perpetually 25 – a state of perfection newly available for purchase thanks to weight-loss drugs and the deep plane facelift .
Covered unironically in leopard print and rhinestones, a cohort of young female pop stars are defying this familiar con with brash electronic pop, shamelessly hedonistic lyrics, anarchic sexuality and an obsession with what was once dismissed as “white trash”. It’s an aesthetic embraced by performers such as Slayyyter , Kim Petras, Cobrah, Demi Lovato, Snow Strippers’ Tatiana Schwaninger, Tove Lo and returning scene godmother Kesha.
On I’m Your Girl Right, the lead single from her new album Estrus, Lo sings “We fuck all night on Ritalin-lin-lin-lin”. Slayyyter, meanwhile, describes herself as a “too drunk, trashy St Louis girl … extensions showing … looking kinda crazy”. Thong, a recent single by rising London-based musician Amara ctk100, celebrates barely-there pants (the artwork centres a thong visibly rising above the waistband of a skirt) and a fake-it-till-you-make-it lifestyle: “Benz outside / Oh no, I lied.”
“Part of this feels like an extension of post-lockdown nihilism,” says Ione Gamble, editor of the forthcoming essay collection The Polyester Book of (Bad) Taste . “Things are so bad in a political context that we may as well have fun.”
What sets this apart from previous moments of hard-partying recession pop is its reckless main character energy and invigorating rejection of feminine respectability. “The older I get, the more intense the pressure gets around being a ‘good woman’, and that mould feels so boring,” says Lo, who is 38. “There’s a confidence in not doing everything perfectly.”
Five years ago, sad-girl bedroom singer-songwriters such as Olivia Rodrigo and Holly Humberstone resonated with a generation spending their formative years in lockdown. Once the pandemic lifted, gen Z reclaimed feckless post-9/11 underground culture as “indie sleaze” and partied through the rubble of their own wrecked prospects. In came smudged eyeliner, shredded tights and the return of electroclash thanks to artists including the Dare and Fcukers .
That 00s sound is “definitely influencing music right now,” says Lo. She celebrates its “rawness and roughness”, which she thinks stemmed from “people not giving a fuck because they’re not being filmed” in an idyllic pre-cameraphone age. “That need to revolt against the norm is building inside us like a pressure cooker. The aggressive ‘getting punched in the face while I scream’ sonic landscape of Slayyyter’s song Crank makes that possible.”
In 2026, the influence of those scenes has mutated into sleazy electro-pop – from throbbing drum’n’bass to hyperactive EDM – delivered with rock-star energy and rap-influenced vocals. The production is aggressively maximalist, all grubby guitars, blown-out synths and addictive hooks. Meanwhile, its energy is rooted in impulsive, raunchy mid-00s US culture: MTV’s Spring Break, Britney with the brakes off, and the proliferation of online porn and reality TV (often both at once, in shows such as Girls of the Playboy Mansion).
Spilling out from Hollywood’s gay club scene, old pop songs by reality TV stars once dismissed as tacky – by the likes of Paris Hilton, Heidi Montag, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Erika Jayne – have been reclaimed as trash-pop ur-texts. Whether it’s Slayyyter screaming “I’m actually kinda famous” or Kim Petras flashing a Louis Vuitton bag and hard cash in her Freak It video, these stars are evoking a time when the rules of celebrity were changing and, for some, fame offered a diamante-encrusted ladder out of poverty.
You can hear early traces of the trash sound in the grimy raunch of early 00s electroclash icon Peaches and the knowing rap-influenced provocations of Princess Superstar, whose 2005 single Perfect had a gen Z-fuelled revival after it was used in Saltburn. Trash-pop was distilled in the mid-2000s Hollywood party scene, when figures such as EDM godfather Skrillex would party next to Hilton, a mix that inspired Porcelain Black. Then a teenage transplant to LA from Detroit, she was making a raucous mix of electro-pop and industrial club music with lyrics about being king of the world and “fucking like a star”. It got her signed to Virgin, who, she says, then panicked about her abrasive attitude and tried to push her into being “something like Avril Lavigne”. Black refused to comply and defied the label by uploading her songs to Myspace, earning millions of plays. “People dream of doing numbers like that online now,” she says.
But it wasn’t long before the music industry realised how lucrative this archetype was: in 2009, Kesha’s rambunctious debut single Tik Tok chimed with post-financial crisis nihilism and she was crowned the queen of pop excess. Last year, Slayyyter and Kesha collaborated with British producer Rose Gray on the club banger Attention! “My music would not exist without Kesha,” Slayyter has said.
Two years ago, Charli xcx’s Brat re-energised pop with hedonistic club energy, opening the cultural garbage chute for trash-pop to flow through. “Charli is an instigator and not a reactor,” says Lo. “Her sound is so infectious it’s impossible for it not to seep into everything new.” “It touched a nerve in the zeitgeist,” adds Slayyyter producer Kyle Shearer. “It hits, it feels good.”
Since Brat was her sixth album, Charli also offered a career blueprint for Slayyyter, whose third album, Wor$t Girl in America, swapped Hollywood glam for denim hotpants and trucker hats, and finally gave her the pop breakthrough she had been pursuing since 2018. By the time Slayyyter played to a huge crowd at Coachella this year, she had become one of US pop’s most talked-about artists. Charlie Harding, co-host of the podcast Switched on Pop, says the album represented “Slayyyter going for broke, her last-ditch effort. Pop music often rewards the thing which feels most authentically that person.”
Even if mainstream audiences have just caught on, the high camp, unapologetic brashness and full-frontal sexuality of trash pop has always attracted a huge LGBTQ+ audience – and artists from the community including Slayyyter, Petras, Swedish star Cobrah and US hyperpop rapper and producer (and early Slayyyter collaborator) Ayesha Erotica have been making this kind of music for years.
Off the back of this moment, Cobrah is now getting broader recognition for her aggressive, sexually charged club music, and was asked by Demi Lovato to feature on her new song Fantasy. Many of Cobrah’s songs – the industrial, icy Brand New Bitch, the hedonistic Good Puss – are about chasing extreme highs. “Everything else just feels very lame and tame,” she says. By leaning harder into her sexuality in her lyricism, she says, “I’ve become more like myself. The opposite of diluted: concentrated.”
Harding suggests that by revelling in hedonism, these artists are “straddling stereotypes of women being unhinged and hysterical while being the masterminds behind the whole endeavour”. You could read it as a reclamation of the mid-00s era, when dishevelled white-girl stars were assumed to be out of control: we know now that Hilton was just cosplaying as an airhead, although Britney Spears wasn’t so lucky, losing the right to run her own life when she was placed under a conservatorship that lasted 14 years .
“It’s an ‘early internet’ type of glamour that until very recently was still considered very low taste,” says Gamble. Slayyyter has named a song Brittany Murphy after the late Clueless and Girl, Interrupted star who died of pneumonia, anaemia and excessive prescription medication use in 2009, age 32. “Once-maligned women of that era are now being reappraised,” Gamble suggests.
This week, Slayyyter went on America’s Tonight Show for the first time wearing a bra made of beer cans , evoking an infamous scene in the Murphy-starring trailer-trash pageant movie Drop Dead Gorgeous . The knowing “white trash” aesthetic could be seen as reflecting and romanticising the economic reality for many in the US. In 2010, one reporter wrote of Kesha: “She’s this white-trash celebration. She’s where the lowbrow get to feel like the highbrow.”
Prof Robin James theorises that “if ‘white trash’ names whiteness that is threateningly close to Blackness, then white queer women performing ‘trashy’ femininity is a way for them to do something like a white girl equivalent of ‘ratchet’ – ie a femme sexuality that exists outside the boundaries of racialised, classed respectability.” She notes its debt to rap: “Of course, Black artists like Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B did this half a decade ago.”
Major labels are taking note of how profitable this archetype is. Having started releasing her songs on SoundCloud, Slayyyter signed with Columbia for her latest album. Korean singer Heyoon, a former member of the squeaky-clean pop band Now United, recently released the hyperactive EP Seriously Unserious, reflecting the trash-pop sound’s incursion into the highly lucrative South Korean market. “I grew up a ‘performer’ which forced me to look perfect and do things perfectly,” she says. Pivoting to what’s “raw and messy” allowed her to leave behind the stress of striving for flawlessness. “It was a healing experience for me,” she says.
The sound is now so popular it’s already being satirised. Comedian Meg Stalter – of Hacks and Lena Dunham’s Netflix series Too Much – just launched a music career with the knowing Prettiest Girl in America, textbook trash-pop about how hard it is to be rich, famous and beautiful, which features a “tramp stamp” tattoo on its artwork.
While this aesthetic stands in stark contrast to a parallel wave of sleekly retro-styled pop stars such as Olivia Dean, Raye and Sienna Spiro, it arguably risks becoming just as contrived; the trash-pop look might suggest maxed-out credit cards, but underneath are financially savvy pop stars. However, culture critic Philippa Snow argues that gen Z is unlikely to care whether or not these artists are truly putting their crumpled dollars where their mouth is. “All trends are performative by nature, no?” she says. As for gen Z fans who adopt the look without the tequila habit to match, “maybe they’re on to something in the long run: we all brutalised our bodies in the 00s.”
Yet there’s more driving the trend than just the urge to have a good time. “People’s rights are being taken away from them,” says Harding. “Queer people, women, all deserve to be angry. This music turns frustration into celebration and hopefully on the other side, some kind of action.” And Lo says: “Just letting that inner turmoil out and letting it roam is cathartic as fuck. I’m happy many of us are realising that.”
Tove Lo’s album Estrus is released via Pretty Swede/Virgin on 18 September. Cobrah’s album Torn is out now via Atlantic. Amara ctk100’s self-released single Thong is out now
Josh Hart scored a playoff career-high 26 points, Jalen Brunson had 19 points and 14 assists, and the New York Knicks moved halfway to their first NBA finals appearance since 1999 by beating the Cleveland Cavaliers 109-93 on Thursday night at Madison Square Garden.
Mikal Bridges also scored 19 points and Karl-Anthony Towns had 18 points and 13 rebounds for the Knicks, who won their ninth straight game. It is the NBA’s longest postseason winning streak since the Boston Celtics won 10 straight on their way to the 2024 championship.
Hart went 5 from 11 from three-point range and also had seven assists.
“Just a whale of a game from Josh,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said.
Two nights after rallying from a 22-point deficit in the fourth quarter, the Knicks made sure they would be in control late with an 18-0 run in the third quarter that gave them a 71-53 lead. Fans chanted “Knicks in four! Knicks in four!” in the final minute, long after the starters had gone to the benches.
“In our mind it’s 0-0. We’ve got to win the next game. It’s the most important game of the year and that’s how we treat it,” Towns said.
Donovan Mitchell scored 26 points and James Harden had 18 for the Cavaliers, who will have to climb out of a 2-0 deficit for the second straight round. They host Game 3 on Saturday.
“Nothing to hang our head about,” Mitchell said. “They protected home court, and we’ve seen this before so we’re going to go to Game 3.”
The Knicks are in the Eastern Conference finals for the second straight year but haven’t played for the championship since losing to the San Antonio Spurs in 1999.
Brunson scored 38 points in the Game 1 comeback. He had only two points in the first half Thursday before making the first basket of the run that broke open the game and finished the highest assist total of his playoff career.
Hart burned a Cavaliers defensive strategy that seemed built around leaving him open from long range after he was benched for the rally in Game 1, playing just three minutes combined in the fourth quarter and overtime.
The forward had been shooting just 26.7% from three-point range and after a third straight miss from long range early Thursday, he put his jersey in his mouth and bit it, bouncing the ball down hard in frustration three times. But he kept firing.
“I knew I had to just keep shooting and if I did that I’d be good,” Hart said.
Mitchell got off to a slow start with just seven points in the first half, triggering more of the questions that followed Game 1 about whether he was injured.
Cleveland cut it to single digits with just under eight minutes left but ruined any chance of getting closer with poor free-throw shooting, missing 10 in the game and finishing at 68.8%. The Knicks eventually pushed their lead to 19 points.
