Rodgers says sacking by Reading in 2009 was pivotal moment
Became more clinical manager while at Swansea City
Manager says Manchester City win will open up significant gap
David Silva makes squad, Sergio Agüero out with leg injury
UNHCR ambassador pays tribute to victims of 1995 Srebrenica massacre and meets women raped during war in Bosnia
Angelina Jolie has paid tribute to the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre after urging the international community to stop the use of sexual violence as a war weapon.
Jolie was accompanied by the British foreign secretary, William Hague, while on a trip to Bosnia.
Original cast of science fiction classic reunite in studio for live performance as part of Radio 4's Character Invasion season
The original cast of the surreal science fiction comedy classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are returning to the theatre where they created the show more than 30 years ago for a one-off performance.
Simon Jones, who played Arthur Dent in both the radio and TV versions of the space travel adventure, even slipped on the dressing gown worn by his character during his adventures.
Comments made to Guardian by goverment minister at heart of pro-union campaign will be major boost for Alex Salmond
A currency union will eventually be agreed between an independent Scotland and the remainder of the UK to ensure fiscal and economic stability on both sides of the border, according to a government minister at the heart of the pro-union campaign.
The private admission comes amid increasing jitters at Westminster, after opinion polls showed an increase in support for independence despite the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats all arguing that Scotland could not keep the pound after a yes vote.
Poet laureate joins actors and writers at London prison to campaign against decision to stop inmates' access to books
The poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, joined other writers and actors outside a north London jail on Friday as the campaign to overturn the government's ban on sending books to prisoners gathered pace.
NSA and Cyber Command chief speaks at Fort Meade
General tells NSA: 'Thanks for protecting our civil liberties'
With minimal reference to Edward Snowden, the former contractor who ushered in a new and unwelcome era for the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander ended his NSA directorship and his 39-year army career on Friday.
Feted at a retirement ceremony attended by intelligence colleagues, legislators, fellow officers and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, Alexander hailed the NSA by quoting General Douglas MacArthurs musings on patriotism, morality and service from his 1962 retirement speech at West Point, which Alexander called especially applicable with all that has gone on in the past year.
US president insists Russia must pull troops back from Ukraine border in discussion over Crimea crisis
Russian president Vladimir Putin called Barack Obama on Friday to discuss a US diplomatic proposal for Ukraine and the US president told Putin that Russia must pull back its troops and not move deeper into Ukraine, the White House said.
It was believed to have been the first direct conversation between Obama and Putin since the US and its European allies began imposing sanctions on Putin's inner circle and threatened to penalise key sectors of Russia's economy.
Somi Guha's lawyers complain to BBC that use of the word 'slope' is the kind of casual racism 'constantly brushed aside'
Moyes claims any manager would have struggled this year
Chelsea manager José Mourinho leaps to Moyes's defence
David Moyes has defended his disastrous first season in charge of Manchester United, claiming even Sir Alex Ferguson would have struggled had he still been the manager due to the "ageing" squad he inherited.
Ferguson retired in the summer having won 13 Premier League titles, two European Cups, five FA Cups and four League Cups. But he left with four of his first-choice team reaching veteran age. Nemanja Vidic, now 32, will leave for Internazionale in the summer, and Patrice Evra, 32, could also be on his way out. Robin van Persie, 30, and Michael Carrick, 32, are also in their fourth decade.
Mark Zuckerberg has plans to expand broadband coverage using unmanned high-altitude aircraft, satellites and lasers
Facebook has bought a Somerset-based designer of solar-powered drones for $20m (£12m) as it goes head-to-head with Google in a high-altitude race to connect the world's most remote locations to the internet.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, has unveiled plans to beam broadband connections from the skies, using satellites, lasers and unmanned high-altitude aircraft designed by the 51-year old British engineer Andrew Cox.
Debbie Vincent says she has been made a scapegoat and criticises the Metropolitan police's use of an undercover officer
An animal rights campaigner convicted of taking part in a conspiracy to blackmail the research company Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) told the Guardian she is a "scapegoat" targeted because detectives cannot catch the "real culprits" who have terrorised the company and its suppliers.
Debbie Vincent, who faces up to 14 years in prison when she is sentenced next month, insisted she is a lawful and peaceful campaigner who had been found guilty of "nebulous" charges that are increasingly being used to clamp down on legitimate protest against vivisection.
Formal identification of body, found about four miles from her Newport home, still to be carried out
Police investigating the disappearance of Nida Ul-Naseer, 19, from Newport, South Wales, have said that a body found near the city is the missing teenager.
Gwent police said a formal identification of the body, which was found about four miles from her home, still has to be carried out.
You'd be hard pressed to find any dish that isn't suitable for Mother's Day, but it would be churlish not to make a bit of an effort
The last few months have been a bit frenzied to say the least. My next book, Plenty More, which is due out in September, has very much passed its deadline, and all the extra writing and photoshoots, on top of my ordinary routine, mean I've turned into a bit of a middle-aged male stereotype: I'm forever forgetting this, dropping that and generally neglecting to keep tabs on my responsibilities. So when my editor at the Guardian nudged me last week to say my next column was more than reasonably late, I had to delve into the recipe file kept for just such emergencies and came up with today's three dishes that are only loosely related, if at all.
Not usually one to panic, I began to fret about how I could thread them together without anyone noticing the obvious flaw. Then I remembered what tomorrow is (see what I mean about forgetting?): Mother's Day to the rescue! After all, you'd be hard pressed to find any dish that isn't suitable for Mother's Day. (Stuffed tripe, maybe, or veg in aspic, but I'm not sure even those two could be completely ruled out.)
Darren Aronofsky has created an epic and stylish adaptation of the biblical flood story, but doesn't quite overcome the traditional difficulties of the genre
Darren Aronofsky, director of Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream, has here created a sombre, powerful biblical epic, shot through with a certain beserk grandeur and gloomy portentousness. Its desire to do justice to the spirit, if not the letter, of the scriptural source should not be doubted; Aronofsky, who co-wrote the script, has given us a grimy, roughened Noah story one spattered with the blood of sacrificial victims, coated with snot and tears, and mostly lit by smoky torch flames.
In fleshing out, and embroidering, on the biblical narrative, Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel have conceived of their Noah as an doughty warrior with a husbandman's conscience early on, he tells his son off for picking one of the sparse flowers growing out of the rocky soil, saying: "We take only what we need, only what we can use." His boatbuilding mission is constructed as an implacable desire to ensure the earth or "creation" as it is tenderly rendered is eradicated of all humankind, including himself and his family: another scene has him cheerfully informing his young children in which order they'll bury each other, and which one will die alone.
Hemlines and hirsuteness on the rise but Don Draper sticks to the Brylcreem for the final season of TV show
Mad Men has entered the 1970s; you can tell by Peggy Olsen's hemlines. A mid-thigh skirt, considered transgressive in the 60s, is now acceptable office attire in the final season of the TV show which premieres in the UK on 16 April.
From the Loire to the Alps, Alastair Sawday picks 10 gorgeous chateaux to stay in across France, where the characterful rooms are as impressive as the food, wine and garden views
Deep in the Loire countryside, this 18th-century chateau has been in the same family for six generations and is now run by the relaxed François de Valbray, his wife (an excellent cook) and their children. They are rightfully proud of their splendid home, with its handsome interiors decorated in traditional style. The drawing room is a symphony of red velvet, and a marble staircase sweeps up to 10 opulent bedrooms. A local sparkling Crémant de Loire is the perfect apéritif before a candlelit three-course meal prepared by your hosts.
Doubles from 110 room only, +33 2 41 42 00 02, briottieres.com
Many of us imagine that running a pub could be a great job, but a recent survey found it to be one of the most miserable jobs in the country, with long hours and relentless pressure. Pete Brown gave it a go behind the bar
'Can you go round and check there's no dead bodies in the toilets, Pete?" asks Will, who has been showing me the ropes. "Flush anything nasty away and then lock them with the bolts at the top." As Petra, another member of the team, finishes mopping the floors, and Andrew, the shift manager, cashes up the tills in the office downstairs, I slump on to a bar stool, knackered. It's 12.30am.
It's not that my first shift behind a bar for over 20 years has been physically arduous. It's just that I'd forgotten what it was like to be alert and on duty at a time when I'm normally nursing a pint on the other side of the bar or thinking about going to bed.
Six ships travelling to zone 1,150 miles west of Perth in attempt to verify possible plane wreckage in Indian Ocean
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The campaign against independence has been so relentlessly negative it risks depriving the UK of a moral mandate
What works best, a negative message or a positive one? What is it that truly motivates voters, their hopes or their fears?
These questions are currently the subject of a grand experiment. The subjects are the people of Scotland, with the experiment due to come to a head on 18 September. That's when they will deliver their verdict on Scottish independence, thereby passing judgment on the campaign to halt it a campaign that has, even its defenders admit, been relentlessly negative.
Manchester United's class of '92 are bringing the John Lewis model of ownership to the game except for the Qatari bit
Our history isn't yours to buy, fumes one of the fan banners at Manchester United except, of course, when it is. But is now such a time? It's never quite clear, in this surreal age when a football club can be bought with a loan for which it is itself the collateral. But reports that United are the target of a Qatari bid fronted by the club's so-called Class of '92 are too phantasmagorically intriguing to ignore not least for the club's share price, which perked up rationally at the news.
On Thursday it was confirmed that Ryan Giggs, Gary and Phil Neville, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt had bought non-league Salford City, subject to FA approval. At the same time reports suggested that the latter quintet, plus David Beckham, are also the frontmen for a bid to relieve the Glazer family of Manchester United. Now, if that sequence of acquisition feels a bit like someone exchanging on a studio flat above a bookies one day, only to put in a bid for Versailles the next, then you are strongly urged to just adjust your mindset.
Mothers can get it wrong in two ways: they are either too emotionally absent or too emotionally present
Philip Larkin may have found the words: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." But his nearish contemporary John Bowlby explained how and why. So what better subject than Bowlby for Mother's Day weekend? Mothers or significant carers can get it wrong in at least two very different ways: they can either be too emotionally absent or too emotionally present. Those mothers who give the impression of not caring or who deprive their children of love and affection tend to create children who grow up into clingy, emotionally needy adults. In contrast, those who emotionally over-rely upon their child, wanting the child to be the adult to their own messy and complex needs, or those who create an overly intense home environment, can create children who grow up into emotionally avoidant adults. This is how problems with what Bowlby called "attachment" come to be transmitted down the generations; how, in Larkin's narrowly gendered words, "Man hands on misery to man".
In a series of experiments in the 1970s, Bowlby's collaborator, Mary Ainsworth, sought to quantify the proportions of those who have problems with attachment. She created an environment called the "strange situation", where a child is abandoned by his or her mother for various periods. Of those children who took part, 60% those whose parenting was generally secure were distressed for a while, but soon comforted. Some 20% of children were extremely distressed, not easily soothed and often exhibited conflicted reactions to the parent's return, like wanting to hug them and punish them at the same time. And 20% weren't much bothered by the separation and continued playing with their toys when the parent returned.
A potential side-effect of the sudden rush for reform could be to turn the Lords into more of an instrument of patronage than now
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the House of Lords evolves on a truly evolutionary timescale. In the hundred years since the shake-up provoked by the People's Budget, countless blueprints for wholesale rationalisation have run up against ermine-trimmed facts on the ground. The changes that there have been, the shortening of the legislative veto for instance, have been tweaks, with gentlemen's understandings such as the convention forbidding outright resistance to government manifesto commitments contributing as much as the law. When the hereditaries faced the chop in 1999, the barons bit back, and a deal was done which not only allowed 92 to cling on in there, but also provided for bizarre aristocrat-only byelections to keep up the blue-blood quotient. A recent book on this stagnant story is subtitled "19112011: A Century of Non-Reform".
Haste in overhauling themselves, then, is one thing that peers have never previously been accused of. Yesterday, however, and almost unnoticed, the best club in London rushed through a rewrite of its own rules, which could actually render the world's most anachronistic legislature into more of an instrument of patronage than now. That is the potential side-effect of a bill, which usefully unseats criminals and allows others to retire. It arises because of a single shortcoming, namely the lack of a ban on former peers immediately putting themselves up for the Commons. In a parliament where prime ministers are free to kick loyalists upstairs, there are profound implications from the prospect of a parachute back down to the green benches.
Head of major inquiry into Medomsley detention centre in County Durham shocked by scale of historical sexual abuse
Police investigating sexual abuse at a Durham detention centre say they believe they have uncovered an organised paedophile ring operating in the 1970s and 80s with more than 500 potential victims.
The head of a 70-strong major inquiry into historical abuse at the Medomsley detention centre, near Consett, told the Guardian the inquiry was triggered by mounting evidence about isolated individuals. However, they were now investigating a complex paedophile ring, with many more victims than previously thought.