Defender Phil Jones has lent his support to his manager saying he was doing a "terrific" job at the club.
Frenchman Wenger, 66, added: "I do not want to go into a world of speculation.
"I personally have a huge respect for Louis van Gaal and I think what is going on there is disrespectful.
"This guy has worked for 30 years in football and has delivered unbelievable quality of work. I think a lot has been made on [Mourinho's departure], and I do not need to add anything."
But to make the announcement in December does not sit right with Wenger.
He said: "I don't like the fact that the managers come out so early for what they will do, because it's not necessarily good for their own team, nor for the speculation about the managers who are going through a little bit of a difficult patch."
Asked if he would encourage Guardiola to come to England, Wenger replied: "Yes, I would welcome [him] to the competition."
Afghan government forces have lost control of the centre of the town of Sangin in Helmand province after days of fierce fighting, reports suggest.
Eyewitnesses told the BBC the Taliban controlled the local government building and police station.
The Taliban say their fighters have seized the entire district and that their flag is flying over Sangin.
However, the Afghan defence ministry said fighting was continuing and that reinforcements had been sent.
Eyewitnesses say some government forces are still fighting in the district centre but are cut off.
District governor Haji Suliman Shah told the BBC he had been airlifted from the district headquarters to Shorabak base - formerly Camp Bastion - in Lashkar Gah early on Wednesday, along with 15 wounded security force members.
Meanwhile Ashuqullah, a police officer with an Afghan army brigade at a barracks about 7km (four miles) from Sangin, told the BBC the "entire" town was controlled by militants.
"Support troops have been airdropped at a distance... but all roads are blocked and in the militants' control," he added.
He said a few hundred members of the security forces were besieged at the barracks.
Sangin was a key focus of Nato's involvement in Afghanistan.
Helmand province has been a major centre of the Taliban insurgency with important supply routes for the opium trade.
Its proximity to Pakistan also gives the area a broader strategic significance.
Afghanistan's acting Defence Minister Masoum Stanikzai described the situation in Helmand as "manageable" and said fresh support troops had been sent in.
However the evacuation by air of the top government official from Sangin suggests many believe the district centre will fall under Taliban control at some point on Wednesday, says the BBC's Waheed Masoud in Kabul.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, claimed on Wednesday:
"The Sangin district centres, its police HQ, and other establishments were under continued attacks of the mujahideen and today... with God's grace the district was fully captured by the mujahideen.
"The white flag of the Islamic emirate is at full mast at the district now.''
Haji Daud, the head of the Sangin district people's council, told the BBC that Sangin residents had fled the district to neighbouring areas.
Responding to the defence minister's claims, he said: "Those whose family brothers and siblings and parents are not fighting on the front, they always say the situation is not dangerous in the area..."
"Those who make such comments do not care to defend Helmand."
NASA's Dawn spacecraft, cruising in its lowest and final orbit at dwarf planet Ceres, has delivered the first images from its best-ever viewpoint. The new images showcase details of the cratered and fractured surface. 3-D versions of two of these views are also available.
Dawn took these images of the southern hemisphere of Ceres on Dec. 10, at an approximate altitude of 240 miles (385 kilometers), which is its lowest-ever orbital altitude. Dawn will remain at this altitude for the rest of its mission, and indefinitely afterward. The resolution of the new images is about 120 feet (35 meters) per pixel.
Among the striking views is a chain of craters called Gerber Catena, located just west of the large crater Urvara. Troughs are common on larger planetary bodies, caused by contraction, impact stresses and the loading of the crust by large mountains -- Olympus Mons on Mars is one example. The fracturing found all across Ceres' surface indicates that similar processes may have occurred there, despite its smaller size (the average diameter of Ceres is 584 miles, or 940 kilometers). Many of the troughs and grooves on Ceres were likely formed as a result of impacts, but some appear to be tectonic, reflecting internal stresses that broke the crust.
"Why they are so prominent is not yet understood, but they are probably related to the complex crustal structure of Ceres," said Paul Schenk, a Dawn science team member at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston.
The images were taken as part of a test of Dawn's backup framing camera. The primary framing camera, which is essentially identical, began its imaging campaign at this lowest orbit on Dec. 16. Both cameras are healthy.
Dawn's other instruments also began their intense period of observations this month. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer will help identify minerals by looking at how various wavelengths of light are reflected by the surface of Ceres. The gamma ray and neutron detector is also active. By measuring the energies and numbers of gamma rays and neutrons, two components of nuclear radiation, it will help scientists determine the abundances of some elements on Ceres.
Earlier in December, Dawn science team members revealed that the bright material found in such notable craters as Occator is consistent with salt -- and proposed that a type of magnesium sulfate called hexahydrite may be present. A different group of Dawn scientists found that Ceres also contains ammoniated clays. Because ammonia is abundant in the outer solar system, this finding suggests that Ceres could have formed in the vicinity of Neptune and migrated inward, or formed in place with material that migrated in from the outer solar system.
"As we take the highest-resolution data ever from Ceres, we will continue to examine our hypotheses and uncover even more surprises about this mysterious world," said Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dawn is the first mission to visit a dwarf planet, and the first mission outside the Earth-moon system to orbit two distinct solar system targets. It orbited protoplanet Vesta for 14 months in 2011 and 2012, and arrived at Ceres on March 6, 2015.
Dawn's mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of mission participants, visit:
Iraqi forces are advancing into the centre of Ramadi, after launching a major assault to drive Islamic State militants from the city, officials say.
Security sources told the BBC that troops and allied tribesmen, backed by US-led air strikes, had already retaken two districts, and entered two others.
They are heading towards the main government complex, and have come up against snipers and suicide bombers.
Ramadi fell to IS in May in an embarrassing defeat for the Iraqi army.
Last month, government forces completed their encirclement of the predominantly Sunni Arab city, about 90km (55 miles) west of Baghdad, cutting off militants inside the centre from strongholds elsewhere in Anbar province and in neighbouring Syria.
Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service spokesman Sabah al-Numani said its troops, supported by soldiers, police and Sunni tribesmen, had begun the assault on central Ramadi at dawn and were advancing on the gove"We went into the centre of Ramadi from several fronts and we began purging residential areas," he told the AFP news agency.
"The city will be cleared in the coming 72 hours."
"We did not face strong resistance - only snipers and suicide bombers, and this is a tactic we expected," he added.
Sources in the Iraqi military's Anbar Operations Command told the BBC that engineers had built temporary bridges over the River Euphrates, which flows along the north and west of the city centre. This had enabled troops to enter directly the al-Haouz district, south-west of the government complex.
By Tuesday afternoon, government forces had retaken the al-Thubat and al-Aramil districts, and entered nearby al-Malaab and Bakir, the sources said.
Sunnis to the fore - Lina Sinjab, BBC News, Beirut
If the battle to recapture Ramadi succeeds, it will be the second largest city after Tikrit to be taken back from the self-proclaimed Islamic State in the past 18 months. It would be a major boost for the morale of the Iraqi security forces and for those Sunnis opposing IS in Iraq.
That is not only because the city of Ramadi is predominantly Sunni and a key IS stronghold, but also because the forces fighting to take it back are spearheaded by Sunni tribesmen.
rnment complex.
The Shia-dominated paramilitary force known as Popular Mobilisation (al-Hashd al-Shaabi) has been involved in many battles against IS, but the government has chosen not to deploy it in Ramadi.
The force was accused of human rights abuses against Sunnis after the recapture of Tikrit in April, and it is believed previous atrocities carried out by Shia militias helped alienate Sunnis and push them into the arms of IS.
A spokesman for the US-led coalition against IS, which carried out at least 12 air strikes in support of the offensive on Tuesday, said the fall of Ramadi was "inevitable", but warned that it would be a "tough fight".
Col Steve Warren suggested there were between 250 and 350 IS militants entrenched in the city centre, with some hundreds more to the north and west.
The Iraqi defence ministry said the jihadists had prevented civilians leaving Ramadi since leaflets warning of an assault were dropped over the city last month.
"They plan to use them as human shields," spokesman Naseer Nuri told the Reuters news agency on Monday.
Col Warren said there were still thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of civilians inside Ramadi.
Sources inside Ramadi told the BBC that IS had carried out a campaign of raids and mass arrests of residents in districts still under its control, in an attempt to prevent an uprising in support of the government offensive.
The operation to recapture Ramadi, which began in early November, has made slow progress, mainly because the government has chosen not to use the powerful Shia-dominated paramilitary force that helped it regain the northern city of Tikrit to avoid increasing sectarian tensions.
IS has lost control of several key towns in Iraq to government and Kurdish forces since overrunning large swathes of the country's west and north in June 2014 and proclaiming the creation of a "caliphate" that also extended into neighbouring Syria.On Monday, analysis by IHS Jane's suggested that IS had lost 14% of its overall territory in Iraq and Syria, about 12,800 sq km (4,940 sq miles), over the past year.Despite this, the group has been able to capture new territory of strategic value over the same period, including Ramadi and Palmyra in Syria's Homs province. It also still controls the Iraqi cities of Falluja, east of Ramadi, and Mosul, in the north.464 gray lineWhat is Islamic State?A notoriously violent Islamist group which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq. It has declared its territory a caliphate - a state governed in accordance with Islamic law - under its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.What does it want?IS demands allegiance from all Muslims, rejects national borders and seeks to expand its territory. It adheres to its own extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam and regards non-believers as deserving of death.How strong is IS?IS projects a powerful image, partly through propaganda and sheer brutality, and is the world's richest insurgent group. It has about 30,000 fighters but is facing daily bombing by a US-led multinational coalition which has vowed to destroy it.
Banned Uefa president Michel Platini has accused world football's ethics committee of "sleeping" for four years before barring him from football.
Platini and Fifa president Sepp Blatter were ruled to have abused their positions over a £1.3m ($2m) "disloyal payment" made to Platini in 2011.
Both men are appealing against eight-year bans issued on Monday.
"What was the Fifa ethics committee doing between 2011 when I was paid and 2015?" said Platini. "Was it sleeping?"
In an interview with French media agency AFP, the 60-year-old former France captain added: "Suddenly it wakes up. Ah yes, it wakes up in a Fifa election year when I'm a candidate. It's amazing."
Swiss Blatter, 79 - Fifa boss since 1998 - had already announced he was quitting with a presidential election in February - with Platini, also a vice-president, tipped to succeed him.
Platini has been in charge of Uefa - European football's governing body - since 2007 and was backed in a statement on Monday, with the organisation saying it was "extremely disappointed" with the decision.
He has submitted his candidacy but cannot stand while banned from all footballing activities. Both men are appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Platini said: "I will fight. But then I'll take my responsibilities according to what happens.
"Whatever happens, my reputation has been sullied, I've been kicked in the teeth: I've been put in the same bag as Blatter."
World athletics' ex-marketing consultant Papa Massata Diack "totally rejects" accusations he had any role in alleged extortion and bribery.
Diack, son of ex-IAAF president Lamine Diack, is accused by French prosecutors of being part of an alleged "system of corruption" involving the blackmail of athletes who had failed drug tests.
He faces a possible life ban following an IAAF disciplinary hearing last week.
The organisation charged Diack Jr and three other men with ethics violations.
"There was no extortion of funds from any athlete," he told the BBC.
"I've never met any athlete, any agent, any person in the world...asking to have a payment.
"I deal with corporate sponsors, I deal with governments, I deal with municipal government, I deal with Olympic committees, I never dealt with any athlete or any agent, so I reject those allegations."
Along with Papa Diack, ex-IAAF anti-doping director Gabriel Dolle, former All-Russia Athletic Federation chief Valentin Balakhnichev and coach Alexei Melnikov are also charged with breaches of the governing body's code of ethics. A verdict is due in January.
A thrilling chapter in the exploration of the solar system will soon conclude, as NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft makes its final close flyby of the ocean-bearing moon Enceladus. Cassini is scheduled to fly past Enceladus at a distance of 3,106 miles (4,999 kilometers) on Saturday, Dec. 19, at 9:49 a.m. PST (12:49 p.m. EST).
Although the spacecraft will continue to observe Enceladus during the remainder of its mission (through September 2017), it will be from much greater distances -- at closest, more than four times farther away than the Dec. 19 encounter.
The upcoming flyby will focus on measuring how much heat is coming through the ice from the moon's interior -- an important consideration for understanding what is driving the plume of gas and icy particles that sprays continuously from an ocean below the surface.
"Understanding how much warmth Enceladus has in its heart provides insight into its remarkable geologic activity, and that makes this last close flyby a fantastic scientific opportunity," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
By design, the encounter will not be Cassini's closest. The flyby was designed to allow Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) instrument to observe heat flow across Enceladus' south polar terrain.
"The distance of this flyby is in the sweet spot for us to map the heat coming from within Enceladus -- not too close, and not too far away. It allows us to map a good portion of the intriguing south polar region at good resolution," said Mike Flasar, CIRS team lead at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
The south polar region of Enceladus, while well lit for observing observations by Cassini's visible light cameras when the spacecraft arrived at Saturn in mid-2004, is presently in the darkness of the years-long Saturnian winter. The absence of heat from the sun makes it easier for Cassini to observe the warmth from Enceladus itself. By the time the mission concludes, Cassini will have obtained observations over six years of winter darkness in the moon's southern hemisphere.
Cassini completed a daring dive through the moon's erupting plume on Oct. 28, passing just 30 miles (49 kilometers) above the surface. Scientists are still analyzing data collected during that encounter to better understand the nature of the plume, its particles and whether hydrogen gas is present -- the latter would be an independent line of evidence for active hydrothermal systems in the seafloor.
This moderately close flyby will be the 22nd of Cassini's long mission. The spacecraft's surprising discovery of geologic activity on Enceladus, not long after arriving at Saturn, prompted changes to the mission's flight plan in order to maximize the number and quality of encounters with the icy moon. Cassini made its closest Enceladus flyby on Oct. 9, 2008, at an altitude of 16 miles (25 kilometers).
The unfolding story of Enceladus has been one of the great triumphs of Cassini's historic mission at Saturn. Scientists first detected signs of the moon's icy plume in early 2005, followed by a series of discoveries about the material gushing from warm fractures near its south pole. They announced strong evidence for a regional subsurface sea in 2014, revising their understanding in 2015 to confirm that the moon hosts a global ocean beneath its icy crust.
"Cassini’s legacy of discoveries in the Saturn system is profound," said Spilker. "We won't get this close to Enceladus again with Cassini, but our travels have opened a path to the exploration of this and other ocean worlds." other ocean worls."
Jose Mourinho will not be taking a break following hissacking by Chelsea on Thursday.
The Portuguese manager was dismissed after nine defeats in 16 Premier League games this season which left the Blues one point above the relegation zone.
"He will not be taking a sabbatical, he isn't tired, he doesn't need it," said a statement from the agency which represents the 52-year-old.
"He is very positive and is already looking forward."
Former Netherlands boss Guus Hiddink is set to succeed Mourinhoand become Chelsea's interim manager for the rest of the campaign.
Former Netherlands boss Guus Hiddink has been appointed interim Chelsea manager until the end of the season following the sacking of Jose Mourinho.
The 69-year-old also managed the Blues on a temporary basis for the final three months of the 2008-09 campaign.
"I am excited to return," said the Dutchman. "Chelsea is one of the biggest clubs in the world but is not where it should be at the moment.
"However, I am sure we can all turn this season around."
Mourinho was sacked on Thursday with champions Chelsea 16th in the Premier League table, one point above the relegation zone.
Hiddink will watch Saturday's visit of Sunderland from the stands, sat near to Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, with coaches Steve Holland and Eddie Newton in charge of the team.
"It's a fantastic appointment. I'm very happy about it. This club needs an experienced manager at the helm and Guus Hiddink is clearly that," said Holland.
