From Vietnam to the Balkans, Donald Trump’s family has launched a global dealmaking blitz since his re-election

A crusading prosecutor in the Balkans comes under pressure to drop a big case. Vietnamese villagers learn they are to be evicted. A convicted crypto kingpin in the Gulf receives a pardon.

All have one thing in common: they appear to be connected to the Trump family’s campaign to amass riches around the world. Since Donald Trump’s re-election a year ago, warnings that his use of presidential power to advance personal interests is corroding American democracy have grown ever louder. What is less understood – and perhaps even more dangerous – is the damage this is doing everywhere else.

Before she was a TV mainstay, Judi Love was a single mum juggling standup with care work. Now she’s back on stage for a show that finds humour in past trauma: ‘It’s laughter that helped me’, she says.

Judi Love was 17 when she was kidnapped, though she adds a couple of years on when reliving it on stage. It was only the anecdote’s second to-audience outing when I watched her recite it, peppered with punchlines, at a late-October work-in-progress gig. The bones of her new show – All About the Love, embarking on a 23-date tour next year – are very much still evolving, but this Wednesday night in Bedford is a sell out, such is the pull of Love’s telly star power.

She starts by twerking her way into the spotlight, before riffing on her career as a social worker and trading “chicken and chips for champagne and ceviche”. Interspersed are opening bouts of sharp crowd work – Love at her free-wheeling best. Next, she’s at college, studying IT, but mostly “going into the games room looking for boys”. It’s here that Love meets this unnamed lad.

Exclusive: Shot as he barricaded the synagogue, Yoni Finlay describes the assault – and the climate that allowed it to happen

It was just after 6am and Yoni Finlay woke early with nerves. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and the 39-year-old Mancunian was due to sing the dawn prayer, Shacharis, before hundreds of worshippers later that morning.

After practising his verse, Finlay buttoned up his white robes and headed to Heaton Park shul in north Manchester. He greeted familiar faces – exchanging a cheery hello with Bernard Agyemang, the security guard – then took a seat on the stage, the bimah, and said prayers.

For a man who insists football isn’t political, the Fifa boss is putting a lot of effort into into courting the most divisive politician on Earth

Gianni Infantino was 18 years old the first time he ran for office. It was a presidential election at FC Brig-Glis, the local amateur football club in the small Swiss town where he grew up. Running against two older men, and with no discernible footballing record of his own, the little red-haired kid with freckles was, unsurprisingly, the rank outsider in the race.

But he had a vision. He had a ferocious work ethic, boundless enthusiasm, well-established networks in the town’s Italian immigrant community. And even at this tender age, he had a flair for an eye-catching scheme. To the shock of many veterans at the club, Infantino surged to victory: partly on the back of his pledge to attract new sponsors and revenue streams, and partly on something more tangible. Infantino promised that if he won, his mother Maria would wash all the players’ kits, every week, for as long as he was president.

For John, group sex is a fantasy he wants to make reality. For Sophie, it is a mistake she does not want to repeat

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

There’s still so much I want to do sexually, and I want to do it now while I still can

The self-described ‘bounced Czech’ created cerebral works centred by a core of genuine emotion – and always understood the ways of our world

• Tom Stoppard: a life in pictures

• Where to start with Tom Stoppard: from Brazil to Leopoldstadt

All the best dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer (“a punk journalist from Bristol” was how someone described him to me) called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating escalating taxi fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

Chancellor accused of misleading public about reasons for tax rises, with opposition MPs calling for her to resign

• UK politics live – latest updates

Rachel Reeves has denied lying to the public in the buildup to last week’s budget, insisting that she needed to raise taxes to a record level to ensure economic stability.

The chancellor said on Sunday she had announced £26bn-worth of tax rises on Wednesday in part to build a buffer against her fiscal rules and reduce the risk of further tax increases in the future, and in part to protect public spending.

President made declaration in a social media post, after FAA last week warned airlines of ‘worsening security situation’

The Venezuelan government has responded defiantly to the heightened pressure by the US government, including Donald Trump’s recent statements on Saturday that the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela is to be closed in its entirety.

In a statement, the Venezuelan government said Trump’s comments are a “colonialist threat” against their sovereignty and violate international law. The government also said it demanded respect for its airspace and would not accept foreign orders or threats.

Members vote narrowly in favour at founding conference overshadowed by Sultana’s rift with Jeremy Corbyn

• UK politics live – latest updates

The new leftwing party headed by Jeremy Corbyn and others has voted narrowly for it to have a ‘“collective leadership” in a win for Zarah Sultana, who has been at loggerheads with the former Labour leader.

The results were announced on Sunday after a chaotic start to its founding conference in Liverpool. Sultana, a former Labour MP who now sits as an independent, had boycotted the first day of the conference amid disagreements over how Your Party – its provisional name – should be run.

Rescue teams find more bodies in burnt-out buildings of Wang Fuk Court complex after Wednesday’s fire

The death toll in Hong Kong’s apartment complex fire has risen to 146 after investigators discovered more bodies in the burnt-out buildings. A steady stream of people placed bouquets of flowers at an ever-growing makeshift memorial at the scene of the disaster, among the worst in the city’s history.

The Hong Kong police’s disaster victim identification unit has been going through the buildings of the Wang Fuk Court complex meticulously and has found bodies both in apartment units and on the roofs, the officer in charge, Cheng Ka-chun, said on Sunday.

The building was once home to the UK’s first US-style multiplex. Now developers are seeking to demolish it for a new housing scheme

Forty years ago this month, British cinema-going changed for ever with the opening of The Point in Milton Keynes, the UK’s first US-style multiplex. Looming over Midsummer Boulevard, the Point’s mirrored glass ziggurat and red pyramidal frame audaciously synthesised Maya and Egyptian motifs in a futuristic, hi-tech temple of pleasure. As well as 10 screens (Back to the Future, The Goonies, and My Beautiful Laundrette opened proceedings), there were bars, restaurants, nightclub and even cup holders on seats, an unimaginable novelty for the time.

Today, with its cinemas long closed, this now-languishing 1980s superstar is under threat of demolition, caught in a row between local campaigners, politicians and heritage groups trying to preserve it, and developers seeking to demolish it for a much-criticised new housing scheme.

Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner expected to meet Kyiv delegation, after another weekend of deadly Russian attacks in Ukraine

Ukrainian negotiators are preparing to meet US officials in Florida to thrash out details of Washington’s proposed framework to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, as Kyiv faces pressure on military and political fronts.

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, are expected to sit down with a Ukrainian delegation on Sunday before planned US talks this week in Moscow with Vladimir Putin.

Exclusive: Guardian investigation finds unlicensed jabs offered as experts call for more online regulation

Companies selling illegal weight-loss drugs are amassing positive Trustpilot reviews as critics say regulatory gaps allow high-risk operators to appear credible.

A Guardian investigation found that Retatrutide UK had a score of 4.4 on the global review site, despite purporting to offer a drug that is unlicensed and illegal to sell or buy. Its website sells a 20mg retatrutide pen for £132.

⚽ Updates from the noon GMT KO at Selhurst Park
⚽ Sign up for Football Daily | Top scorers | Email Michael

And we’re underway in south London. Palace in their red and blue home kit, United in their white away kit.

“Will Manchester United manage a draw today?” asks Jeremy Boyce. “Looking at their sweet and sour form, possibly not. Especially now that Palace have become a decent benchmark for being solid and consistent and playing above their level. They have Glasner to thank for that and, depending on the outcome of today/this season, we might be witnessing the next lines of Glasner’s CV to be handed to Sir Jim if it all goes pear-shaped (no silverware) for Amorim.”

Research finds OpenAI’s free chatbot fails to identify risky behaviour or challenge delusional beliefs

ChatGPT-5 is offering dangerous and unhelpful advice to people experiencing mental health crises, some of the UK’s leading psychologists have warned.

Research conducted by King’s College London (KCL) and the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK (ACP) in partnership with the Guardian suggested that the AI chatbotfailed to identify risky behaviour when communicating with mentally ill people.

Eldonian village was a forerunner in neighbourhood regeneration. Thirty years on it is fighting for survival

It was the utopian housing dream, a community project designed to support its residents from cradle to grave – 400 redbrick homes built around a village hall, leisure centre and playing fields, all of it owned and managed by the people who lived there.

The Eldonian village in Liverpool was heralded at the time of its completion by the then Prince Charles as a “leading example of a successful, community-led, bottom-up approach to neighbourhood regeneration”.

Labour knows it needs to win over the ‘sea wall’ cohort of coastal voters in the next election. But as anger over inequality grows, time is running out

It is a lovely sunny autumn day in Ramsgate on Britain’s Kent coast, and quintessential seaside chippy Peter’s Fish Factory is doing a roaring lunchtime trade. Across the road, at the entrance to the town’s pier, local MP and chair of the newly reformed coastal parliamentary Labour party (PLP), Polly Billington, is having her photo taken.

In between shots she shows us the community art project that adorns the fence along the entrance to the pier. It is made up of pictures, drawn primarily by local children and young people, of the 65 little ships that set sail earlier this year from Ramsgate to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation.

A Green-party globalist and a right-of-centre Tory clash over immigration. Would they see eye to eye over reparations?

Peter, 34, London

Occupation Former civil servant, now a student, studying public health

Understanding the surprising mechanism behind apathy can help unlock scientific ways to boost your motivation

We all know people with very different levels of motivation. Some will go the extra mile in any endeavour. Others just can’t be bothered to put the effort in. We might think of them as lazy – happiest on the sofa, rather than planning their latest project. What’s behind this variation? Most of us would probably attribute it to a mixture of temperament, circumstances, upbringing or even values.

But research in neuroscience and in patients with brain disorders is challenging these assumptions by revealing the brain mechanisms that underlie motivation. When these systems become dysfunctional, people who were once highly motivated can become pathologically apathetic. Whereas previously they might have been curious, highly engaged and productive – at work, in their social lives and in their creative thinking – they can suddenly seem like the opposite.

As we prepare to launch our eighth edition of our global list we present the members of this year’s voting panel, our biggest ever

After another gripping year of women’s football we are ready to launch our list of the best 100 female footballers in the world in 2025.

Our biggest ever panel includes familiar faces such as the outgoing Kansas City Current head coach Vlatko Andonovski, the new OL Lyonnes head coach, Jonatan Giráldez, and Australia’s Joe Montemurro.

One of Britain’s most outstanding playwrights famed for the ‘hypnotised brilliance’ of his prose and dialogue

After the first night of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the National Theatre in London in 1967, Tom Stoppard awoke, like Lord Byron, and found himself famous. This new star in the playwriting firmament was a restless, questing bundle of contradictions. Stoppard wrote great theatre because, primarily, he wrote argumentative and witty dialogue. Writing plays, he said, was the only respectable way of contradicting oneself. His favourite line in modern drama was Christopher Hampton’s in The Philanthropist: “I’m a man of no convictions – at least, I think I am.”

Stoppard, who has died aged 88, was always patient about the demands of the publicity machine, though just as deeply averse, like Harold Pinter, to discussing his work, or indeed his private life, in public. Yet what one critic called “the hypnotised brilliance” of his English prose and dialogue fascinated journalists, as well as the public, who thought of Stoppard as “a bounced Czech” (he described himself thus, having been born in Moravia) with a showman’s flair and a curatorial devotion to his adopted language on a par with Conrad’s, or Nabokov’s.

Two new books analyse what makes the ‘perfect pub’ and both come to a sobering conclusion: Irish pubs are in trouble

Like triple-distilled whiskey, Irish pubs appear to have timeless appeal. They are staple setting in films, books and plays, draw tourists to Ireland, replicate themselves around the world and induce social media quests for the perfect snug and the perfect pint.

Scholars have now bestowed academic imprimatur on this cultural treasure status by examining – and celebrating – pubs through the lens of history, sociology, architecture, psychology, design, art and literature.

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the past seven days

Sydney Sweeney as you’ve never seen her before – genuinely – in a boxing biopic, and the godfather of grunge revisits his dark stuff

Christy
Out now
Based on the life of the American boxer Christy Martin (nickname: the Coal Miner’s Daughter), this sports drama sees Sydney Sweeney Set aside her conventionally feminine America’s sweetheart aesthetic and don the mouth guard and gloves of a professional fighter.

Here’s how to follow along with our coverage – the finest writing and up-to-the-minute reports

The supernatural drama inches closer to the end, while Ethan Hawke fully encapsulates Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s Broadway breakup drama. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

• Bonds made a record 799 appearances for the Hammers

• Took the club into Premier League as a manager

The former West Ham captain and manager Billy Bonds has died at the age of 79, the Premier League club has announced.

Bonds was the longest-serving player for the Irons, making 799 appearances across a 21-year career in which he lifted the FA Cup twice as well as winning the old Second Division.

• Italian goalkeeper at fault in defeat by Fulham

• Frank calls booing ‘unacceptable in my opinion’

Thomas Frank criticised a section of Tottenham’s fans for turning their anger on Guglielmo Vicario after the goalkeeper was at fault in their 2-1 Premier League home defeat by Fulham.

The Italian, dashing yards from his penalty area to the left touchline, made the mistake that presented Harry Wilson with the chance to put Fulham’s second goal into an empty net in Spurs’ latest home defeat. Fulham were leading 2-0 by the sixth minute, with Kenny Tete having scored a deflected opener. Tottenham have not won at home in the league since beating Burnley on the opening weekend.

• ‘A series like this, does it need it? I don’t think so’

• Root’s head-to-head with Starc may be decisive battle

It rarely takes much for an Englishman to be accused of whinging in Australia but when Joe Root was asked a simple question on Sunday – whether a series such as the Ashes actually needs day-night Test cricket – he simply gave an honest answer.

“I personally don’t think so,” replied Root, before England began netting at the Gabba before Thursday’s second Test. “It’s obviously very successful and popular here, and obviously Australia have got a very good record [played 14, won 13]. You can see why we’re playing one of those games.

Top-four seeding shows Fifa prioritising marketing over sporting integrity once again but even best-laid plans can flop

The plastic balls rumble around the glass bowls of destiny. Portentous music plays. There is a sense of possibility, as though the inner workings of the universe have suddenly been laid bare, a door opening to reveal the three Fates sitting by their spinning wheel, measuring rod and shears in hand.

A World Cup draw is a moment of perfection, a platonic vision before reality has had time to intervene. Everybody is fit and in form. Every nation is playing as an ideal version of itself – no injuries, no disputes over bonuses, no concerns about fatigue or the temperature or whether a player might be distracted by a possible transfer; it’s the World Cup as pure potential. With Friday’s draw, next summer will suddenly feel a lot closer.

• Norris slips up in final lap to give rival advantage

• Max Verstappen third on grid; Hamilton 18th

Oscar Piastri knew going into the weekend of the Qatar Grand Prix he would have to be at his best to keep his world championship ambitions alive and, with a battling performance, he did exactly that, by claiming victory in the sprint race and then pole position for the grand prix at the Lusail circuit.

Both were significant but pole was crucial in the tense title fight with his McLaren teammate Lando Norris, who lines up alongside him on the front row of the grid, and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who starts from third, with the three contenders set to go head to head into turn one on Sunday.

Midfielder’s three goals illustrate the different attributes that have made her the player she is today

England laid down a marker at Wembley on Saturday evening as they waltzed to victory over China with a scintillating show of attacking force. Among the many eye-catching performances, Georgia Stanway stood out, joining Beth Mead and Aggie Beever-Jones by becoming the third Lioness to score a hat-trick at Wembley. Her three goals and assist formed part of a midfield display that was right up there with the best the national stadium has witnessed over the years.

The 26-year-old has been one of the first names on Sarina Wiegman’s team sheet since the Dutchwoman took over as manager in 2021. Famous for her long-range finishing and tenacious tackling, she is emblematic of the fight and quality that this England team possess. When in top form, she and Keira Walsh form one of the best midfield partnerships out there, complementing each other’s attributes. She is one of the leaders of this team, unafraid to stand up and be counted on and off the pitch when things go wrong and at the core of their success when they go right.

Leaders wary of the topsy-turvy nature of a competitive fifth tier which is an obstacle course as well as a marathon

There is arguably no tougher feat in modern football than gaining automatic promotion from the National League. Even Wrexham, with all their Hollywood money, took three seasons to crack the code of the solitary automatic spot. There is an illustrious list of former Football League clubs queueing up at the summit of the fifth tier with an eye on the promised land, all upwardly mobile and thriving after battling through various crises. All but two– one up automatically, one through the playoffs – will end the season disappointed.

Rochdale believe they can be the chosen ones. Saved from liquidation last year by a £2m takeover by local family the Ogdens, the club are now thriving on the pitch under Jimmy McNulty and hoping for a return to the EFL, where they enjoyed a 102-year unbroken stay between 1921 and 2023.

Not long ago the Norwegian giants were relegated and almost bankrupt – now a first title in 34 years is in reach

There were moments last weekend when Viking’s latest must-win game at Fredrikstad seemed to turn on a coin toss. The chances came thick and fast; both goalkeepers were forced into acrobatic saves; on the stroke of half-time, the Fredrikstad forward Henrik Skogvold unleashed a shot that cracked the underside of the bar and seemed to defy the laws of physics by spinning away.

Viking knew anything other than a win would allow Bodø/Glimt, Norwegian champions in four of the past five seasons, to dethrone them at the top. In the 71st minute, as the massed ranks of away fans in dark blue held their breath, the odds finally went in their favour: Zlatko Tripic, the captain, arced an inch-perfect cross to the back post, where Henrik Falchener, Viking’s towering centre-back, nodded in to set off an explosion of noise and send thousands of fists into the air in unison.

• Wales 0-73 South Africa

• Springboks score 11 tries but Etzebeth off for eye gouge

Every bit as dispiriting as expected. Worse, was it pointless? Well, it certainly had more points to it than Wales would have liked. But, worse again, was it actively alienating? A record defeat, 11 tries conceded, the first time since 1967 Wales have failed to score a point in Cardiff. The opposition on that day 58 years ago, Ireland, scored 70 fewer than the Springboks here.

“It’s quite a raw, emotional dressing room,” said Dewi Lake, Wales’s captain. “The boys are proud Welshmen, so coming off the field with the scoreboard looking like that is tough to take. But I don’t think it’s going to ruin the confidence of the younger boys. If anything, it drives you even more. You recognise the gap and what you’ve got to do.”

The US hasn’t just left Ukraine vulnerable; it is also provoking Xi’s intensifying attitude towards what he considers a renegade province

Sheer ignorance, fed by malign intent, historical prejudice and mutual misunderstanding, is often the crucial spark that ignites simmering international conflicts. If Adolf Hitler, remarkably ignorant of the US, had grasped the true extent of American industrial might, would he still have fatefully declared war on Washington in 1941?

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, it evidently had no idea what it was getting into. Humiliating defeat contributed greatly to its subsequent disintegration. In 1990, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait, convinced he had a green light from the White House. In all these cases, stupidity produced disastrous misjudgments that proved fatal.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

Big deal-breakers are all very well, but the seemingly small things often tell in the end. How do they feel about sell-by dates? Will they walk out of a bad film? Not asking will come back to haunt you

A friend of mine once declined a date with a kind, funny, clever man because she hated his shoes. When she relayed this to our group of twentysomethings, it didn’t warrant comment or discussion, because it was such a rational decision, which we all would have made. I mean, come on – you can’t go out with someone with bad trainers, can you?

Fortunately for the continuation of the human race, today’s daters appear to be a little less fastidious. A recent report on relationships by the dating app Plenty of Fish not only failed to mention footwear, but showed that people are keen to skip the small-talk phase, so weighty conversation topics such as life goals and dealbreakers are now brought up straight away.

There is growing understanding that our country is witnessing evil in our public life. Here is a path to confronting it

Across the country, organizers are carrying something heavier, clearer and more spiritually charged than anything I have seen in over 30 years of this work. From veteran freedom fighters to young activists, there is a growing alignment around the unmistakable presence of evil in our public life. The horrors unfolding before us have sharpened our collective sight and deepened the understanding that our resistance must be morally unwavering and spiritually grounded.

The spiritual framework for this argument begins with a simple conviction. Our movements need to reclaim a moral vocabulary that names evil plainly. Dr King understood this. When he named the pain of poverty, the sickness of racism and the excess of materialism, he called them the “triple evils”, speaking with unflinching clarity about the devastation that this collective evil was inflicting on the country, on our conscience and on our very souls. We are living in such a moment again. The evil is fully out, and anyone with spiritual integrity can see it. Among the forces driving that clarity are Gaza, empire and ICE.

Dr Rami Nashashibi is a MacArthur fellow and the founding executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN)

An honest debate is needed on this polarising topic as sectors such as social care struggle with recruitment

Keir Starmer’s response to the 69% fall in net migration revealed in official figures last week was to remark: “That’s a step in the right direction.”

Describing a reduction of more than two-thirds of any indicator in a single year as a “step” would be a creative use of statistics, putting it kindly.

The conflict is neither a clearcut defeat nor a feelgood victory, but an in-between outcome that contains profound elements of each

No one should be satisfied with the unjust peace that Ukraine may be forced to accept. The aggressor would be rewarded with territory and other concessions from the victim it has brutalized. Yet the horrified reaction in Washington to recent peace proposals is troubling in its own right.

The Trump administration’s recent 28-point plan, roundly denounced in Congress and the commentariat as a “capitulation” to Moscow, actually offered Kyiv a remarkable strategic outcome. Under its terms, Ukraine would face no meaningful limit on its peacetime military, despite Russian attempts to impose draconian restrictions since 2022. (The only requirement, a cap of 600,000 personnel, probably exceeds the number of active-duty forces Ukraine would maintain anyway.) Moreover, Ukraine would receive a substantial security guarantee from the United States and Europe – the strongest in history, even if short of a Nato-style commitment.

Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School

Trump has a disconcerting tendency to attack the press – but especially female reporters, whom he holds in particular ire

There was a time when it would have been a scandal for the president of the United States to call a journalist “ugly” or a politician “retarded”. Now it’s just another day in America. During a holiday when many Americans were gathering with family and reflecting on what they were grateful for, Trump was crouched over his keyboard slinging insults at his perceived enemies.

On Thanksgiving day, for example, Trump posted a rant on Truth Social about immigration. He called Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, an ableist slur, and then made an Islamophobic jab at “the worst ‘Congressman/woman’ in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab”.

The high-value council tax surcharge may only raise £400m but it’s the best opportunity for a bigger, fairer tax on wealth

Rachel Reeves won little credit last week for lifting the lid on one of the most heated tax debates of the past three decades.

Who in their right mind would consider engaging in the fight that would inevitably lead to some of the richest people in the land calling for your head?

Rosa Park’s story is about courage. But, lest one forget, it is also a story about breaking the law

It was 70 years ago when four African Americans were sitting in the fifth row of a bus in Montgomery. As one white man had to stand towards the front, the driver asked the four to get up and move towards the back of the bus. Three did; one did not – the rest is history. Or so many American kids might think when they first read the story of Rosa Parks in school.

It is a story of courage, but, lest one forget, it is also a story about breaking the law. And the question for us today is what civil disobedience means in an era when the federal government is signaling its readiness severely to punish even perfectly legal dissent.

Russia’s president is only interested in a deal on Moscow’s terms. Equipping Kyiv with the resources to fight on is the quickest route to a just settlement

As Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving Day deadline for a Ukraine peace agreement came and went this week, the Russia expert Mark Galeotti pointed to a telling indicator of how the Kremlin is treating the latest flurry of White House diplomacy. In the government paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a foreign policy scholar close to Vladimir Putin’s regime bluntly observed: “As long as hostilities continue, leverage remains. As soon as they cease, Russia finds itself alone (we harbour no illusions) in the face of coordinated political and diplomatic pressure.”

Mr Putin has no interest in a ceasefire followed by talks where Ukraine’s rights as a sovereign nation would be defended and reasserted. He seeks the capitulation and reabsorption of Russia’s neighbour into Moscow’s orbit. Whether that is achieved through battlefield attrition, or through a Trump-backed deal imposed on Ukraine, is a matter of relative indifference. On Thursday, the Russian president reiterated his demand that Ukraine surrender further territory in its east, adding that the alternative would be to lose it through “force of arms”. Once again, he described Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government as “illegitimate”, and questioned the legally binding nature of any future agreement.

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

Capturing the changing landscapes of the 18th century, the rivals transformed British art. The climate emergency gives new urgency to their work

JMW Turner appears on £20 notes and gives his name to Britain’s most avant garde contemporary art prize. John Constable’s work adorns countless mugs and jigsaws. Both are emblematic English artists, but in the popular imagination, Turner is perceived as daring and dazzling, Constable as nice but a little bit dull. In a Radio 4 poll to find the nation’s favourite painting, Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire – which even features in the James Bond film Skyfall – won. Constable’s The Hay Wain came second. Born only a year later, Constable was always playing catch-up: Turner became a member of the Royal Academy at 27, while Constable had to wait until he was 52.

To mark the 250th anniversary of their births, Tate Britain is putting on the first major exhibition to display the two titans head to head. Shakespeare and Marlowe, Mozart and Salieri, Van Gogh and Gauguin – creative rivalries are the stuff of biopics. Mike Leigh’s 2014 film shows Turner (Timothy Spall) adding a touch of red to his seascape Helvoetsluys to upstage Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1832. Critics delighted in dubbing them “Fire and Water”. The enthralling new Tate show is billed as a battle of rivals, but it also tells another story. Constable’s paintings might not have the exciting steam trains, boats and burning Houses of Parliament of Turner’s, but they were radical too.

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

Prof David Feldman, Dr Ben Gidley and Dr Brendan McGeever from the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism say it is wrong to characterise Jewish support for the Greens as ‘paradoxical’

We were fascinated to read your article on the important report by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) on Jewish voting patterns in the UK (British Jews turn to Greens and Reform UK as support for main parties drops, 20 November). This demonstrates that growing numbers of Jews are deserting the Labour and Conservative parties in favour of the Green party and Reform UK.

As JPR points out, there is no symmetry here. The turn to Reform among Jewish voters is half the size of the growth in support for the party within the population as a whole. On the other hand, support for Greens among Jews is 900% the size of the turn to the Green party overall.

Life’s five ‘eras’ | Levelling up Huddersfield | Favourite headlines | Posh breakfasts | Grieving nominative determinism letters

As one of your older readers, I was looking forward to reading the interesting article on the five epochs of brain development (Brain has five ‘eras’, scientists say – with adult mode not starting until early 30s, 25 November). But why was I not surprised to find the final two epochs given just one sentence between them?
Dave Headey
Faringdon, Oxfordshire

• I was delighted to find out that the Royal Opera House is replacing its 26-year-old stage curtains. Perhaps the old ones could be reused to make new riser cushions for the stage of Huddersfield town hall. We’re still waiting to be levelled up. (See my Guardian letter, 14 February 2022.)
Lynn Brooks
Kirkburton, West Yorkshire

It seems likely the artist’s family wanted to get rid of a woman who was just difficult to get along with, writes Helen James

JMW Turner mother’s died when the artist, then 29, was busy preparing for and opening his first public exhibition, and her “mental illness”, referred to in your review of the BBC Two documentary Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks (19 November), should be described as “purported”.

We only have the testimony provided by the actions of her husband and son, who sent her to a lunatic asylum designed for paupers, when they were in fact not poor and could have accommodated her in a better environment with better care, and thereby lengthened her life.

A concerned NHS midwife responds to an article about the Free Birth Society

I’m an NHS midwife, despairing over your article (Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world, 22 November). My key frustration, though, is how, as with any successful charlatanism, there is truth and real fear being exploited: medical overreach blights lives, women can and should trust their bodies, and a healthy body rarely grows a baby it can’t birth.

However, physiology is not a perfected endpoint. Evolution continues with genetic variation spreading through a population by “survival of the fittest”. In the brutal “wild”, the least “well-adapted” (whether by health or circumstance) do not survive. Human beings, however, don’t like those odds. Medical intervention, yes, but a body of life-saving social knowledge has been passed down since language began, towards facilitating successful birth.

Request submitted weeks after Donald Trump called on Isaac Herzog to pardon Israeli prime minister

Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Israel’s president for a pardon for bribery and fraud charges and an end to a five-year corruption trial, arguing that it would be in the “public interest”.

Isaac Herzog’s office acknowledged receipt of the 111-page submission from the prime minister’s lawyer, and said it had been passed on to the pardons department in the ministry of justice. The president’s legal adviser would also formulate an opinion before Herzog made a decision, it added.

Men represent 50% of all infertility cases but poor understanding among GPs means it is often untreated

Couples are needlessly going through IVF because male infertility is under-researched, with the NHS too often failing to diagnose treatable causes, leading experts have said.

Poor understanding among GPs and a lack of specialists and NHS testing means male infertility is often left untreated in couples struggling to conceive, despite men accounting for 50% of all infertility cases.

San Joaquin County sheriff’s office says juveniles were among the victims in possible ‘targeted’ attack on a banquet hall in Stockton

Four people have died after 14 people were shot at a family gathering in northern California on Saturday night, police said.

The victims, who range from “juveniles to adults”, were taken to local hospitals, Heather Brent, a spokesperson for the San Joaquin County sheriff’s office, said. “What we have confirmed at this time is that there was a banquet hall where a family was celebrating.”

Tensions grow after research in England finds there may not be enough water for planned carbon capture and hydrogen projects

• Revealed: Europe’s water reserves drying up due to climate breakdown

Tensions are growing between the government, the water sector and its regulators over the management of England’s water supplies, as the Environment Agency warns of a potential widespread drought next year.

Research commissioned by a water retailer has found water scarcity could hamper the UK’s ability to reach its net zero targets, and that industrial growth could push some areas of the country into water shortages.

Hundreds of people still missing after heavy rain and mudslides in country’s deadliest natural disaster for years

Entire areas of Sri Lanka’s capital are flooded after a powerful cyclone triggered heavy rains and mudslides across the island, with authorities reporting nearly 200 dead and dozens more missing.

Officials said the extent of the damage in the country’s worst-affected central region was slowly becoming clear on Sunday as relief workers cleared roads blocked by fallen trees and mudslides.

Exclusive: UCL scientists find large swathes of southern Europe are drying up, with ‘far-reaching’ implications

Vast swathes of Europe’s water reserves are drying up, a new analysis using two decades of satellite data reveals, with freshwater storage shrinking across southern and central Europe, from Spain and Italy to Poland and parts of the UK.

Scientists at University College London (UCL), working with Watershed Investigations and the Guardian, analysed 2002–24 data from satellites, which track changes in Earth’s gravitational field.

NSW police arrest 141 people as campaigners demand federal government cancel planned fossil fuel projects and tax existing operations at 78%

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Activists have blocked two more coal ships from entering the Port of Newcastle on the fourth day of the Rising Tide protest, bringing the total number of ships turned around by campaigners this weekend to three.

Thousands of people have gathered at Rising Tide’s annual climate protest at the world’s largest coal port. The blockade began on Thursday and will continue until Tuesday. Hundreds have kayaked into the port, with many more watching on from the beach.

Unique properties of fungi have led to groundbreaking innovations in recent years, from nappies to electronics

From the outside, it looks like any ordinary nappy – one of the tens of billions that end up in landfill each year. But the Hiro diaper comes with an unusual companion: a sachet of freeze-dried fungi to sprinkle over a baby’s gloopy excretions.

The idea is to kickstart a catalytic process that could see the entire nappy – plastics and all – broken down into compost within a year.

Destruction wrought by swine-borne disease is thinning the canopy of bunya pine forests and the problem is getting worse, experts say

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

High up in an ancient conifer rainforest, at what was once the largest Indigenous gathering place in eastern Australia, there is sunlight where there shouldn’t be.

Among the eponymous pine trees of the Bunya Mountains, in south-east Queensland, a deadly disease has taken root. Walking through the forest, Adrian Bauwens, a Wakka Wakka man, says pockets of sunlight have replaced what is “usually quite a dense canopy where’s it’s quite heavily shaded”.

Family ‘saddened’ by minister’s response to London coroner’s concerns over police database access

• Georgia’s story: how a domestic abuse victim’s suicide was ruled an unlawful killing by her partner

The family of a woman judged to have been unlawfully killed by her partner after she took her own life following years of domestic abuse has said “lessons have still not been learnt” after the government indicated it would not make changes to how officers use the police national database.

An inquest earlier this year found that Georgia Barter, 32, experienced years of abuse at the hands of Thomas Bignell.

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter

• Tom Stoppard: a life in pictures

• Michael Billington: ‘A brilliant dramatist who always raised the temperature of the room’

The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88.

On Saturday, United Agents said Stoppard died at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family. They paid tribute to the “brilliance and humanity” of his work and “his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language”.

Pay mistake is latest setback to image of exclusive Qatar-owned London retailer after a series of crises

Harrods warehouse staff have been underpaid thousands of pounds after the temporary recruitment agency employing the workers failed to award them the correct levels of holiday pay.

The error, which possibly equates to a six-figure debt owed to hundreds of lower-paid personnel, marks the latest setback to the image of the exclusive Knightsbridge retailer, which is owned by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and has spent the past 12 months firefighting a series of crises.

Rightwing activist claimed Commons deputy speaker Nusrat Ghani should be barred because she was born in Pakistan

GB News is facing calls to cut ties with a regular contributor who has been accused of racism after claiming that the House of Commons deputy speaker, Nusrat Ghani, should not be allowed in the house because she was born in Pakistan.

The comments by Lucy White, a rightwing activist, have drawn criticism from across the political spectrum amid warnings that explicitly racist language is becoming increasingly normalised in British life.

Exclusive: French artist planning to cover bridge over Seine in tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude

The enigmatic French artist JR will undertake what he says is his biggest ever challenge next year when he “wraps” Pont Neuf, the oldest standing bridge across the Seine River in Paris, in a tribute to a monumental art project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

For three weeks next June, the 232-metre (761ft) long bridge will be wrapped in fabric, 40 years after the married artists known for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations did the same thing.

Committee highlights allegations including dog attacks and sexual violence, raising concern about impunity for war crimes

Israel has “a de facto state policy of organised and widespread torture”, according to a UN report covering the past two years, which also raised concerns about the impunity of Israeli security forces for war crimes.

The UN committee on torture expressed “deep concern over allegations of repeated severe beatings, dog attacks, electrocution, waterboarding, use of prolonged stress positions [and] sexual violence”.

Axing of Maki Otsuki performance in Shanghai the latest in spate of cancelled cultural events involving Asia’s two biggest economies

Japanese “One Piece” singer Maki Otsuki was forced to halt her performance on stage in Shanghai, her management said, one of the latest events hit by a diplomatic spat between Tokyo and Beijing.

Otsuki, known for the theme song of the popular anime, had been slated to perform for two days from Friday at the Bandai Namco Festival 2025 in the Chinese city.

Competition intensifies as former chief of Domino’s says days of ‘massive growth’ are over

Pizza has become ubiquitous on British dinner plates, with chains such as Pizza Express, Franco Manca, Domino’s and Goodfella’s dominating the market – but is its popularity starting to cool?

Domino’s Pizza Group announced this week that its chief executive of two years had stepped down with immediate effect, less than two weeks after he appeared to suggest the UK may be approaching “peak pizza”.

At a time when distrust of big tech is high, Silicon Valley is embracing an alternative ecosystem where every CEO is a star

A montage of Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, and waving US flags set to a remix of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck blasts out as the intro for the tech billionaire’s interview with Sourcery, a YouTube show presented by the digital finance platform Brex. Over the course of a friendly walk through the company offices, Karp fields no questions about Palantir’s controversial ties to ICE but instead extolls the company’s virtues, brandishes a sword and discusses how he exhumed the remains of his childhood dog Rosita to rebury them near his current home.

“That’s really sweet,” host Molly O’Shea tells Karp.

Airline says 55,000 people signed up to Prime, making €4.4m, but passengers benefited by more than €6m

• Business live – latest updates

Ryanair is shutting its frequent flyers members’ club after only eight months because customers exploited its benefits too much.

The budget airline said on Friday it was closing the scheme, which offered benefits including flight discounts, free reserved seating on up to 12 flights a year and travel insurance.

JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to expand UK presence after sector was spared from higher taxes in budget

Over canapés of beef and stilton pie, bone marrow gravy and mushy peas, the financiers at JP Morgan’s New York headquarters held their champagne flutes aloft for a toast: “His majesty the king.”

Just days before Rachel Reeves’s budget – amid the chancellor’s efforts to soothe business fears and bond market jitters – Jamie Dimon, the Wall Street banking company’s boss, was hosting a birthday celebration for King Charles at its new $3bn (£2.3bn) Manhattan headquarters.

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.

Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,” he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.”

Endometriosis, miscarriage, failed relationships, suicide and gaslighting … they are all laid bare on the singer-writer’s new album. But just as she finished recording it, she got a shock diagnosis. She explains why it’s made her determined to be in the moment

You couldn’t make it up, Jessie J says. There she was preparing for her first album release in eight years, ecstatically in love with her newish partner, and finally the mother of a toddler having struggled to conceive for a decade, on top of the world. Then in March she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

The singer-songwriter, real name Jessica Cornish, is famous for telling it as it is. The album, Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, was supposed to be an open book, dealing with every ounce of devastation she’d experienced since she last recorded music (endometriosis, miscarriage, failed relationships, gaslighting, suicide) with typical candour. The first single, No Secrets, was released in April. But by then there was a mighty secret. The cancer. Then second single, Living My Best Life, came out in May and Cornish was giving interviews about how she was living her best life, while still secretly living with breast cancer. A month later she went public, and in early July she had a mastectomy.

The QI presenter’s visit to the French south coast sees her boggling with delight at tales of writers’ past visits, and marvelling at the homes of authors. At points it feels like a literary tour by stealth

‘Look at that!!” exclaims a jubilant Sandi Toksvig at the very start of her jolly new travelogue, Great Riviera Rail Trip. “Marseille!” The city of Marseille is, undeniably, there behind her, it being the starting point for a four-episode trip east along the French south coast that will take in picturesque fishing villages, posh resorts and quirky nooks.

Shows where we watch celebrities go on holiday come in many different stripes, but all boil down to us pressing our noses up against the screen and wishing we were there while the famous bod has a lovely time. The most honest course of action for the famous person is to lean into it and enthuse. Toksvig does this, constantly wriggling and giggling with pleasure as she tells us how incredible, magnificent, wonderful and beautiful the Riviera is. It looks as if she is right.

The angling buddies get intimate as their journey reaches the Scottish Highlands. Plus: Boris Johnson lands Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in danger as Prisoner 951 continues. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
“I had a dream about you,” Paul Whitehouse tells Bob Mortimer. “We were getting married and you had a really thick head of hair – which of those is more likely?” This friends-gone-fishing series never fails to raise smiles. But as well as joking around while trying to catch Bob’s first salmon on a fly in the Scottish Highlands this week, the pair have a more serious moment as they talk about health and Paul’s recent skin biopsy. Hollie Richardson

François Ozon’s handling of classic novel draws both praise and criticism, including from the author’s daughter

More than 80 years after it was published, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger remains one of the most widely read and fiercely contested French books in the world.

Until now, few attempts have been made to adapt the novel, published in English as The Outsider, for television or cinema: it is considered problematic and divisive for its portrayal of France’s colonisation of Algeria.

A controversial Netflix documentary follows an investigation into the truth behind one of the most important wartime photos ever taken

It is one of the most recognizable photographs of the 20th century: a naked girl – arms wide, face contorted, skin scorched and peeling – running toward the camera as she flees a napalm attack in South Vietnam. To her right, a boy’s face is frozen in a Greek tragedy mask of pain. To her left, two other Vietnamese children run away from the bombed village of Trảng Bàng. Behind them, an indistinguishable group of soldiers and, behind them, a wall of black smoke.

Within hours of publication in June 1972, the photo, officially titled The Terror of War but colloquially known as Napalm Girl, went the analog version of viral; seen and discussed by millions of people around the world, it’s widely credited with galvanizing public opinion against the US war in Vietnam. Susan Sontag later wrote that the horrifically indelible image of nine-year-old Kim Phúc in distress “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities”. Sir Don McCullin, the legendary British photojournalist who covered the conflict, deemed it the single best photograph of what would later be called “The Television War”. Napalm Girl is, “simply put, one of the most important photographs of anything ever made, and certainly of the Vietnam war”, said Gary Knight, a British photojournalist with decades of combat photography experience.

The musical prodigy discovered Stevie Wonder aged two and danced to Brazilian jazz at a Grammys afterparty. But what song does he think is the best in the world?

The first song I fell in love with
So many songs hit me as a child, they were like windows opening up new worlds. But the first I truly loved was Did I Hear You Say You Love Me, by Stevie Wonder, which I remember clearly when I was around two years old.

The first single I bought
I bought an iTunes single by Take 6 when I was 13. They are a six-part a cappella, gospel, jazz group, and they completely exploded my creative imagination. The song, He Never Sleeps, has the most unbelievable harmonic journey.

Despite being exiled from pop’s mainstream, he’s outlasted his contemporaries and is still selling out big rooms – what’s the secret to the national institution’s success?

At 85, Sir Cliff Richard is out on the road again. Last week, he wrapped up a run of shows in Australia and New Zealand. Tomorrow, the UK leg of his Can’t Stop Me Now tour opens in Cardiff, finishing at the Royal Albert Hall on 9 December. He was the artist who opened the British rock’n’roll era, with Move It in 1958, and after 67 years he is still selling out big rooms.

To the uninitiated, Sir Cliff’s continued presence is at best a mystery, and at worst an affront to taste. That is to misunderstand him: Sir Cliff doesn’t operate in the music business – despite his gripes with it – so much as in the Cliff Richard business. When he disappeared from national radio, to his great distress, it was because he had long since ceased to operate in a world recognisable to the rest of pop.

Even though he’s partial to hideous noise, free jazz is mostly unknown to the Guardian’s pop critic. A new guidebook from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore may change his mind

In the 1980s, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore asked his friend, the writer Byron Coley, to furnish him with a selection of jazz tapes to listen to on tour. Moore had experienced New York’s fabled avant-garde jazz loft scene first-hand in the late 1970s but “wasn’t so clued in”, he says. “Perhaps I was too young and too preoccupied by the flurry of activity in punk and no wave.” Now, he was keen to learn more.

The tapes, “of Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Sun Ra, Monk et al”, led him by degrees to free jazz: the style of jazz unmoored from standard rhythms and phrasings, resulting in arguably the most challenging and far-out music one can listen to. “A music both liberated and yet wholly indebted to the learned techniques of its tradition” is how Moore enthusiastically describes it. “In some ways, it’s similar to noise and art rock, where the freedom to experiment with open form comes from a scholarship of the music’s historical lineage … truly a soul music, both political and spiritual.”

Californian singer-songwriter Lukas Frank is picking up rave reviews for his second album’s epic choruses and lush orchestrations

From Los Angeles
Recommended if you like John Grant, Scott Walker, Father John Misty
Up next A cover of Duran Duran’s The Chauffeur is out now, with another single due in February

After several years of perseverance, things are happening for Storefront Church. The audience at this month’s sellout gig at St Pancras Old Church in London included Perfume Genius and members of the Last Dinner Party and the Horrors and their self-released second album, Ink & Oil, is picking up rave reviews. One used the term “emotional flood” to describe the album’s epic, baroque pop, big pianos and drums, sweeping choruses and Travis Warner’s lush, cinematic orchestrations.

This collection of macabre stories set across England explores class, hierarchy and the enduring nature of inequality

Folk horror may have had a dramatic resurgence in recent years, but it has always been the backbone of much of our national storytelling. A new anthology of 10 stories set across England, Bog People, brings together some of the most accomplished names in the genre.

In her introduction, editor Hollie Starling describes an ancient ritual in a Devon village: the rich throw heated pennies from their windows, watching those in need burn their fingers. Folk horror by its nature is inherently connected to class and hierarchy. Reverence for tradition is a double-edged sword – or a burning-hot coin.

The rain stops, the sun shows, another night comes dark and flowing with energy. I don’t sleep; I feel my way through the landscape, the trees that reach and catch my shirt sleeves, holding on to me, saving me from slipping on mossy roots, the unfriendly gorse keeping me at a distance, saying don’t step here, stopping me from tearing my feet on its throne of thorns. Stars alive, alight, I wish you could see them…

First light fattened like a dying star and formed the signature of an industrial town already at toil predawn, its factory stacks belching the new day black, the mills dyeing the forked-tongue river sterile inside that Hellmouth north of Halifax where paternal cotton kings had housed their workers in spoked rows of blind back-to-backs quick to tilt and rot.

The author on Anna Karenina, the brilliance of Anita Brookner and finally getting Nabokov

My earliest reading memory
I acquired from somewhere, in my more or less atheistic family, a Ladybird Book of the Lord’s Prayer, whose every page I can recover in all its lurid 1960s naturalism. “As they forgive us our trespasses against them …” The horrified boy leaves a hand mark on the wall his father has just painted.

My favourite book growing up
One of my favourites was E Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods. The lives of those Edwardian children seemed as rich as a plum pudding, with their knickerbockers and their ironies, their cook and their sophisticated vocabulary. I didn’t understand, in my childhood, that they were separated from me by a gulf of time and change. Because of books, the past seemed to be happening in the next room, as if I could step into it effortlessly.

Andy Serkis revels in his narration of the first murder mystery from the author of This Is Going to Hurt, which showcases Kay’s signature pitch-black humour

Dr Eitan Rose is stark naked in a gay sauna when he is called upon to perform CPR on an elderly man and fellow patron who is having a heart attack. When arriving paramedics ask Eitan for his details, he declines to give his real name, instead giving them the name of his work supervisor and nemesis, Douglas Moran. Eitan is a hard-partying consultant rheumatologist who has just returned to work after several months off following a mental health crisis, and who uses liquid cocaine secreted into a nasal inhaler to get through the working day.

When Moran dies in unexpected circumstances, Eitan suspects foul play and sets about finding the culprit. Soon he is performing illicit postmortems and impersonating a police detective so he can cross-examine a suspect. But when he tries to blow the whistle, his colleagues and the police decline to take his claims seriously. Eitan may work among medical professionals, but they are not above stigmatising a colleague diagnosed with bipolar disorder and taking his outlandish claims as evidence of his instability.

It’s always crushing when a wildly anticipated game turns out to be a dud, but this RPG’s awful story and clunky dialogue gave my son and I something to talk about

It was an exciting November for the Diamond household: one of those rare games that we all loved had a sequel coming out! The original Outer Worlds dazzled our eyeballs with its art nouveau palette and charmed our ears with witty dialogue, sucking us into a classic mystery-unravelling story in one of my favourite “little man versus evil corporate overlords” worlds since Deus Ex. It didn’t have the most original combat, but that didn’t matter: it was obviously a labour of love from a team totally invested in the telling of this tale, and we all fell under its spell.

Well, when I say all of us, I mean myself and the three kids. My wife did not play The Outer Worlds, because none of those worlds featured Crash Bandicoot. But the rest of us dug it, and the kids particularly enjoyed that I flounced away from the final boss battle after half a day of trying, declaring that I had pretty much completed the game and that was good enough for a dad with other things to do.

Two decades on, its influence still lingers, marking a moment when gaming felt thrillingly new again

• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Almost 20 years ago (on 1 December 2005, to be precise), I was at my very first video game console launch party somewhere around London’s Leicester Square. The Xbox 360 arrived on 22 November 2005 in the US and 2 December in the UK, about three months after I got my first job as a junior staff writer on GamesTM magazine. My memories of the night are hazy because a) it was a worryingly long time ago and b) there was a free bar, but I do remember that DJ Yoda played to a tragically deserted dancefloor, and everything was very green. My memories of the console itself, however, and the games I played on it, are still as clear as an Xbox Crystal. It is up there with the greatest consoles ever.

In 2001, the first Xbox had muscled in on a scene dominated by Japanese consoles, upsetting the established order (it outsold Nintendo’s GameCube by a couple of million) and dragging console gaming into the online era with Xbox Live, an online multiplayer service that was leagues ahead of what the PlayStation 2 was doing. Nonetheless, the PS2 ended up selling over 150m to the original Xbox’s 25m. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, would sell over 80m, neck and neck with the PlayStation 3 for most of its eight-year life cycle (and well ahead in the US). It turned Xbox from an upstart into a market leader.

Nintendo Switch 2; Bandai Namco/Sora/HAL Laboratory/Nintendo
It takes some getting used to, but this Mario Kart challenger soon reveals a satisfyingly zen, minimalist approach to competitive racing

In the world of cartoonish racing games, it’s clear who is top dog. As Nintendo’s moustachioed plumber lords it up from his gilded go-kart, everyone from Crash Bandicoot to Sonic and Garfield has tried – and failed – to skid their way on to the podium. Now with no one left to challenge its karting dominance, Nintendo is attempting to beat itself at its own game.

The unexpected sequel to a critically panned 2003 GameCube game, Kirby Air Riders has the pink squishball and friends hanging on for dear life to floating race machines. With no Grand Prix to compete in, in the game’s titular mode you choose a track and compete to be the first of six players to cross the finish line, spin-attacking each other and unleashing weapons and special abilities to create cutesy, colourful chaos.

From Minecraft chess and coding for kids to retro consoles and Doom on vinyl for grown-ups – hit select and start with these original non-digital presents

Gamers can be a difficult bunch to buy for. Most of them will get their new games digitally from Steam, Xbox, Nintendo or PlayStation’s online shops, so you can’t just wrap up the latest version of Call of Duty and be done with it. Fortunately, there are plenty of useful accessories and fun lifestyle gifts to look out for, and gamers tend to have a lot of other interests that intersect with games in different ways.

So if you have a player in your life, whether they’re young or old(er), here are some ideas chosen by the Guardian’s games writers. And naturally, we’re starting with Lego …

Manchester Arena
With 70s rock references, tinselly backdrop and some full-on cabaret-theatre vibes, the four-piece have undergone their most fun and complete reinvention yet

‘If I want to wear my sparkly knickers, I will!” Ellie Rowsell giggles into the mic as she struts into The Sofa, a stylish 70s slow-burner about making guilt-free decisions and watching “reruns on the TV” without judgment. Tonight there is no sign of a settee-induced slumber, as the sparkling singer writhes around on the stage in a tight black leotard with red hearts strategically zig-zagged across her torso. She has long since abandoned her tousled blond locks for something closer to PJ Harvey on a glam-rock bender.

It’s a fun, snazzy reinvention, and it bodes well for the audience. Wolf Alice have worn many skins and shed them without sentiment – it has come to be expected of a band with more than 15 years of performing, who began as the north London folk duo of Roswell and guitarist Joff Oddie before evolving into a fully-fledged four-piece. There are grunge snarls in their debut, My Love Is Cool; 90s alt-fuzz in the Mercury Prize winner Visions of a Life and Blue Weekend. But their current arena tour shows that the full-throttle cabaret theatre of The Clearing may just be their most complete incarnation yet.

Beauty and the Beast or Wolf Alice? Queen Marie Antoinette or Count Arthur Strong? Come and behold: the holiday season offers stage, film, music and art that’s worth singing about

The 12 Beans of Christmas
Touring to 19 December
Last year, character comedians Adam Riches and John Kearns joined forces for an archly silly tribute to crooners Michael Ball and Alfie Boe. Now Riches is back with another leftfield celebrity riff as he gives his Game of Thrones-era Sean Bean impression (as seen on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and his Edinburgh show Dungeons’n’Bastards) a yuletide twist. Rachel Aroesti

From Michelangelo and Leonardo to Picasso and Matisse, bitter feuds have defined art. But are contemporary artists more collaborative than their renaissance predecessors?

“He has been here and fired a gun,” John Constable said of JMW Turner. A shootout between these two titans would make a good scene for in a film of their lives, but in reality all Turner did at the 1832 Royal Academy exhibition was add a splash of red to a seascape, to distract from the Constable canvas beside it.

That was by far the most heated moment in what seems to us a struggle on land and sea for supremacy in British art. It’s impossible not to see Tate Britain’s new double header of their work this way. For it is a truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase their contemporary Jane Austen, that when two great artists live at the same time, they must be bitter and remorseless rivals. But is that really so, and does it help or hinder creativity?

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London
Director Holly Race Roughan transposes the summer tale into the darkest of winters as the fairies’ feud over the stolen child leaves the snow smeared with blood

Puck snatches the lovers’ breath from their bodies. They stop mid-sentence, floating under his spell, lanterns shining in the frozen night. Sergo Vares’ malevolent clown, dressed in half tux, half tutu, has chaos in his veins. In this wintery co-production between Headlong and the Globe, comedy and horror sit cheek by jowl, as director Holly Race Roughan conjures a nightmarish take on Shakespeare’s classic dream.

Vares’ crow-like Puck, a nimble shapeshifter, may be the face of the dark deeds in this frosty landscape, but Michael Marcus’s Oberon is the vengeful controller, his every action designed to get his hands on the young girl (Pria Kalsi) in Titania’s care. By shifting the show’s centre of gravity to revolve around this changeling, Roughan brings the play’s brutal undercurrents roaring to the surface.

The US author and orator on leaf blowers and Labubus, the weirdest thing she has done for love and struggling with contemporary novels

I would like to ask your opinion on five things. First of all, leaf blowers.

A horrible, horrible invention. I didn’t even know about them until like 20 years ago when I rented a house in the country. I was shocked! I live in New York City, we don’t have leaf problems. We have every other kind of problem. When I was a kid, we had leaf raking. Which is quiet. Leaf blowers are the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. First of all, they are incredibly noisy. And second of all, 10 minutes after you use it, that big leaf blower in the sky blows them all back. It’s a very stupid invention.

The new National Gallery of Victoria exhibition honours the wide-ranging photographic practices of more than 80 artists working between 1900 and 1975. Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light is open now until May 2026

She made a short, and much-ridiculed, trip to space. She tried to buy a house and fell foul of public opinion. And she’s found love, apparently, with Justin Trudeau. Time to get up to speed before this singer next hits the headlines

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind, wanting to start again? No? Just Katy Perry then. Seven months since her sense-defying jaunt into space, life on planet Earth hasn’t let up for the embattled hitmaker. She’s back in the headlines this week, implied to be raiding the pockets of a “disabled veteran” while facing scrutiny for her somewhat inexplicable new romance with Justin Trudeau. Yes, that Justin Trudeau. Shall we?

1. Perry wins in court, but loses online
By one metric, such as “relative to the rest of 2025”, this might have been a good week for Katy Perry. Since 2020, she has been embroiled in a legal battle against Carl Westcott, who sold her an eight-bedroom, 11-bathroom mansion in Montecito for $15m. Westcott then attempted to renege on the deal, claiming to have been incapacitated by painkillers (prescribed after a back operation) when signing the paperwork. A judge ruled in Perry’s favour in May last year, finding that Westcott was sound of mind when the sale went through. This week, another judge ruled that Perry was owed $1.8m in damages. This sounds like a win, you might think – except Perry had pushed for Westcott to pay $4.7m, and it’s been widely written up as Perry money-grubbing from an “85-year-old disabled veteran”. To give military.com’s headline, from earlier in the dispute in 2023: “Katy Perry Is Fighting a Dying, Elderly Veteran to Force Him to Sell His Home.” It is true that Westcott served in the 101st Airborne Division, is 85 years old and seriously ill with incurable Huntington’s disease. But the insistent framing may say more about Perry’s unenviable position as pop culture’s preferred punching bag.

One line from Ridley Scott’s classic movie was the shove I needed to walk out on my husband after years of his controlling behaviour

It was 1991, I was in my early 40s, living in the south of England and trapped in a marriage that had long since curdled into something quietly suffocating. My husband had become controlling, first with money, then with almost everything else: what I wore, who I saw, what I said. It crept up so slowly that I didn’t quite realise what was happening.

We had met as students in the early 1970s, both from working-class, northern families and feeling slightly out of place at a university full of public school accents. We shared politics, music and a sense of being outsiders together. For years, life felt full of promise. When our first child arrived, I gave up my local government job to stay at home. That’s when the balance between us shifted.

We’ve tasted, sniffed and inspected more than 300 presents to bring you our ultimate Christmas gift guide – from must-have Lego and smoky mezcal to Meera Sodha’s favourite knife

Don’t you just love Christmas shopping? There’s a massive thrill in finding a present you know they’ll love and won’t have thought to ask for, but the pressure is enough to drive any sane person to hibernation.

We’ve gone the extra (2,000) miles to help you find the perfect gifts: we’ve tested out the latest products to see which ones are worth the hype (and which aren’t); trawled shops in person; enlisted babies (OK, their parents), tweens and teens to test out toys and give us their must-haves; tasted the good, bad and the did-I-really-put-this-in-my-mouth; and rounded up some of the products that were tried and tested by us this year.

Our sex expert unwraps her favourite risque Christmas gifts – from cheeky stocking thrillers to mini massagers and toys

• The best self-care gifts for Christmas

Giving a sexy present requires careful consideration. If you proffer a heavy-duty vibrator, piece of bondage gear or other bit of “serious” kit, the recipient may feel obliged to use it with you straight away so as not to look ungrateful – even if they’re secretly a tad intimidated, or aren’t ready to get freaky before the leftover turkey’s been turned into stir-fry.

I advise bundling risque gifts with softer playthings such as a bath bomb (try Lush’s Sex Bomb), or a massage candle (I love Neom’s treatment candle).

Our in-house eco-chef sampled a range of the most sustainable, delicious and well-priced smoked salmon for your Christmas table

Silky, buttery, aromatic smoked salmon is one of Christmas’s purest pleasures, yet salmon farms have a well-earned reputation for poor welfare and environmental damage, so choosing a sustainable one is more than a little daunting. Some certifications, however, are genuinely rigorous. My main guide, as ever, is the Marine Conservation Society’s (MCS) Good Fish Guide, which rates wild-caught Alaskan salmon as the best choice and ranks European Aquaculture Stewardship Council-certified salmon as a good farmed choice.

Organic salmon, meanwhile, scores well for feed sustainability, fish health and management, but fares pretty poorly for environmental impact. If you’re interested in the wider impacts of salmon farming, check out Off the Table and remember, there are delicious, sustainable alternatives out there.

Where to find premium versions of this beloved kitchen staple to bring to your next dinner party or Christmas do

This festive season, olive oil is the new bottle of wine. If booze or a scented candle used to be a fail-safe gift option for a party, retailers and food experts are reporting a surge of interest in the kitchen cupboard staple.

The trend is being driven by several factors including a decline in drinking and a shift from dining out to dinners at home. It is premium extra virgin olive oil – or evoo to the experts – that is dominating.

Never mind the food, what about the vibe? Restaurateurs share tips and tricks that will bring a touch of restaurant magic to your table

Restaurants are temples of aspiration. From sound, scent and ceramics to hand soap and elegant wine glasses, I’ve often wanted to recreate elements of my favourite restaurants at home. I’m unlikely to sous-vide celeriac or triple cook my chips, but I can elevate my plate of pasta with a drizzle of amazing olive oil, or invest in a cutlery set that gives even a midweek dinner a sense of occasion. As much as the cooking, it’s the little details that are, as celebrated chef Skye Gyngell puts it, “what you take away and what make you feel wonderful”.

I spoke to restaurateurs across the UK about the little touches that make their restaurants distinctive – and easy ways to bring their magic into our homes.

It is good that you are getting expert counselling, but seeking support from other solo mums might be helpful too

I am a very lucky person who has a huge amount to be happy and grateful for. But although I have many excellent friendships, I have had very few romantic relationships. I am now 36 and after 10 years of giving dating a real “go”, I have decided to become a single mum by choice. This has been a very positive decision for me and I am excited about the journey.

During a pre-screening psychological counselling session, the psychologist spoke about the grief many women in my shoes experience as a result of not having the family they’d hoped for. Although I was aware of this and have worked extensively on self-acceptance with my own therapist, I now feel deep sadness and regret at being unable to have formed a relationship with someone who wanted to have children with me. In my friends and colleagues groups, this sets me apart from most women my age. I am envious of the companionship and support my peers receive from their partners.

Architect-built cabins and a sauna blend seamlessly into the High Weald landscape and make the most of its magnificent views

I sat stock-still on a bench fashioned from a fallen silver birch, scanning the woods for a sudden movement or a flash of blue. Deer and kingfisher visit this secluded copse and its stream, and I hoped to spot at least one of them. There was a rustle in the undergrowth, but it was only a more familiar winter visitor: a cheery robin.

It was a chilly day for wildlife-watching, but that didn’t matter to me – I was inside a sizzling sauna, gazing out of a large picture window. In fact, I was soon sweating so much, I nipped out to the icy-cold shower to cool off. The next time I overheated, I braved a plunge in the cold-water tub.

The French know how to do Christmas, be it a tender roast capon with rustic chestnuts and layer upon layer of baked, buttery potatoes, or an unmissable cheesy souffle

Rooted in French tradition, this menu celebrates the elegance of seasonal cooking. The twice-baked comté soufflé, light and delicately cheesy, is a timeless favourite that’s simple to prepare yet sure to impress. It’s followed by a roast capon, the festive bird of choice in France, prized for its tender, delicious meat, and paired with chestnuts and pommes Anna. These classic recipes are not just reserved for Christmas tables, but I think the combination captures the spirit of comfort and indulgence that defines traditional French gastronomy.

A stunning but simple festive vegetarian centrepiece for the whole table to enjoy

Last year I wrote about how I lost my food fandango, got it back, and now simplify matters, especially in the kitchen. This means I no longer do feasts with lots of elements, even at Christmas, but I still adore a showstopper, especially one that the whole table, irrespective of dietary requirements, can enjoy together. This year’s offering is such a centrepiece, an aubergine timbale (timbale means drum) packed to the gunnels with vegetables, rice, nuts, fruit, spices and, should you wish it (you should), one of the finest cheeses to come out of Normandy: Boursin.

A festively fizzy, rosy-red aperitif based on a rustic Italian strawberry liqueur

Earlier this year, we launched a range of tiny cocktails in collaboration with drinks writer Tyler Zielinski to reimagine Italian classics in miniature form, all designed to serve as light, pre-dinner tipples. This one’s suitably red, to go with the festive season.

Matteo Pesce, head of beverage, with Tyler Zielinski for Bar Lina, London and Manchester

Make all the individual elements ahead of time, then, on the day, as if by magic, you can conjure up this amazing tower of choux buns and smother it in boozy chocolate sauce

Christmas is the perfect time for something a bit more extravagant and theatrical. And a very good way to achieve this is to bring a tower of puffy choux buns to the table and pour over a jugful of boozy chocolate sauce and coffee caramel while everyone looks on in awe. To help avoid any stress on the day, most of the elements can be made ahead: the chocolate sauce and caramel can be gently reheated before pouring, while the choux shells can be baked the day before and crisped up in the oven for 10 minutes before filling.

When mountaineer Allie Pepper met Mikel Sherpa at Manaslu base camp in Nepal, their romance began with stolen kisses and whispered conversations

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

I discovered a passion for mountaineering in 2000 on a technical climbing course in New Zealand. For two decades I dedicated my life to the mountains, climbing some of the world’s highest peaks including Everest.

In early 2022 my marriage ended and I threw myself completely into my dream of climbing the world’s 14 highest peaks without supplemental oxygen. By September I reached Manaslu base camp in Nepal. I was focused on the mountain ahead, not on love.

Sarah, 53, a psychologist, meets Russell, 61, a behaviour officer

What were you hoping for?
A romantic connection. Failing that, getting to know someone I might not otherwise have crossed paths with.

Shaped by lockdown and two Trump presidencies, gen Z are grappling with a lot in love, dating and the bedroom

The sex lives of gen Z are of great interest – to politicians, to parents, to influencers and dating app executives and to you, apparently. Are gen Z so lonely they are falling in love with AI robots? Are they forming polycules across the US? Are they having enough sex? Are they having sex at all?

Gen Z is defined roughly as young Americans aged 13 to 28. This generation came of age with information about sex readily available to them, for better (the internet provides both sex education and community) and arguably for worse, too (in 2022, 54% of US teens reported first seeing online pornography at age 13 or younger). They are more likely to embrace non-traditional identities and are progressive on issues such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage – especially gen Z women.

It’s important to express your disagreement: for their sake as much as yours, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But first decide on what you aim to accomplish

• Read more Leading questions

How do I respond to someone who contributes to a conversation with “I’m not racist, but … ” and then inevitably proceeds to say something racist, such as talking about immigrants on benefits or getting priority for housing?

I’m referring to social occasions with people that I am not necessarily close to but rather acquaintances I may bump into semi-regularly. I feel myself getting simultaneously angry and tongue-tied and I mostly sit with my frustration to maintain some sense of harmony in the group.

Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

From Isas to salary sacrifice and inheritance to property tax, here’s how to best navigate the chancellor’s changes

• Your questions about your finances answered

• ‘Struggling to pay the bills’: Britons under pressure react to budget

• Video: tax, pensions and energy bills: how the budget could affect you

After much anticipation, the chancellor delivered her second budget this week, unveiling a series of changes that could affect how you spend and save your money.

Here are some suggestions to consider what might lessen the impact on your finances.

Use our interactive tool to see how you have been affected by Rachel Reeves’s tax and spending announcements. Use the arrow keys to scroll sideways and enter your details

• How does freezing tax thresholds affect your tax bill?

• Budget 2025: key points at a glance

From joint bank accounts and pooled savings to mortgages and tax allowances, talk about money for a happy financial future together

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for whether you should manage your finances jointly, separately or somewhere in the middle.

Rachel Reeves’s ‘mansion tax’ may encourage people who were considering downsizing to do so. Here are some options

Venues promoting destruction as stress relief are appearing around the UK but experts – and our correspondent – are unsure

If you find it hard to count to 10 when anger bubbles up, a new trend offers a more hands-on approach. Rage rooms are cropping up across the UK, allowing punters to smash seven bells out of old TVs, plates and furniture.

Such pay-to-destroy ventures are thought to have originated in Japan in 2008, but have since gone global. In the UK alone venues can be found in locations from Birmingham to Brighton, with many promoting destruction as a stress-relieving experience.

If you aren’t getting the quality time or intimacy you need, try these connection experiments to shake up interactions

Lately, life has felt like Groundhog Day: work, gym, sleep, repeat. Between a punishing work schedule, the grim weather and my desire to hibernate, my social life has suffered. I feel dissatisfied, restless and isolated. But I have plenty of friends and active group chats – I can’t be lonely, surely?

Wrong!

It used to be all boozy lunches and late-night carousing. Now it’s hyperbaric chambers and longevity chat. Andrew Carnie, CEO of the private club, explains how life and trends have changed since the Covid era

Friday night in the north of England. On the ninth floor of the old Granada Studios, a very chi-chi crowd is drinking tequila and eating crisps. Not Walkers out of the bag, mind, but canapes of individual crisps with creme fraiche and generous dollops of caviar. A young woman – leather shorts, chunky boots, neon lime nails, artfully messy bob – winks at me from the other side of the silver tray. “Ooh, caviar. Very posh for Manchester.”

Soho House’s 48th members’ club has caused quite the stir. Thirty years after Nick Jones opened the first club in Soho, London, the first north of England outpost of the empire is raising eyebrows. An exclusive club, in the city that AJP Taylor described as “the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery”. (The home, after all, of the Guardian.) An open-air rooftop pool, in the climate that fostered the textile industry because the rain created the perfect cool, damp conditions for spinning cotton. Will it work?

Our muscles, bones and organs are held together by a network of tissue that influences our every move. Is there a way we can use it to our advantage?

Fascia, the connective tissue that holds together the body’s internal structure, really hasn’t spent all that long in the limelight. Anatomists have known about its existence since before the Hippocratic oath was a thing, but until the 1980s it was routinely tossed in the bin during human dissections, regarded as little more than the wrapping that gets in the way of studying everything else. Over the past few decades, though, our understanding of it has evolved and (arguably) overshot – now, there are plenty of personal trainers who will insist that you should be loosening it up with a foam roller, or even harnessing its magical elastic powers to jump higher and do more press-ups. But what’s it really doing – and is there a way you can actually take advantage of it?

“The easiest way to describe fascia is to think about the structure of a tangerine,” says Natasha Kilian, a specialist in musculoskeletal physiotherapy at Pure Sports Medicine. “You’ve got the outer skin, and beneath that, the white pith that separates the segments and holds them together. Fascia works in a similar way: it’s a continuous, all-encompassing network that wraps around and connects everything in the body, from muscles and nerves to blood vessels and organs. It’s essentially the body’s internal wetsuit, keeping everything supported and integrated.” If you’ve ever carved a joint of meat, it’s the thin, silvery layer wrapped around the muscle, like clingfilm.

If ‘naked dressing’ is a stretch too far, sheer fabrics can provide a real-life friendly compromise

Fashion loves nothing more than an extreme trend, one difficult to imagine transferring to most people’s everyday lives. See naked dressing, where stars on the red carpet wear transparent and sometimes barely there gowns.

This party season, however, there appears to be a real-life friendly compromise. Enter the sheer skirt.

Now a hugely popular photographic genre, many women pay thousands to have intimate portraits taken of themselves by a professional. What do they get out of it?

A few hours into Brittany Witt’s boudoir shoot, with the mimosas kicking in and the music going strong, the photographer asked: “How do we feel about some completely nude photos?” Witt was lying on the bed in lingerie, in a studio in Texas, and hadn’t considered nudity an option. “I was like: ‘OK, we’re on this trust path.’” She undressed. The photographer, JoAnna Moore, covered Witt with body oil and squirted her with water, then asked her “to crawl across the floor with my full trust,” Witt says. “I did so. The pose was nude, and it was completely open. I wasn’t covered with a sheet. It was all out, it was all open, and it brought that worst level of self-doubt. I was terrified.”

Witt, 33, has come to see that terror as an important part of her experience. She used to be a competitive weightlifter. “I had a very masculine aura. I showed up in strength,” she says. At school and work – in the construction side of the oil and gas industry – she was “type A – scheduler, planner, had everything together, kind of led the group”. A turbulent home life when she was growing up led her to develop robust protection mechanisms which, in adulthood, acted as a block to relationships – issues she had been addressing with a life coach. But in that moment, on all-fours in Moore’s studio: “I felt those protections stripped away. There was nothing to hide behind, literally, figuratively.”

What begins as a harmless scroll through the secondhand app quickly turns into a window on our anxieties, ambitions and alter egos

• Don’t get Fashion Statement delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

This week’s newsletter idea stemmed from where all good ideas stem from – procrastinating while on a deadline. All it took was for one person to reveal what was on their Vinted Favourites list and suddenly everyone was whipping out phones to compare.

The Lithuanian resale platform launched in the UK just over 10 years ago, but really revved up during 2021 when many of us ran out of excuses to avoid clearing out our wardrobes. Today, “it’s from Vinted” has become a humblebrag indicating you are the type of person who can track down a great deal and don’t buy new from mass retailers.

Whether it’s a tipple with the neighbours or your office party, dress to impress in tactile fabrics and jewel tones

This Eryri refuge for hillwalkers and climbers has been reborn, breathing new life into the once-struggling mountain village of Llanberis

Pete’s Eats, the famous climbers’ cafe in the heart of Eryri (Snowdonia), reopened this summer after almost three years of being shuttered. The newly minted version is a swish affair, with a copper-topped bar, distressed wood panels, local craft beers, tacos and a handsome crew of young locals in branded T-shirts. A lot of money has clearly been spent on the refurb, and it seems to be at the forefront of a new wave of developments in the historic village of Llanberis.

When Pete Norton and his wife Victoria opened a cafe here in 1978, they envisioned a refuge for climbers, hillwalkers and anyone else who was hungry after a day out on the hills of Eryri. Rain-lashed visitors stumbling in from a long hike could look forward to pint mugs of tea poured from a metal teapot the size of a rhino’s skull, huge plates of steaming chilli and vegetable curry on brown rice, an all-day breakfast or mountainous chip butties.

From an ancient castle in Easter Ross to a cosy cabin on Lough Erne, our tipsters share their favourite country boltholes for an active winter escape
• Tell us about a UK winter walk – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

After a beautiful wintry walk along the Roaches in Staffordshire (having been fuelled with Staffordshire oatcakes), we stayed at the historic YHA Hartington Hall youth hostel, a period drama setting for a cosy bunk. We woke up to find the Peak District under a blanket of snow, calm and with that magical silence that makes the world feel at peace.
Ruth Campbell

A series of walking festivals and cultural programmes aim to lure visitors to the Algarve’s woodland interiors and pretty villages to help boost tourism year round

‘I never mind doing the same walk over and over again,” said our guide, Joana Almeida, crouching beside a cluster of flowers. “Each time, there are new things – these weren’t here yesterday.” Standing on stems at least two centimetres tall and starring the dirt with white petals, the fact these star of Bethlehem flowers sprung up overnight was a beautiful testament to how quickly things can grow and regenerate in this hilly, inland section of the Algarve, the national forest of Barão de São João. It was also reassuring to learn that in an area swept by forest fires in September, species such as strawberry trees (which are fire-resistant thanks to their low resin content) were beginning to bounce back – alongside highly flammable eucalyptus, which hinders other fire-retardant trees such as oak. Volunteers were being recruited to help with rewilding.

Visitor numbers to the Algarve are growing, with 2024 showing an increase of 2.6% on the previous year – but most arrivals head straight for the beach, despite there being so much more to explore. The shoreline is certainly wild and dramatic but the region is also keen to highlight the appeal of its inland areas. With the development of year-round hiking and cycling trails, plus the introduction of nature festivals, attention is being drawn to these equally compelling landscapes, featuring mountains and dense woodlands. The Algarve Walking Season (AWS) runs a series of five walking festivals with loose themes such as “water” and “archaeology” between November and April. It’s hoped they will inspire visitors year round, boosting the local economy and helping stem the tide of younger generations leaving in search of work.

With stunning beaches, cosy cafes and a lot fewer people, the unspoilt surfing village of Croyde has just as much to offer out of season

It’s been a while since I’ve struggled into damp neoprene of a morning. It’s the second day of a wintry weekend in Croyde, north-west Devon; I’m stiff from an hour in the sea the previous afternoon, and the upper part of the super-thick wetsuit won’t budge past my elbows. Together, my husband, Mark, and I jiggle and pull and yank it over my limbs. Finally, five minutes later, I am in a silver-blue sea, entirely empty, save for us. White-crested waves roll in, broiling and foaming, rocketing us forward towards the empty swathe of sand. For once there are no other boarders to dodge, no surfers whisking past: it’s exhilarating, extraordinary and … really rather cold.

Croyde has long been a family favourite, but visiting in November does feel a bit of a gamble. It has a reputation as something of a ghost town in the off-season, with a large number of second homes and rentals that stay dark from October to April. But when an unexpected email landed from Endless Summer Beach House offering a 20% discount on winter stays, it seemed the ideal 30th birthday treat for my nephew, Ben. So, together with his girlfriend, Tasha, best mate, Rob, and my sister Caroline, we decided to take the plunge and find out what off-season Croyde is actually like.

The singer on going solo, bringing back George Michael, and why a dog made her rethink motherhood

Born in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Rebecca Lucy Taylor, 39, was in the duo Slow Club. After 10 years, she went solo as Self Esteem and received Mercury prize, NME and Brit nominations for her second album, 2021’s Prioritise Pleasure. This year, she won the Ivor Novello Visionary award and released a book and album, both called A Complicated Woman. In March, she stars in David Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles at the Duke of York’s theatre, London. She lives in London with her partner.

When were you happiest?
Five to 10, when I was just playing out and I didn’t realise I was a girl. Before my boobs came in, basically.

The online banker sounds concerned, as if he’s trying to keep me on the line until the ambulance arrives

Certain contractual terms oblige my oldest sons to periodically appear at their places of employment. On rare occasions they both go in on the same day. On this particular day, my wife and the dog are also out. I’m alone in the house.

I’m lingering over lunch – because, why not? – when my phone pings in my pocket. It’s a text from my bank.

From Charon, Styx and Nix to Dr Fink and Bobby Z, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Which famous portrait is claimed to be of Magdalena van Ruijven from Delft?
2 Charon, Styx and Nix are satellites of which body in the solar system?
3 What type of passport was abolished in 1996?
4 Which Commonwealth capital was built by the Knights of St John?
5 Which African-born influencer is the most followed person on TikTok?
6 Whose Book of Household Management was a Victorian bestseller?
7 Which Devon racecourse is the southernmost in Britain?
8 Whose backing band included Wendy & Lisa, Dr Fink and Bobby Z?
What links:
9 Derwent; Dove; Etherow; Goyt; Wye?
10 Luton Town; Oldham Athletic; Preston North End; QPR?
11 Crucifixion; assassination of Abraham Lincoln; signing of Belfast agreement?
12 Ani Mikheeva; Bella Baxter; Evelyn Quan Wang; Tammy Faye Bakker?
13 Lift; drag; thrust; weight?
14 Singer Marc Almond; comedian Thomas Derbyshire; chemist John Farrow?
15 Golden (English); stone (German); royal (French and Spanish)?

Purwell Ninesprings, Hertfordshire: A chilly evening spent interpreting rustles and admiring the silhouetted trees – now that’s what I call a bargain

I used to regard November as the D month. Dank. Dismal. Dreary. Depressing. That is, until I discovered the Dark. My conversion took place on Black Friday 2019, as I sat alone in a Bedfordshire wood under a sliver of moon.

With eyes slowly acclimatising, I started to pick out night’s nuances – the pale suggestion of leaves underfoot, a glimmer of eyes? What surprised me, though, was the sound. Behind me, the woodland stream continued flowing as loudly and vigorously as by day, yet it seemed incongruous in the darkness, as if the water should be slowing and quietening, preparing to bed down for the night. The irrepressible gushing dispelled any anthropocentric notion that the natural world is a diminished place after dusk.

Alan, 87, has devoted his life to trying to defy death, and has promised his wife, Sylvia, that they will be cryogenically preserved upon death to be reunited in the future. However, when Sylvia dies all too soon, Alan unexpectedly falls in love with another woman and is forced to reconsider his future plans. An extraordinary love story, told with humour and tenderness about how we deal with loss, our own mortality and the prospect of eternal life.

The Daily Mail owner has the Telegraph titles in his sights as part of a long-held ambition to create a dominant stable of rightwing newspapers

Waiting two decades for another chance to snaffle a prized business acquisition is a luxury not afforded to many executives. The Rothermere family, however, takes a more relaxed approach to time.

While most business boards draw up five-year plans, the Rothermeres, having compiled a feared media empire over more than a century, are used to thinking in terms of generations.

As navies seek to counter submarines and protect cables, startups and big defence companies fight to lead market

Flying drones used during the Ukraine war have changed land battle tactics for ever. Now the same thing appears to be happening under the sea.

Navies around the world are racing to add autonomous submarines. The UK’s Royal Navy is planning a fleet of underwater uncrewed vehicles (UUVs) which will, for the first time, take a leading role in tracking submarines and protecting undersea cables and pipelines. Australia has committed to spending $1.7bn (£1.3bn) on “Ghost Shark” submarines to counter Chinese submarines. The huge US Navy is spending billions on several UUV projects, including one already in use that can be launched from nuclear submarines.

Ahead of their 11th movie together, the actor and director discuss musicals, the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and what being bald and 5ft tall does to your flirting skills

‘I like this, it’s good,” Ethan Hawke tells Richard Linklater, midway through a lively digression that has already hopped from politics to the Beatles to the late films of John Huston. “What’s good?” asks Linklater. “All of this,” says Hawke, by which he means the London hotel suite with its coffee table, couch and matching upholstered armchairs; the whole chilly machinery of the international press junket. “I like that we get to spend a couple of days in a room,” he says. “It feels like a continuation of the same conversation we’ve been having for the past 32 years.”

It’s all about the conversation with Linklater and Hawke. The two men like to talk; often the talk sparks a film. The director and actor first met backstage at a play in 1993 (“Sophistry, by Jon Marc Sherman,” says Linklater) and wound up chatting until dawn. The talk laid the ground for what would eventually become Before Sunrise, a star-crossed romance that channelled an off-screen bromance as it sent Hawke and Julie Delpy wandering around mid-90s Vienna, walking and talking and stopping to kiss. “Yeah, that was the moment. That set the tone,” says Linklater, remembering. “Meeting Ethan backstage, then flying out to Vienna.”

We would like to hear from people who could be affected by the new council tax surcharge on homes worth £2m or more

Rachel Reeves has announced that from April 2028, owners of properties in England valued at £2m and over in 2026 will be required to pay an annual council tax surcharge.

The value of qualifying properties will be determined next year by the government’s Valuation Office Agency, with four price bands. The surcharge will rise from £2,500 a year for properties valued between £2m and £2.5m, to £7,500 a year for those valued in the highest band of £5m and above.

If you have a question about the budget, let us know here and we’ll try to answer it

Rachel Reeves has set out her budget, in which she has scrapped the two-child benefit cap, brought in a new “mansion tax” on high-value properties and introduced higher income tax rates on savings, dividends and money earned from property.

As expected, the chancellor also announced that income tax thresholds would be frozen until the 2030-31 tax year. Basic rates of income tax, VAT and national insurance will not go up, which Reeves says means Labour has kept its manifesto pledge not to raise taxes on working people.

As Sean Duffy has urged passengers to mind their manners, we would like to hear about the worst breaches of airline etiquette that you’ve seen

The US transportation secretary Sean Duffy has started a “civility campaign” for air travel, urging passengers to dress smartly instead of wearing PJs and slippers, keeping children’s behaviour in check and remembering their manners.

With this in mind, we would like to hear about the untoward airline behaviour you’ve witnessed. What is the worst breach of aeroplane etiquette you’ve seen?

Guardian column the Pet I’ll Never Forget is returning and we’d like to hear your stories about the amazing pets that you’ve loved

After a one year hiatus - and due to popular demand - the Guardian will soon be resuming the Pet I’ll Never Forget, a column celebrating the magnificent creatures and mischievous critters who have left an indelible mark on their owners.

It’s a real who’s who of pet royalty. There’s Nelson, the unapologetic one-eyed cat; Verity, the kleptomaniac pug; Thumper, the frisky rabbit who got pregnant through her cage; Rambo, the Dexter-watching tarantula, to name but a few.

Wake up to the top stories and what they mean – free to your inbox every weekday morning at 7am

Scroll less, understand more: sign up to receive our news email each weekday for clarity on the top stories in the UK and across the world.

Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you

Get smart, sustainable shopping advice from the Filter team straight to your inbox, every Sunday

The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.

A weekly email from our star chefs featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideas

Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from our star chefs, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent.

Sign up below to start receiving the best of our culinary journalism in one mouth-watering weekly email.

The best new music, film, TV, podcasts and more direct to your inbox, plus hidden gems and reader recommendations

From Billie Eilish to Billie Piper, Succession to Spiderman and everything in between, subscribe and get exclusive arts journalism direct to your inbox. Gwilym Mumford provides an irreverent look at the goings on in pop culture every Friday, pointing you in the direction of the hot new releases and the best journalism from around the world.

Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world