It is one of the most tantalising – and entertaining – puzzles in art, stretching from the Louvre to the Loire via, well, Norfolk. And our critic thinks he has just worked it out

Increased security after the recent heist has made the queues at the Louvre even slower, yet on this rainswept, very wintry morning, no one grumbles. After all, the Mona Lisa is waiting inside for all these tourists who have come from the world over. Leonardo da Vinci’s woman – swathed in dark cloth and silk, smiling enigmatically as she sits in front of a landscape of rocks, road and water – draws crowds like no other painting. But if the Mona Lisa can attract such attention fully clothed, what would the queues be like if she was nude?

Strangely, this is not just amusing speculation – because in 18th-century Britain, she was. An engraving issued by a publisher called John Boydell gave libertine Georgians the opportunity to hang “Joconda” in their boudoir. It must have been popular because many copies survive. This Mona Lisa sits in a chair with her hands crossed in front of a fading view of distant rock formations. And, like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, she smiles enigmatically. But there is one key difference. She is naked from the waist up.

Trump’s admission that he recognises no constraint outside his own morality was a horrifying moment of truth. It should galvanise all those who oppose him

For a serial liar, Donald Trump can be bracingly honest. We’ve known about the mendacity for years – consider the 30,573 documented falsehoods from the president’s first term, culminating in the big lie, his claim to have won the 2020 election – but the examples of bracing candour are fresher. This week both began and ended with the US president speaking the shocking truth.

At a press conference to celebrate his capture of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced that from now on the US would “run” that country, before moving in the very next breath to Venezuela’s oil. There was no pious talk of democracy, scant mention even of the drug trafficking that earlier served as a pretext for military action. Instead, Trump said out loud what had once been a slogan on leftist placards in protest at past US interventions, admitting that it really was all about the oil. It was as transparent a revelation of Trump’s true motive as you could have asked for.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US? On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

Amid an affordable housing crisis, renting a room from a friend can seem like the perfect solution. But without clear rules, it can lead to power imbalances, feuds and even unfair evictions …

When Rachel needed a place to live, Maya was only too happy to offer her spare room. What are friends for?

Rachel had recently returned to her home town to start afresh, having been made redundant. Maya, a childhood friend, owned her three-bedroom home, having been helped to buy it by her parents.

His brutal movies put Korean cinema on the map. Now the director of Oldboy is back with a blistering satire about a man driven to murder after redundancy

The Korean wave is being feted around the world right now but Park Chan-wook is not feeling too celebratory. From the outside, South Korea seems to be a well-oiled machine pumping out a stream of world-conquering pop music, cuisine, cars, cinema (especially the Oscar-winning Parasite) and TV shows, as well as the Samsung flat-screens to watch them on. But Park’s latest film, No Other Choice, bursts the balloon somewhat. It paints modern-day Korea as an unstable landscape of industrial decline, downsizing, unemployment and male fragility – with no KPop Demon Hunters coming to save the day.

“I did not mean it for it to be a realistic portrayal of Korea in 2025,” says Park, a serene, almost professorial 62-year-old. “I think it’s more accurate to view it as a satire on capitalism.”

From the V&A to the Stranger Things finale, the pop icon still looms large – but with lower streaming figures than his peers, how many new listeners are discovering his music?

• ‘A perplexing, astonishing finale’: world pays tribute to David Bowie a decade after his death

When David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, such was the scale of media coverage and public mourning that one would have presumed his music would be everywhere for ever, elevated as he was, to misquote Smash Hits, to the position of the People’s Dame. It was briefly – Starman reached No 18, and Space Oddity No 24 – but then it wasn’t.

Each year, Forbes compiles a posthumous celebrity rich list. Bowie appeared in 2016, ranked at No 11 with estimated earnings of $10.5m (£7.8m), and again in 2017, in the same position but with earnings of $9.5m (£7m). This was unsurprising given the enormous spike in interest there is in the immediate aftermath of a superstar’s death. Yet he didn’t appear in the Forbes list again until 2022, when he was at No 3 with earnings of $250m (£195m) – the highest-ranked musician that year – but that was almost all attributable to the sale of his music publishing rights to Warner Chappell.

An afterlife sitcom, an angry penguin, tossed salad and scrambled eggs, and a Corby trouser press … our writers pick the shows they would happily watch on a loop for ever

I love every character and every aspect of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There isn’t a weak link in the cast and they work together as seamlessly and apparently joyfully as you could wish.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calls protesters ‘vandals’ and ‘saboteurs’ and blames US for instigating the unrest

Iran’s supreme leader has vowed that authorities will not back down in the face of a rapidly growing protest movement, setting the stage for an intensified violent crackdown on the second day of a nationwide internet shutdown.

Protests have raged in cities and towns across the country in recent days, posing a threat to the authority of the regime, which has been significantly weakened since the last large protest movement in the country in 2022. Another round of demonstrations was called for Friday night.

Platform has restricted image creation on the Grok AI tool to paying subscribers, but victims and experts say this does not go far enough

Elon Musk’s X has been ordered by the UK government to tackle a wave of indecent AI images or face a de facto ban, as an expert said the platform was no longer a “safe space” for women.

The media watchdog, Ofcom, confirmed it would accelerate an investigation into X as a backlash grew against the site, which has hosted a deluge of images depicting partially stripped women and children.

Met Office issues rare red warning as winter storm causes power cuts, travel disruption and school closures

Snow and ice are expected to grip much of the UK over the weekend as parts of the country continue to reel from the effects of Storm Goretti, which left thousands of people facing power cuts, school closures and travel chaos.

The storm brought winds of nearly 100mph after forecasters issued a rare red warning for “dangerous, stormy” winds in the south-west.

Information watchdog says party’s data controller should refer unauthorised launch to police

Zarah Sultana’s unauthorised launch of a Your Party membership portal may have been a “serious criminal act” and should be referred to the police, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has advised.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project (PJP), which referred Your Party to the information watchdog last September over a potential data breach, has been advised by the ICO that it should consider “taking further action” regarding the matter, after deciding it was not a matter for them.

Clip first posted by partisan outlet Alpha News shows perspective of ICE agent as Good was fatally shot

Renee Nicole Good calmly said everything was “fine” and “I’m not mad at you” seconds before an on-duty Immigration Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot her in Minneapolis as she drove away, according to a cellphone video shared Friday by Donald Trump’s White House.

The partisan media outlet Alpha News first posted the video on X, a 47-second clip that showed the perspective of the ICE agent – and captured a man’s voice calling Good a “fucking bitch” after she was mortally wounded. It was then shared by the White House’s official Rapid Response X account as well as JD Vance, with the vice-president writing in part that he agreed with the notion that Good’s death was “a tragedy” but accused the media of dishonestly covering the circumstances of her killing.

Jacques Moretti arrested on Friday as lawyers representing families of victims say investigators are not moving fast enough

Like many young people across Switzerland, Kenzo Ronnow, a university student in Lausanne, slept in on 1 January after celebrating the new year.

But as he scrolled through his phone soon after waking, he saw the lead story of a foreign news website was about Switzerland.

Palestine activist and doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah also cleared over alleged support for Hamas in case brought by GMC

The rector of the University of Glasgow has been cleared of misconduct by a medical watchdog over alleged antisemitism and support for Hamas.

Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a plastic surgeon and prominent Palestinian activist, appeared via video link on Friday before a fitness-to-practise panel of the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service in Manchester, where a case of misconduct against him was rejected.

⚽ FA Cup third-round latest from the 7.30pm GMT kick-off
⚽ Live scores | Follow us over on Bluesky | And email John

Big noise from both sets of fans on a chilly night in what used to be known as Clwyd.

Sean Dyche, of course, is wearing shorts as he carries out his pre-match duties.

Study of man often featured in works by the Flemish master reveals hidden painting of woman beneath model’s beard

Is it a bald elderly man with a big bushy beard and a wine-addled stare? Or a friendly young woman with flowing locks and a crown of braids?

To Belgian art dealer Klaas Muller, an answer to that question mattered less than the fact that this particular take on the duck-rabbit optical illusion was painted by one Peter Paul Rubens.

In Tehran this week, young adults told the Guardian about collapsing living standards, the mass anti-government protests and their hopes for the future

Mahsa is single and lives with her family. She has a page online where she sells her clothes and had arranged for a prominent influencer to run a major promotion for her. But because of the current situation, the influencer returned the money, and her sales and page activity came to a halt.

Despite significant support for the shah, Iranian society may be looking for any ‘escape from a dead end’

Supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s deposed shah, were claiming the crowds out in the streets of Iran were a direct response to his call to action. They described it as a referendum on his leadership and that the response showed he had won.

Yet the issue of an alternative leadership for Iran remains unresolved. Many Iranians, eager to end the 47-year-long rule of the clerics, still view a return to monarchical rule with suspicion.

US capture of president gave many Venezuelans hope, but a week on, an even more draconian atmosphere pervades

• US politics live – latest updates

Freddy Guevara will never forget the 34 excruciating days he spent inside Venezuela’s most notorious political prison after being snatched by masked men from Nicolás Maduro’s intelligence agency.

The black hood, the interrogations, the stress positions, the salsa music his captors blasted at him in an attempt to make him crack.

From talent shows to the big screen, the actor’s performance in Hamnet has made her a leading awards contender

Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel about William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway, is a tender meditation on love and grief. Charting the couple’s anguish over the death of their 11-year-old son – said to have inspired the play Hamlet – it has moved audiences to tears and united critics in their praise.

The film’s emotional force is carried by the Irish actor and singer Jessie Buckley, who portrays Hathaway (opposite Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare) with a rawness and intimacy that has already earned her a Critics’ Circle award for best actress, and marked her out as a leading contender for the Golden Globes, Baftas and Oscars. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw called her “unselfconsciously beguiling”, while Rolling Stone predicted audiences “will be talking about Jessie Buckley’s performance for years”.

From the family tree to intriguing cutaway shots – and the early reveals of secret relationships – a fan theory is gaining traction. Is it possible that all the contestants entered in pairs?

It’s a tangled web of intrigue in those castle corridors. Two hidden relationships have already come to light in the current run of The Traitors. The unjustly banished Judy was revealed to be the mother of Faithful Roxy, before psychologist Ellie confessed that Ross, who’d just been sent packing himself, was her boyfriend.

An increasingly popular fan theory suggests that these covert connections are merely the tip of the treacherous iceberg. Sofa sleuths claim the framed family tree on display in the Ardross Castle lobby – the one the Traitors covertly daubed with red fingerprints to mark candidates for murder – is a hint that everyone in this year’s game has a pre-existing tie to somebody else.

As the Gerard Butler film Greenland 2 becomes one more addition to the list of action movies to tamper with the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty or Golden Gate bridge, isn’t it time they mixed it up a bit?

Realistically there was never going to be a good time to release a sequel to 2020’s Greenland. This is partly because Greenland was one of those films in which Gerard Butler runs around looking as if he’s desperately trying to hold in a whopper of a fart. However, releasing a film about Americans focusing all their effort on Greenland at this precise moment in time feels a little on the nose.

Also, and hopefully this isn’t a spoiler, but it’s weird to make Greenland 2 when the entire world was destroyed at the end of Greenland 1. In that film, you will remember, Butler and his family had to get to Greenland because the planet was about to be pummelled by meteors.

Whether it’s a weighted blanket or a cup of chai, enjoy a purposely gentler start to the new year to revitalise you for the months ahead

• Rather get up and go? Try these motivation boosting buys for 2026

After a year that resembled an endurance test, you’d be forgiven for wanting 2026 to land with a gentler, more humane tempo. But an Arctic snap, winter bugs and insane world events (Donald Trump, we’re looking at you) have probably already put paid to that. So instead of hurtling into another “new year, new fitness routine”, perhaps consider the opposite: January as “sofa season”. Think duvet mode, but more intentional – honouring winter’s natural pause with rituals that centre rest, warmth and proper recuperation.

What does that look like? I’d suggest starting with the basics: upgrading to a silk pillowcase and mask may seem indulgent, but swapping cotton for silk reduces friction, keeps skin smoother and hair less frazzled. Add a weighted blanket to help regulate your nervous system, and suddenly your wind-down routine becomes something to look forward to rather than fall into exhausted.

Elon Musk’s reckless and degrading AI could be built differently. But Americans will have to speak up

Over the past year, Elon Musk has made a series of protocol changes to Grok, the proprietary AI chatbot of his company xAI, which runs prominently on his social media site X, formerly Twitter. Many of these changes have been geared to make the bot more amenable to producing pornography. In August 2025, Grok launched an image generator, branded as Grok Imagine, which featured a service geared toward creating nude, suggestive or sexually explicit content, including computer-generated pornographic images of real women. The feature, which was quickly used to create naked images of celebrities such as Taylor Swift, also allowed users to create brief videos, complete with animations and sounds.

Musk also rolled out AI girlfriends on the platform: animated personas – including female characters with exaggerated breasts and hips – that interacted in sexually explicit ways with users. One of the characters, “Ani”, was an anime-style cartoon blonde with a series of skimpy outfits; the bot blew kisses and addressed users as “my love” while directing the chats toward sexual content.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

This article was updated on 9 January 2026 to note that Grok said the image-generating service had been turned off for users who do not subscribe.

Now I can truly face the year with the brutal honesty, courage and low expectations it needs

Some berk has invented “longevity scales”. You step on to them and the tech packed into them by said berk scans 60 biomarkers – including your blood oxygen, heart’s rhythm and pumping efficiency, the distribution of fat and muscle, especially the visceral fat around your abdominal muscles, which is apparently the stuff that’s really out to get you, cellular age – and tells you you’re a goddamn mess.

We shouldn’t be surprised when our experiences on competitive TV shows or the football field are consistent with everyday life

Has the world gone woke? Some would have you believe it has, but I disagree. We’re not very “woke” if we’re still surprised when Black people are kicked out of reality TV shows first. Some people are now arguing that unconscious racial bias may well be influencing the outcome of The Traitors. But why wouldn’t it? Racial bias influences the outcome of all our lives. I think we are simply watching reality TV reflect reality.

We cannot know what is in people’s heads and it is difficult to ascribe motive, but Judy, who was booted out last week, was described by a fellow contestant as being “angry” and “having her back up” when she was accused of being a traitor. This may have been a criticism specific to her – but it also rings alarm bells. I’ve heard this before. Hands up if you’re a Black woman who has been called surly at work when “assertive” or “confident” would have been more appropriate? There have been countless studies of misogynoir (discrimination that uniquely affects Black women) in the workplace and they all come to the same conclusion. Being a Black woman at work means being judged negatively for behaviour that would be innocuous in another person.

Athena Kugblenu is a comedian and writer

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.

Many of the old challenges remain but there are a number of reasons why this time a deal of some kind could be possible

• Mining firms Rio Tinto and Glencore restart $260bn merger talks

Here we go again. A combination of Rio Tinto and Glencore has been talked about for years and the duo held aborted negotiations at the end of 2024. With the global mining industry in deal-making mode – frenzies come along every 15 years or so – the idea of RioGlen or GlenTinto was due another whirl. On Friday, the two FTSE 100 companies said they were in “preliminary discussions” about a “possible combination of some or all of their businesses”. A full-blown tie-up would be worth about $260bn (£120bn), including debt.

Many of the old challenges to a deal haven’t gone away. Glencore’s roots lie in trading commodities; Rio is a traditional pure miner, so the fit is culturally imperfect. Does Rio, which got out of coal as long ago as 2018 under investor pressure, really want to go back in by adding Glencore’s significant assets in that area? Reports suggested it is prepared to do so. But, if not, should coal be hived off beforehand? Should Glencore’s trading operation go with it?

Barely a mile from Floyd’s murder, an officer killed Renee Nicole Good. We must peacefully say no to this violence

On 25 May 2020, America witnessed a stunning act of police brutality when a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, murdered George Floyd. The killer, Derek Chauvin, apparently confident that he would be immune to accountability, did his deed in the open, with other officers standing by and in front of a crowd of onlookers.

The video of Floyd’s murder shocked the nation.

Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty

As Americans worry about healthcare and affordability, the ‘no more wars’ president is helping oil companies instead

Immediately after Donald Trump ordered a military strike in Venezuela, many critics focused on how that attack violated international law as well as the US War Powers Resolution. But there hasn’t been nearly enough focus on the domestic implications of Trump’s move.

Trump seems to have ordered his Venezuela venture in part to flip the script away from domestic matters, where things aren’t going well for him. His approval ratings are underwater, and he’s getting low marks on the economy, health policy (just 30% approval), inflation (31% approval on the cost of living), his immigration crackdown (41% approval) and his sending the national guard into US cities. Then there’s the big thumbs down that Americans are giving to his tariffs, which have helped push up prices even though candidate Trump promised to lower prices on day one.

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues

We’ve already geoengineered the planet through the careless release of greenhouse gases. Now we need a plan to manage the risks we’ve set in motion

A few months ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a Georgia representative, held a hearing on her bill to ban research on “geoengineering”, which refers to technological climate interventions, such as using reflective particles to reflect away sunlight. The hearing represented something of a first – a Republican raising alarm bells about human activity altering the health of the planet. Of course, for centuries, people have burned fossil fuels to power and feed society, emitting greenhouse gases that now overheat the planet.

Unfortunately, her hearing waved past an urgent debate that policymakers are confronting around the world: after centuries of accidental fossil-fuel geoengineering, should we deliberately explore interventions to cool the planet and give the energy transition breathing room?

Craig Segall is the former deputy executive officer and assistant chief counsel of the California Air Resources Board. He is also former senior vice-president of Evergreen Action and a longtime climate advocate. He has academic seats at the University of Edinburgh, New York University, and the University of California at Berkeley The opinions in this piece are his own.

Baroness Bryony Worthington was created a life peer in 2011, giving her a seat in the UK’s House of Lords where she served as shadow energy minister She has over 25 years of experience working on climate, energy and environmental policy in the NGO and public sectors, and in the private sector.

A brutal regime has failed to safeguard either the country’s physical security or basic living standards. But Donald Trump’s threats to intervene won’t help civilians

The internet blackout across Iran is meant to prevent protests from spreading, and observers from witnessing the crackdown on them. But it’s also emblematic of the deep uncertainty surrounding this unrest and the response of a regime under growing pressure.

Rocketing inflation and a tanking currency sparked the protests in late December. They have since broadened and spread. Videos showed thousands marching in Tehran on Thursday night and people setting fire to vehicles and state-owned buildings.

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.

It can make us healthier, happier and live longer. Engaging in culture should be encouraged like good diet and exercise

The second Friday in January has been dubbed “Quitter’s Day”, when we are most likely to give up our new year resolutions. Instead of denying ourselves pleasures, suggests a new batch of books, a more successful route may be adding to them – nourishing our minds and souls by making creativity as much a daily habit as eating vegetables and exercising. Rather than the familiar exhortations to stop drinking, diet, take up yoga or running, there is an overwhelming body of evidence to suggest that joining a choir, going to an art gallery or learning to dance should be added to the new year list.

Art Cure by Daisy Fancourt, professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London, brings together numerous research projects confirming what we have always suspected – art is good for us. It helps us enjoy happier, healthier and longer lives. One study found that people who engaged regularly with the arts had a 31% lower risk of dying at any point during the follow-up period, even when confounding socioeconomic, demographic and health factors were taken into account. Studies also show that visiting museums and attending live music events can make people physiologically younger, and a monthly cultural activity almost halves our chances of depression. As Fancourt argues, if a drug boasted such benefits governments would be pouring billions into it. Instead, funding has been slashed across the culture sector and arts education has been devalued and eroded in the UK.

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.

Steven Bowditch on an indelible memory of a night at the theatre and the death of a president

I too saw Spike Milligan in The Bed-Sitting Room as a 16-year-old (Letters, 30 December), on a trip organised by my church youth club. Due to the double selling of our tickets at the theatre in London, we were put in a box next to the stage. During the performance, Milligan climbed up the outside and peered over. He shouted: “There will come a time when all those in the box will sit at the back of the theatre and all those at the back will have the best seats!” He then added: “You’re not on complimentaries, are you?”

On the way home, the coach driver stopped to see why there were scores of people on otherwise empty streets buying the late-night final. The date was 22 November 1963. The headlines were about the assassination of John F Kennedy. Some memories never leave you.
Steven Bowditch
Carlisle

Stephen Pound on using rubber serpents to deal with greedy, ring-necked parakeets. Plus letters from Dr Andrew Bodey and Nigel Walker

The curse of the ring-necked parakeets so vividly described in your report certainly struck a chord with me and, no doubt, with many more Londoners (Rapid expansion of ring-necked parakeets in UK sparks concern, 2 January). Whether the green beasts escaped from the set of the African Queen or from Jimi Hendrix’s garden matters not to me but I did object most strongly to the flashmobs that descended on my bird tables and whose rapacious greed drove away many of the native species.

However, all was not lost when I calculated that the parakeets were of tropical origin and held within their DNA an atavistic fear of snakes. Draping my feeders with realistic rubber serpents achieved an almost instant absence of the greedy greens and allowed my long established west London avian neighbours to regroup and enjoy their new year feast of suet and seeds without suffering the egregious emerald assaults.
Stephen Pound
London

Male bonds | Northern exposure | Lofty goals | Small talk

Gaby Hinsliff’s column on male bonds struck a chord (Male bonds develop one way, female friendships another. Should we stop trying to make men more like women?, 6 January). Despite essentially no interactions since we moved in 2021, working with my retired (male) neighbour to remove a shared overgrown ivy one afternoon last summer led to me knowing his grandchildren by name and we now say hello in the village. Occasionally he even stops for a chat. But that’s enough about that.
Nick Jolliffe
Boston Spa, West Yorkshire

• Re Isabella Stone’s letter (8 January) pointing out that Ashbourne is not in “the north of England”, when I met my husband, who comes from Ramsgate, he believed the north began at the Elephant and Castle. I come from Birmingham, which is in the West Midlands – not in the north, as his family insisted it was.
Jane Gregory
Emsworth, Hampshire

Dr Carol S Leonard writes that mRNA vaccines are a way forward for those with melanoma, but hopes are dashed by financial cuts

This is a critically important editorial (The Guardian view on mRNA vaccines: they are the future – with or without Donald Trump, 1 January). I have just gained at least a year of life from a trial of a new mRNA off-the-shelf “vaccine” (neoantigen therapeutic), to which I turned after receiving the message “no options left”.

A dual American and British citizen and academic, I was a researcher, university professor and policy adviser in Russia, and because of the cost of treatment in the US, I returned to the UK in 2019 after being diagnosed with an incurable melanoma of the nasal mucosa. In the UK, I underwent surgery and was given immunotherapy, the most advanced treatment then available. After recurrence, when further surgery was ruled out, I sent an email to the remarkable head of the mRNA trial, Dr David Pinato of Imperial College, who suggested I apply for recruitment by his team at Hammersmith hospital. My tumours are now virtually gone.

⚽ Afcon updates from the game in Rabat, kick-off 7pm GMT
⚽ Live scores | Read Football Daily | And you can mail Niall

1 min: The hosts, playing in all white, kick off to a raucous reception. El Khannouss appeals hopefully for a penalty after his early cross hits Kotto on the shoulder.

The anthems ring out around the Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium, with the entire crowd belting out the Moroccan anthem. It’s go time!

• Coach is vying with Michael Carrick to be interim manager

• Solskjær due at Carrington training base on Saturday

Ole Gunnar Solskjær will have face-to-face talks with Manchester United on Saturday over becoming the interim manager until the end of the season.

The Norwegian is vying with Michael Carrick for the position and is expected to meet Omar Berrada, United’s chief executive, and Jason Wilcox, the director of football, at the club’s Carrington training base for discussions.

National League South side face Grimsby in the third round and those at the club are desperate for the ride to continue

Weeks on from the FA Cup third-round draw, inside Weston-super-Mare’s modest clubhouse at their stadium a couple of miles from the holiday haven beachfront, there is still a tinge of incredulity at what might have been. Bridget Bolland, operations manager and one of the mini-army of staff who keep the part-time sixth-tier side ticking, relays how, normally, visiting teams have their post-match meal on a bench beside the skittles alley, sausage and chips usually the offering. The thought of Bruno Fernandes or Erling Haaland tucking in here is yet to fully evaporate.

But the draw meant Weston, the promotion-chasing National League South side who have reached this stage of the Cup for the first time, have been preparing for a different challenge: a tie at fourth-tier Grimsby Town, who beat Manchester United in the Carabao Cup in August. “As a United fan, I hated them that night,” says Weston’s manager, Scott Rogers. “I was going mad at the TV. But I’m hoping we can do something similar. There’s always an upset in the Cup: why can’t it be us?”

After a breakout week in Auckland that saw her defeat world No 15 Emma Navarro, injuries that have dogged the 25-year-old’s career have bitten again

During the first weeks of last year’s clay-court season, Francesca Jones found herself fighting through a breathless three-set tussle in Bogotá that was rapidly falling out of her control. Trailing 5-3 in the final set of her second-round match, an exhausted Jones began her service motion. As she tried to leap into the air and strike the ball, however, she staggered forwards and collapsed to the ground. Two points from defeat, she was steered off the court in a wheelchair.

This was an extreme experience for Jones, but it was also painfully reflective of her career until that point. Her biggest adversary has so often been her own body. In 2024 alone, she contested 20 tournaments – seven of which ended in a mid-match retirement and she also withdrew mid-tournament from another event. In 40% of the events she took part in that year, her body simply did not allow her to play tennis.

If there is one takeaway for England from this Ashes tour it should be how cricket thrives in a nation where it is readily and freely available as the dominant summer pastime

The drive to Bowral in New South Wales takes you through some of Australia’s most English countryside. Pastoral hills roll right up to the roadside and finish in grassy verges, flecked with yellow and white wildflowers. Alliums stand sentinel around vibrant lawns. Even the eucalypts are cosplaying as beech and oaks. You might be in Hampshire, if it weren’t for the dazzling sun.

Just a few roads from the high street – storefronts full of fancy cookware and country casuals – is the Bradman Oval. This small ground, with its pre-loved outfield, has become a pilgrimage stop for the Australian cricketing faithful. Head out to the middle and you’re walking across the sacred turf where Sir Don honed his skills. Stand at the crease, look past the white picket fence, and you can see the family homes where he grew from boy to man, on Shepherd Street and Glebe Street respectively.

• Deal understood to lift pay to about £300,000 a week

• Arsenal keen to reward Declan Rice with new deal

Bukayo Saka has agreed a new five-year contract at Arsenal that will make him one of the highest-paid players in the club’s history.

The England forward’s deal that he signed in May 2023 is thought to be worth about £200,000 a week and is due to expire in 2027. Saka said before the Champions League quarter-final victory against Real Madrid in April that he wanted to “win wearing this badge” but also said he was in “no rush” to sign a new contract.

Dutch head coach has been rewarded for winning Champions League with contract that runs until 2029 designed to return club to domestic dominance

The summer of 2029 feels very distant, whether you think of it as the year of the next Women’s Euros, the year when theoretically there will be the next UK general election or the year when a near-Earth asteroid larger than the Emirates Stadium is scheduled to pass by our planet.

When it comes to English women’s football Arsenal, with an unrivalled 48 major trophies, are as large a celestial body as you can get, but in terms of domestic success they have been rather stuck in orbit since their most recent WSL title in 2019, and nobody at the club will want to imagine reaching 2029 and having gone a decade without a league title.

• Warwick and Kempton face 8am Saturday inspections

• Cautious approach adopted in face of falling temperature

The valuable meetings at Warwick and Kempton on Saturday are subject to inspections at 8am due to the threat of overnight frost as cold weather continues to threaten the racing programme.

Kempton was initially declared fit for racing on Friday afternoon but a revised forecast for sub-zero temperatures overnight forced Barney Clifford, the clerk of the course, to adopt a more cautious approach.

Strip away the peroxide hair, the TikTok dancing and the trademark try celebrations and the Northampton and England flanker has a white-hot ambition to be the best

Next Wednesday will be Henry Pollock’s 21st birthday. You slightly feel for his family and friends: what do you buy a guy with the Midas touch? Two tries on debut for England in Cardiff, a British & Irish Lions tour of Australia and a world breakthrough player of the year nomination would be prized accolades for anyone, let alone a bleach-blond tyro with nine Prem starts.

A bottle of HP Sauce as an ironic gift, maybe? Sitting across the table in a snow-dusted Northampton is a young athlete who enjoys a bit of banter. But strip away the peripheral stuff – the hairstyle, the black headband, the TikTok dancing and the trademark try celebration – and most striking is his white-hot ambition. “I’m just a normal kid who has this amazing drive to want to be the best,” he says. “I’m never satisfied in anything I do.”

Four out of five councils controlled by party have proposed 5% council tax rises, the maximum permitted by law

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has been accused of betraying election promises to cut council tax after several councils it controls said they planned to increase rates close to the maximum allowed.

They include Kent county council – the party’s flagship local authority and one viewed by it as the “shop window” for what a Reform-led government would look like – which has proposed an increase of 3.99%.

Exclusive: In first comments since US attack on Venezuela, Richard Hermer refrains from singling out Trump administration

Nations are right to consider diplomatic relations when deciding whether to “call out” potential breaches of international law, the attorney general has said, after the UK government faced criticism over its reluctance to condemn the US attack on Venezuela.

In an interview with the Guardian, Richard Hermer, the government’s most senior law officer and a close ally of Keir Starmer, said that in a “complicated and dangerous” world, leaders should be able to use “statecraft” to consider other factors when establishing whether to hold allies to account.

Kyiv dismisses as ‘absurd’ Moscow’s attempt to portray missile launch as retaliation for supposed attempted drone strike on Putin residence

Russia’s military has fired its new hypersonic Oreshnik missile at a target in Ukraine during a massive overnight strike.

Ukraine confirmed the attack, saying it took place in the west of the country near the EU border. Moscow said the launch of the intermediate-range ballistic missile was retaliation for a supposed attempted Ukrainian drone attack on Vladimir Putin’s residence late last month – an allegation Kyiv and Washington have said is false.

Over 100 pieces of human remains including skulls and headless torsos found in car and home of Jonathan Gerlach

A Pennsylvania man suspected of desecrating a historic cemetery in his state is facing hundreds of charges pertaining to grave robbery after authorities recently found more than 100 pieces of human remains in his possession, prompting one official to call the case “the most horrific thing”.

Jonathan Gerlach, 34, had human skulls, bones, mummified feet, headless torsos and other corpse parts – including in his car, home and storage locker – after his arrest on Tuesday, according to a sworn police statement reported by NBC News.

Catherine says she feels deeply grateful in final instalment of Mother Nature series a year on from cancer treatment

The power of nature has been a huge theme for the Princess of Wales in the year since her announcement that she was in remission from cancer.

Now, on her 44th birthday, she has embraced it again, reflecting in a short video on how deeply grateful she is, how important it is to be at one with nature and its power to heal.

Some wet years and recent winter storms have helped bring the state out of drought after years of insufficient rainfall

California is completely drought-free for the first time in a quarter of a century, a significant development in a state that endured grueling years with insufficient rainfall.

Over the last 25 years, drought conditions in California have intensified the state’s wildfire crisis and created challenges in its massive agricultural sector. But a few wet years, and a recent spate of winter storms, helped bring the state out of drought.

Oceans absorb 90% of global heating, making them a stark indicator of the relentless march of the climate crisis

The world’s oceans absorbed colossal amounts of heat in 2025, setting yet another new record and fuelling more extreme weather, scientists have reported.

More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s carbon pollution is taken up by the oceans. This makes ocean heat one of the starkest indicators of the relentless march of the climate crisis, which will only end when emissions fall to zero. Almost every year since the start of the millennium has set a new ocean heat record.

For much of the last 30 years, the rest of the world has been forced to persevere with climate action in the face of US intransigence

• Outrage as Trump withdraws from key UN climate treaty along with dozens of international organisations

Donald Trump’s latest attack on climate action takes place amid rapidly rising temperatures, rising sea levels, still-rising greenhouse gas emissions, burgeoning costs from extreme weather and the imminent danger that the world will trigger “tipping points” in the climate system that will lead to catastrophic and irreversible changes.

The US president’s decision to withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the world’s leading body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will not alter any of those scientific realities.

Plant Heritage says gardening trends mean many species in danger of disappearing as they are no longer offered for sale

More than half of garden plants previously grown in the UK are no longer offered for sale as flower fashions and modern gardening trends have reduced the diversity of blooms.

Plant Heritage is asking the public to choose unusual plants for their gardens, and maybe even start their own national collections of rare blooms, in order to stop some cultivated plants from dying out.

PC Matthew Pike is on trial charged with causing death of Dr Keryl Johnson by dangerous driving in 2021 incident

A police officer charged with causing death by dangerous driving reached speeds of up to 93mph (150km/h) through a city centre shortly before a fatal crash, a court has heard.

Matthew Pike, 40, was following a white Volkswagen Tiguan driven by Lewis Griffin through Bristol city centre shortly before midnight on 4 November 2021.

Scientists at UCL say drug developers should focus on two risk-raising variants of the Apoe gene

New therapies for Alzheimer’s disease should target a particular gene linked to the condition, according to researchers who said most cases would never arise if its harmful effects were neutralised.

The call to action follows the arrival of the first wave of drugs that aim to treat Alzheimer’s patients by removing toxic proteins from the brain. While the drugs slow the disease down, the benefits are minor, and they have been rejected for widespread use by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice).

Report says officials seem unprepared for potential risks that unregulated industry poses to UK financial stability

The UK Treasury has a “limited grasp” of concerns linked to the booming shadow banking sector and may not be prepared for risks the unregulated industry poses to financial stability, peers have said.

While a lack of data makes it hard to say whether the $16tn (£12tn) non-bank financial sector could bring the wider financial system to its knees, officials do not seem to be alive to the potential risks, according to a Lords financial services regulation committee report.

Bassem Abudagga losing hope after being told wife must go to visa application centre, of which none remain in Gaza

A Palestinian academic has failed in his latest attempt to be reunited with his family in the UK after the Home Office concluded their case was not urgent and it was more appropriate for his two children to remain with their mother in a tent in Gaza.

Bassem Abudagga was also told in a letter from Home Office officials that no reason had been found that was “sufficiently compelling” to defer a requirement that his wife attend a visa application centre (VAC) in Gaza so she could provide fingerprints to satisfy the conditions for evacuation.

Agreement after 25 years of negotiations prompts farmers to block roads in Paris, Brussels and Warsaw

European Union member states have backed the biggest ever free trade agreement with a group of Latin American countries, ending 25 years of negotiations but stoking further tensions with farmers and environmentalists around the bloc.

The contentious Mercosur deal with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay prompted immediate protests in Poland, France, Greece and Belgium, with farmers blocking key roads in Paris, Brussels and Warsaw.

Results of research offer hope to older women – but it will be several years at least before technique is approved

• Human eggs ‘rejuvenated’ in an advance that could boost IVF success rates

It is a rollercoaster of emotional extremes that will be familiar to many who have gone through IVF treatment: hope and joy turns to despair and back again. This is especially true for women over 35, the age when IVF success rates decline steeply and for whom the only real way to improve the odds is to keep trying.

While there has been huge progress in IVF in the past decades, including the advent of genetic testing, egg freezing and techniques to overcome male infertility, the primary cause of age-related female infertility – egg quality – has not been directly addressed.

Cyclists and others voice frustration as transport infrastructure descends into chaos amid increasingly rare cold snap

A week-long winter cold snap that would once have been normal in the Netherlands has caused more than 2,000 flight cancellations, chaos on roads and railways, buildings to partially collapse, and a stream of angry cyclists asking why roads seem better gritted than cycle lanes.

Since Saturday, up to 15cm of snow has fallen across the country, with temperatures of -10C (14F) including wind chill, sparking angry commentary over how some nations manage months of snow but the Netherlands, no longer used to it, appears paralysed.

Military opens window for civilians to leave as Kurdish groups turn down demand their fighters withdraw from city

Syria’s army says it will renew attacks against a Kurdish-majority district of Aleppo where clashes have raged this week, after Kurdish groups rejected Damascus’s ceasefire terms that demanded their fighters withdraw from the city.

The army said it would target military sites used by Kurdish fighters in the Sheikh Maqsoud district, announcing the opening of a humanitarian corridor from 4pm (1300 GMT) to 6pm on Friday for civilians to leave.

Bosses at body that trained chef Jamie Oliver were awarded million-pound bonuses after sale to private firm

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The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into City & Guilds’ sale of its qualification awards business to a private company last year.

The announcement has been made after the Guardian revealed last month how City & Guilds bosses were handed million-pound bonuses after the charity privatised its business arm.

Deal would create world’s largest mining company and come almost a year after previous discussions failed

• Nils Pratley: Glencore and Rio Tinto are at it again – and the markets smell action

Rio Tinto and Glencore have restarted talks over a merger that would create the world’s largest mining company.

The talks come almost a year after previous discussions between the two mining companies collapsed. If a deal is agreed, it would create a global mining business with an enterprise value of more than $260bn (£193bn).

City firms welcome clarity as government signals it will not reopen Brussels-era rules, despite closer cooperation elsewhere

• Business live – latest updates

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Keir Starmer will exclude financial services from negotiations on closer alignment with the EU, prompting a sigh of relief from Brexit-weary City lobbyists.

A government spokesperson said officials would continue to explore cooperation “where it is in our economy’s interest”, but it is understood there will be no push for City firms to return to the Brussels rulebook.

Robot vacuums that can climb stairs and device for BlackBerry lovers also on display at annual Las Vegas tech show

This year will be filled with robots that can fold your laundry, pick up objects and climb stairs, fridges that you can command to open by voice, laptops with screens that can follow you around the room on motorised hinges and the reimagining of the BlackBerry phone.

Those are the predictions from the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas that took place this week. The sprawling event aims to showcase cutting-edge technology developed by startups and big brands.

Major new films promise to reveal more about the lives of public figures, provocative topics and historical events

The landscape for nonfiction cinema is swift, fragile and constantly in flux in these absurd times; films we discuss now may not be released, and films we discuss a year from now may not even be the germ of an idea yet. But between the usual stable of celebrity retrospectives, music documentaries and the ongoing work to record the atrocities in Gaza, the documentary slate for 2026 already seems both full and promising. From the assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie to AI, a Billie Jean King retrospective to Elon Musk, here are 10 of the most hotly anticipated documentaries in 2026.

With strong showings for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and target hit for 50% female directors, criticism that has dogged the prizes in recent years may have been headed off

For now, the Bafta film awards appears to have headed off further criticism over its long-running diversity crisis after revealing its longlists on Friday.

Despite Bafta overhauling its awards voting system in 2020 after claims of “systemic racism”, outrage re-emerged in 2023 after no people of colour won awards. The longlists, which are an intermediate stage on the way to the final nominations with each category determined by different mixes of membership voting and jury selection, suggest that some progress is being made.

Teaser reels for next December’s coming episode give no clues to the story, still less to how these old characters are returning via the multiverse

Avengers: Doomsday may still be almost a year off, but already it feels as if Hollywood has entered a new era of confidence marketing, built around a sort of ritualised roll-call of legacy characters who really need everyone to know they haven’t been retired yet. In the last few weeks we’ve had three almost completely pointless short trailers online, with another reportedly playing in cinemas ahead of Avatar: Fire and Ash. First there was Captain America cradling his baby, then Thor praying to his dear old dead omnipotent dad. This week we got our first proper look at the classic X-Men lineup in the new film, and there are suggestions that an encounter between the Fantastic Four’s The Thing and half of Wakanda is imminent.

Something weird is clearly happening. These aren’t teaser trailers in any meaningful sense, because these half-cocked, chord-drenched promotional entries tell us absolutely nothing about what is to come. Assembled fandom wants to know who Doctor Doom is in the new movie, and why he looks exactly like Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man (because if this is just stunt-casting there are going to be walkouts). We want to know how all the Fantastic Four and X-Men have suddenly turned up in the main Marvel timeline, when the last 17 years of these movies made no mention of them whatsoever. And we’d really like it not to just be explained away by … “the multiverse”.

Almost every scene in Steven Knight’s late-Victorian thriller is stolen by its female lead. You absolutely marvel at her in this darker second outing

The problem with having Erin Doherty star in your TV drama is that it makes it extremely difficult to tell whether it’s any good or not. The 33-year-old is more than an impressive actor – she is a magnetic presence, able to sell the idea that she actually is her character in a way few others can (a particularly impressive feat considering her breakthrough was playing Princess Anne in The Crown). As such, Doherty’s participation in a series can elevate the premise, plot and script in a slightly confusing way. Watching the first few episodes of Steven Knight’s late-Victorian thriller A Thousand Blows, I wasn’t sure whether I was genuinely enjoying the programme or simply marvelling at Doherty’s effervescent turn as wily, tough-as-boots pickpocketing queen Mary Carr.

Series two makes it easier to spot the difference. While the first outing suffered from its share of heavy-handed exposition, the tale of an East End boxer (played by Doherty’s Adolescence co-star Stephen Graham) whose local dominance is undone by a smart Jamaican fighter (Malachi Kirby) was propulsive and slick, and the presence of the Forty Elephants – a real all-female crime syndicate – was giddily novel. The rivalry between Henry “Sugar” Goodson (old school, bare-knuckle, chip-on-both-shoulders, mildly deranged) and Hezekiah Moscow (young, fun, good-hearted, and willing to cash in on the gentrified west London boxing scene) was a framework that allowed room for commentary on colonialism, racism, tradition and class. Throw in Mary and her mischievous colleagues and you also had a compelling exploration of female empowerment, poverty and the psychology of risk and reward.

Featuring Wood, her famous sidekicks Julie Walters and Celia Imrie and other female standups, this documentary is tender, moving and an absolute hoot

There is a moment at the start of this documentary about the comedian Victoria Wood when you realise what she was up against at the beginning of her career: a snippet from the archives of Melvyn Bragg hailing her as Britain’s first female standup comedian. That wasn’t entirely the case, but it seems unthinkable now that it took until the 1980s for women to break through in any numbers. In 1985, when season one of Wood’s sketch show As Seen on TV aired on BBC2, there were sniffs of doubt that a woman could front a comedy programme, let alone a northern woman. How wrong they were. Clips from the show, featuring Wood, Julie Walters and Celia Imrie, are a hoot: high on a tipsy energy, the performers are all on the edge of collapsing into giggles.

For those who grew up with Wood as a national treasure, Becoming Victoria Wood will be a revelation. Her standup routines in the 1980s blazed a trail, with jokes about tampons and cellulite. She had a lonely childhood, was ignored by her mother and was shy and self-conscious about her weight. (Later press coverage fixating on her size was vile.) She didn’t feel clever or good-looking enough but she had a fierce streak of ambition that seemed to come from nowhere.

Ahead of his reunion with Ben Affleck in thriller The Rip – as well as his starring role in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Imax epic The Odyssey – we run through the best work of one of Hollywood’s most reliable heroes

Matt Damon is essentially a bland dish that requires the right spice truly to zing, which means he is often at his best when playing beastly. His flagrantly nasty turn as one of the antisemitic bullies who makes prep school life hell for a secretly Jewish classmate (Brendan Fraser) offers an early indication that Damon realised this, too.

(Transgressive)
In Jenny Hollingworth’s first solo venture, her singular songwriting powers shine in swooping vocals and transcendent pop melodies

Over the past decade, 27-year-old Jenny Hollingworth’s musical output has become steadily less strange. As half of Let’s Eat Grandma, the Norwich native started out making freaky synth-folk the arch syrupiness of which chimed with the then-nascent hyperpop scene: I, Gemini, the duo’s 2016 debut, was outsiderish juvenilia of the most thrilling variety. For its follow-up, I’m All Ears, Hollingworth and her bandmate, Rosa Walton, sharpened their songwriting skills while holding tight to their eccentricities; the result was an album of sensational futurist pop. By 2022’s Two Ribbons, they were slipping into slightly more subdued, conventional territory – albeit retaining enough idiosyncratic sonic detailing to maintain their place at the edge.

So it takes a moment to adjust to the overt familiarity of Hollingworth’s first solo venture. Like Two Ribbons, it reflects on grief (she lost her partner in 2019) and the temporary disintegration of her lifelong friendship with Walton, except this time the introspection is set to knowingly nostalgic 1980s new wave. When the choruses don’t sparkle, Quicksand Heart can feel like plodding through the past, but the moment Hollingworth lands on an irresistible melody – see: Every Ounce of Me, whose bittersweet bounce bridges the gap between Olivia Rodrigo and the Waterboys – the effect is transcendent. The record peaks with the archetypally perfect powerpop number Appetite and the genre-bending Do You Still Believe in Me? in which Hollingworth patchworks together breakbeats, vertiginously swooping vocals, squealing hair metal bombast and shoegazey dissonance, reminding us of her singular powers in the process.

(Self-released)
The Beirut-born producer’s masterly second album revels in dark tension to cinematic effect, finding beauty in ruinous sound

Arabic electronic experimentalism is thriving. In recent years, diaspora artists such as Egyptian producer Abdullah Miniawy, singer Nadah El Shazly and Lebanese singer-songwriter Mayssa Jallad have each released records that combine the Arabic musical tradition of maqam and its slippery melodies with granular electronic sound design, rumbling bass and metallic drum programming to create a dramatic new proposition.

Beirut-born and Amsterdam-based composer Toni Geitani is the latest to contribute to this growing scene with his masterfully produced second album Wahj (“radiance” in Arabic). Working as a visual artist and sound designer, Geitani is well versed in creating imaginative soundscapes for films such as 2024 sci-fi Radius Collapse, as well as referencing the shadowy nocturnal hiss of producers such as Burial on his dabke-sampling 2018 debut album Al Roujoou Ilal Qamar. On Wahj, he harnesses soaring layali vocalisations, reverb-laden drums and analogue synths to leave a cinematic impression.

Bray/Vann/Grainger/Schofield
(Chandos)
The easy fluency of Bray and pianist William Vann guides us through familiar and less well known Kurt Weill songs with the haunting Youkali as the lodestar on our journey

Youkali, for Kurt Weill, was the land of desires, promised but never to be attained – a strong image for an exiled and itinerant composer. The 1935 song in which he captured the idea, a lilting tango, forms the lodestar of Katie Bray’s voyage through Weill’s chameleonic songwriting career, undertaken alongside the pianist William Vann, accordionist Murray Grainger and double bassist Marianne Schofield, the latter moonlighting from the Hermes Experiment.

First, we hear a haunting, unaccompanied musing on the Youkali melody, then more of these punctuate the programme until we reach the song in full at the end. The journey takes in numbers in German, French and English – some familiar, some not – including a couple of songs written for the Huckleberry Finn musical Weill was working on at the time of his death.

(PIAS)
The Jarman brothers’ ninth album adds a little 80s pop sheen to their distorted guitars and confident songwriting, while always sounding exactly like the indie stalwarts

Last summer, the BBC broadcast an eight-part podcast called The Rise and Fall of Indie Sleaze. Its third episode heavily featured the Cribs’ bassist and vocalist Gary Jarman talking about his band’s first flush of mid-00s fame. It centred on their 2005 single Hey Scenesters!, from which the episode also took its name. It was a curious choice: on close examination, Hey Scenesters! wasn’t a celebration of what some people unfortunately dubbed the New Rock Revolution so much as the sound of Jarman and his bandmate brothers poking fun at it.

There was the peculiar dichotomy of the Cribs in a nutshell. They were a band so of the mid-00s moment that they were nearly signed to a record label founded by Myspace. But they always seemed slightly apart from the scene. They were certainly less voracious in the pursuit of mainstream success than contemporaries Razorlight or Kaiser Chiefs: “A cash injection, a nasty infection – don’t regret it,” offers a song from their ninth album, Selling a Vibe, with the pointed title Self Respect. They were more in tune with what their sometime-producer Edwyn Collins called “proper indie” from a pre-Britpop age, when “indie” indicated not a predilection for skinny jeans and trilby hats, but something set apart from the mainstream that viewed the attentions of Top of the Pops and the tabloid press with deep suspicion and balanced limited commercial ambitions against artistic freedom. It was a point underlined by the kind of artists who gave them co-signs. Quite aside from the former frontman of Orange Juice, there was Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Johnny Marr – who briefly joined the Cribs, co-writing 2009’s Ignore the Ignorant – and the late producer/engineer Steve Albini.

The author on the trouble with the Brönte novels, what she gained from reading John Updike and Martin Amis – and the brilliance of Barbara Pym

My earliest reading memory
Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome, aged seven. I didn’t learn to read in the first years of school and became entrenched in illiteracy until my grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened. I loved the Swallows and Amazons series, and especially Swallowdale in which a shipwreck is redeemed and the adults provide exactly the right support when the children mess up.

My favourite book growing up
The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose politics I now find obviously objectionable. I often tell students that what you don’t get is what gets you, and I’m sure the obsession with rugged independence and the repression of foundational violence did me no good, but I liked the landscapes and the combination of domesticity and adventure.

This poignant debut about two strangers who fall in love offers a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain

“Love is not an easy thing … It’s both the disease and the medicine,” a character says in Manish Chauhan’s meditation on modern love. This poignant and perceptive coming-of-age story, about two strangers who become star-crossed lovers, is a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain, and of love as home, hope and destiny.

Newly arrived in England following an arranged marriage with British-Indian Rajiv, Mira feels increasingly out of place as she finds out that Rajiv holds secrets and loves someone else. On the eponymous Belgrave Road in Leicester, entire days go by “without sight of an English person”, and Mira feels “disappointed that England wasn’t as foreign or as mysterious as she had hoped”. She takes English classes, finds companionship in her mother-in-law and fills her days with household chores, but nothing shifts her deep loneliness.

The novelist and writing tutor delivers bracing advice that demolishes familiar ‘stick to what you know’ nostrums

Trope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world.

What writers used to say to small circles of students in an attempt to help them improve their storytelling technique has become a familiar way, often parodic and self-knowing, of interpreting the grand and not-so‑grand narratives of our time. “Don’t worry about Liz Truss’s YouTube series – she’s just having a main character moment.”

Drawing on his own near-death experience, the author finds a powerful intensity in this tale of a young man’s convalescence in a Cornish village

“I had to pick through the wreckage, blind at first. I had to find all the pieces of me, scattered all around, and put them back together, one by one.” Following a cardiac arrest which left him clinically dead for 40 minutes, Jago Trevarno, the young narrator of Patrick Charnley’s moving debut novel, has retreated to the Cornish village where he grew up, to shelter under the protection of his “off-gridder” uncle, Jacob.

His mother dead of cancer and his father long gone, at 20 Jago’s world seems to have shrunk to nothing but the hard daily labour of working a subsistence farm high above the rugged Atlantic coast. The life Jago had begun to construct in the city, “a runaway train” in flight from his mother’s death and everything that reminded him of her, has evaporated abruptly in the aftermath of his near-death experience. He has “gone from someone who needed to slow down, to be present, to someone having no choice about it”, and must start from scratch.

PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, Xbox, PC; Square-Enix
This landmark role-playing game remains a revolutionary tour de force

At first glance, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, first released in 1997 and now available in newly remastered guise, does little to separate itself from other boilerplate fantasy fiction. There is a hero, Ramza – an idealistic nobleman with luscious blond hair who cavorts about the medieval-inspired realm of Ivalice in search of high adventure. But quickly, and with narrative elegance, the picture complicates: peasant revolutionaries duke it out with gilded monarchists; machiavellian plots plunge the kingdom into chaos. Ramza must navigate this knotty political matrix, all while experiencing his own ideological awakening.

There is a strong case to be made that Final Fantasy Tactics tells a better story than the landmark Final Fantasy VII (which saw Cloud Strife and a ragtag bunch of eco-terrorist pals taking on the shady megacorporation Shinra). And with our real-world political focus shifting from the looming threat of the climate crisis to the more pressing rise of fascism (though the two are inextricably linked), one can make the argument that Tactics is now also the more timely game.

In this week’s newsletter: Stranger Things’ climactic showdown is the latest pop culture spectacle to feel like its been ported straight from a console. The industries’ reciprocally influential relationship can be to everyone’s gain

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It had begun to feel like an endurance test by the end, but nonetheless, like the sucker I am, I watched the Stranger Things finale last week. And spoiler warning: I’m going to talk about it in general terms in this newsletter. Because approximately 80% of the final season comprised twentysomething “teenagers” explaining things to each other while using random 1980s objects to illustrate convoluted plans and plot points, my expectations were not high. After an interminable hour, finally, something fun happens, as the not-kids arm themselves with machine guns and molotovs and face off against a monstrously gigantic demon-crab. Aha, I thought – the final boss battle!

The fight was like something out of Monster Hunter, all scale and spectacle with a touch of desperation. For a very long time, video games sought to imitate cinema. Now cinema (and TV) often feels like a video game. The structure of Stranger Things’ final season reminded me a lot of Resident Evil: long periods of walking slowly through corridors, with characters exchanging plot information aloud on their way to the action, and occasional explosions of gunfire, screeching monsters or car chases. Those long periods of relative inaction are much more tolerable when you’ve got a controller in your hands. I am all for TV and film embracing the excitement, spectacle and dynamism of video games, but do they have to embrace the unnecessary side-quests and open-world bloat, too?

This now venerable hardware remains an ideal platform for classics such as Minecraft and daring experiments from the brightest new developers

Now surely approaching their twilight years, the Xbox Series S and X machines nevertheless still have plenty to offer both new and veteran owners. We have selected 15 titles that show the range of what’s on offer, from the biggest blockbusters to lesser known indie gems you may have missed. Whether you’re after tense psychological horror or wild escapism, it’s all here and more.

New mind-bending puzzlers, landmark RPGs and furry multiverse adventures await you as the PlayStation 5 enters its sixth year

Entering its sixth year, the PlayStation 5 has built up a formidable library of epic adventures, button-pummelling shooters and even the odd cutesy platformer. So whether you’ve owned the machine for years or only just entered the current console generation, here are 15 titles we think you should have in your PlayStation collection.

Soho theatre, London
The comic targets Christian sexism head-on – while the argument is well worn, Owens’ manic physicality and dark humour keep the show fizzing

Who would have thought, in 2026, that comedy would still be called upon to spoof the sexism of the Christian church? So it is with Kate Owens’ Cooking With Kathryn, in which a woman from America’s Bible belt struggles to keep up appearances as she hosts, for the first time, her late mom’s community cooking show. Owens was nominated for the best newcomer award at Edinburgh fringe for this one, and you can see why. She’s a teasing and charismatic presence here, playing a type – woman on the edge, her panic barely concealed by too much makeup and a flashing smile – that audiences will instantly recognise.

Maybe she’s too recognisable: the show’s argument, that Christian zealotry subjugates women, is nothing if not familiar, and Owens discloses Kathryn’s particular crisis (her tyrannical mom; her lovelessness) very explicitly right from the get-go. But if the terrain feels well trodden, Owens brings it to sparkling life, as the daughter flailing to become the home-maker of her late mom’s dreams. The cookery workshops descend into slapstick disaster, via an erotic egg-beating skit and a hastily improvised tinfoil bandage. Proceedings are given a psychotically needy edge when Kathryn’s supposed sweetheart is discovered sitting in the front row.

At Soho theatre, London, until 10 January

Jewels of island life go on display, Beuys introduces heroism to washtime and Nan Goldin’s classic The Ballad of Sexual Dependency reveals itself – all in your weekly dispatch

Hawai‘i
Some of the most spectacular masterpieces in the British Museum, including feathered war helmets and glaring gods collected by Captain Cook, make this exhibition created in collaboration with Hawaii community leaders and artists entrancing.
• The British Museum, London, from 15 January to 25 May

(We indulge in) a bit of roll play is an explicit drama about a young disabled man’s sexual expression – and puts uncomfortable questions to its audience

“I’m asked quite a lot why everything I make ends up being about sex,” says Scottish writer and director Robert Softley Gale, artistic director of the company Birds of Paradise. His new production, (We indulge in) a bit of roll play, is designed to provoke frank discussions around sex and disability. “People say the right things and that they support equality, but what if you push that into areas that are less comfortable? Like would you ever date a disabled person? Would you marry a disabled person? Would you have sex with a disabled person? Some would go, ‘Yeah, of course I would.’ But would they? There’s still discomfort in recognising that disabled people have sex lives.”

Softley Gale and his co-writers, Hana Pascal Keegan and Gabriella Sloss, aim to challenge audiences in the show which he is also directing. They hope to counter narratives around disabled people needing charity or pity, and instead show lives that are complex and nuanced. “We don’t see a lot of disabled characters full stop. Seeing them having respectful, enjoyable sex is almost unheard of. By doing that in the ways that we do, we’re being quite provocative,” he says.

Abbey theatre, Dublin
Barbara Bergin’s tale follows four families through strikes in the slums, the Easter Rising, the early years of independence and the HIV-Aids crisis of the 1980s

In Barbara Bergin’s epic “losers’ history” of Dublin, street names tell their own story. Tosser’s Pot leads to Cutpurse, then from Pokes Alley to Kiphouse Row. For the residents of the inner-city tenement building where the action opens in 1880, choices are starkly circumscribed and lives are cut short by poverty, disease or violence.

Covering 100 years of life in this house, the narrative traces four families, their lives intertwined through generations, with trauma recurring – to women in particular – echoing the spirit of Seán O’Casey. The historical backdrop is outlined in broad brush: from strikes in the slums to revolution and war, through the early years of the independent state, to the heroin and HIV-Aids crises of the 1980s.

At Abbey theatre, Dublin, until 31 January

​In this week’s newsletter: In the first of a new series, we’re digging into the archives to find the first fleeting mentions of pop culture’s great and good. But who’s this little lady?

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From Radiohead playing in backroom pubs as On a Friday to Timothée Chalamet’s early days as an Xbox YouTuber, it’s always fascinating to see the faltering first steps of famous folk. So in this week’s newsletter we’re launching a new regular feature, Origin stories, where we’ll look at how the Guardian first covered some now very familiar pop culture figures or institutions. And you’ll find out who the tyke above is, from a 1973 photoshoot, at the end.

To the archives!

Film director of poetic narratives set in remote Hungarian communities, filled with desolation and foreboding

Susan Sontag once claimed she would be “glad to see” Béla Tarr’s 1994 masterpiece Sátántangó “every year for the rest of my life”. No small compliment given that the film is more than seven hours long.

Tarr, who has died aged 70, earned the reverence of cinephiles on the basis of a handful of austere, poetic and painstakingly slow black-and-white films including Damnation (1987), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) and his swansong The Turin Horse (2011).

The Merseyside comic used her experiences of Oxbridge to create the fringe hit Eat the Rich, but struggled in ways her well-off contemporaries didn’t. Now she’s determined to use success to bring more working-class voices into comedy

Jade Franks was scrubbing loos while her peers were playing polo. A working-class student at Cambridge, living a double life as a cleaner alongside full-time studies, she has parlayed her experience into her winningly titled play Eat the Rich (But Maybe Not Me Mates x). An early, buzzy hit at the Edinburgh festival fringe, the comic skewering of the Oxbridge elite sold out its initial run, added extra shows and won multiple awards, including a sought-after Fringe First. With a London run and regional tour about to kick off, Eat the Rich now follows in the footsteps of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer in being developed for TV, with a bidding war seeing the show currently under development with Netflix and Adolescence director Philip Barantini’s indie company It’s All Made Up Productions. But Franks is a grafter, and she’s only just getting started.

“I was always really ambitious,” says Franks, in her lush scouse accent, wearing thick cat-eye glasses. “I don’t think I was fully aware of class until it was stopping me from getting where I wanted.” Fictionalising her own life, Eat the Rich undercuts Franks’s effortless charm with rage at wealth inequality. Tracing her first term, the arcane rituals and alien environments get her into regular pickles simply because she doesn’t understand the state of play: dinners are suddenly conducted in Latin; money-oozing peers mimic her accent; and the grated cheddar she brings to a party is swiftly rejected from the cheese board.

Ahead of her final European tour, the US songwriter discusses her unlikely life as a country star, seeking advice from Pete Seeger – and why retirement isn’t on the cards just yet

When Emmylou Harris was starting out in the late 1960s, she thought country music wasn’t for her. “I hadn’t seen the light,” she says. “I was a folk singer who believed you don’t ever work with drummers as they wreck everything.” It was Gram Parsons, of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, who changed her mind. Their musical partnership was brief – Parsons died after an accidental drug overdose at the Joshua Tree national park in 1973, aged 26 – but his impact on her was profound. “He had one foot in country and one in rock and was conversant in both. It changed my thinking completely.”

Is Harris, legendary doyenne of the country ballad and distinguished recipient of three Country Music Association awards whose guitar was exhibited in Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, really saying she hated country? “It can be corny!” she says. “Country music aims straight for the heart and when it misses, it misses really badly. And that’s the stuff that makes the most noise and takes up most space.” She pauses. “But then you hear something like George Jones’s Once You’ve Had the Best, and you hear the simplicity of his phrasing and the earnestness with which he sings. There’s a soulfulness to country music that can elude you if you just look at the big picture.”

As screen fatigue grows, a new trend is swapping smartphones for crosswords and sketchbooks – turning the humble bag into a tool for offline living

There’s a new “it” bag – but this time it is not about a designer label or splashy logo. Instead, it’s what is inside that counts.

So-called analogue bags, filled with activities such as crosswords, knitting, novels and journals, have become the unexpected accessory of the season.

I love the way we are both looking in astonishment at my son. It shows the unwavering support she gave me when he was born

This picture of my mother, me and my eldest son, Theo, was taken the morning after he was born in May 2002, in University College Hospital, London.

There are a lot of things I love about it. I love the fact my mother is exquisitely dressed – she’s wearing her pearls! She always looked very elegant at this time in her life and enjoyed clothes (we bought that suit on a day out together). I love the composition too – our three dark heads, faces in profile and the way our three hands are aligned. I love the miracle of my son’s intricate little shell of an ear, the nose (his dad’s) and lips (mine) still visible now in his 23-year-old face.

Our fitness expert clocked up his indoor miles to put the best exercise bikes, including simple spin machines and gym-quality models, to the test

• The best treadmills for your home, tested

Cycling has the potential to benefit your health in myriad ways, whether it’s the mood-boosting properties of inhaling fresh air, the social element of riding with friends or the simple act of improving cardiovascular fitness with every pedal stroke.

The UK weather doesn’t always play ball, though, so for those who don’t want a dire forecast to result in a missed workout, indoor training replicates the exercise (if not the fresh air).

Best exercise bike overall:
Peloton Bike+

Best budget exercise bike for beginners:
Horizon 3.0SC indoor cycle

Storm Goretti is bringing an icy blast to the UK this week. Whether you’re hunkering down at home or braving a winter run, we’ve rounded up everything you need to keep cosy

• The best umbrellas for staying dry in the wind and rain

For many of us, 2026 has started with ice, snow and frost. And with weather warnings continuing across the UK, spring feels a long way off.

So whether you’re heading outside for winter hikes or exercise, or just want to raise your temperature indoors without racking up your energy bills, we’ve rounded up some of our most loved products to get you through the cold snap – from cosy pyjamas and electric blankets to hand warmers and winter running essentials.

Trying damp or dry January? Enjoy the buzz without the booze with our pick of the best hangover-free beverages

• The best no- and low-alcohol wines

Was your Christmas a little too merry? Maybe you’re giving Dry January a go; maybe you fancy trying more zebra striping (alternating alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks) this year; or maybe you want to steer clear of alcohol for a while for health reasons. Whatever the motivation, many of us will use the new year as a chance to re-evaluate our relationship with booze and look for alternatives to the hard stuff.

Luckily, the low- and no-alcohol category is increasingly better; these days there’s no excuse to serve you a sad lemonade just because you’re the designated driver. The world of low-alcohol beer is particularly excellent, with loads of brilliantly brewed lagers, pilsners, stouts and ales that are just as exciting and tasty as their alcoholic counterparts. Spirits are good, too, with delicious agave-based liquids and dozens of gin-adjacent spirits I’d be happy to drink in a 0% G&T. Wines can be more challenging, I find, but there are some that taste more than passable, and sparkling wines, teas and the like are often excellent.

They may be small, but toothbrushes can create mountains of waste. Experts reveal how to clean and care for them and extend their life

• The best electric toothbrushes, tested

If toothbrushes were sentient, they’d complain about their lot in life. Their thankless existence involves repeatedly cleaning one of the grimmest parts of the body, then being thrown out once their bristles are insufficiently effective. Or, in the case of electric toothbrushes, decapitated before resuming their duties with a fresh head.

This relentless cycle is essential for hygiene reasons: an ineffective brush can lead directly to tooth decay and gum disease. However, given the big dual crises of our time – climate and cost of living – it would certainly help for toothbrushes to last a bit longer. So what can we do to maximise their longevity without sacrificing dental hygiene?

A sweet and sparkly way to use up cocktail cherries at the 19th hole

If, like many people, you’ve got an opened jar of cocktail cherries in the fridge after the festivities, here’s a very classy way to use up some of the syrup.

Emilio Giovanazzi, head bartender, The American Bar, Gleneagles, Auchterarder, Perthshire

A wholesome and indulgent pudding that’s a great way to use up dried fruit left over from the festive season

After the excesses of December, these baked apples are a light, refreshing vegan pudding. The filling makes good use of any dried fruit lingering still from Christmas, and is brightened with lemon and bound with nutty tahini. As the apples bake, they turn yielding and fragrant, while the sesame oat topping crisps to a golden crown. Serve warm with a splash of cream, yoghurt or ice-cream (dairy or otherwise), and you have comfort that feels wholesome and indulgent.

Nolo beer is becoming easier, cheaper and tastier, so tip one back in Dry January without a care

As the last of the liqueur bottles are consigned to the recycling and the festive hangovers subside, even those of us who scorn the very concept of Dry January (no booze at all? In the gloomiest month of the year? Are they mad?) tend to take our feet off the alcohol pedal and give our livers something of a rest.

Water, of course, is the easiest, cheapest and probably most effective way to detox; it’s also the most boring. We can zap our inner organs with herbal infusions, turmeric/kale/spirulina shots and smoothies, or with the fermented goodness of kombuchas and kefirs, but sometimes the mindful drinking halo of virtue can become too heavy to bear and we want something that feels like a “real” drink. You know, the one at the end of the day when you deserve something cheering, or when you meet your mates in some scuzzy pub or swanky wine bar, and you want a drink for relaxation and pleasure, but still steer clear of the hooch.

This superb winter salad uses shaved and roast pumpkin to bring a riot of textural contrast and a flash of colour to a grey winter’s day

I try to grow a few varieties of squash every season, but in the past couple of years the results have more or less failed me. I originally put that down to the lack of time and attention I’d given those poor plants, but I’m now starting to wonder if the soil in my raised garden beds overlooking Lyme Bay in Dorset is actually right for them.

I’m not giving up just yet, though, and this year I’ll be trying different varieties in a different bed that I’ve prepared and composted over the winter with seaweed mulch. As luck would have it, however, my friend Rob Corbett came to the rescue a couple of weeks ago by giving me several specimens when he delivered some wine from his Castlewood vineyard a few miles away in east Devon. If you know your gourds even a little, you will also know that squashes keep for months, which is handy, because they ideally need to cure and ripen before use. Happily, that also means you can use your crop throughout the long winter months.

Mark Hix is a restaurateur and writer based in Lyme Regis, Dorset. His latest limited-edition book, Fishy Tales, with illustrations by Nettie Wakefield, is published at £90.

In Vallejo, California, ‘trad sons’ report feeling trapped by family obligations, slim job prospects and the fear of violence – leaving little room for romance

Are boys becoming men later? In recent decades, the markers of adulthood have shifted for young American men: they are almost twice as likely to be single, less likely to go to college and more likely to be unemployed. Most significantly for their parents, they are also less likely to have fled the nest, with the term “trad son” springing into social media lexicon in recent months. In the 1970s, only 8% of Americans aged 25 to 34 were living with their parents, but by 2023, that figure had jumped to 18%, with men more likely to live at home than women, according to a Pew survey.

But not everywhere in the US has the same rates of adults living in their familial home. The living arrangement is least common in the midwest and most common in the north-east. Topping the list was Vallejo, where 33% of young adults live with their parents. How were they making it work?

Bored, lonely and emerging from lockdown, a less-traditional relationship was just what I was looking for

We were just two midlifers in our 50s who met back in 2020 using a popular dating app. Bored, lonely and emerging from lockdown we jumped at the chance for an outing. We had our first date at a trendy, dimly-lit Japanese restaurant and bar in Sydney’s Surry Hills. By our second lychee martini, we became aware of some mutual connections that we knew and discovered that we had actually grown up in the same place.

There was an immediate feeling of familiarity and a shared sense of humour that clicked without effort. We were in no rush for anything too serious. In fact, it would take another five outings, including antique-trawling for some 70s-inspired crockery, before things would develop into more of a romantic connection.

Valerie and Max have discovered the secret of maintaining an active sex life in your 70s – and are happy to pass on their tips

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

I’ve actually found that age has affected sex in a very positive way. Now I can have five orgasms in a row

Your friend fears dependency and wants to regain control. Is there someone you can talk to about your own feelings?

I am in my 80s and an old friend has several health issues. She will probably die in the not too distant future due to the inoperable cancer she has been aware of for some years.

She has two adult children, with domestic and career problems of their own, but she sees them frequently, and I know them both.

Research finds growing trend of employers letting employees work remotely to free up more holiday time

Katherine first caught the bug when she visited Australia a couple of years ago. The flights were expensive, and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, so she asked her manager if she could extend the trip by two weeks, and work remotely from her friend’s house.

That was her first taste of a “workation” – combining working with a holiday – and she loved it. She now regularly arranges petsitting in different places so she can visit family, friends and new cities for long weekends without spending extra.

The firm that is holding the files has gone out of business, and complaining may take months

My dad died in July in harrowing circumstances. Our probate application was close to being finalised by our solicitor.

Then this month we received an email from the solicitor, Samuel Phillips Law, to say it had ceased trading. No explanation was given.

It allocated my NI number to a stranger who has died, and will not process my pension top-up request as a result

HM Revenue and Customs allocated my national insurance (NI) number to a stranger who has since died. It therefore now insists that I am dead and so will not process my pension top-up request.

I’ve had this number since 1991 when I moved to the UK for six years to work.

Fraudsters use phishing to steal card details, which fund a spending spree using Apple Pay or Google Pay

You get a call from your bank and the informed voice asks to you to confirm the personal details they have on file, which you do. You are then asked whether you bought something at an electrical retailer recently for £120 and spent £235 in Birmingham, but neither transaction rings true.

The caller tells you they have blocked the payments but they must now secure your account, and say they will send you a notification to approve, or a code to pass on to them. You feel under pressure to protect your money, so you do what is asked.

From vitamins C and D to calcium and magnesium, it’s critical to know whether you’re taking the correct dosage to avoid health problems

There are more than 100,000 supplements on the US market – capsules, powders, tablets and gummies sold to improve or maintain health. Supplements can contain vitamins, minerals, botanicals and amino acids on their own or in various combinations.

The consumption of these products is surging. But it’s a common misunderstanding that these products are entirely safe, says Dr Pieter Cohen, an internist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. Excessive amounts of nutrients can cause health problems, so it’s critical to know whether you’re using the correct dosage of high-quality products.

This article was amended on 9 January 2026 to clarify the possible negative side effects of probiotics.

As we age, we naturally lose mobility. But there are some steps we can take to keep these joints healthy for longer

• Read more summer essentials

You’re clinging to the overhead strap on a packed bus during rush hour when the driver suddenly slams on the brakes. As the crowd surges, your arm jerks back and your shoulder takes the full force of the momentum. It’s times like these one is grateful for a strong and healthy shoulder.

“If you’ve got a strong and mobile shoulder, you have the control to reduce the risk of anything [bad] happening,” says Dr Josh Zadro, a physiotherapist and senior research fellow at the University of Sydney.

Arm circles: Large, controlled circles in front of your body.

The wall slide: Face a wall and slide your hands up as high as possible.

The overhead reach: Stretch your arms to the ceiling to counteract the forward hunch of computer work.

Engaging in creativity can reduce depression, improve immunity and delay ageing – all while you’re having fun

For some reason, we have collectively agreed that new year is the time to reinvent ourselves. The problem, for many people, is that we’ve tried all the usual health kicks – running, yoga, meditation, the latest diets – even if we haven’t really enjoyed them, in a bid to improve our minds and bodies. But have any of us given as much thought to creativity? Allow me to suggest that this year be a time to embrace the arts.

Ever since our Paleolithic ancestors began painting caves, carving figurines, dancing and singing, engaging in the arts has been interwoven with health and healing. Look through the early writings of every major medical tradition around the world and you find the arts. What is much newer – and rapidly accelerating over the past two decades – is a blossoming scientific evidence-base identifying and quantifying exactly what the health benefits of the arts are.

Though most nosebleeds are mild and benign, they shouldn’t happen. Experts weigh in on when to see a doctor

If you frequently experience nosebleeds, you might come to regard them as nothing more than a messy inconvenience.

Yet, even though most nosebleeds are mild and benign, they should not happen “if everything inside the nose is healthy”, says Dr Patricia Loftus, an otolaryngologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Against a backdrop of rising white nationalism, the ‘global authority on colour’ has chosen white as the shade of 2026. Four experts wade in on the implications for everything from interior design choices to racial politics

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For more than 25 years, Pantone, which describes itself as “the global authority for colour communication and inspiration”, has attempted to prophesy the year ahead by choosing its specific colour. For 2026, it is hedging its bets on something called cloud dancer.

While it’s highly unlikely that the next 12 months can be neatly summarised by one colour before the year has even kicked off (Pantone’s announcement took place in December), it still garners headlines because, in a way, Pantone’s decision does reflect on some level what is happening in the zeitgeist – or, at least, what is expected to happen. After the economic crash in 2009 came mimosa, a “warm and engaging” shade of yellow said to represent hope and optimism (it rang true with a mimosa-coloured sofa becoming a must-have and everyone taking up daily affirmations). In 2016, there was the blending of serenity and rose quartz – AKA the ubiquitous millennial pink – while last year’s mocha mousse is the reason you are seeing brown everywhere.

They don’t have to be expensive, they go with everything and they boost confidence – if you get the styling right

The eternal appeal of the white shirt is not just that it goes with anything, although it does. And not only that it can take you anywhere, although it can. It is not even that it never goes out of style, or that good quality versions are accessible at real-world prices, although those are true also.

A white shirt is self-confidence. It stands for it, and it brings it, and that’s the real secret. It is a superhero cloak that bestows you with this formidable power. Self-confidence is not as snazzy as the ability to fly or live for ever, but arguably it’s more practical. I don’t know why or how it works, but it doesn’t matter, because if you feel confident then you are confident. Faking it and making it are one and the same here.

Exfoliating, plumping and hydrating, the best products will leave your skin glowing without costing a fortune

Lactic acid – always the bridesmaid for the more hyped glycolic acid – is my first choice of alpha hydroxy acid for all manner of reasons. It exfoliates without stripping or stinging (its bigger molecule size makes it particularly well tolerated by even sensitive skins), can stimulate collagen and ceramide production to firm, plump and protect mature skins, has antibacterial properties for more problematic ones, and binds with water to keep every type more hydrated. Lactic also imparts an unmistakable glow to the complexion and deflakes rough areas brilliantly.

I’ve always loved it, but have rarely been so spoilt for choice. Beauty Pie’s new Youthbomb Extreme Retinal Triple Renewal Serum (£49 to members) is their best formula in some time, which goes some way to justify its high (for Beauty Pie) price point.

In politics, clothes matter – as the mid-market formal wear favoured by the new, young New York mayor testifies

Growing up in London in the 00s, I was surrounded by suits. On City boys darting around the Square Mile. In Hyde Park, where Arab dads in baggy suits kicked footballs with their children in honeyed light. At school, where cheap grey suits were our uniform. The suit has always been a costume of seriousness that signals powerfulness and performance; all the things I was apparently supposed to want if I ever intended to become a “man”. But until recently, my generation seemed to wear them less and less, and they had all but disappeared from my consciousness.

Then came the newly elected New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who was sworn in at a private ceremony dressed in a sober black overcoat, crisp white shirt and an Eri silk tie from New Delhi-based designer Kartik Kumra of Kartik Research – styled by US fashion editor, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. Buoyed up by an ingenious campaign, he caught the imagination of the world like no other New York mayoral candidate of recent times. But whether he was throwing his hands in the air at a hip-hop club or at a premiere party for the film Marty Supreme, one thing on his campaign trail rarely changed: he was almost always in a suit. Loosely tailored, modern with soft shoulders, yet conventional and ordinary, his is a typically middle-class millennial suit – well, as typical as it can be for a generation that rarely bothers to wear one.

Poland’s capital is now rated above cities like San Francisco and Copenhagen for its vegan options. We sample plant-based schnitzel, ramen and, of course, pierogi

Pinny on, hands dusted with flour, I rolled out dough, cut it into circles, added a spoonful of filling and sealed it into little parcels. I was getting stuck into a dumpling cooking class in one of the most vegan-friendly cities in the world. Making gyoza in Tokyo, perhaps? Wontons in Singapore? Potstickers in Taipei?

In fact, I was preparing pierogi in Warsaw. Friends who associate Polish cuisine with stews and sausages were surprised to hear it, but vegan food has proliferated across the country over the past 20 years. Happy Cow, the veteran vegan restaurant guide, now consistently ranks Warsaw in its top cities globally – last year it was in 11th place, ahead of Bangkok, San Francisco and Copenhagen.

On Ulva, in the Inner Hebrides, Banjo Beale and his husband are transforming a rundown mansion into their dream hotel, while another adventurous couple have created a charming bothy for hardier folk

Ulva House is a building site. There are workmen up ladders, hammering, plastering, but I leave my muddy walking boots by the door. There’s no central heating or hot water and Banjo Beale and his husband, Ro, have been camping out here for weeks, but he greets me, dazzlingly debonair, in a burnt orange beanie and fabulous Moroccan rug coat.

The 2022 winner of the BBC’s Interior Design Masters, who went on to front his own makeover show Designing the Hebrides, Banjo’s vibe is more exuberant Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen than quizzical Kevin McCloud. His latest project with Ro, the transformation of a derelict mansion on the small Hebridean island of Ulva into a boutique hotel, is the subject of a new six-part series, airing on BBC Scotland. I’m here for a preview of the finished rooms.

The festive season can stretch waistbands and wallets to breaking point. Here’s our pick of boltholes for a new year reset – each with a spa and rooms for under £160 a night

Virginia Woolf described the South Downs as “too much for one pair of eyes, enough to float a whole population in happiness”. So where better to head at this time of year, when our happiness levels are traditionally at their lowest ebb? Striding across the rolling chalkland towards the teetering sea cliffs buoyed up by a stiff breeze is the perfect antidote to the January blues. And if there’s a cosy hotel bar with an open fire waiting for you at the end of the walk, so much the better.

This 14-mile section of the Sandstone Trail crosses an ancient landscape of hills, woods and ridges, bookended by two fine old inns

Deep in the heartland of rural Cheshire, there’s a wind-scoured ridge of sandstone that hides a two-storey cave known as Mad Allen’s Hole. Here, on the flanks of Bickerton Hill, it is said that in the 18th century a heartbroken man called John Harris of Handley lived as a hermit for several decades.

As locations to weather the storm of romantic trauma go, this – I mused as I stood above it on a crisp winter’s day – certainly takes some beating. Offering a panorama of nine counties of England and Wales from its entrance, I could spy the white disc of Jodrell Bank Observatory glistening in the sunlight, while the peaks and troughs of the Clwydian range appeared like a watermark in the distance.

Kim Elms, a speech pathologist, shares her experience as an auditory-visual synaesthete

• Read more stories of synaesthesia in the way I feel series

Car journeys with my partner are a nightmare. He’s an ex-DJ so he likes to crank the music up, but for me this means seeing static images and flashes of light in my mind’s eye while I’m trying to drive. It’s hard to describe exactly what I see when I hear sound. But it’s almost like the sound waves you’d see if you watched an audio recording on a screen, or these little neurons connecting and space nebulas exploding in front of me.

I’m 44 now and only realised I had auditory-visual synaesthesia in my 30s. What I did know was that I seemed to have an extraordinary ability for linguistics. In school I studied Japanese and did really well without trying because I could literally see the words and sounds presented as images in front of me, making them easy to remember. At university I majored in Spanish, Korean and Indonesian and it was no effort at all. I then joined the air force as an intelligence officer because I didn’t want to become a teacher or translator. I walked away from the language aptitude test thinking I’d either messed it up or that it had been the easiest thing I’d ever done in my life. No one’s ever managed to get every answer right, they said when the results came back. But I hadn’t even tried. It just came naturally.

People say my job must make me morbid, but I think the opposite is true, I truly appreciate life

Not many people can say their happy place is a cemetery, but mine certainly is. I didn’t set out to dig graves for a living – it’s nobody’s childhood dream – but working as a contract gardener for the council in Oxfordshire, I did some work tending cemeteries, and eventually I was offered a job digging graves.

I found it quite daunting at first. I was responsible for digging the plots and being on hand during the funeral service, as well as filling in the grave. It felt like a huge responsibility. I’d recently lost my nan and I’d sit and watch the funerals with a lump in my throat. From the beginning, I treated every grave as though it were for a member of my own family. For the first time, I felt like my job really mattered.

The whole plant is edible and they don’t need much light – so they’re an easy, tasty treat

January can hardly be considered an abundant time of year. All but the evergreens are barren and bare. Yet there is an approach to year-round growing that, in the depths of winter, feels all the more miraculous. Microgreens are not a “type” of plant, but a method of growing leafy crops which doesn’t require much space or effort – and, importantly for now, can be done indoors – in order to achieve an unseasonably fresh burst of flavour on your dinner plate.

Any plant that is edible from top-to-toe can be grown as a microgreen. From salad leaves like lettuce and sorrel to herbs such as basil, dill, coriander and fennel, plus all the brassicas from the very delicious mustard greens and rocket to the far less spicy broccoli and kale. Also on the fuller side of the flavour profile are nasturtiums and sunflowers, which produce juicy shoots with a nutty flavour. Peas also produce a substantial shoot with pretty leaves and tendrils. Amaranth, carrot and perilla are other edible plants I am eager to try.

From a penthouse flat in London to a Georgian house in Sheffield

Dying is a process and in a person’s final hours and days, Nickie and her Threshold Choir are there to accompany people on their way and bring comfort. Through specially composed songs, akin to lullabies, the choir cultivates an environment of love and safety around those on their deathbed.  For the volunteer choir members, it is also an opportunity to channel their own experiences of grief and together open up conversations about death.

Full interview with Nickie Aven, available here

Caracas shake-up could intensify violence in Catatumbo in Colombia, an area rich with coca crops, cocaine laboratories and a porous border with Venezuela

Alberto’s eyes shifted nervously. His chin trembled.

His slender hands fumbled with a manila folder containing his family’s documents, which he was waiting to present to staff of the Human Rights Ombudsman in the north-eastern Colombian city of Cúcuta, in the hope of receiving humanitarian aid.

Trump sounds off on Venezuela’s future, Taiwan’s security and his aims for Greenland, days after operation to seize Nicolás Maduro

Just days after launching an unprecedented operation in Venezuela to seize its president and effectively take control of its oil industry, Donald Trump sat down with New York Times journalists for a wide-ranging interview that took in international law, Taiwan, Greenland and weight-loss drugs.

The president, riding high on the success of an operation that has upended the rules of global power, spoke candidly and casually about the new world order he appears eager to usher in; an order governed not by international norms or long-lasting alliances, but national strength and military power.

The president has vowed to kill off ‘woke’ in his second term in office, and the venerable cultural institution a few blocks from the White House is in his sights

On 30 May last year, Kim Sajet was working in her office in the grandly porticoed National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The gallery is one of the most important branches of the Smithsonian Institution, the complex of national museums that, for almost 200 years, has told the story of the nation. The director’s suite, large enough to host a small party, has a grandeur befitting the museum’s role as the keeper of portraits of the United States’ most significant historical figures. Sajet was working beneath the gaze of artworks from the collection, including a striking 1952 painting of Mary Mills, a military-uniformed, African American nurse, and a bronze head of jazz and blues singer Ethel Waters.

It seemed like an ordinary Friday. Until, that is, an anxious colleague came in to tell Sajet that the president of the United States had personally denounced her on social media. “Upon the request and recommendation of many people I am herby [sic] terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery,” Donald Trump had posted on Truth Social. According to the post, Sajet was “a highly partisan person” and a “strong supporter” of diversity and inclusion programmes, which by an executive order on his inauguration day, 20 January, he had eradicated from federal agencies. “Her replacement will be named shortly,” continued the message. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

We would like to hear from people about the impact of the stormy weather conditions in the UK and parts of Europe

Road, rail and air travel have been disrupted across the UK as Storm Goretti has brought wind, rain and snow to the country and parts of Europe.

At the time of writing, there six weather warnings in place across the UK. According to the Met Office, there are five yellow weather warnings and one amber.

We would like to hear about the TV shows you like to watch again and again

Some TV shows are made to watch again and again, to the point where they become a soothing presence in the background of our lives. We would like to hear about your favourite comfort TV shows. What is the show that you would happily watch on loop forever, and why?

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We are looking to tell the stories of pairings who developed friendships because a common life experience - either shared at the same time or lived apart - bonded them

Do you have a friend who was the right person at the right time? Did they become a great source of support because you met at a certain moment in your life or a particular shared set of circumstances brought you together?

We are looking to tell the stories of pairings who developed life-affirming friendships because a common life experience - either shared at the same time or lived apart - bonded them. From becoming parents at the same time to losing a relative or dealing with a new diagnosis, we want to hear how you helped each other. Whatever scenario brought you close – whether overcoming adversity or celebrating a new life stage – we’d love to hear about your friendship and how it helped you both.

We’d like to hear from people in Greenland on their thoughts about the US president’s renewed call to take over the territory

Speaking aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Donald Trump doubled down on his claim that Greenland should become part of the United States. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” Trump told reporters.

We’d like to hear from people in Greenland on their views on Trump’s renewed call to take over the autonomous territory. You can share your views below.

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Nicolás Maduro seized, Russian drone strikes rock Kyiv, anti-ICE protests erupt in Minneapolis and Storm Goretti lashes Britain – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists