The Irish politician was targeted in 2022, in the final weeks of her run for office. She has never found out who made the malicious deepfake, but knew immediately she had to try to stop this happening to other women

When Cara Hunter, the Irish politician, looks back on the moment she found out she had been deepfaked, she says it is “like watching a horror movie”. The setting is her grandmother’s rural home in the west of Tyrone on her 90th birthday, April 2022. “Everyone was there,” she says. “I was sitting with all my closest family members and family friends when I got a notification through Facebook Messenger.” It was from a stranger. “Is that you in the video … the one going round on WhatsApp?” he asked.

Hunter made videos all the time, especially then, less than three weeks before elections for the Northern Ireland assembly. She was defending her East Londonderry seat, campaigning, canvassing, debating. Yet, as a woman, this message from a man she didn’t know was enough to put her on alert. “I replied that I wasn’t sure which video he was talking about,” Hunter says. “So he asked, did I want to see it?” Then he sent it over.

Broken ceasefires, bombing, ground incursions and mounting deaths: Israeli imperialism is now expanding across the region

It is clear now that the ceasefire in Gaza is only a “reducefire”. The onslaught continues. There are near-daily attacks on the territory. On a single day at the end of October, almost 100 Palestinians were killed. On 19 November, 32 were killed. On 23 November, 21. And on it goes. Since the ceasefire, more than 300 have been killed and almost 1,000 injured. Those numbers will rise. The real shift is that the ceasefire has reduced global attention and scrutiny. Meanwhile, Israel’s emerging blueprint becomes clearer: bloody domination not only in Gaza, but across Palestine and the wider region.

A “dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal”, is how Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, described this post-ceasefire period. Israeli authorities have reduced attacks and allowed some aid into Gaza, she said, but “the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.” Not a single hospital in Gaza has returned to being fully operational. The onset of rain and cooling weather has left thousands exposed in dilapidated tents. Since the ceasefire on 10 October, almost 6,500 tonnes of UN-coordinated relief materials have been denied entry into Gaza by Israeli authorities. According to Oxfam, in the two weeks after the ceasefire alone, shipments of water, food, tents and medical supplies from 17 international NGOs were denied.

The husband and wife team cook up a winter storm with lamb shoulder, dauphinoise and brown sugar meringues – just don’t ask them who’s doing the cleaning up

When I first started seeing Mattie, there was a constant dinner party at his mum’s house,” recalls pastry chef Ravneet Gill. “There were loads of people there all the time, being fed with massive bowls of home-cooked food and a big block of parmesan.” There was an open-door policy, with pastas and roast meats on heavy rotation, confirms her now-husband and fellow chef, Taiano. And it’s this sentiment that has carried through to the couple’s restaurant, Gina, which opened in Chingford, east London, earlier this year, a process they documented in their newsletter, Club Gina.

Named after Taiano’s late mother, it is very much a neighbourhood joint, Gill points out, with the food – from pithiviers and vol au vents to Gina’s pasta with tomato sauce, half a roast chicken with little gems and aioli to share on Sundays, and slabs of “Ravi’s” chocolate cake – an extension of how the couple like to eat.

Michael Bond’s beloved bear is the star of an eagerly anticipated new show at the Savoy theatre in London. Here is what the critics thought

Paddington is brought to life with state-of-the-art animatronics: James Hameed is his voice and remote puppeteer, while Arti Shah is under his furry skin on stage (puppet design by Tahra Zafar). The Brown family are recognisable from the star-studded film: risk-averse dad (Adrian Der Gregorian), arty mum (Amy Ellen Richardson), adolescent Judy (Delilah Bennett-Cardy) and encyclopaedia-chomping wee Jonathan (Jasper Rowse on the night of attendance), along with houseguest Mrs Bird (Bonnie Langford, in national treasure mode) … This is the new Mary Poppins: a well-known story imaginatively staged, immaculately performed and utterly winning.

Arifa Akbar, the Guardian

The plot and general mood here are both loosely based on the first Paddington film, with director Luke Sheppard and set designer Tom Pye creating a warm, multicultural, and gorgeously maximalist evocation of bohemian London. The famous bear crash-lands in an inhospitable city, then finds a home with the kindly Brown family. In the glorious set-piece song Don’t Touch That, his butter-pawed curiosity nearly destroys the fabric of their home: shelves tilt, white goods explode, and soap bubbles and jets of water burst through the ceiling.

The moment when the newcomer from darkest Peru tries on his trademark duffle coat for the first time drew a chorus of “Ahs” around the auditorium. The adults aren’t to be upstaged in an effervescent, if slightly overlong production directed by Luke Sheppard. Jessica Swale’s script is based on the original Paddington books and the first of the film spin-offs. Here, it’s the busybody neighbour Mr Curry who gets some of the best lines, Tom Edden having no end of fun as a killjoy with a combover who eventually sees the error of his ways.

Ah, Paddington Bear. Are the poppy songs in this new musical, by Tom Fletcher of McFly, especially memorable? They are not. Is the plot, by Jessica Swale, full of holes and needless diversions? It is. But will your eyes be moist the minute that the little furball from Darkest Peru sets paw in Paddington station – and will they be full to overflowing by the time he climbs into a black taxi with the Brown family and sets off on his journey towards home, family and belonging? Unless there’s something seriously wrong with you – and, probably, almost in spite of yourself – yes, they will.

Not only does he blink bashfully, his little puzzled muzzle wrinkles with extreme pathos – and off-the-Richter-scale cuteness. When he turns to wiggle his tiny behind, he gets the kind of reception normally reserved for a 40-point Samba on Strictly. So the bear necessities – designed by Tahra Zafar – are genius. But Paddington is a team effort. His voice is delivered from the wings by James Hameed, while the costume itself is inhabited by Arti Shah. She has the little fella’s adorable wiggle off pat.

There’s a glorious, hallucinogenic knees-up in praise of marmalade (involving Tom Edden’s joyously slimy neighbour Mr Curry), tub-thumping carry-on courtesy of the Geographers’ Guild and a show-stopper in which Bonnie Langford’s wise old Mrs Bird turns theatrical trouper, does the splits and brings the house down; so silly, yet so life-affirming. Is this a new classic on a par with Mary Poppins or Matilda? No, it’s a touch threadbare and a little overstuffed with songs, but it’s still a very welcome addition to the British musical family.

It is not only the bear design that is marvellous. Scenic designer Tom Pye makes stunning use of the high ceiling and proscenium arch by flooding them with a mosaic of images that evoke Paddington’s homeland and the superhero cartoons that Mrs Brown draws. Every detail of this show is exquisite – and I predict that this will be one proudly British export that will go on to conquer the world.

This is a show about welcoming foreigners, about asserting the values of kindness and tolerance that used to be Britain’s hallmarks. Swale’s script and Fletcher’s lyrics make that point over and over again. It’s uplifting to find such a strong message in such a popular entertainment. Yet the comedy of the show never lets up.

Ruben Amorim is happy to ‘steal’ from others, Phil Foden is central to City and Thomas Frank is in trouble at Tottenham

• Latest Premier League table | Top scorers

As Barney Ronay has noted, Arsenal are facing a weekly renewal of the Game You Just Have to Win If You Want to Be Champions. Did this represent a Game You Just Have to Win Because Chelsea’s Moisés Caicedo Was Sent Off? Yes and no. The hosts will naturally be more pleased with a point in the context of the first-half red card, while Arsenal perhaps looked a little jaded and below their best overall. But Enzo Maresca’s side were excellent throughout, despite having to play so much of the match with 10 men, and they deserved something from it. Compared with some Chelsea v Arsenal encounters from the olden days (when more overtly physical iterations of the Blues traditionally used to crush the fragile Gunners) there were no signs of weakness, mental or otherwise, from Arteta’s Premier League leaders in a fierce and physical derby. They will experience few harder tests than this, and a point was fair. Luke McLaughlin

Residents in Batn al-Hawa have all but given up hope and blame the Gaza war which, they say, has created ‘an atmosphere of hate’ towards them

The dome of the al-Aqsa mosque gleamed in the late afternoon autumnal sun as Zohair Rajabi looked out from his balcony towards the skyline of Jerusalem’s Old City. Christian pilgrims spilled out of buses, while observant Jewish worshippers gathered outside the gate to the Western Wall.

New flags now fly a few metres from Rajabi’s home. Blue and white and bearing the Star of David, they mark where residents were evicted recently from their homes by Israeli police. After more than 20 years of activism, Rajabi knows his days in Batn al-Hawa, a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood less than a mile south of the Old City, are almost certainly numbered.

PM says he is ‘very supportive’ of spending watchdog but breach was a ‘massive discourtesy’ to parliament

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has increased pressure on the head of the government’s spending watchdog over the budget leak by saying that while he was “very supportive” of the institution, a “serious error” had been made.

The prime minister said the breach of market-sensitive information, shortly before Rachel Reeves delivered her statement last week, was a “massive discourtesy” to parliament.

Ukrainian president embarks on busy week of diplomacy as US ups pressure to end war

UK prime minister Keir Starmer is delivering a major economy speech this morning.

You can follow all the key lines on our UK live blog with my colleague Andrew Sparrow, but there’s a particular line of argument that will no doubt reasonate in Europe, too.

“Let me be crystal clear, there is no credible economic vision for Britain that does not position us as an open, trading economy.

So we must all now confront the reality that the Brexit deal we have significantly hurt our economy and so for economic renewal, we have to keep reducing frictions.

MP for Hampstead and Highgate in London denies allegations and condemns ‘flawed and farcical’ trial

• What led to Bangladesh trial of Tulip Siddiq in her absence?

A court in Bangladesh has sentenced the British MP Tulip Siddiq to two years in jail after a judge ruled she was complicit in corrupt land deals with her aunt, the country’s deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina.

In a ruling on Monday, a judge found Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, guilty of misusing her “special influence” as a British politician to coerce Hasina into giving valuable pieces of land to her mother, brother and sister.

Advocacy group tells education secretary ‘working smarter’ can protect staff wellbeing and help students

Campaigners have urged the government to pilot four-day working weeks in schools in England and Wales saying it would boost teacher wellbeing, retention and recruitment rates.

The 4 Day Week Foundation has written to the education secretary calling for greater autonomy for schools to pilot shorter working weeks, saying the government will not be able to meet its manifesto pledge of recruiting 6,500 new teachers without change.

WHO urges countries to make drugs such as Mounjaro more accessible to people and asks drugs companies to lower prices

Weight loss drugs such as Mounjaro offer huge potential to tackle soaring obesity globally that will affect 2 billion people worldwide by 2030, the World Health Organization has said.

Their proven effectiveness in helping people lose weight means the medications represent “a new chapter” in how health services can treat obesity and the killer diseases it causes, the WHO added.

Hundreds remain missing in Indonesia and Sri Lanka as rescue efforts continue after Cyclone Ditwah

• How cyclones and monsoon rains combined to devastate parts of Asia – visual guide

Cyclone Ditwah, which unleashed catastrophic flooding and landslides across Sri Lanka, has brought heavy rain to India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu.

The storm, now about 30 miles off the coast of the city of Chennai, the state capital, has weakened into a “deep depression”, according to weather officials, who expect it to weaken even further across the day.

Exclusive: Pollution targets set out alongside nature recovery projects to allay concerns over housebuilding

Wood-burning stoves are likely to face tighter restrictions in England under new pollution targets set as part of an updated environmental plan released by ministers on Monday.

Speaking to the Guardian before the publication of the updated environmental improvement plan (EIP), the environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, said it would boost nature recovery in a number of areas, replacing an EIP under the last government she said was “not credible”.

Three people are accused of belonging to the Base, an ‘accelerationist’ white power organisation founded in the US

Police in Spain have arrested three people on suspicion of belonging to the Base, a global neo-Nazi terrorist group that incites and trains members in techniques to overthrow governments and bring about a race war.

The group, which has been designated a terrorist organisation by the EU, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is part of a worldwide “accelerationist” white power movement that prepares its cells to carry out violent and destabilising attacks.

Existence of phrase – to describe content intended to make you angry – shows people are aware of manipulation tactics used online, says Oxford Dictionary publisher

Good news for those who find their blood pressure rising as they scroll through their online news feeds: the Oxford English Dictionary’s publisher has highlighted the term they might need to describe how they often feel, naming “rage bait” as its word of the year.

According to the Oxford University Press’ analysis, use of the phrase has tripled in the past 12 months.

In Silicon Valley, rival companies are spending trillions of dollars to reach a goal that could change humanity – or potentially destroy it

On the 8.49am train through Silicon Valley, the tables are packed with young people glued to laptops, earbuds in, rattling out code.

As the northern California hills scroll past, instructions flash up on screens from bosses: fix this bug; add new script. There is no time to enjoy the view. These commuters are foot soldiers in the global race towards artificial general intelligence – when AI systems become as or more capable than highly qualified humans.

Data shows increase in neighbourhoods where few metres of asphalt, hedgerow, or wall can separate deep inequality

The homes of people in Nunsthorpe, a postwar former council housing estate known locally as “The Nunny”, sit only a few metres away from their more affluent neighbours in Scartho with their conservatories and driveways.

Walking between the two is almost impossible because of a 1.8-metre-high (6ft) barricade between them, which blocks off roads and walkways that link the two areas in Grimsby, Lincolnshire.

Extreme weather has killed more than 1,100 people across southern and south-eastern Asia as cyclones turbocharged rain systems across the region

• Devastating floods hit Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand – latest updates

Tropical cyclones have combined with heavy monsoon rains to lay waste to swathes of Asia, killing over 1,100 people and leaving many more homeless.

Parts of the Indonesian archipelago have been particularly hard hit by flooding that began about a week ago, killing 604 people and leaving 464 missing. Nearly 300,000 people have been displaced and nearly 3,000 houses damaged, including 827 that were flattened or swept away.

In Bangladesh, over a million people in the world’s largest refugee camp depend on aid – and cuts mean new arrivals are not even given shelter

The light of a single lightbulb powered by a backup generator lasts just long enough for Noor and Sowkat to see the faces of their newborn babies for the first time. The two children were born on the same night on a crumbling foam mattress, its corners ripped to shreds by the thousands of women who have gone into labour here in Camp 22’s makeshift delivery room.

The newborns have just become the youngest residents of the world’s largest refugee camp, in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, which is struggling to operate in the face of a 63% deficit in humanitarian aid funding.

‘I spent the 90s with Pam – clubbing and partying in the way those times demanded. What I saw was a truly groundbreaking artist, and a life marked by independence, courage and kindness’

• Pam Hogg, fashion designer with a rock’n’roll spirit, dies at 66 – news
• Pam Hogg – obituary

There are people who live life to the full, then there’s Pamela Hogg. Pam’s tenure on this earth is a trawl through just about every significant cultural and creative moment in the UK over the last 30-odd years. One of our most groundbreaking artists, Pam was a colourist of Warholian proportions, creating art to be hung on the body rather than the walls of a gallery. She was a punk who provocatively mashed up gender and sexual stereotypes. Fashion was the art form that freed her imagination, and her success was due to her talent and drive being greater than her disdain of the conformist industry and the gatekeepers surrounding it.

I sat in St Joseph’s hospice in London by her unconscious but serenely beautiful figure – as if she’d made her exit into another work of art – telling her that her jam-packed life was characterised by creativity, independence, courage and kindness. “Hoggy, you left absolutely nothing on the table.”

The minute I had any disposable income, I would spend it on things I didn’t need. Deciding to wait a day before handing over my money changed everything

One day at work two years ago, a notification hit my phone: my paycheck had come through. It was a fair amount for someone still at university, so I did what I always did when payday arrived: I opened every shopping app on my phone. Amazon, Vinted, Etsy, Depop, Zara, you name it. Within the space of an hour, I had spent £90 on clothes, decorative items and a completely useless weighted blanket I never touched.

A few days later, I went online again and bought a hairdryer. I already owned one, but thought another couldn’t hurt. Then I added LED strip lights and two pairs of shoes that weren’t even my size. This wasn’t new behaviour. In fact, I’d been notorious for it ever since I could afford to buy my own things.

Transformative gratitude occurs within sincere relationships, but building those links is not always an easy process

Recently, my psychoanalyst annoyed me. She said something and I felt misunderstood, criticised – and that she was wrong. I wanted an apology. As we worked through this, as she listened to me and I listened to her, I gradually realised that she hadn’t meant exactly what I thought, and that I was the one who had misunderstood, who was being so critical. But why couldn’t she have made it easier for me to understand, phrased it like I would have done? She responded: “That isn’t what I thought.”

In that moment, something clicked. I felt the rush and the relief of sudden emotional clarity. I think this came from seeing that my psychoanalyst, by not apologising to appease my anger, by not taking an easy way out of the conflict, by persisting in offering me her honest thoughts about what was going on in my mind and by bearing my struggle to take them in, was giving me an extremely rare and precious experience. I felt an overwhelming and surprising surge of gratitude.

Signe Gaupset, Rasheedat Ajibade and Lily Yohannes all feature as we start our countdown to the year’s best players

• Meet the judges | 2024 list | 2023 list | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018

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Moderate wine consumption may benefit your cardiac health, but foods such as grapes and berries offer similar advantages without the negative effects

“People shouldn’t think that drinking wine is good for you,” says Dr Oliver Guttmann, a consultant cardiologist at the Wellington hospital in London.

Alcohol consumption is linked to high blood pressure, liver disease, digestive, mental health and immune system problems, as well as cancer.

The case of a planned Cumbrian coalmine shows how governments around the world are being threatened by litigation in shadowy offshore courts

How do you reckon our political system works? Perhaps something like this. We elect MPs. They vote on bills. If a majority is achieved, the bills becomes law. The law is upheld by the courts. End of story. Well, that’s how it used to work. No longer.

Today, foreign corporations, or the oligarchs who own them, can sue governments for the laws they pass, at offshore tribunals composed of corporate lawyers. The cases are held in secret. Unlike our courts, these tribunals allow no right of appeal or judicial review. You or I cannot take a case to them, nor can our government, or even businesses based in this country. They are open only to corporations based overseas.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Nuns are having a moment. It’s not the religion women crave, however – it’s a sense of purpose, community and peace

Nuns are everywhere – we’ve had Isabella Rossellini’s Sister Agnes stealing the show in Conclave and nuns with main character energy in The Phoenician Scheme, And Just Like That and Nine Perfect Strangers. On #nuntok (yes, a thing), real sisters demystify and give surprisingly irreverent glimpses into their lives. There was the Austrian trio jailbreaking from a care home to return to their beloved convent, and at the other end of the demographic scale, a rise in younger women following, or at least considering, cloistered vocations.

Nun memes have become a jokey shorthand for real dissatisfaction with life as a woman in 2025 – unsolicited dick pics, workplace discrimination and the endless, soul-sapping scroll. They don’t, mostly, express a yearning for strict religiosity or voluntary celibacy, but for community, purpose and a retreat from chaos. It’s the same impulse that attracts women to single-sex communities or makes them pine, like Stella in Bernard MacLaverty’s brilliant Midwinter Break, for béguinages (the lay communities of single women that flourished in the Low Countries in the middle ages). We all just want peace.

Judge last week’s budget in the light of our bold plans to sweep away red tape, tackle inactivity among young people and pursue a closer trading relationship with the EU

• Keir Starmer is the prime minister of the United Kingdom

• Report: Labour’s economic plan will take years to deliver, Starmer says

At the budget last week, we made the right choices for Britain, cutting the cost of energy with £150 off bills, protecting the NHS and tackling the scourge of child poverty by removing the two-child limit. We also ensured that the revenue we raised through taxes was done fairly, with everyone contributing but those with the broadest shoulders contributing their fair share. As a result of the choices we made, the budget created a more stable economic environment, driving down inflation and government bond yields. This is vital for protecting our public services, when £1 in every £10 spent by government goes on debt interest.

The budget builds on the action we have already taken to improve the economy: providing £120bn in extra capital investment in such things as roads, rail and energy; enacting the biggest planning reforms in a generation to back builders, not blockers; supporting the expansion of Heathrow and Gatwick; and signing trade deals with the EU, India and the US. Taken together, these have allowed us to exceed our growth forecasts.

Keir Starmer is the prime minister of the United Kingdom

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.

The New York mayor-elect’s devotion to a north London club shows how the global game is winning hearts across the US

• Bryan Armen Graham is the deputy sport editor of Guardian US

When Zohran Mamdani made an appearance on The Adam Friedland Show last week, the newly elected mayor of New York was expecting the typical nimble rundown of politics, jokes and conversational detours. What he wasn’t expecting was Ian Wright suddenly filling a phone screen with a congratulatory video. The former England and Arsenal striker saluted him on “what you’ve achieved”, urged him to channel that “winning energy” into the job ahead before signing off with a nod to the Arsenal manager, Mikel Arteta. Mamdani cheesed guilelessly as it played before finally blurting out: “I love this man.”

For a moment, the incoming mayor of the most powerful city in the United States was simply another geeked-out Arsenal obsessive left weak by one of his childhood heroes. And in that moment lies something revealing about how football fandom in the US has changed. This was not a politician deploying a sports reference for relatability; it was a display of genuine allegiance that’s planted at the intersection of two different stories about how Americans have come to love the global game.

Bryan Armen Graham is the deputy sport editor of Guardian US

Last week’s budget left middle-income families anxious and angry. The party is turning its back on voters it can little afford to lose

Just over 15 years ago, a realisation began to dawn on British politicians, triggered by the financial crash of 2008 and its effects on millions of ordinary lives.

Before that rupture, they had clung to the idea that a huge chunk of the public was made up of contented consumers and property owners. Now, though, any such certainties were being shaken – something highlighted by the Labour conference speech given in 2009 by Gordon Brown, which contained two particularly eye-catching words: “When markets falter and banks fail,” he said, “it’s the jobs and the homes and the security of the squeezed middle that are hit the hardest.”

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Bans on the dangerous practice, condemned by national mental health organizations, could soon be struck down

Homosexuality is an illness that therapists can and should cure: that’s the rationale for “conversion therapy”, a practice promoted as a way to change an individual’s sexual orientation from gay to straight.

But a host of studies conclude that such counseling doesn’t work – small wonder, since sexual orientation is a core part of an individual’s identity. It’s also potentially harmful, especially for minors. Research shows that youth subjected to conversion practices, often at the insistence of misguided parents, are prone to depression, anxiety, drug use, homelessness and suicide.

David Kirp is professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley and a frequent Guardian contributor.

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

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

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

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

Tory special needs reforms upended council finances, but Labour’s plan to rebuild public provision won’t come cheap if it’s done properly

The crisis over special educational needs and disabilities in England is not just a question of cash. Children and parents spend months and years battling for support to which the law entitles them, schools lack the funding to meet needs, and specialist provision is inadequate. An adversarial system shunts families towards tribunals that councils almost invariably lose.

Tory reforms created obligations for local authorities but did not adequately fund them – allowing ministers to duck responsibility. The result has been financial chaos, with the overall overspend on special educational needs and disabilities (Send) predicted to reach £6.6bn by next March, and keep rising. Taking responsibility for funding away from councils and handing it to the Department for Education is the right move. But the most important questions about Send go beyond accounting. A white paper on reform was postponed in October. Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, told MPs that she would consult further before deciding on the future of education, health and care plans, which set out entitlements for individual children, and the tribunals where parents can challenge council decisions.

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.

Rising economic division is destabilising nations and eroding accountability. Joseph Stiglitz’s G20 blueprint offers a way toward global economic renewal

When Swiss tycoons handed Donald Trump a gold bar and a Rolex watch – gifts that were followed by a cut in US tariffs – it was no diplomatic nicety. It was a reminder of how concentrated wealth seems to buy access and bend policy. It may, alarmingly, become the norm if the global “inequality emergency” continues. That’s the message of the most recent work by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The economist sees the yawning gap between rich and poor as a human-made crisis which is destroying politics, society and the planet. He’s not wrong.

The problem is no longer confined to a few fragile states. It is a global harm, with 90% of the world’s population living under the World Bank’s definition of “high income inequality”. The US sits just below that threshold and is the most unequal country in the G7, followed by the UK. Prof Stiglitz’s insight is that the current system’s defenders can no longer explain its mounting anomalies. Hence he wants a new framework to replace it. His blueprint for change is contained within the G20’s first-ever inequality report, endorsed by key European, African and middle-income nations.

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.

Rev Dr Michael Fox responds to an article by Nesrine Malik on the home secretary using her ‘story’ to silence criticism of her policies

Nesrine Malik’s analysis of Shabana Mahmood’s immigration policies may apply more widely than to second-generation immigrant politicians (Shabana Mahmood is an avatar of open Britain – that’s what makes her fable about immigration so seductive, 24 November).

Twenty years ago, while making a documentary on politics for the Open University, I interviewed a group of 15-year-olds at a school in Moss Side, Manchester. The school had selected a mixed group of children, half identifying as white British, half as second-generation immigrant.

Dr Robin Lovell-Badge and Prof Emma Robinson respond to an editorial on using new technologies to reduce the reliance on animal experiments

I write in response to your editorial on animals in research (The Guardian view on animal testing: we can stop sacrificing millions of lives for our own health, 23 November). I am supportive of many aspects of the strategy to aid the development, validation and uptake of alternative methods to replace the use of animals. However, much of this is geared towards regulatory testing, where the goals are more readily achievable, rather than for discovery science.

All scientists working with animals in the UK have signed up to the 3Rs: replacement (developing alternatives), reduction and refinement. But we are definitely not ready to abandon research with animals, and for some disciplines we may never get to this. Advances in the ability to generate large amounts of detailed information about gene activity in cells and computer analysis have been amazing, but much of this is correlative. To prove causation still requires testing.

The discussion over UPFs distracts from the real public health problem: meat and dairy products, writes Noah Praamsma

It’s time to clear up the confusion over ultra-processed foods (We know ultra-processed foods are bad for you – but can you spot them? Take our quiz, 21 November). Yes, eating UPFs made from animal products (like chicken nuggets and cheese in a squeeze bottle) can increase the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and certain cancers, but UPFs from plants (like cereal, canned beans and even veggie burgers) can actually help keep you healthy.

More and more leading health organisations agree that a more nuanced approach to UPFs is necessary. The American Medical Association recently passed a resolution that “supports and promotes public awareness and education about the differences between healthful foods and unhealthful ultra-processed foods”. The American Heart Association also recently released a report noting that “not all UPFs are junk foods or have poor nutritional quality; some UPFs have better nutritional value [than others] and can be part of an overall healthy dietary pattern”. This difference has a lot to do with whether the UPF is an animal- or plant-based product.

Too often savings in construction cost and time are at the expense of design and materials, and high finance and support costs, writes Martin Cook

In response to Lord Hutton’s letter (23 November) on NHS hospitals built under the private finance initiative (PFI), independent research into the design quality of PFI public buildings, by all of the auditing authorities in the UK, showed serious flaws and a significant “quality gap” when compared to traditional design-led procurement.

In my 2007 book The Design Quality Manual: Improving Building Performance, I included results from all these reviews, starting with the Audit Commission’s 2003 report PFI in Schools. The design flaws were serious, including poor functionality, short-life materials, and non-compliance with building and safety regulations.

• Norris passed Mercedes driver near finish of Qatar GP

• Red Bull had initially hinted at foul play in title fight

The Mercedes teenage driver Kimi Antonelli has been subjected to death threats after Red Bull suggested he deliberately moved out of Lando Norris’s way in the closing stages of the Qatar Grand Prix.

Norris was elevated to fourth after Antonelli ran wide on the penultimate lap of Sunday’s race. Norris gained two points from Antonelli’s mistake which means he now can finish third, rather than runner-up at this weekend’s season finale in Abu Dhabi, to be assured of beating Red Bull’s Max Verstappen to the title.

• Senior club figures think defeats would lead to sacking

• Leeds have lost six of their past seven matches

Daniel Farke is facing a defining week as Leeds manager, with senior figures at the club expecting him to be sacked if his side lose home games against Chelsea and Liverpool.

Leeds were unfortunate to be beaten by an injury-time Phil Foden goal at Manchester City last Saturday, but because it was their fourth successive defeat, and sixth in seven matches, patience at Elland Road is wearing thin.

• Ifab may loosen approach to trials of new rules

• World Cup could see first trial use of VAR for corners

Football’s lawmakers are exploring the possibility of allowing tournaments to run their own trials of new rules, which could lead to VAR being used to adjudicate on corner kicks at next summer’s World Cup.

Under the change the International Football Association Board (Ifab) would allow more short-term trials as an alternative to the system whereby major tournaments largely introduce measures only after they have been trialled, usually in minor leagues or tournaments.

Bo Henriksen and Mainz are now floundering at the foot of the Bundesliga after a humiliation in the Black Forest

It was, as the clock chimed metaphorical midnight in Berlin, just another Bundesliga day for Heidenheim, without help, hope or points as they trailed Union going into the 90th minute, heading towards another weekend at the foot of the table and, no doubt, for the umpteenth time so far this season, veteran coach Frank Schmidt warning that at current pace, relegation was less a fear and more an inevitability.

Then it all changed. A burst down the right from Omar Haktab Traoré and a cross to the front post was met by fellow substitute Stefan Schimmer, and a wobbling Union had stumbled. The away side sensed the moment and a corner from Arijon Ibrahimovic, swung in just after the announced four minutes of stoppage time in moments added by Schimmer’s goal and its aftermath, was headed in by another sub, Jan Schöppner, to spark pandemonium. Referee Patrick Ittrich almost immediately blew for full-time and finally, more than two months after their hitherto solitary Bundesliga win of the season, Schmidt and company were taking three points home.

No team in Serie A have collected more points this year, so the Giallorossi remain upbeat in a stacked title battle

Gian Piero Gasperini was a victim of mistaken identity last week, after an Italian news story about a man who allegedly impersonated his dead mother to collect her pension was picked up by media outlets around the world. Roma’s manager has no connection to any of this, yet one Argentinian broadcaster included an old photo of him in their coverage.

The segment for Telefe Noticias showed Gasperini’s face between those of the accused and the deceased. A silly meme, circulated by football fans on social media to imply some (dubious) resemblance, had been confused as being authentic. The online version of the video was quickly taken down from YouTube, but not before it created a fresh set of headlines back in Italy.

• Pyrotechnics in stands cause referee to call halt

• Real Madrid’s Mbappé levels in 1-1 draw at Girona

Ajax have strongly criticised an “utterly outrageous” firework display that caused their Eredivisie match against Groningen at the Johan Cruyff Arena to be abandoned.

The referee Bas Nijhuis took the players off the field within five minutes of the start after fireworks and flares were ignited behind one of the goals, and the stadium filled with smoke. Attempts to restart the match 45 minutes later were met with more fireworks, causing Nijhuis to formally abandon the game.

San Francisco are a flawed team with serious injuries. But with no great teams in the league this year, the playoffs are wide open

The 49ers’ season felt over after Week 6’s loss to Tampa Bay. Yes, they were 4-2. Yes, they were tied with the Seahawks and Rams and had already won head-to-head games against both. But that’s when they hit rock bottom. All Pro linebacker Fred Warner was the latest casualty, following in the footsteps of All Pro edge rusher Nick Bosa with a season-ending injury. Brock Purdy had also struggled with injuries. George Kittle was hurt in Week 1. Both were not expected to return for several games. Brandon Aiyuk had no plans to play any time soon, at least not for San Francisco. By Week 7, the only big names in action were Christian McCaffrey and Trent Williams.

Dire as the 49ers appeared on paper, they hung in. It helped that the Cardinals, Falcons, Giants, and Panthers featured in their upcoming schedule. They beat all four of them, losing only to the Texans and Rams in the next few weeks. None of the wins inspired much confidence, though. The Cardinals outgained the 49ers by 200 yards. Purdy threw three interceptions against the Panthers.

• Batter relishing prospect of this week’s day-nighter at the Gabba

• England have not used the pink ball in nearly three years

Marnus Labuschagne has admitted that Australia’s experience of playing day-night Tests will see them start the second game of the Ashes on Thursday with an in-built advantage, while England are using a pink ball for the first time in nearly three years.

As well as hosting more day-night Tests than the rest of the world put together, Australia has also scheduled several Sheffield Shield games under lights and with a pink ball, first between 2013 and 2018 and again in each of the last two seasons. Cricket Australia’s head of national teams, Ben Oliver, explained when they were reintroduced that they are designed “to enhance the experience for domestic players and best prepare them for the challenges of international cricket”.

President’s remarks come amid calls for an immediate investigation into reports Hegseth ordered a second strike on alleged drug-smuggling boat

After two members of the West Virginia national guard were shot in DC last week, the president has invited their families to the White House.

One soldier, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, was killed in the attack –which took place the day before Thanksgiving. Her fellow service member, US air force staff Sgt Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains hospitalized in critical condition. Vigils across West Virginia have taken place in their memory.

Authorities face growing criticism for detaining at least two civilians who have called for accountability

Authorities in Hong Kong have arrested 13 people on suspicion of manslaughter in relation to last week’s devastating fire, as they face growing criticism from residents over the arrests under national security laws of at least two civilians calling for accountability.

Emergency services continued to search through the seven towers of the Wang Fuk Court estate in Tai Po on Monday, days after the city’s deadliest fire in 75 years. The death toll rose to 151 and is expected to rise further as the search continues. About 40 people are still missing.

Alleged gunman faces nine charges including second-degree murder in New York state case

Luigi Mangione is due to appear in Manhattan state court on Monday for the first day of a potentially weeklong proceeding to weigh the legality of evidence gathered during his arrest after the killing of a prominent healthcare executive.

Mangione was apprehended last December in the murder of senior United HealthCare figure Brian Thompson last December. In addition to state-level charges, he faces a Manhattan federal court case.

Morgan Geyser, who stabbed a classmate as a 12-year-old, fled after a decade being raised by state institutions

The haunting apparition of “Slender Man” reappeared last week when Morgan Geyser, a central character in an 11-year-old attempted murder case, briefly absconded from a Wisconsin care home to which she had been transferred after being released from a psychiatric institution over the summer.

Geyser was 12 in 2014 when she pleaded guilty to stabbing a sixth-grade classmate to appease the mythical Slender Man.

French manufacturer had to ground thousands of planes at weekend but fewer than 100 now need update

Airbus has fixed most of its jets affected by a software glitch, averting further travel disruption after a technical problem grounded thousands of its planes.

Airlines around the world cancelled and delayed flights over the weekend after the French plane manufacturer ordered immediate repairs to 6,000 of its A320 family of jets, more than half of its global fleet.

TotalEnergies scheme became lightning rod for terror in region and was accused of violating human rights

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The UK government has pulled a controversial $1.15bn (£870m) loan to a giant gas project in Mozambique that has been accused of fuelling the climate crisis and deadly terror attacks in the region.

The business secretary, Peter Kyle, said the UK would withdraw its export finance to the Mozambique liquified natural gas project, five years after it ignited bitter opposition from campaigners over its impact on human rights, security and the environment.

Use of 8m pounds of antibiotics and antifungals a year leads to superbugs and damages human health, lawsuit claims

A new legal petition filed by a dozen public health and farm worker groups demands the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stop allowing farms to spray antibiotics on food crops in the US because they are probably causing superbugs to flourish and sickening farm workers.

The agricultural industry sprays about 8m pounds of antibiotic and antifungal pesticides on US food crops annually, many of which are banned in other countries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whistleblower says chain of command failed to stop extrajudicial shootings, including of children, after alarm was raised

The former director of UK special forces and other senior military officers tried to cover up concerns that SAS units were carrying out unlawful killings in Afghanistan, an inquiry has heard.

A senior special forces whistleblower said the chain of command failed to stop extrajudicial shootings, including of two small children, after the alarm was first raised in early 2011. That failure allegedly allowed them to continue until 2013.

Liverpool gathering lays bare bitter divisions within new party founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana

The new leftwing party founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana will be called Your Party after a vote by members, but its weekend conference laid bare bitter divisions.

Just over 37% of members voted for the name Your Party, provisionally adopted when it was launched earlier this year, to become permanent. The votes for others on the shortlist were 25.23% to be called Popular Alliance, 23.52% to be called For The Many and 14.19% for Our Party.

Refugee Council says Home Office figures show safe and legal pathways are ‘disappearing when most needed’

The number of refugees allowed to settle in the UK under UN-facilitated schemes has dropped by more than a quarter in a year, according to figures released by the Home Office.

Just 7,271 people were granted protection through refugee resettlement programmes in the year ending September 2025, about half of whom were Afghans whose lives were at risk after an accidental data breach by a UK defence official.

Journalist and editor also led British Board of Film Classification and served as senior lay member of the Church of England

Andreas Whittam Smith, the co-founder of the Independent newspaper and a former president of the British Board of Film Classification, has died aged 88.

Whittam Smith was also the first editor of the Independent and served as first church estates commissioner, the senior lay member of the Church of England, from 2002 to 2017.

Philip Pierre hopes to fend off challenge from former PM Allen Chastanet amid tense relations with US

Voters in St Lucia have gone to the polls to elect a new legislature and choose their prime minister, in a race dominated by debates over economic management, violent crime and passport sales.

The Labour party, led by the prime minister, Philip Pierre, is seeking to fend off a challenge from the conservative opposition leader, Allen Chastanet, who preceded Pierre as prime minister of the island of 180,000 people. Labour holds a strong majority in both of St Lucia’s legislative chambers.

Country seen as champion of equal rights faces reckoning after senior politician says she felt compelled to quit

Increasing hate, threats and harassment against female politicians are scaring women away from public life and forcing them to censor themselves, the Swedish government’s equality agency has said, warning that this poses a “big threat to democracy.”

Women’s safety in politics has come under heightened scrutiny in the Scandinavian country since October, when Anna-Karin Hatt resigned as leader of the Centre party after only five months in office, citing hate and threats.

Will the bubble ravage the economy when it bursts? What will it leave of value once it pops?

The California Gold Rush left an outsized imprint on America. Some 300,000 people flocked there from 1848 to 1955, from as far away as the Ottoman Empire. Prospectors massacred Indigenous people to take the gold from their lands in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And they boosted the economies of nearby states and faraway countries from whence they bought their supplies.

Gold provided the motivation for California – a former Mexican territory then controlled by the US military – to become a state with laws of its own. And yet, few “49ers” as prospectors were known, struck it rich. It was the merchants selling prospectors food and shovels who made the money. One, a Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss who sold denim overalls to the gold bugs passing through San Francisco, may be the most remembered figure of his day.

Consultancy’s move to embrace artificial intelligence follows Disney’s use of the term ‘imagineers’

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Accenture has reportedly begun calling its near-800,000 employees “reinventors”, as the consultancy tries to position itself as a leader in artificial intelligence.

The consultancy’s chief executive, Julie Sweet, has already started referring to staff by the new label and the business is now pushing for the term to be used more widely.

Company failed to protect thousands of people switching from analogue to digital landline, Ofcom rules

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Virgin Media has been fined £23.8m for putting thousands of vulnerable people “at risk of harm” when switching them from an analogue to a digital landline.

The media watchdog, Ofcom, found the company failed to protect people who relied on telecare alarms to call for help, after Virgin Media self-reported a number of “serious incidents” in November and December 2023.

One-time wunderkind of UK energy market faces battle for new investment – but it continues to pay out millions to its founder’s company

As Britons braced for freezing wintry weather in early months of the 2022 energy cost crisis, the country’s fourth largest gas and electricity supplier urged struggling households to try “doing a few star jumps” to keep warm.

This poorly judged suggestion, alongside others such as “having a cuddle with your pets”, was branded insulting and offensive by consumer groups. For many, the gaffe marked the beginning of Ovo Energy’s precipitous fall from grace.

River Action says use of issuance tied to environmental benefits is ‘corporate greenwash on steroids’

Water companies have issued a fifth of the UK’s “green bonds” since 2017, despite a consistently poor record of sewage pollution during that time, research has shown.

Privately owned water companies in England have together issued £10.5bn in bonds tied to projects that offer “environmental benefits”, according to analysis of financial market data by Unearthed, which is part of Greenpeace UK.

The latest in our series of writers highlighting their favourite comfort rewatches is a look back at Joe Dante’s raucously rule-defying sequel

“Well, it’s rather brutal here. We’re advising all of our clients to put everything they’ve got into canned food and shotguns.” Some sage advice from the Brain Gremlin – a genetically modified, talking, glasses-wearing member of the slimy Gremlin horde that overruns Manhattan’s super-smart Clamp Tower skyscraper in director Joe Dante’s madcap sequel Gremlins 2: The New Batch. At face value, it’s nothing more than an investment tip from one monster to another. However, in a weird way, it’s also pretty solid life advice. Seriously, hear me out.

When things go bad, the worst thing you can do is take things too seriously. The Brain Gremlin knows this. In fact, most of the toothy monsters that populate Dante’s wild 1990 film (arguably his best) have the same sly, self-aware sense of humour when it comes to the blurry line separating everyday life and unadulterated chaos. It’s one element of Gremlins 2: The New Batch that keeps me coming back – and the older I get, it’s the theme that resonates the most.

A new read-aloud favourite, doughnuts with world-conquering ambitions, high fantasy from Katherine Rundell, and more

This year’s standout works for children include joyous picture books, gloriously bizarre nonfiction and stories of courage, companionship and rapturous flight – testament to the human need for connection, justice and freedom.

In picture books, Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, the author-illustrator team behind We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, collaborate again on the exuberant Oh Dear, Look What I Got! (Walker), in which a shopping trip is beset by rhyming errors (a parrot for a carrot, a snake for a cake). It all results in an ever more despairing refrain: “Do I want that? No I do not!” Oxenbury’s joyfully expressive huddles of animal and human characters heighten the sense of mayhem in this bouncy, cumulative delight, boasting all the ingredients of a perennial read-aloud favourite.

Violence erupts in series based on Patrick Radden-Keefe’s award-winning book. Plus: poignant memories are evoked in The Marvellous Miniature Workshop. Here’s what to watch today

9pm, Channel 4
First shown on Disney+, this brutal, gripping drama tells the story of IRA volunteer Dolours Price. Based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning book, it begins with the abduction of Belfast mother of 10 Jean McConville in 1972. Meanwhile, as violence erupts, Dolours swears she isn’t getting involved … It stars Maxine Peake as the older Dolours, and Lola Petticrew, who recently crushed hearts in Trespasses, as the younger. Hollie Richardson

A disaffected Portuguese NGO worker dallies with a drag queen as he wrestles with white man’s privilege in Pedro Pinho’s intelligent drama

‘What disgusts me the most are good men,” says a Bissau-Guinean sex worker to Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem), a Portuguese environmental engineer working for an NGO on a road construction project in the country. He’s struggling to perform, as if his private life is letting slip some fundamental doubt about his role in Africa.

There’s a good dose of self-flagellation about western paternalism and hypocrisy in Pedro Pinho’s fifth feature, but it’s smart enough to know that this hand-wringing, extended over three hours, is yet another form of white man’s privilege. First seen driving through a sand blizzard like one of Antonioni’s existential wanderers, Sérgio seems to want to avoid thinking about the power dynamics at play around him. Being “here now”, in the moment, is his superpower – as he tells Gui (Jonathan Guilherme), the lofty Brazilian drag queen he dallies with. Gui’s gender-fluid posse, who hang out at the bar run by market hustler Diara (Cleo Diára), is a racial and sexual utopia ready to accept anyone, including this white expat. But, as Gui intuits, Sérgio’s bisexuality mirrors something noncommittal, even opportunistic, about him. He both lives in the expat enclave and the streets, without belonging to either.

Razaaq Adoti writes and stars in this scrappy gangland action romp, mixing Nollywood energy with bloody set pieces and a dash of 80s-style grit

You have to respect an action film that has its protagonist stagger out of the intensive-care ward into an open-air street market in a backless hospital gown, his tackle whacking conspicuously against the fabric. Star Razaaq Adoti can’t blame his agent, as it was the actor himself who scripted this Nigeria-set revenge thriller, in which his former special forces soldier makes a Jack Carter-like return to wreak havoc on the mean streets of Lagos.

Zion (Adoti) has made the US his home after being dishonourably discharged and doing a stretch in the slammer. But he makes a beeline for Lagos when he receives an SOS message from his sister Ronke (Sharon Rotimi), a hotel chambermaid who stumbles on respectable medical professional cum evil drug kingpin Dr Baptiste (Philip Asaya) as he murders a sex worker. Zion is too late: Ronke is a goner, framed as another victim of the fentanyl cocktail Matrix that’s doing the rounds, courtesy of the bad doctor. Time for Zion to dust off his particular set of skills.

Gigglemug’s musical revisits 1991’s cake-or-biscuit VAT dispute, John C Reilly gets romantic and Beauty and the Beast rock out

Is it a cake or is it a biscuit? That’s the juicy question at the centre of this jolly courtroom musical. Gigglemug’s comedy revisits the 1991 dispute between McVitie’s and HMRC, about whether the VAT charged on chocolate biscuits should be levied on Jaffa Cakes. Its catchy songs will stay with you long into the new year. Available from Lounges.TV along with Gigglemug’s Scouts! The Musical.

Albert Hall, Manchester
With two of the most-feted albums of the past 12 months under his belt, the New York singer-songwriter puts fresh spins on songs from his solo debut

Hearing Cameron Winter croon of God, Jesus and the devil in the former Methodist chapel of Manchester’s Albert Hall may seem appropriate, but this superficial link belies the 23-year-old’s talent for the secular and absurd. Winter works primarily in contrasts: poppy instrumentation with off-kilter song structures; lyrics that are abstract yet never impenetrable; boyish charm wrapped in the confidence expected from a singer-songwriter twice his age.

In this intimate show, Winter hunches over his piano, whittling away at songs as if the audience are peering through the window of his private rehearsal space. It would be the more conventional choice for him to tour with a band, especially after the one-two punch of his solo debut album Heavy Metal late last year and his band Geese’s Getting Killed in September. But Winter doesn’t do things simply: every song tonight gets a new arrangement. He tickles and pummels reverb-soaked keys in ways that transform and reconstruct Heavy Metal’s foundations into something more alive than the recording. It is stripped back, but never stark.

The Celebrity Traitor winner teams up with fellow comedian Lee Peart for a hilarious attempt to demystify vino. Plus, David Suchet narrates Dickens’s spine-tingling tales

“It’s not like a lads, lads, lads podcast this, is it?” says Alan Carr in the first of his new wine show with comedian pal Lee Peart. There are tastings, reader dilemmas and a Q&A with wine expert Tom Gilbey. The real highlight is the pair’s banter. Carr’s response when Peart says he wants to get him “back on white” so he gets to have his favourite type of wine when they share a bottle? “You could have told me this off camera … I didn’t know this was Relate!” Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sharply satirical attack on unevenly applied 19th-century laws to enforce religious observance still bites today

Rich or Poor, or Saint and Sinner

The poor man’s sins are glaring;
In the face of ghostly warning
He is caught in the fact
Of an overt act —
Buying greens on Sunday morning.

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

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

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

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

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

Kiwi developers are punching well above their weight thanks to a unique government support program that offers more than just grants

Those not immersed in the world of gaming might not be familiar with Pax Australia: the enormous gaming conference and exhibition that takes over the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre every October. My favourite section is always Pax Rising, a showcase of indie video games and tabletop, the majority Australian – but there has been a recent shift that was particularly notable this year: many of the standout titles had crossed the Tasman, arriving from New Zealand.

At the booth run by Code – New Zealand’s government-funded Centre of Digital Excellence – 18 Kiwi developers demoed their forthcoming games in a showcase of the vibrant local scene that was buzzing with crowds. In the comedic Headlice, I controlled a parasitic headcrab monster which could latch on to people’s brains and puppet them. How Was Your Day?, a cozy time-loop game set in New Zealand, warmed my heart with its story about a young girl searching for her missing dog. And Killing Things With Your Friends, a co-operative multiplayer action game about surviving bizarre medical trials, had me pulling off my own arm to use as a weapon against enemy hordes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unicorn theatre, London
This exuberant adaptation of Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen’s picture book moves with the rhythm of a child’s racing imagination

Never mind what’s hidden inside the wrapping paper, here’s a bigger mystery: how does Santa go down the chimney? Mac Barnett’s 2023 picture book of the same name appeals to inquisitive young readers by offering a festive selection of breaking-and-entering techniques. Does he find the key under the flower pot, post himself through the letterbox, even swim in through the taps? Jon Klassen’s illustrations feature a pack of reindeer, with inscrutable expressions, watching Santa’s increasingly wacky antics.

Directing his own adaptation for the Unicorn’s co-production with Told By an Idiot, Paul Hunter follows the book’s rhythm of a child’s racing imagination, with each far-fetched idea mooted, discarded, then swiftly replaced by another. He turns the book into a sort of variety show, with volunteers from the audience occasionally cast as Santa’s little helpers.

At Unicorn theatre, London, until 3 January

Watermill theatre, Newbury
Relocating the Hans Christian Andersen tale to Cornwall, with its folk musicians and fishermen, Elgiva Field and Lara Barbier’s show is cheery and sweet

Christmas has gone undersea for 2025, with productions of The Little Mermaid in Nottingham, Hull and Newcastle. This one, at the Watermill, is presented in the theatre’s trademark actor-musician style, with the script illuminated by cheery live folk music played on stage. There’s even some snow thrown in for festive good measure.

The story is relocated to Cornwall in this short and sweet adaptation by Elgiva Field and Lara Barbier. Following the basic structure of Hans Christian Andersen’s original, it narrates the tale of a sea girl (here called Merryn) who longs to experience life onshore. In this version, it is when her younger brother Kitto (a very charming Zach Burns) goes missing that Merryn is compelled to make a deal with a sea witch named Granny Ocean, trading her voice for a pair of legs.

Gaiety theatre, Ayr
A rosy-cheeks-and-spotty-socks kind of show full of generous laughs, Fraser Boyle’s take on Aladdin also has several original innovations and a subversive streak

Who needs a flying carpet when you’ve got the bus to Maybole? The high point of Fraser Boyle’s joyful panto comes when Abanazar (Gavin Jon Wright) leaks the location of his not-so-secret lair and the rest of the cast go in pursuit. On public transport. On film. Outside broadcasting was never so funny.

Not that the baddie stands much chance: having stolen the magic lamp and summoned up its four genies (in a show big on community engagement, actors outnumber the special effects), he recklessly squanders his three wishes. Happily, Wright relishes our boos as much as we do.

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

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

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

Auctioneer found the Flemish artist’s masterpiece – depicting a crucified Christ – in a Paris mansion as he was preparing for the property to be sold

A long-lost painting by baroque master Peter Paul Rubens has sold at auction in France for €2.3m ($2.7m) – well beyond its asking price.

The work, of Jesus Christ on the cross and painted in 1613, was unearthed by auctioneer Jean-Pierre Osenat in a Paris mansion last year after being hidden for more than four centuries.

Put some artful oomph into your festive season with our bumper guide, featuring everything from a satanic South Park shirt to Marina Abramović’s penis salt and pepper pots

Is there an overly sweary person in your life? Do you have a friend who’s utterly bereft without The Traitors? Would anyone you know like to shake up their cocktail-making? And do you ever wish your neighbours’ doormat was, well, a bit more kinky?

Well, look no further! Our bumper Christmas gift guide has arty present suggestions galore for all these people – and many more. Dig in before the jingle bells rush!

The gay BDSM biker romance won best film at the Bifas, tying with Iraq war drama Warfare for most awards on four each

Gay BDSM biker romance Pillion took the top prize at the British independent film awards (Bifas), which were announced on Sunday at a ceremony in London. Pillion also tied with real-time Iraq war drama Warfare for most awards on four, with all the latter’s wins having been previously announced.

Pillion, adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’s novel Box Hill, also picked up best debut screenwriter for its director Harry Lighton, as well as best costume and hair and makeup design. The film premiered at the Cannes film festival in May to admiring notices, including a four-star review from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw who called it “funny and touching and alarming – like a cross between Alan Bennett and Tom of Finland”.

The actor himself has promised to accept all future cameos as the beloved claw-gremlin, but this will only wear out his superpowers

There was once a time when Hugh Jackman Wolverine cameos made a sort of sense. Bursting out of a cell in full Weapon X gear, massacring half a bunker, then vanishing, in 2016’s otherwise pretty forgettable X-Men: Apocalypse. Telling potential recruitment team Magneto and Professor X to, er, go fuck themselves while propping up a bar in 2011’s X-Men: First Class. Even popping up via archived footage from X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2018’s Deadpool 2. These were cameos we could accept: quick, self-contained sideshows that understood the sacred rule that such things ought to be fun and brief. They also arrived at a time when Jackman didn’t yet carry the weight of 25 years of audience investment.

Last week, in an appearance on the BBC’s Graham Norton Show, Jackman revealed that he has banned himself from saying no to future appearances as the surly mutant. “I am never saying ‘never’ ever again,” he said. “But I did mean it when I said ‘never’, until the day when I changed my mind. But I really did for quite a few years, I meant it.” There are suggestions that he could make a brief appearance in the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday, in order to capitalise on the success of Marvel’s recent $1bn megahit Deadpool & Wolverine, even though he wasn’t mentioned in an interminable name-on-chair live stream from earlier this year, in which most of the main cast members were revealed.

We recommended them – then you flocked to buy them once the discounts landed. Plus: what teens really want for Christmas, and the best cold-water swimming gear

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On the one hand, Black Friday is a tawdry US import designed to snatch what little cash you have left after buying Christmas presents and putting the heating on. On the other hand, it’s saved some of us a fortune. I’ve finally got the gym membership and cat food subscription I’d been holding out on until their prices dropped, and you’ve leapt with similar gusto on some newly discounted Filter recommendations.

Not all your Black Friday favourites are big-ticket items (two are card games that cost less than a tenner), but it definitely seems that you’ve waited to snap up expensive stuff at Black Friday prices. Our top-rated hybrid mattress, heated clothes airer and Christmas tree are among the products you flocked to buy once the discounts landed. You loved some of the more gift-able items so much that they sold out, such as the gorgeous Lucien table lamp. Here are a few more whose stocks you haven’t drained – yet.

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

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

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

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

• The best self-care gifts for Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The route showcases the North Pennines’ unsung landscapes. We road test a 50-mile section that takes in golden forests, high moors and pretty villages

Up on Langley Common the wind is rising. The tussocks under my boots cover the Maiden Way, perhaps the highest Roman road in Britain, but the sense of being close to the sky – today a simmering grey – remains as palpable as it would have been 2,000 years ago. Looking north, a rainbow arcs across the horizon, the full reach of it clearly visible from this high ground. Buffeted by the squall with every step, it feels as though I’m striding across the top of the world, which is apt, since I’m following the new Roof of England Walk.

This 188-mile, multi-day trail was developed by the North Pennines national landscape team, and launched in September. Taking in lofty footpaths and some of the best-loved elements of the North Pennines – among them High Force, Cross Fell, High Cup Nick, the Nine Standards and England’s highest pub, the Tan Hill Inn – the aim is to showcase this sometimes overlooked corner of the country.

There’s a lot of pressure to make a splash, but you can create beautiful festive decor on a budget – just ask the people who do it all year round

It has been Christmas in the retail world for weeks but most of us are only now getting the decorations out at home. How can you reuse and recycle what you already have to create the perfect festive feel? Shop window-dressers – or visual merchandisers, as they are also known – share their tips for capturing the magic of the most wonderful time of the year.

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

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

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

A fishy festive centrepiece that’s ready in next to no time but still has pizzazz

While I tend to stick pretty close to tradition when it comes to my Christmas Day side offerings, I can’t remember the last time I cooked a turkey or goose as the showstopper. You see, my family is mostly made up of pescatarians, so anything larger than a chicken or cockerel (my personal favourite) for the meat eaters is just excessive. So, alongside a lovingly cooked smaller bird, I also make something fishy – hopefully something with a bit of star-quality, but not too shouty. A dish that will be delicious, fancy, but stress-free all at the same time. These pan-fried monkfish fillets are this year’s solution. It’s the sort of dish that can be made in next to no time while everything else finishes off in the oven, but that still has all the glitz and glamour of Christmas.

This amazing scallop gratin with a creamy, white wine and shallot sauce and topped with parsley breadcrumbs is a classic for a reason, and can be made in nine easy steps

’Tis the season for food that makes everyone feel a little bit loved and special; for showstoppers – but preferably the kind that don’t stop the show for too long, given how much else is likely to be going on. This French classic, which can be made a day ahead, if necessary, and/or bulked out with other seafood, is a luxurious light starter or fancy canapé.

Prep 20 min
Cook 15 min
Makes 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The comedians on their first meeting, pissing each other off, and a shared obsession with Pride and Prejudice

Born in London in 1982, Cariad Lloyd is a comedian, actor and podcaster. She met comedian and musician Rachel Parris, born in Leicester in 1984, through improv comedy. Along with six other comedians, they formed Austentatious. The show is an improvised Jane Austen novel, based on an audience’s suggestion for a title, and is currently on at the Vaudeville theatre in London. Beyond their stage work, Cariad hosts the podcast Griefcast and is a co-host on Weirdos Book Club and Rachel worked on The Mash Report and publishes Introducing Mrs Collins: A Pride and Prejudice Novel on 6 November.

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

Peter, 34, London

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

Weird tales of meter mix-ups, incomprehensible bills, and to foment the drama, a teenager threatened with a trashed credit rating

On a dark winter’s night, what could be more engrossing than my latest tragifarce about energy firms, guaranteed to set spines tingling?

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

• Your questions about your finances answered

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

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

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

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

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

• How does freezing tax thresholds affect your tax bill?

• Budget 2025: key points at a glance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women of all ages, especially older ones, are actively choosing to travel alone. What’s behind the trend?

UK travel companies have reported an increase in bookings for solo travellers, primarily older women, often leaving partners behind to “explore on their own terms”.

Last month, the tour operator Jules Verne said solo travellers accounted for 46% of bookings for its trips departing next year, up from 40% in 2023. Just under 70% of its current solo bookings are made by women.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The many ambiguities in a recent puzzle are teased out …

When November’s Genius puzzle germinated in July, no one knew how popular its hidden theme would be by the time of publication. “A celebrity version of The Traitors?” sniffed the sceptics. “We – and they – will already know the personalities. Typical terrible TV idea. Won’t work.”

Eleven million live viewers later, we can now have a look at the filled version of Glyph’s remarkable grid. Or rather, grids. Solvers are told:

Entrants must pick a side. The majority of down clues must have a letter removed before solving. These letters, taken in clue order, inform the solver of one who may not pick a side.

BEARS or BARES
PATER or PRIOR
FAT or OAT
GOLFBALL or GOLFBAGS

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

Which ancient and perhaps long-forgotten Christmas traditions should be revived? Ryan, Kent

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’d like to hear about your favourite recipes that have passed down through generations

Recipes carry stories, and often when they have been passed down from generation to generation, these tales have a chapter added to them each time they are made. Family members concoct elaborate treats and seasoning mixes, which in some cases travel across oceans to end up on our dinner tables.

We would like to hear about the recipes that have stood the test of time for you, and never fail to impress. Who first made it for you? Did you stick to the recipe that was passed down or have you improvised? What are the stories you associate with your favourite family recipe?

We’d like to hear from people in Britain who have turned to family or friends to borrow money instead of to banks, and how this has affected them

Britons often turn to family and friends to borrow money now, a new survey has suggested.

The survey of more than 4,000 adults commissioned by non-profit Fair4All Finance found that while 25% of respondents had taken out a Buy Now Pay Later loan, 26% had borrowed from family and 15% from friends this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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