Red chicory leaves with blue cheese, honey and walnuts; a big jug of caramelised swede and honey soup; a turkey wellington with red wine gravy, cranberry relish and a hispi and sprout slaw; and a showstopping yule log to finish

Christmas lunch in my family is about as traditional as it comes, and is pretty much the same every year no matter who’s house we’re at (including at least three monumental rows about things that happened years ago). Everyone chips in, too, even the kids – well, they’ve got to earn their dinner somehow. Rather than shooing them off to watch cartoons while the adults do all the work, we make sure they’re hands-on in the kitchen alongside us, especially with the annual yule log. Not only is this a valuable life lesson, it also helps develop and strengthen our family culture. The children get to share in that sense of pride at a job well done, too, and everyone feels a part of the occasion. And isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

The party’s astonishingly speedy growth disguised shallow roots – and its success has brought a level of scrutiny for which it simply isn’t ready

Imagine a classroom with almost nothing in it, save some hard wooden benches and a stack of Bibles. Imagine the school it is in has only one loo, no canteen, gets freezing cold in winter – oh, and the playground is full of gravestones.

If this sounds to you like the perfect setting to teach the country’s most vulnerable children, then you’re going to love Reform UK’s new Send policy, which involves cutting the bill for taxiing children to far-flung special schools by repurposing nearby “empty churches” (a term that in itself may surprise vicars) as schools on weekdays. But if you have actually met any children, and therefore suspect this idea isn’t going to fly, then read on to find out why Reform looks more beatable at the end of what has undeniably been its breakthrough year than it did at the beginning.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

My heart skipped a beat. I felt quite light-headed. Finally, the moment I dreamed of had arrived

I can’t remember the first time I played the lottery – I was probably quite young. I’m an optimist. If you don’t play, you can’t win, and somebody has to win the big prize. Why not me? To me, winning would mean freedom – leave my job, have no debts and do exactly as I pleased.

I live in Norway, and every few weeks I’d buy a lottery ticket. I’d occasionally win 100 kroner (£7.50), which just covered the cost of the ticket. It kept the dream alive, though.

A family classic reborn in a wide open world, a satirical adventure through teenage life and a mystery puzzler for the ages – our critics on the year’s best fun
• More on the best culture of 2025

Ivy Road/Annapurna Interactive; PC, PS5, Xbox
An arena warrior on a losing streak takes refuge in a vast forest where she discovers the joy of working in a cosy teashop. From this simple premise comes a joyful game of mindfulness and social interaction, as Alta learns how to serve up witty conversation and decent hot drinks. Colourful and highly stylised, it is a thoughtful study of burnout and recovery.

Do you know your Tesla from your Jaguar? Test your 2025 business knowledge here with our annual quiz …

This year, the once-vanishing symbol of Las Vegas glamour was reborn in the wardrobes of Gen Z superstars

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After a 31-year stint on the Las Vegas strip, the showgirls from the revue Jubilee! took a final synchronised kick in 2016. The show, known for its elaborate costumes created by the American fashion designer Bob Mackie, came to an end due to falling audience numbers and unimpressed critics who described it as a spectacle “trapped in time”.

Now, almost a decade later, showgirls, or at least the showgirl aesthetic, is back.

Two-year deal will cover most of Ukraine’s needs, but will be secured against EU borrowing rather than Russian assets

EU leaders have pledged a €90bn loan for Ukraine to meet urgent financial needs, but failed to agree on the preferred option for many of securing that loan against Russia’s frozen assets in the bloc.

After talks ended in the early hours of Friday, the president of the European Council, António Costa, told reporters: “We committed and we delivered.” He said EU leaders had approved a decision to make a €90bn loan to Ukraine for the next two years backed by the EU budget, which Kyiv would repay only once Russia pays reparations.

Exclusive: Labour says Nigel Farage’s party should swiftly condemn Chris Parry after further comments emerge

A Reform UK mayoral candidate who said David Lammy should “go home to the Caribbean” has suggested that at least eight other politicians from minority ethnic backgrounds do not have a primary loyalty towards the UK.

Nigel Farage’s party has so far refused to condemn Chris Parry, a retired naval rear admiral who has been picked to contest the now-postponed Hampshire and the Solent mayoral election for the party, over his comment about Lammy, the deputy prime minister.

Transport groups warn of unprecedented congestion as commuters, shoppers and holidaymakers travel at once

Britain’s roads and runways will take a festive pounding on Friday as traffic peaks before Christmas and record numbers head to the skies.

Motoring organisations are forecasting exceptionally busy roads, with getaways expected to peak on Saturday and Christmas Eve. However, they say the mix of commuter travel, shopping trips and early departures will make Friday the most congested day.

Exclusive Guardian investigation finds companies set up by people sanctioned by US hired Colombian fighters for Rapid Support Forces, widely suspected of war crimes in Sudan

Close to Tottenham Hotspur’s shiny football stadium in London is a squat, nondescript block of flats. It holds a grim secret beyond the unremarkable beige brickwork – a cramped, second-floor apartment in the British capital, linked to murderous atrocities unfolding 3,000 miles south.

The one-bedroom flat off north London’s Creighton Road is, according to UK government records, tied to a transnational network of companies involved in the mass recruitment of mercenaries to fight in Sudan alongside paramilitaries accused of myriad war crimes and genocide.

ONS figures show public sector net borrowing was £11.7bn – £1.9bn less than in same month last year

The UK government borrowed more than expected in November, official figures show, amid pressure on the economy before chancellor Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed public sector net borrowing – the difference between spending and income – was £11.7bn last month, £1.9bn less than in the same month a year earlier.

Images, undated and uncaptioned, include Nabokov lines written on woman’s body and show Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky

• What we know so far about the Epstein files

Democrats on the House oversight committee have released a new batch of photos from the estate of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as the deadline for the justice department to release its files related to Epstein looms.

The images, released on Thursday, are undated and lack captions or context. Among them are photographs of what appear to be lines from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita written on different parts of a woman’s body.

Claudio Neves Valente, who was found dead in a storage facility, also killed an MIT professor at his Boston-area home

A man suspected of killing two and wounding nine others at Brown University, and then killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, has been found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility where he had rented a unit, officials said.

Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and a former Brown student, was found dead on Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Oscar Perez, the Providence police chief, said at a news conference. Perez said as far as investigators know, the suspect acted alone.’

Analysis suggests consumption at Northumberland site could be 50 times higher than US operator QTS estimates

The UK’s largest proposed datacentre is understating the scale of its planned water use, according to an analysis.

The first phase of construction for the hyperscale campus in Cambois in Northumberland has been given the go-ahead by the local council. The US operator QTS, which is developing the site, has promoted its “water-free” cooling system as proof of its sustainability.

Hosts heading towards series victory in Adelaide
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Enough talk, Scott Boland is about to bowl the first over of day three. It’s much cooler in Adelaide, around 26 degrees.

“Honestly, it’s not England’s batting – that’s pretty much on par with Australia’s,” writes Andy Roberts. “The glaring difference is the bowling. If Australian batters look better, it’s because they are getting a lot more bad balls to hit. England couldn’t score any faster yesterday because the bowling was consistently accurate and tested the batter’s technique and concentration over after over, with no weak links. Compare that to England, with Jacks and Carse sending down rubbish time and time again.

When AIs become consistently more capable than humans, life could change in strange ways. It could happen in the next few years, or a little longer. If and when it comes, our domestic routines – trips to the doctor, farming, work and justice systems – could all look very different. Here we take a look at how the era of artificial general intelligence might feel

“Does it hurt when I do this?”

Meetings in Gibraltar are the latest twist in worldwide campaign that is enriching the US president’s family

One Friday in November, armed police blocked off the road that runs beside Gibraltar’s medieval city walls to clear the way for a convoy of blacked-out BMWs. The vehicles pulled up at the offices of Hassans, a law firm.

The British enclave in the Mediterranean is a hub for the international ultra-rich, and Hassans counts many of them as clients. But few as highly placed as that day’s visitor: Donald Trump Jr, the man running the family business while his father is in the White House.

Exclusive: Clashes over rural plots are increasing, as people whose big-city plans have evaporated return home to face local governments groaning under huge debt

Standing inside the temple armed with buckets of rice, the villagers gaze out at police officers armed with riot shields and sticks, the sound of shouting audible over banging drums.

Then the tension erupts. A scuffle breaks out, some villagers throw handfuls of rice at the officers, a traditional custom for dispelling evil, while others hoist religious artefacts onto their shoulders and march away, past groups of police and other officials.

In the Peloponnese mountains, the usually hardy trees are turning brown even where fires haven’t reached. Experts are raising the alarm on a complex crisis

In the southern Peloponnese, the Greek fir is a towering presence. The deep green, slow-growing conifers have long defined the region’s high-altitude forests, thriving in the mountains and rocky soils. For generations they have been one of the country’s hardier species, unusually capable of withstanding drought, insects and the wildfires that periodically sweep through Mediterranean ecosystems. These Greek forests have lived with fire for as long as anyone can remember.

So when Dimitrios Avtzis, a senior researcher at the Forest Research Institute (FRI) of Elgo-Dimitra, was dispatched to document the aftermath of a spring blaze in the region, nothing about the assignment seemed exceptional. He had walked into countless burnt landscapes, tracking the expected pockets of mortality, as well as the trees that survived their scorching.

Jack Black gifts us an extremely silly flight of fancy set in a right-angled world, and Hugh Grant has the time of his life in the most perfect movie ever made. Plus: mulled wine in film form!

Director Jared Hess has a history of extreme silliness (see Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre) so is a great choice for this flight of fancy based on the popular building-block video game. In a superbly imagined right-angled world that runs on its own surreal logic, siblings Henry (Sebastian Hansen) and Natalie (Emma Myers) – guided by Jason Momoa’s ex-gamer Garrett and Jack Black’s salesman Steve; a double act without a straight man – have to use their construction skills to defeat baddies from the Nether. Catnip for the under-12s. Simon Wardell
Christmas Day, 7.10am, 6.15pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

From a Grade II*-listed converted village chapel to a flat in the heart of London

In her day job, the ‘first lady of Croatian avant garde’ sliced up cadavers at Zagreb’s anatomical institute. In her studio, she used the same medical instruments to make art that surprises to this day

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” says David Crowley, curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work at Muzeum Susch, in eastern Switzerland. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes Marika Kuźmicz, the museum’s curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

OpenAI is the latest to make a political hire as big tech spreads its tentacles around the world. So what’s the attraction?

George Osborne getting a new job isn’t exactly news. Since leaving frontline politics, the former chancellor has served as the chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, edited (not entirely successfully) the Evening Standard, advised asset manager BlackRock, joined boutique advisory firm Robey Warshaw, been appointed as the chair of the British Museum and taken on roles including advising crypto firm Coinbase. Oh, and like any white man of a particular age, he co-hosts a political podcast.

But Osborne’s latest job is the most eye-opening – and is an alarming augur of what is to come. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has become the latest organisation to employ Osborne. He will run OpenAI for Countries, a unit tasked with working directly with governments while expanding the company’s Stargate datacentre programme beyond the US. At least it was announced with a tweet, rather than a LinkedIn post.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

Sidelined by Trump, preoccupied with Ukraine and damaged by its immoral stance on Gaza, Europe can still help stabilise its eastern Mediterranean neighbours

A year after the overthrow of Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, the former jihadi fighter turned Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa addressed the Doha Forum earlier this month, deftly parrying questions about his controversial past and outlining his country’s complex journey toward a participatory, rules-based system. As I listened, it struck me that, while Europe’s role in the Middle East has been severely damaged by its immoral stance on the Gaza war and its self-inflicted exclusion from Iran nuclear diplomacy, Europeans still have a role to play when it comes to its neighbours in the eastern Mediterranean.

Europe’s world has been turned upside down by Washington’s alignment with Moscow in the Ukraine war and the transatlantic rift as the Trump administration treats Europe as an adversary. Another dimension of this upheaval is Europe’s growing irrelevance in the Middle East. Only if Europeans accept that the past is behind them can they hope to regain a constructive independent role in the region.

Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist

With the Christmas recess slowing the political havoc, it’s time to hand out the Guardian’s parliamentarian of the year awards

You can hear the sighs of relief. Not from the MPs who are packing up to slope back to their constituencies for the Christmas recess, but from the rest of the country. Finally, the year is coming to an end and there will be few chances for our politicians to do any further damage before they return to Westminster in January.

The psychodrama is finally done. We can all go to bed vaguely hopeful that the world won’t have taken a further turn for the worse by the time we wake up.

The decision to replace Murray Auchincloss with Woodside’s Meg O’Neill is puzzling on at least two counts

Here we go again. Just when you thought BP was trying to generate less drama, the new chair has decided a new chief executive is needed. Say goodbye to Murray Auchincloss, who junked the green-ish transition strategy of his predecessor as recently as February. Meg O’Neill, the American boss of the Australian group Woodside Energy, becomes BP’s first outside hire as chief executive.

At face value, a new appointment should not be an outright surprise. Albert Manifold arrived as BP chair in July and, after the many flip-flops under the ineffectual Helge Lund, he had a mandate to take his own view of how the company should be managed. If he and the board think an injection of “increased rigour and diligence” is necessary to fulfil the new oilier plan, fair enough. The activist investor Elliott may have been urging much the same. Even Auchincloss recognised the possibility he could be axed. His statement said he had told Manifold of his “openness to step down” if a new leader was identified.

Friends, family and assorted strangers have been sending thoughts and prayers about my ‘cancer journey’. It is, in the nicest possible way, a lot

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago railing at the app-heavy facelessness of dealing with the NHS about what I believe is known as one’s care pathway. My point was that it might be efficient if reducing head count in admin departments is what counts as efficiency, but not if clear communication is the aim. The whole palaver of the comms around the journey to diagnosis was more of a drama than the diagnosis itself, which was for a very mild variant of skin cancer. As fond as I am of a wallow in self-pity and catastrophisation, even I couldn’t get myself into a panic over this. So I certainly wasn’t courting sympathy or concern by making too much of it, and I was as careful as possible to get this across.

But then a couple of media outlets ran clickbait-type headlines along the lines of AC REVEALS HE HAS CANCER. And everything went nuts; thoughts and prayers came streaming in from all quarters. There were family and friends – to whom I’d not mentioned it because I didn’t think it merited a mention. There were people I’d not heard from in years.

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 racism, the predatory politics, the banality and cruelty: we struggle to make sense of it, but JG Ballard foretold everything we are living through now

An Englishman drives into a new town and can’t see the warning signs. Richard Pearson is visiting Surrey to close down his late father’s home and settle his affairs and, everywhere he looks, the flag of St George is flying “from suburban gardens and filling stations and branch post offices”. How nice, he thinks, how festive.

Soon he learns the truth.

So runs the opening not of a recent piece of journalism, but a novel by JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, which despite being almost 20 years old anticipates today’s Britain with eerie precision. In the mid-2000s, Pearson reads up on his new surroundings, only to find the same headlines that assail us in the mid-2020s: “Every day the local newspaper reported attacks on an asylum hotel, the torching of a Bangladeshi takeaway, injuries to a Kosovan youth thrown over the fence into an industrial estate.”

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Kingdom Come by JG Ballard (Fourth Estate, £10.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

White elephant parties – in which people are invited to steal each other’s gifts – are the last thing we need right now

Happy forced frivolity season! We have once again arrived at the eye of the storm for the holidays, where cheerfulness is mandatory and lack of goodwill towards people is punishable by stoning in the town square. Surely, I don’t have to tell you that such quaint human emotions as “happiness” and “hope” are in short supply these days. This year, of all years, no one should be blamed for plugging their ears any time Mariah Carey comes on in the lobby of the unemployment office. And yet, we carry on with the rituals of joy that seem more and more incongruous, when life feels like some never-ending episode of MTV’s Ridiculousness, where God comments on clips of the human race getting hit in the face with a plastic baseball bat.

I’m certainly making an effort to put on a pleasant facade. I’ve cobbled together some nice gifts for my friends and family. I say hello to strangers, even the ones that look like they might want to deny me my basic rights as outlined in the US constitution. And I say yes to just about every holiday party invite – save for one massive exception.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Labour’s delayed strategy stresses prevention. Big changes in policing and the courts are needed too

Labour set itself a mammoth task when it pledged, before last year’s election, to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in 10 years. While many forms of crime have decreased over the past decade, sexual assault has not. In the year to March 2025, 1.9% of people in England and Wales experienced it, and 82% of victims were female. The prevalence of image-related offences has risen sharply. So has concern about the impact on young men of violent pornography and influencers.

Given this grim backdrop, and the fiscal constraints under which the government has chosen to operate, it is no wonder that the promised VAWG strategy was delayed. This is a societal issue that does not sit neatly in one government department. Jess Phillips is the minister responsible at the Home Office. But education and justice reforms are also essential if aims are to be met.

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 plan to mobilise Russia’s frozen assets is morally compelling and ingenious. The problem is that its enemies will never see it that way

Morally, the decision facing the European Council in Brussels this week has been a no-brainer. Russia invaded Ukraine illegally and unilaterally. Moscow shows no sign of wanting peace. It actively threatens other countries too, including Britain. Ukraine is running out of money. Yet £184bn worth of Russian assets remain frozen in Europe, notably in Belgium. That money should therefore be mobilised to fund Ukraine. To many, this would be the enactment of a clear and present duty, proof positive that Europe can still be a heavy hitter.

In the messy reaches of the real world, however, things have not been straightforward. Law, economics and politics all managed to insinuate themselves, sometimes venomously, into the intense buildup to Brussels. Reparations can have lethal political consequences. Seizure of assets will undoubtedly face legal challenge. It is also bitterly opposed by Donald Trump, who wants the unfreezing of assets to form a key part of his pro-Russian peace plan. Mr Trump is pressing hard for a quick deal, and US and Russian negotiators are poised to meet again in Miami at the weekend.

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.

Readers respond to the far-right extremist’s conversion and his recent ‘Unite the Kingdom’ carols event

Obviously, we would love to follow Tommy Robinson’s advice on the true meaning of Christmas in our north London Catholic parish church (C of E responds to Tommy Robinson’s carols event with ‘Christmas is for all’ message, 13 December).

Teeny problem though. Would we need to get rid of our Nigerian priests? Our Filipino altar servers? Our Nigerian readers? The African-Caribbean man who does the collections? Our admin staff from east Africa? And don’t even start me on all the Irish, Burmese, Congolese and Indian people who come to mass. Our local imam can always be relied on to attend our multifaith events – do we have to uninvite him, as well as our Jewish friends? And, dare I say it, we will be celebrating the birth of a Jew born in Palestine. Nollaig shona daoibh.
Dr Ronan Cormacain
Finsbury Park, London

Prof Andrew Weeks, Anna Melamed and Sonia Richardson on the rising rate of postpartum haemorrhage, and the factors associated with it

Your report (Risk to women of severe bleeding after giving birth at five-year high in England, 13 December) rightly points out that the risk to women of severe bleeding after giving birth is at a five-year high. The article suggests that this is due to the declining quality and safety of NHS maternity care. But this is not true. The problem of increasing haemorrhage after birth is not simple, and neither women nor the quality of maternity care should be blamed.

In a recent World Health Organization analysis, the largest influence on the rate of haemorrhage was caesarean birth, and the only two factors that reduced the haemorrhage risk were home birth and early skin-to-skin contact/breastfeeding. Increased rates of haemorrhage are a natural consequence of high caesarean section rates. Sensationalist quotes of the “terrifying” risk to mothers of haemorrhage will only make the problem worse, as women seek to avoid labour in the NHS, either by choosing a caesarean (which increases the risk of haemorrhage) or by opting out of maternity care altogether (which increases the risk of death if haemorrhage occurs).

Ruth Wilkinson says good regulation allows business to thrive without risking workers’ health

John Fingleton’s claim that health and safety rules are holding UK infrastructure back (Report, 12 December) is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. Stripping back protections in the name of speed is a false economy that risks lives, reputations and resilience. The UK’s health and safety framework is the backbone of safe and sustainable growth. These regulations have driven a historic decline in workplace fatalities, injuries and ill health. Weakening them would reverse decades of progress and shift enormous costs on to the NHS, employers and taxpayers.

Despite the progress, 124 people died in accidents at work in 2024-25. In 2023-24, the estimated annual cost of workplace injuries and new cases of work-related ill health reached £22.9bn. Good regulation allows businesses to thrive without compromising worker health and safety. The idea that deregulation will unlock growth ignores the reality – unsafe work slows projects, causes harm and damages reputations. We urge policymakers to reject calls for health and safety deregulation, and uphold the world-class standards that make Britain a safe, healthy and competitive place to work, trade and invest.
Ruth Wilkinson
Head of policy and public affairs, Institution of Occupational Safety and Health

Karen Ford says strike action is set to continue because of political posturing, while an NHS consultant worries about the deteriorating relationship among colleagues. Plus letters from John Sowerby, Dr Mussaddaq Iqbal, Gill Kelly and a final-year medical student

“Striking resident doctors are digging in. History suggests this will go on and on” says the headline on Denis Campbell’s analysis piece (16 December). As a retired public health research and policy adviser and the parent of a doctor currently in core training, I agree that it is likely to go on and on – but not because doctors are stubborn. It will persist because the numbers do not add up and too much of the response has been political posturing rather than workforce planning.

This year, around 30,000 doctors competed for just 10,000 specialty training posts, leaving thousands unable to progress. Promised increases of around 1,000 posts from 2026 may help at the margins, but will leave large numbers with no route into registrar training.

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• Masters champion is first golfer in 36 years to claim award

• Kildunne finishes second in vote and Norris third

• Ryder Cup side win team award and Wiegman coach prize

A full-throated “Rory roar” reverberated around MediaCity in Salford as Rory McIlroy became the first golfer in 36 years to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award – and tie a bow on a year for the ages.

It was a fitting reward for the 36-year-old, who completed a career grand slam at the Masters in April and then led Europe to a thrilling Ryder Cup victory in New York, in the teeth of unrelenting hostility from American fans. For good measure, he also won the European Order of Merit too.

Ngumoha could step up for Liverpool, injury-hit Newcastle need to bounce back and Parker feels the heat

• Top scorers: check the latest Premier League standings

Chelsea are fourth in the Premier League and Newcastle 12th but the gap between them is only six points. It dictates that, given Eddie Howe’s ambitions of qualifying for the Champions League via the league, this is a pivotal fixture. How Newcastle’s manager must hope Enzo Maresca’s recent cryptic hints about potential discord behind the scenes at Stamford Bridge somehow help to undo the visitors on Tyneside, cutting the aforementioned gap in half. If off-pitch harmony endures at St James’ Park, Newcastle’s Saudi Arabian ownership will, nonetheless, be keen to see Howe and his players make further amends for last Sunday’s ignominious defeat at Sunderland. Falling nine points behind Chelsea may not be well received in Riyadh. Howe might have been tempted to start with a back five but with Tino Livramento the latest victim of a defensive injury crisis, he only possesses sufficient fit personnel to staff a four-man rearguard. Assuming Howe sticks with his preferred 4-3-3 it will be intriguing to see whether he drops a winger and fields Yoane Wissa to Nick Woltemade’s left in attack. Or does he opt for a potentially more fluid 4-2-3-1 with Woltemade as the No 10 and Wissa at No 9? Louise Taylor

Newcastle v Chelsea, Saturday 12.30pm (all times GMT)

Bournemouth v Burnley, Saturday 3pm

Brighton v Sunderland, Saturday 3pm

Manchester City v West Ham, Saturday 3pm

Wolves v Brentford, Saturday 3pm

Back at the PDC world championship for the first time since 2022, the women’s world champion means business, starting on Friday against the world No 22

“When I was younger, they thought I was a mute,” Beau Greaves says with a wry smile, thinking about all the ways darts has changed her. “Never said owt in school, really shy. Didn’t really know what to say half the time. I suppose playing darts just brought me out of my shell. When you get popular, people want to meet you and talk. It’s matured me.”

Greaves was 18 the first time she won the Lakeside women’s world championship, thrusting herself firmly into the crosshairs of public adulation. And even if she played like a natural-born star, with her beautiful fluid throwing arc, she didn’t always feel like one. Endless interviews, viral fame, global domination: this was never what she had craved from the sport. She was Beau, and she just wanted to throw.

Millions will tune in to watch the brash YouTuber get his comeuppance – the fight will likely go on as long as Joshua decides to let it

An undersized loudmouth disruptor arrives in Miami for a no-hope fight with one of history’s most destructive heavyweights, exploiting every available lever of new media to amplify his delusions of grandeur to mass audiences. There are mounting concerns for his mental and physical wellbeing, with doctors, commentators and former fighters openly questioning his soundness of mind and wondering whether he might end up in hospital – or worse. The oddsmakers have made him an 8-1 longshot, a price that feels almost charitable given the epic scale of the mismatch. The buildup revolves less around the favorite than around the smaller man’s mouth: his noise, his presence, and the creeping suspicion that spectacle may finally have outrun sense.

Cassius Clay wound up shocking the world back in 1964 when he made Sonny Liston quit on his stool after six rounds at the Miami Beach Convention Center. But it’s right here, on the eve of Friday night’s scheduled eight-round showdown between Jake Paul and Anthony Joshua at the nearby Kaseya Center, where those curious rhymes with the past come to a screeching halt.

Scott McTominay has come in at 19th in the world in our rankings and is joined by Declan Rice and Désiré Doué for places 40 to 11

• Our methodology | The top 100 female players for 2025

• 2024 edition | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012

A Guardian study of past ticket prices for the men’s World Cup, compared with current 2026 figures, shows how the barrier for entry has been raised for most fans

In the past, a fan’s ability to attend a World Cup hosted in their nation hinged more on bid books than their checkbooks. For 2026 in the US, Mexico and Canada, even the least expensive tickets are a luxury commodity by comparison.

An analysis by the Guardian of men’s World Cup ticket pricing shows that amid the general rise in ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup, the most extreme of those hikes have often applied to the cheapest tickets. The analysis is based on official Fifa pricing dating back to 1994, with more robust data available starting in 2006. Prices for 2026 games are accurate as of 16 December 2025, and do not include the 1.6% of sellable tickets for each game that Fifa recently made available for a fixed $60 price.

• Bid includes 11 new stadiums but PIF wants to cut costs

• Architecture firms asked to resubmit plans, Guardian told

Saudi Arabia’s construction of stadiums for the 2034 World Cup is facing delays owing to a desire from the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, to scale back costs.

The Guardian has been told that several architecture firms awarded contracts to build stadiums in Saudi have been asked to resubmit plans because their designs have been deemed too expensive, and contractors due to start work next year have been told the build will not begin on time.

The bad news for Oliver Glasner is that Crystal Palace’s marathon season is about to get even longer. A thrilling draw against Finnish side KuPS in their 27th game of the campaign means that they must now contest a two-leg playoff at the end of February after finishing just outside the top eight in the Conference League table.

Having selected an entirely different starting lineup including four teenagers from the side who lost to Manchester City at the weekend, the Palace manager saw his second string impress as Christantus Uche gave them a deserved half-time lead.

• West Ham have one win from 11 league game this season

• Skinner has been in charge of club since July 2023

West Ham have sacked their women’s team manager, Rehanne Skinner, with the club second-bottom of the Women’s Super League. A statement said “recent results have not matched expectations” and that a change was deemed necessary.

Skinner had been in charge since July 2023 and departs after securing one win from 11 WSL matches this season. The news comes three days before West Ham host Manchester City in the League Cup quarter-finals.

Prime minister announces first firearm buyback since Port Arthur massacre, and designates Sunday a national day of reflection in honour of Hanukah shooting victims

• Victims of Bondi beach shooting

• Ten minutes of terror: how the Bondi mass shooting unfolded in real time – video

• Follow the latest live updates

The federal government will launch a new gun buyback scheme in response to the Bondi beach terror attack in what Anthony Albanese says will be the biggest collection of weapons since the Port Arthur massacre nearly three decades ago.

It comes as New South Wales announced a suite of gun control measures including capping the number of firearms most recreational shooters can hold at four.

Party says US government’s explicit support for far-right nationalist parties in Europe amounts to outside interference

An inquiry into interference by hostile foreign states in the UK should be extended to cover the actions of Donald Trump’s US, the Liberal Democrats have said.

In a letter to the communities secretary, Steve Reed, whose department is leading on the independent review, the Lib Dems said the US government’s explicit support for far-right nationalist parties in Europe amounted to outside interference.

House of Lords report says tools such as raising pension age and increasing immigration will not be adequate

Young people will suffer most from the government’s failure to take seriously the unsustainable pressure on public finances and living standards created by the UK’s ageing population, according to the findings of a House of Lords inquiry.

The report, Preparing for an Ageing Society, by the economic affairs committee, also found successive governments’ inaction on adult social care “remains a scandal”.

US pressure, broken promises by China and corruption scandals have halted Taiwan’s slide to diplomatic irrelevance in the region

After weeks of technology failures, accusations of fraud and complaints about US President Donald Trump’s interference, the outcome of Honduras’ 30 November election is yet to be called. But there is a clear winner beyond the Central American nation’s borders: Taiwan.

Both leading candidates say they will cut diplomatic ties with Beijing and re-establish relations with Taipei, reversing the March 2023 decision by the then president, Xiomara Castro, to sensationally end Honduras’ 82-year relationship with Taiwan.

Film based on popular plush toys is in early development after Sony Pictures acquired screen rights

Paul King, director of the global hit Paddington films and the Timothée Chalamet-led musical Wonka, is set to direct the Labubu film.

In November it was announced that Sony Pictures, fresh off the global success of KPop Demon Hunters, had acquired the screen rights to the Chinese plush toy sensation with a feature film already in early development.

In this week’s newsletter: A generation is using the legal system to demand accountability for climate harm

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Rikki Held grew up on her family’s ranch in Montana, watching the land transform amid the climate crisis. The Powder River, which runs through the property, has sometimes dried up during drought, leaving crops and livestock without water. At other points, rapid snowmelt and heavy rains have caused flooding and eroded riverbanks, making the land difficult to use.

Two years ago, the 24-year-old and a group of other young people won a groundbreaking legal victory, intended to prevent those impacts from worsening. In August 2023, a judge ruled in favour of plaintiffs in Held v Montana, in which 16 young people accused the state of violating their constitutional rights by promoting planet-warming fossil fuels. The state’s supreme court affirmed the judge’s findings late last year, but plaintiffs say lawmakers have since passed new laws that violate that ruling. So last week, they filed a new petition calling on the supreme court to enforce their earlier win, one of several youth-led constitutional climate lawsuits filed in the US this year.

‘A shift no country can ignore’: where global emissions stand, 10 years after the Paris climate agreement

The trauma after the storm: Hurricane Melissa leaves trail of emotional devastation across Jamaica

Synthetic chemicals in food system creating health burden of $2.2tn a year, report finds

Montana youth activists who won landmark climate case push for court enforcement

More than 40 Trump administration picks tied directly to oil, gas and coal, analysis shows

Youth-led US climate activists widen focus to fight authoritarianism

Scientists say government must prepare for unlikely but ‘plausible’ 4C rise in temperature and a 2-metre rise in sea levels

The worst-case impacts of the climate crisis for the UK have been laid bare by scientists, ranging from a scorching 4C rise in temperatures to a 2-metre rise in sea level. Another scenario sees a plunge of 6C in temperature after the collapse of key Atlantic Ocean currents, massively disrupting farming and energy needs.

The impacts, some of which are linked to climate tipping points, are seen as low probability but plausible. The researchers said the scenarios filled a gap in forecasting that had left the UK unprepared for extreme outcomes.

From floods to droughts, erratic weather patterns are affecting food security, with crop yields projected to fall if changes are not made

Experts have warned that the world’s ability to feed itself is under threat from the “chaos” of extreme weather caused by climate change.

Crop yields have increased enormously over the past few decades. But early warning signs have arrived as crop yield rates flatline, prompting warnings of efficiency hitting its limits and the impacts of climate change taking effect.

Study author says tech companies are reaping benefits of artificial intelligence age but society is left to pay cost

The AI boom has caused as much carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere in 2025 as emitted by the whole of New York City, it has been claimed.

The global environmental impact of the rapidly spreading technology has been estimated in research published on Wednesday, which also found that AI-related water use now exceeds the entirety of global bottled-water demand.

Turner, appointed ambassador to UN in May, now replaces Peter Mandelson who was sacked over Epstein links

Keir Starmer has appointed the career diplomat Christian Turner as the UK’s ambassador to Washington, replacing Peter Mandelson who was sacked over his links to Jeffrey Epstein.

Turner, who was appointed ambassador to the UN in May, had previously been political director at the Foreign Office and had brokered a close relationship with the new Labour administration before taking up his UN role in New York.

Commons leader denies allegation and says government ‘not trying to break bodies’ after doctor said prisoners were dying

The government is “not trying to break the bodies” of Palestine Action protesters on hunger strike, a minister has said, after a doctor said eight of the activists were dying.

The prisoners on hunger strike are facing charges related to alleged break-ins or criminal damage on behalf of Palestine Action before the group was banned under terrorism legislation in July, charges which they deny and have called to be dropped.

Campaigners welcome plans but say poor funding means Labour’s ambitions unlikely to be met

A landmark strategy to protect women and girls from violence and abuse “falls seriously short” of the funding required to realise the government’s ambitions, campaigners have said.

The government’s strategy to combat violence against women and girls (VAWG) was hailed as a “milestone” by women’s organisations. It will focus on prevention and tackling harmful behaviours in boys, by teaching pupils about healthy relationships and pornography and equipping teachers with the skills to intervene if they witness disturbing or worrying behaviour.

Tackling misogyny with focused education in schools.

A new GP referral service and £50m funding for therapeutic support for child victims of sexual abuse.

New laws to ban AI “nudification” apps.

Plans to work with tech companies to ban the sharing of nude images on children’s phones.

Specialist rape and sexual offences units in every police force.

A national rollout of strict new restraining orders on domestic abusers.

£19m funding for councils to provide safe housing for domestic abuse survivors.

£550m investment to support victims and witnesses throughout the criminal justice system.

Scrapping of afternoon press conferences could limit scrutiny and transparency, say reporters

Sweeping changes to Downing Street’s press lobby system have been criticised by journalists.

No 10 normally holds two briefings on most days that parliament sits to allow the lobby – political journalists that cover Westminster – to question the prime minister’s official spokesperson.

Medical professionals and some in conservative circles feel argument of Lee Jae Myung may be a bit thin

South Korean president Lee Jae Myung has instructed his government to consider extending public health insurance to cover hair-loss treatments, arguing that baldness has become a “matter of survival” rather than a cosmetic concern for young people.

The proposal, which has since faced a backlash from medical professionals and conservative figures, was announced during a policy briefing on Tuesday and would expand coverage beyond the limited medical treatments currently available for certain types of hair loss.

Youth leader Sharif Osman Hadi was shot by masked assailants on 12 December as he left a mosque

Violence broke out in Bangladesh’s capital early on Friday after a youth leader of the country’s 2024 pro-democracy uprising who was injured in an assassination attempt died in a hospital in Singapore.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Dhaka after the death of Sharif Osman Hadi, 32, was announced, to demand that his killers be arrested.

US military declares five alleged drug traffickers killed in Pacific Ocean

The US military said it killed on Thursday five more alleged drug traffickers aboard two vessels in the Pacific Ocean, bringing the divisive campaign’s death toll to over 100.

The Trump administration has carried out such strikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September but has provided no evidence that the boats are involved in drug trafficking, prompting debate about the operations’ legality.

Intelligence service says attacks were work of groups connected to Russian state in ‘clear evidence’ of hybrid war

The Danish government has accused Russia of being behind two “destructive and disruptive” cyber-attacks in what it describes as “very clear evidence” of a hybrid war.

The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyber-attack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal and regional council elections in November.

Bremen lawyers say three unnamed people charged with crimes relating to bankruptcy and misrepresentation of bank’s finances

German prosecutors have brought criminal charges against three people involved in running Greensill Bank for their role in the 2021 collapse of the lender.

The Bremen public prosecutor’s office said the unnamed people were charged with crimes related to the bankruptcy, as well as the misrepresentation of the German bank’s finances.

Corvex says Premier Inn owner should rethink strategy as company braces for business rate changes next year

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The owner of Premier Inn is facing calls from an American activist investor to rethink its business strategy, just weeks after the company warned the budget would cost it up to £50m next year.

Corvex, a New York-based hedge fund, told Whitbread it should begin a strategic review as it braces for big tax rises next year after changes announced by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.

O’Neill, who has led Woodside Energy since 2021, will be oil and gas company’s first female chief executive

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BP’s board has appointed its first female chief executive in a move to revive the oil company’s fortunes, after ousting Murray Auchincloss less than two years into his role.

In an unexpected leadership shake-up, Auchincloss will step down as chief executive with immediate effect, but remain in an advisory role until the end of next year.

US hedge fund Elliott thought to prefer IPO in London over New York, which could be welcome boost to UK stock market

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The owner of Waterstones and Barnes & Noble is reportedly preparing to list the booksellers on the stock market.

Elliott Investment Management, the hedge fund that owns the most popular bookstores in the US and the UK, has spoken to potential advisers about an initial public offering (IPO), the Financial Times reported.

The US-Ireland Alliance will give the actor the Oscar Wilde award at the event’s 20th anniversary in Los Angeles in March

After a varied career in which he has played a psychopath, a romcom heart-throb, an intergalactic warlord and a plucky newspaper editor among others, Domhnall Gleeson has won his first Hollywood award.

The US-Ireland Alliance announced that Gleeson will receive the Oscar Wilde award at the event’s 20th anniversary in Los Angeles in March in the run-up to the Oscars. It honours a body of work rather than a particular performance.

In just two years, Rae has gone from star TikTok dancer to being Grammy-nominated for best new artist. She reflects on her critically acclaimed debut and how she’s learning to reclaim and relinquish control

No one in pop has had a year like Addison Rae. She may not be the biggest star – that remains Taylor Swift – or even the most commercially successful breakout act. But the dreamy dance-pop haze of her debut album, Addison, made her into an artist’s artist, loved by the likes of Charli xcx and Lana Del Rey – the leftfield pop acts who paved the way for someone like her. Like a pre-Brat Charli, or perhaps Sky Ferreira, the 25-year-old is the pop connoisseur’s choice, justly earning comparisons to Del Rey, her fellow Louisiana girl Britney Spears and Ray of Light-era Madonna, while knowing her way around her R&B and Jersey club. She’s up for best new artist at next year’s Grammy awards – and with Addison and its knowingly anaesthetised single Headphones On placing in the Guardian’s top five albums and tracks of 2025 respectively, she’s our artist of the year.

So it’s crazy to flick back just two years to when Rae wasn’t just a flop, but a punchline. In 2023, she released her debut single Obsessed, a perfectly average Benny Blanco-produced single that attracted disproportionate hatred because Rae was then just a TikTok star whose breezy dance videos had made her the platform’s fifth most-followed figure. The song flopped. Five months later came the AR EP: featuring a Charli guest verse – she asked to feature on a leaked demo that she loved – it made Rae a cult favourite. Last summer, she returned the favour, guesting on a remix of Charli’s Von Dutch: “While you’re sitting in your dad’s basement … Got a lot to say about my debut!” Rae taunted.

Dispatches investigates this growing crimewave. Plus: it’s getting very hot in the kitchen for the MasterChef final. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
There are some real grinches out there: a parcel is stolen in Britain every seven seconds. Reporter Tir Dhondy is on a mission to get to the bottom of the crimewave by hiding tracking devices in parcels and following stolen ones to challenge who took them. He also learns how gangs target delivery vans as part of their business model and gets access to a major police operation. Hollie Richardson

The documentary-maker on new film 2000 Meters to Andriivka (the Guardian’s No 2 film of 2025), being on the Oscar circuit with 20 Days in Mariupol and filming on the frontline

Adrian Horton: I know you were showing your prior film, 20 Days in Mariupol, to western audiences when you began working on this film. What brought you back to the frontlines?
Mstyslav Chernov: What brought me back was not speaking to the audiences, even, but just coming out of Mariupol, we were so devastated and so scarred by what happened. And then we went off to Bucha, where we saw more war crimes. And then I went to Kharkiv, my home town, which was bombed every day, just as Mariupol was. So even when we were starting to edit 20 Days in Mariupol, I was already looking for a story that would be, in a way, a response to that feeling I had, of devastation and helplessness. I kept seeing Ukraine as a victim of this brutal invasion, and I wanted to tell another story which would have an opposite direction – to show some sort of agency, some sort of strength and response to that violence, when Ukrainians push back.

AH: And that was when Mariupol was already out? What was that dissonance like for you – being on the Oscar circuit, then filming on the frontlines?
MC: That was when the theatrical release started in July. It was the same time as Barbie and Oppenheimer, and it was the same time when we had dozens and dozens of Q&As for the wider public. It was when the first receptions and red carpets started. But of course, at the same time, the frontline was on fire. Ukraine was fighting this counteroffensive. And I would go from those places in the United States, in the UK, in Europe, these beautiful, peaceful cities, back to Ukraine – fly to the border, get a car, get a train, get another car, get in a trench. And in that trench, I would see a world that was so different. It would be like another planet, or 100 years backward in time. That collision of two worlds – I just tried to express it. I tried to comprehend it, how we live in a world where both war and peace and humanity and violence exist. And so 2000 Meters to Andriivka naturally became a film about distances, not just about the reality of war, not just about the humanity of people who are pinned down in those foxholes. But also about the distance between Europe and Ukraine, between Ukrainian society and people in the trenches. Hopefully that comes through.

Regulator received thousands of complaints over treatment of Shakira Khan by other female contestants on ITV series

ITV’s Love Island has proved a hit for the broadcaster, but the reality dating show has also dominated a more unwelcome chart – comprehensively winning the title of this year’s most complained about programme.

The treatment of Shakira Khan, a contestant many viewers believed had faced bullying, was the main issue ensuring the show took all three top spots in a list of TV output provoking the most protests to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator.

As his 1981 film is rereleased, the director talks about his Oscar-winning fable about an actor’s Faustian pact with the Nazi party – and its new relevance

At the 54th Academy Awards, in 1982, Chariots of Fire was imperial, and Katharine Hepburn broke records. Less remembered today is a darkly brilliant European film about a stage actor in Nazi Germany that went home from the ceremony with the best international feature prize. Mephisto, directed by István Szabó, was the first ever Hungarian film to do so.

“The moment took me by surprise,” remembers Szabó, 87, four decades later. “I didn’t expect it.” Visibly elated on the live broadcast as he took to the stage, Szabó today says that he “knew this award wasn’t just mine, but also Brandauer’s”, meaning the film’s electrifying lead actor, and the largely Hungarian crew “who contributed with their talent to the making of the film”.

Furiously angry and uproariously witty, the Irish singer’s third album was a high-water mark for pop, inspiring a TikTok dance craze and a triumphant set at Glastonbury

• The 50 best albums of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

The making of CMAT’s third album was a fraught business. Holed up in New York, writing and recording the follow-up to 2023’s Crazymad, for Me – which, despite critical acclaim and a Mercury nomination, was pronounced unsatisfactory by the singer herself – Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson suffered what sounds like a pretty terrifying breakdown. “I started actually hallucinating,” she said earlier this year. “I didn’t realise for the first two months that was what was happening, but I basically imagined the entire apartment I was staying in was crawling with insects … I went to the doctor and showed him my bites, and he said: ‘Those are stress hives; you’re mental.’”

One assumes that wasn’t exactly what he said, but you get the gist. And yet, despite its author comparing its recording to “a toxic relationship”, Euro-Country does not sound like it was challenging to make. On the contrary: it sounds like the supremely assured work of a songwriter whose powers have reached a new peak. It is, by turns, poignant, moving, furiously angry, uproariously funny and packed with incredible tunes. It strides confidently away from the country-infused style she minted on her 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, into territory that touches on jazz (Janis Joplining), raging alt-rock (The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station) and soul-kissed pop (Running/ Planning; Take a Sexy Picture of Me) without losing the essence of what made her successful in the first place.

Her post-punk trailblazers were a key influence on riot grrrl. Now, after decades working as a lawyer, she is taking the name – though, contentiously, not the rest of the band – back on the road. ‘I haven’t given the best of me yet’, she says

At the height of her music career in the early 1980s, Lesley Woods got accustomed to dealing with irate men. As the singer and guitarist of Au Pairs, the Birmingham post-punk four-piece, she recalls “guys being aggressive purely because you were a woman on stage”. At one show, the band were on the bill with UB40 and the Angelic Upstarts, only the latter didn’t turn up. “So the audience, who were 95% skinheads, were gobbing at us and throwing anything they could get their hands on – which included a bin.” Was she scared? “No, I was bolshie back then. I just went to the front of the stage and said: ‘You missed.’”

After the band split in 1983, Woods hoped her days of dealing with overt misogyny were behind her. But then she retrained and became a lawyer. “When I came to the bar [in the 1990s], women couldn’t even wear trousers. I used to get men saying: ‘What colour knickers are you wearing today, Lesley?’ It’s better now, but back then law was way worse than music in how it treated women.”

The Nazis adopted Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Happy Birthday hides a tale of corporate greed. And Putin uses Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony as a call to arms. That’s why I put them in my soundtrack to the complexities of human existence

The idea was always a ludicrous one: to reduce millennia of human musical history – not to mention billennia of the Earth’s sonic geology – into a book of 50 pieces of music. And yet that’s the challenge I decided to take on. The most pressing question was: why? To which my answer was: the inevitable failures and gaps of the project are precisely where its interest lies.

The next concern was how. Called A History of the World in 50 Pieces, the book is not a digested history of music, nor a list of my favourite songs, performances or recordings. Instead, it’s centred on the definition of a “piece of music”. This is a democratic principle – a belief that works don’t belong only to their creators but are shared and reinterpreted by generations of musicians at distances of time, geography and technology, in ways their original composers and performers could not imagine.

Cadogan Hall, London
The likes of Janine Jansen, Timothy Ridout and Kian Soltani were part of a starry lineup giving this London audience a taste of heaven on earth

This week’s Hodge Report has formally identified problems that have long been anecdotally evident. Arts in the UK are underfunded and overburdened with bureaucracy to gain what little money there is in a contracting industry. It’s heartening, then, to see a major new charity step into the breach.

Veteran London-based violin dealers J&A Beare have supported students and professional players with loan-instruments for nearly five decades. Now they up the ante with a new Cultural Trust, founded to supply masterclasses, scholarships and practical support for string players. A biennial mini festival, featuring Beare’s instruments and their international players, launched last night at a sold-out Cadogan Hall, with a second concert at the Wigmore Hall this evening.

Bob and Dick Sherman take centre stage in this well-researched account of how Walt Disney created a classic

Like many kids of the VHS generation, I must have watched my taped-off-the-telly copy of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) well over 100 times. I probably knew every frame as well as Walt Disney himself, who invested 20 years in bringing it to the screen.

The culmination of his live action achievements, Mary Poppins remained the project Walt was most proud of. A sophisticated, multi-Oscar-winning musical that proved the House of Mouse was about more than just cartoons, its box office success enabled him to expand his Florida ambitions for Disney World resort and shore up the company’s financial future.

The no-nonsense comic actor and author further cements her status as a national treasure with her trademark gobby one-liners

A lot of terrible things happen to Kathy Burke in her memoir, though you won’t find her mired in self-pity. Burke was a toddler when her mother died from stomach cancer, meaning she has no memory of her. In the Islington council flat where she grew up, she shared a bedroom with her alcoholic dad who would give up booze only to fall off the wagon and, at his worst, became violent. When a stranger on the estate called her ugly in front of her friends, she cannily deflected the insult with laughter. “I’m the best dancer at the ugly bug ball though,” she hooted, and did a little dance.

Burke would find her tribe on London’s punk scene and, in her teens, got the acting bug and a place at London’s Anna Scher Theatre school. This put her on the path to a brilliant and varied acting and writing career that saw her appearing in comedy sketches with Harry Enfield and French and Saunders, being called a genius by Peter Cook and taken by Luc Besson’s private jet to collect the prize for best actress at Cannes film festival for Gary Oldman’s 1997 film Nil By Mouth. There, much to her chagrin, she found herself “accepting a bellini cocktail from Harvey fuckface Weinstein”.

In the early 2020s, readers flocked to books to explain political turbulence. But is the world now too grim to read about – and are podcasters taking the place of authors?

In the decade leading up to the pandemic, nonfiction seemed unstoppable. Readers flocked to books that explained a world upended by Brexit, Trump, #MeToo and climate upheaval. Titles such as Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women, and Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility soared up the charts. It felt as though reading itself was part of the civic response, a way to understand what was happening, and perhaps influence what might happen next.

Fast forward to the present day, and the picture is starting to look different: a recent report from NielsenIQ found that trade nonfiction sales have slipped sharply. In volume terms, the category is down 8.4% between last summer and the same period this year – nearly double the decline in paperback fiction – and down 4.7% in value. Though there have been some exceptions, such Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare and Want by Gillian Anderson, 14 out of 18 nonfiction subcategories have contracted.

This resurrected Danish novel about a man who is ‘frozen down’, awaking in an Orwellian dystopia two decades later, is inventive, funny and all too timely

In the Danish author’s uncannily prescient novel, first published in 1969, the year is 1973 and Bruno works as a fiction editor for a popular weekly magazine; his talent for generating story ideas makes him indispensable to his authors. Invited for dinner at the home of one of them, Bruno finds himself seated next to a woman named Jenny, a struggling ballet dancer with a gloomy aspect and no sense of humour. Bruno is drawn to her nonetheless, and finds himself inventing stories about her. The following day, he is admitted to hospital to undergo tests: a small lump on the side of his neck has raised some concerns. Bruno cannot help feeling the two events are somehow connected.

It comes as little surprise to Bruno when he learns he has cancer. The doctor in charge of his case, Josef Ackerman, offers a choice: he can either undergo the gruelling and fallible radiotherapy currently prescribed for his disease, or he can become a pioneer in a new, radically experimental treatment programme in which patients are “frozen down”, remaining in a state of suspended animation until such time as medical science has advanced sufficiently to offer a cure.

Whether your household is in the mood for singing, driving, quizzing or shouting, here are our top choices for homely holiday fun

Multiplayer hand-to-hand combat games are ridiculously good fun and there are plenty to choose from, including the rather similar Gang Beasts and Party Animals. I’ve gone for this one, however, which lets everyone pick a cake to play as before competing in food fights and taking on mini-games such as roasting marshmallows and lobbing fruit into a pie. If you ever wished that the Great British Bake Off was ever-so-slightly more gladitorial, this is the game for you.

With ​a blend of retro-futurism, moral ambiguity and monster-filled wastelands, Fallout became an unlikely prestige television favourite. Now there is something a bigger, stranger and funnier journey ahead

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The Fallout TV series returns to Prime Video today, and it’s fair to say that everyone was pleasantly surprised by how good the first season was. By portraying Fallout’s retro-futuristic, post-apocalyptic US through three different characters, it managed to capture different aspects of the game player’s experience, too. There was vault-dweller Lucy, trying to do the right thing and finding that the wasteland made that very difficult; Max, the Brotherhood of Steel rookie, who starts to question his cult’s authority and causes a lot of havoc in robotic power armour; and the Ghoul, Walton Goggins’s breakout character, who has long since lost any sense of morality out in the irradiated wilderness.

The show’s first season ended with a revelation about who helped cause the nuclear war that trapped a group of people in underground vaults for a couple of centuries. It also left plenty of questions open for the second season – and, this time, expectations are higher. Even being “not terrible” was a win for a video game adaptation until quite recently. How are the Fallout TV show’s creators feeling now that the first season has been a success?

PC, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2; Simogo
A suite of iOS classics is lovingly preserved in this collection from the Swedish developer, early standard-setters of the meaningful smartphone game

Fifteen years ago in Malmö, Sweden, animator Simon Flesser and programmer Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck left their jobs at the now-defunct games studio Southend Interactive to strike out on their own. Tired of the fussy nature of console development, the pair would stake their claim on Apple’s App Store, which in 2010 was regarded as one of the most exciting frontiers in games. Mashing their names together to form a portmanteau, Flesser and Gardebäck became Simogo, and a consistently wonderful and forward-thinking games studios was born.

Simogo Legacy Collection represents the Swedish indie studio’s first seven games, released across its first five years. Originally released for iPhone and iPad from 2010 to 2015, Apple’s constantly changing standards meant that Simogo, like all iOS developers, had to either regularly update their games to comply with the latest specifications, or see their games rendered unplayable. The only solutions are either to perpetually issue updates, or find a way to bring the mobile game experience to other platforms.

He rewrote the rule book with Rockstar then left it all behind. Now Dan Houser is back with a storytelling-focused studio to take on AI-obsessed tech bros and Mexican beauty queens

There are only a handful of video game makers who have had as profound an effect on the industry as Dan Houser. The co-founder of Rockstar Games, and its lead writer, worked on all the GTA titles since the groundbreaking third instalment, as well as both Red Dead Redemption adventures. But then, in 2019, he took an extended break from the company which ended with his official departure. Now he’s back with a new studio and a range of projects, and 12 years after we last interviewed him, he’s ready to talk about what comes next.

“Finishing those big projects and thinking about doing another one is really intense,” he says about his decision to go. “I’d been in full production mode every single day from the very start of each project to the very end, for 20 years. I stayed so long because I loved the games. It was a real privilege to be there, but it was probably the right time to leave. I turned 45 just after Red Dead 2 came out. I thought, well, it’s probably a good time to try working on some other stuff.”

Almeida theatre, London
A north London Jewish family share a meal – and heated arguments – in this complex and courageous drama

Stella Adler, the renowned actor and teacher of Yiddish origin, believed theatre to be a “spiritual and social X-ray of its time”. That might be an ever more unattainable ideal in our time of Punch and Judy politics, culture wars and artistic self-censorship. This is one of the reasons why Sam Grabiner’s play about a north London Jewish family eating dinner on Christmas Day feels so singularly outspoken.

It begins lightly with humour (“You’re not Larry David, you’re from Hendon”), then builds to bickering and full-on fallouts, covering antisemitism, spirituality, belonging and how the Israel-Gaza war has shaped these Londoners’ sense of self. There is certainly no conflation of Israel and Jewishness but a deliberate foray into this highly charged and contested ground.

At Almeida theatre, London, until 8 January

Puccini’s opera returns to Covent Garden in a vivid staging that, although 40 years old, still feels fresh and fun. David Levene had exclusive access to rehearsals to witness the severed heads, the sumptuous costumes – and the executioner going green

Andrei Șerban’s staging, with dazzling designs by Sally Jacobs, made its debut in 1984 and is the Royal Opera’s longest-running production. This is its 19th revival: the performance on 18 December will be its 295th at Covent Garden. Turandot tackles grand emotions and even grander themes: love, fear, devotion, power, loyalty, life and death in a fantastical, fairytale version of imperial China. And, of course, there’s surely opera’s most famous moment, the showstopper aria Nessun Dorma.

“If the opera has depths, Șerban is content to ignore them, but for once it doesn’t seem to matter. The three-storey Chinese pagoda set, army of extras and troupe of masked dancers make his cartoon-coloured creation the nearest the company has to a West End spectacular,” wrote the Guardian’s Erica Jeal reviewing a 2005 revival.

Puccini’s libretto states that the emperor appears among “clouds of incense … among the clouds like a god”. In this production he does indeed appear as if from the heavens, his magnificent throne lowered slowly to the ground.

Soho theatre, London
Lauren Lyle and Alexander Arnold make a compelling pair in a surprising drama about a one night stand

It is set on a summer morning in Edinburgh during the festival but David Ireland’s two-hander, first staged as a reading at the fringe in 2012, has an odd sort of Christmas spirit heightened by the timing of its London premiere.

To explain requires some spoilers about its bizarre twists but the setting could not be more straightforward. In a Travelodge hotel room, a couple wake up after a one night stand. She’s in the shower; he’s devouring a bucket of KFC for breakfast. When she emerges, Glaswegian Mary (Karen Pirie star Lauren Lyle) licks her lips and takes pleasure from recounting their mind-blowing sex while Hoosier Mike (Skins’ Alexander Arnold) reserves his orgasmic delight for the drumsticks. Wasn’t last night amazing, she asks. “It was something else,” he replies – and half an hour later we find out what he means.

At Soho theatre, London, until 24 January

Soho theatre, London
The comedian’s compelling show explores gender politics in modern India, singledom and self-improvement

Modesty: “I don’t speak for all women …” Swagger: “… but I do speak for many.” Prashasti Singh’s Divine Feminine shuttles between these poles, now deprecating her own foibles as a thirtysomething unmarried woman in modern India, now running the rule over gender politics in the 21st century. A deft balance is struck, with enough self-mocking silliness to endear herself and keep us entertained, but some arresting thinking too about Singh’s home country and its progress towards female liberation.

That’s the subject under interrogation here, albeit refracted through the confusions and contradictions of a woman who grew up wishing to be a man. Few of the female role models on offer in India seemed terribly inspiring – and the one that did, a high-achieving distant relative, undercut her inspo standing with a very unsisterly warning against spinsterdom. No wonder our host swings wildly between pride in her independence well into middle age, anxiety that her descent into “crazy lady” status may soon be irreversible – and therapy sessions advising she reframe her sadness as a colourful personality trait.

Late-night hosts recapped Trump’s national address and further insights from chief of staff Susie Wiles’s interview

Late-night hosts discussed – or ignored – Donald Trump’s surprise primetime address and dug further into the explosive new interview the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

Panto season is upon us, and for the performers, anything could happen. Actors recall their most excruciating moments – from a panic attack while dressed as a cow, to dripping blood while in flight as Peter Pan

When panto goes wrong, the show must always go on. And there is a lot that could go wrong: malfunctioning pyrotechnics, panic attacks, chafing thighs, broken props, broken bones, bruised egos – and that’s before you get live animals involved. Missed cues and forgotten lines are small potatoes by comparison. So with panto season once again in full swing, we speak to seasoned professionals about the exhausting, error-laden, explosive truth behind the most “magical” season of the year.

Adam Buksh played The Genie in Aladdin at Howden Park Centre, Livingston, West Lothian, in 2013
It was halfway through the show when Aladdin got trapped in the cave. Our version was based on the original story, One Thousand and One Nights (not Disney’s), in which Aladdin possesses two magical entities: a powerful Genie of the Lamp (me) and Scheherazade, Genie of the Ring. I was on stage with Aladdin and Scheherazade, using my magic to smash the ring and break the evil sorcerer’s curse. For dramatic purposes, we used a handheld pyrotechnic which was similar to a little lighter with a wheel flint, but made of metal. I would use it to break the ring and free Aladdin from the cave.

Actor who starred opposite Adam Faith in the 70s TV series Budgie and played Ruth in Emmerdale Farm

The career of the actor Lynn Dalby, who has died from the lung condition COPD aged 78, embraced drama, sitcoms and soap, as well as the West End stage, but she will be best remembered as Adam Faith’s girlfriend in Budgie on television.

Over two series (1971-72), she played Hazel Fletcher, a jobbing actor in a relationship with Budgie, the petty criminal whose real name is Ronald Bird. With comic elements thrown in, he is usually out of his depth in money-making antics that backfire, often commissioned by Charlie Endell, an underworld villain and strip club owner (played by Iain Cuthbertson). The opening credits depicted him grabbing at banknotes blowing in the wind.

From aerial footage of an Indian pilgrimage to portraits of Romanians in bear costumes, this year’s awards featured stunning images from the streets of 23 countries

In need of a last-minute gift or a showstopping centrepiece? Our expert has tested and rated the most beautiful blooms, including sustainable and same-day delivery options, this Christmas

• The best letterbox gifts

I pride myself on being an excellent gift-giver. And I truly believe the uplifting feeling of finding flowers on the doorstep is hard to beat (unless they’re from an ex who “just wants to talk” – never be that guy).

Flowers are such an easy win for the gift-giver, too. There’s a plethora of online flower delivery services with a range of offerings. Some provide next-day delivery; some will deliver flowers monthly via subscription; some will even slip in a box of chocolates, a bottle of fizz or a candle in the delivery.

Best flower delivery overall:
Marks & Spencer

Best budget flower delivery:
Scilly Flowers

They claim to fix fine lines, blemishes and redness – but which stand up to scrutiny? We asked dermatologists and put them to the test to find out

• The best anti-ageing creams, serums and treatments

LED face masks are booming in popularity – despite being one of the most expensive at-home beauty products ever to hit the market. Many masks are available, each claiming to either reduce the appearance of fine lines, stop spots or calm redness. Some even combine different types of light to enhance the benefits.

But it’s wise to be sceptical about new treatments that are costly and non-invasive, and to do your research before you buy. With this in mind, I spoke with doctors and dermatologists to find out whether these light therapy devices actually work.

Best LED face mask overall:
CurrentBody Series 2

Best budget LED face mask:
Silk’n LED face mask 100

Unleash your inner mixologist this Christmas with these awesome agave spirits, from sustainable to smoky to margarita-ready

• ‘Dreamy in a dirty martini’: the best vodkas, tested

Across North America, Mexican spirits have always been big – tequila even overtook whiskey as the US’s second biggest spirit in 2023 – but it’s taken the UK a little longer to catch on.

Now, though, premium Mexican spirits are on the rise, and we are surely in our agave era. Celebs are bringing out agave-based drinks by the crate-load (shout out to Rita Ora, Kendall Jenner and Nick Jonas), spicy margs have their own merch, and even Waitrose reported an 86% increase in sales of tequila last year.

Your tips and tricks for cutting festive waste; how to host the perfect Christmas dinner; and the best pyjamas for cosy nights and lazy mornings

• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Not to sound too Scrooge-ish, but it can sometimes feel like Christmas is the season of overconsumption and overindulgence. Whether it’s wasted food, unwanted presents or single-use crackers, trees and wrapping paper – once we’ve finished decking the halls, a lot of it ends up decking landfill.

Our handy guide to cutting Christmas waste has lots of useful ideas, but we also asked you for your tips and tricks. From alternative trees to an ingenious way to use up leftovers, here are your top hacks for a more sustainable festive season.

Hosting Christmas? Don’t panic. Here’s our experts’ guide to a memorable meal, from thoughtful details to sustainable produce and tips on stress-free entertaining

• The best Christmas drinks

Canapes, crackers, Christmas playlists, flowing drinks, and a ripe brie cosying up to a firm gruyere on a cheeseboard surrounded by grapes and fresh figs: there is no better time of year to host guests, feast and be merry.

Even better, you can do almost everything in advance of the big day: decorate, prepare canapes, get your dinner oven-ready and even pre-batch your cocktails. We’ve spoken to chefs, wine experts and professional hosts – among others – to pull together a curated guide to every element of your Christmas dinner, from ethical turkey to table decorations that won’t spend the rest of the year at the back of a drawer.

You could try showing them the depths of what they don’t know, says advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Knowing what they’re missing could be a path to mutual respect

• Read more Leading questions

How do I talk to grown grandsons who have different political beliefs and dismiss mine as fuzzy thinking, since I am old?

They are conservative and believe they “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps”. They didn’t. They had parents and family and help with university. They are lovely men and kind to me, but I cannot converse with them on the issues of the day.

They have had setbacks, but nothing that makes them realise how very difficult life can be. I want to tell them that they cannot always control life, and also that I disagree with them. What can I say?

The reader’s letter has been edited for length

Some traditional treats may be off the menu, but there are plenty of alternatives for a festive feast

For a festival with childbirth at its religious heart, it is perverse how much of our traditional Christmas spread isn’t recommended for pregnant women. Pre-pregnancy, this was not something I’d clocked. I was the soft cheese supremo, canape queen – at my happiest with a smoked trout blini in one hand and a champagne flute in the other. Then one day in October, two blue lines appeared on a test result and everything started to change: my body, my future and most pressingly my Christmas.

Don’t get me wrong: no present under the tree can match the gift I’ve got in store. But as a food writer who loves this season, I can’t think of a worse time to be nauseated, exhausted and forbidden by the NHS to eat, drink or do my favourite things to eat, drink or do in winter. I have no alternatives for saunas, skiing and hot baths. I do, however, know enough chefs, bartenders, retailers and producers to create a Christmas feast that is full of wonder, joy and within the NHS guidelines.

Should your overworked festive palate ever tire of the tawny port, these suggestions might perk up your spirits come pudding time

It may well be that you already have a drink that you traditionally like to sip on after dinner (or lunch), and who am I to tell you that needs to change? Even so, I have a few ideas for drinks you might like to try instead.

Let’s start with the classics. There are many different sorts of port, including white and rosé, but you’re more likely to come across ruby and tawny ports at Christmas time. I like an LBV, a port that’s aged for up to six years in barrel, especially with cheese or anything chocolatey.

Marcona almonds from Spain, walnuts, dark chocolate, Agen prunes from France and a few decades of love go into this sumptuous, boozy frangipane tart

A recipe box was rifled through, but, alas, much like shopping for a present last minute, nothing leapt to the fore. Out of the corner of an eye I spied an old folder of pudding menus, all stained and tattered. A wonder at how this might have escaped notice was soon dispelled – unsurprising, really, given the usual state of my desk and shelves – and the page on which it fell open revealed the scribbles for a midwinter pudding menu. And, just like that, as if the scent rose from the page itself, came a memory of an almond, chocolate, walnut and prune tart being lifted from the oven, all mahogany hued and with a few bubbles bursting from the pieces of chocolate among the prunes peeking out.

My appetite for almond tart has never waned; be it in a restaurant kitchen or at home, an almond tart is nigh-on inevitable. When I was younger, almond tarts were often made with ready-ground almonds and usually invigorated by a drop or two of almond essence, because they were often shy of flavour. But then bags of whole marcona almonds from Spain began to arrive, and quickly usurped any notion of baking with any other almond. Shaped like teardrops and almost milky in colour, delicate, buttery and freshly ground, these almonds imbue a tart with a superb quality and flavour. The benefit of not having to blind bake a tart case balanced the need to bake the tart on a rack sat in a tray to catch any butter and almond oil-infused tears released while baking.

Jeremy Lee is chef/co-owner of Quo Vadis in London, and author of Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many, published by HarperCollins at £30. To order a copy, visit guardianbookshop.com.

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Welcome to the final Thursday news quiz of the year – a small festive tradition involving the news, a handful of jokes, and the knowledge that somewhere there are 1,057 pedants limbering up to find something to nitpick. And it is a bumper 20-question edition. Thank you for quizzing throughout the year, for your comments, corrections and good-natured quibbles, and most of all for the kind messages literally hundreds of you sent the quizmaster during the Great Thursday Quiz Hiatus of 2025™, when he was off sick. It really meant a lot. Allons-y!

The Thursday quiz will return in the new year and wishes you a Merry Christmas, a great festive holiday period and all the best for 2026. Sign up for First Edition to get a Thursday quiz-style quiz of the year in your inbox on Christmas Day.

Make ahead and impress your guests with crunchy-topped hazelnut creme brulees and a centrepiece chocolate fondant bundt cake

Even though our to-do lists are longer and our homes busier than ever, there’s something about Christmas that gives us the extra chutzpah to bake. And not just any baking, but baking for a crowd. So, with this in mind, here are two crowdpleasing recipes – a rich hazelnut “Nutcracker” creme brulee and a resplendent chocolate fondant bundt cake – with a few make-ahead and shortcut secrets to give you a head start.

Parveen doesn’t know if she’s getting a sponge cake or a burger bap, but Joe thinks she needs to embrace his northern-isms. You decide who is sweet and who is sour
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Joe says ‘buns’ covers all sweet things in the north, but I worry he’ll bring me home a burger bun

Regional differences in language are all part of the fun – plus, surely sugar is sugar?

David Gentleman’s brilliant career spans eight decades, from watercolour painting to tube station murals to drawing the Tottenham riots. Here his daughter, the Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman, dispenses his invaluable advice

When we were children, my father, the painter David Gentleman, never offered much advice to me or my siblings. If we wanted to draw, he would hand out pencils and let us get on with it. He was encouraging, but never gave us instructions. If we were enjoying ourselves, more paper was available; but if we wanted to go and do something else, that was fine too. The idea of teaching people how to do things still makes him uncomfortable, so his latest book, Lessons for Young Artists, has come as a surprise to us all. At 95, he has attempted to distil everything he has learned about working as a painter since the late 1940s into clear advice. These lessons are not aimed exclusively at art students, or even at older people who want to paint, but are for anyone wondering how to build a life and career as a creative person.

I haven’t inherited his artistic talents, but I have picked up other important things from growing up with someone who has managed to spend the past eight decades earning a living from what he enjoys doing most. Over the past two years, as he wrote this book, I’ve spent hours in his Camden studio, talking about painting and drawing and helping him search for pictures to illustrate his ideas. Here are 10 things I’ve learned from a lifetime watching him work.

In the UK, close to half of 25-year-olds now live with parents who, in many cases, would expect their nest to have long since emptied. How does this change families, for good and bad?

If life had worked out differently, Serena would by now be coming to terms with an empty nest. Having brought up seven children, she and her husband might even have been enjoying a little more money and time for themselves. But as it is, three of their adult children are now at home: the 23-year-old finishing his degree; the 28-year-old, a teacher, saving for a house deposit; and the 34-year-old, after a mental health crisis. At 63, Serena comes home from her job as a social worker to a mountain of laundry, and a spare downstairs room requisitioned as a bedroom.

Having a houseful is “really good fun”, she says, and makes life richer and more interesting. But it took a while to get used to partners staying over – “I’m not a prude, but you don’t necessarily want to be part of that life for your children, do you?” – and lately, she has felt the lack of an important rite of passage. “I’ve become old and I never really felt it, because I’ve been in that parent mode for such a long time,” she says. “It’s suddenly hit me that I didn’t have that transition that often happens, with kids who leave when you’re in your 40s and 50s – that just hasn’t happened. It’s odd.”

Parents and experts weigh in on how to navigate blended family dynamics over the festive season

The festive season can be a stressful time for anyone, especially so for those managing co-parenting and blended families.

Here, parents with lived experience; psychologist Dr Ahona Guha; and a spokesperson for the Council of Single Mothers and their Children (CSMC) offer their best tips for co-parenting at this time of year, from navigating tricky family dynamics to managing the season’s expectations and pace.

With a bit of planning, plenty of delegation and the right home comforts, you can reduce the Christmas cortisol

• How to host the perfect Christmas dinner

Whether you relish the role of host or it’s simply your turn, having a houseful of guests at Christmas can be hard work. Cramming everyone in, remembering everyone’s dietary requirements – and the fact that no matter how many glasses and mugs you think you own, it’s never enough.

Logistics aside, though, there’s something so magical about seeing your whole crew under your own roof. And from DIY troubleshooting to deliberately mismatched crockery, there’s plenty you can do to reduce the Christmas cortisol levels – and, yes, that includes delegation.

Celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver launch ‘Bang in Some Beans’ campaign to highlight cost savings and health advantages

• Magic beans: top chefs’ recipes for protein-rich superfood

Beans have it all, according to some of the best-known chefs in the country. They are sustainable, plentiful, nutritious and a fraction of the cost of meats such as steak and chicken.

Notifications of cancellations at Rebecca Adlington and Steve Parry’s swimming school don’t mention form-filling process to get money back

Swim!, the nationwide swimming school set up by the Olympians Rebecca Adlington and Steve Parry, has cancelled a number of my child’s lessons recently, but makes it unnecessarily hard to get refunds.

Parents, who pay by direct debit, must specifically request a refund by filling out a form within 30 days. None of the text or email notifications of cancellations mention this. Consequently, I have ended up inadvertently paying for five cancelled lessons.

The service was cut off and then there were threats of losing the number of 60 years

My 84-year-old parents, who have significant disabilities, had their TalkTalk landline cut off without notice in August.

We eventually had to sign a new contract to get the service restored and were assured that they would keep their phone number of 60 years.

The temptation is to sit at home and hibernate, but beating the winter blues can be done. Here’s how to embrace the coldest and arguably most beautiful season

Stephanie Fitzgerald, a chartered clinical psychologist, used to dread winter. Like many, she coped by keeping busy at work and hibernating at home, waiting for the cold, dark days to be over. But this approach wasn’t making her happy. So she sought out the science that would help her embrace the winter months, rather than try to escape them. In her resulting book, The Gifts of Winter, she writes: “I fell deeply in love with winter … It is a captivating and truly gorgeous season.”

How did she change her mindset – and can the 42% of us who say summer is our favourite season learn to love winter too?

A breast cancer diagnosis is hard enough – what happens when a mother and daughter go through it at the same time?

Genna Freed should have been in the mood to celebrate. On a cloudy November day in 2022, her mother, Julie Newman, was about to complete her final round of radiation, after being diagnosed with breast cancer in September. The whole family, a close-knit bunch, was gathering with balloons and signs.

But Freed, then a few weeks shy of her 31st birthday, was carrying a secret. Spurred by her mother’s diagnosis, she had her first mammogram a couple days earlier, and it had turned up a suspicious spot. Now she needed a second, diagnostic mammogram, and likely a biopsy. She found herself walking a surreal sort of tightrope, caught between relief that her mother’s treatment was over and fear that she might soon be starting her own.

Several kinds of bacteria can give you an upset stomach. Here is how to steer clear of the worst offenders, and what to do if they do make it through

Many people in the modern world, it’s probably fair to say, do not take food poisoning particularly seriously. Yes, most folks wash their hands after handling raw chicken and use different chopping boards for beef and green beans – but who among us can honestly say we’ve never used the same tongs for an entire barbecue or left a storage box of cooked rice on the sideboard for a couple of hours? Ignore that rhetorical question for a moment, though – before you comment that of course everyone should do all those things, let’s talk about what’s happening in your body when it all goes horribly wrong.

At the risk of stating the obvious, food poisoning occurs when you eat food contaminated with harmful bacteria, viruses or toxins – but that doesn’t mean it always works the same way. “Some bacteria, such as Bacillus cereus – sometimes found in reheated rice – produce toxins before the food is eaten, meaning they can cause symptoms such as sudden vomiting within hours,” says Dr Masarat Jilani, an NHS specialist who regularly manages children and adults with food poisoning. Bacillus cereus also produces another type of toxin in the small intestine, which can cause diarrhoea. “Others, such as Salmonella and E. coli, act after you’ve eaten and often cause longer-lasting symptoms through inflammation of the gut.”

I understand the temptation to run away – I have felt it too. Try to stay in the room, and in the moment. You’ll be glad you did

This is my last column for you. I am shocked and delighted that I’ve been allowed to carry on for almost two years, saying such controversial and true things as: the oedipal complex is real and all of us have one; psychodynamic psychotherapy is an effective and vital mental health treatment and we must fight for it in the NHS; and Midnight Run is the best film of all time. It has been a joy and an honour, and, now we are here, I’ve been thinking about the significance of endings.

Because they are significant. Sometimes, having no time left can make it possible to feel and say what was impossible before. They can invite an intimacy and truthfulness and grief that some find overwhelming. It’s not unusual for patients to talk of dropping out, or to skip the final session – to call it a waste of time, to want to leave the room before the end.

Set the seasonal mood with special pieces – from cosy knits to a touch of sparkle

Clothes can be tricky presents to pick, but follow my simple rules and you’ll have your shopping all wrapped up

Once upon a time, Christmas shopping meant grabbing the newest album release or an old-favourite DVD box set, wrapping it in glitter paper, depositing it under the tree and putting your feet up with a highlighter pen to annotate the Radio Times. Now that music and film lives in the cloud, we’ve turned to clothes as the new go-to gift. But choosing them for another person is a high-risk endeavour. How can we boost our chances of getting it right?

Because we do really, really want to get it right. Kids just want Santa to bring them the swag, but one of the things that happens when you become a grownup is that you care more about whether other people like the gifts you’ve given them than you do about what you receive. And fashion is more difficult to get right than many think. After all, if how to dress well was self-evident, then I wouldn’t have a job.

Clip-in fringes are easy to use and trying one first could save tears and regrets

That quote about the definition of insanity being the repetition of the same behaviours with the expectation of a different result is often wrongly attributed to Einstein. Whoever it really was, I’m certain it was someone who had decided to get another fringe – and I relate.

Despite occasionally catching sight of one of my several former fringes in a photo album and always thinking how bloody awful I look (only my husband disagrees), I am seemingly never far from a decision I’d definitely regret. As was proved when I saw a recent photograph of Demi Moore, all yard-long black hair and short, scruffy fringe that looked to be artfully cut with a pair of old nail scissors. She looked exquisite, obviously, in a way that my rational brain knows to be absolutely unattainable, but nonetheless I found myself sending hairdresser Hadley Yates a WhatsApp asking if he’d do the deed.

For years it’s been predicted that the market for male ‘support garments’ will take off … but it hasn’t quite happened. Now M&S is trying again

There is a moment – just seconds into getting dressed – when I think I might panic. The hem of my stretchy top has got rolled up round my ribs before my head has popped out of the neck hole, and with my hands still stuck in the sleeves, I cannot reach round to pull it down. I wriggle helplessly for a minute, but the situation doesn’t improve; the band of rolled-up fabric is taut across my chest, immovable. That’s when I feel the first tingle of rising alarm – so familiar from early childhood – that comes of being trapped in your clothes.

I am trying, for the first time, to put on an item of shapewear for men – an ordinary-looking, highly elasticated long-sleeved workout top that will, I hope, give me the instant slim profile of someone who goes to the gym regularly, instead of not since the pandemic started.

With ancient standing stones and modern midwinter festivals, the West Penwith peninsula is a land of magic and mystery

The light is fading fast as I stand inside Tregeseal stone circle near St Just. The granite stones of the circle are luminous in this sombre landscape, like pale, inquisitive ghosts gathered round to see what we’re up to. Above us, a sea of withered bracken and gorse rises to Carn Kenidjack, the sinister rock outcrop that dominates the naked skyline. At night, this moor is said to be frequented by pixies and demons, and sometimes the devil himself rides out in search of lost souls.

Unbothered by any supernatural threat, we are gazing seawards, towards the smudges on the horizon that are the distant Isles of Scilly. The clouds crack open and a flood of golden light falls over the islands. My companion, archaeoastronomer Carolyn Kennett, and I gasp. It is marvellous natural theatre which may have been enjoyed by the people who built this circle 4,000 years ago.

This tiny country is awash with atmospheric castles, many of which you can stay in, making for a magical wintry break. And it won’t cost you a cent to travel between them

The top of the tower had disappeared in the mist, but its bells rang clear and true, tolling beyond the abbey gates, over the slopes of frost-fringed trees, down to the town in the valley below. Final call for morning mass. I took a seat at the back of the modern church, built when the Abbey of Saint Maurice and Saint Maurus relocated to this hill in Clervaux, north Luxembourg, in 1910. Then the monks swept in – and swept away 1,000 years. Sung in Latin, their Gregorian chants filled the nave: simple, calming, timeless. I’m not religious and didn’t understand a word, but also, in a way, understood it completely.

Although mass is held here at 10am daily, year-round, the monks’ ethereal incantations seemed to perfectly suit the season. I left the church, picked up a waymarked hiking trail and walked deeper into the forest – and the mood remained. There was no one else around, no wind to dislodge the last, clinging beech leaves or sway the soaring spruce. A jay screeched, and plumes of hair ice feathered fallen logs. As in the church, all was stillness, a little magic.

Going away for the festive season has left me with unforgettable memories, from a boat trip with Bangladeshi fishermen to exploring Castro’s Cuban hideout

I have made a point of escaping Christmas for as long as I can remember. Not escaping for Christmas, but avoiding it altogether – the stressful buildup, consumer chaos, panic buying, the enforced jollity and parties. When the first festive gifts start appearing in the shops in September, it’s time to confirm my travel plans, ideally to include New Year’s Eve as well.

Sometimes I travel independently, but more often in a group, and while it’s not always possible to avoid the tinsel and baubles – even in non-Christian countries thousands of miles away – I just relish not being at home at this time of year.

From Essex to Istanbul, and from a soul music bar to a dramatic mountain pass, our tipsters share their personal travel highlights of the year

Moments after stepping off the bus, I wanted to text my friend: “What have I done to you, why did you tell me to come here?” As I weaved my way through coach-party day trippers, my initial suspicions dissipated. I came to swim, but Piran offered so much more. Venetian squares provided a delicately ornate backdrop, while cobbled passageways housed bustling seafood restaurants, serving the day’s catch. The majestic Adriatic was made manageable by concrete diving platforms, fit for all ages. Naša Pekarna stocked delightfully crisp and filling böreks, and the bar/cafe Pri Starcu – owned by Patrik Ipavec, a former Slovenia international footballer – married warm hospitality with ice-cold beer and delicious early evening refreshments.
Alex

What was the final resting place of the bronze age toxophilite? Which butterfly is named after the giant with 100 eyes? Who was shown carrying Bananaman’s 45th birthday cake? On your marks … set, go!

Editor’s note: the King William’s College quiz has appeared in the Guardian since 1951. The quiz is no longer sat formally; it is sent to the schoolchildren and their families to tackle over the Christmas holiday. So yes, you are allowed to Google – however, the questions are constructed to make that less than straightforward. Answers will appear on theguardian.com on 13 January 2025. Good luck!

General knowledge paper, 2025-2026, No 121, set for the pupils of King William’s College, Isle of Man

I had no idea what to do with the injured bird I named Belinda. But suddenly 3,000 Mancunians were happy to help, giving me a whole new appreciation of my home town

The plane pushed through wall after wall of sleet on its descent into Manchester. I’d had a sinking feeling during the flight that only deepened as I shuffled through the terminal. I resented having to be back in the city where I had grown up, after living on the other side of the world for what had felt like a lifetime.

After a few days, I headed out to get a haircut. My mind was miles away, back across an ocean, when I heard something hit the pavement. I looked down to see a pigeon on its back, spatchcocked, and twitching.

Just in time for Christmas, a little calf has arrived at a German zoo and gone viral. But is he cuter than Moo Deng?

Name: Panya the pygmy hippo.

Age: About three weeks.

It can work wonders on aphids but won’t conquer tough infestations such as mealybugs – and be careful not to scorch the leaves

The problem
Few things test a plant-lover’s patience like a pest infestation. The internet is full of DIY advice, and one of the most popular tips is to mix washing-up liquid with water and use it as a pest spray. It’s cheap, easy and always within reach. But it’s not without risk.

The hack
A diluted detergent solution is said to break down the waxy coating of soft-bodied pests, dehydrating them on contact. It can work wonders on aphids, spider mites and thrips, killing them quickly without the need for harsh chemicals. But household detergents weren’t made for plants. The wrong formula or a heavy hand can cause serious leaf burn, leaving behind residue that stresses your plant more than the pests did.

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

Full interview with Nickie Aven, available here

Across the world, incarcerated pregnant women are often held in deplorable conditions, leading some to miscarry or give birth alone inside a cell, say campaigners

• Read more in our Women in prison series

Dina Hernández was 35 weeks pregnant when she was arrested near her home in San Salvador in March 2024. The 28-year-old human rights activist, who was with her five-year-old son, was accused of “illicit association” with gang members and jailed without evidence.

Three weeks later, her family received a call from the prison authorities to collect the body of her newborn baby. The cause of death has not been investigated and the family has no idea what happened, or whether Hernández – who is believed to remain in prison – received any postnatal care.

The Guardian's Jonathan Liew visits the World Darts Championships at Alexandra Palace to explore how the game went from the working men's clubs to the world stage, what the next 10 years looks like, and how it continues to have a ever-developing cultural impact around the world

On a frontline where Russia has made the most gains in recent weeks, drone pilots wonder how long they can keep up the fight

In a warm bunker, lined with wooden logs, it is Dmytro’s job to monitor and help the drone crews on the frontline. Perhaps a dozen video feeds come through to his screen on an increasingly hot section of the front, running roughly from Pokrovske to Huliaipole, 50 miles east of Zaporizhzhia city.

Dmytro, 33, is with the 423rd drone battalion, a specialist unit only formed in 2024. He cycles through the feeds, on Ukraine’s battlefield Delta system, expanding each in turn. The grainy images come from one-way FPV (first person view) drones; clearer footage, with heights and speed, from commercially bought Mavic drones; at another point there is a bomber drone, available munitions marked in green.

We would like to hear about your television highlights of the year. Share your thoughts now

The Guardian’s culture writers are compiling their best TV shows of the year – and we’d like to hear about yours, too.

What was your top TV show of 2025, and why?

We want to hear about the best film you have seen this year. Share your favourite now

We would like to hear about your favourite films of 2025. Was it a tantalising thriller, a comedy that had you rolling in the aisles, or a horror that gave you goosebumps? Which film released in 2025 tops your list?

If you’re having trouble using the form click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here.

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.

We would like to hear from centenarians, their family and friends

The number of centenarians (aged 100 years and over) in the UK has doubled from 8,300 in 2004 to 16,600 in 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Between 2004 and 2024, the number of male centenarians has tripled from 910 to 3,100. During the same period, the number of female centenarians almost doubled from 7,400 to 13,600.

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