Black Friday isn’t all about pricey electronics. Here are all our favourite 2025 deals under £50

• How to shop smart this Black Friday
• The best Black Friday deals on the products we love

Garmin watches and iPhones whose prices fall from insanely unaffordable to merely very expensive may be the headline-grabbers of Black Friday, but they’re not exactly cheap. In a cost-of-living crisis, the true bargains of the sales season are those useful and joy-giving items discounted to genuinely affordable prices.

Here we’ve assembled the best sub-£50 bargains we’ve found so far, with prices falling even further as you scroll down the page. These deals span the Christmas gifting gamut from premium vodka to Sealskinz socks, plus the Filter’s top-rated household items and tech – all now for less than the price of a takeaway.

She’s the emerging star of this year’s dance show, wowing judges with her paso doble. The pundit and former footballer talks about gentleness, bullying, her love of the Lionesses and why she’s never been so happy

The qualities that made Karen Carney an unstoppable winger on the football pitch – her speed and attack, and the sheer relentlessness of both – are more of a hindrance in the ballroom, for some of the dances at least. As the emerging star of this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, she has had to learn to slow down, stand up straighter, to be softer, and it’s taken a lot of hard work. On week eight, she had just performed the American Smooth, and her pro partner Carlos Gu was tearfully describing Carney’s work ethic. Who could watch her trying to hold back her own tears, chewing on emotion like a particularly tough bit of gristle, and fail to see a woman who was giving it everything?

It was Carney’s dream to be on Strictly. The former England footballer, now TV pundit and podcaster, has just made it through week nine, performing an astonishing paso doble at the all-important Blackpool week, and something will have gone very wrong if she doesn’t reach the final. The show has been struggling this year – a man described as a Strictly “star” was reportedly arrested in October on suspicion of rape, and the announcement from its longtime hosts Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman that this will be their final series has been destabilising. But Carney says that for her, it has been an overwhelmingly positive time. “There’s a team spirit within the cast. Behind [the scenes], the team can’t do enough for you to have the best experience.”

From picking your guests (always add a random) and your outfit, to coping with drunks and nudity, this is what you need to know

When I was young, I thought the worst thing you could do, as a host, was to run out of booze. Then, when I was less young, I thought it was to not have enough food, and now I am perfectly wise, I know that those things don’t matter at all, because you can always go to the shop. The important thing is not to look harried, and to not look that way, you need to not be that way.

The TV equivalent of raiding a bare cupboard, the supposed extra hour here is cobbled together from previous DVD extras – but you can’t miss the tension between Harrison and McCartney

There’s no doubt that the arrival of The Beatles Anthology in 1995 was a big deal. The TV series was broadcast at prime time on both sides of the Atlantic, and ABC in the US even changed its name to ABeatlesC in its honour. The three accompanying albums (the first time the Beatles had allowed outtakes from their recording sessions to be officially released) sold in their millions. Its success helped kickstart the latterday Beatles industry, a steady stream of officially sanctioned documentaries, reissues, remixes, compilations and expanded editions, predicated on two ideas: that the Beatles’ archive contains fathomless bounty; and that the band’s story is so rich there’s no limit to the number of times it can fruitfully be retold in fresh light.

For a while, those ideas seemed to hold true, but recently, it’s been hard not to think the Beatles’ Apple Corps might be trying to feed an insatiable appetite for content from an increasingly bare cupboard. You can marvel at the highlights of Peter Jackson’s TV series Get Back and still wonder whether the director wasn’t stretching his material a little thin; whether nearly eight hours of it – plus a separate Imax film of the Beatles’ final live performance on the roof of Apple’s London HQ, and a reissue of the original 1970 Let It Be documentary – might have been rather too much of a good thing.

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

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

Wrong!

Bloomberg publishes extraordinary transcripts of secret discussions, but their provenance remains unclear

Bloomberg’s scoop showing how Trump aide Steve Witkoff coached the Kremlin on the best way to get into Trump’s good graces is extraordinary for what it tells us about Witkoff’s dubious loyalties and the Kremlin’s potential influence over US negotiation efforts. But equally interesting is the leaked material itself and where it may have come from.

The story covers two intercepted phone calls: one between Witkoff and top Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, and another between Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, who has been deeply involved in negotiations with the Trump White House.

Chancellor axes two-child benefit cap and cuts energy bills paid for by mansion tax and freezing tax thresholds

• Analysis: ‘Tax-raising budget crash-lands on struggling economy’

• Budget 2025: key points at a glance

• Budget 2025: what it means for you

Rachel Reeves targeted Britain’s wealthiest households with a £26bn tax-raising budget to fund scrapping the two-child benefit policy and cutting energy bills.

On a chaotic day that involved key details of her budget accidentally being released early by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the chancellor defended the measures, saying she was “asking everyone to make a contribution to repair the public finances”, but that she wanted the wealthiest to pay the most.

Rachel Reeves has announced her financial update – here are the main points, with political analysis

• How does freezing tax thresholds affect your tax bill?

• Budget calculator: find out if you are better or worse off

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

• How does freezing tax thresholds affect your tax bill?

• Budget 2025: key points at a glance

How Rachel Reeves’s measures on tax, NI and benefits affect single people, couples, families and those receiving pensions in England, Wales and Northern Ireland

Luke can’t get a graduate role and works 35 hours a week in a cafe. He is paid the national living wage (NLW) of £12.21 for workers aged 21 and over. He pays £1,930 in income tax and £772 in national insurance (NI) contributions. This results in a monthly take-home pay of £1,627 after tax, or £19,520 a year. On 1 April 2026 the NLW rate will increase 50p – 4.1% – to £12.71 an hour. His annual income tax bill will rise to £2,112 and NI to £845, leaving him with £1,681 a month, an increase of £54.

By the time the chancellor reached the dispatch box, the OBR had accidentally published its verdict in full online

• At a glance: the key points from the budget

Shortly before midday on Wednesday, a series of headlines about Rachel Reeves’s budget began appearing on the Reuters newswire, sending instant ripples though financial markets.

The details were jaw-dropping: they appeared to spell out the key policies of the chancellor’s budget more than 40 minutes before she was due to deliver them to a crowded Commons chamber.

Bond vigilantes may be reassured but the jury is out for households and businesses

• Rachel Reeves says budget will cut living costs after shock OBR leak

For a Labour voter who nodded off at the moment of the exit poll for last year’s general election, and woke up blinking in Wednesday’s wintry sunshine 16 months later, Rachel Reeves’s budget would have kindled a warm glow.

A mansion tax of sorts, the end of the two-child limit on benefits, more money for the NHS, and jam today for households via cheaper utility bills.

After initial chaos caused by OBR leak, London financial traders say markets do not appear to have been upset

• Budget 2025: key points at a glance

As financial traders milled around 26 floors up in a tower in the Canary Wharf district of London, there was little sign of nerves ahead of Rachel Reeves’s second budget – until the surprise accidental early release of the government’s official economic analysis started to move markets.

Headline numbers from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) flashed through on banks of computer screens, followed shortly by the detailed analysis itself.

Reeves told MPs she had stuck to her pledges. Responding, Kemi Badenoch said the opposite. Who is right?

• Budget 2025: key points at a glance

Rachel Reeves told MPs in the Commons on Wednesday: “I have cut the cost of living – with money off bills and prices frozen – all while keeping every single one of our manifesto commitments.”

The claim was a bold one, given that the chancellor had promised not to raise national insurance, VAT or income tax, and has arguably raised two of them.

Chancellor tried a different approach to this budget, revealing all her plans and causing chaos before she even delivered it

Just maybe Rachel Reeves had a cunning plan all along. Most budgets have a tendency to be moderately well received on the day, only to fall apart when the economist wonks have had a chance to go through the small print 24 hours later. Rachel has tried a rather different approach. The budget of dialectics. Her mission has been to get her budget to fall apart in the weeks and months before she delivered it. Own goal after own goal. It was a thing of Hegelian beauty. All in the hope that everything would be all right on the day and in the weeks after. She is keeping her fingers firmly crossed. Desperate measures for desperate times.

You certainly can’t fault Reeves for effort. A pre-budget shambles on this scale doesn’t happen of its own accord. It takes a lot of hard work to create this much chaos. Imagine going to the trouble of calling an early morning press conference to signal you were planning to increase income tax by 2p, only to decide against it the following week. You’ve shown you can’t be entirely trusted to keep your word while getting none of the fiscal benefits. A headless chicken is more sentient than that.

Three men arrested as 26 rescue teams on site at Wang Fuk Court residential apartment complex in Tai Po district. Follow the latest updates live

• Full report: Death toll in Hong Kong tower block fire rises to 36 with 279 reported missing

• What we know so far about the blaze

• Bamboo scaffolding may be to blame for spread of Hong Kong tower block fire

The death toll has risen again to 44, fire officials say.

Officials said they are still having difficulties proceeding into the upper floors in some of the buildings in the residential complex as the fire continues.

Suspect in custody after two West Virginia guard members shot in ‘targeted’ incident, Washington mayor says

• US politics live – latest updates

Two West Virginia national guardsmen shot near the White House remained in critical condition on Wednesday in an attack that rattled the country’s capital.

The incident comes amid a controversial deployment of troops to Washington DC ordered by the Trump administration. FBI director Kash Patel, Washington mayor Muriel Bowser and other officials confirmed in a press conference that both the guardsmen were in the hospital and described the shooting as “targeted”.

The British Future thinktank’s data predicts net migration to the UK will fall to about 300,000, less than a third of 2023’s figures

Net migration figures due on Thursday are predicted to drop to pre-Brexit levels of about 300,000, according to a thinktank.

British Future, which calculated the drop in overall migration, also found that most Britons remain unaware of the falling numbers, and expect the figures to rise or stay the same.

Tezepelumab treatment may mean asthmatics for whom inhalers are ineffective can reduce or stop taking steroids

A monthly injection could allow people with severe asthma to stop taking daily steroid tablets, a clinical trial has found.

More than 260 million people are thought to have asthma worldwide. While most can control their asthma with inhalers to treat immediate symptoms and preventive ones to reduce inflammation, those with the most severe asthma often take daily doses of oral corticosteroids as well.

Co-founder’s lawyer says group is part of an ‘honourable tradition’ of direct action and civil disobedience

The proscription of Palestine Action is a repugnant, unprecedented and disproportionate interference with the right to protest, the high court has heard.

On the first day of a legal challenge to the ban brought by co-founder Huda Ammori, her lawyer said the group had been engaged in an “honourable tradition” of direct action and civil disobedience prior to proscription.

Ellame Ford-Dunn, 16, who had mental health problems, absconded from a ward and killed herself shortly afterwards

A girl who killed herself when she absconded from 24-hour clinical supervision was failed by a system that was meant to protect her, her parents have said, after the NHS trust involved was fined over the avoidable death.

Ellame Ford-Dunn, 16, who suffered with severe mental health problems, died on 20 March 2022, minutes after leaving the Bluefin acute children’s ward in Worthing hospital, part of University hospitals Sussex NHS trust (UHSussex).

Hearings will be held in private to assess ‘whether government agencies took all practicable steps to protect the safety and welfare of the Phillips children’, says attorney general

A public inquiry will be held into the authorities’ handling of the disappearance of fugitive father Tom Phillips with his three children, who hid in New Zealand’s wilderness for nearly four years, the government has announced.

Phillips disappeared into the rugged North Island wilderness with his children just before Christmas in 2021, following a dispute with their mother. He did not have legal custody of his children.

In August, he was killed in an exchange of fire with police after reports of a burglary in the remote town of Piopio, in the central North Island. A police officer was shot and required surgery.

The rankings were changed after the UN used new criteria to give a more accurate picture of the rapid urbanisation driving the growth of megacities

Jakarta has overtaken Tokyo as the world’s most populous city, according to a UN study that uses new criteria to give a more accurate picture of the rapid urbanisation driving the growth of megacities.

The Indonesian capital is home to 42 million people, according to an estimate by the population division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs in its World Urbanisation Prospects 2025 report published this month.

The debut novel took the top prize while The Café at the Edge of the Woods by Mikey Please was named children’s book of the year

The Artist by Lucy Steeds has been named this year’s Waterstones book of the year.

The novel, which is set in 1920s Provence and blends mystery with a love story, also took home the Waterstones debut fiction prize earlier this year, and was longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction.

Fire in densely packed group of 31-storey tower blocks that is home to thousands quickly spread via bamboo scaffolding

Dozens of people have died in a huge fire that engulfed several residential tower blocks in Hong Kong, home to thousands of people, on Wednesday afternoon. Many more are in a critical condition and hundreds remain missing, with the fire continuing to burn into Thursday morning.

The fire was first reported at 2.52pm on Wednesday, at the Wang Fuk Court residential complex in Tai Po, in the northern New Territories. The exact cause of the fire remains unknown, but officials say it started on the external scaffolding of Wang Cheong House, before spreading to seven of the eight buildings in the densely packed complex.

Reform UK leader has again denied allegations about his behaviour as a schoolboy but what are the facts?

Nigel Farage has again denied allegations of racism as a schoolboy and repeated his claim that some had been concocted because people disliked his politics.

During a press conference, he snapped at one reporter who asked about the issue, saying: “I think we’ve gone quite a long way towards answering all this, don’t you?”

A new feature on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter allows users to see the location of other accounts. It has resulted in a firestorm of recriminations

When X rolled out a new feature revealing the locations of popular accounts, the company was acting to boost transparency and clamp down on disinformation. The result, however, has been a circular firing squad of recriminations, as users turn on each other enraged by the revelation that dozens of popular “America first” and pro-Trump accounts originated overseas.

The new feature was enabled over the weekend by X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, who called it the first step in “securing the integrity of the global town square.” Since then many high-engagement accounts that post incessantly about US politics have been “unmasked” by fellow users.

In a case echoing the Pelicot trial, dozens of women allege they were given hot drinks mixed with a diuretic to make them urinate. Three of them speak out here

When Sylvie Delezenne, a marketing expert from Lille, was job-hunting in 2015, she was delighted to be contacted on LinkedIn by a human resources manager at the French culture ministry, inviting her to Paris for an interview.

“It was my dream to work at the culture ministry,” she said.

The Footnote x Counterpoints prize is intended to uncover new literary voices whose work reflects the experiences of migration

Footnote Press and Counterpoints Arts have announced a new fiction award celebrating writers from refugee and migrant backgrounds, offering a £15,000 prize and a publishing deal for the winner.

The Footnote x Counterpoints prize for fiction, launching on Thursday, marks the second time the two organisations have collaborated on a prize. In 2023, writers were invited to submit narrative nonfiction, but now the prize will focus on fiction for the first time.

When north Cornwall residents’ water turned black and gelatinous in 1988, they were urged to mix it with orange squash when drinking. This powerful film lays out the effects of the toxic H2O – and their long struggle for justice

It is becoming a cliche to liken issues-based TV dramas and documentaries to Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Nevertheless, you get the sense that Poison Water is hoping to do for communities affected by the shocking inaction of the water industry what ITV’s hit did for the subpostmasters wrongly criminalised because of a software glitch. A damning one-off, it tells the story of Britain’s biggest mass poisoning and the apparent greed and incompetence that has meant it has loomed large in victims’ lives ever since. There are also parallels with the recent drama Toxic Town, and the continued fight for those affected by poisonous waste in Corby in Northamptonshire.

We open in the summer of 1988, when residents in several towns and villages in north Cornwall noticed something strange about the water coming out of their taps. It was blue in some cases, black in others, and could be gelatinous or sticky. It was also accompanied by a rapid outbreak of ill health, from vomiting and diarrhoea to rashes, blisters and severe headaches. For some, the effects were temporary, but many people went on to have long-term health problems, and there were even premature deaths that families are convinced were caused by the water they drank and bathed in that summer. Water that – because of an error at a treatment facility – had been laced with toxic amounts of aluminium sulphate. It would take more than two weeks for those in power to admit there was a problem. In the meantime, residents were told the water was perfectly safe, and to mix it with orange squash to improve the taste.

Carole Wyatt, a resident of the sleepy village of St Minver, says she didn’t want to speak about the poisoning again. Thank goodness she changed her mind, as she quickly becomes one of the programme’s most outspoken interviewees. There’s blooper-ish humour as Wyatt urges the programme-makers not to edit her down like they did on an episode of the BBC’s Horizon at the time, and to keep in the “good bits”. Things quickly become less droll, as she explains what she wants them to preserve. “Miscarriage of justice, I want that in … before I die I want this truth to come out.” As we learn, justice has indeed been scant – bar a government apology – with calls for a public inquiry unanswered in the intervening years.

Poison Water relies heavily on that Horizon episode and other archive material, and there is a risk that the final product could feel more like a repackaging than an original piece. Naturally, though, taking a four-decade step back from events casts them in a different light. And there are enough new interviews here – with residents, experts and politicians – to bring the whole thing startlingly, discomfitingly into the present. Among those interviewed is Michael Howard, then minister for water and planning under Margaret Thatcher. He is shown a letter obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, in which an employee of the water inspectorate had urged the government to go easy on the whole thing, lest prosecutions “render the whole of the water industry unattractive to the City” (this was at a time when the government was preparing for the privatisation of the water industry). Howard says he isn’t sure he ever saw the letter. “I hope you’ll emphasise that it was a long time ago and I can’t remember,” he adds. He strongly denies any suggestion of a cover-up or collusion, describing it as “a terrible mistake which should never have happened”.

Versatile actor, director and playwright who found television fame in the detective series Wycliffe

The actor Jack Shepherd, who has died aged 85, was, in his own quiet and modest way, a Renaissance man who not only acted beautifully on stage and screen for 60 years, but also wrote a dozen plays, directed at Shakespeare’s Globe, painted in oils, played jazz piano and saxophone, and loved singing.

His innumerable credits are testament to a pathological creative energy, and he was drawn most energetically of all to the contemporary writing of Trevor Griffiths and the National Theatre company of the director Bill Bryden in the Peter Hall era of the 1970s.

The leftist party exploded out of Spain’s anti-austerity protests in 2011 and upended Spain’s entrenched two-party system. I was instantly captivated – and for the next decade, I worked for the party. But I ended up quitting politics in disappointment. What happened?

• This article originally appeared in Equator, a new magazine of politics, culture and art

I never expected to retire in my 30s, but I suppose politics is the art of the impossible: what it promises, what it extracts. A decade at the heart of Spain’s boldest modern political experiment aged me in ways I’ve only just begun to fathom.

In May 2014, just four months after it was founded, the leftwing Spanish party Podemos (“We Can”) won five seats in the European parliament. As a recent university graduate who had been part of a local Podemos group (or círculo, as they were known) in Paris, I was hired to work for these MEPs. We arrived in Brussels as complete tyros and had to learn everything on the job. But we were motivated by the promise of doing what we used to call “real politics” – that is to say, not the internal power struggles and ideological weather patterns of the movement (which were always abundant), but the actual issues, such as gender discrimination and unemployment.

After a tumultuous run-up to a make-or-break moment for the government, has the chancellor struck the right balance?

Only 20% of tax rises will go towards making people better off. The vast majority will be spent meeting Labour’s fiscal rules and paying for U-turns

Imagine it: you are the chancellor of a government in mortal peril. Poll ratings are down the U-bend; backbenchers are mutinous and colleagues are circling around the prime minister, readying themselves to land the fatal blow. You have a budget, which may be your last chance to avert the inevitable. What do you do?

If you’re Rachel Reeves, you use it to buy time. Time for Keir Starmer and you to carry on in office for a while longer, so perhaps your luck will change. Extra time for this unfortunate, empty, placeholder of a PM costs more than olive oil, but the chancellor still splashed out. This afternoon, she delivered a budget that was a £26bn attempt to buy her government some time.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

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.

Maintaining existing drilling sites for longer is sensible but doesn’t square with plans to keep the energy profits levy

Labour’s manifesto commitment on North Sea oil and gas production was a fudge. On one hand, it said no new licences “to explore new fields” would be granted. On the other, it said existing fields would be managed “for the entirety of their lifespan” in a way “that does not jeopardise jobs”.

The formulation raised many questions. Where, exactly, would the line be drawn between a new field and an existing field? What would be the approach to protecting workers when, as now, North Sea jobs are estimated to be going at a rate of 1,000 a month according to analysis by Robert Gordon University?

It gets into its twentysomething characters’ heads in a way that’s fresh and real. You either get it, or you don’t

It’s been a while since a TV show came along that people leaned into losing their minds about, but finally, and after a year of otherwise mediocre programming, we have one. I Love LA, the HBO comedy set among wannabe gen Z influencers, is only halfway through its eight-episode run, but it is already comfortably the best show of the year. And more importantly, it has triggered all the signifiers of event TV: obsessive repeat viewings, line-by-line coverage, big platform profiles of its stars and weekly recaps on Vulture, New York magazine’s website. Within days of each episode airing, people have transcribed and uploaded the entire script, which – with the best will in the world – no one’s doing for Riot Women.

The surprising thing about this is not the fact that it’s the first show by Rachel Sennott, the show’s 30-year-old creator and star, or that the action takes place in a tiny world in east LA, but that content about influencers can be watchable at all. To date, millennial and older writers have tended to use social media as a lumbering plot device – oh my God, something’s gone “viral!” – or as a stand-in for the collapse of all known standards. You probably haven’t watched these because nobody did, but take your pick from: HBO’s one-season disaster The Girls on the Bus, in which an old-media reporter covers a US election race only to find that influencers – those pesky kids! – have stolen her patch. Or the equally horrific Netflix flop Girlboss, loosely based on the memoirs of Sophia Amoruso, the early influencer, and which not even a cameo by Cole Escola could save. Or Flack, the deathly Anna Paquin-fronted show about publicists trying to manage their clients’ social media, and an early red flag for which was the use of the word “maven” in the show’s publicity.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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It can feel wrong to encourage young people to shoot for the stars – yet if no one did, our world would be empty of the artists, actors, athletes and visionaries who give it so much pleasure and meaning

Who wants to crush a kid’s dreams? Not me. But what to say when asked by a teenager about a career in the media? With tens of thousands of media, journalism and other graduates crowding into the market every year, the chances of finding steady work, let alone stardom, are more remote than ever. There’s no advice I feel comfortable giving. Too often, I suck my teeth and tell them how hard it is, which surely invites them to wonder exactly how hard it can be if I’ve managed to pull it off. Fair point. But what’s the point encouraging them to chase something that probably isn’t there? Dispiriting.

Dispiriting too, when you encounter the opposite of a teenage dreamer: the teenage realist. A few years ago, I was being shown around a secondary school in the Black Country with various worthies. A venerable member of the Cadbury family was in our group. Tremendously tall, stooping to hear what was said, he was kind and attentive, but not of a breed recognisable to any of the kids around us. Undaunted, the head boy led our group with some aplomb. He was but 16 – the school didn’t have a sixth form. He talked to us about the school in a mature, intelligent manner, but without a trace of precocity. In his own quiet way, he was quite something. This young man will go far, I thought. With this in mind, I asked him what he wanted to go on to study. He said he was looking at doing drama at a local college.

She and her husband seem keen on their titles and accolades, and less enthusiastic about putting in the work that ordinarily goes with them

Meghan may be a resident of Montecito, California, but she is still the Duchess of Sussex, and she won’t let us commoners forget it. Despite their highly publicised separation from the royal family, Harry and Meghan remain extraordinarily loyal to their fancy titles. They have been asked before why they cling to their aristocratic honorifics and shrugged off the question. “What difference would that make?” Harry told Anderson Cooper in 2023, when asked why the couple didn’t renounce the titles.

The difference, Mr Duke, is that people might stop wondering why you and Megs are so keen on reminding everyone that you’re royals, while living in a country that famously has no monarchy. And this question isn’t going away. It keeps popping up and it’s back in the news now thanks to a Harper’s Bazaar cover story on Meghan.

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.

Millions of sexual violent survivors will not live a day longer with this torturous injustice

It began as I finished Nobody’s Girl, the torturous and devastating account of Virginia Giuffre’s life. It was what I can only describe as a kind of corporeal attack, an existential clutch followed by days of such powerful anxiety my body was taken in bouts of uncontrollable shaking. A sense of not mattering, a virulent dread and dissolving into an all-encompassing nothingness impossible to shake. How many times as a child, after being abused by my father, had I experienced this sense of erasure and disappearance?

Feeling that no matter what I did, what I accomplished, how hard I tried to lift my head above the parapet I would be cast out forever. This attack lasted days. Perhaps it was Virginia’s story, parts of which felt much like my own. Raped as a child by her father, then raped by her father’s good friend, then raped when she ran away, then the years of being raped by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, then being sexually trafficked to powerful and sadistic men to be raped again.

Three ICC judges have been put on a sanctions list with terrorists after approving an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister. This is the charade of the ‘rules-based order’

The fate of one French judge is a case study in the west’s long unravelling. Nicolas Guillou cannot shop online. When he used Expedia to book a hotel in his own country, the reservation was cancelled within hours. He is “blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system”, unable to use most bank cards.

Guillou, you see, has been sanctioned by the United States, putting him on a 15,000-strong list alongside al-Qaida terrorists, drug cartels and Vladimir Putin. Why? Because alongside two other judges of the international criminal court pre-trial chamber I, he approved arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and Mohammed Deif, the former commander of Hamas’s military wing. Guillou and his colleagues had “actively engaged in the ICC’s illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America or our close ally, Israel”, the US claimed when imposing the sanctions in June. All are now barred from entering the US – but that is the least of the consequences.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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Rachel Reeves’s interventions will ease the cost of living and suggest a desire to revive growth and protect public services

Rachel Reeves’s budget contains many measures to make any social democrat cheer. Scrapping the two‑child benefit cap, putting up gambling taxes, freezing rail fares and implementing a mansion tax are not just sensible moves – they are long overdue. As is a “managed transition” for the North Sea that supports workers while pivoting to clean energy, without abruptly ditching oil and gas. The country will be a better, fairer place for these measures. They should also assuage backbench anger over self-inflicted damage by the chancellor’s proposed welfare cuts and secure Ms Reeves’s position – for now.

The dilemma at the heart of Ms Reeves’s fiscal strategy is that while individual policies may be progressive, the economic framework they sit inside is not. This is exposed by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Behind the signature policies lies a deeply conservative macro strategy. The budget will see £26bn in tax rises borne heavily by workers, falling investment, stagnant growth, flat wages and a fiscal debt rule met on a coin toss. The OBR warns that under Ms Reeves’s spending plans, unprotected services – councils, courts and police – will face Osborne-style cuts of 3.3% a year from 2029 to 2031 unless the Treasury finds £21bn extra. Her fiscal rule makes those cuts inevitable.

Although some appointees make valuable contributions, the absurd archaism of the second chamber of parliament has to be addressed

Not much about the House of Lords is defensible on principles of democratic representation. One plausible merit of an appointed chamber is that specialists might be recruited to apply non-political expertise in legislative scrutiny. Appointees are certainly not supposed to use their privileged position to advance the interests of paying clients.

After a Guardian investigation, two peers were disciplined this week for breaking lobbying rules. Lord Dannatt, a former head of the British army who served as a crossbencher, and Lord Evans of Watford, a businessman and Labour peer, have been suspended for four and five months respectively. Both men were recorded by undercover Guardian reporters posing as property developers, discussing ways in which their Westminster contacts might be useful to advance potential clients’ access.

Dr Lucy Thomas and Penelope Jenkins support the House of Lords’ examination of the bill, but Margaret Pelling says they seem to be blocking the legislation, not scrutinising it

Simon Jenkins is right that the Lords should not kill legislation by procedural manoeuvre (Unelected Lords are blocking assisted dying: that’s a democratic outrage) . But peers are not playing games with the assisted dying bill; they are finally providing the independent scrutiny it has so far lacked. And the carefully crafted campaign slogans collapse under examination.

Rather than addressing suffering, the bill makes no mention of it – let alone requiring, as most assisted dying laws do, that a person be experiencing suffering that cannot otherwise be relieved. And, rather than respecting autonomy, as the Swiss do, under this bill the state – not the individual – decides the circumstances in which ending your life is acceptable, and makes doctors the agents of that judgment.

Readers describe the ubiquity of racist attitudes and behaviours at British public schools at the time the Reform UK leader attended Dulwich College

I was at a private boys’ school similar to Dulwich College, at the same time as Nigel Farage. I was also in the combined cadet force. The sorts of racist behaviour described in your article were normal (‘Deeply shocking’: Nigel Farage faces fresh claims of racism and antisemitism at school, 18 November).

As the child of a refugee from the Nazis, I chose not only to ignore but even to join in with some of the antisemitism, much to my shame these days. It is striking that, with the exception of Chloe Deakin, teachers at the time seem to have viewed Farage’s behaviour as more like “high spirits” or “naughtiness”. Striking, but unsurprising: the private schools which were built to train young Englishmen for empire-building were deeply racist even in the 1980s. Mine had a quota for the maximum number of Jewish pupils. My German teacher routinely, and publicly, humiliated the one Muslim boy in my class.

Jon Reeds of Smart Growth UK says the proposed development in Cambridgeshire’s countryside would see precious farmland destroyed

Protection of nature is a key component of sustainability, but all too often we forget its other essential elements (How ambitious ‘forest city’ plan for England could become a reality, 23 November).

Promoters of a so-called “forest city” in east Cambridgeshire’s countryside ignore the fact that building across 18,000 hectares (45,000 acres) – as well as setting aside 4,800 hectares (12,000 acres) for a new forest – would destroy some of England’s most productive and scarce grade 2 farmland.

Nicholas True responds to an article that reported that hereditary peers had voted against Labour’s employment bill

You claim that “out-of-touch” hereditary peers in the House of Lords are blocking Angela Rayner’s controversial employment bill, which is spreading fear and anxiety throughout British business and choking the job prospects of young people in particular (‘Out of touch’ hereditary peers criticised for voting against workers’ rights, 18 November).

Yet who really is out of touch with the realities of the job market? Cabinet members – none of whom has had a serious job in business? Or those you deride, many of whom have vast experience in setting up and running businesses, large and small. Unemployment has hit 5%, 1.7 million people are now on unemployment benefits, and the government’s own analysis has shown this bill will cost businesses £5,000m a year.

• Club on worst run since 1953-54 after 4-1 rout

• ‘I have got a lot of support from above’

Arne Slot said it was understandable that questions were being asked over his future as Liverpool head coach, but he insisted he retained the support of the club’s hierarchy following another heavy defeat, this time against PSV Eindhoven.

Liverpool fell to a ninth defeat in 12 games, the club’s worst run since being relegated in 1953-54, as they were picked apart by the Eredivisie champions on a punishing night at Anfield. Liverpool last lost three successive games by a three-goal margin or more in December 1953.

This was billed as a clash of two of the best teams in Europe and for most of a cold evening in north London it felt like it. An absorbing game that ebbed and flowed throughout had Bayern Munich’s rising teenager Lennart Karl cancel out Jurrien Timber’s opening goal from a corner before substitutes Noni Madueke and Gabriel Martinelli sealed a deserved win for the home side. It maintains their 100% record in the Champions League and sends them top of the table.

Harry Kane let it slip in the buildup that scoring against Arsenal gives him “a bit more joy” than any other club. But the England striker with 27 goals for his club to his name this season barely had a sniff as a Bayern Munich side that had also won their first four matches in the Champions League group stage and had been unbeaten in 21 previous games this season were taught a lesson. A place in the knockout stages now seems a mere formality.

There was no shame in this defeat for Tottenham, which represented progress after the north London derby disaster at Arsenal on Sunday. There were measures of encouragement for the crucial Premier League home game against Fulham on Saturday, most notably in the shape of Randal Kolo Muani, the striker who is on loan from Paris Saint-Germain.

Kolo Muani set up Richarlison for 1-0 and scored with a stinging volley for 2-1. There would be another for him before this wild Champions League tie was over. They were his first in Spurs colours, a reminder to his parent club about his quality. After his move to PSG from Eintracht Frankfurt in 2023 for an initial €75m, he endured a difficult 18 months.

• Optus Stadium pitch offered ‘fair balance between bat and ball’

• Cricket Australia says good bowling and ‘frenetic’ contest led to early result

England only have themselves to blame for their two-day capitulation in Perth, after the pitch for the first Ashes Test received the top rating possible by the International Cricket Council.

The “very good” assessment by the ICC match referee was made on a pitch with “good carry, limited seam movement, and consistent bounce early in the match, allowing for a balanced contest between batters and bowlers”.

• England player opts to prioritise engineering over sport

• John Mitchell salutes ‘best right winger in world rugby’

The Rugby World Cup winner Abby Dow has announced her shock retirement from professional rugby, with the Red Roses head coach, John Mitchell, bemoaning the fact that England have lost “the best right winger in world rugby at the peak of her powers”.

Dow has made the surprise move to focus on her engineering career. The England player’s last game came in the World Cup final in September when the Red Roses defeated Canada 33-13 in front of a world‑record crowd of 81,885 at Twickenham. Alongside the World Cup in her 59‑cap international career, the 28-year-old Dow won seven Six Nations titles and two WXV 1 trophies.

• Real Madrid edge home 4-3 in Greece

• Giménez heads home in injury time for Atlético

Kylian Mbappé scored the second-fastest hat-trick in the Champions League as he helped himself to all four goals in Real Madrid’s 4-3 win at Olympiacos.

The La Liga leaders were trailing to Chiquinho’s early strike at the Stadio Georgios Karaiskakis before Mbappé intervened with a seven-minute treble after 22, 24 and 29 minutes.

• Blades beat Portsmouth after owners’ merger statement

• Wednesday rock bottom following defeat at Millwall

Sheffield United lifted themselves out of the Championship’s relegation zone on the day their owners reiterated their desire to take the club to the Premier League with a 3-0 win against 10-man Portsmouth.

Patrick Bamford scored on his full United debut, turning home a scrappy rebound early in the second half for his first goal in 19 months, after Sydie Peck’s penalty had given the Blades a 1-0 interval lead. Peck converted his first senior goal for the club after the Pompey defender Terry Devlin had been shown a straight red card for handling on the goalline shortly before half-time.

• Player ingested a banned stimulant from rubber crumb

• She has been exonerated but talks of ‘terrible moment’

The Norwegian club Vålerenga have called for anti-doping regulations to be strengthened after an extraordinary case in which a player from their women’s team was found to have ingested a banned stimulant from rubber crumb in an artificial pitch.

A seven-month saga concluded on Wednesday when the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) chose not to appeal against the decision of Anti-Doping Norway (Adno) that the player was faultless. But the landmark case has highlighted the risks to footballers of environmental exposure to banned substances and opened up the possibility of further controversies emerging around the thousands of synthetic pitches across Europe.

• Duty for betting on horse racing unchanged at 15%

• ‘We want to maintain Britain’s place on world stage’

Charles Allen, the chair of the British Horseracing Authority, paid tribute on Wednesday to “everyone who has played their part across the sport” after the budget announcement by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, that the rate of duty for betting on horse racing will remain unchanged at 15%.

Confirmation that racing would be exempt from tax hikes on online casino gaming as well as betting on football and other sports follows a seven-month campaign under the slogan “Axe The Racing Tax”. It was initially launched in response to a Treasury proposal to “harmonise” the duty paid on betting and gaming at a single rate.

Vatican says ‘demanding’ six-day mission will be packed with meetings with political and religious leaders

Pope Leo will make his debut overseas trip as leader of the Catholic church on Thursday, travelling on a six-day mission of peace and unity to Turkey and Lebanon in what the Vatican said was expected to be a “demanding” schedule packed with meetings with political and religious leaders amid heightened Middle East tensions.

In Turkey, a country with a Muslim majority and home to an estimated 36,000 Catholics, the Chicago-born pontiff, who was elected in May, will first meet President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara.

Centre left can win broad support by addressing soaring house prices and rents, according to data analysis

Centre-left parties can build a broad new coalition of support if they tackle Europe’s deepening housing crisis, researchers have said. Conversely, ignoring it risks pushing increasingly fed-up voters into the arms of the far right.

Research by the Progressive Politics Research Network (PPRNet) suggests dramatic rises in the cost of housing over recent years have eroded support for centre-left parties – once the champions of affordable housing – and fuelled anti-establishment disaffection.

Paul Doyle, who drove into a crowd of celebrating football fans in May, changes plea unexpectedly

A former Royal Marine has pleaded guilty on the first day of his trial to ploughing his car into a crowd at a Liverpool FC victory parade, injuring 134 people including two babies.

Paul Doyle, 54, deliberately drove his Ford Galaxy at football fans after tailgating an ambulance down a packed road that was closed to non-emergency vehicles on 26 May.

Ralph Gonsalves campaigns on strong economy in bid to retain office he has held since 2001

Voters in St Vincent and the Grenadines will go to the polls on Thursday with Ralph Gonsalves seeking a record sixth consecutive term as prime minister.

The elections are expected to be a tight contest between the ruling Unity Labour party, which has been in power since 2001, and the opposition New Democratic party.In the last election, ULP won nine of 15 seats, but the NDP won the popular vote.

Swimmers aged in their 20s bitten by shark at Kylies beach in Crowdy Bay early on Thursday morning, with woman dying at the scene

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A woman has died after a “large bull shark” attacked her and a man on the New South Wales mid-north coast at Kylies beach.

The pair, both aged in their 20s, were swimming together at the beach at Crowdy Bay on Thursday morning when they were bitten, police said.

‘Tiebacks’ will permit small amount of new fossil fuel extraction, but campaigners want bolder strategy

The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has returned from the Cop30 climate conference in Brazil, where he championed the UK’s world-leading promise to ban all new oil and gas licences and backed the call for a blueprint to “transition away from fossil fuels”.

Back at home, the government says it is sticking to its manifesto pledge by becoming the first major economy to have a 1.5C- and climate science-aligned no new licences position, but it plans to allow some new drilling in oil and gas fields that have existing licenses.

The Mohana of Pakistan’s Sindh province once thrived on the lake but pollution and drought have caused the fragile ecosystem to collapse, along with their way of life

At the mouth of Lake Manchar, gentle lapping disturbs the silence. A small boat cuts through the water, propelled by a bamboo pole scraping the muddy bottom of the canal.

Bashir Ahmed manoeuvres his frail craft with agility. His slender boat is more than just a means of transport. It is the legacy of a people who live to the rhythm of water: the Mohana. They have lived for generations on the waters of Lake Manchar in Sindh province, a vast freshwater mirror covering nearly 250 sq km. The lake, once the largest in Pakistan, was long an oasis of life. Now, it is dying.

Bashir Ahmed in his boat on the lake, next to simple huts built on top of the right bank outfall drain

Emotions ran high at the UN climate summit in Brazil, which was hit by its first major protest in four years

It was a tense moment. A group of about 50 people from the Munduruku, an Indigenous people in the Amazon basin, had blocked the entrance to the Cop30 venue in protest, causing long lines of delegates to snake down access roads, simmering in the morning heat.

It took some oblique wording, but Saudi Arabia made a last-minute decision to sign deal that marks departure for Cop

Dawn was breaking over the Amazonian city of Belém on Saturday morning, but in the windowless conference room it could have been day or night. They had been stuck there for more than 12 hours, dozens of ministers representing 17 groups of countries, from the poorest on the planet to the richest, urged by the Brazilian hosts to accept a settlement cooked up the day before.

Tempers were short, the air thick as the sweaty and exhausted delegates faced up to reality: there would not be a deal here in Brazil. The 30th UN climate conference would end in abject failure.

Prime minister says Reform leader’s explanations about alleged comments are ‘unconvincing to say the least’

Keir Starmer has called on Nigel Farage to apologise to his school contemporaries who claim the Reform leader racially abused them while at Dulwich College.

The Guardian reported last week the testimony of Peter Ettedgui, who said a 13-year-old Farage “would sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘gas them’, sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers”.

Many of the 30 people taking part in the protest are scheduled to be forcibly returned to France on Thursday

Thirty asylum seekers in detention in the UK have gone on hunger strike in protest against their imminent removal to France under the Home Office’s controversial “one in, one out” scheme.

The Guardian understands the group began their hunger strike on Monday and many are due to be forcibly removed to France on Thursday.

Exclusive: data released in response to FoI request shows 108% rise in new claims against force in 2023-24

Race discrimination employment tribunal claims brought by Metropolitan police officers and staff more than doubled in the last financial year, the Guardian can reveal.

The figures show a 108% increase in racism-related claims compared with the previous year, reaching the highest level recorded across the past five years.

Mark Damazer says over-assertive board and executives feeling ‘embattled’ played into departures of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness

A “toxic mix” of over-assertive BBC board members and executives feeling under siege contributed to the resignations of its two most senior editorial leaders, an influential former BBC figure has warned.

A bitter row is still raging over the events that led up to the resignations of the director general, Tim Davie, and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News.

Commission president says undermining of sovereign European nation would ‘open the doors for more wars’

The European Commission president has warned against “the unilateral carving up of a sovereign European nation” as Europe scrambles to assert influence over the US’s attempt to end the war in Ukraine.

Speaking to European lawmakers in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen said Russia showed “no signs of true willingness to end the conflict” and continued to operate in a mindset unchanged since the days of Yalta – the much-criticised and misunderstood 1945 summit to settle the postwar order.

Officers say they are closing borders and suspending poll as president and main rival both claim victory

Soldiers in Guinea-Bissau have announced they are taking “total control” of the west African country, three days after elections that both the two main presidential contenders claim to have won.

Military officers said they were suspending Guinea-Bissau’s electoral process and closing its borders, in a statement read out at the army’s headquarters in the capital Bissau and broadcast on state TV. They said they had formed “the high military command for the restoration of order”, which would rule the country until further notice.

Israeli military and security service say ‘broad counter-terrorism operation’ in Tubas to continue for several days

Hundreds of Israeli soldiers supported by armoured vehicles have conducted raids in the Palestinian town of Tubas near Nablus in the biggest such military deployment by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank since the ceasefire came into effect in Gaza last month.

Palestinian media reported that a curfew was imposed on Tuesday night on Tubas and some neighbouring communities, roads were closed by earthen barriers and families forced from their homes to allow Israeli forces to use the buildings.

Verdict is fresh blow for former French president who was released from prison only this month in connection with separate conviction

The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been convicted of illegal campaign financing in his failed 2012 re-election bid, after the country’s highest court rejected his final appeal.

Sarkozy, who was the country’s rightwing president between 2007 and 2012, was convicted of hiding illegal overspending for his unsuccessful re-election campaign that was shaped by vast American-style rallies.

Rishi Sunak’s ‘temporary’ 5p-a-litre cut to be reversed in stages from next September in effort to keep EVs attractive

Fuel duty will be frozen again, but only for five months until September 2026, the chancellor has announced, as she confirmed a new 3p-a-mile charge for electric cars from 2028.

Rachel Reeves will freeze fuel duty in April at 52.95p a litre for petrol and diesel – a 16th successive year without a rise – but the so-called “temporary” 5p cut introduced by Rishi Sunak will be reversed in stages from September.

The chancellor almost doubled remote gaming duty in Wednesday’s budget, taking it to 40% from April next year

Online casinos and bookmakers will pay billions of pounds more in tax under a steep rise in duties levied on their takings from British gamblers.

In her second budget as chancellor, Rachel Reeves announced duty changes expected to raise an extra £1.1bn a year by 2029-30, raiding a fast-growing sector that made £12.6bn from punters last year.

Peter Ruis discusses the chain’s £800m reboot, bringing ‘radical relevance’ – and that dance-driven Christmas ad

You may think the department store has had its day. Debenhams and Beales have left the high street, House of Fraser has closed almost two-thirds of its stores and Fenwick exited its prime London site.

Peter Ruis, the managing director of John Lewis, has a different view. After closing 16 stores during the pandemic and shedding thousands of jobs as it fought for survival, he says expansion is now “definitely something we are looking at”. The 161-year-old retailer is spending £800m by 2029 on giving its 36 remaining outlets a reboot.

Music company representing Coldplay and Ed Sheeran had sued tech platform alleging mass copyright infringement

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Warner Music has signed a licensing deal with the artificial intelligence song generator Suno after settling a copyright infringement lawsuit it launched against the service a year ago

Warner, the world’s third-largest music company and home to acts including Coldplay, Charli XCX and Ed Sheeran, is the first of the major record labels to partner officially with the company.

The president’s bizarre insistence that the dead Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker series should return resulted in a shock announcement this week. Maybe there’s more to come …

So far, Donald Trump’s control of the media has involved a lot more stick than carrot. Thanks to a combination of outbursts and indiscriminate legal threats, the powerful figures at the centre of a rapidly consolidating industry find themselves with little option but to bend to the president’s every demand. Unfortunately, what he’s demanding is Rush Hour 4.

Just a few days ago, this seemed like a weird overreach, like when Trump used a keynote speech at a McDonald’s to demand more tartare sauce on Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. But in this case it really happened. Trump told majority Paramount Skydance shareholder Larry Ellison that he wished someone would make Rush Hour 4, and now Rush Hour 4 is being made.

‘She wasn’t very fond of Skipper, our jack russell, who loved the hose. But they were dancing together – two beings in the afternoon sunlight, having their own conversation’

I am an only child. My father was killed in a car accident when I was 14 and my mother was 47. We were really tightly bonded after that. She worked at a university and was an artist: she painted and carved birds. She was a wonderful person, who lit up a room and was someone everyone wanted to be around. She was very giving.

Later in life, she developed dementia. I left my teaching position to stay home and look after her. She was very active – she would go outside and rip up bulbs, put the horses in the wrong stalls. It was very stressful to come home – I would enter the driveway and think: “Oh my word!”

Oliver Laxe’s Cannes prize winner about a father’s search for his missing daughter starts impressively then descends into Pythonesque perdition

Oliver Laxe leads his audience into a wilderness of non-meaning in this strange and unrewardingly oppressive film that was the joint jury prize winner at Cannes this year and the recipient of all sorts of critical superlatives. For me, Sirāt is the most overpraised movie of the year – exasperating and bizarre in ways that become less and less interesting and more and more ridiculous as the film wears on.

There is a moment of tragic horror halfway through the action that is not absorbed or clarified and whose (presumed) emotional and spiritual consequences are not conveyed. It simply looks coercive and even slightly farcical. The later explosions in the desert are, frankly, Pythonesque. And yet, as with Laxe’s earlier film Mimosas there are some wonderful visual moments and stylish shots of the Moroccan desert landscape. Veteran Spanish actor Sergi López gives Sirāt some ballast.

Daniel Craig is joined by a sparkling array of talent including O’Connor, Glenn Close and Josh Brolin in this latest murder mystery with a religious undercurrent

Rian Johnson’s delectable new Knives Out film is a chocolate box: mouthwateringly delicious on the first layer and … well, perfectly tasty on the second. Daniel Craig returns as private detective Benoit Blanc, in a slightly more serious mode than before, with not as many droll suth’n phrases and quirky faux-naif mannerisms, but rocking a longer hairstyle and handsomely tailored three-piece suit.

Blanc arrives at a Catholic church in upstate New York to investigate the sensational murder of its presiding priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, a ferocious clerical alpha male played by Josh Brolin, thundering his reactionary views from the pulpit. (That “Monsignor” title can only be bestowed by the pope incidentally: presumably Benedict XVI or John Paul II, not milksop liberals like Francis or Leo XIV.) And prime suspect is the sweet-natured, thoughtful junior priest Father Jud Duplenticy, amusingly played by Josh O’Connor, who was upset by the Monsignor’s heartless attitudes and was caught on video threatening to cut him out of the church like a cancer. Atheist Blanc faces off with the young priest, a worldview culture-clash which leads to an extraordinary encounter with the Resurrection itself.

Underpowered David Michôd film fails to land the story of the groundbreaking 90s female boxing champion and the horrendous abuse she faced at home

An uninspired and undirected performance from Sydney Sweeney means there’s a fatal lack of force in this movie from director and co-writer David Michôd. It manages to be unsubtle without being powerful. His subject is Christy Salters Martin, who under the grinning tutelage of Don King became the world’s most successful female boxing champion in the 90s and 00s but faced a misogynist nightmare outside the ring.

The film fails to deliver the power of the traditional boxing movie, or the real importance of a story about domestic abuse and coercive control, or the sensory detail of true crime. It relies on the simple fact of a woman pioneeringly taking on what had once been solely a man’s sport and relapses into cliche. Christy, with her frizzy hair and brown contact lenses, doesn’t seem to plausibly develop as a character throughout the film, and it sometimes seems as if Michôd is slightly more engaged with her gargoyle of a husband-slash-manager Jim Martin, played by Ben Foster with a standard-issue combover and paunch.

Poison Water is a damning documentary that puts 1988 water contamination in Cornwall in the spotlight. Plus: Grand Designs: House of the Year – the shortlist. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
“Before I die, I want this truth to come out.” Carol Wyatt was a victim of what this damning film claims to be the biggest mass poisoning in British history – the 1988 water contamination in north Cornwall. She recalls her water being the colour of loo cleaner. Many complaints were made (“Our daughter’s hair has turned green and it’s sticking like glue,” says one phone recording) but the authorities – some speak here, including South West Water authority’s former head of operations – insisted the water was safe. Despite claims that the aluminium caused Alzheimer’s, there has not been a fully independent public inquiry. Perhaps this can change that. Hollie Richardson

One Mancunian bassist remembers another: Hook pays tribute to the ‘wonderful soul’ Gary Mounfield, the Stone Roses and Primal Scream musician who has died aged 63

I first met Mani when the Stone Roses’ manager asked me to produce them. We did Elephant Stone and they were lovely. Then as Manchester turned into Madchester I got to know them really well. I went to the great gig they did in Blackpool; I went to Spike Island. It was a fantastic time to be together and the Haçienda was the glue. There was no VIP area in the club, so punters would walk around and think: “There’s Mani!”

I had the Roses in my Suite 16 studio doing demos for what was going to be the second album, until they scrapped it. I got to know Mani and his wife, Imelda. We had a wild period. Then after our various bands stopped playing live we started Freebass, with three bass players: myself, Mani and Andy Rourke, who’d been in the Smiths. The band was ill-fated – too many chefs – and eventually we fell out badly after a row over a gig. Mani slagged me off but God bless him, the very next day he phoned me up and apologised. That was Mani. Once we were no longer working together, we became friends and after that every day spent with him was a total pleasure.

Fans and historians have spent 60 years debating what the band means – and which member is greatest. Will the returning Anthology project and Sam Mendes’s planned biopics create new arguments?

The early notion of the Beatles as “four lads that shook the world” has been subject to many shifts in emphasis over the decades. They have been valorised, vilified, mythologised, misunderstood and even ignored. The release this month of the new Beatles Anthology – an expansion of the original mid-1990s compilation with CD, vinyl reissues and the documentary series streaming on Disney+ – is testament not just to their enduring appeal but also to how the constant reframing of their story reveals as much about our changing tastes. The 2025 edition arrives as a full-scale revisitation of the original project, bringing with it a remastered, expanded documentary series and a substantial reissue campaign.

What is more likely to reshape the way we see the band, though, is the addition of a brand-new ninth episode to the original TV series, built from recently excavated footage of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr working together in 1994–95. Far more intimate and informal than the original broadcast, this material captures the three surviving Beatles rehearsing, reflecting and simply spending time as old friends rather than cultural monuments, albeit still with the “kid brother” tensions between Harrison and McCartney. They work on Free As a Bird and Now and Then, jokingly speculate on a stadium reunion tour and generally talk about their history, loss and their unfinished musical ideas. It’s a rare, humanising coda to the well-worn story. With new material like this, and with more than that axiomatic 50 years of distance since the Beatles dissolved in a blizzard of lawsuits and “funny paper”, are we finally approaching a unified theory of everything fab?

One of the greatest stars of Jamaican reggae known for his 1969 hit Many Rivers to Cross and the film The Harder They Come

The singer and songwriter Jimmy Cliff, who has died aged 81, was one of Jamaica’s most celebrated performers. An itinerant ambassador who introduced the music and culture of his island to audiences across the world at a time when reggae was largely unknown, he was a pioneer with a distinctive high tenor voice whose themes of civil and human rights resonated with many.

The stirring optimism of his orchestrated Wonderful World, Beautiful People spent 13 weeks in the British singles charts in 1969, peaking at No 6, and his caustic Vietnam, in the same year, was a favourite of Bob Dylan’s that inspired Paul Simon to later record Mother and Child Reunion in Jamaica with the same backing band, after Dylan made him aware of it.

Depot, Cardiff
Twenty-five years on from their first UK tour, the Swedish band are at their cartoonish, snarling best, eager to prove themselves rather than wallow in nostalgia

‘I’m powering clothes, that’s how electric I am,” Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist quips, the trim on his LED-encrusted suit glowing as he climbs into the crowd. It’s funny, but on this evidence, it’s not really a joke. As an exhilarating Tick Tick Boom crashes back into the room, it’s easy to believe that the Hives could prop up the National Grid.

Twenty-five years on from their first UK tour, the Swedish punk’n’rollers are full of piss and vinegar, reinvigorated after breaking a decade-plus recording hiatus with two well-received albums in three years, all while playing some of the biggest shows of their career, from stadium support slots with Arctic Monkeys to an upcoming night at London’s Alexandra Palace.

The anthropologist and father of New York’s mayor-elect offers a revisionist view of modern Ugandan history

Children of Ugandan Indians are having a bit of a moment. Electropop boasts Charlie XCX; statecraft, the Patels: Priti the shadow foreign secretary, Kash the FBI boss. And while the ones who go into politics have tended to be conservative, we now have a counterexample in Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who clinched the New York mayoralty at the beginning of this month.

The anomaly is best explained by the politics of his father, Mahmood Mamdani. The apple, it seems, did not roll especially far down the postcolonial hillside. Mahmood, professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University, has long styled himself as the left’s answer to VS Naipaul. Where the Nobel-winning curmudgeon surveyed postcolonial Africa with disdain, revelling in the wreckage of independence, Mamdani presents a more forgiving view: pathos instead of pity, paradox instead of despair. If independence didn’t live up to the promise, he argues, it was because the colonised had been dealt a losing hand.

Working in a bookshop while failing to write a novel, the narrator admits to being a ‘living cliche’ in this bitter black comedy

“I had become a living cliche: the cantankerous bookseller,” the narrator declares a third of the way through John Tottenham’s debut novel. “No book or movie that included a scene set in a bookstore was complete without such a stock ‘character’.” That’s one way to pre-empt criticism, and Sean Hangland is just such a stock figure. Embittered, rude, apathetic, resentful of the success and happiness of others and intellectually snobbish, he’s a 48-year-old aspiring writer who makes ends meet, just about, working in an independent bookshop in a gentrifying part of LA.

He worries about turning 50 having made nothing of his life. He notes, lugubriously, that he barely seems to get any writing done and that – having no gift for plot, characterisation or prose – the novel he claims to be trying to produce will be lousy anyway. He keeps bumping into old friends whose books are being published by hip independent presses or who have acquired nice girlfriends, or both. His teeth are in bad shape.

In the fourth volume of the occult Morning Star cycle, a Faustian pact haunts a misanthropic artist who finds miraculous success

Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be even larger in scope than his six-volume autofictional bestseller, My Struggle. Four books deep, this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism is an unsettling account of the occult phenomena that attend the appearance in the sky of a bright new star. Mysteries from the first three volumes include: who killed the musicians in the forest? What’s going on with the local wildlife? Why does no one seem to be dying any more? By the end of The School of Night, the most burning question may sound comparatively mundane: who is Kristian Hadeland?

Scattered references appeared in the saga’s first 2,000 pages. Kristian Hadeland was the 67-year-old man buried without mourners by doubting priest Kathrine Reinhardsen in The Morning Star (2021). In The Third Realm (2024), he was the sinister chap hitching a lift with Kathrine’s husband after the unloved man she buried is supposed to have died.

Genius and arrogance play leading roles in a new biography of the man who helped uncover the structure of DNA

Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness.

Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain”, questions that were usually discussed in religious or mystical terms but that he believed could be answered by science. In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress in achieving them, radically remaking two scientific disciplines in the process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The use of AI in the surprise game-of-the-year contender has sparked a heated cultural and ethical debate, and raised existential questions for artists, writers and voice actors

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Arc Raiders is, by all accounts, a late game-of-the-year contender. Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines – and each other. Can you trust the other raider you’ve spotted on your way back to humanity’s safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you’ve just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I’ve talked to about this game.

In a review for Gamespot, Mark Delaney paints a beguiling picture of Arc Raiders’s potential for generating war stories, and highlights its surprisingly hopeful tone as the thing that elevates it above similar multiplayer extraction shooters: “We can all kill each other in Arc Raiders. The fact that most of us are choosing instead to lend a helping hand, if not a sign that humanity will be all right in the real world, at the very least makes for one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played.”

Onyeka Igwe and Morgan Quaintance have jointly scooped the £10,000 prize for artists working with moving images. They talk about manipulating their audience – and correcting history

Somerset House in London used to be known as the “national beehive”, says artist and film-maker Onyeka Igwe, as she leads the way through corridors and down stone steps to her studio in the building’s inner reaches. As the former home of the Inland Revenue, and the General Register Office responsible for recording births, deaths and marriages, Somerset House once held all the information necessary to tax and manage the population. “There were so many workers here,” Igwe says.

Archives are the prosaic raw materials of her films – stories of resistance, dispossession and the power of communal activism for which she and fellow London-born and -based artist, writer and musician Morgan Quaintance have been made joint recipients of the 2025 Film London Jarman award.

Arcola theatre, London
Hanging around backstage while their chances to play Brutus and Cassius fade, two unnamed actors start to act out their own drama

This is no glamorous dressing room: no telegrams, fizz or floral tributes. Instead, there’s an ailing pot plant and a bucket to catch the drips. It’s the understudies’ lair in a West End production of Julius Caesar. Some big name plays Caesar (consensus is he’s a bit of a dick), while our guys cover the chief assassins. They don’t even get their own names here – just Understudy Brutus and Understudy Cassius.

Night after night they skulk, waiting for the call that never comes, the show Tannoy an implacable reminder of the parade passing them by. For the show’s 100th performance, they celebrate with party hats, microwave popcorn and a run-through of the play they may never deliver for real.

At Arcola theatre, London, until 20 December

Jermyn Street theatre, London
Abigail Pickard Price’s stripped-back staging conjures ghost stories, seaside dreams and Dickensian tragedy through three performers’ dazzling transformations

The first approach of the festive season can always be marked, in theatreland, by the rearing Christmas spectre of Charles Dickens. Here is something different from Scrooge and his ghosts, though just as bracing a warm-up to the season of goodwill. Three actors perform this zesty bildungsroman about a Victorian boy’s travails through misfortune, adventure – and a formative trip to Yarmouth.

Adapted and directed by Abigail Pickard Price, who was behind last year’sthree-person Pride and Prejudice, this is so much more than a parlour game. Produced by the Guildford Shakespeare Company, it is performed by Luke Barton (from Pride and Prejudice), Louise Beresford and Eddy Payne, and bears the quick-witted theatricality of the old Reduced Shakespeare Company. Like them, it retains the essence of the original, whittled down, with delightful dollops of mischief and invention.

Barbican Hall, London
From ghost-story minimalism to wartime memory, Rani’s two new works, premiered here, shimmer with imagination, although issues of balance diminished the piano concerto

In a crowded post-minimalist world, Hania Rani has carved herself out a respectable niche. The Polish pianist and composer’s erudite yet accessible work often defies genres, appealing to classical, jazz and electronic aficionados alike. This concert comprised two 40-minute premieres and fell pretty firmly into the classical category, yet the lively audience skewed significantly younger than the Brahms and Beethoven crowd. Stylishly performed by the envelope-pushing Manchester Collective, it felt like quite the happening.

Shining occupied the first half, a piece devised for the kind of 12-piece band favoured by Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It’s based on a short story by Jon Fosse; a stream of consciousness tale of a man lost in the woods at night. Opening with sinister discords on bass clarinet, bassoon and horn, its motifs shifted and spun. A pall of smoke and half-lit players conjured images of a ghost story told around a campfire at midnight.

When the great artist saw a shocking play by Martin McDonagh about the torture of children, she asked him for more dark stories. As the vivid, extraordinary works they triggered go on show, the playwright looks back

In the summer of 2004, Paula Rego wrote to Martin McDonagh asking for permission to name some pictures after his play The Pillowman. His shocking investigation into the relationship between art and life featured two brothers under interrogation for the torture and murder of children. One is a writer whose stories are summarised by an investigator as: “A hundred and one ways to skewer a fucking five-year-old.”

Rego, then a 69-year-old grandmother as well as a world famous artist, had been taken to see the play at the National Theatre in London by one of her daughters, who knew it would resonate with her. “The brutality and beauty and humour rang very true and like something I had known all my life,” she wrote to McDonagh. “I am actually Portuguese, although I have lived in London for 50 years, and our stories are brusque and cruel like yours.”

The artist and his wife, novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave, lost seven pregnancies before their daughter was born. They explain how his nude paintings of her helped them process their grief – and eventual joy

‘The subject comes with huge baggage and I like that,” says Tom de Freston. The painter and I are in his studio in a village outside Oxford, surrounded by nude portraits of his wife, the novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave. “I wanted to ask, ‘What does it mean as a male artist to be looking at the female figure? And where does the agency sit?’”

We have been talking about Titian’s Poesie series, how those paintings – commissioned by the most powerful man in the world at the time, King Philip II of Spain – fetishise the naked female body. “Obviously there’s other things going on in them … I think Titian’s often prodding at morality and power,” De Freston says.

The final season of the epic Netflix 80s show is about to air. But how much can you remember about the world of the Upside Down? Test your knowledge with our fiendish quiz

French thriller starring Benoît Magimel has been accused of stealing its story from a 1976 action film

A new Apple TV thriller has been pulled from the schedules because of accusations of plagiarism. French drama The Hunt was due to be released on 3 December, but it has been hit by allegations of similarity to a 1976 film adaptation of a novel, Shoot.

The Hunt stars Cannes and three-time César award winner Benoît Magimel and two-time César winner Mélanie Laurent, who has featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. But press releases about The Hunt, as well as its official trailers, have now been removed from Apple’s site.

Rex is an uber-macho hunter who, together with four equally testosterone-addled buddies, embarks on a hunting trip in the Canadian wilderness. But their weekend is cut short by a rival band of hunters they encounter in the forest, one of whom inexplicably takes a potshot at Rex’s party and grazes the head of one of his buddies. Another of Rex’s friends returns fire, killing the shooter. From there Rex and company scurry off and head back to civilisation. Rex, however, becomes convinced that the dead man’s companions are going to come after him and his friends.

From budget-friendly and refillable options to cult favourites, these are the beauty advent calendars worth buying

• The best (and worst) chocolate Advent calendars, tasted and rated

With colder weather upon us and Christmas music already bleeding into everyday life, there’s less than a week left to invest in a beauty Advent calendar before December starts.

Our favourite brands and retailers have been selling their 2025 calendars since the late summer. That might seem early, but many sold out long before the festive season started. In fact, the Space NK beauty Advent calendar, which was my top recommendation, sold out at the end of September. Since then, my second-place pick from Cult Beauty has also sold out. But don’t worry, there are still plenty of options to choose from below.

Our writer trialled the most powerful robot vacuums – some of which even mop your floors – and these are the ones he rates

• The best window vacs for clearing condensation: seven expert picks for streak-free shine

Robot vacuum cleaners take the drudge work out of cleaning your floors and carpets. No more tiresome weekly stints of vacuuming, and no more last-minute panic sessions when you have visitors on the way. Instead, your compact robot chum regularly trundles out from its dock, sucking up dust, hair and debris to leave your floors looking spick and span.

Over the past few years, robot vacuums have become much more affordable, with basic units starting at about £150. They’re also doing more than they used to, mopping areas of hard flooring and charging in sophisticated cleaning stations that empty their dust collectors and clean their mop pads for you.

Best robot vacuum cleaner overall:
Eufy X10 Pro Omni

Whether you want to bolster your home’s security or simply make sure you know who’s at the door, the latest generation of smart doorbells will help put your mind at ease

• The best robot vacuums to keep your home clean and dust free

Doorbells have evolved. Today, they watch us as we approach, let the people inside the home know we’re coming sooner than our finger can hit the button, and give them a good look at our faces before they open the door. They’re essentially security cameras with a chime function.

If you haven’t already installed one of these handy tools, there’s a huge array available. Choosing the best video doorbell can be a bewildering task, with various factors to consider, including how much of your doorstep you want to see or whether you’re prepared to pay for a subscription. To help make the decision a little bit easier, I tested eight popular video doorbells to find the best.

Best video doorbell overall:
Google Nest Doorbell (battery)

Best budget video doorbell:
Blink smart video doorbell with Sync Module 2

Here’s how to spot a genuinely good laptop deal, plus the best discounts we’ve seen so far on everything from MacBooks to gaming laptops

• Do you really need to buy a new laptop?
• How to shop smart this Black Friday

Black Friday deals have started, and if you’ve been on the lookout for a good price on a new laptop, then this could be your lucky day. But with so many websites being shouty about their Black Friday offers, the best buys aren’t always easy to spot. So before you splash the cash, it might pay to do some research – and look closely at the specification.

I know this may not be welcome advice. After all, the thought of drawing up a spreadsheet of memory configurations and pricing history might put a slight dampener on the excitement that builds as Black Friday approaches. But buy the right laptop today and you can look forward to many years of joyful productivity. Pick a duff one, and every time you open the lid you’ll be cursing your past self’s impulsive nature. So don’t get caught out; be prepared with our useful tips – and a roundup of the Filter’s favourite laptop deals.

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

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

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

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

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

As I watched the news about Australia’s devastating bushfires in 2020 I felt compelled to help. It was the start of a new relationship with nature, and a reminder of my childhood joie de vivre

As hookup sites go, it was in another league. I was looking for a different kind of soulmate and I was spoilt for choice. Would it be Floyd, “a stylish poser and a winner of hearts”? Or Bobby, “who loves cuddling and is a bit of a showoff”? Or could it be the “beautiful and incredibly sweet Morris with a gentle nature”? One stood out. Not only was he “very affectionate” but he was also “a bit of a troublemaker – always exploring and often found sitting on the rocks”. Just what I was looking for; I swiped right. That’s how I met Jarrah. My koala.

A month before, in 2020, I’d seen a newsflash about the bushfires in Australia. The effect on the continent’s wildlife was devastating. An estimated 61,000 koalas had been killed or injured among 143 million other native mammals. There were two things I felt I could do from the UK: one was to make koala mittens to protect their burnt paws (following a pattern I found online); and two, I could adopt a koala and send monthly donations to protect them in the wild. So I joined the Australian Koala Foundation, which is dedicated to the marsupials’ survival.

These iced Danish pastries stuffed with nuts and jam are a speciality of Tim’s hometown of Racine, Wisconsin

Kringles are a kind of pastry that’s synonymous with my home town of Racine, Wisconsin. Originally introduced by Danish immigrants in the late 19th century, they’re essentially a big ring of flaky Viennese pastry filled with fruit or nuts, then iced and served in little slices. Even bad kringles are pretty delicious, and when out-of-towners try them for the first time, their reaction is usually: ”Where has this been all my life?”

We eat kringles year-round, but I mainly associate them with fall, perhaps because of their common autumnal fillings such as apple or cranberry, or perhaps because of the sense of hygge they provide. I also associate kringles with Thanksgiving – and with uncles. And I don’t think it’s just me; Racine’s biggest kringle baker, O&H Danish Bakery, operates a cafe/shop called “Danish Uncle”. But I also think of Thanksgiving as the most uncle-y American holiday, geared towards watching football and snoozing on the couch.

Tim Anderson is the author of the 24 Hour Pancake People newsletter and Hokkaido: Recipes from the Seas, Fields and Farmlands of Northern Japan, published by Hardie Grant at £28. To order a copy for £25.20, go to guardianbookshop.com. Rachel Roddy is away.

Eke out that last stubborn scrape of Marmite and turn it into a dream glaze for crisp roast potatoes

I never peel a roastie, because boiling potatoes with their skins on, then cracking them open, gives you the best of both worlds: fluffy insides and golden, craggy edges. Especially when you finish roasting them in a glaze made with butter (or, even better, saved chicken, pork, beef or goose fat) and the last scrapings from a Marmite jar.

It’s love at first bite for diners. From cheese puffs to tuna eclairs, chefs are putting some of their best ideas on the snack menu

Elliot’s in east London has many hip credentials: the blond-wood colour scheme, the off-sale natural wine bottles, LCD Soundsystem and David Byrne playing at just the right decibel. The menu also features the right buzzwords, such as “small plates” and “wood grill”.

But first comes “snacks”. There are classics: focaccia, olives, anchovies on toast. But more creative options include potato flatbreads with creme fraiche and trout roe, mangalitsa saltimbocca with quince, and what became (and has stayed) the Hackney restaurant’s signature dish since around 2012, Isle of Mull cheese puffs: plump, gooey croquettes filled with Scottish cheddar and comté, deep-fried until crisp and topped with yet more grated cheddar. Only two other dishes have never left the menu: fried potatoes with aïoli and cheesecake.

Layer after luscious layer of spuds, smoked trout and cavolo nero in a herby cream and topped with bubbly cheese, and crisp roast potatoes tossed in a buttery wine reduction

A deliciously decadent gratin with layers of potato, smoked trout and cavolo nero all smothered in herb-infused cream and finished with a grating of gruyere. It’s the ultimate cosy potato main course. Then, for a flavourful twist on everyone’s favourite part of a roast dinner, crisp roast potatoes tossed in a lightly spiced and herby butter emulsion.

It is said to be harder to make friends as you age. But I found that a mix of apps and other tools, as well as a happy attitude, led to a world of potential new pals

Tonight, Rachel, Elvira and I will meet for dinner. A year ago, none of us knew the others existed. Six months ago Rachel and Elvira were strangers until I introduced them. But now, here we are, something as close to firm friends as is possible after such a short time.

If you’ve ever consumed any media, you would be forgiven for thinking that life after 35 is a burning wasteland of unimaginable horrors: the beginnings of incessant back pain, an interest in dishwasher loading, the discovery that you’re ineligible for entire industries billed as “a young person’s game”, and, apparently, an inability to make friends.

Andy, who is in a sexless marriage, has become besotted with Rita – and their sexual chemistry is incredible. But how long can they go on like this?

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

What makes the sex incredible is our chemistry, and the complete lack of judgment and pressure

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions. This week, the knotty issue of home boundaries, and what the saying was intended to mean

They say “good fences make good neighbours”, presumably meaning that the stronger the boundary between you and people you need to deal with, the more robust the relationship. Is this really true? Jamila, via email

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Henry, 28, a student, meets Sarah, 30, an operations manager

What were you hoping for?
A fun, easy-going evening with some yummy grub.

As a doctor I stepped in to tend to an elderly passenger … but it won’t waive £100 transfer fee to rebook

I was due to fly from London Stansted to Pescara, Italy. I was nearing the departure gate when an elderly woman fell down an escalator. I am a doctor and stopped to help. She had sustained a broken wrist, deep cuts and a worrying head injury and I had to stem the bleeding until staff and paramedics arrived.

I asked for gate crew to be made aware that I was delayed by a medical emergency, but when I reached the gate 15 minutes before my flight departed, it had closed.

Two out of five illegal streamers have fallen prey to fraud, likely via a ‘modded’ USB stick that exposes users to data theft and cybercrime

The big fight is on TV on Saturday night but you really don’t want to shell out to watch it on pay-per-view. Luckily, you bought a cheap Amazon Fire Stick online that gives you access to all the sports you want as well as TV streaming services.

While the quality of the picture is not brilliant, you are saving on monthly subscriptions and the one-off fees to watch big sporting events. The stick was a bargain – or so you think.

Could you keep the markets calm and your MPs happy as you pull the economic levers to deliver a budget?

On 26 November, Rachel Reeves will deliver this year’s budget to parliament. As in all years, the chancellor has to strike a balance between:

Raising the money needed to fund the services that voters demand.

Keeping taxes at levels that are acceptable to voters.

Persuading the government’s creditors in the bond markets that it will continue to be able to pay its debts.

Billions will be spent on credit over the discount weekend but experts say the payment option is ‘not risk-free’

Black Friday bargain-hunters should be wary of the flood of “buy now, pay later” offers at the checkout, money experts have warned, amid record numbers of people seeking help with shopping debts.

Billions of pounds will be spent online and in shops over the coming weeks, with more than one in three Britons said to be planning to use this form of credit to help stagger their Black Friday spending.

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

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

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

Here’s what you should know before getting an epidural – and why it might not provide full pain relief as expected

The first time I got an epidural, it was too late.

I’d heard it was best to wait, for fear the medication would run out mid-labor (I later found out this is a myth). So I gritted my teeth through hours of contractions, and when I finally told the nurses I was ready, the anesthesiologist was with another patient.

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

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

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

Experts unpack the common myth of menstruating people’s cycles synchronizing when they’re in close proximity for long enough

• Tell us: what are the best and worst gifts you’ve ever received?

To be someone who menstruates means continuously trying to untangle fact from fiction. Is it true that you can’t swim on your period? No. Does the scent of a person menstruating attract bears? Also no.

There is one period rumor I’ve always kind of enjoyed, though: when women are in close proximity for long enough, their menstrual cycles will eventually sync up, also known as “menstrual synchrony”. I’ve had several friends over the years claim that my period had yanked them on to my cycle.

Body composition: a high BMI is associated with irregular cycles, says Kling.

Age: “Menses can be irregular in adolescents and as people approach menopause,” says Jensen.

Psychological stress: depression can disrupt a person’s cycle.

Medication, such as birth control.

Medical conditions, such as thyroid disease, polycystic ovarian syndrome or menopause.

Lifestyle factors, such as smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption, diet and physical activity.

Its popularity is as enduring as its fabrics – and it allows men to age stylishly without worrying about their waistlines. One collector delves into the reasons the ordinary clothes of workers past live on in men’s wardrobes today

We’ll never know who designed much of the workwear worn by the labouring classes of yesteryear. But they might well be bemused that the ordinary garments they cut generously, to allow movement while operating a machine or driving a train, are now highly collectible and sought after – worn by men who do little more than swivel on an office chair.

If you’ve not noticed the prevalence of the dull tan of the Carhartt barn jacket or the triple-patch pocket of the chore coat, then perhaps you’ve been living in a cave with no signal to receive Instagram ads. Marks & Spencer is abundant with chore jackets and, in this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert, the dad has his suitably saccharine emotional moment wearing one, too.

Shades of green, pink and glitter accompany sold out screenings as Wicked: For Good’s release prompts wave of themed dressing

Outside one of Leicester Square’s main cinemas, small crowds gathered in shades of green, pink and glitter, a loose palette of fairies and witches.

As Wicked: For Good lands in UK cinemas on Friday and this weekend, some fans have decided that simply watching the film isn’t enough. They want to wear it.

The haircut of the moment is ‘The Claudia’, but not everyone has the luscious locks of la Winkleman. Not a problem. Fake fringes are everywhere – and I tried one out

The 70s had “the Fawcett.” In the 90s it was all about “the Rachel.” But now there’s a new era-defining hair cut. “The Claudia.” Yes, the glossy inky-black block fringe that mostly shrouds the face of its owner, the presenter Claudia Winkleman, has become a seminal moment on and off TV screens.

It is a fringe that has spawned memes, online forums dedicated to debating its length and a fan account on X. “Thoughts and opinions from the highest paid fringe on the BBC” reads the bio. Alan Carr has described it, not Winkleman, as a national treasure.

The folding of the progressive youth-focused magazine into Vogue comes at turbulent time for journalism and the crumbling of feminist media

In late 2016, just a few weeks after Donald Trump won his first presidential election, Teen Vogue published a story that set the internet ablaze: “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.”

The story garnered more than 1.3m hits, making it the magazine’s most-read story of the year. Elaine Welteroth, then the editor-in-chief, told NPR that the day it published, Teen Vogue sold “in that month, more copies of the magazine than we had that entire year”. It was a transformative moment for the publication: proof that a magazine long associated with Disney child stars and headlines like “Prom Fever!” could shine light on the political dimensions of young people’s lives.

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

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

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

The Alicante region is renowned for its rice and seafood dishes. Less well known is that its restaurant scene has a wealth of talented female chefs, a rarity in Spain

I’m on a quest in buzzy, beachy Alicante on the Costa Blanca to investigate the rice dishes the Valencian province is famed for, as well as explore the vast palm grove of nearby Elche. I start with a pilgrimage to a restaurant featured in my book on tapas, New Tapas, a mere 25 years ago. Mesón de Labradores in the pedestrianised old town is now engulfed by Italian eateries (so more pizza and pasta than paella) but it remains a comforting outpost of tradition and honest food.

Here I catch up with Timothy Denny, a British chef who relocated to Spain, gained an alicantina girlfriend and became a master of dishes from the region. Over a fideuá de mariscos (seafood noodles, €20), we chew over local gastronomy. “For me, Alicante epitomises the Mediterranean – for rice, seafood and artichokes,” he says. “But there are curiosities, too, like pavo borracho.” Tim explains that so-called “drunken turkeys” are cooked in vast amounts of cognac plus a shot of red wine and eventually emerge as a hefty stew, perfect in winter.

From stylish townhouses to characterful country piles, this selection of inns, B&Bs and hotels offer delicious food and a touch of luxury for £150 a night or less

Drakes, Brighton
Keep an eye out for deals at this glamorous Regency seafront hotel (a November 30% discount won’t be a one-off). A sea-view balcony room, of course, will cost a bit, but even the snuggest, city-facing bedrooms have air conditioning, a king-size bed, wet room, bathtub and Green & Spring toiletries. For somewhere so fun and stylish, Drakes offers real value, including the shorter tasting menus in Dilsk restaurant. Or just treat yourself to a sundowner in the bar, then head out to dine. This is Brighton; the world is your oyster.
Doubles from £143.50 B&B, drakeshotel.com

Poor weather couldn’t spoil my high-altitude walking trip amid these stunning peaks, especially with delicious, hearty Tyrolean cuisine to keep me going

When you come to the Dolomites for winter walking, it’s with the intention of having spellbinding snow-streaked peaks that are unlike anything else in the Alps as your constant companion. But with impenetrable cloud and heavy rain forecast, it was hard not to feel deflated.

Then again, this was Italy, where it’s easy to make the best of things whatever the weather. And the 3 Zinnen Dolomites ski resort and nature park – right on Italy’s border with Austria, about two-and-a-half hours north of Venice, is always charming, with the usual jumble of cultures you see in South Tyrol. Part Italian, it’s more Austrian thanks to the legacy of the Habsburgs, who ruled this part of Italy until 1918. Hence most places have an Austrian and an Italian name, 3 Zinnen or Tre Cime (meaning three peaks) being a case in point. It’s the home of Ladin, an ancient Romance language, too.

Why must every cafe, pub, restaurant or event insist on having its patrons cosplay as babies in highchairs? Bar stools are a bonafide torture device

• Read more petty gripes

Being short comes with sizeable challenges. My view at concerts is almost always blocked. I own more pinchy heels than comfy flats. Finding jeans that fit properly is a headache. But most importantly: bar stools. They are inescapable.

I was reminded of this deep-seated hatred during this year’s Melbourne fashion week. I arrived unfashionably late and had to sit behind the front row – which didn’t upset me, I was truly happy to just be there! But what did annoy me was the only chair choice available: a bar stool that came up to my waist.

As people continue to move away in record numbers, readers share their reasons for leaving and contemplate life in New Zealand

In the past year, tens of thousands of New Zealanders have left the country, surpassing the last spike in 2012 and raising fears of a “hollowing out” of mid-career workers. Guardian readers share their experiences on why they left – or are thinking of moving out of New Zealand.

I followed the obvious signs but an enforcement officer had to point out a notice on the back of the entrance sign and it cost me £140

Our car was clamped while parked at the NET Forest Tram Park and Ride in Nottingham, and we had to pay £140 to have it freed.

The prominent signs displayed at the entrance state that those parking without using the tram will be clamped. We did use the tram to and from the city centre after walking in the adjacent park.

Venues designed for people to smash things up safely are seeing an enormous rise in bookings. But why? And what explains the pronounced gender gap?

Name: Rage rooms.

Appearance: Full of old appliances and angry women.

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

A record 39,000 birds are overwintering on Wallasea island wetlands thanks to soil transported from London tunnels

Almost 40,000 birds have made their home on a nature reserve created using soil from tunnel excavations for the Elizabeth line.

Three million tonnes of earth were transported from London to Wallasea island in Essex and used to lift the ground level and make wetlands.

From the top lollipop person to the most dedicated convenience store managers, we celebrate the winners of the year’s most unusual accolades

Michael Leech, from Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, has been named the UK bus driver of the year

As casualties mount, recruitment is expanding. Three women talk about why they signed up for a brutal combat environment

Women have been involved in Ukraine’s drone operations since the early months of the full-scale invasion, but as shortages in the military increase their presence has grown, particularly in FPV (first-person-view) attack units.

Casualty figures are not disclosed but widely understood to be high, and Ukraine is becoming reliant on civilians to fill roles that once belonged to trained military personnel. A short but intensive 15-day course is given to a trainee operator for frontline deployment, a turnaround that reflects the urgent need.

Indoor and outdoor training courses set up for trainee pilots at a drone school

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

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

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

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

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

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

From stargazing to swimming, we’d love to hear how you beat the winter blues by getting out into nature – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

With the days getting shorter (and colder), it’s tempting to go into hibernation mode. But winter can feel like a special time of year if you get out and embrace it. We’d love to hear about your favourite UK-based outdoor winter activity, whether it’s cold-water swimming, stargazing, birdwatching or simply wrapping up and going for a bracing walk or off-road bike ride.

The best tip of the week, chosen by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet wins a £200 voucher to stay at a Coolstays property – the company has more than 3,000 worldwide. The best tips will appear in the Guardian Travel section and website.

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

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

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

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