The right is unafraid to show its might on the world stage – meanwhile the prime minister is tinkering with potholes. That just about sums up the centre-left

Last weekend, as the world wondered whether Donald Trump would swipe Greenland, Keir Starmer made his own big geographic intervention: he published a map of which councils were fixing potholes.

Yes, potholes. Yes, a map. Barely 18 months into office, with crucial elections just ahead and his party lagging behind the ragtag troops of Nigel Farage and even Kemi Badenoch, this was how Team Starmer kicked off 2026. To be fair, as the young people say, the map is colour-coded.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

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An appetite for self-destruction left Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies hugely influential but financially insecure. They’re back with a big show and their first album together since 1995

‘There isn’t one songwriter, and so the flavour of the band is always going to change,” says Dave Vanian, reflecting on 50 years of the group of which he has been the sole constant member, the Damned. “Captain Sensible is a great fan of syrupy pop music and prog and glam rock. So his writing is very poppy, melodic and quite wonderful. My writing is more melodramatic, more theatrical. And Rat Scabies was a mod who really loved bands like the Who. That melting pot would either not work at all, or be an absolute firecracker.” As the history of the Damned attests, it has, on occasion, been both.

There have been three break-ups: in the late 70s, late 80s and early 90s; Sensible and Scabies have had repeated spells out of the band; Scabies only started working with them again in 2022, after 27 years away. “The rift was really between him and Captain,” says Vanian, though at one time or another, it seems as though each of the three principals has been in a relationship-ending rage with one or both of the others.

Every week my DisOrient FC team and I would show up at the Park Tavern, our second home, drown our sorrows after a five-a-side match and forge ongoing friendships

Whatever else you might say about the Park Tavern, you can unequivocally say this: it is, without question, the closest pub to the five-a-side pitches where my team DisOrient FC used to play every Tuesday night from 2011 to 2016.

Hamnet and H Is for Hawk fuse themes of loss, birds and elemental female emotion. But whose fault is it if you remain dry-eyed?

‘Is it porn or is it art?” A familiar, even dated question where nudity is involved, and (forgive thumbnail) pretty well-resolved– which is to say: we let the tastemakers decide, and it tips the scale towards “art” if one or both protagonists are not that good-looking.

“Is it grief-porn or is it grief-art?” is a more vexed question. Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true.

It makes me feel like a proud parent to see them take flight

The International Crane Foundation was set up in 1973, with the aim of safeguarding the world’s 15 crane species – most are endangered or vulnerable due to habitat loss, climate change and hunting. As senior aviculturist at the headquarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin, I’m involved in everything from daily feeding to overseeing chick-rearing.

Whenever possible, chicks are raised by their biological parents or adopted by other adult cranes, but when that isn’t possible, we have to raise them, and teach them how to behave like cranes. Some chicks will later be released into the wild, so it’s important that they learn to stay away from people and other predators.

Architects and designers have recycled ancient practice of collecting rainwater to make buildings ecologically friendly

When the legendary Taiwanese rock band Mayday were due to perform in Beijing one evening in May 2023, some fans were worried that the rainy weather could affect the show. Mayday were taking to the stage in Beijing’s National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, built for the 2008 Olympics. Like the real-life twig piles that give the building its nickname, the stadium is built with an intricate and highly porous lattice, made of steel.

“Don’t worry too much,” reassured an article published by the official newsletter for China’s ministry of water resources. “The Bird’s Nest also has its ‘secret weapon’!”

Some supporters are concerned about the number of Conservatives being welcomed by their party, and fear it could alienate voters

If Reform UK was officially celebrating Robert Jenrick’s defection to Nigel Farage’s party, the reaction of the rank-and-file was an altogether more complicated one – ranging from jubilation to despair that yet another Tory was coming onboard.

“Enough already! Reform uk please take note, you are going to lose members and voters if you don’t cap this craziness … We don’t want a Tory party Pt II,” was the early response from James Scott, one of a number of members expressing their unhappiness on one of the largest private Reform Facebook groups.

Trump heaped praise on the Venezuelan opposition leader for presenting him with ‘her Nobel peace prize for the work I have done’

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has presented her gold Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump after meeting him in the White House, nearly a fortnight after he ordered the abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Machado, who received the award last year for her struggle against Maduro’s “brutal, authoritarian state”, told reporters on Thursday she had done so “in recognition [of] his unique commitment [to] our freedom”.

Despite restrictions announced this week, Guardian reporters find standalone app continues to allow posting of nonconsensual content

X has continued to allow users to post highly sexualised videos of women in bikinis generated by its AI tool Grok, despite the company’s claim to have cracked down on misuse.

The Guardian was able to create short videos of people stripping to bikinis from photographs of fully clothed, real women. It was also possible to post this adult content on to X’s public platform without any sign of it being moderated, meaning the clip could be viewed within seconds by anyone with an account.

Campaigners claim firm has bought sway over the teaching of science, technology, engineering and maths

Campaigners have accused BP of having an insidious influence over the teaching of science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) in the UK through its relationship with the Science Museum.

Documents obtained under freedom of information legislation show how the company funded a research project that led to the creation of the Science Museum Group academy – its teacher and educator training programme – which BP sponsors and which has run more than 500 courses, for more than 5,000 teachers.

Up to 30,000 customers of South East Water had no supply or low pressure at height of incident

Water has been restored to most homes across Kent and Sussex after almost a week of disruption.

South East Water (SEW) said the outage, which began on Saturday, was the result of Storm Goretti causing burst pipes and power cuts.

Anonymously sourced report that Jonathan Ross ‘suffered internal bleeding’ after killing Renee Good faced skepticism inside CBS newsroom

Some CBS News employees expressed concern after the network cited two anonymous “US officials” on Wednesday to report that the ICE officer who fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis “suffered internal bleeding to the torso” after the incident.

CBS initially published the account about officer Jonathan Ross on X, formerly Twitter. About 30 minutes later, the network followed up with another post, containing a link to an article by two correspondents that similarly cited “two US officials briefed on his medical condition”.

Jafar Panahi, director of Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, says Iranian leaders want to destroy country

The Khamenei regime will not be able to maintain control over Iranian society after the violent suppression of the latest wave of protests, one of the country’s leading film-makers has predicted.

“It is impossible for this government to sustain itself in this situation,” the director Jafar Panahi told the Guardian. “They know it too. They know that it will be impossible to rule over people. Perhaps their only goal right now is to bring the country to the verge of complete collapse and try to destroy it.”

Jeanne Shaheen, the most senior Democrat on the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations said ‘millions of Americans are deeply concerned about the recent rhetoric of the United States taking over Greenland’

Meanwhile, Italian defence minister Guido Crosetto does not seem to be convinced about the merits of European military deployments to Greenland.

Speaking to journalists, he wondered “what a hundred, two hundred, or three hundred soldiers of any nationality could do” in Greenland. “It sounds like the beginning of a joke.”

“It’s not a competition to see who sends the military around the world.”

“A part of me is not sure how much of this is a distraction, to try and take the attention of the American people away from some very real issues that we have in the United States right now.

The cost of living is a real concern for Americans [and] Donald Trump got elected saying he was going to address the cost of living.

Pleas for scrutiny of system fraught with accusations of negligence after one-year-old’s death in hospital

Nigerians have called for urgent reforms to the healthcare sector after the death of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 21-month-old son prompted an outpouring of grief and accounts of negligence and inadequate care.

In a leaked WhatsApp message, the bestselling author said she had been told by a doctor that the resident anaesthesiologist at the Lagos hospital treating her son Nkanu Nnamdi had administered an overdose of the sedative propofol.

From his exile in the US, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran, has galvanised protesters in his home country, calling for them to continue demonstrating against the Islamic Republic. But Pahlavi is a divisive figure. As the heir of a violent authoritarian regime, his potential return is viewed suspiciously by some. Chants in his favour heard in the streets of Tehran and beyond may be less about support for the crown and more about him being seen as the only option to take people out of the country's political 'dead end'

• Growing protests in Iran do not necessarily herald a return to monarchy

• ‘The world needs to know what’s happening’: families of protesters killed in Iran tell of heartbreak

As the UK government faces pressure to follow suit, evidence on whether the ban is working is still a while away.

More than 4.7m accounts for teens under 16 have been been taken offline by Australia’s social media ban, but that doesn’t mean it’s been successful.

As the UK government faces pressure to follow suit, let’s take a closer look at the facts and figures.

I’d love to claim the Hand & Heart in Nottingham taught me something profound – but it was mostly about bankrolling free rounds

When I was a teenager, before Tripadvisor, pubs lived as mental notes rather than star ratings. There was the one where – exactly like that scene in The Inbetweeners – we realised they’d serve us a pint at 16 if we ordered some food (one shared plate of chips). There was the one you might get lucky in on Christmas Eve; the one you’d take a girl to, to impress her with the romantic views; and the one that only served cider in halves because it was so brain cell-poppingly strong – a pub best tackled before a bank holiday Monday, known colloquially as “Super Cider Sunday”, when you still had a few brain cells to spare.

From Gilmore Girls to Perry Mason, readers reveal the programmes that never fail to bring them joy

I really think Toast of London is Matt Berry’s best work. It’s hilarious. The plots are daft, the cameos are often left-field but work well, and it has loads of great nonsensical gags. It’s a shining example of a sitcom with an unlikable protagonist that you can’t help but root for anyway. I must have watched it from beginning to end at least 15 times. Every friendship and relationship in my life eventually reaches a crossroads: will they like Toast or not? Rhys, 24, Cardiff

The team behind Baby Steps discuss why they made a whiny, unprepared manbaby the protagonist – and how players have grown to love Nate as he struggles up a mountain

“I don’t know why he is in a onesie and has a big ass,” shrugs game developer Gabe Cuzzillo. “Bennett just came in with that at some point.”

“I thought it would be cute,” replies Bennett Foddy, who was formerly Cuzzillo’s professor at New York University’s Game Center and is now his collaborator. “Working on character design and animation brings you over to liking big butts. I could give you an enormous amount of evidence for this.”

The Gardanas, a pair of mucus-coloured hemp shoes, are a somewhat paradoxical current must-have. But their appeal goes deeper than the topsoil

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There is every chance that 2026 will be the year you see your first pair of Gardana gardening clogs in the wild. In fact, if you spend much time on TikTok, or live in Brooklyn, you’ve probably already been seeing them for months, if not years. I saw my first pair a few weeks ago. I watched a dad dropping his kids off at school in head-to-toe Carhartt, a pair of Gardanas peeping out from below his trousers like a shy frog.

Pliable, but with a sturdy sole, they go for as little as £25. The work of French “environmental poet” André Ravachol, who founded the Plasticana brand behind the clogs in 1998, they’re made from 100% recycled PVC and hemp, which gives them their earthy-caramel or, as Vogue put it, “bird-pooey” hue. They have since been called “maybe the coolest shoes in London” by one TikToker, as he Lime-biked his way through the capital to try to nab a pair.

(A$AP Rocky Recordings)
Now a father of three and burgeoning actor, Rocky finally comes back to music with his strongest album since his 2013 debut – though there’s plenty of flab

It has been eight years since A$AP Rocky, once and future king of New York rap, released an album. In the world of hip-hop, where even A-list stars such as Rocky’s friend and collaborator Tyler, the Creator are prone to releasing multiple albums a year, this is a lifetime. In the time since Rocky released his third album, 2018’s Testing, Kanye West has rebranded as a born-again Christian, swerved to the right and released five albums. Rocky hasn’t been sitting around: he’s been a press mainstay, thanks to his relationship with pop superstar Rihanna, with whom he now has three children, and last year was acquitted of firing a gun at a former friend, dodging up to 24 years in prison. He has also found acclaim as an actor, starring opposite Rose Byrne in the lauded dark comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest.

Aside from a few one-off singles, such as the Tame Impala collaboration Sundress, Rocky has released music in fits and starts in recent years. (In terms of mainstream stars, perhaps only Rocky’s romantic partner outpaces him when it comes to leaving fans waiting: it has been a decade since Rihanna’s last record.) Testing yielded the Skepta-featuring hit Praise the Lord (Da Shine), but otherwise fell flat with mainstream audiences and critics alike, lacking the dynamism and potent charisma of his breakout albums. That album seemed to leave Rocky at a crossroads. Would it serve him best to continue exploring its slipshod experimentalism, or to make an attempt at retrenchment, and return to the more straightforward music that made him famous?

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

For the sake of British Jews and British Muslims – and those of us who believe in multiculturalism – lessons must be learned from the Villa Park row

It was an infamous night in football.

More than 5,000 Dutch police officers had to be deployed to contain hundreds of Israeli fans embarking on a post-match rampage, tearing down Palestinian flags, assaulting Muslim taxi drivers and throwing innocent bystanders into a river.

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As head of an immigration charity, I’ve seen firsthand how hostility and toxicity have reached unprecedented levels

• Enver Solomon is the outgoing chief executive of the Refugee Council

It is difficult to think of another area of government policy that has weathered as much legislative hyperactivity as asylum and migration. I have been chief executive of the Refugee Council since 2020, and I am struck by the fact that there have been four bills that have become law since I started. A fifth one in as many years is expected soon as Home Office officials beaver away under the orders of the home secretary to quickly turn the proposed asylum reforms, published in November, into legislation.

As I prepare to leave the organisation this month, I have been reflecting on how the asylum and migration landscape has changed. It’s clear the rhetoric and intent behind all these new laws has been the same: to deter so-called asylum shopping, to disrupt the people-smuggling gangs, to ramp up removals of migrants, to fix the broken asylum system and, ultimately, deliver control of our borders.

Enver Solomon is the outgoing chief executive of the Refugee Council

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This week’s furore is microplastics researchers’ ozone moment. If they fail, the powerful plastics lobby will step into the breach

• Debora MacKenzie is a science journalist and author of Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

Are we being injured and killed by ubiquitous, teeny-tiny shards of toxic plastic? Or aren’t we? For many months, the Guardian has reported a series of worrying scientific results that our bodies are full of jagged microplastic particles that could be giving us everything from heart attacks to reproductive problems.

But on Tuesday, the Guardian revealed that a significant number of scientists think many of these studies showed no such thing. Or maybe they did. The methods are new and riddled with problems, so we can’t always reliably tell.

Debora MacKenzie is a science journalist and author of Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

Carl Schmitt wanted empires that dominated the small countries in their orbits. But the US president’s chaotic actions are not that strategic

It is axiomatic to many of his critics that the US president, Donald Trump, is a fascist. Indeed, some have seen echoes of the work of the Nazis’ “crown jurist” and political theorist, Carl Schmitt, in the Trump administration’s domestic policies, particularly his doctrine of “the exception”, which can be used to suspend certain constitutional rights. After a tumultuous few weeks in geopolitics, his work is being discussed for its contemporary relevance again.

In the wake of the release of the new US National Security Strategy in 2025, its raid on Venezuela, the president’s rhetoric on Greenland, Panama, Colombia, Mexico and Cuba, and his apparent indulgence towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the question now being asked is whether Trump is also an advocate of aspects of Schmitt’s concept of “great space”.

Brendan Simms is director of the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University and author of Hitler: Only the World Was Enough

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Even Nigel Farage looked taken aback by the news Honest Bob was about to join his flock, but he quickly saw the upside

• UK politics live – latest updates

One is too many and 1,000 never enough. Addiction is a tricky business. What starts as fun inevitably, insidiously, tears away the soul. And there are signs that Nigel Farage’s press conference habit is getting out of control. He started off at one a week. Then his narcissistic need craved more and more attention. So he upped it to two or three a week. Each time the buzz got less. He was mainlining more and more just to try to stand still. To keep the withdrawals at bay. Still not enough. So on Thursday, Nige upped the dose to two inside a day. This can only end in a spell in rehab. Followed by meetings of PA. Pressers Anonymous.

Boom. The best laid plans etc. Nige was just six minutes into his first press conference of the day – the unveiling of the latest Tory defector, the meg-rich Malcolm Offord, whose lifetime achievements amount to buying yachts, as the leader of Reform Scotland – when it all kicked off. Malc had just signed a card renouncing his peerage, when every journalist in the room started looking at their phones. There was breaking news. Kemi Badenoch had announced she was sacking Robert Jenrick from the shadow cabinet and the Tory party.

The Bonfire of the Insanities by John Crace (Guardian Faber Publishing, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Survivors of the regime like me are reliving our nightmares as brave Iranians fight for their freedom. They say they have nothing to lose but their chains

It has been more than 40 years since I was imprisoned in Iran for speaking out against human rights abuses and state executions, and for defending women’s rights. I spent eight years behind bars in Iran’s notorious Evin prison. I was tortured. I remember it as if it happened yesterday.

Every few years, uprisings erupt across Iran – and each wave of resistance is deeper and more widespread than the one before. In 2022, it was women who led the Woman, Life, Freedom movement after the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the country’s “morality police”, and it revolutionised my country. Today, women wear what they want, go out in public with their boyfriends – even live with them – without fear of being arrested. Women earned these rights with their lives. In late December 2025, the spark was once again lit – this time in an old bazaar in Tehran.

Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran. Her books include A Prison Memoir: One Woman’s Struggle in Iran, and the novel The Secret Letters from X to A

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Farage was all smiles as the Tory rightwinger he once called a ‘fraud’ defected to Reform. Will it be big enough for the both of them? Keep watching

The best thing right now would be to read the turmoil in the Tory party as told by the spy novelist Len Deighton. He would give us more detail on Robert Jenrick’s defection media-handling plan: a statement on what a future in Reform meant to him, how he’d wrestled with his decision to leave the Conservatives behind. Kemi Badenoch would discover it by a process of intricate deduction, rather than the more likely story – that some mischief-maker leaked it to her. The trail of clues would be ever more ominous, as Jenrick skipped opportunities to show loyalty to his party leader, mysteriously didn’t show for longstanding commitments. The betrayal would unfold slowly in scarce-to-be-believed fashion until, wham: someone saw his to-do list. Iron turquoise shirt. Call Sophy Ridge.

Instead, Jenrick’s ejection from his party is slightly spoiled, from a storytelling point of view, by the chaos of conjecture and semi-analysis. What happened this afternoon was beyond Deighton. For hours, Nigel Farage would confirm only that he’d had conversations with Jenrick, and stated categorically that he hadn’t signed a deal with him. There were questions over whether Badenoch had successfully ruined Farage’s Westminster press conference, planned for 4:30pm today, where he would purportedly reveal Jenrick as his latest defector. And even more about what it would mean for Jenrick’s political ambitions, inside or outside the Tory party.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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A former Tory cabinet minister leaps to Reform and turns the issue of Kemi Badenoch’s authority into a test of Conservative survival

Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch’s decision to sack her shadow justice minister, Robert Jenrick, due to his impending defection was not so much about damage control as the first shot of civil war on the right. With Mr Jenrick shifting publicly to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, the issue became less about party discipline and more about the Conservatives’ political viability. Mr Jenrick says he left because Britain is broken and the Tories refused to acknowledge their role in breaking it. His claim rests on a self-serving distinction: that the damage was done by a party he served, but not by him.

Despite her improving polls, Mrs Badenoch is still recovering from the devastating 2024 election loss. With ambitious colleagues coveting her job, she could not afford to tolerate dissent. By acting she exposed a deeper fragility in UK rightwing politics. Mr Jenrick was not merely a restless colleague but a plausible alternative centre of gravity. His embrace of hardline populism could attract Reform voters; he had support among party members; and he was ambitious enough to believe his moment had arrived. Mrs Badenoch calculated that delay, in such circumstances, could be fatal.

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The US president delights in his inconsistency. But his short-term victories have profound long-term costs for his country and the world

The Middle East was braced on Wednesday night, but the anxious petitioning of Gulf states and Iran’s attempts to appease the US president appeared to win out – at least for the moment. No bombs fell on Tehran. After all his threats, and with military options under discussion in Washington, Donald Trump stepped back, announcing that “the killing [of protesters] has stopped”.

Despite the telecommunications blackout, it seems clear that a ruthless regime has shed still more blood than in previous protest crackdowns. Rights groups say that thousands have been killed and vast numbers arrested; one official spoke of 2,000 deaths. Witnesses compared the streets to a war zone. If the large-scale killings have indeed ebbed, that is probably because Iranians have been terrified out of the streets – for now, at least. Iran’s foreign minister chose Fox News to insist no hangings were imminent, in case the identity of the message’s one-man audience was in any doubt. But while retribution may have been postponed, it will not be cancelled as it should be: the calls for the regime’s downfall are seen as an existential threat. The Iranian authorities can wait. Mr Trump will move on.

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In the hope that the law might change, Ruby Bayley and her partner are considering putting off starting a family

Reading Ilyas Nagdee’s article (14 January) about taking eight months of paternity leave and the profound difference it has made to his family struck a deep chord with me and my partner. The piece beautifully captures the joy, closeness and rebalancing that meaningful paternity leave can bring, and it makes a compelling case for why this time matters so deeply.

But as we read it, we were also struck by what was missing. The article does not mention self-employed or freelance parents at all, and that absence reflects a wider pattern in the current conversation about paternity leave reform. For families like ours, it is impossible to read about extended paid leave without also feeling the sharp edge of exclusion.

David Joss Buckley recalls his time in rep with the actor, while Nicholas Woodeson and Harriet Monkhouse reflect on their memories, both real and imagined

The tenth anniversary of Alan Rickman’s death stirred a memory of when we were both jobbing actors in rep, performing in a schools’ matinee (‘I fell in love with him on the spot’: Alan Rickman remembered, 10 years after his death, 14 January).

The play was Gunslinger by Richard Crane, written in 1976 to celebrate the US bicentennial, and Alan had been cast as Sitting Bull. Dressed in full Native American attire, complete with sumptuously feathered headdress, his was the concluding speech of the play. It was a moving and sombre piece delivered beautifully in that rich and sonorous voice.

The Cambridge college remains committed to widening participation, says its master, Mary Hockaday

As the master of Trinity Hall, I am sorry for the distress and anger caused by some of the words used in the internal memo referred to in your article (Cambridge college to target elite private schools for student recruitment, 7 January). It has been the cause for much reflection in the college.

But I must set the record straight. Trinity Hall has not changed its admissions policy nor its commitment to widening participation. We do not confuse opportunity with ability (Letters, 12 January) and our admissions team is skilled at assessing academic potential in the context of background and schooling. We know from experience that our top-performing students come from every part of the country, every school type and every background.

Charlie Whelan argues that aluminium, produced using power from the Spey dam, is not a green alternative to glass bottles for whisky

I read your article about the Stirling Distillery with interest (Green whisky? Scottish distillery tests eco-friendly aluminium bottles, 11 January). The marketing director of the distillery seems to believe that younger consumers could be motivated by promises of far better green credentials from using aluminium bottles rather than glass ones.

However, the production of aluminium at Fort William, in the Highlands of Scotland, is anything but green. The smelter there uses electricity part-generated by the Spey dam, diverted from the Spey catchment.

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A very poor 9/15 from me.

Afcon is moving to a four-year cycle, a decision the Confederation of African Football has been accused of forcing through without proper consultation. Ed Aarons and Romain Molina report:

Several presidents of African football federations have told the Guardian they were not informed of the decision until it was surprisingly announced by the Caf president, Patrice Motsepe, on 20 December, prompting claims that the confederation breached its statutes by failing to seek approval at a general assembly.

Chelsea need to avoid long-throw blues, plus: a vacant spot for Liverpool and West Ham’s best hope for survival

• Race for the golden boot: Premier League top scorers

Can the 198th derby be any spicier for Manchester United and their latest interim manager, Michael Carrick? This is his second caretaker tenure, though the three games of November-December 2021 (beating Villarreal and Arsenal, drawing with Chelsea) hardly compares with sending out an XI to try to beat Manchester City in Saturday’s early kick-off. Pep Guardiola’s high-performing unit remain in contention on all fronts. Carrick takes charge of a United suffering the aftershocks of a latest manager sacking, hoping to salvage the season via European qualification. The lad from Wallsend has 17 games to do so – his new team are in seventh place on 32 points, so victory over City would be a fine start. But you wonder if the match might end with Carrick and United humbled or, even worse, humiliated. Jamie Jackson

Manchester United v Manchester City, Saturday 12.30pm (all times GMT)

Chelsea v Brentford, Saturday 3pm

Leeds v Fulham, Saturday 3pm

Liverpool v Burnley, Saturday 3pm

• Tournament to be played every four years from 2028

• Federation denies statutes breached in making decision

The Confederation of African Football (Caf) has been accused of pushing through its controversial decision to stage the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) every four years without properly consulting member federations.

Several presidents of African football federations have told the Guardian they were not informed of the decision until it was surprisingly announced by the Caf president, Patrice Motsepe, on 20 December, prompting claims that the confederation breached its statutes by failing to seek approval at a general assembly.

• Wangerheim joins from Hammarby on contract to 2029

• Toone expected to be out for at least another six weeks

Manchester United have signed the Sweden forward Ellen Wangerheim from Hammarby on a contract until June 2029. The 21-year-old becomes the Women’s Super League side’s third signing of the January transfer window, after Hanna Lundkvist and Lea Schüller.

Matt Johnson, United’s director of women’s football, told the club’s media channels that Wangerheim was “one of Europe’s best young talents”, saying: “As a dynamic, invasive and versatile forward Ellen brings variation and a natural scoring instinct to the team. Everyone at the club is excited to have her at Manchester United and the opportunity to help maximise her potential.”

• Player fell to world ranking No 113 at end of last year

• Norrie will be highest-ranked British player in Melbourne

Katie Boulter is hopeful that she can rediscover her best form and return towards the top of the WTA Tour this year with the help of Maria Sharapova’s former coach Michael Joyce.

Boulter opted to split with her previous longtime coach, Biljana Veselinovic, at the end of last year after an incredibly difficult season in which she fell from her career high ranking of No 23 at the end of 2024 to her current ranking of No 113.

Today’s rumours might even get home one day

This year, as with last year, Aston Villa are eyeing the January market to bolster their forward line. For Marcus Rashford in 2025, read Tammy Abraham in 2026. Roma own his registration, though he is now on loan at Besiktas. He was a fan favourite when on loan from Chelsea in Villa’s Championship days, so such a move would be something of a homecoming. Another Villa target is Dani Ceballos, the midfielder once of Arsenal, and a useful Real Madrid squad player for years now.

To compound Crystal Palace’s FA Cup misery, and the unsettling tidings on Oliver Glasner’s future, there’s the rumour that Jean-Philippe Mateta is a target for Juventus.

Former playing great starts new season as an owner in sport’s second tier aiming to rebuild club who would give British game a major lift if they return to Super League

Darren Lockyer has faced some monumental challenges for club and country but this year his trickiest task may be finding the opponents of his new club on a map as he takes on rugby league’s mission impossible.

Throughout his illustrious career, Lockyer faced Melbourne Storm, Sydney Roosters and some of the world’s best international teams. This year, Lockyer’s interests will be centred on places like Goole, Swinton and Batley after taking ownership of London Broncos late last year and attempting to make them a rugby league powerhouse.

• Red Bull first to launch 2026 car under new regulations

• Row brewing over possible loophole in engine rules

Red Bull formally began their tilt at the forthcoming Formula One season, unveiling the livery for their challenger, the RB22, in a showcase event in Detroit on Thursday, with Max Verstappen admitting the sweeping regulation changes for 2026 will be a step into the “unknown”.

Before a highly anticipated season, with a swathe of big rule changes presenting a challenge across the grid, Red Bull are the first in what is due to be a hectic period of launches before pre-season testing begins.

• British roads will host the start of both races next year

• First time both Grands Départs have been outside France

The men’s Tour de France will start in Scotland for the first time in 2027 and make its first visit to Wales when Britain stages the Grand Départ of the men’s and women’s races in the biggest festival of elite cycling on the isles since London 2012.

Across six days of racing on British roads, the men’s Tour will visit Edinburgh, Carlisle, Keswick, Liverpool, Welshpool and Cardiff, while the Tour de France Femmes races from Leeds to Manchester, then to Sheffield and also includes a central London stage. On Thursday night all host cities were illuminated by yellow beams in recognition of them staging the Tour.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen among figures showing support for Hungary’s prime minister

Rightwing leaders from around the world have come together to endorse Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, hinting at the symbolism that the country’s elections hold for global far-right movements even as the populist leader lags in the polls.

A campaign video published online by Orbán this week includes endorsements from nearly a dozen leaders including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, France’s Marine Le Pen and Germany’s Alice Weidel.

Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank report calls on chancellor to pursue policy of ‘securonomics’

Tens of thousands of jobs could be lost if the UK’s clean energy supply chains were to suffer a shock as a result of an over-reliance on China, a left-leaning thinktank has warned.

A year-long disruption to the supply of essential battery components used to manufacture electric vehicles could wipe out production of more than 580,000 electric cars and endanger 90,000 jobs, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Yoon Suk Yeol’s conviction for obstructing own arrest separate from main trial that could lead to death penalty

A South Korean court has sentenced former president Yoon Suk Yeol to five years in prison for mobilising presidential security forces to block his own arrest and abusing his powers. It is the first judicial ruling linked to the events surrounding his failed martial law declaration in December 2024.

The ruling is separate from Yoon’s main insurrection trial, where prosecutors earlier this week sought the death penalty and a verdict is due next month.

Women allege Spanish singer subjected them ‘to inappropriate touching, insults and humiliation … in atmosphere of control’

The Spanish singer Julio Iglesias has broken his silence over allegations that he sexually abused two women who worked in his Caribbean mansions, saying he has never “abused, coerced or disrespected any woman”.

The 82-year-old entertainer, whose career spans six decades, had been accused by two female former employees who allege they had been sexually assaulted and subjected “to inappropriate touching, insults and humiliation … in an atmosphere of control and constant harassment”.

Exclusive: Jesse Binnall and Joe Flynn, who campaigned to overturn 2020 election, seek to win Bosnia deal for little-known US firm

Leading members of Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election are seeking a huge European pipeline contract, the latest figures from the US president’s circle to mix business and geopolitics.

Jesse Binnall, a lawyer who worked on legal actions advancing Trump’s baseless claim that the vote was stolen from him, and Joe Flynn, who also sought to undermine Joe Biden’s victory, have been in Bosnia this week to discuss the project.

Flood warning raised to highest level with roads washed away and rain forcing evacuation of Kruger national park

Large areas of north-eastern South Africa and neighbouring Mozambique have been inundated for several days with exceptionally heavy rainfall. Some locations in South Africa recorded hundreds of millimetres of rain over the weekend, such as Graskop in Mpumalanga, where 113mm fell in 24 hours, and Phalaborwa, which recorded about 85mm of rainfall. Rain has continued to fall across the region since the weekend.

The deluge has been driven by a slow-moving cut-off low pressure system that has remained anchored over the region, repeatedly drawing in moisture and triggering intense downpours. Further heavy rainfall is expected on Friday and over the weekend. Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, could expect daily rainfall totals to exceed 200mm by the end of Friday, while western parts of South Africa and north-western Eswatini may record more than 100mm.

In this week’s newsletter: US earnings would be 12% higher without the climate crisis, a study reveals – and the hotter the world gets, the greater the economic losses

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Donald Trump has long railed against emissions-cutting policy as an expensive “hoax” and “scam”. But the climate crisis itself comes with a major price tag for Americans, a new study shows.

Previous research has found that global heating has driven up utility costs, home insurance premiums and healthcare bills. But according to the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, it has also slashed US incomes by more than a tenth since 2000 – a severe national economic jolt.

‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body

The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age

Africa’s great elephant divide: countries struggle with too many elephants – or too few

Average person will be 40% poorer if world warms by 4C, new research shows

Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought – report

Tackling climate crisis will increase economic growth, OECD research finds

Authorities and firefighters say the Victorian fires of January 2026 were unlike anything seen before in speed, scale and destruction. And they came much earlier than normal

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• A new fight for Victorian farmers – saving livestock that survived devastating bushfires

Victoria has been battered by some of the most destructive bushfires in its history, with blazes tearing through 400,000 hectares across the state and claiming the life of a cattle farmer, Maxwell Hobson. Almost 900 buildings have been destroyed, including more than 250 homes, and more than 15,000 livestock have been killed, along with countless wildlife.

Both authorities and firefighters on the ground have reported the fires were unlike anything seen before in their speed, scale and destruction. They also came much earlier than the traditional bushfire season, which typically peaks in February.

Whiteley, Hampshire: It’s a remarkably mundane place for a large communal roost, but these birds are here for good reason

At the heart of the shopping centre, a courtyard opens between the shops and restaurants. A row of ornamental silver birches rises from the concrete paving, their pale trunks reflecting the glow from the storefronts. I was passing through on my way to meet friends for dinner when a burst of sound pulled my gaze upwards. The crown of the nearest tree was alive with movement. Pied wagtails were arriving from all directions, tails flicking like metronomes as they congregated. The flock’s chatter was punctuated by clipped, high‑pitched “chizzick” flight calls, as more birds streamed into the roost site.

Most shoppers hurried by without a glance. I had time to linger, so I leaned against a pillar and watched. For 10 minutes or so, the flock remained unsettled. Birds shuffled along the branches, displaced one another, then lifted together in a brief, swirling cloud before dropping into a neighbouring tree, only to rise again. Their white faces caught the artificial light, glinting like snowflakes.

Patrick Vallance says robots would take away ‘repetitive’ tasks, but Sadiq Khan warns AI will usher in ‘new era of mass unemployment’

Advances in AI and robotics will transform human jobs, starting with roles in warehouses and factories, the UK science minister has said, as the government announced plans to reduce red tape for robot and defence tech companies.

Patrick Vallance said technological progress was creating a “whole new area” for robots to work in. “What’s really changing now is the combination of AI and robotics. It is opening up a whole new area, particularly in the sorts of things like humanoid robotics. And that will increase productivity, it will change the human job,” he told the Guardian.

Five organisations whose work fosters community, tolerance and empathy will share proceeds of readers’ generosity

The Guardian has raised more than £1m in its Hope appeal to support grassroots charities whose work offers a positive antidote to social division, racism and hatred.

The appeal, which closed on Thursday, had five partner charities that will share the donations: Citizens UK, the Linking Network, Locality, Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust and Who Is Your Neighbour?

Officers with riot shields, dogs and teargas called in to quell action at Harmondsworth and Brook House facilities

More than 100 asylum seekers held at two immigration detention centres have staged overnight protests against the UK’s controversial “one in, one out” scheme with France.

Officers with riot shields, dogs and teargas arrived to quell the protests.

FoIs show integrated care boards are curbing assessments but have not told GPs or patients who face long waits

The NHS is restricting people’s ability to be assessed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in order to save money but not telling GPs or patients, despite soaring demand for the service.

More than half of the NHS’s 42 integrated care boards (ICBs) in England have imposed limits on how many people can be assessed for ADHD during 2025-26, freedom of information responses show.

With polls showing no clear leader among 11 candidates, the absurd Candidate Vieira captures attention

In Lisbon’s Campo de Ourique market earlier this week, conversation had turned – a little inevitably – to Sunday’s presidential election, which will decide who will take over from the outgoing Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.

But amid the usual claims and counter-claims, promises and pledges, one candidate has been offering voters something a bit more enticing than his competitors have.

Veteran president holding off main challenger Bobi Wine after campaign marred by violence at opposition rallies

The veteran Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, held a commanding lead in early presidential election results announced on Friday, as conflicting accounts emerged of violence after the vote.

Museveni, who is 81 and has ruled Uganda since seizing power in 1986, is seeking a decisive victory after a campaign marred by violence at opposition rallies.

Soaking fabrics in a commonly used insect repellent is a simple and effective tool as mosquito bites become more common during daytime, study shows

From Africa to Latin America to Asia, babies have been carried in cloth wraps on their mothers’ backs for centuries. Now, the practice of generations of women could become a lifesaving tool in the fight against malaria.

Researchers in Uganda have found that treating wraps with the insect repellent permethrin cut rates of malaria in the infants carried in them by two-thirds.

Response crews at work following strikes in Ukraine’s second city as Britain commits £20m after Zelenskyy declares energy emergency. What we know on day 1,423

Russian forces destroyed a large energy facility in Ukraine’s second-biggest city, Kharkiv, the mayor said on Thursday, the latest target of a winter air campaign by Moscow that has plunged millions of Ukrainians into darkness and cold. Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that emergency crews were working around the clock, while he did not specify what sort of facility had been hit. Regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said officials were assessing the extent of damage.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy proceeded with a drive to tackle the damage inflicted by Russian strikes, chairing a meeting aimed at securing quick decisions from regional leaders. The Ukrainian president said there had been new strikes on the capital into the evening. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said about 300 apartment buildings remained without heat after a 9 January attack knocked out heating to half the city’s high-rises.

The UK on Friday announced new emergency energy support of £20m ($27m) for Ukraine after Zelenskyy declared a state of emergency following sustained attacks on the country’s power infrastructure. He acted as emergency crews worked to restore heating and electricity in Kyiv and other cities after last week’s attacks by Russia knocked out supplies during sub-zero temperatures. The British support includes funding aimed at keeping electricity and heating on in homes, hospitals and schools across winter.

The Ukrainian prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, introduced measures to deal with power and heating outages, reducing overnight curfews and allowing businesses and government institutions to import more power. School holidays in Kyiv were extended until 1 February. Foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said the foreign and energy ministries had organised an appeal for funds to help tackle Ukraine’s energy problems, similar to periodic meetings on arms supplies. Norway, he said, had made an initial grant of $200m.

The International Monetary Fund chief, Kristalina Georgieva, met with Zelenskyy and other top Ukrainian officials in Kyiv in a surprise visit on Thursday, telling Reuters she expected to send a new $8.1bn lending program to the fund’s board for approval in coming weeks. The program would help to unlock funds from other institutions for the country, said Georgieva, on her first visit to Ukraine since 2023. During her trip to the capital – kept secret until her arrival by train before dawn – she honoured fallen soldiers and inspected energy infrastructure hit by Russian strikes.

Anti-corruption investigators have reportedly accused Yulia Tymoshenko, the prominent Ukrainian opposition figure and former prime minister, of organising a scheme to bribe MPs – said to include figures from Zelenskyy’s own party – to undermine him. A spokesperson for the specialised anti-corruption prosecutor’s office (Sapo) said on Wednesday that Tymoshenko had been charged after the offices of her Fatherland party were raided late on Tuesday night by officers from Sapo and the national anti-corruption bureau, report Peter Beaumont and Artem Mazhulin. Tymoshenko has not been formally identified but she released a statement denying any accusations.

Nato secretary general Mark Rutte spoke to Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss the latest Russian attacks on Ukraine. Rutte posted on X that they talked on Thursday “about the energy situation in Ukraine, with Russia’s attacks causing terrible human suffering, as well as on the ongoing efforts to bring an end to the war”. He also said: “We’re committed to ensuring that Ukraine continues to get the crucial support needed to defend today and ultimately secure a lasting peace.” In his account of the conversation, Zelenskyy said he discussed the “serious challenges” posed by the latest Russian strikes and the need to bolster Ukraine’s air defences.

Zelenskyy said on Thursday that Ukraine was not an obstacle to peace, pushing back against comments made a day earlier by Donald Trump. “We also talked about diplomatic work with America – Ukraine has never been and will never be an obstacle to peace,” the Ukrainian president said in his nightly video address.

Pair will be absent ‘for short period’ from vocational trainer, whose charity is under investigation by Charity Commission

The two most senior executives at City & Guilds have been put on leave shortly after a scandal over millions of pounds of bonuses triggered a Charity Commission investigation into the vocational training body.

City & Guilds has told staff that its chief executive, Kirstie Donnelly, and the chief financial officer, Abid Ismail, will be “absent from work for a short period”.

Move comes as calls for Australia-style social media ban for under-16s grow around world

TikTok will begin to roll out new age-verification technology across the EU in the coming weeks, as calls grow for an Australia-style social media ban for under-16s in countries including the UK.

ByteDance-owned TikTok, and other major platforms popular with young people such as YouTube, are coming under increasing pressure to better identify and remove accounts belonging to children.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Just over half of the world’s top economists think global economic conditions will weaken this year, a report by the World Economic Forum has found.

Its survey found that 53% of chief economists expect global economic conditions will weaken in the year ahead – which marks an improvement compared with 72% who said so in September 2025.

The chief economists survey reveals three defining trends for 2026: surging AI investment and its implications for the global economy; debt approaching critical thresholds with unprecedented shifts in fiscal and monetary policies; and trade realignments.

Governments and companies will have to navigate an uncertain near-term environment with agility while continuing to build resilience and invest in the long-term fundamentals of growth.”

Exclusive: David Hinton, who faces calls to resign, will receive payout regardless of performance if he stays until July 2030

• South East Water could lose operating licence after outages
• Business live – latest updates

The boss of the company that has left thousands of households in south-east England without water for days is in line for a £400,000 long-term bonus regardless of his performance, if he resists calls for him to resign over the outages.

David Hinton, the chief executive of South East Water, is to receive the payout if he stays on until July 2030.

The title is loaded with meaning for all Koreans, and will give fans globally an insight into the folksong culture that shaped the world’s biggest K-pop group

BTS announced their long-awaited comeback and world tour this week, with their first full-length album in nearly four years set for release on 20 March.

On Friday, the K-pop group revealed its title – Arirang – a choice that carries profound emotional weight for Koreans. So what does it mean, what is its significance for the Koreas, and why did BTS choose it?

How a boardroom flare-up sparked an international boycott – and a looming defamation battle

It began as a quiet programming dispute in the genteel city of churches.

But by Wednesday morning, a frantic, six-day war of words had culminated in the end of the 2026 Adelaide writers’ week and total institutional collapse.

The longtime friends and colleagues add weight to Joe Carnahan’s enjoyably boisterous Friday night crowdpleaser

January has long been a B-movie buffet for those exhausted by prestige awards bait, a month when Gerard Butler and Jason Statham are suddenly commanding wide releases and often No 1 mini-hits. But as the former’s apocalyptic sequel Greenland 2: Migration lingers in the top five and the latter’s action romp Shelter prepares to premiere, we find two more prominent stars – Oscar winners Ben Affleck and Matt Damon – resigned to the small screen instead.

In a non-Netflix world, a film like The Rip – flashy, action-heavy, led by two household names – should be available this weekend on the biggest high-format screens across the country. But then in that same world, at this particular time, it’s doubtful that a film like this would even get made, granted a budget that’s reportedly close to $100m, highly unusual for R-rated non-IP. The streamer was, in fact, so keen to get it made that it has briefly agreed to change its pay structure, allowing Affleck and Damon to bring across their profit-sharing Artists Equity rule, by which each member of the cast and crew gets a bonus if the film performs well. So, as with many films at this weird moment, it’s a take-what-you-can-get situation and while it would have been preferable to see a film like this, which looks and feels like it was made in 2002, on the big screen, the landscape has dictated that the small will have to do.

Tilda Swinton delves into hidden family secrets in Joanna Hogg’s poignant haunted house tale, and Nida Manzoor’s wedding sabotage film is a punchy delight

There are plenty of creaks and bumps in the night in Joanna Hogg’s latest drama, set in a Welsh country hotel shrouded in mist. But despite the haunted house trappings, this is a place where the ghosts are mostly memories. Tilda Swinton, always a sensitive performer, takes dual roles: film-maker Julie and her elderly mother, Rosalind. They come to stay at the rural venue – which used to be the home of Rosalind’s aunt – as a nostalgia trip and a birthday treat for Rosalind. But Julie is unsettled by unexplained noises, while her buttoned-up parent’s recollections of childhood visits there encompass the bad as well as the good. A poignant tale of love, loss and remembrance.
Friday 23 January, 11pm, BBC Two

Sophie Turner is excellent as an office worker caught up in an armed heist, while Bella Hadid leads Ryan Murphy’s flashy and deeply unserious drama about an injection that comes with the promise: ‘one shot will make you hot’

Zara (Sophie Turner) is half-heartedly slogging away in a mid-ranking job at a pensions company. But her life is dramatically upended when a brutal and terrifyingly efficient gang of robbers appear in her workplace to carry out a £4bn heist. This thriller gives up its secrets gradually: what originally seems to be a taut crime caper soon twists and turns in unsettling and credulity-stretching ways. It’s a smart attempt to reimagine the perfect financial crime for the digital age and Turner’s lead performance is deceptively subtle, with her apparent office-drone apathy eventually barely concealing a surprising level of slick calculation. Archie Madekwe is also excellent as her sidekick Luke.
Prime Video, from Wednesday 21 January

The comedian goes paddleboarding with Bongo the tabby in a surprisingly moving new series. Plus, an ‘educational’ Taskmaster spin-off. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
Why are there no cat TV shows? David Baddiel – proud owner of Zelda, Tiger, Ron and Pip – rectifies this with a surprisingly moving three-part ode to all things feline. First, he meets fellow kitty fans Jonathan Ross (cat dad to Pads Pikkleson and Maude Ross) and Philippa Perry (cat mum to Kevin). Then, it’s time for a spot of paddleboarding with Bongo the tabby. And will Larry the Downing Street cat – now 18 years old – let Baddiel pick him up? Hollie Richardson

(Columbia)
Framed as the music Williams wanted to make post-Take That, Britpop surpasses pastiche and swerves unpredictably. Homoerotic paean to Morrissey, anyone?

The arrival of Robbie Williams’s 13th album has been a complicated business. It was announced in May 2025 and was supposed to come out in October, when its title would have chimed with the 90s nostalgia sparked by the Oasis reunion. Williams spent the summer engaging in promotion, unveiling fake Britpop-themed blue plaques around London and staging a press conference at the Groucho Club. There was a launch gig at storied Camden venue Dingwalls, at which he performed not just his new album in full, but his 1997 solo debut Life Thru a Lens.

It was a bold choice, given that Life Thru a Lens initially threatened to derail his solo career: at the time, the now nakedly obvious supernova hits Angels and Let Me Entertain You were overlooked while people criticised Williams’s muddled attempts to fit in with, well, Britpop. On stage at Dingwalls, he made the surprise announcement that the album now wasn’t coming out until mid-February, admitting with winning candour that he didn’t want to compete with Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Now it’s suddenly appeared, without explanation, two weeks into January: presumably because Williams will have fewer competitors in the albums chart this week, giving him a greater chance at breaking the record he currently jointly holds with the Beatles for the most UK No 1 albums ever.

(InFiné)
The composers’ first collaborative album ebbs from epic, cinematic heights to delicate and dreamy lullabies

After years of touring together, Los Angeles-based composers Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have developed what the former refers to as a “musical telepathy”. Tragic Magic, the pair’s first collaborative album, evidences this bond: born out of a short series of improv sessions in Paris, it’s a wonderfully immersive set of new age and ambient tracks, where Barwick’s airy, reverbed vocals and atmospheric synth washes interweave with, and accentuate, Lattimore’s twinkling harp.

The album sessions took place shortly after last year’s California wildfires, which the two musicians experienced as residents. Accordingly, tragedy and hope cut through the dreamlike haze of these unfurling compositions. With its delicate harp loop and hushed whispers, opener Perpetual Adoration is as sweet and dreamy as a lullaby, while the gorgeous, moving Haze With No Haze carries a quiet desperation in the brittle, staccato melody and Barwick’s yearning high register. As always, her lyrics are indiscernible, words blurring into texture and shapeless whispers, but teem with feeling.

(Rough Trade)
The duo’s 13th album finds Jason Williamson as baffled and infuriated as ever at the state of the world, with help from some unexpected collaborators

Over the course of a dozen albums, Jason Williamson (words) and Andrew Fearn (music) have journeyed from DIY to the album chart Top 5 by providing a gut-punchingly bleak and amusingly absurdist commentary on the financial crash, austerity, Brexit and the rise of the far right. On their 13th LP, Williamson again convinces in the role of a potty-mouthed bystander, baffled and infuriated by what goes on around him, whether empty lives in the digital age (“Weights and wanking / Hard bodies and phone lights / That’s all we got”), Trump’s US (“Maga’s off their tits”) or minor daily irritants: “Lazy dog walkers on short walks, mate, wanker!”

However, developments here should gently broaden their appeal. Williamson displays a welcome new vulnerability on the harrowing Gina Was, about a childhood incident. Meanwhile, Fearn is subtly developing his production, venturing beyond electro-punk to use classical strings on Double Diamond and a broader range of collaborators. The combination of Willliamson, Game of Thrones actor Gwendoline Christie’s furious rap and Big Special’s David Bowie-ish crooning on The Good Life makes for one of the most hauntingly catchy things they’ve done.

Daniel Reuss/Noord Nederlands Orkest/Cappella Amsterdam
(Pentatone)
Noord Nederlands Orkest and Cappella Amsterdam breathe colour and light into work from the composer’s most austere period

In his later years, Igor Stravinsky became fascinated by serialism, both as a means of distilling musical thought and as an intellectual and stylistic challenge for a composer entering his 70s and 80s. The results struck some contemporary listeners as austere, but there’s a self-effacing purity and beauty about this complex, intellectually probing music that deserves a wider audience than hitherto. Kudos, then, to conductor Daniel Reuss, whose precise yet vital interpretations teem with colour and light.

There are four main works here. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas from 1954 is an extended, impassioned setting for solo tenor of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Threni, a spiny, multifaceted jewel from 1958, sets words from the Book of Lamentations. The haunting Introitus and bristling Requiem Canticles, from 1965 and 1966 respectively, complete the set, interspersed with briefer pieces including an unpretentious Lord’s Prayer and the severely cerebral two-minute Elegy for JFK.

From classmates to co-parents, the changing dynamics of a female friendship are astutely observed in a novel that explores the boundaries between love, lust and companionship

Australian author Madeleine Gray’s award-winning debut novel Green Dot was a smart, funny tale of a doomed office affair. Her new novel, Chosen Family, is a smart, funny tale of a complicated, life-changing relationship between two women.

Nell and Eve meet aged 12 at a girls’ school in Sydney. Gray’s narrative moves smoothly back and forth from the 00s to the present day; as in David Nicholls’s One Day, we learn about our protagonists by meeting them at different moments in their lives, from the pressures of high school to the alcohol-soaked freedoms of university to the frustrations and joys of early parenthood.

The Lincoln in the Bardo author is back with another metaphysical tale. He discusses Buddhism, partisan politics and the terrifying flight that changed his life

Like his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker prize in 2017, George Saunders’s new novel is a ghost story. In Vigil, an oil tycoon who spent a lifetime covering up the scientific evidence for climate change is visited on his deathbed by a host of spirits, who force him to grapple with his legacy. What draws Saunders to ghost stories? “If I had us talking here in a story and I allowed a ghost in from the 1940s, I might be more interested in it. It might be because they are in fact here,” he says, gesturing to the hotel lobby around us. “Or even if it’s not ghosts, we both have memories of people we love who have passed. They are here, in a neurologically very active way.” A ghost story can feel more “truthful”, he adds: “If you were really trying to tell the truth about this moment, would you so confidently narrow it to just today?”

Ghosts also invite us to confront our mortality and, in so doing, force a new perspective on life: what remains once you strip away the meaningless, day-to-day distractions in which we tend to lose ourselves? “Death, to me, has always been a hot topic,” Saunders says. “It’s so unbelievable that it will happen to us, too. And I suppose as you get older it becomes more …” he puts on a goofy voice: “interesting”. He is 67, grizzled and avuncular, surprisingly softly spoken for a writer who talks so loudly – and with such freewheeling, wisecracking energy – on the page. He says death is close to becoming a “preoccupation” for him and he worries that he is not prepared for it.

A fascinating deep dive into the discovery, use and implications of a revolutionary new treatment

Few aspects of being human have generated more judgment, scorn and condemnation than a person’s size, shape and weight – particularly if you happen to be female. As late as 2022, the Times’s columnist Matthew Parris published a column headlined “Fat shaming is the only way to beat the obesity crisis” in which he attributed Britain’s “losing battle with fat” to society’s failure to goad and stigmatise the overweight into finally, shamefacedly, eating less. The tendency to equate excess weight with poor character (and thinness with grit and self-control) treats obesity as a moral as well as physical failing – less a disease than a lifestyle choice.

One of the great strengths of Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan’s first book is its insistence on framing the discovery of the new weight-loss drugs within the fraught social and cultural context of beauty norms, body image and health. For those who need them, weekly injections of Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro can be revolutionary. Yet for every person with diabetes or obesity taking the drugs to improve their health, others – neither obese nor diabetic – are obtaining them to get “beach-body” ready, fit into smaller dresses, or attain the slender aesthetic social media demands of them. Small wonder some commentators have likened the injections to “an eating disorder in a pen”.

Family trauma shapes a student’s affair with her teacher in this bleak and funny fiction debut from the American memoirist

When it was published in 2022, Jennette McCurdy’s memoir lit a touchpaper to a nascent cultural conversation. I’m Glad My Mom Died introduced her mother Debra’s narcissistic personality disorder into a world eager to discuss adult child and parent estrangement. McCurdy had also suffered sexual abuse, and claimed her mother had contributed to her developing an eating disorder. The memoir was a bestseller, walking readers through the realities of generational trauma; a step change for the former Disney child star who had been “the funny one” on obnoxious Nickelodeon kids’ shows.

In her debut work of fiction, Half His Age, McCurdy continues to shake open a Pandora’s box, shedding light on blurred parent-child boundaries and loss of identity due to over-enmeshment, with solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers’ room.

Showing the value of great design over visual impact, this faithfully resurrected home computer seamlessly integrates modern tech with some wonderful additional touches

The emotional hit was something I didn’t expect, although perhaps I should have. The Commodore 64 Ultimate, a new version of the legendary 8-bit computer, comes in a box designed to resemble the original packaging – a photo of the machine itself on a background of deep blue fading into a series of white stripes. Then when you open it, you find an uncannily accurate replica of what fans lovingly referred to as the breadbox – the chunky, sloped Commodore 64, in hues of brown and beige, the red LED in one corner above the row of fawn-coloured function keys. It’s like 1982 all over again.

My dad bought us a C64 in late 1983. It was our second computer after the ZX81 and it felt like an enormous leap into the future with its detailed colour graphics, advanced sound chip and proper grown-up keyboard. We unpacked it on our dinner table, plugging it into a small portable TV and loading the one game we had, a very basic Donkey Kong clone named Crazy Kong. My life would never be the same again. This contraption was my obsession for the next four years – my friendships and free-time would revolve around games such as Bruce Lee, Paradroid and Hyper Sports. To this day, I treasure the memories of playing golf sim Leaderboard with my dad. The sound effects, speech samples and graphics conjured by that computer have lived rent free in my head for, god, almost 40 years.

When Hollow Knight: Silksong came out last summer I was in so much pain that I didn’t know if I’d be able to play it. Could a video game teach me anything new about suffering?

Last year I became uncomfortably well acquainted with suffering. In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder – burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but everything was painful; even at rest it was horrible. I couldn’t play my guitar; I couldn’t play video games; I couldn’t sleep. I learned how quickly physical suffering lacerates your mental wellbeing.

I’d had episodes of nagging pain from so-called repetitive strain injuries before, the product of long hours hunched over laptops and game controllers over the course of decades, but nothing like this. A few months later, after the initial unrelenting agony had subsided to a permanent hum of more moderate pain, it was diagnosed as brachial neuritis, inflammation of the nerve path that travels from the base of your neck down to your hand. (Nobody knows what causes it, but it sometimes happens after an infection or an injury.) The good news, I was told by a neurologist, was that it usually gets better in about one to three years, and I hadn’t lost any function in my right hand. The bad news was that there was nothing much to be done about the pain in the meantime.

From the greatest cartoon racing game in history to a remastered version of an Alien-inspired sci-fi shooter, here are the Switch’s must-play games

• The 15 best games to play on the Nintendo Switch in 2025

Although the Nintendo Switch 2 has been out for several months, not everyone has made the leap to the new machine and there is still much to enjoy on the original console in 2026 (and beyond). From timeless Mario adventures to cutesy shooters to chasm-deep role-playing quests, here are 15 games no Switch owner should be without.

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

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

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

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Dai Fujikura’s elusive trombone concerto was given its UK premiere by Peter Moore, who made its colours and textures sing; a persuasive but perhaps too sunny reading of Mahler’s first symphony followed in the concert’s second half

Trombone concertos don’t come around every day. The last time this Cinderella of the brass section had a major moment in the spotlight was in 2022, when the Proms hosted their first solo trombonist in almost 20 years. Before that, you have to go back to 2008 for headlines – when a dazzling 12-year-old broke records as the youngest ever winner of BBC Young Musician. The trombone player in each case? Peter Moore.

Now with a decade-long stint at the London Symphony Orchestra under his belt, Belfast-born Moore is one of the great champions of his instrument, whose growing concerto repertoire has a lot to do with his persuasive advocacy. He had an intriguing platform in Dai Fujikura’s Vast Ocean II (2023) – a reworking of the composer’s 2005 trombone concerto, given its UK premiere here by Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

King’s Head theatre, London
Levi Kreis embarks on a journey of rediscovery in song, from self-hating adolescence to self-destructive adulthood

The title of this semi-autobiographical musical is also a massive spoiler. Broadway star Levi Kreis plays a version of himself, battling his demons and facing his past, only to conclude that, however flawed he often feels, he is in fact – ah, you’ve guessed.

This Levi stumbles off stage, inked and emotional, having been dumped by text during a matinee. After 11 sober months, he reaches for the crystal meth – but his soft-eyed sponsor Ben (Yiftach “Iffy” Mizrahi) urges him to confront his inner child, ideally in song. Levi is unconvinced – “my inner child is like Chucky, but he’s human, he’s gay and he thinks he’s Elvis” – but sits at the keyboard and yowls through the pain.

Piotr Anderszewski
(Warner Classics)
Darkness hangs over a fluid and distinctively emotional take on a dozen introspective works

Brahms’s late piano music is a pinnacle of 19th-century Romanticism, though its atmosphere of introspection and veiled emotion is a million miles from the more turbulent works of his youth. Piotr Anderszewski sees in it a testament of sorts, but one that keeps as many secrets as it reveals. By selecting a dozen of these intimate miniatures to make up an absorbing 48-minute programme, the Polish pianist opens a markedly individual window on to the composer’s solitary artistic maturity.

He opens with the aching B-minor Intermezzo from the Op 119 set, the tempo measured and laden with melancholy reflection. Phrasing is fluid across concentrated interpretations that exhibit a distinctive emotional core. The moderate pace continues throughout, with Anderszewski preferring to avoid leavening the mood merely for the sake of contrast. The cumulative effect is one of penetrating regret.

For the first time in the UK, the photographer’s magnum opus is going on display in its entirety – introducing new viewers to New York’s edgy downtown scene and a generation lost to Aids. Here, she looks back at the ‘fearlessness and wildness’ of her life and times

The North Macedonian town celebrated the 1,400-year-old festival over two days. The part-pagan, part-satire carnival is believed to scare away evil spirits, and marks the beginning of the Julian calendar’s New Year.

Following the anniversary of the actor’s death, fans recall his joy at a train platform mishap, enthusing about experimental theatre and an embarrassed double-take

• ‘I fell in love with him on the spot’: friends remember Alan Rickman, 10 years after his death

One of the highlights of my late wife’s life involved Alan Rickman. Returning to university in Manchester in the mid-90s for a new term, she was attempting to put on an enormous rucksack full of books (she did English). As she managed to get the thing on, she experienced an error in balance, fell backwards and laid on the platform, wiggling her arms and legs like an inverted tortoise, unable to move.

Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive!, one of the bestselling live albums of all time, is turning 50. You won’t find that on this list, however: instead there’s metal, soul, and an ‘indecently exciting’ No 1 …

Already stars in Black America, Maze became the ultimate if-you-know-you-know band among British fans of underground soul thanks to Live in New Orleans. It perfectly encapsulated their appeal: smooth but not slick, an awesomely tight band making breezily relaxed music, one fantastic song after another.

Artist and beekeeper who highlights eco crisis plans to spend £40,000 award on building cultural centre in Peru

An artist and beekeeper from a remote corner of the Andes has won one of the UK’s most prestigious contemporary arts awards and plans to spend the £40,000 prize on building a cultural centre in the Peruvian mountains.

Antonio Paucar was declared the winner of the biennial Artes Mundi prize after presenting work ranging from a spiral made of alpaca wool to a video of him writing a poem – in his own blood – about the environmental crisis facing his region as he sits at a table high in the mountains.

Reducing the number of rooms while creating more space turned an uninspiring house into a thing of beauty with an exotic garden to match

Already weary from multiple house viewings that didn’t meet their criteria, Purvi Harlalka and Jyothish George were unenthused when details of a large, long-neglected HMO (house of multiple occupancy) in north London dropped into their inbox. First impressions in real life were equally lacklustre, at least for George.

“We arrived for our viewing and he whispered, ‘There’s no way we’re going to buy this dump!’” says Harlalka. “But later, I convinced him of its potential. It had so much light and, importantly, a garden. I knew it was the one.”

Our readers bask in the memory of great beach discoveries, from Latvia to Sicily
• Send us a tip on Scandinavia or Finland – the best wins a £200 holiday voucher

Forty miles east of Palermo, the magnificent Sicilian resort town of Cefalù juts out beneath dramatic cliffs. The town has a perfect half-moon beach of golden sands melding into the gorgeous clear turquoise sea. Medieval lanes of stones in a diamond pattern lead up to a lively square offering great Italian food. It’s fronted by a beautiful Norman cathedral with twin towers and Byzantine mosaics inside.
David Innes-Wilkin

Cold weather cracking your hands? From cult classics to anti-ageing formulas, these creams will nourish and protect

• The best body moisturisers, tested

The skin on your hands is exposed to all sorts of stressors, from cold weather to cleaning products. Even hand soap can strip skin of its natural oils, causing dryness and irritation. Whether you’re struggling with skin dryness or want something with anti-ageing benefits, there’s probably a hand cream that can help.

The best hand cream for you will depend on the specific problems you’re facing, so I asked dermatologists to identify the best ingredients for each goal. The recommendations here are a result of weeks of thorough testing, based on the expert advice I received.

Best hand cream overall:
L’Occitane shea butter hand cream

Best budget hand cream:
E45 Repairing hand cream

From vintage suede to discount designer heels, these wardrobe staples are often better preloved

• From beeswax to baby wipes: how to make your leather last a lifetime

What’s not to love about secondhand shopping? You get one-off pieces while making an environmentally conscious fashion choice. From party dresses to jeans, some pieces are even better – and much more affordable – vintage. A well-made, brand-new leather jacket could set you back anywhere between £150 and £700, but you could pick up a secondhand one for £50 or less.

But it can be daunting when you first start. Knowing what you’re looking for and where you can find it is key. Consider where to shop: Vinted is good for a high-street steal, while Vestiaire Collective could get you discount designer (and it’s great for shoes; see below). Don’t overlook your local charity shop, either: some of my most satisfying secondhand buys have come from Oxfam or Crisis.

Are you easing into 2026 by resting and restoring? Or hitting it at 100mph? Either way, we have tips, tech and ideas for you. Plus, low- and no-alcohol drinks and cold weather essentials

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As you open a new calendar and the pressure mounts to become a shinier, fitter, more optimised version of yourself, it’s worth acknowledging a small but liberating truth: January is a really awkward month to reinvent your life.

It’s cold, it’s dark, everyone’s broke and our collective serotonin is running low. Which is why, this year, we’re proposing two equally valid paths – and suggesting we stop pretending we have to choose just one.

The best exercise bikes for home workouts, spin and getting sweaty, tested

‘A sign to change your technique’: how to make your toothbrush last longer – and keep it out of landfill

I tried 75 low- and no-alcohol drinks: here are my favourite beers, wines and spirits

How to dress in cold weather: 10 stylish and cosy updates for winter

The big freeze: 21 winter essentials to get you through the cold snap

‘A classic citric-forward twang and complex flavour’: the best supermarket marmalade, tasted and rated

Most resolutions don’t survive past January, so how do you make a change that lasts? Readers share their top tips, from habit stacking to drinking their second coffee outdoors

• Motivation-boosting buys to help you stick to your resolutions

January often starts with a long list of unrealistic resolutions – and ends with them all being abandoned. But some good habits are worth keeping, whether that’s flossing daily, getting exercise or eating more plants.

So how do you build a habit that sticks – and what helped you to do it? We asked for your tips on changes that worked, from drinking your second cup of coffee outdoors to reminders to move (or putting a trampoline in your kitchen).

Moreish teatime treats that melt in the mouth… go on, you deserve it

If I were to rank my top biscuits of all time, Viennese fingers would sit firmly in my top three. There’s not too much going on: just a good, buttery crumb, melt-in-the-mouth texture and chocolate-dipped ends, which are a must. While they’re pretty straightforward to make, issues often arise when it’s time to pipe the dough, and it can be tricky to strike a balance between a consistency that has enough butter but still holds its shape once baked. I find that the addition of a little milk helps make it more pipeable, as does using a large, open-star nozzle to avoid cramped hands and burst piping bags.

There are some decent wine substitutes out there that are worth trying – but it’s always worth remembering that they aren’t actually ‘wine’

Are you a lover of oaky rioja, or maybe zingy Kiwi sauvignon blanc, and looking to find a non-alcoholic lookalike? To put it bluntly, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Alcohol does much more than make you tipsy; it is the magic ingredient that gives so much of wine’s wondrous complexity, character and charm. Not only does it carry volatile compounds that make up wine’s endlessly fascinating combinations of scents and tastes, along with a sensation of warmth, it also creates that viscous body and texture – what’s rather grossly known in the trade as “mouthfeel” – of the liquid in your mouth, and the overall balance of all these factors in the wine.

When the base wine is dealcoholised, however, all that character goes with it. Compared with beer’s relatively low-alcohol content, wine’s usual 11%-15% ABV means that, when the alcohol has gone, you feel its absence more, which is partly why nolo beers are generally more successful than nolo wine. That said, there are some wine substitutes that are worth trying, but, to avoid disappointment, my advice is to see them as drinks that aren’t wine because, well, they’re simply not.

Whether you’re abstaining or just cutting back, a glass of red, white or rosé can elevate everything from risottos and stews to pasta and puddings

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Hands up, who is dry Januarying? While it’s not something I do explicitly, I do like to cut back a bit at the beginning of the year. The marathon that is Christmas socialising can be fun but relentless, and I imagine there are many others in the same boat. When it comes to wine, at least, the problem with cutting back is what to do with the rest of the bottle. Sure, I’ll have a glass or two if I fancy it one evening, but it’s pretty much a wasted bottle if you don’t finish the rest within a few days. Fear not – I have a plethora of recipes that will ensure you never need to waste a drop – enjoy a glass or two, then use the rest in the dish of your choice. Winner, winner, chicken Marbella dinner (one of my all-time effortless favourites – scroll the link for the recipe).

There are lots of excellent suggestions in this wonderful feature on how to incorporate wine into everything from pasta to pudding. In particular, the braised short ribs from James Ramsden immediately caught my attention, as this is precisely the kind of food I want to be making and eating right now. Preferably with a pan of oozy, buttery polenta on the side. Another dish that is ticking all the cold, winter boxes is Tom Hunt’s meat stew, an all-round great braising method. If you are more of a white wine drinker, then Italian classic chicken cacciatore is equally comforting and would also be perfect with creamy polenta or mash. And let’s not forget about rosé – whoever says you can only drink it in the summer has clearly not read Fiona Beckett’s strong case for this delicate pink drink being enjoyed year-round. While the recipe for these prawns with garlic and chilli calls for white wine, I am confident you could happily switch for rosé.

Sustainable fresh scallops are best treated simply, and this herby, garlicky breadcrumb topping ticks all the right boxes

As a kid growing up in West Bay, Dorset, I used to sit on the harbour wall and watch the small trawlers coming in with their catch. My friend Mark’s dad’s boat, along with all the others, would be stacked high with sacks of queenies that they’d dredged up only hours before, and Mark’s mum would pack us off to school with a tub each of queen scallop meat doused in Sarson’s vinegar and white pepper, to eat later as a playground snack. At the time, I thought nothing of it, but, looking back now, I realise quite what a luxurious schoolday treat this was.

These days, however, our local scallop fishermen don’t fish for queenies much any more, because the time it takes to shuck and clean them is more or less the same as that for larger king scallops, so they’re no longer financially viable; also, instead of all those trawlers that Lyme Bay had in the past, it’s now mostly divers who fish more sustainably for king scallops, without demolishing the sea bed in the process. There are two main dive boats that fish out of Lyme Regis nowadays, operated by Jon Shuker and Ali Day, and they’ve pretty much cornered the local market. They recently started experimenting with so-called “disco scallops”, which are caught in pots fitted with flashing lights that lure them in, which is much more efficient, crew-wise, than diving, because a boat with one diver is legally required to have a crew of four, comprising the working diver, a standby diver, a supervisor and a driver. Crazy, eh?

Margaret says her daughter didn’t pay the airport charge, so it’s on her. Georgie says this cock up is all her mum’s doing. You decide who got them into this fine mess
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

We dropped Georgia off in her own car and she didn’t pay the drop-off fee, so the fine is hers

I didn’t know you had to pay for drop-off. Mum knew and didn’t tell me, so she should help pay

Researcher calls for guidelines for diagnosing prolonged grief disorder to be expanded to cover people who lose pets

Grief over the death of a pet could be as chronic as that for a human family member, research has shown, confirming what many people already know about their bond with their furry friends.

People grieving the loss of a pet can suffer from prolonged grief disorder (PGD), a mental health condition brought about by the death of a loved one, a survey published in the academic journal PLOS One has found.

Sex parties allow Conrad and Callum to explore their desires in a safe space – and as couple

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

We keep the connection with subtle signals, glances across the room and an unspoken agreement that we won’t disappear

Counselling should help, but it sounds as if you need to slow down and give yourself time to grieve

I am 37 years old, happily married and have two children, who came along quickly after we got married in my late 20s. I instantly fell in love with them. However, I wasn’t really emotionally or practically ready, and developed postnatal anxiety.

I’ve always cared about the climate crisis, and since after having kids, and knowing it will affect their lives more than mine, I became motivated to make changes. We live a very “green” life.

If you rush it because 31 January is on the horizon you are likely to make mistakes, or not have everything you need

The deadline is 31 January, but don’t put it off – try to set aside enough time over the next few days to complete your tax return for the tax year that ran from 6 April 2024 to 5 April 2025.

This was even though I had revoked my citizenship and now have dual British and German nationality

I want to flag a discriminatory experience I’ve had with the Co-op’s will-writing service.

I asked it to update a will it had drawn up for me in 2020, with my partner and our daughter as the beneficiaries. I received no follow-up for two months.

I have paid two monthly £108 instalments but am now phone-less and out of pocket

I ordered a £544 phone from Amazon. A tracking update later informed me that it “may be lost” and I could request a refund. I pressed the refund option and was directed to customer service, which insisted I wait a week to claim.

A week later I was told I needed to file an incident report from the email address associated with my account. When I complied, the report was rejected as coming from an address that “didn’t meet certain security standards”.

Thousands of people thought they paid the Dart Charge, but only realised when they got a penalty charge notice

You have had a long car journey but, thankfully, remember after you get home that you have to pay the Dart Charge, the toll for driving over the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, part of the busy Dartford Crossing over the Thames linking Essex and Kent. You quickly pay on your phone after searching for the website.

A few weeks later, however, a penalty charge notice (PCN) arrives and you realise you have been duped. The site you thought you had paid the £3.50 toll through was a fraud and the money went to criminals, while you are left with a £70 fine.

It’s becoming more common for people to use AI chatbots for personal guidance – but this doesn’t come without risks

• Sign up for our free newsletter course on how to make AI work for you

If you’re like a lot of people, you’ve probably ditched your new year resolutions by now. Setting goals is hard; keeping them is harder – and failure can bring about icky feelings about yourself.

This year, in an effort to game the system and tilt the scales toward success, some people used AI for their 2026 resolutions. It’s the latest step in an ongoing trend: in September 2025, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released findings showing that using the AI chatbot for personal guidance is very common.

My friends were already experienced climbers, while I was starting at zero. My first day brought many hard lessons

• Read more summer essentials

At first, I didn’t notice it. When it became too big to not notice, I ignored it. In my ignorance, I even mocked it. It wasn’t until it had completely subsumed my inner circle that I was forced to accept reality: my friends can climb up walls like mountain goats.

Bouldering is the art of ascending short “climbs” using time-tested techniques. As much a problem-solving exercise as it is a physical one, it pleases parts of the brain left dormant for millennia. What began as a way to train rock climbers has blossomed into its own culture replete with specialised gear, terminology, community and Italian brain rot memes.

For fifteen years I have been devoted to the sport, but can still barely tackle or shoot. I decided to get a coach and give him the challenge of a lifetime

If I told you I have played football for 15 years, you’d probably assume that I’m decent. Unfortunately, I am not. I have three left feet and a not-very-convincing shot on goal. Despite how many years I have put into the sport, these things show little to no improvement.

I play football for the joy of it: the rush of the first whistle; the exhilaration of making a successful tackle or a clever pass; and the feeling of all fears and concerns melting away the moment the game starts. So until recently, the fact that I’m so bad at it occurred to me as, at worst, incidental. I grew up at a time when football was largely considered a men’s sport. In the 90s, there were about 80 girls’ football clubs in England (there are more than 12,000 now); there wasn’t a women’s premier league until 1994; and by the time I was in my 20s, boring jokes about women knowing the offside rule were wheeled out with disappointing regularity. As someone who still remembers the feeling of getting kicked off the pitch by the boys as soon as I entered year 3, I’ve always just felt blessed to play.

I hadn’t fully grasped how the idea of a better future sustained me – now I, like many others, find it difficult to be productive

A new year is upon us. Traditionally, we use this time to look forward, imagine and plan.

But instead, I have noticed that most of my friends have been struggling to think beyond the next few days or weeks. I, too, have been having difficulty conjuring up visions of a better future – either for myself or in general.

The bandhgala jacket will no longer be part of the formal uniform for Indian Railways staff, following claims it symbolises a ‘colonial mindset’

It is one India’s most ubiquitous garments, with origins in the grand Mughal courts and Rajasthani kingdoms of times past, and still widely favoured by sharply dressed grooms at wedding receptions.

But this week, the distinctive high-collared bandhgala jacket – known to many as the “princely jacket” in a nod to its royal origins – found itself at the centre of a lively debate after it was denounced by the Indian railways minister as a symbol of a “colonial mindset”.

Bring your ostracised wardrobe items in from the cold by forgetting about whether they go with each other. Instead, let them shine in all their glory

Fashion is a dance between rules and rebellion. Great style requires a bit of both. The rules are essential, because one of the key emotional benefits that a great wardrobe can deliver is a sense of control in a chaotic world. The rules are there to simplify and clarify, lighting our route to a well put-together outfit. That well put-together outfit has the power to help you feel calmer, simply because you look in the mirror and see a competent person and therefore feel like a competent person. Style rules also come in useful for making sense of the world around us. Dress codes, style tribes, the signals we send – whether as blatant as the slogan on a T-shirt, or as subtle as the brand of your rucksack – hold an important social function, making other people legible to us.

But style also needs friction. Fashion dies if it stops moving, because moving with the times is what makes it fashion rather than just pretty clothes. The restless forward energy that moves hemlines and invents new silhouettes is what drives the plot and keeps us interested.

Looking for something gentle and kind for a sensitive nose? The new gen Z brands have you covered

For someone who makes no secret of her obsession with fragrance, I’m always surprised by how frequently people ask me to recommend one for someone who hates the stuff.

Sometimes wearing more potent fragrances is impossible for those prone to allergies or migraines, but mostly it’s an instinctive aversion to being held captive all day by scent too pervasive for one’s liking. And in these instances, I invariably suggest the layering of two more subtly scented products with compatible aromas, to add depth and interest without the same strength as a power perfume.

The performative male was over at the 2026 Golden Globes, where even risk-takers like Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi and Jeremy Allen White did little to temper the black tie stuffiness

Timothée Chalamet was the final clue. As he arrived in good time on the Golden Globes red carpet, the star of Marty Supreme put pay to speculation as to whether the chromatic marketing of the film’s ping pong balls would have him wearing orange. Instead, he wore a black T-shirt; vest, jacket and Timberland boots with silver buttons by Chrome Hearts, souped up with a five-figure Cartier necklace. Kylie Jenner, his partner and sartorial foil, was nowhere to be seen.

Styled by Taylor McNeill, who was also responsible for Chalamet’s wildly amusing if chaotic red carpet campaign for the film, the look was bad boy Bond. It also set the tone for an evening of subdued tones. If we thought the penguin suit had gone extinct, we were wrong. The performative male is over – welcome to the return of the staid suit.

Dipping in the freezing waters of Scandinavia, Greenland and Finland was life-changing – and full of warmth thanks to saunas, hot springs and like-minded people

Warm lights shine from the houses that dot the wintry slopes of Mount Fløyen and a cold wind blows as I stand in a swimming costume trying to talk myself into joining my friends in Bergen harbour. Stars are already appearing in the inky mid-afternoon sky.

Life-changing moments are easy to spot in retrospect, but at the time they can feel so ordinary. I didn’t know then that my wintry swim would lead to a year of adventures. I was a hair’s breadth from wimping out, but then I was in. The water was so cold it burned. I gasped for breath. The bones in my feet ached with cold as I trod water, legs frantic under the dark surface. It lasted under a minute and then we were out.

The multi-day trail between the Cumbria and North Yorkshire coasts is one of Britain’s most popular, and now upgrades, path repairs and trail officers aim to preserve it for future generations

A soft breeze tickled the waters of Innominate Tarn, sending ripples dashing across the pool, bogbean and tussock grass dancing at its fringes. From my rocky perch atop Haystacks, I gazed down on Buttermere and Crummock Water glistening to the north, the round-shouldered hulks of Pillar and Great Gable looming to the south. A pair of ravens cronked indignantly, protesting against the intrusion on their eyrie; otherwise, stillness reigned.

Bless you, Alfred Wainwright, I murmured, picturing the hiking legend whose ashes are scattered around this lonely tarn. And then, surprising myself: you too, Rishi Sunak. In very different ways, both had brought me to this most spectacular of Lakeland crags.

Cut out flying and you shred skiing’s carbon footprint. And opting for a high-altitude resort that needs less artificial snow makes it even greener. Les Arcs in the French Alps ticks both boxes

I’ve always wanted to try skiing, but it’s not a cheap holiday and I have always had a lingering suspicion that some resorts are like Las Vegas in the mountains, with artificial snow, damaging infrastructure, annihilated vegetation and air-freighted fine dining – in short, profoundly unsustainable.

However, if there’s a way to have a green family ski holiday, then sign me – and my husband, Joe, two kids and my mum – up. Here’s how to do it.

Three trains, two buses and a ferry take our writer from Essex to Northern Ireland, to enjoy wild swims, whiskey, sandy beaches and the Giant’s Causeway

Oystercatchers fly off as I step through stalks of storm-racked kelp for an icy dip in the winter-grey sea. Actually, the water feels unexpectedly warm, perhaps in contrast to the freezing wind. But it’s cold enough to do its job: every nerve is singing and I feel euphoric. I’m exploring the Antrim coast, which has some of the UK’s finest beaches, and proves excellent for a sustainable break – even in the stormy depths of winter.

Ballygally Castle is a great place to start and offers a Sea Dips and Hot Sips package that includes dry robes, hot-water bottles and flasks. The affordable castle, celebrating its 400th birthday this year, is perhaps Northern Ireland’s only 17th-century hotel.

These long, hangover-free January weekends offer a great opportunity for some horticultural housekeeping

Lots of pressure at this time of year, isn’t there? All those pink cheeks and sweaty brows puffing their way around the park in dusted-down trainers; all those Botivo mocktails (delicious, for what it’s worth) as we strive to self-improve during one of the most grisly months of the year. I’ve never really been one for resolutions, nor time-measured sobriety (amazing how having small children deflates one’s desire to drink enough to conjure a hangover). I prefer to believe that we should mirror what the outdoor world is doing at this time: namely hibernating in an attempt to store up energy for the warmer months that are to come.

Still, if you really feel you must do something vaguely horticultural at this time of year, can I suggest you get your seeds in order? I still think about a photograph I saw of Monty Don’s seed stash in a colour supplement years ago. It was housed in a pleasingly bashed-up vintage index-card cabinet, tucked against the wall of his potting shed – a building with more natural light and square footage than many flats I’ve lived in. How chic! How clever! How deliciously organised!

From a city tower block with its own salon to pamper your pooch to a thatched cottage with a dog flap to the garden

From postcode pricing to falling wholesale costs, the price you pay at the pump depends less on petrol itself than on where – and when – you fill up

Why do petrol prices vary so much between filling stations? On the same road I’ve seen a 5p-a-litre difference on what must be an identical product, while the same chains charge differently from town to town.

Weird, isn’t it? Of all the things we buy, the price of petrol is probably the most transparently disclosed before we enter the retailer’s premises, and yet this only serves to leave us wondering why how much we pay can come down to where we live, or even on which side of the road we are driving.

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

Full interview with Nickie Aven, available here

Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered

In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.

It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.

With a huge audience and serving as an avatar for millions of centrist Americans, Rogan compares ICE raids to Gestapo

Joe Rogan’s comparison of US immigration raids to Gestapo operations, made during a podcast episode earlier this week, has sparked speculation about whether the wildly popular podcaster, who endorsed Donald Trump in 2024, has fully soured on Trump’s presidency – and what that might say of the millions of mainly young men who listen to Rogan’s show.

Rogan’s views, as expressed in the podcast discussion, were more complicated than the Gestapo remark taken alone might make them seem. Yet even his more measured skepticism about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids feels somewhat significant, given Rogan’s cultural status and the evidence that Americans in general are turning against Trump’s hardline anti-immigration efforts.

Key maps show the growing strategic importance of Greenland as Arctic ice melts under global heating

Lying between the US and Russia, Greenland has become a critical frontline as the Arctic opens up because of global heating.

Its importance has been underscored by Donald Trump openly considering the US taking the island from its Nato partner Denmark, either by buying it, or by force.

We would like to hear about what your pet meant to you and your family

Grief over the death of a pet could be as chronic as that for a human family member, according new research published in the academic journal PLOS One.

According to the study, grieving pet owners can suffer from prolonged grief disorder (PGD) – although currently only those grieving the loss of a person can be diagnosed.

We would like to hear about your much-loved locals. What was the pub that changed you – and how?

As part of a new series, writers are telling the stories of the pub that changed them, kicking off with Zoe Williams who was barred from the Spoons she adored most.

Now we would like to hear about your much-loved locals. Was there a bar of your past that left a lasting impression on you? What was the pub that changed you – and how? Let us know and we’ll publish a selection of your responses.

We’d like to hear from young people, parents and teachers about how Elon Musk’s controversial chatbot is affecting you

Degrading images of real women and children with their clothes digitally removed by Elon Musk’s Grok tool continue to be shared online, despite widespread alarm and a pledge by the platform to suspend users who generate them.

While some safeguards have been introduced, the ease with which the AI tool can be abused has raised urgent questions about consent, online safety and the ability of governments worldwide to regulate fast-moving AI technologies. Meanwhile, the misuse of AI to harass, humiliate and sexually exploit people – particularly women and girls – is rapidly escalating.

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

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

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

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