Chelsea 1-0 Arsenal: Women’s Super League – live reaction

• Women’s Super League updates, 12.30pm GMT kick-off
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In case you were not already aware, Chelsea agreed a $1.1million deal with San Diego Wave for USA defender Naomi Girma this week. Here’s what our very own Tom Garry had to say about the historic transfer…

Sonia Bompastor has just all-but confirmed the signing of Naomi Girma. The Chelsea manager told BBC Sport: “Yes, we will probably have to announce something about Naomi soon.”

Sukkwan Island review – a survival drama takes an ill-advised left-turn

Sundance film festival: Anatomy Of A Fall’s Swann Arlaud plays a father who gets caught in a dangerous situation with his son in a well-made yet frustrating misfire

As writer-director, Vladimir de Fontenay has taken the central novella Sukkwan Island from David Vann’s autobiographical short-fiction collection from 2009, detached it from the surrounding complex constellation of stories related to this main piece and presents it here as a standalone drama of father-son bonding.

The resulting film begins as something forthright and heartfelt; it looks as if it’s going to be a liberatingly scary wilderness adventure out there in the real world away from cellphones, social media etc. But with its strenuous yet subdued performances and weirdly cramped and gloomy narrative, it leads us finally into a blind alley: a twist-reveal which I found fundamentally unsatisfying.

Sukkwan Island is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Rabbit Trap review – Dev Patel gets lost in the woods in messy folk horror

Sundance film festival: Strong performances and an eerie atmosphere can’t save an increasingly baffling 70s-set curio

After Rose Byrne’s stress-inducing motherhood-is-hell panic attack If I Had Legs I’d Kick You premiered, 70s-set folk horror Rabbit Trap is providing yet more confirmation to Sundance attendees that children should be avoided. In writer-director Bryn Chainey’s patchy feature debut, his lead couple might not have a child of their own, but a mysterious local stranger would certainly disagree, forcing himself into their household, whether they like it or not.

For a while they do, sound recordist Darcy (Dev Patel) and alternative musician Daphne (Rosy McEwen), charmed and intrigued by the nameless kid (Jade Croot), an unusual and self-possessed boy eager to teach them more about the area. They moved to a remote Welsh cottage from London, both transfixed by the many sounds of nature, hoping it might lead to creative inspiration. Chainey is as fascinated as they are and it’s immediately easy to see why, the film’s ASMR immersion into the specific squishes, gusts and crunches of the countryside around them proving to be entirely transporting.

Rabbit Trap is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

The anti-abortion movement weighs its next move: ‘We haven’t gone away’

The movement is on the upswing thanks to Trump but a question lingers: what is their role in his administration?

Minutes into the National Pro-Life Summit, Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, had convinced its more than attendees to leap to their feet. She was recording a video, and she had a message she wanted them to send to Donald Trump.

“THANK YOU MISTER PRESIDENT!” the crowd in the ballroom thundered, before bursting into raucous applause – complete with wolf whistles.

Democratic lawmakers devising legal obstacles to fight anti-immigration push

California, New York and other states resist by expanding healthcare and education and limiting detention centers

As Donald Trump tightens the nation’s immigration policies, lawmakers in Democrat-led states are proposing new measures that could erect legal obstacles for federal immigration officials and help immigrants lacking legal status avoid deportation.

The resistance efforts in California, New York and other states are a counterpoint to the many Republican-led states advancing measures to aid Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, highlighting a national divide.

What is Trump’s game with TikTok? | Lloyd Green

This is what crony capitalism looks like. Trump’s delay contravenes the law Congress passed last spring

The Trump TikTok flip-flop continues as the 47th president has shoved his finger into the eye of Congress. With scant legal authority, he has paused the divestment of the app by ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent. After issuing an executive order on point, the president then held out the possibility that Larry Ellison of Oracle, a Trump-backer, or Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, would scoop-up TikTok.

This is what crony capitalism looks like. Trump’s delay contravenes the law Congress passed last spring, which set a 19 January 2025 divestment deadline. Last week, the US supreme court unanimously held that Congress acted within its constitutional rights to sever the link between TikTok and China.

Is language the key to resolving the WFH v back-to-the-office culture wars? | Emma Beddington

Those who work from home and their office-based colleagues need to understand each other better – and that starts with language. Here’s my new corporate glossary

I note, wearily, that the work culture wars grind on. We are in the midst of yet another push to get staff back in to the office, with Amazon, Morgan Stanley and Asda all desperately trying to stuff the human genie back into its cubicle bottle. Staff at the Office for National Statistics and the Land Registry, among others, have voted to strike to preserve their right to work from home (WFH). Stuart Rose, former CEO of M&S and until November executive chair of Asda, told Panorama that home work isn’t “proper work” and the Mail quotes a “Gen Z CEO” saying he is wrong. Can’t we all just get along?

One possible explanation for the continued conflict is that we have become strangers to each other. Absence made the heart grow more suspicious: our office-based overlords think we WFHers have become an army of side-hustling slackers. We, meanwhile, know them only by their diktats: to us they are as blankly remote and unrelatable as extras in Severance.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

None of us wants to think about death. But pretending it won’t happen may not be the best option

No matter how much we put it off, the bell will toll for each of us. How do we process that eternal human dilemma?

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

When I was 16, a good friend of my older brother was killed in a car accident. The vehicle he was driving had slid into a parked truck on a country road. Apparently, there was barely a mark on him, but he had hit his head in the wrong spot, and just like that, his life was extinguished. He was 18.

I remember my mother answering the phone call that conveyed that news and hearing her burst into tears. For about a year afterwards, whenever the phone rang in our house, I felt a surge of anxiety. Death had come near, and I found it profoundly shocking. Years later, and with a decades-old religious faith, I am only partially cured of the discomfort at the thought of death.

Inside the 100-year fight to get a Black revolutionary pardoned

Joe Biden’s pardon of Marcus Garvey capped a decades-long campaign to restore the reputation of one of the most significant Black leaders of the 20th century

In the days before President Joe Biden’s final moments in office, Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor, received a call from a White House staffer. They told Hansford that Marcus Garvey, the revolutionary Jamaican leader who pushed for the unity of Black people and a collective return to Africa, would soon be posthumously pardoned for mail fraud.

Hansford dialed in Garvey’s son, Dr Julius Garvey, for a three-way call to break the news to him before it hit the newspaper circuit. As he thought of his nearly two decades of legal and advocacy work to help exonerate Garvey, Hansford remembered Garvey’s wife Amy Jacques who began the efforts to pardon him in 1923.

From showers to tiny fish to windmills, Trump’s climate policies are driven by fixations

‘It was striking that the White House memo included toilets and shower heads as a presidential priority,’ said one expert

From crusading against showers he feels don’t sufficiently wash his hair to reversing protections for a small fish he calls “worthless”, Donald Trump’s personal fixations have helped shape his first environmental priorities as US president.

While withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accords and declaring an “energy emergency” were among Trump’s most noteworthy executive orders on his first day in office, both were further down a list of priorities put out by the White House than measures to improve “consumer choice in vehicles, shower heads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs and dishwashers”.

Salt ’n’ pepper chips, hash brown bhaji, hot honey and bacon mash – Poppy O’Toole’s potato recipes

From chef to social-media sensation, the queen of spuds celebrates ‘the glory’ of the humble potato

Potatoes are my heart, so it had to happen,” says Poppy O’Toole, the 31-year-old chef and TikTok superstar once referred to by Nigella Lawson as the “high priestess of the potato”. O’Toole has every reason to be sincere about the humble spud. In November 2020, when she was an out-of-work chef, she made a TikTok video of her “crispy crunchy parmesan roasties”, which quickly got a million views. Since then, she has built up 4.4 million followers on TikTok, 1.1 million on Instagram, and is a regular on TV, whipping up potato dishes on Saturday Kitchen and This Morning. It is only a wonder that it has taken her so long to get around to writing an entire potato-themed cookbook. Next month’s The Potato Book is the fourth in her Poppy Cooks series. “Good things come to those who wait,” she says.

I meet O’Toole for coffee in a cafe in the centre of Birmingham. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got green fingers,” she says. Last night she went to a party dressed as Shrek. She grew up in the West Midlands, lives nearby, and a lot of her training was done here, first under Glynn Purnell at the recently closed Purnell’s, and then under Alex Claridge at the Wilderness. We drool over one of the city’s very best potato dishes, the aloo tuk at Opheem. “Aktar Islam knows how to respect a vegetable,” she says, admiringly. When she was writing The Potato Book, she realised that in all of her previous jobs, she’d been asked to look after the spuds. “They’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, Poppy, do dauphinoise’, or ‘Poppy, do the fondant potatoes’. Maybe I was always meant to be the potato queen.”

Australian Open 2025: the best images from women’s and men’s finals – in pictures

As Madison Keys and Jannik Sinner celebrate victory, we take a look at some of the best images from both finals

At least 420,000 still without power in UK and Ireland after Storm Éowyn

Repair efforts hampered by strong winds and rain as Met Office issues new storm-related weather warnings

More than 400,000 properties across the UK and Ireland remain without power after the battering by Storm Éowyn, with repair efforts hampered by continuing strong winds and rain.

In Northern Ireland about 101,000 households and businesses were without power on Sunday while in Scotland the figure was 20,000.

Should Los Angeles be in such a rush to rebuild after the devastating wildfires?

Experts suggest that replicating the conditions that saw neighorhoods burn to the ground may not be the best policy

Gavin Newsom signed a $2.5bn wildfire relief package this week, with the goal of helping Los Angeles “rebuild faster”. Both the California governor and the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, pledged to suspend environmental and other regulations to make rebuilding homes and businesses easier. Donald Trump has reportedly said he wants the city to recover quickly so that the 2028 Olympics, which Los Angeles is hosting, can be “the greatest Games”.

But many environmental and urban planning experts say that Los Angeles should actually be pausing, and taking a moment to consider how and where to safely rebuild communities located in high-risk wildfire zones.

Alex Kapranos: ‘It took me a few years to realise that I didn’t have to drink everything on the rider’

The Franz Ferdinand frontman, and former chef, on songwriting, souffles and celebrating his Greek roots

Alex Kapranos has been a regular at Le Pantruche since he made Paris his most regular home two or three years ago, following his marriage to French singer-songwriter Clara Luciani. The bistro is a 1930s fantasy of a neighbourhood restaurant in Pigalle, set among the guitar shops of the city’s equivalent of Tin Pan Alley or Denmark Street: a dozen tables and a well-stocked bar crowded into a tiny shopfront room; today’s wines by the glass chalked on a board (nothing over €10); a menu that changes according to what seasonal flavours chef Franck Baranger is excited about cooking; casually stylish regulars who all seem to know Martin, waiter and maitre d’, by name.

Kapranos was introduced to the restaurant by the producer of Franz Ferdinand’s new album, who has a studio round the corner. He loves it here for many reasons, he says, but specifically for the everyday miracle of its Grand Marnier souffle. Before he was a rock star, Kapranos was a chef himself, most notably at Glasgow’s outpost of London’s Groucho Club, Saint Judes, so he knows what’s involved. “At Saint Judes, we used to do this thing called an inside-out chocolate pudding,” he says. “When it was perfectly executed, you had this wonderful light crust a bit like a cannoli. And then you would just tap it gently, and the whole thing would collapse in on itself and this gooey, delicious chocolate would ooze out. But to get it right was literally a margin of about 10 seconds of cooking. And if you fucked it up, that meant you had to start again. We didn’t even try souffles – but when they do them perfectly each time here, I’m still just awestruck.”

Meliz Berg’s secret ingredient: dried mint

This distinctive but often overlooked dried herb is brilliant in meatballs, and balances salty cheese or sweet dried fruit

It’s my favourite dried herb. Dried mint, I think, is one of those ingredients, especially in Cypriot cuisine, that has such a distinctive flavour profile, just a teaspoon can immediately change a dish. We use it a lot in cakes and pastries such as pilavuna. This is a Cypriot pastry filled with cheese, but the dried mint offsets that saltiness.

It pairs incredibly well with hellim [halloumi], another quintessential Cypriot ingredient. So if we’re making any kind of pasta dish, there’s no parmesan – instead we use finely grated hellim with dried mint.

What does the inauguration’s authoritarian-chic fashion tell us? Designers are suddenly eager to dress the Trumps | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

The first time round, high fashion shunned the president’s family. Now industry figures are flocking to them

Mussolini once said that “any power whatsoever is destined to fail before fashion. If fashion says skirts are short, you will not succeed in lengthening them, even with the guillotine.” For that reason, far-right authoritarian movements have long attempted to capture the fashion system. We can argue endlessly about whether the new Trump administration can be compared to fascism. I think that it meets most of the key traits identified by Umberto Eco, but others will disagree. Regardless of your stance, it’s fair to say that the women of the Republican party have deployed fashion in ways that send a political message.

Though men especially like to highlight fashion’s supposed vapidity (tell that to Roland Barthes, I always think) it is an art form and a visual language that has much to tell us about the state of the world, and is as worthy of analysis as any other aspect of culture. The rise of the tradwife – and the modest, floral prairie dresses so beloved by these rightwing influencers, which then trickled down to the high street – has mirrored the shift in the US much further to the right. As this new administration inevitably comes to roll back more women’s rights, I wonder how it will be reflected in fashion. Prairie dresses are on the way out, but there are other styles to replace them.

Madison Keys’ mental breakthrough helps her unlock potential at last

Years of personal work have enabled the Australian Open champion to showcase her talent on the biggest stage

“Lots of therapy,” said a delirious, exhausted Madison Keys as she finally appeared at her post-match press conference in the early hours of Sunday morning. Flanked by an enormous trophy on one side and a glass of champagne on the other, the American was still in the early stages of digesting her emotions after finally achieving the dream she had been chasing since she was a child.

After becoming the oldest first-time women’s singles Australian Open champion in history at 29 by defeating the No 1 seed, Aryna Sabalenka, in an incredible three-set battle on Saturday, the question posed to Keys was when and how she had come to the realisation that things needed to change.

Donald Trump says residents of Greenland want to be part of US

President tells reporters he believes US will take control of island, after reports of ‘horrendous’ call with Denmark PM

Donald Trump has said he believes the US will take control of Greenland, after details emerged of a “horrendous” call in which he made economic threats to Denmark, which has said the territory is not for sale.

Speaking onboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said: “I think we’re going to have it,” and claimed that the Arctic island’s 57,000 residents “want to be with us”.

Australian Open final: Jannik Sinner downs Zverev to win third grand slam

• World No 1 wins 6-3, 7-6 (4), 6-3 to claim men’s singles title
• Sinner successfully defends trophy he won in 2024

As he worked hard to maintain the momentum he had built in his third grand slam final, there was just one fleeting moment where Jannik Sinner was seriously under pressure. Down 5-6, 30-30 on his serve in the second set, as Alexander Zverev tried desperately to steal the set, the German pounced on a forehand and flitted forward to the net. Sinner responded to the danger by producing one of the most brilliant points of the tournament, chasing down every last shot before slipping a pinpoint backhand winner past his flailing opponent at the net.

It was another demonstration of supreme mental fortitude from an incredible tennis player who continues to establish himself as a potential all-time great. After wresting control of the match again, Sinner closed out a ruthless, efficient performance with a 6-3, 7-6 (4), 6-3 victory over Zverev, the second seed, to win his second Australian Open title.

South Korean president indicted for insurrection over martial law decree

Impeached leader Yoon Suk Yeoul could face years in prison after six-hour imposition which set off political upheaval

South Korea’s prosecutors indicted the impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, on Sunday on charges of leading an insurrection with his short-lived imposition of martial law on 3 December, the main opposition party said.

The charges are unprecedented for a South Korean president, and if convicted, Yoon could face years in prison for his shock martial law decree, which sought to ban political and parliamentary activity and control the media.

‘We’re watching mass delusion happen’: Trump’s return to White House brings cascade of lies

In first week in office, president has made false claims on topics from immigration and economy to Panama canal

Donald Trump had been US president again for less than 15 minutes when he made his first factually dubious claim.

“The vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation of the justice department and our government will end,” he said early in his inaugural address. There is no evidence that former president Joe Biden ordered the justice department to prosecute Trump and no violence took place.

‘A slice of 1970s Babylon restored’: living the office dream at the Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke

With its lush terraces, themed gardens and calm interiors, this trailblazing office building by Arup Architects has been treated to a subtle £32m makeover that still has wellness at its heart

“Wellness” is all the rage at the fancier end of modern office development. Anxious to entice valuable employees away from the comforts of working from home, or from defecting to rivals, companies offer them spas, gyms and views of greenery. Proposals for gigantic office blocks in the City of London now come garnished with shrubs and trees and other forms of urban parsley dozens of storeys up in the air. There’s a related mania for running green stuff up the outside of all kinds of buildings. All too often these plans exist more in the realm of gesture than reality, and come without full consideration as to what it actually takes for plants to flourish some distance from the ground.

The idea of achieving wellbeing through multistorey vegetation is not new. It was put into practice a half-century ago with a building known officially as Gateway House, then Mountbatten House and now Plant, more popularly known as the “Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke”. Designed by Arup Associates and the plantsman James Russell (1920-96), it provides six levels of gardens stepping up a sloping site, arranged so that its interiors would never be far from views of greenery, transporting office workers from the mess of roads and office blocks in which it stands up to a world of lush terraces that seem to flow into the surrounding hills. Created during a time when Basingstoke was a “London overspill” area – a government designation that brought with it a smidgin of the forward-looking ideals of new towns, of providing new lives for escapers from the crowded metropolis – Gateway House was to be a model enlightened workplace for the then-200-year-old paper-making company that commissioned it, Wiggins Teape.

Trump suggests Palestinians leave Gaza and ‘we just clean out’ territory

US president says he wants people to move to neighbouring nations, after resuming shipments of 2,000lb bombs to Israel

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has suggested large numbers of Palestinians should leave Gaza to “just clean out” the whole strip, after ordering the US military to restart shipments of 2,000lb bombs to Israel.

The US president said he wanted Gaza residents to move to neighbouring nations, and that they could be displaced “temporarily or could be long-term”, after a phone call with Jordan’s King Abdullah on Saturday.

Rare manuscript from middle ages that inspired Disney castle to go on display for first time in 40 years

Les Très Riches Heures, a ‘book of hours’ made by artists felled by the Black Death, will be shown in France this summer

A celebrated manuscript from the middle ages that inspired a Walt Disney castle but has been unseen by the public and scholars for more than 40 years will go on display in France this summer.

Pages from Les Très Riches Heures (The Very Rich Hours) – an elaborately decorated prayer book from the 15th century – will be exhibited at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris, after a costly restoration. It has not been seen, even by historians and academics, since the 1980s.

From gay clubs to Maga anthem: the absurd, contested history of the Village People’s YMCA

A barely recognizable version of the band performed the 1978 classic at Donald Trump’s inauguration, the latest chapter in a strange tale of disco, feuds and showboating

Jim Newman was over it. “Hell no!” Newman, a Village People member for eight years in the 2010s, wrote in a 15 January Instagram post. “Neither myself or any of my band mates will be performing at Trump’s rallies.” Newman had received a slew of texts asking if he would be on stage with the president in the leadup to the inauguration, and he wanted to set the record straight. “Our Village People would never ever perform at a Trump rally; we would never give him the rights to use those songs.”

Donald Trump has been slowly adopting the song as a campaign anthem since 2018, playing it at rallies and dancing on stage to it. It became a favorite at anti-lockdown rallies, DJ Steve Bannon has spun it and Trump helped it hit No 1 decades after its release on Billboard’s dance/electronic sales chart. It all peaked with a performance of the song by a group calling themselves Village People but containing only one original member, the “cop” Victor Willis, at the inauguration ball. The song was co-written in 1978 by Willis and the French songwriting/production duo Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo.

New accents: the company reshaping Brazilian film by showing ‘ordinary’ life

Filmes de Plástico has filled cinemas and won acclaim by focusing on Black characters living in poor urban areas

After arriving late several times at work, a librarian is dismissed from his school. The HR employee tasked with presenting the bad news offers him a lift, their conversation deepens and by the end of the night they discover they have a lot in common – including a shared history of mental health treatment – and end up falling in love.

In The Day I Met You, the scenarios, the characters’ professions and the actors playing the protagonists – Renato Novaes and Grace Passô – challenge the conventions of Brazilian romantic films: two Black actors in their 40s defying the genre’s usual slender body standards.

Manic Street Preachers: ‘The band feels like something you can go into battle with against the world’

As they release their 15th album, the Manic Street Preachers are as fired up as ever. They talk about tech bros, stealing hotel shampoo and four decades of combining friendship with being in a band

In the video for the Manic Street Preachers’ latest single, Hiding in Plain Sight, we see bassist Nicky Wire getting ready to do his job. He sits in front of a lightbulb mirror, applies glittery eyeshadow, black eyeliner, then stands to add a feather boa, a sailor cap, a jacket covered in badges and home-sewn patches. The other two members of the Manics, guitarist James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore, along with backing singer Lana McDonagh, guitarist Wayne Murray and keyboardist Nick Nasmyth (who play in the Manics live shows) are playing their instruments. Also, because it’s the Manics, everyone’s reading books: Camus’ The Plague, Cynan Jones’s The Dig, Angharad Price’s The Life of Rebecca Jones. “The mirror is a trap that saves/Or a debt that makes you pay,” sings Wire, surrounded by Polaroids of the band when they were young: skinny, obstreperous, beautiful. “I wanna be in love /With the man I used to be/In a decade I felt free”.

It’s curiously defiant, the video. “Yeah, it’s got a bit of resistance to it,” says Wire. “It’s a warped nostalgia. It’s not pretending I can go back.”

Scores killed in hospital attack in Sudan’s besieged El Fasher, says WHO

About 70 people, including patients, believed to have been killed in attack blamed on rebel Rapid Support Forces

About 70 people have been killed in an attack on the only functional hospital in the besieged city of El Fasher in Sudan, the head of the World Health Organization has said, the latest in a series of attacks as the African nation’s civil war has escalated in recent days.

The attack on the Saudi Teaching Maternal hospital was blamed by local officials on the rebel Rapid Support Forces, a group that has recently faced apparent battlefield losses to the Sudanese military and allied forces under the command of army chief Gen Abdel-Fattah Burhan.

Another convicted January 6 US Capitol attacker rejects Trump’s pardon

Jason Riddle says he rejected pardon because ‘it happened. I did those things, and they weren’t pardonable’

At least one more person who was convicted in connection with the 2021 US Capitol attack carried out by Donald Trump supporters has rejected a pardon from the president, saying he believed his actions “weren’t pardonable”.

In an interview published Friday by New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR), US navy veteran Jason Riddle said: “It’s almost like [Trump] was trying to say it didn’t happen. And it happened. I did those things, and they weren’t pardonable.

Ultra-processed food? Forever chemicals? Declining birth rates? What’s behind rising cancer in the under-50s?

Research into the disease has never been more far-reaching, but there is little consensus as to what is causing the rocketing rates of diagnosis in young adults

In 2022, around 16% of the 20 million people with cancer worldwide were under 50. Cancer has always been markedly more of an older person’s disease, says Lynn Turner, director of research at Worldwide Cancer Research. But between 1990 and 2019, the incidence of the disease in under-50s rose by 79%, according to research published in the British Medical Journal in 2023. That short timeframe means the rise cannot be explained by genetic factors, according to Tracey Woodruff, director of the University of California, San Francisco’s programme on reproductive health and the environment.

Many of these “early-onset” cases are happening in wealthier countries, says Kathryn Bradbury, senior research fellow at the University of Auckland’s school of population health. The rates are striking because younger populations are mainly non-smokers, says Mary Beth Terry, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. About two-thirds of cancers in under-50s occur in women, she adds.

The Brutalist review – Brady Corbet’s audacious architecture drama is a monumental achievement

The director’s Adrien Brody-starring tale of a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor building a new future in the US moves him into the big league

Bold, confrontational and oversized in every way imaginable, Brady Corbet’s wildly ambitious three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic The Brutalist represents a near-perfect symbiosis of subject with film-making style. It’s a huge, uncompromising cinematic statement about the creation of a huge, uncompromising architectural statement. It’s a paean to purity of creative vision in the face of petty ignorance and tightened purse strings, of noble personal sacrifice in the name of art. The kinship between the misunderstood modernist architect who finds worlds of both opportunity and pain courtesy of the fickle whims of wealthy American philistines and Corbet, a former US child actor turned independent film-maker, is there for all who choose to see it.

The uncharitable may suggest that there’s a degree of self-lionisation at play in Corbet’s audacious third feature film (his previous pictures were The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux). But even the uncharitable would agree that The Brutalist is a remarkable achievement, the kind of immense and audacious passion project that is usually out of reach to all but a select few celebrated auteurs and veteran directors.

Mardi Gras the Balkan way – alternatives to Venice carnival

In Croatia, Montenegro and Albania, the legacy of Venetian occupation lives on in a series of spectacular carnivals that these days have a local twist

My guide Jovana Markic scoops up a glass of wine from a street table in Kotor old town and raises a toast: “Abrum!” The table is unguarded and not linked to any particular restaurant, but people are happily helping themselves to free vino and food. Jovana says this is normal.

It’s a welcome gesture for visitors coming to Kotor, on Montenegro’s Adriatic coast, for the masked Mardi Gras carnival (3-25 February this year). Abrum means welcome in the local dialect and comes from ombra, Venetian for a little glass of wine.

The best new novelists for 2025

Welcome to our annual selection of the year’s finest debut novels. We have a proven track record in picking authors that go on to be loved by readers and win awards … from Douglas Stuart and Sally Rooney to Caleb Azumah Nelson and Bonnie Garmus. Here are 2025’s gems

For the 12th year running, writers and editors on the Observer New Review spent the busy weeks before Christmas immersed in dozens of forthcoming debut novels, seeking out the titles we reckon deserve to be in everyone’s hands over the months ahead. Whatever your taste in fiction, this list gives you a heads-up on the future prize winners, mega-sellers and word-of-mouth hits that change the literary conversation. From Shuggie Bain to Conversations with Friends and The Miniaturist, and from Caleb Azumah Nelson to Bonnie Garmus and Sheena Patel – all found early champions here. Colin Barrett, one of last year’s picks, just won this year’s Nero debut fiction prize, awarded last year to Michael Magee, one of our 2023 picks.

Our search for the year’s best debut novels only ever has one rule: the writers we choose must live in the UK or Ireland. After that, anything goes. The class of 2025 includes authors whose manuscripts were snapped up before they’d left university, and some who didn’t put pen to paper until a later-life left turn. Some are published by independent presses, others by cash-splashing corporates trumpeting the spoils of multiway bidding wars, television rights already in the bag. There are novels on this list that were written at dawn, through lunch breaks, whenever the nine-to-five allowed, and at least one that was written on the cushion of a six-figure advance – a pressure of its own. Several authors here are already well known for their short story collections. Nothing mattered to us but the novels themselves.

The strong showing from writers in Ireland and Northern Ireland makes sense when you hear them talk about the subsidised literary magazines and development agencies that helped them grow. Surprise, surprise: arts funding is transformative. Those kinds of fortifying networks exist in Britain too, yet the mood feels more atomised, less collegiate, not least since the White Review – a magazine that broke many new names – ceased to publish after Arts Council cuts in 2023.

If there’s a theme among this year’s books, it might be care – parent-child relationships recur in a variety of guises – but their style and subject differ as widely as their paths to publication. There’s a dizzyingly transcontinental ecological epic about Hindu nationalism, set everywhere from the Chagos Islands to the Arctic Circle. There’s a spare, slender tale of embattled gay love in 1980s south Wales. There’s a pacy page-turner about escaping coercive control, and a filthy comic romp about an “Islamic State bride” in Iraq (really). And that’s just for starters; we loved every one of these outstanding novels, and we think you will too. Here’s to yet more excellent reading.
Anthony Cummins

A lot of eco fiction is very worthy. My book has car chases!

As a teenager, sex is all-consuming … grotty but still erotic, even romantic – shenanigans in cinemas, shenanigans behind cinemas

Will the return of King Maga to the White House mean a Trumpification of British politics | Andrew Rawnsley

Donald Trump poses dilemmas and dangers for the Tories as well as Labour, and presents opportunities to the Lib Dems and Reform

We can list those people who expect to profit from the second coming of Donald Trump. They include the billionaire tech tycoons who were on conspicuous display at his inauguration, the oil companies who will be liberated to “drill, baby drill”, crypto-pushers and, um, Sir Ed Davey.

I don’t know whether you’ve clocked it, and I’m pretty certain that the target won’t have, but there’s been a flurry of Trump-hostile activity by the Lib Dems since he won the US election. Sir Ed describes the American’s return to the White Office as “a dark, dark day for people around the globe”, refers to him as a “dangerous, destructive demagogue” and greeted his oath-swearing as a “threat to peace and prosperity”.

‘We’re mobilising’: Indigenous Australians speak of treaty and independence as change the date and failed voice referendum fade

‘This day we mourn everything that has happened and what is still happening’, says one Wiradjuri man

• Reflection, recollection and resistance: Invasion Day 2025 – in pictures
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The smell of smouldering gum leaves swirls through the air as Wiradjuri man Neenan Simpson blows it towards the thousands that have gathered in Sydney’s Belmore park.

“This day we mourn everything that has happened and what is still happening,” he said, with the smoking mound now sitting at his feet, moving with the wind.

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UK haunted by Johnson’s ‘botched Brexit deal’ and Labour’s plans don’t go far enough | Anand Menon and Joël Reland

Five years on, it’s unclear how a proposed UK-EU relationship reset would repair damage to the economy

Five years since Brexit, the UK wants to reset the EU relationship. A simple question of sitting down with the EU and negotiating, surely?

Sort of, though not quite. It’s easy to see why a self-professed growth-obsessed government might seek to be closer to the EU. It’s less clear why it’s seeking what it is, or whether achieving any of it will be easy.

‘I sense Brussels is ready to be bold and ambitious’: hope mixes with anger on Brexit’s fifth anniversary

The union jack was lowered in Brussels this week in 2020. Today, despite the problems caused by leaving, a yearning for ‘Breturn’ flowers

Andrew Moss despairs, even now, when he thinks back to the end of January 2020. It was a painful, traumatic time for anyone building an export business in the UK.

On 30 January, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a public health emergency of ­international concern. The ­following day, the UK finally exited the European Union.

The big picture: a gaggle of visitors gather beneath London’s Shard

Photographer Andy Hall​’s atmospheric new series captures the capital’s eerie financial heart

For the past seven years the Observer photographer Andy Hall has been wandering the City of London with his camera – post-Brexit, through the eerie emptiness of the pandemic and beyond – to document the changing faces of the capital’s former citadel; home to about 8,000 people, daily workplace for about 600,000 more. His pictures, now collected in a fabulous book, The Same for Everyone, examine the atmosphere and soul of the engine of the British economy, with its exposed Roman foundations and its thicket of tabloid-named towers (the Cheesegrater, the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie) jostling for head space above the vaults of the Bank of England.

This 2023 image of a gaggle of City visitors with the peak of the Shard behind them conjures some of the airier strangeness of that landscape, in which bright minds spend long days at terminals trying to bend figures in their favour. The group here appear to have come upon this odd civilisation unexpectedly and are in search of bearings and landmarks.

Polls open in Belarus with Lukashenko’s 30-year rule set to be extended

The 70-year-old former collective farm boss has been in power in reclusive, Moscow-allied Belarus since 1994

Belarusians began voting on Sunday, with president Alexander Lukashenko expected to cruise to victory unchallenged for a seventh term, prolonging his three-decade authoritarian rule.

Lukashenko – a 70-year-old former collective farm boss – has been in power in reclusive, Moscow-allied Belarus since 1994.

Hydrating face masks: 10 of the best

For brighter, healthy-looking skin a weekly hydrating mask is a winter essential

I have long eschewed the arduous multi-stepped skincare regime that once upon a time promised us our “best skin ever!” This was because very quickly I realised two things: 1) I lacked the commitment to the game, and 2) I discovered that using tons of products all at once is really confusing for the skin – imagine 15 people trying to speak at the same time. Yeah, exactly. Also, using a million and one products – particularly those with active ingredients – won’t necessarily deliver great skin. Instead, it will give you the gift of super-sensitised skin and an annoying catch-22 situation that will have you going around in circles as you constantly battle new skincare issues. I say all this to reiterate that minimising your skincare steps is definitely a good idea. However, certain steps should remain in place – such as face masks, particularly a hydrating mask. Drenching skin with hydration at this time of year is a no-brainer. Especially when they work overnight… Oh the ease! And yet many of us either forget or simply use them in a state of emergency. A great hydrating mask should be used at least once a week. It will plump up skin leaving it looking more healthy, awake and youthful. Your makeup will sit better and your skin won’t retain the same tone as the grey weather.

1. Laneige Cica Sleeping Mask £30, lookfantastic.com
2. Youth To The People Superberry Hydrate + Glow Dream Mask £47, spacenk.com
3. Beauty Pie Triple Hyaluronic Acid Hydra-Glow Sheet Mask £20, beautypie.com
4. REN Evercalm Ultra Comforting Rescue Mask £40, renskincare.co.uk
5. Farmacy Honey Potion Plus Ceramide Hydration Mask £37, sephora.co.uk
6. Dr Jart+ Vital Hydra Solution Hydro Plump Overnight Mask £30, drjart.co.uk
7. Hello Sunday The Recovery One Glow Face Mask £27, hellosundayspf.com
8. Clinique Moisture Surge Overnight Mask £42, boots.com
9. Tata Harper Hydrating Floral Mask £85, tataharperskincare.com
10. Emma Lewisham Supernatural Sleeping Mask £74, emmalewisham.co.uk

I’ve lost contact with my mother and feel I’m the family pariah | Ask Philippa

Is there room for a more exploratory – rather than confrontational – dialogue?

The question I grew up as the scapegoat in a toxic family where my mother played her children off against each other. I went no-contact with her a few years ago and keep my interactions with my siblings to a minimum.

I am now the divorced mother of four young adults, all living away from home. I have a male relative who, with his partner, has become close to two of my children. Initially I welcomed this, but it has increasingly come at some cost to me. The relative has been expressing astonishment that a person who is such a mess (me, apparently) could have brought up such wonderful children. By doing that, they are trying to cause a rift between myself and the children. They have also become very friendly with my ex-husband, despite the latter never being interested in cultivating any sort of relationship with them until I ended the marriage.

Rediscovered Munch painting with ‘intriguing mystery’ to go on display in UK for first time

Striking image will be unveiled at National Portrait Gallery in March, as part of a major exhibition of the Norwegian master’s portraits

At first glance, it is a striking portrait by Edvard Munch, painted in 1892, a year before the Norwegian master was to create his most famous masterpiece, The Scream.

But peer closely at the man’s sleeve along the bottom edge and two embracing, ethereal figures in a mysterious moonlit landscape are revealed.

CIA now backs lab leak theory to explain origins of Covid-19

Finding suggests the agency believes totality of evidence makes a lab origin more likely, but assigns a low degree of confidence to the conclusion

The CIA now believes the virus responsible for the coronavirus pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory, according to an assessment released on Saturday that points the finger at China even while acknowledging that the spy agency has “low confidence” in its own conclusion.

The finding is not the result of any new intelligence, and the report was completed at the behest of the Biden administration and former CIA director William Burns. It was declassified and released on Saturday on the orders of president Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency, John Ratcliffe, who was sworn in as director on Thursday.

Mr Nobody Against Putin review – a teacher fights back in a powerful documentary

Sundance film festival: A primary school teacher in Russia pushes back on cruel nationalist propaganda in a fascinating and daring look at everyday encroachment

Pavel Talankin is, by his own admission early in the extraordinary documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, not the person you or he would pick to be the hero of the story or to take on an oppressive regime. To stand up to Vladimir Putin takes a considerable amount of courage and a not inconsiderable amount of resources; Pasha, as he is known to his students, is a teacher at a small primary school in Karabash, a mining town in the Ural mountains remarkable only for its renowned levels of toxic waste, and would have been more or less content to remain the titular nobody far from Moscow. He loves his hometown, its smokestacks and Soviet buildings, but most of all loves the curiosity and enthusiasm of his students, all filmed by Talankin in his capacity as school videographer.

But Talankin has always cut a bit of a non-conformist streak – he is the one teacher with a Russian democracy flag in his classroom, a safe haven for the school’s punks and artsy weirdos, or anyone with a desire to speak freely. He is openly alarmed, to the extent one can be, when the school begins enacting Vladimir Putin’s new “patriotic education policy” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He keeps doing his job, filming the new blatantly nationalist curriculum, the lies about the necessity of invasion told as fact, the forced military drills and oaths of loyalty forced on initially bored and apathetic children.

Mr Nobody Against Putin is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Trump’s anti-DEI order yanks air force videos of Tuskegee Airmen and female pilots

Official cites review of course curriculum at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, where new recruits get basic training

Donald Trump’s order halting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has led the US air force to suspend course instruction on a documentary about the first Black airmen in the US military, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, a US official said on Saturday.

The famed Black aviators included 450 pilots who fought overseas in segregated units during the second world war. Their success in combat helped pave the way for Harry Truman’s decision to desegregate the armed forces in 1948.

Roman Kemp: ‘Here’s all my faults. Have ’em. Enjoy’

With famous parents, Roman Kemp always knew people would make certain judgments about him – but he never guessed he’d become an advocate for mental health. Here, he talks about radio, tattoos – and the event that changed his life

I apologise if you hear any buzzing,” says Roman Kemp, the 31-year-old radio and television presenter, leaning back in his chair. I’ve done interviews in some strange scenarios, including a sauna (twice), but this is a new one. Kemp, who is in Northern Ireland filming the BBC One quizshow The Finish Line, is video-calling me on his day off from the tattoo parlour. As he holds the phone to his face, an artist is at work inking a portrait of Thierry Henry on to his shin. “On my right leg I want to try to build as many of my favourite footballers of all time,” Kemp explains. “So I started out with original Ronaldo and we’re currently doing Thierry, and then we’ll add from there. So it’s a work in progress but yes, as I’ll show you… Very much happening.”

Kemp spins the camera, just in time to catch the needle tracing his skin. Isn’t that quite painful? “Once you go past a certain amount of tattoos, you earn the right to use numbing cream,” he replies. “When I first started having them, especially some of the bigger ones, a lot of parlours want you to have the full experience. And I just suffered for many hours, and hated it. I’m too much of a wuss to do it any more to myself. I refuse to sit here in pain.”

‘Our job is to be truthful not neutral’: Christiane Amanpour on Trump, tech and fighting for the truth

Christiane Amanpour has spent four decades as a celebrated journalist and war reporter. With disinformation rampaging through the media, she talks about the threat of technocracy, Donald Trump’s second term – and why facts are more important than ever

Just occasionally, in more than 40 years of reporting the world’s troubles, Christiane Amanpour has forced herself to step away and pause for breath. One of those moments for rebooting came over Christmas and new year, when she took a holiday in South Africa. I met her on the day she got back to work at the CNN offices in London, from which she makes her nightly news programme, and Saturday’s The Amanpour Hour. There is a powerful sense of her team buckling up for the tumultuous year ahead. “What I cover is the international reverberations of what America does in the world and what might be coming back at America,” she says. “The good, the bad and the ugly.”

Amanpour’s choice of holiday destination was, inevitably, not unrelated to the immediate challenges of that role as kickstarted by the second inauguration of President Trump this week in Washington DC. Before that she wanted to holiday somewhere, she suggests, that represented a robust spirit of hope. She had always regretted missing out on perhaps the greatest good news story of our lives: the release of Nelson Mandela from 27 years in prison and his subsequent rise to power. “I was covering all the really bad stories, the Rwanda genocide, the Bosnia war,” she says. “And I’ve always felt a little sad I missed that, because I do strongly believe that good things happen in this world. I don’t ever want to only focus on the bad. South Africa is obviously still a huge work in progress, but it was just phenomenal to see it, even as a holiday.”

Rwandan army ‘ready to invade DRC’ and help rebels seize city

Intelligence sources suggest battle for Congolese regional capital Goma is imminent before UN crisis talks on Sunday

Large numbers of troops from Rwanda have been pouring across the border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to help rebels seize the regional capital of Goma before an emergency UN meeting about the crisis takes place on Sunday, intelligence officials have warned.

Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) soldiers are believed to have secretly crossed into the eastern DRC over the past few days to assist a lightning offensive by the M23 militia.

Manchester City’s big guns ride to rescue after Khusanov’s nightmare start

Debutant’s error handed Chelsea the lead but he was bailed out by the performances of more experienced teammates

It took fewer than six minutes of Abdukodir Khusanov’s debut for the £33.8m centre-back to be given a round of sarcastic applause for making a successful five-yard backpass to Ederson. Needless to say, things had not started well for the 20-year-old Uzbekistan defender.

Without trying to offend the good people at Belarusian club Energetik‑BGU and Lens, stepping into the spotlight of Manchester City against a Chelsea team with Champions League ambitions was always going to be a tricky first assignment for someone who had been in the country less than a week.

Good Ange is now Bad Postecoglou and caught in the Premier League doom spiral | Jonathan Wilson

Irritable and resentful, the Spurs manager is not unique in being unnerved by a remorseless league where every game is a test

Long before he began experimenting with the mind-expanding potential of psychedelic mushrooms, Timothy Leary was a psychologist. In 1957, he came up with the interpersonal behaviour circumplex, which sought to represent personality using two dimensions: power and love. While relationships on the power axis were oppositional – that is, dominance inspires submission and vice versa – on the love axis they are reflexive: hostility inspires hostility and cooperation inspires cooperation.

This was subsequently developed by Emily and Laurence Alison at the University of Liverpool. In their 2020 book Rapport, they use animals to express the four basic characteristics: a lion for control, a mouse for capitulation, a T-Rex for assertiveness and a monkey for cooperation. None of these are intrinsically good or bad: the lion could be inspiring and supportive, but he could also be patronising or dictatorial. And nor are many people represented by a single animal.

Tilak Varma denies England as India edge to dramatic victory in second T20

• England 165-9; India 166-8 – India win by two wickets
• Tilak’s unbeaten 72 proves vital in nail-biting chase

This was a night of push and pull in Chennai, a match undecided until the final hit, the 20-over game at its best, initially belonging to Brydon Carse but ending with the roar of Tilak Varma. The India No 3 was both responsible and electric in a chase of 166, an unbeaten 55-ball 72 providing his side with a 2-0 lead in this five-match series with England.

Carse excelled, his 17-ball 31 followed by three crowd-silencing wickets. With India requiring 40 from 30, but with three wickets in hand, the match was turning towards the visitors. With Jofra Archer’s heat to take in once again, Varma had much to do.

Let it glow: fireflies illuminating Japanese woodlands – in pictures

For 10 days in the summer, the forests of Japan’s Yamagata prefecture are lit up by himebotaru, a type of firefly endemic to the region. Photographer Kazuaki Koseki has attempted to capture the phenomenon in his Summer Faeries series, compiled over a period of eight years. “The spectacle of fireflies flying through the summer forest is like the twinkling of a starry sky,” says Koseki. “That sight is fantastic enough to forget the awe of the night forest.” In recent years, the fireflies’ habitat has been increasingly endangered by deforestation and the tourism industry. “The unpredictability of the fireflies’ trails of light highlights the urgency of our planet’s climate crisis, while at the same time holding a strong and enduring hope for the future.”

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Slovakian PM rejects calls to quit as tension grows over shift towards Russia

The latest protests come after private meeting between Robert Fico and Vladimir Putin in December

The Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, has rejected calls for his resignation after tens of thousands demonstrated against his government’s policy shift closer to Russia.

About 60,000 people protested in the capital, Bratislava, on Friday and approximately 100,000 turned out for rallies in cities across the country, the largest demonstrations since Fico returned to power in 2023.

The Kyoto climate treaty is hailed on stage but reality tells a different story

A gripping play in London’s West End tells how agreement of the first climate protocol in 1997 was a triumph, as scientists share new warnings about the scale of the crisis

As material for a West End show, the backroom machinations of an international climate conference sound unpromising.

Pedantry, boredom and delegates fighting over the wording of treaty clauses do not sound like the stuff of high drama. Nevertheless, Kyoto, a Royal Shakespeare Company production by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson now playing at Soho Place in London, has been widely praised by critics and rapturously received at its opening this month.

The ‘house next door’: Rudolf Höss's villa opens to honour Auschwitz victims

On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, House 88 with its chilling past has been turned into centre to combat hate

The villa where Rudolf Höss and his family lived stood immediately next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The garden wall of the villa was the wall of the camp.

At Christmas time, they put up a tree in the living room and festooned it with ornaments and candles. In the garden, there was a pond, a sandpit, a slide, several picnic benches and a greenhouse with exotic plants. At night, Höss tucked his sons and daughters into bed and said: “Schlaf schön meine Kinder” – sleep well my children.

Diamonds lose their sparkle as prices come crashing down

Lab-grown rocks and fewer weddings have put a huge dampener on the market. On the bright side, a big dazzler is now affordable for many

Diamonds are woven through the tapestry of human history. The ancient Greeks were enthralled by their remarkable hardness. The Koh-i-Noor alone has been at the centre of invasions, murder, superstition and larceny. Millions of marriages have been launched using diamonds as the symbol of their everlasting lustre.

So the idea that diamonds might somehow lose their value seems unnatural. And yet prices are falling fast and show no signs of stopping. Natural diamonds cost 26% less in shops than two years ago, a drop during a time of high inflation that would be extraordinary were it not dwarfed by the poor fortune of their identical twins, lab-grown diamonds, which are now 74% cheaper than in 2020.

I was jailed for four years for a non-violent climate protest – this is my prison diary

I was one of a group of Just Stop Oil activists given the longest-ever UK sentences for peaceful protest after blocking a motorway. Six months into my incarceration, this is what I have learned

Locked in a tiny metal box in a prison transport van rattling its way to HMP Bronzefield, in Middlesex, I felt at peace. I was on trial with four other Just Stop Oil protesters over the group’s non-violent direct action on the M25 motorway in 2022. The judge had told the jury to ignore evidence of the climate emergency, and we were not allowed to talk in depth about the climate breakdown when defending our actions. But we do not have the time to pretend the existential threat we face is not real. My sense of peace came from having an opportunity to speak out about the crisis during our trial.

Phoenix nears dry spell record as drought conditions worsen

Arizona capital, made drier and hotter by climate crisis, edges towards longest streak without recorded rain

The US city of Phoenix is close to breaking another extreme weather record, this time the longest stretch without rain as drought conditions worsen across Arizona.

As of Saturday, there had been no recorded rainfall in America’s fifth largest city for 154 consecutive days – the second longest dry spell on record as the climate crisis collides with natural weather patterns.

Revolution is in the air as Trump arrives with a bang – but can he follow through?

The president has wasted little time in pushing a radical rightwing agenda at the start of his second term

This time last week Stewart Rhodes was serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy over his role in a deadly attack on the US Capitol. On Wednesday, two days after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, Rhodes was inside the Capitol building, wearing a Trump 2020 hat and relaxing at a Dunkin’ Donuts.

With mere strokes of a pen, Trump has launched a rightwing political revolution in America, deploying troops to the US-Mexico border, assailing a constitutional right to citizenship, reversing gender and diversity policies, all but abandoning the fight against the climate crisis and freeing violent criminals who backed him.

‘The nice version of her was manufactured for YouTube’: my mum, the family vlogger who became a child abuser

Ruby Franke was a social media star who made viral videos about her six children and perfect-seeming life – until she was jailed for child abuse. Now her eldest daughter Shari is telling her side of the story

The video doorbell footage is blurry, but you can make out the young boy approaching. He has blond hair, his legs are alarmingly skinny, duct tape is strapped to his wrists and ankles, and he is shoeless. In the background, the magnificent Red Mountains rise imperiously over the desert city of Ivins, Utah. The boy rings the bell. His voice is desperate. He asks the neighbour to take him to the police station. The neighbour tells him to take a seat, asks what is going on, then calls the police.

Neighbour: “I just had a 12-year-old boy show up here at my front door asking for help and he said he just came from a neighbour’s house. He’s emaciated. He’s got tape around his legs. He’s hungry and he’s thirsty.” The neighbour, a stranger, is so upset that he starts to cry. He says it’s obvious that the boy has been held against his will and has been hurt.

‘I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of it’: Dotun Ajoa aka McAwhy’s best phone picture

The photographer captures the moment his three-year-old son found him napping and decided to join him

Dotun Ajao had been juggling a typical Saturday of errands, chores and caring for his three-year-old son, Ireyao. The tired dad had snuck off for a nap when Ireyao found him, and, instead of asking for a snack or to play as he usually would, the toddler quietly climbed into bed and used his father’s head as a pillow.

“I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of it,” says the Lagos-born photographer, who now lives in Norfolk. “I picked up my phone to check the time but then I thought, what if we captured this?”

Just Stop Oil protester, 78, has jail term extended after no suitable tag found

Exclusive: Gaie Delap told she will have to serve 20 more days that correspond to period of time at home after recall

A 78-year-old climate protester has had her prison term extended for being “unlawfully at large” when government contractors were unable to find the right-sized tag for her wrist, which would have allowed her to complete her sentence in the community.

Gaie Delap, a retired teacher and Just Stop Oil protester, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for her participation in a climate protest on the M25 in 2022 and was released last November under the home detention curfew (HDC) scheme.

My mum the family vlogger and child abuser; Marina Hyde on Trump’s ‘golden age’; and Spotify’s Billions Club – podcast

Confusing and capricious, Trump started as he means to go on: chaos, dysfunction and a coalition of creeps; Ruby Franke was a social media star who made viral videos about her six children – until she was jailed for child abuse. Now her eldest daughter Shari is telling her side of the story; and No Dylan but loads of Coldplay! What the songs with a billion streams on Spotify tell us about music taste today.

‘I have no neighbours’: overtourism pushes residents in Spain and Portugal to the limit

As visitor numbers hit record levels in southern Europe, some residents are surrounded entirely by tourist flats

When her husband, who had cancer at the time, took a tumble in the couple’s sixth-floor flat last year, Maria frantically wondered who she could call for help to lift him.

In another building, another era, she might have dashed next door to ask a neighbour. But it wasn’t an option in her 11-unit building in central Lisbon, where tourist flats had proliferated and turned long-term residents into a rarity.

The week around the world in 20 pictures

Trump’s inauguration, fires in California, the hostage release in Israel and Storm Éowyn: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

Snakes, a sniper and Captain Cook: photos of the day – Friday

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Humphrey’s world: how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain’s strangest pub chain – podcast

Since the 1970s, Humphrey Smith has acquired scores of pubs and historic properties around the UK. But time after time, he has left the buildings empty. Why has he allowed his empire to moulder? By Mark Blacklock. Read by Joe Layton

Southport attacks: the failures that allowed Axel Rudakubana to kill – podcast

The murders of three little girls in the seaside town led to horror – and then racist riots. Now the teenaged killer has been sentenced to 52 years. Josh Halliday reports

It was hard to imagine a more unlikely place for horror to unfold than a community centre holding a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the sleepy seaside town of Southport. So when three little girls were murdered and eight other children and two adults viciously stabbed by a 17-year-old boy, it seemed incomprehensible. But before the shock could wear off, misinformation and lies about who had unleashed this misery began to spread. The result was days of racist riots and violence.

Josh Halliday, the Guardian’s North of England editor, covered the attacks, the riots and now the court case of Axel Rudakubana as he was sentenced to 52 years in prison. On Monday, as the jury was expected to be sworn in, the now 18-year-old Rudakubana shocked everyone by pleading guilty to all the charges he was faced with. And this week the judge gave him a life sentence.

Tell us: who is your pick to win at the Oscars 2025?

Now the Oscars 2024 nominees have been announced, we would like to hear about your personal favourite

The 2025 Oscar nominations have been announced, with a record-breaking 13 for Jacques Audiard’s musical Emilia Pérez – the most ever earned by a film not in the English language.

Brady Corbet’s epic The Brutalist, about a Hungarian architect who moves to the US after the second world war, took 10 nominations, as did the musical Wicked. A Complete Unknown and Conclave both came away with eight.

Joy in Thailand as same-sex couples can finally marry – video

Thailand’s LGBTQ+ community has fought for decades for the right to equal marriage, and on Thursday 878 district offices across the country opened their doors to same-sex couples who wished to register and get married. It has made Thailand the first country in south-east Asia to recognise equal marriage, and only the third in Asia, behind Taiwan and Nepal

• ‘I am so proud’: Joy as Thailand’s same-sex couples can at last get married

• Thai same-sex marriage law comes into force – in pictures

City down and almost out in Paris as Arsenal march on – Football Weekly Extra

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Nicky Bandini, Jonathan Fadugba and Barney Ronay to discuss the Champions League action

Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

On the podcast today: PSG do the very thing PSG aren’t supposed to do and un-implode against Manchester City, coming back from 2-0 down to win 4-2 and leave Pep’s side with a chance of not making the Champions League playoffs.

Share pictures and stories of your favourite brutalist buildings

We want to see people’s most loved brutalist buildings around the world and why people treasure them

The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s film about a fictional modernist architect in postwar America, has become a hotly anticipated film release.

Architecture experts hope the movie will renew interest in brutalist heritage.

Share your experience of working and paying into a pension

We’d like to find out how actively involved people are in saving for their pension

We are interested in finding out more about different pension systems around the world and how engaged people are with their savings plan.

If you are still working, how actively are you involved in your pension and do you think it will be enough when you retire? If not, what are your plans for when you stop working? What, if anything, do you think you will get from your state pension?

Could the Southport attack have been prevented? – Politics Weekly UK

The government has announced a public inquiry into why authorities failed to stop Axel Rudakubana before he killed three girls in Southport. But is it enough to stop another such attack? John Harris asks the counter-terrorism practitioner Rashad Ali. Plus, the Guardian political correspondent Kiran Stacey explores how Keir Starmer will deal with Donald Trump’s return

‘They fear for their lives’: Bishop confronts Trump on immigration and gay rights – video

President Donald Trump began his first full day in office attending a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral. The Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, pleaded with Trump during the service, asking the newly elected president to protect immigrants and respect gay rights. ‘There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives,’ she said as Trump and his family watched on. After the inauguration, Trump launched a sweeping immigration crackdown and promised mass deportations

• US Politics live – latest updates

Tell us about the financial consequences you are facing due to the California fires

We’d like to hear about the disaster’s financial impact on people who have lost their home, business, or community – their mortgages, lost possessions, rents, insurances and investments

California homeowners and business owners who lost everything in the devastating Los Angeles-area fires now have to tackle their insurance companies to recover the value of their homeowners’ policies – if they are lucky enough to have insurance at all.

With estimates of the economic damage from the fires now expected to reach over $200bn, we’d like to hear what financial consequences people face due to the fires.

The 'new China' in Thailand: ‘if you want hope, you have to leave’ – video

After 30 years of relentless growth and capitalism, a new trend has emerged in China. The search for a simpler, calmer life is leading some Chinese people to seek a life abroad. The trend is so popular that it’s gained its own internet buzzword: the 'run philosophy'.

Chiang mai, in northern Thailand is the country’s second biggest city. It’s a tourist hotspot popular with backpackers but has recently become an unlikely second home for thousands of Chinese people seeking alternative lifestyles.

Inside Syria’s ‘horror city': Sednaya and a country reborn – video

A new Syria is emerging from the shadow of the brutal Assad regime. The Guardian’s Bethan McKernan and Ayman Abu Ramouz meet people celebrating their hard-won freedom, but also those grappling with a traumatic past. The pair travel to the notorious Sednaya prison, where they meet a former prisoner who was liberated by his family just days before

• Resistance was not a choice’: how Syria’s unlikely rebel alliance took Aleppo

• 'The Syrian regime hit us with chemical weapons: only now can we speak out' – video

• Syria’s disappeared: one woman’s search for her missing father

How big pharma keeps affordable drugs out of reach – video

Pharmaceutical corporations claim high prices are the cost of innovation, but the reality is far more complicated — and troubling. In 2030, the patents of some of the world’s best-selling drugs will expire, an event called the 'patent cliff', and companies are doubling down on tactics such as 'evergreening' patents and pay-for-delay deals to keep prices high and competition out.

In this video, Neelam Tailor uncovers the shocking strategies big pharma use to game the system, explaining how these moves protect profits but hurt patients

Revealed: Israel used US weapons in strike that killed journalists in Lebanon – video explainer

A Guardian investigation has found that Israel used a US munition to target and kill three journalists and wound three more in an attack in south Lebanon on 25 October that legal experts have called a potential war crime. The Guardian's reporter William Christou explains what he uncovered when he visited the site of the strike

• Read more about the investigation

'The Syrian regime hit us with chemical weapons: only now can we speak out' – video

Syrian airforce helicopters dropped two cylinders of chlorine gas onto the town of Douma on 7 April 2018. At least 43 people choked to death. For six years, afraid of reprisals, the town has grieved in silence for loved ones lost to chemical attacks and countless others killed by conventional weapons.

But after an astonishing and rapid offensive by rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), more than 50 years of Assad family rule collapsed last week, and the residents of Douma are finally free to tell their stories. The Guardian’s Bethan McKernan travelled to the town to listen to them

• Middle East crisis - live updates

• US urges Syrian rebels to form ‘inclusive’ government

• American found in Damascus appears to have been released from Syrian prison

Guardian reporter at the scene of the burnt tomb of Assad’s father – video

Syrians returned to a mausoleum in Qardaha near Latakia that housed the remains of Hafez al-Assad, who seized control of Syria in 1970. A day after the remains of the former leader were burned by armed Islamist rebels, people fired bullets into the building and visited the charred remains. Assad ruled over Syria until 2000 in what has been described as one of the most oppressive police states in the Middle East. His son, Bashar al-Assad, was ousted and fled the country after rebels captured the capital after a lightning advance completed in just under two weeks

• Middle East crisis live: American freed in Syria after seven months in detention; Iran warns it must live with ‘new realities’

• US urges Syrian rebels to form ‘inclusive’ government

• American found in Damascus appears to have been released from Syrian prison

Reunited families celebrate as Syrian rebels return home to Damascus – video

For years, fighters and displaced people in the north-west of Syria were unable to return home to government-held territories. Thousands were greeted with teary embraces and celebratory gunfire as they reunited with their families in Damascus in its surrounding countryside.

• ‘This is a happy day’: Syrian rebels return home to reunite with family and rebuild

• Who are the main actors in the fall of the regime in Syria?

• Inside the hunt for hidden cells in Sednaya prison, Syria’s ‘human slaughterhouse’

Syrian rebels seize the capital: How the night unfolded – video

The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, is believed to have fled the country his family has ruled over for 50 years, after rebels said they had captured the capital after a lightning advance completed in just under two weeks. Footage from the capital, Damascus, showed rebels storming the presidential palace and destroying the Iranian embassy. State television soon declared the end of Assad's rule and celebrations erupted on the streets across Syria. In a matter of hours, queues formed at the Lebanese border with Syria as displaced families began to return to their homes

• Middle East crisis - live updates

• Bashar al-Assad reported to have fled Syria as rebels say they have captured Damascus

The Guardian's top 10 female footballers in the world 2024 – video

A panel of 99 judges have submitted their verdicts on the best female players in the world in 2024. Together their votes determined a list of the top 100 players in the world. Here, Guardian football writer Suzanne Wrack talks through the top 10 players and why they made it to the top of the list this year.

• The 100 best female footballers in the world 2024

How the Brian Thompson shooting unfolded – video timeline

On 4 December, Brian Thompson, the 50-year-old chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in New York near the midtown Manhattan branch of the Hilton hotel. The search for his killer has entered its third day, with police revealing clues about the suspect's identity. However, many details surrounding the shocking shooting remain unclear. Here is a timeline compiled by The Guardian covering the incident and the suspect's escape route

• Brian Thompson: search for shooter continues for third day as police reveal clues

How the South Korean president's martial law declaration unfolded – video

After South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in the country, thousands of protesters took to the streets alongside the leading opposition Democratic party, urging MPs to head to the national assembly and vote it down. Following a dramatic night in which soldiers attempted to block MPs from entering parliament, lawmakers unanimously adopted a bill rejecting the martial law declaration, prompting the president to backtrack. Here is how the night unfolded in Seoul

• Declaration of martial law awakens ghosts South Koreans thought were laid to rest

• South Korea gripped by uncertainty as MPs defy president’s declaration of martial law

How Europe closed its borders and betrayed its values – video

Border walls and fences around European countries have grown by 75% in just 10 years and EU leaders have increasingly been open to making deals with autocrats, creating a virtual border across the Mediterranean to stop migrants arriving on their shores.

The Guardian's senior global development reporter Mark Townsend looks back at a decade in which Europe has become a fortress, militarising its borders and moving away from the commitment to human rights on which it was founded

How having babies became so political - video

The pronatalist movement in the US is gathering pace once again, rekindled by Silicon Valley personalities and hard-right conservatives who are becoming increasingly vocal about whether or not women are having enough babies. But it's not just in the US, some governments in other countries have launched marketing campaigns encouraging people to have more children, while others have offered financial incentives. But while many of these policies claim to be about halting population decline, there are other factors at play. Josh Toussaint-Strauss interrogates efforts around the world to boost birth rates, as well as the underlying political motivations, from bodily autonomy to immigration

• Birth rates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide?

• When desperate measures to persuade women to have children fail, it’s time for fresh thinking

How Russia is winning the arms race in Ukraine – video

Russia is engaging in a 'shadow war' with Nato states, which is reportedly part of a deliberate strategy to undermine the alliance’s ability to support Ukraine. At the same time Russia's military industrial complex is producing arms at a formidable rate, and with Nato countries struggling to keep up in term of numbers, the arms race is having a big impact on the frontline. Josh Toussaint-Strauss finds out how Russia is using hybrid warfare alongside boosting its arms industry to outpace Nato, and what this all means for the war in Ukraine

• West’s spy chiefs alarmed at recklessness of Russian counterparts

• Russia to raise defence budget by 25% to highest level on record

• ‘A lot higher than we expected’: Russian arms production worries Europe’s war planners