‘It felt dangerous. You got naggy’: Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater on power, combovers and Blue Moon

Ahead of their 11th movie together, the actor and director discuss musicals, the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and what being bald and 5ft tall does to your flirting skills

‘I like this, it’s good,” Ethan Hawke tells Richard Linklater, midway through a lively digression that has already hopped from politics to the Beatles to the late films of John Huston. “What’s good?” asks Linklater. “All of this,” says Hawke, by which he means the London hotel suite with its coffee table, couch and matching upholstered armchairs; the whole chilly machinery of the international press junket. “I like that we get to spend a couple of days in a room,” he says. “It feels like a continuation of the same conversation we’ve been having for the past 32 years.”

It’s all about the conversation with Linklater and Hawke. The two men like to talk; often the talk sparks a film. The director and actor first met backstage at a play in 1993 (“Sophistry, by Jon Marc Sherman,” says Linklater) and wound up chatting until dawn. The talk laid the ground for what would eventually become Before Sunrise, a star-crossed romance that channelled an off-screen bromance as it sent Hawke and Julie Delpy wandering around mid-90s Vienna, walking and talking and stopping to kiss. “Yeah, that was the moment. That set the tone,” says Linklater, remembering. “Meeting Ethan backstage, then flying out to Vienna.”

Published: November 28, 2025, 5:00 am

Today is Black Friday. Here are 65+ very best deals in the US, curated and vetted

Our experts found the best deals and sales that are actually worth your money. Here are our picks for pillows, bath towels, packing cubes and more

• Snag these tech, travel, home and kitchen Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

We all have holiday traditions we look forward to each year: cooking your grandmother’s classic stuffing recipe. Opening your favorite Advent calendar. Or, if you’re a retailer, pushing deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

With the influx of these so-called “doorbuster deals”, it can be hard to know a true steal from a modest markdown. So we’ve asked shopping experts to curate the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales across five of the most-shopped for categories. Whether you’re looking for a much-needed sleep upgrade or a cordless vacuum that’ll stand the test of time, below is our list of the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals across home, kitchen, tech, travel and wellness products. These are items that normally add up fast but right now are going for prices you won’t wince at.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:19 pm

Experience: I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while performing Julius Caesar

Our student theatre group had the bright idea of using actual knives on stage for authenticity. The blade missed my aorta by about a centimetre

As someone committed to my craft, I’ve always believed that the show must go on. An accident in my second year of university took it to new extremes. It was the Exeter University theatre society’s annual play at the Edinburgh fringe and I’d landed the part of Cassius in Julius Caesar. The director decided that instead of killing himself, Cassius would die during a choreographed fight with his rival, Mark Antony. We also chose to use real knives, which sounds absurd, but we wanted to be authentic. The plan was for the actor playing Antony to grab my arm as I held the knife, and pretend to push it behind my back. We must have rehearsed the sequence 50 times.

We were about halfway through our month-long run, performing to a decently sized audience. Dressed in our togas, with the stage dark and moody, we began the fight as usual. Then something went wrong.

Published: November 28, 2025, 5:00 am

The 28-point ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine may be dead – but Trump still won’t stop Putin | Dmytro Kuleba

Kyiv and the rest of Europe must stand together to prevent Russia from seizing more territory by force

• Dmytro Kuleba is a former foreign minister of Ukraine

Europe breathed a deep collective sigh of relief on Monday, as the crisis triggered by Washington’s presentation of a new 28-point plan for ending the war appeared – briefly – to have been stabilised. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, spoke of “substantial progress” after Ukraine-US talks in Geneva. On Monday night, Vladimir Putin made his countermove: another massive barrage of missile and drone strikes on Kyiv.

The sequence of contrasting events captured the grim essence of the outgoing year. By day, diplomatic battles are fought: hopeful statements are issued from Washington, London, Brussels and Kyiv. Immense energy is expended on containing Donald Trump’s initiatives. By night, Putin brutally reminds the world that, for him, war remains the primary tool for achieving “peace”.

Dmytro Kuleba was Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs from 2020 to 2024

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:36 pm

After a career as an environment writer, here’s what I have learned

Paul Brown looks back at his career reporting on the climate crisis, failed summit and nuclear power – and how to do it well

Paul Brown was the Guardian’s environment correspondent from 1989 until 2005 and has written many columns since. He submitted his last column last week after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. From his hospital bed in Luton, Paul offers his reflections on 45 years writing for the Guardian.

We, in the climate business, all owe a great deal to Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Her politics were anathema to me and to many Guardian readers. But she prided herself on being a scientist before she was a politician.

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:00 pm

How do I respond to someone who says ‘I’m not racist, but ... ’? | Leading questions

It’s important to express your disagreement: for their sake as much as yours, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But first decide on what you aim to accomplish

• Read more Leading questions

How do I respond to someone who contributes to a conversation with “I’m not racist, but … ” and then inevitably proceeds to say something racist, such as talking about immigrants on benefits or getting priority for housing?

I’m referring to social occasions with people that I am not necessarily close to but rather acquaintances I may bump into semi-regularly. I feel myself getting simultaneously angry and tongue-tied and I mostly sit with my frustration to maintain some sense of harmony in the group.

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Published: November 28, 2025, 1:32 am

Trump says he will ‘permanently pause’ migration from ‘third world countries’ after national guard shooting

In a social media post sent late on Thanksgiving, US president said he would ‘end all federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens’ following Washington DC shooting

• US politics – live updates

Donald Trump has said he will “permanently pause migration from all third world countries,” a day after two national guard members were shot in Washington DC in an attack that has become a political flashpoint in the president’s ongoing crackdown on immigration.

In a social media post beginning with “a very happy Thanksgiving,” sent after 11pm on Thursday, the US president said his administration would “end all federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens” and remove “anyone who is not a net asset to the United States”.

Published: November 28, 2025, 5:36 am

Video shows Israeli forces shooting Palestinians dead moments after surrender

Far-right minister defends killing of two men who appeared to have given themselves up, saying ‘terrorists must die’

Video of an Israeli military raid in the West Bank shows soldiers summarily executing two Palestinians they had detained seconds earlier.

The shooting on Thursday evening, which was also witnessed by journalists close to the scene, is under justice ministry review, but has already been defended by Israel’s far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who declared that “terrorists must die”.

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:42 pm

US regulators ‘taking seriously’ allegations of bankers’ support for Epstein

Exclusive: It follows calls from US senator Elizabeth Warren to investigate bank executives including ex-Barclays boss Jes Staley

US regulators say they are taking allegations that top banks may have facilitated Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activity “very seriously”, as they faced calls to investigate executives including the former Barclays boss Jes Staley.

In correspondence seen by the Guardian, bosses from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) said they had reviewed a letter from the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, which raised concerns over bankers’ alleged support for the convicted child sex offender Epstein.

Published: November 28, 2025, 10:00 am

‘We can’t get any answers’: grief and anger in Hong Kong after deadly high-rise fire

With the blaze extinguished but hundreds still unaccounted for, the city is grieving – with questions being raised of authorities

For almost 48 hours, Mr Lau had been calling his cousin. On Wednesday afternoon Lau was at his home nearby, when he saw smoke from Mei Lan’s building. Mei Lan, her husband, and their children live in the Wang Fuk Court high-rise apartment complex in northern Hong Kong. Shortly after lunchtime on Wednesday, a fire started in one of its eight high-rise towers, and quickly spread to six others. It burned for more than two days, killing at least 128 people – a number certain to rise.

The inferno has been compared to London’s Grenfell Tower disaster. Not just for the scale, but for the now rampant questions about negligent safety standards and corruption, amid revelations that the construction site had been inspected 16 times for safety concerns and allegedly had a history of violations.

Published: November 28, 2025, 2:54 pm

Zelenskyy chief of staff resigns after property raid by Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies – Europe live

‘I want there to be no rumours and speculation,’ Zelenskyy says as Yermak resigns

The Commission also totally rejected dismissed Russia’s criticism of Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “illegitimate” leader of Ukraine, after Vladimir Putin suggested yesterday that was a technical reason he couldn’t agree a peace deal with Zelenskyy.

“President Zelensky is the democratically elected president, by the Ukrainian people, of Ukraine,” a commission spokesperson said in response, somewhat mockingly adding that Putin seems to have “some difficulties in recognising the democratically elected president of his neighbour country, Ukraine.”

“Let me stress the fight against corruption is a key element for a country to join the EU, it requires continuous efforts and a strong capacity to fight corruption. This is a key element that we also address in our enlargement report that was published a couple of weeks ago, so we will continue to follow the situation very closely.”

Published: November 28, 2025, 3:31 pm

More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate

Workers say the firm’s ‘warp-speed’ approach fuels pressure, layoffs and rising emissions

More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to “democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”

The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:50 pm

Alabama priest leaves clergy after woman alleges ‘private companionship’ beginning when she was 17

Robert Sullivan’s self-imposed removal comes after accusations he provided financial support in exchange for arrangement which included sex

A longtime Roman Catholic priest in Alabama has voluntarily left the clergy after a woman alleged to his superiors that he provided her financial support in exchange for “private companionship” including sex beginning when she was 17.

Robert Sullivan’s self-imposed removal from the priesthood – known as laicization – was announced Wednesday, the day before the US holiday of Thanksgiving, in a public statement from Birmingham, Alabama, by Bishop Steven Raica.

Published: November 28, 2025, 11:00 am

FDA poised to kill proposal that would require asbestos testing for cosmetics

RFK Jr signed order withdrawing rule that would mandate testing for the cancer-linked toxin in talc-based makeup

The Food and Drug Administration is poised to kill a proposed rule that would require testing for toxic asbestos in talc-based cosmetics, a problem that has been linked to cancer.

Talc is widely used, including in cosmetics, food, medication and personal care products. The order was signed by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, leader of the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:00 pm

Rebel nuns who busted out of Austrian care home win reprieve – for now

Trio given leave to stay in their abandoned convent near Salzburg until further notice, church officials say

Three octogenarian nuns who gained a global following after breaking out of their care home and moving back to their abandoned convent near Salzburg have been given leave to stay in the nunnery “until further notice”, church officials have said.

The rebel sisters – Bernadette, 88, Regina, 86, and Rita, 82, all former teachers at the school adjacent to their convent – broke back into their old home of Goldenstein Castle in Elsbethen in September in defiance of their spiritual superiors.

Published: November 28, 2025, 3:24 pm

Chicago’s faith leaders on front lines of resistance against ICE crackdown

Religious leaders’ ‘powerful prophetic and moral compass’ comes to fore amid ICE arrests, teargas and violence

For weeks, Chicago has been at the center of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security officials have arrested 800 people as of 1 October, while also using violent tactics such as body-slamming and deploying teargas in residential areas.

Amid the raids and arrests, which have created a pervasive sense of fear, faith leaders have stepped up, putting themselves on the front lines of resistance.

Published: November 28, 2025, 3:00 pm

Amid ‘instability and fear’ in Trump’s economy, Americans are cutting holiday spending

In addition to rising prices and tariffs, readers cite growing unemployment as a reason not to exchange gifts this year

Americans are feeling rattled about the state of the economy. Donald Trump has batted away question after question from reporters on concerns over higher prices, just a year after he won an election promising to bring down costs.

While the White House has tried to reduce concern, floating tariff-funded $2,000 stimulus checks and removing import levies on certain agricultural imports, many consumers remain anxious.

Published: November 28, 2025, 11:00 am

Trump order to keep Michigan power plant open costs taxpayers $113m

Critics say JH Campbell coal-fired plant in western Michigan is expensive and emits high levels of toxic pollution

Trump administration orders to keep an ageing, unneeded Michigan coal-fired power plant online has cost ratepayers from across the US midwest about $113m so far, according to estimates from the plant’s operator and regulators.

Still, the US energy department last week ordered the plant to remain open for another 90 days.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:00 pm

Maga moms, Trump babies and Erika Kirk: Republicans woo women in run-up to midterms

Erika Kirk – the widow of Charlie Kirk, the rightwing activist killed in Utah in September – has indicated she would be willing to support JD Vance in a 2028 presidential bid. Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, invites senior Republicans on to her podcast for discussions with conservative women. And the Trump administration is developing baby-boom policies it hopes will help gain the backing of women in the midterm elections.

Jonathan Freedland speaks to the Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi about the Republican drive to win over women

Archive: Megyn Kelly podcast, Katie Miller podcast, NBC, Fox, ABC, CNN

Published: November 28, 2025, 2:00 pm

The deadliest wait: five women on death row

Up to 1,000 women globally await execution in prison, with mitigating factors such as child abuse and coercion ignored

• Read more in our Women in prison series

There are between 500 and 1,000 women on death row in at least 42 countries, according to a 2023 report by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The countries that execute the most women are also the countries that execute the most people, namely China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

According to Amnesty International, in 2024 an unknown number of women were executed in China, two were put to death in Egypt, 30 in Iran, one in Iraq, nine in Saudi Arabia and two in Yemen. Some countries, including China, North Korea and Vietnam, do not publish accurate data.

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:00 pm

Newsom, AOC, Harris? Potential Democratic contenders for 2028 run

Would-be contenders include governors, senators, members of Congress and the former vice-president

After Democrats’s devastating loss to Donald Trump, the path forward for the party remains uncertain. With no clear direction – and no obvious standard-bearer – the race for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination is wide open. Would-be contenders include governors, senators, members of Congress, a former cabinet secretary and the former vice-president. While no one has officially announced their candidacy, several have begun visiting the early-voting states, and raising their profiles with appearances on popular podcasts and cross-country book tours. Of course, much could change in the months and years ahead, leaving room for surprises and new faces.

Many more Democrats are viewed as potential contenders. Here’s who else to watch.

Illinois governor JB Pritzker

Maryland governor Wes Moore

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer

Minnesota governor and former vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz

Colorado governor Jared Polis

Former commerce secretary Gina Raimondo

Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel

Arizona senator Mark Kelly

Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin

Connecticut senator Chris Murphy

New Jersey senator Cory Booker

California congressman Ro Khanna

Colorado congressman Jason Crow

Media personality Stephen A Smith

Published: November 28, 2025, 10:00 am

Before Charlie Kirk was killed on their campus, students felt happy there. They want that again

Many knew little about the polarizing figure before Utah Valley University was thrust into the national spotlight

The spot where Charlie Kirk was killed is fenced off. The fountain beside it shut down. The American flags nearby hang low above the spot where he fell. Every so often, someone stops to leave flowers or say a prayer. There are far more police officers and security staff than before, and many linger around the venue, as if the campus itself hasn’t taken a full breath since that day.

Back in 2019, Utah Valley University felt big and loud in the best way, a sprawling public campus of nearly 46,000 students and one of the most diverse in the state, with a large share of first-generation students. Then, on 10 September 2025, Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA and one of the country’s most polarizing conservative commentators, was shot on stage during a campus event. The attack sparked national outrage and political blame, adding to a long list of politically violent episodes. Two months later, UVU stands at the center of a national conversation.

Published: November 28, 2025, 11:00 am

‘Not going to happen’: First Nations threaten to end Carney’s pipe dream

The Canadian PM’s breakthrough oil deal with Alberta cost him a cabinet minister and will still face stiff opposition

When the people of the Haida nation won a decades-long battle for recognition that an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia in Canada was rightfully theirs, it was a long overdue victory.

The unprecedented deal with the provincial and the federal governments meant the Haida no longer had to prove that they had Aboriginal title to the land of Xhaaidlagha Gwaayaai, “the islands at the boundary of the world”

Published: November 28, 2025, 2:30 pm

From Fugee to felon: how Pras ‘betrayed his country’

Ex-member of the hip-hop group was convicted of money laundering and campaign finance violations after funneling money from a rich Malaysian

From the moment the Fugees shot to fame in the mid-90s, Prakazrel “Pras” Michél was discounted as an incidental member of the hip-hop superstars. He was the unremarkable New Jersey rhyme spitter by way of Brooklyn who was lucky enough to be a high school classmate of the mesmerizing Lauryn Hill and a cousin to mercurial Wyclef Jean. On the group’s breakout album The Score, Michel’s eight-bar features were minor contributions, relative to Hill’s adroitness as an emcee and balladeer and Jean’s compositional polymathy.

“From Hawaii to Hawthorne, I run marathons, like / Buju Banton, I’m a true champion, like / Farrakhan reads his daily Qur’an / It’s a phenomenon, lyrics fast like Ramadan,” Michél raps on the band’s breakout single Fu-Gee-La, in one of his more pedestrian efforts.

Published: November 28, 2025, 11:00 am

City life is reshaping raccoons – and may be nudging them toward domestication

Scientists say urban raccoons’ shorter snouts and calmer reactions to people mirror traits found in domesticated animals across species

Raccoons living wild in cities in the United States are beginning to show physical changes that resemble early signs of domestication, according to a recent study.

The study found that urban raccoons had developed shorter snouts than rural raccoons, with the research produced by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and published in Frontiers in Zoology. This is an example of a physical trait that appears across domesticated animals that have adapted to living in close proximity to humans over long periods of time, along with other traits such as smaller teeth, curlier tails, smaller brains and floppier ears.

Published: November 28, 2025, 2:00 pm

Fewer one night stands, more AI lovers: the data behind generation Z’s sex lives

Shaped by lockdown and two Trump presidencies, gen Z are grappling with a lot in love, dating and the bedroom

The sex lives of gen Z are of great interest – to politicians, to parents, to influencers and dating app executives and to you, apparently. Are gen Z so lonely they are falling in love with AI robots? Are they forming polycules across the US? Are they having enough sex? Are they having sex at all?

Gen Z is defined roughly as young Americans aged 13 to 28. This generation came of age with information about sex readily available to them, for better (the internet provides both sex education and community) and arguably for worse, too (in 2022, 54% of US teens reported first seeing online pornography at age 13 or younger). They are more likely to embrace non-traditional identities and are progressive on issues such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage – especially gen Z women.

Published: November 28, 2025, 3:00 pm

After a teddy bear talked about kink, AI watchdogs are warning parents against smart toys

Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulation

As the holiday season looms into view with Black Friday, one category on people’s gift lists is causing increasing concern: products with artificial intelligence.

The development has raised new concerns about the dangers smart toys could pose to children, as consumer advocacy groups say AI could harm kids’ safety and development. The trend has prompted calls for increased testing of such products and governmental oversight.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:00 pm

Spirit of Walt but no Mickey Mouse in Disney’s planned desert community

The entertainment giant is building almost 2,000 homes in California’s Palm Springs area so beloved by its founder

The Coachella valley typically brings a few things to mind: hot desert sun, the most Instagrammable music festival in the country, and even more sun. What it doesn’t bring to mind, however, is the family-friendly, Mickey Mouse-eared nostalgia associated with all things Disney. But that may be changing.

In 2022, Disney announced plans to build a first-of-its-kind branded residential community, which they have named “Storyliving by Disney”. The first of the Storyliving communities, Cotino, is officially welcoming residents into model homes in Rancho Mirage, a city nestled in Coachella valley. When all plans are finished, the 618-acre community will feature almost 2,000 residential units, including single-family homes and condos.

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:00 pm

‘We have to be able to ask difficult questions’: who really took the iconic Napalm Girl photo?

A controversial Netflix documentary follows an investigation into the truth behind one of the most important wartime photos ever taken

It is one of the most recognizable photographs of the 20th century: a naked girl – arms wide, face contorted, skin scorched and peeling – running toward the camera as she flees a napalm attack in South Vietnam. To her right, a boy’s face is frozen in a Greek tragedy mask of pain. To her left, two other Vietnamese children run away from the bombed village of Trảng Bàng. Behind them, an indistinguishable group of soldiers and, behind them, a wall of black smoke.

Within hours of publication in June 1972, the photo, officially titled The Terror of War but colloquially known as Napalm Girl, went the analog version of viral; seen and discussed by millions of people around the world, it’s widely credited with galvanizing public opinion against the US war in Vietnam. Susan Sontag later wrote that the horrifically indelible image of nine-year-old Kim Phúc in distress “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities”. Sir Don McCullin, the legendary British photojournalist who covered the conflict, deemed it the single best photograph of what would later be called “The Television War”. Napalm Girl is, “simply put, one of the most important photographs of anything ever made, and certainly of the Vietnam war”, said Gary Knight, a British photojournalist with decades of combat photography experience.

Published: November 28, 2025, 9:03 am

The genocide in Gaza is far from over | Raz Segal

We live not in a post-Holocaust world of ‘Never Again’ but in the same world that led to the Holocaust, a world of ‘Again and Again’

On 10 October, following two years of Israeli genocide that have turned Gaza into the new benchmark of total destruction, after Israel has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and inflicted on all the people in Gaza “severe bodily or mental harm,” to quote from the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Trump administration imposed a ceasefire, giving rise to the idea that the Gaza war has ended.

The ceasefire, however, seems to be designed mostly to move forward with the business deals of the mega rich in the Middle East, and the fire has never ceased: the Israeli government has continued its assault, killing and injuring hundreds of Palestinians since 10 October, destroying thousands of homes and buildings, and blocking the entry of sufficient aid.

Raz Segal is an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide

Published: November 28, 2025, 11:00 am

Food is medicine, and that’s a fact. Why we all need Native American foodways

Ecologically sound farming and land stewardship can change individual, collective and planetary health

Within Indigenous communities across North America and beyond, we have long known that food is medicine. This isn’t just theory; it’s fact. We understand that seasonal, regionally specific and culturally relevant foods are vital for nurturing, nourishing and healing both our people and our planet. And it’s high time we all embrace the Native American concept of food as medicine.

Our ancestral wisdom has ensured our survival for millennia, even in the face of unthinkable circumstances like colonialism, genocide and ongoing oppression. This ever-relevant knowledge will ensure our collective survival amid today’s unthinkable circumstances here in the United States, such as political instability, climate change and rising health issues.

Published: November 27, 2025, 2:00 pm

How Amazon turned our capitalist era of free markets into the age of technofeudalism | Yanis Varoufakis

Amazon Web Services owns the basic infrastructure for other businesses to operate online, turning even governments into its serfs. But now some people are fighting back

For the past six years, every Black Friday – that made-up carnival of consumption – Amazon workers and their allies have mobilised across the world in coordinated strikes and protests. At first glance, these disputes look like the standard struggle between a giant capitalist employer and the people who keep it running. But Amazon is no ordinary corporation. It is the clearest expression of what I call technofeudalism: a new economic order in which platforms behave like lords owning the fiefs that have replaced markets.

To appreciate Amazon’s extraordinary power, we must recall the system it is helping to bury. Capitalism relied on markets and profit. Firms invested in productive capital, hired workers, produced commodities and lived or died by profit and loss. But the emerging order is one in which the most powerful capitalist firms have exited that market altogether. They own the digital infrastructure that everyone else must use to trade, work, communicate and live.

Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25 and the author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

Published: November 27, 2025, 5:20 pm

Conchological delight and a return to real life. Remember that? | Lucy Mangan

A change of heart on the search for a GHS down by the Thames before discovering the growing trend for ‘posting zero’

The hunt is apparently on in London for the German hairy snail. OK. I have an idea. Why don’t we NOT search for anything called “the German hairy snail”? In fact, I have an even better idea – why don’t we not search for any kind of “hairy snail”. I would go even further and suggest not searching for anything “hairy” at all because that is second only to “mucus” in the list of world’s worst words. But I will settle for not searching for the thing that unassailably evokes the two in grotesque combination.

Published: November 28, 2025, 11:32 am

Eating Thanksgiving dinner at dinnertime is ludicrous. Here’s why | Dave Schilling

Dining at 3pm allows for an ideal holiday schedule. Let’s retire the term ‘dinner’ from our Thanksgiving lexicon

Without question, my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. I relish the opportunity to appreciate all the wonderful things about life. I also love that it is simultaneously a holiday all about complaints, criticism and arguments. Every holiday should contain such multitudes. I might be feeling grateful for my blessings while also wishing the gravy had more salt in it. There’s something uniquely American about turning a holiday that’s meant to be a joyous celebration of abundance into a chance to vehemently disagree about something trivial.

Of course, I love arguing about trivial things. In fact, that might be what I’m most grateful for. Thanksgiving traditions are fertile ground for arguments. What to eat and, even more crucially, when to eat. Every year, someone in your life – a family member, friend, know-it-all writer – will tell you they have settled the eternal debate about when to commence Thanksgiving dinner. Some (wrong) people think the word “dinner” should be taken literally, in the American sense. These strict constitutionalists can see no nuance in the holiday traditions and believe (falsely) that the meal should begin between 5pm and 7pm, when it’s properly dark outside.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Published: November 27, 2025, 1:00 pm

The Guardian view on city living: an urban species is still adapting to our new environment | Editorial

UN figures show that four-fifths of the global population now live in major settlements. We’re still figuring out how to cope

Cities have existed for millennia, but their triumph is remarkably recent. As recently as 1950, only 30% of the world’s population were urban dwellers. This week, a United Nations report suggested that more than 80% of people are now urbanites, with most of those living in cities. London became the first city to reach a million inhabitants in the early 19th century. Now, almost 500 have done so.

Jakarta, with 42 million residents, has just overtaken Tokyo as the most populous of the lot; nine of the 10 largest megacities are in Asia. The UN report revealed the scale of the recent population shift to towns and cities thanks to a new, standardised measure in place of the widely varying national criteria previously used. The urbanisation rate in its 2018 report was just 55%.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Published: November 27, 2025, 6:35 pm

From value-adds to networking superconductor: how the weird language of tech dulled sport | Aaron Timms

Tech investors promise to disrupt everything from padel to basketball, but their pitch-deck jargon is slowly draining the humanity from sport itself

Finally, a sector more ludicrously hyped than AI. Speaking to Yahoo Sports recently about the launch of Project B, a startup global women’s basketball league, co-founder Grady Burnett declared that “women’s basketball is growing right now as fast as AI”. Come again? There’s no question that women’s basketball is growing nicely, a development that we should all cheer: this year’s WNBA season was the most watched ever. But it is testing credulity to suggest that the sport is growing at anything like the same speed as AI, which since 2022 has gone from the technological margins to the very center of the US economy: by some reports, AI spending accounted for half of the growth in US GDP in the first half of this year. Perhaps I’m missing the real story here and the Federal Reserve is actively keeping tabs on attendance figures at Washington Mystics v Golden State Valkyries games for signs of potential overheating in the US economy. But it seems unlikely.

Claims like Burnett’s are par for the course in the hyperventilating world of sports investment, in which new leagues intent on world domination are launched seemingly every week and the pitches, delivered at investment conferences by slick men with gleaming teeth and spotless sneakers, grow more and more clammily self-satisfied by the hour. Burnett’s league, which he co-founded with former Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice, was briefly associated with Maverick Carter and LeBron James over the summer but that pair now seems to have been removed from the picture, and the league is emerging from “stealth mode”, to use a wormy bit of tech jargon, as the pure, uncut essence of bored Silicon Valley rich guy calculation. In a crowded field, Project B may be the most insanely overcaffeinated, tech bro-addled pitch for a new sports league yet.

Published: November 28, 2025, 10:00 am

NFL Thanksgiving games: Love powers Packers over Lions; Cowboys and Bengals win

• Packers sweep Lions and strengthen division tiebreaker

• Prescott and Davis feature as Cowboys beat Chiefs

• Burrow helps Bengals spoil Ravens’ Thanksgiving

Jordan Love converted a pair of fourth downs with touchdown passes in the first half and finished with a career-high-matching four TD throws, leading the Green Bay Packers to a 31-24 win over the Detroit Lions on Thursday.

The Packers (8-3-1) swept the season series to earn a potential tiebreaker in the NFC North and are in second place in the division behind Chicago (8-3), who play at Philadelphia on Friday.

Published: November 27, 2025, 9:49 pm

Palmer fit to start against Arsenal, Gueye red card appeal rejected – football live

• The latest football updates and reaction

• Read Football Daily | Ten things to look out for

Europa League: Aston Villa 2-1 Young Boys

Donyell Malen has a cut to the head and two more goals to his name after leading Aston Villa to the verge of automatic qualification for the last 16 of the Europa League against a backdrop of more crowd violence from Young Boys supporters.

Published: November 28, 2025, 3:22 pm

Iga Swiatek: ‘I didn’t want to give any points for free – it’s a Wimbledon final and I wanted to win’

SW19 champion baffled by post-match suggestions she should have let Amanda Anisimova win one game in grand slam final as she turns focus to Australian Open in 2026

In the coming months, if and when her schedule allows, Iga Swiatek will make a pilgrimage to London and the All England Club, the scene of her biggest and, she admits, most surprising triumph. In July, the 24-year-old won her first Wimbledon title and sixth grand slam title in all, crushing a hapless Amanda Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 in the final.

It was the undoubted highlight of an up-and-down year for the Pole, who struggled on her best surface of clay but who will end 2025 ranked No 2, her fourth year in a row finishing inside the world’s top two.

Published: November 28, 2025, 8:00 am

Chess: Sindarov, 19, becomes youngest World Cup winner as London Classic begins

The Uzbek won $120,000 and qualified for the 2026 Candidates in Cyprus, which will decide the official challenger for Gukesh Dommaraju’s world crown

Javokhir Sindarov, 19, became the youngest ever winner of the Fide knockout World Cup on Wednesday when the Uzbek defeated China’s Wei Yi 2.5-1.5 in the final at Goa. Ukraine’s Ruslan Ponomariov had been a year younger in 2002, but that World Cup had also doubled as the Fide world championship in a period when the global title was disputed.

Wei was the favourite, but handicapped himself by poor time management in the decisive game. He declined a draw and could have gained an advantage by 52 Qg6! when Black’s king was trapped on the back row, and right at the end could have drawn by 57 Kg2! Qh4 58 Rf8+! when White can force perpetual check. Instead, he blundered into a checkmating attack.

Published: November 28, 2025, 8:00 am

Fuzzy Zoeller, two-time major winner haunted by racist Tiger Woods joke, dies aged 74

• Masters champion in 1979 and US Open winner in 1984

• Post-career reputation marred by remarks about Woods

• Trump pays tribute to ‘remarkable person and player’

Fuzzy Zoeller, the two-time major champion whose genial public persona was overshadowed by a racially insensitive joke about Tiger Woods that came to define the latter part of his career, has died aged 74.

No cause of death was immediately available. Brian Naugle, tournament director of the Insperity Invitational in Houston and a longtime colleague, said Zoeller’s daughter notified him of the death on Thursday.

Published: November 27, 2025, 7:13 pm

Odermatt wins super-G at Copper Mountain as Kilde’s return leaves Shiffrin in tears

• Swiss ace wins by 0.08sec in Copper Mountain super-G

• Kilde returns 700 days after devastating Wengen crash

• Shiffrin cries as fiancé finishes emotional comeback run

Swiss ski star Marco Odermatt started the World Cup super-G season with a Thanksgiving win at Copper Mountain on Thursday, while Aleksander Aamodt Kilde reduced fiancée Mikaela Shiffrin to tears by making his comeback after nearly two years out.

Odermatt has already won the opening giant slalom – at Sölden in the Austrian Alps last month – in what is an ominous start to the season by the world’s best men’s skier leading up to the Milan Cortina Olympic Games in February.

Published: November 27, 2025, 9:34 pm

Green days: Ben Ainslie’s new team lead the way on and out of the water | Emma John

The SailGP championship harnesses sailors’ competitive instincts in the cause of sustainability as teams vie to be the greenest of them all

British sailors have always been a belligerent bunch. Francis Drake, Lord Nelson, Admiral Cunningham … and, of course, Sir Ben Ainslie. The most successful Olympian in sailing’s history is also the sport’s equivalent of The Hulk: you really don’t want to make him angry.

So perhaps it’s a good thing that there has been plenty to annoy him this year, not least that acrimonious split from his America’s Cup team owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe. In true Ainslie style, it only seems to have made him more dangerous. His Emirates GBR team top the SailGP championship going into this weekend’s grand final. And on Wednesday, they were named 2025 winners of its Impact League, which ranks the racing teams on the contribution they have made to their social and natural environment.

Published: November 28, 2025, 8:00 am

The Super Bowl Shuffle at 40: how a goofy rap classic boosted the Bears’ title run

A new documentary charts how a song that featured a 335lb rapper and bad dancing went viral in the pre-internet era

The Chicago Bears are 8-3 and soaring in this season’s NFL standings. For a fanbase that’s grown accustomed to looking up at the division rival Green Bay Packers and looking ahead to the next season’s prospects, it’s reason to smell the roses and indulge in some light strutting. But even as fans find themselves looking forward to the Bears’ first playoff berth in five years, something that once seemed unthinkable with a second-year quarterback and a rookie head coaching helming a squad that managed only five wins last year, no fan is thinking the 2025 Bears have a Super Bowl run in them – not without a rap song to lay the marker down.

Before the 1985 edition of the Bears romped to victory in Super Bowl XX, they tempted fate by recording The Super Bowl Shuffle. Although the song only peaked at 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, the accompanying video came to rival Michael Jackson’s Thriller for popularity as it popped up endlessly on TV during the Bears’ title run. “The Super Bowl Shuffle went viral in an age where there was no viral existence like we know it today,” the song’s recording engineer, Fred Breitberg, says. “It was a phenomenal entity as well as being a good record.”

Published: November 27, 2025, 10:00 am

‘Foam that’s washed away’: support dissolves as Bolsonaro starts 27-year jail term

Brazil shows little sign of feared rightwing rebellion, with only a few die-hards protesting outside prison

A few hours before Jair Bolsonaro was ordered to start his 27-year coup sentence in a parking space-sized room, Arley Xavier stood outside the former president’s new home putting a brave face on his leader’s bind.

“It’s not over. There’s still so much Jair Messias Bolsonaro needs to do here in Brazil … No, it’s not over,” insisted the 21-year-old activist, urging conservatives to rise up against Bolsonaro’s imprisonment by flocking to the capital, Brasília, to protest.

Published: November 28, 2025, 10:00 am

German president honours victims of Nazi bombing atrocity on Guernica visit

Frank-Walter Steinmeier travels to Basque town for remembrance ceremony marking ‘terrible crimes’ of 1937

Eighty-eight years after Luftwaffe pilots took part in the most infamous atrocity of the Spanish civil war, Germany’s president has visited the Basque town of Guernica to honour the victims of the Nazi bombing and to urge that the “terrible crimes” committed there are never forgotten.

Hundreds of civilians were killed and hundreds more injured on 26 April 1937 when planes from the German Condor Legion, operating alongside aircraft from fascist Italy, spent hours bombing Guernica on market day. Adolf Hitler had loaned the Luftwaffe unit to Gen Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces to help them in their coup against the republican government, and to allow Nazi Germany’s pilots to practise the blitzkrieg tactics they would later use in the second world war.

Published: November 28, 2025, 3:26 pm

‘A step-change’: tech firms battle for undersea dominance with submarine drones

As navies seek to counter submarines and protect cables, startups and big defence companies fight to lead market

Flying drones used during the Ukraine war have changed land battle tactics for ever. Now the same thing appears to be happening under the sea.

Navies around the world are racing to add autonomous submarines. The UK’s Royal Navy is planning a fleet of underwater uncrewed vehicles (UUVs) which will, for the first time, take a leading role in tracking submarines and protecting undersea cables and pipelines. Australia has committed to spending $1.7bn (£1.3bn) on “Ghost Shark” submarines to counter Chinese submarines. The huge US Navy is spending billions on several UUV projects, including one already in use that can be launched from nuclear submarines.

Published: November 28, 2025, 6:00 am

New film adaptation of Camus’s L’Étranger opens old colonial wounds

François Ozon’s handling of classic novel draws both praise and criticism, including from the author’s daughter

More than 80 years after it was published, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger remains one of the most widely read and fiercely contested French books in the world.

Until now, few attempts have been made to adapt the novel, published in English as The Outsider, for television or cinema: it is considered problematic and divisive for its portrayal of France’s colonisation of Algeria.

Published: November 28, 2025, 3:00 pm

Jacob Zuma’s daughter resigns amid claims South Africans tricked to fight for Russia

Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla quits as MP after being accused of recruiting 17 men who are trapped in war-torn Ukraine

A daughter of the former South African president Jacob Zuma has resigned as an MP, after being accused of tricking 17 South African men into fighting for Russia in Ukraine by telling them they were travelling to Russia to train as bodyguards for the Zumas’ uMkohnto weSizwe (MK) party.

Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, 43, the most visible and active in politics of her siblings, volunteered to resign and step back from public roles while cooperating with a police investigation and working to bring the men home, the MK chair, Nkosinathi Nhleko, said at a press conference in Durban.

Published: November 28, 2025, 3:28 pm

Olivia Dean fans refunded by Ticketmaster after singer criticises ‘vile’ resale practices

Ticketmaster said they would ‘lead by example’ after Dean called out companies when tickets for her North American tour appeared on resale sites at prices in excess of $1,000

Ticketmaster has given fans of Olivia Dean partial refunds after the British singer condemned ticketing companies for allowing touts to relist tickets for her North American tour at more than 14 times their face value.

After the tour sold out in minutes on 21 November and tickets appeared on resale sites at prices in excess of $1,000, Dean addressed the major ticketing companies on Instagram: “@Ticketmaster @Livenation @AEGPresents you are providing a disgusting service,” she wrote. “The prices at which you’re allowing tickets to be re-sold is vile and completely against our wishes. Live music should be affordable and accessible and we need to find a new way of making that possible. BE BETTER.”

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:58 pm

Germany to urge EU to soften 2035 ban on sale of new petrol and diesel cars

Friedrich Merz to ask for series of exemptions in attempt to protect crisis-hit automotive industry

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is to urge the EU to soften the 2035 cutoff date for the sale of combustion-engine cars.

Merz said he would send a letter to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Friday urging Brussels to keep technological options open for carmakers. The sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the EU is scheduled to be banned in a decade’s time.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:12 pm

Africa’s forests transformed from carbon sink to carbon source, study finds

Alarming shift since 2010 means planet’s three main rainforest regions now contribute to climate breakdown

Africa’s forests have turned from a carbon sink into a carbon source, according to research that underscores the need for urgent action to save the world’s great natural climate stabilisers.

The alarming shift, which has happened since 2010, means all of the planet’s three main rainforest regions – the South American Amazon, south-east Asia and Africa – have gone from being allies in the fight against climate breakdown to being part of the problem.

Published: November 28, 2025, 10:00 am

Beyond the negative headlines, some truly good things came out of Cop30

In this week’s newsletter: Ultimately, climate progress will come from real-world action, and this year’s summit made some promising strides on that front

• Don’t get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Some commentators have called Cop30 a failure. An attempt to insert plans for a route to the phaseout of fossil fuels into the legal text was stymied, consideration of how to improve countries’ emissions-cutting plans was put off till next year, and although developing countries got the tripling of finance for adaptation that they were seeking, it will not be delivered in full until 2035 – and will come out of already promised funds.

Look beyond the headlines, however, and the Cop achieved a great deal more. Take the outcome on fossil fuels – it seems absurd, but until 2023 three decades of annual climate summits had failed to address fossil fuels directly.

UK can create 5,400 jobs if it stops plastic waste exports, report finds

Zombie fires: how Arctic wildfires that come back to life are ravaging forests

There’s a catastrophic black hole in our climate data – and it’s a gift to deniers | George Monbiot

US, Russia and Saudi Arabia create axis of obstruction as Cop30 sputters out

We delivered a clear message at Cop30: the delayers and defeatists are losing the climate fight | Ed Miliband

Another Cop wrecked by fossil fuel interests and our leaders’ cowardice – but there is another way | Genevieve Guenther

Published: November 28, 2025, 7:00 am

US midwest and north brace for storm as nearly 82m people travel for holidays

Several flights are delayed and parts of Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan could see six to 10 inches of snow

Parts of the US midwest and the Great Lakes region are bracing for a strong storm this weekend, as an estimated 82 million Americans travel to gather in celebration of Thanksgiving.

Some parts of the country are expecting cold, snowy conditions, and the weather has already caused some travel delays. On Thursday morning more than 800 flights were already delayed, most in the northern states.

Published: November 27, 2025, 6:55 pm

‘Nature feeds us more than it floods us’: Asheville after-school program teaches kids to forage

In the wake of Hurricane Helene, No Taste Like Home aims to rebuild trust between students and the land

Juniper Stewart just turned 12. She wears a cropped orange sweater and her ginger curls in a bob. She used to like Taylor Swift, but now she’s more into the Cranberries and other indie rock.

Juniper also knows how to identify a Pilobolus mushroom, which grows on “cow poop”, according to Juniper. She can confidently harvest plantain leaf, a ubiquitous wild plant that’s tasty in salads and sautées, and useful as a poultice on stings and poison ivy. She has paper bags full of sourwood leaves drying at home to make tea, and she’s delighted by the fact that when you touch jewelweed seed pods, they explode.

Published: November 27, 2025, 1:00 pm

Florida professor may have solved mystery of Peru’s Band of Holes

Charles Stanish surmised indentations were rudimentary market place and later adapted as accounting and storage system

A Florida archaeologist’s decades-long persistence has helped solve one of Peru’s most puzzling geographical conundrums: the origin and purpose of the so-called Band of Holes in the country’s mountainous Pisco Valley.

Charles Stanish, professor of archaeology at the University of South Florida, and an expert on Andean culture, spent years studying the more than 5,200 curious hillside shallow pits known to local residents as Monte Sierpe - serpent mountain.

Published: November 27, 2025, 5:01 pm

Robert AM Stern, architect dubbed ‘King of Central Park West’, dies aged 86

Stern, credited with designing 15 Central Park West, sought to design buildings that invoked pre-war splendor

Robert AM Stern, an architect who fashioned the New York City skyline with buildings that sought to invoke pre-war splendor but with modern luxury fit for billionaires and movie stars, has died at the age of 86.

Dubbed “The King of Central Park West” by Vanity Fair, Stern was credited with designing 15 Central Park West that, in 2008, was credited as being the highest-priced new apartment building in the history of New York.

Published: November 27, 2025, 8:35 pm

Estate of Johnny Cash suing Coca-Cola for using tribute act in advert

The company is being sued under the new Elvis act, which protects a person’s voice from exploitation without consent

The estate of Johnny Cash is suing Coca-Cola for illegally hiring a tribute act to impersonate the late US country singer in an advertisement that plays between college football games.

The case has been filed under the Elvis Act of Tennessee, made effective last year, which protects a person’s voice from exploitation without consent. The estate said that while it has previously licensed Cash’s songs, Coca-Cola did not approach them for permission in this instance.

Published: November 27, 2025, 10:30 am

‘Stay tuned’: new Anne Rice film could foretell release of unpublished work by late author

Documentary series of Interview with the Vampire writer available to stream with potential for further releases

The worst heartbreak and most riveting triumph of Anne Rice’s life happened in relatively quick succession, each beginning when the US novelist’s daughter – Michele, then about three – told her she was too tired to play.

Rice had never heard such a comment from a child that age, and subsequent blood tests ordered by a doctor revealed that her beloved “Mouse” had acute granulocytic leukemia, considered untreatable for her.

Published: November 27, 2025, 10:00 am

Sugababes, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Wolf Alice and more to play all-star charity concert for trans rights

Organised by Olly Alexander and the Mighty Hoopla festival to ‘fight back against the politics of fear and exclusion’, Trans Mission will take place at Wembley Arena in March

Artists including Sugababes, Wolf Alice, Romy, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Christine and the Queens, Beth Ditto, Beverley Knight, Jasmine.4.T, Kae Tempest and more will perform at an all-star charity concert at Wembley Arena in support of trans rights next year.

Organised by Olly Alexander and the Mighty Hoopla festival, Trans Mission will also feature appearances from figures including Green party leader Zack Polanski, actor Ian McKellen, comedian Grace Campbell, author Shon Faye, actor Mawaan Rizwan, model Munroe Bergdorf and actor Nicola Coughlan.

Adam Lambert

Beth Ditto

Bimini

Beverley Knight

Christine and the Queens

Fat Tony

GottMikk

HAAi

Jasmine.4.T

Kae Tempest

Kate Nash

MNEK

Olly Alexander

Romy

Sink the Pink

Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Sugababes

Tom Grennan

Tom Rasmussen

Trans Voices

Wolf Alice

Dani St James

Grace Campbell

Harriet Rose

Ian McKellen

Jack Rooke

Jayde Adams

Jo Maugham

Jordan Stephens

Juno Birch

Juno Dawson

Kadiff Kirwan

Layton Williams

Mawaan Rizwan

Munroe Bergdorf

Nicola Coughlan

Russell Tovey

Shon Faye

Tia Kofi

Tiara Skye

Zack Polanski

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:17 pm

Fatos Nano obituary

Politician who helped steer Albania’s chaotic transition in the early 1990s from communist rule to fledgling market economy

Whether he was in government or in jail, Fatos Nano was one of the two figures, along with his arch-rival, Sali Berisha, who dominated Albania’s political scene in the turbulent 15 years that began with the disintegration of Communist party rule in 1990.

It was characteristic of the political turmoil of this period that, although he was appointed prime minister on four separate occasions, Nano served for only a total of four years in that post.

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:49 pm

Palestinian-American teenager held in Israeli prison freed after nine months

Israeli soldiers had taken Mohammed Ibrahim from his home in a night raid when he was only 15 years old

A 16-year-old American citizen was freed on Thursday after spending nine months in an Israeli prison.

Mohammed Ibrahim, a Palestinian-American teenager from Florida whose case was first exposed by the Guardian in July, was released following a guilty plea and suspended sentence, according to his family. Relatives said he was taken to a hospital for intravenous therapy and blood work immediately after his release, and noted he is severely underweight, pale and is still suffering from scabies contracted during his detention. Ibrahim had lost a quarter of his body weight in detention, his family said.

Published: November 27, 2025, 3:04 pm

Canada minister resigns from cabinet over Carney’s controversial oil pipeline deal

Minister Steven Guilbeault says Indigenous nations were not consulted and the pipeline would have ‘major environmental impacts’

Mark Carney has agreed an energy deal with Alberta centred on plans for a new heavy oil pipeline reaching from the province’s oil sands to the Pacific coast, a politically volatile project that is expected to face stiff opposition.

The move proved politically damaging within hours, with the minister of Canadian culture, Steven Guilbeault, who is the former environment minister, announcing he would leave cabinet. Guilbault, a former activist and lifelong environmental advocate, said he strongly opposed the plan.

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:09 am

Macy’s Annual Thanksgiving Day Parade 2025: in pictures

The 99th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, one of the largest in the world, dazzled crowds in Manhattan, New York, on Thursday. Thirty-two balloons, three giant balloons, 27 floats, four special units, 33 clown groups, 11 marching bands, performance groups, and music stars parade to welcome ‘Santa Claus and the holiday season’

Published: November 27, 2025, 7:04 pm

Stranger Things season five review – this luxurious final run will have you standing on a chair, yelling with joy

The kids growing up might have changed this show’s appeal, but they manage to go out in a flame-throwing, bullet-dodging blaze of glory – while still being more moving than ever before

Time’s up for Stranger Things. The fifth and last season arrives almost three-and-a-half years after a fourth run that felt like a finale, not least because it seemed the kids had grown up. Having originally aped beloved 1980s films where stubbornly brave children avert apocalypse, the franchise now starred young adults and had adjusted plotlines and dialogue accordingly. Life lessons had been learned. Selves had been found. Adolescent anxieties – as personified by Vecna, the narky telekinetic tree-man who rules a parallel dimension adjacent to the humdrum town of Hawkins, Indiana – had been put aside.

But Stranger Things now belatedly returns, with the cast all visibly in their 20s. This is a problem. The whole point is that it’s fun to watch kids outrun monsters by pedalling faster on their BMX bikes, or ignoring their mum calling them to dinner because they’re in the basement with their school pals, drawing up plans to bamboozle the US military using pencils, bubblegum and Dungeons & Dragons figurines. If everyone looks old enough to have a studio apartment and a stocks portfolio, none of the above really flies.

Published: November 27, 2025, 1:01 am

Oh yes he is! Kiefer Sutherland dives into the world of panto

Hollywood megastars hit Leeds this year to make Tinsel Town, a feelgood festive comedy about panto. The 24 star, Rebel Wilson and more talk about their addiction to Greggs sausage rolls – and epic brawls with Danny Dyer

Twenty-odd years ago, I binged a TV series on DVD for the first time. At my mate’s house in a village outside Harrogate, I was glued to Jack Bauer shooting his way through 24. We probably only made it to episode six before surrendering to sleep for school the next day.

Fast forward to the start of this year, and photos are all over the local news of Kiefer Sutherland out and about in nearby market towns Knaresborough and Wetherby. The real Jack Bauer in Yorkshire! He and Rebel Wilson are in the area making Tinsel Town, a British Christmas film about pantomimes. By March, I am invited to a Leeds studio, where they are filming, and find Sutherland dressed as Buttons on a stage. His glittery eyeshadow shimmers as he smiles and dances to Katy Perry’s Roar with the Cinderella cast. He repeats this showstopper scene about 15 times. It’s a surreal full circle moment; I half expect him to pull a pistol out on the ugly stepsisters.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:00 pm

You’re gonna need a bigger boat: the 20 best films set on water – ranked!

As L’Atalante is re-released, we count down the best movies set largely on ships, boats, barges, yachts, steamers and trimarans. Submarines banned, as they’re under water

Stephen Sommers’ sci-fi horror pulp follows a bunch of scene-stealing character actors playing mercenaries hired to destroy the cruise ship Argonautica for insurance purposes. But a giant mutant octopus has got there first! Among the potential cephalopod fodder are Treat Williams, Kevin J O’Connor, and Famke Janssen as a jewel thief.

Published: November 27, 2025, 1:26 pm

The US government ruins Thanksgiving: it’s a South Park holiday special

Idiotic US war secretary Pete Hegseth launches an attack on a turkey-based festivity in frustration at his inability to outsmart a buffoonish police detective. A wild season finale looms

Tonight’s South Park is something of a breather in what has been their most story-driven season (or seasons, as it turned out) ever. There is some advancement to the overriding plot of Donald Trump attempting to kill the unborn baby he’s expecting with his lover, Satan, before it can unleash the prophesied apocalypse – a plot that involves master manipulator (and new Trump sex partner) JD Vance and billionaire/self-proclaimed antichrist expert Peter Thiel (recently incarcerated by South Park’s finest for kidnapping Eric Cartman). But tonight’s instalment, Turkey Trot, focuses more on the goings-on in the titular town than in Washington DC.

As Thanksgiving approaches, South Park finds its annual holiday marathon in jeopardy. None of its regular sponsors – Stan Marsh’s Tegridy Weed Farms, recently shuttered, and City Asian Popup Store, beset by high tariffs – can afford to pay for it. Desperate for a solution, the town reaches out to the one entity that has plenty of money to spend in America: the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Published: November 27, 2025, 12:31 pm

Add to playlist: Storefront Church’s cinematic baroque pop and the week’s best new tracks

Californian singer-songwriter Lukas Frank is picking up rave reviews for his second album’s epic choruses and lush orchestrations

From Los Angeles
Recommended if you like John Grant, Scott Walker, Father John Misty
Up next A cover of Duran Duran’s The Chauffeur is out now, with another single due in February

After several years of perseverance, things are happening for Storefront Church. The audience at this month’s sellout gig at St Pancras Old Church in London included Perfume Genius and members of the Last Dinner Party and the Horrors and their self-released second album, Ink & Oil, is picking up rave reviews. One used the term “emotional flood” to describe the album’s epic, baroque pop, big pianos and drums, sweeping choruses and Travis Warner’s lush, cinematic orchestrations.

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:00 pm

‘How am I still going?’: the everlasting appeal of Cliff Richard

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

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

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

Published: November 28, 2025, 10:21 am

Ikonika: Sad review – vocal-led new direction is a hit for the Hyperdub veteran

(Hyperdub)
The dancefloor producer weaves seductive and steely lyrics with their trademark production in a convincing embrace of pop

Sad represents a total reinvention for Ikonika, the producer, songwriter and singer also known as Sara Chen. Putting their own vocals at the forefront of their music for the first time, Chen becomes a charismatic and haunting pop presence. Sometimes, they play the role of warm R&B vocalist (Listen to Your Heart); at other times, such as on the nervy, hypnotic Whatchureallywant, they’re seductive and steely, commanding the dancefloor over production that draws equally from bass music and South African amapiano.

Ikonika has long been an established presence in underground electronic music. They have been signed to the Hyperdub label for nearly 20 years; muscular, sprightly releases such as 2020’s Your Body and 2018’s The Library Album have contributed to their reputation as a brash, warm-spirited producer. But Sad has the feel of a debut, centring sounds from northern and southern Africa (Chen is part-Egyptian) on tracks like Sense Seeker and Gone. Their lyrics draw on ideas of safety and care, pushing their persona past “party starter” and into more complex territory.

Published: November 28, 2025, 8:30 am

The Durutti Column: The Return of the Durutti Column review – fragile classic that echoes far beyond its time

(London)
The delicate experimentation of the band’s debut may not have chimed with the post-punk 1980s, but its durability makes this deluxe reissue thoroughly deserved

The Durutti Column’s debut album does not have an auspicious origin story. The band whose name it bore had split acrimoniously just before they were supposed to record it. Their guitarist Vini Reilly was so poleaxed by depression that he was virtually unable to leave his house: 12 different attempts were made to section him over the course of 1979. Believing that Reilly was “going to die”, Factory Records boss Tony Wilson intervened, buying him a new guitar, then suggested he visit a studio with the label’s troubled but visionary producer Martin Hannett as “an experiment”. The sessions were a disaster. Hannett ignored Reilly in favour of tinkering with a vast amount of cutting-edge electronic equipment he had brought with him. Reilly fitfully played something on the guitar, but eventually stormed out with the words: “I’m fucking sick of this.” He did not return.

Unaware that he was making an album, Reilly was “mortified” when Hannett handed over a finished product, and “absolutely hated” what he heard. The solitary upside, as he saw it, was his sense that it would never find a wider audience. The music on 1980’s The Return of the Durutti Column bore no relation to the workmanlike post-punk that the original band had contributed to the label’s compilation EP A Factory Sample, put together the previous year. (Although Reilly thought they were “complete and total rubbish”, too.) Grasping for comparisons, the music press likened it to the atmospheric jazz of the German label ECM and Reilly’s guitar playing to that of Mike Oldfield and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia – neither of them having much musical cachet in the post-punk world of 1980. Even a positive review in the NME suggested listeners would consider The Return of the Durutti Column “hippy noodling”.

Published: November 27, 2025, 2:49 pm

Tessa Hadley: ‘Uneasy books are good in uneasy times’

The author on Anna Karenina, the brilliance of Anita Brookner and finally getting Nabokov

My earliest reading memory
I acquired from somewhere, in my more or less atheistic family, a Ladybird Book of the Lord’s Prayer, whose every page I can recover in all its lurid 1960s naturalism. “As they forgive us our trespasses against them …” The horrified boy leaves a hand mark on the wall his father has just painted.

My favourite book growing up
One of my favourites was E Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods. The lives of those Edwardian children seemed as rich as a plum pudding, with their knickerbockers and their ironies, their cook and their sophisticated vocabulary. I didn’t understand, in my childhood, that they were separated from me by a gulf of time and change. Because of books, the past seemed to be happening in the next room, as if I could step into it effortlessly.

Published: November 28, 2025, 10:00 am

Luigi: The Making and the Meaning by John H Richardson review – sympathy for a devil?

This nebulous study of Luigi Mangione veers close to romanticising him as a latter-day Robin Hood

On 5 December 2024, the New York Times ran the headline “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The newspaper then noted that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then walked coolly away”. The murder in broad daylight was indeed both cold and shocking. But many Americans had a different response: for those who had been denied health insurance or faced exorbitant healthcase costs, the news felt cathartic. Social media blew up. One post read: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximize profits on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a master’s in computer science, was apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on federal and state charges of murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. So who is Mangione? And what might have motivated the alleged crime? These are the questions John H Richardson attempts to answer in an investigation that explores broader themes, too.

Published: November 27, 2025, 9:00 am

‘Adults think with their mouths open’: five modern aphorisms to help us make sense of 2025

In his new book The World in a Phrase, author James Geary shares aphorisms from David Byrne, James Baldwin and more that speak to the modern day

When it comes to aphorisms, the biggest hits are familiar: “a penny saved is a penny earned”, “a picture is worth 1,000 words”, the one about why teaching fishing is better than fish donations. These phrases have been around so long they can feel as old as language itself.

But aphorisms aren’t just historical artifacts. People regularly come up with new ones, and even if they haven’t come from the pen of Confucius or Emily Dickinson, they can shed light on the modern human experience with just a few words. In fact, “the aphorism is, in some ways, perfectly suited to the digital age: the oldest form of literature finds its ideal vehicle in the most modern short modes of communication,” writes James Geary in The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism.

Published: November 27, 2025, 3:00 pm

My family’s excitement about Outer Worlds 2 was short-lived | Dominik Diamond

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

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

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

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:00 pm

Peaches: ‘We need lube to smooth out the friction of the world’

The Canadian electroclash icon on No Lube So Rude, her first album in a decade, the state of global politics, the ‘punk energy’ of the older generation and her love of ping-pong

Why is your forthcoming album your first in over a decade and who is/are the “you” in comeback single Not in Your Mouth None of Your Business? k4ren123
I’ve been very busy – touring, working with dance troupes, performance art, sculptures, playing the lead role in a production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins in Stuttgart, and on and on. Then, finally, I started on new music. The “you” in the single are people who feel they have the right to have autonomy over other people’s bodies and make it unsafe for people to be who they want to be. I’m especially talking about queer and mostly trans rights. The song’s like a mantra or chant, a way to empower people in only a few sentences.

As a fan of your concert costume design as much as your music, what can we expect from the upcoming tour? Kelechica
I was thinking about sustainability and went to a costume sale at the Berlin opera and bought a bunch of opera costumes. I’m working with Charlie Le Mindu, who is transforming them into weird new creations. In the video for Not in Your Mouth, I’m wearing my sister’s leather jacket. It’s just been the fifth anniversary of her passing, and I wanted to keep something of her, so I kept her leather jacket that she wore the crap out of since the 90s. So, in a way, she’ll be in the show.

Published: November 27, 2025, 3:00 pm

Netflix crashes within minutes of releasing Stranger Things series five

Viewers unable to watch episodes of long-awaited final series on TV when the streaming service briefly froze

When Netflix crashed within minutes of releasing Stranger Things series five, it felt like a plot twist worthy of the sci-fi show itself.

Viewers were left unable to stream the opening episodes of the long-awaited final series, with many voicing their frustration on social media platforms.

Published: November 27, 2025, 8:53 am

God, gears and gun jewellery: Route 1 revisited – in pictures

Anastasia Samoylova took a photographic journey up the US east coast – and found herself in America’s unreconciled past just as much as its fragmented present

Published: November 27, 2025, 7:00 am

Soft seat cushions, AirTags and travel adapters: 20 Black Friday deals that readers love the most

From a chef-approved spatula to steeply discounted JBL earbuds, here are the picks readers have been snagging like hotcakes

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

• The very best US Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, curated and vetted

At this point, you don’t need me to tell you that Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale season is under way. We wanted you to enter the 2025 holiday sales season with a game plan, which is why we’ve already rounded up the best early Black Friday deals, shared strategies to avoid buyer’s remorse and put together a holiday gift guide of 163 items vetted by Guardian US staff and shopping experts.

And you must have all taken notes, because you’ve been buying the deals we’ve found. We’re learning that Guardian readers’ most frequently shopped items range from a chef-approved spatula to a steeply discounted pair of noise-cancelling headphones.

Published: November 27, 2025, 5:52 pm

The 15 best gifts in the US for the people who already have everything

Wondering what to buy for the person who already has everything? Our experts curated presents for the tough to buy for person on your list

• The 163 best holiday gift ideas for 2025, vetted by the Guardian US staff

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

You look around their house and they seem to have an abundance of stuff, or they’ve always got just the thing you need in their back pocket. They’re the person who seems to have everything – and they still deserve a memorable gift this holiday. After all, no one deserves to be penalized for being well-stocked or resourceful.

Maybe it’s a kitschy gadget sourced from the dredges of the internet, or an item so niche only you could ever determine they need it. Either way, the act of gift-giving itself strengthens any relationship, making your present less about the thing itself and more about making them feel special during the holidays – or even just because.

Published: November 27, 2025, 9:15 pm

Lock in a year of cheap TV with the best US Black Friday streaming deals

Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max and Apple TV are all slashing the price of a subscription this Black Friday – here are the best deals

• The very best US Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, curated and vetted

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

If there’s one thing you can count on for 2026, it’s that the major streamers will raise their prices at some point in the new year.

That’s why this year’s Black Friday streaming deals are very enticing: you have an opportunity to lock in below-market rates for up to an entire year. Netflix isn’t offering any Black Friday deal – because it doesn’t have to – but everyone else in the streaming realm is clearly vying to be number two behind the biggest streamer in the world. And they’re slashing prices to get there.

Published: November 27, 2025, 6:15 pm

The 15 US gifts to give the women in your life

From a silk sleep mask to Google’s smart speaker, here are the sentimental and practical presents for your mom, sister, wife or friend

• The 163 best holiday gift ideas for 2025, vetted by the Guardian US staff

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

If you’ve got a lucky lady in your life – be it a partner or a family member – chances are you’ve already racked your brain trying to choose the perfect holiday gift. Maybe you’re close to giving the tried-and-true beauty product she already orders on repeat, or yet another fleece throw to add to the growing pile on the couch. Don’t give in. This season calls for something a little more out of the (gift) box.

To shop for your favorite woman, think not only about what they already use, but what they’ve mentioned they’ve wanted in passing. Everyone scores peppermint bark-flavored brownie points around the holidays for proving they actually listen.

Published: November 27, 2025, 3:15 pm

Face transplants promised hope. Patients were put through the unthinkable

Twenty years after the first face transplant, patients are dying, data is missing, and the experimental procedure’s future hangs in the balance

In the early hours of 28 May 2005, Isabelle Dinoire woke up in a pool of blood. After fighting with her family the night before, she turned to alcohol and sleeping tablets “to forget”, she later said.

Reaching for a cigarette out of habit, she realized she couldn’t hold it between her lips. She understood something was wrong.

Published: November 27, 2025, 11:00 am

‘It was no longer a gift for my husband. It was all for me’: four women on how boudoir photography changed their lives

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

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

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

Published: November 27, 2025, 10:00 am

Facing burnout, she chased her dream of making pie - and built an empire: ‘Pie brings us together’

She left Silicon Valley to master pie, became Hollywood’s baker and now films its healing power

Thanksgiving may be a holiday steeped in myth and controversy – but there’s still something Americans largely agree on: there’s nothing wrong with the holiday’s traditional dessert. So says Beth Howard, expert pie maker, cookbook author, memoirist, and now documentary film-maker.

“No matter what, pie brings us together. Pie is love,” says Howard, who never tires of talking about anything with a flaky crust and filling. She’s spent the last few months at community screenings – over 100 and counting – of her new documentary – Pieowa – that’s Pie + Iowa (her home state). The film chronicles the history of pie and how it brings people together. It’s full of church ladies, blue ribbon winners, home bakers, expert pie makers and cyclists, which is where Iowa comes in.

Pieowa is now screening in Iowa and across the US, find out more info at https://theworldneedsmorepie.com/pieowa/

2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour (plus approximately 1/2 cup more for rolling)

1/2 cup butter, chilled

1/2 cup vegetable shortening or lard

1/2 tsp salt

Ice water (fill one cup but use only enough to moisten dough)

3lbs Granny Smith apples, peeled (approx. 7 or 8 apples depending on size)

*It’s also okay to use a variety of apples. Try Braeburn, Jonathan and Gala. Avoid Fuji or Delicious as they’re too juicy and not tart enough.

3/4 cup sugar (or more, depending on your taste or tartness of apples)

4 tablespoons flour (to thicken the filling)

1/2 teaspoon salt (you’ll sprinkle this on so don’t worry about precise amount)

1 to 2 teaspoons cinnamon (or however much you like)

1 tablespoon butter (put dollop on top before covering with top crust)

1 beaten egg (you won’t use all of it, just enough to brush on pie before baking)

Published: November 27, 2025, 3:00 pm

How the beauty industry still profits from colonialism – video

The skin-lightening industry is booming, while at the same time there has been a surge in cancers and irreversible skin damage among women of colour using unregulated products. But this is not a new story. The dangers of skin-lightening products have been well documented for years, so how is this still happening? Josh Toussaint-Strauss digs into the long history behind the practice of skin lightening, and how the beauty industry has used messaging rooted in classism and colonialism to sell its products, as well as investigating what unregulated products are doing to the skin

• How the colonial legacy has created a toxic beauty industry

• How skin-lightening products are linked to cancer in black African women

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:16 pm

Cocktail of the week: Bar Lina’s tiny fragolino – recipe | The good mixer

A festively fizzy, rosy-red aperitif based on a rustic Italian strawberry liqueur

Earlier this year, we launched a range of tiny cocktails in collaboration with drinks writer Tyler Zielinski to reimagine Italian classics in miniature form, all designed to serve as light, pre-dinner tipples. This one’s suitably red, to go with the festive season.

Matteo Pesce, head of beverage, with Tyler Zielinski for Bar Lina, London and Manchester

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:00 pm

Small talk: a bluffer’s guide

Dread the thought of party chat? This selection of cultural keypoints will put some fizz in your conversation

It seemed Trump had finally dealt with domestic terrorist Jimmy Kimmel after his chat show was briefly cancelled, but now it’s back on air. So should we expect more censorship? Surely South Park is skating on thin ice by mocking the president and his allegedly inadequate penis? Maybe the president will throw a curveball and declare a nature show about squirrels to be a secret antifa recruitment operation? Or perhaps he will simply cut the niceties and just put Oprah Winfrey up on Showtrial (“Ratings like you’ve never seen before!”)?

Published: November 28, 2025, 10:00 am

Pam Hogg obituary

Fashion designer whose idiosyncratic mix of glam and DIY couture was worn by Björk, Siouxsie Sioux and Taylor Swift

The designer Pam Hogg stayed faithful for life to the principles, practices, provocations and politics of the art school, music and club scene of her youth around 1980. The fashion industry metamorphosed over the decades since, but she went on believing in individuality and drama, painstakingly achieved. Debbie Harry, Siouxsie Sioux, Rihanna, Björk, Lady Gaga, Lily Allen, Kylie Minogue and Taylor Swift, among others, bought her garments, which were auditorium-dominating mixes of sex, eccentricity and intellect. Hogg’s catsuits in Latex and PVC became the glam workwear of the rock and pop stage. They never dated. When a star strides on stage in one, the audience knows the action is about to kick off.

Yet to the end of her life, Hogg, who has died, aged perhaps 66 (she refused to reveal her age publicly), remained a struggling artist. She hoped to arrive at the same safe destination as her long-term friend Vivienne Westwood, with an atelier equipped with pattern cutter and couture seamstresses, plus financial backing for a ready-to-wear line that would not betray her nonconforming philosophy of dress.

Published: November 27, 2025, 5:08 pm

‘There were eight of us, only two are alive’: the growing crisis of arsenic in Argentina’s water

In some of the country’s poorest, driest areas, people rely on water contaminated with arsenic 60 times over safe limits, causing crippling illnesses in families

It’s a cloudy winter’s day in El Chañaral, an old Indigenous Wichi community now inhabited only by the Bustamante family. It lies nine miles from San José del Boquerón and near Piruaj Bajo, in Argentina’s northern Copo department.

As Batista Bustamante and Lidia Cuellar drink mate tea, their seven-year-old daughter, Marcela, climbs on to her purple bicycle and heads into the scrubland. She reaches a reservoir – a puddle of greenish-brown water – and pulls a pink pair of scissors from her pocket, which she drives into the earth to extract chunks of mud.

Published: November 27, 2025, 2:00 pm

Inside the rise and fall of Podemos: ‘We believed we had a stake in the future’

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

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

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

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

Published: November 27, 2025, 5:00 am

Tell us about the worst behaviour you’ve witnessed on a flight

As Sean Duffy has urged passengers to mind their manners, we would like to hear about the worst breaches of airline etiquette that you’ve seen

The US transportation secretary Sean Duffy has started a “civility campaign” for air travel, urging passengers to dress smartly instead of wearing PJs and slippers, keeping children’s behaviour in check and remembering their manners.

With this in mind, we would like to hear about the untoward airline behaviour you’ve witnessed. What is the worst breach of aeroplane etiquette you’ve seen?

Published: November 27, 2025, 10:41 am

Fungi lanterns and northern lights: photos of the day – Friday

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

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:34 pm