Gifts with heart: 15 thoughtful US ideas that support causes in need

For often-underfunded non-profits, merch can help raise funds and visibility – here are gifts that support animal conservation, civil liberties and public media

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Last year, when my daughter opened her axolotl stuffed animal from her grandmother, I admit I was slightly peeved. Did we really need yet another stuffy? But this one had a purpose: it came from World Wildlife Foundation, a conservation non-profit that sends 85% of proceeds toward conservation work and has a four-star rating on Charity Navigator.

My daughter loved it, and given the state of our climate, I appreciated a gift that supports animal and land conservation.

Published: December 17, 2025, 8:29 pm

The magical life of Toni Basil: how she taught Elvis, enchanted Bowie – and had a smash hit with ‘Mickey’

The woman Quentin Tarantino called ‘the goddess of go-go’ is one of the most connected and accomplished in Hollywood. At 82, she recalls working with Tina Turner, Bette Midler, Frank Sinatra, David Byrne, Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio – the list goes on – and the time Bing Crosby made a pass at her

If your knowledge of Toni Basil begins and ends with her cheerleader-chanting smash hit Mickey, that’s just the tip of a very deep iceberg. By the time Mickey topped the US charts 43 years ago this week, in 1982, Basil had already spent four decades in the entertainment industry. The deeper you go, the more places you realise she was. When Elvis Presley sings “See the girl with the red dress on” in his 1964 movie Viva Las Vegas, and points across the dancefloor, the gyrating girl in the red dress is Basil. When Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper take LSD at the end of Easy Rider with two sex workers, one of them is Basil. When dance troupe the Lockers show​case their pre-hip-hop street dance moves on Soul Train in 1976, it’s six guys and … Basil. By the time of Mickey she had already worked with everyone from David Bowie to Tina Turner to Talking Heads, with more to come.

Basil has been-there-done-that in so many places, for so long, and over the course of our two-hour conversation she’ll casually drop asides such as “… so I went to see Devo with Iggy Pop and Dean Stockwell” or “… me and Bowie had just come from dinner with Bob Geldof, Paula Yates and Freddie Mercury” or “I was just at Bette Midler’s 80th birthday party, what a bash!” She’s now 82 years old but on Zoom, from her dance studio in Los Angeles, she doesn’t look much older than she did in the video for Mickey – and she looked like a teenager in that, even though she was 38 at the time. Her memory is perfectly sharp, too, and her energy levels are as high as ever, as she shares her packed life story with animated diction. If she has a secret to eternal youth, it’s that she has danced her whole life, and she still does, she says. “Dance is my drug of choice. You get high from it, and it gives you community.”

Published: December 17, 2025, 10:00 am

A Harvard scholar’s ouster exposes a crisis of institutional integrity | Eric Reinhart

The dismissal of a a renowned health leader who refused to ignore Palestine highlights false claims of universality in human rights, global health and academia

Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down” as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new “focus on children’s health”.

It omitted the fact that, according to a Harvard Crimson source, Bassett had been asked to resign just two hours earlier and instructed to vacate her office by the end of the year. The decision was not a routine administrative transition. It was the culmination of a year of escalating pressure on the Center for Health and Human Rights for its work on the health and human rights of Palestinians. Powerful figures inside and outside Harvard, including the former Harvard president and now thoroughly disgraced economist Larry Summers, condemned this work and claimed it “foments antisemitism”. A leading public health scholar whose career has been defined by work on racial justice, poverty, HIV, and global inequality appears to have been removed not because her commitments shifted, but because the political costs of applying those commitments to Palestinians became too great for Harvard to tolerate.

Published: December 17, 2025, 11:00 am

How to become a good and thoughtful gift-giver

Choosing the right gift can feel difficult, but it is possible to buy something meaningful that will please your loved ones – and stay out of the trash

My family members are incredible gift-givers. Every birthday and holiday, they manage to select exactly what the recipient wanted – or didn’t know they wanted.

I didn’t inherit this gene.

What do people talk about when they’re not trying to impress you? What are their genuine interests, passions and concerns?

Notice their lifestyle, Maso says: “How they live, what they value, where they unwind.”

Choose something that “reflects their world, not yours”. Did I want a Lego orchid? Yes. Did my father? No.

Add a touch of the unexpected. “The best gifts always have a little, ‘I didn’t know I needed this, but it’s so me!’ moment,” Maso says.

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:00 pm

‘A cave complex worthy of Batman!’ Mind-boggling buildings that showed the world a new China

Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
The birth of the People’s Republic is seen as a time of drab buildings. But this dazzling show, featuring a factory in a cave and a denounced roof, tells a wildly different story

In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.”

Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, “unable to protect you from wind, rain or sun”, as a passerby observes. “Why don’t these buildings adopt the Chinese national style?” asks another bewildered figure, as he cowers beneath a looming glass tower that bears all the hallmarks of the corrupt, capitalist west.

Published: December 17, 2025, 3:30 pm

The Knicks have a trophy and Wembanyama has a chip on his shoulder: Five NBA Cup takeaways

New York got a championship while a high-stakes meeting between the Thunder and Spurs showed where the NBA, and the NBA Cup, is today

After toppling the defending champion Boston Celtics in a shocking upset in the Eastern Conference semi-finals this spring, The New York Knicks immediately became the favorites to represent the conference in the NBA Finals. The Indiana Pacers, a team that will no doubt go down as having one of the most compelling Cinderella stories in modern NBA history, had other plans.

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:37 pm

UnitedHealth reduced hospitalizations for nursing home seniors. Now it faces wrongful death claims

The company says it is protecting nursing home residents by curbing unnecessary hospital transfers. Whistleblowers allege cost-cutting tactics have endangered the elderly

Three nursing home residents died because employees of the American healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group helped delay or deny them critical hospital care, two pending lawsuits and a complaint to state authorities have alleged.

The three cases involve a UnitedHealth partnership initiative that places medical staff from the company’s direct care unit, Optum, inside nursing homes to care for residents insured by the company’s insurance arm.

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:50 pm

Four Republicans join Democrats to force vote on bill that would extend Obamacare subsidies

Stunning move comes after House Republicans pushed ahead with bill that doesn’t address soaring premiums if Affordable Care Act tax credits expire

• US politics live – latest updates

In a major setback for Mike Johnson and the House GOP, four Republicans have joined with the Democrats to sign a petition forcing a vote on legislation that will extend for three years premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act healthcare plans.

The rebellion underscores the nervousness among Republicans over an increase in healthcare costs before the 2026 midterm elections, in which the party will be defending its slim control of the House.

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:07 pm

Donald Trump says Venezuela ‘illegally took’ US oil and ‘we want it back’ – live

President tells reporters that Venezuela ‘took all of our energy rights’ in latest ramping up of rhetoric

• Four Republicans join Democrats to force vote on bill that would extend Obamacare subsidies

The Donald Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, will soon make his first appearance before Congress since sparking an uproar with comments seen as pressuring ABC to temporarily pull comedian Jimmy Kimmel from the air.

ABC indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show over statements he made following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which prompted Carr to say that he wanted broadcasters to “take action” on Kimmel, and: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

Published: December 17, 2025, 11:21 pm

Trump attacks Democratic foes in White House presidential portraits

New plaques on ‘Presidential Walk of Fame’ scorn ‘divisive’ Obama and ‘by far the worst’ Biden – but Reagan is praised

White House officials on Wednesday revised what they call the “Presidential Walk of Fame,” installing plaques beneath portraits of former presidents that reflect Donald Trump’s own views, including branding former president Joe Biden as “the worst president in American history”.

The changes are part of Trump’s broader effort to reshape the White House environment to match his preferences. Along the colonnade, portraits of past presidents now feature expanded text that permanently records Trump’s assessments of their records.

Published: December 17, 2025, 8:44 pm

Bondi terror suspects spent whole Philippines visit in city and rarely left hotel, staff and police say

Philippine police dismiss speculation Naveed and Sajid Akram underwent training during four-week stay in Davao City

• Full report: Bondi terror attack

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

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The Bondi terror attacks suspects spent their entire four-week visit to the Philippines in Davao City, rarely leaving their hotel except for an hour or so at a time, and never talking to any other guests or receiving visitors, according to Philippine police and hotel staff.

The initial police investigation casts more light on the four-week trip by the alleged gunmen, the father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, amid speculation that they went to the Philippines to receive military training from Islamist groups believed to operate in the country.

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:36 pm

Trump appears to confirm Dan Bongino will step down from FBI role

President told reporters that deputy director ‘did a great job’ and ‘wants to go back to his show’

Donald Trump appears to have confirmed reports that the FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino, is planning to step down, telling reporters on Wednesday that “Dan did a great job” and that he thinks Bongino “wants to go back to his show”.

The US president made the remarks while answering questions from various reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews.

Published: December 17, 2025, 9:34 pm

American Academy of Pediatrics loses government funding after criticizing RFK Jr

Cuts, which affect projects focused on issues including early identification of autism, made without prior notice to AAP

The US department of health and human services (HHS) has terminated several multi-million-dollar grants to the American Academy of Pediatrics following the association’s criticisms of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s policies.

The funding cuts, which affect projects focused on issues including fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and early identification of autism, were first reported by the Washington Post and made without prior notice to the AAP.

Published: December 17, 2025, 9:57 pm

Nick Reiner appears in court on murder charges in killing of parents

Son of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner who is being held without bail did not enter a plea

Nick Reiner, who has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the killing of his parents, acclaimed actor and director Rob Reiner and photographer Michele Singer Reiner, made his first appearance in court on Wednesday.

The 32-year-old, who is being held without bail, did not enter a plea, and his arraignment has been delayed until January.

Published: December 17, 2025, 6:22 pm

Fani Willis defends Trump prosecution at contentious Georgia hearing

Fulton county DA hits back at Republican opponents who investigated her over relationship with special prosecutor

Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis testified on Wednesday at a combative Georgia state senate committee about her prosecution of Donald Trump for election interference.

The state senate created the special committee in early 2024 to investigate Willis after the revelation that she had a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, special prosecutor in the Trump case, which ultimately derailed the prosecution of the now-re-elected president.

Published: December 17, 2025, 9:05 pm

US Senate confirms billionaire Musk ally Jared Isaacman as Nasa chief

Vote on Isaacman, private astronaut and Mars missions advocate, passes 67-30 for him to be agency’s 15th leader

The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become Donald Trump’s Nasa administrator. The confirmation makes an advocate of Mars missions and an ally of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk the space agency’s 15th leader.

The vote on Isaacman, who Trump nominated, removed and then renamed for the post of Nasa administrator this year, passed 67-30, two weeks after he told senators in his second hearing that Nasa must pick up the pace in beating China back to the moon this decade.

Published: December 17, 2025, 10:07 pm

US judge will block hundreds of Trump administration layoffs, citing shutdown law

District judge says hundreds of federal layoffs at four agencies not allowed under law Congress passed last month

A federal judge on Wednesday said she would block Donald Trump’s administration from laying off hundreds of federal employees, the latest legal setback for the president’s efforts to downsize the US government workforce.

US district judge Susan Illston during a hearing in San Francisco said hundreds of layoffs at four agencies were likely not allowed under a law Congress passed last month to end a 43-day government shutdown.

Published: December 17, 2025, 10:44 pm

Susie Wiles interview might be a useful distraction from how poorly things are going for Americans

The incendiary quotes don’t disguise how dissatisfied people are about jobs, inflation or the cost of living

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland; sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

So it appears Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, agrees with many of us: she thinks Donald Trump’s cabinet is bonkers.

From that bombshell Vanity Fair interview, which featured some truly terrifying close-up photos, we learned that Wiles considers JD Vance to have been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade”. She believes Elon Musk to be an “odd, odd duck”. Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, is, in Wiles’ view, “a right-wing absolute zealot”.

“If we’re judging by these numbers, Americans are completely dissatisfied with the way things are happening in this country.”

Published: December 17, 2025, 6:00 pm

Trump administration to dismantle key climate research center in Colorado

Governor Jared Polis warned that breaking up Boulder’s NCAR would put ‘public safety at risk’

The Trump administration is breaking up a research center praised as a “crown jewel” of climate research after accusing it of spreading “alarmism” about climate change.

Russell Vought, the director of the White House’s office and management budget, said the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, would be dismantled under the supervision of the National Science Foundation.

Published: December 17, 2025, 4:59 pm

The chaotic life of an immigration lawyer in Trump’s America: ‘Some days you break down in tears’

The Guardian followed immigration attorney Milli Atkinson as she pivoted from case to case – and tried to keep herself sane. This is what her typical day looks like

It’s been a chaotic year in San Francisco immigration court. At least 88 asylum seekers have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at their court hearings. More than half of the immigration judges have been fired. A climate of fear and uncertainty pervades.

At the center of it all, immigration attorney Milli Atkinson has been holding things together. She leads the San Francisco Bar Association’s Attorney of the Day program, which provides people from all over Northern California with free legal advice when they show up to immigration court. She also leads San Francisco’s Rapid Response Network, finding legal representation for anyone in the city arrested by ICE.

Published: December 17, 2025, 12:00 pm

In Durham, North Carolina, neighbors are protecting neighbors from ICE: ‘We care for each other’

Community members have stepped up with carpools, food deliveries, school patrols and policy advocacy

Before the school bell rang on the morning of 19 November, dozens of parents – mostly dads – huddled outside schools all around Durham, North Carolina. Bleary-eyed from late-night meetings and dinging group chats, they passed out whistles and gloves before dispersing to stand along school perimeters.

The parents had formed ad hoc welcoming committees for students being dropped off for school – and to serve as a united group of watchdogs against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A week before Thanksgiving, federal immigration agents had descended upon the city as part of a massive statewide campaign that included Charlotte and smaller communities. For almost a month, masked agents, often in tactical vests or fatigues and some carrying rifles, patrolled quiet neighborhoods and vibrant shopping centers around North Carolina. ICE doubled its North Carolina arrests in 2025 from the previous year, totaling 3,400 arrests from 20 January through 15 October.

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:00 pm

‘Everything is worse since Drax came here’: US residents say wood-pellet plant harming their town

Residents of Gloster, Mississippi, are suing plant that exports wood pellets to UK and Europe. Company says it is reducing emissions

When Helen Reed first learned about the bioenergy mill opening in her hometown of Gloster, Mississippi, the word was it would bring jobs and economic opportunities. It was only later that she learned that activity came with a cost: the Amite Bioenergy mill, opened in 2014 by British energy giant Drax, emits large – and sometimes illegal – quantities of air pollutants, including methanol, acrolein and formaldehyde, which are linked to cancers and other serious illnesses.

“When I go out, I can’t hardly catch my breath,” Reed said. “Everything is worse since Drax came here.”

Published: December 17, 2025, 4:00 pm

These migrants grow the US’s Christmas trees. Trump’s wage cuts may keep them away

Legal temporary farm workers also worry about the H-2A visa program and Trump’s anti-immigration regime

This article is a collaboration between the Guardian and Enlace Latino NC, an independent bilingual publication. Read this article in Spanish.

On a cold December afternoon, about 10 workers load the season’s final Christmas trees onto a truck at Wolf Creek Tree Farm and Nursery in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Nearby, another group takes a break, warming up around a barrel fire. More workers are out in the fields, a half-hour’s drive up further into the mountains.

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:00 pm

‘A festive tour de force’: Guardian writers on their favorite underrated Christmas movies

From a John Cusack 80s teen comedy to the other Frank Capra Christmas crowd-pleaser, here are some seasonal picks you might not have seen

Something that bugs me about a lot of contemporary Christmas movies is how insistently self-conscious they are about the whole production – the ostentatious decorations, checklist of soundtrack chestnuts, the dialogue about the true meaning of the holidays that sounds canned even when the movie is trying to acknowledge its various stressors. Maybe because the idea of a holiday movie hadn’t yet ossified into routine, I’ve found that the versions of these films that came out in the 1940s tend to approach Christmas from more inventive, less neurotically obsessive angles. One of my favorite discoveries in sifting through 1940s Christmas comedies is It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a 1947 semi-romantic farce with a great starting hook: a cheerful vagrant Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) winters in New York every year, because he knows a way into a particular Fifth Avenue mansion seasonally vacated by its enormously wealthy owner. One winter, Aloysius invites some new acquaintances to stay with him: veteran Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) and his military buddies, plus runaway Trudy O’Connor (Gale Storm) – who is secretly the daughter of the mansion’s owner. Eventually, the owner himself is forced to disguise himself as another vagrant and stay in the house, too, so Trudy can make sure Jim loves her on her own merits. This all takes place during the run-up to Christmas and into New Year’s, and director Roy Del Ruth gives the movie a found-family warmth that newer holiday movies have to labor two or three times as hard for, assembling a funny and lovable surrogate family in one of the city’s well-appointed empty spaces. Speaking of labor: It Happened on Fifth Avenue lands perfectly between class-conscious social picture about the importance of affordable housing and romantic urban fairytale. Jesse Hassenger

It Happened on Fifth Avenue is available on Plex and to rent digitally in the US, UK and Australia

Published: December 17, 2025, 10:03 am

Best movies of 2025 in the US: No 3 – The Ice Tower

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s kaleidoscopic fable, starring Marion Cotillard as a haughty, damaged diva, is a cautionary tale about the perils of fantasy

• The best movies of 2025 in the US
• More on the best culture of 2025

Lucile Hadžihalilović is a good bet for the most underrated director on the planet. She’s only made four features in 20 years, but with obsessive consistency each time: an exquisitely controlled hermetic world that exudes weird biological and psychological anxieties – from the pre-pubescent prep school of 2004’s Innocence, to the island hospital nurturing impregnated boys in 2015’s Evolution. These microcosms, governed by their own internal laws, seem to exist in some far-off arthouse realm indifferent to regular cinema.

But her new film, The Ice Tower, makes the coyest of glances towards commercial territory by rooting itself in Hans Christian Andersen. “Vast, immense, glittering like ice was the realm of the Snow Queen,” lullabies Marion Cotillard in the preamble; the story is the preferred bedtime reading of teenage orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini), who escapes from her foster home, heads down the mountain, and stows away on a film production of the fairytale. The queen is being played by imperious diva Cristina van der Berg (who is played for us by none other than la Cotillard).

Published: December 17, 2025, 12:00 pm

Trump’s tariffs are choking small US manufacturers – even those making music magic

EarthQuaker Devices has served Smashing Pumpkins, PJ Harvey and Radiohead but says tariffs add costs up to 30%

Julie Robbins and her team at EarthQuaker Devices have made guitar pedals for some of the biggest names in the world of music. The Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, PJ Harvey and others have sought out the company’s bespoke, handmade pedals for their unique sounds and designs. Its most popular model, Plumes, has sold over 67,000 devices.

Their made-from-scratch effects pedals use more than 1,000 components, many which are imported directly from countries such as China and Vietnam or are bought from companies that bring them in from overseas.

Published: December 17, 2025, 1:00 pm

Stephen Colbert on Susie Wiles’s candid interviews: ‘She dished, bish’

Late-night hosts discussed the White House chief of staff ’s shocking and revealing interviews with Vanity Fair

Late-night hosts reacted to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s revealing interview with Vanity Fair.

Published: December 17, 2025, 3:54 pm

Storytellers: how the world’s oldest job became the hottest new corporate job title

Big tech, retailers and compliance firms are hiring people to ‘own the narrative’. But what do they actually mean by that?

Name: Storyteller

Age: Since Once Upon a Time, in a land far, far away.

Published: December 17, 2025, 6:08 pm

In a middling year for television, Pluribus is ending things on a high

Apple’s smash hit sci-fi drama has confounded and compelled in equal measure and provided hope for small screen innovation at an underwhelming time

In many ways, it feels like 2025 was the year that television gave up. Old favourites such as The White Lotus and Severance let us down, with gaping plotholes and a total absence of forward momentum respectively. New shows have failed to break through, too, largely due to an expectation that television shows are now the things people put on in the background while they scroll on their phones.

All in all, it seems like there hasn’t been a show that people could really get their teeth into this year. That is, until Pluribus came along.

Published: December 17, 2025, 12:04 pm

Ben Jennings on Donald Trump suing the BBC – cartoon

Continue reading...

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:42 pm

Everything about Paul Mescal is irresistible – with one exception | Adrian Chiles

The actor has said Shakespeare’s language can be understood ‘in the body’. I couldn’t disagree more

I want to believe in reincarnation because I want to come back as Paul Mescal. What it must be like to be irresistible. I’m sure it gets wearing, but I’d still like to give it a try, just for research purposes. Not so much for the carnal stuff, but for the way every word he utters is taken to be as beautiful as he is. Intoxicated by their admiration, his admirers leap headfirst into the still waters of his pronouncements apparently certain of hidden depths thereunder.

So it has been with the reaction to how he comforted his director when she confessed, in so many words, that she couldn’t always grasp what Shakespeare was on about. We’ve all been there. At least I have. There there, quoth Mescal: “Listen, if Shakespeare is performed right, you don’t have to understand what they’re saying. You feel it in the body, the language is written like that.”

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:09 pm

My petty gripe: office parties feel like work because that’s what they are

And don’t get me started on office Secret Santas

As we head into the so-called silly season – that sun-drenched summer of drinks and parties, barbecues and socialising – there’s a shadow looming over the festivities.

The office Christmas party.

Published: December 17, 2025, 11:07 pm

AI toys are suddenly everywhere - but I suggest you don't give them to your children | Arwa Mahdawi

Earlier this year my four-year-old tried out an AI soft toy for a few days. New research indicates I was right to be creeped out

If you’re thinking about buying your kid a new-fangled AI-powered toy for the holidays, may I kindly suggest you don’t? I’m sure most Guardian readers would be horrified by the very idea anyway, but it’s going to be hard to avoid the things soon. The market is booming and, according to the MIT Technology Review, there are already more than 1,500 AI toy companies in China. With the likes of Mattel, which owns the Barbie brand, announcing a “strategic collaboration” with OpenAI, you can bet more of the uncanny objects will be in a department store near you soon.

Let me offer myself up as a cautionary tale for anyone who might be intrigued by the idea of a cuddly chatbot. Back in September I let my four-year-old use an AI-powered soft toy called Grem for a few days. Developed by a company called Curio in collaboration with the musician Grimes, it uses OpenAI’s technology to have personalised conversations and play interactive games with your child.

Published: December 17, 2025, 11:00 am

The Guardian view on Australia’s social media ban: dragging tech companies into action | Editorial

Children under the age of 16 needed protecting and the moral argument wasn’t winning. Government regulation can change the terms of debate

On 10 December, the world watched as Australia enacted the first social media ban for under-16s. Whether it will have the desired effect of improving young people’s lives we are yet to find out. But what the ban has achieved already is clear.

Many politicians, along with academics and philosophers, have noted that self-regulation has not been an effective safeguard against the harms of social media – especially when the bottom line for people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk depends on keeping eyes on screens. For too long, these companies resisted, decrying censorship and prioritising “free speech” over moderation. The Australian government decided waiting was no longer an option. The social media ban and similar regulation across the world is now dragging tech companies kicking and screaming toward change. That it has taken the force of the law to ensure basic standards – such as robust age verification, teen-friendly user accounts and deactivation where appropriate – are met shows the moral argument alone was not enough.

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: December 17, 2025, 6:39 pm

The Guardian view on another green U-turn in Brussels: going slow on car-industry targets is a road to nowhere | Editorial

The European Commission’s proposals to water down a 2035 ban on new petrol and diesel cars will store up major problems for the future

Two years ago, the European Union’s adoption of a 2035 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars was hailed as an act of global leadership, and a declaration of faith in the journey to net zero. That the home of BMW, Renault and Fiat should decisively reverse away from the internal combustion engine was seen as a symbolic moment.

This week, Brussels proposals to water down that ban have sent a very different kind of message. Electric vehicles might be the future. But after intensive lobbying by German and Italian manufacturers, the European Commission has proposed a reprieve for new CO₂-emitting cars that would allow them to be sold after the former cut-off date. According to the EU’s industry commissioner, Stéphane Séjourné, this U-turn offers a “lifeline” to an ailing car industry that has struggled to cope with Donald Trump’s trade wars and Chinese competition.

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: December 17, 2025, 6:40 pm

If he never returns, Terence Crawford’s legacy as one of boxing’s greats is secure | Bryan Armen Graham

The ring’s standout problem-solver steps away from ‘competition’ on his own terms and with an unblemished record across five divisions

Terence “Bud” Crawford has always fought like a man who wanted to leave no room for argument. Not simply to win, but to win so cleanly that dissent collapses on contact. So his retirement announcement on Tuesday didn’t feel like a sudden fade-out so much as the closing of a file: tidy, decisive, signed in his own hand. Three months after scaling two weight divisions to outclass Canelo Álvarez in Las Vegas and become the undisputed super-middleweight champion, Crawford says he is stepping away “on his own terms”. In the cruellest sport, that is rarer than a perfect record.

Boxing is purpose-built to keep you in. To lure you back with one more payday, one more belt, one more chance to settle a score that only exists because the promoters or the public insist it should. The hurt business has never been conducive to happy endings. The preferred vernacular is violent or sad or compromised: a stoppage you don’t see coming, a dubious decision, a diminished version of yourself preserved forever in high definition.

Published: December 17, 2025, 6:52 pm

Manchester City 2-0 Brentford, Newcastle 2-1 Fulham: Carabao Cup quarter-finals and semi-final draw

Brentford and Fulham both gave it their best, but Manchester City and Newcastle did enough to set up a semi-final showdown

6 min: Cherki executes his first, but almost certainly not his last, cheeky backheel of the evening. But it doesn’t release Lewis down the right. Soon the ball’s back at the feet of Trafford, who launches long. Bobb threatens to get in behind Henry, but the Brentford defender turns on the jets to win the footrace and head back to his keeper Valdimarsson.

4 min: BREAKING NEWS: It’s raining in Manchester. Meanwhile only a gentle rumble in the stands, with nothing much happening yet.

Published: December 17, 2025, 11:01 pm

Miami Dolphins to bench QB Tua Tagovailoa after missing playoffs

• Rookie Quinn Ewers will be starter, says Mike McDaniel

• Tagovailoa will be ‘emergency’ QB behind Zach Wilson

The Miami Dolphins are benching quarterback Tua Tagovailoa and will start rookie Quinn Ewers on Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals, head coach Mike McDaniel announced on Wednesday.

The Dolphins (6-8), eliminated from postseason play, signed Tagovailoa to a four-year, $212m extension in July 2024 after he led the NFL in passing yards in 2023 with 4,624.

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:14 pm

World Cup prize money increased by 50% as Fifa offers $50m for 2026 winners

• All 48 competing nations to get minimum of $10.5m

• Fifa Council approval comes amid ticket price row

Fifa has announced a 50% increase in World Cup prize money for next year’s tournament, with the champions set to take home $50m (£37.5m) as a reward for their success.

The news comes days after there was widespread public outrage over the price of seats at the tournament, to be held in the US, Mexico and Canada. Fifa this week announced a limited number of discount tickets for fans of participating countries.

Published: December 17, 2025, 1:31 pm

‘Cool Hand’ to ‘Panda Man’: the power or pitfalls of a darting nickname

Some monikers are a perfect fit for the audience and reflect a player’s style of play; others are just too hot for TV

It’s September 2017, and a humble Challenge Tour quarter-final at the Robin Park Leisure Centre in Wigan is about to change the course of darting history. Luke Humphries and Martin Lukeman are two promising young throwers making their way on the Professional Darts Corporation’s second-tier tour, dreaming of the big time. But there’s one problem.

Humphries has styled himself “Cool Hand”, based on the 1967 Paul Newman film that to date he has still never watched. Lukeman, meanwhile, has decided to call himself “Cool Man”: less catchy, doesn’t really scan, but still just about works. And though the pair are firm friends, when the draw in Wigan pits them against each other, they decide that this best-of-nine match will settle matters once and for all. Winner gets the nickname. Loser has to think of something else.

Published: December 17, 2025, 8:00 am

Alex Carey’s sparkling Ashes century steadies Australia after England strike early in heat

• Third Test, day one: Australia 326-8

• Usman Khawaja digs in for 82 while Archer has 3-29

After the pandemonium of Perth and Brisbane’s pink-ball palooza came a more familiar opening day at Adelaide Oval. It was also roasting hot out in the middle – 35C on the mercury – and when the toss went against Ben Stokes and his embattled England players, they could easily have melted.

Instead, despite some sloppiness and Alex Carey’s magical century on the ground he calls home, the tourists kept plugging away with the fight that Stokes called for at 2-0 down. At stumps Australia were 326 for eight from 83 sapping overs – runs on the heritage-listed scoreboard, granted, but short of ambitions when the returning Pat Cummins got the choice first thing.

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:29 am

Mikaela Shiffrin extends record with 105th World Cup win in slalom

• US skier finished 1.55 seconds ahead of second place

• Shiffrin has won the opening four slaloms of the season

Mikaela Shiffrin isn’t just winning every slalom of the Olympic season. She’s dominating each race and winning by large margins, too.

The American skiing standout claimed a record-extending 105th World Cup victory after several of her top challengers went out during the opening run of a night race Tuesday.

Published: December 16, 2025, 9:29 pm

Joshua v Paul makes Joe Louis’ ‘Bum of the Month’ look like the Rumble in the Jungle | Sean Ingle

The best we can hope for is that Paul does not get seriously hurt. Joshua, Netflix and the sport itself should know better

Precisely 85 years ago, one of the most fearsome heavyweight boxers in history stunk out the joint. Joe Louis was in the midst of his “Bum of the Month club”: a staggering run of 13 world title defences in 29 months against an assortment of stiffs, wild men and colourful characters. And when he arrived in Boston on 16 December 1940, most believed that Al McCoy would rapidly become his next victim. Only it didn’t quite turn out that way.

“McCoy was expected to crumple under the first punch Louis tossed in his direction,” the New York Times’ correspondent wrote. “Instead, the wily New England veteran made Louis appear ludicrous at times. Adopting a crouching, bobbing, weaving style, McCoy was an elusive target for the paralysing fists of the titleholder.” After the messy contest was stopped at the end of the fifth, a storm of jeers rang out. Louis had won, but only his bank balance had been enhanced.

Published: December 16, 2025, 8:00 am

Congress passes $901bn defense bill that includes support for Ukraine and Europe

Senate advances 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which White House says Trump will sign into law

The US Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to advance a $901bn bill setting policy for the Pentagon, sending the big piece of legislation to the White House, which has said Donald Trump will sign it into law.

The fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, is a compromise between separate measures passed earlier this year in the House of Representatives and Senate. It authorizes a record $901bn in annual military spending, with a 4% pay raise for the troops, purchases of military equipment and efforts to boost competitiveness with US archrivals China and Russia.

Published: December 17, 2025, 6:14 pm

Heart attacks increased after Los Angeles wildfires, study finds

Researchers at Cedars-Sinai say rates of heart attack and respiratory illness ‘matched worst years of Covid’

In the first 90 days after the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires that destroyed entire Los Angeles neighborhoods, there was a 46% increase in ER visits for heart attack symptoms at LA’s Cedars-Sinai hospital, according to a newly released study.

“Rates of heart attacks in January 2025 actually surpassed heart attack rates during all the prior Januaries, even during the Covid years,” Dr Susan Cheng, director of public health research at Cedars-Sinai and the study’s senior author, told the Guardian.

Published: December 17, 2025, 10:55 pm

Washington state flooding damage profound but unclear, governor warns

Record rains have forced hundreds of rescues, swamped communities and left rivers high, with more storms forecast

The extent of the damage in Washington state is profound but unclear after more than a week of heavy rains and record flooding, according to the state’s governor, Bob Ferguson.

A barrage of storms from weather systems stretching across the Pacific has dumped close to 2ft (0.6 metres) of rain in parts of the state, swelling rivers far beyond their banks and prompting more than 600 rescues across 10 counties.

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:17 pm

US judge says Trump officials can’t ban surprise lawmaker visits to ICE facilities

District judge says policies deeming ICE field offices ‘off-limits for congressional oversight’ violates federal law

A federal judge on Wednesday said Donald Trump’s administration cannot bar members of Congress from making unannounced visits to immigrant detention facilities.

US district judge Jia Cobb in Washington DC said US Department of Homeland Security policies deeming Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices “off-limits for congressional oversight” and requiring seven days’ notice for visits violated federal law.

Published: December 17, 2025, 10:32 pm

Oscars to move over to YouTube starting in 2029

Exclusive global rights to the year’s biggest night in film will move to the video platform for a four year period

The Oscars will be moving from broadcast to online as part of a multi-year new deal with YouTube.

From 2029, the video platform will have exclusive global rights to Hollywood’s biggest night, including the ceremony but also red carpet coverage, behind-the-scenes content and Governors Ball access. The deal will run until 2033.

Published: December 17, 2025, 6:19 pm

FCC chair suggests agency is not independent amid fears of Trump power grab

Brendan Carr’s declaration raises concerns amid Trump efforts to exert greater control over independent agencies

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is not an “independent” agency, its chairman suggested on Wednesday, as the word was scrubbed from its online mission statement.

Brendan Carr’s declaration to senators raised concerns of a further power grab by the White House, amid concerns surrounding efforts by Donald Trump and his officials to exert greater control over independent agencies since his return to office in January.

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:15 pm

Former Trump prosecutor Jack Smith defends investigation in House testimony

Ex-special counsel tells House panel US president’s actions alone underpinned now-dropped prosecutions

Jack Smith, the former US justice department special counsel who brought two now-dropped criminal cases against Donald Trump, defended his investigation before a House of Representatives panel on Wednesday, telling lawmakers that the basis for the prosecutions “rests entirely with President Trump and his actions”.

Smith gave private testimony to the Republican-controlled House judiciary committee following months of disclosures from Trump appointees at the justice department, and Republican lawmakers intended to discredit Smith’s investigation and bolster Trump’s claims that the cases were an abuse of the legal system.

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:37 pm

Scientists log rare case of female polar bear adopting cub: ‘They’re really good moms’

Canadian researchers tracking bear known as X33991 noticed she had gained a second cub who likely needed help

Scientists in Canada have documented a rare case of female polar bear adopting a new cub, in an episode of “curious behaviour” that highlights the complex relationships among the apex Arctic predators.

Polar Bears International, a non-profit conservation group, said on Wednesday that when they first placed a GPS collar on a female polar bear in the spring, she had one young cub. But when she was spotted with two cubs of roughly the same age last month, they realized they were witnessing an exceedingly rare case of adoption.

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:20 pm

MPs warn that UK agreements with Donald Trump are ‘built on sand’

Exclusive: UK government’s ‘naive belief’ that Trump is a good faith actor ‘could cost UK taxpayer billions’, says health select committee chair

Ministers and senior MPs have warned that the UK’s agreements with Donald Trump are “built on sand” after the Guardian established that the deal to avoid drug tariffs has no underlying text beyond limited headline terms.

The “milestone” US-UK deal announced this month on pharmaceuticals, which will mean the NHS pays more for medicines in exchange for a promise of zero tariffs on the industry, still lacks a legal footing beyond top lines contained in two government press releases.

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:42 pm

Greek tragedy: the rare seals hiding in caves to escape tourists

Greece is hoping that protected areas will help keep daytrippers away and allow vulnerable monk seals to return to their island habitats

Deep in a sea cave in Greece’s northern Sporades, a bulky shape moves in the gloom. Someone on the boat bobbing at a distance offshore passes round a pair of binoculars and yes! – there it is. It’s a huge Mediterranean monk seal, one of the world’s rarest marine mammals , which at up to 2.8 metres and over 300kg (660lbs), is also one of the world’s largest types of seal.

Piperi, where the seal has come ashore, is a strictly guarded island in the National Marine Park of Alonissos and Northern Sporades, Greece’s largest marine protected area (MPA) and a critical breeding habitat for the seals. Only researchers are allowed within three miles of its shores, with permission from the government’s Natural Environment and Climate Change Agency.

Published: December 17, 2025, 12:00 pm

‘Magical’ galaxy frogs disappear after reports of photographers destroying their habitats

Researcher in Kerala rainforest sounds alarm after being told frogs had died after being handled by humans

A group of endangered “galaxy frogs” are missing, presumed dead, after trespassing photographers reportedly destroyed their microhabitats for photos.

Melanobatrachus indicus, each the size of a fingertip, is the only species in its family, and lives under logs in the lush rainforest in Kerala, India. Their miraculous spots do not indicate poison, as people sometimes assume, but are thought to be used as a mode of communication, according to Rajkumar K P, a Zoological Society of London fellow and researcher.

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:00 am

Arctic endured year of record heat as climate scientists warn of ‘winter being redefined’

Region known as ‘world’s refrigerator’ is heating up as much as four times as quickly as global average, Noaa experts say

The Arctic endured a year of record heat and shrunken sea ice as the world’s northern latitudes continue a rapid shift to becoming rainier and less ice-bound due to the climate crisis, scientists have reported.

From October 2024 to September 2025, temperatures across the entire Arctic region were the hottest in 125 years of modern record keeping, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said, with the last 10 years being the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic.

Published: December 16, 2025, 5:01 pm

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

Experts are calling for the integration of mental health into climate-disaster policy in the Caribbean as studies show that PTSD risks increase after hurricanes and displacement

When Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica on 28 October with 185mph winds, destroying homes, hospitals and infrastructure, killing 32 people and affecting 1.5 million, Toni-Jan Ifill immediately realised it would leave many with long-term traumatic memories.

A month and a half after the storm, which also affected eastern Cuba, the clinical psychologist says recollections of the terrifying winds also haunt some of the staff at the University Hospital of the West Indies in Kingston. Even the sound of rain can cause trauma responses among people who lived through it.

Published: December 16, 2025, 2:00 pm

Warner Bros Discovery urges shareholders to reject Paramount’s $108.4bn takeover bid

After WBD accused Paramount of misleading investors, the network assured it had ‘all necessary financing’ for the deal

Warner Bros Discovery has urged shareholders to reject a $108.4bn hostile takeover offer from Paramount Skydance, branding it “inadequate” amid an extraordinary corporate battle to control the legacy media conglomerate.

WBD agreed to sell its storied movie studios, HBO cable network and streaming service to Netflix in a $82.7bn deal earlier this month, setting the stage for a seismic shift in Hollywood’s industrial landscape.

This article was amended on 17 December 2025 to include comment from Paramount and its chair, David Ellison

Published: December 17, 2025, 12:49 pm

Executives of bankrupt subprime auto lender Tricolor Holdings charged with fraud

Daniel Chu, the company’s founder, charged with directing multiple executives since 2018 to defraud investors

Executives at Tricolor Holdings, the bankrupt subprime auto lender, were charged on Wednesday over their alleged roles in what US prosecutors described as a years-long, “systematic fraud” scheme.

Daniel Chu, the company’s founder and former CEO, was charged in an indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court with directing multiple executives since 2018 to defraud investors and lending institutions through multiple schemes.

Published: December 17, 2025, 3:48 pm

FDA recalls salad dressing after ‘plastic material’ found in ingredients

More than 3,500 cases of dressing, including Hidden Valley Ranch, recalled after ‘foreign objects’ were discovered

Thousands of cases of salad dressing have been recalled in the US after “foreign objects” were discovered in the products, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The recall involves items produced by California-based Ventura Foods and affects dressings distributed to retailers nationwide.

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:09 pm

Plans for New Orleans attack thwarted after ex-marine arrested

Officials had been surveilling Micah James Legnon due to ties to extremist anti-capitalist and anti-government group

Plans to “carry out an attack” in New Orleans were thwarted after an ex-US marine was arrested while on the way to the Louisiana city with guns and body armor in the car, according to court documents obtained Tuesday by the Associated Press.

Micah James Legnon, 28, was charged with threats in interstate commerce. Federal authorities said they had been surveilling Legnon due to ties to an extremist anti-capitalist and anti-government group. Four members of the group were arrested Friday in the Mojave desert, east of Los Angeles, as they were rehearsing a foiled plot to set off bombs in southern California on New Year’s Eve, authorities said.

Published: December 17, 2025, 4:18 pm

Parents of sextortion victim sue Meta for alleged wrongful death

Exclusive: Lawsuit is the first UK case of its kind, with Ros and Mark Dowey accusing Meta of ‘putting profit before our young people’

The parents of a 16-year-old who took his own life after he fell victim to a sextortion gang on Instagram are suing Meta for the alleged wrongful death of their son, in the first UK case of its kind.

Murray Dowey died in December 2023 at his family home in Dunblane, after being tricked into sending intimate pictures to an Instagram contact. He thought it was a girl his own age, but it turned out to be overseas criminals involved in financially motivated sexual extortion.

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:52 pm

Canada sees large drop in population amid international students crackdown

Population fell by 0.2% in third quarter – and the only other quarterly decline on record was attributed to Covid limits

Canada experienced one of its largest drops in population in the most recent quarter, the result of a crackdown on international students. The drop marks dramatic turnaround for a country that has long pegged its economic growth to immigration.

New estimates released on Wednesday by Statistics Canada showed that Canada’s population fell by 0.2% in the third quarter to stand at 41.6 million, down from 41.65 million on 1 July.

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:03 pm

Sheinbaum urges UN to ‘prevent bloodshed’ after Trump orders Venezuela blockade

Mexican leader warns of conflict as US president targets sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela

• What action is Trump taking against Venezuela’s oil industry?

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has urged the United Nations to “prevent any bloodshed” in Venezuela, as Donald Trump piled more pressure on the South American country.

“The United Nations has been conspicuously absent. It must assume its role to prevent any bloodshed and to always seek the peaceful resolution of conflicts,” the leftwing president told reporters the morning after Washington announced a blockade of “sanctioned oil tankers” entering or leaving Venezuela.

Published: December 17, 2025, 4:20 pm

Brigitte Macron faces lawsuit after being filmed using sexist slur at Paris theatre

More than 300 women file complaint after video shows French first lady calling feminist protesters ‘sales connes’

Brigitte Macron is facing a legal complaint from several organisations, including women’s rights groups, after she was filmed saying feminist protesters at a theatre show in Paris were “stupid bitches”.

More than 300 women – specifically 343, a historically symbolic number in French feminism – this week filed the complaint against the French first lady for public insult.

Published: December 17, 2025, 4:27 pm

Melania: first trailer released for Amazon’s documentary on the first lady

The $40m film – directed by Brett Ratner, who has been accused of sexual misconduct – follows Melania Trump in the days before the 2025 inauguration

Amazon has released the first trailer for next year’s documentary on Melania Trump.

The film will follow the first lady in the 20 days before the 2025 inauguration and has “unprecedented access” with promises of “exclusive footage capturing critical meetings, private conversations, and never-before-seen environments”.

Published: December 17, 2025, 4:02 pm

Are we falling out of love with nonfiction?

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 3:41 pm

Fallout season two review – this postapocalyptic thriller is absolutely hilarious

The video game-derived thriller series should be terrifying, but it’s often side-splitting. Its second outing adds excellent guest spots from Justin Theroux, Kumail Nanjiani and Macaulay Culkin

The west doesn’t get much wilder than in Fallout. The show takes place 200 years into a post-nuclear apocalypse where most humans are scratching out an existence in a stricken wasteland California of sand dunes, outlaw gangs and mutated monsters. Resources are scarce. Life is cruel. Death is a constant. It should be terrifying. Instead, it’s often hilarious.

A wicked sense of humour elevated the first season of Prime Video’s well-received, no-expense-spared adaptation of the long-running video game franchise. An early episode opened with one faction dumping newborn pups into an incinerator – in case you were wondering who the bad guys were – and those flashes of satirical glee gave Fallout an edge over gloomier post-apocalyptic shows such as The Walking Dead or The Last of Us.

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:00 am

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy review – life gets gamified in one-note Korean sci-fi

Big K-pop stars and a teen-skewed subtext aims this squarely at a particular audience but this fantasy never really levels up

Starring the actor (Ahn Hyo-seop) who voiced the lead boy-band bad guy in KPop Demon Hunters, and one of the singers (Kim Ji-soo, also known mononymically as Jisoo) from real-world girl-band Blackpink, this Korean sci-fi-fantasy feature feels very skewed towards the young on all counts. Superficially, it appears to be about a guy named Kim Dok-ja (Ahn) who finds that the web novel he’s been following for years is turning into reality. That means the whole world becomes gamified, as if everyone has been turned into players compelled to kill to survive, while plagued by CGI monsters and puckish digital dokkaebi (demons) which explain things when the rules change.

But under the surface, this film is really about being popular, coping with traumatic childhood experiences such as being forced to beat up your best friend, getting a pimple, and building up enough gumption to tell authority figures – older people, your boss, the author of the book you’ve been a fan of for ages – that they suck.

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:00 am

The Housemaid review – Sydney Sweeney takes the job from hell in outrageous suspense thriller

Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar co-star as Sweeney’s secretive bosses in an upstate New York mansion, and director Paul Feig ramps up the sexual tension with evident gusto

Director Paul Feig is known for broad comedy; now he cranks up the schlock-serious dial for an outrageously enjoyable – or at any rate enjoyably outrageous – psycho-suspense thriller in the spirit of 90s erotic noir, adapted by screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine from the 2022 bestseller by Freida McFadden. We are back in the sleazy, glossy world of Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Joe Eszterhas’s Basic Instinct, but skating quite close, though not too close, to satire.

The scene is a bizarrely opulent mansion somewhere in upstate New York, splendidly isolated among a sea of bland suburban housing; it is approached by a drive, once you have got past the electronic gates. And it is down this avenue that Millie (Sydney Sweeney) nervously drives, wearing fake glasses to make herself look more mature, to apply for the job of live-in housemaid to the wealthy couple that lives there; she is hoping her prospective employers will not notice the worrying inconsistencies in her CV. She is greeted with smiley, Stepford-blond blandness by Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), who appears to adore Millie, and explains that the job entails cooking, cleaning and looking after her young daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle).

Published: December 16, 2025, 5:00 pm

‘I could watch the final 30 minutes on a loop till the end of time’: Guardian writers’ favourite Rob Reiner moments

The director’s incredible versatility and talent meant that he could reduce to tears with anguish or laughter, effortlessly pivoting from comedy to courtroom drama, romcom to rock mockumentary

Obviously The Shining remains the greatest Stephen King adaptation ever made, but Stand By Me is the one I love beyond all measure. It’s the warmest, the saddest and the funniest, too: a lovely, grubby ode to the joys of misspent youth. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12,” remarks small-town adventurer Gordie Lachance, who sets off with his pals to find a dead body in the woods. “Jesus, does anyone?”

Published: December 16, 2025, 12:45 pm

The 50 best albums of 2025: No 3 – Blood Orange: Essex Honey

Dev Hynes’ deeply personal response to his mother’s death embodied the many unexpected shades of grief in pastoral hymnals and post-punk

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

There’s a lot of grief across the best albums of this year. It’s unsurprising: 2025 has felt like a definitive and dismal break with government accountability, protections for marginalised people and holding back the encroachment of AI in creative and intellectual fields, to cherrypick just a few horrors. Anna von Hausswolff and Rosalía reached for transcendence from these earthly disappointments. Bad Bunny and KeiyaA countered colonial abuse and neglect with writhing resistance anthems. On a more personal scale, Lily Allen and Cate Le Bon grappled with disillusionment about mis-sold romantic ideals. For Jerskin Fendrix, the Tubs, Jennifer Walton, Jim Legxacy and Blood Orange, grief was, straightforwardly, grief for lost loved ones.

Each of those albums was as distinctive and profound as any personal experience of loss always is. Dev Hynes’ fifth album as Blood Orange felt uniquely keyed into the fragmented, distracted headspace that comes after someone passes, in his case, his mother. Essex Honey’s restive nature was summed up in its painful opening lines, which you could read as the dying’s acceptance of death starkly contrasting the living’s ability to meet them on those terms: “In your grace, I looked for some meaning,” Hynes sings on Look at You. “But I found none, and I still search for a truth.”

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:00 pm

Even Happy Birthday has a dark side: my quest to tell the history of the world in 50 pieces of music

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 4:04 pm

The 50 best albums of 2025

The year’s finest LPs as decided by 30 Guardian music writers – from a slip’n’slide through British club culture to a New York garage rock band in their 20s
• More on the best culture of 2025

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Published: December 17, 2025, 2:25 pm

‘It became a running joke how much my brothers and I hated it’: the sound of Christmas to me

Beyond Wham! and Elton, Guardian writers from across the generations select the songs that conjure the personal magic and memories of the season

I’m always fascinated by the ways in which my generation manage to participate in the circulation of music. Amateur TikTok edits resurrect forgotten gems and turn obscure starlets into sensations; home producers fabricate entire albums if their favourite rapper doesn’t release enough. Such is the case with Doom Xmas, the brainchild of Grammy-winning Spanish producer Cookin’ Soul, which refashions the work of late cult rapper MF Doom into Christmas music. There are filthy Grinch soundtrack flips, hectic Latin Christmas skits and a chopped-and-screwed Nat King Cole that’ll change the way you hear The Christmas Song.

Published: December 16, 2025, 4:00 pm

Bog Queen by Anna North review – a tale that could dig deeper

This story of a teenage druid whose body is discovered in a peat bog has memorable moments – but its evocation of time and place is unconvincing

Anna North’s fourth book, Bog Queen, is a stranded or braided novel. First “a colony of moss” speaks – or rather, does not speak, but “if such a colony could tell the story of its life”, here’s some of what it might say. Then we have Agnes in 2018, American, tall, awkward, expert in forensic pathology and uncertain about everything else, including much of life in England. And then, in the first person, there is an iron age teenage girl, the druid of her village, riding towards a Roman town with her brother Aesu and friend Crab: “I had been druid for two seasons at that point and everyone said I was doing very well.”

Agnes has a post-doctoral fellowship in Manchester, from which she is summoned to the discovery of a body in a peat bog in Ludlow. The story shadows that of Lindow Man, found by peat harvesters in a bog near Wilmslow in 1984. In this novel, “Ludlow” is a town in which “the steel mill has closed down” leaving nothing but “[a] few shops, a Tesco, a Pizza Express”. It’s “the Gateway to the north” and a bus ride from Manchester. Novelists may of course invent time and place as they see fit, but it’s an odd choice to borrow the location of a bourgeois satellite town of Manchester and give it the name of a pretty medieval market town in the Welsh Marches, with a history that belongs to neither.

Published: December 17, 2025, 9:00 am

Virginia Roberts Giuffre: Epstein accuser’s memoir sells 1m copies in two months

Giuffre’s family calls the success of her posthumous memoir, Nobody's Girl, ‘bittersweet’ after her death in April

A posthumous memoir by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s best-known accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, has sold 1m copies worldwide in just the two months after its release.

Publisher Alfred A Knopf announced on Tuesday that more than half the sales for Nobody’s Girl came out of North America; in the US, the book is now in its 10th printing after an initial run of 70,000 copies. Giuffre’s book, co-written by author-journalist Amy Wallace, was published in early October.

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:14 am

Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson review – startlingly original

The Indigenous Canadian author brilliantly captures the interdependence of humans and the natural world, in a darkly satirical critique of colonialism

Noopiming, by the Canadian writer-musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, means “in the bush” in the language of the Ojibwe people. The title of this startlingly original fiction is an ironic reference to Roughing It in the Bush; or, Forest Life in Canada, an 1852 memoir about “the civilisation of barbarous countries” by Susanna Moodie – Simpson’s eponymous “white lady” – a Briton who settled in the 1830s on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where Simpson’s ancestors resided and she now lives.

That 19th-century settlers’ guidebook went on to be hailed as the origin of Canadian women’s writing; Margaret Atwood adopted the Suffolk-born frontierswoman’s voice in her 1970 poetry collection, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Though she mentions Moodie’s book only in an afterword, Simpson’s perspective is different. For Moodie, extolling “our copper, silver and plumbago mines” in the extractivist British colony, the “red-skin” was a noble savage, and the “half-caste” a “lying, vicious rogue”. Yet, rather than a riposte to the toxic original, Noopiming – first published in Canada in 2020 and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary award in 2022 – sets about building a world on its own terms. The “cure”, then – the antidote to Moodie’s blinkered vision – is this book.

Published: December 16, 2025, 7:00 am

The Innocents of Florence by Joseph Luzzi review – how abandoned babies spurred a flowering of Renaissance art

The precarious, cruel but dazzling world of a foundling hospital is brought wonderfully to life by the author of Botticelli’s Secret

Joseph Luzzi, a professor at Bard College in New York, is a Dante scholar whose books argue for the relevance of the great Italian art and literature of the late middle ages and Renaissance to our own times. A great populariser and advocate of the humanities in public life, he has done for Dante what his Bard colleague Daniel Mendelsohn did for Homer in An Odyssey and other books.

This short volume tells the story of the Hospital of the Innocents in Dante’s home town of Florence, a building Luzzi has been fascinated by since encountering it in 1987 on his college year abroad. The Innocenti, as it is known, was the first institution in Europe devoted solely to the care of unwanted children. The first foundling, named Agata because she was left by its gates on Saint Agata’s Day 1445, had been nibbled at by mice.

Published: December 16, 2025, 9:00 am

Inside Fallout, gaming’s most surprising TV hit

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 3:00 pm

Simogo Legacy Collection review – remember when phone games were this wonderful?

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 11:52 am

Take that Santa! This is me upside-down and naked in a fireplace – Brooke DiDonato’s best photograph

‘I wanted to make a perfect square with my body. My back hurt for days afterwards. People often want to know if the kitten is real’

I’ve thought a lot about the time I made this image. In my 20s, I was living in New York. Then I broke up with my long-term partner in 2019 and I sort of didn’t really know how to cope any more. I didn’t feel creative – my whole experience of living in New York was tied to that relationship, and I felt I needed to go somewhere else and start over. I moved to Austin, Texas – I thought I’d give it a go for a bit.

I was doing a lot of tinkering at home, and I started doing a lot more self-portraits and let my psyche run wild. At this point, in 2021, one of my friends, Mike, was living in a 1940s building in East Austin, with old popcorn ceilings, really cool mouldings and outlet covers and original details, including the fireplace. It was inspiring to be there.

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:47 pm

‘She dreamt bigger than all of us’: is Timothée Chalamet really a Susan Boyle superfan?

The Marty Supreme star said the Britain’s Got Talent runner-up is one of the greatest Britons of all time – surely he’s not taking her name in vain for attention

Timothée Chalamet understands the true nature of greatness. In Marty Supreme, he plays a character loosely based on a former two-time US men’s singles table tennis champion. In A Complete Unknown, he played Bob Dylan at the exact moment he decided to reshape all of pop culture in his own image. His upcoming third Dune film is based on a book that is literally called Messiah. So when Timothée Chalamet singles out a figure for greatness, understand that the greatness is warranted.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that Timothée Chalamet thinks Susan Boyle is great. Not only great, but one of the greatest Britons to have ever lived.

Published: December 17, 2025, 1:34 pm

‘Music needs a human component to be of any value’: Guardian readers on the growing use of AI in music

AI promises to have far-reaching effects in music-making. While some welcome it as a compositional tool, many have deep concerns. Here are some of your responses

AI-generated music is flooding streaming platforms, and it seems to be here to stay. Last month, three AI songs reached the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts. Jorja Smith’s label has called for her to receive a share of royalties from a song thought to have trained its original AI-generated vocals on her catalogue, which were later re-recorded by a human singer.

With this in mind, we asked for your thoughts on music composed by AI, the use of AI as a tool in the creation of music, and what should be done to protect musicians. Here are some of your responses.

Published: December 17, 2025, 11:00 am

My fish spatula changed how I cook everything - not just fish, but also eggs, sauces and even cookies

Consider me the fish spatula spokesperson: here are all the ways I use it in my kitchen – and the best three in the market

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The fish spatula has been unfairly typecast. It’s all in the name. Because this kitchen tool is called a fish spatula, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking it exists for a singular purpose: flipping fish.

But use your fish spatula to smoothly flip an egg, and suddenly you’ll realize that its thin edge maneuvers under the white’s delicate, lacy edges better than any other tool in your kitchen crock. Use it to peel a cookie off of a baking sheet that you forgot to grease, and you’ll realize that the same sharp edge can pry things as precisely as a knife.

The best fish spatula: Victorinox Slotted Fish Turner Wood

Published: December 16, 2025, 9:13 pm

Four rules for being a good guest this holiday season

Sustainable pet toys, what to get for your mom and gift ideas from small businesses

• This piece was originally published in the Filter US newsletter on buying fewer, better things. Sign up here to get early access to it

Each week we cut through the noise to bring you smart, practical recommendations on how to live better – from what is worth buying to the tools, habits and ideas that actually last.

Recently, my colleague Danielle Renwick published a piece where she interviewed Chelsea Fagan, author of Having People Over, about how to host a dinner party without breaking the bank.

Published: December 16, 2025, 3:15 pm

Antony Price, ultra-glam designer for Duran Duran, Bowie and Roxy Music, dies aged 80

The great maverick image-maker, who was praised for inventing ‘result-wear’ yet only staged six shows, was adored by stars and Queen Camilla – and cut Mick Jagger’s Gimme Shelter trousers in his first job

Antony Price, the maverick British designer and theatrical “image maker” has died aged 80. He was among the first to combine music, theatre and fashion, helping to craft Roxy Music’s glam rock aesthetic and designing Duran Duran’s yacht rock tailoring a decade later. More recently, he became Queen Camilla’s go-to designer.

Often described as the greatest designer you’ve never heard of, Price only ever staged six shows – or “fashion extravaganzas” – in his 55-year career but just last month returned to the London catwalk for the first time in more than 30 years with a show in collaboration with 16Arlington. There, Lily Allen created headlines by modelling a black velvet “revenge dress”.

Published: December 17, 2025, 6:03 pm

‘Don’t be disheartened by mistakes’: 10 lessons my artist father taught me

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 12:00 pm

First she got breast cancer. Then her daughter did, too

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

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

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

Published: December 16, 2025, 5:00 pm

Rise of the full nesters: what life is like with adult children who just can’t leave home

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

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

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

Published: December 16, 2025, 10:00 am

Falling sales at Stella McCartney fuel fears over fashion label’s future

Directors blame ‘challenging market conditions’ as losses widen from £25m in 2024 to £33m

Sales at Stella McCartney’s fashion label sank by more than a quarter last year tipping it further into the red and adding to fears it could run out of money by 2028.

Pre-tax losses at the British brand led by the daughter of former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney widened to £33.6m in 2024 from £25m the year before, while sales fell 27% to £16m, according to accounts filed at Companies House.

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:49 pm

Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: my top tips for gifting clothes this Christmas

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:00 pm

Sali Hughes on beauty: fancy a fringe? Read this before you go for the chop

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 10:00 am

A moment that changed me: a pigeon fell out of the sky – and she led me to a secret underground rescue network

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 6:55 am

Worried about winter? 10 ways to thrive – from socialising to Sad lamps to celebrating the new year in April

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 5:00 am

Create new rituals and ‘be the river’: seven tips for co-parenting during the Christmas period

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 2:00 pm

A winter tour of Luxembourg’s fairytale chateaux – on the country’s free bus network

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

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

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 7:00 am

‘An unhealthy and creepy obsession’: Ilhan Omar on Trump’s attacks

The Zen-like US representative from Minnesota has had the highest level of death threats of any congressperson because of the president’s attacks

“That’s Teddy,” said Tim Mynett, husband of the US representative Ilhan Omar, as their five-year-old labrador retriever capered around her office on Capitol Hill. “If you make too much eye contact, he’ll lose it. He’s my best friend – and he’s our security detail these days.”

The couple were sitting on black leather furniture around a coffee table. Apart from a sneezing fit that took her husband by surprise, Omar had an unusual Zen-like calm for someone who receives frequent death threats and is the subject of a vendetta from the most powerful man in the world.

Published: December 16, 2025, 1:00 pm

Water levels across the Great Lakes are falling – just as US data centers move in

Region struggling with drought now threatened by energy-hungry facilities – but some residents are fighting back

The sign outside Tom Hermes’s farmyard in Perkins Township in Ohio, a short drive south of the shores of Lake Erie, proudly claims that his family have farmed the land here since 1900. Today, he raises 130 head of cattle and grows corn, wheat, grass and soybeans on 1,200 acres of land.

For his family, his animals and wider business, water is life.

Published: December 16, 2025, 1:00 pm

‘It’s terrifying, but not surprising’: a Brown University student on surviving her second school shooting

Mia Tretta has advocated for gun-violence prevention since being shot as a high school student in California in 2019

As federal and local authorities in Providence, Rhode Island, continue searching for the person who killed two Brown University students and injured nine others on Saturday, campus members and the broader community are grieving and dealing with a shattered sense of safety.

But for 21-year-old Brown University junior Mia Tretta, it’s familiar territory.

Published: December 16, 2025, 12:00 pm

Tell us your favourite film of 2025

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

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

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Published: December 16, 2025, 10:45 am

Tell us your favourite TV shows of 2025

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

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

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

Published: December 16, 2025, 10:46 am

Ice sculptures, evictions and strikes: photos of the day – Wednesday

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

Published: December 17, 2025, 12:47 pm