It’s the BBC v Trump, Farage and co. Who in their right mind would want to be its new boss? | Marina Hyde

Public life is a minefield and the best and brightest just don’t want to know. How convenient for foes of the most trusted news organisation in the world

Listen, I hate to ruin a yarn wall but I don’t think it’s at all helpful to start framing the current crisis at the BBC as a giant conspiracy or coup by dark rightwing forces, and get stuck in the weeds of that. The fact is, the three mistakes that form the bulk of Michael Prescott’s explosive leaked memo about impartiality – the Panorama edit, issues with coverage of the transgender issue and bias in the BBC Arabic service – happened and are bad. Given their spectacular fallout and the highest-level scalps that have been claimed, the opportunity to now deal with them might as well be taken by what is, let’s not forget, the most trusted news organisation in the world.

There is no news organisation in the United States that reaches more than 25% of people in a week. BBC News reaches 74% of UK adults in a week. There is vastly more distrust of news brands in the US. We in Britain live in a country with a far less polarised news market than almost anywhere else, in a world where 70% of people don’t even have a free press. This is great, whatever you might be told by Nigel Farage – a political leader who’s gunning to be the next PM but still presents a nightly current affairs show on GB News like that isn’t a massive conflict of interest and we live in Russia or something. Thanks for dialling in, Mr Ethics!

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:05 pm

Peanut allergies have plummeted among kids since 2017 – what happened?

Blockbuster research has upended assumptions about the allergy. Experts shared what parents should know about introducing food allergens

According to a paper published in the Journal of Pediatrics this month, the number of peanut allergy diagnoses among children has dropped over 40% since 2017.

The reason? Food allergy guidelines have undergone a sea change in the past decade.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:00 pm

I’m an American relying on food stamps. This country has turned us into lab rats

I’m one of 41 million people who need Snap to make ends meet. For weeks, the administration has turned our survival into a game: will they eat, or won’t they?

It is 10 November, and my refrigerator is almost empty.

I am, in fact, hungry as I write this. It is not that I do not have food at all; it is that I do not have the inclination to eat a can of tuna for breakfast, nor do I have the time to cook the winter squash my neighbor gave me.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:39 pm

‘It’s notoriously hard to write about sex’: David Szalay on Flesh, his astounding Booker prize-winner

The novel’s protagonist is violent, libidinous and so inarticulate he says ‘OK’ some 500 times. So how did the author turn his story into a tragic masterpiece?

When we meet the morning after the announcement of this year’s Booker prize, David Szalay, the winner, seems an extremely genial and gentle author to have created one of the most morally ambiguous characters in recent contemporary fiction. His sixth novel, Flesh, about the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK, is unlike anything you have read before.

Szalay (pronounced “Sol-oy”) is often described as “Hungarian-British”, but that has offended Canadians this morning, he says. His mother was Canadian and he was born in that country, where his Hungarian father had moved a few years earlier. “I’m arguably more Canadian than Hungarian.” Now 51, he grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, and lived in Hungary for 15 years. To make things more confusing, he is over from Vienna, where he now lives with his wife and young son Jonathan.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:49 pm

A Dutch war cemetery added displays showing black US soldiers. Then they were quietly removed

Relatives fear the move is part of ‘the same virus affecting the US’, as historians and politicians say it coincided with Trump’s DEI purge

A white marble cross marks the final resting place of Julius W Morris, private first class in the US army, who died in April 1945.

But at the cemetery where he lies in Margraten, a village in the south of the Netherlands, a new battle has begun over the quiet removal of two display panels about African American soldiers, like Morris.

Published: November 11, 2025, 1:25 pm

Waiting for the tsunami: its big waves are loved by surfers – but this Canadian town is braced for disaster

How do you plan for an event whose timing is unknown? For residents of Tofino on Vancouver Island the threat is distant but signs of preparedness are everywhere

Justin Goss was in the shower when he first heard the piercing wail of a nearby tsunami early-warning siren. Still dripping wet, he threw on clothes, grabbed his dog and rushed to the truck. The pair made it 3 metres and no further.

“The whole parking lot across the street was jammed up. It was complete gridlock within three minutes,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh shit, this is not good.’”

Published: November 11, 2025, 12:00 pm

Top House Democrats vow to oppose shutdown bill over healthcare funding

Democrats are demanding an extension of tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans set to expire at end of year

• US politics live – latest updates

As House Republican leaders move to hold a vote on legislation to reopen the US government, top Democrats vowed on Tuesday to oppose the bill for not addressing their demand for more healthcare funding.

Democrats have for weeks demanded that any measure to fund the government include an extension of tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans, which were created under Joe Biden and due to expire at the end of the year, sending premiums for enrollees higher.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:27 pm

Israel attacked Palestinian water sources over 250 times in five years, data reveals

Armed forces and settlers used bombs, dogs, poison and machinery to attack people and infrastructure at key sites

Israeli armed forces and settlers have attacked Palestinian water sources more than 250 times in the past five years, amounting to the most sustained assault on civilian water supplies in recent years, new research reveals.

Bombs, dogs, poison and heavy machinery were among the weapons used to attack Palestinians and their infrastructure at drinking water, irrigation and sanitation sites in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on at least 90 occasions between January 2024 and mid-2025, according to the Pacific Institute, a California-based nonpartisan thinktank tracking water conflicts.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:00 pm

With his threat of a $1bn lawsuit against BBC, Trump’s assault on the media goes global

US president’s latest media target comes from across the pond as he continues to scrutinize coverage he does not like

• US politics live – latest updates

Donald Trump has, for years, used legal threats and lawsuits to pressure news companies who put out coverage he does not like. After his return to power, a string of US broadcasters and tech firms have paid tens of millions of dollars to settle such cases.

The president has now gone global with this campaign, crossing the pond to threaten the BBC with a $1bn lawsuit over an episode of the Panorama documentary program that aired more than a year ago.

Published: November 11, 2025, 8:00 am

Pentagon’s largest warship enters Latin American waters as US tensions with Venezuela rise

USS Gerald R Ford’s arrival marks the largest US military presence in the region since the invasion of Panama in 1989

The US navy has announced that the USS Gerald R Ford, regarded as the world’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, has entered the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.

The deployment of the ship and the strike group it leads – which includes dozens of aircraft and destroyer ships – had been announced nearly three weeks ago, and its arrival marks an escalation in the military buildup between the US and Venezuela.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:47 pm

ICE agents accused of pepper-spraying Illinois parents and their one-year-old

Video shows Rafael Veraza holding his face after he and his family were allegedly sprayed through open car window

An Illinois man said his US citizen family – including his one-year-old daughter – were pepper-sprayed in their car by federal immigration agents during a shopping trip in a Chicago suburb.

Video of the encounter outside a Sam’s Club in Cicero shows Rafael Veraza clutching at his face after he was allegedly sprayed through his open window with a cloudy substance fired by a masked agent from a pickup truck traveling in the opposite direction.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:43 pm

Families of Camp Mystic campers and counselors file lawsuits over deaths

Families allege camp leaders ignored known flood risks in ‘entirely preventable’ tragedy that killed multiple people

The families of several campers and two counselors who died in July’s catastrophic Hill Country floods in Texas have filed multiple lawsuits against Camp Mystic and its owners, accusing them of “gross negligence”.

The 4 July floods, which claimed more than 130 lives across the region and was described as some of the US’s deadliest floods in decades, devastated the 99-year-old Christian all-girls camp, located on the banks of the Guadalupe river in Kerr county.

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:48 pm

Sally Kirkland, Oscar-nominated actor of film and television, dies at 84

The actor has over 250 screen credits, including Anna, The Way We Were and JFK, and collaborated with Andy Warhol

Sally Kirkland, the Oscar-nominated actor and one-time member of Andy Warhol’s the Factory, has died at 84.

The star of films including Anna, JFK and Bruce Almighty had entered hospice care two days before her death after a period of ill health. Last year, a GoFundMe page had been set up to help her in the wake of “life-threatening infections” and a number of falls. She had also been diagnosed with dementia.

Published: November 11, 2025, 3:12 pm

Mississippi student arrested for yelling antisemitic comments at Dave Portnoy

University student charged with disturbing peace after yelling and throwing coins towards Barstool Sports founder

A Mississippi State University student has been arrested after yelling antisemitic comments at Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy.

The arrest of 20-year old Patrick McClintock, a mechanical engineering student at MSU, came after Starkville police were “made aware of a video circulating online that depicted an individual yelling an antisemitic statement and throwing coins toward another person outside a local business”, the police department said in a statement.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:13 pm

‘It’s changed me’: Jeff Goldblum says he has stopped eating meat after working on Wicked

Actor said discussions about animal cruelty with director Jon Chu had led him to join Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in renouncing meat

The actor Jeff Goldblum has credited working on the Wicked movies with his decision to turn pescatarian.

Speaking on This Morning, Goldblum, 73, said that he had been affected by the film series’ themes of animal cruelty to such an extent that he stopped eating meat.

Published: November 11, 2025, 12:50 pm

Utah judge approves map creating new House seat in Democratic-leaning area

Decision breathes new life into Democrats’ attempts to reclaim the House in the 2026 midterm elections

A Utah judge has handed Democrats a win in the continuing national fight over voting districts by ordering a new map that creates a House seat in a Democratic-leaning area, in a state where Republicans currently control all four positions.

The judge, Dianna Gibson, ruled just before a midnight deadline on Monday that a revised map submitted by the Republican-controlled state legislature “unduly favors Republicans and disfavors Democrats”, throwing out lawmakers’ second attempt to draw districts.

Published: November 11, 2025, 3:09 pm

Pediatricians fill vaccine messaging void left by CDC amid bad flu season

Doctors step up after US health department suspended its flu vaccine campaign following Trump’s election

As flu season begins in the US, following the deadliest flu outbreak in children outside of a pandemic since record-keeping began in 2004, pediatricians are taking the lead on vaccine messaging.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not plan to resume its “wild to mild” flu vaccination campaign, which was halted in the midst of the record-breaking flu season.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:00 pm

‘A classic authoritarian tactic’: outrage over Trump’s pardons for friends and allies

Ex-prosecutors and legal scholars say US president ‘meting out pardons for blatantly corrupt and self-serving ends’

Donald Trump’s unprecedented pardoning spree for political and business friends since returning to the White House has prompted warnings from ex-prosecutors and legal scholars of “corrupt” pay-to-play schemes, conflicts of interest and blatant partisanship.

It has included hundreds of Maga allies, a cryptocurrency mogul with ties to a Trump family crypto firm, disgraced politicians, and others who could yield political and financial benefits.

Published: November 11, 2025, 12:00 pm

Trump asks supreme court to throw out jury’s finding in E Jean Carroll lawsuit

Writer and author had testified, and won, at trial that the president had sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s

Donald Trump asked the US supreme court on Monday to throw out a jury’s finding in a civil lawsuit that he sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s and later defamed her.

Trump’s lawyers argued in a lengthy filing with the high court that allegations leading to the $5m verdict were “propped up” by a “series of indefensible evidentiary rulings” that allowed Carroll’s lawyers to present “highly inflammatory propensity evidence” against him.

Published: November 11, 2025, 3:19 am

US firefighter detained on the job speaks out after deportation: ‘I feel betrayed’

Exclusive: Border patrol arrested José Bertin Cruz-Estrada while he was battling a wildfire in Washington. He is now in Mexico, separated from his family in Oregon

José Bertin Cruz-Estrada was responding to a wildfire in Washington state on 27 August when four unmarked vehicles drove up to his crew’s remote location in a national forest.

Cruz-Estrada, part of a team of 20 Oregon-based firefighters, had spent a week hiking through dense terrain, battling smoke and clearing fallen trees and other debris to prevent the Bear Gulch fire, a 9,000-acre blaze, from growing. That morning, they were waiting for a taskforce leader to provide instructions, but Cruz-Estrada quickly realized the men arriving in trucks were not emergency responders.

Published: November 11, 2025, 1:00 pm

‘People were screaming for help’: Delhi car blast witnesses describe scenes of horror

Explosion near the Red Fort landmark was so loud and intense it was felt several kilometres away

Few monuments symbolise Delhi’s past splendour than its grand, 17th-century Red Fort, once the imperial domain of Mughal emperors. The fortress now stands as a museum frozen in time but the surrounding area remains the thriving heart of the Indian capital, where dried fruit and vegetable vendors jostle for space alongside stalls selling clothes, suitcases and shoes.

Across the street are the narrow lanes of the famed Chandi Chowk bazaar. By nightfall, the roads are chock-full of rickshaws and loudly honking cars.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:28 pm

The race begins to make the world’s best self-driving cars

Chinese search giant Baidu challenges Google’s Waymo’s driverless vehicles and Musk aims for a $1tn pay package

• Sign up for the TechScape newsletter here

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you from Barcelona, where my diet has transformed at least half my body into ham.

Sam Altman’s bet: can OpenAI’s profits keep pace with industry’s soaring costs?

‘It shows such a laziness’: why I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT

What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms

EU could water down AI Act amid pressure from Trump and big tech

Google plans to put datacentres in space to meet demand for AI

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:27 pm

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t review – light-as-a-feather magic threequel

The starry franchise returns for a belated third outing, with Rosamund Pike in villain mode and familiar but forgettable tricks

If Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Ocean’s Eleven attempted to capture some remnant of an older Las Vegas, sounding an elegiac note in its scene of the crew departing the Bellagio fountains one by one, then the Now You See Me series seems to aspire to something closer to the Las Vegas of today. The belated third entry Now You See Me: Now You Don’t swells the ranks of its tricky magician thieves to nearly Ocean’s Eleven numbers, then winds them through a heist plot that ultimately has the illusory spontaneity of a pop artist in the midst of a 30-show residency. It’s glitzy, fun fakery that fades quickly unless you’re an inexplicably hardcore fan.

Those fans will recall that it’s been nearly a decade since the most recent adventures of ringleader Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), card trickster Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) at the behest of The Eye, a secret magician society that sends particularly skilled illusionists on righteous, spy-like missions. Actually, it’s been even longer for Henley, who wasn’t in the 2016 sequel unforgivably titled Now You See Me 2, apparently saving its more obvious moniker for this three-quel (and therefore squandering the opportunity to call the new one Now You Three Me). But the estranged quartet calling themselves the Four Horsemen are tricked into a testy reunion when a message from The Eye brings Atlas to the doorstep of a younger trio of similarly gifted magicians: Bosco (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith). Their task: steal an enormous diamond from money-laundering arms dealer Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a mission mostly in sync with the new kids’ proclivity for wealth redistribution, albeit more neatly traditional in its choice of evildoer.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:40 pm

Jon Stewart on government shutdown deal: ‘A world-class collapse by Democrats’

Late-night hosts discussed the deal between Republican Senators and eight rogue Democrats to end the government shutdown with no assurances on healthcare

Late-night hosts unleashed on Senate Democrats for caving on the longest-ever government shutdown with no assurance on healthcare subsidies from Republicans.

Published: November 11, 2025, 3:13 pm

‘A Ukrainian witch kicks the crap out of Russian soldiers’: the new wave of horror films taking on Putin’s army

Homegrown, female-driven scary movies in which witches and zombies lay waste to invading troops are proving popular in Ukraine. But why seek out horror on screen if you have so much of it in real life?

When Ukrainian horror movie The Witch: Revenge started filming in late 2023, the costumes for the Russian soldiers were sourced straight from the battlefield. “They were real Russian uniforms. The captured soldiers or the dead soldiers, they just took those uniforms and cleaned them, and we used them,” the film’s producer, Iryna Kostyuk, says, speaking from Kyiv. Having cleaned the uniforms, the film-makers then had to dirty them up again so they looked suitably lived-in. Some of the vests still had names written in them – and several had names crossed out, presumably because Russian soldiers had filched them themselves from fallen comrades. “It was quite a challenge for the [Ukrainian] actors to wear them,” the producer says.

The movie, also known as The Konotop Witch, is about a witch who has renounced her powers but re-summons them after the Russians kill her fiance. It was a runaway hit at the Ukrainian box office last year, making $1.4m – a very big number for a country during a war, facing curfews and electricity cuts. It’s also the first in a horror universe cycle, called Heroines of the Dark Times, that Kostyuk is overseeing. Kostyuk and her team have now completed the second film in the series, The Dam. A zombie splatterfest, full of gore and severed heads, it follows a unit of Ukrainian soldiers, led by a female fighter codenamed Mara, who uncover a cold war era laboratory where Soviet scientists conducted nefarious experiments in the 1950s. Mara and her team face the inevitable battle with undead Soviet soldiers – but must also confront their own innermost fears, and learn to trust one another.

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:16 pm

No-toe area: why a barefoot living group has banned pictures of feet

The UK’s biggest barefoot Facebook group has prohibited closeups after being targeted by foot fetishists

Name: Barefoot living.

Age: Humans have been barefoot since humans have been being. The earliest shoe, a (frankly not very stylish) sagebrush bark sandal, dropped in what’s now Oregon about 10,000 years ago.

Published: November 11, 2025, 3:35 pm

Musk is paid $1tn. Nvidia’s worth $5tn. Yet America’s poor are struggling to eat | Steven Greenhouse

We may be in a golden age for the super-rich – but it doesn’t feel that way for the 42 million Americans who use Snap

It seems like an understatement to call this the New Gilded Age. Perhaps we should instead call it the Obscenely Over-the-Top Gilded Age, considering that Tesla shareholders just approved a $1tn pay package for Elon Musk and the market value of the chipmaker Nvidia has rocketed above $5tn.

Not only that, the 10 richest billionaires in the US saw their collective wealth soar by $698bn over the past year, while Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, reportedly paid $110m for a 123-room mansion in Los Angeles to host events. And then there’s our billionaire president, who – when his family isn’t raking in tens of millions of dollars through crypto – is obsessed with building a $300m, gilded-to-the-hilt ballroom, funded by fellow billionaires.

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues

Published: November 11, 2025, 11:00 am

Ben Jennings on Cop30 – cartoon

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Published: November 11, 2025, 5:54 pm

How do you care for an ageing parent – when they want none of it? | Barry J Jacobs

Supporting my mother as she grew older meant facing pride, minimization and resistance. The key to a healthier relationship was empathy

One evening as I was using my key to let myself into my mother’s apartment for a visit, I glanced toward the kitchen table where she usually sat reading the newspaper and saw her rolling walker standing alone. Surprised, I said loudly: “Where are you, Mom?”

“Here,” I heard her respond from her bedroom down the hall. “I’m fine.”

Published: November 11, 2025, 1:00 pm

I’ve seen the BBC flat out on the canvas before. Brave journalism is the best way to hit back | Roger Mosey

The corporation is again being put to the test. Now is its chance to double down on reporting that serves the people of the UK

• Roger Mosey is a former head of BBC TV News

The BBC is battered and sprawling on the canvas again. As a corporation executive, I lived through a number of these episodes: the Hutton report into coverage of Iraq, which resulted in the resignation of Greg Dyke as director general; and then the Jimmy Savile revelations, which helped force out George Entwistle, even though he had nothing to do with the appalling crimes of history. Now Tim Davie has resigned over the misleading editing of a Panorama programme, and the BBC’s enemies haven’t just scented blood: they have got it.

There is only one response, and that is to get up and fight. As digital nonsense and lies swamp us every day, and tech billionaires in foreign countries decide what we see and hear, there is a stronger case than ever for British content and for journalism that serves the people of the UK – with some of those old-fashioned things such as honesty, accuracy and truth. Despite all the attacks upon it, and the whippings it administers to itself, the BBC is the country’s most trusted broadcaster. Its reach and its universality are why its foes hate it.

Roger Mosey is a former head of BBC TV News

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

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:00 pm

A leaked IDF video showing alleged detainee abuse has Israel reeling, but not in the way you might think | Roy Schwartz

The outrage has been all about who leaked the footage and who is hurting Israel’s image, not what actually happened at the Sde Teiman detention camp

“I would never, ever publish a video that makes IDF soldiers look bad, even when they did something wrong, out of the understanding that it could tarnish our image in the eyes of the entire world.”

These are not the words of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) chief. They were not even written by a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Shockingly, they came from a journalist, Amichai Attali, a political correspondent for one of Israel’s most popular newspapers.

Roy Schwartz is a senior editor and op-ed contributor at Haaretz

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

Published: November 11, 2025, 11:26 am

Dallas Mavericks fire GM Nico Harrison nine months after Luka Dončić trade

• Harrison joined the Mavs in 2021 from Nike

• GM took responsibility for sending Dončić to Lakers

The Dallas Mavericks have fired general manager Nico Harrison, the team’s governor, Patrick Dumont, has confirmed.

“This decision reflects our continued commitment to building a championship-caliber organization, one that delivers for our players, our partners, and most importantly, our fans,” Dumont said in a statement.

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:39 pm

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones speaks of grief over death of ‘unique’ Marshawn Kneeland at 24

• Cowboys to pay tribute to defensive end at next game

• Jones hails defensive end’s ‘zest for life’

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has spoken about his grief at the death of Dallas defensive end Marshawn Kneeland last week.

Kneeland, who was in his second year with the Cowboys, was 24 at the time of his death.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:13 pm

Mauricio Pochettino chooses caution with time running out before the World Cup

Weston McKennie remains at Juventus due to a manager change, and the US remain vulnerable to outside elements

When Weston McKennie signed for Juventus in 2020, it had only been 30 days since Andrea Pirlo was made the Italian club’s manager. A few weeks ago, Luciano Spalletti was appointed as Juve’s fifth manager since McKennie joined – or his seventh, if you count the interim head coaches. It’s not a new situation for the American. But according to US men’s national team head coach Mauricio Pochettino, it’s why McKennie isn’t with the US during their upcoming friendlies with Paraguay on Saturday and Uruguay on Tuesday.

Pochettino could have selected McKennie, trusting that Spalletti is the first Juventus manager in years to be instantly convinced of the multifunctional Texan’s value. Rather than the usual routine of a manager trying to push McKennie out of the club, only to realize that there’s a reason only three players in the squad have been at the club longer, Spalletti has given McKennie starts in all three matches he’s overseen. The 27-year-old has played all but five available minutes in that span.

Published: November 11, 2025, 1:00 pm

Carlos Alcaraz battles back to beat Taylor Fritz: ATP Finals tennis – as it happened

Taylor Fritz did all he could, but it still wasn’t enough to beat Carlos Alcaraz, who recovered after losing the first set to win an epic in three

*Alcaraz 1-1 Fritz The last thing Fritz will want is for Alcraraz to rush through an easy hold and he makes 0-15, then attacks a second serve with a backhand down the line, as we suggested he should, for 0-30. And, though Alcaraz halves his arrears, Faritz runs around his forehand to clout down the line, raising two break points; the first disappears with an overhit forehand, the second with a service winner. Up advantage, though, Alcaraz errs, and this is already ridiculously enjoyable, Fritz taking control of the next rally by landing a forehand on to the baseline and seeing it home with backhands down the line to earn a third break point. And this time he looks ready to take it, racing to net when a drop sits up … but Alcaraz reads him and puts away the volley! The anticipation there was spooky, and there’s something about watching him play that’s almost wrong, stuff that shouldn’t be possible happening with such regularity it feels unreal, or staged. And that’s exactly the next point, a no-look drop, discharged with Fritz expecting a booming cross-court shot, followed up with a perfectly disguised and perfect lob; from there, Alcaraz sees out the hold, and these two games have been of absurdly high standard.

Alcaraz 0-1 Fritz* (denotes server) A forehand clouted wide gives Alcaraz 0-15 … but that’s nothing a service winner can’t solve. At 30-15, though, a tame forehand into the net puts him under immediate pressure … but that’s nothing an ace can’t serve. He quickly makes 40-30, too, but a backhand winner sizzles past him cross, and another netted forehand means Alcaraz has advantage. Fritz looks nervous, reflecting how well he knows he’s playing: this is is his time. He saves break point with a forehand winner, but is soon down advantage again, totally dominated in the next rally. Also again, though, he restores deuce, and this time an ace raises game point … only to be followed by a double. On the one hand, this isn’t the game Fritz had in mind when he opted to serve but, on the other, if he can see out the tension and hold, it’ll fortify him with confidence. Meantime, though, an ace earns another advantage, but again, he can’t see it out; what a start to the match this is. AND HAVE A LOOK! Again up advantage and this tome at the net with a simple putaway there for him, Fritz picks out Alcaraz who hoists a lob, then deals with the tweener sent at him in riposte via volley. That was another terrific exchange, was, restoring deuce, but Fritz again makes his ad, this time punishing down an ace to secure a nine-minute hold. MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE.

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:25 pm

‘Focus on driving and talk less’: Ferrari president hits back at Lewis Hamilton

• John Elkann has say after Hamilton’s ‘nightmare’ verdict

• Lando Norris plays down title talk after victory in Brazil

Lewis Hamilton has been told to “focus on driving and talk less” in a rebuke from the Ferrari president, John Elkann, which was almost certainly a reaction to Hamilton’s outspoken description of his first season with the team as a “nightmare”.

Hamilton has endured a difficult debut year with Ferrari, with the team underperforming and the seven‑time champion having a trying time adapting to a new environment and practices.

Published: November 10, 2025, 6:31 pm

Eagles edge to victory over Packers as defenses dominate Monday Night Football

• Philadelphia Eagles 10-7 Green Bay Packers

• Green Bay fall to third in NFC North after loss

• Teams went pointless in dour first-half

Jalen Hurts threw a 36-yard pass to DeVonta Smith for Philadelphia’s only touchdown of the game as the Eagles’ defense led the way to a 10-7 victory over the Green Bay Packers on Monday night.

Brandon McManus’s attempt at a game-tying, 64-yard field goal as time expired fell several yards short.

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:45 am

MLB pitcher Luis Ortiz released on $500,000 bail after allegedly taking gambling bribes

• Guardians pitchers indicted on fraud allegations

• NBA also caught up in its own gambling scandal

Cleveland Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz appeared in federal court on Monday on charges accusing him and teammate Emmanuel Clase of taking bribes to help associates win prop bets placed on pitches they threw.

A judge in in Boston granted Ortiz his release but with several conditions, including that he surrender his passport, restrict his travel to the US northeast and post a $500,000 bond. He must also avoid contact with anyone who could be viewed as a victim, witness or co-defendant in the case.

Ortiz, dressed in a pale green track suit, did not say anything in court. His lawyers declined to speak to reporters afterward.

Published: November 10, 2025, 10:40 pm

David Squires on … Fifa’s peace prize and Donald Trump’s eligibility

Our cartoonist on how the US president’s actions in office may have put him in line for an award

• Buy a Squires cartoon in our Print Shop

• David’s latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

Published: November 11, 2025, 11:29 am

Arne Slot’s big mistake at Liverpool this season? Failing to drop struggling Salah | Barney Ronay

Mohamed Salah has drifted from crucial to peripheral in big games, and Arne Slot’s decision to keep picking him is strange

There must be blame. We need heads on the battlements. We need entrails, horses, chains, a public quartering. Basically we just need to feel something. We need, above all, to feel that this is all someone’s fault.

This is how elite football must function now. The Dalai Lama once said that instead of looking to blame others we should look for answers within ourselves, which just goes to show how wrong you can be and is, frankly, very disappointing from the Dalai Lama.

Published: November 11, 2025, 8:00 am

‘Ciao, bambino!’: Paris agreement architect says absence of US is good for Cop30 - live

Christiana Figueres tells summit that decarbonisation of global economy is inevitable despite disruptive Trump presidency

In the run-up to Cop30, the Guardian published a series of articles looking at the ten biggest polluters of greenhouse gas, and their plans to clean up. Here’s a piece my colleague Jonathan Watts wrote in September about China, which according to an analysis published today has plateaued its emissions.

Chinese power took on an old-fashioned hue in the past week with a huge military parade, a gathering of former allies Russia and North Korea, and President Xi Jinping’s defiant vow not to be intimidated by bullies.

Published: November 11, 2025, 6:00 pm

Man and daughter flying hurricane relief supplies to Jamaica identified as victims of crash

Alexander Wurm, 53, and his daughter Serena died in Florida crash as they were flying supplies to Jamaica

The founder of a church ministry and his 22-year-old daughter have been identified as the victims of a deadly plane crash in Florida on Monday as they were flying hurricane relief supplies to Jamaica.

Alexander Wurm, 53, and his daughter Serena died when their twin-engined Beechcraft King Air crashed into a residential neighborhood in Coral Springs on Monday morning shortly after take-off from Fort Lauderdale’s executive airport.

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:06 pm

TikTok influencer killed in public ‘execution’ as Mali’s jihadist crisis worsens

Mariam Cissé, who posted videos in support of ruling junta, received death threats before being abducted and killed

A TikTok influencer has been shot dead in front of a crowd by suspected jihadists in Mali, underlining how state control has been eroded in the west African nation.

Mariam Cissé often wore combat attire to post videos in support of the country’s military to more than 100,000 followers on TikTok. According to Yehia Tandina, the mayor of Timbuktu region, she was abducted in a market on Friday by unknown gunmen.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:07 pm

Shuttle crash at DC-area Dulles airport sends 18 people to hospital

Injuries are non-life-threatening after mobile lounge moving passengers between terminal and plane hit dock

A vehicle transporting passengers at a Washington DC-area airport hit a dock at the building on Monday, sending 18 people to the hospital, according to officials.

A mobile lounge, which transports passengers between the terminal and aircraft, struck the dock at an angle at about 4.30pm at Washington Dulles international airport as it was pulling up to the building, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority said in a statement. The dock is where the vehicle stops to let people into the concourse.

Published: November 11, 2025, 3:29 pm

Search for West Virginia miner trapped by floodwater extends into fourth day

Rescuers have been seeking unnamed man since pocket of water inundated Rolling Thunder mine on Saturday

Emergency responders have been trying to reach a miner trapped deep inside a flooded West Virginia coalmine since Saturday, according to authorities.

A mining crew hit an unknown pocket of water on Saturday about three-quarters of a mile into the Rolling Thunder mine near Drennen, about 50 miles (80km) east of the state capital of Charleston, the Nicholas county commissioner, Garrett Cole, said in a Facebook post.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:58 pm

China removes two popular gay dating apps from Apple and Android stores

Withdrawal of Blued and Finka raises fears of further crackdowns on LGBT rights amid growing restrictions

Two of China’s most popular gay dating apps have disappeared from app stores in the country, raising fears of a further crackdown on LGBT communities.

As of Tuesday, Blued and Finka were unavailable on Apple’s app store and several Android platforms. Users who had already downloaded the apps appeared to still be able to use them.

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:50 pm

SoftBank sells stake in Nvidia for $5.8bn as it doubles down on OpenAI bets

Shares in chipmaker Nvidia fall after announcement by Japanese investor, with other tech shares also slipping

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The Japanese technology investor SoftBank intensified the debate about valuations in the artificial intelligence world on Tuesday by revealing it had sold its stake in the chipmaker Nvidia.

In its latest quarterly results, SoftBank showed it had sold its shares in Nvidia for $5.8bn (£4.4bn) in October, as it doubles down on its bets on OpenAI, the group behind the ChatGPT chatbot. It also reported that second-quarter net profit more than doubled to 2.5tn yen (£12.2bn), driven by valuation gains in its OpenAI holdings.

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:44 pm

ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics, German court rules

OpenAI ordered to pay undisclosed damages for training its language models on artists’ work without permission

A court in Munich has ruled that OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by using hits from top-selling musicians to train its language models in what creative industry advocates described as a landmark European ruling.

The Munich regional court sided in favour of Germany’s music rights society GEMA, which said ChatGPT had harvested protected lyrics by popular artists to “learn” from them.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:00 pm

Bee-elzebub: new horned ‘Lucifer’ bee discovered in Western Australia

Australian expert stumbled across new species when surveying a critically endangered wildflower in 2019

As if deadly snakes, spiders and sharks were not enough, Australia now has a new creepy critter: a “Lucifer” bee with devil-like horns.

The species – dubbed Megachile (Hackeriapis) lucifer – was found in the state of Western Australia, Curtin University announced on Tuesday.

Published: November 11, 2025, 6:44 am

Why ‘mob grazing’ may help protect drought-hit Senegal’s vast grasslands

A regenerative scheme has shown early promise, with herders hopeful it can restore degraded pastures

Ibrahima Ka, dressed in flowing indigo robes, gathers his herd with those of his neighbours before a stretch of lush, untouched pasture. The bellowing, heaving and trampling of 350 impatient zebu cows behind a wire perimeter marks a break with centuries of herding tradition in Senegal, west Africa. Rather than roaming freely across the country’s vast grasslands, shepherds tightly pack the herd together, confining them to graze in short, intensive bursts before being moved to a new plot.

Ka, the village chief of Thignol, is spearheading the first pilot of “mob grazing” in Senegal, aiming to mimic, on a much smaller scale, how wildebeest flow across the Serengeti, moving to protect themselves against lions and cheetahs. The idea that intense grazing can regenerate grasslands rather than accelerate their decline has been controversial. Initially, proponents argued it could help to solve the climate crisis through storing carbon in regenerated grasslands – a claim with little scientific basis. But there is some evidence that the method can boost biodiversity and grassland health in dry areas such as Senegal.

Published: November 11, 2025, 1:52 pm

‘She rang me to say there was water coming into the house’ – This is climate breakdown

His mother had lived in the same house for 83 years. When the floods came, no one was ready. This is Paul Gilbert’s story

Location Chesterfield, UK

Disaster Storm Babet, 2023

Paul Gilbert’s mother, Maureen, lived in Chesterfield. In 2023, Storm Babet claimed seven lives across the UK, led to more than 10,000 people being evacuated from their homes and caused in excess of £450m in property damage. Extreme rainfall is more common and more intense because of human-caused climate breakdown across most of the world, and experts have linked some of the damage caused by Storm Babet to the climate crisis.

Published: November 11, 2025, 12:00 pm

China’s CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for past 18 months, analysis finds

World’s biggest polluter on track to hit peak emissions target early but miss goal for cutting carbon intensity

• Cop30: click here for full Guardian coverage of the climate talks in Brazil

China’s carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months, analysis reveals, adding evidence to the hope that the world’s biggest polluter has managed to hit its target of peak CO₂ emissions well ahead of schedule.

Rapid increases in the deployment of solar and wind power generation – which grew by 46% and 11% respectively in the third quarter of this year – meant the country’s energy sector emissions remained flat, even as the demand for electricity increased.

Published: November 11, 2025, 12:01 am

The temperature at Cop30: Trump’s absence better than a US wrecking ball

After bully-like behavior last month over a small emissions levy, diplomats will be relieved if the US stays away from climate talks

• Cop30: click here for full Guardian coverage of the climate talks in Brazil

For years, countries around the world pressed the US to engage with them in addressing the climate crisis and to show it was serious about taking action. Now, with key United Nations climate talks under way in Brazil this week, other nations have been quietly hoping the US stays well away.

Under Donald Trump, who has called the climate crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, the US has not only pulled back from climate action but openly agitated for greater global fossil fuel use and for other countries to tear down their own climate policies.

Published: November 10, 2025, 10:00 am

Outcry as TikTok livestreamer who allegedly hit and killed man asks for donations

Woman requests help to support ‘mental leave’ after incident in which Darren Lucas, 59, was struck and killed

A social media creator who allegedly hit and killed a pedestrian as she hosted a livestream while simultaneously driving through a Chicago suburb has been met with backlash after apparently soliciting donations she said were meant to support “mental leave”.

“You know I don’t like asking y’all for shit, but if y’all … find it in y’all’s heart and y’all wanna support, my CashApp [account] is right there,” the woman said, according to a recording of the plea made to a restricted TikTok audience three days from the traffic crash that killed 59-year-old Darren Lucas.

Published: November 11, 2025, 11:00 am

Willing states must act to save international legal order, warns top academic

Yale professor says wars in Ukraine and Gaza and threats from Donald Trump risk the ‘total collapse’ of the global courts system

A coalition of states is needed to stop the international legal order falling apart, a distinguished international academic has warned.

Oona Hathaway, the president-elect of the American Society of International Law and a former Pentagon legal adviser, said the core of the postwar global order – the prohibition on taking land by force – was under unprecedented challenge in a “scary moment” for the world.

Published: November 11, 2025, 8:00 am

Protests as rightwing Charlie Kirk activist group makes final campus tour stop

People shout ‘Fascists out of Berkeley’ as Turning Point USA brings message to college with history of leftwing activism

Turning Point USA, the influential rightwing college group founded by Charlie Kirk, has brought Kirk’s message to a campus with a long history of leftwing activism two months after his death.

An event at the University of California, Berkeley, on Monday evening marked the chaotic last stop of the American Comeback tour, which Kirk had just begun at the time of his death at Utah Valley University. In the aftermath of Kirk’s fatal shooting, the events have come to serve as memorials, with prominent conservative speakers, including JD Vance, highlighting the staggering impact the controversial rightwing influencer’s death has had on American politics.

Published: November 11, 2025, 3:22 am

Trump scolds air traffic controllers and blames rivals for economy in interview

President put forth his vision of ‘Trump Care’ for health and insisted ‘we have the greatest economy we ever had’

Donald Trump chastised overwhelmed air traffic controllers, cast blame and doubt in response to poor economic indicators and claimed that increased access to food stamps had put “the country in jeopardy”, in an exclusive interview on Fox News on Monday evening.

Speaking with Laura Ingraham, the president shared his thoughts on a wide range of topics from housing mortgages to foreign policy, interspersed with insults flung at his political opponents that were teed up by Ingraham’s questions, including Gavin Newsom, the California governor and Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:47 am

Milan prosecutors investigate alleged ‘sniper tourism’ during Bosnian war

Groups from Italy and elsewhere alleged to have paid Serb soldiers to shoot Sarajevo residents during siege

Prosecutors in Milan have opened an investigation into Italians who allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army for trips to Sarajevo so that they could kill citizens during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s.

More than 10,000 people were killed in Sarajevo by constant shelling and sniper fire between 1992 and 1996 in what was the longest siege in modern history, after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:20 pm

Catherine Connolly sworn in as Ireland’s president on day of pomp and celebration

New president pledges ‘all voices’ will be heard and vows to promote climate action, tolerance and a Gaelic revival

Catherine Connolly has vowed to make Ireland a “republic worthy of its name” by using her presidency to champion diversity, the Irish language and the legacy of decolonisation.

Connolly spelled out a leftwing alternative to centre-right orthodoxy in her inauguration speech after being sworn in to office on Tuesday.

Published: November 11, 2025, 4:27 pm

German man with alleged neo-Nazi links arrested over darknet assassination calls

Prosecutor says suspect ran platform with lists of politicians’ names and requests for crypto donations, to be offered as ‘bounties’

Germany’s chief federal prosecutor has announced the arrest of a German-Polish national with alleged neo-Nazi ties who is accused of calling on the darknet for the assassination of top politicians and seeking donations for bounties on their heads.

More than 20 people were on the list of potential targets, including former chancellors Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz as well as judges and ex-government ministers, local media reported.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:44 pm

‘Entirely political’: Istanbul mayor charged with 142 offences that could total 2,000 years in jail

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the main political rival of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, faces charges including bribery and extortion

Turkish prosecutors have charged Istanbul’s jailed mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, with 142 offences that could carry a penalty of hundreds of years in prison, in a move seen as a politically motivated attack on the country’s opposition.

The indictment filed on Tuesday, which runs to nearly 4,000 pages, charges the popular opposition figure who was arrested on 19 March with offences including running a criminal organisation, bribery, embezzlement, money laundering, extortion and tender rigging.

Published: November 11, 2025, 3:10 pm

‘Harlem has always been evolving’: inside the Studio Museum’s $160m new home

The iconic museum, which was founded in 1968, has been rehoused in 82,000-sq-ft building providing a new destination for Black art in New York City

Call it the second Harlem renaissance. On Manhattan’s 125th Street, where a statue of Adam Clayton Powell Jr strides onwards and upwards, and a sign marks the spot where a freed Nelson Mandela dropped by, there is bustle and buzz.

The celebrated Apollo Theater is in the midst of a major renovation. The National Black Theatre is preparing to move into a $80m arts complex spanning a city block. In September the National Urban League opened a $250m building containing its headquarters, affordable housing and retail space with New York’s first civil rights museum to come.

Published: November 11, 2025, 10:03 am

‘I can see a world where Spotify doesn’t exist’: will a new generation of music streaming companies succeed?

Nimble, open-minded outfits such as Nina Protocol, Cantilever and Subvert are looking to bring more money to artists, and a richer experience for listeners

The noise around Spotify this year has been louder than ever, from Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine – a biting indictment of the company and its alleged practices, described as “error-riddled theories” by Spotify itself – to a slew of indie artists leaving the platform due to political and ethical reasons. There was even a recent music forum in California called Death to Spotify.

So the timing is fortuitous for a growing number of independent streaming and music community platforms, such as Nina Protocol, Coda, Subvert, Lissen, Vocana, and just last week a new one launched in the UK: Cantilever. “More people are definitely looking for alternatives,” says Nina Protocol’s chief executive Mike Pollard. “We strongly believe the future of music is independent.”

Published: November 11, 2025, 11:20 am

Old is M Night Shyamalan at his best: ambitious, abrasive and surprisingly poignant

After a string of duds, Shyamalan returned to studio filmmaking with this 2021 thriller probing ageing and sickness – via the beach that makes you old

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In August 2002, Newsweek boldly anointed the sternly faced man pictured on the front cover of its splashy summer issue as “The Next Spielberg”. While some might have called this an unfair comparison to one of cinema’s most legendary figures, for a then 31-year-old M Night Shyamalan, it was a childhood dream come true. The Indian-born, Pennsylvanian-raised film-maker had whetted his cinematic appetite on the images of Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and for better or worse, would find himself chasing that same level of stratospheric fame in the early days of his career.

Despite the initial acclaim of The Sixth Sense, though, Shyamalan’s reputation and audience goodwill would soon begin to nosedive as his idiosyncratic directing style increasingly rubbed against the grander ambitions of his movies. But after a temporary exodus from Hollywood and a retreat to his roots in independent cinema, Shyamalan finally returned to studio film-making in 2021 with the release of Old: a masterful high-concept thriller that rekindled the director’s longtime fascination with family, parenting and the mystifying possibility of the unknown.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:00 pm

Under the Stars review – picturesque Italian setting is backdrop for AI prompt of a romcom

The tale of two strangers finding love ticks all the right boxes – including big-name support in Toni Collette and Andy Garcia – yet feels clunky and unconvincing

Anyone who thinks it’s easy to make a romcom should take a look at this. It has all the ingredients: good-looking leads (Alex Pettyfer, Eva De Dominici), picturesque locations (the film is mainly set in Puglia, and benefits from funding from the region), lightly comic music underlining the scenes, charismatic veterans in supporting roles (“with Toni Collette … and Andy Garcia”), transparently engineered third-act jeopardy, and so on and so forth. But like a failed soufflé on Bake Off, it never rises to the necessary level.

Pettyfer plays the hero, a romance novelist named Ian. (Yes, Ian. The sitcom Peep Show made great capital out of the ludicrousness of naming a baby Ian in the 21st century. Without wishing to do down the name, it’s an odd choice and speaks to a wider tone-deafness in the script.) In fact the plotline for Under the Stars is the inverse of, say, a great Richard Curtis one, in which implausible scenarios feel wholly realistic: there’s nothing particularly impossible about Under the Stars, and yet it all feels clunkily unlikely.

Published: November 11, 2025, 11:00 am

Unlicensed review – boxing meets dodgy City trader in tale of prizefighting redemption

Mark Hampton wrote, directed and stars in this drama, but his easy onscreen charisma can’t overcome a shaky, soap opera-style plot

Financial traders in the movies are usually hubris personified, while boxers are a sure-fire vehicle for an underdog story. Writing, and playing, the role of reformed city fraudster turned pugilist Danny Goode, as well as directing the low-budget British drama that results, Mark Hampton sets up a potentially fertile collision of these two opposed elements. But cornering himself into an ultra-earnest tale of redemption, he lets his film absorb a few too many cheap cliche shots.

Danny is released after a three-year stretch for cooking the books; and, as a former high-rolling member of a late-night/early-morning gambling crew called the Breakfast Club, he now must accept diminished circumstances. This means a poky rental flat and, after his licence to trade is revoked, a restaurant job washing dishes arranged by an old friend, Jon (Mark Tunstall). His ex-wife, Chloe (Sarah Diamond), has the divorce papers ready to go, but Danny is keen to build bridges with his son, Ben (Artie Wong). He promises the kid a swanky holiday, so one more high-risk play is his only means of coming good: entering a £10,000 prize fight organised by local hardman Billy (Gary Davidson Jnr), who trains at Jon’s gym.

Published: November 11, 2025, 9:00 am

The Secret Santa Project review – festive romcom tries for the Love Actually style multiple story strands

Set in a London council office, this clunky Christmas comedy interweaves a handful of storylines but musters only a brief flicker of cosy charm

Feelgood Christmas romcoms are like school nativity plays: you can forgive a lot in return for a toasty warm festive glow. The Secret Santa Project, based on a book by Tracy Bloom and set in a London council’s accounting department, manages a brief flicker of cosy charm in places but in truth it’s bit of a Christmas clunker.

Like Richard Curtis’s Love Actually this is a film with a handful of interwoven storylines. Samantha Giles plays Diane, the grinchy head of accounts who in the tradition of London romcoms walks to work over Westminster bridge past Big Ben; she would love to see Christmas cancelled and save the council a few pounds. Her husband Leon (Mark Williams) is a panto director, and Diane suspects he’s got a thing going on with Snow White. This plot line is not a million miles from Emma Thompson’s in Love Actually, but it bungles along to a clumsy resolution lacking the poignancy of Thompson slipping off to the bedroom for a cry on Christmas Day.

Published: November 11, 2025, 7:00 am

Charli xcx: House ft John Cale review – haunt me, then! An elegant, brutal taste of the Wuthering Heights OST

(Atlantic)
Featuring a lugubrious monologue from the Velvet Underground legend, its jagged strings are more reminiscent of that band than anything on Brat

When Charli xcx says her first new material in more than a year is “something entirely new, entirely opposite” to the sound she pursued on the era-defining Brat, she isn’t joking. Taken from the soundtrack to director Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the darkly gothic House bears almost no relation in sound or mood to the contents of Brat: it was, she says, inspired by John Cale’s description of the sound of his old mob the Velvet Underground as “elegant and brutal”.

Always skilled and generous at collaboration, here Charli xcx cedes two-thirds of the track’s vocal to Cale. He delivers a monologue – oblique and initially conversational, it turns increasingly ominous – in a voice that’s rich, sonorous and, to a certain kind of music fan at least, immediate recognisable. Weathered by time at age 83, it’s still audibly the same voice that recounted Lou Reed’s grisly short story The Gift on White Light/White Heat 57 years ago.

Published: November 11, 2025, 11:22 am

Michelle Obama dishes the secrets behind her most famous outfits: best podcasts of the week

The former First Lady hosts an absorbing new show about her fashion evolution. Plus, Katy Davis explores ‘waiting’ – whether it’s for a bus or an imprisoned lover

Published: November 10, 2025, 7:00 am

‘We never had much fun – we were angry’: Eve Libertine on life with anarcho-punk pioneers Crass

Accused of obscenity and sued by police and Tory MPs, Libertine outraged the establishment as part of Crass. Now she’s back – and she hasn’t mellowed with age

‘Things haven’t changed,” sighs Eve Libertine as she contemplates her new album. “All those songs are as relevant as they ever were.” The album in question, Live at the Horse Hospital, shows no sign that one of punk’s most anti-establishment figures is mellowing with age. Recorded at one blistering London live show in April 2024, Libertine collaborated with Chilean guitarist Eva Leblanc, reimagining tracks from Libertine’s back catalogue including ones from her time singing with 1970s anarcho-punk pioneers Crass. Produced by Crass founder Penny Rimbaud, it treads a path between performance art, experimental music and earth ritual; with her strident operatic tones, Libertine sounds like a soothsayer foretelling an apocalypse. It’s not an easy listen, but that was never the case with Crass, either.

“We never had much fun, to be honest,” Libertine says. “It was really heavy going at times. We were angry; we were trying to say things in a way that was confrontational and shocking to get a reaction. And we definitely did.”

Published: November 10, 2025, 8:00 am

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson review – freewheeling reflections on life, art and AI

One Thousand and One Nights is the framing device for the author’s pithy and thought provoking takes on everything from eugenics to trouser suits

In the framing device that opens the Middle Eastern folk tales collected in One Thousand and One Nights, King Shahryar avenges his wife’s infidelity by ordering her execution and marrying a new virgin every night, having each of them beheaded by sunrise so they won’t have time to cheat. When he runs out of victims, the young Persian queen Shahrazad volunteers but stalls her own murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another – and those become the stories we’re reading.

As Jeanette Winterson puts it in her new book – a dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the Nights – Shahrazad’s feat of creativity “refuses the present emergency – the contrived drama of a powerful man”. The echo of life in the Trump era is deliberate; for Winterson, the means by which Shahrazad changes her predicament holds out hope for a progressive politics currently losing ground to “radical-rightwing thuggery”. “A better story starts with a better story,” she writes. “Reason will not win the day. Without imagination nothing changes.”

Published: November 11, 2025, 9:00 am

Vaim by Jon Fosse review – the Nobel laureate performs a strange miracle

In the Norwegian master’s latest example of ‘mystical realism’, one man makes a dreamlike, hypnotic voyage through life

“I have always known that writing can save lives,” said the Norwegian author Jon Fosse in his speech accepting the 2023 Nobel prize in literature. “And if my writing also can help to save the lives of others, nothing would make me happier.” Rare is the novelist who talks in such language these days: fiction tends to know its modest place. Fosse, who is also a poet and an essayist, and one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, follows his own path. A case in point: Septology (2019-2021), published across three volumes, running to more than 800 pages, containing a single sentence. Forget formalism, though; his fictions, often set in fjordic Norway, are disintegration loops, quiet and incantatory, emotionally overwhelming.

At fewer than 120 pages, Vaim, his first new work since winning the Nobel, is a wisp of a thing. Divided into three sections, each narrated by a different character, it begins with Jatgeir sailing on a small boat from the small town of Vaim to the big city of Bjørgvin. His mission is to buy a needle and thread to fix a missing button. It’s a long journey and, not just at one shop but at two, he gets royally ripped off, being charged far over the odds for a single spool. He huffs and seethes, but says nothing to the storekeepers themselves. What a hick, we might think. What a chump.

Published: November 11, 2025, 7:00 am

The risky strategy of Booker winner Flesh pays off | Justine Jordan

The protagonist’s inner life is hidden from the reader in this highly original novel

• David Szalay wins 2025 Booker prize for ‘dark’ Flesh

Reflecting on the Booker judging process, chair Roddy Doyle stressed the “singularity” of Flesh, the most unusual novel on the shortlist. In his sixth book, Hungarian-British writer David Szalay takes a classic story arc – one man’s journey through life, from childhood to old age – and presents it in a radically new and challenging way, scooping out the interiority that usually powers the novel form.

We meet his protagonist, István, as a bored 15-year-old in a Hungarian backwater. He is seduced by a middle-aged neighbour into a relationship suffused with shame and disgust; a confused act of violence knocks his life off course; he joins the military and is stationed in Kuwait; he moves to London and works as a bouncer before the rising tides of global capital carry him, for a while, into the monied elite. And all the while, we are cut off from his thoughts, emotions and motivations: we see only how others react to him, desire him, fear him. The most we tend to hear from István himself is a bland, noncommittal “OK”.

Flesh by David Szalay (Vintage Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy for £16.14 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Published: November 10, 2025, 10:00 pm

David Szalay wins 2025 Booker prize for ‘dark’ Flesh

The judges ‘had never read anything quite like it’, says panel chair Roddy Doyle, announcing the Hungarian-British author’s novel as the winner of the £50,000 award

• Justine Jordan: The risky strategy of Booker winner Flesh pays off

Hungarian-British author David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker prize for his novel Flesh.

Szalay’s sixth work of fiction traces the life of one man, István, from his youth to midlife. The judges “had never read anything quite like it”, said panel chair Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993. “It is, in many ways, a dark book, but it is a joy to read.”

Published: November 10, 2025, 10:00 pm

‘We were effectively props’: young stars of game development feel let down by the ‘gaming Oscars’

Announced in 2020 by the Game Awards as an inclusive programme for the industry’s next generation, the Future Class initiative has now been discontinued. Inductees describe clashes with organisers and a lack of support from the beginning

Video games have long struggled with diversification and inclusivity, so it was no surprise when the Game Awards host and producer Geoff Keighley announced the Future Class programme in 2020. Its purpose was to highlight a cohort of individuals working in video games as the “bright, bold and inclusive future” of the industry.

Considering the widespread reach of the annual Keighley-led show, which saw an estimated 154m livestreams last year, Future Class felt like a genuine effort. Inductees were invited to attend the illustrious December ceremony, billed as “gaming’s Oscars”, featured on the official Game Awards website, and promised networking opportunities and career advancement advice. However, the programme reportedly struggled from the start. Over the last couple of years, support waned. Now, it appears the Game Awards Future Class has been wholly abandoned.

Published: November 11, 2025, 12:30 pm

‘Hermann Göring loved his kids. That’s what’s terrifying’: James Vanderbilt, Rami Malek and Michael Shannon on Nuremberg

Russell Crowe has a malevolent charm as the Nazi on trial in a compelling new film. His co-stars and director explain how they understood this monster – and the persistence of evil today

Among the Nazis who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring. Less widely known, though, is the involvement of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spent more than 80 hours interviewing and assessing Göring and 21 other Nazi officials prior to the trials. As described in Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Kelley was charmed by Göring but also haunted by his own conclusion that the Nazis’ atrocities were not specific to that time and place or to those people: they could in fact happen anywhere. He was ultimately destroyed by this discovery, and what he saw as the world’s reluctance to heed it.

The writer-director James Vanderbilt, whose script for David Fincher’s enigmatic serial-killer drama Zodiac similarly explored the real-life case of a professional being corroded by his pursuit of truth, has used The Nazi and the Psychiatrist as the basis of his new film, Nuremberg. Russell Crowe plays the preening, charismatic Göring, Rami Malek plays Kelley, and Michael Shannon is Robert Jackson, the American supreme court justice who was not only instrumental in mounting the trials but went head-to-head with Göring in court.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:00 am

Jilly Cooper died of head injury suffered in fall at home, inquest hears

Coroner reaches conclusion of accidental death and says author died as a result of a traumatic subdural haematoma

The author Jilly Cooper suffered a fatal head injury during a fall at her Gloucestershire home, an inquest has heard.

Cooper, 88, whose 18 novels include Riders and Rivals, was found by family at her home in Bisley at about 5pm on 4 October.

Published: November 11, 2025, 2:01 pm

‘So weird and so awkward’: Florence Pugh says intimacy coordinator is ‘a job that’s still figuring itself out’

Pugh says she also has worked with ‘fantastic’ people who helped her ‘find the story’ of sex scenes

Florence Pugh has had both positive and negative experiences with intimacy coordinators, saying some were “fantastic” and “effective”, while others were “shit” and “weird”.

Pugh was speaking on the Louis Theroux Podcast and was asked by Theroux what she felt about their role.

Published: November 11, 2025, 12:24 pm

Beatles, Bowie, Dylan, Mercury and more: rock’n’roll royalty – in pictures

Music photographer Barrie Wentzell shot the world’s biggest stars between 1965 and 1975. He talks us through some of his favourite moments

Published: November 11, 2025, 7:00 am

‘Fashion exposes people’s desires and anxieties’: how much do we really reveal when we get dressed?

A new exhibition – with contributions from Chanel, McQueen and Galliano – places 100 looks under the psychoanalytic lens, and suggests that what we wear is the result of a battle in the psyche

When you picked out an outfit this morning, did it feel like free will? Was it a series of deliberate choices that made it desirable to venture out into the world wearing said garment? Or was your decision a response to deeper subconscious forces? What if the choices we make about clothes are not our own conscious choices to make?

That’s the premise of a new exhibition in New York. Dress, Dreams and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis, at the Fashion Institute of Technology, that makes the case that clothes are the “deep surface”, the “changeable, renewable second skin”, that outside the merely practical act as a facade for far more than we know.

Published: November 11, 2025, 1:25 pm

The perplexing rise of protein shakes: how a ‘meaty sludge’ became a billion-dollar industry

In 1865, the first ever protein-based product consisted of ‘melted-down beef hides and carcasses’. Now, there are countless shakes on the market – including one by a Michelin-starred chef. Why is everyone drinking them?

I always thought my first foray into Michelin-starred culinary territory would involve sitting in a fancy restaurant feasting on some perfectly seared scallops or a magnificent rack of lamb doused in a rich jus. Instead, I’m in a fitness studio – with Doja Cat blaring through the speakers – watching my “Michelin-starred” shake come together in a blender. Inside is a scoop of vanilla protein powder, the flesh of a guanabana (a tropical fruit with a spiky exterior that tastes like a cross between a mango and a banana) and some almond milk. Saffron foam is sprayed into a plastic cup and sprinkled with some blue spirulina before the pale protein mixture is poured on top.

The resulting shake, which was developed by the Michelin-starred chef Miller Prada for Hermosa, a luxury protein powder brand sold in Barry’s, a chain of fitness studios, is like a drinkable lava lamp, with white, blue and yellow swirling softly in the cup. According to Erika Tamayo, the founder of Hermosa, it has only one comparison. “Everyone says that it looks like Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night,” she says. Before I’m allowed to taste it, she spritzes a coffee-scented liquid on the lid and then tells me how to drink it to get the “full Michelin experience”. Place the straw about midway in the cup and suck (it should taste like an ice-cream), before shoving it down full-throttle to get a hit of the “mood-enhancing” saffron.

Published: November 11, 2025, 10:00 am

Want long, luscious hair? Experts offer their hair growth tips

Influencers tend to give hair care advice based on vibes. We asked medical professionals

Trying to grow your hair? If so, here’s what social media suggests: shampoo daily; don’t shampoo daily; avoid sulfates; embrace sulfates; use protein treatments; absolutely don’t use protein treatments; trim your hair regularly, but not too regularly.

Is that helpful?

Published: November 10, 2025, 5:00 pm

The 10 best toaster ovens in the US – tested and reviewed

A new breed of toaster ovens can air fry, bake, roast, broil and more – all in a compact box that will fit in almost any kitchen

• Five chefs share the kitchen appliances they can’t live without

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

Toaster ovens have always been extremely versatile appliances, but the newest models take it to another level. A modern toaster oven can do away with your dehydrator, air fryer, microwave and even your traditional gas oven. They heat up faster than ovens, cook your food faster, and use less electricity. Many of the toaster ovens in this guide are even capacious enough for families of four, and can roast a whole chicken.

They are also consistently excellent appliances. I tested 10 different models for this guide, and they generally produced such good results that you really can’t go wrong. But with so many sizes, features and price points, it can still be challenging to find the right fit for you and your kitchen. Fortunately, we found great models for every size and preference.

Best overall:
Breville Joule Smart Countertop Oven Air Fryer

Best budget:
Cuisinart AirFryer Toaster Oven with Grill

Published: November 10, 2025, 8:15 pm

‘I opened up like a giant elevator’: the seven sly, savage stages of a £100,000 romance scam

Last year, romance fraud rose 52% for over-55s in the UK. Victims often feel they’ve made a terrible mistake and are at fault – but really, they’ve been expertly groomed by criminals

In total, over two and a half years, Elizabeth gave £100,000 to “Sam”, the “man” she met online, who she thought she loved and loved her back. She emptied her savings account, pawned her late mother’s jewellery and took out bank loans. She became so overdrawn that she could barely afford food and lived mainly on soup.

She had sent this money, for all sorts of reasons, to a man she’d never met. The first was a $500 Amazon voucher because Sam, a consultant, was out on an oil rig and needed to buy a manual. Later, the rig required a new part; then the tanker transporting the oil ran into problems, too. She gave money to Sam’s daughter who was trapped in an abusive marriage. Finally, when Sam became ill, Elizabeth was contacted by his doctor and began paying Sam’s medical bills. “When this doctor messaged to tell me that Sam was in a coma, I remember thinking he had such a strange, unprofessional turn of phrase,” says Elizabeth. “He said, ‘I’m sorry to spill the beans.’” She breaks into laughter. “A doctor! How could I have been so gullible?”

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:00 am

‘It shows such a laziness’: why I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT

It’s the ultimate ick: trying to form a deep, lasting connection with a person who outsources original thought

It was a setting fit for a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, in a rustic-chic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if to tell me a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled tightly as this man described using generative AI for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I responded politely. Inside, however, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Published: November 10, 2025, 12:00 pm

Is it true that … the harder you work out, the more you sweat?

Sweat levels can be misleading, and factors such as age, sex, humidity and even your clothes all make a difference

It seems like common sense: if you leave a fitness class looking as though you’ve just ridden a log flume, you’ve probably worked harder than if you’re barely glistening. But that’s not always the case, says Adam Collins, a researcher from the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise and Metabolism at the University of Bath.

Sweating, he says, is part of the thermoregulation process. When your body temperature rises, it signals to your brain to sweat in order to cool you down. As the sweat evaporates, it helps regulate your core temperature.

Published: November 10, 2025, 8:00 am

‘It makes you feel glam’: shaggy, Studio 54-style coats are partying again

Once worn by the likes of Jerry Hall and Bianca Jagger, furry jackets offer a ‘one and done’ look based on a single piece

The New York nightclub Studio 54 closed its doors almost 40 years ago, but it continues to influence how we dress.

This time around it is not Cher’s sheer bodysuit but the fuzzy coats and the furry stoles worn by the likes of Jerry Hall and Bianca Jagger as well as the hopefuls who queued outside for hours pleading for permission to cross the club’s velvet ropes.

Published: November 10, 2025, 6:00 am

Houseplant hacks: do humidifiers really help houseplants?

Electric humidifiers aren’t essential for hardy species, but they deliver a steady mist and consistent results – at a price

The problem
Winter is brutal for tropical houseplants. Central heating turns living rooms into deserts, leaving once lush calatheas with brown, crispy edges. Misting can increase humidity, but the effects are short-lived.

The hack
An electric humidifier delivers a steady mist to boost humidity around your plants. You simply fill the tank with water and let it run for a few hours a day, so humidity levels feel more like the tropics than Trafford.

Published: November 11, 2025, 10:00 am

From the Andes to the Amazon: a six-week riverboat adventure to Belém, Brazil’s gateway to the river

Visiting the city hosting the Cop30 conference brings with it questions about farming, tourism and sustainability

In an open-air market in the Brazilian city of Belém, I had a problem. It was breakfast time and I wanted a drink, but the long menu of fruit juices was baffling. Apart from pineapple (abacaxi) and mango (manga), I’d never heard of any of the drinks. What are bacuri, buriti and muruci? And what about mangaba, tucumã and uxi? Even my phone was confused. Uxi, it informed me, is a Zulu word meaning “you are”.

But then I started to recognise names that I’d heard on my six-week voyage from the Andes to the mouth of the Amazon. There was cupuaçu. I’d picked one of those cacao-like pods in a Colombian village about 1,900 miles (3,000km) back upriver. And even further away, in Peru, there was açaí: a purple berry growing high up on a wild palm. The Amazon, it seems, is vast and varied, but also remarkably similar along its astonishing length.

Published: November 11, 2025, 7:00 am

Same sheet, different dish: how to use up excess lasagne sheets

Smash them up and put them in soup or serve with pasta sauce, says our overstocked panel of pasta pundits

• Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

I’ve accidentally bought too many boxes of dried lasagne sheets. How can I use them up?
Jemma, by email
This is sounding all too familiar to Jordon Ezra King, the man behind the A Curious Cook newsletter. “It’s funny Jemma asks this,” he says, “because I was in this exact same situation earlier this year after over-catering for a client dinner.” The first thing to say is there’s no immediate rush, he adds: “It sounds obvious, but you can keep the boxes for a long time.” Fortunately for Jemma and her shopping mishap, however, lasagne sheets are also flexible, and their shape doesn’t have to dictate what you do with them.

With this in mind, soupy things are good to get on the weekly dinner rotation, be that pasta e ceci or minestrone, the latter being the go-to of choice for Mattie Taiano, chef and co-owner with Ravneet Gill of Gina’s in Chingford, Essex: “Just bash up the lasagne sheets with a rolling pin and chuck in all the bits.” Theo Randall, chef-patron of Cucina Italiana at the InterContinental London Park Lane, meanwhile, would break the pasta lengthways and cook it in boiling salted water: “Add that to a ragu-like sauce with some of the pasta cooking water and a generous knob of butter. Just make sure you cook the pasta and sauce together for at least three minutes, so they combine in texture and flavour.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Published: November 11, 2025, 1:00 pm

The one change that worked: I was burned out and stressed – then I found a steamy solution

After a bereavement and world events left me struggling to cope, I tried meditation, yoga and therapy. But it was my local sauna that helped me find peace and purpose

Earlier this year, I was approaching burnout. I felt as though my career as a freelance journalist was on permanent life-support, I was juggling a hectic family life, and I was consumed with worry about a world seemingly hellbent on self-destruction. I was struggling, too, with the death of a close family member and an old school friend. Grieving had become a default status. Despite support from family and loved ones, I needed to find a way to cope with this nearly overwhelming sense of loss.

I tried meditation, yoga and therapy, which all helped. Then I heard of Community Sauna Baths, a not-for-profit project in London designed to make saunas accessible and affordable for everyone. From my very first visit, I felt something change. A sense of peace came over me. It immediately felt like a sanctuary, a pocket of calm in the chaotic city that also allowed me to soothe this churning sadness and release some of the bottled-up angst.

Published: November 10, 2025, 11:00 am

Love Immortal: the man devoted to defying death through cryonics – documentary

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

Published: November 11, 2025, 10:33 am

Next day delivery, no weapons allowed: the unstoppable postal service keeping Ukraine going

Nova Poshta connects frontline cities to the capital, and to millions of refugees across Europe, delivering everything from home comforts to house moving boxes, even under fire

In a post office 10 miles (15km) from Ukraine’s frontline, in a suburb of the eastern city of Kharkiv, business is brisk on a chilly autumn morning – despite the ballistic missiles that had shaken the city at midnight, lighting up the sky with a false dawn of flames.

The customer area is fitted out with phone-charging stations “and a small co-working space, which people can use during blackouts, since we have generators”, says the branch manager, 30-year-old Yaroslav Dobronos. There is also a changing room, in which a young woman is trying on, with a critical gaze, a new pair of jeans, before repacking them and sending them straight back.

Nova Poshta logistics hub in Kyiv, where packages are moved through a complex set of scanners and chutes before being loaded on to lorries for the journey to their destinations

Published: November 11, 2025, 9:00 am

When I met Craig he was 13 and homeless. I still thought his life might turn around. I was tragically wrong

I knew he was running away from something. It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered the truth

Craig was a runaway when I first met him. Missing from a local children’s home, he spent his days hanging out in Nottingham city centre. He had just turned 13 and he was tall for his age, easily recognisable with his blond hair, but he seemed invisible to the authorities.

No one was looking for him or the other dozen children who congregated on the market square. Most of them had absconded from care, some were dodging school. A few, like Craig’s mate Mikey, just didn’t bother going home. The youngest runaway, Mark, claimed he’d been missing from foster care for months and had spent his 12th birthday on the run. They were glad to have found each other and for a week or so they slept together in an alleyway. Craig organised bedding. He had picked up some tips from the experienced rough sleepers, he told me, as he collected cardboard he’d stored behind a bin. “Keeps the cold off your bones,” he said, without confidence. That was his first taste of being homeless.

Published: November 11, 2025, 5:00 am

How could Zohran Mamdani pay for his bold agenda for New York? We broke it down

A look at the realities the mayor-elect will face to pay for his progressive policies – and whose support he needs

• Who is Zohran Mamdani, New York’s democratic socialist new mayor?

Bold promises to make the city more affordable propelled the New York City mayor-elect and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to his unlikely win on Tuesday. Among them: free buses, universal childcare and a massive expansion in low-cost housing.

But making the city more affordable for residents is an expensive government task, and many economists and politicians to Mamdani’s right say he faces too many obstacles to meaningfully deliver on his signature ideas.

Published: November 10, 2025, 1:00 pm

Carnival season in Germany and Armistice Day services: photos of the day – Tuesday

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

Published: November 11, 2025, 1:59 pm