Editor’s note: Part two in a three-part series in which Whig sports reporter Gare Joyce explores whether Kingston’s Bill Taugher, a member of the Kingston & District Sports Hall of Fame, did in fact play one game for the Montreal Canadiens. Read part one here.Read More
Poland’s Donald Tusk issues warning to European leaders before Brussels summit as Zelenskyy says no deal would pose ‘big problems for Ukraine’
Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz confirms his support for the EU’s reparations loan, saying he sees “no better option.”
He diplomatically acknowledges Belgium’s concerns, and says he hopes “we can address them together” to “send a signal of strength and resolve … towards Russia.”
Tourists trail by 158 after late Stokes and Archer stand
On a sweltering second day in the so-called city of churches, faith appeared to evaporate. Faith in technology, certainly, a sentiment shared by both sets of players. But for England there was a broader loss of belief in their attacking philosophy after having it systematically dismantled by Australia.
This could have been the day that England finally made a statement with the bat in this Ashes series. It was a 40c furnace out in the middle for the bowlers, the breeze akin to a hairdryer. And the pitch, bone dry, had none of the bounce that proved their undoing during those sorry defeats in Perth and Brisbane.
Heavily armed tactical operation officers intercepted two cars on a busy street with images showing suspects cable-tied on the side of the road
Police have detained seven men in connection with possible planned violence in Sydney’s south-west.
Tactical operations police had responded to “information received that a violent act was possibly being planned” on Thursday evening, a NSW Police spokesperson said.
England should not make wholesale changes to their playing group even if their expected Ashes defeat is confirmed, says former captain Michael Vaughan.
Social mobilityreport highlights ‘extreme regional differences’ in terms of childhood, jobs, innovation and growth
Former industrial communities across Britain are facing “entrenched disadvantages” stretching back decades, the latest social mobility research has said.
It raises specific concern about the rising number of young people aged 16-24 not in education, employment or training (Neets), which was one in seven between 2022 and 2024.
After Guardian writers picked their favourite lesser-known festive movies, readers shoutout Klaus, The Ref and more
I thought a real modern hidden gem is All Is Bright starring Paul Rudd and Paul Giamatti as two down-on-their-luck Christmas tree sellers. It’s perfectly played by both, with Rudd putting in, not his usual “puppy dog everyone wants to be your mate” role but a sarcastic turn, complementing Giamatti’s Christmas grinch. More a black comedy (by Hollywood standards), it’s an excellent film. Andyouwillknowme
What was the final resting place of the bronze age toxophilite? Which butterfly is named after the giant with 100 eyes? Who was shown carrying Bananaman’s 45th birthday cake? On your marks … set, go!
Editor’s note: the King William’s College quiz has appeared in the Guardian since 1951. The quiz is no longer sat formally; it is sent to the schoolchildren and their families to tackle over the Christmas holiday. So yes, you are allowed to Google – however, the questions are constructed to make that less than straightforward. Answers will appear on theguardian.com on 13 January 2025. Good luck!
General knowledge paper, 2025-2026, No 121, set for the pupils of King William’s College, Isle of Man
Oh, The Studio – how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Or at least allow me to gaze, rapt, from behind an ornamental palm tree as your vintage convertible hurtles towards yet another catastrophic Hollywood assignation.
The Emmy-winning creation of Seth Rogen and long-term writing partner Evan Goldberg, The Studio follows Matt Remick, an idealistic film executive who finds himself unexpectedly promoted to head of Continental Studios. “This could be my time!” he gasps, cock-a-hoop to find himself in charge of the company to which he has devoted the last 22 years of his life. He is, unfortunately, correct. “Film is my life,” he splutters during his tearfully grateful acceptance speech to CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston). Mill – an oleaginous sod with a spray tan the colour of a 70s ski lodge – smiles thinly. “At Continental, we don’t make films. We make movies. MOOOOVIEEEEES that people wanna PAY to see,” he explains, tightly, and Matt’s face proceeds to sink like a souffle. And it continues to sink over 10 exquisitely excruciating episodes, as his hopes for a new era of intelligent, auteur-helmed blockbusters are repeatedly marmalised by a system both frightened and angered by anything that can’t be deposited in a Swiss bank account.
Keir Starmer is planning for a new king’s speech after the crunch May elections as a reset moment for the government amid speculation over the prime minister’s future.
Senior sources in parliament said planning was under way to end the parliamentary session the week after local elections in England and parliamentary elections in Wales and Scotland in May, making it a significantly longer session than normal, and nearly two years since Labour first set out its legislative agenda.
Former top medic described as ‘Dr Death’ by prosecutors poisoned 30 people ranging in age from four to 89
A French anaesthetist described by prosecutors as “Dr Death” has been found guilty of intentionally poisoning 30 patients and killing 12 over almost a decade as a top medic.
Frédéric Péchier, 53, once seen by colleagues as a “star anaesthetist”, was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday after state prosecutors said he was “one of the biggest criminals in the history of the French legal system”.
The documentary-maker on new film 2000 Meters to Andriivka (the Guardian’s No 2 film of 2025), being on the Oscar circuit with 20 Days in Mariupol and filming on the frontline
Adrian Horton: I know you were showing your prior film, 20 Days in Mariupol, to western audiences when you began working on this film. What brought you back to the frontlines? Mstyslav Chernov: What brought me back was not speaking to the audiences, even, but just coming out of Mariupol, we were so devastated and so scarred by what happened. And then we went off to Bucha, where we saw more war crimes. And then I went to Kharkiv, my home town, which was bombed every day, just as Mariupol was. So even when we were starting to edit 20 Days in Mariupol, I was already looking for a story that would be, in a way, a response to that feeling I had, of devastation and helplessness. I kept seeing Ukraine as a victim of this brutal invasion, and I wanted to tell another story which would have an opposite direction – to show some sort of agency, some sort of strength and response to that violence, when Ukrainians push back.
AH: And that was when Mariupol was already out? What was that dissonance like for you – being on the Oscar circuit, then filming on the frontlines? MC: That was when the theatrical release started in July. It was the same time as Barbie and Oppenheimer, and it was the same time when we had dozens and dozens of Q&As for the wider public. It was when the first receptions and red carpets started. But of course, at the same time, the frontline was on fire. Ukraine was fighting this counteroffensive. And I would go from those places in the United States, in the UK, in Europe, these beautiful, peaceful cities, back to Ukraine – fly to the border, get a car, get a train, get another car, get in a trench. And in that trench, I would see a world that was so different. It would be like another planet, or 100 years backward in time. That collision of two worlds – I just tried to express it. I tried to comprehend it, how we live in a world where both war and peace and humanity and violence exist. And so 2000 Meters to Andriivka naturally became a film about distances, not just about the reality of war, not just about the humanity of people who are pinned down in those foxholes. But also about the distance between Europe and Ukraine, between Ukrainian society and people in the trenches. Hopefully that comes through.
The owner of Waterstones and Barnes & Noble is reportedly preparing to list the booksellers on the stock market.
Elliott Investment Management, the hedge fund that owns the most popular bookstores in the US and the UK, has spoken to potential advisers about an initial public offering (IPO), the Financial Times reported.
Letter from 39 backbenchers threatens rebellion over proposal to expedite court backlog in England and Wales
Keir Starmer is facing the threat of a backbench rebellion over plans to reduce the number of jury trials in England and Wales as dozens of Labour MPs signed a letter describing the move as “madness”.
The justice secretary, David Lammy, announced plans earlier this month that will take thousands of trials away from the jury system to be heard instead by judges and magistrates.
AI Security Institute report finds most common type of AI tech used was general purpose assistants such as ChatGPT and Amazon Alexa
A third of UK citizens have used artificial intelligence for emotional support, companionship or social interaction, according to the government’s AI security body.
The AI Security Institute (AISI) said nearly one in 10 people used systems like chatbots for emotional purposes on a weekly basis, and 4% daily.
The Scottish actor and presenter – who hosted the Bafta TV awards this year – will take over from David Tennant at the February ceremony
The Scottish actor and presenter Alan Cumming has been named as the new host of the Bafta film awards, taking over the reins from David Tennant.
Cumming, who hosted the Bafta TV awards earlier this year and captivated audiences worldwide as host of The Traitors US, will take the stage at the Royal Festival Hall for the ceremony on 22 February 2026.
Remarkably, most of the men connected to the convicted sex offender have barely experienced any fallout. That says as much as the scandal itself
A couple of weeks ago, the annual DealBook Summit got under way in New York. It’s a series of public talks billed as conversations with “the world’s most consequential people”, and is part of that circuit of live events in which the worst people on Earth gather on stage to address the second-worst people on Earth, their paying audience. Hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the conference was a characteristically starry affair, but in a lineup that included Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and “changemaker” Halle Berry, it was Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel and a former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, who really caught the eye.
My first thought about Barak’s appearance was: Larry Summers must be spitting. Summers, the former president of Harvard and another Epstein associate, was very much not on stage at the DealBook Summit, nor is he anywhere else in polite society right now. One can only imagine how bitter he must be feeling about the variance in fortunes of the men – and occasional woman – with known connections to Epstein. Of this list, two are dead (Marvin Minsky and Jean-Luc Brunel), one is in jail (Ghislaine Maxwell) and one has lost his house, his title and his invitation to the family Christmas (Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor). But for the rest of the prominent associates, email correspondents, birthday-card signatories, grant recipients and dinner companions of the late convicted paedophile – all of whom insist that, while in Epstein’s orbit, they remained in total ignorance as to the man’s true nature – the cancellation fairy’s aim has been predictably inconsistent and wide.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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.
England's batters have another day to forget as Australia dominate with the ball on day two of the third Ashes Test, with the tourists closing on 213-8, still 158 runs behind Australia's first innings total of 371, with the home side closing in on an Ashes series victory with two matches to spare.
TV’s greatest guilty pleasure is back – and it’s still a total hoot! Prepare to gorge yourself silly on it over the holidays along with the mince pies. You know you want to …
‘Turn off your brain and jump!” So says London geezer Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) to ex-girlfriend Emily’s best pal Mindy (Ashley Park), as they flirt their way through a racy dance scene. It could, of course, be an instruction to viewers of season five of Emily in Paris, too. Once pilloried for its Anglophile tendencies and surface-level commitment to la culture française, the fluffy dramedy about an American in Paris helmed by Lily Collins has – over the past five years – become one of TV’s greatest guilty pleasures: a fancy fever dream of great clothes, strapping love interests and a constant karaoke soundtrack courtesy of Park, a Broadway star whose contract clearly dictates that she sing at least five times per episode. The clothes are less outlandish this time around, but still aspirational – lending the show a strand of Sex and the City DNA (they also share a creator, Darren Star).
But, unlike SATC – whose spinoff And Just Like That devolved into a mindless mess – Emily in Paris is free of any baggage, and at liberty to be as silly as it fancies. Much of season five doesn’t even take place in Paris, as our leading lady continues to mix business and pleasure in Rome with cashmere heir Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini). “Ciao and ni hao!” says Mindy, who has rejected a job as a judge on Chinese Popstar (“I’d rather be judging people in real life than on TV”) and is now headed to Italy, just in time to help Emily and her crack marketing team with some #sponsoredcontent (read: singing inside a giant martini glass). Also in town is Alfie: cue an inadvisable fling between the two that instantly breaks all the rules of girl code.
Fifa has made big mistakes over 2026 tournament but it can afford to slash prices and even give some tickets away
Who is the World Cup for? Fifa appeared to share some of its thinking on this topic in the past week. On the one hand, there was the revelation that spectators are being asked to pay more than twice as much for match tickets than they were in Qatar. On the other, the news that prize money for competing teams is to rise by more than 50% on four years ago. Stakeholders are doing good! Fans? Not so good.
It hasn’t taken long for some of those watching to wonder whether things could be done differently. Tom Greatrex, the chair of the Football Supporters’ Association, which represents fans in England and Wales, argued that the ability to pay expanded prize money, itself a result of expanded revenue, showed “there is no need to charge extortionate ticket prices to the supporters who bring the vibrancy to the World Cup”. You could go so far as to say there was never a real need to do it in the first place.
Her post-punk trailblazers were a key influence on riot grrrl. Now, after decades working as a lawyer, she is taking the name – though, contentiously, not the rest of the band – back on the road. ‘I haven’t given the best of me yet’, she says
At the height of her music career in the early 1980s, Lesley Woods got accustomed to dealing with irate men. As the singer and guitarist of Au Pairs, the Birmingham post-punk four-piece, she recalls “guys being aggressive purely because you were a woman on stage”. At one show, the band were on the bill with UB40 and the Angelic Upstarts, only the latter didn’t turn up. “So the audience, who were 95% skinheads, were gobbing at us and throwing anything they could get their hands on – which included a bin.” Was she scared? “No, I was bolshie back then. I just went to the front of the stage and said: ‘You missed.’”
After the band split in 1983, Woods hoped her days of dealing with overt misogyny were behind her. But then she retrained and became a lawyer. “When I came to the bar [in the 1990s], women couldn’t even wear trousers. I used to get men saying: ‘What colour knickers are you wearing today, Lesley?’ It’s better now, but back then law was way worse than music in how it treated women.”
The racism, the predatory politics, the banality and cruelty: we struggle to make sense of it, but JG Ballard foretold everything we are living through now
An Englishman drives into a new town and can’t see the warning signs. Richard Pearson is visiting Surrey to close down his late father’s home and settle his affairs and, everywhere he looks, the flag of St George is flying “from suburban gardens and filling stations and branch post offices”. How nice, he thinks, how festive.
Soon he learns the truth.
So runs the opening not of a recent piece of journalism, but a novel by JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, which despite being almost 20 years old anticipates today’s Britain with eerie precision. In the mid-2000s, Pearson reads up on his new surroundings, only to find the same headlines that assail us in the mid-2020s: “Every day the local newspaper reported attacks on an asylum hotel, the torching of a Bangladeshi takeaway, injuries to a Kosovan youth thrown over the fence into an industrial estate.”
From floods to droughts, erratic weather patterns are affecting food security, with crop yields projected to fall if changes are not made
Experts have warned that the world’s ability to feed itself is under threat from the “chaos” of extreme weather caused by climate change.
Crop yields have increased enormously over the past few decades. But early warning signs have arrived as crop yield rates flatline, prompting warnings of efficiency hitting its limits and the impacts of climate change taking effect.
In the year leading up to March 2025, one in eight women in England and Wales had been a victim of domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking. Almost 200 rapes are recorded every day. And on average, three women are killed by men in the UK every single week. Just pause and consider that.
There has been plenty of tough talk on violence against women and girls over the past decade – but too little action. We will deploy the full power of the state in the largest crackdown on violence perpetrated against women and girls in British history. This violence is a national emergency. And as a dad to a daughter, it terrifies me. But as a dad to two sons, it drives home that we can’t keep doing things the same way.
David Lammy MP is the deputy prime minister, lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice
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.
From aerial footage of an Indian pilgrimage to portraits of Romanians in bear costumes, this year’s awards featured stunning images from the streets of 23 countries
With ancient standing stones and modern midwinter festivals, the West Penwith peninsula is a land of magic and mystery
The light is fading fast as I stand inside Tregeseal stone circle near St Just. The granite stones of the circle are luminous in this sombre landscape, like pale, inquisitive ghosts gathered round to see what we’re up to. Above us, a sea of withered bracken and gorse rises to Carn Kenidjack, the sinister rock outcrop that dominates the naked skyline. At night, this moor is said to be frequented by pixies and demons, and sometimes the devil himself rides out in search of lost souls.
Unbothered by any supernatural threat, we are gazing seawards, towards the smudges on the horizon that are the distant Isles of Scilly. The clouds crack open and a flood of golden light falls over the islands. My companion, archaeoastronomer Carolyn Kennett, and I gasp. It is marvellous natural theatre which may have been enjoyed by the people who built this circle 4,000 years ago.
This resurrected Danish novel about a man who is ‘frozen down’, awaking in an Orwellian dystopia two decades later, is inventive, funny and all too timely
In the Danish author’s uncannily prescient novel, first published in 1969, the year is 1973 and Bruno works as a fiction editor for a popular weekly magazine; his talent for generating story ideas makes him indispensable to his authors. Invited for dinner at the home of one of them, Bruno finds himself seated next to a woman named Jenny, a struggling ballet dancer with a gloomy aspect and no sense of humour. Bruno is drawn to her nonetheless, and finds himself inventing stories about her. The following day, he is admitted to hospital to undergo tests: a small lump on the side of his neck has raised some concerns. Bruno cannot help feeling the two events are somehow connected.
It comes as little surprise to Bruno when he learns he has cancer. The doctor in charge of his case, Josef Ackerman, offers a choice: he can either undergo the gruelling and fallible radiotherapy currently prescribed for his disease, or he can become a pioneer in a new, radically experimental treatment programme in which patients are “frozen down”, remaining in a state of suspended animation until such time as medical science has advanced sufficiently to offer a cure.
Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?
Welcome to the final Thursday news quiz of the year – a small festive tradition involving the news, a handful of jokes, and the knowledge that somewhere there are 1,057 pedants limbering up to find something to nitpick. And it is a bumper 20-question edition. Thank you for quizzing throughout the year, for your comments, corrections and good-natured quibbles, and most of all for the kind messages literally hundreds of you sent the quizmaster during the Great Thursday Quiz Hiatus of 2025™, when he was off sick. It really meant a lot. Allons-y!
The Thursday quiz will return in the new year and wishes you a Merry Christmas, a great festive holiday period and all the best for 2026. Sign up for First Edition to get a Thursday quiz-style quiz of the year in your inbox on Christmas Day.
The Olympic cyclist puts together an inspirational plan to raise funds for cancer sufferers. Plus: Monica Dolan reads Jane Austen. Here’s what to watch this evening
9pm, BBC One This inspiring film follows Chris Hoy as he formulates a constructive and defiant response to his terminal cancer diagnosis. Glasgow: the Tour de Four is a bike ride that smashed its fundraising target of £1m for charity and proves that a medical prognosis doesn’t need to be the end. Famous friends, including Andy Murray and Jason Kenny, are around to lend a hand. Phil Harrison
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