Officials say raccoon that broke into Virginia liquor store on 29 November had previously hit DMV and karate studio

The raccoon that barged into a Virginia liquor store, smashed bottles of booze and passed out drunk in a bathroom this past Black Friday has at least two other break-ins under his belt, a local government official has revealed.

Before burgling the Ashland ABC store on 29 November, the raccoon had separately broken into a karate studio and a department of motor vehicles office, all on the same block of businesses, Hanover county animal protection officer Samantha Martin said on an episode of the local government’s official podcast published Thursday.

By using music from SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo in ICE videos, the government is playing a game of rage-bait

Last week, as the Trump administration was engulfed in controversy over its illegal military strikes near Venezuela (among numerous other crises), a Department of Homeland Security employee – I picture the worst sniveling, self-satisfied, hateful loser – got to work on the official X account. The state-employed memelord posted a video depicting Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officials arresting people in what appeared to be Chicago, celebrating the humiliation and incarceration of undocumented immigrants as some sort of patriotic achievement. The vile video borrowed, as they often do, from mainstream pop culture; in this case, a viral lyric from Sabrina Carpenter’s song Juno – “Have you ever tried this one?,” referring to sex positions – overlaid clips of agents chasing, tackling and handcuffing people, cheekily nodding to all the methods in ICE’s terror toolbox.

Carpenter, as a pre-eminent pop star, was caught in an impossible position. Say nothing, as her friend and collaborator Taylor Swift did weeks earlier when the White House used her music in a Trump hype video, and risk appearing as if you condone the administration’s use of your art for a domestic terror campaign (the administration hasn’t yet used Swift for an ICE video, but I’m sure it’s coming); engage, even if to honestly express your utter disgust, and risk bringing more attention to objectionable propaganda designed to provoke a response.

Exclusive: A trio of candidates have been interviewed by the PM, but he could still decide to directly appoint someone else

Keir Starmer is poised to choose a new ambassador to Washington from a shortlist of three as relations with the US are tested over Ukraine and Donald Trump’s attacks on European leaders.

The prime minister held interviews with three finalists for the role this week, the Guardian has learned, with Downing Street preparing to make an appointment before the end of the year.

As Paramount, with close ties to the Trump administration, entered the bidding, experts predict any merger will ‘raise red flags’ among regulators

Over the first 10 months of his second presidency, Donald Trump has not hidden his desire to control the US media industry – from encouraging TV networks to fire journalists, comedians and critics he dislikes to pushing regulators to revoke broadcast licences. Now he seems determined to set the terms for one of the biggest media deals in history.

It’s a deal that could have repercussions not just in the US, but across the world, with not just the future of Hollywood at stake but also the landscape of news.

National Trust looks to halt construction, claiming Trump tore down historic East Wing without needed permission

Donald Trump is facing a federal lawsuit seeking to halt construction on his $300m White House ballroom, with historic preservationists accusing the president of violating multiple federal laws by tearing down part of the iconic building without required reviews or congressional approval.

The legal challenge, filed on Friday by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the US district court for the District of Columbia, represents the most significant attempt yet to stop Trump’s 90,000-sq-ft addition to the White House complex. The organization is seeking a temporary restraining order to freeze all construction activities until proper federal oversight procedures are completed.

Several European nations are already planning similar moves while Britain has said ‘nothing is off the table’

Australia is taking on powerful tech companies with its under-16 social media ban, but will the rest of the world follow? The country’s enactment of the policy is being watched closely by politicians, safety campaigners and parents. A number of other countries are not far behind, with Europe in particular hoping to replicate Australia, while the UK is keeping more of a watchful interest.

California jury finds company knew its talc-based products were dangerous but failed to warn consumers

A California jury on Friday awarded $40m to two women who said Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder was to blame for their ovarian cancer.

The jury in Los Angeles superior court awarded $18m to Monica Kent and $22m to Deborah Schultz and her husband after finding that Johnson & Johnson knew for years its talc-based products were dangerous but failed to warn consumers.

Blaine McGraw accused of inappropriately touching and secretly filming patients during appointments on base

Another 81 women have joined a civil suit against a US army gynecologist who was recently criminally charged in connection with accusations that he secretly filmed dozens of his patients during medical examinations.

The civil lawsuit, which initially began in November, alleges that Blaine McGraw, a doctor and army major at Fort Hood in Texas, repeatedly inappropriately touched and secretly filmed dozens of women during appointments at an on-base medical center.

Ex-Fed governor Kevin Warsh is at top of his list to succeed Powell as central bank’s chair, president says in interview

Donald Trump declared he “should be listened to” by the Federal Reserve, as he weighs candidates to lead the central bank amid an extraordinary campaign by the White House to exert greater control over its decisions.

The US president said on Friday that former Fed governor Kevin Warsh is currently top of his list to chair the central bank.

Repeated fall storms led to the temporary lake, known as Lake Manly, appearing in basin 282ft beneath sea level

After record-breaking rains, an ancient lake in Death Valley national park that had vanished has returned to view.

The temporary lake, known informally as Lake Manly, has appeared once more at the bottom of Badwater Basin, which sits 282ft beneath sea level, in California. The basin is the lowest point in North America, according to the National Park Service.

A year-long investigation into the Free Birth Society reveals how mothers lost children after being radicalised by uplifting podcast tales of births without midwives or doctors.

Lucy Hough talks to the investigative correspondent Lucy Osborne about her reporting.

The US is ramping up the pressure on Nicolás Maduro with a tanker seizure and expanded sanctions following threats and boat strikes

Early in his first term, Donald Trump mooted a “military option” for Venezuela to dislodge its president, Nicolás Maduro. Reports suggest that he eagerly discussed the prospect of an invasion behind closed doors. Advisers eventually talked him down. Instead, the US pursued a “maximum pressure” strategy of sanctions and threats.

But Mr Maduro is still in place. And Mr Trump’s attempts to remove him are ramping up again. The US has amassed its largest military presence in the Caribbean since the 1989 invasion of Panama. It has carried out more than 20 shocking strikes on alleged drug boats. Mr Trump reportedly delivered an ultimatum late last month, telling the Venezuelan leader that he could have safe passage from his country if he left immediately. There was already a $50m bounty on his head. This week came expanded sanctions and the seizure of a tanker.

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The US also listed as a threat due to its growing interest in Greenland, which is vital to America’s national security

Danish intelligence services have accused the US of using its economic power to “assert its will” and threatening military force against its allies.

The comments, made in its annual assessment released this week, mark the first time that the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) has listed the US as a threat to the country. Denmark, the report warns, is “facing more and more serious threats and security policy challenges than in many years”.

Europe must realise its superior economic and military potential has to be mobilised, writes Bill Jones, while Robin Wilson addresses Belgium’s resistance to seizing Russian assets

I wholly support the plea to Europe by Timothy Garton Ash (Only Europe can save Ukraine from Putin and Trump – but will it?, 6 December). One aspect he did not mention was the strategic nuclear balance. Since the late 1940s, responsibility for deterrence has always lain with the Pentagon and has succeeded in keeping the peace, though at times a very fragile version of it.

The recent US statement on defence makes it clear that Europe is no longer seen as a priority by the Trump administration, the danger now being that doubt is crucially being raised as to the credibility of Nato’s deterrent. Without certainty of a reaction in kind, Russia, under its ambitious and risk-taking president, might be tempted to chance its arm in what almost looks like a ceding of Europe by the US into a Russian “sphere of influence”.

Notable figures in batch of images include Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Woody Allen and Bill Gates

• The latest tranche of Epstein evidence – in pictures

House Democrats have published a new tranche of what they called “disturbing” photographs from the estate of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, featuring among others Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and the British former royal Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

The 19 photographs in the initial drop – some of which have been seen before – plus another 70 released later Friday afternoon represent a small number of the almost 100,000 images released to the House oversight committee, which is looking into the conduct and connections of Epstein, the disgraced financier who died by apparent suicide in a New York jail cell in 2019 after he was charged with sex-trafficking offenses.

In World Cup parlance, Qatar was Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s qualifier. Now it’s the big time for Trump’s dictator-curious protege

I used to think Fifa’s recent practice of holding the World Cup in autocracies was because it made it easier for world football’s governing body to do the things it loved: spend untold billions of other people’s money and siphon the profits without having to worry about boring little things like human rights or public opinion. Which, let’s face it, really piss around with your bottom line.

But for a while now, that view has seemed ridiculously naive, a bit like assuming Recep Erdoğan followed Vladimir Putin’s election-hollowing gameplan just because hey, he’s an interested guy who likes to read around a lot of subjects. So no: Fifa president Gianni Infantino hasn’t spent recent tournaments cosying up to authoritarians because it made his life easier. He’s done it to learn from the best. And his latest decree this week simply confirms Fifa is now a fully operational autocracy in the classic populace-rinsing style. Do just absorb yesterday’s news that the cheapest ticket for next year’s World Cup final in the US will cost £3,120 – seven times more than the cheapest ticket for the last World Cup final in Qatar. (Admittedly, still marginally cheaper than an off-peak single from London to Manchester.)

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

President spoke at Congressional ball after Senate rejected two competing proposals to address imminent expiration of Obamacare subsidies

US envoy John Coale held talks with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko during a visit to Minsk, a Telegram channel linked to the Belarusian presidential administration said.

Coale has been tasked by president Donald Trump with negotiating the release of political prisoners in Belarus. Trump has urged Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, to free up to 1,400 people that Trump has called “hostages”.

Special forces veteran Bryan Stern says he told US defence officials some of his planned route to reduce airstrike risk

The most dangerous moments came when salvation seemed finally assured.

Many miles from land, the small fishing skiff carrying the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel prize laureate María Corina Machado had been lost at sea for hours, tossed by strong winds and 10ft waves. A further hazard was the ever present risk of an inadvertent airstrike by US warplanes hunting alleged cocaine smugglers.

Exclusive: Congress members seek answers after Guardian revealed data to be shared for immigration enforcement

More than 20 members of Congress are demanding answers from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and homeland security officials after the Guardian revealed the VA is compiling a report on all non-US citizens “employed by or affiliated with” the government agency that will then be shared with other federal agencies, including immigration authorities.

The lawmakers, led by Illinois congresswoman Delia Ramirez – along with congressman Mark Takano of California and US senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the top Democrats on the House and Senate veterans affairs committees – have written a group letter to be sent to the VA secretary, Doug Collins, and the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, on Friday.

Co-founder of Singapore-based Terraform Labs given more jail time by US judge than prosecutors sought

Do Kwon, the entrepreneur behind two cryptocurrencies that lost $40bn (£29.8bn) three years ago and caused the sector to crash, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for fraud.

The South Korean, 34, had pleaded guilty to two counts of US charges of conspiracy to defraud and wire fraud.

Proposals to change US citizenship rules leaves dual citizens like me caught in the crossfire. If push comes to shove, I know where my loyalty lies

Taken star lends his voice to a film that questions the legitimacy of vaccines and includes interview with RFK Jr

Liam Neeson has lent his voice to a new documentary that questions the legitimacy of vaccines and praises Donald Trump’s health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The film, called Plague of Corruption, is narrated by the Taken actor and based on a bestselling book co-authored by Judy Mikovits, a disgraced former scientist who gained notoriety during the Covid pandemic. She claimed Covid was caused by a bad strain of the flu vaccine and urged people not to get vaccinated.

Utah judge weighs media access in prosecution of Tyler Robinson, 22, who is charged with aggravated murder

The 22-year-old Utah man charged with killing Charlie Kirk made his first in-person court appearance on Thursday as his attorneys push to further limit media access in the high-profile criminal case.

A Utah judge is weighing the public’s right to know details in the prosecution of Tyler Robinson against his attorneys’ concerns that the swarm of media attention could interfere with his right to a fair trial.

Yana Leonova faces multiple charges including fraud and conspiracy for smuggling US aviation parts to Russia

An ongoing FBI investigation into a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling US aviation parts and electronics to Russia is teetering on the brink of collapse after being caught in what one judge called a “Kafkaesque” case brought on by the Trump administration’s attempts to deport her before she faces trial.

Federal prosecutors had worked for over a year to secure the extradition of Yana Leonova, who faces multiple charges including fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. But their efforts unraveled when immigration officials abruptly issued an order to detain and deport her soon after she was flown into the US last month, a move that plunged the case into legal chaos.

Six more oil supertankers added to sanctions list, as well as members of Maduro’s extended family, amid rising tensions following tanker seizure

Donald Trump has exerted more pressure on Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, expanding sanctions and issuing fresh threats to strike land targets in Venezuela, as the South American dictator accused the US president of ushering in a new “era of criminal naval piracy” in the Caribbean.

Late on Thursday, the US imposed curbs on three nephews of Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, as well as six crude oil supertankers and the shipping companies linked to them. The treasury department alleged the vessels “engaged in deceptive and unsafe shipping practices and continue to provide financial resources that fuel Maduro’s corrupt narco-terrorist regime”.

It would be absurd to claim the UK has suddenly become a life-sciences leader thanks to the new pricing and tariffs pact

That’s gratitude, eh? It’s not even a fortnight since the government agreed to raise the prices the NHS pays for new medicines and here comes the boss of GSK, Britain’s second largest pharma firm, to extol the virtues of doing business in the US.

The US is “still the leading market in the world in terms of the launches of new drugs and vaccines”, said the chief executive, Emma Walmsley, in a BBC interview, explaining why GSK invests about three times as much over there as it does at home. Alongside China, the US is also “the best market in the world to do business development”.

US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s campaign against the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, whose government called the seizure an act of international piracy.

The Trump administration is facing increasing scrutiny over a series of attacks on boats off the Venezuelan coast. At least 87 people have been killed in 22 known strikes since early September. Lucy Hough talks to the Guardian’s deputy head of international news, Devika Bhat

Weaker-than-forecast quarterly data for Larry Ellison’s tech company shows slowdown in revenue growth and big rise in spending

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Oracle’s shares tumbled 15% on Thursday in response to the company’s quarterly financial results, disclosed the day before.

Roughly $80bn vanish from the value of the business software company co-founded by Donald Trump ally Larry Ellison, falling from $630bn (£470bn) to $550bn and fuelling fears of a bubble in artificial intelligence-related stocks. Shares in the chipmaker Nvidia, seen as a bellwether for the AI boom, fell after Oracle’s.

Ukrainian president says plan would not be fair without guarantees that Russia would not simply take over zone

The US wants Ukraine to withdraw its troops from the Donbas region, and Washington would then create a “free economic zone” in the parts Kyiv currently controls, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.

Previously, the US had suggested Kyiv should hand over the parts of Donbas it still controlled to Russia, but the Ukrainian president said on Thursday that Washington had now suggested a compromise version in which Ukrainian troops would withdraw, but Russian troops would not advance into the territory.

The Housemaid actor received backlash in September when she left a comment on Instagram after the rightwing activist was killed

The Housemaid star Amanda Seyfried has said she is “not fucking apologising” for describing Charlie Kirk as “hateful” after the latter was shot dead in September.

Seyfried was speaking to Who What Wear when she was asked about her social media activity, including the backlash around her Kirk comment. “I’m not fucking apologising for that. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I commented on one thing. I said something that was based on actual reality and actual footage and actual quotes. What I said was pretty damn factual, and I’m free to have an opinion, of course.”

Success doesn’t mean you can speak your mind – and criticizing Paul Dano is like kicking a bunny at a birthday party

There are many things Hollywood is known for: lavish parties, subtle (or not so subtle) plastic surgery, the concept of juice as a meal. What it is not traditionally known for is honesty. I live in Los Angeles, work in the entertainment industry when I’m not moonlighting as a semi-reputable journalist and have done my fair share of lying … or, more accurately, omitting the truth. One of the least pleasant experiences in town is being asked to give honest feedback to someone who is at best an acquaintance. It’s worse yet if that person is a friend, lover or family member who actually takes your opinion seriously. Overall, the notion of offering honesty to a peer is akin to rubbing poison oak on your privates.

And yet, despite knowing how gruesome this can be, I still solicit feedback on scripts, films and even nascent ideas I’m toying with. Naturally, I feel guilty doing it. I blubber about how gracious the person is for taking the time to engage with my creative output, how generous they are and how crucial this step is to any sort of actual success in the industry. I’m even lying when I say that to someone. I should tell them: “I’m sorry I just asked you to do the equivalent of punching several of your own teeth out for free. Please don’t destroy my self-esteem completely. Let my mother finish the job.”

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Agreement comes amid anxiety in Hollywood over impact of AI on the industry, expression and rights of creators

Walt Disney has announced a $1bn equity investment in OpenAI, enabling the AI startup’s Sora video generation tool to use its characters.

Users of Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that draw on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters as part of a three-year licensing agreement between OpenAI and the entertainment giant.

House of Commons calls on Keir Starmer to condemn Donald Trump’s ‘interference’ in European politics

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The US is engaging in “extreme rightwing tropes” with echoes of the 1930s and threatening “chilling” interference in European democracies, British MPs warned ministers on Thursday.

The House of Commons rounded on Donald Trump’s national security strategy, which stated that Europe was facing “civilisational erasure” and vowed to help the continent “correct its current trajectory and promote patriotic European parties”.

The president called immigrants such as Ilhan Omar ‘garbage’ – but this latest racist outburst may be another sign of weakness

Last week, as ICE agents descended on Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota’s Twin Cities, and members of migrant communities there retreated into hiding, Donald Trump unleashed a wave of bigotry against the area’s Somali population in a moment of vitriol that was shockingly racist even by his own very low standards. Rousing himself to animation at the tail end of a televised 2 December cabinet meeting during which he sometimes appeared to be struggling to stay awake, the president disparaged Somali immigrants, many of whom are refugees from the country’s long-running civil conflict, as ungrateful and unfit for residence in the United States.

“I don’t want ’em in our country,” Trump said of ethnic Somalis, about 80,000 of whom live in the Minneapolis area. “Their country’s no good for a reason.” The comments echoed recent posts from the president’s powerful adviser Stephen Miller, who has largely taken over immigration policy. Referring to what he called “the lie of mass migration” in a November 27 post on X, Miller cast doubt on the possibility of assimilation, and suggested that immigrants from troubled countries would contaminate America with a kind of genetic or ontological incapacity for democratic governance. “At scale, migrants and their descendants represent the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” Miller wrote.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

The president’s son-in-law is once again at the center of an international business deal that will require administration approval

On Monday, Paramount Skydance launched a $108bn takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, the entertainment giant that owns Hollywood movie studios, along with CNN, HBO and other media businesses. The bid is led by David Ellison, son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison – a prominent Donald Trump supporter and Republican donor. Netflix had already prevailed over Paramount in a previous bidding competition for the purchase, but Trump announced on Sunday that he would “be involved” in his administration’s review of the Netflix deal. The president suggested the sale “could be a problem” because Netflix is already dominant in the US streaming market.

Paramount left out a significant fact in the press release announcing its offer: the bid includes funding from the private equity firm owned by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, as well as three Arab monarchies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which collectively have billions of dollars in ongoing ventures involving the Trump family business. Those details were buried in required paperwork filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

US president says Europeans pushing for meeting as ‘Coalition of Willing’ due to hold call about war

In other news, we will also hear from Nobel peace prize winner María Corina Machado later today, as she arrived in Oslo overnight after a truly incredible trip from Venezuela.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the details of the operation to get her out of the country and over to Norway, describing how she “slipped through 10 military checkpoints to reach a fishing boat bound for Curaçao and a private jet headed to Norway,” where she met members of her family for the first time in almost two years.

Unfettered love for late photographer in France and elsewhere stands in contrast to occasional reservations in UK

The death of Martin Parr, the photographer whose work chronicled the rituals and customs of British life, was front-page news in France and his life and work were celebrated as far afield as the US and Japan.

If his native England had to shake off concerns about the role of class in Parr’s satirical gaze before it could fully embrace him, countries like France have long revered the Epsom-born artist “like a rock or a movie star”, said the curator Quentin Bajac.

More than £3bn that could have been used for UK patients will go to big pharma for its branded products – money for care siphoned off for profit

Of Arthur Scargill it was said that he began each day with two newspapers. The miners’ leader read the Morning Star of course, but only after consulting the Financial Times. Why did a class warrior from Yorkshire accord such importance to the house journal of pinstriped Londoners? Before imbibing views, he told a journalist, he wanted “to get the facts”.

In that spirit, let us parse a deal just struck by the governments of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer. You may not have heard much about this agreement on medicine, but it is huge in both financial and political significance – and Downing Street could not be more proud.

A “world-beating deal,” boasts the science minister, Patrick Vallance. It “paves the way for the UK to become a global hub for life sciences,” claims the business secretary, Peter Kyle, with the government press release adding: “Tens of thousands of NHS patients will benefit.”

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Every day he broadcasts a marathon Twitch stream, airing his views to his three million followers. It has led to fame – and some fear – in a country ever more politically divided

Hasan Piker calls it the bus driver test: “You get on a bus and you have 30 seconds to explain whatever online phenomena took place to the bus driver without them looking at you and going, ‘Get off the fucking bus.’” Most online discourse, no matter how heated, fails the test, he says – not least an incident last weekend, when someone on a Dublin street asked to take a picture with Piker, then held up a picture of his dog and shouted “Free Kaya!” Never mind the bus driver; trying to explain the significance of this particular event might well take the rest of this article, but the wider point is that there is a jarring overlap, or more often disconnect, between the online and offline worlds.

Piker finds himself in this in-between space more and more these days. Until fairly recently, the 34-year-old was familiar only to the very online, especially Americans in their 20s and 30s, largely thanks to his presence on the streaming channel Twitch, where he has 3 million followers. But since Donald Trump’s election, Piker has become an in-demand voice in “the real world” for his views on the beleaguered political left, and especially that inordinately fretted-over demographic, young men.

Transport infrastructure in the US is a hot mess – and the guy in charge thinks ‘wellness spaces’ are going to solve the problem

Sean “Dog” Duffy is a legend in the lumberjack world: a three-time world champion in the 90ft lumberjack speed climb who is renowned for his prowess in mounting and rolling big bits of wood. Not just a lumberjack, Duffy also made waves on late-90s reality TV shows The Real World: Boston and Road Rules: All Stars. And now Duffy is parlaying his experience on Road Rules into his role as US transportation secretary.

Duffy has got a lot on his big lumberjack hands: transport infrastructure in the US is, to use the technical term, a hot mess. More than a third of the country’s bridges need major repair work or replacement. There has been little historical investment in railways and the country lags behind the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to high-speed trains. Meanwhile, there’s a chronic air-traffic-controller shortage, which was exacerbated by the recent government shutdown when a number of controllers, fed up with the dysfunctional system, took early retirement.

The White House has formalised its contempt for ‘decaying’ Europe with an ominous plan to undermine the EU and boost the far right

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Almost half of EU citizens regard Donald Trump as an enemy of Europe, a new survey across nine countries revealed last week. The poll, conducted for the French debate platform Le Grand Continent, found that across Europe, Trumpism is considered “a hostile force”.

The new US foreign policy doctrine published by the White House on Friday will have heightened these respondents’ worst fears. The 30-page National Security Strategy landed like a bombshell in Europe. And citizens may have been out in front of their political leaders in figuring out what Trump’s worldview could mean for Europeans.

Footage uploaded to X by US attorney general shows its forces landing on the tanker in major escalation of Trump’s pressure campaign

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US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whose government called the seizure “an act of international piracy”.

Trump confirmed the operation on Wednesday, saying: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually.”

Space agency is investigating after Maven abruptly stopped communicating to ground stations over the weekend

Nasa has lost contact with a spacecraft that has orbited Mars for more than a decade, though the US space agency said it was trying to re-establish a communications link.

Maven abruptly stopped communicating to ground stations over the weekend. Nasa said this week that the spacecraft had been working fine before it went behind the red planet. When it reappeared, there was only silence. “Telemetry showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind [Mars],” Nasa said in a statement.

Car company said team detected ‘unusual activity’ inside vehicle and called to check on rider and alert 911

Self-driving Waymo taxis have gone viral for negative reasons including the death of a beloved San Francisco bodega cat and pulling an illegal U-turn in front of police, who were unable to issue a ticket to a nonexistent driver.

But this week, the company behind the self-driving taxis is drawing attention to the happier news that a San Francisco woman gave birth in a Waymo.

Divisive vote to lower rates highlights uncertainty in the Fed as economy absorbs major shakeups, including tariffs

The US Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it was cutting interest rates by a quarter point for the third time this year, as the embattled central bank appeared split over how best to manage the US economy.

The Fed chair, Jerome Powell, has emphasized unity within the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the board of Fed leaders that sets interest rates. But the nine-to-three vote to lower rates to a range of 3.5% to 3.75% was divisive among the committee that tends to vote in unanimity.

President says there were ‘strong words’ in latest call, as Volodymyr Zelenskyy to join other European leaders to discuss peace plan on Thursday

Leaders of the “coalition of the willing” group of nations will hold a video call about the Ukraine war on Thursday as Donald Trump voiced impatience with European allies and put US involvement in further talks in doubt, saying they risked “wasting time”.

Amid chaotic American efforts to push through a peace deal, the US president said on Wednesday night: “We discussed Ukraine in pretty strong words”, when asked about an earlier phone call with British prime minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz

Plan would apply to countries not currently required to get visas to the US, including Britain and France

Tourists to the United States would have to reveal their social media activity from the last five years, under new Trump administration plans.

The mandatory new disclosures would apply to the 42 countries whose nationals are currently permitted to enter the US without a visa, including longtime US allies Britain, France, Australia, Germany and Japan.

Co-chairs will preside over gala theme of Costume Art, with Beyoncé attending for first time since 2016

The co-chairs of the Met Gala, which is held every year on the first Monday in May in New York City, have been announced as Beyoncé, Venus Williams, Nicole Kidman and, of course, Anna Wintour.

The gala is known as “fashion’s biggest night out” or “the Superbowl of fashion”, and it will be Beyoncé’s first time in attendance since 2016, when she wore Givenchy to attend a Met Gala themed Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.

The festival says goodbye to both founder Robert Redford and its longtime home of Park City, Utah, with a selection of provocative documentaries and starry new films

New films starring Charli xcx, Natalie Portman and Salman Rushdie will all receive their world premieres at next month’s Sundance film festival.

The festival will be held for the last time in Park City, Utah, before it moves to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027. Over the years, it has been home to the first screenings of films including Get Out, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Blair Witch Project, Past Lives, Napoleon Dynamite, Precious and Little Miss Sunshine.