European leaders meet in Brussels as Poland’s Donald Tusk issues warning to fellow EU states
Meanwhile, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that a failure to agree on the use of frozen Russian assets would pose a serious challenge for Ukraine.
“I will speak with all the leaders, present our arguments, and I very much hope we can obtain a positive decision. Without it, there will be a big problem for Ukraine,” Zelenskyy told reporters, quoted by AFP.
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© Photograph: Nicolas Tucat/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Nicolas Tucat/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Nicolas Tucat/AFP/Getty Images
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.
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© Photograph: Bafta/Charlie Clift/PA
© Photograph: Bafta/Charlie Clift/PA
© Photograph: Bafta/Charlie Clift/PA
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.
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© Photograph: Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images
© Photograph: Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images
© Photograph: Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images
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
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© Photograph: Epstein Estate/House Oversight/Planet Pix/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Epstein Estate/House Oversight/Planet Pix/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Epstein Estate/House Oversight/Planet Pix/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Teachers to be given extra training as Keir Starmer warns ‘toxic ideas are taking hold early and going unchallenged’
Children as young as 11 who demonstrate misogynistic behaviour will be taught the difference between pornography and real relationships, as part of a multimillion-pound investment to tackle misogyny in England’s schools, the Guardian understands.
On the eve of the government publishing its long-awaited strategy to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade, David Lammy told the Guardian that the battle “begins with how we raise our boys”, adding that toxic masculinity and keeping girls and women safe were “bound together”.
Preventing young men being harmed by “manosphere” influencers such as Andrew Tate.
Stopping abusers in England and Wales through measures such as dedicated rape and sexual offences teams and enforceable domestic abuse protection orders.
£550m of funding to support victims.
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© Photograph: JohnnyGreig/Getty Images
© Photograph: JohnnyGreig/Getty Images
© Photograph: JohnnyGreig/Getty Images
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.
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© Photograph: Caroline Dubois/NETFLIX
© Photograph: Caroline Dubois/NETFLIX
© Photograph: Caroline Dubois/NETFLIX
Parveen doesn’t know if she’s getting a sponge cake or a burger bap, but Joe thinks she needs to embrace his northern-isms. You decide who is sweet and who is sour
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror
Joe says ‘buns’ covers all sweet things in the north, but I worry he’ll bring me home a burger bun
Regional differences in language are all part of the fun – plus, surely sugar is sugar?
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© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian
© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian
© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian
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.
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© Photograph: Héctor Vivas/FIFA/Getty Images
© Photograph: Héctor Vivas/FIFA/Getty Images
© Photograph: Héctor Vivas/FIFA/Getty Images
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.”
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© Photograph: David Corio/Redferns
© Photograph: David Corio/Redferns
© Photograph: David Corio/Redferns
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.”
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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© Illustration: Bill Bragg/The Guardian
© Illustration: Bill Bragg/The Guardian
© Illustration: Bill Bragg/The Guardian
Tourists trail by 158 after late Stokes and Archer stand
At the end of a brain-boiling second day in South Australia two things could be said with a fair degree of certainty: England were staring at the termination of their already faint Ashes hopes and players on both sides had lost faith in the Snicko technology.
The match situation first, which at stumps pointed firmly towards Australia and the 3-0 lead that was ultimately loading. England had subsided to 213 for eight from 68 overs in reply to Australia’s 371 all out, trailing by 158 runs and hugely grateful to Jofra Archer, 30 not out, holding firm alongside Ben Stokes during the final hour.
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© Photograph: Robbie Stephenson/PA
© Photograph: Robbie Stephenson/PA
© Photograph: Robbie Stephenson/PA
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.
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© Illustration: Guardian Design
© Illustration: Guardian Design
© Illustration: Guardian Design
Violence against women is a national emergency. As a minister, but also as a father, I see Labour’s new strategy as a matter of the highest priority
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.
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© Photograph: WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
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
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© Photograph: Rodrigo Koraicho
© Photograph: Rodrigo Koraicho
© Photograph: Rodrigo Koraicho
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.
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© Photograph: Carolyn Kennett)
© Photograph: Carolyn Kennett)
© Photograph: Carolyn Kennett)
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.
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© Photograph: Piyaphorn Promnonsri/Getty Images
© Photograph: Piyaphorn Promnonsri/Getty Images
© Photograph: Piyaphorn Promnonsri/Getty Images
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.
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© Photograph: Thilo Schmülgen/Reuters
© Photograph: Thilo Schmülgen/Reuters
© Photograph: Thilo Schmülgen/Reuters
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