European Union leaders agreed on Friday to provide a massive interest-free loan to Ukraine to meet its military and economic needs for the next two years, but they failed to bridge differences with Belgium that would have allowed them to use frozen Russian assets to raise the funds.

Fifa’s lack of concern for African football’s key money-spinner has led to inadequate preparation time

With the hosts, Morocco, taking on the island nation of Comoros in the Africa Cup of Nations opener in Rabat on Sunday, there is no mistaking the excitement across the continent. Football is akin to a religion among Africa’s largely young population, with 60% of its 1.5 billion people under the age of 25.

But the timing of this Afcon, to be played over the Christmas and New Year period in Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech, Agadir, Tangier and Fez, has never happened since the tournament began in 1957, igniting a storm of anger throughout the African football community.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Abdel Majid Bziouat/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Abdel Majid Bziouat/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Abdel Majid Bziouat/AFP/Getty Images

A hotel’s worth of rich guests cut off by snow, a dead body, the mafia and some supernatural antics … there’s a banquet of melodrama to feast on in this soapy foreign-language series

The snow is crisp and even, up in the Italian Alps: how lucky the protagonists in the new Walter Presents series Stranded are to be spending Christmas at a four-star spa resort in the beautiful Vanoi Valley! The welcome is warm, the hot chocolate is decadent and the hotel building, bedecked with giant baubles, looks like a greetings card painting. But wait! Threatening music? Characters staring anxiously into space, because they clearly have a big dark secret? A guest in a witness protection programme, and another who recognises her as the witness in the forthcoming trial of his secret mafia brother? Attenzione! This Italian-made Green, Red and White Lotus might not be such a paradise. Bad stuff is about to go down.

Specifically, this is several thousand tons of snow and the side of a nearby mountain. One avalanche later and, with frozen rocks blocking the tunnel that’s the only access to the valley – which we know on account of someone driving through it earlier and remarking “This tunnel is the only access to the valley” – everyone in the hotel is stuck there for the festive season, cut off from the outside world. Who lives? Who dies? Who chills in the bar with a grappa and a plate of carne salada, patiently waiting for help to arrive? Nobody, is the answer to that last question – they’re all too busy with their shady hidden agendas.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Marco Bellucci/Channel 4

© Photograph: Marco Bellucci/Channel 4

© Photograph: Marco Bellucci/Channel 4

The Norwegian world No 1 will compete at Doha next week, a year after he was penalised for wearing jeans in New York

One year ago, the world No 1, Magnus Carlsen, and the global chess body, Fide, were at loggerheads after the Norwegian was penalised for wearing jeans at the World Rapid in New York. The 35-year-old also agreed to share the World Blitz crown despite a rule requiring an outright winner.

Relations worsened further when Fide opposed Carlsen’s wish for the new Freestyle circuit winner to be called a world champion, he announced that he was “done” with Fide.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

Leonardo DiCaprio is a former revolutionary searching for his daughter in Paul Thomas Anderson’s exhilaratingly audacious counterculture epic
• The best films of 2025 in the UK
• More on the best culture of 2025

Paul Thomas Anderson’s countercultural drama-thriller One Battle After Another, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, is a formal enigma that has perplexed, provoked and entranced, and the year ends with no definitive consensus as to its exact meaning. A rare naysayer is screenwriter and film-maker Paul Schrader, who commented tersely online: “Film-making at level A+, but try as I might I couldn’t muster up an ounce of empathy for Leo DiCaprio or Sean Penn. I kept waiting for them to die.”

But that’s why the film is gripping: there is indeed no empathy for its two unlovely leading males, and their mortality and vulnerability has a kind of unwinding, entropic energy. They are heading for disaster. And yes, the film-making is A+ or A++; it is supercharged with pleasure at its own audacity and expertise. It is moviemaking with a late-Kubrick elegance and a knowing theatricality, culminating in an exhilarating but also eerily strange car chase on an undulating freeway. This isn’t the same as style without substance, but it’s certainly a movie that can’t help put promote its self-aware style to equal status with its subject matter: a petty-tyrannical America of the present and future, and those who will grow old in resisting it from within.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

Rejoining Erasmus should just be a first step – as the economic evidence piles up, the need for closer ties with Europe could not be clearer

Month by month, Labour is bringing us closer to Europe. This week, the UK announced it is rejoining the Erasmus+ youth exchange programme. This will open the door beyond the many young people who attend university – its remit includes FE students, apprentices, and youth and school groups. A whoop of excitement greeted the announcement, with opportunities for those involved in education, training, culture and sport, and a commitment to maximise take-up by disadvantaged young people. Widening experience, encouraging adventure: Erasmus+ may help cure Britain’s monolingual handicap and the catastrophic decline in language courses. Last year in the UK, less than 3% of A-levels were in languages.

This all eludes Europhobes such as Andrew Neil, who posted on X that “extra taxes now being inflicted on working people will be used to finance some ‘study’ in Barcelona for gap-year yahs from affluent families”.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

© Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

© Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Indonesia Ministry of Forestry/YIARI/International Animal Rescue

© Photograph: Indonesia Ministry of Forestry/YIARI/International Animal Rescue

© Photograph: Indonesia Ministry of Forestry/YIARI/International Animal Rescue

Minister says ‘any individual’ at low risk from hack, while Sun reports Chinese cyber gang responsible for breach

The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was hacked in October, the minister Chris Bryant has said.

Bryant, a trade minister in Keir Starmer’s government, told Sky News there was a low risk to “any individual” from the cyber-attack.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Dinendra Haria/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Dinendra Haria/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Dinendra Haria/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

Dear Abby advises a man who had an affair with a woman named "Dawn," only to be ghosted after being in a relationship with her for 12 years.

During the operation, authorities said they uncovered 17 individuals illegally present in the United States.

• Third Test, day three: Australia 371 & 271-4; England 286

• England trail by 356 runs to leave series hopes hanging by a thread

There were flickers of hope for England on the third day in Adelaide but like some of the murmurs thrown up by Snicko during this pivotal third Ashes Test, they were never entirely convincing. Instead, courtesy of Travis Head’s hometown hundred, Australia manoeuvred their way into a position of outright dominance.

At stumps the hosts had reached 271 for four and built a lead of 356 runs. As a 53,700-strong crowd filtered out, the majority did so beaming. They had watched Head only further his cult hero status: an unbeaten 142 from 196 balls that meant England would need a record chase on this ground to prevent going 3-0 down in the series.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Reuters

© Photograph: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Reuters

© Photograph: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Reuters

Actor describes 1977 Academy Awards ceremony as 'volcanic moment' that turned 'very sad.'

ONS figures show public sector net borrowing was £11.7bn – £1.9bn less than in same month last year

• Business live – latest updates

The UK government borrowed more than expected in November, official figures show, amid pressure on the economy before chancellor Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed public sector net borrowing – the difference between spending and income – was £11.7bn last month, £1.9bn less than in the same month a year earlier.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters

© Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters

© Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters

An Arizona jury on Thursday sentenced a man to death in a string of killings in metro Phoenix during a three-week span in 2017, marking the end of a seven-month trial over attacks that targeted random victims and the defendant’s own mother and stepfather.

In this week’s newsletter: A generation is using the legal system to demand accountability for climate harm

• Don’t get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Rikki Held grew up on her family’s ranch in Montana, watching the land transform amid the climate crisis. The Powder River, which runs through the property, has sometimes dried up during drought, leaving crops and livestock without water. At other points, rapid snowmelt and heavy rains have caused flooding and eroded riverbanks, making the land difficult to use.

Two years ago, the 24-year-old and a group of other young people won a groundbreaking legal victory, intended to prevent those impacts from worsening. In August 2023, a judge ruled in favour of plaintiffs in Held v Montana, in which 16 young people accused the state of violating their constitutional rights by promoting planet-warming fossil fuels. The state’s supreme court affirmed the judge’s findings late last year, but plaintiffs say lawmakers have since passed new laws that violate that ruling. So last week, they filed a new petition calling on the supreme court to enforce their earlier win, one of several youth-led constitutional climate lawsuits filed in the US this year.

‘A shift no country can ignore’: where global emissions stand, 10 years after the Paris climate agreement

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

Synthetic chemicals in food system creating health burden of $2.2tn a year, report finds

Montana youth activists who won landmark climate case push for court enforcement

More than 40 Trump administration picks tied directly to oil, gas and coal, analysis shows

Youth-led US climate activists widen focus to fight authoritarianism

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Thom Bridge/AP

© Photograph: Thom Bridge/AP

© Photograph: Thom Bridge/AP

From a Grade II*-listed converted village chapel to a flat in the heart of London

Continue reading...

© Photograph: The Modern House

© Photograph: The Modern House

© Photograph: The Modern House

This year, the once-vanishing symbol of Las Vegas glamour was reborn in the wardrobes of Gen Z superstars

• Don’t get Fashion Statement delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

After a 31-year stint on the Las Vegas strip, the showgirls from the revue Jubilee! took a final synchronised kick in 2016. The show, known for its elaborate costumes created by the American fashion designer Bob Mackie, came to an end due to falling audience numbers and unimpressed critics who described it as a spectacle “trapped in time”.

Now, almost a decade later, showgirls, or at least the showgirl aesthetic, is back.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott/PA

© Photograph: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott/PA

© Photograph: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott/PA

When AIs become consistently more capable than humans, life could change in strange ways. It could happen in the next few years, or a little longer. If and when it comes, our domestic routines – trips to the doctor, farming, work and justice systems – could all look very different. Here we take a look at how the era of artificial general intelligence might feel

“Does it hurt when I do this?”

Continue reading...

© Illustration: Jay Cover/The Guardian

© Illustration: Jay Cover/The Guardian

© Illustration: Jay Cover/The Guardian

Exclusive: Labour says Nigel Farage’s party should swiftly condemn Chris Parry after further comments emerge

A Reform UK mayoral candidate who said David Lammy should “go home to the Caribbean” has suggested that at least eight other politicians from minority ethnic backgrounds do not have a primary loyalty towards the UK.

Nigel Farage’s party has so far refused to condemn Chris Parry, a retired naval rear admiral who has been picked to contest the now-postponed Hampshire and the Solent mayoral election for the party, over his comment about Lammy, the deputy prime minister.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Paul Jacobs/pictureexclusive.com

© Photograph: Paul Jacobs/pictureexclusive.com

© Photograph: Paul Jacobs/pictureexclusive.com

Bob and Dick Sherman take centre stage in this well-researched account of how Walt Disney created a classic

Like many kids of the VHS generation, I must have watched my taped-off-the-telly copy of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) well over 100 times. I probably knew every frame as well as Walt Disney himself, who invested 20 years in bringing it to the screen.

The culmination of his live action achievements, Mary Poppins remained the project Walt was most proud of. A sophisticated, multi-Oscar-winning musical that proved the House of Mouse was about more than just cartoons, its box office success enabled him to expand his Florida ambitions for Disney World resort and shore up the company’s financial future.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

© Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

© Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

For Michael Porter Jr., making an All-Star team would be both a first and a childhood dream.

Do you know your Tesla from your Jaguar? Test your 2025 business knowledge here with our annual quiz …

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

© Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

© Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

In her day job, the ‘first lady of Croatian avant garde’ sliced up cadavers at Zagreb’s anatomical institute. In her studio, she used the same medical instruments to make art that surprises to this day

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” says David Crowley, curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work at Muzeum Susch, in eastern Switzerland. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes Marika Kuźmicz, the museum’s curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Marijan Susovski

© Photograph: Marijan Susovski

© Photograph: Marijan Susovski

• Darnold hits Smith-Njigba for winning OT TD

• Seahawks erase 16-point fourth-quarter deficit

• Seattle move ahead of Rams atop NFC West

Sam Darnold connected with Jaxon Smith-Njigba for a touchdown in overtime, then hit a wide-open Eric Saubert for the winning two-point conversion, and the Seattle Seahawks rallied from a 16-point fourth-quarter deficit to stun the Los Angeles Rams 38-37 on Thursday night and take a one-game lead in the NFC West.

The Seahawks went 3 for 3 on two-point conversions, none more improbable than the one that tied the game at 30-all in the fourth quarter. Darnold’s deflected pass intended for Zach Charbonnet was initially ruled incomplete, but after a replay review was determined to be a backward pass. Charbonnet, who had casually picked up the loose ball in the end zone, was credited with the two points.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Soobum Im/Getty Images

© Photograph: Soobum Im/Getty Images

© Photograph: Soobum Im/Getty Images