As the number of the semi-aquatic creatures soars so can tensions. But the Swiss have a tried and tested system to calm the neighbours and restore harmony

“I hate beavers,” a woman tells the beaver hotline. Forty years ago she planted an oak tree in a small town in southern Zurich – now at the frontier of beaver expansion – and it has just been felled: gnawed by the large, semi-aquatic rodents as they enter their seasonal home-improvement mode.

The caller is one of 10 new people getting in touch each week at this time of year. Beavers, nature’s great engineers, can unleash mayhem during winter as they renovate their lodges and build up their dams. For people, this can mean flooding, sinkholes appearing in roads and trees being felled. A single incident can clock up 70,000 Swiss francs (£65,000) in damages.

The American author uses fiction to explore the life of her Chinese mother as she seeks to understand the violence that marked their relationship

At first glance, the protagonist of Gish Jen’s latest novel seems like many of the other Chinese American immigrants Jen has portrayed so astutely in her decades-long career. Loo Shu-hsin is born into privilege in 1924 – her father is a banker in the largely British-run International Settlement of Shanghai – but her life is marked by her mother’s constant belittlement. “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk,” she’s told, after speaking out of turn. “With a tongue like yours, no one will ever marry you.” Her only solace in the household is a nursemaid, Nai-ma, who vanishes one day without warning – a psychic wound that lingers even as she grows up, emigrates to the US and enrols in a PhD programme.

In one striking way, however, Loo Shu-hsin is different from Jen’s previous protagonists: she happens to be Jen’s own mother. Bad Bad Girl is in part a fictionalised reconstruction of Jen’s mother’s life, in service of a searching attempt to excavate their troubled relationship. “All my life, after all,” Jen writes, “I have wanted to know how our relationship went wrong – how I became her nemesis, her bête noire, her lightning rod, a scapegoat.”

Two people killed in assault launched on country’s energy infrastructure as temperatures dip towards freezing

Several Ukrainian regions were hit by power cuts in frigid winter weather on Tuesday after Russia launched its latest deadly large-scale attack with drones and missiles, authorities said.

Neighbouring Poland scrambled jets to protect its airspace during the strikes, the country’s military said in a post on X.

Ahead of his new album, My Days of 58, the US singer-songwriter will answer your questions for the Guardian’s reader interview

In a career hardly plagued with lows, Bill Callahan has been on a hot streak recently. Since 2019’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, the Maryland-born songwriter has shared his beguiling meditations on being changed by parenthood and marriage, while his music has loosened and expanded accordingly. The latter is in part down to the chemistry that Callahan has formed with his live band – guitarist Matt Kinsey, saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Jim White also of the Dirty Three – audible on the extraordinary 2024 live album Resuscitate! It’s this ensemble and their facility for improv that powers Callahan’s forthcoming solo record, My Days of 58, the first tastes of which offer up some Callahan wisdom.

The song Lonely City, he said, was an odd one for him to write, being generally more concerned with “humans and the spirit within”.

So writing about concrete and steel felt like a no go. Like I’m going to write a song about a car next? But of course cities are made by humans so they are human, too. You have a relationship with them, like friends.

Like many of his US counterparts, the Russian science protege turned hugely successful ‘digital populist’ has a deep suspicion of government constraint

Tech visionary, Kremlin dissident, FSB agent, free speech absolutist, health guru. These are just some of the labels admirers and critics have attached to Pavel Durov over the past decade.

The Russian-born tech entrepreneur founded Russia’s version of Facebook before going on to create the messaging app Telegram, launch a cryptocurrency ecosystem and amass a multibillion-dollar fortune, all while clashing repeatedly with authorities in Russia and beyond.

Political backbiting has led to accusations Fifa is running the show as tournament switches to four-year cycle

It was a decision that took many by surprise, although not those who have been watching closely since February 2020. Members of the Confederation of African Football’s (Caf) executive committee, along with various other dignitaries including George Weah, the former Ballon d’Or winner and president of Liberia at the time, were assembled in Rabat at a seminar to hear Gianni Infantino outline his plan for the development of competitions and infrastructure in African football.

As well as improving standards in refereeing and mobilising investment in the continent’s infrastructure, the president of Fifa floated the prospect of holding its most important tournament, the Africa Cup of Nations, every four years instead of every two and described the current arrangement as “useless”. The argument ran that it would be more beneficial for countries “at the commercial level” and would help to “project African football to the top of the world”. “Let us show the world what we can do,” added Infantino. “This day is special – it’s the start of a new chapter for African football.”

The chaos is undeniable, but where else are you going to get a pair of jeans and a pistachio-cream panettone cake for such a reasonable price?

‘Oh it’s a mess!” my mum says, shaking her head. “It’s like a jumble sale.” I’m fresh from a trip to TK Maxx, and all I’m getting is negativity. A couple of days later I’m watching Educating Yorkshire when it happens again: one of the teachers tells his pupils to tidy up, lest their classroom look like one of its stores.

Quite frankly, I’m sick of the slander. Sure, I’ve been in some branches that do look like a tornado has just blown through them. But, these days, they’re few and far between. My local TK Maxx, in a nice enough London suburb, is tidy and organised – so much so that when I hid a pair of Good American jeans the other day to “have a think” and then circled back for them, they had already been moved.

Hannah J Davies is a freelance culture writer and editor

The Croatia legend on his return to Dinamo Zagreb, his fall out with Uefa and the ‘shameful’ actions of Gianni Infantino

An afternoon mist is descending over Maksimir Stadion, enhancing the severity of its dramatic, precipitous angles. In a building across the way, Zvonimir Boban is explaining what brought him back. We are eating squid ink risotto in one corner of a room now configured as Dinamo Zagreb’s canteen; diagonally opposite is the spot where, fighting through the club’s youth system, a young arrival from Dalmatia used to sleep. “Emotionally it’s the biggest story of my life, this one,” Boban says, memories of this former dormitory leaping into his mind’s eye. “Where, if not here?”

He has, in some shape or form, been almost everywhere else. Boban has burned brightly but briefly in each of his various lives as a football administrator. The sport would look different were it not for his influence in senior roles at Fifa and Uefa across the past decade. Almost two years have passed since his high-profile resignation from the latter and there was always the sense Boban, opinionated and deeply principled, had further rungs to climb.

• Purdy throws career-high five TD passes

• McCaffrey stars again in versatile role

• Rivers’ return can’t halt Colts’ slide

Brock Purdy threw a career-high five touchdown passes and Dee Winters returned an interception of Philip Rivers’ final pass 74 yards for a score to lead the San Francisco 49ers to a 48-27 victory over the Indianapolis Colts on Monday night.

Purdy was 25 of 34 for 295 yards with one interception. Christian McCaffrey rushed 21 times for 117 yards and caught six passes for 29 yards and two scores. George Kittle had seven receptions for 115 yards and one TD.

• Team director has ‘no issue’ with trip after second Test

• England will investigate claims of excessive drinking

Rob Key has defended England’s mid-tour break in Noosa but confirmed he will look into reports that excessive drinking by players in between the second and third Ashes Tests turned it into a “glorified stag do”.

Sitting 3-0 down to Australia, the Ashes having gone, the team director, Key, has followed the head coach, Brendon McCullum, in stating that his future now rests in the hands of senior figures at the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Newsflash: Ryanair says it will “immediately” appeal today’s ruling from Italy’s competition authorities, which it calls “legally flawed” and “bizarre/unsound”, and the and the €256m fine.

The budget airline insists that its model of offering customers the lowest fares through its website benefits customers (rather than letting travel agents scrape details of the fares and then sell them).

Ryanair, Europe’s No.1 airline, today (Tues, 23 Dec) instructed its lawyers to immediately appeal both the bizarre/unsound ruling and the €256m fine, unjustly levied by the Italian Competition Authority (AGCM), which seeks to ignore – and overturn – the Jan 2024 Precedent Ruling of the Milan Court, which declared that Ryanair’s direct distribution model “undoubtedly benefits consumers” and leads to “competitive fares”.

Lebanese singer-songwriter Yasmine Hamdan returns with mournful minimalism, Mohinder Kaur Bhamra’s 1982 album of Punjabi disco makes a comeback and Guatemalan duo Titanic serve up ecstatic tracks
• The 50 best albums of 2025
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A 40-minute suite of continuous, repetitive drumming might not sound like the most accessible music but south Asian percussionist and producer Sarathy Korwar’s latest album, There Is Beauty, There Already, turns this concept of insistent rhythm into strangely alluring work. Leading an ensemble of three drummers, Korwar develops a dense percussive language throughout the record’s 10 movements, channelling Steve Reich’s phasing motifs as well as Indian classical phrasing and anchoring each in the repetition of a continual, thrumming refrain. As the album continues, the refrain begins to emulate the hypnotic repetition of ceremonial rhythm, drawing us further into Korwar’s percussive world the longer we listen.

Executed with trademark technical flair and empathy, this part-horror, part-fairytale set in a haunted orphanage from 2001 is one of the director’s best

He’s a household name now after The Shape of Water and his new Frankenstein, but 25 years ago Guillermo del Toro was a virtual unknown, still bruised from the Harvey Weinstein-produced Hollywood flop Mimic. But, as this overlooked follow-up attests, he was always a class act. In fact, this is one of his best: a rich, rousing ghost story shrouded in trademark gothic gloom but executed with technical flair and a good deal of empathy.

As with his later breakthrough Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s part-horror, part-fairytale, with children at its centre. The setting is a middle-of-nowhere boys’ orphanage in 1930s Spain, a leftist sanctuary from Franco’s fascists during the civil war. Newcomer Carlos (Fernando Tielve) must find his feet in this semi-surreal realm, with an unexploded bomb in the middle of the courtyard, some kindly adults (one-legged Marisa Paredes and kindly doctor Federico Luppi), some not-so-kindly adults (aggressive caretaker Eduardo Noriega), and junior bullies to win over. There’s also a ghost in the mix: a pale-faced boy named Santi, whose death no one seems to want to discuss, and to whose empty bed Carlos is ominously assigned.

Hope appeal is raising funds for five UK charities that build trust, hope and change at grassroots level

• Donate to the charity appeal here

Generous Guardian readers have so far raised more than £500,000 for the Hope appeal supporting inspirational grassroots charities that bring together divided communities, promote tolerance, and tackle racism and hatred.

The 2025 Guardian appeal is raising funds for five charities: Citizens UK, the Linking Network, Locality, Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust, and Who Is Your Neighbour?

Exclusive: Campaigners say slashing overseas aid would leave UK unable to meet existing commitments

Plans by Reform UK to slash the aid budget by 90% would not cover existing contributions to global bodies such as the UN and World Bank, shredding Britain’s international influence and risking its standing within those organisations, charities and other parties have warned.

Under cuts announced by Nigel Farage in November, overseas aid would be capped at £1bn a year, or about 0.03% of GDP. Keir Starmer’s government is already set to reduce aid from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3% by 2027, but even that lower proportion would still amount to £9bn a year.

Beijing’s push to dominate technology through state-backed industrial policy is reshaping global trade and could devastate European industry

Emmanuel Macron came back from China in early December empty-handed. The French president’s appeal to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to help stop the war in Ukraine was never going to gain traction given Beijing’s unqualified support for Russia.

Urging Xi to address China’s surging trade surplus, the result of the country’s economic and industrial policies, predictably also fell on closed ears.

The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account

In the early 17th century, the Peruvian city of Potosí billed itself as the “treasure of the world” and “envy of kings”. Sprouting at the foot of the Cerro Rico, South America’s most populous settlement produced 60% of the world’s silver, which not only enabled Spain to wage its wars and service its debts, but also accelerated the economic development of India and China. The city’s wealthy elites could enjoy crystal from Venice and diamonds from Ceylon while one in four of its mostly indigenous miners perished. Cerro Rico became known as “the mountain that eats men”.

The story of Potosí, in what is now southern Bolivia, contains the core elements of Sven Beckert’s mammoth history of capitalism: extravagant wealth, immense suffering, complex international networks, a world transformed. The Eurocentric version of capitalism’s history holds that it grew out of democracy, free markets, Enlightenment values and the Protestant work ethic. Beckert, a Harvard history professor and author of 2015’s prize-winning Empire of Cotton, assembles a much more expansive narrative, spanning the entire globe and close to a millennium. Like its subject, the book has a “tendency to grow, flow, and permeate all areas of activity”. Fredric Jameson famously said that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. At times during these 1,100 pages, I found it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.

This hidden gem has country inns, canalside walks, a stunning viaduct, the historic town of Market Harborough – and not a tour bus in sight

It was a chilly Sunday in November 2000 when the gods chose to smile on Ken Wallace. The retired teacher was sweeping his metal detector across a hillside in Leicestershire’s Welland valley when a series of beeps brought him up short. Digging down, he found a cache of buried coins almost two millennia old. He had chanced upon one of the UK’s most important iron age hoards, totalling about 5,000 silver and gold coins.

More than 25 years on, I’m staring at Ken’s find at the civic museum in the nearby town of Market Harborough. The now gleaming coins are decorated with wreaths and horses. They’re about the size of 5p pieces, but speak of a wild-eyed age of tribal lands and windswept hill forts.

The Cameroonian professor made the Time most influential list in 2025 and saw the project he co-founded receive $100m for its virus detection work. Now he is on a mission to transform Africa’s genomics capability

Winning the world’s health lottery is a lonely business in the current climate. “It’s like being an orphan in a space where there used to be many kids playing – suddenly everybody’s gone and you’re just there with a ball,” says Dr Christian Happi.

The Cameroonian distinguished professor of molecular biology and genomics has just won $100m for his work – at a time when global health funding is being viciously slashed as part of wider aid cuts.

Cryptic festive fun …

The US economy is pumped up on tech-bro vanity. The inevitable correction must prompt a global conversation about intelligent machines, regulation and risk

If AI did not change your life in 2025, next year it will. That is one of few forecasts that can be made with confidence in unpredictable times. This is not an invitation to believe the hype about what the technology can do today, or may one day achieve. The hype doesn’t need your credence. It is puffed up enough on Silicon Valley finance to distort the global economy and fuel geopolitical rivalries, shaping your world regardless of whether the most fanciful claims about AI capability are ever realised.

ChatGPT was launched just over three years ago and became the fastest-growing consumer app in history. Now it has about 800m weekly users. Its parent company, OpenAI, is valued at about $500bn. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, has negotiated an intricate and, to some eyes, suspiciously opaque network of deals with other players in the sector to build the infrastructure required for the US’s AI-powered future. The value of these commitments is about $1.5tn. This is not real cash, but bear in mind that a person spending $1 every second would need 31,700 years to get through a trillion-dollar stash.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Met Office says temperatures are tracking ahead of 2022 after year of heatwaves and drought, though late cold spell could yet intervene

Forecasters say 2025 is “more likely than not” to break the record for the hottest year in the UK since records began, after a summer of heatwaves and drought followed by a mild autumn.

According to the Met Office, the official forecaster, the mean temperature for 2025 is tracking well ahead of the previous highest year, set in 2022. However, a colder spell expected from Christmas until the new year makes it too close to call definitively.

CPS says new law marked ‘significant shift in recognising serious nature’ of offence, often linked to domestic abuse and sexual assault

The number of suspects charged for strangulation and suffocation in England and Wales has increased almost sixfold in the three years since the offence was first introduced, Crown Prosecution Service data has revealed.

Brought in under the Domestic Abuse Act, which came into force in 2022, the legislation closed a gap in the existing law, giving courts much greater sentencing powers.

Labour urged to accelerate reset with Brussels as many exporters struggling to trade in the EU after Brexit deal

Keir Starmer’s government has been told a closer EU trade deal is a “strategic necessity” for companies in Britain as growing numbers of exporters find it tougher to do business under the UK’s post-Brexit agreement.

Calling on Labour to accelerate its reset with Brussels, the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said the UK’s existing trade and cooperation agreement (TCA) was failing to help them grow their sales in the EU.