Alex Pretti had courage and empathy. This, not Maga’s conception of male power, is what we must teach young men

The first thing that grabbed me about the Rapture’s 2011 song It Takes Time to be a Man was the warbly, analogue fuzz of its recurring guitar and piano riff. Once that drew me in, what kept me listening were the lyrics’ hard-marriage of masculinity and empathy. In the final verse, Luke Jenner tells us that: “Well there’s room in your heart now / for excellence to take a stand / And there’s tears that need shedding / it’s all part of the plan”.

For the past year, rightwing voices have waged war on empathy. According to Elon Musk, empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilisation”. Others go further, calling it “toxic”, “suicidal” and even “sinful”. Certainly, the macho wing of the Maga right sees no place for it amid its (mis)appropriation of medieval history and imagery that is visible everywhere from the face paint and horned headdress of the “QAnon shaman”, convicted for his role in the US Capitol siege, to the tattooed arms and body of Donald Trump’s secretary of war, Pete Hegseth.

And yet, consider the ideal of chivalry held by medieval knights: generosity and suspicion of profit, courtesy, honesty and the bind of your word, hospitality, abiding by the rules of combat and granting mercy to your adversary – whose life a knight takes only as a last resort. I say this not because I think the medieval knight should be the new standard for modern men, but to point out that Maga men would fail, miserably so, to live up to their own ideals.

Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist. H​is memoir, Generation Desperation​, is published in January 2026

I live in a country where a woman’s value is often measured by motherhood, but for me and many others fulfilment simply looks different

I booked an online appointment with a gynaecologist in Karachi during the pandemic. I had a severe urinary tract infection and needed immediate relief. Everything felt routine at first: the doctor joined the video call late, held her phone awkwardly and asked about my symptoms. I explained, she prescribed medication, and then came the expected questions: Was I married? For how long? Any children? When I said “no,” her tone shifted as she asked, “Bachay tou chaihiye na aap ko?” (You do want children, right?). It felt subtly menacing – the assumption was clear: not wanting kids meant something was wrong.

What shocked me more was my own response. “Ji, ji, bilkul,” (Yes, yes, of course) I mumbled. Later, I was furious with myself for crumbling under pressure – for not being honest.

Jump of £37bn in budget deficit by 2040 would force government to increase taxes, NIESR predicts

The UK economy would be 3.6% smaller by 2040 if net migration fell to zero, forcing the government to raise taxes to combat a much bigger budget deficit, a thinktank has predicted.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said falling birthrates in the UK and a sharp decrease in net migration last year had led it to consider what would happen if this trend continued to the end of the decade.

When Essex University’s Southend campus opened, it was a message of hope for a ‘left behind’ UK seaside town. Its closure will be felt far beyond its 800 students, some of whom will not get their degrees

The seaside city of Southend-on-Sea, on England’s east coast, looks grey on a winter afternoon in term-time. Its cobbled high street, bordering the university campus, is sparsely populated with market stalls, vape shops and discount retailers, and feels unusually quiet.

“There used to be lots of shops, restaurants and youth clubs around here,” says 23-year-old Nathan Doucette-Chiddicks. Now, the city is about to lose something else that it can scarcely do without.

Prediction markets allow you to put money on everything from the US attacking Iran to Jesus returning. Saahil Desai explains their dizzying rise

In the early hours of 3 January, Donald Trump ordered a surprise attack on the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, to kidnap the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Millions of Venezuelans’ lives were thrown into uncertainty. Politicians at home and abroad scrambled to respond. It seemed this was something no one had seen coming. Except one person did actually predict it.

In the hours before the attack, someone - and we have no way of knowing who - placed a series of bets that Donald Trump would oust Maduro on a prediction market platform, netting them nearly $500,000 when it happened. These platforms allow their users not just to bet on whoever’s going to win the Super Bowl, but also on world events. Heavily regulated under the Biden administration, these apps have enjoyed a huge boom in popularity since Trump came to power.

Despite Trump-appeasing shows of willingness, a big gap remains between the positions of delegations meeting in Abu Dhabi

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Senior Ukrainian and Russian officials are due to meet in Abu Dhabi for a second round of talks brokered by the Trump administration.

The two-day talks are expected to mirror last month’s format, with negotiators from Washington, Kyiv and Moscow in attendance.

Lawyers for accused Tyler Robinson urge removal because prosecutor’s daughter attended rally where Kirk was killed

A Utah prosecutor involved in the case against Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, denied allegations of a conflict of interest in the case during a hearing on Tuesday.

Robinson’s attorneys have argued that a judge should disqualify local prosecutors because the adult daughter of Chad Grunander, a deputy county attorney, was in attendance at the rally on a Utah college campus where Kirk was shot dead. The defense alleges that the office’s move to seek the death penalty just days after Kirk’s killing indicated a “strong emotional reaction” from Grunander, and suggested a conflict of interest.

‘What have I done?’ thought Joanne Appelbee as she waited for rescue with her two other children in rough seas off Western Australia

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Joanne Appelbee says asking her 13-year-old son Austin to swim four hours through dangerous waters to get help after her family was swept out to sea was “one of the hardest decisions” she has ever made.

“I knew he was the strongest and he could do it,” she told the ABC. “I would have never went because I wouldn’t have left the kids at sea, so I had to send somebody.”

Learning to say no helps them resist impulsiveness and builds reflection into the decision-making process

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One of the most frustrating aspects of parenting is having to force your kids to do something they will undoubtedly enjoy. The effort required to get them out of the house for football practice, a museum visit or a swim at the beach can often outweigh any potential reward (a temporary reprieve from holiday boredom, for example).

Couples talk about love languages. Parents are more familiar with the multifarious languages of no. These range from blunt refusal through to nuclear meltdowns and very temporary and highly specific vision loss – the latter rendering essential objects such as clothes and shoes invisible, even within a high-contrast setting.

Government to invest £2bn in NHS cancer services in England as figures show diagnosis made every 75 seconds in the UK

Three in four cancer patients in England will beat cancer under government plans to raise survival rates, as figures reveal someone is now diagnosed every 75 seconds in the UK.

Cancer is the country’s biggest killer, causing about one in four deaths, and survival rates lag behind several European countries, including Romania and Poland. Three-quarters of NHS hospital trusts are failing cancer patients, a Guardian analysis found last year, prompting experts to declare a “national emergency”.

Nili Kupfer-Naouri and Rachel Touitou said to be accused of trying to block delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza

A French investigating magistrate has issued summonses to two French-Israeli nationals in relation to “complicity in genocide” over allegations they tried to block the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, French media have reported.

The summonses, which reportedly mark the first time a country has considered the blocking of aid “complicity in genocide”, were issued for Nili Kupfer-Naouri and Rachel Touitou in July, Le Monde and Agence France-Presse reported.

It featured the queen, Rupert Everett and horses paying their respects, amid a combination of romance, absurdity and delight at Southwark Cathedral last week

Jilly Cooper’s memorial last week started with the dean of Southwark telling a story from her funeral last year: as the congregation made their way to her final resting place, five horses ambled majestically across a field, and came to stand in formation, looking at the grave. They would not be budged and their intention was crystal clear: they were paying their horse-respect (this is not verbatim by the way) to an author who did as much for equine-kind as she did for humans. The story was pitch perfect; you could imagine Cooper laughing at it, at the same time as believing it, at the same time as thinking no funeral was complete without five horses.

The combination of romance, magnitude, absurdity, delight and animals could have come straight off the pages of a Jilly Cooper novel, but how would a dean know that? Did they also, back in the day, pass a bashed-up copy of Riders around dean school? (My friend who is a librarian expressed some professional irritation that, at her school, they couldn’t get it together to buy more than one copy of a book in such demand. She said by the time they’d all finished it, it looked like Magna Carta.)

Statement says Republican senator, 83, checked himself into local hospital and prognosis is ‘positive’

The Republican senator Mitch McConnell was admitted to a hospital on Monday night due to “flu-like symptoms”, his office said in a statement.

“In an abundance of caution, after experiencing flu-like symptoms over the weekend, Senator McConnell checked himself into a local hospital for evaluation last night,” the statement reads. “His prognosis is positive and he is grateful for the excellent care he is receiving.”

Ruling comes after agents fired teargas, pepper balls and rubber bullets into peaceful protest that included children

A federal judge has temporarily restricted immigration officers from shooting teargas or projectile munitions at protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, Oregon, which has been the site of repeated demonstrations since last year that the Trump administration has increasingly met with force.

The US district judge Michael Simon’s ruling comes after a weekend in which immigration agents at the ICE building fired teargas, pepper balls and rubber bullets into a crowd of thousands of protesters that included children. Local officials had described the protest as peaceful prior to the excessive force.

Pedro Sánchez says urgent action needed to protect children from ‘digital wild west’, drawing anger from owner of X

Spain has proposed a ban on social media use by teenagers as attitudes hardened in Europe against the technology, drawing personal insults against the prime minister from Elon Musk.

The government is preparing a series of measures including a social media ban for under-16s, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said, promising to protect children from the “digital wild west” and hold tech companies responsible for hateful and harmful content.

Renewables and energy storage contributed more than 50% of supplied electricity last quarter as real progress is being made – but it’s not yet job done

Ten years ago, if a heatwave as intense as last week’s record-breaker had hit the east coast, Australia’s power supply may well have buckled. But this time, the system largely operated as we needed, despite some outages.

On Australia’s main grid last quarter, renewables and energy storage contributed more than 50% of supplied electricity for the first time, while wholesale power prices were more than 40% lower than a year earlier.

Netflix film revisits evidence that led to Letby’s conviction and hears from expert who says his research was misused

Shortly after Lucy Letby was sentenced to 15 whole-life terms for murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others between June 2015 and June 2016 – a conviction that made her Britain’s worst ever child serial killer – Cheshire police agreed to give “unparalleled and exclusive access” to the makers of a Netflix film about the case.

The finished documentary, The Investigation Of Lucy Letby, which is released on Wednesday, must be very different from what the producers envisaged when they first began work on the project, given the subsequent unexpected turns in the story. Since the two trials, the prosecution evidence and police handling of the case have faced criticism from an unprecedentedly large number of distinguished British and international medical experts. Led by the Canadian neonatologist, Dr Shoo Lee – who says again in the feature-length Netflix documentary that his research was misused to convict the nurse – many of the experts are convinced Letby is innocent, the victim of a catastrophic miscarriage of justice.

Rights group says growing authoritarianism and abuses in US, Russia and China threaten global rules-based order

The world is in a “democratic recession” with almost three-quarters of the global population now living under autocratic rulers – levels not seen since the 1980s, according to a new report.

The system underpinning human rights was “in peril”, said Philippe Bolopion, executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), with a growing authoritarian wave becoming “the challenge of a generation”, he said.

‘Mid-career’ females also being sidelined by rigid hiring processes, says City of London Corporation

Women working in tech and financial services are at greater risk of losing their jobs to increased use of AI and automation than their male peers, according to a report that found experienced females were also being sidelined as a result of “rigid hiring processes”.

“Mid-career” women – with at least five years’ experience – are being overlooked for digital roles in the tech and financial and professional services sectors, where they are traditionally underrepresented, according to the report by the City of London Corporation.

Data comes as government prepares to publish plans to overhaul Send system in England

One in six autistic pupils have not been to school at all since the start of this academic year, according to a new survey which found that mental health issues were often behind high levels of school absence.

Nearly half (45%) of the parents and children who responded to the UK-wide survey by the Ambitious About Autism charity said they felt “blamed” by the government for the absences.

Billionaires and intellectuals attended events with the disgraced financier years after he served time for sex offense, files reveal

Newly released emails and travel itineraries appear to show that for years after Jeffrey Epstein served time for procuring underage girls for prostitution, he continued to attend exclusive dinners alongside Silicon Valley’s most famous billionaires.

The emails, part of a trove released by the Department of Justice on Friday, show that as late as 2018, Epstein was invited to or attended dinners alongside the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Google vice-president and later Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

Conservancy sees nonnative species as major threat to local biodiversity, while residents rally to preserve local identity

California wildlife officials moved forward last week with a plan to eradicate a mule deer herd from Santa Catalina Island: extermination.

The plan has long pitted locals from the island off the coast of Los Angeles against the Catalina Island Conservancy, an environmental non-profit that manages 88% of the island’s terrain. The conservancy sees mule deer, which are not native to the island, as a major threat to local biodiversity, water quality and fire resilience.

Search and rescue operation involving boats, helicopter and divers under way off the eastern Aegean island of Chios

A collision between a speedboat carrying migrants and a Greek coastguard patrol vessel off the eastern Aegean island of Chios has killed at least 14 people, the coastguard said.

A search and rescue operation involving four patrol vessels, an air force helicopter and a private boat carrying divers was under way for potential missing passengers.

Sebastien Lai criticises ministers for not putting conditions on his father’s release during Beijing trip

The British son of the jailed Hong Kong media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai has criticised the UK government for failing to place conditions on his father’s release during the prime minister’s visit to China last week.

Speaking at a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday, Sebastien Lai said his father’s incarceration was not only a humanitarian and national security issue, but an issue “where our values are being locked up” along with him.