Former BBC head of music and arts, he brought the joy of classical music to the general public over decades

Sir Humphrey Burton, one of the most influential figures in arts broadcasting, has died at the age of 94.

The award-wining film-maker and director, who revolutionised classical music programming, died at home with his family by his side.

Conservationists appeal to public for help after rare birds disappear in suspicious circumstances

One of the first white-tailed eagles to fledge in England for hundreds of years has vanished in suspicious circumstances, alongside two more “devastating” disappearances of the reintroduced raptor.

Police are appealing for public help as they investigate the disappearances, which are a setback to the bird’s successful reintroduction. Their disappearance is being investigated by several police forces and the National Wildlife Crime Unit.

An unnamed source told the New York Times the Reiners’ daughter, Romy, had discovered only her father’s body, and disputed reports the couple argued with their son, Nick, at a party the previous evening

New details have emerged about the deaths of film director Rob Reiner and photographer Michele Singer Reiner, whose bodies were discovered at their home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, on Sunday.

A report in the New York Times, quoting a “person close to the family” who remained anonymous, says that a massage therapist arriving for an appointment first raised the alarm after not being able to gain access for an appointment on Sunday. The therapist contacted their daughter Romy Reiner, who lives nearby, who entered the house and found Rob Reiner’s body. The Times said that Romy “fled the house in anguish” without realising that her mother’s body was also inside, and that her roommate, who had accompanied her, called 911. Emergency responders then discovered Michele Singer Reiner’s body.

Earlier this year my four-year-old tried out an AI soft toy for a few days. New research indicates I was right to be creeped out

If you’re thinking about buying your kid a new-fangled AI-powered toy for the holidays, may I kindly suggest you don’t? I’m sure most Guardian readers would be horrified by the very idea anyway, but it’s going to be hard to avoid the things soon. The market is booming and, according to the MIT Technology Review, there are already more than 1,500 AI toy companies in China. With the likes of Mattel, which owns the Barbie brand, announcing a “strategic collaboration” with OpenAI, you can bet more of the uncanny objects will be in a department store near you soon.

Let me offer myself up as a cautionary tale for anyone who might be intrigued by the idea of a cuddly chatbot. Back in September I let my four-year-old use an AI-powered soft toy called Grem for a few days. Developed by a company called Curio in collaboration with the musician Grimes, it uses OpenAI’s technology to have personalised conversations and play interactive games with your child.

The dismissal of a a renowned health leader who refused to ignore Palestine highlights false claims of universality in human rights, global health and academia

Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down” as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new “focus on children’s health”.

It omitted the fact that, according to a Harvard Crimson source, Bassett had been asked to resign just two hours earlier and instructed to vacate her office by the end of the year. The decision was not a routine administrative transition. It was the culmination of a year of escalating pressure on the Center for Health and Human Rights for its work on the health and human rights of Palestinians. Powerful figures inside and outside Harvard, including the former Harvard president and now thoroughly disgraced economist Larry Summers, condemned this work and claimed it “foments antisemitism”. A leading public health scholar whose career has been defined by work on racial justice, poverty, HIV, and global inequality appears to have been removed not because her commitments shifted, but because the political costs of applying those commitments to Palestinians became too great for Harvard to tolerate.

AI promises to have far-reaching effects in music-making. While some welcome it as a compositional tool, many have deep concerns. Here are some of your responses

AI-generated music is flooding streaming platforms, and it seems to be here to stay. Last month, three AI songs reached the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts. Jorja Smith’s label has called for her to receive a share of royalties from a song thought to have trained its original AI-generated vocals on her catalogue, which were later re-recorded by a human singer.

With this in mind, we asked for your thoughts on music composed by AI, the use of AI as a tool in the creation of music, and what should be done to protect musicians. Here are some of your responses.

• Company admits operator error led to Carey surviving

• Wrong stump mic used so audio did not match picture

England are considering a formal complaint over the Snicko technology being used in this Ashes series after Alex Carey received a lifeline en route to a telling century on the opening day of the third Test.

Carey, who made 106 in Australia’s 326 for eight by stumps, was on 72 when Josh Tongue believed the left-hander had edged behind. He was given not out on the field and the third umpire, Chris Gaffeney, felt he did not have enough evidence to overturn the decision despite a spike showing up on the review.

Exclusive: DNA advances show Roman-era skeleton, once hailed as first black Briton, came from southern England

Beachy Head Woman, a Roman-era skeleton once hailed as the earliest known black Briton and who scientists later speculated could be of Cypriot descent, has now been shown to have originated from southern England.

The mystery of the skeleton’s shifting identity was finally resolved after advances in DNA sequencing produced a high-quality genetic readout from the remains.

From a John Cusack 80s teen comedy to the other Frank Capra Christmas crowd-pleaser, here are some seasonal picks you might not have seen

Something that bugs me about a lot of contemporary Christmas movies is how insistently self-conscious they are about the whole production – the ostentatious decorations, checklist of soundtrack chestnuts, the dialogue about the true meaning of the holidays that sounds canned even when the movie is trying to acknowledge its various stressors. Maybe because the idea of a holiday movie hadn’t yet ossified into routine, I’ve found that the versions of these films that came out in the 1940s tend to approach Christmas from more inventive, less neurotically obsessive angles. One of my favorite discoveries in sifting through 1940s Christmas comedies is It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a 1947 semi-romantic farce with a great starting hook: a cheerful vagrant Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) winters in New York every year, because he knows a way into a particular Fifth Avenue mansion seasonally vacated by its enormously wealthy owner. One winter, Aloysius invites some new acquaintances to stay with him: veteran Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) and his military buddies, plus runaway Trudy O’Connor (Gale Storm) – who is secretly the daughter of the mansion’s owner. Eventually, the owner himself is forced to disguise himself as another vagrant and stay in the house, too, so Trudy can make sure Jim loves her on her own merits. This all takes place during the run-up to Christmas and into New Year’s, and director Roy Del Ruth gives the movie a found-family warmth that newer holiday movies have to labor two or three times as hard for, assembling a funny and lovable surrogate family in one of the city’s well-appointed empty spaces. Speaking of labor: It Happened on Fifth Avenue lands perfectly between class-conscious social picture about the importance of affordable housing and romantic urban fairytale. Jesse Hassenger

It Happened on Fifth Avenue is available on Plex and to rent digitally in the US, UK and Australia

The woman Quentin Tarantino called ‘the goddess of go-go’ is one of the most connected and accomplished in Hollywood. At 82, she recalls working with Tina Turner, Bette Midler, Frank Sinatra, David Byrne, Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio - the list goes on - and the time Bing Crosby made a pass at her

If your knowledge of Toni Basil begins and ends with her cheerleader-chanting smash hit Mickey, that’s just the tip of a very deep iceberg. By the time Mickey topped the US charts 43 years ago this week, in 1982, Basil had already spent four decades in the entertainment industry. The deeper you go, the more places you realise she was. When Elvis Presley sings “See the girl with the red dress on” in his 1964 movie Viva Las Vegas, and points across the dancefloor, the gyrating girl in the red dress is Basil. When Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper take LSD at the end of Easy Rider with two sex workers, one of them is Basil. When dance troupe the Lockers show​case their pre-hip-hop street dance moves on Soul Train in 1976, it’s six guys and … Basil. By the time of Mickey she had already worked with everyone from David Bowie to Tina Turner to Talking Heads, with more to come.

Basil has been-there-done-that in so many places, for so long, and over the course of our two-hour conversation she’ll casually drop asides such as “… so I went to see Devo with Iggy Pop and Dean Stockwell” or “… me and Bowie had just come from dinner with Bob Geldof, Paula Yates and Freddie Mercury” or “I was just at Bette Midler’s 80th birthday party, what a bash!” She’s now 82 years old but on Zoom, from her dance studio in Los Angeles, she doesn’t look much older than she did in the video for Mickey – and she looked like a teenager in that, even though she was 38 at the time. Her memory is perfectly sharp, too, and her energy levels are as high as ever, as she shares her packed life story with animated diction. If she has a secret to eternal youth, it’s that she has danced her whole life, and she still does, she says. “Dance is my drug of choice. You get high from it, and it gives you community.”

Clip-in fringes are easy to use and trying one first could save tears and regrets

That quote about the definition of insanity being the repetition of the same behaviours with the expectation of a different result is often wrongly attributed to Einstein. Whoever it really was, I’m certain it was someone who had decided to get another fringe – and I relate.

Despite occasionally catching sight of one of my several former fringes in a photo album and always thinking how bloody awful I look (only my husband disagrees), I am seemingly never far from a decision I’d definitely regret. As was proved when I saw a recent photograph of Demi Moore, all yard-long black hair and short, scruffy fringe that looked to be artfully cut with a pair of old nail scissors. She looked exquisite, obviously, in a way that my rational brain knows to be absolutely unattainable, but nonetheless I found myself sending hairdresser Hadley Yates a WhatsApp asking if he’d do the deed.

Ultra-conservative Christian organisations look to reshape global health landscape as new aid agreements open door to demands restricting family planning services

The sudden stop work order on USAID in January 2025 sent shock waves around the world. Many health clinics were immediately shut down, leaving millions without access to vital medicines and facilities, with potentially deadly consequences, especially for HIV patients, children, and women and adolescent girls.

To many, the subsequent axing of 83% of USAID programmes seemed like pure nihilism, engineered by ideologues who wanted to kill off the agency. But there was a long-term vision behind the destruction. The gutting of USAID has cleared a path for the next phase of a plan to reshape the global health landscape, say reproductive justice campaigners.

The legal action has made news and it will do damage. A potential disaster for the corporation and the UK, but a good day’s work for this president

Love Actually may be a terrible movie, but it provides one speech that’s hard not to wish into reality this Christmas. Keir Starmer, the actual, nonfictional UK prime minister, needs to channel the one played by Hugh Grant – and stand up to an absurd US president now bullying the BBC with a $10bn lawsuit.

Just imagine for one moment that Starmer decided to make Donald Trump’s claim against the BBC the final straw for a special relationship that is increasingly special only in a bad way. That would not be outlandish, for not only has Trump taken aim against a British broadcaster, but earlier this week it seemed that his promise of an AI “prosperity deal” (bought, let’s not forget, with gurning invites to Windsor Castle) is set to evaporate. As the fictional Love Actually PM once said: “A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend … Since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger.”

Jane Martinson is professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. She writes in a personal capacity

This precision-crafted Belfast police drama is a tense, thrilling watch that’s rich with detail. Has there ever been a more terrifying cliffhanger than it served up this season?

• The 50 best TV shows of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025

There haven’t been many police dramas quite like Blue Lights. While it might feel as if you’re simply watching a superior spin on a generic format – the gritty, urban cop show – Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson’s Belfast-set thriller is actually an outlier. Paradoxically, police procedurals usually work as entertainment because the police defy the procedures. The rule-breaking maverick cop is among the sturdiest of all TV archetypes. Blue Lights is the opposite. It works so brilliantly because it’s a stickler for the rules. It has to be.

Rule-breaking mavericks generally come a cropper in Blue Lights. Shane (Frank Blake) nearly loses his career because of some shady evidence-gathering via a mobile phone. When Aisling (Dearbháile McKinney) pays an after-hours visit to a domestic violence suspect, catches him abusing his wife and arrests him, she doesn’t get a pat on the back; she is suspended for behaving like a vigilante.

England team on tour are unlikely to mirror comeback orchestrated by legendary batter in the 1936-37 series

By the time you read this, day one of the third Test will have gently unfolded/catastrophically unspooled. You will already have some inkling of how (un)likely it is that England will be able to haul in Australia’s 2-0 lead and claw back the urn.

As you also probably know, only one side has overcome a 2-0 deficit to win a series, and that side was Australia, and that Australia included Don Bradman.

This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.

Anna Bilonozhenko describes how she was left seriously injured after Paul Doyle drove into crowd at parade

A woman who fled the war in Ukraine has said being seriously injured in the Liverpool FC trophy parade was “one of the most traumatic experiences” of her life.

Anna Bilonozhenko, 43, fractured her right knee when she was hit by Paul Doyle’s Ford Galaxy as it struck more than 130 people in just two minutes.

I had no idea what to do with the injured bird I named Belinda. But suddenly 3,000 Mancunians were happy to help, giving me a whole new appreciation of my home town

The plane pushed through wall after wall of sleet on its descent into Manchester. I’d had a sinking feeling during the flight that only deepened as I shuffled through the terminal. I resented having to be back in the city where I had grown up, after living on the other side of the world for what had felt like a lifetime.

After a few days, I headed out to get a haircut. My mind was miles away, back across an ocean, when I heard something hit the pavement. I looked down to see a pigeon on its back, spatchcocked, and twitching.

Negotiations among EU leaders continue ahead of critical European Council meeting in Brussels on Thursday

The last available Erasmus+ country report for the UK based on 2020 data shows that University of Glasgow, University of Bristol, and University of Edinburgh were the three top UK universities sending students abroad, with most people coming into the UK from Spain, France and Germany.

Just over 16,000 European students came into the UK as part of from the scheme in 2019/2020, with almost 6,000 trainees on top of that figure. 9,800 UK students and 6,500 trainees went in the other direction, data show.

Fuelled by social media and a rare visit by Japan’s elite wrestlers, growing numbers of Britons are taking part in the centuries-old sport

It is a centuries-old Japanese tradition, steeped in ceremony, with roots deep in the ancient faith of Shintoism … and it also happens to be super popular on TikTok.

Sumo is finding a new audience in the UK and, not only that, many Britons are now donning a loincloth – or mawashi – and taking up the sport themselves. So much so, in fact, that amateur wrestlers from across the UK and Ireland are gearing up for the first ever British Isles Sumo Championships, due to be held in six weeks.

This story of a teenage druid whose body is discovered in a peat bog has memorable moments – but its evocation of time and place is unconvincing

Anna North’s fourth book, Bog Queen, is a stranded or braided novel. First “a colony of moss” speaks – or rather, does not speak, but “if such a colony could tell the story of its life”, here’s some of what it might say. Then we have Agnes in 2018, American, tall, awkward, expert in forensic pathology and uncertain about everything else, including much of life in England. And then, in the first person, there is an iron age teenage girl, the druid of her village, riding towards a Roman town with her brother Aesu and friend Crab: “I had been druid for two seasons at that point and everyone said I was doing very well.”

Agnes has a post-doctoral fellowship in Manchester, from which she is summoned to the discovery of a body in a peat bog in Ludlow. The story shadows that of Lindow Man, found by peat harvesters in a bog near Wilmslow in 1984. In this novel, “Ludlow” is a town in which “the steel mill has closed down” leaving nothing but “[a] few shops, a Tesco, a Pizza Express”. It’s “the Gateway to the north” and a bus ride from Manchester. Novelists may of course invent time and place as they see fit, but it’s an odd choice to borrow the location of a bourgeois satellite town of Manchester and give it the name of a pretty medieval market town in the Welsh Marches, with a history that belongs to neither.

Some monikers are a perfect fit for the audience and reflect a player’s style of play; others are just too hot for TV

It’s September 2017, and a humble Challenge Tour quarter-final at the Robin Park Leisure Centre in Wigan is about to change the course of darting history. Luke Humphries and Martin Lukeman are two promising young throwers making their way on the Professional Darts Corporation’s second-tier tour, dreaming of the big time. But there’s one problem.

Humphries has styled himself “Cool Hand”, based on the 1967 Paul Newman film that to date he has still never watched. Lukeman, meanwhile, has decided to call himself “Cool Man”: less catchy, doesn’t really scan, but still just about works. And though the pair are firm friends, when the draw in Wigan pits them against each other, they decide that this best-of-nine match will settle matters once and for all. Winner gets the nickname. Loser has to think of something else.

Leave support is falling. That’s an opportunity the PM should seize before pro-Europe challengers for the Labour leadership do

Seven years ago, it took just eight words to electrify the Labour conference and to show the party was falling out of love with its then leader. Although not exactly the kind of soaring oratory that gets reproduced on T-shirts, the words were greeted with wild cheering as most of the hall rose in spontaneous acclamation.

As the commotion died down, Keir Starmer, then Brexit spokesman, stood at the podium, blinking in surprise. He wasn’t really accustomed to his speeches having such an effect. All he had said was: “Nobody is ruling out remain as an option.” But context is everything.

Tom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer, The Biography

Plus: which European champions were top at Christmas, players giving each other presents and other festive trivia

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“Just reading a book about Christmas No 1s,” begins Paul Savage. “The section about Wham!’s Last Christmas says Andrew Ridgeley was watching football at George Michael’s parents on a Sunday, when George got the melody and wandered off to record it upstairs. Greatness obviously awaited but I want to know: which match was it? It’s 1984, a Sunday and presumably on terrestrial TV. Was the second half worth Ridgeley not getting involved in the recording?”

Last Christmas by Wham! didn’t become a Christmas No 1 until 2023, having been kept off top spot by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas in 1984. As Paul mentioned, George Michael wrote the song in his childhood bedroom while his parents and Andrew Ridgeley watched football on TV downstairs.

• Third Test, day one: Australia 326-8

• Usman Khawaja digs in for 82 while Archer has 3-29

After the pandemonium of Perth and Brisbane’s pink-ball palooza came a more familiar opening day at Adelaide Oval. It was also roasting hot out in the middle – 35C on the mercury – and when the toss went against Ben Stokes and his embattled England players, they could easily have melted.

Instead, despite some sloppiness and Alex Carey’s magical century on the ground he calls home, the tourists kept plugging away with the fight that Stokes called for at 2-0 down. At stumps Australia were 326 for eight from 83 sapping overs – runs on the heritage-listed scoreboard, granted, but short of ambitions when the returning Pat Cummins got the choice first thing.