Exclusive: Move is part of Trump’s broader crackdown on leftwing groups, including designation of antifa as ‘domestic terrorism’ group

• US politics live – latest updates

The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, instructed law enforcement officials on Thursday to investigate antifa and other supposed domestic terror groups, and specifically directed them to search for “tax crimes” the groups may have committed, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian.

The document signals how the Trump administration and Bondi are ramping up efforts to crack down on leftwing groups. Antifa, short for antifascist, is not a clearly defined organization, but rather a loose network of activists. Trump signed an executive order in September declaring it a domestic terrorism organization – something legal experts say he does not have the authority to do.

Move from RFK Jr’s advisers mirrors Trump team’s regressive approach to longstanding vaccine guidance

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s vaccine advisers voted on Friday morning to limit hepatitis vaccines in a major move signaling the Trump administration’s regressive approach to vaccines that have been given safely and effectively for decades.

The panel of advisers to US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr voted to remove the broad recommendation that all newborns in the US receive a hepatitis B vaccine.

Decision by four countries to pull out over Israel’s inclusion is significant for the contest but crisis may not be existential

The decision by four European broadcasters to boycott next year’s Eurovision over Israel’s inclusion is undoubtedly a watershed moment in the 70-year history of the song contest.

One of the few genuinely popular, non-elitist and pan-European cultural events will be without Spain, one of the “big five” nations in terms of financial contributions; Ireland, which has won the contest more times than any other country bar Sweden; 1956 founding member the Netherlands; and Slovenia, symbolic of the EU’s eastward enlargement.

Nathaniel Spencer, from Birmingham, is accused of 45 offences, including some against children under 13

A former doctor has been charged with carrying out sexual assaults against 38 people who were patients in his care.

Nathaniel Spencer, from Birmingham, is accused of dozens of acts of sexual assault, some of them against children younger than 13, between 2017 and 2021.

• CEO Zak Brown: ‘We’re going to do what we can to win’

• Verstappen could pip Norris and Piastri to championship

Zak Brown has said McLaren will use team orders for Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri if required to ensure the team secure the Formula One drivers’ championship in the season finale at Abu Dhabi on Sunday.

With Red Bull’s Max Verstappen trailing Norris by 10 points, the Dutchman still has a good shot at taking the title from McLaren’s grasp. Piastri is a further six points back. Having spent all season allowing their drivers to race and attempting to be scrupulously fair to both, Brown announced at the Yas Marina circuit that if circumstances rendered it necessary, they would use orders.

• UK government freezes assets of Gurpreet Singh Rehal

• Rehal accused of recruiting for Sikh militant group

The UK government has frozen the financial assets of a key member of Morecambe FC’s ownership group after he was accused of supporting a terrorist organisation in India.

Morecambe say they have ceased relations with Gurpreet Singh Rehal, previously described as the head of communications and director of marketing for the club’s owner, Panjab Warriors.

If you had the chance to write just one last letter, to whom would you send it?

The Danish postal service will deliver its last letter at the end of this month to focus on packages, citing the “increasing digitalisation” of society.

While the public will still be able to send letters through the distributor DAO, it made us think about how we would use that last chance to send a letter.

All 18-year-old men to be screened for suitability for armed forces, but proposal falls short of conscription

The German parliament has rubberstamped a new model for military service that aims to boost its armed forces as thousands of school pupils demonstrated across the country against the plans.

The change will include the obligatory screening of all 18-year-old men to gauge their suitability to serve in the military from 1 January, but does not include conscription, as favoured by some conservative politicians.

Many users of the app were shocked, this week, by this addition to the Spotify Wrapped roundup – especially twentysomethings who were judged to be 100

“Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally.” Those words were the first inkling I had that I was about to receive some very bad news.

I woke up on Wednesday with a mild hangover after celebrating my 44th birthday. Unfortunately for me, this was the day Spotify released “Spotify Wrapped”, its analysis of (in my case) the 4,863 minutes I had spent listening to music on its platform over the past year. And this year, for the first time, they are calculating the “listening age” of all their users.

Pulled by Steam and Epic Games Store, indie horror Horses shook up the industry before it was even released. Now it’s out, all the drama surrounding it seems superfluous

On 25 November, award-winning Italian developer Santa Ragione, responsible for acclaimed titles such as MirrorMoon EP and Saturnalia, revealed that its latest project, Horses, had been banned from Steam - the largest digital store for PC games. A week later, another popular storefront, Epic Games Store, also pulled Horses, right before its 2 December launch date. The game was also briefly removed from the Humble Store, but was reinstated a day later.

The controversy has helped the game rocket to the top of the digital stores that are selling it, namely itch.io and GOG. But the question remains – why was it banned? Horses certainly delves into some intensely controversial topics (a content warning at the start details, “physical violence, psychological abuse, gory imagery, depiction of slavery, physical and psychological torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault, suicide, and misogyny”) and is upsetting and unnerving.

Designer Michael Schmidt’s 36-piece collection was made from the wool of rams who have shown same-sex attraction

When a ram tips its head back, curls its upper lip, and takes a deep breath – what is known in the world of animal husbandry as a “flehmen response” – it is often a sign of arousal. Sheep have a small sensory organ located above the roof of the mouth, and the flehmen response helps to flood it with any sex pheromones wafting about.

Usually, rams flehmen when they encounter ewes during the mating period, according to Michael Stücke, a farmer with 30 years of experience raising sheep in Westphalia, Germany. But on Stücke’s farm, the rams flehmen “all the time”.

The director’s two-part revenge saga has now been released as one mammoth movie with tweaks and additions here and there

Quentin Tarantino and his epic revenge saga Kill Bill had, as the vengeful lead character in the movie keeps saying, unfinished business. Actually, Tarantino mostly finished the business of re-integrating two volumes of Kill Bill into a single feature as early as 2006, just a couple of years after the release of Kill Bill: Vol 2. But while that version played at Cannes and had a few more recent runs at Tarantino-owned theaters in Los Angeles, it never reached home video (though some bootlegs attempted to recreate it) or a wide theatrical release. That’s all changed with this weekend’s debut of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, a four-and-a-half-hour version of the movie hitting over 1,000 screens across North America.

Tarantino made long movies before and after Kill Bill; features that run over two-and-a-half hours make up the vast majority of his filmography. But in the early 2000s, Kill Bill represented a major pivot for the film-maker, away from his then-signature crime dramas with healthy helpings of black comedy. Tarantino and his Pulp Fiction star Uma Thurman cooked up the character of the Bride – “Q & U” are named as providers of the source material in the credits – as a pregnant ex-assassin who becomes the victim of a vicious wedding-eve attack from her ex-boss/lover (that would be Bill) and their lethal colleagues (those would be the other four on her “death list five”, a phrase whose rhythm recalls Fox Force Five, the fictional TV pilot Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction once starred in). The Bride unexpectedly survives the shooting, goes into a coma, and wakes up years later desperate for revenge, forming the backbone of a movie that pays extensive tribute to the kung fu, exploitation, and revenge movies of Tarantino’s youth – and his dreams, if the vividly colorful look of the film is any indication.

Robbie addresses backlash to casting Elordi as a character described by Brontë as ‘dark-skinned’, while Fennell praises her female star’s ‘big dick energy’

Margot Robbie has come out in defence of Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which she is playing Cathy opposite Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff.

Despite being months away from release, the film has attracted criticism for its casting as well as alterations that Fennell has made to the characters. In an interview with Vogue magazine, Robbie said: “I get it … there’s nothing else to go off at this point until people see the movie.”

From El Jannah’s webpage dedicated to ‘health-conscious individuals’ to Habibi Chicken’s ‘Gym Bro’ pack, businesses are catering to the post-leg day crowd

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Popularised in Australia by Balkan and Lebanese immigrants, charcoal chicken has long been part of our comfort-food canon. But recently, the humble chicken shop has had a renaissance – driven by fresh takes on the classics, the expansion of longstanding chains and a surge of protein-conscious gym goers.

In June, charcoal chicken chain El Jannah, which has more than 50 stores, launched a page on its website dedicated to protein and macros – complete with recommendations for the best post-leg day order – a clear nod to the fitness crowd.

• Drops not down to poor preparation, says Root

• ‘Not great visuals’ at Gabba, says Australia’s Weatherald

Joe Root has insisted that human error rather than poor preparation lay behind a string of dropped catches during a day of toil in the field for ­England. Travis Head, Alex Carey – twice – Josh Inglis and Michael Neser all got lifelines as Australia ended day two of the second Test on 378 for six, a lead of 44.

“We worked as hard as we could in the lead-up to this, we had five days of prep and we did a huge amount of catching,” Root said. “We made sure we utilised those two [training] sessions under lights well. You can’t replicate that surface, the bounce, the way the nicks come. It’s never going to be exactly the same, it’s never going to be perfect. All you can do is give yourself the best possible chance and I think we’ve done that.

Narendra Modi says energy security is ‘pillar of the India-Russia partnership’ as two leaders meet in Delhi

Vladimir Putin has told the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, that Russia is ready to continue “uninterrupted” shipments of oil to India, signalling a defiant stance to the US as the two leaders met in Delhi and affirmed that their ties were “resilient to external pressure”.

The statement, made on Friday after the annual India-Russia summit, appeared to be directed at western countries – particularly the US – that have attempted to pressure New Delhi into scaling back its ties to Moscow.

Ruling likely to put European Commission on collision course with billionaire, and possibly Donald Trump

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Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m (£105m) after it was found in breach of new EU digital laws, in a ruling likely to put the European Commission on a collision course with the US billionaire and potentially Donald Trump.

The breaches, under consideration for two years, included what the EU said was a “deceptive” blue tick verification badge given to users and the lack of transparency of the platform’s advertising.

Web infrastructure provider says problem lasted half an hour and was not an attack, weeks after larger outage

A host of websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector went offline on Friday morning after fresh problems at Cloudflare – the company’s second outage in less than a month.

Cloudflare said the outage came after it adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week, and was not an attack. Earlier, it noted a separate issue reported with its application programming interfaces.

Official text, signed by Trump, outlines plan to ‘cultivate resistance’ in EU nations to their ‘current trajectory’

Donald Trump’s administration has said that Europe faces “civilisational erasure” within the next two decades as a result of migration and EU integration. In a policy document, it argues that the US must “cultivate resistance” within the continent to “Europe’s current trajectory”.

Billed as “a roadmap to ensure America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history and the home of freedom on earth”, the US National Security Strategy makes explicit Washington’s support for Europe’s far-right parties.

⚽ Draw begins in Washington DC at 5pm GMT / 12pm local
⚽ Draw explainer | Qualifiers | Follow on Bluesky | Mail us

Benjamin gets in touch: “I am webmaster of www.national-football-teams.com !

“As you can imagine, draw day is quite something when international football is one of your things. I want to chip in on possible groups of death. These are the two of the hardest groups I could come up with:

Argentina

Morocco

Norway

Italy (If they qualify)

Spain

Colombia

Ivory Coast

Denmark (If they qualify)

Canada

Austria

Qatar

Cape Verde

Belgium

Iran

South Africa

Curacao

From an enraging indictment of Spotify to Del Amitri frontman Justin Currie’s account of Parkinson’s and a compelling biography of Tupac Shakur, here are five titles that strike a chord

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
Liz Pelly (Hodder & Stoughton)
Enraging, thoroughly depressing, but entirely necessary, Mood Music offers a timely, forensically researched demolition of Spotify. In Pelly’s account, the music streaming giant views music as a kind of nondescript sonic wallpaper, artists as an unnecessary encumbrance to the business of making more money and its target market not as music fans, but mindless drones who don’t really care what they’re listening to, ripe for manipulation by its algorithm. Sharp business practices and evidence of its deleterious effect on the quality and variety of new music abound: the worst thing is that Pelly can’t really come up with a viable alternative in a world where convenience trumps all.

Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty
Kate Mossman (Bonnier)
There’s no doubt that Men of a Certain Age is a hard sell, a semi-autobiographical book in which the New Statesman’s arts editor traces her obsession with often wildly unfashionable, ageing male artists – Queen’s Roger Taylor, Bruce Hornsby, Steve Perry of Journey, Jon Bon Jovi among them – through a series of interviews variously absurd, insightful, hair-raising and weirdly touching. But it’s elevated to unmissable status by Mossman’s writing, which is so sparkling, witty and shrewd that your personal feelings about her subjects are rendered irrelevant amid the cocktail of self-awareness, affection and sharp analysis she brings to every encounter. In a world of music books retelling tired legends, Men of a Certain Age offers that rare thing: an entirely original take on rock history.

As it turns out, not that much

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