Son of jailed former Brazilian president says spokesperson for ‘national symbol’ sandals is ‘openly leftwing’
Leaderless since its figurehead was jailed for attempting a coup, Brazil’s far right has found a new nemesis: the iconic flip-flop brand Havaianas, which has been “cancelled” by Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters over a television advert.
The controversy stems from the actor Fernanda Torres – the star of I’m Still Here, the Brazilian film that won an Oscar for best international feature – saying in the ad that she hoped audiences would not start 2026 “on the right foot”, but “with both feet”.
I would never want them to feel that they had been naughty if I couldn’t afford their gifts one year
In my house, Christmas Day looks very normal. My boys will wake me up at the crack of dawn then tumble downstairs, falling over each other, to find presents under the tree. As the tearing of wrapping paper cross-fades into screams of excitement, for a moment, everything feels exactly as it should. Except for one subtle difference: my children have never believed in Santa.
This isn’t the result of an “I don’t want to lie to my children” ideology or some Scroogist attempt to be different. It’s a deliberate choice I have made, one that is rooted in fear. Behind the fairy lights and goodwill of Christmas lurk financial demands that many families cannot meet. According to a YouGov poll for debt charity Step Change earlier this month, about one in three adults with children will struggle to afford Christmas this year. For many, the festive season brings anxiety, overdrafts and guilt rather than joy.
Matt Taylor is a writer, music producer and author of the Underclass Hero Substack newsletter
The 1960 film about a downtrodden insurance worker and his burgeoning crush is full of staccato repartee and unforgettable jokes. It’s barely aged a day
For romantic comedies and Christmas movies alike, a little misery can go a long way. No one understood this balancing act more than Billy Wilder, whose films ran the gamut from bottomless cynicism (Ace in the Hole) to gender-bending farce (Some Like it Hot). His 1960 film The Apartment splits the difference.
Like another yuletide classic, Carol, the film finds inspiration in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which depicts an extramarital affair briefly consummated in the bed of a friend’s apartment. In an old interview, Wilder says he was compelled by a character “who comes back home and climbs into the warm bed the lovers just left”, and so The Apartment’s hero, CC “Bud” Baxter, was born.
She won an Emmy for her electric performance in the Netflix smash hit, but the casting process wasn’t exactly hiccup-free. The actor opens up about a year of success, struggle – and how she nearly became a footballer
For a while, Erin Doherty ignored Stephen Graham’s calls. Not deliberately, she stresses with a laugh. “I’m just really bad at my phone. I’m such a technophobe, and he knew that,” she says. They had made the Disney+ show A Thousand Blows together, in which Doherty plays an East End crime boss in Victorian London, and Graham had talked about an idea he wanted to dramatise, about a teenage boy who is catastrophically radicalised by online misogyny. A couple of months after they’d wrapped A Thousand Blows, Graham and his wife and producing partner, Hannah Walters, kept trying to get in touch. “I was getting voice notes from him and Hannah being like, ‘Erin, pick up your phone!’” Doherty’s girlfriend told her to ring him back and Graham offered her the role in Adolescence. She said yes on the spot, without reading the script.
Since it was screened on Netflix in March, Adolescence has had nearly 150m views. It sparked a huge cultural conversation; it was shown in secondary schools and its creators were invited to Downing Street. Did they have any idea it would become such a phenomenon? “No, and I’m not sure you’re supposed to,” says Doherty when we speak. She is chatty and down-to-earth, even in the year her career went stellar. As well as starring in A Thousand Blows, her role in Adolescence – as Briony Ariston, a psychologist – won her an Emmy for best supporting actress. “But you do know when you’re a part of something that’s good and deserves to be seen, and we knew that about it. I think because it came from such a genuine place, a place of real purity and rawness, it [fed into] the making of it. From day one, it had that electricity.”
Throughout his career, Al Chapman has spent several months cooking “on ice” – that is, in Antarctica. During the summer of 2021-22, the chef was one of three kitchen crew stationed at Scott Base, New Zealand’s only Antarctic research station. The dining hall was the hub of social activity, serving breakfast, morning tea, lunch and dinner for up to 85 people at its peak. It’s like working in a restaurant, says Chapman – one where you can sometimes see penguins from the kitchen.
Speaking of penguins: Chapman is adamant they aren’t eaten, unlike in the early days of Antarctic exploration. Not just because they’re protected under the Antarctic treaty, or that starvation is no longer a serious concern; Chapman says it’s important to serve food people like, especially when they’re working in such an isolated part of the world, in extreme conditions.
The beautiful despair of Cameron Winter, the perfectly imperfect life of Lily Allen, the maximalist R&B of Dijon and more: here’s what our readers have had on heavy rotation • The 50 best albums of 2025
The production is uniquely rhythmic and layered, the instrumental performances are all pretty bulletproof, and Cameron Winter’s writing is just ridiculously good. He is able to show us beauty and despair, and the beauty in despair and the despair in beauty. The best track to me is Islands of Men, which builds over this hypnotic instrumental while Winter sings about isolation and self-illusion. Other highlights would be the title track and Half Real, which feels like a dizzy, intoxicated folk song. Geese are the next big thing. Freddie, 18, Surrey
The actor has been doing it all to sell his 50s-set ping-pong epic but, as a year of A-list flops shows, there’s no formula for guaranteed success
On 15 November, without prior announcement, one of the defining comedies of the year was posted to Timothée Chalamet’s Instagram account. Captioned only “video93884728.mp4”, the 18-minute video at first appeared to be a leaked Zoom call in which the Oscar-nominated actor pitched marketing ideas for the movie Marty Supreme to bemused staff at the indie production house A24. It might take a few minutes, and at least one shock interjection of “schwap!” from the very serious-seeming star, to realize that it’s a joke. Well, sort of – the meta video, in which an egomaniacal Chalamet proposes they “highlight international cooperation” by painting both the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower a “very specific shade orange”, satirizes the tedium of movie marketing desperate to get people in seats, while also introducing a harebrained marketing strategy that’s unabashedly thirsty to get people in seats.
The “leak” heralded an unconventional and extremely committed press campaign for Josh Safdie’s 50s-set ping-pong epic that has turned movie marketing – so often formulaic, cloying or apathetic – into eye-catching performance art. “Movie marketing is trying to be passive, trying to be chic,” Chalamet says in the video, for which he wrote the script. “We’re not trying to be chic.”
Ownership of Frauen-Bundesliga is being taken over by the clubs, who want to keep pace with game in England
“The reason we started this whole process was a fear of losing more and more the connection to the top,” says Katharina Kiel, the head of women’s football at Eintracht Frankfurt.
Alongside her role at one of Germany’s more successful women’s football teams, Kiel was this month elected president of the new Women’s Bundesliga Association, after all 14 clubs agreed to split from the German Football Federation (DFB) and form their own committee to take ownership of the league to further commercialise and grow it, with the 2027-28 campaign a targeted start date.
Epstein files reveal messages between his accomplice and a man who appears to be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor
A man identified as “A” who appears to be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor discussed facilitating meetings with “inappropriate friends” with Jeffrey Epstein’s accompliceGhislaine Maxwell.
Among the latest tranche of Epstein files are email exchanges in 2001 and 2002 between Maxwell and a correspondent who appears as “The Invisible Man” in the email thread and says that he is writing from Balmoral.
Bill C-12 includes many changes around border security along with new ineligibility rules for refugee claimants
Canada’s Liberal government is pushing through sweeping new legislation targeting refugees that observers fear will usher in a new era of US-style border policies, fueling xenophobia and the scapegoating of immigrants.
Bill C-12, or Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, includes many changes around border security along with new ineligibility rules for refugee claimants.
Preston court finds Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein guilty of preparing acts of terrorism after buying AK-47s from undercover officer
Two men have been found guilty of plotting to “kill as many Jewish people as they could”, in what detectives believe would have been the UK’s worst terror attack if it hadn’t been thwarted.
Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, have been found guilty at Preston crown court of preparing acts of terrorism between 13 December 2023 and 9 May 2024. Jurors were told they were Islamist extremists with a “visceral dislike” of Jewish people who planned a marauding attack in Greater Manchester.
Two other people held on suspicion of criminal damage after protest at insurance company’s offices
Greta Thunberg has been arrested in London after taking part in a protest holding a sign expressing support for Palestine Action-affiliated hunger strikers.
The Swedish activist arrived after a protest had begun outside the offices of an insurance company in London and she sat down with a sign saying “I support the Palestine Action prisoners. I oppose genocide.”
I still can’t get over Sinners. It’s what the cinema was made for. It looked amazing; its sound was so rich and textured; and the juke joint dance sequence was a genuine WTF surprise that could have been grim but was utter genius. And if you haven’t seen it, please stay for the scene that comes mid-credits: it has to be my favourite five minutes of film all year. Michael, Manchester
If the train had had a single working toilet I would have been fine. Ditto if it had been the fast route. But I was on the slow train to Derby and knew I was in trouble ...
I had been visiting my boyfriend in London for the weekend. He was a hard-up student and I was still at sixth-form, but beer was pretty cheap in 2000, so we had been out for a few pints. Now we were racing to St Pancras so I could get the last train home to Derby.
I legged it through the station and made it on to the train with seconds to spare. No time for the loo, but I’d relieve myself on the train. Or so I thought.
Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro warns Trump administration may ‘destabilise the entire region’ amid rising tensions
While all eyes are on the four-month-long US military campaign against Venezuela, the White House has been quietly striking security agreements with other countries to deploy US troops across Latin America and the Caribbean.
As Donald Trump announced a blockade on oil tankers under sanctions and ordered the seizure of vessels amid airstrikes that have killed more than 100 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the US secured military deals with Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago in the past week alone.
The activist and author of Here Comes the Sun discusses rapid advances in solar and wind power and how the US ceded leadership in the sector to its main rival
Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature, published in 1989, warned early of the dangers of climate changes and he has been campaigning and writing ever since. His most recent book, Here Comes the Sun, takes a look at the soaring potential of renewable energy
Is your latest book a more optimistic take on this world?
Segment that Bari Weiss had removed provides in-depth look at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison
A 60 Minutes episode investigating a brutal prison in El Salvador, which CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled from the air on Sunday, appeared online on Monday after appearing on a Canadian TV app.
The segment, which runs for nearly 14 minutes and was viewed by the Guardian, provides an in-depth look at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot) prison in El Salvador. It opens with footage of the megaprison and shows detainees being shackled upon arrival in El Salvador.
Ryanair has been fined €256m (£223m) by Italy’s competition authority for abusing its dominant market position to limit sales of tickets by online travel agents.
The authority said Europe’s largest airline had “implemented an abusive strategy to hinder travel agencies” via an “elaborate strategy” of technical obstacles for agents and passengers to make it difficult for online travel agents to sell Ryanair tickets and instead force sales through its own website.
Tesla continued a run of weak sales in the EU in November, with new car registrations of Elon Musk’s brand down a third, while Chinese carmakers’ sales soared.
Tesla sold 12,130 new cars across the EU last month, down from 18,430 in November 2024, shrinking its market share from 2.1% to 1.4%, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (Acea), a lobby group.
Away from our families, my flatmate and I hung out in his bedroom, Christmas lunch on our laps, watching a poorly written, jarringly inappropriate movie
In 2022, I was living in a flat in north London above a chicken shop, with two flatmates and a cockroach infestation (what did we expect, said the landlord, living above a takeaway?). My flatmate was from Lithuania, and was due to go home in January, and our other flatmate, his girlfriend, was away for Christmas. I’d been home to Canada the month before, so for Christmas Day itself it was just the two of us.
I bought a small chicken to roast, and served it with stuffing I’d brought back from Canada – it’s the same concept as the stuffing in the UK but somehow fluffier and with more texture – and some pasta. I made brussels sprouts, trying to recreate a dish I like from a restaurant in my home town by cooking them with bacon, maple syrup, parmesan and a mayonnaise drizzle. It wasn’t very nice. We had some prosecco that my flatmate had won in a competition, even though neither of us really liked prosecco. It felt like we should, because it was Christmas.
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