Han Duck-soo says he will step aside to avoid further chaos, as finance minister assumes acting presidency

On Friday The Korean won plummeted to its lowest level against the dollar since 2008’s global financial crisis. Both parties, the liberal Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and the conservative People Power Party (PPP), formerly the United Future Party (UFP).

The assembly approved the impeachment motion in a 192-0 vote on Friday. Governing party lawmakers boycotted the vote.

Han, the No 2 official in South Korea, has been the caretaker leader after President Yoon Suk Yeol was impeached by the assembly over his short-lived imposition of martial law this month.

Head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was at Yemen’s international airport when it was hit

The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have been attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea for more than a year to try to enforce a naval blockade on Israel, saying they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Israel’s year-long war in Gaza.

The strikes on shipping by the Houthis, who have also launched missiles at Israel, have prompted retaliatory strikes by the US and Britain. Here is an extract from our explainer on the group:

The Houthis are a Yemeni militia group named after their founder, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, and representing the Zaidi branch of Shia Islam.

They emerged in the 1980s in opposition to Saudi Arabia’s religious influence in Yemen.

The director of the latest movie in the bloodsucker tradition explains why he went back to the Transylvanian source for his version of one of cinema’s enduring adaptations

We are all drawn to archetypal stories. Fairytales, folktales, fables, myths: we tell them over and over again because they always have meaning in our lives. We can always see reflections of ourselves in Hansel and Gretel, Oedipus and King Lear. They can mean different things at different stages of our lives and be interpreted in different ways by individuals sitting in the same audience.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is among them. It one of the most influential novels of the turn of the last century and, along with the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Jesus Christ, among the most adapted works in cinema history.

Denise says Marsha is obsessed with her appearance and is wasting her money. Marsha says times have changed. You decide whose argument lacks foundation
Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Why does a 19-year-old need to use £200 night cream? Plus she already wants ‘baby Botox’

Kids now have 10-step skincare routines. Mum doesn’t understand the pressure I’m under

The Seleção had high hopes before heading to Switzerland but the ‘Battle of Berne’ quarter-final ended in a riot

The fallout from the defeat to Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final overshadowed Brazil’s buildup to Switzerland. Some of the Brazilian press had labelled the national team “bottlers” and what many saw as their inability to perform in crunch games had become a preoccupation.

The pressure had eased a little after the Seleção went unbeaten on their way to clinching the Campeonato Pan-Americano in 1952 – Brazil’s first tournament win on foreign soil. But losing the deciding match to Paraguay in the Sul-Americano the following year raised more questions over the team’s temperament. Alfredo Moreira Júnior had replaced Flávio Costa as manager. Zezé, as he was known, made fewer than 50 appearances as a midfielder at Flamengo, Palestra Itália (now Palmeiras) and Botafogo but would go on to clock up a staggering 474 games as Fluminense coach over several spells from the 1950s to the early 70s – a record that still stands today. Zezé was famed for being one of the country’s early strategists and tried to bring some balance to the Brazil squad that had fired in an impressive 22 goals in the World Cup in 1950 but were suspect at the back. The coach toyed with zonal marking, which made Brazil’s defence a little tighter but reduced their firepower.

Reform would have you believe that multiculturalism is an act of exclusion. In fact, the opposite is the case

As the dust settled on last summer’s English riots, I found myself taking part in a radio discussion on the question: has multiculturalism failed? It was a depressing response to events that were themselves deeply depressing: an all-too-vivid reminder of how acute Britain’s problems with racism and Islamophobia continue to be. Yet the radio discussion also showed how multiculturalism acts as a scapegoat when it comes to concerns about issues such as immigration and community cohesion. For decades now, multiculturalism has functioned as Britain’s bogeyman.

There was opposition to the term almost as soon as it began to gain traction in the late 1970s and 80s. Initially, multiculturalism was associated with policies that some local councils introduced to address inequalities in education. What this meant in practice was things such as an expanded religious education curriculum, the provision of halal meat options for Muslim schoolchildren, and the distribution of information about a child’s schooling in their parents’ first language.

Kieran Connell is a writer and historian at Queen’s University Belfast

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

If you can’t be bothered with an LBD, opt for a classic that’s casual but shouts party pizzazz

There is a moment about halfway through Christmas dinner when the cracker hats have slipped askew, shoes been kicked off under the table and belts un-notched, that marks the official end of the season of Making An Effort. A frenzied month of putting on mascara in the work loos and shivering on the way home because you are wearing your fancy coat instead of your warm one is over, up in flames along with the Christmas pudding brandy. Time to breathe out, shift into a lower gear, adjust to the sacred interlude of cheese and telly, half-eaten chocolate reindeers and gap-toothed jigsaws that is Twixmas.

So it can feel a little tricky, a few days later, to go full jazz-hands for New Year’s Eve. But that’s what we are doing.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Parker solar spacecraft successfully completes closest flyby of any human-made object

Nasa’s Parker solar probe is safe and operating normally after successfully completing the closest-ever approach to the sun by any human-made object, the space agency has said.

The spacecraft passed just 3.8m miles (6.1m km) from the solar surface on 24 December, flying into the sun’s outer atmosphere – the corona – on a mission to help scientists learn more about Earth’s closest star.

Why did we succeeded when other hominins didn’t, and can lessons from our evolutionary past help rein in our destructive impulses?

In an institute in Germany, scientists are growing “Neanderthalised” human brain cells in a dish. These cells form synapses and spark as they would have done in a living Neanderthal as she (they are female cells) foraged or breastfed or gazed out of a cave mouth at dusk. That is the spine-tingling opening gambit of a book co-authored by one of the directors of the institute, Johannes Krause, and the information that sets it apart from a host of popular science books that attempt to predict humanity’s future based on our evolutionary past.

A mere 90 genetic differences distinguish modern humans, Homo sapiens, from Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis. That’s paltry, given the roughly 20,000 genes that make up the human blueprint, and not all of them affect the brain. Yet those 90 differences could explain why Neanderthals died out, some 40,000 years ago, while we went on to dominate the planet. They could hold the key to how we, the apparently more adaptable human type, might adapt again before we destroy the ecosystems we depend on, and ourselves along with them.

We travelled with our folding e-bike for a cycling holiday in France with no problems on the way out, but on return it was not allowed on the train

At the end of August my partner and I went on a cycling holiday in France with our folding e-bikes. We travelled by Eurostar and had no problems on the way out.

However, on the return journey we were stopped by security at Paris Gare du Nord and told our batteries would not be allowed on the train as “they were at risk of exploding”.

Our photographer selects his favourite images of the opera productions he has shot in 2024; from Rossini in a deli to an athletic rake

• All pictures: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

From a Grade I-listed building in Norfolk designed by Sir John Soane to a minimalist cottage in the Scottish countryside

Nato’s warning reached me as I braced for a missile attack in Kyiv – where we’ve learned how to survive in the era of Russian hybrid warfare

Day 1,024 of the invasion. Kyiv, 7am. Friday the 13th. In a former life, someone would have observed that this is a day that portends bad luck. But in a country where shelling is a daily occurrence, it has become irrelevant. I wake up to the sound of an app on my phone warning me of an increased missile threat. While my partner and I are hiding in the corridor, I read the news that the Nato chief, Mark Rutte, has called on members of the US-led transatlantic alliance to “shift to a wartime mindset”.

With the first bang of the air defence system, a thought strikes me: for those who have not already been living with it for nearly three years, how would you explain this mindset? What is this wartime thinking?

The mist rolled in with such ­increasing density from the Trent that even­tually it was difficult to make out which Tottenham player was running down which blind alley. But what is crystal clear is ­Nottingham Forest’s momentum which, after Anthony Elanga’s third goal in successive games, has lifted them into third place in the Premier League.

Nuno Espírito Santo, Forest’s former Spurs manager, has organised his team so efficiently that they now have 34 points from 18 games, more than in the whole of last season – and the same tally they had at this stage in 1987‑88 when Brian Clough was ­manager, eight seasons after the European Cup had been retained.

• ‘Even the players think we have to add’
• Kyle Walker missed Everton draw with illness

Pep Guardiola and the Manchester City board will discuss new signings for the January transfer window this week, the manager said after his team dropped another two points in the 1-1 draw with Everton.

The result makes it one win in City’s last 13 matches and several key players are out, such as Rodri for the whole season, Oscar Bobb also for the long term and Jack Grealish, Rúben Dias, John Stones, Ederson and Matheus Nunes at present. Against Everton Kyle Walker was missing because of illness.

Secondhand tumble dryer and roast beef for vegetarian also in ‘worst present ever received’ poll

A burial plot and a toilet seat top the list of the nation’s all-time worst Christmas gifts, according to research that suggests one in five Britons receive an unwanted present in their annual haul.

More than 2,000 members of the public were polled by Which? about what they were given at Christmas last year, with 21% saying they had received an unwanted or unsuitable gift.

We cooked ragu and listened to records while lying on chaises longues. Then the M11 link road was built – and everything changed

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

In the mid-1980s, I was in my early 20s and was reading for the Bar in London. I was living in a mouldy Balham bedsit and returning regularly to the comfort zone of my native York, when a friend told me a room was going in a shared house in Leytonstone.

I wasn’t expecting much of E11. I wasn’t expecting trees, for example, but my walk from the attractive art deco tube station took me along roads better described as avenues. The house itself seemed almost the last one in London, an illusion created by the proximity of Wanstead Flats. It was a rangy, detached 1920s house, white with a red roof, and it had a name, but I’ll just call it the villa.

Andrew Martin is an English novelist; his latest book is The Night in Venice

With approval to run trains between Swindon, Taunton and Weston-super-Mare, services could start in 2026

The idea for the country’s first cooperative rail service came to Alex Lawrie in 2004 after another frustrating trip across Somerset.

Having moved to Yeovil four years earlier with his young family, his job as a cooperative development manager involved daily trips across the south-west trying to set up member-owned businesses.

Analysis shows fossil fuels are supercharging heatwaves, leaving millions prone to deadly temperatures

The climate crisis caused an additional six weeks of dangerously hot days in 2024 for the average person, supercharging the fatal impact of heatwaves around the world.

The effects of human-caused global heating were far worse for some people, an analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central has shown. Those in Caribbean and Pacific island states were the hardest hit. Many endured about 150 more days of dangerous heat than they would have done without global heating, almost half the year.

As reports of battlefield casualties emerge, Russian locals say presence of soldiers sent by Pyongyang is barely noticed

At dusk one afternoon last week, two dozen wounded North Korean soldiers were brought to one of the main hospitals in the Russian city of Kursk.

They were ushered into a specially designated floor, guarded by police, with access limited to translators and medical personnel.

Starring an Oscar-tipped Timothée Chalamet, James Mangold’s biopic retells Dylan’s electric early career, but it resonates with today’s toxic fame and politics. The creative team explain their process – and what Dylan makes of it

Bob Dylan is notoriously averse to others poking around in his past – he once suggested the legions of self-styled “Dylanologists” who examine his career in forensic detail should “get a life, please … you’re wasting your life”. So when he summoned the director James Mangold to meet him and discuss the Dylan biopic Mangold was making, it had the potential to go badly.

The film, A Complete Unknown, was already well under way. A script based on the folk musician and writer Elijah Wald’s acclaimed 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! had been written by Jay Cocks, best known as the screenwriter of Gangs of New York. Timothée Chalamet was slated to star as Dylan: perfect for the role, Mangold suggests, because “he’s thin and wiry and mercurial and super smart and restless and he’s also a really fucking good actor”.