A collection of columns by the German Booker winner reveals a keen eye for details that mark the passing of time

Jenny Erpenbeck wrote the pieces collected in this compact yet kaleidoscopic book for a column in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; published in German in 2009, they now appear in an English translation by Kurt Beals, following the immense success of Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos, which won the 2024 International Booker prize.

It’s interesting and instructive to reflect on what German newspaper readers made of the column in the early years of the new millennium, nearly two decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall. For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form – apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrötchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for a more elaborate and wealthy clientele – she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of ennui and mild querulousness with which journalists hope to woo a time-pressed but disenchanted or nostalgic readership, Erpenbeck smuggled metaphysics, politics and history.

• Allen sacked eight times in bruising Houston loss

• Rookie Calen Bullock seals win with late interception

• Shakir, Cook star but title-tipped Bills fall to 7–4

Little went right for Josh Allen in a frustrating game Thursday night against the Houston Texans.

And still he came close to willing the Buffalo Bills to a victory before an interception in the final minute sealed their fate in a 23-19 loss.

Miss Mexico Fatima Bosch has been crowned the 74th Miss Universe, after accusing an organiser in Thailand of insulting her

As contestants prepared to walk the runway for the 74th Miss Universe competition on Friday, the pageant’s organisers were in damage control.

“In light of recent public statements and social media posts, the Miss Universe Organization considers it necessary to clarify certain inaccuracies,” a statement by the organisation began. It was addressing allegations of vote rigging – but it could just have easily been referring to a myriad of other scandals the event has seen over recent weeks.

The temperature has truly dropped, so get a pot of something warming and delicious going on the stove. Plus: Amy Poon’s perfect post-pub fare

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At the risk of sounding like a British cliche, can we take a moment to discuss the change in the weather? This week’s sudden drop in temperature has our house excited for potential snow (the children are giddy), with everything suddenly feeling a lot more wintry. New coats are on the hooks, thermals are being dug out and a casserole dish filled with some sort of soup, stew or stock seems to be permanently ticking away on the hob. These range from quick, warming weeknight dinners to leisurely, slow-cooked weekend meals.

Whatever the time of year, I always have speedy packets of wontons and gyozas in the freezer, and cook them depending on how I feel (fried and steamed versus boiled and soupy). At the moment, I am craving warmth and nourishment, and Meera Sodha’s quickish vegan wonton soup hits all the right spots; an added bonus is that it is a soup my children can get on board with, too. I rely on my brothy braised chicory and beans (pictured top) to get me through working-from-home lunches, when I don’t have much time, as well as Rukmini Iyer’s spiced black bean and tomato soup, which is equally speedy and comforting.

It is uncomfortable to watch royals appealing to the nation’s best instincts while an elected government feels compelled to chase our worst

Every child has the right to feel safe, loved and as if they belong.

Put like that, there is nothing remotely radical about what the Princess of Wales used her first public speech since recovering from cancer to say: that families need consistently nurturing environments to flourish; that the world could actually use a bit more tenderness; that we are all responsible for the culture in which future generations grow up; and that (as she told an audience of blue-chip employers) caring for others is work deserving of respect. It’s the reasons why those motherhood-and-apple-pie values don’t always prevail in real life, rather than the values themselves, that are generally too contentious for the carefully apolitical royals. Yet what were once safe, bland nothings are increasingly no longer so – and not just because of the awkward shadow now cast over any royal initiative involving childhood by the former prince Andrew’s infamous association with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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The pristine copy of Superman No 1, the character’s first solo title from 1939, was discovered in an attic in California last year

A copy of Superman No 1 that was discovered in an attic in California last year has become the world’s most expensive comic book after selling for US$9.12m (£6.96m, A$14.14m).

Superman No 1 was published in 1939 and was the Man of Steel’s first solo title. It marked the first time a character that debuted in a comic book had their own title devoted entirely to them.

In May, Cannes went weak at the knees for Harry Lighton’s tale of BDSM and bootlicking in suburbia. Ahead of its release, the director and his stars reveal the explicit shots snipped from the final cut and discuss why Pride has become too sanitised

Harry Melling knows the secret to being a good boot-licker. “You want to give a decent, satisfying, sexy lick,” says the 36-year-old actor, who has the umlaut eyes and nasal tones of Nicholas Lyndhurst. “Once you get to the toe-cap, you need to make sure they can really feel your tongue through the leather.”

Melling, barely recognisable from his childhood role as wretched Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, learned this new skill while preparing for the award-winning BDSM romcom Pillion. He plays Colin, a timid traffic warden who becomes the willing submissive to a taciturn biker named Ray. Listening intently to Melling’s boot-licking tips in this London hotel room are his Pillion partners-in-kink: Harry Lighton, the film’s 33-year-old writer-director, whose flat cap and smirk lend him a roguish look, and Alexander Skarsgård, 49, who plays Ray, and is dressed today in a slobby ensemble – red sweatshirt, blue tracksuit bottoms, black shoes – that fails to spoil his pin-up prettiness.

Tether tokens found to facilitate scheme that enables sanctions evasion and launders money for the Kremlin

A cryptocurrency backed by one of Nigel Farage’s biggest donors has been used to help Russia fight its war against Ukraine, British investigators say.

The National Crime Agency has spent four years trying to crack a multibillion-dollar scheme that exchanges cash from drug and gun sales in the UK for crypto, digital tokens that are designed to hide their users’ identities.

‘The world thinks Palestinians don’t need help any more,’ aid organiser says, despite desperate need as winter nears

Fundraisers collecting for Palestinian civilians in Gaza are seeing a “catastrophic” drop-off in donations since the ceasefire was announced in October.

Donations collected by volunteers and funnelled to needy families living in temporary shelters and struggling with illness, hunger and malnutrition have been harder to raise since then, according to organisers, many of whom have been running volunteer initiatives for Palestinians in Gaza on third-party crowdfunding platforms over the past two years.

Great and good pay tribute in Washington but honouring of former vice-president was an exercise in omission

You suspected that Maga had not conquered the Washington national cathedral when Bill Kristol was spotted at a men’s urinal conversing with Chris Wallace. You knew it for sure when James Carville, Anthony Fauci and Rachel Maddow were seen sitting close to one another in the nave.

The funeral of the 46th US vice-president, Dick Cheney, who died earlier this month aged 84, was a throwback to a less raucous and rancorous time. Ex-presidents and vice-presidents, Democratic and Republican, made small talk, but Donald Trump, who spent Thursday crying treason and calling for Democrats to be put to death, and his deputy JD Vance were not invited.

• Stadium planned to feature 12 chimney-like towers

• Club chair Tom Wagner sees it as ‘beacon for excellence’

Birmingham City have unveiled designs of their striking new 62,000-capacity stadium, the Birmingham City Powerhouse, which the Championship club say will open for the 2030-31 season.

The stadium, which features 12 chimney-like towers inspired by the city’s industrial heritage, will dominate the Birmingham skyline and be visible up to 40 miles away. One tower will include a lift to Birmingham’s highest bar, offering city-wide views.

As she launches her first children’s book, the actor answers your questions on Alan Partridge, her iconic green dress and thrilling 10-year-olds with a bullseye

Have you read or listened to the delightful chapter in Alan Partridge’s Big Beacon where he demands: “We came for Knightley, we want to see Knightley, where’s Knightley?” dcieron
No! Do I want to see it? Or is it something that will make me cringe and want to hide under the sofa? I do like Alan Partridge. He’s kind of terrifying but amazing, so now that I know I’ve been a part of Alan Partridge, I should check it out.

When you first wore the green dress in Atonement, did you realise how iconic it would be? Murdomania
I thought it was a bloody good dress. It never actually lasted. It was so fragile that, any time you touched the front, it would completely break, so they had to make a load of different fronts. By the end, I was thoroughly sick with having the dress remade on me. But it’s a beautiful dress and I had no idea that it would have the life that it did.

I guessed it would be worth a couple of hundred pounds at most, but it was a preparatory print for his famous 1639 etching The Goldweigher

My father died 20 years ago, when I was 26, and my mother died 10 years later. I’ve always felt grateful that one of the things they passed on to me was a love of art. My dad, Alan Barlow, was a stage designer, a Benedictine monk and then, after marrying my mother, Grace – who was a GP – he became a full-time artist.

In his studio in Norfolk, there were two big Victorian plan chests, where he stored paper and sketches he had created. He was also an art collector and some of the drawers contained artworks he had bought but didn’t have wall space for. For a long time, I didn’t feel ready to go through everything in his studio. I always felt connected to him when I went in there.

Milan allegations link Aleksandar Vučić to 1990s shootings of civilians in Bosnian capital by Italians and others

• In the snipers’ sights: life under fire during siege of Sarajevo – in pictures

A Croatian investigative reporter has filed a complaint with Milan prosecutors against the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, for his alleged involvement in the “Sarajevo safari” affair, in which snipers from Italy and other countries allegedly travelled to the Bosnian capital to kill civilians during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s.

Last week, Milan prosecutors launched an investigation aimed at identifying the Italians allegedly involved on charges of voluntary murder aggravated by cruelty and abject motives.

Little is taught about the murderous, incompetent dictatorship – and now almost one in five young people say Franco was good for the country

At first sight, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky voiced army officer with a shaky grasp on non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco’s ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Giles Tremlett is the author of El Generalisimo and Ghosts of Spain

Users noted that in a raft of now-deleted posts, the chatbot would frequently rank Musk top in any given field

Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, has been telling users the world’s richest person is smarter and more fit than anyone in the world, in a raft of recently deleted posts that have called into question the bot’s objectivity.

Users on X using the artificial intelligence chatbot in the past week have noted that whatever the comparison – from questions of athleticism to intelligence and even divinity – Musk would frequently come out on top.

Mexican woman Ary Gisell Silva, 23, admitted she instigated robbery of Jake and Callum Robinson, as well as American Jack Carter Rhoad

A Mexican court sentenced a woman to 20 years in prison for her involvement in the April 2024 killings of two Australian surfers and an American at a surfing hotspot in Baja California, judicial authorities said Thursday.

The victims were Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson, aged 30 and 33, respectively, and Jack Carter Rhoad, a 30-year-old US citizen.

The tale of Prof Sarah Blagden’s attempt to find a treatment that stops the disease is the rarest of things – TV that makes you dare to hope

Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures should come with a rare warning: may make you feel hopeful for humanity and marginally less convinced that we are all willingly leaping into a handcart and smoothing our own paths to hell.

This is an hour that outlines the work being done to create vaccines against cancers. Lung cancer, specifically, at the moment – 50,000 cases of which are diagnosed each year in the UK and which is the most common cause of cancer-related death – but with the potential to prevent many more types in the future.

Exclusive: The Guardian understands Brazil had been planning to drop a roadmap to a transition away from fossil fuels amid opposition from petro states

Countries supporting a phase-out of fossil fuels at the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil have threatened to block any agreement that does not include such a commitment, in a significant escalation of tensions at the crunch talks, the Guardian can reveal.

The simmering row over a potential roadmap for the “transition away from fossil fuels” boiled over on Thursday night when a group of at least 29 countries signed a strongly worded letter to Brazil, the Cop presidency. The leaked letter demanded that the roadmap be included in the outcome of the talks, which are due to end on Friday but likely to carry on into the weekend.

The 1940 painting of Kahlo asleep in bed has surpassed the record set by the $44.4m sale of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 in 2014

A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m, A$84.7m) at a New York art auction, setting a new top sale price for a work by any female artist.

El sueño (La cama), or The Dream (The Bed), which depicts Kahlo asleep in a bed with a smiling skeleton wrapped in dynamite on the canopy above her, sold on Thursday night at a Sotheby’s auction of surrealist art after four minutes of bidding.

Haigh’s name to be added to Wall of Names at Freedom Park in Pretoria, alongside former Australian PMs Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser

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The former Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh would rightly be proud of his inclusion on South Africa’s Wall of Names at the country’s Freedom Park, honouring those who resisted apartheid.

But the many who knew and loved Haigh, one of Australia’s least conventional but more effective and fearless diplomats, suspect he might also have been somewhat bemused that his name was being added to the wall on Friday at the same time as those of the former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser.

England all out for 172 after winning the toss and batting
Ashes top 100 | Our predictions | The omens | Mail Rob

The all-too predictable pre-Ashes banter turned personal as former England spinner Monty Panesar went to relatively tame and tiresome lengths to inject himself into the conversation – and just like a medium-paced half-tracker drifting on to his pads, Steve Smith could not help but take the bait.

The back n’ forth unfortunately overshadowed the confirmation that Jake Weatherald would debut at the top of the order for Australia, and that Brendan Doggett would become just the third Indigenous cricketer to play in the men’s Test team.

Prakazrel ‘Pras’ Michel was convicted in 2023 after a trial that included testimony from actor Leonardo DiCaprio and former US attorney general Jeff Sessions

The Grammy-winning rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel of the Fugees has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for a case in which he was convicted of illegally funnelling millions of dollars in foreign contributions to former US president Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Michel, 52, declined to address the court before US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him on Thursday.