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It’s January. It’s time to gossip. Plenty of transfer links flying around here, courtesy of Simon Burnton.

Fernanda’s pooch, Roo, has been banned from the home after an altercation with Vivienne’s cat. You decide if Roo should be let out of the doghouse

If Fernanda’s dog moves in, my cat will get stressed and not come home. That would break my heart

I’ve put in more effort to adjust to Vivienne’s life than she has to mine. Roo just needs training

The justices are increasingly operating by the sheer force of raw power. That should trouble us all

We’re supposed to believe that it was about a job interview. On Tuesday, president-elect Donald Trump spoke on the phone with supreme court Justice Samuel Alito; the call came just a few hours before Trump’s attorneys petitioned the supreme court to put a stop to his criminal sentencing, scheduled for this Friday, in a New York state court.

Alito insists that this was all perfectly innocent. “William Levi, one of my former law clerks, asked me to take a call from president-elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position,” the justice told ABC News after word of the call leaked on Wednesday.

Cinephiles and industry insiders explain why the most-watched films in 2024 were made in France

The most-watched films in French cinemas last year were a feelgood comedy featuring a cast of non-professional, disabled actors and a swashbuckling three-hour costume drama based on a 1,500-page novel first published in 1844.

Both were made in France, where, according to 2024’s box office figures from the national film board, CNC, more people saw them than watched Disney and Pixar’s Inside Out 2, the most successful animated film of all time and global blockbuster of the year. In fact, almost half the cinema tickets sold in France in 2024 were for French films.

The sand swirled, and cleared. A flash of gold appeared and my heart leapt

I was 10 when I went on my first archaeological dig. I’d been exploring a clay pit near Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, where I grew up, and found the fossilised jawbone of a small ichthyosaurus, complete with tiny teeth. I took it to a local geologist – he was amazed at what I’d found and put me in touch with an archaeologist in Buckinghamshire, who took me to a dig site. I found a bucket full of historical items in a spoil heap. From then on, I went to dig sites every weekend.

I like to work with my hands, so pursued a career as a brick- and stonemason; I even taught the trade in a college for three years. In 1984, I was working as a builder when a former student invited me to try scuba diving. It was exciting being able to see underwater. Over the next two years, I trained for a diving qualification and became close with some guys in a scuba club.

Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s first novel, Blessings, about love in a hostile climate, was written after a life-changing encounter with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Shortly after his 18th birthday, Chukwuebuka Ibeh embarked on his first trip outside his home city of Port Harcourt. He drove more than eight hours north to Lagos for a 10-day creative writing workshop led by fellow Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of Half of a Yellow Sun.

It was a life-changing event for Ibeh, who last year published his own novel, Blessings, at the age of 24.

Trump, who was found guilty of committing 34 felonies, is first ever US president to face a criminal trial and sentencing

Donald Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in his New York hush-money case on Friday, marking both a dramatic and anticlimactic development in historic criminal proceedings weeks before he assumes the presidency.

Trump, whose presidential inauguration is scheduled for 20 January, is the first US president – former or sitting – to face a criminal trial, let alone a guilty verdict and subsequent sentencing. But the judge presiding over Trump’s case, Juan Merchan, has strongly implied that Trump will not face any meaningful consequences for committing 34 felony counts in an effort to tilt the 2016 election in his favor.

Culture secretary says it should go ahead despite pressure for it to be cancelled over Taliban’s treatment of women

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England should be allowed to play next month’s cricket match against Afghanistan, the culture and sport secretary has said, despite calls for a boycott over the Taliban government’s treatment of women.

Lisa Nandy backed a decision by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to allow the game to go ahead, saying on Friday that cancelling it would “deny sports fans the opportunity that they love”.

I loved to scour apps and charity shops for cheap clothes and toys – but now I know it is another kind of overconsumption

‘Guess how much this was,” I say to my partner mischievously, revealing with relish the latest toy I’ve found for our youngest son. It’s wooden, Montessori in style (apparently a ball dropping through a hole teaches him object permanence), and retails at about £20 new. “A quid,” my partner proffers, wearily: he is savvy to this game by now. This time, though, I can go one better. “Free!” I screech with glee. “Free! Can you believe that? Someone was giving it away on that secondhand WhatApp group.” I’m giddy with my find, drunk on the size of the bargain, but, as I add the new (to me) toy to the teetering pile of others – dolls, a tunnel, toy cars, a lunchbox – I can feel something – guilt, I think – gnawing away at me. Am I a secondhand overconsumer?

I’ve always been a champion of secondhand shopping. I was plundering charity shops before it was cool and, in a tale that has become family folklore, once found a standard lamp in a branch of the British Heart Foundation and carried it home on the bus. In fairness, that lamp has moved house with me seven times and still stands, resplendent, in my living room. But I fear too many of my other secondhand purchases have been flash-in-the-pan dopamine hits. These purchases gather dust in our bedroom, the study, my son’s toy box. Clothes I’ve bought from charity shops, heady with the exhilaration of them being “only £5”, lie crumpled and forgotten in the depths of my wardrobe before, months later, being dragged out and sold on Vinted for a couple of quid. And still I buy more, ensnared in the grip of what I’ve started to believe is something akin to an addiction.

Chloë Hamilton is a freelance journalist

(ECM)
Played by world-class personnel including Bill Frisell and the late, great alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, this 2014 set is full of subtle, spontaneous ideas

When Miles Davis led the 1948-50 sessions that became jazz’s Birth of the Cool releases, the most bewitching solo voice apart from his own trumpet was that of a little-known 21-year-old called Lee Konitz. The alto saxophonist’s quietly captivating work still shimmers as a central feature of Danish guitarist Jakob Bro’s Taking Turns, also recorded in New York but more than 60 years later, and strangely consigned to ECM’s vaults from 2014 until now.

Bro’s reputation grew when he succeeded Bill Frisell in drum master Paul Motian’s band in 2006, the connection that first introduced him to Konitz, who can instantly invent fresh lines to any composition put in front of him. Bro credits this ability with his own understanding of how to lead an improviser’s band that plays composed music with looseness and flow.

Latest battle over whether to ban the app will force justices to weigh importance of security with freedom of speech

The US supreme court will hear oral arguments over the fate of TikTok on Friday. It’s the latest battle in the long war over whether to ban the tremendously popular social media app in the US – and will force the justices to weigh the importance of national security with the freedom of speech.

TikTok and its parent company, Chinese-based ByteDance, asked the supreme court to review the case after a lower court ruled last month to uphold a law to ban the app in the US. That ban is scheduled to go into effect on 19 January, unless ByteDance sells TikTok’s assets to a non-Chinese company. While ByteDance has the option to divest, it claimed in a legal filing that divestiture “is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally”.

Share your recent photos and tell us where you were and why that scene resonated with you

The Guardian Weekly is our international news magazine, featuring the best of the Guardian, the Observer and our digital journalism in one beautifully designed and illustrated package.

We’re now on the lookout for our readers’ best photographs of the world around us. For a chance to feature in the magazine, send us a picture you took recently, telling us where it is in the world, when you took it and why the scene resonated with you at that particular moment.

Try to upload the highest resolution possible. The limit for photo uploads is 5MB.

Landscape images are preferable due to the page design

Tell us as much as you can about when and where the photo was taken as well as what was happening

When we publish an image we want to credit you so please ensure that we have contact information and your full name

Populist trolling thrives on the oxygen of publicity. It’s on all of us – media and voters – to start looking away

Even more than other forms of politics, populism needs an audience. Populist politicians want to be famous personalities, to make attention-getting claims and promises, to create new national myths. Like other ambitious but less ideological entertainers, they want their act to be widely noticed, and then requested again and again. Without a receptive audience, populism can just seem cranky and simplistic – little different from fringe political movements down the ages.

In Britain, the US and many other democracies from India to Argentina, populism’s current dominant variant is rightwing, and much of its intended audience is the rightwing media. Conservative commentators, reporters and public intellectuals are constantly required to amplify populism’s messages and help maintain the public profiles of its leading figures. With only five Reform UK MPs, Nigel Farage needs the Tory press – just as the Tory press needs him, with rightwing politics in Britain otherwise at a low ebb.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

After Hollywood farce of Chelsea and two years out of game, rags-to-riches manager has seized chance to join ‘family club’

Remember Angrygate? For a few surreal days in February 2023, pretty much the entire talking apparatus of English football was engaged – as is its habit – in a fevered, earnest and yet entirely fatuous debate about whether Graham Potter was angry enough to be the Chelsea manager.

Under an increasingly persistent line of questioning, Potter coped pretty well. He firmly pointed out that you do not go from the ninth tier to one of the biggest clubs in the world without a certain ruthless streak. He subtly rebuked the hypocrisy of the media for demanding greater touchline theatrics from Premier League managers and then pontificating about the culture of abuse towards grassroots referees. So subtly, in fact, that the media blissfully ignored that bit.

The World No 1, who wed Ella Victoria Malone last Saturday, will play for St Pauli in the Bundesliga, where he may meet the new classical champion, Gukesh Dommaraju

Magnus Carlsen, the 34-year-old world No 1 and candidate for the greatest of all time, married Ella Victoria Mallone last Saturday in Oslo, where the congregation included a film crew from Netflix. The new Mrs Carlsen, 26, was born in Hong Kong to a Norwegian mother and an American father, was educated in the US, the UK and Canada, and has spent several years in Singapore.

Carlsen’s stellar chess career, boosted by his controversial shared World Blitz title, is set to resume as early as this weekend, when the Norwegian will lead the newly promoted St Pauli team in the German Bundesliga, the strongest chess league in Europe.

From non-smudgy mascara to the surprisingly worth-the-hype Dyson AirStrait, here are my top purchases of 2024

I was struck by how dominant makeup and devices were in 2024, after years of skincare mania in the market. Saie, a fairly priced US makeup startup, stormed it. With the notable exception of its complexion products (improvement needed), the line is excellent. Dew Bronze (£20), an extremely easy, natural-looking bronzing liquid, was its best launch. I reached for it again and again, fluffing it into cheeks and temples with their now-indispensable Base Brush (£21). Saie could get away with less for the money, but mostly overdelivers.

Speaking of price, the high-street hits kept on coming. Elf’s non-smudgy, seven quid Lash XTNDR would have been my mascara of the year at any price.

Conflict has forced a fifth of the country’s schools to close. One teacher, determined to keep working despite threats from marauding Islamist militias, shares their testimony

Teaching in Burkina Faso is a dangerous commitment. Thousands of schools are closed and teachers forced out of the profession because of the risks they face, mostly from Islamist militants attacking schools.

Jihadist violence first broke out in 2015 but the conflict has intensified in the past few years, driven by militants who have seized up to 40% of the country. It is estimated that as many as 6.3 million people – a quarter of the population – were in need of humanitarian aid in 2024, with the country named as the world’s most neglected displacement crisis for the second year in a row.

Fifty years on from their dissolution, admirers from Joan Jett to Dave Vanian explain the appeal of a band who ripped up rock’n’roll in high heels – and pointed towards punk

Fifty years ago, the most important American underground rock band of its generation was dying. The New York Dolls, the androgynous-but-tough band who mixed the Rolling Stones, girl groups and garage rock, were imploding under the weight of their own addictions and failures. You wouldn’t say they split, per se – there was still a version of the band led by David Johansen in existence until the end of 1976. But 1975 was the end for Johnny Thunders, Arthur Kane and Jerry Nolan, and the Dolls stopped being the Lower East Side’s rock’n’roll street gang.

They only made two albums, and barely played outside New York. But the band laid the foundations for punk, and taught a generation of outsiders and refuseniks they could be something different, as those whose lives were changed by them recall.

My work bag is closer in scale to a laundry basket than the tiny handbags clutched by models

Fashion sometimes excludes people on grounds that are truly nasty and toxic and which reflect and drive fundamental problems in our culture: race, weight, wealth. So I hesitate to bring up what I’m about to say because it is small-fry compared with those issues. What I want to talk about today is not, in the scheme of things, any kind of hard luck story. But I am going to bring it up anyway.

The microaggression for which I would like to call out fashion, today, is for all the times it has made me feel excluded because my handbag is inelegantly big and heavy. I have quite often felt like a no-hope outcast from glamour, on the grounds that the outfits fashion celebrates on catwalks or billboards or red carpets feature a handbag no bigger than a hardback novel, while the bag I carry to the office and back every day is closer in scale to a laundry basket.

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

A revelatory account of the composers and performers whose lives were determined by the whims of a dictator

The fact that Joseph Stalin loved music and believed it mattered was both a blessing and a curse for the men and women who made it. If your work found favour you were treated as a secular god with all the trimmings – palatial apartment, good food and freedom to roam as far as the decadent West (assuming you came back when called).

But for those who offended Stalin’s arbitrary and shifting tastes it was another matter. The Father of Nations regularly took time out from his busy killing schedule to vet each new classical music record that came across his desk, noting on the sleeve whether it was “good”, “average” or “rubbish”. A bad rating could earn you a stint in the gulag or, if there were aggravating circumstances (homosexuality, say), a bullet in the back of the head. It has been calculated that 68 composers were sent to Siberia during Stalin’s 30-year reign of terror. Hundreds of other musical artists, from virtuoso composers to popular songbirds via second violinists, were consigned to oblivion when the paper trails concerning them were deliberately destroyed.

Amid the devastation in Ukraine, the photojournalist Robin Tutenges has captured how skateboarding provides a vital escape for the country’s young people – an act of resilience and freedom as they reclaim the streets in the face of conflict and trauma

Far from the frontlines, the streets of some Ukrainian cities may seem to be returning to a semblance of normality, but nothing is quite the same. War imposes itself at every turn, between the shell-torn buildings, the sandbags on the corners of caulked windows and the antitank obstacles – dozens of them are piled up under a tarpaulin, as pictured below. By reclaiming these scarred spaces, Ukrainian skateboarders want to give themselves permission to live. To regain control of their lives in the face of a war that blurs their bearings.

‘Ukraine is like a jail you can’t get out of and Kyiv is my cell. Only skateboarding allows me to escape’
Alexandr

Donald Trump Jr came here, but I sometimes wonder if the world knows anything about us. Our dream is independence

The news that Donald Trump Jr was about to visit Nuuk felt like a flashback to almost six years ago, when his father, Donald Trump, famously floated the idea of buying Greenland. At the time, I had just moved back to Nuuk after finishing film school in Denmark. I remember working on the production of a segment for a travel series by the comedian Conan O’Brien. He came to Nuuk to film an episode poking fun at the idea of Trump buying us.

This time, there’s no late-night comedian in sight, and the next president of the United States has just refused to rule out using military force to take control of my country. Instead of poking fun at the latest US intervention, I found myself in my kitchen with four other women, planning a demonstration against Denmark’s practice of removing Inuit children from their families.

Last year saw dazzling cover art for records by Fontaines DC, Julia Holter and more. But Rajni Perera’s soulful blue painting for Hiatus Kaiyote’s Love Heart Cheat Code proved to be the ultimate winner of the 20th Best Art Vinyl award

Though few welcome idea of being acquired by the US, status quo as part of Denmark is not universally popular

Greenland’s prime minister has called for unity and calm after Donald Trump reheated his global row with Nato allies on Tuesday, when the US president-elect said he was prepared to use tariffs or military force to seize control of Greenland.

The comments led the Greenlandic prime minister, Múte Egede, to say: “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders.” The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said on Thursday that the US seizure of Greenland is “not going to happen”, while Germany and France have warned Trump over annexation.

Doubt cast on tennis former world number one’s comments in GQ interview as debate reopens about handling of visa saga

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Experts have cast doubt on Novak Djokovic’s claim that he was “poisoned” by the food he ate in hotel immigration detention during his Australian Open visa saga, suggesting it is possible but unlikely.

Interviews with the former world number one ahead of the 2025 Australian Open have reopened public debate about the chain of events in 2022, with Australian tennis star Nick Kyrgios saying his home country had “treated [Djokovic] like shit” by cancelling his visa in 2022.

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Conditions for a January LA firestorm have not existed before now, writes a meteorologist and climate journalist

• California wildfires – live
• Californians: have you been affected by the wildfires?

An exceptional mix of environmental conditions has created an ongoing firestorm without known historical precedent across southern California this week.

The ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events – simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond.

Health secretary accused of talking ‘utter nonsense’ about private sector’s ability to help cut NHS waiting times

Wes Streeting has defended the growing use of the private sector to help tackle long waiting lists for treatment but said providers must “pull their weight” and not take resources away from the NHS.

The health secretary, who has previously said “middle-class lefties” risked putting ideological purity ahead of patient care, said he would be “entirely pragmatic” about using spare capacity in the private sector.

His mother says he was groomed by drug gangsters despite her attempts to get help. Let his death spark fresh debate about how we care for vulnerable people

The last time Mary Bokassa saw her 14-year-old son alive was around lunchtime, on his first day back to school after Christmas. She had no way of knowing that within an hour and a half, her child would be dead, stabbed 12 times on a bus in broad daylight in Woolwich, south London.

And yet, as his mother explained in a bleak and haunting interview, his death was a shock but not a surprise. Her son Kelyan had been targeted by gang members trying to recruit him since he was six, she told the BBC: “I tried to prevent it. I’ve tried so many, so many times. I screamed it, I said, ‘My son is going to be killed.’” But the family hadn’t, she said, got the help they needed. She had fought for her little boy and she had lost, and there is something about the starkness with which she said it that will have stopped parents across the country in their tracks.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Largest known deportation of people back to Niger to date comes as EU is accused of outsourcing cruelty to reduce Mediterranean crossings

More than 600 people have been forcibly deported from Libya on a “dangerous and traumatising” journey across the Sahara, in what is thought to be one of the largest expulsions from the north African country to date.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) confirmed 613 people, all Nigerien nationals, arrived in the desert town of Dirkou in Niger last weekend in a convoy of trucks. They were among a large number of migrant workers rounded up by the authorities in Libya over the past month.

From parkruns to pilates classes, here is the kit that will make getting out of bed to work out on a cold morning a little easier

Challenges of hitting net zero emissions are often discussed, but little focus is given to the gains of living in a low-carbon world

The challenges of reaching net zero emissions are often discussed, but little attention is given to the gains from living in a low-carbon future. Less fossil-fuel combustion means less air pollution, and if the changes are done correctly, net zero could result in homes that are easier to keep warm and a healthier population from walking and cycling every day.

A study has looked at air pollution and the health benefits from net zero changes to our homes, our vehicles and the ways we travel.

Hundreds of homes were burned in Kyauk Ni Maw village in the aerial attack on Rakhine state, says Arakan Army says

An airstrike by Myanmar’s army on a village under the control of an armed ethnic minority group killed about 40 people and injured at least 20 others, officials of the group and a local charity said on Thursday.

The attack occurred Wednesday in Kyauk Ni Maw village on Ramree island, an area controlled by the ethnic Arakan Army in western Rakhine state, with hundreds of houses burned in a fire triggered by the bombing, they said. The military has not announced any attack in the area.

The World Sports Photography Awards are the only global awards for sport photography and are designed to recognise and celebrate incredible sports images and the photographers who take them. More than 2,200 professional sports photographers from over 96 countries submitted more than 13,000 images across the 24 categories to this year’s competition, which all tell compelling stories of the emotion, passion, athleticism and focus that are at the heart of sport

The writer-director of A Real Pain and co-stars Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Grey and Will Sharpe talk about being overcome by generational trauma while making Oscar season’s funniest film

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are in complete agreement. People being more open about everyday anguish is a good thing. Absolutely. One hundred per cent.

Not them, though. They will continue to button up. “I know my pain is unexceptional,” says Eisenberg, words clattering out of him like a runaway train, “so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it. I have OCD and general anxiety disorder and bad things happen to me, but I’ll never talk about them because I don’t want that kind of attention.”

John Calhoun designed an apartment complex for mice to examine the effects of overcrowding. It was hailed as a groundbreaking study of social breakdown, but is largely forgotten. So what happened? By Lee Alan Dugatkin

Authorities are reluctant to curb excesses of a new year’s tradition that is causing life-changing injuries

Seven-year-old Necati Karki had gathered with his family as part of a crowd in their neighbourhood in northern Berlin when a treacherous new addition to the New Year’s Eve festivities went off: a “firework bomb”.

Fired out of a pipe by unknown assailants and possibly deliberately aimed at the targets, the illegally imported pyrotechnic – called a kugelbombe (spherical bomb) – flew straight into the group of mainly women and children, injuring eight. Karki has undergone at least three operations and is still fighting for his life, with horrific injuries to the lower half of his body, one of his adult brothers reported on Instagram.

This week we learned that Meta is dropping third-party fact-checking, the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, spiked a cartoon that made fun of him and other tech leaders kneeling before a statue of Donald Trump, and just about all the big Silicon Valley companies are donating $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund. Jonathan Freedland and Blake Montgomery look at who will hold the power between big tech and the White House over the next four years

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Welsh star promises big, bold plays that bring vital ‘under-explored’ stories about Wales to life

Michael Sheen, a global star of screen and stage, is spearheading a new national theatre for Wales, promising to create big, bold plays that bring vital stories about his homeland to life.

Sheen said he was bursting with ideas and promised to appear in the newly forged Welsh National Theatre’s first production, a “foundation” story about Wales staged at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff.

The Thistle will be available 365 days a year and provide a supervised space where drugs can be injected safely

The UK’s first legal drug consumption room, the Thistle, will open its doors in the East End of Glasgow on Monday morning after a 10-year battle to realise the pioneering facility.

The Thistle will remain open 365 days a year from 9am to 9pm and allow some of the most vulnerable addicts in the city to take their own drugs in a clean and safe environment under the supervision of health professionals.